Kant established the modern rules for discussing how it is that someone knows the external world, and in doing so he initiated the breakdown of the old distinction between subject and object. When this breakdown crossed over into theology, it resulted in an overemphasis on God's immanence and a diminished emphasis on his transcendence. This change had profound implications for the meaning of Christian faith.
Prior to Kant, the reigning epistemological paradigm held that the mind was simply a mirror in which the external world was reflected, that an objective world imprinted its reality on minds that were passive, inert, and uninvolved in this transaction. Kant rejected this model. Instead of beginning with the objective world, he began with the subjective conditions for knowledge, with the shape and functioning of the mind. He argued that the mind is active in and a constitutive part of what is known. It sorts into categories the stream of information contributed by the five senses and then synthesizes the data in ways that do not necessarily correspond to what is externally existent. He maintained that space and time, for example, are categories of the mind rather than realities in the world. Whatever can be said in favor of this, it should immediately be recognized that a fateful move had been made. Once the mind was seen as itself a source of knowledge, knowledge that was then superimposed on the data of the outside world, and once this knowledge was cut loose from control in the knowledge of God, a juggernaut was launched.
In literature this inescapable pluralism has been pursued by the post-modernists with purposeful vengeance. In their different ways, such post-modern critics as Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, and Stanley Fish have each made the argument that texts have no stable, unchanging meaning, that they mean only what individual readers perceive them to mean. Fish asserts that this approach does not amount to imposing meaning on the text, that it is simply a recognition of the fact that words have no independent meaning apart from specific contexts. Moreover, the contexts that are crucial for meaning reside not in the sentences and paragraphs of the texts but in the reader's internal psychology, in the ways the reader is inclined to understand life. Thus the subjective triumphs completely over the objective.
Prior to Kant, the reigning epistemological paradigm held that the mind was simply a mirror in which the external world was reflected, that an objective world imprinted its reality on minds that were passive, inert, and uninvolved in this transaction. Kant rejected this model. Instead of beginning with the objective world, he began with the subjective conditions for knowledge, with the shape and functioning of the mind. He argued that the mind is active in and a constitutive part of what is known. It sorts into categories the stream of information contributed by the five senses and then synthesizes the data in ways that do not necessarily correspond to what is externally existent. He maintained that space and time, for example, are categories of the mind rather than realities in the world. Whatever can be said in favor of this, it should immediately be recognized that a fateful move had been made. Once the mind was seen as itself a source of knowledge, knowledge that was then superimposed on the data of the outside world, and once this knowledge was cut loose from control in the knowledge of God, a juggernaut was launched.
In literature this inescapable pluralism has been pursued by the post-modernists with purposeful vengeance. In their different ways, such post-modern critics as Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, and Stanley Fish have each made the argument that texts have no stable, unchanging meaning, that they mean only what individual readers perceive them to mean. Fish asserts that this approach does not amount to imposing meaning on the text, that it is simply a recognition of the fact that words have no independent meaning apart from specific contexts. Moreover, the contexts that are crucial for meaning reside not in the sentences and paragraphs of the texts but in the reader's internal psychology, in the ways the reader is inclined to understand life. Thus the subjective triumphs completely over the objective.
- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland:
The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.
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