Postmodern attack on Liberty of Indifference

Often overlooked… is the… postmodern claim that “what you want” is not entirely up to you. Both biological nature and social environment program you to want some things and not others and to perceive only certain objects and only in certain ways…. You are a product of power…

Aichele, George, The Control of Biblical Meaning: Canon as Semiotic Mechanism (Harrisburg, Trinity Press, 2001), p17

Some contemporary evidence for types of social and biological determination may help to make the claim that there is no such thing as liberty of indifference, only liberty of spontaneity, more credible and comprehensible to those who find it difficult. My choices are real and are really mine, even if who I am is a product of all sorts of factors, such as my genes, my upbringing, my creation, my living in God’s world under his sovereign rule.

Deconstruction

Donald T. Williams is against it. He says:

deconstruction… is… the ultimate form of epistemological rebellion against the meaning structure built into the universe by God. It is hermeneutical lawlessness, the refusal of all restraint that is the essence of sin applied to texts.

from Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dec 1998 available here.

A definition of Postmodernism

George Aichele says: “there is no single, widely accepted definition of postmodernism. Nor is there a single postmodern standpoint on any given topic…. [T]hat particular discussion [of the meanings of postmodernism] … is itself in some ways highly symptomatic of postmodernism.” (Sign, Text, Scripture: Semiotics and the Bible, Sheffield Academic Press, 1997, p15)

Aichele goes on: “I somewhat arbitrarily adopt for my purposes the well-known definition of the French Philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard:

The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.

Lyotard, J-F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge trans. Bennington & Massumi (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1984) p81

Well, from my no doubt culture bound perspective, this seems to me to deny itself the solaces of making sense and saying what it means. Its more like hints at descriptions than a useful definition, because, really, what is it on about? Unpresentable? Impenetrable.

Obviously, of course

But isn’t that just stating the obvious?

Yes, probably. But somehow it only seems really obvious once you’ve stated it. The obvious is too easily overlooked. And your “obvious” is sometimes my obscure(d).

This comment from Paul Ricoeur (Interpretation Theory, p15) is pertinent and would be relevant to postmodern claims that we can't get at an author's original intended meaning:

For the linguist, communication is a fact, even a most obvious fact. People do actually speak to one another. But for an existential investigation [i.e. to the philosopher] communication is an enigma, even a wonder.

Obvious, really.