Most of
today’s influential Western thinkers concur that we have arrived at period called
the post-modern era. The term finds it
origin with scientist Michael Polanyi, who expressed the view that a change is
needed in Western thought tradition, moving it from objectivism and
subjectivism to a less culturally constrained method[1].
Polanyi actually called this concept, “post-critical.”
Polanyi asserted
that the way past the present Western modernism is semiotics[2], a concept introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce. Sander’s semiotic process described a
methodology of discerning truth based on the interpretation of the sign or
symbol presented by an object or an action.
Sanders
asserted that the ideal interpretative process for human reality is one that involves
the continuous interpretation of the signs symbols presented by any object or
action, each of which is then subject to further interpretation. In short, Sanders rediscovered an aspect of pre-modern
methodology of discerning truth.
However,
in real time and space, post-modernism has become primarily a process of
deconstructing all that was concluded by the culturally constrained
objective/subjective critical modernism. While embracing semiotics it is still
sorely lacking.
Why? Because,
the Western post-modernism is still captive to subjectivism; while the western post-
modern mind has come to reject critical objectivism, it has not come to terms critical
subjectivism. As a rule, the average
western person still trusts his own individual intellectual capacities. In short, most know that everyone is biased;
therefore, they choose to go with their own personal biases concluding that
ultimate truth cannot be known.
It is precisely
at this point in human history that the West needs a dose of Orthodox
Christianity to pull it out of the mire.
Orthodoxy would agree with Polanyi and Sanders regarding the value of
Semiotics, however, with two additional imperatives.
1. The use of
signs and symbols to arrive at truth (semiotics) is not merely a private
experience; it is a collective or concilliar experience. The signs have a meaning that is participated
in by a general consensus of those who experience them. The individual intellect must be seen as less
able to discern than that of the whole.
2. The merely
intellectual use of signs and symbols to arrive at truth is to be held with
suspicion precisely because the main consequence of the fall of man is not
primarily angering a law abiding God, but rather of the subjection of the
intellect to our personal disorders and dysfunctions (the passions). Discerning truth is not only a corporate
matter, but a looking for the understanding of those who are to a greater
degree healed of our common dysfunctions.
The way through to post post-modernism is
found in the way that has never changed, Orthodoxy.
