ABSTRACT
We live in a time of failed conditions. Everywhere people who have no faith in any possibility, either for themselves, each other, or for the world, mouth locutions they do not understand. With words such as ‘politics’, they attempt to formalise the unformalisable and found secular cities upon it. They attempt to live in the in-between and celebrate ambiguity as the new social horizon, always however bringing diversity into accord with their own projections. Always and everywhere, these late moderns make competing claims about the a priori, for they must be seen to disagree. Indeed such thinkers feel so strongly about the ethical nature of their doubt that they argue with vehemence about overcoming metaphysics, about language and the dangers of presence. Since God is committed to presence, they assume that theology is no longer an option sustainable by serious minds.2 These secular scholars accept without question the philosophical necessity of their position (they are happy autonomous creatures these atheists), even though with a certain magnanimity of gesture they might concede in an informal discussion that God could perhaps exist in some possible world, but they tell us in all likelihood it is not this one. To an external observer such gestures might suggest that these minds are grasping for enemies in a world that they are no longer sure of. But of course such external positions are now no longer considered possible. Blind to the immanence3 of such a world, unable to disengage themselves from whatever transcendental schema they wish to endorse, these secular minds are only now beginning to perceive that all is not as it should be, that what was promised to them-self-liberation through the limitation of the world to human faculties-might after all be a form of self-mutilation. Indeed, ever since Kant dismissed God from human cognition and relegated access to Him to the sphere of practical ethics and moral motivation, human beings have been very pragmatic indeed. They have found value in self-legislation and so see no reason for God. For after all, they now maintain, there can be no moral realism, the good cannot possess any actuality outside the conditional and conditioning nature of the human mind. Nor apparently, according to these late moderns, can a transcendent value escape any of the contemporary surrogates-language, pragmatics, power-which transcendental thinking has engendered in order to preserve itself. These proxies, which are viewed as the ruling a prioris of the day, supposedly determine or foreclose upon any other possibility. No, their advocates say, ‘your values are ancillary to this, in respect of this discernment everything else is subordinate, this is the prior discourse that secures our descriptions, and we, we who ascertained this, we are the authors and judges of this world and there is no other’. Perhaps unsurprisingly this state of affairs is viewed as a cause of much joy and self-affirmation.
