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WE MODERNS FACE A DILEMMA. On the one hand stands the grandeur of enlightenment rationalism, claiming that humans are capable of achieving certain knowledge of universal truths by virtue of the rational minds with which we are endowed. On the other hand stand the so-called postmodernists, who deny any form of epistemological foundationalism and hold that truth is nothing but the construction of a particular society; thus, all truth claims are necessarily local in nature, and aspirations to universal, objective truth represent mistakes at best and intellectual imperialism at worst. In this essay, I want to explore the nature of this dilemma and suggest a third alternative, an alternative that does not succumb to the aspiration of a God's eye-view, as does the enlightenment rationalist, or retreat into the misshapen hovel of relativism with its attendant subjectivism, as do the post-modernists. In essence, the alternative I will suggest overcomes the problem of modernity by pushing beyond it while at the same time reaching back to recover a pre-modern insight that was jettisoned by those committed to the modern project. Two thinkers who represent the temporal nodes of this third way are the much neglected twentieth-century thinker Michael Polanyi and the great fourth-century father St. Augustine.
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Modern theories of knowledge are characterized by their underlying skepticism. Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, set the stage with his sweeping rejection of tradition and his methodological doubt to which he subjected all possible objects of knowledge. The corrosive work of Cartesian doubt eliminates from the realm of knowledge all that cannot be known "clearly and distinctly." While Descartes's conclusions are not widely accepted in the academy today-he managed, for instance, to maintain his Christian belief-his methodology transformed modern philosophy. The rise of scientism resulted, with its confident claim to universality and certainty-the new scientific methodology alone yields true knowledge.
But the optimistic promises of enlightenment rationalism, while producing stunning gains in science and technology, seemed, ironically, to open the door to an inverse movement in the humane fields of inquiry. With technological advances, of course, came greater killing potential-a more efficient means of disposing of one's enemies. Because it falls outside the purview of modern scientific methodology, morality-along with religion and aesthetics-was reduced to the status of...