Before postmodernism

Writing in 1945, Arnold Nash wrote that “On the fundamental questions of life and destiny, as Kierkegaard has reminded modern man, neutrality is impossible. Even to take up a neutral position is to take up some position.” The philosophy of the liberal university, “whose fundamental tenets are that man, if not perfect, is, like the world itself, slowly getting better, and that pre-suppositionless science, as the only way of reaching truth, is the main agent whereby – through education – this progress can be maintained” has been “shattered beyond all possible hope of repair.” This in 1945!

Only ignorance of the sustained Christian critique of modernity’s pretensions to neutrality (manifest especially in modern science) could lead to the notion that postmodernism’s assault on the Cartesian “view from nowhere” is something new.