subjectivity and objectivity

the following is from an essay in the Westminster Theological Review by John Porier that attempts to respond to James K.A. Smith's book "Who's Afraid of Post-Modernism?"

"What Derrida fails to realize is that the real world is always rushing in upon our language, and that, just as it is impossible to have a purely objective thought, so also it is impossible to have a purely subjective thought. (As H. Richard Niebuhr noted fifty years ago, "The subjective can no more be meaningfully abstracted from the objective than vice "Our language can never shut out the real world. This allows for critical means to exist for improving our interpretations' relation to reality. The deconstructionist observation that all interpretation is dependent on other interpretations is just a minor facet of the more generally recognized truth that there is a perpetual gap between language and reality (or between knowledge and truth). The question before us is how we should conceptualize the imperfection of that perpetual gap. Derrida and other deconstructionists seem to overstate the problem, as if our access to the world might be symbolized by a hopelessly lost courier or a broken telephone line. The Apostle Paul sums up the dilemma with the comparatively hopeful metaphor of a lens—a darkling lens, but a real lens nonetheless (1 Cor 13:12). In contrast to the lens metaphor, deconstruction fails to recognize any work of transcendence in the phenomenon of reference."

My philosophical training was in the continental tradition that Poirier reacts to and which, despite the best attempts by James Smith and others to enlighten, he and many others seem to still misunderstand. However I find the quote from H. Richard Niebuhr to be quite prescient. This is precisely the point on which those thinkers descended from Heidegger and those descended from the Anglo realist school get so hung up on--the paradoxical relationship between reality and our perception of it. Each emphasizes one side of the paradox and damns the other for not recognizing it, while both recognizes the paradoxical nature of the subject at hand. This grossly understates the complexity of the discussion and the acumen of those on both sides, but I still believe a good deal of the rhetoric is based on miscommunication.

Behind Poirier's latter comments seems to lie a basic assumption that may be responsible for the clash of rhetoric between postmodernists and anti-postmodernists, viz. the assumption that there is only one complete and accurate account of the way the world is which our accounts may approach asymptotically. A contrasting perspective is captured in some comments I recently heard from Ken Myers over at Mars Hill Audio Journal commenting on the use of the word "worldview" by evangelicals. Ken noted that the word is often used as a short hand to (somewhat reductionistically) refer to a set of propositions or doctrines, as in "the Christian worldview is..." Myers noted that this attitude is shallow and reductionist, not taking into account the richness and complexity a worldview. By way of illustration Myers noted that he knows of two or three truly excellent interpreters of Schubert who do justice to the richness of Schubert but approach his music in idiosyncratic ways. A moderate post modernist like Myers or myself would want to insist, contra those like Poirier, that accounts of the way the world is may be idiosyncratic and yet true to the thing itself. However, acknowledging the plurality of valid, authentic, or respectful interpretations does not commit us to saying all interpretations are correct--our accounts can be idiosyncratic and wrong.