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Pocket Guide to Postmodernism
that science will study what we observe—the phenomenal world only. As a result, science cannot find “Truth.” All we can claim to know, according to Kant, “ha[s] no independent existence outside our thoughts” since all we observe are appearances or representations. What is left of our view of the noumenal or “real” world must, then, be left to faith and religion.
Critiquing Kant Now that we have spent some time looking at Kant’s ideas and how we have arrived at some of the prevailing ideas upon which postmodernism depends, we can also present a few objections to these arguments. One of the strongest claims of Kant and postmodernism outlined above is the idea that each of us generates a subjective reality. Our senses only access a generated, phenomenal world. In other words, awareness must be unmediated in order to be awareness of the real and the true. We might wonder, in response, why our organs of consciousness would be obstacles to the awareness of reality? The second key argument, which did not originate from Kant, affirmed that universality (the idea of ultimate facts) and necessity (in logic, ideas can only be true or false, such as Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle) are not found in reality. Another name given to this problem was the problem of induction (the inference of a general law from particular instances), which was argued extensively by Scottish philosopher David Hume. The problem was that in creating concepts, such as the nature of a copper atom, we cannot hope to test the behavior of all the copper atoms in the universe in order to be sure we have found the “universal” characteristics of copper. Instead, we find a convergence
