He Is There and He Is Not Silent
By Francis A. Schaeffer
Part III: Modern Man’s Epistemological Problem
From Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. 128, October-December 1971, pp. 300-315
These last two articles are really a unity. They have to do with the rationalistic modern man’s epistemological problem and the Christian answer to the problem, or we might word it "The Christian’s View of Knowing." These articles are the very heart of the modern problem that we must understand if we are going to understand how to communicate to our generation.
The word "epistemology" means the theory of the method or grounds of knowledge, or it sometimes is defined as the theory of knowledge. Or again, it may be defined as how we know. Epistemology is the central problem of our generation. I am totally convinced that the generation gap is really an epistemological gap simply because the modern generation looks at knowledge in a radically different way than the previous ones.
Greek Philosophy: The Dilemma of Particulars and Universals
In this series I want to begin at the time of the Greek philosophers. The Greeks spent much time grappling with the problem of knowledge. One who wrestled with this with great sensitivity was Plato. He understood the basic problem, that is, in the area of knowledge as in the area of morals there must be more than merely particulars if there is to be any meaning. He understood this very, very well.
In the area of knowledge you have particulars by which we mean the individual things which we see in the world. Constantly throughout life at any given moment we are confronted with thousands of particulars. The problem is what are the universals which give these particulars meaning? This is the heart of the problem of epistemology and the problem of knowing.
A related problem to this is the way we learn. Let us consider for example the question of apples. There are sheepnose apples, Queen of Canada¾I do not know how many varieties of apples, hundreds of varieties of apples. Every time I wanted to talk about apples, I could simply memorize this list of all the varieties of apples and I could go through the whole list and I would be summing up apples. But, of course, we do not do it this way. We just use the single word "apple," and that includes all the particular kinds of apples that fall under the concept of apple. This is actually the way we learn. If you watch a little child, you will notice that he is constantly naming things and then bringing them together under collective words. This is the way God has made our minds.
We can go further, of course, and we can do the same with pears and plums, but we do not list all of these either. We call them apples, plums, pears, and then we bring them together under the term "fruit." What we are doing is building universals out of particulars. We learn this way.
This is exactly the same in the area of science. Science is constantly looking at the particulars and trying to make laws which cover a sufficient number of particulars for us to see the associations and to understand properly. That is what science is all about. Science is no different from philosophy in this respect. You move from particulars to universals.
The great super laws we have seen come in our generation are laws that go further than this, which reduce all the particulars in the material universe to as few universals as possible. Einstein, of course, came closer to this than others by reducing all the particulars in the material universe to two universals¾the two laws, electro magnetism and gravity. He was attempting at the end of his life to bind these together under one super law, one universal that would include all particulars so we could really understand it.
So whether we are talking about apples or science, in learning we are constantly moving from particulars to universals. This is not only a linguistic thing, it is actually the way we come to know. It is not an abstract theory or some kind of scholasticism, but the matter of actually knowing and knowing that we know. The Greek philosophers, and especially Plato, were seeking for universals which would make all the particulars meaningful.
We can understand this very well in the area of morals. As I pointed out in my previous articles, we need universals or absolutes if we are going to know what is right or wrong. If we do not have real absolutes, we have only the modern concept of that which is sociological. Then one can only assess the statistics of public opinion of right and wrong, and the majority comes to determine the moral questions or an elite can dictate what is right and what is wrong. But both of these approaches are merely a matter of averages. The Greeks understood that if we are really to know what is right and wrong, we have to have a universal which would cover the particulars. It is very easy to see in the area of morals, but it is even more crucial in the area of knowing. How can we find universals that are large enough to cover the particulars so that we know we know?
Plato, for example, put forth a concept of ideals which would provide the needed universal. For example, let us take a chair. There was the idea that somewhere there was an ideal chair and this ideal chair would cover all the particulars of all the chairs that ever were. Thus a chair had meaning in reference to the ideal chair and not merely to a particular chair. When we use the word chair, there is meaning that is beyond our mere gathering up of particulars about chairs. This was Plato’s solution¾an ideal somewhere that would cover all the possible particulars that anybody could ever possibly find about chairs. There would be no chair outside of this universal or beyond the concept that was covered by the ideal chair. Anything outside of it was not a chair.
From this parallel, with the area of morals we can see the problem of knowledge, of knowing, of being sure. The Greeks thought of two ways to try to provide this. One was the sense of the polis. Technically the Greek word "polis" simply means the city, but in Greek thinking the polis has meaning beyond merely the geographic city. The word polis is applied to the structure of society. Some Greeks had the idea that the polis, the society, could supply the universal. But soon they were wise enough to see that this was unsatisfactory because then you are right back to merely the 51% vote, or the concept of the small elite. So you would soon arrive at only Plato’s philosopher kings, for example, but this, too, was limited. Even if you chose only the philosopher kings in the polis, eventually they were not going to be able to give a universal which would cover all the particulars.
The next step was to move back to the gods on the grounds that the gods could give something more than the polis could give us. But the difficulty is that the Greek gods simply were not big enough. They were personal gods in contrast to the eastern gods who include everything and are impersonal, but they were not big enough. Consequently, because they were not big enough, the problem remained unsolved for the Greeks.
Just as society did not solve the need for a universal because it was not big enough, so also the gods did not settle it because they were not big enough. The gods fought among themselves and had differences over all kinds of petty things as seen in Greek mythology. All the classical gods put together were not really enough. This is why you never know whether the Fates are controlled by the gods or whether the Fates control the gods in Greek literature. Are the Fates simply the vehicle of the action of the gods? There is this constant confusion between the Fates and the gods as the final control. This expresses the Greeks’ deep comprehension that their gods simply were not big enough. They were not big enough in regard to the Fates because they were not big enough in regard to knowledge. So, although Plato and the Greeks understood the necessity of finding a universal, they never found a place from which the universal could come, either from the polis or from the gods.
Thomas Aquinas: The Dilemma of Nature and Grace
Thomas Aquinas picked up the dilemma of the Greek philosophers. Before this time, the Byzantine world had no real interest in particulars. They lived in the midst of them, but they had an entirely different thought form. They were not interested in nature nor the particulars. We can thank Thomas Aquinas for the fact that because of his views, nature was again brought into importance in man’s thinking.
Gradually, as Thomas Aquinas’ emphasis spread, it began to be understood and dissimulated in the area of the arts. For instance, Cimabue (1240-1302) began to paint in a different way. Dante began to write in a different way (1265-1321) in which nature had its emphasis, but there was also arising a tension between nature and grace. Nature and grace are highly technical terms. In nature you have the world, and in grace you have God. It is an upper and lower story situation. In nature you have men and the natural cause-and-effect world. In grace you have the heavenly forces and how these unseen forces affect the world. In nature you have the body; in grace you have the soul. Eventually in the nature-and-grace discussion, you always come down to the problem of particulars and universals. Particulars are in the area of nature; universals are in the area of grace.
These men, Cimabue and Dante, and others like Giotto (1267-1337) who followed them began to emphasize nature. This is all to the good, let us notice, but there was a problem. There is that which is good because nature was being reestablished in man’s thinking and reemphasized. There is that which is also bad, however, because they were making the particulars (that is, nature) autonomous, thus losing the universals that gave the particulars meaning. This was the birth of humanism.
There is a principle here¾if nature or the particulars are autonomous from God, then nature begins to eat up grace. When the universals are lost, all you have left are the particulars, not only in the area of morals which would be bad enough, but also in the area of knowledge. Here you can see the drift toward modern man and his cynicism. It was born back there. It has been a long while coming to the place where cynicism is out in the streets. This generation is only the result of all this growth in the past. We are left with mountains of particulars, but with no way whatsoever to put them together.
By this time nature is eating up grace in the area of morals, and even more basically, in the area of epistemology as well. This is where Leonardo da Vinci is so important. He was the first modern mathematician and he really understood this dilemma. He understood hundreds of years ago where modern man would end up if men failed to find a solution. That is what real genius is¾being able to see ahead before other people can see, understanding before one’s own time¾and Leonardo da Vinci did understand. He understood that if you began only on the basis of rationalism, you would only have mathematics and particulars. Eventually these would be only mechanics.
It is amazing that Leonardo da Vinci understood all the rules of the game and the name of the game that we have come to in our own generation. He was so far ahead of his time that he really understood that in the modern world everything was going to end up only as a machine with no universals or any meaning at all. The universals were all going to be crossed out. So Leonardo became very much like the modern man. He said he would try to paint the universals. This is very close to the modern concept of the upper story experience, and I am assuming you understand my terminology. He worked and he worked, trying to paint the universals. He actually tried to paint the universals just as Plato had tried to establish the idea or ideal as a universal. Leonardo understood this and he said, let man produce the universal. But what kind of man? A mathematical man? (Remember, he is the first modern mathematician, the mathematical genius.) Not at all. Not the mathematical man, but the painter, the sensitive man. So Leonardo is a very crucial man in the area of humanistic epistemology.
Science: The Loss of Grace
Modern science is the original science, as I name it, in which you have men who believed in the uniformity of natural causes but in a limited system, a system that could be reordered by God and man made in the image of God. There was a uniformity of cause and effect, but nevertheless this science was not a uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system. It was in a limited system, a system that could be changed either by God or by man made in God’s image.
Both Whitehead and Oppenheimer have insisted that modern science could not have been born except in the Christian milieu. As Whitehead so beautifully points out, these founders of modern science believed that the universe was created by a reasonable God and, therefore, the universe could be found out by reason. This was their base. But from the time of Newton (not Newton himself, but the Newtonians who followed him), we have the concept of the machine until we are left only with the machine. This was the modern-modern science in which there is a uniformity of natural causes in a closed system including sociology and psychology. In other words, the closed system, the machine system includes man as well as chemistry and astronomy. That is the world in which we live in the area of science today.
The modern-modern scientists cannot be sure that the universe is reasonable because it was created by a reasonable God. They no longer believe this because they do not believe it was created by a reasonable God. They believe it is autonomous. It stands "decreated" to use Simone Weil’s word, not in the sense that it is not there, but simply because it never was created, a decreated world. So this science today stands on the monolithic presupposition of our educational and social viewpoint¾the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. Scientists can no longer be sure that the universe is reasonable because they do not know that it was created by a reasonable God.
This raises the question which Leonardo da Vinci already understood and which the Greeks understood before that. How does the scientist know, and on what basis can he know that when he knows he really knows? Having stepped away from the original base, on what basis can he have for knowing? So rationalism put forth at this point the epistemological concept of positivism. There are all kinds of positivisms ending with logical positivism; but, nevertheless, they are all of a kind. This is where it was born. It was an attempt to put a base under science after the original presuppositions were no longer held.
What is this positivism? Positivism is a theory in the area of knowing, epistemology, which assumes that we can know objects and facts with total objectivity. Modern-modern scientism is built upon positivism. This is a truly romantic concept. While it held sway, rationalistic man felt that he stood ten feet tall in his pride. It was based on the notion that without any universals to begin with, finite man could reach out and grasp with his reason sufficient true knowledge to make universals out of particulars.
Rousseau: The Dilemma of Nature and Freedom
Now we come to the place of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau is very crucial at this point. He changed the formulation from nature and grace to nature and freedom, absolute freedom. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the men around him saw that in the area of nature everything had become the machine. Upstairs they add the other thing, that is, absolute freedom. In the sense of absolute freedom in their upstairs, not only is man not to be bound by revelation, but he is not to be bound by society, the polis, either. This concept of autonomous freedom is expressed in Rousseau’s concept of the noble savage. The result of this stress on absolute freedom shows itself very quickly in morals, especially in sexual anarchy. But this is a destructive freedom in the area of knowledge as well. In metaphysics, in the area of Being as well as morals, we are supposed to have absolute freedom. But then the dilemma comes, how do you know?
We may imagine the Greeks and Leonardo da Vinci and all the neo-Platonists at the time of the High Renaissance coming in and asking Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers, "Don’t you see what you have done? Where are the universals? How are you going to know? How are you going to build enough universals out of particulars even for society to run, let alone enough to build true knowledge, knowledge that you really know and you are sure that you know?"
It is only a step, really, from men like Rousseau to the whole hippie culture. There is a parenthesis in time in one sense from Jean-Jacques Rousseau until 1964 at the birth of the hippie culture which is founded on this, namely, that there are no universals anywhere, that man is totally hedonistically free, not only morally but also in the area of knowledge. One can easily see the moral confusion that has resulted from this, but the epistemological confusion is worse. If there are no universals, how do we know reality from non-reality? This is the modern dilemma.
Hegel and Kierkegaard: The Loss of Truth
Now let us go back to right after Jean-Jacques Rousseau and soon after that you come to Hegel who changed the whole concept of epistemology. Previous to this, in epistemology man always thought in terms of antithesis. The methodology of epistemology had been antithesis, that is, you learn by saying "a" is not non-a. That is the first step of classical logic. In others words, in antithesis if this is true then that is not true. You can make an antithesis. That is the classical methodology of epistemology.
But Hegel said antithesis had never turned out well for them on a rationalistic basis, so let us change the methodology of epistemology. Instead of dealing with antithesis, let us deal with synthesis, and he set up his famous triangle¾everything is a thesis, it sets up an antithesis, and the answer is always synthesis. The whole world changed in the area of morals, political science, all kinds of things, but it changed more profoundly than any of these in the area of knowing and knowing itself. He changed the whole theory of how we know.
Kierkegaard took this a step further. He set up the absolute dichotomy between reason and non-reason. In Kierkegaard, and especially Kierkegaardism that followed him, the "knowledge" which gives meaning is always separated from reason. Reason only leads to knowledge which is mathematical knowledge without any meaning, but upstairs you hope to find a non-rational meaning. This is Kierkegaard’s contribution.
There are three forms of existentialism which come from Kierkegaard¾the French, Jean Paul Sartre; Heidegger, the German; and Paul Jaspers, who is also a German but he lives in Switzerland. But distinctions between the forms of existentialism do not change the fact that it is the same system even though it has different expressions with these different men. Rationality only leads to something horrible in the area of everything, including knowledge. Indeed, not including knowledge but first of all knowledge, principally knowledge. So any knowledge you can have on the basis of reason will only lead to a mathematical formula stating that in which man is finally only a machine. This is their concept of where reason leads. Instead of reason, they hope to find some sort of mystical experience upstairs apart from reason to provide a universal.
Here we can feel again the drift of the hippie movement and the drug culture. Man hopes to find something inside his head because he cannot know with certainty that anything is out there. This is where we are. As I have said, I am convinced that the generation gap is basically in the area of epistemology. Before, men had a romantic hope that on the basis of rationalism they were going to be able to find a meaning to life and put universals over the particulars. But on this side of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard this hope no longer exists, the hope is given up.
Young people today live in a generation that no longer believes in the hope of truth as truth. That is why I use the term in my books "true-truth" to emphasize real truth. This is not just a tautology. Some such expression is needed because the word "truth" now means something that before these four men would not have been considered truth at all. Usually when men talk about truth today, they are talking about something that before these four men would not have been accepted under the term truth. So, I have coined the word "true-truth" in trying to make the point. It is hard to make the point and make it sharp enough for people to understand how large the problem really is.
After Kierkegaard, rationality is seen as leading to pessimism. We can have mathematical knowledge¾that man is only a machine¾but any kind of optimism one could have concerning meaning would have to be in the area of the non-rational, the upstairs. So rationality, including modern science, will lead only to pessimism¾man is only the machine, man is only the zero. I am nothing in this; I am only one particular among thousands of particulars and no particulars have meaning. I have no meaning; I die; man is dead.
If students wonder why they are treated like IBM cards, it is not because of a lesser reason than the thing I am presenting. You are not going to be treated any other way. If they treat you any other way, you will be considered a psychological case which is the same thing really again. So man makes his leap upstairs into all sorts of mysticisms in the area of knowledge, and they are mysticisms because they are totally separated from all rationality.
This is a mysticism like no previous mysticism. Previous mysticisms always assumed something was there, but modern man’s mysticisms are semantic mysticisms that deal only with words. They are simply concerned with something in your head or in language in one form or another. It was in an attempt to find a mystical answer that Aldous Huxley suggested drugs, and the drug culture flows from his ideas¾an attempt to find a mystical answer inside one’s own head.
Polanyi: The Destruction of Positivism
Now we must turn our attention to the downstairs positivism. This was the great hope of rationalistic man, but gradually positivism died. I remember the days when I first lectured at Oxford and Cambridge. I had to shift gears between the two great universities because in Oxford they were still teaching positivism, logical positivism. When I went to Cambridge, it was all linguistic analysis. It is all finished now; it is linguistic analysis everywhere in the world. Gradually positivism died. For a careful study as to why it has died, I would suggest Michael Polanyi’s book Personal Knowledge, an Introduction to Post-Critical Philosophy. Polanyi seldom appears in the popular press and few people know him, but he is one of the dominant thinkers in the real intellectual world. Polanyi shows why positivism is not a sufficient epistemology and why the hope of modern science to have any certain knowledge is doomed to failure. His book is really titanic in the way positivism is literally torn to shreds and destroyed.
There is probably not a chair of philosophy of importance in the world today that teaches positivism, but it is still held by the undergraduate and by the naive scientist. The scientist today is building with a happy smile on his face, on a foundation that no longer exists. Positivism is dead.
Now notice where we have come. The first of the modern scientists had the courage to begin to formulate modern science because they believed the universe had been created by a reasonable God. Therefore, they maintained it was possible to find out the meaning of the universe by reason. Then we come to naturalistic science and all that is destroyed. Positivism was put in its place and they built on this, but now positivism is destroyed.
Polanyi argues that positivism is inadequate because it does not consider the knower of what is known. That is its basic weakness. It acts as though the knower may be overlooked and yet he can have full knowledge of certain things. Or you can say, positivism does not take into account the knower’s theories or the knower’s presuppositions, as though he had no grid through which he feeds his knowledge. There is the dilemma as Polanyi shows, because this simply is not true.
There is no scientist who does not approach the particulars already with a grid¾a theory through which to feed that which he sees and that which he finds. The concept of the totally innocent objective observer is totally naive, and science does not exist without an observer. The observer sets up the experiment and then the observer observes the experiment and the observer makes the conclusions¾so you cannot have science without an observer. Polanyi says the observer is never neutral; he had a grid; he has presuppositions through which he feeds the thing which he finds.
To me positivism has an even more basic problem, that is, that within the system of positivism itself. It has no way of saying with certainty that anything exists; it has no real way. Within the system of positivism itself by the very nature of the case, you simply begin nakedly with nothing there. You have no reason within the system to know that the data is data; that what is reaching you is data. Within the system there is no universal that gives you the right to be sure that what is reaching you from outside is data. The system of positivism itself gives you no certainty that anything is there, that there is really in the beginning move any difference between reality and fantasy. There is no reason within positivism as positivism to be sure there is correlation between the observer, the subject, and the thing that is the object.
Karl Popper, one of the great thinkers of our day, has recently written a book that acknowledges this. Previously he had maintained that a thing is meaningless unless it is open to verification and falsification. In his new book, however, he has taken a step backward. He now says there is no possibility of verification, only falsification. That is, you cannot say what a thing is, but you can only say certain things about what it is not. When Polanyi finished destroying logical positivism so beautifully, he was left with total cynicism in the area of epistemology concerning knowing. In his new book, Karl Popper comes to the same place. All positivism left one with was not knowledge, but a set of statistical averages and approximations with no certainty that anything was there and no certainty of continuity in the things that were there.
Wittgenstein: Silence and the Antiphilosophies
Wittgenstein is the philosopher who is the key to this whole matter. In this early stage, he argued that down here in the world in the area of reason you have facts, you have the propositions of natural science. This is the limit of language, the limit of logic. Downstairs we can speak, but all that can be spoken is the mathematical propositions of natural science. That is all you have on the lower level. Language is limited to the downstairs of reason and that ends up with mathematical formulations.
But as Bertrand Russell clearly emphasizes in his works, Wittgenstein was a mystic. Even in his early days, there were already the elements of mysticism. In the upperstory he put silence; so he had an upperstory all right, but up there he said there were no sounds because you could not talk about anything outside of the known world of natural science. Yet you desperately needed values, ethics, meanings to it all. You desperately needed this. Then he said we will put these on the upper level, but what is up there? Only silence! It is because of Wittgenstein’s concept of silence that I have chosen my title, "He Is There and He Is Not Silent." Wittgenstein says there is only silence in the area of the things you desperately need most, that is, values, ethics, and meanings. You know it needs to be there, he argues, but you cannot even think or talk about it. Values, ethics, meanings¾all are upstairs. You need them desperately, but there is only silence.
From this Wittgenstein plunged into his later period of linguistic analysis which is now the dominant philosophy all over the world. Linguistic analysis was born in desperation when positivism was seen to be inadequate. Wittgenstein and the existentialist are really very close at this particular point. There is a way to see them in which they are very, very close at the moment when he says there are no real values in all these things, only the silence.
What we are left with is antiphilosophy. Everything that makes life worthwhile, everything that would give meaning to life, everything that would bind life together and not leave it only with isolated particulars is in an upstairs of total silence. Thus we are left with two antiphilosophies in the world today. One, existentialism which is an antiphilosophy because it deals with the big questions but with no rationality, and having no rationality it is an antiphilosophy. If we follow the later Wittgenstein’s development, we move into linguistic analysis, and we find that this also is an antiphilosophy because while it defines words in the area of reason the language never has anything to do with the real questions. Language only leads to language and that is all.
Heidegger in his later writing also dealt with language in a very different way, but the emphasis is also on language. Heidegger was originally an existentialist who believed that there was only the angst in the universe which gave a hope that something was there. But later he focused this hope on language. Because there is a being (man) who uses language in the universe, we may hope that there is something there, a non-rational hope of an ultimate meaning. So Heidegger says, "Just listen to the poets." Not the content of the poet, but just because there is a poet who is speaking. In other words, because there is a being (that is the poet) who speaks, we can hope that Being (existence) has meaning.
Heidegger adds a different note in an attempt to make his position empirical and not just abstract. What he did was claim that there was in the far past, in the pre-Socratic Greeks before Aristotle, a great-golden language when there was a direct, first-order experience between the universe and the people. This was purely hypothetical; it is not true historically. But by stating this, he tried to make his position seem more empirical. This was an act of desperation in an attempt to lay an historical foundation under an otherwise purely hypothetical and nebulous concept.
Heidegger is saying to listen to the poet, an upperstory semantic mysticism, an upperstory leap, which seems to give hope. Wittgenstein moves in the opposite direction and is more honest in saying there is only silence upstairs. All modern philosophy can do is define words, but these will never deal with meanings or values. Whether we look at Heidegger or Wittgenstein who move in opposite directions at the point of language, the interesting thing is that modern man has come to conclude that the secret of the whole thing lies somehow in language. This is where we have come. This is the age of semantics at this very basic point.
Notice what this means to us. The whole question with Wittgenstein and modern man is whether there is anyone in the universe to speak adequately. We are surrounded then by a sea of antiphilosophy. Positivism¾the optimistic, rationalistic base of naturalistic science¾has died. It has been proved to be an insufficient epistemology. But the remaining alternatives¾existentialism on the one hand and linguistic analysis on the other hand¾are antiphilosophies. They have given up hope of including anything that deals with real ethics, values and meaning or the certainty of knowledge.
So in epistemology we are surrounded by a sea of antiphilosophy. Polanyi, for example, who was so magnificent in destroying logical positivism, ends up with pure cynicism in the area of epistemology and knowing, as does also Karl Popper. They end up in cynicism about knowing. Positivism is dead and what is left is cynicism as to knowing. Modern man is stuck right there whether he knows it or not.
Modern Man: The Loss of Categories
This is what has happened to those who have been raised in the last couple of decades. The really great problem is not, for example, just drugs or amorality. The problem is knowing. This is a generation of antiphilosophy, people caught in a live form of uncertainty of knowing. The problem of modern man is this: In the downstairs area he ascribes to rationality and talks with meaningful language. Still, here he can only see himself as a machine, a totally determined machine, and has no way to be sure of knowing even the natural world. But in the area of the upstairs nonrationality, modern man is completely without categories, for categories are always related to reason and antithesis.
Four groups of categories are lost or involved here: moral categories, human categories, the categories which separate reality and fantasy, and the categories necessary to really know other people. In the area of morals, man has no way to say this is right as opposed to this being non-right in the upstairs. But notice, it is more profound and more horrible, a very special kind of modern hell, living upstairs he has no way to say this is true as opposed to that which is non-true. Don’t you feel the desperation? This means that he has no control (and I use the word control with the French meaning--control as the possibility of checking something). It is impossible to have controls outside the area of reason.
Antonioni’s film "Blow Up" is an example of this. The posters advertising Antonioni’s film announced "Murder without guilt; love without meaning." In other words, there are no categories in the area of morals¾murder is without guilt; but equally there are no categories in the area of the human realm¾love is without meaning. So Antonioni pictured the death of categories.
In this area of morality, there is no universal above; we are left only with particulars. That is all rationalistic man can do for himself. And all the way back to the Greeks, we have for two thousand years the brainiest men who ever lived trying to find a way to put meaning and certainty of knowledge into the area of rationalistic man. But man beginning with himself and with no other knowledge outside of himself is a total failure.
The modern cinema and other art forms go beyond the loss of human and moral categories. They point out quite properly that if you have no place for categories, you also lose any categories which would distinguish between reality and fantasy. Now we are really in the world of your children. There are no categories in this upper area, so eventually there is no category to distinguish the difference between reality and fantasy.
The drug culture enters into this, too. In the very heart of the drug culture is the loss of distinction between reality and fantasy by the taking of drugs. But even if modern man does not take drugs, modern man has no categories once he has moved out of the lower area. Downstairs he is already dead, he is only a machine, and none of these things have any meaning. But as soon as he moves upstairs into the mystical, all that is left is a place with no categories with which to distinguish the inner world from the outer world with any certainty whatsoever.
Modern man’s uncertainty about knowing has also left him with a problem in terms of knowing another person. How can two people meeting each other know each other, and how can they know that they know each other? How are there any categories to enable a person to move into another person’s thought world? This is modern man’s alienation¾the feeling of total alienation. They can sleep together for ten years, fifteen years, it makes no difference. It is easy to know a language machine, but how can you get behind the language and know the other person? This is a very special form of lostness.
Modern man is left either downstairs as a machine with words that do not lead either to values or facts but only to words, or upstairs in a world without categories in regard to human values, moral values, or the difference between reality and fantasy. Cry for our generation. Man made in the image of God was meant to be in vertical communication with the One who is there and who is not silent, and to have horizontal communication with his own kind. Modern man because of his proud rationalism, making himself autonomous, has come to this place of horrible silence.
Christianity has no epistemological problem because it begins with a God who is there, an infinite-personal God who has made man in His own image. What we find is that in the Bible the answer rests upon language¾the language of revelation. We will explore this in the next article. The amazing thing is that Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the two big names in the area of modern epistemology, both see that the answer is going to be in the area of language, but they have no one there to speak. Only Christianity has the solution to the problem of epistemology which modern man so desperately needs.