后现代的含混——超世俗还是宗教的回归?

Amphibolies of the Postmodern: Hyper-Secularity or the Return of Religion?

现代进步与技术问题自文艺复兴以来,人类按照自己的形象重新改造了世界,所采用的方式是人类栖居地球以来前所未有的。科学与技术的进步使人类能够超越先前最大胆的想象,以自己的方式塑造世界。然而,这一进步却逐渐侵蚀了我们存在的物质基础或基底,进而动摇了以往看来那些明显的客观性(apparent objectivities),例如"自然""物自体"或甚"真实"。

This essay begins by articulating the turn from modernism to postmodernism as a function largely of the progressive take-over by technology of every aspect of our lives.The difference between nature and culture,between the given and the produced,between the real and the artificial dwindles to practically nothing.When this difference is eroded to the point where it presents itself to us as just another artifice,then we lose the very horizon of a reality that is given to us as nonnegotiable.In this situation,the human realizes itself without limits,but set up on this basis it is also poised to implode.It does so for lack of any external support or resistance from something that is not itself.The structures of totality and infinity that have been transferred onto our own human work of endless construction cannot be sustained by anything merely finite,such as is everything that we produceall our language and culture and institutions.Philosophical secularization carried to its limits thus turns inside out and becomes a re-opening to religious reflection and its theological heritage and underpinnings.