For the purpose of understanding the contrasts and relationships among premodern, modern, and postmodern, we will chose traditional Christianity as the representative of the premodern; the Enlightenment Western World as the representative of the modern and the deconstructive postmodernism as the representative of the postmodern for our discussions
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The premodern assert that their religion (worldview) is the only and absolute worldview to be accepted by everyone. They will take their religion (worldview) as final authority.
to judge and condemn all other religions (worldviews) as heresies intolerantly. The modern discover that there are many different religions (worldviews) in the world (Anthropologist's participant observation teaches us this somber reality) (Wagner 1981: 4) and that their own religion (worldview) is not always correct (The Galileo's telescope is an epoch making incident). After René Descartes' (1596-1650) famous cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) which is closely connected with dubito ergo sum, autonomous rationality is being uphold as the final authority to arbitrate the truthfulness of all worldviews (Anderson 1990: 32-33). Autonomous rationality brings about scientific and technological advancement that gives humans the instrumental power to manipulate nature as object as well as the optimistic faith on progression under the influence of Darwin's evolution theory. Gradually materialistic, deterministic, rationalistic, and scientific worldview (secularism) is believed to be the universal truth. .
Fredrich Nietzsche critiques that all claims of truth, reason and science are tools for the preservation of life by the will to power which seeks to control and to dominate (1968: 227). Karl Marx warns us the possibility of "false .
consciousness- (False belief in social reality structures that betray the believers) (Mannheim 1936: 78). Karl Mannheim learns from Nietzsche and borrows from Karl Marx the concept of false consciousness and applies it eventually to Marxism.
For a while now I've been going through a long thought process wondering not "What is man? " but "What am I?- and where I belong in the garden maze known as life. My philosophy on all the topics that we've had in this course and those that I've experienced in my life are rather optimistic, hypocritical, and skeptical. I believe that human life is valued less than it should be, that it does have a meaning. ...