Being moved by God? Introducing L.P. Hemming’s Postmodernity’s Transcending: Devaluing God

Abstract

Philosophy has never been, and never will be, in medias res. Central to philosophy’s endeavour is its relation to its proper history. Stepping out of metaphysics, therefore, is at the same time entering into metaphysics’ most intimate questions. It is this that in postmodernity, for the most part, is forgotten. Postmodernity is, and I think Laurence Paul Hemming will gladly agree, a time of recycling. It proceeds from citation to citation, it knows only citations of citations, and forgets in the process, that the task of thinking is mine, jemeinig each time anew, and therefore, that to think is, time and again, addressed by an appeal to ‘think more thoughtfully’. Postmodernity, in spite of ‘the end of grand narratives’, is a narration of narratives, it narrates at will, writes its own history, and jumps, deliberately or not – it matters little – into the deep end. Could we be mistaken about the depth of these postmodern waters? Have we forgotten what it is to move in the waters of being? To be immersed in it as if in a flood and flux?..