truth is unavoidable

Tim Keller writes in The Reason for God, that Foucault wrote: “Truth is a thing of this world. It is produced only by multiple forms of constraint and that includes the regular effects of power.” We see many in the postmodern world embracing that. They see truth-claims as power plays. Of course the problem with this claim is that it falls prey to itself. What surprises me more is that these well-read postmoderns not only miss the fallacy of their argument but they somehow imagine they are onto something new and revolutionary.

C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man:

But you cannot go on “explaining away” forever; you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? … a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.

One hundred years ago G.K. Chesterton made the same point:

The new rebel is a skeptic, and will not trust anything … [but] therefore he can never be really a revolutionary. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind … Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything … There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.