Edmundson notes that the modernist thinkers and critics still left the door open for a new secular transcendent order:
But the problem with this modern tendency to disenchant the world was that it turned the old religious drive upside down. The traditional man of faith seeks transcendence. He wants contact with God, the One, the Truth. The modern thinker, inspired by Marx and Freud, found truth in repressed or hidden impulses, but he FOUND TRUTH nonetheless. Similarly, modern artists and critics found organic cohesion, autonomy—a form of truth, perhaps—in the grand works, works like Joyce’s “Ulysses” or Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
Thus, according to Edmundson, the central challenge for a postmodernist is to retain a healthy skepticism about all purported truths—including the “truths” offered by the postmodernists themselves:
The postmodern man sees religious residues in ANY way of thinking that affirms the Truth. He reads the modern period as the time when transcendentalism gave way, yes, but to a kind of thinking that sought to penetrate the depths, there to find bedrock reality. The spirit of the . . . post-modern movement in the arts, literary criticism, and philosophy might, assuming one were determined to shrink it to bumper-sticker size, be expressed like this: “If you want to be genuinely secular, then give up on transcendence in every form.” Or, if your bumper’s too small for that: “Accept no substitutes—for God.” In other words, don’t replace the deity with some other idol, like scientific truth, the self, the destiny of America, or what have you. And (front bumper) “Don’t turn your postmodernism into a faith. Don’t get pious about your impiety.”
