layer of dough? Are all things, including human beings, really only
"things?"

The post-modern world-view says yes. In its effort to overcome the
old dichotomies found within the traditional doctrines of science,
philosophy, and theology, the hyper-modern school has reacted by
rolling everything together into one Great Unknown and then calling
upon the creative powers of human nature in order to provide people
and societies with the appearance of definite types and sorts of things
which appear to possess independent acts of existence relative to each
other. But is the knower really there at all as an independent subject
and substance? Apparently he or she really is, and isn't, and at the
same time.

In the process of trying to maintain this strange situation, all of
our most basic common-sense knowledge of reality is taken apart,
reinterpreted, deconstructed, and restructured, not once but,
potentially at least, over and over again forever into the future. Not
only that, the theory, since it purports to instruct us about the way the
world and the human condition really is, demands that this has
indeed always been the case throughout the whole history of human
existence. Objectivity is what the spirit-of-the-world (people) want to
be the case. Man-the-world-builder is radicalized. Not only is the
historical process of scientific development relativized, but the very
truths of science are also deconstructed.

Moreover, not only does this do great violence to our everyday
world, it also negates most of the traditional theological notions of the
Judaeo-Christian and Islamic religions. Personal immortality
vanishes under the new radical hermeneutic of the One. The line
between good and evil is blurred to the point where, like the Becoming
which is Reality, the very idea of guilt and sin become unintelligible.
The sacraments become merely superficial social signs of com-
munity involvement. Theology and philosophy are transmuted into
anthropology, psychology, and sociology. God himself is melded and
kneaded into the uncreated, never-ending universe.

In the case of extreme positions, however, as in the case of
pendulums, the extreme view must soon enough move back toward
center under its own weight. The force of reality is strong enough to
overcome any power some given philosophical theory may possess to
pull us off-center for a short time. And what our life-centered
experience of reality demands is both essence and existence, fixed
meanings and multiple variations, the traditional and the modern,
and so forth. However avant-garde it may appear at the moment, any
philosophy, interpretation, or hermeneutic which affirms one at the
expense of the other is doomed to failure.

Explaining how we can have both aspects of reality simultane-
ously is within the province of the philosophy of being. That we do in
fact have both is a fact of experience. Even the hyper-moderns

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