John D. Caputo writes about Jacques Derrida: "Reflection for him is a mediated and limited process, at once made possible by, yet constrained within the limits of, the system of signifiers within which it occurs." Derrida was the founder of deconstruction, a postmodern philosophy that has been associated with nihilism, relativism, and the denial of any truth outside our historical-cultural categories of language. Among Caputo's philosophical projects has been a defense of Derrida and deconstruction against its detractors. He has also written on the religious signification of Derrida's philosophy.
While I do not entirely agree with Caputo or Derrida, I have come to see that they are neither nihilists nor relativists. I thought they were until I actually read them. They have, moreover, modified my thinking. For the record, I am still a believer in orthodoxy. Possible?
I used to view truth as a correspondence between one's idea of reality and reality itself. One's ideas about things in reality could be assessed as true or false based on whether or not they matched the things themselves. This assessment could be made by testing the ideas against the things themselves, which I believed we experience as they are in themselves.
Language, of course, is a finite thing with limitations, so any correspondence between word and thing would not be a perfect, one-to-one correspondence. In addition to being situated in history and culture, language reveals and conceals what it refers to, especially when referring to abstract things like love or justice. Our concept of knowledge, for example, makes use of different metaphors, some sight-based, others touched-based. The image of seeing for knowledge suggests distance; whereas touching implies intimacy with the thing known, but with a focus on only a part of it at a time. Grasping indicates a possessiveness to our knowledge. Understanding means standing under, getting to the root of what we seek to know. Each figure reveals something true of knowledge, but each also conceals some meaning of knowledge. There is no pure concept that encapsulates every significance of knowledge.
Enter Derrida: One of his insights was that the categories of language are already there (at play, he would say) prior to our experience, and these categories make possible but limit the experience of things. Because categories and concepts of language reveal and conceal (at times creatively) what they refer to, and because this creative revealing and concealing of signs allows for and shapes our perceptions of things, our experience of reality is not of reality itself, pure and unmediated; rather it is our experience of things in so far as they fit into and are formed by our language. If this is true, then we judge the veracity of our ideas based not on reality as it is in itself, but based on our experience of reality, an experience that is shaped by our linguistic categories and concepts.
I do not see this as a nihilistic destruction of truth. It means that truth is not reducible to one system of thought, for any system of thought is always a limited construct, always situated in history.
We deconstruct our philosophies, histories, scientific theories, and yes, even our theologies to open them up to the undeconstructable, that which--to bring in a theological point--we will only see at the Beatific Vision. As apologist Frank Sheed has explained, the Beatific Vision occurs when we see God face to face, unmediated by even the purest concept.
I trust I make myself obscure.
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