When all is said and done, however, whatever contributions can be found in these developments that are actually really interesting, there is very little that is actually substantially new. When A.N. Whitehead said that all of philosophy has been nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato, he was, of course, exaggerating. But only a bit. I realize that there are individuals, such as John D. Caputo, Jean-Luc Marion, and to some extent, perhaps, Marold Westphal, who have made personal careers out of endeavoring to demonstrate that something worth discovering may finally reside beneath all the superficial hype surrounding the now deceased Derrida and his deconstructionist reading of philosophical texts.I can relate. One of the aspects of Derrida's thought that intrigued me and drew me into his way of seeing the world was that his philosophy really wasn't new. Philosophizing in his own situation, time, culture, and language, Derrida was illuminating the darkness of our minds with the bright torch of Socrates, who like Derrida knew that he did not know. Particularly enjoyable in those years after becoming acquainted with deconstruction was my reading of classic texts from Plato to Josef Pieper to Frank Sheed, and after coming upon a particular passage, remarking to myself that what they said kinda sounded like Derrida.
The Pertinacious Papist concludes:
When all was said and done, I found these thinkers -- as valuable as the have been for understanding where we are today -- utterly disappointing. In the beginning, they entice. They seduce. They draw one in with the promise of profundity. But their larders are empty, their cisterns dry, and they leave their victims empty, famished, parched with thirst. By contrast, I have found that turning back to some of the forgotten, neglected, rejected, derided "scholastic" sorts of thinkers that I have mentioned above has turned up an unexpected oasis within the deserts of modernity and postmodernity -- a place with fertile growth and deep wells where one can drink deeply and find satisfaction.I can understand this dissatisfaction with postmodernism, which can tend to focus on how we don't know rather than on the being we can know. Perhaps it is a mental perversion of mine that I am equally fascinated with how we know and don't know as I am with being, truth, and goodness. I find much good wine in the wells of postmodernism. My defense is that I believe even philosophers have vocations, special callings to devote themselves to projects most others would find not to their liking.