May 2015
Cecilia Huckestein received a master's degree in English literature and a doctorate in
educational psychology from the University of Southern California. She has taught in several universities, including
the University of Puerto Rico, Hawaii Pacific University, California State University Los Angeles, California Lutheran
University, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. She is currently Adjunct Professor of Psychology at California
State University Channel Islands. Her writing has appeared in the Jesuit quarterly Human Development and the Fellowship
of Catholic Scholars Quarterly.
When we look at our world today, we see a massive amount of moral chaos, and we sense that something is drastically
off. In some cases, we see the substitution of what we thought
was evil for what we thought was good. Recent political campaigns boasted of “change” as an antidote to our immediate
needs or desires. This change is being forced upon us by those in positions of rhetorical authority, in the media
and political realms, in academia and technology. These rhetorical authorities are the current-day sophists, and
they have manipulated language to shape their own versions of reality, and have altered the traditional meanings
of words to suit their own agendas. The original Sophists, as far back as the fifth century, proposed that the
truth was not to be found in transcendent sources, such as Plato’s universal forms. Rather, they believed that
the truth emerged from a clash of arguments. Even more radically, they believed that “the world could always be
recreated linguistically and that reality itself is a linguistic construction” (Advent
and Christmas, Wisdom from St. Thomas Aquinas, Andrew Carl Wisdom O.P., ed., 2009).
We who are rooted in the Word — Jesus Christ, the Son of God
— recognize the beauty and power of the truth, which is the Word itself, that the truth is unchanging and unchangeable,
and that our own words can and must reflect the truth. Why then have we become so timid in expressing our moral
claims with a vocabulary that used to prevail? Why have great numbers of people replaced erudition rooted in wisdom
and holiness with secular solvents that admit a linguistic equivalence between good and evil? The answer lies in
part in the powerful influence of the academic world, where postmodern skepticism about moral truth has assumed
the mantle of authority. This influence has its origin in the thought of an illustrious professor of philosophy
named Jacques Derrida.
Derrida is the author of a fashionable dialectical theory of language known as deconstructionism, which had more influence on literary, philosophical, sociological, anthropological, historical, and
psychological studies than perhaps any other force in the second half of the twentieth century. A student at Harvard
in the 1950s, Derrida is the subject of an astonishingly large volume of scholarly work across a vast array of
academic disciplines, and although he died in 2004 he remains one of the most controversial academicians of our
time.
Parents of college-bound children need to take note: Due largely to Derrida’s theory of language, colleges and
universities across the country have embraced new methods of reading texts, which has led to the emergence of novel
and bizarre academic areas of study, including “Gay and Lesbian Studies,” “Queer Theory,” “Feminist Studies,” “Black
Studies,” “The Rhetoric of Karl Marx,” “Power Discourse,” “Excluded Discourse,” “Post-Structuralism,” and so on.
Over the past thirty years, it is likely that most college students have been exposed to Derrida’s theories, either
overtly or subtly through some professor’s deviationist “take” on a subject at hand.
Derrida believed that language is not a neutral instrument that refers to or describes objective reality but that
it is “circular,” referring back to itself. This means that any piece of writing (which he called a “text”) is
autonomous, floating around by itself, waiting for someone to give it meaning. In fact, more often than not, each
different reader gives it a different meaning. The intentions of the author have no bearing on a text’s meaning
since language does not “refer” to anything in any objective way. From this came the insufferable divisions in
academia, and the massive increases in curriculum courses, each one a peculiar twist on its traditional source.
Prior to the twentieth century, the principle concern of philosophical studies in most universities across the
Western world had been Aristotelian metaphysics. Its object was to throw light on the nature of the universe as
a whole. The purpose of philosophic inquiry was to reflect upon the results of the various sciences, add to them
the results of the religious and ethical experiences of mankind, and then try to analyze the whole. The hope was
that, by these means, we would be able to reach some general conclusions concerning the nature of the universe
and our place and prospects in it.
A new group of philosophers, called logical positivists, felt that this quest was doomed to disappoint. In their
view, these traditional aims were mistaken, or at least unrealizable. The primary object of philosophy, they thought,
was to analyze and clarify the meaning of commonsense statements, not in the way grammar clarifies or analyzes
them, but with a view to making clear precisely what our words mean
when we use them significantly. It was still possible, but by no means certain, that, with this clarification of
meaning, we might obtain some information about the structure of facts. In short, the logical positivists wanted
to find out what we are asserting when we say we know certain
things to be true. They thought that without this investigation, metaphysics would be engaging in nothing more
than a kind of sophisticated myth-making.
The philosophical pendulum thus swung in the direction of language
— but not language as commonly understood. The logical positivists rejected language as an organized system of
auditory-visual symbols by which we refer to concepts in firm,
precise forms. And so, language as reference to something objective
came under assault, at first in France, and then throughout the world.
In Germany and Austria, in the meantime, the ponderous works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel were achieving increasing
notice. Hegel laid the groundwork in Germany, in terms of the concept of “reality,” for what Derrida would do to
the concept of “language” in France. Hegel’s dialectical method produced the most elephantine metaphysical system
ever known to man. To attempt a brief synopsis of it here is not possible, but what is most important to remember
is that, for Hegel, reality is contradictory: “It is a systematic progression of colliding contradictions organized
in triads of thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” writes the noted constitutional and civil liberties attorney John
W. Whitehead (The Stealing of America, 1983). It means that
we should not feel “limited by the Aristotelian view that everything that exists has a specific identity, that
things are what they are, that A is A.”
When Hegel applied his triad to existence, here is what happened: The opposite of being is nonbeing. Contradiction develops a conflict between
these two concepts, which produces synthesis. The resulting synthesis is becoming, which places everything in perpetual motion or process. This dialectic logic obliterates the ideas of
an objective God, objective truth, and moral absolutes. Everything becomes relative; everything, everywhere is
in a constant state of change. And because there is no objective
truth, the idea of truth itself becomes situational. Those versed in the political history of the twentieth century
will recognize that Hegel laid the foundation for the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, for whose ideology
millions upon millions were executed throughout Europe and Asia. These Hegelian principles led to the marginalization
of the Judeo-Christian concept of God as a transcendent Being to whom we have direct access, since human origin
and life itself can only be interpreted in light of process.
The second critical point is this: If the transcendent referential element, who for many is God, is removed, the
stability of the real, as well as the psychic depth of each of us to discover the real, is no longer valid. What
achieves exclusive validity is language. If reality is no longer viewed as a pre-existent formation to which language
is a response, if reality is no longer a concept independent of language, then language itself becomes transcendent
and inaccessible to our own independent acts of will and intelligence. Language becomes the indissoluble element
of human self-creation. Words, signs, and signifiers are no longer vehicles for ideas, no longer means to an end,
but are the end itself. They are the “synthesis” of ever-active “processes.”
What Hegel could not know is that, a century after his death, one of his most prodigious students, Jacques Derrida,
would be born in France. Whereas in Hegelian thought a concept achieved definition through its opposite, for Derrida
meaning is always “deferred” to the creative activity of the interpreter. There can be no objective meaning, but
only processes of interpretation. For Derrida the relationship between a word and the formal element and meaning
which this element is, is not fixed. The “creative” ability of the interpreter to refer to all the other elements
to which a written or spoken word does not refer asphyxiates
objective meaning.
At this point, you might be thinking, This is all crazy! And
I would say that you are not incorrect. In light of these propositions, the question posed by Eric Shopler and
Gary B. Mesibov in their book Communication Problems in Autism
(1985) is profoundly significant: “How can a person be expected to appropriately use words for which he does not
have an objective meaning base?” For Shopler and Mesibov, as well as for many other specialists in the field of
autism, objective reference, context, and communicative intents are the very ramparts of healthy psychological
construction; the autistic person is missing, on some level, all three requirements. This, too, is a topic too
large and complex to address here. Suffice it to say that Derrida’s thesis appears to be a macabre facsimile of
the autistic syndrome.
What Derrida’s thesis also leaves us with is relativism. Aldous
Huxley in Brave New World (1932) predicted that a false reality
with a false sense of truth would eventually comprise the modern world. Today, it seems that he was correct, in
that truth is seen as an entirely subjective notion and that any distinctions between truth and falsity should
be abolished. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI spoke on numerous occasions about a “dictatorship of relativism” that
threatens to obscure the unchanging truths concerning man’s destiny, his ultimate good, and his very nature. This
relativism hides beneath a word, and that word is tolerance.
In fact, this word disguises, with quintessential irony, a totalitarian intolerance to all things established according to a Christian worldview. Its agenda is for the state to be the new
moral arbiter for all mankind. The ultimate result, however, would be no different from the results achieved by
all nefarious atheistic ideologies of the twentieth century: enslavement and death. Elsewhere, Huxley reminds us
of the importance of words and language in our discussions of man’s nature, the moral life, the common good, and
our political systems:
A great deal
of attention has been paid…to the technical languages in which men of science do their specialized thinking…. But
the colloquial usages of everyday speech, the literary and philosophical dialects in which men do their thinking
about the problems of morals, politics, religion and psychology — these have been strangely neglected. We talk
about “mere matter of words” in a tone which implies that we regard words as things beneath the notice of a serious-minded
person. This is a most unfortunate attitude. For the fact is that words play an enormous part in our lives and
are therefore deserving of the closest study. The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its
falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect — but not in the way that magicians
supposed, and not the way they affect the minds of those who use them. “A mere matter of words” we say contemptuously,
forgetting that words have power to mold men’s thinking, to banalize their feeling, to direct their willing and
acting. Conduct and character are largely determined by the nature of the words we currently use to discuss ourselves
and the world around us. (quoted in The Use and Misuse of Language,
S.I. Hayakawa, 1978)
All of our institutions — marriage, family, school, government,
military, even the Church — have been infested with this dark and obfuscating force of deconstructionism, this
malevolent corruption of language, whose impetus is to tear down all present realities and replace them with those
of our vain and avaricious desires. Edmund Burke, the acclaimed eighteenth-century thinker, said that we all have
one intellectual choice in this life, and the choice is between two paradoxical ideas: Either we conform our minds
to reality, or we shape reality to conform to our thinking. St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that we must choose the
first.
So, where does this leave us as far as gaining a better understanding of the current cultural morass? For one,
we must reflect more deeply on what we do know. And we know more than Hegel, who believed that God was a “process”
of differentiating spirit and love, or Derrida, who called the notion of God “wholly other” and “indeterminable.”
Indeed, ancient philosophy as far back as the second century viewed language in light of a detailed structure of
all things, and as a manifestation of divine reason. We know that language refers; it involves a meaningful association
between signs or symbols — either spoken words, written symbols, gestures, or the play-work sequences of a child.
We also know that we are “transcended,” and we know by whom; we know, too, who our “transcendent” is, and that
He had a Son, the Word, who died for us so that the “truth” of eternal life could be ours,
forever, without changing. We know, from Aristotle and Aquinas and many, many other illustrious scholars and saints,
that reality is objective and does not depend on the human mind’s knowledge of it for its existence. Gaudium et Spes, Vatican II’s “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” reminds us that we have been,
from the beginning of time and until the last day, in a monumental battle against the powers of darkness, and if
we are to remain in Him, we must wrestle valiantly, “struggle constantly,” and the grace of God will be with us
(no. 37). This we also know.
G.K. Chesterton asserted that if we sever our link with God, the result is a state of madness: “If Man is not a
divinity, then Man is a disease. Either he is the image of God, or else he is the one animal which has gone mad.”
If in the beginning were words, as deconstructionism sees it, then it is marked out by indeterminacies. But if
John’s Gospel is correct, and “the Word is God,” then we are spared the abyss of psychopathy, and we can retrieve
our selfhood as an enduring existence and meaning beyond as well as through our individual selves. And then the dynamic and
vital process of experience mirrors the novel in literature, a sublime “text” in which the pattern of life contains
not only an abundance of characters but reflects the transcendent Author as well.