Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
I will actually start making the argument on Monday
Jacques
Derrida (1930-2004)
is perhaps the closest thing to the major voice of postmodernism. If
we were to try to sum up in one sentence a single idea emblematic of
postmodernism we could not do better than to say postmodernism is the
view that three are no meta narratives. Derrida, working in the
philosophical
heritage of Edmomnd Husseral. “Given this ontological
critique, which Derrida claims pervades all of western philosophy,
Derrida asserts a sort of post-metaphysical, post-foundational,
perspective of reality that is not so much a new philosophy, but
rather one that no longer naively accepts the arbitrary metaphysical
claims of western thought.”[1] Derrida holds that western
thought has always assumed
a logos, or a transcendental signified. “For
essential reasons the unity of all that allows itself to be attempted
today through the most diverse concepts of science and of writing,
is in principle, more or less covertly, yet always, determined by an
historico-metaphysical epoch of which we merely glimpse the
closure.”[2]
Rather
than seeking to destroy all truth he seeks to show that the modern
metaphysical referents to which the assumptions of logos pertain are
inherently problematic.
To explain the meaning of the transcendental signified with reference to the article itself as well as my previous understanding of this concept, I can say that Derrida assumes that the entire history of Western metaphysics from Plato to the present is founded on a classic, fundamental error. This error is searching for a transcendental signified, an “ external point of reference” ( like God, religion, reason, science….) upon which one may build a concept or philosophy. This transcendental signified would provide the ultimate meaning and would be the origin of origins. This transcendental signified is centered in the process of interpretation and whatever else is decentered. To Derrida THIS IS A GREAT ERROR because... 1. There is no ultimate truth or a unifying element in universe, and thus no ultimate reality (including whatever transcendental signified). What is left is only difference. 2. Any text, in the light of this fact, has almost an infinite number of possible interpretations, and there is no assumed one signified meaning.[3]
For
Derrida, as
with Davies,
there is nothing outside of the realm of signifier
that we can latch onto and pull ourselves out of the
quagmire of signs and signification. There is no touchstone of
meaning outside of that realm
because all meaning is
based
upon the shifting sands of signifier and differance.[4] So modern though is between a
rock and a
hard
place. We are either trapped in the world of signification where
meaning is arbitrary and always differed to the next signifier which
is also arbitrary, or we are stuck in the Cul-de-Sac
of scientific reductionism.
Jacob
Gabriel Hale asserts
that Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) has the answer. Van Til was a
Philosopher and Reformed Theologian best known for the transcendental
Argument for God (TAG).[5] Hale
compares Derrida to Van Til. Both understand modern thought to be
trapped in the same dead end seeking a logos but unable to connect
with
it. While
Derridia's answer is to give up on logos and tear down hierarchies
and be stuck like a character in a Becket play, Van Til understands
God as the true presupposition to logic.[6] Thus Van Til fills in the blank of the logos with the Christian
Logos. The
Christian intellectual tradition has always regarded God as the basis
of logic
probably going back to the Greeks and their idea of logos. It's a
concept very reminiscent of St. Augustine in his association of God
with truth.
Augustine
expresses the concept of the super-essential Godhead many times and
in many ways. Augustine was a Platonist. In that regard perhaps his
greatest innovation was to place the Platonic forms in the mind of
God. That is a major innovation because it trumps the Neo-Platonistic
following after Plotinus, who conceived of a form of the forms. In
Augustinian understanding the equivalent of the “the one” the
form that holds all other forms within itself is the mind of God.
Augustine never made an argument for the existence of God because for
him God was known with certainty and immediacy. God is immediately
discerned in the apprehension of truth, thus need not be “proved.”
God is the basis of all truth, and therefore, cannot be the object of
questioning about truth, since God is he medium through which other
truths can be known.[7] Paul Tillich reflects upon Augustine’s concept:
Augustine, after he had experienced all the implications of ancient
skepticism, gave a classical answer to the problem of the two
absolutes: they coincide in the nature of truth. Veritas is
presupposed in ever philosophical argument; and veritas is
God. You cannot deny truth as such because you could do it only in
the name of truth, thus establishing truth. And if you establish
truth you affirm God. “Where I have found the truth there I have
found my God, the truth itself,” Augustine says. The question of
the two Ultimates is solved in such a way that the religious Ultimate
is presupposed in every philosophical question, including the
question of God. God is the presupposition of the question of God.
This is the ontological solution of the problem of the philosophy
of religion. God can never be reached if he is the object of a
question and not its basis.
Augustine says God is truth. He doesn’t so much say God is being as
he says God is truth. But to say this in this way is actually in line
with the general theme we have been discussing, the one I call
“super-essential Godhead,” or Tillich’s existential ontology.
Augustine puts the emphasis upon God’s name as love, not being.
Since he was a neo Platonist he thought of true reality as beyond
being and thus he thought of God as “beyond being.” This makes no
sense in a modern setting since for us “to be” is reality, and to
not be part of being would meaning being unreal. But in the platonic
context, true reality was beyond this level of reality and what we
think of as “our reality” or “our world” is only a plane
reflection of the true reality. We are creatures of a refection in a
mud puddle and the thing reflected that is totally removed from our
being is the true reality. It was this distinction Tillich tried to
preserve by distinguishing between being and existence.[8]
Augustine
looked to the same passage in Exodus that Gilson quotes in connection
with Aquinas. Augustine’s conclusions are much the same about that
phrase “I am that I am.” This is one of his key reasons for his
identification between God and truth. He saw the nature of God’s
timeless being as a key also to identifying God with truth. The link
between God and truth is the Platonic “one.” Augustine puts the
forms in the mind of God, so God becomes the forms really. The basis
of this identification is partly God’s eternal nature. From that
point on it’s all an easy identification between eternal verities,
such as truth, eternal being, beauty, the one, and God. The other
half of the equation is God’s revelation of himself as eternal and
necessary through the phrase, for very similar reasons to those
listed already by Gilson, between I am that I am and being itself (or
in Augustine’s case the transcended of being). “He answers,
disclosing himself to creature as Creator, as God to man, as Immortal
to mortal, eternal to a thing of time he answers ‘I am who I am.’”[9]
Problems with TAG
I
am about to present am argument that also uses the term
“transcendental.” Both arguments argue for belief in God. The
difference being that TAG proceeds from presuppositional apologetics,
while my argument is made
on an
evidential
basis.
Both assume that God is at the basis of all knowledge and meaning.
This is what is meant by “transcendental,” it refers to the basis
of the system of thought. My argument uses the TS as an evidential
basis for belief while the presupositional argument merely assumes
the truth of the argument then rejects the presuppositions
of other views. TAG says nothing about signifier.
To understand the insufficiency of TAG (thus they need for a new
argument) we must examine TAG more closely. Greg
Bahnsen was the champion of TAG[10]. Van Til never really makes the argument, never actually states it.[11] TAG is basically just the assumptions of Van Til's presupositional
approach, he wants to scratch starting from a point of neutrality
and
trying
to prove truth and asserting the presuppositions we believe:
“ He
maintained that because God, speaking in his word, is the ultimate
epistemological starting point, there is no way of arguing for the
faith on the basis of something other than the faith itself. God's
authority is ultimate and thus self-attesting.”[12]
That is really the basis of TAG. The problem is he never bothers to
prove it. That is an instant turn off for most atheists, and since he
never states the argument clearly, it's not real clear what it is. I
like the idea of not being stuck with a phony neutrality because most
atheists, at least new atheists lionize their assumptions, at least
in my experience those I've dealt with tend to do that. I don't seek
to argue for total proof but rational warrant for belief. This
argument I will present in terms of the best explanation.
I
think the approach I'm taking will offer a couple of things that Van
Til doesn't. First, In dealing with Derrida’s world of signifiers
and it's concept of the TS we are in a better position to insist that
God is the presupposition, because all the Derridians agree Western
metaphysics accepts TS and that is basically another version of God.
So the difficulty in getting the secular thinker to accept the
premise that God is the presupposition is not as great a gap to cover
if we can start out assuming the tradition affirms a God-like premise
in a logos anyway. Secondly, I don't think Van Til get's us out of
the closed in world of his presuppositions. He asserts that the
Triune deity is the presupposition to all logic, truth, and meaning
but why would an unbeliever assume it? If my argument is successful
it should become apparent that God is the best explanation.
Modern
secular thought can't make the leap outside itself to find God
because it either rejects God or uses itself as the standard of
truth. Of course this is inadequate because that is the problem in
the first place. God is truth but that's not obvious because it's too
transparent, we are too close to the reality. St. Augustine made an
argument that might be considered transcendental in that it assumes
God as the presupposition to truth. Paul Tillich summarizes this
argument:
Augustine,
after he had experienced all the implications of ancient skepticism,
gave a classical answer to the problem of the two absolutes: they
coincide in the nature of truth. Veritas is presupposed in
every philosophical argument; and veritas is God. You cannot
deny truth as such because you could do it only in the name of truth,
thus establishing truth. And if you establish truth you affirm God.
“Where I have found the truth there I have found my God, the truth
itself,” Augustine says. The question of the two Ultimates is
solved in such a way that the religious Ultimate is presupposed in
every philosophical question, including the question of God. God
is the presupposition of the question of God. This is the
ontological solution of the problem of the philosophy of religion.
God can never be reached if he is the object of a question and
not its basis.[13]
One
might ask why, if God is so basic to be synonymous with truth we
can't all recognize it? That is the reason, it's so basic. So it is
with being, we write it off as “just what is” and go on looking
for this “God” who can’t be found because we don’t understand
he’s nearer than our inmost being. Such is the pitfall of
scientific empiricism. The point of course is that God is too basic
to our being, too much a part of the existence we share that we don't
see any indications of presence. We take for granted the aspects of
being that indicate God's reality. Some of the indications might be
physical or cosmological, such as fine tuning or modal necessity.
Others are experiential. The atheists pointed out that water is
physical and can be detected. It's only an analogy and all analogies
break down at some point. Analogies are not proofs anyway. I don't
offer this as proof but as a clarification of a concept. In so
clarifying we find a link to being; the connection between God and
Being itself.
Heidegger
approaches being in this manner, it is ready-to-hand, too basic to
notice. In other words like a carpenter using tools we find being so
inherently part of our experience, so ready-to-hand that we don't
notice it. Paul Tillich worked in the vain of Heidegger, he used the
philosopher to translate classic Christian theology into modern
thought. In that vain we are too close to being, it's too fundamental
to what we are to realize that our place in it is to be contingencies
based upon the reality of God. God is also "detectable" but
of course, not in the sense that physical objects are. Like a fish in
water, being is the medium in which we exist. Given certain
assumptions we can understand the correlation between experience of
presence and the nature of eternal necessary being. When we
experience the reality of God through the presence of holiness we
experience the nature of being as eternal and necessary. All we need
to do is realize the necessary aspect of being to realize the reality
of God. This is why Tillich says:
The name of infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of our being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation. Perhaps, in order to do so, you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself. For if you know that God means depth, you know much about Him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. Being itself is surface only. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not."[14]
"Depth
of being" and being itself are synonymous. Depth just means that
there's more to being than appears on the surface. The surface is the
most obvious aspect, that things exist. The existence of any given
thing is the surface level. If we go deeper to probe the nature of
being that entails the realization of the eternal necessary aspect of
being and thus being has depth. Then we realize our own contingent
nature and thus, we are at one and the same time realizing the
reality of God (that is after all the basis of the cosmological
argument and the ontological argument as well. This is why God
seems to be hidden. God is not hiding himself. According to
Hartshorne, "only God can be so universally important that no
subject can ever wholly fail or ever have failed to be aware of him
(in however dim or UN-reflective fashion)."[15] Now the issue of why God doesn't hold a "press conference"
has do do with the fact that God does not communicate by violating
normal causal principles. In process terms, the "communication"
of God must be understood as the prehension of God by human beings. A
"prehension" is the response of an occasion to the entire
past world (both the contiguous past and the remote past.) As God is
in every occasion's past actual world, every occasion must "prehend"
or take account of God.
- It should be noted that "prehension" is a generic mode of perception that does not necessarily entail consciousness or sensory experience. There a two modes of pure perception --"perception in the mode of causal efficacy" and "perception in the mode of presentational immediacy." If God is present to us, then it is in the presensory perceptual mode of causal efficacy as opposed to the sensory and conscious perceptual mode of presentational immediacy.[16] That is why God is "invisible", i.e. invisible to sense perception. The foundation for experience of God lies in the nonsesnory non conscious mode of prehension. So now, there is the further question: Why is there variability in our experience of God?. Or, why are some of us atheists, pantheists, theists, etc.? Every prehension has an initial datum derived from God, yet there are a multiplicity of ways in which this datum is prehended from diverse perspectives.
- I agreed with Hume that sense perception tells us nothing about efficient causation (or final causation for that matter). Hume was actually presupposing causal efficacy in his attempt to deny it (i.e., in his relating sense impressions to awareness).[17] Causation could be described as an element of experience, but as Whitehead explains, this experience is not sensory experience. From Hume's own analysis Whitehead derives at least two forms of non-sensory perception: the perception of our own body and the non-sensory perception of one's past.
- But this is at an unconscious level. However, in some people, this direct prehension of the "Holy" rises to the level of conscious experience. We generally call theses people "mystics". Now, the reason why a few people are conscious of God is not the result of God violating causal principle; some people are just able to conform to God's initial datum in greater degree than other people can. I don't think that God chooses to make himself consciously known to some and not to others. That would make God an elitist. Now, the question as to why I am a theist as opposed to an atheist does have to do with me experiencing some exceptional religious or mystical experience; it does not have to do with amazing experiences that prove. Rather, I believe that these extraordinary experiences of the great religious leaders are genuine and that they do conform to the ultimate nature of things. It's not necessarily a "blind leap" of faith, as my religious beliefs are accepted, in part, on the basis of whether or not they illuminate my experience of reality.
- The experience of no one single witness is the "the final proof," but the fact that there are millions of witnesses who, in differing levels from the generally intuitive to the mystical, experience must be the same thing in terms of general religious belief, the argument is simply that God interacts on a “human heart” (deep psychological) level, and the experiences of those who witness such interaction is strong evidence for that conclusion. This does not, however, remove the usefulness of deductive argument. The argument could be made as an inductive argument based upon religious experiences, yet with greater uncertainty. While deductive veracity is assurance of the truth of a statement, that assumes the premises are true, that's hard to establish with no basis in the empirical. that's hard to do if one finds it hard to believe that deduction can prove God we don't need to argue that. It can establish a rational warrant. For example we can't prove by observation weather the moon was a fragment of Earth or a captured meteorite, until we invent time travel we can't know empirically but we deduce a theory that makes sense. We might never know with certainty but we can have an indication that makes sense. So with deductive argument and God belief. Deductive argument can give us rational warrant for belief. The difference in warrant and proof is the difference in really knowing how the moon came to be and reaching a rational conclusion based upon deductive reasoning. One might ask “where does warrant get us in terms of belief in God?” It doesn't prove but may clear away the clutter so that we can come to terms with God on an existential level.
[1] Jacob
Gabriel Hale, “Derrida. Van Til, And the Metaphysics of
Postmodernism,” Reformed Perspectives Magazine, Volume
6, number 19 (Junje 30 to July 6, 2004) Third Medellin Ministries,
on line Resource URL
[2]
Jaques
Derrida, The End of
the Book and the Beginning of Writing,
New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovonovitch, trans. Gayatri Spivak 1967
in Contemporary Critical Theory, ed. Dan Latimer, 1989, p.166
[3] Ayman
Elhallaq. “Tramscemdemtal; Signiofioed as the basis of
Deconstruction theory,” Literary Theory in Class,
(July 17, 2005) bloh URL:
http://iupengl752-elhallaqayman.blogspot.com/2005/07/transcendental-signified-as-basis-of.html
accessed 5/19/16
[4] Hale,
op cit,
Derrida intentionally spells “difference”
with an “a” to remind the reader that the meaning signifier is
not based upon an essential correspondence between signifier and
signified but is arbitrary and meaning is always referenced by
another word that is itself arbitrary. His overall point is that
there is no ultimate meaning,
[5]
Michael R. Butler.“The
Transcendental
Argument for God's Existence,” online resourse,
URL:http://butler-harris.org/tag/,
viewed 7/3/15.
Mike
Butler is Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Faculty at Christ
College, Lynchburg, Virginia.
[6] Ibid
[7] Donald Keef, Thomism and the Ontological Theology: A Comparison of
Systems. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1971,140.
[8]
Paul
Tillich, Theology
of Culture,
New
York: Oxford University press,1964
12-13.
[9] Carl Avren Levenson,
John Westphal, editors, Reality: Readings
in Phlosophy.
Indianapolis,
Indiana:Hackett
Pulbishing company, inc. 1994, 54
“…St. Augustine’s view
that God is being itself is based partly upon
Platonism (“God is
that
which truly is” and partly on the Bible—“I am that I am”).
The transcendence of time as a condition of full reality is a
central theme…[in Augustine’s work].”
[10] Greg L. Bhansen.
Pushing the Antithesis, Powder
Springs, Georgia:
American Vision Inc. 2007Ibid.,
6-7
[11] Gordon H. Clark, in Nash, op
cit 301.
original,
Gordon
H. Clark,
"Apologetics," Contemporary
Evangelical Thought (Carl
F. H. Henry, ed.),140.
[12] Butler,
op.cit.
[13]
Paul Tillich, Theology
of Culture,
London, op cit
[14]
Paul Tillich. The Shaking of the Foundations. Eugene
Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2012, 57.
[15] Charles Harthorne, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of
God, New
Haven: Yale University press, 1982, 70.
[16] Jon
Mills. “Harthorne's Unconscious Ontology,” oneline,URL:
http://www.processpsychology.com/new-articles/Whitehead.htm
accessed,7/3/15.
[17] This
is common knowledge of Hume's take on causality that we don't see
causes at work. This is the pojnt of the billiard balls.
