Post modernism generated many ideas about ideas, language, certainty and even physics. Many of those ideas were incorrect or based upon premises that were incomplete. Those ideas influenced academics and policy makers. Derrida’s ideas about language, certainty and the relationship of social organizations to language heavily influenced American educators and the American left and continue to do so. Communism influenced the world, as it was presented roughly by Karl Marx and it too was usually misunderstood.
Perhaps there are three basic threads that went into forming post-modern concepts regarding skepticism and the inability ti have certainty concerning objective events and even reality. One is the rise of linguistic philosophy and developments in the philosophy of language, and the other is quantum mechanics, the Schrodinger wave-function/collapse and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The final thread is that of epistemology- the theory of knowledge, Philosophers like W.V.O. Quine and P.F. Strawson combined the fields of epistemology, logic and language within their work. Sartre observed the organizing principle and forms of society subjectively in Being and Nothingness and The Critique of Dialectical Reason- taking the structures at face value without historical analysis. Derrida followed these philosophers in time and formulated an excellent abstract of the way language forms in society. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work on explaining on how language meanings arise preceded that of Derrida by nearly a half century (i.e. The Blue and Brown Books). Derrida seemed to make some of the same mistakes as Aristotle in over-estimating the reliability of words, additionally over-estimating their strength in forming social structures.
Karl Marx was the greatest historical social analyst writer of his time. Witnessing poverty and the oppression of concentrated wealth with royalty first hand he sought a political remedy for it. Rather than to advocate a tax increase on the wealthy he sought complete revolution to end social inequality. With the England of his time being something like post-communist revolution Shanghai in the pathos of civilian deaths among the poor, and having fathered several children, his desire to improve social conditions for the poor was personal as well as compassionate. In some respects his ideas were ahead of their time as well as partly incorrect. Marx’s work prescriptively were his best theories for how to reform society to a more just extent. Plainly he made numerous errors in that regard.
One of Marx’s famous and misunderstood expressions that might be used to highlight the uncertainty of language is; “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. That could be a remark from classical economics concerning the ‘allocation of resources’ to attain maximum economic productivity. Each individual would produce according to his ability, perhaps with social support in education and training ‘to be the best that he or she can be’, and venture capital would provide funds to inventors and developers according to his or her needs. In Marx’s England perhaps the ordinary citizen that desired to be an entrepreneur or to develop an invention could not find the capital to do so. Marx’s expression has been interpreted in other ways to mean quite different things. That is an example of the incompleteness of language for defining meanings for objects and relationships. That occurs words are different from the objects and relationships they describe. Words have practical communication value that arise from use and application rather than from the things-in-themselves. The entity that produces red fruit of a certain shape that is, does not also grow its name ‘apple’ upon its branches as it would need to if there were a direct relationship between word/name and object.
Derrida assumed that numerous mass social issues of his time; such as decolonization, racism, nationalism and wars originated because of cohesive language structures inherent in mass organizations, social structures and classes. Deconstructing social iniquity could be achieved achieved through language. Deconstruction as a tool for Biblical criticism was especially popular because of the rise of Darwinian evolution theory and the changes that drove through popularization of scientific thought in the field of education and popular concepts of genesis cosmology. Marxist were especially anti-theistic and atheist; the left became militant for social evolution/revolutions based on a wave of post-modernist, atheistic ideology that regarded itself as post-ideological after the end of the Cold War (that Joe Biden has renewed perhaps because of memory-cognitive issues and a preference that the first cold war never really ended).
Derrida was understandably accused by sone of being an anarchist for trying to dissolve existing social institutions and establishments through the deconstruction of language in order to create something better without having a clear idea of wat that was. Yet Derrida simply extrapolated too far from the basis of his rather sound language structure ideas to the reason why social organizations arise to start with and to the role they play in societies.
Adam in the garden named objects brought before him; his words didn’t create the objects. Derrida’s followers believed that by changing the words and deconstructing the languages and history they would change the objects. Derrida’s over-belief in the power of language and in the uncertainty and malleability of its meanings were developed in post-world War II Europe where a chaos of languages, manifest destruction of social order and problems of nationalism and colonialism were evident first hand. Within the post-war cauldron of a Babel of languages that Nimrod would have had difficulty making sense of so far as social organization goes, a new way for the left to view social reality developed. It was in effect a popular epistemological system based in misunderstanding the philosophy of language, quantum physics and history.
The German physicist Werner Heisenberg found that one could find the position of a quantum particle like the photon or its speed yet not both. Quanta exist in a wave theoretically at all possible positions traveling at a certain speed. When one collapse the wave in making a measurement at a particular point that does determine the position of a quanta though not the speed since it should be a wave in motion. That was the Uncertainty principle and eventually in the popular conception that developed a meaning that reality could not be understood or knowledge trustworthy. Coupled with Derrida’s deconstruction of language for reliability and certainty, the left had powerful tools for skepticism, truth and logic.
Simultaneous criticisms of Descartes' dualist spirit-matter epistemology in preference for the materialism and atheism of Karl Marx and Feurbach coupled with Biblical criticism that regard the Word of God scripture as literature could be credited without a preponderance of error as the main rationale for the present social state of affairs of the left. Deconstruction elevated somewhat superficial philosophers like Frederick Nietzsche while the public were generally not reading analytic philosophers and the subtle epistemology of Quine’s Word and Object’ or P.F. Strawson’s ‘Individuals’.
Human social organizations like those of penguins and the wild kingdom generally evolve with adaptations to the environment. If humans were without language capacity they would still organize in some way. Human organization evolved to address common biological and existential challenges. What is lacking is reform and adaptability in social organization.
The 20th century had innumerable interesting queries into the foundations of knowledge and language. Chomsky and Everett developed different viewpoints on the question of grammar being innate in the human brain or learned (or both?). Perhaps it was Nam Chomsky’s career as a linguist who regarded language phenomenally that made his political criticisms so appealing to the left since deconstruction of establishment politics was an important method of the era. I use the left within this essay in distinction to the right that generally is economically and socially more conservative (or was in the era) and doesn’t seek to deconstruct anything. That fact has been in conflict in some times to general improvements and upgrades to select doctrines when new information becomes available or is developed through further research and insights. Biblical hermeneutics is one such field; there is no reason at all to think tat God is not capable of using quantum mechanics paradigms although none are mentioned in the Bible explicitly (as if people of the 2nd millennium B.C. would have understood such references)
Language has accreted lexicons and word groupings with meaning values understood by users. Languages arose m when human cultures were rather isolated from other cultures. To speak one language shares meanings throughout a culture without much confusion or ambiguity about meanings. The meanings are those used by convention and historical inclusion. Over time words tend to lose their root, original values; they are comparable to algebraic variables that evolve different values over the course of the programs written by history and change.
A culture of many languages greatly multiplies the uncertainty of the meaning of words. Derrida’s post-war Europe and the aftermath of defeating the German National Socialist Worker’s Party-aka the NAZI party was one fraught with uncertainty of an historical and linguistic character.
Language, like algebraic formulas can have meaning and refer to real objects, although philosophers are aware of the phenomenal nature these days of what and how objects are presented within the quantum fields that supports the existence of a Universe. Valid language use is pragmatic and meanings as fine tuned for accuracy as possible and practical. In using the word apple for instance, one needn’t describe every possible configuration or appearance and circumstance of any apple that has ever, or will ever exist. It does not negate the value of language in communication to abbreviate that constellation of possible value to the one present and necessary. This is common sense and the value of intelligence. Humans exist in a bottomless, unbounded experience yet they wish to share communication about it with others though uncertainty is an aspect of the unknown. Though uncertainty abounds in temporal exstasis of past, present and future human experience existentially is certain on the pragmatic scale.
God’s word, in the beginning generated waveforms shaping quantum fields that formed reality; human words do not shape reality from nothing. Though human words can reflect intentions to reshape mass and energy, human language did not create the human race itself. Humans may shape existing matter and energy and form new organizations yet human language is a way of expressing ideas and will comparable to algebraic formula. God’s word is omni-powerful in this Universe; human language isn’t.
