Happy Saturday, dear TBB crew!
A warning: the following article is pretty darn dense philosophically, and is pretty long, so if that’s not your cup of tea (i.e., Barry’s black Irish tea), then enjoy your overtly sweet, peach-flavored Peace tea (which I myself also do also enjoy). As promised—although many of you would have perhaps been happy if I hadn’t kept it—in an older article, this is the next chapter (the second of three) of my edited senior thesis from Christendom College.
Just an historical sidetrack, the inspiration for writing my thesis on language and semantics came from a conversation I had with a Norwegian atheist outside of a club in Krakow, Poland, on a cold winter’s night. He was a married man, a father of two, and seemed generally virtuous. When it came down to it, however, the “true, the good, and the beautiful” was “all just semantics” in his mind. I pressed a number of different arguments to him, but whenever it seemed I had almost cornered him, those words inevitably came out: “it’s just semantics.” I didn’t know enough about language and semantics at the time to counter with any good points, so I made a mental note that I would delve wholeheartedly into the linguistic landscape and learn more about it when I had the chance (so that the next time I found someone using “semantics” as foliage to hide their arguments behind, I could cut away at the semantic overgrowth to show their arguments as they truly are—naked and afraid in the Garden). However, after a semester (the one in which I wrote my senior thesis) of diving into the murky waters of language, I’ve discovered that it’s not just a lake or a pond, but a flowing ocean of signs, symbols, and mystery, and this same ocean is connected and contributes to and receives from the other oceans of reality: rites and reason, vice and virtue, lies and love. Anyways, if my memory serves true, and it’s a funny thing if it does, I believe that the atheist’s name was Christian.
Please, if you have any thoughts on, questions on, or challenges to my arguments, then feel free to email me or leave a comment below—we’d love to hear from you out in that great, big world of SEOs and algorithms. If you enjoy linguistics, semantics, semiotics, epistemology, phenomenology, Aristotle, Aquinas, Walker Percy, or just delving into the complicated mire of experience and reality, then this is the article for you!
I hope you enjoy the following piece.
In mysterio Verbi,
James
Delta Versus Derrida
Man, it would appear, is able to capture objective reality in his words. But how is this possible? Bluntly put, it seems to be possible by way of the human language’s triadic structure, as expounded by Aristotle and Percy (Walker Percy, if you have not yet read the first article on this topic, is a philosopher and novelist from the 20th century). Yet, as Percy writes, “man’s capacity for...language...is so intimately part and parcel of his being human, of his perceiving and knowing...that it is all but impossible for him to focus on the magic prism through which he sees everything else.” [1] This “magic prism,” i.e., man’s inherent ability to express reality (in varying attempts), is opposed, however, by Jacques Derrida’s denunciation of “logocentrism,” as he calls it. This Derridean denunciation denies that the full meaning of words is present to us when we speak; all that is present in our words is the “trace” of the meaning. As author Christina Howells explains, “Logocentrism enshrines a reassuringly stable and hierarchical view of the world." [2] Derrida’s condemnation of logocentrism, however, is a false panacea. The things signified by words must be present to us in their full meaning, otherwise men become, as Percy writes, “incommunicado” to one another and they are disconnected from the objective world and from one another. This chapter will be a defense of a proper understanding of logocentrism via the Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of language and meaning. To demonstrate this defense against Derrida’s arguments, I will first address Derrida’s notion of anti-presence, that is, the ‘trace’; second, I will address Derrida’s notion of ‘dissemination’; third, I’ll attempt to contrast Aristotle’s semantic triangle and Percy’s delta phenomenon to Derrida’s aforementioned notions of language, and I will try to show that the semantic triangle and the delta phenomenon are the same thing: an articulation of the “magic prism” by which man relates to language, to the world, and fellow human beings.
While Derrida’s views of language are highly nuanced, the basic premise of his work is an effort to dismantle, or to “deconstruct,” the Western tradition’s theory of meaning and language, and its apparent obsession with a philosophy of presence. While Nietzsche, quoted in chapter one, is not a deconstructionist he is certainly a precursor of the movement in his attack of the traditions and structures of society, especially the ones that subverted the conventional as the natural. The sum of both philosophers’ obloquy of Western tradition is contained in Derrida’s concept of what he calls logocentrism, which Howells articulates in her assessment of the concept.
“Logocentrism is Derrida's term for a philosophy of presence, that is to say a worldview which understands being in terms of presence: the unmediated presence to consciousness of the world, and the self-presence of consciousness. Logocentrism is a form of 'onto-theology', or religion of being; in other words it subordinates all differences to the plenitude of presence resumed in the Logos, and determines the archaeological and eschatological meaning of being in terms of presence and Parousia.”
What logocentrism would seem to imply, then, is that when one speaks or writes, when one communicates (intelligibly, hopefully) the full meaning of one’s words is present to us; it becomes incarnate to us. Derrida, however, appears to disagree with this sentiment. Howells continues, saying that logocentrism further proposes a view of reality that sees the world as a stable and “hierarchical” place.
“It [logocentrism] supports those theories which see a direct relationship between thought and language, words and things, speech and writing...the signifier is always the representation of an original signified. Sometimes Derrida refers to this as the myth of the transcendental signified. Logocentrism enshrines a reassuringly stable and hierarchical view of the world, and one which Derrida subjects to relentless scrutiny in whatever form he finds it.” [3]
What is expounded here by Howells encapsulates in a nutshell the view that is held by the Thomistic-Aristotelian tradition, and it is exactly this summary of Western thought that Derrida criticizes. Derrida, like Nietzsche, believes that the whole structure of language and reality was based upon a stacked, static, and binary, yet illusory, worldview: male and female, good and bad, true and false, etc. Howells, paraphrasing Derrida’s sentiment, which refers to Rousseau’s philosophy, writes that “Ideally, speech should entail full presence; in practice it disappoints, and conveys rather lack and absence...speech attempts to capture its object, but in reality presents only a deceptive mirage.” [4] This “lack and absence,” of language is, however, the basis of Derrida’s semantics, via his concept known as the ‘trace’, and it complies with Nietzsche’s argument that the strength of words and concepts does not depend on their degree of truth, but on their historicity and relation to other concepts. In one sense, I agree with this sentiment: words are indeed social and historical constructs, and they certainly can falsify our view of reality. However, there is no reason why these constructs couldn’t, in a foundational way, truly represent the structure of reality. As such, we will never know everything about reality, and thus our words and language will never be able to fully express reality, yet, what we do know of reality (in our limited ways) our words are able to truly express.
Derrida, on the other hand, seems to posit a complete and fundamental negation of language. This fundamental negation of language by Derrida is epitomized in his theory of the “trace,” which, again, is summarized by Howells as the ‘absence’ of ‘presence.’
In simple terms, the trace expresses the absence of full, present meaning: in so far as meaning is differential, a matter of constant referral onwards from term to term, each of which has meaning only from its necessary differences from other signifiers, it is constituted by a network of traces...Derrida writes at length about the trace and its paradoxes. It is a 'simulacrum of presence', through which 'the present becomes the sign of a sign, the trace of a trace’. [5]
This circulatory, endless nature of language is one of Derrida’s biggest points in demonstration of his semantic theory. In an effort to explain one concept or word one must, in turn, use other words that need other words, and so on, to the point that one inevitably returns to the original concept that was first trying to be explained. This is what ultimately leads Derrida, I believe, to make his famous statement, “there is nothing outside of the text.” [6] Howells recognizes that this means that, for Derrida, there is, “no ‘world’ (in the sense of an organized totality) pre-existing the sign; the sign is constitutive of the world as we know it.” [7] In other words, according to Derrida, man does not know the external world presently and directly, but only in a deferred sense, and indirectly, through the fleeting symbols of language. Either way, if this is the case, then Derrida’s semantics annul any ability of the human language to express objective reality as it is—here and now—and one can only speak of objective reality accidentally, in a ‘dyadic’ sense, and not essentially, in a triadic sense. If such is the case, then man, it would seem, has evolved beyond his language and the words that express traditional values, or that purport perpetual meaning, are instead euphemisms of now non-existent, non-evolved, anachronistic constructs (e.g., the current postmodern effort to deconstruct the “oppressive” notions of male and female).
If we are to express objective reality as it truly is, we must be able to speak of it essentially. We must be able to grasp the essentials in things as separately existing things from us. This grasping—this apprehending—of the essences of things presupposes the existence of a logocentric reality, i.e., the notion which constitutes the world as a hierarchical and stable place (and which doesn’t necessarily exclude any anomalies or exceptions to the rule). Logocentrism is a place of unity and order that can be perceived by the human senses and conceptualized in the mind as that which is, and not just “is,” and from this “is” a name comes to be. This process of epistemology, which discovers essentials, is possible and explained by the semantic triangle of Aristotle and is further elucidated by Percy’s delta phenomenon. Both notions say the same thing in different ways, in the same way that English and Japanese can both speak of a beautiful flower in their respective tongues. While they may have different perspectives, different approaches, to speaking of such a thing, they are simply climbing up the same mountain on different trails, but the goal is the same: to reach the summit to see. Whichever trail is better, or the best, is another argument altogether.
Provided that logocentrism is true, then there is an external reality outside of the mind and it can be known directly and essentially. This reality is what is posited by Aristotle’s semantic triangle. As Aristotle himself writes, this triangle is made up of three loci: articulated sounds, passions of the soul, and things.
“Spoken words then are symbols of affections of the soul, and written words are symbols of spoken words. And just as written letters are not the same for all humans, neither are spoken words. But what these primarily signs of, the affections of the soul, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our affections are likenesses.” [8] (De Interpretatione, 16a3-8)
Although Aristotle never coined the term “semantic triangle,” Thomistic Philosopher John O’Callaghan states, “the ‘semantic triangle’ of Aristotle takes its name from the three vertices – articulated sounds, passions of the soul, and things.” O’Callaghan expands on Aristotle’s argument by writing that while the words used by men are both varied and ever-changing, there is something similar in the other two vertices: one, the passions of the soul that are signified by the articulated sounds (words) are the same in all men; two, all the externally existing things, “of which the passions of the soul are likeness are the same.” Referring to Aquinas, O’Callaghan also clarifies that the passions of the soul are synonymous, in this case, with “conceptions of the intellect. [9] Meanwhile, philosopher Ralph McInerny, in his exposition of the Thomistic-Aristotelian theory of the semantic triangle, writes, “what Aristotle here calls ‘passions of the soul’ are pure means of knowing, not primary objects of knowing.” [10] In addition to this, Gilson writes, “The meaning is not a desirable and possessable good; it is given as coessential to the intellect.” [11] Thus, it is not the images in our mind that we seek to know, but they are a means of knowing what they represent, that is, the world as it is outside of our minds. These same semantic relations are summarized by Modrak who writes, “The crucial relations are the relation between the word and the mental state and the relation between the mental state and the object in the world.” Furthermore, elucidating Aristotle's exposition of these two relations, Modrak continues, “the crucial contrast here is between convention as the explanation of how sounds carry meaning and natural relation, the same for all humans, rooted in the likeness between a meaning and a reality.” [12] Aristotle’s reconciliation of the natural and conventional aspects of language, as discussed in chapter one, makes this contrast possible. One could posit language as a convention-natural composite in which the variety of different conventional languages are based upon the natural relations that man has with the external world.
The only relation, then, that would not seem to receive the same emphasis as these other two relations, is the relation between the word and the thing in the world. The mental states (or the conceptions of the intellect) and the things in the world would appear, then, to be mediated by language, by words, when the things in the world are not physically present to us. Language can make present to us that which is absent to us. These conceptions of the intellect spring forth not through themselves, however, but through man who is ultimately the mediator of the two vertices. viz., the conceptions of the intellect and the external world, and who vocally manifests his mediating ontology between the two realms. Words are mediators per accidens through man, who is, in turn, the mediator per se. Man mediates the material element, the actually existing thing, to the immaterial element, the conception in the intellect, in the word, the name, through the “is.” As opposed to Derrida’s “There is nothing outside of the text,” Aristotle’s semantic triangle joins the text, and the language, to the “nothing” that is, in fact, objective reality. The semantic triangle is the underlying structure of the human language that allows a singular man to re-incarnate reality presently through his spoken word.
Language is not off Derrida’s chopping block just yet, however, as his philosophy also sketches another nuance which derives from his trace theory. This nuance is shaded into his outline of anti-logocentrism by his notion of “dissemination,” which, according to Derrida, “refers to the multiplicity of meanings spawned by the modern text.” Thus, in Derrida’s terms, dissemination fragments any sort of totalized and gathered meaning or intention of a text or argument, etc., as Modrak explains.
Dissemination disrupts semantics in so far as it produces an indefinite number of semantic effects...Unlike polysemy, then, dissemination is not dominated by the author, and its multiple meanings cannot be totalized as forming part of the author’s intentions. But like différance, dissemination is positive: it is not a loss of meaning but rather the affirmation of an indefinite number of meanings. It is anti-reductive.
Adding to this, Modrak writes, “Intention, Derrida argues, is never fully present.” [13] In brief, then, it seems that Derrida argues that dissemination, a radical type of polysemy, completely severs all the disparate meanings and intentions available in a proposition, argument, or text from one another. It seems that dissemination abrogates any unifying or definite meaning because there are infinite meanings available. Derrida, “sees the alternative to this closed system as a form of play (jeu) which is marked precisely by the absence of any transcendental signified.” [14] The transcendental signified, as such, would be the definite and certain meaning that the word represents. In one sense, this notion of language is true, but only in the sense of degrees, or in types of language (e.g., to put it hyperbolically, a commentary of a commentary of a commentary and so on). The definite meaning of words in Derrida’s semantics thus becomes lost, absent, or, as he proposes, non-present, and it perhaps does not even exist among the infinite possibilities. One can only vainly “trace” this elusive definite, as in play, by scampering from one grain of sand to the next upon the endless desert of possible meanings.
While perhaps Derrida speaks to a point (which he would probably argue is pointless), that there are possibly infinite numbers of meanings or implications in a proposition, it would seem that he fails to distinguish between two important factors: put simply, the essential and the accidental. While Derrida rejects these said notions, expounded mostly by the likes of Aristotle and Aquinas, it does not eviscerate their viability. In Aristotle, as commented on by Aquinas, the essential and accidental characters of things are discerned through the well-known “twofold operation of the intellect.”
There is a twofold operation of the intellect, as the Philosopher says in III De Anima. One is the understanding of simple objects, that is, the operation by which the intellect apprehends just the essence of a thing alone; the other is the operation of composing and dividing...The first of these operations is ordered to the second, for there cannot be composition and division unless things have already been apprehended simply. [15]
As is apparent, understanding ‘simple objects’ is basically the process by which we apprehend the essences of things, i.e., the essentials, and the composing and dividing is equivalent to the accidental characteristics of the simple objects apprehended. For Derrida, there seems to be a disconnect between the word and the object it represents — the two, it would seem, have no direct connection. Yet, for Aristotle, our intellects, via the senses, can grasp the essential unchanging substance in external objects. In other words, our intellects can grasp the underlying core of something, while stripping away the conditional layers of accidental characters. While Derrida’s notion of dissemination is anti-reductive, in regard to a word’s definite meaning (i.e., a word cannot be reduced to one single meaning), Aristotle applies this notion of irreducibility to the semantic triangle, the underlying structure of language, instead of words, which allows us to reduce a word’s meaning to a given definite. Derrida gives a false primacy to language, i.e., the words, as the irreducible factor, but it is in fact the primacy of man and reason, which Aristotle prefers, that is irreducible. The irreducibility of the semantic triangle in man’s relation to the world allows him, to not to reduce, but to capture things to their essence; to distinguish the accidentals and to grasp the heart of the manner. Again, the conventional — the plastic, the changing—is based upon the natural, the unchanging.
Galvanizing this concept of irreducibility is Percy’s Delta Phenomenon, which articulates Aristotle’s triangle through more contemporary and phenomenological terms. Percy believes that the Delta Phenomenon could potentially be, “the new key to open a new door and see in a new way,” and to, “See man not the less mysterious but of a piece, maybe even a whole, a whole creature put together again after the three-hundred-year-old Cartesian split.” [16] The Cartesian split, of course, being the separation between mind and body, the phenomenal and noumenal, and, furthermore, the conventional creation of the sort of binary bifurcation which is perhaps what Derrida was actually critiquing in his anti-logocentrism, although doing so ignorantly. This split seems to have fractured language as well, in which the logos, the meaning-bearing word, has been severed from its relationship to the real world and man, and the end of language is simply language for worldly purposes, and one is left with word-bearing words instead of meaning-bearing words that have an organic connection to reality. This severing could be seen as analogous to Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of the separation of the telos from morality and man, where now morality, as a whole, must be justified by itself, for itself. [17] Percy, through his discovery and propounding of the Delta Phenomenon, introduces a view of language that would seem to reunite it to man and to reality. Through Delta, the dyadic relation between man and reality is transformed into a triadic relation in which the two are united in a very real sense to the word, and furthermore, the transcendental signified.
It could be said that what Percy discovered as the delta phenomenon is actually, in the overview of things, the discovery of Aristotle’s semantic triangle (a unique view of the same mountain), with a nuance to it, though: it is more phenomenological. At base level, both concepts share what could be called the three vertices: man, the signified, and the signifier. Both concepts purport themselves, Aristotle implicitly at least, as the irreducible element in language in which we are able to induce essentials from the jungle of accidentals. While Percy never makes mention of the semantic triangle, or even of Aristotle, perhaps he intentionally chose to preclude relating the two concepts for the sake of modern palatability; I’m sure many modern and postmodern scholars have a penchant towards disregarding as obsolete anything to do with Aristotle’s philosophy, let alone Antiquity. Maybe, as with Derrida’s grudge, many think the past too “logocentric” and too certain of truth.
While Aristotle and Percy share similarities in their theories of this triangle, there are also important differences by way of emphases that the two philosophers illustrate. On the one hand, Aristotle’s exposition of the triangle came from a much more purely semantic approach, hence the term “semantic,” and opposition only came from one camp, that of Platonism and Idealism. Percy, on the other hand, assimilating a more contemporary philosophy, approaches the notion from a phenomenological aspect, hence the name “the delta phenomenon,” which as he writes, also implies a sense of, “mystery.” [18] But Percy, having to deal with the likes of Neo-Platonists, e.g., Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, also has to deal with the pervasive presence of modern science and empiricism, which completely sidelines any notion of ideas, of a transcendental signified, having any real presence or influence in reality. Percy’s delta phenomenon seeks to reconcile the two camps of idealism and empiricism, positing man as the mediating agent of language, which, further, unites the signifier, as adored by idealism, to the signified, as worshipped by empiricism.
A true understanding and defense of logocentrism, to conclude, is necessary if man is to know objective reality. While it is clear that reality is constantly changing and there are many seeming anomalies, there must also be a stable and ordered structure underlying and transcending the contingent and conditional. There must be a logos, a preordained structure, within reality that permeates everything and orders it properly in accord with its function and its end, otherwise the only meaning is that there is no meaning, and we’d be living a reductio ad absurdum. Not only this, but man must be able to discern this logos, the transcendental signified, to a greater or lesser degree, if he is to understand not only the world but himself. “Things [in nature],” says Sokolowski, display a logos, the ability to be a whole articulated into parts; it is not only human convention and making and language that introduces such wholes and articulations.” It seems that language is a hidden segue by which man enters into the mystery of his nature, as I quoted Percy above, but this must presuppose that there is an essential structure to it all, i.e., to the world. It takes the clearing away of the merely conventional and the sheer accidental to perceive of this structure as it truly is. The next and final chapter will address the need for ethics, the need for virtue, namely, the need for prudence, in clearing our vision, which is so connected to Percy’s “magic prism,” so that we can see as we should, and so speak as we should.
"We must understand in the first place that the very insatiability of human desire has a positive significance; it means this: that we are attracted by an infinite good. Disgust with each particular good is but the reverse side of our thirst for the total good; weirdness is but a presentiment of the infinite gulf that lies between the thing loved and the thing within love's capacity. In this sense the problem of love, as it arises in Christian philosophy, is a precise parallel to the problem of knowledge. By intelligence the soul is capable of truth; by love it is capable of the Good; its torment arises from the fact that it seeks it without knowing what it seeks and, consequently, without knowing where to look for it [emphasis added]."
~ Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy
[1]Percy, 29.
[2]Howells, 49-50.
[3]Howells, 49.
[4]Howells, 55.
[5]Howells, 50.
[6]Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 163.
[7]Howells, 76.
[8]Aristotle, On Interpretation: Commentary by St. Thomas and Cajetan, trans. by Jean Oesterle,
Mediaeval Philosophical Texts in Translation, No. 10 (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette University Press, 1962), 16a3-8.
[9]John O’Callaghan, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 16.
[10]Ralph McInerny, Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings, ed. by Ralph McInerny (Penguin Classics. London: Penguin Books, 1998), 455.
[11]Etienne Gilson, Linguistics and Philosophy: An Essay on the Philosophical Constants of Language, trans. by John Lyon (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 28.
[12]Modrak, 3, 13.
[13]Modrak, 66, 78-79.
[14]Howells, 49.
[15]Aristotle, and Jean T Oesterle, On Interpretation: Commentary by St. Thomas and Cajetan, Mediaeval Philosophical Texts in Translation, No. 11 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1962), 17.
[16]Percy, 44.
[17]Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd. Edition (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 51-61. All citations of After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory will henceforth be cited in the footnotes by author and page number.
[18]Percy, 41.