An Answer to Post-Modernism and Deconstructionism

AN ANSWER TO POST-MODERNISM AND DECONSTRUCTIONISM

Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D.    12-13

ABSTRACT:  The paradoxes of deconstructionism and post-modern thought are outlined briefly, and an existential position that allows a way forward is described.

KEY WORDS:  post-modernism, deconstructionism, philosophy

The two world wars, the Cold War, the insecurities of the nuclear age, and the further loss of traditional values due to modern consumerism and mobility have increased greatly the uncertainty of many human beings about how to live and what could be depended on for guidance and security, as expressed in existentialist assertions of our aloneness and questioning of our basic existence.  (Interestingly, the root issues in this social change were sensed by philosophers in the late 1800’s, particularly by Friedrich Nietzsche, greatly anticipating the consciousness of such things by the educated public.)  The greater detachment of human beings from human contact in the Industrial Age, which again reduces experiential certainties and security, has been augmented in recent years by the information revolution and its e-mail and cell phone technologies. 

Recently, in the area of philosophy, deconstructionism has questioned our ability to describe reality in language, and post-modern thought asserts that because of language inadequacies and other human limitations, we are quite unable to determine what is true or to identify a meaningful “reality” at all.  These philosophical movements have added to and expressed the underlying despair that human beings in developed countries feel about finding meaning, satisfaction, and fulfillment in the modern life (and, of course, since philosophical movements are language-based efforts to describe our human existence and experience, they must define themselves as failures even as they struggle to debunk much of what we thought we believed!)

Very briefly, deconstructionism basically points out the inadequacies of our language and our use of language in describing anything (our experience, the world around us).  If we think carefully about what we say (and think), this view becomes clear.  Try to define “chair,” for example, in words that give a complete and unambiguous definition, and you will find that it is actually difficult, even though you “know” what a chair is.  How many legs does it have?  Must it have legs at all?  Does it have a back?  Is a beanbag a chair?  Is a suspended wicker basket to sit in a chair?  Is the crotch of a tree a chair?  You may be tempted to give up in disgust, saying “Everybody knows what a chair is, so why bother?”  This is true, as far as it goes, since you and those around you are seldom confused when any of you refer to a chair.  We must conclude, however, that our communication is filled with these references (chair, love, happiness, freedom, etc.) that are all somewhat ambiguous when we try to agree on a single definition, so in real life, it seems that we must be satisfied with verbal communications that are productive but ambiguous.

Similarly, if we pay close attention to our thoughts and awarenesses, we observe a dizzying sequence of brief moments of ideas, perceptions, feelings, etc.  What we communicate to others or put into words to ourselves is a very small selection out of all of that, so it is clear that we can never fully describe our total experience, to others or to ourselves in a reflective way, and since we cannot record or communicate our total experience, it seems questionable to think that reasoning based on a small subset of our experience could provide us with accurate guidance about living.

Things are even worse in the area of feelings.  Try to define happiness or grief.  In the external world we usually have a physical referent to work with (though not in the quantum world).  With feelings, we have no referent.  If we consider why we react emotionally to certain things in certain ways, we see that we are born with brains that have, because of their construction (their similar parts and neural pathways), tendencies to produce certain emotions or feelings that are probably roughly similar, though not identical, in all of us, but that we each have somewhat different conditioning with regard to them.  Some of us are more sensitive to shame induction than others, while some of us are more excitable than others.  Some seem to feel their feelings more strongly than others.  Some of us have been abused and have some over-developed fears.  Some cultures use shame more than others to shape behavior, and some use guilt more.  We know that our emotional state is affected by how our brains are operating because chemicals that affect brain chemistry can change our emotional states.  We must conclude that since our brains are all just a little different and our life experiences are different from those of anyone else, each of us will have slightly different views of and experiences of our feelings.

The upshot of all this is that if we use language to communicate with each other about more complex notions than “chair,” it becomes a real challenge to establish definitions that we all agree on (or understand).  Hopefully you have thought this yourself when listening to people in political debate with each other.  In most such instances, you can easily see that when they talk of “freedom,” each of them means something different, and when they talk of certain government activities, one person thinks of it as interference or control while the other sees it as a beneficent attempt to solve a problem. 

The more abstract terms that are involved (existence, being, freedom, choice, determinism), the more difficult it gets, so that philosophers can write for pages and pages (or books and books) in order to investigate one sentence, and they will still disagree with each other or be incomprehensible to each other.  The conclusion is that most of our human efforts to describe reality with language are pitifully inadequate (even if we do manage to select, buy, and sit in chairs).  Very few people even try to be clear about what they say (or to think clearly), and those who do often have insoluble disagreements.  Since we record what we believe to be God’s communications to us with our words in our language and have only our human brains with which to understand them, we may very well have misinterpreted communications from God—not a comforting thought at all!

Post-modernism expands this analysis of language deficiency to include all thinking and all constructs created by groups of people.  Our thinking is just as inaccurate and muddled as our language, and morality is a human construction for the purpose of controlling behavior and teaching members of the group what to do and what not to do.  Group customs are arbitrary (shaking hands on meeting someone versus some other gesture).  Laws are poorly stated rules for interactive behavior, as evidenced by the fact that our courts are forever engaged in how to “interpret” what the laws “mean.”  The conclusion is that we make practically all of it up (our words, our definitions, our customs, our rules), and that there probably is no reality that we understand the same as others understand it.  (This is not to say that there is no reality, but simply that we are incapable of adequately defining and understanding it.)

There is no denying our sloppiness and difficulties in thinking and speaking.  We don’t like having these difficulties pointed out (look at what happened to Socrates, who delighted in pointing these difficulties out and was eventually put to death for it).  We fall back on “if it was good enough for my father, it’s good enough for me” or “God said it and that’s that,” but these are clearly reactions that simply attempt to justify our situation or try to claim that if we’re doing it, it must be good.

LIVING WELL DESPITE POST-MODERNISM AND DECONSTRUCTIONISM

We must go on living as the imperfect human beings that we are, in spite of the insights of post-modernism and deconstructionism, and we will do better if we take these meaningful criticisms of our behavior into account, while continuing to act in effective and meaningful ways in our lives.  It is suggested here that using our “common sense” while adding greater care to our thinking and speaking and greater awareness of our uncertainties and leaps of faith (to keep us honest in our assertions about “reality”) provides us with a workable framework for living.

Philosophers are hit hardest by these acknowledgements, since the goal of philosophy seems to have been to express the truth in language.  Given the many efforts to do this by mighty thinkers over many centuries, we may be justified in concluding that it is not possible—that our human capacities are not sufficient for the task.  Given human curiosity, adolescent hubris, and the fact that every human being must figure out for himself or herself how to relate to oneself, others, and the world, people will continue to try find “the truth” and express it in words.  Each person will have to conclude, if they go far enough in that effort, that expressing the whole truth or the truth about everything is not in fact possible.  We are still left, though, with thought and verbal facility, just not enough of them to find and express the complete truth in language, and in order to make our lives as good as they can be (in terms of survival, satisfying relationships, and reasonable security), we still must employ our thinking and language to find the best possible solutions to many problems in living.  Perhaps philosophy can define a different project for itself—to help people to know as much of the truth as they can and to make that truth (that portion of the truth that we are capable of comprehending) ever more clear, even if it must remain incomplete.

The best that we can do would seem to be to (1) carefully review everything that we think and say, before inflicting it upon ourselves, others, and the world, (2) learn how to identify beliefs that have no basis in fact or evidence in contrast to beliefs that do have some basis in fact or evidence, (3) be willing to admit it when our beliefs (what we want to conclude or believe) are unsupported or are simply what we want to believe, (4) stop claiming that we have the truth (in order to get our way with others) when we do not have it, and (5) learn to tolerate the uncertainties of not knowing.

Many will resist this call to be more careful in their thinking and speaking, because without their claimed certainties (God will take care of us; marriage is for life; we’ll all meet again in heaven; if it’s really love, it will last forever), they feel fearful, adrift in existence, and without meaning in their lives.  The existentialists see this as facing the truth about human existence.  We can’t have it both ways, though.  We can’t make up beliefs that we “know” are uncertain (or could know if we let ourselves) and at the same time improve the accuracy and clarity of our thinking and communications (unless, perhaps, we restrict our improvements to only the physical world and keep unchanged our sloppiness regarding feelings and existence).  Each person must choose which way to go.

Our eternal quest as groups to have everyone in the group see and understand things the same way is one way in which we try to adapt to not knowing very much for certain.  We feel that if everyone thinks and believes one way, then that way “must” be right.  We praise freedom of thought and belief, but we are fairly intolerant of others’ thoughts and beliefs if those push us toward changing our lives or behavior.  We actually insist on quite a bit of uniformity of thoughts and beliefs, while allowing only differences that are kept private or don’t affect others negatively.

It seems clear that in order to have a world in which people get as close to the truth as possible, those people will have to face the fact that they don’t know very much at all for certain.  People dislike and are upset by “not knowing,” however, so getting as close as we can to the truth, then, is more of an emotional problem than a knowledge problem.  We can learn as much as we can, but we will never “know for certain” most of what we would like to know about life.  Accepting this is difficult, since it highlights our limitations as humans (when what we prefer is to pump up our pride in what human beings can accomplish) and since it leaves us with having to find other methods of adapting to reality (as far as we can know it) than making up false beliefs and clinging to them.

We will have to be satisfied with what is, instead of believing in what is unlikely.  We would not even hope that we could have politicians who put the welfare of their constituents above their own benefit (desirable as that might be), so we would look for ways to get the best job out of them that they are capable of.  We would have somewhat different marriages if we faced the fact that our spouses could die at any time, but it might make us value what we have together more.  We would undertake big projects more soberly, instead of assuming or asserting that “we can do anything,” but perhaps many of those big projects don’t actually better people’s lives anyway.  We would stop trying to deny our frailty and mortality by telling ourselves lies, but we might then value each day of our lives even more.

We all have to make choices based on what we want for our futures, and usually we have to make them without being certain of our predictions of what each choice will bring in the future.  Accepting that we don’t know much would lead us to think as realistically as possible about what each possible behavioral path would lead to, since clearly this is more likely to be helpful in ensuring good outcomes than basing our choice simply on what we would like to see happen as an outcome.  We don’t need to stop making choices, just because we don’t know very much, but we do need to make those choices as carefully as we can and based on as much of reality as we can, instead of going blindly onward based only on wishful thinking.

Much confusion arises from inattention to definitions, both in our own thinking and in our interactions with others.  In order to reach the conclusions that we desire, we often “fudge” our definitions, so that in one place we mean passion when we say “love” and in another we mean “affection” or “affiliation” by “love.”  To use words only in accord with clear definitions is “work,” but it is important for accurate thinking to use our definitions consistently (which means, first of all, to notice when we are using them inconsistently, and then to rethink or restate).  This is a key tool in resolving differences between people about their views of reality.

For most people, improving the accuracy of their thinking and speaking will require re-evaluating everything they think they know, but fortunately this can be done a little bit at a time (as long as all opportunities to do this are taken when they come along), and the further along one gets with this project, the faster it will go.

Since we now “know” that we know very little for certain, it will clearly be useful to attach a “likelihood of truth” to everything we “know.”  “The sun will come up every morning for the rest of my life” would have a very high likelihood of being true (since only very unlikely astronomical events could change that likelihood), while “the U. S. economy will continue to experience significant up’s and down’s” would have a moderate likelihood, and “all Democrats are fools” would be quite unlikely.  These likelihoods are derived from our knowledge about ourselves, others, and the world, so it is absolutely necessary to learn a great deal (and to evaluate the “truth likelihood” of each supposed fact or piece of “knowledge” that we come across).  The truth likelihood of things people say varies with their own level of accuracy of thinking and with their purposes in making statements and holding the opinions that they hold.  Just because your parent, your teacher, or your priest tell you something doesn’t make it true!  With a knowledge of these likelihoods, then, one can be more careful in evaluating the likelihoods of other “facts” or statements being close to true or not.

We will also need to improve the logic of our thinking.  For example, concluding from the moderately likely “fact” that some Republicans don’t think carefully about all of the implications of their proposals that Republicans have nothing worthwhile to contribute to political decisions would be faulty thinking.  Since Republicans and Democrats are both human beings, the same conclusion with “Democrats” substituted for “Republicans” would be equally untrue.

MANAGING OUR FEELINGS

It should be clear by now that striving to get as close to the truth as we can will require managing the discomfort that arises from finding conclusions that are probably true that are upsetting and that we wish were not true.  It is typical of human beings to reverse course at that point and to revise the “facts” to arrive at a conclusion that we like better.  Of course, if we want the truth (as close to the truth as we can get), we must work on being comfortable with what appears to us to be the most likely descriptions of reality.

Our discomfort can be over seeing things we don’t want to see about our parents or our children, or it may be about aspects of our existential position (death comes for all of us; we don’t know very much; keeping our bodies healthy involves a certain amount of pain and self-discipline; we are all capable of hurting others for our own advantage; etc.).  Accepting reality solves this problem, but that means stopping our resisting of reality and allowing ourselves to “get used to” it.  After all, the reality of things doesn’t change just because we recognize and accept it.  The same things are problems in the same ways after we accept a new view of things as they were before we accepted it.  So life is not going to get worse just from recognizing the truth, as long as we accept it.  If you continue to ruminate over one of these new, more realistic views, it means that you have not accepted it.

SUMMARY

The realities pointed out by post-modernism and deconstructionism about our limitations do not need to lead to despair.  We can adapt and incorporate these insights by accepting that we don’t know very much for certain, learning to think better, tolerating the ambiguity of not knowing things for certain, and managing our unpleasant feelings in response to realities (as near as we can honestly get to reality) that we encounter as a result of thinking more accurately.

We can take some comfort from the fact that poor as our thinking and communications are, we still manage to have pretty good lives.  Admitting the truth about our intellectual capacities shouldn’t stop us from having lives that are at least that good, and if we are willing to face facts, we can make our lives somewhat through becoming better at thinking, speaking, and planning than we are now.

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