well you’ve been around long enough to get the gist of my position regarding this problem of language. i took a strong post-structural turn toward philosophy after i found wittgenstein, and recently i’ve been studying derrida… something that seems almost like a grand finale to my epistemological nihilism. the timing is perfect; derrida’s concept of the ‘trace’, ‘logocentrism’, ‘différance’, ‘binary oppositions’, ‘presence’ and ‘aporia’, are all magnificent insights revealing the essential instability of philosophical text (where they are expressed most). and what’s great about all this is that i get to see it happening in real-time at these forums. it’s almost like i’m taking a class, dude. when i apply the concepts i’ve learned from wittgenstein in a deconstructive approach to what i read here, i see all these things come to life. for example, in one of the freewill threads, there is now a new binary opposition of ‘internal’ and ‘external’. now it’s not the fact that such a dichotomy would be irrelevant to what and how causation works - there is not a space or enclosure or limit at which causation starts or stops working… so ‘inside’ and outside’ are fortuitous terms here - but that even if there were such a difference of space, of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, nobody using the term could define clearly where it was. and yet, they flow right on with the discussion as if this idea is taken for granted and understood by everyone using the term. so with this you get a great example of the wittgensteinian language game - where a word used in an ordinary context to define physical, geometric locations is now transferred into a metaphysical environment where it’s usual connotations are completely missing - as well as derrida’s aporia; the stability of the terms depends solely on ‘what comes next’, but this in turn depends also on what follows, etc. being that the terms are fortuitous to begin with, there can be no ‘right’ direction, and any direction will produce the same ‘sense’ of meaningfulness for the viewers… precisely because they are meaningless. the reader takes possession of the text, decentralizes the transcendental center or intent of the writer, and re-appropriates the meaning to fit what he understands the words to mean. so you finally have a kind of self sustaining logocentric simulacrum freely operating between the writer and reader… wherein the language becomes the destabilized transcendental center rather than the intent of the writer or reader. what occurs is a meaningless freeplay or pantomime of language… by which each interlocutor is only arguing with himself.
a general principle: in language, the signifier is always incompletely defining all the possible ways the signified can be meaningful (cue W’s language games)… and yet at any point that the signifier is pinned down and becomes dependent on ‘what follows’, the aporia results and the text loses all stability by being continuously postponed.
from one nihilist to another, let me suggest that, in fact, the intuitions we experience when we observe what we can’t make any sense of (or multiple senses of… which amounts to the same thing), result from what are actually subtle structures which nonsense and ambiguity must conform to. granted that this is a deconstruction… you might think of it, paradoxically, as the last possible structural approach to language and philosophy. so no, my friend, you are not the crazy one here. on forum boards, insanity is the rule. for the nihilist, it is an exception.
i had breezed by derrida a decade ago without giving him much thought… but this was because i hadn’t yet put the necessary years in to experience exactly what he was on about. now i see it more clearly than ever. odd that many ordinary language philosophers call him an obscurantist. like wittgenstein, he’s actually waged an assault on philosophy for the purposes of returning language from it’s metaphysical environment.
in any case, check out this video.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STydy9wbAo0[/youtube]