Beyond truth and reason
What structures of language are left to create meaning?
February 20, 2007
Jolene Hildebrand
Do arguments for truth have relevance for today’s culture? Does applying method to language through systematic frameworks legitimately persuade an individual, or is the intentional manipulation of language violate the integrity of truth and meaning?
It seems that truth can fluctuate according to its cultural climate. With the progression of time, language acquires new frameworks of meaning, constantly morphing: discarding superfluity and creating new expressions. Does this mean that truth also changes? The relationship between meaning and language remains a seemingly irreconcilable stalemate.
The attempt of semantics and rhetoric to manipulate words, and thus distort meanings, ultimately results in a stagnation of truth. It’s disconcerting how easy it could be to convince a person of “the truth” with the mere power of words. Meaning becomes a tool of language – something to dissolve and recreate with words. Under a modern sensibility, the complexities of subjective experience are reduced to insignificant feelings that vapourize beneath the scrutiny of reason. However, the shifting post-modern climate has inverted many modernist restraints, exposing the shifting contingencies of truth.
In today’s culture, one can no longer use argument as a form of debating truth. We are very conscious that objective standards of truth impose one individual’s understanding on another person. There is no longer a universally acknowledged platform to argue beliefs with. As we observe and participate in the dissipation of modernism, what structures of language are left to create meaning?
The French post-structuralist Jacques Derrida emphasized language as the creation of meaning. In response to the modern view of language as a destructive expression that threatened the integrity of speech, Derrida sought to replace writing as the primary means of creating meaning. Imperative to his philosophy and theory was the futility of creating a language of discourse that would extend beyond the binary confines of differance, the irreducible gap between reality and language that confounds us. Because of this gap, there is no way to fully reconcile reality, or the truth of what we attempt to say, with the words that we must inevitably use to try to ascribe articulation to our meaning.
Yet what civilization can maintain itself without the structures of truth and reason? Before modernity and the belief in pure reason, religion provided this framework. But as the philosopher Freidrich Neitzche lamented, God is dead and man has killed him, meaning that religion’s authority is lost in society. And so language has subverted the infallibility of truth and reason, but it is too obtuse and fluid to provide any fundamental values. Can there ever be any way to arrest its motion and solidify meaning?
This irreducible gap would seem to result in paralysis. Continuously searching for the subversion of meaning within language results in disorientation and stagnation. It would seem that no truth could be harvested from this understanding, and that there could never be found the means to justify any action as right, or proper. If one cannot rely on an established structure of reason from which to orient one’s actions and motives, then there is no justification for one course of action or belief over any other.
Yet this apparent immobility does not necessitate the crumbling of all belief systems. It may be that the significant power of language trumps, or at least obscures, the concept of truth, but that does not mean that truth does not exist. Can a symbiotic relationship exist between the desire to adapt language to meaning, and the impulse to create meaning out of language? If this is so, then truth becomes more than just a mere function of language, but also acknowledges the significant role that language plays in revealing truth to each culture. Perhaps what would appear to be an illogical claim – that truth remains objective despite its ability to adapt and respond to varying cultures – can become a deeper understanding of the desire to address the complexity of human nature.
Now you go...
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