What is deconstructing discursive dualisms?

An impressionistic sketch of the aims of a substack on everything and nothing

This is Deconstructing discursive dualisms, a blog of miscellaneous reflections that engage in one way or another, either explicitly or implicitly, with a non-dual way of experiencing reality. Or perhaps it would be better to speak of non-dual ways, since they are many ways to tread this Way or Dao, as David Loy’s comparative study in Nonduality indicates even with its focus only on what can broadly be called (though not without the risk of homogenisation) ‘the Eastern tradition’s metaphysics’. But, of course, such a non-dualist view of reality is not limited to South and East Asian cultures (in traditions such as Mahāyāna Buddhism, Advaita Vedānta, and Daoism), even if it is more conspicuously and consistently revealed therein—in particular in what they term enlightenment or liberation (nirvāṇa, mokṣa, satori, etc.). In more Western Greco-Roman cultures, statements regarding the non-dual nature of reality seem prima facie rarer, as if they were a seed which, though sown in many different climes, has rarely if ever found fertile soil. However, the seeds are certainly there if relatively hidden: in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, for instance, or in various Platonist Christian traditions, from Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor to Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa. Moreover, the seeds which, for whatever reasons, did not sprout can potentially sprout in the future; and the seeds which did sprout but not mature can also potentially mature in the future, as they have already in the aforementioned South and East Asian cultures into a variety of species (which have in more recent times been so attractive to many Westerners because in their variegation they seem so exotic in relation to our apparently uniform own).

This substack will (hopefully) not just be an academic exercise in comparative philosophy and religion in particular or interdisciplinarity in general, however. The ultimate goal, though dimly seen thus far, is to awaken others to realise that there is another, nondual way of experiencing the world that is perhaps more veridical than the dualistic world that we are familiar with and presuppose as the most real: the world as a collection of separate objects, interacting causally in space and time. This is not to completely deny the reality of the latter world, but to argue that if we construct our metaphysics (in the broadest sense possible) on the basis of dualistic experience only we might remain in the ‘shadows’ of Plato’s cave and potentially mistake the limited ‘torch light’ thrown on the walls of our perception for being the ‘sun’ or light in its totality.

The potential of remaining fixed in a dualistic frame of mind and world is where the deconstructing of discursive dualisms in the title becomes important. A discursive dualism is easy enough to understand—referring to the way in which we carve up the world into opposing contraries in our discourse, like subject and object, self and other, etc.—but what is deconstruction? Deconstruction is a word associated with the 20th century French philosopher Jacques Derrida, though it is not a word which Derrida in using the phrase particularly liked himself (calling it neither a good word [un bon mot] nor elegant [beau]), not least because its Heideggerian roots are frequently lost in translation: it translates two German words, Destruktion and Abbau, the former of which “is not a destruction but precisely a destructuring that dismantles the structural layers in a system”, while the latter Derrida glossed as “tak[ing] apart an edifice in order to see how it is constituted or deconstituted” (Derrida, The Ear of the Other [1985], pp. 86-87). Or, as Derrida put it earlier in a letter to the Japanese scholar of Oriental studies Toshihiko Izutzu, called a ‘Letter to a Japanese friend’, dated July 10, 1983: “I wished to translate and adapt to my own ends [these Heideggerian words]. Each signified in this context an operation bearing on the structure or traditional architecture of the fundamental concepts of ontology or of Western metaphysics. But in French “destruction” too obviously implied an annihilation or a negative reduction much closer perhaps to Nietzschean “demolition” than to the Heideggerian interpretation or to the type of reading that I proposed.” So he settled with ‘déconstruction’, a word “rarely used” and “largely unknown in France.” Nevertheless, “the negative appearance was and remains much more difficult to efface than is suggested by the grammar of the word (de-), even though it can designate a genealogical restoration [remonter] rather than a demolition. That is why the word, at least on its own, has never appeared satisfactory to me (but what word is), and must always be girded by an entire discourse.” All such discourses, Derrida continues a few paragraphs later, are potentially deconstructible too, and so to say that ‘deconstruction is X’ or ‘deconstruction is Y’ completely misses the point. One of the main things at stake in what is called ‘deconstruction’ is “precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third person present indicative: S is P.”

It is for such reasons that deconstruction has been called a type of negative or apophatic theology. Though Derrida characteristically called this association “neither true nor false”, I am inclined to view this association as apt for a number of reasons. For one, just as when posing the question ‘what is deconstruction?’ Derrida said both “everything” and “nothing”, so too when considering the question ‘what is God?’ many apophatic theologians (Pseudo-Dionysius and John Scotus Eriugena most notably in the Christian tradition) have said that God is both no (particular) thing and every single thing in its identity. This paradoxical claim that God is not being, nor non-being, but the source of all being and itself beyond being, is called by Michael Sells in his Mystical Languages of Unsaying (1994) “a language of disontology.” It is not a particularly original insight to notice that such discursive efforts to avoid reifying the transcendent as an “entity” or “being” or “thing” seem intrinsically incoherent: in the very act of asserting the nothing-ness of the subject of discourse, one cannot help positing it as a “being” or “thing.” Yet this is why one is counselled in turn to ‘negate the negation’ or ‘unsay the saying’, as a way to acknowledge that all predications and all speech and thought in general, though expressing and imaging God, ultimately fails to express the inexpressible or comprehend the incomprehensible. Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus, as Augustine put it in a sermon: “for if you comprehend it, it is not God.” While “he himself is not truly known by the sound of these two syllables [non enim re vera in strepitu istarum duarum syllabarum ipse cognoscitur, i.e. de-us], Augustine says at the beginning of the first book of De doctrina christiana, “yet when the word strikes our ears, it moves all users of the Latin language to think some supremely excellent and immortal nature” [sed tamen omnes latinae linguae socios, cum aures eorum sonus iste tetigerit, movet ad cogitandam excellentissimam quandam immortalemque naturam]. God thus does not refer to some contentless, meaningless ‘abstraction’, even though Augustine uses a range of terms with negative prefixes in Latin: incomprehensibilis, inexplicabilis, ineffabilis, impenetrabilis, invisibilis, etc. Instead, God is revealed as incomprehensible in our comprehending, inexplicable in our explicating, ineffable in our effing (or, to use a less equivocal word, uttering), impenetrable in our penetrating, and invisible in our vision of him/her/it.

Another reason why comparing deconstruction with classical Western apophasis (not inaccurately translated “unsaying” from phasis=speaking, apo=away) can be valuable is that both engage in a perpetual, open-ended dynamic wherein opposing contraries co-exist or coincide. In order to see this conceptual convergence, it is perhaps best to dwell a bit longer on the latter by briefly exploring a related, second feature at the heart of apophasis—following on from the aforementioned disontology—that Sells refers to, namely, a distinctive dialectic of transcendence and immanence in which the utterly transcendent is revealed as the utterly immanent. As he points out, it is precisely because God is infinitely “beyond” being that God can be revealed as most intimately “within” being and beings (even, according to some like Maximus, to the point of “becoming” them in finite form). If God were not truly transcendent of all things—if, in other words, God were just another being alongside all other beings in the world (even if possessing unlimited properties)—then God would in some sense be conditioned by those things. And no finite, conditioned being can said to simultaneously be “within” or somehow be identical to all other beings; ergo, the only way that God can said to be within or as beings is, paradoxically, by not being wholly identified with or confined to any particular being. In simpler terms, God cannot said to be immanent to all beings if God is not transcendent to all beings. And, conversely, God cannot said to be transcendent at all if God is not immanent to something. For the God that is interior intimo meo is superior summo meo, and vice versa, to refer to Augustine again (from book 3 of the Confessiones). This distinctive dialectic wherein the transcendent realises itself as the immanent, and the immanent realises the transcendent always already “within” it, is perhaps initially difficult to grasp, since it is prima facie counter-intuitive in light of our dualistic experience; but, secunda facie, it seems to make a lot of sense of many aspects of our experience, such as why the unitary forms or ideas that constitute the common nature of many particular instances (like the beauty in beautiful things) can be seen as simultaneously “abstract” and “concrete” or “transcendent” to and “immanent” in them—why, in short, universals are only known as concrete and never exist as uninstantiated. (The magnificent Platonist scholar Eric Perl puts this point wonderfully in a 1999 article (“The Presence of the Paradigm: Immanence and Transcendence in Plato's Theory of Forms”) by asking the question ‘where is beauty?’. Everywhere and nowhere, he responds, much like Derrida above: everywhere, because wherever a beautiful thing is, there is beauty; nowhere, because we cannot point to any one of them say ‘There it is!’ as if it were identical with or confined to that instance.)

For our purposes here, however, beginning to see how the terms transcendence and immanence co-constitute each other or exist in an interdependent (not to say completely symmetrical) relationship suffices for the comparison with deconstruction. At the heart of deconstruction, too, is a similar ‘symbiotic’ dialectic: every deconstruction presupposes a prior construction, and, conversely, every construction has the potential to become deconstructed, giving way to a reconstruction that “sublates” (to use the Hegelian phrase: Aufhebung), i.e. negates and “takes up”, the prior construction. I’m not sure I would call myself a Hegelian just yet (though I have my obvious sympathies), but it seems to me that this is an accurate way to describe the way in which the world of our thoughts and the world of being (inner and outer being, if you will) “progresses” or, to use a less loaded phrase, moves along, whether or not we recognise it consciously. It is a commonplace to acknowledge that all experience is constructed, though, as Sells notes in the epilogue to his book, it is probably true that “the concept of experience is a modern construct” (214). In any case, it is fair to say that our common ‘experience’ of experience is intentional, that is to say, it is about something; there is an object outside our consciousness that comes into contact with us or that we ‘intend’ to come in contact with ourselves (or both). All these objects that make up the ‘stream’ of our consciousness of reality are all our constructions, which is not to say they are merely projections but only to acknowledge that we always compose reality as we receive it. If this is all true then all the conceptual constructions that aid us in knowing reality necessarily conceal as much as they reveal reality to us. The contemporary Zen Buddhist scholar Bret Davis has encapsulated this ‘double’ structure in his intentionally ambiguous phrase “knowing limits” (cf. a 2019 article of the same name): depending on whether one takes “limits” as a noun or a verb, the phrase suggests either a recognition of the limits of knowledge or that the act or event of knowing delimits the parameters of that which is known. The “versatile perspectivism” that Davis describes and advocates (he acknowledges that his task is as ethical as epistemological) with reference to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Zhuangzi, and Zen thinkers might seem disorientingly ‘relativistic’ to accept at first; but, once again, it just seems intuitively true and salient to note: “Revealing always entails a simultaneous concealing both of other potential perspectival horizons and of the undelimited open-region in which such delimited perspectival horizons are housed” (325).

If the above sounds a bit too, uh, ‘Heideggerian’ (because it is) and so obscure in meaning to anyone, I will try to paraphrase what I take to be its meaning by returning to the language of de/construction: Davis is saying that when anything shows itself to us, this self-showing—which, recall, is too our construction—conceals not only other constructions from appearing to us, but also that wider field beyond all delimited perspectives in which are “held in reserve” an abundance of potential meanings—die Gegnet, a Middle High German form of Gegend (region) that Davis translates as “the open-region.” It is this unlimited ‘open-region’ that encompasses all human perspectives which one could readily correlate with the transcendent or God, though Heidegger may not like the correlation (it might still look like “ontotheological metaphysics”, even though it is not intended to be). If so, one must not necessarily conclude that it is only the ‘force’ of deconstruction that would in turn correlate with God; surely it must be the case that God is revealed in the dialectic between construction and deconstruction. Just as things show themselves but can never be exhaustively revealed; just as the transcendent shows itself in the immanent but only limitedly; so too, finally, we can say that constructions reflect or express reality but only in a finite form, and so should be seen as self-deconstructing (not to say self-destructing, otherwise all coherence would be lost).