Wittgenstein, Foucalt, Derrida, Rorty, and Compass Psychotheology

Analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), in his influential book, Philosophical Investigations, portrays philosophy solely in terms of linguistic analysis. It is no longer the task of the philosopher to investigate the nature of reality or explore the meaning of human experience, but rather to clarify the meaning of language. 

Wittgenstein

This narrow focus lops off the exploration of metaphysics, ethics, and religion, because such things as human feelings and human values, or spiritual experiences, are considered indefinable and therefore nonsensical.

In A History of Western Philosophy, W. T. Jones reveals the spiritual bankruptcy of the analytic position when he summarizes their conclusions: “We must learn to live in a world in which God is dead; we must learn to get along without Truth, or rather, we must learn to live with the one truth that there is no Truth.” 

With Wittgenstein and the analytic philosophers, the human soul is eclipsed by secular thinking devoid of spiritual realities.

Postmodernism persists in this approach by arguing that there is no way to get outside language and thought to some deeper reality. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) sees language as offering no fundamental role in knowledge, that language can be nothing more than a higher-order instrument of thought, a physical representation of ideas, with no meaning except in relation to these ideas. 

Foucault

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), the founder of deconstruction, uses this term to indicate how the “accidental” features of a text betray, even subvert, its supposedly “essential” message, thereby rendering philosophy, concepts, words themselves, suspect at every level. The theory of deconstruction attempts to show that all pairs of opposite concepts in philosophical systems are in fact self-refuting. 

Derrida

This post-structuralism position common to both Derrida and Foucault therefore contends that forms of expression such as novels and philosophical texts are completely closed systems and only possess meaning from whatever the reader brings to the material. Postmodernist concerns move beyond the world of philosophy to examine such fields as literature, art, music, theater, and architecture. 

Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty (1931-2007) looks forward to a pragmatic utopia where people can divest themselves of the worship of anything. He rejects the notion that there are “essences” to things, such as a “true nature of the self” or a universal moral law discoverable by human reason. Persons are only confronted with “contingency,” with the ever-presence of “chance” that is surmountable through constant self-transformation or self-creation, thereby, among other consequences, rendering the autonomous self as myth. 

Rorty

Postmodern philosophy is immersed exclusively in the fragmentary and chaotic currents of change, seeing the constraints of culture everywhere, because the whole history of searching for a unified meaning of things is utterly flawed.

How to respond to these developments? 

Dan and Kate Montgomery's Compass Psychotheology affirms the existential search for meaning at every level of thought—the postmodernists’ interest in breaking down barriers between philosophy and the arts, psychology, and science; and their interest in taking language seriously, breaking down linguistic interpretation, and exploring the effects of words on cultural application. 

Dan & Kate Montgomery

The problem is that once begun on a process of breaking down, without the transcendent or even immanent presence of the Trinity to encompass such exploration, the search only spirals into further dissolution and lack of ability to draw any conclusions because no words suffice, since no word has meaning, no unity exists, no overarching, explanatory theory, all is fragmented, nothing is sure. No center that holds. 

All is undone. All leads to a single human being left with one’s own thoughts, if they are thoughts, one’s own body, if there is a body, no way to communicate clearly with another human being, for no language is trustworthy, and certainly nothing as extravagantly unnecessary and nonsensical as a Creator, let alone one who is three Persons, a Triune God who made this human being in God’s image, for loving friendship and ongoing dialogue. No, nothing like that.