Sophia Bits & Bytes

  Love, which is the fundamental positive emotion characteristic of human beings, can be either subjective and irrational, or objective and rational. In feeling love for another person, I can either experience a pleasurable emotion which he stimulates in me, or I can love him. We have, therefore, to ask ourselves, is it really the other person that I love, or is it myself? Do I enjoy him or do I enjoy myself in being with him? Is he just an instrument for keeping me pleased with myself, or do I feel his existence and his reality to be important in themselves? The difference between these two kinds of love is the ultimate difference between organic and personal life. It is the difference between rational and irrational emotion. The capacity to love objectively is the capacity which makes us persons. It is the ultimate source of our capacity to behave in terms of the object. It is the core of rationality. [J.MacMurray, Reason and Emotion, p 31-32]

 But let us not blame Descartes overmuch, for he merely articulated and expressed the logical conclusion to the movement begun with Frank Petrarch in the 14C. Essentially, what Petrarch did was to release the mind/spirit from the chains which bound it to the soil beneath your bare feet. From the top of a mountain human eyes could finally take a long and calm look at the world; and so let it speak for itself, and in its own many voices. Now this was a wide and clear vision of all creation (and hard won, let us remember), but also a cold and lonely one. Then along comes friend Rene who proceeds to disconnect the mind from the body, and from the senses as well! Hey, why not? After all, thus was modern philosophy, modern science, and modern culture born.

 Now "Deconstruction" as such is not easy to define. It is something that arises out of the knowledge that the Human Being is *not* a rational animal (as understood by the classic philosophical tradition). It dwells in that foggy realm where philosophy and literature meet. ["Literature is more philosophical, and philosophy is more literary, than many opponents of Deconstruction are willing to admit" (Taylor, 'Deconstruction in Context, p.vii).] It has very long roots: going back to Descartes, and the modern turn to the subject, and the corresponding quest for certainty. But Deconstruction is not so much a philosophy as an interpretive method based on a certain attitude of mind (and a few guiding principles).
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  In defining the nature of what he calls 'local theology', Schreiter also happens to give us a nice and short definition of Deconstruction: "Obviously it is a complex process, aware of contexts, of histories, of the role of experience, of the need to encounter the traditions of faith in other believing communities." He then goes on at once to state the first principle of Deconstruction: "It is also obvious that contexts are complex, that histories can be variously read, that experience can be ambiguous, that the encounter in faith is often dimly understood" (20).
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  A much better definition is available in 'The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy' by S.Blackburn, 1994: "D. is a skeptical approach to the possibility of coherent meaning initiated by the French philosopher *Derrida. There is no privileged point, such as an author's intention or a contact with external reality, that confers significance on a text. There is only the limitless opportunity for fresh commentary or text (a linguistic version of the *idealist belief that we cannot escape the world of our own ideas). A deconstructionist reading of a text subverts its apparent significance by uncovering contradictions and conflict within it. However, since it is impossible to take up a significant vantage point above a text, it is sometimes admitted that deconstruction leaves everything as it was; its attempt 'to think the unthinkable' proceeds with puns and jokes as much as by recognizable argument. The apparently willful obscurity of much deconstructionist writing has tended to outrage more orthodox philosophers. See Derrida, differance, postmodernism, post-structuralism."