Crisis and Its Resolution

New Experiences in Metaphysics: The Metaphysics of Society, the Metaphysics of Deconstruction, the Metaphysics of Faith

Deconstruction, the analytical critique of all philosophical data as texts, engenders its own metaphysics in the figure of Jacques Derrida (1930—2004). Derrida primarily contemplates how we perceive the world. We lay claim to many things: our signatures, our honest words, and we believe that we have dominion over the world itself. However, Derrida warns us that we are mistaken in this belief, for our authority arises solely from our writing, our habits, or our ability to gaze—only there can we find any legitimate schedule for such dominion. We have entered into a game that the world anticipated of us, only to suddenly declare that we are stepping out of the game, appropriating the ball that was cast to us.

Such behavior, Derrida insists, is unacceptable, for by stepping out of the game, we merely impair the hearing of our reason, “recording” it, cloaking it in exculpatory inscriptions and signatures under new obligations, thinking we have recorded something significant. Philosophy obliges nothing; it perpetually borrows from someone else—be it art, literature, or social life—but its acknowledgments are always just acknowledgments of the significant.

He also speaks of translation: a translator has no right to translate anything, for the resulting text will still not be a text, not what it was supposed to be. Yet the translator is always correct when translating philosophy or reflective poetry, for they no longer define what ought to be, but merely fulfill their debt. The Tower of Babel, often recognized as a singular event and a symbol suggesting that wars will arise and people will scatter to their apartments, plotting against one another, is for Derrida merely an offering from former debtors. The Tower of Babel was built in an attempt to eliminate debts forever, to settle and reconcile with all in such a manner that all, including the heavens, emerge in balance.

Thus, in translating, we do not erase the Tower of Babel from the face of the earth, but rather construct it within the fields of our text—simply because we are repaying our debt to the translated text and striving to render a living thought that is due to ourselves. The heavens do not retaliate or take offense; they suffer upon witnessing what we do with thought, even if our intentions are the kindest, and they suffer from the fact that our thoughts so often err. Nevertheless, we remain proper names at the edge of language, inscribed among the number of debtors to friends and strangers alike, and language can turn our intentions to dust, compelling us to think about that which we never intended to contemplate, thus rendering such contemplation a miracle for us.

Derrida writes of how poetry leads a person from threshold to threshold until they themselves realize they are a wanderer. As long as we are not at the threshold, we are always in an open space; it is intolerable to believe that we are in a city; we are in a bare, open field. Yet to be at the threshold, at the beginning or the end of the path, is worse than being on the brink of death. Death, at least, has some words and images, whereas the threshold has only a “shibboleth,” a password from a biblical narrative that distinguishes the familiar from the foreign. However, it is precisely upon crossing this threshold, uttering, articulating, and reading a poem to its conclusion, that one sheds all the problematic aspects of self and other, friend and foe. For Derrida, Paul Celan, a poet of equal significance to him as Hölderlin is to Heidegger, is a friend to all who live during their lifetime. Not because he is friendly in his verse, but because the threshold temperature of his first and last notes—the note (the inscription) about the ashes into which he transformed himself, empathizing with the victims of the Holocaust—allows the poet to reach out to all of us, to call out, to exclaim, and simply to converse, let us say, amidst the fields of Van Gogh (an image crucial for both Heidegger and Derrida) as an image shared by art itself amidst madness and catastrophe.

Derrida finally reflects on the nature of ash, not only as a burned page, a life consumed by the poet, or a remnant of the conflagration, but as a fingerprint. For Derrida, it is not sight that incinerates the visible, as is often thought, but the finger, a rustle (thus we return to the theme of the ear) that leaves a mark. And this mark is ash, and because it cannot be erased, and because this alkali is stronger than any text, it represents a nota bene that surpasses any note discerned amid the texts of signs. This note resonates, unlike notes that are merely annotations demanding attention, yet even reading them with our eyes requires patience. Ash sounds, for when it diminishes, it ceases to crackle but erupts into a single cry of the inexpressible. And here, Derrida teaches us to contemplate the dust, opening his own school of contemplation to avoid being forever astonished by this cry.

There are metaphysicians among our contemporaries, such as the Greek Christos Yannaras, whom we have already cited. One of Yannaras's recent works, “The Mystery of Evil,” is devoid of chiaroscuro: it was penned with the brush of Matisse, who was advised by a Cretan Byzantine iconographer. There is no game of patristic quotations, not even the most honest game; rather, every citation from the Church Fathers is placed under a bright surgical light, wherein only their life is visible. This is neither a verification nor a trial nor a critique of tradition—it is a means to vivify the perception of tradition. Yannaras's central thesis is that evil is the absence of relation, non-relationality; this is precisely the nature of evil, an indifferent and devastating force that strikes both irrational beings and rational ones, including geniuses and talents. This fresco of indifferent destruction ignites a bright light when discussing the fate of humanity: a person spiritually perishes when they fail to become a Face, placing themselves in relation to the love of the Other.

While in his earlier works, Yannaras's arguments concerning “being as relation” and “non-being as the absence of relation” were dialectical, here they become poetic, resonating like a poem: in the instance of the Face, the drive toward triumphant love finds solace, and the ecstatic emergence of the Other toward the person becomes the most harmonious fate of humanity. It is precisely the music from the abyss that saves: if a person hovers above the abyss of “atomism,” the fragmentation of things that are split because they are moments of experience, thus rolling into entropy and non-being, then the music of the Song of Songs is sufficient, the love of the Other crucified in all directions of Love, experienced as relating to various people or to different moments of being within one Face, to save one from this abyss, to be in rhyme with salvation and in a unified rhythm with the greatest triumph.

This juxtaposition of the moment of (non)existence of individual things and the continuity of a grand love story leads Yannaras to a nearly Bultmannian critique of exegesis, to the deconstruction of familiar meanings. For instance, who are angels, these strange demi-gods, neither Assyrian-Babylonian winged bulls nor named forces of good that guide the history of the Jews in the correct direction as symbols? Angels are an important part of Scripture and Tradition, yet they are not part of everyday church experience. Therefore, they are first and foremost sparks of divine love, artistic images that are more real than reality itself, which, scattered across the sky of speculations, elucidate for any person both the reality of being and the reality of otherness.

Such an understanding of many aspects of church teaching as an “iconically symbolic” language is rooted in the Greek baroque comprehension of the “mystery-working symbol.” Yet, what is important is not how Yannaras perceives the relationship between reason and imagination, but how he envisions the Fall: as a preference for natural (atomistic) being over supernatural (ecstatic) being. This atomistic being is the existence of a qualified consumer of knowledge, who can adapt everything to their understanding, yet can never truly love anything. A well-known hero of many novels; but what is significant is that Yannaras transforms from a mere recounter of old intellectual conclusions into a talented poet each time he employs the simple words “natural” and “supernatural”: they lose their moralistic charge and transform into poems that play with one another, capable of singing one another. The natural is both atomistic, yet also the one who perceives the Other; the supernatural is ecstatic, yet simultaneously blissful in the simplicity of its being, the simplicity of “energies,” the production of “relation,” the future connection of love. Evil ceases to reign over the world each time the natural state becomes perceptive. And salvation occurs when the supernatural becomes loving—it is, of course, always loving, but our experience cannot immediately grasp or articulate it as loving.