Postmodern philosophy introduced to critical thought the grammatological tool of deconstruction as a way to penetrate and critically examine complex structures of textual meaning. If the Enlightenment project of modernism and the premodern thought that preceded it had led to enclosing the human mind and its societies in intellectual and social structures, the postmodernist project aimed to deconstruct them. By perceiving every context as a text (as Jacques Derrida, famously announced, ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’, or ‘there is no external text’ or, as it is sometimes rendered ‘there is nothing beyond the text’, a phrase which has been interpreted perhaps more broadly than he had intended), all structures, intellectual and societal, among others, were subject to its scalpel. Because it perceived those structures to be endlessly reducible, deconstruction was conceived to be a never‑ending process of unraveling. As a tool, its scope was, on its face, limitless. When applied to the architectures of society and culture, it yielded a potent critique of authority, hierarchy and power. Among its many influences, it threw light on how sclerotic modes of thought and fixed institutional constructs operated to condition various elements of societies. It also exposed ways in which distorted perceptions of alterity engendered false stereotypes and arbitrary categorizations, and thereby advantaged institutionalized power in ways that rationalized the subjugation of others. This exposure resulted in a greater awareness of forms of thought and structures of power, and contributed to various reforms to redress political, social, cultural, economic, and religious modes of oppression and inequity. In diverse ways, deconstruction has been employed as a tool to enhance societal freedoms and social equality, creating an appreciation of plurality and of the necessity for more open spaces to accommodate its diverse expressions.
When employed without regard to grounding spiritual principles (themselves, according to grammatological surgeons, to be deconstructed), deconstruction can become a never‑ending process of dismantling leading to nihilism.
But deconstructing the world has also resulted in a myriad of excesses ranging from an unhealthy obsession with repressive political correctness and identity politics to an anti‑metaphysical disdain for both faith and authority. It has led to both cognitive and moral relativism, to a degradation of forms, and also to a levelling‑out of hierarchic orders in the pursuit of equality, promoting, in effect, a hyper‑equality or an exaggerated egalitarianism that curtails freedom and qualitative hierarchy. When employed without regard to grounding spiritual principles (themselves, according to grammatological surgeons, to be deconstructed), deconstruction can become a never‑ending process of dismantling leading to nihilism. In this sense, it is radically anarchic and can risk undermining the very fabric of societal and metaphysical cohesion. By denying logic its ontological foundations, it possesses an overreaching tendency which presumes to deconstruct the very ground of its being, to lop off the branch that supports it, to absurdly stand on no ground but itself, as though deconstruction were an end in itself.
Despite assertions to the contrary by those who view it as being beyond definition or analysis, deconstruction can be viewed as, simply stated, a tool to critically examine language and structures by locating and penetrating their points of instability and differentiation (what Derrida terms ‘différance’, a term which, in typical postmodernist fashion, he says ‘can refer to a whole complex of its meanings at once, for it is immediately and irreducibly multivalent’[[1]]). Derrida has cautioned that deconstruction is not a method, theory, or operation, lest, in itself, it become a defining (structure‑imposing) approach. If deconstruction can itself be deconstructed – although some postmodern theoreticians would deny even this possibility, thereby ironically absolutizing it – it should, as with any tool, be found to be value‑neutral and to have no necessary adherence to principles. However, it possesses anti‑normative tendencies, which derive from an inbuilt destabilizing feature, what we might call its inherently anarchic metaphysical skepticism. Granted that penetrating texts and structures to open them up to new spaces, vantages and meanings can, in a certain sense, be regarded as a metaphysical exercise, yet it is the postmodernist disdain for metaphysical foundations themselves, which it dismisses as ‘logocentric’ constructs or ‘meta‑narratives’, and its denial of the possibility of any stable or ultimate foundation of meaning, that determines the anti‑metaphysical nature of deconstruction. Derrida points out that all language is inherently metaphysical because signifiers point beyond themselves and that all truth is, at best, provisional. In this, he can be seen to be in a certain sense in line with an aspect of traditional metaphysics illustrated, for instance, in the Buddhist analogy of ‘the finger pointing at the moon’ or the metaphysical analogies of cosmic sheaths or veils that are onion‑like layers covering over truth. An important distinction, however, is that traditional metaphysics is rooted in spiritual and intellectual foundations that postmodernists reject. For traditional teachers, meaning is foreclosed without the possibility of a symbolic and archetypal foundation in spiritual substance, a dilemma that postmodernism, which rejects the reality of spiritual substance, fails to overcome. By de‑mythologizing the world, postmodernists also de‑spiritualize it.
Derrida has maintained that deconstruction does not renounce truth as a value, yet its radical reduction of truth to, at best, liminality and its skepticism of the humility of grace, betrays a fundamentally destructive and nihilistic tendency. This can be noted in its relentless quest for and continual dismantling of meaning which, on its own terms, is ultimately unattainable and seen to be merely provisional. As an approach to truth and meaning, it is constantly seeking to destabilize without affirming. As René Guénon has observed in a different context[[2]], ‘While the rest of mankind seeks for the sake of finding and knowing, the Westerner of today seeks for the sake of seeking; the Gospel sentence, Quaerite et invenietis (“Seek and ye shall find’), is for him a dead letter, in the full force of this expression, since he calls “death” anything and everything that constitutes a definite finality, just as he gives the name “life” to what is no more than fruitless agitation.’ In its failure to distinguish between the healthy dogma which apprehends the all‑encompassing ground of reality (as Frithjof Schuon notes, ‘dogmas are necessary as immutable foundations and have inward and inclusive dimensions’[[3]]) and the unhealthy dogmatism which both reduces and atomizes it, deconstruction can become profoundly cynical and, ultimately, destructive insofar as it presumes to deconstruct reality to the point of aporetic absurdity, rather than to embrace its spiritual ecology.
In ‘a world of signs’, while the mind can decipher theophany, it cannot deconstruct its irreducible ground and the principle of the mind itself, the very reality that inhabits and transcends it.
Traditional metaphysicians have themselves always affirmed that the concept of reality as ordinarily understood must be deconstructed, penetrated to its core (appreciating that this core cannot itself be deconstructed but only experienced), and that its meaning must be hermeneutically retraced back to the originating and central spiritual source, or Principle, which is both Essence and Being. This is a retracing that Sufis term ta’wil, by which the world (macrocosm) and self (microcosm) are seen in light of their harmonizing ontological Principle (metacosm). While there is no unveiling of the Hidden Treasure, or Essence, except ontologically and through anagogical meaning within the realm of Being, the self as theophany participates in spiritual substance. It is a ‘center’ within the meaning of the adage, ‘God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere and the circumference nowhere’ (Bonaventure). In ‘a world of signs’, while the mind can decipher theophany, it cannot deconstruct its irreducible ground and the principle of the mind itself, the very reality that inhabits and transcends it, in short, the ontological Principle which is its ultimate referent for existence. This axiomatic fountainhead is, in its Essence, the foundational reality in which all opposites are reconciled (the ‘coincidentia oppositorum’) and in which all differences dissolve. The Principle, in this sense, transcends the irreducibly multivalent ‘différance’. (Postmodernists resist any attempt to equate the term with God. Note, for instance, John Caputo, one of Derrida’s influential interpreters: ‘There is no negative ontological argument against God implied in différance nor is différance to be confused with God.’) While this principial Center is both the transcendental station and instant of stability, it is also the metaphysical pivot of the wheel of existence in motion and in time. While one can deconstruct elements of the circle of existence, the Center from which the circle itself emerges is beyond deconstruction. It simultaneously transcends and immanently participates in the circle of existence. In one formulation, it is termed huwa la huwa (‘He is, He is not’). As ibn ‘Arabi states[[4]], affirming this metaphysical unity as well as its plurality,
“If you insist only on His transcendence, you restrict Him, And if you insist only on His immanence you limit Him. If you maintain both aspects you are right...”
The Essence, being humanly unknowable, necessitates transcendence, revelation, faith and apophasis. Yet, the soul as created Logos discerns and mystically participates in the uncreated Logos, which resides in the ontological ground of Reality. The Spirit, thereby, is realized ontologically and is known through its existential qualities and attributes, hence the possibility of intellection, and the cataphatic awareness of immanence, of communion and the experience that ‘all that lives is holy’.
Tradition teaches that existence is a cosmic veil or, more accurately in view of the planimetric nature of reality, a multiplicity of veils, including a veil over the soul, which must itself be deconstructed in order to move from occluded vision to translucent perception. In that clarity, otherness is subsumed within the awareness of ontological wholeness, the shared spiritual ground of the soul’s being. This ultimate ground is primordial, inclusive and capable of being experienced, as mystics and sages have attested to throughout the ages. It is therefore not merely a conceptual reality of the order of an ‘a priori’ Kantian postulate. Rather, the Spirit possesses ontological reality; it is a cardial presence, not merely a logical or grammatological structure capable of being deconstructed as part of a postmodernist mind game or its semiotic gymnastics. Yet postmodernists remain skeptical of the Spirit’s reality, treating it at best as a grammatalogical concept, and God as a semantic postulate to be subjected to its scalpel.
This distinction between ‘truth as concept’ and ‘truth as presence’ reveals the basic difference in approach between the profane and sacred epistemologies. While modernism is built upon the epistemologies of scientific rationalism and positivism, postmodernism is wary of deconstructing them. In the words of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Post‑modernists usually deconstruct everything except modern science because, if this were to be done, the whole world view of modernism
along with post‑modernism would collapse.” Fundamentally, both modernists and postmodernists are skeptical of faith and tradition, and are critical, if not cynical, of all forms of authority, with the exception of modern science. The science that would reduce reality to the limits of its own modes of knowing (that is to say, scientism) is ideologically opposed to faith, which regards both world and self as theophany, as metaphysically integrated and replete with symbols and archetypes that resonate and reinforce this connection. Postmodern epistemology, by contrast, while fascinated in an outward manner by symbolism and continually seeking to deconstruct the world, cannot locate its imaginal foundation because it rejects metaphysical integrity and thereby its sacred symbolism. Profane hermeneutics, proceeding infernally, merely dismantles reality without intuiting its all‑embracing substance, while sacred hermeneutics, by contrast, witnesses through faith, intellect, and grace the unveiled presence of the Spirit which it recognizes as its selfsame substance.
Meaning is therefore subsumed in the grace of faith and mystical experience, not deferred through a grammatological instinct for elusiveness or the stratagems of hermeneutic elasticity.
While there are considerable similarities between the mystical path of apophasis, which emphasizes the ultimate unknowability of Reality as Essence, and the postmodernist’s instinct to permanently defer the possibility of meaning, there are significant differences too between their approaches. While for Derrida “there are only contexts without any centre of absolute anchoring”[[5]], the person of faith, by contrast, is anchored in the Spirit. Meaning is therefore subsumed in the grace of faith and mystical experience, not deferred through a grammatological instinct for elusiveness or the stratagems of hermeneutic elasticity. While approaching Reality through apophasis, the mystic can nevertheless affirm it cataphatically. Similarly, while seeking to merge into the spiritual Void through self‑annihilation (fana’), the mystic can equally affirm its subsistence as pleroma (baqa’). This self‑annihilation or ‘dying into the Spirit’, far from being a nihilistic negation of reality, is an affirmation of it, validating the wholeness of Spirit through faith, grace, witnessing, and spiritual union. This is completely at odds with the postmodernist’s ‘religion without religion’ or ‘faith without faith’.
The angelic command, iqra, ‘read’ or ‘recite’, given to the Prophet of Islam, is, in sacred hermeneutics, understood to be a call to humanity to ‘read the signs’ of spiritual presence, of the ever‑unfolding reality of divine self‑disclosure upon the tablet of existence. The angelic command in effect calls for the adept to look with the inner eye and to ‘see’, to read with spiritual ‘in‑sight’, rather than to engage in the agile grammatology of textual deconstruction. The Spirit as created Logos, whose visionary faculties transcend the reified analytics of grammatology, reads the signs by ontologically participating in their spiritual substance. The visionary Logos deconstructs the ‘signs’ in order to unveil the Spirit, while the profane mind deconstructs merely in order to deconstruct. Lacking spiritual insight, it seeks meaning without any unitive or ontological foundation for truth or knowledge. The grammatologist fails to accept that sacred unveiling is not so much a deconstruction of reality as it is a visionary and transformative experience of the Spirit. He remains intellectually aloof from the text while deconstructing it, in contrast to the visionary who seeks to be mystically immersed in it. Through immersion, the mystic’s soul is unified with the Spirit. The process requires both faith and virtue, the pilgrimage and the ‘waiting‑at‑the‑threshold’, and grace which makes possible the soul’s admission into the Sanctuary of the Spirit, the heart’s sanctum. For the postmodernist, there are no sanctuaries to enter, only an infinite number of thresholds to overcome.
A similar problem arises for the postmodernist with respect to the impossibility of operative prayer. If truth cannot be ultimately attained, it cannot be effectively expressed. Prayer can never reach it. Prayer itself is merely to be deconstructed, just as is the ‘god’ to whom the prayer might be addressed. And faith, which is the foundation for the possibility of operative prayer, is dissolved in the skepticism of the mind which regards it merely as a concept to be unraveled rather than as a reality to be affirmed. The irony is that the postmodernist who only deconstructs structures to escape its confining enclosures is thereby imprisoned in its endless processes, living only in the pseudo‑reality of absence, and not in the affirming reality of spiritual presence. Though keenly sensitive to otherness, he nevertheless walls himself off from the ‘Other’ by rejecting their shared ontological connection, and the possibility of spiritual amplitude. By contrast to him, the man of faith demolishes the psychic barriers of alienation to discover the ontological ground of spiritual communion. Just as the outer eye sees by the grace of the physical light, so the ‘Eye of the Heart’, through grace and receptivity, participates in the light of the universe by the revelation of the self‑illumining Sun. Sacred knowledge, therefore, deconstructs without denying its transcendence and also its role as the shared ground of being, the source of its vision, and without rejecting the intellect’s dynamic relationship with faith.
God is the very seat of subjectivity, as much as He is the fountainhead of objectivity, Subject and Object thereby being identical with spiritual substance.
The human mind is, in the end, more than a thinking machine. It is the instrument of the Logos. In the words of Titus Burckhardt, “Man, a ‘thinking animal’, is either the divine masterpiece of nature or else its adversary; the reason for this is that ‘being’ and ‘knowing‘ become dissociated in the mind, which, through decadence, gives rise to all scissions.”[[6]] In this postmodern age which is experiencing a theft of enormous magnitude, a theft of the soul’s ontological awareness, it is more important than ever to appreciate that thought itself must be grounded in spiritual substance in order to integrate man and the world. Spiritual intelligence must therefore seek to reconstruct the self before it presumes to deconstruct the world or its expressions. In fact the two processes are inextricably connected: the world can only be known in the mode of the knower so that if the lens of the subject is occluded, so too is the object perceived. As teachers like Ramana Maharshi have taught, God is the very seat of subjectivity, as much as He is the fountainhead of objectivity, Subject and Object thereby being identical with spiritual substance. Gnosis therefore begins in humility and in the primordial intelligence of spiritual receptivity. As humility empties the soul of its usurping egoic propensities, the intellect graces the soul with the corresponding awareness of its compensatory spiritual amplitude. As egoic selfhood diminishes, the awareness of spiritual reality expands until, finally, the self dissolves into the Spirit.
It is in the self‑illumining Spirit in whose mercy we abide that we must finally rest, seeking to dissolve all interposing veils and usurping images that would conceal its reality and our identity. This is basis of true apophatic knowledge which ultimately annihilates even the knowing self into the pleroma of Reality, absorbing all light into the effulgent Darkness that is ‘the Dot beneath the Ba’, the Heart that is ‘Black but Beautiful’.
[[1]]: Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. D. Allison, p. 136
[[2]]: René Guénon, Orient et Occident, p. 78, quoted by Whitall N. Perry in A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom (Perennial Books, 1981), p.732
[[3]]: Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, ed. James Cutsinger (World Wisdom, 2009), p. 3
[[4]]: Ibn ‘Arabi, The Bezels of Wisdom (Fusus al Hikam), trans. R. Austin (Paulist Press, 1980), p. 75
[[5]]: Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Harvester, 1982), p. 317; quoted by Ian Almond in Sufism and Deconstruction (Routledge, 2004), p. 21
[[6]]: Titus Burckhardt, Introduction aux Doctrines ésotériques de l’Islam, pp.93‑94, quoted by Whitall N. Perry in A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom (Perennial Books, 1981), p.732
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