Rediscovering Meaning

This post first appeared in the Christian Scholar's Review Blog. You can access it here: https://christianscholars.com/rediscovering-meaning/

Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash

Outside the friendly confines of the CSR blogosphere, society is fragmenting (or perhaps you could say it is fragmented). Truth itself seems increasingly privatized and tribal, adrift in a sea of relativism, subjective interpretations, and bold-faced lies. Political debates have intensified into existential wars, revealing a culture that feels not merely divided, but antagonistic, hateful, violent, even nihilistic.¹

Given this context, I am not surprised at all to see a five-part discussion on the relationship between love and truth come across my inbox over the last week or so. We are registering this tension in the society around us and trying to discern on which side of the “dangerous edge of things” we land. As was showcased by Hiebert’s initial argument and Glanzer’s subsequent rebuttal (and as recognized by Smith as well), lying at the heart of this tension is a clash between profoundly polarized moral visions. In our recent conversation, the question is the priority of love and truth in a co-habiting concept: who gets to sit before the hyphen?

In the broader society, it is a question of love or truth. Or rather, this truth or that truth.

To grasp this situation and to deepen our present conversation, I suggest we consider the philosophical waves that carried us here. Primarily, I am referring to postmodernism. Before it became a catch-all term for “all things evil” by conservatives or an ipso facto defense for ultimate self-determinism by progressives, postmodernism was an academic movement defined by scholars such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard. Traces of this philosophical movement recall arguments made by Frederich Nietzsche and Ferdinand de Saussure as well.

Postmodernism was an important development following the societal upheaval of consecutive World Wars instigated by diametrically opposed (false) utopian dreams of authoritarian nationalism and Marxist socialism. Left in the wasteland of post-war Europe, these scholars crafted a critical frame that challenged traditional understanding of reality, meaning, and truth, reflecting their own disillusionment with the surrounding systems of power.

The term, “post-modern,” was coined by Jean Baudrillard. He described three distinct eras in culture: pre-modern, modern, and post-modern. Simulacra, human fabrications which mediate reality, play an important role in Baudrillard’s theories. In pre-modern and modern times, language functioned as a simulacrum, mediating reality through words. However, in postmodernity, “signs are exchanged against each other rather than the real,” Baudrillard says, meaning that our language, our art, our culture-making is increasingly self-referential, based more and more on other simulacra than on reality itself.²

Living in postmodernity is like walking through the maze of mirrors at the county fair.

In this postmodern world, meaning itself becomes meaningless because it seems foundationless. Reality is so washed out by interpretations of reality that any understanding of reality is now based on interpretations of interpretations of reality. Given this, the postmodernist poses the question, “What is truth?”

Frederich Nietzsche’s answer provides a window to the postmodernist perspective: “What then is truth? …[T]ruths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are…”³

“What is truth?” is merely another way to state “Truth is a simulacrum.”

While we must ultimately reject this answer (and we will get to that in a moment), our discussion over the last few days testifies that this is an unavoidable question, given the state of the world. The postmodernists spoke prophetically about our present circumstances: we have lost our sense of meaning.

In the last decade or so, the term “deconstruction” has frequented many public platforms and private discussions. Derrida—the father of deconstruction—views deconstruction as a never-ending process which tests the instability of our pre-conceived notions, works to uproot injustice, and seeks to diminish the power of death.⁴ To the latter, Derrida famously says, “To deconstruct death, then, that is the subject… No less than that. Death to Death.”⁵ Derrida does not assume as a matter of course that there is no truth beneath the shifting, buzzing swarm of simulacra; rather, he seeks to show through deconstruction that our understanding of truth, our perception of truth, our systems of meaning-making are always in flux.

However, it is hard to find this understanding of deconstruction in the public discourse, let alone in the comments section on YouTube. Truly postmodernist deconstruction is a process by which we uncover the simulations we assumed to be real—it asks the question, “What is truth?” and then earnestly seeks the answer. The “street” deconstruction of today asks, “What is truth?” and presumes the answer: “The truth is whatever I make it.”

This was the first step towards today’s polarized society: the destabilization of structures of meaning which led to the wholesale abandonment of shared meaning.

And this leads to the second step. It is a very postmodern thing to say, “I make my own truth,” but when we consider the American philosophical landscape, we do not see 340.1 million individual truths. As a culture, we have unmoored ourselves from systems of shared meaning, not to complete and utter individualism, but to smaller, tribal camps. We have given lip-service to Nietzsche’s declaration, “Truths are illusions,” and declared ourselves free from the entrapments of any anchoring reality. Yet all we have accomplished is moving our anchor from one common reality to one of many diverse “realities.”

This is the root of the fragmentation we experience today.

Amid the profound confusion and division characterizing our cultural moment, the reconnection to universal truth is both urgent and essential. Philosophical critiques of truth hold value, yet they must coexist within a framework recognizing universal truths that anchor human dignity and societal cohesion. Embracing universal truth—particularly through the clarity and direction offered by a Christian worldview—provides a hopeful and stabilizing path forward, one that restores coherence, purpose, and unity to a fractured society.

As we develop this conversation on the relationship between love and truth, I want to invite us to consider the response and responsibility of the church (the ecumenical body) in this mess. Let us listen alongside the Romans and the Thessalonians as Paul admonishes them to test their thinking, that they might “discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”⁶

We need to faithfully and humbly examine our Gospel, inviting the Holy Spirit to shake our beliefs, to reveal and remove that which can be shaken, “so that which cannot be shaken may remain.”⁷

The world is starving for this unshakeable kingdom. Insofar as we are unable to clearly preach the good news of that which cannot be shaken to the world, we deprive the world of its true foundation, thus relegating it to the nearest substitute and the inevitable conflict which follows.

Footnotes

1. Hunter, James Davison (2024), “Culture Wars: The Endgame | Nihilism’s Grip on American Democracy,” The Hedgehog Review (Fall 2024 Edition).

2. Baudrillard, Jean, 1976, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Ian Hamilton Grant (trans.), London: Sage Publications, 1993.

3. Nietzsche, Frederich, 1896, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, In The Portable Nietzsche (1988), Walter Kauffman (trans.), Penguin Books.

4. Lawlor, Leonard, “Jacques Derrida”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/derrida/>.

5. The Death Penalty (Volume 1), trans. Peggy Kamuf, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

6. Romans 12:2

7. Hebrews 12:27