St. Paul Goes to Berkeley, Part 3: Advocatus Diaboli Claims Reification for the Gauntlet

Dear Promotor Fidei,

I adore your predilection for the disputatio: it is a format which in its ceaseless alternation between argument and counterargument embodies that Heraclitean flux to which we are all so liberatingly bound. I fail to see how you have simulated the disputatio in your missive, but I am pleased nonetheless.

Metaphysical reality, then. I prize metaphysics almost as much as my collection of Neolithic artifacts, and in much the same way. I suppose that in your attempt to push our topic of "the death of the author" to a higher level of abstraction, you are taking the tack of that favorite Dutch theologian of yours, whose name I unfortunately cannot remember, but whose method generally consists in avoiding the question at hand. So, you would thwart my language games by an appeal to Platonic realism. Very well.

Regarding problem (a): I find it difficult to imagine how a text could "contain" metaphysical reality, and almost equally perplexing to conceive of a metaphysical reality to which it could "correspond." Surely you do not wish to revive either the Aristotelian essence or the Platonic form?

Regarding problem (b): of course the text exists externally to the reader; it is material. It is the significance claimed for the text which is created by the reader, not the text itself.

Regarding problem (c): I deny all metaphysical reality in the strict sense. I consider all attempts at metaphysics, at least in the classic Western tradition, to be pernicious avoidances of the human question(s).

Regarding problem (d): hmm, hermeneutical obligations. Consciously constructing interpretations of texts in such a way that marginalized persons/groups are "read back in" comes to mind.

Is the problem of the author truly a metaphysical one? I fail to see how it must be, although I understand how it could be made to appear so. It seems a more or less straightforwardly hermeneutical problem to me. As far as external reality is concerned, I don't think that we'll disagree much over the independent existence of the material universe. Of course there is a correlation between the external object and the noetic process; it is only the significance attached to the external object that is a construction.

Mirabile dictu or not, these questions are much older than the Enlightenment. Gorgias comes to mind.

I believe, my friend, that in your "counterstroke" you have conflated "meaning" with "univocity." My claim is not that there is no shared sphere in which language games can take place; my claim is that entrance into the language games entails the equivocity innate in the disparate natures of multiple minds. You seem to understand "meaning" as a hermetically sealed unit that can be shuttled back and forth between minds without contamination. Of course your words have meaning; there is a phonetic sequence that you have produced which signifies something. That particular something which is signified, though, is almost certainly different for both of us: not utterly different, for then we would have no communication, but substantially different, or otherwise we would have identical minds.

Take, for instance, your use of "Luddite." "Luddite" is at the present moment most commonly used as a pejorative against those who distrust technology. You seem to use the term to mean a person who avows archaic beliefs. So we share the term "Luddite," it has a referent for both of us, but that referent is substantially different in both cases-though this does not preclude discourse. It only precludes a univocal meaning for your term.

So I deny that I assume "meaning" in your sense when I write to you. I assume a shared exercise in arbitrariness, which we call "language," I assume that you are reading this as English prose and not as numerology, but I do not assume that these words will mean precisely to you what they do to me. My words, in your mind, will be different entities from what they are in mine. In particular, my dear Promotor, because you have no access to the intentionality which produced these words. You understand this text as it enters your mental matrix, not as it proceeds from mine. And this is not the death of meaning, as you claim. It is rather the birth of meaning. For the blood of univocity is the seed of infinite meanings.

I will pass by your Steiner quotation, as it seems rather far-fetched for recognition. I obviously deny the charge, as would most of your compatriots in orthodoxy. There are fideists, and there are those who have fallen off the edge of fideism. Your proposed ally appears to be one of the latter.

Promotor, you might better comprehend if you attempted to understand language, not as something inviolable which was dropped out of the sky by the gods on a particularly beneficent day, but as itself a construction of "humankind." Language is a game, its rules are arbitrary and constantly subject to change-except for the rule that there can be no teams.

Entertaining as all this has been, I repeat the untouched (by you) original pronouncement: the author is dead, and no amount of nostalgia for univocity is going to resuscitate him.

Kind regards,

Advocatus Diaboli