Words, words, words

I remember the first time I read Derrida. It was my second year of college, but for at least two years before that magical moment, I'd already been throwing around terms like "deconstruction" and "différance" without any knowledge of how they fit into the Western theoretical canon. Actually reading Derrida (some photocopied snippet from Of Grammatology, I think, for an Intro to Lit Theory course) only solidified my arrogant assurance of my own brilliance and superiority. I rushed home and, at the first chance I got, gleefully blurted out, "Everything is a language game!" to a philosophy major who'd been lecturing me on the finer points of Hegel and Kant. I probably felt just like an entire generation of post-WWI European schoolkids upon discovering the quasi-mystical kabbalah that was Marxist-Leninism. Grand theory of everything: discovered. Mysteries of life: solved. Check and check. So... worker's rally, then nip of gin and some foxtrot?

Reading Leibniz's Monadology (with excellent commentary by George MacDonald Ross), I'm reminded again of that bittersweet moment when all the complexities of the universe are crystallized under the aegis of one theoretical framework. Sweet not just because we as humans are lovers of orderly patterns, but also because, as Ross points out, many of the esoteric or just plain kooky aspects of Leibniz's philosophical system have recently been vindicated by the 20th century discovery of quantum mechanics. But bitter, too, for precisely that reason. Ross says the following of the modern-day application of the monad:

The Leibnizian point is that you can escape from this infinite regress only by postulating ultimate entities which do not have the properties of matter. Quantum mechanics comes quite close to this, despite the concept of a smallest possible but finite quantity (which is what ‘quantum’ means), since the characteristics of space, time, motion, and causation at the sub-atomic level are almost unrecognisably different from the macroscopic level. The same goes for relativity theory and very large magnitudes.

It's nice to know that what a century of scholars thought was crackpot theorizing is actually somewhat sound. But who's to say that in a hundred years, we won't look back at the quantum explanation of matter with equally patronizing mirth as we do at Leibniz's monad -- or Aquinas's immaterial angel. "They were brilliant thinkers," we'll say of the men and women who, today, we consider cutting-edge experts in capital-S Science (c.f. capital-T Truth), "and if they'd only had Technological Innovation X and Mathematical Breakthrough Y, they'd have finally reached what we know today, which is that matter is actually Z!" We'll still read their work, of course, but stripped of that transitory eureka power, the everything-finally-explainedness that makes the world make sense, it'll be mere logical cartwheels. Esoteric word-play. Nothing but... a language game.

We know what gravity is. We have all the mathematical formulas, the experiments with feathers and bowling balls, the variables and coefficients. But not a single person in the world can actually explain it in anything other than those terms. What's the point of all this endless theorizing, abstracting, parsing the world into terms and numbers that have as much relation to reality as g-force does to a brick dropped on my toe? It's moments like this that either the capital-T Truth of Neo-Platonism (aka, religion) or the quietus of a bare bodkin (aka, David Foster Wallace) seem really attractive. Or maybe I just need to get the hell out of grad school.