All Surface and No Substance

There's a crowd in academic philosophy and literature who contend that reality and literature are all surface and no substance. They think, in literature for instance, that there is no stable interpretation for any particular literary work - a book, a poem, whatever - and that's because there's no stable meaning for any particular work. Once the author produces the work, even the author's intended meaning can't define the work. The meaning is all up for grabs. So there's no substance, just surface off which our own intentions, dreams, healthy - or fucked up - organic processes are reflected.

This may or may not be worth a buffalo nickel's worth of anything for many folks - what do I care what some academics think about the meaning of Shakepeare's plays, or the movie "The Matrix", or Frou Frou's musical ouvre. Especially, do Shakespeare, the Wachowski brothers, and Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth give a shit what some Ph.D. thinks their creations mean? If anyone is going to even care to defend the fact that these works mean something, and mean something specific, it would be the authors. If they don't care, then there is no one to be threatened - nor enlightened - by these academic notions.

But what about the philosophical strain of this anti-meaning stuff? The philosophical version says that there is no stable meaning, period. Not for any particular novel, not for any particular poem, but also, not for any particular social convention (abortion, abstinence), or any scientific theory (evolution) or body of facts (quantum physics). Quantum physics, evolution, the doctrine of the trinity, the story of Jesus' resurrection - these are no different, with regard to their meaning, than "The Matrix", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "Mein Kampf", the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, or the War on Terror. It's all surface and no substance.

It's easy to ignore this kind of sophistry - or never to encounter it to begin with, at least in such an obvious and naked depiction. But it's out there, and it's not easy to counter. Here's one of my attempts to engage it directly (scroll down to "Truth and Consequences" after clicking on that link); my book (link is in my list of links on this blog) is another.

Studying graduate level philosophy, I practically had to breathe this stuff day in and day out; even more so as a graduate student in literature, believe it or not. Partly because that's the nature of graduate school in those two fields; partly because of the nature of my own focus in philosophy. This blog is all about that focus.