Postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida may have unwittingly crippled philosophy with his theory of deconstruction. The idea behind deconstruction is that there is no actual foundation for knowledge in the world because all written statements can be interpreted in different ways. At first this might sound ridiculous, because writing something as commonly known as the sky being blue would seemingly make the words factual. But language is just a system of symbols, which means they can't always convey the same meaning about things. Words are vulnerable to things like translational errors, metaphorical mistakes, misinterpretation, and things taken out of context. The words themselves have no actuality; they just substitute things in the world, based on subjectivity. Therefore a text such as The Bible has never really had a unifying interpretation despite it being a "bringer of truth" to billions of people. Jews, Muslims, Christians (and even different types of Christians) will never agree on what certain things mean in the Bible, due to their different cultural interpretations. Each time something is translated and borrowed from another culture, its mythology is morphed into something else- a modernized version of a more ancient class of myths. Thus, the legends of the Greeks were just modernized versions of Egyptian mythologies: the same with the Hebrews borrowing from the Babylonians, and Christians from all the others. Because of the flexibility of language, original ideas get lost in the details of each subsequent cultural transformation.
Derrida also said that language is the only transcendental signifier that exists entirely inside a system of causation. A transcendental signifier is something that a metaphysical philosopher uses to explain the origin of causation, whether it be God, man, consciousness, and so forth. These signifiers come and go, depending on the period in history in which their ideas resonate the strongest. Long ago it was God in the west and consciousness in the east that were thought to be the things that came from nothing. After the Enlightenment, people started reasoning that since man had created God, it was really man who was the original creator, and that things only existed because he was there to interpret them. In Derrida's late 20th century, he thought that we'd entered a period where language became the transcendental signifier, that all meaning became lost in translation as the world became increasingly complex. It was then that cultures started to mix more than ever, and so their mythologies blended into a signifying whole through the vast amount of translating that took place, particularly in America. The reason language can't exist outside a system of causation is because it constantly perpetuates itself inside its own system, meaning it couldn't have created the world because it depends on symbols and not an event.
I don't think deconstruction marks the end of philosophy though. There is a system of communication that doesn't require subjective reasoning, and that is mathematics. I believe numbers will become the next transcendental signifier, as humans evolve into more mechanistic beings. Already we can see this in effect as we witness the type of influence computers and electronics have had on us. The digitalization of the world might translate into a philosophy that embraces mathematics as the root of all causation. An analogy for this is the evolution of mythological art into abstract images based on subjectivity, and thence into minimalist art. The mythological parallel is with God; most of the art that was made when God was the transcendental signifier was based on religious myth. Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Reubens, Caravaggio: all the greatest artists prior to the 20th century were known for their religious interpretations translated onto the canvas. After man and language became the signifiers, abstract art allowed the subjectivity of all our experiences free reign. Starting with impressionists like Van Gogh and Renoir, and ending with the cubists like Picasso and Braque, reality became internal and art represented man's penchant for distorting natural objects by his own means. Then art became as minimalist as possible around 1950, when computers started to make their imprint on society. Artists like Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko were able to unify all the principles of causation inside the most basic of shapes, like squares and circles. Not that it takes much talent represent the cosmos within a square, but that's what they were trying to communicate.
For an in-depth study on how numbers could become the next transcendental signifier, have a look at my post on Sacred Geometry in Cosmologica. It's probably a more mystical context of what might defeat the language barrier, but it's a good introduction to the kind of purity that numbers can provide for metaphysicians.
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