Having had some “conversations” with English lit PhD candidates and NT students immersed in some form of post-structuralism (literary criticism) from the late 70s through the early 90s, I was surprised last night to find a young philosopher Brett Yardley PhD talking about this in relation to R. W. Funk.
[1] I am not tagging Funk post-structuralist. I am simply saying his ideas about language and culture share certain attributes with people who have been identified with a very vague conglomeration of ideas sometimes referred to as post-structuralism.The underlying philosophical concept that under girds Funk's work is his understanding of language and reality which are wrapped up in history. Both precede from what he sees as the “problem of language,” the circular conundrum of which came first: joint understanding or previously understood language.iii For Funk the two create a form of dualism where the two, language and understanding, “give birth to each other” and “also hold each other captive.”iv Since both must occur simultaneously, Funk denies a univocal reality.v For Funk, reality is the shared experiences common to all men that give birth to language and vice versa. As reality evolves or progresses overtime, it is first shaped as men inherit language from history and then subsequently reshape it using that language to create new shared experiences which modify the language for future generations. Second, Funk affirms univocal language.vi He desires that language be cleaned of all equivocal elements so that words “square” (match one-on-one) with the reality man experiences. Taken together, these two presuppositions put a figurative expiration-date on words since their meaning is derived from a reality limited to the shared experiences of the communicator and the intended audience. Once that shared reality has entered history, the words become empty shells devoid of their common experience based meaning and weigh down modern language as “historical litter.”vii
Brett Yardley PhD
http://www.brettyardley.com/fail-forwar ... ert-w-funk