What Happens When We Think We Have Already Understood?

Caputo, Derrida, and Deconstruction

In the first essay, I asked the question: Can a human being move?

I began with social workers who, for twenty years, had encountered some of the same people on the street. From the outside, it could appear that little had changed. The same street. The same substance use. The same people.

But they moved.

They walked every day.

And the social workers moved as well. They went out again. Met them again. Listened again. Tried again.

The street found them.

The street found the helpers.

This led to another question. After twenty years, a social worker may know a great deal about a person. She knows the history, the relapses, the attempts at treatment, the conflicts, and the defeats.

And precisely then, a dangerous sentence may arise:

I know him. I know who he is.

What happens when we think we have already understood?

This is where deconstruction begins.

Taking Something Apart

The word deconstruction can sound violent. It may suggest that something is to be torn down or destroyed.

But this is a poor way into Jacques Derrida.

Deconstruction does not simply mean destruction. Nor does it mean that every understanding is wrong, or that all interpretations are equally good. Derrida examines how our concepts, texts, and systems are constructed, which differences they depend upon, and what happens when something that was supposed to be clear and stable turns out to contain tensions that cannot simply be removed.

Deconstruction therefore does not merely arrive from the outside like a hammer.

It works from within.

A text may say more than its author intended. A concept may carry assumptions that become visible only when we examine what the concept excludes. An opposition that seems self-evident may turn out to depend upon what it is trying to keep at a distance.

Deconstruction is therefore, first of all, a way of reading.

But perhaps also a way of living.

The Words We Need

Social work cannot take place without concepts.

We must be able to describe what we see. We need words for substance dependence, neglect, violence, poverty, mental distress, exclusion, and social hardship. We need diagnoses, laws, case records, intervention plans, and professional assessments.

Without categories, professional practice would be impossible.

The problem, therefore, does not arise because we use concepts.

The problem arises when we forget that they are concepts.

A person may be described as dependent on drugs.

But is the person their dependence?

A young person may be described as difficult.

But difficult for whom?

A client may be described as unmotivated.

But what does motivation mean in this person's life?

A person may be described as resistant to treatment.

But what is the person resisting?

Suddenly, the words begin to move.

This is where deconstruction becomes practical.

It does not necessarily say that the concepts are wrong.

It asks what they do.

What Falls Outside

Every concept draws a boundary.

When we say that something is normal, the abnormal appears at the same time. When we speak of the integrated, there is also the marginalised. When we speak of the motivated client, the unmotivated client appears.

Such distinctions may be necessary.

But they are not innocent.

For one side is often given priority.

Normality appears better than deviance. Independence better than dependence. Activity better than passivity. Change better than immobility.

And in social work: the helper as the one who knows, the client as the one who is to be understood.

But what happens if we begin to examine this final opposition?

The helper tries to understand the client.

But the client also interprets the helper.

He watches how she walks. How she speaks. Whether she has time. Whether she truly listens. Whether she returns the next day. He may have met a hundred helpers before her.

He reads her.

At the same time, she reads him.

Neither stands outside interpretation.

The street finds the helpers too.

Reading Resistance

Derrida is difficult to summarise because deconstruction is not primarily a theory that can simply be applied to reality. It happens in the reading.

One reads slowly enough to discover that the text does not always do what it says it does.

This can, with some caution, be transferred to practical philosophy.

Consider the word resistance.

A social worker may write that a client “shows resistance to treatment.”

That may be a reasonable description.

But deconstruction asks further questions.

Resistance to what?

To treatment?

To this treatment?

To this institution?

To the way the problem has been defined?

To the helper?

To the expectation that life should change in a particular direction?

Or perhaps the resistance is a way of protecting something that the helper has not yet understood?

We do not know.

And precisely this we do not know is important.

It does not mean that we cannot act.

It means that action must not be confused with final understanding.

The Dangerous “Is”

There is a small word that can become surprisingly powerful in professional descriptions:

is.

He is an addict.

She is difficult.

He is aggressive.

She is manipulative.

He is unmotivated.

Sometimes such words describe something real. The problem arises when description slips into identity.

From:

He uses drugs.

to:

He is a drug user.

From:

She reacted aggressively.

to:

She is aggressive.

Linguistically, the difference is small.

Existentially, it can be enormous.

An action has a history and a context.

An identity risks closing the history.

Then the case record may become more powerful than the moment.

The person who walks through the door today is met by what was written about him yesterday.

And perhaps by what was written ten years ago.

The Archive Meets the Moment

Here Kierkegaard returns from the first essay.

Repetition takes place in the moment.

History cannot be erased. The social worker should not pretend that she is meeting a person without a past. That would be both naive and professionally irresponsible.

But neither can the past be allowed to exhaust the present.

The case record says something true.

But the case record does not say everything.

It describes the human being who was seen, interpreted, and written about at particular moments by particular people within particular institutional frameworks.

Today, the encounter happens again.

Therefore, interpretation must also be repeated.

Not because the previous understanding was necessarily wrong.

But because the human being is still alive.

Caputo's Radicalisation

John D. Caputo allows deconstruction to radicalise hermeneutics.

In the first essay, kinesis – movement – was decisive. The human being moves, and therefore understanding must move as well.

Now the consequence becomes clearer.

If understanding itself is in motion, we cannot simply imagine a final vantage point from which we eventually see the whole truth about another person.

There is no final case record.

No final diagnosis.

No last interpretation capable of bringing a living human being to a close.

This does not mean that truth disappears. Nor does it mean that professional knowledge becomes worthless.

On the contrary, it places greater demands upon knowledge.

Because knowledge must be able to withstand being read again.

Deconstruction does not ask only:

Is this true?

It also asks:

How did this become true for us?

What assumptions make this understanding possible?

What becomes visible through it?

And what becomes invisible?

The Helper Under Deconstruction

But it would be too easy if deconstruction were applied only to the client.

Then we would once again have placed the helper outside the movement.

The helper's understanding must also be open to deconstruction.

What happens to a social worker who encounters people on the street for twenty years?

Perhaps some of the ideas she brought with her from her education no longer hold.

Perhaps she once believed that help must always lead a person from one state to another.

From substance use to abstinence.

From the street to housing.

From dependence to independence.

After twenty years, she may have learned something else.

Not that these goals are unimportant.

But that a human life does not always follow the line the helper had drawn.

The street may have deconstructed the helper's understanding of help.

It is a strange thought.

We usually imagine that the social worker goes out onto the street carrying her knowledge with her.

But after twenty years, she also returns carrying knowledge the street has given her.

The street finds the helpers.

And perhaps it deconstructs them too.

Deconstruction as Ethical Unease

Here deconstruction acquires an ethical significance.

Not as a rule telling the social worker what to do, but as an unease within the certainty that she already knows who the other person is.

I need my concepts.

But I must be able to question them.

I need my experience.

But I must be able to ask what my experience prevents me from seeing.

I need the case record.

But I must be able to meet the human being standing before me.

I need knowledge.

But knowledge must not become the final word.

Deconstruction, then, does not become the destruction of understanding.

It becomes what keeps understanding open.

What Happens When We Think We Have Already Understood?

We can now return to the question with which we began:

What happens when we think we have already understood?

Perhaps we stop seeing.

We no longer encounter the human being, but our own interpretation of that human being.

We no longer hear what is being said, because we already know what it means.

We no longer see the moment, because history has explained it in advance.

Deconstruction does not ask us to throw history away.

It asks us to read it again.

It does not ask us to abandon knowledge.

It asks us to examine what knowledge does to our way of seeing.

And it does not ask us to stop interpreting.

On the contrary.

Interpret again.

Meet the human being again.

Read the text again.

Examine the concept again.

Not because nothing can be understood.

But because understanding is never finished.

In the first essay, I arrived at the thought that human life is never completed. It is repeated. And in repetition, it moves.

Now perhaps we can add:

When the human being moves, our concepts must be able to move as well.

For perhaps the greatest danger is not that we fail to understand another human being.

The greatest danger may be the moment when we become certain that we do.

Further Reading

Caputo, J. D. (1987/1988). Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project. Indiana University Press.

Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967.)

Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference (A. Bass, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1967.)

Derrida, J. (1981). Dissemination (B. Johnson, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1972.)

Kierkegaard, S. (1843). Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology (published under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius).

 

When the human being moves, our concepts must be able to move as well.

For perhaps the greatest danger is not that we fail to understand another human being.

The greatest danger may be the moment when we become certain that we do.

This essay was written in a conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT