Language is crucial to our understanding of the world around us. Russian speakers who have words that differentiate between lighter and darker blues are able to distinguish between shades of blue faster than English speakers; East Asian languages that use honorifics create a culture that emphasizes respect and age difference. The Native Americans whose languages are based on verbs and contain no nouns could not conceive receiving an offer to buy their land, while for the Europeans, noun-based linguistics normalized this concept. Language affects the very way we think and view the world, and Indo-European linguistics have contributed greatly to our current comprehension of classical science and literature.

The classical view of language leads us to hold a particular perspective in life in many ways, even simply by involving the separation and hierarchization of a “signifier” and “signified”. In order to understand ideas of post-classical science and post-modern literature and philosophy, we must deconstruct the language we use and release ourselves from the way it forces us to understand the world.

The “signified” referred to above indicates the actual concept that the “signifier” is attempting to “represent”; thus, modern language is based on the idea of representation of concepts. Everything is concrete – “present” – and able to be “held” or “grasped”, hence the heavy reliance of nouns in the English language. The representation of the “signified” requires something, normally an object, to be represented. Our fixation on “objects” reflects onto the way our mind thinks, as we are forced to separate and differentiate the world around us into perceived concepts. This “logic of representation” is what Derrida calls a “metaphysics of presence” because of the hierarchy and differentiation created by language. Much of Eurocentric thought is based on fundamentals that can be built on: pure truths (a “transcendental signified” that transcends all signifiers) that reveal more complex ideas, basic building blocks of life (elementary particles) that combine to build everything else in the universe.

In this way, the atomic view in science is similar to the classical view of language. Much of the classical perspective in science is based on a hierarchy. Basic elements, such as atoms and molecules, come together in different ways to form different – again – “objects”. Essentially, the classical perspective on the world attempts to understand a screenshot of the world – What is present at this point in time? What comprises of this world in the present? Just as the modern English language follows a “logic of representation”, classical science also implements a line of logical thinking that separates and categorizes our physical world using an “either-or” mindset in order to understand our world.

In contrast, the post-classical perspective regards time as something in a state of “flux”. Thus, the world is comprised not of “things”, but of “events”. Everything in the world is changing constantly; nothing in two different points of time are the same, not even what seems to be permanent. Even mountains are slowly eroding, no matter how slow it takes.

In this manner enters the idea of “undecidability”. Because of the ever-changing state of the world around us, “pure” concepts no longer exist and opposites intangle. Nothing is “ranked” higher than another. Good and evil are no longer opposite sides of a spectrum nor one considered superior to another, and everything around us is both present and absent. There is essentially a coexistence of opposites, as one cannot exist without the other; they are two sides of the same coin, running along opposite and both ends of a Mobius strip. Rather than classify the surrounding world through “either-or” mentality (which cuts through the balance of a chiasmic unity), Derrida’s notion of undecidability rejects the binary opposites and instead views the world through the perspective of the word “and”, the idea that we can be both sides of a dichotomy. This idea of “chiasmic unity” relates to that of “metaphor” in literature. Metaphoricity allows to understand ideas through the “and” lens, simply introducing relation rather than definition and distinction.

Post-classical scientists challenge the classical atomic structure of the universe with their own “and” glasses in the form of quantum theory. Niels Bohr discusses the results of experiments that reveal light to be both a wave as well as a particle. This concept of complementarity completely undermines the classical way of scientific thinking, as it is revealed that it is entirely possible to have the qualities of two mutually exclusive opposites. Werner Heisenburg later introduces the idea of “uncertainty”, which claims that it is impossible for a particle’s position and momentum to be precisely measured, due to the flux of time.

Because so much of our worldview is shaped by modern language, we must challenge the very fundamentals of language – including the classification of concepts separated by employment of “either-or” methods of thought – in order to understand the “complementarity” of opposites central to post-classical science and post-modern literature.