Well, Derrida & his miserable issue persuaded this English major that the discipline was destroyed and nothing could be more absurd than wasting years on a Ph.D. in English.

So I went to law school instead, a field where language is no joke!!

Nothing more tragic, and repelling, than watching people take a field with such potential to edify, enrich, and reveal, and transform it into a political cudgel useful for no more than cheap shots and destruction.

Derrida's philosophy congealed the 20th Century West's drift toward nihilism & self-abnegation into one neat, poison pill.

The key word about Derrida is decadence. He was to a philosopher what the May 68 movment as to a revolution... I thisk he epitomizes the byzantine fascination for emptiness and self-destruction. Won't make waves in a few years...

Robin -

meant to ask this in the other thread, but here the question is more germane anyway - have you read much Merleau-Ponty, particularly Adventures of the Dialectic and other writings where he takes on Sartre's Stalinism? I know M-P isn't really considered part of the Official PoMo Pantheon, but he's kind of the leading light of mine. I think his thought and politics are quintessentially postmodern in a specific sense (his opposition to Stalinism and the modernist 'objective' Marxism that led Sartre & the rest of the French intelligentsia to support Stalin), and I think his phenomenological perspective allows for the recognition of the very real problems of knowledge - political knowledge in particular - while also refusing to be paralyzed by them. he acknowledges human uncertainty as well as the human desire to think and act despite that uncertainty.

I have read Merleau-Ponty, but I did so years ago and had trouble getting a good grasp on what to take away from his phenomenology. I did take away the point you make about acting despite uncertainty. He managed, as I recall, to discuss that without lapsing into the extreme existentialist stance of Sartre, as his description of deciding has a place for the body, sensory inputs and a more coherent sense of personal identity.

I must admit that in general the existentialists don't appeal to me much, but among them Husserl and to some degree Merleau-Ponty do so much more than Sartre among the philosophers or Bultmann among the biblical critics.

I have more perspective now and maybe I should find time to go read the phenomenologists again. There is a tangential relevance to some of my research -- but I have a lot to do towards a my conference presentation in January, so that will need to be a postponed luxury.

Thanks for reminding me of them again. Have you looked at Cassirer's description of humans as symbolizing creatures?

Man has, as it were, discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we find in man a third link which we may describe as the symbolic system. This new acquisition transforms the whole of human life. As compared with the other animals man lives not merely in a broader reality; he lives, so to speak, in a new dimension of reality." (An Essay on Man, 1944)

Derrida took a wrong turn in Plato's cave. That man cannot know reality directly is obvious not only for the reason he stated, but because there is no such thing as reality. It's a spectre in the human brain conjured by our limited senses. Were humans endowed with more complete and powerful senses, we might experience the universe as fields of different density or as different concentrations of superstrings. Reality is unreal, so let's pretend. It'd sufficed for millennia and I daresay it's all we can hope to have.

Well, Johann Hari captures the heart of what I would argue, but with a good deal more eloquence and clarity.
Just shows a double first philosophy from Kings, Cam., does shade a 2.1 history from Worcester. Oh well.

(When I'm in Plato's cave, I usually say "I can do that rabbit one. Look!")

Anyway, Hume said it all, and said it first, and best. In effect: pure deductive reasoning leaves you stranded in a wilderness of mirrors.
The only course is to turn aside from the marsh-lantern of pure mentation to the reality checks of empiricism and pragmatism.
In effect the road the Anglo-Scottish-American mainstream took, the roads from Newton, Smith, Darwin etc.

Kick that stone, Johnson!

Best quote of the day!

When I'm in Plato's cave, I usually say "I can do that rabbit one. Look!"

Thanks for that one, John. I feel that way often myself LOL.

Ding dong. The witch is dead.

I think the 9/11 terrorists should have read more Derrida and less islamist fundie stuff, and (we wish) realized that the rock of moral righteousness and the absolute truths they believed in - maybe weren't that absolute after all.

Millennia before Monsieur Derrida, mystics and psychics discovered that the world of the senses cannot reveal reality in its completeness. But because most of us normally lack the type of consciousness necessary to perceive metaphysical reality, we must (consciously or unconsciously) act as if the world shown to our senses is "real." Although many words refer only to sense perceptions — and in that sense Derrida and his mob are correct that words are constructions that don't reflect an ultimate reality — they are useful constructions. By the same token, a $100 bill is "really" just a piece of paper, and a credit card is "really" a piece of plastic, but we all agree to accept that it represents a certain amount of value that can be traded for goods or services.

But every language known to me has other kinds of words: abstractions. They represent "things" that can't be experienced by the senses: who has seen or touched kindness, fairness, skepticism, laziness? (I mean the quality itself, not the results of it.) Yet our minds intuitively understand that these abstractions, which of course can be derided (or Derridad) as constructions, have a reality of a different order.

In their own way, Derrida and the post-modernist deconstructivists are more hung up on language than the rest of us, in taking it absolutely literally. They are the ones who think words are the only kind of reality we can know, and if you can demonstrate that words don't represent something tangible, they think this shows that the words are meaningless.

Fortunately, most people aren't that "clever." They realize that abstractions speak to a part of our nature that lives in a higher realm than language can represent.

Deconstruct all you want. Truth and beauty will still be there, and even if the poet was wrong that that's all we need to know, we still need to know it.

Robin, thanks lots.
But actually, the rabbit joke's based on memory of an original idea by Terry Pratchett.
(Looking it up...)
Small Gods, p.226
A book well worth reading, IMHO:
"I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers."

If you tell me "this is a staff" you lie.

If you tell me this is not a staff I will hit you with it.

Derrida left off the second part.

Thus stupidity.

A man incapable of holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time.

Not much of an intellect at all.

There is a nice take on the type of argument Derrida made in Rescher's book "Relativism". He agrees that it is non-controversial that humans will have different understandings of the world (different genetics, different histories). But then he argues that you have to act as though the underlying basis is knowable, even if neither you nor anyone else will know it. St. Theresa of Avilla had good stuff to say on these lines when musing on whether she was experiencing God or the Devil (the Tempter) in her devotions.

Anyone care to compare Foucault and Derrida? If they even are comparable?

I always seem to bring Derrida when someone goes off in a Foucault-like "every thing power" rant.

Personally, I dont like either. Thoughts?

Again, I must caution that I am not extensively read in Foucault as he neither attracted nor impressed me sufficiently to delve more deeply than I did go.

But based on that little familiarity, I would say that Foucault is primarily a social critic whereas Derrida starts and ends with language.

Both want to break out of the tyranny of structures -- one, of the structures of western social order and the other, of the structures of western thought. Each attacks the center and moves towards the periphery -- Derrida, to the place where meaning is in flux and Foucault, to the edges of society: the insane, the misfit.

I suspect some of our readers can do a better job than that of answering .....

PacRim Jim:

I don't even think Derrida ever was in Plato's cave. His cave probably was the "Caveau de la Huchette", one of those existentialist caves in the Latin Quarter where the fine thing to do was to hang out and listen (of all music) to dixieland with a couple of books by Mao Tzedong/Stalin/Trotsky (depending on ideological flavor) under the arm.

By the way, a Parisian urban legend has Pol Pot a frequent visitor of "le caveau".

Excuse me for the frivoulous innuendo, I just couldn't let the opening pass by :-) an I really disliked the man and his alter egos. By the way, the "Caveau" is still in business...

Good lord, it's Dr. Simon Pritchett, in the flesh.

When did he start peddling this stuff? Rand is seeming eerily prescient.

(Note to self: if Burt Rutan mysteriously disappears, start hoarding food and weapons...)

John A wrote something that kicked off some random neurons:

" I think his phenomenological perspective allows for the recognition of the very real problems of knowledge - political knowledge in particular - while also refusing to be paralyzed by them. He acknowledges human uncertainty as well as the human desire to think and act despite that uncertainty."

What of the 'real' study of the problems of mind, knowledge and uncertainty that the Cognitive Scientists have mounted over the years? Have I just missed the section labeled "scientific theories of mind" or would it be fair to suggest some common effort to catch up on what CogSci has to say?

Robin Burk - rather than catching up on what the phenomenologists wrote years ago, why not dive into the much fresher and better-informed (by neuroscience, anyway) works of Pinker and Searle?

In 1987 it was discovered that the late Paul de Man, one of the principal figures of deconstruction, had been a Nazi collaborator during WWII, writing anti-Semitic articles for a Belgian newspaper. (After the war he abandoned his wife and children, moved to America and assumed a new identity. If asked about the war, he gave vague hints of anti-Nazi resistance.) There is no evidence that de Man was an actual anti-Semite, merely (?) that he was an amoral opportunist.)

Jacques Derrida wrote an essay "explaining" that de Man's anti-Semitic writings were in reality anti-anti-Semitic. When a number of academics wrote articles and letters of disagreement, Derrida attacked them viciously. He didn't even bother to address their criticisms but instead engaged in nasty ad hominem vitriol. How dare they interpret his and de Man's words?

But a fundamental tenet of deconstructionism, one that Derrida applied with glee to all other writers, is that the writer is not an authority on what a text means. So how could Derrida claim privileged authority? So, in addition to seeing what a nasty man Derrida could be, we also learned that he was an utter hypocrite.

As an aside, some of de Man's critics have noted how convenient it was for him to adopt a theory which denies the possibility of objective truth and even the concept of individual responsibility and guilt.