The suggestion that Reagan was somehow associated with deconstruction becoming the rage in western literary studies in the 1980s is entirely justified, though not for the reasons suggested. The rage was in large part a consequence of the collapse of the great intellectual prestige of Marxism on western campuses, which followed upon the collapse of Marxism as an organised global political force. This would not have occurred (not then anyway) if the real \”great prevaricator\” (i.e. Carter) had not been displaced by Reagan. Q.E.D.
Brian Leiter\’s article about Jacques Derrida and his supporters seems to me intemperate. He says there were no appreciative comments from American philosophers upon Derrida\’s death in the American press \”because American philosophers thought he was a fraud, a betrayal to philosophy\’s grand history.\” Though Prof. Leiter concedes that Derrida was personally kind, he does so in order to make the point that Derrida \”devoted his life to increasing the amount of ignorance in the world.\” Well, not all American philosophers think that. Richard Rorty is a well-known American philosopher and his appreciative comments about Derrida were quoted in at least one obituary I read. (Now, perhaps the mention of Rorty\’s name incites the same sort of invective from Prof. Leiter as does Derrida\’s name. If so, I apologize, since I have no desire to further stir Prof. Leiter\’s acidic juices.)
More obscure American philosophers would also have been happy to offer appreciative comments on Derrida if they had been asked. Come to think of it, as an American philosopher myself, I would have been willing to offer an appreciative comment. I read Derrida\’s book, \”The Work of Mourning,\” a collection of his elegies for French intellectual friends. Although Derrida didn\’t do philosophy in the argumentative-analytic mode that we American philosophers mostly favor, I thought his book was intelligent, had a lot of wise things to say about death and how to think about death, and displayed a good understanding of the work of the French intellectuals of his generation. The book was written in a style accessible to literate adults with an interest in the subject.
Prof. Leiter\’s citation of Leeds professor Bryan Frances, who asks, \”What if philosophy was baseball and Jacques Derrida a baseball player?\” in order to point out that Derrida has a lower lifetime batting average than advertised, is unpersuasive. Prof. Frances\’ metaphor is cute, but no more persuasive than thundering declarations from Derrida supporters that Derrida, along with Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is among the three great philosophers of the 20th century. The truth, of course, is that we don\’t know who the great philosophers of the 20th century are, nor do we know what Derrida\’s lifetime batting average is. It\’s too early to say.
It probably doesn\’t need to be pointed out, but the comment from Luther Blissett below that attacks the quality of Prof. Leiter\’s thought because Leiter\’s books may not be selling as well as Derrida\’s in Austin, Texas, is a bad argument. Dan Brown\’s \”The DaVinci Code\” is selling very well indeed, but that doesn\’t tell us much about the quality of Mr. Brown\’s mind.
I can see that Prof. Leiter has given considerable thought to Derrida and is long-aggrieved by what he regards as a case of intellectual charlatanism, but I\’m unpersuaded by his argument, and repelled by his aggressive mode.
In response to Paul Kurtz’s article on Science and Ethical Judgments I advocate the establishment of a new genre, which I call Evolved Self Lit. Currently the polemics issued on behalf of Scientism and Creationism fail to overlap, so little dialog results. A genre of fictional vehicles for exploring issues such as those raised in his excellent review would do a lot, I believe, to advance effective debate.
I see Evolved Self Lit. providing material for provoking discussion among general readers and students of evolutionism and providing a broadening of the terms of dialog. Here are a few capsule samples to try out on students. Their answers should be in standard English and restricted, to limit wiggle-room, to perhaps 50 words:
1. As our standard of ethical principle, from which any divergence must be justified, it is proposed we take the largest land empire the world has ever seen—the Mongolian Empire. Shouldn’t the widest distribution of a set of ethical principles be taken as the standard, and if not, why not?
2. It is suggested that humans evolved as a way of restoring to the mature Earth the higher rate of physical catastrophe that genetic adaptation rates were designed for in the Earth’s more turbulent infancy. Is a mechanism for such evolution possible?
3. Since humans are evolved, does that mean they are incapable of intelligent design? If they are capable of intelligent design, is the peahen not capable of intelligent design, too, in selecting for how peacock’s tails are designed. If not, explain how humans can intelligently design, but peahens cannot?
Does such a genre already exist? If so I would appreciate some pointers to examples, and who publishes them. My own examples can be sampled at http://www.evolvedself.com.
Brian Leiter\’s article on Derrida reflects just the kind of deliberate misrepresentation that I critique in my article on Jonathan Kandell\’s New York Times obituary for Derrida: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041213&s=benjamin
I confess I got quite a laugh out of Brian Leiter\’s rant about the late Jacques Derrida. He gives new meaning to the phrase \”kick \’em when they\’re down.\” However, my good-humor quickly turned to anger and disappointment when I bothered to click on one of the links in Leiter\’s piece to find long lists of philosophers, historians, critical theorists; in short, all manner of academics who embraced and certainly \”appreciated\” Derrida\’s work. And wouldn\’t you know, many of them were actually Americans! O the humanities! Professors Scott and Taylor are far more formidable thinkers than I am and so are capable of taking care of themselves. But the fact that the entire framework of Leiter\’s polemic is a fabrication and based on this light-weight straw-man argument leads me to believe that he is much more of a threat to \”philosophy\’s grand history\” than Derrida ever was, or any of us \”non-philosophers\” who would have the audacity to weigh-in on the man\’s life. butterfliesandwheels should be more diligent in combating such \”fashionable nonsense.\”
As for the claim that Derrida was of little interest to few if any important American philosophers, I submit (for the defense, as it were) the name of Stanley Cavell.
I have not read the article in question. But I would be happy to sit down with the professor to discuss what a nitwit he is. Or maybe by phone. This is just another instance of polically driven mongrels spouting inane denunciations about Derrida\’s stature as a professional philosopher. The fellow is a nitwit.
Your claim that Derrida has not influenced philosophy is based on a semantic bait-and-switch. True, he has not influenced philosophy departments in the US and UK (most of which are analytic and are influenced by positivist traditions and debates). But he has enormously influenced readers of \’continental philosophy.\’ This tradition is not consolidated in any one academic department in the current academic world, but exerts influence in philosophy, literature, cultural studies and political science departments.
Simply quoting the unqualified opinion of supposed authorities as if this is somehow proof of anything is not something I\’d let my freshmen students get away with, and you really ought to be a little more serious if you\’re going to make the extreme claims you make here about a recently deceased man (such as \”he led a bad life\”). This is disrespectful.
The only real argument you advance here is that \”the plausibility of Derridean readings can only be adjudicated by comparing them with that of other scholars.\” Well, if we are to judge by this, thousands upon thousands of scholars–yes, PhDs in many kinds of departments in many traditions and with many concerns–have been invigorated for decades by Derrida\’s output.
However, comparing his readings with those of other scholars is not in fact the \”only\” way to judge the plausibility of Derrida\’s readings. I can think of at least one other way. Its called using your own brain. Ditch your fraudulent appeals to selective expert opinion and your crotchety sloganeering and you\’ll be surprised at what you might find. Read Rousseau. Read Derrida on Rousseau. Read Freud. Read Derrida on Freud. Then get back to us with something other than canned summaries of what Freud is about. In every word of your article, cliche has replaced analytic demonstration. I don\’t care if this is the internet, its inexcusable.
Well, you do have another argument. You suggest that Freud\’s theory of the repressive mechanism is intellectually viable because it can be tested against empirical evidence for and against, and that Derrida\’s is somehow illegitimate because \”there is nothing empirical about the Derridean claim.\”
I am ASTONISHED that you would confuse empirical and hermeneutical arguments. I\’m ashamed aldaily.com would link something so fatuous. To suggest that Derrida\’s arguments can be settled by an appeal to empirical evidence would be like suggesting we need to test the validity of a novel in laboratories.
Also, your law school reader describes Bromwich\’s book as \”giving a good and thoughtful lashing to identity politics,\” as if this has anything to do with Derrida. It doesn\’t. He had nothing to do with identity politics. Quite the opposite.
Derrida\’s painstaking work–spending pages attempting to tease out the implications of sentences and images and metaphors–deserves a thoughtful engagement. Derrida spent his entire life trying to replace ossified opinions with patient elaboration. I\’m saddened when I read him so disserviced.
I was quite pleased to read Professor Leiter\’s reassessment of Derrida and his \”contributions,\” in light of Taylor\’s glowing praise. I am one of the many in the Humanities who has opened a volume of essays by Derrida, only to find myself turned off immediately by his deliberate obfuscations and his whimisical, indeed precious, manipulation of language. I am not a philosopher myself, nor am I a psychoanalyst, which is why I have consciously rejected the appropriation of Derridean or Lacanian discourse in literary praxis. Too many, it seems, have found it necessary to appropriate Derrida and Lacan, despite the fact that they may have no training in philosophy or psychoanalysis, and can thus have no real claim to an understanding of what it is Derrida or Lacan was trying to say (if anything at all). The rampant dishonesty of current literary praxis in the Humanities is an unwholesome truth that many are unwilling to acknowledge. Is it really too much to expect of literary discourse that it be accessible, that it rid itself once and for all of its penchant for obscurantism, that it express itself in an idiom that is plain-speaking, open, accessible, honest?
A small matter — could whoever types these in use a double dash or an em dash for parenthetical comments? The use of a hyphen is very confusing. I had to read the phrase \”statements about what-they insist-cannot happen\” about three times before I worked it out.
I would merely point out that Mr. Leiter doesn\’t show us that Derrida is a \”bad reader,\” he (Leiter) merely tells us. One certainly can\’t maintain that D simply fails to read, say, Hegel. One would have to show, show being the operative word, that D\’s reading of Hegel is ultimately inadequate.
As a Hegel expert (and current president of the Hegel Society of America), I have found Derrida\’s treatment of Hegel to be quite interesting and informative.
To be sure, Derrida made some basic mistakes in his way of doing philosophy, and I have criticized them harshly elsewhere. But then, no philosopher doesn\’t make basic mistakes. Not even Mr. Leiter.
I remain astonished that critics who fault Derrida for poor reading almost never cite any of his texts. This piece is a perfect example … at least Derrida always pointed to a specific moment in a given text that defied its own internal logic. That\’s not sloppy thinking. It\’s rigor, and it\’s not on display here.
I realize, like legions of other readers, and like Derrida himself, that deconstruction is not a substitute for progressive politics. But, surely, close reading of the kind Derrida encouraged is not incompatible with progressive politics. In fact, in times like these, when truth has become politicized by reactionaries, deconstruction is a necessary antidote to political fiction. Just because it undermines the possibility of transcendental concepts doesn\’t mean it undermines the possibility of concepts themselves. Contingency does not obviate political committment, but it does make identity politics harder — which may be a good thing. It\’s time we learned this lesson.
The postings in response to Professor Leiter are unlikely to persuade those of us who are skeptical about Derrida that we are wrong in thinking that Derrida mainly appeals to those not very bright or clear-headed. Even ignoring those whose response is to attack Leiter as a dimwit, dodo brain, and idiot, the quality of the rejoinders seem unusually weak, suggesting that it may not be possible to defend Derrida\’s work on the philosophical merits of his contribution.
The unfortunate fact is that Professor Leiter reports what is the philosophical consensus–not the analytic philosopher\’s consensus, but the consensus among philosophers of all stripes. As Professor Leiter noted on his blog site from which this item comes, even the Irvine letter failed to find more than a handful of philosophers in Europe who would attest to Derrida\’s importance or greatness. The semantic bait-and-switch to which Mr. Glover alludes is nowhere to be found in the original article or in reality. Derrida is not considered a major philosopher among the vast majority of English-speaking philosophers, but nor is he considered significant among most of those in Europe. Only those in literature departments, whose understanding of philosophy is shaky, seem to think Derrida is a major philosopher.
Contrary to Mr. Glover, quoting the judgment of knowledgeable individuals–and, based on my experience, Professor Leiter reports accurately the overwhelming consensus among scholars of European philosophy and philosophers in diverse fields–is perfectly appropriate, especially in the context of an opinion piece like this. I have no idea who Professor McCumber is, but I know that preeminent Hegel scholars like Allen Wood of Stanford University and Michael Forster of the University of Chicago share something like Professor Leiter\’s view of Derrida. You need only consult their works to see that while they widely reference European commentators who write on Hegel, they ignore Derrida.
Particularly silly, I thought, was Mr. Blissett\’s idea that disciplinary boundaries should be determined by where store clerks file books. Again, this is a quality of thinking that hardly does credit to the Derridean cause.
Mr Leiter doesn\’t like Derrida, and has many critical things to say. I am an analytical philosopher, so perhaps I should agree. But, in fact, Mr. Leiter offers not one bit of actual evidence (beyond the \”always fallacious\” appeal to authority–as the notorious Daniel Dennett likes to describe said strategy). It\’s a hell of a lot easier to accuse someone of misreading a text, than to show why there is a misreading. You have to actually do philosophy to accomplish the latter. And as some of us know, including Mr Derrida, I venture, philosophy is hard. Wouldn\’t know that from Mr. Leiter\’s text, would we?
Oh, I get it! This essay is all a piece of grand irony.
Leiter decries Derrida as a \”bad reader,\” then reads Derrida badly. Witty!
Leiter criticizes Derrida\’s inability to provide \”empirical evidence\” for philosophy (a rather odd request) and then doesn\’t provide any \”empirical evidence\” for his own opinion.
Leither berates Derrida and Derrideans for their inability to provide any sort of real proof of their assertions, then makes an unproven, unsupported assertion about the rise of Derrida and the rise of Reaganism and the New Right in the U.S.
With reference to your piece on the \’Derrida industry\’, it is possible to find that industry risible at the same time as appreciating Derrida\’s validity within the discipline of philosophy. And it is a discipline, one of Derrida\’s many lessons. Although some of his UK followers (although I would exclude from this criticism Professor Geoff Bennington, one of Derrida\’s professional acquaintances and translators, under whom I read, occasionally, for a PhD) tended to get hot under the collar at the potential for an application of deconstruction which allowed endless textual \’freeplay\’. Once the whiff of brimstone had faded, however, the \’point\’ of Derrida became clearer. However, your writer seems to believe (in accordance with a prewritten liberal diktat), that Derrida\’s obligatory primary function was to educate, and that he somehow shirked this via a programme of deliberate obfuscation. But philosophy is already too demanding for most people, it is already obfuscation in action. That\’s one of the reasons we do it. It\’s an increasingly modern error to believe that all philosophers, or practitioners of any discipline, have a civic duty to enlighten beyond the sphere of themselves. It\’s the mistake that drove Freud to practice medicine, in which he had a marginal effect as psychoanalysis gave way to pharmaceuticals, when in actuality he was one of the finest philosophers (particularly of the mind/body problem) of modern times. Philosophy is, for some of us, a more hermetic concern than modern academia recognises, and this is where Derrida functions best. Derrida\’s purely philosophical work, before he tottered off into leftish dribble and letters to Japanese friends and what have you, illuminates the history of Western philosophy more ably than the schools of thought whose exemplary utterances are along the lines of the following. In refuting Derrida\’s thesis that reality is constructed by \’acts of exclusion\’, we read:
This isn\’t an insight, it\’s a tautology. Necessarily, every X excludes not-X, else it would not be X.
Where would this reductionism leave Heidegger? And you surely aren\’t going to say Heidegger was deliberately obfuscatory. That\’s about as clever as saying he doesn\’t count because he was a Nazi. If your line of philosophy is the type of Anglo-American concept-crunching that keeps going back to algebra like a ten-dollar hooker, you\’re unlikely to get much out of the very real philosophical discussions central to, for example, Plato\’s Pharmacy, Notes on the Mystic Writing Block or Derrida\’s work on Husserl. So don\’t just barge your way into the queue and start yelling about how Derrida is a charlatan just because he doesn\’t fit your liberal sensibilities. It makes you look as smart as goatboy journalists who use the word \’deconstruct\’ in their lifestyle pieces when what they mean is \’understand\’.
Brian Leiter evidently wants to be one of those who philosophize with a hammer in his taking down of Derrida. Unfortunately, he keeps whacking himself in the forehead with it.
Leiter’s main accusation against Derrida is that he is not a good interpreter of philosophy texts. He quotes Mark Taylor saying Derrida was a careful reader, and then replies:
“It is impossible in the abstract to assess this proposition, but surely it bears noting that a primary reason for skepticism about Derrida is that overwhelmingly those who engage in philosophical scholarship on figures like Plato and Nietzsche and Husserl find that Derrida misreads the texts, in careless and often intentionally flippant ways, inventing meanings, lifting passages out of context, misunderstanding philosophical arguments, and on and on.”
It is hard to know what to do with Leiter’s accusation because we don’t have an example of what he considers a good reader. Would he consider Gregory Vlastos a good reader of Plato, for example? Vlastos has a very high reputation in academia, but one can see, by simply glancing at his work, that he assigns a wholly alien scheme – the fretwork of analytic philsophy – to Plato. Would Leiter consider Bernard Williams a good reader of Descartes? Again, looking at Williams one finds him engaged in translating Descartes philosophy wholesale into the vocabulary of contemporary analytic philosophy. If these two mainstream ‘readers” of philosophy are a fair sample, then surely Derrida has a warrant for at least reading, say, Saussure or Rousseau in a vocabulary they might not recognize.
But there is more to be said here. If I were to make an analogy not to sports but to music, I would say that Derrida – like Kojeve, like Foucault, like Deleuze, like Heidegger – viewed reading a philosophic master the way a pianist views playing a classic piece. The point is to play it both as it is and as it hasn’t been heard before. There’s no ontological hocus pocus about this – there is, in fact, a whole industry built upon distinguishing one symphony’s playing of a Beethoven symphony from another, or one conductor’s way of directing Wagner from another.
So let’s look at a Derrida reading. Say, since it is at hand, La Verite en peinture. The first essay in that piece is, contra Leiter, a very influential essay in the Philosophy of Aesthetics entitled “Parergon.” It examines Kant’s Critique of Judgment. As in many of Derrida’s essays, however, it is also concerned with a number of texts in the philosophy of aesthetics, including Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art.
Accusation one: Derrida “misreads the texts, in careless and often intentionally flippant ways”. Really? Actually, he employs all the traditional machinery of a reading – he gives us the times at which his texts were written; he quotes other philosophers (for instance, Victor Cousin) on Kant’s text, and he shows, via that quote, how it was institutionalized (a concern with the historic context that is notably lacking in all too many analytic readings of philosophers, who believe that the text is the ‘thing itself” and their application of a foreign system of interpretation is wholly uninfected by the chain of interpretation reaching down to their own groovy reconstruction of the text\’s logic); he quotes both in the French and the the German original; he takes those passages that deal with work and art and tries to show how they work within the textual worlds created by Heidegger and Kant – in short, as far as academic standards are concerned, Derrida more than fullfills them. I’d love to see Leiter compare, say, Vlastos on Parmenides with Derrida on Kant. Vlastos would surely be the wilder reader.
That is, in one way he would be – employing the canons of scholarship that are standards in the social sciences, but that are sadly lacking in philosophy.
But this is only the groundwork. Surely Derrida was “flippant?”
What Leiter means is that Derrida refused to overlook instances in the text, or in its production (say, the production of notes out of which many Nietzschian texts were composed), that are incongruous with the rather tame history of philosophy that analytic philosophers have tried to identify with the real history of philosophy. In the analytic story, philosophy has always striven to be a science. That gives the analytic readings of philosophy their often so oddly telelogical bent – making Leibnitz, for instance, an anticipator of Frege, or Descartes the man who is all about brains in vats. To do this, of course, the philosophic interpreter has to discard the real texts that he is dealing with, that are shot through with inconsistencies, biases, methodological aberrations, and, above all, stylistic touches. These are, after all, dialogues, or essays, or tractates or theodicies or things of that nature. For Leiter and his kind, style is an accident, the dixie cup that we throw away to get the nectar of the gods – all those great thoughts. And then we anthologize it, freeze dry it, and feed it to the undergrades in the most degraded form possible (Yes, Johnny, Descartes IS like that character on Star Trek!)
For Derrida, that simply isn’t the case. Derrida’s reading of Plato, for instance, is closer to the ethnological theories of Vernant about the Greeks than the analytic ideas about the formal structure of lgoical propositions. The test, here, is the reading. Read, for instance, the Phaedrus – the text that forms the basis for Derrida’s essay, Plato’s Pharmakon – and read another interpreter of it. Or try to understand, using a scientific criteria for evidence, how the school of analytic philosophers of Plato come up with their dating for Plato’s dialogues – a hilarious exercise in circular logic that tells us pretty much what we need to know about how Leiter’s ‘mainstream” philosophers do history. While fetishizing science, they seem oddly inept at practicing it on even a rudimentary level.
The argument about whether Derrida is one of the greatest philosophers of the century isn’t really worth having. However, it is definitely worth your time, as a philosopher, to read Derrida. That’s all that matters.
This is the worst letter that I have read in a long while. It is shameful to dismiss another philosopher\’s entire life\’s work in such an offhanded way (and without examples from Derrida\’s own works, I might add!). It can only serve to fuel the growing sense of disconnection between the various schools of thought within our discipline, and consequently, much substanceless quibbling among those who are otherwise very intelligent people.
Leiter speaks of the shameful legacy that Derrida has bequeathed to the humanties– the promotion of careless reading and analytic skills, but I wonder about the effect that his own letter may have. There is a saying that comes to mind and seems very appropriate here: \”When an ass looks in the mirror, he will always see an ass staring back.\” Of course, it would not be Derrida\’s fault if this happens, after all, it is quite natural.
Jesus wept. If Leiter wants names of American philosophers who recognize Derrida\’s importance to philosophy, all he need do is ask. Rorty, Cavell, Hacking, Haugeland, just for starters. If Leiter is illiterate, that\’s his problem, but there\’s no need to inflict his unrecognizable caricature of Derrida on the rest of us.
I have thought it over and decided that is not fair to call anyone an \”ass\”. Please disregard the last few lines of my first response, they are utterly unproductive and uncalled for. However, I would like to say a few more things about Leiter\’s letter. First, after reading Taylor\’s obituary, I am left confused regarding Leiter\’s treatment of it. I was not aware that Taylor was offering an argument, and so the logical critique seems misguided on Leiter\’s part. After all, is it really necessary to pluck paragraphs from it and reduce them to symbolic language? it seems a bit excessive and out of place. Second, it is clear that Leiter does not speak for \”most American philosophers\” in his assesment of Derrida\’s importance. Certainly most of the pro-Derridean responses on this sight come from American philosophers. Third, I do not think that it is Leiter\’s right to refer to certain others as \”non-philosophers\”, especially since it pre-supposes a certain vision of philosophy that not everyone shares. This seems analogous to refering to those who are ignorant of Christianity as \”non-religious human beings\” because they do not meet a certain narrowly defined vision of what it means to be religious. After all, who has the privilaged position of deciding such things? Finally, I want to reiterate the importance of attempting to understand the work of another, and if then it is impossible to accept that work, the further importance of showing another the problems with it as demonstrated through the work in question. It would be great if Leiter could show us, and others have mentioned this also, if he could show us where Derrida goes wrong specifically and tell us why this is a problem. For instance, Leiter claims that many commentators on Husserl, for example, have claimed that Derrida is notorious for bad interpretations of Husserl\’s work, but as far as I know, he is one of the best commentators on Husserl\’s work. For instance, his introduction to \”On the Origin of Geometry\” is quite excellent and remarkably lucid. So, what in particular in this interpretation is bad?
It might be a good idea for all the respondents to the Derrida debate to took a look at Samuel Wheeler\’s excellent \”Deconstruction as Analytical Philosophy\” which sets out how Derrida\’s work, like much of the European hermeneutic tradition, is thoroughly in line with the Quinian and Davidsonian critiques of empiricism. That way there might be some real dialogue between those working in analytical philosophy and those in the other European traditions, rather than mere point-scoring polemic.
The God question may have become a little more complicated. I found the following post on the Net. I\’ve downloaded the manuscript and it\’s no hoax!!!
A new scriptural synthesis and Gnostic interpretation, [authorship unknown] which includes material from the OT/NT, Apocrypha, The Dead Sea Scrolls and The Nag Hammadi Library, to describe the first wholly new moral conception of the teaching of Christ for two thousand years is on the Net.
And this is the first ever religious teaching, able to demonstrate by an act of faith, its own efficacy! That is to say, the first living and testable proof of the living God has been published! However incredulous this may sound, if this teaching is confirmed, and there appear to be many who are attempting to do so, it can only be described as an intellectual and religious revolution as well! The site where I found my copy [a 1.3mb pdf download] at is at http://www.energon.uklinux.net
To accuse Martin Heidegger of being \’a personal and moral monster\’ is a sign of extreme ignorance and shows the shallow foundations of the critic\’s moral and personal education. And it may also point to someone with a hidden agenda but lacking the courage to make that public. Martin Heidegger represents the best of the Western cultural tradition, he is the last of the great philosophers and as Hegel refers to Socrates and Plato, \’one of those men destined to be teachers of the human race\’ Mr Leiter is a moral pigmy compared to Heidegger.
Leiter: \”[T]here are no \’appreciative quotes\’ from \’American philosophers,\’ because American philosophers thought he was a fraud, a betrayal to philosophy\’s grand history.\”
APR: Hogwash. I\’m not terribly familiar with Derrida, but I know with certainty that \”American philosophers\” have never been in 100% agreement on anything.
Leiter: \”This isn\’t an insight, it\’s a tautology. Necessarily, every X excludes not-X, else it would not be X.\”
APR: Since when are tautologies barred from being insights? A tautology is a pair of alternate phrasings of one fact; a different phrasing always carries different emphasis. An insight is not a discovery of new facts, but rather the revelation of the meaning of old, known facts.
This entire article smacks of grudge-talk more than scholarship.
Your assessment appeared to be accurate and fair, because it agreed with my own, that is until the final paragraph:
Was it entirely an accident that at the same time that deconstruction became the rage in literary studies (namely, the 1980s), American politics went off the rails with the Great Prevaricator, Ronald Reagan? Is it simply coincidental that the total corruption of public discourse and language–which we may only hope has reached its peak at the present moment–coincided with the collapse of careful reading and the responsible use of language in one of the central humanities disciplines?
As Wittgenstein and Heidegger are controversial choices, though in terms of sheer impact, they are plainly in a wholly different philosophical league from Derrida, so Reagan is a controversial choice, but plainly in a whole different prevarication league from Bill or Hillary Clinton whom you appear to have ignored – or defended.
This is the saddest piece of \”philosophy\” I have ever read. From Leiter\’s text one would think that philosophy is about slandering others, about ad hominem \”arguments\” and moral attacks…
Derrida is a bad reader, says Mr. L., but what evidence does he provide to show that he (Leiter) has actually read Derrida? To make the kind of judgements that Leiter makes, I would expect that he at least has taking the time to study his enemy. But no, it seems from this example (Leiter\’s text) that reading is not necessary to do philosophy.
There are dozens of texts by Derrida that are more rigorous and scholarly than what usually pass as philosophy in the Academic world.
As for the idiotic comment that there are no American philosophers on the side of Derrida, I wonder why there are more than 4000 signatures on the Remembering Derrida website (U. California, Irvine), and not only from respected American professores and hundreds from students, but from all over the world. Or else, search \”Derrida\” on Amazon and see how many books by American authors appear on screen… etc… It is just tiresome to even have to waste time trying to denounce the ignorance of some \”comentators\”…
Derrida always defended certain Enlightenment ideals, human rights, and was one of the strongest defenders of philosophy in France, so to accuse him of ignorance is only possible if the one doing the accusation is REALLY ignorant. To read Derrida is to learn to think in new ways, ways, it seems, that are beyond the scope and capacity of someone like Mr. Leiter… His comment, his tone, is what represents a real embarrassment for philosophy… Derrida never wrote on that tone, and never slandered anyone. I\’m sure he wouldn´t have even slandered Mr. Leiter. I figure he would have made a witty comment that Mr. L wouldn\’t have been able to understand…
(please excuse me if there are errors on this response: English in not my mother tongue.)
I don\’t want to get in the middle of the feel-sorry-for-Derrida festival here…but look guys:
(1) This was an opinion piece, why are you asking for a scholarly article documenting all of Derrida\’s mistakes? Even Einstein was entitled to write an article reporting that e=mc2, without proving it.
(2) You can come up with jokers like Cavell all you want, fact is that overwhelmingly philosophers think Derrida was a faker, and that\’s why almost no philosophers signed the Irvine letter.
All you guys who are saying, \”Lieter, how come you didn\’t produce evidence that Derrida was a fake?\” couldn\’t someone say back to you, \”How come you haven\’t produced any evidence that Derrida was a good scholar?\” How come?
Interesting how you begin your comment with a sentence that shows the limits of analytic philosophy of language: \”I don\’t want to get in the middle of the feel-sorry-for-Derrida festival here…but look guys.\”
On the level of Gricean implicature, you\’ve defied the rule of truthfulness (because you do want to get in the middle of the feel-sorry-for Derrida festival), perspicaciousness and relevance (beginning a topic by saying you don\’t want to begin the topic.) In fact, I\’d say that it is a sentence ripe for … deconstruction.
Not that I want to say that it is a sentence ripe for deconstruction.
Uh, Roger, the opening sentence was sarcastic. It\’s got nothing to do with analytic philosophy of language, or with deconstruction. Sarcasm existed before Derrida.
But keep going, this may yet vindicate Leiter\’s polemic.
Well, since we are pointing out the obvious, today, then maybe I\’ll emphasize, once again, that analytic philosophy of language is helpless to account for why a sentence that seems to say that the speaker doesn\’t want to do something actually means that the speaker does want to do something. To do so, it has to give up the magic quest for a metalanguage that would explain all language as an instrument of truth.
And — to continue with this lesson in things that are right before our nose — that is the point of saying that Derrida is definitely right to point to the genre constraints which bear on philosophic texts, and right to deepen that analysis by showing how they operate within those texts, and right again (wow, he is racking up the prizes today) to try to find patterns in the way in which these tensions are formed, and right again to relate them to a theme that seems, at first, peripheral, the privileging of voice over writing, which, by the way, what your sarcasm is heavily dependent on — insofar as it exists, crucially, as an inflection, a way of writing the \”don\’t want to.\”
But keep going, Adam, this is definitely vindicating Roger.
\”Why Intelligent Design Fails\” (WIDF) attempts to refute intelligent design (ID) by refuting ID claims that evolutionary biology cannot explain the existence of the biological forms we find on this planet today. What I find lacking in this and other attempts to defend the modern picture of evolution (mutation plus selection)is a frontal attack on the concept of ID itself. The problem is, as Paul Gross points out in his review of WIDF, that the ID\’ers will continue to attack and claim that these attacks constitutes doing science and that responses to these attacks demonstrates the respectability of ID.
A direct attack on the whole concept of ID will force the ID\’ers to try to defend their concept rather than attacking evolution. I therefore offer the following critique of ID and challenge the ID community to answer it.
1. It does not try to justify ID directly but assumes the false dichotemy that if evolution is wrong then ID must be right. This is of course nonsense. Even if the present day theory of natural selection should prove inadequate to explain speciation for example, it is far from obvious that some other explanation, based on the known laws of the physical and biological sciences, could not do so.
2. ID can explain anything and therefore explains nothing. It makes no testable predictions and therefore cannot be refuted and is hence not science. The fact that ID cannot be refuted of course does not mean that it must be correct. One cannot refute the claim that the whole universe was created five minutes ago either.
3. ID supposes that a complex entity can only be created by a more complex entity but this is far from obvious. Simple rules can lead to very complex structures buth in computor simulations and in nature. ID\’ers are also faced with the problem of who or what created the intelligent designer of biological systems.
4. ID lacks a mechanism whereby it can be implimented. We are not told who or what the intelligent designer is or how this incorporeal being can put its designs into practice. ID strains at a gnat but is prepared to pss a camel. Until the proponents of ID come up with an answer to this objection ID cannot be taken seriously as an alternative to
evolution.
Let the ID\’ers answer these objections before scientists spend any more time refuting half-baked ID objections to evolution.
“Home Secretary David Blunkett wants to make incitement to religious hatred a crime. A good many people are queuing up to express doubts, as they did last July, when Blunkett was flogging the idea on \’Today\’ by saying that people would still be allowed to express opinions about religion – as long as they were sensible.”
And journalists, writers, streetcorner skeptics, village atheists, the man on the Clapham omnibus – what about any and all of us who have our quarrels with religion and don\’t want to be told to keep them to ourselves on pain of imprisonment?
I never heard of Mr. Blunkett and I don’t know what a Home Secretary is. But Blunkett sounds like John Ashcroft’s soulmate.
My first reaction to Blunkett’s proposal to make it a crime to “incite religious hatred” was outrage. But this quickly turned to amusement. Who will deem whether a particular statement is “sensible” or not? And the requirement of “sensible” isn’t very constraining at all.
All of the abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) posit the existence of a higher power that is human and male. Christianity hypothesizes that Jesus was the son of God. These are empirical claims and though we cannot determine their validity with 100% certainty, we can evaluate the likelihood of being true (which of course, is all science can ever do.)
After Darwin, any religion that alleges that God is male and/or human is extremely unlikely. If there’s a god, it is beyond species and gender. So if your religion literally or metaphorically believes there’s a guy in the sky who runs the place, your faith is based on an empirical claim that is almost certainly false.
Eastern and primitive religions that conceptualize god as beyond species and gender are more sensible, logical, plausible and probable than abrahamic religions that posit a guy in the sky. Scientists and scientifically literate people should speak this truth. We are taught to be polite when it comes to religion. Scientists (starting with Darwin) have coddled the Judeo-Christians for much too long.
Deb Frisch is right to be concerned by Blunkett\’s law. For it may go against humour and satire. Freedom of speach! Defend the Right to Offend! That I value.
However, it think that Ms Frisch should have a deeper knowlegdge of British politics. How can an informed person be so ignorant as to not know what the Home Secretary is, or who he is?
I despair at this. No wonder apathy is such a problem…
PS. I like this website dear editor! Allowing for philosophical discussion without the pettyness of uncontrolled emotion: a gift this surely is in the age of celeb worship and political correctness.
The article by Peter Tatchell is spot on. I went to a Communist-hosted 90th birthday party for my uncle this year, an unreconstructed Stalinist and peace worker since the 1930s. The speeches and poetry were interminable.
At the back of the room were a group of Iraqi communists. I heard my uncle and his friends saying how these guys approved of the invasion and removing Saddam, but they would use them for their value in the anti-war campaign.
The Left it seems care nothing for truth peace or justice, just the fight to defeat America.
Wow, that ACSH \’apology\’ is a marvellous example of the art of projection. Are you sure it\’s not a spoof?
\’We go where the science takes us, not the money\’ . . . but they then come out with examples of where the money\’s taken them. Do they not have a single example of finding against their funders which they\’ve gone on to publicise?
Then, after denouncing ad hominen attacks, they launch . . . an ad hominen attack.
Usually I try to side with science against the tree-huggers, but there are certain issues – asbestos, tobacco, pthalates, and various medical drugs spring to mind – where it\’s pretty obvious that big money is being spent in the effort to gather together and promote all the evidence that Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, while rubbishing anyone who has evidence that it might not be.
I do not understand your including asbestos in a list of things being promoted under a \”Toxic Sludge Is Good For You\” heading.
I was ont aware of anyone denying that asbestos (and only asbestos) causes a particular form of cancer – mesothelioma.
Any public controversy relates to people who do not suffer this condition suing for compensation (and often getting it, thanks to crooked lawyers, corrupt doctors and courts failing to do their job).
Having just (quite independently) written some notes on elitism, attacking the kind of anti-elitism that fails to distinguish good from bad elitism, I was intrigued to see how much overlap there seemed to be, despite a great difference in style and context.
Although not a philosopher by profession, I have in my time read various works by: Aristotle and Plato, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and ploughed my way through Hegel\’s Phenomenology and the lesser Logic, and Marx\’s Capital I, the 1844 Manuscripts, German Ideology and so on, and Nietzsche plus a sprinkling of moderns, including such as Croce, Bergson, Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Cassirer, Benjamin, Ayer, Sartre, Ryle etc. Where I did not fully comprehend I fancy I caught the gist and in any case felt the sort of intellectual exhilaration surely experienced by so many down the ages and decades when reading these masters.
Then, I had a go at Derrida\’s On Grammatology. Perhaps it was not the best introduction, or I came to it too late in life. At any rate I found I could not follow even the most rudimentary train of thought – in fact I did not understand a single word. To find out what Derrida is \”about\”, I have had to rely on Derridian commentators, and even they I could not really fathom. It seems to me that if one can find at the least an arcane pleasure and frisson in reading the Preface to Hegel\’s Phenomenology, one can surely read just about anything with SOME grasp! So why is Derrida incomprehensible (at least to me) when so many others aren\’t? One hesitates to adopt the defence mechanism of invoking Hans Christian Andersen to the effect that the Emperor isn\’t wearing any clothes, but that opens one to the charge of being anti-intellectual. Is that what we have been afraid of all these years, regarding Derrida? In which case I must get down immediately to the writing of 400 pages of my own nonsense so obscurely phrased that no one will dare criticise. Perhaps it would gain me a chair somewhere.
A propos the late Joan Walloch Scott, I have this from her GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY (1988), Introduction:
\”Poststructuralism (Derrida/Foucault) can offer feminism a powerful analytic perspective. (P. 4) …
\”There is no separation between material conditions and human thoughts and actions they are said to generate. No such separation is possible since \’interest\’ does not inhere in actors or their structural positions but is discursively produced. The objects of study are then epistemological phenomena, which includes [sic] economics, industrialization, relations of production, factories, families, classes, genders, collective action, and political ideas, as well as one\’s own interpretive categories.\” (P. 5)
My note on this says: \”Amazing series of statements – metaphysical idealism in history with a vengeance! The first sentence of that portion cited on p. 5 is reasonable enough. Marx, for one, would surely agree, perhaps with some slight alterations in phrasing. But then Walloch collapses all \’material conditions\’ into \’discourse\’, a striking violation of the dialectic that her initial sentence puts forward! All these things are \’discursively produced\’, and are therefore no more than elements in \’discourse\’. Now all we have to ask is: how? And why? (But of course if there can be no reasons for the production of discourse, since discourse is all there is, these questions are unanswerable.) The best thing the student can do is ignore the theoretical incoherence of her Introduction and just read the history, the writing of which is interesting and useful and not dependent upon the theoretical statements at the head. How could it be? For this \’theory\’ is entirely unworkable from the viewpoint of any practicing historian, let alone one who had the temerity to pursue a definite and objective agenda like feminism. \’Theory\’ appears to be hauled in here to provide abstract, \’academic\’ glossing. It is killing off film studies already, which once upon a time intelligently and cogently and sensitively interpreted actual films and the purposes of their auteurs.\”
It has made a mish-mash of French Revolution studies, reaching a point amongst the more radical revisionists where the Revolution per se didn\’t really happen: it was \”perceived\” to have happened, and when people started putting on those funny caps and marching through the streets demanding bread they really thought it had happened. But in reality it was a charade, a sort of festival. When I tell my students that according to some of its postmodernist interpreters the French Revolution was \”all in the mind\”, so to speak, they gape at me with entirely reasonable incredulity. Challenged to provide some sort of coherence or overview for his festively revisionist approach to the Revolution, Francois Furet merely said that no such overview or interpretation is possible. Which is rather like climbing to the roof and pulling the ladder up after you.
I might add that the apparently Derridian incursions into the theory of feminism – fostered by Scott amongst others – have seriously debilitated this worthy cause from the eighties to our own day.
Is there not a fundamental flaw in all relativism to the effect that if one lays down the \”law\” that all is relative, one has postulated an absolute? I have heard this murmured about postmodernism in general from time to time but nobody seems to want to shout it from the rooftops, exactly.
On the other hand, the point of deconstruction appears to be that it can and indeed must be deconstructed: in which case we might all have saved ourselves the bother of reading it up in the first place.
Just finished the article by Andrew Weeks re The Passion. I found the article while I was trying to find some info on Luise Hensel. When on the internet, I am not used to the intellectual depth and excellent reasoning shown in this article. Thank you for this insight into Brentano, Emmerich, and Mel Gibson. It is amazing!
The suggestion that Reagan was somehow associated with deconstruction becoming the rage in western literary studies in the 1980s is entirely justified, though not for the reasons suggested. The rage was in large part a consequence of the collapse of the great intellectual prestige of Marxism on western campuses, which followed upon the collapse of Marxism as an organised global political force. This would not have occurred (not then anyway) if the real \”great prevaricator\” (i.e. Carter) had not been displaced by Reagan. Q.E.D.
Brian Leiter\’s article about Jacques Derrida and his supporters seems to me intemperate. He says there were no appreciative comments from American philosophers upon Derrida\’s death in the American press \”because American philosophers thought he was a fraud, a betrayal to philosophy\’s grand history.\” Though Prof. Leiter concedes that Derrida was personally kind, he does so in order to make the point that Derrida \”devoted his life to increasing the amount of ignorance in the world.\” Well, not all American philosophers think that. Richard Rorty is a well-known American philosopher and his appreciative comments about Derrida were quoted in at least one obituary I read. (Now, perhaps the mention of Rorty\’s name incites the same sort of invective from Prof. Leiter as does Derrida\’s name. If so, I apologize, since I have no desire to further stir Prof. Leiter\’s acidic juices.)
More obscure American philosophers would also have been happy to offer appreciative comments on Derrida if they had been asked. Come to think of it, as an American philosopher myself, I would have been willing to offer an appreciative comment. I read Derrida\’s book, \”The Work of Mourning,\” a collection of his elegies for French intellectual friends. Although Derrida didn\’t do philosophy in the argumentative-analytic mode that we American philosophers mostly favor, I thought his book was intelligent, had a lot of wise things to say about death and how to think about death, and displayed a good understanding of the work of the French intellectuals of his generation. The book was written in a style accessible to literate adults with an interest in the subject.
Prof. Leiter\’s citation of Leeds professor Bryan Frances, who asks, \”What if philosophy was baseball and Jacques Derrida a baseball player?\” in order to point out that Derrida has a lower lifetime batting average than advertised, is unpersuasive. Prof. Frances\’ metaphor is cute, but no more persuasive than thundering declarations from Derrida supporters that Derrida, along with Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is among the three great philosophers of the 20th century. The truth, of course, is that we don\’t know who the great philosophers of the 20th century are, nor do we know what Derrida\’s lifetime batting average is. It\’s too early to say.
It probably doesn\’t need to be pointed out, but the comment from Luther Blissett below that attacks the quality of Prof. Leiter\’s thought because Leiter\’s books may not be selling as well as Derrida\’s in Austin, Texas, is a bad argument. Dan Brown\’s \”The DaVinci Code\” is selling very well indeed, but that doesn\’t tell us much about the quality of Mr. Brown\’s mind.
I can see that Prof. Leiter has given considerable thought to Derrida and is long-aggrieved by what he regards as a case of intellectual charlatanism, but I\’m unpersuaded by his argument, and repelled by his aggressive mode.
It seems as though Leitner might make an excellent deconstructionist.
In response to Paul Kurtz’s article on Science and Ethical Judgments I advocate the establishment of a new genre, which I call Evolved Self Lit. Currently the polemics issued on behalf of Scientism and Creationism fail to overlap, so little dialog results. A genre of fictional vehicles for exploring issues such as those raised in his excellent review would do a lot, I believe, to advance effective debate.
I see Evolved Self Lit. providing material for provoking discussion among general readers and students of evolutionism and providing a broadening of the terms of dialog. Here are a few capsule samples to try out on students. Their answers should be in standard English and restricted, to limit wiggle-room, to perhaps 50 words:
1. As our standard of ethical principle, from which any divergence must be justified, it is proposed we take the largest land empire the world has ever seen—the Mongolian Empire. Shouldn’t the widest distribution of a set of ethical principles be taken as the standard, and if not, why not?
2. It is suggested that humans evolved as a way of restoring to the mature Earth the higher rate of physical catastrophe that genetic adaptation rates were designed for in the Earth’s more turbulent infancy. Is a mechanism for such evolution possible?
3. Since humans are evolved, does that mean they are incapable of intelligent design? If they are capable of intelligent design, is the peahen not capable of intelligent design, too, in selecting for how peacock’s tails are designed. If not, explain how humans can intelligently design, but peahens cannot?
Does such a genre already exist? If so I would appreciate some pointers to examples, and who publishes them. My own examples can be sampled at http://www.evolvedself.com.
small thoughts by a small man, and yet another example of the pathetic state of philosophy in our time.
Brian Leiter\’s article on Derrida reflects just the kind of deliberate misrepresentation that I critique in my article on Jonathan Kandell\’s New York Times obituary for Derrida: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041213&s=benjamin
I confess I got quite a laugh out of Brian Leiter\’s rant about the late Jacques Derrida. He gives new meaning to the phrase \”kick \’em when they\’re down.\” However, my good-humor quickly turned to anger and disappointment when I bothered to click on one of the links in Leiter\’s piece to find long lists of philosophers, historians, critical theorists; in short, all manner of academics who embraced and certainly \”appreciated\” Derrida\’s work. And wouldn\’t you know, many of them were actually Americans! O the humanities! Professors Scott and Taylor are far more formidable thinkers than I am and so are capable of taking care of themselves. But the fact that the entire framework of Leiter\’s polemic is a fabrication and based on this light-weight straw-man argument leads me to believe that he is much more of a threat to \”philosophy\’s grand history\” than Derrida ever was, or any of us \”non-philosophers\” who would have the audacity to weigh-in on the man\’s life. butterfliesandwheels should be more diligent in combating such \”fashionable nonsense.\”
As for the claim that Derrida was of little interest to few if any important American philosophers, I submit (for the defense, as it were) the name of Stanley Cavell.
I don\’t think \”charlatancy\” is a word.
I have not read the article in question. But I would be happy to sit down with the professor to discuss what a nitwit he is. Or maybe by phone. This is just another instance of polically driven mongrels spouting inane denunciations about Derrida\’s stature as a professional philosopher. The fellow is a nitwit.
Oh my gosh. I have started to read this stuff. Like Ms Cheney\’s assessment of Kerry, Derrida must be a bad man… bad bad bad.
This fellow is an idiot. He is dodo birdbrain making fabulous and fatuous evaluations a rather formidable intellect.
Your claim that Derrida has not influenced philosophy is based on a semantic bait-and-switch. True, he has not influenced philosophy departments in the US and UK (most of which are analytic and are influenced by positivist traditions and debates). But he has enormously influenced readers of \’continental philosophy.\’ This tradition is not consolidated in any one academic department in the current academic world, but exerts influence in philosophy, literature, cultural studies and political science departments.
Simply quoting the unqualified opinion of supposed authorities as if this is somehow proof of anything is not something I\’d let my freshmen students get away with, and you really ought to be a little more serious if you\’re going to make the extreme claims you make here about a recently deceased man (such as \”he led a bad life\”). This is disrespectful.
The only real argument you advance here is that \”the plausibility of Derridean readings can only be adjudicated by comparing them with that of other scholars.\” Well, if we are to judge by this, thousands upon thousands of scholars–yes, PhDs in many kinds of departments in many traditions and with many concerns–have been invigorated for decades by Derrida\’s output.
However, comparing his readings with those of other scholars is not in fact the \”only\” way to judge the plausibility of Derrida\’s readings. I can think of at least one other way. Its called using your own brain. Ditch your fraudulent appeals to selective expert opinion and your crotchety sloganeering and you\’ll be surprised at what you might find. Read Rousseau. Read Derrida on Rousseau. Read Freud. Read Derrida on Freud. Then get back to us with something other than canned summaries of what Freud is about. In every word of your article, cliche has replaced analytic demonstration. I don\’t care if this is the internet, its inexcusable.
Well, you do have another argument. You suggest that Freud\’s theory of the repressive mechanism is intellectually viable because it can be tested against empirical evidence for and against, and that Derrida\’s is somehow illegitimate because \”there is nothing empirical about the Derridean claim.\”
I am ASTONISHED that you would confuse empirical and hermeneutical arguments. I\’m ashamed aldaily.com would link something so fatuous. To suggest that Derrida\’s arguments can be settled by an appeal to empirical evidence would be like suggesting we need to test the validity of a novel in laboratories.
Also, your law school reader describes Bromwich\’s book as \”giving a good and thoughtful lashing to identity politics,\” as if this has anything to do with Derrida. It doesn\’t. He had nothing to do with identity politics. Quite the opposite.
Derrida\’s painstaking work–spending pages attempting to tease out the implications of sentences and images and metaphors–deserves a thoughtful engagement. Derrida spent his entire life trying to replace ossified opinions with patient elaboration. I\’m saddened when I read him so disserviced.
I was quite pleased to read Professor Leiter\’s reassessment of Derrida and his \”contributions,\” in light of Taylor\’s glowing praise. I am one of the many in the Humanities who has opened a volume of essays by Derrida, only to find myself turned off immediately by his deliberate obfuscations and his whimisical, indeed precious, manipulation of language. I am not a philosopher myself, nor am I a psychoanalyst, which is why I have consciously rejected the appropriation of Derridean or Lacanian discourse in literary praxis. Too many, it seems, have found it necessary to appropriate Derrida and Lacan, despite the fact that they may have no training in philosophy or psychoanalysis, and can thus have no real claim to an understanding of what it is Derrida or Lacan was trying to say (if anything at all). The rampant dishonesty of current literary praxis in the Humanities is an unwholesome truth that many are unwilling to acknowledge. Is it really too much to expect of literary discourse that it be accessible, that it rid itself once and for all of its penchant for obscurantism, that it express itself in an idiom that is plain-speaking, open, accessible, honest?
A small matter — could whoever types these in use a double dash or an em dash for parenthetical comments? The use of a hyphen is very confusing. I had to read the phrase \”statements about what-they insist-cannot happen\” about three times before I worked it out.
In my defence, that is my only complaint.
I would merely point out that Mr. Leiter doesn\’t show us that Derrida is a \”bad reader,\” he (Leiter) merely tells us. One certainly can\’t maintain that D simply fails to read, say, Hegel. One would have to show, show being the operative word, that D\’s reading of Hegel is ultimately inadequate.
As a Hegel expert (and current president of the Hegel Society of America), I have found Derrida\’s treatment of Hegel to be quite interesting and informative.
To be sure, Derrida made some basic mistakes in his way of doing philosophy, and I have criticized them harshly elsewhere. But then, no philosopher doesn\’t make basic mistakes. Not even Mr. Leiter.
I second D. Hill\’s reflective evaluation.
For Derrida\’s comment of 12/02/04: You are \”absolutely\” correct.
I remain astonished that critics who fault Derrida for poor reading almost never cite any of his texts. This piece is a perfect example … at least Derrida always pointed to a specific moment in a given text that defied its own internal logic. That\’s not sloppy thinking. It\’s rigor, and it\’s not on display here.
I realize, like legions of other readers, and like Derrida himself, that deconstruction is not a substitute for progressive politics. But, surely, close reading of the kind Derrida encouraged is not incompatible with progressive politics. In fact, in times like these, when truth has become politicized by reactionaries, deconstruction is a necessary antidote to political fiction. Just because it undermines the possibility of transcendental concepts doesn\’t mean it undermines the possibility of concepts themselves. Contingency does not obviate political committment, but it does make identity politics harder — which may be a good thing. It\’s time we learned this lesson.
For a more generous obituary on Derrida, see mine: http://www.flakmag.com/opinion/derrida.html
The postings in response to Professor Leiter are unlikely to persuade those of us who are skeptical about Derrida that we are wrong in thinking that Derrida mainly appeals to those not very bright or clear-headed. Even ignoring those whose response is to attack Leiter as a dimwit, dodo brain, and idiot, the quality of the rejoinders seem unusually weak, suggesting that it may not be possible to defend Derrida\’s work on the philosophical merits of his contribution.
The unfortunate fact is that Professor Leiter reports what is the philosophical consensus–not the analytic philosopher\’s consensus, but the consensus among philosophers of all stripes. As Professor Leiter noted on his blog site from which this item comes, even the Irvine letter failed to find more than a handful of philosophers in Europe who would attest to Derrida\’s importance or greatness. The semantic bait-and-switch to which Mr. Glover alludes is nowhere to be found in the original article or in reality. Derrida is not considered a major philosopher among the vast majority of English-speaking philosophers, but nor is he considered significant among most of those in Europe. Only those in literature departments, whose understanding of philosophy is shaky, seem to think Derrida is a major philosopher.
Contrary to Mr. Glover, quoting the judgment of knowledgeable individuals–and, based on my experience, Professor Leiter reports accurately the overwhelming consensus among scholars of European philosophy and philosophers in diverse fields–is perfectly appropriate, especially in the context of an opinion piece like this. I have no idea who Professor McCumber is, but I know that preeminent Hegel scholars like Allen Wood of Stanford University and Michael Forster of the University of Chicago share something like Professor Leiter\’s view of Derrida. You need only consult their works to see that while they widely reference European commentators who write on Hegel, they ignore Derrida.
Particularly silly, I thought, was Mr. Blissett\’s idea that disciplinary boundaries should be determined by where store clerks file books. Again, this is a quality of thinking that hardly does credit to the Derridean cause.
Mr Leiter doesn\’t like Derrida, and has many critical things to say. I am an analytical philosopher, so perhaps I should agree. But, in fact, Mr. Leiter offers not one bit of actual evidence (beyond the \”always fallacious\” appeal to authority–as the notorious Daniel Dennett likes to describe said strategy). It\’s a hell of a lot easier to accuse someone of misreading a text, than to show why there is a misreading. You have to actually do philosophy to accomplish the latter. And as some of us know, including Mr Derrida, I venture, philosophy is hard. Wouldn\’t know that from Mr. Leiter\’s text, would we?
DD
Oh, I get it! This essay is all a piece of grand irony.
Leiter decries Derrida as a \”bad reader,\” then reads Derrida badly. Witty!
Leiter criticizes Derrida\’s inability to provide \”empirical evidence\” for philosophy (a rather odd request) and then doesn\’t provide any \”empirical evidence\” for his own opinion.
Leither berates Derrida and Derrideans for their inability to provide any sort of real proof of their assertions, then makes an unproven, unsupported assertion about the rise of Derrida and the rise of Reaganism and the New Right in the U.S.
Very wity, Mr. Leiter. Very wity!
With reference to your piece on the \’Derrida industry\’, it is possible to find that industry risible at the same time as appreciating Derrida\’s validity within the discipline of philosophy. And it is a discipline, one of Derrida\’s many lessons. Although some of his UK followers (although I would exclude from this criticism Professor Geoff Bennington, one of Derrida\’s professional acquaintances and translators, under whom I read, occasionally, for a PhD) tended to get hot under the collar at the potential for an application of deconstruction which allowed endless textual \’freeplay\’. Once the whiff of brimstone had faded, however, the \’point\’ of Derrida became clearer. However, your writer seems to believe (in accordance with a prewritten liberal diktat), that Derrida\’s obligatory primary function was to educate, and that he somehow shirked this via a programme of deliberate obfuscation. But philosophy is already too demanding for most people, it is already obfuscation in action. That\’s one of the reasons we do it. It\’s an increasingly modern error to believe that all philosophers, or practitioners of any discipline, have a civic duty to enlighten beyond the sphere of themselves. It\’s the mistake that drove Freud to practice medicine, in which he had a marginal effect as psychoanalysis gave way to pharmaceuticals, when in actuality he was one of the finest philosophers (particularly of the mind/body problem) of modern times. Philosophy is, for some of us, a more hermetic concern than modern academia recognises, and this is where Derrida functions best. Derrida\’s purely philosophical work, before he tottered off into leftish dribble and letters to Japanese friends and what have you, illuminates the history of Western philosophy more ably than the schools of thought whose exemplary utterances are along the lines of the following. In refuting Derrida\’s thesis that reality is constructed by \’acts of exclusion\’, we read:
This isn\’t an insight, it\’s a tautology. Necessarily, every X excludes not-X, else it would not be X.
Where would this reductionism leave Heidegger? And you surely aren\’t going to say Heidegger was deliberately obfuscatory. That\’s about as clever as saying he doesn\’t count because he was a Nazi. If your line of philosophy is the type of Anglo-American concept-crunching that keeps going back to algebra like a ten-dollar hooker, you\’re unlikely to get much out of the very real philosophical discussions central to, for example, Plato\’s Pharmacy, Notes on the Mystic Writing Block or Derrida\’s work on Husserl. So don\’t just barge your way into the queue and start yelling about how Derrida is a charlatan just because he doesn\’t fit your liberal sensibilities. It makes you look as smart as goatboy journalists who use the word \’deconstruct\’ in their lifestyle pieces when what they mean is \’understand\’.
Since when has it been necessary to teach even earnest students to read and think badly?
Who cares about reputations or \’industries\’ or other, um, fashionable nonsense? Why not actually engage with the texts?
Brian Leiter evidently wants to be one of those who philosophize with a hammer in his taking down of Derrida. Unfortunately, he keeps whacking himself in the forehead with it.
Leiter’s main accusation against Derrida is that he is not a good interpreter of philosophy texts. He quotes Mark Taylor saying Derrida was a careful reader, and then replies:
“It is impossible in the abstract to assess this proposition, but surely it bears noting that a primary reason for skepticism about Derrida is that overwhelmingly those who engage in philosophical scholarship on figures like Plato and Nietzsche and Husserl find that Derrida misreads the texts, in careless and often intentionally flippant ways, inventing meanings, lifting passages out of context, misunderstanding philosophical arguments, and on and on.”
It is hard to know what to do with Leiter’s accusation because we don’t have an example of what he considers a good reader. Would he consider Gregory Vlastos a good reader of Plato, for example? Vlastos has a very high reputation in academia, but one can see, by simply glancing at his work, that he assigns a wholly alien scheme – the fretwork of analytic philsophy – to Plato. Would Leiter consider Bernard Williams a good reader of Descartes? Again, looking at Williams one finds him engaged in translating Descartes philosophy wholesale into the vocabulary of contemporary analytic philosophy. If these two mainstream ‘readers” of philosophy are a fair sample, then surely Derrida has a warrant for at least reading, say, Saussure or Rousseau in a vocabulary they might not recognize.
But there is more to be said here. If I were to make an analogy not to sports but to music, I would say that Derrida – like Kojeve, like Foucault, like Deleuze, like Heidegger – viewed reading a philosophic master the way a pianist views playing a classic piece. The point is to play it both as it is and as it hasn’t been heard before. There’s no ontological hocus pocus about this – there is, in fact, a whole industry built upon distinguishing one symphony’s playing of a Beethoven symphony from another, or one conductor’s way of directing Wagner from another.
So let’s look at a Derrida reading. Say, since it is at hand, La Verite en peinture. The first essay in that piece is, contra Leiter, a very influential essay in the Philosophy of Aesthetics entitled “Parergon.” It examines Kant’s Critique of Judgment. As in many of Derrida’s essays, however, it is also concerned with a number of texts in the philosophy of aesthetics, including Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art.
Accusation one: Derrida “misreads the texts, in careless and often intentionally flippant ways”. Really? Actually, he employs all the traditional machinery of a reading – he gives us the times at which his texts were written; he quotes other philosophers (for instance, Victor Cousin) on Kant’s text, and he shows, via that quote, how it was institutionalized (a concern with the historic context that is notably lacking in all too many analytic readings of philosophers, who believe that the text is the ‘thing itself” and their application of a foreign system of interpretation is wholly uninfected by the chain of interpretation reaching down to their own groovy reconstruction of the text\’s logic); he quotes both in the French and the the German original; he takes those passages that deal with work and art and tries to show how they work within the textual worlds created by Heidegger and Kant – in short, as far as academic standards are concerned, Derrida more than fullfills them. I’d love to see Leiter compare, say, Vlastos on Parmenides with Derrida on Kant. Vlastos would surely be the wilder reader.
That is, in one way he would be – employing the canons of scholarship that are standards in the social sciences, but that are sadly lacking in philosophy.
But this is only the groundwork. Surely Derrida was “flippant?”
What Leiter means is that Derrida refused to overlook instances in the text, or in its production (say, the production of notes out of which many Nietzschian texts were composed), that are incongruous with the rather tame history of philosophy that analytic philosophers have tried to identify with the real history of philosophy. In the analytic story, philosophy has always striven to be a science. That gives the analytic readings of philosophy their often so oddly telelogical bent – making Leibnitz, for instance, an anticipator of Frege, or Descartes the man who is all about brains in vats. To do this, of course, the philosophic interpreter has to discard the real texts that he is dealing with, that are shot through with inconsistencies, biases, methodological aberrations, and, above all, stylistic touches. These are, after all, dialogues, or essays, or tractates or theodicies or things of that nature. For Leiter and his kind, style is an accident, the dixie cup that we throw away to get the nectar of the gods – all those great thoughts. And then we anthologize it, freeze dry it, and feed it to the undergrades in the most degraded form possible (Yes, Johnny, Descartes IS like that character on Star Trek!)
For Derrida, that simply isn’t the case. Derrida’s reading of Plato, for instance, is closer to the ethnological theories of Vernant about the Greeks than the analytic ideas about the formal structure of lgoical propositions. The test, here, is the reading. Read, for instance, the Phaedrus – the text that forms the basis for Derrida’s essay, Plato’s Pharmakon – and read another interpreter of it. Or try to understand, using a scientific criteria for evidence, how the school of analytic philosophers of Plato come up with their dating for Plato’s dialogues – a hilarious exercise in circular logic that tells us pretty much what we need to know about how Leiter’s ‘mainstream” philosophers do history. While fetishizing science, they seem oddly inept at practicing it on even a rudimentary level.
The argument about whether Derrida is one of the greatest philosophers of the century isn’t really worth having. However, it is definitely worth your time, as a philosopher, to read Derrida. That’s all that matters.
This is the worst letter that I have read in a long while. It is shameful to dismiss another philosopher\’s entire life\’s work in such an offhanded way (and without examples from Derrida\’s own works, I might add!). It can only serve to fuel the growing sense of disconnection between the various schools of thought within our discipline, and consequently, much substanceless quibbling among those who are otherwise very intelligent people.
Leiter speaks of the shameful legacy that Derrida has bequeathed to the humanties– the promotion of careless reading and analytic skills, but I wonder about the effect that his own letter may have. There is a saying that comes to mind and seems very appropriate here: \”When an ass looks in the mirror, he will always see an ass staring back.\” Of course, it would not be Derrida\’s fault if this happens, after all, it is quite natural.
Jesus wept. If Leiter wants names of American philosophers who recognize Derrida\’s importance to philosophy, all he need do is ask. Rorty, Cavell, Hacking, Haugeland, just for starters. If Leiter is illiterate, that\’s his problem, but there\’s no need to inflict his unrecognizable caricature of Derrida on the rest of us.
I have thought it over and decided that is not fair to call anyone an \”ass\”. Please disregard the last few lines of my first response, they are utterly unproductive and uncalled for. However, I would like to say a few more things about Leiter\’s letter. First, after reading Taylor\’s obituary, I am left confused regarding Leiter\’s treatment of it. I was not aware that Taylor was offering an argument, and so the logical critique seems misguided on Leiter\’s part. After all, is it really necessary to pluck paragraphs from it and reduce them to symbolic language? it seems a bit excessive and out of place. Second, it is clear that Leiter does not speak for \”most American philosophers\” in his assesment of Derrida\’s importance. Certainly most of the pro-Derridean responses on this sight come from American philosophers. Third, I do not think that it is Leiter\’s right to refer to certain others as \”non-philosophers\”, especially since it pre-supposes a certain vision of philosophy that not everyone shares. This seems analogous to refering to those who are ignorant of Christianity as \”non-religious human beings\” because they do not meet a certain narrowly defined vision of what it means to be religious. After all, who has the privilaged position of deciding such things? Finally, I want to reiterate the importance of attempting to understand the work of another, and if then it is impossible to accept that work, the further importance of showing another the problems with it as demonstrated through the work in question. It would be great if Leiter could show us, and others have mentioned this also, if he could show us where Derrida goes wrong specifically and tell us why this is a problem. For instance, Leiter claims that many commentators on Husserl, for example, have claimed that Derrida is notorious for bad interpretations of Husserl\’s work, but as far as I know, he is one of the best commentators on Husserl\’s work. For instance, his introduction to \”On the Origin of Geometry\” is quite excellent and remarkably lucid. So, what in particular in this interpretation is bad?
It might be a good idea for all the respondents to the Derrida debate to took a look at Samuel Wheeler\’s excellent \”Deconstruction as Analytical Philosophy\” which sets out how Derrida\’s work, like much of the European hermeneutic tradition, is thoroughly in line with the Quinian and Davidsonian critiques of empiricism. That way there might be some real dialogue between those working in analytical philosophy and those in the other European traditions, rather than mere point-scoring polemic.
The God question may have become a little more complicated. I found the following post on the Net. I\’ve downloaded the manuscript and it\’s no hoax!!!
A new scriptural synthesis and Gnostic interpretation, [authorship unknown] which includes material from the OT/NT, Apocrypha, The Dead Sea Scrolls and The Nag Hammadi Library, to describe the first wholly new moral conception of the teaching of Christ for two thousand years is on the Net.
And this is the first ever religious teaching, able to demonstrate by an act of faith, its own efficacy! That is to say, the first living and testable proof of the living God has been published! However incredulous this may sound, if this teaching is confirmed, and there appear to be many who are attempting to do so, it can only be described as an intellectual and religious revolution as well! The site where I found my copy [a 1.3mb pdf download] at is at http://www.energon.uklinux.net
To accuse Martin Heidegger of being \’a personal and moral monster\’ is a sign of extreme ignorance and shows the shallow foundations of the critic\’s moral and personal education. And it may also point to someone with a hidden agenda but lacking the courage to make that public. Martin Heidegger represents the best of the Western cultural tradition, he is the last of the great philosophers and as Hegel refers to Socrates and Plato, \’one of those men destined to be teachers of the human race\’ Mr Leiter is a moral pigmy compared to Heidegger.
Leiter: \”[T]here are no \’appreciative quotes\’ from \’American philosophers,\’ because American philosophers thought he was a fraud, a betrayal to philosophy\’s grand history.\”
APR: Hogwash. I\’m not terribly familiar with Derrida, but I know with certainty that \”American philosophers\” have never been in 100% agreement on anything.
Leiter: \”This isn\’t an insight, it\’s a tautology. Necessarily, every X excludes not-X, else it would not be X.\”
APR: Since when are tautologies barred from being insights? A tautology is a pair of alternate phrasings of one fact; a different phrasing always carries different emphasis. An insight is not a discovery of new facts, but rather the revelation of the meaning of old, known facts.
This entire article smacks of grudge-talk more than scholarship.
Your assessment appeared to be accurate and fair, because it agreed with my own, that is until the final paragraph:
Was it entirely an accident that at the same time that deconstruction became the rage in literary studies (namely, the 1980s), American politics went off the rails with the Great Prevaricator, Ronald Reagan? Is it simply coincidental that the total corruption of public discourse and language–which we may only hope has reached its peak at the present moment–coincided with the collapse of careful reading and the responsible use of language in one of the central humanities disciplines?
As Wittgenstein and Heidegger are controversial choices, though in terms of sheer impact, they are plainly in a wholly different philosophical league from Derrida, so Reagan is a controversial choice, but plainly in a whole different prevarication league from Bill or Hillary Clinton whom you appear to have ignored – or defended.
This is the saddest piece of \”philosophy\” I have ever read. From Leiter\’s text one would think that philosophy is about slandering others, about ad hominem \”arguments\” and moral attacks…
Derrida is a bad reader, says Mr. L., but what evidence does he provide to show that he (Leiter) has actually read Derrida? To make the kind of judgements that Leiter makes, I would expect that he at least has taking the time to study his enemy. But no, it seems from this example (Leiter\’s text) that reading is not necessary to do philosophy.
There are dozens of texts by Derrida that are more rigorous and scholarly than what usually pass as philosophy in the Academic world.
As for the idiotic comment that there are no American philosophers on the side of Derrida, I wonder why there are more than 4000 signatures on the Remembering Derrida website (U. California, Irvine), and not only from respected American professores and hundreds from students, but from all over the world. Or else, search \”Derrida\” on Amazon and see how many books by American authors appear on screen… etc… It is just tiresome to even have to waste time trying to denounce the ignorance of some \”comentators\”…
Derrida always defended certain Enlightenment ideals, human rights, and was one of the strongest defenders of philosophy in France, so to accuse him of ignorance is only possible if the one doing the accusation is REALLY ignorant. To read Derrida is to learn to think in new ways, ways, it seems, that are beyond the scope and capacity of someone like Mr. Leiter… His comment, his tone, is what represents a real embarrassment for philosophy… Derrida never wrote on that tone, and never slandered anyone. I\’m sure he wouldn´t have even slandered Mr. Leiter. I figure he would have made a witty comment that Mr. L wouldn\’t have been able to understand…
(please excuse me if there are errors on this response: English in not my mother tongue.)
I don\’t want to get in the middle of the feel-sorry-for-Derrida festival here…but look guys:
(1) This was an opinion piece, why are you asking for a scholarly article documenting all of Derrida\’s mistakes? Even Einstein was entitled to write an article reporting that e=mc2, without proving it.
(2) You can come up with jokers like Cavell all you want, fact is that overwhelmingly philosophers think Derrida was a faker, and that\’s why almost no philosophers signed the Irvine letter.
All you guys who are saying, \”Lieter, how come you didn\’t produce evidence that Derrida was a fake?\” couldn\’t someone say back to you, \”How come you haven\’t produced any evidence that Derrida was a good scholar?\” How come?
Note to Rudolf Carnap:
You claim not to know who I am, but–apparently like you–I am at UCLA and teach in the Philosophy Department.
Why don\’t youj contact me–under your real name and email address–and we can have a coffee? Maybe we would both learn something!
Comment on Phil Mole\’s review of \’The Ghost in the Machine\’
On the strength of your review, I\’ve order a copy from Amazon.
Sales rank: 174186
Category: Science & Nature; Horror
It\’ll be some time before books like this beat crap like the \’Da Vinci Code\’ for popularity, obviously.
Two hundred thousand years, perhaps?
Or am I over-optimistic?
Interesting how you begin your comment with a sentence that shows the limits of analytic philosophy of language: \”I don\’t want to get in the middle of the feel-sorry-for-Derrida festival here…but look guys.\”
On the level of Gricean implicature, you\’ve defied the rule of truthfulness (because you do want to get in the middle of the feel-sorry-for Derrida festival), perspicaciousness and relevance (beginning a topic by saying you don\’t want to begin the topic.) In fact, I\’d say that it is a sentence ripe for … deconstruction.
Not that I want to say that it is a sentence ripe for deconstruction.
Uh, Roger, the opening sentence was sarcastic. It\’s got nothing to do with analytic philosophy of language, or with deconstruction. Sarcasm existed before Derrida.
But keep going, this may yet vindicate Leiter\’s polemic.
Adam, really? Wow, it was sarcastic, eh?
Well, since we are pointing out the obvious, today, then maybe I\’ll emphasize, once again, that analytic philosophy of language is helpless to account for why a sentence that seems to say that the speaker doesn\’t want to do something actually means that the speaker does want to do something. To do so, it has to give up the magic quest for a metalanguage that would explain all language as an instrument of truth.
And — to continue with this lesson in things that are right before our nose — that is the point of saying that Derrida is definitely right to point to the genre constraints which bear on philosophic texts, and right to deepen that analysis by showing how they operate within those texts, and right again (wow, he is racking up the prizes today) to try to find patterns in the way in which these tensions are formed, and right again to relate them to a theme that seems, at first, peripheral, the privileging of voice over writing, which, by the way, what your sarcasm is heavily dependent on — insofar as it exists, crucially, as an inflection, a way of writing the \”don\’t want to.\”
But keep going, Adam, this is definitely vindicating Roger.
\”Why Intelligent Design Fails\” (WIDF) attempts to refute intelligent design (ID) by refuting ID claims that evolutionary biology cannot explain the existence of the biological forms we find on this planet today. What I find lacking in this and other attempts to defend the modern picture of evolution (mutation plus selection)is a frontal attack on the concept of ID itself. The problem is, as Paul Gross points out in his review of WIDF, that the ID\’ers will continue to attack and claim that these attacks constitutes doing science and that responses to these attacks demonstrates the respectability of ID.
A direct attack on the whole concept of ID will force the ID\’ers to try to defend their concept rather than attacking evolution. I therefore offer the following critique of ID and challenge the ID community to answer it.
1. It does not try to justify ID directly but assumes the false dichotemy that if evolution is wrong then ID must be right. This is of course nonsense. Even if the present day theory of natural selection should prove inadequate to explain speciation for example, it is far from obvious that some other explanation, based on the known laws of the physical and biological sciences, could not do so.
2. ID can explain anything and therefore explains nothing. It makes no testable predictions and therefore cannot be refuted and is hence not science. The fact that ID cannot be refuted of course does not mean that it must be correct. One cannot refute the claim that the whole universe was created five minutes ago either.
3. ID supposes that a complex entity can only be created by a more complex entity but this is far from obvious. Simple rules can lead to very complex structures buth in computor simulations and in nature. ID\’ers are also faced with the problem of who or what created the intelligent designer of biological systems.
4. ID lacks a mechanism whereby it can be implimented. We are not told who or what the intelligent designer is or how this incorporeal being can put its designs into practice. ID strains at a gnat but is prepared to pss a camel. Until the proponents of ID come up with an answer to this objection ID cannot be taken seriously as an alternative to
evolution.
Let the ID\’ers answer these objections before scientists spend any more time refuting half-baked ID objections to evolution.
“Home Secretary David Blunkett wants to make incitement to religious hatred a crime. A good many people are queuing up to express doubts, as they did last July, when Blunkett was flogging the idea on \’Today\’ by saying that people would still be allowed to express opinions about religion – as long as they were sensible.”
And journalists, writers, streetcorner skeptics, village atheists, the man on the Clapham omnibus – what about any and all of us who have our quarrels with religion and don\’t want to be told to keep them to ourselves on pain of imprisonment?
I never heard of Mr. Blunkett and I don’t know what a Home Secretary is. But Blunkett sounds like John Ashcroft’s soulmate.
My first reaction to Blunkett’s proposal to make it a crime to “incite religious hatred” was outrage. But this quickly turned to amusement. Who will deem whether a particular statement is “sensible” or not? And the requirement of “sensible” isn’t very constraining at all.
All of the abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) posit the existence of a higher power that is human and male. Christianity hypothesizes that Jesus was the son of God. These are empirical claims and though we cannot determine their validity with 100% certainty, we can evaluate the likelihood of being true (which of course, is all science can ever do.)
After Darwin, any religion that alleges that God is male and/or human is extremely unlikely. If there’s a god, it is beyond species and gender. So if your religion literally or metaphorically believes there’s a guy in the sky who runs the place, your faith is based on an empirical claim that is almost certainly false.
Eastern and primitive religions that conceptualize god as beyond species and gender are more sensible, logical, plausible and probable than abrahamic religions that posit a guy in the sky. Scientists and scientifically literate people should speak this truth. We are taught to be polite when it comes to religion. Scientists (starting with Darwin) have coddled the Judeo-Christians for much too long.
Deb Frisch is right to be concerned by Blunkett\’s law. For it may go against humour and satire. Freedom of speach! Defend the Right to Offend! That I value.
However, it think that Ms Frisch should have a deeper knowlegdge of British politics. How can an informed person be so ignorant as to not know what the Home Secretary is, or who he is?
I despair at this. No wonder apathy is such a problem…
PS. I like this website dear editor! Allowing for philosophical discussion without the pettyness of uncontrolled emotion: a gift this surely is in the age of celeb worship and political correctness.
The article by Peter Tatchell is spot on. I went to a Communist-hosted 90th birthday party for my uncle this year, an unreconstructed Stalinist and peace worker since the 1930s. The speeches and poetry were interminable.
At the back of the room were a group of Iraqi communists. I heard my uncle and his friends saying how these guys approved of the invasion and removing Saddam, but they would use them for their value in the anti-war campaign.
The Left it seems care nothing for truth peace or justice, just the fight to defeat America.
But, what\’s the life expectancy in China?. Without this reference your comments make no sense.
Sincerely yours.
Wow, that ACSH \’apology\’ is a marvellous example of the art of projection. Are you sure it\’s not a spoof?
\’We go where the science takes us, not the money\’ . . . but they then come out with examples of where the money\’s taken them. Do they not have a single example of finding against their funders which they\’ve gone on to publicise?
Then, after denouncing ad hominen attacks, they launch . . . an ad hominen attack.
Usually I try to side with science against the tree-huggers, but there are certain issues – asbestos, tobacco, pthalates, and various medical drugs spring to mind – where it\’s pretty obvious that big money is being spent in the effort to gather together and promote all the evidence that Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, while rubbishing anyone who has evidence that it might not be.
Chris:
I do not understand your including asbestos in a list of things being promoted under a \”Toxic Sludge Is Good For You\” heading.
I was ont aware of anyone denying that asbestos (and only asbestos) causes a particular form of cancer – mesothelioma.
Any public controversy relates to people who do not suffer this condition suing for compensation (and often getting it, thanks to crooked lawyers, corrupt doctors and courts failing to do their job).
I had never heard of B&W until I discovered this article on elitism via google:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/infocusprint.php?num=13&subject=Elitism
Having just (quite independently) written some notes on elitism, attacking the kind of anti-elitism that fails to distinguish good from bad elitism, I was intrigued to see how much overlap there seemed to be, despite a great difference in style and context.
My notes are here:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/misc/elitism.html
Comments and criticisms welcome.
Best wishes.
Aaron Sloman
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs
Although not a philosopher by profession, I have in my time read various works by: Aristotle and Plato, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and ploughed my way through Hegel\’s Phenomenology and the lesser Logic, and Marx\’s Capital I, the 1844 Manuscripts, German Ideology and so on, and Nietzsche plus a sprinkling of moderns, including such as Croce, Bergson, Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Cassirer, Benjamin, Ayer, Sartre, Ryle etc. Where I did not fully comprehend I fancy I caught the gist and in any case felt the sort of intellectual exhilaration surely experienced by so many down the ages and decades when reading these masters.
Then, I had a go at Derrida\’s On Grammatology. Perhaps it was not the best introduction, or I came to it too late in life. At any rate I found I could not follow even the most rudimentary train of thought – in fact I did not understand a single word. To find out what Derrida is \”about\”, I have had to rely on Derridian commentators, and even they I could not really fathom. It seems to me that if one can find at the least an arcane pleasure and frisson in reading the Preface to Hegel\’s Phenomenology, one can surely read just about anything with SOME grasp! So why is Derrida incomprehensible (at least to me) when so many others aren\’t? One hesitates to adopt the defence mechanism of invoking Hans Christian Andersen to the effect that the Emperor isn\’t wearing any clothes, but that opens one to the charge of being anti-intellectual. Is that what we have been afraid of all these years, regarding Derrida? In which case I must get down immediately to the writing of 400 pages of my own nonsense so obscurely phrased that no one will dare criticise. Perhaps it would gain me a chair somewhere.
A propos the late Joan Walloch Scott, I have this from her GENDER AND THE POLITICS OF HISTORY (1988), Introduction:
\”Poststructuralism (Derrida/Foucault) can offer feminism a powerful analytic perspective. (P. 4) …
\”There is no separation between material conditions and human thoughts and actions they are said to generate. No such separation is possible since \’interest\’ does not inhere in actors or their structural positions but is discursively produced. The objects of study are then epistemological phenomena, which includes [sic] economics, industrialization, relations of production, factories, families, classes, genders, collective action, and political ideas, as well as one\’s own interpretive categories.\” (P. 5)
My note on this says: \”Amazing series of statements – metaphysical idealism in history with a vengeance! The first sentence of that portion cited on p. 5 is reasonable enough. Marx, for one, would surely agree, perhaps with some slight alterations in phrasing. But then Walloch collapses all \’material conditions\’ into \’discourse\’, a striking violation of the dialectic that her initial sentence puts forward! All these things are \’discursively produced\’, and are therefore no more than elements in \’discourse\’. Now all we have to ask is: how? And why? (But of course if there can be no reasons for the production of discourse, since discourse is all there is, these questions are unanswerable.) The best thing the student can do is ignore the theoretical incoherence of her Introduction and just read the history, the writing of which is interesting and useful and not dependent upon the theoretical statements at the head. How could it be? For this \’theory\’ is entirely unworkable from the viewpoint of any practicing historian, let alone one who had the temerity to pursue a definite and objective agenda like feminism. \’Theory\’ appears to be hauled in here to provide abstract, \’academic\’ glossing. It is killing off film studies already, which once upon a time intelligently and cogently and sensitively interpreted actual films and the purposes of their auteurs.\”
It has made a mish-mash of French Revolution studies, reaching a point amongst the more radical revisionists where the Revolution per se didn\’t really happen: it was \”perceived\” to have happened, and when people started putting on those funny caps and marching through the streets demanding bread they really thought it had happened. But in reality it was a charade, a sort of festival. When I tell my students that according to some of its postmodernist interpreters the French Revolution was \”all in the mind\”, so to speak, they gape at me with entirely reasonable incredulity. Challenged to provide some sort of coherence or overview for his festively revisionist approach to the Revolution, Francois Furet merely said that no such overview or interpretation is possible. Which is rather like climbing to the roof and pulling the ladder up after you.
I might add that the apparently Derridian incursions into the theory of feminism – fostered by Scott amongst others – have seriously debilitated this worthy cause from the eighties to our own day.
Is there not a fundamental flaw in all relativism to the effect that if one lays down the \”law\” that all is relative, one has postulated an absolute? I have heard this murmured about postmodernism in general from time to time but nobody seems to want to shout it from the rooftops, exactly.
On the other hand, the point of deconstruction appears to be that it can and indeed must be deconstructed: in which case we might all have saved ourselves the bother of reading it up in the first place.
Keep up the good work,
BRIAN MILLER
Department of Historical Studies
University of Bristol
UK
Just finished the article by Andrew Weeks re The Passion. I found the article while I was trying to find some info on Luise Hensel. When on the internet, I am not used to the intellectual depth and excellent reasoning shown in this article. Thank you for this insight into Brentano, Emmerich, and Mel Gibson. It is amazing!
Sincerely,
Lucy Geyser