Aporias and Avatars
Tzvetan Todorov has a good essay in Theory’s Empire. I’ll give you a quotation from it.
The renunciation of judgment and of values leads to insurmountable aporias, as well. To make their own task easier, deconstructionists seem to have assimliated all values to religious values, thus rejecting the distinction between faith and reason, and they treat reason as an avatar – no more and no less – of God, thus wiping out several centuries of struggle with a single stroke of the pen.
Rejecting that distinction between faith and reason is – such a bottomlessly terrible idea.
Would be nice if Todorov gave an example…although, it makes his task much easier to avoid all that evidence stuff.
My Funk & Wagnalls doesn’t have “aporia” in it, so — I’m guessing here — it’s on the OTHER side of the Illinois River. . . Right?
The word is in the OERD. Through idle curiosity, I also checked the Petit Larousse, and it exists in French too; something which is to be somewhat expected for Greek words. The latter notes the term is used specifically in philosophy.
An ‘insurmountable aporia’, incidentally, is a pleonasm.
Siddown, makeselfahome, aporia a drink.
My OED is not so clear about this. While the more modern usage is “a perplexing difficulty” (and not, by the way, insurmountable), the original seems to be a rhetorical form that casts as doubtful things that would be obvious if given in plain language.
Oh, come on! “Aporia” is a well-worn word. It’s as old as Plato. The Greek rhetoricians used it to mean a figure of speech whereby one began an oration by saying that not only did one not know how to resolve the issues of a topic, but one did not know even where to begin. Since there was no specifically philosophical jargon available at the time, Plato lifted the term to express a new mode of thinking. Briefly, an aporia occurs when, given two equally crucial and evident aspects to understanding a phenomenon,- (that what show itself of itself),- A and B, one can not get from A to B or vice versa by legitimate inference or without presupposing that which is to be arrived at. The most commonplace example of an aporia would be Aristotle’s distinction between the tode ti, “that it is”, existence, and the ti estin, “what it is”, essence, an aporia designed precisely to be turned against Plato and his doctrine of Ideas. If one starts from the that to get at the what, one immediately starts talking in terms of a what without having derived it from a that, but if one starts from a what, one likewise immediately starts talking about it in terms of a particular example of a that. The fact that such a puzzling distinction was then the basis for the working-out of a doctrine or understanding of beings that has long since sunk into the received common sense of the Western tradition should not be cause for forgetting the puzzling, aporetic nature and intent of the distinction, nor the recurrent forms of that aporia since. More generally, the Greek philosophers experienced to ontos on, the being of beings, as a genuinely puzzling problem, an enigma not easily answered- (or answered to). Briefly, humans experience themselves as dependent on a world or environment that they did not create or produce and subject to its forces, such that they must know themselves as contingent things amongst things. On the other hand, they experience themselves as capable of ranging over a wide variety of things and of “freely” intervening in that world or environment in limited ways to shape it as their habitation. What source or arche can account for this strange duality of humans and the nature of their polis in relation to the nature of the world that they are at once subjected to and dispose over? (Surely it can’t be found in humans themselves or their minds, unless one takes the idealist route, whereby one asks for still more aporetic troubles.)
As to Derrida, Foucault, et alia, one could take them to be collapsing, more or less nihilistically, any distinction between reason and unreason. Or one could take them to be inquiring into the particularities that are or tend to be suppressed by (overgeneralized?) claims to rationality and into, at this late date, the sources of intelligibility by which claims to rationality are raised and the forces and interests that determine or inflect them. The issue would be that of the other of reason, in the double sense of the genitive; that is, at once what is other than reason in the world and reason’s own other, the other reason which reflects on the perhaps prerational sources and resources by which reason can itself become reasonable, responsive to its other. But the intrication of faith with reason is itself an old issue of long standing and it won’t do to accuse those Frenchies of ignoring the tradition of historical struggles. (They went to Normal Sup and had their heads stuffed with all that tradition.) A better take would be to ask whether they raise their questions in a particularly perspicuous fashion and whether their approach is wont to yield any valuable, broadly useful insight. In the case of Derrida in particular, he seems to be concerned with the (denegated experience of) the limits of language and communication as the promissary link between past and future, memory and expectation. “As Derrida remarks…, in the original affirmation of language…, we are linked by a faith that cannot be eliminated by any erasure in any discourse or narrative. A text in which such erasure would be complete would be, precisely, a ‘figure of evil’, the very specter of the worst, of violence become absolute” (Hent De Vries). What then would distinguish deconstruction from hermeneutics, I haven’t a clue. But to call such a minimal faith by the name of “God”, which Derrida scarcely does, only by way of a logically empty name, would scarcely be irrational.