Lagayscienza wrote
Thanks, Hereandnow. I understand, I think, what Rorty says about the contingency of language and about contingency more generally. I can see how his ideas sit well with the Continental philosophy of Derrida et al. I have difficulty with it. Therefore, I will never be an ironist in Rorty’s terms. Certainly, we need to be aware of context and that some deconstruction may be necessary, but I think too much has been made of this. What we see as being true can, of course, be coloured by our own experiences and our individual points of view, but I don’t agree that truth is only made and not discovered. It’s hard to see how that idea can lead anywhere useful. For Derrida there is no such this as meaning. But I don’t think that his obfuscation can be philosophically grounded. If we go down that route it’s hard to see how we might arrive at an understand anything. And yet, we clearly do have an understanding of some things. I gravitate more towards an analytic and scientific mode of inquiry. Science can give us an idea, albeit imperfect, about what is real and true.
All this is not to say that other ways of broadening and raising consciousness such as mediation are useless. Science is certainly not the be all and end all of life. But it's a powerful tool for understanding the universe. And understanding the universe is what, to me, is most interesting and why I have subscriptions to scientific journals like Nature. The universe revealed by science is endlessly fascinating.
I suppose, as you say, I would need to go back to Kant, read some Husserl and Hegel, and revisit Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to help me understand Heidegger and so read myself out of my current world view. But we only get one reading life and there is much to fit in.
Science, if I may, does not deal with the world qualitatively, only quantitatively. And it doesn't deal with basic questions. This isn't its job, to think about epistemology and ontology and ethics and aesthetics. It is a "first order" of thinking, you could say. Philosophy deals with the presuppositions of this.
There is another way to think about Derrida, and this comes from John Caputo, who wrote the very helpful Radical Hermeneutics. He also wrote The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida which begins with an inscription by Eckhart: I pray God to rid me of God!
Then there is Derrida's Metaphysics of Violence in which he dicusses Levinas, and Levinas' principle point is, for me, the difficult and most enigmatic thing there is in this thinking. Caputo's Derrida treats deconstruction like apophatic theology: it is not that language is merely suspect, but is altogether different from the impossible world that is wholly Other than language. This "tout autre" is the impossible reference; it is what Wittgenstein wouldn't talk about, because it can't be talked about but this crisis in understanding is powerful, if one, you know, follows through on this kind of thing, loses sleep over the ineffability of our existence. Caputo is a good read, but a bit verbose. And he really doesn't nail this down, as I see it. But Michel Henry gets it. I think of Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick, who, whenb addressing Starbuck's concerns makes his outrage clear: it is not the whale, but is behind the whale, the Godly source from which issues forth all that is, and this includes the misery he had to endure, losing his leg to the whale (important to notw that Ahab was a scholarly man, who could philoosphize about the world, for it is not world seen that offends; it is the unseen foundation of existence that is truly responsible, and Ahab's quest is not just Ahab's, but belongs to all of us born to suffer and die. The point is that there are two ways to understand the world. One sees a leg devouring whale, and the other? Here is Henry talking about fear:
The discovery of fear is inauthentic...... By this we must understand that
fear guards against a being which it fears and not against its origin,
namely, against the world as such; in fact, it hides from this, from the
origin of all fears behind a being which it attends to
"A being which it fears," like a lion or a disease. This has Ahab all over it. All of our affectivities, the hate, rage, love, bliss, and our sufferings, and on and on; these issue from the wholly other, metaphysics. It is "behind" the white whale's evil (not that whales can be evil), the transcendental source of everything . This is not the world of physics, but the world of phenomenology, so causal accounts are out the window. What IS is the presence of the world.
Anyway, Derrida's philosophy is received with such resentment by analytic philosophers simply because they don't read continental philosophy and work through this radical ontology. Obviously I myself don't understand this with clarity because no one does. But this is because the world itself is foundationally indeterminate. Derrida makes this very clear. But he stands on Husserl's shoulders, and Husserl comes first, he and his infamous epoche that, formally speaking, causes all the trouble.
- By Fanisa Ndhabambi
- By Thrylix