• Is there an external material world ?
    So, I think the argument is that philosophical realism assumes that empirical knowledge portrays the world as it truly is. — Wayfarer

    A quibble, but one can believe that there is some kind of 'the way things are outside us' without believing that science ever portrays it correctly or can be sure that it is doing so.)Personally I would go so far as to say 'the way things are outside us.' I largely agree with your point, just to be clear. I'm only saying that an outright denial of some kind of crap 'out there' is metaphysically nontrivial (though probably practically trivial.)
  • Is there an external material world ?
    From the empirical perspective it is true that the world existed before any particular mind came along. But it is the mind that furnishes the framework within which the whole concept of temporal priority is meaningful in the first place. — Wayfarer

    I agree with this. Both points are valid.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    So, what I'm getting from this book is the sense in which you can say that the mind creates the universe. It's not some spooky cosmic mind, but every mind, or mind in general. — Wayfarer

    Call it the human mind and make it a demiurge, and I think I agree. There was stuff here before us from which we emerged, but the world as we know it is largely our creation. Humans take some kind of raw environmental 'stuff' and (as you mention) carve out a lifeworld. We even created among ourselves norms that govern our communication. We understand concepts like lying or fallacious reasoning...and we understand that we understand such things. We are at the level of Hamlet. We are characters who are also playwrights, experiencing ourselves on a stage, accountable for our words and deeds, as potentially and ideally responsible and autonomous selves among other such selves. (This is related to Robert Brandom's stripped down and modernized version of Hegel.)
  • Is there an external material world ?
    not as an articulated or explicit philosophy but as a set of implicit assumptions, questioning of which often results in eye-rolling or exasperation. — Wayfarer

    Now that I can relate to. It's those pesky implicit assumptions that wreak the most havoc. We can't criticize what we don't yet recognize as optional.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    I don’t think that my idea falls into the problem of applying it to itself, because I didn’t suggest any alternative system. What I suggested is abandoning philosophy and making art by using the remnants of the abandoned philosophy. How can art be suspected of proposing another metaphysical system? — Angelo Cannata

    To be fair, I'll grant that one can sort of escape metaphysics by carefully avoiding any talk that involves norms. One can suggest that we try something else. The wrong way to do this is the pomo cartoon, which presents the impossibility of truth or metaphysics as a supreme metaphysical truth. The more sophisticated way to do this (a Rortian way?) is to avoid the temptation to make grand claims (including grand claims about the nullity of grand claims ) and stick with artsy suggestions. I think art is great, and I can understand a literary shift away from metaphysics...while not being so ready to abandon ship myself.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    His basic contention is that the features and structure of everything we see is transformed into a gestalt (a meaningful whole) by the process of cognition, which occurs in even the most simple of organisms (fairyflies, 0.5mm in length) and this cogntive act is what creates the structure that we perceive as 'the Universe'. He contrasts that with the instinctive view of naive realism, which is also a consequence of the same evolutionary processes that give rise to cognition in the first place (with the caveat that humans are potentially able to 'deconstruct' this instictive, but fallacious, sense of reality.) — Wayfarer

    I find it hard to believe that naive realism exists very much among adults. A few philosophers pretend to be, but I think they are playing with words (or indulging linguistic preferences). For context, I wouldn't call a confident atheoretical managing of daily tasks 'naive realism' just because one is not recalling that of course the scene of those tasks is largely the product of my nervous system.

    My point about the inscription is from a perspective of indirect realism. The 'raw material' that our nervous system transforms into mountains and messages has a memory that makes such a message possible. That chiseled string of gashes in the granite is like a dormant virus, waiting for a host, for the possibility of its quotation.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    The underlying issue is that the classical attitude of modern science was to assume a stance of complete objectivity, by reducing the objects of analysis to purely quantitative terms. This was supposedly to arrive at the putative 'view from nowhere' which was understood to be what was truly there. — Wayfarer

    In my view, objectivity is just a synonym of rationality, and 'complete' objectivity sounds like perfect science, or just the goal of (rational) inquiry. I don't object to the notion that some scientists were also metaphysicians who liked to think that the entities in their models were more real than the medium sized dry goods that made such modeling possible, but it seems prudent to insist on the gap between science and a correlated, optional metaphysical 'crust.' Are electrons more real than microscopes or sidewalks? I was thinking of this on my walk earlier. If meaning lives in our inferences and the norms that govern them, then sidewalks and electrons and promises and inferences are all on the same 'plane.' (The only thing that seems to have priority epistemologically or ontologically is the philosophical situation itself, which is to say us and the norms that more our less explicitly govern our discussion. This 'fixes' the Cartesian beginning, which forgets that being rational is a group activity. )
  • Is there an external material world ?
    I don't think you can extract the sense in which the world exists apart from our participatory observation in it. — Wayfarer

    I may agree that one cannot extract or capture the sense or meaning of the world apart from that human meaning making. If meaning, as some theorists hold, lives in our inferences and the norms that govern them, then it's only where we are. But can we move from this to insisting that there was nothing here before we were able to talk about it ? Surely my mother was here before I was, and surely early lifeforms, not yet intelligent, preceded our own appearance as a species...as a condition of its possibility, making it harder to deny.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪180 Proof

    I appreciate your taking the time to provide the links. It seems we both agree that 'the modern' is already self-critical. I go on from this idea to include Derrida in the same old tradition. He doesn't even necessarily deserve an especially prominent place. Perhaps his early work is pepper to the later Wittgenstein's salt.

    As for the intolerance of bullshit, that's the rule that binds all of us as we play at being philosophers. I expect that most of us would understand ourselves to be virtuously cranky in the same way. It's just not always easy to decide whether something is bullshit.
  • Postmodern Philosophy and Morality
    Do you think a poor, ugly person enjoys being self-aware, benefits from it? — baker

    The poor, ugly person might be perfectly able to acknowledge both of these apparently unfortunate attributes, happily even, if their self-esteem is founded on their kindness or their intellect or their discipline or walk with god or ...

    It's even feasible that one who has arduously attained a relatively sage-like equanimity is grateful for these attributes as goads toward the transcendence of the usual obsession with wealth and beauty. Such 'lower' goods could be viewed in retrospect additional obstacles to overcome. It's harder to transcend a world that'll worship your skin or your big tips.

    When mocked about his criminal father, a forger, Diogenes answered : why do you think I became a philosopher?

    I'm too handsome and rich of course to speak from experience.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    I "keep coming back" to challenge, as I've said, Derrida's apologists & expositors. — 180 Proof

    So far, though, your challenge seems to consist in accusations that you have not yet substantiated. I'm not saying you can't make a great case but that you haven't yet. So far your critique is all too familiar. The thread would only benefit if you expand your comments, go into more detail.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    Isn’t this where Derrida comes in? That is, the concept of writing as the way that a mark that I produce survives me and my intent? — Joshs

    It's related. The man relies upon a code to 'escape' his own annihilation in a certain sense. Even as a corpse he can talk. 'Some are born posthumously.'

    But in this context what I'm emphasizing is that the message persists when not being perceived (or so common sense might say). Some thinkers talk as if the world only exists through human perception. It's not really 'out there' in some sense. How can they make sense of the state of this inscription between its writing and its initial rediscovery? Is it nonexistent in the interim? Is that plausible? Do coffee tables only exist when we are looking to see if they are still there?

    My own take is that we can grant that the world as humanly experience is naturally dependent upon the experiencing human. But I don't see how we can leap from this truism to a denial of the world's independent existence, even if I admit that it's difficult indeed to articulate exact 'how' it is supposed to exist in this sense. There's no practical constraint on such talk to keep it honest. But I do think my mother was here before I was. And that others will be taking their first steps when I am forgotten ashes.
  • The “hard problem” of suffering
    Who/what am I? — Agent Smith

    This is where I do my bit and say that 'you' are the thing that gets in trouble if 'you' break the rules. Or gets a Scooby snack when 'you' are a good boy. 'You' have to give reasons for what you say is true or for the weird thing you got caught doing. ('I' am caught up basically in the same play, of course, so I'm using the second person when I could be using the first.)

    I say this from a perspective that emphasizes that 'you' is a mark/noise traded according to mostly tacit and always evolving rules by curiously inventive monkeys on the third rock from the sun. These monkeys, like other animals, are hungry and horny, and useful and dangerous to one another. So the 'game' of these marks and noises is primarily about organizing the cooperative and occasionally warlike monkey lifestyle. We are the monkeys who make promises. It's evolution, baby.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDaOgu2CQtI
    "I am the first mammal to make plans."
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    For all his vision he hadn't the vision - can't blame him, of course - to forsee something like Facebook. — ZzzoneiroCosm

    I agree with the implication that maybe he was wrong on that point. That's quite a can of worms in itself, the private ownership of the de facto town square (not that it is or has to stay Facebook.)
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Olivier5

    Right. But what I was referring to is this:

    In 1997, Sokal and Jean Bricmont co-wrote Impostures intellectuelles (US: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science; UK: Intellectual Impostures, 1998).[14] The book featured analysis of extracts from established intellectuals' writings that Sokal and Bricmont claimed misused scientific terminology.[15] It closed with a critical summary of postmodernism and criticism of the strong programme of social constructionism in the sociology of scientific knowledge.[16] — wiki

    I presume that Sokal's annoyance with these 'imposters' inspired the prank in the first place. It seems that Sokal depended on his own credentials as a physicist to overcome editorial concerns. While the editors surely look bad, it doesn't make Sokal look all that great. His parody of post-modernism, which admittedly scores some points, also echoes the conspiracy theory about 'postmodernists' that one might get from Tucker Carlson. Lots of that parody might apply to an early reception of Kant, except for the topical political progressivism bit (as if reactionary politics isn't just as threatening to science.)

    My theory is that folks are at their worst intellectually (at their blindest) when they talk about their perceived enemies. 'Math is racist' is stupid. But go too far in the other direction and one is shrieking about the newspeak denial of biological sex --when all that's happening is a change in manners, predictably occasionally awkward or nasty.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪ZzzoneiroCosm

    I'm basically progressive and liberal, I guess, but I don't like institutions betraying their principles in fits of topical self-righteousness. Areopagitica, motherfuckers !

    Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

    I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

    Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.

    Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary…. They are not skillful considerers of human things who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin.

    Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.     — Milton
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    .
    ... Or more broadly about the various echo chambers and sins of convergent thinking in Academia. — ZzzoneiroCosm

    Yes indeed, and outside too. But inside is sadder in a way, just as dirty cops are worse than other criminals.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    .
    I'm far from anti-pomo but appreciate iconoclasm of any kind. — ZzzoneiroCosm

    Same here. I hate the idea of being trapped in a tribal bubble. I guess my fantasy of the philosopher is tied up to some kind of neutral Shakespearean consciousness that can be everyone and no one.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    Heh, you say that -- but from my perspective it seems you keep coming back! :D — Moliere
    :up:
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    Thanks for the quotes. I'll have to give them a close reading when I have time. — ZzzoneiroCosm
    :up:
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    The Sokal Affair is relevant here, in case you haven't heard of it: — ZzzoneiroCosm

    It was a great prank, and some French thinkers have been guilty of playing fast and loose with concepts from other fields, and some of them just suck, but what does it really prove that one journal was fooled ?Antipomo types on the other side seem just as liable to bias. It's some nerdy version of the culture war.

    I remember Scruton calling Zizek an anti-Semite on a very thin pretext. So I didn't mind so much when it happened to Scruton. It's like the bitchiness in this thread (I'm as guilty as others.) We are tribal fuckers, only relinquishing our prejudices under pressure, if even then.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    If you haven’t read him, you might enjoy Husserl’s analyses of the constitution of a real spatial object.
    The real object is never completely fulfilled. It is a concatenation of memory , actual appearance and anticipation. So the object is an idealization, a kind of faith in a total unity that is never fully achieved.     — Joshs

    I have (somewhat), and I like Husserl. And that theme of a unity to come also appears valuably in Gadamer's theory of interpretation. I think it also applies to the adjacent concepts of referral and representation. How can I talk about an object that I know little or nothing about? How can my label stick to the right place?

    “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.”(Husserl 1973) — Joshs

    To me this is like poetry that pretty much gets it right. It accords with introspection. But I'm more drawn to the view from the outside. Rationality is prior to any claim worth taking seriously, and that implies (it seems to be) that we are on the stage, so that the meaning of words is best looked for in proprieties of use. The object is the same (despite subjective sensory flux) because we treat it as the same. We are the 'same' person day after day, because in fact I wake up responsible to others for what I did and said the day before.

    But Wittgenstein's Blue Book helps us imagine a different way of life. For example, what if there's a weekend me and the weekday me? With two names? The same with you and everyone. It's how we all roll. Maybe one of the selves sharing my body is thrown in prison for murder, probably the weekend self. But obviously the weekday self can not be punished for this crime, so the one body is only locked up on weekends.

    One might speak of the fantasy of something 'deeper' than such norms that gives them necessity.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    Concepts evolve, they have a life, a vitality which you can kill if you try to trap them. — Olivier5

    I would maybe say here though that concepts evolve because we try to trap them. They have a life because we keep trying to put them death. Philosophy seeks for more clarity than the carpenter requires. The astronomer doesn't care about ICBMs. Philosophers are especially itchy fuckers, especially irritable (Schopenhauer's insight). Either those drapes inconsistencies/ambiguities go or I do !
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Olivier5

    I basically agree with all of that.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    A lifelong student of the likes of Freddy, Witty & Peirce, I still find 'p0m0 post/structuralism' as redundant as it is rhetorically obscurant. — 180 Proof

    OK, but I can't personally see the big gap between Derrida and Nietzsche or Derrida and Wittgenstein. Not now that the movement is a relic and basically just texts. Maybe Nietzsche 'already said that' in some sense, but Derrida would hardly deny the influence of a primary hero, and to me his best passages are like some of my favorites from Nietzsche. As good, as poetic, as penetrating.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    What about the idea that the same endures by continuing to be itself differently? I would say that this is the essence of deconstruction. — Joshs

    Sure. I'm down with that. I'd just stress the interdependence of the concepts involved. And I'd look to local practical/context. The most recent context is the 'master madness' of the fear of death. Granted 100% that there is no 'truly' enduring self (and that one cannot step into the same river twice), I'd also make the opposite point and say that making unequal things equal is automatic and properly presupposed --- so one can step into the same river twice, because 'river' organizes or captures a flux, makes flux possible in the first place, one might say. Though the concepts are independent. There's no origin.

    The unripe toe tag of the proper legal name also has an enduring referent. We can say that the referent changes if we want. But that depends on how we approach the institution of names and referrals. The thing referred to can change only if it's gathered as a stable unity that frames such a change. (I don't think either us is lacking comprehension of any of the relevant issues, so it feels like a matter of focus or preference.)
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    ↪Olivier5

    Continuing the thought above about the uselessness or Derrida (and Kant and Hume and calculus and ...), I offer a quote from Hobbes about power. The context is a catalogue of all the sources of power, while power itself is roughly the command of human effort (as in labor or war.)

    Also, what quality soever maketh a man beloved, or feared of many; or the reputation of such quality, is Power; because it is a means to have the assistance, and service of many.

    Good successe is Power; because it maketh reputation of Wisdome, or good fortune; which makes men either feare him, or rely on him.

    Affability of men already in power, is encrease of Power; because it gaineth love.

    Reputation of Prudence in the conduct of Peace or War, is Power; because to prudent men, we commit the government of our selves, more willingly than to others.

    Nobility is Power, not in all places, but onely in those Common-wealths, where it has Priviledges: for in such priviledges consisteth their Power.

    Eloquence is Power; because it is seeming Prudence.

    Forme is Power; because being a promise of Good, it recommendeth men to the favour of women and strangers.

    The Sciences, are small Power; because not eminent; and therefore, not acknowledged in any man; nor are at all, but in a few; and in them, but of a few things. For Science is of that nature, as none can understand it to be, but such as in a good measure have attayned it.

    Arts of publique use, as Fortification, making of Engines, and other Instruments of War; because they conferre to Defence, and Victory, are Power; And though the true Mother of them, be Science, namely the Mathematiques; yet, because they are brought into the Light, by the hand of the Artificer, they be esteemed (the Midwife passing with the vulgar for the Mother,) as his issue.     — Hobbes
    https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2H_4_0034
    (Hobbes is just great, by the way.)

    I though about starting a thread on this, because it's such a killer line. For Science is of that nature, as none can understand it to be, but such as in a good measure have attayned it.

    A buffoon like Jordan Peterson (when he wanders from his actual field) is indistinguishable from a more serious and successful thinker on the same topics. In the same way, a math crank cannot be distinguished from the outside from a Field'e medalist, except by social indicators like that medal. At least a fake plumber is revealed by leaks. But the indirect path from science to the practical life gives the real thing a kind of temporary invisibility to outsiders, so that Derrida or Wittgenstein are easily called frauds. Note that Kant was a Derrida in his day. Check out Beiser on the history of this period. Such as The Fate of Reason. Kant was a nihilist, an idealist, etc. Folks don't like their proprieties fucked with.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    The essence of rationality is a ghost. Essences are always ghostly. We can barely watch them, let alone catch them. — Olivier5

    Perhaps, but isn't this metaphor of a ghost precisely one more such attempt?

    I don't see how Derrida isn't doing basically the same old song and dance or pointing out and trying to work around or epistemological throwness. If he's worthless or unnecessary (which is no doubt true for someone just trying to pay the rent), then so is Kant. It's arguably a weird, elitist interest. One doesn't need to think about this stuff...or about real analysis, which is not the source of our faith in applied mathematics, or only very secondarily so. The anti-intellectual attitude can always accurately point out that it's a lot of trouble for not much external reward.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    bitch.

    ( thought I’d keep you off guard)     — Joshs

    Well fucking played!
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    But no, monseiur, writing IS time. ( you know, the repetition that alters ) — Joshs

    OK but the concept of alteration depends on the endurance of the same. I've been mentioning the self that functions as a player on the great stage of fools known as the world, the one responsible for claims, subject to praise and sanctions. It's this thing that we identity with and whose destruction we fear. Why did Derrida (why did Milton?) want his text saved from the grave? To be seen is the ambition of ghosts. To be remembered is the ambition of the dead.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    Your writing is a lot more entertaining than mine. — Joshs

    A very generous comment, sir! For what's worth, I'm glad someone as clearly informed and enthusiastic about this stuff is here for me talk with. And I appreciate your even tone and good manners.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    I haven’t read much on this aspect of Derrida’s life. Can you say more? — Joshs

    He had an illegitimate child with a student (or ex-student, can't remember when the affair started.) And the Peeters bio suggests (gently, respectfully) that our world-traveling Derrida never exactly settled down. I got the impression that he was adulterous when traveling (when his wife stayed home) but careful to maintain his marriage and family life too. The Post Card is, I believe, addressed to the mother of his illegitimate child. Also noteworthy: he gave very long talks, suggesting an extraordinary narcissism, which, as you may know, was sometimes explicitly discussed, along with his related fear of death and the destruction/loss of his archive. His affection for writing was probably connected to its partial or temporary escape from the abyss of death. As Bloom said, the strong poet is more afraid of annihilation than most...and tries harder to be worth remembering.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    But as Collingwood implies, there is no thought without premises. Without at its root some absolute unprovable presuppositions. An axiomatique is always there somewhere, often unconscious. Think of it as an operating system, without which no computer can function. The operating system provides a creed, a credo based on which computing can happen. — Olivier5

    Exactly, and this is a Heideggerian/Derridean point too. What makes rationality possible is a system of inherited concepts. But this same system makes 'pure' rationality impossible...or always 'to come' as a sort of point at infinity, a hope, a mere direction of travel. This is epistemological Geworfenheit. It's what endangers modern philosophy's Kantian project while making it enticing in the first place. This project might be framed as the automation of critical thinking. If a philosopher could once and for all articulate the essence of rationality and lay down rules that would remain genuinely binding, that'd be the end of a particular story. It'd be a machine because that philosopher would die and leave his signs behind, somehow true and binding and intelligible in his absence, a 'bone machine' that reveals what it means to be a 'bone machine' in a way that governs inferences about inference, etc. (The philosophical dream is of 'the system' of traces/signs that somehow nets the truth about truth. 'Bone' refers to the endurance of these traces, and their having been stripped of all contingent flesh.) What would be left would just be empirical. We would have at least have grasped our essence as scientific beings. The science of science's essence would be complete.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    Ok, but remember, the mark is undecidable(because it is split into two equivocal aspects), not indeterminate, so he would probably bristle at the term ‘vague’. In its own way it is very precise. — Joshs

    Oh I recall Derrida avoiding 'ambiguity' somewhere for some sanctified synonym, but that's a point for insiders. I'm probably just the right amount of insider (as in not too much of one) to play a Derrida whisperer, but it doesn't bother me to translate 62 bits into the most relative 32 bits. The metaphor here is unsupervised machine learning, a bottlenecked autoencoder. For what it's worth, I acknowledge the possibility that you may be better read in Derrida. But I can't help thinking my irreverent style of paraphrase might offer something that yours doesn't, maybe because of the fidelity of your approach (which can be just as hard to decipher as the original text.)
  • Is there an external material world ?
    But this is not enough for philosophy: philosophy wants to get the roots, the total, the ultimate, the general, the universal. The problem is that philosophy gets the ultimate by using the primitive instruments I said before. — Angelo Cannata

    You make a good point, but it's hard to see how a sketching of the limits of philosophical knowledge isn't one more project that tries to get at the roots with finite concepts and violates those same limitations. It's as if early anti-metaphysical thought was Kantian and then later anti-metaphysical thought was (had to be) anti-Kantian. So you are making a Kantian point, and I am making the point that your Kantian point is self-threatening...that theories of knowledge are just as metaphysical in their way as those systems they would forbid or constrain.
  • Is there an external material world ?
    These questions swirl nebulously around practical debates and they rouse confusion and fury. I think you are right that they are often too big to make sense of. But they are not going to go away easily. — Cuthbert

    Very well put !
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    that of the guy who points to the inherent vagueness of things. Things, such as concepts, are often more vague than scolars think. — Olivier5

    Again...the kind of point I find in Derrida.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    He's got all the looks of a true philosopher, so aesthetic is apt in this way. — Olivier5

    Wittgenstein and Derrida were both beautiful men. That probably helped them and hurt them at the same time. Derrida was especially annoyingly attractive. It doesn't annoy me, but I think it annoyed others. It was as if he was taking the liberties of a good looking person, fucking around where ugly men had to be serious and earnest to get any respect. The fantasy might be that academics are above such petty responses, but we are primates. And Derrida's fame in literary departments was probably dependent on both a cartoon misunderstanding of him and the T-shirt readiness of his pleasant face and hair. He was a womanizer like Sartre, but with better hygiene. (I really enjoy the persona of Sartre. He was virtuous in some ways but a creep in others, and I think being a little wicked helps with access to unpleasant truths about human nature. It may be that saints don't make the best philosophers.)
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    Purity from what? If nothing human is foreign to philosophy, sin is philosophical, and as many holy men have told us, philosophy is sin. — Olivier5

    Purity from irrationality, from prejudice. Philosophy is sin to the holy men precisely in its "Satanic" humanism. We humans decide what is true and good, for ourselves. That's the Enlightenment, in the eyes of which religious superstition is impure.

    The Left Hegelians are useful here. They would criticize various secular philosophers (one another, often enough) for being still-too-theological, still insufficiently rational or critical. The 'sin' for humanism and rationality is the unjustified assumption, the incomplete achievement of autonomy, etc. The battle against superstition and puerility/slavishness is endless. Derrida fits pretty nicely into this project. He just added some worthy targets. Sometimes husk is mistaken for kernel.
  • What Was Deconstruction?
    In any case even a dry text seemingly avoiding any rhetorical effects... is itself using dryness for rhetorical effect! — Olivier5

    A Derridean point maybe, and I agree. There's always some notion of the proper in effect, something that got there before we did, a background against which our performance will be judged. Along these lines, I also don't find pure concepts available. I find words entangled in histories with connotations and 'irrational' overtones. I find hieroglyphs like 'clarity' or 'foundation,' dead metaphors that somehow signify beyond the pictures at their root.
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