I feel you're making assertions I cannot evaluate, because I'm only responding to some of the takes on Derrida that I feel confident enough to refute. How do you feel about 180 Proof's statement @Joshs ?

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/570551 — 180 Proof

I believe I answered this charge here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/707330

I just mean before Derrida.

But then it would seem that Hume wouldn't undermine Derrida, but get along with him?

That's why I asked, because I'm not sure if your reading of Hume is in some sense undermining Derrida, or if it's just that Derrida is not original due to Hume.

OK -- so are you contesting that Hume basically did it first, more or less?

@180 Proof

I guess what I really see in Derrida -- my interest in him -- is what I often see in philosophers. There's a unique perspective there that I don't see anyone else really doing or trying to do within philosophy.

The broadening of philosophical activity is a natural goal and interest of mine, given that I'm not within the institutions of academia but this stuff still floats about my head, and Derrida's project naturally lends itself to broadening the notion of philosophy.

And I see it as a continuation of -- in line with -- the philosophical project. If Derrida is no skeptic -- and at this point in the thread it seems we're pretty much in agreement on that, minus Jackson due to Hume -- then his is a response to the problem of skepticism, ye olde classic question that marks the traditional history of the modern era of philosophy.

Not at all. I just don't understand your "preference" re: Derrida. That's not my "preference" versus yours, only intellectual honesty on my part. :,point: — 180 Proof

Ahhh -- ok. That's fair. Plus, it keeps things interesting when we find places to dispute rather than simply dismiss.

I guess I just don't feel challenged because it seems to me to be a matter of preference, but then when I say so it seems like you don't acknowledge it's a matter of preference. It seems you still want to say that your preference is right.

Alright, @Jackson -- if you're willing to spit it out I'm willing to hear it. How does Hume undermine all of this? I believe that's basically last we left off.

Heh, you say that -- but from my perspective it seems you keep coming back! :D

OK, this is interesting.

So, it is safe to say deconstruction is not a way of proceeding in the world. And it's larger than what I was imputing -- a way of reading a philosophical work.

I'm honestly at a stage where I cannot tell if deconstruction is algorithmic or not, though I do see it as a method. In the same way that analysis is a method, though not algorithmic (you can begin an analysis anywhere, and an analysis relies upon the interpretive machinery being brought to the material, which varies depending on the analyzer)

I see patterns, though -- something is going on. And, much to my relief, it seems some others here are able to corroborate, and disentangle, some of my impressions and wonderings

However, in line with what I've been saying about how one reads a text, I was only able to begin to tease out what was going on by doing a soft reading, and reading what others who had read were saying. And I was intrinsically motivated to do so just because I like philosophy on the whole -- like a nerd who just likes things and starts to learn about them on his own because the nerd likes them.

So for me the whole idea of defending a philosopher is already something I'm not really doing. It's easy to refute philosophy -- all you need to do is say "Nope!" , and insofar that you or your audience are satisfied your refutation is complete. I've long ago given up on proselytizing philosophy to others -- if they have the interest then great! And if not, then I don't know how to impart the bug. It's just a matter of preference, as far as I can tell. Or maybe accident.

Heh, I, for one, never think there's anything useful in philosophy -- so asking me, well... I'm the wrong source. :)

But there is something beautiful in it, at times. And seeing that beauty requires me to put aside my own projects and try to understand why someone would go on the way they did.

In the most general sense, for understanding deconstruction! :D But also clearing grime off old memories.

One of the questions I'm coming to right now is this notion the thread started with -- of deconstruction deconstructing itself -- and trying to draw out a communicable distinction between refutation and deconstruction. Because if Derrida had wanted to refute Husserl or Saussure, then I don't think he'd have to develop deconstruction -- it would be straightforward, right?

In Streetlight's quote the beginnings of an answer:

Deconstruction starts with an interrogation of a variety of contradictions and aporias in the discourse of philosophy. These are not contradictions and aporias proper, however, since the discourse of philosophy accommodates them without difficulty

Somehow the problems Derrida are interested -- or the question driving his writing -- will easily be swept away in this old style.

But reflecting back onto deconstruction -- it would mean that refutation isn't the goal of deconstruction. And that perhaps deconstruction deconstructing itself would actually be an affirmation?

After all, that's just good old self-consistency, yes?

Really? I actually found it helpful.

I was just responding to what you said -- you prefer Tristan Tzara.

Thanks for all these. This is good stuff to work with. One of the problems I was having in thinking through what to quote is there was always these two layers of interpretation in quoting Derrida -- the text he's deconstructing, and his own moves with the text: but these are great bits for fusing those two nicely in a neat package.

We all have our preferences -- surely you can see how there's more value to deconstruction than what the original article stated though, yes?

This is good. Then I think I'm on the right track.

You may ask! However, there are others in the thread who'd do better than I -- and, in truth, the whole thread is basically asking this question :D What, after all, is deconstruction? Surely we should have read some Derrida before pondering this -- and I'll admit to simply feeling a little lazy -- but it would only be a pondering worth having if you've read something, I think. Else, you'd just repeat what I said.

Heh. It's a good role to play. One I'm appreciating, given where my understanding is at.

I have no quote on his skepticism. One of the reasons I've said he's the opposite of his cartoon is it always seemed like he cared a great deal about the philosophical project -- just in his own particular way that seemed hard to enunciate.

Heh. Funnily enough, at least with where I'm at now with Derrida, I'd still agree that he's a skeptic here :D -- at least, because of my understanding of having knowledge.

I sometimes read philosophy in that mode, and sometimes I read philosophy in another mode. With respect to Derrida I'd say that I'm attempting to maximize the meaning of the text -- basically when I'm attempting to understanding something I'm trying to be as charitable as I can be, hence my introducing the hard/soft distinction earlier for interpretation (which obviously could go by other names too).

I don't think there's a correct reading of a text, there are just correct readings. There are erroneous readings of various degrees or kinds, and then there's some good readings -- some more creative than others, but mostly good and within bounds of the texts I read.

I think this is a different sort of reading than what I'm giving. Can you see the difference? Or is there a real reading to which you're referring, a reading of Hume that is the right reading of Hume?

Perhaps for Hume there isn't really that necessity (I mean, if I were to talk strictly of Kant, I wouldn't call him a skeptic -- since he squarely denies being a skeptic! -- but for the purposes of this conversation, I can see him being included, when thinking on Derrida). If we start to zoom in on Hume I'm sure I'd have more to say -- but it does seem to make sense of the quote to me, which is all I was going for. This bit of Hume made sense of that bit of Husserl -- and so a pattern of sorts is established between us, some points of reference for beginning to talk among one another.

But I'm willing to hear another interpretation, or perhaps Husserl's sentence is so off that it really should be dismissed out of hand? However, given that this is at least something we've shared together, I'd rather not do that. I'm hoping to come up with some kind of shared understanding.

Cool.

"skepticism insists on the validity of the factually experienced world, that of actual experience,
and finds in it nothing of reason or its ideas."

So, moving over to "and finds in it nothing of reason or its ideas" -- for me, necessity -- in Hume -- is the concept that makes the most sense of the quote, because necessity is the concept that definitely isn't part of our experience: our experience is the constant correspondence of events, and through habit we assign said necessity, but it is nowhere to be found in experience, ala Hume's argument.

Is it not a fact that you experience? A little simpler than The World of Facts or something phenomenological, just the world I experience, and "I experience the world" is a fact.

I read it as "the world experienced" -- as in, the world I experience, in fact.

“Unremittingly, skepticism insists on the validity of the factually experienced world, that of actual experience,
and finds in it nothing of reason or its ideas.”( Crisis of European Sciences) — Joshs

No worries. Cross-posting between different posters is all. This is where it's from.

What for? At this point I'm only parsing theories from one another, making distinctions, that sort of thing -- attempting to come up with something of a shared usage of language, given the many places we all come from and the way categorical nouns tend to make us misunderstand one another.

I see this as being in agreement with what I said, so I'll just ask the question again: How would you interpret the Husserl quotation? Is it just wrong?

As Zahavi puts it, phenomenology and deconstruction “dismiss the kind of skepticism that would argue that the way the world appears to us is compatible with the world really being completely different.” — Joshs

I think that's a good approximation on general skepticism -- the radical skeptic claiming the world could be radically otherwise, Humean skeptic denying causation as knowledge (instead its animal habit), Kantian skepticism of things-in-themselves (which could be otherwise, but we wouldn't know, tho it seems like Kant believes we should believe it's otherwise for moral reasons)

How would you go about interpreting Husserl in the quotation?

What made sense to me was Hume's arguments regarding causation -- on the conceptual side you have the necessary connection between events, and on the experiential side you have habituation and the belief that what we experience is necessary, but only because of human habit. So necessity, at least, must be conceptually distinguishable from the world we experience.

One thing to keep in mind is that "skepticism" itself is already a term with a multiplicity of meanings -- so much so that I don't feel like I'm in contradiction in affirming skepticism of Derrida and in affirming him not being a skeptic -- depending on what one means by "skepticism", of course. Also, I think we could start elsewhere, but "skeptic" is as good a word as any as far as I'm concerned. (There's also something funny going on here, in my mind, between pinning down a word, and Derrida's philosophy which seems to indicate the impossibility of doing so by reference to the signs alone)

For myself, I think I'm looking for some amount of agreement between us here -- I'm not as interested in defending deconstruction as understanding it. Or at least understanding perspectives on deconstruction to help round out my own understanding a little better than where it was. So to start here:

“Unremittingly, skepticism insists on the validity of the factually experienced world, that of actual experience,
and finds in it nothing of reason or its ideas. — Joshs

In that sense Derrida is not a skeptic because I don't think he believes in the validity of the factually experienced world -- Or, at least, that it's not a Humean construct of the mind where one can separate the experienced world from the concepts. If Derrida's philosophy is to apply to all text, and everything is text, then it follows that the experienced world is not so easily separable from concept -- hence, not a skeptic in this sense.

That's too much work for me to want to pick up :D I'll fully admit I'm running from impressions of having read, here -- just out of interest, and to hear what others say. And I'm not demanding anything more from anyone else on that front, at least.

The problem I have with Derrida is going from his writing to scholar's writing -- where Derrida's texts read as extremely specific readings of a particular document, the secondary literature reads like an interpretation of his entire oeuvre. And I certainly haven't read Derrida oeuvre! I'm in a half-way house between absolute ignorance and confidence in my assertions -- a place of impression and memory, more than anything, but one I enjoy talking through if others are willing to talk with. While I normally like to bring quotes and such, I have a hard time doing so with Derrida because I feel like the philosophy is in the demonstration more than the words written.

I'll admit that the skepticism I have in mind in saying he's a skeptic isn't so specific as Humean skepticism -- what I have in mind is less precise: I wouldn't call him a radical skeptic, or a Humean skeptic. I think he's skeptical of foundationalist philosophy -- I think he's skeptical of, not universally skeptical, and he seems to want to move beyond such skepticism. But I also don't know where Derrida locates truth; naturally I'm willing to hear more from yourself, though, if you so wish to say more. For myself it seemed like Derrida believes the deconstructive process will, in some sense, lead one where they're supposed to go or towards something like the truth -- but I'd have to say that these are impressions of my own, and nothing more.

I'll admit -- this is close to what I feel on Derrida too.

I really think we could come together on our reading of Derrida. There's enough between us that we could find agreement here.

No?

Many read the section "Absolute Knowing" in the Phenomenology as saying dialectical history comes to an end. Hegel is criticizing subjectivity and saying we are in the stage of objective knowing. Like you said, a concrete thinker. Thus Hegel is not a skeptic. — Jackson

In that sense I'd say that I agree with you -- Derrida is a skeptic.

I suppose I feel more empathy with his skepticism than Hegel's optimism? But that shouldn't be a surprise given how I prefer Kant to Hegel :)

Heh. It's not a bad place to be. I'll admit to choosing the same with other authors.

I agree that Hegel is a concrete thinker, tho -- just fyi

Ahhhhh... OK.

I'll admit that this critique is a bit beyond me. I just think your critique is of a higher level than the original article -- the original article felt like the normal sorts of things I hear when people say Derrida is bad. And maybe that works for some, but for me it didn't.

That being said -- if you feel you can say more on the topic, I'm all ears. Or if not, no worries. I'm only stating what I'm interested in, not assigning homework assignments :)