Seems to me standard physics. — Jackson

yes, it is standard physics , but it ignores the fact that these images that forms sequence are. or neural bits of data, they appear to us and qualitatively differing unfoldings. Hume is consistent with a standard physical account of the measurement of motion. Phenomenological and postmodern accounts are not, because they see not just quantitative shifts from
image to image but qualitative. Bergson was among the first to recognize this with his concept of lived duration.

Right, an act of the imagination as a "fiction." — Jackson

I wouldnt assume as continuous a scattered array of images. I would instead say that there were different things moving independently of each other.So what about this particular series of images allows me this fiction? Also, is it true that I can quantitively measure the transition from one image to the next in the sequence as a counting of degrees?


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I see a ball rolling down the hill. This is actually a sequence of discrete, digital, images. Some see it as continuous movement, thus a "fiction of a continued existence" (T I.4.2.36). — Jackson

What ties together this sequence of discrete images in my mind such that , for the sake of convenience, I can idealize it as a continuous movement? After all, I wouldnt assume as continuous a scattered array of images. I would instead say that there were different things moving independently of each other. Also, it is true that I can quantitively measure the transition from one image to the next in the sequence as a counting of degrees?

That sounds admirably highminded - but, talk about being a liberal :) - it seems that human societies can be pretty easily reduced to who, whom. In the absence of reason, logic and empirism that is - power structures tend to work as power structures without some civilizational, enlightened constraints. The worst will always be full of passionate intensity while the best might be continental postmodern philosophers idling about in Sorbonne — hwyl

I’m a firm believer in two things:
1) Constructive alternativism:

There are an infinite number of ways we can organize our understanding of our world. We discover that some work better than others , but not because they conform to some independent way thing ‘really are’ out there.

2) Over time , by repeatedly trying on differently frameworks of understanding, we will be able to construct systems that allow the social and other events of the world to appear to us in more and more intricately interconnected and harmonious ways. This is not our conforming to the way things ‘really, really’ are in the sense of having to adapt ourselves to some undeniable set of facts.
If ‘reason, logic and empiricism’ mean such conformity of reason to an arbitrary content , then that is a dangerous way of thinking that ends up blaming others for our failure to recognize the prison that ‘reason’ can create when it doesn’t recognize its dependence on a subjective worldview. Calling scientific worldviews ‘subjective’ doesn’t mean we can’t attain that ultimate harmonious understanding of each other. On the contrary, recognizing the intricate interplay between subjective interpretation and the world is the only effective avenue to that goal.

In the name of logic, reason and truth you yourself may be inclined to demonize certain right wing political views ( Trumpism, Qanon) that you believe are
either irrational, illogical or false. But do you really understand why they hold those views, where they came from, and how similar that process was to the formation of your own ‘rational’ views?

How do thing become associated? Hume wrote specifically about this.
— Joshs

Convention. — Jackson

Can you give some examples?

No glue. What gave Kant hysterics. — Jackson

How do thing become associated? Hume wrote specifically about this.

. But almost invariably postmodernity seems to lead to reaction, to anti-progressivism, and being a liberal, as vaguely as I can muster :) that will not do. In the absence of "objective" (or rather objectivish) concepts, power will dictate truth values and truth (however imperfect it will always remain here) should be independent of power. — hwyl

FWIW, most of the political rants you hear about accusing some entity or other of wielding their power and privilege is not postmodern but Marxist or neo-Marxist. Postmodernists like Foucault dont see groups as having or holding onto power. That is a modernist notion, and the insufferable finger-pointing moralisms go along with this kind of thinking. The postmodern philosophers are not moralists. For them power is not a thing , not anything we can posses. It is more like the differential elements of a value system that is produced by being disseminated among a culture, from one to the next to the next. They don’t demonize groups but aim to establish interchange.

For Hume, there is no necessity to association. Objects and events do not have continuity. — Jackson

The question is , how do things become associated ? What is the ‘glue’ that binds them?

Please explain what that intimate relationship is and why traditional philosophies do not have that. — Jackson

Think about Hume’s model of associative synthesis. Correct me if I’m wrong , but like the behavioral
models in psychology that borrowed from it, it determines the conditions under which two events become associated with each in our mind in terms of temporal and spatial contiguity , etc. These are external criteria of association. Husserl offered instead an intentional model
of associative synthesis, which is internalistic.

“The old concepts of association and of laws of associ­ation, though they too have usually been related to the coheren­cies of pure psychic life by Hume and later thinkers, are only naturalistic distortions of the corresponding genuine, intentional concepts.

It is phenome­nologically evident, but strange to the tradition-bound, that association is not a title merely for a conformity to empirical laws on the part of complexes of data comprised in a ''psyche".”(Husserl)

A more intimate relationship of understanding between people... I have always thought postmodernity an ironic, distancing, sceptical approach against the dead(ish), inert(ish) but often sincerely and strongly felt certainties and identities of modernity and pre-modernity. — hwyl

The more solid, substantial and permanent you make your irreducible contents, the more polarizing and violent becomes the relations between these contents. This is fine for people who believe in good and evil or a correspondence theory of truth. Their moral thinking is this violent and polarizing sort, moral and empirical truth as the forcing of conformity to an arbitrary content.

But what happens when you replace supposedly nailed down content ( God, categories of the understanding, independently existing empirical objects, deterministically causal mechanism) with process? This is what postmodernists do. They see patterns of always intricately changing belonging where others see the arbitrariness of fixed mechanistic causation. The former finds an intrinsic relationality between events, the latter only find extrinsic pre-assigned causation.

The 'not even temporarily' point is hard to make sense of. If you are only saying that it's all just fiction or mirage, I guess that's fine, but so is fiction and mirage. I don't think one can plausibly deny though that we are animals in the world together using sounds and marks to arrange our affairs. — igjugarjuk

What I mean by ‘not even temporarily’ is that only the actual interchange , in that moment, establishes the actual norm as what it is. The norm is a pragmatic action ,not a concept. This is no mirage, it is the only contact with the real. Every new moment is a new action and interaction and contests a previous instantiation of a norm. Dont let a norm be a thing that exists first and then changes, like a moving object. Let the act BE the norm.

Some of the points in the quote above are not unlike pointing out that the self is fiction. We can say that reference is a fiction too and so on. But the role of the illusion of reference and the talk about reference is still fascinating. There are patterns in what we do. I'm more than a little willing to embrace a zoo of social entities that only 'exist' 'in' or 'as' such patterns. — igjugarjuk

As I’m sure you will agree, there are central ethical implications to how we understand the relation between identity and difference. Much of the discussion here on deconstruction and postmodernism centers around the fear that these approaches lead to a loss of access to truth, meaning and understanding. What tends to be missed in these discussions is that effective insight into other peoples’ ways of thinking and behaving, our ability to empathize with them and avoid fearing and condemning them for their apparent alienating, irreconcilable and even dangerous and immoral differences from us, is directly tied to how solid and permanent we make the fundamental ‘stuff’ of the subjective and object aspects of the world.

What I find extraordinarily powerful about Derrida and various related postmodernisms from an ethical
point of view is that they allow for a more intimate relationship of understanding between people than the more traditional philosophies they critique.

Any reductions of conceptual norms to something deeper and "more real" will depend on those same norms for their authority.

One criticism might be that the priority of conceptual norms is tautological and uninteresting. One retort is that maybe it's only obvious use to pointing out the absurdity in various extreme metaphysical theses that forget their dependence on an interpersonal framework of giving and asking for reasons. — igjugarjuk

I could be wrong , but it seems you’re not comfortable in making the leap from neo-Kantianism to a phenomenologically-informed enactivism. You want to hold onto the idea of a self-subsisting (even if only temporarily) content internal not just to conceptual norms but to empirical materiality. These irreducibly inhering contents constrain and influence experience normatively , both in terms of the (temporary) intransigence of materiality and of the manifest image, the space of reasons.

What Rouse and the enactivists are saying is that the world speaks back to , interrogates and modifies our space of reasons in every interaction with others and the world. This is what Wittgenstein means by the sense of words being person-specific and context-specific, that the meaning of a word is only in its actual use right NOW, in THIS context of interaction. There are no norms, no manifest image, no space of reasons that just sit there (even temporarily) protected from active, living, changing temporal context.

what is discursive practice? Is it rational ? Is it a group activity? It's hard to see how one monkey body can make a nonviolently binding claim on other monkey body without discursive norms that hold each monkey accountable for assertions as to the way things are. If there are proper ways to use concepts, we have norms, which are hard to make sense of without individuals subject to them before witnesses. Once we are doing philosophy, it's 'too late' to question the framework, for such questioning is part of the game. "Let me prove to you that the responsible and autonomous self is ontologically secondary." — igjugarjuk

Im reminded of two opposing reading of the later Wittgenstein. The first has been put forth by Pete Hacker, along with Gordon Baker , who later jumped ship and embraced the second reading. Also in this first camp are many of the Oxford school Wittgensteinians(, Malcolm, Ryle, Strawson and Mounce).

Among adherents of the second reading are Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond and Burton Dreben.

The first reading is I think broadly consistent with your indirect realism, in that it wants to protect the idea of a material or formal substrate that to some extent can protect itself from contextual change such as to be able to exert a specific influence on the present context from a position in memory, history or the world at least partially independent of the immediate context of the now.

As Phil Hutchinson argues against Hacker:

“ The thought that mapping our language might serve a purpose (non-person relative, non-occasion sensitive) relies on the assumption that certain relatively static reference points obtain within that language. What vantage point on language would one need to assume so as to be able to discern that which would serve as (non-person-relative, non occasion-sensitive) reference points?”

“The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker's thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-thing relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words' belonging to a ‘type of use.'It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture' which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”

m

We are at the level of Hamlet, characters who are playwrights, experiencing ourselves on a stage, accountable for our words and deeds, as potentially and ideally responsible and autonomous selves among other such selves. — igjugarjuk

Unless of course the responsible and autonomous self is just an effect of discursive practices within a community.

I doubt if much can ever be smensibly said, so we should probably stay quiet about it, wovon man nicht sprechen kan etc. — hwyl

Oh, but I think a lot has sensibly been said by recent philosophy about a concept of history that is neither Cartesian nor Kantian.

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. — igjugarjuk

It isnt simply a matter of pointing out that everything has a history. As you know , for Derrida, Foucault, Nietzsche and Heidegger we are nothing but history. But there is an important distinction between history as they understand it and what they call historicism. The former understands history as a genealogy. The latter subordinates history to a scheme , whether dialectic or empirical causation within some form
of realism or another. Heidegger and Derrida point out that not only a pre-human history , but the history of what I ate for breakfast yesterday, is not behind us but ahead of us as a reinterpretation of ‘what was’, generated by current concerns.

It sounds like you want to use the history of a thing in a causative way within a realist paradigm. Such does not realize the normative assumptions that secretly guide its notion of history.

All we need to do is see if people with certain political beliefs actually do not notice counterevidence. This doesn't mean they are wrong to think the Iraq was wrong or abortions are ok. Both sides of any issue can be shown to literally not notice things that go against their beliefs.

I can see things like this in myself in relation to 'things that happened' and how I viewed them then and notice that I didn't not look at things/hypocrisies/evidence that I would have found hard to face. I protected myself from guilt or shame. — Bylaw

My point about the relation between negative emotions like guilt and shame , and the breakdown of predictive sense-making, is that guilt, shame and anger all have to do with situations that surprise, violate and thus invalidate schemes of understanding the world that we counted on to effectively predict events.Since these emotions are expressions or byproducts of a partial breakdown in the effectiveness of our schemes of understanding events and people, it is not the guilt, shame or anger that we need to protect ourselves from, it is ideas and behaviors of others that we cannot make sense of. We withdraw from people who alarm, disturb or confuse us with ideas that don’t make sense to us, and that as a consequence we may feel are harmful or immoral.
It is not that we simply ignore evidence that contradicts our beliefs, as if a part of ourselves recognizes and fully understands the opposing belief, we form a negative emotion and then decide to protect ourself from this emotion by ignoring the belief. We never get to this stage of recognition and comprehension. A belief is part of a larger system of mutually consistent ideas. It is impossible to incorporate, or even to fully recognize as meaningful, ideas of someone else that are incompatible with that system. Such ideas simply don’t make sense to us, seem incoherent or illogical , or may be mostly invisible. It’s not that we are pretending they don’t make sense, they really dont make sense. This isnt a matter of fooling ourselves or hiding something from ourselves that has already been absorbed. We have no peg, no proper structure to hang it on, and so it simply isn’t assimilated. This selectiveness of perception is a necessary feature of sense making.

In today’s polarized political climate, we spend a lot of time psychoanalyzing our opponents. We say they refuse to accept reality, create fake news, are brainwashed, succumb to shady motives, ignore what they don’t want to hear. What we have a great deal
of difficulty doing is recognizing that a fact only makes the sense it does within a particular account, and people from different backgrounds and histories use different accounts to interpret facts.

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. — igjugarjuk

The question is what it is we are doing when we produce science, philosophy and other forms of understanding. For Rouse , enactivist cognitive science , the phenomenologists and postmodern philosophers, discursive practices of science are not about securing epistemological knowledge but of producing forms of interaction with the world. We ‘know’ the world by changing it, reconstructing it not only with our theories but materially. And this changed world speaks back to us, allowing further transformations of our practices, that then reciprocally reshapes our world. This leaves behind the idea of ‘independence’ in favor of constraints and affordances that feedback from the interventions that our empirical inquiries enact in our world. This is why Rouse likens scientific inquiry to niche construction. Just as organisms enact their own niche via their normative functioning , the niche they produce speaks back and shapes the organism’s goals and patterns of functioning.

As inquirers , we have no use for what is ‘independent’ of our schemes. Extremely slow and simple processes of interacting elements in an ancient universe show a great deal of independence from each other, but such is the stuff of useless , meaningless arbitrariness until it is reconfigured by human construction as a pattern of meaning of relevantly interrelated parts. One could think of this progressive sloughing off of material independence and arbitrariness in terms of Hegel’s dialectical world coming to know itself through its own becoming. Or one could ditch the dialectical idealism and just keep the becoming, as Nietzsche did. In that case this is the fate of independent material reality:

“Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real, that we cannot get down or up to any “reality” except the reality of our drives (since thinking is only a relation between these drives) – aren't we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn't enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well?

We would be able to understand the mechanistic world as a kind of life of the drives, where all the organic functions (self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism) are still synthetically bound together – as a pre-form of life?”

Granted 100% that there is no 'truly' enduring self (and that one cannot step into the same river twice), I'd 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 — igjugarjuk

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 that changes slightly moment to moment. So the object is an idealization, a kind of faith in a total unity that is never fully achieved.

“The consciousness of its [the object’s] existence is here a belief in act; by virtue of the accord in which the perceptive appearances flow off in original presentation, retention, and protention, an accord of continuous self-affirmation, belief is continuous certainty of belief, which has its certainty in this originality of the object in its living being-present.”

The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “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)

“ Every temporal being "appears" in one or another continually changing mode of running-off, and the "Object in the mode of running-of" is in this change always something other, even though we still say that the Object and every point of its time and this time itself are one and the same.”(Husserl 1964)

It sounds like you are arguing that there is a cognitive bias in the research that has concluded there is cognitive bias. If humans who are trying to be objective and have systematic protocols still manage to have a cognitive bias, don't you think this supports the idea in general that many people have a cognitive bias? Further do you really doubt that people adjust their memories to avoid certain feelings and conclusions (about themselves and others)? Sure, objective research can have hidden biases and specific conclusions about cognitive bias may be faulty, but I encounter cognitive bias in myself and others all the time. What gets noticed and what doesn't depending on group identity or ego self-protection. If cognitive bias was a crime, there is clear motive and access. — Bylaw

We don’t observe the world directly but through a personal framework of constructs that form a functional
unity. Each of us is thus ‘biased’ with respect to the perspectives of others. We each live in slightly different worlds. When we reach consensus on facts of situations or the working of the mind , this consensus doesn’t eliminate the perspectival nature of our outlooks. Consensus and normative agreement on scientific fact is an averaging of all of our personal biases , not their elimination. The ‘objective’ fact is a view that no one in particular actually holds, we all hold our own variation on that template.

When we accuse someone of cognitive bias, we are pointing out that their view deviates from
the consensus of the larger group. This doesn’t tell us the view of the majority is more ‘correct’ than that of the deviant. They cannot be said to be in closer touch with ‘true’ reality. The fundamental arbiter of validity of a viewpoint is to what extent it is consistent with one’s own understanding, not whether it measures up to some third person external criterion of truth.

Our negative emotions tell us when an aspect of the world no longer makes sense to us, when our personal anticipations of events fails to match up with what actually ensues( from our own personal perspective). We can block painful emotions , but this is generally a matter of not being able to articulate those feelings of chaos. We repress and avoid what we can’t make sense of, but this doesn’t eliminate the crisis, it only constricts our engagement with the world to what we can handle.

OK but the concept of alteration depends on the endurance of the same. — igjugarjuk

What about the idea that the same endures by continuing to be itself differently? From this vantage, it is endurance of the same which depends on alteration. I would say that this is the essence of deconstruction. If by endure , you mean an empirical notion of duration as persisting self-identity over time, this was critiqued by Bergson, Husserl , Deleuze and Heidegger in different ways.

And I appreciate your even tone and good manners. — igjugarjuk

bitch.

( thought I’d keep you off guard)

His affection for writing was probably connected to its partial or temporary escape from time. — igjugarjuk

But no, monseiur, writing IS time. ( you know, the repetition that alters )

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.) — igjugarjuk

Your writing is a lot more entertaining than mine. ( that’s a compliment)

Okay. And what does that have to do with method? — Jackson

A method is a way of proceeding in the world , a way of organizing particular meanings according to a larger scheme or totality of relevance. In that sense , method cannot be separated from value system, of which it forms a subspecies.

What is the "basis of all methods?" — Jackson

The structure of temporality is the basis of all methods , in that it throws us into a world that is already intelligible to us in some way. This familiarity with the world is the basis of method.

↪Olivier5 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) — Moliere

Derrida’s notion of deconstruction is not a method but a way of understanding the basis of all methods. And it not an algorithm but a way of understanding how all algorithms deconstruct themselves.

A man gets lost in the mountains and carves his name on some peak before he dies. A thousand years later his inscription is discovered for the first time. The world has a kind of memory it seems, some kind of 'wax' that holds a pattern in the absence of us and, presumably, all lifeforms. It doesn't matter so much to me whether the scientific image is equated with this metaphorical wax. I just think 'anti-materialists' have to explain the possibility of this lonely inscription. — igjugarjuk

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? It can be read after my death, but not without an alteration of my originally intended meaning.
And even in writing to myself , the same alteration takes place:

“Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)... It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition(p.53)”

So what is left of the sense of ‘materiality’ here?

What do you think ? Is materialism right ? Is idealism right ? Is it some mix of the two ? Can we even settle the question ? Is materialism a good explanation for patterns in different experiences ? — Hello Human

I think the position you’d be comfortable with is neo-Kantianism, It asserts that the facts of the world only come to us mediated by our interpretations , but nonetheless a world outside of consciousness does indeed exist.

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. — igjugarjuk

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.

He was a womanizer like Sartre, but with better hygiene. — igjugarjuk

I haven’t read much on this aspect of Derrida’s life. Can you say more?

Yes, and this requires more explanation, of course. When deconstruction claims that we really do not have grounds upon which the truth of our literary writings rest, this is the stuff that skepticism is made of. There's more, but I've been overposting here already. :joke: :

Note: grounds here means external foundation upon which truth is based on — L'éléphant

But deconstruction doesn’t need external grounds. When one assumes such ‘externality’, one is already courting skepticism. Deconstruction doesn’t do away with grounds , it takes what has preciously been assumed as ‘external’ and makes it internal to a structure. Put differently , what grounds any element of meaning is memory , history , a formal basis from which I intend to mean something. But the catch here is that in intending to mean what I mean , I alter that history , memory , form. So each element of meaning rests on a ground that it alters , and both of these features take place at the same time( form and content , memory and change. It is not the case that this constitutes lack of a ground, and therefore a skepticism. Deconstruction reveals an extraordinarily intricate order to the flow of meaningful expereince. It reveals ongoing patterns and thematics, and how they are created and persist by continuing to be the same differently. The kinds of things one expects from skepticism: chance, randomness, arbitrariness , meaninglessness, are utterly missing from deconstruction.

I used Miller because he provided an authoritative explanation for what I needed. — L'éléphant

I disagree with Miller’s account of deconstruction. His definition is one that has been used within literary theory, but their understanding of deconstruction differs from Derrida’s. For one thing, there is never just one “alogical” element in a structure, as if the structure is unified outside or apart from this one element. A structure is a system of differences in which no part has a ‘logical’ relation to any other part. This does not mean that these relations are alogical either. They are neither one nor the other, but both at the same time. We don’t first have structures and then their unraveling. The unraveling is one with their formation , always one element at a time.

The very idea of the rift is skepticism. — Jackson

I agree

I say that's skepticism based on my thoughts of what skepticism is. I don't care whether he claims he's a skeptic. His criticism is a form of skepticism. — L'éléphant

I have been describing skepticism in terms of the impossibility of transcending the rift between our representations of truth and meaning , and the world itself. Is that your notion of skepticism?

Derrida was well aware of Camus and Sartre (he continued to respect Nausea) — igjugarjuk

Here’s my collection of Derrida quotes about Sartre. They’re all nasty. Hold onto your seat:

The Pocket-Size Interview with Jacques Derrida Freddy Tellez and Bruno Mazzoldi “It is true that in my work Sartre was very important, in the beginning. When I was a student, he was already there, and it's by reading Sartre that, in a certain way, I began to get into the field of philosophy and literature. For this reason, it would be absurd for me to try to absolutely distance myself from Sartre. That being said, quite quickly I thought it clear that Sartre was a representative of a philosophy like Husserlian phenomenology, adapted to France, a philosophy that was already beginning to make some noise but that at the same time, and even with respect to what he was introducing or translating from phenomenology, from Heidegger even, that there were some enlargements, distortions, simplifications, which from that point of view seemed to me to amortize what was essentially interesting about the work of Husserl and Heidegger. And so since then I have never ceased, in a certain way, to see better into all of that. [Lights up a cigar.]

FT: But do you mean that from the point of view of the legitimacy of Husserl's and Heidegger's thought, for instance, or of a critique of the reading offered by Sartre of Husserl or Heidegger? JD: Yes, I mean that both in what he was keeping and in what he was critiquing, in my opinion, he was not a rigorous enough reader. And from that point of view, it turns out that the work done by him in France was very ambiguous. I am not saying that it was simply negative, but he and others with him kept from us for a long time the real importance and the sharpness of Husserl's and Heidegger's work while importing them and pretending to critique them, as both translator, if you like, of Husserl and Heidegger and critic of Husserl and Heidegger. This is not to say that it was simply a question of finding our way back into Husserlian and Heideggerian orthodoxy against Sartre. Not at all. But I think that even in order to understand, to critique Husserl and Heidegger, it was necessary to understand them better than Sartre did in those days. The point is not here to issue some condemnation; since that's how it happened, it couldn't have happened otherwise, in those conditions and in a certain number of historical conditions. But it is a fact that Sartre's thought obscured in quite a powerful way what was happening elsewhere in German philosophy, even in the philosophy that he himself pretended to be introducing in France. To say nothing of Marx and to say nothing of Freud and to say nothing of Nietzsche, whom he, in a way, never really read. I mean that he misunderstood Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (to put them together as is usually done) even more than he misunderstood Husserl and Heidegger, whom he nevertheless quoted.

And so, from that point of view, we have to deal with a huge sedimentation of thought, a huge philosophical sediment that covered the French scene for quite a few years after the war and that, I think, has marked everyone from that generation. I would say that there was a lot of dissimulation, and subsequently it has been necessary to undo this sedimentation in order to find again what was dissimulated by it, in a way. But, in the end, I don't want to take it all out on Sartre now and say that he as an individual is responsible for this obscuring. If this obscuring has taken place it is due to a great number of conditions: the French tradition of thought, the state of the French university, the ideological scene in Paris, the political scene in the postwar period. OK, all of that is worthy of an analysis that would not be limited to Sartre as an individual. I would not want to privilege..not even in a critique..the case of Sartre. An analysis would have to be undertaken that would run, again, through very complex historical and political networks, right? Through, evidently, once again, what the French university was like. But Sartre is still, I would say, on this point, even though he left the university quite early and, until today, is very deeply marked, more than some professional academics, by the university, by this very building, by the rhetoric, by the display of the dissertation, of the lesson, in his writing. For this reason his writing, for instance (I haven't read the text on Calder, but I have read others), is still, in spite of his agility, his talent, and his resources, marked by a French university rhetoric against which he has never really busied himself, whatever his position against the university might have been. That doesn't change anything.

I think that, for example, "Cartouches" is more of a rupture with respect to this rhetoric..even though I, me, personally [smiles], am inside the university to a greater degree than Sartre..let's say, more of a rupture against that kind of writing than that of Sartre's.” From ‘Points':

Q.: It is then that you began to read Sartre, right?

J . D . : A little earlier. He played a major role for me then. A model that I have since judged to be nefarious and catastrophic, but that I love; no doubt as what I had to love, and I always love what I have loved, it's very simple . . .

Q.: Nefarious and catastrophic! That's a bit strong; you'll have to explain . . .

J . D . : Do you think we should keep that or cut it? Okay. First of all, I repeat, Sartre no doubt, well, guided me, as he did so many others at the time. Reading him, I discovered Blanchot, Bataille, Ponge-whom I now think one could have read otherwise. But finally, Same was himself the "unsurpassable horizon"P Things changed when, thanks to him but especially against him, I read Husser!, Heidegger, Blanchot, and others. One would have to devote several dozen books to this question: What must a society such as ours be if a man, who, in his own way, rejected or misunderstood so many theoretical and literary events of his timelet's say, to go quickly, psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot-who accumulated and disseminated incredible misreadings of Heidegger, sometimes of Husserl, could come to dominate the cultural scene to the point of becoming a great popular figure? It is true that works can traverse their time like tornadoes, overturn the historical landscape, interpret it without seeming to understand anything about it, without being sensitive or acquiescing to every "novelty."

I don't think this is the case with Sartre but, while asking myself a lot of questions, even about his likeable and legendary generosity, I sometimes share the almost familial affection that many feel for this man whom I have never seen. And who does not belong to the age of those works that matter for me . . .

Q. : And that were being written at the same time . . .

J . D . : Or even much earlier, look at Mallarme! What must a French intellectual be if such a phenomenon can happen or happen again? What grants authority to his evaluations? What interests me still today is especially the France of Sartre, the relation of our culture to this man (rather than to his work) . And also Sartre's relation to the University. It is said that he escaped it or resisted it. It seems to me that university norms determined his work in the most internal fashion, as they did for so many writers who don't realize or who deny this fact. An analysis of his philosophical rhetoric, of his literary criticism, and even of his plays or novels would be greatly helped if it took into account, for better or worse, the models and the history of education, the lycee, the khagne, the Ecole Normale, and the agregation.4 I began this exercise, one day, with some students, taking the example of Sartre's Saint Genet. Thus an enormous screen of French culture. But reading it, I no doubt learned a lot and, even if it goes against him, I am indebted to him. But tell me, is this an interview about Sartre!

Q. : So, in short, you see in Sartre the perfect example of what an intellectual should not be . . .

J . D . : I didn't say that . . .

Q.: But, then, what should be the attitude of an intellectual in relation to political affairs?

J . D . : No one stands to gain by there being a model, especially just one model. Also the category of "intellectual" no longer has very strict limits, and probably never did. It is true that Sartre's example, which is why one has to insist upon it, incites one to prudence. His academic legitimacy (graduate of the Ecole Normale, agrege) and his legitimacy asa writer for a major publishing house5 (don't ever separate these two things, but I am going too quickly) lent to his most impulsive remarks, whether or not you take them seriously, a formidable authority, the authority that was not granted to stricter and more interesting analysts. In political affairs especially, as everyone knows. One could take other examples today, because the thing is being amplified here and there as new powers and new structures appear (media, publishing, and so forth). Not that one has therefore to go into retreat or avoid taking public positions: quite to the contrary, the moment has perhaps come to do more and better, that is, otherwise . . .”

“After the war, under the name of Christian or atheist existentialism, and in conjunction with a fundamentally Christian personalism, the thought that dominated France presented itself essentially as humanist. Even if one does not wish to summarize Sartre's thought under the slogan "existentialism is a humanism," it must be recognized that in Being and Nothingness, The Sketch of a Theory of the Emotions, etc., the major concept, the theme of the last analysis, the irreducible horizon and origin is what was then called "human-reality." As is well known, this is a translation of Heideggerian Dasein. A monstrous translation in many respects, but so much the more significant. That this translation proposed by Corbin was adopted at the time, and that by means of Sartre's authority it reigned, gives us much to think about the reading or the nonreading of Heidegger during this period, and about what was at stake in reading or not reading him in this way. Certainly the notion of "human-reality" translated the project of thinking the meaning of man, the humanity of man, on a new basis, if you will. If the neutral and undetermined notion of "human reality" was substituted for the notion of man, with all its metaphysical heritage and the substantialist motif or temptation inscribed in it, it was also in order to suspend all the presuppositions which had always constituted the concept of the unity of man.

I find the whole idea of cognitive bias unconvincing. Even if it is true, so what?
— Jackson
, ↪Joshs

Then you are doomed to indulge in cognitive bias. You are denying accepted psychology. — Banno

Not every school of psychology considers the objectivizing approach implied by cognitive bias as “accepted”. There are approaches which are troubled by the assumption that discerning such things as bias is a matter of passing judgments on easily discernible facts. This fails to acknowledge the deeply normative character of supposedly neutral and ‘objective’ descriptions of cognitive bias. The vantage from which empirical psychology determines a behavior to be biased is itself an unacknowledged normative bias.

Small point maybe, but what do you imagine to be the center of a system of differences without positive elements? I don't see a center for language itself, but only a central cluster perhaps in certain language games (such as in philosophy there are few master concepts entangled with all the others.) — igjugarjuk

Hmm. A system of differences without positive elements. The question is how that system comes into play in contextual word use. As a normative , grammatical or rule-forming criterion, is the relation between this system and actual word use referential( the rule is accessed and applied to the current situation) or does the system only actually exist as it is being redefined by the present context of word use? Witty thought of such systems in terms of family resemblance wherein the particular context establishes the rule, (from the particular to the general) , rather than the pre-existing structure determining the contextual sense of the world ( from general to particular)

I'll prove it to you: how can the post modernist condemn Nazism? Post modernism is morally relativist - so cannot condemn nazism on moral grounds. I can condemn Nazism - because I know it's factually baseless, and immoral. But post modernism is also epistemically relativist - so facts are no help to you either. On what basis can you condemn nazism? You cannot! — karl stone

Here’s a reply from one of the right’s favorite punching bags, Derrida, the poster child of postmodern ‘relativism’:

“Of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] , a better way, and let i t b e said i n passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, preciSion, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.”