6 ms·

Derrida vs. the rationalists

43 points by Hooke 10y ago

RodericDay 10y ago
It's not really just Derrida, is it? I find the most powerful anecdote of the whole bunch is that of Wittgenstein. The article mentions him -- Outside France, the dominant philosophical school was analytic philosophy. A broad church, its foundations had initially been articulated by, among others, Bertrand Russell, GE Moore and the early works of Wittgenstein. -- but just mentioning "the early works" offhand is misleading, since it goes a lot deeper than that. Wittgenstein wasn't just "a part of the church". After the Tractatus, he was hailed by many of them, especially among the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle that most closely resemble "skeptics" and techie-technocrats today, as their Jesus. And with Philosophical Investigations, later on, he criticized the climax of his earlier work, and became an apostate of sorts. Everyone with a passing interest in this topic should check out Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, "Duty of Genius". It's very well told.
- yarrel 10y ago
  Wittgenstein is interesting in the history of philosophy as the guy who ruined it twice. Had he lived longer there's no doubt he would have done it again.
- biggestlou 10y ago
  And Monk wrote that biography at the age of 26. I've wasted my life.
  - ianai 10y ago
    It was in my early 20s that I was most active with philosophy. Let's not forget that many (most?) philosophers first lived their lives and then wrote about it in their end years. I'm betting my story will be similar.
  - ASipos 10y ago
    34.
- wanda 10y ago
  I must point out that Wittgenstein should not be considered a messiah to logical positivists, because while they saw his Tractatus as the holy grail — the ultimate philosophical weapon, the end of the line for those vacuous, angst-ridden, mysticism-indulging continentalists — they grossly misunderstood Wittgenstein's point. I have found the following quote by F. H. Bradley to capture the folly of the Vienna Circle: "The man who is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is wholly impossible... is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles." (F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality) (I typically whip this quote out whenever conversing with a peer in the overtly cynical industry of software development. Many of my peers over the years have been quite convinced that philosophy is nonsense, but this is already a philosophical stance.) Suffice it to say that Wittgenstein despised the logical positivists, audacious and hasty as they were to presume that his Tractatus was little more than a weapon against continental philosophy and metaphysics, and an answer to all philosophical problems. I think anyone who perceives Wittgenstein as a logical positivist or a champion of theirs has only read or only understood the final statement of the book: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (or something like that). This does not mean that the continental philosopher should not speak, for two reasons: 1. if you have understood continental philosopher's work, he typically is not attempting to speak from a privileged, metaphysical position, but rather from a wholly anthropic and internal perspective; 2. Wittgenstein was not trying to tell metaphysically minded philosophers to shut up, but rather that their efforts were doomed by virtue of being without any meaning w.r.t. the real world. Wittgenstein all but condemns his own book to Hume's philosophical fire in the preface to the Tractatus, stating that he who understands what Wittgenstein came to understand, and recorded in the book, will realise that to grok the book is to ascend a ladder and kick the ladder away beneath you. This is because the book itself is without meaningfulness by its own standards. In a similarly unsettling (for logical positivists) vein, Wittgenstein bundled mathematical propositions in with those nasty, problematic metaphysical ones, because for Wittgenstein, both are tautologies, or truisms. Think about this statement: 'God is an omnipotent being'. Using a typical definition of the word 'God', this is a truism, because the word God lacks a reference to a real world object and is instead intended to signify something with the following properties: - existence - omnipotence - omniscience - omnipresence So the statement 'God is an omnipotent being' is equivalent to 'an omnipotent being is an omnipotent being'. Which is the same as saying '2+2 = 4', because 2+2 is the definition of 4, and can be considered an alias to 4, just as 4 is the definition of 2+2 and so on. Mathematics is an infinite set of truisms, and the only reason we don't have a total understanding of mathematics is that we are not omniscient and because there are, as has been proven, propositions in mathematics that cannot be proven. Taken out of context, Wittgenstein's Tractatus is nothing more than its conclusion: that there can be no meaningful conversations about topics like deities and ethics because they are beyond the epistemology of humans — or as I like to phrase it, out of scope. Yet he arrived at this conclusion by being rather more similar to a continental philosopher in his thinking than any analytic philosopher. His work has not stopped nearly every human from discussing such topics in the years after his work was published, and while Wittgenstein was mostly careful to avoid such discussions, this was simply because he considered it a waste of energy and time.
camdenlock 10y ago
> Derrida’s famously difficult thought is often dismissed as “post-modern” nonsense. Is there more to it than might first appear? TL;DR: No. Well-written article, though. Unfortunately for the author, Derrida's philosophy is fundamentally self-defeating, so arguing for its value is an extremely expensive exercise in fighting against the nature of our universe. So, 30 Rock is my go-to philosophical rebuttal for such displays of mind-numbing struggle: "Life finds a way. Did you learn NOTHING from Jurassic Park?"
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  To expand a bit: How do we know what Derrida thought? Well, he wrote several papers, and he gave several talks. But if Derrida's view is correct, we can't be sure that we actually understood what he meant, either. Worse, if Derrida really believed what he said, why write a paper or give a talk anyway? It's not like his readers or hearers were going to understand him, so why bother? (That is, Derrida, by writing the papers and giving the talks, demonstrates that on some level he doesn't believe his own position.)
  - bitwize 10y ago
    The rationalists say that a major purpose of language is to communicate facts about the world. The postmodernists say: "What are 'facts'? What is 'world'?" So with facts gone and the real world gone, that leaves only one purpose for language, for saying anything at all: to get others to do what you want them to do. (This is a simplification of Wittgenstein's "language-games" of the form of e.g., the Builders' Game.) I've always maintained that Derridean postmodernism is, in actuality, a form of long-form trolling whose main purpose was to provoke traditional philosophers by baffling them or getting them to fruitlessly debate the propositions. In this it's sort of a language-game: Derrida produced words, and the philosophers reacted in just the way he intended them to when he wrote the words. Whether it was for his own amusement, to show those stiff-necked rationalists that they're not immune to cognitive or deductive traps, or whatever -- who knows? But the interesting bit is that trolling survives as a valid intention for Derrida to produce the philosophy he did, whether or not he took his own propositions seriously (though if he did, he would have to consider whether the academics he was trolling existed just in his own head).
gambler 10y ago
The only good thing about post-modernism is the fact that it illustrates the vacuous nature of academic philosophy. If the field had anything worthwhile in it, it would have built up some kind of institutional immune response to that kind of bullshit. And no, I don't mean an endless stream of convoluted rebuttals. I mean post-modernism just wouldn't enter any sensible conversation in the first place. I find it amusing that fsmoud scientists from Feynman to Dawkins often jab at philosohers in their works, probably thanks to post-modernism.
- bykovich 10y ago
  Probably thanks to unmitigated baseless arrogance.
- jnbiche 10y ago
  You realize that most academic philosophers in the US and other English-speaking countries share your attitude toward post-modernism, right? TFA even points out the divide. You must have gone to a program with a "traditional" philosophy department, perhaps in Europe? Most university philosophy departments in the US focus on logic, analytic philosophy, philosophy of science, cognitive science, etc, etc. I can't even think of a single philosopher at my university's department who would have done anything but chuckle at post-modernism. In fact, it was a philosophy prof who told me about the book "Fashionable Nonsense". From the article: "Outside France, the dominant philosophical school was analytic philosophy. A broad church, its foundations had initially been articulated by, among others, Bertrand Russell, GE Moore and the early works of Wittgenstein. Founded on the notion of conceptual clarity, analytic philosophy (in its crudest form) regards philosophy as a branch of the sciences, often subservient to the natural sciences, or at best continuous with them. It proposes that through the logical analysis of philosophical propositions, the basic questions of existence can be clarified, and possibly solved." So why would you generalize all philosophers into the bucket of post-modernism? Many of the founders of modern analytic philosophy were mathematicians: Russell, Frege, Whitehead, Peirce, etc.
  - mannykannot 10y ago
    A fair point, but the persistence of the divide is, itself, telling (or interesting. Or both.)
usgroup 10y ago
Pain ... Studied analytical Phil at Undergrad and struggled with what's well captured in this joke: "To do maths you need pen, paper and a wastebasket. For philosophy, the pen and paper are enough." There's just so much noise, even in it's supposedly distilled analytical form. The stuff worth a damn e.g ontology, possible world semantics, epistemological logic, etc quickly finds its way out into another field. It's there, the value is there, it's just all that damned noise is too.
- crucialfelix 10y ago
  Noise is just music that hasn't yet been understood, codified and eventually commodified. (I'm joking, but not entirely)
  - splawn 10y ago
    Noise is a sub-genere of music. (I'm serious, but not entirely) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_music
  - crucialfelix 10y ago
    It's also the name of a very influential book on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise:_The_Political_Economy_of_Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise:_The_Political_Economy_o...
EekSnakePond 10y ago
The early internet was a Derridian playground. There was, literally, nothing beyond the text at 9600 baud. Identity and purpose and intention of content generators were permanently undecipherable in those days. You could only take things as they were presented to maintain sanity and causality.
lutusp 10y ago
Postmodernists deny the reality of shared, objective truths, then try to begin a dialogue requiring what's just been denied.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  Worse: Presenting their view as the shared, objective truth.
d--b 10y ago
Come on, as technologists, hn readers cant seriously favor structuralism over post modern thinking. To put it in CS terms: structuralists would think that general AI would be obtained by coding expert systems. Structuralists were the ones who believed the semantic web would work. That as engineers, we could write a structure, a schema, a program, that would underlie all things and ideas in the universe. This of course has been quite a failure. The bottom up approach to AI, which appeared with neural networks, is deeply postmodern. It assumes that all experience is relative and that human intelligence grasps with reality in a reflexive way. reacting to stimuli rather than building a unique model of the world that would fit all situations. You may say that post modern philosophy is written in a hard way, but it cant be denied that there are a lot of people here who are postmodern without knowing it!
- yongjik 10y ago
  That's about as vacuous as saying that neural networks require every constituent to work in harmony with each other and thus show the value of Confucian ideology over Platonic pursuit of objective truth.
gnl 10y ago
"No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it." Many identities, lifes, careers, organizations have been built around the assumption that objective and absolute knowledge is possible, truth can be defined, reality must have a solid core at its foundation. We're talking countless man-centuries of emotional, intellectual and social investment. No one wants to shake the branch they're sitting on. And yet, the way I see it if someone claims to be engaged in science or philosophy, that is precisely what they must do, rather than summarily discard anything they have been conditioned to consider ridiculous. Between "we don't know anything about anything, might as well drop the whole science thing" and "we know with absolute certainty that <something>" there is this huge grey area, where we seem to know enough about what seems to be reality that we can often predict it, shape it to our liking and build cool things. To me, the most interesting question of this whole postmodernism vs scientific inquiry/analytic philosophy debate is why so many are so incredibly uncomfortable in that area (where, one might argue, life actually happens), that they must either, with an almost religious zeal, insist on having found absolute truth (despite no evidence having ever been produced to that effect and, allowing for the existence of objective reality, tons of evidence of having been wrong in the past) or altogether deny the obvious usefulness of the scientific method. It seems that more often than not we can only engage with reality while pretending that we can know, understand and control it with absolute certainty and if/when disavowed of that illusion, are ready to immediately fall into some form of nihilism, denying any objective approach to anything. What I'm saying is that there's nothing wrong with using an analytic/scientific approach to make good things happen and generally have a good time while at the same time not being quite as trigger happy with the "pseudoscience", "ridiculous" and "impossible" labels when something doesn't fit our ideas of how the world is supposed to be. Let's not forget there was a time when one could get locked up for suggesting the earth was orbiting the sun.
woodandsteel 10y ago
I think the short answer to deconstruction is that meaning comes from the regularities of the human body and the world in which it lives. However, contrary to much (but certainly not all) Western philosophy, this meaning cannot be fully described in a single set of precise concepts. I think the key to understanding deconstruction is that is is what the French left became when it lost its faith in the Communist movement, but still wanted to maintain a hope in bringing about a radical new world that would overcome all the problems of the modern liberal industrial era.

43 points by Hooke 10y ago

It's not really just Derrida, is it? I find the most powerful anecdote of the whole bunch is that of Wittgenstein. The article mentions him -- Outside France, the dominant philosophical school was analytic philosophy. A broad church, its foundations had initially been articulated by, among others, Bertrand Russell, GE Moore and the early works of Wittgenstein. -- but just mentioning "the early works" offhand is misleading, since it goes a lot deeper than that. Wittgenstein wasn't just "a part of the church". After the Tractatus, he was hailed by many of them, especially among the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle that most closely resemble "skeptics" and techie-technocrats today, as their Jesus. And with Philosophical Investigations, later on, he criticized the climax of his earlier work, and became an apostate of sorts. Everyone with a passing interest in this topic should check out Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, "Duty of Genius". It's very well told.

yarrel 10y ago
Wittgenstein is interesting in the history of philosophy as the guy who ruined it twice. Had he lived longer there's no doubt he would have done it again.
biggestlou 10y ago
And Monk wrote that biography at the age of 26. I've wasted my life.
- ianai 10y ago
  It was in my early 20s that I was most active with philosophy. Let's not forget that many (most?) philosophers first lived their lives and then wrote about it in their end years. I'm betting my story will be similar.
- ASipos 10y ago
  34.
wanda 10y ago
I must point out that Wittgenstein should not be considered a messiah to logical positivists, because while they saw his Tractatus as the holy grail — the ultimate philosophical weapon, the end of the line for those vacuous, angst-ridden, mysticism-indulging continentalists — they grossly misunderstood Wittgenstein's point. I have found the following quote by F. H. Bradley to capture the folly of the Vienna Circle: "The man who is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is wholly impossible... is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles." (F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality) (I typically whip this quote out whenever conversing with a peer in the overtly cynical industry of software development. Many of my peers over the years have been quite convinced that philosophy is nonsense, but this is already a philosophical stance.) Suffice it to say that Wittgenstein despised the logical positivists, audacious and hasty as they were to presume that his Tractatus was little more than a weapon against continental philosophy and metaphysics, and an answer to all philosophical problems. I think anyone who perceives Wittgenstein as a logical positivist or a champion of theirs has only read or only understood the final statement of the book: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" (or something like that). This does not mean that the continental philosopher should not speak, for two reasons: 1. if you have understood continental philosopher's work, he typically is not attempting to speak from a privileged, metaphysical position, but rather from a wholly anthropic and internal perspective; 2. Wittgenstein was not trying to tell metaphysically minded philosophers to shut up, but rather that their efforts were doomed by virtue of being without any meaning w.r.t. the real world. Wittgenstein all but condemns his own book to Hume's philosophical fire in the preface to the Tractatus, stating that he who understands what Wittgenstein came to understand, and recorded in the book, will realise that to grok the book is to ascend a ladder and kick the ladder away beneath you. This is because the book itself is without meaningfulness by its own standards. In a similarly unsettling (for logical positivists) vein, Wittgenstein bundled mathematical propositions in with those nasty, problematic metaphysical ones, because for Wittgenstein, both are tautologies, or truisms. Think about this statement: 'God is an omnipotent being'. Using a typical definition of the word 'God', this is a truism, because the word God lacks a reference to a real world object and is instead intended to signify something with the following properties: - existence - omnipotence - omniscience - omnipresence So the statement 'God is an omnipotent being' is equivalent to 'an omnipotent being is an omnipotent being'. Which is the same as saying '2+2 = 4', because 2+2 is the definition of 4, and can be considered an alias to 4, just as 4 is the definition of 2+2 and so on. Mathematics is an infinite set of truisms, and the only reason we don't have a total understanding of mathematics is that we are not omniscient and because there are, as has been proven, propositions in mathematics that cannot be proven. Taken out of context, Wittgenstein's Tractatus is nothing more than its conclusion: that there can be no meaningful conversations about topics like deities and ethics because they are beyond the epistemology of humans — or as I like to phrase it, out of scope. Yet he arrived at this conclusion by being rather more similar to a continental philosopher in his thinking than any analytic philosopher. His work has not stopped nearly every human from discussing such topics in the years after his work was published, and while Wittgenstein was mostly careful to avoid such discussions, this was simply because he considered it a waste of energy and time.

camdenlock 10y ago

> Derrida’s famously difficult thought is often dismissed as “post-modern” nonsense. Is there more to it than might first appear? TL;DR: No. Well-written article, though. Unfortunately for the author, Derrida's philosophy is fundamentally self-defeating, so arguing for its value is an extremely expensive exercise in fighting against the nature of our universe. So, 30 Rock is my go-to philosophical rebuttal for such displays of mind-numbing struggle: "Life finds a way. Did you learn NOTHING from Jurassic Park?"

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
To expand a bit: How do we know what Derrida thought? Well, he wrote several papers, and he gave several talks. But if Derrida's view is correct, we can't be sure that we actually understood what he meant, either. Worse, if Derrida really believed what he said, why write a paper or give a talk anyway? It's not like his readers or hearers were going to understand him, so why bother? (That is, Derrida, by writing the papers and giving the talks, demonstrates that on some level he doesn't believe his own position.)
- bitwize 10y ago
  The rationalists say that a major purpose of language is to communicate facts about the world. The postmodernists say: "What are 'facts'? What is 'world'?" So with facts gone and the real world gone, that leaves only one purpose for language, for saying anything at all: to get others to do what you want them to do. (This is a simplification of Wittgenstein's "language-games" of the form of e.g., the Builders' Game.) I've always maintained that Derridean postmodernism is, in actuality, a form of long-form trolling whose main purpose was to provoke traditional philosophers by baffling them or getting them to fruitlessly debate the propositions. In this it's sort of a language-game: Derrida produced words, and the philosophers reacted in just the way he intended them to when he wrote the words. Whether it was for his own amusement, to show those stiff-necked rationalists that they're not immune to cognitive or deductive traps, or whatever -- who knows? But the interesting bit is that trolling survives as a valid intention for Derrida to produce the philosophy he did, whether or not he took his own propositions seriously (though if he did, he would have to consider whether the academics he was trolling existed just in his own head).

gambler 10y ago

The only good thing about post-modernism is the fact that it illustrates the vacuous nature of academic philosophy. If the field had anything worthwhile in it, it would have built up some kind of institutional immune response to that kind of bullshit. And no, I don't mean an endless stream of convoluted rebuttals. I mean post-modernism just wouldn't enter any sensible conversation in the first place. I find it amusing that fsmoud scientists from Feynman to Dawkins often jab at philosohers in their works, probably thanks to post-modernism.

bykovich 10y ago
Probably thanks to unmitigated baseless arrogance.
jnbiche 10y ago
You realize that most academic philosophers in the US and other English-speaking countries share your attitude toward post-modernism, right? TFA even points out the divide. You must have gone to a program with a "traditional" philosophy department, perhaps in Europe? Most university philosophy departments in the US focus on logic, analytic philosophy, philosophy of science, cognitive science, etc, etc. I can't even think of a single philosopher at my university's department who would have done anything but chuckle at post-modernism. In fact, it was a philosophy prof who told me about the book "Fashionable Nonsense". From the article: "Outside France, the dominant philosophical school was analytic philosophy. A broad church, its foundations had initially been articulated by, among others, Bertrand Russell, GE Moore and the early works of Wittgenstein. Founded on the notion of conceptual clarity, analytic philosophy (in its crudest form) regards philosophy as a branch of the sciences, often subservient to the natural sciences, or at best continuous with them. It proposes that through the logical analysis of philosophical propositions, the basic questions of existence can be clarified, and possibly solved." So why would you generalize all philosophers into the bucket of post-modernism? Many of the founders of modern analytic philosophy were mathematicians: Russell, Frege, Whitehead, Peirce, etc.
- mannykannot 10y ago
  A fair point, but the persistence of the divide is, itself, telling (or interesting. Or both.)

usgroup 10y ago

Pain ... Studied analytical Phil at Undergrad and struggled with what's well captured in this joke: "To do maths you need pen, paper and a wastebasket. For philosophy, the pen and paper are enough." There's just so much noise, even in it's supposedly distilled analytical form. The stuff worth a damn e.g ontology, possible world semantics, epistemological logic, etc quickly finds its way out into another field. It's there, the value is there, it's just all that damned noise is too.

crucialfelix 10y ago
Noise is just music that hasn't yet been understood, codified and eventually commodified. (I'm joking, but not entirely)
- splawn 10y ago
  Noise is a sub-genere of music. (I'm serious, but not entirely) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_music
- crucialfelix 10y ago
  It's also the name of a very influential book on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise:_The_Political_Economy_of_Music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise:_The_Political_Economy_o...

EekSnakePond 10y ago

The early internet was a Derridian playground. There was, literally, nothing beyond the text at 9600 baud. Identity and purpose and intention of content generators were permanently undecipherable in those days. You could only take things as they were presented to maintain sanity and causality.

lutusp 10y ago

Postmodernists deny the reality of shared, objective truths, then try to begin a dialogue requiring what's just been denied.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Worse: Presenting their view as the shared, objective truth.

d--b 10y ago

Come on, as technologists, hn readers cant seriously favor structuralism over post modern thinking. To put it in CS terms: structuralists would think that general AI would be obtained by coding expert systems. Structuralists were the ones who believed the semantic web would work. That as engineers, we could write a structure, a schema, a program, that would underlie all things and ideas in the universe. This of course has been quite a failure. The bottom up approach to AI, which appeared with neural networks, is deeply postmodern. It assumes that all experience is relative and that human intelligence grasps with reality in a reflexive way. reacting to stimuli rather than building a unique model of the world that would fit all situations. You may say that post modern philosophy is written in a hard way, but it cant be denied that there are a lot of people here who are postmodern without knowing it!

yongjik 10y ago
That's about as vacuous as saying that neural networks require every constituent to work in harmony with each other and thus show the value of Confucian ideology over Platonic pursuit of objective truth.

gnl 10y ago

"No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it." Many identities, lifes, careers, organizations have been built around the assumption that objective and absolute knowledge is possible, truth can be defined, reality must have a solid core at its foundation. We're talking countless man-centuries of emotional, intellectual and social investment. No one wants to shake the branch they're sitting on. And yet, the way I see it if someone claims to be engaged in science or philosophy, that is precisely what they must do, rather than summarily discard anything they have been conditioned to consider ridiculous. Between "we don't know anything about anything, might as well drop the whole science thing" and "we know with absolute certainty that <something>" there is this huge grey area, where we seem to know enough about what seems to be reality that we can often predict it, shape it to our liking and build cool things. To me, the most interesting question of this whole postmodernism vs scientific inquiry/analytic philosophy debate is why so many are so incredibly uncomfortable in that area (where, one might argue, life actually happens), that they must either, with an almost religious zeal, insist on having found absolute truth (despite no evidence having ever been produced to that effect and, allowing for the existence of objective reality, tons of evidence of having been wrong in the past) or altogether deny the obvious usefulness of the scientific method. It seems that more often than not we can only engage with reality while pretending that we can know, understand and control it with absolute certainty and if/when disavowed of that illusion, are ready to immediately fall into some form of nihilism, denying any objective approach to anything. What I'm saying is that there's nothing wrong with using an analytic/scientific approach to make good things happen and generally have a good time while at the same time not being quite as trigger happy with the "pseudoscience", "ridiculous" and "impossible" labels when something doesn't fit our ideas of how the world is supposed to be. Let's not forget there was a time when one could get locked up for suggesting the earth was orbiting the sun.

woodandsteel 10y ago

I think the short answer to deconstruction is that meaning comes from the regularities of the human body and the world in which it lives. However, contrary to much (but certainly not all) Western philosophy, this meaning cannot be fully described in a single set of precise concepts. I think the key to understanding deconstruction is that is is what the French left became when it lost its faith in the Communist movement, but still wanted to maintain a hope in bringing about a radical new world that would overcome all the problems of the modern liberal industrial era.