Re: text and links some might like to see

What is quoted down below, in its entirety since it probably isn't
remembered well, is a post that Jim made in the last post-spike of this
general topic (go down and re-familiarize if you've totally forgotten). I
had kept it in my inbox because I wanted to respond to it, but about a week
and a half ago I decided that since it had been so long it wasn't important
enough to post. Now that the general topic has been revived I've decided to
post a response after all, but probably in briefer form than I had
originally intended.

Jim, I won't object to most of what you said. In fact, if we decide to
chalk up the criticisms in those links to pure bigotry, plain and simple, I
am familiar enough with at least one of the pertinent critics to wish for
some better evidence of it, but I will happily let it be at that. I am very
reluctant, though, with the claim that science or scientific-mindedness has
anything at all to do with it.

I posted a long time ago, toward the beginning of this continuously dying
and resurrecting stream of posts, a post concerning what I take to be the
artificial and profoundly damaging divide between the humanities and the
sciences. I thought that divide was hidden somewhere in the tangle of this
mess, but nobody seemed to pick up on what I was saying and it had a life of
about one post. But here it is again, and you've brought it right to the
surface.

I'll say it again: science is one of the humanities. Treated properly,
science is a liberal (liberating) art, every bit as much a part (and as
important a part) of the humanities as literature or philosophy. And
science has a particular (and profound) relationship with philosophy. The
distinction as we know it, in fact, is only a few centuries old.

Even as the distinction between science and philosophy developed and become
important, so profound and influential a philosopher as Kant himself was
irremovably connected to science: he was nothing if not the president of the
Isaac Newton fan-club. I expect, in fact, that one could argue well that
the Critique of Pure Reason, at its heart, is an exploration of a question
Kant has about Newton -- and even that it seeks to mend the swiftly widening
rift (while maintaining the now necessary distinction) between what men in
his day might have called metaphysics and natural philosophy, or put another
way, between philosophy and science (perhaps between Hume and Newton). Kant
is a particularly good example of the special connection between science and
philosophy, since a solid knowledge of Newton (not to say anything of
Euclid) in fact opens Kant up, gives a reader of Kant a profound advantage
over his fellow readers who are ignorant of the other side of the divide.

I would go so far as to say, in fact, that the thoroughly unscientific mind
will make a piss-poor philosopher (and that the thoroughly unphilosophical
mind will make a piss-poor scientist).

It might be that Chomsky and Norris and Mellor and the others are dogmatic
bigots, that they have commitments that require them to be dismissive of
Derrida and people like him, and that they cling to these commitments
unrelentingly and unreasonably. I affirm, however, that such commitments,
if they exist, are not simply to science. If there is something of worth in
Derrida, it must be every bit as accessible to a good scientist as to
anybody else.

Science is not, to use your phrase, "foundationally incompatible" with
philosophy, and it ought not to be so with any truth in Derrida (even if he
is, as you say, "negative and questioning"). Some of the things you say to
this effect seem to indicate only an unfortunate ignorance of science.

(And apropos of I'm not sure what, but in case it's interesting or at all
insightful, Chomsky has been by scientists and philosophers alike called --
and criticized for being -- a Cartesian.)

And on a slightly different note, you said of Mellor at the end of the post
(and have said since):
<< It's interesting how he defends authorial intent when that's been tossed
aside for over 50 years now. Derrida has nothing to do with this. >>

It might be so that authorial intent has been tossed aside as irrelevant or
a nuisance or fundamentally inaccessible by literary critics for several
decades, but this tossing aside has not -- at least as it seems to me --
extended very far beyond the circles most interested in literary criticism.
Mellor's objection is, in fact, very good evidence of this. Perhaps he's
all wrong about Derrida, perhaps he's even dogmatic and bigoted about it,
but he's no dummy and he's not isolated from the last fifty years of
intellectual progress. I'm sure that one can, in fact, find very bright and
widely-read people in a great variety of departments in great universities
all over the world who have not "tossed aside" authorial intent. Derrida
(or Derrida and the others somehow popularly affiliated with him) has become
a figurehead for the assertion of the inaccessibility of authorial intent.
People who have never encountered the idea with a name attached are likely
to encounter it first with Derrida's name attached, and that -- despite what
critics have been saying for over fifty years -- is how he DOES have
something to do with it.

-robbie

Jim's old message follows:
> Responses below. Finally read the links:
>
> L. Manning Vines wrote:
>
> >You can find it here:
> >http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html
> >If you don't want to read all of it, you can jump to the pertinent stuff
by
> >having your browser search for "Derrida."
> >
> In this link I think Chomsky has a point about some of the
> characteristics of "theory" though I think he tends to understand
> "theory" in a scientific, mechanistic framework (you keep seeing
> references to science when he gropes for examples). I tend to agree
> with some of his observations, and think it's commendable that he
> actually read /Of Grammatology/, but the fact is there are books out
> there that do talk about Derrida's philosophy in fairly plain language.
> If he hasn't found them it's because he hasn't looked. It sounds to me
> like he's not interested in looking -- which is, of course, fine -- but
> then he needs to withdraw some of his claims. I suspect the people on
> the list are probably guilty of just what he describes, but that's not
> true of the world outside the list.
>
> I agree that what many of the theorists are saying isn't necessarily
> new, but it is their emphasis that is new.
>
> When Chomsky said this: "It's certainly true that lots of people can't
> read the books I write. That's not because the ideas or language are
> complicated --- we have no problems in informal discussion on exactly
> the same points, and even in the same words. "
>
> I had to laugh. Spivak said the same thing about her writing recently
> -- "the ideas and language aren't that complicated."
>
> No, of course not, not if you're the author. I laughed at Spivak too.
>
> >Another article is here: http://cognet.mit.edu/Books/chomsky/5/8.html
> >This, also, is on post-modernism (I am aware that John -- I do believe it
> >was John -- said with some authority that on some grounds Derrida is not
a
> >post-modernist) and Derrida fares a little bit better here. Chomsky is
> >still critical of him, but does say that "Derrida. . . at least should be
> >read. . ."
> >
> It's interesting that the author said this about Chomsky -- "But
> postmodernism nonetheless says something, in its own obfuscated
> language, that is an affront to Chomsky's sensibilities." -- which is
> what I've been suspecting. The article didn't describe those
> sensibilities and how postmodernism violates them, though, so it doesn't
> really leave us any better than before.
>
> I think Norris is a bit hard on Baudrillard. Yes, the Gulf War "really"
> happened, but hundreds of millions of us only know it as a series of
> images on a TV screen, voices on the radio, and words in print. These
> are all simulacra and we don't, and can't, know how closely they
> correspond to the "real" Gulf War. It's conceivable our sources of
> information are lying to us significantly. It's almost certain they're
> lying to us at least somewhat. I wonder what Norris would say about the
> movie Capricorn One.
>
> The article did mention Derrida in a positive light, yes. It's a nice
> verbalization of some of my own ideas. Look at the language used to
> describe Derrida's work in /Of Grammaology/, though -- it consists of
> /tu quoque /("you too") arguments (a "you too" argument would go: "It's
> hypocritical for the US to want to keep Iraq from having nuclear weapons
> because it has them too." This is technically a logical fallacy, but I
> think it depends on how the argument is being used), and it "carries the
> argument by sheer force of reasoning and meticulous attention to the
> blind-spots in his opponents' discourse."
>
> None of this -- the /tu quoque/ argumentation, or the pointing out of
> blind spots -- is really part of formal scholarship on, say, Rousseau
> and Plato, unless it was incorporated into a coherent description of the
> philosophies as a whole, which Derrida never attempts. He picks at
> seams, pulls little threads, to unravel opposing arguments.
>
> >And finally, I also bumped into this:
> >http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/~dhm11/Cogito.html
> >It's an interview with Cambridge Professor (Emeritus) Hugh Mellor, one of
> >the more vocal opponents to the honorary degree. He talks about it and
> >Derrida (briefly) toward the bottom of the interview.
> >
> Heh...this opening line told me everything I needed to know: "Herbert
> Feigl, who had been a member of the Vienna Circle and was a friend of
> Einstein and Popper. I took a course with him. That was what really led,
> in the end, to my becoming a philosopher." -- Popper is the kind of
> philosopher only a scientist, or the scientifically minded, would love.
> No wonder he's not fond of Derrida.
>
> I mean, look at what he says here: "But there is also a more
> mathematically based, scientifically oriented tradition of philosophy
> which I got from Richard Braithwaite, but which goes back through
> Russell and Ramsey and Broad. I feel myself as belonging to this
tradition."
>
> Given his scientific bent, it's not surprising that he would say, "I
> think the 'linguistic turn' in modern philosophy has greatly exaggerated
> the importance of language for philosophy."
>
> This is exactly the kind of predisposition that would generate hostility
> to Derrida. For science to work, it can't question the language upon
> which it is based. It can question some uses of language, but not the
> institution of language itself. It doesn't have a frame of reference
> from which it can stand outside language. It can critique verbal
> language from a mathematical framework (which is what seems to be
> happening in his discussion of time), but mathematics can't be used to
> talk about everything.
>
> So when he gets to Derrida it's no wonder he says, "But he also mixes
> these truisms up with silly falsehoods, which, if believed and acted on,
> would cripple intellectual activities of all kinds."
>
> That's exactly the point. If he doesn't see Derrida's assertions as
> "falsehoods," he wouldn't be able to do his work.
>
> And of course he makes Derrida's central ideas "trivial" -- " it's just
> trivially true that if an action leaves a trace, then the trace will
> always be of something in the past that was once present" -- but that's
> not the point Derrida makes. I think the point is that the trace is all
> we ever have, not the presence of the thing itself. And this leads to
> instability in the use of language. He can't and doesn't want to
> confront this, however. In order to do science, he needs to believe he
> is dealing with tangible, present, real things, not sign systems with no
> anchor in a present reality.
>
> It's interesting how he defends authorial intent when that's been tossed
> aside for over 50 years now. Derrida has nothing to do with this.
>
> I think it's interesting that the people mentioned here as critics of
> Derrida seem to be associated with science. Derrida is negative and
> questioning; science is positivist and answering. These stances are
> foundationally incompatible. The question is the end for Derrida, but
> just the beginning for the scientist. These critiques of Derrida are
> inevitable given the previous commitments of the people making the
> critiques.
>
> Jim
>
>
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Received on Sat Mar 8 05:02:44 2003