
Derrida vs. the rationalists - Hooke
https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5143/derrida-vs-the-rationalists
======
usgroup
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
Noise is just music that hasn't yet been understood, codified and eventually
commodified.

(I'm joking, but not entirely)

~~~
splawn
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)

------
camdenlock
> 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
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
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).

~~~
ocschwar
> 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.

And now we have a regime in the United States that has downright weaponized
this posture.

~~~
camdenlock
Indeed. It's distressing how this tactic can be (and is) employed by all sorts
of unhinged extremists, from radical postmodernists to Trump and his cronies.

Being an obscurantist is apparently a great strategy if you want to fool and
exploit people. Would that it weren't so damn effective. :/

------
gambler
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.

~~~
jnbiche
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.

~~~
theoh
The mathematician Michael Harris wrote a very good even-handed review of
Fashionable Nonsense.

He finds possible value in the philosophy that it mocks, and points out the
general crudeness of the authors' attitude and approach. I think his review is
well worth reading.

[https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~michael.harris/Iknow.pdf](https://webusers.imj-
prg.fr/~michael.harris/Iknow.pdf)

~~~
jnbiche
Oh dear God, I read only 1/4 of the review and I feel like I've lost several
IQ points. Yes, perhaps they were crude, but unlike Dr. Harris, I find no
value in the philosophy mocked by Fashionable Nonsense. Even reading _about_
that kind of postmodern philosophical claptrap is pretty devoid of value
(which is probably why I never managed to read all of Fashionable Nonsense).

But yes, he's a mathematician, I agree.

~~~
theoh
Harris has, I think, a really good prose style and a refreshing "all's grist
to my mill" attitude to the topic.

Sorry for the damage to your IQ.

------
gnl
"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.

------
d--b
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
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.

------
RodericDay
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.

~~~
biggestlou
And Monk wrote that biography at the age of 26. I've wasted my life.

~~~
ianai
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.

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

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Worse: Presenting _their view_ as the shared, objective truth.

------
woodandsteel
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.

------
EekSnakePond
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.

