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On the
Correct Handling of Contradictions
among the Philosophers
Derrida's trademark “find the aporia” method was also used
by Leo Strauss and Alfred North Whitehead, albeit somewhat differently .
Derrida zeroes in on the essential metaphysical
aporiae of whatever it
is that he's reading, finding each text to have been built upon its
own particular defining impossibilities and self-contradictions. (In
lesser hands his method becomes a one-size-fits-all cake-mix
refutation recipe which produces terribly unsuspenseful readings).
Here Derrida destroys Husserl's
description of direct experience:
The fact that non-presence and
otherness are internal to presence strikes at the very root of the
argument for the uselessness of signs in the self-relation.....One
then sees quickly that the presence of the perceived present can
appear as such only inasmuch as it is continuously compounded with a
non-presence and a non-perception, with primary memory and
expectation.....
Derrida, J., Speech and
Phenomena, Northwestern, 1973, pp. 64, 66.
Since the presence or direct
experience which Derrida proved impossible was supposed to have been
the foundation on which everything else was built, Derrida's
critique, if accepted, leaves Husserl's philosophy in shambles.
Whitehead's use of this method was
more sympathetic and more modest, interpreting a certain
self-contradiction in Locke as the incipient and imperfect
recognition of a difficult truth. Strauss's use of the
method, on the other hand, was almost occultist. Strauss looked for rare statements
contradicting most of the rest of an author's work, and interpreted
them as deliberate secret messages expressing the author's true
meaning.
Whitehead credited to Locke the
anticipation of his “neutral monism” principle, which he claimed
resolved the idealist-materialist debate by defining consciousness
and matter as two phases of the same thing -- consciousness being
the emergence of novelty in time, and matter being the
objectification or memory of past novelty. But he grants that
Locke's formulation of the principle was poorly-developed and not
well-integrated into the rest of Locke's philosophy, thus leaving it
open to Hume's attack and supposed refutation, which (accepted by
other philosophers) doomed mankind to two centuries of subjectivist
error.
Whitehead will argue that although
Descartes and Locke officially accept the subjectivist principle,
there are moments when each repudiates the principle ....these
moments are their more profound moments, Whitehead argues, and they
foreshadow the doctrine of 'objectification' in the philosophy of
organism.
Sherburne,
Donald, A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality, Indiana,
1966, pp. 127-8.
I am certainly not maintaining
that Locke grasped explicitly the implications of his words as thus
developed for the philosophy of organism. But it is a short step
from a careless phrase to a flash of insight; nor is it unbelievable
that Locke saw further into the metaphysical problems than some of
his followers.
Whitehead, A. N., Process and
Reality, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 59-60.
He speaks of the ideas in the
perceived objects, and tacitly presupposes their identification with
the corresponding ideas in the perceiving mind..... This mode of
speech can be construed as a casual carelessness of speech on the
part of Locke, or a philosophical inconsistency. But apart from this
inconsistency Locke's philosophy falls to pieces.
(Process and Reality, p.
113)
Strauss, by contrast, does not find
errors or slips in the authors he reads. Their every word was fully
intentional, and our task is to find their deepest level of meaning.
For Strauss all true philosophy must be secret, since the truths of
philosophy necessarily call into question the conventions of
society, and for that reason will put the philosopher at risk of a
Socratic death at the hands of the mob. As a result, philosophers
write esoterically, producing works whose relatively simple obvious
meanings are supportive of the local social and religious conventions, while
at the same time the real, subversive, dangerous
truths are expressed at a deeper, coded level. These deep truths can seldom be
openly acted
upon, and they normally can serve only as the guiding principles of a
secret elite.
If we find in writings of a
certain kind two contradictory theses, we are entitled to assume
that the one which is more secret, i. e. occurs more rarely [or
"only once"], expresses the author's serious view. (p. 230).
Strauss, Leo, What is Political
Philosophy, Chicago, 1959, "On a Forgotten Kind of Writing", pp.
221-233.
To my mind Whitehead's method is the
most reasonable of the three. He only claims that an internal
inconsistency in Locke's philosophy (supposedly corrected by Hume)
actually was an imperfect anticipation of the correct view. In
Whitehead's view, Hume's
revision of Locke was internally more consistent but led to a
subjectivism which misdirected modern
philosophy. Locke's incoherent statement, by contrast, at least left the problem
for others to solve, and he did express the correct view a few
times, though not in a fully-developed form.
By
contrast, Derrida and especially Strauss used an extreme form of the
philological lectio difficilior
rule, which even as a
carefully-used technical tool often leads to problems. Foucault
criticized Derrida for proposing "a
pedagogy that gives to the master's voice the limitless sovereignty
that allows it to restate the text indefinitely",
and the same criticism of Strauss would be valid a fortiori.
Within their frameworks, the more erudite author can say anything he
wants to, and there are really no criteria for argument or
disagreement. Strauss assumes that the authors he reads are perfect,
without inconsistency and perhaps even without internal development,
whereas Derrida seems to assume that the authors he discusses are identically
self-refuting and only of interest as Derridian takeoff-points.
There is good to be found in
everything, of course, but on the balance I think that the effects
in the scholarly world of Strauss's Jesuitical cabbalism and Derrida's euphuistic Gongorism have been more harmful than beneficial.
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Original materials copyright John J
Emerson
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