Friday, July 18, 2008

Searle on Derrida and Desconstruction

Frequent readers will undoubtedly know that I have an ongoing cold war with postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, or whatever you want to call the very confusing (and often very nonsensical) "philosophical" position that seeks to "deconstruct" philosophy, science, and rationality in general, revealing them as "social constructs" or--even worse--"mere texualities." The claims espoused by proponents of these positions include such gems as "reality is a text," "truth is a kind of fiction," and (my personal favorite), ""what we think of as the innermost spaces and places of the body—vagina, stomach, intestine—are in fact pockets of externality folded in."

This philosophical style (and I use the term loosely) is exemplified by Jacques Derrida, a French "philosopher" who is commonly credited with having founded the field. His writing, as far as I've seen, is spectacularly confused and cloaked in so much obfuscation and deliberately obscure language as to be almost unreadable, either in French or in translation. He, like most other proponents of his field, is fond of masking his almost universally ridiculous claims in language that makes them seem profound--he could have been the very subject that Nietzsche (no bastion of clarity himself) had in mind when he said "Those who know they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound strive for obscurity." Here's an example from Writing and Difference, just to give you a taste of his style:

The entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix [...] is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence - eidos, arche, telos, energia, ouisa(essence, existence, substance, subject), transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.
If you find yourself thinking "well that doesn't really say anything at all!" congratulations: you're sane. The central thrust of my objection to the entire deconstructionist thesis is (briefly) just this: is isn't accurate to portray all of reality as a "text" to be interpreted it, as a "social construct" or as a relative phenomenon. There is, in fact, a difference between referent and thing referenced, between subjectivity and objectivity, and between truth and fiction. When I make a statement like "there is a tree outside my window," I'm making a claim about how the world really is that, depending on various facts about the real world is either going to be true or false. It isn't a matter of interpretation, opinion, or "textual construction" (whatever that even means), and cloaking these sorts of inanities in sophisticated (or deep sounding) language isn't going to change that basic fact.

I'm not going to continue with my critique here, because John Searle did a much better job than I ever could. The depth and ferocity of his attack on Derrida, his disciples, and deconstructionist ideology in general is breathtaking in its effectiveness. Snip:

What are the results of deconstruction supposed to be? Characteristically the deconstructionist does not attempt to prove or refute, to establish or confirm, and he is certainly not seeking the truth. On the contrary, this whole family of concepts is part of the logocentrism he wants to overcome; rather he seeks to undermine, or call in question, or overcome, or breach, or disclose complicities. And the target is not just a set of philosophical and literary texts, but the Western conception of rationality and the set of presuppositions that underlie our conceptions of language, science, and common sense, such as the distinction between reality and appearance, and between truth and fiction. According to Culler, "The effect of deconstructive analyses, as numerous readers can attest, is knowledge and feelings of mastery" (p. 225).

The trouble with this claim is that it requires us to have some way of distinguishing genuine knowledge from its counterfeits, and justified feelings of mastery from mere enthusiasms generated by a lot of pretentious verbosity. And the examples that Culler and Derrida provide are, to say the least, not very convincing. In Culler's book, we get the following examples of knowledge and mastery: speech is a form of writing (passim), presence is a certain type of absence (p. 106), the marginal is in fact central (p. 140), the literal is metaphorical (p. 148), truth is a kind of fiction (p. 181), reading is a form of misreading (p. 176), understanding is a form of misunderstanding (p. 176), sanity is a kind of neurosis (p. 160), and man is a form of woman (p. 171). Some readers may feel that such a list generates not so much feelings of mastery as of monotony. There is in deconstructive writing a constant straining of the prose to attain something that sounds profound by giving it the air of a paradox, e.g., "truths are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten" (p. 181).


The direct target of his attack is a book by Derrida's disciple Jonathan Culler, but the criticisms hold true for Derrida himself, as well as for much of the deconstructionist movement in general. If you are--like me--inclined to view academia in general (and philosophy in particular) as a project that aims to get at clear and rational truth about an objective world, I urge to you read Searle's criticisms: they are spot on.

Link.

65 comments:

Anonymous said...

I understand not agreeing with someone, or having a viewpoint, but why get upset about it? I don't accept mind-body dualism, but I am not angry at Descartes.

Jon said...

It's not so much "angry" as "irritated that they give philosophy a bad name." I dislike the Deconstructionists in the same way that evolutionary biologists and geologists dislike "creation scientists." By injecting pure nonsense under the guise of "scientific discourse" into the debate, it makes those who are legitimately interested in getting at the truth less equipped to do so.

Perhaps worse, it's the postmodern inanities like "truth is a kind of fiction" that the man on the street often thinks of when he hears the word "philosophy." They give my profession a bad name.

Anonymous said...

"Truth is a kind of fiction" - is that really all that far from Hume's skepticism? In many ways, isn't Hume's skepticism more radical?

Philosophy is not science. It doesn't act like science, its practitioners don't make progress like scientists do, you cannot judge philosophers as if they are scientists. There is no analogy with science.

Jon said...

Yes, I think there's a pretty large difference there (though I don't find Hume's skepticism very convincing either). Statements like "truth is a kind of fiction" pretend to depth, but melt apart under close scrutiny. Hume's thinking, while perhaps erroneous, was at least clear, lucid, and directed at discerning the truth. Derrida (and those like him) would deny that there is such a truth to be found.

I disagree with the idea that philosophy has nothing to do with science. Columbia has a thriving philosophy of science faculty, and offers a MA in the philosophical foundations of physics, a degree which incorporates philosophy classes and physics classes into an interdisciplinary whole. Science--especially research science--is not always crystal clear, and this is particularly true at its edges. In areas like quantum mechanics, cognitive neuroscience, or computer science, philosophers offer an important contribution to science: theory to unite the data.

Additionally, science and philosophy (properly construed) also have the same overall goal: correctly describing the world around us. Methodology differs in some cases (though experimental philosophy is a thriving field), but that does not mean the two disciplines have nothing in common.

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Anonymous said...

and oh.. for the record... I think Derrida kicked Searle's sweet arse!

Unknown said...

The problem is,I think,the gap between the continental and analytic anglo-saxon philosophy.The approach,the subjects discussed,and even the understanding of philosophy are different(for example the problems of the philosophy of mind are hardly discussed on the continent).I've spoken with european students that find analytic philosohy obscure,over-formalized,boring,and even irrelevant ,as you say about Derrida.

I think it's a good idea to study the context,and the history of the specific philosophical climate,before reading Derrida,because his ideas are a response to earlier problems and approaches.The text you cited from him is very clear,its an reformulated idea from Heidegger.It basically says that in western metaphysics the world has been conceived as a structure with a center,a principle that gave it reality,being (such as God,Plato's world of Ideas,etc).
Derida's purpose is to show that such a principle is never present by itself,but,in order to gain meaning,it has to relate to something else,so it's not possible to say that this concept is primordial,and all others are derivative,as many metaphysicians would want us to believe.

Anonymous said...

@Bakkalon.

Your few lines on the subject provide perhaps the clearest summary of Derrida's position I have ever read. Thank you.

Anonymous said...

I'm always amazed and amused at the reductive ingenuity with which people invent straw man arguments against deconstruction. Though it does in a way prove your point: Derrida really should have tried to write more clearly.

firezdog said...

See I think it's exactly the wrong approach to these philosophers to say that they write nonsense -- that's the reason they've gotten away with it for so long!

Anyway, I think Derrida's point here, if a bit rhetorical, is pretty clear (I suppose it helps that I've been exposed to some literary theory and a fair bit of Heidegger):

Even though the history of philosophy seems to consist in a slew of incompatible metaphysical theories (Aristotelianism, Cartesianism, Idealism), all of these 'isms' share the common aim of grounding (epistemology, metaphysics, ethics?) in the present -- in something immediate and indubitable. So (I suppose the thought continues) even though it seems like the history of philosophy consists in successive attempts to get rid of metaphysics, each attempt to overturn the old metaphysical principles ends up just replacing them with new ones.

The right way to object to Derrida in my mind (and Heidegger, in whom I'm more interested) is to defend metaphysics -- or to contest his (empirical) claims about the history of philosophy -- or to show that there's nothing pernicious about (I guess) some form of foundationalism -- or whatever.

I don't think these theories necessarily deserve charity in and of themselves -- they're pretty wretched in quite a few ways -- but I think that the only way to refute them is to carefully and patiently take them apart. It's all the more important not to resort to rhetoric precisely because rhetoric is that in which the theorists excel. Searle deserves some blame in this respect -- he tried to engage Derrida, but the whole thing quickly degenerated into a turf war.

What one has to do is state the argument as clearly as one can, criticize it, wait for the (inevitably indignant) response, and then show how the response either fails to address the criticism or, alternatively, to criticize it in turn.

firezdog said...

I should add that one has to take up the Socratic position -- one has to convince one's opponent (and oneself) that one doesn't understand him. This leads to a mutual effort towards understanding -- in short, to constructive dialogue.

(I would call this progress -- there's something subjective about progress, to the extent that progress has to do not just with where one ends up but also with where one starts. I must be rather optimistic in thinking that anyone can make progress now matter how much of muddle he's gotten himself into -- that is, that you can start in the direction of the truth just as well from Hegel and Heidegger as you can from Russell and Frege. It's just a matter of examining one's position and trying to clarify it. Whatever survives these efforts at clarification one keeps and builds upon; the rest falls away.)

So I hope thinking these things doesn't just make me another damned continental philosopher or something, but I'm doing the best I can (or at least that's my intention!)...

Anonymous said...

Putting aside what can only be described as faith (entirely misguided faith in my opinion) that a criticism of Culler would "hold true for Derrida himself", that you think Searle's criticism of Culler has any intellectual respectability betrays a lack of research. Look at the last quote from Searle
"to attain something that sounds profound by giving it the air of a paradox, e.g., "truths are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten" (p. 181).
Now, turn to page 181 in Culler's book, what has Searle missed? He's cut the "if" that starts the sentence. It's a conditional statement, it's not being endorsed by Culler, and it's certainly not Derrida's position. It's a thought with a line of descent from Nietzsche that Derrida in fact complicates significantly.

Anonymous said...

Here is the full quote from Culler's book (as provided by Searle in his response to Mackie, who accussed him of the same misrepresentation as 'anonymous'):

Deconstruction's demonstration that these hierarchies are undone by the workings of the texts that propose them alters the standing of literary language. If serious language is a special case of the nonserious, if truths are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten, then literature is not a deviant, parasitical instance of language. On the contrary, other discourses can be seen as cases of a generalized literature, or archi-literature. [p. 81]

As Searle points out, 'it is quite obvious from the context that Culler is asserting (among other things) that the deconstructive practice he has been expounding has 'demonstrated' that 'truths are fictions whose fictionality has been forgotten.' I find it pretty hard to argue with Searle's interpretation of the above passage, even if Derrida significantly complicates the idea that truths are fictions.

Anonymous said...

John Searle's critics are great, he can clarify the wrong assumptions of Derrida and others about language and the importance of speech acts and texts, thus revealing the little foundation deconstructionist philosophy has.

And for those who have just defended Derrida, it would be nice to read the full article. I'm sure most of the points Searle makes can't be denied.

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Jeremy said...

I think there are interesting and compelling ways to challenge Derrida and those influenced by him (especially derivative English professors instrumentalizing Derrida for affected profundity), but your post smacks of dismissive hubris that pops up at time in those from the analytic tradition. Simply put, it's sloppy criticism. To dismiss Derrida's "obfuscation," you would need to also discuss Heidegger's "obfuscation," and, more importantly, it would be crucial to also discuss Hegel's "obfuscation." Derrida was significantly influenced by both of those philosophers and he was responding to them as well.

Treating Derrida as some sort of ex nihilo thinker decontextualizes his work and ignores some major movements in the continental tradition. Derrida may be dense, but that's just the nature of philosophy. Without some context and training, a person won't find much to read that is "clear" and expressing and obvious purpose.

So my question to you is, why and how exactly do you dismiss guys like Heidegger or Hegel? Heidegger is the one people find easier to clear away, but Hegel (who is even more dense to read than Derrida) is a little harder to set aside.

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Anonymous said...

Strange that an argument purporting to defend 'reality' against relativism begins by citing a bunch of unatttributed 'quotations' rather than the actual claims of the alleged enemy. Who on earth is supposed to have claimed that 'reality is a text'? Perhaps this refers to Derrida's 'there is nothing outside the text'. If so, it is a worthless parody with no application to 'reality' at all, since these two sentences are very far from being semantically identical.

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