Postmodernism, cont.

                                                          Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)

One of the strangest features of popular postmodernism is the emphasis on ‘binary opposites’ and the alleged implications undermining people’s ability to represent reality using language.

   The basic idea is not complicated. My 9-year-old son expressed it not too long ago”: “You know, without evil, there would be no good. The good would just be common.” He is thinking Derrida’s thoughts after him. I have tried to write about how the meaning of one concept depends not only on an opposite (sometimes) but a whole web of other, related concepts.

    Now if we don’t get carried away, that can be a helpful insight. I immediately think of what a revelation it was to Malcolm X and Mohammad Ali how black and white, darkness and light, are connotated in our language; how categorizing people as black and white imported all those connotations into our experience of race; how their natural response was to reverse the hierarchy, seeing white a of the devil and black as of God. I can understand how the use of ‘men’ or ‘Man’ for human beings normalized a view of men as somehow paradigmatic human beings and women as only human by analogy. What this means for me is that we must subject the use of such language to critical, moral thinking. I have no problem with that. Let’s root out all demeaning, dehumanizing uses of language, both conscious and unconscious uses. Concepts are not fixed. Philosophy is the making sense of and the deepening of concepts. This deepening can go on without end.

   It is when the idea becomes metaphysical, absolute that the problems begins. An argument like this:

The meaning of one concept is intelligible only with reference to another opposite concept. If meaning is thus constructed, it is a function of the differences between concepts and not how they represent reality. Thus attempts to represent reality with language are futile. Thus there is no truth, no understanding, etc.

It is true we would not clearly – clear and muddled, another binary opposite (I unashamedly think clarity a virtue and muddle a vice – another binary) – recognize the evilness of Auschwitz without the concepts of good and evil. We would not recognize the evilness of the evil of Auschwitz without at the same time being able to recognize the goodness of a Primo Levi, who wrote so truthfully about the experience of being alive in Auschwitz. The meaning is not conveyed by one concept alone but both. More, the ‘binary’ belongs to a larger conceptual web of concepts. It is a complicated phenomenon. We apply the concept ‘evil’ to Auschwitz but Auschwitz expands the meaning of the concept ‘evil’ as well. When applied to Auschwitz, evil means something different than it does when applied to, say, Donald Trump. Every application of the concept changes both the concept and the object it is applied to and the person applying it. Every application involves perspective and interpretation. In no case do we have a god-like, absolute understanding of things. We are always in danger of applying it in inauthentic ways, in ways that cover up as opposed to revealing reality. Any use can involve us in difficult thought. But the goal is to conform our language and our thinking to the experience of evil – in this case, the evil of Auschwitz. And our experience of evil is an experience of something that confronts us, shocks us even. Reality is thus the measure of thinking. It is like that perfect circle that judges all the empirical circles we draw with pencil and paper.

    The point of the pop-Derrideans is that trying to conform your mind to reality is pointless because the structure of language constructs reality all the way down. (I am not sure this is Derrida’s point. I don’t pretend deeply to understand him though I have spent some time and effort reading a selection of his ‘texts’). That would make sense only if I accept a binary – Absolute knowledge or complete skepticism – that makes no sense to me. It is important to understand how ignorant we are. We understand this better the more we understand. But it trivializes experience to imagine that evil is just a word (nominalism!) and thus doesn’t disclose anything about Auschwitz.