The Taylor Affair, Continued

However glorious it is to bask in a rare moment of Leiter-conferred legitimacy, noblesse oblige that I finish the job I began in an earlier post by confessing that my distaste for American Derrideanism in no way implies sympathy for the Derrideans' usual enemies.

Much like Leibniz, who insisted that the fact that he was not a physician freed him up to call it like he saw it in debates about the source of vital heat, animal motion, etc., without having to worry about where this positioned him vis-à-vis the prevailing positions of the medical establishment, so too I see my total lack of any stake in toeing the analytic or the continental party line as freeing me up to say whatever I like about any and all dogmas of academic philosophy. My own opinion as to what is the right approach to philosophy is so completely marginal that I am quite certain virtually no one on either side of the divide has ever even thought of it. (Briefly, I think of philosophy as the history of philosophy, and I believe this should be approached as a branch of history itself, by employing the best scientific methods of paleography and philology, complemented by a thorough interest in social and economic history, demography, climatology, etc. I agree with experimental philosophers that philosophy should be approached scientifically, but it is different sciences, whose scientificity has largely been forgotten since the early 20th century, that interest me most.)

Given the marginality of my approach to philosophy, and the hyper-narrowness of my primary research domain (I believe that there are universes in grains of sand, as the saying goes, and it is for this reason that I believe that dissertations on citation techniques in Duns Scotus and whatever else Mark C. Taylor wants to get rid of are very much worth defending), I am perhaps more sensitive than some to the tendency of scholars in our field to inflate their own line of research into something much more important than it actually is. What irks me about expressions like 'attempting to think after Hegel' is that they take the contingent research path down which a scholar has gone --by, let us be honest, a combination of both interest and, as it were, thrownness-- to have much more of an epochal character than it could possibly have.

I've joked recently that I am 'attempting to think after Ralph Cudworth'. This is obviously a joke, whereas one can still say the same thing about Hegel in the loftiest of tones. But what is the difference? Perhaps it's that Hegel is just a more profound thinker than Cudworth. But perhaps also it's that the contingent absence of any community of neo-Cudworthians forces scholars working on the True Intellectual System to be much more modest about the project they are engaged in. But why are there neo-Hegelians, or people working in the wake of Hegel, coming to terms with his legacy, etc., while there are no such people coming to terms with Cudworth? I would submit that this has more to do with their respective reception histories than with the actual content of their work. History could have gone differently: Cudworthianism could have been a prominent current of thought, or even an official state ideology. History shows that eager disciples have managed to do more with less.

I am reminded here of one of Rorty's funnier lines. Commenting somewhere on the works cited by Heidegger in Being and Time, the obscure academic dissertations from late-19th and early-20th-century Germany,  he notes that it is surprising that Being should choose to hew so close to the syllabus. That is, anyone with even a bit of a sense of the contingency of the tradition in which they are working will recognize that they are not telling you about Being itself, or Spirit itself, or Truth itself, but only providing running commentary on the readings with which they are familiar. It is only familiarity with these readings that makes 'thinking after so-and-so' difficult, rather than any real epochal change that so-and-so brought about. Still worse when the epochal change is held to have occurred not just in the way people conceptualize reality, but in reality itself, in the unfolding of absolute Spirit.

Now the original post was criticized by some for being ad hominem. But it seems to me that this would only be a fair criticism if what I claimed to be doing in the post was assessing the internal rationale of claims made by Derrida or Taylor. But this is not what I was doing. I was talking about the social context of French academic philosophy in the late 20th century, and of its influence on the American intellectual scene. This is not so much ad hominem as it is de hominibus, and I really don't know what would be left to say about social history of any sort if one respected a ban on any mention of homines. I believe, with Steven Shapin, that philosophy, like science, can be studied "as if it was produced by people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture and society, and struggling for credibility and authority." If it is possible to look at Robert Boyle in that light, why not Jacques Derrida? To suggest that such a thing is possible says nothing about the merit of the work of these authors, and the persistent tendency of philosophers to think that studying their leading figures in a Shapinesque way automatically amounts to a judgment about their ideas shows the great extent to which philosophy remains Whiggish in its historiography and Idealist about the sources of its ideas.

Now I did remark that these social factors influence the style of some French philosophy, and this might have seemed like a judgment as to its value. But again, I don't think there is anything sacrilegious about exposing the social factors influencing the production even of philosophical works I admire, so simply to say that such and such factors are visible in the production of a work such as Glas is not necessarily to dismiss it. It is simply to take it as something other than a production of pure genius.

To the extent that I am perfectly happy to see philosophy as a culture-bound activity, I don't think there is anything wrong with looking for the extra-academic sources of philosophical trends, and in the French case we will generally have to look to different domains of culture than in the American case. Quine has no secret debt to Jackson Pollock, while in France there is a long history of influence from the aesthetic avant-garde to establishment philosophy. A good example of such influence in the pre-post-structural era is Ferdinand Alquié's 1955 Philosophie du surréalisme, which evidently André Breton greeted lukewarmly, for the obvious reason that he did not want to see his embrace of absurdity translated into even a quasi-rational system of thought. Now such domestication is not necessarily a bad thing, but my personal preference is for the littérateurs who have no venerated social position to guard. I'll take the outlaw and the cut-throat, thanks (even in the knowledge that this reputation is in large part the result of self-mythologizing).

I confess that when I attempt to read Derrida, the experience is that of looking into the goings-on inside a very private club, yet at the same time there is a prior expectation that, because this is philosophy and not (just) literature, I am not supposed to be experiencing it in this way, but rather as universal. I recently picked up On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy, and found Derrida reflecting on the proximity to his own body, at some point in the past, of his colleague's various meatuses. I felt like I was interrupting something. As haughty and pompously authoritative as their work can be, this is an impression one never gets when reading analytic philosophers. Their work is meant to be universally relevant, and it is meant to be read by strangers. I can't look at a text like On Touching and not come away with the impression that its author was writing for a very intimate circle, one that shares the same values and manners and registers of speech, and that quite a bit will inevitably be lost in any attempt at cultural or linguistic translation.

I strongly suspect, again, that this difference has something to do with the cultural role of the philosophy professor in France. I certainly recognize that French philosophers have produced much of great interest, and I recognize that Derrida is just one special microbrew within French philosophy ('bottled for export', as has been suggested). Nowhere in my original post did I dismiss French philosophy wholesale. But I do think that there is an institutional tendency towards insularity and, relatedly, towards the preservation of the cohesion of the insular group through an exclusive way of talking. This is, again, not my own original observation, and it is one that is not made exclusively or even primarily by analytic Americans who prefer "straight shootin'." It is a point made at length by Pierre Bourdieu in his Homo academicus.

If anything, I had in fact thought I was being fairly sympathetic to French philosophy in my original post, even if the excerpts that were found fit for display on the Leiter blog did not communicate this. What I in fact think is that even if the cultural position occupied by the philosopher in France tends to lead towards insularity, it is preferable that a society protect and value its philosophers, than that they be reduced to behaving like free-market agents without any loyalties, which is closer to the truth about the American model of academia, and all the more so in the era of the downsizing of the humanities, the closure of unprofitable departments and programs, and the various threats to the institution of tenure.

Now we come, finally, again, to Mark C. Taylor, who in my opinion has combined the worst of both worlds: a career of obscurantism, capped off by the ultimate gesture of disloyalty to the institution that made it all possible. Again, I believe this provides a vivid illustration of the distance between French theory's American incarnation and the rarefied intellectual scene from which it derives. If French theory is primarily an American phenomenon, while French philosophy itself remains much richer, subtler, and diverse than this one thin thread of it reveals, this is perhaps because, as one commenter sharply noted, paraphrasing an article he recalls having read in the now defunct, aptly named Lingua Franca, "it was perhaps inevitable that the philosophy of the endless deferral of meaning should find its most receptive audience in the land of the junk bond, the leveraged buyout, and the pyramid scheme, where the bottom line reads 'Break this chain of signifiers and you die'." It seems to me that the transition from author of Altarity to advocate for the dismantling of tenure parallels the economic history of the past few decades in America all too well: a bubble burst by false promises, and those who were once so busy inflating it now making off with whatever they can get for themselves. At a moment like this, I would prefer to see a degree of guild loyalty, even if that required us all to converse in our own sort of insider cant.

Comments

[S.]

Wait a minute, you said:

"The usual line of criticism approaches the phenomenon of French obscurantism with the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy (a measure by which it is doomed in advance), when what is in fact needed is sociology."

It seems to me that this strongly implies that sociology would provide a better "line of criticism", and what you offer in the following paragraphs are sociological observations. Are you saying that the remainder of that message was just a long aside?

[beamish]

This is pretty terrific.

[Nathan Smith]

S - "criticism" doesn't always have to be critical. It can be nuanced, deferential, disinterested, to name a few.

A really nice rejoinder, Justin. I like your view of philosophy, under the recognition that this leaves open other ventures for philosophers.