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DECONSTRUCTION IS ELITIST
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- RENE DESCARTES
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DECONSTRUCTION IS ELITIST1. DECONSTRUCTION IS CLASSIST Bill Martin, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University, HUMANISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1995, p. 9. A debt of gratitude is owed to the Yale School. It was the pathway through which Jacques Derrida's work came to be disseminated in North America. I do not wish to engage in crude or reductive analysis. However, launched as it was as a North American movement, deconstruction bears the marks of its elite class origins. There is the need, then, to extend deconstruction beyond the halls of the Ivy League academies and far beyond the academy in general. There is a further need for a kind of "recovery" (another word that seems funny in this context) of deconstruction, a return to Derrida's texts and to their position in relation to the canons of western philosophy and literature. I need not ignore or disparage the work of the Yale critics in order to move this agenda. Finally, there is the need to deepen the project of deconstruction, which again means taking deconstruction beyond the academy, particularly beyond the academy's superficiality with regard to the most significant questions facing humanity. Here the class character of much deconstruction as practiced in the academy, and the class character of the academy, as stamped upon much of the practice of deconstruction, stands as a major obstacle in the way of a deconstruction that really works, on every level, to let the other speak. DECONSTRUCTION IS BASED ON A FLAWED VIEW OF LANGUAGE 1. IT NOT DEMONSTRATE CONTRADICTIONS INHERENT IN LANGUAGE Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, DERRIDA: A CRITICAL READER, 1992, p. 241. Nominalists like myself‑those for whom language is a tool rather than a medium, and for whom a concept is just the regular use of a mark or noisecannot make sense of Hegel's claim that a concept like 'Being' breaks apart, sunders itself, turns into its opposite, etc., nor of Gasch's Derridean claim that 'concepts and discursive totalities are already cracked and fissured by necessary contradictions and heterogeneities'. The best we nominalists can do with such claims is to construe them as saying that one can always make an old language‑game look bad by thinking up a better one‑replace an old tool with a new one by using an old word in a new way (for example, as the 'privileged' rather than the 'derivative' term of a contrast), or by replacing it with a new word. But this need for replacement is ours, not the concept's. It does not go to pieces; rather, we set it aside and replace it with something else.
Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities, University of Virginia, DERRIDA: A CRITICAL READER, 1992, p. 242. Gasché is quite right in saying that to follow Wittgenstein and Tugendhat in this nominalism will reduce what he wants to call 'philosophical reflection' to 'a fluidization or liquefaction (Verflussigung) of all oppositions and particularities by means of objective irony'.19 Such liquefaction is what I am calling Aufhebung and praising Derrida for having done spectacularly well. We nominalists think that all that philosophers of the world‑disclosing (as opposed to the problem‑solving) sort can do is to fluidize old vocabularies. We cannot make sense of the notion of discovering a 'condition of the possibility of language'‑nor, indeed, of the notion of 'language' as something homogeneous enough to have 'conditions'. If, with Wittgenstein, Tugendhat, Quine and Davidson, one ceases to see language as a medium, one will reject a fortiori Gasché’s claim that '[language] must, in philosophical terms, be thought of as a totalizing medium’. That is only how a certain antinominalistic philosophical tradition‑'the philosophy of reflection'‑must think of it.
PHILOSOPHER 1596 - 1650Biographical BackgroundRegarded as the founder of modem philosophy, Rene Descartes is among the most highly regarded European philosophers who ever lived. His scholarship in the fields of science, mathematics and philosophy has ranked him among the most brilliant men in modem history. Descartes was born on March 31, 1596 in La Haye-Descartes, France, to parents who were fairly well-to-do. Originally, the town was only named La Haye, but Descartes was added in his honor. He never married, although he apparently lived with a Dutch woman far many years who bore him a daughter who died in childhood Because his parents had some wealth, Descartes received a quality education at the Jesuit academy of La Flèche in France and later received a law degree from the University of Poitiers. As a young man he was able to travel throughout Europe, mostly as a volunteer in national military units, like the Dutch and Bavarian armies. It was during these travels that Descartes began to develop his concepts in philosophy and mathematics. Among some of the men who influenced Descartes were the Dutch scientist Isaac Beeckman and Pierre Cardinal de Bérulle, a leading figure in the Roman Catholic Renaissance in France. Philosophical and Methodological SummaryCogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. Anyone who has studied philosophy is familiar with this phrase. It is paradoxically a simple yet, highly complex philosophical notion. And it is the root of Descartes’s beliefs. Several different terms have been used to describe the type of philosophy Descartes developed, among them are rationalism, objectivism, and epistemology. Rationalism is generally considered the kind of philosophical belief that knowledge stems from reason, not experience. The term objectivism has been attached to Cartesian philosophy because it is rooted in the notion that knowledge should be free of subjective elements that are attributed to the person expressing the knowledge. In other words, there must be a source for knowledge outside of experience. Finally, epistemology is the central area of philosophy that is concerned with the nature and justification of knowledge claims. Rationalism, objectivism, and epistemology all represented theories that were contradictory to the prevailing philosophical tenants of Descartes’s day. Essentially, most European teaching of that time was based on skepticism, that is, humans can not be certain of very much. Therefore, Descartes was unique among his contemporaries because he held that there was an alternative philosophical position. He rejected skepticism and instead felt that one must suspend belief of any perceptions that are based on sensory data. In other words, just because something is perceived by sight or sound, for example, does not necessarily mean that is real or true. According to scholar C.G. Prado, Descartes best represents the view that human reason is capable of determining objective truth, and therefore of gaining “timeless and certain knowledge.” Prado writes, ‘Descartes’ view was that truth is objective, that it is timeless and autonomous in the sense of being wholly independent of human interests, and that it is accessible to human reason.” Thus, Prado claims that for Descartes, the only proper aim for inquiry was to seek absolute knowledge.1 Descartes believed that information obtained through the senses could never be conclusive and even deceptive. Therefore, in order to construct a new basis for discerning what was true and to be believed he began with what he knew to be a fact not based on the senses: I think, therefore I am. This one sentence was not based on anything be had touched, smelled, saw, or tasted, it was a fact. While Descartes’s search for truth seems to be based on a simple premise, over the centuries it has generated enormous amounts of research, study, and debate. It is perhaps the most widely studied philosophical theory in Western thought several experts have tried to synthesize and explain Cartesian philosophy. One of the these experts is C.G. Prado, who wrote that the Cartesian method ‘analyze[s] the complex into its simple components, and to test those components by comparing them to an indubitable sample of truth. 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