Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Coping with Nietzsche's Legacy: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer

Full essay here.

~*~

….When the “real world” at last becomes a myth, a simulacrum, we are witnessing the death not only of Truth and of Science, but also of Philosophy itself. At least Philosophy with a capital P, as Rorty would say. What are we then left with? Is there anything to be found in Nietzsche's legacy (“Let us abolish the real world”) other than the most abyssmal of nihilisms? What are we to do when there is no more Truth and no more Reality–and no more Philosophy (Science) to tell us what Truth and Reality really and truly are? How are we to cope with this situation which defines our postmodernity? Perhaps we could pick up some pointers by considering how three eminent thinkers of our times–Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer–have sought to cope with Nietzsche's legacy, each in his own quite distinctive way.

RORTY

Rorty, it must be admitted, has not had any great trouble knowing what to do after the end of Philosophy. Of the three thinkers I shall be considering, Rorty has been the least discomforted by the heavy burden of Nietzsche's legacy. Indeed, in the light-hearted joyfulness of his new-found philosophical innocence, he has wholeheartedly embraced Nietzsche's pronouncements about the demise of Truth. If he is anything at all, Rorty is a carefree, happy-go-lucky nihilist who is not about to let himself be bothered any more by the old concerns of philosophy. Nietzsche's word about the “death of God” seems to have been the liberating news he had been awaiting throughout all of the years of his exile in the arid waste lands of analytic philosophy. He tells us now that reading philosophy books is mostly a waste of time (it doesn't contribute to human solidarity): Who, he asks, was ever convinced in ways that matter by a philosophical argument? We ought to read novels instead, people like Nabokov and Orwell, Dickens and Proust. Rorty fully endorses Lyotard's claim that philosophical metanarratives are out, mininarratives are in. What counts is not to say something “truthful” but something “interesting,” something “edifying.” We should also change the conversation as much as possible, lest it become boring (we do this, according to Rorty, by continually inventing new “vocabularies,” “simply by playing the new off against the old”). Not Socrates' “Don't tell a lie,” but Johnny Carson's “Don't be boring” seems to have become Rorty's watchword.

And indeed Rorty has many interesting, even “edifying,” things to say. I have no doubt that his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature has performed an extremely valuable service to the English-speaking philosophical community (to those, at least, who have lent it an attentive ear). I fully agree with Richard Bernstein when he says: “Richard Rorty has written one of the most important and challenging books to be published by an American philosopher in the past few decades.” Bernstein is also right in remarking on how those who find it a “deeply disturbing book” and those who find it “liberating and exhilarating” are both right and wrong. It is unquestionably liberating and exhilarating, but it is also deeply disturbing, for reasons I shall indicate in a moment.

What is liberating and exhilarating about the book is the way in which it was able to open the eyes of so many people to the utter bankrupcy of traditional, foundationalist philosophizing. European philosophers (e.g., Derrida) had of course already said much the same thing, but Rorty's easy style of writing served to bring the message home with great éclat. What is announced here so effectively is the demise of modern philosophy, of, in other words, the whole epistemological project of modernity or what Rorty calls “epistemology centered philosophy.” Rorty defines epistemology “as the quest, initiated by Descartes, for those privileged items in the field of consciousness which are the touchstones of truth” (210). Epistemology is a foundational discipline, not itself a science in the narrow sense of the term, but the theory of science which secures for each and every science its legitimacy by establishing for it its foundation and method. Rorty asks whether in these postmodern times, when the Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian “cognizing subject” of modernity–a subject which is nothing but a pure, disembodied gaze upon a fully object world (the mind as a “mirror of nature”)–has been deconstructed, “there still remains something for epistemology to be” (210). His answer, of course, is that there doesn't. When, for just one thing, one considers all the interesting developments in postpositivist and postpopperian philosophy of science (Kuhn, Hesse, Toulmin, Feyerabend, etc.), it is hard not to agree. Epistemology is now dead, thanks in large part to Rorty.

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty uses the term “hermeneutics,” “a polemical term in contemporary philosophy,” as he calls it (357), to designate this central attempt on the part of postmodern thinking to set aside epistemologically centered philosophy. This is a most fitting term since Gadamer himself has characterized his philosophizing–hermeneutics–as an attempt to overcome the modes of thought of “the epistemological era (l'ère de la théorie de la connaissance).” In his subsequent writings, however, Rorty tends to use the term “hermeneutics” less and less, perhaps due to the influence of Derrida, who quite erroneously has insinuated that hermeneutics remains attached to the old metaphysics of presence. But this, too, is fitting since in this book Rorty gives a hint of what is to come when he says that “hermeneutics is an expression of hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled” (315, emphasis added). Unlike Gadamer who has sought, by means of hermeneutics, to provide an alternative, a postmodern option, to “epistemologically centered philosophy,” Rorty does indeed leave us with a cultural void. This is precisely what makes Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature a “deeply disturbing” book.

What indeed, we may ask, are the ultimate “consequences” of Rorty's postmodern pragmatism? I think they can fairly well be summed up in two words: relativism and nihilism. Rorty has, to be sure, protested the charge of relativism, but his responses are evasive and his arguments lack the power of conviction (which I suppose is only fitting in the case of someone who no longer believes in philosophical argumentation). We are inevitably condemned to relativism when, rejecting like Rorty the metaphysical notion of Truth, we reject also all metanarratives, when, that is, we reject the legitimacy of theory, which always seeks some form of universal validity. And, similarly, we find ourselves in a state of nihilism when, rejecting the metaphysical notion of Reality, we go on to assert as well that everyone's “truths” are merely their own private “fictions,” when, that is, we equate fiction with mere semblance (similacrum) and deny it the power to recreate or refigure, and thus enhance, what is called “reality.”

Rorty says that in a post-Philosophical age the attempt to understand things (by means of philosophical theory) is passé. The important thing, he says, is to learn how to cope. Rorty may have something of a point here. Indeed, one fairly common characteristic of postmodern thought in general is that it insists on the primacy of the practical over the theoretical (this is reflected, for instance, in Gadamer's rehabilitation of the Aristotelian notion of phronesis: “the primacy of 'practice' is undeniable”). It is one thing to accord priority to praxis, to ethos; it is quite another, however, to deny to theory a legitimate and, indeed, central role in the formation and sustenance of life practices and socio-political modes of being-in-the-world–in other words, their justification or, as Habermas would say much to Rorty's displeasure, “legitimation.” But this is something that Rorty, with his anti-theory stance, does. He ignores the fact that arriving at some (theoretical) understanding of things is a most important way in which humans manage to cope with things (and, I might add, not only cope with them, but critically and creatively engage with them).

Rorty obviously likes to view himself as a kind of social or culture critic, denouncing cruelty and promoting solidarity. One thing that flows from his postphilosophical stance, however, is the rejection of any form of universal theory (diverse cultures or “conceptual schemes” are simply “incommensurable”), and thus any form of philosophical, which is to say universal, critique; for this he would substitute a “de-theoreticized sense of community,” in other words, compassionate feelings of a Rousseauian sort. Having thrown overboard the universalist claims of Enlightenment reason, the best Rorty can do when confronted with “cruelty” is to express his personal distaste for it by not admitting cruel people to his own comfy club of “we postmodernist bourgeois liberals,” i.e., “people who are more afraid of being cruel than of anything else.” Letting it be known that they are not “one of us” (190) is about as condemnatory as he can get. We may believe in something like human rights and the value of the individual, but if we are candid, we must admit that “this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance” (189). What right do we have, therefore, to “impose” it on people in other cultures and historical circumstances? None, it would seem, since there are no “general principles,” only historical narrations whose validity (if that's the proper word) is limited to a given community at a given time. It is hard to imagine what kind of argument Rorty could address to the violators of human rights in China other than to urge them to read George Orwell. I can in fact see how the ruling clique in China could well turn Rorty's anti-universalist, “frankly ethnocentric,” stance to their own good use when they feel the urge to protest Western denunciations of their barbaric practices as so much interference in their “internal affairs”: Who are we Westerners, we “bourgeois liberals” (a term which is for them an invective), we non-Chinese to tell them what to do anyhow? Rorty has deconstructed the metaphysical absolutism of the Tradition only to land himself in the quagmire of a quite traditional form of ethical relativism.

What, like a number of other postmodernists of a relativist bent, Rorty fails to realize is that philosophical theory and critique need not necessarily be “foundationalist.” He has not realized that in the new postmodern, globalist, multipolar or polycentric civilization which is emerging everywhere in the world, universality and particularity need no longer be metaphysical opposites. It is only for a modernist, essentialist mentality that universalism has to mean homegeneity and cultural imperialism. Like so many other anti-theorists today, Rorty has not so much overcome modernism as he has simply abandoned it for its opposite (absolutism for relativism, necessity for contingency, [essentialist] universalism for “localism”); he is not so much a postfoundationalist as he is a mere antifoundationalist who has simply (as Searle would say of Derrida) “turned the world upside down.” In, as is his wont, merely “changing the subject,” he has failed to work out any viable theoretical alternative to the bankrupt conceptuality of philosophical modernity. Derrida, at least, has realized that “metaphysics” is not simply something one can drop at one's pleasure, like an old, worn-out pair of shoes, or simply set aside, like a game with which one has become bored or a conversation which has gone stale. Like (as some would say) Nietzsche himself, Rorty has not succeeded in “overcoming metaphysics”–although he has at least managed, willy-nilly, to find a way of coping with the nihilism which, as Nietzsche pointed out, tends inevitably to follow upon the overthrowing of metaphysics. Rorty's writings can be of value to those who no longer have any principled way of defending the notion of value.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

DERRIDA


Derrida is one of Rorty's cultural heroes, and it is not hard to see why. As a fellow postnietzschean who also proclaims the demise of philosophy and the end of “man,” Derrida has all the appearances of being a living incarnation of the Rortyan ideal of the nonchalant postphilosophical thinker, viz., the “kibitzer” and “all-purpose intellectual,” the “intellectual dilettante.” Derrida is clearly a child of Nietzsche's, an heir, as Rorty sees it, to Nietzsche's joyful wisdom who, beyond all metaphyscial seriousness, extols the playful “innocence of becoming.” Like, you might say, the child idealized by Nietzsche who in his playfulness “constructs and destroys, all in innocence,” who “builds towers of sand…at the seashore, piles them up and tramples them down…in innocent caprice.” For Rorty, Derrida is the great postphilosophical prankster, the “ironist,” the indefatigable turner-out of texts which are mercifully free from the burden of having to actually mean something (qui ne veulent rien dire, as Derrida himself would say), a superb fabricator of “private fantasies.” A number of Derrida's writings, especially later ones such as Glas (which even Derrida scholars seem to have difficulty making sense of) would, on the face of it at least, seem to be nothing more than elaborate jokes, philosophy just for the fun (or pun) of it, a form of gleeful, uninhibited scribbling which, as Rorty says, seeks neither to demonstrate anything nor refute anybody. Compared to the up-tight analytic philosophers Rorty grew up with, Derrida is undoubtedly a delightful jokester. And yet there is a kind of seriousness to the Derridian enterprise that escapes Rorty's notice or, to be more precise, that Rorty prefers to ignore, to which he turns a blind eye.

Derrida may indeed be a postmodern gamester, but there is more to his work than “just gaming” (to allude to the title of a work of Lyotard's). It is of course true that Derrida is no more of a believer in the traditional metanarratives of philosophy than is Rorty and is thus, like him, a kind of postmodern agnostic who sets no store by philosophy's traditional claim to “knowledge” (scientia) and is in fact out to undermine it as best he can. In some ways Derrida is even less of a “philosopher” than Rorty, since he not only does not have a “position” to defend but does not even engage in arguments against various philosophical positons. What is referred to as “deconstruction” is not a set of theses or beliefs, not even loosely articulated ones like those of Rorty, but is simply, so to speak, a method, a way of reading texts, philosophical ones in particular. Actually, it is not even a “method,” at least not in the modernist sense of the term, i.e., a set of explicit rules to be followed so as to arrive at certain positive results (“the truth”). This is why Derrida insists that what he is doing is not “hermeneutics,” by which he means that his reading of texts does not aim at unconvering a hidden meaning in them. Derrida quite simply does not believe in meaning–a hopelessly metaphysical concept according to him.

The task of deconstruction is in fact to show that philosophical texts do not mean what they seem to mean, do not mean what their authors wanted them to mean (what they “intended”), do not in fact have any “decidable” meaning at all. The aim of a deconstructive reading is to show how texts laying claim to knowledge are full of internal tensions and contradictions or antinomies which end up by subverting their stated goals and their own claims to truth. The purpose of a deconstructive reading of philosophical texts is frankly anti-Philosophical; it is aimed at showing how in every instance the attempt by traditional philosophers to use language in such a way as to get beyond language so as to arrive at some translinguistic, transcultural, transhistorical truth–“transcendental signified”–which language could then be said to “mirror,” inevitably fails. Philosophers who aim at the Truth, at universal essences, cannot in fact escape the gravitational pull of a particular language. Philosophy's univocal concepts turn out to be nothing more than disguised metaphors of strictly local prominence and significance. There's no escaping the play of language.

Just as Rorty undermines the “epistemologically centered philosophy” of modernity, so Derrida's deconstructive undertaking calls into question not only modern philosophy but the entire philosophical tradition, or what Derrida calls the “metaphysics of presence.” This is the aspect of Derrida's work which, to borrow Bernstein's words, is “liberating and exhilarating.” Derrida's deconstructive attack on what he calls “logocentrism” is liberating in that, among other things, it frees us from the tyranny of two particularly insidious notions which, from the beginning, have dominated philosophy: the notions of totality and essence.

The notion of “totality,” i.e, the idea that reality is One, and is, consequently, the proper object of a Unified Science, is oppressive because it invariably leads to the suppression of all sorts of loose ends to things (and to people) which cannot or will not (which refuse) to be fittled neatly into the System. This, of course, was the main point in Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel. Totality rules out both individuality and alterity (the “multiple forms of otherness” that postmodern thought seeks to safeguard). And as we have learned in our times, in late modernity, totalizing thinking is hazardous to human life because it serves to lend philosophical legitimacy to totalitarianism, i.e., the totalized society (the socio-political equivalent of the unified science dreamed of by modern rationalists). Thus, by discrediting the notion of totality, of a totalizing discourse, deconstruction serves to further the postmodern concern for particularity and difference, diversity and heterogeneity, the fragmentary and the marginal, in a word, pluralism–the kind of pluralism which is the necessary condition for genuine freedom and democracy.

The notion of “essence” is also oppressive and fully merits being deconstructed. “Essence” is the grounding notion of philosophical science, the that-without-which it could not be. Science or Knowledge is, by definition, the knowing of what something is (its “whatness” [quidditas] or essence). The metaphysical presupposition behind this epistemic endeavor is that a thing is indeed just precisely what it is and not something else; essentialism upholds the rule of the Principle of Identity, the cornerstone of logocentrism. The trouble with essentialism is that, as Sextus Empiricus already knew, it cannot but result in dogmatism (dogmatism being, as Sextus said, belief in “the substantial existence of the True”). And dogmatism is oppressive since it legitimates “expertocracy” and “rationalist terrorism,” i.e., the tyranny of those who claim to be “in the know.” To be constrained by essences (which, as Nietzsche pointed out, are simply what some people in the past have said things are and whose sayings have over time become fixed and canonical) is to be imprisoned in a stagnant universe of stringently limited possibilities and fixed, unalterable meanings. Essentialism provides a handy justification for the tyranny of the status quo and of established power structures.

That is the “liberating and exhilarating” side to Derrida's work. But there is another side to it which, if not “deeply disturbing” (as in the case of Rorty), is, at the very least, disappointing. The trouble with deconstruction is that it does not seem to “go” anywhere. Unlike Rorty, Derrida realizes, as I mentioned before, that one cannot simply toss “metaphysics” out the window and be done with it once and for all. The work of deconstruction is serious and demanding, requiring “the skill of the tightrope walker, tripping the light fantastic on a world-wire over the abysss.” Overcoming metaphysics is thus no easy matter; it is necessary, Derrida suggests, to lodge “oneself within [the] traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it.” There is an honesty here that one does not find in Rorty who seems to believe that whenever it strikes our fancy we can change ourselves overnight by simply inventing new “vocabularies.” That notwithstanding, having deconstructed metaphysics but unable to get beyond it, remaining, as he might say, “on the edge,” Derrida is left, and leaves us, sitting in the rubble of this once magnificent monument to human pride and presumptuousness. This is perhaps why the later Derrida, who is much more to Rorty's liking, tends more and more to just horse around, turning out texts whose philosophical significance, if any there be, is hard to detect but which are the aesthetic delight of lit crit audiences this side of the Atlantic.

But even Derrida's earlier, more “serious” works are disappointing. After having deconstructed metaphysics, we are left, in a way similar to Rorty, with an immense philosophical void, with, indeed, a kind of nihilism. Derrida seems to believe that, in the absence of metaphysical absolutes, of a “transcendental signified,” all that remains is the ultimately meaningless play of words which refer not in any way to “reality” but only to more and more other words, in an endless drift, deferral, or dissemination of undecidable meaning (différance), words without end, an abyssmal labyrinth in which we are forever condemned to wander aimlessly about. “The absence of the transendental signified,” he says, “extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.” “There are only, everywhere,” he says, “differences and traces of traces,” nothing but “a play of traces or differance that has no sense.” Or as Rorty says of his hero: “For Derrida, writing always leads to more writing, and more, and still more.” libido scribendi, ad nauseum, as the Romans would have said (or “logorrhea,” as Allan Megill says). Because (as Derrida rightly perceives) nothing means any one thing in particular, he concludes that in the last analysis nothing means anything at all.

As Rorty realizes, Derrida is an irrepressibly “excessive” writer. For him philosophical works are all play and no work (they do not, that is, seek to produce that effect called “truth”). Philosophy is turned into a form of “literature” (“a kind of writing,” in Rorty's words), i.e., fiction. Philosophy's world is but a dream world. When everything becomes textuality and intertextuality and nothing but, the real world of human concerns and human praxis vanishes into the black hole of free-floating signifiers. This is indeed nihilism, a joyful nihilism perhaps, but nihilism nonetheless. Thus, as David Hoy very pertinently remarks: “If dissemination is at times a useful antidote, in excess it may also be a poison.”

I conclude that in simply reversing the pro and the con, Derrida's joyful wisdom, his response to Neitzsche's legacy, remains, as does Rorty's, a captive of the metaphyscial tradition and its tenacious oppositional, either/or mentalité.
Derrida's rejection of logocentrism is not revolutionary, and because he thinks it is, he is unable to take advantage of the sophistication that the debate on essentialist thinking has already reached; as a result, he jumps from one extreme (meaning is a matter of fixed, immutable concepts) to the other (meaning is a matter of the indeterminate, infinite play of signs). This appears very like the undeveloped response of one who has just been surprised by the realization that real essences do not exist. The conclusion of this discussion can therefore only be that Derrida's contribution to the debate on language and meaning is not substantial; it fails to establish any coherent new view of meaning or of the way language functions. In lieu of metaphysical fixity Derrida offers us nothing more than uncontrollable “slippage.” A pretty meager consolation prize for so great a deconstructive effort. Carefree and Dionysian though he may appear to be, I do not believe that Derrida has succeeded in freeing himself from the bad conscience of the metaphysicians. For this reason, and because for Derrida, as for those poststructuralists who repudiate the legacy of the Enlightenment, nothing can any longer be said to be better than anything else, only different, I do not believe that Derrida has much to contribute, in a positive way, to what is most needed today now that marxist-leninist ideology has been relegated to the rubbish heap of history–by which I mean the detailed working out of a postmetaphysical, postmodern way of doing philosophy, a form of critical theory free finally of foundationalist and essentialist hang-ups, one which could, by means of theory, advance the cause of a truly universal freedom, i.e., a freedom which would be the prized possession not only of ethnocentric bourgeois liberals like Rorty but of humanity everywhere. Derrida is at least to be congratulated on having abandoned the modernist tactic of previous left-wing intellectuals who extolled confrontational politics (“revolutionism”), in line with Lenin's exhortation to “suppress the suppressors.” As various postmarxists have now (finally) realized, a politics of violence of this sort contributes only to more thoroughgoing forms of tyranny überhaupt. What is needed is a philosophical defense of universal human rights and individual freedoms, a postfoundationalist reassertion of Jefferson's Enlightenment declaration that all men are “created equal” and are endowed with certain “unalienable rights.” The notion of universal human rights and freedoms can, however, make sense only if you have a universalist conceptuality with which to make sense of it–only if you have a “philosophy.” The “end of philosophy” and the end of “humanism” proclaimed by both Derrida and Rorty means, of course, the end of universalism, and thus the end, not only of “history,” but of “humanity” itself (it must not be forgotten that the concept of humanity–a humanity–was, like that of history [history being world history, the history of humanity], an invention of the philosophers, a product of philosophical theory).

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

…nothing can any longer be said to be better than anything else, only different.
 
Just a quickie response. If this is the kind of conclusion this guy comes to then he hasn't a clue.

What is needed is a philosophical defense of universal human rights and individual freedoms.

This article appears to have been written in '91? If this guy still thinks, based on post '01 writings, that Derrida is a hopeless nihilist and relativist with nothing positive to contribute to (post)metaphysics then he's an idiot not worth engaging, plain and simple. Derrida has since '91 (and likely before) delineated a most definitive philosophy using relative, and quasi-universal, qualitative distinctions and he's most certained championed democracy and human rights. This guy needs to get his altitude raised, or something.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

To get much more accurate information on both Rorty and Derrida, and their similarities and differences, see John Caputo's More Radical Hermeneutics (Indiana UP, 2000), Chapter 4: The case of Derrida and Rorty. You can see most of the chapter at the free Google book preview where it dispells the type of nonsense Madison writes.

As one example from the above chapter: 

Derrida does have a certain “philosophical idea” about language. One might even say he has a certain “theory”…. Derrida has at least a quasi-theory about what is going on in language and not just language, but other sign-making or meaning-making or more generally effect-producing quasi-systems…which goes under the name of the quasi-transcendental…. Let us be deadly serious. Derrida is a transcendental philosopher—almost (96-7).

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

I'm wondering where Madison went in his thinking after that essay.  A reason I wonder is that Caputo apparently wrote an essay in honor of him in 2004: 

“Good Will and the Hermeneutics of Friendship: Gadamer, Derrida and Madison,”Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy , 8, no. 2 (Summer, 2004): 213-25. (Special issue entitled “Working Through Postmodernity: Essays in Honor of Gary B. Madison,” ed. Paul Fairfield).

Good Will and the Hermeneutics of Friendship; Gadamer, Derrida, and Madison

JOHN D. CAPUTO, Villanova University


Gary Madison has written thoughtfully and well about the intersection of hermeneutics and postmodernity. While his self-acknowledged mentors have been Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Gadamer, he has developed a distinctively North American voice from which we have all greatly profited. His lively polemics, his ear for a philosophical argument that has not been buried by his considerable erudition, has shown us the way to deal with the anxiety of influence that is inevitably bred by reading the great Continental masters. He has sought to go as far as possible in the direction of a postmodern delimitation of metaphysical speculation without driving off the road into the irrationality and anarchy of the most extreme forms such delimitations can assume. His project is conducted in the name of hermeneutic phenomenology, or of a postmodern hermeneutics, but without falling into the excesses of postmodernity's worst side. He has tended to associate the latter with Jacques Derrida, of whom he has been something of a critic, basing these criticisms largely on a certain reading of the texts of the 1960s and 1970s.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

GADAMER

Disregarding the standard (i.e., pre-postmodern) narrative ordering according to which, as Descartes insisted, one should always begin at the beginning, I turn to Gadamer last. Even though his work antedates both Derrida's and Rorty's, its significance is perhaps best understood when viewed in the light of his wayward progeny. It is, after all, a basic hermeneutical principle that we always understand backwards, après coup. As Gadamer himself has remarked: “All beginnings lie in the darkness, and what is more, they can be illuminated only in the light of what came later and from the perspective of what followed.” When examined in the context of what I have said about Rorty and Derrida, Gadamer's hermeneutics may perhaps be seen to provide valuable suggestions for doing philosophy in a postnietzschean, postmodern age, ones that are not to be found in either Rorty or Derrida.

If the writings of Rorty and Derrida can be said to be liberating, and if indeed the notion of liberation figures prominently in one way or another in what they have to say, the same is no less true of Gadamer's work. Indeed, Gadamer has no qualms about retelling one of the greatest metanarratives of all time, that of the progressive liberation of humankind. In the context (significantly enough perhaps) of a discussion of Hegel he writes:

[T]here is no higher principle of reason than that of freedom. Thus the opinion of Hegel and thus our own opinion as well. No higher principle is thinkable than that of the freedom of all, and we understand actual history from the perspective of this principle: as the ever-to-be-renewed and the never-ending struggle for this freedom.

The first proclaims that modernity is over, that a new age has begun. The new age makes use of the past, and of modern achievements, but it has its own new freedoms and its own self-definition. The second type of thought is deconstructive, and works to undermine the unities and closures found in modernity, without escaping from them into some new age.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Here's another (more recent) essay by Madison on Gadamer, phenomenological hermeneutics, and post-metaphysics.  (The link opens a document containing two essays, the latter of which is by Madison.)

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Madison's better on Gadamer than he is on other thinkers. That above tract on Gadamer and hermeneutics is excellent. He's got all the pieces assembled there.

He's a bit of an oddball in his lectures, mixing brilliant insights into Ricouer or Merleau-Ponty or Gadamer one minute with almost reactionary dismissals of other thinkers the next minute. He was at MixMaster U when I did my grad work in Religious Studies there, and we learned to ignore his tirades, as entertaining as they were. He liked to goad others into reaction, but then back off and look quizzical when they flew off the handle.

He was weaker when defending Gadamer against charges, such as that of “relativism,” but then everyone was attempting to “work through” that sort of thing back then. In his later writings I think he was less dismissive of Derridoodle, and he talked about “reading through” him, ie his approach was much more dialogical or dialectical.

There was back then an almost wholesale dismissal of Derrida among professional academic philosophers, with almost the opposite going on in certain English departments. I think, over the years, most have softened their view on Derrida, and thinkers have begun to engage what he has to say more “seriously.” And likewise the near worship of Derrida among certain lit clit types has dropped away, and a more critical appreciation has appeared.

The tracts on Derrida and Rorty can largely be ignored, IMO, but I like the piece on Gadamer very much.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Also, I think that this was at about the time that the debate between Derrida and Gadamer had come to publication, so people back then were drawing the battle lines. The same can be said for Habermas and Derrida or Searle and Derrida. Finding differences was very important for those engaged in some form of post-modernism.

(I can't help but look at the essay historically/hermeneutically :-)

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

among certain lit clit types

Did you mean lit crit? Or literally clits that are afire?

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

sorry, yes, i'm punning.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Any writer who can find an easy, unpretentious  little slot for the term “arrière gout” can't be half bad. Its a harder task than one would think.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Any writer who can find an easy, unpretentious  little slot for the term “arrière gout” can't be half bad. Its a harder task than one would think.
 
Possibly, though not surprising given Gary's propensity to imbibe, which may have been one of the reasons for his entertaining if at times flippant lectures.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

As you know, this has nothing to do with anything.

GADDY   

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Some of the sections from the God-damner tract that I like (sans the polemic and straw men):

Whereas Hegel believed that “the True is the whole,” Gadamer does not subscribe to the notion of totality or closure, to the Hegelian notion of Knowledge (Wissenschaft). For Gadamer, there is only one thing we can know for sure, and that is that any kind of Hegelian absolute is irremediably beyond our grasp. “Philosophical thinking,” he writes,” is not science at all….There is no claim of definitive knowledge, with the exception of one: the acknowledgement of the finitude of human being in itself.”
 
“[T]he special feature of historical experience is that we stand in the midst of an event without knowing what is happening to us before we grasp what has happened in looking backwards.”

Gadamerian or phenomenological hermeneutics incorporates a genuinely deconstructive strategy inasmuch as it decidedly rejects the modernistic objectivism of pre-phenomenological, romantic hermeneutics…

For hermeneutics, “truth” no longer signifies the “correspondence” of “mental states” to “objective” reality, and “meaning” is no longer conceived of as some sort of objective, in-itself state of affairs which merely awaits being “discovered” and “represented” by a mirroring mind. “Truth” and “meaning” refer instead to creative operations on the part of human understanding itself, which is always interpretive (never simply “representational”). Hermeneutical truth is inseparable from the interpretive process, and meaning, as hermeneutics understands it, is nothing other than what results from such a process, namely, the existential-practical transformation that occurs in the interpreting subject (in his or her world orientation) as a result of his or her active encounter with texts, other people, or “the world.” Truth and meaning… are integral aspects of the “event” of understanding itself, are inseparable from, as Gadamer would say, the “play” of understanding.

“Knowledge,” for hermeneutics, is nothing other than the shared understanding that a community of inquirers comes to as a result of a free exchange of opinions.

Truth is not something simply to be discovered (“represented”) but something to be made –– through the exercise of communicative rationality. Truth is a practical concept. It is something that can exist only if we take responsibility for its existence.

Gadamer's dialogical view of understanding… provides the model for a social order based not on coercion or domination (Herrschaft) but on rational persuasion, the kind of tolerant and pluralist social order envisaged by the great rhetoricians and humanists of the past.

…hermeneutics… promotes the exercise of critical reason. The function of hermeneutical criticism is to expose and denouce forms of socio-political organization which oppress and stifle the communicative process — fosterning thereby the development of dialogical communities.

Gadamer's hermeneutics is indeed one which “makes use of the past and of modern achievements” — but in accordance with its own renewed conception of such traditional notions as truth, meaning, and knowledge. 
 
…because Gadamer recognizes that human understanding can never transcend its limitations so as to arrive at some atemporal Archimedean point, is always culturally and historically situated, is, indeed, rooted in tradition — and because he realizes that this is not a “defect” in the make-up of human understanding but the that-without-which there would be no understanding at all — because of this, he is able to appropriate elements within the tradition…
 
As Gadamer has himself recognized, his hermeneutics… is guided by an emancipatory interest and has a pronounced critical thrust to it. The whole point of the self-understanding which is the goal of hermeneutics is, as Gadamer insists, that of “saving a freedom threatened not only by all rulers but much more by the domination and dependence that issue from everything we think we control.”

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

I appreciated his summary of Gadamer as well.  Here is a passage from the second essay I linked above that I also enjoyed:

The main charge that philosophers of a traditionalist (“modernist”) sort generally level against hermeneutics is that, by rejecting modern epistemologism and its notion of truth as the correspondence of subjective states of mind to an “objective,” in-itself reality (the mind as a “mirror of nature” – what elsewhere I have referred to as referentialist-representationalism), hermeneutics leads directly (or by means of a “slippery slope”) to an all-out, truth-denying relativism. In calling into question the traditional notion of truth (and thus also the traditional notion of reality as something “univocal” in itself), hermeneutics, it is claimed, embraces a form of irrationalism that undermines any and all claims to universally valid knowledge. It is in this regard yet another instance of the post-Nietzschean nihilism so prevalent in postmodern thought (see Madison, “Hermeneutical Integrity”).

On the other side of the ledger, critics of a “postmodern” sort, who are often themselves avowed relativists fully prepared to sacrifice philosophy's traditional claim to knowledge (the “end of philosophy”), tend to be equally dismissive of hermeneutics – but for an altogether different reason. For them, hermeneutics, far from having broken with traditional metaphysics, is nothing more than the old “essentialism” (the “metaphysics of presence”) dressed up in new (and perhaps more seductive) garb. Jacques Derrida once sought to portray Gadamer as (as Gadamer summed it up) “a lost sheep in the dried up pastures of metaphysics.” And one of Derrida's leading spokespersons, John D. Caputo, flatly accused Gadamer of being “a closet essentialist.”1

Simple logic dictates that these two mutually exclusive charges leveled against hermeneutics cannot both be right. Either one is true and the other is false – or perhaps neither is true. Logic alone cannot of course decide the issue; before one can properly assess any particular ideational position, it is first necessary to determine (as Plato would say) the “kind” of position it is, i.e., the conceptual category into which it falls. Now, as hermeneuticists themselves view the matter, hermeneutics is fully a form of postmodern thought – but one that differs in highly significant ways from other forms of postmodernism. Although many people still fail to appreciate the fact, phenomenological hermeneutics incorporates a genuinely deconstructive strategy inasmuch as it conscientiously rejects the modernistic objectivism of pre-phenomenological, Romantic hermeneutics. According to Richard E. Palmer, it is important to see “the unfolding of the hermeneutical problematic in terms of the philosophical critique of the metaphysics of modernity,” and he has pointed out how such a critique generates the need for a deconstructive strategy very much akin in a number of ways to Derridian deconstruction (323). Hermeneutics is decidedly postmodern in that, like classical phenomenology of which it is a logical extension, it seeks deliberately to set aside the guiding prejudices of modern philosophy (see Madison, “The Interpretive Turn”).

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

I'm back on the question of the role of hermenetics for the time being. The second essay posted by Bruce addresses the same concerns I was talking about when I wrote the following (slightly edited):

“I'd also like to explore in greater depth the “problems” of, or with, the “philosophy of consciousness.” Some years ago I had been reading a series of authors, most notably Sarte and Levinas, on the question of the all consuming “I,” or “Eye,” in European philosophy, not only as it relates to Hegel's encompassing, “inclusivist” dialectic (that acts like a kind “blob” from an sci fi movie consuming and digesting everything in its path), but also, as Sarte came to see, in phenomenology as well. The issue is deep in our psyche and goes back to the Greek's conception of 'istoria (from which we get “history”), which for them was really a kind of descriptive cultural anthropology, conducted by people like Pausanis who followed the Greek hoplites during their campaigns. Included in this conception is the idea of the Greeks coming to understand themselves, and transform themselves, through their interation with “the other.” I came across this idea while reading Halbfass' India and Europe. But (and this is the dark side), in this process of self-understanding and transformation, the “self” changes the “other,” and indeed, may attempt to remake the “other” in its own image (re: neo-cons in Iraq; Wilber's perennialism, etc.). The idea reappears in Hegel's notion that we come to understand ourselves through our interaction with others, an idea, oddly enough, that remains virtually unchanged in Heidegger's Being and Time. The problem here, noted by Levinas, is that there is a connection between this conception of philosophy and things like European cultural imperialism.”

As I say in the above, this idea of the relation between the “self” and “other” remains virtually unchanged in Heidegger's Being an Time. Given that Gadamer was profoundly influenced by Heidegger's conception of hermeneutic understanding, I think it is a legitimate question to ask, as Bernasconi does, about the degree to which Gadamer remains attached to Hegelian conceptions, or to put it another way, to ask about the degree to which his project remains “Romantic.” I think it is a bit of a red herring to defend Gadamer as not Romantic by bringing up the questions of representationism, historicism, objectivism, and so on, as they apply to Gadamer, and to argue that to this degree Gadamer is not a Romantic. He's obviously not. The real issue is this business of the “fusion” of horizons.

While I think there may indeed be problems with Gadamerian hermeneutics in this regard, I also think that Gadamer is correct in regards to his position that radical alterity is an impossibility. Ironically, perhaps, this is precisely Derrida's critique of Levinas (which may or may not represent the difference between the Sephardic and Levantine views): What sense, really, does it make to speak of radical alterity, of the “absolute transcendence” of the “other”? To even speak of an “other” in this manner presuppposes that the other is, in some sense, a part of my self, and my self is a part of the “other.” In the past I have argued against ideas such as “the radical alterity of the other” and “absolute ruptures in history” along the lines of Wittgenstein's critique of the possibility of a private language and his “pull the rug out from under” critique of the problem of “other minds.” What I mean by this is that to speak of a culture, or period of history, or any other “other,” in such terms is akin to speaking in terms of a thoroughly autonomous subject, which is what analytic philosophers do when they speak of the problem of “other minds.” But there is no absolute subject in this sense; subjectivity is itself grounded in intersubjectivity. Mutatis mutandis, one might argue that we should understand the relation between cultures or eras of history in an anologous manner — as not radically heterogenous. There is, in other words, no absolute rift between the two. As Wittgenstein would say, with regard to the problem of “other minds,” to even speak about about the problem in this way presupposes that there is no absolute rift, that there is some connection between the two; if the problem were real, we would not use language the way we do.

Nonetheless, the above question remains, with respect to the status of this “fusion of horizons” (represented, perhaps, by the question mark at end of the “Blob” trailer: have we really done away with Hegel???). And Levinas does present an interesting ethical challenge, even if his conception of “transcendence” is idealized. I might add, though, as cautionary note, that even if the radical autonomy and alterity of the “other” is an impossibility, it does not make this sort of thing correct.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Here's another Madison essay I just came across, this one dealing with his suggestions for a post-postmodern / Merleau-Pontyan approach which allows for non-essentialized universals.  One reason I'm posting it is because it relates, tangentially at least, to this recent discussion.


~*~


The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity and After
Gary Brent Madison
McMaster University
madison@mcmaster.ca

My “specific” perhaps best falls under the heading of “phenomenology” (and “culture” and “politics” as well). The question has been posed: “If we absorb postmodernism, if we recognize the variety and ungroundedness of grounds, but do not want to stop in arbitrariness, relativism, or aporia what comes after postmodernism?” I believe that the beginnings of an “after postmodernism” can clearly be discerned in that philosophical discipline known as phenomenological hermeneutics.

The two most outstanding features of phenomenological hermeneutics from the point of view of the present discussion are (1) that it as “postmodern” as any other form of postmodern thought, but (2) unlike other forms of postmodernism (“poststructuralism,” “neopragmatism”), it does not lead into the dead-end of relativism and nihilism (see my submitted paper, “Coping with Nietzsche's Legacy: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer”).

Phenomenological hermeneutics can be viewed as an ongoing attempt to draw out and articulate the radical, postmetaphysical implications of Husserl's phenomenological critique of the Tradition (see Ricoeur, “On Interpretation” in Philosophy in France Today and Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity). Present-day hermeneutics seeks to rethink many of the traditional notions of philosophy–truth, reason, value, etc.–in strictly phenomenological or experiential terms–in terms, specifically, of communicative praxis (see the work of Calvin Schrag). For this reason, like other forms of postmodernism, it eschews all forms of essentialist and foundationalist thinking, and thus involves, to a significant extent, a work of “deconstruction.”

At the same time that hermeneutics embraces the postmodern, deconstructive critique of the Tradition (“metaphysics” [Heidegger], “Platonism” [Rorty]), it also points beyond postmodernism. For what principally serves to differentiate hermeneutical postmodernism from other critiques of modernity is that it does not seek merely to jettison as so much worn-out conceptual baggage the core values of the philosophical tradition and of the Enlightenment; it seeks rather to rearticulate (“reconstruct”) these values in such a way as to avoid both metaphysical essentialism and foundationalism and intellectual arbitrariness and cultural relativism (Madison, “Philosophy without Foundations,” Reason Papers 16). Hermeneutics seeks to avoid The “philosophers' error” that Nietzsche speaks of:

The philosopher supposes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure; but posterity finds its value in the stone which he used for building, and which is used many more times after that for building–better. Thus it finds the value in the fact that the structure can be destroyed and nevertheless retains value as building material (Genealogy, p. 176).

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Balder,

Thanks for dropping this in here, a serious playground. A few thoughts:

1. In the spirit of not leaving one member behind, I thought some of the newer ones might find this page useful.

2. Madison writes: “…phenomenological hermeneutics from the point of view of the present discussion are (1) that it as “postmodern” as any other form of postmodern thought, but (2) unlike other forms of postmodernism (“poststructuralism,” “neopragmatism”), it does not lead into the dead-end of relativism and nihilism…”

It is my feeling that relativism and nihilism are the dread things bumping in the occupational twilight only for professional philosophers because each signal an end to their current gigs. So it is important always to keep these two illusions sitting on the fringes as straw threats to which one can attach an alert status color code. My thinking on this goes thus:

 a) willfulness and choice trump relativism: a willful choice to choose relativism contextualizes relativism in such a way that things are no longer relative vis a vis the choice.

 b) I agree with M-P that phenomenology begins in the body, thus if one can get as close as possible to that subconscious function of the mind that either creates order from purported chaos (or highlights the orderly in a chaotic natural environment) then it would appear there is hardwiring within the species that is the precursor to meaning–something like: (rationalized after the instinctual act) “The meaning of the needs in this moment is to turn and walk purposefully away from the bear standing in the path.” Not far from that function one would probably encounter another function(s) that stimulate the sociability of the species so that meanings as to the needs of the moment become consensual local universals i.e. (from the companion) “I agree, remember we must walk purposefully, never run from the bear in the path.” Consensual meaning trumps nihilism in all ways except as an intriguing Romantic possibility; a possibility which must always be kept in mind in order to sustain the joy of free-falling through the abyss flowing from its source in the willful choice.

 c) Madison should be cited for falling back on the straw threats of conventional wisdom re: postmodernism. The sentence quoted did not need to be there, though arguably its presence is just a professional courtesy for the more timid professional philosophers.

d) I have never read where Rorty took the threat of nihilism seriously either as a professional hindrance or an epithet regarding his own work. And in terms of pragmatic communication, I think Rorty's writings make Madison's redundant.

3. Madison writes: Hermeneutics believes that one can get beyond both modernism and postmodernism by using many of the “stones” of a deconstructed modernity to build a genuinely postmetaphysical edifice.

This bothers me a little. Isn't an edifice a structure in both time and space. It might even be (in keeping with the current iPMS zeitgeist) inclusivist. Is he making the same claim here that Wilber makes for AQAL? Why the underlying need for a structure? Is it for the same reason as the underlying need to maintain those straw threats that go bump in the twilight of philosophy?

4) Madison writes: This theoretical endeavor to articulate a postmetaphysical universalism serves to promote, in the practical sphere, an ethics of mutual recognition and reciprocity and to provide a philosophical justification for the democratic politics of universal human rights.

My experience tells me that it is better to ground ethics in the instincts of the species rather than in the more airy edifice of a language that has been manipulated into submission. If one cannot feel the urge to act ethically than a rational argument will probably not be able to fabricate a reliable imitation. (One would think a phenomenologist would have thought of that.)

5. Overall, I don't think he makes the case for universality except as a titular quality for a particular mode of reasoning rather than a accurate descriptor of its result. Granted one can see how the little essay works to created an edifice in world-space, but unless one thinks of time as a structure he fails in that venue of being. It is the same as with everyday on paper or handshake contracts: the meaning of the contract is in its negotiation, but it becomes obsolete the moment it is signed for 10,000 variables beyond that time mean that all bets are off, even notwithstanding all the provisions for the contract's legal interpretation should it come to that.

6. I have read several times the exchange between Balder and Tom that Balder references in the post above. Except for the Nietzsche quote that seems common to both, their posts seem to be written in a vocabulary that is privileged to them, thus I can't quite relate enough to draw even tangential lines between that dialog and the Madison piece.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Ya, there are things that bother me about the Madison piece, as well. For one, I don't think he has answered the question he set out too: how universality can be reconciled with historical situatedness, linguistic mediation, the limitations of one's horizon, etc. Maybe there is more to read from him though.

Madison is generally a fairly clear thinker and speaker — he doesn't try to bamboozle his readers or listeners with high-faluntin or obfuscating philosophical gibberish. I'll give him that. But any clear thinker is one that also becomes a fairly easy target. When I had last heard him speak he seemed genuinely concerned with this problem of “relativism.” And he really didnt have answers to questions posed from the floor concerning such problems after he delivered talks on the subject of hermeneutics.

I get the sense that there is a pronounced conservative side to his philosophical nature, and also that he wishes to retain traditional elements of phenomenology. But he's not so conservative to the point where he is merely another traditional philosopher. He was most animated, and funny, when ridiculing metaphysicians.

One thing that comes to mind. If there were a way to describe what “philosophy” does, one might be to say that the philoosphy attempts to speak in general terms such that they can become universalizable. That is one strand of the discipline, anyway. I'm not sure if everyone would agree that this sort of thing is still possible or desirable. I'm not sure that Rorty, for example, would agree with Madison here.

What is in the background here, I believe, are questions concerning human rights and so on, as Steven notices. Do we, though, need a theory of discourse as it pertains to such questions? Habermas seems to think we do as well, though his position differs from that of Gadamer.

I can see what interests Balder here though: mediating traditional elements in such as way that the insights of “post-modernism” have been recongized, or “integrated.”

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Come on. What do think, you're going figure out the world by blabbing away on some Internet site. Are you kiddding? Do you think blabbing some academic philosophy will change the world or anything else? Pleaazsse….

Do the get it? Nobody cares.

Gadddy. 

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

I've sort of been wondering what you're doing blabbing away on each of these threads, Gaddy, not really adding much to any of them …

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Bruce, I especially liked what you said here:  ” For what principally serves to differentiate hermeneutical postmodernism from other critiques of modernity is that it does not seek merely to jettison as so much worn-out conceptual baggage the core values of the philosophical tradition and of the Enlightenment; it seeks rather to rearticulate (“reconstruct”) these values in such a way as to avoid both metaphysical essentialism and foundationalism and intellectual arbitrariness and cultural relativism”. 
  Yes, to “re-articulate” -  that seems to be the deepest impulse of the evolving mind. Below is an observation (excerpt from The Marketing of Virtue: Allsberg Rising)  about individual mind/motor development as a metaphor of “deconstruction” leading to “reconstruction”.  


…Prehension, the ability to grasp objects with one's hand, occurs early in infancy - only to disappear for quite some time. …
   In the infant's neurophysical development, prehension returns some months later, but with a new twist. The new “twist” is not only in a figurative sense, but in a quite literal sense as well. The infant’s hand can now twist, or turn, in proper relation to the objects to be grasped. A much more effective form of grasping has been achieved. 

    What had appeared to be a disintegration - a kind of wilderness- of neurophysical function during that period of lost prehension, turns out to be a part of an ongoing journey toward higher neurophysical integration - a “promised land”. One can only assume that the earlier, inflexible, form of grasping has to die before a kind of developmental “resurrection” can occur. I have been told that the word resurrection originally meant something to the effect of  “to stand again”, or “second stand”. In this case, the “stand” is the act of grasping.    The new “stand” in the development of the mind is also, I believe, a higher level of flexibility, effectiveness, and integration.        By the “new stand”, I am refering to a mind that can see itself as it acts and projects - a self-aware mind, similar, if not identical, to David Bohm's “proprioceptive thought”. 
Darrell

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Darrell, to clear something up first:  I didn't write the passage you quoted.  In that post, I was sharing an essay by Gary Madison.

Anyway, I liked your illustration.  I can recognize that process in myself on a number of different levels, one of which is my experience as a writer:  Years ago, when I used to write creatively on a regular basis, I would hit “dead spots” from time to time, during which I was unable to write satisfying sentences or craft compelling narratives – when I seemed to regress in my creative abilities and would enter a sort of dry or fallow period – and then after a time, the juices would start to flow again and I could sense I was actually writing now at a higher or more skillful level.  I don't think I noticed this the first or even second time this happened, but after a number of occurrences, I came to recognize that a momentary regression and subsequent leap had taken place.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Death as a way of giving birth? Post Modern Deconstruction leading to Reconstruction? Hegel's antithesis leading to synthesis? Neitzchie's God dying (being dead) in order to be born again in the heart?

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Yes, clearly, it's a well-recognized pattern:  St. John's dark night, Jung/Washburn's regression in the service of growth/transcendence, etc.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Bruce, I once read a book called Positive Disintegration by an author whose name began with the letter “D” (I'm thinking “Dobroski”). Same pattern. I recall that he contended that some forms of mental illness actually allow the person a chance to reform themselves at a higher level of integration. Of course, as an ex mental health clinician, I realize that there is a big “if” involved there. If the person can work through or survive the mental illness without getting stuck there. Unfortunately, it can be very tough call whether to help someone manage thier painful (and, at time dangerous) symptoms, and to risk fixating them at a lower level, or to risk helping them grab the mental illness bull by the horns and work their way through it like Jacob wrestling a angel in the bible. I was often an accomplice to throwing psychiatric meds at mental illness (in my role of one of several treatment team members), but at other times did try to help the client face and work through the issues contributing to the “positive disintegration”. Helping clients to cognitively reframe the mental illness as that, as a stepping stone to higher integration -an opportunity for letting something go or gaining new insights or skills - seemed helpful in and of itself at times. 
     Darrell

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Who cares ?\

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Kelamuni, I especially liked this section: 
Truth and meaning… are integral aspects of the “event” of understanding itself, are inseparable from, as Gadamer would say, the “play” of understanding.

“Knowledge,” for hermeneutics, is nothing other than the shared understanding that a community of inquirers comes to as a result of a free exchange of opinions. 

Truth is not something simply to be discovered (“represented”) but something to bemade –– through the exercise of communicative rationality. Truth is a practicalconcept. It is something that can exist only if we take responsibility for its existence. 

Gadamer's dialogical view of understanding… provides the model for a social order based not on coercion or domination (Herrschaft) but on rational persuasion, the kind of tolerant and pluralist social order envisaged by the great rhetoricians and humanists of the past.

…hermeneutics… promotes the exercise of critical reason. The function of hermeneutical criticism is to expose and denouce forms of socio-political organization which oppress and stifle the communicative process — fosterning thereby the development of dialogical communities. 



       


 I like this section because, to me, “knowledge” seems to imply content, which is a kind of “thinking like matter”. But hermeneutics seems more like process, like “thinking like energy” (energy being dynamic and having here-there-and-everywhere characteristics, rather than the “simple location” mentioned in Wilber's book The Marriage of Sense and Soul).  
   When the truth is a group function, an enactment, then it allows for greater transformation than merely following an external object called “the truth”. Such external truths are never whole, never completely true in the sense of being wholely self evident, because they leave out the intimate and dynamic transformation of mind. But hermeneutics seems to allow “truths” to touch each of us personally, and to empower us - not by authority, but by authenticity. Perhaps we can never definitively hold the truth, but we can be “real”/ authentic, as we strive toward, and into, and through, “truth”. 
    I want to swim, rather than stand. To be, rather than to “exist” (which, translated, means “to stand out”).


   Darrell

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Talk about swimming …


Generation


Ducks in the water;
big one up front,
little ones following. 
They are the next generation,
swimmers in time,
passing the fly fisherman
up to his hips in currents, 
hoping to lure and snag
a rainbow moment.

Picnics take place on grassy knolls 
above silt and mud banks,
on dry sunny summer days.
Families sit on blankets and around thick tables, 
counting on a good meal,
as predictable as life on dry land.

But the next generation
circles around, playing tag
or running just to feel the wind on faces,
arms swinging like fly fishing filament 
oscillating toward a colorful time.

The adults unpack their fried chicken
and containers of potato salad 
and baked beans.

Meanwhile, ducklings paddle on by. 
They are too fresh in the creation of life, 
too far from the illusion of land 
to forget that we are all swimmers.  


copyright 2005 Darrell Moneyhon

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Pleasase……another poem.

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

hej gadstone

Once a dickhead always a dickhead,

you are just too much, cool.

hhahhahahh

Re: Gary Madison on Rorty, Derrida, and Gadamer

Bruce, as regards Nietzsche's “death of God”, in your piece above about Rorty's ideas, I noticed some matching to a rough draft of a chapter outline I jotted down for my next writing project Christians Thinking Like Energy.  Here are the ideas for one of the chapters in that (proposed) book:   



chapt 4:  Why God doesn't need to exist, and we don't need God to exist in order                to benefit from God.                

            1. Meaning of “exist”  (“to stand out”)                 
            2. God is alive but doesn't exist                
            3. God rests in, and sometimes springs forth (the Holy Spirit)                
            4. God unfolds with (the Son)                
            5. God Watches Over, and Wraps Around (the Father)               
            6. Our reality is God's thoughts (not God)               
            7. How God's thoughts can be our thoughts, and how our thoughts can                     be God's thoughts.                
            8. God, the Deep                
            9. God the Ideal              
          10. God the Whole.              
          11. When God the Deep, God the Ideal, and God the Whole align.     



     I see value in Nietzsche's line of thought, if it is a way to help us let go of the matter-based view of God, and to free us to look at Ultimate Reality as energy-like or feild-like. To die is to allow God to be reborn as an active agent freeing us to be pro-active (or truley enactive), as opposed to following metaphysical assumptions (and some authority's directions/imperatives) like mindless sheep.   The resurrected “God” must “die” to be reborn as an unfolding from within each of us. But, to me, this does not mean God ceases to be alive. “Dead” in terms of material-form “standing out” (existing), but very much alive in terms of creative force unfolding from within us, through us, and around us. Energy rather than matter. The Matter God is dead. The Energy God (or God-as-pure-energy) is very much alive and well. 
     Darrell