Philosophy as a Literary Tradition

...And whether one initially classifies Derrida's work as "literature" or as "philosophy" is less important than that he be appreciated as the sort of writer whose originality forces us to throw away old taxonomies and come up with new ones...

...So graduate study in philosophy in these countries is largely a matter of reading books and articles written in English within the last 20 years...

...Many of them see no more need to study the history of philosophy than physicists do to study the history of physics...

...The result has been that even among Continental philosophers Derrida is often dismissed as a merely "literary" figure—a brilliant writer, perhaps, but not a Thinker...

...His books are at the center of what now goes by the name of "literary theory"—a discipline pursued in literature departments, and sneered at in philosophy departments...

...And this because those problems are indubitably there, installed within philosophy and reaching beyond it into every department of modern institutionalized knowledge...

...Indeed, his essays sometimes appear to be complicated jokes...

...For a long time there has been a split between what gets called "philosophy" in the English-speaking world and what gets called by that name in France and Germany...

...There is much to be said on both sides of this quarrel, and a lot of it is said in the course of controversies about Derrida...

...no better tribute could be paid to these men than to be read as he reads them...

...For my part, I doubt that "reason" is a useful notion, much less the name of something with a "principle" whose "limits" we can discover...

...It seems to me that there are fashions in philosophical problems as there are fashions in prose styles, and that discussion of such transitory problems rarely makes much difference—except in very indirect and long-term ways —to other areas of culture, much less to socioeconomic arrangements...

...Here Norris agrees with the analytic school that philosophy is a matter of deep and enduring problems, whose solution would have an impact on social and cultural institutions...

...But I think that Mill, Neitzsche and Dewey have already shown us what was wrong with that hypostatization, and that there is little further work to be done in this area...

...But he is read mostly by professors and students of literature, who greatly outnumber (by about 10 to one) their counterparts in philosophy...

...He fits nicely into the canonical sequence of Continental philosophers, since his themes and preoccupations are pretty much those of Heidegger...

...In this book he combines very intelligent and informed summaries of crucial Derridean texts with a polemic against people like myself: people who read Derrida as a writer about philosophy—a sort of postphilosophical commentator—rather than as a contributor to philosophy...

...He takes his cue from what looks to me to be a traditional Marxist overvaluation of philosophy...

...These philosophers think that the professors of English and Derrida deserve one another...

...From the perspective of so-called " Continental" philosophy, the neglect of history in the analytic camp looks like the trivialization of philosophy by illiterates...

...I feel I have learned a great deal from Derrida about the writers who mean most to me, yet I should be hard put to spell out exactly what truths he has taught me...

...But I cannot draw out any philosophical doctrines or morals from Derrida's work...

...To read him that way, says Norris, "is to ignore the awkward fact that Derrida has devoted the bulk of his writings to a patient working-through (albeit on his own, very different terms) of precisely those problems that have occupied philosophers in the 'mainstream' tradition, from Kant to Husserl and Frege...

...I agree that "Western experience" owes quite a bit to the traditional philosophical attempt to produce a secularized version of monotheism by hypostatizing certain human abilities under the name of "reason...

...He sees deconstruction (i.e., Derridean philosophizing) as "a rigorous attempt to think the limits of that principle of reason which has shaped the emergence of Western philosophy, science and technology at large...

...The idea that there is some such thing seems to me just the typical philosophical hope that all the things one dislikes most will turn out to have a single root, so that one can then cut them away with a single dialectical stroke...

...Norris maintains that my attitude underrates and misunderstands Derrida...

...From the side of English-language "analytic" philosophy, this attention to history looks like antiquarianism—or worse yet, like an attempt to treat the pre-history of a science as a substitute for that science...

...Austin) and discuss it in terms of some hitherto unnoticed turn of phrase, or aside, or example...

...One of Derrida's favorite ploys is to pick up a text (by Hegel, or Plato, or an analytic philosopher like J.L...

...Among analytic philosophers he is often regarded as simply a charlatan—somebody who pretends to depth when all he has to offer is verbal prestidigitation...

...Johnson on Milton, Nabokov on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Emerson) or a great historian (Gibbon on the Antonines, Henry Adams on Jefferson...

...Whether Norris is the better reader of Derrida or I am is less important than that Derrida should continue to be read...

...They regard "literary theory" and "deconstructive criticism" as the names of academic rackets—pseudodisciplines in which fools are cozened by knaves...

...Derrida, in my view, is a writer of genius who has taken philosophy for his theme...

...Norris, as a political radical, would like philosophy to have social utility and, if possible, revolutionary implications...

...Norris thinks that I make Derrida too playfully literary, and I think that Norris makes him too staidly philosophical...

...I also doubt that any single thing has "shaped every aspect of Western experience...

...author, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" Jacques Derrida is, in America, the most widely read living philosopher...

...British and American philosophy professors like to think of themselves as quasi-scientists—people busy solving problems...

...By contrast, graduate study in philosophy on the Continent is still a matter of starting with Parmenides and working one's way down through Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and Hegel, to people like Nietzsche and Heidegger...

...Norris' thoughtful book will help people appreciate that originality...

...Having become, over the years, somewhat distanced from the analytic philosophy in which I was trained, I am dubious about this claim...

...So I tend to read philosophy as one more literary tradition, although one of the West's most valuable and important literary traditions...

...His treatment of Rousseau's view of the role of writing in culture, for instance, revolves around Rousseau having characterized writing as a "supplement" to thought and speech, and having used the same word (in the Confessions) to describe his own habit of frequent masturbation...

...I simply admire his skill at writing and at reading, as I do that of a great literary critic (Dr...

...In Coming Issues Phoebe Pettingell on Joseph Brodsky's "To Urania" Robert Cox on Emilio F. Mignone's "Witness to the Truth" Christopher Norris and I (teachers of English and philosophy, respectively) are both admirers of Derrida, but we each think the other admires him for the wrong reasons...

...Norris believes there is something called "reason" that "in its various practical or technocratic forms, has shaped every aspect of Western experience...

...Unlike Heidegger, however, he has a sense of humor...

...He reads him as a "transcendental philosopher" whose work is characterized, above all, by "rigor...

...His way of treating Plato, Hegel and Heidegger seems to me as profound and instructive as it is funny...

...Another of Derrida's specialties is to put a lot of weight on bilingual puns, in the manner of Finnegans Wake...