Principia Deconstructivia

Just when I'm ready to give up on the whole enterprise I stumble across a post like this one that raises interesting issues that were apparently inspired by Derrida. Of course one reason I like it is that Bérubé is a clearer writer than Derrida and situates the latter's contributions within a broader framework that acknowledges both its strengths and its weaknesses. Plus it's a short punchy blog post instead of a long dense philosophical treatise.

It's not Derrida's fault that he doesn't have the perspective to situate his work within a broader context, or objectively evaluate its faults. (Presumably plenty of weak arguments got cut from the final draft.) J.D. was the first one out of the gate with his particular program, and a certain level of obscurity is just the side effect of intellectual creativity. He couldn't do anything but what he did. In this respect he's no different from anyone else who introduces an original idea. You have to cut them some slack, because what matters is not so much what they say but how it ends up becoming part of the background. (Bérubé's seeping-into-the-groundwater metaphor is particularly apt here.) If a philosopher spends their life writing a near-indecipherable mass of verbiage that someone eventually boils down into a Wikipedia article, they've pretty much done their job.

So some of my frustration with J.D. may be a frustration with reading primary sources in general. As someone who works in the sciences (or at least "sciences" in the case of linguistics) I'm used to viewing primary sources as inherently incoherent and unmoored. For example, there is a large component of physics known as "Newtonian physics"–a crucial body of knowledge that helps us keep planes aloft, prevent bridges from collapsing, land probes on Mars, all kinds of neat things. This body of knowledge has its origins in a particular historical figure, Isaac Newton, and a particular book, the Principia Mathematica, and physicists speak of both reverentially. However, no one actually reads the Principia today except as a historical document. It would be a huge waste of time to try and learn Newton's ideas from Newton's words–you're better off picking up a freshman physics textbook, which three centuries' worth of hindsight has rendered vastly easier to comprehend.

I gather that this is not the case in philosophy, where the fundamentally more idiosyncratic and irreconcilable nature of the material requires that you go back and read primary sources to truly get them. (Though I recall some discussion in the Translator's Preface of the way philosophers' ideas seep beyond their original presentations. So for example there's Kant the person, Kant the section of the bookshelf, and "Kant" the second-hand body of ideas, all of which may exist on equal footing. I remember this catching my attention because it reminded me of the Newton example, and intend to go back and look at it again.) So to some extent I'm just annoyed that I can't go read Derrida for Dummies and be done with it. At the same time, if seepage is the final mark of a philosopher's success, then you need skilled explicators to ease that process along. And I have the sense that a certain deliberate obscurity became the house style for many people working in this branch of philosophy. If so, that's too bad for Derrida, because it impedes the dissemination of whatever is useful in his ideas, forcing him to seep through granite instead of soft pliable earth.