Well, I miss Sherdog when I'm in school. I'll leave it as an open question whether that means Sherdog is better than people think, school is worse than people think, or both
Trust me, I didn't leave behind a great career in geometry to go into the humanities. You won't find someone dumber when it comes to math shit than me. For Derrida, it's more the idea of origin and Husserl's method of conducting his investigation into the origin of geometry than it is weirdo math talk.
Sure. The tl/dr deconstruction critique
Peterson does a great job explaining Derrida's position with his critique of what he originally called "logocentrism" and which he later expanded to "phallogocentrism." But Peterson has only occasionally used the word deconstruction and he's never worked down to the fundamental level of Derrida's thinking. He has pointed out that, as with most people, Derrida starts out from a sensible place (I like Wittgenstein's idea that errors in thinking "can be fitted into what [one] knows aright"). In his introduction to
The Origin of Geometry, he frames his endeavor (at this point not yet called deconstruction) by pointing out that “every critical enterprise” allegedly suffers from a “natural naiveté of its language” and thus requires “rigorous philological or ‘etymological’” investigation.
So far, so good. He's basically saying that often people smuggle in assumptions or are sometimes even unaware of the assumptions driving their arguments. On the basis of that idea, you can easily see him as continuing in a Wittgensteinian vein with something like "grammatical" investigation. He wants to get down to the deepest levels of thinking, where we are "continually call[ed] back to the unnoticed presuppositions of ever recurring problems," and try to work shit out from the beginning.
(Let's leave to the side for the moment the Marxist logic here most influentially put forth by Louis Althusser regarding the presumption of stepping outside of all "language-games," like stepping outside of "ideology," to be able to investigate other people's language-games while at the same time whining about how it's the language-game as such that's fucking shit up with its inescapable/constitutive phallogocentrism.)
The key idea that Derrida extracts from this is that there's a basic metaphysical presupposition, an ontological and epistemological orientation, that goes all the way back to Aristotle. He calls this
the metaphysics of presence. The idea of metaphysical, ontological presence - as well as, in terms of consciousness, the idea of
self-presence - is a given. Derrida tries to argue that this "given" is a problematic "naiveté" in philosophy and he tries to deconstruct it. This leads him to try to invalidate the axiomatic concepts of existence, identity, and consciousness.
Derrida often makes a big show of deconstructing "binary logic." So, in the case of presence, what's really going on is a binary battle between presence/absence (and male/female, white/black, right/wrong, and on down the line). And, since objectivity has been off the table since at least Kant (and something very important that not enough people have been talking about, and Peterson is no exception, is how much this nonsense relies on Kantian ideas, though in his recent podcast with Hicks that I linked to, they finally get into some Kantian territory), Derrida goes on to argue that the side of the binary that's favored is not just a language-game, but a language-game of power.
This is where deconstruction runs off the rails and becomes silly, incoherent, contradictory, and ultimately self-refuting nonsense.
This should be pretty standard stuff. You've probably heard Peterson mention these ideas in a variety of contexts. What always sticks with me is when these morons start talking about art. Or, as they prefer, "texts." Not only is every artistic object - a book, a painting, a movie - a "text," it's an "infinitely polysemous" text. And, since we've gotten rid of objectivity, no text means anything except what a person decides to say it means. And nobody can be "right" about what they've arbitrarily decided to say a text means because what could the concept of "right" possibly be attached to in the absence of an objectively existing artwork?
Are you wondering where the author comes into the picture? Don't bother. He doesn't. If you ask about what the author of a "text" meant, you'd get laughed at for assuming (a) that authors actually know what they mean to do when they create an artwork and (b) that you could possibly know what an author actually meant to do.
It's a neat little trick whereby Derrida and his crew are able to invalidate the idea of an objectively existing artwork to which people can refer in conversations/criticism (so goodbye concepts of "right" and "wrong" and "good" and "bad"), the idea of texts having "fixed" meanings or identities (so goodbye to the concept of "meaning"), the idea of conscious intention (so goodbye authorial intention), and the idea of communication (so goodbye identifying intent).
So what's left? If this is a "victory" in any sense of the word, it's at best a Pyrrhic victory. But if you actually work through the "logic" in these arguments, it doesn't even stand as a Pyrrhic victory for long. And that's what I do in my essay. I work through Barthes and his retarded essay "The Death of the Author" and then I work through Derrida, focusing primarily on his writings on Husserl and phenomenology and how they undergird his idiotic aesthetic ideas. In the process, I point out shit like how Barthes' allegiance to altruism and Marxism produces a terrifyingly violent conception of art criticism and how Derrida's fear of responsibility makes him susceptible to nihilism and results in a corpus even more fractured and incoherent than Nietzsche's.
Unlike Peterson, though, I have a bit of sympathy for Derrida. None for Barthes. That guy was a piece of shit. Derrida was just scared and confused. But, like I said, I detail more of that shit in the essay itself. For an inkling, though, and so you get a sense of what Peterson means when he talks about the psychological weakness of people who cling to nonsense like this, consider that Derrida came up with deconstruction as a means by which to avoid in philosophical practice “aberration, forgetfulness, and irresponsibility." Yet, at the same time, he tried to argue that "no intention can ever be fully conscious, or actually present to itself," which would mean that language “leaves us no choice but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say), to say something other than what we say and would have wanted to say.”
This is what I call, following Cavell, Derrida's fantasy of "necessary inexpressiveness." It's what allows him, in his fear of responsibility and accountability, to indulge in a fantasy in which responsibility is not even an option. It's a philosophical "safe space." But notice the contradiction. Is Derrida’s pathological fear throughout his career of “aberration, forgetfulness, and irresponsibility” not already a rejection of the claim that we are fated “to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say)”?
This is the type of shit that needs accounting for, that needs to be explained. But good luck getting an explanation that makes any more sense than the shit that needs explaining
Even though I'm an academic and I write nerdy shit, I try to keep shit on the sensible level, which means it shouldn't go over anybody's head provided people are actually using their heads.
That's one of the key tricks used by people like Derrida. They hide their retardation inside of jargony gobbledygook. I don't let that shit slide. I shine a big bright light onto it so that the silly shit has nowhere to hide.
This is why Gad Saad, in his "Saad Truth" clips on postmodernism, always reads these ridiculously convoluted abstracts for papers that don't actually say or mean anything. And it's why he always emphasizes that, when you read that type of shit, don't go inside and think that you're not smart enough to "get it," that the profundity is over your head. If it sounds like a crock of shit, it probably is.
In my essay, I frame it as an attempt on my part to work through what Ayn Rand referred to as "the unreadable." It's really scary how right she was about academic practice, but this is what she said about unreadable garbage like Derrida. As she explained, an unreadable book or essay “does not count on men’s intelligence, but on their weaknesses, pretensions, and fears”; it “is not a tool of enlightenment, but of intellectual intimidation”; and it “is not aimed at the reader’s understanding, but at his inferiority complex":
"Within a few years [of the publication of an unreadable book or essay], commentators will begin to fill libraries with works analyzing, 'clarifying,' and interpreting its mysteries. Their notions will spread all over the academic map, ranging from the appeasers, who will try to soften [its] meaning—to the glamorizers, who will ascribe to it nothing worse than their own pet inanities—to the compromisers, who will try to reconcile its theory with its exact opposite—to the avant-garde, who will spell out and demand the acceptance of its logical consequences. The contradictory, antithetical nature of such interpretations will be ascribed to [its] profundity—particularly by those who function on the motto: 'If I don’t understand it, it’s deep.' The students will believe that the professors know the proof of [its] theory, the professors will believe that the commentators know it, the commentators will believe that the author knows it—and the author will be alone to know that no proof exists and that none was offered. Within a generation, the number of commentaries will have grown to such proportions that the original [unreadable book or essay] will be accepted as a subject of philosophical specialization, requiring a lifetime of study—and any refutation of [its] theory will be ignored or rejected if unaccompanied by a full discussion of the theories of all the commentators, a task which no one will be able to undertake."
I take the baton from the point where she says fighting this shit is "a task which no one will be able to undertake." That's too pessimistic for my taste. I also get sad when Peterson talks about how the humanities are dead and the university is beyond fixing. That may be true, but the only way I'll accept that is by trying to fix the shit myself and failing.
Have you ever read Joseph Campbell? I can't help but notice the coincidence that
The Hero with a Thousand Faces was originally published in 1949, and then, exactly half a century later, in 1999, Peterson published
Maps of Meaning. For the sake of his fascination with religion, it's like he's the second coming of Campbell
If you like the way Peterson can break shit down, check out some Campbell when you get a chance. He'll make religion and mythology make so much more sense for you. And bringing those two together will basically span the entirety of man's attempts to express ideas and values in story form.
Same. I've only read the first 20 pages or so. In a couple of months, I'm going to get to do a guest lecture in my supervisor's "Film and Visual Culture" class on
Inception and philosophical skepticism, so I'm too busy going back over Descartes and Kant, but every time I go into my PDF folders, I can fucking hear
Maps of Meaning calling to me
You know what's worried me ever since I first read the words, though? What Wittgenstein said in his preface to the
Tractatus: "Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it - or at least similar thoughts."
What do you do with that? If you find in Peterson's words something to grab onto, if you find in his thoughts similar thoughts to those that you've had yourself, great. But, ultimately, the goal is to get the people who think differently to abandon their stupid, dangerous, (self-)destructive thoughts. Have they ever had similar thoughts? If not, will they ever understand? If they will, how do you get them to understand?
The most logical answer is provided by Rand:
"We do not tell – we
show. We do not claim – we
prove. It is not your obedience that we seek to win, but your rational conviction. You have seen all the elements of our secret. The conclusion is now yours to draw – we can help you to name it, but not to accept it – the sight, the knowledge, and the acceptance must be yours."
Translation: You can bring a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Great. So what do we do once we get to the fucking water
