In Which Hegel is Straightforward

But not straightforwardly spoken-of. It's a theology post :o

I have hidden it so you don't read it by accident. It's a screenshot from the Derrida movie.

(and now that you know that, you can skip the movie. Total letdown.)

Given my background in theology, one of the first things I tried to figure out when I was getting into Hegel was whether he was some sort of atheist/pantheist/proto-Marxist radical/gnostic (etc.), or if he was a Lutheran of more or less orthodox stripe. All of the secondary literature I came across came down pretty strongly in favor of the former: Hegel was a modern Simon Magus, an Arch-heretic for a new age, or else he was secretly a Marxist before Marx, or some sort of pagan nature-mystic, or he was a follower of Valentinus, or... (there wasn't a clear consensus on what Hegel was, only that he wasn't a plain ol' Lutheran). The textual support for these claims was never particularly clear to me -- Hegel clearly opposed certain theological positions and certain conceptions of God, but then so does every orthodox Christian thinker. And when Hegel considers the question, he certainly doesn't seem to mince words: the longest paragraph in the "Philosophy of Spirit", §573, is dedicated to taking down those who "know" that philosophy promulgates a pantheistic doctrine. (He also devotes a great deal of attention to the topic in the introductions & prefaces to the Encyclopedia; Jacobi had claimed that all philosophy leads to pantheism, by which he meant Spinozism, since Spinozism is the only consistent philosophy.)

(An aside: I think it's clear that Spinoza is fairly counted as an atheist; the author of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus clearly wanted to convince his readers to give up their (Judaeo-Christian) religion in favor of a modern, natural science-minded philosophy. Strauss's reading of Spinoza here is, I think, blatantly correct. And so, by the standard Hegel refers to in §573, Spinoza is rightly considered an atheist by Jewish/Christian thinkers -- Spinoza is opposed to their religious conceptions, and intentionally sets out to undermine them. I don't think it's inconsistent to say all this while still allowing Hegel to be right in claiming that Spinoza is more properly viewed as an "acosmist" than an "atheist". For by §573's standard, someone can be a "theist" in some sense while still being an "atheist". Which is where Spinoza seems to fall. For in Spinoza's positive doctrine, he does posit a deus sive natura, and he does deny that "the world" apart from this monad has any reality. (I am aware that this is sketchy; I need to read more Spinoza.) Hegel's aufhebung of Spinoza here sets aside the polemical purpose Spinoza had in the Tractatus, just as it sets aside the acosmism -- insofar as Hegel is a Spinozist, he's a Spinozist who is not fairly counted as an atheist.)

It's become clear to me that many of Hegel's interpreters simply want him to not be a Lutheran. For if they regard themselves as Hegelians, they don't want to be seen as endorsing Christianity (or religion generally -- certainly not any sort of orthodox Protestantism); if they regard themselves as anti-Hegelians, they don't want to be seen as opposing Christian thought. I've noticed this in some of Pippin's stuff: whenever Hegel's religion is mentioned, it's always "Hegel's heterodox Christianity". (I'm not even going to go into what it would mean for a Protestant thinker to be heterodox -- if there's just one way to be an orthodox Protestant, than either Luther or Calvin or both are heterodox, for they disagree with each other over what each took to be foundational matters of doctrine. To say nothing of all the other branches of Protestant Christianity, such as Anabaptism or the various American phenomena. If you want to find some common core of Orthodoxy among all these groups, it's going to end up being pretty darn thin. And so it's going to become less and less plausible that Hegel rejects it.)

I recently read Hegel's foreword to Hinrich's Religion in its Inner Relation to Science. It's good. Really wish I'd encountered it a few years ago -- would've saved myself a lot of effort. Hegel even praises the Scholastics, which is really strange. Normally he says good things about Anselm, and then there's a few centuries of Deep Darkness under those Fiendish Papists and their retrograde "philosophy" which consisted of bungling Aristotle and contributing nothing positive. (It's not clear that Hegel read any medieval philosophy, apart from Anselm.) But when Hegel has his face set on arguing against Schliermacher-and-friends that speculative philosophy and theology aren't innately opposed to each other, well, he's clearly trying everything he can think of to show that they are dumb and wrong. Hegel writes a pretty decent polemic when he takes a mind to it.

But anyway, on to the impetus for my writing this post. I've been skipping around in "Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition", which is agreeably crazy and fun. (Yes, Hegel really liked Jacob Boehme. He also admitted that it's hard to figure out what the heck he was getting at, and that you can't read him for long before putting the book down because it's too darned strange.) In the introduction, in a footnote, Magee quotes from Hegel's letters. I'll just reproduce the entire footnote:

In a July 3, 1826, letter to Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck (1799-1877), Hegel writes, "I am a Lutheran, and through philosophy have been at once completely confirmed in Lutheranism." See Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christianne Seiler [citation details omitted]. In 1826 a small controversy erupted in Berlin when a priest attending Hegel's lectures complained to the government about allegedly anti-Catholic statements made by Hegel. Hegel responded: "Should suit be filed because of remarks I have made from the podium before Catholic students causing them annoyance, they would have to blame only themselves for attending philosophical lectures at a Protestant university under a professor who prides himself on having been baptized and raised a Lutheran, which he still is and shall remain."

Pro Tip: Don't respond like this when someone threatens to take you to court for being a bigot.

So far, Magee's book is trying too hard to find "hermetic" elements in Hegel. There's certainly some weird stuff in there -- Magee's right that "anti-theological" readings of Hegel have to excise a lot of stuff -- but sometimes he goes too far. For instance, the quotation at the head of his introduction is itself a quotation; I remember chasing down the reference once (it required a good bit of work to figure out who "C.F.G." was), and it didn't turn out to be anything earth-shattering. If memory serves, he was a theologian. He certainly wasn't anyone who I wouldn't expect to be quoted as expounding Christian ("revealed religious") doctrine. Magee holds back on the fact that his header is neither original to Hegel nor Hermetic in origin.

Magee's exposition of "hermeticism" is also tilted in favor of his conclusion. He positions it between Christianity and pantheism, ignoring the fact that 1) Hegel doubts that anyone has ever held the latter position and 2) Christianity is a bigger tent than he lets on. He implies that Hermeticism spoke of "moments" in the way Hegel did; it did not. Hegel took the term from contemporary mechanics. (I'm positive that this is mentioned in an endnote in the Hackett Encyclopedia Logic, but "moment" is not in the index and I can't find it by skimming. The point was credited to Findlay.) He claims that Hegel's philosophy of nature spoke of nature "emanating" from God; this was a point at which Hegel criticized von Baader (see the third preface to the Encyclopedia, ps.15/16 in the Hackett Encyclopedia Logic, footnote. The relevant paragraph in the Philosophy of Nature, which is what von Baader was discussing, is admirably clear, considering its subject-matter).

I've not gotten to his attempt to claim the Phenomenology as a sort of hermetic "initiation" to the System yet. I'm pretty sure that my antecedent commitments about the relationship between the PhG and the Encyclopedia system are going to outweigh whatever evidence he can dredge up for that conclusion. I'm curious if he has anything more to back up his claim that Hegel is "not a philosopher", past that one line about raising "love of wisdom" to "wisdom itself". Certainly Hegel continued to refer to what he was doing as "philosophy"; he seems to use "philosophy" and "science" interchangeably when referring to his System. Magee requires "science" to mean something very specific, and very peculiar; Hegel seems to be using it in that good ol' super-broad sense it has in German.

Magee does have a section on Hegel and Mesmer (animal magnetism and all that); that should be fun. Hegel really did have some weird views there -- though most of them are presumably unremarkable for his time, they really do look crazy now. This is one way I can tell that most slanderers of Hegel haven't read him: they never mention animal magnetism. (A short version: Hegel thought that mind-reading was real. He cites a slew of sources to back himself up on the point, which tells me that the view was at least a little crazy at the time. But, in his theoretical account of how it might work, he only allows that feelings might be communicated from one body to another -- not thoughts. Communicating thoughts requires language (or gestures, or writing, or something cultured like that).) There really is some flat embarrassing stuff in the "Subjective Spirit" section of the Encyclopedia -- I'm curious how much of the "cures for insanity" section in the Zusatze to ss408 is credible and how much is credulous. Incidentally, in Findlay's introduction to Miller's & Wallace's translation of that volume, he claims Hegel's openness to "E.S.P." phenomena as one of the good parts of Hegel. Findlay was a theosophical nutcase -- Magee is at least right in connecting his reading of Hegel to Findlay.

PS: Classes start in a matter of hours! :o

Brief notes on various things

I am pretty satisfied with this comment on my previous post.

Paul Redding's "Hegel and Piercean Abduction" (European Journal of Philosophy 22:3) hits a lot of interesting material. It's mostly about the German Idealists' conceptions of the logical structure of judgements and the intuition/concept distinction. Redding, following Brandom, claims that the Idealists adopted an inferentialist approach to conceptual content. Hegel's opposition to Kant's distinction between intuitions (as singular representations) and concepts (as general representations) is shown to flow from his commitment to the notion that empirical judgements have their conceptual content because of their inferential relations; this is related to Hegel's treatment of the syllogism as "the truth of judgement". Empirical judgements are shown to have "syllogistic" structures, with concepts figuring variously as singular, as particular, and as universal, rather than (as on the Kantian account) being combinations of concepts with non-conceptual intuitions. This is related to the Romantic emphases on the authority of "feeling" and of the natural as normative, and Hegel's rejection of both of these, by way of Hegel's treatment of aesthetic judgements as the paradigm of judgements in general. There's also an extended discussion of Pierce's appropriation of Aristotle's syllogistic logic, and a few other lines of thought, all in fourteen pages. It'd be nice to have a more extended treatment of pretty much everything Redding mentions, but what's here is quite nice.

John Divers's "Quinean Skepticism about de re Modality after David Lewis" (European Journal of Philosophy 15:1) is a very nice discussion of Quine's "Reference and Modality", Lewis's response to it, Lewis's use of "On What There Is" to motivate his modal realism, and possible motivations for continued "Quinean" skepticism about de re modalities after all of this is taken into consideration. In the audio interview with Burton Dreben, Quine claims that he rejects Lewisian defenses of de re modality because they are ontologically profligate; "possible worlds" are too high a price to pay to be able to make sense of modal operators. Divers does a good job of showing how this sort of response is in tension with Quine's mathematical platonism: Quine is already willing to allow for unaesthetic extensions to his "desert landscape" ontology to accommodate number-talk, so it's not clear why he can refuse to do the same with modal-talk. Divers ends up offering a suggestion as to how de re modal-talk might still be resisted: Insist that de re modal-talk hasn't been shown to serve any useful purpose, and so there's no immediate reason why we should bother trying to make accomodations for it, rather than just dropping it altogether. I suspect that at least a partial response to this demand might be made by way of the Brandomian-Sellarsian notion that "the language of modality is a transposed language of norms", but this sort of answer would show as unmotivated many "metaphysical" uses of de re modal-talk -- there's no need for a theory of counterparts if "A is necessarily p" and "B is possibly q" can be fully cached out in terms of what moves are and aren't allowed in a language-game.

Haugeland's "The Intentionality All-Stars" (Philosophical Perspectives, volume 4, 1990 pp.383-427) has the best meta-philosophy joke ever. I won't spoil it. The article is good apart from that joke, too.

Huwe Price's Metaphysics After Carnap: The Ghost Who Walks?" is, as the title suggests, a discussion of the queer fact that metaphysics is alive and well nowadays, after so many attempts to kill it. Price focuses on the role Quine's "On What There Is" has (purportedly) played in the rehabilitation of metaphysics, with an eye to reversing the trend. Price notes that appeal to a supposed Quine-Putnam "argument from indispensability" plays a central role in debates about "modal realism", and offers a rebuttal to it: Refusing to either give or deny an "ontological" ground for our mathematical practices is not "intellectually dishonest" in the way Quine claims. Ironically, Putnam himself opposes the argument attributed to him in a variety of places; he thinks the Quinean insistence on a univocal reading of the quantifier is absurd, and so is mathematical platonism.

Price's "One Cheer for Representationalism" is slated to appear in the "Library of Living [sic] Philosophers" volume on Rorty, which is currently in development. Rorty plays almost no role in the paper. It is mostly about Brandom and Blackburn's "quasi-realism", which Price expands to a "global expressivism", as he has previously urged in other places. (Link has powerpoint slides and audio, for maximal "I-don't-feel-like-reading-this"-ness!) Price seems to me to recoil too far away from representation-talk, just as Rorty did, so perhaps the essay is not as inappropriate as it initially seems. Price only wants to rehabilitate talk of "representations" in an expressivist manner, but I can't see any motivation for stopping there, beyond a "naturalism" which makes the causal world seem "sparse" rather than "rich". I don't know how Price reconciles a global expressivism with this scientism; if no language plays the role of "representing how things are", then why are we supposed to take "our best current science" as somehow giving us a picture of "the causal order"? Why are we supposed to think there's any sense to talking about "the" causal order at all?

I have read in various places that Wiggins was influential for both Davidson and McDowell, so I looked him up on JStor. So far all I've read is "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time", because it was only six pages long, and some book reviews. I can already sense why Wiggins might've been a cool dude. A quote from "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time", p.92:

If it is a materialistic thesis that T = W [where T=a tree, W=the cellulose molecules that compose the tree], then my denial that T = W is a form of denial of materialism. It is interesting how very uninteresting an obstacle these Leibnizian difficulties-real though they are-put in the way of the reduction of botany and all its primitive terms to organic chemistry or to physics. (If it does not follow from T != W that trees are something over and above their matter, how much the less can it follow that they are immanent or transcendent or supervenient or immaterial beings. This is obviously absurd for trees. A Leibnizian disproof of strict identity could never be enough to show something so intriguing or obscure.) I should expect there to be equally valid, and from the point of view of ontology almost equally unexciting, difficulties in the reduction of persons to flesh and bones, in psychophysical event-materialism, and in the materialisms which one might formulate in other categories (such as the Aristotelian categories property and state or the categories situation and fact). Over and above is one question, identity is another. But of course the only stuff there is is stuff.

That's a pretty elegant way to avoid a bunch of ontological claims that I want to avoid. Is there some particular piece of Wiggins's I need to hunt down ASAP?

I read Derrida's "Signature Event Context"at Barnes&Noble. It was collected along with "limited ink abc...", an afterword where Derrida responded to some criticisms of "limited ink abc...", and a summary of Searle's article; apparently he wouldn't agree to having it reprinted in between the Derrida articles. Derrida's style still strikes me as the opposite of pleasant, but 'd' in "limited ink abc..." was pretty funny. Somewhere partway through 'e' I skipped to the afterword, where (paraphrasing since I didn't buy the book) Derrida is asked if he doesn't assume that concepts must have "rigid" rules for application, such that something is always "A or not-A" (vague or not vague, communicable or not communicable, etc.; he runs through a big list of them). Derrida answers in the affirmative: He does think concepts must be "rigid" in this way, so that one must always say, with the tradition, that (and here he runs through a whole slew of "A or not-A" phrases that I want not to affirm). I am now confident that I'll be fine not reading anything else Derrida wrote. Rorty's "Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition" left me with the strong impression that Rorty only praised Derrida so highly because of his style, and I am now convinced that this is how it is. As a philosopher, Derrida does not seem to have much to recommend him -- he is too caught up with dead projects.

Cavell would be easier to get into if he wasn't so damned erudite. Stop tying your philosophical points in to plays I haven't seen and novels I haven't read, dagnabit!

McDowell has an essay linked here which I can't recall anyone having linked to: "Why Is It Called "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"?", which is a reading of Sellars as an empiricist, contra Brandom. I still haven't read Brandom's "study guide", and I'm now inclined to keep putting it off; McDowell's reading of Sellars strikes me as so obviously correct that I don't know how Brandom could read it otherwise. (I am of course aware that it is uncharitable to think Brandom is ever writing on something other than his own project. But Brandom's claim to be a Sellarsian is rather more forceful than his claim to be a Hegelian or Kantian, so a misreading here is more irksome.)

I'm slowly getting through "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". The end of Chapter X left me still wondering why Kuhn thinks it's worthwhile to talk of scientists as "operating in different worlds" rather than just "doing different things" or "seeing things differently". Why the "swinging stone" could not have been seen as the same thing by both Aristotelians and Galileans is unclear to me -- the Aristotelians cannot see it as a pendulum, and the Galileans cannot see it as an object which by nature moves "down", but why can't both see it as a swinging stone? Doesn't Kuhn's presentation of the matter actually require this? Doesn't this leave "different worlds"-talk looking too strong? (A more detailed discussion of Kuhn's account would be needed to flesh this out, I realize.)

I suspect that this is tied to a passage that struck me as bizarre: speaking of the duckrabbit picture beloved of gestalt psychology (and the second part of Philosophical Investigations), Kuhn notes that a subject might eventually come to see the picture as neither duck nor rabbit, but as "lines on paper", "and he may then say (what he could not have legitimately said earlier) that it is these lines which he really sees but that he sees them alternately as a duck and as a rabbit." (p.114 in the third edition) -- Isn't it just as legitimate for him to say that he sees the picture of a duck (or of a rabbit) as "mere lines"? I don't get what "really sees" means here. Surely he sees the ink on the paper (or pixels on a screen) as lines; then it is really the ink (or the pixels) that he sees! But both of these strike me as absurd -- the duckrabbit isn't "really" ink or lines or a duck or a rabbit, though it can be seen as all of these. There isn't anything it "really" is, behind all the aspects that one can perceive. The aspects one sees are what it "really is", in the only sense in which it "really is" anything at all. It's not as if the duck-aspect disappears when we don't see it; if someone (at first) can only see the rabbit, or can't see either picture (as happens with some of the worse gestalt images), then it isn't the case that the aspects have yet to come into being (after all, other people might be able to see them already). The fellow simply hasn't noticed them yet. So "perspectival aspects" seem as real as anything has claim to be.

Kuhn claims that the absence of an "external standard" in duckrabbit-like cases distinguishes simple gestalt shifts from scientific revolutions. If the "seeing lines as such-and-such" approach was supposed to be this "external standard", then scientific revolutions seem to revert to "simple" gestalt phenomena if that line was unintelligible. I want to say: One could view phenomena as they were conceived under an obsolete paradigm, it's simply (exceedingly) inconvenient scientifically, and suicidal professionally, for any given scientist to do so. In fact, it's not clear to me why one can't always go back to "pre-paradigm science" talk, if one doesn't mind giving up huge amounts of utility -- one can always talk in terms of "that thingy over there" and "that other thingy", if nothing else. It's liable to be confusing and there's no reason anyone would ever want to do this, but I don't see that it would somehow fail to "get a grip" on the world discussed by our best paradigm-enabled science. There's an awful lot you won't be able to discuss profitably, but what you can talk about, you can talk about. Similarly, I don't see why anything other than psychological limitations prohibit a scientist from working with multiple incompatible paradigms, at different points in time, and suspect that there have been such individuals. Which seems to sap Kuhn of some of his philosophical interest.

Kuhn seems so focused on the theory-ladenness of observation (not his term) that he ignores how much conflicting paradigms can have in common. For instance, both the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems (and our modern systems of astronomy) agree that there are visible stars at some distance from us. There are many other theoretical commitments which incompatible paradigms do not share in common, but they aren't entirely exclusive of one another. There's no "core" of observational data that all theories share among themselves, nor any definite set of observation sentences which are independent of all paradigms. And perhaps there are not sentences shared by all paradigms, since the "is common to these two paradigms" relation needn't be transitive. But I don't see why one can't grant all of this, which seems to be what Kuhn is actually interested in convincing us of, without going to some of the rhetorical extremes that Kuhn does.

But, like I said in an earlier post, I should probably finish the book before thinking about it too much.

And finally, because I do not think I have posted enough random pictures recently: Cirno.

She is the strongest!

A Narcissism of Small differences

This interview with Derrida annoyed me more than it probably should, which I find to be a common experience with Derrida and Derrideans. So, might as well post about what I don't like. (as it so happens, I ended up merely making disjointed remarks; this seems to me to be quite fitting.)

What does it matter when philosophy started, or what is or is not philosophy, or if philosophy nowadays is or is not the same sort of thing (or a similar sort of thing) as Plato did, or as Heraclitus did? I'd write this off as one of the stupid questions interviewers ask when they don't know the subject, but Heidegger really did seem to think that ancient Greek history was Very Important for philosophy nowadays (indeed, for life & thought themselves nowadays), and Derrida seems to join in with the "We Must Seriously Engage The Platonic Dialogues If We Are To Think Today" silliness. As if history of philosophy just is philosophy, as if "participating in the tradition" meant writing commentaries rather than just doing things which are more or less like what previous folks have done. Heidegger seems to have some weird volkische ideas backing his intuitions about how important the history of thought is, what relation serious thought has to have to its history etc., but I'm not sure why Derrida hangs on to anything of the sort. Greek puns aren't going to help you make progress in understanding anything except what Greek words sound like other Greek words. Do they really blather about "love of wisdom" every year in French philosophy departments? I can see doing it once at the start of an undergrad course (like how many dull speeches begin with "Webster's Dictionary defines this as..."), but every year? What's the point in developing cleverer and cleverer answers to a question like that? What benefit could come from asking the question repeatedly, except the development of cleverness in answering it?

"This love means an affirmative desire towards the Other - to respect the Other, to pay attention to the Other, not to destroy the otherness of the Other" -- here I detect a move that I encountered a fair bit as an undergrad, the shift from "respect for another" to "respect for the Other". I suspect that those who want to develop a "Christian ethics" are particularly vulnerable to this sort of sliding. The problem is that in everyday respect, love, attention there is not anything particularly radical: I comport myself with you in a way that we both find agreeable, I try to look out for your best interests (even, sometimes, when they diverge from my own), I listen to what you have to say and try to not fool myself into thinking you're happy when you aren't etc. In the first place, there's not a need for a "theory of friendship" or a "definition of love"; that sort of understanding is quite useless if what one cares about is love, friendship etc. Nor is anything in this made clearer by talking of "the otherness of the Other" or "the absolute Other" or "irreducible Otherness" or "violence towards the Other". The fact that an everyday practice is going on does not mean that there is some sort of metaphysical whotsits backing it, influencing it, controlling it, guiding it, and so there is not necessarily a demand for a counter-theory in a similar register as that imagined theory (even a counter-theory which is supposed to be "antitheoretical" or "subversive" or "antimetaphysical").
Theologians often want to go from talk about love between people, friendship, respect to love of God, worship, religion as if they were merely continuing the conversation, but this sort of move is a change of topic -- metabasis eis allos genos is the Greek, I believe.

There's a problem from the other direction too, I think: denying that "the absolutely Other" is intelligible is taken to be akin to hating friendship and love and peace and happiness, when really all that is meant is that "otherness" isn't something that makes sense when you push it very far. Red is one color, green is another; sand is different from glass; red and green are both colors; sand and glass have roughly the same chemical makeup; but it makes no sense to ask whether red is the same as or different from glass, or whether "the true is more or less identical to the good." Roughly put: "the other X" or "another X" is intelligible for most values of X, but not for an X with no value. And in all of this "unintelligible" is meant in the only sense it ever has: It makes as much sense as "fserra2trfer342 r4j34jq4neu2 4jh43ujhu4hi34". It is not that the "absolutely Other" merely escapes understanding, or that understanding fails to comprehend it, but that there is mere babble in all talk of this sort. There is no there there.

(I take this to be a broadly Hegelian point, and I think Heidegger and Derrida are both explicitly setting their faces against Hegel in defending some such bogeyman as "the Other." The only hint I've been able to find for why they might do this is because Hegel is associated with totalitarianism, or some octopus-like behemoth named Liberal Capitalism, or The System Which Must Assimilate All Comers, or some such silliness; or else he's just not holding out the promise of the poetic Rhineland soil which is supposed to save us all, nor is he a messianic figure. So then attacking Hegel's muted spinozism is supposed to be of a piece with opposing various bad political movements. As if it was the Logic, and not Hegel's knowledge of economics and liberal political thought, that was motivating the Rechtsphilosophie.)

(if there is anything to the Heideggerian/Derridean defense of the capital-O "Other" that isn't just politics in disguise, then I suspect that it's just the Myth of the Given and/or the Scheme/Content dualism again. Which would, again, be places where the right move is Hegelian -- in this case, Hegel in the guise of Sellars and Davidson, both of whom say nice things about Kant while espousing positions that are more Hegel than Kant.)

"When you address the Other, even if it is to oppose the Other, you make a sort of promise - that is, to address the Other as Other, not to reduce the otherness of the Other, and to take into account the singularity of the Other. That's an irreducible affirmation, its the original ethics if you want." It seems that to "address the Other as something other than Other" is simply to not address the Other at all. In which case "as Other" is only pleonasm, and does not actually rule out anything. The same with "not to reduce the otherness of the Other" -- if one could reduce the "otherness of the Other" then it would of course be intelligible that one might not do this, or even shouldn't do this, or in fact never do do this. But here the idea seems to be that inevitably the "otherness of the Other" is not reduced. In which case it's no accomplishment when there isn't a reduction; nothing happens thereby. If something was supposed to be, or claimed to be, "reducing the otherness of the Other" then this simply shows that words are being used oddly -- there is not a claim to be "reducing the otherness of the Other" or an accusation that this has in fact happened, but merely a homonymous phrase.

From the interviewer, a description which Derrida does not reject: "To many of your readers, one of the important consequences of reading your works is the realization that criticism from an "outside" position is no longer possible, that one is always working with inherited language, and because one inherits language, one inevitably works within a shared framework." Here there is a very salutary point combined with a very confused one: The "outside" position is not no longer possible, but was never a position at all. Nor is it something that might become possible, or one that (so to speak) God might take up. To have something in view means to have a point from which to view things; the point of view does not occlude, but is that which makes vision possible. (One cannot see everything from every point, but this merely means that one must move around to see more things; one must experiment to deepen one's understanding. But the goal is not a viewpoint which encompasses everything, but merely a multitude of viewpoints which allow one to carry out the tasks which one takes to be desirable at various points. There is no limit to what one might be seeking after, but "Everything!" is not an intelligible answer to such a question.) Thus there is no sense to worrying about the fact that one is always working with a "shared framework"; an idiomatic framework would not intelligibly do the work of a framework, since what is in view is our only world and not some private objects, nor does a framework distort or shape anything, but puts a viewer in direct contact with the objects & events, the things & happenings, which fill our lives. Derrida seems to half-see this: He wants to put the point as being that the framework doesn't always have these nefarious effects, because it's constitutionally defective (as are all frameworks). "When you inherit a language, it does not mean you are totally in it or you are passively programmed by it. To inherit means to be able to, of course, appropriate this language, to transform it, to select something. Heritage is not something you are given as a whole. It is something that calls for interpretations, selections, reactions, response and responsibility. When you take your responsibility as an heir, you are not simply subjected to the heritage, you are not called to simply conserve or keep this heritage as it is, intact. You have to make it live and survive, and that is a process - a selective and interpretive process.... I would even say that in order to make something new happen, you have to inherit, you have to be inside the language, inside the tradition. You would not be able to transform or displace anything without in some way being inside the tradition, without understanding the language." I can't make up my mind if this is a very good & correct thing to say, or if it is deeply confused. "Heritage is not something you are given as a whole" seems to me to be a very bad way to put things, since it suggests that there is a whole, but it is simply not given, when I would much prefer to say that what one gains in learning a language, in working in a tradition, just is this ability to do what needs doing, to understand things, to have one's eyes opened to the world, to become able to make one's own mark on things. I suspect that Derrida's desire to say bad things about "conservatism" and "reactionaries" motivates some of this; there must be a way to describe those who do cling to "dead tradition" as doing something bad. I suspect, though, that the difference between "reactionaries" and "progressives" (or "revolutionaries") is not a difference in kind, but a difference in taste: One doesn't like the reactionaries, but one feels a regard for the other group. Both, it seems to me, are taking up elements from the tradition and bringing it forward; trying to maintain an oppressive old code is still to do something in the present, and is not literally dwelling in the past. This is not to say that "reactionaries" are really a sort of progressive, or that they betray their own reactionary nature, but that the demarcation was never a fit one to start with; it didn't carve reality up at the joints, but just hacked at things gracelessly.

Jaroslav Pelikan distinguished between "tradition" and "traditionalism" thusly: Tradition is the living faith of the dead, while traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. This is a nice picture for playing up the important of tradition (which is more noticeable in theology, Pelikan's home discipline, but the point has broader application). I like the line a good bit. But it is, again, striking out against reactionary forces at the expense of being entirely truthful: the "dead faith" of the reactionaries is of course a faith still, though it be an infernal sort of faith, and so "dead" here means not "not alive" but rather "bad." To call something a "dead faith" is to denigrate it. This is of course not to end up with a futile relativism, since insofar as we agree that something should be denigrated (perhaps while we actually denigrate it), then there is no room for us to have skeptical doubts about whether or not our denigration is in the right or not. So "N is denigrating X" can only seem like a skeptical rendering of "X is bad" (in N's mouth) so long as I really am undecided about my own views on X; "N and I are denigrating X" does not leave open the question, neither for N nor for me, whether or not X is up to snuff. The question may of course be broached and earnestly engaged with, but only against a background of notions which are not currently being held open to question.

"So I think there are inventive forms of respecting the tradition, and there are reactive or non-inventive forms. But I would not say that in order to invent something new, or to make something new happen, you have to betray the tradition or to forget the tradition." The only way I can make sense of this is if "inventive" means "good inventive." I don't know how a reactionary response is supposed to be non-inventive, given that it is a response.

To end on a happy note, I very much liked this bit: "If you expect an answer in the form of a "yes or no", I would say no. But if you give me more time, I would be more hesitant." If only he could hesitate before he said "no" as well!