Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 09:14:41 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: Reason & Metanarratives




On Wed, 10 Dec 1997, Mark Shulgasser wrote:

> But aren't all non-scientific understandings necessarily dependent on a
> self-concept (problemmatic as it may be) to state and experience them,
> while the "scientific" explanation is precisely the (putatively) objective
> and thus purged of self? Does not the abandonment of subjectivity leave us
> with nothing but science; and vice versa, he abandonment of science leave
> us with nothing but subjectivity?

Mark,
Thankyou for your response--it was very thought-provoking.  I think I
would turn around and say "aren't all understandings dependent upon a
self-concept" constructed through language?  Then those understandings
become perspectives alongside other perspectives, some more desirable or
more powerful than other perspectives, but all of them perspectives
constructed in language (none can free themselves from the
system--language--which produces them, there's no "outside" of this
terrain where we can step to and get a total picture of the puzzle of
knowledge--we always approach the matter through a particular linguistic
lens, a framework that is culturally, historically determined).

So your conception of the self will differ probably from someone in Africa
or Asia or from Descartes's conception of self (which distinguished a doer
from his or her deed--which is what Nietzsche criticized--how one could
make that distinction in the first place).  It's the power behind the
adoption of a particular concept of self which is more crucial than what
concept is adopted.  In Plato you have this division at its "beginning",
the decision to distinguish between the ideal forms and what we see--Plato
wanted to explain how we can know what we know, a theory of knowledge or
epistemology, to account for the possibility of understanding.  There must
be ideal forms "out there" (and for him they literally existed) to which
the copies or reproductions we encounter correspond.  I see a tree,
therefore the tree must correspond to the ideal form of tree in order for
me to have any possible idea of "tree".

So there must be a "self", an ideal form, to which our conceptions of self
must correspond.  But Nietzsche would say this is a fiction--that original
act of positing an ideal world to which our world corresponds was an act
of forgetting (even as we were engaged in doing it!).  Forgetting that 
the "self" is a metaphor, that it resides in a whole system of
metaphors--an economy--and that how it is interpreted and defined
depends more upon circumstances of power than upon any inherent truth
value beneath the interpretation itself.  Even Nietzsche would have
said that his definition of the self would be one of many, no more
truthful than the next, but perhaps more desirable than others.

Science, as far as I can see, still follows this original gesture, this
forgetting.  You see what I mean?  If you question that original gesture
to make a distinction between the interior and the exterior, the
subjective and the objective, the real and the ideal--distinctions about
objective knowledge versus subjective influences become really
problematic.  If you question this original gesture--that was possible
because of the structure of the Greek language (Hebrew for a contrast has
no verb to be in which an act of predication would be possible as it is in
Greek))  then the distinction between objective and subjective no longer
means anything.  It is not a matter of choosing one for and against the
other, but of saying how can we even speak of such a division in the first
place?! 

> >From a wholly non-scientific perspective Derrida vs. Gadamer on human
> goodness is a replay the astrological disagreement between the former's
> deep, Cancerian cynicism about human motives (cf. July-born Proust and
> Kafka), vs. the latter's rainbowy Aquarian idealism of such Februarians as
> Swedenborg and Buber and Ruskin.

You're probably right!  I tend to think that their positions concerning
hermeneutics are not actually that different, but that Derrida is
attacking Gadamer's position rather than his method.  Gadamer, like
Derrida, accounts very clearly for what cannot be known in
interpretation--the "pre-judgements"--that can be dispelled in part when
examined during the act of having dialogue with a text, but ultimately
cannot be completely abandoned since they are a part of what the
interpreter "is"--his or her situatedness in a particular context, a
historical, cultural world of practises.  So there is never complete
transparency in our context--there is no "outside" by which we could
totalize our experience of the text and our reading of the text.  We
always find ourselves "read" and implicated in the act of dialogue and we
never come to know our own position entirely.  I think though that it is
the presumption that there is a common desire for "understanding" which
Gadamer sees and which Derrida's criticizes.  But of course Derrida
desires to be understood too, even if he doesn't say so!) 

Best wishes,
Matt