The Hebraism of Postmodernism

Postmodernism, as I've indicated in previous posts, is many things, some of which are quite inimical to Christian faith. But in important respects, postmodernism - especially the thought of Derrida - is a Hebraic protest against Hellenized philosophy. In his fine recent book on Derrida, James KA Smith suggests that "In the beginning was the word" would be a "fitting epigraph" to Derrida's Complete Works, and elaborates:

The post-Heideggerian linguistic turn "runs counter to a long tradition in Western thought that has tended either to forget or to denigrate language: forgetting that philosophy only 'happens' in the medium of a discourse . . and, whenever it does turn to the question of language, regularly denigrates its 'secondariness' . . . as a fall from pure access to Truth. This forgetting and denigration of language maps onto a general philosophical attitude toward embodiment and the alterity of being-in-relation to others. The connection is a natural one: the world of signs - whether graphemes or phonemes - is a world of sensuous phenomena that activate and depend on the body. There would be no language without air and ears, without marks and tablets. Thus, language is inextricably linked to matter and materiality, to bodies which have ears to hear and eyes to read. Moreover, language as a 'public' phenomenon - shared with others in a community - is an essentially relational phenomenon and thus necessarily involves others. Insofar as the philosophical tradition has devalued language it has also devalued the 'media' of language - bodies and matter. Or, conversely, insofar as a long-standing rationalism (and dualism) in the Western philosophical tradition has denigrated bodies and materiality, the negative accounts of language are a symptom of deeper metaphysical commitments." One could start elsewhere, but for Derrida language is a "case" that enables him to detect wider problems in the Western tradition. And, because the Western tradition exists as a tradition only in the very language and texts that it treats as "secondary," Derrida's probing of the issue of language is the master illustration of "deconstruction."

Time and change are also bound up with questions of writing and language. To have certain and unchanging knowledge, much of the Western tradition has claimed, we must have access to ideas, which enable the philosopher "to shift the object of philosophical knowledge out of the mundane, muddy, corruptible world of bodies to the eternal, unchanging world of 'ideas.'" To get at true knowledge, we must have knowledge of something that is not subjected to the vagaries of time: "While I might 'know' that this tree in the garden is green, in fact that claim does not count as knowledge proper (or 'intelligible' knowledge) because the assertion could tomorrow be false: the autumnal processes of change could set upon the organism overnight, and I will awake to find the tree a shade of yellow." The idea of a tree, however, never changes.

Hence, Derrida discerns in the Western tradition a complex of commitments - to ideas over language, to mind over body, to changelessness over change, to timelessness over time, (perhaps) to individual over relation. Each of these commitments entails the others, and an assault on Hellenic views of language is an assault on the whole structure.

Derrida, remember, was Jewish.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, January 06, 2006 at 06:15 PM

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