Offering multiple perspectives from many fields of human inquiry that may move all of us toward a more integrated understanding of who we are as conscious beings.
Yes . . . and it depends. The first binary we ever experience - and we ALL experience it - is the realization, long before language or the ability to "think," that we are a separate organism from mom, environment, the "surround" (the term developmental intersubjective theorists use to describe the world of the infant, internal and external). Until we reach the formal operations level of cognitive development, most people cannot think outside of binaries.
Once we reach formal and post-formal cognition, however, binaries can become tenuous and resolve into a kind of spectrum. For people at this level, binaries still exist (those old cognitive structures are hold to undo) as a part of implicit consciousness, but they are not generally explicit in one's cognitive workspace when stating beliefs.
That's my opinion - watch the video to hear what these smart folks think on this topic.
Published on Nov 12, 2013 Are binary oppositions real? Watch Barry Smith, Hilary Rose, Luciano Floridi, and Hilary Lawson debate reality and opposition. True or false, male or female, Heaven or Hell. Human thought craves oppositions. Can we transcend this way of thinking or are these oppositions fundamental to human thought, and even wrought within the fabric of the world?
Investigate new ways of thinking with top scholars:
Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London Barry C Smith
London School of Economics sociologist Hilary Rose
Award-winning philosopher of the information age Luciano Floridi
Ecopsychology is a relatively new but rapidly growing field of psychology, with its correlate ecotherapy. Here is a little background on ecopsychology from Robert Greenway, which references Ken Wilber's dismissive assault on earlier ecopsych models. Below this is Rowland's article on ecopsychology.
I. Ecopsychology as Umbrella/Container for Discussions About Nature This is the most common use of the term, and its meanings are diverse, to say the least. Somehow, the term 'ecopsychology' frees people to talk very personally about their concerns over environmental issues, or their angers or fears or grief over specific human-caused problems, or just about anything even remotely connected to natural processes (examples recently gleaned from an Internet ecopsychology group: discussions of recycling, burial practices, education, politics, economics, corporate responsibility, endangered species, ebonics, and so on). There are no boundaries in this realm, although it is commonly assumed, more or less, that any human activity means 'psychology', and anything having to do with 'nature' is ecology, which, together, cover just about everything. Most discussions in this realm are covered more rigorously in other fields. Thus, this category has all the characteristics of a popular fad, a bandwagon, although obviously a need is being fulfilled; perhaps a 'mythic container' is being created, a stimulus for much-needed development of personal and social narrative recasting the human nature relationship. II. Ecopsychology as Basis for Healing, for a 'New' Therapy This is also a common (and one of the most coherent) uses of the term. There are at least two (overlapping) camps within this category: (A) The psychological problems resulting from Western-Industrial Culture's alleged increasing distance from Nature (or 'natural processes'). Paul Shepherd's work (Nature and Madness) is paradigmatic. (B) The use of nature (some kind of immersion in nature) for healing what is believed to be 'the human-nature disjunction' (the idea that re-immersion in nature will somehow offset the pathogenic effects of a culture increasingly isolated from- or dominant over- natural processes). The many forms of wild-erness healing are paradigmatic, although psychotherapists discuss the movement of a therapeutic session from inside the office to out on the patio or a walk in the garden or park as 'ecopsychology'. III. Calls for an Ecopsychology For many, expressions of the need for an ecopsychology are synonymous with ecopsychology-as-field. Although as pointed out above, ideas about the human-nature relationship have been around for decades, or centuries (whether couched in philosophical speculations or pragmatic need), the 1990's call for an ecopsychology is at once a call for a container, for a field, for a discipline, for principles, most of all, for something to do to 'save the earth' from human-caused destruction to the very processes upon which humans and all life depends. Theodore Roszak's The Voice of the Earth is paradigmatic; some of James Hillman's writings are calling for a revision of psychology that would acknowledge the existence of a natural context for all psychological processes, all life!; and, as mentioned above, Paul Shepherd's Nature and Madness (and all his other writings) have for a long time been calling for psychology to become aware of the disjunctive effects of our culture's accelerating distancing with natural processes. IV. Ecopsychology as Experiential For a variety of reasons (such as recent generations' mistrust of philosophy; of 'words that dominate'; of rationality, objectivity, logic; the relief of physical activity as opposed to thinking; the obvious needs for- and benefits of- 'actions'; the increasingly obvious contradictions between what environmental theorists do and what they say ; the conviction that 'experience' (usually meaning experience prior to cultural mediation) is more 'correct' or 'spiritual' or should have primacy over all subsequent psychological processes) - all this and more brings into the burgeoning ecopsychology 'field' calls for 'less talk and more walk'. Thus, for many, 'ecopsychology' means the vision quest, the wilderness excursion, the full-moon ritual, the blockade of a logging road, yoga, or the meditation practice. At a more linguistic level, such actions - and particularly those that involve 'bridges' between culture and nature (such as, say, gardening, sexuality, child-raising, food finding and preparation, shelter, etc.) - are seen not so much as synonymous with ecopsychology, but an essential experiential source of psychological language (i.e., from experience-to-language rather than from philosophy-to-language). V. Spiritual Practice as Ecopsycyology This of course overlaps with category IV, above, but warrants separate attention, for the reason that, though 'spiritual' here means primarily experiential, it also includes the theoretical, as for example, Ken Wilber's massive intellectual work (in particular the first book in his huge trilogy: Sex, Evolution, and Spirit). The underlying assumption here, crucial to many in the environmental movement, is that nature is spirit (i.e. 'Source', where a return to 'right relationship' with nature implies a right relationship with Spirit, and that without this depth (or height!) all efforts at healing the human-nature relationship will fall short. Of course the debate rages whether Spirit has fully descended into earth, or whether earth-consciousness is evolving towards a higher 'spirit' (or whether both are true). Whatever, many now working within an ecopsychology umbrella strive for that feeling or 'groove' of oneness with nature, and assume this to be an essential spiritual approach to healing the human-nature relationship. Many others are turning to the works of Ken Wilber as a trans-personal psychology base for the 'psychology' part of ecopsychology; or to Buddhist psychology (or other religions) as a way of including spirit or 'mystery' in the attempts to overcome the dualism currently inherent in western cultural views of the human-nature relationship. VI. 'Core' Ecopsychology as Language Without discounting any of the above categories of emergent ecopsychology, this category -- very sparse, and without much attention indeed – attempts to 'ground' an ecopsychology in language (the 'logos' of both psychology and ecology) that is philosophically coherent and consistent. The assumption here is, like other disciplines, without a core language, or at least a core set of questions, something as vast as 'ecopsychology' will fly off in all directions and will become, essentially, meaningless, however stimulating or productive of an occasional insight it may be. Assumptions tend to be that the human-nature relationship is psychologically based, that psychology (as emergent in culture) is capable of being skewed (and that this is the case in Western culture), that no existing psychology has a complete handle on the situation (and thus a 'new' psychology must emerge), that the human cognitive penchant for extreme dualism is as close as we can presently come to an expression of the cause of the human-nature disjunction; that language needn't be dualistic (though it often engenders dualism), and that, perhaps, 'the question of consciousness' is at the heart of all these core questions. The work of Warwick Fox (Transpersonal Ecology) is an attempt at a core language, using an analysis of 'deep ecology' and 'transpersonal psychology' to formulate a model of a healthy human-nature relationship. Ken Wilber's work attempts the same, although his rather vicious attacks on deep ecology and earlier forms of ecopsychology for not being transpersonal enough (or rather, for not being couched explicitly in Wilber's latest transpersonal models) makes his work somewhat problematical. At present, the only true ecopsychology text is by Deborah Winter (Ecological Psychology: Healing the Split Between Planet and Self), which is an excellent basic text that combs through a variety of psychologies and philosophies in search of an ecopsychological language that would be practical and stimulating for changing behaviors re the human-nature relationship. There are of course many shorter papers coming out dealing with definitions and ecopsychological ideas, and a number of books in the works that will, hopefully, help to focus this 'field' in a coherent language.
And now, here is Katherine Rowland's new article from Guernica.
The evolving field of ecopsychology aims to cure what ails us by bridging the human-nature rift.
Image from Flickr via Poytr
By Katherine Rowland
“The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment,” said Herman Daly in his 1977 treatise Steady State Economics, invoking the notion that global financial systems hang in careful balance dependent on the planet’s environmental health—a rare idea for the time. Economists, environmentalists, and social scientists alike have since carried variations of Daly’s logic to consumers and boardroom members, urging the public and private sectors to recognize that capital can only be as healthy as the resources on which it depends. Even these ambitious ideas, though, don’t question the underlying assumption that the whole wild world exists for man to mine and plunder, and that we humans are separate from the nature rather than a part of it. The group of specialists now calling bluff on this disconnection is a surprising one, coming not from wildlife biology or atmospheric science but from mental health professions. Many suggest that it’s high time to reframe Daly’s adage to include the human psyche. An evolving field known as “ecopsychology” proposes that the pervasive but fictive gulf between man and nature not only drives ecological decline, but also contributes to modern afflictions such as depression, anxiety, obesity and heart disease. From tenuous roots in Hippie-era urgings that we all be one with mother earth, ecopsychology has in recent years emerged as a legitimate approach to mental health, elaborating on research showing that people benefit from contact with nature—and suffer from its absence. As If the Whole Earth Mattered Oregon-based clinical psychologist Thomas Doherty has been at the forefront of efforts to usher the field into the realm of academic credibility. One of the directors of the American Psychological Association’s recently established Climate Change Task Force, Doherty is encouraging his mental health colleagues to address the psychic damage caused by ecological decline and the modern world’s insistent separateness from nature. “Ecopsychology is not a discipline, so much as it is a social movement, a world view,” he says. Although practitioners have evolved a number of diverse treatment methods, from conducting therapy sessions out of doors to helping clients grieve toxic spills and species loss, Doherty says one of the unifying ideas in ecopsychology is its attempt to integrate a different set of questions into clinical practice. What, for example, does it mean to live as part of the web of life, but to behave as if we didn’t?
Ecopsychology endeavors to explode the nature-culture, mind-body binaries that for centuries have informed how we measure sanity and health. This bifurcating tendency is at the murky core of modern pathologies.
The seeming simplicity of this question obscures its underlying radicalism. “Psychology, as part of the Western tradition, is a Cartesian enterprise,” says Doherty. “It consciously tries to separate humans from the rest of nature.” The widely accepted rift between nature and humanity has supposed roots as broad and deep as the advent of language, of agriculture, the legacy of the Enlightenment. Ecopsychology endeavors to explode the nature-culture, mind-body binaries that for centuries have informed how we measure sanity and health. This bifurcating tendency doesn’t preserve civilization from savagery, but rather is at the murky core of modern pathologies, like anxiety, substance abuse, and compulsive shopping. In other words, it is only because we are at such a remove from nature that we can behave the way we do: using resources with no regard for consequence, consuming goods with no thought as to their production. Doherty asks “what if we were to reinvent psychology so that at its heart it was an ecological discipline?” Could changing our relationship to nature hold the key to mental health? Shamans and Scientists While aspects of ecopsychology emerged in the 1960s, congruent with the gathering force of the environmental movement, it was not really until the 1990s that it gained traction. In 1992 social historian Theodore Rozak (who takes credit for the term “counter-culture”) introduced “ecopsychology” into the vernacular, and called on practitioners to pursue “psychology as if the whole earth mattered.” The diversity in the field suggests that there is no general consensus on what this exactly means. Today, adherents hail from ranks as diverse as therapists, clinical researchers, wilderness guides, shamans, activists and anthropologists, whose methods range from conducting therapy sessions in parks, to vision quests, to documenting the healing qualities of green spaces, and probing what motivates someone to “sell their own nest.” But despite its eclecticism, ecopsychology has steadily begun to penetrate mainstream psychological circles. In 2010, Doherty launched the first peer-reviewed journal devoted to the subject, and this year MIT released a dedicated anthology. As a field of advanced study, ecopsychology degrees and courses are now offered by Lewis and Clark, Oberlin, and the University of Wisconsin, among other institutions.
How does depression correspond to a ruined landscape, or anxiety link to global warming or visions of future generations walking round a world eternally diminished?
However, when it comes to hard facts and data, ecopsychology begins to falter. While there is a robust literature supporting the idea that spending time in nature offers a host of health benefits, such as decreased stress, improved ability to focus, and even lowered risk for heart disease, proving cause and effect is far from clear. “There’s a lot of research showing the psychological benefits of nature. But does the loss of the natural world degrade mental health? That’s a difficult conclusion to support,” says experimental psychologist John Davis. How, for example, does depression correspond to a ruined landscape, or anxiety link to global warming or visions of future generations walking round a world eternally diminished? Although more and more research has tried to broach these issues, much of the relationship between mental health and nature remains elusive, falling into chasms described simply as “psyche,” “consciousness,” and “modern life.” But Davis suggests that even if the connections are drawn in wavering lines, they underscore an important shift in psychological practice. Rather than consider anxiety or depression as outcomes of strictly personal history and circumstance, ecopsychology admits the possibility that outside events and circumstance bear on mental health. “Sometimes,” says Davis, “suffering really is about the planet.” The Connection Cure After years of psychiatric treatment that did little to resolve his long-standing depression, a patient, whom we’ll call Paul, enlisted the services of an ecopsychologist. Paul had taken a number of drugs to manage his symptoms and weekly laid out on the proverbial couch to reflect on his childhood and past relationships, “but this persistent sense of doom remained,” he says. “If the world is going to hell, I just couldn’t really see the point of carrying on everyday. Raising my family, working my job seemed really futile to the point of absurdity, if we are destroying the earth so quickly that my kids will just be left with a mess.” As a practitioner, Davis came to ecopsychology with similar preoccupations in mind. Once captivated by the psychological ramifications of living through the Cold War, in the early 1980s, he turned his attention to the environment: “Just as the atomic clock was moving further from midnight, I began to ask what it’s like for young people to grow up with a sense of environmental damage, devastation, and ecological peril.” Widespread environmental destruction, and sobering realities like climate change can impinge on the mental health of youth, he says, taking away from the sense of having options or a positive future.
“It’s a form of insanity that we’re in the process of destroying our own life support systems.”
For Davis, as well as a significant number of ecopsychologists and ecotherapists, the solution is not to take stock of silver linings, but rather to more actively engage with feelings of pain and loss. He describes contemporary attitudes toward the environment as akin to a passerby blithely strolling as a woman is murdered in the street. “There’s a learned helplessness,” he says. “We grow numb rather than face what’s really going on. We need to learn how to be active participants rather than bystanders to a tragedy.” Your childhood house is now dust buried beneath a strip mall; the apple tree that once gave you shade has been cut, burned, turned to splinter; the rivers where you once fished now run thick with toxic silt. Youth inherit this depletion and everywhere is starving, poisoned, desiccated, stripped and out of balance. “This environmental destruction can cause a profound sense of loss,” says clinical therapist Linda Buzell, founder of the International Association for Ecotherapy. “And it’s important to reckon with what that means, and really experience that pain in order to move through it.”
We suffer because we’re removed from nature; nature suffers because we are removed from it.
For Paul, therapy involved a serious inquiry into how he valued nature. “I spent a lot of time thinking about this tree that I used to love in a field by my house, and how angry I was when it was cut down so that the field could be turned into one of those McMansion developments.” Paul’s therapist encouraged him to spend more time outdoors. “There was a whole year when I just meditated on leaves. At first I didn’t really think much about them, but it became a gateway to start thinking about how I was connected to this enormous, incredible ecosystem, and I began talking about these issues with my wife and friends, and teaching my kids about ecology.” But achieving reconciliation is rarely an easy process, offers psychologist and educator Craig Chalquist, who with Buzell recently authored Healing with Nature in Mind. “The ecological crisis is also a crisis of human consciousness,” he says. “Much of modern culture is dedicated to helping us numb ourselves. We become apathetic, paralyzed, to protect ourselves from feeling overwhelmed.” Part of ecopsychologists’ solution rests in simply opening up a space for people to give voice to ambient worries and free-floating distress. Herein, suggests Chalquist, ecopsychology can assume an advocacy role, helping people to not only identify their concerns, but strategize ways to address environmental damage in their own communities and professional lives. Eco-Grief and Eco-Action Buzzell describes the process of becoming conscious of ecological decline as similar to the stages of grief that accompany the death of a loved one: from despair, it’s possible to move toward acceptance. Looking to the widespread apathy in younger generations—“They know they got a raw deal!” – Buzzell maintains that helping youth validate their anger can serve to empower them to make behavioral changes in their own lives; they don’t have to adhere to the wasteful, anti-ecological, consumerist precedents set by their parents, she says. But here, the field confronts a challenge larger than internalized eco-grief. While the modern world’s diminished landscapes may contribute to malaise, so too does the modern mind, with its heavy bent toward apathy and consumer appetites, facilitate ecological degradation. The current state of the world is in and of itself a symptom of an “insane disconnection between humans and the environment,” says Buzzell. “From top to bottom across modern culture, this rift is evident. It’s a form of insanity that we’re in the process of destroying our own life support systems.” “It’s possible,” says Chalquist, “to regard climate change as a consequence of mental health. Not in terms of strict cause and effect, but as systemic consequences. You tune out the built environment, you buy more stuff to distract yourself. We’re living and participating in a system that industrializes the destruction of the world.” “What is the effect of global climate change on the psyche of young people, growing up in full knowledge that the world they’re inheriting is different from the world of their parents?” asks Buzzell. “Scientists are now saying, sorry folks, we’ve crossed the line. So it’s really time to focus on resilience, learning how to live on a new planet—it’s changing so quickly it’s no longer the same planet you were born on.” Although ecopsychology introduces a provocative philosophical and analytical approach to conventional mental health practices, it rests on a slippery theoretical ground, and in its diversity exists both its greatest assets and weaknesses. Searching for a therapist to whom to bring your environmental woes, you are as likely to find a clinical practitioner as you are a shamanic guide, and the field’s general inclusiveness makes for some strange bedfellows. This inclusiveness, however, is also what gives the field its dynamism: ecopsychology rallies the mainstream and the unorthodox round a central problem, on the unique premise that treating a pervasive malady is more important than maintaining disciplinary divides. However, adherents of all stripes expound an ideal of ecological connectedness, against which degrees of separation are meted out in mental suffering. We suffer because we’re removed from nature; nature suffers because we are removed from it. Yet this ideal does not exist in modern life, but rather reaches across time and culture to restore mankind to some archetypal form, composed of equal parts history, myth and longing. “All we’re doing is remembering what we’ve lost,” says ecopsychologist Betsy Perluss. “We’re not creating anything new. This is in our DNA.” Even in its most radical interpretations, psychology remains a small-scale enterprise, typically focused on individual minds, rather than entire cultures. Its very person-centered approach, treating one individual at a time, might undermine the larger goal of enjoining humanity and nature. But while ecopsychology may not achieve a culture-wide revolution, let alone halt what Chalquist calls industrialized destruction, it frames the resource-use mentality as sickness, and in so doing may be positioned to address the crises of earth and psyche it generates. ~ Katherine Rowland is a journalist currently based in New York. Her work has appeared in Nature, the Financial Times, the Independent, OnEarth and other publications.
These two videos are really just audio, but the lectures are interesting for anyone who enjoys postmodern philosophy. Jacques Derrida was nearly a rock star as far as philosophers are concerned, which is rare in our day. Zizek has achieved nearly as much fame in recent years, but his is more to do with his outrageous behavior and commentaries (which is part of his philosophy) than Derrida's, which was due more to his ideas, especially as concerns justice.
In order to make sense of Derrida's position on religion - or anything else - it helps to understand his use of the word deconstruction and what the method means as he uses it. This is from a Wikipedia entry on Deconstruction, and there is more from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Religion below the videos.
Derrida approaches all texts as constructed around elemental oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This is so because identity is viewed in non-essentialist terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of differences inside a "system of distinct signs". This approach to text, in a broad sense,[1][2] emerges from semiology advanced by Ferdinand de Saussure.
Saussure is considered one of the fathers of structuralism when he explained that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language
In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. [...] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.[3]
Saussure explicitly suggested that linguistics was only a branch of a more general semiology, of a science of signs in general, being human codes only one among others. Nevertheless, in the end, as Derrida pointed out, he made of linguistics "the regulatory model", and "for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, and everything that links the sign to phone".[4] Derrida will prefer to follow the more "fruitful paths (formalization)" of a general semiotics without falling in what he considered "a hierarchizing teleology" privileging linguistics, and speak of 'mark' rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as the pure possibility of language, working every where there is a relation to something else.
Derrida then sees these differences, as elemental oppositions (0-1), working in all "languages", all "systems of distinct signs", all "codes", where terms don't have an"absolute" meaning, but can only get it from reciprocal determination with the other terms (1-0). This structural difference is the first component that Derrida will take into account when articulating the meaning of différance, a mark he felt the need to create and will become a fundamental tool in his life long work: deconstruction.[5]:
1) Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of these opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.
But structural difference will not be considered without him already destabilizing from the start its static, synchronic, taxonomic, ahistoric motifs, remembering that all structure already refers to the generative movement in the play of differences[6]
The other main component of différance is deferring, that takes into account the fact that meaning is not only a question of synchrony with all the other terms inside a structure, but also of diachrony, with everything that was said and will be said, in History, difference as structure and deffering as genesis.[7]:
2) "the a of différance also recalls that spacing is temporization, the detour and postponement by means of which intuition, perception, consummation - in a word, the relationship to the present, the reference to a present reality, to a being - are always deferred. Deferred by virtue of the very principle of difference which holds that an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces. This economic aspect of différance, which brings into play a certain not conscious calculation in a field of forces, is inseparable from the more narrowly semiotic aspect of différance.
This confirms the subject as not present to itself and constituted on becoming space, in temporizing and also, as Saussure said, that "language [which consists only of differences] is not a function of the speaking subject."[8] Questioned this myth of the presence of meaning in itself ("objective") and/or for itself ("subjective") Derrida will start a long deconstruction of all texts where conceptual oppositions are put to work in the actual construction of meaning and values based on the subordination of the movement of "differance"[7]:
At the point at which the concept of differance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of differance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to differance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified."
But, as Derrida also points out, these relations with other terms don’t express only meaning but also values. The way elemental oppositions are put to work in all texts it's not only a theoretical operation but also a practical option. The first task of deconstruction, starting with philosophy and afterwards revealing it operating in literary texts, juridical texts, etc, would be to overturn these oppositions[9]:
On the one hand, we must traverse a phase of overturning. To do justice to this necessity is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand.
To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. To overlook this phase of overturning is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition.
It’s not that the final task of deconstruction is to surpass all oppositions, because they are structurally necessary to produce sense. They simply cannot be suspended once and for all. But this doesn’t mean that they don’t need to be analyzed and criticized in all its manifestations, showing the way these oppositions, both logical and axiological, are at work in all discourse for it to be able to produce meaning and values.[10]
And it’s not enough to deconstruction to expose the way oppositions work and how meaning and values are produced in speech of all kinds and stop there in a nihilistic or cynic position regarding all meaning, "thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively".[11]
To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new concepts, not to synthesize the terms in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay[12]:
That being said - and on the other hand - to remain in this phase is still to operate on the terrain of and from within the deconstructed system. By means of this double, and precisely stratified, dislodged and dislodging, writing, we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new concept that no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime. If this interval, this biface or biphase, can be inscribed only in a bifurcated writing then it can only be marked in what I would call a grouped textual field: in the last analysis it is impossible to point it out, for a unilinear text, or a punctual position, an operation signed by a single author, are all by definition incapable of practicing this interval.
This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of analysis, to better mark the intervals:
Henceforth, in order better to mark this interval it has been necessary to analyze, to set to work, within the text of the history of philosophy, as well as within the so-called literary text (for example, Mallarme), certain marks, shall we say (I mentioned certain ones just now, there are many others), that by analogy (I underline) I have called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition: but which., however, inhabit philosophical oppositions, resisting and organizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics
Some examples of these new terms created by Derrida clearly exemplify the deconstruction procedure[12]:
(the pharmkon is neither remedy nor poison, neither good nor evil, neither the inside nor the outside, neither speech nor writing;
the supplement is neither a plus nor a minus, neither an outside nor the complement of an inside, neither accident nor essence, etc.;
the hymen is neither confusion nor distinction, neither identity nor difference, neither consummation nor virginity, neither the veil nor unveiled, neither inside nor the outside, etc.;
the gram is neither a signifier nor a signified, neither a sign nor a thing, neither presence nor an absence, neither a position nor a negation, etc.;
spacing is neither space nor time;
the incision is neither the incised integrity of a beginning, or of a simple cutting into, nor simple secondary.
Nevertheless, perhaps Derrida's most famous mark was, from the start, differance, created to deconstruct the opposition between speech and writing and open the way to the rest of his approach:
and this holds first of all for a new concept of writing, that simultaneously provokes the overturning of the hierarchy speech/writing, and the entire system attached to it, and releases the dissonance of a writing within speech, thereby disorganizing the entire inherited order and invading the entire field
OK, then, so here is the introduction to the videos.
Jacques Derrida on Religion
Jacques Derrida was one of the most well known twentieth century philosophers. He was also one of the most prolific. Distancing himself from the various philosophical movements and traditions that preceded him on the French intellectual scene (phenomenology, existentialism, and structuralism), he developed a strategy called "deconstruction" in the mid 1960s. Although not purely negative, deconstruction is primarily concerned with something tantamount to a critique of the Western philosophical tradition. Deconstruction is generally presented via an analysis of specific texts. It seeks to expose, and then to subvert, the various binary oppositions that undergird our dominant ways of thinking—presence/absence, speech/writing, and so forth. (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
As we said at the beginning, “deconstruction” is the most famous of Derrida's terms. He seems to have appropriated the term from Heidegger's use of “destruction” in Being and Time. But we can get a general sense of what Derrida means with deconstruction by recalling Descartes's First Meditation. There Descartes says that for a long time he has been making mistakes. The criticism of his former beliefs both mistaken and valid aims towards uncovering a “firm and permanent foundation.” The image of a foundation implies that the collection of his former beliefs resembles a building. In the First Meditation then, Descartes is in effect taking down this old building, “de-constructing” it. We have also seen how much Derrida is indebted to traditional transcendental philosophy which really starts here with Descartes' search for a “firm and permanent foundation.” But with Derrida, we know now, the foundation is not a unified self but a divisible limit between myself and myself as an other (auto-affection as hetero-affection: “origin-heterogeneous”).
Derrida has provided many definitions of deconstruction. But three definitions are classical. The first is early, being found in the 1971 interview “Positions” and in the 1972 Preface to Dissemination: deconstruction consists in “two phases” (Positions, pp. 41-42, Dissemination, pp.4-6). At this stage of his career Derrida famously (or infamously) speaks of “metaphysics” as if the Western philosophical tradition was monolithic and homogeneous. At times he also speaks of “Platonism,” as Nietzsche did. Simply, deconstruction is a criticism of Platonism, which is defined by the belief that existence is structured in terms of oppositions (separate substances or forms) and that the oppositions are hierarchical, with one side of the opposition being more valuable than the other. The first phase of deconstruction attacks this belief by reversing the Platonistic hierarchies: the hierarchies between the invisible or intelligible and the visible or sensible; between essence and appearance; between the soul and body; between living memory and rote memory; between mnēmē and hypomnēsis; between voice and writing; between finally good and evil. In order to clarify deconstruction's “two phases,” let us restrict ourselves to one specific opposition, the opposition between appearance and essence. Nietzsche had also criticized this opposition but it is clearly central to phenomenological thinking as well. So, in Platonism, essence is more valuable than appearance. In deconstruction however, we reverse this, making appearance more valuable than essence. How? Here we could resort to empiricist arguments (in Hume for example) that show that all knowledge of what we call essence depends on the experience of what appears. But then, this argumentation would imply that essence and appearance are not related to one another as separate oppositional poles. The argumentation in other words would show us that essence can be reduced down to a variation of appearances (involving the roles of memory and anticipation). The reduction is a reduction to what we can call “immanence,” which carries the sense of “within” or “in.” So, we would say that what we used to call essence is found in appearance, essence is mixed into appearance. Now, we can back track a bit in the history of Western metaphysics. On the basis of the reversal of the essence-appearance hierarchy and on the basis of the reduction to immanence, we can see that something like a decision (a perhaps impossible decision) must have been made at the beginning of the metaphysical tradition, a decision that instituted the hierarchy of essence-appearance and separated essence from appearance. This decision is what really defines Platonism or “metaphysics.” After this retrospection, we can turn now to a second step in the reversal-reduction of Platonism, which is the second “phase” of deconstruction. The previously inferior term must be re-inscribed as the “origin” or “resource” of the opposition and hierarchy itself. How would this re-inscription or redefinition of appearance work? Here we would have to return to the idea that every appearance or every experience is temporal. In the experience of the present, there is always a small difference between the moment of now-ness and the past and the future. (It is perhaps possible that Hume had already discovered this small difference when, in the Treatise, he speaks of the idea of relation.) In any case, this infinitesimal difference is not only a difference that is non-dualistic, but also it is a difference that is, as Derrida would say, “undecidable.” Although the minuscule difference is virtually unnoticeable in everyday common experience, when we in fact notice it, we cannot decide if we are experiencing the past or the present, if we are experiencing the present or the future. Insofar as the difference is undecidable, it destabilizes the original decision that instituted the hierarchy. After the redefinition of the previously inferior term, Derrida usually changes the term's orthography, for example, writing “différence” with an “a” as “différance” in order to indicate the change in its status. Différance (which is found in appearances when we recognize their temporal nature) then refers to the undecidable resource into which “metaphysics” “cut” in order to makes its decision. In “Positions,” Derrida calls names like “différance” “old names” or “paleonyms,” and there he also provides a list of these “old terms”: “pharmakon”; “supplement”; “hymen”; “gram”; “spacing”; and “incision” (Positions, p. 43). These names are old because, like the word “appearance” or the word “difference,” they have been used for centuries in the history of Western philosophy to refer to the inferior position in hierarchies. But now, they are being used to refer to the resource that has never had a name in “metaphysics”; they are being used to refer to the resource that is indeed “older” than the metaphysical decision.
This first definition of deconstruction as two phases gives way to the refinement we find in the “Force of Law” (which dates from 1989-1990). This second definition is less metaphysical and more political. In “Force of Law,” Derrida says that deconstruction is practiced in two styles (Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, p. 21). These “two styles” do not correspond to the “two phases” in the earlier definition of deconstruction. On the one hand, there is the genealogical style of deconstruction, which recalls the history of a concept or theme. Earlier in his career, in Of Grammatology, Derrida had laid out, for example, the history of the concept of writing. But now what is at issue is the history of justice. On the other hand, there is the more formalistic or structural style of deconstruction, which examines a-historical paradoxes or aporias. In “Force of Law,” Derrida lays out three aporias, although they all seem to be variants of one, an aporia concerning the unstable relation between law (the French term is “droit,” which also means “right”) and justice.
Derrida calls the first aporia, “the epoche of the rule” (Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, pp. 22-23). Our most common axiom in ethical or political thought is that to be just or unjust and to exercise justice, one must be free and responsible for one's actions and decisions. Here Derrida in effect is asking: what is freedom. On the one hand, freedom consists in following a rule; but in the case of justice, we would say that a judgment that simply followed the law was only right, not just. For a decision to be just, not only must a judge follow a rule but also he or she must “re-institute” it, in a new judgment. Thus a decision aiming at justice (a free decision) is both regulated and unregulated. The law must be conserved and also destroyed or suspended, suspension being the meaning of the word “epoche.” Each case is other, each decision is different and requires an absolutely unique interpretation which no existing coded rule can or ought to guarantee. If a judge programmatically follows a code, he or she is a “calculating machine.” Strict calculation or arbitrariness, one or the other is unjust, but they are both involved; thus, in the present, we cannot say that a judgment, a decision is just, purely just. For Derrida, the “re-institution” of the law in a unique decision is a kind of violence since it does not conform perfectly to the instituted codes; the law is always, according to Derrida, founded in violence. The violent re-institution of the law means that justice is impossible. Derrida calls the second aporia “the ghost of the undecidable (Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, pp. 24-26). A decision begins with the initiative to read, to interpret, and even to calculate. But to make such a decision, one must first of all experience what Derrida calls “undecidability.” One must experience that the case, being unique and singular, does not fit the established codes and therefore a decision about it seems to be impossible. The undecidable, for Derrida, is not mere oscillation between two significations. It is the experience of what, though foreign to the calculable and the rule, is still obligated. We are obligated – this is a kind of duty—to give oneself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of rules and law. As Derrida says, “A decision that did not go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process” (Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, p. 24). And once the ordeal is past (“if this ever happens,” as Derrida says), then the decision has again followed or given itself a rule and is no longer presently just. Justice therefore is always to come in the future, it is never present. There is apparently no moment during which a decision could be called presently and fully just. Either it has not a followed a rule, hence it is unjust; or it has followed a rule, which has no foundation, which makes it again unjust; or if it did follow a rule, it was calculated and again unjust since it did not respect the singularity of the case. This relentless injustice is why the ordeal of the undecidable is never past. It keeps coming back like a “phantom,” which “deconstructs from the inside every assurance of presence, and thus every criteriology that would assure us of the justice of the decision” (Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, pp. 24-25). Even though justice is impossible and therefore always to come in or from the future, justice is not, for Derrida, a Kantian ideal, which brings us to the third aporia. The third is called “the urgency that obstructs the horizon of knowledge” (Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, pp. 26-28). Derrida stresses the Greek etymology of the word “horizon”: “As its Greek name suggests, a horizon is both the opening and limit that defines an infinite progress or a period of waiting.” Justice, however, even though it is un-presentable, does not wait. A just decision is always required immediately. It cannot furnish itself with unlimited knowledge. The moment of decision itself remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation. The instant of decision is then the moment of madness, acting in the night of non-knowledge and non-rule. Once again we have a moment of irruptive violence. This urgency is why justice has no horizon of expectation (either regulative or messianic). Justice remains an event yet to come. Perhaps one must always say “can-be” (the French word for “perhaps” is “peut-être,” which literally means “can be”) for justice. This ability for justice aims however towards what is impossible.
Even later in Derrida's career he will formalize, beyond these aporias, the nature of deconstruction. The third definition of deconstruction can be found in an essay from 2000 called “Et Cetera.” Here Derrida in fact presents the principle that defines deconstruction:
Each time that I say ‘deconstruction and X (regardless of the concept or the theme),’ this is the prelude to a very singular division that turns this X into, or rather makes appear in this X, an impossibility that becomes its proper and sole possibility, with the result that between the X as possible and the ‘same’ X as impossible, there is nothing but a relation of homonymy, a relation for which we have to provide an account…. For example, here referring myself to demonstrations I have already attempted …, gift, hospitality, death itself (and therefore so many other things) can be possible only as impossible, as the im-possible, that is, unconditionally (Deconstructions: a User's Guide, p. 300, my emphasis).
Even though the word “deconstruction” has been bandied about, we can see now the kind of thinking in which deconstruction engages. It is a kind of thinking that never finds itself at the end. Justice – this is undeniable – is impossible (perhaps justice is the “impossible”) and therefore it is necessary to make justice possible in countless ways.
