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Deconstructing Deconstruction
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19231 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
1,079 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
My Fourth of July wish for America is that academia free itself from debilitating fads such as deconstruction that are infesting the academic milieu in this country. Although deconstruction has become obsolescent in France, the land of its birth, it is difficult to pick up a journal in law or literature in the United States without becoming immersed in deconstructionist exercises.
The late Paul de Man, professor of literature at Yale University and a disciple of Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction, was the most prominent American exponent of literary deconstruction. De Man is the subject of David Lehman's book, which is reviewed by David Rothman in this issue of THE WORLD & I.
Derrida's deconstructionist philosophy is based on an insight that is at least partly correct. It is strongly related to Heidegger's attacks upon what he perceived as Greek metaphysics and has its origin in Hegel's attempt to find a logic in which A = not A. Greek metaphysics, in this view, imposed a finite logic on an infinite world and, thus, misrepresented it. An extensive analysis of what is right and what is wrong in this position is presented in my chapter on Derrida in Science, Language, and the Human Condition. I shall deal with matters more simply and briefly here.
The Greek worldview included a concept of essences that lay behind appearances and that guaranteed a strong, unique, and hierarchical order in reality. The correct use of language would penetrate to the inner core of being. However distant from Greek metaphysics were English empiricists such as Locke, still they shared the position that the world was strongly and uniquely ordered. Locke, for instance, believed that the mind formed images that reproduced the external world, at least in its primary characteristics, on the basis of sense impressions.
It is easy to see that this concept is false. The pupil of the human eye is in continual motion, and sense data pour in from different angles. Our perception of a stationary object depends upon a process that reorders sense data even prior to their reception in the brain. In the absence of this process, there would be only a disorderly set of constantly shifting images. We know only interpretations of reality. And these will not be constant for all cultures or all creatures. Thus, no single account of the world can be absolutely regulative.
However, Derrida took this truth and radicalized it until it was even more misleading than
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