The rhetoric of the absolute

As of late I have been reading Walter Brueggemann's "Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy." However, this morning something really annoyed me, a tendency in much post-Derridean critical thinking. Following Derrida's critique of people like Heidegger, Plato, and Hegel, thinkers sometimes bring out a rather simplified picture of "totalizing" and "absolutizing" picture of western thought. In my view, this is tremendously wrong: not just because it over-generalizes in its own way, but rather because it seriously misreads so much of western philosophy. Derrida's deconstruction, I would argue, is quite egregious in this. 

First Brueggemann. In explaining the concept of "countertestimony" in the Old Testament (i.e., those texts of the Old Testament that seem to challenge Yahweh's sovereignty), Brueggemann sets up the opposition between a "Jewish" way of thinking, and a "mode of reason" associated with the West, "rooted in Plato", which tries to settle all disputes, and hence "to stop the political discourse that was sponsored by the Sophists" (330). What Brueggemann is pointing to here is the difference between "eristics" and "dialectics" for Plato. E.g., in the Meno, Socrates contrasts the "contentious and eristical wise men" to a more "gentle" form of discourse, "dialectic" (75d). For Brueggemann, and I would add a number of other contemporary Biblical scholars (Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza comes to mind here), this is a contrast between an "open" rhetoric and sophistical movement, with a "closed" philosophical and absolutizing movement. Derrida certainly was fond of pointing to the chinks in the supposed armor of Platonic "realism." 

But is this what goes on in Plato? Hardly. One of the most consistent mistakes in understanding Plato is forgetting that he wrote dialogues, and that "Plato" never appears in any one of them. There is a good reason for this: Plato's Academy, as many attest to later (especially Cicero), was actually the most open of all the ancient philosophical schools (especially in comparison with the Epicureans), because so much of their philosophical way of life was rooted in dialectic. Dialectic is a communal process that philosophers in Plato's school engaged in, and it was primarily an askesis, or a self-transformative practice, that aimed at enabling the student to transform him or herself into one that submitted to reasonable discourse, instead of "eristics" - which in their view, was argument for argument's sake. In other words, the point of dialectic was to transform individuals into those who could recognize that force of the better argument, and participate in argumentation in order to search for the truth. 

Furthermore, it is clear from later dialogues such as the Parmenides (which is a thorough-going critique of the supposed "theory of forms") that there is no such thing as "Plato's doctrine" (written or, as the esoterics would have it, unwritten), and that the dialogues were not meant as a "system" of philosophy. From various testimonies in the Hellenistic period, Plato's Academy never had one over-arching "doctrine," like the Epicureans or Stoics (the Peripatos did not either), but included a multitude of perspectives. The philosophical way of life for Plato's Academy was thus philosophers learning how to dialogue with one another. I suspect it was rather the Imperial Period - especially the Neoplatonists - that codified a "Platonic" doctrine. This period was marked by commentary - which the earlier Hellenistic period was not.

Be that as it may, this brings up a tendency in contemporary thought, out of a somewhat Derridean lineage, to generalize certain aspects of a thinker without a seemingly clear interpretation of that thinker. Derrida, in my view, is the Socrates of the early dialogues. That Socrates asked the impossible: define "piety," "poetry," "virtue," etc. He was never asking to actually get a definition - the terms he sets up for this definition are too impossible by half - and so most of the early dialogues end in aporia, or in a puzzle. Derrida does this by looking at the impossible in texts, the little contradictions, the peculiarities, those parts of the text that seem to intentionally be misunderstood. He does this, it seems, for a very particular purpose: like Socrates, to engage us in active re-interpretation. Derrida is too, like Socrates, repetitive and annoying (Socrates himself mentions this fact in the Apology), and if you read too much Derrida, you start to be annoying. Nevertheless, Derrida's philosophical purpose seems to me to be right in line with the Academic (in the sense of Plato's school) way of thinking. Deconstruction is "justice," as Derrida says. In other words, deconstruction is a practice, an askesis that tries to move one out from under a self-satisfied "knowledge" of our philosophical tradition, toward a constant re-engagement with that tradition. 

The problem comes in with the "disciples" of the "deconstructionist." Too many thinkers take the easy way out, and refuse to deconstruct Derrida himself, or resort to the Pythagorean "ipse dixit" - Derrida tells us that Heidegger is absolutizing, Hegel is a totalist, Plato squashes all political debate. From the beginning though Derrida has always pointed to deconstruction as a method, like the Platonic dialectic, that does not issue into doctrines, but is an end in itself. Furthermore, the reason it is an end in itself is that it seems to me, at least, to be primarily a practice. Philosophy is a way of life, and like other thinkers before - the entire ancient tradition, but also thinkers like Wittgenstein, Hegel, and Heidegger - philosophy is meant to issue forth into an entire life. And as it was for Plato, so it is for Derrida: that life is a life of justice.