HERE COMES DERRIDA, THE PHILOSOPHER WITHOUT FEAR! Over the weekend I had a small-scale revelation. I’ve written here and here about my problems with Derrida’s version of deconstruction–but the Old Oligarch wrote a superb essay on the ways in which an authentic intellectual conservatism could and should be deconstructionist, and so I had to start rethinking my take on the guy. Here’s a scattershot post on where I’m at now:

J.D. is very big on being open to the avenir, the what-is-to-come, the unanticipated and not yet even imagined possibility. But in attempting to avoid stasis–robotic repetition, tradition as ossification, nostalgia rather than renewal–he dissipates into vagueness and foggy abstractions. He can’t tell us what “being open to the avenir” requires without constraining it somehow, thus not being open to the avenir! So the concept swallows its own head (kind of like David Blaine on “South Park” tonight… did I say that out loud?).

But the problem of distinguishing repetition and nostalgia from renewal is pretty obviously a pressing concern for anyone who calls herself a “conservative.” I’m deeply unimpressed with conservatisms that seek a return to some past time, real or imagined–conservatisms that locate the Fall in the Industrial Revolution or the sexual revolution or the 1992 election, instead of, you know, the Garden.

Similarly, it’s often really hard for people to understand how they can take a stand while still being open to the possibility that they might be wrong. Too often, people end up in relativism or subjectivism because they try to speak in three tenses at once: present, future, and subjunctive (? not sure if the last one is right). “I think A… but tomorrow I’ll think something else… and it could even be not-A! Oh no! How can I take any actions based on A? What if I’m wrong? How can I know?”

I wonder if it isn’t possible to move beyond both of these dilemmas–not to “solve” them, since I don’t think existential questions are there to be “solved,” but to transform them–by investigating a different Derridean concept: openness to the Other.

Openness to the Other requires specificity, not vagueness; attention, not conformity; humility, not pride. It is the act of love.

Openness to the Other would prevent us from making up predictable fantasy-pasts onto which to hook our nostalgias. CS Lewis makes this point in a quick, heartbreaking moment in A Grief Observed, in which he realizes that when he imagines his late wife, he erases all the otherness and individuality, all the unpredictability, that he loved in her. He made her into a fantasy, not a memory. Genuine openness to the Other requires attention to specifics and an unwillingness to conform the Other to our needs–an unwillingness to treat the Other as a “human resource.”

And openness to the Other would force us to take a stand. Because if you love someone, if you are attentive to her, you will not be able to leave her to her own devices. You will advise and interfere and pray and beg. You will notice when she heads in a direction that will hurt her, or cause her to act craven, or cause her to fail to be her best self. You will want her to be her best, and you will want to be your best for her. And that means you have to have a standard of “best.”

(Related: I read a really compelling point against aesthetic relativism a while ago: Artists are almost never aesthetic relativists. That’s because they know they aren’t good enough, and they know they need to improve, and they want to know how!)

Love is an acid that eats away relativism.

I’ve seen these processes work in my debating society–and, unsurprisingly, it was interacting with that society that prompted these unfinished reflections. It’s the intense friendships, the sense of adventure, the desire for other people to be fully other, and the care for other people (“other” doesn’t mean “I don’t care if you damage or diminish yourself”!), that allow this group to sail so far out across the wine-dark sea of philosophy. It’s the personal openness, the way we get tangled up in each other’s lives, that makes the society such an intense intellectual experience.

More as I figure it out.