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Postmodernism, as I\u2019ve indicated in previous posts, is many things, some of which are quite inimical to Christian faith. But in important respects, postmodernism \u2013 especially the thought of Derrida \u2013 is a Hebraic protest against Hellenized philosophy. In his fine recent book on Derrida, James KA Smith suggests that \u201cIn the beginning was the word\u201d would be a \u201cfitting epigraph\u201d to Derrida\u2019s Complete Works, and elaborates: <\/p>\n
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 \u201cto shift the object of philosophical knowledge out of the mundane, muddy, corruptible world of bodies to the eternal, unchanging world of \u2018ideas.\u2019\u201d To get at true knowledge, we must have knowledge of something that is not subjected to the vagaries of time: \u201cWhile I might \u2018know\u2019 that this tree in the garden is green, in fact that claim does not count as knowledge proper (or \u2018intelligible\u2019 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.\u201d The idea of a tree, however, never changes. <\/p>\n Hence, Derrida discerns in the Western tradition a complex of commitments \u2013 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. <\/p>\n Derrida, remember, was Jewish. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Postmodernism, as I\u2019ve indicated in previous posts, is many things, some of which are quite inimical to Christian faith. But in important respects, postmodernism \u2013 especially the thought of Derrida \u2013 is a Hebraic protest against Hellenized philosophy. In his fine recent book on Derrida, James KA Smith suggests that \u201cIn the beginning was the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"yoast_head":"\n
The post-Heideggerian linguistic turn \u201cruns counter to a long tradition in Western thought that has tended either to forget or to denigrate language: forgetting <\/em> that philosophy only \u2018happens\u2019 in the medium of a discourse . . and, whenever it does turn to the question of language, regularly denigrates <\/em> its \u2018secondariness\u2019 . . . 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 \u2013 whether graphemes or phonemes \u2013 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 \u2018public\u2019 phenomenon \u2013 shared with others in a community \u2013 is an essentially relational phenomenon and thus necessarily involves others. Insofar as the philosophical tradition has devalued language it has also devalued the \u2018media\u2019 of language \u2013 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.\u201d One could start elsewhere, but for Derrida language is a \u201ccase\u201d that enables him to detect wider problems in the Western tradition. And, because the Western tradition exists as a tradition only <\/em> in the very language and texts that it treats as \u201csecondary,\u201d Derrida\u2019s probing of the issue of language is the master illustration of \u201cdeconstruction.\u201d <\/p>\n