Derrida and bullshit

John Searle famously remarked that Derrida's work is the kind of stuff that gives bullshit a bad name. I have never read a single word by Derrida, and I would generally refrain from commenting on any philosopher whose work I have not read. Besides, there are philosophers I take seriously (such as Stanley Cavell) who take Derrida seriously, so I have never joined in when some of my friends trashed Derrida.

Today, however, I came across a book that may be evidence that Derrida was quite capable of bullshitting. The book includes an interview with Derrida a few weeks after the 9/11 attack, and here is the first five hundred words or so of Derrida's response to the question "Do you consider what we now tend to call 'September 11' an unprecedented event, one that radically alters the way we see ourselves?":

Le 11 septembre, as you say, or, since we have agreed to speak two languages, "September 11." We will have to return later to this question of language. As well as to this act of naming: a date and nothing more. When you say "September 11" you are already citing, are you not? You are inviting me to speak here by recalling, as if in quotation marks, a date or a dating that has taken over our public space and our private lives for five weeks now. Something fait date, I would say in a French idiom, something marks a date, a date in history; that is always what's most striking, the very impact of what is at least felt, in an apparently immediate way, to be an event that truly marks, that truly makes its mark, a singular and, as they say here, "unprecedented" event. I say "apparently immediate" because this "feeling" is actually less spontaneous than it appears: it is to a large extent conditioned, constituted, if not actually constructed, circulated at any rate through the media by means of a prodigious techno-socio-political machine. "To mark a date in history" presupposes, in any case, that "something" comes or happens for the first and last time, "something" that we do not yet really know how to identify, determine, recognize, or analyze but that should remain from here on in unforgettable: an ineffaceable event in the shared archive of a universal calendar, that is, a supposedly universal calendar, for these are—and I want to insist on this at the outset—only suppositions and presuppositions. Unrefined and dogmatic, or else carefully considered, organized, calculated, strategic—or all of these at once. For the index pointing toward this date, the bare act, the minimal deictic, the minimalist aim of this dating, also marks something else. Namely, the fact that we perhaps have no concept and no meaning available to us to name in any other way this "thing" that has just happened, this supposed "event." An act of "international terrorism," for example, and we will return to this, is anything but a rigorous concept that would help us grasp the singularity of what we will be trying to discuss. "Something" took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the "thing." But this very thing, the place and meaning of this "event," remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it's talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy—a name, a number—points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.

I would have no better response to this than: Was talking about the 9/11 attack that complicated? Give me a break!

Can you love the whole world?

Alva Noë has written a short piece on love for NPR, which ends with the question "Can you love the whole world?". What is interesting is not the question itself, but what he compares the question to:

Can you love the whole world? I suppose this is like the question, Is there a God?

My answer to both questions is "No" (if "the whole world" refers to every human being in the world and if "God" refers to a personal God who listens to and answers prayers). There are, however, many people who would answer "No" to the first question but "Yes" to the second. But even for these people, the two questions are alike in the respect that both require us to look beyond ourselves and our immediate concerns. Both are in this sense demanding questions and should not be answered lightly.

Wittgenstein on the difficulty of speaking

I read the following entry in one of Wittgenstein's diaries today:

I speak far too easily. --- Through a question or an objection one can seduce me to produce a stream of words. While I talk I sometimes see that I am on an ugly track: that I say more than I mean, talk to amuse the other, draw in irrelevancies in order to impressionate and so forth. I then strive to correct the conversation, to steer it back onto a more decent course. But only turn it a little and not enough out of fear --- lack of courage --- & retain a bad taste.

This happens to me easily especially in England since the difficulty of communication (because of character, not because of the language) are enormous from the start. So that one must perform one's exercises on a swaying raft rather than on solid ground. For one never knows whether the other has entirely understood one; & the other has never understood oneentirely.

This entry is particularly interesting to me because the very same words can be used to express my own experience. Indeed, I find that the difficulty of communication makes me speak far too easily. This is not paradoxical, for the word "easily" does not mean without difficulty, but means likely to happen.

I speak faster in English than in Chinese even though English is my second language, and even though my spoken English is far from good. When I speak English, I am "on a swaying raft rather than on solid ground", so I have to move a lot to make sure that I am heading in the right direction.

Absence of evidence and evidence of absence

Is it true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence? The best answer is: It depends on the case. Let us consider three cases:

I. There is no evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life, but the absence of evidence is not evidence that there is no extraterrestrial life. This is because we may have reason to believe that it is improbable for life not to exist somewhere other than Earth.

II. You are investigating a murder case and there are only two persons, A and B, who might have motivation for murdering the victim. A and B are the only suspects; you have some (but not overwhelming) evidence that A committed the crime, but you do not have any evidence that B did it. The absence of evidence that B did it is not evidence that he didn't do it --- he is still a suspect. However, if later on there is more and more evidence that it was A who committed the crime, this will allow you to give more weight to the fact that there is no evidence that B did it, and you can accordingly say that the absence of evidence is now evidence that he didn't do it.

III. Suppose Jennifer believes that there are unicorns. You point out that unicorns are mythical creatures and there is no evidence that they exist. She responds by insisting that the absence of evidence for the existence of unicorns is not evidence that they don't exist. Is this a reasonable response? No, for we have very good reasons for believing that there are no unicorns and there is no need for having any evidence for the truth of the belief.

There can be a more systematic treatment of "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"; the point I want to make here is just that we should not accept it as a general principle.

How was Jesus sacrificed when he did not really die?

Christians believe that Jesus died for our sins, but they also believe that Jesus rose from the dead, that is, Jesus did not die after all. If Jesus did not really die, then he wasn’t really sacrificed, was he? Cf. If you slaughtered an animal in order to sacrifice it to your god(s), but it came back to life immediately, was the animal sacrificed?

Indeed, if you believe that Jesus is God, and that God cannot die, then you have to believe that Jesus cannot die either. You can at most believe that that human organism which was Jesus' body ceased to function and then was revived by God. (This was, by the way, no big deal for God. Remember, God is omnipotent!) But then this would be compatible with Jesus the person not being dead at any time. If Jesus is God, then there was no point of time at which the person Jesus --- who is God --- was dead.

So, strictly speaking, Jesus was not sacrificed; it was Jesus' body that was sacrificed (even this, as I pointed out in the first paragraph, is questionable since his body was revived). But there is no reason to believe that that particular human body was so special that the sacrifice of it was sufficient for redeeming us, for God could easily have taken on another human body.

It may be objected that if, as Christians believe, humans have an immaterial soul, then in the sense in which Jesus did not die, humans whose bodies ceased to function did not die either, nor, for that reason,could any of them be sacrificed. True, but that only strengthens my point. If not even humans can be sacrificed, then how could Jesus be sacrificed? (There is, however, an important difference between normal humans and Jesus: even if humans have an immaterial soul, a human soul can be destroyed by God, while Jesus cannot cease to exist.)

Love at first sight

Is there such a thing as love at first sight? I think it depends on how literally we take the word 'love' here. If 'love' here means no more than a feeling of romantic attraction, then there is certainly love at first sight. However, if 'love' here means, well, love, then it is not clear that most of the cases that people would describe as 'love at first sight' are really love.

When someone describes his first encounter with his beloved as 'love at first sight', it is usually a retrospective description. It is in the light of his love for her now that he sees the first encounter that way. If after the first encounter their relationship had not developed further, that would not have changed that experience, but he probably would not have described it as 'love at first sight'. So it is more reasonable to think that the first encounter was not love at first sight; it is just that it is seen as love at first sight retrospectively.

The largest class ever

It is unusual for a philosophy book written by a famous professional philosopher to be a New York Times bestseller, but here is one: Michael Sandel's Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?. It is based on Sandel's "Justice" course at Harvard, which has been one of the most popular courses at Harvard since it was first offered about twenty years ago. The class is usually very large, and in Fall 2007, it had 1.115 students, making it the largest class ever at Harvard. I can't imagine what it is like to be teaching such a huge class. I am teaching a 120-student class this semester, and it is already too large for me. My teaching has been improving though. This is the fifth week of the semester and I think I have learnt a few tricks to teach the class more effectively. But it is still not easy. Over a thousand students? No way!

By the way, I have skimmed through Sandel's book and got the impression that it is a very interesting introduction to moral philosophy.

Surprise

Whoever knows he is deep, strives for clarity; whoever would like to appear deep to the crowd, strives for obscurity. For the crowd considers anything deep if only it cannot see to the bottom: the crowd is so timid and afraid of going into the water.

So true. But who says this? Surprise, surprise: it's Nietzsche!

Is everyone a philosopher?

Is everyone a philosopher? For me the answer is clearly 'No'. Some may think we can define 'philosopher' so loosely that anyone who thinks about how to live and answers the question --- who thereby has her own 'philosophy of life' --- is a philosopher. But the fact is, not everyone thinks about how to live. Some people are incurably unreflective; they should not be considered philosophers even on the above extremely loose definition of the term.

There are, however, people who think that even if they are not philosophers, they will understand philosophy if they try to. They believe that if they pick up a philosophy book and read it, they will understand it; they also believe that if two philosophers are discussing a philosophical problem, they can easily chime in and contribute to the discussion. They have no idea that some philosophical ideas/problems/arguments/theories are impossible to understand without some training and background knowledge.

How do I know there are such people? From the following experience: I was reading a rather difficult philosophy book; a friend saw that and asked me what I was reading. I told him the title, and he went on to ask me what the book was about. I tried my best to explain the problem discussed in the book in terms that he might understand. His response was, "How interesting! That will be the next book on my reading list." And I said, certainly unwisely, "I think this book is a bit too advanced for you." He seemed offended.

It is hard to imagine that this would have happened if I were a physicist and the book I read were on quantum mechanics.