The Poison and the Cure the Life and Afterlife of French Theory
theideasletter.org
theideasletter.org
For someone with zero philosophical training, can anyone convince me that indeed the writings of the folk described are not "charged with meretricious obscurity, italicized neologisms and occasional quasi-mathematical formulae and a travesty of scientific inquiry". I accept that the huge amount of time and energy devoted to it as noted in the review will of course inevitably have generated some interesting writing and avenues of thought.
In my naivety I am open to argument but don't such potential arguments have to use statements with pretty much fixed meaning - a concept denied by the French theorists? Seems to me that Roger Scruton was on track in writing of “a boiling tide of nonsense” that would “eliminate the possibility of rational argument” and “annihilate meaning.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinkers_of_the_New_Left and Fools and as a follow-up in 2015, 'Fools, Frauds and Firebrands', available in the eu.archive.
https://dn760005.eu.archive.org/0/items/scruton-roger-fools-...
Those are fair criticisms, actually. Continental philosophy (for continental Europe, not just French people) really loves complexity, and tends to see philosophy as something more wide than science, that embeds science as one of its parts - which gives them room to justify not even trying to tend to formality, like analytic philosophy (the US way, broadly) does. And from there, they play with words and concepts. A lot. Their main justification is that "wider than science", which could be simplified as: they're more about exploring imagination than trying to stick to science and realizing science doesn't really need them (my words, of course).
I agree that this would be the place to begin.
Frege has a distinction between sense and reference -- analytic philosophy by and large took the path of reference.
A quote from Timothy Williamson, probably the most respected living analytic philosopher sums it up:
Interviewer: “What do you wish was true?”
TW: “I hope that some relatively simple, elegant, powerful theory is true, rather than it just being such a mess that it’s hard to say anything true about it.
I hope that the role of context in semantics of natural languages is comparatively limited, because otherwise it will be much harder to get any theoretical control over lots of things.
In a way it’s a hope that things are beautiful even though lots of things are horribly ugly."
(In the age of AI, there's an operationalised idea of context - partly a vindication of the inerradicability of context)
Since we are doing philosophy, we are allowed to ask questions like, what is this demand for the decontextualised?
Is it justified?
Does meaning actually survive decontextualisation?
It would seem that in our time the pull towards decontextualisation goes hand in hand with the approach of the absence of meaning.
What is decontextualisation is a wilful ignoring of meaning? A turn to objects, or a blocking out of distractions...
An arch conservative like Scruton is a bit torn here - context being related to history.
What is clear is that French philosophy deals with the highly contextual - somehow strangely mixed in with general principles - and that means that literary devices are fair game for philosophising. Because the rhythm of a passage, a choice amongst synonyms, etymology, rhyme, speaking in different voices, hyperbole etc all have contextual effects. I think of it in analogy to foreground and background in vision. There is a kind of philosophy that lays everything out in front of you and talks about it. And there's a kind of philosophy that depends on things moving in the background, and sometimes gestures back to the background, of which we are a part. This pointing might even be accomplished by manipulating what's there in front of you. It remains a philosophical position whether the latter kind can be reduced to the former. Some might say the latter kind lets us move ahead into the uncharted and eventually once we have the right definitions it can be setup like the first kind. Some might say that the uncharted is structurally always there.
Skipping other things I might say- where this first choice of path takes you evolves into quite extreme expressions of either positions. For the French the point of philosophy cannot be to give a context-free account of everything, since such a notion is for them self-defeating, something sought for on the basis of an ignorance -- instead philosophy becomes more about movement: moving in a way that we wouldn't otherwise.