Today we will present you with a bit of Ennobler history: the title of this page appeared first in the authors’ discourse in gerund form. One day in August, the debate over what is and is not “ennobling” with respect to high and popular cultures gained far more momentum among us than it really deserved. Jeremiah said “ennobling” tens of times (in the course of two or more sentences), Jason claimed that he’d never heard the word “ennobling” so frequently in so few verbal feet, and here we are as an indirect result.
The value of popular culture may or may not be discussed here again (though I’m afraid I may be playing the role of Epimetheus for mentioning it). What is interesting, however, is the way our academic discourse has mirrored the world-weariness evident in the most modern of popular culture outfits. Why is it that college philosophy students like Nietzsche so much? By my judgment it’s because he’s as clever and sarcastic and glib as they themselves hope to be. It is never about humanity anymore on television as much as it’s about an attempt to distance oneself from it, and so it goes in academic circles as higher educators find a way to feed to their students what it is they’ve been trained to value.
This is not about metaphysical systems and contrived philosophical discourse. It is rare to find a modern philosopher who writes to convince you of his metaphysical system the way Leibniz or Berkeley did; instead, they are content to create terms and words for others to use, the way Heidegger did. We are witnessing the continual collapse of the Grand Narrative, as Lyotard described it, and I’m not sure that it’s a categorical negative. But the result is certainly a lack of progress as such and an absence of authority that might serve to eliminate a large degree of richness in the philosophical traditions to come.
If our philosophical cravings don’t model Nietzsche, they probably mirror Derrida. Popular interpretations of Derrida hold that ultimate philosophical truth is un-attainable, non-existent or uninteresting. It is the third that is most pernicious: whether or not there are metaphysical truths we can know through reason is an open question (and it might serve undergraduate philosophy students to admit that maybe they themselves haven't quite developed the faculties to know those truths), but it is the fallback of the ‘clever and sarcastic and glib’ community to subordinate philosophy as a whole to a literary exercise wherein they are required to do no more than deconstruct. As we know from watching liberals the past eight years, it’s much easier to tear down a theoretical structure than build one, and perhaps a whole lot more fun.
Derrida sought to turn philosophy into a historical conversation of constant interpretation and re-interpretation. Why is this? Well, if there’s no truth to be had, the only place we can go is backwards. The problem with this pattern is not the principle itself, but the effect. You do not need to be very learned to make fun of writings the way Derrida has. The more this suits one’s purpose as a scholar, the more undercutting takes the floor as the dominant mental exercise of those who read to generate commentary.
I am not arguing that Derrida is useless, just that too many young academics are like him. Deconstruction is not without value, but it is not much of a goal, really. With it, we risk a failure to appreciate the philosophical giants, especially the ones that the ‘clever and sarcastic and glib’ would call outdated (like Aquinas or Aristotle, who are just pathetic in their treatment of current issues like feminism and atheism). There is a place for analytics and textual criticism in philosophy (Jeremiah may disagree), but there is also a need for the beautiful cathedrals of thought that people like Spinoza built for us to consider. Here’s to the idea that we can reclaim an appreciation for the great thinker, no matter how large or small his system, nor how inviting his work is for the less-ennobling comedies within us.
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