Continued from last post . . . So where do
these ghosts of Marx come from? Well, I only just started reading Spectres of Marx, so I can't exactly tell you
that. As of when I'm writing this post's draft, Jacques Derrida is only just
introducing an analogy to Shakespeare's Hamlet to describe the concept of being
haunted.
 |
| Pictured: The inescapable, unfulfillable obligation of memory: the ghost, spectre, haunting. |
I've skimmed
throughout the book, so I know that he comes back to this narrative of Hamlet's
relationship with the ghost of his father the king many times throughout the
book. It'll illustrate some other aspect of how a set of ideas can haunt a
society each time it comes up.
This is basically
how Derrida writes. And I think it's the foundation of why people, particularly
in philosophy, think he's confusing. It's been called meditative writing. I
give it a more descriptive name of writing in a spiral.
Most of the time,
when you've taken philosophy courses, or been introduced to philosophy some
other way, you learn that it's written as arguments. We're all familiar with
the argumentative essay.
You state a thesis,
then assemble a series of premises and inferences. You infer further
propositions from your premises, and infer more propositions down the chain,
until your essay ends with an inference to your thesis.
For a book-length
work, four or five premises will sometimes interact in different ways
throughout a complicated argument. And you might have more than one thesis. But
the process is basically the same. It moves in a straight pattern of steps from
premises through inferences to conclusions.
Spiralling writing
works a little differently. It's less about proving a thesis and more about
understanding a concept. So you have your basic idea at the beginning when you
introduce it. But it's hazy, unspecific, difficult, or opaque. So you move
forward by explaining the idea.
This Friday, I'm
doing an interview with KZYX radio in California to promote Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity,
and I might talk about how I use this spiralling technique in my own philosophy
writing. The book is about a few different concepts, so here's a rough guide to
how one spiral runs there.
A central concept is
a half-neglected idea in North American environmental philosophy, the intrinsic
value of nature. I introduce the idea in that context, particularly focussing
on how it was developed by its most profound advocate, Arne Næss. I also talk
about how it was criticized by the academic establishment, why those critiques
were so successful in marginalizing the idea in the discipline.
Then I describe how
this idea of the intrinsic value of nature can work, which is by
distinguishing ethics from morality. The words are usually interchangeable in
the academic discipline, but some members of the tradition distinguish them. Benedict
Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze.
Morality is, in this
explanation, about the rules and laws through which a society governs its
social behaviour. Morality is a source of authority. Ethics would be about
identity, who you are and what that who is. The intrinsic value of nature
doesn't make sense as a moral principle, but it does make sense as an ethical
principle.
You're literally
meditating on a concept, thinking it through, and making a story of how you
think it through.
Begin with an idea.
Introduce it. Examine a problem that the idea stumbles into, given what we
understand of it as it's been introduced. Figure out a solution to that
problem. Explore how that solution changes how we understand that idea. The
introductory version is still part of how we understand the idea. But we also
have this more comprehensive understanding: we now know more of what the idea
can do.
This is how
meditative writing works, clarifying piece by piece a big, complicated concept.
So how do I see this spiralling or meditative writing in Derrida? He was a main
developer of the technique, so how is it most effective? To be continued . . .
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