New essay: Mystifying the Appearances
Perhaps my favourite recent piece of more theoretical work, now live at Røyst
Late last year I was commissioned by Røyst, a Norwegian literary publication, to write something on the theme of “Dissidents”. I proposed an essay on “the politics of occlusion”, a theme I’ve been turning over in my mind recently. I’m sharing it here as I think a few of you might enjoy the argument.
Read “Mystifying the Appearances”.
In the essay I read the English philosopher Owen Barfield, against the French post-structuralist critic Jacques Derrida, as parallel examples of twentieth-century thinkers who both grappled with the return of what Barfield calls “participation” - that is, our conceptual entanglement in what we perceive. This is, in my view, the single most potent repressed theme in twentieth-century intellectual history, and one that’s erupting into the mainstream today with widespread and chaotic consequences.
I read Barfield’s and Derrida’s responses as taking this insight in two directions: one (Barfield’s) that sees the “unrepresented” as magical, fruitful, and life-giving mystery, and the other (Derrida’s) as dangerous, chaotic, and tragic: the worm in the apple of objective truth.
As I’ve argued, it was Derrida’s approach that won - a victory that saved the empiricist appearances, more or less, but at a terrible cost: gnawing nihilism and a collapsing anti-culture. Now, though, his victory is in doubt; in its aftermath, we stand at the threshold of a new age of post-atomic politics.
This is spot on. And I love the insight that deconstructionism is not the antithesis of empirical materialism but its natural conclusion.
I have, in different words, come to the conclusion, which was the intellectual path for me to faith in God. Only later did I experience the emotional and overwhelming sense of resonance with God and the creative Spirit and the salvation this created - an existence saturated with meaning.
My conclusion is that life and meaning are the same thing, and that meaning requires both a sense of value, an ordering of value, a discernment of how to accomplish value and actions that make this manifest - or in short, life is the expression of power.
What this power is used for is a different story. But to deconstruct power for the purpose of deconstruction itself, and as a means of revealing the impossibility of truth, is really to deconstruct life itself.
The Post-Structuralists didn’t really understand science. Lyotard admitted as much. The essay refers to Heisenberg and entanglement, but there are other ways to think about these things (Joyce and Eliot were much more impacted by the Great War).
McGhilchrist covers this ground in The Matter with Things. He is a reader of Whitehead who remarked on the variable, “This fact, that the general conditions transcend any one set of particular entities, is the ground for the entry into mathematics, and into mathematical logic, of the notion of the ‘variable.”
That the variable is one of the core concepts that holds our modern civilization together seems enough proof alone to discard Derrida as a sophist, the latest in a long line of anti-Platonists. In other words, it’s not pre-emptively invalid to claim that Derrida was wrong and his ascent in prestige was a material part of a larger consolidation of power amongst the managerial class. The essay hastily dismisses this claim to which I say, not so fast.