Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'later work', 'Sickness unto Death' and 'Behaviorism'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     specify just one area for these texts

5 ideas

1. Philosophy / H. Continental Philosophy / 6. Deconstruction
6840 Derrida came to believe in the undeconstructability of justice, which cannot be relativised [Derrida, by Critchley]
     Full Idea: In Derrida's later work we find him moving explicitly towards a belief in the undeconstructability of justice, as he puts it, which is an overarching value that cannot be relativised.
     From: report of Jacques Derrida (later work [1980]) by Simon Critchley - Interview with Baggini and Stangroom p.191
     A reaction: A nice corrective to the standard Anglo-Saxon assumption that Derrida is an extreme (and stupid) relativist. The notion of 'undeconstructability' is nice, just as Descartes found an idea that resisted the blasts of scepticism.
16. Persons / B. Nature of the Self / 3. Self as Non-physical
16002 The self is a combination of pairs of attributes: freedom/necessity, infinite/finite, temporal/eternal [Kierkegaard]
     Full Idea: A human being is essentially spirit, but what is spirit? Spirit is to be a self. But what is the Self? In short, it is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.
     From: Søren Kierkegaard (Sickness unto Death [1849], p.59)
     A reaction: The dense language of his first paragraph was to poke fun at fashionable Hegelian writing. The book gets very lucid afterwards! [SY]
22. Metaethics / A. Ethics Foundations / 2. Source of Ethics / e. Human nature
7517 I could take a healthy infant and train it up to be any type of specialist I choose [Watson,JB]
     Full Idea: Give me a dozen healthy infants, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, artist, beggar, thief - regardless of his ancestry.
     From: J.B. Watson (Behaviorism [1924], Ch.2), quoted by Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate
     A reaction: This was a famous pronouncement rejecting the concept of human nature as in any way fixed - a total assertion of nurture over nature. Modern research seems to be suggesting that Watson is (alas?) wrong.
24. Political Theory / A. Basis of a State / 1. A People / c. A unified people
21936 A community must consist of singular persons, with nothing in common [Derrida, by Glendinning]
     Full Idea: In Derrida's modal reversal (where the only possible forgiveness is forgiving the unforgivable), the only possible community is the impossible community, which is a 'community of singularities' without anything in common.
     From: report of Jacques Derrida (later work [1980]) by Simon Glendinning - Derrida: A Very Short Introduction 7
     A reaction: Since this seems to go beyond multiculturalism, I can only see it as hyper-liberalism - that isolated individuals have an absolute status. Sounds like Nozick, but Derrida saw himself as a non-Marxist left-winger.
21937 Can there be democratic friendship without us all becoming identical? [Derrida, by Glendinning]
     Full Idea: The question is whether it is possible to think of a politics of democratic friendship that could free itself from the terrifying threat of homogenization.
     From: report of Jacques Derrida (later work [1980]) by Simon Glendinning - Derrida: A Very Short Introduction 7
     A reaction: Being terrified of people becoming all the same links Derrida to existentialist individualism. Is he just a linguistic existentialist, trying to free us from the tyranny of linguistic uniformity?