In Solomon Among the Postmoderns, Dr. Leithart wrote:
We can no more bring the world under our complete control than we can guide the wind into a paddock for the night. We can no more give permanent form to the world than we can sculpt the evening breeze into solid shapes. Our projects are not sandcastles on the beach. That image, for Solomon, would suggest something far too solid and permanent. Our projects are cloud castles on a windy day.
Solomon asks, “Who knows the interpretation of a word?” and the modern believes the question not to be rhetorical. A word can be known. A word can be analyzed, parsed, spread out like a patient etherized on the grammarian’s table. The word, the basic building block in language, can be used to build to truth if—in its foundation—it is “perfectly known and incapable of being doubted,” as Descartes put it. Peace and unity can only be won if humankind can begin from these objective foundations of truthful language and build up an entire structure of Truth. Modernity lacked the advantage of those at Shinar; moderns live post-Babel, with many tongues. So modernity had to construct a new story of the language of Reason, the tongue which all men possess. This is something common to modern philosophers from Descartes to Locke to Kant.
This is what Derrida is attacking (although, as we’ll see in a minute, his line of attack is a complicated one). Plato’s Pharmacy is a long, winding, playful piece—one which took me to the very end before I decided it was worthwhile. But it in spite of its wanderings, in the end it provides a very sharp critique, first, of the way we view words, and second, the way we view truth.
The first concept which is crucial to understand in Derrida is his distinction between speech and writing. Derrida argues that speech has been seen as the “original” form of language by Plato and the Western tradition. Writing is a latter development which, because it involves using “signs” and letters, is one step farther removed from the truth. If you remember Plato’s forms, or the emanations of Plotinus, you’ll remember how the true form of a thing is contain in a spiritual, non-material, world. We, who are accustomed to using signs and material to craft our language, are in a cave, (or in neo-Platonism, several steps away from the emanation of truth). So, because of this, writing to Plato is viewed as untrustworthy, what Derrida recognizes as an act of violence. Like Nietzsche said, to force a thing into a category (like “leaf” or “tree”) is to do violence to both the thing and to language. You participate in a lie. Plato and modernity recognize this aspect of language, and therefore try to set up some sort of “rational” language, which transcends all the violence of material language. Derrida says you can’t do that. It’s impossible.
The entire Pharmacy is in one sense, Derrida playing cat-and-mouse with Plato. In Plato’s dialogue (Phaedrus), the father of Western philosophy (ironically) tells an old Egyptian story to illustrate his idea of language, speech, and writing. The old god Theuth came to King Thamus to demonstrate the gift of writing, which the king recognizes as a great danger to learning, memory, and truth. Writing has several bad effects: 1) it will undermine memory by giving men the semblance of wisdom, but not the real thing; 2) writing lacks breath (human spirit), contrasted to speech; 3) writing removes the text from the author, and opens up the text to interpretation and misinterpretation. Who will be around to make sure the truth of the text is maintained? Derrida writes: “But in truth, writing is essentially bad, external to memory, productive not of science but of belief, not of truth but of appearances.” Writing is open to all sorts of influences, because the farther away from capital “T” truth you get, the more convoluted and dangerous things become. As Derrida interprets Plato: “writing [is] an occult…. [Plato’s] mistrust of the mantic and magic, of sorcerers and casters of spells is well attested” (126). Words beget words, and intentions give way to misinterpretations and reversals of meaning. It’s like a childhood game of telephone. Every logos begets another logos, and the son rises up to kill the father. A 18th century preacher could exhort his congregation, “Let your heart be gay,” and not be run out of the church. The word changes. But Plato doesn’t want it to. The form of the Sun doesn’t change. But Derrida says, by implication: the Egyptians called that object “Ra” and thought it was a mighty god; we call it “sun” and think of it as a ball of gas. And we have the audacity to think our conception will last forever, just like the Egyptians thought four thousand years ago.
Again toying with his Greek predecessor, Derrida points out that Plato’s word choice of “pharmakon” gives the lie to just this point. The Greek word Pharmakon is a medicinal term, but can be translated either as “remedy” or “cure.” Of course, the distinction isn’t minor—it’s lethal. The word itself, even in its original context over two thousand years ago, is slippery and dangerous. Ask the doctor to give you a pharmakon and he might give you Tylenol or cyanide. You better hope he knows the context of your request. Here we see Plato indulge in what Derrida points out is a subtle contradiction. For while written words are (at first) supposedly far removed from reality, Plato also views them as dangerous “supplements.” For words, signs, images, pharmakons, break into reality and distort our memory of things, our concepts of the true forms. So, Derrida points out, words are at once ghostly and all too real.
Now here is where I think that Derrida finally nails Plato (and Descartes). At the end of page 135, he brings out his “kettle” analogy, which I’ll quote:
1) The kettle I am returning to you is brand new; 2) The holes were already in it when you lent it to me; 3) You never lent me a kettle anyway. Analogously 1) Writing is rigorously exterior and inferior to living memory and speech, which are therefore undamaged by it. 2) Writing is harmful to them because it puts them to sleep and infects their life which would otherwise remain intact. 3) Anyway, if one has resorted to hypomnesia and writing at all, it is not for their intrinsic value, but because living memory is finite, it already has holes in it before writing ever comes to leave its traces. Writing has no effect on memory (135-136).
In other words, Plato wants to have his cake and eat it, too. On one hand, he wants to maintain that written words are lesser things, mere shadows on the wall of the cave (and therefore not real). On the other hand, he warns us shrilly that writing can damage reality by distorting it. So which is it?
Derrida does seem to have cornered Plato. Plato wanted at first to make the written word irrelevant, or unreal. Signs are different—weaker—than the things signified, Plato maintains. In fact, this premise is exactly what Plato uses to differentiate himself from the sophists.
Derrida wants to embrace the two-edged nature of language, its slipperiness, its danger. Sure, he says, language can’t be pinned down. Why try? Why try to build your castle in the sky. Derrida never lifted a hand to help the Shinarites build the Tower of Babel. He was making dirty jokes in the pub the whole time.
So what do we make of all this? I think that both T.S. Eliot and Dr. Leithart acknowledge Derrida’s criticism of Plato and modernity. But they also point out that, as Christians, we can advance the argument another step. Yes, words are impossible to interpret from age to age (as Solomon said). The idea that the real meaning of words can be found is a deceit, as Eliot says—a lie of the “quiet-voiced elders” of modernity.
But of course… as you may have noticed (and Dr. Leithart points out in Deep Comedy), Derrida opens himself up to a biblical criticism when he starts using terminology like “logos,” and “father and son.” John’s gospel in particular talks of the mystery of logos, and claims: “no man has seen the Father.” This is Derrida’s position so far: logos is invisible. But of course, we also know from John’s gospel that the father became known through the son. Meaning is communicated through a Word. The Word was spoken and now dwells and tabernacles with us. The Word is spoken and written. And Jesus has the audacity to claim that if you have seen the Son you have seen the Father. You see the Word, and because He obeys the Father, you have seen the Father, too. Derrida knows only disobedient parricidal words. Jesus gives us another type: the obedient Word. Derrida’s theory of language is a tragedy. The Bible’s is not, though it is a mystery.
Eliot reminds us that we can never hope to fully pin down language. It is too elusive—in this Derrida was right. And this is something that Derrida—like Balaam’s ass—can teach us, I think. Our search for true words is “useless in the darkness.” We sought “knowledge derived from experience,” but time gave the lie to that sort of knowledge. We have learned that time imposes new patterns and experiences which dizzy us, disorient us. “Every moment is a new and shocking / Valuation.” So, in the end, after we’ve wrestled with the word all night and have at last bested him—then, at the breaking of day, the word says: “Let me go.” And we say, “Not until you bless me.” And then, in the middle of this stalemate, the Word turns to you and gives you a new name—that is enough. What more can you require of God in language? You present him with your most difficult problems (the problem of evil, the problem of the meaning of life), and all he does is answer you with another riddle. He gives you a new name and blesses you because you wrestled with him all night. Even when you have him pinned—physically— you can’t win. He extricates Himself with a Word. But that’s all you needed anyway.
I’ll finish up with a brief quotation from Stanley Hauerwas: “We know who we are only when we can place our selves—locate our stories—within God’s story. This is the basis for the extraordinary Christian claim that we participate morally in God’s life…. Grace is not an eternal moment above history rendering history irrelevant; rather it is God’s choice to be a Lord whose kingdom is furthered by our concrete obedience through which we acquire a history befitting our nature as God’s creatures” (The Peaceable Kingdom, 27).
