Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies:
"The Continental Origins of Postmodernism"

Week 9: November 8-14 and Week 10: November 15-21

Roger Donway's Comment on
William Thomas's Review of Jacques Derrida's "Cogito and the History of Madness" and "Structure, Sign and Discourse in the Human Sciences",
with follow-up

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 1999 11:07 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: RD Comment on WT Derrida Review

Madness and Argument
By Roger Donway

Foucault (as Derrida interprets him) says that: "Descartes is not interested
in madness, he does not welcome it, he does not consider it. He excludes it
by decree" (p. 47 of our text). Will Thomas then adds: "At some length,
Derrida offers an alternative reading of Descartes, one that is 'banal' by
his own admission." This alternative reading amounts to saying: "Descartes
does (implicitly) consider madness and does claim that it offers no
exception to the certainty provided by the Cogito." The passage Derrida
quotes is one from the Discourse on Method, which declares that the Cogito
is "so certain and so assured that all the most extravagant suppositions
brought forward by the sceptics were incapable of shaking it."

I find this debate about the history of philosophy more interesting than
what Derrida has to say about his own philosophy. But having no fund of
scholarship regarding Descartes, I must proceed to analyze the debate
largely on the basis the facts presented above.

As Objectivists, we reject the skeptics' game of "It is possible that. . . "
But Descartes did not. He apparently believed that he could be certain of
his knowledge only if he could exclude all objections based on the assertion
of possibility, and he apparently believed that he had some way of knowing
whether an assertion of possibility stood as an objection or had been
overcome, even when the assertion had been uttered without evidence.

Now, early in the First Meditation, Descartes considers whether he is
certain of knowledge that is based on sensory observation and that regards
large objects near at hand. Is his certainty undermined, he wonders, by the
fact that "certain persons, devoid of sense, whose cerebella are so troubled
and clouded by the violent vapours of black biles that they constantly
assure us that . . . they are clothed in purple when they are really without
covering. . . . " Descartes answers: "They are mad, and I should not be any
less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant." He then goes on to
pursue the possibility that he is dreaming.

This is the passage that, Foucault says, shows Descartes excluding madness
by decree. And this is the objection based on the possibility of madness
that Derrida says Descartes later dealt with. Without going into the
specific answer that Derrida believes Descartes made, let us look at the
question schematically.

Descartes: I am certain of proprositional knowledge based on the sensory
awareness of large-scale objects near-at-hand.
Interlocutor: But it is possible that you are mad.
Descartes: [Counter-argument]

The problem is that, according to Descartes, the very possibility of making
a counter-argument depends upon the assumption that he is not mad. As David
Kelley put it in Evidence and Justification, Descartes held that "the
acceptance of a proposition p is justified in accordance with some
epistemological rule R only if the subject has determined that accepting p
does comply with R." (p. 7) But this determination can be made only if the
subject is rational. To be specific: Descartes' acceptance of the
proposition "I am sane" is justified in accordance with some epistemological
rule R only if Descartes has [rationally] determined that accepting "I am
sane" complies with R..

On this basis, I think Foucault may have the better of the argument with
Derrida, and perhaps this is why Descartes writes, in reply to the fourth
set of Objections, "the power of thinking is asleep . . . in maniacs." If
the power of thinking itself is asleep in madmen, the question of arriving
at certain knowledge does not arise for them. They could never get to the
point of saying, "I may be mad, but I have grasped (by reason) that 'I
think, therefore I am.'" Therefore, Descartes does not welcome their
presence in his argument.

Beyond the question of madness in Descartes' philosophy, however, there lies
the more interesting question of madness (and rationality) in Objectivism.
(Not having any acquaintance with the seriously mad, I here rely upon the
long quotation from a paranoid cited in David Kelley's The Art of Reasoning
[3rd edition, pp. 578-79].)

Start with Kelley's Evidence and Justification: "To know a fact
inferentially is to know it by means of its relationship with other facts.
Those other facts are the evidence for the conclusion. . . . These facts,
and the relationship between them, exist regardless of whether I know them
or not. The concept of evidence pertains to what is 'out there.' . . .
[Nevertheless,] what justifies my acceptance of the conclusion is therefore
not the evidence per se, but my awareness of the evidence. . . . For a
subject to be justified in accepting a given proposition, he must have some
grasp of the evidential relationship on which it is based. . . . If he knew
the premises to be true but saw no relation between them and the conclusion,
then his acceptance of the conclusion would be arbitrary." (pp. 12-14)

A question Kelley does not discuss explicitly is what we should make of a
person (like the paranoid) who sees evidentiary connections everywhere. From
a third person perspective, we may say, in a particular case, "Yes. The
facts he cites provide evidence for the conclusion he mentions." But must we
then go on to say, hypothetically, "If he actually grasps the evidentiary
connection here, then he knows the conclusion"?

I wonder if the matter is that cut-and-dried? If the paranoid is
constitutionally incapable of distinguishing a grasp of an evidentiary
relationship from a completely arbitrary relationship, can we ever say that
he has grasped an evidentiary connection? If a judge rules in whatever way
he feels like, but sometimes he feels like ruling in accordance with the
evidence, is he rendering objective judgment in those cases? Perhaps that is
a bad analogy, but it is the best I can think of.

Suppose, then, that we conclude the madman can never properly be said to
grasp an evidentiary relationship. We are led to the conclusion that none of
the madman's judgments are knowledge, and thus we return in a new way to
Descartes' problem.

When I am awake, I know I am awake. When I am dreaming, I do not know I am
dreaming. But the second fact does not undermine the first. To say it does,
is the mistake of the "It's possible" school. By parallel: If I am sane
(rational), I can know that I am sane, even if a mad person cannot know he
is mad. But how exactly do I know that I am sane/rational? It cannot be
inferred knowledge, because all inferred knowledge depends on the fact that
I am sane/rational (if my argument above is correct). Is it, then, an axiom
or a corollary of an axiom?

We might well argue that it is one way of looking at the axiom of free-will.
"The integrative processes of conceptual thought must be initiated by
conscious effort, and they must be consciously directed in such a way as to
avoid error and exclude subjective whims, biases, and preconceptions. If we
could not control our integrative processes volitionally, we could have no
confidence in the validity of their products. In this respect, volition is a
fundamental feature of conceptual thought, and the choice to think might
also be described as the choice to be objective, to be governed by facts
rather than whims."(The Logical Structure of Objectivism, Beta Version, pp.
28-29)

So perhaps Foucault was on to something. Descartes, whether he fully
realized it or not, had no way (within the context of his philosophy) of
presenting an argument against the possibility that he was mad. And, having
no grasp of the Objectivist axioms, he could rule out the possibility that
he was mad only "by decree."

[Roger Donway]


*************************************************
Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*************************************************

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 1999 10:50 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Derrida on Madness

[From: Will Wilkinson]

I've been strapped for time, and have not read the Derrida essays in any
detail. I began the first and then quickly petered out, finding Derrida's
opaque style annoying, and having been already exhausted by Saul Kripke's
and David Lewis's respective brands of stupefying clarity. Anyway, here is what
I thought of the first few pages of Derrida just in case I don't find the time
later to say anything more.

I found what I took Derrida's first point in "Cogito and the History of
Madness" to be maybe vacuous and probably false. The point (?): someone who
is really mad can't tell us what it is like being mad, because he is mad, and
someone who isn't mad can't tell us what it is like being mad, because he
isn't.

If the point is that the experience of madness is entirely ineffable, that
it is the sort of thing we have no vocabulary to describe, then fine. But I
would think this point in need of an argument. Why is our usual complement of
concepts insufficient for describing what madness is like? Of course, no
description of madness will make the reader herself experience it. But we
don't expect an apt description of anger to make us experience anger. Why
should madness be any different? Derrida seems to assume that an account of
madness would have to draw upon a language with very special or impossible
properties. He seems to think a *real* account of madness would require a
mad language. But does an account of anger require an angry language, or an
account of cats a catty language? I don't suppose it does.

Now, I'm almost certain that this is a trivialization of Derrida's position.
But since I cannot otherwise determine what that position is, I'll leave it
at that.

One last thing. Derrida suffers terribly from logorrhea. He just can't shut
up. He goes on and on belaboring his point, delighting in his own noises.
Others (no one here) have told me they find Derrida *playful*. I find him
tiresome and overindulgent.

I apologize for the shallow and flippant nature of these comments. I hope to
find time to read more, and thus say something more substantive later in the
week.

-- Will W.




*************************************************
Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*************************************************

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Saturday, November 20, 1999 9:20 AM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Derrida on Madness

[From: David L. Potts ]

Will Wilkinson writes:

>Others (no one here) have told me they find Derrida *playful*.

This sounds to me like somebody parroting Derrida's own self-promotional
shtick. Play is one of Derrida's key concepts, play being all we'll have
once objective science has been exposed as incompetent and discarded in the
coming "future epoch of differance" (_Of Grammatology_ 93). I think we're
supposed to "get" that Derrida's puns and word games are a part of this
"play," this liberation from "linear" language. (Derrida attacks objectivity
as requiring a "linear model" of language at 85-87. It is now common to use
"linear" as an epithet of reason, and I wonder whether this is the source.)

Derrida has a book I saw in a bookstore - I think it was _Glas_ - which is
an oversized volume in which separate chunks of text are printed in all
manner of different font sizes and faces, jumbled together on the same page.
This also, I presume, is "play."

Play is "the absence of the transcendental signified" (_Of Grammatology_
50). Or, in a somewhat less clear but semantically equivalent metaphor, "the
disruption of presence" ("Structure, Sign, and Play" 292). What this means
is that symbols, including words and sentences, never have any
extra-symbolic referents. They refer only to other symbols in an endless
chain anchored to nothing.

If you take this conception seriously, it implies two things. One is, that
since reference never really happens in language - that is, since there is
never any reference to anything outside language itself - language really
does become a game in a rather literal sense. It's like chess: the pieces
may be _called_ "King," "Knight," etc., but they actually refer to nothing
beyond the rules that comprise the game itself. Language therefore _is_
play; it's hard to see what else Derrida could call it. The other is, that
more than just language is included in this play. If symbols don't really
refer, they aren't significantly different from any other rule governed
system. Thus everything becomes "writing." And writing is governed by
nothing but play.

-David



*************************************************
Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*************************************************