Does the person who coined the term "deconstruction" have anything worthwhile to say about mythicism?
In his book,
Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Jacques Derrida deconstructs Heidegger's use of the word "spirit" ("Geist").
Derrida starts by outlining Heidegger's critique of Descartes:
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Descartes, then, did not displace medieval theology. In stopping at the distinction between ens creatum and ens infinitum or increatum, medieval theology failed to interrogate the Being of this ens. What passes for the rebirth or modern period of philosophical thinking is only the "rootedness of a deathly prejudice" (p. 21)
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The consequence of this failure of modern philosophy is that the sciences of the spirit (
Geistwissenschaften) are unable to provide insight into the fundamentals of human nature:
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Whether in Husserl or Scheler, it is the same inability to interrogate the Being of the person. What it lacks, apart from any ontological question as to what makes man a unity (soul, consciousness, spirit and body), is thus indeed an analytic of Gemüt (p. 22)
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The solution to the problem is that "this concept of spirit must be deconstructed." (p. 23)
What does Heidegger have to say, then, about the nature of spirit? Derrida charts the development of Heidegger's treatment of the subject, and ends with:
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What is spirit? Everything suggests that, from as early as 1933, the date at which, lifting at last the quotation marks, he begins to talk of spirit and in the name of spirit, Heidegger never stopped interrogating the Being of Geist. What is spirit? Final reply, in 1953: fire, flame, burning, conflagration. (p. 83)
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But Derrida points out that Heidegger has suppressed an important historico-linguistic dimension to the question of spirit, and asks, " Does it not remain open from its origin and by its very structure onto what Greek and then Latin
had to translate by
pneuma and
spiritus, that is, the Hebrew
ruah?" (p. 100)
Derrida then precedes to outline the Biblical origin of the concept of spirit:
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Without being able to invoke here the vast corpus of prophetic texts and their translations, without doing any more than recalling what makes it permissible to read a whole tradition of Jewish thought as an inexhaustible thinking about fire ; without citing the evidence from the Gospels of a pneumatology which has an ineradicable relationship of translation with ruah, I will refer only to one distinction, made by Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians (2:14), between pneuma and psyche. Corresponding to the distinction between ruah and néphéch, it belongs-if it is not its opening-to the theologico-philosophical tradition in which Heidegger continues to interpret the relationship between Geist and Seele.
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So what does all this mean? Very simply, Derrida, via Heidegger, has deconstructed the entire Western intellectual tradition as a failed ripoff of prophetic Judaism. Without an adequate understanding of spirit, Western man has a crippling " inability to interrogate the Being of the person." Thus he cannot know himself, he cannot know others, and he cannot know Christ. Mythicism thus stands as part of the inevitable final failure of the Western intellectual tradition.
08-31-2005, 01:50 PM
Deconstruction and mythicism
