Relative thinking
The death of Jacques Derrida prompted a flood of barbed jokes and criticism of the so-called “anything goes” branch of philosophical thought with which he was most closely identified. What is it about relativism that gets us so hot under the collar? Richard Lea investigates
An announcement from president Jacques Chirac, an attack in the New York Times, a series of puzzled obituaries and a torrent of jokes about deconstructing mortality. “Naturally the coverage of Derrida’s death was mixed,” says AC Grayling, reader in philosophy at Birkbeck College, “he was a controversial figure.”
A writer who had made a career out of searching for latent contradictions could have expected no less. The Guardian hailed his “dramatic impact on the study of literature”; Roger Scruton said he talked “nonsense”. “Can there be any certainty in the death of Jacques Derrida?” quipped the Times.
But Simon Glendinning, director of the Forum for European Philosophy, read the coverage with a sinking feeling. “From the very first press releases carrying the news of his death it was clear that the papers were going to have a field day with the kind of depressingly familiar distortions of his thought that he had to face so often - and faced so graciously - when he was alive.”
The charge sheet is impressive. The New York Times accused Derrida and his theory of relativism (the idea that what is true depends on who you are) of “robbing texts - whether literature, history or philosophy - of truthfulness”. Scruton dismissed him as a philosopher who claimed that “anything goes”. “Derrida, you could say, carried on the demolition [of objective truth and traditional morality] where Nietzsche left off,” the Times declared.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be so depressing if this censure were confined to one dashing French thinker, but in fact, the attacks on Derrida are just the latest sortie in a wider campaign being waged against academics, intellectuals and other disreputable figures. Academia is portrayed as a hotbed of fancy foreign notions, a den of dangerous relativists who can’t talk straight, can’t think straight - and don’t even want to try.
“The more obscure and unintelligible the teaching and writing, the better. The goal is to appear profound,” says the Telegraph. The Guardian picks up the baton with “to rely on reason, we are told by tenured professors … is tantamount to relying on a horse and buggy to get around town”, while the Times accuses intellectuals of forming “a ‘confederacy of dunces’ whose first aim is to exclude anyone who thinks out of line, [which] is why university departments in the humanities and social sciences are now such grim, bigoted places.”
“Some areas of academic life are indeed pointless and out of touch, precisely because of their embrace of sloppy, fashion-following, jargon-ridden, introverted, authority-besotted nonsense,” Grayling nods. “Very little harm would be done if literary critics and postmodernist anthropologists, lawyers and the like were told to go and get real jobs.”
The opponents of academia rarely make such clear distinctions between faculties, however, and the caricature they present feeds a set of dangerous arguments. If you believe that academics talk nonsense, for example, then you can safely ignore them and cut their funding - it would be no more than they deserve. After all, as the Times asserts, they have “manufactured their own weapon of intellectual mass destruction, and have disappeared in the resulting puff of smoke”. If it is indeed academics who are to blame for “the draining away of intrinsic value for culture and learning” - for dumbing down, cynicism and moral decay - then getting rid of them would almost be a duty.
But who are these relativists that the papers speak of, and how has their dangerous philosophy managed to take over our intellectual culture? They turn out to be harder to track down than you might think. No matter where you look, they are always hiding in the next field.
“Relativism is not a mainstream position in anglophone analytic philosophy”, says Grayling. “But it is an important one, in the sense that the challenge of relativism has always had to be addressed.” English and American philosophy, then, has stood up to the challenge of a few relativist thinkers, and responded vigorously. This field, at least, has yet to be overrun. But what about philosophy on the continent?
“I don’t know of anyone who holds the caricature position,” says Glendinning. “There are, however, mainstream and important critiques of various forms of naive realism and objectivism. One only has to think of Kuhn’s work in the history of science. Kuhn argued that scientists in different paradigms are not merely interpreting the world differently but are, in an important sense, inhabiting different worlds. The caricature would be: no paradigm is in ‘better shape’ vis-Ã -vis ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ than any other. But Kuhn does not endorse the caricature. He believes we can make sense of getting a better theory, one that can be judged ‘an advance’ over another.” The relativists, then, seem to have evaporated from philosophy. Perhaps we should look further afield.
“Relativism is the mainstream position for postmodernist theory across a wide range of disciplines - anthropology and literary theory especially,” suggests Grayling. “It is easy to believe and takes careful thought to counter, and it feeds PC considerations by the truckload. Also it is espoused by people with enticing and intellectual-sounding foreign names - Manolo Blahniks of the mind rather than the feet.”
Let’s take anthropology first. Has it been seduced by attractive foreign agents? Are anthropologists teetering around on fashionable but flimsy foundations?
“Modern popular discourse can and does caricature anthropology as ‘relativist’,” says Wendy James, professor of social anthropology at Oxford University, “but this is to misrepresent its main aims.”
“Most social anthropologists would not espouse a moral relativism of the strong type”, agrees David Mills, a lecturer in anthropology at Birmingham University, “but an element of methodological relativism is still important. If you go into a society with absolute views about right and wrong these are going to affect your ability to get along with people and your understanding of situations. Approaching controversial issues with sensitivity and respect might be seen as a weak form of relativism, but it is in fact both social courtesy and basic professionalism in a discipline that seeks to make sense of relationships. This doesn’t turn anthropologists into moral relativists.”
It is easy to see that if you set out to understand how other cultures think about the world then you need to suspend your disbelief for a moment. You need to assume that any strange ideas you may come across make at least some sense - or at least as much sense as the evolutionary biologist who goes to church on a Sunday. “This can make some situations rather tricky,” says Mills, “but the anthropologist doesn’t have to participate in a circumcision ritual to begin to learn about the social meanings and truths created in a particular community about circumcision.”
A weak methodological relativism of the sort that Mills describes doesn’t mean that the anthropologist is giving up on truth or on moral judgments. If you want to understand why the Zande suspend a stone from a string while they build a hut then you have to listen while they explain how it will stop the rain from falling. You don’t have to believe in witchcraft. If you want to understand why genital mutilation is sometimes a source of pride for young girls then you have to listen while the village elder explains how it ensures she is chaste, clean and ready for marriage. You don’t have to condone it.
“When one acknowledges historical and cultural variations, and acknowledges that there is more than one way of human flourishing, that is not to affirm that truth is relative,” says Glendinning, “but that what is at issue for evaluation as true and false - what we care about - can and does change.”
So if the anthropologists are merely suspending their disbelief - if they too have resisted the appeal of fraudulent foreign nonsense - where are the relativists hiding? “One hears a great deal of noise about how bad things have got in literature departments,” suggests Glendinning, “but what I have seen never seems to be quite what one has been led to expect.”
“If you asked me to name the leading relativist in the world, I couldn’t,” says Robert Eaglestone, a senior lecturer in the department of English at Royal Holloway, “because they just don’t exist. Relativism has always been a bogeyman used to scare people. No-one’s ever lived up to the straw figure of the full-blown relativist constructed by their opponents. If you read any of the usual suspects - Derrida, Rorty, Lyotard, Kuhn - with care, you’ll find that none of them ever suggests that ‘anything goes’.”
Somehow the ‘real’ relativists always seem to be somewhere else, somehow their wacky notions always seem to evaporate on closer inspection, to turn into something perfectly sensible. But if these relativists are just a tiny minority in academia, or if they really don’t exist at all, then why does everybody believe that the humanities are overrun by shifty foreign nonsense? Why does the ‘anything goes’ caricature of the modern intellectual stick? Why do we distrust everything that snowy-haired French philosophers say?
“Well, it is very difficult to summarise Derrida’s thought,” says Glendinning. “It, like any serious and penetrating thought, even resists summary - any philosophy that can be summed up in a nutshell belongs in one. People are troubled by a form of critique which challenges our most cherished assumptions - and so they want a caricature.”
Eaglestone also points out the impatience of the modern world, the lack of time for anything complicated, and even suggests an uglier motivation, “a thoroughgoing English anti-intellectualism which leads to academics and intellectuals being despised, so any charge will stick.” Modern thinkers challenge received ideas, such as the assumption that genes alone determine character, or that art can only be good for you. They are not afraid to tackle institutions on both the left and the right, which has left them with few friends. “People don’t like to have their certainties questioned,” says Eaglestone. “Sadly that’s the academic’s job.”
