Classical Greek Philosophical Paideia in Light of the Postmodern Occidentalism of Jacques Derrida :: Philosophy

Classical Greek Philosophical Paideia in Light of the Postmodern Occidentalism of Jacques DerridaABSTRACT In his books during the 60s and 70s, Derrida situates his doctrine of diffrance in the context of a radical critique of the Western philosophical tradition. This critique rests on a scathing criticism of the tradition as logocentric/phallogocentric. Often speaking in a postured, bermenschean manner, Derrida claimed that his new aporetic philosophy of diffrance would help bring about the clture of the Western legacy of logocentrism and phallogocentrism. Although in recent writings he appears to have settled into a more pietistic attitude towards the traditionally Judeo-Christian sense of the sacred and a stronger declamatory acknowledgment of his solidarity with the critical rove of the Greek thinkers, many of his readers are still left with a sour taste in their mouths due to the denunciatory and self-ingratiating tone of his earlier writings. In this paper, I address these con cerns, arguing that the earlier phallogocentric paradigm underlying Derridas critique of classical Greek philosophical paideia can be troped as a postmodern, Franco-Euro form of Occidentalism-a metanarrative real similar in intent to the Orientalism critiqued by Said. In Derridas earlier writings, it is indeed very difficult to untangle this Occidental metanarrative from the aporetic metaphysics of diffrance. a. From Hellenocentrism to PhallogocentrismIn his highly important Introduction to Paideia the Ideals of Greek Culture (1933), Werner Jaeger discusses the ideals of Greek paideia in terms of their seminal influence on European culture, a culture which he forebodingly describes in the untimelyish thirties as tired of civilization. Jaeger employs the term hellenocentric to describe the essential nature of the Greek influence on the development of modern European culture his mode of interpreting Greek culture rests on an attempt both to reanimate the waning classicism of nine teenth century philhellenism and to challenge the widespread, Nietzschean-inspired war against the excessive rationalisation of modern life, a war that also leads, claims Jaeger, to a carte blanche historiographical dismissal of Greek paideia as excessively rationalistic. In his attempt to reanimate and challenge nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figurings of Greek paideia, Jaeger argues that the intellectual and spiritual nature of Greek intellectual life cannot be understood, as he felt it had been understood, in vacuo, cut off from the fiat which produced it and to which it was addressed. In his Introduction to Paideia, Jaeger reconstructs the dynamic interplay in Greek paideia between the polis and the individual, between social responsibility and individual freedom, --in short, between the zw/on politikon and the gnwqi seautovn-- in the hope of restoring to European culture a greater appreciation of its hellenocentric origins.