AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human. Robert Smith Rowland
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both a negative and a positive mode, both brake and accelerator. The brake involved taking a fine-toothed comb to the texts of leading thinkers in order to expose biases, point out contradictions, and highlight apparently marginal remarks that undermined the central thesis. The accelerator saw Derrida blending disciplines usually held apart, such as psychoanalysis and philosophy, in order to produce fresh insight. Ever inventive, he created a host of new concepts as well as reinventing the old. Even when debunking the arguments of another philosopher, he would generally do so in a highly respectful manner, helping the reader to understand that other philosopher’s reasoning. Through Derrida, one could learn about the entire history of ideas. One also saw how these ideas could be renewed.
Not everybody appreciated both sides. The innate conservatism of Oxford led many academics to denounce Derrida as an intellectual terrorist, bent on detonating the achievements of Western civilisation. They claimed that he was a nihilist. They said that the prolixity of his prose served to mask a lack of clear thinking. To quote a phrase of the times, they belittled his writings as ‘intellectual masturbation’.
Jacques Derrida was a divisive figure. In Oxford, the majority took against him, especially the philosophers, although he enjoyed support among a group of Literature dons and assorted mavericks. In many British universities he was reviled, but still there were pro-Derrida camps, especially at Sussex University, in Brighton, which after all was closer to France. At Cambridge – always more international in its tastes than Oxford – the controversy reached a head when a motion was submitted to award the contrarian an honorary doctorate. It threw the academy into turmoil, and the story made the nationals. After measured oration and bitter wrangling, the proposal squeaked through.
The purpose star
Like other Derrida fans, I felt that his detractors had jumped to their conclusions. When I probed as to which particular aspects of his thinking they eschewed, I would be met by generalisations. It turned out that they hadn’t read Derrida first hand, and were going on hearsay from their academic friends. It seemed that an uninformed view expressed by a trusted peer counted for more than unfiltered data from the primary source.
Perhaps that’s not surprising. One cannot form an opinion without excluding some of the facts. Moreover, one makes that exclusion for the sake of affirming identity. Opinions are first and foremost expressions of our belonging. The content comes a distant second. Whenever we opine on a given subject, our underlying motive is to indicate the tribe to which we belong, and affirm our membership of it. It’s one of the reasons why people so rarely change their minds. Changing your mind involves changing the group to which you feel you belong. That takes courage. Change more broadly follows the same rule: many people attest to wanting to change, but precious few are willing to disturb their identity.
I tired of defending Derrida. My leaning was towards the philosophy itself. Before long, it became my passion. I began collecting the master’s books, in English and in French, taking especial delight when I stumbled upon a bilingual edition. I ordered copies direct from Paris. To celebrate the end of my third year, I shelled out forty-seven pounds – a king’s ransom – for a hardback copy of Derrida’s signature work, called Glas.
But why did I latch on so? Why Derrida and not Marx? What’s happening when we make such attachments? For many if not all of us, there is a time in our lives, usually in our teens or twenties, when we hit upon the thing that is going to guide us in our work life. At that point – and it often is a point – we see the thing, like an apparition, to which we are going to pledge our time. It might be training as a doctor, setting up a business, working for a politician, joining the navy, making ceramics, coding software, looking after children. Sometimes we make a false start, studying as an accountant before becoming a teacher, or taking up nursing only to leave for the theatre. But nearly always there is a moment – or at least a period – when we identify our guiding purpose and attach to it. It is like noticing a star that you had never seen before and deciding to follow. I call it the ‘purpose star’.
Finding the purpose star seems to occur when three conditions are met:
1 There has been an interim beforehand of uncertainty, lack of direction, or sheer purposelessness. It is virtually impossible to make an instant transition from one strong sense of purpose to another. Fallow periods play a vital role in preparing for fertility. Before our purpose can be known, first it must be unknown. Time spent feeling uncertain, therefore, is not invariably unproductive. It could represent a precondition of certainty, a prelude that allows the mind to sift its junk and make space for purpose’s arrival.
2 The purpose has to fit with our context. I wouldn’t have latched on to Derrida had I not been a student. I wouldn’t have latched on had Derrida’s work not been a hot topic. I wouldn’t have latched on had the study of English literature at Oxford not been in a state of torpor, needing rejuvenation. Realistically, my purpose could never have been to become a fisherman or a miner: such possibilities were too remote from the world that I inhabited.
3 Our purpose has to align with whom we want to be. It is an expression of our ideal selves. I adopted Derrida because I saw him as clever, innovative and cool. If I am candid, these attributes were exactly the three that I would have picked to describe my ideal self. They were how I wished to be seen. That’s not quite the same as identification, which is the process of identifying with somebody else, whereby my hero and I share an identity, or there is an existing affinity. It’s rather that a fantasy about oneself is embodied by another person. Jacques Derrida and I were not the same. Between his identity and mine, there lay a gap. What filled that gap was my aspiration to be like him. He might not have been clever, innovative and cool at all. The point is that I valued those three attributes, and then attributed the attributes to him. That made him an ideal version of myself. If he was my hero, he was a proxy for me as my own hero. I then aspired to become this ideal version of myself.
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