The Joy of Academic Reading: Why Wittgenstein and Derrida are not the same

Academic reading can be a chore. For some reason, experts often engage in a sort of linguistic torture that leaves readers bored, confused, and emotionally drained. But every so often, one encounters a piece of academic writing that makes the soul sing. This was the treat that awaited me today as I read Toril Moi's 2009 essay, "They practice their trades in different worlds": Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy."

Over the past year I wrote a thesis on Stanley Hauerwas that featured a chapter on his indebtedness to Ordinary Language Philosophy. I was frustrated by the constant criticisms of the "linguistic turn" in Hauerwas' work that often came from a group known as the "Biola School." Their criticisms seemed to me to be off-base somehow, but I could never quite articulate a satisfactory account of what these folks got wrong. I supposed that they simply had not undergone the Wittgensteinian therapy necessary to rightly read Hauerwas (which, in a sense, is true), but I knew that this was an insufficient argument to dismiss their complaints. I muddled through, and came up with something that was sufficient to have my thesis accepted and so I moved on.

As I read Moi's essay today, I realized at once what the issue was. To an untrained ear, there is considerable resonance between the Derridean Postructuralist approach to language and Wittgensteinian Ordinary Language Philosophy, but they are in fact quite some distance apart. One of the constant misreadings of Hauerwas that I encountered was that his "linguistic turn" left him stranded in language, unable to connect with the "real" world. Moi helpfully shows that while this is a potential shortfall in Derrida's appropriation of Husserlian accounts of language, Ordinary Language in fact takes us the opposite direction, connecting users of language more intimately with the world.

Reading Moi today was like a Damascus Road experience. The scales fell from my eyes and I was able to understand why the criticisms of Hauerwas by folks like R. Scott Smith and others never seemed to hit the mark; they had brought a critique of Derrida's deconstruction to an Ordinary Language game.

For those interested in Ordinary Language, I would encourage you to read Moi's essay that I have linked to above. I will leave you with a quote from the concluding paragraph:

For me, the greatest achievement of ordinary language philosophy is precisely that it gets away from the idea of language as negation, that it shows us instead that language is the very condition of possibility of lived experience; turning towards ordinary language, we turn towards the world, and towards others.

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