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9 one Revelation as Immediacy The view that there is nothing external to experience—no World of Forms, City of God, independent cogito, a priori category, transcendental Mind, or far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves, but only the mundane business of making our way as best we can in a universe shot through with contingency. All ‘‘homes’’ are in finite experience; finite experience as such is homeless. Nothing outside the flux secures the issue of it. Just as much of American culture and society looks like a concerted effort to refute Jesus’ claim that ‘‘one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions ’’ (Luke 12:15), so much of contemporary French philosophy (often designated by such umbrella names as poststructuralism or postmodernism) looks like a concerted effort to refute the claim that frames the book of Revelation, ‘‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’’ (1:8, 21:6, and 22:13; cf. 1:17–18). Through loyalty to (or entrapment in) the metaphysical traditions of which they are so sharply critical, philosophers like Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard prefer Greek to Hebrew. So their assault is on the notions of arche and telos. In its search to establish the primacy of unity over plurality, univocity over equivocity, stability over flux, and so forth, western metaphysics has regularly resorted to the notion of an ultimate origin to be the foundation of everything or an ultimate goal to be the harmonization of everything, or, typically, both. But there is no pure origin, divine (creator) or human (cogito);1 the only beginnings we can find are relative beginnings, themselves grounded in that which precedes them. Nor is there any goal by which experience or reality can be, to use the official term, totalized. All such ends represent the Revelation 10 wishful thinking of finite parts to be the whole, the effort of centers of force that can see that they are not the arche to be the telos. The epistemological foundationalism of which Descartes is the paradigm and the eschatological holism of which Hegel and Marx are the paradigms are so riddled with paradox and paralogism that we must eschew the comfort they provide and accept our ultimate homelessness. Neither path leads to Absolute Knowledge, but only to other paths. The earth stands on the back of an elephant and—here’s the kicker—it’s elephants all the way down. This line of thought, so nicely summarized in the quotations at the beginning of this essay, can be called contemporary French negativism. It is a series of critiques of pure reason emphasizing the wounded character of reason, its situatedness and thus its particularity, its fractured character and thus its plurality . Reason is always indebted, both to the past, by which it has been constituted , and to the future, which holds all its unfulfilled promissory notes. A number of observations can be made about this French radicalism, whose American enthusiasts sometimes bill themselves as intellectual terrorists. 1. Only the details of its critique are distinctive. For example, the two quotations at the beginning of this chapter, which the reader is no doubt quite prepared to attribute to Derrida, or Foucault, or Lyotard, are not about French postmodernism at all. The first is Louis Menand’s definition of American pragmatism and the second a quotation from William James in support of it.2 Furthermore, the repudiation of classical foundationalism with its appeal to privileged representations ‘‘which cannot be gainsaid’’3 is a staple of American philosophy from Peirce to Plantinga, and the repudiation of Hegelian holism is perhaps the only theme common to all forms of ‘‘analytic philosophy’’ from Moore and Russell to the present.4 2. French negativism refuses, persistently and explicitly, to draw the conclusion its opponents would like to foist upon it, a certain kind of nihilistic relativism. Its exponents are relativists insofar as they make the claim that we have access to no absolute standpoint. But they refuse to infer that every point of view or every practice is just as good as any other. They insist on making distinctions even while admitting that they have no absolute criteria for doing so. Intellectual life is not exempted from the riskiness of life in general. For example, Lyotard argues that moral judgments can never be grounded or justified. Ought can never be derived from is, that is, prescriptions expressive of justice can never be ‘‘derived from other propositions, in which the latter...

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