Chapter 5.4: Jacques Derrida, no one ever gets to clarity 

I have been around the block with philosophy videos. For anyone that wants to get their feet wet, this guy doing these videos is THE BEST!

OH MY GOD! This has to be the most comprehensible educational video on YoutTube. Beautifully explained through well articulated examples.

Not even my prof ,a Harvard graduate could make it more understandable to me as you did. Your channel and the content is so simple and makes it clear in one go. Thanks a lot 😊

Finally, someone on RU-vid who makes sense.

1:08 Presence and Absence 2:30 Concept 3:45 What does x tell about y? 4:14 What is the difference between owning x rather than owning y? 5:57 The Traditional Theory of language cannot be right 7:07 “You cannot have the full meaning of any concept present to your consciousness.” 7:24 “Language projects structure into the world.” 7:56 Meanings don’t exist in our minds. 8:21 Meanings are nowhere. 9:14 There is nothing outside the text. Meaning is relations between words. 10:10 Traditional Hermeneutics mistake 10:44 No one knows fully what they are saying. 11:00 Interpretation

This video deserves to be watched over and over again

Wow! I loved Dr. Gijsbers lectures on Foucault - a philosopher I could not understand, at all, untill his lecture made his writings so much clearer. Now Derrida is clearer, and absolutely facinating, the way this guy lectures. Thank you. Thank you Thank you!

You are awesome to explain this pretty much nuttish theory !!! Can be frustrating at times that even if you understand Derrida , you will not find a language to express that you actually understood him !!! Crazy man this Derrida !!!

These videos are fantastic. Can't stop watching them all! They're inspiring me for story / theme ideas for my [computer game that will change the world]. :) THANKS!

I think this is the closest thing to perfect clarity from Dr. Gijsbers! Brilliant lecture!

this guy's amazing he made this so often difficult subject look like a child's play, i would have liked he had done baudrillard ,because i think after derrida ,baudrillard would be a pretty logical sequence ,though i know well he blew the language issue out of proportion

Thank you so much for putting something across so clearly. So many people will get wiser based on it. Brilliant. ❤️

Thank you so much for clearing this complicated concept by Derrida . The best lecture so far 🫶🏻

Good explanation. Easy to understand. Thanks.

Why did Derrida not speak like this? I think this man understands Derrida better than Derrida understood himself.

loved that little nod at the end :D

What a fresh breath of air

Wow. So clear, thank you!

Nice one, thanks for sharing, much appreciated.

You are a good teacher indeed.

Language is no more than a tool. It can be used to create poetry, it can be used to mislead and obscure. Who said perfect clarity is reliant on words at all. The affection I see in my doggos eyes are beyond words. I see a little faith, I see a little hope. Doesn't matter, good doggo. Let's go for a walk.

Just out of the world!

Amazing explanation!

Well explained! The question is: if Derrida believes no one ever gets on clarity does that include his own theory ? Which then puts the possibility of one has it on clarity back to existence!! After this video I feel that Derrida was just philosophically mastrubating !!

Excellent.

VERY helpful. Thank you so much.

Language can often be based on a specific object as a starting point! So all the adjectives that distinguish this from other objects. Like color, size, being standing or moving and even being dangerous or useful, also further and further! perhaps toward the abstraction and extraction of abstract words that seem independent but can still be traced back to the physical origin.

Hats off!

Thanks alot Will you please do a video on Baudrilarrd and his theory of simulation Thanks in advance

I think that if we assume that there are no "right" interpretations, then consequently we must also assume that there are no "better" or "worse" interpretations either. Because what other meaning can we assume here for the word "better" than that it implies "closer to something." And it can only be closer to something that we assume is optimal (or 'right'). Of course, if by 'better' we only mean closer to an interpretation that promotes a certain (explicit or implicit) goal (say, ideological or even literary), then 'better' makes sense, but only if we agree with the goal.

I love this bloody hippie!

I wanted to read a few of the comments before I wrote my own. I see that they are very complimentary. Their language honestly gives me a fair bit of context. After seeing the video I feel like I understand how these people feel haha. You explain things beautifully and concisely and each video I watch, which you present, I feel like I am learning something new- this feels really good. Thank you. I have never subscribed to a RU-vid channel before. This will be the first.

This is brilliant!!

If nobody ever knows with perfect clarity what they are saying, neither could Derrida have so known when he said that.

If the structure defining any object is too large and complex to be apprehended in a single instance, we seem too have come full circle to the reasons given for rejecting Augustine.

Could someone explain how it would be possible to judge there to be better or worse interpretations of a text without referring to the goals of the interpreter?

If Derrida is consistent, then there cannot be better or worse interpretations only different ones. Why - because interpretation is entirely subjective. There cannot be any standard by which we judge interpretations then.

this Derrida guy is the first person you've mentioned that seems silly to me. Who the hell needs a "full concept" in their mind. You don't need a whole cow for supper. A steak or a burger is enough.

I believe that language and concepts are different processes, like how it is for people with autism, the autistic traits in humans is the thing that is at the forefront of creating language. The rest of the human spectrum of consciousness is conservation of language, religiously. If you know philosophy really well, please give me some references where the language turn and the reasons for it is explained, because I need to investigate if modern philosophy is built on the wrong premise.

Sorry if this has already been said, but, @1:59, I thought "The elephant not in the room."

When the words, ''Brilliant Geeky Young Professor with Mad 1970s Hair'' suddenly appear in our minds without any choice by us... we realise that we don't have true control of our mind's processes. Do you rule your thoughts or do your thoughts rule you?

link in the description doesn't work

9:00 Lets see what quantum computing and machine learning will say about that.

Informative video. 6:43 Yes it is possible, why is it out of the picture ? Also, even if it is not possible to think all of these at once, what about in a time of multiple thoughts ? 7:44 A tree carries the concept/meaning of the tree despite the fact that there are multiple ways to say the word 'tree'. Moreover there is not infinity of concepts literally; a lot, yes, but infinite, no. It is probably what he meant🤷🏽‍♂. 8:00 I disagree with Derrida again here; the meanings are basically information about the thing that is thought about or talked about - in this case a tree - which is in the brain and in the thing itself; this knowledge of the tree, no matter how vast, is the meaning of the tree and every concept.

difícil pensar sin hablar

Is Derrida's deconstruction criticism of Structuralism?

So how does one have perfect clarity of Derrida?

Clarity of thought, then clarity of expression. Though man is a thinking reed, it may be bruised and bent, the process of forming concepts is not automatic, it requires effort. There is a teleological progression. It is intentional, the will has the appetite to know. Total enlightenment may not be accessible, illumination does dispel ignorance. Full clarity may escape us, yet in the dimly-lit corridors of the mind, sense and intelligibility is constructed, man cannot but make meaning of things, it is almost impossible to speak no-sense for a human being endowed with the faculty of reason. Derrida may have grasped the limits of knowing anything for sure, thinking too much must have created nebulous, chaotic cumulus of doubt.

How do we know Derrida meant that

I have no one with whom to discuss these kind of topics, so first, I'm loving these lectures. But second, I'm going to shoot my queries into the void in hopes of critique. As I understand Derrida is claiming that the correspondence of the concept "cat" is a fiction because the thought evoked by the term does not/cannot fully encapsulate the breadth of the concept "cat" but merely a fraction of that concept. If my understanding is correct, then, the word "cat" is at best only partly true. Going a step further, the statement "a cat is on the table" is also at best only partly true. So here's my question: Is the tautology "a cat is a cat" more true than the word "cat" itself? Put another way: (Concept x) < truth but (Concept x is Concept x) = truth

One of the first philosophical thoughts in my life was said by my grandpa. He said: "You can't read a book which you don't have in your mind already." I was young boy and very puzzled with that . :) he was just a fisherman without any formal education.

Plot twist: language itself appeals to transcendentals outside of language itself preceding the use of language. Its impossible to think a thought or make an argument without unconsciously accepting and appealing to transcendentals like meaning, math, order, reason a priori. If that wasnt the case we could question meaning itself, but how do we understand our own words without meaning? Self negation isn't possible therefore language is posterior to transcendentals. Derrida was sorely mistaken

Believing this, that words dictate reality, is a very left brain way of thinking.

Weirdest Ford Focus advertisement I've seen today.

I don't think JD would have claimed that "all interpretations are equally good"! On the contrary, he protested about this kind of misrepresentation many times - for example in Limited Inc and the afterword to the book version of that paper. Just sayin'.

hmm...

You look like earthling Ed and Brad Pitt had a baby

Ceci, n'est pas un youtube comment.

Yeah, erm, there are big problems in the Derridean angle... to the extent that I understand it. It appears to fail to ask the question as to how communication is possible at all, and so while it claims to avoid extreme/totalising relativism, it doesn't bother to explain how the network of differential relations is anchored such that communication is possible. And that appears to be why we're in this mess now of the 'culture wars', where Derrida is accused of being the prime sophist. There are errors in this youtube presentation, in that it fails to make the distinction between practical clarity, and a hypothetical total/cosmic clarity, and it also fails to make it clear that there isn't a singular network of e.g. the cultural meaning of a car, but rather there are just experiencers who experience those cultural meanings based on their own position in the network, and that the language they use is also a product of their experiences of the other communicating agents that they have come into contact with, and hence the language is constantly being remade by the criss-crossing interactions of all agents. So there is no meta 'cultural meaning'... and this might kind of be actually the point of what Derrida is saying... and yet the video ends by giving the impression that there is this weird activity of generating abundant different interpretations of 'texts'. But in the real world, for practical purposes, we often have something specific in mind in terms of figuring out authorial intention, and we can satisfy that, because language is anchored enough to do pretty amazing things, like design and manufacture microprocessors. The question then is, how is it anchored? How could it be that a network of criss-crossing concept-generating actors can do things like make microprocessors etc.? Masturbating over the 'play of signifiers' tends to paint the wrong picture.

The explanation is very clear. However, if this is really what Derrida was saying, then it is not a particularly original insight. Since time immemorial, people who have thought about language or used it creatively have known that semantic concepts are fluid or that they need context or that they relate to other concepts, and so on. Shakespeare or Samuel Johnson would have yawned at much of this.

10:43 I disagree; it sounds absurd to me that authors are not sure or do not understand what they are writing or want to say. Each person with the knowledge he has of the things he is talking/writing about is or can be sure that he knows and understands what he is talking about.

Fooly understand :)

I like example of your neighbor purchasing an inferior Ametican car. I see that it does present a complex cultural meaning, although it looks like a simple concept. Also, I hope your neighbor doesn't get too much unwanted criticism for it 😅

There are more and less lucid interpretations of any literary work (in relation to the time in which it was written or is being interpreted), but it's true that the author never gets the final say. In some ways, Derrida's correct. In others, he's a complete buffoon.

Fuzzy logic solves the problem.

Derrida was just nonsense about reversing the genesis of processes or concepts, and that's kantians version of hospitality. He clearly explained it in a paper and Of hospitality.

probeer maar eens iets te construeren zonder woorden & of schrift...