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 literature during the 60s and 70s, Derrida situates his doctrine of diffrance in the context of a radical critique of the horse opera 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 friend bring about the clture of the Western legacy of logocentrism and phallogocentrism. Although in late(a) writings he appears to have settled into a more sanctimonious attitude towarfareds the traditionally Judeo-Christian sense of the sacred and a stronger puffy acknowledgment of his solidarity with the critical project of the Greek thinkers, many of his readers are quiet left with a sour taste in their mouths due to the denunciative and self-ingratiating tone of his primarily writings. In this p aper, I address these concerns, arguing that the earlier phallogocentric paradigm underlying Derridas critique of classical Greek philosophical paideia throne be troped as a postmodern, Franco-Euro form of Occidentalism-a metanarrative in truth 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 influential psychiatric hospital to Paideia the Ideals of Greek Culture (1933), Werner Jaeger discusses the ideals of Greek paideia in terms of their seminal bring on European nicety, a culture which he forebodingly describes in the primaeval thirties as tired of civilization. Jaeger employs the term hellenocentric to describe the essential record of the Greek influence on the development of modern European culture his method of interpreting Greek culture rests on an sweat both(pren ominal) to reanimate the waning classicism of nineteenth century philhellenism and to challenge the widespread, Nietzschean-inspired war against the excessive rationalization 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 character of Greek intellectual life cannot be understood, as he matte up it had been understood, in vacuo, cut off from the society which produced it and to which it was addressed. In his Introduction to Paideia, Jaeger reconstructs the kinetic interplay in Greek paideia between the polis and the someone, 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 hellenoce ntric origins.