2. I am done with university, so no I'm not "like other undergrad students".
I apologise for this patronising comment. I made it because the tone of your posts reminds me of students who have had similar problems with philosophy and who usually haven't engaged with the implications of the thinkers they're studying. I wasn't just dismissing your post as 'undergraduate bullshit' which is probably what it sounded like. But I hold to my assertion that your dismissal of institutionalised philosophy as a circle jerk is arrogant in itself.
4. I never implied that postmodernism was the point at which philosophy parted with its main objective. I actually mentioned several times that I think it was during the so-called "enlightenment" that this has happened. What I do think is that post-modernism marks the death of philosophy as such, and its corpse has been carved out into many "theory" disciplines as you have so generously shown. And so, what is the point of studying philosophy, again?
Well I mean what you're showing here is that at some level, all disciplinary boundaries are in a sense arbitrary. Which is fine. But I mean, you're also saying you have a beef with everything since the Enlightenment. So I took your object of cricisism to be, well, everything since the Enlightenment (and specifically the po-mo's, since you mention Derrida specifically.
5. I realize why Derrida is so difficult to read. What I'd like to know is what is it's point. You say it is not intellectual masturbation but a product of it's time. What I am saying is that, like other products of it's time, ALL are academic masturbation (or more precisely, circle-jerks). It is an exchange of whimsical little self-aggrandizing expositions that try to out-self-aggrandize the other's, limited to a few select academics of the time. You have not given me a reason why it is good to read, yet.
Actually, Derrida and the other po-mo's go a long way to undermining the most problematic elements of Enlightenment rationalism. Derrida argued that all knowledge is premised on tiered binaries which disguise the fact that as a product of social relations, texts can be deconstructed and demystified to show that they in fact reflect the conditions of their production. So what Derrida and co show is the contingency of all knowledge. It's against the arragance of positivist assumptions about the objectivity of knowledge so long as the scientific method is applied. So there is a point to reading Derrida. But there is also a point to reading Plato (since Derrida is in a very fundamental sense a conversation with/against Plato).
6. Need for opaque and confusing language is a telling sign that the system you're working with is simply not suited for what you're doing. Why is it that a Sufi poet can, in a single verse, completely obliterate Hiedigger's entire corpus of works?
Philosophy's main (and indeed, ONLY) tool is language. If you cannot use language properly to get your message across (which is what "great" philosophers like Kant and Sartre seem to be suffering from), does that not make you bad at your craft?
I don't see how being a bad writer makes your ideas bad. I don't see how being a very good writer makes your ideas any better. There are heaps of terrible writers who are very influential for very good reasons (Judith Butler springs to mind here). There are also writers who are difficult to read for very good reasons. Heidegger is one of these. Heidegger constructed a original ontology of being. The reasons he used words in ideosyncratic ways is because he was describing things that in a very real sense, nobody had ever described before.
It seems to me that, today, the academic study of philosophy is actually all about trying to out-decipher the texts of past with your fellow scholars.
That said, I do agree with you that the offshoots of philosophy, (ex. Social Theory) have had their importance. But I had agreed with this since my first post, i do not see why you seem to think you need to refute it.
Yeah there are competing interpretations of important texts. This is healthy and all to the good and reflects a positive, critical disciplinary environment which leads to new thought. So I don't see what is wrong about arguing about what something means.
Also, I think your criticism is a little incoherent. You are okay with social theory, but not with 'the academic study of philosophy' which is what social theory is. I mean, social theory is just philosophy with society, knowledge and ethics as its object. So I'm still not clear on what the problem is.
Think about this: In the human sciences, once you reach a certain level of theoretical abstraction, everybody is using the same theorists. Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger, Butler, whoever, all of these are being used by academics in politics, sociology, anthropology, history, geography, literature, etc etc. So if you want to know the point of philosophy, just look at the way those disciplines have changed since their inception. Every philosopher has added their own unique element to the narrative of Occidental knowledge. For example, Foucault (a social theorist whom you certainly know) was influenced by Heidegger, Nietzche, and some important philosophers of science (most importantly Canguilhem [sp?]). So without Heidegger, no Foucault. Without Merleu Ponty, no Heidegger. And so it goes. (incidentally, without Enlightenment empiricism, no science, so let's not use the benefit of hindsight to get too down on those guys.)
The philosophical narrative is reflected both in institutionalised philosophy, and the disciplines which draw upon theories of knowledge to inform their practice. Critical engagement within academic institutions is crucial to the movement of this narrative and we are better off for it. So uh don't be so hasty in thinking the whole thing is bullshit and pointless.
