Hello and welcome to episode 23!

Apologies for the delay in this episode. We have a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes and are preparing for some really special episodes in the future. More on that soon, but now this:

We offer a reading of another piece of writing by Jacques Derrida, namely his landmark essay: Plato’s Pharmacy. This is one of those essays that if you read at just the right time in your life, you’ll never be the same again. In a few short pages Derrida unwinds and unravels the entire project of western philosophy and reveals what is really at the root of everything. Just as deft as his downward movement is his upward ascendency into a completely new frame of thinking. 

Derrida offers a reading of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus and asks us to consider the relationship between philosophy and sophistry and between ideas and language. Most of us have some idea of what the philosophers were up to. The sophists were iconoclastic, gunslinging thinkers that would teach anyone how to argue any point…for a price. Plato’s Socrates looks down on sophists because they don’t love wisdom for the sake of wisdom; they’re too practical. They’re the classic antecedent to the lawyer. But we shouldn’t turn our nose up at the sophists. They played a tremendously democratic function in 5th century Athens. They believed that anyone could learn how to think. Before them knowledge of the good was thought to be a product of bloodlines. Virtue was inherited, not taught.

Derrida ruminates on the tension between philosophy (pure rationality) and sophistry (pure rhetorical instrumentality) through the concept of the “pharmakon” a word that refers to both the cure for a poison and the poison itself. The pharmakon for philosophy is language, specifically sophistry. Sophistry is both the tool that allows one to practice philosophy, but it is also the poison that kills it. While on the one hand Plato’s philosophy seeks to distinguish itself from sophistry, it cannot do so without relying on the vary tactics of sophistry, namely rhetoric. Socrates would like us to believe that his arguments are grounded in pure reason, but the reality is that the arguments are simply expertly argued through his deft use of rhetoric.

This essay offers one way to understand why people like myself, Alex, and Maria chose to study literature instead of philosophy. One of the great discoveries of 20th century thought — a consequence of structuralism — is what’s known as “the linguistic turn,” the realization that thinking cannot be separated from its medium. In most cases this means language or writing or communication. Until you have a robust theory of language, writing, speaking, and communication, you cannot understand the operations of thought, expression, meaning, and intention. This is why philosophers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and others begin to look more like historians, literary critics, and cultural theorists.

We hope you enjoy this discussion and we’re looking forward to launching from this episode into a more accessible and engaging realm of cultural studies and analysis.

Stay beautiful, 

your losers

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