Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault are my two main interlocutors in Life after God. I would like to think that I come more to praise them than to bury them. Our disagreements with others may loom large when we engage them the better to formulate our own ideas, but the good in their thought should not get interred.
There are at least two reasons why we might engage other thinkers. If we find their work interesting and admirable, we might engage them to improve our own ideas. If we believe that they are having a pernicious influence, we might engage them to counter that influence. Both these reasons motivate Life after God. I find the work of Derrida and Foucault of interest in part because they grappled insightfully with my main question. What does it mean to be without God? How should we think about knowledge and ourselves if we do not believe in a transcendent or immanent guiding light, and if we do not believe that we can have access to pure reason or unmediated experience? I find their work admirable here because they remorselessly exposed those of our beliefs and practices that still assume we are with God. Few thinkers have been more zealous in hunting down heretical residues. The range and rigor of their work has challenged me to rethink many of my beliefs, I hope for the better.
However, I worry that the wider influence of Derrida and Foucault is proving pernicious. My main worries are the theoretical ones explored in this book. Sometimes their work encourages an overt anti-humanism. At other times, it encourages a self-righteous yet vacuous use of critique without any discussion of preferred alternatives. Not for them, alas, the idea voiced by Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein that after we renounce the alienated gods of religion and reason, we can still turn to everyday life and ordinary language to find resources for reasoned discussion. In addition, I have concerns about the conduct of an intellectual left that is indebted to postmodernism. Far too many postmodernists – and, alas, I cannot entirely exclude Derrida and Foucault from what follows – attack straw men. Where, I ask myself, are the contemporary metaphysicians and humanists who really hold the beliefs that the postmodernists ascribe to them? The postmodernists constitute themselves as the elect who alone avoid the fallacies associated with these straw men. Today the elect are marked by their unswerving devotion to the names and vocabularies of their prophets. Worst of all, the elect frequently conduct a righteous crusade against everyone who does not share these marks and so, in the view of the elect, can be assimilated to the straw men. I hope that Life after God might do a little to break down this us-against-them mentality, but I will probably just find myself cast among the “them”.