“In order to understand, Heidegger says, one must see phenomenologically. He thus invites us to the first exercise of phenomenological “kindergarten.” To tear apart [zer-reissen] means: to tear into two parts, to separate: to make two out of one. If a sock is torn, then the sock is no longer present-at-hand—but note: precisely not as a sock. In fact, when I have it on my foot, I see the “intact” sock precisely not as a sock. On the contrary, if it is torn, then THE sock appears with more force through the “sock torn into pieces.” In other words, what is lacking in the torn sock is the UNITY of the sock. However, this lack is paradoxically the most positive, for this Unity in being-torn is present [gegenwärtig] as a lost unity.” (Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars p. 11)

“Twice the audience laughed over the “torn sock” saying. At first Heidegger answered pedantically, “I do not know why you are laughing. You must learn to endure the scope of a sentence such as the one I have cited.” (Heidegger, Martin. Four Seminars  p. 100).

(i)

Last time we looked at the story of the Tower of Babel and applied our understanding to translating the beginning of the Ode to Man in Sophocles Antigone.  In the Tower of Babel story, God with his unpronounceable but deeply meaningful name rendered the one human language into many that are pronounceable but also heard as meaningless jabber to the outsider.  I may hear Chinese but not have anything conveyed by it.  When we translate, we hear the resonance of the divine language behind the many human language which permits travel from one language to another to another.

In translation, we do not reproduce a model but expand the original by bringing a world of information to make the inconspicuous original to stand forth in conspicuousness.  Regarding translation, we looked at the key phrase in Sophocles’ Antigone which is going to lay bare the Greek soul/world and its world and thereby color the entire play: polla ta deina kouden anthrōpou deinoteron pelei (“Many deina, and nothing deinoteron than man”).  The standard academic English translation is “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man” (or slight variations like “Many are the wonders, and none is more wonderful than man”).  This is the widely cited opening of the first stasimon (Ode to Man) in Sophocles’ Antigone (lines 332–333 in standard numbering): πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει (polla ta deina kouden anthrōpou deinoteron pelei).

“Wonders are many…” is the classic rendering in many academic and student editions, notably R.C. Jebb’s influential translation (often reproduced or lightly adapted on sites like the Perseus Project or MIT Classics). “Deinos” (δεινός) is the key ambiguous term. It carries a double sense of wonderful/awesome (marvelous, extraordinary) and terrible/fearful/dreadful. Many modern translations try to capture this ambivalence, e.g.:”Many are the wonders, none more wonderful than man” (emphasizing awe) / “Numberless wonders, terrible wonders walk the world but none the match for man” (Robert Fagles — highlights the ominous side). / “Many wonders, many terrors…” (Paul Woodruff and others).

The Jebb-style version remains the most “standard academic” one taught in many Classics courses and referenced in scholarship for its balance and tradition. The full ode continues by celebrating humanity’s mastery over the sea, earth, animals, and speech/law—while ending on a note of caution about transgressing divine justice. The opening line sets up that humanistic yet hubristic theme central to the play.

Deinos (δεινός) is inherently double-edged in ancient Greek: it can mean wonderful, marvelous, clever, powerful, strange, terrible, fearful, or awe-inspiring (in both positive and dread-inducing senses). Sophocles exploits this ambiguity throughout the play. Many English translations (e.g., “wonders are many… none more wonderful than man”) lean toward the admiring, humanistic reading, but this risks flattening the word’s darker undertones.

Last time I gave a darker reading following Holderlin and Heidegger’s rendering of deinon as terrifying, monstrous, unhomely, and proposed a reading of unsettling/unsettled.  I won’t rehash the argument here (the reader can look at the previous post), but I will offer a connection from Homer in the words of Apollo (again, in my translation modifying Krell)

In a famous passage from Homer, which is usually translated so as to suggest mortals are wretched because they die, Krell translates more literally: Apollo says

“Why should I do battle for the sake of mere mortals!’ exclaims the sun god, ‘mortals, who are as wretched as the leaves on the trees, flourishing at first, enjoying the fruits of the earth, but then, deprived of heart (akerioi), vanishing (1, 21, 464-66) … Vanishing how? Akerioi, as … those who are deprived of [heart] (Krell, 1999, 105).”

I would modify this slightly to read:

“Why should I do battle for the sake of mere mortals!’ exclaims the sun god, ‘mortals, who are as wretched as the leaves on the trees, flourishing at first, enjoying the fruits of the earth, but then, their hearts no longer in life (akerioi), vanishing (1, 21, 464-66).”

Boredom and listlessness were known traits of old age in the ancient world, and so Aristotle called the philosophers eternally in youth like the ambrosia eating gods (athanatizein) even at great age, “deathless” here not meaning immortality since the Greeks thought everyone lived forever, even if just as tragic, restless shades.

(ii)

In this article I would like to look at Derrida’s analysis of ‘example’ thinking.  A house is an example of houseness.  Recall previously we thought of the threefold mode of “taking as” appearing of threefold Beauty with houseness: (1) The mansion as houseness incarnate (Now that’s a house), (2) Houseness being merely present in the average house, and (3) deficient in the dilapidated shack.  Of course, (4) the mansion may appear as gawdy to the next person, and (5) the shack quaint/rustic.  A similar example is Niagara Falls appearing as a wonder of the world to the tourist, as background scenery to the commuter, and as noise pollution to the local resident.

The above refers to what the Aristotle called the apophantic structure of people encountering beings, taking something as something else.  For example, if I hear a living thing at my feet in the forest only to look down and see I “mis-took” dead leaves rustling in the wind as a living thing, this “mis-taking” show our basic relationship to beings is taking-as.  Antisthenes denied this complex structure, but if it wasn’t true error wouldn’t be possible.

Antisthenes, Aristotle says (Metaphysics, V, chapter 28, 1024b32f ), believed only in addressing a being in the logos proper to it because he did not distinguish between addressing the thing in itself and addressing the thing ‘as’ something. For Antisthenes, a definition was not possible because it did not, following what was said above, address the thing, and hence a tautology, positing one and the same thing in relation to itself, was the only proper logos.  Hence, the addressing of something as something (else) is excluded in Antisthenes doctrine. Plato, in the Sophist, called Antisthenes doctrine “the most laughable, katagelastotata (252b8),” because it denied that something was to be understood by appealing to something beyond the thing itself, while Antisthenes himself tacitly adopted a whole slew of ontological structures that go beyond the mere entity at hand, such as einai Being, choris separate from, ton allown, the others, and kath auto, in itself.  I encounter the plant “as” not me, for instance.  I may not want to know something in its relational connections but “as” it is in itself, etc.

Now, Saussure famously emphasized opposites (specifically binary oppositions) as fundamental to language, while Derrida built on this but offered a critical, deconstructive take that undermined their stability and hierarchy.

Ferdinand de Saussure (in his Course in General Linguistics) argued that language is a system of signs where meaning arises not from positive content or reference to the world, but from differences and relations within the system. A key mechanism is binary opposition: units of language (signs) gain value through reciprocal determination with what they are not.   “Hot” derives meaning in contrast to “cold”; “good” in contrast to “evil”; “inside” vs. “outside.”  These are not necessarily contradictory but structural and complementary — each term defines the other.

Saussure saw this as how the entire mechanism of language works: “in language there are only differences without positive terms.” Unless I wholistically analyze houseness, and simply say houseness is present in the house, the term present is vague and undetermined.  Signs are defined negatively against others in the system (paradigmatic relations).   This idea became central to structuralism, influencing fields like anthropology (e.g., Lévi-Strauss) and literary theory. Opposites create a structured system that makes meaning possible.

Jacques Derrida (post-structuralist) drew heavily from Saussure but critiqued and radicalized his ideas through deconstruction. He didn’t reject binary oppositions outright but showed they are hierarchical, not neutral.  One term is typically privileged (superior, primary, associated with “presence”) while the other is subordinated (derivative, inferior, associated with “absence”). Examples include speech/writing, presence/absence, male/female, nature/culture, good/evil. Western metaphysics (what Derrida called the “metaphysics of presence” or logocentrism) favors the first term.

Nietzsche as cultural physician asked why is it that contra survival of the fittest, why do the weak and sickly so often manage to dominate the strong.  To take the example of good/evil, Nietzsche showed that the evaluative criteria of good/vs evil we inherited from Christianity actually demonizes master values (power, wealth, egoism, etc) and valorizes slave conditions (poverty, meekness, etc).  Nietzsche proposed replacing the evaluative criteria of good/evil with health/sickness, to determine whether actions are a sign of health or a sign of sickness.  Derrida’s famous line from Of Grammatology (1967) is “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” — most often translated as “there is nothing outside the text” or “there is no outside-text.”  Derrida himself later clarified that this means “there is nothing outside context.” Meaning is always embedded in networks of signs, traces, and interpretations — there is no pure “outside” (e.g., a transcendental signified, raw reality, or authorial intent) that escapes this play of differences and contextuality.  Hume’s text might overcome itself when Kant interprets it.

Derrida noted the privileged term relies on the suppressed one for its identity. They “contaminate” each other; strict boundaries break down. Meaning is endlessly deferred through différance (a play on “difference” and “deferral”), with no fixed center or ultimate signified.  Derrida’s deconstruction involves identifying the binary and hierarchy in a text or philosophy, reversing or overturning it temporarily (elevating the “inferior” term), and   showing the opposition undermines itself, revealing traces of the other term within each.

For instance, Saussure privileged speech (as more immediate/present) over writing (as secondary). Derrida deconstructed this in Of Grammatology, arguing writing (as a system of differences) is more fundamental, exposing the instability in Saussure’s own framework.

Saussure → Opposites are foundational, stable building blocks of a coherent linguistic system.

Derrida → Opposites are hierarchical constructs of Western thought that deconstruct themselves; meaning is fluid, differential, and without a secure origin or center.

This shift from structuralism to post-structuralism influenced literary theory, philosophy, and cultural studies by questioning fixed meanings and power structures embedded in language.

Strictly speaking, while so-called opposites and opposition create meaning, e.g., light – dark, while light creates visibility and darkness its lack, visibility is granted by the sun but no more possible in the dark than it is staring directly into the sun, a point Plato employs in the allegory of the cave and his analysis of Justice.  Light – Brightness – Dark.

Since Platonism, with the advent of metaphysics proper as a paradigm, everything could be divided into the really real (e.g., intelligible forms, alethos on) and the deficient (sensible things, me on), not nothing (ouk on), but deficient with respect to the primary image – and so the house in front of me shows a limited aspect of houseness.  Beings stand forth in this difference, and so for example:

Man opposed to

– Gods

– Animals

– Women

1.  Classically, man means hu-man-ity / man-kind and is deficient and opposed to the gods, who are the really real.  The Greeks thought every person was immortal, so the difference wasn’t that the gods were immortal and men weren’t but that humans started out with the fire and absorption of youth but were destined to the listless depression and meaninglessness of old age and an eternity of restlessness as a wandering shade.  Aristotle called thinkers athanatizein or deathless because they had the fire of youth absorbed in their thoughts even at great age.   Aristotle in the Politics notes only a beast or god is at home in solitude, noting the hidden cabin fever waiting to explode when  man is separated from his distractions.  As we can see, we are not primarily dealing with a mere opposite between gods and man but a threefold gods-thinker-average man.

2.  Similarly, we have a distinction between man as the really real and animals like dogs and cats as deficient.  Man unconsciously self-legislates itself a rule that man morally accompanies in accountability all of its actions, which can be contrasted/opposed with certainly mentally challenged individuals and animals who are not accountable in that way.  A dog is not immoral if it chews up the couch, it is just being a dog.  Only man can sink below animals in terms of depravity.  Our capacity for evil defines us in distinction to animals for whom evil is not a possibility.  Again, we are not dealing with a binary opposite of man-animal, but a dynamic of ordinary man – mentally challenged individual –   animal

3.  Another distinction (although as Derrida notes we could keep multiplying this so that full meaning never becomes present), is within man/mankind itself in tradition between man and woman with man as the really real and woman deficient.  This traditionally emerges between the distinction of the masculine and feminine such as the masculine dominating and the feminine submissive.  This shines through our word effeminate: From Latin effēminātus, past participle of effēmināre (“to make womanish”), from ex- (“out/away”) + fēmina (“woman”). It means “womanish” or having qualities associated with women, often pejoratively.  Ancient Greek had terms like μαλακός (malakós, “soft, weak, effeminate”) and κίναιδος (kínaidos, often for effeminate men, especially in a sexual context). Another was ἀνδρόγυνος (andrógynos, “man-woman”).  And so, homosexuality has been stigmatized since ancient times, not for moral reasons, but because the passive partner is being womanly.

Jennifer Eyl’s analyzes martial imagery in Paul where Paul wants his followers to exemplify in pistis/faith/trust/fidelity/faithfulness/loyalty, the traits of a Roman soldier’s allegiance and obedience such as in 1 Thessalonians of struggle, opposition, fortification and armor. Socrates in the Apology (like the stoics) likens philosophical life to not breaking rank in military formation which was allotted to him by a god. Paul talks a parakaleo in pistis/faith of the flock, a word meaning marshalling an army in Plutarch. The idea of being a soldier in Christ surfaces again later in 2 Timothy 2:3.   Mark thus presents Jesus as a soldier of faith dying following orders, which is why the Roman Soldier at the cross converts.  Stephen Young notes what is often overlooked is Paul’s list of virtues reflects masculinity such as mastery and self-control over the passions and so wanted to re-masculinize the pagans who had become effeminate in this broad sense.  Paul thus encourages his flock in 1 Corinthians to become manly, Plutarch also noting the Roman word for manliness and virtue are the same and through this lens we can see avoiding pleasure.  The manliness of virtue and courage is very present in Greco Roman writers analyzing “andreia.”  And so, again we are not looking at binary opposites of masculine/feminine but the dynamic between, Masculine-Effeminate-Feminine.

(iii)

Now, Derrida in this text is looking at “examples,” and so we find our threefold structure again: 1 Not just any example but a prime example, an exemplar or exemplary being, like a true or genuine friend; 2 A mere example, an instance; 3 a deficient example, what we would call a cautionary example.  Many don’t know how to debate besides offering examples and analogies to illustrate their positions.  Of course, you can come up with compelling illustrations of mutually exclusive positions: e.g., pro life vs pro choice.

Derrida’s essay “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German” (originally in French 1989; English 1991) is a deconstructive reading of Hermann Cohen’s 1915–1916 wartime text Deutschtum und Judentum (“Germanism and Judaism”).

Derrida examines the fraught, “at war” interpretations of identity, philosophy, nationality, and religion in the context of German-Jewish relations during World War I. Cohen, a leading Neo-Kantian philosopher and Jewish thinker, wrote his essay to argue for a profound, even essential, kinship or symbiosis between Deutschtum (German culture/spirit) and Judentum (Jewishness). He positioned Kant as a pivotal figure bridging them—portraying German idealism (via Kant) as aligned with Jewish ethical monotheism and prophetic tradition, and suggesting that German Jewry represented a legitimate, exemplary synthesis of these traditions.

Derrida dissects this as a symptomatic, overdetermined text marked by historical tension and internal conflict. He highlights the “interpretations at war”—competing readings and forces within philosophical, national, and religious identities—showing how they collide without easy resolution. Key themes include: The German-Jewish “alliance” and its fragility: Cohen’s passionate defense of German-Jewish harmony (even calling Germany a kind of spiritual homeland for Jews) is read against the backdrop of rising anti-Semitism and the looming catastrophes of 20th-century Europe. Derrida critiques the forced or “delirious” nature of this identification.   Kant is interpreted as a “false messiah” or bridge figure in Cohen’s view (linking Protestantism, idealism, and Judaism). Derrida explores how such philosophical appropriations serve political and identitarian ends.

Derrida deconstructs exemplarity and identity.  Typical of Derrida, the essay probes questions of belonging, translation between cultures/religions, and the unstable borders between “the Jew,” “the German,” and philosophical universalism. It ties into broader Derridean concerns with hospitality, the other, and how texts reveal aporias (irreconcilable tensions) under pressure (here, wartime nationalism).  In the essay (“Interpretations at War”), this theme appears in how Cohen positions Kant, Germanism, or Judaism as exemplary bridges or syntheses. Derrida reads these claims deconstructively, exposing their internal conflicts and historical overdetermination rather than accepting them at face value.  Scholars note that Derrida does not simply reject exemplarity but destabilizes its traditional metaphysical framing, opening possibilities for reinvention or affirmative play with its ambiguities. It is not “destroyed” but shown as non-self-identical and haunted by traces of the other (consider our houseness incarnate beautiful mansion example mentioned earlier and the contrasting 5 manifestations of houseness).  It reflects on how German philosophy (especially post-Kantian idealism) left a deep mark in the period between Franco-German wars, and how intellectual constructions can align with or mask historical violence.

I will explore this text by Derrida more next time.