Noetic Dysphoria?

Levinas, Caliban, Descartes, Foucault, and Affirmation

I just wrote a mega thread on Levinas. In it, I compare Levinas to Shakespeare’s Caliban—a thinker trapped in the language of someone (Heidegger) from whom he seeks to extricate himself, but cannot. Call it language-dysphoria or noetic-dysphoria. Can you imagine saying, “I’m an X trapped in the mind of a Y?” On what basis would you say it?

The Caliban metaphor fits the gnostic paradigm by which the world is fundamentally distorted and goodness and truth lie outside of it, beyond reach. This is the speculative hypothesis of Descartes’s second meditation—which Descartes ultimately rejects. Foucault and his followers, though, seem to believe that the only way to liberate ourselves from the ubiquitous ideological forces that dominate us is to name them, as if doing so weren’t one more self-delusion. For a certain post-Marxist academic line of thinking it’s self-deception and bad faith all the way down.

But the problem with Foucault, gnosticism, and the Caliban trope, is that radical skepticism is unsustainable—we need to hold something as true to get our doubt off the ground; critique needs an anchor in some foundational commitment, even if loosely held. There has to be something good, even self-critical in Prospero’s language if Caliban is to speak against him. The exercise of finding one’s language or intellectual inheritance to be confining can’t remain gnostic; it must be an affirmative one.

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