Derrida, Context, and Tradition

By

Anthony J. Fejfar, B.A., J.D., Esq., Coif

©Copyright 2010 by Anthony J. Fejfar

The idea of “context,” has been attributed to Jacques Derrida, and his book,

“The Force of Law.” Some have taken the idea of context to the extreme and have

argued that context implies extreme relativism, that, anything can mean anything. For

example, some assert, wrongly, that one could say that black is white, male is female, and

up is down, and vice versa. Now, this is simply not true. As Gadamer, tells us, context

always takes place in the context of tradition. If, for over 2,000 years, we have used the

word male instead of female for a guy who has a penis and tesiticles, and no vagina or

clitoris, then Gadamer argues that we should just follow tradition and leave things that

way. Now, we might change the meaning or spelling of a word, if there was a very good

reason for doing so, but, usually there is not. Additionally, it may very well be that

some words have an intrinsic meaning. For example, in Spanish, masculine words end

with an O and feminine words end with an A. It may be that both O and A actually

have some sort of “magic” or natural law, meaning, that really cannot be changed. Thus,

as a general rule, numerologists say that odd numbers are feminine, and even numbers

are masculine. Therefore, if we try to change the word “male” and replace it with

“female,” it is possible that those words really do have an instrinsic meaning, and if we

change them around we will be making heterosexual men into homosexual men and

heterosexual women, into dikes. Conversely, if there is no intrinsic meaning to words

such as “male” or “female,” then, after enough time has passed we will all use the word
“female” for a guy with a penis and testicles, and who does not have a vagina and a

clitoris, and after awhile the same attitudes will develop around the word female, such as

baseball, football, golf, boxing, etc., etc., and soon the “men” will be demanding that they

now be referred to as “women,” following Derrida, in order to “correct’ cultural bias.

Either, way, it is clear that context does take place in the context of tradition, or, that

tradition is part of context, and therefore, we should not try to change the spelling or

meaning of any word, without good reason. Therefore, we can say, that at least for the

foregoing reason, context is not everything.