the winning technical term

The new technical term for the phenomenon I was describing last night shall henceforth be trumpery.

In the first place, it’s already an English word, though not used especially often (at least not in the American idiom). It’s the descendant of the Middle English word trompery, which obviously derives ultimately from the French tromper, to deceive. One online dictionary gives the following definitions:

1. Showy but worthless finery; bric-a-brac.
2. Nonsense; rubbish.
3. Deception; trickery; fraud.

The phrase “trumped up” is related to this origin. And there’s certainly a bit of that in the phenomenon I’ve described.

But luckily, there’s also the resonance here of a second and unrelated root, the one found in “trump card.” That term actually derives from the Italian word for triumph, and this is good, because empty triumphalism is the very essence of the phenomenon I’ve described.

“Contrary to the gullible masses of readers who all think Heidegger is straightforwardly anti-technology, it’s not really that simple.” This is trumpery: a deceptive, misleading trump card based on false sophistication.

I’m going to write an essay on this phenomenon before long, because it is a pivotal part of our intellectual lives: the positing of gullible masses who think X, so that we can then reverse it into the sophistication of Y. Correlationism does this as its essential gesture: “The naive are trapped by the pseudo-problem of ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ or ‘outer’ and ‘inner’, when in fact we are already outside ourselves in our very inwardness.” It is this gesture that prevents me from being too loyal to phenomenology, much though I appreciate the School. Husserl and Heidegger are both at their weakest when they pull this maneuver. Being-in-the-world is a good case of trumpery, I’m afraid. But so are parts of Hegel. There are many forms of this phenomenon that need to be sorted out.

Actually, almost any form of dismissing a problem as a “pseudo-problem” turns out to be a form of trumpery. But more about that some other time. I’m already on record (as is Meillassoux in After Finitude) as hating the strategy of claiming that other people’s problems are pseudo-problems. The unbearable haughtiness of it ought to have been a good warning to avoid it.