trumpery vs. realism

I’ve not used that word in awhile, trumpery, but I plan to write an essay on it. It’s a pre-existent English word that I chose and adapted to refer to the triumphalistic one-upping of positions that are defined as naive/traditionalistic.

Aristotle is the primary victim of trumpery. People don’t realize how good or how weird he is (though his bizarre sense of humor ought to be a dead giveaway) and so there is a lot of easy point-scoring at his expense. This sort of thing: “There is no ‘substance’ hidden behind a plurality of effects or events.”

And it always sounds hiply progressive and cutting-edge. The problems are:

(1) Everyone is doing it, so it’s hardly an original transgressive gesture, even though everyone always acts as though it’s the latest word in haute couture.

(2) More importantly, it is rather weak in philosophical terms.

Whenever I hear someone denounce hidden unities behind the plurality of surface-effects, I reach for my revolver.

Look, it’s been exhaustively attempted over the past century, and now it’s run its course. It’s time to recover these bemoaned hidden unities lying behind appearance, rather than trumping them with easy avant garde positions that are now much too banal to be avant garde.

Worst example of trumpery in the past half-century: probably Derrida’s White Mythology essay, which sets up Aristotle as a stodgy old patriarchal-imperialistic grandpa and then knocks him down, but entirely on the basis of a conflation between univocal meaning and univocal being. (That is to say, Aristotle does think that each thing simply is what it is, but by no means does he seek to police the production of meaning. That Derrida is able to mix these two points together shows how little a realist he ever was. See the section in my book Guerrilla Metaphysics about Aristotle/Derrida for a more detailed complaint.)