The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (122 page)

32
Cf. n. 27.

33
A set of absolute presuppositions falls short of being an outlook if the presuppositions in it are not consupponible. But lack of consupponibility is liable to be just what is at stake here.

34
For some recognition on Collingwood’s part that an individual can indeed direct the transition from one outlook to another, see ‘Function of Metaphysics’, p. 410, where he suggests that this is what Kant did with respect to the Causal Principle.

35
Cf.
Philosophical Method
,
Ch. X
, §2.9, where Collingwood argues that philosophy is unlike science, especially in its use of language; and
Ch. X
, §4, where he goes on to say why it is more like poetry. This is certainly conducive to the point that I am making. Recall, however, that his view of philosophy in that work is quite different from the view of metaphysics with which we have been concerned: see n. 13. Furthermore, even in the passages mentioned, he does not go as far as I am recommending. Thus on p. 214 he writes, ‘The philosopher’s word-patterns are constructed only to reveal the thought which they express.’

36
Compare some of the ideas in this section with Martin (
1998
), pp. xlvii–li. But Rex Martin is more sympathetic to Collingwood than I am. He also sees greater scope in Collingwood than I do for acknowledging progress in the transition from one outlook to another.

Chapter 20 Derrida Metaphysics Deconstructed?

1. A Foretaste

At the end of each of the two previous chapters I adverted to the important difference that it can make, in the most general attempt to make sense of things, if the sense concerned need not be propositional, if the aim of the exercise need not be to produce true declarative sentences, as in the sciences, but to produce something closer to artwork. I urged that Collingwood would have done well to acknowledge this possibility and that Heidegger may have shown in his practice that he did acknowledge it, however unself-consciously. But it was
Chapter 9
that provided the model.
¹
The maximally general sense-making in which the early Wittgenstein was engaged was non-propositional, and the way in which he tried to convey it was through a creative use of nonsense.

Wittgenstein was still using language however. He may not have been intending to produce true declarative sentences, but he was still affecting to do so. The sense that he was trying to convey may not have been linguistic,
²
but his medium was. (Similarly in Heidegger’s case.) This chapter will provide a further indication of how linguistic resources might be used to convey non-propositional sense.

2. Derrida
Vis-à-Vis
Phenomenology; or, Derrida
Pro
Heidegger and
Contra
Husserl

(a) Derrida
Pro
Heidegger

On certain fundamental matters that are especially pertinent to our enquiry Jacques Derrida (1930–
2004
) is a card-carrying Heideggerian.
³
In particular,
he accepts Heidegger’s distinction between Being and beings, and he shares Heidegger’s repudiation of traditional metaphysics. ‘What I have attempted to do,’ he says in an interview with Henri Ronse, ‘would not have been possible without the opening of Heidegger’s questions[,] … would not have been possible without the attention to what Heidegger calls the difference between Being and beings’ (‘Implications’, p. 8
⁴
). And he agrees with Heidegger that precisely what traditional metaphysics has done is to ignore this difference. Metaphysics is a legitimate activity only if it treats of Being. But traditional metaphysics has proceeded as though it were a natural science. And natural sciences can treat only of beings. (See
Ch. 18
, §4; and cf. ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, pp. 140ff.)

One concept that becomes pivotal to this critique in Derrida’s hands is that of presence. In fact he refers to traditional metaphysics as ‘the metaphysics of presence’ (e.g. ‘Structure’, p. 281). There is a passage in
Being and Time
in which Heidegger says, in connection with the ancients:

Beings [were] grasped in their Being as ‘presence’; this means that they [were] understood with regard to a definite mode of time – the ‘
present
’. (Heidegger (
1962a
), p. 47/p. 25 in the original German, emphasis in original; cf. Heidegger (1972), passim)
⁵

Derrida fastens on this passage (e.g. ‘
Ousia
and
Gramm
’, p. 31). He takes Heidegger to be signalling how and where things began to go wrong (though, as we shall see, he is less sympathetic to the idea that there was an earlier golden age in which they had gone right). He thinks that the fundamental error of traditional metaphysics has been to identify Being with presence, usually understood very narrowly as applying only to that which is given, in the present, as present, to consciousness; and that this is what has made it so difficult for metaphysicians properly to come to terms with the
difference between Being and beings. It is this error that he thinks Heidegger has helped us overcome. (See e.g. ‘Structure’, pp. 278ff., and ‘
Ousia
and
Gramm
’, passim.)

One way in which he thinks Heidegger has helped us overcome this error is by helping us to think properly about
absence
(e.g. ‘
Ousia
and
Gramm
’, pp. 63–67; cf.
Grammatology
, pp. 166–167).
⁶
Another is by helping us to think properly about something which, though it is intimately related to both presence and absence, is different from each of them, namely the
trace
of what is not present within what is (cf.
Grammatology
, p. 70). Metaphysics has not taken due account of this trace. On the contrary, it has ‘[striven] toward [its] reduction’ (
Grammatology
, p. 71). And this trace has ironically included the trace of the very difference between Being and beings to which metaphysics has at the same time been oblivious, the trace which it has itself created. Here is Derrida:

What Heidegger wants to mark is this: the difference between Being and beings, the forgotten of metaphysics, has disappeared without leaving a trace. The very trace of difference has been submerged. If we maintain that [the difference between Being and beings is itself] other than absence and presence, … then when it is a matter of the forgetting of the difference (between Being and beings), we would have to speak of a disappearance of the trace of the trace….

… [But] the erasure of the early trace … of difference is … the ‘same’ as its tracing in the text of metaphysics. The latter must have maintained the mark of what it has lost, reserved, put aside. The paradox of such a structure, in the language of metaphysics, is an inversion of metaphysical concepts, which produces the following effect: the present becomes … the trace of the trace. (‘
Différance
’, pp. 22–23)
⁷

We can put it in terms of the Transcendence Question which I posed in §6 of the Introduction. In
some
sense traditional metaphysicians have not tried properly to make sense of what is transcendent. That is, they have not tried properly to make sense of what, on their own narrow conception of
presence, is not present. What they have done, in their inchoate awareness that too little of metaphysical concern is present on that narrow conception, is to conjure up a transcendence of their own. They have followed Plato in conceiving a realm of beings that are indeed present, on that narrow conception, but by being eternal, that is by being always present, thus transcending the sensible and the transitory; and they have allowed what should have been an attempt to make sense of Being to become an attempt to make sense of just such beings, in particular those that supposedly equip them to arrive at a maximally general understanding of things. Here is Derrida again:

[The matrix of the history of metaphysics] is the determination of Being as
presence
in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence –
eidos
,
arch
,
telos
,
energeia
,
ousia
(essence, existence, substance, subject),
al
theia
, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth. (‘Structure’, pp. 279–280)
⁸