The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (123 page)

Metaphysics, in Derrida’s view, should be rid of its obsessive concern with such beings; rid, in fact, of the idea that such beings exist at all.

This is reminiscent of Nietzsche, whose revolt against that same Platonism
⁹
Heidegger, whilst fully acknowledging it, nevertheless saw as itself a contribution, albeit the last remaining possible contribution, to traditional metaphysics. This gives Derrida pause. On the one hand he thinks that this is an injustice of sorts to Nietzsche, whom he takes to have broken with the tradition in ways for which Heidegger gives him insufficient credit (
Grammatology
, pp. 18ff.). On the other hand he thinks that two can play at Heidegger’s game: there is as much rationale for us to say that Heidegger’s struggles with the tradition constitute a contribution to it as there is for him to say that Nietzsche’s do (e.g. ‘Structure’, pp. 281–282 and
Ousia and Gramm
, pp. 47–48; cf. ‘Positions’, pp. 48–49).
¹⁰

Derrida’s Heideggerianism is far from unqualified then. The quarrel over Nietzsche illustrates what is perhaps his principal departure from Heidegger. He is altogether more pessimistic than Heidegger about the prospects for what I called in
Chapter 18
‘good’ metaphysics. By the same token he is suspicious of Heidegger’s belief that a form of good metaphysics prevailed among the pre-Socratics. Where Heidegger believes that we can make sense
of Being by determining its meaning – ‘[by naming] the essential nature of Being, … [by] finding in thought the word for Being’ (Heidegger (
1984b
), p. 52) – Derrida, in much more Nietzschean vein, believes that we can at most make sense of Being by supplying ever new interpretations of it from ever changing points of view. It is in the same vein that he writes:

There will be no unique name, even if it were the name of Being. And we must think this without
nostalgia
, that is, outside of the myth of … a lost native country of thought. On the contrary, we must
affirm
this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance.

From the vantage of this laughter and this dance, … the other side of nostalgia, what I will call Heideggerian
hope
, comes into question. (‘
Différance
’, p. 27, emphasis in original)
¹¹

(b) Derrida
Contra
Husserl

Although Derrida’s Heideggerianism means that there is a line of descent from Husserl to Derrida, Husserl is actually one of Derrida’s primary targets, if not the primary one. Recall Husserl’s ‘principle of all principles’, quoted at the end of the lengthy parenthetical addendum to
Chapter 17
, §3. Derrida takes this to be a way of acceding to what he calls ‘[the]
presence
of sense to a full and primordial intuition’ (
Speech and Phenomena
, p. 5, emphasis in original).
¹²
In other words – in the words that I used in the previous sub-section – he takes the principle to be a way of acceding to the idea that Being amounts to being given, in the present, as present, to consciousness.
¹³
If anything belongs to the metaphysics of presence, Derrida insists, this does. (At one point he refers to ‘the embedding of transcendental phenomenology in the metaphysics of presence’ (‘Cogito’, p. 60).)

Now Heidegger too took issue with Husserl, as we saw in
Chapter 18
, §2(c). Indeed he rejected Husserl’s very phenomenological reduction, along with its concomitant the transcendental Ego, at least as Husserl himself understood these. And really Derrida is just playing out a variation on that Heideggerian theme, albeit a variation in which many of the original contrasts
are accentuated in important ways. Thus Derrida rails against the idea of a transcendental Ego, conceived as a self-contained world-independent consciousness which is brought to light by the reduction and which, though distinct from the psychological Ego, is nevertheless curiously in tandem with it (e.g.
Speech and Phenomena
, pp. 10ff.; ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, pp. 134–135; and ‘Phenomenology’, p. 165). ‘Between consciousness and … the “world”,’ Derrida writes, with somewhat uncharacteristic understatement, ‘the rupture, even in the subtle form of the reduction, is perhaps not possible’ (
Grammatology
, p. 67). And he thinks that one crucial symptom of consciousness’ inextricability from the ‘world’ is its relation to that which lies beyond it in the past or future:

Does not everything that is announced already in [the] reduction to ‘solitary mental life’ … appear to be stricken in its very possibility by what we are calling time [i.e. by time conceived as transcending what is immediately present to consciousness]? … Is not the concept of pure solitude – of the monad in the phenomenological sense –
undermined
by its own origin, by the very condition of its self-presence, that is, by ‘time,’ to be conceived … on the basis … of difference within auto-affection
¹⁴
…? (
Speech and Phenomena
, p. 68, emphasis in original)

Finally, taking his lead once again from Heidegger, he thinks that the most pungent and most elemental instance of the subject’s relation to what lies beyond it in the past or future is its relation to its own eventual non-existence, something else for which he thinks Husserl is unable to give a satisfactory account (e.g.
Speech and Phenomena
, p. 54, and ‘Phenomenology’, pp. 167–168).

But, as I have already intimated, Derrida’s recoil from Husserl is more extreme than Heidegger’s. Though he claims at one point to be providing a critique of phenomenology ‘in the name of phenomenology’ (‘Hospitality’, p. 81), it is hard ultimately to see him as remaining in the camp. Elsewhere his critique takes the form of an assault on the very possibility of a phenomenological reduction:

Auto-affection supposed that a pure difference comes to divide self-presence. In this pure difference is rooted the possibility of everything we think we can exclude from auto-affection: space, the outside, the world, the body, etc. As soon as it is admitted that auto-affection is the condition for self-presence, no pure transcendental reduction
¹⁵
is possible. (
Speech and Phenomena
, p. 82)

Elsewhere again, in an allusion to the phenomenological slogan ‘Back to the things themselves’ he writes:

Contrary to what phenomenology … has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes. (
Speech and Phenomena
, p. 104)

Derrida may be Heideggerian on crucial points of doctrine. He may even be Heideggerian on crucial points of methodology. But for reasons that we glimpsed at the end of the previous sub-section, and that we shall explore further in the next section, he is unable to commit himself to the phenomenological project in the way in which Heidegger does.
¹⁶

Derrida’s criticisms of Husserl put him at a greater remove than Heidegger then. But how fair are they? On many issues, most notably on the issue of how the subject relates to the past and the future, there is good reason to think that they are not fair.
¹⁷
But that is because there is good reason to think that the exegesis underlying them is not fair.
¹⁸
If we consider Derrida’s criticisms as criticisms of the views themselves, irrespective of whether these views are Husserl’s, then they seem to me to constitute some of his most penetrating writing.
¹⁹

3. Speech and Writing

As we have seen, the fact that Derrida is, as I put it in the previous section, a card-carrying Heideggerian on certain fundamental matters does not make him a card-carrying Heideggerian on all matters, still less an unregenerate card-carrying phenomenologist. In this section we shall reconsider the way in which he distances himself from phenomenology, and especially from Husserl. ‘Reconsider’ is the operative word. The ideas that we shall see him parade in this section are not essentially different from the ideas that we saw him parade in the previous section. But we shall see him give importantly new expression to them. Heidegger will once again provide the initial inspiration.

Heidegger held language to be of utmost significance in how we make sense of things, and therefore in the character of Being. He wrote:

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are guardians of this home. (Heidegger (
1993c
), p. 193)

He was not making the Whorfian point that the fundamental categories people use to make sense of things are affected by the language they happen to use.
²⁰
That is an anthropological point. Heidegger’s point is a phenomenological point: the very structure of language reflects how things are given to us. (See Heidegger (
1962a
), §§33 and 34.)

Derrida too comes to regard language as a focal point both in the project of making sense of how we make sense of things and in his own more specific project of saying why he wants to keep phenomenology at bay. He uses linguistic notions to provide an alternative characterization of the metaphysics of presence. This enables him not only to explain further what he rejects in Husserl, but to explain further what he rejects in the whole tradition of which he takes Husserl to be a prime representative. (It also establishes important connections between his work and work that we studied in
Part Two
of this enquiry.)

Derrida’s starting point is the distinction between speech and writing.
²¹
I say ‘the’ distinction between speech and writing. In fact this is already misleading. The first thing that needs to be emphasized is that Derrida is not using the two terms ‘speech’ and ‘writing’ with their customary meanings. We do best, really, to think of them as two terms of art for him.
²²
Indeed from now on I shall adopt the convention of writing both terms, and their cognates, in small capitals – ‘
SPEECH
’, ‘
WRITING
’, ‘
WRITTEN
’, and so forth – whenever they are being used in Derrida’s sense. It is not that the normal associations of the two terms are irrelevant to what he is doing with them. But their relevance is largely a matter of how he situates himself with respect to other thinkers. Derrida, as we shall see, wants to challenge the prioritization, within traditional metaphysics, of
SPEECH
over
WRITING
.
And he is able to cite a range of thinkers whose prioritization of speech over writing importantly reflects this: Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Condillac, and Saussure, among others.
²³

Very well, how does Derrida use these two terms? By extrapolating from the most basic structural feature of the more familiar distinction, as it is understood by those who accept the prioritization just mentioned. Those who accept this prioritization will say that, whereas speech involves the use of signs to represent things, writing has an extra level of mediation: it involves the use of signs to represent those signs, and hence only indirectly to represent the corresponding things.

Derrida is interested in a variation of this which he calls ‘logocentrism’ or ‘phonocentrism’ (see e.g.
Grammatology
, pp. 11–12). This is the idea that some entities that represent things do so of their very essence – they have representational powers that are intrinsic to them – whereas other entities that represent things do so only because they have been associated by artifice and by convention with entities of the former kind – they have representational powers that are not intrinsic to them. Let us call entities of the former kind
direct marks
. And let us call entities of the latter kind
indirect marks
.
²⁴
Direct marks cannot be misinterpreted. They ‘speak for themselves’, as we aptly say. Indirect marks can be misinterpreted. Their meanings need to be learned, and the learning process is fallible. Examples of direct marks are, arguably, Descartes’ clear and distinct perceptions, Kant’s intuitions, Frege’s senses, and Husserl’s noemata.
²⁵
Examples of indirect marks are, arguably, the words and expressions of any natural language.
²⁶
Thus, for instance,
Frege would say that to understand the English word ‘salt’ is to grasp the sense which, by convention, has been associated with that word; and that to grasp this sense
just is
to think of salt, or to be ‘presented’ with salt, in a certain way. Now by ‘
SPEECH
’ Derrida intends exercise of direct marks. By ‘
WRITING
’ he intends, among other things – the reason for this qualification will become apparent in due course – exercise of indirect marks.