Category: Philosophy

Unhinging of the American Mind--Derrida as Pretext (The)

This conference calls upon us to say something illuminating about the causes of the current condition of the university syste causation is a notoriously slippery topic. It is difficult to say anything with much confidence or even precision about it. But unexamined. So I shall simply state what considerable hard thinking and experience has brought me to believe about the ma ON THE NATURE OF THE CRISIS

Almost everyone--left or right, up or down--who takes an interest in education agrees that the American university system i financially, or in the sense that it turns out multitudes of people who are uneducated. The heart of the university crisis is, in institutional structures and processes are no longer organized around knowledge. The life of knowledge is no longer their te knowing is not what is had in view or consciously supported by them. The people in charge are in fact only very rarely thin the place "is about" in the mental processes of those who determine, or think they determine, curriculum, program and perso or bad, and who is to be rewarded in various ways or not.

At the other end of university life, the Freshmen are not, on the whole, leaping with joyful anticipation at the prospect of lea hunger and joy are not displacing social and athletic activities or TV watching in their heart. They have many other things o through a process at the university which they believe, for often quite obscure reasons, to be necessary for their present or fu well, for they are invariably faced with a set of choices, in progressing toward their degree, which have no substantive (con supposed to guarantee a certain "spread." (It is amazing the degree to which curriculum committees and administrators are d

The absolute disarray of the undergraduate curriculum--outside of the major and pre-professional subsections at least, and e demonstrates that the university is not about knowledge. It is, of course, about granting degrees or certificates, but this is co units, and has no necessary connection with the grantees becoming knowledge-able persons, which by and large they dutifu

I am used to the reply that what I am describing has always been the case, that students and faculty have never been more se now, but that now they are just more honest, hence more virtuous. Here I can only say that such replies seem to me complet world of higher education in the pre-World War I era, for example, and for some time thereafter. The mere words written on even high school buildings then simply could not be written now. Imagine now writing on the walls of a new building at an "Let only the eager, thoughtful and reverent enter here." This is written on the entrance to Pomona College, one of the bette Written when they were, these words are now excusable because quaint. Written now they would be a joke. Of course they

The point I have been making about knowledge cannot be stated by responsible university leaders, nor can it be happily rec Nevertheless, it makes its presence felt in various ways, and that frequently results in statements from university administra changed, e.g. as a result of computers, or the ethnic mix of populations, or the way research is arranged and funded, etc. etc. government of Quebec, for example, even took the quite reasonable step of asking Jean-Francois Lyotard to write a report o Western world. There is a general recognition among higher-level administrators that something fundamental has changed.

Lyotard began his report with the statement--or "working hypothesis," as he calls it--that "the status of knowledge is altered postindustrial age and culture enters what is known as the postmodern age." 1 To the surprise of no one, he reports that "scie discourse"--a metaphysical truism of the late Twentieth Century which silently crouches at the heart of our situation--and he the kind of social ferment that makes up the 'knowledge' interchange or condition within this discourse: always involving so (pp. 18-19, 35, 43)

To the surprise of some, perhaps, it emerges at the end of the report that "consensus has become an outmoded and suspect v form that epistemic social acceptance now takes. What marks "good work" at present is fruitful antagonisms within the disc instability, is valued, where the best players in the game of 'knowledge' are always requesting that new rules be introduced t

(denotive) language games; and "The only legitimation that can make this kind of request admissible is that it will generate (p., 65)2

It is very easy to recognize current university reality in Lyotard's report, and especially in its conclusion, where good work a terms of novelty and antagonism. There is almost no limit to how far cleverness, careful arranging and chutzpah can take on prepared to adjust our use of the term "knowledge" to conform to his implicit recommendation, we could then say that the u knowledge and knowing, for it is concerned to be a place where "discourse" of the type discussed by Lyotard goes on.

But we could not say that the university is now concerned with knowledge "as always." For knowledge in this sense of a su traditionally what has been the focus of university life. In fact, what Lyotard describes is simply the social side of the life of today, largely in a university setting. He does a quite adequate job of stating "what goes on." Many, perhaps most, do now a function of the university, not knowing or the preservation, extension and communication of knowledge. We have "research knowledge." This latter phrase is not just quaint or strange, but is strongly repugnant. Knowledge talk leaves university peo uneasiness nowadays. Knowledge finds itself dismissed with various platitudes, such as that what you 'learn' in school is ob "Knowledge" is suspect, slightly delusional. In any case it is conditional, transitory, temporal. But research is eternal. In the seems you could have research going on--possibly by "top" researchers--without involving knowledge at all, except under a

This only confirms what I have just said, that university life is no longer organized around knowing and knowledge. If it we subordinated to that, the academic scene would be very different from what it now is. Among other things, teaching would position from what it has. But Lessing's statement, that if God stood before him and offered truth in one hand and pursuit of pursuit, expresses an attitude that has simply won in the university context. It has won with such force that it no longer requ expressed. "Truth" sounds like dogmatism. It threatens self-expression, which is perhaps the primary right and value in con

(At dog races the dogs chase a device which simulates game to them, and which they never catch. They are judged successf finish line that has nothing to do with what they are chasing. They are unable to tell that what they are chasing is not what th difference to the masters of the game--or to them. All that matters to the masters is how fast they are running in relation to t running against a clock.)

Now what is the knowing and knowledge around which, I am claiming, the university system is no longer organized? We sh this matter here, where, indeed, we step into an area fraught with genuine philosophical difficulties. But the idea of knowled almost a millenium--the same idea which inspired both classical thought and the rise and development of modern science--i be able to think of things as they are, as distinct from how they only seem or are taken to be, and to be able to do so on an ap thought. To learn is to pass from a state of inability so to think of things to a corresponding state of ability. To inquire--or "d knowing--is to try to learn or "find out" how things are in some determinate respect.

Now, all hairsplitting and hare-starting aside, anyone who has read the literature of Epistemology from Plato to Bertrand Ru concerned with knowledge in the sense just delineated, even where skeptical conclusions are reached. Moreover, if you spe knowledge, and explain it in this manner, you will nearly always elicit immediate recognition--at least if they are far enough that taught them that "No one knows nothin' nohow." In their lives they are constantly dealing with people who know and th themselves--and they have a fair understanding of what this distinction is. (Of course university people do too, when not de dealing with their fringe benefits.)

Associated with this view of knowledge is the idea that there are bodies of knowledge, which are made up of a content and discipline upon those who would master them, learn them, and thus become knowledge-able in the respective fields. Geogra itself in a social and historical group of human beings and their cognitive products, is a body of knowledge about the earth a To master geography is not to 'master' this social group, but to master the body of knowledge for the sake of which and in s The body of knowledge is a human achievement to be sure. All of the true propositions, the 'truths', that go into Geography as a body of knowledge. They (or some significant subsection of them) must become known, and be in the possession of so of knowing relevant to them, before they constitute a body of knowledge or a discipline. But there is a level of content and remains the same and provides the field's continuity through often wide-ranging changes, extensions and transformations th Einsteinian physics, or from Euclid to analytic geometry and beyond. This in turn is anchored in the fact that knowledge, on knowledge of how things really are, as contrasted with how they seem or are taken to be.

Thus, as indicated by the very term, a "discipline" imposes norms as to what "good work" in its domain must be. Good wor word!--to the discipline. For if it does not, it departs (on the traditional view) from the reality that is presented and dealt wit knowledge; and the consequences for human life, which depends upon successful accomodation to how things really stand, worst disasterous. Such, I submit, is the picture of knowledge and reality that gave rise to "higher" education and nourished

And this brings us to the point where the "sense of crisis" that many feel when looking at the current university scene can pe "attack" on the university at present takes the form of the claim that there is something pervasively and totally wrong with t which collectively make up the intellectual /artistic, and hence the academic, world.

This claim or attitude rests upon two sub-claims: First, that these "bodies of knowledge," and the practices based thereon, d case cannot, represent or present what they purport to deal with "as it is, in distinction from how it seems or is taken to be." business, is not governed by an independent reality; and "good work" and who gets the university (and resultant social) rew something outside the assignment process or distinct from the persons who manage the process.4 Second, that the process o controlled, not even by the conscious self-interest or other motivations of individual administrators, publishers, colleagues, some part. What such people think they are doing is not necessarily what is happening at all, and in any case does not much the playthings of more encompassing powers, such as transcendental historicity, the dominant episteme, or some other perv structure and dialectics have been big in the recent past, but less so now--that can only be discerned by something called "th

And this, of course, is where "those Frenchmen" come in. For they present themselves as, and are widely taken to be, maste REASONS REVEALED BY THEIR THEORY, there is something pervasively and totally 'wrong' with the traditional disc necessarily in the past, but certainly in the present--and with how they have been conceptualized as the basis for institutions existence) in the Western world. This was the Marxist view, but it survives on the Rousseauism that has always been power they know his name or not--and also was central to the Marxist vision.5

The main point where this all forcefully comes home in the current university setting is in the treatment of "texts." The unde disciplines seems at the popular level to open the way to saying that any reading of a text by anybody has a certain legitima various ways--or to saying that the reading of the text that is socially sustainable at present is the right one, as long as it is s such views to any of our Gallic theorists, but they certainly are held by people who claim to be influenced by them. And the teacher/student nexus is thick with such views, coming from both of its sides. This goes along with the view, commonly def good," or can be as good, as any other, since there is no objective ordering of texts as to their value, and no 'canon' other tha

Now "texts" and the instrumentalities of their interpretation are the primary means through which humanity in its developed about life and preserves its identity through time. Concern about how texts and the disciplines in which they are interwoven becomes a concern for those concrete forms of humanity (e.g. American society now) in which the university stands as the a right to say how things are, and indirectly to determine what may or shall be done.

If these centers come under the control of those who hold such "open" views of the meanings of texts, what limits would the ferment, might present itself as 'knowledge'? And knowledge always presents itself in human life as what ought to be confo to, in action. It is determinative of the boundaries of the obligatory and the permissable. If the texts are "open," what standa desire and will, either at the level of the individual, or in social institutions and practices? Will not, as Plato feared, the belly subordination to the head? Will not brute force--call it 'reason' in society or history if you will--become what determines law come to be managed by people who simply know how to get their way among a mass of those who no longer believe that th texts and the traditional disciplines, determine how things are in nature, art or morality, regardless of how anyone wishes th authority present them? Will not knowledge itself, as traditionally understood and looked to as the guide to life, simply be l devalued as a bulwark against desire embodied in political and social objectives? Is this not happening now?

BASIC CAUSES OF THE DISPLACEMENT OF KNOWLEDGE AS TELOS OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

What are the main causal factors back of the current crisis in higher education in the United States? I shall briefly consider t influential, though several others will be mentioned in the process.

First there is egalitarianism, than which nothing is more dear to the American heart. As the idea that all people should receiv moral ideal necessary for a good society and state. However, such equality is not what is commonly understood in the Ame

exhalted. What is understood is that one person is just as good as another. In particular, I am just as good as you are--whoev

This deep set of American personality wells up spontaneously in the arts. James Dickey's epic poem, "Sermon," now in stag audience: "We should feel as free and correct as the animals feel. They may be penned up, but they strain toward sex where freedom--freedom from male and religious dominance. We are whole and should treat ourselves accordingly." 6 The basic p "women's issues," but about what people are just in virtue of being human. They are all equal and all wonderful and therefo drive to be thought in no way deficient often takes amazing forms, such as a recent insistence that deafness be regarded, "no enhancement of vision."

But how does this effect the situation in American universities? In particular, how does it deflect away from knowing and k of higher learning? Very simply: by filling them with people to whom knowledge and knowing in themselves mean little or as just as good as anyone else and having a perfect right to occupy a university position nonetheless.

If we take the education system as a whole, from the early grades on, the most obvious thing about it is that most of the stud to learn or teach the disciplines, and in any case are not really engaged in doing so during most of their time. This then carri education, which has passed from being an opportunity for those who love and revere knowledge, art and scholarship to live which people who care nothing for such things must endure in order to achieve security, respectability and a pleasant life. T who are present in the university are people who do not feel diminished by an almost total ignorance of mathematics, the hi literature or art and its function in life, the ideas which have governed the great civilizations, or...you name it. This is becau fundamental value in its own right. They would never miss it but for extrinsic reasons.

Now equality in this vague but powerful social sense was "on paper" in America long before it had any significant impact o mainly because university training was seen, generally, as having little connection with money or success, and usually--as i regarded as a move in the opposite direction. It had a vague superiority about it, which was a kind of "consolation" prize for that really matter in life. But this all begin to change rapidly when hundreds of thousands of GI's begin to flood into academ GI Bill of Rights" (more precisely, "The Servicemen's Readjustment Act" of 1944).

Then, the government began to pour money into university research, in response to needs of the economy, industry and the of university property. The university became associated with vast amounts of money. In the 50s and 60s huge, totally new previously frequented by rabbits. As space became available for masses of students for whom there previously was just no p government and government supported scholarships were abundantly provided. The challenges of the 60s to the university i predicated upon the presence in the universities of a huge mass of people who were not there for knowledge but for "opport have been widely studied by now. College/university education was simply forced to become something of which all with a given their interests and talents.

To say that "the mass,"--as Ortega y Gasset has studied it in his crucial book, The Revolt of the Masses,7--has now occupied major causal factor in the crisis described above, is not to say that the students or faculty of the current university are either believe them with very few exceptions to be just the opposite--though some of my acquaintances who are university admini that they do not live for knowledge, knowing, learning, and teaching. We have to add that there is no reason why all people relatively small percentage of humanity should. But American society 'tells' its citizens that the way to security, respect and and cites statistics that tie potential employment and income to the level of schooling attained. This forces masses of people knowing, but everything of 'research' and 'getting credits'. Then the call to displace knowledge and make other objectives--t work place ("competing in world markets"), rectification of social structures, service to society, getting a good job or positio education takes firm root in the minds of those for whom knowledge and knowing has little or no intrinsic value anyway.

A second major factor leading to the current state of the university in this country is empiricism. By this term I refer to the t value to the sense perceptible, including the 'feelable'. Here, as with egalitarianism, we are not dealing with a philosophical reality, historically developed and developing. Pitkim Sorokin's book, The Crisis of Our Age, is an indispensible resource fo cultural reality.

Knowledge itself, and most of the things worth knowing, are not sense perceptible. This is well illustrated by the field of lit reference to texts of all sorts. Literature is not sense perceptible--though of course one can see and touch books and pages. N powers and values interwoven with it, which is what literature as a field of knowledge really deals with. (It is hardly the phy

correct, then what you 'feel' when you read a book or poem is the limit of its value. Admittedly, some theorists have toyed w to me to come close to it, at least. But literature as a discipline, creative or interpretative, simply can't survive on such an ap discipline can survive if you try to treat validity or implication in terms of the feelings arguments give to people, or try to tu There is just nothing left that will permit logic to be a field of knowledge, and a similar point must be made for literary stud sciences.9 Very few of the things in which human life has a knowledge interest, and very few of the things studied in the un comprehended, though most involve some element of the sense perceptible. And least of all, perhaps, are knowledge and kn

So how can knowledge justify itself in the face of a society that is dominated by empiricism? It cannot. Thus we see once ag displaced as the Telos of the American university.

Empiricism has also adversely effected the status of knowledge in American culture by giving rise to a version of Represen -though it is not the only way in which such a theory of knowledge can arise. This version is also sometimes called "epistem responsible for the view that in consciousness of objects we never contact them but only our images or representations of th in his, held that all of the identities dealt with cognitively and practically in the world around us are products of our mind (p in this general form, their philosophies come out at exactly the same result as Derrida's, though the arguments and explanati the 20th Century on, "representations" became linguistic, on the Carnapian or the later Wittgensteinian model, and consciou activity. The fact that two thousand years of close scrutiny of consciousness by some pretty bright people had not revealed t to me that the shift to the linguisticization of consciousness was not driven by a deeper insight into consciousness, but by th the physical, sense perceptible world, which words, sentences, and utterances arguably are. So today, as is well known, wha is apart from us is not "inner" representations--"ideas," "images," "impressions,"--but the language(s) we speak as a part of crucial move for the current university situation. It allows a new dimension of attack upon knowledge as traditionally conce become language, and this enables us to say such things as: "Theory, you know, is just another practice," which means just there is thought to be no meta- or super-culture or language from which all other cultures can be comparatively judged. It is university dogma today--that no culture can be judged superior to another. Here we see how 'empiricism' supports that posit

The final major causal factor which I shall mention here as leading to the current state of the university is the absolutizing o unquestioned values or justifications for action in American culture. One is pleasure (which gets in under the empiricist wir what you want (which is also commonly regarded as 'feelable'). That something "feels good" or is "what you want to do" ar reasons for action. People are regarded as right and rational if they act upon them, unless there is some strongly countervail be spelled out ultimately in terms of longer-run pleasure or freedom. So-called "natural" rights--which Bentham, with genui on stilts"--from time to time threaten this neat arrangement, but with little prospect of setting it aside in American culture, w commonly invoked only to shore up the pursuit of pleasure and freedom.

Freedom absolutized exists culturally in a sort of free-floating equation with individualism ("doing your own thing," "being with egalitarianism. This complex of ideation and motivation arranges itself in opposition to authority, and opens the way to the rebel and the sceptic. To question authority is a sign of intelligence and a sceptical pose can be made to pass for brillian earned through the attainment of knowledge.

Now knowledge, by contrast, is essentially the sort of thing that cannot be just any way you please. If you are to know you submit yourself to the relevant subject matter and methodologies. The recent popularity of books written against method, or Method"--where truth is opposed, in a certain subtle but fundamental sense, to method--or of theories according to which th certain cataclysmic leaps between incommensurable states of research history, is to be understood as a part of the drive to re knowledge and knowing with an anti-realist, social process view of knowledge. The attacks on Positivistic and falsely Obje important points to make. But the widespread acceptance of the anti-method tendency is not, I think, based upon widespread and reality, but upon "Representational" theories of knowledge plus that drive to absolutize will and freedom which constitu out of the Eighteenth Century, and which harmfully extends Individualism, deriving from the late Middle Ages.

Refusal to accept servitude to painful method is a reason why one of the most dismal aspects of university life in America is mathematics and in languages. And just think of what vast possibilities in the way of knowledge and knowing is lost to the everything worth doing is painful and undesirable in its early stages. On the bedrock foundation of egalitarianism, 'empirici "fun" part of languages and mathematics is more than most can manage.

Now, if I am right, egalitarianism, empiricism, and absolutized freedom, understood not as mere 'philosophical' views, but a developing historically and concretized in American society, are the three main factors leading to the displacement of know

substance or telos of the university system. Other things that currently play an important role in university life could be men importance when compared to these three. For example, the influence of Pop Culture and 'art'. Or the removal of logic from replaced by a strange amalgum called "critical thinking." Logic, of course, has something to say about what is essential to k what knowledge is without an understanding of logic. Yet you often find logic spoken of as in instrument of oppression tod exact knowledge, where, as in mathematics, you either measure up or you don't. On the other hand, the talk of many logics technical philosophical circles and out, both has the effect of making logic seem arbitrary (which fits right into the scene, of or invent 'logics' of their own, if they don't like the conclusions that are coming down on them. This makes it very easy to ju of its conclusion to social demands rather than in terms of the validity and soundness of the process itself. ("Judged by who this question were deep.)

The flight from logic leaves little recourse but to submit to "the best professional practice" in whatever academic field may faddishness that characterizes the social sciences and the humanities in particular, as this or that powerful personality or tren an objective discipline is set aside, the no doubt necessary pattern of "inference to the best explanation" too easily allows th socially or within the politics of the profession. Indeed, explanation itself may be given a social/historical interpretation. WHAT IS DERRIDA ET. AL. TO ALL OF THIS?

So we and our universities exist in a society where what is widely taken to be best is cause of some of our worst problems. O create a dominant mind-set in which a rich and socially powerful institution such as the university can hardly fail to be defle knowledge, and therefore is seen by many observers as threatened with the lost of its integrity. Now we turn to the question phenomenon," as we might call it, is responsible for the threat. What I have said thus far surely makes it clear that I can acc not the end of the story. 'Deconstructionism' does exercise an influence, and it really is, in my opinion, in the direction feare more reasonable to think of the university crisis and the deconstruction phenomenon as joint effects of a common causation cause of the other--though, once established, they may each significantly influence the other. To suppose that deconstructio are the cause of our problems in academia would be a severe misdiagnosis. They may exacerbate a pre-existing bad situatio them, and if you got rid of them you would still have the problem.

Why should we not hold Derrida et. al. more responsible than this? There are, I believe, grounds other than the streams of so them. Looking at the specifically philosophical interpretations of thought (language) and reality that occupied the American Heidegger, Habermas, Derrida, etc., we find that Quine and Wilfrid Sellars alone are enough to make Derrida's announceme no "original" data or conceptualizations, no access to the "real stuff" apart from the shapings imparted by language, a little l philosophy has had no first rate philosopher who was a coherent realist since C. S. Peirce. Russell is the closest we have com idea that metaphysics (ontology) can only be a shadow cast by logic--which with other confusions (especially those about 's working out a view of the mind/object nexus that would accomodate knowledge in the sense explained above. In any case, f on through Quine and Sellars, the views of knowledge arrived at really differ very little--especially in outcome--from what role of history, power, and mystical factors such as Derrida's "living present," are of less significance in the continuing Ame Positivism and Ordinary Language Philosophy through American thought certainly did nothing to blunt its basically anti-re

So, in fact, the deconstructionist phenomenon adds little to American thought at the more austerely philosophical level of an should not hold Derrida and company heavily responsible for the current academic tempest that often swirls around their na American figures, in literature and other fields, who claim to be under their influence really do understand the basic elemen simply use Derrida and others as authorities within professional circles where their names carry weight.

Paul A. Bov, for example, has written a book called Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry.11 Arme interpretation of the "present to hand," and the metaphysics of presence, Bov relentlessly goes after "reification," opposing life and reality, of course). The closed structures of "the reifying West" once set aside, he then provides a interesting and so "free play" in the poetry of Whitman, Stevens and Charles Olson. His is a book well worth reading. But it simply starts from philosophy" that is not grounded in Heidegger's work or much of anything else, and it does not take account of the fact, whi is much more of an essence philosopher than many of his hangers on would like. I really doubt that "the ongoing process of which occurs in Heidegger's philosophical destruction" (p. 161) has much in common with the "openness" that Bov empha

A similar point is to be made with reference to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's widely influential book, Contingencies of Value, rediscovered variability in experiences of the same objects, and draws extreme relativist conclusions (especially about valua quite consistently declines to prove. But then she admits that she does "attempt to point the way quite energetically" only "b

any other way, she's glad for a bit of company." (pp. 183-184) That is the last sentence of her book. She's kidding! Of cours the book to help her get some company, nor would she be appointed, paid or promoted just to help her in that regard. In fact deconstructionist phenomenon in her profession, where it--and therefore her book--is regarded by influential people as corr experience and its objects. But she herself does not detail the logic by which discovered relativities have the implications sh fundamental arguments and analyses of Derrida and others concerning language, consciousness and the world. He, along w Modern and Contemporary thought, simply serves as a pretext by virtue of a system of authority that functions in her profes

Bov and Smith are among the more careful workers who take Heidegger and Derrida as authority figures. Christopher Nor camp followers," and rejects the idea that "'deconstruction' is synonymous with a handful of overworked catch-words ('textu the rest) whose promiscuous usage at the hands of literary critics bears no relation to the role they play in Derrida's work." ( "deconstruction differs so markedly from the work of neo-pragmatist adepts like Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish" precisely coherence of ideas and his "refusal to accomodate 'current beliefs and practices'." (p. 139) Deconstruction properly understo canons of rigor in logic and methodology. So says Norris, whom I have chosen to quote because he represents the most mat Derrida/Searle interchange.

Now I agree with the need to distance deconstruction from the excesses of the camp followers. That is a right which every c tendency of thought must reserve to itself. But Norris does not do justice to the extent in which Derrida, intentionally or not devotees (though he might never commit them) and justifies the continuing attacks of people like John Searle and John Ellis rigorous and logical in his own analyses and writings. Norris can insist all he wishes on Derrida's allegiance to rigor, but, in the determinancy of concept and proposition which it presupposes, is indelibly tarred with the brush of logocentrism by Der learn from Derrida (and Heidegger) it is that logocentrism just doesn't "get it." Logocentrism is precisely what is wrong wit in the Western world. And if this is so, then as long as Derrida stays within logocentric boundaries he too isn't "getting it." S that he is "getting it," we can assume that he is not operating within the confines of logic by any common conception.

And in fact he isn't. The many stylistic and personal devices he uses in his writing and speaking to cause the logocentric bou "shudder" and to establish movements and connections associated with terms such as "differance" and "trace" and so forth: least mainly so. If they are warranted (or not) in any epistemic sense, it is a sense that falls beyond logic. Norris speaks of h their well-known encounter, was "activating latent or unlooked-for possibilities of sense which thus become the basis for a the less goes clean against the intentional or manifest drift of Searle's argument." (p. 143; cf. 151) ------- Well of course, late sense which are then made the basis (?) for "a scrupulously literal reading" that flatly contradicts the "manifest drift" of an a Norris nor any other rigorous deconstructionists have ever made any sense of this contrast between manifest and latent sens deepest of metaphysical issues are involved. (What is it to be or not be part of or necessary adjunct to a sense--manifest or o senses? Etc.) Yet this is precisely the boundary between logocentrism and whatever else there is to thought and its objectivi you move across the boundary and out of "mere" logocentric analysis. Derrida has never tamed this area in such a way that in it and his critics could be satisfied that what he is doing is anything other than what the loosest "reader response" theory o allow.

What this all really comes down to, I think, is that "deconstruction" is not a method of thought. It is at best a set of claims a meanings. If you look at the most fundamental "result" in Derrida's corpus, the 'demonstration' (if that is a proper term) in S nonpresence and otherness are internal to presence," 13 you will find many claims (about the "primordial structure of repetiti definitions ("ideality"), plays on words ("re-presentation"), and stories, e.g. about how the experience of voice gives an illus sound argument, or even anything put forward as such, for Derrida's earth-shaking conclusion. And this in what Norris insis modern analytical philosophy, taking that description to extend well beyond its current, strangely narrowed professional sco

Derrida is a brilliant and fascinating individual who has been able to make a personal style look like cognitive substance in knowledge in the traditional sense has already been socially displaced. But deconstruction is no method, any more than was arose and dominated philosophical thought in the Anglo-American countries for a few decades. The latter sustained itself on with Ryle and Austin as lesser lights. Recall the lengthy interchanges on the nature of logic between Strawson or Ryle, on th the other. It sustained itself on personalities for a time. Long enough to weed out or permanently disqualify a large number didn't get "it," and to professionally lionize others who did. These latter went on to careers as "Ordinary Language Philosop suddenly everyone realize that there was just nothing there to get. A large number of people had to spend the last decade or while they kept getting what was not there to get. Wittgenstein himself was buried, and later resurrected as an outstanding " probably much happier.

Something similar will happen with Derrida, though I predict a less substantial afterlife in his case. Wittgenstein was after a greatest philosophical minds of this century. But Derrida only stepped into a pre-existing situation in the American academy creative powers would otherwise not have produced. We need to keep his effects distinct from the deeper- lying causes of th university, and not try to rectify the latter by attacking him. We also need to try to keep younger scholars from tying their ca phenomenon, and to prevent colleagues and students from being black-balled because they do not get his "it" that in truth is present. * I should add in closing:

I am very happy to be a member of a university faculty, and I treasure my colleagues, students and administrators. I think it readily come up with something I would like better or think of greater value.

Secondly, I have not tried to go deeply into particular points of philosophical analysis (especially of the mind /object nexus) crucial philosophical questions. This is regrettable, but otherwise it would have been impossible to cover the topics that I th conference for which these remarks were prepared.

Thirdly, I have spoken of the "unhinging" of the American mind in purposive contrast to Alan Bloom's idea of the "closing" have chosen "disarray." Such language seems more appropriate because the "closing" which Bloom discusses is seen by him that he regards as the only accepted intellectual or artistic virtue of our age. Frankly, my experience leads me to think of the floundering, and incapable of such resolution as he suggests.

NOTES 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 3. Return to text. The contrast between traditional and critical theory drawn by Max Horkheimer in his essay, "Traditional and Critic Selected Essays, translated by Matthew J. O'Connell and others, New York: The Seabury Press, 1972], is absolutel in the university today. Contrast Husserl's account of theory, and his careful specification of its relationships to psy Volume I of his Logical Investigations. Return to text. Plato, Book Seven of The Republic, and J. H. Newman, University Subjects, New York: Houghton Mifflin Compa editions. Return to text. See, for example, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, Press, 1988. Return to text. Conspiracy theories and views of the pervasive wrongness of society are frequent in the Enlightenment period. Re "the moral virtues are the political offspring which flattery begot upon pride." [Page 353 of Volume II of British M Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964.] On this whole issue of pervasive distortion see Selby-Bigge's "P Los Angeles Times, Calendar section, page F2, Jan 2, 1993. See also the piece by Robert J. Samuelson, "The Trop 45. Return to text. Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, New York: New American Library, 1950. First published in Span See my paper "Space, Color, Sense Perception and the Epistemology of Logic," The Monist, 72, #1 (January 1989 See Husserl's penetrating comment, "On certain basic defects of empiricism," an "Appendix" to subsection 26 in V Investigations. Return to text. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Revolt Against Dualism, La Salle, IL: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1960, Lecture I. R New York: Columbia University Press, 1975, 1980. Return to text. In his What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy, Baltimore: The Johns Hop P. 66 of Speech and Phenomena, translated by David B. Allison, Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 19

Category: Philosophy

Predication as Originary Violence: A Phenomenological Critique of Derrida's View of Intentionality

Appears in G. B. Madison, ed., Working Through Derrida, Evanston IL.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1993, pp. 120-136.

What happens to intentionality in the thought of Jacques Derrida? When he is finished--when the terminological chain of di with and marked off from that of "presence"--what has been made of that common state of affairs in which an "act" of cons object? What then are its components to be, and how are they related? For example, when I recall the first automobile I own my next sabbatical leave, or savor the colors in a sunset sky? How does Derrida analyze that peculiar type of affinity betwe and specifically correlated events (of the various possible types) which we often express by the prepositions "of" and "abou to him, of that ofness or aboutness which is characteristic of acts of consciousness? Especially, how does differance enter in

The fabled king Midas of Phrygia turned everything he touched, including his food, into gold. There is a long-standing trad which whatever objects present themselves to consciousness are the products of some more fundamental type of "touching" else. Our first thesis here is that Derrida falls squarely within this "Midas" tradition in the interpretation of intentionality: a t in the modern period--possibly only Husserl, though the most common reading does not even exempt him--have managed t intentionality for Derrida really is a kind of making: a making that is always a re-making, thus moving all "objects"--the ind the realm of the ideal as he understands it, and simultaneously doing "violence" to that from which this `ideal' object of con the produced object itself. Our second thesis will be that his view is descriptively false to the facts of consciousness, and dri perhaps, ultimately, historical prejudices--which he not only never rationally supports, but which are in fact rationally insup insistence. Beginning with Bergson

The Midas tradition extends into obscure antiquity. Locke and Kant are the most obvious members of it from within the "M of course, are highly instructive to study in clarifying its dynamics. But here we shall begin with Bergson, who, in truth, lef Emmanuel Levinas has recently tried to remind us of the extent to which Bergson pre-empted the later critiques of technolo with his own form of "life" philosophy and his analysis of the relationship between concepts, language, history and duree.1 hopeful philosopher. Perhaps there should be no serene philosophers in a world where, increasingly, only sour resentment a especially toward the intellect, which had proven astonishingly inept at realizing the hopes of the Enlightenment for humank practically disappeared, though his substance continued to be of great historical effect in the work of people who might be e Now we find Bergson saying that:

"...what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply a selection made by my senses to serve as a light to my condu therefore, give me no more than a practical simplification of reality. In the vision they furnish me of myself and things, the obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are emphasized; ways are traced out for me in advance, along which my ways which all mankind has trod before me. Things have been classified with a view to the use I can derive from them. And more clearly than the color and shape of things.... The individuality of things escapes us.... In short, we do not see the actua confine ourselves to reading the labels affixed to them.... The word...intervenes between it and ourselves....

"Not only external objects, but even our own mental states, are screened from us in their inmost, their personal aspects, in th only the impersonal aspect of our feelings, that aspect which speech has set down once for all because it is almost the same, Thus, even in our own individual, individuality escapes our ken.... [W]e live in a zone midway between things and ourselve

to ourselves."2

Of course Bergson did concede that metaphysical "intuition" and the experience of art allow us, upon occasion, to get to the the self, to "grasp something that has nothing in common with language, certain rhythms of life and breath that are closer to the living law--varying with each individual--of his enthusiasm and despair, his hopes and regrets." (p. 154) Although they knowledge, there still is some kind of "knowledge"--for Bergson as well as for the Existentialists and for Derrida himself--w "objectively" or "logocentrically.." Sartre and the Touch

Sartre at one point gave great promise of escaping the Midas model, with some help from Husserl. In his brilliant little note `Phenomenologie' de Husserl, l'intentionnalite," which appeared in La nouvelle revue francaise for January of 1939, he deft Brunschvicg, Lalande and Meyerson by describing how, for them,

"....the mental spider draws things into its web, covers them with a pale spittle, and slowly swallows them, turning them into stone, or a house? It is a certain assemblage of `contents of consciousness', a arrangement of those contents. An alimentary the table the actual content of my perceptions? And is not my perception the present state of my consciousness?.... In vain d among us search for something solid, something which, at last, was not mental. Everywhere we were met only by a flabby m ourselves!" By contrast, Sartre notes,

"Husserl never ceased to assert that the thing cannot be dissolved into consciousness. You see, possibly, this tree here. But y there where it is. --- Amidst the dust. Alone and withered in the heat. Twenty leagues from the Mediterranian coast. It could it is not of the same nature as your consciousness."3

But, alas! Hopes are only to be dashed. By the time we get to Being and Nothingness, if not earlier, the table, stone, tree, etc "mental," now proves to be something that, through its necessary "world," is internally related to, and so could not exist wit "Nothingness"--and now we must also say the "differance"--that alone can explain the the possibility of a world--of a struct up by interwoven "nots" or "lacks." (See "Part Two" of Being and Nothingness.) This is, today, a familiar story, and needs n offers us is that tables and trees are, at least, not parts of someone's mind. But, under such headings as the "noematic," the " substance has nevertheless been transformed by `the Midas touch' of consciousness, generously interpreted, into something not exist without "the mental spider"--now, however, a spider conceived in social/ historical/linguistic terms and inscribed f Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Saussure, Freud, Levi-Strauss, etc. Exempting Husserl

When we turn to Derrida's writings, two significant points become very clear. One is that the overall view of the "world" of expressed by Bergson and Sartre, according to which it is a product of human reality, is the one accepted by Derrida. Admit significantly differs at certain points from that of his predecessors--including Heidegger, to whom he no doubt is closest. Bu says remains much the same as the views of Bergson and Sartre. We will come back to this claim below, to give it a basis in

The other point is that Derrida certainly believes that the view of the world and of the objects of science outlined above, acc fundamentally "products" of Dasein, is also the view of Husserl. I shall not try to support this claim here, because I think an Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction and Speech and Phenomena will amply show it to be true. He believes this interpretation of Husserl according to which the objects of consciousness are noemata. 4 And I strongly agree that Husserl c the Midas touch only if he does not hold that objects of consciousness are, in general, noemata.

But in my opinion he did not hold that noemata are the objects of consciousness--and also did not equate the ideal with the To the contrary, for him the usual objects of consciousness, whether real or ideal, are not noemata--though noemata can, of consciousness in special acts directed, precisely, upon them--and those "usual" objects would continue to exist and to be wh disappeared from the universe. Such objects, that is, as stars and galaxies, worms and algae, trees and stones, colors and sha "metaphysical correlate" of them, but these themselves as they may now be given to a veridical consciousness. And, for Hu

disappear with consciousness, e.g. acts of consciousness themselves, would not disappear because they ceased to be "presen consciousness.

Derrida's views are parasitical upon Husserl's texts. His interpretations of Husserl's views enter essentially into, and (in a rh force for, his own presentations. So it will be appropriate to refer to a few passages from Ideas I in support of my claims abo hope here to set aside what has by now become an entrenched interpretation of them. In truth, he is not misread in the mann statements to the contrary. Subsection 43 of Ideas I is headed, "Light on a Fundamental Error." The fundamental error in qu perception (and, each in their own way, every other type of thing intuition) fails to arrive at the thing itself" because of the a in the case of God who allegedly cognizes them "without mediation through `appearances'." The idea is that appearances pr Indeed, the spatial thing can only be given to us in connection with appearances, which it always exceeds or transcends. Bu despite all its transcendence, perceived, given in person to consciousness. An image or sign is not given in its place." (Cf. su Investigation")

The standard reading of Husserl today--even among many who agree that the object is for him not the noema--is that the tra only a something referred to by means of the corresponding noemata or appearances, which of course are mind/language/ h temporal events. But Husserl holds there to be an unbridgeable difference of essence between consciousness via meanings o former case "we intuit something in consciousness as imaging or signitively pointing to something else. Having the one wit directed upon it, but, through the medium of a founded apprehending, upon the other: the imaged, the designated. But there little as in plain and simple recollection or phantasy." The tree, table, etc. is directly present to us, no matter how complicate

Moreover, what is intuited in the usual perception does not mean, is not of or about, something else, as the appearance or no is not of something, as its appearances as well as acts of perceiving it are, each in their own way, of it. Both the intentional corresponding noema ("appearance") have a content and, based therein, a reference to an object, the object being the same f Ideas I) But for Husserl the object itself has, in the usual case, neither content nor object in that same sense, and hence is ne the ("usual") object is not a noema.

Finally, all objects, even when they are experienced, come to consciousness as being there prior to their being known, and n dependent upon the acts or appearances in which they come to consciousness. (See subsections 45 and 52) He is especially holding ideal objects (essences) to be produced by psychical acts. (subsection 22) Any alleged dependence of our usual obje something findable, but can only be derived from metaphysical prejudice. Appearances (whether called noemata or not) are trees and tables. You only have to attend to their details to see. To suppose that we might not be able to tell when we are co contemplating the appearance of a table is to make a astounding, gratuitous concession from which there is no recovery in p possibly be more obvious than that a table is not an appearance of a table--once you attend to what an appearance of a table

One of Husserl's discussions concerns the claim "that when we think we perceive, e.g., the property of white, we really only ourselves, a resemblance between the apparent object and other objects...." In a manner characteristic of his whole approach

"...in the face of all Evidenz an object evidently different from our intentional object has been substituted for it. The thing co thing I think that I am grasping perceptually or imaging in phantasy stands by and large above all dispute. I may be deceive perception, but not as to the fact that I do perceive it as determined in this or that way, that my percept's target is not some t instead of a cockroach. This Evidenz in characterizing description (or in identification and distinction of intentional objects limits, but it is true and genuine Evidenz." (IInd "Logical Investigation," subsection 37)

My hope is that considerations such as these will strongly suggest, at least, that Husserl is not in the Midas touch tradition o the line of interpretation that puts him there by treating his noemata as the objects of the usual acts of consciousness is mista ground in his writings for associating him with that tradition. Derrida's Position By contrast, a very simple line of reasoning locates Derrida squarely in the Midas tradition: 1.

The everyday objects of consciousness and discourse (or the objects of the usual consciousness and discourse) hav special sense of the term.

2. 3.

4. 5.

Presence involves a certain self-containedness and discreteness that alone makes re-identification and identity poss from ab-straction: a pulling-away-from, an ex-traction from the logocentrically ineffable and yet essential union w discourse, is different from, outside of, that which has presence. This "ex-traction" to create "beings" (with lower case "b"), things "present" (the usual sorts of objects), is the work language. These two linguistic functions constitute a `violence' to the "deeper" unification of beings where the arch reigns. It thus gives rise to trees, tables, persons (subjects), as well as to numbers and colors and virtues, etc. Witho would not exist. Naming and predication are functions of language, and hence of "transcendental historicity," not of individual min only results (in some sense) of naming and predication. But while language and historicity are "more" than individual human beings, they do not produce beings apart from

____________________ Hence: Ordinary objects, beings, things "present," are

after all the outcome of individual minds ("inhabited" by or "inhabiting" language and historicity, to be sure) touching (bein process and transforming "something" of "it" into trees, tables, persons, etc. Without such minds there would be no world o above. Derrida's System

To explain the reasoning back of this thesis we look more closely at Derrida's system. He has a system of thought. Not that with his standard qualifiers.5 And what he says about the limits of "system," as one link in the logocentric conceptual chain, be emphasized is that he does tell us how things essentially stand. His writings are full of synthetic apriori statements--e.g. t be closed in upon itself, on the inside of its proper interiority, or on its coincidence with itself. The irreducibility of spacing "There cannot be a unique sign for a unique thing." 6 His claim that in certain areas we cannot, strictly, state essence is a par essentially stand. This is not changed at all by his further claim that the "telling" of how things essentially stand must be do framework and causing it to "tremble" by showing that its constitutive contrasts--especially the one between presence and a inhabit each other through the dynamism of differance and "trace." In this regard he is only one more in a long line of 19th have held that the "real philosophical stuff" can only be shown and cannot be said.

Derrida's system is basically tripartite. It is strongly Kantian. Another close parallel would be Critical Realism as practiced century. In each case, the world of objects of science and common sense--including the individual self--is treated as a result between factors of what there is. The three dimensions of the "system" are: I. II.

III.

The realm of identifiable (re-identifiable) objects or beings, including the self, the Being of which is, according to be present or have presence, which is achievable only through the violence of predication. "There is no presence," semiological differance..."7 The realm of differance, of a deferring and differing, of a movement that is neither active nor passive, that does no somehow makes place for, identities capable of presence, objects of the everyday sort. (Margins, pp. 9-11) This is the tain of the mirror which has no resemblance to the objects mirrored but makes it possible for them to be reflect there is no name, essence or science.8 The interaction between the realm of beings and the realm of differance, as "the process of scission and division w different things or differences." (Margins, p. 9)

Naming and Predication as "Violence"

Here we are especially interested in the status of the world of ordinary objects or beings. They originate, as we have indicat structure of violence is complex," Derrida holds,

"and its possibility--writing--is no less so....To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute. To think the unique wit is the gesture of the arche-writing: arche-violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence, in truth the los

self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of and always already split, repeated, incapable of appearing to disappearance."9

Proper names, indeed, never function except as "a designation of appurtenance and a linguistico-social classification." (Gra names is a system of classification, expressed in predicates, through which things are designated in terms of their other, sub classification, and of the system of appelations." (p. 110) Within the organized meanings of a language, nothing ever just is in the predicate or name is treated as just this. The mastery that comes from this making something to be present founds "a repetition that the eidos and ousia made available seems to acquire an absolute independence. Ideality and substantiality rel res cogitans, by a movement of pure auto-affection. Consciousness is the experience of pure auto-affection." (Gramm pp. 97

Whatever is an object of linguistic meaning will, therefore, always be characteristically different from whatever is not an ob the presence which makes it a being. And yet, as classified, it also bears the essential traces of its other within it--as the lette system of the alphabet, its relationships with the other letters. Thus, even "The thing itself is a sign." (Gramm p. 49) That is present within it through the relationships implicit in its classification or kind. Thus: "From the moment that there is meanin only in signs." (p. 50) The signified which transcends the system of signifiers is an illusion. "Writing" he says, is "the impos signified that would not relaunch this signified, in that the signified is already in the position of the signifying substitution." Two Crucial Clarifications

Yet the being that is given or taken as present is not, for Derrida, an illusion. In his interview with Kearney he responds vig denies the existence of the subject, the person--and by implication of other "substances":

"I have never said that the subject should be dispensed with. Only that it should be deconstructed. To deconstruct the subjec There are subjects, `operations' or `effects` of subjectivity. This is an incontrovertible fact. To acknowledge this does not m says it is. The subject is not some extra-linguistic substance or identity, some pure cogito of self-presence; it is always inscr therefore, destroy the subject; it simply tries to resituate it." 11

This is a highly important statement for interpreting Derrida's views. The beings (whose Being is presence) really do exist-provides a clarification of what it is, in general, for something to be: of the difference between being and not-being. (The di Being--the ontico-ontological difference-- gets all the attention and the difference between being and not-being gets lost.) T are, even though without the violence which enables them, forces them, to have "presence" they would not exist.

This clarification goes hand in hand with another important statement to Kearny. Derrida emphatically rejects the view "tha reference," along with those critiques which see his "work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we ar says, "the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the `other'and the `other of language'." him) treat `Post-Structuralism' as the view "that there is nothing beyond language, that we are submerged in words--and oth

"deconstruction tries to show that the question of reference is much more complex and problematic than traditional theories beyond language and which summons language, is perhaps not a `referent' in the normal sense which linguists have attached thus..., does not amount to saying there is nothing beyond language." (p. 123-124)

These highly significant correctives to popular misunderstandings must be kept in mind. However, one must also be clear a gives rise to such misunderstandings. It is his view that the usual sorts of objects, including and especially linguistic signs th tied to the kind of identity (re-identifiability, hence freedom from context, hence ideality) which they possess. That is, a Bei them, to have presence. And presence does not belong to anything apart from significations or concepts, which do not exist in all of the deconstructive points about "inside/outside.") On the other hand, differance, trace, mark, etc. do not exist or hav indicate the Being of what has presence. What is `outside' of language does not "exist"--even if in some sense (which Derrid comprehensible) it "has Being." Accordingly it is hardly appropriate, though it is understandable, for him to refer to "stupid stupidity, and Derrida should accept his share of responsibility for the misunderstanding. Clearly, for him, the world of obje for language and its gathering and dissemination significations; for presence, the self-identity that gives logocentrism its po standard logic, mathematics, and the like, is a function of language--even of "writing" in the usual sense of that term. What outside of, language (again, in the usual sense) can hardly be regarded as obvious.

The Midas Touch Remains

Let us now grant to Derrida that language and meanings are not the inventions, are not produced or brought into being, by i world are formed by a historical reality. Can Derrida, given this, escape the charge of subjectivism, of being in the "Midas t don't see how. Language and historicity do not obtain and have effects in their own right. Derrida more than most wants to r place." If individuals are at the disposal of language and history, owe their beingly Being to it, it is also true that language a through their insertion into individuals (or through insertion of individuals into them). The being and action of signification While language and history are indifferent to any arbitrary individual subject, they are totally dependent upon the existence Concepts and signs do not have a being apart from individual humans: one from where, irrespective of individuals, they mig identifiable object into that degree of presence (never complete or unadulterated with absence, of course) which allows it to there to be oak trees in North America, for instance.

Language and significations require the existence of historically developing communities of communication. It is for the ind communities, not for language or history apart from them, that there is a world and that there are oak trees in North Americ upon the individual subjects, though not on any one of them in particular. This is not lessened by the fact that the subjects m that has developed historically. And it does not really help, I think, to point out that to raise the question about individual su back into the oppositional structures of logocentrism (or of "metaphysics" or even "philosophy," in Derrida's special sense). remains that language is powerless to structure objects except through the actions of individuals. Contact with individual mi beings. Of course the minds are beings too--but then nothing is every just what it is for Derrida. The Intentional Nexus in Deconstruction

These remarks bring to light the fact that Derrida really has no account at all of how language (conceptual systems) and the objects present to or through them. In this he is like the anti-psychologistic logicians of the early and mid-20th century, who mental events so far that they could not longer explain how logic could serve in the critique of actual thought and discourse empiricism and platonism. He tries to do this by introducing senses (concepts, essences, significations) which provide a mo absolute beginning or end. But this is where the properly phenomenological critique of his views begins to take hold. For th of how sense history enters into the individual mind or minds at a given time to yield the correlative world of beings--includ apparently, not even intended to operate at that level of analysis. The result is that in fleeing from origins, transcendental sig no positive analysis of intentionality: of the grounds (in the act and in the object) of the intentional grasp of the object by th logocentric account of this nexus cannot be wholly correct, it does not follow that no account is available or required.

Instead of doing the canonical phenomenological labor of examining particular cases where an act of a certain type is direct with general argumentations derived from selected associations of certain terms. The basic term examined is, of course, "rep be understood "in the sense of re-presentation, as repetition or reproduction of presentation, as the Vergegenwaertigung wh Gegenwaertigung. And it can be understood as what takes the place of, what occupies the place of, another Vorstellung (Re Stellvertreter)."15 Thus the specific phenomenon of intentionality (ofness, aboutness) is ignored in favor of what Derrida wi repetition (being the "same" as, though not merely "identical" with) and replacement.

But now a few questions must be asked. First, do we not know that the affinity which my present perception has with this co upon it, is not a matter of the latter (or the former) being a repetition of and/or replacement for the former (or the latter). Isn part of my perception or that perception as a whole repeats or replaces the screen? Can any of Derrida's points about differe it assist my act to be about the screen if part of it did repeat of replace the screen or conversely? After all, `repeating' and `re they do not involve the repeated or replaced standing in the intentional nexus with what repeats or replaces it. Just as, contra similarity is too general a trait to use as an analysis of "ofness" or representation, so with differance.

One sees evidence in many of Derrida's statements that he has simply lost the sense of basic semantical and intentionalistic well-known theses is that "even within so-called phonetic writing, the `graphic' signifier refers to the phoneme through a we like all signifiers, to other written and oral signifiers, within a `total' system open, let us say, to all possible investments of s graphic signifer does not refer to the phoneme at all. It is not of or about or intentionally directed upon it. It has some sort o Derrida says about differance casts some light upon that relationship. But to speak of "reference" here is simply to deprive t analysis. A similar point is to be made for the claim that the signified always becomes a sign because an absence always inh structures of Derrida are found just about everywhere, so far as I can tell. But intentionality, the affinity of a given act or sig type of union which, on the whole, appears to be pretty rare in the universe. We have to consider the possibility that, distrac

insights into differance, Derrida has yet to discover or discuss intentionality. A general point about sameness (namely, that w "identity," but always "deconstructs" to exhibit "otherness," always necessarily involves difference, when examined with ca Bradley and many others like him taught us?) cannot be turned into a philosophical account of practically everything, even about Western culture and history. Voice and Consciousness

Derrida's discussion of voice and consciousness--an indispensable cornerstone of his entire system--shows the same phenom "Why," he asks, "is the epoch of the phone also the epoch of being in the form of presence, that is, of ideality?" (SP p. 74) H that does not impair the presence and self-presence of the acts that aim at" the (always ideal) signified. (pp. 75-76) "The ide being-for a nonempirical consciousness, can only be expressed in an element whose phenomenality does not have a worldly they seem not to leave me: not to fall outside me, outside my breath, at a visible distance...." (p. 76)

"The `apparent transcendence' of the voice thus results from the fact that the signified, which is always ideal by essence, the present in the act of expression. This immediate presence results from the fact that the phenomenological `body' of the signi moment it is produced; it seems already to belong to the element of ideality. It phenomenologically reduces itself, transform pure diaphaneity." (p. 77)

Thus, "the signifier, animated by my breath and by the meaning-intention...is in absolute proximity to me. The living act...s from its own self-presence." (p. 77) Thus it becomes paradigmatic of beings (with small "b"). "The subject can hear or spea signifer he produces, without passing through an external detour, the world, the sphere of what is not `his own'. Every other through what is outside the sphere of `ownness'...." (78) This leads Derrida to hold that "de jure and by virtue of its structure the voice. The voice is the being which is present to itself in the form of universality, as con-sciousness; the voice is conscio

Now we must note, to begin with, that Derrida here does not trouble himself to describe in detail a specific case of the expe von oben, with the general claim that an object is ideal and so can only be expressed--we are never told why--by "an elemen real or worldly existence. His next claim is that my speech, my spoken words, seem not to leave me and take on separate ex signified to be (to seem?) immediately present in the act of expression, thus giving the act the type of undivided self-identit allowing the immediate presence of the signified in the act of expression.

But let us look at some facts. Speech, my words, in soliloquy or in colloquy, are sounds experienced as located in my specif is great danger of war in the Middle East, the words used are experienced as sounds moving in and from my chest and throa phenomenological test.) When things are in good working order, speaking may be relatively effortless, but it is never a case anyone learning to speak a new language (to make the unaccustomed sounds with their bodily parts) or suffering from a goo

The crucial difference between spoken and written symbolism has nothing to do with "proximity," but with the fact that spe consists in continuants or substances which are the results of events. Spoken words do not become "diaphanous." In the man exist after an appropriate temporal elongation, which is very different from becoming diaphanous. But they no more have a expression than, for example, the movements of the fingers in the sign language of the deaf, which utilizes space and not so

Once these matters are clear from the descriptive analysis of actual speaking, we will then understand that to say that no con to say something obviously false. Consciousness constantly and mainly occurs without corresponding speech. Hence, consc This, as a matter of historical fact, is a point upon which all of the great philosophers through the centuries (Plato, Descartes Husserl, agreed. Perhaps because simple description of the details of specific events in our conscious life will show it to be reversal on this point is another matter.) And if to claim that voice is consciousness, that no consciousness is possible witho obviously false, it is to use the word "voice" in a way that has nothing to do with actual speech or language. As, for exampl consciousness--where, so far as I can tell, speech or `voice' is (falsely) assigned the absolute self-presence often said to be th instead of an honest reference to language, a cosmic principle of the most obscure nature (differance, "writing") is invoked.

So it emerges, in my opinion, that Derrida does not really have a view of the specific phenomenon of intentionality or mean respects, his reflections on differance cast no light on how language (name, predicate) works through individual minds to ac corresponding "objects." They also provide no understanding of wherein consists that peculiar affinity or selectivity of the a

referent, that we call "intentionality." It is not so much that his account is wrong as that it really is no account at all of these NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

A quoi pensent les philosophes, edited by Jacques Message, Joel Roman and Etienne Tassin, (Paris: Autrement Re Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, translated by C. Brereton and F. Rothwell, (New 151ff. Return to text. Translated by Joseph P. Fell in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, I, 1970, pp. 4-5. Return to text. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p
Return to text.

Jacques Derrida, Positions, translated by Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 3. {Hereafte Positions, p. 94, and Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Spivak, (Baltimore: The Johns Hop {Hereafter referred to as "Gramm".} Return to text. Positions, p. 28; cf. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, (Chicago: University of Chi referred to as "Margins".} Return to text. Gramm pp. 49 & 93; cf. Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror, (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1 Gramm p. 112; WD pp. 147-149. Return to text. Positions p. 82; cf. WD p. 25. Return to text. Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, (Manches 1984), p. 125. Cf. Positions p. 88. Return to text. Kearney, p. 123. Cf. Ynhui Park, "Derrida ou la prison du language," Philosophy, (Seoul, Korea), 1983, pp. 151-16 Gramm p. 167, Margins 21-25 Return to text. Discussed in my Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1984), Chapter IV Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 49. {Hereafter refer

Category: Philosophy

Is Derrida's View of Ideal Being Rationally Defensible?

"Certainly, there be that delight in giddiness; and count it a bondage to fix a belief; affecting freewill in thinking as well as i philosophers of that kind be gone, yet there remain certain discoursing wits which are of the same veins, though there be no those of the ancients." (Of Truth, Francis Bacon)

"Promise me that all you say is true. That's all I ask of you." (Phantom of the Opera)

In this paper I shall inquire to what extent there may be good reasons for holding (or rejecting) Derrida's view on the existen universals. That is, is his view true or is it false? And are there considerations which can be stated in the form of proposition known to be true and that logically entail, or render significantly probable, either the view of ideal being which Derrida mai the results of an appraisal of Derrida's position on this matter from the viewpoint of standard logic? I share Newton Garver's left himself any ground on which to stand and may be enticing us along a path to nowhere...." 1

I do not mean to suggest that this is the only interesting question which might be raised about his views--on ideal being or o could be some justification for asserting what he asserts on various topics even if his assertions were not rationally defensib must be of some interest to him, as well as to others, if we were to find that his views were not rationally defensible in the s thinking that to establish the rational indefensibility of his views on ideal being must have a significant effect on whatever r philosophical discourse, of life and of history.

I am aware that "standard logic" does not by any means coincide with "rationality." Yet it seems to me that a position which significantly failed with regard to rationality, and that whatever aspirations it may have to be rational would then face a very could be rational if, after careful examination, it doesn't have a logical leg to stand on, and especially if it turns out to be log

**

What, exactly, is Derrida's position on the existence and nature of ideal beings or universals? I should the outset express my or universals to exist and to have a specific nature, and that his view is, with relatively minor deviations, the view which, in he attributes to Edmund Husserl. Many of his readers will disagree with me about this, and it may be possible later on to see have to be determined by what they say. Let us see what Derrida says.

To begin with, which are the ideal beings according to Derrida? He would, I believe, accept the re-identifiable corresponden names as ideal beings. In terms of consciousness, any ob-ject of consciousness: anything singled out as an identity for the fl being, precisely because of its repeatability in identity. The main element in "identity" for Derrida is reidentifiability, not so constitutes identity regardless of consciousness and language. (Similarly as Quine, in his slogan, "No entity without identity criteria of identification, hence to re-identifiability, and not to some metaphysical "fact about" entities in themselves--which involving cross-references to the same object, and not nouns, bear existential commitment for him.) A consequence of this general description of ideal beings for Derrida is that what are commonly regarded as individuals, as

turn out to be ideal beings. Indeed he embraces the view that "The ideal object is the absolute model for any object whateve SP 99)2 This will not be surprising to anyone who has read her Bradley or Quine well, and perceives the profound kinship i these three thinkers. However, in this paper we shall not pursue issues concerning individuals and their ideality. Rather we s classically understood to be universal, and with their being and ideality.

Cases of ideal being in this narrower sense will surely include the ones discussed in his first major publication, his lengthy " of Husserl's L'origine de la geometrie. These are the properties and relations dealt with in geometry, such as point, line, plan intersection, triangle, and so forth. His discussions also suggest that numbers and their properties and relationships fall amo doubt from his later writings that non-mathematical properties and relations of all sorts, which can be singled out and assert fall among ideal beings in the narrower sense of universals. Properties such as red, vanilla, difficult, oviparous, and so forth characteristic ways among themselves as well as from mathematical properties.

A very special class among universal ideal beings, for Derrida, is constituted by meanings, significations, or senses. At this question of how significations or senses are related to universal ideal beings which are not significations: whether the signif being which it is 'of', whether there are any ideal beings which aren't significations or senses, and so forth. For now it suffic property of a certain figure or thing), and the sense, signification or concept of triangularity (as a determination or compone consciousness), are ideal beings on Derrida's view.

With this indication of what ideal beings are in extension, let us now turn to some of Derrida's essential characterizations of of what it is for a being to be ideal. 1. Ideal objects do not exist in self-contained completeness in a topos ouranios. (OG 75, SP 6, WD 157-158)3

2. Ideal objects are "free," and therefore can be normative, with regard to all "factual subjectivity." That is, the cessation of not destroy them, for they can be cognized in other, perhaps infinitely repeated, acts, which also can be criticized in terms o must be developed in terms of what those objects are. (WD 158)

3. 1 and 2 imply that ideal objects derive from "a transcendental subjectivity," that is, a mind-like producing and reproducin not any particular mind, but expresses itself through particular minds. (WD 158, SP 82) 4. It also follows that ideal objects are essentially and intrinsically historical. (WD 158, SP 85)

5. Ideal entities are essentially and only objects of consciousness. They depend for their existence or being upon being cogn ideal....is only what it appears to be....is already reduced...and its being is, from the outset, to be an object for a pure conscio in general is here determined as object: as something that is accessible and available in general and first for a regard or gaze object is to put it at the permanent disposition of a pure gaze." (OG 78) "Ideality...does not exist in the world and does not c

6. The being of ideal entities (universal or particular) is presence: "...the absolute proximity of self-identity, the being-in-fro the maintenance of the temporal present, whose ideal form is the self-presence of transcendental life, whose ideal identity a 99; cf. 6) By contrast, differance is the mark of the non-ideal. Differance does not exist (MP 21)4 and has no essence (p. 25) 25)5

7. The origin of an ideal object "will always be the possible repetition of a productive act." (SP 6) The ideal object "depends repetition. It is constituted by this possibility." (SP 52)

8. Repeatability of the ideal is possible "...in the identity of its presence because of the very fact that it does not exist, is not being a fiction, but in another sense,...whose possibility will permit us to speak of nonreality and essential necessity, the noe general the non-worldly." (SP 6; cf 55 & 74-75)

9. Language is the medium in which transcendental subjectivity produces objects, ideal objects, senses. (SP 73-75 & 80) "Is to unify life and ideality." (SP 10) Without language there would be no ideal beings.

10. Absolute objectivity, repeatability in its highest degree, is only achieved in the written language and symbolisms of scie

***

To provide a contrast with the above, we consider Edmund Husserl's views on being and ideal being. This is especially imp now regard the view of being and ideality expressed in the previous paragraphs as Husserl's view. But for Husserl, to exist o same thing) is simply to possess qualities or relations. In the case of specific types of beings, certain qualitative structures m for beings of those types to exist, or for things which exist to be things of those types. Such qualitative structures are the ess considered from the standpoint of how the entities are to be given if "they themselves" are present, they determine the 'Sinn entities. (Ideas I, subsection 142 [p. 396])6 But what it is for them to be, the being of such beings, is the same in every case: ontological chasms, including the real and ideal, the reelle and the irreelle.

Special questions about being in Husserl have been raised by what he says about the noema. The noema was introduced by between acts of consciousness which fall in the dimension of appearance. Concretely considered, the noematic consists of c the noematic "moments," which, "idealiter gefasst," are universals (qualities, relations) that make up the qualitative structur Husserl introduces the noematic as a distinctive domain of entities on the basis of characters, qualities, 'predicates' which be nothing else, by means of which it uniquely is to be described. (Ideas I, pp. 258, 260, 283-284, 289) He remarks: "These pre through such reflection acts of consciousness>. We grasp what concerns the correlate as such through the glance being turn grasp the negated, the affirmed, the possible, the questionable, and so forth, as directly qualifying the appearing object as su which we find as inseparable features of the perceived, fancied, remembered, etc., as such." (p. 266) They can belong, as pr to the reelle act, and hence must be part of another domain, that of the irreelle. Yet for the irreele, the noematic, as well as fo subject to, to actually have, relevant properties or relations.

This view of the being of beings, of the univocity of being, is essentially the same as that of Hermann Lotze, from whom Hu Twentieth Century essentially the same view has been held by Bertrand Russell and C. J. Ducasse. It is the indispensible ke view. It correctly preserves the ancient dictum: Diversum est esse et id quod est. That which exists is not identified with its having of qualities remains "something" in its own right, a characteristic type of relational structure. Moreover it can (indee as the "Being of beings" will in any case most certainly be, as is proven by who better than Heidegger and Sartre and Derrid "X'd out" terms and otherwise, to the effect that one can't really do what one is doing.

More importantly, the being of beings is regarded, on Husserl's view, as logically independent of independence, as well as o entity is dependent or non-thinglike has no implication for its being or not-being as such, or for the 'degree' to which it is or consciousness. Whatever is dependent on consciousness exists--though that does not settle any of the difficult questions as t consciousness (or language, if that is not the same thing)--and there is no reason in the nature of being, as Husserl understan known or cognized or mentally intended. Objects of all kinds are, for him, "relative" to knowledge or consciousness, in the they are to be known, if they are known, whereas there is no similar relativity of consciousness to the world or to realms of numbers. But, except for the obvious exceptions in the cultural or 'spiritual' realm, the world and other realms of which we what we know them to be, if consciousness were in fact totally eliminated from reality or being.

For our present discussion it is most important to say that being as Husserl understands it has absolutely nothing whatsoeve temporal nor intentional ('mental') presence is required for being in general--though in the specific case of noematic momen Husserl does hold that to be is to be perceived, which is yet not the same as saying that the being of the noematic moment is Husserl, something can be and yet be present in none of these senses. It may be that all entities are present in some or sever what it is for them to be.

The famous Husserlian "Principle of all Principles" has to do with the knowledge of being and beings, not with being; and t it as a principle of being merely reflects their own commitments with regard to intentionality and being, and possibly their o essentially to do with being as Husserl himself understood it. (While the being of X is for Husserl [Ideas I, subsections 142 of evident judgments about X, the possibility of evident judgments involves much more and other than the being of X, whic possibility, but not conversely. The possibility of evident judgments does not ground the being of the relevant objects.)

If "presence" means simply identity, then the discussion with regard to Husserl becomes more difficult, but I suspect that H accommodate what Derrida has to say on this point also. (See SP 99 on the meanings of "presence.") I have not yet been ab

on this point, and will not comment further.

The definitive passage on Husserl's view of being occurs in the IInd "Logical Investigation," which, I must say, seems to be triumphant historicist/nominalist interpretation of his views--to which, no doubt, it is an acute embarassment. In subsection ideal being with (both mental and extramental) real being, for which "temporality is a sufficient mark" (p. 351), and with fic all." (p. 352)9 In contrast, "Ideal objects...exist genuinely. Evidently there is not merely a good sense in speaking of such ob of redness, of the principle of contradiction, etc.) and in conceiving them as sustaining predicates: we also have insight into such ideal objects. If these truths hold, everything presupposed as an object by their holding must have being. If I see the tru predicate of my assertion actually pertains to the ideal object 4, then this object cannot be a mere fiction, a mere facon de pa 352-353)

In the immediately following paragraph Husserl allows "the possibility that the sense of this being, and the sense also of thi with their sense in cases where a real (reales) predicate, a property is asserted or denied of a real subject. "We do not deny, fundamental categorial split in our unified conception of being (or, what is the same, in our conception of an object as such) distinguish between ideal being and real being; between being as Species and being as what is individual. The conceptual un two essentially different sub-species according as we affirm or deny properties of individuals, or affirm or deny general dete does not, however, do away with a supreme unity in the concept of an object, nor with the correlated concept of a categorial something (a predicate) pertains or does not pertain to an object (a subject), and the sense of this most universal pertinence, also determines the most universal sense of being, or of an object, as such; exactly as the more special sense of generic pred determines (or presupposes) the sense of an ideal object." (p. 353)

This point is carried over to Ideas I and elsewhere where object, in the sense of an entity or being, is "defined as anything w (categorical, affirmative) statement" (subsection 22), and where the view that ideal, "non-temporal," beings such as the num branded as "an absurdity, an offence against the perfectly clear meaning of arithmetical speech which can at any time be per theories concerning it. If concepts are mental constructs, then such things as pure numbers are no concepts. But if they are c constructs." (Ideas I, p. 90) There can be no doubt whatsoever that Husserl would still make this claim if we were to replace of transcendental historicity." The being of ideal, non-temporal, objects has essentially nothing to do with being made or de presupposed in all temporal making and development.

It was this view of ideal being as simply a subject of appropriate predicates, also provided by Lotze, that opened the way to elsewhere10 called the "Paradox of Logical Psychologism"--the oddity that the laws of logic govern mental events in certain about mental events. This resolution was achieved through the integration of the Bolzanian concepts and propositions "an si tells us in his 1903 review of a book by Palagyi, "concepts and propositions merely have the ideal being or validity of gener things...of temporal particulars" 11, a point repeated in chapter II of Ideas I.

This same point is strongly made in subsection 32 of the first "Logical Investigation": "Meanings constitute, we may say fur 'universal objects'. They are not for that reason objects which, though existing nowhere in the world, have being in a or in a hypostatization would be absurd. If one has accustomed oneself to understand by 'being' only real being, and by 'objects' on objects and of their being may seem basically wrong; no offence will, however, be given to one who has first used such talk judgments, such in fact as concern numbers, propositions, geometrical forms, etc., and who now asks whether he is not evid affix the label 'genuinely existent object' to the correlate of his judgment's validity, to what it judges about. In sober truth, th speaking, seven objects precisely as the seven sages are: the principle of the parallelogram of forces is as much a single obj

It must be emphasized that the view asserted here is no mere in rebus or post rem doctrine of universals. To deny that unive their instances--which would be to treat them as peculiar sorts of individuals or realities, and thus to commit a "metaphysica "Platonic hypostatization" (Ideas I, subsection 22 [p. 88])--is not at all to hold that they exist only (or at all) in their instance instances in the appropriate fashion. Nor is it to say that they in any way depend, for their being or being known, upon their open as a possibility. It is simply to point out as irrelevant certain problems about how universals relate to their instances or on 'distance'. To be, entities do not, in general, have to be some where.

Accordingly, the inference repeatedly drawn by Derrida (OG 75 and elsewhere) that, for Husserl, ideal objects must be crea they do not "descend from heaven" (from a ) is just an astonishing faux pas. Like certain other of his claims, e.g. that the be "from the outset, to be an object [etre-objet] for a pure consciousness" (OG 27; cf. SP 53 & 76), or that "the ideal is always Idea in the Kantian sense" (SP 100), it is simply never brought over against Husserl's explicit arguments and denials (all of

case, and subsection 32 of the Ist "Investigation," in the latter). Perhaps what operates here in order to, supposedly, make su image of Husserl the chameleon, whose last and therefore (?) genuine position was that of a quasi-Hegelian historicist; or p "deconstructed" to make it say the exact opposite of what it explicitly says.

Concepts and propositions--and significations (which are but concepts and propositions expressed in language)--are simply "Logical Investigation," subsection 33) They are no more created or developed by thought or language than are other univer independence from time that marks ideal being, as noted. There are many 'meanings' (concepts, propositions) which never f language. "We cannot therefore say that all ideal unities of this sort are expressed meanings. Wherever a new concept is for realized that was previously unrealized. As numbers--in the ideal sense that arithmetic presupposes--neither spring forth nor and as the endless number-series thus consists in an objectively fixed set of general objects, sharply delimited by an ideal la take away from, so it is with the ideal unities of pure logic: the concepts, propositions, truths, and hence the "meanings," wh are an ideally closed set of general objects, to which being thought or being expressed are alike contingent. There are theref common, relational sense, are merely possible ones, since they are never expressed, and since they can, owing to the limits expressed." (Ist "Logical Investigation," subsection 35, p. 333) But as concepts they really are, have being, and are "possibl

In reflecting upon the viability of the historicist/nominalist interpretation of Husserl, we at least will have to acknowledge th reject his own earlier realist version of ideal being or universals (including significations) and the arguments and analyses u ask ourselves: If Husserl forsook his realism, how did he do it? Could he have overlooked this change? That seems highly u be incredibly dense as a philosopher. But if not, are we to believe him to be the sort of thinker who could, in advancing his ignore the task of refuting the arguments, previously validated at such excruciating lengths, which were earlier taken to refu new view now, allegedly, adopted? Again, it seems highly unlikely. Or did he just pass over the change in silence, hoping it Preposterous idea! But then surely the burden of explaining how Husserl underwent the transition from Realist to Nominali explicitly works it through, would lead one to suspect that it never occurred, as far as he was concerned--no matter what mi If the intentions of an author has no authority over the meaning of a text, the deconstruction of a text has no authority over t

The ideality of cultural entities, as discussed in Formal and Transcendental Logic and elsewhere, is not in the least inconsis though they require a treatment in their own right. They have a certain 'ideality' in virtue of their repeatability as "the same, string quartet, two enunciations of the same English sentence, but they indeed are "real," not ideal, in terms of their tempora Husserl's sense of the real.

****

Having clarified Husserl's views on ideal being, and contrasted them with Derrida's, we now take up the question of whethe based on good reasons or is rational. We will especially focus on his claim that ideal beings are 'products' of historical acts a

First, we note that the reason given by him for saying that ideal objects originate and develop in history through acts of cons conclusion. That reason is that they do not exist elsewhere--in a heavenly place or divine mind. Curiously, it is Derrida, not exists must have a 'place' if it is to exist. Perhaps because of his own emphasis on "presence." Not there, so only here. That (here or there) is not a requirement for existence if Husserl is correct. He clearly saw that existence does not require a repos unless, of course, the existent in question--e.g. a horse--is of a specific sort that does so. This is one of his most basic insigh Lotze, was an epoch-making event in his mental history. We have commented on this above and elsewhere.

Further, although I cannot find any explicitly stated argument, as we have in the case just cited, I am sure that Derrida consi necessary in order to account for the historical development of scientific theories and techniques, as well as of other cultura philosophical nonsense of a purely empirical history and the impotence of an ahistorical rationalism..." (OG 51) The latter i objects and concepts which, I maintain, Husserl held to the end. Derrida's view seems to be that if ideal objects do not origi "history" in his special non-fact sense, they cannot be active agents in history, and we are left only with logical deduction or illuminate historical--therefore human--process and reality. Such alone cannot illuminate history--especially as sense histor originate in history and be transformed through history--a line of thought that we certainly find in earlier thinkers such as M

But this line of thought seems to depend upon the same type of assumption as the previous one. Namely, that the 'effects' or processes, including the conscious ones, depend upon those objects not existing 'apart' from the processes, meaning indepen above, however, location is irrelevant to ideal objects or universals on the Husserlian (and I think correct) alternative, both a

Proximity is relevant only to the efficaciousness of particulars; and to transfer such a condition to ideal objects is what Huss "perverse 'Platonic hypostatization'," without in any sense surrendering his realism.

On Husserl's view, the terms and subjects of logical relations and predicates--concepts and propositions--are dynamic when acts (and hence in history), under the form of motivation, which he described as "the fundamental law-form in the mental li motivation reaches far beyond logical relations, on the one hand, and beyond causation on the other. It is in terms of motiva and components of consciousness actualize a coherent and developmental "sense history" such as we see discussed in Husse Motivation, in its manifold specific manifestations in consciousness and in history, provides the "third way" rightly insisted others, without in the least supporting the nominalist/historicist interpretation of ideal objects which Derrida maintains.

Perhaps there are other reasons which Derrida gives for his view of ideal objects, but I have been unable to find them. His m easy to identify arguments he may be giving for his views.

*****

On the other hand I think there are some substantial reasons for thinking that his view of ideal beings is false. One must me arguments stated and explained to exasperating lengths in Husserl's IInd "Logical Investigation," especially in Chapter One them, not examine them in detail, as I have done elsewhere. 12 There is an argument from predication, one from similarity, o and one from the unity of classes or extensions of concepts. Only the one from mental acts is peculiar to Husserl, so far as I and criticized by many people throughout the history of philosophy. Husserl was convinced that each of the four was suffici ideal beings.

Now these arguments must all be wrong if Derrida's view of ideal being or universals is to be right. Yet he does not even at due to his assuming that Husserl himself "later" saw them to be wrong and deserted realism. Or possibly he assumes that all somehow useless because based on logocentric pressuppositions, which are false, about the nature of being itself. There is n disagrees with Husserl (and all logocentricists) about the nature of being itself, what it is to be; and this disagreement well m that they could never meet on the field of argument to settle questions of existence or of its independence or dependence up transcendental or otherwise. Reasoning for and against Derrida's view of ideal being would then seem to be irrelevant, and s rationality.

Still, I think that this is not the end of the question as to the rationality of Derrida's view of ideal objects. He does make stat And in those statements there are certain claims made which, I suspect, are inherently incoherent if not incompatible. If that sense in which his view cannot be regarded as rational. Mystical, perhaps, but not rational.

Derrida's central claim, with regard to ideal objects, is that they are made, or brought about. Moreover, that they are brough consciousness, though, to be sure, acts which presuppose activity on the part of transcendental historical subjectivity--whate details. For every ideal object, there is a point in cosmic time when it does not exist, and then at some later point it does exi specific acts of specific persons, both acts and persons formed somehow by transcendental subjectivity--which, I gather, its It also seems that, on Derrida's view, some ideal objects (perhaps all will) come to a point where they cease to exist, even if even by now many ideal objects have gone out of existence, but I am unable to determine under what precise conditions, ac only a matter of a certain segment of language disappearing; and this, we know, certainly does happen.

(He holds that the phenomenological and eidetic reductions are impossible because essences--including those of mental acts worldly reality of language.13 It would seem that a universe with no languages would be a universe with no ideal beings, an the familiar scientific story, then, the universe for most of its 'history' (but we can't say that) was one with no kinds of thing scientific theory of such a world, or what it would mean for anything to happen in it, is surely very puzzling.)

But whatever we are to make of such things, I think it is entirely accurate and fair to say that Derrida gives us no informatio 'interchange' between transcendental subjectivity, the prior state of affairs, the individual person, that person's act, and the id through the progression toward the written language of science) produced or 'made' as it emerges into history.

Are we to think of the object--say triangularity or vanilla or the proposition that 4 is an even number--as being produced ex of acts? Exactly how, then, could an act of consciousness, being what it is, possibly produce ex nihilo vanilla or triangularit

so, but how could it produce the entire range, infinite no doubt, of ideal objects, while yet remaining the specific sort of thin sequence of such acts? The supposition that it could do this is surely very close to rationally incoherent, especially when on itself, as well as the individual subject, bears the essential marks of presence and therefore ideality?

I believe that the difficulty is partly hid by Derrida's failure or unwillingness to provide any detailed account of the contents consciousness. It is at this point that his work most radically departs from phenomenology as Husserl so carefully developed signified, voice, differance and presence do not an analysis of the act of consciousness or language make. Rather, when that that, instead of description of how things are, we are receiving von oben the results of an apriori ontological framework. Th if I am told that "the living presence" and its "movement" cannot be analyzed in terms of attributes. We are still left with the or account of the act of consciousness, and hence not of how it could produce ex nihilo--even with the help of transcendenta a mere deus ex machina--the ideal objects which there have been, are and will be.

The difficulties are hardly less severe if we take the act of consciousness (with transcendental historical aid) to make ideal o of Derrida's language suggests that this is the way it happens. (See point #9 above)

If the process of 'production' is interpreted merely as one of disregarding associated objects or entities, then the point of mak But if the process really is one of 'carving out' or extracting or 'leaving out' (as suggested by the passage under #9), then tha the 'carving' action, while it simultaneously raises the question of how the act of consciousness or language, being what it is mean? How could the act (or history) produce vanilla or triangularity, being what they are, from pre-conceptualized being -

Now it seems to me that Derrida's response to all of this really comes down to saying that what goes on between language, t objects is ineffable: ineffable because the living present can't be presented in concepts and propositions, names and predicat insist, as he surely does, that the living present is of such a nature that it, and its manifestations in history and consciousness ineffable. Natures surely are not ineffable.

Derrida's fundamental ontology is heir to the problems of Bergson's fundamental ontology, which it so largely replicates. Be (understood as indistinguishable from qualities and relations) as derivative from the movement of the elan vital. But 'movem Derrida's differance, is always in a specific 'direction'. Its direction can only be understood in terms of the qualities and rela after. This shows, I believe, the fundamental incoherence of any effort to locate "force" prior to signification (to meaning or

So I, tentatively, conclude that Derrida's view of ideal objects is not rationally defensible, and this in the three-fold sense th that the arguments against it (Husserl's) are conclusive, and that its main thesis ('production' of ideal beings by conscious ac Whether it has some importance other than as a rational position, I do not contest.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

In his "Preface" to the English edition of Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, translated by David B. Allison, University Press, 1973), p. xxviii. Return to text. "SP" refers to Speech and Phenomena (see note # 1), and "OG" to the English edition of J. Derrida, Edmund Husse Introduction, translated by John P. Leavey, Jr., (Stonybrook, NY: Nicolas Hays, Ltd, 1978). Return to text. "WD" refers to the English version of J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, (Chicago: Univ
text. text. text.

"MP" refers to the English edition of J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, translated by Alan Bass, (Chicago: Univer

"G" refers to the English edition of J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri C. Spivak, (Baltimore: The

Page references to Ideas I are to the Boyce Gibson translation, (London: George Allen & Unwin LTD, 1931) Retur See, for example, his Microcosmus, Part IX, chapter 1, subsection #3. Return to text. On these issues see Martin Schwab's excellent paper, "The Rejection of Origin: Derrida's Interpretation of Husserl
text.

Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, two volumes, translation by J. N. Findlay, (New York: Humanities Press, edition. Return to text.

10. My "The Paradox of Logical Psychologism: Husserl's Way Out," American Philosophical Quarterly, IX, #1 (Janua the Objectivity of Knowledge, (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984), pp. 143-166. Return to text. 11. Edmund Husserl, Aufsaetze und Rezensionen (1890-1910), "Husserliana" volume XXII, (The Hague: Martinus Ni 12. See pp. 186-193 of my Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge. Return to text. 13. OG 66ff. Return to text.