References
- Jacques Derrida, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990 (written in 1953–4); Eng. trans. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, by M. Hobson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003; Jacques Derrida, “Introduction.” In Edmund Husserl, L'origine de la géométrie, traduction et introduction par Jacques Derrida. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1962] 1974; Eng. trans. Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, by J. Leavey. Stony Brook: Nicolas Hayes. Henceforth as IOG, followed by the page number in the text; Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967; Eng. trans. Speech and Phenomena. And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, by D. Allison and N. Garver. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Henceforth as SP, followed by the page number in the text.
- See, for example, the collection of essays “Derrida's Interpretation of Husserl” in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. XXXII, Supplement, ed. L. Lawlor (1993). For a general, exhaustive, and sympathetic presentation of Derrida's critique of Husserl, see Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl. The Basic Problem of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
- Among many others, see Curtis Bowman, “Speech and Phenomena on Expression and Indication: Derrida's Dual Critique of Husserl's Demand for Apodictic Evidence and the Phenomenological Reduction.” International Studies on Philosophy 31 n.4 (1999), 1–21; Alan White, “Reconstructing Husserl: A Critical Response to Derrida's Speech and Phenomenon.” Husserl Studies 4, n.1 (1987) 45–62.
- Among many others, see Rudolf Bernet, “Derrida and His Master's Voice”, in W.R. McKenna and J.C. Evans (eds.), Derrida and Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995, 1–21; Rudolf Bernet, “On Derrida's Introduction to Husserl's ‘Origin of Geometry’”, in Hugh Silverman (Ed.), Derrida and Deconstruction. New York: Routledge, 1989, 139–153; Burt Hopkins, “Husserl and Derrida on the ‘Origin of Geometry’”, in McKenna and J.C. Evans, Derrida and Phenomenology 61–93; Leonard Lawlor, “The Legacy of Husserl's ‘Ursprung der Geometrie’: The Limits of Phenomenology in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida.” In Ted Toadvine and Lester Embree, Merleau-Ponty's Reading of Husserl. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, 201–223; Dallas Willard, “Is Derrida's View of Ideal Being Rationally Defensible?” McKenna and J.C. Evans, Derrida and Phenomenology, 23–41.
- See, among others, Donn Welton, The Other Husserl. The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
- Edmund Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry.“ In Husserl. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Henceforth as OG, followed by the page number in the text.
- As Derrida formulates it, “if, physically or not, [the expressive stratum] proffers a constituted sense, it is essentially re-productive, that is unproductive” (Jacques Derrida, “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language.” In Derrida, Speech and Phenomena. And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, 115. Derrida's emphasis).
- Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. A. Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 19.
- Burt Hopkins, “Husserl and Derrida on the ‘Origin of Geometry,’“ 84.
- Traditionally, and Derrida sees Husserl as part of that tradition, soliloquy is the voice of consciousness where there is no mediation and where I communicate directly with myself. As Derrida explains in Of Grammatology, “Voice produces a signifier that does not seem to fall in the world, outside the ideality of the signified, but remains sheltered, at the very moment it reaches the audio-phonic system of the other, in the pure interiority of self- affection…Voice and voice consciousness, i.e., consciousness as such as presence to oneself—are the phenomenon of a lived self-affection as a suppression of différance. This phenomenon, this presumed suppression of différance, this lived reduction of the opacity of the signifier are the origin of what we call presence. Is present what is not submitted to the process of difference?” (Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967, 236. My translation).
- Rudolf Bernet summarizes Derrida's critique as follows: “by submitting itself to a transindividual code the voice loses its self-mastery and can only be recognized through the detour through anonymity” (Rudolf Bernet, “Derrida and His master's Voice” p. 18). Bernet concludes that “there is neither immediate consciousness of itself which is fully intuitive and purely internal, nor an unchanging presence of an ideal object which would remain identically the same throughout its multiple repetitions and representations” (18–9).
- Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy. trans. A. Bass. Chicago: The University Press of Chicago, 12.
- Derrida, Margins 15.
- Derrida, Margins 16.
- Derrida, “‘Genèse et structure’ et la phénomè;nologie.“ In Derrida, L'écriture et la différence. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967, 235.
- Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 105–6.
- Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 106. For a detailed treatment of the notion of species of acts, see Donn Welton, The Other Husserl, 64ff. This leads Husserl to draw two further conclusions. Because they are species and thus not limited by the contingent circumstances of the performance of the act, they are also not bound to signs. “In itself there is no necessary connection between the ideal unities, which factually function as meanings, and the signs to which they are bound, that is to say, through which these meanings are realized in the human mind. We can thus not affirm that all ideal unities of this sort are expressive meanings. Each case of new conceptual formation shows us how a meaning comes to be realized which before had never been realized” (Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen 109–10). In addition, there is the possibility for some meanings to be such without being instantiated. “There are thus innumerous meanings which in the habitual relative sense of the word are purely possible meanings, whereas they have never come to expression and, by virtue of the limits of the human cognitive capacities can never come to expression” (Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen 109–10). This latter claim seems to go against what is stated in the Fifth Logical Investigation, where Husserl qualifies the species as the matter of acts and thus as a component of acts. We cannot strictly speaking consider a meaning that could not be instantiated, unless we imagine a possible future consciousness capable of such; for example, if we were to move to another planet where different laws of physics apply. And the talk of a meaning that in principle cannot be instantiated can only be “meaningful” if we imagine superhumans endowed with an intelligence far superior to ours, while at the same time imagining our relation to these superhumans in one single community.
- Peter Simons, “Meaning and Language.“ In Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith, The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 113. He continues: “Husserl thus effects a remarkable economy in the ontology of abstract meaning by employing the relation of instantiation or exemplification, which the realist about universals needs anyway, and at the same time tying meaning internally to the mental, a feat which had eluded his Platonist forebears Bolzano and Frege. At the same time Husserl manages to avoid a psychologistic and subjectivistic account of meaning, a feat which had eluded his empiricist forebears” (113).
- Jocelyn Benoist takes another angle: he claims that “in fact and properly speaking there is nothing other than acts; meaning so to speak ‘does not exist.’ At best can we conceive a manner of distributing acts in classes of acts, and there lies the possibility of thinking something as the identity of ‘the’ meaning, as we say” (Jocelyn Benoist, “L'identité d'un sens: Husserl, des espèces à la grammaire.” In Jocelyn Benoist, Robert Brisart, and Jacques English (eds.), Liminaires phénoménologiques. Recherches sur le développement de la théorie de la signification de Husserl. Bruxelles: Publications des Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1998, 231. My translation).
- Maurita Harney, Intentionality, Sense and the Mind. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984, 162.
- Donn Welton, The Other Husserl, 265.
- Husserl, Transzendentaler Idealismus. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1921). Husserliana 36. Hrsg. R. Rollinger and R. Sowa. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003, 33. Consciousness does not have to be an actual one, but only a possible one: “Even when they do not refer back to a real consciousness, general objects and ideas refer to a possible consciousness and this possibility is finally itself only thinkable in relation to an actual consciousness” (Husserl, Transzendentaler Idealismus, 72).
- Derrida, “Introduction“ 178.
- Derrida formulates Husserl's problem as follows: “Either [this genesis] is an empirical operation that founds ideal significations, and these are then bereft of objectivity and rigor, or else the ideal objectivities are a priori possible and the sense or the necessity of their historical becoming is no longer understood. Because he did not start from an a priori that was ontological rather than phenomenological (a [phenomenological one] which at the end becomes formal), because he did no unite synthetically and dialectically being and time…Husserl is obliged to bring together in confusion an empiricism and a metaphysics, the two ghosts of phenomenology” (The Problem of Genesis 169).
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours sur L'origine de la géometrie de Husserl. Renaud Barbaras. (ed.) Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998, 27; Eng. trans. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. L. Lawlor and B. Bergo Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 24 (trans. modified).
- Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours sur L'origine de la géométrie de Husserl, 29; Eng. trans. 25 (transd. modified).
- ibid, 53; Eng. trans. 44 (trans. modified).
- ibid, 57; Eng. trans. 47 (trans. modified).
- Interestingly, Derrida mentions an analogous dangerous alternative: “to distinguish into an absolute opposition the phenomenological advent of objectivity and the historical event of its appearance; starting from this separation, there is an oscillation again between two types of reduction of genesis to a pure accident stripped of all phenomenological meaning: at some points, under the pretext that objectivity presupposes freedom in relation to historical determination, and thinking thus to be respectful of its phenomenological signification, its advent is held to be the only essential thing; at other points, considering that this liberty is nothing without the historical act of liberation that produced it and produces it at each instant, and that objectivity and freedom are ‘constituted’ in and through the history of nature, the event is made into the only effective reality. In both cases, is there not infidelity to the most authentic intention of Husserl's phenomenology?” (The Problem of Genesis, xxvii).
- Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. Hrsg. P. Janssen. Husserliana 17. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974, 359. This text was translated as the first part of Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Trans. A. Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001, 12 (translation modified).
- Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik 359; Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis 12.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen. Hrsg. E. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, 1953, 102.
- Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik 360; Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis 14.
- Husserl, ibid., 363; Eng. 17.
- Husserl, ibid., 366–7; Eng. 23.
- Husserl, ibid., 358; Eng. 10.
- “Language possesses the objectivity of objectlike formations, of the so-called spiritual or cultural world and not that of mere physical nature. As an objective, spiritual formation, language has the same features as other spiritual formations. In this way we distinguish from the thousand reproductions of an engraving, the engraving itself, and this engraving, that is, the engraved image itself, is intuitively read-off of every reproduction, and is given in every one of them in the same way as identically ideal. Likewise, when we speak of the Kreutzer sonata in distinction to any of its arbitrary reproductions. Even if the sonata itself consists of sounds, it is an ideal unity, and its sounds are no less an ideal unity; they are not for instance physicalistic sounds or even the sounds of external, acoustic perception” (Husserl, ibid., 359; Eng. 11).
- Edmund Husserl, ibid.,. 361; Eng. 15.
- In a diachronic perspective or in intercultural encounters Derrida's perspective is more valid. As Foucault showed in The Order of Things, there may be a certain manner of ordering things that people as a community take for granted and do not even perceive, but that outside observers—like anthropologists—or historians—in the case of Foucault—can point to. The talk of “indication”—this particular scientific method of the 17th century “indicates” the manner in which this epoch ordered things—would then be legitimate. But, to repeat, what is indicated could not be qualified as an intentional state because people of that epoch could not entertain those intentional states consciously.
- In a footnote Husserl writes: “At first, of course, it is a matter of a firm direction of the will, which the scientist establishes in himself, aimed at the certain capacity for reactivation. If the goal of reactivatability can be only relatively fulfilled, then the claim which stems from the consciousness of being able to acquire something also has its relativity; and this relativity also makes itself noticeable and driven out. Ultimately, objective, absolutely firm knowledge of truth is an infinite idea” (OG 362–3).
- Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften I. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1955, 55.