References
- Leonard Lawlor, “Double Necessity: Comments for the Husserl Circle, June 12, 2003“ [cited hereafter as DN], p. 1.
- Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002 [hereafter cited as DH], p. 2.
- Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967 [hereafter cited as SZ], p. 25.
- Jacques Derrida, “Difference” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, tr. David Allison, Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973, [hereafter cited as VP], p. 139.
- This is something that I attempt to do in, among other works, Postfoundational Phenomenology, University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2001, pp. 23–33, 189–198.
- Prof. Lawlor follows Derrida in asserting that “the early Heidegger” (the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit), remains caught (pris) in onto-theology.” This is because Heidegger's “style of reading”—with its emphasis on disclosure or unveiling—“seems to make Heidegger's fundamental ontology again be dependent on or come after phenomenological consciousness and presence: the truth of being hidden in Dasein's veils must be brought out, exposed, put in the light, held near, made present” (DH, p. 39). This style affects the later Heidegger. “Heidegger's entire thought of the truth of being—both early and later—concerns itself with reducing the ontological difference; to have being close by is, for Heidegger, what is proper to man.” Noting Heidegger's focus on the relation of the senses of “man” and “being,” Prof. Lawlor thus concludes: “Not only does Heidegger's thought of the truth of being seem to depend on onto-theology—it belongs to onto-theology without belonging to it—it also seems again to depend on phenomenology, which reduces all things down to their sense.” (DH, p. 40).
- Here, I follow Prof. Lawlor's definition: “Presence, for Derrida, consists in (a) the distance of what is over and against (object and form, what is iterable), what we could call “objective presence,” (b) the proximity of the self to itself in its acts (subject and intuition or content), what we could call “subjective presence,” and then (c) the unification of these two species of presence, that is, presence and self-presence, in the present (in the “form of the living present,” which, Derrida will explain, mediates itself through the voice)” (DH, p. 2).
- Frege uses this example to show that the attributes of things falling under an idea cannot be predicated of the idea itself. Frege makes this point to argue against Hilbert that mathematics is not creative. The mere act of defining an idea or concept is not sufficient to show that there are, mathematically speaking, objects corresponding to such a definition. Since the concept itself does not have the properties, to specify a concept is not to create the corresponding objects. As Frege puts this, “Whether such objects exist is not immediately known by means of their definitions…. Neither has the concept defined got this property, nor is a definition a guarantee that the concept is realized” (Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, eds. and trans. P. Geach and Max Black, Oxford, 1970, p.145).
- Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, ed. S. Strasser, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963, p. 118.
- Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, 5th ed., Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1968., II/2, 141.
- As Roman Ingarden, one of Husserl's most brilliant students, observed, this question determines the sense of Husserl's epoché. Engaging in the epoché, I suspend my positing, which includes my belief in its validity, in order to free myself to regard with unprejudiced eyes the phenomena that lead me to this positing. The logical requirement of this suspension is, as Ingarten observes, that of avoiding the fallacy of a petitio principii. One cannot include the validity of a thesis as a part of the evidence brought forward for this validity. If one did, one would commit the petitio—that is, assume what one was trying to evidentially validate (Roman Ingarden, On the Motives which led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism, trans. A. Hannibalsson, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975, p. 12).
- I wish to thank the director of the Husserl Archives, Prof. Rudolf Bernet, for permission to cite from the Nachlaß.
- As Husserl elsewhere puts this: “…the ego which is the counterpart (Gegenüber) to everything is anonymous. It is not its own counterpart. The house is my counterpart, not vice versa. And yet I can turn my attention to myself. But then this counterpart in which the ego comes forward along with everything which was its counterpart is again split. The ego which comes forward as a counterpart and its counterpart [e.g., the house it was perceiving] are both counterparts to me. Forthwith, I—the subject of this new counterpart—am anonymous (Ms. C 2 I, p. 2, Aug. 1931).
- Husserl thus writes: “What is remembered…does not now exist—otherwise it would not be something that has been but something present; and in memory (retention) it is not given as now, otherwise memory (or retention) would precisely not be memory but perception” (Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, ed. R. Boehm, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, Hua X, p. 34.
- As I have stressed elsewhere, both also function in the working of language. Without absence, indicative signs are impossible, without presence, expressive signs are impossible. Even from a strict Husserlian perspective, the “contamination” of language is such that both are required for its functioning. See Mensch, “Derrida-Husserl: Towards a Phenomenology of Language,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Seattle: Noesis Press, 2001, pp. 1–66.
- The lack of contradiction signifies entanglement. As Rudolf Bernet expresses this: “The thought of ‘différance’ contests the philosophy of presence in the name not of absence but of the indissoluble ‘entanglement’ of presence and absence…” (“Derrida and his Master's Voice,” in Derrida and Phenomenology, eds. William McKenna and J. Claude Evans, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995, p. 3).
- In Derrida's words, the difficulty is that we cannot engage in a critique of metaphysics “without the concepts of metaphysics.” “We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history” (“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” A Postmodern Reader, ed. Natoli and Hutcheon, Albany: SUNY, 1993, p. 226). Thus, the problem faced by deconstruction is “the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself.” (p. 228). Derrida's solution is to use the concepts of the tradition, “while…exposing here and there their limits, treating them as tools which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to them….” Rather there is an attempt to separate “method from truth” (p. 231).
- In Derrida's words, “We thus come to posit presence—and, in particular, consciousness, the being-next-to itself of consciousness—…as a ‘determination’ and ‘effect.’ Presence is a determination and effect within a system which is no longer that of presence but that of différance” (“Différance,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays, tr. David Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1973, p. 147).
- (Fr. 123, The Presocratic Philosophers, trans. and ed., G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1966, p. 193).
- (Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1962, p. 149).