The traditional emphasis on speech as a means of transmitting philosophical ideas has fooled us all, Derrida believes, into thinking that we have immediate access to meaning. We think that meaning is about “presence”—when we speak with another person, we imagine that they make their thoughts “present” for us, and that we are doing the same for them. If there is any confusion, we ask the other person to clarify. And if there are any puzzles, or aporias, we either ask for clarification, or these simply slide past us without our noticing. This leads us to think that meaning in general is about presence—to think, for example, that the real meaning of “cat” can be found in the presence of a cat on my lap.
But when we deal with a written text, we are freed from this naïve belief in presence. Without the author there to make their excuses and explain for us, we start to notice the complexities and the puzzles and the impasses. All of a sudden, language begins to look a little more complicated.
"We think only in signs."
Jacques Derrida
Questioning meaning
When Derrida says that there is nothing outside of the text, he does not mean that all that matters is the world of books, that somehow the world “of flesh and bone” does not matter. Nor is he trying to play down the importance of any social concerns that might lie behind the text. So what exactly is he saying?
First, Derrida is suggesting that if we take seriously the idea that meaning is a matter of différance, of differing and of deferring, then if we want to engage with the question of how we ought think about the world, we must always keep alive to the fact that meaning is never as straightforward as we think it is, and that this meaning is always open to being examined by deconstruction.
Second, Derrida is suggesting that in our thinking, our writing, and our speaking, we are always implicated in all manner of political, historical, and ethical questions that we may not even recognize or acknowledge. For this reason, some philosophers have suggested that deconstruction is essentially an ethical practice. In reading a text deconstructively, we call into question the claims that it is making, and we open up difficult ethical issues that may have remained hidden. Certainly in his later life, Derrida turned his attention to some of the very real ethical puzzles and contradictions that are raised by ideas such as “hospitality” and “forgiveness.”
Derrida’s own thesis that there is nothing outside of the text is open to be analyzed using his own deconstructive methods. Even the idea as explained in this book is subject to différance.
Derrida registered his opposition to the Vietnam War in a lecture given in the US in 1968. His involvement in numerous political issues and debates informed much of his later work.
Critics of Derrida
Given that Derrida’s idea is based on the notion that meaning can never be completely present in the text, it is perhaps not surprising that Derrida’s work can often be difficult. Michel Foucault, one of Derrida’s contemporaries, attacked Derrida’s thinking for being wilfully obscure; he protested that often it was impossible to say exactly what Derrida’s thesis actually was. The latter’s response to this, perhaps, might be to say that the idea of having a thesis is itself based on the idea of “presence” that he is attempting to call into question. This may seem like dodging the issue; but if we take Derrida’s idea seriously, then we have to admit that the idea that there is nothing outside of the text is itself not outside of the text. To take this idea seriously, then, is to treat it sceptically, to deconstruct it, and to explore the puzzles, impasses, and contradictions that—according to Derrida himself—lurk within it.
"I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult."
Jacques Derrida
JACQUES DERRIDA
Jacques Derrida was born to Jewish parents in the then French colony of Algeria. He was interested in philosophy from an early age, but also nurtured dreams of becoming a professional soccer player. Eventually it was philosophy that won out and, in 1951, he entered the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There he formed a friendship with Louis Althusser, also of Algerian origin, who, like Derrida, went on to become one of the most prominent thinkers of his day.
The publication in 1967 of Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena sealed Derrida’s international reputation. A regular visiting lecturer at a number of European and American universities, he took up the post of Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, in 1986. His later work increasingly focused on issues of ethics, partly due to the influence of Emmanuel Levinas.
Key works
1967 Of Grammatology
1967 Writing and Difference
1967 Speech and Phenomena
1994 The Politics of Friendship
See also: Plato • Charles Sanders Peirce • Ferdinand de Saussure • Emmanuel Levinas • Louis Althusser • René Girard • Michel Foucault
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Pragmatism
BEFORE
5th century BCE Socrates disputes the nature of justice, goodness, and other concepts with the citizens of Athens.
4th century BCE Aristotle writes a treatise on the nature of the soul.
1878 Charles Sanders Peirce coins the term “pragmatism.”
1956 American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars publishes Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, calling into question the “myth of the given.”
AFTER
1994 South-African-born philosopher John McDowell publishes Mind and World, a book strongly influenced by Rorty’s work.
The soul is a curious thing. Even if we cannot say much about our souls or describe what a soul is like, many of us nonetheless hold firmly to the belief that, somewhere deep down, we each have such a thing. Not only this, we might claim that this thing is the fundamental self (“me”) and, at the same time, is somehow connected directly with the truth or reality.
The tendency to picture ourselves as possessing a kind of “double”—a soul or a deep self that “uses Reality’s own language”—is explored by American philosopher Richard Rorty in the introduction to his book, The Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). Rorty argues that, to the extent that we have such a thing at all, a soul is a human invention; it is something that we have put there ourselves.
Knowledge as a mirror
Rorty was a philosopher who worked within the American tradition of pragmatism. In considering a statement, most philosophical traditions ask “is this true?”, in the sense of: “does this correctly represent the way things are?.” But pragmatists consider statements in quite a different way, asking instead: “what are the practical implications of accepting this as true?”
Rorty’s first major book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979, was an attempt to argue against the idea that knowledge is a matter of correctly representing the world, like some kind of mental mirror. Rorty argues that this view of knowledge cannot be upheld, for two reasons. First, we assume that our experience of the world is directly “given” to us—we assume that what we experience is the raw data of how the world is. Second, we assume that once this raw data has been collected, our reason (or some other faculty of mind) then starts to work on it, reconstructing how this knowledge fits together as a whole, and mirroring what is in the world.
Rorty follows the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in claiming that the idea of experience as “given” is a myth. We cannot ever access anything like raw data—it is not possible for us to experience a dog, for instance, outside of thought or language. We o
nly become aware of something through conceptualizing it, and our concepts are learned through language. Our perceptions are therefore inextricably tangled up with the habitual ways that we use language to divide up the world.
Rorty suggests that knowledge is not so much a way of mirroring nature as “a matter of conversation and social practice.” When we decide what counts as knowledge, our judgement rests not on how strongly a “fact” correlates to the world, so much as whether it is something “that society lets us say.” What we can and cannot count as knowledge is therefore limited by the social contexts that we live in, by our histories, and by what those around us will allow us to claim. “Truth,” said Rorty, “is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying.”
"Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative."
Richard Rorty
Some theories of knowledge claim that we gain knowledge by processing “raw data” like a camera captures light, but Rorty says our perceptions are tangled up with our beliefs, which we impose on things in the world.
Reasons for judgement
But does truth really reduce down to a matter of what we can get away with? Rorty is aware that there are some disturbing implications here, especially in questions of ethics. Imagine, for instance, that I kidnap my neighbor’s pet hamster and subject it to all manner of cruel tortures, simply for the fun of hearing it squeak. We might all agree that doing such a thing to the poor hamster (or, for that matter, doing such a thing to my neighbor) is a morally blameable act. We might claim that there is something absolutely and fundamentally wrong about doing such a thing to another living being; and we might all agree that we ought not let other people get away with such things.
But when we look at the reasons that we give for saying that this is a morally blameable act, things become interesting. For example, imagine that you are asked by a particularly awkward moral philosopher why it is wrong to treat hamsters (or horses, or humans) in this way. At first you might suggest all manner of reasons. But philosophy being what it is, and moral philosophers being the kinds of beings they are, you might find that for every reason you can think of, your philosopher friend has a counter-reason or leads you into some kind of contradiction.
This is, in fact, precisely what the philosopher Socrates did in ancient Athens. Socrates wanted to find out what concepts such as “goodness” and “justice” really were, so he questioned people who used these concepts, to find out whether they really knew what these things were. As the dialogues of Plato show, most of the people Socrates talked to were surprisingly unclear about what it was they were actually talking about, despite their earlier conviction that they fully grasped the relevant concepts. In the same way, after an hour or two of being interrogated by a modern-day Socrates about how to treat hamsters, you might blurt out in frustration the following sentence: “But I just know, in my heart of hearts, that it is wrong!”
Using children as soldiers may seem intrinsically wrong, but Rorty says there are no ethical absolutes. Ethics is a matter of doing our best, in solidarity with others, to realize a better world.
"What sort of a world can we prepare for our great-grandchildren?"
Richard Rorty
My heart of hearts
We say or think this kind of thing relatively frequently, but it is not immediately clear what exactly we mean. To examine the idea more closely, we can break it down into three parts. First, it seems that when we say “I know, in my heart of hearts, that it is wrong”, we are speaking as if there is something out there in the world that is “wrongness”, and that this thing is knowable. Or, as some philosophers put it, we are speaking as if there is an essence of “wrongness” to which this particular instance of wrongness corresponds.
Second, by saying that we just “know” in our heart of hearts, we imply that this mysterious entity—our “heart of hearts”—is a thing that, for reasons unknown, has a particular grasp of truth.
Third, we seem to be speaking as if there is a straightforward relationship between our “heart of hearts” and this “wrongness” that lies out there in the world, such that if we know something in our heart of hearts, we can have access to an absolutely certain kind of knowledge. In other words, this is just another version of the idea that knowledge is a way of mirroring the world. And this, Rorty believes, is unacceptable.
"If we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else."
Richard Rorty
A world without absolutes
In order for his beliefs to be consistent, Rorty has to give up on the idea of fundamental moral truths. There can be no absolute right or wrong if knowledge is “what society lets us say.” Rorty recognizes that this is a difficult thing to accept. But is it necessary to believe that on doing something morally wrong you are betraying something deep within you? Must you believe that there is “some truth about life, or some absolute moral law, that you are violating” in order to maintain even a shred of human decency? Rorty thinks not. He maintains that we are finite beings, whose existence is limited to a short time on Earth, and none of us have a hotline to some deeper, more fundamental moral truth. However, this does not imply that the problems of life have either gone away or ceased to matter. These problems are still with us, and in the absence of absolute moral laws we are thrown back upon our own resources. We are left, Rorty writes, with “our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark.” There is no absolute sense of rightness and wrongness to be discovered. So we simply have to hold on to our hopes and loyalties, and continue to participate in involved conversations in which we talk about these difficult issues.
Perhaps, Rorty is saying, these things are enough: the humility that comes from recognizing that there is no absolute standard of truth; the solidarity we have with others; and our hopes that we may be able to contribute to, and to bequeath to those who come after us, a world that is worth living in.
We do not need to believe in an absolute moral law in order to live as ethical beings. Conversation, social hope, and solidarity with others allow us to form a working definition of “the good.”
RICHARD RORTY
Richard Rorty was born in New York, USA in 1931. His parents were political activists, and Rorty describes his early years as being spent reading about Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary. He said that he knew by the age of 12 that “the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice.” He began attending the University of Chicago early, at the age of 15, going on to take a PhD at Yale in 1956. He was then drafted into the army for two years, before becoming a professor. He wrote his most important book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, while professor of philosophy at Princeton. He wrote widely on philosophy, literature, and politics and, unusually for a 20th-century philosopher, drew on both the so-called analytic and the continental traditions. Rorty died of cancer aged 75.
Key works
1979 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
1998 Achieving Our Country
1999 Philosophy and Social Hope
See also: Socrates • Aristotle • Charles Sanders Peirce • William James • John Dewey • Jürgen Habermas
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Political philosophy
APPROACH
Feminism
BEFORE
1792 Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman first initiates serious debate about the place of women in society.
1890s Austrian
psychologist Sigmund Freud establishes his psychoanalytic method, which will greatly influence Irigaray’s work.
1949 Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex explores the implications of sexual difference.
AFTER
1993 Luce Irigaray turns to non-Western modes of thought about sexual difference in An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
The Belgian philosopher and analyst Luce Irigaray is concerned above all else with the idea of sexual difference. A former student of Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalyst who famously explored the linguistic structure of the unconscious, Irigaray claims that all language is essentially masculine in nature.
In Sex and Genealogies (1993) she writes: “Everywhere, in everything, men’s speech, men’s values, dreams, and desires are law.” Irigaray’s feminist work can be seen as a struggle to find authentically female ways of speaking and desiring that are free from male-centeredness.
"One must assume the feminine role deliberately."
Luce Irigaray
Wisdom and desire
To address this problem, Irigaray suggests that all thinking—even the most apparently sober and objective-sounding philosophy, with its talk of wisdom, certainty, rectitude, and moderation—is underpinned by desire. In failing to acknowledge the desire that underpins it, traditional male-centered philosophy has also failed to acknowledge that beneath its apparent rationality simmer all manner of irrational impulses.
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