If I argued below, like other Heideggerians of late, for looking at Heidegger as a philosopher of truth rather than a philosopher of Being, the same argument applies to who I also argued to be the best reader and developer of Heidegger in the last century, Derrida. Recently I found a remark of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, written on the occasion of Derrida's death, that concisely puts forth this view:
His concern was not the exposure of error but an investigation into how we produce truth.
-From a letter to the New York Times
The locution "how we produce truth" seems to step into the place of what we might expect to be present, given the rhythm of the rest of the line--namely, just "truth," (so the line would run, "was not the exposure of error but an investigation into truth"). But Spivak is getting at something which can easily be misread (especially and primarily in the case of Derrida, but also in the case of Heidegger).
Spivak is not emptying out the simple, classically philosophical term "truth" into the more relativistic formulation "how we produce truth," as if to remain undecided as of yet as to the existence of truth, or even to remain decided against this existence. No. Spivak rightly uses "how we produce truth" because the efforts of Derrida were directed towards showing that truth is already at play in how we produce it. Notice I did not say what is often popularly regarded as the insight of Derrida and other "postmodernists" (even by those postmodernists themselves, most significantly in Lyotard's famous summary of the condition): that truth is how it is produced, that how we produce truth is truth. If anything, this is a Marxist thesis, one that Derrida could be shown to be chiefly at work criticizing throughout Spectres of Marx. No, read correctly, and how I am sure Spivak would like it to be read, the displacement at work in her sentence consolidates a central thesis that lets the work of Derrida show itself as stronger than any relativist postmodernism and, for that matter, than any analytic effort that presumes truth is never found at play in its production. Indeed, this is why Derrida's concern was not the mere "exposure of error:" if this were true, the second, weak reading of this sentence would suffice.
But Derrida investigates the truth already in reserve within its production, in its presencing, and, like Heidegger, therefore attests unremittingly to its existence--indeed, to the point where saying truth "exists" or "has Being" cannot itself get at the real ability for truth to determine our lives and give us freedom (this is in fact the most basic premise of both Heidegger and Derrida). It is not that truth does not exist: it is that saying it exists does not encompass the phenomenon of its existence. The same goes with saying that it is the "highest:" the true is not the most real or actual in the sense of the most in-existence or in-Being, nor is it the existence that, as what is most in-existence or in-Being, determines all other existents or beings. Heidegger coined a term for investigations that hold these conceptions of truth early on, ontotheology, and called for the overcoming or the leap out of of it. And Derrida begins his work with this concept and this task at hand for him. Thus, we shouldn't expect him to be doubting the existence of truth by emptying it out into the process of its production. Rather, like Spivak is saying here, we should be looking at how from the beginning Derrida seeks like Heidegger to find a language other than that of Being and existence to bring the massive impact of truth upon us into our sights--or, put in a better and more expansive way, how he seeks to find a language that can answer to the truth already at work in existence.
All this makes it apparent that Spivak writes that Derrida investigates "how we produce truth" instead of just "truth" because "truth" is an inadequate term for truth after Derrida: the displacement of truth into the possibility of its being in reserve within its production is his legacy, a legacy Spivak understands and seeks to teach us. So, in the end, it is in this sense that we must speak of both Derrida and, in a different way, Heidegger as philosophers of truth. That is, like Spivak, we must speak of them equally (or, even better, evoking a displacement) as philosophers of how we produce of truth.
Friday, September 14, 2007
The Big Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach post, part 4
...Feuerbach begins by analyzing the strengths of the Hegelian perspective in dispelling the otherworldliness of God or Spiritual meaningfulness by having God be the product of a dialectical movement of worldly actions, as we noted just now and earlier. Spirit is in the world (or, rather, is the world) for Hegel, dependent on the actions of beings for its completion: this is an improvement for Feuerbach, who believes that this lends incredible and holy determinateness to God. Indeed, God’s otherworldly guarantee of meaning for the world was detestable for both Hegel and Feuerbach not because they just felt that God should be in the world and not outside it. Rather, they objected to this conception of an otherworldly God based on its specific effect: this view left God and meaning ultimately indeterminate. God and meaningfulness was only the mere negation of what was worldly or came about due to the actions of beings: because it was merely what was not worldly, it could be anything not worldly. In fact, if God could be anything except what was worldly, he could just as well be nothing instead of something. Thus this view’s specific effect that offends Hegel and Feuerbach was that it encouraged a profound skepticism concerning whether there really was meaning to the world: if God or significance was otherworldly, unable to be affected or known by beings, the statement that “God or significance exists,” could, for Kant and those of the Christian tradition, mean essentially the same thing as saying “God or significance may not exist.” Thus God and meaningfulness needed to be in the world, have qualities, be determinate, if they were to exist. And so Feuerbach says, after summarizing the Hegelian achievement, that
A God who is injured by determinate qualities has not the courage and the strength to exist. Qualities are the fire, the vital breath, the oxygen, the salt of existence. An existence in general, an existence without qualities, is an insipidity, an absurdity.
-The Essence of Religion, in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, 240, italics added
Translated into the language of Hegel, this means that Spirit, in its most developed or completed or Absolute form, the form where what exists Spiritually is nothing other than Spirit itself—this Spirit must be determinate or have qualities in order to actually exist. Now, Spirit or the meaningfulness of the world (and world-history) of beings attained this stage supposedly after it had developed itself out of itself, or, to use the Hegelian language of Feuerbach here, determined itself to the fullest extent. Does it necessarily follow, then, that merely because this determination through development occurred (as Hegel said it did) Absolute Spirit or God existed? No—and this is the point at which “the spell was broken,” and “the system was cast aside.” In other words, because Hegel cannot answer this question sufficiently Feuerbach disparages Hegel’s idea of the Absolute as merely a subtler skepticism, “a still milder way of denying the divine” (240), and outlines how this divine should be replaced.
Now, why does Hegel’s reasoning flawed? Well, Feuerbach points out that Hegel needs Spiritual events to effectuate the Absolute, God, and not merely the completed form of Spirit. For it does not follow that when Spirit determines itself, it will at this point bring forth anything other than completed and totalized Spirit—what then ensures that this completed Spirit is indeed the Absolute, that they are identical? Even if there is nothing more than the completion of Spirit, even if all that meaningfully exists is the totality of meaningful action, and even if this action is determined as that which possesses an elusive, intersubjective quality, the result of the development of Spirit is nothing other than existing Spirit.
The crucial turn in Feuerbach’s reasoning appears here: after showing us this indeterminacy in Hegel, he turns around and advocates the Hegelian conception of God—i.e. he affirms that the Absolute is Spirit. So he outlines how Hegel’s conception of the necessitation of God from the full development of Spirit does not follow, only to then affirm the result of that error. This means two things: 1) Feuerbach believes that there can be no coherent conception of God or the Absolute other than that of fully developed Spirit, the totality of meaningful action, and 2) that he nevertheless believes that the way this conception is proved in Hegel is erroneous. Feuerbach does not advocate another type of God than Hegel’s fully determined Spirit, and yet he finds this God must be shown to arise in a different way. Thus, in this sense, our remark that Feuerbach seeks to replace Hegel’s conception of the divine or Absolute is completely wrong, for Feuerbach does not substitute any other “better” type of Absolute for the Hegelian determinate Spirit. At the same time, our remark is completely correct insofar as the way this Absolute is proved is really the crucial thing for the beings that are to conceive and access it—in short, Feuerbach does seek to replace the Absolute as an object of religion.
Now, instead of specifying what “as an object of religion” actually means (we will get to this later), it is important to stick with and emphasize this first point for now, because it brings Feuerbach’s position with respect to Hegel into sharp focus. That Feuerbach assents to the Hegelian conception of God reveals to us that his motives in showing how Hegel’s fully determined Spirit is only Spirit, and necessarily not anything more than this, did not arise from any indignation at the fact that the Hegelian determinate Spirit does not “resemble the traditional features we ascribe to God,” or some similar notion. Feuerbach is in fact quite ready to affirm a conception of God that is “nontraditional,” to the extent that he virulently attacks the critics of Hegel who advance lines of argument like this. Feuerbach feels that Hegel’s God, as merely the culmination of Spirit, is a more coherent conception of the divine (that is, we remember, of reality or the real) than any anthropopathized (“humanized”) conception of God—the God with which all existent religions would supposedly replace this Hegelian Absolute in order to “more accurately reflect the Divine,” to be “more in conformity with the nature of God.” Indeed, this argument against the common practice of anthropopathizing or ascribing human features to God is the main thrust of Feuerbach’s remarks throughout The Essence of Christianity: Feuerbach thinks anthropopathizing is an irreligious act that wishes to make God somewhat determinate yet retain his indeterminate and otherworldly character, that has the effect of bogging the divine itself down in contradiction. By making God merely the meaningful culmination of worldly action, Hegel, in Feuerbach’s eyes, purges the conception of the divine from this inconsistency, as well as his otherworldliness. What results is a consistently determinate conception of the meaningful for the world—what Feuerbach indeed thinks is in conformity with the essence of Christianity...
A God who is injured by determinate qualities has not the courage and the strength to exist. Qualities are the fire, the vital breath, the oxygen, the salt of existence. An existence in general, an existence without qualities, is an insipidity, an absurdity.
-The Essence of Religion, in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, 240, italics added
Translated into the language of Hegel, this means that Spirit, in its most developed or completed or Absolute form, the form where what exists Spiritually is nothing other than Spirit itself—this Spirit must be determinate or have qualities in order to actually exist. Now, Spirit or the meaningfulness of the world (and world-history) of beings attained this stage supposedly after it had developed itself out of itself, or, to use the Hegelian language of Feuerbach here, determined itself to the fullest extent. Does it necessarily follow, then, that merely because this determination through development occurred (as Hegel said it did) Absolute Spirit or God existed? No—and this is the point at which “the spell was broken,” and “the system was cast aside.” In other words, because Hegel cannot answer this question sufficiently Feuerbach disparages Hegel’s idea of the Absolute as merely a subtler skepticism, “a still milder way of denying the divine” (240), and outlines how this divine should be replaced.
Now, why does Hegel’s reasoning flawed? Well, Feuerbach points out that Hegel needs Spiritual events to effectuate the Absolute, God, and not merely the completed form of Spirit. For it does not follow that when Spirit determines itself, it will at this point bring forth anything other than completed and totalized Spirit—what then ensures that this completed Spirit is indeed the Absolute, that they are identical? Even if there is nothing more than the completion of Spirit, even if all that meaningfully exists is the totality of meaningful action, and even if this action is determined as that which possesses an elusive, intersubjective quality, the result of the development of Spirit is nothing other than existing Spirit.
The crucial turn in Feuerbach’s reasoning appears here: after showing us this indeterminacy in Hegel, he turns around and advocates the Hegelian conception of God—i.e. he affirms that the Absolute is Spirit. So he outlines how Hegel’s conception of the necessitation of God from the full development of Spirit does not follow, only to then affirm the result of that error. This means two things: 1) Feuerbach believes that there can be no coherent conception of God or the Absolute other than that of fully developed Spirit, the totality of meaningful action, and 2) that he nevertheless believes that the way this conception is proved in Hegel is erroneous. Feuerbach does not advocate another type of God than Hegel’s fully determined Spirit, and yet he finds this God must be shown to arise in a different way. Thus, in this sense, our remark that Feuerbach seeks to replace Hegel’s conception of the divine or Absolute is completely wrong, for Feuerbach does not substitute any other “better” type of Absolute for the Hegelian determinate Spirit. At the same time, our remark is completely correct insofar as the way this Absolute is proved is really the crucial thing for the beings that are to conceive and access it—in short, Feuerbach does seek to replace the Absolute as an object of religion.
Now, instead of specifying what “as an object of religion” actually means (we will get to this later), it is important to stick with and emphasize this first point for now, because it brings Feuerbach’s position with respect to Hegel into sharp focus. That Feuerbach assents to the Hegelian conception of God reveals to us that his motives in showing how Hegel’s fully determined Spirit is only Spirit, and necessarily not anything more than this, did not arise from any indignation at the fact that the Hegelian determinate Spirit does not “resemble the traditional features we ascribe to God,” or some similar notion. Feuerbach is in fact quite ready to affirm a conception of God that is “nontraditional,” to the extent that he virulently attacks the critics of Hegel who advance lines of argument like this. Feuerbach feels that Hegel’s God, as merely the culmination of Spirit, is a more coherent conception of the divine (that is, we remember, of reality or the real) than any anthropopathized (“humanized”) conception of God—the God with which all existent religions would supposedly replace this Hegelian Absolute in order to “more accurately reflect the Divine,” to be “more in conformity with the nature of God.” Indeed, this argument against the common practice of anthropopathizing or ascribing human features to God is the main thrust of Feuerbach’s remarks throughout The Essence of Christianity: Feuerbach thinks anthropopathizing is an irreligious act that wishes to make God somewhat determinate yet retain his indeterminate and otherworldly character, that has the effect of bogging the divine itself down in contradiction. By making God merely the meaningful culmination of worldly action, Hegel, in Feuerbach’s eyes, purges the conception of the divine from this inconsistency, as well as his otherworldliness. What results is a consistently determinate conception of the meaningful for the world—what Feuerbach indeed thinks is in conformity with the essence of Christianity...
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Derrida and Heidegger at the end of the summer
I just realized I spent most of the summer reading a lot of Heidegger. As classes begin, I'm wondering how what I read, and how I read it, relates to the tasks within an English department that I'll have to manage. In short, I'm wondering how the philosophy I read will relate to the critical theory I will engage with. This relationship will articulate itself I think as the relationship between Heidegger (who represents philosophy) and the person who is closest to my concerns with texts, and thus with literature, Derrida (who represents critical theory). Now, these two categories were and are constituted for me not by any intrinsic content: it is not as if Derrida is not philosophical and Heidegger is not able to be used heavily within critical theory. It just stems from the way I read the works--and this reflection in itself I think is an important one, perhaps one of the most important I've culled from out of the summer. I read Heidegger in a philosophical tradition (whose concerns were for me concepts like being, existence, essence, dialectic, appearance, time, etc.), whereas I read Derrida within a tradition of critical theory (whose concerns are for me concepts like the subject, the body, society and ideology, exclusion and inclusion): this is all that really made these texts philosophical or not. And the context in which I read them does make a difference: that is, each context for me constituted a different method of reading and interpreting, and its these two ways that I need to reconcile now. So, I'll put forward two ideas that will sum up what I know now about this relationship thanks to all that reading:
1. Derrida is, at his core, an immensely powerful reader of Heidegger--perhaps the most powerful of all readers of Heidegger. Derrida does not "copy moves" from Heidegger, or import them as something external to what he is talking about, but elaborates Heidegger, develops him, takes him further than he was willing or able to go. This makes the work of Derrida extremely philosophical and extremely anti-philosophical, if only because this was the character of Heidegger's work as well. But because Derrida elaborates and develops Heidegger, he pushes this philosophy/anti-philosophy towards new concepts that even the anti-philosophy of Heidegger could not develop (the closest Heidegger came to something this refined, this concretely anti-philosophical--and it is an amazingly significant intervention into "theory,"--were with his reflections on technology). In other words, Derrida links the philosophical/anti-philosophical tradition of Heidegger (characterized by concepts like being, existence, essence, etc.) with new concepts that this tradition can engage with (like ideology, the subject, exclusion, etc.) but no longer as this tradition, even in its anti-philosphical or anti-traditional strain. In other words, Derrida accomplishes the break with metaphysics that Heidegger sought, and this allows him to formulate what were metaphysical/philosophical questions with new concepts, or concepts that had been developing alongside philosophy for ages. Whether this break is a real break with metaphysics or is merely a substitution of other fields of thought for philosophical thought is questionable: all I'm saying is that the conception of the break (not how it was carried out) was the conception Heidegger sought. He accomplishes this break via our second idea:
2. Derrida develops the ideas of Heidegger by replacing the concept of Ereignis with the concept of the trace. Derrida, throughout his entire corpus, keeps ready to hand an amazing passage by Heidegger that appears in "The Anaximander Fragment," which tries to articulate, essentially, the presencing and withdrawing of Being--or the operation of Ereignis throughout the ontological difference--via a metaphor of writing, the metaphor of the trace that appears and yet erases and yet remains. In this passage, Derrida writes in "Différance," "the present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace... it is a trace, and a trace of the erasure of the trace" (24). "Différance" becomes the name for this locus of the trace in its movement, what in Heidegger was the ontological difference between Being and beings, and "trace" itself which makes up this locus and the essential movement itself becomes sort of a substitute for what Heidegger thinks through in his concept of Ereignis--that which brings Being to presence but, that does not have Being, that which is prior to the most prior, Being. It is this replacement of Heidegger's almost anthropomorphic metaphors that constitute his most essential terminology that Derrida is able to bring Heidegger's thought back into the thinkable and at the same time completely out of the concept of metaphysics (which may or may not be metaphysics itself) that he was trying to break with. Like many French appropriations of German concepts (think of Lacan's work with Freud, Merleau-Ponty's appropriation of Husserl, or Sartre's interpretations of Hegel via Kojeve--and I mean all this in no bad way), this replacement reifies and concretizes what Heidegger can only describe as a movement. But this reification works against the process of reification itself with this particular concept: it is nothing less than what Heidegger needed to do with his thinking but could not bring himself to do.
Maybe this is too rigid a conception of the significance and not to mention the actual thought going on here, and maybe its totally off--I'm not sure if any of this is even right. But it seems to look this way, and if you make this connection at least you can pursue the relationship between Derrida and Heidegger without reference to their external connections: you see the movement between them, and between issues in critical theory and philosophy more generally, developing out of the concepts themselves as they work in their thinking. For me, its the limit of what I found this summer, amidst all sorts of other amazing things, and what will underlie much of what I deal with in the upcoming months. I hope its helpful!
1. Derrida is, at his core, an immensely powerful reader of Heidegger--perhaps the most powerful of all readers of Heidegger. Derrida does not "copy moves" from Heidegger, or import them as something external to what he is talking about, but elaborates Heidegger, develops him, takes him further than he was willing or able to go. This makes the work of Derrida extremely philosophical and extremely anti-philosophical, if only because this was the character of Heidegger's work as well. But because Derrida elaborates and develops Heidegger, he pushes this philosophy/anti-philosophy towards new concepts that even the anti-philosophy of Heidegger could not develop (the closest Heidegger came to something this refined, this concretely anti-philosophical--and it is an amazingly significant intervention into "theory,"--were with his reflections on technology). In other words, Derrida links the philosophical/anti-philosophical tradition of Heidegger (characterized by concepts like being, existence, essence, etc.) with new concepts that this tradition can engage with (like ideology, the subject, exclusion, etc.) but no longer as this tradition, even in its anti-philosphical or anti-traditional strain. In other words, Derrida accomplishes the break with metaphysics that Heidegger sought, and this allows him to formulate what were metaphysical/philosophical questions with new concepts, or concepts that had been developing alongside philosophy for ages. Whether this break is a real break with metaphysics or is merely a substitution of other fields of thought for philosophical thought is questionable: all I'm saying is that the conception of the break (not how it was carried out) was the conception Heidegger sought. He accomplishes this break via our second idea:
2. Derrida develops the ideas of Heidegger by replacing the concept of Ereignis with the concept of the trace. Derrida, throughout his entire corpus, keeps ready to hand an amazing passage by Heidegger that appears in "The Anaximander Fragment," which tries to articulate, essentially, the presencing and withdrawing of Being--or the operation of Ereignis throughout the ontological difference--via a metaphor of writing, the metaphor of the trace that appears and yet erases and yet remains. In this passage, Derrida writes in "Différance," "the present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace... it is a trace, and a trace of the erasure of the trace" (24). "Différance" becomes the name for this locus of the trace in its movement, what in Heidegger was the ontological difference between Being and beings, and "trace" itself which makes up this locus and the essential movement itself becomes sort of a substitute for what Heidegger thinks through in his concept of Ereignis--that which brings Being to presence but, that does not have Being, that which is prior to the most prior, Being. It is this replacement of Heidegger's almost anthropomorphic metaphors that constitute his most essential terminology that Derrida is able to bring Heidegger's thought back into the thinkable and at the same time completely out of the concept of metaphysics (which may or may not be metaphysics itself) that he was trying to break with. Like many French appropriations of German concepts (think of Lacan's work with Freud, Merleau-Ponty's appropriation of Husserl, or Sartre's interpretations of Hegel via Kojeve--and I mean all this in no bad way), this replacement reifies and concretizes what Heidegger can only describe as a movement. But this reification works against the process of reification itself with this particular concept: it is nothing less than what Heidegger needed to do with his thinking but could not bring himself to do.
Maybe this is too rigid a conception of the significance and not to mention the actual thought going on here, and maybe its totally off--I'm not sure if any of this is even right. But it seems to look this way, and if you make this connection at least you can pursue the relationship between Derrida and Heidegger without reference to their external connections: you see the movement between them, and between issues in critical theory and philosophy more generally, developing out of the concepts themselves as they work in their thinking. For me, its the limit of what I found this summer, amidst all sorts of other amazing things, and what will underlie much of what I deal with in the upcoming months. I hope its helpful!
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