Philosophical Confusions Part I: ADerridasayswhat?

by Simon Smith

I’ve been turning something a bit Derridean over in my mind recently. It was, in part, sparked by someone (can’t remember who) mentioning Jacques Derrida’s visit to the University of Sussex in 1997 (I think). I was a mere stripling at the time, about to finish my undergraduate degree in philosophy and go out into the big wide world. Well, Brighton. The man himself was everything any of us could have hoped for: brilliant, enigmatic, French. He wore a broad-brimmed black hat and a black cape; I remember him as carrying a stick, but that might not be true since memory paints it as a silver top cane, which at the time I hoped was a sword-stick. I still do. Derrida looked every inch the Continental Philosopher, an intellectual hero in the oh-so Romantic tradition. Next to the shabby fuc– individuals who populated the philosophy department at Sussex, he was very, very cool.

He was also quite incomprehensible, at least as far as this particular shabby individual was concerned. Understood nary a word of it. Impressed, I most assuredly was, but.

Since then, things have changed little. True, I’m no longer an undergraduate, shabby or otherwise. I even tuck my shirt in all the way round sometimes. I still wouldn’t claim to have a fulsome or especially clear grasp of Derrida’s philosophy, but I believe I have some idea as to what’s occurring and I’m working on it, insofar as it might turn out to be useful.

My rather loose noodling around with the Man in the Black Hat, came a bit more into focus recently when talking at a friend: viz. Dr James Beauregard also of this digital parish. I say, ‘talking at;’ it began as conversation, but I had, in Jamesian fashion (M.R., not Old Bill), ‘fallen somewhat into the tone of a lecturer.’ I suspect that, on the other end of the email, Jim ‘was feeling a little restive under… [my] harangue.’ And I dahn’t blame ‘im niyver.

In an effort to give that harangue still more focus, perhaps to the stage where it might, to slight some degree, begin to make sense, I decided to set it down here for the delectation and edification of any who might happen this way.

The discussion was, as is so often the case with Jim and I, about the nature of persons. I was maintaining a dynamic view: persons as persons-in-action, persons-in-relation (hooray!). Jim holds out for the ontological priority (whatever that means) of persons apart from action and relation in line with an older, metaphysic of the inert and the static (boo!). What set me off about Derrida was a comment to the effect that, in order to have relations or actions or anything of the sort, we need at least two somethings to do the relating or acting.

As it happens, I wouldn’t automatically disagree with this claim, except when being deliberately difficult or obtuse. In a purely philosophical mood, however, it all depends on the logical status of the word ‘need’.  Where ‘need’ signifies necessity or entailment relations – which it doesn’t actually need to do, as it were – the claim is certainly false. When we look at the fundamental constituents of the universe, we find that there are no actual things at all, only (but not just, no never just) the constant interplay of process: rhythmic patterns of energy or activity interconnecting like the bejaysus. There are no things to relate. 

On the other hand, if ‘need’ means ‘presupposes,’ then Jim is basically correct, especially at the higher level of personal action: relations do presuppose relata just as actions presuppose agents. But that just means, in order to talk about or make sense of ideas like ‘relation’ and ‘action,’ we need the idea of agents to do the relating or acting. Logically speaking, it’s a requirement not a condition. This gives us something a little looser and more flexible to replace rigid and supposedly watertight entailment relations. Presuppositional logic is, incidentally, how intentionality works: the intended, as Austin Farrer very nearly said but didn’t, presupposes the intending, the act presupposes the agent.

As an existence claim, this allows plenty of room for being wrong. I could, after all, be wrong about the circumstances I interpret as personal action. It might be a natural event, like the wind or the tides. Isn’t that the real meaning of magic and superstition, ghosties and ghoulies and the like? So we’re told. When I look at the stars, I might imagine that I see figures or symbols, figures and symbols presumably put there by somebody. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just a lot of flaming gas balls scattered across the night sky and I’m projecting the symbols and figures onto them.

Mind. 
Blown.

The point is, presuppositional logic allows for mistakes: what looks like personal activity (the placing of astral bodies in particular patterns) is actually nothing of the sort; it looks that way but isn’t really.

To put it another way, we can’t draw the inference any tighter because what counts as an intentional action is always going to be a matter of interpretation. And this is true, even when it’s something someone does; even, for that matter, when it’s something you or I do. We set out to do something deliberately, intentionally, and we do something else by accident or mistake. You pick up a glass of what looks like beer, but it turns out to be another kind of yellow fizzing liquid (though why someone put that in a beer glass is a mystery). This very evening, I set out to make a very nice curry. In so doing, I singularly failed. My intentional action went badly awry and what I actually made was a bit of a weird mess with too much vinegar and way too much tamarind. I did not deliberately or intentionally create a weird mess; that was an accident. Honest.

I’m actually a pretty good cook, if you want to know. Ask anybody. The only person I’ve even remotely poisoned is my father; and that, only a couple of times thus far.

In any case, the point is—

Wait, what’s that strange burning sensation in my thro….ack ack aaarrrgh?! Thud!