Philosophical Confusions Part IV: The Never-Ending Story of D

by Simon Smith

When we last abandoned this discussion which was, as the more eagle-eyed readers will undoubtedly have noticed, supposed to be about Derrida, we were considering the uniqueness of outbursts and utterances. This was all in aid of considering some reasons why Derrida might want to deny a tight ontological connection between any particular message and any particular author/reader combo. Then we bumped into J. L. Austin, lost our basic epistemological principle – a tough break for a growing lad – and got caught up in a shoot-out with an unknown, and doubtless shadowy, figure.

That’s right, this is one philosopher who knows how to handle a gat in a tight corner.

Leaving such appalling violence aside, however, we come back to language use – and, just possibly, Derrida. An utterly unique message, one that was ontologically conjoined to me as its author and you as its recipient, would be like a phenomenon that occurred only one: it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else. It would stand outside all our linguistic networks, i.e. the rules and implicational relations, which makes language a language. That, I suspect, would amount to a private language, which, in turn, seems to contradict the very idea of language as a mode of communication.

Another aside: as it happens, I’m not at all convinced by the claim that language is, at root, a mode of communication in any case. The fundamental purpose of language is not to convey information but to disclose, better still, to enact or actualise. In language, that is, both self and world become.

Back to the point: applying the loosely Polanyian thought outlined above, it’s not at all clear how a unique message, one that stood outside our linguistic networks by virtue of its tight ontological connections, might impact on our thoughts or actions. Being unique, it wouldn’t do the things that messages ordinarily do, such as asking for things, giving orders, reminding us of arrangements, notifying us of changes and so on, because all these activities and meanings occur within the context of language as it is shared.

Once again and just to be clear, Derrida cannot and should not be held responsible for any of this. This extraordinary attempt at an interpretation is all mine.

Nevertheless, the point seems to be that messages have to be able to do without both the sender and the recipient, ontologically speaking. Now, I don’t think this means we can simply strip out all the authorial intent and the author-reader transaction, both of which are essential to any cogent conception of action. Derrida, of course, might well have disagreed here. What seems particularly clear, however, is that he absolutely was destabilising the classical rationalists’ necessary correlation between author and message; which, to reiterate a well-worn point, is to say that no particular message entails any particular author.

Allow me to illustrate: just over my left shoulder is a bookshelf on which are a number of books, many of which are by the Oxford philosopher and theologian Austin Marsden Farrer. Now, I believe that Farrer was a real person, just like you or me; and I believe that he really did write the books on which his name appears. I also believe that I have good reasons for believing that – which I won’t go into here – but I am aware that I could, just possibly, be wrong. Unlikely as that may seem – me? Wrong? Preposterous – it is possible that someone else wrote the books or, more pertinently, that no such person corresponding to my idea of Farrer ever did or ever will exist.

Thinking about it, there are lots of even better examples: Shakespeare, Socrates, the Gospel writers, the writer of the song, ‘All I Wanna do is Look at Readers Wives,’ the Author of Beyond Realism: Seeking the Divine Other (Vernon Press, 2016; available from all good bookstores now!), Elon Musk.

Incidentally, I know Elon Musk isn’t a writer, but he is definitely made-up. Like the Pope.

We have ideas and beliefs about who some of those people were but it’s entirely possible, in some instances perhaps even quite likely, that no such individual ever existed. It’s possible that there may not even have been an individual at all. Homer, we are told, may well have been lots of people rather than just the one. We have, apparently ‘known for quite some time that Homer is not one man but a collection of nameless bards.’[1] So says the Harvard classicist, Vincent T. Ciaramella; and why should we doubt him? We might, if we were particularly bold, go a step further and suggest that, however unlikely it may be, it is just possible that no people were involved at all. Granted, that is unlikely; indeed, I’m not entirely sure that I can even make sense of it, insofar as I cannot conceive of a way in which the Iliad or the Odyssey could have been written without at least some people being in on the act. Nevertheless, one in possession of a philosophic temperament must always be ready to concede:

From my inability to conceive an event or state of affairs, it does not follow that said event or state of affairs could not have come to pass.

When it comes to readers, of course, the idea that texts or messages cannot be ontologically harnessed to particular people is, perhaps, even more obvious. A message or a book or what have you would still be a message or a book, even if no one ever read it. If no one else anywhere ever reads that most remarkable work of the 21^st Century, Beyond Realism: Seeking the Divine Other (Vernon Press, 2016; still available from all good bookstores – buy your copies today!), it would still be a book what I wrote. Even if the Gospels or Plato’s dialogues had never been found and read by anyone at all, they would still be linguistic artefacts.

All of which, in sum, effectively rules out any necessary connection between a text and either its author or its readers.

So, as I hope is now becoming clear, the point is—

Wait, where’s everyone going? What’s that? You’re all rushing over to Amazon so you can buy a copy of that legendary cult classic, Beyond Realism, which is considerably more affordable now it’s out in paperback, you say? What’s that? Copies for yourselves and all your loved ones? Yes, of course that’s an amazingly thoughtful gift which any good mother would love to get on her birthday, for Christmas, or Mother’s Day! But I haven’t finished. I haven’t FINISHED!

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[1] Ciaramella, Vincent T. ‘The Persistent Myth of the Existence of Homer in Mainstream History’. Harvard University, 2015.