Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology

The Final Idea: Memory and Life

The Final Idea: Memory and Life The phrase “looking for noon at two o’clock” de¤nes the new kind of thinking that Derrida inaugurated, deconstruction. We have laid out the narrative of this inauguration. The prologue to this narrative was Fink’s famous 1933 Kantstudien essay on Husserl; indeed, the phrase “the basic problem of phenomenology” comes from Fink. Fink showed that the basic problem of phenomenology is not an epistemological problem (even though Husserl himself de¤ned phenomenology in terms of traditional epistemological problems in Cartesian Meditations); rather, for Fink, the basic problem of phenomenology is the old cosmological problem of the origin of the world. The basic problem of phenomenology, one might say, is God. But just as important as Fink’s de¤nition of phenomenology is the fact that Fink de¤ned, for phenomenology, the sense of the transcendental. The transcendental in Husserl is extra-mundane; the origin of the world cannot be of the world. Yet Fink also speci¤ed that this transcendental, that is, transcendental subjectivity is not otherworldly; phenomenology is not a form of Platonism. Phenomenological transcendental subjectivity is at once transcendent to the world and immanent to the world (in the sense that transcendental subjectivity contains the world within itself); the transcendental ego is different from me and yet it is me (or it contains me). Because of this new conception of the transcendental—this transcendental is by no means Kantian—Fink also showed at the conclusion of the essay that the phenomenological problem of the origin of the world results in a series of paradoxes. These paradoxes are at the foundation of Derrida’s thinking. The problem is: how can we conceive, what is the logic of an origin of the world that is at once both extra-mundane and mundane? Thus the title of Derrida’s ¤rst book on Husserl derives from Fink: Le Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. What is truly important about this ¤rst book is that it puts to rest (perhaps once and for all) the question of Derrida’s scholarship; clearly he had a masterly command of the then available works by Husserl. By means of the scholarly work laid out in Le Problème de la genèse, Derrida was able to show that Husserl does not conceive genesis in a way adequate to his own principle of all principles; in short he lacks evidence for the claims he makes about the origin and end of genesis (there is always an “already constituted” at the origin and the Idea in the Kantian sense does not itself appear). Husserl himself therefore falls prey to metaphysics in the sense of unfounded speculation. The result of this phenomenological critique is that Derrida tries to develop an “originary dialectic”between existence and essence that is transcendental and yet contains an empirical element. Derrida develops this dialectic in a sort of gamble with Tran-Duc-Thao and Cavaillès, who had already presented a kind of dialectical thinking as a solution to the problem of genesis in Husserl’s philosophy. But Cavaillès’s dialectic resolved the contradiction in the direction of essence or form, while that of Tran-Duc-Thao resolved it in the direction of fact or matter. Derrida’s dialectic differs from the dialectics of both Cavaillès and Tran-Duc-Thao because it is empiricist in one case and essentialist in the other. More generally however, Derrida’s dialectic differs because it is more basic. Derrida believed that the dialectics of Cavaillès and Tran-Duc-Thao were mundane . Being worldly, the dialectics of both Cavaillès (ideal) and Tran-DucThao (real) remain, as Derrida says, at an “already constituted”level (PGH 8). So, in Le Problème de la genèse, Derrida “ups the ante”on dialectic. And we saw that he does this upping of the ante by trying to articulate a transcendental dialectic which nevertheless contains a real or empirical moment which he calls “human existence” (following Sartre). But, of course, the phrase “human existence” alludes to Heidegger (even though Derrida does not cite one text by Heidegger). So Derrida’s upping of the ante on dialectic consists in constructing a dialectic between phenomenology and ontology. Derrida’s thought begins with phenomenology and ontology. While Le Problème de la genèse allows us to do away with the question of Derrida’s Husserl scholarship, we must recognize that the Introduction to Husserl’s “The Origin of...