The key to Derrida's interpretation (thus far) of Husserl;
I'll quote Derrida with my own analysis inside which I'll signify as "B"
"to distinguish between natural reality and spiritual culture, we must now discriminate, in order to understand pure culture and traditionality in general, between empirical culture and that of truth. In other words, between de facto historical culture (B: factual cultural), on the one hand, in which sense-sedimentation does not exclude the fact that validity (which is rooted in a language,terrain,epoch,and so forth) can become dated, and on the other hand, the culture of truth, whose ideality is absolutely normative (B: omni-temporal, not dated, the fact that there can be truth without it ever being dated; that it's possible in any wholly other being that isn't beleaguered by historicity). No doubt the later would be in fact (B: In being of historicity) impossible without the former. But on the one hand, the culture of truth is the highest and more irreducible possibility of empirical culture; on the other hand, the culture of truth is itself only the possibility of a reduction of empirical culture and is manifested to itself only through such a reduction which has become possible by an irruption of the infinite as a revolution within empirical culture"...The emancipation can be confused with a breaking from history in general. For those who confine themselves to historical factuality, as well as for those who enclose themselves in the ideality of validity, the narration of the truth can only have the historic originality of myth. But in another sense, one that corresponds to Husserl's intention, the tradition of truth is the most profound and purest history...without which there would only be an empirical aggregate of finite and accidental units" -Derrida
End Quote
The realization of the phenomenological reduction which manifests the idea de jure (by law) requires the zone ("the zone" is what I call it; it's synonymous with what Husserl and Derrida call "horizon", which means an opening for a possibility or possibilities) to be able to be reduced in the first place. So it seems that when one is thinking with gestures of prioritization, in other words, origins, one would privilege the un-idealized zone over the fact that there is some ideal validity to it; this validity though Derrida points out about Husserl includes the sense of error, not just a correctness. The historical sedimented fact is first required before a reduction can take place that can try to understand how a fact can have sense in the first place. But as Derrida states, without this "irruption of the infinite as a revolution" there can be no idea of The Idea. It's absolutely irreducible, the most irreducible possibility of the zone; but this irreducibility "can be confused with a breaking from history in general". The reduction can never break with the fact that it came from a history, but history can't help itself from revealing to itself it's own sense. You can't have a history that is without an origin. You can't have a history that isn't always dating itself; which is it's own sense that has become revealed. So while History is first required for anything to happen, the revolution of historicity confuses an empirical grounding for an empiricist to say that "there is first blank empirical data", because this is an idea; and more importantly, this is an idea we realize as an idea; a pseudo blank state. And nothing can be said for something that was never a matter of a saying.
So not only does neither come first (the empirical nor the ideal), but the thinking of what comes first is inappropriate because they both can easily be argued that each come first without either contradicting the other. The sense of history (without us knowing it) happens at the same time of history simply happening. The broaching of history is also the broaching of it's sense which need not be realized until the realization; as Hegel would say 'when the idea realizes itself'; in other words, when history realizes that it is history. History is no longer a blind progression that can go anywhere in some timelessness, but is aware of itself as a progression that is happening in time, in dates, in a progression. History itself doesn't realize it's own dialectic until (for reasons completely unknown) it makes it's self aware to itself AT a certain time, and when it does, history is revealed as what it's always been doing without realizing it; but this was always in the cards, to realize the sense of itself. That is part of the sense of history, to eventually come to a point (this is the question, which point, why, when and where) when something had to be revealed . This is the absolutely crazy part; History without even knowing it already had in store for itself the fact of knowing itself, and this is it's sense; essentially for there to be something that is wholly other, and then out of nowhere to realize that this wholly other was something more than how it operated in a pure blind machine-like way. The transcendental ego is not simply the individual self realizing itself, but the self realizing itself as history realizing itself as history. The transcendental ego is history at one and the same time, a no time and time.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
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