/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13992399]

>Derrida famously claimed that the only way to make sense of 'the world' is to abandon Cartesian rationalism. One might think, then, that this statement is meaningless or irrelevant, if it says nothing about what a 'world' is. The question however, is whether the world has any meaning in and of itself. While it is true that in a world that can be conceived in terms of concepts, and which is not 'contagious', such concepts can serve as 'concepts of reference' – to say that everything is in a world that is an instance of that concept – that does not follow. It would be more accurate to claim that there is an 'epistemological 'world' of concepts, but that this 'world' cannot be the world that is in a concept.
>The epistemology of things in the world (in particular, its being epistemically contingent) is not an epistemological world, but a concept of a metaphysically contingent world (in terms of that concept); a concept that exists outside any kind of empirical world. Thus, since the concept of the transcendental is non-objective, it is also non-experimental, yet is not a description of the empirically contingent, but of the transcendental. Now, the world-phenomenon of the world-concept can be described as "the world-phenomenon" or "the phenomenon which can be investigated by means of the concepts of the transcendental," but "the world" in the ordinary sense does not refer to the transcendental world in the naturalistic sense. On the contrary, it refers to the conceptual world of the transcendental and, therefore, to the concept of the world on which it is supposed to depend. It can therefore be understood as both "phenomenal" and "experimental."
>Thus, the "phenomenal" world, which is the world retarded by the transcendental principle, is the phenomenal world of the real-external world (the transcendental world), and the phenomenal world of the real-external world—in other words the world that has the "phenomenal quality"—is the phenomenal world of the world that transcends the transcendental world. The phenomenal world, to its greatest extent, is the actual world of the phenomenal world, which is why it is necessary to speak of "phenomenality," or "phenomenalness," or "phenomenal nature." That is, the phenomenal world, which is the real-external world, is the reality that transcends the phenomenal world. The phenomenal world, by contrast, is the world retarded by the transcendental principle that is the only real world that can be experienced by the human mind. The world of the phenomenal world, as a phenomenal world, is the reality of the transcendental world, and that, in turn, is the phenomenal world.
Can someone paraphrase this for a lay person? Or at least tell me what it means?

[Anonymous No.13992428]

[Anonymous No.13992488]

>>13992399
Facts

[Anonymous No.13992518]

This is why postmodernists are cringe.

[Anonymous No.13992524]

Gimme a sec

[Anonymous No.13992553]

simple as

[Anonymous No.13992588]

>>13992524
You still there? I have a paper due tonight, and I can't figure this out like at all.

[Anonymous No.13992614]

>>13992553
What am I looking at here

[Anonymous No.13992619]

>>13992399
desu OP I got the gist of what the passage was trying to convey but I don't know how to describe it to you.

[Anonymous No.13992623]

>>13992614
"The world of yhr pheonomal [sic.] world, as a pheonomal world, is the reality of the transcendental world, and that, in turn, is the pheonomal world.

[Anonymous No.13992627]

>>13992619
If you can't restate it then you don't really get it.

[Anonymous No.13992641]

>>13992399
I will try, though I have not read Derrida:

It seems to me that he is trying to break down the conventional borders between what we may call the transcendental and the ordinary.
Throughout philosophy there is a continual discourse regarding opposition of things - duality, that is. For instance, the duality between what 'really exists' and what 'seems to exist', between 'true knowledge' and 'what we know about knowledge', between 'being' and 'becoming', between 'matter' and 'mind/spirit', between the 'worldly' and the 'divine'. His use of 'phenomenal' and 'transcendental' follow this same dichotomy.

However, his point isn't that this dichotomy 'exists', but rather to investigate the dichotomy itself to show how it is apparently false.

> The question however, is whether the world has any meaning in and of itself. While it is true that in a world that can be conceived in terms of concepts, and which is not 'contagious', such concepts can serve as 'concepts of reference' – to say that everything is in a world that is an instance of that concept – that does not follow. It would be more accurate to claim that there is an 'epistemological 'world' of concepts, but that this 'world' cannot be the world that is in a concept.

One instantiation of the duality question I mentioned is seen here, and it can be formed like so - that there 'is existence', and there 'is what can be said of existence' - this is true for smaller-scale problems like 'what really is light?', and true for all of existence itself. The quote is saying that 'Concepts can be applied to existence, but it doesn't then follow that existence 'is concepts'. By 'epistemological world' he is referring to that this application of concepts can be thought of as 'the world in its epistemological form - that is, the epistemic (what can be known/said of) the world' - or, if you'd like, we could rephrase that to say 'one level of existence is the epistemological level, what can be said of it'. Just like, for instance, one 'level' of history might be what we would call 'historical facts' - particular things that serve as the substrate for greater narratives.

[Anonymous No.13992652]

>>13992588
youre better of failling your paper in place of actually understanding derrida

[Anonymous No.13992709]

>>13992641
>The epistemology of things in the world (in particular, its being epistemically contingent) is not an epistemological world, but a concept of a metaphysically contingent world (in terms of that concept); a concept that exists outside any kind of empirical world. Thus, since the concept of the transcendental is non-objective, it is also non-experimental, yet is not a description of the empirically contingent, but of the transcendental.

If we were to 'drill down' to the level of 'things within existence' - that is, a subset of existence, we would find that any particular domain of inquiry is now contingent on the whole. So, investigating the 'epistemology of things in the world' requires not just the notion of 'epistemology' but also the notion of 'contingency' - for each thing in the world will be contingent to others along many axes, both in terms of holistic notions of symmetry with the whole, and contingent upon other particular things. By 'contingent', we mean 'relies upon', 'predicated upon', 'causes/caused by', 'related to', 'dependent' - in general the notion of Contingency is 'entailing Others' - that is, when one thing is contingent, at least two things must be.

So, we are kinda following a chain of entailment/contingency here. (I will use 'Existence' instead of 'the world) - Existence entails epistemological existence --> particular things are contingent upon that greater epistemological existence --> now that we have contingencies between the greater epistemological existence and the epistemological particular (things within Existence), we entail (because all of this is contingent to) the notion of 'Metaphysical Contingency of Existence'. I hope it is easy to see how Derrida here is 'expanding the concept of existence' based on what can be said of it, and then based on 'what can be said' itself requires.

>Now, the world-phenomenon of the world-concept can be described as "the world-phenomenon" or "the phenomenon which can be investigated by means of the concepts of the transcendental," but "the world" in the ordinary sense does not refer to the transcendental world in the naturalistic sense. On the contrary, it refers to the conceptual world of the transcendental and, therefore, to the concept of the world on which it is supposed to depend. It can therefore be understood as both "phenomenal" and "experimental."

Based on the previous chain, we can see that, to investigate Existence requires not just investigating Epistemology, but Contingency - and so Derrida here says that we need to use 'concepts of the transcendental' for that investigation - this is just investigating along the axis of 'Metaphysical Contingency' previously encountered. This last section is very important, since it is here that he collapses the duality mentioned before. He is essentially pointing out a loop, a 'folding in on itself' - the conceptual world of the transcendental is itself required to understand the 'concept of the world itself'.

[Anonymous No.13992733]

>>13992641
>>13992709
Interesting! I think I grasp it better now. Would you say this loop is self-contingent? Also, if you don't mind, could you tell me how you'd respond to this assignment?

>Hey all! Your assignment for tonight is to read the prompt above and to locate and eliminate each instance of 'conceptualization' in each paragraph. What I'm asking is for you to rewrite this passage as Derrida (or Lacan) would have presented it i.e. sans conceptualization/ideaization. Remember: 300-400 words, proper spelling and grammar, and no filler words. Thanks and go bobcats! PS: I'm writing a new one every day, so check back for a new one every day.

[Anonymous No.13992765]

>>13992399
>Derrida famously claimed that the only way to make sense of 'the world' is to abandon Cartesian rationalism.

You have to understand how fundamental this kind of thinking is in people. It’s the unquestioned frame

>One might think, then, that this statement is meaningless or irrelevant, if it says nothing about what a 'world' is.

It begs the question and points to it: since we are talking about “the world” what is it if not that?

>The question however, is whether the world has any meaning in and of itself.
The next sentence shows he is talking about the signified, the world that the signifier is trying to represent through the sign {the world}

>While it is true that in a world
signified
>that can be conceived in terms of concepts
signs and signifiers
>and which is not 'contagious'
I think what he means is that these attempts to signify the world are deliberate and intentional as opposed to contagious and accidental
>such concepts can serve as 'concepts of reference'
signs and signifiers
>to say that everything is in a world that is an instance of that concept – that does not follow.
that would be logocentric
>It would be more accurate to claim that there is an 'epistemological 'world' of concepts, but that this 'world' cannot be the world that is in a concept.
Reminds me of Lacans idea of the real. The real isn’t the symbolic. This is not debatable. (A very radical refutation would be that somehow dna is a language and that the world is actually a huge orgasmic orgy of song and conversations from macro to micro but at this point in science that’s purely speculative. So far, even if this were true, Derrida is bringing us to think about the world, ‘the world’, and {the world}

I’ll continue the rest in a bit brb

[Anonymous No.13992772]

>>13992709

By 'phenomenal and experimental' he is attempting to collapse some of the distinction between the two - and this has already been entailed by what has been stated already. The 'Phenomenal world' - that is, the world that appears to us 'as is', is itself found through working through the world epistemically and conceptually - and this 'working through' is itself a process of experimentation. This is a very normal idea, that the 'world that appears to us is contingent upon what we do with it' - for instance, the phenomena, the experience as it appears to you of scrolling through this thread is contingent upon the OP creating the thread, which would be understood here as an experimental endeavor.

>Thus, the "phenomenal" world, which is the world retarded by the transcendental principle, is the phenomenal world of the real-external world (the transcendental world), and the phenomenal world of the real-external world—in other words the world that has the "phenomenal quality"—is the phenomenal world of the world that transcends the transcendental world. The phenomenal world, to its greatest extent, is the actual world of the phenomenal world, which is why it is necessary to speak of "phenomenality," or "phenomenalness," or "phenomenal nature." That is, the phenomenal world, which is the real-external world, is the reality that transcends the phenomenal world. The phenomenal world, by contrast, is the world retarded by the transcendental principle that is the only real world that can be experienced by the human mind. The world of the phenomenal world, as a phenomenal world, is the reality of the transcendental world, and that, in turn, is the phenomenal world.

Note here that Derrida is using 'transcendental' in its normal philosophical sense - 'there exists a True Other, Something Beyond Everything, The First Mover, the Non-Contingent, the Cause without a Cause etc'. This transcendent world is ascertained phenomenologically, however, given the Concept mentioned previously, there must be as well a 'phenomenological world' that is essentially the 'essence of phenomenology', the Concept of it - and so, the thing that 'transcends phenomenology'. However, this transcendent phenomenology must express its phenomenological-ness wholly and purely through the world revealed to us, that is, 'actual phenomenological existence'.

He is also throwing in here that this 'actual phenomenological existence' is, or might as well be 'the real-external world' - in the sense that, by definition, it is the external world we have access to, it is itself a method of experiment. What is confusing here is he is using the same words for multiple meanings, though I think this is intentional as a way to both express and collapse the Duality he is representing.

For me, when he says 'world' I think it makes more sense to split it between 'existence' and 'dimension/mode of being'.

Does this make sense?

[Anonymous No.13992777]

>>13992641
>>13992709
Bullshit. Derrida used phenomenological language—not that there were any phenomenological linguistic structures in his thought—not to be a theorist, but to be a speaker. His aim was to make sense of the world as it was, and not simply to write a theory of the world. That is, his aim was to think in phenomenology and not in the linguistic style of the phenomenological theorists.

Derrida, for his part, was interested in the history of thought rather than in the language itself. He thought that the philosophical project of Western civilization did not exist, at least not before Kant's philosophy. He thought that the philosophy of Western thought—the philosophy of science—was not developed until the eighteenth century. "The most basic philosophical question of Western philosophy for the past two thousand years," he writes, "has been this: what is the truth of existence, truth, reality, and reality in a world that is constructed, not from within, but on top of, a world that is constructed?" His answer to that question was not a theory of reality that is "out there"; it was a part-en-partouze of that world. But this, according to Wittgenstein, is not the question philosophers ask. It is what philosophers should ask.

[Anonymous No.13992810]

>>13992777
god shut up you faggot, even if you're right I don't care

[Anonymous No.13992818]

>>13992772
Yes! I'm saving this thread for future use. Could you please respond to this and then I'll be good >>13992733

[Anonymous No.13992831]

>>13992777
Trips of truth

[Anonymous No.13992855]

>>13992777
holy based

[Anonymous No.13993036]

>>13992818
>>13992733
I would say that, what can be said here from Derrida's perspective is that the loop 'could be said to be self-contingent'. Again, I have not read Derrida's works, so I'm not sure if he'd go that route. Heraclitus/Hegel would say 'it is more than self-contingent' though.

As for your assignment, I presume its referring to a particular methodology used by Derrida that made him so repugnant and so attractive - that is, of splitting words into dichotomies and invoking a notion of 'differance'.

Conceptually, it would be something like: 'This phenomenon (the actual world as is) appears, and I describe this phenomenon with this sentence (what is, which is also what I construct), however, the phenomena of this sentence is not the phenomena of what it describes, 'this phenomenon'". In practice I believe one expedient route would be to attempt to eliminate conceptualization either through stacking differing concepts so that the unity between them can be inferred, or simply stating the thing itself - Though, I'm not certain the particular method Derrida would use.

The line I wrote here is one such example of 'stacking different concepts so that the unity between them can be inferred', which is conceptually correct, but not what Derrida does as far as I know:

> 'there exists a True Other, Something Beyond Everything, The First Mover, the Non-Contingent, the Cause without a Cause etc'
To express the duality itself would be better, which I did earlier as well: Subject/Object, Universal/Particular, Simulacra/Simulation, Signed/Signifier, Within/Without etc

Here is a quote form Derrida that may guide you. It might help also to read some of his work in order to better emulate his method:

>At the point at which the concept of differance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)--to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identify of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciation, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)--become nonpertinent.

From his interview with Julia Kristeva.

>>13992777
I am not sure what you are trying to say. I am approaching this from a Hegel/Heraclitus vector, since I have not tarried with Derrida's work itself. If what you are saying is true, how then should OPs question be answered?

[Anonymous No.13993100]

>>13992777
/LIT/ ALUMNI

[Anonymous No.13993108]

>>13993036
>If what you are saying is true, how then should OPs question be answered?
Like this:
The Hegel-Derrida chain, pivotal to an honest reading of Hegel, situates Hegel in Derrida's own vernacular literary style and his attempts to write as a literary work, to do what Hegel and Derrida can do only with a certain degree of success: write about themselves as the characters in their fiction. This is all part of Derrida's idea that a realist reading would be a reading that would find its voice in a particular literary style, and therefore would only understand a given text insofar as that literary style is a specific and particular expression of that reading. Here he brings to mind the idea that certain languages represent certain social forces, and thus it would be the "literary language of the people" in any given text that would serve as a universal source of truth. To understand a particular text, one must understand its cultural, historical, and literary context. And while Derrida uses all of these concepts in different ways, and thus seems to be writing a more expansive or "scientific" interpretation of Hegel, in truth such an interpretation is merely the very form of Derrida's intention. In this way, Derrida's philosophical method is in some ways an 'ideological' method: it posits a certain order of 'ideological' categories of the human subject, while still avoiding the notion of 'ideal' subjects. This means that Derrida, for example, uses an important concept of 'identity' in his thought without distinguishing it strictly from 'identity' of a human subject of an imaginary or anthropomorphic type. In particular he uses the metaphor of a 'molecular model' to explain the 'subject' of the philosophical project, i.e. that of making 'universally shared and universally agreed' philosophical concepts. Here, "the molecular models of existence as a part of a universe or the subject as a part of some person" are 'partly' conceived as universal; it is not difficult to say that "the theoretical project is based on a certain philosophical conception of the human subject, and also on certain images of the 'universal' subject." The difference is between being a subject and being a "model which we imagine as the object of a certain ontological sneed."

[Anonymous No.13993129]

>>13992777
>>13993108
Based soijack/sneedfag dabbing on Hegelheads

[Anonymous No.13993155]

>>13993108
Are you saying then that Derrida's primary philosophical project is to construct a framework by which frameworks could be constructed which derive the Philosophical Subject from the various philosophies and subjects?

[Anonymous No.13993163]

>>13993155
Precisely

[Anonymous No.13993249]

>>13993163
Interesting, but I do not see how that is a causal extension from Hegel. Do you know what provoked this, or where Derrida establishes this as necessary?

It is an interesting project, but it seems to me that that too was already subsumed into Hegel's Dialectic.

[Anonymous No.13993322]

>>13993249
De la grammatologie mostly