Well I was going to write up a long and thoughtful comparison of Peirce and Derrida this afternoon. Unfortunately I ended up having to work late and I'm not sure when I'll have the time. But I didn't want to neglect the issue since it is important. So consider this a preface that isn't written after the text. Or notes on a text taken before the text has been read. More a set of aims for what I want to do. Since these are being written off the top of my head without texts beyond a few I've googled, I'm sure I'll make a few mistakes. Bear with me. I'll try to refer back to this post and expand on the points I make below.
First off let's consider Peirce's notion of truth as what the community of inquirers would agree upon in the long run (typically taken to be the infinite future). This means that truth is tied to intersubjectivity and not the individual. This means that truth is not something present but in an infinitely deferred future. That is truth is essentially defined in terms of an absence. Further Peirce considers this convergence by inquirers on truth to occur because reality is actually acting on the community of inquirers. As the community inquires this will allow ideas to be "falsified." That is, truth is essentially tied to the actions of reality on the community.
Now compare this to Derrida/Heidegger. We also have truth tied in certain ways to intersubjectivity or the possibility of truth being manifest. Admittedly Peirce may actually go father here than Derrida, although I hope to investigate that as we proceed over the subsequent days. Truth is for both Heidegger and Derrida not a presence and not finite but rather the notion of absence must be considered. Truth is unveiling but not necessarily the unveiled. (Or, to using different terms is found in the saying and not the said) Finally for Derrida and Heidegger I strongly feel entail an ontic realism where reality acts on us, determining our thoughts. This might in Peirce be considered a power of reality, and I think in Derrida we have issues of power as well.
Derrida famously says that Peirce came closes to his notion of Deconstruction. That is, the claim that semiosis can never end. For Peirce this is because a sign always brings about an other sign. We understand signs in terms of signs. So we never reach a terminus. It is true that reality acts to bring about signs (thus reality produces thoughts in us). But we never reach that starting point because we never escape from signs.
We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo. (Peirce, Elements of Logic)
Peirce's phenomenology clearly is different from Husserl's. (See Joseph Ransdell's "Is Peirce a Phenomenologist" for one argument for this. Derrida makes a similar argument in On Grammatology.
The difference between Husserl's and Peirce's phenomenologies is fundamental since it concerns the concept of the sign and of the manifestation of presence, the relationships between the re-presentation and the originary presentation of the thing itself (truth). On this point Peirce is undoubtedly closer to the inventor of the word phenomenology: Lambert proposed in fact to “reduce the theory of things to the theory of signs.” According to the “phaneoroscopy” or “Phenomenology” of Peirce, manifestation itself does not reveal a presence, it makes a sign. One may read in the Principle of Phenomenology that “the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign.” There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called “thing itself” is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated from itself. The property of the representamen is not to be proper [propre], that is to say absolutely proximate to itself (prope, proprius). The represented is always already a representamen. (Derrida, On Grammatology)
Thus one could argue that in most ways, Peirce's phenomenology and Derrida's new post-Husserlian phenomenology are the same. (Although one can debate whether one still ought call it phenomenology - but certainly as Derrida illustrates figures prior to Husserl adopted the term)
Determination for Peirce is not a judgement made by the individual as one often finds in traditional empiricisms. Rather,
Anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum.
No doubt, intelligent consciousness must enter into the series. If the series of successive interpretants comes to an end, the sign is thereby rendered imperfect, at least. If, an interpretant idea having been determined in an individual consciousness, it determines no outward sign, but thay consciousness becomes annihilated, or otherwise loses all memory or other significant effect of the sign, it becomes absolutely undiscoverable that there ever was such an idea in that consciousness; and in that case it is difficult to see how it could have any meaning to say that that consciousness ever had the idea, since the saying so would be an interpretant of that idea.
That is, the location of determination is placed differently from what one usually encounters. The source, the thing represented determines the thought in the person rather than the person determining the thought from the thing. It is, in a certain way, an inversion of what one normally finds. Compare this now with Derrida. (Context found in my oft linked Derrida on Derrida post)
I am not a pluralist and I would never say that every interpretation is equal but I do not select. The interpretations select themselves. I am a Nietzschean in that sense. [...]Meaning is determined by a system of forces which is not personal. It does not depend on the subjective identity but on the field of different forces, the conflict of forces, which produce interpretations. (Derrida, British Post-Structuralism Since 1968)
Now as I've said several times, the big divide is over the type-token relation and repetition. I'll get to that as I proceed.
One can fairly ask, why study Derrida if this all is in Peirce? A fair point. First one has to work it out of Peirce. Lots of people read Peirce and neglect these aspects. Further on certain matters Peirce is inconsistent. Finally Peirce's mature thought from the late 1890s and beyond is simultaneously his most neglected. I also think that tying Peirce to Heidegger is an interesting project. One could do this, but I think Derrida offers ways to think about this (rightly or wrongly) as well as demonstrating some of the implications of Peirce's thought. That is, I think one can rightly ask about the implications of Peirce's thought which aren't necessarily found in Peirce.
I've never read any Derrida or Pierce, however having just finished Terrence Deacon's "The Symbolic Species" I can see that I definitely need to get acquainted with at least Pierce. Deacon heavily draws on Pierce's three categories of referential associations: icon, index and symbol.
From there he goes on to give what are to me some remarkable commentary regarding both the social nature of selves as well as Searle's Chinese Room argument. These comments can be found in his section "To be or not to be: what is the difference?" and I would be VERY curious to hear your opinion regarding what he says as well as perhaps point me in a direction as to where I can get more information regarding these three categories of referential associations.
Jeffrey, I have links to most of the major Peirce resources near the bottom of the right sidebar. The best is the Peirce Gateway which has collected an awful lot of papers on Peirce as well as many of his major writings. For terms, I'd suggest the Peirce Dictionary and just look up icon, index and symbol as well as firstness, secondness and thirdness. It consists of near definitional quotes from various of Peirce's writings.
Two of the helpful papers at the Peirce Gateway are Anne Freadman's discussion of Peirce's notion of signs in his early period and then his later period.
One other point I ought bring up that I noticed when looking for that link at the Peirce Gateway is Peirce's advances in logic with respect to the law of excluded middle and the principle of contradiction. These are issues that I think Derrida addresses, albeit not in a clear way that makes it easy to coax out. Peirce wrote rather clearly on this subject, but is still frequently misunderstood. The paper "Principles of Excluded Middle and Contradiction" is well worth reading on this subject. Derrida and issues of the law of excluded middle have been addressed in secondary literature and I think it is one place (among several) where he could perhaps be a tad more to the point.
In addition John Deely's book The Beginning of Postmodern Times or Charles Sanders Peirce and the Recovery of Signum has a very interesting comment at the end. (It has an unfortunate title, given the negative connotation that "postmodernism" has come to have.) It's well worth reading, especially since the whole book can be read as a PDF for free. But this comment from page 71 I think sets up a lot.
The one author after Peirce who contributes most to the consolidation and definitive estab- lishment of a postmodern spirit in philosophy is Martin Heidegger (1889 1976). Although Heidegger’s philosophy has neither the scope of Peirce’s thought nor the clarity as to the being of sign as central to the development of human understanding, what Heidegger does contribute at the foundations of the postmodern age is an uncompromising clarity and rigor that exceeds Peirce’s own in focusing on the central problem of human understanding vis-à-vis the notion of Umwelt, wherein arises within experience the distinction between object and thing under the notion of ens primum cognitum. This heretofore neglected problem is what is central to the problematic of philosophy in a postmodern age. This problem is the ground and soil of the doctrine of signs, whose development "the way of signs" constitutes the positive essence of postmodernity.
The big value of Derrida, as I see him, is particularly in taking Heidegger in the direction of semiotics. Heidegger does mention signs, especially in Being and Time. But his thought in this direction has been well worked out by Derrida I feel.
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