Benue State University, Makurdi

The Relationship between Subjectivity and Language in the Thoughts of Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida

Joseph P. Nietlong, PhD and Gideon Kato

Abstract

Modern Western philosophy starts with the turn to subjectivity. Rene Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Georg Frederich Hegel and subsequent thinkers understood and pushed this turn in different directions. For Descartes, this turn primarily grounds epistemology while, for Kant it is equally ontological. Both ushered in forms of dualism. Subsequent thinkers had to come to term with this bifurcation of reality. In the Story of Western Philosophy, the predominant representative of the transcendental-constituting self paradigm is Edmund Husserl. For Husserl, the performance of the Epoche brings about a modification of thinking. Husserl’s Epoche is purely instrumental. Its methodical function opens up the field of research proper to phenomenology, that is, pure consciousness, which provides an absolute foundation for knowledge. Although Martin Heidegger did not mention the reduction and saw no need to discuss it, his writings, however, were carried out ‘within’ the operation of the Epoche, and thus a transformation of the Husserlian Epoche. It frees one to turn to the thing as it presents-that is, gives-itself. Unlike Michel Foucault’s discourse of epistemic spaces and knowledge frameworks, where every couple of centuries a new episteme supplants the previous one, Jacques Derrida seems to elaborate only two ‘epochs’: that of metaphysics and that which arises at the closure of metaphysics. Near the edge of metaphysical discourse Heidegger interprets the problem of time. He is involved in the destruction of classical ontology, but as per Derrida, such destruction is not yet deconstruction. Heidegger’s thought reinstates rather than destroys the instance of the logos and of the truth of being as the transcendental signified implied by all linguistic signifiers. We are the authors of our own language. Language speaks us as authors of our own speech. The speaking of language is where we are logocentrically located.

DOWNLOAD COMPLETE ARTICLE HERE (CLICK)