Text is a tease. It promises more than it can deliver, then swears it didn’t promise any such thing. To describe a reading must include the interactions between the reader and the world. Wherever the book is, a published volume, a magazine, a physical piece of paper, or some sort of display device. The device in the world presents a text, and some conscious time must be taken to recognize the words on the page, and enunciate them clearly back to a mind, pretending to be the author.
This can sound too obvious to state, but I counter that it cannot be overstated how important this is. In order to read, we must pretend we are someone else. We are then in this sense volunteering to lie to ourselves in order to pretend we hear someone tell us the information on the page. We cannot go into this reading with an assumption that there is meaning or information simply in the traces on a page. That would miss the point of what Derrida staked his career, and indeed his life on. It would also prejudice the investigation which we are about to commence.
For every tool we gain, we lose a skill. I’ve found this a useful yardstick in measuring the usefulness of any tool. All tools represent a choice, but the poles of that choice are not always so obvious. There are no tools which do not carry some cost. If the tool is useful enough to change behavior, then it will change skills, and what others are doing competing for the same resources determines what abilities become a priority. The tool of writing itself cannot be detangled from the behaviors which it makes possible. This includes behaviors in mind which thinking in a written language makes possible. Can we ask, has anyone ever asked the question, what is the cost of writing to our quality of mind, thereby our quality of life? Not of writing this or that, but just the fact of Writing’s existence. What are the consequences to moment by moment experience of us, those whose minds are wired with a written language? Without questioning it, any information maintained by it and through it might be irreparably biased in an unpredictable way. Unpredictable, at least because no one has thought seriously about or entertained an alternative. There is 100% certainty that our species lived most of its evolution without such a thing as writing, and therefore without a mind that thinks in a written language. We do not know, cannot know culturally, and cannot remember personally to a time before writing. We know there must have been a time in our lives when we indeed did NOT think in a language like English, which is built on a written form with an external index larger than any living person can fully know. Enculturation renders those memories of infancy outside of intellectual importance.
As we move into this reading, you will note I have a very cautious eye to text. I read it carefully, and note that it is trying to trick me. Have your eyes open, and your mind open, just not so open that your brain falls out (with thanks to Robert Heinlein).
So now, Derrida’s Text.
“The concept of writing should define the field of a science.”
To begin, we are not first talking about simply writing. We are talking about the CONCEPT of writing. The concept of writing, the possibility and the conceptual necessities which would create the possibility of writing as we know it. This “should define the field of a science” So we are here examining the possibility of a science of the concept of writing.
When we pull that apart as above, we only have to think about what a science is, and there is a paradox. A science is, by definition a series of texts which describe a field of knowledge. For the field of knowledge which is the concept of writing, to already be using text to record what has not yet been investigated rigorously seems to fail a fundamental tenant of the science, which is to say, using a tool without validation. This may at first blush be a tautology, writing as a phenomena to be investigated, as well as a tool necessary for any science, as understood in the institutional sense, the canonic science of peer reviewed and accepted tenants and models. As the reader here, this is what I am interested in, fascinated by, frustrated by. As a reader, I am paying close attention to what is being written about writing and science.
Moving on, “But can it be determined by scholars outside of all the historico-metaphysical predeterminations that we have just situated so clinically?” This science of the concept of writing then, in order to have some standing of authenticity, would need to avoid the problem pointed out. Derrida is suggesting, it seems, that scholars studying this science, or by implication any science, do so within the context of an ‘historico-metaphysical predetermination’. The “just situated so clinically” refers to the previous chapter, but is conveniently summarized and encapsulated in that first little sentence. The “Historico-metaphysical predetermination” could use some picking apart.
The concept of ‘metaphysics’ as a philosophical discipline is the context that this page needs to be approached in. To be clear, there is no indication of “supernatural” at all. Metaphysics is the philosophical underpinnings which make anything like physics possible. To talk about the historical evolution of metaphysics is referring to a crucial line of reasoning stretching back at least to the ancient greeks. Up until modern times, scientific investigation was matched with philosophical investigations. Investigation into the origin and structure of human knowledge and understanding, epistemology. The investigation into what fundamentally makes possible the origin and structures of the world is the field of metaphysics. Derrida follows this to something of an end in the philosophy of Heidegger. The important point in this sentence is that metaphysics, epistemology, and all of the philosophical questions are contained within the ‘historico-metaphysical predeterminations’ Outside of this history, outside of the presumptions of one metaphysical system or another, is it possible to determine a science of the concept of writing? That is Derrida’s question, the gauntlet he is throwing down here.
“What can a science of writing begin to signify, if it is granted:” Asking now about what a science of writing can ‘signify’, here picking apart what makes writing writing. Writing is the tracing (creating some imprint on a physical medium which may then be read) of a signifier. The creation of a trace. The meaning of language is the looking at that word and seeing the signified in place of the signifier, in our mind where words become the world we know. Here, we are to explore what a science of writing may be like, what it may mean, what it may do for our understanding of writing and through that what anything which uses writing may mean. The list which is now to come, the list which makes up the bulk of this page of text, is all what must be granted. Derrida is suggesting in something of a backhand or offhand way that any one of these coming points may be enough to derail the entire enterprise he is setting to embark upon, the defining of a science of the concept of writing. Therein lies Derrida’s one point, which is all points. Writing is Deconstructing. Deconstructing could refer to something a writer is trying to engage in, but that is not Derrida’s point. Deconstructing is something that has been going on within text. It is as essential to text as is the myth that the text is the same wherever and however written. This illusion of repeatability, and the inherent and inevitable reversal of its meaning in its very existence, are manifestations of deconstruction. Derrida will go on to make his case for other reasons, what to him were the most compelling and damning of Text’s lies. But I am fascinated and quite content to look a little deeper into these six points which he throws off as some exercise to the interested student to explore, he hadn’t the time.
“1. that the very idea of science was born in a certain epoch of writing;”
We are trying to ‘bracket’, to set apart for examination, the concept of writing … yet if writing had not existed, the investigation would never have been conceived. One must have a mind which knows of writing to conceive of a science of writing. Someone has an idea to write something down, someone else reads what they have to say, and thus a peer-reviewed scientific canon may be created, science as well as religion, governments, universities, guilds and unions can be created. All of this, right back to having the idea to write it down, presumes writing or something equivalent to it, not just for the fact of writing it down, but the way a written language focuses the mind. I won’t admit that there is evidence that the mind produces consciousness, which may be a universal constant like pi, but as a consciousness amplifier and pattern recognition engine, written language as a mental tool is extremely powerful.
Any symbolic system runs the risk of distorting That which it is trying to represent. In certain ways Derrida’s observations about natural language text are in accord with Godël’s incompleteness theorem. No symbolic system complex enough to represent arithmetic is both complete and consistent. I would put it also alongside Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. There is a limit to precision, specifically when trying to determine both time and space, particle position and momentum. If you expect to be scientific, you must know that the means you are using to produce the corpus, the body of science has not yet been examined. If what you mean by science is this institution of institutions, which ordains certain papers to be “accepted canon”, then you have to back up and question the foundations of such basic tools as logic, mathematics, kinematics, and thermodynamics, at least, from which all of science and engineering are built.
I think it is interesting that even experts in their field are not experts in general knowledge, fitting together all the other fields. Writing facilitates specialization, and the more specialized, the more writing is generated. There is a trust, in a scientificity through specialization. Writing is the DNA making all institutions possible. Any given scientist must rely on the judgement of many other scientists, meeting certain standards of rigor, then translating observations into standard representations, and communicating them effectively to collegues qualified in the specialty. Communication and protocol can be, and is, checked far more thoroughly than any truth-value (matched against a sensory world by individual readers). Further, science has been carefully and specifically (historically) separated from religion, or in a certain sense anything directly involved in a person’s life. Because “Science” as a category has been institutionalized, as have most other categorically distinct areas of human knowledge, those who are not ordained specialists are discouraged from thinking about these questions seriously. They are encouraged to “watch a show” or “read a passage” which “explains” the accepted theory on the question. And this is generally the end of it. Not very different from knowing a religious story.
A question which I have is different than the one Derrida is proposing. I wonder about a science without writing. And I see a known prehistoric model. The model of a canonical science is not the only useful human model of science. Each human alive in the time of prehistory, were scientists. They certainly communicated with their family, their associates, but mostly they observed the world. They knew about the phases of the moon and the position of the stars, because if they didn’t they would get lost and die. They knew how to make a fire for the same reason. What to eat, what not to eat, how to find water. They didn’t expect anything other than their lives depending on understanding how the world works. What I see is that writing and thinking in a written language has diverged human attention from understanding how the world works, into believing this or that story about this or that tidbit of information. Noting that the idea of a science of writing has come about in an epoch of writing does provide for me a way of stepping back, and noting the necessary seed of science within each individual was there, common, and unsaid in an epoch before writing. I want to open up and bring to mind in stark relief against this page of Derrida’s this way of being science where I am directly responsible for knowing everything about the world around me. A deep wordless whole-mind paradygm, spiritual in scope, scientific in rigor. That is the deeper science in each of us, which is wholly personal, but no less scientific. The scientificity, as I see it, is not in the canon and review process. Like Husserl, I see Science as first and foremost a wordless phenomena, in which we touch the infinite. And it is an identical infinite inside, which the paleolithic scientist had access to. He had no reason to doubt what he saw. Writing cannot point us back inward, it only distracts us outward to other people’s words. We can see the power of writing, in relief against the depth of what we have lost by using that power.
“2. that it was thought and formulated, as task, idea, project, in a language implying a certain kind of structurally and axiologically determined relationship between speech and writing;”
So not just writing as a general concept, but the specifics of our cultural writing. Writing and activities of writing specific to our history, and its relationship with human language in general combined to create the idea of science. So the conception of science, the idea of science, was a part, a product of a culture within which writing was an intrinsic and specific part. So are there specific biases built into our writing? How do we know it has not gone from our writing to our thinking? And we cannot rule out intrinsic, systemic defects. Inherent broad flaws in the intentionality assumed and demanded by the means of communication, which also by the time of science also the means of ego identity.
“3. that, to that extent, it was first related to the concept and the adventure of phonetic writing, valorized as the telos of all writing, even though what was always the exemplary model of scientificity — mathematics — constantly moved away from that goal;”
Derrida makes much of the voice. He is showing ways in which speech lends the author’s credibility to the text and allows writing to be its agent. Here, he is showing there is also an unacknowledged tension between an historical preference for phonetic writing (a European ethnocentrism) and the non phonetic and even non-linear mathematical notations. Mathematical notation have a different object than phonetic sentences. They are appealing to a different, more visual and spacial model of possibilities. The existence of mathematical notations shows a creative drive in the mind to explore non-verbal forms. They are still symbolic in a way, but a line and a coordinate system can say something in a few short strokes that a paragraph could not as precisely describe. Derrida’s point is that, even knowing this, there was never any doubt that there was essentially no limit to the truth collecting potential of text. Text somehow has been assumed to be perfect as a cultural storehouse of wisdom. Perfect in the sense that a clear pane of class is perfectly clear.
These are part of the unwritten, unspoken, assumed power of the concept of writing.
“4. that the strictest notion of a general science of writing was born, for non-fortuitous reasons, during a certain period of the world’s history (beginning around the eighteenth century) and within a certain determined system of relationships between “living” speech and inscription;”
Here he is noting that a general scientific analysis of writing began, along with a scientific attitude being defined, was not the sort of science which Derrida is embarking on. A science of writing defining itself by staking out territory no other scientific discipline was interested in (typology, archeology of ancient scripts to disambiguate ancient cultures, etc) is not what Derrida is interested in. Rather, he is looking for something foundational. A science which would include writing, along with anything and everything which derives from the attributes of writing, the abilities of writing. And he goes on to make much of the primacy given to speech, and its strange relationship with ‘inscription’, which is to say any text.
“5. that writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service of science and possibly its object — but first, as Husserl in particular pointed out in The Origin of Geometry, the condition of the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity. Before being its object, writing is the condition of the epistémè.”
Husserl is Edmund Husserl, a German philosopher who made it his life’s work to define and expound a foundation for science. That is, any and all sciences need to be proved to be scientific in its foundations, or whatever comes after cannot hope to be. He called his system “transcendental phenomenology”. He began as a mathematics student, and in pursuit of the foundations of arithmetic, he discovered that mathematics, even simple arithmetic, could not be separated from foundational postulates, based on simply an idea. Without presumptions creating an artificial intellectual model, traditional math and therefore all of the traditional sciences, could not be said to be well founded, even if they proceed to build themselves into useful predictive tools.
Husserl worked for some 40 years developing his system, which he also referred to as a “Science of Sciences”. At the time there were several mainstream approaches to “finish mathematics”. One of the major efforts was Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell writing “Principia Mathematica”, a book which they then solicited mathematicians to prove that they had achieved their goal of a consistent and complete description of basic mathematics and logic. Instead in 1931 Gödel proved with his incompleteness theorems the opposite, that one cannot define a system which is complex enough to include arithmetic of the natural numbers, and be both complete, and provably consistent from its own axioms.
Husserl’s work was different. A different approach, and a different goal. He understood that any postulates or axioms stand in the way of an understanding of the natural world. These presumptions allow progress, but the system under study is removed from the natural world, with each postulate, axiom, or presupposition. In a sense, Derrida’s work in “Of Grammatology” as well as his books specifically on Husserl, closes the door on Husserl, and shows that his approach, as original and far reaching as it may have been, was still bound and gagged by the properties of text. Still, in this passage, Derrida is here showing that Husserl noticed that the idea of science, the scientific method itself would not have existed without writing. Ideal objects were central to Husserl’s understanding of science, mathematics itself being made up of ideal objects which can be signified in the world, with numbers, equations, and descriptions, but their existence is separate from the signs. The final phrase in this passage is my favorite in the whole page. “Writing is the condition of the epistémè (with which Derrida is referring to “knowledge”). Without writing, there would be no “knowledge” in the sense of a science. Or at least no access for us humans into a place of immortal and universal truth. That is the strange truth of mathematics. I would say the epistémè is the key to understanding a lot about why this passage is so important to me. Of all the phrases in this page, this is the one that rings out to me over and over. Epistémè is essentially epistemology. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, the structure of human thinking. As part of my reading Derrida, this part of the writing leads me to Wikipedia, just to check that I am in agreement with the wiki at large about what this word means. While the article as a whole is interesting, the first paragraph (as with most wikipedia articles) is the most useful, and least controversial:
from – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology Sat March 19th 2011
“Epistemology (from Greek ἐπιστήμη – epistēmē, “knowledge, science” + λόγος, “logos”) or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. It addresses the questions: What is knowledge? How is knowledge acquired? How do we know what we know? Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to connected notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims.”
This is the epistémè Derrida was talking about. And let’s play my favorite phrase again. “Writing is the condition of the epistémè.” There may have been thoughts in people’s heads, but until there was someone somewhere writing it down, then there is no knowledge. Epistémè makes possible the building of a “body” of knowledge. That is how we refer to it. Interestingly enough, there is no body, except the body of the reader reading the work, embodying it in spending time reading it. The text has no body. The paper even is not the body of the text. The ink, only pigment. They are both hardware. The text is software. This is in itself strangely embodied, really disembodied, through the use of computers. The text has not really become detached from the necessity of a physical trace, but it is possible to make that trace smaller and smaller. It is also possible to transmit that trace farther and wider. When you have a page of text, for example, on a typical server, that server can have thousands of requests for the same page in seconds. The text of a typical web page occupies far less physical space in the memory or disk of a computer than the dot in these “i’s.”
Epistémè means knowledge and science, as the Greek root. Whatever the specifics are, Derrida following the lead by Husserl, makes clear that knowledge and science themselves would not exist without a means to abstract the knowledge such that two individuals can agree that the idea is indeed the same. Even if we can imagine a pre-literate conversation deriving natural numbers and addition, there is a line that is not crossed without creating a static trace. A limit to the repercussions on the use of shared information. Not having a form of writing available to the hand or to the mind changes the ways these individuals can discuss these ideal objects, and the individuals could only conceive of suggesting the discussion if the idea of abstracted meaning was relevant in their relationship.
It seems from my perspective unlikely to come up, but it is less likely that I really have the slightest clue as to the lives and thoughts of pre-literate, paleolithic homo sapiens. What I am trying to suggest is that we could learn a lot about ourselves by considering that there was a preliterate scientist, the “Paleolithic scientist” who’s life depended on an ability to be a scientist and engineer. Understanding correlations and seeing patterns directly in the nature of the world around them is how any scientist builds a model of that world in their minds. That’s what they were doing. That’s what each of us can do. One which is still a derivative of the world we live in, the undifferentiated experienced consciousness. There is no lack of information. No belief that anyone else knows any better, viscerally living how the world works. Living means being life, and you live according to that. No time or reason to second guess what was done, always full attention on the next moment, the next challenge, potentially to the death. What do I eat? Where am I? Where is my family? Where is water? Will anything attack us? The paleolithic scientist lacks no knowledge, and so is far more expert than any canonic scientist. Only our belief in limiting stories has changed. There is a paleolithic scientist in each of us.
“6. that historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing; to the possibility of writing in general, beyond those particular forms of writing in the name of which we have long spoken of peoples without writing and without history.”
This is self evident. writing and history must come together, and they come together with a conception of a prehistory. A memory of a people who were different, because they did not have the book which we have now. But as writing presents it to us, it is not a real memory. Certainly not the memory of an individual. More the story written by someone who remembered a story told to them from someone who also was remembering a previous conversation. Or it was wholesale made up by someone. We don’t know. The historicity of text allows another property of text, especially text about historic events. It is a lens. It focuses and refracts attention. And the time itself can magnify the importance of events seen through a text that stays deceptively the same. Text is often viewed as a clear lens, but as often it is anything but clear and unbiased. And as we’ve been seeing, the issue is not simply the text and what the text seems to say, but the consciousness and the quality of life and mind of people who read and see through history and through their lives in the lens of text. The believed text which one may never have read, but which we know is there, out there, everywhere else, making history without us, and making our time and existence barely meaningful. Names for this and that don’t matter so much if this is the structure of your experience, of your mind using its intellect to propose a place in the relevant social hierarchy for the meaning of your life’s story.
“Before being the object of a history — of an historical science — writing opens the field of history — of historical becoming. And the former (Historie in German) presupposes the latter (Geschichte).”
What becomes is the story of who we are. Who our heroes are. Who we think about. What we think is important. So here we’re faced with trying to create a historical account of what would be necessary to take a count. Which would have to be conceived in order to make literary conception possible. We are writing about the possibility of writing with pens already always writing. An examination of the beginning of writing as if from the child of pen and paper. The text, as we’ve observed earlier, is in neither the paper, or the pigment. It takes the movement of a hand, and the reading of an eye with an internal voice. A voice who is willing to lie, and pretend they are someone who they are not. That voice will pretend they are the person who wrote the page. And they have a chance to say anything, until that voice loses interest, and no longer feels compelled by the text to be an agent of the text. The conscious time spent reading the text is conjuring some spirit of that text. Some essence of the text. A revivifying the thought behind the text. There are plenty of texts that are not worthy of our time. Like gods in an old science fiction trope, reading text is a prayer to that text, which gives it life in you. All life is subjective, and time is all we have. It turns out our lives are all text has too.
Have I run off the rails? In this reading I mean. As a reader of the text, and as a father, telling a bedtime story to his bewildered five year old, sometimes you just try to plant some seeds that will grow into questions later. If you’re lucky, the questions will turn inward, because the outward ones need tending, and you know you can’t catch all of them. There are plenty of people who sound like they have the answers. The dangerous ones will actually say they have the answer, but those will rarely explain exactly what the question was. In my experience. The inward questions end up in the Buddha’s territory. All the questions have inward answers, that may well reframe the question. As the child grows, you just pray they follow that inner light, rather than the compelling sparkly things.
I an trying to suggest believing no one. Understand as much of you can from your own surroundings. Never take someone else’s word for what something DOESN’T mean. Understand cause and effect, and understand that time is what you are making. That is the part of you that is real. The rest is a story you’re making up, and spending a lot of time believing, defending, or being devastated by. Present company included, I am not immune to personal devastation, and incomprehensible behavior. I like to take life as it comes, and I’m better equipped for reality than I was a few months ago, for what it’s worth. But that’s my story. You’re here, you should be interested, because there is a nugget of insight somewhere in this article that may jiggle something loose in that intellect of yours. Reading is my humanness approaching a text, and breathing life into it, enacting it in my mind, reading it to myself and pretending I am the writing, as if I am Derrida, telling me something with his voice. His voice which contains his years, his experience, his wisdom. Yet here we are, being as explicit as we can be that there is no other. There is no presence of a writer. I am reading, meaning looking at words and having emotional experiences as my intellect understands, or chooses to react to for me. I pretend I am my imperfect, incomplete image of a man I never met, who was more comfortable in a language I cannot understand. Yet I see his image in my mind when I read his words, and hear his voice as if his ghost was inside me.
I am almost done with this reading, just a couple of concluding paragraphs. And I pause to consider my choices. I could not finish, never go further. Or I can read the last couple of paragraphs, comment on them, some concluding remarks (mostly already written just not edited). I so want to finish. I have set myself up to expect to finish, and so I shall. But there is something comforting to know that I don’t have to. That there is a force of will. A push against the inertia of doing nothing, being pushed by events rather than pushing. If I have something to offer the world of the future, it starts with this reading of this page.
“The science of writing should therefore look for its object at the roots of scientificity, the history of writing should turn back toward the origin of historicity.”
We know this because scientificity is to say science to which historical development is possible because writing is available. Derrida is honing in on the special meaning of the writing which directly made science possible. Knowing scientific correlations from personal observation was possible before. But written language is a powerful advantage, first through physical writing and the organizational advantages of large groups. Then even more so with the capabilities that written structures makes available to the intellect and the thinking mind. In essence, the intellect which seems like a simple device driver which simply translates ultimately is empowered by the power of the language through which it is a gateway.
“A science of the possibility of science?”
Here we are finally getting to the matter. A science of the possibility of science. As a civilization we have been putting the cart before the horse, in order to get the fruits of science, but with a deferral of actual responsibility as to the consequences of what we have imprecisely labeled “science”. All of western technological progress accelerated quickly after the trial of Galileo. Science was inadvertently institutionally ethically and grammatically freed from any religious consequence. Scientists had to in a certain way bias their perspective away from religious or (in Heidegger’s vocabulary) Ontological questions. Scientific professionals, who are the designated gatekeepers of what is culturally “accepted” as scientific, act in their professional capacities as agents of text, watching that accepted texts are “scientific” enough, but it turns out to be scientific in word is easier to ensure. In deed is not so easy to require or detect. Texts define procedures, regulations, capital, tools, tools to construct tools, committee minutes, GPS readings, budgets. But there is no religious, and in some sense no ethical compass attached directly to their field. That is someone else’s job, which as much as anything else shows the power and the price of text. Of being able to compartmentalize our world, our language, and our minds.
None of this activity of science adds to the scientificity of the endeavor, by which I mean a historical thread that seeks to make the activities and the theories more scientific in a rigorous way. This may have something to do with more and more precise measurement of things, but I would like you to think of the ramifications of “pre-mature categorization”. That is not the most important bias that gets built into any scientific model, but it is common and easy to understand. More and more precision measuring something which ultimately is a derivative and not a fundamental parameter is not as helpful as stepping back and seeing the whole process as a single integrated cycle. I have for my own satisfaction released the assumption that it can be written into text. But I do see text as an important scaffold, with which each person must climb, construct and integrate the scientific stories they hear into a reasonable personal science of the world. The same can be said for all of those stories, which in the fully integrated lived mind, there are no categories. All words in the intellect amount to scaffolding, merging into the larger wordless infinite-inside Mind. Buddhism, such wisdom as in the Four Noble Truths is an extremely useful tool to see this, but more on that another time.
In Canonic science, one may wonder where the science is really happening. Is the science happening inside the electron gun? Is it the screen the data ia displayed on? Or is it the grad student typing in the professor’s notes for the final paper? We see how writing makes science possible. What we are asking now, seeing what we are calling “science”, is what are we really believing in, when we believe in something we hear attributed to “science.” This is what a science of the possibility of science could clear up. What is it that makes science possible? Is it really a written record of a category of human knowledge which we refer to as “science” that has in it a bunch of useful principles for dealing with issues that come up in space and time? In a casual way, that’s about what we mean, but there is an implicit understanding in each person who knows science to be such, that there is something REAL about the theories and laws of science. It is not a “truth”, it is not part of the explicit theatre of modern science, selling its own story for creation over some traditional camp. In this way, it is not fundamentally different than religious, spiritual, or for that matter atheist canon. We note physical laws and relationships giving “us” as a species predictive abilities, and great power. With all of that, we’re still not seeing the science out in the open. It is not taught really. An essentially scientific attentiveness which was at the fingertips and tongue of every human being for most of our history has been inadvertently taken from us, in the name of progress.
It is easy to emotionally point to the science as the wonder. Beyond knowing, beyond knowing there is any separation between you all that is within your conscious frame to witness. That is Phenomenology. The phenomena is both the event and the witness and all and everything in between. An instant and a universe at once and forever. That is what Husserl tried to describe. Transcendental Phenomenology exists in the certainty that all that is real and measurable is the subjective. Intersubjective does not make the transcendental, however. It discovers what cannot be created or destroyed, for it simply is. It is all but identical to Buddhist Mindfulness meditation. Derrida corrected the deep biases in Husserl that leaned too heavily on the empty promises of text and writing. I bring them all together with the words of the Bodhisatva Mahasatva Avalokitishvara in the Heart Sutra, “Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form.” I see it as possible to first show a path down which people can build their own neo-paleolithic science based on expecting themselves to get it, and from there use writing and its offspring as understood and bounded tools, rather than disembodied historical characters and emotional principles. And then you understand that the wisdom of the Heart Sutra is all that is needed. Put in another way, the only thing that is real is “Emptiness”, and everything else just looks like stuff. And where is the emptiness? All behind your eyes, when you’re seeing it. More on that another time.
“A science of science which would no longer have the form of logic but that of grammatics?”
What is the difference between a science in the form of logic (and by extension mathematics) and one of grammatics? Where mathematical facts and grammatical statements have equal rigor in their tests and assertions.
But is that what Derrida is suggesting? I would say partially, but in so suggesting, also allowing us to see the futility there too. Because we can note things about grammer, used in casual speech, or in precise scientific contexts, does not mean they are the dominant, or even formative factors in actual scientific observation and insight. The grammatical rules, formalisms, informalisms, seem a strange place to create a foundation of scientificity. The story scientists know about logic is a few basic rules that are then universal, and are baked into many layers to allow vast complexity based on simple rules and presumptions. To dismantle a logic based science for a new one, even if better founded science, would obviously be a non-starter without some assurance that the outcome would be in some measurable and productive way “better” than before. Derrida would certainly make no promises, in my best estimation.
“A history of the possibility of history which would no longer be an archaeology, a philosophy of history or a history of philosophy?”
An archeology is a story of how some fact came to be. A philosophy of history being a perspective on how to create historical categories which allow for a reasonable understanding as to the progress and unfolding of history, and a history of philosophy. Stories. Stories on how this or that came to be this or that way. A science of the possibility of writing? Yes, it can navigate around these problems, these distractions…A science of science which is a personal science first.
“The positive and the classical sciences of writing are obliged to repress this sort of question.”
Of course the status quo would not like new divisions, a science of science which includes all sciences is threatening. The classical sciences, sciences of a divided epistemology, survives on maintaining its identity, so it knows what it is studying, and what it is not studying.
“Up to a certain point, such repression is even necessary to the progress of positive investigation.”
The repression is necessary for the traditional sciences, for the limited and categorized fields of knowledge. But by opening up a science of writing, a science of the concept of writing, then we must see the categories before they were categories. Like science, the “paleolithic scientist” concept is a context for science far before science could have been conceived, but this should make it no less precise. We cannot go back to a pre-literate way of being from where we are, but we (meaning each of us for ourselves) can create a full-mind paleolithic-like state of seeing the world, and use Buddhist principles to set internal priorities of myself and the world. The intellect cannot be abandoned, it just must be founded in the larger mind, rather than the other way around. Derrida in this sentence is allowing text to play its role of limiting scope, which is surely what is necessary to make progress in any scientific investigation. Text facilitates limiting of scope. He is also echoing the deep problems, the vast gap between what text is assumed and supposed to be doing, versus what may actually be going on in the readings.
“Beside the fact that it would still be held within a philosophizing logic, the onto-phenomenological question of essence, that is to say of the origin of writing, could, by itself, only paralyse or sterilize the typological or historical research of facts.”
In this sentence of the passage, I see Derrida reluctant to start the process. Text is for those who use it and depend on it to be an unassailable tool. An invisible tool which is simply a means to the seemingly simple task of moving information from one place to another, and a means for many people to agree on something like a shared “truth”. Yet, it is all but invisible. It is all but unbiased. It’s structures are not pure, but historically conglomerated. It’s implications are not necessarily logical, but more likely grammatical. To start the scientific examination of writing implies that everything that came before is founded on a non-scientific ground. It is instead an artificial ground.
But we’re not afraid, we’re done. I’ve finished reading what I wanted to read, I made my points. My original point I leave to you, with a reminder of what I proposed. I said this is the most important page of text ever printed, or that even could be printed. I stand by that, now that we see the case that it makes. Without reading this page, one would not understand the limits of writing. The very nature of writing which misleads. One would not understand that aside from the implications for the many fields which are based on textual categories, that science in particular can clearly never arrive at both the precision and eloquence in explaining how the world works in a general way, in a set of texts, bequeathed to future generations. Rather, the Science that I seek to understand and disseminate is a science that first lives in the whole of my mind, and which inspires people to find their own science, in their mind’s own language. The point is not to find a book that is “True” or “Truer”. First, your truth must come from within.
– Tem Noon 28 March 2011 (Minor grammatical edits 30 Mar 2011)
