Dear Clark, lists, Den 25/09/2014 kl. 19.22 skrev Clark Goble <cl...@lextek.com<mailto:cl...@lextek.com>>:
On Sep 25, 2014, at 8:50 AM, Frederik Stjernfelt <stj...@hum.ku.dk<mailto:stj...@hum.ku.dk>> wrote: This isn’t to say Heidegger and Peirce are the same. Just that I think the move towards an externalist approach to mind in Heidegger is also made in Peirce. And it’s precisely within the proposition (or more expansively the dicisign) that Peirce makes this move. I suspect both of them are making this move due to influence from Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. (I think this is explicit for Heidegger although I’m not sure) Within the analytic tradition a lot of this is “solved” via judgments. This doesn’t quite work since we then have to ask what makes judgements possible. That is a good point. I think Peirce's analysis attempts to ground the basic logic of Dicisigns in topology (co-localization being basically a topological concept) - I think Husserl went in the same direction when attempting to ground logic on geometry (in Erfahrung und Urtheil) … I should note that it’s precisely in Husserl’s grounding logic in geometry that Derrida makes his critique. Now this is one place where many Husserlians say Derrida misreads Husserl. However it’s also where Derrida breaks from Husserl and moves more into a Peircean direction. (I’d also add that it’s where Derrida tends to be clearer than usual) It’s been a very long time since I last read Derrida’s intro to Origin of Geometry. So I’m loath to say too much. Effectively though Derrida sees Husserl as introducing the relationship between ideal objects and signs. (He attributes to Husserl being the first philosopher to do so, but clearly that’s not the case) Where Derrida sees Husserl still tying meaning to subjectivity Derrida sees it in signs. (The play of difference is effectively Peirce’s later conception of sign with a distinction between dynamic and immediate objects) As I said one can dispute Derrida’s reading of Husserl rather easily. However effectively he’s critiquing a dyadic (topological) conception with a process based trichotomy sign. This becomes much more clear in the first half of On Grammatology where he says Peirce comes closest to what he’s arguing. (Although my sense is he hadn’t read much Peirce - certainly not the mature stuff like his letters to Lady Weby which anticipate much of what Derrida does later) I am quite sure Derrida never read much Peirce and I have a hard time seeing them go in the same direction. As far as I recall the Peirce references of the Grammatology, Derrida only focuses upon infinite semiosis, delighting in the interpretation that the chain of signs ever bars us from reality - quite the opposite of Peirce to whom that chain brings us ever closer … Now a possible place we have a divide between Heidegger and Peirce is found within your quote from EP 2:311. There the copula joins not the two signs “Socrates” and “wise” but their replicas. For Heidegger the copula shows the objects of both. So, a collapse of sign and referent. Yes and no. This is a place that it really depends upon “which” Heidegger you read. There are quite a few quite different takes on Heidegger. I think some of Thomas Sheehan’s work has reduced that somewhat. At least we see a lot less of the “word mysticism” type of Heideggarianism. I favor a strong realist take on Heidegger where he just had a poor vocabulary to discuss what he was after. That is most of Heidegger’s work is just about meaning and its source. While not necessary to this take, I think a common view within this reading translated into Peirce’s taxonomies would be to see Heidegger as focused on the copula as index but moving to a general sign analysis. (Thus his concern with being within a painting which effectively is the same shift Peirce makes shifting to the dicisign) In this take Heidegger’s has a coherent focus even through his later work on the openness that allows objects to become meaningfully present to people. This is the index and it would be an index to both a representation and an other index. So effectively I read Heidegger as eventually reaching the dicisign although there may be subtle differences. (Certainly there are different focuses) Now there may be even here some differences. Heidegger moves from the focus on the copula (being) to der geoworfene Entwurf and then to Ereignis. That’s sometimes translated as the appropriation of existence to sustain the clearing. The clearing is the phenomenological clearing away of previous experiences of firstness to a new experience of firstness such that this reflects iconical, indexical and most significantly symbolical phenomenological experiences. That is there’s always a move so it is a process. One way to look at this is as the change in indices within us. But this is going farther afield from just a consideration of the dicisign which is a far more limited phenomena. Effectively Heidegger’s concern is what enables a dicisign to be a dicisign for us. Famously that includes an index to a set of practices each of which can’t be treated merely as a representation but also irreducibly indexes. (His “for the sake of which” and “in order to” logic is effectively just indices to other practices, objects and eventually to ourselves that allow objects to be meaningful. As his famous example of hammering shows, it’s often only when an index fails that we’re able to notice the objects both as a representation but also as an index to the object itself rather than just to the practice. All of this obviously can be cast into a Peircean context. (And rather fruitfully I think) However it quickly shows that most sign relations have numerous hidden icons and indices within them. The dicisign is just one example of that deep complexity. Even Heidegger’s notion of λόγος can probably be seen as very close to Peirce’s notion of argument or at least what enables an argument to be an argument. i.e. it’s not the argument as such, but the quasi-mind process of signs that is a logical precursor to arguments as such. Again I think Thomas Sheehan’s work is the best at simplifying and clarifying Heidegger’s work in order to make all of this clear. For Peirceans who may have studied a little Heidegger in college it’s probably worth reading him. His “What, after all, was Heidegger about?” is definitely worth it. http://blogs.helsinki.fi/nosp-2014/files/2014/04/2014-WHAT-AFTER-ALL-WAS-HEIDEGGER-ABOUT-HELSINKI.pdf Hmm, again I hesitate to go along with the Heidegger-Peirce approachment, if only because of Heidegger's ardent anti-science stance ("Wissenschaft denkt nicht") - while Peirce, of course, saw his own project as part of and continuation of existing results in science - Hintikka, in his distinction between logic-as-a-universal-language and logic-as-a-calculus, puts the Frege-Russell tradition in the first category. His claim is that when you think there is only one correct language, you become inable to compare that language with reality, you cannot discuss the properties of that language using the same language, and truth becomes ineffable. The prisonhouse of language. Interestingly, Hintikka puts Heidegger and Derrida in the same category. In the second category, however, he puts Peirce, Husserl, Carnap, and himself. In the "logic-as-calculus" tradition, there is no universal language, but a pluralism of representation systems. Surprisingly, this pluralism leads to realism: the same object may be triangulated from different semiotic viewpoints, just like one semiotic formalism may discuss and correct the other. Again it probably depends upon what reading of Heidegger and Derrida one adopts. I think both of them have strong realist tendencies. While both, especially Derrida, point out the limits of language and the inescapability of language, they also see the primary focus as being on the Other of language. That is what language is about. To the things themselves is the cry that is often forgotten. So while both get at the ineffability of language it’s much more a kind of immanent critique to get at the pluralism. I think this is pretty clear in Derrida but I fully admit that he’s typically read as saying language is all there is. Which is weird because the whole point of différance and deconstruction is to get you to an aporia via immanent critiques that then force you to go beyond. Effectively both Derrida and Heidegger are doing a phenomenology which forces one to go beyond representations into the index. That is an index is communicated via representations. It’s just that for Derrida this happens via aporias. But his whole critique is that logocentrism confuses the index and the icon as mere representation and by doing so represses iconic relationships. That is philosophy is trapped within a Cartesian logic where correlates have to be found without what Peirceans would call true indices and icons. I should add that it’s fairly clear why, especially with in anglo tradition, both Heidegger and Derrida were taken in this way. That’s the way they were appropriated by the social constructivists and frankly most of their treatment in English departments. While not everyone doing Theory within English departments threw off realism, most did. Also Derrida in particular was often introduced to students without the difficult training in phenomenology that really is required to read Derrida. i.e. first Husserl, then Heidegger and a careful engagement through that line. I remember back in the 90’s how blatantly bad most students read them. I’d also say that logic for Heidegger is neither a universal language nor a calculus. His lecture notes from around the time of Being and Time on Leibniz are well worth reading there. It’s printed as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. While it covers a lot of the same ground as Being and Time I rather like tracing through the logic via Leibniz rather than Descartes and Aristotle as in BT. It’s fun to read alongside Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language too. Again, I find the realism of Heidegger and Derrida exagerrated - not least as measured on the Hintikka observation above - Best F
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