Despite his teenage rebellion, Derrida’s exceptional intellect remained unmistakable. At nineteen he was sent to Paris to study for entry to the École Normale Supérieure, the most prestigious higher-education establishment in France. But living alone amidst the grey cold streets of Paris proved an alienating experience after the sea and sunlight of Algiers. Derrida found himself drawn to the nihilistic existentialist philosophy of Sartre, which was then all the rage in the student cafés of the Left Bank. Sartre asserted “existence before essence.” He maintained that there was no such thing as an essential humanity. Our subjectivity was not given to us: we create it ourselves by our actions. The way we choose to live makes us who we are.
As a result of exam pressure, disorientation, and pill-taking (amphetamines and sleeping pills), Derrida walked out after taking his first exam and suffered a minor nervous breakdown. In 1952, at his second attempt, he gained admission to the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy for the next five years. Here Derrida began a close reading of the two figures who had most influenced Sartre, the German philosophers Husserl and Heidegger. These early-twentieth-century thinkers had been instrumental in developing and elaborating phenomenology, “the philosophy of consciousness.” This insisted that our fundamental consciousness lies beyond the reach of rational proof or scientific evidence. It is accessible only to intuition. By means of this alone we arrive at the central problems of being, of existence itself. The basis of all our knowledge thus lies beyond reason and science: our knowing is grounded in consciousness.
In 1954 the Algerian War broke out when the local Arab and Berber populations rose against the French in a bid for independence. Derrida supported the struggle for independence, but after graduating in 1957 he was called up to serve in Algeria with the French army. He volunteered to teach and was posted outside Algiers to a school for the children of French and Algerian soldiers in the French army. Derrida found himself torn by the increasing atrocities on both sides, but still hoped for an independent Algeria where Europeans could coexist with their Arab and Berber neighbours. Derrida’s family had lived in Algeria for more than five generations and regarded themselves as Algerians rather than French. In 1960 he returned to France, where he obtained a post teaching philosophy and logic at the Sorbonne, part of the University of Paris. He was now married to Marguerite Aucoutourier, who had been a fellow student at the École Normale Supérieure. She had accompanied him to Algeria but was unable to prevent him from suffering a severe depressive episode after his return. The war would end with Algeria’s independence in 1962 and the mass exodus of Europeans. Derrida’s cherished hope of becoming a citizen of an independent Algeria was shattered; from this time on he would frequently experience feelings of what he called “nostalgeria.” But 1962 would also see the inception of Derrida’s own independence as a philosopher, with the publication of his first important work. To a translation he had made of Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry he appended a book-length Introduction which dwarfed Husserl’s essay-length work.
Husserl had originally been a mathematician, which led him to see the danger of phenomenology basing all knowledge on intuition or the immediacy of individual apprehension. If the basis of all knowledge lay beyond reason and science, how could one know the truth of anything that was not based upon his own intuition? This meant that mathematical and scientific knowledge was relative. Such propositions as 2 + 2 = 4 were not incontrovertible, they just arose from one’s intuition of the world. Others might intuit things differently. In which case one would have no grounds to refute them.
Husserl sought to rescue philosophy from this difficulty, which threatened to undermine all knowledge. He took geometry as the most certain form of our knowledge, using it as a paradigm for all scientific and mathematical knowledge. If our knowledge of geometry could be shown to be beyond relativism, this would secure the truth of all such science.
Husserl argued that geometry must have had a historical origin. Its origin lay in an original intuition by a historical human being. On a particular day in prehistory a particular individual must have had an intuition of line, or distance, or possibly even of a point. In this subjective way geometry – line, distance, point, and so forth – had begun. Such original terms must have had a clear, irrefutable meaning, first grasped by intuition. But once these terms had been grasped by intuition, the rest of geometry was simply a matter of discovering the logical implications of these grounding assumptions. In ancient Greek times Euclid had shown how the structure of geometry was built up from such basic concepts. Geometry itself was somehow “already there,” waiting to be discovered, abiding its historical moment. Once the original notions had been intuited, the rest was incontestable: there could be no relativism about it. All scientific and even philosophical knowledge worked in this manner. Yes, in line with the strictures of phenomenology it was certainly grounded on intuition (historically speaking). But no, it was not relative, because it followed on from these original intuitions by logical steps that uncovered a structure that was in a way “already there,” just waiting to be discovered.
Derrida was convinced that this argument contained an aporia, an internal inconsistency which remained irresolvable. And in arguing this in his Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, and in later works, he laid the basis for his philosophical attitude. For Derrida’s “philosophy” is not a philosophy as such, it is rather a questioning of philosophy: an “interrogation of its very possibility.” He questions the entire basis of philosophy and its ability to operate on its own terms. The whole structure of philosophy is flawed by an aporia, and as such it cannot be consistent. This was more than an obscure argument about the basis of geometry: it questioned the possibility of philosophy itself. And as such, the grounds of all knowledge.
According to Derrida, Husserl saw geometry as a form of perfect knowledge, which existed in a realm of timeless truth. It was incontestable and remained true regardless of human apprehension or intuition. For Derrida, any possible prehistoric intuition was irrelevant to the way geometry had come to be regarded in history, as the paradigm of all scientific and philosophical truth. This was an ideal truth, beyond the realms of argument. Derrida contested this. Even if the basic concepts of this truth had been historically (or prehistorically) intuited, the truth itself was not grounded in lived experience. According to Husserl, it had already existed “out there,” waiting to be discovered. Hence this truth could not possibly be grounded in lived experience. It was not consciously intuited – the necessary grounding required by phenomenology for all knowledge. Here at the very heart of philosophy was an aporia. By implication, our entire notion of knowledge was inconsistent. Either our knowing was grounded in intuition, or it wasn’t; it couldn’t somehow be both. How do we know that geometry is “out there” waiting to be discovered? And surely we accept geometry as true because we apply logic to it, rather than intuit this? It may be logically consistent within its own terms, but how do we intuit it as knowledge? What basis in our consciousness – the ultimate grounding of our knowledge – do we have for accepting its truth?
Such questions may appear niggling, but their implications affect the whole of Western philosophy and the scientific knowledge that is based upon it. Heidegger had asked similar questions, and in doing so had revealed a hidden assumption that underlay the entire structure of our knowledge. And far from being grounded in individual intuition, this assumption was purely metaphysical. That is, it was somehow above and beyond our physical world. It wasn’t based on experience of any sort. Heidegger showed that the whole notion of Western philosophy, and its attendant scientific knowledge, was based upon the idea that somehow, somewhere, truth itself could be validated in some absolute sense. There was a realm of truth that was not relative. The “somewhere out there” where geometry existed was part of a realm, “a presence,” where absolute truth existed. It also guaranteed all truth. Here truth was validated by its own presence. It existed. (Otherwise it would have been an absence.) This presence was absolute, guaranteeing absolute truth. The identity of this existent presence can be none other than a form of being that knows all things and knows the truth of all things, including itself. This is the meaning of its truth. There is a coincidence of being and knowing in this presence which guarantees the truth of all things.
As Derrida would show, this guarantee of truth, this presence,