Breaking Down the Walls of Experience: Derrida and Locke

The main argument that I took issue with from Locke’s An Essay on Concerning Human Understanding was the distinction of an ‘idea’ from language. Locke argues that an idea arises from a given experience while language is what is used in an attempt to articulate that idea outside of the moment of having that idea. This separation of an idea existing apart from language is problematic considering that the ideas we have about experiences are not only constructed and understood through language, but the essence of those ideas rely on previous experiences constructed through language. Derrida, in his essay “Différance”, attempts to dismantle the claim that there is a present moment at all, much less whether it can or cannot be articulated through language. Thus while language is arbitrarily designated and cannot fully represent the natural world, our only understanding of that natural world is based on a system of relationships created and maintained through language.

Locke outlines the ends of language as “First, to make known one man’s thoughts or ideas to another; secondly, to do it with as much ease and quickness as possible; and, thirdly, thereby to convey the knowledge of things” (825). According to Locke, there exists a knowledge that humans attempt to convey through language, only known to humans through observation. They attempt to relay this knowledge through discourse, which is always insufficient because language does not carry with it direct signification. In addition, “all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgement” (827). According to Locke, real and true knowledge thus can only be observable knowledge, not ideas that have no existence in reality, and thus by bringing these unrealistic ideas into language, knowledge is clouded and corrupted. It is clear that Locke is tied within his own episteme of enlightenment thinkers; however, there is a fundamental lacking in Locke’s theory that later deconstructionists address. Humans, at least in this relative point in time, are inescapably linguistic. Our ‘present’ ideas and thoughts are not somehow free from the supposed pitfalls of language.

Although insufficient, Locke’s theories were necessary for theorists like Derrida to build-off of. In his essay, Derrida uses the verbs “to differ” and “to defer” in conjunction with each other in order to demonstrate how the alterity of the former and the temporalizing/spacing effect of the latter work together in our understanding of experiences and observations. This word, differance, by adding the 'a', is an "assemblage" rather than a concept in that it seeks to bring to light the significance of relationships, a “general system of all these schemata”, as being how we understand things and ideas (280).  Space and time, ideas that our culture tries to discuss in a concrete manner, are always a process, in motion, never capable of being captured, always defined by the past and previous moment, and always carrying traces of other spaces. It is only in viewing things in terms of the other that they are identifiable. "Differance can refer to the whole complex of its meanings at once, for it is immediately and irreducibly multivalent" (283). It is not a word or concept, something attempted to be defined in space and time, but rather it is an ongoing system and process, aware of itself as a connection.

Thus, by attempting to understand language as Locke suggests—insufficient in describing situated observations and experiences—the essential differences are not taken into account, and the rigidity of this defined knowledge is misleading. “In this way we question the authority of presence or its simple symmetrical contrary, absence or lack. We thus interrogate the limit that has always constrained us, that always constrains us, we who inhabit a language and a system of thought—to form the meaning of being in general as presence or absence, in the categories of being or beingness” (285).