Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

The age-old causality dilemma, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is something that revolves around people questioning how the universe and life itself began. However, when I think of this saying, it immediately reminds me of John Locke and Jacques Derrida and their texts, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Differance, respectively. In relation to these texts, I pose a similar question, which came first, the idea or the word? Locke would say the idea. Then, language came into being and labeled the idea a word. However, Derrida, being less concerned with labeling and more concerned with deconstructing, might have some points to add about that old adage.

For Locke, his philosophy was “to search for the truth in the physical world and attempt to understand knowledge as a psychological phenomenon” (Bizzell 814). Basically, he declares that we know everything through experience. He also says that words refer to ideas, not things. But, he contradicts himself here, because how is it possible to refer to or understand an idea if we don’t know what the word “idea” is through and through, because we have not yet experienced “idea”?

Locke says that all humans can ever know are their own ideas of things, not the real “essences” of things themselves. Since everyone has different experiences in life, it shapes their ideas about things – pretty simple to understand. For example, someone that grew up in an environmentalist/animal activist’s home might go to Sea World and watch the Shamu show and think to themselves, this is just not right. They are caging up these wild animals and not letting them thrive in their natural habitat. Thus, they see Sea World, an amusement park, this “thing”, as an awful, animal-torturing place. On the flip side, someone else that grew up in a fast-food loving, any kind of animal-hunting home probably attends the Shamu show at Sea World and thinks it’s the most spectacular show they’ve ever seen. They say to themselves, wow, they whales can jump so high! The trainers have done such a great job exploiting these animals for our viewing pleasure. Our upbringings, our discourse communities, our experiences, they all shape our ideas of things – even silly things such as amusement parks. But since experiences shape our ideas, we come across the problem of language then convoluting the meaning of signs through words, because of words and languages inherent inconsistency. What gets even tougher is that Lock thinks we can have incomplete ideas of our experiences and our associations for words – “for a word may designate, for some people, certain features of the thing signified and, for others, different features” (Lock 815). Thus, language is an imprecise means of conveying knowledge. Ultimately, we see with Locke that there is no universal meaning for a word.

However, with Derrida, he is more interested in deconstructing – as you read his text you’ll realize this is his favorite word – words. He is all about the middle ground between what the author intends to say and what is actually going on in the text. He says, “deconstruction teaches us that no author is in complete, intentional, conscious control of the meanings of any written text” (Herrick 254). So, is he saying that we are influenced by external experiences as well? Possibly. To him, we learn that rhetoric teaches us the power of the intentional structuring of texts; but with deconstruction, it teaches us that no author is in complete control. When you deconstruct, you get rid of the “blinders”. “One of the goals of the deconstruction of discourse is to reveal those blind-spots of arguments that result from rigid, unexamined meanings attributed to terms” (Herrick 255). Think of when you’re driving down the highway and you see some horses in their trailer being pulled behind a large truck. Do the horses have their heads out the window, taking in the scenery and enjoying ride? Most certainly not. Often times, horses have black blinders, which sort of look like pirate eye patches, around the outer cusp of their eyes, shielding them from any sort of activity that is going on outside of their trailer, so as not to rile them up and scare them. If the horse was the reader and the person putting on the blinders was a theorist, Derrida would be the one fighting to take off the blinders, while the other theorist who wants to put the blinders on the reader is battling him back to keep them, to keep things and definitions and life in order. But Derrida says no no no… “make room for the ‘other’, not the narcissistic author’s voice” (Herrick 254). He would insist to take off the blinders so that we can see words as “a system of relations and oppositions” that must be continually defined. Deconstructing allows the reader to, in essence, think outside of the box, or, think outside of the definition. Dictionaries give us the “meanings” of words, but what gave the creators of these texts the validity to decide what that “meaning was? Certainly, Locke wouldn’t agree with their meanings.

This is where Locke and Derrida intersect paths.

Derrida is more concerned with challenging the reader to deconstruct and realizing that ideas, or units of language, have “no substance apart from the networks of differences” (Derrida 278). He is more troubled by having people understand that “the foundations of argument…are the effects of rhetorical interactions, rather than the objective foundations of argument”. In another vantage point, it’s almost like he is a psychotherapist/psychologist. When you are in a therapy session – and I know this because my dad has been a licensed psychotherapist for over twenty years – your therapist is more worried by the reasons behind why you are saying you feel a certain way, rather than what you’re actually saying about your feelings. Meanwhile, Locke is over there just trying to make people understand that a word is not a word unless you say it’s a word. There is no universal meaning for a word, so really, there’s no point in having dictionaries. He struggles with this relationship between language and knowledge, hoping to discover the process of creating “true” knowledge, but since it is always evolving, there really is no way to stamp down a “true meaning” of anything. So while Locke may the idea came before the word, is there really any true way of knowing?

-Morgan Crawford