Abstract
This paper discusses Heidegger’s destruction and Derrida’s critique of it in his deconstruction. It reads destruction in various Heidegger texts and discusses Derrida’s intervention through his critique of destruction in deconstruction. Heidegger writes that metaphysics is in decline and is approaching its end, as the earth informed by metaphysics has become desolate. This decline marks the oblivion of Being as metaphysics, as the truth of metaphysics has met its desolation. Heidegger argues that metaphysics has been an illusion that sustained reality and is now approaching its end. In its place, truth needs to be rethought as the unconcealment of Being as aletheia.
Heidegger on Destruction
Heidegger writes that the task of philosophy is the destruction of the history of ontology. Proposed in 1927 in Being and Time, this notion of destruction of ancient ontology may be illuminated further by what Heidegger writes of the end of philosophy in his 1964 essay “The End of Philosophy and the task of thinking.” Heidegger’s project in these texts is to rethink philosophy by pronouncing an end or destruction of traditional metaphysics and rethink the task of thinking that takes the form of aletheia, or unconcealing, of truth.
Destroying Ancient Ontology and the Task of Philosophy
Heidegger writes in What is Philosophy that destruction does not mean destroying but dismantling, liquidating, putting to one side the merely historical assertions about the history of philosophy. The task of philosophy is now designated by Heidegger to overcome the history of metaphysics, which has trapped philosophy in representational thinking and Platonism.
Structure, Sign and Play
Derrida says that it is naive to refer to an event, doctrine or an author to designate the occurrence of decentering and a thinking of structurality of structure. He argues that all languages and thought affirm the structurality of structure. There is no language outside metaphysics and the structures that determine it. As Derrida argues: “There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language — no syntax or lexicon — which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.”
Overcoming Metaphysics and the End of Philosophy
Heidegger argues that metaphysics has been the ground of misunderstanding by preventing access in experience to the essence of Being. While metaphysics has been thought to be the truth of being, it translates as the oblivion of Being, namely, it destroys and prevents access to the disclosure of Being as aletheia.
The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking
Heidegger writes that philosophy as metaphysics has reached its end. This ground of being as presence has reached its completion, and perfection as metaphysics has fulfilled itself as a form of Platonism.
The Shift from Metaphysics to Ontology
In Towards the Definition of Philosophy, Heidegger contests the philosophical enframing of world-view strictly in terms of science. Heidegger questions the separation of existence and essence, arguing that the problem with philosophy that is strictly critical idealism or critical realism is its one-sided world view.
Aletheia
Heidegger’s notion of truth as aletheia borrows its entire ontological framework of Being as presence from metaphysics. Heidegger describes this aletheia as an opening of presence to the outside. The task of thinking becomes thus aletheia, to think that which grants the very possibility of truth as the unconcealing or disclosure of Being.
Conclusion
In this paper the author has examined Heidegger’s move to set out the task of philosophy as the destruction of metaphysics to move into the realm of ontology, or an inquiry into the being of Being. Derrida critiques Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics in suggesting a non-metaphysics or destroyed metaphysics remains a metaphysics, and thus ultimately a destruction of metaphysics is simply a repetition or reproduction of it and hence, the same as metaphysics. Derrida thus discovers that metaphysics is repeated even in its destruction and thus is no different or the same as non-metaphysics or destroyed metaphysics.
Works Cited
- Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press, 1978.
- Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translation and Annotation by Alan Bass. Brighton; Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Harvester Press, 1982.
- Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
- Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. New York: Harper, 1962.
- Heidegger, Martin. Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988.
- Heidegger, Martin. Towards the Definition of Philosophy. Translated by Ted Sandler. New York: The Athlone Press, 2000.
- Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991.
- Heidegger, Martin. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Trans. T. Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
- Heidegger, Martin. On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
- Heidegger, Martin. The End of Philosophy. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973.