MARJORIE GRENE
267
correlated in this account are sounds and "inner" processes , and the
relation to reality-to "things"-makes its appearance, or is said to
do so , only in that presence of Being ro the mind which is expressed,
or is said to be expressed, by the speaker in living speech . I shall have
more ro say later about the relative places of nature and convention in
Derrida's, as compared with Wittgenstein's, interpretation of lan–
guage . But for now let us just settle this much: traditional philoso–
phers , Wittgenstein and Derrida agree, insist on the interaction of
three ingredients which are signs, thoughts , and reality (or realities) of
some kind in their account of language. For Wittgenstein, signs have
been too single-mindedly and simple-mindedly correlated with
things; and/or the process has been stubbornly misdirected
to
some
.. inner" going-on that somehow philosophers have thought it must
beJor.
In Derrida's view, the single/simple-mindedness of the tradi–
tion has resided in its belief that the outer (sound) refers univocally
to an inner (thought) which in its turn is intuitively united with the
Being present to it in that thought. True speech has been conceived
as the speech of the lover who has climbed the ladder, of the philoso–
pher who has escaped the cave to live in the light of the sun.
Now given these two very different diagnoses of the same dis–
ease, we shall not be surprised
to
find both the problems raised and
the methods used to deal with them very different too. Wittgenstein
has a seemingly workable model to start from, but one that turns out
to be partly too simple and partly rather silly. On the one hand,
philosophy seeks symbol systems- correlations of words and things–
but they don't come out just right (this against himself in the
Tracla–
Ius.
And, on the other hand , philosophy seeks
to
go from this outer ,
working-or not quite working-word-thing relation to some inner
life-the desires of the child Augustine-on which the process some–
how hangs. Here Wittgenstein is opposing, not so much his own early
view, as almost every one else; for this kind of inner something that
philosophers are always chasing never gets caught at all. Given this
simple, partly operative but limited model , then, he asks : Why tie
ourselves
to
this one very simple pattern of linguistic activity with its
will-o-the-wisp accompaniment? Doesn't language work in all sorts
of other ways? Is language
always
like that? Derrida, in contrast , is
looking not at a working machine too simply understood , but at a
dream of language , an alleged machine that has never existed and
