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PARTISAN REVIEW
on with the job . Philosophy, compared
to
ordinary goings-on , is
deathlike ; it tries to stop the game in the midst of play. Forget it , or
try to forget it. Let life go on.
Yet of course Wittgenstein recognizes the existence of another
notion of "life ," that alleged secret "inner process ," whatever life it
is that belongs to the beetle in the box. In
Zettel
he writes :
One might say: in all cases one means by " thought " what is
living
in the sentence. That without which it is dead, a mere
sound-sequence or sequence ofwritten shapes .
Then he gives his chess example, and continues:
Or what if we spoke of a something that distinguishes paper
money from mere printed slips of paper and gives it its meaning,
its life!
But that is very like what, in Derrida's account, Husserl meant by
life.
It
is in that sense, or one allied to it, that phenomenology ap–
pears as a "philosophy of life." That is also the meaning, I should
say, of Same's " Ie vecu ." For if there is life , as against machinery ,
in the Cartesian tradition (and both Husser! and Sartre are die-hard
Cartesians), it can only be the secret life of the soul, the pure lucid
moment of the
cogitatio
in the very presence of the Being it knows .
Now admittedly, both Wittgenstein and Derrida are counter-Car–
tesians; but, as we have seen, their accounts of the' 'secret inner life'
I
and their ways of dealing with it are as far apart as they could be in
both their direction and their style.
Wittgenstein wants
to
displace "life" from inner not to outer,
but to ordinary-which is neither" in" nor "out ," neither hidden
"subject" nor lifeless "object ," but just the way things naturally do
work. Thus the alleged inner "life, " when held fast ,
is
a kind of
death; to come
to
life is to ignore it- to ignore beetles in boxes and
their like and go on talking, in the appropriate way for appropriate
contexts , as real live human beings indeed do.
Derrida, however, is taking that ideal, never-existent inner life
as an inescapable , if unfulfillable,
telos
oflanguage and of our "lives'
I
as language-users. If we could realize that goal, he admits, this would
be both absolute life and total death . Yet, in contrast to Wittgen-
