Derrida and Nicolai Hartmann, two deaths on 9 October and two ways of taking being seriously

Jacques Derrida died in a Paris hospital on 9 October 2004, of pancreatic cancer, at seventy-four. Fifty-four years earlier to the day, on 9 October 1950, Nicolai Hartmann died of a stroke in Göttingen at sixty-eight. The calendar has put together two philosophers who would not have had much to say to each other, and that is the interest of it. Hartmann believed that being has a structure, that the structure can be described in categories, and that it is there whether or not anyone describes it. Derrida spent a working life showing that every such description leans on a term it cannot secure, that presence is always deferred, and that the metaphysics of being is a history of privileged words. Each of them was, in his own sense, taking ontology seriously. They simply took it in opposite directions.

The word is worth insisting on, because Derrida is still filed as the man who dissolved everything into text, and Hartmann is barely filed at all. Neither label survives contact with the work. Derrida's late books are about justice, hospitality, forgiveness, mourning, the animal and sovereignty, hardly the concerns of a man who thought nothing was real. Hartmann's ontology of levels, which fell out of fashion with astonishing speed after his death, has lately been dug up by philosophers of emergence and of the sciences who find in it exactly the non-reductive realism they were looking for. Take the two in turn, then set them against each other.

2004: the man at war with himself#

Derrida was born in El Biar, outside Algiers, on 15 July 1930, into a Sephardic Jewish family that had been in Algeria long before the French. In 1942 the Vichy authorities applied a numerus clausus to Jewish pupils and he was put out of his lycée; he later described himself as having been, for a time, a citizen of no country at all. He came to France in 1949, entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1952, taught there from 1964 to 1983, and in 1967 published three books in one year, Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference, which put the word deconstruction into the language.

What the word named was never a method, and Derrida refused the term whenever it was offered. It was a practice of reading that attended to the hierarchies a text relies on, speech over writing, reason over feeling, presence over absence, the proper over the metaphorical, and showed that the superior term depends on the inferior one it pretends to exclude. Western metaphysics, on this account, is a long preference for presence: for the voice over the letter, the living intention over the dead mark, the thing itself over the sign. The neologism différance, spelt with an a that can be seen but not heard, names the double movement by which meaning is produced through difference and at the same time deferred, so that it is never fully present in any sign.

The early reception was partisan. Derrida became a hero in American literature departments and a suspect in analytic philosophy, and the two reputations collided in 1992 when Cambridge proposed to give him an honorary doctorate. A letter to The Times from philosophers led by Barry Smith objected that his work did not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour; the university voted, and Derrida won by 336 to 204. In December 1981 he had been arrested in Prague, after a clandestine seminar, on a fabricated drugs charge, and released after François Mitterrand intervened.

From the late 1980s the writing turned openly to ethics and politics, though Derrida would have said the turn was only a change of emphasis. In 'Force of Law' (1989) he argued that law is deconstructible and justice is not, and allowed himself the sentence 'deconstruction is justice'. Specters of Marx (1993) coined hauntology, a logic of what is neither present nor absent, and insisted, after the Cold War, that a certain spirit of Marx could not be exorcised. The Animal That Therefore I Am, drawn from a 1997 lecture, asked what the philosophical tradition had been doing in calling every non-human creature by the single word 'animal'. In 2003 he and Jürgen Habermas, after decades of mutual suspicion, signed a joint appeal for a European public sphere in the wake of the Iraq war demonstrations of 15 February.

In his last interview, given to Le Monde in August 2004 and published under the title 'I am at war with myself', he spoke of learning to live as something one never manages, and of survival as the structure of every trace. At his burial at Ris-Orangis his son Pierre read a message he had written for the occasion, asking those present to prefer life and never to stop affirming survival. We have discussed elsewhere what his ideas of archive and trace do when applied to machine learning. On the anniversary of his death the point to make is simpler. Derrida was an ontologist in the negative: his whole enterprise presupposed that the question of being mattered enough to be worth unsettling, and that the unsettling was itself a form of fidelity to it.

1950: the ontology that was supposed to be impossible#

Nicolai Hartmann was born in Riga on 20 February 1882, a Baltic German subject of the Tsar, and came to philosophy through the Marburg school. He took his doctorate at Marburg in 1907 under Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, the two heads of neo-Kantianism, and in 1922 succeeded to Natorp's chair. The following year Martin Heidegger arrived at Marburg, and the two were colleagues until Hartmann left for Cologne in 1925; he went to Berlin in 1931 and held the chair of theoretical philosophy there until 1945, then taught at Göttingen for the last five years of his life.

The break with his teachers was the decisive event. For Cohen and Natorp, as for Kant read a certain way, the object of knowledge is constituted by the knowing; there is no sense in asking about things apart from the conditions under which they are given to us. Hartmann's Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis (1921) argued the opposite: knowing is a grasping of something that is already there and would be there without us, and the fact that our grasp is always partial is the best evidence that the object exceeds it. Knowledge does not create its object; it is measured against it. From this realist starting point he built, across the 1930s and 1940s, the most elaborate systematic ontology written in German in the twentieth century: Zur Grundlegung der Ontologie (1935), Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit (1938), Der Aufbau der realen Welt (1940) and Philosophie der Natur, which appeared in 1950, the year he died.

The core of the system is the doctrine of strata. The real world, Hartmann argued, is built in four layers: the inorganic, the organic, the psychical and the spiritual or cultural. Each higher layer rests on the one below and cannot exist without it, yet each brings in a novum, categories of its own that do not appear lower down and cannot be derived from what does. Life depends on chemistry but is not reducible to it; mind depends on life; the objective spirit of language, law and institutions depends on individual minds and outlasts any of them. The lower is the stronger, since it can exist without the higher; the higher is the freer, since it has room to move the lower does not. Hartmann set out the laws of this dependence, of recurrence, modification, novelty and distance between levels, with a thoroughness that reads today like a draft of the debates about emergence and reduction that philosophers of science conduct without ever mentioning his name.

His Ethik (1926), a book of forbidding length, did for value what the later books did for being. Following Max Scheler, he held that values form an objective order that we discover rather than invent; departing from Scheler, he thought our discovery of it is historical and piecemeal, so that every age sees some values and is blind to others. He had no use for Heidegger's fundamental ontology, which he thought had replaced the question of being with the question of the human being who asks it. The feeling was reciprocated. By the 1960s Heidegger's reputation had swallowed his, and Hartmann became what he remains in most English-speaking departments, a name in a footnote.

Two reflexes#

Set the two men side by side and the century's two great philosophical reflexes come into view. Hartmann's is the reflex of the builder: the world has levels, the levels have laws, and the philosopher's job is to describe them without the reductive shortcuts of either the physicist or the idealist. Derrida's is the reflex of the reader: every description is a text, every text has a margin, and the philosopher's job is to find the term the description cannot afford to look at. Each had a diagnosis of the other ready to hand. For a Hartmannian, deconstruction is a sophisticated version of the idealist error, a refusal to let the object be anything but the trace of our dealings with it. For a Derridean, Hartmann's strata are the metaphysics of presence in its most architectural form, with 'the real world' doing the work that 'the voice' did for Rousseau.

The honest observation is that neither reflex has gone away and neither has won. The realist recovery of the last twenty years, from the new materialisms to the revival of interest in emergence and grounding, is in Hartmann's lineage whether it knows it or not; the suspicion of any vocabulary that claims to describe the world from nowhere is in Derrida's, and it has survived the decline of his school. A reader in 2026 asking whether a large language model has an inner life will find herself needing both: a theory of levels to say what sort of thing such a system is, and a theory of the trace to explain why the question keeps slipping. That the two died on the same day of the calendar is an accident. That they are both still needed is not.

Also on the day#

Pope Pius XII died at Castel Gandolfo on 9 October 1958, after a pontificate that had defended Thomism against the 'new theology' which would prevail at the Council his successor opened four years later. And on 9 October 1967, at La Higuera in Bolivia, Che Guevara was executed a day after his capture; the photographs of the body, laid out like a Mantegna, became one of the century's studies in how a presence is manufactured out of an absence.