ABSTRACT
Even if Derrida did not respond to the hard problem, some of the terms of its usual expression were taken up and discussed by him. In particular, and from very early in his career, he posed questions to traditional philosophy concerning its appeal to consciousness: ‘But what is consciousness? What does “consciousness” mean?’ (Derrida 1972: 16). I will look at how Derrida responds on behalf of the tradition in a moment, but it is worth noting fi rst the pointers or gestures o ered in the literature on the hard problem that relate to the sort of thing a refl ection on consciousness should include in its embrace. On the one hand, we fi nd examples of certain kinds of qualitative experiential contents: ‘the quality of deep blue’, ‘the sensation of middle C’. And, on the other hand, something like the general dimension of the qualitative itself: ‘a subjective aspect’ of thinking and perceiving, ‘a rich inner life’ and the notorious idea that ‘there is something it is like to be a conscious
organism’ (Chalmers 1995). The more general dimension adds a further specifi cation: the experiential contents at issue are undergone by a ‘subject of experience’. There is, then, some ‘who’ for whom these experiences are undergone as experiences. On the idea of such a ‘subject’ Derrida has very clear views, views which he takes to have been developed and elaborated before him by Heidegger. And here Derrida does not take for granted that the concepts deployed by those who pose the hard problem are philosophically innocent or unproblematic. The following passage, continuing Derrida’s initial question about consciousness, fairly summarizes Derrida’s orientation in this area:
Proponents of the hard problem sometimes like to fi nd its expression in the work of philosophers from the past. We have to be prepared to fi nd this unpersuasive: that its appearance there only illustrates its rootedness in the onto-theological, metaphysical tradition and is not reliable testimony to a problem. Since Heidegger, this tradition has itself become a theme for philosophical thinking and its inadequacies (or claimed inadequacies) tracked down. As the quotation shows, Derrida is a follower of Heidegger in this area, and his own contribution belongs to an inheritance of the Heideggerian understanding of the philosophical tradition.
