Page 43 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

more appropriate to the text than the word of Hegel himself. In this sacrifice, all (holos) is burned (caustos)... (Derrida 1986:241)
—another total figure that leaves no trace. Glas uses its two-column layout to juxtapose this point with a scene in an Algerian synagogue. Of Spirit, as weknow, is more reticent. The Holocaust is never named, but it is implicitly suggested and deconstructed, both as a conceptual and as an historical totality: the Solution that was not Final, the ash that was not consumed.
9. Conclusion
It should by now be apparent that the very appearance of deconstruction in the context of an encyclopedia is paradoxical. An encyclopedia surveys established knowledge in a necessarily dogmatic fashion, while deconstruction seeks precisely to question the dog- matic and the established. Yet, as already shown, it has to differ from within; and this not only justifies its placing in reference books but, in a larger sense, gives it its cultural role.
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Several twentieth-century philosophers of language have argued that the semantic properties of language have important essentialist implications. Essentialism is, however, a vague doctrine, and before examining its modern manifestations it is helpful to look briefly at its historical origins.
1. Aristotelian Essentialism
There is a manifest difference between those properties which objects possess only at some times and those which they possess throughout their existence. If this distinction is extended to embrace possible changes as well as actual ones, one arrives at one conception of an object's 'essential' (as opposed to its accidental) properties, namely those properties which it cannot fail to possess. Aristotle held that in identifying that essential property of an object which identifies what kind of thing it is—its essence—the means is provided for an understanding of all the object's properties, since all explanations rest upon 'first principles' which concern these essences. This thesis was enormously
influential, and is the basis of traditional essentialism. Descartes shows its influence when he discusses the essences of mind (thought) and matter (extension), and constructs his psychology and physics upon these identifications. But the essentialist tradition became problematic as new sciences developed without ref- erence to traditional essences. Locke shows well the resulting situation: he acknowledged the traditional doctrine in his theory of 'real essences,' but, doubting people's ability to know anything of them, he held that the classifications employed in the new sciences are only 'nominal essences,' that is, not really essential properties at all.
In Kant's works essentialism returns, but now as a doctrine about the essential features of objective experience, and thus only indirectly as a doctrine about essential features of the world. Nonetheless, Kant's doctrines provided the stimulus for an idealist essentialism according to which all aspects of the world are essentially related. Since the analytic pro- gram in philosophy arose as a reaction against the
Essentialism T. R. Baldwin
Wood D, Bernasconi R (eds.) 1985 Derrida and Parousia Press, Coventry
Differance.
Essentialism
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