edge and everyday life. Geometry, for Derrida as for Husserl,
offers an example of ideas that change the world, that change
experience itself. Every day, we see and feel the strict forms that
were not there before geometry first appeared. In this way, the
geometrical becomes firm evidence for itself.
Beginning with Plato’s Meno,geometrical truth has been
identified with (as Husserl puts it) what is “objectively there
for ‘everyone’” (Introduction 65 ). It is of crucial importance for
Husserl that this ideal objectivity has a history. No final state of
geometrical knowledge will ever be reached: instead, we are
treated to an infinite progress of understanding. Husserl asso-
ciates this infinite progress with European culture, the home of
the exact sciences. But the source of the idealizing ability that
stands behind exact science, and that therefore supports phe-
nomenology, remains obscure. As Derrida puts it, “the Logos
cannot appear as such, can never be given in a philosophy of
seeing” like Husserl’s ( 141 ). There is no “phenomenology of the
Idea” ( 138 ).
Derrida, then, implies that Husserl’s philosophy is an-
chored in something that remains external to it, and that can-
not be subjected to phenomenological investigation. What is
missing, and must remain missing, is a story about how the
difference between mere facts and ideal objects first arose. On
the one hand, as Husserl phrases it, “the human surrounding
world is the same today and always” (Introduction 180 ). Phe-
nomenological investigation, like geometrical truth, can take
place anywhere, at any time. On the other hand, the “Origin of
Geometry” suggests that objective truth is less at home in civ-
ilization than it once was, given the rampant irrationalism of
early twentieth-century politics. Husserl dwells on the differ-
ence between the work of reason involved in mathematics,
which requires the activity of making things self-evident and
From Algeria to the École Normale 45