- 2025年9月6日
From the Deconstruction of “Presence” to a Philosophy of “Networks”
— Heidegger and Lacan as a Bridge from the Modern to the Postmodern —
From the Deconstruction of “Presence” to a Philosophy of “Networks”
— Heidegger and Lacan as a Bridge from the Modern to the Postmodern —
Introduction: The Collapse of Certainty and the Search for “Method”
If early modern philosophy set out from Descartes’ unshakable conviction “I think, therefore I am,” then contemporary philosophy begins by exposing how the certainty of that very “I,” of its “thinking,” and of its “being,” rests on precarious ground. It was Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology that delivered the decisive blow.
The aim of this essay is to set side by side two giants who stood upon the horizon of knowledge Husserl opened—Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan—and to clarify how their thought effected a decisive passage from the modern to the postmodern. As your original manuscript perceptively intuited, this is the story of a grand paradigm shift from a philosophy of “reality” to a philosophy of “networks.”
Chapter 1: Husserl’s Revolution — Bracketing the World
At a time when science was single-mindedly pursuing the “objective world,” the mathematician Husserl re-grounded philosophy as a “rigorous science.” We have no way to prove that an external world “really” exists. Then let us put that very question in brackets and suspend judgment (epoché). This was his revolutionary proposal.
This does not mean ignoring the world. Rather, the task is to describe—excluding all presuppositions—how that “world” appears to consciousness as a phenomenon, and how it is endowed with meaning. The sole strictly philosophical enterprise is to describe the genesis of meaning. This method, which analyzes the intentionality of consciousness (noesis/noema), changed the soil of philosophy at its root.
Chapter 2: Heidegger’s Response — The World as a Network of Involvements
Heidegger inherits phenomenology while pulling the question back from “consciousness” to Being itself. He names the human being not a mere thinking subject but Dasein, the being “for whom its own being is an issue,” always already “being-in-the-world.”
The core lies in his analysis of the equipmental nexus (Zeugzusammenhang).
When we take a hammer in hand, it shows up primarily not as a neutral physical object—present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit)—but as a tool-for-driving-nails, embedded in a nexus of nails, wood, and the project of building a house—ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). Only when it breaks, or when we step back from our task, does it appear as a mere “thing.”
In short, our cognition does not arise first by directing attention to an object; the object is already meaningful within a practical network of ends, tools, and others. Heidegger unpacks the meaning of being from this mesh of lived involvements. This is not a return to naïve realism but a new horizon of ontology.
Chapter 3: Lacan’s Response — The Subject as a Network of Language
Where Heidegger reads being from the web of lived involvement, Lacan rereads Freud: the unconscious is structured like a language. He clarifies how the subject is formed by the network of signifiers.
His well-known Schema L diagrams this structure:
- S (the subject): not the Cartesian, transparent self, but a barred and split being, alienated by language (the barred subject, S̶).
- A (the big Other): the symbolic order itself—language, law, social norms—which exceeds any individual.
- a′ (the ego): the imaginary self-image formed in the mirror and under the gaze of others.
- a (the small other): the concrete other; in other contexts, the object a, the cause of desire.
The diagram makes a startling claim: the sense of “I (a′)” is constructed through relations with others (a) mediated by the symbolic order (A). The subject (S) does not precede language’s network; it is an effect of it. Your intuition that “presence forms a network” fits perfectly here: if Heidegger’s network is one of tools and purposes, Lacan’s is one of signifiers and desire.
Chapter 4: From Modern to Postmodern — Dismantling Structure and the Play of Difference
Structuralism—with Lacan as one of its pillars—exposed the unconscious “structures” at work in culture and society. Yet post-structuralism advanced by questioning the very stability of those structures.
Jacques Derrida radicalizes Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of presence: meaning never fully “presents itself” here and now. Every word bears within it the trace of what it is not; the fixation of meaning is always deferred. He calls the joint movement of difference and deferral différance. There is no restful node in the network, only the ceaseless slippage and becoming of the mesh.
Michel Foucault shows that notions modernity took for granted—“man,” “reason”—were produced by historically specific networks of knowledge and power (épistémè), and he announces the end of “man.”
Thus the Cartesian program “analyze → understand → reduce (back)” has its very premises overturned. “Understanding” itself proves to be a power-operation that freezes the object; true understanding becomes—borrowing your apt metaphor—the expert’s act of “reading” the Mona Lisa: an open-ended journey into the work’s inexhaustible horizon.
Conclusion: At the End of Two Rigors
Husserl demanded of philosophy a rigor of method.
Heidegger and Lacan inherit that rigor—one as a web of lived involvements, the other as a web of signifiers—and show how cognition is constituted as a network.
Post-structuralism then insists on a second rigor—the rigor of relations—by which even that network is not fixed but ever-generative and ever-shifting.
For minds habituated to classical physics, this may cut against intuition; as you note, it resembles the strangeness of quantum theory. Yet once we acquire this vantage point, we can survey intellectual history—and the world—from a higher dimension.
The price is the loss of sanctuary in absolute truth or immovable reality. The gain is a freedom that affirms plurality and opens onto the infinite possibilities of knowledge.