From the Deconstruction of to a Philosophy of the

—Heidegger and Lacan: A Bridge from the Modern to the Postmodern—

From the Deconstruction of <Presence> to a Philosophy of the <Network>

—Heidegger and Lacan: A Bridge from the Modern to the Postmodern—

Introduction: The Collapse of Certainty and the Quest for a “Method”

If modern philosophy began with Descartes’ unshakeable certainty in “I think, therefore I am,” then contemporary philosophy begins by exposing the precarious foundations upon which that “I,” that “thinking,” and that “being” stand. The decisive blow was struck by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology.

The purpose of this essay is to juxtapose the thought of two giants who stood upon the new intellectual horizon opened by Husserl: Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan. Furthermore, it aims to clarify how their thought became the crucial bridge from the modern to the postmodern. As your own manuscript so aptly put it, this is the story of a grand paradigm shift from a philosophy of “substance” to a philosophy of the “network.”

Chapter 1: Husserl’s Revolution—Putting the World in Brackets

In an era when science was making great strides in its quest for an “objective world,” Husserl, who came from a background in mathematics, sought to re-establish philosophy’s foundation to give it the status of a “rigorous science.” We have no means of proving whether the “external world truly exists.” Therefore, he argued, let us “put this question in brackets and suspend judgment (epoché).” This was his revolutionary proposal.

This is not to ignore the world. Rather, it is to focus solely on the process by which that “world” appears to our consciousness as a “phenomenon” and is endowed with meaning. To describe this process of meaning’s genesis, free from all presuppositions, is the only rigorous undertaking worthy of philosophy. This methodology, the analysis of consciousness’s intentionality (noesis/noema), would fundamentally alter the soil of all subsequent philosophy.

Chapter 2: Heidegger’s Response—The World as a Network of <Involvement>

Heidegger, while inheriting his teacher Husserl’s phenomenology, shifted the inquiry back from “consciousness” to “Being” itself. He called the human being not merely a conscious subject, but “Dasein.” Dasein is the being “for whom Being is an issue,” a being always already thrown into the world as “Being-in-the-world.”

The core of his analysis here lies in the referential totality of equipment (Zeugzusammenhang). When we take a hammer in hand, it does not first appear to us as an objective object of “wood and iron” (presence-at-hand, Vorhandenheit). Instead, it appears as a “tool for hammering nails” within a referential context of nails, wood, and the purpose of building a house. This is the primordial way of being for equipment (readiness-to-hand, Zuhandenheit). Only when the hammer breaks, or when we pause our work to gaze upon it, does it emerge as a mere “thing.”

In other words, our cognition does not arise from first directing our attention to an object. Rather, meaning is always already constituted within a practical network of “involvement” with purposes and with others. Heidegger elucidated the meaning of Being from within this web of lived engagement. It was not a return to realism, but a new horizon for ontology.

Chapter 3: Lacan’s Response—The Subject as a Network of <Language>

Whereas Heidegger interpreted Being through “lived involvement,” the psychoanalyst Lacan reinterpreted the Freudian unconscious as being “structured like a language,” and elucidated how the subject is formed by a network of language.

His famous Schema L is a diagram of this structure.

• S (Subject): Not the transparent self-awareness of Descartes, but a being divided and alienated by language (the barred subject, $).
• A (big Other): The trans-personal Symbolic Order itself, comprising language, law, and social norms.
• a’ (ego): The “illusory self” formed in the gaze of the other, like a mirror image (the Imaginary Order).
• a (small other): The concrete other, and also the cause of desire (objet petit a).

What this diagram reveals is a shocking fact: the sense of “I” (a’) is merely a result, constructed through our relationship with the other (a) as mediated by the linguistic order (A). The subject (S) does not precede the network of language; it is an effect produced by it.

Your intuition that “presence forms a network” is perfectly aligned with this. If Heidegger’s network was a web of “tools and purposes,” Lacan’s is a web of “signs and desires.”

Chapter 4: From the Modern to the Postmodern—Deconstructing Structure and the Play of <Difference>

Structuralism, with Lacan as one of its key figures, exposed the unconscious “structures” in the depths of culture and society. However, it was post-structuralism that questioned the very stability of that structure and advanced philosophy to its next stage.

• Jacques Derrida radicalized Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of presence, arguing that the meaning of a word is never fully present “here and now.” Every word contains within it the trace of a difference from other words (what it is not), and the fixing of its meaning is always deferred. This movement of “differing” and “deferring,” which he termed différance, is, he says, the very condition of our world. There are no longer stable nodes (substances) in the network, only the ceaseless shifting and genesis of the network’s mesh.
• Michel Foucault exposed how concepts the modern era took for granted, such as “Man” and “Reason,” were in fact produced by a “network of knowledge and power” (épistémè) specific to a particular historical period, thus announcing “the end of Man.”

Thus, the Cartesian reductionist method of “disassemble → understand → reassemble” has its premise overturned. The very act of “understanding” becomes a function of power that fixes an object in place. True understanding, to borrow your words, becomes like an expert “reading” the Mona Lisa—an unending journey that opens onto the infinite expanse of the object itself.

Conclusion: At the End of Two Rigors

What Husserl sought in philosophy was a rigor of method. Heidegger and Lacan inherited this rigor, each depicting how cognition is constituted as a network—one of “lived context” and the other of “symbolic context.” And post-structuralism pushed this to its limit, pursuing a rigor of relations that sees the network itself not as fixed, but as a movement of constant generation and displacement.

For us, accustomed to the worldview of classical physics, these ideas may seem counter-intuitive. As you noted, the strangeness is akin to that of quantum theory. However, once we acquire this perspective, we become capable of surveying the history of thought, and indeed the world, from a higher dimension.

It means that in exchange for losing the resting place of absolute truth and unshakeable reality, we gain the freedom to affirm a diversity of beings and to open ourselves to the infinite possibilities of knowledge.