From Socrates to Rousseau: Toward a Genealogy of Logocentrism in Nietzsche and Derrida

Checkmate of Reason. AI art: symbolic expressioninsm Introduction The critique of reason as the gravitational center of Western culture has been developed through multiple genealogies. Jacques Derrida, in Of Grammatology , denounces "logocentrism": a structure of thought that privileges speech over writing, presence over absence, and origin over supplement. But long before Derrida, Friedrich Nietzsche had already sketched a structural critique of the dominance of rationality in the history of art, particularly in The Birth of Tragedy . His diagnosis of Socrates as a symptom of cultural decline and his suspicion of reason as a tyranny disguised as truth anticipate, in different terms, a proto-deconstructive approach. This article explores how Nietzsche and Derrida disarticulate two analogous hierarchical inversions: that of reason over instinct, and that of speech over writing. Socrates as Symptom: Nietzsche's Diagnosis Nietzsche does not view Socrates as a model...