574 Derrida

There is much confusion and misunderstanding concerning Derrida’s ideas of ‘differance’ (with an ‘a’), and ‘deconstruction’. They evoked different interpretations, and here I give mine.

In interpret ‘differance’ as a process, a verb, not a substantive. In my view it is meant as a process in which one finds or creates differences. Nothing is fixed, and everything is subject to minor or major change, in development or rupture, without end. For many people, such lack of fixity is frightening, or at least unsettling, and resulted in a search of substance and fixity, in some absolute of a God or a process of history that ultimately will yield stability.

I find fixity, the reaching of a horizon, dull. What happens after reaching it? It keeps on shifting away. One finds ongoing, unpredictable change in Taoism. You cannot predict what you don’t know. Indeed, this openness is exhilarating, but it requires resilience, in adaptation to the unpredictable. Water adapts its form to where it streams.

An example of this process of ongoing change is the ‘cycle of discovery’ that I discussed earlier in this blog. Development arises from the processes of ‘assimilation’ and ‘accommodation’ that I adopted from Piaget. This is driven by a change of context; of location, as Derrida called it. You try to assimilate what is foreign in the new location, and when that fails you accommodate to it, deconstruct it, as Derrida said. Deconstruction is not destruction, and leads on to reconstruction, as Derrida said.

In the new location one finds out where the limits of validity lie, and interaction with what is foreign yields hints what to adapt. This applies to knowledge, interpretation of texts, language, identity, ethics and society. In particular, people need interaction with others, opposition from others, to get rid of some of their preconceptions.

Philosophy of dynamics goes back to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, and there was some of it in in the philosophy of Schelling, in the18th-19th century. In economics, Schumpeter proposed the notion of ‘creative destruction’, but this was never fully absorbed in economic theory.

The question is how far development can go. One form of change is the realisation of a potential, as an acorn developing into a tree, as Aristotle said. But it cannot develop into a crocodile. Evolution brings such change, in species driving each other out. or engaging in symbiosis with another species, even tiny fish that pick the teeth of crocodiles clean.

Interaction, between species, and individuals within species, seems to drive development. . An example was the interaction between people to develop their ideas. Humanity developed its ideas and language in evolution, in interaction with nature and with each other. I recently learned that trees interact with other trees via connections of their roots with mycelium under the ground, with which they exchange sugar produced by the chlorophyl in their leaves with moistures and minerals from the mycelium.

I don’t know where this interaction comes from. Is the drive to interact part of DNA? Is it there because it contributed to survival in evolution?