Jacques Derrida

Wilber's View

Derrida gets more careful, sympathetic handling from Wilber than the average "deconstructive postmodernist" — and then, in the same book, gets filed as an example of postmodernism's worst failure mode. On the sympathetic side, Wilber treats différance as essentially compatible with his own holonic ontology: he reads Derrida (via Jonathan Culler) as saying that meaning is context-bound, not that truth doesn't exist — and since every context is itself a whole nested in a larger context without end, Wilber recasts Derrida's "nothing is ever simply present" as just another way of stating that everything is a holon, a whole/part with no final, self-sufficient resting point. He even singles Derrida out, "uncharacteristically," for treating Hegel with real respect, tracing Derrida's critique of self-contained "presence" back to the same dialectical lineage (Hegel, then Bradley, then Nagarjuna) that Wilber's own Emptiness-teaching draws on. But Wilber's verdict on where deconstruction actually lands is blunt: next to that lineage of philosopher-mystics, "the deconstructionists are very thin soup indeed" — because they stop at declaring everything self-contradictory and unstable, and miss what Wilber takes to be the punch line those mystics were making: if you don't want to rest in permanent self-contradiction, you must rest in infinity. Instead, deconstruction's American form treats the study of nested truths as if it were the study of nested lies, which is exactly why Wilber holds it responsible — alongside Foucault, Nietzsche, and the rest of the postmodern lineage — for tipping vision-logic's real insight about context into outright nihilism.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

"Derrida himself defines the notion very simply as 'the process of differentiation.'"

And for all the commotion surrounding Derrida's notion of différance (to differ and defer)—some critics have used the notion to deconstruct anything they didn't happen to like—Derrida himself defines the notion very simply as "the process of differentiation." Before communication can begin, entities have to be differentiated in the first place, and in one sense these entities do not exist prior to the differentiating process per se.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 2, "The Pattern That Connects"

"Derrida does not deny truth per se, but only insists that truth and meaning are context-bound"

This is why Jonathan Culler, perhaps the foremost interpreter of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, can point out that Derrida does not deny truth per se, but only insists that truth and meaning are context-bound (each context being a whole that is also part of another whole context, which itself …). "One could therefore," says Culler, "identify deconstruction with the twin principles of the contextual determination of meaning and the infinite extendability of context."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 2, "The Pattern That Connects"

"Nothing, in either the elements or the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent." (Derrida, quoted)

The play of differences involves syntheses and referrals which prevent there from being at any moment or in any way a simple element which is present in and of itself and refers only to itself… This linkage means that each "element" is constituted with reference to the trace in it of the other elements of the system. Nothing, in either the elements or the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent.

— Derrida, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 2, "The Pattern That Connects"

"The deconstructionists are very thin soup indeed… they almost always miss the punch line"

The deconstructionists have picked up certain of these lines of thought (mostly from Hegel, whom Derrida uncharacteristically treats with much respect), but after Bradley and Nagarjuna, the deconstructionists are very thin soup indeed, and, depressingly, they almost always miss the punch line: if you don't want to be a complete self-contradiction, then you must rest in infinity.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14, "The Unpacking of God"

See Also

• postmodernism — Wilber's fuller diagnosis of the nihilism he thinks deconstruction lands in
• flatland — the collapse he thinks deconstructive postmodernism shares with scientific materialism, from the opposite direction
• holons — the holonic, context-within-context ontology Wilber reads différance as gesturing toward
• hegel — the dialectical lineage Wilber traces Derrida's critique of "presence" back to