Following the lines of the last post, I read Mooney's article "Whitehead and Derrida". He argues that there are important similarities between Whitehead's philosophy and deconstruction in Derrida. Specially when it comes to deal with substances, complete presences and contingency. Derrida's conception of writing as leaving traces agrees well with the idea of prehension as a perception that could live aside some things while keeping in them somehow what was not considered. The greatest contrast are precisely when it comes to Whitehead's subjective ends - the entity's agenda - that condition the action and cannot be set aside. What is interesting is that Mooney portraits Derrida as unhappy with what is presented in Whitehead because every code can be rewritten by adding supplement, and this is always done in reading itself. The limits to supplementing code is really justice: and that shows up in the form of a conversation (or a negotiation) among subjective ends. The subjective aim is either something that can be supplemented or is something that lies outside the sphere of deconstruction (and the process of constituting things through traces that never encode complete presences). Mooney fears that Whitehead would lie in the second alternative. If this is so, subjective aim is really the source of selfishness (and self-sufficiency, satisfaction, self-containedness) of the actual entity. There is in it (in the agenda of the agent) an element of closure perhaps different from that in Leibniz's monads - for aims are constructed together with each entity and not as part of a world previously chosen - but still closure. The closure is the closure of ontologism (see last post). It is therefore inherited from the belief that at the fundamental level of being, what exists is made of a pure interior (and not an exit sign placed in its heart).
Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...
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