Difference is a key concept of

philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some ...

, denoting the process or set of properties by which one entity is distinguished from another within a relational field or a given conceptual system. In the Western philosophical system, difference is traditionally viewed as being opposed to identity, following the Principles of Leibniz, and in particular, his Law of the identity of indiscernibles. In structuralist and

poststructuralist Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques ...

accounts, however, difference is understood to be ''constitutive'' of both meaning and identity. In other words, because identity (particularly, personal identity) is viewed in

non-essentialist Often synonymous to anti-foundationalism, non-essentialism in philosophy is the non-belief in an essence (from Latin ''esse'') of any given thing, idea, or metaphysical entity (e.g. God). Non-essentialism might also be defined cataphatically (i ...

terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of differences (see below), it is the case that for both

structuralism In sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, structuralism is a general theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader ...

and

poststructuralism Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques ...

, identity cannot be said to exist without difference.

Difference in Leibniz's law

Gottfried Leibniz's Principle of the identity of indiscernibles states that two things are identical if and only if they share the same and only the same properties. This is a principle which defines identity rather than difference, although it established the tradition in logic and analytical philosophy of conceiving of identity and difference as oppositional.

Kant's critique

In his '' Critique of Pure Reason'', Immanuel Kant argues that it is necessary to distinguish between the thing in itself and its appearance. Even if two objects have completely the same properties, if they are at two different places at the same time, they are numerically different:

Difference in structuralism

Structural linguistics Structural linguistics, or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating Semiotics, semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other element ...

, and subsequently

proper, are founded on the idea that meaning can only be produced differentially in signifying systems (such as language). This concept first came to prominence in the structuralist writings of Swiss linguist

Ferdinand de Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure (; ; 26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widel ...

and was developed for the analysis of social and mental structures by French

anthropologist An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms and ...

Claude Lévi-Strauss. The former was concerned to question the prevailing view of meaning "inhering" in words, or the idea that language is a nomenclature bearing a one-to-one correspondence to the real. Instead, Saussure argues that meaning arises through differentiation of one

sign A sign is an object, quality, event, or entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else. A natural sign bears a causal relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm, or me ...

from another, or even of one phoneme from another:

In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. ... A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.

In his ''

Structural Anthropology Structural anthropology is a school of sociocultural anthropology based on Claude Lévi-Strauss' 1949 idea that immutable deep structures exist in all cultures, and consequently, that all cultural practices have homologous counterparts in other ...

'', Claude Lévi-Strauss applied this concept to the anthropological study of mental structures,

kinship In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox says that ...

and belief systems, examining the way in which social meaning emerges through a series of structural oppositions between paired/opposed kinship groups, for example, or between basic oppositional categories (such as friend and enemy, life and death, or in a later volume, the raw and the cooked).

Difference and in poststructuralism

The French philosopher

Jacques Derrida Jacques Derrida (; ; born Jackie Élie Derrida; See also . 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in numerous texts, and which was developed t ...

both extended and profoundly critiqued structuralist thought on the processes by which meaning is produced through the interplay of difference in language, and in particular, writing. Whereas structuralist linguistics had recognized that meaning is differential, much structuralist thought, such as narratology, had become too focused on identifying and producing a typology of the fixed differential structures and binary oppositions at work in any given system. In his work, Derrida sought to show how the differences on which any signifying system depends are not fixed, but get caught up and entangled with each other. Writing itself becomes the prototype of this process of entanglement, and in ''

Of Grammatology ''Of Grammatology'' (french: links=no, De la grammatologie) is a 1967 book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. The book, originating the idea of deconstruction, proposes that throughout continental philosophy, especially as philosophers en ...

'' (1967) and "" (in ''Margins of Philosophy'', 1972) Derrida shows how the concept of writing (as the paradoxical absence or de-presencing of the living voice) has been subordinated to the desired "full presence" of speech within the Western philosophical tradition. His early thought on the relationship between writing and difference is collected in his book of essays entitled '' Writing and Difference'' (1967). Elsewhere, Derrida coined the term (a deliberate misspelling of ) in order to provide a conceptual hook for his thinking on the meaning processes at work within writing/language. This neologism is a play on the two meanings of the French word : to differ and to defer. Derrida thereby argues that meaning does not arise out of fixed differences between static elements in a structure, but that the meanings produced in language and other signifying systems are always partial, provisional and infinitely deferred along a chain of differing/deferring signifiers. At the same time, the word itself ''performs'' this entanglement and confusion of differential meanings, for it depends on a minimal difference (the substitution of the letter "a" for the letter "e") which cannot be apprehended in oral speech, since the suffixes "-ance" and "-ence" have the same pronunciation in French. The " phonemic" (non-)difference between and can only be observed in writing, hence producing differential meaning only in a partial, deferred and entangled manner. has been defined as "the non-originary, constituting-disruption of presence": spatially, it differs, creating spaces, ruptures, and differences and temporally, it defers, delaying presence from ever being fully attained. Derrida's criticism of essentialist ontology draws on the differential ontology of Friedrich Nietzsche (who introduced the concept of , "difference", in his unpublished manuscripts ('' KSA'' 11:35 8 p. 537)) and Emmanuel Levinas (who proposed an ethics of the Other).Douglas L. Donkel, ''The Theory of Difference: Readings in Contemporary Continental Thought'', SUNY Press, 2001, p. 295. In a similar vein,

Gilles Deleuze Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( , ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volu ...

's '' Difference and Repetition'' (1968) was an attempt to think difference as having an ontological privilege over identity, inverting the traditional relationship between those two concepts and implying that identities are only produced through processes of differentiation.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Difference (Philosophy) Logic Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Immanuel Kant Continental philosophy Structuralism Deconstruction Post-structuralism Difference French philosophers