INTRODUCTION It is therefore the game of the world that must be first thought; before attempting to understand all the forms of play in the world. (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology)
Erasing the difference, filling the gap, igniting the flame The classical notion of knowledge is that the essence of things, the truth, the logos, the idea, are known immediately and expressed by language. The ideas are embodied by things and revealed by speech. Thought systems expressed by language thereby represent the truth, the Being, of beings. With 'modernism' and the scientific analysis of things based on quantitative measurement and logical induction and deduction, there intervenes a constructed world of theoretical explanation and subjective interpretation which becomes the object of thought, language, and other symbolic systems. Language then is a tool for the expression of the scientific understanding of things, or of the economic or political or religious understanding, and not the expression of a direct perception of things, or of the things themselves. Formerly word, speech, language expressed a close identity with the known; latterly it has expressed a mediated system of abstract thinking about the known. Then the known becomes the interpretation, and not the things themselves. Unfortunately, then the being of things no longer matters much. It is caring for the being of things that needs to be restored, as Heidegger said. Whitehead made a point of this division in many of his lectures, where he treated the distinction between the intuitive and the analytic approaches to knowledge as a matter of historical development. Today the difference is more likely to be explained by theories of the split brain in neuropsychology. Especially in the modern age of science and technology, word, speech, or sign signify conceptual systems of explanation, our “frames� of knowledge, and not the processes and things the systems are supposed to explain, and even less their integrity, their feelings, their self-existent meaning and purpose. This view or analysis is postmodern, one for 3