Self and other: Justice in Derrida and Piaget (Jacques Derrida, Jean Piaget)

What we are able to hope for human community depends on the trajectory established in how we construe the relationship between self and other. There is a strong stream of thought that understands this relationship as one characterized primarily by conflict, threat, or lack, a stream that meanders through thinkers in the psychoanalytic tradition, Christian theology, and western philosophy. Jacques Derrida's work opens up a way to think very differently, training our attention on the essential affirmation of the other that underlies all human experience. He points to a self forged not from exclusion and defense, but in open response to and welcome of the other. The central thesis of this work is that the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, read against the grain of how his work has often been appropriated, lends support to this more hopeful reading. Piaget traces development as a gradual decentration of self in response to and dependence on others, a self that comes to respect difference and grows in the ability to appreciate the perspective of others.