Schopenhauer was the first point of reconnection between our two search parties, the Abrahamic and Brahmanic

Combining Western Know-How with Eastern Be-Who from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

As the two world-historical streams -- the Abrahamic and Brahmanic -- meandered and ramified, they took very different courses before arriving at oddly parallel conclusions. In the West, science pursued the material world down to the atom, eventually passing beyond it to discover an implicate realm of unbroken wholeness flowing beneath our misleading perceptions of duration and solidity. Vedanta proceeded in the opposite direction, tracing the illusory contours of our world-representation down to the explicate self, and then smashing it to discover another vast realm of unbroken wholeness and unity beneath our contingent and transient egos.

In the West, Kant and later Schopenhauer (his biography by Magee is outstanding) took metaphysics as far as the Western dualistic paradigm would allow, to the threshold of the noumenon, the unknowable ultimate reality that lay hidden behind our evolved perceptions (or what we like to call O). Kant maintained that we could only know the phenomenal world, the one revealed by our senses and categories of thought. Whatever lay outside those categories was utterly unknown and unknowable for us.

Schopenhauer went further than Kant, in that he realized that fleeting glimpses of the noumenon could be experienced, for example, in sexual union or in moments of aesthetic exaltation, especially through music. By the way, note that noumenon must be singular, not plural; there can be no "noumena," because that already presumes an egoic standpoint detached from it. In Coonskrit, it would be analogous to suggesting that there could be more than one O, when we all know there can onely be (n)one.

Schopenhauer never imagined that we could actually evolve beyond the neuropsychological walls of the ego and know the noumenon directly. That is, until he discovered the Upanishads, which you might say was the first point of reconnection between our two search parties, the Abrahamic and Brahmanic.

(Although there is, of course, much interesting, perhaps kooky, speculation as to how much Jesus was influenced by Eastern ideas, and why not? First century Palestine was an extraordinary melting pot of religious influences, and we can really have no idea what Luke exactly means by the statement that Jesus "grew in wisdom and stature" (2:52) or how he did it, for what does the Son of God need to learn in order to grow and become wise, and from whom does he learn it? Very early on, Jesus began to be officially "Helenized" at the same time he was de-Judaized, which is perhaps why some of the early fathers who gave Christianity more of a Vedantin twist are still regarded with suspicion, e.g., Denys -- who seems to have been familiar with Eastern ideas -- and his greatest acolyte, John Scottus Eriugena.)

***

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Where Merleau-Ponty is quick to see a gap where th...":

You know I get the impression from all of these guys that prattle on about various philosophies of the body that none of them are actually involved in any form of consistent discipline of the body via hatha yoga, tai chi, aikido, pilates, rolfing, and of the various body-based methods of psycho-physical transformation that were pioneered at Esalen and described (for instance) in the masterful The Future of the Body by Michael Murphy. Posted by Anonymous to Feel Philosophy at 9:17 AM, February 06, 2008

Where Merleau-Ponty is quick to see a gap where the body would play or function, Derrida sees total play, that breaks with this functioning

Le gai savoir philosophy, literature, art, and other things Saturday, February 2, 2008
Some remarks on Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus, and Derrida

Derrida's quite formulaic comments in On Touching--Jean Luc Nancy on Husserl and Merleau-Ponty would add something to current general readings of Merleau-Ponty here in the US. These can be represented generally (and only generally) by Hubert Dreyfus' work on Merleau-Ponty and skill acquisition (which are summed up quite nicely in a paper he gives here). Dreyfus makes much about the anti-representationalist or bodily nature of perception that Merleau-Ponty employs as an alternative to the more "representationalist" theories of the mind--especially found in computational models. These representationalist theories of mind would require a perception to be registered not necessarily consciously, but by the system or network of input/output relations that constitute the functional mind. Merleau-Ponty places the impression a perception makes beyond our outside these sites of registration, as Dreyfus quotes Merleau-Ponty as saying:

An impression can never by itself be associated with another impression. Nor has it the power to arouse others. It does so only provided that it is already understood in the light of the past experience in which it co-existed with those which we are concerned to arouse.

This pre-representational precomprehension would structure experience beyond any computational model and even (or, as Merleau-Ponty constantly reminds us in his Phenomenology of Perception) beyond any Kantian transcendental structure, situating it in a network of relations that are lived spatially and temporally in the purity of a gap or space between the world and the mind or self that lives. This space (and time) is the body, and it is only on the basis of this body, this pre-understanding of the possibility of a perceptual impression to mean or to have value (we are speaking loosely and too quickly here) that we then can have an impression at all and associate it with another--that is, come forth or be represented and related explicitly with the other--as the computational or representationalist model of the mind would have it. The gap in between the "source" of the perception (the world) and "destination" that receives it as an impression (the mind--again, speaking very loosely) is the space and time in which there would exist a contingent (thus not transcendental or ideal or Kantian) comportment that structures the possibility of these two, and in fact is possibility itself: the unique fabric or intertwining of the world and the self that juts into time and space as an intention. It is here that we must look for phenomena like skill-acquisition, learning, decision, etc. etc.--and Dreyfus outlines quite clearly all the possibilities of this.

Now, Derrida considers this space and time itself divided or dispersed--that is, this gap across which stretches an intention is itself a gap, a space and time, and so on and so on. But not because the body or the intentional network that structures our experience just has at its center an irreducible gap, that every intention is itself never fully able to be bridged and grasp (Dreyfus looks closely at grasping) what it wants to get at or accomplish itself except arbitrarily (by fantasy) or by starting over (compulsion): rather, it is because for there to be an intention, for this intentional space prior to representation to be contingent and not ideal, to be fully worldly, that is, indeterminate and yet (as intention) finite, there would have to exist infinite contingency, the possibility of complete indetermination. In other words, the pre-representational body of intention (my prior worldly understanding that juts through space and time and accomplishes) only accomplishes what it does because at its heart, it is completely the carrying out of what, outside this intention, is capable of being represented fully. In other words, the computational model is what is at the heart of this pre-computational intention: it has to be able to be represented by this model to such an extent that it is, in its accomplishing of the intention, exactly indistinguishable from it. The space of intentional precomprehension is, therefore, precisely in its contingency, absolutely ideal.

So the tendency to grasp, for example. This is often used as the expression of the preunderstanding or comprehension of a bodily subjectivity that makes possible and comprehensible any subjectivity, any decision that comes to mind consciously: it is only on the basis of a tendency to grasp that one can grasp and also think to themselves that they want to grasp whatever they grasp. How would Derrida look at this? Well, the body, as the intentional structure that really is the locus where the grasping is made possible, is itself rent apart as a space of intention. So my grasping would not be able to be traced as taking place there, in the bodily subjectivity. At the same time, it would still not be in the mind as represented. The tendency, in other words, would give us nothing to look at: there is no ground or basis on which one could represent to oneself the possibility of grasping--where in Merleau-Ponty (that is, Dreyfus' Merleau-Ponty, mainly) it is only on this basis that there is this representation. The tendency is empty: it is itself totally other than a tendency, a consistency, a structure of itself prior to what is structured. Rather, the tendency to grasp would be "caused" or based only on the possibility that it could be the action of someone who could say to themselves "I want to grasp this" and thereby carry it out. The carrying out of the tendency to grasp would be only possible if it is impossible as a tendency, if it were, as a tendency, already completely other to itself in its non-being, in its functioning. In fact, it would have to be precisely this representation, this saying, in order to be a tendency: in short, the intentional must be the computational or representational in order to be intentional.

This isn't some basic playing with concepts: in fact, every act would be structured and actually accomplished this way, for Derrida. In the space of the lived body, there is already division that makes it determined by the possibility of what it makes possible (representation)--thus making it impossible: this is how every intention finds its fulfillment--that is, impossibly. This means that it is always radically contingent to the extent that it looks like it could merely be calculated by a computer, merely associated. This constitutes his whole objection to the reading of Husserl that Merleau-Ponty engages in: where Merleau-Ponty is quick to see a gap where the body would play or function, Derrida sees total play, unreserved play, total functioning, to the extent that it breaks with this functioning. To put it in the language of the quote of Dreyfus: it is only on the basis of the fact that every impression is associated with every other that there could be a space prior to this which, as the understanding that makes them possible, brings them about and in so doing brings nothing about or renders itself impossible. I'll post more on this later, but hopefully these sketches will do some good. Posted by Mike at 1:14 AM What is written about: Derrida, Dreyfus, Merleau-Ponty

Burke proposes five broad categories to discuss motives: Scene, act, agent, agency, purpose

Scene and Act from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects

Recently I have been rereading A Grammar of Motives by the rhetorician Kenneth Burke.

Burke proposes five broad categories (his pentad) to discuss motives: Scene, act, agent, agency, purpose. Acts are done in a scene, by an agent, often with some particular tool or means (agency), for the sake of some end.

• By Scene Burke is thus referring to the background or setting of an action.
• Agents, of course, are those doing the action.
• Acts are the acts done.
• Agency is the means by which it is done (a tool, speech, one’s body, and so on).
• And purpose is that for the sake of which the action is done.

It is necessary to emphasize that these terms are extremely broad. Scene, for example, could be language as when talked about Lacan in the context of how the subject is formed in the field of the Other. However, language can be an act or agency in other contexts. Similarly, when Lucretius claims that everything is composed of combinations of indivisible atoms falling in the void, he is talking about scene. When Marx talks about conditions of production he is talking about scene. When Freud talks about drives and the unconscious he is talking about scene. When a religious person talks about God’s plan he is talking about scene. All of these are competing visions of scene. When Walter Ong talks about how the technology of writing transforms the nature of thought, he is talking about how an agency transforms the agent that uses it. Yet in another context, when Foucault or Kuhn talks about the impersonal murmur of language in which we find ourselves thrown, writing, archival texts, are no longer agencies, but are scenes.

Burke’s pentad is of interest in that it allows us to see, a bit more clearly, where the philosophy is placing its emphasis.

• For example, Sartre, Husserl, Kant, and so on, would be philosophies of the agent. The agent is placed front and center and other elements fall into the background.
• Most contemporary philosophies in French theory place emphasis on the scene, as in the case of Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault, and many variants of Marxist thought and critical theory.
• More recently we’ve begun to see philosophies of the act, as in the case of Badiou or Zizek. And so on. In and of itself, this isn’t particularly interesting beyond gaining clarity as to where particular problems might emerge within a philosophy. For example, it is not difficult to see that the work of Badiou and Zizek is a response to the primacy of the scene in much contemporary French thought...

The paradigmatic act would be an act that is ex nihilo, completely unconditioned, that comes from nothing, and that produces something new. The question that seems missing from the scenic philosophers, despite their various “bells and whistles”, is this dimension of the unconditioned and the novelty that it introduces into scenes or situations. Rather, for every act– whether contemplative or in engagement with the world –the strategy is always to trace the act back to the conditioning field in which the act emerged. Yet we might ask, is there not always a remainder that resists this assimilation to the organization of the situation? Like Lucretius’ clinamen or swerve, is there not always something in the act that can’t be accounted for on the basis of atomic motion?

And here is where Burke becomes most interesting, for his task is not simply to examine the ratios between the various elements of the pentad (scene, act, agency, agent, purpose), but to show how certain structural antinomies and paradoxes emerge whenever one of the terms comes to predominate with respect to the rest. In this respect, we could argue that even the most purely scenic philosophies will be haunted by the agent and act as ghosts that cannot be eradicated, even if only as “negative magnitudes”. The question would be one of turning these ghosts into positive magnitudes or making them explicit.

Agamben's own alignment with Benjaminian revolutionary messianism over Schmittian authoritarianism

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, The Spirit of the Age: Hegel and the Fate of Thinking About Home > The Spirit of the Age: Hegel and the Fate of Thinking > Kisner
Agamben, Hegel, and the State of Exception
Wendell Kisner

Abstract
In his account of the state of exception, Agamben repeatedly relies upon what Hegel would have called Wesenslogik or 'transcendental thinking'. Because of this reliance, the state of exception appears in Agamben's account as the hidden ground of modern liberal democracies. When conceived as such a ground, it appears to be a condition of possibility that inexorably persists in the modern state.

Moreover, within the state of exception all juridical order is suspended, leaving no normative or juridical criteria on the basis of which to decide what the structure of any emergent political order should look like. This means that from the state of exception we can just as easily land in a totalitarian as we can in a liberal democratic or democratic socialist state. Without such criteria - lacking due to the total suspension characterizing the state of exception - Agamben's own alignment with Benjaminian revolutionary messianism over Schmittian authoritarianism is arbitrary, and he leaves us with no basis for making any such decision ourselves. Drawing upon Hegel's dialectic of freedom and his critique of transcendental thought, this paper argues that within the state of exception there is an implicit logic that points the way out of it.

Furthermore, it does so in such a way that the state of exception is neither annexed by the structure of a predetermined juridical order along the lines proposed by Schmitt on the one hand nor posited it as a transcendental structure underlying or always preceding modern liberal democracies on the other. This alternative is overlooked by Agamben precisely because of his own insistence upon conceiving of the state of exception in a transcendent way.Full Text: PDF

Bloch warns us that relentless novelty can itself become wearyingly repetitious and static

Whitehead’s God from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro

God, or the Body without Organs Steven Shaviro shaviro@shaviro.com

Deleuze and Guattari warn us that a synthesis, or a process of production, "must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself; nor must it be confused with an infinite perpetuation of itself" (1983, 5). It is oriented towards becoming, rather than continuation. More generally, there is a subtle, and never fully explored, tension in Deleuze’s work (both with and without Guattari) between two different ways – closely related but nonetheless distinct – of conceiving the process of auto-creation. On the one hand, there is Spinoza’s conatus, best defined as "a tendency to maintain and maximize the ability to be affected" (Deleuze 1988, 99, citing Spinoza’s Ethics IV 38). Conatus is quite close to Varela’s concept of autopoiesis, the process by which a relational system maintains itself through dynamic interaction with its environment, recreating the very processes that produce it.

On the other hand, there is Gilbert Simondon’s notion of individuation, the process by which an entity continually reconstitutes itself by actualizing potentials that pre-exist in a metastable environment. Individuation has strong affinities with Whitehead’s concrescence, the way that an entity constitutes itself as something radically new, by selecting among, and recombining, aspects of already-existing entities. All four of these terms (conatus, autopoiesis, individuation, concrescence) imply a certain sort of auto-creation, in which virtualities are actualized. But in conatus and autopoiesis, the emphasis is on a continuity that is created and preserved in and through continual change and interaction with the environment; whereas, in individuation and concresence, the emphasis is on the production of novelty, the entity’s continual redefinition, or becoming-other than what it was...

It is precisely on these grounds that Ernst Bloch (1986, 201) criticizes Bergson, the common predecessor of Whitehead and Deleuze. Bloch warns us that relentless novelty can itself become wearyingly repetitious and static. Incessant innovation, without real consequence, simply results in boredom: the continual passage of "senselessly changing fashions," the "rigidity of a surprise that is always the same." A "constantly required change of direction, required for its own sake," ends up taking us nowhere in particular, but only through the endless "zig-zag" of a random walk. The trouble with a process metaphysics, Bloch says, is that "the process remains empty and repeatedly produces nothing but process." It never arrives at any finished product; and therefore it never arrives at the Novum, the genuinely new. Instead, "the process remains empty and repeatedly produces nothing but process." ...

This is why Deleuze (explicitly) and Whitehead (implicitly) both reject the Hegelian notion of contradiction as the motor of change, or of history. Deleuze is always concerned to define philosophical thought as a power of affirmation, rather than one of negation. But he is always quick to add that the negative still has its place, as long as we see "negations as powers of affirming," instead of invoking negativity "as a motor, a power, and a quality" in its own right (1983, 179). Every New necessarily provides its own negations; but negativity is not in any sense the inner principle of the New...

Deleuze and Guattari’s revision or correction of Kant in Anti-Oedipus consists in referring each of these clusters of Idea, category, and relation back to a corresponding synthesis. The Idea of Self is derived from the conjunctive synthesis; the Idea of the World from the connective synthesis, and the Idea of God from the disjunctive synthesis...

In The Logic of Sense, Oedipus is the "pacifying hero" who "dispelled the infernal power of depths and the celestial power of heights, and now claims only a third empire, the surface, nothing but the surface" (1990, 201). In Anti-Oedipus, this function is condemned rather than celebrated; but it remains the case "that Oedipus is a requirement or a consequence of social reproduction, insofar as this latter aims at domesticating a genealogical form and content that are in every way intractable" (1983, 13). In both texts, Oedipal quasi-causality tames (but cannot altogether master) the schizophrenic intensities produced in the depths of materiality and of bodies.

Anti-Oedipus is usually read as repudiating the depth/surface opposition that structured The Logic of Sense. But the actual relation between the two books is more complicated than such a formulation would indicate. In The Logic of Sense, quasi-causality is described as an effect of the surface; to the contrary, Artaud’s Body without Organs is presented as a pure experience of the depths (1990, 82-93 passim). In Anti-Oedipus, however, the imageless figures of quasi-causality on the surface, and of the Body without Organs in the depths, are equated with one another. This is why the Body without Organs is described as both a "recording surface" and a "full body." The "nondifferentiated" blankness of antiproduction is both a surface effect, and a deep "counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid" (1983, 9). Thus Anti-Oedipus retains both the distinction between surfaces and depths, and the distinction between material causality (production) and quasicausality (antiproduction); only it redistributes these two distinctions, instead of aligning them with one another...

I will only touch briefly here on the vexed question of the relation between what Whitehead calls the "primordial" and "consequent" natures of God. The primordial nature of God is purely conceptual, as it involves potentiality or virtuality: "viewed as primordial, he is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality. In this aspect, he is not before all creation, but with all creation" (1929/1978, 343). This is God as "the principle of concretion – the principle whereby there is initated a definite outcome from a situation riddled with ambiguity" (345). The consequent nature of God, on the other hand, is physical and actual. It "is derived from the objectification of the world in God. . . the concrescent creature is objectified in God as a novel element in God’s objectification of that actual world" (345). That is to say, the consequent nature of God involves something like the inscription, or recording, of everything that has happened in all actual occasions. The primordial nature of God is an opening towards futurity, the condition of possibility for every becoming. The consequent nature of God is like Bergsonian memory, or "pure recollection": the "being in itself of the past" (Deleuze 1991, 60), or its preservation as past. Very roughly speaking, the primordial nature of God corresponds to the Body without Organs as virtual "full body"; while the consequent nature of God corresponds to the Body without Organs as "recording surface."

This is what differentiates process thought from any form of the dialectic. For Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze, and contrary to Hegel (1977, 407), "the wounds of the Spirit" can never be made whole; and they always do leave scars behind. The past persists as past, in its entirety: an "objective immortality" that cannot be subsumed or sublated. But this persistence is itself the condition for a radically open future, one that cannot be prefigured or contained by any sort of dialectical movement...

This is yet another way in which Whitehead remains an heir to Kant’s critical revolution, rather than reverting to pre-critical thought. Deleuze lists as one of Kant’s great "poetic formulas" the way that "Kant reverses the relationship of the law and the Good." Where traditional metaphysics, from Plato onward, derives all moral laws from the the ideal of the Good, for Kant "it is the Good which depends on the Law, and not vice versa. . . The Law as empty form in the Critique of Practical Reason corresponds to time as pure form in the Critique of Pure Reason" (Deleuze 1984, x). Whitehead replaces Kant’s "empty form" of the Categorical Imperative with God’s merely empirical arbitrariness; but he remains Kantian in his refusal to subject this arbitrary "decision" to any pre-existing standard of rationality or Goodness, or to any higher form of justi-fication. "What is metaphysically indeterminate has nevertheless to be categorically determinate. We have come to the limits of rationality" (Whitehead 1925/1967, 178)...

Tim Clark, in his lucid and powerful discussion of Deleuze’s encounter with Whitehead (2002), argues against Deleuze’s reading of Whitehead’s God as a figure of affirmation and metamorphosis. For Clark, Whitehead’s God never performs the disjunctive synthesis in a fully af-firmative or Deleuzian manner. Rather, since for Whitehead "restriction and limitation are the conditions of value," Whitehead’s God "is still required to enact, or at least to found, disjunctions that are not yet positively synthetic or wholly affirmative" (198). Whitehead never quite reaches the condition of a Deleuzian "chaosmos," because "within Whitehead’s system the universe remains, in principle, only semi-open and therefore partially predictable" (202). Deleuze is misreading, therefore, when he attributes his own "total affirmation" of difference to Whitehead, who never fully escapes "the weight of ontotheological tradition bearing down upon him" (205).

I have learned a lot from Clark’s discussion; in particular, I am indebted to him for reading Whitehead’s notion of God in the light of Deleuze’s discussion of the Kantian (and Klossowskian) disjunctive syllogism. And Clark is entirely right to see elements of limitation and exclusion at work in Whitehead’s account of God. I differ from Clark in that I see a movement between the exclusive and inclusive uses of the disjunctive synthesis at work in both Whitehead’s account of God and Deleuze’s account of the Body without Organs – and, indeed, already in Kant’s account of God. Though Deleuze tends to describe the opposition between the two uses of the synthesis polemically and absolutely, in practice he slides back and forth between them – because every actualization of the virtual unavoidably involves some sort of limitation, and because the analysis of forms of coding and capture, on the one hand, and of the mobilization of "lines of flight" on the other, necessarily makes reference to the tension between these two uses...

On the technical level of Whitehead’s metaphysics, this account of God is needed in order to resolve the difficulties raised by the Category of Conceptual Reversion. Whitehead initially formulates this Category as follows: "There is secondary origination of conceptual feelings with data which are partially identical with, and partially diverse from, the eternal objects forming the data in the first phase of the mental pole. The diversity is a relevant diversity determined by the subjective aim" (1929/1978, 26). That is to say, an actual occasion is not limited to prehending only those eternal objects that are realized in the empirical data in front of it. Even if everything that it sees is blue, it is also able to imagine red. It is capable of forming feelings, and yearning after potentialities, that are "diverse from" those provided by "the data in the first phase" of experience.

Now, this is a categorical requirement of Whitehead’s system, or what Kant would call a necessary "transcendental presupposition": for otherwise novelty would be impossible. Without some notion of "conceptual reversion," an actual entity that prehended only blue-colored data would never be able to posit redness. But it is hard to see how the Category of Conceptual Reversion is consistent, or coherent, with Whitehead’s basic ontological principle, which states that "every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any particular instance has its reason either in the character of some actual entity in the actual world of that concrescence, or in the character of the subject which is in process of concrescence" (24). Where, then, does the imagination of redness come from? Since, by definition, the datum of a novel conceptual prehension is not present in any "actual entity in the actual world of that concrescence," it must arise out of "the character of the subject which is in process of concrescence," which is to say, out of the entity’s "subjective aim."

But how does such a previously "unfelt eternal object" (249) ingress into, and alter, an entity’s subjective aim in the first place? What enables "the positive conceptual prehension of relevant alternatives" (249)? Traditional idealist metaphysics resolves this problem by appealing to some Platonic principle of recollection: the Idea of red exists in itself, independently of my thinking it; and for that very reason accessible to my thought. Today’s cognitive science, following Kant, retains this argument by subjectivizing it: the Idea of red may not exist in and of itself, but it is a necessary product of innate structures of the human mind. But Whitehead is loath to accept this line of reasoning – even though he compares what he calls "eternal objects" to the Platonic forms (44). For any appeal to already-given forms would mean limiting the scope of novelty, by reducing it to mere structural permutations, or variations of a theme.

At first, Whitehead entertains the idea that eternal objects might have the power within themselves to refer to other, related eternal objects: "the determinate definiteness of each actuality is an expression of a selection from these forms. It grades them in a diversity of relevance. This ordering of relevance starts from those forms which are, in the fullest sense, exemplified, and passes through grades of relevance down to those forms which in some faint sense are proximately relevant by reason of contrast with actual fact" (43-44). But ultimately Whitehead rejects this argument, because "the question, how, and in what sense, one unrealized eternal object can be more, or less, proximate to an eternal object in realized ingression – that is to say, in comparison with any other unfelt eternal object – is left unanswered by this Category of Reversion" (249-250).

The "grades of relevance" and proximity among eternal objects can only be determined to the extent that these objects can be ordered in a closed and well-defined set. But this is belied by the fact that "nature is never complete," that "it is always passing beyond itself" (289). Whitehead states that "there are no novel eternal objects" (22); but he also requires us to conceive the "whole" of eternal objects as something other than a closed set. (The notion of a whole that is not a closed set is formulated by Deleuze in relation to Bergson: Deleuze 1986, 10-11).

These considerations lead Whitehead to insist that the question of the ingression of previously unrealized eternal objects "can be answered only by reference to some actual entity." In accordance with the ontological principle, there must be some empirical source for the "missing" eternal objects. The "conceptual prehension" of alternative potentialities must have its roots in a prior "physical prehension." God is the actual entity who fulfills this condition – or, whose existence Whitehead infers from the requirement to fulfill this condition. God prehends all eternal objects indiscriminately, and thereby makes them available to any "temporal entity" whatsoever. Through this appeal to God, "the Category of [Conceptual] Reversion is then abolished, and Hume’s principle of the derivation of conceptual experience from physical experience remains without any exception" (250).

Whitehead’s struggle with this problem, and his initial assertion, and subsequent rejection, of the Category of Conceptual Reversion, is traced in detail by Lewis S. Ford (1984, 211-241 passim). The crucial point is that Whitehead’s recourse to God is in fact, odd as this might seem, a way of rejecting transcendent solutions, and embracing instead an immanent one. God is the correlate of Whitehead’s "transcendental empiricism," just as the Body without Organs is of Deleuze’s...

Kant is careful to point out that "this moral necessity is subjective, i.e. a need, and not objective, i.e. itself a duty; for there can be no duty whatever to assume the existence of a thing (because doing so concerns only the theoretical use of reason)" (2002, 159). It is not even our duty to believe in God; it is only the case that we are pragmatically forced to believe in God – i.e. that we are unable not to believe in God – to the extent that we follow the commands of moral obligation. God cannot even be invoked as the basis of moral obligation; rather, moral obligation itself provides the sole basis for any belief in God. Whitehead follows Kant in the way that he posits God’s existence adjunctively, rather than foundationally. But for Whitehead, it is aesthetics, rather than morality, that forces us to assume the existence of God...

As Whitehead dryly says, "God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities. The evocation of societies is purely subsidiary to this absolute end" (105). This "evocation of societies" means precisely the self-perpetuation of living organisms such as ourselves.

Delanda has no account of process. His ontology is excessively, and needlessly, static

Whitehead’s God from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro

Delanda follows Deleuze in insisting that, although an entity is always involved in relations with other entities, "a relation may change without the terms changing" (Delanda 2006, 11, citing Deleuze and Parnet 2002, 55). An entity is never fully defined by its relations; for it is always possible to detach an entity from one particular set of relations, and insert it instead in a different set of relations, with different other entities. Every entity has certain "properties" that are not defined by the set of relations it finds itself in at a given moment; the entity can take these properties with it when it moves from one context (or one set of relations) to another. At the same time, an entity is never devoid of (some sort of) relations: the world is a plenum, indeed it is over-full, and solipsism or atomistic isolation is impossible.

Put differently, no entity can be entirely isolated, because it is always involved in multiple relations of one sort or another, and these relations affect the entity, cause it to change. But this is not to say that the entity is determined by these relations. For the entity has an existence apart from these particular relations, and apart from the other "terms" of the relation, precisely insofar as it is something that is able to affect, and to be affected by, other entities. The entity is not just a function of its present relations, but of a whole history of relations in which it has affected other entities and been affected by them.

DeLanda thus distinguishes between the properties of an entity (which are what it takes with it to another context) and the capacities of that same entity (its potential to affect, and to be affected by, other entities). "These capacities do depend on a component’s properties but cannot be reduced to them since they involve reference to the properties of other interacting entities" (2006, 11). An entity’s capacities are as real as its properties; but we cannot deduce the capacities from the properties; nor can we know (entirely) what these capacities are, aside from how they come into play in particular interactions with other particular entities.

Whitehead’s notion of coherence is largely consistent with Delanda’s account of relations of exteriority. The difference is that Delanda has no account of process, or of how the shift from one set of relations to another actually occurs. His ontology is excessively, and needlessly, static. Whitehead avoids this problem, because he identifies entities with processes, which all at once become and thereby perish. Delanda’s entities correspond, not to Whitehead’s "actual entities," but rather to what Whitehead calls societies. Societies are aggregations of actual entities; these aggregations possess spatial extent and temporal duration, which is what allows them to affect and be affected by other societies. What Delanda calls the innate "properties" of an entity (as distinct from its capacities) would be defined by Whitehead rather as the aggregate of the free (not predetermined) "decisions" made by all the actual entities that constitute the society in question.

Life-changing experiences as a result of their studies in humanities

The Uses of the Humanities, Part Two Stanley Fish NYT January 13, 2008 Tags: humanities, readers, universities

Note that what we’re talking about here is the study, not the production, of humanistic texts. The question I posed in the column was not do works of literature, philosophy and history have instrumental value, but does the academic analysis of works of literature, philosophy and history have instrumental value. When Jeffrey Sachs says that “in the real world” the distinction between the humanities and the sciences on the basis of utility does not hold because “philosophers have made important contributions to the sciences” and “the hard sciences have had a profound impact on the humanities,” he doesn’t come within 100 miles of refuting anything I say. Whatever does or does not happen in the “real world” is not the issue; the issue is what happens in the academic world, where the distinctions Sachs dismisses do hold. It may be, as George Mobus maintains, that “only in academia where you are supposed to be a specialist . . . do we parse the world into silos,” but the academic world is by definition parsed into silos and when the utility of one of them is questioned, it is not to any point to say that in some other world everything exists in some great big mix.
In general those who disagree with my assertions do what Sachs and Mobus do — slide (without acknowledgment or awareness) back and forth between the precincts of academia (which, to make the point again, are the precincts where the dispute is located) to the precincts, often larger, of some other enterprise. When I declare that the humanities are of no use whatsoever, I am talking about humanities departments (“the humanities” is an academic, not a cultural category), not about poets and philosophers and the effects they do or do not have in the world and on those who read them.

The funding of the humanities in colleges and universities cannot be justified by pointing to the fact that poems and philosophical arguments have changed lives and started movements. (I was surprised that no one mentioned “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a book Lincoln is said to have credited with the starting of the Civil War.) The pertinent question is, Do humanities courses change lives and start movements? Does one teach with that purpose, and if one did could it be realized?
If the answers to these questions are (as I contend) “no” – one teaches the subject matter and any delayed effect of what happens in a classroom is contingent and cannot be aimed at – then the route of external justification of the humanities, of a justification that depends on the calculation of measurable results, is closed down. The fact that some commentators, including a few of my former students, report life-changing experiences as a result of their studies is heartening (although I am sure that the vast majority would report something quite different), but it hardly amounts to a reason for supporting the entire apparatus of departments, degrees, colloquia etc. that has grown up around the academic study of humanistic texts...

All of this should not be taken to mean, as it was by some, that I am attacking the humanities or denigrating them or declaring them worthless. I am saying that the value of the humanities cannot be validated by some measure external to the obsessions that lead some (like me) to devote their working lives to them – measures like increased economic productivity, or the fashioning of an informed citizenry, or the sharpening of moral perceptions, or the lessening of prejudice and discrimination. If these or some other instrumental benchmarks – instrumental in the sense that they are tied to a secondary effect rather than to an internal economy – are what the humanities must meet, they will always fall short. But the refusal of the humanities to acknowledge or bow to an end they do not contemplate is, I argue, their salvation and their value. As Stacia says in words more precise than mine, “The subject of these studies are not to be used as tools to achieve something else . . . they are the achievement.”
Of course, this does not mean that anyone will pay for them. In fact, as several posters observed, my argument (and it isn’t only mine) that the humanities are their own good and aren’t much good for anything else can be used to justify turning humanities departments into service departments and cutting funding for humanities research.

About Stanley Fish - Think Again
Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

There is a poetic quality to some of Deleuze's thinking

Against Bodies from Fido the Yak by Fido the Yak

The Logic of Sense reads like a polemic against bodies. This is clearly evident in the way Deleuze addresses one of my favorite questions: how is language possible? He asks whether bodies would be able to ground language and he answers,

"When sounds fall back on (se rabattent sur) bodies and become the actions and passions of mixed bodies, they are no more than the bearers of agonized nonsense" (p. 134).

Bodies are schematically or paradigmatically "down" in Deleuze's thought; the body can only be reached by descent, and depth or the depths can substitute for anything that occurs in the body or between bodies. For language to descend to the body can only mean that violence is done to it; the body has no creative power, but only the power to destroy. The idea that language is an intelligent extension of the body must be rejected by Deleuze. In his view it is the

"world of incorporeal effects or surface effects which makes language possible" (p. 166).

Bodies and sense, depths and surfaces are mutually exclusive. Mixing only pertains to bodies. To even think that language might have several conditions of possibility is to bring the question of language down to the level of the body where it is splintered, where it can only be noise and passionate nonsense.

So Deleuze views language as incorporeal. How exactly is he defining language? He says language is a "system of propositions" (p. 167). This is a rather arboreal view. Let's see that in a little context:

The most general operation of sense is this: it brings that which expresses it into existence; and from that point on, as pure inherence, it brings itself to exist within that which expresses it. It rests therefore with the Aion, as the milieu of surface effects or events, to trace a frontier between things and propostitions; and the Aion traces it with its entire straight line [the labyrinth of the straight line, the eternal return: it's all here]. Without it, sounds would fall back on bodies, and propositions themselves would not be "possible." Language is rendered possible by the frontier which separates it from things and from bodies (including those which speak). (p. 166)

Further:

[T]he straight line which extends simultaneously in two directions traces the frontier between bodies and language, states of affairs and propositions. Language, or the system of propositions, would not exist without this frontier which renders it possible. (p. 167)

Deleuze says that events make language possible. In making this argument he is greatly concerned to persuade us that the ground cannot resemble what it grounds. He says,

"Language is rendered possible by that which distinguishes it. What separates sounds from bodies makes sounds into the elements of a language" (p. 186).

Or, again,

"What renders language possible is that which separates sounds from bodies and organizes them into propositions, freeing them for the expressive function" (p. 181).

This is not a poet's sensibility, which is somewhat ironic because there is a poetic quality to some of Deleuze's thinking, about the Aion for instance. Perhaps we might leave it at that. However I will reach this one conclusion: in the wake of Deleuze (and given the sentiments of the Deleuzians) the body and each and every one of its entailments must be philosophically defended.

Restriction to grammar, delinked from ‘language'

The Primacy of Grammar: Explorations in the Philosophy of Linguistics [Nearly done]
Biolinguistics has been able to maintain some distance from topics that are traditionally thought to be central to the study of language: meaning, concepts, truth-conditions, and communication. From the perspective of familiar notions of language, this could be viewed as a shortcoming of the biolinguistics programme. From the point of view of biolinguistics, however, it is just a fact. Against the current perhaps, I take the isolation of this rather austere object to be the central contribution of Noam Chomsky; its significance lies in its frugality. This is not to suggest that what currently falls under the non-grammatical aspects of language will never be a part of grammatical theory:

‘No one familiar with the field has any illusion today that the horizons of inquiry are even visible, let alone at hand, in any domain’ (Chomsky 2005).

As we will see, there are constant attempts to enlarge the scope of grammatical theory to incorporate other aspects of language and its use. But, as with matured sciences, the chances are that each such incorporation will be hard-fought, since it will have to be formulated, not due to pressures from ‘outside,’ but from within the evolving framework of biolinguistics. This restriction to grammar, so delinked from ‘language,’ opens the possibility that the computational system of human language maybe involved in each cognitive system that requires similar computational resources. A mixture of analytical argumentation, varieties of empirical (including introspective) evidence, and some speculation suggests a picture in which a computational system consisting of very specific principles and operations is likely to be centrally involved in each articulatory symbol system that manifests unboundedness.

In this restricted sense, the object of biolinguistics exemplifies the Cartesian picture of a united mind. In other words, the suggestion is that the following things converge:

(a) the scientific character of biolinguistics,

(b) its isolation from the rest of science and, thus, from the rest of human inquiry,

(c) its basic explanatory form, namely, the computational-representational framework, and

(d) the domains of its application.
From this perspective, the real gain of the biolinguistic approach to cognitive phenomena is that the approach may have identified, after thousands of years of inquiry, a specific structure of the human mind, perhaps a real joint of nature.

Nirmalangshu Mukherji
Professor, Department of Philosophy, Delhi University, Delhi 110007, India
e-mail: somanshu@bol.net.in Telephone: +91-11-27666629 (Off), +91-11-27666253 (Res)

Oedipal structure is always open to a much broader social, political, and historical milieu

The Visible and the Invisible from Larval Subjects

When Deleuze refers to a “sensibility of the senses”, he is not referring to sensations, but rather to the real conditions for the possibility of sensation. That is, what are the conditions or processes by which this domain of sensibility is generated. I do not encounter the world through sonar, nor can I hear the world like a cat, nor do I smell the world like a dog. All of these fields of sensibility are the result of specific individuations that create their own unique universes of retention and expectation. When Deleuze refers to a passive synthesis as opposed to an active synthesis, he seeks to underline that these syntheses are not actively carried out by the mind or will.

“Although it is constitutive it is not, for all that, active. It is not carried out by the mind, but occurs in the mind…” (71).

Sensation or sensibility is not supplemented from above by categories (as in Kant) that would hold for all possible universes, but instead have their own immanent logos or structure of relations pertaining to the field of engagement characterizing the being in question. If we are led to miss this domain of the transcendental aesthetic, then this is because in our engagement with the world, this domain of the transcendental is surpassed in favor of the signs constituted by the pre-individual field out of which sensibility becomes capable of sensing. Deleuze is not, of course, reducing all sensibility to the domain of “vital sensibility” or the biological. As he puts it,

“We must therefore distinguish not only the forms of repetition in relation to passive synthesis but also the levels of passive synthesis and the combinations of these levels with one another” (73).

These levels would include the biological (as understood by contemporary evolutionary theory), the life of the individual in its ongoing individuation or unfurling, and in relation to the social, political, and historical milieu in which the individual is individuated or comes to be. For instance, in Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari take great pains to show how the Oedipal structure is always open to a much broader social, political, and historical milieu wherein parents function as conduits or “transistors” in relation to the developing child. There is nothing, for example, that is specifically familial about language.

The question of aesthetics thus turns out to be far broader than that of art. Aesthetics has tended to be treated as a marginal or “ghetto” discipline within philosophy, remote from the “big questions” of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. Yet, prior to any inquiry into these fields, the objects of these fields must first be given. Traditionally aesthetics has been understood to refer to the theory of the beautiful and, more recently, questions of what constitutes art.

In the Kant of the first Critique, aesthetics is treated rigorously in terms of its etymology as aisthesis, and refers to the domain of sensibility. For Kant there is thus a “transcendental aesthetic”, or the pure, a priori, forms of sensibility or space and time, and an empirical aesthetic referring to the various sensations that populate sensibility such as the various feels, sounds, tastes, and smells we encounter in space and time. Deleuze proposes to unite these two senses of the aesthetic so as to account for the very production of sensibility in a “distribution of the sensible”:

No wonder… that aesthetics should be divided into two irreducible domains: that of the theory of the sensible which captures only the real’s conformity with possible experience; and that of the theory of the beautiful, which deals with the reality of the real in so far as it is thought. Everything changes once we determine the conditions of real experience, which are not larger than the conditioned and which differ in kind from the categories: the two senses of the aesthetic become one, to the point where the being of the sensible reveals itself in the work of art, while at the same time the work of art appears as experimentation. (68)

Sensibility itself becomes a field of artistic creation and experimentation. Following Ranciere, such a thesis invites us to examine the distribution of the sensible in the social field, investigating what is visible and invisible in terms of public discourse, various social identities, and so on. These are all questions of social and political individuation. The question becomes one of how new individuations that depart from the police order might be strategized and produced. In the domain of epistemology and metaphysics, the question is no longer that of the ultimate nature of reality, but rather of the distribution of the sensible within which we find ourselves immersed.

In their attention to how scientific objects are produced or generated, the work of Stengers, Latour, Foucault, and Kuhn come to mind. Why is it, for example, that such and such a field of objectivity becomes visible at such and such a time? Here also the work of Kittler and Ong are especially relevant by virtue of their attentiveness to how new writing and communications technologies impact social individuation, allowing new possibilities of thought without determining what is thought. In all of these cases the question is one of the genesis of sensibility with its own immanent logos, not one of mere receptivity. Of special importance here are questions of the space and time of these fields of sensibility, and the forms of embodiment they produce along with their accompanying fields of objectivity. by larvalsubjects

“Emotions” are visceral before they are mental

The Head Trip; consciousness and affect from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro
I’ve been reading Jeff Warren’s The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness, basically on the recommendation of Erik Davis.

Some modes of consciousness are more expansive (or, to the contrary, more sharply focused) than others; some are more clear and distinct than others; some are more bound up with logical precision, while others give freer reign to imaginative leaps and to insights that break away from our ingrained habits of association. But in Warren’s account, none of these modes seem to be modulated by different affective tones, and none of them seem to be pushed by any sort of desire, passion, or obsession. Affects and desires would seem to be, for Warren, nothing more than genetically determined programs inherited from our reptilian ancestors (and exaggerated in importance by the likes of Steven Pinker) which our consciousness largely allows us to transcend.
Another way to put this is to say that Warren writes as if we could separate the states (or formal structures) of attentiveness, awareness, relaxation, concern, focus, self-reflection, and so on, from the contents that inhabit these states or structures. This is more or less equivalent to the idea — common in old-style AI research — that we can separate syntactics from semantics, and simply ignore the latter. Such a separation has never worked out in practice: it has entirely failed in AI research and elsewhere. And we may well say that this separation is absurd and impossible in principle. Yet we make this kind of separation implicitly, and nearly all the time; it strikes us as almost axiomatic. We may well be conscious of “having” certain emotions; but we cannot help conceiving how we have these emotions as something entirely separate from the emotions themselves.

It may be that consciousness studies and affect studies are too different as approaches to the mind (or, as I’d rather say, to experience) to be integrated at all easily). Indeed, in this discussion I have simply elided the difference between “affect” and “emotion”: the terms are sometimes used more or less interchangeably, but I think any sort of coherent explanation requires a distinction between the two. Brian Massumi uses “affect” to refer to the pre-personal aspects (both physical and mental) of feelings, the ways that these forces form and impel us; he reserves “emotion” to designate feelings to the extent that we experience them as already-constituted conscious selves or subjects. By this account, affects are the grounds of conscious experience, even though they may not themselves be conscious. Crucial here is James’ sense of how what he calls “emotions” are visceral before they are mental: my stomach doesn’t start churning because I feel afraid; rather, I feel afraid because my stomach has started churning (as a pre-conscious reaction to some encounter with the outside world, or to some internally generated apprehension).

The affect is an overall neurological and bodily experience; the emotion is secondary, a result of my becoming-conscious of the affect, or focusing on it self-reflexively. This means that my affective or mental life is not centered upon consciousness; although it gives a different account of non-conscious mental life than either psychoanalysis (which sees it in terms of basic sexual drives) or cognitive theory (which sees non-conscious activity only as “computation”).

Multiculturalism and moral relativism promote an idealization of tribal life

Blind Faiths By AYAAN HIRSI ALI The New York Times: January 6, 2008

Enlightenment thinkers, preoccupied with both individual freedom and secular and limited government, argued that human reason is fallible. They understood that reason is more than just rational thought; it is also a process of trial and error, the ability to learn from past mistakes. The Enlightenment cannot be fully appreciated without a strong awareness of just how frail human reason is. That is why concepts like doubt and reflection are central to any form of decision-making based on reason.
Harris is pessimistic in a way that the Enlightenment thinkers were not. He takes a Darwinian view of the struggle between clashing cultures, criticizing the West for an ethos of selfishness, and he follows Hegel in asserting that where the interest of the individual collides with that of the state, it is the state that should prevail. This is why he attributes such strength to Islamic fanaticism. The collectivity of the umma elevates the communal interest above that of the individual believer. Each Muslim is a slave, first of God, then of the caliphate. Although Harris does not condone this extreme subversion of the self, still a note of admiration seems to creep into his descriptions of Islam’s fierce solidarity, its adherence to tradition and the willingness of individual Muslims to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the greater good.

In addition, Harris extols American exceptionalism together with Hegel as if there were no contradiction between the two. But what makes America unique, especially in contrast to Europe, is its resistance to the philosophy of Hegel with its concept of a unifying world spirit. It is the individual that matters most in the United States. And more generally, it is individuals who make cultures and who break them. Social and cultural evolution has always relied on individuals — to reform, persuade, cajole or force. Culture is formed by the collective agreement of individuals. At the same time, it is crucial that we not fall into the trap of assuming that the survival tactics of individuals living in tribal societies — like lying, hypocrisy, secrecy, violence, intimidation, and so forth — are in the interest of the modern individual or his culture.
I was not born in the West. I was raised with the code of Islam, and from birth I was indoctrinated into a tribal mind-set. Yet I have changed, I have adopted the values of the Enlightenment, and as a result I have to live with the rejection of my native clan as well as the Islamic tribe. Why have I done so? Because in a tribal society, life is cruel and terrible. And I am not alone. Muslims have been migrating to the West in droves for decades now. They are in search of a better life. Yet their tribal and cultural constraints have traveled with them. And the multiculturalism and moral relativism that reign in the West have accommodated this.

Harris is correct, I believe, that many Western leaders are terribly confused about the Islamic world. They are woefully uninformed and often unwilling to confront the tribal nature of Islam. The problem, however, is not too much reason but too little. Harris also fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement. It is out of rejection of religion that the Enlightenment emerged; Romanticism was a revolt against reason.
Both the Romantic movement and organized religion have contributed a great deal to the arts and to the spirituality of the Western mind, but they share a hostility to modernity. Moral and cultural relativism (and their popular manifestation, multiculturalism) are the hallmarks of the Romantics. To argue that reason is the mother of the current mess the West is in is to miss the major impact this movement has had, first in the West and perhaps even more profoundly outside the West, particularly in Muslim lands.
Thus, it is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism. Multiculturalism and moral relativism promote an idealization of tribal life and have shown themselves to be impervious to empirical criticism.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, is the author of “Infidel.” 8:47 AM 9:05 AM

Who is the real God?

It's an Ideal World to Become Who You Are
from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob

The problem is, how do you have a timeless and unalterable truth geared toward individuals? In reality, it's not a problem at all -- it's like asking how can you have a thing called "life," and yet, all these diverse species. Or how can consciousness exist with all these individuals walking around calling themselves "I." Who is the real I?

Likewise, who is the real God? The answer may surprise you. In fact, if it doesn't surprise you, it's probably the wrong answer. More on that later. But to say that God knows the number of hairs on your head is a way of saying that he values your uniqueness.

Now, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Bolton says what amounts to the same thing in his Keys of Gnosis: "Because of the presence of its immanent principle or 'divine spark,' the soul can thus align itself with forces and influences which share its true nature, or it can align itself with forces which are alien to it and which tend to make it more and more a part of a physical system in which individuality would ultimately be lost."

Precisely. The exertion of free will becomes relevant here, for "the less free the will is, the more it functions simply in reaction to outside forces with standard responses to standard stimuli and stimulations." This is the Big Mac person, whom it is so easy for Demogogocrats to control. In all of their policies and pronouncements, they are always speaking to this type of unthinking McDullard. Occasionally the MSM gets hip to the spell, but then they fall right back to sleep, since the platitudes of contemporary liberalism speak to them on a very deeply shallow level, no matter how much they admit it to themselves.

A free will is a will that doesn't react, but acts. I think we'll be getting into this more deeply later in the week, but this is the true meaning of "turning the other cheek." For example, if someone pulls a knife on you, it is perfectly acceptable to pull a gun on them, so long as the act is not "kind for kind" on an emotional or spiritual level. This is a spiritually perilous area, and one must "walk the razor's edge" to not fall into the trap of retaliation, even while administering disinterested cosmic justice, for if done in the wrong spirit, then the wrong will return to you. I mentioned this last year, in reference to the barbarous spirit in which Saddam was put to death, in contrast to the sober manner in which Americans do the necessary deed. Those folks who were whooping it up are asking for it, karmically speaking.

The first division of Being and Time is actually wider in philosophical import than the second

Patočka and Heidegger, or, towards Donner la mort Jan Patočka's interpretation of some of the basic concepts within Being and Time in the fifth of his Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History explores and exploits a point (one point of many) on which the whole of that treatise turns: the relationship of everydayness (Alltäglichkeit) to authenticity (Eigentlichkeit). Recently in America, this point (again, it is one of many crucial points, however) is only explored explicitly with comparable depth by Bill Blattner in his work on Heidegger's notion of temporality (though Hubert Dreyfus' entire presentation of Heidegger could be said to stem from or be founded upon the implicit exploration of this distinction, specifically his conviction that the first division of Being and Time is actually wider in philosophical import than the second: such an assertion can only arise from a move similar to Patočka's and actually needs to be seen as this).

The problem revolves around how there is no term that Heidegger opposes to everydayness that easily bridges the gap between everydayness and authenticity: the only mediator is inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit). So it is here that Patočka must begin (that is, it is here that any analysis of this problem in depth must begin: so while many people analyze the relationship between authenticity and everydayness, it is only with respect to clarifying the relationship of inauthenticity to everydayness in with a view to explicating authenticity that we can have an explicit, in depth analysis of the real unity or lack of unity of the treatise at this point--this is just to clarify the above)... Posted by Mike at 2:38 PM 1 comments What is written about: Adorno, Being and Time, Derrida, Heidegger, Patočka Friday, December 21, 2007

Metalanguage and Derrida Lyotard's dictum (not reducible to his philosophy, which is much richer than this dictum) regarding postmodernism and its leading thinkers--namely, that for it and for them there is at least always incredulity towards metalanguages, if not the outright belief that metalanguages do not exist ("there is no metalanguage" as we often say in Lyotard's name)--does not exactly fit Derrida's thinking, despite the frequency with which this dictum is associated with Derrida.

For Derrida, there is equally the possibility that all that exists is metalanguage: in other words, that there is a metalanguage (a language after another language) and "there is no language before it" ("Psyche: Inventions of the Other," 13). There is no metalanguage and there is only metalanguage: the equiprimordiality here is crucial for grasping anything Derrida says about language in particular and his thought more generally. As Derrida himself puts it: "There is no metalanguage... there is only that, says the echo, or Narcissus" (ibid, 13). Posted by Mike at 9:12 AM 0 comments What is written about: Derrida, Lyotard

Derrida on Merleau-Ponty The two characteristics I isolated in the last post regarding the writing of Merleau-Ponty--namely, 1) its synesthesic descriptions of phenomena and 2) its being full of phenomenal examples/examples that can't be said to be exemplary--end up in their combination as the basic topic of Derrida's discussion of Merleau-Ponty in his amazing On Touching--Jean Luc Nancy.

There, Derrida tries to show, essentially, that Merleau-Ponty is always on the verge of making a synesthesic experience without reserve--that is, without (proper) differentiation between the senses--the sensory experience (i.e. the exemplary sensory experience) in his concept of the flesh, and yet always recoils from it in order to think the unity of this flesh (or rather its "mine-ness," its distinction from otherness).

(Intentionality steps in to fill up the gap. example, the self-touching: mp makes self-touching have to be possible... we have a presentment of its possibility.... he priveliges possibility, because for him the body is a pressing into possibilities, not impossibilities. These are notes that elaborate the full extent of Derrida's discussion and critique: I'll clean them up and finish this later today.) Posted by Mike at 10:29 AM What is written about: Derrida, Merleau-Ponty Le gai savoir philosophy, literature, art, and other things i'm up to and working on, in cambridge, california, new york, princeton, and wherever else i may beSaturday, December 29, 2007

Because clarity isn’t enough

The craft of difficult writing
There are reasons, if you can call them that, why a writer would want to play games with the reader’s mind. SWAHA DAS and HARI NAIR The Hindu Magazine Sunday, Dec 30, 2007

Closer to our times, the craft of “difficult writing” would resonate in a French best-seller published in 1966 called Les Mots et les Choses. In this brilliant but excruciatingly challenging book, the author explains how the European mind classified and ordered everything that was related to the human being since the 16th century. He tells a fascinating story of how Western man was both the agent and the object of study at the same time. Less than a decade after its publication, one of his students scripted an even more difficult, yet inventive, work called Glas. In it, he compares two thinkers in parallel columns strewed with textual quotations and his own commentary. Though the structure of this book might remind us of the glossators of the Middle Ages, the author offers no clue as to how the reader could tackle the text. These books radically challenged the notion of structure, which is inevitable for coherent acts of thinking and writing. No wonder therefore that these writers have been nick-named “post-structuralists” in America.
However, “being difficult” in writing is different from obfuscation. The masters of the stylus insist without end that rigour and intelligibility were never sacrificed by the greatest practitioners of the craft. One such teacher, who offered tips on how to “be difficult” in writing was the Spanish Jesuit, Balthasar Gracián (1601-58). An Argentinean litterateur, famous for being ignored by the Swedish academy, once reviled him in a poem as “the Jesuit who reduced poetry to stratagems through laborious nothingnesses”. However, this cunning soldier of style is today back in vogue amongst scholars of the discipline of Rhetoric as one who perfected conceptismo. This is a clever way of writing prose, where an author creates multiple relationships between words and ideas, and these are loaded with a variety of meanings compressed into concise expressions. Certain meanings become instantly evident to the reader, while others remain hidden.

Possible goals
But, why would a writer go to such pains at playing hide and seek with words and ideas? Well, because ingenuity does not seek truth alone but aspires to beauty, or so Gracián would remind us (Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio, Discourses 2,7&8). The more hidden the truth, the more valued the concept; and hence, more beautiful. He believed that the element of intrigue sparked by a verbal expression will put the reader on alert; and reward her with the feeling of having grasped a hitherto unknown but exquisite element of a puzzle previously seasoned with mystery. For producing similar effects on the reader, our author-priest nudges the potential writer of “difficult” prose to pursue in measured opposition the following: human malice as against the gushing forthrightness of a water-fountain, the inscrutableness of the heart versus the transparency of glass. Between these two binary poles, the writer may offer the reader a range of choices that extend from the simplest to the most sophisticated (AAI, D.13). Writing, then, for Balthasar Gracián, was both lucid and truant, giving and receiving pleasure in every page by playing games with the reader’s mind.
Having come thus far, we mustn’t wind up without lending an ear to certain snooty folk who opine on everything, including the craft of “difficult writing”. In the presidential address delivered to the joint congregation of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society in 1945, Henry Price declared that some things “can only be said obscurely; either in a metaphor, or in an oxymoron or a paradox, i.e., in a sentence which breaks the existing terminological rules.” This eminent Oxonian professor urged his flock of analytical philosophers “not to run-away with the zeal for ‘tightening-up language’ because clarity isn’t enough”.

The sheer volume of these conferences allowing little genuine dialogue to take place

Divergent Series from Larval Subjects

Of late, I confess, I’ve found myself exhausted with blogging or, more generally, communication. On the one hand, dialogue, especially academic dialogue, is constantly threatened by the perils of what Lacan referred to as the “imaginary”. When Lacan evokes the imaginary, of course, he is not speaking of what is imagined or fabrications of the mind, but rather the domain of identification with the specular image of our body. Of particular importance here are all the rivalrous struggles for recognition that Hegel depicted so well in the Phenomenology of Spirit. For some reason these struggles seem to occur with particular intensity and ferocity in academic dialogue. Indeed, where one might intuitively think that such fierce struggles are most intense between strongly polarized intellectual positions– for instance, the infamous split between Analytic and Continental thought –these struggles seem to occur with even greater intensity between intellectual positions that are fairly close to one another, thereby underlining Freud’s point about the narcissism of minor difference.

To the outsider, for instance, it is very difficult to distinguish Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus from the work of late Lacan. Yet for partisans of these thinkers, deafening struggles ensue. Indeed, some of the most bitter struggles I’ve ever witnessed occur among the various Lacanian camps, such that smaller Lacanian groups must think long and hard over whether they would invite the wrath of Jacques-Alain Miller were they to invite Colette Soler to speak or submit a paper. On the other hand, I’ve found myself haunted by this passage from Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

If it happen, from a defect of the organ, that a man is not susceptible of any species of sensation, we always find that he is as little susceptible of the correspondent ideas. A blind man can form no notion of colours; a deaf man of sounds. Restore either of them that sense in which he is deficient; by opening this new inlet for his sensations, you also open an inlet for the ideas; and he finds no difficulty in conceiving these objects. The case is the same, if the object, proper for exciting any sensation, has never been applied to the organ. A Laplander or Negro has no notion of the relish of wine. And though there are few or no instances of a like deficiency in the mind, where a person has never felt or is wholly incapable of a sentiment or passion that belongs to his species; yet we find the same observation to take place in a less degree. A man of mild manners can form no idea of inveterate revenge or cruelty; nor can a selfish heart easily conceive the heights of friendship and generosity. It is readily allowed, that other beings may possess many senses of which we can have no conception; because the ideas of them have never been introduced to us in the only manner by which an idea can have access to the mind, to wit, by the actual feeling and sensation.

What I find particularly troubling in this passage is Hume’s reference to the man of mild manners and the man with a selfish heart. Hume’s thesis, of course, is that all ideas arise from experience. As a consequence of this thesis, the limits of our imagination are defined by the limits of our experience. Should the man with a selfish heart witness an act of genuine generosity or friendship, it would not, according to Hume, even register as such an act, for the associative web characterizing the thought of this man would immediately interpret the other man’s act according to his own universe where selfish motives are treated as axiomatic. As Lacan liked to say, “all communication is miscommunication”. Here we have Hume’s own version of this Lacanian thesis. Where thought is always situated or attached to a field of experience and where ideas are related by principles of association, it follows that no two people will exist in the same universe. Each event that occurs in the field of experience– hearing another’s words, for instance –will evoke different associations and relations, such that the relation between two people is a sort of babble or chaos rather than a communication. There are, of course, all sorts of problematic assumptions here about the nature of communication– namely the assumption that to communicate is to send a signal that is the same for both the sender and receiver –yet it is worthwhile to state the issue in the starkest terms possible.

While not endorsing Hume’s position, I do think that he is able to explain a good deal about about human formations of thought and interactions with one another with his sparse epistemology. Do we not daily see the results of this phenomenon in the way we judge others, detaching their words and actions from the context in which they occur, speaking of issues as if there were some abstract reason or common sense against which their actions could be measured, and transforming actions into acts based on abstract motives that we can then judge? This phenomenon is especially attenuated in the blogosphere, where the field in which we encounter the other person is restricted largely to words and images, sans their daily life, their work, their obligations, their passionate engagements, and so on. Divorced from all context– and no writer could ever be equal to writing context –words and phrases instead dangle for whomever might come along, actualizing all sorts of associations in readers without necessarily having anything to do with the context that first led the author to generate them as a series of 0’s and 1’s that appear on ones monitor.

The consequences that follow from Hume’s simple and straightforward observation are rather bleak. If he is right we are collectively doomed to a comedy of errors. Yet where the literary comedy of errors usually ends with the rise of the prince or love fulfilled, our comedy of errors seems to be one that ends only in cruelty, conflict, and war. This cruelty is all the worse in that it is seldom even aware of itself for the same reason that the mild mannered man cannot even recognize the intense passions of others. Like Derrida’s analysis of the gift in Given Time, where the condition for the possibility of the gift paradoxically consists in a complete unawareness of giving a gift coupled with no unconscious surplus-value drawn from the gift, this would be a situation in which we would be completely unaware of others by virtue of perpetually being trapped in our own networks of associations when relating to others. However, where Derrida shows how this is a condition of the gift– a sort of regulative ideal, as Kant would say –this would be a circumstance fulfilled each and every day in our relations to others. If we like, we can engage in a lot of hand-waving about the formation of shared horizons of meaning, the production of shared contexts, etc., but the situation would still be essentially the same. The question, then, is whether this is the circumstance in which we find ourselves, or whether there is no some minimal transcendence that allows us in certain circumstances– not all –to surmount the limits of our embeddedness in context to encounter some minimal otherness of the other. In encountering others, do we only ever see our own reflection in the mirror? by larvalsubjects

A philosophical summation of the Nature of God as the Supreme Self

Enlightenment of the Whole Body Full Index of Articles

Chapter 1 The Divine Person The Free Standing Man Top

1. The Bhagavad Gita (literally, "Divine Song") is one of the most revered Scriptures of the Hindus, and a religious text of universal appeal and profound esoteric significance. Vyasa is traditionally presumed to be the author, and it was written perhaps as early as the 5th century B.C. (but with its roots in the oral tradition of even more ancient days). Most scholars agree that it may have been revised and expanded considerably over the years.

The Gita is a portion of the great ancient epic and spiritual allegory, the Mahabharata, which is the story of a great fratricidal struggle between two royal families in northern India some 4000 years ago. It is the purported dialogue between the God-Man Krishna and his devotee Arjuna, Commander-in-Chief of the army of the Pandavas, for whom Krishna serves as Charioteer. Arjuna, faced with the prospect of having to kill friends and cousins in an imminent battle, wishes to shirk his duty as a warrior. Krishna refuses to allow him such self-indulgence.

He engages Arjuna in a Teaching conversation that continues for seven hundred verses and presents a philosophical summation of the Nature of God as the Supreme Self, a critical exposition of the many ways of esoteric spiritual practice, and a declaration of the supremacy of the Way of devotional Communion with the Supreme Divine Person in the Form of the living Divine Master-in this case, Krishna himself. His entire spiritual Teaching to Arjuna is summarized in his instruction for the forthcoming battle: "Remember Me, and fight." even to what is and what is not, the Transcendental Self. (37) I bow down. I acknowledge my absolute dependence on You. Radiant Master, Have Mercy. (44)

Theories are always applied and interpreted through our personal and cultural filters

Can theory override intuition? from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

Robin Hanson writes:

For good policy advice, what is the best weight to place on economic theory, versus (individual or cultural) intuitive judgment? [TC: that's Robin reproducing someone else's words]

My guess is over 75% weight, so I try to mostly just straightforwardly apply economic theory, adding little personal or cultural judgment [TC: that's Robin].

In a nutshell, this is the major difference between Robin and me. In my view there is no such thing as "straightforwardly applying economic theory," unless your prescriptions are limited to "we cannot prove that Giffen goods do not exist." Theories are always applied and interpreted through our personal and cultural filters and there is no other way it can be. Robin believes in an Archimedean point for using theory, I do not.

Furthermore we often need to apply personal and cultural judgment to offset the sometimes-erroneous judgments and biases built into the economic way of thinking. Robin's post is the clearest example I have seen of what I call Robin's logical atomism.