The Dreamtime Is Real Places After All, Research Time, 27/02/2018

I said I wasn't going to talk much about the review I’m working on – for Bryan Van Norden’s polemic, his gauntlet throw-down, pistol-packing, Crip-walking graffiti on the university walls, Taking Back Philosophy. But I am a little bit.

There's one idea that I don’t quite have the room to fit into my review, but that actually converges with some of the research I was doing on Félix Guattari’s thinking. Barbara Glowczewski, an anthropologist and former colleague of Guattari’s, wrote an essay for The Guattari Effect volume about a disagreement they had over the ontology of the Warlpiri worldview.

The Pleiades, by Alma Nungarrayi

Van Norden’s book is a call to globalize university philosophy in a very literal sense – change the curriculum of degree programs to include thinkers in traditions other than the Western. Van Norden writes about the Chinese and Indian traditions in more detail because he knows them best.

But Indigenous philosophy is one – actually very, very many – traditions that need to be at the philosophical table. I feel lucky in Canada that my country’s universities host brilliant Indigenous thinkers – and that many other philosopher-activists thrive outside that system too.

The Warlpiri are an Indigenous Australian people. We often think of Indigenous Australians as all having one culture, or being one people. Generic Aboriginie. Or as they say less formally – Abos. Or the most awful one – Boong. As in, Bung. Australians call their continent’s Indigenous “Shit-people.” As in “people made of shit.” Literally.

So Australia makes me cry a little, but the Warlpiri ontology is very interesting. See, we typically think of Indigenous Australian spirituality as revolving around Dream Time – the entry into an eternal or literally time-less astral world.

The real concept is much more complicated. Not only are there many distinct Indigenous Australian cultures, languages, spiritualities, religions, and philosophies – even the Warlpiri Dream Time concept is different from this simple popular concept.

Dream Time isn’t a no-space, or an eternal reflection of the ordinary world kept mystically separate. Conceive of it more like a collapse of all space and time – past, present, future, everywhere at once – into a single location. It’s a totemic marking of territory. Northern Australia itself becomes a topographical map of totemically staked places.

Dreamtime Sisters, by Colleen Wallace Nungarrayi

When Glowczewski shared a concept she’d used to understand the Warlpiri totemic experience space with Guattari, he was less than pleased. Instead of attempting to understand the Warlpiri concepts on its own terms, she’d introduced a Western mathematical concept to them, to explain their totemic spaces.

A hypercube. Guattari was worried that Glowczewski’s topological mathematics was erasing the details of the Warlpiri concept. When they discussed and explored Dream Time, their mysticism was integrated with a complex web of ideas and practices, networked together into a multidimensional multiplicity of meanings and manifestations.

They argued over this for a while. But at the same time, the Warlpiri elders that Glowczewski had come to know had their own answer to the dispute.

That's really the best way to find your answer, honestly. When you’re arguing about some complicated philosophical issue in another culture, a thinker of roughly your own skill from that culture is the best to set you on the right course. At the least, they’ll let you know which of you is the most wrong.

It turned out to be Guattari. The Warlpiri elders and shamans were well ahead of Guattari’s own hesitation. I can see where he was coming from – the white person well aware of the eggshell walkways of post-colonial conversations. You don’t want to risk telling an Indigenous person what their worldview is “really about” because that’s exactly the kind of cultural and philosophical erasure they’ve been dealing with for centuries.

Those Warlpiri philosophers had a surprise for Guattari, at least in Glowczewski’s telling. They liked topological mathematics. They liked the hypercube concept. It worked really well to explain some important aspects of their spiritual thinking and its ontological connection with particular places and place in general.

It wasn’t complete, of course. Topological math couldn’t explain everything, but it was a useful tool to put in their own philosophical bundle. They used it well.

Can a Philosopher Let Herself Trust? A History Boy, 07/02/2018

After a very intense post yesterday, I want to relax a little bit. So I’m going to talk about the philosophical implications or mutual expressions of Riemannian geometry.

That's a serious joke. See, I’ve studied mathematics as someone learning about mathematics. So I know how to follow and read equations, I can see what a given operation is doing in a particular step, I can look back at the whole thing and have a decent idea of how you got from the beginning to end.

Here's how Deleuze described how Riemann changed the way people
did geometry. How he shook it to its core. Geometry had traditionally
been about the construction of different shapes. But Riemann figured
out a way to study mathematically space itself, how to construct
different spaces as well as different shapes, to see how different
shapes would behave in different spaces. A whole new axis of
complexity in geometrical possibility.

If I read the history or philosophy of mathematics, I can understand all the concepts fairly easily. I have to think a bit about it, but as long as the writer is reasonably competent, I can understand what they’re talking about.

It’s like being able to read a language, but not speak it.

I know enough mathematics to know that I’d be a terrible mathematician. When it comes to mathematics, I rely on colleagues I can trust. I run an idea by them – sometimes on a space like this blog. I ask them to comment, give a few thoughts. Tell me if I’m on the right track – definitely if I’m missing something.

I feel like university-trained researchers – I’m talking especially about the humanities and social sciences – get trapped in some paradoxes. Quite a lot of them. This one is mistaking a need to build expertise for your job, for expertise being the necessary condition of saying anything at all.

For instance, my case. If I were at a research conference, and there was a talk on some really interesting ideas in philosophy of mathematics in an otherwise lacklustre timeslot, I’d probably go. I’m pretty sure I have gone.

Sometimes – not all the time – folks would react with astonishment that I’d go see a talk in a field in which I wasn’t some level of expert. I do political theory, ethics, European thought, philosophy of ecology and biology.* Why would I go to a math theory talk?

* The people who know philosophy of ecology and biology would know that you have to understand mathematics at least as well as I do. But anyway.

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself—
Finite infinity

My best friends in the university sector would, if that slot was lacklustre for them too, consider coming to the math theory talk with me. But others have been incredulous. As if the only thing you were allowed to be curious about anymore was what you were already an expert in.

Gilles Deleuze was a much better mathematician than I am. He studied mathematics well enough to teach it at the secondary level in France, which is more than I ever managed.

Study of Gottfried Leibniz’s work on differential calculus and Bernhard Riemann’s heterogeneous geometry helped Deleuze develop concepts of change and variety as fundamental principles of existence.

So when I read an article by someone who’s themselves become an expert in philosophy of mathematics and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, I’ll learn from what they say. Same way I learn from anyone who’s become an expert in what I want to learn about.

I read about how Deleuze interpreted Riemann’s work as tracing the mathematical structures of heterogeneous spaces – spaces that have entirely different properties, but are contiguous, that flow into each other. Objects can travel casually among all these spaces – ordinary as a walk between neighbourhoods – and be unaltered.

They just tumble differently. Into a valley, up a hill, around a bend, around several bends that seem like straight paths when you walk through them. Whatever. Doo bee doo.

Reality seen topologically. Perfectly legitimate – simply not quite what most of us are accustomed to. Let’s explore what makes us uncomfortable. And rely on people we trust – in their expertise and their character – to be our guides so we don’t lose ourselves.

Being Without Existing, Composing, 05/02/2018

It’s a basic rule of thinking decently-well that you shouldn’t apply concepts from scientific fields to moral or political thinking, and vice versa. But . . . .

The most famous example of these cross-domain applications gone horribly wrong is social Darwinism. There are plenty of opportunities to read up on how this popular interpolation of a scientific idea to a political imperative caused horrifying human disasters. Please read the links – they’ll open in separate tabs.

Riffing on a hilarious misinterpretation I've heard from too many
old conservative academic philosophers – Deleuze as simulacra.

Aside from the horrifying political consequences of the most notorious example, it’s just bad form epistemically. You can’t make a straight translation of abstract scientific concepts into a moral imperative. Especially when your example gets all the actual principles of the science totally wrong anyway.

Even Gilles Deleuze, well known philosophical weirdo, would say so. One of the major principles of his last book, What Is Philosophy?, was that scientific knowledge was mathematical and referred to specific situations – philosophy operated very differently.

But . . . . there’s a way to carry scientific concepts into other domains of thinking. It’s a process of abstraction.

Identify the most fundamental aspects of a scientific concept, abstract them into a diagram – so hold onto the complexity, but without the specificity – and experiment to see where else that abstract diagram makes sense.

You aren't so much drawing a conclusion – like the social Darwinists did – as you are an investigation. Where else can this concept apply fruitfully?

Where’s an example of this actually working? Then we can see, in specific terms, how that process of thought works. Well, Deleuze developed one – how the abstract structure of the scientific concept of the infinitesimal and the strange attractor can make sense of the existence of impossible ideals.

That’s a weird and dense thing to say. So what do I mean? In Leibniz’s calculus, an infinitesimal is the smallest possible differential relation. No differential – a dynamic relationship of ∆x/∆y – can ever reach zero. That’s just zero. But their smallest possible relationship is an infinitesimally small difference.

The thing is, infinitesimal quantities can’t exist. They definitely can’t exist in experience, because our perceptual powers give out at sizes of objects and movements way bigger than the infinitesimal. They can’t exist in reality either – the smallest any physical fluctuation can be is about 1.6x10^-35 metres. Way longer than infinitesimal.

All you have to do for your dream to become reality is become a
god. That's well beyond the realm of possibility, but sadly, it's an
ideal that all too often guides our actions.

Infinitesimals can’t exist materially, but they exist as asymptotes in reality – you approach it, and can get closer and closer to it, but never actually reach it. It’s infinitely far from you, or infinitely small. An unreachable target that guides the trajectory of your approach.

And that’s what a moral ideal is – an unreachable target that nonetheless guides your real action. An ideal is real without existing – it’s the principle that provides the underlying logic of your action.

Any ethical act or project you work on will always be disappointing and an utter failure if you treat your ideal as achievable – if you think that a practical action plan will actually make an ideal come true.

Best case scenario, you’ll be disappointed when your ambitious plans to make the world a perfect place fall short of what you aimed for. Instead of pride in what you’ve achieved, you’ll feel ashamed that you couldn’t have done more.

Worst case scenario, you’re Mao Zedong leaving tens of millions dead and a nation of a billion horrifically traumatized. Yeah, that’s fine.

The function of the moral or ethical ideal in human thought is to be the asymptotic attractor for our lives – it governs our development without itself ever being a real state of affairs.

Now ask how such an ideal can be used for the betterment of humanity or for brutal destruction. What facilitates its progressive uses? What facilities its destructiveness?

That right there is what Utopias is about. I think I’ll start the introduction this weekend.

What In the World Will People Think?! Research Time, 04/02/2018

When I was reading through that book of essays on Gilles Deleuze’s influences, one name struck me for an odd reason – it was totally unfamiliar to me.

Who are some of these guys?

Josef-Maria Hoëne-Wronski. Who the hell was this guy? He got a brief mention in a small corner of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s most dense book. But I’ve never come across him in all my research into the corners of Napoleonic-period German philosophy.

Here was his major project, in a few paragraphs.

It’s the 1780s. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason drops, and blows a lot of the intellectual scene in Germany away. It broke with long-established ways of thinking about human nature and thought, but did so by explicitly engaging with its major problems and solving them.

Naturally, Kant's solutions set up an entirely new set of problems. Wronski was a major figure in Polish mathematics and physics, so he had the knowledge base to approach many of the problems Kant’s work posed for the foundational principles of physics.

Kant’s first revolutionary book described how the structures of the mind – frameworks as simple and built into our experience as space, time, number, causality – conditioned experience. Human reason alone – as in logical reasoning – had no power to reach any foundational principle for why the frameworks of our mind were as they were.

Now, Kant would ultimately centre those principles in ethics and morality – practical reason. Wronski would move in a totally different direction – physics, particularly calculus.
• • •
Quick jump out of this to talk history. At the undergraduate level, the history of Western philosophy is usually taught as though there are clear boundaries in its development – classical, medieval, modern, critical, contemporary. 

Steve and I disagree on a lot of substantial ontological and
epistemological issues and debates. But we always have very
fruitful – or at least very entertaining – engagements and
conversations.

All too often, those boundaries settle into researchers’ thinking as they progress as a scholar and specialize. That’s why philosophical work that shows the continuity through all these breaks – the little differences and influences across what we think are distinct periods – is the most valuable history of philosophy to me.

I’m indebted to my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller for having written books that taught me so much about those continuities that our oversimplifying undergrad curriculum paints over and erases. Of all the mentors, teachers, and elders I’ve had over the years, he’s taught me the most about this.
• • •
The choice made sense to Wronski. He was a physicist who came from the German-Polish professional world, where you learned Leibniz’s calculus alongside his complex and imaginative ontologies. So intensely creative, ontologically fertile metaphysics was an ordinary part of mathematical thinking for him.

In most of our undergraduate educations in philosophy, we learn that no one thought this way after reading Kant’s Critiques. That was the long-term effect, but just because it’s happened by now, doesn’t mean that it never took a long time anyway.

Wronski may have thought little of bringing Leibniz’s multivector hybrid approaches to physics, mathematics, and ontology. But the presumption got him into trouble, costing him a job at the Marseille Observatory.

It turns out that it isn’t always acceptable to develop a complexly hybrid ontology of the origins of the universe when you’re supposed to be mapping star movements. At least not outside your lunch breaks anyway.

Who are these guys, Kemo Sabe? Another inadvisable direction.

Wronski eventually became most famous in the intellectual circles of his day as a bit of a crank. As people were abandoning the approaches of Leibniz, he was carrying them forward. As it became less acceptable to motivate philosophical and scientific work using religious and theological principles, he was discussing how mystical visions helped inspire his metaphysical work.

The first major product of this exploration was his Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics and Algorithmic Science. It was a massive synthesis of Leibnizian ontologies of calculus with Pythagorean numerological mysticism, all tuned to the problems of post-Kantian philosophy.

His correspondences and friendships with major figures in European mathematics like Joseph-Louis Lagrange meant that this first book was reviewed in high-rolling circles. This quickly turned into a problem for Wronski, since IPMAS was universally panned, including in the review by Lagrange.

Eventually, Wronski’s own faith in the universality of algebra and calculus ended up just as limited as the Pythagorean faith in flat-planed geometry. After ambitious mathematical papers were likewise panned, he spent the last 30 years of his life in poverty. Still grinding away at epochally-ambitious philosophy and mathematics. But fruitlessly.

Wronski’s work turned out to be a dead end. So associating him with Deleuze becomes incredibly dangerous. The insults Wronski received on his way out of intellectual prominence – mystic spewing madness and nonsense – sound very similar to the insults academician analytic philosophers spew at post-structuralist thinkers like Deleuze.

So an essay talking about the influence of such a reviled figure as Wronski on Deleuze – who is widely reviled as a charlatan in many university circles – has to be careful not to associate them too much. Lest you justify the haters.

Get Your Hate On II: Against Simplicity, Research Time, 04/01/2018

I can understand why Gilles Deleuze would have been especially bitter about what pure Analytic Philosophy™ became. It started as a punk rebellion against pretentious Cambridge Hegelianism.

When I was studying the history of early Analytic Philosophy at McMaster University under Nick Griffin, he told me an amazing story about how that field came to be. G. E. Moore was a graduate student at Cambridge, talking with one of his senior professors, J. M. E. MacTaggart. During this casual lunchtime conversation, MacTaggart offhandedly remarks, “Well, of course, time isn’t real.”

Moore's reaction – “What the fresh fuck?!?!” Or the paragraph-long, overly-polite equivalent appropriate to 1890s England.

Of course, as soon as I thought of this example to update the Waverley
case, I had to throw on this album. More than a decade later, it's still
so good!

That punk spirit – the urge to overthrow an oppressive, beyond-the-world, pretentious Hegelian near-mysticism – animated the forge of Analytic Philosophy. But the school’s leaders focussed that spirit on reducing anything that could suggest the metaphysical away from philosophical thought.

What does that Waverley problem amount to today? Here’s an example better suited to the 2010s.

You remember when Untrue came out and no one knew who Burial was? So before 2008, when you talked about “Burial,” the reference of the name was mysterious, unknown. You could point to the album, listen to the music, but you couldn’t say what the real meaning of the name “Burial” was before William Bevan was outed.

It’s a mind-twisting problem to consider on its own terms. People still write essays returning to Bertrand Russell’s “On Denoting” to this day, more than a century later. But Deleuze’s critique still stands – Who the fuck cares? What does it matter?

In the specific context of mathematical logic, it makes perfect sense. But the extreme reductivism of Analytic Philosophy™ reduces philosophical thinking to these problems of word meaning and reference. Everything of wide or visceral relevance is abstracted from philosophy.

So here’s Deleuze’s argument for why Analytic Philosophy™ is to destructive to genuinely creative thinking.

Reason one. When you apply a problem of reference whose proper context is mathematical logic to all philosophical thinking, you end up reducing all of philosophy to logic. The doctrinaire rationalism of the American Analytics – I’m thinking in particular of Willard Quine and the many other thinkers he influenced – raises science to the ideal of thought.

I've come to think of Richard Rorty as having combined the most
profound errors of American Pragmatist™ thinking with those of
doctrinaire Analytic Philosophy™, delivered with all the smugness
of a lifelong Ivy League academician's style.
But that's another post.

But this reductive image of science isn’t even how science actually works. It’s that bizarre science of totalizing unification – the one true form of knowledge. This is why the sub-disciplines of philosophy of science that haven’t yet overcome the influence of Quine and Donald Davidson have become so moribund – their practitioners believe in a unified science that doesn’t exist.

Reason two. Philosophy turns into discourse alone. You exchange logical propositions and proofs – whether as symbolic logic or as propositions with the same simple framework – and evaluate them. Are the inferences valid? According to which system of logic?* A vibrant, creative tradition reduced to tiresome nitpicking.

* Even here, merely admitting that there can be more than one valid system of logic, all mutually incommensurable or irreducible, is more than the presumptions of doctrinaire Analytic Philosophy™ can bear.

Reason three. Philosophical conversation becomes mere debates over opinions. Is this a good argument? Are all your inferences valid? What are the facts and states of affairs that justify what you say?

Deleuze calls it Richard Rorty’s dinner table. Casual arguments over minutiae, tossed off with all the commitment of those who are never at risk from anything. As if conflicts over values, ethics, and ways of living have never killed anyone.

They never killed anyone as comfortable as Rorty, or most of the folks who think such arguments are philosophy’s central subject matter.

On What There Is, Research Time, 21/12/2017

When Neil DeGrasse Tyson opens his mouth about philosophy, he usually doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If I was going to make this a pissing contest, I’d tell him what a better grasp many philosophers have on the core concepts of the sciences and scientific knowledge.

I could cite him plenty. I’ve known several specialists in philosophy of science who also have bachelor’s degrees in different sciences. An old McMaster colleague has a degree in physics, the department has run a joint degree program in philosophy and mathematics, a friend from my doctoral program has a biology degree, and my old friend Johnny Five has a colleague with a degree in microbiology.

These days, I feel like Bill Nye has simply lost his
touch. He's less an advocate for science, and is now
just one more talking head.
Nice poster, though.

We don't fuck around.

Maybe that’s why philosophy is such an unpopular subject, a tradition that Tyson and Bill Nye shit on. Philosophers don’t even fuck around enough to do children’s entertainment and become national icons of education.*

* John Dewey would be enraged. He might even furrow his brow.

Gilles Deleuze has plenty to say about science, which is actually very insightful in his weird way. Remember that extended riff I went on about his idea that philosophy was about catching hold of chaos? In What Is Philosophy?, he contrasts science.

Scientific thinking is rooted in mathematics – as Deleuze terms it, functions. You use mathematics to plot and describe quantities, intensities, and differentials. You end up with specific measurements. Even in the many situations and disciplines where you deal in probabilities, you’re still dealing in ranges or numbers.

A mathematically indefinite limit is still an infinitely more sane number than the kind of thinking Deleuze calls chaos in this context – ideas changing so infinitely fast that they change completely in the moment of grasping.

Deleuze says philosophy is thinking in terms of what a process can do – its potential, its virtual existence – the limits and frameworks for all that a process or machine** can achieve. Philosophy’s domain is purely about the structure of potentials. At least that’s one reading of this very complex book.

** Same difference, really.

Science, as he contrasts it, is about the actual. Sciences are mathematical ways to describe different domains of actual existence – how things are right now, what they become, what they can become, and the likelihood of their becoming.

Properly speaking, philosophy and the sciences are partners. Historically, they were united in a single, multifaceted discipline. But the different sciences proliferated, differentiated, developed more complex knowledge in more unique domains.

We understood enough about the world to realize how many unique approaches to knowledge were needed to understand more of the world. So now we don’t have ‘natural philosophy’ anymore. We have a discipline that’s purely conceptual.

Rather, we have many disciplines that constitute together a human knowledge practice more profound than any single tradition within it – whether you start with Parmenides, Kongzi, Moses, or the Vedas. The creation of frameworks for understanding and thinking.

Now we also have the sciences – the detailed, mathematical knowledge of what is. They can exist in a positive feedback loop, each informing different aspects of the other’s practice. In philosophy, that’s what a lot of us do explicitly. How about the sciences?

Constructing a Geometry of Thinking, Research Time, 30/11/2017

Let's actually get a little bit into this idea of a geometry for philosophy. I talked yesterday about what a plane of immanence is – now let’s get into how particular planes work.

So Gilles Deleuze’s term, plane of immanence, is a map of concepts, a map of their mutual possibility. If you can develop a coherent philosophy out of a set of concepts, then that set all exists on the same plane of immanence.

That they can cohere means that their components and structures can all fit together without internal contradictions that make nonsense of the conceptual machinery. But that’s just one philosophical system that fits on the plane.

Imagine that you’re Bernhard Riemann. Sitting in your office, doing mathematics, like a mathematician would. You’re setting up some guidelines for how a particular type of space would work. You can extrapolate from those mathematical rules what types of shapes can exist in your space.

Deleuze: "The components of the schema are as follows:
1) the "I think" as an ox head wired for sound, which
constantly repeats Self=Self; 2) the categories as universal
concepts (four great headings): shafts that are extensive
and retractile according to the movement of; 3) the
moving wheel of the schemata; 4) the shallow stream of
Time as form of interiority, in and out of which the wheel
of the schemata plunges; 5) space as form of exteriority;
the stream's banks and bed; 6) the passive self at the bottom
of the stream and as junction of the two forms; 7) the
principles of synthetic judgments that run across spacetime;
8) the transcendental field of possible experience,
immanent to the "I"; 9) the three Ideas or illusion of
transcendence (circles turning on the absolute horizon;
Soul, World, and God).

A shape that fits a spherical-section space – space curved like a planet – will flay apart, unable to hold itself together, on a negatively-curved space – curved like a saddle. Same goes for shapes that work on saddle spaces splitting apart on spheres.

Now imagine that instead of setting up the boundary conditions for this geometric space, you had to figure out its parameters by trial and error. Try constructing different kinds of shapes and see whether they can exist together. If they can’t, then they each project from themselves a different type of space.

Well, that’s Gilles Deleuze sitting in his office, doing philosophy. But instead of shapes and spaces, he’s working with concepts – frameworks of organizing perceptual and cultural thought to understand our experiences and lives in different ways.

In philosophy, there’s no function to set the boundary conditions for the concepts you develop first. Philosophical concepts have many components organized in complicated ways. Check out this example of Kant’s philosophy. It’s a ridiculous-looking diagram, but it’s a genuinely pithy description (and depiction) of his concept of subjectivity.

Analyze this concept. Think about all of its components and their dynamic relationships with each other. How does this concept help us understand our own subject-hood, mind, personality, and experience? Once you understand all the concept’s components, internal dynamics, and practical effects, then you can start the next step in the process.

Yeah, I know. You’re not even done after all that work. At least this is only one possible process for philosophical thinking – it might be the most admirable, if you consider only the dedication to such a strange and difficult task. So here’s the next step.

Figure out its plane of immanence. Extrapolate from those components, dynamics, and practical affects what other concepts are compatible with this particular way of thinking. If you’re lucky, the thinker you’re studying has done a lot of the work for you. Like Kant, who developed concepts in morality, aesthetics, theology, and philosophy of science alongside his central concept of subjectivity.

Maybe you’re a bit less lucky, and the map expands across the work of many thinkers. You might study a particular tradition of thinkers, like the Abbasid-era Aristotelians.

Or maybe you do comparative philosophy, looking for conceptual compatibilities across cultures and civilizations – analyzing structures of thought developed in Chinese Legalism of the Warring States period and contemporary authoritarian philosophies like those of Carl Schmitt, Giovanni Gentile, or Vladimir Lenin.

Most terrifying task of all in mapping planes of immanence – straight-up creating concepts from near-scratch and testing them for mutual compatibility. If they fit, you have another few points on the map. If not, rinse and repeat.

Thought: An Uncanny Precision, Research Time, 21/11/2017

Gilles Deleuze has an awful reputation as an impenetrable writer. And I mean fucking impenetrable. Not like it isn’t his fault. Some of Deleuze’s sentences – especially in his super-dense late 1960s works – are the kind of language you grind your teeth on.

Working with Félix Guattari made his words more poetic, more like a teacher than a researcher. But the flow of this jazz was sometimes a little too out-there. Deleuze’s language was looser in his solo works during his last decade alive, though he never met the fever pitches of those collaborative works again.

I do sometimes think of their collaborative style like jazz musicians
riffing on each other's improvisations, or rappers freestyling in tandem.
Deleuze and Guattari's collaborations do have a very musical feeling
to their language.

But he doesn’t have a reputation for precision. Mostly stereotypes about being either immensely difficult or bizarrely weird. Which is too bad, because he’s actually a very precise writer.

When you read What Is Philosophy?, it isn’t just a book of philosophy – it’s also a look at Deleuze’s own method of philosophical thought.* Start by describing what it is he makes. Concepts.

* Why not Guattari too, even though his name is on the cover? A reference to the history. Their collaboration was pretty light on this one, nowhere near the intensity of their work in the 1970s. They were old by then, Guattari deep in a years-long depression. He’d die of a heart attack at 62 the year after it was published. Félix didn’t do too much.

A philosophical concept is an account – in thought and as best you can in words – of the full range of possible variations when several different processes collide and interact. It’s like a mathematical description, but without variables or constants, using only the ranges of all the relevant vectors.

A concept has no X, Y, and Z; no e or π. A concept has maximum and minimum ranges of development from a decisive, transformative point. There’s a collision of forces, a moment of change constitutes from its complex dynamics and turbulence a new system of those forces. The range of possibilities that event sets in motion is its concept.

Let's be honest with ourselves, however. They'd never be as cool as
actual jazz musicians.

A concept is an expression of this knowledge of the ranges of potentials, but in thought. When you ask what these thoughts make possible, you’re doing practical philosophy. Exploring what a particular way of thinking – a framework for understanding the world – enables you to do.

What does such a framework – the ability to understand the world using these ranges – open our minds toward? Practical philosophy – philosophical thinking and analysis going to work in the world.

But in this book, Deleuze is thinking only of the nature of concepts. He’d written enough about their development and use. What Is Philosophy? is Deleuze doing meta-philosophy. Trying to describe what philosophical thinking actually is, and what philosophers do when they’re actually doing philosophy and not just writing about it.**

** The occupation of way too many people who call themselves philosophers.

Studying a concept means examining how that concept is expressed, how it’s written, other explorations of it in different philosophical (or philosophically-inclined) literature.

Once you understand the writing, you can mull over its mechanics – its processes, the activities it suits, what it makes visible and invisible, the relationships and dynamics of all its components, how its structure can affect how someone would think through it.

You survey it, like a drone flight over a mountain range. It has to be a very careful survey, because of its complexity. Incredibly precise knowledge, but only after careful, attentive study. A survey to map thoughts themselves.

The Shock of Your Own Inadequacy, Research Time, 06/11/2017

No, this post isn’t about the first time you experienced erectile dysfunction and get your minds out of the gutter.

Really, I’m taking a second pass at the idea I was talking about earlier this weekend. That idea of alienation coming up in The Human Condition. It’s useful and intriguing, and I want to make sure I have a good handle on how to express it. I think I have a better grasp on the how right now.

When I was a young boy, I read Steven Hawking's A Brief History of
Time. There, I read that the ultimate goal of science was to develop
a theory of everything, a mathematical system that could explain
and predict every phenomenon in the universe in simple formulae.
Hawking should be ashamed of writing such propaganda.

Mathematics are, in some context, important to all sciences. Calculus, geometry, statistics, plain old arithmetic – whatever. If you want to give a quick and dirty one-sentence* definition of science, call it ‘Systematic knowledge emerging from understanding mathematical descriptions of things, systems, and processes.’

* Inevitably inadequate, but making an accurate-enough gesture for us to say that, yeah, it’s true I suppose.

Put that in your introductory-level philosophy of science textbook and smoke it.

Okay, that was the last joke. So Hannah Arendt tries to explain how a profound alienation from nature, the world, and our experience can arise from how central mathematics is to our knowledge.

The mathematical tools of the different sciences give us a better ability to understand natural processes – atomic energy fields, cellular and organic processes, ecological development, cosmological events – than we can get from our ordinary observation of the world.

Go to the typical grade school example – which I don’t think ever gets unpacked the way it really deserves – of geocentric vs heliocentric models of the solar system. We look up in the sky and we see the sun and other heavenly bodies circling us.

But describing their actual motion in our sky takes some convoluted math. So Copernicus, Erasmus, and others developed a heliocentric model with simpler math. It was always an as-if hypothesis just to ease up on the headaches astronomers suffered.

If I could focus on one of the many philosophical and metaphysical
screwups of Christian thought, it's that the common interpretation of
Noah's myth in this tradition is that creation exists for us as we are.
The meaning of the rainbow is that everything is illuminated already.
I much prefer the Jewish tradition, which is much more honest about
how we still have to work for our knowledge.

Mathematics is a technological creation – it’s a human tool, a complex assemblage of symbols and rules. So any knowledge that we produce with mathematical tools isn’t a direct encounter with the world – mathematics mediates our knowledge of the world.

That was fine when we were just coming up with imaginary models to simplify our models of a more complex world – the migraine-inducing calculations of planetary paths in the geocentric model. But then it turned out that the mediated abstract models of visceral experience were true, and our ordinary experience of the world distorted how nature really was.

Arendt talks about Galileo and the astronomical tradition that followed him, but Robert Boyle and the Royal Society’s development of the experimental laboratory was equally important. Mathematics was the symbolism, and the laboratory was the institution and site, of mediated knowledge.

Mediated knowledge was much more effective, more powerful, than knowledge through direct experience of the world. Necessary conditions of humanity’s industrial revolution included that mediated knowledge.

Our own tools, techniques, and technology were the medium of that knowledge. This was a profound cultural shock to the Europeans who developed the modern epoch of mathematics and the institution of the laboratory. My debt here is to my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller’s philosophical history of knowledge.

The power of mediated knowledge over direct experience of the world
was such a shock to Medieval Christian European society that its
success felt like falling back into the Cave. A God whose nature
requires complex mathematics and wrangling results out of a
laboratory to understand isn't nearly as kind and close to us as
Medieval Christian thinking held. All the philosophical attempts
to overcome mediation in knowledge – I think of Hegel's Absolute
and popular evangelical literalist disdain for science – you can
understand as desperate refusals to accept a distant God.

Before this cultural realization of the power of mediated knowledge, Europeans had a view of the world in which every moment of ordinary wandering through the world brought you closer to God.

The medieval Christian conception of worldly knowledge was that our world was creation. Creation was God’s expression, and humanity was the element of creation who God made creation for.

Creation’s purpose was for humans to understand it and live harmoniously in nature. So the popular conception of nature in European Christian culture was as an open book. Creation was something through which we understood God and our relationship to Him. We’re built to understand creation intuitively because creation was made for us.

The success of mediated knowledge demonstrates that creation wasn’t made for us. The most accurate knowledge of the world emerges from using these complicated tools, technology that requires years of training and education to use properly. The world is much more opaque than an entire sub-continent’s culture of our ancestors understood.

People in Medieval Christian European culture thought of themselves as Fallen, that they had to work to understand God and creation again. The success of technology – mathematical symbols and the laboratory – in understanding the world demonstrates to a Medieval European Christian that we’re Fallen much farther than we thought.

We may as well have Fallen into hell.

Save Us V: The World Is Lost But I’m Found, Research Time, 16/12/2015

Well, that turned into a couple of nice false starts. But here we are at the actual start of what I wanted to say about Hobbes when I was writing my follow-up to the Only a God post.

What Leo Strauss has to say about Hobbes is rooted in Strauss' own attitude about truth. The problem of truth – particularly the natural universal rights of man als Männer – is the conceptual core of Natural Right and History.

Here's the pragmatist answer to the problem of
relativism. Many truths doesn't mean there are no truths.
Each truth is partial, limited to a particular unique
domain or set of concerns, and only God knows the
totality of all that truth. But God isn't exactly
forthcoming with the answers, so we have to figure
all this out on our own.

Okay, so what makes truth a problem? 

See, Strauss is a textbook example of someone who thinks that saying “There’s no one absolute eternal truth about X" is the same as saying “There’s no truth at all about X, and you can believe whatever you want about X.” When X is the list of human rights, shit gets serious.

It’s the fear of moral relativism, but in a context where anything that falls short of moral absolutism is total relativism. And Strauss’ analysis of Hobbes is how he roots moral relativism in thinking that goes back well further than the usual suspects like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

The real relativist, as far as he's concerned, is Hobbes. The reason is intriguing, though. It has to do with the implications of a thorough mechanism for knowledge in Hobbes’ thinking.

Before I lay this out, I want to say that these aren't my views at all. I’m walking you through how I understand Strauss’ argument. I think that argument is fascinating as a set of ideas and inferences, but I don’t think it’s true at all.

If everything that exists is a mechanism, then humanity has no powers to progress beyond what we can already do. That includes our thinking. We can only think, plan, and act in a way that’s peculiar to human existence alone. So we can only understand the world in human terms.

If we want to understand everything in the world (the ostensible goal of scientific inquiry), we’d have to understand everything in the world on its own terms. But we only have human knowledge frameworks to work with, so can’t know the world in itself. 

So humans gaining knowledge of truths beyond human experience or thinking is impossible. Reason is impotent. But action isn’t. Mathematics is a human way of knowing, but it does allow us to study how mechanisms work and manipulate them.

The heavily oversignified central illustration of
Hobbes' Leviathan.

Non-human mechanisms are permanently alienated from humanity. But we can use our knowledge of mechanism in the abstract (mathematics and the derived applied sciences) to wrench those alien bodies to behave according to human possibilities.

This is the mind-set of Modernity.* The book of nature is in a language we can never know. But we can burn its pages and remake the world in the human image. Strauss thinks this is a disastrous path, and so have many environmentalists over the years.**

* The epoch, that is. 

** Further notions that environmentalism should properly be a conservative dogma, as it was back when it was called conservationism, and resulted in the creation of America's national park system. But in the 1960s, the movement became critical of big business because of pesticides and pollution, so became the province of hippies. Environmental consciousness still hasn’t recovered the same political power it had in John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt's day, and I don't know that it ever will.

If humanity is so lost in the world that we can only find ourselves, then we'll make sure we can be found everywhere by steamrolling our nature, our character, our way over everything. That’s modernity, says Strauss. 

So we have to figure out a return to the pre-modern mind-set when we rooted philosophical thinking and argument in real endpoints: the actual, absolute, universal answers to our questions.

Hoo boy. To Be Continued . . .

The Creativity of Mathematics and Philosophy, Composing, 03/03/2015

My friend B studies Hegel. This is something that I’m very glad he does, because I simply can’t bring myself to it. Hegel and I have such different sensibilities and approaches to philosophy and by implication pretty much everything else, for me to become a genuine scholar of his work, a route B has taken, at least for part of his professional life as a university worker.

Periodically, he’ll post quotations from Hegel on his Facebook wall, because that sort of thing is actually pretty cool. It’s verbose and difficult language, but it’s philosophically rich, at least through the act of interpretation. Mind you, I don’t always find it philosophically rich in the creative sense, which is why Hegel scholarship and myself don’t always get along.

No, I can't say I've been a fan.

B quotes Hegel from The Science of Logic:

“Not only does arithmetic not contain the concept and the intellectual task of conceptualization that goes with it: it is the very opposite of the concept. Here, because of the indifference of the combined to the combining - a combining that lacks necessity - thought finds itself engaged in an activity which is at the same time the utter externalization of itself, a tour de force in which it moves in an element void of thought, drawing relations where there is no capacity for necessary relations. The subject matter is the abstract thought of externality itself.”

And another quote from the Logic, later in the comments, in response to my question about what specific kind of mathematics Hegel implied:

“Essentially, however, the perversity of enlisting mathematical categories for injecting some determination into the method and content of philosophical science shows in the fact that, inasmuch as mathematical formulas signify thoughts and conceptual distinctions, this meaning must rather first be indicated, determined and justified in philosophy. In its concrete science, philosophy must take its logical element from logic, not from mathematics.”

I wondered if Hegel really did intend to treat all mathematics as if it were simple arithmetic, and B confirmed that arithmetic was really what he was referring to in the first quote. B clarified for me that Hegel was opposed to the notion that a philosopher should develop concepts based on mathematical ideas because they were entirely abstract, with no concrete meaning. 

His critique of Gottfried Leibniz was essentially on these grounds, that the framework of a philosophy can only begin from the concretely meaningful foundation of logic. This would make Leibniz’s inspiration for so much of his philosophy from his innovations developing differential calculus a dead end.

Having learned a few ideas from the
philosophy of physics scene about John
Clerk Maxwell and field dynamics, I'd
think that this was a form of mathematics
that Hegel would have found interesting,
had he lived long enough. But
apparently not.

Hegel’s concept of the concrete is one of the central notions of his philosophical approach, and it’s exactly why I’m not really a fan of his. I consider philosophy, above all else, a creative enterprise. It’s a tradition of creating concepts, new ways to understand the universe, our place in it, and ourselves. We shouldn’t build a restriction into that creativity in philosophical practice itself.

There should be checks on philosophical creativity in the moment, for many reasons. As a discipline of progressing human thought, it has to speak to human concerns of some kind. Most obviously, you should prevent your philosophical exploration from completely going off the rails and taking you to a land so divorced from reality that you could only use it in heavily experimental sci-fi or fantasy. 

But you should also let developments in related fields of human activity guide your philosophical work. It could be the sciences, mathematics, art, medicine, politics. We should root our concepts in some worldly endeavour to keep them relevant to human life. That’s what I did with Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, grounding a philosophical exploration in ecological and biological sciences, giving these relatively abstract concepts a mission statement through environmentalist politics. 

In a way, I have a similar rule as Hegel about what makes good philosophy. The only difference is that I understand philosophy as working best when it’s in a dialogue with other disciplines and knowledge traditions of humanity. Hegel always struck me as understanding philosophy to stand separate and superior from all human endeavours. I don’t really know if I’m built to do philosophy like that.

Boundless ≠ Infinite, Research Time, 08/01/2015

The other day, I discussed only one kind of abstraction that Marshall and Eric McLuhan explore in the first sections of Laws of Media. The second kind of abstraction regards our experience of space, and the epistemic effects of Euclidean and Pythagorean geometry. These are the concepts that I would say are the most trippy so far in their analysis of how thought became abstract.

When I first read Bertrand Russell’s History of Western

Philosophy, his accounts of ancient Greek thought

continually discussed their moral injunction, apparently

an influence of Pythagoras, against eating beans. I don't

know why they hated beans so much, or why Russell

would make such a big deal over it.

“Trippy. Hm. Is that a technical term?”

Yes, actually, it is. 

The son and father describe how people experienced and thought about space before Euclid as acoustic. The primary objects in the world were physical things flying around us, and space was the product of these interactions. Remember, however, that these concepts of space were explained in philosophical poetry, performed testimonials of logos itself that speaker and audience memorized in the act of recitation and listening. There were no mathematics to accompany these concepts. 

Euclid and Pythagoras changed all this when they started constructing geometric figures and investigating their properties on paper. They conceived what MuLuhan calls the visual model of experiencing space, where figures stand in focus on a featureless ground that extends infinitely in all directions. Space exists as infinite extension that is the theatre on which objects appear.

This concept of infinite extension was very different from what amounts to the previous equivalent conception, that of boundlessness. The sages of recitation understood the world as ultimately finite, but having no boundaries. It used to be easily understood, but we've lived with the concept of space as infinitely extended for so long that now boundlessness is hard to get our heads around.

Boundless finitude goes like this. Travel in your spaceship as far away from everything else as you possibly can. Literally everything else in the entire universe is behind you. You’ve only travelled a finite distance, but your position now constitutes the most distant point in the universe. Now throw a baseball in front of you. 

That's what the boundless finite universe is. It's a bunch of stuff scattered around. There’s no limit to that finitude beyond which you can’t go, as if there was a magic fence around the universe. You’re not throwing that baseball into anything. You’re just throwing it farther away from everything else. The size of the universe is just the distance between stuff and there's no principle that sets any limit on how distant stuff can be from each other.

This is actually really hard to conceive today, because as a culture we’re so accustomed to thinking about the universe as a plane of space, the end of which is literally no-space. If you can throw the baseball, you must be able to throw it into something. This idea that there had to be something that underlay the existence and relationships among objects was weird and difficult to understand in Euclid’s day. His ideas were so innovative that they literally made no sense without long periods of complex study.

Of course, Einstein’s revolution in physics has thrown the Euclidean conception of space into the pile of obsolete ontology. Yet we’ve been thinking according to Euclidean presumptions for so long (or so says the McLuhans) that returning to a conception of space that makes it a function of relative distance from the image of a theatre prior to the objects that appear in it is just as difficult as it was to leave that conception behind in the first place 2500 years ago.

I’m not sure where their conceptual story of how we understand space ends, because I’ve been spending most of my philosophical time editing the manuscript of Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. So I had to put Laws of Media down for a while. Only so many hours in the day.

Kraftwerkdenken 1: Machinic Man in a World of Computers, A History Boy, 31/03/2014

Watching Kraftwerk’s 3D concert this Saturday was delicious for my philosophical brain as well as my musical and cinematic brains. It provoked me to revisit an old argument that I’ve heard for a long time, why people are uncomfortable with the typical materialism of philosophy in discussions and contexts regarding mind and soul. 

One of the most striking philosophical denunciations I’ve ever had thrown at me lay in this issue. It happened at one of the Jockey Club meetings in which I used to take part when I was at Memorial’s philosophy department. Discussing a paper about mind-body dualism, I expressed my belief, which I basically still hold, that humans are entirely physical creatures, and that our personalities and mental aspects are ultimately generated by physical processes. And an older student from the English faculty then loudly denounced me as someone who did not believe in morality or ethics, for that reason. 

No matter what their art has suggested over the years, we
are not actually robots. Not even Kraftwerk anymore.

I was more than flummoxed by the response, but it’s rooted in a concern that still rankles people, me included. This is the presumption that material, the physical, is only capable of extremely simple activity. After all, what more can be done with a physical object other than kicking it down the road? When the image of the mind as software for the brain was first developed, computers were very simple machines running very rudimentary processes. They were the kind of computers that Kraftwerk depicts in their visuals and music. Harshly bright green text on a dark green screen, huge clunky monitors and little more processing power than a calculator. 

If this is the kind of computer of which the human mind was a slightly more complicated model, then this vision of humanity depicts us literally as robots. Their mobility depressingly limited, little more than a talking mannequin. All of humanity’s profundities would be mere simulations, lying to ourselves that we could be more significant than we really were. If this was the dream of a technological, materialist humanity, then for many people it was a nightmare. 

If anything bugged me about Cmdr.
Data's existentialism, it was that he
framed it in terms of 'becoming human.'
Really, just like humans, we should all
strive to make ourselves more complex
machines.

Venerable curmudgeonly scholars muscle strong arguments against this reductive materialism, the idea that we are “nothing but” or “mere” matter in motion. But you don’t have to believe in anything transcendentally or cheesily spiritual to overcome this idea. Even just learning how vastly complex material systems can actually become are good enough. This is why I was happy to discover the work of Manuel DeLanda during my doctoral research. He spells out in detail just how complex even the simplest movements of particles (convection currents in your oven, in your oceans, or over your city) actually are, and the frightfully difficult mathematical locations just to plot their tendencies of motion. His 2011 book Philosophy and Simulation was a series of chapters describing the different systems of cellular, organismic, ecological, and socio-political interactions that computer simulation can depict accurately with chaos mathematics. We can now do actual simulations of small tribe economics, one level of ecosystemic relations (that is, just the animals and plants consumption relations and symbioses), and urban traffic flow of vehicles, transit, and pedestrians. And that's just with the technology of the 2000s. There has been progress since. The visuals Kraftwerk played for their "Tour de France" suite at the concert depicted even France itself as an enormous, complex machine, constituted through the trillions of geographical and technological threads that knit it together. 

We too often think, at least in the popular consciousness, that mathematical prediction of movement is easy. The world’s most powerful computers strain to grasp the complexity with which urban traffic systems move. Now consider systems with the incredible complexity of systems and their many layers of interaction as an ecosystem or an organism. The materialism I believe in isn’t that old-fashioned reductive kind that depicts humans as robots moved only by the most simple drives. Why I distrust Freudian or Lacanian perspectives in philosophical and social criticism is because their framework for human motivation is too simple, almost facile, compared to the frameworks of chaos mathematics that actually approach the tendencies of actual matter interacting in the world. My kind of materialism believes that the material is actually adequate to all the tasks for which we commonly believe that a mind is necessary. 

So don't be afraid of your nature as a machine. It’s not that we get rid of the immaterial substance of mind. It’s that we could achieve so much without even having it at all. Matter is powerful enough to be a mind.

What Is Trustworthy About a Visionary? Research Time, 11/03/2014

Through the random posts of a couple of Facebook connections, I came across a remarkable little essay, just over ten years old, by a pair of otherwise unremarkable scholars named Mark Van Atten and Robert Tragesser about the nature of mysticism. In particular, they took a left-field, but deceptively simple, tack on the Common Core Thesis in the philosophy of mysticism. This idea is that, underneath all the divergence of mystical visions, there is a common set of truths at the core of all mystical visions and visionaries.

The notion speaks to our contemporary spirituality of the market of everyday enlightenment. When spirituality can come in a pill, there’s a shaman in every drugstore and on every street corner. But mysticism has played its role in all of humanity’s spiritual traditions. A mystic vision is described as an experience of the Absolute Good, and so that Common Core Thesis would seem to be the only way mysticism could offer genuine guidance in life. When Van Atten and Tragesser discuss contemporary mystics, they’re comparing two people in a profession that’s rarely associated in its popular image with such thinking: L. E. J. Brouwer and Kurt Gödel, the logicians and mathematicians.

I think if I had ever decided to pursue contemporary
philosophy of mathematics itself in any substantial
way, I'd build on the concepts of Kurt Gödel.

Not all visions of an Absolute Good are defined in mystical terms; sometimes they’re couched as political movements, ideologies based on the realization of a single core concept. This is how theories of mysticism can operate in my Utopias project. But I don’t think they’ll play a very central role, and perhaps can play only an underlying role to avoid bogging down my analysis of the religious fervour of politics in the fervour of a singular vision. Singular visions are at the heart of both phenomena, but for an ideologue, that vision can be shared and acted upon, while the mystic vision would appear incommunicable.

Their essay analyses Brouwer’s and Gödel’s different conceptions of the Absolute, and examine the implications of that comparison for the Common Core Thesis. They describe Brouwer as a pure Kantian in one pivotal way: he considered time to be a construction of subjectivity. Going beyond Kant, Brouwer considered mathematics to be an elaboration of the intuitions of discreteness (moments) and continuity (passage or flow) of time. But Brouwer considered this a falling away from the Absolute in which time is not sensed. We are able to achieve practical actions, but in doing so, we are isolated from the true nature of things.*

* In conceiving of the faculty of intelligence or intellect as the ability to quantitatively take stock of the world and focus our thoughts for practical action, Brouwer greatly resembles the ideas of Henri Bergson. Of course, he differs from Bergson in a variety of other, more fundamental, ways. Bergson is an interesting figure in the philosophical tradition of trying to understand mysticism. His treatment of the subject in his last major work, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, is fascinating and nuanced. I don’t quite have the space to go into it here, and I don’t even have a solid enough memory of it to put anything in pixels again just yet. But his entirely immanent conception of what the mystic intuits or experiences wildly differs from virtually every other mystic or analyst of mysticism I’ve ever found, who focus on mystic visions as contact with a transcendent Absolute. It also has no room for any version of the Common Core Thesis. If mysticism becomes an important conceptual pillar of the Utopias project’s analysis of ideology, Bergson’s concept may be a critical alternative to the political absolutisms.

Gödel, meanwhile, conceived of mystical insight as an intellectual matter entirely. His Platonic conception of mathematics made mystical contact with pure mathematical concepts the centrepiece of his epistemology of math. Mysticism was Gödel’s path to intellectual enlightenment, the truth of mathematics. He considered himself extremely influenced by Schelling in this regard.** Contrasted with Brouwer, our trusty co-authors saw them together as disproving the Common Core Thesis. Their concepts of mystical experience, and how they described their own experiences, stand in total opposition and contradiction to each other. There could not be a single universal truth underlying every mystical experience if the content of each of those experiences includes incompossibles, notions that can’t both be true, where the truth of one falsifies the other.

** I’ll say it right now. I’ve never read Schelling. Not one iota. I don’t even really know where I’d start. If any of my friends who have read Schelling have some recommendations on his best books (I don’t want any ‘introductory’ or ‘the easy stuff’ first; I can handle the pure shit), let me know.

If I decide, for at least one dimension of analysis in the Utopias project, to understand ideological absolutism as the worldly articulation of a mystical vision of the Absolute, this paper has been remarkably valuable to me. It offers grounds for the discord underlying all absolutism.

What Is Communism Anyway? 2: Come and Join the Collective, Research Time, 24/02/2014

Continued from previous. Ultimately, as a philosophical matter, my biggest problem with Alain Badiou is his conception of the subject as collective. That is, individuality is only ontologically possible insofar as a person is counted as one, counted as a member of a collective. That collective can even contain just one, but it is still a collective. This may sound like some dogmatic Maoism, one more fool uncritically following a doctrine which they believe on the basis of faith. In his political writings, Badiou does discuss how an individual must have total faith in the movement to bring about a just world and change human character along the lines of justice and true material equality among people. But those words about faith do not seem to be for him. Badiou himself has already discovered the reasons why the subject is necessarily constituted through a collective. I think it lies at the fundamental basis of his entire philosophy.

Badiou can be quite difficult, especially in his ontology,
but he deserves his reputation as a tantalizing author.

You see, the first I read of Badiou was Being and Event, a copy that I picked up while on vacation in Toronto back in 2006. It was a Book City bookstore, which is why I’ve always had good feelings about that franchise: most relatively commercial bookstores have pretty miserable philosophy sections, and this one had an esoteric, huge, and complex account of set theory as the original ontology of existence itself, and how political devotion to a revolutionary cause arises from our encounters with events that are incommensurable with previous orders of being and re-inscribe participants into a new collective. Being and Event is one hell of a book, and I consider it one of the greatest philosophical achievements that a single person has made since the Second World War.

However, we don’t always agree with that we admire. Sadly, I don’t see enough admiring critique in philosophy. Young partisans and fans of Badiou tend to lionize and worship him too much. But the grounds of my disagreement lie in Badiou’s conception of the subject.

A detour that isn’t really a digression. The hallmark of Being and Event was, for me, Badiou’s account of set theory as fundamental ontology. Basically, because at its most basic level, in terms of a body’s mere existence, it can always be counted as a member of a set — the most we can do is count them. He spun several more elaborate ontological principles from applying the operations of set theory in an ontological context, but my story today only requires that basic starting point. Even if a body is counted only as one, it is still one only insofar as it is a set; it would simply be a member of a set with one member. Even nothingness counts as one: the null set. 

So every body is only an individual insofar as it is part of a collective; in the most fundamental aspect of its ontology, its mere existence, a body is part of a collective. So it goes for the subject; even at the individual level, it exists only as part of a collective. To deny this status as a collectivity ignores the most fundamental aspect of its very ontology: that it is only what it is insofar as it is a member of a set. Even a set of one, or a set of nothing, is still a collective. And every individual is a set.

Badiou has done something quite remarkable in following through the implications of his approach to fundamental ontology completely into an ethical and political philosophy, his theory of the subject. Bear in mind that this is only speculation after a partial reading of his work. I don’t speak as an expert on the corpus of Badiou (that may never happen, depending on your standard of expertise), but as an expert on philosophical research and reading exploring an idea of Badiou’s in some essays. So any categorical statements I make now will be provisional (and elaborated a little more tomorrow, but not in the sense some of you might think). 

In an essay in The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou describes
China's Cultural Revolution, particularly is first three years,
as a properly subjectivizing event.

In a political sense, the event, that incommensurable opportunity to change the character of one’s existence, is a moment in a subject’s life when he can actually subjectivize himself. It is a moment when he can change who he is: from a self-conscious individual who believes in his separateness from all others, he realizes that he is a member of a set. The event is the kind of moment that wakes a person up to understand that he only exists as a member of a collective. 

One of the earliest criticisms I made of Badiou was that a person’s formative event need not be one that lets someone actualize himself as a radical/communist egalitarian, but could instead have inspired Nazi nationalism, robber-baron capitalism with absolute contempt for the poor, or some other repugnant ideology or faith. Now that I have a better handle on the implicative relationships of the ontology to the politics, I think I understand how the communist political philosophy follows from it. 

Communism is the only political form that is adequate to the fundamental nature of a body’s existence, existing only as a member of a set, a collective. So the only authentic subject is one who struggles for communism, the radical material equality that counts every person as one, just as every being is counted as one.

My central problem with this, and the topic of tomorrow’s post: There is more to the subject than its existence alone.