The Anxious Superpositions of Wisdom, When Philosophy Is Quantified
There’s an Alice Hoffman novel, from the 1980s, where she constructs an anthropology of academia. Her classification is along these lines, if I recall it correctly.
The degree to which there is consensual agreement among the scholars of a subject concerning the nature of its object, is the degree to which sartorial appearance & outward social focus is neglected.
Pure mathematicians, theoretical physicists, & some philosophers (probably logicians), wander around the campus grounds in a disheveled state, oblivious to others, in their own worlds, where a proof is a proof, & nothing else is relevant. Their social status is contingent only on their ability to produce said proofs.
The humanities scholars, conversely; where the nature of their object of study, even its existence, is in question; require the consensual approval of their peers; so they cultivate impeccable diction, dress smartly, give off an impressive demeanour.
I would add to this, by saying, that the obligation to produce benefits discernible to whatever present-day understandings of utility are circulating amongst those who distribute funding, devolves, essentially, into the demands of commodity production, of results held to be tangible.
And, yes, a direct, results-oriented appoach, that neglects holistic context, in favour of the minimal conditions that are deemed necessary to produce a desired effect; one that can, moreover, be fetishised by capitalism as a ‘commodity’; is going to have more general, global consequences that are not taken into account, precisely because of the neglect of holistic context. The mere awareness of this, in the form of environmental cost reports & the like, means nothing if resulting problems are not acted on with the same zeal & investment given to ‘commodity’ production & ‘profit’.
This affects the ecosystem of philosophical thought, too.
Philosophers are coerced into producing vast amounts of rubbish, & then fall into infighting over its dubious merits. (innocuous noises concerning clarity & obscurity are a big favourite). The coercion is towards quantity, not quality. It isn’t possible to do anything worthwhile under the duress of such a ‘professional’ demand. So most fall into the silent agreement of pretending that the copious trivia of their output is ‘philosophical work’.
Unable to let go of a ‘career’ already invested in, grumbling sets in. In danger of disappearing in the deluge of their own output, desperate overtures are made to other disciplines, or public life, seeking a spurious relevance. But secretly, they are looking for shelter from the self-imposed, Tantalean tasks of turgidity they erroneously imagine are necessary in attaining the brilliance they covet as a corollary of career advancement.
It may be a symptom of self-loathing that so many professional philosophers wish to deny that they are doing Philosophy, whilst accepting salaries from Philosophy Departments.
Has any physicist ever claimed to be a ‘non-scientist’?
It may be that the fad for switching Philosophy ‘On’ & ‘Off’, as if it were a delimited ‘ens’, is the anxious “fort/da” logic of a mindset that can only think according to a metaphoric of simple tangibilities; that ontological consideration brings to its methodological limit, beyond which it is only able to nervously repeat the banality of its methodological procedures; over & over, or return to the easier disciplines of increased tangibility, to the overt presences not requiring anything more challenging than basic representation & its transactions. But crossing over disciplinary boundaries contrived centuries ago does not, in itself, constitute a radical innovation. Going on about it all the time, in the 21st century, only shows the dismal mediocrity of mundane minds not used to thinking naturally.
There are countless conceptual platforms that could be contrived, from which to ironise any & all philosophical output.
Circumscribe it, find out what it doesn’t say, construct a rhetoric of central indispensability concerning this neglect; analyse the output, in the light of the neglect; bingo, you can restate the entire tradition according to the linguistics & internal conceptual structures you’ve concocted to elaborate that neglect. Though this procedure could be said to characterise many acknowledged contributions of the 20th century, there is a significant difference between them & the philosophical productions of the 21st. Those of the 20th century, developed new perspectives on the structures of knowledge. For some, they were often counterintuitive perspectives, not in line with habitual beliefs. But their logics were demonstrable. Those of the 21st century, however, & as far as I can tell, are not of this character. They do not introduce anything not already commonly known & accepted. In some cases they are reactionary nostalgias, pining for the metaphysical simplicity of traditional intuitive positions; the comfortable cultural abbreviations, & their stock variations, that the Social substitutes for the possibility of fresh thought.
Has Philosophy turned into ceremonial ritual, the discursive display, the social signalling, of one’s location on a map of traditional identities? A game of simplistic assumptions, of fully known territories, & their well worn contentions?
It does seem as though the nostalgia for discursively invulnerable ‘givens’ displayed by so many ‘philosophers’, is characteristic of the desire to establish territories of imperialised elaboration. If such projections produce insight or innovation, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. Instead of a potent & potentially productive “contest of interpretations”, there is only the unchanging gladiatorial contention of dogmas.
Default Assumptions: A Comment by Terence Blake
[Terence Blake]: “This is the default assumption.
Whitehead insists that we actually do directly encounter things other than ourselves:”
Amazon Kindle: A Highlight and Note by Terence Blake from The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Posthumanities)
Terence Blake – This is the default assumption.
{AK}: Depending on how the concepts utilised are defined, there is no problem with the above statements. They indicate a possibility, but that possibility is a systematic production that is irreducible.
I like Wittgenstein’s refusal to acknowledge that there wasn’t a rhinoceros in the room. That refusal indicates, to me, anyway, that he understood the radical variability at the root of identity; not only in ‘lingistic representation’, as if ‘lingistic representation’ was somehow a metaphysically fixed realm; as if its apparent anthropic site of origination conferred absolute determinations on its ‘nature’; but radical variation obtains for the very ‘grounds’ of any such thought, to the thinking of any ‘ground’ metaphysics as well, and even to the notion of ‘thought’ itself. This is why, in the 90s, I was working on a project, tentatively titled “After Thought” or ” Beyond the Laws of Thought”.
As to ‘representation’, its whole metaphysics is contingent on the notion of ‘presence’, ‘identity’, and their corollary assumptions of ‘givens’ of various types. ‘Presence’ in the classical sense, of an absolute ‘identity’ that is determinate, has never been established. It can’t be; every essay, attempt, at establishment; escapes what it is establishing; only faithful dreams of economic fidelity continue on in their endless recoveries.
Without ‘presence’, there can be no re-presenting.
Phil Zero So Fee: The Real, I Deal, is So Free!
Interesting discussion here: McKenzie Wark – “… philosophy on the whole is in a posture that is…
Have only briefly scanned it, but this resulted:
For me, the notion of ‘Reality’ has always been an ‘idealisation’, & it has never only been singular, except as the consensual mirage of unity that various thinkings celebrate, through various monistic apprehensions. But notice, a ‘mirage’ is nevertheless an event, a constrained ‘effect’, a necessary structural moment. One can reduce it to various forms of supervenience, using empirical, theoretical, aesthetic vocabularies; but these differential positionings, too, are supervenient ‘metaphysical’ operations, always issuing from some cave of conceptual enclosure, as it were; the slums of imagined ‘sureness’ constituting ‘Knowledge’ with a big ‘K’; which invariably turn out to be yet another consensual coercion, another do-be-us invitation to inhabit the same set of theoretical limitations; limitations constituting yet another mechanism, another production line, of dogma production; of fetishised conceptual circulations forever in search of (an) ultimate expediency.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Perhaps, after all, modern capitalism is a great factory for the production of angels.” Sol Yurick, “Metatron”:1985
Sol Yurick certainly seems in in favour of ‘idealistic interpretations’ of capitalism: so does Weber: so does Bataille.
You’re not going to get away from the iniquities of capitalism by sheltering in the locales of a ‘produced immanence’.
Deflating 19th century characterisations of the ‘ideal’ in no way dissolves the forces that produced those characterisations.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
‘Reality’ is a bad word. The notion of ‘reality’ has had its day. It no longer deserves the tiresome preeminence that is given to it.
In raw metaphysics, if the ‘real’ is positioned as subjectless ‘objectivity’; the subject is then a negative condition, a limit, for this subjectless ‘objectivity’. But is not such an ‘objectivity’ supposed to be subjectless?
Let’s say it is: but then you have an ‘objectivity’ that has no connection with the ‘subject’.
If an eliminativist, materialist, etc., derives ‘subjectivity’ from some scientific-consensual imaging of the ‘objective’; some constant structure of regularity, with respect to which all ‘subjectivity’ is vacillating variation; this in no way obviates the metaphysical difficulty. It merely buys in to the traditional metaphysical gesture of monistic ordering that is at the root of Philosophy, not that such is ‘wrong’, but it is an operation, that seems to go from one ‘perspective’, to another. Both ‘perspectives’ are assumed, though, & it is at this stage that the traditions fragment into one dogma or another, whether backwardly privileging the ‘isms’ of prior positions leading up to the metaphysical difficulty, or arbitrarily celebrating the results, as a ‘perspectivism’ that can be harnessed for whatever conception of pressing expediency takes the eliminativist’s or materialist’s fancy, though, of course they do have to be ‘consensual’ & ‘scientific’ about it. Incidentally, this is precisely the same stalling of metaphysical consideration that religious dogmatism chooses to indulge, though with seemingly different backward privilegings.
If the consensually accepted, empirical limits of conventional ‘subjectivity’ are inflated to a metaphysical level, a space opens wherein all empirical variation is potentially ‘metaphysical’; & all ‘idealistic’ metaphysics is potentially ’empirical’.
This happens because the ’empirical’ & the ‘metaphysical’, are mutual derivations. You can’t get round that possibility, if you follow the logic of the initial conceptions. Conventionalised attributions of ‘immanence’; ‘transcendence’; ’empirical’; ‘metaphysical’; etc., are all very much contingent & fluid; dependent on whatever discursive norms are held to prevail during consideration.
Nevertheless, whether scientific-consensual, or religio-consensual, imaging is involved, there is always a movementation of clo(sure), with one or another metaphysical plant chosen to ‘philosophically’ buzz around.
Anyhow, if we accept these metaphysical tribalisms, it can be observed that with each one, all that was formerly rejected or devalued, returns, albeit according to hierarchical appropriations of the chosen monistic ordering. But each ‘monistic ordering’, each ‘consensual imaging’, is merely that, an ‘ordered image’, the delivery of philosophical pizzas, for a ‘subjective’ feast of banal ‘objective’ insights. Therein resides the secret of not only “modern capitalism”, but of the ‘subject’ & ‘object’ as well. The reciprocal & inflationary fetishisation of two ill-conceived & half-baked notions. It is not the fetishisation in itself that is necessarily the problem. It is the fact that dogmatisms choose to reside within it, incessantly reiterating its banal mantras as bad cultural habits that should be taken seriously, when sustained consideration easily shows that what underlies such dogmatism, is more often than not, a confusion of metaphysical registers; the unawareness of systematic derivation of assumptions that are treated as ‘givens’; a desire to articulate the ‘real’ which always involve paradoxical assertions of simultaneous inclusion & exclusion, done in the same cliched & unknowing ways.
There are a lot of people; academics, too; who, to paraphrase Hume, go into a billiard parlour & proceed to complain about not being able to play croquet. When such complaint gets institutionalised, turned into accepted dogma, one can only say, with Adorno, not only that “Philosophy does live on”, but that it has indeed realised itself, in an era where it is not only ‘Science’ that “does not think” (Heidegger), but Philosophy, too, has reached an apex of unthinking tedium, though it is an apex bereft of any ‘Zen realisation’.
Playing a ‘Beyond Game’ with Materialities of Cognition
[Bill Benzon]: “But who’s going to develop a discourse of freedom and dignity in the context of the computational sophistication of the cognitive sciences? What would that look like?” (Slavoj Žižek, a Note)
{AK}: If “the computational sophistication of the cognitive sciences” operates with specifiable variables, in a specifiable context, producing specifiable computations: then there is a specific layer of mechanism, a limited arrangement, that can be distinguished by the very fact of its specificity. Such limitation and specificity necessarily indicates a limited governance, too. Though its field of “computational play” may be infinitely productive, to the extent of perhaps exceeding and subsuming its very nature as a ‘structural origin’, this subsequent proliferation of moments retains the traces of ‘limited governance’, so long as it is seen through the optic of ‘specifiable computation’, the metaphoric of mechanism. In no way, however, does it follow that such systems of computation exhaust their own contexts of emergence, that which was not specified during their constitution. It is here, in these ‘contexts of emergence’, lacking systematic specification, that the essence of “freedom” resides. For it is here, that all specifications are ‘selected’, that all orders and arrangements are built. To understand this is to see infinite understandings without limit, ‘worlds’ without end. This ‘understanding’, never exhausted by specifications, systems, presences, or meanings, yet traversing them all, constitutes perhaps the only “dignity” worth having.
The Return of Alain Evàron
Alain Evàron is a philosopher who achieved notoriety during May 68. A sometime contributor, under various pseudonyms, to Tel Quel. He has held faculty positions at Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), École Normale Supérieure, and Paris X Nanterre. A truly global voyager, he has lost count of the lands he has traversed. His works are published by Éditions du Seuil.
This is an excerpt of an interview with Alain Evàron, from 2010.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: “How do you see Philosophy these days?”
Alain Evàron: “Philosophy thus far has been merely taxonomic, a servitude of the possibilities of thought to all human needs, good and bad. This anthropic delimitation has been constituted as such, leaving a merely terminological acknowledgement for what is beyond, with words like “transcendent”, “spirit”, and the like. And, as we know, even these avenues of hope have been domesticated into the most banal of secularities by my former colleagues. [Laughs]
Of course, such domestication has always been systematic, a litany of quite deliberate manoeuvres whose historical accumulations are not solely determined by arbitrary, local factors, such as sociopolitique, or at least any conventional conception thereof. There are other considerations; a book could be written, and not just from any of the usual perspectives.”
Bernard-Henri Lévy: “You have often been held to privilege an aesthetic basis for philosophy.”
Alain Evàron: “Are you trying to take refuge in a prosaic reality? An artless one? Instead, one should ask, where is the place without art, without the artist or artisan, without feeling? Yes, there is a need for security, comforting standards, amidst the displacing fero(cities) of global kapital. But, even there, are we merely being administered to, from an aesthetics of certainty constituted by statistical derivations?
And does not such an ‘aesthetics of certainty’ characterise the West, most of all. Even the contemporary obsessions with l’autre (the Other) as romanticised and mysterious imprecision, serves only to sustain the mythology of certainty. This is merely a projection of narcissistic insecurity, not ‘Other’ at all.
And yes, people will make noises about tourism, that an authentic otherness cannot be retrieved by an emissary who speaks in the vernacular of Western civilisation. But I choose not to accept this bipartite idealisation, of otherness as some mysterious inaccessibilité, which, let us not forget, is simultaneously the idealisation of Western hegemony, and its imagined homogeneity. Such notions wish to say that everything else is just like us, only not as good. If there is more, it is unknowable. With this, let us say, Kantian universalism, I do not concur. It is the unethical silencing of a necessary task, giving it so much importance that one doesn’t even begin, like the early Wittgenstein’s avoidance of ethics. Pour ces danses, je écris pas de musique.
Returning to your initial question, it is safer to claim that I do not neglect the aesthetic, that is quite different from any use of it in a foundational gesture. If there are foundational gestures in my work, they are accidental contingencies! [Laughs]
Aesthetic Transactions 01
Is Art a ceremonial engagement with the commodified atrophications of a precisely mystified & valorised “creative impulse”, a “creativity”, an “artistry”?
I haven’t read Kant on aesthetics, but could this commerce in signatured trophies hovering around
galleries, museums & other “fine arts” media, desperately trying to stage the Sublime, be nothing more than a profitable shrine to a monolithic myth of creativity, ultimately configured by religious figures of contemplation, even more so when “atheistic”? A culture of endless & involuted classification: a functional mechanics of “emotion”:, ad hoc cartographies of “soul”, “body”, “the (in)human”: is this aesthetic exploration, or the deep conditioning of entrainment?
Is the carefully crafted agenda of aesthetic legitimation, & all its “institutions”, itself a “work of art”: a vast installation of irony that masks & maintains a primal alienation: the exquisite circulation of an ancient anxiety that was always produced, signed, sealed & delivered: the export of scenarios of fear, the import of unease: are such ministrations of calculated empathy the rhythms of an age that no longer knows how to represent itself. Trapped in self-consumption, a self-reflexive burning of its own history on the stages of Debord’s spectacular society, an age bereft of any stable self-image, because it is now purely an industry of the oneiric, a shuttling commerce of nightmares & dreams…
“Andrew Haase: Often you respond to questions with Kostabisms: “Take the
‘L’ out of PLAY,“” “Take the ‘R’ out of FREE,“ “Paintings are doorways
into collectors’ homes,“‘ “Say less and say yes.“ When interviewers
continue to ask the same questions why change the
answers? These aphorisms seem to be designed to protect Kostabi
from criticism while insuring product recognition in the future. Do
you feel image-production through repetition is a useful marketing
tool?”
(“Rituals of Estheticized Recommodification (An Interview with Mark Kostabi)”: September 9, 1988: p.22)
“Andrew Haase: Kostabi becomes a function‘of the marketplace in an advanced
capitalist society which demands an institutionalized artist while
simultaneously proclaiming the liquidation of the artistic institution.
Both museums and galleries have become not only notches on a
resume, not simply advertising tools, but zones of mass indoctrination
and stream-lined distribution centers for re-processed images
of body, psyche and pocket-book. Not without masochistic pleasure
do we invite Kostabi Inc. to tattoo us with the numbers of our
estheticized recommodification. But how does it feel to be on the
other side of the needle?”
(“Rituals of Estheticized Recommodification (An Interview with Mark Kostabi)”: September 9, 1988: p.20)
“The word people lead the brush people.” Mark Kostabi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kostabi
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/mark-kostabi-con-artist-tribeca-film-fest/
The Trait of Treat(mentation): How to Treat A Philosophical Tradition
Discussion here: “What Is “Continental Philosophy”?”
On this: “16 TRAITS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY”
To the layperson, Anglo-American analytical philosophers would be as obscure as Continental poststructuralists. Lacking facility with symbolic logic, the Anglo-American tradition would seem even more obscure. For those of us who grew up reading SF from a young age, the ability to infer entire ‘worlds’ from a few lexical clues is a strong prerequisite. One always gets a rough idea of what’s going on in a text.
It is always possible to read disingenuously, to appropriate offered specificities & consider them in the light of an entirely different problematic altogether. Has this been done here, to Terence Blake, in the preceding comments? Well, maybe.
I don’t think that Zizek is the best example of a ‘Continental’ or ‘Poststructuralist’ thinker. I see him as an explicator turned media intellectual. He’s ok, but I don’t see him as an originator. However, his sources, and what he discusses, are ‘canonical’, I guess, & so he is going to exemplify them to some degree (don’t really know, haven’t read his books).
If academics in the USA can be considered ‘Continental’, I don’t see that there ought to be any difficulty with those who so consider, to consider Zizek, too, in the same light.
Emile Cioran, after all, was East European, too. Of course, he was brilliant! But brilliance is not the distinguishing criterion at issue.
As to Terence’s “16 Traits of Continental Philosophy”, it might be more valuable to see it as a Borgesian ‘classification’, so to speak: provisional and subject to revision, and additions.
In any case, if Chomsky attacks Derrida, Foucault, & Zizek, etc., for obscurity, is that so significant? He is a towering intellectual figure, but he isn’t a philosopher, some could argue. But it isn’t only Chomsky that thinks thus. Who remembers the controversy over Derrida’s honary degree from Cambridge?
It could be that Anglo-American philosophers never got over Descartes being French. That they obsess over clarity and “jargon” because, subconsciously, they are out to prove that they can be as clear as Descartes? lol
Secretions of Eternity: The Secrecy of Eternal Agency
These notes are in response to the discussion, here: Freedoom (Prelude-1)
Introduction
Usually, I find discussions of ‘free will’, determinacy, etc., constrictive & boring. I don’t want to be restricted by the metaphysical emphases of ‘traditions’ that I consider to be dogmatically limited. I just can’t take them seriously. Conversely, I can take anything at all seriously, if recontextualised in ways that I find interesting.
I guess the topics of ‘agency’, free will’, & ‘eternity’, are important ones, having considerable historical relevance, so I’ve tried to begin some sort of inquiry into them. No doubt, there is a vast prior literature involved, which I haven’t referred to, & of which I am mostly ignorant.
I’ve attempted to analyse the implicit assumptions that give rise to folk conventions, whose subsequent formalisations, in the abbreviated caricaturisations of an expedient & utilitarian mode of conceptualisation, so often produce paradox. The approach has very much been from the ground up, as it were, looking at the conceptual ingredients that sustain the apparently paradoxical. It isn’t my intention to domesticate the paradoxical, rather to see where it might be a contingent effect. In a sense, I’m suggesting that one has to go beyond ‘doxa’, anyway, but in a more radical way, than a safe circling around localised conundrums, from the perspective of largely unrevised ‘doxa’, would suggest. There has to be a more profound recontextualisation.
The first comment on your post, by Mai La Dreapta, expresses the same objection which I, too, somewhat tendentiously state (Mai La Dreapta’s expression is more elegant), concerning the core illogicality of the paradox you suggest:
“Philosophizing on this manner tends to turn opaque, because we want to smuggle in temporal language like “the future already exists”, ascribing grammatical tense to eternity. This is a false view of eternity and leads towards the absurdities and monstrosities discussed above.”
I’ve tried to outline the conditions for why such inflation of chronological convention occurs. Unlike Mai La Dreapta, though, I would question the notion of an objectively existent & fixed future.
Finally, you say that Calvinism is an “intellectual abomination”, that it “cannot be thought without ruin. You add: “It is also the dark motor of Western (and thus global) modernity: the core paradox that makes a horror story of history.” Could it be that the core animus of Neoreaction, itself, is the continuing “shock wave” “of a soul-shattering involvement in eternity, fusing tradition and catastrophe as doom”? Is the same obsessive need for certainty & precision characterising a Europe traumatised by centuries of plagues & wars, the same need atrophying the European mind around a fixated order of representation, all of whose receptions & implementations are localisations of a general traumatic field, which they are constrained to recapitulate?
NL’s Claims
““The notion of ‘eternity’ only indicates an endless series of events.” — This is totally not getting it. Eternity is the Outside of time (or perhaps, time-in-itself — the transcendental edge of time).”
A Note on ‘Apprehension’
Though the notion “apprehension” has been used, here & there, the use is ‘formal’, as it were, not a call to return to, or privilege, the ‘slums’ of a conventional metaphysics of the ‘subject’. The appeal is to open the ‘understanding’, to reconfigure “apprehension” beyond the grasp of the ghettos of insular error, not to confirm yet another locale of ignorant convention.
An Endless Series of Events as Eternity
An “endless series of events” implies a principle of perpetual continuity – the conditional unity of the endless series. This ‘conditional unity’, of an “endless series”, bears a relation of necessity to this “endless series”, the logical necessity of nominal unification. But note, if the ‘conditional unity’ is the unity of an ‘entire’ “endless series”, then no sequential limitation is possible for it: no objectification, ‘in time’, can occur, to it: it cannot be temporally reified: so, the relation must be one of ‘transcendental’ necessity.
So, to speak of an “endless series of events”, is to cite its unity, at least nominally, is necessarily to speak of “the Outside of time”, too. From what perspective, other than the ‘transcendental’, is it possible to speak of an “endless series of events”? Moreover, there would be as many ‘transcendental perspectives’ as there are ‘events’: the unity would be ‘holographic’.
Footnote to “An Endless Series of Events as Eternity”
If something – necessarily an identity of some sort, whether the structural constancy of an economy of events, or an ideality, or whatever – is “without beginning or end” & “lasts forever”: is that essentially identical with saying that that identity is ‘outside’, or unaffected by, time? If the element of identity is eternal (“without beginning or end” & “lasts forever”), does that constitute ‘timelessness’?
If it is suggested that the identity ‘changes’ through time, then it is no longer the same identity, its singular integrity has been vitiated by hybrid composition, it is no longer identical to itself. So, by virtue of being an identity at all, in the absolute, Parmenidean sense, ‘change’ could not be relevant. This, of course, precludes all attributions of conventional identity. Even ‘the One’ can’t be asserted. In order to articulate any identity, differentiation is required. Such ‘differentiation’ is always an event.
Conventional use of identity thinking is contingent on various contextual factors: the metaphysics of ‘subject’ (consensual agreement as to what is to be ‘identified’, & the nature of resultant identities produced)/’object’ (the ‘what’ – scenarios of the mundane – ‘worldness’): whether those ‘identities’ are ‘temporal’ or belong to ‘time-independent’ formal systems.
As can be seen, in the other comments, as soon as a ‘lockdown’ of identity is desired, the yen for an absolute consistency of function, of the ‘universe’, considered as an ‘objective system’, limits are quickly reached. The desire to be absolutely sovereign over worldly mechanism, yet wholly autonomous from ‘it’ (‘free will’), is the desire for absolute control of the ‘Object’ by this ‘Sovereign’ Subject. The whole structure is predicated on a metaphysical model that has become an obsession, an ideological fortress. Hence, all the contrived pathos, the searching for a zone of ‘freedom’, a ‘Mission Control’ of ‘autonomy, untainted by the imaginary of networked manipulation hallucinated by this ‘Sovereign’ Subject.
Shlomo Maistre’s Void
“It’s certainly not some endless cascade of events it’s the lack of events, it’s infinite, it’s an endless void you cannot even conceive of… Some things are beyond human understanding.”
“…to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours, with all its suns and Milky Ways, is — nothing.”
Schopenhauer “The World As Will And Idea (Vol. 1 of 3)”:526
It could be that this ‘void’ is the very ‘condition’ that enables ‘eventuality’: in which events have their ‘being’: the requisite tabula rasa that arises as a corollary of all reificatory dreams.
In this metaphysical drama of distinctions, this litany of ontological limits, Man would rather risk the ‘void’ in order to retain his defined teleological role in an objectified ‘Being’, than see that the very ‘freedom’ he so covets, is the very void that he hallucinates with horror as a fixed emptiness from which he attempts to flee.
“He who attaches to the void is truly lost.”
Time as an Object
Events
There is no such thing as an event-in-itself.
If events are contingent, so, too, are their configurations: any laws of ‘constancy’ inversely derived from the oscillations of eventuality, derive their ‘constancy’, too, through systematic comparison. ‘Constancy’ is a temporal indication: ‘constant with respect to (perceived) change.
The notion of ‘timelessness’ is derived from the fact that an identifiable tendency, structure, or object, appears invariant with respect to a delimited field of ‘change’: identities in transition (events or ‘objects’, being themselves assumed & unanalysed structural constancies).
However, it can be seen that anything identifiable as a structural constant, through ‘its’ actions, is often a constitutive moment of transitional ‘force’ within the economy of another ‘object’ or ‘constant’. There is no final object(ification).
Laws of configuration are ‘abstract’ principles, whose ‘immanent’ ‘reality’ is inferred through the economies of ‘tangible’ haecceity that delineate them, & which they suggest. Such ‘inferences’ are available through the varying admixture of different scales of apprehension, of variant modes of perception, which bring different perspectives, or even ‘worlds,’ into ‘view’, as it were. The play of possibilities is endless. The conventional systematics of ‘Nature’ is only one possible configuration.
The Formalisations of Eternity
The formalisation , or mythologisation, of the notion of ‘Eternity’, as being ‘outside of the ‘temporal’, allows nominal objectifications of Time. Projecting or positioning chosen considerations into this ‘site’, or ‘topos’, of Eternity.
Objects, Times, & Totalities
1) You can’t objectify time: it’s the way objects are delineated, both experientially & otherwise.
2) As objects are interdependent, their essences are mutually derived & co-implicated. Are these ‘essences’ ex-changed, through time?
3)As a final objectification of time is not possible, it can’t be negated. So, timelessness is not objectifiable, either.
4) Chronological time is always derived from objective references, so is variable, referentially contingent.
5) Eternity is an ‘reductive’ objectification.
6)Temporal indications are reductive objectifications.
7) The notion of an essential structure that produces or generates secondary phenomena, is contingent on…
Any object requires a context.
The drive to understand wants totality.
So it always tries to objectify the totality of whatever field of identities concerns it.
As there is nothing else, it has to use nothing, negation, to do this.
Using negation, it can reintroduce all the known identities, but in different ways: fresh combinatorics, rearrangements, that weren’t done before ‘negation’
[The notion of ‘totality’ is always itself a contingent conceptualisation, one that is essentially dependent on the notion of ‘fragmentation’].
As the negation is the negation of a freshly discerned ‘totality’, according to whatever episteme prevails, the “fresh combinatorics” & “rearrangements” are going to differ, too, as long as there is sufficient historical continuity preserving earlier knowledge & insights with adequacy, & there are mechanisms of ‘conscious apprehension’ capable of discerning the respective relevances over time, but not overly tied to the episteme of their temporal location.
Free Will
Free Will as ‘Its’ ‘Own’ Determinant?
The notion of Absolute Free Will has one determinant: that of Will, ‘itself’. What could be the nature of this ‘will’, abstracted from all determining conditions? Is not its essential nature that of responsivity? If so, then does all that it responds to, constitute ‘it’.
It may well have an integrated economy of appropriations, that are identified as ‘it’, but, in truth, ‘it’ has no absolute boundaries.
Environmental Range
If ‘free will’ produces acts & decisions, this production always occurs in a determining context of choices. So, there is always an environment of determining constraints that sets the range of possible production, of possible forms of response.
What is ‘Free Will’, Without ‘Context’?
What is ‘Free Will’, anyway? What would it be outside of the interactions of physiological, cosmological (perhaps astrology is a proto-reading of quantum entanglements? lol), a myriad, subtle influences? A soul-in-itself? Another stupid object? Another braying of ‘Being’?
The Imaginary Universe of ‘FreeWill’
Imagine a universe consisting of a single entity called ‘FreeWill’, & various expressive media.
Take away the ‘expressive media’.
In what way can the freedom of ‘FreeWill’ manifest, be, be known, occur, realise ‘itself’?
Put the ‘expressive media’ back.
If ‘FreeWill’ has complete control of the ‘expressive media’, to the extent that any ‘wish’, any desired transformation, is simultaneously a realisation, then is the metaphysical model of ‘Will’ correct in this scenario?
Such a model often has connotations of ‘resistance’ or ‘difficulty’, such that the articulation of form generates problems of ‘choice’. Concerns of construction, involving these connotations, would not be relevant. Perhaps they could be generated, as aesthetic possibilities?
The point, though, is that if the prevailing structure is that of a wholly undetermined wishfulness-without-limits, as it were, & instant realisation, is it possible to speak of there being anything other than ‘FreeWill’? Is it possible to speak of ‘expression’, even? If there is no ‘Other’, would ‘self-expression’, too, be suspect?
If such a suspicion obtains, what then of the status of ‘FreeWill’? An undeterminable process of transformation(s)?
So, the notion of ‘free will’ only has any significance in a context of determinations other than those of ‘will’. But such a context can be inflated, to the point where ‘will’ disappears, becoming a moment of contextual determination: & the ‘will’ can be inflated, to the point where all contextuality disappears, becoming mere solipsistic resonance. Both are ‘correct’, both are the results of conventions of reification. The mystic transcends both. The mystic realises that the ‘disappearance’ of either, entails the ‘disappearance’ of the other. The mystic realises that everything between is conventional. The mystic realises there are other possibilities.
Do What You Will, See What You Want
Even if we assume future predetermination, would it not follow that this future is inclusive of the results of free will?
If you’re going to objectify all of time, if you’re going to objectify ‘free will’, to the extent of calling it ‘free will’, why not objectify & repeat the whole ‘universe’? Once, as ‘potentia’, twice, as ‘realisation’? Would a repetition vitiate freedom, in any way? Would it vitiate a structure, where, in the ‘moment of action’, the agent’s act is solely derived from a wholly undetermined ‘Will’, thereby conforming to an ideal of absolute autonomy?
But, what is ‘autonomy’? Autonomy is always independence from a determining Otherness. If you assert, reify, or objectify, ‘freewill’, you’re simultaneously asserting, reifying, objectifying determination, too. So, the essence of the autonomous is essentially dependent on a determining Otherness, to operate, to be. No determining ‘otherness’ to be autonomous from, no autonomy, either. Therefore, ‘autonomy’ always arrives as a structural effect, in an inalienable complicity with ‘determination’.
But we’ll put that to one side, for the moment, we can entertain the common view & see where it leads. So, getting back to the ‘repetition of universe’ idea: if it is stated, that for the act of an agent to be ‘free’: at the ‘moment of action’, the time of enactment: ‘its’ ultimate source, as a ‘decisive act’, must not derive from any pattern of temporal determination, i.e., causality. If it is so derivative, does this render the ‘decisive act’ a determined one, suggesting an automaton rather than an agency of ‘freedom’?
If it is held that the future, which would be inclusive of ‘free acts’: that, in principle, are unamenable to prediction: is already pre-existent in ‘Eternity’: does this suggest that ‘Eternity’ is a wholly determining factor, vitiating the uniqueness of the moment of ‘free will’s’ enactment? Does Eternity’s preduplication render the unique moment of ‘free will’ as a ’caused’ re-enactment?
Firstly, if the preduplication is timeless, it cannot, strictly, be subsumed categorically by notions of temporal sequence (past, present & future), at all, so no temporal relation can obtain.
Secondly, is it even a ‘preduplication’? Or is it an Eternal ‘apprehension’, as it were, of a singular action in time?
Thirdly, if the contingent nature of temporal objectivity vitiates any actual achievement of an object, in the Presocratic sense, what is there to timelessly preduplicate, to eternalise?
Any argument from ‘eternal duration’ (eternal law, etc.) rests on a comparative systematically derived from the eventualities already rejected. The timeless definition of Eternity, ironically, could be said to reject eternal duration, too, if such duration is ‘temporal’.
As concepts, the past, present, & future are systematically interdependent. What would they be without the objective interrelationships & sequences that provision the indexes for any actual (referential) chronological measure?
Their intuitive distinctness is a concomitant of apprehension, & is contingent. If the attempt to anchor apprehension in a referential objectivity is posited, such anchoring is vitiated by that objectivity’s temporal nature.
To sum this section up: if the aforesaid dubious reifications are indulged, a problematic schism, between a ‘timeless Eternity’ & ‘the temporal’ is produced. This produces a schismatic doubling, under the twin signs of ‘Eternity’ & ‘Temporality’, which can only produce the conundrum of an illusory “‘intra-temporal’ agency”, sub specie aeternitatis, if the doubling is reified so as to produce two distinct & separate entities (the ‘future’ & its timeless ‘Eternal preduplication, as it were): & if the timeless subsumption, as it were, of all temporality by Eternity, is temporalised in an illegimate way.
Notwithstanding the conventional nature of temporal measurement & objectification, even if all that is granted: even if we grant that the timeless duplication of a ‘future action’ would imply the sheer existence, ‘somewhere’, of a preduplication of that action: then there are only two choices.
If the eternal preduplication is identical with the ‘future’, then so are their respective agencies & actions: temporal agency is timeless, eternal agency: if it isn’t identical, then “the future” cannot be spoken of in the singular, in the formulation “If the future is (already) real”.
Reruns of a Fixed Universe
It would seem that ‘free will’, in the absolute sense, would entail a freedom from any pattern of necessary determination not having its source in the self to whom the ‘free will’ belongs, or with which it can be identified. That is to say, the self has to have a freedom of choice with respect to all the causal streams it encounters. It may not always avail itself of this ‘freedom’ in explicit ways: it could just ‘go with the flow’: but the freedom to do nothing, as it were, is still an expression of freedom, if it is chosen.
For the ideal of ‘Absolute Freedom’ to obtain, for a willing self to truly express such an ‘Absolute Freedom’, the ‘moment’ of this willing self’s action, has to be wholly without reference to any other force, except itself. The ‘will’ has no connection with anything else except itself.
If this conception of an absolutely free will is said to ‘belong’ to a ‘self’, or (id)entity, indeed, in some way, is thought to be essential to such a ‘self’, this would imply that the essence of this ‘self’, too, is non-contingent, underived, not susceptible to being subsumed under any economics of causal determination that does not originate within itself. It becomes an origin, an original source of ‘expression’. Its relation to the temporal ‘universe’, then, is one of ‘transcendence’. It is the intervention of an absolute autonomy, in the causal streams of ‘determination’ constituting the temporal ‘universe’.
The possibilities of these two conceptions can be run through, as a ‘thought experiment’. Assuming the idea of a wholly determined ‘universe’, & the static image of fixed events which it suggests, the notion of absolute free will can be repeatedly tested against this background of fixed variables, to chart its conditions of metaphysical possibility – rerunning freedom over a fixed ‘universe’.
If, over a number of reruns, it shows any kind of discernible patterns of preference, any kind of consistency, ‘it’ enters the realm of predictive determination. Whether such a realm indicates the work of ‘universal’ causal determinacy external to a ‘free will’, or expressions of ‘eternal & innate characteristics’, as it were, of that ‘free will’, is an irresolvable & open question. But, even if the latter, such ‘eternal & innate characteristics’ retain complicity with the system of causal determinations within which the ‘discernible patterns of preference’ find ‘expression’, such preferentiality being doubly contingent, on ‘eternal & innate characteristics’ of the will, & on the system of causal determinations. Given this model, does the complicity introduce causal determinacy into the autonomy of will? Even if the ‘autonomous will’ possesses a ‘timeless’ structure of selective preferences ( its ‘eternal & innate characteristics’), is such a structure not, at least, informed by the system of causal determinations, or their possibility? If so, would not such an anticipatory informing constitute, essentially, a contingency (of anticipation), on ‘the system of causal determinations’, without which no anticipatory structure would be necessary?
If it is wholly random in its choices, at every rerun, is it possible to distinguish it as a coherent entity, as an entity, at all?
Its ‘selfhood’ would only consist of a somatic continuity, a situational form it is seen to inhabit, or whatever signifying traces collect under its nominal rubric. Other than that, it would not be identical to itself in any way, so could not fulfill a fundamental criterion of identity.
This would not necessarily obviate a transcendental essence, as it were, of ‘Self’, but it renders this ‘essence’ insusceptible to ‘intra-universal’ representation.
Realities – A Question of the Real
Reality as a Fixation
Reality is a necessary concomitant of realisation. Realisation is essentially temporal.
Furthermore,the notion of reality as a fixed narrative (of events), presupposes that the distribution of observable events & their laws of configuration: all of which are time-dependent: is somehow determinably objective (capable of finalisation, as a network of structural constants). But is it reasonable to project the linearity & limitations of the modes of objectivity that are characteristic of the empirically ‘real’, into the ‘Eternal’? Need ‘Eternity’ correspond to the extrapolations of conventional, temporal determination? If ‘Eternity’ is the negation of time, then even time-invariant laws, which derive their status of invariancy from fields of temporal variation, cannot, strictly, be seen as ‘timeless’? If you reject events from a ‘timeless Eternity’, are you not going to reject their time-invariant laws of configuration, too? Even if they’re of ‘eternal’ duration (lol)? What renders a discernible ‘law’ so special? Abstraction? Where is the absolute border between the ‘abstract’ & the ‘real’? Is it not contingent upon apprehension?
‘Reality’, as an empirical event, is always going to be a sampling, from a ‘temporal’ perspective.
To presuppose that an ‘Eternal’ view of ‘time’ would see only a singular & fixed sequence of events, is to extrapolate the temporal modalities of sampling, or reception, onto that which one has explicitly stated configures & transcends all realisations.
You’re assuming that Eternity operates according to a model of fixed presence: that the “finite or ‘intra-temporal’” apprehensions of determinate existence, necessarily configure Eternal apprehension, so to speak.
Eternity & Illusion
A timeless perspective would not imply any ‘reality’ of past, present, or future, with respect to each other, because they are realities of time, realisations. To say, “‘’If the future is (already) real, which eternity implies’” temporalises ‘Eternity’. If you abandon the temporal qualifier, the most that can be claimed is that ‘Eternity implies a Platonist reality’, from which all of time is ‘’equally accessible’’. You can’t treat Eternity’s access to the future as an “‘intra-temporal’” fact which somehow renders only “finite or ‘intra-temporal’ agency’” unreal. You can’t have it both ways. You have to admit the illusoriness of the “finite or ‘intra-temporal’, objective world, too.
A ‘real’ Eternity would imply that all of temporality is an illusion.
Topological Distributions
Positions of the Real
1) If Eternity, is positioned as ‘Real’, this turns all of the temporal into ‘illusion’, not just ‘finite or ‘intra-temporal’ agency’. The negative logic that opposes a timelessness conception of Eternity’ to the ‘temporal’, demands that all of temporality be considered ‘illusion’, if ‘Eternity’ is ‘real’.
Such being the case, ‘reality’ cannot be temporalised, at all. You can’t start mixing the intuitive conceptualisations of ‘finitude’, which are contingent, with half-baked domestications of metaphysics. The calculus of contingent abstr(actions), exemplified by the temporal indexes of ‘past’, ‘present’, & ‘future’, are essentially perspectival, linked to the metrics of objectivity, of eventuality, of perceived limitations.
If you say Eternity is real, trying to appropriate this ‘reality’ in the operations of ‘finitude’, in the calculations of ‘illusion’, when you’ve expressly stated such a ‘reality’ is the negation of all such contrivances, necessarily produces error.
2) If Temporality, is positioned as ‘Real’, then Eternity, being its negation, has to be considered an illusion, according to the same negative logic. But if you do this, ‘Reality’ is subject to contingency, arbitrariness, & infinite recontextualisation – the position of the ‘Real’ changes. Or is perspectival, if there is an attempt to reify an ‘objective principle’ & derive a hierarchy of superveniences. Any logic of valorisation just produces more perspectives.
3) The nub of the ‘error’ is in neglecting to mention ‘eternal agency’, such an elision possibly suggesting that ‘agency’ is only ‘finite or ‘intra-temporal’, instead of ‘its’ temporal ‘effects’ being so. You might not be saying that, explicitly, but an undue emphasis on the “‘finite or ‘intra-temporal’”, on the consensual abbreviations of manifest agency, could suggest it. The ‘agent’ can be considered in many ways. If you insist on measuring, or identifying, ‘it’, only according to the language of observed ‘finitudes’, of the consensually observed & legitimated distillations of historical narrative, you’re dealing with a socio-political & domesticated symbol of agency, not ‘real’, metaphysical agency, in the sense of ‘Eternal Reality’.
Summary
So, to sum up, if it is claimed that Eternity is not an endless sequence of events, then it cannot be identified with them, or their operations. If Eternity is seen as ‘real’, then temporality is necessarily unreal, including any ‘agency’ seen as temporal (“finite or ‘intra-temporal’ agency)”.
Though you didn’t state, explicitly, that Eternity was ‘real’, you did state that Eternity’s hosting of ‘the future’ implied that ‘future’s’ present reality. This, as has already been indicated, engages in a complicated itinerary of metonymic transference, wherein Eternity’s hosting is implicitly configured as the preduplication of a fixed ‘future’, whose sheer being or existence, though ‘timeless’, confers the status of illusion on all timely proceedings, including those of agency. The itinerary plays off one positioning of ‘reality’ against the implicitly suggested derivations of another*, in a subtle conflation that masks a blatant incompatibility with the folk metaphysics of idiomatic usage.
* Achieved through an elision.
The Administrations of The Infinite
Terence Blake has posted a link, on Facebook, to this article: “In a MOOC Mystery, a Course Suddenly Vanishes”
Though I realise there are more specific and ‘immediate’ (anthropically appropriated ‘immediacy’ of the internet, lol) concerns ensuing from this, I feel that a theoretical intervention could be of value here.
“A massive open online course on making sense of massive open online courses”
“So far, the course has produced chaos rather than clarity.”
“All the videos, forums, and other course materials mysteriously vanished from the website last week.”
“The professor was behind the deletion, according to Coursera.”
What is a ‘course’? Is it a ‘way’, a ‘route’, through the information deluge of ‘cyberspace’.
The ‘cyber-‘, in cyberspace, has connotations of ‘piloting’ and ‘navigation’.
In cyberspatial realms, where information can be decontextualised to varying degrees, the ‘pilot’ faces the challenges of recontextualisation. That is, what is to configure the gathering of information, the ‘learning process’? This introduces the notion of ‘principles of configuration’ or ‘frames’. What guiding principles are to be relevant? This entails the teleology of ‘purpose’: what is the desired ‘objective’? Usually, in a ‘course’, the ‘goal’ is to achieve a sufficient degree of familiarity with the ‘course’, the ‘information journey’, to the extent that one can demonstrate, not only ‘knowledge’ of the journey, but can communicate this ‘knowledge’ to others, in ways amenable to the social roles and functions reserved for those who can do this. For this, accredited standards of ‘expertise’ are produced, and so forth.
So, the objective here, essentially, is training for teamwork, as it were. The ‘objectives’ are specifiable, usually consisting of a mimetic ability to reproduce accepted standards of demonstrable ‘expertise’. Such specificity is not so readily available in a “course on making sense of massive open online courses”. For the simple reason, that such a course involves ‘stepping back’, so to speak, from the modes of ‘sense production’ particular to ‘objective’ disciplines, into a realm prior to any such objectification. Usually, socioeconomic demands being what they are, this realm is configured as a scenario in which a ‘subject’ chooses a mode of ‘objectification’ according to ‘personal’ preferences and abilities. Such a process is an invitation to inhabit, or help constitute, an ontological system: ‘What do you want to be?’ ‘Sally is an artist, engineer, etc..’
However, because of the decontextualised nature of ‘cyberspace’, the degree of abstraction from the flow of ‘background life cues’, as it were, is greater. The increased abstraction enables a space wherein all possible ‘objectifications’ render as pure possibilities. Such a space, being conducive to ‘pure’ intellectual consideration, enhances the range of considerable possibilities to infinity: the task of navigating the infinite is endless, without final objectification. It is essentially the task of a writer. One is being asked to author one’s own life as an object in a general ontological system. Given this scenario, it is understandable that “he talked of feeling “lost” and in over his head”. For him, it could only be that “the course has produced chaos rather than clarity.” How can he author the life of another, without being a dictator? Hence his ‘experiment’, he has to get them to author their own lives, to pilot their own destinies, to navigate charts they choose. All he can do is facilitate that process.
Given that the initial scenario is that of ‘pure intellectual abstraction’, given that considerations of ‘personal emotion’ are indispensable to authoring ‘one’s life’: his attempt to elicit ’emotional responses’ is understandable as a reintegration strategy (“I pushed people to express emotion.”).
His ethical qualms occurred, because he felt the strategy was an ‘intellectual manipulation’ (“i mean ethics as in when you perform an experiment. i just did a few and feel uneasy about what i have done.” “I got trapped.” “I pushed people…” “And over the weekend things changed.”). Trying to democratise the situation, he offers the recommendation to “Help the others!”.
Realising that the essence of the “course on making sense of massive open online courses” was to reintroduce the ‘active individual’ who constructs ‘senses’ relevant to themselves: realising that this entails a self-motivation that could not be taught: realising that the ‘spell of passive recipience’ that internalises formal discourses was not sufficient to form a fuller learning experience, that an animating context of self-motivation was necessary: realising that the ‘spell of passive recipience’ can only produce ‘confusion’, if faced with the essentially unformalised task of choosing from infinite, formal possibilities, he offers: “First step to #unlearn is to be #confused.”
As the so called ‘world’, ‘itself’, dissolves into its ‘own’ possibilities, as one ontological habitat or another, pronounces its wary, self-interested, structural verdict at every step of an abyyssal dissolution it tries to objectify as ‘elsewhere’, but which its very actions essentially constitute, the lecturer’s predicament is truly that of everyone and every ‘objective’.
Thr’s an intrstng stry I rd, whn I ws a yngstr. It’s an apt cmmntry, smhw, on th mystry of th vnshng crs. lol
‘Ms Fnd in a Lbry [FULL TEXT]’. http://home.comcast.net/~bcleere/texts/draper.html.
‘MS Fnd in a Lbry – Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia’. Accessed 3 October 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry.
PS. Th ‘mssng’ “Rx” drwr could symbls mssng ‘slf-mtvtn’? Wht, exctly, is slf-mtvtn?