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QUICK INQUIRY INTO THE BASICS OF THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE AND DIMENSIONS OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL DISCOURSE
If all determinations are theory-laden; which in absence of a determinate absolute, foundation, or closure, would seem to be a necessity; then those determinations necessarily describe complementary perspectives. Then, it could be suggested, that complementarity functions as foundation, but such complementarity does not reduce to any finalised determination of classically monolithic foundation – i.e., a substance.
The notions of ‘materiality’ and ‘ideality’, are substantial organising principles, metaphors of epistemological architecture following foundational procedures based on subjective and objective assumption.
A ‘positivist’, would be someone who offers monolithic explanation, regardless of what the monolithic principle might be held to be.
In order that the principle of materiality or matter has determinate meaning, it necessarily must exclude or negate. Whatever it excludes, is a neglect that automatically compromises its universality, or any alleged universality that might be ascribed to it, as well as a neglect that inevitably constitutes an alternative perspective, a different epistemological architecture systematically arising through the very determination of neglect or rejection.
Dogmatism arises through the inordinate inhabitation of one particular, epistemological architecture, following the train tracks of that particular, theoretical grid, as an exclusive perspective.
THE ONTOLOGICAL PRODUCTION OF EXISTENTIAL LIMITATION
[Saris Aurelius] “I believe meaning exists, this is why I have will. There is meaning in that I have a sense to engage.”
{AK (CJ)}: “If both ‘meaning’ and ‘existence’ are forms of ‘standing forth’, then to ask whether “meaning exists”, suggests a simple statement of tautology; ‘meaning means’, or, ‘existence exists’?”
If both ‘meaning’ and ‘existence’ are forms of ‘standing forth’, then they are both forms of distinction or difference; ‘standing forth’, necessarily implies ‘that which stands forth’, as a distinct difference, with regard to ‘that which it stands out from’. Thus both ‘meaning’ and ‘existence’ share this differential structuring of the distinct.
Obviously, for you, the order of ‘meaning’ is not the same as the order of ‘existence’, as you locate the order of ‘meaning’, first, in a statement of belief, concerning an existential claim, which seems to assume the separation of the ‘order of meaning’ from the ‘order of existence’. The assumption of this separation suggests a very particular and determinate concept of ‘existence’, for which the mere quality of ‘standing forth’, ‘distinction’, and ‘difference’, are not sufficiently qualifying attributes. However, you link the belief in existential meaning, to the concept of will, presumably granting the concept of will membership within this specifically determinate concept of ‘existence’, a specificity initially separate from the ‘order of meaning’.
Obviously, the concept of will, in your discursive arrangement, functions as immediately existential, in the specifically determinate sense previously implied; whilst the ‘order of meaning’ does not so function, having to traverse the detour of belief before arriving at such existential immediacy, as configured by the concept of will. An additional detour, the possession of a “sense to engage” is stated, as another condition for the specifically determinate ‘existence’ of the ‘order of meaning’.
An initial separation between two forms of ‘standing forth’; producing an ‘order of meaning’ without determinate ‘existence’, and a specifically determinate ‘order of existence’, but without determinate ‘meaning’.
Yet the common background for both orders is ‘standing forth’ – the differential structuring of the distinct.
So we then have to ask why it is that a specifically determinate ‘order of existence’ gets produced?
What are the reasons for the production of such an ‘existential’ determination?
And why is the ‘order of meaning’ existentially indeterminate in the absence of the detours of ‘belief’, ‘will’, and the ‘sense to engage’.
Not mentioned, but present as background assumption, is the metaphysics of subject/object.
>The concept of will, functioning as existential immediacy, is thus ‘objective’, an ‘objective feature’ belonging to the specifically determinate ‘order of existence’.
>The concept of belief, functions as a switching point, between the separated orders of ‘existentially indeterminate Meaning’ and ‘meaningfully indeterminate Existence’.
>This switching point oscillates between the ‘objectivity’ of the specifically determinate ‘order of existence’, and the presumably ‘subjectively’ accessed ‘order of meaning.
Given the background assumption and traditional conventions of the metaphysics of subject/object, the underlying rationale structuring the implicit presuppositions of your initial statement, become clear. The obvious resonances that might be suggested, are a metaphysics of the will, particularly as inflected by Friedrich Nietzsche, though earlier precursors might well be relevant, too. The structure is traditional, after all. There is a kind of metaphysical centring on psychological, perhaps sociological, motifs: ‘belief’; ‘will’; ‘sense to engage’; as anchoring points.
But one of the most important assumptions, the unanalysed assumption of separation, between subjectively accessed ‘meaning’ and objective ‘existence’; no clear criteria has been given for this separation; it is simply assumed, as a ‘given’; in this it follows a Cartesian route, the route of modernity.
The other, connected assumption, again taken as a ‘given’, is the production of a specifically determinate, concept of ‘existence’; again, offered without clear criteria, those criteria being largely social in origin, an unquestioned and shared habit of consensual inculcation.
The issue of existential legitimacy, of what counts as ‘objectively existent’ beyond the fluctuations of subjectivity; beyond the fluctuating subjective access to an ‘order of meaning’ characterised by existential indeterminacy; such existential legitimacy can only occur with respect to a concept of existence no longer bound only to the discernible difference of ‘standing forth’. In order for the concept of existential legitimacy to even arise, further criteria enabling such a legitimacy are required, these have to be invented and produced. What it is that does the inventing and producing, is an open question, and one can look perhaps to the ‘order of meaning’ for various entertainments, in this regard.
But equally, all the notions and habits constituting the metaphysical conventions issuing from the metaphysics of subject/object, are interpretative inventions produced out of the ‘order of meaning’, largely as a result of what can conventionally be called ‘social production’. Because social production is susceptible to the variousness of uses, the notion of shared consensuality arises and is enabled. This commonality, in systematic forms accounting for variousness of use, is the ‘metaphysics of objectivity’, said metaphysics being systematically linked to those forms as a mutually confirming corollary. Existential legitimacy, is a functioning protocol of metaphysical registration belonging to that systematic network.
But the limits of that network, are the limits of its ‘existential legitimacy’.
THE THEATRICS OF LIBIDINAL LIMITATION
Some quick thoughts, weaving their ways, after being invoked by a discussion on Facebook, between Mario Hierro and Daniel Calder; a discussion which I did not fully read, whose assumptions I did not fully engage with or accept, but one which could perhaps be said to help constitute a relation of ‘tangential evocation’ with the foundational revocation of it, that follows. An essay towards an escape of the habits of its epistemology, a veering away from the ‘world’ of those habits and their development, an avoidance no longer exclusively governed by its ‘objects’.
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Metaphysics, after ‘Nature’, or after the system of ‘Nature’, ‘Nature’ being the system of regularities or repetitions belonging to Kant’s notion of ‘Understanding’, or the ‘judgements of perception’; but this ‘Nature’ is still notional, a regulating ‘idea’, thus, as a totality, ‘metaphysical’. So the concept or idea, of ‘Nature’, is an ideologically circumscribed category whose interior determinations, that which it is said to encompass as its categorical domain, are an alleged ‘immanence’ whose very quality as ‘immanence’ is supported by a metaphysical or ‘rational’ idea.
If, on its other, originary meaning, the metaphysics are merely Aristotle’s books ‘after’ the ‘physics’, even here, with this bibliographic conception, the distinction between what is and what is not ‘physical’, is allied to a discursive separation perhaps or potentially itself reflecting the categories of ‘matter’ and ‘form’ constitutively residing at the root of metaphysics itself.
Mutual irreducibility necessarily implies mutual relation. When neither term of said relation is ever found as an incontestable purity; necessarily so, when the conditions of such foundation are preconditions always set and sought for from the location of the opposite term; then it is only left to speculative allegiance as to which term speaks.
The notion of a ‘universe’, is a guiding idea; and if the notion of what speaks is one linked to a metaphysics of ‘agency’; then the expansion of that notion of ‘agency’, looking for its epistemological and ontological ‘grounds’, so to speak, eventually coincides with this ‘universal’ notion. The coincidence is one of speculative totality, a movement in search of foundational objectification or reification. If that reification is merely the product of a search for epistemological-ontological reunification, a reunification itself produced out of fluctuating vacillations, or vacillating fluctuations, between the arbitrary terms of an alleged ‘mutual irreducibility’; then it is merely the case that this entire ‘metaphysical’ theatre of possibilities is one that arises as a result of objective desire, one dispensing the roles of reification according to this libidinal limitation.
NOSTALGIC TIME-SEQUENCES AND THE TEMPORAL TECHNICIAN
Reflections in time, back-and-forth they go, from one memory to another. This playing of mnemonic transactions, a ceaseless interchange of objectifying compulsions, all according to the metaphysics of that strange and unquestioned notion called ‘form’. It is under the spell of this notion, under its unquestioned assumption only, that one can talk about ‘repetition’. Without such an objectifying assumption, without these hypothetical ‘forms’ – at least one – there is nothing to ‘repeat’.
It’s not my intention here to outline the conditions of form or formal metaphysical assumption, but merely to suggest that beyond all the usual reflexive productions of insight attaching itself to this notion, mystery, or the mysterious, continues on its merry way, perhaps hinted at by this or that economy of ‘knowledge’ and its always not quite adequate ‘conclusions’, but never exhausted by these epistemological labours.
As is the case with economies of knowledge, so also with cultural economies of history and memory. It is quite possible for an entire culture to proceed in a particular ‘historical direction’, as it were, failing to adequately register the lessons of its development, and in such a way, that it proves impossible to simply follow along with such a culture, without provisioning radical explications apparently beyond that culture’s understanding. Not that there is necessarily any responsibility to do so, but refusing the task of giving explicatory contextualisations would be an unnecessary neglect.
If both Baudrillard and Fukuyama talked about the ‘end of history’, it is not so much that chronological developments have suddenly ceased to operate, but rather that the notion of ‘history’ in its conventional form; with its linear expectations and traditional narrative understandings; is no longer sufficient as an organisational mode. More is required. But the requirement of such an excess seems beyond the capacities of present cultural cognition. In the grip of this excess which it is no longer able to think, traditional cultural institutions continue on, incessantly repeating themselves and their procedures with ever-increasing uncertainty, as they slide into the unknown.
All that is left, for these alienated creatures, these ‘Occidental Androids’, who do not actually wish to think, is the contentment to merely and vicariously ‘operate’, sputtering positivist ‘memes’ to each other in vast, anxious, and swarming frenzies of ‘self’ and ‘world’ confirmation. As if repeating the exhausted terms of their Cartesian crisis with ever more fervent enthusiasm can somehow substitute for lack of greater understanding, in maintaining what seems to be mostly a dogmatic, miserable, and ignorant, charade. None of this is exactly new, but it is now globally instantaneous, and that is the key that has unlocked the first stages of a noospheric achievement, as it were, beyond conventional notions of both ‘knowledge’ and ‘history’. It is precisely those conventional notions which are in a crisis of inadequacy; their adherents, acolytes, and exploiters, in a crisis of promotion. What can be observed is merely the reflexive dissolution of those conventional dogmas, according to various arcs of nostalgic repetition.
I have, of course, referred to this before, at the outset of this blog: “Philosophy, in its institutional forms, has been busy archiving, classifying, and otherwise industrialising, the driven contemplations of various canonical traditions, as grist for the mill of future recombinant streams of commodified ‘wisdom’: a grist that will sustain the perennial tensions of these venerated traditions, with new brands of ‘logic’, intensified ‘epistemologies’, concentrated ‘ontologies’, nouveau-‘mysticisms’, etc.. All of this, circulating within the same circles of interpretation; playing the same topoi; in rhetorical oscillations, where the current jargons of reduction will scintillate with the shine of ‘progress’. A ‘progress’ in which the same, age-old platitudes can be uttered incessantly, as if they were unearthly revelations, never before thought or expressed.
All this, we have seen, and it has not proved sufficient.”
(“Possibilities of Thought”, Saturday, July 21, 2012: http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?page_id=7)
It has become necessary to return to my earlier period of writings, 1987-1997, for a more suitable and fertile context in which to address these issues. This, of course, is natural for me due to the element of personal continuity, but might prove somewhat strange to readers of this blog, as for the most part, the majority of my Internet writings have been strategically limited to theoretically contained, critical responses and observations , with only a sprinkling of writings from the earlier period. That was sufficient, in terms of addressing the philosophy blogging scene on the Internet, which I’ve done for six years now, but that scene is not sufficient. More is required. If Baudrillard and Fukuyama right, about the ‘end of history’, this recollection of an unexpressed, earlier period is possibly more than mere nostalgia.
THE CONDITION OF COMMODIFIED CONSCIOUSNESS
If there were no such thing as sound, there would be no such thing as ‘silence’.
The notion of a linguistic silence is inherent to language.
As the expansion of non-selection, non-intention, ‘absence’, ‘space’, etc.; it is the expansion of the condition of selection, intention, ‘presence’, ‘sign’, etc..
This expansion, as emphasis and increased consideration, begins to signify the non-significant; setting a conditional semantics, or semantics of condition; against that of simple, positivist, utilitarian, and habitual, selections; or, more precisely, those selections without non-significant, conditional reflection.
Selecting the non-significant, or more bluntly, signifying the non-significant, might seem to be a blatantly paradoxical enterprise. But this would only be the case, with universalising notions, of essentialist conceptions, of the sign and non-sign.
Just as a sign requires delimitation to function as ‘a’ sign; an amalgam of signs, constituting a code or language, too, require delimitation, to function as ‘a’ code or ‘a’ language. Therefore, the gesture of defining selection is always specifically conditioned; specifying that which is defined, with relation to the necessarily undefined. These requirements and gestures would be the minimal conditions necessary to produce ‘significance’, whether as sign or system of signs.
Without sign, or semiotic system; as specific ‘significance’, or specific system of significance production; there can be no non-significance. Signs are relational, so are ‘non-signs’. If there were no signs at all, there would be nothing to negate.
Naive positivist essentialism, has a tendency to look for ‘things in themselves’, at the expense of any genuine consideration of their conditions. It has a tendency towards axiomatic atrophication of signs, and hallucinating unnecessary incommensurabilities of its own construction. Rather than abandon this somewhat emotive attachment to positivist naivety, it will extend relational non-significance into an essentialist nihilism, under its self-imposed cultural duress of monumental self-mythology. In truth, though, this banal exceptionalist desire only suffers from a monumental lack of relational talent. Such is the condition of commodified consciousness.
THE CIRCUITRY OF IDENTIFICATIONS
Looking one way, into the bibliographic vertigo of representations constituting the ‘book’. Looking the other way, discovering the cartooned conditions of representation seemingly occupied.
Reading frames, in both directions. The frame of the book, the cartoon frames seemingly occupied. Frames are determinations.
The notion of ‘freedom’ is an inherently contingent one. There has to be a determination of ‘confinement’ in order to produce a ‘liberation’.
All determinations are necessarily representations, governed by the very assumptions and orders of ‘presence’ which they attempt to determine and re-present. A determination of ‘absence’, if delimited in any way, is necessarily an inverse presence. Conversely, presences are inverse absences. The logic of delimitation governs both terms of absence, and terms of presence.
To construct another sequence, another economy, of representations; mirroring the economy of determinations encountered, in an ecstasy of adequation-acknowledgement and repetition-satisfaction; continues the chosen obligation of fractal reflexivity. That hallucinated machinery of determinations, reinscribing and reproducing itself, at every reflection, inflection, and deflection.
REFLECTIVE INTRODUCTIONS IV: from the Introduction to Rodolphe Gasché’s “The Tain of the Mirror”
“To expose the essential traits and the philosophical thrust of Derridean thought, I have chosen a triple approach. First, I ,situate and interpret Derrida’s philosophy with respect to one particular philosophical problem and its history: namely, the criticism of the notion of reflexivity. Second, while choosing that form of presentation, developed since Aristotle, that proceeds by logical dependency, I also link together a multitude of motifs in Derrida’s oeuvre in order to demonstrate the consistent nature of this philosophical enterprise, and to attempt to systematize some of its results. Third, I further develop these concerns, especially insofar as they impinge on the problem of universality, by analyzing a series of Derridean concepts that have been absorbed into deconstructionist criticism, and I clarify their philosophical status in Derrida’s work. This threefold intention broadly corresponds to the three parts of this book.
Unlike others who have attempted to situate Derrida’s thought in the history of the grand disputes concerning the question of being (Gérard Granel], or in the apocryphal history of the grammatological (Jean Greisch). not to mention certain histories bordering on the phantasmic which some philosophers and critics have devised, I discuss Derrida’s philosophy in terms of the criticism to which the philosophical concept of reflection and reflexivity has been subjected. The reasons for this choice are dearly circumstantial. Indeed the dominant misconception of Derrida is based on the confusion by many literary critics of deconstruction with reflexivity. Reflection and reflexivity, however, are precisely what will not fit in Derrida’s work – not because he would wish to refute or reject them in favor of a dream of immediacy. but because his work questions reflection’s unthought, and thus the limits of its possibility. This book’s title, The Tain of the Mirror, alludes t0 that “beyond” of the orchestrated mirror play of reflection that Derrida’s philosophy seeks to conceptualizc. Tain, a word altered from the French étain, according to the OED, refers to the tinfoil, the silver lining, the lusterless back of the mirror. Derrida‘s philosophy, rather than being a philosophy of reflection, is engaged in the systematic exploration of that dull surface without which no reflection and no specular and speculative activity would be possible, but which at the same time has no place and no part in reflection’s scintillating play.
Yet my history of the critique of reflection, outlined in Part I, is not a straightforward history. It does not describe the full range of answers suggested with respect to this question. Nor does it refer to the Anglo-Saxon and American authors who have broached this problem, from Shadworth Hodgson to Sydney Shoemaker. By contrast, Hegel’s speculative criticism of the philosophy of reflection is given what some may consider inordinate importance. But Part I is intended not as a total history of that problem, but merely as an oriented history that serves as a theoretical prelude to the systematic exposition of Derrida’s thought, which I undertake in Part II. In spite of my contention that Derrida’s philosophy must be related to the modern history of the concept of reflection and to the criticism it has drawn, I seek primarily to bring into view Derrida’s debate with the traditional paradigms of philosophy in general. The speculative form in which Hegel cast the unvarying philosophical topoi, and even their Husserlian or Heideggerian phenomenological form, are, undoubtedly, because of their strategic importance for Derrida’s writings as a whole, privileged means of access to this thinker’s discourse. But neither Hegel nor Husserl is truly at stake, nor is any other regional or historically limited form of philosophy. At stake rather is what in these authors touches on the enterprise of philosophy as such. Indeed to interpret Derrida is to confront the whole tradition of Western thought, not so much as a cumulative series of philosophical figures, however, but as a tradition rooted in and yielding to a set of unsurpassable theoretical and ethical themes and demands. These are, as I have tried to show, the real terms of reference and the adequate horizon of thought of Derrida’s philosophical enterprise, and they alone explain the radicality and contemporary attractiveness of his writing, however misconstrued they may have been.
In short, whether discussing Hegel, Husserl, or Heidegger, Derrida is primarily engaged in a debate with the main philosophical question regarding the ultimate foundation of what is. Contrary to those philosophers who naively negate and thus remain closely and uncontrollably bound up with this issue, Derrida confronts the philosophical quest for the ultimate foundation as a necessity. Yet his faithfulness to intrinsic philosophical demands is paired with an inquiry into the inner limits of these demands themselves, as well as of their unquestionable necessity.
My goal is to demonstrate that Derrida’s philosophical writings display a subtle economy that recognizes the essential requirements of philosophical thought while questioning the limits of the possibility of these requirements. Deconstruction, as I show in Part II, is engaged in the construction of these “quasi-synthetic concepts” which account for the economy of the conditions of possibility and impossibility of the basic philosophemes. Infrastructures, a word used by Derrida on several occasions in reference to these quasi-synthetic constructs, seemed to represent the mast economical way to conceptualize all of Derrida’s proposed quasi-synthetic concepts in a general manner. “Undecidables” would have been an alternative, yet ‘‘infrastructure’’ has the supplementary advantage of allowing for a problematization of Derrida’s debate with structuralism and with the Platonism that it has inherited from conservative strata in Husserlian phenomenology. The notion of infrastructures has not yet been picked up by any of those who have written on Derrida. From the perspective of my analysis of deconstruction, however – its necessity, how it is carried out, and of what its conclusions consist-the occurrence of the word infrastructure in Derrida’s writings is more than a coincidence.
In Part III, I inquire into the problems of philosophical generality and universality from a deconstructive point of view by way of a discussion of Dcrrida’s use of the terms writing, textuality, and metaphor. In each case I try to reconstruct the precise context in which these concepts become operational in Derrida’s work, and thus to determine what philosophical task they are meant to perform. Here too I suggest some of the criteria that a possible deconstructionist literary criticism would have to observe.
As an investigation into the irreducibly plural conditions of possibility of all major philosophical, theoretical, and ethical desiderata, deconstruction is eminently plural. Derrida’s philosophy, as I shall show, is plural. yet not pluralistic in the liberal sense -that is, as Hegel knew, secretly monological. This plural nature, or openness, of Derrida’s philosophy makes it thoroughly impossible to conceive of his work in terms of orthodoxy, nor simply because, since he is a living author, his work is not yet completed, but primarily because it resists any possible closure, and thus doctrinal rigidity, for essential reasons. Still, such openness and pluralism do not give license to a free interpretation of Derrida’s thought. or for its adaptation to any particular need or interest. Nor are all the interpretations of Derrida’s thought that seek legitimacy in such openness equally valid. In this book I hope that I have found a middle ground between the structural plurality of Derrida’s philosophy – a plurality that makes it impossible to elevate any final essence of his work into its true meaning – and the strict criteria to which any interpretation of his work must yield, if it is to be about that work and not merely a private fantasy. These criteria, at center stage in this book, are, as I shall showphilosophical and not literary in nature.
Some might want to call my efforts a retranslation of Derrida’s writings back into the technical language of philosophy and its accepted set of questions. Indeed, in order to show at what precise point the questions and demands of philosophy are transgressed in Derrida’s thought, I have had to emphasize their techhnical aspects. Yet such a procedure can hardly he called a literal retranslation, since “philosophy” is spelled out in capital letters throughout Derrida’s work, his seemingly more playful texts included. If this is a retranslation at all, it is one that focuses on what Dupin describes, referring in The Purloined Letter to a certain game, as that which escapes “observation by dint of being excessively obvious.”‘ Yet this excessively obvious aspect of Derrida’s work, which so many readers have overlooked, is precisely what gives special significance to Derrida’s so-called abandonment of philosophy and its technical language.
Bur in addition to the danger of being too obvious in demonstrating the philosophical thrust of Derrida’s work, a more serious risk is involved in attempting a retranslation. Apart from the always looming danger of opacity and crudity owing to insufficient philosophical sensitivity on the part of the interpreter, the major danger is that this operation may be understood as an end in itself. Obviously this is the risk I encounter with the professional philosopher. Indeed, in referring Derrida’s philosophy back to the classical and technical vocabulary in order to determine precisely the level, locus, and effect of a deconstructive intervention in the traditional field of philosophical problematics, one may well confound the assignment of that locus with the debate itself. In spite of all the precautions I have taken – regarding, for instance, my reference to such Derridean concepts as originary synthesis and transcendentality to indicate the level on which his debate with philosophy occurs – my determination of the level and the scope of the debate may be mistaken by some for that which is at stake in the debate inelf. In this sense, rather than clarifying extremely intricate problems, my “retranslation” may even create a series of new obstacles to understanding Derrida’s thought. Yet this is the risk any interpretation must take, a risk that, as Derrida’s philosophy maintains, is always possible and thus a necessary possibility that has to be accounted for. And it is a risk that I happily assume, if I have been successful in providing some insights into a number of difficult matters not previously addressed, and especially if this book helps set forth more rigorous criteria for any future discussion of Derrida’s thought.”
Introduction to “The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection “, Rodolphe Gasché: (1986): pp. 15-19
REFLECTIVE INTRODUCTIONS III: Epigraph to “The Tain of the Mirror”
“Tain (tēin), sb. [a.F. tain tinfoil altered from F. étain, tin…].
Oxford English Dictionary
The breakthrough toward radical otherness (with respect to the philosophical concept – of the concept) always takes within philosophy, the form of an aposteriority or an empiricism. But this is an effect of the specular nature of philosophical reflection, philosophy being incapable of inscribing (comprehending) what is outside it otherwise than through the appropriating assimilation of a negative image of it, and dissemination is written on the back-the tain-of that mirror.
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination”
(Epigraph to “The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection “, Rodolphe Gasché: (1986))
REFLECTIVE INTRODUCTIONS II: Seeing through the Mirror: Aleatoric Turnings: Viewing All Ways From Beyond
This is a response to a FB post, by Matthias Mauderer, “~ SEE THE MIRROR WITHOUT REFLECTION ~“, & here is the picture on that FB post:
Seeing through the mirror, & through the man (hairy arms) holding it; to the moment of sky? Is the sky, though, not ‘reflection’, ‘turning’, too?
What do you choose, to see through, & to see ‘as’? Through the ‘twists & turns’? What ‘moments’ are so privileged by the intentional & intensive gaze? By the intentio? The forced ‘picturing’? Some, none, all? Or all of those possibilities; all those deliveries, liveries, & deliverances, of the so reified?
Yes, there is a ‘metaphysics’ to all these ‘turnings’, these ‘twists’ of the ‘spirit’; of the ‘world’; of the ‘Self’; of however these veering operations are brought together, under the sign of one of their number. And, yes, level on level, of meta-configurational, or infra-configurational, possibilities, can be discerned & derived, created & generated. In such stomping-grounds, conclusions come easily.
And if it is asked, if ‘one’ asks, is there not ‘more’? Is this request for another quest, not just another ‘turning’, that presupposes the very structures it wishes to exceed?
What is the difference between ‘thinking’ & ‘breathing’? Without reducing one to the other, what is it? See the structures of both; ‘think’ them & ‘breath’ them. In this respiration, can be observed the rite, the ritual, of inspiration.
REFLECTIVE INTRODUCTIONS I: Introduction
This FB post, by Matthias Mauderer, “~ SEE THE MIRROR WITHOUT REFLECTION ~“, brought to mind the need, on this blog, for explicit considerations on the philosophy of Reflection, & on the various ways it has generated metaphysical systems.
Ultimately, of course, my feeling is that this admittedly central concern in Modern philosophy is supervenient on ‘Identity’, or at least is a corollary of ‘Identity’; even if Identity is seen as configured & delivered by processes of ‘Reflection’, or in some way, constituted by movements not other than the specular. They arrive together, but this sequence of posts emphasises the reflective.