[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.