In my last post, I touched on how Nietzsche identifies Nature and embracing one’s identity with Being. The aim of holiness is to transcend the continual flux of societal conventions and to enter true, authentic living by embracing one’s unique self. Through this embracing of one’s identity, the individual breaks through the trappings of Becoming and delves into Being. However, despite Nietzsche’s apparent aversion towards flux and the megalomaniacal workings of Time and change, Nietzsche regards Heraclitus, the champion of Flux and Becoming, as a true philosopher. This post will further explore Nietzsche’s relation with Becoming by touching on Heraclitus’ thought on Becoming and comparing it to Nietzsche’s.

In his Retrieving the Ancients, David Roochnick interprets Heraclitus as modifying the Milesian division between a fundamental property/(non)essence (identified as Being) that (somehow) unites all reality and all things/derivations of this reality (identified as Becoming). In order to solve the problem of how Being/Becoming interacts, Roochnick sees Heraclitus doing away with Being completely, leaving all reality in a constant state of flux: “With a single, insanely bold stroke, Heraclitus of Ephesus…resolved the crisis Milesian philosophy: he eliminated Being” (32). A good illustration of Heraclitus’ notion of flux is a river. Reality is in such a state of motion and change that Heraclitus remarks that it is impossible to step into the same river twice:

“We step into and do not step into the same rivers. We are and we are not” (Curd 36).

Since the river continually flows, it is impossible for the individual to step into the exact same portion of water that previously stepped into. Further, since the individual continually changes (continually getting older, etc), she cannot be the same person she was when she first crossed the river.

In his Retrieving the Ancients, Roochnick cites Nietzsche’s deep admiration for Heraclitus: “His affinity with the ‘obscure one’…was so deep that Nietzsche effortlessly imagined himself speaking in Heraclitus’ own voice” (33). Roochnick continues by giving one of o Nietzsche’s comments concerning Heraclitus:

“Heraclitus proclaimed: ‘I see nothing other than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your myopia, not of the nature of things, if you see land somewhere in the ocean of coming-to-be and passing away. Your names for things as though they rigidly, persistently endured: yet even the stream into which you step a second time is not the one stepped in before’” (cited on 33).

Contrary to Roochnick’s depiction of Heraclitus destroying Being, Nietzsche depicts the philosopher’s understanding of Becoming as a manifestation of man’s limited understanding. All reality appears to be in flux, yet this is not the nature of things. Man’s limited understanding prevents him from grasping the Nature. Instead, his darkened judgment perceives only transient things. This is the myopia or mankind. Nietzsche seems to echo this sentiment:

“God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger, but changes the way when mingled with perfumes, is named according to the scent of each” (38)

In the age of gods and myth, each phenomena was associated with a particular deity. There was a god of war, or love, of hospitality/justice, etc. However, these projections of deity are but different facets of the same driving force. In the Christian tradition, God is portrayed as both Priest and King, both Lion and Lamb, both Man and God. The danger (the idolatry) lies in collapsing God into only one of these depictions.

In similar fashion, Nietzsche (and I argue Heraclitus) warn against man assigning permanent meanings to continual change of popular convention. Such is the arrogance of man to vainly ascribe something evolving (culture and convention) with something permanent and stable. Nietzsche again seems to echo Heraclitus’ sentiments:

“You would not discover the limits of the soul although you travelled every road; it has so deep a logos” (40).

Nietzsche observes these ascriptions of timelessness to timeful things not only in words, but also in morality. What constitutes as the True, the Good and the Beautiful in Greece is not necessarily the same as what constitutes the true, the good and the beautiful today. Rather, Nietzsche argues that we (perhaps unconsciously) associate what is good and just with what we think is most pleasurable:

“The accepted hierarchy of the good, based on how a low, higher or a most high egoism desires that thing or the other, decides today about morality or immorality” (Human All Too Human (HTH) 45).

Notice that it’s the strong ego that determines “today” the morality of a given society. This evolution or genealogy of morality can be witnessed throughout history. Whereas Aristotle viewed magnanimity as a hallmark of the virtuous soul, the Christian tradition perceives (or reinterprets magnanimity) humility as an integral feature of the devout. In contrast, contemporary morality portrays tolerance and acceptance as necessary traits for man in society. Throughout time, it is evident that what is esteemed as noble and good are traits that continually change.

So is there something contrary in Nietzsche sentiments of Being and Becoming? I don’t think so. While Nature itself is constant its striving to produce true, authentic individuals and it’s the true aim of man to embrace this identity as best they can, popular convention is subject to the workings of Time, flux and Becoming. Heraclitus again seems to parallel Nietzsche’s conviction that man, either out of sloth or fear, resigns (and therefore enslaves) himself to wide, most popular path: “Pigs rejoice in mud more than pure water” (Curd 35). Rather than seek the pure water of truly Being and authentic reality, man would rather wallow in the ease and mud of the path that leads to the destruction of self. Recognizing the flux of popular convention, the would-be free spirit takes the first step towards authentic living.

More on Nietzschean morality to come 

WP3

Works Cited
Curd, P. (Ed.). (1996). A Presocratics Reader. (R. D. McKirahan, Trans.) Indianapolis: Hackett.
Nietzsche. (1986). Human, All Too Human. (M. Faber, Trans.) University of Nebraska Press.
Roochnick, D. (2004). Retrieving the Ancients. Malden: Blackwell.

Charles Stein—poet, independent scholar, performance artist, and musician—is coming to the Bay Area! He will be reading and presenting from his works in a variety of venues.

Stein is the author of eleven books of poetry. He studied ancient Greek at Columbia University and received a doctorate in literature from The University of Connecticut. His new verse translation of Homer’s The Odyssey came out in 2008. His recent exploration of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Persephone Unveiled (North Atlantic Books, 2006) includes his translations of The Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the extant writings of Parmenides. He lives in Barrytown, New York, with classical guitarist, choral director, and research historian Megan Hastie.

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Schedule:

Saturday, February 13
Pantheacon
DoubleTree Hotel
2050 Gateway Place
San Jose

1:30pm

A combined reading, talk, seminar, discussion group, tarot card magic event, based on presenter’s Persephone Unveiled, Seeing the Goddess and Freeing the Soul, as well as his own deck of tarot poems based on Rachel Pollack’s “Shining Woman Tarot,” plus his own fifty years study of Parmenides, Magick, Buddhism, Modern Poetry, Philosophy, and Universal Anarchic Wisdoms.

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Monday, February 15
Bird and Beckett Books
653 Chenery Street
San Francisco

7:00pm

Poetry reading with Timotha Doane.

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Tuesday, February 16
Moe’s Books
2476 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley

7:30pm

Poetry reading.

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The Prospect has a good article here on Parmenides (1st few paragraphs available).

“By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at his picture of the world as a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Needless to say, scholars have disagreed over exactly what he meant. They have questioned whether he meant that the universe was one thing, or only that it was undifferentiated.”

Here is a quote from this abstract:

“According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting “fictions”. Each rests upon a “mistake”, the commingling of “qualities of the imagination” or “impressions of reflection” with “external” impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither.“

and also:

“Unlike Hume, however, he (Kant) undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes.“

So is it that constant, unchanging unity of Parmenides just part of the limits of the imagination within a larger philosophical framework? if so, what is its relationship to an actual reality we come to know?

Photo found here.

O mito do eterno retorno nos diz, por negação, que a vida que vai desaparecer de uma vez por todas, e que não mais voltará, é semelhante a uma sombra, que ela é sem peso, que está morta desde hoje, e que, por mais atroz, mais bela, mais esplêndida que seja, essas beleza, esse horror, esse esplendor, não têm o menor sentido. Essa vida não deve ser considerada mais importante do que uma guerra entre dois reinos africanos do século XIV, que não alterou em nada a face do mundo, embra trezentos mil negros tenham encontrado nela a morte através de indescritíveis súplicios.

(…)

Se a Revolução Francesa devesse repetir-se eternamente, a historiografia francesa se mostraria menos orgulhosa de Robespierre. Mas, como ela trata de uma coisa que não voltará, os anos sangrentos não são mais que palavras, teorias, discussões – são mais leves que uma pluma, já não provocam medo.

(…)

Digamos, portanto, que a idéia do eterno retorno designa uma perspectiva na qual as coisas não parecem ser como nós as conhecemos: elas nos aparecem sem a circunstância atenuante de sua fugacidade.

(…)

No mundo do eterno retorno, cada gesto carrega o peso de uma insustentável leveza. Isso é o que fazia com que Nietzsche dissesse que a idéia do eterno retorno é o mais pesado dos fardos (das schwerrste Gewicht).

Se o eterno retorno é o mais pesado dos fardos, nossas vidas, sobre esse pano de fundo, podem aparecer em toda a sua esplêndida leveza.

Mas, na verdade, será atroz o peso e a bela a leveza?

(…)

Quanto mais pesado o fardo, mais próxima da terra está nossa vida, e mais ela é real e verdadeira.

Por outro lado, a ausência total de fardo faz com que o ser humano se torne mais leve do que o ar, com que ele voe, se distancie da terra, do ser terrestre, faz com que ele se torne semi-real, que seus movimentos sejam tão livres quanto insignificantes.

(…) Beethoven considerava o peso como algo de positivo. “Der schwer gefasste Entschulss”, a decisão gravemente pesada está assosciada à voz do Destino (“Es muss sein!”); o peso, a necessidade e o valor são três noções íntima e profundamente ligadas: só é grave aquilo que é necessário, só tem valor aquilo que pesa.

Essa convicção nasce da música de Beethoven, se bem que seja possível (ou talvez provável) que ela seja mais da responsabilidade dos exegetas de Beethoven do que do próprio compositor; todos nós a compartilhamos de uma certa forma hoje em dia: para nós, o que faz a grandeza de um homem é ele carregar seu destino como Atlas carregava sobre os ombros a abóbada celeste. O herói de Beethoven é um halterofilista que levanta pesos metafísicos.

(…)

Acreditamos todos que é impensável que o amor de nossa vida possa ser uma coisa leve, uma coisa imponderável; achamos que nosso amor é o que devia ser; que sem ele nossa vida não seria nossa vida. Comvencemo-nos de que Beethoven em peessoa, triste e de cabelos revoltos, toca seu “Es muss sein!” para nosso grande amor.

(…)

Mas sobretudo: nenhum ser humano pode oferecer a outro o idílio. Só o animal pode, poque não foi banido do paraíso. O amor entre o homem e o cão é idílico. É um amor sem conflitos, sem cenas dramáticas, sem evolução. Em torno de Tereza e de Tomas, Karenin traça o círculo de sua vida, baseada na repetição, esperando deles a mesma coisa.

Se Karenin fosse um ser humano, e não um animal, certamente já teria dito a Terza, há muito tempo: “Escuta, não acho graça de todos os dias ter que levar um croissant na boca. Não poderia descobrir uma brincadeira diferente?” Essa frase contém toda a condenação do homem. O tempo humano não gira em círculos, mas avança em linha reta. Por isso o homem não pode ser feliz, pois a felicidade é o desejo da repetição.

(…)

- Missão, Tereza, é uma palavra idiota. Eu não tenho missão. E é um alívio imenso perceber que somos livres, que não temos missão.

(…) Sentia agora a mesma estranha felicidade, a mesma tristeza estranha de então. Essa tristeza significava: estamos na última parada. Essa felicidade significava: estamos juntos. A tristeza era a forma e a felicidade, o conteúdo. A felicidade preenchia o espaço da tristeza.

From an old observatory on the side of Cowles Mountain, waiting for the sun to rise on the day before the winter solstice, my mind was taken up imagining the sentience of things not human – of animals, trees, rocks, mountains, oceans and the earth itself.

If not for the clouds on the horizon when the sun rose this day, a small peak in the distance would have divided the sun into two lights – one north and one south – an appearance created by the tilt and turn of the earth.  To see the daylight come on such days is to witness the emergence of a different solar system.  To see it, one must climb the mountain in darkness to a certain place on the mountain side to wait for the light to come.  The cosmogenesis lasts only a few seconds.  Then the two lights arc and merge into one.

Some say that reality is ongoing cosmogenesis.  Heraclites said something like that:  we cannot step twice into the same river.  Still, when one sees the two suns arc and merge, it is not hard to imagine that the cosmosgenesis is brief and that in a few celestial seconds all will merge into one, and, just as Parmenides said, in spite of appearance, all is one, even now  – not just the sun, but animals, trees, rocks, mountains, oceans and the earth.

The merging of the suns, the tilt and turn of the earth, the cosmogenetic arc that binds us all in life, and the dreams of one waiting in darkness on Cowles Mountain:  there is one sentience.

There is no respect for others without humility in one’s self.
-Henri Frederic Amiel

For never shall this prevail, that things that are not are.
-Parmenides

To my surprise I came across a book in my neighborhood bookstore that made me do a double-take. Not because I was particularly interested in the author, but because it looked relatively recent. It was. Alan Sokal, the man responsible for the “Sokal Hoax” and two other books milking his devious plan to expose the “lack of rigor” in US academics, had come out (apparently in 2008) with another book dealing with the same topic. This one, entitled “Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture” was to supposedly revisit his work and expound even further on the muddle-headedness of postmodernists and pseudo-scientists. As I stood and thumbed through the book I did not blame the man for making an additional buck out of the whole ‘affair’. Literary demand existed for this type of literature that praises the rational Anglo-analytic traditions and puts the irrational and barbaric foreign influences in their place. But there was something else that did not sit right with me with all of the jargon and joking that constitutes his work. There is something not quite right when I hear the term postmodernism used as a synonym with “relativism”, “anti-rationalism”, or as a philosophy of anti-enlightenmentism. There’s quite a bit of conceptual pollution fogging the whole exposition. And while I have my own selfish reasons for wanting to address this issue (concerned primarily with the conceptual pollution issue) the larger and more important issue at stake is essentially the same one that Sokal professed motivated him. That is to suggest, reactionaristic intellectual trends negatively affecting the lives and horizons of the workers of tomorrow.

Deliriums have always existed in academic institutions. The one that developed in the US under the guise of “postmodernism” was hardly novel. It pales in comparison to the deliriums delinking philosophy from history and the concept in the still dominant analytic philosophical tradition. It pales in comparison to the deliriums facing the institutional structures of higher education today –the marketing and development of exchange values for which there are no use-values (see Michael C. Taylor’s “End the University as We Know It“). Few reactionaristic movements in intellectual circles will have seen such vicious attacks (save the US purging of Marx from thought and text during the McCarthy era). Here I’m directly speaking to Sokals’ utterers of “meaningless and absurd statements”, but I also have in mind the barbarous members of Chomsky’s “cults”, Searle’s enemies of the Western Rationalist Tradition, Dawkins’ arbiters deemed dangerous for their vacuity of honest thought etc. They all play a role in denouncing one thing in particular that may perhaps be admirable and another whole range of things that seems to me quite lacking in the modesty department. There is a double movement that should be denounced: 1) of erecting science as the progenitor par excellence of “truth” and formal logic as the upholder of “reason”; and 2) of a severe lack in “principle of charity” with its resultant lack of learning with regards to the subjects and objects ridiculed in their writing. But before I get to the latter two points, let me first address what admirable about these intellectual interventions.

The Admirable

One has to stand up for truth. Except of course when opinions, beliefs, common sense and ideologies are mistakenly confused or taken for truths without properly being so. Its defense is something needed in all types of situations and environments. It is Parmenides, that great-grandfather of philosophy that first leads the call for the defense of the true.  Taking that risk unapproachable by Xenophanes, of establishing the first passes towards methods of deriving “truth”, he would of course lead the West on its long adventure (or misadventures, depending on your stance, of equating thought with Being). Truth is by nature something that will continually be put under duress in social circumstances. The movement of rationalist starts and stops that ensue historically from Plato to Augustine of Hippo, to Descartes, to Leibniz to Kant seem to all have this motive at heart –to keep truth from the hands of the masses that threaten to extinguish it with their delirium.  And what would truth be most threatened by most if not by the most primitive of our social conditions of co-existence –that of the social relations of power. Power there for us from birth, within the household, the school, the factory, the office etc. As Foucault’s work shows so clearly, recognizing power does not directly change truth, or relativize it, but it does change how, where, or in some cases) if, it is seen. As an example, it is through a challenge to power that a certain hegemony of practice in a particular journal gets “exposed” (created) as truth in what has become the whole ‘Sokal Affair’.

But as suggested, not all that is taken as truth in our realities are. Parmenides is expressing an important aspect of the relation between subjectivity and truth. The latter is never a priori given in the former. It instead must be realized. How exactly does power act against the creation of truth? To understand exactly what occurs here we must invoke a concept most tend to use interchangeably with truth: knowledge. Knowledge, far from being the other side of the coin of “truth” is better seen as the more or less singularized set of presuppositions a given subject uses to operate in given environments. For Kant this was already the distinction between Reason and Understanding. What a given body understands of “postmodernism”, given authors or thinkers or their works is never a prior Reason. It is only so through an action of subjecting the understood (knowledge) to experience (the Event).  Thus, the relationship of knowledge to Truth is that of a ground to a possible concrescence of a novel reference.  Knowledge can thus be reasonable or delirious, containing of scientifically validated facts as much or less as opinion or maliciously spread falsehood. In terms of our thinkings’ plane of reference, there is no distinction of kind. More likely than not, what fills our conscious and pre-conscious activity is that which maintains our social orders: “common sense”.

Sokal’s works abound in the common sense and that sharp “non-subjective” boundary it maintains with “muddle-headedness”. Everybody knows the truth! When you see it, it is self-evident. Like an apple being an apple, Caesar being Caesar, the Rubicon being the Rubicon. But since we cannot equate “common sense” with “truth” we have something of an ill-defined relationship with that which leads to truth, in Kantian terms “Reason”. Where truth becomes the obedience to what is commonly known and where the commonly known doesn’t appear as a collection of “subjective” particulars (“I hold x to be true), but as a universal founded upon the primacy of a universal signifiers, we don’t find Reason, but Power. For example, if the referents of scientific functions can have only a functional (but not conceptual) use,  that is not the creation of a truth from a ground of an “understood” by subjecting it to the Event, but the erection of an understood to a position of transcendence by denying the Event a place in a given discursive sphere.  Thus we praise the defense of truth. The defense of common sense however, is another matter all-together.

It can also be the case that scientific propositions are often confounded with opinions about said scientific propositions. And in an even expanded sense we can also talk about the ground of scientific opinion that moves from “truths” to “knows” the moment they are invoked for the work of continued scientific development. Not even the author of a novel scientific function can ultimately claim ownership of how its referents are changed about or argued over within the scientific field (the longest living example being the evolution of the originally philosophical concept of the atom). That is because statements always concern something more than just propositions about which something is either true or false. Thus, while truth is essential for constructing planes of reference based upon valid functions, pertinent limits and constants, it is always forever only part of the picture. To understand this, we need to look at truth, less like some remote ivory tower sitting academic studying some highfalutin abstract concept, and more like actual subjects thinking and speaking in the world. As we will see, it isn’t that the defense of a coherent foundation of truth is a problem, but there is much more that we are and that is out there that should be held in consideration.

Objects

On the theme of ”truth” one must be clear, and we must expect clarity from our interlocutors as to what truth means and doesn’t mean. When we discuss truth (in our contemporary colloquial sense) we mean: 1) that which corresponds to the state of affairs referenced in a given proposition; and 2) that which constructs meaning in the formation of a given problematic. The first is the traditional definition that defines the basis for which any given statement can be judged true or false, the latter dictates whether a given truth is prepared by the construction of a problematic (and the questionings they imply). From the perspective of subjectivity truth is thus either a quality of our singular propositional enunciations or the product of thought that exceeds thoughts relation to propositional knowledge.

Truth relates to propositions made about the world. Not to some “real” world as such, but the referent of the propositional function judged true or false (if we were to speak in terms of formal logic). When we speak about truth in this way we are invoking truth’s “objects”. Let us take for example a concept and issue within the world of political economy of much debate in the earlier half of this decade, the discussion over the nature, existence and description of a “new economy”. Many authors pondered and tore down many forests explaining, refuting, critiquing, advocating innumerable positions around the theme that ‘today’s’ economy is fundamentally different from that of our parent’s generation. And what did it mean to say it is different? Different structurally? Systemically? Solely in a qualitative sense? Being good materialists, some started from an evaluation of the data—that is to say, looking at the composition of global GDP, changes in the nature of labor, sources of employment, changes in the nature of the relation between global supply and demand etc. But no sooner did many who wrote on such topics invoke data to support a concept did the concept itself take on a life of its own outside of data. This came in the form of speculation about the future of work, about the political consequences of an apparent divorce between a real and financial (virtual) economy etc. And this came and comes naturally, as the limits of our knowledge of particular facts are always confronted with the generally much more vast terrain of questions and concerns one might have about the object in question.

That the world had changed after 1968 was a fact, and in many ways. The question of the truth of object of the “new economy” thus presupposes much more than numbers (data). I say “concern” because the concept of course is not the state of affairs, object, body or state referenced in a proposition but that which is effectuated by the Event of said things. The “true”, which is generally elevated to a dominant level of importance in modernist philosophical discourse (following the Platonic course) as well as discourses surrounding the sciences, plays an interesting role with respect to the concept. To the extent one is no longer concerned with the consistency of the referent but with the particular consistency of a discursive set, one denies propositions of the very things that enrich them and the enunciative fields in which they reside if one ‘pretends’ as though the numbers of the world post-68 ‘speak for themselves’. This is “true” whether the discourse surrounds science, philosophy or the arts.

Where Sokal and those who jumped on his bandwagon have always had the most difficulty is not in the discussion of what they take to be true or not, but in the non-discursive givens of the authors they ridicule. Lacan’s mathemes, Guattari’s speeds & chaos, Derrida’s “einsteinian constant” just to give three examples. What does it mean for someone like Lacan to invoke tools from mathematics to schematize occurrences of the mind? What right does Guattari have in using concepts like speed and chaos (only later appropriated by sciences) in a philosophical manner? Why would non-scientists like Derrida or Hyppolite invoke a scientific example to explain an understanding of structuralism?

For Lacan the heresy only begins with the flagrant disregard of the academic division of labor. More profoundly he goes astray in starting elsewhere with respect to just how and what mathematics is and should be used. Like the concept of truth, the concept of mathematics had already been elided from the demonstration by the time Lacan’s name has been uttered. But it actually serves us (Sokal and all of us) to take a step back and answer the question ‘what is math’? But before taking it to the level of the concept, let’s look to Lynn Steen’s definition– the study of quantity, structure, space, and change. If we ask if quantity, structure, space and change are present in the psyche then it is zero doubt that mathematics certain has a role to play in our quantification of psychic objects and events, and in diagrammatizing the relationship and structure between or of such objects and events. The problem then resides elsewhere. For Sokal there is something profoundly odd about the discussion of topology with respect to the psychoanalytic subject. No doubt this has to do with how one is accustomed to thinking of and applying topological objects and psychological subjects. To question whether topology can apply to the subject it is incumbent that one understands two things, 1) what is being uttered about the subject and 2) what is being said about the topological objects in reference. Nowhere is it sufficient to presuppose one and/or the other and proclaim an understanding of the intention or significance of Lacan’s discussion.

Something that often gets overlooked in the discussion of common interpretation is the question degrees (qualitative and quantitative) of abstraction within concepts and referents as called and recalled through names. So, we look at interpreted objects as though the names of things referred directly back to actual givens instead of things like ontic operators and concepts. So, instead of viewing topology and the psychoanalytic subjects as concepts to be carefully translated, we see direct 1 to 1 correspondences between our words and the words of the Other. It is in such assumptions that we as masses apprehend a humor in 1 not equaling a fraction or an irregular number. A hilarious laughter erupts as one hears the use of topological quanta in reference to the “I” of a psychoanalytic object that might potentially make a transformation from one form of neurosis to another. Proceeding from there however is another arrow aimed at Lacan, not simply that of a hilarious object, but that this hilarious (psychoanalytic) object is a false apprehension of the common-sense mathematical understanding. As with all forms of Zenoism, Sokal’s inapprehension of dis-position (that is to say exo- and not simply endo-ordination) leads him to view object-hood in a homogeneous fashion. The ‘New Economy’ is ‘the New Economy’, no questions to be asked, or the New Economy does not exist. Never that ‘it is this’, and ‘this’, and ‘this’, depending on differences in manifestation, and at a larger lever, possibilization for a given subject.

What one risks in this jump away from Zenoistic spatialized extremes is the type of authority and/or legitimacy that exists by social convention alone. The type of tacit agreements, head-nods, and back-patting that gives momentum to bandwagons. But if the truth of the object is what one is after then such agreements and conventions are obstacles, not solutions to attaining it. As Zeno of Elea’s elder teacher would have put it “For never shall this prevail, that things that are not are. (B 7.1) Perhaps this monumental text should be read as a defense of the eternity of primary matter. A defense of actuality of the change of the post-68 economic and political landscape. Of chaos. Of speed. Of the properties of the universe. The problem is never the real, it is us. Our apprehension or exo-ordinations of that which for us is. Just as time and experimentation confirm or falsify the exo-ordinations of the most concrete or ephemeral of the sciences, the same reveals the truth or relevance of our problematics and concepts –that is to say, the ‘objects’ of our thought, our critiques, our appraisals, and efforts.

Subject
The problem however seems to be larger than our objectifications. In particular, the problem of what’s lost in translation between a Sokal & a Latour is the absence of a shared history. Syntagmatic presuppositions that would be implicit in a discourse that builds on centuries long passages from Descartes, to Leibniz (via Spinoza), to Hegel (via Kant), to Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and their 20^th century heirs only naturally would be worlds away from one which tends to maintain a Cartesian transitivist notion of the subject. The post-Sokal Affair controversy, which was in many regards a battle of who could speak the loudest in the closed halls of already noologically entrenched academic institutions could be seen as an ideal micro-case study for intra-Western noological warfare. By this I mean that Truth has never been the object of such debates. As territorial animals, truth is never something that concerns us on a primary level. If a concern for it arises it is always through a territorial lens. However, we tend to carry the opposite perspective. That we are naturally unbiased, unterritorial interlocutors in discussion of benefit to humanity as a whole. In such a mythical universe, with respect to the Sokal affair, a serious, non-ego-based dialogue would have ensued regarding just what the objects of this discussion were. Yet, in the hundreds of pages spilled in this debate, where does one find an addressing of just what the subject of truth is? Instead it is presupposed, that we know who sees truth and how. And why not? It would not be pragmatic evolutionarily for truth-procedures to be primary in the large portion of our daily activities and reactivities. A strong reliance upon the known and the presupposed is called for. This sediment of knowns and presupposeds clings to consciousness, carving out zones of comfort that we come to add to our sense of self and our territorializations of the world. They fight for a place in our consciousness, but ultimately it is we who end up fighting for them.

Within this sphere of debate Descartes’ res cogitans is very much present, but we do not speak of it. More still, it remains miraculously the same, despite centuries, in these discussions of truth. Pristine. And we must wonder why.

Historically speaking, it is through revolutions within knowledge that come via the interjections of the sciences, the arts, and in various philosophical developments that the bonds Power exercises over the inscription of belief and knowledge are broken with a given subject. Something violent psychologically or socially must come about. These interjections wear away over time at the institutionalizations of knowledge and belief represented by so many temples, churches, schools, factories, think-tanks, media empires etc. Beyond and in conjunction with those most intimate of biological pulsions that would propel us along towards certain ends and objects, it is the hierarchical social semiotic vectors that, as expressions of power become objects to be intervened upon by truths. It is in this sense that subjects liberated from particular oppressive social structures sing the glories of truth as an interruptive force.

It is quite evident in the examples and focus of the writings of the Sokal books that the idea of scientific and mathematical truths is explicitly recognized. But it takes on a transcendence with respect to their actual use within subjects not subtracted from the scientific or mathematical events. To give a brief example, the unstated postulates of scientific hypotheses often have more to do with a subjects’ concepts and Universes of Reference than anything overtly propositional (and thus reducible to true/false claims). Thus one physicist may look to the latest particle acceleration experiments at CERN for clues about the possibility of time travel (with the particular alinear concept of time that this presupposes) and another for the verification of extra-dimensions. So one has to put into relief this broader world of the subject and of subjectivity in order to avoid the common mistakes of assuming a rationalistic and ever-conscious perspective of subjects of knowledge and truths. Put another way, a subject is irreducible to signifying semiological components.

The most common contemporary approach to truth makes of it something bound up in propositions and functions (scientific, mathematical or the propositional functions of formal logic) about a separate material reality. The subject by and large is alienated from it except as approximator and excisor of this correlation between reality and the given proposition. Seen from the perspective of the production of subjectivity however (involving synapses of affect as well as of effect), truth appears to be just as non-bound by necessity to propositions and functions as knowledge is. We’ll get to a description of this non-boundedness in the final section.

Knowledge, being the discursive or non-discursive referents of subjective experience and action (actual and virtual), involves the recognition of variables, constants, and terms in multiple planes. There is the traditional dyad of pouvoir et savoir, but then you have self-referential knowledge. There is knowledge of sensation, of feeling, of affect and perception (to give a few examples) that has nothing to do with knowledge as traditionally confined by western rationalism. There is equally a non-discursive conceptual & diagrammatic knowing that far from being subordinate to science, mathematics or logic and their plane of operation, often determine their referents and horizons of exploration –by setting out what it means to think, to think their objects and to think about their objects. There is much that could be said here about diagrammatic & sensational knowledge and the truths that would correspond to them (if not necessarily in the language of “truth” we’re using here).

So if knowledge thus pertains to the whole wide range of references (some of which involve propositionality and others that don’t) that a subject will require learning of for its survival we cannot assume that knowledge particular to scientific domains are in any fashion the dominant modality in any given subject. Not even, the scientist or philosopher of science.

What then is the subject of a given truth? Or as the world post-Nietzsche would ask, “who” is it? Who speaks through the “I” of a given utterance or enunciation (implicating as it does the agencement of desires, aims and interest of social bodies)? The question necessarily arises, why would a “who” be constitutive or necessary for something that should hold for all individuals? Would not the “subject” of a truth be universalized in the face of something that ultimately transcends any dependence on it for re-production or re-cognition? Insofar as the production of novel propositional functions or percepts involves the essentially abstractive processes of thought whose actual and virtual elements presuppose heterogeneity, a truth’s actualization is both singular and universal. Singular for presupposing the creative action of a subject or collection of subjects (e.g. the difference between the acts of production and products of Newtonian and Leibnizian calculus), and Universal for being a posteriori reproducible by retracing the co-ordinates and conditions of the production. The subject of a given truth is thus ‘eventual’ (something that happens within one).

The person concerned with upholding and preventing the degradation of truth thus upholds a principle of subjective openness. It is we who must be open to it, should we want it bad enough to pursue ceaselessly. I akin it to how William Isaac’s breaks down the concept of “respect”, to respecere, to look again. We respect (or look again), not because of moral imperative, but because it opens us to the possibility of truth. It means opening oneself to risk. Of standing on a limb, like Bruno in light of Mordente, Darwin in light of Owen, DuBois in light of the scientific racism of the early 20^th Century or Marx in light of the entire history of classical political economy. Risk, but only in the sense that the safety of common-sense, leads us to believe we already know truth, and to hold that one does not know, to be open to the truths of an other, implies a humbling of the self. Thus Amiel’s words have pertinence far beyond where he perhaps intended them to land.

Postmodern Truth

I must say that the idea of addressing this issue here did not appeal to me until reading that Sokal’s fashions himself as an “Old Leftist” concerned about the plight of the “working class”, confronted as it is with innumerable contradictions within itself and in its daily experience of the world around them. With such rapid change in the external and academic worlds, the working classes of today and tomorrow need to fend themselves against fashionable intellectual trends that would divert one away from “realistic” analyses of society. On that point, we couldn’t be more in agreement with the Sokals and Bricmonts. Where we differ completely is with the assumption one could claim to have a concern about “truth” yet presuppose that this is simply an epistemological concern and not equally so an ontological one. We would hold that no one who is serious about truth can discuss the one without the other. Thus it makes no more sense for a marginal postmodernist to discuss the production of subjectivity in isolation from both the Real and that productions intervention upon the Real than it would a scientific realist to hold that his or her epistemological commitments (what one believes of how to diagrammatize or come to approach an object or function under observation –ones theories) are not contingent upon a certain disciplining of the collective bodies of a given scientific community and of oneself as a singularization within such a community.

From the perspective of object-hood there are four different levels of truths of existence that are collapsed and thus obfuscated in the discourse Sokal tries to weave regarding certain “postmodernists”. Those of 1) endo-ordination or the substantiation of existence; 2) exo-ordination, or the manifestation of existence; 3) co-ordination, or the possibilization of existence and 4) trans-ordination, or the effectuation of existence. Each of these ‘levels’ when seen conjointly presuppose vastly different actions irreducible to naïve relativism. In fact, their mutual presupposition makes it impossible to talk about relativism without constantly calling into question the given metaphysical commitments of what which is being subjected to something like the ‘scientific method’. Taking again a concrete example from the world of economics, neo-classical and monetarist philosophies hold that money enjoys a life of its own independent of political-economic concerns and that capital is self-generating and having nothing to do with dirty things like labor and processes of production. There are all sorts of metaphysical commitments in someone who can quite successfully enjoy a lifelong career on Wall Street or as a journalist and communicate effectively amongst each other as though these conceptions of money and capital were real. And who would we be to argue with them (on Wall Street), without calling into question these metaphysical commitments and their political implications?

One is not likely to be called a relativist if one counterposes the visions of the neo-classical economists with those of the conventional old-school Marxist. Generally, in academia one is called correct and other incorrect. However both would be relative from the perspective of an ontology that doesn’t recognize a dichotomy between a “real” and a financial economy. That is to say things can in fact be relative from the perspective to a given conception of an accepted truth.

What happens in this example of the real world of capital and money today shows that the substantiation & manifestation of capital (in the forms of public demand for investment and liquidity) presupposes a co-ordination (possibilization) of a deep global financial market completely separate from the fixed capital norm of the Fordist era and the trans-ordination (effectuation) of competitive disinflation via Volker’s monetarist policy turn in 1979. All levels involve one and the same object. But how they are apprehended depends not solely on their ontology of capital but on their subject-hood: the sensible and noematic content that one brings to the same table of Wall Street but which leads one to qualify and territorialize in a completely different manner than ones neighbor. Of subject-hood we can mention four additional levels of activity to those mentioned above: 1) material causation, or subjective necessitation by virtue of introduction of novel acts of territorialization; 2) efficient causation, or subjective heterogenesis through the creation of novel autonomous incorporeal universes; 3) formal causation, or subjective singularization by virtue of synaptic deterritorialization of the range of possible; and 4) final causation, or subjective singularization by virtue of contingent openings onto collective universes of reference.

Which way the stock market will go tomorrow isn’t determined so much by what’s going on with material objects, their scarcity or saturation or a company’s acquisition of this or that other entity but by the reactions or anticipated reactions of other subjects. Other subjects in fact become the objects or criterion from which one makes ones decisions. None of this makes what transpires in either sphere more or less real. What happens on Wall Street has extremely tangible effects on everyone from your average worker/pension-fund investor to your next Google or Microsoft. Yet, two or more actors within this sphere can have very different conceptions of what exactly transpires and why things transpire the way they do. This poses the postmodern dilemma from an economic perspective very nicely. For we intervene subjectively in the very objects we pertain to “objectively” analyze or evaluate. Depending of course on how collective the analyses, evaluations or sciences are, pragmatics may determine to what degree an intervention if singular or conventional, but the interventions occur nonetheless.

We could say then that not only do the actions we make at a physical level have political implications, but equally do our ontologies and diagrammatizations. And the latter perhaps more so for being able to determine our modalities of seeing and approaching all objects contained within them.

What is sad in the whole Sokal Affair is that in a broad sense, politically he and many of the people criticized have similar affinities and allegiances. What initiated more than a decade of cultural (noological) warfare could have instead sparked off a movement of intercultural dialogue. It is clear that the cynicism and the immodest ridicule that accompanied the hasty judgment and misunderstanding effectively and unnecessarily killed such a possibility for what has now become far too long a period of time.

Philosophy has traditionally two views concerning time, namely, the ‘static view of time’ and the ‘dynamic view of time’. The static view of time as embraced by philosophers like Parmenides and Zeno of Elea held that the appearance of temporal change is a mere illusion.
This means that events deemed ‘past’ in one frame of reference must be deemed as the ‘future’ in other frames; thus hinting that the difference between the past and the future might be just one that is subjective to experience rather than a real ontological divide. The dynamic view of time chosen by philosophers like Heraclitus and Aristotle, maintained that the future lacks the certainty of the past and the present therefore reality is continually being added to as time passes. This implies a ‘movement of time from the past into the future’ as ‘future events become present before finally receding into the past’.

Both views of time are true to a certain degree. In fact, both views seem to complement each other and produce a more complete picture of our understanding of time. More importantly, both views show us a fundamental principle in philosophy, that is; some things change and some things do not change. Coming to this point, the task of the philosopher is to determine to a certain degree of accuracy the things that change with time and the things do not.
We all know that some laws of nature and physics do not change relative to time. For example, as long as certain conditions are met, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. If this law of physics do not hold true, no corporation would dare manufacture electrical stoves and kettles! Besides physics, other concepts and principles especially those found in mathematics are constant regardless of the flow of time. We can always with utmost certainty answer that 5 + 7 = 12 since we cannot conceive a world where the answer to such a question would be any different than the one we already know.

These unchanging laws in reality lead us to examine two kinds of propositional knowledge which philosophers call a priori and a posteriori.

Knowledge is said to be a priori when it is a necessary truth, independent of the sense-experience. The most cited example of this kind of knowledge is again mathematics because the authority and validity of mathematical knowledge do not depend upon evidence obtained through experience.
On the other hand, knowledge is said to be a posteriori when it refers to a contingent truth that is authenticated and justified only through the sense-experience. But what can we say about the concept of time? Is it a priori or a posteriori knowledge? -see full article at Eternity in an Hour

Euclides (450 – 380 a.C.) es discípulo de Sócrates pero tras la ejecución de éste, vuelve a Megara donde funda su propia escuela. Los megáricos son conocidos por el uso de la erística, o el arte de la discusión.

La filosofía euclideana es una síntesis de las ideas eleáticas y las socráticas. Identificaba el ser de Parménides con el bien de Sócrates, al que llama a veces, Dios, sabiduría o mente.

No se conservan fragmentos de Leucipo (hacia el 460 a.C.), solo se sabe de su existencia por referencias a él. No obstante, Epicuro sugirió que pudo no existir.

Leucipo fue el padre del atomismo. Como tal, pensaba, en contra de Parménides, en la existencia del no-ser, representado por el vacío. Además, el ser atomista consiste en una formación infinita de átomos que son la unidad mínima indivisible de materia que constituyen las cosas.

Fuentes y bibliografía:

Fernández Martorell, C., y Montaner Lacalle, P. (2003). Història de la filosofia (1ª ed.). Barcelona: Castellnou.

Zenón

Zenón (490 – 430 a.C.) fue un filósofo de Elea, que fue considerado tanto pitagórico como sucesor de Parménides. De todas formas, su obra consistió en crear una serie de paradojas que desmontaban el pluralismo y sostenían la inexistencia del movimiento, tal como ya había explicado Parménides.

Entre los argumentos contra la pluralidad vemos que Si existe una pluralidad, las cosas serán también grandes y pequeñas; tan grandes como para poder ser infinitas en tamaño y tan pequeñas como para no tener tamaño alguno.

Además, postula que si existiese una pluralidad, las cosas existentes serían infinitas; pues siempre habría otra cosa entre ellas, y otras, a su vez, entre estas otras. Y así, los seres existentes son infinitos.

Por otra parte, contra el movimiento explica que su imposibilidad se deduce de que el móvil que se desplaza debe llegar primero a la mitad del trayecto antes de llegar a su término y si suponemos la divisibilidad infinitesimal de las distancias, es imposible llegar a recorrer nunca el recorrido completo.

Fuentes y bibliografía:

Fernández Martorell, C., y Montaner Lacalle, P. (2003). Història de la filosofia (1ª ed.). Barcelona: Castellnou.

Parménides

En contraposición a Heráclito, Parménides (540 – 450 a.C.) interpreta que el logos, siguiendo la línea pitagórica, pero utilizando el razonamiento aplicado de forma lingüística más que matemática, llega a la conclusión de que lo que es, es y lo que no es, no es.

Parménides dice que el ser no pudo ser engendrado ya que entonces tendría origen en el no-ser y como del no ser no puede ser nada, esto es imposible. En esta explicación plasma su concepción del ser inmutable, inmóvil, único, continuo, limitado y eterno, figurándolo como una esfera perfecta.

Parménides describe la existencia de dos Vías de conocimiento, la de la Opinión y la de la Verdad. La de la opinión se basa en los sentidos y no aporta conocimiento real, en cambio la de la verdad se basa en la razón y sí aporta saber. Como se puede ver, Parménides cree en una correspondencia entre razón y realidad.

Fuentes y bibliografía:

Fernández Martorell, C., y Montaner Lacalle, P. (2003). Història de la filosofia (1ª ed.). Barcelona: Castellnou.

Jenófanes

Jenófanes (570 – 475 a.C.) critica los antropomórficos dioses homéricos, diciendo que son una invención humana, corrupta y que no pueden ser usados como ejemplo moral. Propone un único dios sin parecido humano. Éste sería el precursor del ser eterno de Parménides al ser perfecto e inmutable y también la primera señal de la teología filosófica.

En cuanto a la física y cosmología, explica que los elementos celestes eran nubes en ignición, y vemos que toma como arjé el elemento ápeiron. Precursor del pensamiento moderno, deduce del hallazgo de fósiles marinos en montañas, el hecho de que la tierra debió estar cubierta de agua, o un elemento fangoso. Además, expone que todos los seres vivos proceden del barro.

Jenófanes es considerado el fundador de la teoría del conocimiento, diciendo que la verdad consiste en la correspondencia de aquello que decimos con la realidad, pero no tenemos ningún medio para saber cuándo dicha correspondencia se da o no. Distingue la verdad, que es objetiva; de la certeza, entendiendo ésta como un saber subjetivo.

Eine Hamlet-Maschine, das ist in erster Linie natürlich eine Wörter-Maschine. Mit Wörtern kann man viel kaputt machen — wenn das vergangene Jahrhundert uns etwas gelehrt hat, dann wohl das!
Hamlet, das ist dieser Dänenprinz, der das neuzeitliche Bewusstsein erfand, indem er des alten Parmenides Seins-Philosophie anknabberte* — und dabei vielleicht nicht die Dialektik erfand (dazu war nur ein Deutscher in der Lage), aber wenigstens die Differenz einführte, die später zur Differänz (différance) sich verschob (minimal, kaum wahrzunehmen, die Verschiebung, aber sie langte hin).

* Parmenides, in hellenisch schattenloser Mittagshelligkeit: “Man muss sagen und denken, dass etwas ist: denn das Sein existiert, nicht aber das Nicht-Sein.”
Da war der dunstige Hamlet anderer Ansicht: “Sein oder Nicht-Sein, das ist hier die Frage!” tönte er in die Brandung der Ostsee. (Bekanntlich, darf man hier mal mit Fug und Recht hinzusetzen.)

for Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

The problem facing any attempt to think structure is that the element which gives structuration is always missing from the field which receives it. How then do we recognise a structure when we see one? If our lives obeyed a secret pattern, if we were compelled by an invisible hand, or a machine which influenced our actions in some way, how could we possibly know? If our thoughts were not our own but another’s, would they not still be the same thoughts? Is not structuration itself imperceptible? The requirement is not to think the structure, exactly, but its structuration. We do not recognise structuration by seeing what is structured, but rather by seeing what is excluded from the structure. And there is always something necessarily excluded from it since it receives its structuration from another place.

Empiricism teaches that everything which is given to the observer is. Being is the totality of the evidence. But what if our observations were mistaken? This question of deception is crucial, but it cannot simply be maintained that truth is objective and distortion belongs to the subject. There is a deception on the side of the object, an objective distortion. Georges Bataille begins his great text The Solar Anus (1927) with the declaration that “the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form”. It is not simply that observation could be deceived, as if in a dream. This is a banality. The point is that a deception has no being. A dream, fantasy, or hallucination is not unreal, it is perfectly real in itself, but lacks being. Being, in other words, is not an attribute of reality, is not something about which we can be deceived, as if it were a quality like whiteness. One can only be deceived about attributes. Twentieth century European thought bases itself on this ontological insight: while we may be mistaken about what is, we are never mistaken about being, because we are. This overturns Aristotle’s refutation of Parmenides in book one of the Physics, and establishes, in one blow, a kinship between philosophy and madness. While our delusion may give us a false world, a world that is not, the reality of our delusion, that we live in it, is never in question. This one ontological fact is what makes madness an illness and philosophy a kind of madness.

A delusion is false not because it is a deception but because it has no being. This is what establishes delusion as a reality in itself, a private reality within the body of the psychotic, who is unable any longer to leave it. This is what grants the psychotic a place in the asylum, what justifies his incarceration there. Madness is the limit of the communicable world. But being is not secured by what is real. Delusion and psychosis are realities, but do not provide being. A fantasy, a dream are real, there is no being in them. What is real and what is are not the same. This means that being, fundamentally, is on the side of the subject, not the object. The subject gives to reality the being proper to it. The subject attributes being to reality. Being is not an attribute, to be sure, but it is attributed. Madness arises when one is held fully under the sway of the deceptions of objects, the objective distortion. The subjective attribution of being to reality is what structuralism sought. If it also sought to interrogate the theory of the subject established by the humanist and liberal discourse of the person, this is because the humanist subject retains the biases that place being on the side of the object and deception on the side of the subject. The world is, as such, and you or I perceive it or misperceive to varying degrees and according to the representations we form of it. The paradox of structure, on the other hand, demanded the contrary, that what we perceive is not the real but its signification. The structuration to which the signifier submits, and to which it makes us submit in turn, is being. Structuralism refuted atheistic empiricism and the humanist subject on which it is based in favour of a conception of the world as Logos, “in which we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28).

“Parmenides (540-470) of Elea, was a disciple of Xenophanes, and would have a particularly potent influence on Plato.  He extended Xenophanes’ concept of the one God by saying “Hen ta panta,” all things are One. Ultimate reality is constant.  What we believe to be a world of things and motion and change is just an illusion.”

The History Of Psychology. Part 1: The Ancients

Dr. C. George Boeree

© Copyright C. George Boeree 2000

♥Ali.

Historias hostiles en el aire 

Hay pensadores que creyeron ver en la hostilidad, en la guerra, en la perpetua tensión entre contrarios la naturaleza del mundo y también la del hombre. Pensadores de la talla de Heráclito o Nietzsche por ejemplo. Según esta postura, el hombre – y por tanto sus productos – viven, son en una pugna infinita entre opuestos. Historia hostil la del hombre en esta concepción.
Pero también hubo quienes pensaron, por otra parte, que si uno coloca un nombre a una cosa y le adjudica una serie de características inmóviles y concretas, no puede asombrarse después, cuando esas mismas cosas chocan entre sí o cuando adquieren una coherencia prefabricada. Curiosamente (o no tanto), Nietzsche también se cuenta en este grupo, y más tarde Heidegger, y más tarde casi todos los que vinieron después.

Quiero decir: las tensiones entre la filosofía y la literatura (o entre el pensamiento y el arte, o entre la ciencia y la ficción, o como demonios se quiera expresar el dilema) pueden ser vistas como naturales en algún sentido y también como una mera ficción, otra de las tantas que la cultura humana debe confeccionarse a ella misma para subsistir.

Las tensiones entre filosofía y literatura pueden ser el fruto de una naturaleza humana, de la hostilidad que subyace, fundamenta y sobrevuela la vida humana y cada una de sus consecuencias, entre las que se encuentra el terreno del saber y de la expresión. El ser humano tiene creencias, ideologías, gustos; los precisa para vivir, para el mero hecho de despegar el atribulado cráneo de la almohada. Por eso defiende sus creencias, porque en esa defensa le va su propio ser, su constitución como “hombre” o como “sujeto”. ¿Qué otra cosa que aquel manojo de cosas en las que cree es el hombre después de todo?.

El hombre lucha por sus creencias y eso supone, por definición, la existencia de los otros, de las otras creencias. Asimismo, la existencia de las otras creencias supone, también por definición, la pugna, el combate con ellas. Ignoro si esto es cierto; ignoro si en realidad esa hostilidad latente que se da entre los hombres y entre sus productos no es acaso un invento socio-cultural más. Ignoro, en fin, si las disputas omnicomprensivas a las que estamos acostumbrados no podrían trocarse en una convivencia pacífica de accionares sin categorías ni etiquetas. Lo ignoro, pero me acompaña la secreta sospecha de que es mejor así; es decir: no tan así, pero así. La sospecha de que es mejor, siempre mejor, el combate, el intercambio, la polémica. El hombre, antes que un animal racional es un animal apasionado, un animal sintiente al que, por mucho que patalee la ciencia iluminista, no hay acción civilizatoria que logre despojarlo que aquel sentir.

Ahora bien, las tensiones entre filosofía y literatura igualmente pueden ser vistas como un rasgo típico de la estupidez y la vanidad humana, como un mojón entre tantos de su autoritarismo cobarde. ¿Qué significa estrictamente que la filosofía no es “lo mismo” que la literatura? ¿Se hace referencia a diferentes grados del conocimiento en torno a un objeto único y verdadero, verbigracia: la realidad? ¿O simplemente se hace alusión a una diferencia de métodos? ¿O a una divergencia en las recepciones humanas?. Sea como fuera, es viable que la división tajante no responde a otra cosa que al engreimiento humano, a cierta borra del orgullo intelectual de los hombres, que no toleran ver franqueados los límites artificiales que él mismo dispuso (o fraguó) para considerarlos, al minuto siguiente, como naturales.

De un modo u otro, lo concreto es que las tensiones entre literatura y filosofía existen, al menos en las actitudes pendencieras que los representantes de uno y otro bando muestran al respecto y desde siempre. Existe en el aire, en un territorio laxo e indescriptible en el que se cruzan las palabras, los discursos, las mofas y las acusaciones. Las tensiones entre filosofía y literatura existen, aún para disolverse en el examen, aún para perseverar en la tajante parcelación. Las tensiones entre literatura y filosofía existen y subsisten, tal vez para que continuemos pensándolas.

En el principio fue el logos

Para remontar cualquier aspecto de la separación (o de la comunión) entre filosofía y literatura, hay que regresar hasta el principio, en este caso el principio del pensamiento occidental. Me estoy refiriendo al paso del mito al logos, al desplazamiento desde un modo de ver – y por tanto, de narrar, de escribir – el mundo al otro.

Los mitos, pese a la dificultad que ocasiona una definición estricta, eran para los griegos las palabras dichas para explicar el origen de las cosas, historias inmemoriales o atemporales a través de las cuales – recurso a los dioses mediante – los griegos podían explicarse el mundo, es decir, los fenómenos naturales y las angustias psíquicas. Apunta bien Kirk en su La naturaleza de los mitos griegos que es un equívoco hablar del “Mito”; que más bien lo que había eran mitos, historias desperdigadas y disímiles entre sí que explicaban de diferentes modos el desierto de la realidad. Si puede remarcarse algún rasgo y distintivo común, coincido con Kirk en que “Los mitos son alusivos por naturaleza, y su modo de referencia es tangencial. No pretenden ser algo completo, acabado, ni seguir una secuencia lógica y, reducidos a una exposición erudita, pierden gran parte de su encanto”(Kirk:12).

Los mitos no tenían aún la pretensión de verdad sobre sus espinas dorsales, pero esto tampoco debe confundir respecto al status de la mitología en relación con la (aún no bautizada) “realidad”. Para nosotros los occidentales, es muy difícil entender que los mitos refieran a asuntos maravillosos o divinos y que n o obstante represente la cosmovisión que la época se había dado a sí misma con fines estéticos y pedagógicos. La realidad, fuera lo que fuera (ya que no era interpelada aún como tal, ese será el deporte predilecto de la filosofía, lo sabemos), era efectivamente la que “explicaba” la realidad del mundo, Una realidad muy otra, desde ya, de la que nosotros tarareamos como tal.

El logos por su parte era para los griegos (entre las 14 o 15 acepciones que manejaban del término) el discurso escrito, argumentado, racional. Ya no se trataba de “historias” trágicas y edificantes que se pudiesen liberar fácilmente del tiempo en su transcurrir sino de discursos lógicos, cortados por la preminencia misma del logos, por su violencia, que debían encargarse de describir lo “real”, que ahora sí aparecía como una categoría al menos en ciernes. Un discurso más actual y empírico.

Ahora bien, estos dos modos de constituir y regir una cultura pasaron a la historia como rivales, y sin dudas ese rivalidad es la que lleva, en su génesis, a la distinción entre arte y pensamiento, o más concretamente, entre literatura y filosofía. Dicho con más justeza: es la aparición del logos lo que produce el hiato; los mitos no habían (des)calificado nada del logos simplemente porque no existía, el mito no tenía con quién confrontar en cuanto a la lucha por el saber-poder. Fue el logos, con su irrupción, el que comenzó a calificar, a imponer condiciones de verdad y criterios de demarcación que permitieran legitimar un tratamiento de la realidad como “más real” que el otro, como el verdaderamente verdadero, disculpando el horror gramatical.

Pero el logos ¿representó en verdad una irrupción? Dice Heidegger en Logos (Heráclito, fragmento 50): “Desde la Antigüedad se interpretó el Logos de Heráclito de distintas maneras: como ratio, como verbum, como ley del mundo, como lo lógico y la necesidad de pensar, como el sentido, como la razón. Ahí se oye siempre una llamada a la razón como el módulo que rige el hacer y el dejar de hacer. Sin embargo, ¿qué puede la razón si ella, junto con la no-razón y la contra-razón, sigue estando obstinada en el mismo plano de un olvido, un olvido que descuida reflexionar sobre el provenir esencial de la razón, del mismo modo como descuida prestarse a este advenimiento? ¿Qué puede hacer la Lógica, del tipo que sea, si no empezamos nunca prestando atención al Logos y yendo tras su esencia inicial?” Me interesan las palabras de Heidegger principalmente al efecto de notar cómo la no-razón al fin y al cabo no es tan diferente de la razón, cómo ambas tienen deficiencias que comparten y legan a la tradición.

En efecto, el paso del mito al logos no es un asunto tan simple como aparece en los manuales de pensamiento; a este respecto hay opiniones para todos los gustos: hay quienes insinúan que el tránsito de un modo al otro se dio en forma fulminante, como si en el 650 a.c., con el supuesto pensamiento de Tales de Mileto, el mundo griego hubiese abandonado al mito para siempre en cuanto a la legitimidad de su saber para abrazar a la razón, y también hay quienes creen que en verdad ese tránsito no se dio nunca en forma literal puesto que el logos mismo está preñado de mitos y no puede ser entendido ni darse a entender sin ellos. Tengo a las dos propuestas por exageradas: es absurdo pensar que de un día para el otro una civilización abandona un paradigma para ejecutar uno nuevo, tan absurdo como creer que la continuidad entre el mito y el logos es total. El pasaje del mito al logos representa la asunción de la Razón al trono de la autoridad, una Razón preocupada aparentemente por su afuera (por la naturaleza y la realidad) que en verdad no hace más que enamorarse de la auto-inquisición. Dicho pasaje se dio en forma paulatina, en un mecanismo de contaminación mutua que puede dar el pie para la interrogación acerca de las relaciones entre los dos polos en cuestión. ¿O acaso la filosofía, el logos, no buscó también un plano intemporal para explicar la realidad (la Idea platónica, el Motor Inmóvil aristotélica, el Dios de la filosofía cristiana, la Razón moderna)? ¿O no es cierto que la filosofía también es alusiva, que – como gustaba de insinuar Borges – también puede leerse como historias maravillosas, como un mero fruto de mentes geniales?

Vaya la muestra con el ejemplo más básico de la historia filosófica: los Diálogos platónicos. Platón, el campeón del logos, el mismo que recomendaba el destierro de los poetas (cuestión que será revisada en la próxima entrega de esta serie), el inventor de la filosofía tal como la conocemos, elige como modo de expresión una retórica brillante y ficcional a la vez, elige el diálogo, un verdadero género literario.

El Caso Parménides

Si existiese algún tipo de competencia acerca del caso filosófico que más cabalmente muestra el ambiguo y moroso pasaje del mito al logos, estoy seguro que el ganador sería el Caso Parménides, un verdadero leading case al respecto. Parménides aventajaría a sus predecesores (los llamados presocráticos, de los que Parménides naturalmente forma parte) en la hipotética competencia porque de los anteriores no tenemos más que fragmentos, y los fragmentos son eso: fragmentos, que en el caso de los presocráticos no alcanza para adjudicarle un propósito dialéctico (aunque el caso de Heráclito pueda ser discutible). Pero también dejaría rezagado a Platón en la contienda, justamente porque la forma de expresión parmenídea es nada menos que un poema. Y nada es más literatura que un poema, digan lo que digan.

Se ha parloteado espesamente sobre el asunto, muchos puristas del discurso lógico han argüido que, por cuestiones técnico-culturales, Parménides no tenía alternativas al respecto. Eso es cierto, casi tan cierto como que efectivamente la obra, la única obra conocida de Parménides es un poema, más allá de cualquier contexto. Y resulta que esa única obra, ese poema, plantea en unas pocas líneas dos o tres de los grandes problemas filosóficos de todos los tiempos. En el poema se interroga el status del ser y su sentido; en el poema también se pone en cuestión la esencia misma de la sabiduría o el conocimiento racional. En el mismo y único poema de Parménides, finalmente, se instaura el eterno problema del cambio y el movimiento, la imposibilidad de pasaje entre el ser y el no-ser.

La violencia significativa del poema, el peso con el que golpea el incipiente edificio especulativo occidental, convirtieron a Parménides en un genio lacónico, una especie muy extraña de profeta ontológico. Y también esa violencia pone una y otra vez al poema – en tanto forma – como potencial (y efectivo) vehículo de conocimiento racional o “científico”. Insisto: fuera cuál fuera el contexto de Parménides, su forma de escribir es poética, su obra es un poema, y no obstante lega al pensamiento occidental algunos de sus primeros problemas serios. El poema, efectivamente, piensa, enseña, desafía. No se queda en el mero artificio estético, como muchos “pensadores” gustan decir de la poesía en general. La forma-poema gozaría de legitimidad para activar el conocimiento de la “realidad”, legitimidad que se le retiró más bien pronto, en cuanto la filosofía inventó el concepto de episteme (conocimiento científico) para oponerlo al de doxa (opinión); es decir, en cuanto Sócrates y Platón – y más tarde Aristóteles y los demás – postularon una realidad y una verdad trascendente a cualquier plano subjetivo, objetivas, idénticas a sí mismas.

Parménides está allí, incólume, en el torbellino genético del pensamiento que nos acuna y nos incendia en este lado del mundo, inquietando con su mera presencia a los rectores del discurso (proto)racionalista, avivando la paradoja que Fränkel remarca en su Poesía y filosofía de la Grecia arcaica: “El núcleo de la filosofía de Parménides es de naturaleza metafísica (…) La estructura y el discurso poéticos se nos dan en la imagen de un viaje glorioso y alado, que se contrapone a la prosa sencilla, correspondiente al discurso pedestre” (Fränkel: 331). La empresa metafísica es abordada y ejecutada a través de la forma poética, en principio porque las palabras del discurso cotidiano o vulgar no servían al efecto de tan elevada tentativa. Fränkel sugiere – y es francamente plausible – que esa depuración de la lengua, esa intención refinadora, es la causa principal de la elección formal de Parménides.

Ahora bien, los formalistas rusos y sus continuadores, obstinados como estaban en encontrar la “literaturidad” de la obra literaria, ¿no dijeron, en resumidas cuentas, lo mismo? ¿El “extrañamiento” de la lengua no es acaso un sinónimo para la postura de Parménides?. Por mi parte, no abrigo dudas al respecto, y entonces la paradoja se enerva: el rasgo principal que los teóricos modernos han encontrado para hacer de la literatura un “objeto científico” (sic) es precisamente el mismo que adoptó Parménides para inaugurar la tradición racionalista y lógica: la rarefacción del lenguaje banal o utilitario. Podrá acusárseme de incurrir en una diacronía abusiva, pero en verdad creo que hay ciertos deslindes o categorizaciones que el hombre ha efectuado “más allá” del tiempo, fuera del mismo. Y también creo que, en efecto, la distancia entre Parménides y Tinianov, no es significativa en el punto que revisamos: la poesía debe extrañar al lenguaje para comunicar su misión, y eso es lo que la define como poesía, se ocupe esta de rabanitos, de la ruina del amor o de la bondad divina.

Un último punto: el poema de Parménides contiene, en el tramo propiamente metafísico de la obra, un discurso puesto en boca de una Diosa. Es decir: los complejísimos retruécanos ontológicos y gnoseológicos que este filósofo transmitió a la posteridad están pronunciados (hablamos del sujeto enunciativo, apelando a otra manipulación de los contextos) por una Diosa, que refiere inmediatamente a la idea de Musa, tan cara a los poetas de cualquier tiempo. Pero aquí se presenta otra paradoja: la Diosa también es la Verdad, o la Sabiduría, o la Filosofía misma, debe serlo. Otra vez Fränkel para clarificar: “Debemos ver en ella a la Musa del poema, o también a la potencia de la verdad, o del conocimiento, o de la intuición. No hay mucha diferencia, puesto que las musas de los poetas representan todo esto: arte y habilidad, saber y verdad” (Fränkel: 332).

Parménides, el primer metafísico de nuestra tradición, escribió un poema, un poema enclavado entre los márgenes de lo que siempre se entendió por poesía. La existencia de su Poema postula ciertamente la posibilidad de fusión (esto es, indeterminación) entre pensamiento especulativo sobre “lo real” y arte. El hombre debió trabajar mucho para deshacer a tajos esa potencial (y a menudo efectiva) fusión. O no tanto. Lo veremos.

Mome

For the last few years I’ve begun to think that time is not what I think it is.  I’ve been collecting a few clues, and in the next post or two I want to think out loud about them.

The first clue is a biggie.  It’s that time meant an awful lot to Martin Heidegger, the king of ontology.  Ontology is the study of Being (from the ancient Greek, te on meaning “to be” and logos meaning “study or knowledge”).

Following is a shockingly potted summary of Heidegger. 

Mere metaphysics

Heidegger posited that the ontology of the last 2,000 years or so – the discussion of what it means for something to be – is not ontology at all.  Rather, it’s something like “mere metaphysics,” and all such metaphysical discussions of Being fall into one of two categories:

• essentia: a discussion about the nature or character of a thing
• existentia: a discussion about the fact a thing exists.

In the first category would be all the speculations that focus on a thing’s form or material or composition or its extension in space as an explanation of what it means for that thing to be. 

For example, we say a tree is a tree because it’s made of wood, rises out of the ground, has leaves, performs photosynthesis, etc.  We look to its features, its nature, for an explanation of its being. 

In recent science, a classic example of an essentialist conception of being would be the human genome project.  Most if not all scientists, and most if not all laypersons, would assume we can now say that a human being is a human being and not, say, a frog, because we have 10,000 genomes (or whatever the number is) laid out in a certain pattern whereas a frog has only 9,999 genomes.

In the second category – existentia – is the metaphysical question par excellence according to Heidegger: why is there something rather than nothing?  And various questions like that.

It’s the Romans wot did it

Heidegger sees himself as retrieving the question of the meaning of Being from underneath all this metaphysical blather of the past 2,000 years and restoring it to its rightful primacy.  But what happened 2,000 years ago that buried the question?

The Romans is what.  Yes.  Heidegger’s unique explanation is that when the Romans colonised the ancient Greek world and attempted to latinise the ancient Greek language a whole former conception of Being was lost.   The latinisation process bowdlerised, as it were, the ancient Greeks’ understanding of Being, corrupted it, flattened it, and ever since we’ve been labouring under much impoverished ideas about what it means for something to be.

Pre-Socratic conception of Being

For Heidegger, the ancient Greeks — specifically, the pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides (c520 – c450 BCE) — enjoyed a completely different view of Being.

It had naught to do with essentia or existentia, but was something like an arising into presence, an arising and an abiding, a presencing.  Yet so paltry is our latin-derived language, and so grooved and faded our grasp of Being, Heidegger believes the best we can do is make an approach to this pre-Socratic conception of Being and only then by using words in a strange and de-familiarised way.  Which is one of the reasons why his philosophy is so extraordinarily difficult to read.

Heidegger saw it as his mission to try to retrieve, even in an approximate way, this previous conception of Being

Same or different?

The notion of retrieving a pre-Socratic idea of Being that is something like a presencing is a sort of composite view of what Heidegger was about over his long career.  However, there were many sub-plots, and thousands of Heideggerean scholars have literally given their lives trying to discern which parts of Heidegger’s thought are consonant with which other parts; they’re forever playing a game that could be called “same or different?” 

One of most pressing examples of this phenomenon is the question of whether the composite view of Heidegger’s mission is a corrective, maybe even a renunciation, of the view he announced in Being and Time in 1927 at the beginning of his great fame.

Being and Time

In Being and Time Heidegger announces first the neglect of the “question of the meaning of Being,” and second, that the “provisional” answer to the question is Time.  That is, provisionally, what it means for something to be is Time.  All of this by page 3. 

The rest of the book is about testing this provisional answer; about attempting to come at the meaning of Being — at what it means for something to be — via Time.  A planned second part of the book, which was never actually written, was to be an attempt to travel in the other direction: ie, to come at Time via Being.

The fact he never wrote this second part, and never again dealt so directly with Time as a kind of “horizon” of Being suggests to scholars that his views in the book were superseded.

Yet I think Time is still implied in many places in his later thinking.

For example, is not the pre-Socratic idea of Being as a kind of arising into presence, a presencing, an idea in which time is still implicated?  Isn’t it suggestive of Being as an event, and is not an event a thing that occurs, and only occurs, within Time?

My view is that Time never really goes out of the picture for Heidegger, and his insight that Being and Time are implicated in a mutual relation is still sound, and intriguing to me for one.

*****

“Se cada segundo das nossas vidas se repete infinitas vezes, somos pregados à eternidade como Jesus Cristo à cruz. É uma perspectiva aterrorizante. No mundo do eterno retorno, o peso da responsabilidade insuportável recai sobre cada movimento que fazemos. É por isso que Nietzsche chamou à ideia do eterno retorno o mais pesado dos fardos (das Schwerste Gewicht).

Se o eterno retorno é o mais pesado dos fardos, então as nossas vidas contrapõem-se a ele em toda a sua esplêndida leveza.
Mas será o peso, de facto, deplorável, e esplêndida a leveza?

O mais pesado dos fardos esmaga-nos; sob o seu peso afundamo-nos, somos pregados ao chão. E, no entanto, na poesia amorosa de todas as épocas, a mulher anseia por sucumbir ao peso do corpo do homem. O mais pesado dos fardos é, pois, simultaneamente, uma imagem da mais intensa plenitude da vida. Quanto mais pesado o fardo, mais as nossas vidas se aproximam da terra, tornando-se mais reais e verdadeiras. Inversamente, a ausência absoluta de um fardo faz com que o homem se torne mais leve do que o ar, fá-lo alçar-se às alturas, abandonar a terra e a sua existência terrena, tornando-o apenas parcialmente real, os seus movimentos tão livres quanto insignificantes. O que escolheremos então? O peso ou a leveza?

Parmênides levantou essa mesma questão no sexto século antes de Cristo. Ele via o mundo dividido em pares opostos: luz/escuridão, fineza/rudeza, calor/frio, ser/não-ser. A uma metade da oposição, chamou positiva (luz, fineza, calor, ser); à outra, negativa. Poderíamos achar esta divisão num pólo positivo e noutro negativo infantilmente simples, não fosse uma dificuldade: qual é o positivo, o peso ou a leveza? Parmênides respondeu: a leveza é positiva; o peso, negativo. Tinha ou não razão? Essa é a questão. Certo é apenas que a oposição leveza/peso é a mais misteriosa, a mais ambígua de todas.”

A insustentável leveza do ser, Milan Kundera