Guy de Maupassant’s short horror tale The Horla (the out there) is excellent ground for darkly vitalistic speculations. The gothic tale, one of the many celebrated in Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” is told in a series of diary entries. The author who at the start revels in the wonders of nature (the stream, the flowers etc) soon falls ill and writes:

“Whence come those mysterious influences which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence? One might almost say that the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we have to endure.”

The narrator then goes on to discuss the phenomenological bankruptcy of existence, of the lingering problem of the invisible. The narrator attempts to stroll through nature in order to revitalize himself but he is repeatedly struck by shivers. The trees begin to dance around him, the earth heaves and a horrible solitude takes him. The man has a discussion with a monk about local superstitions, about a murmuring often heard in the sand:

“How is it that I have not seen them?”

He replied: “Do we see the hundred-thousandth part of what exists? Look here; there is the wind, which is the strongest force in nature. It knocks down men, and blows down buildings, uproots trees, raises the sea into mountains of water, destroys cliffs and casts great ships on to the breakers; it kills, it whistles, it sighs, it roars. But have you ever seen it, and can you see it? Yet it exists for all that.”

I was silent before this simple reasoning. That man was a philosopher, or perhaps a fool; I could not say which exactly, so I held my tongue. What he had said had often been in my own thoughts.”

Further in the text:

“Ever since man has thought, since he has been able to express and write down his thoughts, he has felt himself close to a mystery which is impenetrable to his coarse and imperfect senses, and he endeavors to supplement the feeble penetration of his organs by the efforts of his intellect. As long as that intellect remained in its elementary stage, this intercourse with invisible spirits assumed forms which were commonplace though terrifying. Thence sprang the popular belief in the supernatural, the legends of wandering spirits, of fairies, of gnomes, of ghosts, I might even say the conception of God, for our ideas of the Workman-Creator, from whatever religion they may have come down to us, are certainly the most mediocre, the stupidest, and the most unacceptable inventions that ever sprang from the frightened brain of any human creature.”

The narrator slips into the mad rationalism of cosmicism: “We are so weak, so powerless, so ignorant, so small — we who live on this particle of mud which revolves in liquid air.”

Maupassant’s tale ends with the narrator contemplating suicide – unable to deal with the indestructable horror of the invisible.

The limit or non-limit of darkness is its terrifying feature – if  the darkness is expansive and not invasive (oil or plague like, creeping inside organisms) then it is its formalized bound that must be decided which also allows for the possibility of a darkness within darkness. Take the following from Ligotti’s “Flowers of the Abyss”:

“With the darkness I saw the darkness. And it was immensity without end around me, and I believe within me. It was unbroken expansion, dark horizon meeting dark horizon. But there were also things within the darkness, within me and outside of me, so that if I reached out to touch them across a universe of darkness, I also reached deep inside of this body.”

The most common bound darkness would be that of the used; the ashen, the rotten, etc.  This dead darkness is the pools of dark putrescence in science fictive and ancient horror.  This can quickly lead to alchemical nigredo.  Deleuze’s dark precursor or the distant past and absolute of Schelling.

Potentiated darkness (shadows and abysses) such as the well known slander against Schelling’s absolute as the night in which all the cows are black which attempts to turn the potentiated darkness back into cold, sterile darkness.  This full but indiscernable darkness is perhaps the clotted darkness of Ligotti’s “Night School”:

“an undiluted darkness, a darkness far greater than the night itself, a consolidated darkness, something clotted with its own density.”

Darknesses within darknesses signals two significant points of engagement within dark vitalism: the darkness in the relation of ontology and epistemology, and the object (or subject) versus flow issue – or the plasma/polyp problem.  In process philosophies the latter issue is only addressed through a de facto anthrocentricism which allows for eternal objects, quasi objects, multiplicities and the like. A strong understanding of space-time (or what we call space-time) will hopefully allow for deeper understanding of formal distinctions in the darkness.  Dark vitalism is the name for this fundamental problem/avenue.  From Ligotti’s “The Shadow, The Darkness”:

“This activating force is something like a shadow that is not on the outside of all the bodies of this world but is inside of everything and thoroughly pervades everything–an all-moving darkness that has no substance in itself but that moves all the objects of this world, including those objects which we call our bodies.”

Prologue to Cold

Time has been spent lately thinking about Schelling’s Idealist appropriations and improvements on Spinoza’s notion of Substance and self, the way that he bent Nature’s history forward towards a development involving a supposedly higher unity, or at least self-conscious, expression, through an attempt to (re)unify the subject and the object. Unfortunately, because he held quite strong Idealist strains which conceived of the subject and the object under a fundamental binary involving the freedom of the self, itself representationalist and based upon a metaphor of a mirror’s reflection, I believe he missed one of the most radical notions contain in Spinoza’s thesis: that freedom consists not in binaries, but in infinities, and that what is “cold” provides in any case, the moment of eruption.

Spinoza’s project might be considered as a contructivist, immanent search for the leverage of Absolute Zero.

For those that don’t know, Absolute Zero, like the much more acclaimed speed of light, stands at a physical limit of the Universe, a temperature state no thing can be put into. So cold that all movement between related parts stops, so frozen that one has only pure structure, or we might say information, with no loss of entropy. Scientists have been attempting to cool things to the lowest point since the mid 19th century, then concentrating on trying to liquefying the eternal gases like oxygen and hydrogen. Now they have gotten within a few hundred billionths of a degree and produced the fantastic Einstein-Bose Condensate, bringing matter into such curious states that the wave functions of quantum particles begin to overlap and quantum effects start to manifest themselves on the macroscopic scale. At the very least the human quest for Absolute Zero, and the remarkable counter-intuitive behaviors of matter there make of the stuff of striking scientific analogy and fact.

I want to draw on the concept of Absolute Zero, −459.67° F or 0 Kelvin, to expose the raw potentiality involved in Spinoza’s criticism of most concepts of the world and our place in it, and in doing so show how Spinoza’s metaphysics signficantly involves prescriptions and diagnoses for how to go about finding real points in a lived life, in real situations, for radical, radix, change (liberation). When I say that I want to draw on the concept, there is a fine line being walked here, for generally I resist loose philosophical appropriations of scientific principles meant to describe very specific physical phenomena (so much messiness with what is done with Quantum Mechanics). There is ever a danger that what is being described in science becomes the event for only a merely fantastical imagination only stimulated by the idea found in a discipline. And perhaps this is the case here. The coldest of the cold has remarkable consonances with the conceptual (and even psychological) armature of Spinoza’s prescription, and in many senses there risks a vast and even confused conflation. But there is more than this to the transfer of Scientific Cold to Spinoza’s Metaphysical Cold, and this is found in translated attempts to connect Spinoza’s thinking on the concept of Idea to a universal notion of Information as a constituent element of the Universe (discussed some here: Information, Spinoza’s “Idea” and The Structure of the Universe ), joining matter and energy. If indeed there is a productive collaboration between Spinozist Idea and Stonier’s notion of Information, the real states of non-entropy, absolute cold, the zero-point edge of all reality, provide a real nexus between what is being described and our prescriptions. In a certain literal sense, Absolute Zero would be a place or state of pure Idea (or at least its approach). I want to investigate then, what it means for us to pursue states of Absolute Zero within our very temperate realm of the human, as a kind of liberating attractor, in the richness of an imaginary and prospective unveiling of the powers of Spinozist metaphysics, without losing the possible literal correspondence between Spinoza’s thinking and the informational properties of the Universe.

From Magnetism to Cold

In the 18th century there was another philosophical appropriation from science, which at least in my view gave birth to one of the more confused ideologies of philosophical thinking…the “dialectic”. Schelling invented the modern dialectic which Hegel perfected into pure abstractions, in part through the influence of Brugmans’ research into magnetism. Schelling, in his quest to reconsile the subject and the object as they are problematically posed in Kant’s and then Ficte’s Idealism, and in result synthesize ethics and subjectivity to objective natural philosophy, found inspiration in the points of “indifference” that Brugmans discovered in magetized metal. Between the metal’s polarities of +/- there were to be found points which were seemingly a kind of null-source of the polarity itself, or rather more technically, there were spatial threshold limits in a metal piece set to be magnetized by another which when fallen short of or transgressed in the process of being stroked produced the said polarity, and when ended upon, did not.

“I shall therefore take the opportunity of calling them the points of indifference. This seems to me to be a not entirely unsuitable, for the ends of the rod which has been stroked up to these points have an indifferent effect upon the poles of the magnetic needle” (Brugmans, Magnitismus seu de affinitatibus magneticis observationes academicae 1778)

These points of “indifference”  inspired in Schelling the notion that there are to be found points or a state of indifference (or really nondifference) to which the Idealist opposites of subject and object are immanent. Ultimately this state of Indifference, apart from Schelling’s early theories on magnetism and the construction of the Universe, would come to be interpreted as the Dark God, Ungrund, or blind Nature within God that gives birth to the otherwise oppositional Identity and difference and other oppositions.

What I want to think on is the Idealist notion of opposition itself, the idea of Absolute Opposition, which drives Schellings entire system (or systems). I would like to take on the very notion of opposed things, and redefine the power of Schelling’s original appeal to magnetism and Indifference to unlock just how Spinoza’s treatment of Idea and Object (and inside and outside) radically dispels all the hierarchies that Idealism attempts to set up to resolve what is for me a false problem, an cast image on which Man is set as precipice.

The difficulty follows from the host of philosophies of Representation and of Reflection that flow from Kant, and Schelling is certainly not immune, despite his Spinozist vertex (in a triangle of Idealism, Spinozism and Romanticism). It will be upon Spinoza’s non-representationalist conception of knowledge, his minimalization of the importance of self-reflection and thus human centricity, that I will try to rebuild the notion of Indifference with an intended radical effect. To see how Schelling conceives of necessary, conceptual opposition, and its Ur-source in optical metaphor one need only look at his comparisons of oppositions found in Bruno, where we find that a mirror image is irreconcilable to its object, unlike combinative chemicals. We are to read all “necessary” oppositions in just this sort of spectral way:

Bruno: I say that things are relatively opposed if they can cease being opposites and can be united in some third thing. Such an identification is unthinkable for absolute opposites, though. You will have an example of relative opposition if you think of two chemical substances with opposite properties, for they can be combined and so produce a third substance. You will have an example of the other sort of opposition if you think of an object and the mirror image of that object. For you can conceive of any third thing that would allow mirror image to pass over into object or permit the object to be transformed into an image? Aren’t they precisely so related that one is object, and the other image, absolutely, necessarily, and eternally distinct from one another?

Bruno, or, On the natural and the divine principle of things

Buried in the heart of Schelling’s attempt to reconcile these supposed opposites is the plague-born philosophy of reflection rich in its imaginary confabulations, leveraged upon the metaphysical consequences that must be earned due to the essentiality of human beings in the hierarchy of creatures. A philosophy of object, reflection and judgment encrusts itself with concerns for the ontological priority of human freedom (necessary for Christian theology and soul-orientation), knotting at its core this representationalist dream: the idea is a reflection of some sort. What is needed is a radix reformulation of what distinguishes idea from object, and a deepened sense of what the Indifference of imagined opposites can provide, in particular when “reflection” is not seen as an occasion of ontological apex.

Instead of thinking how God could ever reflect upon himself and create some sort of unity (as an idealized projection of what human beings optimally do), instead Spinoza provides a kind of maximalization of thought such that human actions (including thoughts) occupy no more priority in the Universe than anything else: human thoughts are about as similar to God’s as the barking dog is to a heavenly constellation, Spinoza tells us. Because ideas are not reflections of their objects (nor objects of their ideas), but rather are parallel expressions of extended things, there is a kind of “indifference” that is already found at the level of any idea (or thing) at all. Each and everything idea/thing is co-incident of Substance, expressively.  The indifference of the distinction between idea and thing resides in their singular essence. 

While Schelling will find the ultimate Indifference between opposites to be posited in a Dark, Unconscious God Ungrund which out of pure yearning give birth to the subsuming Ground of God as a collective of Identity into which all of difference is joined, as due to the quite reflective preoccupation of his philosophy, in Spinoza the Indifference (if we can borrow the term) falls to Substance itself which contains all things as a Unity come out of its unbound nature, a pure affirmation without lack; thus for him the differentiation of essences expressed in an infinite number of Attributes flows from its sheerly immanent, determined and infinite nature. The supposedly necessary “opposites” such as those that occur in fantasmic mirrors do not seem to find anywhere to take hold. Instead, idea and thing are already made mutual and co-incident, born of their essence in a dependent net of horizontal causes. As such in a certain fashion, each and every essence as it expresses itself as an idea and a thing, it itself an Indifference wherein ideas ARE things (despite Spinoza’s restriction against ideas and things cross-causing events in one or the other). Our causal explanations indeed trace out their chains in one or the other, but these two infinities are locked in a singular core of each essence, an essence which makes of any thing-idea existence a bright and gravitious star. Substance is already Indifferent as is each essence, which is its indifferent expression.

There is a sort of rhetorical game going on in my argument because Spinoza does not solve the problem that Schelling attempts to solve with the notion of Indifference because his formulations prevent it in the first place. So when I say that for Spinoza Substance is Indifferent or an essence is indifferent, there is a near non-homology. I say only near non-homology though because I would like to keep to the original science borrowing that inspired Schelling in the first place: there are points within a metal extension that are null to the process of being magnetized into poles. Because the split between thing and idea does not occur, the “point” between them is simply their immanent origin (and not a mirror’s tain), and not a null ground or subsumption of any sort. If indeed poles of magnetism are taken to indicate an imaginary split between idea and thing, image and object, subject and object, as such things are in Spinoza’s vision, the null point of their mutuality actual falls to the conditions of their expression, and within that, to what I would say is their Cold Point.

The Issue of Cold

Upon this framework for a general notion of non-representationalist, non-reflexive Indifference I want to open the path forward from the other end, that of a prescriptive diagnosis for radical change and freedom of action, within history and the condition of human thought. Under the onus of such a path Spinoza’s answer is: look for the Cold, pursue Absolute Zero, find Indifference. 

To be continued…The Cold of the Body Without Organs

Dr. med. Wilhelm Reich steht mit seiner Entdeckung der Orgonenergie in einer kontinuierlichen Tradition von Ärzten, die der Physik neue Wege gewiesen haben. Diese Herangehensweise war äußerst fruchtbar, die umgekehrte, von der unbelebten Natur auf die belebte zu schließen, hat uns, wie in Die zwei Seiten der mechano-mystischen Naturwissenschaft erläutert, die mechanistische Genetik gebracht. Hier die Tradition, in der Reich steht:

Der Arzt Georg Bauer alias Agricola (1494-1555) hat die Gesteins- und Bergbaukunde begründet. Als größte Autorität auf dem Gebiet des Magnetismus in seiner Zeit und als Begründer der experimentellen Methode ist der Arzt William Gilbert (1540-1603) hervorgetreten. Von ihm stammt der Begriff „elektrisch“. Sein Berufskollege und Begründer der naturwissenschaftlichen Denkrichtung in der Medizin, Santoro Santorio (1561-1636), der auch eine medizinische Waage zum Studium des Stoffwechsels konstruierte, maß nicht nur als erster das Fieber mit dem Thermometer, sondern erfand auch den Feuchtigkeitsmesser. Der Mediziner und „Iatrochemiker“ Johann Baptist Helmont (1577-1644) unterschied erstmalig andere Gase vom „Element Luft“. James Hutton (1726-97), ebenfalls Arzt, war der Begründer der Geologie. Der Medizinprofessor Joseph Black (1728-99) entdeckte die spezifische Wärme und die Umwandlungswärme.

Der Professor der Anatomie Luigi Galvani (1737-98) half mit, die moderne Elektrizitätslehre zu begründen. Bizzi und Chiurco, zwei Mitarbeiter Walter Hoppes (der Anfang der 70er Jahre die Orgonomie nach Deutschland brachte), schreiben über Galvanis Forschungen, mit ihnen hätte er sich als erster der Lebensenergie experimentell genähert. Obwohl er als Gründer der Elektrophysiologie anerkannt wird, begründete er in Wirklichkeit eine Theorie der Lebensenergie. Er nannte die von ihm entdeckte biologische Energie zunächst „animalische Elektrizität“, dann „galvanisches Fluidum“ und schließlich „Lebenskraft“. (Eine verblüffende Parallele zur Geschichte des Begriffs „Orgonenergie“.) Galvani ging sogar so weit, eine Verbindung zwischen der atmosphärischen Elektrizität, zwischen dem „elektrischen“ Ozean und dem Organismus zu postulieren. Diesen Punkt bringen die Autoren in Zusammenhang mit dem Konzept Benjamin Franklins (1706-90), der elektrostatische Phänomene mit einem pulsierenden „einheitlichen Fluidum“ erklärte (Hoppe: Wilhelm Reich, München 1984).

Der Arzt Thomas Young (1773-1829) gelangte über die Beschäftigung mit der physiologischen Augenoptik zur Wiederaufnahme der Huygenschen Wellentheorie. Ein anderer Mediziner, William Prout (1785-1850), stellte die für die Entwicklung von Chemie und Physik so fruchtbare und nach ihm benannte Hypothese auf, daß die Atome der Elemente aus Mehrfachen des Wasserstoffatoms bestünden. Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795-1878), ein Professor der Anatomie und Physiologie, begründete experimentell mit seinem Bruder, dem Physik-Professor Wilhelm Edward Weber (1804-1891), die Wellentheorie. Sie machten die ersten Beobachtungen über den Unterschied zwischen Gruppen- und Wellengeschwindigkeit. Der berühmte Léon Foucault (1819-1868) war von Haus aus Mediziner. Mit seinen Pendelversuchen wies er experimentell die Achsendrehung der Erde nach, er maß die Lichtgeschwindigkeit und arbeitete über die induzierten elektro-magnetischen „Foucaultschen“ Wirbelströme.

Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1878) formulierte als erster den allgemeinen Energieerhaltungssatz. Durch Beobachtungen in seiner ärztlichen Praxis war er zu dem Schluß gelangt, daß mechanische Energie, Wärme und chemische Energie äquivalent seien. Auf dem gleichen Gebiet und in die gleiche Richtung, von der Biologie zur Physik hin, arbeitete der Professor der Physiologie Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), der später Physik lehrte. Er erfand Instrumente zur Untersuchung der Augen, begründete die physikalische Theorie der Tonempfindung, beschäftigte sich mit der Fortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeit der Nervenerregung und brachte z.B. die Hypothese von der atomaren Natur der Elektrizität auf. Der Physiologe Henry Gray (1825-1861) unterschied zwischen Leiter und Nichtleiter für Elektrizität.

Reich war über seine ausgeprägten naturwissenschaftlichen Interessen zur Medizin gelangt und hier vor allen Dingen zur Sexologie. So mußte er zwangsläufig auf Freud stoßen. Dessen Theorien gingen aus seiner neurologischen Forschung, aus der Darwinistischen Biologie (z.B. Onto- als Wiederholung der Phylogenese) oder beispielsweise aus der „Psychophysik“ Gustav Theodor Fechners (1801-87) hervor, der wiederum als Schelling-Schüler auf die deutsche Naturphilosophie zurückgeht.

Heute wird gerne so getan, als hätte Freud den Begriff „Energie“ (ursprünglich ein biologischer Begriff) nur als reine Metapher benutzt, doch war es für ihn vielmehr ein erklärendes Konstrukt. Reich hat dann gezeigt, daß diesem Konstrukt eine Wirklichkeit entsprach. Doch während Freud sich von seinem Hintergrund als Physiologe emanzipieren wollte, führte Reich den ursprünglichen naturwissenschaftlichen Ansatz weiter, kam zur Biologie und schließlich, wie viele Ärzte vor ihm, zur Physik und begründete dabei ähnlich wie der Arzt Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) ein neues naturwissenschaftliches Lehrgebäude. Die Systeme beider Männer reichten von Fragen der Medizin, oder z.B. der Erziehung, bis hin zu physikalischen Betrachtungen über Elektrizität und Gravitation. Es gibt auch eine direkte Linie von Mesmer zu Reich, denn der Mesmer-Schüler Puysegur erfand die Hypnose, wie sie von Freuds Lehrer Charcot praktiziert wurde.

Außer über den dänischen Physiker und Schelling-Schüler Hans Christian Oerstedt (1777-1851) hatte die deutsche „Naturphilosophie“ fast keinerlei Einfluß auf die Physik. (Eine Ausnahme ist der Einfluß der „deutschen Lebensphilosophie“ auf Leute wie Heisenberg bei der Ausformulierung der Quantenmechanik.) Die Naturphilosophie hatte Oerstedt dazu gebracht, nach der Einheit in der Natur zu suchen. So schlug er die Brücke zwischen Elektrizität und Magnetismus. Entscheidenden Einfluß hatte die Naturphilosophie auf die Biologie (z.B. auf die Zellenlehre und Embryologie). Mit Reich sollte ein Ausläufer der Naturphilosophie (vermittelt durch Bergson, Freud und andere) mit ihren Hauptcharakteristiken (Lebensenergiekonzept und im weitesten Sinne „dialektische“ Betrachtungsweise) endlich auch der Physik zu konkreten Entdeckungen verhelfen, nachdem Goethe mit seiner Farbenlehre gescheitert war und nur im biologischen Bereich „subjektiver Farben“ wirken konnte.

Während in der Biologie die Mechanisten Anhänger der falschen Präformationslehre waren (der ganze Organismus sei schon im Keimei vollständig en miniature vorhanden), folgten die Vitalisten der richtigen Theorie der Epigenese (der Organismus entwickelt sich durch Neubildung aus der Keimenergie einer spezifischen Formkraft). Ähnlich nahm Reich die Naturgesetze nicht als gegeben, statisch und unveränderlich hin, sondern suchte ihre Genese zu ergründen, sie auf Orgonenergie-Funktionen zu gründen.

In a recent post Reid writes:

“If the difference between nature and artifice is itself artifice, then it seems in vain to probe into uncontaminated nature, which itself exists in its distinction only on behalf of artifice, and as itself artifice.”

Reid writes that this does not lead to social constructivism but instead that:

“Nature, rather, means necessary or of necessity, whereas artificial means unnecessary or contingent. The ‘nature of being’ speaks of what is necessary or essential in being, whereas ontical artifices could either be or not, without affecting being itself.”

The central question of nature still remains what is nature (as Iain puts it what is the ground of ground) and what exactly is the nature of the relation between thinking and being while vitating any appeal to the natural.

Reid goes on:

“The distinction between ground and grounded, nature and artifice, is preserved, with the simple adjustment of emptying the former of any content – the ground is not some metaphysical thing (God, Nature, World, etc), but rather only groundlessness or facticity itself.”

The issue then is dividing nature from the natural where the natural takes nature as what is and transforms it into what is supposed to be. This also seems to be the essential problem with politics in relation to nature and ontology. Calling something unnatural is a political move – queer politics is an obvious examples where forms of desire/identity. Reid’s connection of nature to groundlessness advocates, I would argue, a process philosophy emptied of anthrocentric guarantee via the virtual, the eternal, the logical. Meillassoux’s weakness in regards to nature is that, as Martin Hagglund pointed out, he relies on a transcendental skyhook or thinkability of nature which approaches, or perhaps even emulates, virtuality.

Paradoxically then politics is unnatural but is not unaffected by the processes of nature itself. As Mark states here, a return to nature is a naive political gesture (following Zizek) since nature is not a thing (or state) to  return to – any purported return to nature is actually a return to the natural – an arrestation of progressive nature that transmogrifies nature in itself to nature as such which sneaks in a thinkability of nature in with it.

Over at Infinite Thought, Nina has a post critiquing a ‘race to the bottom’ in contemporary philosophy; a trend in thought which purportedly draws politics from the laws of nature and asserts the meaninglessness of nature and philosophy.  The post makes a number of statements which need to be addressed.  Nick has addressed some of them here already.

1 – Nature as a theoretical object cannot be neatly meshed with the ‘laws of nature.’  Nature is either reduced to what can be discerned from the laws (following from Bacon, Boyle and arguably Leibniz) or exalted in an obscure form (Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche).  Both of these gestures severely limit the ontological weight of nature particularly, as Iain Hamilton Grant has shown, as a productive entity.

2 – Presuming that a feeling of dread or negativity or that any focus on nature leads directly due  a phenomenological account or that everything is ontological is faulty.  The necessity of articulating nature leads to the process of separating the ontic and the ontological.  This is the two philosophies project of the late Schelling.

3 – Following Nick, the two philosophies or what we could call the division of ontology and politics is a strength and not a weakness of many variants of Speculative Realism.  This does not raise ontology above politics but questions the inhumanness of nature and highlights the artificiality or decisionality of politics contra ontology.  Nature should be taken away as a political standing stone.

4 – Pessimism and/or realism is not the same as defeatism – something fairly clear in a number of marxist and post-marxist texts.  This pessimism is often disregarded as apathy, solipsism and the like instead of addressing the unacknowledged positivity of a politics or ontology which must disavow its humanist underpinnings.

5 – The point where many of these issues coincide is that of process philosophy where an ontological positivity hides behind a supposedly realist take on nature.  This positivity however, manifests itself as a pre-thinkability of nature, where categories of the virtual, or the whole or reason necessarily place nature in an intellectual containment field.  This is similar to Meillassoux’s critique of Hegel yet Meillassoux himself (as Hagglund and others have shown) relies on a virtuality (or logical accessibility) which is undermining.

To say that articulating a dark or doomful nature is throwing in the towel politically appears oblivious to the fact that the spirit of positive philosophy has been over endorsed. To say for instance that the ecological movement is without a (erroneous) metaphysics of nature is no different then saying that it is post-ideological.  Nature requires despiritualization, re-contamination and an unbearable bringing-closer of a nature which is faulty purported as ‘out-there’ when really it is passing through us, under us, and above us.

“It was something black and twisted into the form of a man, something that seemed to have come up from the earth and grown over the wooden planks like a dark fungus, consuming the structure. There were now black legs that hung as if charred and withered; there was a head that sagged like a sack of ashes upon a meager body of blackness; and there were thin arms stretched out like knobby branches from a lightning-scorched tree. All of this was supported by a thick dark stalk which rose out of the earth and reached into the effigy like a hand into a puppet.” – Thomas Ligotti, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

In The Grounding of Positive Philosophy Schelling argues that at the bottom of an issue is not being but potentiality, the inner organism of potentiality which is the cause of reason itself (p 142). Politics must acknowledge this generative yet obscure darkness of nature.

The entire argument of After Finitude is built on a subtle, but all the more commonplace  misinterpretation of Kant.  Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” did not institute ”correlationism.”  Rather, it showed the way out of the  ”correlationism” that tacitly determined every traditional metaphysics, and that, in fact, rendered vain the pursuit of metaphysical (ontological) truth.  The structure of knowledge, to be sure, is correlationist, and it is by explicitly recognizing this that Kant hopes to institute the foundational revolution that had previously eluded philosophy.  Yet the a priori truth of “correlationism,” and it is this that matters to philosophy, is not given through a structure of “correlation,” but as an immediate, intuitive experience that resists conceptual articulation.  The finitude of the human subject is absolute: it is the presentation of the immediate experience of the a priori — which is not just what necessarily comes “before” empirical experience, but rather the “opening” in which things show up.

To deny the “correlationist” structure of cognition is not to affirm an “absolute” knowledge, but to back away from the very grounds in which the true problem of knowledge becomes at once possible and opens up onto the question of ontology and truth. With rationalism, the thought of correlation, contained in the very principle of identity, becomes the ineradicable and unseen horizon of thought. A=A means A corresponds to itself.  Pure analytic judgements merely extrapolate from the correlation implicit in the logical form of thinking.  (Thus, for Kant, the revolution in logic happened immediately.  This means only: the correlational moment, the discovery of which precipitates positive science, came immediately.  But the revolution of philosophy is only spoken of by analogy with the revolutions of logic, mathematics, and science : philosophy does not discover correlationism, but the  truth of correlationism.  To deny correlationism in knowledge is only to close the way to this truth.)

The truly philosophical problematic of langauge emerges in the wake of Kant .  Yet it is not a radicalization of his “correlationism,” but rather an attempt to escape the aporia that opens up between the intuitive presentation of the a priori, and its discursive representation — an aporia that threatens to reinscribe correlationism within the thought of an absolute finitude.

Language is the differential presentation of difference: it is not that everything must correspond to language, but rather that language is the immediate medium in which difference (pure synthesis) appears.  The essence of Romanticism: language is made present to us through the mediation of the work.  The a priori of language is a primordial difference that is not discursively articulatable, nor purely intuitive, but is given to us only through the difference that seizes the repetition that would constitute the same as the same.  The “primordial difference” transcends the difference between intuitions and concepts: presentations and representations.

Yet the a prioricity of language is also not exhausted in this difference.  Language is also the field of experiences, and of history. (Kant and Vico — Derrida and Benjamin)

In the German style
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I was told that I write in the German style. Actually, in fact originally I was told I write in the Greman style, although that was just a typo, But it did add to the confusion a bit. In the end, once that little issue was sorted out, I still went, “huh…? What’s the German style?”
Apparently the Germans have a style, not that I knew this, but my friend who had read some of my writing apparently did and made the comparison. Now, I don’t have any German connections in the family tree and the limit of my exposure to German is the odd war movie, 2 years in secondary school dabbling at learning a second language and being bundled through Germany as a 7 year old for several weeks on a family holiday. All in all I would say the sum total of my knowledge of the country amounted to a hill of beans, a very, very small hill. So where I might have acquired a German style from is rather beyond me. A German I am really not at all. My friend however, does have family connections back to Germany, has spent time visiting, and even speaks the language well enough to get around. No doubt she wouldn’t speak exactly like a native, but she has a certain look that would definitely let her slip right in. If she did her hair up in a plait that circled the top of her head and wore a Dirndl, no-one there would look twice at her. Well, they might look twice at her, but that wouldn’t be because she didn’t look like she belonged, so that’s a different story altogether. In this story, I was left thinking, well if anyone here is going to be writing in the German style, it’s rather more likely to be her than me. On the other hand, having that German connection does mean she should know of what she speaks. On this I need to acknowledge and bow to superior knowledge and investigate just what is this “German style”.
The Germans are wonderful people in general, albeit there is a definite cultural style. The rest of Europe likes to make jokes about them in respect of certain of their habits and modes of thought. To be French, or Italian, or Spanish, or English is to be different from the Germans in some odd particular ways. It shows up in the sense of humour, in the work ethic, in the prejudices, in how they go on holiday even. Little things, but definite. One of those little things is manifest in technology. Not so much in the actual physical nuts and bolts, but in the philosophy and mode of thought. As my friend explained the “German style” to me, I did recall that even in translation there is in a German technical document a density and intensity that is peculiarly unique to them. Looking at the original German script of a scientific document is even worse. If there was a gold medal for conjuncted words and length of words, the Germans have that won hands down. For a foreigner to try to pronounce the words is to stumble over the mouthfuls of syllables and roll their eyes in alarm. But more, the Germans write with the assumption that you know what they are talking about in the first place. That any background or introduction is unnecessary, that the argument is self evident and if you cannot follow what is being said then you are obviously not qualified to be involved in the discussion. Apparently, it seems I would make a good German after all.
So I have been told to think more carefully about my style. To write clear introductions, address distinct points and arguments, write clearly to those points – and most importantly, write in a style that engages, explains the background and assumptions, introduces and defines my essays fully and well right from the start. My apologies to any Germans, if I imply that they do none of those things. But for my part, I should try and avoid writing like a German technical document. A large part of that would be because I am not actually writing technical documents, but social and philosophical ones. I would like to engage every-man and every-woman in a broad based debate that is accessible and relevant. Just because it is sociological, conceptual and philosophical doesn’t mean it can’t be readable too. Perhaps shorter and less obscure words would help, haha.
Hmmm… I suppose I shall now have to go and see just what sort of style of writing the German philosophers had. Marx, Engels, Goethe, Hegel, Kant, Humboldt, Meinecke, Nietzsche[sic], Luther, Schiller, Steiner, Weber, Schelling, Arendt. That’s a pretty formidable and eminent list, you could do worse than aspire to them. And perhaps I can argue that if some of them wrote tortured and turgid prose, then why can’t I?

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PS. Quoted from Wikipedia:
” Some of Hegel’s writing was intended for those with advanced knowledge of philosophy, although his “Encyclopedia” was intended as a textbook in a university course. Nevertheless, like many philosophers, Hegel assumed that his readers would be well-versed in Western philosophy, up to and including Descartes, Hume, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. For those wishing to read his work without this background, introductions to and commentaries about Hegel can contribute to comprehension, although the reader is faced with multiple interpretations of Hegel’s writings from incompatible schools of philosophy. The German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno devoted an essay to the difficulty of reading Hegel and asserted that there are certain passages where it is impossible to decipher what Hegel meant. “

“It was the age of everlasting night. The sunset of man had long since gone by, and the last few millions who still dwelt on earth in those far future days took refuge in the mighty pyramid of imperishable metal that was the last of all men’s cities and would ere long become his tomb” – Nightland, William Hope Hodgson

“Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth’s collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:

“- The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.
- The sign of doom is written on your brows- how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?
- But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.
- Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.” – Peter Zapffe, The Last Messiah

In Iain Grant’s Philosophies of Nature after Schelling Grant notes that one of the major problems that his text set out to address was that of naturalism’s relation to reason.  It is also on this point that Grant and Brassier differ most – with my own Dark Vitalism being largely a combination of Grant and Brassier’s work (with elements from others as well) the issue of thought’s connection to nature is a constant problem.

As I understand it, the difference between Grant and Brassier is the transcendent quality of thought – whereas for Grant nature thinks just as nature mountains or rivers whereas for Brassier thought must be transcendentally separate.  The epigraphs above (the first relating to Brassier and the second to Grant) illustrate the stubbornness of thought or the possible opening of its own self-destruction.

The place of thought can also be developed in terms of interiority versus exteriority.  Where elsewhere I have argued that the process of grounding and ungrounding creates interiorities and exteriorities but for Grant the interior is not a concern.  The limiting factor of thinking is the regionality of  the particular identity (unstable subject-object) attempting to grasp nature’s infinitude.

Brassier is concerned with cleansing the dyad of being and thinking of meaning while clarifying the work of the concept.  Furthermore, Brassier’s call to distinguish between objects and concepts (against Latour) asserts that scientific statements give us reason to believe that we can still determine when thought tracts and misses nature.

The alienness of thought collides with the possibility of the unnatural, of whether a human production can be against nature.  As Lovecraft writes in the beginning of “The Call of Cthulhu”:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability f the human mind to correlate all its contents.  We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.  The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age” (Lovecraft, p 355).

Lovecraft’s statement addresses the limitation of our knowledge (“island of ignorance”) as well as the danger of its speculative possibility (“terrifying vistas” and “deadly light”) as they are anchored in the uncertain real (“black seas” and “frightful position therein”).  One dimension that Lovecraft does not mention, the dimension which his own work embodies, is that of thought’s capacity to produce the horrible and not merely reveal it.  The question is whether the worst aspects of thought, of the deepest power of speculation, is a capacity divorced from nature, simultaneously questioning the ontological and epistemological status of the unnatural.

Lovecraft writes in “The Unnameable”: “[...] if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?” (Lovecraft, 260).

The tale which begins with “speculating about the unnameable” (Lovecraft, 256) nominates the very mode of Lovecraft’s story telling; the rampancy of the imagination and that which falls out of psychic classification (Lovecraft, 257).  The problem is the productive capacity of  imagination and philosophy (System, 10-13) in relation to the discernability of the thinker.

As Grant clarifies, the self can only grasp the productivity of its thinking by making itself into an object but this process of objectifying the self is itself an ongoing process (Philosophies of Nature, 176-177).  Being, or objectivity is the temporary limit of productivity (Philosophies of Nature, 181).

The unnameable then, is the inability of thinking to capture being in the flow of its production, not because, in the Kantian sense, that being as such is inaccessible ontologically, as noumenon, but because being is in motion and thought, as an interruption of this trajectory, is just as transient.  That is, the question of an approaching horror raises questions of the limits of being (what is that in terms of its being) and the limits of epistemology (what is that in terms of the perceivers thinking).

Turtlism and Other Quaint Difficulties

A few thoughts on Shaviro’s response to Harman’s appreciation for Turtles (and the problem of infinite regress). He mentions my thoughts on the matter, and seems to ponder such an answer, appealing to Schelling I think rightly so, rather than Hegel. There is a non-entity end of the backwards or beneath/between tracings of entity chains:

It may well be that an ungrounded infinite regress is not such a bad thing (as Harman says, for instance, here). There are, however, other ways to nuance the question of infinite regress. Kvond suggests as much here, raising the point that what stops the regress from being infinite might be of another nature than the entities among which the regress takes place. (This could be seen in a number of ways; I am inclined to think of it in terms of Schelling’s notion of a ground, as opposed to Hegel’s totalizing closure). But I need to think about this some more, so I will postpone further discussion until another time.

From my perspective though, it is Schelling’s Idealism that draws him down, and it is his Spinozism that makes such a concept of “ground” compelling. There is nothing that Schelling actually adds to the Spinozist solution to object-oriented Turtlism. There should be no ontological priority of mind (or subject/object binarism) in the analysis of either objects or their relations (I hope to post on this soon, under the concept of information). What is compelling about the Spinozist answer of Substance (against an Aristotelian concept of substances), is that each and every assemblage indeed retains its own inside/outside boundary, an epistemic concrescence we might want to say, but continually and ever this is an open relation, the interiors of recursivity being insufficient to define or “reduce” the object to any pure objecthood.

A Diversity and Richness of Relations

Shaviro goes onto praise the diversity of objects which Harman’s position brings into view, but decries the paucity of an appreciation of relations. He looks for a Realism (speculative or otherwise) which grants nobility to relations, as much as it does for said “objects”:

I am looking for a “speculative realism” that does justice to the multifariousness of relations, as well as to the multifariousness of things or substances.

As I have emphasized in the past, Harman’s love of objects isn’t I suspect really for objects at all, but rather the object is to serve as mere and empty anchor for the sensuous qualities, turning his philosophy into a QOP: The “sensuous vicar” of Causation.  Indeed, I think what distinguishes the framework that Harman provides is that, as Shaviro notes, it is a speculative mode of perception that leaves out the very connective material, the relations between such objects. The reality of those relations. One can see this symptomatically of course in his rather poor or insubstantive reading of causation. But it is more than this. Harman sees the world as fulled with objects because I think he wants to see it as filled with centers of activity. A center of activity here, a center of activity there, and the activities are sensuously confined behind the closed doors of the object’s surface. Harman’s is really a social theory of privatized interiors, in my mind anthropomorphically projected onto the rest of the Universe, a projection attempting to erase its social positioning of privatized sensuous inner realms.

But it goes beyond this, and Shaviro’s complaint is revealing. It comes to a question of openness vs. closeness. What a reality of relations (and not just closed centers of activity) gives us is a grammar of analysis for social relations themselves, the connective parts and forces that exist between located centers of activity. One might say the very fabric of what is real. In such a fabric, I suggest, is the very possibilities we have for self-direction and social increase, the very openness of our path-steering and trans-personal capacities of experience itself. Much is at stake when we are considering whether we should see the world as solely filled with centers of activity, or composed of activities, processes, etc., which sometimes cohere into centers better seen as boundaried.

The reason I suspect that objects must yield in turn to proceses or relations, in part is because this shapes the way that we encounter, change and participate in what we find, the way in which we blurr boundaries, cross over into objects, conjoinedly enflesh ourselves with pieces of the world, a view in which a primary sense of objects-under-retreat simply makes little sense.

Note

As a sidenote – and the reference may be non sequitur to some who have not been following my other posts - recent examination of the history of military strategy in the theories of John Boyd (on whom I also hope to post soon), I believe reveals the importance of reading the world as composed of solely centers of activity. When facing issues of an opponent (or a potential communicator)  the game of defeat or communication is won or lost in the very connectivity between centers (best not seen as centers themselves); while the evolutionary, preditor-oriented eye might readily travel to the centers of activity (the head, the heart, etc.), the warp and weft between the concrescences of pattern – those the seeming locuses of power, experience and mind - is where advantage is most played out.

Repeatedly I have formulated Dark Vitalism as the description of the cosmological cascade or emergence of varying modes of reality schematized in the following way.

Real—Immanence——Sense——Extilligence

With matter as the operator between the first and second, life as the operator between the second and third, and pathology/drive as operating between the third and fourth.

The first two results of the Prohairesis (volition) of the indiscernible Sub-Planck epoch are intensive and space manipulating/creating whereas the latter two are Extensive and space filling.

This process proceeds from the One not as an eternality but an initial potential which is unfolding not as a plasma but as a simultaneous creation and destruction of entities via forces and powers. From the one we have only the piling of Zeros (in an Okenian sense) the reformatting of the detritus of the One. The procedure appearing as such:

1.00000000

The Force of Forces or Prohairesis following from the One.

The question becomes if individual entities are present yet also deformed/destroyed etc by the Force of Forces (spatio-temporality) then can we have a non-absolute or background independent conception of time and or space? That is, if time is conceived as relational, as that between entities, then how can it been seen as the darkly vital force that I have set it up as?

Relevant here is Martin Hagglund’s critique of Meillassoux in his paper presented at the 21st Century Materialism Conference. Hagglund is critical of Meillassoux’s underdeveloped theory of succession stating that there must be some connection between ancestral and phenomenal time and that time must not be a virtual power absolutized and severed from spatiality.

Hagglund connects these issues directly to the emergence of life on Earth:

“Consequently, there is no need for Meillassoux’s skyhook of irruption ex nihilo to explain the emergence of life. The emergence of life is certainly a contingent event, but this contingency cannot be equated with a power to make anything happen at any time. Rather, the emergence is dependent both on preceding material conditions that restrict what is possible and on succeeding events that determine whether it will have been the emergence of anything at all. “

That is, while Meillassoux himself notes that the transcendental must be anchored in this or that material thing, the issue is in fact why Meillassoux is attributing transcendental like characteristics to life itself. Hagglund allies this anti-scientific transcendentalizing with vitalism when he says the following:

“Accordingly, there is an asymmetry between the animate and the inanimate in the arche-materiality of the trace. As soon as there is life there is death, so there can be no animation without the inanimate, but the inverse argument does not hold. If there were animation as soon as there is inanimate matter, we would be advocating a vitalist conception of the universe, where life is the potential force or the teleological goal of existence. The conception of life that follows from the arche-materiality of the trace is as far as one can get from such vitalism, since it accounts for the utter contingency and destructibility of life”

While certain accounts of vitalism have posited that there some vital stuff transmittable between bodies, vitalism does not seem to suggest life’s indestructability tout court. Furthermore, as Bergson noted in Creative Evolution, his one positive comment on vitalism was that at least it pointed towards our lack of understanding when it came to the category of life itself. This latter dimension seems too easily forgotten in most critiques of vitalism including Hagglund’s.

Dark Vitalism is particularly focused on the destructibility of life and but is also sceptical of Hagglund’s valorization of survival. That is, Hagglund’s account must take disadaptation, feedback and, when it comes to humans, pathology as paramount in understanding the category of survival. That is, one must be careful as soon as discussions of survival are connected to those of care – in that the physicality of death begins to immediately move towards culturalized death or even poeticized death. While Hagglund opens life as it must be in order to borrow energy from its environment to survive, life is always open to death, not just mournable death but the possibility of total annhilation. The spectral and the hauntological risk this as does Agamben’s form-of-life and Badiou’s recent discussion of a true life. The bio-cultural consistently dismisses the physical – the particlization of being.

Ultimately the issue is navigating between the weakness of humanity at the whim of nature, of the accident and its absorption by the unconscious and the weakness of nature, as Lacan saw it, in that our generation of artificiality puts us, in a material sense, at a apparent distance from nature as such.

The alchemist term azoth stretches from the beginning to the end in its etymological roots and unites cohesion and corrosion.  This term may have inspired Lovecraft’s gibbering monstrosity known as Azathoth.  This blind idiot god, I argue, is somewhere between or perhaps an interpenetration of Oken’s Zero and Plotinus’ One.

Oken’s zero, as Iain Hamilton Grant points out in “Being and Slime”, the wavering zero as the generator of all slime which thereby asserts that something is merely the repetition of nothing as ideal/intensity or real/extensive and the reason for all.  Nothingness is the reason for all, extended and intensive which must be differentiated from Deleuze’s virtual which appears too much like a crypto-transcendence.  The key is that ideation is preemted by time and not virtualized in subjective terms.

In regards to Plotinus’ One:

The One is a non-concept which is known through its effect as power, foundation and location. The One, as all that is and what is potential, emanates all existents. The One is pure possibility. Furthermore, the One generates intelligence which is the source of being yet this is the Intelligence (nous). The nous, as the container of being, collapses thinking and being in a way somewhat analogous to Schelling.

Substance (the generative slime) becomes nothing more than that which is produced by and acted upon by time. Looking at Schelling the unity of the real and the ideal is both real and ideal in an identitarian way, that is in terms of a thought simultaneity but not a temporal or historical simultaneity. That is, the withdrawnness of nature holds the ideal back but the ideal also moves towards the light, moves forward in time.

As Graham and Levi have discussed in recent posts (and what is a large issue in Prince of Networks) is that of the plasma to polyp equation – that of the crystalization of individual entities if one assumes an underlying unity.  Graham asserts that immanence for Plotinus, for instance, allows only vertical and not horizontal relations as individual entities spring up from the il y a or whatever or plasma.  But does this necessary need to be the case?

Is it impossible to have the polyp from the matter of the cosmological cascade interact with other polyps (objects)?  The One (as the absolute) explodes releasing space/time where pure interiorty explodes in pure exteriority before accretion ressurects the interior.  Objects as all a result from the One may be of the same matter and resulting from the same substance (nothingnesses of the Real piles atop one another as in Oken’s zeroes) but they can interact and have unique existence in terms of time and space.  Azathoth is the horrible specter of this twisted exapanse where, as in Ligotti’s Sect of the Idiot, no object is ever as banal as it seems.

More on this later…

Wrapped up  Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google this afternoon and what a great read!  Definitely warrants a re-read, but that’ll have to wait until the semester’s underway; I’m seriously considering using it as a text for some of my classes in the Digital Art & Design program.

As the last 3rd of the book picked up steam, I was particularly interested in the psychology and sociological terminology, perspective and studies Carr brought up to talk about the effects of centralization, de-centralization, control, and the prospects for artificial intelligence in the lives of people.

I’d never before heard the term “bounded rationality” though I’d seen something like it very early in my life as a comic book publisher.  EVERYBODY wants a piece of certain talented people.  We were fortunate enough to work with, very early on, a few hugely significant artists who lent their talents to our humble project.  From those 2 or 3 artists came a flood of other artists who were willing to work with us –I’m sure because we paid well and were good people– but largely on account of the association with those other folks.  Rational bounding, as I understand it, explains that we’re not always able to make the most rational decision, and so we are forced to rely on “filters” to screen ideas, people, etc.  Our early association with those great artists opened up a lot of other doors to people who would otherwise have no time to rationally consider who my company was, what our projects were, and other factors to weigh in the decision to lend one’s name to a new startup.  There’s probably a connection in there somewhere to be made with Gladwell’s Tipping Point types too, though I am reluctant to label any of those talented guys salesmen, mavens, or connectors; but their names definitely provided industry cachet.

Back to The Big Switch, I was fascinated by the inclusion of Schelling’s simple, hypothetical neighborhood experiment which demonstrated how slight preferences yield BIG trends, and alarmed to consider how quickly these are magnified by the speed of the internet!

I’ve also heard many times the concern that while the internet opens up a world of information and richly contrasting opinions in theory, what we actually observe is a system whereby people filter to them only information they want to hear or are likely to agree with in practice. “Ideological amplification” is what Carr calls it, and he’s particular eloquent speaking about the dangers of groupthink on the web and “it’s power to undermine the spirit of compromise and practice of consensus-building that lies at the heart of democracy itself…[Indeed] That the Web will create a more bountiful culture and that it will promote greater harmony and understanding should be treated with skepticism. Cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation seem equally likely outcomes.”

From that reading came an idea, to ME at least, to engage students in an assignment as part of their coursework that asks them to confront something they may have a strong adverse reaction to.  Postman may have approved.

Carr writes near the end that ”Technology is amoral, and inventions are routinely deployed in ways their creators neither intend nor sanction…to hold inventors liable for the misuse of their inventions is to indict progress itself.”  While I understand and agree with this, a part of me still gets mighty antsy with all the discussion of Google/Skynet’s efforts to develop AI.  For me, it’s much clearer how the development of a “better brain beyond our own brain” is a bad idea.  I don’t know if it’s my classics training and grounding in the western cult of the individual, but I think that thinking machines would have little patience for the crap we humans do.  Logic is inherently inhuman, and if logic and efficiency will drive these new superbrains, it seems logical and efficient to eliminate such wasteful, petty, short-sighted things as Man.  I like Man, but I don’t know that other intelligences will share my appreciation for the subtle good mixed in with so much obvious bad. * Note – This is NOT to be construed that I believe in original sin or man’s inherent evil; I reject both notions.

~benc

Fichte ist möglicherweise heute (vielleicht aber nur für den phänomenologisch Denkenden) der unmittelbar Anschlussfähigste der klassischen deutschen Idealisten, und zwar weil er sich voll und ganz zur methodischen Reflexion bekennt. Dies sei umwegshaft verdeutlicht, indem ich eine terminologische Unterscheidung zwischen ‘Nachvollzug’ und ‘Mitvollzug’ vorschlage.

Das methodische Ideal Hegels und wohl auch Schellings (wahrscheinlich trotz allem sogar noch in dessen Spätphilosophie)  ist der ‘Nachvollzug’ des Absoluten, d.h. die mimetische Identifikation mit dem originären Vollzug des Absoluten (etwa durch Hervortretenlassen des der Sache selbst immanenten Denkens). Deshalb ist in diesem Denken methodisch die propädeutische ‘Standpunkterringung’ so entscheidend. Das ‘Nach-’ ist dabei nicht so sehr in seinem (für dieses Denken fatalen) zeitlichen Sinne, sondern im erwähnten mimetischen Sinne zu hören; der Nachvollzug kann also gelingen, indem er den originären Vollzug nachbildet. Dabei ist es ganz gleichgültig, ob der Nachvollzug methodisch durch eine intellektuelle Anschauung (früher Schelling) oder durch Identifizierung mit der absoluten Methode (Hegel) durchzuführen versucht wird; beide Weisen vollziehen genau den Schritt, den wir noch heute als ’spekulativ’ bezeichnen würden.

Bei Fichte – nichts dergleichen: Die reflexive Tätigkeit bleibt von der “absoluten Tätigkeit” (des Ich bin) – man muss sagen: durch einen methodischen Hiatus –  getrennt, da die absolute Tätigkeit (die im 1. Grundsatz der Wissenschaftslehre ausgesprochen wird) in theoretischer Hinsicht immer nur als Voraussetzung erwiesen wird und niemals als deduktiver Ausgangspunkt in Anspruch genommen wird. Fichte stellt den 1. Grundsatz auf, ohne ihn als Grundsatz zu gebrauchen – seine Methode arbeitet nur mit dem 2. und 3. Grundsatz, wie er in aller wünschenswerten Deutlichkeit sagt (siehe den Schluss des 1. Teils der WL 1794). Der Reflexion geht es daher nur darum, den ihr immanenten  Grund – die vorausgesetzte absolute Tätigkeit – in seiner Vorausgesetztheit mitzuvollziehen (weil es nur darum geht, kann Fichte die Reihe der Antithesen und Synthesen offen belassen). Über dieses ‘Mit-’ wäre noch vieles zu sagen.