To make this clearer: suppose we are faced with a new concept — a gaze. The first thing we should ask is: what new hierarchy does it establish? What is it trying to destroy? What horizons of disclosure appear, and which ones disappear?
What kind of ethics might be implied by your approach? Does it provide a refreshing alternative to the usual takes on realism, truth and the is-ought divide dominating the several threads on ethics currently active in TPF?
It depends on the context.
Ethics can be considered as part of power — as something that structurally holds a social system together.
In the context of personal ethics, things are more complicated. I see the figure of the thinker as tragic. The attack does not take place directly, but rather through self-deconstruction. Through this self-deconstruction, a new gaze may appear — and this gaze can then begin to form society in a new way. This always happens through social losses and gains.
By the way, I have an article on fluid ethics as an instrument of power.
In my view, this approach has enormous potential in the field of practical philosophy and ethics in particular.
I’m not ready to share this yet, but I assure you that many of the obvious things that seem obvious to us in a substantialist ontology unfold completely differently in a dynamic ontology.
How does power relate to the concept of the will?
I simply do not use this term. I do not have a concept of neutral will. Will is always already included in some scheme.
Instead, I have the notions of rupture, micro-death, and the ontological gesture, in which a new gaze–time–power scheme can arise.
I reread what I had written and realized that it may look similar to the Nietzschean Übermensch, who establishes his own personal morality through his will.
But my view is somewhat different. The thinker does not establish a new order of things through his free will. Rather, through self-deconstruction and self-rupture, he recognizes the scheme in which he already exists.
He does not invent something new, but rather makes visible what is already there.
I don’t follow interpreters of Nietzsche who think he believes n ‘free will’. My touchstones are Klossowski, Foucault and Deleuze, for whom the will dissolves the subject, rather than being controlled by it. The will wills what it wants, not what I want.
Why do I believe in causes and effects? What gives me the right to speak about an I, and, for that matter, about an I as cause, and, finally, about an I as the cause of thoughts?
I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit: that a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.
Below every thought lies an affect. Every thought, every feeling, every will is not born of one particular drive but is a total state, a whole surface of the whole conscious ness, and results from how the power of all the drives that constitute us is fixed at that moment - thus, the power of the drive that dominates just now as well as of the drives obeying or resisting it. The next thought is a sign of how the total power situation has now shifted again.
The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has ever been conceived, a type of logical rape and abomination. But humanity’s excessive pride has got itself profoundly and horribly entangled with precisely this piece of nonsense. The longing for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense (which, unfortunately, still rules in the heads of the half educated), the longing to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for your actions yourself and to relieve God, world, ancestors, chance, and society of the burden – all this means nothing less than being that very causa sui and, with a courage greater than Munchhausen’s, pulling yourself by the hair from the swamp of nothingness up into existence.
I do not consider will and desire in the same context as the post-structuralists do.
For me, consciousness is not a reflection in a mirror, and not an inner dialogue — after all, inner dialogue is possible even in a dream. Rather, consciousness is a rare rupture with oneself, a micro-death, in which one exits a life-scheme and a detached gaze from the outside appears.
Most of the time, a human being remains within the framework of a biological machine, automatisms, and cultural conditioning.
Reflection? Mirror? Dialogue? Inner? Consciousness?These are terms you will never see figures like Deleuze and Foucault use to describe the play of forces which produce subjects as their effects. It’s more like a war or struggle in which death, rupture and the outside are intrinsic to the play.
Deleuze and Foucault reject the traditional picture of consciousness as an inner reflective theater, a mirror of nature, or a private dialogue with oneself. They are much more interested in impersonal forces, practices, discourses, institutions, and relations of power that produce subjects rather than being produced by them.
I have a cardinal difference from Derrida in the interpretation of openness/closedness.
Derrida reduces openness/closedness to différance, which most likely does not possess a definite structure, since Derrida’s method is to deconstruct asymmetric oppositions, which rather opens the way to différance.
It is something dark, neutral, which can be described as neither this nor that.
In my case, however, opening/closing is considered as an inevitable part of struggle, tension, and part of the military, attacking essence of being, which is immediately non-neutral.
First of all, I love metaphysics and ontology, so this is great. Please correct me where I’m wrong here.
Let me restate this. Vision is taken from vision of the world and its light. So vision has an ontology baked into it. A concept is made in the mind, so conditionally, we will grant the concept its ontology as if it exists in the world of the one who gazes (and maybe reunite the concept with the world of vision if we can get epistemology to work…) But basically, gazing into the light is conceptualizing in mind. Conceptualizing isn’t a metaphorical gazing, it is a different activity entirely, analogous to gazing, where the object of the gaze is reflected light and the object of conceptualizing is the concept. This probably isn’t exactly what you meant, but is it consistent with your meaning?
This reminds me of my “what is a thing” thread, and provides the basic ontology. A thing is perceived at its differentiation from its horizon, so the dynamism of differentiation only happens at the same moment as the individuation of a single thing. All individuals are individuated from - from the dynamics, we see a coming to be individuated. “A” coming to be is important. This is the boundary of an individual at the point of dynamic interaction (with another individual).
This is where process purists sometimes leave me behind. Thing may have no meaning without its context, but that can’t mean “thing has no real meaning.” Just because a thing arises at the point of dynamic interaction, I don’t see why one must conclude there is nothing to the thing in itself, or that “thing” has no real meaning or presence, or that the interaction itself isn’t clearly entailing the presence/existence of two things interacting?
I get that process is difficult be linear and logical about, but why does process completely remove things from the ontology? Or how would language even serve a purpose if right out of the gate its references to “things” are referring to nothing actually there? If interaction is there, things interacting must be there, so things are there. I can’t find any coherence out of the presence of interaction spelling the absence of things.
Epistemology creeping in. And the object holding our gaze begins to vanish, which is ironic isn’t it. Mankind, the ironic ape. We seek to know our world, while the act of inquiring into it destroys it. To know is paradoxical. But is it only paradoxical, and never graspable? What about knowing that knowing is not passive? Don’t we have to stand still, passively, to recognize that knowing is not passive?
This is better. But I think this resurrects things being things in the world. We can’t say “are the world” without having implied “things are”. Right? otherwise “process exists” and “are the world” are two occuring at the same time - there would be no thing to differentiate process in the world from the process that is the world.
Right, but this doesn’t hollow out the being of the particle - it just situates it against another thing, namely the macro-system.
This is all the same difficulty of trying to understand being and becoming, and permanence and change, linguistically, truth and opinion.
This is where I wallow. Paradox is not a mental trick - it is a fundamental component of ontology. A paradox is a wall, defining a form, terminating motion and change and time and reason into a living, dynamic permanence. When we reach a paradox, we either turn back, consider ourselves lost, or recognize a living end or existing termination point, or a feature of the shape of intelligibility itself. Paradox is the context of logic, so not logic, but defined by it.
My sense is that philosophy has been led astray by the notion that we can conduct a reasonable critique of reason that is not merely self-serving (Kant), and the notion that all “things” are constructs invented after the fact of becoming for us to talk about as pretense to gaining knowledge about some world.
Bottom line to me is that, maybe becoming DOES defeat things ever being things. My intuition is that we wouldn’t have noticed becoming if we didn’t notice things (your white noise indistinguishable from dark emptiness), so a becoming with no things persisting during it (and thus, things being) is not correct. But if I’m wrong, and if in fact becoming does defeat the presence of all intelligible form, I lose the plot of doing any more philosophy at all. We will never be able to move anything, because there is nothing to move and nowhere new to go.
Since Kant, and before him Hume, philosophy is merely the struggle to find a subject for the philosopher to address. And many philosophers since Kant and Hume, have spiraled around this central conundrum, not adequately admitting philosophizing may be but a cosmic joke. Which is why we have to love Nietzsche, because he openly admitted he didn’t care what anyone thought nor what the world bound him to do and say. I still care, and find the boundaries and essences of things remaining things liberating. (Another thing I don’t understand is how a lack of essence can be liberating - being free to play games doesn’t fulfill a need to get work done; a hunger for substance is not satisfied because there is no substance to be found, and convincing yourself you aren’t really hungry denies the possibility of learning.
See but, what is the difference between saying the above, and saying “If there is no context of use, no possible dynamics, no presumed history, then the object doesn’t exist.” How does “invisible to us” become a scientific observation and preserve any ontological fact about that thing or its context? I see “invisible to us” as epistemological, a cause for inquiry - but “the object” must have its own ontology to be an object we seek to know while it persists in being invisible (even though knowing is not passive).
I think, in the context of process dominating the ontology, you have to be saying “If there is no context of use, no possible dynamics, no presumed history, then the object doesn’t exist.” In which case, the gazing is the giving birth, and the object gazed upon need not exist at all without the gazing. We can see the cat-mat as a single beautiful piece of furniture if we want, or a group of billions of atoms, or two things, one living… Our gaze becomes the only context from which any of these objects are even born. So “things” remain pretense and I become stuck again, alone, knowing nothing of the world ever besides “process is” (and I only know that to give myself a reason not to seek any further knowledge despite my urges to the contrary).
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I didn’t directly address gaze-time-power because I’m hoping you can use it to show me where I’ve gone wrong (or more precisely, where I haven’t caught up to the modern age).
I see most of philosophy since the early 20th century as an attempt to rationalize (or just talk about) what is hollow and empty, formless while invisible, making nothingness a thing, for sake of fabricating meaning out of nothingness. The philosopher is born on a crumbling precipice over a windy abyss. Modern philosophy really adds nothing more to this picture, turning philosophy into a self-proclaimed futility, in excruciating detail. I see the emptiness. But I still see something in it, calling out to me whether I be active or passive or distracted. So I see things, besides their dissolving.
Process itself is but the running of the engine. We’ve forgotten it takes the engine to manifest the running, just as it takes the running, to make it an engine.
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This affords me a great way to highlight how we may have reached the limit of philosophy.
‘A = A’ seems like a simple, analytic, obvious truth. But in practice, we know that what happens over time is actually 𝐴𝑡𝑥 ≠𝐴𝑡𝑥+1. In practice, there never is an A long enough to demarcate or grasp ‘A’ and or show that ‘A = A’ is ever applicable in the world. So ‘A’, or “a thing” is a phantasm in the world, means ‘A = A’ might be good on a chalkboard but it has nothing to do with the world .
Yet the philosopher who wants to say this, has to fix an unchanging and eternal ‘A’. None of the above can be made sense of at all if we don’t fix ‘A’ in concept and as something we can possibly experience (the pyramid at Giza) first. We can’t figure out that the Giza pyramid one second ago (A) is not the Giza pyramid now (𝐴𝑡𝑥+1), unless we grasp firmly forever a Giza pyramid or our concept form “A” meaning “A + A”.
So philosophy (logical speech) is doomed to impossibility; that is, philosophy is only doomed if we only see motion in every gaze.
We see motion, but we are never only seeing motion. We may fix things in concept, but in concept is not the only place things fix. That is my intuition.
The only thing I can show you as evidence of things is, if you followed my post here, ask yourself, do you understand me, or do you understand something about the world? If you see the problem for philosophy for yourself, then something has congealed and fixed itself in the world. That’s thing speak, not process purity.
A thing as a thing, an object as an object, arises within the context of a possible interaction.
A glass on a table exists as a glass only for us. Without us, it has no essence of its own; it is only a potential something, which cannot even be called a set of atoms, since “atom” is also a human concept.
A “thing” is an abstraction, a way of thinking. At first glance this way of thinking seems unshakeable, but it is not. For example, in programming there is functional programming, where thinking proceeds from the processing of data, and anything that meets certain criteria — essentially any data — can be treated as a “thing.”
But one can also assume that a thing has some hidden meaning, some essence. To me, that is something like alchemical thinking: the belief that behind the process there is a special inner substance or secret nature of the thing itself.
In quantum mechanics, there are no formulas that describe a particle “as such.” They use a coordinate system, but as Einstein showed, a coordinate system is always relative; it does not exist in itself.
Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of microparticles within the macroscopic world, and without that macroscopic world, concepts such as mass and energy lose their meaning.
Here physics is only a metaphor. But it shows that actions can create objects out of an already existing context or potential. For example, a sculptor makes a sculpture out of clay — the sculpture as an object arose from an existing potential: clay.
Of course, the creation of a sculpture is not described by quantum equations, but it shows that, in principle, it is possible to build a model of thinking that proceeds from action, potential, possibility, and hierarchy.
Philosophy, after all, is not the world itself, but a way of thinking about the world.
Yes, we may speak of God or of “the divine.” But this is the dark amoral divinity of Job. The fire of Time itself.
What a man has to learn through suffering is not this or that particular thing, but insight into the limitations of humanity, into the absoluteness of the barrier that separates man from the divine. It is ultimately a religious insight — the kind of insight that gave birth to Greek tragedy. Thus experience is experience of human finitude.
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If it is characteristic of every phase of the process of experience that the experienced person acquires a new openness to new experiences, this is certainly true of the idea of being perfectly experienced. It does not mean that experience has ceased and a higher form of knowledge is reached (Hegel), but that for the first time experience fully and truly is. In it all dogmatism, which proceeds from the soaring desires of the human heart, reaches an absolute barrier. Experience teaches us to acknowledge the real. The genuine result of experience, then — as of all desire to know — is to know what is. But “what is,” here, is not this or that thing, but “what cannot be destroyed” (Ranke).
Gadamer again, because it’s a great passage…
Yes, this was rather a reference to Anaximander:
“Whence things have their origin, thence also their destruction happens, according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to one another for their injustice according to the order of Time.”
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Nice ! I didn’t know that passage.
As far as I understand, the motif of Time as an executioner appears in many cultures. There is Cronus devouring his children, the Book of Job, which you mentioned, and also the Bhagavad Gita: “I am Time, the destroyer of worlds.”
The character and aims of the gods may differ across cultures, but the common structure is visible: Time is Power.
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The Cronus story has long fascinated me. Zeus defeats the titan Time in order to institute divinity. The divine is what time cannot destroy. So we get “forms” or other philosophical insurgencies. The philosophy wants to put a dent in the world that time will not erase. Oddly they often succeed by discussing time itself. “All is vanity” and “flesh is as grass.” Or “fire will judge and convict all things.” This is the reluctant piety of the proud toward the enemy they could not defeat. Their comfort is that they expect Time to devour all of their rivals as well.
Interesting that in Homer the heroes are already worried about an immortality in song. Their brief lives can be redeemed somehow in the memory of the bards, if they charge madly and with great death-bringing skill at a death they cannot avoid anyway.