Saturday, January 8, 2022

Propositions of Metaphysics

 (Another set of aphorisms! See my last here. Can't help but feel a little embarrassed posting aphorisms as it may seem like I position myself as some kind of Nietzsche, but it's just a nice way to express the ideas you have in little germs you will probably not develop, or can choose to develop later on. Ah, and apologies, these will be quite obscure to most everyone—I have not earned this kind of obscurity!)

1
Bergson is an inversion of Platonism (see An Introduction to Metaphysics) in the sense that rather than flux coming out of forms, forms come out of flux (as illusions of the intellect). Whereas Deleuze is an inversion of Platonism (see Difference and Repetition) in the sense that rather than there being a fixed and eternal set of Ideas, there is a constant reproduction of new ones. One reaches the true meaning of difference while the other does not.

2
Indeed, Deleuze rejoices in his role as sophist—as defined by Plato in the Sophist. Spurred by his rejection of negation, Deleuze is forced to affirm what Plato thinks the sophist does as what reality really is. Namely, the perpetual reproduction of determinate appearances as novel forms generated out of a purely differentiated and indeterminate field. For Deleuze, as for the sophist, there is no truth or falsity, just the problematic.

3
Conversely, Bergson, while he too joins the sophist, vetoes determinate form altogether. Forms and Ideas are merely illusions of the intellect, not to be interpreted literally. Similarly spurred by his rejection of negation, Bergson goes Parmenidean: it is simply not possible to speak of likenesses, phantasms, or appearances because there is no real relational differentiation between individuals (even if there is a kind of primitive becoming). Thinking is being, being is duration, and intuition is our coinciding with it.

4
"We need to use every argument we can to fight against anyone who does away with knowledge, understanding, and intelligence but at the same time asserts anything at all about anything" (Sophist, 249c). Plato challenges the sophist. Against Parmenides, Heraclitus, the Sophists, Bergson and Deleuze, who all must relinquish these notions to some degree, Plato, alongside Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre, all assert that "that which is not somehow is" is the condition for the very possibility of philosophy.

5
Thus, the very foundation of philosophy, for Plato (&co), paradoxically, is nothing. To understand the problem of metaphysics—of intelligibility and rationality in general—is to take seriously the nothing and its implications. It is to understand that the nothing is one of the most important questions to be answered, (whether it be affirmed or denied).

6
Plato, Aristotle, and the Scholastics respected the Eleatic challenge in a way that modern philosophers do not. It's really no surprise then they wanted to scaffold being with intelligibility in (what we pejoratively call) occult ways (essences, forms, universals, teleology). Their lack of any seeming explanatory value for us disenchanted heathens is explained by the fact that they are basically transcendental arguments that make experience, common sense, discourse, intelligibility, and truth, possible, without slipping into Eleatic homogeneity or self-destructive sophistry.

7
Hegel was onto something with his bizarre metaphysics: the affirmation of real contradiction and determinate negation. Radical metaphysics is a sign that the thinker takes the problem seriously, not that his system is incoherent or unworthy, but that it is up to the challenge.

8
Hegel tried to develop process-metaphysics while holding onto the premises of substance metaphysics—while holding onto the notion of 'thing' as enduring. Unsurprising he ran into so many contradictions! Here is the key: mereology must be overcome.

9
To truly think Being without nothing (because the nothing is unthinkable), we must make the transcendental affirmation of a pure generative plenitude: a Being of self-generation and self-overcoming, a creative Being that advances into absolute novelty.

10
The way Heidegger justifies why we should be in wonder of Being, and treat it as divine, rather than as utterly rationally calculable, is the same justification Sartre has for why we should not be in bad faith. In both cases we are making a metaphysical error—we are wrong about the nature of the world and our relationship in it. For Sartre, it is simply false that we are determined to do anything because we are a new and thus utterly free being in every moment. For Heidegger, Being is never uncovered as it is in itself—Being is never present, it is necessarily hidden to us in some ways. Thus, the human condition is to be in a fundamentally mysterious relationship with being.

11
I guess the worry is whether Sartre and Heidegger ever actually manage to wring an ought (we ought to act in good faith, we ought to revere being) from an is (we are free, Being is hidden from us). Neither accepts an unanalysed account of intrinsic goodness nor of some irreducible normative relationship to evidence and knowledge. Perhaps they think it is enough to hope, psychologically, that merely knowing these things will lead us to make the right choice. But what's "right" about it? (Perhaps this is man's anguish.)

12
Schopenhauer's Will and Bergson's intuition are not so far from one another. First, both thinkers are attempting to overcome the metaphysical quietism in Kantian idealism. Second, both thinkers attempt to do this through an appeal to experience and the nature of introspection. The idea inherited from Kant that we cannot know things-in-themselves, even though we ourselves are a thing-in-itself, they both find silly. Any insight into what we are is an insight into the world. They were both right about this.

13
The difference between them is that Bergson overcomes Kantian dualism and immanentizes consciousness into the one organic reality. Perception is developmentally relative to biology and history, but still genuinely sees the changing world it is a part of, as it really is, in duration. Whereas Schopenhauer, while he gets frustratingly close to saying we have knowledge about the world as it is in representations, retains Kant’s static transcendental idealism and postulates the converse side of reality as an eternal and static Eleatic will. Schopenhauer's error is to not grasp the full Heraclitean meaning of both introspection and perception.

14
However, it must be kept in mind that Bergson would take exception to being compared to Heraclitus. He writes in a footnote in The Creative Mind: “Let me insist I am thereby in no way setting aside substance. On the contrary, I affirm the presence of existences. And I believe I have facilitated their representation. How was it ever possible to compare this doctrine with the doctrine of Heraclites?” That being said, to my mind, this seems like a comparison he ought to embrace as. This statement is very much at odds with other statements of his, and a reasonable interpretation of him I think lends itself to the comparison. I think he objects more to the spirit of Heraclitus with whom you get chaos and disorder—a universe which is a dust-heap piled up at random. Whereas in Bergson you get stability and the eventual crystallisation of individual forms, novel evolution that respects the past, and confidence in the reality of most common-sense things, albeit in a strange, fluid (non-determinate), sense. Thus, if we do liken them, it is important to emphasise this difference. (If you do insist on taking this particular protest very literally you basically get Deleuze. But I think there is another, better, way.) 

15
Spinoza and Bergson agree on contingency in spirit, but not in letter. Spinoza thinks every existence is necessary (as it follows from God's perfections) and that contingency merely denotes ignorance. Bergson thinks necessity and contingency are both meaningless. However, they do not actually disagree: both think that all there is, is actual being. Bergson just follows through with the critique by showing that necessity loses its meaning when contingency does.

16
It is bizarre to think that the soul interacted with the body through the pineal gland, as Descartes thought, and it is bizarre that materialists identify the mind with (only) the brain. "[M]any physiological inquirers would doubtless feel enormously relieved if a specific portion of the cortex could be ascertained to be the seat of consciousness." Naive physicalism is just more dualism!

17
Believing in the substantial metaphysical existence of individuals (of any kind) is just a hangover of Aristotelian formal causes. Contemporary philosophers should just accept, essence, substance, or some other platonic variant to explain and maintain form—but few do! Lloyd Gerson has an essay (somewhere) where he poses platonism against naturalism as the two real options, metaphysically speaking. Where the former is full-blown Plotinan style platonism, and the latter is full-blown Rortyian relativism. Indeed this isn't far from Rorty's own description—and I think there's something to it.

18
The Persistence of Aristotelian Causation: belief in the existence of objects and action is just the last hangover of Aristotelian formal causation. Aristotle's explanation of how things are individuated is to say that there is substance present insofar as some matter is unified by something over and above such matter: a form. How are ordinary objects or action explanations any different? People think now that some object or action is present insofar as space is distributed in the right way. What else could "in the right way" be (if they insist it is not reducible to either atoms, events, or the universe) other than a form and thus a non-reducible substance? Fine! Just commit to it! The analytic Thomists do...

19
My reading of the first parts of the Philosophical Investigations is that Wittgenstein thought that the early platonic dialogues (pre-mouthpiece Socrates) are a booming success.

20
David Lewis (great philosopher that he is) does a whole lot of handwringing and metaphysical heavy-lifting, just to make all of our utterances true (modality, counterfactuals, fictional characters, perdurance)—utterances we do not even necessarily care to be true! (Maybe reference is not all it's cracked up to be!)

21
When I first heard about reference magnetism I thought analytic metaphysicians were having me on. The idea is that our language carves reality accurately according to a kind of 'natural seeming' relationship. Whatever 'seems vague' may actually be vague and whatever does not seem vague, may actually be precise! No argument is given for why we might think this. For philosophers who think that physics is the be-all and end-all of first-order metaphysics and that philosophy should be continuous with the natural sciences, it's funny they believe in literal magic!

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