As is so often the case during breaks, my brain has all but fallen out of my ear and I’ve been in a bit of a dark malaise. I’ve spent the last week reading Badiou’s Logics of Worlds, Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver (I’m about halfway through at the part where Half-Cocked Jack and Eliza meet Leibniz), sleeping in, eating, and doing a whole lot of nothing. I really have to get myself in action this week and start getting things done.
Malaise aside, I have been getting some nice gardening done. The other day I turned over all the soil so roots could grow better, and, in my ongoing battle with wabbits, I put in a ring of marigolds about the perimeter to drive them away. So far this strategy seems to be working as I haven’t seen any hanging out in my backyard since.
In addition to keeping the wabbits out, I think they look terrific as well.
My tomatoes are beginning to come in which is very exciting. In addition to that my four cucumber plants are beginning to flower like crazy, so there’s a good chance I’ll be inundated with cukes. The situation is much the same with my pepper plants. I planted about seven different varieties of peppers, using both seeds and pre-grown plants.
Much to my surprise between seventeen and twenty plants popped out of the ground, so with any luck I’ll be crushed under the weight of habaneros, jalapenos, poblanos, serranos, a couple varieties of bells, cherry peppers and who knows what else. Who knew that you could just put plants in the ground and they’d start producing stuff?
If you look carefully– I know the pictures are fuzzy –you can see a couple of tomatoes on one of my plants.
I even have a nice harvest of lettuce and herbs that are just about ready, and my very first pepper (a cherry pepper) has appeared (visible at the very bottom of the page)! I have no idea what non-pickled cherry peppers might taste like, but I’m keen to find out.
Perhaps I should give up this philosophy and theory stuff altogether and just open a vegetable stand along the side of the road somewhere. After all, being the great fan I am of Epicurus and Lucretius it seems like a good idea to follow their advice of tending to ones garden. Of course, that’ll never happen.
If I find the time and motivation this week I’d like to write a post on the role that the concept of chaos plays in the history of philosophy and contemporary thought and another post on Badiou’s Logics of Worlds. Whether we are speaking of the creation myth in the Bible, the myth of the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, or chaos in Deleuze, Badiou, and any number of phenomenologists, there seems to be a marked tendency of thought to conceive the materiality of matter as a sort of pure chaotic flux without any internal structuring– or as Graham has put it “formatting” –principle within it. Following an Aristotlean protocol– though a protocol already present in the thought of Plato and perhaps even Parmenides –it seems as if matter is ineluctably conceived only in its negative, as the absence of form. This generates the entire problem or question of how form is generated or how matter comes to be “form-atted”. And, of course, because matter has already been conceived as formlessness, as the un-form-atted, as that which is without in-form-ation, the principle of form must come from elsewhere or outside of matter.
Just as we have the Little Dipper and the Big Dipper in the domain of stellar phenomena, where the question of in-form-ation emerges, we inevitably get either the Big Demiurge or the Little Demiurge as the principle or source of form. In other words, this model of matter or the materiality of matter comes to require reference to a transcendence to account for the genesis of form. In the case of the Big Demiurge, this would, of course, be the theological conception of God imposing order on the pure chaotic materiality of being. In the case of the Little Demiurge, this source of in-form-ation would be a subject of some sort, whether of the Kantian variety, the Husserlian variety, the Sartrean variety or some other sort. Matter itself is treated as being without its own structuring principle or as being without its own ordering principle. As Gilbert Simondon observed, this way of thinking most likely arises as a consequence of technocratic thought where humans impose form on a matter that is thought or conceived of as a passive recipient of structuration.
However, it is not difficult to discern this move as already necessitated by the Parmenidean declaration. Here the whole problem emerges in relation to Parmenides’ declaration that being is and non-being is not. Now, if being is and non-being is not, we very quickly run into the problem of difference. For if to differ is to be what something is not, then it follows that differences are not for as we know being is. Yet if differences are not, then it follows as a consequence that entities are not, for to be an entity is to differ.
Perhaps it would be no exaggeration to say that an entire destiny of Western thought already lies within Parmenides’ fateful decision. Here the issue would lie not with the declaration that being is, but rather with the identification of difference with negativity. For in identifying difference with negativity, Parmenides insures that the principle by which being is form-atted requires an exteriority, another agency, another principle through which difference is introduced. We thereby get the interminable story of the Big and Little Demiurge imposing form on the world. However, in identifying difference with the power of negativity, has not Parminedes fallen into what Roy Bhaskar calls the “Epistemic Fallacy” or the conflation of the epistemic and the ontological? Between difference as it functions in representation, recognition, or the cognitive activity of identification and difference as it is ontologically, there is a massive chasm. I say “This is a cherry pepper”, thereby identifying the pepper and distinguishing it from other types of peppers and plants. But it would be a mistake to suggest that the pepper itself, in being a cherry pepper, proceeds by way of negation in establishing or acting its being. The differences that compose the ongoing adventure of the pepper are absolutely positive, affirmative, and without any sort of negation. What is required in overcoming the Parmenidean consequence is a purely positive conception of difference that is not based on negation or negativity.
May 25, 2009 at 4:51 am
That’s great stuff about the big and little demi-urges.
I’m trying to think of non-fallacious ways one might go from the epistemic to the ontological in this very respect. . .
Or maybe it’s something like this. Schopenhauer argues that if difference is something that can only be posited with respect to the phenomenal realm (and he argues that Kant should be committed to that), then we are not justified in positing any differences in the noumenal realm.
If we stop at that point that’s still epistemic because it’s only making a claim about that which we are not justified in saying (I don’t know if that’s enough to get us to start reading the Baghivad Ghita the way Schopenhauer desired).
If we think of this in terms of your big demiurge/little demiurge thing, then this is approaching chaos/matter as negative theologians approach God.
That probably doesn’t work though. In “Beyond the Limits of Thought” Graham Priest argues that such maneuvers always end up doing the very thing Schopenhauer accuses Kant of, saying you can’t say certain things about that which is beyond our epistemic or conceptual or logical limits and then saying those very things (he is brilliantly able to apply versions of Russell’s paradox over and over again to show that philosophical attempts to place such limits constitutionally involve transgressing those very limits).
If Priest is correct then even the most resolute quietist/negative theological strategies to keep something like a Kantian or little demiurge version of your distinction are going to ultimately fail.
Which would be all to the good!
May 25, 2009 at 4:54 am
Oops, I don’t know why I just wrote “your distinction” in reference to the form/matter distinction.
Well there are worse things than being equated with Aristotle I guess, but I should make clear that I realize you are critiquing the distinction.
May 25, 2009 at 5:15 am
Jon,
I think that in many respects this is the key issue. Nonetheless, I think we can say a great deal metaphysically independent of questions of epistemic access. Take Hume’s problem. Epistemically he shows how we cannot know any causal claim with certainty because we cannot establish that the future must be like the past in a non-circular way. However, the issue of our knowledge of any particular causal relation is distinct, I think, from the issue of what causality is. Metaphysically we can still say a great deal about the nature of causality, I think, without raising questions of our access to any particular causal relation.
May 26, 2009 at 3:06 am
I just wanted to point out that someone like Hegel would say that your peppers do proceed by negation – they negate the nutrients which they take in and sublate them.
so, while I agree with you about the mistake involved in thinking difference as negation, I also think that Hegel’s great insight here is that negation is far more complex than one might think at first. ~~p does not equal p. the question then is whether Hegel manages to push negation to the point where he can think difference…
May 26, 2009 at 4:16 am
Caemeron,
Hegel is probably the most important philosopher that I know the least about.
Does he explicitly argue somewhere that the inference from ~~P to P is invalid? I’d be really interested in what he says.
Even if that’s more your take on it, I’d be interested to hear how you are conceiving of that in a Hegelian framework.
June 12, 2009 at 12:28 am
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