tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post4873091068180714217..comments2024-01-05T01:21:21.702-08:00Comments on <center>SPECULUM CRITICUM TRADITIONIS</center>: Speculative Realism as Kantian Deconstruction.skholiasthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-88939468164439839582010-02-15T22:01:28.216-08:002010-02-15T22:01:28.216-08:00Meillassoux actually does venture that a becoming ...Meillassoux actually does venture that a becoming God is possible; but any teleological drive towards God a la the Newage would be very foreign to him, since he eschews any thought of necessity in the whole. I mention a little of this-- a very little-- in my Badiou/McClain paper. You can read Meillassoux's paper here:<br />http://www.scribd.com/doc/23792245/Quentin-Meillassoux-Spectral-Dilemma<br />I agree with you, however-- the question of the Whole will not be dismissed. This is philosophy, after all.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-4304118241816978372010-02-15T10:17:48.197-08:002010-02-15T10:17:48.197-08:00Yes, I suspect you are right, 'speculative rea...Yes, I suspect you are right, 'speculative realists' do not want to talk about the Whole. But I also suspect that eventually they will.<br />The problem, as you say, involves 'generalizing Psychology'. Just as the German Idealists moved beyond Spinoza by making Spinoza's Substance = Spirit. And now, the free-floating (sub-philosophical) 'new-age' movement has stepped beyond this and said that this Substance/Spirit is (that is, all beings are) always (becoming) a self-conscious 'god'. - Now, how's that as an attempt to 'universalize the subject-object rift'?! <br />But before we get to this point it will have to be accepted that the Whole always becomes more than it is. (In the computer language 'C' we say that x = x + 1, so in a new metaphysics we would say that the Whole = the Whole + x; forever!) Of course, all this would make Psychology and Cosmogenesis exactly the same.<br />Heraclitus said the way up and the way down are the same.<br />This new way of thinking would maintain, perhaps even in the same gnomic spirit, that the way 'in' (to ones unfathomable depths) and the way 'out' (to an unreachable, always expanding Reality) are the Same.Joe Pomonomohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15799366948466532024noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-73430172660469724162010-02-15T09:29:18.380-08:002010-02-15T09:29:18.380-08:00a follow-up: An end-run around Nietzsche? Maybe n...a follow-up: An end-run around Nietzsche? Maybe not; Nietzsche was, as all too often, there ahead of us, "like the hedgehog in Montaigne." <br /><br />This from a notebook entry in 1886-87: "Fundamental question: whether the perspectival of the essence, and not just a form of regarding, a relation between various beings? Do the various forces stand in relation to one another, in such a way that this relation is tied to the viewpoint of perception? This would be possible if everything were essentially something that perceives." (see Heidegger's <i>Nietzsche: Will to Power as Art</i>; p 213).skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-19209424412774443332010-02-15T08:51:44.521-08:002010-02-15T08:51:44.521-08:00Susan,
thanks for the kind words and I'm glad...Susan, <br />thanks for the kind words and I'm glad to have you reading along. I look forward to your comments as you see fit.<br /><br /><br />Joe, <br />Thanks for the heads-up re. the link; I put the URL into the post but it looks like it needs to be pasted into the address bar. <br />Still owe you a real reply to yr last remarks; have been a bit backed up. <br /><br />Yes, "materializing" the linguistic turn is a good way to put what I see going on. Reading Merleau-Ponty today (the seminar on Nature) I saw it a different way: just as non-Euclidean geometry generalized the concept of space, making flat 3-D just one instance of a whole range of possible spaces; just as Copernicanism ultimately made the Earth and Sun just one of a whole range of possible star-systems; just as Darwinism makes the history of the biosphere one of a huge range of possible histories (as do various multiverse theories with the universe as a whole), so too Badiou and Harman in different modes universalize the subject-object rift. <br /><br />Badiou would not want to say that Cosmogenesis is Queen, sinnce for him it is an axiom that there can be no study of the Whole because there is no Whole. Likewise Harman, I think-- at least this is how I take his image of the bottomless sea with 'dormant' entities at the top... see his article Intentional Objects for Nonhumans, <br />http://www.europhilosophie.eu/recherche/IMG/pdf/intentional-objects.pdf<br /><br />And this comes fairly close to the point that troubles me. I am more of an out-of-season neoplatonist, and think that the Whole has been too easily shrugged off. Derrida had the good conscience to acknowledge that shrug it off though we might, the aspiration to grasp the Whole would keep coming back. It's 'human nature', you might say (against Badiou)... I'm perfectly willing to generalize this beyond humans. Maybe this amounts to your 'end run around Nietzsche', or maybe it's generalizing Psychology... I could see it either way. What do you think?skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-81353834622319011712010-02-15T02:07:37.305-08:002010-02-15T02:07:37.305-08:00Thanks for this.
The link to the anthology "T...Thanks for this.<br />The link to the anthology "The Speculative Turn" fails with the following error: <br /><br />----<br />Not Acceptable<br /><br />An appropriate representation of the requested resource /content/view/64/40/ could not be found on this server.<br /><br />Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.<br />----<br /><br />The book can be found here:<br /><br />http://www.re-press.org/content/blogsection/5/40/<br /><br />Now, my sense of things is that the annoyance with Kant stems from his (and also the [neo-]Kantians) tendency to make such a big deal out of the phenomena/noumena split. (After all, where would Nietzsche be without the closing chapter -'The Standpoint of the Ideal'- of Lange's "The History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance"?) Badiou's “differences are just what there is” seems to be the way to go. (I mean the way to go for Speculative Realism.) The other way merely, as you say, 'radicalizes' the “linguistic turn.” - Perhaps 'materializes' the “linguistic turn” is closer to what you mean?<br /><br />To me, what is at stake here is an attempt to make an end run around Nietzsche's 'Psychology is the Queen of the Sciences' remark. If the phenomena/noumena split is correct all we can ever know is the human reception of the "given"; that is to say, all we know is human fashion. If Badiou is right, “differences are just what there is”, then we are seeing 'reality' itself. That is, if Badiou is right, then cosmogenesis (the philosophical study of the Whole), not psychology, is the Queen of the Sciences!<br /><br />Is that what is at stake here?Joe Pomonomohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15799366948466532024noreply@blogger.com