Monthly Archives: April 2015

Avenues Into Philosophy

Listening to some academic philosophers discuss the question, “Why philosophy?”, I hear a kind of implicit response to a question not posed. Namely, “How can philosophy apply to the ‘real’ world?” where ‘real’ here means vocation. For undergraduate students taking a philosophy class, I can certainly see the relevance of posing and answer to this question. However, this kind of positioning of the question of philosophy can also be a bit of a subterfuge which leads away from the real questions and relevance of philosophy. To make a living teaching philosophy puts some constraints on a professional philosopher which cannot or perhaps should not be avoided. However, perhaps the unbridled truth is that philosophy does not have a very solid connection to the demands of practicality and capitalism. This in itself could lead one to begin to question capitalism or at least to clarify to oneself why one would think of capitalism as a kind of arbiter of the good. In any case, in this paper I simply want to lay out some of the basic pathways into philosophy.

Whether we like it or not or admit it or not, we all make synthetic judgments. In other words, we have some sort of unitary idea of how things came about and how they work. Let’s start our journey with two basic beginnings. We have unity and change. In the extreme would could have change which spawns off incessant differences. We would have forms or appearances without necessarily any intrinsic connection. It would be like a stream of consciousness. We would have apparitions appearing and disappearing without ever having a sense of a beginning or end or even a unifying idea of ‘objects’. This would be pure sensations. On the other hand, we could start with unities, wholes, objects, God, gods, laws of nature or physics and from this, necessarily, the notion of origins, beginnings (the Big Bang) which make the notions of unity possible. However, if everything starts as unities we may have problems explaining changes which appear to be totally detached from their unities. For example, if we start with the ideal triangle where the sum of its internal angles will always equal 180 degrees we may have a hard time with the observed fact that no existing triangle has ever had the sum of its internal angles equal 180 degrees. In the ‘real’ world (which is itself another unity) there is always some error which keeps the perfect form forever away. Socrates might call the ‘real’ world triangles shadows or apparitions. Since both unity and change pose solutions and contradictions let’s explore a new avenue: the synthesis of the two.

For the sake of this paper let’s say one possibility for synthesis is what I will call the ‘bag of tools’ approach. In this approach ourselves, the universe, existence is the culmination of a collection of tools we have acquired. This is not so unlike the condition where eventually 100 monkeys, given enough time, could build the Empire State building. Somewhat like Nietzsche’s metaphysics of eternal recurrence of the same, if time is infinite and matter is finite eventually any and every possibility will happen again and again. Since one of those already determined, limited and bounded (in advance) possibilities is 100 monkeys building the Empire State building eventually the building will appear. Notice that now we are facing two more avenues: randomness or causation. Nietzsche’s solution evokes the random. There is no apparent casual connection to effects only happenstance given unlimited time and limited space. Of course, modern physics tells us that both time and space is created by the expansion of the universe so unlimited time may be problematic. Also, limited mass may be intuitively correct as ‘what must be’ but this is not a positive proof only a stand-in for the lack of a positive proof. This we can call a negative proof. If there are infinite universes as some have postulated in recent physics, then at the least we have an alternative ‘negative’ explanation which has no positive proof as of yet.

Evolution embodies the notion that we have over time acquired a ‘bag of tools’ which has culminated in language, history (the knowledge of), science and even a more ‘primitive’ beginning in religion. The ‘bag of tools’ approach is the proverbial “pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps” intuition. This approach depends on certain sets of given conditions necessitating or causing determinate outcomes. Of course, the problem with this is the old ‘chicken and egg’ dilemma. In order to support this theory we have to keep substantiating our ‘given conditions’ so the effects we want to explain will ‘naturally’ follow. This means that this way of thinking depends on origin and beginning. However, if we follow the path of evolution back to single cells, bacteria, molecules, atoms and all the way to the Big Bang we have a problem. It seems as if our reliance on the beginning has come to an end. This presents a dilemma: our strategy of beginnings has collapsed in on itself. We are left reeling with only a negative proof that there must be a beginning before the Big Bang.

Now, we have come full circle to the other approach than the ‘bag of tools’ approach. This approach is the ‘God’ approach. By ‘God’ here we include gods, mysticism, faith. This approach does not require a ‘proof’ negative or positive, only a belief. God cannot be subject to ‘proof’ or the laws of physics since God created those things. Note that we have already made a critical distinction: things and non-things. This will be useful latter. For the ‘God’ approach we cannot explicitly rely on knowledge since ‘God’ also created knowledge. Knowledge cannot lead us to God but ‘revelation’ can. Revelation is a form of knowledge which cannot be falsified. It cannot be falsified because it begins in faith. The downside of faith is dogma. The problem with dogma is a vice. In modern terms we call this vice narcissism. In older times it was known as the sin of pride. The person of faith will always have to straddle the precipice of faith and dogma. Proof was the apparent solution to this dilemma. However, the history of science is no stranger to dogma and faith. The claim of the validity of science over ‘god’ is that science can be falsifiable whereas ‘God’ can never be false in any sense for the believer. In religion false gods are always measured by the true ‘God’ whatever form that takes on.

The incestuous relationship of knowledge and language to ‘God’ or science has always presented a conundrum to philosophers. Aristotle thought of this dilemma in terms of forms and being. The essence of form is change. Form has appearance. Appearance is mutable. All appearances in the ‘real’ world change over time. Yet, we have a notion of stuff being the same over time in some sense. Time as an intuition, not a relative idea, does not change. So, even in the midst of changing forms we have a phenomenon which apparently does not change and even seems to validate sameness: time. Well, that intuition is not exactly true since Einstein. Now we know, counter to intuition, that time can change. However, as Heidegger points out this intuition of time as linear and always the same is actually abstract. This notion is really a historical development.

Earlier civilizations thought of time as more like a quality than a quantity. The early Greeks had the word kairos and chronos. The Greeks observed that what Heidegger termed ‘lived time’ had a stretch. When one is feeling joyful or elated time feels like it moves quickly. When one is bored or having anxiety one feels that time is dragging on. There is also sacred time. For the ancients sacred time had a feel of vastness, later thought as ‘eternal’. Kairos, for the Greeks, was the supreme time, the fullness of time, the moment of all moments. Chronos was a sequence of ‘now’ moments. It is what we intuit as time contemporaneously and project it as never ending or infinite. Heidegger thought this notion of time as vulgar time. So, if our modern intuition of time is actually abstract, not in line with relativity, and not like we actually experience time we need to ask ourselves a couple questions: 1) How is it that intuition can be ‘fooled’ by history? – 2) What is it about us than can make ‘abstract’ time into what we think as ‘real’ time?

If intuition can be fooled, can revelation also be fooled? We are at the least left with an insecurity about the very nature of knowledge itself. If knowledge is subject to mutability it cannot be thought as ‘true’ at least in an absolute sense. Knowledge is always provisional. It is circumstantial. It has the real possibility of being false. If knowledge can be false what is the difference between knowledge and the chirping of a bird? This is the beginning of skepticism and existential doubt. We are thrown back upon our assumption of ‘truth’. How does this insecurity of knowledge effect our intuition of unity, of sameness, of God, of our founded-ness in the world? Are we reductively and merely products of change, of history? Are we accidental? How does this affect our sense of meaning? Does meaning have to be eternal to be true? As we live phenomenally, do we have a real or true sense of unity, of sameness. Surely we are not just a stream of consciousness in the way most of us experience ourselves. If we were simply to stand back and observe this sense of unity in ourselves we could be informed by at the least its appearance. Existence as we know it, as it can only be known with the word ‘existence’ does imply some sense of immutability. At minimum, it implies a relative differentiation between change and sameness. This was the problem Aristotle, in particular, was consumed with.

In the tradition of Aristotle, Heidegger also raised anew the question of Being in his monumental work “Being and Time”. All of us assume we know what being means but upon closer inspection this intuition appears to be one of the most empty of all meaning. We act as if it were absolutely ‘real’ and ‘true’ but try to sit down and write out what you think it is. Inevitably, most folks will just end up with a circular argument, “it is true just because it is (true)”. This is called a tautology. The root of tautology is Identity. Identity must always be ‘true’ because it can only ever only restate itself. The interpretive circle called the hermeneutical circle can only always and ever reaffirm itself like faith. However, in phenomenology our method is always to step back and ask what does this affinity in us show us about ourselves? Well, certainly it shows that we are historical in our being-ness. It also shows us that we cannot not think of ‘true’ or ‘real’ because for one, pragmatically we must act as if there is ‘real’ or ‘true’ to be in the world. The ‘true’ and ‘real’ seems to dog us like a shadow. In spite of this we seem to have a kind of poverty about absolute knowledge (unless of course you are a Hegelian). So now we have a lived, phenomenal sense of the ‘real’ or ‘true’ and we also (as is the case for the notion of being) have a kind of emptiness about what the heck it is. We must act as if it is true (pun?) in the face of our own fragility and mortality.

This then is how philosophy begins…

The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

Republicans are calling out the Clintons for not disclosing all the donors to their charity foundation. Let’s see, what party to this accusation has put all the resources and money into making it easy for political donors to not disclose their identity? What party bought and won the Citizen’s United Decision?1 If there is quid pro quo in the Clinton’s case, a vigilantes group shouting hang-um high and tying to reap the political benefits of gossip is not the way to settle it. We have ample law enforcement groups in the Federal Government to discover and prosecute any violation of law. Of course, if you conveniently have been conditioned to hate or distrust the Federal Government then you probably have also decided another source is more reliable and trustworthy like Fox News for instance. Certainly there must be more checks and balances in Rupert Murdoch’s organizations than anything the framers of our Constitution could have set up. After all Rupert set up the largest collection of gossip media on the planet so he must know something about facts right?

I really do believe the Republican’s dominate rhetorical strategy is to publicly disavow the Darwinian, survival of the fittest,2 ‘free’ market strategies they employ and shift any righteous indignation from the less survivable types towards any ideologies which threaten the conqueror’s dominance. They actually blame the advocates of these ‘dangerous ideologies’ for the very activities they employ covertly and overtly much more effectively and with much greater impact. So, for example, Hillary Clinton is accused of taking money for a charity organization where she receives none of the proceeds for some alleged quid pro quo bribe. She did not benefit from these contributions directly but other, less fortunate folks benefited from them. Allegations of indirect financial benefit have no basis in fact but convenient election year politics by a factually challenged author.3 All the while, the political party which consistently aligns themselves with big business has effectively changed laws which benefit their benefactors.

One such effort the Republicans got through in the Clinton administration deregulated the financial market. From the Clinton years through the Bush years, the sub-prime loans these derivatives where partially based on went from millions of dollars to multiples of billions of dollars. The Bush administration continually resisted efforts to reign in sub-prime lending by gutting regulatory oversight.4 This directly resulted in the collapse of these ‘free range’ financial derivatives effecting the entire planet during the Great Recession. The failures of mortgages alone in the U.S. could have never had this large of an impact on the world economy without the multiplier effect of the deregulated derivatives. Yet, the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation blamed sub-prime loans in the U.S. not financial deregulation even though the bi-partisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission found financial deregulation to be a major factor in the collapse.5

In addition, Republican intelligentsia know if they can convince the slaves they are free they can suppress rebellion and trouble makers. They cater to the aspirational desires of the less fortunate with an illusion of financial success and freedom all the while enacting laws and protections which make it harder for the less fortunate to realize their dreams and easier for the most fortunate to protect and increase their gains. It will be interesting to see how long this charade can go on before it begins to wear thin and it dawns on folks that perhaps the ‘free’ market is more like Santa Clause than reality. One thing we can certainly ascertain that Marx seemed to have missed completely is that people appear to be much more disposed towards aspirational, wish-fulfillment6 than necessity.7 To die without hope is worse than to die without food. It is too bad that this dismal bi-polar choice is also a produced illusion as the tools of a market economy and democracy and fairness do not have to be essentially at odds.

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1 Formalism: When a Lie Becomes Truth (really)

2 Free Market Either/Or Government?

3 The Washington Post, Rachel Maddow explores ‘Clinton Cash’ book’s connection to New York Times, Washington Post

4 The Credit Crisis: The Bush Administration’s Record of Denial and Regulatory Neglect

5 Latest Observations on the Housing and Economic Crisis

6 Aspirational, wish-fulfillment is not rooted in the material conditions of human labor and overcoming alienation. It has no practical basis in need but in wish, phantasma. In this sense, fantasy becomes the nexus of wish and fulfillment. It is rooted in the concrete production of abstract possibility for the implicit purpose of perpetual illusion, the mirage of utopia. In this case, Sisyphus did not roll the huge boulder up the steep hill for punishment but for reward which can never quite be realized. The machinery of this production is built on the ever deferred pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Immediate need is marginalized for the promise of unbridled success. This notion makes Marxist alienation into fulfillment. In effect, it reverses the dialectic of materialism into a totalizing dialect of spiritualism. It diminishes the negative effects of alienation into non-existence, unconscious sublimation which favors the ‘truth’ of the desire for completion over the concrete struggle for existence. The collective and constant reaffirmation of fantastic aspirations replace the Marxist dialectic of aspiration and alienation. Perhaps, this could be thought in terms of Marx’s critique of Hegelian Idealism but with the ‘higher order’ production of non-falsifiable and totalizing ideals and desires for capital utopia replacing the Hegelian Idea (Begriff) and inverting the Marxist analysis of alienation into a collective virtue.

“True heteronomy begins when obedience ceases to be obedient consciousness and becomes an inclination. The supreme violence is in that supreme gentleness. To have a servile soul is to be incapable of being jarred, incapable of being ordered. The love for the master fills the soul to such an extent that the soul no longer takes its distances. Fear fills the soul to such an extent that one no longer sees it, but sees from its perspective.”
Levinas, E. (2012-12-06). Collected Philosophical Papers (Phaenomenologica) (Kindle Locations 1066-1069). Springer Netherlands. Kindle Edition.

7 What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

“Personhood” Amendment in Colorado

If you oppose the latest attempt by a radical minority in Colorado to continually usurp the will of the voters, please send your elected representative an email and let them know. You can use any or all of the letter I wrote to my state representative and senator below…

 

I am writing to ask that you oppose Senate Bill 15-268, A BILL FOR AN ACT CONCERNING OFFENSES AGAINST AN UNBORN CHILD. This bill is a yet another blatant attempt by the anti-abortion folks to force their dogma into government policy. The bill contains the following description:

THE TERM “PERSON” INCLUDES AN UNBORN CHILD AT EVERY STAGE OF GESTATION FROM CONCEPTION UNTIL LIVE BIRTH.

This bill and others like it should be struck down by good legislative stewardship for the following reasons:

The voters in Colorado have voted against these “personhood” bills for some time. This is the will of the people.

During weeks 1 and 2 of gestation a woman “is not yet pregnant”. Also, week 5 is when the heart and brain begin to develop in a fetus. The science tells us that certainly without a brain we cannot call the fetus human or a person. See Fetal Development

The Supreme Court has continually reaffirmed that a fetus is not a person if it cannot survive outside the womb. Any law which goes against the solid, historical jurisprudent precedence will ultimately cost the Coloradan taxpayer needlessly for legal expenses.

Any aggravated assault of a pregnant woman already caries criminal penalties which include life in prison. This law is not necessary and a blatant attempt to erode the will of the people.

Since the beginning of the gallop pole in 1975, only 20% of our citizens believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances and 80% believe that abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances even though some of the latter folks call themselves “pro-life”. See Gallop Pole

I believe all these facts indicate that responsible, legislative representation should resist any and all attempts of a radical minority to legislate what is ultimately their religious beliefs.

Best Regards,

Breaking News From Fox News

Hillary Clinton’s charity foundation took money from bad guys to help children. The bad guys could have spent the money on bad deeds so it was wrong that Hillary took that money to help kids. Also, her foundation took money from foreign countries that discriminate against women to fund programs that reduce discrimination against women. “That is just wrong” a Fox News spokesman told us.

Additionally, Fox News reports that while Hillary may ‘say’ she is for the lower 90% and against the upper 10% of income earners she is really part of the upper 10% herself so “how in the world could she ever understand the plight of the lower 90% as Fox News, the Republican Party and the upper 10% which makes up the most of the financial support of the Republican Party do”?

Fox News also reports that the total mess the Democrats have made of foreign policy and the economy is not how the former President left it when he left the office. It was the leadership of the former President that let the world know the United States is in charge as Afghanistan and Iraq proved. Also, the top 10% actually made more income during the Great Recession that was started during the Bush administration and the trickle down jobs started by the job creators simply made the current President look good but was really a direct result of successful wall street, free market, policies advocated by the Republican Party. They also went on to say that on their watch they proved that they would go up against corporations to big to fail as Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns discovered before they were bailed out. It just so happened that the former President’s policies to help poor folks get houses bankrupted the world with wacky financial tools that the Republicans pushed through Congress in financial deregulation during the Clinton years.

An unofficial spokesman for Fox News who did not want to be disclosed told us that thanks to the Citizens United Decision of the Supreme Court, wealthy Republicans have secretly converged to finance the campaigns of all the Republican Candidates to make the public think all the conservative voices are being heeded by the Republican Party but their plan is to strategically pull the funding so their candidate of choice, as yet undisclosed, can sail through their primary process and win in the general election with more moderate claims and high indebtedness to their benefactors.

Note: In the interest of fair and accurate reporting all the news above was really fabricated by a commy, liberal unless you think it actually made Republicans look good in which case it was totally true.

An Interlude to Anaximander

Philosophy Series Contents (to be updated with each new installment)

Philosophy Series 1 – Prelude to the Philosophy Series

Philosophy Series 2 – Introduction

Philosophy Series 3 – Appendix A, Part 1

Philosophy Series 4 – The Pre-Socratics – Hesiod

Philosophy Series 5 – A Detour of Time

Philosophy Series 6 – The Origin

Philosophy Series 7 – Eros

Philosophy Series 8 – Thales

Philosophy Series 9 – An Interlude to Anaximander

Philosophy Series 10 – On the Way to Anaximander: Language and Proximity

Philosophy Series 11 – Aristotle and Modernity: The Eternal and Science

Philosophy Series 12 – Levinas and the Problem of Metaphysics

Philosophy Series 13 – On Origin

Philosophy Series 14 – George Orwell and Emmanuel Levinas Introspective: Socialism and the Other

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An Interlude to Anaximander

Someone must have already stated this elsewhere so for lack of citation let me reiterate, there are many academics but few scholars. Scholars attain a breadth of mastery that few academics ever realize. Analogously, most folks are philosophers in one way or another but few find concrete paths from philosophy to existentia, actual existence. This why philosophers in modernity from existentialists to post-existentialism has focused philosophy on the concrete fact of death. Of course, death, itself, also holds the possibility for abstraction. This is why Heidegger, for example, is swift to frame death in terms of “my death”. Death is not just an end but in non-negotiable ways “my end”. When limit is thought in terms of ‘mineness’, something passionate and irreplaceable comes to the fore. Religions are also able to harness this ‘something’ in concrete displays of passion and ‘faith’. For Kierkegaard, faith is the absolute passion of existence. While academic philosophers, spurred on by the quest for recognition and therefore, economic reward, are goaded by the continuing requirement for sustenance, they are also pricked by the constraints of their specific traditions. Their freedom must end in the horizon of other’s genius. Thus, the academic is born. However, existence persists and places on each the necessity of an existential answer. However, this ‘answer’ takes form, as religion, science, morality or polis/political, denial, it must be responded to, existence therefore evokes. Evocation has long fascinated the phantasma of human imagination as magic, sorcery, desire, wish-fulfillment and even love.

In undertaking this philosophy series, I am continually facing the prospects of pure academia or existentialism. For me, philosophy dies in pure academia. Philosophy finds value and virtue in its fundamental evocation. Whenever philosophy becomes instantiated in ‘isness’ or perhaps as Levinas might sway us to, il ya, it can become obsession or insomniac. It loses a certain kind of weightiness, a certain kind of necessary ‘evocativeness’ is deferred. In the loss of limit, the bounds of ‘mineness’ can be displaced, and thus, the possibility for radical alterity. The ‘end’, this peras, was also noted by Anaximander and many before including Hesiod. Peras, simply translated as end or limit is only the beginning of its etymological intonations. The early Greeks as many archaic traditions recognized change, transition, mutation of form. The Ionians were fascinated with the notion that transitions were not magical apparitions, popping in and out of existence but had some substratum, some basis of mutability. Science and religion have been intrigued ever since. Anaximander, perceptively enough also echoing other archaic traditions thought of these limitations as intensified by re-occurrence of some sense of the same, the dissolution and reemergence of like forms. Iteration, when amplified infinitely by a notion of the same, persistence and unity through time, becomes a-peras (apeiron), the negation of limitation. It becomes intense, imposing, non-negotiable…existential as my being-towards-an-end which cannot grab hold of what this means. This inability to be able is cast without limit, without understanding in the midst of understanding. This type of overflowing itself could be thought as a beckoning of exteriority. This intensity thought in Greek terms is kairos. Kairos as the beckoning moment of answer, necessitates and requires, completion, finality, condensation, movement and action. As such, it is qualitative. It overflows itself as qualitative. In this moment, existence is borne and born.

The urgency and necessity of this evocation did not escape the keen observations of the Greeks. Nor has it yet escaped the gaze of science’s Orphic vision. Necessity is certainly embodied in biological evolution. Survival, as utmost, is dependent on successful adaptations. Could it be that habit as specific to an individual organism, the repetition of successfully completed iterations where ‘success’ is thought in terms of survival, of tarrying to the next iteration, can find some genetic bridge over successive generations of ritualistic practice into what we think as ‘instinct’. Can ‘instinct’ be ingested into DNA? Just as Nobel Prize winner Barbara Mcclintock found the cellular reflection of environment into itself as equally primordial to the cells’ internal structure, could it be that ‘adaptation’ is the innate struggle (polemus) of the internal and the external to come to stasis, to a temporal completion of ‘moment’ when neither impose its form on the other but mutually respond and co-habitat with the other. In genetic encoding then this moment becomes ‘physical’, ‘biological’ and ‘chemical’. It also becomes ‘physics’ as atomic or better sub-atomic.

In modern physics we have the notions of isolated, closed and open systems. Isolated systems can neither pass energy or matter. Closed systems can pass energy but not matter. Closed systems in classic mechanics would be considered an isolated system in thermodynamics. Isolated systems do not exist in actuality. Open systems can pass both energy and matter. In isolated physical systems we say that momentum is conserved. In an isolated system we can account for change, transition, mutation and thus energy is conserved. However, in an open systems we have a loss of accountability we call entropy that shows itself as error. The isolated system is thought yet again as the Hegelian dialectic of internal and external, the particular and the universal. The isolated system demonstrates a kind of respite, a cessation of strife, of the temporal tearing, incessant bubbling of sub-atomic particles, a transformation (aufhebung), where, what Hesiod termed, a ‘yawning gap’, chaos, subsides and the moment of archy, of origin, of birth, opens up genesis, genetics, genet’. This moment is a kind of equilateral-ism, congruency, a pause thought as stasis. Aristotle’s discussions of actuality (actualitas Latin, energeia Greek) or work as what persists and potential (potentia Latin, dunamis Greek) or possibility as what could be, find their stasis in motion or kinetic (kinesis) as the actuality of potentiality, as the persistence of possibility. Temporality and motion, known in Classic Greece, is conserved and preserved by persisting through time by limitation, by form. A temporal wholeness or completion as ousia, being, is evoked from apeiron, perhaps Hesiod’s ‘before the gods’ of chaos. Of necessity, this temporal pause to the incessant change of form, is first made possible by a terminus, a telos, a limit or boundary. The existential weight of evocation, the ‘must’ of action, cannot be ignored or denied without only re-affirming it. Any turning away is yet again a turning towards as the existential moment of existence must obey a call from without as a singularity, as a persisting form cast upon the void, the yawning gap.

The isolated system in physics is always a kind of existence creating moment. It is imposed by boundary and limit, arrangement and designation. However, closed systems, as the perfect triangle, are idealizations. Any isolated system in reality leak and absorb information in the larger context of an open system. Isolated systems in the real world are intrinsically and essentially effected by externality, they have entropy. Information cannot be completely recovered in an isolated system. Information must be truncated in the idealization of an isolated system. The loss is irretrievable in an isolated system context. Typically, the universe is thought in the motif of a closed system. A closed system universe could interact with other energies, perhaps from bubbling multi-verses or multi-dimensional factors but not with any ability to transfer mass. This then gives rise to a metaphysical question, is the notion of the absolute open, closed or isolated? Or, could it be that, the notion of the absolute is an iteration, a singularity, a tautology of a primordial limit in an isolated system context? Some might say this question, devoid of existential import, may as well ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

In modern physics, a singularity such as the infamous ‘black hole’ is a margin from the isolated system con-text. It is a parenthesis, a deferment until logos, understanding, can finally recover its enigma. Is information conserved or lost in a black hole? Has physics reached an absolute limit in a black hole? The black hole is a unity. It is not a solely a swarming buzz of sub-atomic particles popping in and out of existence. It is not a formless chaos. It is in stasis, driven by necessity to be, and yet it’s being is an absolute limit in a multitude of ways…more importantly, to understanding, the very possibility of understanding. Physics has in recent times brought to the fore more and more staggering limitations of itself with the ‘God Particle’, super-symmetry, multi-verses, higher order dimensions, dark matter and dark energy and brought with these, reflective questions of knowledge itself. Not that there is an alternative to knowledge but it has brought to the fore the necessity of knowledge and at the same time it’s absolute limit. Absolute limitation in physics mathematically become singularities. Singularities are nonsensical, Alice in Wonderland. While ‘bad science’ is thought to end in a proliferation of singularities, they cannot be ignored as they pose fundamental questions which defy ‘reality’, the light of, even the possibility of, knowledge and as such convey an unsettling existential angst.

Mass and energy are inextricably linked just as Aristotle’s thinking of actuality and potentiality are linked. Now with the proof of the Higgs Boson we have a particle ‘field’ whose origin appears in the first moments of the Big Bang which determines and necessitates mass. It transforms massless energy to relative degrees of stickiness, of clumping, of resistance, weightiness; mass. This boson imposes an ir-refusable limit to matter. Thus, the name ‘God Particle’.

The point of this divergence into modern phusis is to show that the import of ‘my death’ never achieves an ‘outside’. It can only converge in upon itself into a singularity. It cannot retain information without irretrievable loss. Even more so, we see this phenomena everywhere we look in phusis. This is the setting in essence of ancient Greek inquiry. The Greeks did not have the apathy of centuries of abstractions into being. They felt the import originally with other archaic cultures and the interruption of the raw gap, the chaos, not yet historically named but recognized in imposing enigma. They understood the transformations of forms as mutations of hot and cold, damp and dry, atom and void. They thought with resoluteness and determination the absolute connotations of limitation, of death, of knowledge. These differences could not easily rest in stasis as being and nothingness, self and other, as pure, self-determining Idea. These differences brought them to the abyss that looks back into our souls, beyond Dread to a gap, an otherness not captured by thought but intensified as the moment of dissolution and birth, of limit in which even light cannot penetrate or escape.1

Philosophy Series 10 – On the Way to Anaximander: Language and Proximity

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1 The next installment in this series will probably take some more time for research and thought as the topic of Anaximander brings with it enormous scholarly attention and far reaching possibilities for departure. There may be more preliminary discussions before I really start with the textual, philological and canonical discussion.