Category Archives: Philosophy

χαίρετε, τέκνα Διός, δότε δ᾽ ἱμερόεσσαν ἀοιδήν.
κλείετε δ᾽ ἀθανάτων ἱερὸν γένος αἰὲν ἐόντων,
οἳ Γῆς τ᾽ ἐξεγένοντο καὶ Οὐρανοῦ ἀστερόεντος,
Νυκτός τε δνοφερῆς, οὕς θ᾽ ἁλμυρὸς ἔτρεφε Πόντος.
εἴπατε δ᾽, ὡς τὰ πρῶτα θεοὶ καὶ γαῖα γένοντο
καὶ ποταμοὶ καὶ πόντος ἀπείριτος, οἴδματι θυίων,
ἄστρα τε λαμπετόωντα καὶ οὐρανὸς εὐρὺς ὕπερθεν
οἵ τ᾽ ἐκ τῶν ἐγένοντο θεοί, δωτῆρες ἐάων
ὥς τ᾽ ἄφενος δάσσαντο καὶ ὡς τιμὰς διέλοντο
ἠδὲ καὶ ὡς τὰ πρῶτα πολύπτυχον ἔσχον Ὄλυμπον.
ταῦτά μοι ἔσπετε Μοῦσαι, Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσαι
ἐξ ἀρχῆς, καὶ εἴπαθ᾽, ὅ τι πρῶτον γένετ᾽ αὐτῶν.
ἦ τοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ᾽, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
Γαῖ᾽ εὐρύστερνος, πάντων ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ
ἀθανάτων, οἳ ἔχουσι κάρη νιφόεντος Ὀλύμπου,
Τάρταρά τ᾽ ἠερόεντα μυχῷ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης,
ἠδ᾽ Ἔρος, ὃς κάλλιστος ἐν ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι,
λυσιμελής, πάντων δὲ θεῶν πάντων τ᾽ ἀνθρώπων
δάμναται ἐν στήθεσσι νόον καὶ ἐπίφρονα βουλήν.
ἐκ Χάεος δ᾽ Ἔρεβός τε μέλαινά τε Νὺξ ἐγένοντο:
Νυκτὸς δ᾽ αὖτ᾽ Αἰθήρ τε καὶ Ἡμέρη ἐξεγένοντο,
οὓς τέκε κυσαμένη Ἐρέβει φιλότητι μιγεῖσα.
Γαῖα δέ τοι πρῶτον μὲν ἐγείνατο ἶσον ἑαυτῇ
Οὐρανὸν ἀστερόενθ᾽, ἵνα μιν περὶ πάντα καλύπτοι,
ὄφρ᾽ εἴη μακάρεσσι θεοῖς ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεί.
γείνατο δ᾽ Οὔρεα μακρά, θεῶν χαρίεντας ἐναύλους,
Νυμφέων, αἳ ναίουσιν ἀν᾽ οὔρεα βησσήεντα.
ἣ δὲ καὶ ἀτρύγετον πέλαγος τέκεν, οἴδματι θυῖον,
Πόντον, ἄτερ φιλότητος ἐφιμέρου: αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα
Οὐρανῷ εὐνηθεῖσα τέκ᾽ Ὠκεανὸν βαθυδίνην²

Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are for ever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear. Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honors amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus³. Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning [archê, ἀρχῆς], tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽].

First of all Chaos came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽]; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all [the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus], and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos [ρεβος, the god of deep darkness, shadow] and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither [the god of upper air, the mist of bright, glowing light, home of the gods] and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean”⁴

This is the beginning of the Hesiod’s Theogony, the birth of the gods, the an-archic, origin of origins, written around 700 BC, more than 2700 years ago. Hesiod was a poet and a contemporary of Homer. The Theogony was probably influenced by Hittite and Babylonian cultural trade influences which were known to have happened a few centuries earlier.⁵ The Theogony was an early and important influence on latter Greek thinking. The traditional understanding of chaos is that it is the separation of the earth and sky. Cornford⁶ and Kirk and Raven⁷ understood the cosmogonic, mythopoeic Theogony as another telling of the Babylonian⁸ and Hebrew⁹ cosmogony with regard to the separation of earth and sky.¹⁰ Both of those cosmogonic accounts refer to a separation of the earth and sky at the beginning of creation. The Babylonian and Hebrew accounts start with a propositional statement of assertion, apophantis, about cosmogenesis (i.e., In the beginning God created the heaven the earth). However, the Theogony starts with Hesiod’s interrogative, the openness of his question to the Muses.

Hesiod asks a question of the Muses. The Muses are female goddesses. They are the birth, origin and keepers of art and knowledge.¹¹ Hesiod asks which of the gods was the first that “came-to-be”. A conundrum is embedded in Hesiod’s question. Namely, how can the first come to be? The Muses were fond of play and gaiety. As such, they reply in kind to Hesiod that “truly” and “verily” the first, Chaos, came-to-be. In the very first reply to Hesiod, the ‘truth’ is at play in the Muses. The Muses here are speaking as one even though there are nine Muses. Even in this, there is already play of the ‘one and the many’, harmony and cacophony, the doubling of the signature¹². What is more, Hesiod’s question preconditions the answer given by the ‘one and the many’ Muses. Hesiod asks, “from the beginning [archê, ἀρχῆς], tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be [genet’, γένετ᾽]”?

Let’s take a closer look at the Muses reply to Hesiod…

First of all Chaos came-to-be

ή τοι μεν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ’;

Etoi men protista Xaos genet’;

The gist of the words is:

ἤτοι – now surely, truly, verily¹³

μέν – indeed, of a truth¹⁴

πρώτιστα – the very first¹⁵

χάος – chaos, gap, yawn (as wide open), void¹⁶

γένετ’ – come into a new state of being¹⁷

‘The very first’, πρώτιστα (protista), comes from the Doric-Aeolic dialects of ancient Greece. It was also used in Hesiod’s era known as the Poetic or Homeric. The Aeolic dialect is more archaic than the Attic-Ionic dialect used by later Greek philosophers. Just as we have many words in English that come from older languages, the language of ancient Greece also comes from older languages and a confluence of dialects (for a more detailed discussion of ancient Greek dialects and philosophers see Appendix A, Part 1). Πρώτιστα (protista) here is an adjective, singular, feminine and nominative¹⁸ of protistos, the very first, superlative of protos, first. It is where we get ‘proto’ as in prototype.

Chaos (χάος) is the Greek word χάος. It is not confusion, un-differentiation or an unbounded space or place.¹⁹ It is a gap, yawn, breach, separation or void. As such, it implies radical differentiation. However, it is not space as later philosophers thought it to be. Kirk and Raven made the case that chaos as space, water, or disorder was not Hesiod’s idea but a later notion in Greek philosophy.

Three interpretations may be rejected immediately: (i) Aristotle (Phys. I, 208 b 29) took it to mean space. But this concept is much later than the Theogony, occurring first, probably, in Pythagoras, then more clearly in Zeno of Elea, and most clearly in Plato’s Timaeus. (ii) The Stoics followed Zeno of Citium (e.g. SVF I 103), who perhaps took the idea from Pherecydes of Syros (DK 7BIa), in deriving xaos from χέεσθαι and therefore interpreting it as what is poured, i.e. water. (iii) The common modern sense of chaos as disorder can be seen e.g. in Lucian Amores 32, where Hesiod’s xaos is interpreted as disordered, shapeless matter. This, again, may be Stoic in origin.²⁰

Yένετ’ (genet’) is a verb, 3rd person, singular, middle voice used from the early Homeric and Ionic eras. The middle voice is not in modern Greek or modern languages. It denotes a mutual and simultaneous reciprocity of the subject acting on and being acted upon by something or someone. The middle voice only survives in a few languages other than ancient Greek such as Albanian, Bengali, Fula, Tamil, Sanskrit, Icelandic and Swedish. In this case γένετ’ denotes chaos acted on being and chaos was acted upon by being in the phrase ‘came to be’. Yένετ’ comes from γίγνομαι – come into a new state of being²¹ – γένετ’ is also used in γενετικός (genetikos), “genitive” and that from γένεσις (genesis, “origin, source, beginning, nativity, generation, production, creation”), from γίγνεσθαι second aor. γενέσθαι (“to be produced, become, be”).²² Note: This is also were we get our modern day word ‘genetics’. Yένετ’ and archê will become important concepts for ancient Greek philosophers a short time later (this will be discussed more later in the series).

The Muses tell us that being does not arise from ‘the one’ or from an unchanging, unmoved singularity as in monism nor even from a plurality. Being or ‘isness’ refuses consolidation, summation, absolute closure as given in some metaphysical ‘One’ or some synthesis of being and non-being (or nothingness). The Muses tell us that the gap, radical differentiation came to, acted on, ‘isness’ and that the gap, radical differentiation came upon, was acted upon, by ‘isness’. One important consequence of this is that at the beginning of the ancient Greek quest for phusis, for being, radical differentiation requires otherness first for being. Likewise, otherness is acted upon by being. However, the action upon otherness is a retreat; it is not an equivocal reciprocity which reduces to the same. It is not some kind of Hegelian ‘lifting up’ of the abstractions of being and nothing (aufhebung) into becoming and thus, concrete determinacy from abstraction.²³ This effect on otherness of being is privation, a withdrawal which eludes presence, form and idea. This notion of privation is key to understanding the struggle (polemus, strife, war) at work inside ancient Greek thinkers. Becoming is given by differentiation and radical otherness which cannot be brought fully to presence. Otherness is accentuated²⁴ and highlighted by being in its absence, both abstractly and concretely, in theory (θεωρία) and practice (πρᾶξις), in seeing and acting in its relentless refusal of being.²⁵

The Muses, in notably un-myth like language, do not declare a god as the first. Instead, in one voice they playfully undue their unison by first directly answering Hesiod’s question that chaos was first. The unity of the Muse’s voice is undone in their answer of the first, the primal lack of unity and presence. Chaos in this case is given as differentiation without prerequisite. The gap, separation, breach or void begs the question – between what? What does chaos hold open or serve as a gap? For traditional scholarship, the answer is earth and sky. However, the noted scholar Mitchell Miller points out:

What is it, however, that the coming-into-being of Chaos differentiates from what? It is clear that one side of the gap is ‘broad-breasted earth’, which comes to be ‘next’, immediately after Chaos. What is the other side? Cornford’s response is to look outside the text, on the one hand to cosmogonic myth in a host of archaic cultures, on the other hand to sixth and fifth century Greek poetry. In the latter, in particular in Ibycus, Bacchylides, and Aristophanes, he finds uses of xãow to refer to the space between the upper sky and the ground, the space through which birds fly. In the former, especially in Hebrew and Babylonian myth, he finds stories of the formation of the world through an original separation of earth and sky. And so he proposes that the coming-into-being of Chaos is the separation of earth and sky.6 Does the text support this possibility? Cornford finds both corroboration and apparent resistance. Self-evident corroboration, he thinks, is offered by line 700, where, he asserts without argument, xãow ‘denotes the gap or void space between sky and earth’. But the text, he recognizes, appears to resist his interpretation at lines 126-127 [in the Greek text cited above]: there, only a few lines after telling of the coming-into-being of Chaos, Hesiod tells how ‘earth first bore…starry sky’. If, as he presumes, Chaos is ‘the gap separating heaven and earth’ and it ‘has already come-into-being’, there should be no need for earth to go on to beget sky; that begetting ‘duplicates’ the coming-into-being of sky that must have already occurred with the coming-into-being of Chaos.²⁶

Chaos is a differentiation but of what? No typical poetic trope is given by the Muses in their direct answer. The Muses state plainly that the very first was chaos. Then, with deference to the question they add to “First of all Chaos” with “came-to-be”, genet’. Hesiod is asking for the first, how it came-to-be (genet’), and they tell him chaos but with the same supplement in Hesiod’s question, genet’. The wisdom of this statement is along the lines of “First of all Chaos”. How can chaos come-to-be if it was first? Isn’t this a contradiction? Contradiction would not bother a Muse. However, what would bother a Muse is mere contradiction; so boring. Instead, a deeper thread, a secret meaning was always more fun for a Muse. Perhaps, what they were implying is not only what was first, what had no prior origin or birth, but what ‘come-to-be’ is. ‘Come-to-be’ is becoming. Becoming must always come from difference. Difference ‘first’ allows the possibility for determinateness. The possibility for determinateness is the gap, the opening, which makes becoming possible. Instead of the one and many voices of the Muses giving one answer to Hesiod, they give him two in one…now that is more like a Muse. The Muses are not contradicting themselves or giving an infinite regression but giving Hesiod the answer he wants and more. The answer has exceeded the expectation of the question as it MUST since the question marks a limit to what an answer should be (i.e., does ‘what was the first’ ask for a chicken or an egg and how would the answer ever decide the question?). Instead of a declaratory, apophantic, answer, the Muses transcend the limits of the question with a double answer which the Muses testify to as “now surely, truly, verily” “indeed, of a truth”. Additionally, according to Miller²⁷, Hesiod had no way, given the tools of his mythopoeic language, to think the ‘first’ without a coming-to-be. Additionally, the lapse of the mythopoeic style in this one phrase was not a necessary lapse. Hesiod could have written this in a form more true to the overall style of the poem but he didn’t. This can either be ignored as an omission of Hesiod (or an addition of someone else) or intentional and a mark of an emphasis of some type. Even today, when a song or poetic interlude is stated directly and plainly, without the trappings of the current style, it is meant to bring atypical attention to what is stated.

Could it be that the very first, the beginning (archê) Hesiod asks for, is always incomplete, determinate but without specific determinations to come-to-be…to came-to-be…to evoke chora (khora or chora; χώρα, clearing, opening);²⁸ the evocation gestured in the written supplement – “but then afterwards” (αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα; autar epeita). Autar epeita first gives later, the temporal (sorge), the chora of becoming (genet’)? The gaping void requires, necessitates, determines, place (chora), generation (origin), birth, response (the evocative) and temporality. The chaos differentiates but without anything to differentiate, the opening of difference is broken on the disjunctive, “but then afterwards” (αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα; autar epeita). Drew Hyland makes this remark about autar epeita:

With the autar epeita, Hesiod emphasizes the very separation from the subsequent comings-to-be of earth, Tartaros, and eros. Autar, according to Liddell and Scott, means “but, besides, moreover” and is employed “to introduce a contrast.” Epeita, in turn, means, again quoting Liddell and Scott, “when in strong opposition to the former act or state, with past tenses, `thereafter, afterwards.””‘ Since autar establishes precisely such a contrast with the preceding, I have altered Miller’s translation slightly to try to bring out that contrast; hence my “but then afterwards …” rather than Miller’s less strong “then next.” My point, then, is that not only does Hesiod say “First of all Chaos came-to-be”; with the emphatic autar epeita he clearly distinguishes the coming-to-be of Chaos from what comes afterwards: earth, Tartaros, eros, and then gradually the rest of the articulated cosmos.²⁹

Autar epeita is not generative. Earth, Tartara and Eros are not born from chaos. If the Muses meant ‘born’ they could have used a form of genet’ or γόνος (gonos; that which is born, begotten, child, offspring). The “strong opposition” Hyland writes of does not join what follows but demarcates, refuses the cause and effect of progeny, with what follows. Hesiod’s chaos is not-yet temporal. Temporality begins for the Muses with autar epeita not as later Latin history suggested with Cronus.

It is important that in one of the most important accounts at the dawn of ancient Greek philosophy, how being came to be was answered by the jesting Muses in a rare directness, a full moment (kairos), as radical disjuncture, as chaos. Before logos (where we get our word logic) we find the question of origin, of beginning, is anarchy (an-archê, ἀν-αρχία; no origin). Anarchy founds origin from the impossibility of origin. Origin must generate (gene) being in the absolute void of chaos, the gap. ‘Coming to be’ is not completed in logos but left open by chaos. Ancient Greek philosophy must ever after be read from the riddle of origin. Origin must be said from logos which, in its fullest moment, undoes and erases itself as chaos, an unbridgeable gap. Only in this unsettled and unresolved footing does ancient Greek philosophy acquire its richness and dislodge itself from final closure. In this way, being is held open as existence. Phusis is not closed off by some reductive, anthropomorphic mythos but becoming is first opened by chaos, a radical alterity, a gap generative of inquiry, of logos. History and temporality find their start in “but then afterwards” from the face of what undoes it not from some absolute but from groundless suspension over the void (as Heidegger might suggest). Anarchy is not evasion from rule and domination as Latin later postulated and forever embodied it in the metaphysic of individuality, but in the suspension of finality or origin. Existence is never complete. Completion or fulfillment (telos) can never be final because origin can only cover over its chaotic lack. Existence cannot resolve itself as idea (eidos, the form or appearance of things); not even as ‘it’. The notion of phusis as ‘it’, as third person neuter, can only supplement an unsolvable riddle, a Gordian knot, which can only untie itself by tying another knot. The Idea can only be, always and already, a “but then afterwards” which fills the gap, the yawning gap that must withdraw from sight and appearance. In this riddle, play of the Muses, ancient Greek thought attained astounding depth and richness which both posed and opened the question of appearance and being, phusis and ‘beings as such’ or ‘first cause’ (arche) later in the Latin era called metaphysics.³⁰ The priority of metaphysics for Aristotle was a priority of ontos–ology (the logos or study of being) over idea and appearance. Idea must forever be inchoate in origin and finality, perhaps shadows thrown on cave walls from Forms which can only dance over the void, eternally supplementing themselves from desire, Eros, the in-between of mortal and immortal; this radical otherness which cannot take the Form of a modern ‘it’ nor even an idea (the appearance of) of chaos but can only face us in the other. The good beyond being, the disjunction of the primacy of ontology and the impossibility of the never ending supplementation of the Idea can only ‘be’ in the face of the other which has no origin or completion in our gaze and yet, cannot be ignored.

Philosophy Series 5 – A Detour of Time

_________________

¹The series on the Pre-Socratics relies heavily on THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS: A CRITICAL HISTORY WITH A SELECTION OF TEXTS, BY G. S. KIRK & J. E. RAVEN, PUBLTSHED BY THE SYNDICS OF THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, Bentley House, 200 Euston Road, London, N.W., American Branch: 32 East 57th Street, New York , N.Y., CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1957 and Heidegger And Aristotle: The Twofoldness Of Being, Walter A. Brogan, Kindle Edition and Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays, First of all Came Chaos, Drew A. Hyland, Kindle Edition.

²See Link

³See Link

⁴Hesiod, “Theogony”, Translated by Drew A. Hyland; “First of All Came Chaos”, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 9). Kindle Edition; For text see Link, Hes. Th. 115 to 135;

⁵See Robin Lane Fox’s Travelling Heroes and Walcot’s Hesiod and the Near East

⁶The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), later reformulated in Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophic Thought (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1971)

⁷G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). Restated and reaffirmed in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)

⁸See Link

⁹See Link

¹⁰G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957)., Section “SEPARATION IN NON-GREEK SOURCES”, page 33-34

¹¹See Link

¹²John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), see the Prologue; Also Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1988)

¹³See Link

¹⁴See Link

¹⁵πρώτιστα – adj sg fem nom doric aeolic poetic – Link, πρώτιστ-ος, η, ον, also ος, ον h.Cer.157:—poet. and late Prose Sup. of πρῶτος,

A the very first, Il.2.228, 16.656, Od.19.447; πολὺ π. Il.2.702, Od.14.220, etc.; ὁ π. χρόνος, opp. ὁ ἐνεστώς, PEleph.10.4 (iii B.C.); principal, primal, θεὰ π. Νύξ Phld.Piet.14; αἰτία Procl.Inst. 12; τῶν φύσει κρειττόνων π. ὁ δημιουργός Hierocl. in CA3p.424M., cf. Iamb.Comm.Math.4, al., Dexipp.Fr.32(b)J., Agath.3.2: neut. πρώτιστον as Adv., first of all, Od.10.462, 20.60, al., Pi.N.5.25, B.8.11, Ar.Lys.555, D.43.75, Antiph.98: also pl. πρώτιστα Il.1.105, Od.3.419, Hes.Op.109, A.Fr.195, S.OT1439, El.669, Ar.Pl.792; ἐπειδὴ π. now that, Alc.15.7; ὅτε π. when aforetime, Call.Aet.Oxy.2079.21; especially, principally, π. ἁλίσκεται ἐνταῦθα τὸ ὄψον Str.12.3.19: also τὸ π. E.Supp.430; τὰ π. Od.11.168. –
Link

¹⁶See Link

¹⁷γένετ’ – verb, 3rd person, middle voice used from the early Homeric time. It comes from γίγνομαι – come into a new state of being (see Link) – γένετ’ is also used in γενετικός [genetikos], “genitive” and that from Ancient Greek γένεσις (genesis, “origin, source, beginning, nativity, generation, production, creation”), from γίγνεσθαι second aor. γενέσθαι (“to be produced, become, be”). Link, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵenh₁, Note: This is also were we get our modern day word ‘genetics’.

¹⁸See Link for information on the Greek grammar.

¹⁹
‘First of all’: On the Semantics and Ethics of Hesiod’s Cosmogony, Mitchell Miller, Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001), Mathesis Publications, See Link (pdf)

²⁰G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957)., Section ” 4. THE HESIODIC COSMOGONY, AND THE SEPARATION OF SKY AND EARTH”, page 26-27

²¹See Link

²²See Link

²³Consider Hegel’s beginning in The Logic where he states: “Pure Being makes the beginning: because it is on the one hand pure thought, and on the other immediacy itself, simple and indeterminate; and the first beginning cannot be mediated by anything, or be further determined.” See Link, Section 86. This beginning is very different from the Hesiod’s beginning where pure ‘isness’ does not begin as indeterminate immediacy but contrarily ‘isness’ begins as differentiation, a gap, which begins as differentiated. The differentiation here is not yet mediated in Hesiod. Remember that in Hesiod’s cosmogony, meditation only starts after the phrase ‘but then afterwards”. Pure thought as idea (eidos) does not yet appear or take form in Hesiod’s ‘first’. Mediation does not lead to determinacy for Hesiod but determinacy leads to mediation. This is an important distinction which may have led the entire Hegelian genius astray. It certainly deserves consideration at a minimum as, if nothing else, an important difference in Hegelian wissenschaft and post modernism with thinkers such as Derrida and Levinas.

Consider this a little latter in the same section:

When thinking is to begin, we have nothing but thought in its merest indeterminateness: for we cannot determine unless there is both one and another: and in the beginning there is yet no other. The indeterminate, as we have it, is the blank we begin with, not a featurelessness reached by abstraction, not the elimination of all character, but the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all. And this we call Being. It is not to be felt, or perceived by sense, or pictured in imagination: it is only and merely thought, and as such it forms the beginning. Essence also is indeterminate, but in another sense: it has traversed the process of mediation and contains implicit the determination it has absorbed.

In Hesiod’s beginning there isn’t “the other” but otherness. Not long after Hesiod the struggle began to wrestle with precisely what Hegel is articulating. One answer the Eleatics came up with is that in Hegel’s words “we cannot determine unless there is both one and another”. Therefore, the Eleatics came up with ‘the One’. Hegel believes that they erred in naming this being, “they went too far”, When Hegel states, “The indeterminate, as we have it, is the blank we begin with, not a featurelessness reached by abstraction, not the elimination of all character, but the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all. And this we call Being” he initially states that the indeterminate is not some “featurelessness reached by abstraction” but then goes on to tell us about “the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all”. Wouldn’t this require that the “original featurelessness” has also been arrived at by featurelessness abstraction? Would it be sacrilege to suggest that at minimum the “original featurelessness” is made up of language and words which may hint a kind of yet another form of “featurelessness reached by abstraction”. This subtle circularity denies in order to reaffirm albeit more seductively. In any case, the logic of determination without one or another is certainly compelling and it is understandable how one might be lead from here to monism or immediacy. However, the inability of even the word ‘immediacy’ to divest itself of language and therefore mediacy and abstraction violently forces a conclusion which cannot be sustained by virtue of its own terms. Hegel’s immediacy can never be what it assumes something other than language and thereby escape the hermeneutical circularity of language. This impossibility should be preserved in thought not replaced with yet another supplement, a façade or appearance, which has the effect of relieving this absurdity (i.e., immediacy). In the Muse’s refusal to resolve chaos as first undifferentiated but instead differentiated without “both one and another” a questioned is opened which, depending on decision, can either be nonsense or some other (Latinized chaos as disorder or the Greek notion of gap).

²⁴…could we say with Kierkegaard accentuating passion to the infinite …

²⁵When determination is derived, it becomes dependent on its determinate whether it is ‘immediacy’, abstraction, etc. When determination is differentiation before ‘objects’, the notion of the other does not depend on derivation but upon, as Levinas might suggest, ‘Ethics’. Levinas might suggest borrowing from Plato’s ‘the good beyond being’ as the good otherwise than being (note the radical disjuncture).

²⁶‘First of all’: On the Semantics and Ethics of Hesiod’s Cosmogony, Mitchell Miller, Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001), Mathesis Publications, page 5

²⁷“…what is remarkable is not that Hesiod says of Chaos that it genet[o], ‘came-to-be’ or, connotatively, ‘was born’; he has little choice. Rather, what is remarkable is that, in face of the assumption that what ‘comes-to-be’ must have a parent, he holds back from naming one and instead declares Chaos to have come-to-be ‘first’.” See Link (pdf, page 21-22)

²⁸John Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)

²⁹Drew A. Hyland; “First of All Came Chaos”, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (p. 13). Kindle Edition, page 13

³⁰See Link

Philosophy Series 3 – Appendix A, Part 1

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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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Appendix A

(Note: This appendix was originally planned to be released in whole near the beginning of the first chapter. However, its size has grown too large to publish as one post. Additionally, it would probably be better to release sections of the appendix which correspond to subject matter in the chapter releases. Therefore, I have decided to release it piecemeal.)

Before the Greeks

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is a common language that many scholars believe was spoken long before classical Greece, as early as 3,700 BC and possibly into upper paleolithic before the 10th century BC. The theory of PIE has been developed over several centuries. PIE is still a theory because it preceded writing. PIE was only oral. It was developed by a linguistic archeology (archē and logos) that links common grammatical and roots or stems of words in various ancient languages. Here is a chart of how PIE may have split into various languages.

Greek Philosophy and Periods

To start, these are generally accepted Greek histories, dialects and some pertinent facts:

Proto-Greek (c. 3000–1600 BC)

Ancient Greek and Vedic Sanskrit suggest that both Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian were quite similar to later Proto-Indo-European (somewhere in the late 4th millennium BC)

Mycenaean (c. 1600–1100 BC)

Bronze age, Linear B, oral
tradition, the “heroic age” in Homer

Greek Dark Age (c. 1100-800 BC)

Dorian invasion to the first signs of the Greek
poleis, lack of discovered inscriptions, ends with use of vowels in writing with Phoenician
alphabet

Ancient Greek (c. 800–330 BC)
Dialects:
Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, Attic–Ionic,
Doric, Locrian, Pamphylian,
Homeric Greek,
Macedonian

archaic and classical period

Koine Greek (c. 330 BC–330)

Hellenistic period, the common dialect, translations include the Christian New Testament and the Septuagint

Homeric Greek (or epic or poetic Greek) is an early East Greek blending of Ionic and Aeolic features. Aeolic includes the Lesbian and the Thessalian and the Boeotian dialects.¹ Ionic may go back to the 11th century BC while Aeolic may go back to the 14th century BC. Homeric Ionic is called ‘Old Ionic’. The later Ionic called ‘New Ionic’ used by many ancient philosophers started around the 6th century BC. Many of the well known ancient philosophers wrote in the Attic-Ionic dialect. The Aeolic dialect was more archaic than Attic-Ionic, Doric, Northwestern and Arcadocypriot. It was considered more barbaric than the Attic-Ionic used during the time of Plato.²

Around the 4th millennium BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia outgrew human memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form.

By definition, the modern practice of history begins with written records; evidence of human culture without writing is the realm of prehistory.³

Homer and his Iliad and Odyssey are said to be part of an oral tradition. Since the Iliad and Odyssey were written down, it should be emphasized that they came out of the earlier oral period. It is thought that the epics we know today are the result of generations of storytellers (a technical term for them is rhapsodes) passing on the material until finally, somehow, someone wrote it.

An epithet (Greek — επιθετον and Latin — epitheton; literally meaning ‘imposed’) is a descriptive word or phrase that has become a fixed formula.⁴

Homer and Hesiod wrote in a form of poetry that was rhythmic and rhymed. It was probably sung for many centuries orally before it was finally written down. The written form of Homer and Hesiod, when the poets were finally transcribed probably goes back to 750 to 600 BC.⁵ It could be thought as the earliest form of what we might call “rap” today. The oral tradition of their poetry may go back to 1400 BC or even earlier.⁶

Philosophers that wrote in Old Ionic were Heraclitus, Hecataeus and logographers, Herodotus, Democritus, and Hippocrates.

Attic Orators, Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle wrote in Attic proper, Thucydides in Old Attic, the dramatists in an artificial poetic language^[8] while the Attic Comedy contains several vernacular elements.

Geography and Greek Dialects⁷

Greek Schools

Ancient Greek philosophy is widely varied and rich. It is problematic to accurately schematize the philosophers. There are cases where traditional scholarship includes a thinker in a school not because the philosophers had an abundance of ideas in common but because one was thought to be a student or influenced by the other. With this in mind, we can sketch out six main schools of ancient Greek philosophy: Milesian, Pythagorean, Eleatic, Pluralist, Atomist and Sophists and unaffiliated philosophers. These schools have some common threads in that they are all focused on what ‘is’ or what shows itself in nature or phusis. Heidegger maintains that phusis, the word we know as physics, was the original word the Greeks had for being.

In the age of the first and definitive unfolding of Western philosophy among the Greeks, when questioning about beings as such and as a whole received its true inception, beings were called phusis. This fundamental Greek word for beings is usually translated “nature.” We use the Latin translation natura which really means “to be born,” “birth.” But with this Latin translation, the originary content of the Greek word phusis is already thrust aside, the authentic philosophical naming force of the Greek word is destroyed… Now, what does the word phusis say? It says what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding and holding itself and persisting in appearance–in short, the emerging-abiding sway… phuein [the noun form of phusis] means to grow, to make grow (Introduction to Metaphysics, 14-15).

It is interesting to note one of the Indo-European root words for being is associated with the etymological roots of the Greek word phusis:

Another Indo-European root is bhú or bheu. Out of this we get “be,” “been,” bin, and bist. Significantly, from this root also comes the Greek phuein (to grow, emerge) and phusis. The Greek term phainesthai is also derived from this root. This word means “show” or “display,” and “phenomenon” is derived from it.⁸

Julius Pokorny, a linguist, also believes that the Sanskrit word Brahman, a very important concept in Buddhism and Hinduism, also comes from the same Indo-European root (also see the root *bʰuH in the section, Being and “to be”, below).⁹

Early Greek philosophy was intensely focused on being and phusis with questions such as: is being and existence real or illusion, one or many, idea or substance (such as water or fire)? Many scholars think that the shift from Greek mythos to phusis is the beginning of philosophy. This shift becomes apparent with the Milesians and continues through the various Greek schools. Their concerns were focused on what shows itself in phenomena (from phainesthai). They were fully aware that what shows itself may not always be immediately apparent at all. It could also show itself as semblance, as what it is not (i.e., as Gods or already understood as a multiplicity of lifeless and separate things). They were also keenly aware that what shows itself is not simply a thing before us that we passively see. When we see phenomenon, phusis must retreat in the act of our seeing and observing. Phusis has a way of withdrawing in order to make it possible to see (long before Schrödinger’s cat¹⁰). Perception, thought and speech, the logos, requires a kind of dynamic privation, a retreat into the background of we might think as ‘context’ but the Greeks would think AS phusis. This is important as the difference demarcated by ‘context’ and phusis shows a historical difference which cannot easily be overcome. When thinking about these philosophers and schools modern reductions show early Greek thought as ‘primitive’ and ‘archaic’. However, these convenient castings obscure more than they reveal. They vastly restrict and miss important possibilities forged and virtually lost by these early thinkers. For some of these schools, a certain kind of preoccupation with all that ‘is’ leads to theories of all one or monism. For others, the problem this way of thinking leads to is, how can multiplicity and change be thought from the standpoint of sameness? Each of the schools had different ways of addressing these questions. What follows is a high level summary of these schools of thought.

This is a rough timeline and various schools of Greek philosophy.¹¹

Milesian

Miletus was a city in Ionia, on the west coast of what is now Turkey. It was a trade route to the older cultures of Babylon, Egypt, Lydia and Phoenicia. The Milesian School which came from the region was the earliest school of ancient Greek philosophy. The Milesians were credited with bringing the first writing to Greece. Phoenicia was a name the Greeks gave to the Semitics that lived in the area of modern day Lebanon. The Semites were part of the older Canaanite culture. The Phoenicians were credited with bringing the first writing alphabet to the Greeks by Herodotus. However, Anaximander claimed that the Egyptians brought writing to Greece.¹² It is now thought that writing arrived in Miletus around 750 BCE. In any case, writing began to take the place of hieroglyphics in many cultures long before the Greeks. The Phoenician alphabet was very similar to Hebrew at that time. The oral tradition went back well before writing arrived in Greece. The epic battles in Homer are thought to have occurred around the 13 century BC in the battle with Troy. Homer and Hesiod were recited verbally in hexameter by the rhapsodist.

[My comment: The transition from the oral tradition to writing has been the subject of much discussion even to the present time. Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology argues that the transition from speech to writing displaced the speaker, the presence of the rhapsodist, of consciousness. This displacement was effectively a loss of an authorized origin, an arche. What replaced speech was a system of signs and differences, a yawning gap; perhaps in Hesiod’s cosmogony, chaos. The play of differences, of signs, in writing undoes the truth of presence and the signature of the speaker. It allows endless hermeneutics which disseminate truth, presence and origin. Could it be that what scholars refer to as the ‘anthropomorphic’ fixation of the gods in epic speech or rhapsody and the introduction of writing were not coincident in the transition to ‘logos’ but complicit? Could it be that pure consciousness as present in speech was displaced by writing so that the truth of the rhapsodist no longer sufficed as what ‘was’, the ‘real’ of ‘is-ness’, requiring a logos, a ‘logocentrism’ as Derrida suggests to become the thrust to re-authorize a canon based on phusis, the nature of being, the Idea (eidos) behind the shadow of consciousness? It is perhaps in this disruption we can catch a glimpse of the trace of “differance” (as Derrida writes) which plays as chaos, as an unthinkable gap which violently tears at the desire for origin, for arche.]

The primary philosophers in the Milesian School were: Thales (624 – 546 BCE), Anaximander (610 – c. 546 BCE) and Anaximenes of Miletus (585 – 528 BCE). These philosophers are typically thought as the first Greeks to start wondering what lies beneath appearance and change, phusis. The Milesian School did not want to understand what ‘is’ in terms of the gods. The Milesians were cynical about the ‘theologists’ of Homer and Hesiod’s time. However, it should be noted the chaos of Hesiod’s Theogony was not a God but more like a principle. The epic poets had more in common with the Milesians than some traditional scholars have acknowledged. The Milesians wanted to inquire into what could be seen, phusis, to understand what persists and what merely comes in and out accidentally of what ‘is’. The Milesians were early physicists.

These philosophers were looking for origins (arche). They suggested it was water, the infinite (apeiron) and air. They understood geometry and physical properties such as evaporation and condensation. They were looking for what remained the same in what appeared to change. They understood qualities could change like water could be solid as ice, misty as fog or liquid but all the qualities were still composed of water. Later, in Latin commentators, the ‘sameness’ was thought as ‘substance’. However, ‘substance’ has more modern connotations that did not necessarily apply to early Greek thinkers. The Milesian School is known as being hylozoistic. They thought of being, existence, and the universe as alive. Aristotle referring to Thales wrote, “Some say that soul is diffused throughout the whole universe; and it may have been this which led Thales to think that all things are full of gods.” (Arist., On the Soul or de Anima, i. 5 ; 411 a 7)¹³ They did not have the clear modern distinction of dead matter, of ‘it’ and some absolute neutrality we now easily think as ‘thing’. They were also called monists and animists as they were looking for universal principles and did not have a whole history that reduced and informed them that most of the universe was inanimate, lifeless and easily understood under the order of the ‘thing’. They still wondered at what we have already understood as ‘thing’ as having more, an excess, which could not be reduced to what we already know as a mere thing. While they may have disagreed about what that was, it is important to understand that it was not a settled matter but open and highly interesting. It is also interesting to note that even with the talk of modern physics telling us that they now understand very little of the universe in light of dark energy and dark matter, the underlying ontology, the unquestioned philosophy of being which already knows stuff as ‘thing’ and neutral, is still unsettled albeit, unquestioned by many. We would do well to incline our ears to a beginning in which these notions were still unsettled and open.

The Milesians marked the beginning of the transition from mythos to logos according to classic scholarship. Logos is our modern word for logic but our modern notion of logic is very different from what the ancient Greeks thought as logos. In the later Greek thinking of Aristotle, logos is what allows phusis (what lies forth¹⁴) to be gathered into itself as what appears and what does not appear in the phenomenon (phainomenon; what shows itself or comes to light). However, at the time of Thales logos was a verbal account or reckoning. Speech was common to humans. We talk to one another and do not solely create private languages that no else can comprehend. This made the logos appear to have a ‘sameness’ that made it understandable to others. Because of this, the logos would become increasingly more interesting for Greek philosophers and the questioning of phusis. Heraclitus, a student of Anaximander, was thought to have stated, “For this reason it is necessary to follow what is common. But although the LOGOS is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding.”(Diels-Kranz, 22B2) Already, early on, Greek philosophers realized that logos exhibited an interesting tension between commonality and individuality, the many and the one.

Philosophy Series 4 – The Pre-Socratics – Hesiod

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¹See Link

²See Link

³See Link

⁴See Link

⁵See Link (pdf)

⁶See Link (pdf)

⁷Roger D. Woodard (2008), “Greek dialects”, in: The Ancient Languages of Europe, ed. R. D. Woodard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 51.

⁸See Link

⁹See Link

¹⁰One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat mixed or smeared out in equal parts. It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

—Erwin Schrödinger, Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik (The present situation in quantum mechanics), Naturwissenschaften

(translated by John D. Trimmer in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society) See Link

¹¹See Link, Link, Link, Link

¹²See The Greek Concept Of Nature By Gérard Naddaf here, page 103

¹³See this

¹⁴Phusis, therefore, is what has been said. And everything that contains within itself an emerging and governing (arche) which is constituted in this way `has’ phusis. And each of these beings is (has being) in the manner of beingness (ousia). That is to say, phusis is a lying-forth from out of itself (hupokeimenon) of this sort and is in each being which is lying-forth. However, each of these beings, as well as everything which belongs to it in and of itself is in accordance with phusis. For example, it belongs to fire to be borne upward. That is to say, this (being borne upward) is certainly not phusis, nor does it contain phusis, but rather it is from out of phusis and in accordance with phusis. Thus what phusis is is now determined as well as what is meant by `from out of phusis’ and in accordance with phusis. (Physics 192 b3z-i93 az; WBP 329)

Walter A. Brogan. Heidegger And Aristotle: The Twofoldness Of Being (Kindle Locations 774-779). Kindle Edition.

A Footnote

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This will be an endnote in this series…

With regard to this,

Perhaps as a ‘he’ or a ‘she’.

This phrase, incorrect grammatically, is an allusion to what classic Greek scholars have referred to as the ‘anthropomorphic’ tendency of the Pre-Socratics. I must confess this was a little intentional on my part as the entire piece is a bit of a play (although I am not above gross editing mistakes-no reviewers for the paltry). The early Greeks did in fact refer to their Gods as ‘he’ and ‘she’ early on. Classic philology has analyzed the pre-classic Greek period of Homer and Hesiod as mythological and the transition into the Classic period as the move from mythos to logos, logic or rationality. However, not all scholars (Nietzsche and perhaps Heidegger come to mind) are in agreement with this analysis. In the future, much more concerning this topic will be discussed in further installments of this series but for now suffice to add that the transition to ‘rationality’ is coincidentally also a transition to neutrality. Rationality and its discoveries tend to come in lumps of ‘it’. While I would not disagree that some ‘anthropomorphic’ mythological projections were at work in early rhapsody I would also like to caution the thinker about adopting this reduction wholly. If, as Heidegger maintains, the Greeks thought ontologically early on it would not be a large stretch to think that the Greek fascination with ontos (being) could have already had its seeds in Homer and Hesiod. We must remember that the early Greeks did not have common and modern concepts to rely on as they gazed into the question of philosophy and origins (arche). If being was given wings in the archaic period, and later, it would not be out of the question to think that their judgments would not be conditioned by what might be thought as the post Greek ‘anthropomorphic’ fascination with neutrality. Neutrality, we must remember is, or could also be, thought as ‘anthropomorphic’. Early Greek thinking was not so committed to a pre-existing ontology. Therefore, it is not unthinkable that their musings may have been infused with gender and affect. In quickly dismissing their works as ‘anthropomorphic’ as opposed to ‘rational’ we may be denying ourselves an alternate way into their thinking. Additionally, I would bring to mind the works of Levinas that some may also be attempted to label ‘anthropomorphic’ but, again, the excess to his thought would be lost in this reduction. The original phrase is meant to bring the philological error, the overlap of mythos, ontos and the Other of Levinas into a bit of a succinct conundrum.

Philosophy Series 1

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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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Prelude to the Philosophy Series

An Introduction to Greek Thinking

Suppose you could look at infinity (apeirōn, ἄπειρον). What would that mean? Would you see something? You may but might it be an apparition? True, it may be some-thing, a concrete thing, definite in its appearance but might it be facade? Might it be that what you may see of infinity is really what you can’t see? Would there be an excess that would incessantly show itself precisely by not showing itself? Its showing would be in its continual vanishing. You would never see infinity, only a phantasm, an imagining, a mythos, a muse. Your imagining might take various forms depending on your history. You might think of space, of time-space, the khôra in Greek (χώρα); a receptacle which gives place and makes movement possible, thus, temporality. Yet, infinity would not be this generative space. This space would be a fantasy of infinity. Infinity would elude arche (ἀρχή), genesis, origin. Infinity would always take leave of khôra. It might be imagined as a gap, a yawning gap (χάος) translated as chaos. While all things might be born (γένετ’), come into new being, from khôra, infinity would always be a radical tear, an infinite rupture, absolute alterity or otherness. Infinity would always overflow itself in our phantasms. Could we think of infinity as an ‘it’? How could infinity overflow an ‘it’? Perhaps as a ‘he’ or a ‘she’. Certainly, that would be an excess to an ‘it’. Yes, but infinity would yet again find itself in between our idea (ἰδέα) of neuter and gender. The idea as form (morphe, μορφή), what appears and becomes present, and endures in itself must always underlie phantasm. Idea conveys permanence as what really ‘is’ (ontos, ὄντος). However, with regard to infinity another idea shows itself – void. Is the idea of void the end (telos, τέλος) and completion of infinity? I think not. After all, ideas have some affinity with infinity in phantasm and the idea of negation, even as the ‘idea’ of what retreats and cannot show itself in idea. Even in retreat, negation and privation we only allude to infinity. We poeticize, metaphor-icize, allegorize, mythologize and yet the gap remains. This gap is yet another idea that eternally turns on itself, the hermeneutical circle of language. It affirms contradiction at every step and leaves us impoverished, alone, wanderers without home; world weary and moving; this we call aging. In turmoil and strife (polemus, πόλεμος) our phantasm wears down and grinds down without ever achieving anything other than itself and all the while infinity remains. When we can no longer endure infinity we gracefully find death, escape from infinity into infinity. Our retreat is once again our entrance. We begin where we started and by that we know infinity.

And Beyond…

En-thinking infinity is an ethics. We can choose an absolute or we can choose to stand in the face of what exceeds our absolute. Ah, you gest, how can absolute be absolute without infinity? Therefore, we must have an idea of infinity in ‘absolute’. Here there is play. Yes, it could be that ‘absolute’ is a synonym for infinity as even ‘inifinty’ is an idea. If absolute overflows itself then we may take it as a synonym. We might take everything, all (panta, παντα) as another synonym. To take it further, we might monistic-ally, monotheistic-ally and mystically let infinity play in out phantasms; this, we call God. In God, infinity is finally revealed…we think. On the other hand, we may separate and divide our absolute dialectically or synthesize and integrate until we finally arrive at ‘The Absolute’, ‘The Idea’ and there we may confidently declare this is infinity. The final solution to infinity has no excess in this magnificent discovery…we think. Here, as Idea, we can see and understand that infinity is nothing other than pure, self-determining Idea. The residue of God and Idea is metaphysical. Here metaphysics has been transformed from what ‘is’ is (ontos, ὄντος) to what is True, what truly shows itself as itself as infinity. Metaphysics has been raised to beyond physics. At the same time physics has been raised to beyond metaphysics. In this battle of the Titans the banner of Truth is the battle cry. En-history we survey bleak materialism or rich spiritualism, body and mind, subject and object, accident and substance, thing and no-thing. And then, beyond meets end. Beyond good and evil the Great Nausea is eternal recurrence of the same. Our over-rich history has aged and become old. It repeats itself in tiresome fashion as we age in desperate and futile attempts to de-legitimize, capitalize, evade, re-phantasma-size, affirm and overcome, cyni-size and skepti-size; yet, all sizes no longer fit. Infinity has once again escaped and we find ourselves once again where we started, a new beginning. And still, we never knew infinity. How is it that history is infinity’s haunting?

This is how philosophy begins…

Philosophy Series 2 – Introduction

Marx Vis-à-vis Lorenzo

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In this essay, Lorenzo states:

“All of which has made it easier, alas, for one of Marx’s more profound errors to become part of many people’s common wisdom. An idea set out in the first chapter of Das Kapital:”

He goes on to quote Marx from Das Kapital:

“…[commodities of equal value] must, as exchange values, be replaceable by each other, or equal to each other. Therefore, first: the valid exchange values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.” (Chapter 1, Section 1)

After quoting Das Kapital Lorenzo, goes on to state:

“The notion that exchange is a matter of matching equivalences keeps turning up in the writings of anthropologists on money. It is a deeply wrong-headed way to look at exchange.” (Chapter 1, Section 1)

If this is the “The insidious reach of error” then Marx would agree. Lorenzo should take a closer look at the text. Let’s take a closer look at the actual text from Section 1 of Das Kapital. Das Kapital begins with this:

“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,”[1] its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.[2] Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production. ” (Chapter 1, Section 1)

Marx begins with an analysis of the ‘commodity’. He wants to think what is a commodity? What is a commodities value? The title of Chapter 1, Section 1 in Das Kapital is “THE TWO FACTORS OF A COMMODITY: USE-VALUE AND VALUE (THE SUBSTANCE OF VALUE AND THE MAGNITUDE OF VALUE)”. He starts out with a discussion of the utility of the thing [commodity] as its use value. He goes on to state, “Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value”. Therefore in the “form of society we are about to consider” [i.e., capitalism] the use value is the “material depositories of exchange value”. He is not stating that HE thinks commodities, as exchange values, are replaceable by each other, are equal to each other, but that this is how capitalism treats commodities. To the contrary, he is going to criticize this perception as Lorenzo also wants to do.

Marx goes on to state before the next paragraph that Lorenzo quotes:

“Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort,[6] a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.[7] Let us consider the matter a little more closely.” (Chapter 1, Section 1)

So, at first sight, exchange value is a quantitative relation and as such APPEARS to be something accidental and purely relative. In exchange value, commodities are thought as “a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c. – in short, for other commodities in the most different proportions”. The exchange value thought in terms of quantity is taken as an intrinsic property of the commodity. Marx states that this “seems a contradiction in terms”. He goes on to state, “In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity”. The “something common to them all” “cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value. Then one use value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity”. Marx is suggesting that the equality of commodities in exchange value is a “total abstraction”. Marx further states, “As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value”. Marx thinks that the equality thought in terms of exchange value leaves out something very important about commodities – the labor value. Marx states:

“If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.” (Chapter 1, Section 1)

Marx is criticizing the reduction, the abstraction, of value as purely and merely quantitative. He wants to claim that the value of a commodity is more than an ‘equality’, a number, a proportion. He wants to say that the labor that goes into making a commodity is not merely an abstraction but a real, concrete value of the commodity. Therefore, the question of the value of a commodity is not merely a question of the exchange of quantities but gets to what Lorenzo want to ask about money, where do we derive a sense of the value of money?

In Chapter 1, Section 3 (The Equivalent form of value) Marx states, “The body of the commodity that serves as the equivalent, figures as the materialisation of human labour in the abstract, and is at the same time the product of some specifically useful concrete labour. This concrete labour becomes, therefore, the medium for expressing abstract human labour”. Here again Marx wants to show how concrete labor gets articulated into abstraction when thought in terms of equivocation. It is interesting to note that Adam Smith also subscribed to the classical labor theory of value (see Wealth of Nations Book 1, chapter V). The labor theory of value can also be found in Aristotle’s Politics. Moreover, Plato has much discussion of techne [crudely technique or skill] as what, in effect, distinguishes human being and transforms the very being and origin of matter into created rather than natural beings [for an excellent discussion of techne and Aristotle see Heidegger and Aristotle The Twofoldness of Being, Walter A. Brogan, link].

Lorenzo takes this quote by Marx:

“The utility of a thing makes it a use value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity.” (Chapter 1, Section 1)

and states:

“This is wrong, for utility is utility to someone. So, the utility of a thing does have existence apart from that commodity, it exists in the relation of the thing to the purposes of anyone who has a use for it.”

Marx is not suggesting that utility exists only in the commodity and not in relation to someone. Marx’s theory of use value means that a coat may not have the same value in a tropical country as in a colder climate (“Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value” quoted below). Marx states there are cases where a thing with use value may not have value such as air and soil. He also states that a thing can have use value but not be a commodity if a person directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labor. In order for a thing with use value to be a commodity, Marx states that a commodity must have “use values for others, social use values”. When Lorenzo states that Marx “is wrong” and that “utility is utility for someone” he directly contradicts what Marx states below concerning use value as “use values for others, social use values”:

“A thing can be a use value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.)[12] Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value. “(Chapter 1, Section 1)

Additionally, Marx clearly states that there are things that have use value that are not commodities. If they have use value for others, the product of labor gives the commodity value.

After getting Marx wrong on utility and exchange he goes on to get Marx wrong on the value of labor. Lorenzo states:

“Having got utility and equivalence wrong, Marx then moves on to the third false claim:”

He then quotes Marx as stating:

“if then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour.” (Chapter 1, Section 1)

After quoting Marx Lorenzo states:

“Which is also not true. Commodities also have the qualities of being made of materials (what economists call ‘land’) and by tools (what economists call ‘capital’); labour on its own produces little or nothing.

Even more basically, to be exchanged, such things have to be controlled by someone. Locke’s metaphor that a person in the state of nature acquires something by “mixing his labour” with it is misleading: what they do is take control of it (and, more importantly, that control is acknowledged by others). Any contribution of labour to exchange—whether in production or the realisation of value in exchange—is framed by such control: as is also true of land and capital. Moreover, the control has to matter: the thing has to have sufficient scarcity and be sufficiently wanted by someone for such control to matter. We can control a twig, but who cares? (Acknowledged) control, scarcity and wanting are the bases of exchange.”

Yet, from the previous quote of Marx, we see that things can have use value that are not the product of labor as when the “case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows”. Marx is not suggesting that land cannot be bought and sold, he is simply stating that natural elements can have use value without being commodities. As far as I know air is not being sold yet. Lorenzo states commodities have to be “controlled by someone”. Does this contradict Marx when Marx writes, “To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange”? I am not sure what Lorenzo’s point is about ‘tools’ since tools are most often the product of labor.

It is astonishing that on virtually every point Lorenzo gets it wrong in direct contradiction to what Marx writes in the exact text that Lorenzo quotes. However, to be clear, apart from getting Marx wrong, I think I agree with some of his latter, main points. I like the way Lorenzo distinguishes between equivalence and intersection. Lorenzo states:

“The search for a “common property” in things exchanged is completely wrong-headed, because exchange is a matter of intersecting differences, not matching equivalences.”

Certainly we can see cases where labor does and should add to the value of a commodity. However, if a fine coat shop opens up in the Caribbean it would be no surprise to Marx that the labor value in the coats would not be worth much as previously stated. Yes, the value of a commodity will change with demand. I am fully aware that Marx wants to make the labor value of a commodity more solid, a “common property”, than the ‘abstraction’ of exchange values. I think Marx does want to erect a protectionist strategy for the laborer by encapsulating the value of labor in the commodity. However, the encapsulation is not an either/or scenario and does work within bounds and limitations as I have pointed out. In any case I think Lorenzo wants to make a more substantial break with value as residing in a commodity. In this sense I take Lorenzo’s point about “intersecting differences”.

I think it is important to have some understanding of Hegel to really make sense of Marx. Dialectical materialism, a phrase coined after Marx, was the science that “put Hegel’s dialectics back on its feet”. Dialecticism was Hegel’s method of thesis, antithesis and synthesis (aufhebung conserves the thesis and the antithesis and transcends them both). Marx thought that the idealism of Hegel got it wrong with its movement toward Spirit, the concretization of Truth in pure logic, in Hegel’s master work, The Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik). Marx employed the dialectics of Hegel but in service of the history of class struggle. The ‘Spiritalization’ of Hegel was the domain of the bourgeoisie. It was a fairy tale the bourgeois told themselves while basking themselves in the materials of other’s labor. The bourgeois abstract away from the material and also devalue the products of laborers (in the material form of unfair or low wages or even slavery). They reshape societal values after their own abstract values of God, Truth, eternity and spiritualization at the expense of the working class. They make value a product of their abstract fetish and not a product of labor. The concretization of Truth does not happen in thought but in objective matter according to Marx. However, this concretization is not as simple as Lorenzo would have us believe. A noted Marxist scholar puts it this way [I apologize for the long quote]:

“Marx defines the concrete as ‘the unity of diverse aspects. [Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] This definition may appear paradoxical from the standpoint of traditional formal logic: the reduction of the sensually given diversity to unity appears at first sight to be the task of abstract knowledge of things rather than of concrete one. From the point of view of this logic, to realise unity in the sensually perceived diversity of phenomena means to reveal the abstractly general, identical elements that all of these phenomena possess. This abstract unity, recorded in consciousness by means of a general term, appears at first sight to be that very ‘unity’ which is the only thing to be treated in logic.

…

When Marx defines the concrete as unity of diverse aspects, he assumes a dialectical interpretation of unity, diversity, and of their relationship. In dialectics, unity is interpreted first and foremost as connection, as interconnection and interaction of different phenomena within a certain system or agglomeration, and not as abstract likeness of these phenomena. Marx’s definition assumes exactly this dialectical meaning of the term ‘unity’.

…

This conception of unity in diversity (or concreteness) is not merely different from the one which old logic proceeded from, but is its direct opposite. The conception approaches that of the concept of integrity or wholeness. Marx uses this term in those cases when he has to characterise the object as an integral whole unified in all its diverse manifestations, as an organic system of mutually conditioning phenomena in contradiction to a metaphysical conception of it as a mechanical agglomeration of immutable constituent parts that are linked with each other only externally, more or less accidentally.

The most important aspect of Marx’s definition of the concrete is that the concrete is treated first of all as an objective characteristic of a thing considered quite independently from any evolutions that may take place in the cognising subject. The object is concrete by and in itself, independent from its being conceived by thought or perceived by sense organs. Concreteness is not created in the process of reflection of the object by the subject either at the sensual stage of reflection or at the rational-logical one.

In other words, ‘the concrete’ is first of all the same kind of objective category as any other category of materialist dialectics, as ‘the necessary’ and ‘the accidental’, ‘essence, and ‘appearance’. It expresses a universal form of development of nature, society, and thinking. In the system of Marx’s views, ‘the concrete’ is by no means a synonym for the sensually given, immediately contemplated.

Insofar as ‘the concrete’ is opposed to ‘the abstract’ the latter is treated by Marx first and foremost objectively. For Marx, it is by no means a synonym of the ‘purely ideal’, of a product of mental activity, a synonym of the subjectively psychological phenomenon occurring in man’s brain only. Time and again Marx uses this term to characterise real phenomena and relations existing outside consciousness, irrespective of whether they are reflected in consciousness or not.

For instance, Marx speaks in Capital of abstract labour. Abstractness appears here as an objective characteristic of the form which human labour assumes in developed commodity production, in capitalist production. Elsewhere he stresses that the reduction of different kinds of labour to uniform simple labour devoid of any distinctions ‘is an abstraction which is made every day in the social process of production’. It is ‘no less real (an abstraction) than the resolution of all organic bodies into air’. [Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy]

The definition of gold as material being of abstract wealth also expresses its specific function in the organism of the capitalist formation and not in the consciousness of the theoretician or practical worker, by any means.

This use of the term ‘abstract’ is not a terminological whim of Marx’s at all: it is linked with the very essence of his logical views, with the dialectical interpretation of the relation of forms of thinking and those of objective reality, with the view of practice (sensual activity involving objects) as a criterion of the truth of the abstractions of thought.

Still less can this usage be explained as ‘a throwback to Hegelianism’: it is against Hegel that Marx’s proposition is directed to the effect that ‘the simplest economic category, e.g., exchange value … cannot exist except as an abstract, unilateral relation of an already existing concrete organic whole ‘. [ibid.]

‘The abstract’ in this kind of context, very frequent in Marx, assumes the meaning of the ‘simple’, undeveloped, one-sided, fragmentary, ‘pure’ (i.e., uncomplicated) by any deforming influences). It goes without saying that ‘the abstract’ in this sense can be an objective characteristic of real phenomena, and not only of phenomena of consciousness.

‘It is precisely the predominance of agricultural peoples in the ancient world which caused the merchant nations – Phoenicians, Carthaginians – to develop in such purity (abstract precision)’ [ibid.]; it was not, of course, the result of predominance of the ‘abstractive power of thought’ of Phoenicians or the scholars writing the history of Phoenicia. ‘The abstract’ in this sense is by no means the product and result of thinking. This fact is just as little dependent on thinking as the circumstance that ‘the abstract law of multiplying exists only for plants and animals’.

According to Marx, ‘the abstract’ (just as its counterpart, ‘the concrete’) is a category of dialectics as the science of universal forms of development of nature, society and thought, and on this basis also a category of logic, for dialectics is also the Logic of Marxism.

This objective interpretation of the category of the abstract is spearheaded against all kinds of neo-Kantian logic and epistemology which oppose, in a crudely metaphysical way, ‘pure forms of thought’ to forms of objective reality. For these schools in logic, ‘the abstract’ is only a form of thought, whereas ‘the concrete’, a form of a sensually given image. This interpretation, in the Mill-Humean and Kantian traditions in logic (e.g., Chelpanov and Vvedensky in Russia), is alien and hostile to the very essence of dialectics as logic and theory of knowledge.

The narrow epistemological (that is, essentially psychological, in the final analysis) interpretation of the categories of the abstract and the concrete became firmly rooted in modern bourgeois philosophy. Here is a fresh example – definitions from the Philosophical Dictionary by Max Apel and Peter Ludz [Berlin 1958]:

‘abstract: divorced from a given connection and considered by itself only. Thus abstract acquires the meaning of conceptual, conceived, in opposition to given in contemplation.

‘abstraction: the logical process for ascending, through omission of features, from that given in contemplation to a general notion and from the given concept to a more general one. Abstraction decreases the content and extends the volume. Opposed to determination.

‘concrete: the immediately given in contemplation; concrete concepts denote that which is contemplated, individual objects of contemplation. Opposed to abstract.’

This one-sided definition (abstraction is, of course, mental separation, among other things, but it is by no means reducible to it) varies but insignificantly from dictionary to dictionary. It has been polished in dozens of editions and has become generally accepted among philosophers in capitalist countries. That is certainly no proof of its correctness.

A ‘concrete concept’ is reduced by these definitions to ‘designating’ the sensually contemplated individual things, to a mere sign, or symbol. In other words, ‘the concrete’ is only nominally present in thought, only in the capacity of the ‘designating name’. On the other hand, .’the concrete’ is made into a synonym of uninterpreted, indefinite ‘sensual givenness’. Neither the concrete nor the abstract can, according to these definitions, be used as characteristics of theoretical knowledge in regard of its real objective content. They characterise only the ‘form of cognition’: ‘the concrete’, the form of sensual cognition, and ‘the abstract’, the form of thought, the form of rational cognition. In other words, they belong to different spheres of the psyche, to different objects. There is nothing abstract where there is something concrete, and vice versa. That is all there is to these definitions.

The problem of the relation of the abstract to the concrete appears in quite a different light from Marx’s point of view, the point of view of dialectics as logic and theory of knowledge.

It is only at first sight that this question might seem a), merely ‘epistemological’ one, a question of the relation of’, a mental abstraction to the sensually perceived image. In; actual fact its real content is much wider and deeper than.’ that, and it is inevitably supplanted by quite a different problem in the course of analysis – the problem of the relation of the object to itself, that is, relationship between different elements within a certain concrete whole. That is why the problem is solved, first and foremost, within the framework of objective dialectics – the teaching of the universal forms and laws of development of nature, society and thought itself, and not on the narrow epistemological plane, as neo-Kantians and positivists do.

Insofar as Marx treats the epistemological aspect of the problem, he interprets the abstract as any one-sided, incomplete, lopsided reflection of the object in consciousness, as opposed to concrete knowledge which is well developed, all-round, comprehensive knowledge. It does not matter at all in what subjective psychological form this knowledge is ‘experienced’ by the subject – in sensually perceived images or in abstract verbal form. The logic (dialectics) of Marx and Lenin establishes its distinctions in regard of the objective sense and meaning of knowledge rather than in regard of the subjective form of experience. Poor, meagre, lopsided knowledge may be assimilated in the form of a sensual image. In this case, logic will have to define it as ‘abstract’ knowledge, despite its being embodied in a sensually given image. Contrariwise, abstract verbal form, the language of formulas, may express rich, well-developed, profound and comprehensive knowledge, that is, concrete knowledge.

‘Concreteness’ is neither a synonym for nor a privilege of the sensual-image form of reflection of reality in consciousness, just as ‘abstractness’ is not a specific characteristic of rational theoretical knowledge. Certainly we speak, as often as not, of the concreteness of a sensual image and of abstract thought.

A sensual image, an image of contemplation, may just as often be very abstract, too. Suffice it to remember a geometric figure or a work of abstract painting. And vice versa, thinking in concepts may and even must be concrete in the full and strict meaning of the word. We know that there is no abstract truth, that truth is always concrete. And that does not mean at all that only the sensually perceived image, the contemplation of an individual thing may be true.

The concrete in thinking also appears, according to Marx’s definition, in the form of combination (synthesis) of numerous definitions. A logically coherent system of definitions is precisely that ‘natural’ form in which concrete truth is realised in thought. Each of the definitions forming part of the system naturally reflects only a part, a fragment, an element, an aspect of the concrete reality – and that is why it is abstract if taken by itself, separately from other definitions. In other words, the concrete is realised in thinking through the abstract, through its own opposite, and it is impossible without it. But that is, in general, the rule rather than an exception in dialectics. Necessity is in just the same kind of relation with chance, essence with appearance, and so on.

On the other hand, each of the numerous definitions forming part of the conceptual system of a concrete science, loses its abstract character in it, being filled with the sense and meaning of all the other definitions connected with it. Separate abstract definitions mutually complement each other, so that the abstractness of each of them, taken separately, is overcome. In short, herein lies the dialectics of the relation of the abstract to the concrete in thinking which reflects the concrete in reality. The dialectics of the abstract and the concrete in the course of theoretical processing of the material of living contemplation, in processing the results of contemplation and notions in terms of concepts is the subject-matter of study in the present work.

Of course, we cannot claim to offer an exhaustive solution to the problem of the abstract and the concrete at all the stages of the process of cognition in general, in all forms of reflection. The formation of the sensually perceived image of a thing involves its own dialectics of the abstract and the concrete, and a very complicated one, and that is even more true of the formation of the notion connected with speech, with words. Memory, which also plays an enormous role in cognition, contains in its structure a no less complex relation of the abstract to the concrete. These categories also have a bearing on artistic creativity. We are compelled to leave all of these aspects out of consideration, as subject-matter of a special study.

The path of cognition loading from living contemplation to abstract thought and from it to practice, is a very complicated path. A complex and dialectically contradictory transformation of the concrete into the abstract and vice versa takes place in each link of this path. Even sensation gives a rougher picture of reality than it actually is, even in direct perception there is an element of transition from the concrete in reality to the abstract in consciousness. The transition from living contemplation to abstract thought is by no means the same thing as the movement ‘from the concrete to the abstract’. It is by no means reducible to this moment, although the latter is always present in it. It is the same thing only for those who interpret the concrete as a synonym of an immediate sensual image, and the abstract, as a synonym of the mental, the ideal, the conceptual.” (Ilyenkov, The dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital, Chapter One – Dialectical & Metaphysical Conception of the Concrete, The Definition of the Concrete in Marx, link)

There is some common ground with “the unity of diverse aspects” and Lorenzo’s “points of intersection, not points of equivalence”. To reiterate, Marx thought of “points of equivalence” “against Hegel that Marx’s proposition is directed to the effect that ‘the simplest economic category, e.g., exchange value … cannot exist except as an abstract, unilateral relation of an already existing concrete organic whole”. The “concrete organic whole” for Marx is the physical product of labor.

What I hope has become evident in this pitting of Lorenzo and Marx is the leap that I think Lorenzo would make (which I think has some better articulated similarities with some Postmodernists) that is a leap away from the consolidation of value in labor, in the material commodity, and an absolute break in the notion of any kind of unity in the commodity or even perhaps (?) the isolation of the commodity as a thing ‘in the market’ of exchange. I would be interested in how far he would like to take this in more detail. However, there is one danger I would flag along this way, we should pay attention to: At what point does this non sequitur, this undecipherable point of intersection (in terms of intrinsic value and market/labor causality), become a abstract rationalization for the impoverishment of the laborer (yet again)? This epistemological move would constitute the mystification in service of the bourgeois that Marx criticizes in the equivalence and free floating form of exchange. Personally, I am not decided as I think I could assist putting even more flesh to the bones that Lorenzo wants to articulate in light of contemporary philosophy. However, that would be another book. In general, I think I like many of Lorenzo’s directions but I think he has taken some lumps where a better defense and point of attack could be made for his positions. I would hope that this essay has been an attempt of one case and point of this.

I think the best Marx can do for us at this juncture in history is to provoke our sense of integrity. Should we have any values to preserve or protect the laborer or the middle class? Is lassie faire sufficient? By extension, should we have any concern for those with immediate and vital human needs and if so, at what point should we be concerned? Is the environment worthy of regulatory concern? More generally what constitutes ‘regulatory’ and what are its legitimate bounds? [Note 1] These more direct concerns still circulate around the issues Marx articulates and the potential for the oblivion of the free market to fairness (justice in the Greek sense). Is ‘fairness’ a concept we should even think together with the free market or is the free market just another name for the war of all against all, in a ‘social contract’ sense at best, and an inevitable, perpetual revolution at worst? Is the materiality of the commodity the locus of value or is value a random and ultimately disconnected concept [free floating and prone to manipulation]? These are all questions Marx and other philosophers have raised in quite intricate and thoughtful detail. We can content ourselves with platitudes about these thinkers or let the force of the original questions they posed shake our foundations.

[Note 1] For example, is The Bill of Rights a regulatory document par excellence (i.e., religion, speech, press, assembly, right to bear arms, petition, quartering of troops, search and seizure, grand jury, double jeopardy, self-incrimination, due process, jury trial (criminal and civil), right to confront and to counsel, excess bail or fines, cruel and unusual punishment, non-enumerated rights, rights reserved to states)? Do rights also effectively regulate? If so, are these the only allowable regulations? Why, especially considering the Ninth Amendment [non-enumerated rights]?

God and Other

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Since, as humans, we are composed of atoms and star dust it may be that we have a bare hunch, a non-specific intuition, about the limit of time and space, the end of reason, perhaps as Heidegger might suggest, death as the possibility of the absolute impossibility of me. The notion of me as limited gives way to a kind of feeling of existential suspension, of an ‘other’ to me, to mine, to all. Let’s suppose that this feeling or vague awareness provides a sort of blank field for humans, a tabula rasa, that calls for content, a projection onto nothingness. For some that content could be God. For others it could simply be natural end. For others it could be angst. In any case, this field lends itself to a kind of volitional creation, Desire for the eternal, filling the gap, personal responsibility for one’s ultimate meaning. Faith, as thought by the religious person, might be the positive projection in this void that wishes to hope in their notion of absolute meaning as eternal life, the Good, perfection, love, etc. In any case, the ability to project without any basis, any logic, and any rationality certainly opens the way for error and the inability to be able to understand, to know with absolute certainty, to know that we do not know; yet, to live in this projection as if it is. This is a hypothetical that gathers up more than just logic or truth propositions but essential meaning. However, another aspect of this personal dynamic is how it works for communities, how we are as together with others. A fundamental transformation from the personal to the communal takes place that displaces the personal projection into this active nothingness. A kind of attributed certainty that is not felt in the strict personal Desire acquires a kind of momentum of its own that displaces the bare standing before one’s end. This certainty with others is a kind of diversion from the bare me, the recognition of the not-me…the other. The feeling of the question of essential meaning gets filled in with an answer, a Logic. Even if the Logic addresses existential Desire, it can lose the impact that is rooted in my inability to be able to finally ground me, to identify apodictically with absolute certainty. This homelessness cannot be overcome with Logic but always remains a gap. In this gap the face of the other is brought back once more without my certainties, my schemes, my logic. For Emmanuel Levinas this is what opens up, each time, the possibility for Ethics.

The Free Market Ideal

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Thank you Jeff for your thoughtful comments…here are some of my observations.

First, I do think we have some agreement on many of your points. Here are some of the differences that I would highlight.

Regulation is not just something that happens in government. Here are some observations from my own experience. At U.S. Robotics one of the engineering groups I managed was responsible for getting regulatory approval not just for the US but for many countries in the world. We called this homologation. In the US we had to get Underwriters Lab (UL) and FCC approvals to sell in the US. We also sold modems into hundreds of other countries and they all had their own similar approval requirements. These requirements were for consumer safety and radio interference issues.

In the 90s Microsoft decided they would implement a hardware certification process. It was practically impossible to sell modems without the Microsoft certification approval. It was also practically impossible to get all our modems every quarter through the huge bureaucracy of Microsoft. They certainly stifled our competitive efforts based on their regulatory approval.

Microsoft has also required a software vendor like myself to pay private regulatory companies a yearly fee which can be very pricey to “digitally sign” our software. They claim this is to keep hackers from infecting software products. However, there are many very good products available for software vendors like ‘obfuscators’ (which I use) that keep hackers out of code. The actual incidents that Microsoft rationalizes its ‘code signing’ process for is statistically very minimal. However, they do get kick backs from their ‘approved’ code signing companies.

Now, with the release of Windows 7, Microsoft has taken another regulatory step by reporting software that does not have a ‘reputation’. This has nothing to do with the code signing. A company may have their code digitally signed and still run into the ‘reputation virus’. Microsoft reports it as a virus. However, if you read what the ‘reputation virus’ is; it only means that Microsoft has never heard of you. Norton and other virus programs take the Microsoft virus alert and automatically delete the downloaded trial software we produce. They report it as a virus. Microsoft readily admits that 90% of the folks that see the virus alert will not install the product. This means software vendors like myself are not permitted to compete in the ‘free market’ of the software business. I have two products for download on the internet. Both are exactly the same code. The only difference is one byte in a text, configuration file that allows the product to come up as either product. One of my software downloads is allowed by Microsoft and Norton, the other is not. It is reported as a virus and automatically deleted. This affects 90% of my new and upcoming business on the Windows 7 platform. I have talked to literally hundreds of other software vendors on the web who are in total agreement with my contention of Microsoft’s market monopolizing practices.

There are many other cases of ‘private market’ regulation that I could cite but this can probably suffice. The idea is that the corrosive effect of regulation is not just a charge that can be levied against the government. It happens all the time in the ‘free market’ as well. Does this effect competition adversely? Absolutely. Is there perhaps some need for regulation by both the government and big corporations? Probably, but as Jeff suggests it is also used as an excuse to kill competition. However, not as a component of government but of the private market itself. I think most folks agree that there is some need for market regulation by an impartial regulatory agency. However, effective regulatory restrictions by large corporations with vested interests are a market distortion that happens often and distorts the ‘free market’ ideal based on competition. When the government becomes a vehicle for the capitalists that do not want competition as Jeff suggest, it is certainly corporatism which is one of the hallmarks of historical fascism.

It is not a matter of is there corporatism or crony capitalism but to what degree it happens not just by government but by big corporations as well. To the degree that this happens, it is not the ideal of the ‘free market’ but a hybrid practical reality of how it actually works. The Bush administration was a perfect example of what happens when regulatory agencies rubber stamp big business. Oil and gas regulation, toy regulations, financial market regulations and more were thrown out the window and companies were given free reign over regulators. Corporations were even discovered to be wining, dining and giving the regulators luxurious trips. This was not the government interfering with the market but giving it carte blanche to do whatever it wanted. The ideal of small footprint regulation, as Jeff espouses, was realized by the Bush administration and it ultimately resulted in the recession. The housing crisis was not caused by too much regulation but the absolute lack of regulation in the derivatives market. One email at Standard and Poor’s stated, “Rating agencies continue to create and [sic] even bigger monster–the CDO [Collateralized debt obligations ] market. Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.” Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s, both private companies, are considered to have elevated ratings on CDO’s which are mortgage backed securities to minimize the risk and, in so doing, increase the profits for investors. See The Housing Crisis – Research Revisted, this and this for more data.

Another tactic of the ‘free market’ is price collusion and price fixing. Individual multinational corporations and conglomerations of individual market segment corporations have often been accused of doing this. The diamond market is notorious for this as well as Oil and Gas (remember Standard Oil, Rockefeller) and railroad industries. While this kind of activity in normally associated with monopolies it is still a reality of the practical workings of the free market. It seems to me that thinking of this kind of activity as a rare monopoly situation allows a sort of effective monopolizing in the actual market. Jeff states that, “Thus, monopolies don’t stay monopolies for long unless they are making consumers happy” but how does this measure up? Remember AT&T, officially deemed a monopoly by the courts, -they monopolized the market for decades…is this a short time? In any case, the kind of activity that goes on daily in the market by Microsoft and others has not acquired the label of ‘monopoly’ but shows that monopolizing activity is not a rare court decided phenomenon of the market; it is an analog, practical reality of the market. Microsoft has been brought to court and found guilty at least once that I know of for market monopolizing practices. This kind of activity has to get extremely severe before a public, official pronouncement is made.

Jeff quotes Smith here, “They often propose new laws and regulations, as Smith points out, that are to the benefit of their companies, but not to the benefit of society as a whole (i.e., to consumers).” However, Adam Smith himself, proposed over one hundred pages of financial industry regulations in the “Wealth of Nations” which have largely been neglected by the modern market place. I suppose Adam Smith himself was one the “they”s that Jeff refers to.

My contention is that it is extremely idealistic to think that the ‘free market’ is, in practice, all about competition. Yes, that is a positive aspect of the real market place but it is still an ideal and does not reflect a large part of how the market works. I also agree that government can become the problem when it effectively acts as a monopolist in the market, corporatism. However, as I have shown this is not just an essential evil of the government but occurs in the private market as well. My contention has always been that the free market works best for the public interest when government and big corporations collide. While the David and Goliath story may be cute, two Goliaths tend to do more damage to each other. The government in a democracy is ideally supposed to be the public defender and not the corporate defender although this ideal too has shown itself to be different from the reality. The answer is not to throw in the governmental towel as we did in the Bush administration but to make sure that we elect politicians that will oppose corporatism and government collusion with capitalists.

I find it interesting that Jeff thinks capitalists are capitalism’s biggest detractors. To me, this is like suggesting that churches are Christianities biggest problem. Capitalists vote Republican for the most part. If they wanted more government it seems to me like they would vote Democrat as the Republicans are fond of laying this charge on the Democrats. Republicans publicly state, almost daily, that they are on the side of business and the capitalists. Therefore, they publicly acknowledge that either they welcome the interference with the market that Jeff denounces or they want to return to the lassie faire capitalism of the Bush administration. While the Democrats may be complicitous in Jeff’s charge as well, they are not so bold proclaiming it which might account for something positive (or not). Are we to believe that the best proponents of a philosophy are intent on its destruction? This certainly may add some credence to some of Nietzsche’s discussion and post modernism but it also is a living demonstration of the inability of the system to rationalize itself based on its members. If major and important members are bent on the destruction of the market, are we suggesting that the only way to redeem the ‘free market’ is by the ideal that it proposes? If the reality has anything to do with some of the practicalities that I have suggested and seen, then ‘free market’ capitalism seems like it gets its validation based on an ‘otherworldly’ idealism not unlike Christianity. Are we supposed to believe that the ‘free market’ liberties in the Bush administration were problems of too much government still and therefore salvage the validity of the ‘free market’ ideal? I think this is a bit much to swallow. It is like continually suggesting that historical Christianity is not the ‘true’ Christianity in order to preserve an ideal Christianity that may appear dubious in practice. At some point, even the best metaphysician must live and breathe and have their existence in the world. Dreams are nice but realties are necessary. I do not advocate overthrowing capitalism but simply dealing with the reality of it without using its ideal as a pretense to justify its inadequacies. I think simple answers that make the government the scapegoat for the failures of capitalism are there to reinforce that idealism of a flawed system and enable us to overlook fundamental issues that need to be addressed. I prefer to address the issues directly and smartly while making the market more of a level playing field and less rigged against the interests of the public; a primary concern for Adam Smith and Karl Marx as well.

For me, the problem is better framed not in terms of government versus the private market but big versus small. Is the ideal of the free market demonstrated in TBTF (too big to fail)? What does competition have to do with propping up a business because it is too big? If competition always produces a better value for the consumer how is it that a ‘big’, that is too big to let the competition kill it can come from the ideal Jeff defends (remember Bush and Paulson)? If the ideal of the ‘free market’ is actually realized in practice, is this yet another glitch in the system that we have to rationalize away? How many times can we look the other way and still pronounce the ‘free market’ holy? What interest is served in ‘free market’ apologetics? My point is that ‘big’ is another name for effective monopoly in many cases. I would also apply this to the government with this caveat…the ideal of the government should be efficiency not small. If we make the government a David I would wager that Goliath will win the battle 99 out of 100 times. We need to make the big of the government our friend and defender because if we give that up we will have the mercy of the ‘free market’ and the legacy of George Bush as our BFFs.

Morality and its Shadow

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The funny thing about “political correctness” is that those that would criticize it do so under the banner of political correctness. Morality is a bit like the Tar-Baby. The more we try to “neutralize” ourselves from it, the more we fall prey to our own ‘bad faith’. From Lorenzo’s argument, we can certainly see the hypocrisy of a double standard with regard to Christianity and Islam. However, how real is the double standard for progressives? Certainly, I have no doubt there are progressives that fall under Lorenzo’s snare but how much of that is a stereotype habitually repeated by the right and how much can empirically be proven true of a majority of progressives? I did not see any reputable polls in the essay but there may be some in his source material. I do not know if I would qualify as ‘progressive’ since I am left of liberal but the Lorenzo box would not apply to me as I acknowledge the logic of his argument and agree that it certainly demonstrates the ‘bad faith’ of morality. Surely, we can suggest that the set of all “moral mascots” is not equivalent to the set of all progressives as that would be the apodictic example of the fallacy of equivocation. So I suppose we must content ourselves with suggesting that some unknown amount of progressives certainly fall under his indictment.

However, I would also suggest that under the guise of this kind of progressive critique there is also another political correctness, -the political correctness of conservatism. After all, painting progressives with the broad brush of hypocrisy is in the implicit interest of conservatism. It would seem that the ‘elitist’ moralists on the left are not the first on the historical stage of moral hypocrisy or perhaps at least the most dominant player in the present drama. If we take a step back from such righteous pontifications we may have to concede that Christianity has certainly had a lead role in the moral passion play and its hypocritical production. A few things come immediately to mind such as the crusades, priests and altar boys, dark age executions for heresy and witchcraft, anti-abortion (‘pro-life’), Republican Christians support of just wars like Iraq and Afghanistan and capital punishment, etc. It seems that shifting the argument to revolve around the lesser case of progressives from the greater case of historical Christianity is a conservative tactic to expunge their own predominate role in the power play of morality. However, I am willing to admit that political disposition may certainly have much to do with the sense of proportionality and number that typically lies dormant in pontificating.

The sort of Tar-Baby circularity I am highlighting really calls for a deeper look at the quagmire. One argument that can be made, Nietzsche made it elegantly, is that morality is really about power. In his view individuals and more importantly religions, politics, cultures preserve and maintain domination on the basis of the moral imperative. All despicable forms of human behavior can be dressed up with the garb of truth, morality and universality. However, the naked truth of the emperor with no cloths is that morality is used to advance and justify the unabashed use of power and domination. While I am not entirely on board with this cynical perspective of morality I certainly cannot deny the legitimacy of such an argument. Historically, we have desperately tried to authenticate our anthromorphic, myopic narcissism on the basis of the ‘eternal’, the ‘true’ and the ‘good’. I believe Foucault provides a rich empirical study for this case. When it comes to morality everyone and every culture thinks their morality is the ‘true’ morality and the ‘others’ demonstrate ‘bad faith’ morality. The logic of this power mongering morality has been proven over and over again and the only escape from contradictory cynicism appears to be neutrality. However, before I get into that I would like to cite one other avenue with regard to the topic of morality.

One way that folks try to escape the quandary of morality is to be a-moral. If we have no morality but only self-interest we can try to justify that on the basis of the best interest of every self or the morality of a-morality but that comes off as mere pretense. Why would a true a-moralist care if others take their ideology as serving the interest of morality as that would be a contradiction of terms; sort of like an atheist needing to assume the existence of God in some fashion in order to disprove it. Perhaps Nietzsche was given a pass to some extent by the mere force of his insights but his tinny sounding disciples remind me of what Nietzsche said about Christianity; there was only one Christian and he died two thousand years ago. The post-Rand era, Darwinian capitalist drum pounding may be cute and dramatic but it has certainly become cliché and over done. I suppose you could admire the pure self-aggrandizing of a Hitler, a Stalin, a Gingus Kahn, etc. but that cannot help but set up the most despicable and ‘bad faith’ form of morality, the morality of might makes right, -the butt of Nietzsche’s problem with (and admiration of) Christianity. He decried Christianity as descendent and decadent but he also credited it with the ingenious invention of eternal Hell and the inferior parishioner’s fear of reprisals for not listening to priests admonitions of how to avoid it. While he may have romanticized the nobility of the Greeks and the warrior he himself lived in a moat by the castle (as Kierkegaard criticized Hegel). Sorry, but I find the chest beating neocon to be a caricature of himself.

On the surface arguments against neutrality could bring up the fascist science of Aryan Nazism or the scientific Stalinism of communism. Ah, but the retort would be that those political sciences were not ‘true’ science. This is reminiscent of the claim that the Crusaders were not ‘true’ Christians. At all costs we must preserve the possibility for truth even if it maintains the necessity for untruth to establish it. Perhaps true science can only maintain a kind of quietism on questions of politics and social science. We could also bring up the argument that for every science there is a scientist, a human with morals and biases. Even if neutrality does offer refuge it appears to not offer refuge for living humans that still must moralize and have personal judgments or biases. As the existentialists were fully aware we must act and make judgments, even scientists. We must intervene against the unjust exercise of totalitarian perceptions, of the morality of power, and yet we can lay no claim to the absolute impartiality of our own judgments. Neutrality at best can only stifle and ignore the need for action when we are not the ones on the adverse receiving ends of the morality of power. I believe the French call the neutral justification for inaction the bourgeoisie. I am afraid that the refuge of neutrality is really only an empty abstraction for those that can afford one, those ordained by the gifts of power and morality. By this I mean that neutrality does not place us above the fray of having to act and make decisions based on our own flawed judgments and moral inconsistencies. If neutrality is used to justify inaction when faced with the need to act it is really only a pretense for conserving one’s own moral ascendency when faced with our inability to establish morality on anything other than, more ‘true’ than, ourselves. The latest cliché for moral hypocrisy may be ‘political correctness’ but its reality was perfected long before progressives came on the scene.

One caveat to this discussion on neutrality is that I do not want to reduce all neutrality to ‘bad conscious’ or bourgeois morality. I do believe that emotions may equally taint and break down the need to act based on our own moral ambivalences; clear thinking is in no way excused from our existential dilemma. The point is that we are offered no refuge from which we can gain a ‘Gods-eye’ perspective and therefore escape bad morality. I propose that instead of the one-upmanship game of establishing our morality on higher divine grounds or morally excusing ourselves from our moral selves perhaps we should look at morality as the small and individual way in which we are, -as having to make judgments, act and have unfounded and inferior opinions.

As humans we have to the possibility of learning and changing as long as we live. We cannot deny that we have morality and that we can and do use it in bad faith but we also have the possibility to learn and grow, to change. We are not utterly and always reduced to the necessity for wrong actions and hypocrisy. We must be politically correct even if we are conservatives in our uniquely conservative fashion but we do not have to universalize and absolutely justify our moral certainties. We are allowed tentative judgments. We must also recognize our clay feet and ‘bad faith’ morality without making it a virtue or ignoring it. To some extent, we are responsible for the plight of others. Each of us has to make a judgment call about where that responsibility lies. Perhaps as Levinas would have it, the other continually faces us and reminds us of our abnegation to their call of our responsibility. We may as well fess up and do what we can in the face of our own hypocrisy. Neutrality never succeeds completely as permanent oblivion is not an option in the face of human tragedy; our indolence always comes back to us in one way or another. I suppose we can justify, rationalize, divine and demon but it also requires constant effort to keep form and chaos in their perspective corners. Perhaps the best we can do is accept the burden of our morality, forge ahead in the need to act and try to listen for the still, small voice that affords us the opportunity to learn.

Zizek, Hegel, Possibility

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This is why the Hegelian ‘loss of the loss’ is definitively not the return to a full identity, lacking nothing. the ‘loss of the loss’ is the moment in which loss ceases to be the loss of ‘something’ and becomes the opening of the empty place that the object (‘something’) can occupy, the moment in which the empty place is conceived as prior to that which fills it – the loss opens up a space for the appearance of the object. In the ‘loss of the loss’, the loss remains a loss, it is not ‘cancelled’ in the ordinary sense: the regained ‘positivity’ is that of the loss as such, the experience of loss as a ‘positive’, indeed ‘productive’, condition.

Would it not be possible to define the final moment of the analytic process, the passe, as precisely this experience of the ‘positive’ character of loss, of the original void filled by the dazzling and fascinating experience of the fantasmatic object, the experience that the object as such, in its fundamental dimension, is the positivization of a void? Is this not the traversing of the fantasy, this experience of the priority of place in relation to the fantasmatic object, in the moment when, recalling the formula of Mallarmé, ‘nothing takes place but the place’?

In the field of philosophy, Hegelian Absolute Knowledge – and perhaps only Hegelian Absolute Knowledge – designates the same subjective position, that of the traversing of the fantasy, the post-fantasmatic relationship to the object, the experience of the lack in the Other. Perhaps the unique status of Hegelian Absolute Knowledge is due to the question that can be posed to proponents of the so-called ‘post-Hegelian inversion’, whether the likes of Marx or Schelling: is this ‘inversion’ not, in the last resort, a flight in the face of the unbearability of the Hegelian procedure? The price of their ‘inversion’ seems to be a reading of Hegel that is totally blind to the dimension evoked by the traversing of the fantasy and the lack in the Other: in this reading. Absolute Knowledge becomes the culminating moment of so-called ‘idealist panlogicism’, against which one is able, of course, to affirm without any problem the ‘process of effective life’.

The Most Sublime of Hysterics: Hegel with Lacan, Slavoj Zizek

The conception of the self (ego) as identical with, yet threatened by and aggressive toward, the other (specular image) is at bottom alienation pure and simple; seeing him or herself as the other and other as self makes the very notion of selfhood one typified by a perpetual oscillation between projection and assimilation. The self and other are thus two sides of the same process, at the heart of which is alienation; they are mutually dependent on each other for their definitions, imaginatively existing while in reality merely ex-sisting: “The ego and the counterpart form the prototypical dual relationship, and are interchangeable. This relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification with the little other means that the ego, and the imaginary order itself, are both sites of a radical alienation” (Evans 82). As Lacan says, although in an inversion of terms which reveals the mutually constitutive relationship of alienation to the imaginary, “alienation is constitutive of the imaginary order” (qtd. in Evans 82). Alienation, the ability to think the self as other and the other as self is thus the defining feature of the I, the basis for the fantasy of selfhood.

Returning thus to desire as a constitutive feature of human existence, we find a ready expression of how the desire for the other’s desire functions in the mirror stage. As I have shown above, the infant enters the imaginary through a process of identification with a specular image, an “other” with which it longs to be identified. The essential component to such identification, however (and the aspect that renders it impossible), is the necessity for the other similarly to desire identification with the infant. This desire for the other’s desire is not a simple matter of mutual desire such as that experienced in erotic love, but a more all-encompassing demand for total recognition; the infant wants not some part (however large) of the other’s desire, but all of it – he or she wants to be the be-all and end-all of the other’s desire. The impossibility of such a total identification is what keeps subjectivity moving from object to object in its quest for an object that will represent and capture the other’s desire and by possession of which the individual can absorb and utterly subjugate the other’s desire. Most simply put, desire is always a desire for the other’s desire; only the other’s desire for a given object transforms it from an object of demand or need into one of desire.

A Very Brief Introduction to Lacan, Prepared by Professor Stephen Ross

It seems to me that there is a play of differences in the way Zizek thinks of Hegel and the way the “post-Hegelian inversion” of “idealist panlogicism” would think of Hegel. If we think of the latter as the final move of Concept that loses contingencies from being and essence, truly the ‘concrete universal’ (asymptotic as abstract universality but concretized by taking full account of particularities), then the stated thesis eliminates the possibility for criticism and lays hold of the claim for presupposition-less. The concrete universal cannot be lacking. Otherwise, it would not be concrete; it would be abstract. By definition, the Concept as concrete universal must be self-determined. If it is not self-determined it would not be concrete. A tautology is hidden in this formula that must, of necessity, be true. If a concrete universal means that all contingencies are taken account of in the sublation of the Concept then an argument against the concreteness of the universal only proves what it would criticize – that the argument is already taken account of in the earlier movements of Spirit (being, essence). This also proves the presupposition-less claim that presuppositions are not dismissed but accounted for; therefore, there are no presuppositions. This is a ‘check mate’ of Spirit.

Many critiques against the pan logicians including Zizek’s Hegelian reading are already interior to the argument and can only result in a misunderstanding of latter moves. Thus, Zizek must have attributed a foundationalism to Hegel’s moment of negation that refuses the move into the resolution of oppositions, resolution not as some kind of new-age’y, mush of unity but as holding terms in their distinctness together. Thus the lack created by the loss of the phantasm of the object stops short of the culmination of the self in the object and the object in the self. Even from Lacan the self as mirrored from image, the specular, is the fantasm of object. Therefore, the lack in object and final depletion of desire, aggression; fantasm, is simultaneously the end of the spectacle. The self-object as master-slave dies and, according to the Concept, is resurrected in its final unity (which is all it ever really was). Thus, the negation gives way to inevitability, the final state of completion and therefore, self-determination. The critique of Zizek has been taken hold of and accounted for; Zizek no longer has to reify loss but let it pass into its natural death to find its completion in Concept.

This illustrates the impossibility of falsifying tautology. Critiques from psychology whether individual or sociological; political whether bourgeois or materialistic; philosophical whether categorical, empirical, existential or nihilistic; religious and mystical will always be taken already into account by the concretized absolute power of tautology. To criticize Hegel is tantamount to suggesting that true is false for pan-Logic. To think the concrete absolute is not concrete is to affirm that the concrete universal ‘is’. In this then the Concept has emancipated itself.

The emancipation of the Concept certainly does acquire the sure footing of self-sufficiency. It completes the lack of self and object (specular) in itself. The completion is not a lack but a fullness; the subject and object complete themselves in each other. Therefore, the lack is regarded as only a negative step along the way to Concept. The final Concept is not the final solution, the foundationalism of violence, otherwise it would not be universal. The concrete universal must contain all individual objections and contingencies as moments of hierarchy. The tautological seal must be all inclusive for the Concept to be what it is. -In this then has the authentic notion of tautology been universalized. When tautology is universal and concrete it must, by definition, provide a hermeneutic for any excess. Even more so, there is no ‘excess’ to Concept, no exteriority, as that would defy itself; the excess of Being and Essence IS Concept.

The possibility for no excess to Concept is impossible. If there truly is no excess, the possibility cannot exist, have essence or be thought…and yet, it ‘is’. Existentially, the absolute impossibility of the possibility of excess to the Concept exists (exits). It may be fantasm that the pan logicians must perpetually defend against. It may already be taken hold of in earlier movements of Spirit but how could it be if it is what it is?

Let’s recapitulate, the possibility referred to here is not a contingent claim against the Concept but a universal claim against the concrete universal – the possibility of excess to ‘concrete’ universality. Of course, the logical play is that would not be universal but abstract universality. Thus, to speculate that there is a possibility for excess to ‘concrete’ universality is to misunderstand the tautological definition of concrete universal. This ‘misunderstanding’ contradicts the defining ‘definition’ and therefore cannot be allowed. To allow it would be to allow nonsense, chaos, contradiction…perhaps what may be meant as existence?…poetry?…the supplement of writing? Is there a ‘concrete’ existence that is not taken account of by the pan logicians? Perhaps the moment of Being exceeds the contingency of Being without arriving at Concept. There may be lack in the notion of existence that topples the triads of the Logic. “Ah”, you say, “but that then would not be existence because existence would have to take hold of chaos (apeiron (ἄπειρον) – unlimited, infinite or indefinite from ἀ– a-, “without” and πεῖραρ peirar, “end, limit”, the Ionic Greek form of πέρας peras, “end, limit, boundary”).”

Could the alpha-privative of limit, form, Concept already have been thought of at the beginning as the (Hegelian) end? Wouldn’t this turn the whole notion of progress, world historical Spirit, on its head? Why would it not be possible to turn the Hegelian tautology on its head and think of chaos (and contingency) not as a moment of Concept but Concept as a moment of chaos?

In thinking of the chaotic thought of excess not as abstracted from the concrete but as exceeding the concrete (henceforth the Possibility) we may have tried to think the sublimely ridiculous but we may also have stumbled back into existence not as a moment of Concept but as an excess of Concept. To suggest that the thought is absurd (ever heard of Kierkegaard) is not to extinguish its ridiculousness but merely to ignore it. The Possibility may take on all the adjectives of disdain, derision, improper, profane and unholy but nevertheless, even a Hegelian, could not deny that it COULD be posed (in all its horror and lunacy). This positing would then be an exteriority- perhaps a bastard exteriority as Chaos and Eros (neither divine nor mortal but a bastard) for Hesiod but nevertheless, an exteriority.

The impossibility of this exteriority may inherit all the moral indignations that it deservedly acquires from pan-Logic but Possibility must exist as a bastard. The ‘must exist’ not of subjugated moment but as circumscription of Concept may be Hesiod’s chaos. In Possibility, Concept may be but a moment albeit an eternal moment. Tautology would thus not be contradicted but in the possibility of the im-possibility of this otherness, the thought that can’t be, allowed to be, even thought; -the secret that cannot be uttered, the Other that cannot be faced – it undoes me and Concept(s). Perhaps in this undoing, absolutely chaotic passivity, anarchy; there may be something as Ethics – the need to act from the other that faces me in his or her im-Possibility. Of course, I know that all this can be re-appropriated into its proper ‘place’, its bare nakedness as Possibility can be thought as what it is ‘not’ or as what it should be or really ‘is’ but that would not think the thought as given but as what could be accounted for, what it really could be. This ‘real’ turns on the necessity of the Concept not the idea given by Possibility. Thus the materiality of the idea is transformed into its ideal. The eternal question that must reoccur is the violence of the ‘same’ – the totality of the Concept.

It may be that Possibility can be just as archaic and violent not as unifying violence but as tearing down violence (mystification). It may be that Possibility may throw out Ethics just as likely as it would include it. Violence in this case would be an overtaking of the other, the other that cannot be allowed, that must be mastered in order for the self to survive and thrive. It may be that Possibility would re-enact the fantasm of object; even more, give it unrestricted license. Agreed, Possibility is not bonded to Ethics. It may be that Possibility is the ‘rabbit hole’ of Alice. These objections do not take away Possibility although they do try to give it place. However, its place-less-ness remains; it’s excess to place. It is just as likely and historically, probably much more likely, that the bastardization of Concept can take its leave of Ethics. I know that the true Hegelian would protest that this is not the true Concept as a Christian would proclaim that the true Christ is not the Christ of the Crusades. Nevertheless, the profanity of the Concept has occurred in history and will occur again. The rubric of the proper has always held the potential for mass im-properness (Foucault). It may be that when the improper profanity of Concept is fueled by the fire of concrete absolutism, a kind of ‘no exit’ from Concept increases the passion of extremism to the infinite (a negative Kierkegaard theology). There certainly seems to be a historical circularity of the impossibility of the canonical text, concrete universality, as Derrida may point out. However, the trace may be the Concept’s impossible repeatability as ‘pure’, -each repetition is condemned to fail from its own infinite insistence of itself. In this case, Possibility may restrain the fanaticism of the play of Concept. Possibility then would not, could not ever be eternal or mortal but an interlude that humanizes in the shadow of Concept.

Greek Mythos (updated 2/16/12)

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First of all Chaos came-to-be; but then afterwards Broad-breasted earth, a secure dwelling place forever for all (the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and misty Tartara in the depths under the wide-wayed grounds and Eros who, handsomest among the deathless gods a looser of limbs, in all the gods and in all human beings overpowers in their breasts their intelligence and careful planning. And from Chaos came-to-be both Erebos and dark night, and from night, in turn, came-to-be both Aither and day, whom she conceived and bore after joining in love with Erebos. But earth first begat, as an equal to herself, starry sky, so that he might cover her on all sides, in order to be a secure dwelling place forever for all the blessed gods, and she begat the tall mountains, pleasing haunts of the goddess-nymphs who make their homes in the forested hills, and also she bore the barren main with its raging swell, the sea, all without any sweet act of love; but then next, having lain with sky, she bore deep-swirling ocean.[i]

The underworld, Hades, was bounded by five rivers: Acheron (the river of sorrow), Cocytus (the river of lamentation), Phlegethon (the river of fire), Lethe (the river of forgetfulness) and Styx (the river of hate). Lethe was the daughter of Eris (strife) and Nyx (night) , and the sister of Ponos (toil), Limos (starvation), the Algea (pains), the Hysminai (fightings), the Makhai (battles), the Phonoi (murders), the Androktasiai (man-slaughters), the Neikea (quarrels), the Pseudologoi (lies), the Amphilogiai (disputes), Dysnomia (lawlessness), Atë (ruin), and Horkos (oath).

Aletheia, often translated ‘truth’, is the alpha-privative of Lethe. In the Myth of Er, Plato tells us that after the departed choose the next life they would have to drink of the waters of Lethe, forgetfulness, before they could be re-born. Aletheia is the ‘not’ of forgetfulness, it is remembrance. A later rendition of the myth claims there was another river, Mnemosyne (memory), that the departed could drink from that resulted in a-Lethe, remembrance. Zeus and Mnemosyne slept together for nine nights and Mnemosyne gave birth to the nine muses. One of the muses, Erato (the lovely, the desired), was the muse of poetry and mimicry. Erato is from the same Greek root as Eros.

For Heidegger, Lethe was concealment and aletheia was unconcealment or uncovering. Lethe was oblivion (covering), perhaps the il ya (there is) of Blanchot. Oblivion is not nothing but chaos (without genealogy), absolute indeterminacy, the incessant buzz of anticorrelation – the ‘not’ of relation. The copula in ‘A is B’ relates ‘A as B’. The ‘isness’ of ‘A is B’ instantiates being through the relation ‘as’. The phonemes in ‘as’ signifies relation and connects the symbols (symbole) ‘A’ and ‘B’. Sign, the ‘as’ (phone) of ‘A as B’, hold together the symbols ‘A’ and ‘B’ in their separateness without conflating them. Sign signifies not only the relation with ‘A’ and ‘B’ but distinguishes a uniqueness between ‘A’ and ‘B’ that stands out. What ‘stands out’ from what? –Logos. At the same time that ‘A’ and ‘B’ relate they are also set apart from something else that is dissimilar. ‘A as B’ unconceals a relatedness but equiprimordially (equally primordial) also conceals the background from which the concealedness is possible.

The Greeks thought of this ‘background’ as logos. The simultaneous unconcealing and concealing is what Heidegger says that the Greeks called ‘aletheia’ and ‘lethe’. Aletheia is simply the negation of lethe. This is important because ‘truth’ as aletheia is rooted in concealment. There is no ‘truth’ that is pure or proper or holy that stands above, over and against, existence. Essential truth (A) is essential concealment (B). Heidegger notes three modes of concealment: error (Irre), the concealment of error and the mystery of no-thing.

The apprehension (noesis) of symbols (‘A’ and ‘B’, noemata) and the revealing as revelation of their relatedness also hides the as-a-whole, the logos that bind us to them. Every human being, the ‘there of being’ (Dasein), is bound to logos. Simultaneously, logos allows itself to be given over to the dissemination of speech. Logos giving itself over in passivity makes speech (language) possible. As humans we stand together in agreement in existence (ek-sistence, out-standing) for the openness of revelation. Logos given over and filled with the totality of history (world) is always already there in revelation but remains concealed in the act of speech; -this is the source for error. Speech as revelation must conceal much more than it unconceals; -this is error. The forgetting of error is the covering over of error; -Lethe. In apotheosis, the deification of revelation, what was not revealed in the act (i.e., of speech) becomes of no consequence for us, no-thing. No-thing is mystery. Mystery animates from behind the scenes because no-thing is not non-existent (as never has been or will be) but remains dormant, absolutely passive, in the face of the apotheosis of revelation, the error of lethe.

Sign then becomes the nexus formed by the triadic: Being, aletheia, logos of Heidegger; perhaps the real, imaginary, symbol of Lacan[ii]. The ‘as’, referent, unconceals from ‘worldhood’ for Heidegger. World is the history of Being, the ‘as-a-whole’ that can never be made visible. World is always and in every case (ontic, particular) declared in the copula ‘is’ as a pre-condition that gives the possibility for aletheia. The ‘as’ declares (apophantikos) and is only possible from the worlding given by logos:

The “as”-structure itself is the condition of the of the logos apophantikos. The “as” is not some property of the logos, stuck on or grafted onto it, but the reverse: the “as”-structure for its part is in general the condition of the possibility of this logos. (Heidegger, 315/458)

Unconcealedness makes existientiell truth possible. Every ontic ‘there’ of being (da-sein), human being, already speaks (logon) – uses phonemes that project the already-as-a-whole given by logos – the worlding of world. Every human being (ontic, particular) already has agreement of the whole in the sense of thrown into existence from worlding made possible by logos. When ‘A as B’ is said, the cohesion, adherence, relation of the ‘as’ can only ‘be’ from the thrown ‘there’ of beings projected as the openness logos.

“In projection there occurs the letting-prevail of the being of beings in the whole of their possible binding character in each case. In projection, world prevails” (365/530, Heidegger’s emphasis).

In each case of human being there is agreement (kata syntheses) that makes communication possible. Additionally, ‘A as B’ is not a mush of indeterminate-ability but unites (synthesis) the terms by holding them apart (diairesis). If ‘A as B’ is thought as false, it is still a negative modality of truth, aletheia, unconealedness. In this case, the truth is deemed as false. However, the concealed as-a-whole from logos is always already apprehended. If I say, “I am at my house” the ‘mine’ with feet planted on earth under the heavens in dwelling situated before the truths and falsities (gods) of worldhood – all and more are brought together in the simplicity of saying. Of course, the ‘all and more’ are not explicitly thought as they remain concealed, in the background. For Lacan, the background is the unconscious. The unconscious is structured like a language.

Lacan has been criticized by linguists that believe that his structure of language is outdated and inadequate. In other words, if the unconscious is structured like language then the structure of the unconscious must change as our understanding of linguistics changes. Actually, Lacan would have no problem with the idea that particular structures of the unconscious are malleable just as language can change but retain certain ‘deep structures’ as Chomsky noted. For Lacan, the symbolic lack of the primordial symbiosis with the mother can only be mediated by the present structures of a natural language. The significance of the other becomes the repetition of submerged symbol. The imagined ‘original’ symbiosis is retained in repetitive symbols that can only be given from the tools of a native language. In this way a kind of ‘double inscription’ between significance and speech occurs that mutually constrain each other. Speech is not hermetically sealed in some narcissistic monad. Speech is always directed towards the desire for the other that always lacks the originary, the arche, and can only be simulated and supplemented with symbolic representation. The symbol becomes phantasm that nevertheless maintains its essential tension, cognitive dissonance, from the ‘real’ that is impossible (primordial symbiosis) and the phantasm that seeks to replace it from linguistic constructs (all it has) – the symbol is metaphor and metonymy. Lacan said that the ‘unconscious is the discourse [dialectic] of the other’. Aristotle distinguishes human being as ‘zoon logon echon’, the animal having words, speech, logos.

Finally, the points at which the vector of desire and the signifying chain cross can be seen as instances of Freudian double inscription. The ‘conscious and unconscious’ significance of an act or utterance are one and the same, and each constrains the other.[iii]

For Lacan, an infant is first mirrored in the perfect union with the mother. Her facial gestures and motor abilities are the infants as well. However, as the infant begins to realize that he or she does not have motor control skills, the infant is frustrated and struggles to gain motor control. A visceral tension is generated when the infant perceives his or her reflection in the mirror. The reflection displaces the frustration of motor abilities as the reflected image of the baby gets substituted for the kinesthetic lack. The image provides a satisfaction that is lacking in affect. The infant imagines an idealized perfection in the image, the other, and attributes the pleasure of the image to the pleasure of self, the perfected self. Writing of the mirror stage Professor Steven Ross states,

The circularity and self-referentiality of this process is abundantly clear in Bowie’s articulation, as the ego both constructs an ideal version of itself on the basis of various imaginary features with which it would like to be identified, and then acts as though it unpremeditatedly “recognises” itself in objects that bear an imaginary correspondence to that ideal. Basically, the imaginary is the scene in which the ego undertakes the perpetual and paradoxical practice of seeking “wholeness, synthesis, autonomy, duality and, above all, similarity” through identification with external objects. Each such identification is necessarily illusory, however, as it is but a pale imitation of the originary wholeness that was sacrificed in the primal identification of the ego with its specular image in the mirror stage.[iv]

Studies of the brain and the unconscious are providing radical evidence that the ‘agent’ of control is imagined erroneously from disparate and unaware processes that take place in the background of consciousness, the unconscious. In “The New Unconscious” studies have shown that the unconscious is capable of doing everything that we think should be the function of conscious. The question that comes out of these studies is, “What is consciousness for?” This is a rather long quote but it illustrates the point. Consider these experiments on the principle of agency,

A person cannot possibly think about and be consciously aware of all of the individual muscle actions in compound and sequential movements-there are too many of them and they are too fast (see, e.g., Thach, 1996). Therefore they can occur only through some process that is automatic and subconscious. Empirical support for this conclusion comes from a study by Fourneret and Jeannerod (1998). Participants attempted to trace a line displayed on a computer monitor, but with their drawing hand hidden from them by a mirror. Thus they were not able to see how their hand actually moved in order to reproduce the drawing: they had to refer to a graphical representation of that movement on a computer monitor in front of them. However, unknown to the participants, substantial bias had been programmed into the translation of their actual movement into that which was displayed on the screen, so that the displayed line did not actually move in the same direction as had their drawing hand. Despite this, all participants felt and reported great confidence that their hand had indeed moved in the direction shown on the screen. This could only have occurred if normal participants have little or no direct conscious access to their actual hand movements.[v]

In a study of this principle [the principle of agency], Wegner and Wheatley (1999) presented people with thoughts (e.g., a tape-recorded mention of the word swan) relevant to their action (moving an onscreen cursor to select a picture of a swan). The movement the participants performed was actually not their own, as they shared the computer mouse with an experimental confederate who gently forced the action without the participants’ knowledge. (In yet other trials, the effect of the thought on the participant’s own action was found to be nil when the action was not forced.) Nevertheless, when the relevant thought was provided either 1 or 5 seconds before the action, participants reported feeling that they acted intentionally in making the movement. This experience of will followed the priority principle. This was clear because on other trials, thoughts of the swan were prompted 30 seconds before the forced action or I second afterward-and these prompts did not yield an inflated experience of will. Even when the thought of the action is wholly external-appearing as in this case over headphones-its timely appearance before the action leads to an enhanced experience of apparent mental causation.

The second key to apparent mental causation is the consistency principle, which describes the semantic connectedness of the thought and the action. Thoughts that are relevant to the action and consistent with it promote a greater experience of mental causation than thoughts that are not relevant or consistent. So, for example, having the thought of eating a salad (and only this thought) just before you find yourself ordering a plate of fries is likely to make the ordering of the fries feel foreign and unwilled (Where did these come from,). Thinking of fries and then ordering fries, in contrast, will prompt an experience of will. As another example. consider what happens when people with schizophrenia experience hearing voices. Although there is good evidence that these voices are self-produced, the typical response to such auditory hallucinations is to report that the voice belongs to someone else. Hoffman (1986) has suggested that the inconsistency of the utterance with the person’s prior thoughts leads to the inference that the utterance was not consciously willed-and so to the delusion that others’ voices are speaking “in one’s head.” Ordinarily, we know our actions in advance of their performance and experience the authorship of action because of the consistency of this preview with the action.

In a laboratory test of the consistency principle, Wegner, Sparrow, and Winerman (2004) arranged for each of several undergraduate participants to observe their mirror reflection as another person behind them, hidden from view, extended arms forward on each side of them. The person behind the participant then followed instructions delivered over headphones for a series of hand movements. This circumstance reproduced a standard pantomime sometimes called Helping Hands in which the other person’s hands look, at least in the mirror, as though they belong to the participant. This appearance did not lead participants to feel that they were controlling the hands if they only saw the hand movements. When participants could hear the instructions that the hand helper followed as the movements were occurring, though, they reported an enhanced feeling that they could control the other’s hands.

In another experiment on hand control, this effect was again found. In addition, the experience of willing the other’s movements was found to be accompanied by an empathic sensation of the other’s hands. Participants for this second study watched as one of the hands snapped a rubber band on the wrist of the other, once before the sequence of hand movements and once again afterward. All participants showed a skin conductance response (SCR) to the first snap-a surge in hand sweating that lasted for several seconds after the snap. The participants who had heard previews of the hand movements consistent with the hands’ actions showed a sizeable SCR to the second rubber band snap as well. In contrast, those with no previews, or who heard previews that were inconsistent with the action, showed a reduced SCR to the snap that was made after the movements. The experience of controlling the hand movements seems to induce a sort of emotional ownership of the hands. Although SCR dissipated after the movements in participants who did not hear previews, it was sustained in the consistent preview condition. The consistency of thought with action, in sum, can create a sense that one is controlling someone else’s hands and, furthermore, can yield a physiological entrainment that responds to apparent sensations in those hands. It makes sense in this light that consistency between thought and action might be a powerful source of the experience of conscious will we feel for our own actions as well.

The third principle of apparent mental causation is exclusivity, the perception that the link between one’s thought and action is free of other potential causes of the action. This principle explains why one feels little voluntariness for an action that was apparently caused by someone else. Perceptions of outside agency can undermine the experience of will in a variety of circumstances, but the most common case is obedience to the instructions given by another. Milgram (1974) suggested in this regard that the experience of obedience introduces “agentic shift”-a feeling that agency has been transferred away from oneself. More exotic instances of this effect occur in trance channeling, spirit possession, and glossolalia or “speaking in tongues,” when an imagined agent (such as a spirit, entity, or even the Holy Spirit) is understood to be influencing one’s actions, and so produces a decrement in the experience of conscious will (Wegner, 2002).

A further example of the operation of exclusivity is the phenomenon of facilitated communication (FC), which was introduced as a manual technique for helping autistic and other communication-impaired individuals to communicate without speaking. A facilitator would hold the client’s finger above a letter board or keyboard, ostensibly to brace and support the client’s pointing or key-pressing movements, but not to produce them. Clients who had never spoken in their lives were sometimes found to produce lengthy typed expressions this way, at a level of detail and grammatical precision that was miraculous. Studies of FC soon discovered, however, that when separate questions were addressed (over headphones) to the facilitator and the client, those heard only by the facilitator were the ones being answered. Facilitators commonly expressed no sense at all that they were producing the communications, and instead they attributed the messages to their clients. Their strong belief that FC would work, along with the conviction that the client was indeed a competent agent whose communications merely needed to be facilitated, led to a breakdown in their experience of conscious will for their own actions (Twachtman-Cullen, 1997: Wegner, Fuller, & Sparrow, 2003). Without a perception that one’s own thought is the exclusive cause of one’s action, it is possible to lose authorship entirely and attribute it even to an unlikely outside agent.

Another example of the exclusivity principle at work is provided in studies of the subliminal priming of agents (Dijksterhuis, Preston, Wegner, & Aarts, 2004). Participants in these experiments were asked to react to letter strings on a computer screen by judging them to be words or not-and to do this as quickly as possible in a race with the computer. On each trial in this lexical decision task, the screen showing the letters went blank either when the person pressed the response button, or automatically at a short interval (about 400-650 ms) after the presentation. This made it unclear whether the person had answered correctly and turned off the display or whether the computer did it, and on each trial the person was asked to guess who did it. In addition, however, and without participants’ prior knowledge, the word I or me or some other word was very briefly presented on each trial. This presentation lasted only 17 ms, and was both preceded and followed by random letter masks-such that participants reported no awareness of these presentations. The subliminal presentations influenced judgments of authorship. On trials with the subliminal priming of a first-person singular pronoun, participants more often judged that they had beaten the computer. They were influenced by the unconscious priming of self to attribute an ambiguous action to their own will. In a related study, participants were subliminally primed on some trials with the thought of an agent that was not the self-God. Among those participants who professed a personal belief in God, this prime reduced the causal attribution of the action to self. Apparently, the decision of whether self is the cause of an action is heavily influenced by the unconscious accessibility of self versus nonself agents. This suggests that the exclusivity of conscious thought as a cause of action can be influenced even by the unconscious accessibility of possible agents outside the self.

The theory of apparent mental causation, in sum, rests on the notion that our experience of conscious will is normally a construction. When the right timing, content, and context link our thought and our action, this construction yields a feeling of authorship of the action. It seems that we did it. However, this feeling is an inference we draw from the juxtaposition of our thought and action, not a direct perception of causal agency. Thus, the feeling can be wrong. Although the experience of will can become the basis of our guilt and our pride, and can signal to us whether we feel responsible for action in the moral sense as well, it is merely an estimate of the causal influence of our thoughts on our actions, not a direct readout of such influence. Apparent mental causation nevertheless is the basis of our feeling that we are controllers.[vi]

There is a baffling problem about what consciousness is for. It is equally baffling, moreover, that the function of consciousness should remain so baffling. It seems extraordinary that despite the pervasiveness and familiarity of consciousness in our lives, we are uncertain in what way (if at all) it is actually indispensable to us. (Frankfurt, 1988, p. 162) What is consciousness for, if perfectly unconscious, indeed subjectless, information processing is in principle capable of achieving all the ends for which conscious minds were supposed to exist? (Dennett, 1981, p. 13)[vii]

It appears that the meta-language of an agency of self is not some kind of self-evident ‘truth’ but is a kind of imagined self that gets surmised ex post facto and gets set up like symbols; the symbols of individualism, free will and self. These symbols, much like ‘A as B’, are substituted metaphorically as a condensation of a plurality of unconscious processes and get repeated metonymically over the course of a lifetime to reinforce their significance. The symbols are the signifiers and the signified, as place holders of other signifiers, of meaning, individualism, free will and self, are taken over from the as-a-whole, the worlding given from logos. The terms of speech uncover the meta-language of agency drawn from a vast pool, language. Language is not memorized word for word starting from infancy. It is intuited as world and made possible as the event of revelation (speech) in the openness of logos.

The impossible ‘real’ of Lacan interrupts symbol and imagination. The ‘real’ is not yet a symbolic and imagined ‘other’; as Lacan illustrates, “a knock on the door that interrupts a dream” or the absolute alterity of the other from Levinas that interrupts totality. The ‘real’ is ineffable, absolute indeterminacy, the incessant buzz of anticorrelation, the ‘not’ of relation – chaos. Only after do we mirror, represent, relate, situate as symbols not-present-at-hand but instrumentally given from linguistic phonemes and ‘understand’ meaning or lack thereof. However, the insufficiency of symbolic dissemination, difference and deterrence (differance) always requires a supplement. Desire as lack of primordial symbiosis is the basis for the uncanny.

‘Canny’ is from the Anglo-Saxon root ‘ken’ which means knowledge, understanding, cognizance, mental perception, one’s ken. Thus the uncanny is something outside one’s familiar knowledge or perceptions.

The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche – “the opposite of what is familiar”) is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange or uncomfortably familiar.

Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize.

Freud draws on a wholly different element of the story, namely, “the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes,” as the “more striking instance of uncanniness” in the tale.

Freud goes on, for the remainder of the essay, to identify uncanny effects that result from instances of “repetition of the same thing,” including incidents wherein one becomes lost and accidentally retraces one’s steps, and instances wherein random numbers recur, seemingly meaningfully (here Freud may be said to be prefiguring the concept that Jung would later refer to as synchronicity). He also discusses the uncanny nature of Otto Rank’s concept of the “double.”

Basically, the Uncanny is what unconsciously reminds us of our own Id, our forbidden and thus repressed impulses perceived as a threatening force by our super-ego ridden with oedipal guilt as it fears symbolic castration by punishment for deviating from societal norms. Thus, the items and individuals that we project our own repressed impulses upon become a most uncanny threat to us, uncanny monsters and freaks akin to fairy-tale folk-devils, and subsequently often become scapegoats we blame for all sorts of perceived miseries, calamities, and maladies.[viii]

The uncanny, the familiar strange, endless dyads of is and isn’t are not quieted by fetish, the desire for the other represented as object, as absolute knowledge. The reflection in the mirror of self determining Spirit is thought in Zizek’s description of “The Most Sublime of Hysterics”

Lacan’s formula that Hegel is ‘the most sublime of hysterics’ should be interpreted along these lines: the hysteric, by his very questioning, ‘burrows a hole in the Other’; his desire is experienced precisely as the Other’s desire. Which is to say, the hysterical subject is fundamentally a subject who poses himself a question all the while presupposing that the Other has the key to the answer, that the Other knows the secret. But this question posed to the Other is in fact resolved, in the dialectical process, by a reflexive turn – namely, by regarding the question as its own answer.[ix]

Here, desire for the other has become absolute knowledge. The uncanny has become its own answer and thus, transformed, synthesized in the essence of its question. It is for this reason that the System was not finished by Hegel and never will be. The uncanny distends and distorts existentially, -ek-sisting. Semiosis can only defer and detain; the metaphysical desire for absolutes imagined, -in-sisting (distinguished from con-sisting) as language. The uncanny hides its concealment of error as mystery; as what does not show itself in showing, in aletheia. Only when the question of the ‘there’ of being can be heard as if for the first time, the ghost of logos, can the uncanny Other be heard in myth.

According to Hesiod, Eros is: “…the fairest of the deathless gods; he unstrings the limbs [makes the limbs go limp] and subdues both mind and sensible thought in the breasts of all gods and all men.” Hesiod tells us that Eros was one of the oldest deities, born from Chaos alongside Gaia (the Earth) and Tartarus (the Underworld).

Eros, the non-generative, without arche, parentless God from Hesiod is neither divine or mortal.

At the beginning there was only Chaos, Night (Nyx), Darkness (Erebus), and the Abyss (Tartarus). Earth, the Air and Heaven had no existence. Firstly, blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Darkness, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Love (Eros) with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in the deep Abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light.[x]

Later Eros is spoken of as the child of night (Nyx). He is also spoken of as the son of Aphrodite,

[Hera addresses Athene :] We must have a word with Aphrodite. Let us go together and ask her to persuade her boy [Eros], if that is possible, to loose an arrow at Aeetes’ daughter, Medea of the many spells, and make her fall in love with Iason . . .[xi]

He [Eros] smites maids’ breasts with unknown heat, and bids the very gods leave heaven and dwell on earth in borrowed forms.[xii]

Once, when Venus’son [Cupid, aka Eros] was kissing her, his quiver dangling down, a jutting arrow, unbeknown, had grazed her breast. She pushed the boy away. In fact the wound was deeper than it seemed, though unperceived at first. [And she became] enraptured by the beauty of a man [Adonis].[xiii]

Eros drove Dionysos mad for the girl [Aura] with the delicious wound of his arrow, then curving his wings flew lightly to Olympos. And the god roamed over the hills scourged with a greater fire.[xiv]

Socrates tells us of Eros,

“What then is Love?” I asked; “Is he mortal?” “No.” “What then?” “As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between the two.” “What is he, Diotima?” “He is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal.” “And what,” I said, “is his power?” “He interprets,” she replied, “between gods and men, conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is bound together, and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all, prophecy and incantation, find their way. For God mingles not with man; but through Love. all the intercourse, and converse of god with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. The wisdom which understands this is spiritual; all other wisdom, such as that of arts and handicrafts, is mean and vulgar.
…
He is by nature neither mortal nor immortal, but alive and flourishing at one moment when he is in plenty, and dead at another moment, and again alive by reason of his father’s nature. But that which is always flowing in is always flowing out, and so he is never in want and never in wealth; and, further, he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge. The truth of the matter is this: No god is a philosopher. or seeker after wisdom, for he is wise already; nor does any man who is wise seek after wisdom. Neither do the ignorant seek after Wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want.” “But-who then, Diotima,” I said, “are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the foolish?” “A child may answer that question,” she replied; “they are those who are in a mean between the two; Love is one of them. For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher: or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant.[xv]

In the second century a story is told of Eros and Psyche,

The story tells of the struggle for love and trust between Eros and Psyche. Aphrodite was jealous of the beauty of mortal princess Psyche, as men were leaving her altars barren to worship a mere human woman instead, and so she commanded her son Eros, the god of love, to cause Psyche to fall in love with the ugliest creature on earth. But instead, Eros falls in love with Psyche himself and spirits her away to his home. Their fragile peace is ruined by a visit from Psyche’s jealous sisters, who cause Psyche to betray the trust of her husband. Wounded, Eros leaves his wife, and Psyche wanders the Earth, looking for her lost love. Eventually she approaches Aphrodite and asks for her help. Aphrodite imposes a series of difficult tasks on Psyche, which she is able to achieve by means of supernatural assistance. After successfully completing these tasks, Aphrodite relents and Psyche becomes immortal to live alongside her husband Eros. Together they had a daughter, Voluptas or Hedone (meaning physical pleasure, bliss).

In Greek mythology, Psyche was the deification of the human soul. She was portrayed in ancient mosaics as a goddess with butterfly wings (because psyche was also the Ancient Greek word for ‘butterfly’). The Greek word psyche literally means “soul, spirit, breath, life or animating force”.[xvi]

[i] Hesiod, “Theogony”, Drew A. Hyland;John Panteleimon Manoussakis. Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 9). Kindle Edition.

[ii] William J. Richardson;Toward the Future of Truth, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Studies in Continental Thought). Kindle Edition.

[iii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_of_desire

[iv] A Very Brief Introduction to Lacan, Prepared by Professor Stephen Ross, http://web.uvic.ca/~saross/lacan.html

[v] Ran R. Hassin;James S. Uleman;John A. Bargh. The New Unconscious (Oxford Series in Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience) (pp. 45-46). Kindle Edition.

[vi] Drew A. Hyland;John Panteleimon Manoussakis. Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (Studies in Continental Thought) (p. 97). Kindle Edition.

[vii] Ran R. Hassin;James S. Uleman;John A. Bargh. The New Unconscious (Oxford Series in Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience) (p. 52). Kindle Edition.

[viii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uncanny

[ix] The Most Sublime of Hysterics: Hegel with Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, translated by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, http://www.lacan.com/zizlacan2.htm

[x] Aristophanes, Birds, lines 690-699. (Translation by Eugene O’Neill, Jr., Perseus Digital Library; translation modified.)

[xi] Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 3. 25 ff – a Greek epic of the 3rd century B.C.

[xii] Seneca, Phaedra 290 ff

[xiii] Ovid, Metamorphoses 10. 525 ff

[xiv] Nonnus, Dionysiaca 48. 470 ff – a Greek epic of the 5th century AD

[xv] Symposium, Plato, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html

[xvi] http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_cupidandpsyche.htm

Musings

Thoughts on Philosophy, Politics, Physics, Religion, Music and Economics

Category Archives: Philosophy

Philosophy Series 4

Philosophy Series 3 – Appendix A, Part 1

Appendix A

Before the Greeks

Greek Philosophy and Periods

Greek Schools

Milesian

A Footnote

Philosophy Series 1

Prelude to the Philosophy Series

An Introduction to Greek Thinking

And Beyond…

This is how philosophy begins…

Marx Vis-à-vis Lorenzo

God and Other

The Free Market Ideal

Morality and its Shadow

Zizek, Hegel, Possibility

Greek Mythos (updated 2/16/12)