Tag Archives: philosophy

On Death

Death is not something that happens at the end of life. As Blanchot mentions in the quote at the end of my recent post,

As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death, but the impossibility of dying…. I have no relationship with it, it is that toward which I cannot go, for in it I do not die, I have fallen from the power to die. In it they die; they do not cease, and they do not finish dying ― Maurice Blanchot, Literature and the Right to Death.

The only way I experience death is through life. Death is strictly a phenomenon of life. The fear of death is a fear of life as life and death are inseparable. The death of my son in 2017 is not ‘his’ death. He is not experiencing death as he is not mortal any longer; not living. Chris is not human now. He was a beautiful, young, and amazing human but now his humanity is in my heart, my memory, my pain. This is where he dwells now in me and those who knew and loved him. The pain of death is the pain of living. It is not optional but essential. The question remains, how shall we live in the essence of death?

Death is a zenith. It is where life disappears into the infinity of horizon. It is not the horror of hell or bliss of heaven. It is the gate of the infinite. Mortality cannot pass through its gate. The absolute fluidity of this universe breaks upon the shores of death in which there is no return. Does death start where it began as if some universal law of physics requires it to do so?

What we know of physics is that there is a vast multitude of possible and actual physics. The laws of physics in our current universe are themselves a zenith of time and place. The ‘laws’ are an invention of circumstance. According to physicists, they were radically different at the beginning. If not for slightly more matter than antimatter after the ‘big bang’ or the ‘big bounce’ we would not be here at all. As to the question of what’s ‘outside’ the universe we are told two things: 1) Outside is a conventional notion we have derived from this time, this space, this circumstance and says nothing about this mythical notion of an outside to the universe, 2) If there are other universes, they have radically different physics. They would have absolutely no necessity placed on them to mimic our space/time physics in this singular moment of our circumstance.

So, this tells us that even this moment we call ‘life’ is itself a zenith caught on the brink of infinity. We stare infinity in the face every moment of our existence and found or are found by language as history to pacify our delusions of security as we draw in the breath of ‘I’. We forget the boundless ocean of eternity we stand on the shores of. We rationalize and sanctify and flee in the face of this awe and beauty and wonder which is the essence which can no longer be thought as ‘essence’. There is no ground beneath our feet only instantaneous, massless ‘particles’ better thought as infinitesimal force fields which pop in and out of existence and declare, “I am”. What we need in the face of eternity is perspective not absolute determinations.

We breath ‘we’ in this eternity of temporality. Sure, we have individual bodies which are really a communion of organism, cells, molecules, atoms, infinitesimals popping in and out of existence but somehow organizing themselves as an illusion of a whole, a body, my body. We communicate with language which we did not invent but in some undeciphered way acquired from a history we never knew or experienced. ‘Understanding’ is not a something but an acquisition of a ‘not me’, a gift given without merit or even existence as ‘mine’. We think ‘me’ from ‘we’. The ‘me’ that protests, that complains, that judges is a construction of the ‘we’ of language which speaks and has spoken and will speak with and without me, my existence. In all our languages we face plurality of other languages. Not just human but also animal languages, plant languages (actual science behind this). Existence is language. It is communication. It is the physics of interaction. It is the boundary conditions. It is the face. The face is not just a ‘presentation’, a presence. It is an absence of infinity which cannot present itself except as the boundary conditions of this moment, this interaction, this ‘idea’ of reality.

‘Idea’ informs us of notions which give reason, promise meaning, promotes sense and sensible. We even have the notion of ‘absolute’ which finds no home in infinity except as ‘idea’. What is more, ‘idea’ is what Hegel believes is all that faces us. There is no exterior ‘thing’ out there. The ‘thing’ is the idea. There is never a ‘thing’ without an idea. So, in Hegel’s estimation idea ‘is’ infinity and finite, it is ‘isness’. The face of which I spoke is the idea of face, nothing more, nothing less. For Hegel, the ‘notion’ exceeds other notions as being and nothingness and finds place as ‘Concept’. Concept is the embodiment of place, of divine, of me and us, of face. The other and the same cannot remain as they are but must be taken up by the necessity of self-consciousness. There is no self as a notion without an other as a counter notion. The same and the other are the necessity of a self, a me. Even the notion of space and time is a requirement of particularity. We must be a ‘we’ by necessity of Concept not by some exteriority which makes it so. For Hegel this does not do violence to the other as another person for example but requires us to look further into exactly what we are talking about and referring to; to fundamentally question the very fabric of isness and how Concept becomes the necessity of isness.

This leads us to choice. There is no way in my estimation to prove Hegel wrong. He may well be correct that Concept is essentially ‘is’. For Hegel this does not end in some kind of essential narcissism but in a foundation from any such thing as narcissism. Hegel is not bestowing sainthood on individualism and such notions as chest-beating ‘capitalism’. He is certainly providing a foundation for their existence, for existence itself, but not some modern right-wing notion of ultra-conservatism. In any case, there is a question Hegel poses which must be faced, a choice must be made.

I started this post with the notion of infinity. In due course, we have found that infinity and finitude may have and certainly, in some yet undetermined sense, has a basis in Concept but is that the end of the story (or perhaps another beginning)? Even if Hegel is correct, is there an ethical necessity placed on us to face the other, to face my son without Hegel’s face? Are we to abandon ourselves to the necessity of Concept and if so, how does that effect my orientation to the other, to the infinity of the face, to the requirement of my son’s life and living death which I must endure? Even more, what of the suffering of the other? How shall I face this lifetime of suffering which I must endure, my suffering and the suffering of the other? Should I find some kind of solace in the absolute fact of ‘Concept’? Should I think infinity as a necessary condition of finitude? Have I violated something other than my own biases and misunderstandings of Concept? Isn’t ethics just another requirement of Concept, of self-consciousness?

This is where choice determines eternity. I have no basis external to the requirements of self-consciousness for choosing an exteriority which cannot be thought only or more precisely determined by thought. I can choose to found self on Concept and call that ‘isness’. I probably have more reason to do so than not in Hegelian terms. I see many folks who use Hegel (and less intellectual achievements) as a kind of license to justify whatever they want to do to whomever they want to do it to. Perhaps, Hegel’s philosophy is not ready for mere mortals or vice versa. However, I do have to live in the face of the absolute, unsubstantiated abyss of existence. I have to wake up every day with my death, the death of my son, the death of innocence from bigotry, greed, injustice and I have to face it on an ongoing basis without any justification for why it must be so from Concept. In all this I must act and I must make choices not because I am that Concept but because I suffer and I am with those that suffer. My choice is to be self-determined or, without necessity, to heed the cry of the other.

To conclude, I would like to add a bit of speculation, highly speculative. We see in nature and physics (whether it is pure Concept or not) a return to regularity, order, instinct; to repetition in some degree. We did not proceed from Concept to birth but from nothingness (certainly with regard to consciousness) to birth. Somehow, I and we popped into existence. Is there a regularity in ‘popping into existence’? Perhaps, we don’t know. However, one thing we do know is that we did become but from what? We can call this Concept and satisfy the need for origin. However, I prefer to leave that to what Hesiod referred to as chaos (really the yawning gap). There is a gap of not knowing which we can choose to reserve. There is also the observation that phusis or physics, biology, ‘isness’ might like to repeat itself. We are gift standing from infinite abyss facing eternity with language and consciousness that is not our own. Who is to say that that gift cannot find repetition, increasing wisdom and another moment when what I did, how I acted in the face of the other; who is to say it is not the foundation for something I know not what…choose wisely.

With regard to a discussion on causality…

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My initial post to a question about causality…

One thing that comes to mind is Schrödinger’s cat. Determinations are made by the act of observation that preclude certain results and determine causal outcomes. Could we think of the “box” as determining the result?…perhaps better to think of the observer as predisposing physics towards his expectations – quite a murky business in any case.

After the deserved critcism of being too “poppy” I expanded the explanation…

Yes, perhaps a bit “poppy” in my brief post but the mystery remains.  Speaking of the observable disorder in molecules Schrodinger writes, “But whether any particular molecule, supposing you could follow, its course, will be among those which have reacted or among those which are still untouched, he [the chemist] could not predict. That is a matter of pure chance. This is not a purely theoretical conjecture. It is not that we can never observe the fate of a single small group of atoms or even of a single atom. We can, occasionally. But whenever we do, we find complete irregularity, co-operating to produce regularity only on the average.”

 “What Is Life”, pdf page 27

http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

It is a bit of a wishful leap to suggest that the phenomena that Schrodinger observed on the quantum scale has been “explained”.  His supposition was that order arises out of chaos (peros from aperion) not unlike the thoughts of Plato, I might add.

I would submit that the slit experiment can actually strengthen my rather anemic response.  When individual photons are emitted through two slits (or more) to the photographic film, the apparent simultaneity of the photon passing through both slits introduces an uncertainty that has yet to be explained.   While Schrodinger referred to this “mystery” as entanglement, Heisenberg addressed the wave particle duality in his “uncertainty principle”.  Subatomic particles incessantly pop in and out of existence in a way that disallows determinism and can only be explained statistically with essential and inherent uncertainty.

Forgive the indulgence but according to the Copenhagen Interpretation (not pop) if you never measure the x-spin (box, i.e., Schrodinger) of an electron, it will never jump to an eigenstate of x-spin and thus will have a 100% probability of y-spin (a contradictory state).  The conclusion is that observable results depend on whether the electron is in an indeterminate state or determinate but unknown state.  Indeterminate states are not just determinate states we have no knowledge of.  Physical objects actually behave differently depending on whether their states are unknown or indeterminate.

One need look no further than quantum entanglement, the spooky action at a distance that Einstein despised and tried to refute with his EPR paradox only to end up showing the non-classical characteristics of the measurement process.

A Couple Quotes:

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

Niels Bohr

I think that I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

Richard Feynman

I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.

Erwin Schrödinger

What is Not

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Rene Descartes wrote of the unique idea of infinity.  Infinity is a word that we know and use.  Even more, today we would say that calculus is the math of infinities.  Yet, according to Descartes, infinity is a notion that overflows itself.  Of necessity, it is a word that must be what it isn’t.  A word or an idea is finite.  Yet, the idea of infinity is a placeholder for what it cannot be.  It is not like the ostensive definition of a cat.  The word cat points directly to a cat.  The word “infinity” does not point directly to any such “thing” as an object.  However, it is a word that gets its meaning by negating itself not for some mystical reason but for something as real as the mathematics of calculus.

The Greeks were very taken by the geometry of the triangle.  Even more, Plato spoke of the forms, the ideal perfection, the real of everything we see.  Everything we see is murky and shadowy.  We know from Einstein that there is no such thing as a perfect triangle.  Space-time is warped and curved by mass so, while we might imagine a straight line, a straight line does not exist.  The real strait line only exists in concept form.  The real triangle is an ideal form but has never existed.  Yet, we use the idea practically all the time.  It is a concrete ideal or as Hegel might phrase it a concrete universal.

While language is a system of signs, signs are not all made the same.  Some signs have a real, ostensive object like a cat.  Others can only point to something concrete by dismantling themselves, by holding the “not” more closely they point to ideals that never “are” in existence and yet “are” as real, concrete and practical as a cat.  What should be observed is that they are what they are by being what they are not.

Perhaps this could be said of all words and ideas to some degree.  They designate over and against to function.  They instantly define by negating what they are not.  Some words and ideas can function as ambiguities, metaphors, poetry, art, etc.  Similar to infinity they can simultaneously hold various systems of thought, ideas or get reduced to a myriad of words.  Take this poem I wrote a while ago:

Oh wistful night of a million suns.
Spawn dancing shadows from nameless orbs.
Through stellar darkness light years are thrown.
Perchance dark grace our sun or moon
And primal night fire my heart drum.

Oh wistful thoughts of a million souls
Spawn dancing shadows from nameless histories.
Through unconscious darkness years are thrown.
Perchance dark grace our I or other.
And primal projections fire my loves

This poem speaks of a natural phenomenon, an eclipse.  Yet, it also holds with it a primal humanity, an archaic origin.  These are not systems of signs that would normally go together but in the metaphor of poetry that can actually elucidate or bring to presence a “reality” of who we are. 

Words can also be mistakes. We can say that a square is a circle or that A is not A but it is simply wrong to insist on such a thing.  In a more sophisticated fashion we can all freely develop ideals or ideologies in politics, religion, morality, etc. that are simply based on wrong facts.  We can put together ways of thinking that do not belong together.  As in evolution, we can make mistakes that can take on a life of their own.  When Einstein first came out with what we now call relativity more physicists opposed him than agreed with him.  Many thought that the universe Einstein envisioned was a step back to the hocus pocus of the dark ages, a step away from the concreteness of Newton.  Over many decades the doubters became less and the believers increased.  Einstein had a set of facts that he observed keenly that embodied many wrong perceptions (see “Einstein’s Mistakes”) but held together enough of unexplained phenomena that the Newtonian physics could not hold together to provide a more plausible showing of our universe.  The point here is that while language allows us to put together systems of signs that do not go together, that are wrong, not based on “facts”, they can also hold enough of a truth, a cohesion that does hold together to make them plausible.  This does not mean that a square will ever be a circle but in curved space-time it is possible to pick a coordinate system in which an object could be described as a square or a circle.  A cylinder can be sliced as either.  Yet, the idealized concept of a square and a circle will always be fundamentally at odds with each other.  To insist that A is not A is opposite to a tautology, an absolute contradiction.  The idea holds together concepts that are absolutely incompatible.  In its “wrongness” the idea comes to be.  Its “wrongness” is always contingent.  It can only be wrong by proclaiming it, by naming it and what it necessarily entails.  It abstractly “nots” itself while at the same time asserts itself.

In every thought and concept there is a “not”.  The “not” has to be for the word, thought or idea to be.  Any idea must be what it is by announcing what it is not, by suggesting it is this and not that.  This may seem trivial but for Hegel the “not” was always an absolutely necessary operative in every concrete word, concept, idea, reality, etc. – the “not” is always necessarily and unequivocally implied by existence.  Post modern deconstruction might think this as the trace of the knot that always must undo itself, a sort of tangential contingency that is always taken up into our surest notions, the dark side of presence, the banal “not” of existence.  It allows and creates existence.  It is always the “other” that cannot be totalized or brought into a cohesive presence.  It must eternally be relegated to the nether region.  For the light to be, the dark must always be a close ally.  Our finitude and mortality can only be in lieu of infinitude and immortality.  Wrong must be for right to be.   This is a step into Hegel.

Knowing this play of signs destabilizes our absolutes, our forms.  This awareness curves in on itself into an absolute singularity, nonsense, a hermeneutical circle.  It frees us of logic while simultaneously necessitating logic.  Normally, only the ravings of a madman would be attributed to such rants.  Perhaps it is madness but it is a madness that must be for the sane to be.  Foucault spoke if this in “Madness and Civilization”.  There is a irrationality that necessarily plays at the roots of rationality.  It can be “deduced” and has been by philosophers and scientists.  Physicists have known about singularities for centuries.  Yet, a black hole is a singularity.  When they recognize a singularity it causes them to reflect back on their theory.  The mind necessarily turns back on itself and doubts itself, its current understanding of physics in this case.  Curved space-time was such a demonic notion for a classical Newtonian.  How can mass get larger with speed?  How can a ruler get shorter with speed?  How can time slow down with speed?  Did you know that one of the first ways relativity was proved was by synchronizing two clocks, putting one in a plane and flying it around the world several times and comparing the results when the clocks were brought back together?  Sure enough, they reported different times.  Can you image being one of the folks carrying a clock around in a airplane to see if speed changed it?  No wonder physicists thought Einstein was insane.  Need I discuss string theory?  Have you heard of the m-verse, the multi-universe?  All particles we observe in our universe are really multi-dimensional strings coming in and out of existence or our brane (membrane).  Just as a triangle can never really exist because all space is curved, our brain tells us that it is and we use it every day as an essential tool of technology. 

You may think that the way the “not” circumscribes and denotes what is is insane but the fact is that it is as a “not”.  I am not making this stuff up, only reporting it in the company of those that are much smarter than me.  Sure there are myriad other ways to process this insanity at the roots of the sane but they may only be the illusions of a brain that cannot allow the contradiction to be.  It may be that the evolution of the brain has made it impossible for the concreteness of an absolute “not” that “is”, that necessarily gives rise to “isness” to “see” what shows itself here.  This absolute fissure in achrony, time, how we perceive, understand, know, etc. is an alterity or otherness that can never be gathered or held together – and yet, it must be in its “not being”.  The sense of this is embodied in the intuition that for God to create being and existence God must be outside of being and existence.  Only by God “being” outside of existence can existence be.  This is yet another indication of the insanity that awaits us in the “absolute impossibility of the possibility of death” as Heidegger suggested.  The “me” that is to die cannot in any way conceive of death and yet death “is”.  Be careful as Nietzsche points out that if we look too long in the abyss the abyss will look back into us. 

What gives rise to the “soul”, the different kinds of awareness’s that enables humans to write books, create art, build technology, in effect, create worldhood?  It is the way that we are thrown back on ourselves in the face of the “not”.  It is the reflection that forces us to doubt our concrete perceptions, understandings, knowings.  When we doubt we re-think, we ponder, we try to make sense of, decipher and restore the cosmos to order.  This is our life long burden and we eternally are rolling the stone up a huge, never ending mountain.  While our dilemma may be insane it cannot be argued that it is not concrete and as “real” as any of our functional and assumed realities.  Only by the denial and sublimation of what the conscious cannot conceive can we have an unconscious, a dark side, a mystic writing pad that in advance of our deliberations writes our history and requires our obedience to a call that we cannot choose.  The turn here can only recognize a sort of Kantian category of knowledge.  Light is invisible and yet when it hits mass, particles it gets filtered sort of like a prism and shows color, sight, objects.  Light is not what we are seeing only the effects of the filtering of light.  Likewise, the “not” that necessarily gives rise to being, existence, concreteness is itself always never perceived but in its wake we are and have our being.