Rene Descartes wrote of the unique idea of infinity.\u00a0 Infinity is a word that we know and use.\u00a0 Even more, today we would say that calculus is the math of infinities.\u00a0 Yet, according to Descartes, infinity is a notion that overflows itself.\u00a0 Of necessity, it is a word that must be what it isn\u2019t.\u00a0 A word or an idea is finite.\u00a0 Yet, the idea of infinity is a placeholder for what it cannot be.\u00a0 It is not like the ostensive definition of a cat.\u00a0 The word cat points directly to a cat.\u00a0 The word \u201cinfinity\u201d does not point directly to any such \u201cthing\u201d as an object.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The Greeks were very taken by the geometry of the triangle.\u00a0 Even more, Plato spoke of the forms, the ideal perfection, the real of everything we see.\u00a0 Everything we see is murky and shadowy.\u00a0 We know from Einstein that there is no such thing as a perfect triangle.\u00a0 Space-time is warped and curved by mass so, while we might imagine a straight line, a straight line does not exist.\u00a0 The real strait line only exists in concept form.\u00a0 The real triangle is an ideal form but has never existed.\u00a0 Yet, we use the idea practically all the time.\u00a0 It is a concrete ideal or as Hegel might phrase it a concrete universal.<\/p>\n
While language is a system of signs, signs are not all made the same.\u00a0 Some signs have a real, ostensive object like a cat.\u00a0 Others can only point to something concrete by dismantling themselves, by holding the \u201cnot\u201d more closely they point to ideals that never \u201care\u201d in existence and yet \u201care\u201d as real, concrete and practical as a cat.\u00a0 What should be observed is that they are what they are by being what they are not.<\/p>\n
Perhaps this could be said of all words and ideas to some degree.\u00a0 They designate over and against to function.\u00a0 They instantly define by negating what they are not.\u00a0 Some words and ideas can function as ambiguities, metaphors, poetry, art, etc.\u00a0 Similar to infinity they can simultaneously hold various systems of thought, ideas or get reduced to a myriad of words.\u00a0 Take this poem I wrote a while ago:<\/p>\n
Oh wistful night of a million suns.
\nSpawn dancing shadows from nameless orbs.
\nThrough stellar darkness light years are thrown.
\nPerchance dark grace our sun or moon
\nAnd primal night fire my heart drum.<\/p>\n
Oh wistful thoughts of a million souls
\nSpawn dancing shadows from nameless histories.
\nThrough unconscious darkness years are thrown.
\nPerchance dark grace our I or other.
\nAnd primal projections fire my loves<\/p>\n
This poem speaks of a natural phenomenon, an eclipse.\u00a0 Yet, it also holds with it a primal humanity, an archaic origin.\u00a0 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 \u201creality\u201d of who we are.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We can put together ways of thinking that do not belong together.\u00a0 As in evolution, we can make mistakes that can take on a life of their own.\u00a0 When Einstein first came out with what we now call relativity more physicists opposed him than agreed with him.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Over many decades the doubters became less and the believers increased.\u00a0 Einstein had a set of facts that he observed keenly that embodied many wrong perceptions (see \u201cEinstein\u2019s Mistakes\u201d) but held together enough of unexplained phenomena that the Newtonian physics could not hold together to provide a more plausible showing of our universe.\u00a0 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 \u201cfacts\u201d, they can also hold enough of a truth, a cohesion that does hold together to make them plausible.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 A cylinder can be sliced as either.\u00a0 Yet, the idealized concept of a square and a circle will always be fundamentally at odds with each other.\u00a0 To insist that A is not A is opposite to a tautology, an absolute contradiction.\u00a0 The idea holds together concepts that are absolutely incompatible.\u00a0 In its \u201cwrongness\u201d the idea comes to be.\u00a0 Its \u201cwrongness\u201d is always contingent.\u00a0 It can only be wrong by proclaiming it, by naming it and what it necessarily entails.\u00a0 It abstractly \u201cnots\u201d itself while at the same time asserts itself.<\/p>\n
In every thought and concept there is a \u201cnot\u201d.\u00a0 The \u201cnot\u201d has to be for the word, thought or idea to be.\u00a0 Any idea must be what it is by announcing what it is not, by suggesting it is this and not that.\u00a0 This may seem trivial but for Hegel the \u201cnot\u201d was always an absolutely necessary operative in every concrete word, concept, idea, reality, etc. \u2013 the \u201cnot\u201d is always necessarily and unequivocally implied by existence.\u00a0 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 \u201cnot\u201d of existence.\u00a0 It allows and creates existence.\u00a0 It is always the \u201cother\u201d that cannot be totalized or brought into a cohesive presence.\u00a0 It must eternally be relegated to the nether region.\u00a0 For the light to be, the dark must always be a close ally.\u00a0 Our finitude and mortality can only be in lieu of infinitude and immortality.\u00a0 Wrong must be for right to be.\u00a0\u00a0 This is a step into Hegel.<\/p>\n
Knowing this play of signs destabilizes our absolutes, our forms.\u00a0 This awareness curves in on itself into an absolute singularity, nonsense, a hermeneutical circle.\u00a0 It frees us of logic while simultaneously necessitating logic.\u00a0 Normally, only the ravings of a madman would be attributed to such rants.\u00a0 Perhaps it is madness but it is a madness that must be for the sane to be.\u00a0 Foucault spoke if this in \u201cMadness and Civilization\u201d.\u00a0 There is a irrationality that necessarily plays at the roots of rationality.\u00a0 It can be \u201cdeduced\u201d and has been by philosophers and scientists.\u00a0 Physicists have known about singularities for centuries.\u00a0 Yet, a black hole is a singularity.\u00a0 When they recognize a singularity it causes them to reflect back on their theory.\u00a0 The mind necessarily turns back on itself and doubts itself, its current understanding of physics in this case.\u00a0 Curved space-time was such a demonic notion for a classical Newtonian.\u00a0 How can mass get larger with speed?\u00a0 How can a ruler get\u00a0shorter with speed?\u00a0 How can time slow down with speed?\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Sure enough, they reported different times.\u00a0 Can you image being one of the folks carrying a clock around in a airplane to see if speed changed it?\u00a0 No wonder physicists thought Einstein was insane.\u00a0 Need I discuss string theory?\u00a0 Have you heard of the m-verse, the multi-universe?\u00a0 All particles we observe in our universe are really multi-dimensional strings coming in and out of existence or our brane (membrane).\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You may think that the way the \u201cnot\u201d circumscribes and denotes what is is insane but the fact is that it is as a \u201cnot\u201d.\u00a0 I am not making this stuff up, only reporting it in the company of those that are much smarter than me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It may be that the evolution of the brain has made it impossible for the concreteness of an absolute \u201cnot\u201d that \u201cis\u201d, that necessarily gives rise to \u201cisness\u201d to \u201csee\u201d what shows itself here.\u00a0 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 \u201cnot being\u201d.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Only by God \u201cbeing\u201d outside of existence can existence be.\u00a0 This is yet another indication of the insanity that awaits us in the \u201cabsolute impossibility of the possibility of death\u201d as Heidegger suggested.\u00a0 The \u201cme\u201d that is to die cannot in any way conceive of death and yet death \u201cis\u201d.\u00a0 Be careful as Nietzsche points out that if we look too long in the abyss the abyss will look back into us.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What gives rise to the \u201csoul\u201d, the different kinds of awareness\u2019s that enables humans to write books, create art, build technology, in effect, create worldhood?\u00a0 It is the way that we are thrown back on ourselves in the face of the \u201cnot\u201d.\u00a0 It is the reflection that forces us to doubt our concrete perceptions, understandings, knowings.\u00a0 When we doubt we re-think, we ponder, we try to make sense of, decipher and restore the cosmos to order.\u00a0 This is our life long burden and we eternally are rolling the stone up a huge, never ending mountain.\u00a0 While our dilemma may be insane it cannot be argued that it is not concrete and as \u201creal\u201d as any of our functional and assumed realities.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The turn here can only recognize a sort of Kantian category of knowledge.\u00a0 Light is invisible and yet when it hits mass, particles it gets filtered sort of like a prism and shows color, sight, objects.\u00a0 Light is not what we are seeing only the effects of the filtering of light.\u00a0 Likewise, the \u201cnot\u201d that necessarily gives rise to being, existence, concreteness is itself always never perceived but in its wake we are and have our being.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rene Descartes wrote of the unique idea of infinity.\u00a0 Infinity is a word that we know and use.\u00a0 Even more, today we would say that calculus is the math of infinities.\u00a0 Yet, according to Descartes, infinity is a notion that overflows itself.\u00a0 Of necessity, it is a word that must be what it isn\u2019t.\u00a0 A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,15],"tags":[103,165,179],"class_list":["post-269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-western-philosophy","category-poetry","tag-hegel","tag-philosophy","tag-pysics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3930,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269\/revisions\/3930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}