Zero is New Olds

A second part of reporting my thoughts upon reading “Zero: the biography of a dangerous idea” by C. Seidel.

Recall that my work centers upon orientation upon objects as the significant philosophical issue of our time.

The excerpt pictures above gives a manner by which to apprehend the coupling of history and idea that informs subsequent reality.

“It is hard to imagine something with no width and no height — with no substance at all — being a square.”

Why?

The statement is not axiomatic. It is not a truism either. Rather, it is a cosmological statement, A statement that reflects a view upon the world that is taken to be accurate of the actual universe.

This is to say, if I can find an instance which takes a count of the mathematical conundrum that is presented, and yet defies the conclusion that appears automatically common and sensible, then we can say that the statement is reflecting a belief rather than an actual instance of a true universe.

I propose that it is not hard to imagine something with no width and no height that is also a square: It is an idea of the square.

Likewise: the area of a rectangle with a zero height or zero width is the idea of the whole universe.

These two instances, these examples I just give are exactly the opposite of what is implicitly proposed as assumed of the mathematics drawn upon for this book.

There is an assumed coordination between the physical reality of the universe and our ability to analytically and logically come to formulations about it, but along a particular orientation as to our relationship with the world.

In the exercise just in this particular post, we can notice that there is a gap, I kind of invisible space that twists the view that we have for that we gain. We miss that there is a difference between the idea of the rectangle and an actual rectangle, and we superimpose these upon one another. But the superposition does not align, and we glaze over that, we forget about it, we set it aside for the sake of our belief. This is to say that “our idea” is not actually “our“ idea. It is an idea that arises within a particular faith in what is being given to our knowledge. And we could even go so far as to suggest that the infamous poststructuralist analysis of the situation indeed finds subjective repression. Ideology posed as absolute knowledge.

This is very similar to what the sociologist Bruno Latour calls a pass in his book An Inquiry into Modes of Existence.