metaphysics – The Dog Walks

The Human Constant.

I was imagining how the first hominids ( or whatever we’re calling now our early human ancestors) probably reacted when the first person or family group decided to build a structure instead of just living in Holes that were already there, or the trees or burrowing under ground or something…

Their neighbors were probably screaming at them:

“what are you doing ruining a perfectly good tree!? Oh my God the whole forest is going to be destroyed ! it’s the end of the world!”

#theactualendoftheworld

I imagine when the world actually ends, when we actually do die as a species or a creature or whatever, that we wont have the slightest foresight of anticipation about what it was.

Post-modernism’s Worth.

When we are too close to an event, we talk about it as from a distance. That is, what we say is automatically distanced from the event, a maximum distance. The event is thus, by this occurrence, an object. As opposed to our psychotherapeutic model, the closer we are to an event, the more dishonest we are about its true bearings, that is, the truth of the matter, why it is that the (the wholeness of the) event has occurred the way it has. The impetus and the reaction can be come upon as an included item, a truth in-itself, only when we are distanced from the event. The truth of an object, as opposed to the True Object, can only be viewed in its truth from a distance. The equation is thus of inversion, of ratio.

Here then we may have a basis upon which to properly view foundational post-modern writers, namely, Derrida, Deleuze and Guittari, but others also. To wit: Their descriptions were from a basis too close to the event, such that they attempted to quickly and finally establish a ground for the event; the event being thus so profound and significant, they were compelled to offer a reason.

They were not wrong, only rash.

It is analogous to an explosion. We have now the data from the explosion, having encountered it ourselves, but also come across the initial first hand rationalization and fact crunching reports of the explosion itself – with that, subsequent explosions, and now the reports and experience of the aftermath(s) of explosions, we can now safely report upon the truth of the whole event.

Am I Beginning to Make Any Sense at All?

I agree with Malabou’s initial consideration. “Relinquishing transcendentalism”. How tentative. How civilized. But her approach, I must say, just like all subsequent considerations, asks good questions but then never quite gets to any answer what so ever more than a reiteration, a parroting of conventional method. In very short verse: this is correlationalism. The very moment of her critique is correlationalism in situ. The proposal of Miellassoux set as is it in play, as I have said, is prime occasion to speak of the Significant Event; those interested will have to wait for the book, since the development is much larger than the blog format.

Suffice it to get to the issue behind such proposition. We might consider what ‘throwing away the ladder’ means. I am sure there will be the usual preponderance who hang onto the ladder for the use of arguing what one means by throwing away the ladder. And they won’t even see the redundancy and ridiculousness of their position; how indeed they may have thrown away the ladder yet are telling us what Neitzche and so and so mean by this and how they thus might qualify to having already thrown away the ladder, and then give further reason why now having thrown away the ladder, so and so says this and so we argue this and that based upon the meaning of so and so, that we may present the problemitization of throwing away the ladder such that we can the grant our position such that we now are moving beyond the ladder or not.

This little dance reminds me of a jazz artist in the late 1980’s who put out a CD with liner notes that described and made an argument in a quite intellectual fashion, how Jazz is not an intellectual art form or musical expression. I love jazz, but I just had to laugh, and then listen to his non intellectual music that, in my opinion, had with so much obvious talent and expertise so little soul and depth, so much explicit expression and so little inuition and grasp of the reason why, at least I, listen to music.

I draw this analogy to philosophy. The death of philosophy is evidenced exactly in such philosophers talking about the possibility of philosophy relinquishing the transcendent, parting from Kant and such. Obviously the meaning of philosophy has taken a turn, and it hardly hinges upon relinquishing anything, but rather more a hanging on to the well established method working of social lubrication and conceptual capital to make a name and a living. So much for every hobby and career; rarely it seems, if never, do the users of ideas really take to heart what they are talking about or reading about, keeping all meaning at arms length for the sake of quick access and face.

So as I have said of Harman, we have to give these brain users a benefit of doubt, and grant that they do indeed feel and believe with a passion that their involvement and discussion are really involving a type of truth, a type of real working. So it is that we must locate such thinking people in an arena that takes quite seriously their deep ideas, and call it ‘reality’ as a place, space or position, and ‘conventional’ as a method fitting and no larger than the arena, the terms of which holding such a value for investment, the infinity of such an arena, calls to such thinkers to regard it as quite inescapable and indeed thus always accounting for every possibility in its potential; always climbing the ladder, they are, even as they talk about whether it might be thrown away or not.

It is good to be the straw man, because this particular kind of straw man is not allowed in the correlationalist cycle, for it indicts the conventional method, rather, it bases of method. For logic is not a tool; it does not show where truth is located. It is a vehicle, a route by which conclusions may be shown. The idea of a ‘hidden’ truth which by the tool of logic may uncover is a conventional trope, an ideological dogma. Along such conventional lines, such confrontation is rebutted by saying that it defines a nothing, a nihilism, which is why so many authors now are considering and defining what nihilism might ‘really’ mean.

The post just before this one, here in Constructive Undoing, the “reblogg” post, is the example for which we say that we must destroy the transcendent. Miellassoux is being much too kind, much too diplomatic. The reason for this necessity is that the real conventional discourse relies upon the transcendent even as we might want to and in order to posit that we might get rid of it. And if anyone has been reading my blog, it is only in the act of blatant and obstinate denial that an arrangement of terms may effectively do anything, let alone now not have a transcendent involved in what reality may be. In fact, this is also why we must say that reality is the place where discourse determines what is true. We need not reiterate the past year of posts of Constructive Undoing. It is enough to use the “reblogg” to give a concrete and specific example of what it means to destroy the transcendent, what divergence means and why it is necessary. I’m not sure if this post will cover all that right now, but at least it will get to showing what we are up to by distinguishing ‘conventional methodology’.

Thus a throwing away of the ladder really evidences the problem I indicate by referring to the “Reblogg” post. Let’s look there now, the comments and discussion arena after the blog….Heres the link: http://darkecologies.com/2014/12/03/the-battle-in-philosophy-time-substance-and-the-void/

Ok, we’re back. Now keep in mind, I am not rebutting his essay for its content. In fact, D.E. rebukes me for not wanting to discuss within the parameters of what he has presented. Yet, we might say that part of the discussion of the Significant Event concedes the benefit of doubt to the argument in question, that for this case, the author of D.E. (Sorry man, I never got yer name) has indeed read the authors quite thoroughly and is fluent enough in the verses to bring to mind various quotes appropriate to the issue in question, and that such referencings likewise connote a good possible consideration of the matter. We concede that the opinion expressed is a valid opinion, in as much as it most probably sticks to the commonly recognized version of meaning, that this common reading thus laid admits various hazards, that these hazards will surly be rooted out, voiced and problematizing in various ways, etcetera.

My question is always: What does that mean? When I read his essay (as this is the example here), I have a pretty good idea of what he is saying, as well as the problem he suggests or implicates, as well as how an impetus for discussion has been set. Having a pretty good reading of the authors myself, I understand how the stage has been set, why the lights are faced here and there, the actors supposed to enter here, turn there, the music come in here. While I know the play, and the different showings and performances, and casts, that each is slightly different, with different stage sets, different colors, interpretations of phrasings, tempo, mood, timbre, etcetera — the play is the same play. It may be entertaining to see the play every year at different venues, but it always suggests the same meaning even while differing in reference to the moments in which I attend the showing, as my attendance and watching may have different significances to my regular life at the various times.

So it is that when I read philosophy, i am informed to meaning through the question of what does it mean, what is the author saying. Now, the problem I wish to shed light upon. In this effort for meaning, a reader inevitably comes to want to find out what is ‘really’ meant, and so dismisses the meaning that is gained in potential through definitional ‘gaps’ such that now the reader has to look for context that does not seem to appear in the present text, i.e., the reader needs to read other authors and see what they are saying, and so on. What this process amounts to is a storehouse of information that when drawn upon appears to be conveying deep significant meaning, but when stood back from, really just presents a bunch of terms that says nothing in particular; this type of discursive posturing that seems so profound by its educationally privileged layering is what I call metaphysical (in the bad way) because the level that is supposed of its definitional structure is supposed to get at some more real or more true meaning of the issue presented.

It is this kind of philosophical method that is correlational, that which relies upon a transcending aspect of discourse by which to assume or propose an actual truth of the situation. As we might see in D.E.’s talks on Zizek; Zizek himself talks in a way to show this very situation: that there is no subject that has any actual or substantial truth to it, but that we are viewing it in a particular way, in a particular fashion. This is what all the various Zizek talking abouts on this particular issue means: there is nothing there.

Now, philosophers will debate this, but the debate will be based upon the fact that obviously there is something ( but again Zizek accounts for this in various places also, but how he says it is less important that what he means; how he says it is just nice to look at). So the philosophers will bring in their storehouse of authorial knowledge to pose and discuss what Zizek may be saying and what then may be the actual truth of the matter. But never do they stand back and find out what it is such rhetoric actually means. The point which Zizek reiterates all over the place is that such rhetoric is nonsensical, that the discourse itself, a particular discourse that he references capitalistic, sees its elements as substantial capital, actual true real things that are negotiated. But the point I’m making is not to dispute what Zizek is saying; the points of Zizek will be pronounced in the Significant Event. The point I wish to expose is that the various arguments that would rebut or expound upon Zizek often miss what Zizek says over and over.

A most specific and pertinent example of the motion of conventional correlationalist philosophy occurs in relief through the exchange in the comments of D.E. of the link I gave, between him (her? Come to think of it, I don’t really know) and I.

Hopefully my distinction will be made more clear.

I use the term ‘True Object’ in my writings. This usage often gets the best objections in the form of it making no sense. My question is what sense is there not to be made? The philosophers (and I have encountered this over and over in many places) routinely bring argument against ‘truth’ and ‘object’, and are typically repulsed by ‘faith’, at various junctures. My proposal is of a simplicity that is completely missed by the conventionalists that I see is due to their investment in the storehouse of authorial knowledge. I am saying that reality is constituted of True Objects, objects that cannot but be helped to function in reality as true things. Like the car I drive down the road. There is a car. The question of what a car may ‘actually’ be as an object is of no concern; indeed I am, as I drive, driving a car down the road. The ideological or theoretical considerations do not come into play here; much like Harman’s Third Chair, but most like the ‘First’ chair, what ever may be the actual ‘car’ does not come into play in my driving down that road. The car is a True Object. To argue what the car may actually be is entirely a theoretical issue, but more, an issue that is entirely metaphysical, which is also to say, concerning what is more true or more real, which is for all other terms, concerning what is transcendent or for better terms, as a methodological reduction, concerning ‘The’ transcendent.

There is no theory that needs go into this, but the theory is already there in the various authors all over the place. Harman’s difference with Zizek, even as he may say he disagree with Zizek, is in as much as Harman is invested in the truth of the terms he is using, as his terms are stemming from a sort of essential relation of thing to thing (the ‘thing’ that is Harman, and the ‘thing’ that Harman is addressing: object -> object). As I have said, he must argue this because this argument then validates retroactively the position by which he attains his truth of reality. And this next is key to my proposal of the situation of the True Object: his difference with Zizek takes place in reality.

Once this situation is understood, then we can consider the meaning ala Miellassoux, correlationalism and transcendence. Then, once this situation takes hold, the question no longer concerns what the author means, for this routinely beckons conventional method back into its correlation of ideologically ordered (Foucault) and scaffolded (Wittgenstien) terms — and besides, we have already climbed the ladder of this meaning — but rather the question becomes: What does this situation mean? Hence, to question this situation stems from a position that is not real. The real ladder of meaning must be thrown away. The question comes to concern the Significant Event.

We can see this in action in the comments of the linked blog on Dark Ecologies. That the simplicity I propose is countered by recourse to an authorial bank (Freire) of knowledge. The conventional philosopher cannot understand what I am referring to because he is caught in the metaphysical correlational world of ‘real’ discursive method. Hence, divergence.

Again; this is not to say that D.E. essays do not present valid points, but rather that the meaning of the points are routinely missed for the sake of the correlationally (transcendentally) justified arguments that stem from an assertion of identity, from the equivocation of the object and the discourse (terms) about them — but not just any discourse; a particular discourse that can be associated, as Zizek does, with the capitalistic paradigm wherein True things exist because of the metaphysical discourse that supplies the ‘more true’ reason for its objectivity — as if I am not really driving a car down the road. The car is thus a True Object due to the insistence of the metaphysical support.

But to get back to Malabou; the question of ‘why’ should the transcendent be relinquished (I apologize; I have only listened to the first 20 minutes of her talk. My input may change when I hear the rest) is made nearly moot due to the understanding that comes through the simple understanding of what authors such as Badiou, Zizek, and Laruelle, (if not many, more; such as, Kant, Hume, Hegel, Faurbach, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Nietchze, Wittgenstien, Heidegger, Sartre [my spelling is horrendous] and many, many more, whose names apologetically do not directly come to mind right now — oh, and if not Miellssoux, and Harman) are really saying. The difference between these varied authors concerns the awareness of the following: The transcendent must be destroyed because it is the transcendent that perpetuates the continuance of real confusion. We must not ‘relinquish’ it because, as Malabou also says, to relinquish is more like a kind parting, and such a codependent relationship will never kindly part ways.

“Should humanity be saved?” Laruelle has asked. I say: humanity should not be saved. Because, should humanity be saved it would not even know that it had already been saved, if indeed humanity should have been.

SE part 7; A Synopsis of the Issue So Far.

So its about time I get back to the issue at hand.

I have been writing what is turning out to be an extensive essay concerning Graham Harman and the Object Orientation of the SpeculativeRealists, but it is getting much too long and getting to be, as it turns out, a way more tangential discussion to this essay here about the Significant Event.

Though such tangency is significant and integral to what is treated, suffice it to give for now a synopsis of the situation at hand.

The Speculative Realists have stepped out of the problematic philosophical arena posed by them to have begun with Kant and the Copernican revolution and argued itself along a subjective path to the current situation correlationalism. This stepping out is from the ‘subject orientation’ upon the world to an ‘object orientation’, and thus can be said to be a divergence from traditionally appropriated western philosophy. Roughly speaking, correlationalism is the argument that says knowledge can only reach knowledge; Kant’s idea is that no object in-itself can be known.

Correlationalism says that due to this limit of knowledge, terms do not refer to (true, ‘out there’) objects but only to other terms. The end run argument of this situation is once language becomes the determining factor for the knowledge of the world, the arguments and discussions concerning the world begin to cycle back through different terms to make and reiterate the same arguments. This is to say that once the way of speaking about the world can be defined to its limitation, the arguments that are able to be made within a particular scheme, framework, or scaffolding of terms by which reality can be known, have all been made and for our treatment here, within a certain parameter that we have called the ‘subject-object duality’ that privileges the subject, or at least are represented in sufficient variation of significant themes (Kant’s subjective intuition, Spinoza’s sort of underlying or overreaching encompassment, Feuerbach’s economy of human beings, Wittgenstein’s language, Hiedegger’s Being, to name four) so that now the arguments are replayed in different guises. These guises are thus viewed or understood as new or otherwise progressed ideas (ideas that are in-themselves true as such part of a series) by those ‘caught’ in the Kantian-Copernican discursive paradigm, this recycling of ideas due to the orientation upon an object that is only knowable through a human (Kantian) intuition by which the human subject individual is the sole arbiter of truth and reality. Hence the human being, albeit through guises that suppose and or propose of some transcendent ‘linker’ or ‘encompassment’, even to say that such linkage or encompassment is not a transcendence (for this is merely a negative form) becomes or otherwise is the only possible center of the true universe. This is likened to the Copernican Revolution in that when the Earth was understood as the center of the universe, humans were the special creation of which God was the exact center. With the displacement of the Earth for the Sun as the center, human beings’ centrality loses the credibility and backing of a God and begins a path of human query as to the possibility of this centrality of human thinking as the end of the line, ‘the buck stops here’ credibility.

Yet the issue then presents the at least two aggravating issues, that are not missed by the SRs. And excuse me if this is a repeating of my earlier essays.

1.) The Kantian shift from metaphysical speculation to speculation upon language, tells us that a metaphysical God now is merely a manner of speaking, that the idea of a God does not indicate an actual true transcendently immanent entity or agent over which dogmatic idealism argues of its stature or manifestation; in fact, this allows for atheism. Hence the centrality of human discourse in an immanent universal structural operation. This structural operation is thus apparent in as much
human beings can intuit what the truth of the structure is. Kant thereby sees a problem of such intuition as the problem of correct and incorrect appropriation of what is intuited; hence his categorical and hypothetical imperatives and pure and practical reason.

But this is not the place for a exegesis of Kant. Suffice to say that what we have then is a reality that is still functioning, albeit now through terms, despite what the terms denote to be in-itself or not, of the universe.

2.) The functioning of reality that ‘calls forth’ this seminal idea of Kant argues that all reality, indeed all of history, is was ‘really’ a discursive negotiation. By this notion, we have two positional situations. First, the conventional reading sees a common position of humans in a real universe where humans before Kant were merely ignorant of their situation, positing metaphysical gods and spirits and all sorts of supernatural entities, and humans since Kant are now really dealing with the actual human universal situation, i.e., discursive negotiation. Second and more significant; if this first proposal is indeed the situation, and we can likewise include the proposals subsequent to Kant, the ramifications of having language as the determinant of reality, for example of Wittgenstien and Sartre if not also Kierkegaard, then what was or is posited as past or ‘of the before’ contradicts the meaning of the first proposal. That is, if this is all a present discursive negotiation of proper and improper intuitions, the fact that we came upon such a moment with Kant argues that such present negotiations are not present negotiations at all, but rather are negotiations taking place upon actual prior situations that we collectively call the Past. As well, the supposition that there are or were subsequent ideas based on Kant’s becomes non sequitur, a contradiction of premise to conclusion.

The former position is what Miellasoux has called ‘weak’ correlationalism, where the correlate term-objects are being informed by a transcendent intuition for a type of manifest destiny, a progress of history not dissimilar to Hegalian Historical Consciousness, such as may be found through proper and improper assessment of such intuitions in negotiation, and the latter position is what he calls ‘strong’ correlationalism, where all discourse reflects only the reality of the moment.

As we just said, this situation contradicts itself, so when this is noticed, the question becomes first of how such a situation can be noticed, and is noticed, and then of where or when or how to stop in this reiterating process that repeats itself unknowingly, at once positing a given past that is negated in the present situation of discourse. It is here, from this contradiction that a precipitate of sorts fall out of the issue: the contradiction yields the ‘only’ option, that of the limit of a particular kind of discourse necessarily posits that there are things, as Miellassoux puts it, antecedent to — not merely thought, but rather reason, an effect of thought.

Note that the SE argument yields Miessaloux arguing that the situation is due to a misconstruing, a sort of mistake of route upon the subject rather than upon the object, as based in a sort of choice that allows for the continuance of the error, such that then he may argue that it is reason that is incorrect, and this based in the assumption that discourse has or otherwise becomes a power over how the world is estimated for its truth by human beings. Because this power is somehow based in an originating or effective power for change, choice, that can alter or change the discursive power base, such that the power of choice (in an ability for observation, analysis and activity) establishes the arena against which further choice can be made to alter it, he thereby argues that such a mistake can be corrected. It is interesting and provocative for this essay of the Significant Event because such a situation must be stated outright where as it is usually assumed as the common basic and true feature of being human; as suggested, that this is the ‘natural’ route of progress. Hence his statement, as I repeat myself, is indeed a ‘Realist’ argument, an argument for a ‘more real’ or ‘better and more true’ reality. Along these lines, then, Harman attempts to describe the ‘more true’ real object.

The issue of the point of contention, once we have come upon this stalemate, is that such a present ‘strong correlationalism’, whether the state of that situation or the noticing of it, is relying upon a transcendent interlocutor to gain its discursive position within reality. This is all to say that to say ‘discourse’ does not solve the problem but only avoids it. And this situation is to invoke a hard correlationalism, where not only does discourse argue the present situation, but that the present situation includes all human experience that is allowed to count as reality.

In an earlier essay of Constructive Undoing, we began with the proposal that we must start with the consideration that we no longer have a subject and and object (see my essay ‘Direct Tangent 6.9’), that we should no longer be involved with the attempt to reduce situations of reality to that of objective circumstance, but neither should we fall into the conclusion of analysis of subjectivity or subjective agent, but instead should consider such human factors as ‘subject-objects’, and indeed begin to consider how it may be the object that is determining the subject as opposed to the opposite, that which is typically understood, and thus begin to question such notions of ‘thought’ and ‘choice’. Yet because when we look out into the world, when we interact with society, one cannot deny the obvious and overwhelming presence and persistence of human beings who deal with reality, the world and or the universe in this way, that is, as there being objects and subjects, thoughts and choice, things ‘out there’ and humans with ‘inner’ beings, we must come to the conclusion that reality operates in this manner at least for us humans, through this basic and fundamental duality. Further, in this reality that is obvious, due to its apparent obviousness, the human ‘inner’ being is understood as a part of the universal operation that science uncovers, and so psychology and similar sciences that deal with the human being, such as neuroscience, are involved with situating and handling the human being similarly to how more proper objects ‘out there’ in the world are handled, which is to say, as an object. We call this human being in reality the ‘individual’.

The problem that arises, though, in this worldview has to do with the subject, and not so much with the object. This problem is exactly the contradiction involved with a subjective view upon an object, which is the preoccupation of the last 300 some years of Western philosophy. But the basic problem that this historical route cannot resolve is indeed that it is a subject that is viewing the object, and that this object cannot be known in-itself. This is the Kantian problem; such ‘in-itself-ness’ is only known through human intuition of its truth. Even if we take science at face value, along with all of its ‘philosophical’ what-ifs, all of its findings of neurons, brains, and mental psychologies, multiple universes and cultural realities, it is still an objective appearance of subjective impetus; the discussions and negotiations about scientific objects are but subjective appropriations of intuited objects, the objects that are supposed to be given as neutral things offering up true aspects of themselves to our proper methods, objects apparently being the impetus for our subjective ability to discover true things of things — all of this is relying upon human subjectivity.

Faced with this problem, philosophy (what we term ‘conventional philosophy’) has been in the effort to overcome the gap between the knowing subject and the neutral object without a reliance upon this intuition that always implicates a type of transcendent interlocutor to allow for human beings to have such truth. More particularly, the problem is much more insidious; such a transcendent interlocutor grants the human idea of progress, since if there is no object in-itself that we are knowing of in our daily activities with objects, then the apparent progress we come upon in our dealings with objects must be inspired by a sort of ‘guide’ that is giving us such objects to our knowledge in such a way or manner to allow us progress.

These two situations told are equally intolerable and offensive. Where science has no true in-itself object and the true object is given to us by a transcendent agent or aspect, the only sensible option is the apparent and obvious option, that indeed there is an object that is open to our real methods and query. Due to the ubiquity of such a presence, we can only call this reality. Hence, that which allows for such reality must be a function of being human that avoids its own intelligible approximate yet extensive investigation given what is available for consideration and analysis; we call this avoidance ‘denial’, and the basis upon which such activity yet gains apparent coincidence of progress, ‘faith’.

Such it is that conventional philosophy itself is stuck in this same quandary, taking the obviousness of terms of discussion as likewise true objects, but defaulting to the Kantian intuition in a type of redundancy that allows the discussion of true reality to continue and progress based upon the real maxim that the situating of terms to meaning in the act of explaining achieves an overcoming of the gap inherently and intuitively by the proposal of the proposition that explains Kant’s addressing of objects ‘out there’ and not the objects being used to make the assertion, that is, the terms; such conventional philosophers thereby avoid the problem of their method by a reliance upon an essential segregation of real things, i.e., avoiding that the terms which are not capable of reaching the object ‘out there’ have the same function and capacity as the terms themselves for themselves, that is, the terms that are supposed and assumed to reach the terms which they address in argument.

Further; the scientific effort that is psychology, which purports to gain a description of how the human psyche works, cannot give an account for how such a psyche is able to view itself as a functioning psyche, how the psyche that enacts the effort is able to discern the psyche for which the effort is applied. In fact, the mental construal of such psychology involves such a multitude of aspects, such a phantasmic operation of mental shades and states, that psychology can hardly be said to be presenting an actual true picture of how the psyche works beyond a particular sensibility given particular meaningful structures for any time (ideology) that are equally indescribable or unable to be located (ideological structures have blurred boundaries) so at best is describing a particular manifestation of psyche, one which avoids the very fundamentality of the psyche itself. It feeds back its ‘objective’ observations to itself to explain itself while avoiding the very process by which it may be coming upon such observations and conclusions. Again, this problem is outright denied for the sake of true reality.

So, in as much as we have the apparent abundance and majority of people who see themselves, the world and their mental functioning as being addressed and indeed contained in the magic of science and psychology, we have real individuals, human beings who are oriented upon objects in a particular manner, this manner characterized by denial of the conclusion found of its own method and extended basis of knowing as a division of labor. Such individuals see and act upon True Objects by virtue of the faith that overcomes the accusation of inherent denial of the gap that at once withholds the object from their truth of it, while installing a necessary transcendent interlocutor that allows for progress regardless.

When contradiction arises in reality, faith allows for the reinstatement of that reality where it should be compromised; faith makes true. Such a faith in progress thus sees the terms of reality as indicating different true things, for the terms are the manifestation of the evidence of progress given by the transcendent aspect. So it is that evidence of the contradiction or failure of the subjective determination of reality, the indication that the individual of free agency effects true objects in a catalytic manner is an improper categorization of elements, a categorization that marginalizes human agency to a hypothetical imperative, cannot be allowed to compromise real individual identity, a basic structural form that instead recoups the failure in different terms that always complete the term-object identity as the centralized individual for reality.

This situation of reality, because it is the unavoidable condition in which a human being must reside, and because it indeed does rely upon a distancing of itself from contradiction and a consolidating of itself in identity and agency, due to these limitations and following from the gap it avoids, requires the necessary situation that arises outside of reality can only be not real. This proposal counters the assertions of the Speculative Realists by its route. The route that is thus not real is in response to the proposal that can find a more real reality, which is to say, in rebuttal to the route that takes as its ground the amorphous arena given to the choice upon the already shaky ground having been established through the series of choice (mentioned above). Thus SR are posing an injunction upon the series through the very route that allows for injunctions as part of the series, as part of the true method for coming upon reality; they are arguing an inclusion for the individual in reality, a manner of overcoming the gap. Hence to pose a more real reality is merely relying upon the basic reality for which humans have an intuited truth, and only deals with a contingent and arbitrary break within the unknowable series but posed as now knowable, that is, restated to account for most of reality and its history. This ‘most’ is then evident in the staking of claim upon the moment of the Kantian Copernican Revolution, and reality remains as that ‘thing’, the ‘greater’ object that remains to be dealt with through what is therefore and can only be not real. The Significant Event thus works to expose the route upon which reality stakes its claim to progress by revealing that method by which such claims are made.

And once again, with little reflection upon such a venture as proposed thus far, this exposure is ironic. The once last thing that the subject would imagine, due to the object becoming forefront, exposed, is now becoming or will have became, the first thing.

End part 7.

The Impossible, part 4: Spiritual Oneness and the State of Incorporated Reality.

The operative question that motivates the essays on the impossible can be formulated by the questions of determinism and contingency: Is the random aspect of the physical universe of science responsible or otherwise enacted or present in the random aspect that involves human choice, such that choice is determined by the state of the universe, or, is the human being a mediator or mediation of an extra or supra universal element and the physical world, where the random aspect of the physical is but that supra element of the human, that the physical universe is contingent upon the series of choice?

We should see that these questions remain salient so far as the terms themselves reflect or are capable of reflecting True Objects of a particular scheme. The impossible, then, lay at the exposure or decoupling of such metaphysical structures, at the complete shredding of all discursive-conceptual methods for meaning, including such conceptions that would end this with an ineffective nothingness or nihilism.

The reader should be clear in his or her orientation upon this reading. This is not a discernment of ‘either you’re in or you’re out’ situation; but, this statement assumes that the reader is indeed oriented in this way, or at least can understand from that perspective, and thus has been coming upon a sort of intuitive rebuttal, that some sort of antagonistic anxiety is cultivating the response that places the argument for nonsense, ripe to be useless, ridiculous, or for a term extrapolated to nothing less than impossible. This is the sign of irony; the argument presents the dissolution of its representation. The attachment to or faith in the True Object come upon by its dissolution as an indication of another True Object is, as Soren Kierkegaard rightly situated, despair, but its opposite elicitation is elation. The continuation through despair, and not the Sartrean revolt from it, is the revealing of the impossible into discourse, into the logic involved in the meaning of terms, it’s implicated scheme, that has become itself ripe to speak of the impossible in its impossibility, that what has so far been seen as the polemical position to reality is but a discursive situation of a modernist sort, which is to say, of a One True Universe, that is or has developed itself to the point of being capable of revealing its own limitation through its limiting definition of objects, such that these objects not only argue their determination but their contingency as well, and ultimately, that because this situation has arisen only and of the the supposed common humanity of meaning, that this common humanity can no longer be upheld, where the subject agent of will likewise is seen as a faulty conception. The irony is that the universe counts as a ‘one’ in which humans are not segregate, and that the universe, as a conceptual scheme that comes about in humans, has developed the meaning of its unsound concept. Hence, the concept brought to its objective ends is despair, yet it moved through is the phenomenon itself, an ironic reversal or upending of reality. The revolt from despair is a re-establishing of reality, as well as its historical truth.

The potential at any moment for the revealing the full extent of the contradictory feature of any conventional discourse evidences the true qualitative motion of history and is reflected in the mood or attitude of the era. What has been defined, at this late date, as modernist and post-modernist expresses the oscillation of history to non-history, and by this we should surmise that the history of which science designates evolution and the development of human beings and all its stages, is much, much older than what physics and anthropology has determined. In our moment we are struggling with the situation that has deconstructed the subject, what heretofore I have called the subject-object. The natural and automatic ‘revolt’ has been back into modernist objectivism, which is for our time, reality, the ideologized capitalized corporate structure. The conception that is left to fully dismantle the tower of righteous babble, since we have already seen how the human determines object contingency, thus involves the revealing of the object unto itself, which is to say, how it is the object itself that determines human contingency. The resistance to such exposure, the subject of the object of capitalism is the incorporation of the the effect of human ignorance into the exaltation of its own designation, the subject (-object) in despair of its own existence; in effect, this is the building of the ‘God-human’ out of the oppressing state of reality, which is to say, out of the real, inviolate, and essential human subject of faith. To reiterate: The effect of the inability to withdraw faith from the calculus of reality is capitalized upon, and this, also as effect, reduces reality to a real particular assertion of power that is enacted by the capitalist upon humanity. The con of capitalism is reality itself maintained through a ploy of the individual with free will.

The reason we must emphasize ‘effect’ has to do with the difference between authentic human interpersonal relations and the thoughts which overdetermine the activity of a larger common human whole. The traversing of what I shall term ‘local’ interactions to a ‘distant’ humanity calls forth the ideological negotiations of faith concerning True Objects, and thus the various religious (see below) assertions of Truth that become capitalized upon in the reducing capitalistic fetishism; in the avoidance of such objects of faith, one must speak about effects (see my earlier essays, particularly, “Aphilosophy, Convention, Faith and God”).

Yet, before we describe in detail the impossible situation of reality that most of know intuitively, we must begin with tying up some loose ends.

Whereas ‘before’, in the subjective ‘phase’, so to speak, such argument come upon was seen to indicate some sort of spiritual basis, some transcendent or otherwise meta or supra reality, some ‘other than regular’ world that lay at some recouping of total meaning that then indicated a Truth of the universe, that couples with regular reality. The idea is that usual reality is recouped or accounted for by a type of ‘psychic’ or thoughtful ‘centered-ness’, that in turn presents usual reality against a more real ‘One’ reality’. There are two rebuttals to this. The first concerns ‘logical’ discursive failure, as Western minds might consider metaphysics, and the second, spiritual or philosophical failure – and see that what is philosophical is meant in a more Eastern mode, such as Tantric or Zen Buddhist can be considered. The union of these two coordinations represent the one possibility of reality. Religion, or what can be called spiritual ideology, in general reflects belief that corresponds the logical and spiritual in this respect. Recently, Non-philosophy-as-method appears to resonate this ‘one’ posture, but its move is incomplete; this is why non-philosophy represents convention in-the-last-instance, the ‘least overdetermined’ object of reality, despite its ‘regular’ non-philosophical meaning incited in the ‘Future Christ’.

It is not difficult to see, though, that metaphysical speculation, which includes all forms of real speculation, will not relinquish its hold upon the agent as a fixed social construct. The subject object of faith will not allow reality to be disturbed, and the linear progress of history will continue as the individual subject-object remains under the dominion of a particular effective power of the doctrine of free will. We can only suppose that Non-philosophy will be taken as another philosophical object, even as we redefine what philosophy is or re-term it, and that its Future Christ will become another speckle in the lineage of philosophical ideas.

One issue in this that will be addressed later is the point of elucidating the truth of the matter if no one wants to or is capable of hearing or understanding it.

If we can concur that this can be a logical assessment of the facts thus far (see my essays on The Impossible, parts 1,2,3) then it is here from which we may derive all the facets of ontological and cosmological discourses, their arguments, including religion, philosophy and science. These purport to explain what can be called ‘the argument of the One’, which is always the basis of every reality, and which can amount to the query, how do we reconcile the random universe with the random human choice? We have just indicated above that the answer is routinely reconciled in having the universe as basic, and the human being as a thing of the universe, and that even taking the human being as central, the universe is situated likewise as basic. Science proposes to be able to discover or uncover the true thing (True Object) that is the universe, and psychology proposes that we may discover the true thing (True Subject-Object) of the human being, that we may discover the mechanisms and or functioning of the universal human, a thing of the universe. Religious and or spiritual thought also propose to be able to offer a true One of reality, but is not limited in the same way as science; spiritual proposals may use any number of rhetorical devices, but their arguments likewise draw from the sensibility of a knowable One.

We can see here that the historical solution to reality always tends toward falling into the True Object, as I define it, of faith; the bare human in the world is one of a past ignorance toward an informed future. The situation is always of the world of True Objects, since it is quickly apparent that there is a world of things that humans must negotiate in order to survive, but this imperative then colludes with the terms and derives reality proper. Any deviation from this endeavor, of things, as definition might distinguish various things from other things that are not things, is typically called ‘spiritual’ and is correspondent with a situation that occurs ‘within’ the knowing subject individual; psychology is scientific investigation into this ‘spirit’, and thus accounting for the motion that sees the universe as primary to any investigation, amounts to a ‘world religion’.

The motion of spiritual endeavor, though, the activity of psychic investigation, is taken up along two vectors of discourse that again collude ( I will take to the ethical implications later) in a quadripartite:

1) A practice of instruction that suggests the individual toward a correct understanding-and-practice, an experience-understanding gained by the individual. This is nothing more than an assertion of proper method. The Eastern philosophical teachings that propose a relieving of the individual of all true objects to the ‘meta-nirvana’, so to speak, recourses similarly to Sartre-esque motion. From a coming to a realization of the sangsaric phantasmagoria of temporal objects, the ‘enlightened’ individual may come to more intuitive or aware consciousness of bodily operations and how such operations may effect the individual’s appropriation of conceptualization of objective situations. The various coordinations amount to the methods traditionally call ‘martial arts’, as these stem from ‘right’ thought, action, attitude, etcetera, but extrapolated into achievement and practice for ability can said to include any proper method.

2) A practice of ‘following ones bliss’, so to speak, where the individual is disclosed upon his or her own motion as proper unto itself. Whether the individual sees itself as some sort of cosmic or psychic center or entity, in communion with a spiritual source, is worthy or unworthy, the product of such calculus is the same; the motion does not avoid this classification. When undertaken thoughtfully in experience as a thing unto itself, as a motion with ends of itself and not upholding a proper object as projected ends, this vector develops in a more ‘proper’ Sartre-existentialist motion, as I describe in my previous essay, “post-post-modern-modernism”. The individual ‘revolts’ from this precipitated abyss of nothingness and thereby finds true agency for the negotiations of established ideological structures, or True Objects, and appropriates proper methods based upon given routes for such methods, though most are not systematized to a degree as the Eastern martial arts to be called such. Of course, the individual of (now) free agency would never admit to their activity being determined, neither that they are fitting their agency into preexisting ideological structures of True Objects, it is more likely that such a one would adamantly assert that they have created or established something entirely new, but he is capitalizing upon the gap that is maintained in the revolt; the power of the True Object is gained through its becoming a fetish, the ‘magic’ that arises in the real denial of the gap (see below). Obviously, such agency is supplied by the old adage “ignorance is bliss”; it is similar to my assertion that computers function by water moving through vessels to fill rubber balloons, obviously I don’t care at all about how they might really work, but nevertheless, they still work for me. Hence it is useless to talk about ‘more real’ reality, but only effects of reality – the power that humans appear to have over objects is a real effect.

These two ideologic situations can be coaxed out of the present East-West ideological paradigms, where it can be seen each ideological-spiritual base involves the same polemical motive elements. Respectively, though aggravated argument can blur any statement of character, it is not difficult to draw an umbrella over the West to characterize it with individualism and as well see the European-American ideal of manifest destiny as an individualized motif. The individual, moved by a ‘invisible hand’ starts out and motivated by his or her own impetus, strives and thereby creates their own world united in individuality. The East, similarly generalized, contains individuals ordained in their incarnations under a celestial dictate that is evidenced in social order. Noted that such generalizations are not absolute in their designations; the West has an overreaching and implied structure of order, and the East has individuals that act upon individual ‘karmic’ designations. Indeed every human place carries these designations in their own way. Again, what can argue the inadequacy of such a generalization are based upon random factors that real investigation seeks to discredit in method, and by its effort establish the unified ‘One True’ universe.

( Note: This is the third-moving-into-the-fourth of non philosophy, but, as I have said elsewhere, the non-philosophical fourth is still but one fourth of two possibilities, such that we have a quadripartite of a quadripartite that derives its meaning from the philosophical object that is non-philosophy as it represents itself as (non-) cornered in the Real, extended by radical immanence into the Future Christ, that has inevitably been established by it.)

Again, the same problem poses itself through every route. The persistent aspect of real inquiry into True things that obscures the truth for the certitude of the One Reality can be called a ‘gap’. As to our discussion so far, we consider universal randomness, human randomness, universal basis, and human psychic basis. Conceptual gaps become presented in a critical consideration relating any to each of these categories, but are always overcome with reference to and or correspondent with whichever category is taken to be basic to the investigation. Francios Laruelle has indicated as much of philosophy in his non-philosophy. When the universe is taken as basic, then all discourse refers to its truth, that once the human mind is understood, a proper linking of causal relations will be made to universal physical randomness. When choice is basic, likewise physical interpretations will be able to be understood by a contextual consciousness, such as free will. Where the universal thing is basic, the human will be accounted for as an explained thing; where the psyche is basic, universal structures will likewise become realized. And, where choice, discourse will reconcile determinacy; where the universal true thing, randomness will be accounted for. Any combination of these four categories yield a correspondent solution oriented by what is taken as basic, but each solution, when applied dialectically to the possibility of other bases, will yield a conceptual gap, a contradiction that then necessitates a move upon, elliptically, in condensing and expanding substantive real quality, back into the base as truth of the matter in question.

Of course, the distinctions of these categories do not argue absolute categories and are not upheld, rather suspended, in the activity of consideration; each operating base organizes a particular matrix of transcendental and immanent elements within the discursive posture (see my earlier essay, “Aphilosophy, Convnetion, Faith and God”). Take for example the statement, “I am a human being.” In considering the statement’s veracity, any term of the phrase will reside in a transcendent or immanent state while one term is considered. For a universal basic query, the term “I” considered may yield an assertion of evolutionary physical traits acquired through a natural selection such that the term “I” is qualified; in such suspension, “am a human being” may state transcendent qualifiers that reify the universal proposition, while offering immanent qualifiers in the subsequent explanation likewise. The human query may refer the term “I” to a universal evolutionary stage, but then qualify the universal evolution to an immanent fact of knowing, thereby reifying the meaning of the basic human. The humanity of the universal, it the case here, and the humanity of the human position may have exchange due to the ignorance of the contradiction involved in approaching absolute bases. The term “human”, though understood as an object in-itself, as indicating a True object between such arenas (universal/human), is already a contradiction in argument, since one cannot have an evolutionary product decide upon its own agency to be evolutionarily determined. Yet also the contradictions are suspended within bases likewise in so much as ‘I’ may be a ‘human being’, but when I go to figure out what a human being is, ‘I’ am not including the ‘I’ in the consideration; ‘I’ have become immanent to the discussion, and by the time I may have found out what a human being is, I have probably situated it in a universal setting yet while avoiding again the basis of my evolutionary redundancy for the sake of arguing the human center of being human, so the evolution has become transcendent. Different terms and the statements that support argument pronounce or otherwise punctuate different ordinances of transcendental-immanent structure according to the base from which it is argued; this feature of discourse can be called a ‘differend’, the gap that is reconciled in a discursive redundancy that is denied for reality, and this occurs in ‘real time’.

To reiterate; for every basic argument, its conclusions are supported upon non-admitted contradictions that reveal its lack when considered against other discursive bases; to uphold its truth, it must retain an ability for plausible denial in its argumentative structure by speaking of and to possible referents of and to other discourses while never confronting the base of truth the other discourses rely upon: it must ‘disguise’ its equivocations that cover for the vacillating or oscillating discourse through posturing, or for another term, identity. In general, the science of physics and mathematics eventually comes to admit a type of universal structure that contains the possibility of ‘non-locality’ (an extrapolated meaning of the Heisenberg Principle), along with mathematical ‘complexity’ and ‘chaos’, where the non-local event resides in the position of observation; a contradictory situation, but also a noticeably ‘conscious’ indication. The scientific observation of non-locality in chaotic complexity excludes the observer as an included variable but instead develops parameters that include the description of the observer as ‘an excluded observer’, and by extended discursive moves, negates the act of observation through including multiple occurrences of different observers’ observations, which again, through yet more discursive maneuvers neatly avoid that the arena by which the observations have been or are being performed has already been established as the reality that they are testing, the results of which already determined by the parameters of real meaning; a particular orientation upon objects is assumed. Reality is seen as variable in contrast to the controlled experiment which yields the constant elements of reality, but reality is static in as much as it yields consistent results when a consistent method is applied. In other words, the procession of physical discourse, in its transcribing mathematical data to meaningful terms, must use terms that are a ‘best analogy’ and left uninvestigated in order to make the statements of its findings. What is truly static and variable is ignored for the definition that corresponds with a particular and proper orientation upon objects. In effect, science does its best to assure that the choice that is made upon a decision to experiment or observe, is mitigated by the ‘natural’ demands of physical element to be tested; the phenomena ‘lends itself’ to the formulation of experiment and the matter of its communication is likewise left to a presumption of the real universe where what is spoken about the findings of physics is necessarily consistent with the terms of the experiment. Take for example the Higgs Boson; this particle is supposed to have something to do with the manifesting or ‘ability to be’ of matter. What this Higgs-type Boson has to do with the scientists who are made of matter experimenting, finding this boson, and concluding things about it, I am not sure. It seems plain to me though that the boson is nothing more that a way to justify the individual human scientists in reality. What this boson has to do with me is I find an occasion to write in a particular way. To stick to some absolute category, such as physical science, as if they are really finding an actual basic particle of the True universe, avoids the reality that is already manifested so as to bring about that course of events, including me writing about the ridiculousness of the importance of the boson, for the sake of the individual free agent of reality.

Extended at root, the situation of human choice represents an effective conceptual gap from the physical base, a gap that occurs where the universe is segregated into static or controlled elements and ‘in motion’ or variable elements. Since the physical-mathematical world is taken as base, yet it is choice that has allowed such a base to become known, the knowing individual comes to miss its own resonant motion in the vacillation, for the sake of defining what is moving. One could say Einstein was a philosopher. Likewise and further, spiritual type findings of ‘acceptance’, as well for meditation, communion and proper action, deriving from choice as base, and seeking to find guidance or correspondence from some ‘higher’ source, may use the ideas of theoretical physics to support its spiritual affection claim, such as ‘chaos’, ‘complexity’, ‘fractal’, aspects of subatomic theory, to name a few from contemporary science, but the scientific and physical discourse of the manifestation of physical things indicates no effective ‘source’ that an individual may have audience with beyond an inference made by the spiritual participant. The individual is caught in a vacillation that he does not recognize due to the insistence of his own true conceptual-discursive base.

Though this may be a somewhat ‘dry’ interpretation or designation, while these two categorical arenas may seem to overlap and conspire with each other to define a sort of ‘holistic’ picture at certain junctures, the meaning of each discourse indicates a universe that cannot admit a transcending consciousness as well as a consciousness that cannot fully account for a (scientific) physical universe due to the insubstantial situation of those things, even while each might defer to the other to round out each respective lack. Together, the implicated unity of such universe relies upon discursive situational gaps that are avoided in the act of deference, or emphasized in the act of debate, to the ‘One’ truth. Here we find the definitional parameters of reality; the various discourses of truth have veracity only in as much as the truth they suppose to be the goal or purpose of their efforts contributes with other discourses of the One Truth, but this One Truth is always suspended in the very proposal that seeks it.

Yet, ironically, one argument is typically and routinely unheard, one that arises in the conflation of basic discourses, in the gap, so to speak. Our understanding of the universe has no necessary correspondence with what is true of the universe or ourselves beyond what is understood through faith. The effect, the ‘presence’ of the conscious human being thinking, acting, and behaving in the world, is consistently reduced in the prior decision of investigation that seeks the true One; faith is anachronized in a history of and displaced to religion and spirituality of the One True Thing. This is to say, the idea of reality is a mythology, as well an ideology of power that prescribes beforehand every investigation as to its object and purpose, as well as placement and function. Further, and in type contrast, in so much that the human being is merely another thing of the universe, all human activity must be correspondent with the universe functioning; that which evidences this without seeking a scapegoat of random occurrence must admit then that the mythology is the human-thing of the universe behaving universally. Yet, its behavior cannot admit anything ‘of the True universe’ since the universe’s operation is not evident ‘to’ the meaning that humans develop, but only ‘in’ the meaning. The meaning that would have humans gain a true understanding of the universe and its operations or even purpose, is an ‘overdetermined’ meaning, a meaning that derives from a presumption of the One, of transcendence and or immanence of divinity that ‘evens out’ the vacillations of existence for the sake of itself. This then outlines what is meant by the question “how do I know this”, and, “how do I segregate myself from the universe sufficiently to know of the truth of the universe”. To reiterate; human consciousness cannot be anything but a universal operation, which is to say, human consciousness ‘makes sense’, it ‘forms meaning’ and ‘means forms’, but that such meaning has no more meaning beyond its establishing than, say, a leaf might be able to know of a true photon of light. The relation of meaning meaning is one of pure effect unto itself. The issue then is not so much about what may or may not be determined or chosen, about the uncovering or discovering the truth of an object, but about how one is oriented upon the True Objects of reality.

Hence, not only have I outlined the problem of what is possible and thereby indicated what is impossible, and as well represented what is most offensive to faith in reality, but most significantly, I have presented a situation, the meaning of this essay, that is not only impossible, but more so, ironic. For if the meaning of this essay is true, then its meaning cannot be true. Indeed, it is, again, not real, absurd. For what has occurred in order for the meaning of this essay to be conveyed, is no discursive segregated overdetermination. The essay speaks of reality, for for a one that may not be included by it. It speaks of history for the future; in other words: nonsense.

It is for this reason that metaphysical speculation will always remain the procurer and law of reality, and irony remain excluded as a viable discourse of truth.

So, if I may accentuate my point with a quote from the bodacious author David Mitchell, from his abominable book “Cloud Atlas”, 2004, pg 401:

“Maybe the answer is not a function of metaphysics but one, simply, of power.”

More impossibility in part 5? Hold onto your diapers!

The Problem of the Dialectic: Convention, Reality and Irony.

The dialectic, as I have said earlier, cannot be taken too seriously. For when it is, the break that has perspective finds the levity that brings the truth of the matter over the impending doom. Yet when things have become so serious, it is only because I have been presented with my self and the truth and I wish to hold to my faith, my salvation of true things. When I try to suck from the matter something so thick with seriousness, the moves I have reduce the possibility that I have come wrong, and I am squeezed with apprehension. It is then what I do with it is significant; but the state of affairs often shows that what is significant does not matter, so what is really significant is that I proceed even when no one is looking or cares. If I had a choice then I would probably care and the whole thing would become a circus; but perhaps I’m not realizing just what a master of ceremonies I am, or have become.

One problem in reading a true critical exegesis of reality and truth through the dialectic, has to do with the tendency of people to read argument as if there is an absolutely true object to be discerned, that this discerning must be of an ‘either/or’ nature, that indicates a decision. This decision occupies, or is situated within a singular and particular horizon. The difficulty, then, in reading essays such as this one, but any writing really, is that the meaning taken is offensive to this orientation. The situation is this: The points I bring appear to contradict what is apparently obvious, and so the individual either sees the points as exteraneous to their activity, interest or ability, like I am involved in a division of labor, i.e. computer science speaks a certain jargon that has nothing directly applicable to mowing lawns, and so I leave what involvement their talk has to do with me in their capable hands, or, they see what I am talking about as complete nonsense.

I should point out that there is no manner of speaking that can remove the reality of, say, a rock. I can of course, as I suggest in an earlier post, talk about how there is no amount of descriptive talking that will ever gain the rock. These two statements show how the problem of the previous paragraph takes place. People want to find either the first or the latter as true; if both are included, then the assumption is that the operation of the first is accounted for by the second and the second involves a division of labor. Yet, if one is taken as true, then the other must be not true, or ridiculous nonsense. In both of these meanings, the nature of facts is misunderstood. The fact of the rock is that it is there; another fact of the rock is we cannot know of it in-itself. The orientation that involves facts with the discussion founded upon a division of labor is of the conventional methodology, of conventional reality.

Reality is real. There is no more or less real reality, and what is not real is real in so much as what is not real is really a part of giving us what is real. There is nothing more or less real than reality but that which is real. Within reality (we cannot but move within reality) situations are presented. Outside of what is presented is that which has meaning, and this meaning discerns what is real and not real. Meaning is not before or after reality, but reality cannot but involve meaning. In so much as I then have been presented with something not real in this regard, i can only situate it by real terms. It is confusion or mistake that excludes by virtue of what is real, the true and false by absolute measure. This is all also to say that situations are posed, or posited, or are posed as they are presented but we do not know what is posed until they are posited. This situation is situated by Immanuel Kant as having to do with ‘the Idea’, ‘intuition’, and ‘the concept’.

Perhaps, a little Kant primer.

I will admit, right off, that mine will be a quite brief synopsis of his formulations, one that considers what is pertinent to this process here.

Kant was attempting to reconcile what he saw as superstitious ideas to what might be called more rational thinking; he was attempting to develop a more true metaphysics. His “Critique of Pure Reason” lays out the problem as well as the conventional solution in its title. His base is that there must be a type of reasoning, or ‘reason’ as in rational thinking, that is ‘pure’. There must be a type or way of thinking that discerns what is actually true of the real world, and he presents this ideal idea as “pure reason”. Keep in mind that his intent as a writer exhibited no particular consideration of irony in his theses, and this (ironically) set the stage for the possibility of convention, as I develop the term. Nevertheless, his ‘Critique’ can be read from opposing camps: (1) Kant was critiquing the very notion that there might be a ‘pure reason’. This stems from the apparency that every one has an aptitude for ‘reason’, though it may seem ‘irrational’ (for now, we set aside the more current ideological, modernist and post-modernist assertions that developed after Kant), and that everyone has a ‘pure reasoning’ behind their assertions of truth, even those ‘irrational superstitious’ ones. In this respect, he can be understood as bringing into question this assumption not only as it might be understood of unique individuals, but more so as the capacity of individuals might be captured under an umbrella of a common human capacity or ability, an ‘absolute’ Pure Reason. (2) The basic presumption of ‘rationality’ is upon a ‘Pure Reason’; his theses can likewise be a critique from this rational ‘purity’; he is thereby staking a true world upon refuting the ‘superstitious’ reasoning. See also that the term ‘reason’ can mean purpose, as in the reason we are discussing… as well as ability or capacity, as in listen to reason.

All of these approaches in reading his “Critique” includes his analysis, at least what is necessary; what is sufficient of his theses reveals his limitation, which is the noumena. The noumena is proposed as the object in-itself; his thesis sufficiency is a reconciling of the noumena and knowledge.

His proposal that is relevant here; If there is a ‘pure reason’ of any sort, then we human beings must have access to it, for if we cannot, then there is no speaking about it. Such access can be implied in experience and this, for Kant, is ‘the Idea’. Because such an Idea is only intuited, he brings in another notion, that by which we can infer the Idea in experience ‘through the senses’, which is then ‘intuition’. Then, the inferred and the inference comes together for knowledge in the ‘concept’. He proceeds to critically explicate the implications of meaning upon this base. He develops what ‘a priori’ and ‘a posteriori’ can mean involving also ‘analytical’ and ‘synthetical’ modes of knowing. The analytical has to do with ‘analyzing’ what is already given, supposedly by the ‘pure reason’, through the Idea, intuition and concept; the synthetical has to do with ‘synthesizing’ what has been derived from analysis of the given, the logical consequences of merging two ideas. Kant situates these activities through possibilities of their arrival ‘prior to’ or ‘after which’. Eventually he comes upon ‘imperatives’ that can be ‘hypothetical’ or ‘categorical’. A categorical imperative amounts to ‘what can only be done according to the pure reason’; a hypothetical imperative are those situations in which we may have an option, such as if I am thirsty I may get a drink of water. But, we come upon his limitation as his qualifiers of both these imperatives is contained within moral contingencies of activity, which is to say, of choice. The Idea is then that which is inferred by the intuition, which are then implied retrograde by the concept. The (small ‘i’) idea is that everyone has something ‘inside’ like a thought, but these thoughts do not come into actual play, in the real world, the ethical world, until they form a concept. The whole world thus concerns the object, the thing, the concept thereof, and so far as this world is an ethical world, that is, a world that exists as an interplay of activities but primarily as such activities involve behavior, such activities of human beings concern moral qualifiers of what one does or how one situates knowledge.

As an individual in the real world, it is not difficult to understand Kant’s motives nor his conclusions. It is commonplace that we have thoughts, these thoughts can be localized in ‘me’ or ‘you’, ‘I’ have thoughts that orient me in reality and the world; it makes sense that there might be a intangible Idea that has to do with an object, that I know of the object through an intuitive aspect of the mind that forms thus concepts. But part of the problem lay in the overdetermination of his (our) presentations, which is particularly conventional. His intentions were based in a type of brutal honesty that is not too often seen; he was not afraid of the potential that might contradict his preconceptions, and so his product ended up serving existence more that reality. The conventionalist – and I mean to point to the ‘philosophers’ of Laruelle, the conventional methodologists, the ‘philosophy of…’ people – would have Kant be giving us a method by which to dissect the ‘true objects’ of reality. Like learning math, they carefully and studiously learn how to discern analytical a priori statements from a posteriori synthetical statements and likewise hypothetical and categorical imperatives as if (1) the statements are really reflecting possibilities of true ‘out-there’ things, (2) that the mind is limited by its also being founded of an object (the brain or body), that knowledge is an aspect of information of an object, and (3) that the truth of reality (the true organization of the universe) can be found through applying Kant’s methods and other critically formed methods, such as the method evident with Lyotard’s ‘phrasing’ (see below). This latter application, by the way, was (maybe still is) responsible for much post-modern nonsense: the conventional misunderstanding of the point of contention activating catalyzing the intentive activities involved in discovering the truth by application of the method.

What Kant achieved though despite himself, is a cleft, a break, a ‘scandalous’ destruction of the world he was attempting to (re-)build. By undertaking a critical project based upon ‘conventional truths derived from Pure Reason’, he revealed that ethics is insufficient to establish the truth of the whole world through of the possibility of that world reduced to discourse itself. Hence, his critique that was intended to establish a particular rational base for activity in the world, not only disrupted the very Idea of rationality (pure reason), but did so through the assumption of a common rationality that ultimately lead to the disruption. This feat of existential motion that disrupts what it establishes in its establishing is called transformation, but for reality, it is called irony.

The issue lay exactly here: there is indeed a thing there, say, a rock, and I cannot but speak about it. Lyotard goes even further by saying that even a silence speaks, he thus reduces the issue to the phrase, that even though a person may not actually vocalize about the thing, something about the thing is still being ‘said’.

Hence, we can situate Kant’s Idea, intuition, and concept. The problem inherent with his proposal had to do with thought, as thought is seen to be prior to, a priori, the world. A whole priority of ordering is thus established of reality, as what is real also designates the true world. Thought is central to this world. Thought, by this situation, appropriates all reality (this statement in itself is problematic, but), the inner and outer, and reality, due to this orientating placement of the individual subject, is thereby set in a true real duality of the ‘thinker’ and the ‘world’, a duality that calls for ethics and morality.

Now; it is just this type of stating of the facts that results in a reader being offended. It says to him, “here is the problem of the situation”, and the ‘problem’ means something must be wrong with the object of the situation, or the conclusions I state. In this case, I am taken to be saying that there is in reality no ‘thinker’, let alone ‘thought’, and no ‘world’ separate of the thinker, as well that the call for ethics must be somehow incorrect. But I am not saying this; I am saying that such an orientation, that is offended of this case, is real, but it is not true. By this I mean that reality is determined through a conventional methodology; conventional methodology is not ‘wrong’ but is absolutely necessary. What is mistaken is the placement of the idea of thought within the conventional scheme of meaning; the placement is real because the scheme says its necessary for there to be thought in such a manner in that placement, that thought can only be so in this way to be true. This necessity is then exactly what presents its fault – because, how could it not be necessary? The mistake of conventional reality is to answer: The methodology relies upon no knowable absolute base, and because this base is unknowable, the methodology that addresses or seeks the ‘ability’ is absolutely true, though through the methodology we can determine if the results of the method are false. Significantly enough, the conventionalist would deny that there is any absolute method, and would point to particular methods to show this, i.e. the mathematicians’ method, the plumbers’ method, the teachers’ method, the dialecticians’ method, the surfer’s method, the surgeon’s method, etcetera. But the base that is conventionally ‘unknowable’ is merely a situation of the term, because convention would have little problem with ‘knowing’ that the unknowable base arises with the human being existing in the world, indeed, that it is existence that allows for our ‘seeking’ as well as our ability to ‘seek’ – the seeking appears to have paid off with the absolute truth once again, as neuroscience, psychology, astrophysics and other sciences have determined and are determining, beyond a reasonable doubt, to know things beyond our ability to know (exactly: the true object of faith, the true relation of subject and object).The aggravation here is that these statements are typically read through one lens, so to speak, the conventional lens of truth, as Plato marks it, ‘of the greater position’. So we have a conventional situation where what is real is equivocal with knowing about an unknown, where a term (unknowable) is designated as real, which is to indicate a condition of reality, through the meaning of another term that is knowable (existence); together they form a conventional truth, to wit, existence is what informs humanity to what is real because reality accounts for existence. Another redundancy is found if we continue: Reality is that which allows for our knowing of existence, as existence unfolds in process to grant us reality. Knowledge, here, is always seen as a conducting catalyst of identity between the individual and the true object. The containing operation that equivocates reality with existence poses its limitation as ‘not-limited’ through designations of ‘true/false’, ‘either/or’, and this very limitation can be exhibited in many if not all real situations. The greater truth is founded in limitation, which, when addressed by the “phrase”, reveals only a conventional context.

This is not confronting any necessary context of meaning, since that by which context has meaning is the necessity of conventional method; the operations of the method have no necessary base of relations but that of the world, its object, and the world is real. So long as context is limited to a particular meaning of an object, to a particular (absolute) way of coming upon what is true, we have the redundancy that occurs with the ‘phrase’, that then necessarily moves into a specific temporal context, i.e. the ‘true universe’, that becomes, in one instance, the explication of the present existence, often known as ideological structure or a ‘meta-linguistic’ analysis, but can also at times venture out into the ‘spiritual’ or ‘scientific’ realms of matter, particles, waves, minds, souls, parallel universes and planes of existence (metaphysics and mythology), and in another, cultural critique that seeks to explain a proper course of activity, both thoughtful and behavioral, which then is the moral world that Kant Begins and ends with. Since ‘what is moral’ likewise is made into an object in this way (non-philosophy’s philosophical object), the individual becomes caught in an eternal negotiation of intent and motives based in momentary circumstances. The problem thus becomes intensified and increasingly localized as one attempts to circumscribe the world within these psychic and behavioral (discursive) realms. In the last conventional resort, the problem persists as a ‘world’ that perpetuates the transcending and immanent operations that was or is first proposed to be overcome.

Hence, we have problematized, again, duality, but reduced to its significant bases: the world or universe, and the method by which we engage with it, that is, the object and the subject, respectively. More so, we have reduced this duality to another duality (the non-philosophical quadripartite?), where the only object that exists is one confined the the dictates of an ethical situation. What this means has to do with what I have called the ‘subject-object’, the human being centered upon a true world that is discerned through thought, and ultimately the differend that is indicated by the division of faith from knowledge. For what we mean when we speak of the subject cannot but exclude or include the object in question. We cannot reduce the whole world to a single rhetoric of reality (ah, but we do!) and this is to say, where reality is reduced to a one universe, there we have exclusion, faith, and where there is at least two realities, there we have knowledge. But knowledge then can be that the subject is the meaning of the object as well as the topic of discussion, and as these conflate, the individual human being. Therefore, in so much as we have distinguished the significance of reality, we also find that knowledge tends toward an establishment of the truth where it might lack (of these realities), and is then again usurped by convention.

The issue is not about discourse as a bracketed phrase or context; Lyotard is speaking less of method and more of existence, of the necessary categories that extrapolate from any situation; which is, in his case, as well as mine, the point of contention. The dialectic is crucial here: Where the phrase may be operative for any reality, by contrast, context is a relation of meaning that defies convention while using it as a means; the point of contention can be said to be that base from which meaning springs out of context: the term. Lyotard offers us thus a rendition of the point of contention, reducing ‘reality’ to the present within or of or to discourse itself, showing how the ‘phrase’ can either encompass or lack its supposed subject, but including these motions into a proposed ‘non-lack’ or truth of reality (singular); his point thus presents convention. He leaves the differend to itself with reference to discourse, as discourse (the phrase) implicates existence. As a motion before the court, I beg to differ, and submit that, though Lyotard has fully explored conventional reality, its existential destructive motion, he comes very close but misses irony; the issue concerns the term, and a person’s orientation upon its reality.

* *

For those who might be where a full understanding of the issue begins, I wish to admit two things:

(1) Nothing has been discovered anew. In the same way that any object can begin the reduction to the same issues at hand, every ‘good’ philosopher worth its salt deals with the point of contention.

This is why I do little citing or relating of ideas; every other sentence I wrote would be filled with at least another sentence if not paragraph of citing and bibliography. Of course, this blog is mainly a working space, and future books and essays will most probably report the redundancy of authors’ ideas.

(2) Where I may differ is where every thinker differs in the discussion after the point of contention; but where I go further, I do so only upon the necessary results of the premises given in time.

It is not so much then that I may discover a new synthesis based upon a considerate analysis of the ideas of other authors, rather, it is that such authors deal with the point of contention, and so in reading I find out what has already been said of it, that in repeating, reiterating or ‘re-phrasing’ it, I may thus present something ‘new’. This motion can be said, thus, to be of the differend of the dialectic, which is, in every case, ironic. The reader, if s/he is keen, will then inevitably proceed to ‘throw out the ladder’.

Issues and Existence.

I subscribe to a blog called “Bigstoryguide” where he author is involved with a running commentary as he goes through the Bible. Yes, the whole Bible. His blog he calls ‘Jesus’s death to life project’. I think he just got to the New Testament.

I am not a Christian; I am not religious nor prescribe to any particular religious doctrine. I would say if there is a god then he-it-they guide and/or ‘cooperates’, not so much with me, but, more so say, ‘upon’ or ‘through’ me. I’m not much for claiming god as my homie or leader of my gang or nothing, but neither, as what could appear contrary but complimentary to religion, would i say i practice or believe any sort of spirituality; if i am spiritual it is because i am motivated to convey (in practice and speech, as writing or talking is a practice also) what I understand and understand how i might be able to convey it. God or gods, religion and spirituality are just interesting to me, and seem to suggest many significant issues with reality, life and the world, as well as their solutions. If I say I am religious or spiritual, believe in God, gods, spirit, universal energy, etc… It is in the ‘spirit’ of colloquialism for the purpose of the attempt to communicate and/or to help. In a way, one could say, it is not so much what I say I believe, but what is true of what I say.

So this blogger posted a nice piece that I use as an occasion to comment. Here is his post, with the link after:

One night during the Spanish Inquisition in Seville, a cell door swings open and The Grand Inquisitor steps into the doorway. Pausing on the threshold, he lifts his lamp into the small dungeon to cast light on the prisoner’s face. The light yreveals what he already knows. The prisoner is Jesus.

There will be no trial. In fact, The Grand Inquisitor has already made his decision. He will burn Jesus at the stake in the morning.

The verdict: What Jesus offers human beings is not enough. Although He offers Himself as the bread of life, it simply is not enough.

Thou has promised to them the bread of life, the bread of heaven; but I ask Thee again, can that bread ever equal in the sight of the weak and the vicious, the ever ungrateful human race, their daily bread on earth?

(“The Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamozov by Feodor Dostoevsky http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8578/8578-h/8578-h.htm)

John 6. Non-fictional.

A crowd of people searched and found Jesus – excited about the way He had miraculously provided bread for them. However, Jesus didn’t want to talk with them about miraculous provisions of food.

Instead, He offered Himself to them. He offered Himself as “real food” and “real drink.” Their verdict?

“This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”

From this time many of His disciples turned back and no longer followed Him.

http://bigstoryguide.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/bread-of-life-no-thank-you/comment-page-1/#comment-132

I don’t think the blogger intends it, but the situation he presents here in juxtaposing the fiction and the, supposedly, non-fiction, sums up what can be called our current ‘existential situation’.

Again, as I have said in previous posts, the issue is not so much about what may be true of these stories, but how to speak of it, about its significance. The religio-mythological writ coordination of meaning, such as the (assumed) intent of the Bigstoryguide blogger, is much too dogmatic for me, too much like “…and the moral of the story is…better eat yer veggies!” As if one can merely choose to believe; as if if I just explain it to you well enough, then you will of course choose the obvious better choice. My question is: Why wouldn’t you? I mean, if all you got to do is believe and everything will be ok, why would anyone choose not to believe it? I, for one, can honestly say I have not chosen anything about what I believe, except maybe that I believe I will leave for work tomorrow 20 minutes early instead of 30. So it is that we have our existential situation. (By the way, in case you didn’t know, Dostoevsky is considered an existentialist writer, though he wrote before the term was coined.)

{ Side: Somewhat recently I saw a book, a humor book, that was called something to the effect like, ‘The Idiots Guide to Choosing a Religion’. It was great; truly funny. Similar tongue-and-cheek to a book from the 1980’s called, again, I think, “The Book of Money”, or maybe “The Money Bible”, From what I remember of it (the latter book), someone wrote this book using ‘biblical-speak’, with titled books that mimicked the actual books of the Bible, numbered chapters and versus; stories similar to the Bible stories’ content, but its was all about money. I wish I would have gotten it when I saw it. It was classic. The best chapter, which was in the book with the name and style that mimicked the book of Psalms, and was called “Money”, went something like this:

1. Money money money; oh money. Money money money money money money thou money. 2. Money money, money money. My money money money: money money money money. 3. Money. Money money money ….

Well, you get the jist. Absolutely hilarious. And the really great thing about it, the thing that struck me about it, was I wasn’t totally sure that it was meant to be a joke. As I said; Classic.

The ‘Religion’ book, though, is like a reference book, and it has every religion, sect, and cult that you can think of from the ages till now, all listed as to their qualities. Fundamental beliefs; type of pantheon, from one God, to paganism, to polytheism, to natural philosophy; benefits, such as, having an afterlife, or being forgiven, to you get to have you own universe, and ‘thumbs-down’, like, believes there is a hell, or must be willing to kill yourself, or have to wear certain clothes; practices; etcetera. Each religion and/or spiritual belief system has its own listing and even is rated, like, in a five star scale, against others. At least, again, this was my impression of it; the actual details may be slightly different. And again; I’m not totally sure that it is a joke, but I’m pretty sure it was written in good fun.

The reason I mention it is because it comes out of the idea that people can choose what they believe, like we can actually go shopping for a religion that best fits our beliefs, as if i can find one that meets most of my criteria and the rest ill just choose to believe; or, I can even choose what I want of believe because I’m not totally sure what I believe, or what it means. Well, I’m sure we can do this, but what does that really say of what we believe ? }

The issue I am going to deal with now is posed in the excerpt. Particularly how John puts it, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”

Again, if I wasn’t clear, I am not advocating Christianity, or that one needs to ‘accept’ Jesus as their personal savior. But likewise, I am not taking a dig at Christian blogger dude; he likewise could no more choose not to be a Christian (I only assume he is a Christian), than he could choose to be, say, an alligator, though it is just as well that most everyone believes that there is a choice to be had. I suppose the significant idea is found in asking someone to believe she can choose to believe that she has no choice. Or even better, asking someone to not believe in what they believe. That person might then respond by saying that their belief (that is in question) has developed through a consideration of circumstances, upon choices made, and that they cannot choose to not believe what they believe because their belief is sound, and they would not want to change their belief. So then I would have to say that they have no choice in what they believe. The rebuttal then would affirm that for their present belief they have no choice because the choices made in the past have brought them to their current condition of belief, which is to say that our present situation is determined by our past choices, which is thus sound (or not sound, as the case may be with having an issue (read on; see below) but the point then for the response is that the belief that they have an issue, is sound) Well, I say, what prevented the past situations of belief from being chosen out of; at what point in time did you have a choice upon what you believe? And back: And why would I want to believe that I had or have no choice? And me again: in what way has your wants determined what you choose? So can you choose to not want what you want? The argument could go on and on, through many avenues and considerations, quite like Plato’s dialogues, but the pivotal response would inevitably arrive: Why would I want to choose out of that which has soundly brought me to my place of truth? And, why would I want to choose not to want what I want anyways?

This is the issue, isn’t it. Issues.

Here is another way of looking at it.

The question I have pondered for a long time is: why wouldn’t I choose the ‘easy’ way; I mean, why wouldn’t I choose what is healthy for me, or ‘better’ for me? Why would I choose to make things difficult on myself? Am i not intelligent and sane? Now, I don’t mean this in the sense like studying and going to school to be an engineer might be difficult. Rather, I mean why would I choose to party real hard, too hard maybe, so I am incapable of studying well enough so I could get the career of my dreams? Well, the typical thinking goes to psychology: I am just fuckt up like that, like, something is wrong with me, like I have some issues embedded in my psyche or my mind that makes or compels me to make decisions that are not to my benefit despite myself.

I propose for this situation that the individual in question could not choose because she had no choice, and Christianity, the institution, and all Religion and spirituality in general, as well as psychology, the ‘science of mind/ behavior’, so to speak, develops not only in response but out of this apparent inability. I submit that the individual was doing all she could to do what was in her best interest, that in fact, she was doing what was in her best interest the whole time ( ill address the ‘best interest’ part later). Most if not many would say, that is because she does have issues. Ok; say I believe that I have issues. I reflect upon those times, or I resent those times because I come across thoughts that I had, or now have in me that were telling me that I should make the other choice, the one that at the time I knew was the right choice but did not make. I have an issue, and then I have an issue because of the issue, so I decide to get get help with my issues. I goto therapy. Over time I come to terms with my issues and get better – or maybe I don’t.

Never mind that many would argue that one does not ‘believe’ he has issues, he merely has issues; well, who is talking about what one believes? What issues are there if one does not believe that there are issues? The issues everyone else sees, or believes they see? The issue one has in-itself, or the issue that one believes everyone else does not have? But here, this is not a matter of believing, it is a matter of what is true.

The significant question has got to be: Why could I not just choose to leave my issues behind when I realized that I had them? Why would I sit in them when I know they have caused and are causing me all sorts of problems? The answer has got to be concerning belief, and not so much of what is reality and what I chose as a subject of reality; it can not be so much about what may be true of reality as much as one is involved with it. Perhaps it can be said, it does have more to do with what I am not choosing, but not so much as my issues have not been chosen in so much as they were thrown upon me: it is because my issues are informing me exactly as to who I am, and I cannot dismiss myself from my identity, nor do i want to. And, if i want to, I cannot. Hence the problem.

So I have to ask, against what am I having the cognition that I have issues? Exactly against the idea that allows me to know that I have issues. It is not some issue in-itself, as if there is some natural, ‘non-issue’ way, and due to this, I have some issue that is making me screwed up in my choices. Perhaps a person looks out into the world and sees that his life is not a picture that he enjoys, or perhaps he just feels wrong in his own skin. Again, the question must be, how could he be any different? Against or within this question lay the pertinent answer: in the past as different choices, or the future as a result of making different choices. Indeed; if such answers ( and so the question) were not salient, would there be an issue? And what is the past and future? Only an idea against which can have ideas about how one might have issues or not. ‘Now’ is not viable; in fact people will argue against my having an issue even while they will admit it. Likewise, those pictures and feelings one has of oneself and ones life can only exist in that they take form as ‘something that I am not’. I’m sure many are thinking that this is a most ridiculous notion, merely a conceptual game – but again, a ‘game’ as opposed to what? To what is Real? I say that it is just this game that we are all playing. In truth, such issues are entirely of one’s self, not put upon him by some separate force, but exactly the force that is that person entirely and absolutely, which has no true basis as a construction of outside forces. To bring in and reiterate what I have said before; in so much as I am an individual that has real issues thrust upon me, so much do I have faith, as well, am a subject of faith, and thereby do I look to solve my issues through faith, but ironically that faith that expresses my inability to choose to exit from them.

The thing is, so much as i may have issues, when I am able to fully concede to my issue, and thus fully accept it as me, it goes away. In as much as I deny or ignore it, it remains, and if I accept it, but not that it is me, likewise it remains. This is the presumed mode or operation of modern ‘psychoanalytic’ and/or ‘encounter’ therapy; when someone realizes whatever it is that has prevented them from ‘real-izing’ the issue (which is, really, a break from their usually reality), it is a ‘breakthrough’, like they have ‘broken through’ the facade of ‘their’ reality. And also, in this very same way, this is the presumed mode of the Christian problem, expressed in the above excerpts, that is solved through ‘belief’. In truth, this is to say of either solution, which actually is the same solution, either the issue still remains, but is accepted of oneself, or the issue is gone and so needs no acceptance; either way, the effect of the issue having power over or in ones life, is proposed as belief of the problem ‘no longer an issue’.

This is so much to outline the situation of human existence.

The main problem that the excerpts shed light upon is that for most people, such a ‘breakthrough’ never occurs. (At some point I will address this issue). So far as Christ might relate to the human condition, people are unable to sufficiently understand, or believe, so to bring about a dismissal or relieving of the issue. Beyond the dogmatics of Christian religion, Christ is the figure or actual-symbol of the message that a person merely needs to fully accept, understand or otherwise come to terms with her or his situation as an existing being. In fact, one cannot merely ‘believe’, as if a choice can be made; one must actually ‘give up’ the ideal relation that establishes oneself in, as I have spoken about it, reality. Yet, within the belief of Christianity, the functioning thereof, Jesus is that element of oneself – a precipitate of sorts, of oneself ‘un-revealed’, so to speak, unto his inability – that holds the person back from making the breakthrough, which is to say, ironically, Jesus ‘fills’ in that place, aspect or otherwise resisting area of the individual that prevents one from ‘accepting the teaching’. Jesus is the bread, is the link between the ‘not being able’ and the sought after ‘wanting for’. His presence in position of interlocutor for the discrepancy is that part of oneself that is denied for the sake of having belief being effective as a belief of choice; in other words, the Christianized Jesus is choice objectified, is that boundary, that chasm, by which one may find oneself in the substantive echo, the ‘issue’ of not being able to believe well enough, such that one may then choose to believe what suits her the belief that belief is significant. Such it is that only with the presentation of Jesus do we have the situation of a “hard teaching” that no one can accept, except that one may then, for Christianity, choose to believe.

For Psychology, as it is for Christianity, one need only choose to believe. If I can choose to believe that a ‘discussion’ about the terms of my issues will allow my issue to go away, then similarly I can choose to believe in Christ, since I need only to address my issues behind not believing. But one need not choose; choosing is the problem. So it is that the problem of the apparent inability is taken as indicating course, and a method for discerning exactly where the inability resides within a psyche or mind or soul of a now real individual (one who cannot but have the inability) is drawn out through a method of finding truth; the truth is thus the way as well as the life; it is the only way to find truth, as it concerns the human life, the only life that can be for all humanity in reality. The method becomes the true method to find truth (of oneself). No more then must we choose because our inability to choose ‘the better’, the ‘not having an issue’, is found in the choice that is the method: we need not and can not choose our way out of the situation of reality that is the issue, we instead goto therapy and believe. The therapist works to draw out the issue, as a leech for the disease of the blood, by listening to the individual speak and directing the individual to possibilities within what the individual has said, possibilities that have arisen as the science of psyche has developed out of and due to the analysis of the inability to step out of the issue. At some point, hopefully, the individual ‘speaks the issue’ so to speak, and or comes upon the issue in relation to a meaning of what was being said about it, around it, or because of it. The issue thus ‘breaks through’ the ‘wall’ of the psyche that was created by the psyche itself to protect itself in the procurement of a proper reality from the issue, but it thereby effects or establishes a reality that is ‘off’. Thus the issue is responsible for reality, as reality is the issue. Like the tract responsible for ambergris, the psyche of psychology develops along with the issue such that the matter of expulsion of the issue becomes a disgustingly beautiful thing to behold, but likewise, we can be sure the functioning of the psyche will produce another issue in its procurement of reality. The truth of this method, and or the method for finding a method that works, is hardly chosen, it is taken in faith that it is true, and that its methods are real, at least. Hence the conventional bias that sublimates and or denies its basis of operation for choice and belief.

The “breakthrough” of Psychology is the “bread” of Jesus of Christianity extrapolated in time’s discourse for the incessant and persistent inability or refusal of humanity to come to terms with its own existence. It was the same in the supposed time when the Gospels were written, as it was for Dostoevsky’s time, as it continues to be for our time. Nothing has gotten better, no one has gotten closer for all the ‘progress’ we might purport. I submit, just as many believed then as now as with those doing therapy now – so it seems.

The mid-20th century notion of Existentialism, as coined by the thinker Jean-Paul Sartre, is the expression in its explaining of the condition of not being able to relinquish such an identity. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, whom Sartre called the first existentialist, was the first (it seems) Western, or maybe also ‘modern’ thinker to come upon the point of contention in the way I am presenting it. They tell of the motion of existence, possible ways of situating existence in reality, which is to say, discourse, and the process whereby human beings come to terms with such an understanding. The proposal can be seen as ironic; people either are in bad faith, or they find themselves in a situation of ‘bad faith’; this is the process of conventional faith on one hand, and faith in doubt on the other. With reference to John (above, and please keep in mind that I am not advocating believing any type of dogmatics), when a person finds themselves in a situation of existence, they then realize the paradox of the “hard teaching”, and they become unsettled. They come to have ‘angst’ or become ‘anxious’ because the certainty of reality is failing, and this person either falls back into discourse of the real, or they fall onward in truth. If the latter, such angst leads to ‘despair’, and despair then is the harbinger of the ‘breakthrough’. Ironically, then the person finds that what they saw or knew of reality is no longer real.

And again, and to reiterate; the problem is precisely that understanding this process does nothing to bring it about; actually, understanding this process works to prevent it from occurring; for our examples, understanding how and why therapy operates, and that Christianly speaking, that our sinful nature can be solved through Christ; both resolve in a capacity for belief. The truth of the matter at hand is ‘hard to accept’, I would say ‘offensive’, so this state of innate human offense is solved conventionally by belief; this is summation of the presentation of conventional history. Understanding the issue only functions to bring it back around so it remains, and understanding this further tends to keep it cycling. This is the same problem of reality, what I have called “conventional methodology”. The means and manner by which reality is established and maintained is due to the overwhelming predominance of human beings who cannot let go of their ‘real identity’, even when it is plagued with issues that hinder ones ability to function. The recourse to this plague, this dis-ease of what is real, is to reify that the problem can only be found in what is real, namely, methods.

This is why and how the message of Christ became the institution of Christianity that allowed for Western Psychology. One merely needs then to believe; one needs only to repent; one needs to pray; one needs to confront their issues; one merely needs to get real with oneself; the real answer is always one needs to do something differently. Thus Christianity (of the West), sewed its own predominance; Catholicism let to Protestantism, because the Catholic way was not doing the trick. Protestantism lead to modern ‘philology’, as if we just need to study more and find the true meaning; this lead to the current Western philosophy, and this brought psychology. Round the time of the rebuking of supernaturalistic metaphysics, maybe circa 1750, and into the 19th century, we see a split in method. Protestantism developed all sorts of sects; Transcendentalism arose, as well as all sorts of Spiritualism, culminating in a profound polemic of Atheism and Magic, this last most significantly of the scholarly sort that seeks the truth through study, Alistar Crowley. Though this is admittedly quite a rough description of developments, all seek to reconcile that which is most insistently discrepant: the problematic real individual person.
It also is significant that the concepts of individualism, freedom and capitalism all came about at a time when the Christian sway was evidencing a profound failure: A state founded on the idea of the free and equal individual under the law, and the law as merely a device of negotiating individuals, individuals with pronounced and apparently unsolvable issues.

Further on Faith; A Reflection.

Im gonna step a little closer to home here, just for a moment, and offer what could be considered a fictional account of life in experience. A word on faith.

“Where I am offended, I have faith.”

I have difficulty with a faith that must be worked for, as if some times I have faith and other times I do not. The fact is, if i have faith, it is because I doubt; I have faith in doubt. This may seem offensive or contradictory to some, but I cannot help but doubt. I cannot hold to some idea of hope. I cannot hold to an idea that seems to be working sometimes but other times does not; rather, I can only hold on so long. The idea of ‘working’ is very problematic to me; if faith only works dependent upon what work I do to get it, then I am doomed, because I will fail every time – because then what about the times, despite myself, i am not working for my faith? But not just that, if i am working for faith but it somehow does not seem to be working, I will take that to mean that I am doing something wrong, that I am not worthy. I thereby end up invalidating myself unto the world and validate myself in the world. I cannot but be justified and be human.

If I have faith and I am working for it, but things do not seem to be going my way and yet I still have faith that indeed I am still worthy, my faith is vindicated but I may not have been involved with what is true, but only what I have made true through my belief that working for something is noble. If I have faith but am not working for it and things seem to be not going my way but yet i still feel worthy, again i am vindicated but I may be avoiding what is true for the sake of what I have made so, like a mistaken type of zen master; what then is this faith? And, If i have a faith that i need not do anything for, why would I even call it faith? Either way, my faith seems then to not have anything to do with whether things are going my way or not, except that my faith concerns a justification of what i am doing. If i am completely removed from my relation with the world against which i have to justify myself, what need have I of faith? Even so, the world in which I behave without the necessity of justification, is sufficient for revealing the truth of the matter of faith. .

The pivotal issue has to do with one who has no faith and does nothing for it, that is, I am not working for my faith for I have no faith. Here then the issue of truth is presented in its fullest. One idea that truth needs no faith is basic to anyone who sees faith as having to do with religion or spirituality, where instead, one opts for a scientific, or perhaps, in a manner of speaking, a ‘practical’ approach to reality, one that needs no faith but is steeped in knowledge. This one works for knowledge. So what we have is a person who works for knowledge, but has no faith, but feels worthy despite whether or not such knowledge is working. In fact such knowledge is or contains or accounts for knowledge that works and knowledge that does not work. Here is one who is justified in his work despite the results of that work, and he thereby completes all of the possibilities of faith. Whether or not he calls his work a work of faith makes no difference except in that he would deny that his work is based in faith, for if it did not matter to him whether he was in faith or not, or working for it or not, then it would be equally valid to say that he indeed had or has faith. When he denies that he is working in faith, then he is exactly without faith but is working for something else, and in this a state of denial he is precisely having faith in the fact that he has no faith. He has not doubted, so his faith is in that he justifies himself in the terms of his doing, for if he was doing nothing he would have to justify it or he would not be worthy and his faith that is not faith would fail, since he had no faith by which to support his worth; his situation then is that he had no faith, was not working for it, and was not worthy. Hence, the truth that he was working for despite whether it worked or not would be found not true, but only true in so much as his working for it was allowing it to be so. This one would not see that indeed his effort is ironic, that in his not working, and so not being justified or worthy of the world, his effort was exactly one of faith.

To have faith in a goodness that permeates the bad spots of life, as if there is a transcendent good purpose, or proposer, of which I can only know a piece, an immanent piece, selects my person away from what may be true, into the world, which is to say, into reality; such a faith removes me from a relationship with the world where I am intimate with the truth, and leaves me in a relation of distance and denial, of fear and frustration, a potential that is grounded in hope. I become invested in a person that is mythological, one who misses the truth of the world for the glamour of heaven, which is exactly missing the adventure of existence for the beauty of fantasy. In this fantasy, the world and I are at odds of a natural course – this course, of course, needs an interlocutor, a fantastic redeemer, one who restores worth and relieves hope with the hoped-for.

I can come to this notion only through experience, not reality. If i see my experience is of, or gained from or through reality, then i can only hope that my experience is faithful. Through a faith that is based in hoping, because of my wanting to have faith, I inevitably find that my faith is actually a term I use to refer to a relation with my object of faith. I can say it is God, or a god, or spirit or daemon, the universe, or whatever, but I have some sort of interaction with the world where an element of faith is involved, where the goods and the bads are tempered with a certain kind of reflection, one that has me in reaction to things of the world. What have I done wrong? What have I done right? How can I go about things differently or what did I do so I can repeat it? What lesson have I learned? How can I apply what I have learned to present and future circumstances? As many of these questions are not answered satisfactorily, or such answers again yield still the same queries from oneself, i come to a crossroads and divide myself into experience: I thereby come upon transcendence and immanence localized in the meaning of an unrecognized world of doubt that appears as an object of faith.

So I begin to recede…

So it was, my faith was exactly not faith, but in that i had no faith i only had faith – yet i doubted this. A curious thing happened after a while of living life this way; I began to reflect upon my reflecting, for i could not have such considerations as to appraising the moment toward what i should do next unless there was some thing that aroused or caused such consideration, which is to say, the world, that is, unless i wanted to make the the world ‘happy’: In effect, i found myself, consciously, in a motion toward elements that were not me.

If this first reflection is exactly self-conscious, where my motivations and aspirations, strategies and tactics were geared toward establishing myself in the world, my second reflection is upon the elements by which I am developing such self-consciousness upon or towards; the reason I have such thoughts and behavior is exactly because I am a reflection of the world. The third reflection sees that the world is no longer a stage that I arrange and upon which I assert my play because I now am involved withthe world.

The second reflection emerged because I began to see that my conscious reflection really only occurred when things were not going the way I wanted them to. If things were good, I figured I was doing right, or rather, correctly, like they were supposed to, and my reflection only amounted to a “that was great” kind of feeling, if there was any thought upon it; my ideas concurred with a righteous presentation. I didn’t correct myself at these times, it seemed to come naturally. The only reflection i had upon such moments was that everything thing was ok, and from there I proceeded outward, away from reflection. What I had learned must be being put to good use; what I had learned was being put into practice; things were good. Only when things were not going good would I consider what I may not be doing right, and I would attempt to find out what was wrong. It could have been just being in the situation to begin with, or it could actually be something I did wrong; it could have been merely that ‘shit happens’. Basically, though, if it was good, I was good, but if it was bad, I tried to find out what it was so to reestablish it being good. Life was always toward everything being ok; i never tried to make things bad.

But the bad times would come again. The funny thing is, It never occurred to me that the position from which i drew my assessments might be incorrect, and it took a long time to see that regardless of what I was doing, despite all the mental and physical effort I made towards having a good life and being happy, bad times always came. The blind spot of my situation brought me to dwell in this situation such that i began to forebode of the good, to prepare for the bad to come and the manner by which I attempted to counter these grey times was at best a defensive attitude of indifference, tempered with a renewed fortitude. For a bit, the callus allowed me to have an identity.

Some would say “that’s just life”. Yet, still we endeavor for the good and this, in its most simplistic operation, is the basis of faith.

In so much as reflection is invested in life upon the good and the bad moments, I was in a relationship with life; for it seemed there was something else at work beyond my best efforts to harness it, something always fouled it up. This thing that fouled it up most of the time was the world, but still I was involved, and that made it personal. Here I was, doing my best. The feelings and thoughts around the times when everything seemed good and was going my way was exactly that I was correspondent with the world, which is to say, we were getting along. Whatever the particular aspects that I encountered of the world, these aspects agreed with me in the sense that I was being fulfilled. In so much as they didn’t agree with me, but yet my life was good, the effect was still that I was doing good, the world was ‘functioning’ for my benefit, on my behalf, so to speak, so i could ‘learn’. The relationship was good. Yet, I could not hang on to a faith that would disappear into hope when things were bad, for my faith did not thus disappear, i merely denied it. I would get angry and spiteful at the world and things in or of the world, but it remained; good or bad, the world remained intact for whatever it was doing. It was this realization, this rejection of pitiful insecurity disguised as strength, that the good and the bad was in fact based in a true and necessary relation, not a contingent relation, with the world that then allowed me to come to a knowledge of the situation I was in; this was the beginning of the third reflection.

When things went bad, I had to make an effort back towards life being ok and this effort had to do with my caring for the world, the world that gave me that with which i struggle. It could only be that the world and i were involved that i struggled. I could not longer deny in peace. The relationship did not end, now, in fact, i drew upon it, intuited from it what was off, what angles I could take, gleaned from it the overt and covert elements of the situation: i looked upon – indeed, engaged – the world for the information by which to bring a solution to the problem because it was though the world was working against with me despite myself. Never was there a time where I could dismiss myself from the world, in fact, so much as I may have had faith, I could not help but to consider the events of my life with respect to this other aspect of my experience that I could not control but nevertheless offered to me what i could control, which was really only that these things i could not control were informing me of what i could control because they were in fact things I could not control because they were presented to me as such, ‘those things I could control’. My faith waned as the truth began to assert itself as knowledge. The things I would do to correct the situations became acts of reconciliation or amends, instead of methods and coercements. Eventually I began to see the world not as an object upon which I reflect, but a reflection of the object I asserted when I reflected self-consciously upon the world. This second reflection came back to me, interacted with me, as a world not a stoic and inanimate void of substance concept, but as an emotional and conscious aspect of self, and this was the fourth reflection, where I come present.

The fiction above tells a story of the situation of reality. Reality occurs in the first reflection. The truth of existence begins, but is not always completed subsequently, through the second reflection. Reality occurs through the individual in denial of his relationship with the world. The first as it may move to the second has to do with separation, of an assertion of one upon the other, of control over impotence, of exception, of denial, of alienation, of identity: of the philosophy of the One true universe. The movement through and beyond the second has to do with acceptance, praxis and agency, as these are the beginnings to the motion that completes in the fourth reflection.

“Education is the practice of freedom”; where one ceases to doubt for the sake of individual identity, one has proclaimed his complicity in the game of oppression and staked the world against his faith.
‘Faith makes true’ is the operational maxim; for convention it is the basis of belief and the foundation of reality; for the ironic it is the process that leaves itself once the truth has become apparent. Instead of ‘making true’, faith becomes knowledge, such that what was faith then becomes a kind of willed ignorance, and the truth becomes that which accounts for it.

Direct Tangent 6.5: What I Think Is A Pretty Good Indication of My Position.

If I am saying so myself: this title is pretty fkg great; hilarious.
Anyways….

My reply to a comment by Mr. Adkins came out pretty good, so I’m posting it (with some editing):

Mr. Adkins: – “”There is no contradiction where there is radical duality”.

Also, the excerpt above is interesting, the one about there being ‘no illusions’. This may be true for non-philosophy and from the perspective of vision-in-One, but philosophy’s own belief-in-itself-as-in-the-real is the source of its transcendental Illusion, and the latter is veritably the same thing as its resistance, which is what non-philosophy, as science of philosophy, takes as its object.””

Direct Tangent 5.31: “- I submit that due to this doubling-back upon the “tatters”, non-philosophy will remain ‘unheard’ due to the persistent confusion that is the discussion of the philosophical object. Yet neither can be excluded since there are no illusions; I would say illusions only occur with the conventionally oriented.”

Yes, again: from your comment, it is difficult to believe that you are considering that what I write has any merit, since it appears that you only have glanced through my essays. For i agree and have said as much as your paragraph reply.

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There may indeed be no contradiction where there is radical duality, but the appearance of the explanation of it cannot avoid a contradicting duality. Even as I come upon the occasion of L’s work, I can only see it in reference to my particular experience, as an occasion-in-the-last-instance, so to speak, and this is a sublimated or reconciled form of duality in that i want or attempt to mean ‘my whole experience’. (I will address Slavoj Zizek’s comment on ‘love’ – we “do not love the whole world; we pick and choose what we love” – in a later post.) I see that L uses ‘radical’ in an attempt to release, or distinguish his meaning from what other typical or usually-philosophical meanings may be or have been proposed. The fact that he uses the term ‘radical’ must imply something that everyone commonly knows of the ‘usual’ meaning of of radical-ness or he would have chosen a different term.

Yet, I have problems with the ‘vision-in-One’. No matter how this is situated in meaning, he would not use the term ‘One’ if the usual meaning of ‘one’ was not operative somehow; neither would he have used the idea of ‘vision’. Any proposition of unity is a transcendental form (I will make my argument around this in an upcoming essay, I think); there is no situating a meaning of “oneness” without implicating some sort of “oneness” – that is unless he is speaking ironically. If his intent on using such ideas is to identify where such meaning lacks, and in this lack show exactly where non-philosophy resides or functions, then his idea is ironically solute: But I do not think he leaves his rhetoric open for such repetition; I think he is attempting to re-iterate a type of Hermeticism or ‘early’ Gnosticism so as to verify some sort of evolutionary progress of consciousness. The difference between what he is saying and what I am saying is quite a fine line, and I am working out how this line can be. ( with your help it seems 😉

The fact that I have come upon such presentation is revealed in duality, but unified by its being presented to me is a radical project; as i take it back to relinquish it again, without but absolutely with, transformed by my positional-absence (if i am also allowed to make up hyphenated terms and we can speak of it this way) – this is an ironic project. To deny duality through some assemblage of meaning does not negate duality, the meaning accounts for it. Hence philosophy and non-philosophy respectively, but my conventional methodology and philosophy, again respectively.

In this respect, I cannot expect a conventional agent to understand non-philosophy unless it is some thing to be comprehended, and not occasioned.

I may apprehend or comprehend that any and every manifestation and or presentation is really some sort of radical immanence, that I am included as instigator-receiver as well as passive catalyst and active resistor in the total scheme of meaning that includes what may be other-ness, that I am included totally just as what I may see as other beings are really part of my own radical immanence, but in a way that excludes the possibility of philosophically situating myself inclusively as that having providence or of ownership of other or others, or they me, and in such a way that we all thus co-participate in the democracy of strangers on or of or in a (non-)planar (non-)dimensional unilateral non-particular situational loci-circum-stance – it seems to me he is in a discursive process of describing a situation of positing without the necessity of its positing, attempting to describe how position is really movement and movement really position, like some quantum discourse or something. He is arranging giving terms, and this situating of meaning appears on the scene as contradictory; he is resolving innate philosophical contradictions through presenting “positive-negation”, of posing terms as if they are completed by including a negative with the positive, thus his preponderance of hyphen-terms. The need for such hyphens is due to dividing what is necessarily complicit and involved; where there is auto-polemic, hyphens are needed to overcome the division, to merge the dyadic meaning, for example, ‘non-philosophy’; where there is a suspended meaning, a meaning cleft from its counterpositional situation, hyphens are needed to emphasize the divisional position, such as, ‘vision-in-One’. But all of these terms, by their discursive manifestation, appear as positive. If the proposal is seen as not contradictory, that is, the situating of terms that supposedly encompass and thereby resolve the contradiction of ‘positive-negative’, then he is involved in the promotion of a particular method of truth, one that argues a true universe and by extension or reduction, the true object. The true object is a mythological proposition: its meaning is exactly transcendental, not immanent; yet, immanence is the mode of the mythological. There are no people who can behave radically in a radical sense who also can be known by others as such, it denies the very idea of radicality – except by two mutually exclusive moves: irony is in play, or, in as much as ‘radical’ is known in the same way or mode as one might be known as, say, a republican or democrat, passive or active, or short or tall. But if this latter is the case, then non-philosophy has no more or less baring upon truth, reality or existence than any other floating idea concerning proposed bases. Hence, the issue of non-philosophy’s presentation apparently contradicting is meaning. This is the summation of my accusation of Laruelle being in Bad Faith (see my earlier posts, and below).

When attempting to speak of the truth of reality and existence honestly and openly, there is usually, conventionally, no situating of meaning that avoids this; each situation carries the accounting-for element and the exclusive element. Indeed, Badiou, Lyotard, Foucault, even Bourdieu – probably all the postmodernistical French, all see this and express themselves against or in consideration of this phenomenon. Zizek does very well with this also. When the contradiction is taken as an indication of where truth indeed lay, instead of indicating where it falls short or fails, then we can begin to understand what is Radical: that non-philosophy is but one manner of situating terms to account for the truth, what Laruelle implicates by saying ‘knowledges’.

Though he would release himself from the philosophical imperative by ‘non’-ing everything, his result gains a re-circumscription, which is exactly an ideological assertion. When one sees that Laruelle part of a philosophical tradition, and his proposition is just the latest assertion-in-the-last-instance of what theorists in a certain tradition have been already developing using their various terms and attitudes (‘attitude’ like that of a flying plane’s angle of attack against the air) then his lack can be seen in obvious relief.

Bad faith is the condition of not seeing that ones object of faith is not true, a situation evident in a presentation the meaning of which is denied by the presentation. As i have said elsewhere; If Laruelle knows his proposition is true, then he is in bad faith by his presentation, or, if he agrees with the subsequent efforts that claim non-philosophy, then he is in bad faith due to his conventional orientation upon the term. Hence, I see my situating of terms to describe the situation as more precise and more inclusive of the facts. His jargon is unnecessary and forced, though it may be sufficient for the presentation. Unilateralization only resolves ironically, that is to say, it cannot be known or enacted and remain radical, unless, as I have said above, non-philosophy has no more or less validity than the reasons someone likes the Steelers better that the Dolphins in American football. And thus, it is very pertinent and revealing that he would even notice a question that has to do with whether or not humanity should be saved, because he sees his effort as a part of progress towards the true object.

My question has to do with this aspect of L’s work: what does it mean when a meaning accounts for is own lack? And, how is it possible to uphold or suspend the contradicting motion of appearance ? The answer is ironic. Hence I eagerly await the arrival of “Principles of Non-philosophy”, and “Future Christ”.

Direct Tangent 5.31: Radical, Immanence and Faith.

I hope you have a good appetite. We are at a table in a restaurant. Laruelle is my dinner partner in the seat next to me. He is having non-philosophy as his main dish; ironically, I have have opted for the buffet. There are others at our table but they have not been introduced. Many people come by our table and say hi, comment on what we are having or how nice the restaurant is, or the weather, and then disappear back into the restaurant. As I look around, I see other tables ordering ‘what he has’ and pointing to our table…

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This is a discussion of what may be ‘immanence’ and to this end, what may be ‘radical’, through an occasioning of non-philosophy.

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“There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations.”
from “Struggle and Utopia in the End Times of Philosophy” by Francois Laruelle.

“In so much as there may be a radical non-philosophical agent, its appearance in reality never is apprehended for what it is, except by those who see the truth of the manifestation, where it therein becomes the mere occasion for radical agency.”
from “Direction 5.18: Recant and Reoccasion” by Lance Kair.

“This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it.”
Ibid. Laruelle.

Laruelle is the occasion for my work here. The significance of his premises are apparent, and the rest follows necessarily: once the issue is understood, the rest is obvious. Many, many, many will read me and argue that i do not thereby understand him, or will ask me to prove it. I will ‘prove it’ by stating the facts. Laruelle has also considered the facts; we are addressing the same issue but approaching it in different terms. What emerges subsequently is of the individual, and does not pertain to the truth of the premises necessarily, though it does sufficiently. The one who sees the parallax conjunction evident in these initial statements will need no discussion on the matter; his or her work will see in ours an occasion that verifies to them that they indeed know the truth of the matter. My problem with Laruelle was never that he is incorrect; my issue with L centers on why his is so shadowed in jargon and dressed in flattery – and if he himself is subject to the mirage (but I tend to think he is not). The truth does not disguise itself, nor does it appeal to tastes. But this does not mean there is no discussion to be had…

Some comments on the opening excerpts:

-In the first excerpt, Laruelle tells us that he recognizes that his effort, non-philosophy, will be taken as a philosophical object, that what may be an actual meaning of non-philosophy will be lost in the confusion, that non-philosophy’s “effectuations” will be commandeered by “interpretations”. The heritage that non-philosophy will leave in pieces will double back with interpretations of what occurred.

– I submit that due to this doubling-back upon the “tatters”, non-philosophy will remain ‘unheard’ due to the persistent confusion that is the discussion of the philosophical object. Yet neither can be excluded since there are no illusions; I would say illusions only occur with the conventionally oriented.

– The non-philosopher, what I could call the ‘radical agent’, is only comprehended by one who already understands what non-philosophy may be, but who may not have called it ‘non-philosophy’, and this one thereby has no need to present an interpretation of it, to make a philosophical object out of it, but instead sees non-philosophy as an occasion that verifies – not ‘tells it the way it is’ – the truth of the matter; that is, unless, as I see it, non-philosophy is proposed as, which is to say that L’s intension fulfills or otherwise acknowledges, an ironic ‘object’ of sorts.

-The question involved in the occasion here, then, is the discrepancy involved in the meanings inherent of these statements (above) taken individually and together. What can Laruelle be meaning by “immanence”? What does it mean for immanence to be treated in an immanent manner?

Most thoughtful people would say that immanence concerns or means, somehow, consistency or acceptance of or within oneself. The problem with such an idea is it means everyone already is behaving in this manner, and that the issue has to do with if they know, acknowledge or realize it or not. Then the question would be how is this possible; how can there be a bifurcation of the same movement? How can there be a ‘one being’ at odds with itself? We can get into the scientific convention of quantum physics later, but the question has to do with the usual answer. Rather, it is really the individual involved and concerned with a proper method that yields an inability to come upon immanence; that then brings a consolation that says immanence is attainable if one does the right things and applies the proper method. This method of consolation justifies the individual lack by reducing immanence to a religious, metaphysical or psychological idea that really means and has meant all along that one just needs to ‘be one’ with oneself, whether it is taken in a religious measure, such as atonement or confession or adhering to certain rituals or practices, or whether it denotes the individual coming to terms with his or her past, or doing some psychological work on the various issues and/or neuroses that are causing one to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with how one would rather be, is causing various problems in one’s life, or is otherwise preventing or hindering one from being comfortable in oneself or in other cases ‘being successful’. Noble and heartwarming as this intent and these activities may be, the proposed end result (objective) does not come close to immanence. It smells a lot like the super-mundane, utter ideological metaphysical pedestrianism, if not outright propaganda. But those so human-healthy will usually be the first to suggest that such activity is a spiritual exercise. What has occurred, though, is that what may be or have been true of ‘the spirit’ or the ‘spiritual’ has been deemed a type of misinterpretation, all this or that time just needing of discussion to figure out what it actually means or is. The discrepancy between the individual and his idea of himself thus marks a failure of the idea rather than the individual, or vice versa, instead of a failure of the scheme of meaning that has brought the idea as well as the individual to contradiction, which is to say, at odds. The method for correcting or reconciling the discrepancy is thus sought through the very scheme that establishes the problem in the first place. This is the method of philosophy, of bringing what may be various knowledges under one knowledge, of binding experience to a particular method of meaning, the discourse of the One Truth, the Universe of the True Object.

I would suggest then, that it is the negation (but not nullifying) of this type of thoughtful activity that Laruelle is up to with his non-philosophy (or at least he should be). Also, this is not my interpretation, rather, what is radical is that which is supposed to be the solution to the problem inherent of the scheme itself, and immanence is that condition that is thus let to knowledge once the scheme (of and in which the problem resides) has been fully renounced (the Name has been relinquished). But the question remains: How can this be?

Many will say this whole line of thought is ridiculous, but what we have here is exactly the condition of letting the concept come into existence through the phenomenon, rather than relying upon an equivocality of concept and phenomenon. It is not a matter of the term being solute with reality, but that such a solution denies other solutions. Hence my “conventional” and possibly Laruelle’s “philosophical” reality; yet, I see the real issue as centering on the ‘term’ and ones orientation upon the object. This cannot be estimated; that is, the reliance upon the equivocality that brings thought into a correspondent relation with (real) objects reveals the inherent over-determination already invested in the effort to produce a viable solution to the problem of reality: This over-determination is exactly transcendence and not immanence, radical or otherwise. The determination of reality must be precise in order for a true relation (or non-relation, as the case may be) to have any meaning at all: the determination must be not real. Otherwise, the meaning is exactly faith. For once the determination is true, no longer do we have reality equated to thoughts except through a mistaken willing of belief – but there exactly do we have difference. It is thus the ‘sameness’, the in-distinction that qualifies the philosophical movements that at once understand but still play the language games as if some progress can be or will be made due to the recognition, within which discussion abounds upon a transcending truth as everyone wills themselves into reality.

Thus, to come back to the individual’s inability to come upon immanence, this means that the individual is routinely unable, does not have the capacity, to renounce the problematic scheme wholesale, and so, as a human ideological-cultural motif, has deemed such ability, as well as any terms that might denote, refer or indicate such ability, to be false. The proper method – right action, right thought, etc…to mediation and yoga, to therapy, exercise or even medication, but also methods of negotiation, philosophical but also including economic, cultural and sociological methods – thus emerges in history toward the true ‘objective’ that has been determined in denial to never be a reconciliation of discrepant objects, but always the creation of problem within a posed solvent future, the mistaken past corrected by the future, which reveals precisely the ideological agenda of the conventional agent, as well as offers routes into cultural critique. Immanence at once is deemed an anachronistic and/or religious-metaphysical (read: false) notion for the sake of the transcendent truth, as well is absorbed into the conventional rhetoric to justify its reductive and unifying motion; immanence becomes an ideological justification of activity localized in the conventional agent. This last is why, i believe, Laruelle had to introduce radical immanence, to admit and assert poignantly and decisively what should not ever be confused -though it typically, habitually and persistently does – with, what I submit is a more precise terming, the conventional methodology.

My research has found that other authors have and are indeed addressing reality through the same understanding, but that often the authors and their conventional agents quibble over the use of terms. So it is from this perspective that I join the discussion. As a substrate to my proposals, I must ask: How is it possible that I have come upon such knowledge?

My posts have been growing rather lengthy. So I have decided to chop my essays into more easily digestible portions. This helps me to keep to more specific points, as well as develop a more sensible and consistent proposition.

So I will have a drink, and return from the buffet in a moment…