decision – Unexpected Objects

Concerning Commitment. Violence and Nonviolence.

Yes; one could say ‘divinity’. I think the problem, as some people have talked about elsewhere, is what that term incorporates; hence the ‘need’ for commitment, what I could term, conventional commitment, or maybe a commitment to the institutionalized-ideologized State, the incorporated arena thereof that has been designated (conventionally) ‘x-ism’, or even for another arena, ‘family’ – the need for commitment because the journey ends in the wilderness, one never leaves, and so far as one might say ‘divinity’ and holds to the term as it is supposed to convey something ‘already known’, she has made a commitment to that presumption. But the presumption often misses the meaning because one is attempting to place some meaning gained in the wilderness into reality. Yet, the one stays there because the wilderness is that one-ness, the place where one is, and reality is not of oneness, and ‘divinity’ thus mis-represents – that is unless one then has made a decision for commitment. Here then one type of faith may arise out of the wilderness for its longing to bring the wilderness into reality, but reality is civilization, it is idea-ology, community, multiplicity: reality is humanity. If one needs no commitment but rather decides upon a commitment it is because she has no one to bring with, but sees reality as One, as The One, The Only One; she is the individual, the subject of multiple discourses, the pure multiple of the One. By this, as a methodological reduction, I would venture the commitment of decision is likewise the non-philosophical Real under which the (non-) article in the ‘last-instance’ of conventional methodology resides. The wanderer into the wilderness knows she is one, has encountered the one in communion, and wishes reality could be this, wishes the one-ness could be brought into reality – but alas, what is romantic? Why else would she have found herself there? Why would there even be an issue?

Maybe it is not so novel; perhaps this is very much like Francois Laruelle’s essay about ‘The Call’, his ‘tearing away’ from philosophy, except here the tearing has already happened. Inso much as it still might happen or is happening, as in philosophies of progress, violence appears to explain reality in a quite interesting manner. See, correspondingly, it seems, I am tending toward violence, of a type, maybe a dialectic of violence of non-violence. The ever-present violence and the ever-present effort to counter it; reality and its philosophical discursive acrobatics based in, basically, an effort of denial, of ‘covering up’ the violence. It appears that violence is the real standard, the evil that always peers its head and makes itself be known without effort.

Anger, frustration, conflict, suffering, desperation, self righteousness, deceit; these seem the given of life. Peace, contentment, happiness, openness; these are taught to us early in childhood, but the teaching is instigated by violence. We recall here the discussions around prohibitive “Thou Shalt Not” religions, a violence, as well ironically and by contrast Socrates’s ‘daimon’ that behaves to indicate where he should not proceed, as an indicator of non-violence. The point here is that the former dictates movement, where the latter guides. Indeed, the child is initiated into human life through violence that is confirmed by the ‘no’; it is the parent saying by perfect parenthood, “you, the child shall have no contentment, no peace until your first learn that life is not acceptance, all is not good. You child need know what life really is, and it is proper assertion of who you are, and to know who you really are, you have to compete.” From birth we are taught violence against what we are. Every parental kindness, act of love and compassion is tempered by the effort for the development of the child’s real identity, of being able not only to function in the world and be able to absorb or deflect life’s inherent crassness, but to excel amidst this violence to oneself; indeed, to make by example the real effective denial of violence. A distinction between what is violent and not violent is the difference between being told the truth and knowing the truth; non-violence as a bridge between these worlds appears to seek telling without telling.

Excellence. A commonly heard standard for human life. It is no wonder that we can arrive with conventional reality, that consciousness is a retreat from the world. The human being must become something it is not, it must learn from that which is not of itself, to be itself. One must excel, endeavor for excellence, in becoming something he or she is not, so if life can be said to be a movement of coming to know oneself, then already we have a confusion involved in the effort toward, what can be called, self awareness, effectiveness, or maybe even authenticity; a confusion based in what it means for what we do to be excellent. The meaning of some centers of philosophy seem to resonate this maxim as a sort of mantra; we need only arrange terms in a excellent way and this excellence will thus be the truth, by proof that the terms could be arranged in such a way. The irony settles here and the description of where it settles evidences a prohibition that cannot be reconciled, except through a violent act of departure, and thus only of ‘witnessing’.

Duality insists upon the human being at its conception, for it is this conception that is the individual in reality, a conception involved with de-cision, a reiteration of the One. The violence I speak of against the One occurs due to ‘re-cision’ (or maybe even as I have said “recede”), for reality is a move of joining that which has been put asunder or is truthfully segregate. The unity of the universe is in decision since if we are part of the universe then our functioning is not segregate from its operation and we cannot be separated enough from the universe to gain any true understanding of its functioning; we have no ability to be excellent, to make progress well, to excel. So ironic it is, reality is typically and routinely the Idea that excellence is not innate to the human being, which is to say that the individual by itself is nothing – as nothing is validated in nothing, some essentially empty or null ‘no-thing’, some transcendental non-unknown but not even unknown as known…we could go on infinitely attempting to describe this nothing – and so requires an Idea outside of oneself that is true, something one must necessarily appropriate of the world, such that excellence in the world must become the object. More so, as now the individual must achieve against others in the world, a proper method arises, and the True Object is born. The individual is an inherently violent manifestation, being at odds with itself for the sake of itself, and then for this sake of itself is at odds with the things of the world. The real violence is the presentation of the individual in existence by an orientation of being re-presented by the terms of reality, as well, the terms that designate what is true of reality. One could say that this particular orientation moves linearly, progressively.

It is possible ( but I have yet to see how this can be so, beyond the witnessing mentioned above) non-violence could be seen as a revealing the curve unto its violent linearity, but the representation of this significance risks violence unto itself, since if the violence is the linearity, and this linearity is real, then to show that such linearity is really not linear and not non-linear is a violent act upon reality, for reality always transcribes for what is real. Besides, the revealing of the curvature is always done linearly, maybe to say, conventionally represented; by contrast, the curvature’s revealing is presented ironically.

Capitalization upon presented subjects is the maturity of the real individual as excessive violence (overdetermination, representation) taken in course as reality, the activity of ‘bending straight’ the divergent. Reality is then an acquiescence, non-acceptance (if you will permit) of the real individual, its necessary violence. The will against what cannot be willed, infinite strength applied upon an immovable object. Violence itself is the discrepancy inherent of the individual in reality that allows for the gaining of the upper hand in the stalemate, and its application, its effort, its assertion, what I have called ‘conventional faith’, the faith that is ‘taught’ of reality, which, as an orientation upon True Objects, arises as method, the method by which faith diversifies, as objects contain no truth in themselves, but give rise to new objects of the terms, new (conventional philosophical) Faiths of the True Universe. The universe is the clash of faiths, the arena of the ‘faithful’.

It might be important to delineate the situation, to bring into relief for the sake of purchase the point of contention. The point arises between the question of choice, determinism and contingency. I see the performance of non-violence as having to do with mitigating that damage that is ‘already’ done, yet acting from a position where violence is ‘not yet’ done. Violence as the basis from which human beings may exist as humans, the real issue becomes scale or degree such violence is left unchecked; the practice of non-violence then would be in reference to this ‘place’ in which we find ourselves in the world; in practice we find ourselves in conventional reality, the violence being done, making a claim as to the particular manifestation of violence in reality, such as, social equality, gender and race inequality, human abuse, drug abuse, gangs, and political justice, to mention a general few. This can be said to be the real violence.

The true violence, I dare say, is the more significant issue with regards to our existential situation, consciousness presented as consciousness of human existence and the conventional individual. That we have been taught of reality, which is to say, in hindsight we were taught, is violence already enacted and denied. The compounding of violence is already enacted by the viewing of our birth as an act of (neutralized) violence, as well as our indoctrination into reality, for here we are viewing the situation through the violent lens, the lens that is already situated to show only ‘no-violence’, ‘just’ reality, the film that violently arranges us to avoid the violence involved with the seeing that our ‘double’ birth is twice removed from the infraction. Our doctrine of reality sees neutrality where violence is occurring, because in truth, we were not taught faith, but such faith is the necessary determination of reality. Conventional faith here is the standard, the Law, for what is real.

So the deeper, or maybe, anti-meta talk about violence enters when we have the conception that we were taught (or that which could be taught); it is taught with danger, but not the danger of the wilderness, for that was already manifest, not taught. It is, as someone, I’m sure, has said, the situation of violence that we attempt to reconcile non-violently, the real situation; there are two arguing parties, and I, a third, as a vehicle of non-violence in their dispute. I am the interventionalist for the violence. When we consider the situation already brought, as I am brought into the world, (“thrown”, “held out into”, ala Heidegger) we cannot but see that a disruption has occurred somewhere. The third party is proposing by his intervention to be a one relieved of the violence. His disclaimer is only relevant by the occasion of violence; since the violent parties are obviously real, they have a possibility of referring the violence to the intervention. Yet this real situation of the interventionalist is that he has understood the issue, and thereby makes a commitment of a sort (a decision upon ‘violence is X) to teaching others (the world) the manner by which he himself has been ‘dismissed of’ or has otherwise reconciled the violence. Because he himself has been taught through the violence of his humanity (from childhood) and has understood the issue, the discrepancy involved there as to the commitment had to have occurred, further, by some third party that is not prone or ‘responsible’ to the violence, and this element is the proposed transcendent interlocutor, by which the interventionalist mediates the real violence, but also by which he is a mediator between the real and the ‘non-real’, the world and the transcendent, an agent of non-violence.

Here I am, now, using the method I was taught to speak about that the method was taught to me, implying by this talk that the method is violence, and that somehow I am going to rely upon the method, by introspection and thoughtful consideration of the issue, to counter its violence, but indeed it is this very method by which I have been able to come across the transcendent interlocutor as if the interlocutor were already operating in their life and they just need to be taught how to find it. Indeed, if I may shine a spot over to Francios Laruelle’s non-philosophy; the crux to the meaning of non-philosophy is its admitting that philosophy is the staple, the given, the present form of what is true, or the true form of what is present, by the very act of the annexation of the ‘non-‘. By this act, non-philosophy proclaims that philosophy is King of the Real, and the ‘non’ merely presents its kingdom, and at this so to suggest that the revealing of the kingdom to its King will somehow transform the King, or reveal to Him that his obligation is to step down, for the kingdom will not rise to overthrow the King because it is itself, by its very nature, the King’s-Dom-ain. It is no more ‘of the last instance’ to accompany the King on a tour of his kingdom than it is to assassinate the King. The King is dead; long live the King. Without the King there is no kingdom, and without philosophy there is no non-philosophy; non-philosophy may be able to show the King his kingdom, but it shows no more than the last guide showed of the kingdom to the last King; it was the same plot of earth. The non-philosophical Ego, regardless of how it is situated and due to its philosophical (read, methodological) basis of representation, is nothing less than the ‘Kether’ of the philosophical beast, the King of Kings, so as it may be, of non-philosophy, the ‘Future Christ’, the ‘one day as now’ God in Man. So it is with violence and non-violence.

Hence, it is just as well if I wish to enact a revolution I should not propose to be radical or reformist; I am not sure if the apocalypse, the ‘revealing’ or ‘uncovering’ is possible as a future, but it may be possible as a past for a present. The violence I wish to incite is what had already been mentioned, and it is so much that this mentioning again reveals the ‘monsters be here’ part of the Real, the place where the Real does not go or even reach but only indicates. It is not ‘non-Real’, because Laruelle already designates the Real as a realm of non-philosophy; it is ridiculous and beyond any good meaning for the intent, to then say the ‘non-non-real’. This type of reasoning is what gets is to the Real. The End. The No More but now we have to come up with a More that somehow leaves the no more behind: conventional reality is all this all is. A reaffirmation that reality is real, and that the real is One, and that the One is all there is: the real-ization of violence involved with a responsive non-violence only reifies that violence is justified, but in the Real, violence is justified by the implication of the progressed incorporated State, which in this case is non-violence as a real practice.

When we no longer wish to be radical in our approach to reality, we are left only to the revolution that comes from what is not real. In a way of speaking, one no longer practices, or develops a praxis, instead, one performs. The actor, instead of returning a play of the script and replaying the method of reality, improvises. She is no longer reading and playing His script. She takes cues from the audience and responds accordingly; no interpretation is needed, and no director. The actor no longer acts, as in pretends to be a character of the play that she is not, rehearsing backstage, secretly in mind of ‘himself’, the actor, awaiting her praises after the scene, the character of herself; instead, the actor plays the role that is given to her by the crowd. There is no longer distinction between the actor on the stage and the actor of rehearsing and praise, between the scene and the audience. She no longer ‘takes’ her place, but rather she ‘has’ a position. This is no non-violence; it is a complete rejection of the real method of violence: a violence upon violence. She has not revolted from the abyss of freedom to come able to enact a new agency. She has become freedom; she has absolutely withdrawn, to the place of relative violence, but in the position of absolute violence, absolute peace.

Perhaps, we can now speak of the elements of violence.

The issue is the term.

The real problem is deconstructing the conventional term, but then, once that is seen as impossible to its real end, and we ‘commit’ to radical practice, then the stakes become all the more threatening, the theatre all the more violent. For this much I think (I wonder) we can concur; the place is a madhouse, the audience is rioting.

I would venture, the move into the wilderness was already deconstruction. Indeed, perhaps that ‘(maybe) irreducible point of singularity’ is/was the impetus, the ‘prime mover’,so to speak, by virtue thereof that the wilderness was the only option, maybe in Laruelle’s terms, the Real option, but I would think the Real encompasses the possibility of retaining the wilderness in civilization. Maybe the difference lay in what the romance entailed/entails, the romance being the possibility of the deconstructed universe to its universal bias, the ‘scenario’ upon which the terms of civilization ‘take’ place.

The issue that arises, though, concerns the point at which and the manner in which the commitment takes shape. How do we situate the bias in real terms, in the scheme of which for meaning the terms are relying upon (the bias) for conventional-civilized-reality? The situation of the non-philosophical Real serves irony; while its author(s) propose to recoup all possible meaning unto itself while relieving itself from that responsibility, the seriousness of its being proposed as Real removes it as a true viable method by excluding the individual through a restating of an encompassing reality, as if the individual exists by this Statement. It is a discursive trick of mirrors. Yet if we make fun of the seriousness of the author(s), the project practitioners, and take their statements with tongue in cheek, then we begin to see how violent such peaceful and innocuous encompassment that is non-encompassing may be, how its seriousness reveals its bad faith, and how offense is the basis of the conventional faith of reality.

What we learn from the ‘post-modernists’, but Kierkegaard and Wittgenstien at least, is that the meaning they intend is/was not comprehended by the majority of people, even by people who’s interest and skill is deep critical thinking, never mind what rough interpretation has gleaned from an incomplete reading (for example, existentialism, post-modern itself, but we can include all the critical ‘turns’), and not to mention the ‘popular’ meanings that serve to justify whatever occasion through fad out of context quoting and name dropping. In effect, we have not only a misconstruing of their meaning, but we have a meaning that has taken effect as the meaning of what they said. Such it is that there was a ‘post-modern’ era and PM writers and such. The irony of the authors is that they are (were) speaking of themselves, about themselves, in reality. Their meaning is just facts, but the facts are seen as advocating an agenda (which, if argued of the authors themselves, may be said to be based in a commitment to themselves – which brings to mind the issue of commitment itself! ). The facts indicate the solution, but do not lead to a solution through the consideration of their discourse as method, as terms are ‘to be’ schematized, properly put in their place, when the terms of their discourse are taken to refer as identity to True Things. Hence, I see that such discourses have occurred throughout what is usually known as human history, and have likewise been misunderstood and misappropriated. The misappropriation, or Lacan ‘mistake’, taken as an apparent whole, is what I call reality. The nature of the misappropriation cannot be disclosed to reality as a method of understanding, but only is understood correctly when it is already understood. The nature of reality, convention, is to usurp the, maybe intended, but true, meaning for the real meaning. Deconstruction as a conventional method to truth fails, except to show that the present temporally manifested truth is faulty and needs a reworking; in reality, again, this has been the basis for the discourse of social justice. Hence, also, this ‘problem of problem’ is ‘how we found each other’, or more correctly, you found me, this as evidence of “the Crowd is Untruth” (Kierkegaard): how is one oriented?

I recall from a conversation something like us both having a resistance to be ‘boxed’, confined, labeled. I suppose that is indeed a type of risk we accept when we make the commitment; the risk ventured and lost is the coming upon the value less individual, that the value lay only in that we do (in all we do) and that the consideration of such doing by the individual ( am I doing or thinking about what to do; am I thinking about how doing is distinct from thinking ?) devalues the actual presence for being of service, in the service of love. In reality, the risk ventured and won is always won by reality through methods that are constantly developing in the effort to reconcile these questions and ideas, but they achieve only more method, and more thoughts about actions, actions of thoughts and the eternal recurrence. Perhaps this is a similar movement of K, his aesthetic, ethical and religious. That the commitment may be into the ethical, but the substance or the fidelity to the romance of the aesthetic in reality is in turn religious. It is interesting; the basic problem with which K dealt and reconciled with the ‘true’ Christian – but he could not overcome the discrepancy for his person himself, except through faith, and his discursive assertions, but even that was despairing; for his moment, his is the evidence of a qualitative movement of history – seems to be what Laruelle, and so much as I have, come to terms, and you (? -it seems) – is that the terms are the problem, not the Objects that the terms seem to be indicating, for the Objects are the terms. Hence Laruelle attempts to ‘fully deconstruct’ the Object, as he sees, of the ’cause’ of this repeating mistake, philosophy. But more so, his invocation of the Ego remains, as I see it, ‘in the last’ a bastion of this history of oneness, with his Real. A true irony that non-philosophy is of ‘in the last instance’, for he is speaking of the last words of the subject-object of a particular history of terms. Yet, as with all historical discourses on the point of contention, his will not be ‘the last’, but will, or has already become, another philosophical object to be one day set aside or placed in its category (Is Lyotard’s “The Differend” really a piece of literary critique?) in the never-ending march for reality’s one truth. His may mark a type of peak-point in the oscillating wave of meaningful existence of human consciousness, but conventional faith will not cease in its operation, as I said above, just because he, or me or you, for that matter, said something. I step from NP method, as NP announces, to aphilosophy, the rebuttal of method for the True Object. Hence, as to faith, I speak of orientation upon the Object as the issue of the point of contention.

‘From where’ does the Object take hold? Does it ‘already’ have hold? Or do I ‘hold it’? (Be-hold?) If it already has hold, then the terms, the situating of terms in or of reality is the issue; but not ‘how might I go about this’, but rather, ‘how I do go about this’. If I hold it, as I may posses and consider the Object as it is a True Thing, an object In-itself, then I find reality as the omnipotence, of which I am subject, an individual in reality. These – though I am still working – present absolute situations, partitioned in essence, that which cannot be resolved, except in a re-solution, that avoids history, and thereby avoids reality. The indication that serves to establish me in reality, amounts to the commitment that is never made, the choice that is no choice, except in reality. If I have to decide, then I am lost; the true choice made is the choice that could not be made.

So, the commitment can also be made in fidelity to the significant event, the romance, through various situations of terms. ‘How do I speak about it’, I see, as not deriving from any choice I have, but rather, how the occasion presents a correspondence of terms. Maybe our role, between us, through our interaction, is to map out some of these possibilities. But maybe this is just my part; perhaps I am just as intimately involved in yours too. For you see, just as there is the true meaning of what I intend, am obligated to say/act, so there is also a real meaning that takes shape, likewise entailing or implying an obligation. The apprehension of this is the effective conception of the State, but where the despair moves through the dreadfulness, through the offense against faith, there we have a true comprehension, just as reality itself is comprised comprehensively.

—

SIGHTINGS and Further Readings.

* Blog: Adfontem: Beyond Categories: Aquinas’ Commitment to Christianity (Part III). 2014.

* Book: Principles of Non-Philosophy. Francois Laruelle. 1996. English translation 2013.

* Essay: The Call and the Phenomenon. Francois Laruelle. 2013. Published in “The Journal of French and Froncophone Philosophy”.

*Book: Being and Event. Alain Badiou. 1988. English translation 2005.

* Book: The Differend. Jean-Fancois Lyotard. 1983. English translation 1988

* Essay: Letter on Humanism. Martin Heidegger. 1947.

* Any of Soren Kierkegaard’s writings.

*Essay: concerning convention; Link: http://darkecologies.com/2014/02/12/gilles-deleuze-on-humes-theory-of-society/

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’.

Thoughts of God, the Dialectic of Faith and the Conventional Bias.

As we move into the process of constructively undoing the presumptions of method that present to us the problem-filled world of reality we all know, for which we recourse to hope, it may be well that you need not venture into that heart of darkness all alone. Otherwise, at minimum, you should see that it is only on the precipice that the abyss seems endless; we need no longer cringe back into the bliss of faith. One may proceed as in a liturgy, but where the call and response of priest and congregants are removed from any hierarchical or proper structure, the hymnal and ‘Good Book’ consigned to discourse, the priest extraneous, its voice from the outside, an unnecessary element, and the congregants likewise lose their imperative compulsion to supplicate. Neither does the arrogance of righteousness cloud the firmament of heaven.

Considered much, and ventured far from civility, it is often difficult not to speak the truth; I am sure it is with you. Bias is only mitigated through faith, so we have first to deal with situating the conventional bias.

The truth exists through the dialectic, as one is thereby placed within it. So, we should situate what is meant here by the dialectic; here I tend away from Aristotle, more toward Hegel. I call into play here an idea developed by Jean-Francois Lyotard: the differend. We might see that his is an extrapolation or possibly re-presentation, a re-iteration of what Hegel presented; yet i would go so far to say that most, what is called, Continental philosophy, if not all philosophy in general, is merely a re-presentation of the point of contention.

Lyotard’s moves and layout of the necessary reprecussions of his designation are not entirely pertinent here; this is because his project exhibits problematic limitations (which I will more thoroughly address) that can be discerned by his situating the dialectic as part of a total phrasing by which he poses the differend. Breaking with his inherent boundary, a boundary that forces significance in polemical fashion ( a differend of itself), I shall call the differend that aspect of discourse that cannot be accounted for within conventional discussion, but nevertheless is involved ironically. It is not a basis of such discussion, nor a given, nor a ‘decision’ of the like of Francois Laruelle; in fact it is the converse of the philosophical decision, and not un-akin to the non-philosophical method, so to speak. A differend is that which stands ‘in the way’ of discussion; it grants the discussion from the person that reaches out to an other in order to establish a common ground. A differend is that by which a discussion about the nature of reality and existence may take place and have credence beyond the division of labor. It is also the assumption of what is common between participants where the assumption carries no weight for the discussion due to the differend allowing for faith by its absence. A differend is a means for accounting for truth; it is a way ‘I’ can account for ‘you’ as well as you, I, as well as we, the world. Thus, complicit yet skew to Lyotard’s situation, we should see that a true dialectic occurs, not between two parties in an attempt to locate or discover truth, the process based in faith (bad faith), rather, it occurs of the first party in relation with the differend of the presented discussion, such that the differend is the only ‘thing’ that remains constant through the real scheme of negotiated truths, that which brings the discussion of two parties indeed to a common ground. In this way or effect, the differend is what likewise presents, in relief, what I have termed the conventional methodology for truth, that which supplies the ‘true object’.

“Be not discouraged” is operative. In the dialectic, we come to terms with this, for an object is an obstacle that brings in its relief the irreconcilable damages that then require the reasonable doubt for which faith is demanded, the judgement of the court.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell has given us a pretty good rendition of the issue of the ‘true object’, but I shall attempt my own. I present an object, and ask, “what is it; that thing there in front of us? How shall I define it?” Maybe I begin by describing its functions, then its characteristics. Have I succeeded in granting what, say, a chair is? The person next to me says, well, you have given me qualities of that thing there, but im not sure you have conveyed what a chair is; I know what it is, but i wish to communicate what it is. So then maybe I go to a dictionary, maybe an encyclopedia. Still, the person is not convinced. We are looking at a chair, we both call it a chair, but I have not succeeded in granting to him what a chair is, beyond an incomplete description of that thing that somehow is common between us. In fact, I can continue to describe aspects of that thing and I will never get to a complete description of it. Then, besides whether or not the thing ‘the chair’ can be described enough to grant it, there are also questions that bring into question that there is really a thing that corresponds with the label ‘chair’. For example, if I say ‘a chair has four legs’, one may ask if a table qualifies as a chair, and I could say, yeah, if I sit on it then it could be a chair. But if you don’t sit on it, can it still be a chair?

This is the situation of every object. It is not a situation of subjective, personal or individual realities, but neither is there an absolute qualifier for what a ‘chair’ is beyond knowledge. This is the idea Kant expounded upon when he concluded there is no knowable object “in-itself”, that objects exist entirely within or of knowledge. His analysis goes much further in depth, situating terms and discussing the outcomes of the apparently logical ordinances that then arise, than our discussion here requires. Yet, we should see that his analysis involves a differend that implicates at least two ‘things’, an object in-itself, the chair in our example, as well as a ‘brain’ or ‘mind’ (a subject, un-problematized) that is deduced as incapable of overcoming the epistemological wall (the object problematized); this situation, then, presents a fundamental duality, a given that then allows for its own denial, a forgetting, so as to allow his presentation. Though his effort concerned establishing a ‘better’, less superstitious, metaphysics, he succeeds ironically in perpetuating the same (see my subsequent post).

The key to breaking this epistemological nightmare, though, where what surely appears to me as a true thing is actually not so true, at least, in so much as I might want to convey it to another person, is the third party. In the third party lay the responsibility of truth, there resides truth’s criterion. It is the problem of the third party that reveals one’s orientation upon the object. Orientation concerns the differend. In contrast to the dialectic as I situate it above, but projected toward what Lyotard calls “the referent”, what can be called the object, where the thing or object is taken as self-evident, as containing aspects of itself that human beings through some method can then know as true (for example, the proposed objects of conventional dialectic and discourse in general) as well, where the subject is localized by the individual for the sake of the substantiation of the individual – in other words, where there is no deferend worth mentioning – we have then the ‘true object’. Where the situation of knowledge concerning communication is mitigated or denied for the sake of having a true thing, due to the ‘displacement’ of the individual into reality, there we also have faith.

The overlay of ideas that accounts for the dialectic of faith concerns the subject as the subject no longer is distinguished through the conventional methodology as equivocal to the individual. What then emerges through this differend is a real assertion of the priority of the individual that henceforth can be called the ‘subject-object’.

Hence; what we deal with can be understood through the following possibilities:
(1) Faith: The relation between transcendent-immanent (God) and human involving a total reality of the created universe (of objects);
(2) Faith: The relation between (1) and the subject-object, which is to say, the individual of conventional reality;
(3) The effective differend of (1) and (2).

* *

With the foregoing in mind, I begin with a quote from an ongoing discussion of comments for the previous post “Issues and Existence”:

– “For example: I discover I have terminal cancer. I have heard that God loves me, and I have heard that God is all-powerful. Given these “truths,” I can’t imagine why God would not cure me of cancer, so I ask him to cure me.
Why does a request like this not get answered with a cure 100 percent of the time?

If I understand The Bible’s rendition of our story, this world is no longer the world that God created or intended. God has a plan to restore creation, but His Death-to-Life Project moves directly through death.

So, I think a short answer to the question is that God is leading humanity on a difficult — but hopeful — route through a ruined world“.
.”

Since the idea of faith is so tied up with Christian ideology and cosmology, I’m gonna give a list of ideas mentioned in the excerpt that I have difficulty with:

– god intends.
– god loves
– god restores creation
– god is leading humanity through a ruined world

These above statements present most poingnoantly the problem I’m treating. The statements indicate one statement. I’m going to skip over that it relies and implicates a ‘Divine Power’ (obviously), and go to what is most significant: It exactly ‘presents’ a proposed absolutely true object, God, and beckons the human being away from the world. It confirms the problems of humanity, that a human being cannot but have problems, that is, that the ‘problems’ are universal (again, a proposed ‘true object’) and so all human beings deal with problems the same way; which is to say, they have a common mode of psyche that defines humanity as such – saying this without a speck of irony. God thus ‘intends’ better for ‘all’ humanity because humanity is taken as another common true object amoung other objects of a true universe (God at the ‘top’ as creator of true objects) with absolute definitive qualities and having ‘difficulty’ being such because it is human nature in-intself, as human nature is defined by the ability to choose out of thier (problematic) sinful condition through ‘repentance’ and belief, this idea being totally misconstrewed in the idea of free will. The correspondence between these two true objects (the ‘equal’ and common true object called the human being and the true object ‘God’ that intends and tends for that humanity) must indeed be one of faith as I have described, and bridged in Christianity by belief in Jesus, instead of relieved through knowledge of what is said of him. I would suggest reading, or re-reading Nietzsche.

I would prefer to say “God is love”. If there is a heavenly or divine aspect that human beings can be involved with, it must be love. But this has nothing to do with “why God would not cure me”, except that one is involved with an orientation upon the world that requires of him (the individual), for the sense that one can have of it, to think of oneself as partial to oneself essentially, that is, as having elements of themselves that can be separate from other parts, such as, my self, what people like to call ‘ego’ (which is a most appropriate idea here), separate from God. Only through this type of denial can ‘a God’ love, and by extension or retraction, love the individual.

We can begin to situate how conventional reality lacks in irony by considering what
Slavoj Zizek has said about love:

(You can also google ‘Slavoj Zizek on love’, if the link doesn’t work.)

In listening to Zizek, one should see that how he frames his bit is the same that frames the differend with its referent, so to speak, that the universe is contained or accounted for as a totality in this framing. Thereby, if there is a ‘good’, as one might inscribe a whole universe, ‘inclusivity maxima’, where all is ‘come over’ by a total ethics, where the impetus (non-impetus?) is toward or completed, resolved, in ‘goodness’, then it is what can be understood as a ‘beginning-and-but-end’, or perhaps, a ‘creation’, and ‘good’ is the purpose or reason in a ‘returning to’ (reckoning). Love is then the proposed motion of this return. Against the ‘beginning’, as what has begun thereby separates what has set out from its beginning, and what at one time began is now separated from, Zizek says, “love is evil”.

We are situated in a world that we supposedly all know. Some people who proclaim themselves as a sort of activist, or maybe spiritual advocate for whole-ness, of a whole world, say they love the world, while others of a more pessimistic nature might say they hate the world. But these postures reflect the very position of ‘being set out’, of having the inherent ability gained by their being ‘not whole’. By the fact of the phrase, as Lyotard might put it, such sayings present the world as separated, as ‘not good’, as ‘evil’. By the sayings or assertions of position (presented presentations: representations), those seek to overcome the discrepancy involved in the having to say ‘I love…’ or ‘I hate…(the world)’. The sayings present thus a ‘longing’ that cannot be resolved – except through faith. Thus Zizek is saying “We do not love the whole world…(rather) we pick and choose what we love” through the phrases as they indicate a referent (the true object); the condition of such referent is, though, insolvent, and is thus termed expressions of the evil that resides in the world.

If ‘creation’ means its most exstistant meaning, as opposed to its existing meaning, then there is nothing to restore; rather, every moment restores what was lost through itself. This is the dialectic, the truth found within. To bring in ‘a God’ destroys so it might redeem; when one reads many Gnostic texts, we get a glimpse of how they situated this possibility in discourse. (By the way, Laruelle attempts to reiterate this meaning without reifying the Gnostic dogma or the textual form of analysis {hermeneutics}.) In most religious-type systems, such ideas typically are found in ‘secret”; this includes Judaism. The God who creates the world or universe is seen to have revolted from an earlier ‘God’ from which the ‘creator’ came. If I recall, at least in one Gnostic text, this creator-god is seen to hold the world in a lie, and proclaims upon his creation “you will have no other Gods before me”.

From another angle, if you think about it, one must ask, why would a god who created all the heavens and the earth need to make a law, to command his creation not to have any other gods?

The ‘ruined world’ must be that human situation where such a commandment is necessary. So it is that with the presentation of the commandments we have already the ruined world. But there has been no ‘progress’. There has only been the situation of the ‘one and the others’: the one, such as Moses or Jesus, who has knowledge, and the others, who need or have faith. The ones of knowledge need no faith, they know the truth; creation is manifest; creation exists. Only for those of faith does creation need to be restored, because ruination is their own, but denied for the sake of faith. The restoration never occurs because the situation is the situation of existence, not of conventional history, not of the true past toward a fulfilled future. The movement of such history is entirely of knowledge, spoken synchronously, the subject separated from the individual projected into humanity and extended as hope in time. Thus the movement of history is the movement of humanity involved in this dialectic, the discussion founded upon the responsibility of the third party, and how this is situated for meaning; there is nothing beyond this aspect. This is to say, the movement of what is beyond is ironic; so much as history is extended in time as the discrepancy and dynamic of knowledge and faith, what is beyond is beyond distinction in this way: It is contradiction in truth and paradox in meaning. It is that which contradicts while affirming that is existence, and in this way, is offensive to conventional truth: the truth is absurd. That which contradicts and is offensive to conventional faith is that we merely are meaning-making creatures; what is absurd is that this reduction allows for meaning that arises from such meaninglessness, the truth of reality in faith: the double voice.

What we can have of the differend is the distinction between knowledge and faith, instead of the relation that is revealed of knowledge and faith that tends toward a speculative metaphysics of conventional reality. The difference is located in whether all the facts are accounted for without offense or not. What is not offensive to the conventional method, the reason why metaphysics is so alluring, is that it is involved with, indeed, making progress. Whether such progress is marked by technological, scientific, economic, emotional, mental, religious or other objective genres makes no difference because they are all motions of the conventional methodology of reality, of the individual of objects, all motions posited in faith. I submit that humanity, the conglomerate or constituency of human beings, of faith is being lead nowhere. What is ‘difficulty’ is being free and alone in a hostile world, and this then beckons a faith in hope as purpose. But likewise, what is difficult is the knowledge of what is true against the multitude of faith. The one of knowledge thus is not alone in a hostile world, but free against the hostility founded through the ones of faith. His difficulty is that he knows the truth and thereby is lead; the problem then is how to come to terms with the people of faith. The problem here then, is how the differend is situated in reality. The differend has to do with absolute presentation of the situation, not so much the phrase or its existant or substantive role in context, but rather as i have said, the issue is the term.

Direct Tangent 4.13: A Particular Addressing.

I have to admit, I had never encountered the understanding that I have come upon, nor this position from where I proceed into the world, in another author that is alive; that is until I came across Francois Laruelle and his non-philosophy. But I still have to wonder of authors. I myself am skeptical of understanding gained by mere learning. I have found that an organization of terms may appear to evidence a false veneer; but i remain open. Nevertheless, because of this feature, I am inevitably confronted with the possibility of tangible verification, in other words, validation, and it is this last possibility that I address through direct tangents.

Now, what this means is that if Laruelle and other authors have likewise been come upon by the same experience, I have an obligation to myself to doubt it. I have thereby only to continue with my exposition here in ‘Constructive Undoing’.

* *
The following quotes are from a quite accessible essay that describes Laruelle’s project, non-philosophy. Here’s the link: http://speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/smith-anthony-paul-history-of-non-philosophy.pdf.

“Laruelle tells us quite simply in his Dictionnaire de la non-philosophie that, ‘The philosophical decision is an operation of transcendence that believes (in a naïve and hallucinatory way) in the possibility of a unitary discourse of the Real.'”
– [François Laruelle et collaboratuers, Dictionnaire de la non-philosophie (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1998), p. 40. See also Taylor Adkins draft translation of this passage and the rest of the Dictionnaire available online: . My own translation is modified from that of Adkins.]

“In order to overcome the narcissism that arises out of the hallucinatory splitting of immanence Laruelle situates the philosophical decision in its immanent cause – the vision-in-One. The vision-in-One is equivalent to the Real, meaning that when one thinks from (rather than about) the Real then one is thinking from the vision-in-One as radical immanence.”

— — Though these quotes are quite a bit more easily grasped, they still rely upon a certain priviledge. The aire or tone of the explanation, though muted from the orignial it proposes to explain, still lifts itself from the reader as if to call the reader by the usually obscure terms to his or her relative ignorance or intelligence; it beckons the reader to investigate further into the discourse so s/he may become more informed as to what the jargon terms really mean. The pull is created by the mysterious term rather than by reader sympathetic curiosity; which is to say, the reader is forced to consider his ignorance with reference to will, and to fall into an apparent void that the jargon leaves in the reader, rather than the reader being compelled by interest in what is being awakened within him through the presentation. (Though the ‘fall into the void’ would be the proper place to start, as in “thinking from the Real” – ironically, the situation right here assumes its counter-position, as if against a blind.)

One might ask what or how ignorance and interest can be in conflict; for is not interest often aroused because of ignorance? I intend to point to a willing with reference to these ideas, so much that it is an attitude of will that promotes proper method, and it is a lack of owning or having a supposed ability – for example, an ability to understand a sentence because of mere jargon as opposed to an otherwise explainable idea – that places the individual in a perpetual state of ignorance. This type of ignorance compels one into will, so much as one attempts to assert will over the objective world so as to dominate it through absolutely true understanding. The point here is that jargon is an infinitely deep pit of unknowing, yet proposed as if it is a true knowing – without the irony.

I use these passages (above) as a platform from which to depart or detach from the (sticking with Laruelle’s useage) philosophical rhetoric, the endless abyss; whereas Laruelle uses such terms of philosophical jargon, I insist that such forest front can be cleared to reveal the hidden stream, that though one may surely have to venture into the forest to find it, I can almost guarantee that only the honest intent for such a foray is required; a clearing need not be a decimation. Laruelle proposes a re-situating or a restating of philosophical discourse to find a more substantial, positive, ground within and in mind of the premises of modern (post-modern?) relativity; in other words, he proposes his project in a suspension that he calls reality, or Real. I propose to ground such jargon in the actual truth of the situation allowing for no suspension of plausible discursive denial of contradiction, at once, as an extended project, explaining the totality of what may be history as well as what can be known (what I would call) conventional history, as well as how this allows for reality and/or the Real.

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First, as promised, I proceed with a more particularized addressing of the jargon.

In the first quote, Laruelle speaks of the ‘philosophical decision’. I submit it is this kind of jargon that tends distract one from the issue at hand, enough to make me think that indeed L is merely discussing a particular discursive arena ( a discursive arena is what is talked about around a particular topic or category of topics, such as ‘philosophy’, or ‘diabetes’, for example. ). Let me attempt to distinguish what I am indicating by first offering my take upon his “philosophical decision”: it is what i call the ‘conventional true object’.

The reason I have come to call what is typically known as philosophy (in L’s sense) ‘conventional methodology’, has to do with the true object: philosophy sees its motion as in an effort similar and correspondent with science, to discover the true object. As I have said earlier, in the same way that science is proposed with an object whereby science comes about, philosophy sees itself having a similarly manifested object. It is this similarity that has developed a common discourse about what is true, where science and philosophy are complicit with discerning the absolutely true reality. An ‘object’ is usually particularized, as in that lamp is an object and that tree is an object, but when we begin to think critically about objects, we will find that the philosophical generalizes objects into the question about the object, a category which now includes the possibility of the manifestation of things in the world. By extension and extrapolation, the discussion of the object inevitably concerns all reality; this object is called ‘reality’, ‘being’ and/or ‘existence’, or in more general speaking, the ‘world’ or ‘universe’. Philosophy’s effort is thus to come to a ‘general theory’ so to speak, the grand equation or explanation that accounts for a total sensibility of all objects. What Laruelle calls a “unitary discourse of the Real” – It is the same thing to say that philosophy concerns the effort to discover or find the true object: Real objects are true and Reality is the totality of true objects. I suggest that the effort to discover the true object is a conventional effort, and such conventional efforts that are seen to have somehow discovered or come upon truth are put forth and looked upon as proper, and are thus conveyed or communicated to others as a method by which to reproduce the results which are true and thus makes the method likewise true: hence, philosophy is a conventional methodology because it advocates a proper method by which to find or discover the truth – not just the truth of the matter but the matter of the true object which then has to be absolutely true.

It may now become apparent how Laruelle and I are addressing the same issue but along opposite vectors, such that one might say our discourses constitute a diametric survey.

See that the term ‘decision’ locates a transcendent. In philosophical discourse, a transcendent means ‘god’ but a sterilized form that is meant to be disassociate from any religious doctrinal predicates; that is, a transcendent is god without corresponding moral qualifiers or objective descriptors. Laruelle is saying that philosophy’s motions are based upon a god that is denied in and through, implicitly and explicitly, the very efforts of discussion and argument. This is to say that the act of philosophizing cannot (is incapable of) admit that its functions and operations stem from an impetus that avoids the analytic gaze of philosophy itself – philosophy functions through denial – and, philosophy tends to or usually begins its argument at atheism as a given or truism. In other words, the process of philosophy is based upon dividing and comparing, so this process begins in the de-cision: philosophy begins upon a moment that is not divided; this, and also, the process depends upon acts of analysis to place the distinction in order to create discursive sides by which to construct argument, and this progressive process occurs in mind of achieving a “unitary discourse of the Real”. L is saying that both of these types of ‘decisions’ rely upon a ‘philosophical decision’ (described here above) that is either relied upon or put off and never encountered in the act of philosophy itself: this element thus transcends philosophy, and thus grants philosophy a beginning and an end. It thereby seems obvious to me to ask: Where have we heard this before? “I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end”.

Now, for Laruelle the ‘decision’ indicates a situation a priori, or prior to philosophy and so thereby directs its motion upon a transcendent or a transcending element or aspect toward a unified theory. I, on the other hand, locate the term a priori the decision. More precisely, the term designates what the decision is: the decision, for Non-Philosophy, is true; the decision is a true thing: it is an object. The term is philosophy because it is then we have a situation that Laruelle describes as “narcissism that arises from the splitting of immanence”; the denial of the property of method reveals the philosophical maxim: to find the true reality. Yet, once this property is realized the issue of the term no longer can be a philosophical issue, it must be something other than philosophy: So much as L, the issue must be one of non-philosophy. Nevertheless, because L sees a ‘philosophical decision’ and not the term as the issue, because he has displaced the issue to a secondary or dependent clause, his Non-Philosophy appears as a ‘conventional methodology’. Conventional methodology proposes an ability to encounter the true object through a proper method and this proposal stems from the term. The term itself is a proposal of truth such that convention may have reality; true and false thereby become indicators of what is actually and absolutely true and false. What is false is false; it is not true that what is false is false, but it is not false either: it is paradoxical and contradictory in its process and thus indicates what is true, but again: not what is merely true but absolutely true. This conventional process does not allow for any other truth; it contains and has the ability to find what is true – and only convention has such capacity and ability: it accounts for the true reality.

Hence we have the real issue; hence I have suggested that Laruelle is in bad faith; hence I have come upon the poignant and significant issue: what does this mean? What does it mean that in the effort to situate and describe a space or element that is not philosophical, such effort is indeed philosophical ?

I will address the second quote more thoroughly in the next post.
For now; Im gonna go eat an orange.

Direction 4.5: Jargon, Bad Faith and a brief explanation of the non-philosophical project, its problems and shortcomings.

The other problem with truth is that everyone already knows what is the truth. They encounter it everyday and what they know is sufficient for them to go through life with at least adequate contentment; the rest they can invest in church or their respective church-like elements of their lives.

I came off rather strong in that last post. If I have offended anyone’s sense of truth or reality then I have struck something significant with you. It then either beckons you to a question of your reaction or to a denial of the offending proposition.

Anyways, I have only to continue. Here is a sound byte of an author taking about what non-philosophy may be.

(I hope this link is a good link to a 7 minute spoken introduction to a book about non-philosophy that just came out. )
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It is possible that some readers may have noticed a paradoxical aspect of my presentation. Somehow I disagree with Laruelle but yet in that I am discussing his ideas I appear to agree with him. In particular, I have pointed out that his use of jargon is contradictory to what should seem to be a humanistic effort; as well, I have accused him of being in bad faith. But I do agree that there is a generally “unrecognized” arena or basis of knowledge that is ignored or denied; this is the reason I can speak to his project: because I am addressing the significant issue, and not so much (yet) the veracity of his position.

I should make a distinction in terms between Laruelle’s and my own. Laruelle has coined ‘non-philosophy’ to distinguish his proposal from ‘philosophy’; I propose that what most people consider philosophy is not philosophy but what i call ‘conventional methodology’. Hence, his Non-Philosophy is what I consider as Philosophy, and what he points at and rebuts that he calls Philosophy, I call Conventional Methodology, because it functions the same as any other effort to solve problems between things. He has relinquished a quality of term to the masses so that he just thus frames Non-Philosophy to oppose what has been commandeered and called philosophy.

Ironically, I might say that another reason he uses such “high” jargon is so he might not offend anyone, so he might be thus able to (finally) implement or explain sufficiently the truth of the matter and thus gain some other honest seekers, but it is this futile effort that explains more thoroughly the issue at hand and the phenomenon of bad faith.

The distinction that both of us have come upon has not until somewhat recently (within the past couple hundred years maybe, but particularly in the past hundred – but maybe 4000! ) been noticed, or at least not in institutional or conventional discussion. The problem is located in the assumption of common effort, which is the idea that everyone who might be considering things is human and thus are involved in the same problems and solutions that collectively are known as progress. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were the first to notice this problem, but they were caught likewise in the assumption: they still thought that people, once shown the truth, would thereby change; but this never happens because either no one cares or because they already know what is true. Again, what was clearly delineated in both their works as a break, a polemic, was and is taken up in conventional methodology, or philosophy, to be allegorical; as if K and N were really speaking of and to “individuals”, that their discussions were aimed at everyone so the individual might consider ‘new insights into existence as a human being’ – because conventional-methodological philosophy cannot have essential difference, it must reduce everything back into its common generality. I submit that such insight is entirely wrong, a misappropriation of meaning from what Laruelle would call non-philosophical, what I would call true philosophy, into philosophy, or what I would call conventional methodology. It is correct, of course, to the extent or in the belief as one is oriented in their Being towards a absolutely true, one, single, reality: as one is of an unquestioned faith.

The assumption of common effort is what Laruelle identifies as an understanding of a world given to knowledge: the understanding which philosophy ( I will now stick with Laruelle’s usage ) takes as its ground and purpose, a progress of and towards truth, a progress that Laruelle has eloquently debunked. Yet, it is also where religion gains its purpose. We should see that Laruelle is being strategic in his presentation; he is applying discursive tactics by focusing his attack on philosophy: the analysis and construction of the basic methodological approach for conventional thinking upon being human and existence (ontology and epistemology). But indeed such a critique and commentary cannot be confined without becoming that which it decries. As i have already indicated, conventional methodology behaves as a religion, functions through faith, and develops history along particular lines of control and power. If Laruelle truly sees his effort as particular to philosophy and not to reality in general, then in one instance at least, he is in bad faith. But this kind of bad faith is only of a lower type, and the more significant is being developed here.

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The description of the situation is only made available with or through the understanding that I have come upon, the understanding that Laruelle seems to expound. Yet we have merely come upon and agreed upon the issue; where we diverge is at his excessive and overtly positive asserting – because this seems to necessitate jargon. This is my third explanation for his excessive jargon. Laruelle is fixated upon reconciling the discrepancies of reality, and in so doing, I fear, he is really venturing no further than the philosophy he is supposedly critiquing. The positivity – that is to say, the orientation upon a one reality that attempts to describe a completeness, or total explanation of what occurs or is occurring – that Laruelle is involved in mimics Sartre: his description is so considerate of positive, historical possibility – even while describing it away in meta-synthesis – it seems plausible and credible.

Here is a bit of synopsis of Laruelle by another author

[Gabriel Alkon,1 Boris Gunjević2
1City University of New York, Baruch College, Department of English, 455 Fort Washington Avenue, US–10033 New York, NY
2Theological Faculty “Matija Vlačić Ilirik”, Radićeva 34, HR–10000 Zagreb gabriel_alkon@msn.com, boris.gunjevic@zg.htnet.hr]

PG. 213:

“According to Laruelle, the true event for philosophy is in fact the coordinated positing of relative and absolute, combined and separate, conditioned and unconditioned, as mutual presuppositions – there is no event apart from the philosophical “decision” that sets these oppositions in motion. This decision is the “proto-event”, which is the self-positing of philosophy as the discourse concerning the relation of the unconditioned to what it conditions, or of the transcendental to the given. This relation, which becomes an immediate unity in the event, is the presupposition that establishes philosophy’s adequacy to its other. The presumed correlation of actual being to a transcendental condi- tioning power is what allows philosophy to know itself through the other by moving beyond the other as given. It is the sheer being-given of what it knows that philosophy must resist; its skill is the derivation of the transcendental – the transcendental that is its unacknowledged presupposition. The event, which undoes the given in the immediate presence of its preconditions, is the true culmination of philosophy – the moment at which it need no longer depend on its objects, which are replaced by the transcendentals that are the preserve of philosophy alone.”

Now, my problem with Laruelle is primarily founded in the high-speak of philosophical jargon. Here is another author explicating what Laruelle has said and he cannot even remove himself from the necessary jargon. It is like a disease that is contagious, spread by the mere act of dense and vague verbosity, not even the person who is attempting to disseminate into, what is suppose is meant to be, simpler language, is able to tear himself away from the sickness, is not able to get simple.

Since I am not concerned with status, position or privilege, I find the truth of the matter in much simpler terms and thus come to a more solute ground of the issue (my wording nor word count does not have a dollar or a academic discursive value attached to its effort):

The issue is the term. Since the object can never be known in itself, we are left with only knowledge. Not knowledge of it the object, but only knowledge. Knowledge concerns the object, but because of its limitation (knowledge reflects only itself) the object thus likewise must be a condition of such knowledge, and not the converse. Such conditions designate reality according to discursive relations of meaning ( I will dispense with the Big-Name droppings since there is no profit in it in truth ), relations that correspond with Laruelle’s “coordinated positing”. Such relations cannot be known in themselves without, as Laruelle also finds, resting upon silent, or denied relations upon which the new relations are thus situated for their truth, and this is Laruelle’s philosophical “decision”. Thus, to be simple, we are not ever dealing with things in-themselves, but only terms; it is not that there may be such “decision” or “proto event”‘ but how one is oriented in knowledge toward those ‘things’. Terms are thus situated in consciousness and are revealed by the manner of their use by Beings as to their orientation upon existence- this orientation operative in the questions: Is the term equivalent to its object? Does the term express a true object? Does the Being see itself essentially integral with a common true reality designated by true objects that are conveyed through terms – what Laruelle calls “the world given to knowledge” ? When we begin to understand the issue, we will see it is one of faith; in other words, terms always rely upon an ability to express absolute truths, an object in-itself, and thus implicate, in their role of expressing truth, a transcending element. Again: We are not therefore concerned here then with what the terms may be able to express so far as absolutely true objects, but whether or how one is so oriented upon the truth that is supposed to be expressed in such terms. Hence the polemical non-philosophical and philosophical projects – which I see as better expressed as ‘philosophical’ and ‘conventional- methodological’, respectively.

It appears that Laruelle in his efforts is like Sartre in that he is attempting to describe a true world. We may find over time and repeated returns to this type of philosophy ( or non-philosophy, as the case may be), that they are indeed giving us a comprehensive picture of reality as it is/was at the time of the position. We will have then another way to view reality in existence as another sort of style or fashion. So far, in as much as every expression is an exact reflection of existence at that moment, at least, we have Sartre’s description and now we have Laruelle’s. The problem is in their bad faith of being able to present a description of a real, true world; they end up only giving us a picture of a world that existed for a moment – but without the irony that would allow their proposal to give a picture of the eternally true world.
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I am honored if indeed anyone has continued with me this far; I must assume that if you are still here then I have been speaking to the right person.

But chances are none have ventured this far.

Nevertheless, I have only to continue, regardless.

But right now, I’ve to go to the snack stand….