August-September Twitter Archive
Oct. 1st, 2012 11:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
3-5 Aug
"The One" is just what it does: it is the principle of individuation. The same goes for Being and for other Platonic principles. There really is no more to any of these hypostases than what they do, no "nature" beyond their activity. When we talk about "the One", there just is nothing that we are talking about other than the logic of individuality.
@vajramrita: and of identity.
Identity-and-difference is a mode of unity. What I mean is that the logic of identity-and-difference is a subset of the logic of unity. Identity-and-difference is negative, holistic unity, by which a unit is the same as itself and differentiated from every other. A different mode of unity is that of the proper name, which is positive. "The One" is simply unity (to hen), which is equivocal, embracing several ways of being-a-unit. The most logically primitive way of being-a-unit is to be a unique unit, which we express through the use of proper names. Unique units demand description, of course; but the position of such basic units, to whatever we ascribe them, is ineliminable. In this way a basic hierarchy of implication in modes of unity can be established, and this gets the Platonic ball rolling.
@tonhoberlinense: In what sense do unique units demand description? For our intellect?
A delicate question. I think that they demand a resolution of the antithesis between powers and haecceity, whence noûs. Whose demand, indeed, though. This is the issue between Proclus and Damascius.
@mailjones: Have you read Laruelle? I think you'd like what he does with the One. I like seeing arguments for the one, as opposed to the old hip différance/difference stance.
The problem is that as long as they talk about "the One" and not about "ones", they're almost certainly missing the point.
@cole_tucker: Do the One, Being and the Good have a horizontal relationship?
Not sure I understand you. "The One" and "the Good" are considered alternate names for the first principle: "The One" from the viewpoint of procession, i.e., constructively; "The Good" from that of reversion, analytically. Being is posterior, that is, logically dependent, upon the One/Good. We may even regard the One and Being as in opposition.
The integrity of each thing is its supreme good. Through this, we can reconstitute the whole hierarchy of principles, by recognizing on what a thing depends for its integrity.
A thing's integrity often lies outside a narrow sense of its "self", or may be problematic, contradictory.
@cole_tucker: as in a heroic sacrifice, where ones life is given up in a different sort of becoming.
A more mundane example: my personal integrity depends upon maintaining the conditions necessary for manifesting the human form.
@cole_tucker: Am I correct in thinking the Neoplatonic worldview, from this perspective, does not require an analogy to the Pleroma?
The nature of Being is holistic, so beings are necessarily posited in relation to that pleroma.
The henad—the unit qua unit—instead posits the pleroma for itself.
@cole_tucker: A pregiven Pleroma?
Depends what sort of being, and what sort of pleroma. Different relationships of priority/posteriority are possible.
19 Aug
On the Hermopolitan cosmogony
Ontic production as the negation of the negation, the lesson of Hermopolitan cosmogony. The Hermopolitan system in its totality very powerful, begins from the Ogdoad, culminates in writing as sacred praxis.
On Damascius
I think Damascius resists contradistinction (antidiairesis) in archai to head off necessitarian dialectical procession à la Hegel. "How can the first <principle> be in determinacy and contradistinction? How can the first be a form? For 'the One' and 'the Good' are one certain form out of many," (De princ. I 95.1-3); "Opposed terms counterparticipate [antimetechei] one another," (ibid., 8-9). Viz. also the argument that the antithesis between One and Many does not call for a further unity (DP II 23.22-24). Indeed, "the One does not proceed … the Multiple manifests determinacy from itself, whether pluralizing and distinguishing itself, or being itself solely multiple and diacritical," (DP II 20.12-20).
@tonhoberlinense: Such a necessitarian dialectic might have a place within the Unified, a reason to deny its being produced.
Yes! But this placement makes it virtually empirical—viz. Damascius' reference to Metis in this connection (DP II 34).
@Apophatos: I would be inclined to consider an a priori principle arranging objects to be a "further unity" diff't hypostasis. Whether a priori or a posteriori, I find it hard to not to give such a principle weight akin to the objects subject to it. Does that make me a closet Aristotelean?
Damascius is referring to an ultimate "principle" (his "Ineffable") which yields no structured totality. So there is something beyond the antithesis, in one respect; in another, nothing. Each of the many is one, but not all of them.
@Apophatos: I would infer that a derivative derives from something, that something/source is at least a one, no?
A further hypostasis, but not a unity; it corresponds to the totality each henad posits for itself, which is primordial.
@Apophatos: Derivative from the Ineffable is also entirely ineffable, or includes ineffability with other (non-ineffable) characteristics?
I'd say the ineffability of each object is really inseparable from non-ineffable properties, in some cases numerically identical.
@Apophatos: So, ineffable has derivatives but not a procession. Ok. Still sounds like a logos thru hypostases tho.
The only derivative of the Ineffable, Damascius explains, is that which remains ineffable in each thing, but he does not think this sufficient to posit a "procession" of the Ineffable, or a structure of participation in it.
21-22 Aug
@vajramrita: what do you think of Hegel as "+our+ Plato"?
In the sense of creating a certain "limit" of thought? Perhaps—or perhaps more of a Parmenides in spirit.
w/@vajramrita, on contradiction and paradox
The immediate basis of Hegelian contradiction is Kantian antinomy. Deleuze is novel as an anti-Hegelianism not essentially a fallback to Kant (though there are Kantian themes in his work). In Difference and Repetition he probably mounts a more successful immanent critique of Hegel than any other, but it could be argued that dualistic tendencies in his later work weaken the force of the earlier critique. The issue is not contradiction vs. paradox, but rather the status of *other* kinds of difference.
On the materiality of language, w/@vajramrita @Honxqp @EstherHawdon @sdv_duras
@vajramrita: if language was material wouldn't meaning have a spacetime location like other material objects?
Materiality of language is relative to its formal dimensions; not (just) about ink, soundwaves.
E.g., what Kristeva (Revolution in Poetic Language) calls the "semiotic" or the "chora".
25 Aug
Damascius
"The three principles are toward one another as hyparxis [existence], dynamis [power] of hyparxis, and intelligence [noêsis] of dynamis." Hence: (1) existential individuality, haecceitas, Dasein; (2) existential properties; (3) phenomenology of existential properties. (From Damascius, De princ. II, 36.4-6)
28 Aug
Why do so many find substantial monism exciting? I'm not disputing its coherence, just that it should count as "profound". I'm always tempted to invoke Freud's "oceanic feeling" in this regard
2 Sep
@t3dy: Can you explain in layman's terms how your work on Proclus can inform the interpretation of Giordano Bruno's philosophy?
Understanding supervenience of Platonic Unity upon *units* permits a more consistent and coherent interpretation of Bruno, I'd say. Otherwise, we get this notion of Bruno as advancing, at different times, different, incompatible monisms.
3 Sep
@shaviro: I stand towards OOO [object oriented ontology] as Tarde does towards Leibniz: the world is indeed composed of innumerable monads, but these are open rather than closed
Perhaps the problem is OOO not conceiving the closure of monads in a proper metaphysical register, i.e., OOO conceives them as Aristotelian substances rather than as Platonic units. There need not be any intelligible content to the "withdrawn" monad.
But then this is perhaps not what the proponents of OOO are looking for in any case.
7 Sep
The ultimate roots of mathesis lie in the intelligible-intellective, the "space" of noêsis, of encounter between intellect and object. Here we find the pure possibilities of relation between henads; this is the root of arithmetic and geometry for Proclus. This is the mathematics of non-indifferent units Plato speaks of in the Philebus as superior to abstract or quantitative arithmetic. I discussed the intelligible-intellective plane here. It is one of the key innovations of later Platonism. This "philosophical arithmetic" is a mathesis inseparable from narrativity and ethics. It's not about reduction to number, on the one hand, or about "numerology", on the other, but about topoi in a sense that would preserve the rhetorical use of the term alongside the purely mathematical sense of "topology".
13-14 Sep
@cole_tucker: "... it is by virtue of [the Gods'] powers that they themselves can be grapsed like beings and treated ontologically..."
@sdv_duras: that is pretty strange what @EPButler said there… given what reactionary nonsense the media is full of at the moment it reads very strangely…
It's rather straightforward: ontology as a science (epistêmê) is of universals. The Gods, by contrast, are unique, proper-named individuals, and theology is hence of the factical, the particular. But the Gods' powers (dynameis), their properties or attributes, afford us an epistemic purchase upon them.
@sdv_duras: religion is a universal… it may be a false universal but it's still a universal… hence not sure that it's safe to identify it as a particularism without the recognition it is aso a false universal
I'm using the term "theology" in the ancient sense, refers not to a theoretical doctrine, but e.g. to Homer, Hesiod. Also, the "particularity" of henads is higher than the universality of forms, and a fortiori higher than particularity in the strict sense, i.e. of participants in forms.
@sdv_duras: now that is interesting… do neither of you understand how reactionary religion is in the present?
The paper he is quoting concerns disputes over the interpretation of thinkers who lived more than 1,500 years ago. Moreover, I'm dealing with thinkers who were confronting monotheistic hegemony when it was first constituted. They were polytheists, which to some is just as bad, but hard to argue it doesn't function differently.
@cole_tucker asks about sympatheia and synthêmata in ancient Platonists and in, e.g., Cornelius Agrippa, where Virtues of sympathetic objects bait the attention of the World Soul, wherein she can be enticed to form a connection with their eternal idea and bestow its blessing. This wouldn't fit with Proclus' structure, for it would require the Gods to exist within Being, or at least intimately related as opposed to standing completely separate?
The Gods exist within Being, but also beyond it. They are active on every plane of Being, all the way down to the corporeal. Sunthêmata are literally "tokens", items belonging to the "series" or "chain" of symbolic expressions of a deity. Sympatheia is a quality of entities in the cosmos that are, literally, "affected the same way", i.e., by some soul. Sympatheia is not really a technical term in Proclus, I can't speak to its significance for Renaissance occultists. Elemental doctrines are generally more Stoic than Platonic. One needs a sense of how coarse-grained something like Agrippa is compared to the late antique Platonists. A philosopher like Proclus would have regarded elemental theory as technology, out of his area except in the broadest terms. After a catastrophic loss of knowledge and expertise, for a while it appears that there can be one theory of everything. I would say that natural sympathies are only a small part of theurgy for someone like Proclus.
18 Sep
When Graham Harman uses Bruno as an exemplar of "undermining" objects, it is clear that Bruno's monadology is being overlooked. If a person could place the monadology at the center of Bruno's thought, we would not only have a more coherent reading of Bruno, but would also have an example of how someone who seems in certain respects like a paradigmatic monist can also be "object oriented". It's striking, in fact, that in the essay I just read, Harman *contrasts* Bruno and Leibniz, the two modern fathers of monadology.
@cratylus: individuals are predicate trees in Aristotle just realized
Yes, which is why the "objects" in object oriented ontology are misidentified as Aristotelian substances.
@cratylus: as a model they do capture that notion of a hierarchy though? I guess "specific differences" aren't though
OOO holds, though, that the object is not reducible without remainder to its vertical or horizontal relations, or the combination. In this respect, it must take a step beyond Aristotle's substance ontology, to Platonic henology, and construe its "objects" as Platonic units or monads. The henological perspective provides the "flatness" characteristic of object oriented ontology.
@cratylus: how does Henology relate to universals etc.? my old prof David Armstrong used to like a tractarian states of affairs model where universals were "real" but were lodged in structures called "facts".
Universals and particulars are both units, and so it is a question of explicating the unit-structure of each. Henology, as I see it, places itself prior to ontological disputes like this, as a structure for analyzing competing models.
23 Sep
Professor Harman took issue with what I said about his reading of Bruno. But he disables comments on his blog, says he doesn't like conversing on Twitter, so no way for me to respond. Several of the people who follow my Twitter closely have read my article on Bruno, which is under review at yet another journal. My remarks were really directed at them, because they would know my reading of Bruno's monadology. I wish that I could just direct him to the Bruno article. My record holder for longest time spent trying to get an article published. (Update, 25 Sep: Harman wants to have it that I don't get that atomism is an "undermining" ontology, but Bruno's monadology ≠ atomism.)
25 Sep
One of the trickiest things about translating Damascius is capturing his use of plurals. E.g., ta panta, "all things", ≠ to pan, "the all"; ta polla, "the many <things>" ≠ to plêthos, "the manifold". Another frustrating thing is the difficulty of rendering in English his adverbial constructions. Translators tend to turn them into adjectives, e.g. to haplôs hen, "the simply one" becomes "l'un pur". But it's a *way* of being a unit, I don't like rendering it "the simple/pure/absolute one" (and likewise hê haplôs ousia, et al.). The third problem is the paucity of terms in English to translate his different terms for differentiation and determinacy and the processual forms of them, e.g., diakrinomena, "things in the process of becoming diacritically distinguished". (Or, "things diacritically distinguishing themselves <from one another>".) E.g., "there cannot be a substance <composed> of things differentiated [diakekrimenôn] and in process of differentiation [diakrinomenôn]." I don't normally have problems with Westerink's translations, other than wanting it a bit more literal, but failing to distinguish, either in Proclus or Damascius, between holotês, "wholeness", and pantotês, "totality", that's a problem.
27 Sep
Reading Brassier's Nihil Unbound; there will probably be disagreements, but I have no problem with his celebration in the Preface of "disenchantment". As a polytheist, I have slim-to-no attachment to "the great chain of being" or "the book of the world", despite their nominal Platonism.
28 Sep
I feel torn. In a dispute recently with a friend who adopts what seems to me an increasingly dogmatic Kantian position, I felt compelled to argue strongly on behalf of ontology as such, although my own position, which comes from my reading of the Platonists is sufficiently divergent relative to what ontology is generally considered to be that I have sometimes openly contrasted them. There were times, as well, when I have deliberately used language evoking the "critical" philosophy, especially re: theology vs. philosophy. Perhaps my willingness to use "ontology" in a broader sense is influenced by working on Damascius, with his broad sense of "substance". I think that it also has a lot to do, however, with an unwillingness to surrender the tradition of metaphysics to reactionary forces. I have always thought of philosophy as ontology, in a broad sense, never comfortable with the chastity, so to speak, of "critical" thought. I have never accepted that radicalizing the divide between appearance and being is the correct path to pluralism.
@erik_davis: Does that (admirable) unwillingness to release metaphysics have to itself be philosophical?
Well, pragmatically it also comes from a deep conviction the standard interpretation of classical metaphysics is deeply flawed. I have never accepted that radicalizing the divide between appearance and being is the correct path to pluralism.