{"id":1602,"date":"2019-12-08T11:57:52","date_gmt":"2019-12-08T11:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/?p=1602"},"modified":"2019-12-08T11:57:52","modified_gmt":"2019-12-08T11:57:52","slug":"the-tyranny-of-oneness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/?p=1602","title":{"rendered":"The Tyranny of Oneness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I should preface this by saying, as I have before, that I regard myself as a definite non-philosopher, so I particularly invite any reader who is<\/em><\/strong> a philosopher to comment or email me…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one of those coincidences (synchronicities?)\nwhich, these days, seem to mark my interaction with the internet, I find myself\nlistening to Peter  Rollins<\/a> course \u201cThe Tyranny of Oneness\u201d\n(which is broadly on Hegel) \u2013 it\u2019s available to his Patreon supporters – at the\nsame time as happening across a link to an article\non Hegel<\/a> on Partially Examined Life and discussing the limits of knowledge\nand of representation in two other locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article says at one point \u201cThe safest indication of the rupture is our\ngut feeling that overwhelms us when we read some classical metaphysical.\nSomething tells us that today, we simply cannot any longer think like that\u2026\u201d<\/em>\nYes. I look at Plato\u2019s idealism and Aristotle\u2019s realism (or Spinoza\u2019s), and I\ncan\u2019t think like either of them any more \u2013 but they are classical philosophy,\npre-Kantian philosophy, and my brain can get me up to shortly before Kant, but\nKant himself, and pretty much everything in philosophy after that, leaves me\nfeeling that I don\u2019t quite understand what\u2019s going on. That may be at least in\npart because the way philosophers word their work seems to me to take a\nnosedive with Kant, and to keep on getting worse as time goes by (I make an\nexception for a few \u2013 William James\u2019 pragmatism, for instance). In their case,\nit isn\u2019t so much that I can\u2019t think like that anymore, it\u2019s that I\u2019m not\ncertain I ever could think like them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, from what I understand of\nKant from second hand sources, I am entirely with him in thinking that there\nexists a transcendental divide between perception and underlying reality; we\ncan only know phenomenology, not ontology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is one reason why I came to\nlike Pete Rollins\u2019 work \u2013 he is clearly entirely up to speed on post-Hegelian\ncontinental thought, at the least, and sometimes it has seemed to me that he\nhas put bits of that in terms which make sense to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trouble is, he talks extensively\nin this course (and a lot of his other recent work) about a fundamental\ninconsistency in reality (otherwise a lack or a conflict), and I get the same\noverwhelming gut feeling about that as well. I do that when reading the later\nstages of the article as well.  It\nstates, for instance \u201cWith regard to\nphilosophical issues that have predominated in the last decades, a new and more\nconvincing case for the rupture was made by Paul Livingstone who, in his <\/em>The\nPolitics of Logic<\/em>, located it\nin the new space symbolized by the names \u201cCantor\u201d and \u201cGoedel.\u201d Here, of\ncourse, \u201cCantor\u201d stands for set theory, through self-relating procedures (an\nempty set, a set of sets), compelling us to admit an infinity of infinities.\n\u201cGoedel,\u201d for his part, is notable for his two incompleteness theorems,\ndemonstrating that \u2013 to simplify it to the utmost \u2013 an axiomatic system cannot demonstrate its own consistency since it\nnecessarily generates statements that can neither be proved nor disproved by it<\/strong>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I rather fancy that my problem with\nthose two luminaries is a function of the very action of making something\nself-relating. Russell and Frege, it seems (and again, this is insofar as I\nunderstand either) consider that self-reference is an illegitimate logical step\n(what you can say of a set is not what you can say of a set of sets, for\ninstance). G\u00f6del\u2019s famous proof is based on a very devious way of making a\nsystem self-referential, and I find it impossible to accept it as logical,\nwhile being intuitively confident that, while it is not a proof, his thesis\n(which I\u2019ve emboldened above) is correct. Without going into the depths of\nRussell and Frege, I just think that the idea of something which includes\nitself with remainder is logically ridiculous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am equally unprepared to accept an\ninfinity of infinities as being something real; it has been suggested that\nthere are only three really interesting numbers in mathematics, zero, one and\ninfinity, and I am sceptical of the existence of two of those (zero, which is a\nnothingness elevated into reality, and infinity, which is never observable)[1]<\/a>.\nI grant you that both of those are readily manipulatable in mathematics and,\nindeed, maths couldn\u2019t survive without them. Mind you, quite a lot of maths\n(for example, quantum mechanics and electrodynamics) also couldn\u2019t survive\nwithout the square root of -1, which (\u201ci\u201d) is even called<\/em><\/strong> an \u201cimaginary\nnumber\u201d.  What we can do in what I often\nrefer to as \u201cconcept space\u201d does not map accurately onto what is actually in\nexistence… we can, clearly, imagine (at least in the sense of being able to\nput some symbols together on paper) things which do not and cannot exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m in more or less the same place\nwhen it comes to people talking of \u201cbeing itself\u201d or \u201cthe ground of all being\u201d;\nto me, these are the inverse of Russel l and Frege\u2019s position on nothing or\nnothingness \u2013 whereas they consider that \u201cnothing \u201c merely denotes the falsity\nof a correspondence between a statement and reality, \u201cbeing\u201d seems to me only\nto connote the truth of such a correspondence. I used, once, to quite like talk\nof \u201cground of all being\u201d used by some mystics (Teilhard de Chardin\u2019s \u201cMilieu\nDivin\u201d springs to mind), but further thought has given me another dose of the\noverwhelming gut feeling that there is something wrong \u2013 and in the case both\nof nothing and of being, the basis for that is that there is no referent for\nthem. This, unfortunately, means that a substantial slice of Pete\u2019s thought\n(including  in a recent seminar \u201cA Contingent\nGristle of the Real\u201d) where he talks of a rupture or a deadlock between\nsomething and nothing floats serenely over my head, having no referent for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working more from the article than\nfrom Pete\u2019s seminars, though, I have a couple of worries about Hegel. Firstly\nis the complete dismissal of anything other than phenomena. Now, I\u2019m entirely\nhappy with the idea that we cannot know, for certain, what is beyond phenomena,\nbut entirely unhappy with the suggestion that there is<\/em><\/strong> nothing beyond\nphenomena. We may not be able to know that an ontology is correct, but we can\nbe pretty certain that some ontologies are not correct, due, if nothing else,\nto the fact that most if not all ontologies demand that the resulting phenomena\nbe some way which they are not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond that, however, I have the\nvery strong feeling that, if this kind of interpretation of Hegel is correct,\nhe is in effect constructing an equivalent to an ontology, and lapsing back\ninto a form of idealism. When Pete talks of a \u201crupture at the heart of\nreality\u201d, how can this be anything other than an ontological statement? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The article puts it like this: \u201cWe remain within the domain of reason, and\nthis domain is deprived of its consistency from within: immanent\ninconsistencies of reason do not imply that there is some deeper reality which\nescapes reason. Rather, these inconsistencies are in some sense \u2018the thing\nitself.\u2019\u201c <\/em>For me, while yes, those inconsistencies do not imply that there\nis a deeper reality, they equally do not imply that there isn\u2019t, and while\nSchopenhauer\u2019s irrationality is rejected (why, I ask?), they absolutely cannot\nbe \u201ca sign that we touched the real\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am not persuaded by Peter\u2019s\nmention of quantum mechanics either. True, at the most fundamental level we can\nexamine, we have phenomena like wave-particle duality, non-locality and \u201cspooky\naction at a distance\u201d to contend with, but in that case we are definitely\nlooking at a failure of our system of representation adequately to describe\nwhat is there, and inasmuch as that is not amenable to rationality at the\nmoment, it is at least in part because it is probabilistic, not rationally\ndeterministic. \u201cFuzzy\u201d is not the same thing as \u201cruptured\u201d, and I observe that\nthat fuzziness only operates at the quantum level; at higher levels, things are\nnot fuzzy, because (at least in part) those probabilistic effects sum into\nsomething dependable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, we know that we are\nexamining reality through the lens of our own subjectivity, and when the\narticle talks of that embodying exactly the kind of self-reference which G\u00f6del\nmade use of and which Russell and Frege rejected, it is a relatively\nstraightforward deduction that some form of self-reference is involved (though\nnot self-inclusion with remainder). We are clearly (and I think here of Douglas\nHofstadter\u2019s \u201cG\u00f6del, Escher Bach\u201d and \u201cI am a Strange Loop\u201d) composed in at\nleast some part of one or more feedback loops, and when Pete talks of something\nnot being self-identical, in the case of a human subject (and any other organism\nwhich is in any sense self-aware), this is obviously true, on the basis that\nwhat is in view in this feedback loop is always going to be a slightly previous\nversion of its current state \u2013 in the manner of Heraclitus\u2019 river, it cannot be\nstepped in twice.
\n
\nThat, however, is not a fully adequate answer \u2013 after all, what is observed by\nthat feedback loop is probably only infinitesimally different from that which\nobserves. Hofstadter, however, is usually talking of \u201ca\u201d strange loop, and we\nare not simple. What does the observing is very probably also a loop separate\nfrom the loop which is doing the thinking in the first place, and so is not\ntruly feeding back to itself \u2013 but what it is observing is then not<\/em><\/strong>\nitself. The \u201cconscious mind\u201d observes a subset of the conscious mind and thinks\nthat that is all it is… and that is, in a sense, a \u201crupture\u201d, but only one\nwhich betokens multiplicity rather than simplicity. (Where the \u201cinteresting\nnumbers\u201d I mentioned earlier are concerned, what is perhaps most interesting\nabout infinity is that it is multiple, not that it is infinite \u2013 and that is\nsomething which can<\/em><\/strong> be observed, at least in some way.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It follows that when the article\nsays \u201cThe elementary gesture of\nreflexivity is that of taking a step back and including into the picture or\nsituation one is observing or analyzing one\u2019s own presence. Only in this way\none can get the full picture.\u201d<\/em> I think \u201cNo, you are still<\/em><\/strong> not getting the\nfull picture\u201d. Not only, from my point of view, can you \u201cnot have totality and\nconsistency at the same time\u201d, you cannot have either <\/em><\/strong>of them in any\nabsolute sense[2]<\/a>. I\nalso have no time for \u201cThe\nHegelo-Lacanian perspective conceives these paradoxes as an indication of the\npresence of subjectivity: the subject can emerge only in the imbalance between\na genus and its species.\u201d <\/em>There is no need for any imbalance as such, only\nfor a feedback loop.  Nor am I impressed\nby \u201cparadoxico-critical analysis\ndemonstrates how this order is already in itself its own\nexception<\/strong>, sustained by permanent violations of its own rules.\u201d<\/em>\nThere is no need, in Hofstadter\u2019s system, for any violation of its own rules.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have, in passing, an even more\nvisceral rejection when the article says \u201cFor\na Lacanian, it is immediately evident that Livingston\u2019s duality of the generic\nand the paradoxico-critical perfectly fits the duality of the masculine side\nand the feminine side of the \u2018formulas of sexuation.\u2019\u201d<\/em> As soon as any\nwriter uses masculine and feminine to mean anything other than gender, I turn\noff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, I repeat, I am not a\nphilosopher. If anything, I\u2019m a scientist \u2013 I have a bachelor\u2019s degree in\nPhysics, and am currently active, albeit very part time, doing research\nChemistry. As such, I look at this as a problem in using some lab equipment (in\nthis case the lab equipment being ourselves); most of the time my first line of\nenquiry where some phenomenon occurs is to look at the equipment to see if it\nis generating that phenomenon irrespective of the observation you are trying to\nmake through it. And there, I find that we do indeed have a fundamental rift;\nthe most basic feature of our thought is to distinguish one thing from another\n(the archetypal essay question starts \u201ccompare and contrast\u201d with the split\nalready in existence and asking to be better defined). We start with \u201cA and\nnot-A\u201d and work from there. This is an even more basic feature than the\n\u201cstrange loop\u201d, and, from what I can see, gives rise to quite a bit of\nphilosophical thinking, possibly including Hegel (if I could only wade through\nthe word-salad and come up with something understandable). As soon as the\ndivision becomes \u201cA or B\u201d, we arrive at excluded middles, surpluses of meaning\nand arbitrary divisions of continua, and this gives philosophers endless\namusement, such as saying \u201cFor Hegel, the\nOne of self-identity is not just always inconsistent, fractured, antagonistic,\netc.; identity itself is the assertion of radical (self-)difference. To say\nthat something is identical with itself means that it is distinct from all its\nparticular properties, that it cannot be reduced to them. \u2018A rose is a rose\u2019\nmeans that a rose is something more than all its features: there is some <\/em>je\nne sais quoi<\/em> which makes it a\nrose, something \u2018more in a rose than the rose itself.\u2019\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inasmuch as this has any meaning to\nme, it is perhaps saying that the old saying \u201cthe whole is greater than the sum\nof its parts\u201d is true, perhaps saying that the framework in which you observe\nthat something is a rose is a different framework from that in which you\nidentify properties of a rose, a different set of distinctions is being made. It\nmay just be returning in a slightly disguised form to Kant\u2019s absolute barrier\nbetween reality and phenomena. What it appears to be saying, however, is that\nif you were to write \u201cA=A\u201d there is suddenly some kind of inconsistency (and we\nare possibly back to things including themselves with remainder). That just\nappears ridiculous to me, and symptomatic of the tendency to make distinctions\nwhere there is no difference which I\u2019m afraid I tend to see in philosophy (and\nwhich is one of the things which probably disqualify me as a philosopher). I\nnote in passing that this includes the apparent compulsion to make binary\ndistinctions where there is actually a continuum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That, in itself, leads me to what I\nthink IS a fundamental difficulty of logical systems in dealing with the way\nthings are (or, more accurately, appear to be) or, at least, language-based\nlogical systems. I find, in this area, philosophers taking wave-particle\nduality or the concept of the \u201cDirac\nsea<\/a>\u201d as supporting ideas of fundamental inconsistency or fundamental rift,\nand comment as a Physicist that neither of them seems to me to support those ideas.\nWhat they more reasonably support for me is the superiority of ideas of\nuncertainty and of probability over deterministic concepts and the view that\nnatural language and the concepts we have in it fail miserably to describe\nadequately the way things behave at quantum levels (the oft-quoted \u201cshut up and\ndo the maths\u201d line which many quantum physicists have used is here indicative\nthat the maths, which is itself a logical system, works a lot better than does\nnatural language…)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There IS, therefore, a rather\nfundamental rift in human thinking, but it seems to me to derive from our\nbinary way of thinking rather than from anything fundamental. What is\nfundamental seems to be something more like fuzziness, at least at the smallest\nscales we can investigate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, as the whole area we are\nnow talking of is observations made by humans, we are inevitably talking of\nhuman psychology; to use my analogy, the experimental apparatus is our senses\nand minds (the two are inseparable), and psychology is possibly better suited\nto examine our minds than is philosophy. I am therefore less reluctant to\naccept the introduction of figures like Freud and Lacan into the discussion\nthan I instinctively want to be \u2013 again, I\u2019m to a significant extent a\nscientist, and I instinctively prefer philosophy to psychology, which still\nseems to me an appallingly imprecise science, and I long for \u201cobjective truth\u201d\neven while being convinced that this is not ultimately obtainable.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, both Freud and Lacan, as\npsychotherapists, tended to see people with psychological disorders. I worry\nthat, as a result, they are imposing specific pathologies on the generality of\nhumanity, because that\u2019s what their sample is drawn from. For instance Pete,\nbased on Lacan, makes much of the \u201cbig other\u201d, and I try in vain to find any \u201cbig\nother\u201d in my own psychology. Not that I\u2019m saying my own psychology is normal\nand they are just dealing with abnormal psychology; I am well aware that my own\npsychology is abnormal in a number of ways, just not those which Freud and\nLacan typically wrote about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, when Pete talks of some\nperson or object making you \u201cwhole and complete\u201d, this is something which doesn\u2019t\nafflict me, possibly because, as a mystic, I am used to experiences of \u201coceanic\noneness\u201d which do<\/em><\/strong>, briefly, provide a feeling of wholeness and completeness.\nNothing else is going to do that. Thus, I don\u2019t have the drive to find that in\npersons or objects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This, however, does not mean that Freuds or Lacan\u2019s insights do not have very wide applicability, indeed, I think they probably do (Lacan\u2019s more than Freuds…) I just worry that they are being taken as being of universal application, as a quasi-ontology, and one counterexample is sufficient to defeat that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have one more note, and that’s on the use of the term “deadlock”. Pete is starting from the Hegelian idea of dialectic, which, to him at least, is something more than the mere human tendency to distinguish into binary oppositions and then need to find some wider sense. A deadlock is a situation which prevents movement. It is similar to the physical concept of stability, in which the forces on an object are balanced so that no movement occurs, but may well be more like the concept of metastability, in which if a force is applied, the object returns rapidly to the balanced condition. Now, as I don’t relate well to many of the concepts he is using (see above!), I need to find some other way of viewing this – and my own base dichotomy is between order and chaos. Order is balanced, static, immovable and yes, deadlocked. Chaos, on the other hand, is all movement and no regularity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, in order to have the world as we perceive it, we need both order and chaos. Yes, at the smallest scales we can perceive, chaos appears to reign (we cannot be certain where things are, how fast they are moving, what wavelength they are if they are wavelike or, ultimately, whether they exist or not) but at the scales we perceive in normal life, there is a balance – things move, they develop, they grow and shrink and are born and die. Movement requires an imbalance <\/em><\/strong>of forces, and things which are not moving and developing are essentially dead. However, they are ordered. The order is temporary and, given entropy, inevitably ceases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somewhere in that mode of thought, I hope to find some access to Pete’s thinking…

To conclude, I don’t see Oneness as in any way tyrannical, though I grant you that it would be for someone who was seeking it at the expense of living a reasonably balanced life. I do however see it as counter to the general project of philosophy and science in particular and human thought more generally, that being do divide things up into smaller and smaller bits and then argue about where the dividing lines should be…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to get this down on paper\nbefore Pete\u2019s next talk (later today), which is titled \u201cThe Deadlock of\nMysticism\u201d, which I confidently expect to hate!
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a>\nPlease do not go away and try to construct a mathematics which avoids zero and\ninfinity (or, indeed, either of them). That way lies madness…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a> I note here that \u201cabsolute sense\u201d equates, for me, to taking things to an infinity \u2013 and I\u2019m sceptical about infinities. I also note that there is a very strong tendency in science for theories to break down in \u201climit\u201d conditions, strong enough for me to expect that any explanation is going to do that when called \u201cabsolute\u201d. This could link very well to Pete’s ideas of taking a position to the extreme, and seeing it fail…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/a>\nThough self-referencing systems (and science in general may be thought of as a\ncomplex self-referencing system) can produce iterative solutions which\napproximate more and more closely to an accurate answer, as an example the very\nsimple formulae for calculating a square root. If X is the number you with to\nfind the root of, make a guess of A(0), then instead of Aexp2=X, take A(0)*A(1)=X,\ni.e. A(1)=X\/A(0). Then the next guess A(2)=(A(0)+A(1))\/2; repeat until A(n)=A(n-1)\nto however many places of decimals you want. One might hope that a similar more\ngeneral procedure could produce, if not \u201cabsolute\u201d accuracy, then an\narbitrarily close result to that. The formula needs to be convergent rather\nthan divergent, and there is huge additional complexity where multiple factors\nare in play, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I should preface this by saying, as I have before, that I regard myself as a definite non-philosopher, so I particularly invite any reader who is a philosopher to comment or email me… In one of those coincidences (synchronicities?) which, these days, seem to mark my interaction with the internet, I find myself listening to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1602"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1603,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1602\/revisions\/1603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}