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HYPER窶適ALOKAGATHIA

This is the result of Top20 assignment given by Esther de Vries during Graphic Design classes at Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague, 2014.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

4 HYPER-KALOKAGATHIA 5 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 10 1.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA

62 11.

RENE DESCARTES DISCOURSE ON THE METHOD

14 2.

IMMANUEL KANT CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

66 12.

GILLES DELEUZE & FÉLIX GUATTARI A THOUSAND PLATEAUS

20 3.

PLATO THE REPUBLIC

72 13.

ALBERT CAMUS THE STRANGER

26 4.

MICHEL FOUCAULT THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

76 14.

JEAN — JACQUES ROUSSEAU ON THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

30 5.

ARISTOTLE METAPHYSICS 36 6.

HENRI BERGSON TIME AND FREE WILL 42 7.

JEAN BAUDRILLARD SIMULACRA AND SIMULATION

80 15.

KARL MARX CAPITAL 84 16.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER BEING AND TIME 88 17.

JACQUES DERRIDA OF GRAMMATOLOGY

48 8.

BRIAN MASSUMI PARABLES OF THE VIRTUAL

92 18.

JÜRGEN HABERMAS THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION

52 9.

BARUCH SPINOZA ETHICS

96 19.

SØREN KIERKEGAARD FEAR AND TREMBLING

58 10.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS

100 20.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION

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HYPER–KALOKAGATHIA I live in a hyper-reality, surrounded by glossy aesthetics of consumer capitalism.

My face is face post-representational female subject.

My mind, consciousness and memory are full of mystical, powerful, breath-taking, critical, creative, dialectic, eclectic, connecting, affective and affecting discourse.

To produce myself I set up my value as hyper-kalokagathian. This post-render existence is powerful force of virtue and excellence, the unity of a beauty and a goodness.

My face moved beyond the representations. I am like you.

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INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence. … In the realm of cognition, the special sciences are the trees, but philosophy is the soil which makes the forest possible. — Ayn Rand I'm constantly curious and feel the urge to learn by asking and experiencing. So what is the philosophy? It is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument In more casual speech, by extension, “philosophy” can refer to “the most basic beliefs, concepts, and attitudes of an individual or group”.

the human species has yet devised. This intellectual process includes both an analytic and synthetic mode of operation. Philosophy as a critical and comprehensive process of thought involves resolving confusion, unmasking assumptions, revealing presuppositions, distinguishing importance, testing positions, correcting distortions, looking for reasons, examining world-views and questioning conceptual frameworks. It also includes dispelling ignorance, enriching understanding, broadening experience, expanding horizons, developing imagination , controlling emotion, exploring values, fixing beliefs by rational inquiry, establishing habits of acting, widening considerations, synthesizing knowledge and questing for wisdom.

The word “philosophy” comes from the Ancient Greek philosophia, which literally means “love of wisdom”. The introduction of the terms “philosopher” and “philosophy” has been ascribed to the Greek thinker Pythagoras. Philosophy is an activity: a quest after wisdom.

The most widespread systems of ideas that offer philosophical guidance are religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Religions differ from philosophies not in the subjects they address, but in the method they use to address them. Religions have their basis in mythic stories that pre-date the discovery of explicitly rational methods of inquiry.

A philosophy is a comprehensive system of ideas about human nature and the nature of the reality we live in. It is a guide for living, because the issues it addresses are basic and pervasive, determining the course we take in life and how we treat other people. Philosophy is an activity of thought, a type of thinking. Philosophy is critical and comprehensive thought, the most critical and comprehensive manner of thinking which

Philosophy as a process functions as an activity which responds to society's demand for wisdom, which is bringing together all that we know in order to obtain what we value. Viewed in this way Philosophy is part of the activity of human growth and thus an integral, essential part of the process of education. Philosophy and education have as a common goal the development of the total intellect of a person, the realization

6 of the human potential. What type of thought is Philosophy? Philosophy is thought which is critical and comprehensive; analytic and synthetic; practical and theoretical; logical and empirical.

The topics that philosophy addresses fall into several distinct fields. Among those of fundamental concern are these five: 1) Metaphysics (the theory of reality), 2) Epistemology (the theory of knowledge), 3) Ethics (the theory of moral values), 4) Politics (the theory of legal rights and government), 5) Aesthetics (the theory of the nature of art) Epistemology is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge, such as the relationships between truth, belief, perception and theories of justification. It contains Skepticism and Rationalism.

Skepticism is the position which questions the possibility of completely justifying any truth. The regress argument, a fundamental problem in epistemology, occurs when, in order to completely prove any statement, its justification itself needs to be supported by another justification.

Rationalism is the emphasis on reasoning as a source of knowledge. Empiricism is the emphasis on observational evidence via sensory experience over other evidence as the source of knowledge.

Rationalism claims that every possible object of knowledge can be deduced from coherent premises without observation. Empiricism claims that at least some knowledge is only a matter of

observation. For this, Empiricism often cites the concept of tabula rasa, where individuals are not born with mental content and that knowledge builds from experience or perception. Epistemological solipsism is the idea that the existence of the world outside the mind is an unresolvable question.

Logic is the study of the principles of correct reasoning. Arguments use either deductive reasoning or inductive reasoning.

Deductive reasoning is when, given certain statements (called premises), other statements (called conclusions) are unavoidably implied. Rules of inferences from premises include the most popular method, modus ponens, where given “A” and “If A then B”, then “B” must be concluded. Syllogism, an argument is termed valid if its conclusion does follow from its premises, whether the premises are true or not, while an argument is sound if its conclusion follows from premises that are true.

Metaphysics is the study of the most general features of reality, such as existence, time, the relationship between mind and body, objects and their properties, wholes and their parts, events, processes, and causation. Traditional branches of metaphysics include cosmology, the study of the world in its entirety, and ontology, the study of being.

Within metaphysics itself there are a wide range of differing philosophical theories. Idealism, for example, is the belief that reality is mentally constructed or otherwise immaterial while

7 realism holds that reality, or at least some part of it, exists independently of the mind. Subjective idealism describes objects as no more than collections or "bundles" of sense data in the perceiver. The 18th-century philosopher George Berkeley contended that existence is fundamentally tied to perception with the phrase Esse est aut percipi aut percipere or "To be is to be perceived or to perceive".

Tthere is also an ontological dichotomy within metaphysics between the concepts of particulars and universals as well. Particulars are those objects that are said to exist in space and time, as opposed to abstract objects, such as numbers. Universals are properties held by multiple particulars, such as redness or a gender. The type of existence, if any, of universals and abstract objects is an issue of serious debate within metaphysical philosophy. Realism is the philosophical position that universals do in fact exist, while nominalism is the negation, or denial of universals, abstract objects, or both.Conceptualism holds that universals exist, but only within the mind's perception.

The question of whether or not existence is a predicate has been discussed since the Early Modern period. Essence is the set of attributes that make an object what it fundamentally is and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the substance has contingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity.

Ethics, or "moral philosophy," is concerned primarily with the question of the best way to live, and secondarily, concerning the question of whether this question can be answered. The main branches of ethics are meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics.

Meta-ethics concerns the nature of ethical thought, such as the origins of the words good and bad, and origins of other comparative words of various ethical systems, whether there are absolute ethical truths, and how such truths could be known. Ethics is also associated with the idea of morality, and the two are often interchangeable.

Political philosophy is the study of government and the relationship of individuals (or families and clans) to communities including the state. It includes questions about justice, law, property, and the rights and obligations of the citizen. Politics and ethics are traditionally inter-linked subjects, as both discuss the question of what is good and how people should live. From ancient times, and well beyond them, the roots of justification for political authority were inescapably tied to outlooks on human nature. In The Republic, Plato presented the argument that the ideal society would be run by a council of philosopher-kings who are able to realize the good.

Aesthetics deals with beauty, art, enjoyment, sensory-emotional values, perception, and matters of taste and sentiment.

1891 GERMANY

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1.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA

It is a philosophical novel which deals with ideas such as the "eternal recurrence of the same", the parable on the "death of God", and the "prophecy of the Übermensch", which were first introduced in Nietzsche's book The Gay Science. The book chronicles the fictitious travels and speeches of Persian Zarathustra. Nietzsche is clearly portraying a "new" or "different" Zarathustra, one who turns traditional morality on its head.

and end in itself, is his work. ” Zarathustra also contains the famous dictum "God is dead".

At any rate, it is by Zarathustra's transfiguration that he embraces eternity, that he at last ascertains "the supreme will to power" This inspiration finds its expression with Zarathustra's roundelay, featured twice in the book, once near the story's close: “O man, take care! What does the deep midnight declare? I was asleep — From a deep dream I woke and swear: The world is deep, Deeper than day had been aware. Deep is its woe — Joy — deeper yet than agony: Woe mplores: Go! But all joy wants eternity — Wants deep, wants deep eternity."

◊ Thus Spoke Zarathustra was conceived while Nietzsche was writing The Gay Science; he made a small note, reading "6,000 feet beyond man and time," as evidence of this. More specifically, this note related to the concept of the eternal recurrence, which is, by Nietzsche's admission, the central idea of Zarathustra; this idea occurred to him by a "pyramidal block of stone" on the shores of Lake Silvaplana in the 1,8 km high alpine region.

Another singular feature of Zarathustra, first presented in the prologue, is the designation of human beings as a transition between apes and the "Übermensch" (in English, either the "overman" or "superman"; or, superhuman or overhuman).

The Übermensch is one of the many interconnecting, interdependent themes of the story, and is represented through several different metaphors.

Nietzsche goes on to characterize "Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause,

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12 Examples include: the lightning that is portended by the silence and raindrops of a travelling storm cloud; or the sun's rise and culmination at its midday zenith; or a man traversing a rope stationed above an abyss, moving away from his uncultivated animality and towards the Übermensch. The symbol of the Übermensch also alludes to Nietzsche's notions of "self-mastery", "self-cultivation", "self-direction", and "self-overcoming".

Since many of the book's ideas are also present in his other works, Zarathustra is seen to have served as a precursor to his later philosophical thought. With the book, Nietzsche embraced a distinct aesthetic assiduity. He later reformulated many of his ideas, inBeyond Good and Evil and various other writings that he composed thereafter. He continued to emphasize his philosophical concerns; generally, his intention was to show an alternative to repressive moral codes and to avert "nihilism" in all of its varied forms. Other aspects of Thus Spoke Zarathustra relate to Nietzsche's proposed "Transvaluation of All Values".

This incomplete project began with The Antichrist.

The eternal recurrence, found elsewhere in Nietzsche's writing, is also mentioned.

"Eternal recurrence" is the possibility that all events in one's life will happen again and again, infinitely. The embrace of all of life's horrors and pleasures.

Opting to change any decision or event in one's life would indicate the presence of resentment or fear; contradistinctly

the overman is characterized by courage and a Dionysian spirit.

The will to power is the fundamental component of human nature. Everything we do is an expression of the will to power. The will to power is a psychological analysis of all human action and is accentuated by self-overcoming and self-enhancement. Contrasted with living for procreation, pleasure, or happiness, the will to power is the summary of all man's struggle against his surrounding environment as well as his reason for living in it.

The book in several passages expresses loathing for sentiments of human pity, compassion, indulgence and mercy towards a victim, which are regarded as the greatest sin and most insidious danger. Part of Nietzsche's reactionary thought is also that the creature he most sincerely loathes is the spirit of revolution, and his hatred for the anarchist and rebel. Many criticisms of Christianity can be found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in particular Christian values of good and evil and its belief in an afterlife. The basis for his critique of Christianity lies in the perceived squandering of our earthly lives in pursuit of a perfect afterlife, of which there is no evidence. JudeoChristian values are more thoroughly examined in On the Genealogy of Morals as a product of what he calls "slave morality."

1844 — 1900 ∞ Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philologist, philosopher, cultural critic, poet and

13 composer. He wrote several critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.

Nietzsche's key ideas include the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy, perspectivism, the Will to Power, the "death of God", the Ăœbermensch and eternal recurrence. One of the key tenets of his philosophy is the concept of "life-affirmation," which embraces the realities of the world in which we live over the idea of a world beyond. It further champions the creative powers of the individual to strive beyond social, cultural, and moral contexts.

Nietzsche's attitude towards religion and morality was marked withatheism, psychologism and historism; he considered them to be human creations loaded with the error of confusing cause and effect.His radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth has been the focus of extensive commentary, and his influence remains substantial, particularly in the continental philosophical schools ofexistentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism. His ideas of individual overcoming and transcendence beyond structure and context have had a profound impact on late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century thinkers, who have used these concepts as points of departure in the development of their philosophies. Most recently, Nietzsche's reflections have been received in various philosophical

approaches which move beyond humanism, e.g. transhumanism.

1781 GERMANY

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2.

IMMANUEL KANT CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

"I do not mean by this a critique of books and systems, but of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may strive independently of all experience." — Kant explains what he means by a critique of pure reason. ◊ Kant aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions.

The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was a theme both of the Age of Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy. His ideas moved philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists.

Kant argues that there are synthetic judgments such as the connection of cause and

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effect: " Every effect has a cause." Kant uses the classical example of 7 + 5 = 12. No amount of analysis will find 12 in either 7 or 5. Thus Kant arrives at the conclusion that all pure mathematics is synthetic though a priori; the number 7 is seven and the number 5 is five and the number 12 is twelve and the same principle applies to other numerals; in other words, they are universal and necessary. For Kant then, mathematics is synthetic judgment a priori.

This conclusion led Kant into a new problem as he wanted to establish how this could be possible: How is pure mathematics possible?

This also led him to inquire whether it could be possible to ground synthetic a priori knowledge for a study of metaphysics, because most of the principles of metaphysics from Plato through to Kant's immediate predecessors made assertions about the world or about God or about the soul that were not self-evident but which could not be derived

16 from empirical observation. For Kant, all post-Cartesian metaphysics is mistaken from its very beginning: the empiricists are mistaken because they assert that it is not possible to go beyond experience and the dogmatists are mistaken because they assert that it is only possible to go beyond experience through theoretical reason.

This led to his most influential contribution to metaphysics: the abandonment of the quest to try to know the world as it is "in itself" independent of sense experience. He demonstrated this with a thought experiment, showing that it is not possible to meaningfully conceive of an object that exists outside of time and has no spatial components and is not structured in accordance with the categories of the understanding, such as substance and causality. Although such an object cannot be conceived, Kant argues, there is no way of showing that such an object does not exist. Therefore,Kant says, the science of metaphysics must not attempt to reach beyond the limits of possible experience but must discuss only those limits, thus furthering the understanding of ourselves as thinking beings. The human mind is incapable of going beyond experience so as to obtain a knowledge of ultimate reality, because no direct advance can be made from pure ideas to objective existence.

Kant writes, "Since, then, the receptivity of the subject, its capacity to be affected by objects, must necessarily precede all intuitions of these objects, it can readily be understood how the form of all

appearances can be given prior to all actual perceptions, and so exist in the mind a priori". Appearance is then, via the faculty of transcendental imagination, grounded systematically in accordance with the categories of the understanding. Kant's metaphysical system, which focuses on the operations of cognitive faculties, places substantial limits on knowledge not founded in the forms of sensibility. Knowledge does not depend so much on the object of knowledge as on the capacity of the knower.

Kant claimed that phenomena depend upon the conditions of sensibility, space and time, and on the synthesizing activity of the mind manifested in the rule-based structuring of perceptions into a world of objects, this thesis is not equivalent to mind-dependence in the sense ofBerkeley's idealism. Kant defines transcendental idealism: "I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not things in themselves, and accordingly that time and space are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves. To this idealism is opposed transcendental realism, which regards space and time as something given in themselves (independent of our sensibility)."

The Critique of Pure Reason is divided into the Doctrine of Elements and the Doctrine of Method. The Doctrine of Elements sets out the a priori products

17 of the mind, and the correct and incorrect use of these presentations. Kant further divides the Doctrine of Elements into the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Logic, reflecting his basic distinction between sensibility and the understanding. In the Transcendental Aesthetic he argues that space and time are pure forms of intuition inherent in our faculty of sense.

Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic deals with sensibility and with objects as far as they can be perceived, the word aesthetic being derived from the Greek root "aesthesis" meaning capable of sensation or feeling. Kant distinguishes between the matter and the form of appearances. The matter is "that in the appearance that corresponds to sensation". The form is "that which so determines the manifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered in certain relations". Kant's revolutionary claim is that the form of appearances — which he later identifies as space and time — is a contribution made by the faculty of sensation to cognition, rather than something that exists independently of the mind. This is the thrust of Kant's doctrine of the transcendental ideality of space and time.

In Section I (Of Space) of Transcendental Aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant poses the following questions: What then are time and space? Are they real existences? Or, are they merely relations or determinations of things, such, however, as would equally belong to these things in themselves, though they should

never become objects of intuition; or, are they such as belong only to the form of intuition, and consequently to the subjective constitution of the mind, without which these predicates of time and space could not be attached to any object? The answer that space and time are real existences belongs to Newton. The answer that space and time are merely relations or determinations of things even when they are not being sensed belongs to Leibniz. Both answers maintain that space and time exist independently of the subject's awareness. This is exactly what Kant denies in his answer that space and time belong to the subjective constitution of the mind.

The Transcendental Logic is separated into the Transcendental Analytic and the Transcendental Dialectic: The Transcendental Analytic sets forth the appropriate uses of a priori concepts, called the categories, and other principles of the understanding, as conditions of the possibility of a science of metaphysics. In the Analytic, Kant investigates the contributions of the understanding to knowledge. The section titled the Metaphysical Deductionconsiders the origin of the categories. In the Transcendental Deduction, Kant then shows the application of the categories to experience. Next, the Analytic of Principles sets out arguments for the relation of the categories to metaphysical principles. This section begins with the Schematism, which describes how the imagination can apply pure concepts to the object given in sense perception. Next are arguments relating the

18 a priori principles with the schematized categories.

Kant aims to derive the twelve pure concepts of the understanding (which he also calls "categories") from the logical forms of judgment. These categories are the fundamental or primary conceptions of the understanding and for human thought, universal and necessary. The understanding is never active, until sensible data are furnished as material for it to act upon, and so it may truly be said that they become known to us "only on the occasion of sensible experience." For Kant, in opposition to Christian Wolff and Hobbes, the categories exist only in the mind.

The Transcendental Dialectic describes the transcendental illusion behind the misuse of these principles in attempts to apply them to realms beyond sense experience. In the Dialectic, Kant investigates the limits of the understanding.

Kant’s most significant arguments are the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, the Antinomy of Pure Reason, and the Ideal of Pure Reason, aimed against, respectively, traditional theories of the soul, the universe as a whole, and the existence of God. The Doctrine of Method contains four sections. The first section, Discipline of Pure Reason, compares mathematical and logical methods of proof, and the second section, Canon of Pure Reason, distinguishes theoretical from practical reason. In the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant showed how pure reason

is improperly used when it is not related to experience. In the Method of Transcendentalism, he explained the proper use of pure reason. Discipline is the restraint, through caution and self-examination, that prevents philosophical pure reason from applying itself beyond the limits of possible sensual experience.

Proofs of transcendental propositions about pure reason (God, soul, free will, causality, simplicity) must first prove whether the concept is valid. Reason should be moderated and not asked to perform beyond its power. The three rules of the proofs of pure reason are: (1) consider the legitimacy of your principles, (2) each proposition can have only one proof because it is based on one concept and its general object, and (3) only direct proofs can be used, never indirect proofs (e.g., a proposition is true because its opposite is false).

The speculative propositions of God, immortal soul, and free will have no cognitive use but are valuable to our moral interest. In pure philosophy, reason is morally (practically) concerned with what ought to be done if the will is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world. Yet, in its actual practical employment and use, reason is only concerned with the existence of God and a future life. Basically, the canon of pure reason deals with two questions: Is there a God? Is there a future life? These questions are translated by the canon of pure reason into two criteria: What ought I to do? and What may I hope for? yielding the

19 postulates of God's own existence and a future life, or life in the future.

The greatest advantage of the philosophy of pure reason is negative, the prevention of error. Yet moral reason can provide positive knowledge. There can't be a canon, or system of a priori principles, for the correct use of speculative reason. However, there can be a canon for the practical (moral) use of reason.

Reason has three main questions and answers: What can I know? We cannot know, through reason, anything that can't be a possible sense experience; ("that all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt") What should I do? Do that which will make you deserve happiness; What may I hope? We can hope to be happy as far as we have made ourselves deserving of it through our conduct.

Reason tells us that there is a God, the supreme good, who arranges a future life in a moral world. If not, moral laws would be idle fantasies. Our happiness in that intelligible world will exactly depend on how we have made ourselves worthy of being happy. The union of speculative and practical reason occurs when we see God's reason and purpose in nature's unity of design or general system of ends.

1724 — 1804 ∞ Immanuel Kant argued that fundamental concepts structure human experience, and that reason is the source of morality. His thought continues to have a major influence in contemporary thought, especially

the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics.

Kant's major work, the Critique of Pure Reason aimed to explain the relationship between reason and human experience. Kant argued that our experiences are structured by necessary features of our minds. In his view, the mind shapes and structures experience so that, on an abstract level, all human experience shares certain essential structural features.

Among other things, Kant believed that the concepts of space and time are integral to all human experience, as are our concepts of cause and effect. Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason, Metaphysics of Morals, which dealt with ethics, and the Critique of Judgment, which looks at aesthetics and teleology. Kant aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. He moved philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists.

380 BC ANCIENT GREECE

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PLATO THE REPUBLIC

It is a Socratic dialogue, concerning the definition of justice, the order and character of the just city-state and the just man. One of the most intellectually and historically influential works of philosophy and political theory.

stronger".

Socrates overturns their definitions and says that it is your advantage to be just and disadvantage to be unjust. The first book ends in aporia concerning its essence.

â—Š Work discusses the meaning of justice and examines whether or not the just man is happier than the unjust man by considering a series of different cities coming into existence "in speech", culminating in a city (Kallipolis) ruled by philosopher-kings; and by examining the nature of existing regimes. The participants also discuss the theory of forms, the immortality of the soul, and the roles of the philosopher and of poetry in society. This influential work consist of several parts. In first book "The Descent to the Piraeus" while visiting the Piraeus with Glaucon, Socrates is asked by Polemarchus to join him for a celebration. Cephalus, Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus are then each asked their definitions of justice by Socrates.

Cephalus defines justice as giving what is owed. Polemarchus says justice is "the art which gives good to friends and evil to enemies".

While Thrasymachus proclaims "justice is nothing else than the interest of the

"Education of the Guardians" is third book, Socrates and his companions Adeimantus and Glaucon conclude their discussion concerning the education.

Socrates breaks the educational system into two. Socrates, Adeimantus and Glaucon came to a conclusion that Poetry (libelous) and fiction should be taken out of the guardians' educational system. They rather suggested that guardians should be educated on these four virtues: wisdom, courage, justice and temperance. They also suggested that the second part of the guardians' education should be on gymnastics. With the physical training they will be able to live without getting medical attention often. In other words, the physical education or training will help prevent illness and weakness. In summary, Socrates asserts that both male and female guardians be given the same education, that all wives and children be

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22 shared, and that ownership of private property ought to be prohibited amongst them. The following outlines stages that guardians should grow through before they are able to lead their people: Until age 18, would-be guardians are engaged in basic intellectual study and physical training, followed by two years of military training. Next, they receive ten years of mathematics until age 30, and then five years of dialectic training. Guardians then spend the next 15 years as leaders, trying to 'lead people from the cave' (note, this is figurative, not literal). Upon reaching 50, they are fully aware of the form of the good and totally mature ready to lead!

Book 4 is called "Justice in the Polis" Cephalus defined justice as being honest and paying what is owed, Polemarchus as legal obligations and helping friends and harming foes. Both emphasize giving what is owed as appropriate. For Plato and Socrates, justice is fulfilling one's appropriate role, and consequently giving to the city what is owed. Socrates creates an analogy between the just city and the just man—both are defined by their different parts each performing its specific function. They thus proceed to search for the four cardinal excellences (virtues) of wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. They find wisdom among the guardian rulers, courage among the guardian warriors (or auxiliaries), temperance among all classes of the city in arguing who should rule and who ought to be ruled, and finally justice as the state in which each part of the whole performs only its work, not

meddling in the performance of work belonging to other parts. Some of what has been discussed about the state is then applied to the soul, which was the aim of the state digression in the first place.

In "Embodiment of the Idea", the sixth book by Plato, Socrates argument is that in the ideal city, a true Philosopher with understanding of forms will facilitate the harmonious co-operation of all the citizens of the city. This philosopher-king must be intelligent, reliable, and willing to lead a simple life. However, these qualities are rarely manifested on their own, and so they must be encouraged through education and the study of the Good. Just as visible objects must be illuminated in order to be seen, so objects of knowledge must also be true if light is cast led on them. Just as light comes from the sun, so does truth comes from goodness. Goodness as the source of truth makes it possible for the mind to know, just as light from the sun makes the eyes able to see.

Seventh book on "Education of the Philosophers" Socrates elaborates upon the Allegory of the Cave, in which he insists that the psyche must be freed from bondage to the visible world by making the painful journey into the intelligible world. Allegory of a Cave: Plato has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall.

The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to designate names to these shadows. The shadows

23 are as close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners. The allegory may be related to Plato's Theory of Forms, according to which the "Forms" (or "Ideas"), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality.

In book 8 "The Decline of the Polis": Socrates discusses four unjust cities or governments. Those governments are timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. He uses these four governments to prove the point that soon the city will go through every single stage and then reach the final destructive phase which would be tyranny. The timocracy involves a lot of compromise, between wealth and virtue. This will eventually lead to oligarchy which will have a constant feud between the rich and the poor. The next government would be the democracy, which has a lot more poor people than rich. However the poor end up revolting because there is a lot more freedom in the democracy; that was the main goal.

This leads to the distribution of power to many people who did not know what they were doing. The tyranny has a leader that is obsessed with focusing the citizens on war and feuding so he can get away with his extravagant lifestyle.

Everyone is enslaved by the ruler while he takes all the money. This is the last and

worst government in the city; it is extremely destructive.

Book 10 "Rejection of Mimetic Art" Socrates finally rejects any form of imitative art and sadly concludes that such artists have no place in the just city. He continues on to argue for the immortality of the psyche and even espouses a theory of reincarnation. He finishes by detailing the rewards of being just, both in this life and the next. Artists create things but they are only different copies of the idea of the original. "And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man --whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyze the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.

What is Platonism? "Platonism" is a term coined by scholars to refer to the intellectual consequences of denying, as Plato's Socrates often does, the reality of the material world. In several dialogues, most notably the Republic, Socrates inverts the common man's intuition about what is knowable and what is real. While most people take the objects of their senses to be real if anything is, Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In the Theaetetus, he says such people are "eu a-mousoi",

24 an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses" (Theaetetus 156a). In other words, such people live without the divine inspiration that gives him, and people like him, access to higher insights about reality.

Socrates's idea that reality is unavailable to those who use their senses is what puts him at odds with the common man, and with common sense. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his allegory of the cave, and more explicitly in his description of the divided line. The allegory of the cave (begins Republic 7.514a) is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible ("noeton") and that the visible world ("(h) oraton") is the least knowable, and the most obscure.

Socrates says in the Republic that people who take the sun-lit world of the senses to be good and real are living pitifully in a den of evil and ignorance. Socrates admits that few climb out of the den, or cave of ignorance, and those who do, not only have a terrible struggle to attain the heights, but when they go back down for a visit or to help other people up, they find themselves objects of scorn and ridicule.

According to Socrates, physical objects and physical events are "shadows" of their ideal or perfect forms, and exist only to the extent that they instantiate the perfect versions of themselves. Just as shadows are temporary,

inconsequential epiphenomena produced by physical objects, physical objects are themselves fleeting phenomena caused by more substantial causes, the ideals of which they are mere instances. For example, Socrates thinks that perfect justice exists (although it is not clear where) and his own trial would be a cheap copy of it.

The theory of Forms (or theory of Ideas) typically refers to the belief that the material world as it seems to us is not the real world, but only an "image" or "copy" of the real world. In some of Plato's dialogues, this is expressed by Socrates, who spoke of forms in formulating a solution to the problem of universals. The forms, according to Socrates, are archetypes or abstract representations of the many types of things, and properties we feel and see around us, that can only be perceived by reason. (That is, they are universals.) In other words, Socrates was able to recognize two worlds: the apparent world, which constantly changes, and an unchanging and unseen world of forms, which may be the cause of what is apparent.

428 — 347 BCE ∞ Plato was a philosopher, as well as mathematician, in Classical Greece, and an influential figure in philosophy, central in Western philosophy.

He was Socrates' student, and founded the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with Socrates and his most famous student,

25 Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." His theory of Forms began a unique perspective on abstract objects, and led to a school of thought called Platonism. Plato's dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, religion and mathematics.

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4.

MICHEL FOUCAULT THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE

It is a methodological and historiographical treatise promoting what Foucault calls "archaeology" or the "archaeological method", an analytical method he implicitly used in his previous works Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. It is Foucault's only explicitly methodological work. ◊ The premise of the book is that systems of thought and knowle-dge ("epistemes" or "discursive formations") are governed by rules (beyond those of grammar and logic) which operate in the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period. The book also becomes a philosophical treatment and critique of phenomenological and dogmatic structuralreadings of history and philosophy, portraying continuous narratives as naïve ways of projecting our own consciousness onto the past, thus being exclusive and excluding. Foucault demonstrates his political motivations, personal projects and preoccupations, and, explicitly and implicitly, the

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many influences that inform the discourse of the time.

Foucault argues that the contemporary study of the history of ideas, although it targets moments of transition between historical worldviews, is ultimately dependent on continuities that break down under close inspection. The history of ideas marks points of discontinuity between broadly defined modes of knowledge, but the assumption that those modes exist as wholes fails to do justice to the complexities of discourse. Foucault argues that "discourses" emerge and transform not according to a developing series of unarticulated, common worldviews, but according to a vast and complex set of discursive and institutional relationships, which are defined as much by breaks and ruptures as by unified themes.

Foucault defines a "discourse" as a way of speaking. Thus, his method studies only the set of 'things said' in their emergences and transformations, without any speculation about the overall, collective meaning. of those statements, and carries his insistence on discourse-in-itself down to the most basic unit of things said: the statement. During most of Archaeology,

28 Foucault argues for and against various notions of what are inherent aspects of a statement, without arriving at a comprehensive definition. He does, however, argue that a statement is the rules which render an expression (that is, a phrase, a proposition, or a speech act) discursively meaningful. This concept of meaning differs from the concept of signification: Though an expression is signifying, for instance "The gold mountain is in California", it may nevertheless be discursively meaningless and therefore have no existence within a certain discourse.

For this reason, the "statement" is an existence function for discursive meaning.

Being rules, the "statement" has a special meaning in the Archaeology: it is not the expression itself, but the rules which make an expression discursively meaningful. These rules are not the syntax and semantics that makes an expression signifying. It is additional rules. In contrast to structuralists, Foucault demonstrates that the semantic and syntactic structures do not suffice to determine the discursive meaning of an expression.

Depending on whether or not it complies with these rules of discursive meaning, a grammatically correct phrase may lack discursive meaning or, inversely, a grammatically incorrect sentence may be discursively meaningful - even meaningless letters may have discursive meaning. Thus, the meaning of expressions depends on the conditions in which they emerge and exist within a field of discourse; the discursive meaning of an expression is reliant on the succession of statements that precede and follow it.

In short, the "statements" Foucault analysed are not propositions, phrases, or speech acts. Rather, "statements" constitute a network of rules establishing which expressions are discursively meaningful, and these rules are the preconditions for signifying propositions, utterances, or speech acts to have discursive meaning. However, "statements" are also 'events', because, like other rules, they appear (or disappear) at some time.

Foucault's analysis then turns towards the organized dispersion of statements, which he calls discursive formations.

Foucault reiterates that the analysis he is outlining is only one possible procedure, and that he is not seeking to displace other ways of analysing discourse or render them as invalid.Foucault concludes Archaeology with responses to criticisms from a hypothetical critic.

Foucault begins with a polemic Introduction (Part I), noting recent shifts in historical method, relating these shifts to the newly uncertain status of the historical document, and critiquing histories that depend on loose notions of continuity as unhelpful and outdated. He says that these histories are also narcissistic, because what they really seek in forms of historical continuity is the assurance that history depends on the constant present of a transcendent human consciousness.

Part II, 'The Discursive Regularities,' asks what kinds of unities really do exist in the history of discourse. Foucault tries four hypotheses, in which unity is based on the object of discourse, the author(s)

29 of discourse, the concepts used in discourse, or the theories and themes of discourse. Each hypothesized basis for discursive unity turns out to be something more complex than we thought it was, and each turns out not to be the single basis for unity, but one aspect of a discursive unity that can only be described in its variability and complexity.

The four hypotheses do yield four specific levels at which discursive formations can be analyzed, however: the formation of objects of discourse, the formation of enunciative positions or modes, the formation of theoretical strategies, and the formation of concepts.

continuities and generalizations with specific, describable relations that preserve the differences and irregularities of discourse. The last chapter in this part, 'Science and Knowledge,' deals with the reasons that archeological analysis has focused on the history of the sciences, and with the details of how this focus is carried out. Foucault concludes with an intriguing, often poetic, dialogue between himself and a hypothetical critic of his method. In it, he defends archeology against charges that it is essentially structuralist and that it invests discourse with transcendence over other elements of history.

In Part III, 'The Statement and the Archive,' Foucault attempts to describe the discursive field from its smallest elements to its most general totality. The smallest units are statements; although they have no single, stable unit (they change size according to their field of use), they form the most detailed level at which discourse can be analyzed.

'Statement' really refers more to a specific aspect of articulated language than it does to a unit of language. The statement is the level of the active, historical existence of a set of signs. The rest of Part II is devoted to the archive, which is 'the general system of the formation and transformation of statements.'

1926 — 1984 ∞ Michel foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologistand literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power andknowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history of modernity.

Part IV addresses the difference between Foucault's archeological method and that of the history of ideas. For the four issues of originality, contradiction, comparison, and change, Foucault shows that his method replaces broad

These first three histories were examples of a historiographical technique Foucault was developing which he called "archaeology". "I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism.

For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance."

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5.

ARISTOTLE METAPHYSICS

The principal subject is "being qua being", or being understood as being. It examines what can be asserted about anything that exists just because of its existenceand not because of any special qualities it has. Also covered are different kinds of causation, form and matter, the existence of mathematical objects, and a prime-mover God. Aristotle defines metaphysics as "the knowledge of immaterial being," or of "being in the highest degree of abstraction." He refers to metaphysics as "first philosophy", as well as "the theologic science." â—Š The Metaphysics is considered to be one of the greatest philosophical works. Its influence on the Greeks, the Muslim philosophers, the scholastic philosophers and even writers such as Dante, was immense.

It is essentially a reconciliation of Plato's theory of Formsthat Aristotle acquired at the Academy in Athens, with the view of the world given by common sense and the observations of the natural sciences. According to Plato, the real nature of things is eternal and unchangeable. However, the world we observe around us is constantly and perpetually changing.

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Aristotle’s genius was to reconcile these two apparently contradictory views of the world. The result is a synthesis of the naturalism of empirical science, and the rationalism of Plato, that informed the Western intellectual tradition for more than a thousand years.

At the heart of the book lie three questions. What is existence, and what sorts of things exist in the world? How can things continue to exist, and yet undergo the change we see about us in the natural world? And how can this world be understood?

By the time Aristotle was writing, the tradition of Greek philosophy was only two hundred years old. It had begun with the efforts of thinkers in the Greek world to theorize about the common structure that underlies the changes we observe in the natural world. Two contrasting theories, those of Heraclitus and Parmenides, were an important influence on both Plato and Aristotle.

Heraclitus argued that things that appear to be permanent are in fact always gradually changing. Therefore, though

32 we believe we are surrounded by a world of things that remain identical through time, this world is really in flux, with no underlying structure or identity. By contrast, Parmenides argued that we can reach certain conclusions by means of reason alone, making no use of the senses.

What we acquire through the process of reason is fixed, unchanging and eternal.

The world is not made up of a variety of things in constant flux, but of one single Truth or reality. Plato’s theory of forms is a synthesis of these two views. Given, any object that changes is in an imperfect state. Then, the form of each object we see in this world is an imperfect reflection of the perfect form of the object. For example, Plato claimed a chair may take many forms, but in the perfect world there is only one perfect form of chair.

Aristotle encountered the theory of forms when he studied at the Academy, which he joined at the age of about 18 in the 360s B.C. Aristotle soon expanded on the concept of forms in his Metaphysics.

He believed that in every change there is something which persists through the change (for example, Socrates), and something else which did not exist before, but comes into existence as a result of the change (musical Socrates). To explain how Socrates comes to be born (since he did not exist before he was born) Aristotle says that it is ‘matter’ (hyle) that underlies the change. The matter

has the ‘form’ of Socrates imposed on it to become Socrates himself. Thus all the things around us, all substances, are composites of two radically different things: form and matter. This doctrine is sometimes known as Hylomorphism (from the Greek words for matter and form). Book Alpha outlines "first philosophy", which is a knowledge of the first principles or causes of things. The wise are able to teach because they know the why of things, unlike those who only know that things are a certain way based on their memory and sensations.

Because of their knowledge of first causes and principles they are better fitted to command, rather than to obey.

Book Gamma is a defense of (a) what we now call the principle of contradiction, the principle that it is not possible for the same proposition to be (the case) and not to be (the case), and (b) what we now call the principle of excluded middle: tertium non datur — there cannot be an intermediary between contradictory statements.

Book Epsilon has two main concerns.

Aristotle is first concerned with a hierarchy of the sciences. As we know, a science can be either productive, practical or theoretical. Because theoretical sciences study being or beings for their own sake—for example, Physics studies beings that can be moved—and do not have a target ( end or goal; complete or perfect) beyond themselves, they are superior. The study of being qua being, or First Philosophy, is superior to all the other theoretical sciences because it is

33 concerned the ultimate causes of all reality, not just the secondary causes of a part of reality. The second concern of Epsilon is proving that being considered per accidens cannot be studied as a science. Per accidens being does not involve art , nor does exist by necessity, and therefore does not deserve to be studied as a science. Aristotle dismisses the study of the per accidens as a science fit for Sophists, a group whose philosophies (or lack thereof) he consistently rejects throughout the Metaphysics.

Book Zeta begins with the remark that ‘Being’ has many senses. The purpose of philosophy is to understand being. The primary kind of being is what Aristotle calls substance. What substances are there, and are there any substances besides perceptible ones?

Aristotle considers four candidates for substance: (i) the ‘essence’ or ‘what it was to be a thing’ (ii) the Platonic universal, (iii) the genus to which a substance belongs and (iv) the substratum or ‘matter’ which underlies all the properties of a thing. He dismisses the idea that matter can be substance, for if we eliminate everything that is a property from what can have the property, we are left with something that has no properties at all. Such 'ultimate matter' cannot be substance.

Separability and 'this-ness' are fundamental to our concept of substance.

According to Aristotle essence is the criterion of substantiality. The essence of something is what is included in a secundum se ('according to itself')

account of a thing, i.e. which tells what a thing is by its very nature.

Book Theta sets out to define potentiality and actuality. We learn that this term indicates the potential (dunamis) of something to change: potentiality is "a principle of change in another thing or in the thing itself qua other". We can only know actuality through observation or "analogy;" thus "as that which builds is to that which is capable of building, so is that which is awake to that which is asleep...or that which is separated from matter to matter itself". Actuality is the completed state of something that had the potential to be completed.

The relationship between actuality and potentiality can be thought of as the relationship between form and matter, but with the added aspect of time.

Actuality and potentiality are diachronic (across time) distinctions, whereas form and matter are synchronic (at one time) distinctions.

His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today.

Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues –Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold" – it is thought that only around a third of his original output has survived.

384 — 322 BCE ∞ At eighteen, Aristotle joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of thirty-seven. His writings cover

34 many subjects – including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, linguistics, politics and government – and constitute the first comprehensive system of Western philosophy. According to the EncyclopÌdia Britannica, "Aristotle was the first genuine scientist in history ... [and] every scientist is in his debt."

Teaching Alexander the Great gave Aristotle many opportunities and an abundance of supplies. He established a library in the Lyceum which aided in the production of many of his hundreds of books. The fact that Aristotle was a pupil of Plato contributed to his former views of Platonism, but, following Plato's death, Aristotle immersed himself in empirical studies and shifted from Platonism to empiricism.He believed all peoples' concepts and all of their knowledge was ultimately based on perception.

Aristotle's views on natural sciences represent the groundwork underlying many of his works. Aristotle was well known among medieval Muslim intellectuals and revered as "The First Teacher".

Aristotle's views on physical science profoundly shaped medieval scholarship. Their influence extended into the Renaissance and were not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and theories such as classical mechanics. Some of Aristotle's zoological observations

were not confirmed or refuted until the 19th century.[examples needed] His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic.

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6.

HENRI BERGSON TIME AND FREE WILL

Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness has to be seen as an attack on Kant, for whom freedom belongs to a realm outside of space and time. Bergson thinks that Kant has confused space and time in a mixture, with the result that we must conceive human action as determined by natural causality. Bergson offers a twofold response. ◊ On the one hand, in order to define consciousness and therefore freedom, Bergson proposes to differentiate between time and space, “to un-mix” them, we might say.

On the other hand, through the differentiation, he defines the immediate data of consciousness as being temporal, in other words, as the duration. In the duration, there is no juxta-position of events; therefore there is no mechanistic causality. It is in the duration that we can speak of the experience of freedom.

Similarly, “our projection of our psychic states into space in order to form a discretemultiplicity is likely to influence these states themselves and to given them inreflective consciousness a new form.”

This new form appears

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when, in thinking of time, we “think of a homogenous medium in which our conscious states are rangedalong each other as in space so as to form a discrete multiplicity.” But such time is actually “a sign a symbol, absolutely distinct from a true duration.” The true duration appears when we ask “consciousness to isolates itself from theexternal world, and, by a vigorous effort of abstraction, to become itself again.”

Concept of Multiplicity: The concept of multiplicity has two fates in the Twentieth Century: Bergsonism and phenomenology. In phenomenology, the multiplicity of phenomena is always related to a unified consciousness. In contrast, in Bergsonism, “the immediate data of consciousness” are a multiplicity. Here, two prepositions, “to” and “of,” indicate perhaps the most basic difference between Bergsonism and phenomenology. Of course, this phrase is the title of Bergson's first work, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. It is the text that Sartre claimed attracted him to philosophy.

38 For Bergson, we must understand the duration as a qualitative multiplicity — as opposed to a quantitative multiplicity.

In Time and Free Will, we find several examples of a quantitative multiplicity; the example of a flock of sheep is perhaps the easiest to grasp. When we look at a flock of sheep, what we notice is that they all look alike. Thus a quantitative multiplicity is always homogeneous. But also, we notice that we can enumerate the sheep, despite their homogeneity.

We are able to enumerate them because each sheep is spatially separated from or juxtaposed to the others; in other words, each occupies a discernable spatial location. Therefore, quantitative multiplicities are homogeneous and spatial.

Moreover, because a quantitative multiplicity is homogeneous, we can represent it with a symbol, for instance, a sum: “25.” In contrast, qualitative multiplicities are heterogeneous and temporal; this is a difficult idea, since we would normally think that if there is heterogeneity, there is juxtaposition. But, in the duration, heterogeneity does not imply juxtaposition (or it implies juxtaposition only retrospectively). Again, Bergson gives us many examples; but perhaps the easiest example to grasp is the feeling of sympathy, a moral feeling. Sympathy is not only the easiest to grasp, it is also significant, as we shall see.

Our experience of sympathy begins, according to Bergson, with our putting ourselves in the place of others, feeling their pain. But, if this were all, the feeling would inspire in us abhorrence of others, and we would want to avoid them,

not help them. Bergson concedes that the feeling of horror may be at the root of sympathy. But then, we realize that if we do not help this poor wretch, it is going to turn out that, when we need help, no one will come to our aide. There is a “need” to help the suffering. For Bergson, these two phases are “inferior forms of pity.” In contrast, true pity involves not so much fearing pain as desiring it. It is as if “nature” has committed a great injustice and what we want is to be seen as not complicit with it. As Bergson says, “The essence of pity is thus a need for self-abasement, an aspiration downward” into pain. But, this painful aspiration develops into a sense of being superior.

We realize that we can do without certain sensuous goods; we are superior to them since we have managed to dissociate ourselves from them. In the end, one feels humility, humble since we are now stripped of these sensuous goods. Now, Bergson calls this feeling “a qualitative progress.” It consists in a “transition from repugnance to fear, from fear to sympathy, and from sympathy itself to humility.” The genius of Bergson's description is that there is a heterogeneity of feelings here, and yet no one would be able to juxtapose them or say that one negates the other. There is no negation in the duration. We shall return to this important point concerning negation when discussing “Creative Evolution.”

In any case, the feelings are continuous with one another; they interpenetrate one another, and there is even

39 an opposition between inferior needs and superior needs. A qualitative multiplicity is therefore heterogeneous (or singularized), continuous (or interpenetrating), oppositional (or dualistic) at the extremes, and progressive (or temporal, an irreversible flow, which is not given all at once). Because a qualitative multiplicity is heterogeneous and yet interpenetrating, it cannot be adequately represented by a symbol; indeed, for Bergson, a qualitative multiplicity is inexpressible. Bergson also calls the last characteristic of temporal progress mobility. For Bergson — and perhaps this is his greatest insight — freedom is mobility. Because Bergson connects duration with mobility, in the second half of the Twentieth Century (in Deleuze and Foucault, in particular), the Bergsonian concept of qualitative multiplicity will be dissociated from time and associated with space (Deleuze 1986).

Method of Intuition: As we already noted, Bergson's thought must be seen as an attempt to overcome Kant. In Bergson's eyes, Kant's philosophy is scandalous, since it eliminates the possibility of absolute knowledge and mires metaphysics in antinomies. Bergson's own method of intuition is supposed to restore the possibility of absolute knowledge – here one should see a kinship between Bergsonian intuition and what Kant calls intellectual intuition – and metaphysics. To do this, intuition in Bergson's sense must place us above the divisions of the different schools of philosophy like rationalism and empiricism or idealism and realism. Philosophy, for Bergson, does not

consist in choosing between concepts and in taking sides. These antinomies of concepts and positions, according to him, result from the normal or habitual way our intelligence works. Here we find Bergson's connection to American pragmatism.

The normal way our intelligence works is guided by needs and thus the knowledge it gathers is not disinterested; it is relative knowledge. And how it gathers knowledge is through what Bergson calls “analysis,” that is, the dividing of things according to perspectives taken.

Comprehensive analytic knowledge then consists in reconstruction or re-composition of a thing by means of synthesizing the perspectives. This synthesis, while helping us satisfy needs, never gives us the thing itself; it only gives us a general concept of things. Thus, intuition reverses the normal working of intelligence, which is interested and analytic (synthesis being only a development of analysis). In the fourth chapter to Matter and Memory, Bergson calls this reversal of habitual intelligence “the turn of experience” where experience becomes concerned with utility, where it becomes human experience (Matter and Memory, pp.184–85). This placement of oneself up above the turn is not easy; above all else, Bergson appreciates effort.

Intuition therefore is a kind of experience, and indeed Bergson himself calls his thought “the true empiricism” (The Creative Mind, p. 175). What sort of experience? In the opening pages of “Introduction to Metaphysics,” he calls

40 intuition sympathy (The Creative Mind, p. 159). As we have seen from our discussion of multiplicity in Time and Free Will, sympathy consists in putting ourselves in the place of others. Bergsonian intuition then consists in entering into the thing, rather than going around it from the outside.

This “entering into,” for Bergson, gives us absolute knowledge. In a moment, we are going to have to qualify this “absoluteness.” In any case, for Bergson, intuition is entering into ourselves – he says we seize ourselves from within – but this self-sympathy develops heterogeneously into others. In other words, when one sympathizes with oneself, one installs oneself within duration and then feels a “certain well defined tension, whose very determinateness seems like a choice between an infinity of possible durations” (The Creative Mind, p. 185).

In order to help us understand intuition, which is always an intuition of duration, let us return to the color spectrum image. Bergson says that we should suppose that perhaps there is no other color than orange. Yet, if we could enter into orange, that is, if we could sympathize with it, we would “sense ourselves caught,” as Bergson says, “between red and yellow.” This means that if we make an effort when we perceive orange, we sense a variety of shades. If we make more of an effort, we sense that the darkest shade of orange is a different color, red, while the lightest is also a different color, yellow.

1859–1941 ∞ Henri Bergson was one of the most famous and influential French philosophers of the late 19th century-early 20th century. He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented" Bergson rejected what he saw as the overly mechanistic predominant view of causality (as expressed in, say, finalism). He argued that we must allow space for free will to unfold in an autonomous and unpredictable fashion. While Kant saw free will as something beyond time and space and therefore ultimately a matter of faith, Bergson attempted to redefine the modern conceptions of time, space, and causality in his concept of Duration, making room for a tangible marriage of free will with causality.

Seeing Duration as a mobile and fluid concept, Bergson argued that one cannot understand Duration through "immobile" analysis, but only through experiential, first-person intuition.He was an eminent and charismatic dramatist poet.

Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces. His philosophy emphasises pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterize his system as a process philosophy. It touches upon such

41 topics as time and identity, free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the foundation of mathematics and the limits of reason.

evolution used by man to survive. If metaphysics is to avoid "false problems", it should not extend to pure speculation the abstract concepts of intelligence, but rather use intuition.

Criticizing Kant's theory of knowledge exposed in the Critique of Pure Reason and his conception of truth — which he compares to Plato's conception of truth as its symmetrical inversion (order of nature/order of thought) — Bergson attempted to redefine the relations between science and metaphysics, intelligence and intuition, and insisted on the necessity of increasing thought's possibility through the use of intuition, which, according to him, alone approached a knowledge of the absolute and of real life, understood as pure duration.

Because of his (relative) criticism of intelligence, he makes a frequent use of images and metaphors in his writings in order to avoid the use of concepts, which (he considers) fail to touch the whole of reality, being only a sort of abstract net thrown on things.

While such French thinkers as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and LĂŠvinas explicitly acknowledged his influence on their thought, it is generally agreed that it was Gilles Deleuze's 1966 Bergsonism that marked the reawakening of interest in Bergson's work.

Deleuze realized that Bergson's most enduring contribution to philosophical thinking is his concept of multiplicity. Bergson's concept of multiplicity attempts to unify in a consistent way two contradictory features: heterogeneity and continuity. Many philosophers today think that this concept of multiplicity, despite its difficulty, is revolutionary. It is revolutionary because it opens the way to a reconception of community.

For instance, he says in The Creative Evolution that thought in itself would never have thought it possible for the human being to swim, as it cannot deduce swimming from walking. For swimming to be possible, man must throw itself in water, and only then can thought consider swimming as possible. Intelligence, for Bergson, is a practical faculty rather than a pure speculative faculty, a product of

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7.

JEAN BAUDRILLARD SIMULACRA AND SIMULATION

Baudrillard turned his attention to the work of Marshall McLuhan, developing ideas about how the nature of social relations is determined by the forms of communication that a society employs. ◊ The concept of Simulacra also involves a negation of the concept of reality as we usually understand it.

Baudrillard argues that today there is no such thing as reality. Simulation, Baudrillard claims, is the current stage of the simulacrum: all is composed of references with no referents, a hyperreality. Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no longer have an original.

Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. “ The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

Studies in Simulation and Simulacra articulate the principle of a fundamental rupture between modern and

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postmodern societies and mark Baudrillard's departure from the problematic of modern social theory. For Baudrillard, modern societies are organized around the production and consumption of commodities, while postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs, denoting a situation in which codes, models, and signs are the organizing forms of a new social order where simulation rules. In the society of simulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of images, and codes and models determine how individuals perceive themselves and relate to other people. Economics, politics, social life, and culture are all governed by the mode of simulation, whereby codes and models determine how goods are consumed and used, politics unfold, culture is produced and consumed, and everyday life is lived.

Baudrillard's postmodern world is also one in which previously important boundaries and distinctions — such as those between social classes, genders, political leanings,

44 and once autonomous realms of society and culture — lose power. If modern societies, for classical social theory, were characterized by differentiation, for Baudrillard, postmodern societies are characterized by dedifferentiation, the “collapse” of (the power of) distinctions, or implosion. In Baudrillard's society of simulation, the realms of economics, politics, culture, sexuality, and the social all implode into each other. In this implosive mix, economics is fundamentally shaped by culture, politics, and other spheres, while art, once a sphere of potential difference and opposition, is absorbed into the economic and political, while sexuality is everywhere. In this situation, differences between individuals and groups implode in a rapidly mutating or changing dissolution of the social and the previous boundaries and structures upon which social theory had once focused.

His postmodern universe is one of hyperreality in which entertainment, information, and communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving than the scenes of banal everyday life, as well as the codes and models that structure everyday life. The realm of the hyperreal (e.g., media simulations of reality, Disneyland and amusement parks, malls and consumer fantasylands, TV sports, and other excursions into ideal worlds) is more real than real, whereby the models, images, and codes of the hyperreal come to control thought and behavior. Yet determination itself is aleatory in a non-linear world where it is impossible to chart causal mechanisms in a situation in which individuals are

confronted with an overwhelming flux of images, codes, and models, any of which may shape an individual's thought or behavior.

In this postmodern world, individuals flee from the “desert of the real” for the ecstasies of hyperreality and the new realm of computer, media, and technological experience. In this universe, subjectivities are fragmented and lost, and a new terrain of experience appears that for Baudrillard renders previous social theories and politics obsolete and irrelevant.

Tracing the vicissitudes of the subject in present-day society, Baudrillard claims that contemporary subjects are no longer afflicted with modern pathologies like hysteria or paranoia. Rather, they exist in “a state of terror which is characteristic of the schizophrenic, an over-proximity of all things, a foul promiscuity of all things which beleaguer and penetrate him, meeting with no resistance, and no halo, no aura, not even the aura of his own body protects him.

In spite of himself the schizophrenic is open to everything and lives in the most extreme confusion. For Baudrillard, the “ecstasy of communication” means that the subject is in close proximity to instantaneous images and information, in an overexposed and transparent world.

In this situation, the subject “becomes a pure screen a pure absorption and re-absorption surface of the influent networks” In other words, an individual in a postmodern world becomes merely an entity influenced by media, technological experience, and the hyperreal.

45 Thus, Baudrillard's categories of simulation, implosion, and hyperreality combine to create an emergent postmodern condition that requires entirely new modes of theory and politics to chart and respond to the novelties of the contemporary era.

His style and writing strategies are also implosive (i.e., working against previously important distinctions), combining material from strikingly different fields, studded with examples from the mass media and popular culture in an innovative mode of postmodern theory that does not respect disciplinary boundaries.

His writing attempts to itself simulate the new conditions, capturing its novelties through inventive use of language and theory. Such radical questioning of contemporary theory and the need for new theoretical strategies are thus legitimated for Baudrillard by the large extent of changes in the current era.

For instance, Baudrillard claims that modernity operates with a mode of representation in which ideas represent reality and truth, concepts that are key postulates of modern theory. A postmodern society explodes this epistemology by creating a situation in which subjects lose contact with the real and fragment and dissolve. This situation portends the end of modern theory that operated with a subject-object dialectic in which the subject was supposed to represent and control the object. In the story of modern philosophy, the philosophic subject attempts to discern the nature of reality, to secure grounded knowledge, and to apply this knowledge to control and dominate the object (e.g., nature, other people,

ideas, and so on). Baudrillard follows here the poststructuralist critique that thought and discourse could no longer be securely anchored in a priori or privileged structures of “the real.” Reacting against the mode of representation in modern theory, French thought, especially some deconstructionists (Rorty's “strong textualists”), moved into the play of textuality, of discourse, which allegedly referred only to other texts or discourses in which “the real” or an “outside” were banished to the realm of nostalgia.

In a similar fashion, Baudrillard, a “strong simulacrist,” claims that in the media and consumer society, people are caught up in the play of images, spectacles, and simulacra, that have less and less relationship to an outside, to an external “reality,” to such an extent that the very concepts of the social, political, or even “reality” no longer seem to have any meaning. And the narcoticized and mesmerized (some of Baudrillard's metaphors) media-saturated consciousness is in such a state of fascination with image and spectacle that the concept of meaning itself (which depends on stable boundaries, fixed structures, shared consensus) dissolves.

In this alarming and novel postmodern situation, the referent, the behind and the outside, along with depth, essence, and reality all disappear, and with their disappearance, the possibility of all potential opposition vanishes as well.

As simulations proliferate, they come to refer only to themselves: a carnival of mirrors reflecting images projected

46 from other mirrors onto the omnipresent television and computer screen and the screen of consciousness, which in turn refers the image to its previous storehouse of images also produced by simulatory mirrors. Caught up in the universe of simulations, the “masses” are “bathed in a media massage” without messages or meaning, a mass age where classes disappear, and politics is dead, as are the grand dreams of disalienation, liberation, and revolution.

1929 — 2007 ∞ French theorist Jean Baudrillard was one of the foremost intellectual figures of the present age whose work combines philosophy, social theory, and an idiosyncratic cultural metaphysics that reflects on key events of phenomena of the epoch. A sharp critic of contemporary society, culture, and thought.

Baudrillard is often seen as a major guru of French postmodern theory, although he can also be read as a thinker who combines social theory and philosophy in original and provocative ways and a writer who has developed his own style and forms of writing. He was an extremely prolific author who has published over thirty books and commented on some of the most salient cultural and sociological phenomena of the contemporary era, including the erasure of the distinctions of gender, race, and class that structured modern societies in a new postmodern consumer, media, and high tech society; the mutating roles of art and aesthetics; fundamental

changes in politics, culture, and human beings; and the impact of new media, information, and cybernetic technologies in the creation of a qualitatively different social order, providing fundamental mutations of human and social life.

For some years a cult figure of postmodern theory, Baudrillard moved beyond the postmodern discourse from the early 1980s to the present, and has developed a highly idiosyncratic mode of philosophical and cultural analysis. This entry focuses on the development of Baudrillard's unique modes of thought and how he moved from social theory to postmodern theory to a provocative type of philosophical analysis. In retrospect, Baudrillard can be seen a theorist who has traced in original ways the life of signs and impact of technology on social life, and who has systematically criticized major modes of modern thought, while developing his own philosophical perspectives.

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8.

BRIAN MASSUMI PARABLES OF THE VIRTUAL

The aim of the book is to consider the body and its capacity for movement and sensation in writings of cultural theory. There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literary, and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information - and image-based late capitalist culture. ◊ Affect is integral to postmoder-nism, yet the problem, as Masumi so rightly explains, is that ‘there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. Influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze, he sets himself the task of exploring the possibility that movement, affect and sensation ‘might be culturally-theoretically thinkable’. Rather than seeking to be oppositional to traditions of post-structuralism and cultural studies, he intends, instead, to build on this body of work by also travelling theoretical and critical journeys in new directions that, above all, consider affect and the corporeal in their analysis.

In their search for the discovery of the Holy Grail of theoretical paradigms, cultural theorists sought to reduce the cultural process and the body that occupies and moves, breathes

and lives within that cultural process, to models that attempted to function like mathematical equations.

As Massumi points out, however, society and humanity are far more complex creatures. They cannot be reduced to a sequence of diagrams or a mathematical configuration that states A + B = C. New, fresh approaches are in order because ‘Critical thinking disavows its own inventiveness as much as possible’ (p.12), and inventiveness is the only way out of what have become stagnant and unproductive models. But, rather than debunking and critiquing these traditions, instead, Massumi seeks alternate affirmative paths that are more productive - models that can build on the work of the past and inject new life to the achievements already attained.

Inventiveness is the key: ‘why not hang up the academic hat of critical self-seriousness, set aside the intemperate arrogance of debunking - and enjoy?... If you don't enjoy concepts and writing and don't feel that when you write you are adding something to the world, if only the

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50 enjoyment itself, and that by adding that ounce of positive experience to the world you are affirming and celebrating its potentials, tending its growth, in however small a way, however really abstractly well just hang it up’.

Beginning with Deleuze’s writings on movement and becoming, and travelling the path of Henri Bergson’s analysis of Zeno's paradoxes of movement, Massumi emphasizes that the continuity of movement is one that is not measurable or easily defined. The movement that unravels throughout an individual’s life is not a fixed or static one that can be clearly mapped into a theoretical paradigm. For example, while Althusserian critique may speak of the subject that is interpellated by ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (the aim of the theorist being to decode the nature of that interpretation), an understanding of this same subject through the lens of Bergson or Deleuze would teach us that, at any point in a life, there are multiple possible endpoints. Viewed retrospectively, movement signifies that the subject undergoes a series of qualitative changes that are effected by a ‘passing event’; ‘positionality is an emergent quality of movement’ (pp.7-8). Within this, issues of gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity, for example, occupy facets of the travelled path. As such, critical theory and the body of the spectator need not be limited to pursuing one, fixed interpretative path. Movement is dynamic, and its emergent potential is ever-present. The process of change is cumulative and, no matter how minor a change or rupture,

its effect, in the big scheme of things, can be dramatic. he asserts that ‘Invention requires experimentation’. The first rule of thumb if you want to invent or reinvent concepts is simple: don't apply them’ (p.3) - even if, in the process, you affirm ‘your own stupidity’ (p.18). The idea is to aim for an ‘open system’ that draws not only on diverse aspects of the humanities philosophy, psychology, literary theory, politics, anthropology (p.18). ‘Shameless poaching from science I advocate and endeavor to practice’ and in moving beyond the system of humanities it is possible to ‘force a change in the humanities’ (p.20). By placing the critical body in movement, it is perceivable that critical theory will move beyond the stagnant swamps that enclose it, finding new, exciting avenues that offer innovative approaches that address the affective charge of the individual and cultural body. And what is the reader left with? ‘a very special gift: a headache’ that prompts its own infectious virus, one that spreads a ‘creative contagion’. born 1956 ∞ Brian Massumi (born 1956) is a Canadian social theorist, writer and philosopher. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture, political theory, cultural studies and philosophy.

He is widely known for his Englishlanguage translations of recent French philosophy, including Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (with Geoffrey Bennington), Jacques Attali's Noise

51 and Gilles Deleuze andFĂŠlix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus.

Massumi's research is two-fold: the experience of movement and the interrelations between the senses, in particular in the context of new media art and technology; and emergent modes of power associated with the globalization of capitalism and the rise of preemptive politics. His work, likewise, emerges primarily from two distinct sources of inspiration: French post-structuralism and radical empiricism. The various thinkers who can be seen to speak to his work are Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, FĂŠlix Guattari and William James. Massumi's work engages with questions surrounding the affect, the virtual, and perception. In his work, he intends to break the hold of signification to find the emergent states of intensity outside of the linear order of narrative continuity. Rather than directly opposing intensity to signification, he sees them as interacting on two different levels, the linear and the superlinear.

He associates intensity with affect and endeavors to create an "asignifying philosophy of affect." Massumi believes that any contemporary theory of media or culture must take affect into account as much as the signifier had been in structuralism, if for no other reason because "the skin is faster than the word."

Working with the senses, Massumi distinguishes between 'virtual' and 'artificial' reality, two terms that

became linked with the rise of digital technology. Instead of a delineation between natural and cultural (or artificial) form can instead be seen as quite active. In an interview with Thomas Markunson for Intelligent Agent Massumi describes the architecture of Greg Lynn (an architect and fellow reader of Deleuze and Guattari's work) who worked with programming forces instead of forms.

The virtual environment in prospective relationships to virtual objects produces form that is dictated through interaction of the potential modifications. Further in the interview, Massumi discusses how architecture, as a form that is expected to give form is truly reliant on the the perceptions of people, "Only by continuing the process of form emergence on a different level, in the register of the embodied experience of the people who use the building," he continues, "In other words, by building into the architecture forces of perception that interact in ways designed to trigger experiential events. Likewise, in regards to neuroscience and brain activity, it is important to move past the idea that the brain passively transmits impressions, but that it is fully engaged in the environment around it and it coordinates events actively."

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9.

BARUCH SPINOZA ETHICS

It is an ambitious and multifaceted work. It is also bold critique of the traditional philosophical conceptions of God, the human being and the universe, and, above all, of the religions and the theological and moral beliefs grounded thereupon. ◊ What Spinoza intends to demonstrate is the truth about God, nature and especially ourselves; and the highest principles of society, religion and the good life. Despite the great deal of metaphysics, physics, anthropology and psychology, Spinoza took the crucial message of the work to be ethical in nature. It consists in showing that our happiness and well-being lie not in a life enslaved to the passions and to the transitory goods we ordinarily pursue; nor in the related unreflective attachment to the superstitions that pass as religion, but rather in the life of reason. To clarify and support these broadly ethical conclusions, however, Spinoza must first demystify the universe and show it for what it really is.

God or Nature: “On God” begins with some deceptively simple definitions of terms that would be familiar to any seventeenth

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century philosopher. “By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself”; “By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence”; “By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” The definitions of Part One are, in effect, simply clear concepts that ground the rest of his system.

They are followed by a number of axioms that, he assumes, will be regarded as obvious and unproblematic by the philosophically informed: “Whatever is, is either in itself or in another”; “From a given determinate cause the effect follows necessarily”. From these, the first proposition necessarily follows, and every subsequent proposition can be demonstrated using only what precedes it.

In propositions one through fifteen of Part One, Spinoza presents the basic elements of his picture of God. God is the infinite, necessarily existing (that is,

54 uncaused), unique substance of the universe. There is only one substance in the universe; it is God; and everything else that is, is in God. Proposition 1: A substance is prior in nature to its affections. Proposition 2: Two substances having different attributes (=their nature) have nothing in common with one another.

Proposition 3: If things have nothing in common with one another, one of them cannot be the cause of the other.

Proposition 5: In nature, there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute. Proposition 6: One substance cannot be produced by another substance. Proposition 8: Every substance is necessarily infinite. Proposition 9: The more reality or being each thing has, the more attributes belong to it.

Spinoza's metaphysics of God is neatly summed up in a phrase that occurs in the Latin (but not the Dutch) edition of the Ethics: “God, or Nature”, Deus, sive Natura: “That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists”.

The key to discovering and experiencing God, for Spinoza, is philosophy and science, not religious awe and worshipful submission. The latter give rise only to superstitious behavior and subservience to ecclesiastic authorities; the former leads to enlightenment, freedom and true blessedness (i.e., peace of mind).

The Human Being: In Part Two, Spinoza turns to the origin and nature of the human being. The two attributes of God

of which we have cognizance are extension and thought. This, in itself, involves what would have been an astounding thesis in the eyes of his contemporaries, one that was usually misunderstood and always vilified. When Spinoza claims in Proposition Two that “Extension is an attribute of God, or God is an extended thing”, he was almost universally— but erroneously—interpreted as saying that God is literally corporeal. For just this reason, “Spinozism” became, for his critics, synonymous with atheistic materialism.

According to one interpretation, God is indeed material, even matter itself, but this does not imply that God has a body. Another interpretation, however, one which will be adopted here, is that what is in God is not matter per se, but extension as an essence. And extension and thought are two distinct essences that have absolutely nothing in common. The modes or expressions of extension are physical bodies; the modes of thought are ideas. Because extension and thought have nothing in common, the two realms of matter and mind are causally closed systems. Everything that is extended follows from the attribute of extension alone.

Every bodily event is part of an infinite causal series of bodily events and is determined only by the nature of extension and its laws, in conjunction with its relations to other extended bodies. Similarly, every idea follows only from the attribute of thought. Any idea is an integral part of an infinite series of ideas and is

55 determined by the nature of thought and its laws, along with its relations to other ideas. There is, in other words, no causal interaction between bodies and ideas, between the physical and the mental.

There is, however, a thoroughgoing correlation and parallelism between the two series. For every mode in extension that is a relatively stable collection of matter, there is a corresponding mode in thought. In fact, he insists, “a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways”.

The human mind and the human body are two different expressions—under Thought and under Extension—of one and the same thing: the person. And because there is no causal interaction between the mind and the body, the so-called mind-body problem does not, technically speaking, arise.

Knowledge: The human mind, like God, contains ideas. Some of these ideas— sensory images, qualitative “feels” (like pains and pleasures), perceptual data— are imprecise qualitative phenomena, being the expression in thought of states of the body as it is affected by the bodies surrounding it. Such ideas do not convey adequate and true knowledge of the world, but only a relative, partial and subjective picture of how things presently seem to be to the perceiver. There is no systematic order to these perceptions, nor any critical oversight by reason.

“As long as the human Mind perceives things from the common order of nature,

it does not have an adequate, but only a confused and mutilated knowledge of itself, of its own Body, and of external bodies” (IIp29c). Under such circumstances, we are simply determined in our ideas by our fortuitous and haphazard encounter with things in the external world. This superficial acquaintance will never provide us with knowledge of the essences of those things. In fact, it is an invariable source of falsehood and error.

This “knowledge from random experience” is also the origin of great delusions, since we—thinking ourselves free— are, in our ignorance, unaware of just how we are determined by causes.

Adequate ideas, on the other hand, are formed in a rational and orderly manner, and are necessarily true and revelatory of the essences of things. “Reason”, the second kind of knowledge (after “random experience”), is the apprehension of the essence of a thing through a discursive, inferential procedure. “A true idea means nothing other than knowing a thing perfectly, or in the best way”.

Passion and Happiness: Because of our innate striving to persevere—which, in the human being, is called “will” or “appetite”—we naturally pursue those things that we believe will benefit us by increasing our power of acting and shun or flee those things that we believe will harm us by decreasing our power of acting. This provides Spinoza with a foundation for cataloguing the human passions. For the passions are all functions of the ways in which external things affect our powers or capacities. Joy [Laetitiae, sometimes translated as “pleasure”], for example,

56 is simply the movement or passage to a greater capacity for action. “By Joy … I shall understand that passion by which the Mind passes to a greater perfection” (IIIp11s). Being a passion, joy is always brought about by some external object.

Sadness [Tristitiae, or “pain”], on the other hand, is the passage to a lesser state of perfection, also occasioned by a thing outside us. Love is simply Joy accompanied by an awareness of the external cause that brings about the passage to a greater perfection. We love that object that benefits us and causes us joy. Hate is nothing but “Sadness with the accompanying idea of an external cause”. Hope is simply “an inconstant Joy which has arisen from the image of a future or past thing whose outcome we doubt”.

The transition from a state of nature, where each seeks his own advantage without limitation, to a civil state involves the universal renunciation of certain natural rights—such as “the right everyone has of avenging himself, and of judging good and evil”—and the investment of those prerogatives in a central authority. As long as human beings are guided by their passions, the state is necessary to bring it about that they “live harmoniously and be of assistance to one another”.

What, in the end, replaces the passionate love for ephemeral “goods” is an intellectual love for an eternal, immutable good that we can fully and stably possess, God. The third kind of knowledge generates a love for its object, and in this love consists not joy, a

passion, but blessedness itself. Taking his cue from Maimonides's view of human eudaimonia, Spinoza argues that the mind's intellectual love of God is our understanding of the universe, our virtue, our happiness, our well-being and our “salvation”.

1632 — 1677 ∞ Spinoza lived an outwardly simple life as a lens grinder, turning down rewards and honors throughout his life, including prestigious teaching positions. is philosophical accomplishments and moral character prompted 20th-century philosopher Gilles Deleuze to name him "the 'prince' of philosophers".

Spinoza is one of the most important philosophers—and certainly the most radical—of the early modern period.

His thought combines a commitment to a number of Cartesian metaphysical and epistemological principles with elements from ancient Stoicism and medieval Jewish rationalism into a nonetheless highly original system.

His extremely naturalistic views on God, the world, the human being and knowledge serve to ground a moral philosophy centered on the control of the passions leading to virtue and happiness. They also lay the foundations for a strongly democratic political thought and a deep critique of the pretensions of Scripture and sectarian religion. Of all the philosophers of the seventeenth-century, perhaps none have more relevance today than Spinoza.

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10.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS

Wittgenstein wrote the notes for the Tractatus while he was a soldier during World War I and completed it when a prisoner of war at Cassino in August 1918. ◊ Clearly, the book addresses the central problems of philosophy which deal with the world, thought and language, and presents a ‘solution’ of these problems that is grounded in logic and in the nature of representation. The world is represented by thought, which is a proposition with sense, since they all—world, thought, and proposition—share the same logical form. Hence, the thought and the proposition can be pictures of the facts.

There are seven main propositions in the text. These are: a) The world is everything that is the case. b) What is the case (a fact) is the existence of states of affairs. c) A logical picture of facts is a thought. e) A thought is a proposition with a sense. f) A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.) g) The general form of a proposition is the general form of a truth function. This is the general form of a proposition. h) Whereof one

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cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Starting with a seeming metaphysics, Wittgenstein sees the world as consisting of facts, rather than the traditional, atomistic conception of a world made up of objects.

Facts are existent states of affairs and states of affairs, in turn, are combinations of objects. The move to thought, and thereafter to language, is perpetrated with the use of Wittgenstein's famous idea that thoughts, and propositions, are pictures—“the picture is a model of reality” and “Form is the possibility of structure.”

While “the logical picture of the facts is the thought”, in the move to language Wittgenstein continues to investigate the possibilities of significance for propositions: “Only the proposition has sense; only in the context of a proposition has a name meaning”.

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein's logical construction of a philosophical system has a purpose—to find the limits of world, thought and language; in other words, to distinguish between sense and nonsense.

60 “The book will … draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts …. The limit can … only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense”.

He makes a distinction between saying and showing which is made to do additional crucial work. “What can be shown cannot be said,” that is, what cannot be formulated in sayable (sensical) propositions can only be shown. This applies, for example, to the logical form of the world, the pictorial form, etc., which show themselves in the form of (contingent) propositions, in the symbolism, and in logical propositions. Even the unsayable (metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic) propositions of philosophy belong in this group—which Wittgenstein finally describes as “things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical”.

it. If someone thinks the proposition, "There is a tree in the yard," then that proposition accurately pictures the world if and only if there is a tree in the yard.

If there is no tree in the yard, the proposition does not accurately picture the world. Although something need not be a proposition to represent something in the world, Wittgenstein was largely concerned with the way propositions function as representations.

"A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push."

Wittgenstein was inspired for this theory by the way that traffic courts in Paris reenact automobile accidents. A toy car is a representation of a real car, a toy truck is a representation of a real truck, and dolls are representations of people. In order to convey to a judge what happened in an automobile accident, someone in the courtroom might place the toy cars in a position like the position the real cars were in, and move them in the ways that the real cars moved. In this way, the elements of the picture (the toy cars) are in spatial relation to one another, and this relation itself pictures the spatial relation between the real cars in the automobile accident.

A prominent view set out in the Tractatus is the picture theory. The picture theory is a proposed description of the relation of representation. This view is sometimes called the picture theory of language, but Wittgenstein discusses various representational picturing relationships, including non-linguistic "pictures" such as photographs and sculptures. According to the theory, propositions can "picture" the world, and thus accurately represent

Pictures have what Wittgenstein calls Form der Abbildung, or pictorial form, in virtue of their being similar to what they picture. The fact that the toy car has four wheels, for example, is part of its pictorial form, because the real car had four wheels. The fact that the toy car is significantly smaller than the real car is part of its representational form, or the differences between the picture and what it pictures, which Wittgenstein

61 is interpreted to mean by Form der Darstellung.

This picturing relationship, Wittgenstein believed, was our key to understanding the relationship a proposition holds to the world. We can't see a proposition like we can a toy car, yet he believed a proposition must still have a pictorial form.

The pictorial form of a proposition is best captured in the pictorial form of a thought, as thoughts consist only of pictorial form. This pictorial form is logical structure.

Wittgenstein believed that the parts of the logical structure of thought must somehow correspond to words as parts of the logical structure of propositions, although he did not know exactly how.

Here, Wittgenstein ran into a problem he acknowledged widely: we cannot think about a picture outside of its representational form. Recall that part of the representational form of toy cars is their size—specifically, the fact that they are necessarily smaller than the actual cars.

Just so, a picture cannot express its own pictorial form.

One outcome of the picture theory is that a priori truth does not exist. Truth comes from the accurate representation of a state of affairs (i.e., some aspect of the real world) by a picture (i.e., a proposition). "The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world." Thus without holding a proposition up against the real world, we cannot tell whether the proposition is true or false.

1889 — 1951 ∞ Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial, role in 20th-century analytic philosophy.

He continues to influence current philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics and culture.

Originally, there were two commonly recognized stages of Wittgenstein's thought—the early and the later— both of which were taken to be pivotal in their respective periods. It is commonly acknowledged that the early Wittgenstein is epitomized in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. By showing the application of modern logic to metaphysics, via language, he provided new insights into the relations between world, thought and language and thereby into the nature of philosophy. It is the later Wittgenstein, mostly recognized in the Philosophical Investigations, who took the more revolutionary step in critiquing all of traditional philosophy including its climax in his own early work. The nature of his new philosophy is heralded as anti-systematic through and through, yet still conducive to genuine philosophical understanding of traditional problems.

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RENE DESCARTES DISCOURSE ON THE METHOD

The Discourse recounted Descartes own life journey, explaining how he had come to the position of doubting his previous knowledge and seeking to begin afresh. “For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it.” There is nothing we can be sure of. But we make no mistakes by saying that we exist (I think, therefore I am).

When I think and exist, there must be the wrold of thinking things. Cartesian dualism: there is body and mind (material and immaterial) they work together and influence each other. ◊ It offered some initial results of his metaphysical investigations, including mind–body dualism. It did not, however, engage in the deep skepticism of the later Meditations, nor did it claim to establish, metaphysically, that the essence of matter is extension. This last conclusion was presented merely as a hypothesis whose fruitfulness could be tested and proven by way of its results, as contained in the attached essays on Dioptrics and Meteorology.

In his Meteorology, Descartes described his general hypothesis about

the nature of matter, before continuing on to provide accounts of vapors, salt, winds, clouds, snow, rain, hail, lightning, the rainbow, coronas, and parhelia. Descartes wrote in the Meteorology that he was working from the following “supposition” or hypothesis: “that the water, earth, air, and all other such bodies that surround us are composed of many small parts of various shapes and sizes, which are never so properly disposed nor so exactly joined together that there do not remain many intervals around them; and that these intervals are not empty but are filled with that extremely subtle matter through the mediation of which, I have said above, the action of light is communicated”.

He presented a corpuscularian basis for his physics, which denied the atomsand-void theory of ancient atomism and affirmed that all bodies are composed from one type of matter, which is infinitely divisible. In the World, he had presented his non-atomistic corpuscularism, but without denying void space outright and without affirming infinite divisibility.

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64 In the Meteorology, he also proclaimed that his natural philosophy had no need for the “substantial forms” and “real qualities” that other philosophers “imagine to be in bodies”. He had taken the same position in the World, where he said that in conceiving his new “world” (i.e., his conception of the universe), “I do not use the qualities called heat, cold, moistness, and dryness, as the Philosophers do”. Indeed, Descartes claimed that he could explain these qualities themselves through matter in motion (11:26), a claim that he repeated in the Meteorology. In effect, he was denying the then-dominant scholastic Aristotelian ontology, which explained all natural bodies as comprised of a “prime matter” informed by a “substantial form,” and which explained qualities such as hot and cold as really inhering in bodies in a way that is “similar” to the qualities of hot and cold as we experience them tactually.

Unlike Descartes' purely extended matter, which can exist on its own having only size and shape, many scholastic Aristotelians held that prime matter cannot exist on its own. To form a substance, or something that can exist by itself, prime matter must be “informed” by a substantial form (a form that renders something into a substance). The four Aristotelian elements, earth, air, fire, and water, had substantial forms that combined the basic qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry: earth is cold and dry; air is hot and wet; fire is hot and dry; and water is cold and wet.

These elements can themselves then serve as “matter” to higher substantial forms, such as the form of a mineral, or a magnet, or a living thing. Whether in the case of earth or of a living rabbit, the “form” of a thing directs its characteristic activity. For earth, that activity is to approach the center to the universe; water has the same tendency, but not as strongly. For this reason, Aristotelians explained, the planet earth has formed at the center, with water on its surface. A new rabbit is formed when a male rabbit contributes, through its seed-matter, the “form” of rabbithood to the seed-matter of the female rabbit. This form then organizes that matter into a the shape of a rabbit, including organizing and directing the activity of its various organs and physiological processes. The newborn rabbit's behavior is then guided by its rabbit-specific “sensitive soul,” which is the name for the substantial form of the rabbit. Other properties of the rabbit, such as the whiteness of its fur, are explained by the “real quality” of white inhering in each strand of hair.

1596 — 1650 ∞ René Descartes was a creative mathematician, an important scientific thinker, and an original metaphysician. During the course of his life, he was a mathematician first, a natural scientist or “natural philosopher” second, and a metaphysician third. In mathematics, he developed the techniques that made possible algebraic (or “analytic”) geometry. In natural philosophy, he can be credited with several specific achievements: co-framer of the sine law of

65 refraction, developer of an important empirical account of the rainbow, and proposer of a naturalistic account of the formation of the earth and planets (a precursor to the nebular hypothesis).

More importantly, he offered a new vision of the natural world that continues to shape our thought today: a world of matter possessing a few fundamental properties and interacting according to a few universal laws. This natural world included an immaterial mind that, in human beings, was directly related to the brain; in this way, Descartes formulated the modern version of the mind–body problem. In metaphysics, he provided arguments for the existence of God, to show that the essence of matter is extension, and that the essence of mind is thought. Descartes claimed early on to possess a special method, which was variously exhibited in mathematics, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, and which, in the latter part of his life, included, or was supplemented by, a method of doubt.

He has been seen, at various times, as a hero and as a villain; as a brilliant theorist who set new directions in thought, and as the harbinger of a cold, rationalistic, and calculative conception of human beings.

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12.

GILLES DELEUZE & FÉLIX GUATTARI A THOUSAND PLATEAUS

Cosmic, geologic, evolutionary, developmental, anthropological, mythological, economic, political... IT is a book of strange new questions: “Who Does the Earth Think It Is?,” “How Do You make Yourself a Body Without Organs?,” “How does the war-machine ward off the apparatus of capture of the State?” and so on. ◊ To over-simplify, Deleuze and Guattari take up the insights of dynamical systems theory, which explores the various thresholds at which material systems self-organize (that is, reduce their degrees of freedom, as in our previous example of convection currents).

Deleuze and Guattari then extend the notion of self-organizing material systems—those with no need of transcendent organizing agents such as gods, leaders, capital, or subjects—to the social, linguistic, political-economic, and psychological realms. The resultant “rhizome” or de-centered network that is A Thousand Plateaus provides hints for experimentation with the more and more de-regulated flows of energy and matter, ideas and actions—and the at-

tendant attempts at binding them—that make up the contemporary world.

A Thousand Plateaus maintains the tripartite ontological scheme of all of Deleuze's work, but, as the title indicates, with geological terms of reference. Deleuze and Guattari call the virtual “the Earth,” the intensive is called “consistency,” and the actual is called “the system of the strata.” As the latter term indicates, one of the foci of their investigations is the tendency of some systems to head toward congealment or stratification.

More precisely put, any concrete system is composed of intensive processes tending toward the (virtual) plane of consistency and/or toward (actual) stratification. We can say that all that exists is the intensive, tending towards the limits of virtuality and actuality; these last two ontological registers do not “exist,” but they do “insist,” to use one of Deleuze's terms.

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68 Nothing ever instantiates the sheer frozen stasis of the actual nor the sheer differential dispersion of the virtual; rather, natural or worldly processes are always and only actualizations, that is, they are processes of actualization structured by virtual multiplicities and heading toward an actual state they never quite attain.

More precisely, systems also contain tendencies moving in the other direction, toward virtuality; systems are more or less stable sets of processes moving in different directions, toward actuality and toward virtuality. In still other words, Deleuze and Guattari are process philosophers; neither the structures of such processes nor their completed products merit the same ontological status as processes themselves. With this perspective, Deleuze and Guattari offer a detailed and complex “open system” which is extraordinarily rich and complex. A useful way into it is to follow the concepts of coding, stratification and territorialization. They are related in the following manner.

Coding is the process of ordering matter as it is drawn into a body; by contrast, stratification is the process of creating hierarchal bodies, while territorialization is the ordering of those bodies in “assemblages,” that is to say, an emergent unity joining together heterogeneous bodies in a “consistency.” These concepts, and several other networks of concepts considerations of space preclude us from considering, are put to work in addressing the following topics. After a discussion of the notion of “rhizome” in the

first chapter (or “plateau” as they call it), Deleuze and Guattari quickly dismiss psychoanalysis in the second.

In the third chapter they discuss the process of stratification in physical, organic, and social strata, with special attention to questions in population genetics, where speciation can be thought to stratify or channel the flow of genes.

In chapters 4 and 5 they intervene in debates in linguistics in favor of pragmatics, that is to say, highlighting the “incorporeal transformations” (labels that prompt a different form of action to be applied to a body: “I now pronounce you man and wife”) that socially sanctioned “order words” bring about (Deleuze and Guattari also refer to speech act theory in this regard). They also lay out the theory of “territories” or sets of environmentally embedded triggers of self-organizing processes, and the concomitant processes of deterritorialization (breaking of habits) and reterritorialization (formation of habits).

Chapters 6 and 7 discuss methods of experimenting with the strata in which we found ourselves. Chapter 6 deals with the organic stratum or the “organism”; the notorious term of art “Body without Organs” can be at least partially glossed as the reservoir of potentials for different patterns of bodily affect. Chapter 7 deals with the intersection of signifiance (“signifier-ness”) and subjectification in “faciality”; the face arrests the drift of signification by tying meaning to the expressive gestures of a subject. Chapters 8 and 9 deal with the social organizing

69 practices they name “lines” and “segments”; of particular interest here is their treatment of fascism.

of humanist thought and the belief that humans—through language, science, and art—can represent or reflect the world.

Chapter 10 returns to the question of intensive experimentation, now discussed in terms of “becoming,” in which (at least) two systems come together to form an emergent system or “assemblage.” Chapter 11 discusses the “refrain” or rhythm as a means of escaping from and forming new territories, or even existing in a process of continual deterritorialization, what they call “consistency.”

All of Western thought is inherently arborescent, even linguistics, as it all grows (or has grown) from a supposed original source. Deleuze and Guattari even argue that most modern texts, while seemingly representing multiple origins and the elimination of the linearity of language, posit some type of unity, or form a “whole,” within the reading subject, which also represents arborescence. Similarly, most modes of thought attempt to posit an origin or totalizing structure, which as we know leads to thinking in terms of binary oppositions and the privileging of one binary over the other.

Chapters 12 and 13 discuss the relation of the “war machine” and the State; the former is a form of social organization that fosters creativity (it “reterritorializes on deterritorialization itself”), while the latter is an “apparatus of capture” living vampirically off of labor (here Deleuze and Guattari's basically Marxist perspective is apparent). Finally, Chapter 14 discusses types of social constitution of space, primarily the “smooth” space of war machines and the “striated” space of States.

The most important idea in the essay is the idea of the rhizome. To understand Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the rhizome, it is important to first comprehend what the rhizome is a response to.

They argue that all of Western thought is based on the model of the tree. The tree sprouts from a single seed, producing a trunk and continuously branching out; it grows and spreads vertically, yet the tree can be traced back to a single origin.

Basically, arborescence is representative

In order to break from traditional arborescent thought and the resulting binaries, Deleuze and Guattari proclaim, “The multiple must be made”. The ultimate symbol of the multiple, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the rhizome. A rhizome is a root-like organism (though not a root) that spreads and grows horizontally (generally underground). Some examples are potatoes, couchgrass, and weeds. Couchgrass, or crabgrass, continues to grow even if you pull up what you think is all of it, since it has no central element. As a rhizome has no center, it spreads continuously without beginning or end. The main principles of the rhizome are “principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be”. Basically, the rhizome

70 establishes connections between everything, combining rhizomes that are themselves made of combinations of rhizomes. Language is rhizomatic, as “a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles . . . there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages”.

Even what we view as one specific language is composed of multiplicities of languages. There is no true language; the dominant language is only a “power takeover” within what Deleuze and Guattari call a “political multiplicity.”

We “can analyze language only by decentering it onto other dimensions and other registers. A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence”. In order to analyze language, we must look at it rhizomatically, viewing it not simply as language, but as everything related to language. Language is a multiplicity and connects to other multiplicities.

According to the “principle of multiplicity: basically, everything is not composed of units operating within rules, as in structuralism, but of multiplicities spreading and connecting with other multiplicities within a non-centered structure. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as

the multiplicity grows)”. The multiplicity, or the rhizome, has no real rules or laws, as it continuously adapts to incorporate other multiplicities. There is no real unity within a rhizome, as “the notion of unity appears only when there is a power takeover in the multiplicity or a corresponding subjectification proceeding”. A “power takeover” is similar to the idea of a unified language in that the power takeover only limits the rhizome in one specific area, and the multiplicities continue to spread outside of it.

According to the “principle of a signifying rupture…a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines”. Deleuze and Guattari use the example of ants: “You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed”.They further claim that the rhizome deterritorializes in one place and reterritorializes in another. They use the image of the wasp and the orchid to demonstrate deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Both the wasp and the orchid continuously spread and multiply. The wasp feeds off the orchid, while the orchid uses the wasp to reproduce.

Deleuze and Guattari further write: “There is neither imitation nor resemblance, [between the wasp and the orchid]only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying”. It seems that the main point of this example is that while

71 the wasp and the orchid are completely heterogeneous, and seemingly unrelated, objects, they both spread and grow in relation to each other.

1925 — 1995 ∞ Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the produc-tion of concepts, and he characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician.”

In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathe-matics and science — a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility.

Deleuze also produced studies in the history of philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, and Leibniz), and on the arts. In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a political activist and radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, comprised of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Their final collaboration was What is Philosophy?

Deleuze is noteworthy for his rejection of the Heideggerian notion of the “end of metaphysics.” In an interview, he once offered this self-assessment: “I feel myself to be a pure metaphysician.... Bergson says that modern science hasn't found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need. It is this metaphysics that interests me.”

[Villani 1999: 130.]) We should also point to the extent of his non-philosophical references (inter alia,

differential calculus, thermodynamics, geology, molecular biology, population genetics, ethology, embryology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, economics, linguistics, and even esoteric thought); his colleague Jean-François Lyotard spoke of him as a “library of Babel.” Although it remains to be seen whether the 20th century will be “Deleuzean,” as his friend Michel Foucault once quipped, Deleuze's influence reaches beyond philosophy; his work is approvingly cited by, and his concepts put to use by, researchers in architecture, urban studies, geography, film studies, musicology, anthropology, gender studies, literary studies and other fields.

One of the barriers to Deleuze's being better read among mainstream philosophers is the difficulty of his writing style in his original works.

Deleuze's prose can be highly allusive, as well as peppered with neologisms; to make matters even more complex, these terminological innovations shift from one work to the other. While claims of intentional obscurantism are not warranted, Deleuze did mean for his style to keep readers on their toes, or even to “force” them to rethink their philosophical assumptions.

Concentrate on the conceptual architecture of his thought, on performative effect of reading the original.

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13.

ALBERT CAMUS THE STRANGER

Theme of this novel and outlook are often cited as exemplars of Camus's philosophy of the absurd and existentialism. “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide”. Camus centers his work on choosing to live without God. ◊ Another way to understand Camus's philosophy is that it is an effort to explore the issues and pitfalls of a post-religious world.

In these essays, Camus sets two attitudes in opposition. The first is what he regards as religion-based fears. He cites religious warnings about pride, concern for one's immortal soul, hope for an afterlife, resignation about the present and preoccupation with God. Against this conventional Christian perspective Camus asserts what he regards as self-evident facts: that we must die and there is nothing beyond this life.

Without mentioning it, Camus draws a conclusion from these facts, namely that the soul is not immortal.

Here, as elsewhere in his philosophical writing, he commends to his readers to face a discomforting reality

squarely and without flinching, but he does not feel compelled to present reasons or evidence. If not with religion, where then does wisdom lie? His answer is: with the “conscious certainty of a death without hope” and in refusing to hide from the fact that we are going to die. For Camus “there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside of the curve of the days…. I can see no point in the happiness of angels” There is nothing but this world, this life, the immediacy of the present.

The Stranger, Camus’s first novel, is both a brilliantly crafted story and an illustration of Camus’s absurdist world view. Published in 1942, the novel tells the story of an emotionally detached, amoral young man named Meursault. He does not cry at his mother’s funeral, does not believe in God, and kills a man he barely knows without any discernible motive. For his crime, Meursault is deemed a threat to society and sentenced to death. When he comes to accept the “gentle indifference of the world,” he finds peace with himself and with the society that persecutes him..

Meursault, protagonist of The Stranger,

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74 comes to consciousness in that book's second part after committing the inexplicable murder that ends the book's first part. He has lived his existence from one moment to the next and without much awareness, but at his trial and while awaiting execution he becomes like Sisyphus, fully conscious of himself and his terrible fate. He will die triumphant as the absurd man.

After the murders, Meursault is still not amoral. It is not that he does not understand right and wrong but rather that his ideas of right and wrong differ from those of society. This different moral code can be seen by the way he refuses to break his own morals. He may not value life but he does value honesty and his disbelief in a higher being. Throughout the book he never lies or pretends to have faith in God not even to save his life. His specific moral code is founded in Camus` ideas of existentialism and the absurd.

In January 1955, Camus said, "I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: 'In our society any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.' I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game."

1913 — 1960 ∞ Albert Camus ignored or opposed systematic philosophy, had little faith in rationalism, asserted rather than argued many of his main ideas, presented others in

metaphors, was preoccupied with immediate and personal experience, and brooded over such questions as the meaning of life in the face of death. was a French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist, and philosopher. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay "The Rebel" that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual and sexual freedom.

Although he forcefully separated himself from existentialism, Camus posed one of the twentieth century's bestknown existentialist questions, which launches The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide”.

And his philosophy of the absurd has left us with a striking image of the human fate: Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rock up the mountain only to see it roll back down each time he gains the top. Camus's philosophy found political expression in The Rebel, which along with his newspaper editorials, political essays, plays, and fiction earned him a reputation as a great moralist. It also embroiled him in conflict with his friend, JeanPaul Sartre, provoking the major political-intellectual divide of the ColdWar era as Camus and Sartre became, respectively, the leading intellectual voices of the anti-Communist and pro-Communist left. Furthermore, in

75 posing and answering urgent philosophical questions of the day, Camus articulated a critique of religion and of the Enlightenment and all its projects, including Marxism. In 1957 he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Camus presents the reader with dualisms such as happiness and sadness, dark and light, life and death, etc. He emphasizes the fact that happiness is fleeting and that the human condition is one of mortality; for Camus, this is cause for a greater appreciation for life and happiness. In Le Mythe, dualism becomes a paradox: we value our own lives in spite of our mortality and in spite of the universe's silence. While we can live with a dualism (I can accept periods of unhappiness, because I know I will also experience happiness to come), we cannot live with the paradox (I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless). In Le Mythe, Camus investigates our experience of the Absurd and asks how we live with it. Our life must have meaning for us to value it. If we accept that life has no meaning and therefore no value, should we kill ourselves?

In Le Mythe, Camus suggests that 'creation of meaning', would entail a logical leap or a kind of philosophical suicide in order to find psychological comfort. But Camus wants to know if he can live with what logic and lucidity has uncovered – if one can build a foundation on what one knows and nothing more. Creation of meaning is not a viable alternative but a logical

leap and an evasion of the problem. He gives examples of how others would seem to make this kind of leap. The alternative option, namely suicide, would entail another kind of leap, where one attempts to kill absurdity by destroying one of its terms (the human being). Camus points out, however, that there is no more meaning in death than there is in life, and that it simply evades the problem yet again. Camus concludes that we must instead "entertain" both death and the absurd, while never agreeing to their terms.

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14.

JEAN — JACQUES ROUSSEAU ON THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

In this book Rousseau theorized about the best way to establish a political community in the face of the problems of commercial society, which he had already identified in his Discourse on Inequality. The Social Contract helped inspire political reforms or revolutions in Europe, especially in France. â—Š Human was born as free, but since then he is imprisoned by law of those who own property, who make that law, who has power among others. The Social Contract argued against the idea that monarchs were divinely empowered to legislate; as Rousseau asserts, only the people, who are sovereign, have that all-powerful right. The stated aim of the book is to determine whether there can be a legitimate political authority, since people's interactions he saw at his time seemed to put them in a state far worse than the good one they were at the state of nature, even though living in isolation.

The stated aim of the Social Contract is to determine whether there can be a legitimate political authority, since people's interactions seemed to put them

(people) in a state far worse than the good one they were at the state of nature, even though living in isolation.

In this desired Social Contract, everyone will be free because they all forfeit the same amount of rights and impose the same duties on all. Rousseau argues that it is illogical for a man to surrender his freedom for slavery; thus, the participants must have a right to choose the laws under which they live. Although the contract imposes new laws, including those safeguarding and regulating property, a person can exit it at any time (except in a time of need, for this is desertion), and is again as free as when he was born.

Rousseau posits that the political aspects of a society should be divided into two parts. First, there must be a sovereign consisting of the whole population (women included) that represents the general will and is the legislative power within the state. The second division is that of the government, being distinct from the

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78 sovereign. Thus, government must remain a separate institution from the sovereign body. When the government exceeds the boundaries set in place by the people, it is the mission of the people to abolish such government, and begin anew.

Rousseau claims that the size of the territory to be governed often decides the nature of the government. Since a government is only as strong as the people, and this strength is absolute, the larger the territory, the more strength the government must be able to exert over the populace. In his view, a monarchical government is able to wield the most power over the people since it has to devote less power to itself, while a democracy the least. In general, the larger the bureaucracy, the more power required for government discipline. Normally, this relationship requires the state to be an aristocracy or monarchy.

As human populations grow, simple but unstable forms of co-operation evolve around activities like hunting. According to Rousseau, the central transitional moment in human history occurs at a stage of society marked by small settled communities. At this point a change, or rather a split, takes place in the natural drive humans have to care for themselves: competition among humans to attract sexual partners leads them to consider their own attractiveness to others and how that attractiveness compares to that of potential rivals. In Emile, where Rousseau is concerned with the psychological development of an individual in

a modern society, he also associates the genesis of amour proprewith sexual competition and the moment, puberty, when the male adolescent starts to think of himself as a sexual being with rivals for the favours of girls and women.

Rousseau's term for this new type of self-interested drive, concerned with comparative success or failure as a social being, is amour propre (love of self, often rendered as pride or vanity in English translations). Amour propre makes a central interest of each human being the need to be recognized by others as having value and to be treated with respect.

In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau traces the growth of agriculture and metallurgy and the first establishment of private property, together with the emergence of inequality between those who own land and those who do not. In an unequal society, human beings who need both the social good of recognition and such material goods as food, warmth, etc. become enmeshed in social relations that are inimical both to their freedom and to their sense of self worth.

Thus, even those who receive the apparent love and adulation of their inferiors cannot thereby find satisfaction for their amour propre. This trope of misrepresentation and frustration receives its clearest treatment in Rousseau's account of the figure of the European minister, towards the end of the Discourse on Inequality, a figure whose need to flatter others in order to secure his own wants leads to his alienation from his own self.

79 1712 — 1778 ∞ The concern that dominates Rousseau's work is to find a way of preserving human freedom in a world where human beings are increasingly dependent on one another for the satisfaction of their needs.

This concern has two dimensions: material and psychological, of which the latter has greater importance.

In the modern world, human beings come to derive their very sense of self from the opinion of others, a fact which Rousseau sees as corrosive of freedom and destructive of individual authenticity.

Rousseau's own view of philosophy and philosophers was firmly negative, seeing philosophers as the post-hoc rationalizers of self-interest, as apologists for various forms of tyranny, and as playing a role in the alienation of the modern individual from humanity's natural impulse to compassion. Rousseau explores two routes to achieving and protecting freedom: the first is a political one aimed at constructing political institutions that allow for the co-existence of free and equal citizens in a community where they themselves are sovereign; the second is a project for child development and education that fosters autonomy and avoids the development of the most destructive forms of self-interest. However, though Rousseau believes the co-existence of human beings in relations of equality and freedom is possible, he is consistently and overwhelmingly pessimistic that humanity will escape from

a dystopia of alienation, oppression, and unfreedom. In addition to his contributions to philosophy, Rousseau was active as a composer and a music theorist, as the pioneer of modern autobiography, as a novelist, and as a botanist. Rousseau's appreciation of the wonders of nature and his stress on the importance of feeling and emotion made him an important influence on and anticipator of the romantic movement. To a very large extent, the interests and concerns that mark his philosophical work also inform these other activities, and Rousseau's contributions in ostensibly non-philosophical fields often serve to illuminate his philosophical commitments and arguments.

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15.

KARL MARX CAPITAL

A work born out of the industrial revolution. Capital

by Karl Marx was the result of nearly 30 years of work on the part of Karl Marx and his influences and protracted study of the nature of not only the capitalist economy, but also the social and historical forces that shape interactions among people both within and outside of trade. ◊ History is history of fight of social classes. People gather into classes among with others who share same economic and social interests, and against others, who don’t like same social and economical ideas.

In Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx proposes that the motivating force

of capitalism is in the exploitation of labour, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of surplus value and then profit both of which concepts have a specific meaning for Marx. The employer is able to claim the right to profits because he or she owns the productive capital assets (means of production), which are legally protected by the capitalist state through property rights (the historical section shows how this right was acquired in the first place chiefly through plunder and conquest and the activity of the merchant and 'middle-man').

In producing capital (money) as well as commodities (goods and services), the workers continually reproduce the economic conditions by which they labour.

Capital proposes an explanation of the "laws of motion" of the capitalist economic system, from its origins throughout its future, by describ-

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82 ing the dynamics of the accumulation of capital, the growth of wage labour, the transformation of the workplace, the concentration of capital, commercial competition, the banking system, the decline of the profit rate, land-rents, et cetera.

Capital begins with an analysis of the idea of commodity production. A commodity is defined as a useful external object, produced for exchange on a market. Thus two necessary conditions for commodity production are the existence of a market, in which exchange can take place, and a social division of labour, in which different people produce different products, without which there would be no motivation for exchange.

Marx suggests that commodities have both use-value — a use in other words — and an exchange-value — initially to be understood as their price. Use value can easily be understood, so Marx says, but he insists that exchange value is a puzzling phenomenon, and relative exchange values need to be explained. Why does a quantity of one commodity exchange for a given quantity of another commodity? His explanation is in terms of the labour input required to produce the commodity, or rather, the socially necessary labour, which is labour exerted at the average level of intensity and productivity for that branch of activity within the economy. Thus the labour theory of value asserts that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time required to produce it.

Capitalism is distinctive, Marx argues, in that it involves not merely the exchange of commodities, but the advancement of capital, in the form of money, with the purpose of generating profit through the purchase of commodities and their transformation into other commodities which can command a higher price, and thus yield a profit. In setting up conditions of production the capitalist purchases the worker's labour power — his ability to labour — for the day. Any work the worker does above this is known as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist. Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all profit.

In Marx's analysis labour power is the only commodity which can produce more value than it is worth, and for this reason it is known as variable capital. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the finished commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are known as constant capital. Profit, then, is the result of the labour performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of his or her wages. This is the surplus value theory of profit.

There are two sides to the labor process.

On one side there is the buyer of labor power, or the capitalist. On the other side there is the worker. For the capitalist the worker possesses only one use-value, that of labor power. The capitalist buys from the worker his labor power, or his ability to do work, and in return the worker receives a wage, or a means of subsistence. Under capitalism it is the capitalist who owns everything in

83 the production process such as: the raw materials that the commodity is made of, the means of production, and the labor power (worker) itself. At the end of the labor process it is the capitalist who owns the product of their labor, not the workers who produced the commodities.

Marx's assertion that only labour can create surplus value is unsupported by any argument or analysis, and can be argued to be merely an artifact of the nature of his presentation. Any commodity can be picked to play a similar role.

Consequently with equal justification one could set out a corn theory of value, arguing that corn has the unique power of creating more value than it costs.

1818 — 1883 ∞ Marx's economic analysis of capitalism is based on his version of the labour theory of value, and includes the analysis of capitalist profit as the extraction of surplus value from the exploited proletariat.

Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, towards economics and politics. However, in addition to his overtly philosophical early work, his later writings have many points of contact with contemporary philosophical debates, especially in the philosophy of history and the social sciences, and in moral and political philosophy.

Historical materialism — Marx's theory of history — is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and

fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, characterized by class struggle, culminating in communism. The analysis of history and economics come together in Marx's prediction of the inevitable economic breakdown of capitalism, to be replaced by communism. However Marx refused to speculate in detail about the nature of communism, arguing that it would arise through historical processes, and was not the realisation of a pre-determined moral ideal.

1927 GERMANY

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MARTIN HEIDEGGER BEING AND TIME

In Being and Time, Heidegger criticized the abstract and metaphysical character of traditional ways of grasping human existence as rational animal, person, man, soul, spirit, or subject. â—Š The existence we want to analyse is always us, each of us on its own. We should live authentic life, be focused on what death and life means for us.

On the first page of Being and Time, Heidegger describes the project in the following way: "our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the sense of being and to do so concretely." Heidegger claims that traditional ontology has prejudicially overlooked this question, dismissing it as overly general, undefinable, or obvious.

Instead Heidegger proposes to understand being itself, as distinguished from any specific entities (beings).'Being' is not something like a being. Being, Heidegger claims, is "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood."

Heidegger is seeking to identify the criteria or conditions by which any specific entity can show up at all.

If we grasp

Being, we will clarify the meaning of being, or "sense" of being ("Sinn des Seins"), where by "sense" Heidegger means that "in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something."

According to Heidegger, as this sense of being precedes any notions of how or in what manner any particular being or beings exist, it is pre-conceptual, non-propositional, and hence pre-scientific. Thus, in Heidegger's view, fundamental ontology would be an explanation of the understanding preceding any other way of knowing, such as the use of logic, theory, specific ontology or act of reflective thought. At the same time, there is no access to being other than via beings themselves—hence pursuing the question of being inevitably means asking about a being with regard to its being.

Heidegger argues that a true understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) can only proceed by referring to particular beings, and that the best method of pursuing being must inevitably, he says, involve a kind of hermeneutic circle,

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86 that is (as he explains in his critique of prior work in the field of hermeneutics), it must rely upon repetitive yet progressive acts of interpretation. "The methodological sense of phenomenological description is interpretation."

Indeed, Heidegger often seems to hold the largely commonsense view that there are culture-independent causal properties of nature which explain why it is that you can make missiles out of rocks or branches, but not out of air or water.

Dasein is understood by Heidegger to be the condition of possibility for anything like a philosophical anthropology.

Dasein, according to Heidegger, is care.

In the course of his existential analytic, Heidegger argues that Dasein, who finds itself thrown into the world amidst things and with others, is thrown into its possibilities, including the possibility and inevitability of one's own mortality.

Science can tell us both what those causal properties are, and how the underlying causal processes work. Such properties and processes are what Heidegger calls the Real, and he comments: “fact that Reality (intelligibility) is ontologically grounded in the Being of Dasein does not signify that only when Dasein exists and as long as Dasein exists can the Real [e.g., nature as revealed by science] be as that which in itself it is”.

Being and Time investigates the question of Being by asking about the being for whom Being is a question. Heidegger names this being Dasein. Although worlds (networks of involvements, what Heidegger sometimes calls Reality) are culturally relative phenomena, Heidegger occasionally seems to suggest that nature, as it is in itself, is not.

Thus, on the one hand, nature may be discovered as ready-to-hand equipment: the “wood is a forest of timber, the mountain is a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails’ ”. Under these circumstances, nature is revealed in certain culturally specific forms determined by our socially conditioned patterns of skilled practical activity. On the other hand, when nature is discovered as present-at-hand, by say science, its intelligibility has an essentially cross-cultural character.

If the picture just sketched is a productive way to understand Heidegger, then, perhaps surprisingly, his position might best be thought of as a mild kind of scientific realism. For, on this interpretation, one of Dasein's cultural practices, the practice of science, has the special quality of revealing natural entities as they are in themselves, that is, independently of Dasein's culturally conditioned uses and articulations of them.

Crucially, however, this sort of scientific realism maintains ample conceptual room for Sheehan's well-observed point that, for Heidegger, at every stage of his thinking, “there is no ‘is’ to things without a taking-as… no sense that is independent of human being… Before homo sapiens evolved, there was no ‘being’ on earth… because ‘being’ for Heidegger does not mean ‘in existence’ ”.

87 Indeed, Being concerns sense-making (intelligibility), and the different ways in which entities make sense to us, including as present-at-hand, are dependent on the fact that we are Dasein, creatures with a particular mode of Being. So while natural entities do not require the existence of Dasein in order just to occur (in an ordinary, straightforward sense of ‘occur’), they do require Dasein in order to be intelligible at all, including as entities that just occur. Understood properly, then, the following two claims that Heidegger makes are entirely consistent with each other.

First: “Being (not entities) is dependent upon the understanding of Being; that is to say, Reality (not the Real) is dependent upon care”. Secondly: “[O]nly as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible), ‘is there’ Being. When Dasein does not exist, ‘independence’ ‘is’ not either, nor ‘is’ the ‘in-itself’ ”.

1889 — 1976 ∞ was a German philosopher, widely seen as a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition, particularly within the fields of existential phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics. His relationship with Nazism has been a controversial and widely debated subject.

For Heidegger, the things in lived experience always have more to them than what we can see; accordingly, the true nature of being is “withdrawal”. The interplay between the obscured reality of things and their

appearance in what he calls the “clearing” is Heidegger's main theme.

The presence of things for us is not their being, but merely their being interpreted as equipment according to a particular system of meaning and purpose. For instance, when a hammer is efficiently used to knock in nails we cease to be aware of it.

This is termed 'ready to hand', and Heidegger considers it an authentic mode. The 'time' in the title of his best-known work, Being and Time, refers to the way that the given features ('past') are interpreted in the light of their possibilities. Heidegger claimed philosophy and science since ancient Greece had reduced things to their presence, which was a superficial way of understanding them. Modern technology made things mere stockpiles of useful presence.

1967 FRANCE

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JACQUES DERRIDA OF GRAMMATOLOGY

Derrida argues that throughout the Western philosophical tradition, writing has been considered as merely a derivative form of speech, and thus as a "fall" from the "full presence" of speech. In the course of the work he deconstructs this position as it appears in the work of several writers, showing the myriad aporias and ellipses to which this leads them. ◊ Nothing exists outside the text, means that the meaning of words we use depends on their realation to words we don’t use.

Therefore the meaning is always not final, complete. So we should tell more words to make it kind of more complete, but its always something which was not saied, so this process can be repeated and grow neverendingly. People think only in signs.

Derrida calls for a new science of "grammatology" that would relate to such questions in a new way. Of Grammatology introduced many of the concepts in relation to

linguistics and writing. The book starts with a review of Saussure's linguistic structuralism. It analyzes the concept of "sign", which consists of components called signifier (signifiant) and signified (signifié).

Derrida quotes Saussure: “Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs; the second exists for the sole purpose of representing the first.” Critiquing this relationship between speech and writing, Derrida suggests that written symbols are legitimate signifiers on their own—that they should not be considered as secondary or derivative relative to oral speech.

Of Grammatology is divided into two parts. Part I is entitled "Writing before the Letter," and Part II is entitled "Nature, Culture, Writing." Part I describes traditional views of the origin of writing, and explains how these views have subordinated the theory of writing to the theory of speech. Part II uses this explanatory method to

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90 deconstruct various texts in such fields as linguistics (Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics), anthropology (LéviStrauss’s Tristes Tropiques), and philosophy (Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages).

rivative form of language that draws its meaning from speech. The importance of speech as central to the development of language is emphasized by logocentrist theory, but the importance of writing is marginalized.

"Logocentrism" is the attitude that logos (the Greek term for speech, thought, law, or reason) is the central principle of language and philosophy. Logocentrism is the view that speech, and not writing, is central to language. Thus, "grammatology" (a term that Derrida uses to refer to the science of writing) can liberate our ideas of writing from being subordinated to our ideas of speech. Grammatology is a method of investigating the origin of language that enables our concepts of writing to become as comprehensive as our concepts of speech.

A signifier may be interior or exterior to other signifiers, according to their relation to the signified. Logocentrism asserts that speech has a quality of interiority and that writing has a quality of exteriority. However, Derrida argues that the play of difference between speech and writng is also the play of difference between interiority and exteriority. Writing cannot be fully understood if it is viewed merely as an external representation of speech.

According to logocentrist theory, speech is the original signifier of meaning, and the written word is derived from the spoken word. The written word is thus a representation of the spoken word.

Logocentrism asserts that language originates as a process of thought that produces speech, and it asserts that speech produces writing. Logocentrism is promoted by the theory that a linguistic sign consists of a signifier which derives its meaning from a signified idea or concept. Writing is conceptualized as exterior to speech, and speech is conceptualized as exterior to thought. However, if writing is only a representation of speech, then writing is only a "signifier of a signifier." Thus, according to logocentrist theory, writing is merely a de-

The play of difference between interiority and exteriority reveals that writing is both exterior and interior to speech and that speech is both interior and exterior to writing. This play of difference between speech and writing also means that interiority and exteriority are erased. The outside is, and is not, the inside. Outside and inside become inadequate concepts to describe speech or writing.

"Differance" is a term that Derrida uses to describe the origin of presence and absence. Differance is indefinable, and it cannot be explained by the "metaphysics of presence." Thus, differance may refer not only to the state or quality of being deferred, but to the state or quality of being different. Differance may be the condition for that which is deferred,

91 and it may be the condition for that which is different. Differance may be the condition for difference.

According to Derrida, "arche-writing" is a form of language that cannot be conceptualized within the "metaphysics of presence." It is an original form of language that is not derived from speech, and it is unhindered by the difference between speech and writing. It is also a condition for the play of difference between written and nonwritten forms of language.

1930 — 2004 ∞ Jacques Derrida was the founder of “deconstruction,” a way of criticizing not only both literary and philosophical texts but also political institutions. Although Derrida at times expressed regret concerning the fate of the word “deconstruction,” its popularity indicates the wide-ranging influence of his thought, in philosophy, in literary criticism and theory, in art and, in particular, architectural theory, and in political theory.

In 1967 Derrida has his “annus mirabilis,” publishing three books at once: Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology.

In all three, Derrida uses the word “deconstruction” (to which we shall return below) in passing to describe his project. The word catches on immediately and comes to define Derrida's thought. From then on up to the present, the word is bandied about, especially in the Anglophone

world. It comes to be associated with a form of writing and thinking that is illogical and imprecise. It must be noted that Derrida's style of writing contributed not only to his great popularity but also to the great animosity some felt towards him.

His style is frequently more literary than philosophical and therefore more evocative than argumentative.

Certainly, Derrida's style is not traditional. In the same speech from 1980 at the time of him being awarded a doctorate, Derrida tells us that, in the Seventies, he devoted himself to developing a style of writing. Beside critique, Derridean deconstruction consists in an attempt to re-conceive the difference that divides self-reflection (or self-consciousness). But even more than the re-conception of difference, and perhaps more importantly, deconstruction works towards preventing the worst violence.

It attempts to render justice. Indeed, deconstruction is relentless in this pursuit since justice is impossible to achieve.

1981 GERMANY

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JÜRGEN HABERMAS THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION

A two-volume critical study of the theories of rationality that informed the classical sociologies of Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, and neo-Marxist critical theory (esp.

Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno). In TCA we find Habermas's conception of the task of philosophy and its relation to the social sciences. ◊ Individuals in society should have law to change or questioning the traditions. This can be done in public sphere with collective thinking which makes consesus (agreement), cause changes and empowers the society. Society lives from the critique of its own traditions.

TCA defends the emphasis on normativity and the universalist ambitions found in the philosophical tradition.

Philosophers, that is, must cooperate with social scientists if they are to understand normative claims

within the current historical context, the context of a complex, modern society that is characterized by social and systemic modes of integration.

Starting with Marx's historical materialism and a close examination of standard critical explanations, such as the theory of ideology.His criticism of modern societies turns on the explanation of the relationship between two very different theoretical terms: a micro-theory of rationality based on communicative coordination and a macro-theory of the systemic integration of modern societies through such mechanisms as the market. In concrete terms, this means that Habermas develops a two-level social theory that includes an analysis of communicative rationality, the rational potential built into everyday speech, on the one hand; and a theory of modern society and modernization, on the other. On the basis of this theory, Habermas hopes to be able to assess the gains and losses of modernization and

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94 to overcome its one-sided version of rationalization.

Habermas begins this task with a discussion of theories of rationality and offers his own distinctive definition of rationality, one that is epistemic, practical, and intersubjective. For Habermas, rationality consists not so much in the possession of particular knowledge, but rather in “how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge”. Any such account is “pragmatic” because it shares a number of distinctive features with other views that see interpreters as competent and knowledgeable agents.

Most importantly, a pragmatic approach develops an account of practical knowledge in the “performative attitude,” that is, from the point of view of a competent speaker. A theory of rationality thus attempts to reconstruct the practical knowledge necessary for being a knowledgeable social actor among other knowledgeable social actors. What is the “performative attitude” that is to be reconstructed in such a theory? From a social-scientific point of view, language is a medium for coordinating action, although not the only such medium. The fundamental form of coordination through language, according to Habermas, requires speakers to adopt a practical stance oriented toward “reaching understanding,” which he regards as the “inherent telos” of speech. When actors address one another with this sort of practical attitude, they engage in what Habermas calls “communicative action,” which he

distinguishes from strategic forms of social action. Because this distinction plays a fundamental role in TCA, it deserves some attention.

In strategic action, actors are not so much interested in mutual understanding as in achieving the individual goals they each bring to the situation. Actor A, for example, will thus appeal to B's desires and fears so as to motivate the behavior on B's part that is required for A's success. As reasons motivating B's cooperation, B's desires and fears are only contingently related to A's goals.B cooperates with A, in other words, not because B finds A's project inherently interesting or worthy, but because of what B gets out of the bargain: avoiding some threat that A can make or obtaining something A has promised (which may be of inherent interest to B but for A is only a means of motivating B).

In communicative action, or what Habermas later came to call “strong communicative action” , speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual goals on the basis of a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit-worthy.

Whereas strategic action succeeds insofar as the actors achieve their individual goals, communicative action succeeds insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behavior. Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilize the potential for rationality” given with

95 ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.

The unresolved difficulty is that in a complex society, as Habermas asserts, “public opinion does not rule” but rather points administrative power in particular directions; or, as he puts it, it does not “steer” but “countersteers” institutional complexity. That is, citizens do not control social processes; they exercise influence through particular institutionalized mechanisms and channels of communication. born 1929 ∞ He is perhaps best known for his theories on communicative rationality and the public sphere.

Habermas's work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies anddemocracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics.

Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism.

Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests. Habermas is known for his work on the concept of modernity, particularly with respect to the discussions of rationalization originally set forth by Max Weber.

He has been influenced by American

pragmatism, action theory, and evenpoststructuralism. Habermas and Jacques Derrida engaged in a series of disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminating in a mutual understanding and friendship in the late 1990s that lasted until Derrida died in 2004.

They originally came in contact when Habermas invited Derrida to speak at The University of Frankfurt in 1984.

The next year Habermas published "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida" in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity in which he described Derrida's method as being unable to provide a foundation for social critique. Derrida, citing Habermas as an example, remarked that, "those who have accused me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric ... have visibly and carefully avoided reading me".

1843 DENMARK

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SØREN KIERKEGAARD FEAR AND TREMBLING

Dread is an essential and potentially productive element of the human consciousness, and according to the contributors to this volume, a defining characteristic of the present-day condition humaine.

Closely related to anxiety and fear, the concept of dread is associated with the ‘dizziness of freedom’, as proposed by Søren Kierkegaard in 1844. ◊ When we make decisions and choices we are absolutely free to decide and we are conscious about that we can do everything or nothing. Therefore we feel fear, which is dizziness of freedom.

The Epistle of Paul to the Philippians: "continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling." Kierkegaard says, "Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith."

Kierkegaard's early work was written under various pseudonyms which he used

to present distinctive viewpoints and interact with each other in complex dialogue. He assigned pseudonyms to explore particular viewpoints in-depth, which required several books in some instances, while Kierkegaard, openly or under another pseudonym, critiqued that position. He wrote many Upbuilding Discourses under his own name and dedicated them to the "single individual" who might want to discover the meaning of his works. Notably, he wrote: "Science and scholarship want to teach that becoming objective is the way. Christianity teaches that the way is to become subjective, to become a subject."

While scientists can learn about the world by observation, Kierkegaard emphatically denied that observation could reveal the inner workings of the spiritual world.

Some of Kierkegaard's key ideas include the concept of "Truth as Subjectivity", the knight of faith, the recollection and repetition dichotomy, angst, the infinite qualitative distinction, faith as a passion, and the three stages on life's way. Kierkegaard's writings were written in Danish and were initially limited to Scandinavia,

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98 but by the turn of the 20th century, his writings were translated into major European languages, such as French and German. By the mid-20th century, his thought exerted a substantial influence on philosophy, theology, and Western culture.

What is the ethical? Kierkegaard steers the reader to Hegel's book Elements of the Philosophy of Right especially the chapter on "The Good and Conscience" where he writes: "It is the right of the subjective will that it should regard as good what it recognizes as authoritative. It is the individual's right, too, that an act, as outer realization of an end, should be counted right or wrong, good or evil, lawful or unlawful, according to his knowledge of the worth it has when objectively realized.

Right of insight into the good is different from right of insight with regard to action as such. The right of objectivity means that the act must be a change in the actual world, be recognized there, and in general be adequate to what has validity there. Whoso will act in this actual world has thereby submitted to its laws, and recognized the right of objectivity. Similarly in the state, which is the objectivity of the conception of reason, legal responsibility does not adapt itself to what any one person holds to be reasonable or unreasonable. It does not adhere to subjective insight into right or wrong, good or evil, or to the claims which an individual makes for the satisfaction of his conviction. In this objective

field the right of insight is reckoned as insight into what is legal or illegal, or the actual law. It limits itself to its simplest meaning, namely, knowledge of or acquaintance with what is lawful and binding.

Through the publicity of the laws and through general customs the state removes from the right of insight that which is for the subject its formal side.

It removes also the element of chance, which at our present standpoint still clings to it."

Abraham didn't follow this theory.

Kierkegaard says Hegel was wrong because he didn't protest against Abraham as the father of faith and call him a murderer. He had suspended the ethical and failed to follow the universal. "If a person is sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong, to some degree in the right, to some degree in the wrong, who, then, is the one who makes that decision except the person himself, but in the decision may he not again be to some degree in the right and to some degree in the wrong?"

Kierkegaard began his 1843 book Either/ Or with a question: "Are passions, then, the pagans of the soul? Reason alone baptized?" He didn't want to devote himself to Thought or Speculation like Hegel did. Faith, hope, love, peace, patience, joy, self-control, vanity, kindness, humility, courage, cowardliness, pride, deceit, and selfishness. These are the inner passions that Thought knows little about. Hegel begins the process of

99 education with thought but Kierkegaard thinks we could begin with passion, or a balance between the two. He was against endless reflection with no passion involved. But at the same time he did not want to draw more attention to the external display of passion but the internal (hidden) passion of the single individual.

1813 — 1855 ∞ " Faith is the highest passion in a person." Søren Kierkegaard was a profound and prolific writer in the Danish “golden age” of intellectual and artistic activity. His work crosses the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, literary criticism, devotional literature and fiction.

"Knowledge can in part be set aside, and one can then go further in order to collect new; the natural scientist can set aside insects and flowers and then go further, but if the existing person sets aside the decision in existence, it is eo ipso lost, and he is changed." Kierkegaard brought this potent mixture of discourses to bear as social critique and for the purpose of renewing Christian faith within Christendom. At the same time he made many original conceptual contributions to each of the disciplines he employed. He is known as the “father of existentialism”, but at least as important are his critiques of Hegel and of the German romantics, his contributions to the development of modernism, his literary experimentation, his vivid re-presentation

of biblical figures to bring out their modern relevance, his invention of key concepts which have been explored and redeployed by thinkers ever since, his interventions in contemporary Danish church politics, and his fervent attempts to analyse and revitalise Christian faith.

1818 GERMANY

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ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER THE WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION

The keynote of Schopenhauer's philosophy is that the sole essential reality in the universe is the will, and that all visible and tangible phenomena are merely subjective representations of that 'will which is the only thing-initself' that actually exists. ◊ Our view of the world is restricted by limited observation and our limited experience or wisdom. Therefore our view of the world doesn’t contain things I haven’ t seen due to limited observation and things I haven’ t experienced. So we consider borders of our field of vision as borders of the world (but in reality its much wider or maybe without borders).

The greatest value of knowledge is that it can be communicated and retained.

This makes it inestimably important for practice. Rational or abstract knowledge is that knowledge which is peculiar to the reason as distinguished from the understanding. The use of reason is that it substitutes abstract concepts for ideas of perception, and adopts

them as the guide of action.

The truth about man is that he is not a pure knowing subject, not a winged cherub without a material body, contemplating the world from without. For he is himself rooted in that world. That is to say, he finds himself in the world as an individual whose knowledge, which is the essential basis of the whole world as idea, is yet ever communicated through the medium of the body, whose sensations are the starting-point of the understanding of that world. His body is for him an idea like every other idea, an object among objects. He only knows its actions as he knows the changes in all other objects, and but for one aid to his understanding of himself he would find this idea and object as strange and incomprehensible as all others.

That aid is will, which alone furnishes the key to the riddle of himself, solves the problem of his own existence and reveals to him the inner structure and significance of his being, his action and his

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102 movements. The body is the immediate object of will; it may be called the objectivity of will. Every true act of will is also instantly a visible act of the body, and every impression on the body is also at once an impression on the will. When it is opposed to the will it is called pain, and when consonant with the will, pleasure.

The essential identity of body and will is shown by the fact that every violent movement of the will--that is to say, every emotion--directly agitates the body and interferes with its vital functions. So we may legitimately say: "My body is the objectivity of my will. " Theworld is my idea' is a truth valid for every living creature, though only man can consciously contemplate it. In doing so he attains philosophical wisdom.

No truth is more absolutely certain than that all that exists for knowledge, and, therefore, this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver--in a word, idea. The world is idea. This truth is by no means new. It lay by implication in the reflections of Descartes; but Berkeley first distinctly enunciated it, while Kant erred by ignoring it. So ancient is it that it was the fundamental principle of the Indian Vedanta, as Sir William Jones points out. In one aspect, the world is idea; in the other aspect the world is will.

That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject; and for this subject all exists. But the world as idea consists of two essential and inseparable halves. One half is the object, whose from consists of time and space, and, through

these, of multiplicity; but the other half is the subject, lying not in space and time, for it subsists whole and undivided in every reflecting being. Thus, any single individual endowed with the faculty of perception of the object constitutes the whole world of idea as completely as the millions in existence; but let this single individual vanish, and the whole world as idea would disappear. Each of these halves possesses meaning and existence only in and through the other, appearing with and vanishing with it. Where the object begins the subject ends.

One of Kant's great merits is that he discovered that the essential and universal forms of all objects--space, time, causality--lie a priori in our consciousness, for they may be discovered and fully known from a consideration of the subject, without any knowledge of the object. Ideas of perception are distinct from abstract ideas. The former comprehend the whole world of experience; the latter are concepts, and are possessed by man alone amongst all creatures on earth; and the capacity for these, distinguishing him from the lower animals, is called reason.

1788 — 1860 ∞ Often considered to be a thoroughgoing pessimist, Schopenhauer in fact advocated ways — via artistic, moral and ascetic forms of awareness — to overcome a frustration-filled and fundamentally painful human condition. Since his death in 1860, his philosophy has had a special attraction for those who wonder about life's meaning, along

103 with those engaged in music, literature, and the visual arts.

Among 19th century philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer was among the first to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place.

Inspired by Plato and Kant, both of whom regarded the world as being more amenable to reason, Schopenhauer developed their philosophies into an instinct-recognizing and ultimately ascetic outlook, emphasizing that in the face of a world filled with endless strife, we ought to minimize our natural desires for the sake of achieving a more tranquil frame of mind and a disposition towards universal beneficence. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four distinct aspects of experience in the phenomenal world; consequently, he has been influential in the history of phenomenology. Four classes of explanation fall under the principle’s rubric.

Hence, four classes of objects occur always and already only in relation to a knowing subject, according to a correlative capacity within the subject: A) Becoming: Only with the combination of time and space does perceptual actuality become possible for a subject, allowing for ideas of perception, and this provides the ground of becoming to judgments.

B) Knowing: This class of objects subsumes all judgments, or abstract

concepts, which a subject knows through conceptual, discursive reason rooted in the ground of knowing.

The other three classes of objects are immediate representations, while this class is always and already composed of representations of representations.

Therefore, the truth-value of concepts abstracted from any of the other three classes of objects is grounded in referring to something outside the concept.

C) Being: a priori (prior to experience), forms of pure sensibility—they make sensations possible for a subject. Time is one dimensional and purely successive; each moment determines the following moment; in space, any position is determined only in its relations to all other positions in a finite, hence, closed system. Thus, intuitions of time and space provide the grounds of being that make arithmetical and geometrical judgments possible, which are also valid for experience.

D) Willing: It is possible for a subject of knowing to know himself directly as ‘will.’ Action then, finds its root in the law of motivation, the ground of acting, which is causality, but seen from the inside. In other words, not only does a subject know his body as an object of outer sense, in space, but also in an inner sense, in time alone; a subject has self-consciousness in addition to knowing his body as an idea of perception.

COLOPHON Hyper—kalokagathia

by Tereza Rullerová © 2014 concept, editing, makeup and graphic design: Tereza Rullerová photography and postproduction: The Rodina, www.therodina.com typeface: Brown Pro, Helvetica, Lyno pigments and glitters: Geotech printed in Deventer (NL) 1st edition — 5 copies numbered and signed All rights reserved.

Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, The Netherlands November 2014 Project was kindly supported with special effect pigments and glitters by Geotech, Haarlem, The Netherlands.

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