In the philosophical tradition, there is a hidden but important debate between the advocates of a static metaphysics -- forms are more real than forces -- and a dynamic metaphysics -- forces are more real than forms. It's been said -- correctly, I think -- that one of Plato's accomplishments was to create the appearance/reality distinction in order to resolve the debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides. In those terms, it might said that Nietzsche's move is to reverse this priority. So there are "ousiological" metaphysicians and "metabological" metaphysicians -- metaphysicians of substance and metaphysicians of change.
Lately I've been trying to articulate why I've retreated from my enthusiasm for Nietzsche and for Deleuze, and I now think I'd want to put it this way: forms and forces are phenomenologically equiprimordial. And my quarrel with Nietzsche, but especially with Deleuze, is that they are no more sensitive to this experiential truth than are the philosophers in the tradition from Parmenides to Hegel which they reject.
Monday, August 11, 2008
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At first blush, I want to agree that "forms and forces are equiprimordial" (which I take to mean equally primordial, or equally sharing an origin). However, as soon as we begin to talk "phenomenologically" I begin to experience these terms, forms and forces, as belonging to a realm of "abstractions" (or?) of a conceptual/linguistic and very specific cultural sort.
When I seek anything phenomenolgically primordial am I not seeking the primal simplicity of lived and felt (somatic) experience? Sometimes it *feels* that I have access to some such primordial "depths" or "roots," but my conceptual mind keeps reminding me that once I'd become a zoon logon, a speaking animal, even my "depths" and "roots" are colored by--at least--my enculturation, language, etc.
What would be a phenomenology of form and force? How do we experience these primordially in this moment?
I think a consequence of your claim here is that modern physics would be a metaphysics...Newton,Einstein,Bohr, and all of the others were doing metaphysics instead of something different...Interpreting nature instead of something different.
--Yusef
Yusef, is that a response to what I said or to what River said?
It's a response to Carl.
I don't know. I think there's a difference between a physical theory in which forces play a basic conceptual role, and a metaphysical account . . . what Whitehead did with quantum mechanics is different, somehow, from what Bohr and Schrodinger did.
But I don't know how to express this difference.
By Newton,a force is, F=MA, where M is mass,A is acceleration. Acceleration is the rate of the rate of change.
Force is an expression of change.
Of this as force, I don't think there's anything resembling it in all of philosophy before Deleuze. In many ways--which I would commit to explore further if I weren't a sluggard--Kant appears to fortify philosophy AGAINST the implications of this. So, I 100% agree with you that there is a difference between a physical theory in which forces play a basic conceptual role, and a metaphysical account--until Deleuze.
I feel Deleuze's greatness is in part his making philosophy permeable to Newton.
A problem so far in the reception of Deleuze and what he's saying is a certain tendency to place it within the romantic reaction.(Wild talk of "becomings",etc.) If I am correct, he belongs to something prior to both the historical Enlightenment AND the romantic reaction.
--Yusef
A= the rate of change of the rate of change.
-Yusef
Does phenomenology, as you speak of it in your post, Carl, seek to inform our conceptuality with something pre-conceptual? Or non-conceptual (in the strict sense of "cognition")?
[In the strict sense of cognition, cognition does not include feelings, emotions, and other somatic-mental activity, but is essentially reducible and
transmissible as symbolic and linguistic communication. I therefore don't like the tradition of cognitive science and philosophy of mind which polices the strict use of "cognition" in this tradition. I don't like it because I think it is false, unreal, and untrue --and therefore terribly misleading about the nature of mind and cognition.]
More on the strict sense of "cognition":
If I recall correctly, there exists in contemporary philosophy a "strict sense of the term 'cognition'" and a certain tendency to police philosphical discourse so as to insure that a less strict sense of the term doesn't get much foothold. The strict sense defines cognition such that "the cognitive" is held discreet from desiring (as feeling and intention), feeling, and what is brodly and loosely named "affect," generally. Strict cognition is also held apart from perception, insofar as perception is conceived as having a "non-(strict)cognitive component or aspect. At bottom, "strict cognition" is all that which is readily mediated by symbol and langauge while all which is not so readily mediated by symbol and language is concieved as "non-cognitive".
(This is a summary of an article I read years ago, as I remember it, but I may not remember and summarize it with precise correctness.)
I remember bringing this topic up in an internet forum and saying that I didn't like the strict sense of cognition and the policing of it in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, psychology, and so forth. I remember in that conversation that I was persuaded to allow that the strict sense may at times have valid uses, and so I pragmatically agreed not to reverse the policing attitude.
But just a while ago I had the thought that my last post was importantly incomplete because I left out a useful analogy. The analogy is this: We have here a ordinary standard red clay brick, of the usual dimensions. It has volume, weight and mass. We do not conflate volume with mass or weight. We recognize the usefulness of each of these measurements and descriptions of this object. And, importantly, these three aspects of this brick may be understood as dependently interpenetrating. The weight of the brick is an aspect of its volume and mass.
Similarly, in discussing cognition--, desire, affect, feeling, emotion, and numerous other essentially somatic aspects are included, overlapping, and sharing various particular dependencies. It would not be difficult to make the case--and I think the phenomenologists have made it well--that there can be no cognition without desire. This is related to what the phenomenologists call "intentionality" -- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-intentionality/ .
Cognition in the strict sense is no less an expression of desire than (in the strict sense) any of the presumably "non-cognitive" somatic-effective phenomena, e.g., racing heart, release of certain chemicals in the body and brain which effect feeling/mood/etc....
The point of my saying all of this is not to dissolve every useful distiction into a muddy mess but to provide another pragmatically useful starting place in an investigation. I think it is possible and useful to sometimes let "the body" have the lead in expressing itself to the philospher, especilly in its desire to be known somatically. The philosopher can benefit from listening directly to the voice of her soma.
Incidentally, the concept of force is crucial to Leibniz as well as to Newton. I don't know anything about the difference in their concepts of force. But I do know that Leibniz argues that physics needs the concept of force but is unable to explain forces in materialistic terms, which is why physics requires metaphysics.
Phenomenology is a technique for showing how discursive intelligibility rests on something other than itself, namely, corporeal intelligibility. One could also say that phenomenology is the consciousness of the non-identity between conceptuality and non-conceptuality.
Husserl once said, in response to a question about the relation between phenomenology and Bergsonism, "we are the true Bergsonians" (1911). I mention this because Bergson also advanced the thesis that concepts falsify or distort the texture of lived experience.
The question that divides Adorno from Bergson, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty is whether the dependence of condeptuality on non-conceptuality can be exhibited by breaking out of conceptuality and getting back to something else -- the life-world, the lived body, etc. -- or whether that "break-out attempt" is impossible -- in which case the limits of conceptuality can only be demarcated from within, as Adorno tries to do, and also I would say, Wittgenstein and Cavell do.
I don't know quite what to say about Deleuze . . . my prejudice is that whereas Adorno is undermining the Kantian account of concepts from within, Deleuze has gone ahead and invented an entirely new theory of concepts and a new way of using them.
Either Deleuze is already exploring what Adorno regarded as a far-off and almost unreachable cognitive utopia, or Deleuze has succumbed to the same fantasy as Husserl and Bergson.
I don't know which of those views I accept at present -- though I'm more inclined to the latter, and that accounts for some of my intellectual distance from Yusef that I've traversed over the past year or so.
Having said that: here I'm only speaking within a space shared by dialectical and phenomenological thinkers. If the discourse shifts from that terrain to psychology or neuroscience, then things become very different!
I didn't know this about Leibniz, so thank you. However, unless we willingly lend authority to an argument ad vericundium, I would like to see reasons why F=MA can't be considered a materialist explanation of force.
As you know, science commonly deals in abstract entities--space, time, energy. To say this--is it to concede science to idealism or metaphysics? I don't think so. All matter is convertible into energy...Wouldn't it be peculiar to think I'm doing metaphysics when I switch on a light?
(A lightbulb goes off in my head!)
--Yusef
In constructing a scientific theory, we work over the material of experience in order to introduce idealizations, quantification, experimental manipulations, conceptual simplifications, etc. All this is exactly what gives science its remarkable explanatory power over other methods of fixing belief.
The metaphysical move or moment is made when the result of abstraction is taken as more fundamentally real than experience itself, and that abstraction is regarded as a tracing, or a representation, of how the world really is.
It's the moment of taking leave from the ground of lived experience that I'm trying to explore here.
Another and maybe better way of putting what I'm trying to get at here is that scientific theories are restricted -- each theory applies to a range of phenomena -- and that restriction itself occurs through idealization, through the invention and use of specialized equipment, etc. Whereas metaphysics are claims about totality, about the whole.
I want to side with the critique of metaphysics which is suspicious about the desire for the totality, or for totalization. One way of doing that is to take metaphysical doctrines as attempts to present an intellectual view of things as being more ordered and more comprehensible than lived experience presents them as being.
"The metaphysical move or moment is made when the result of abstraction is taken as more fundamentally real than experience itself, and that abstraction is regarded as a tracing, or a representation, of how the world really is."
If the first part of your statement above, about the metaphysical move, was accepted, I think Deleuze would qualify as a metaphysician. However, I definitely don't think Deleuze would want to regard abstraction as a tracing or a representation, so I'm not sure how this places him.
--Yusef
I think this is an excellent way of carving up the issue. Insofar as Nietzsche did metaphysics (i.e. when he wasn't heaping scorn upon it) he certainly fell on the heraclitan side of the coin.
Would you be sympathetic to a reading of your attitude towards "totalizing" metaphysics as basically Kantian? That is to say, as an elucidation of the basic, primordial forms of experience, and a critique of those who want to reduce those categories into something transcendentally real, beyond experience and thought?
Dear Carl Sachs,
You are such a tease. You get us all excited that you are back blogging and commenting.....then you disappear.
I asked around at Pannikens and Willis, but no one knows your name....
where are you?
WW
WW,
I do need to get back to blogging here, it's true.
No one at the Pannikin would remember me, and Dennis doesn't have the best memory. I have to remind me who I am when I stroll in there once a year. I was a regular customer a long, long time ago. But at Warwick's, down along Girard and closer to Prospect, there's a gentlemen named John Hughes who usually works there. He would certainly remember me.
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