"Metaphysical revelations begin only when one's superficial equilibrium starts to totter..."
- E.M. Cioran
"...the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery."
- Thomas Ligotti
"When early youth had passed, he left
His cold fireside and alienated home
To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands."
- Alastor, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Hegel once told us that the "aim of knowledge is to divest the objective world of its strangeness and to make us more at home in it." But what if the opposite were true that the real aim of knowledge is to invest the objective world with abject strangeness and to alter our mode within it as pure homelessness?
Homeless voids roam the empty abyss of this universe licking up light from the swirls of galactic clusters surging round the infinite drift of dust and stars; black holes like the gods of some delusionary dream shuffle among the broken quasars seeking out the dark filaments of superfluous suns, each cannibalizing the light of a thousand civilizations on the edge of cosmic nothingness.
We all live like haunted specters on a dead planet full of bones and ashes, each wandering in the erotic tribulation of a nervous thought that can never find its way back home; guided by the Lamentation of a melancholic despair we drift lethargically toward the interminable finitude that is. Renouncing all hope of ever regaining that frozen paradise of fire and ice from which we fell into this funerial world we wander among its dark chemistry seeking out a vulcan science to explain the hidden order of its black life and the broken symmetry of its amor fati. Exiled from our true home we wander forever between desolate voids like misguided children haunting a deranged landscape of jungle and mountain and snowbound chaos: seeking in each other's gaze the nacreous light of that original corruption which first gave us this blasted world; and, like fallen angels who have lost their wings, we have fallen into each other's dream hoping to awaken that darkening spark that once lit the cosmic firestorm of all being.
"Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal..."
- H.P. Lovecraft, The Tomb
Behind our eyes are those of the tiger, wolf, dolphin, elephant, and mustang and all those animals and insects of the terrestial dream; the shifting gazes of a million life-forms spread their light among the dark contours of this sensible self. The mutable surface of skin hides the innumerable macrophages who defend the black inner realms like the militia of a defensive army, engulfing the cellular debris and pathogens of a terrible desire; and 
We have entered a new stage, forsaking the drift of our former philosophic and religious tribulations we shall set off into the hinterlands of cosmic loneliness, mapping the voids between the stars, wandering among the dark recesses of that nihilistic light at the center of this vast Necropolis of the Unreal; and, within this vastation we shall explore the dreams, nightmares, and speculative worlds where the unreal and Real cross each other's paths in the great Void. Guided by a sense of aphoristic play our minds will cross the boundaries of the groundless ground of this interminable Night School of Being seeking out the weird realism of a dark materialist view of existence that resides just below our forlorness; like a fractal thought our minds shift up and down the axis of a hyperdimensional spectrum in search of strange days seeking out kindred spectres to share our visions of a dark vitalism at the heart of this blackest nightmare. Like shamans - breaking free of the mental barriers that have encased us all in a prison house of delusion and abjectness, which for millennia has closed off thought from those terrible truths surrounding us in an uncanny brew of dark religion and political tyranny - we drift among the flotsam and jetsam of ungrounded objects; and, holding on to the radical reason of a new enlightenment to guide us, we shall boldly go where only artists or scientists dare to roam -testing the limits of being and the void; challenging the dark edges of this cosmic catastrophe we will ride the black horses of philosophical nihilism beyond nihilism where the transcendental real is by definition an impossible possible: that which resists words and meanings, but is the source of the scientist's desire to pursue his quest for ontic-epistemic knowledge and the poet's desire to conceive artifacts so well-wrought and convincing that they bring forth from the void those terrible objects from which all splendorous horrors spring!
( Read more... )
It was nice to take some time off, but now it's time to put my head to the grind and do a little catch up on reading and writing. Here is my short list of works to work through:
Graham Harman:
1. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making
2. The Quadruple Project
Levi R. Bryant
The Democracy of Objects: now online!
Eugene Thacker
In the Dust of the Planet: Horror of Philosophy: vol. 1
Iain Hamilton Grant, Jeremy Dunham, Sean Watson
Idealism: The History of a Philosophy
I'd ordered each of these before I went for my trip for the summer, and found them all stacked up at the post office in their brown wrapped amazon boxing waiting for me. So many good books and thoughts to ponder. Time to get reading....
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."
- Mark Twain
"The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead
of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."
- Samuel Johnson
Where to begin is not obvious. One is reminded of that old Saxon poem The Wanderer of the "fare paths of exile." And so I, often full of that desperate melancholy, home bereft, far from the objects of the heart, have tumbled with the earth's dark loam, enfolded by its summer-breath, lifted my eyes toward the boundless ocean's unyielding spray. Like some solitary creature of habit I took leave of my solitude and sought out my kinsmen: my children, cousins, and near relatives among the stones of this strange land with a bundle of well-worn books.
Steinbeck in his short travelogue Travels with Charley tells us that "A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike." Or as Lao Tzu: "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." And, those steps, how they take us into strange worlds, into realms of the real that recede from us even as we move toward them. That's the beauty of Objects: you can never completely know them, they always shift and shuffle just beyond our thoughts, like imps laughing at us from afar. One can enter a forest, see a tall tree suddenly rise up like an old man, a whiff of moss flowing down in a gray moss beard with horned knobby eyes, full of brown light dancing in the late afternoon sun. A movement just beyond, a deer springing from a ledge, a great wrack of antlers weaving back and forth, the pounding hooves, the snorting in the undergrowth, sound and motion, light and darkness, the mind overseeing and overhearing the life of objects that it can never fully comprehend, yet begins to discover in its journeys new forms to take hold of that uncanny familiarity that is its own dark emminence.
It's vacation time... I'll be making the rounds to visit children, friends, going fishing, etc. :)
cya in about two or three weeks ... have fun all!
* Addendum: well my vacation is a little longer.... decided to take a short sabbatical with an old fishing buddy for the season, so may or may not be posting till the end of summer. I'll be doing a lot of reading and thinking through some issues concerning the current state of philosophical speculation.
So as always, enjoy the ride! I'll be back, strong as ever... enjoy what I've got on the site! There will be more down the pipe... :)
- Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann in a little critique of the latter work of Maturana on autopoiesis and its notion that circularity is an objective fact, argues that Maturana leaves out the problem of self-referentiality altogether. Luhmann also tells us that we must be wary of using such analogies borrowed from biological sciences and casting them across other disciplines such as sociology or psychology. For Luhmann what is important in any system are "general patterns which can just be described as making a distinction and crossing the boundary of the distinction [which] enables us to ask questions about society as a self-observing system[s]". [1] This reflexive interference or distinction made by any system goes beyond just human consciousness or even some notion of a transcendental subject, yet as he emphasizes there are systems that use recursive practices that make distinctions using memory functions to guide its self-reflexive modality. For him there are also "formal similarities between psychic systems and social systems, and this is for me important in trying to write a theory, a social theory, of self-describing systems, in particular of society" (TDO, 13)
As Luhmann puts it in the Kantian mode humans never see reality as it is in-itself, we always distort it through the lens of perception. Luhmann puts all this into perspective telling us that it can be rephrased. One possible path to take is the analytical path of seeing this as a problem of language, of oppositional thinking within the binary structure of linguistic terms themselves. As he states it you could formulate the problems saying that "reality emerges if you have inconsistency in your operations; language opposes language, somebody says "yes," another says "no," or I think something which is uncomfortable given my memory, and then you have to find the pattern of resolution." This would be the path of an Analytical philosopher in the sense as that as he says reality "is then the acceptance of solutions for inconsistency problems..." (TDO, 14).
Later on in the interview he tells us that "we need an evolutionary explanation of how systems survive to the extent that they can learn to handle the inside/outside difference within the system, within the context of their own operation. They can never operate outside of the system." Luhmann is trying to infuse theory with a sense of temporality, of time as the distinction in the self-reflexive movement of any system: "I would rather think that a system is always, in its operation, beyond any possible cognition, and it has to follow up its own activity, to look at it in retrospect, to make sense out of what has already happened, to make sense out of what was already produced as a difference between system and environment" (TOD, 22). He goes on to say,
"So first the system produces a difference of system and environment, and then it learns to control its own body and not the environment to make a difference in the system. So cognition then becomes a secondary achievement in a sense, tied to a specific operation which, I think, is that of making a distinction and indicating one side and not the other. It's an explosion of possibilities, if you always have the whole world present in your distinctions."
In another essay Luhmann shows us that the concept of autopoiesis is a grand tautology (i.e., the unity of the system is produced by the system itself), but the methodological task that needs to be done is to deconstruct this tautology. He goes on to tell us that such a methodology must do this "empirically identifying the operations which produce and reproduce the unity of the system." [2] To get there he asks us if the older classical issues surrounding the problem of reference (as a condition of meaning and truth) is itself a meaningful question in regards to the distinctions we make about subject and object, observer/observed, inside/outside, etc... Instead he tells us that we need to transform that question into how we distinguish between "self-reference and external reference".
In his communications theory he states flatly that as a system it depends upon "introducing the difference between system and environment into the system" as the internal split within the system itself that allows it to make the distinction to begin its operative procedures to begin with (OC, 1420). He defines communication as "a kind of autopoetic network of operations which continually organizes what we seek, the coincidence of self-reference (utterance) and external reference (information)" (OC, 1424). He details this out saying,
"Communication comes about by splitting reality through a highly artificial distinction between utterance and information, both taken as contingent events within an ongoing process that recursively uses the results of previous steps and anticipates further ones" (OC, 1424).
This distinction between utterance/information or self-reference/external reference is central to this dualistic process that is both contingent and open to a temporal forms of difference. The most difficult question he tells us is "how to define the operation that differentiates the system and organizes the difference between system and environment while maintaining reciprocity between dependence and independence" (OC, 1426).
Autopoietic systems unlike the input/output models of open systems rely on the concept of structural coupling: it renounces the idea of an overarching causality, but retains the idea of highly selective connections between systems and environments (OC, 1432). Structural coupling is the concept he uses to define and organize the difference between system and environment while maintaining reciprocity between dependence and independence. In some ways autopoiesis is the way things are, their mode of being in the world, and the way they overcome entropy. It is the self-perpetuating system that performs operational closure continuously, selecting, condensing, confirming, changing, or forgetting structures that help it continue its on autopoiesis. As he states it this will not prevent its ultimate destruction, but if "a system can organize structural changes, it can increase its adaptive capacity, but also its maladaption" (OC, 1440). In a final quip he tells us that autopoietic systems are "systems organizing dynamic stability" (OC, 1441).
I will need to read more of Luhmann in the future, yet I do see some interesting features that could be used to move beyond his epistemological mixture of empirical and naturalist leanings and toward an Object-Oriented mode of thought. Even my own personal involvement in those vast Service-Oriented Architectures of network systems I deal with on a daily basis use these concepts of structural coupling/decoupling of objects (autopoietic systems). One must be careful to cross the boundary between one's involvement with Object-Oriented Programming and Object-Oriented Philosophy, yet there are certain ties that resonate - at least for me, on a personal level. His idea of communication as "a kind of autopoetic network of operations which continually organizes what we seek, the coincidence of self-reference (utterance) and external reference (information)" (OC, 1424) is empowering. The sorts of operations that are performed daily in enterprise systems among disparate and often conflictual systems that speak procedural languages of differing types and kinds plays into this for me. I think of one example as the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), a sort of mediator object among disparate systems that allows these systems to communicate with each other indirectly through a mediator object (i.e., a vicar). Within the ESB the translation and transformation of differing operations, languages, and objects takes place according to rules that are guided by the relations among the disparate systems themselves. It's a sort of black box within which operations can be performed that allow systems that otherwise would never come into contact to make contact with each other without the need of direct communication. I'll not go into the intricacies of enterprise development but only use this as an example to show how systems are always negotiating boundaries between the utterance/information in an autopoietic or object based system. Yet, one does not want to equalize these two approaches as if they were the same. They are not. I do see some conflicts, yet also some strange resemblances in the two theories; yet, I need a better understanding of Luhmann's ideas and his empirical and epistemological position before making any final judgements.
I think Graham Harman's Prince of Networks and Ian Bogost's work on Unit Operations extends much of this in a profound way by developing an Object-Oriented mode that allows for reference and withdrawel, or structural coupling/decoupling in Luhmann's terms. Levi R. Bryant is working with much of this territory as well, and I'm sure Democracy of Objects should open up some interesting territory on this line of thought. Fascinating stuff that I'll need to work through in a more lucid fashion to see how all the terminological and philosophical implications play out.
1. Theory of a Different Order: A Conversation with Katherine Hayles and Niklas Luhmann (TDO) Author(s): Katherine Hayles, Niklas Luhmann, William Rasch, Eva Knodt, Cary Wolfe Source: Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II (Autumn, 1995), pp. 7-36 Published by: University of Minnesota Press
2. Operational Closure and Structural Coupling: The Differentiation of the Legal System, by Niklas Luhmann (OC) (Cardoza Law Review Vol. 13:1419 1991 -1192)
- Levi R. Bryant, Luhmann's Antagonistic Commons
Levi makes an interesting observation in his notes on Luhmann's Antagonistic Commons in reference to mass media production as a vehicle for producing difference through oppositional modes of communication. His main thrust is that our "weird sort of Common" ("The commons," for Hardt and Negri "is the incarnation, the production, and the liberation of the multitude" (Empire 303, my emphasis)) is an "antagonistic unity where this world is able to reproduce itself as a unity not through the production of consensus, but through a production of antagonism or difference."
Niklaus Luhmann in The Reality of Mass Media comes to a point where he wonders how communication must be, in "order that it can not only reproduce itself but also take on cognitive functions and separate reproductive or informational components" (96). [1] He then goes on to qualify this - and, I quote at length: "The answer is that communication only comes about at all by being able to distinguish utterance and information in its self-observation (in understanding). Without this distinction, communication would collapse, and participants would have to rely on perceiving something which they would only be able to describe as behavior. The difference of utterance and information corresponds precisely with the requirement of not making the progress of communication to communication dependent upon information being complete and relevant. And only because this primary, constitutive difference exists can communication code itself in a binary form ... and in this way feel its way around the environment with a distinction for which there is no correlate whatever in the environment itself. Without this distinction, which has been entered into its own operation, the system would not be capable of constituting any recognizable identities or developing any memory. Nor could it evolve, or build up its own complexity, or test the possibilities for structuration positively/negatively and thus meet the minimum condition for the continuation of its own autopoiesis. Society as we know it would be impossible" (96-97).
What seems significant in the above remarks is that a system constitutes its difference through inserting a distinction within its own operation between utterance and information, and it is out of this distinction that a system constitutes its self-production and reproduction. It is not the reproduction of information itself that produces difference, it is the distinction made between the utterance and information in the very production process itself that produces difference and makes the continuance of the autopoietic system possible. As Luhmann said in the passage above, without "this distinction, which has been entered into its own operation, the system would not be capable of constituting any recognizable identities or developing any memory." It is the fine line or distinction between utterance and information that is the differance that makes a differance.
1. Niklaus Luhman, The Reality of Mass Media (1996 Westdeutscher Verlag/ Polity Press 2000 )
- Brian Cantwell Smith
An interesting quote from Brian Cantwell Smith, author of a powerful book on ontology, On the Origin of Objects. His work shows how a commitment to epistemological naturalism is still a part of the correlationist program, yet his ideas on irreductionism are to me viable and empowering. Below he comes to the conclusion that scientific laws reduce things to their features as part of "epistemic apparatus involved in the conduct of science as an intellectual activity (on a par with mathematical models); they are not ontological commitments of the theory as a whole." It's obvious then that as long as science reduces things just to their features (qualities) observable from the outside through an epistemological approach that it will leave out those aspects of objects that elude the nets of the reasoning mind; yet, as heuristic devices in the pursuit of Science such distortions if seen for what they are do contain value as long as they do not pretend to displace ontology:"As a way to muster support for simply availing ourselves of 'common-sense ontology', Dennett says 'Look, why not just assume sub-atomic particles and tables and mountains and galaxies, in the way that science does?' This leads me to mention a radical thesis that I hold, although I can't give it much defence here: namely, that science may not be committed to objects at all. Consider: an amoeba splits. Biology doesn't care about the individuals in the situation: whether one amoeba died and two new ones were born; or whether we now have a spatial distribution of unitary amoeba-ness; or whether one of the two emerging amoebae is the original one, and the other one is new; or any other possibility. Another example: in California I own an ancient redwood tree that has clumps of very substantial shoots (some as much as 50 feet high) sprouting around its base. How many redwood trees are there? Science doesn't know, and science doesn't care. Similar conclusions hold for fog, for the units of selection, for a myriad other examples. What this leads me to believe is that scientific laws (like animals) may in fact deal only in features; and that the objects we think of as constitutive of science may merely be simplifying epistemic devices that allow humans to calculate. Objects in science, that is, are in my view properly understood as part of the epistemic apparatus involved in the conduct of science as an intellectual activity (on a par with mathematical models); they are not ontological commitments of the theory as a whole."
- From: Brian Cantwell Smith - Reply to Dennett - in: Hugh Clapin (ed.) - Philosophy of mental representation - Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2002, pp. 241-242 (notes omitted).
Temporality is at the heart of the Object-Oriented philosophical project. If we reverse engineer ontology we get a metontology: a metaphysics of existence within which one can raise questions of ethics. What Heidegger once called a fundamental ontology, which he divided into two parts: the analytic of Dasein, and the analytic of temporalitas. [5] As Harman tells us "If developed, it would be nothing less than a thorough ontology of the metabole, the Umschlag or turnabout between a being's infrastructural depth and its sparkling exterior contours. This must be done concretely, and not just once-for-all as Heidegger does it. Unless and until this happens, most of his specific terms will remain nothing more than distracting literary figures for a single recurring dualism of light and shadow" (TB: v). [1]
One of the things that Heidegger performed, and the French deconstructionists tried to do after him, was to destroy (deconstruct) ontology from within, and by that I mean that the idea of presence as our sole concept of Being's habitation needed to be displaced, deconstructed, destroyed: the issue of Time as kairos instead of chronos (chronological time) - the threefold of past, present, future replaced the concept of presence. As Harman relates it, Heidegger wanted to destroy ontology as it had come down to us from the Greeks and "expose its inner structural skeleton" (HE, 59). Heidegger knew that this would not be an easy task, and that it would probably take countless generations of philosophers to perform such a feat; yet, with Being and Time he felt that he'd performed a new beginning for ontology by setting just such a task. To begin such a task we must remember that Being as conceived by Heidegger in his concept of Dasein is a 'who' not a 'what', and that it is an event, action, or performance that cannot be described from some outside vantage point(i.e., Being or beings cannot be reduced to its/their features, properties, or qualities as viewed from the outside by either a Transcendental observer or a discrete entity or consciousness ). Beings or objects are always already absorbed in the worldhood of the world: enmeshed in its infrastructure or environment, woven together and "fused within a colossal web of meaning in which everything refers to everything else" (HE, 63). What is being devalued in this ontological perspective is knowledge and consciousness as a special view onto this realm within which we are all, along with other objects, entities, or things enmeshed like bugs in a venus fly-trap.
[Addendum: I am in the midst of revising this essay. Below is but a subsection that will be removed into another blog post as a separate issue. I am in the midst of rethinking many issues surrounding the traditions of ontology that emerged out of its modern manifestations within the work of Brenatano, Pierce, and Frege and their many progeny within both the Analytic and Continental camps. So much to do. So little time. But somehow in my mind all of this will be connected back to the underlying currents that face opposing camps within both the Analytic and Continenatl camps. Not an easy task, and one that might take a long while... a lifetime perhaps. Yet, for the moment, one must define and delimit the territory, understand the questions, raise the issues in a form that will allow the opposing views to be displayed in a way that sets them to work on the major problems facing us in regards to this strange speculative philosophy I've found myself to be both an observer and participant.]
1. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects (TB) ( 1999 UMI Company)
2. Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained (Open Court: Caruse Publishing Company 2007)
3. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, editors (re.press Melbourne 2011)
4. Iain Hamilton Grant, Schellingianism & Postmodernity: Towards a Materialist Naturphilosophie (Philosophy and Culture )
5. Jean Grondin, Sources of Hermenutics (State University of New York 1995)
"Sex is the natural in man."
- Camille Paglia
"Since homo sapiens has prowled the earth, nature has adapted to new shadows."
- Nick Land 
Land sees both of these thinkers as precursors to a philosophy of difference. In his view "the difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is not simply that between thoughts of indifference and difference. It is more a question of phases in the emergent thinking of unilateral or non-reciprocal difference, which departs from the bilateral difference synonymous with ontology" (101). This difference is immanent in its relation between the organic and the inorganic in that "the difference between the two is wholly immanent to the inorganic as primary term" (101). In his view of the libidinal economy of energy he sees the idea of the recurrence of the same as the "impact of undifferentiable zero; the abortion of transcendence" (101). Nietzsche's movement is toward a unilateral, materialist, or genealogical interpretation of difference.
Instead of the Ubermensch (Overman) Land tells us "humanity cannot be exacerbated, but only aborted" (103). He goes on to say: "It is first necessary to excavate the embryonic anthropoid beast at the root of man, in order to re-open the intensive series in which it is embedded" (103). Between Schopenhauer's metaphysical pessimism ('European Buddhism') and Nietzsche's Dionysian pessimism ('exultation of dissolution') we get the motor of nihilism: Christianity - "the great zero, and the impersonal generator of nature and culture in their incompossible consistency" (103-104).
Christian history had one goal, and one goal only: the return to God. With the advent of nihilism that goal was lost, nullified, brought down to the level of shit and waste. All those posthumanists or transhumanists who seek to transcend the human in some Overman, a restoration of teleology, are all marked by that nihilism of production and productivity of the Puritan smile: an ascetic grimace that aligns both capital and industry in a pact to institute a permanent war through peace. This is religions revenge: to move into the zero world immanently and emerge as the terminal phase of the human project toward God as Man; the zero-function. The acquisition of the material forces of the earth as a project in transcendence of the human through a teleological affirmation of Zero. How to get there these posthumanists ask? Land tells us: War. But War is Peace as Nietzche affirms: "You should love peace as a means to new wars. And the short peace more than the long one./I do not advise you to work, rather to struggle [N II 312]." As Land tells it these "are the most profound words in the history of military thought; the libidinal comprehension of peace as a unilateral differentiation from war" (106). After a lengthy discourse on the dark demarcations of war he shows us along with Freud that war is the free-flow fundamental "violence of desire." "Civilization (with its attendant militarism) is war subject to repression, and the energy of war is Thanatos; base hydraulics" (107).
History as the study of atrocity is for the genealogist to gaze into the "buried horror" of the laboratory of human cultures. Land then tells us of those scholars of this strange history, saying,
"Academic prose has the remarkable capacity to plunge one into a sublime dystopian nightmare: is anything this appalling really possible? one asks. What happened to these people? Is it part of some elaborate joke perhaps? Or do they just hate books? ... One only has to read genuine scholarship to be wracked by ardent dreams of incinerated cities." (110)
1. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation (Routledge 1992 )
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I used to be a pragmatist. Famous last words. Well in my younger years I used to read the logical-postivists and Analytical philosophers as well. Continental philosophy at that time seemed foreign to my ways of thinking, and seemed to be leading into a realm of pure language, what has now been termed 'the linguistic turn'. Sometimes I go back and think about this part of my life. A guest on a previous post asked if I had any thoughts on Rorty's post-Quine Kuhn/Davidson mashup? Below is a little rendition of past thinking that I have now moved beyond, but fondly go back and remember as the portal onto a younger self struggling with philosophy. No pragmatist will dispute that there is something beyond our physical being that people have termed 'reality'. What we are saying is that, as humans, we are not separated from that reality in any objective sense of the word, that we are already so connected and part of this continuum that the idea of 'Objective truth' would be to try to distance and separate ourselves from something that we are already so interwoven with that it would be impossible.
The idea of 'Representation' goes back to Kant. "Representation" means that the belief concerning the existence or the attributes of a "thing" in the world is a taking-inward of a substituent of the "thing", of the eidos, the idea, the ousia, the hyle or the sensual components of the thing or object into consciousness. Some part, some constituent or some feature of the object as substitute or "envoy" will be present in or to the subject's consciousness. In the traditional representational model the taking-inward happens through the sense organs and mostly by seeing, where seeing is always "impregnated" by cognition. To say it "in" the ocular metaphor, spontaneity and receptivity mediate the "world" to the "mental eye". What the mental "eye" "sees" is not the world or the thing in itself, but a result of an interaction. The structure and the capacities of the mediators determine what can be "seen" and so the object (or thing) as "seen" is constituted by the capabilities of the subject and by "something" out there. The main point of the transcendental turn was that the origin of knowledge is neither a sensorial taking inward of the outside world, nor an a priori rational construction of it, but a result of the interaction between object and subject, between world and the inseparable receptivity and spontaneity that happens in the gap between the two.
As I understand it Rorty argues, since Plato, philosophers have understood our primary relationship with the world as one of representation. We attempt to represent the world as accurately as we can; the pursuit of truth is based on the hope that we might represent the World As It Really Is, the world in-itself for-us. Representation, Rorty claimed in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is a worn-out metaphor, a philosophical position that leads to endless squabbles: if we believe we have represented the world accurately, we fall victim to a blinkered and arrogant dogmatism; the other extreme, the fear that we may never overcome the gap between our subjective minds and the objective world, leads us to epistemological skepticism—the idea that we can never really know anything. Rorty suggests that we replace the idea of representations of the world with the idea of descriptions of the world designed to help us achieve particular, finite purposes. Rather than ask if we are in touch with the way the world really is, Rorty asks if our descriptions and our vocabularies help us complete our projects. This is the pragamatist path...
Rorty sees this break with the idea that reality can be 'represented' as abandoning the correspondence 'theory of truth', which means that we no longer need to insist that truth, like reality is one and seamless. As he states it: "If a true belief is simply the sort of belief which surpasses the competition as a rule for sucessful future action, then there may be no need to reconcile all one's beliefs with all one's other beliefs - no need to attempt to see reality steadily and as a whole (totality, totalist vision) (p. 270)."
For antirepresentationalism, the stance of Rorty, the "causal interaction" of the subject with the ("outside") world, the "coping with the world" is a broader term than the "receptivity and spontaneity" of Kantian thinkers. Antirepresentationalism does not try to see the world as it is, it does not investigate knowledge or accurate representation of reality, since in every statement about the world there is an inseparable "mixture" and "cohabitation" of the subject and the object. That means if we think that we know something about the world, we can never exactly make a distinction, what part of it comes from us and what part comes from the "outside world". Consequently, it makes no sense to make investigations about the epistemological presuppositions of the possibility of knowledge, it makes no sense to research "the idea of knowledge of, or successful linguistic reference to, a reality underlying the appearances that nature presents." Since in the model of Rorty there is no distinction between the objects as they appear and as they are in themselves, it makes no sense in his view to think substantially about the things and consequently Rorty argues for an anti-essential view of the world.
Also antirepresentationalists like Davidson and Rorty tell us we do not need mediation between "minds and the world", between beliefs, sentences and the world. Rorty thinks with Davidson that mind and human being are continuous with the world, we could even say, both philosophers ontologize the interwovenness (the impossible distinction) of scheme and content. Rorty follows from the impossibility of separation of scheme and content, that "philosophically" it makes absolutely no sense to make further investigations of the correctness of our knowledge, of the representative character of our cognitive structure. That is why Rorty rejects the separationist representational model of knowledge and proposes to think of knowledge as a continuous interaction between human beings and the outside world, as a "matter of acquiring habits of actions for coping with reality".
When I was younger I was an avid reader of Analytic and Pragmatist philosophy, but now I have problems with both... but, that is another story.
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earth_wizard- S.C. Hickman
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