Levi on the diagrams
November 12, 2009
It’s a bit like a film preview; I want people to obtain and read the book, after all. But the basic concepts behind the diagrams are fairly simple. In any set of four terms, there are six possible pairings if you don’t allow a term to pair with itself, and ten if you do. I realized some months ago that there is no reason to exclude the self-pairings; they do occur in reality, and do need to be accounted for.
In late 2007, I was still just barely accepting 3 permutations, and in 2008/early 2009 extended it to 4. But there really are 10. They come in 3 basic families:
4 tensions (already explained in my recent writings as time, space, essence, and eidos)
3 of what I now call “radiations” (emanation, contraction, and duplicity which is both emanation and contraction at once)
3 of what I now call “junctions”, because I couldn’t think of a better term to encompass conjunctions, disjunctions, and mediations all at once
*The tensions are object/quality relations: 2 are found in Husserl, 1 in Heidegger, and 1 in Leibniz/Zubiri.
*The radiations all involve multiple qualities emanated by or compressed into the same object
*The junctions all involve the two different types of objects, of which there are three possibilities:
real object / real object (a disjunction or mutual withdrawal for all the “occasionalist” reasons I’ve developed)
real object / sensual object (this is what experience is– I as a real object face-to-face, sincerely, with sensual objects: not with qualities or bundles of qualities, but with objects)
sensual object / sensual object… the relation here is merely one of contiguity. We contend with multiple sensual objects simultaneously, not with just one. The two objects do not touch directly, but are mediated by my own simultaneous concern with both.
The danger with diagrammatic systems of this sort, when new, is that you’re always within a few inches of looking like a goof or a crank cooking up homebrewed philosophical systems in the basements and attics of the internet. What you have to do to avoid that impression is keep on reminding the reader of the absolutely compelling considerations that lead gradually to a model of this sort. It is the (for now) end result of many years of reflection, and I’m already becoming more comfortable playing with it and getting new results out of it.
The periodic table in chemistry was extremely valuable partly because it left holes that told people where to look for new discoveries. The technique has worked for me to some extent as well, and the last couple of years have been fruitful ones.
Satisfied yet, Levi? I’ll send you all ten to help set the stage for Atlanta discussions, but I’m not going to print the other 9 diagrams before the book appears.
