another one not read in ages

Kafka, The Trial. Spring 1986.

Oh man.

speaking of favorite Platonic dialogues

Mine’s the Meno, and no changing it.

Sorry to sound so Philosophy 101 with my choice, but most of what you need to know about Plato is nicely compressed in it, and it’s also pretty funny. (Though other dialogues are even funnier, especially some of the minor ones.)

In fact, “favorite Platonic dialogue” is probably the philosophical equivalent of zodiac signs.

You have the Timaeus people, who are generally either hipster vitalists or colorful antiquarians.

You have plenty of Republic people, and they could be of all different types because there’s so much in it.

You have the Sophist people, who tend to be grave ontologists with beards.

What other types are there?

Symposium people. Right. It may even be my second favorite. I’m a Meno with Symposium rising.

some favorite things that I haven’t read in at least 20 years, for whatever reason

*The Odyssey

*The Tempest

*Don Quixote

*Human, All Too Human

*War and Peace

Plato’s Ion had been on the list until last Christmas. Before then I hadn’t even looked at it since 1985. No, wait… it’s not one of my favorite dialogues, and this is a list of things I especially like.

The Tempest would be the quickest reread of all these, and I have the complete Shakespeare within 10 seconds’ walk of where I’m sitting.

But Don Quixote is the one that sounds most appealing at the moment. Enough time has passed that I’d probably have forgotten many of the incidents by now. Come to think of it, I did plan to reread Quixote about three years ago, picked it out of the library, read about 30 pages and then was sidetracked by distractions, and in those 30 pages most of it seemed unfamiliar. It’s really very funny, in case you’ve never read it.

I’ve spoken on this blog before about War and Peace. I loved every minute of it. If you had asked me if I think of myself as a Tolstoy person or a Dostoevsky person, well, every self-respecting intellectual person should say Dostoevsky.

But I’m sorry to say that, proud as I would be to claim citizenship in Dostoevsky’s universe, he always leaves me a touch disappointed. I’m not saying you should agree with me, I’m just saying he never quite closes the deal for me as a reader. Always a magnificent atmosphere, flashes of amazing dialogue, and of course wonderfully bizarre characters. But things are always tied together less effectively than I want them to be, and I’m afraid D.’s spiritual reflections often leave me yawning.

But as for Tolstoy (at least for this reader) he always seems to deliver as promised. I would never have predicted this on an a priori basis, but it’s my honest conclusion from experience.

McLuhan conference deadline

April 11, 2011 if you want to submit a paper.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE HERE.

headline of the day

Possible meth lab at Georgetown dorm

Yes, that’s obviously the best place to put a meth lab: right in the middle of a university dormitory filled with hundreds of students who have no stake in keeping the information to themselves. Should have thought of that business idea myself.

People usually put these labs in lonely, abandoned farmhouses for a reason, you know.

the real mystery in Meillassoux

As I’m finishing up this book, I think the biggest mystery in Meillassoux (not the point I disagree with most, which is his defense of the strength of the correlationist argument) is why he has any concept of laws at all.

Hyper-chaos, of course, means that anything can happen at any time without reason. The downfall of the principle of sufficient reason should mean that everything is autonomous and disconnected, not linked in any way with anything else that happens.

But that’s not what Meillassoux says. It is only laws that have no sufficient reason. It is at the level of worlds that the transfinite considerations of Cantor make it impossible to call things probable or improbable.

In the intra-worldly sphere, laws do exist. It is true that these laws can change at any moment for no reason, but they are laws nonetheless, however transient and unreliable. If I pull my keys from my pocket and they turn into a dove and fly from the room, this is certainly possible for Meillassoux. But the more I look at his writings, this sort of ‘chaotic’ event can’t happen directly. What must happen is that the laws of nature governing such things must change– which can happen, of course.

What difference does this make? The difference this makes is that Meillassoux’s hyper-contingency, contrary to what I used to think, doesn’t seem to to operate in intra-worldly settings. Within a world, it is perfectly possible for two things to be connected by a law. If Meillassoux adds that the law is “not necessary,” all that really means is that it might change: i.e., it’s not necessarily eternal. But it remains necessary for as long as it is not abolished.

In short, there is a dualism in Meillassoux’s thought between time and any given instant. The instant is governed by laws, and thus by sufficient reason, and every absence (such as a distant star or the inside of a refrigerator when no one is looking) is merely a lacuna: one could perceive these things if only one were there.

All of the philosophical problems arise, in Meillassoux’s view, when we start looking at time. It is time that can bring about any chaotic change. It is time that, by raising the possibility of an ancestral realm prior to thought itself, makes the initial challenge to the thought-world correlate.

But it would be easy to imagine another Meillassoux, one who simply dispensed with “laws” altogether. They don’t actually do much work in his philosophy other than to split the intraworldly realm (where laws are operative) from the level of changes in world (which amount to a sudden transformation of laws without reason). But it remains unclear why there should be a difference between the worldly and the intraworldly in the first place.

In any case, it’s been a great pleasure to spend more time with all of Meillassoux’s published writings. The metaphor he uses that really struck me this time (I’m not sure why it left little impression before) is that his is a “non-Euclidean philosophy”. Just as Lobachevski created a new geometry by showing (in spite of his initial hopes) that Euclid’s parallel postulate can be cancelled and a consistent geometry will still result, Meillassoux hopes to show that a consistent philosophy can result from showing that the fact that the laws of nature can change suddenly for no reason does not entail that they must change frequently.

It’s not a philosophy I’ll be able to accept, but it’s one that a lot more people might conceivably start to accept than is currently the case. Is it possible to imagine a Meillassouxian School that takes this fork in the road? I think it is, and in fact I still expect such a School to emerge.

One last point… There’s an interesting moment in the interview when he completely rejects my claim that he resembles the German Idealists (despite his admitted admiration for them). As Meillassoux observes, he actually offers a proof in After Finitude for the existence of things-in-themselves.

But does he, really? I say no.

What Meillassoux claims to prove is that the things-in-themselves would exist even if all humans were extinguished. Thus, the things can exist without us.

However, in order for something to be a thing-in-itself, it is not enough simply that it exists when we aren’t looking at it. The real question is: what is it when we are looking at it? And for Meillassoux, the answer is clear: the things themselves can be exhaustively known by thought, in absolute fashion. There are no secret, unfathomable depths to the things; philosophy is a philosophy of immanence.

My claim is that no “philosophy of immanence” can also be a philosophy of things-in-themselves. If you think the things are exhaustible by knowledge, you are simply defining the things as having a character that is able to appear exhaustively in the phenomenal sphere. The world is filled with images, and some of them happen to be true and others happen to be false. I suspect that Bergson in Matter and Memory is the source of this idea of Meillassoux’s; he has told me that Bergson is one of his hidden sources, and simply from reading ‘Subtraction and Contraction’ you can tell how important Matter and Memory was to him.

But in speculative realist terms, this is also one of those points that divides the group in half. For Brassier also, there is no difference in kind between thoughts and things. If something is known scientifically, it is known in adequate fashion (with perhaps some provisos added for the ever uncompleted labor of science). Here too, the world is made up of images: good scientific images and bad folk images. It’s a completely different theory from Meillassoux, but they are both confident in the ability of human thought to plumb the depths of things. Compare my position and Grant’s with the other two here, and you will see that we say the opposite.

I’m not sure when Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making will be published, but I would guess Fall 2011. The long appendix of excerpts from L’Inexistence divine will be a nice bonus for readers of that book.

“Quit Your Day Job”

Just got back to the second half of Simmons. I have nothing personally against James Dolan, but still…

“Q: So I was at a music festival this weekend and one of the bands that was there was JD & The Straight Shot, led by none other than Knicks owner James Dolan. My brother and I were trying to come up with the best heckle for the situation. Mine was “Quit your day job.” Perhaps you have something better?
— Neil, Austin”

and one reader mail to Simmons

This is in reference to James Dolan, the owner of the New York Knicks (basketball) and New York Rangers (hockey). My laugh of the morning.

“1. James Dolan is a screw-up who has only gotten by in life because of his father’s success.
2. He has a history with drugs and alcohol.
3. He was forced to take over for his father in a position that he was clearly not qualified for.
4. He owns a team called the Rangers that he has run into the ground.
5. Millions of people hate him.
6. He thinks he’s smarter than he is.

My question: How long until he is president and sells the Rangers?
— Rich, Philadelphia”

more Simmons on LeBron

I think Simmons is right again. Many of us were too hard on LeBron, myself included:

“That was the real issue last summer: We wanted LeBron to be who we wanted him to be. And you know what he was? A 25-year-old guy who wanted to live in Miami, play with his buddies, get some help and find the easiest way possible to win a championship. He knew Cleveland fans would feel betrayed, but his advisors convinced him that if he gave $3 million in proceeds from his contrived TV special to charity, it would soften the blow. They were wrong. We took it personally. And as a basketball fan, it continues to be hard for me to accept that someone who had a chance to be the GOAT took the easy way out. And yet … it’s only hard because LeBron didn’t act like the LeBron I wanted him to be.”