Bell on bifurcations

Jeffrey Bell at Aberrant Monism has a good post on an important topic: INTELLECTUAL BIFURCATIONS.

Recently I made a post on that familiar novelty toy, the Magic 8 Ball. In a way the 8 Ball gives us ethical or decisional bifurcations. With the exception of a few wishy-washy middle responses and the famous “try again later,” you’re essentially getting yes/no answers for anything you ask the 8 Ball.

Given the randomness of the responses, the answers of the 8 Ball are almost less important than the questions it ask. Real life is like this to some extent as well. If you’re entertaining the idea of doing something or other, there’s already the chance that you might do it. As I said in my own example, I will never find myself asking the 8 Ball whether to go deer hunting or not. Deer hunting as a weekend hobby simply never occurs to me as even remotely worth considering. And neither does “Should I buy cocaine with my latest paycheck?”, and only rarely does “Should I go to a movie tonight?” (Since I rarely do that anymore.)

To get more directly back to the point, the exact content of Leibniz’s or Hume’s positions on the continuous and the discrete almost matter less than the fact that the dispute is occurring at all. Alternative histories of philosophy are imaginable in which different major debates dominate the agenda. And this is why I think the usual alternative between viewing philosophy as a matter of great figures or as the content of arguments may be a false distinction. What is more interesting are philosophical objects, by which I mean the underlying problems that can be expressed in opposite forms in different people and in different arguments. These objects seem to me to be the true protagonists of philosophy, even if specific people are needed to bring them to life. (Deleuze often sees onto this already, though his method would be more powerful if he had also tackled the non-“minority” thinkers and done Aristotle and Hegel along with Epicurus and Bergson.)

Bell refers to a book talking about the early modern birth of a strife between the continuous and the discrete. Fair enough, but I think that’s pretty clearly already the difference between Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics. The Physics is an often Bergson-like defense of continua, while the Metaphysics is of course about a world of individual chunks. It is a tension that Aristotle resolves only by apportioning the two sides of the paradox to different portions of the world.