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Essays on Philosophy

Category: Dialectics

April 10, 2016

Laclau Notes Session 4: Contingency in Theory

1. Back to the Ancients

     The most ferocious attack on Rhetorical Theory came from Plato.  He claimed that rhetoric had no epistemological value at all. Rhetoric is concerned with the discursive movement of deliberation and not the question answer and two term choices which dialectic employs. In the Gorgias, Platon condemns rhetoric because it offers no coherent account of its own status as a form of knowledge, and because it is not possible to delineate a class of objects with which rhetoric is concerned.  Rhetoric is nomadic; it has no specificity and no domicile.  It is to be considered defective and incomplete by a Platonist because it offers a false ontology; it deals with the appearance of truth and good not the definition of the truth or the good.  It offers no epistemological certainty or foundation.  Above all, Plato judged rhetoric to be an amoral instrument of practical politics, unlike ontology and epistemology of course.  A paradox emerges from this account: though rhetoric is tangible and deals with the tangible its arguments cannot stand up to critical scrutiny. 

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April 6, 2016

Laclau Notes Session 3

Review of the History of Rhetoric in Relation to Philosophy

1. The Ancients-Form and Matter     

     For the Greeks, what is sayable of an object is universal, but we must ask, what is the “it” which receives the predications?  For the Greeks all predicables are universals; they make up the form or the rational and knowable part of the entity of the object.  The “it,” the irrational and unknowable individuation that remains when you take away all predicables, is called matter. The Greek thought of the universe as a scale.  At the bottom was the unnameable primary matter hyle.  The first principle of organization was the mineral world where form was imprinted on this primary matter.  The mineral world was as matter to the vegetable world, the vegetable to the animal, the animal world to man, and on top the Gods were pure form and stood as matter in relation to nothing.  

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March 27, 2016

Laclau Seminar Notes Session 2: Floating Signifiers and Heterogeneity

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  • The Moment of Hegemony

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This is a simplified depiction of the moment of hegemony.  The X represents those on top of the frontier.  The antagonistic frontier can be said to be power, the X is sometimes a government.  It can also be the ruling class within a society.  The O’s below the frontier are the oppositional desires or the demands of those who are below the line.  The oval which is raised above the Os is the empty or hegemonic signifier, the arrow shows its origin from a particular desire or demand. These particular demands are arranged in an equivalential series by the emergence of the hegemonic signifier, the universalization or emptying of the hegemonic signifier is represented by the lines stretching from the oval to the chain of Os. 

This is a depiction of a situation in which those who are below the frontier of power have a series of demands which are unmet, and though their demands are different from one another, those who have these differing demands come to see them as equivalent and form a group under the articulation of one particular demand which comes to stand for opposition to X.  For instance, if many people have needs which are unmet in present day America, such as the need for affordable housing and health care, the desire to have more efficient garbage pickup in their neighborhood, the desire for a humane foreign policy and so on, they may end up campaigning for these diverse goals through the mediation of a group which articulates a different demand.  If these demands remain latent in the population, at any given moment if another group launches a large scale protest those with latent demands may join it even though it does not articulate their particular concern because it articulates unmet demand. 

     The X is in fact a group of people.  In order for them to maintain their position above the frontier, they must restrict the formation of such an equivalential logic.  If those who live under power can form a large enough equivalential chain they can overthrow those who are not meeting their demands.  There are two means by which the X will seek to keep the equivalential chain from forming, by articulating a logic of difference, or by constructing an alternative logic of equivalence. 

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March 19, 2016

Critical Notes on Ernesto Laclau’s Seminar on Rhetoric and Hegemony

Session 1: Introduction to Laclau’s Theory of Hegemony

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1. Illusions of Modern Bourgeois Philosophy

     At the beginning of the 20th century three new developments in philosophy were taking place.  Each was based on a strategy which its proponents felt could grant immediate access to the thing in itself. The three strategies were analytic philosophy, phenomenology and structuralism.   All of their key words (referent, phenomenon and sign) played the role of what Levinas called a “neutralizing third term” they appeared to efface themselves in the process of bringing forth the unmediated truth of the world.  As time passed, these third terms became increasingly visible to practitioners of the strategies which they founded.  In the work of the late Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida we see a realization that the founding notions of 20th century philosophy did not grant the immediacy that they had promised.

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March 14, 2016

Notes on the Linguistics of Pecheux

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Notes are based on :

Michel Pecheux LANGUAGE, SEMANTICS AND IDEOLOGY  © Francois Maspero 1975 English translation © Harban, Nagpal 1982

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March 6, 2016

Plato and Ideology

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The most significant lesson that I draw from The Republic is that so long as there is luxury–i.e. class rule–there will be deception and tyranny.  The ‘city of pigs’ that Plato rejects is the crucial point in the story for me. I read Plato’s utopian writing as more of an exercise in following ideas to their conclusions than as manual for statesmen. What Plato does in this work is he attempts to rationalize privilege and he fails at it.  The book demonstrates the fact that privilege cannot be justified without using mass deception combined with censorship and the state sanctioned indoctrination of children.  The friends assembled to discuss justice do not reject the ‘city of pigs’ because it cannot be the just city, but because they (being from the privileged class in Greek society) were accustomed to a standard of living that involved luxury goods.  If they are privileged and they are the only ones in their society who have access to luxury goods, then to say that the city must have luxury goods is as much as to say that the city must have privilege. 

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March 3, 2016

My “Cosmopolitanism”

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It is becoming increasingly difficult to find any work that is not collaboration with evil.  Workfare and food insecurity, the threat of becoming “surplus humanity,” of slums, work camps and prisons, battlefields; these things try to intimidate us into a collaboration with evil, but they can never succeed. It can never be said that we had to–there’s always that moment of heightened contradiction, of a decision for or against open collaboration. In that moment, it is equally possible to recognize the contradiction and repudiate all collaboration. Evil can never enjoy full and total monopoly because the earth itself defies it.

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March 1, 2016

Drama and Rhetoric

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Some people believe that unity of action in drama refers to the presence of one all-encompassing unity, a single self-consistent action that is the subject of the drama. How one interprets this element of drama depends on a reading of the word action, a delimitation of its meaning. Action is ambiguous between the deed and the event. Action can mean a single deed done by a subject; however, it can also mean a combat of armed soldiers, in other words, it can also describe a grand and multi-subjective action. This is an action undertaken by groups of people. No single subjectivity can be held responsible for it. If we reflect for a moment, all action in drama is of this nature; there is tension between multiple characters, it is not the self-consistent act of one subject, but rather the actions of multiple subjects that give rise to the continuing action of drama.

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February 21, 2016

The Courage of Truth

Courage

Who among us has the courage to utter the unspeakable? This type of courage is what is most necessary in free human beings.  The person who possesses this type of courage is the only human being who can claim to be honest.  Knowing what any group defines as the unspeakable is a major key to that group’s motives and nature.  We should always ask ourselves, what is it not possible to articulate within their way of speaking?

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It is often regarded as cruelty to perform the act of speaking the unspeakable.  However this is one case where cruelty should have  positive connotations because cruelty contains an element of fearlessness which is foregrounded in this act.  Thus, there is the English expression regarding the cruelty of some truths.  The articulation of the unspeakable is often the result of a pitiless evaluation, a ruthless evaluation, an evaluation that does not judge in terms of good and evil.  This should be contrasted with the Kantian critique, the critique that justifies its object,  whose axiom is that one should begin by believing  in that which one criticizes. 

Consider a person who walks into a shopping mall and says, “the necessity of work is a myth that is used to enslave us” or the scene in I Heart Hukabees where the fireman character states that Jesus can in fact be mad at someone who believes in him, that faith is not enough.  Another example would be the case of Dr. Wilhelm Reich, and the persecution that he endured for bringing out the connections between politics and sexuality.  What do all of these people have in common? They all have the courage to articulate that which a certain situation is configured to hide. As Hegel put it, “The courage of truth…is the first condition of philosophising.”

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February 20, 2016

Notes on Deleuze ‘The Image of Thought’

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Preliminaries

*Critique requires close attention to the distribution of the empirical/transcendental-de facto/de jure–fact/principle–accident/essence in theoretical systems.

*Dogmatic/Moral/Orthodox image of thought exists as a set of postulates–propositional themes which remain implicit and are understood pre-philosophically

*A Philosophy without presuppositions (‘thought without image’) is the philosophy which undertakes a radical critique of the postulates/the image of thought as non-philosophical. Image is non-philosophical because philosophy is supposed to break with the doxa. 

*”The form of recognition has never sanctioned anything but the recognizable and the recognized; form will never inspire anything but conformities”

*This is an idealization of orthodoxy–instead of a break with the doxa this is a rationalization that universalizes them–a break with the doxic content but retention of the form.

*We will “remain slaves so long as we do not control the problems themselves, so long as we do not possess a right to the problems, to a participation in and management of the problems”

Where philosophy begins–problem of presupposition, problem of beginning

Philosophy≠Science–science has only objective presuppositions eliminable with axiomatic rigor; philosophy has objective and subjective presuppositions.

Philosophical Trick–reject objective presuppositions on condition of assuming subjective ones

Objective Presupposition Subjective Presupposition
Explicit Implicit
In Concepts In Opinions (Doxa)
Public Private
Pre-conceptual/ Non-conceptual knowledge–‘Everybody knows…’

Eudoxus vs. Epistemon–Simpleton and pedant, both have presuppositions, Philosophy sides with Eudoxus and his subjective presuppositions. But philosophy ignores…

Underground Man/Untimely/Idiot–person who does not share the implicit presupposition–the only one without prejudices.

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