Excerpt from a text on the epistemes. Wordcount says near 40,000 words, or 70 pages. Really it’s just a brief digression in the text. It was a headache chopping this into five posts with all the size and font changes in the interlinear notes. Topics include:
Pierce’s semiotics
Harman’s quaternary logic
Schelling’s tautegory and system of transcendental idealism
Grothendieck’s motivic cohomology and theory of groups
Heyting algebra
Plotinian, Pseudo-Dionysian, and Eriugenean metaphysics
Krohn-Rhodes holonomy decomposition theory
Lacanian psychoanalysis
M. Ponty’s model of the entrelacs
Kunze’s metalepsis and zairja
Mochizuki’s Inter-Universal Teichmuller Theory and Frobenioid category
And much more!
We have here a dunamis, in other words, enacted between the ‘primal wisdom’ or uranfanglich Sophe that formulates the finitizing non-identity of will turned toward itself into identity, (the identity of the human ego) [Schelling, in: “Philosophical Investigations Into the Essence of Human Freedom.” “In the divine understanding itself, however, as in primeval wisdom in which God realizes himself ideally or as an archetype (urbildlich),” … “only through division, regulation of forces and exclusion of the darkening or hindering anarchy”] and the Lossagung, [the originary ‘Loss’ of mortality] that differentiates this identity from that toward which it might be projected outwardly, in the service of whichever aim, be it good or evil,- though ultimately toward that which it might be projected infinitely, namely God, deriving for us an infinite differentiation irreducible to any series of synthetic dialectical exchanges, whose force still lies trapped, beyond the lesser differentiation of the Kantian schematism, in the ‘Unconscious of the World’. [Ibid. “The arousal of self-will occurs only so that love in man may find a material or opposition in which it may realize itself. To the extent that the selfhood is the principle of evil in its breaking away (Lossagung), the ground does indeed arouse the possible principle of evil, yet not evil itself and not for the sake of evil.”] In the Grudrib des Ganzen, Schelling tells us that, in order to emerge as real from out of the depth of an infinite productive activity, (namely, this differentiation of absolute Negativity) Being must be inhibited, must contract (tzimtzum) against the apeiron or Ein-sof, that is, a God that transcends Being itself. A truly presuppositionless philosophy, a ‘primary philosophy’, must begin in such an infinite differentiation of pure Negativity, for the way is closed via the apprehension of pure Being by infinite reflection or eidesis, [Kierkegaard’s dismantling of the Hegelian dialectic through an ironic submission of the dialectic to the dialectic reveals the impossible or ‘ineffable’ Being whose Loss no power of the human intellect can account for and recover through either the philosophical synthesis of logos or the monistic synthesis of the subject viz. the ‘modality of the knower’ prompted by the apophatic or objective negation of the known. Or. as Eriugena tells us, following Dionysus and Plotinus: “Gregory of Nyssa and Eriugena both affirm that no created essence can define itself and the limits of its own nature by itself, even endowed with reason and intellect as man is.”] as it is equally closed to us via an infinite abstraction of the Fichtean ego in pure thought or noesis, * for the faculty of Reason is not independent from language, [Hamann’s primary thesis in his Metacritique of Reason is just that: language and reason are inseparably bound up in one symbolic activity characterizing the general phenomenon of human intelligence.] such that no object of noesis might be obtained that is not limited to the symbolic registers instantiated by language, ie. no infinitely abstracted recursion from thought’s ideatum,- contrary to the hope of Cassirer’s transcendental humanism, namely the Darstellungsfunktion, by which all previously “outdated” categories of philosophy (viz. “substance”, “Being”, etc.) had been supplanted in the codification of modern science and the ‘epistemological revolution’, that is, the transition from all conceptualizations of “Being” necessarily grounded in a metaphysics to a purely lexical conceptualization of “order”, (A transition that has brought about the extinguishment of Schelling’s intellectual intuition, to be sure, and therefor philosophia proper, inasmuch as the Platonic category of “Being” simply grounds the mode of reflection in the un-representable silence of what is absent, for “Being” is absent. Cassirer, doubly mistaken, reads the account of Being as simply an archaic symbolic form utilized by philosophers of the past in the attempt to consolidate the ‘physiognomic’ flux of mythical consciousness and relocate the ground of meaning in something outside the circulus of the reflective subject, in some externality, while the Socratic-Platonic dialectic, in nearly an opposite reading, serves to abrupt the reflective subject in his conformation to the organic order of things, preventing any Grund from being obtained in the very substantive realm or “Being” implicated by subjectivity, recommitting philosophy to the very circulus by which Particular and Universal, Singularity and Continuum, Truth and Knowledge, Being and nullity, question and answer, etc. must eternally trade places in sharing the burden of man’s immanent nothingness or ‘oudeis’.) by the Leibinizian ‘syntax’ of a “language of Nature” for which all distinctions of representation can be reduced to mathematical forms and thereby divorced from the vicious circulus of reflection. [Freedom, the ‘first principle’, according to Schelling, of a new philosophy for which the question of the Good is primary to any ontology, that is, primary to any question of the True, is a principle shielded within the dark prematutinal longing of Sehnsucht whose sovereign movement, as objectless poros, instigating the birth of the drive toward knowledge which proves itself coincident with the more general drive to give birth itself, that is, the procreative drive or flight of Eros within the heart of all organic life in its emergence from unthinking matter to an ascendant bent toward the Good,- toward that in whose enunciation the object of thought rests upon the very bulwark to the fury of Nature in which God’s polynomous nullity calls to the nullified anonymity of man, and that in which the aporia of language makes itself known in the attempt to name the very nameless longing to sequester from the chain of causes some initiatory motive, to conquer the elements and bring into existence, to give form, and to create, which it itself is,- always exceeds its productive results, remaining forever unbound to them and unrestricted by them,- a principle, in Spinozist vocabulary, whose ideatum always exceeds its idea, and whose activity or conatus can therefor never be subsumed by that which it engenders, leaving open no possibility of fatally abstracting the former from the later. As Plato-Socrates explains this aporia in the Phaedrus, for philosophy to love and desire Wisdom, it must know that Wisdom is worthy of being loved and desired, that it is Good; yet, in order to recognize Wisdom as Good, philosophy must already know what the Good is, that is, philosophy must already be wise. Totality would exert itself precisely by the subsumption, to the domain of the True, of the excess or ‘remainder’ latent in all questioning of the incomprehensible ground of the first principle, a principle upon which all discourses are founded that cannot itself be founded, and leaves therefor all discourse of the Good separated from the former domain by an ‘unsurpassable gulf’. The irremediable distance of the Good provokes the errant muse of that third member of the Platonic triad to wander the unclaimed space between these two domains, namely the space of the Beautiful, which Kant understood in terms of the aesthetic faculty and its access to the appercepted unity of the supersensible ground of Nature, (Noting Donelan, in “Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic: Fichte, Schiller, Schelling, and the Systemprogramm Fragment”, we see that the German idealists, seeking to overcome the Kantian system and following Hegel’s lead, saw in this unity of the supersensible ground of Nature the basis of a new self-postulating ethics reliant upon a ‘first idea’, namely the presentation of the self to itself in absolute freedom,- the self, not as an already existent subjectivity attempting to contemplate itself, but the self presented to itself imaginatively, originating in no act of a creative subject, but originating in itself as the very act, by which such self-consciousness might precede all other deductions of a priori knowledge, constituting an intuition of the aesthetic faculty satisfying, in a reversal of terms in the series of conceptual events from which Kant’s self-consciousness emerges in recognition of the Grund of Nature as its apperception or ‘first idea’, the condition of Kant’s own ‘supersensible unity’.**) for by this same faculty, man experiences a higher species of pleasure in the movement of the Will toward the True, in the movement from the formless anarchy of freedom toward the contained genius of Form, from the temporal to the eternal, and in all such diversions by which the categorical imperative might find the beginnings of its inescapable moral compulsion. However, we see that Kant is simply enumerating the movement of Eros in several assumed guises and echoing Franz von Baader’s identification of the procreative drive with the emergence of the drive to knowledge such that, just as the instinctive movement of Eros toward its object falls to the psychoanalytic critique as merely a denial of Thanatos, or its own incomprehensible ground, we find in the Kantian conceptualization of the Beautiful only a kind of philosophizing repetition of the very same unconscious forces we had deigned to explicate in taking up the question of Reason’s tentative independence from the psychical reality of human life, from history and language, etc., and certainly nothing of their resolution or annulment,- an order of abstract knowledge that further entrenches the ‘transcendental illusion’ opposing the Intellect to a modality of sensation that is at the same time concealed in Nature’s play of shadows by a veiled apprehension that requires the Intellect to consolidate and bind multiplicity into unity so as to render clear what Nature herself cannot, namely the secret of jouissance or the ‘pleasure-principle’ by which the imperative is secured, the heart of the creative impulse animating her entire multitude and excess, (the Plotinian prohodos) her overflowing from aorgic plenitude to organismal structure, thereby paradoxically reinstating the metaphysical gambit in a disclosure of meaning whose limit is once again lost upon the threshold of articulation to the ‘transcendental illusion’, to the inexorable call of the inaugural One and unity of Spirit,- a threshold like that revealed by the approach of death or madness at the nebulous periphery of our thinking which, paraphrasing Saitya B. Das, in “Political Theology of Schelling”, instead of ‘signifying the cessation of life and thought occurring at the end of their possibility’, rather opens up life and thought to the space of ‘the unconditional which defines the tragic condition of mortals as mortals’ by the imposition of an “ineluctable law of necessity” which is also Thought’s very freedom, the ‘uber etwas hinaus wherein the immeasurable abyss of freedom is furtively glimpsed’ in the “eternity of the transient” (or still better formulated, the ‘eternity of the Beginning’, that is, the radical ceaseless interruption of finitude that draws forth all that has not become immanent to itself and ensures the infinite multiplicity and generativity of Nature in Time; see Wirth, “Schelling’s Practice of the Wild”; Extinction, P. 19.) that “suspends the sacrificial foundation” of philosophy through the derivation of a Love whose desire is not lack, but rather a mobilization of the lack intrinsic to the subject’s own nullity against the fixity of repression and the constraint of the egoic self,- a threshold that returns us to ourselves by exhausting the Form into which Thought has poured itself to learn thereby the measure of its own potency,- (by way of Depontenzierung) a threshold that, as Werner Beierwaltes elaborates concerning Plotinus and Proclus’ metaphysics of the One, “presupposes the self-unfolding of the Spirit just as it preserves and annuls it”, introducing a “degree of mediation to the unity of the Spirit”, (Note Tritten, in “Beyond Presence”, P. 49. Spirit cannot be an absolute self-mediation and simultaneously acknowledge its own content as Reason, providing no means by which to comprehend the actuality of existence within the self-positing ideality of Schelling’s negative philosophy.) “for that unity remains conscious of the differentiation of the manifold eide (Forms) through the mediating prohodos even when that differentiation is annulled”, evincing the “reflexivity of the origin that persists within itself, the origin that is reintegrated with itself after enduring the self-unfolding but that still contains within itself the multiplicity and diversity constituted by the prohodos”,- a threshold by which Beauty is herself split, through chorismos and methexis, (Pugh, “Logic and Metaphysics; Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics.”, P. 93.) into her antithesis in the Sublime, calling into question the autonomy of the aesthetic faculty, and therefor, the independence of Reason from the ‘Naturzwecke’ (nature’s reasons) and ‘Naturstaat’ (state of nature) by implying a doubled teleology in which the ends of man, being the perfection of Reason, and the ends of Nature, being the perfection of aesthetic form (Beauty) in the development of organic life, whose pinnacle was reached in the human body, must be somehow conjoined in the ends of the one Good, which would fulfill them both,- something that would seem to require a ‘new mythology’ as ‘a discursive correlative of the intellektuale Anschauung’, (Balfour, in “The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy; Holderlin’s Moment of Truth”.) that is, a new ‘category’ of the mind capable of uniting the sensible with the intelligible and so balancing the disparate fields of theology, myth, history, physics, art, philosophy, and religion, within a singular aim, and for whose production the later, more radical Schelling, turns to art itself, with the production of the art-work standing as just such an all-encompassing category. The promulgators and enthusiasts of late German idealism, accordingly, made no firmer progress in overcoming Kant and repudiating the encroachments of Totality than did the Romantics make progress in silencing the rationalism of their forbears in the boundlessness of Nature and the ‘Infinity’ of Sehnsucht, for whom the Beautiful becomes what Schiller conceives of as a zero-condition between freedom and form, sense and reason, the ‘singularity of ethical truth’ and the ‘multiplicity of natural event’,- (George Kelly, “Hegel’s Retreat from Eleusis: Studies in Political Thought”.) “a principle that is simultaneously the root of reality and ideality” (See Manfred Frank, “Schiller’s Aesthetics between Kant and Schelling”.) within whose dialectical extremity the True and the Good share one flesh, through which alone we could make comprehensible, in keeping with the more general system of transcendental idealism, “the formulation that reason encounters itself in the other of reason”; the “absolute identity of the real and ideal, of nature and spirit”, standing as the “necessary presupposition of both relations and their play of oppositions”, and through which alone the Kantian imperative could be dispensed with through the consummating act of Reason,- a supreme act by which the philosopher, equaling the aesthetic force of the poets, both asserts the absolute identity and independence of the rational faculty, subverting the primacy of the Good, and extends the intellection of this faculty across the entire unity of the Ideas, bolstering Beauty as a kind of inductress of human nature and returning us, through this final unification, to Totality. As to the second point raised here concerning the independence of man’s rational faculty, we might critique the attempt to separate language and reason across many lines: Lacan, the conjunction of the symbolic-exchange, the hypermnemata, mimesis, etc. Suffice to say that the attempt to instrumentalize Reason and assert it as an independent faculty and sovereign primacy demands the separation of Reason from Language, which cannot be done. Due to the fact that Language implies what Vico calls the circulus of history, that is, the interpenetration of the Logos (‘Reason’) by the Mythos within time, ie. a ‘mythology,’ so we find the historical media and those varied traditions, cultural exchanges and myths out of which all language grows as Sprachbezeichnung, (This term is an appropriation from Schleiermacher indicating the very intentionality of cognitive activity as innately modified by the structure of language, concerning which Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, in “Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present”, tells us the following: “Man, the linguistic being, can be seen as the place where language articulates itself in each speech act and where each spoken utterance can be understood in relation to the totality of language. But man is also a constantly evolving mind and his speaking can only be understood as a moment in his mental life.”) out of which all language springs forth from the very kind of ‘lived experience’ or a ‘moment of our mental life’ the philosopher would deem an arbitrary datum and aim to extract from the Idea, (Minutiae of the sensible world that Hamann would call ‘Aesopic reflections of the passions and symbols of Nature that might better instruct you’.) takes shapes and evolves in subjection to the dreaded play of Time, of imperfect change, of mutability- so we find all of these things to be equally conjoined with Reason and implicated in all its activity. For Hamann, the mytho-logos reaches its historal apex in the figure of the CHRISTUS, such that the very telos of Reason is recapitulated in the derivation of the embodied Word of God, a teleological undercurrent that the trained ‘Sybil’ might read in both the ‘poetic shards’ of the Natural world as well as the potsherds of History, both offering a ‘concealed book’ to the Philosopher in which to decipher the ‘apocalypse’ of Reason, like Adam, by means of ‘images’, and thereby ‘prophesize from bones’.] Thus, the true Text, which we might readily distinguish from the mere book, or the genuine mystery rites, as opposed to the dissimulations and crowd-pleasing shows of the Ὀρφεοτελεσταί, seek an emulation of the ineffable One through the ‘written silence’ of the philosophers, engaged as they are in an ethical commitment to a ‘Good beyond Being’, that is, the “ethical challenge of the incommunicable”, about which nothing at all can be said, as the true Good surpasses the limits of our cognitive order,- [Nicholas Banner, “Philosophic Silence and the ‘One’ in Plotinus”: “Philostratus attributes a kind of discursive silence to the ancient Pythagoreans in his Life of Apollonius: they understood that to keep silence is also to speak.”] a silence whose positive articulation, as opposed to the merely negative or apophatic, [Contra the ‘Socratic’ silence of Hamann. W.M. Alexander, Johann Georg Hamann; Philosophy and Faith: “On the one hand philosophy is given no autonomous status, nor any privileged or definitive position so that it could become, for example, the “prolegomena” to theology- because all philosophies harbor alien deities.” … “To demonstrate that God exists and to demonstrate that He does not exist are two versions of the same joke. Philosophy cannot demonstrate God …”] depends upon a new discourse grounded in a higher metaphysical Negativity than that disclosed by the “aporia inherent in language”, 1 as Levinas had sought in an infinite differentiation of Infinity and Being upon which to ground what he explicitly frames as a post-metaphysics revival of metaphysics for which ethics itself should be elevated to the status of a ‘primary philosophy’.
[size=85]* This use of eidesis and noesis calls to mind, on the one hand, the circular argument of the Descartean cogito in Reflection, (as a general theory of consciousness) and, on the other, the argument of the ‘purely deductive’ counter-Descartean, Leibnizian theory of consciousness as Representation. While no more complete than the Descartean theory of consciousness, the advantage here is we are permitted to describe an entire hierarchical chain of consciousnesses, inasmuch as human consciousness, infinitely ascending itself in recursive self-reflection, can represent its own representations,- indeed this metarepresentation of our own heuristic programmatics and underlying psychological apparatus is one of the basic elements of philosophy, while a lower mammal might only be capable of representing sensory stimuli for the purposes of formulating very rudimentary predictions in the negotiation of its environment, and a plant, being even lower in our hierarchy, capable of even less fidelity in representation, though enough at least to respond to chemical signals geotropically and phototropically, etc. Because a poppy seed will not sprout until it has been over-wintered, the fact that it hasn’t sprouted amounts to a representation of the fact that such a condition has not been obtained. In this way, a panpsychicist implication can be posited, in that even piezoelectric quartz is capable of representing a change in current, therefor possessing some minimal ‘consciousness’.
** The originary “I” as unconditioned absolute, known only through the intellectual intuition and approached by no procedure whose activity consists in merely amassing disjunctive facts,- or, recalling the Phaedrus, the “I” as no material determined by form, and yet neither a form determined by material. Because materiality can only be grasped by consciousness through a formal determination of its content, grounded in Kant’s schematic apperception, and yet form cannot be posited without an object, that is, material, we see that the emergence of the “I”, for Schelling, occurs within a ‘magic circle’ of Thought, whereby Thought appears to itself without any mediation by either Form or Material, but only through a transcendental recursive self-reference to itself whose circulus extends ad infinitum toward the auton or supersensible "I’ of God (the ideal ego) such that all determinate positing, having been excluded from the ‘magic circle’ founded in self-referentiality, serves as a self-limitation of the infinite and the production of finitary matter through the exhaustion of all conditioned determination by the Form of the unconditional. The ‘ontic closure of the ideal ego’ demands the conceptualization of some means of self-mediation by which the unconditional disrupts the circulus and allows itself to be circulated toward the conditional,- a “degree of mediation to the unity of Spirit” in the Plotinian language of divine emanation from the One, by which the nullification of the unity of the form of the Unconditional by the determinate form of the Conditional and the preservation of the conditioned multiplicity of material or ‘prohodos’ within the movement of the Unconditional toward itself, or the One dissolving itself in the Multiple of Nature and the Multiplicity of Nature expressing the plenitude of the Absolute One as mone or return, can be doubly maintained by something Schelling called ‘transcendental imagination’, a mode of connection or ‘epistrophe’ by means of which the One generates productive finitude or multiplicity through self-mediation of its own Unity, (the I is I) this constituting the self-referential circulus through which, by excluding itself from itself, (The Other is Not-I; this “other” or non-ego is what is “excluded”.) the Unconditioned generates all determinate conditioned forms (the potentially infinite list of disjunctive data the procedure of ‘thinking’ might amass; the prohodos) viz. the dark Un-grund of Being. This ‘sacrificial core’ of philosophy or “self-exclusion”,- (of a “finitizing nonidentity”) the ‘agapeic transformation’ of the paradoxical One, or “the impossibility of God’s returning to himself”, as I have elsewhere noted,- is precisely the root of the epistemes in pure Negativity. Just as the transcendental auton or “I” can be known only imaginatively through self-mediation, no object can be discovered for this “I” to derive multiplicity out of unity, or material existence from the infinite, save through self-exclusion of the I from its own circulation in the unconditional toward the conditional, this representing the self-sacrifice of God or divine tzimtzum in the creation of the World. (The Kabbalistic model of God positions God as primordial apeiron, a God higher than Being itself,- a God which must be ironically contracted before it can appear within the world of Being, moving from undiluted light or zohar into the partial light filtered out of Kether toward the World and so restricted by what it is not, this ‘what it is not’ indicating precisely “Being”. The infinite creative productivity of God must be passively inhibited in this way before any determinate form can inhere multiplicity and so eventuate an originary atomic existence that can later be unfolded into more and more complicated forms from out of an initial ‘gene’, a dyad constituted by the opposing elements of ‘Being’ and ‘Not Being’ implicated in the movement of God, that is, the elements of ‘God’ and what God ‘is not’.) If philosophy is to be anything, and if it is to address the question of Being and the question of its own origin, it must be a repetition of this divine act or sacrifice. Because there is nothing the ‘transcendental I’ can be excluded from, (for, if there were something from which it could be excluded, it would no longer transcend it, and it would therefor not be Absolute) this nullity or ‘nonidentity’ becomes a condition of the I’s otherwise unconditional positing, thereby limiting the illimitable and closing the circulus of the absolute I, converting this nothingness into a ‘something’, the self-mediation of the Unity of the One into a mediated Multiplicity, and Form into determinate Material or Being,- a ‘Being’ by means of which the I discovers an object for its own formal determination, that is, an object outside of its circulus or the ‘absconditus’, and through its self-presentation unfolds what Plotinus calls the ‘primordial dyad’ from which the form of all possible finite conditioned determinations, viz. the mathematical continuum, might be further unfolded.
- Consider the fact that all thought, as symbolic representation, takes place within a language,- language indicating no particular human tongue, but only the ascriptive externalization into signs (visibly encoded by letters, or audibly projected with phonemes) of an inscriptive process; to imagine a beginning without any presupposition, that is, without time or space,- a true origin of the universe, of Being itself, and an origination for which none of these can serve as suppositional logica, you would be imagining a beginning before which not even thought itself exists, and therefor, a beginning for which the very language in which thought could possibly occur does not exist: you are imagining a pure, ultimately internalized, inscriptive process, for at this point the very thought you have arrived upon defies the very language in which you have conjured it for yourself,- a total inwardness in other words, given the fact that this inscriptive process is that which gives rise to all internal reality, to thought, to egoic consciousness in our peculiar neural configuration, as human beings-- you are imagining a pure inscription of consciousness itself at this stage in your reconstruction of the creation of the world,- consciousness without thought, object, perception, etc., or any possible ascription- the ‘ideal ego’. Because this imagination you have attempted to conduct cannot itself occur outside of language, there remains only what Schelling called das Verstummen, the ‘growing silent’ that the helplessness and faint audibility (Kaumvernehmlichkeit) of mortal, human language really seeks to approach- our ‘exigency’, for that inscription of an ultimately finitary, self-enclosed and irretrievably internalized, negative consciousness, (finitizing nonidentity) without feature or object, that is, the ‘ideal ego’ that you have accidentally produced by attempting to conceive the true Beginning of things, the origin of the Universe of Being- this is the ‘Night of the World’, the silence of God. In so many words, when you attempt to think ‘the beginning’ of Being, the origin of the universe, of reality, you arrive at this aporia of thought itself, the foundational aporia of philosophy, or what Plato and Aristotle called thaumazein or wonder, which they told us was in fact the beginning of all philosophy. Philosophy, when it tries to think the beginning of itself, when it tries to find its own origin, must first find the origin of Being; but when philosophy attempts to think the origin of Being, it discovers only this aporia, that it must first have thought its own origin, and then proceeds the ‘vicious circle’ of reason back and forth ad infinitum, leaving only das Verstummen, the growing silent before the ineffable,- the irretrievable inscription upon which all ascription rests. The metaphysical ascriptions of Being (time, space, etc.) lay the framework within which interactions can take place between particular beings,- it rests in what Heidegger would call the ontic, while the inscriptive would roughly correspond to the ontological, with the point here being that this aporia leads to an ontic closure of the ideal ego, (By this closure, I mean to say that, in thinking the beginning of Being, thought reveals its own ontological core to be a pure negativity, that is, something devoid of ontic reality, or any ‘being’ of its own that could potentially interact with other beings, implying, for example, that consciousness cannot be traced to cause-effect correlates with actual brain tissue and neural activity, for again, at the level of the ontic, its own being has no way of interacting with other beings.) and thus an ontological differentiation for which no interactions can take place at the level of the ontic, (rendering the attempt of Dasein to take up its own origins impossible, nullified, negated; contra Heidegger. My own conceptualization of the ‘ideal ego’ is, more or less, simply this nullified Dasein) and thus a differentiation of pure negativity, a ‘finitizing nonidentity’. All ascription, all language, is haunted by this irretrievable loss of Being, which leaves voids or gaps behind in all symbolic construction; a negative core that remains, carrying forth the ‘ethical tears’ characteristic of philosophy.[/size]
It would serve well to here digress upon a few of our themes, namely the epistemes, and the concept of the zairja. Where the logic of computation amounts to a linear algorithmic transformation of one form of information into another, like the conversion of the result of Boolean calculations into the position of pixels on a screen forming the images of a video game, the logic of the zairja connects local processes to extra-local ones, decoding the linear data-stream driven by an incontrovertible clock-cycle into a parallel network driven by stochastic events. The zairja’s ultimate application is in the kabbalistic dream of metalepsis, that is, the act of connecting all knowledge to all other knowledge, all forms of information to all other forms of information.
The goal of Schelling’s system and the zairja is the same despite their apparent conceptual distance, considered both philosophically and historically. Their shared goal is to utilize the unconscious principle of Freedom, the activated vital impulse or ‘chaos’ of the inorganic, to set the system of reason into motion, [Through the zairja, this amounts to the incorporation of aleatory techne in the production of thought from non-thought. More precisely, we have images of the Judwalis dancers echoing the movement of the stars in Yeats’ account, or extensive diagrams plotted by the Arabic sages in the sand, by which the resonance of the stars and planets was plotted upon the microcosm, and through whose mapped trajectories ideas were cross-pollinated across multiple domains, be it medicine, philosophy, prophecy, mathematics, theology, etc., that is, all forms of knowledge in the scala ad gradum between the earth and the stars, in the attempt to reveal their hidden symmetries through ‘anamorphosis’, accomplishing a metalepsis, that is, an ‘entrelacs’ or entermeshing of things whereby the structure(s) of the inter-relating, dialectically interpolated upon the things themselves,- rendering their inner forms cognizable as what Harman would call secret essences,- becomes a means of thinking or ‘productive semiosis’ whose mimetically proliferated stochastic resonance or white-noise might amplify the otherwise inaudible signals of all that has been trapped in the ambient background, excavating nullified anonymities from the polynomous nullity of the divine ‘absconditus’. What is of account is the means of this interpolating dialectic.] that is, philosophy, without subsuming freedom to any category within it and so neutralizing its actual potency, such that the dialectical interpolation of the thinker and his own thought (‘metalepsis’) provides, through the manifestation of ‘reversed predication’, (By this we mean to indicate a reversal of the thinker and thought, of the ideatum never perfectly commensurate with its idea and the idea that necessarily exceeds its ideatum; a reversal of ‘pre-reflective unity’ and post-reflective multiplicity’; a reversal by means of which the traditional schema underlying both Hegelian and Fichtean synthesis is necessarily inverted with the admission of Schelling’s ‘impossible Real’ to stand in for a symbolic gap, a pure negativity through which the subject and object, self and world, etc. are infinitely differentiated, preserving between them, for the betterment of our philosophy, what Harman calls the ‘tragic force of opposition’,- a force sublated and nullifed by the ternary universe of synthetic logic,- a force preserved here, in opposition to the attempted synthesis of the Real * or a ‘third universe’, from an absolute subjectivity equivocating subject and object in the movement of Absolute Spirit a la. Hegel’s Geist.) the very ‘obscurity’ within which the unconscious principle is to be protected, as ‘intellectual intuition’, from absorption into the Idea, and through which the machinic logic, infinite semioses and linear flows of accelerating capital (the proliferation of a ‘free mimesis’ toward an ‘intensive-zero’ for the Landian, or ‘unlimited semiosis’ for the Lacanian) are to be decoded, (or ‘reverse-computed’; an ‘intensive zero’ would constitute the prophesized Bataillean apocalypse of an ultimately decoded machinic productivity, the final reverberation of the ‘missing third’ needed to fatally crash the System, the object of accelerationist critique, vis. the pure materiality of an apotheosized end of Capital) namely through a process of ‘continuous interruption’ (by what later psychoanalysis will come to refer to as a ‘death-drive’, or the Lacanians, a ‘symbolic gap’; an element of resistance by which the necessary delay is introduced through which all other drives can be organized as a ‘discourse of the Other’, of course leaving the human ego behind, not as a self properly speaking, but only the productivity of a kind of symbolic gap across which the metonym substitutes part for whole) through which organic Being distinguishes itself as life by reproducing a certain determinate content in accordance to its own concept or ‘form’, (Note that both accelerationists and to a lesser extent the Lacanians, hailing the ultimate victory of the death-drive over Eros or a kind of thanato-gnosis obliterating subjectivity from within, or the victory of what Schelling would call the aorgic over the organic, reject such a form, that is, a hypomnema, or a form which Yeats, noting the Gyraldian spirograms, calls a specifically mathematical form capturing the fundamental movement of Mind interpolated upon its own object; in their programme, all such forms, ‘organisms’, or ‘concepts’ are to be decoded until an ontological minima of differentiation is attained, a pure self-sublimed transcendental materiality whose apocalypse will bring about the eventuation of, in Deleuzian terms, endless independently productive semioses) effectively escaping discourse (through the ‘ideogrammatic loop’) from within and returning thought to the pre-Symbolic Real in which it was first enunciated as a daemonic confrontation and experimentation with the unconscious, a kind of divination,- an ecstatic prophesizing known to Plato-Socrates and many of the ancients.
[size=85]* Of this reversal, recall what had been described earlier as " … a reversal of terms in the series of conceptual events from which Kant’s self-consciousness emerges in recognition of the Grund of Nature as its apperception or ‘first idea’, the condition of Kant’s own ‘supersensible unity’."[/size]
Pierce details ten typological classes of signs based on three combinations of three terms in his “Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations”. This geometry can be directly adapted to the epistemes and the three dialectical triads associated with them, mapping the one scheme to the other 1-to-1. In the four-part logic of the epistemes, this ‘pre-symbolic Real’ would constitute the ‘finitizing non-identity’ of a ‘silent’ or fourth episteme, a kind of semiotic interruption of the three dialectical triads of either the inner or outer dialectic, whose internal geometry, following Pierce, can be arranged to reveal a 10-part typology, collapsible to a four-part schematic representing independent levels of abstraction through which a kind of ‘semiogenetic loop’ perpetuates itself by endless iterations of interacting trichotomies. The three active epistemes, ie. ontic, immanent, and transcendent, mark three typological classifications, that is, a trichotomy, each containing three elements of a dialectical triad, of which there are three in each of the two dialectics. Considering the outer dialectic, at the level of the ontic episteme we have 1) prohodos, epistrophe, mone, recovered from Plotinus; at the immanent, we have 2) comparatio, remotio, excessus, recovered from Augustine; at the transcendent, we have 3) lepsis, methexis, ektheosis, recovered from Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena. The three dialectical triads, excavated from their respective philosophical systems, express a corresponding semiotic pattern replicated at three different levels of abstraction; prohodos, comparatio, and the lepsis represent a stable or ‘complete’ semiogenetic loop through the three epistemes, as does epistrophe, remotio, and methexis, and finally mone, excessus, ektheosis. Arranging these nine typological entities into the ten trichotomies of Pierce’s inverted pyramid or what he calls the ‘cenopythagorean categories’ so as to reveal the ‘pre-symbolic’ interruption of the triads (culminating in ektheosis–mone) and their ‘global’ four-part schema, (a tetrapole or, appropriating Merleau-Ponty’s term and shifting our analysis to the intrinsic, ‘local’ dynamics of each of these four levels, an ‘entrelacs’ divided or, using mathematical terms, ‘canonically split’ by a ‘chiasmus’) we have:
(Prohodos) | Prohodos | Prohodos | ([Mone])
| Comparatio | Comparatio | Excessus | Excessus |
([Ektheosis]) | Lepsis | Lepsis | (Lepsis)
[i][b]The transcendent episteme, the 'third'. [/b][/i]
(Prohodos) | Prohodos | (Epistrophe)
| Comparatio | Remotio | Excessus |
(Methexis) | Lepsis | (Lepsis)
[i][b]The immanent episteme. Pierce's 'second.'
[/b][/i]_______________________________________________________
(Prohodos) | (Epistrophe)
| Remotio | Remotio |
(Methexis) | (Lepsis)
[i][b]The ontic episteme. The 'first'.[/b][/i]
Epistrophe *
Remotio
Methexis
[size=85]* The ‘silent’ episteme, finitizing non-identity. Here the epistrophe, the “Return” of the Remainder, exposes negativity or metaphysical absence, through remotio, to methexis, the interruption of the dialectic and a “consciousnesses infinitely suspended in an infinite object”, (Solger’s radicalization of the self-sublation of the Real) or an opening beyond what Levinas would call the Totality. Epistrophe-Remotio-Methexis is analogous to Pierce’s dicent-indexical-sinsign.
[/size]
We can abbreviate this diagrammatic by assigning letters to each member of the typology, such that
Prohodos, epistrophe, mone:
A, B, C.
Comparatio, remotio, excessus:
D, E, F.
Lepis, methexis, ektheosis:
G, H, I.
So that our model becomes:
[i][b]A A A C The transcendent.
D D F F
I G G G
A A B The Immanent.
D E F
H G G
A B The Ontic.
E E
H G
B The 'silent' episteme. *
E
H [/b][/i]
The formula B-E-H, in Pierce’s pyramidal arrangement, indicates the dicent-indexical-sinsign; in the model of the epistemes, it indicates epistrophe-remotio-methexis. As the dicent-sinsign is a sign that returns, for Pierce, an index of the object, by which it is necessarily affected, (This index constitutes, for Mazzola, the basis of a ‘continuation and accumulation’, a morphism where the symbolic linkage constitutes a living movement toward the object of the Sign, serving as Chatelet’s accomplice of poetic metaphor and not merely as an insubstantial or arbitrary connexion.) so the movement of epistrophe-methexis returns (epistrophe, the return) the methexis (participation of God in the lepsis) or ‘participation’ of Presence to the site of negation or Absence, remotio. (negation, absence) This is the formula of symbolic interruption, the reassertion of the ‘tragic force’ of Negation; hence the logic of dicent-indexical-signsign is reflected in epistrophe-remotio-methexis.
[size=85]* All three typological constituents of the ‘silent’ episteme are drawn from dialectical triads involved in the internal world of the self exclusively; it is, as will be explained later, the sight of axiopoiesis, in which the subject has not yet engaged the world, as characterized by Husserlian logic. We see at the first episteme that two typologies are present, in keeping with the assertion of the binary operator: the original dyad of subject and object, being and nothingness, etc. This binary gap engages the dialectic at the second episteme, where the law of predication is implicated within the three typologies present, as per Lacanian logic and the law of excluded middle, or Lacan’s occluded truth. At the third episteme, this predicative chain is reversed as per Kunze, so that the contents within the second episteme can be interweaved with an entrelacs, from which a new identity is liberated that is freed from the linear or predicative-causal chain, following Bataille. Thus four typologies exist in this final episteme as per Harman, the quaternary logic fully developed.
[/size]
Each of the ten vertical groups represents a trichotomy, an active iteration of intermeshed or ‘interpenetrating’ dialectical triads. (The inter-penetrations themselves would become visible if one connected the terms throughout the entire diagram, ie. every A to every other A, every B to every other B, etc.) These interpenetrations are created by an entrelacs, chiasmus, etc. The four groups represent the four epistemes.
The entrelacs of these epistemes, (the four entries at the outer edges, cutting across each episteme’s typological constituents, as emphasized by enclosed parentheses) moving from the transcendent down, can be read: prohodos-mone-ektheosis-lepsis, (A, C, I, G) followed by two appearances of the identical entrelacs in the immanent and ontic episteme, this being prohodos-epistrophe-methexis-lepsis. (A, B, H, G.) In this repetition we see that the entrelacs has been dilated or extended, its chiasmus enlarged. The silent, inactive, or ‘fourth’ episteme contains no entrelacs, since it contains no semantic content, which is required to initiate an ‘interweaving’ of the signifying chain. The entrelacs becomes accessible at the second episteme in terms of the semiogenetic loop, though each of the three active epistemes contains one, since any interweaving of the signifying chain occurs at multiple abstract levels. The interweaving occurs across a chiasmus or symbolic gap in each episteme which engages the dialectic and the entrelacs divides, expressed in our diagram by the horizontal grouping in the middle of each collected episteme. For the transcendent episteme, the chiasmus is comparatio-comparatio-excessus-excessus, for the immanent it is comparatio-remotio-excessus, and for the ontic it is remotio-remotio. (Remotio-Remotio indicates a double negation, comparatio-remotio-excessus indicates a stable dialectical triad, while the chiasmus of the transcendent episteme, comparatio-comparatio-excessus-excessus, in fact replicates the four-part structure inscribed by the epistemes, in which two objects of comparatio, viz. Being and Nothingness, are associated to a status per privationem and per transcendentiam, giving us the quaternary formula we have noted before: Being per privationem, Being per transcendentiam, Nothingness per privationem, Nothingness per transcendentiam. In other words, this chiasmus within the transcendent episteme, carrying two subjects in comparatio and two objects in excessus, signifies what has elsewhere been described as the ideatum that exceeds its idea, and the idea that cannot be reduced to its ideatum.) The precise role the entrelacs plays will be elaborated on after we first analyze the role the epistemes themselves play.
Note that in Peircean semiotics the apex of the pyramidal structure ('interrupted by what would be ektheosis and mone here, depending on whether one moves from the top down on the pyramid or the reverse) results in a disjunction, confronting the mind with a singularity prompting semiotic shock, or Badiou’s ‘pure event’: the ‘dicent-indexical-sinsign’, analogous to epistrophe-remotio-methexis. The sinsign refers to this singularity as a non-linguistic event, while dicent signifies any complete qualitative expression. An indexical is a sign causally produced by its source object, but one which does not relate to it in terms of logical predication, using the terms laid out here, instead creating Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmus, or what Lacanians call a symbolic gap. Thus the complete expression dicent-indexical-sinsign is formulated by Pierce as an immediate emanation from a source object, opening up, across what Harman would call an efflorescence, a domain of accessible qualities within which the subject can sensibly cohere a new unity, that is, the indexical itself, (this ‘indexical’, in pure Lacanian terms, would in the corresponding logical schema signify the object petit a) though without standing in relationship to that object as its logical predication, therefor protecting itself both from the predicative logic driving the linear series and the reversals of the semiotic chains propagated in that series driving metalepsis, like an overheating wire exploding, liberating an excess mechanical force at the end of the corresponding system of which it is a part; one cannot reverse the series of events and reconstitute the mechanism by ‘unexploding’ the faulty wire. The zairja aims to appropriate this disjunction and the liberated excess, leveraging semiotic shock as a creative impetus, namely as a useful divergence from Totality capable of developing, through gradual iteration and magnification of otherwise inaudible divergences within System that respond to its originary interpolation as a randomization event or white-noise, the level of stochastic resonance needed for liberating new thought from linear predicative logic, from burial within the ambient signals of the unconscious background, that is, from the entropic bent against which Eros contends for primacy over the death-drive.
Where a typical philosophical abstraction or theoretical generalization implicates itself within its object through a causal relationship, ‘explaining it’, we see that the three active epistemes, like Pierce’s three cenopythagorean categories, serve as indeterminate generalizations (like the ‘probability’ of a quantum state) that, instead of being causally paired to what they would ‘explain’, are recursively read into all phenomenon through a matrix of self-interpretative abstractions (like a ‘quantum field’, continuing the former analogy) present at multiple levels within the semiotic chain until the arbitrary phenomenon upon which analysis has been directed serves to gradually render them more and more determinate, extracting their ‘visible forms’ or animus from the ‘internal’; such ideas, instead of explaining something, are themselves explained by it, and in fact by all possible things. The fact that all possible input (like the aleatoric randomizations of the zarija’s input, drawn from the movements of the stars) can serve to initiate a stochastic resonance within their matrix, and so render their inner forms visible to Mind, is what marks them as special categories within the cognitive order, or epistemes, in the first place. This super-phenomenal matrix, (note the etymology of the word matrix, a ‘womb’) within which the epistemes self-clarify and determine themselves,- and in fact determine the entire collective medium available to the human mind’s expression as an active, phenomenologically engaged presence,- is called by Pierce, the phaneron. The three epistemes interpenetrate like the symbolic registers of the Lacanian schema, yet they do so, unlike the registers, arbitrarily, thereby forming, not a ring-structure, but a nested hierarchy whose terms can be endlessly reiterated in a series of trichotomies or modulations; n+ BEH, (where ‘n’ signifies the last member of a preceding trichotomy) n+ BEG, n+ AEH, n+ BFG, etc. etc. At each level of iteration the distinctions obtained between the three epistemes in previous levels of iteration can be reincorporated into the next and further refined as what Pierce calls ‘tinctures’,- knowledge as ‘colorations’ gradually extracted and purified by a process that first defines a space of possible representations for signs, (Pierce’s ‘firstness’) and then fills this space, after implicating the logic of predication such that contrast and opposition might distinguish one sign from another in a concatenation of linguistic events or actions-reactions, (Pierce’s ‘secondness’) with locally tenable distinctions between signs that must then be globally unified, (within Pierce’s ‘thirdness’, the third episteme) along “a universal lattice of forms of reintegrating the Many into the One”, [“Zalamea, Peirce’s cenopythagorean categories, Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmatic, entrelacs and Grothendieck’s Resume”.] by reversing the logic of predication and interweaving (vis. metalepsis) the observed semiotic reactions occurring at the previous level into a new sign active within the first episteme. This same process is reiterated infinitely, producing more and more determinate knowledge from the nested trichotomies, that is, gradually enlarging the representational space or ‘matrix’ of the first episteme ad infinitum, (This space is, in Husserlian terms, an axiological space, an ‘axiopoiesis’ whereby theorein establishes the law of signification and what is excluded from it, that is, the lepsis, without actually asserting any operative signs or moving beyond the limit of the ‘interior discourse’ of the subject,- the purely leptic domain within which the boundary of the self is configured and the degree to which the ‘Other’ is allowed to enter into it is drawn. The Boolean operator of standard logic is here introduced. As we will see, the iteration of the epistemes gradually enriches this space and opens up new axiologies, non-standard logics, novel operators, etc.) gradually enlarging the semiotic chain of events within the second episteme (a ‘semasiokinetic series’ of signs upon which the apparent ‘law’ of causality operates, stretching from the emergence of Being to the end of the universe) while also interweaving them through metalepsis, and gradually cohering the multiplicity of these events into new singularities, into ‘temporally-bound phenomenon’, that is, coherent semioses or ‘meanings’ within the third or transcendental episteme whose content is detached (‘interrupted’) from the causal chain through a reversal of predication across a symbolic gap from whose depth the Schellingian Remainder cannot return as a new cause to precipitate a new event, (the omnipotence of the death-drive; the depth of Psyche thwarting the flight of Eros; the depth of the inactive, purely negative episteme, a “consciousness infinitely suspended in an infinite object”; a depth we understand to be Schelling’s God in exile,- a God buried in the Night of the World, who cannot return to the world after creating it; pure, unabsorbed negativity) producing from a revelatory aporia or moment of ‘thaumazein’ a novel ‘emanation’ of Pierce’s super-linguistic source object 1 whose recognition is staked within the first episteme,- with the ‘kingdom of the Sign’ accordingly enlarged,- only to repeat the process at another level of arbitrary iteration, cycling through the three epistemes actively participating as vocities in the dialectical triads. The signifying chain established within the second episteme, like the True-False of the Boolean operator asserted axiologically, relies upon the logic of the excluded middle, wherein meanings are horizontally linked as causal sequences within time connected by strings of binary-urs, * while the non-standard logics opened up by Pierce’s thirdness, and all such logics within the third episteme, reveal the excluded middle, not as something expunged from semiotic analysis, but merely occulted, buried in a metaphysics of absence referenced by metonyms, that is, a verticality which haunts the metaphorical constructions of all secondary-level signification,- (where isolated objects are conceived in separate geometries) just as Heyting algebra’s subobject classifiers within the elementary topos haunt the “sheaf of holomorphic functions closer to our usual geometries”,- [Ibid.] a verticality which haunts such constructions with what Merleau-Ponty calls an echo of the invisible, or a dynamic exchange between Real and Imaginary within which, through the reversal of predication at the Symbolic register, the transformation of things into their opposites across the Gap, or of causes into their effects and vice versa, can be reconstructed anamorphically, viz. a process ‘unfolded’ from ‘compressed folds of the visible into the invisible’, upsetting the ad aequatia of Signified and Signifier while recovering new creative forms from the interplay of absence with presence, for the reversal of predication opens up a site of exception or ‘clinamental divergence’ that echoes the absence of the ‘missing third’ with philosophy’s own “written silence”. According to Kunze, signifiers operate through stereognostic pairings or tesserae within the site of exception, an interpenetrating center and edge serving to focalize the conversion of one into another, propagating a resonance of the missing third until it is rendered visible. Crucially, the static ring-structure of the Lacanian registers locks the ‘occluded truth’ of the Other within an impenetrable Symbolic core which the Real cannot truly excavate through however many deflations of the primary-fantasy or Imaginary-Virtual registers, through however many masks reft from the subject in the attempt to peer beneath the ‘corpus superadditum’ [In Eriugena’s theology, gender was not differentiated until after the Fall, which introduced the law of the excluded middle and the symbolic gap necessary to distinguish cause and effect, subject and object, etc., in the movement from the first to second episteme. Eriugena’s model of immanence and transcendence interpenetrating supercausally offers a glimpse into a higher metaphysics, the reconstitution of the occluded Depth.] into the Paradisiacal, Edenic state of pre-reflective unity, just as Merleau-Ponty’s ‘hyperdialectic’ locks subjectivity within an ontology of flesh that cannot be detached from the multiplicitous sensible domain within which it is itself entrenched, within which it is itself compressed by an entrelacs and separated from the Real (the ‘pre-reflective unity’ or immediacy to which it cannot return subjectivity) by an impenetrable chiasmus, the inexorable demand of what Bloom’s revisionary calculus names the askesis; the nested hierarchy of the epistemes, on the other hand, reveals the same Depth as an accessible (if inexhaustible) medium open to the exploratory campaign of Consciousness,- as the ‘uncontained doxological presence’ of Plato whose disclosure rests upon a higher metaphysical aporia than that of language, ie. beyond the aporia of language as codified by Lacan’s symbolic register and occluded truth, beyond which he cannot admit any greater, that is, primary or ‘metaphysical’ category. This disclosure is the general subject of Levinas’ philosophy, who situates an ethics beyond ontology and opposes Infinity to Being in the attempt to articulate that super-linguistic aporia as one irreducible to any ontological categories (Heiddegger’s approach) as much as it is irreducible to the symbolic registers and to language.
