Descartes 2

Descartes saw that the self was the god principle (self-verifying truth) of consciousness. If one took away the self, the contents of consciousness would cease to exist. If one saw the self as illusion, the world would be viewed as illusion. Then consciousness would be empty of self-verifying truths.

Because the "I" exists not as a thing but as a process, the self is a conversion of a process (of consciousness) to a thing by giving form to the process through its relation to the contents of the process.

This attempt to convert a process into a thing generates a paradox. The process can only be identified as thing (the self) within the context of the contents of the process, but the thing thus described cannot encapsulate the process because it lies outside that context.

While one might be tempted to attribute causal and so ontological primacy to the contents, it does not account for what the process is in terms of consciousness itself.

Note 172

Is there a basis for the world state? If the liberals are right, there can be no agreement on fundamental values, so it has to be imposed from above. If the conservatives are right, there are objectively correct values, so there is a basis for bottom-up world state formation on the basis of the discovery of higher truths. The problem is one of countering ignorance.

In other words, for the world state to be possible, the liberal has to acknowledge the lack of universality of liberal values, and the conservative has to acknowledge the duty of universal values. In any case, the duty of both is to reconcile the view of the universality of value embedded in the core of each idea with their practical two-level division/relationship of politics and values that has emerged in a world of nation-states.

This reconciliation may be resolved (on the liberal side) by the dissolution of the politic-value distinction via the world-state or the destruction of the liberal state through libertarianism. In conservatism, it may be resolved via the universal spread of conservative values as the basis for political union or conversely, the protection of purity - the maintanence of purer communities through isolation, status structures, and other social or political methods.

Note 171

Morality is defined by the absence of the object which it is for. If it were not absent, it would be a particular interest, and cease to be morality. Therefore, the condition of the Good is the absence of the object, be it God, a divine law, the nation, the common good, the collective utility function, that is the source and end of the act.

The corollary to the moral and meaningful is therefore the necessity of absent and hidden objects, and the two are constitutively bound to each other. The imagined nature of some of these objects is not a hinderance, but an important aid. The more real it becomes, the less it ceases to express moral necessity, and the more it then works through institutions and self-interest, namely the desire for social approbation.

For example, the growing size and strength of states is accompanied by a weakening of nationalism as an abstract good (in favour of globally-minded liberalism) and its growth as one promoted through state institutions and social norms. This explains the paradox of Democrats seeking a larger state and Republicans a smaller one.

Core Civilisational Principles

Or, how to read world history - it can't explain anything or everything, but it is important.

West: Exploration, discovery, conquest
China: Stability, material accumulation
India: Liberation, Moksha
Islam: Adherence to Divine Law

Note 170

Current teleologists are both right and wrong. The world is pragmatically moving toward individual rationality, but to do so only in order to transcend it. The economic mode corresponding to this is post-scarcity. This is not collectivism or communism, but the ability to see the individual for what he/she is.

Identities, Interests and Institutions

Corporate identities play the role of translating expectations into institutional forms. It is evoked when interests demand solidification. Identities are institutionalized interests, as a process.

They are a process by which interests are defined, and by which institutions are defined in relation to these interests, and by which the identities are defined in relation to the institutions, which embody these interests. This paradox of self-definition by way of interests and institutions renders it, by necessity, a process.

Identity is therefore best seen as process through which expectations about interests and power structures mutually construct and reinforce each other over time.

Note 169

Matching content with form is difficult, maybe the most difficult thing. To do so is to bring about the higher order essence of a thing. In some cultures, this may often be taken as expressions of divinity, which can express itself in plural forms. Social definitions of higher and lower are irrelevant or subordinate to this essential art.

Note 168

Philosophy is essentially the activity of tracing the circle from the point at which you begin.

A lot of philosophy starts from a naive point of view, so the circle that is traced essentially tells us what we already know.

Our point of view is hardly significant, it is just one form of diagonality. Who know how many kinds there are?

Note 167

Meaning seeks its own completion, without limit. Therein its meaninglessness.

Note 166

Juxtapose substantivism and relationalism. Both are true; and both melt away.

Asian post-liberalism

Asians have substantial second-mover advantages when it comes to liberalism. Their job then is to wrestle with liberalism (divorced from the Western historical experience), understand its impossibility within its own historical context, and bring about post-liberalism. The first stage is not even reached. Has this task even been recognized?

Note 165

Truth has always been sundered upon itself; form does not match content; and process (teleological and otherwise) is the groping for accomodation across a gap that is pragmatically bridged.

Note 164

If inbuilt contradictions increase the antifragility of a system, the demand for logical coherence is pragmatically incoherent.

The Problem with Pragmatism

The problem of pragmatism is that it is self-referencing. So despite its attempt at coherence, it does not really tell us anything new. That is, unlike truth, negation is not its basis.

Realism, Liberalism and the World State

Conflicts are almost always over ideas, or ideas about interests (or what interests are). They are never about biologically-given interests. And ideas, unlike things, have dialectical development.

***

The liberals of today are the ape-ancestors of liberals of the future.

They are running up against the incoherence of liberalism in a global world with politics.

Liberalism will have to incorporate the universal aspects of rights and discard the culturally and historically-specific aspects of rights to incorporate all cultural possibilities, and so to become what it is.

The liberalism of today is unable to do this. Therefore the irreversible concept it introduces will be eventually reworked into something that suits the possibility it introduces.

The site of this re-working may not be the nation-state, and in fact, is rather unlikely to be the nation state, which principally serves to characterize and restrict the movement and exchange of people in spatial terms.


***

Well, of course there is nothing wrong in being a conservative, but conservatives have always been the idiots of history.

Lesson from Sassure

Not knowing: nihilism is not the negation of knowing but its possibility. The possibility of negation is the possibility of being insofar as it is relational. Knowing is double negation. Philosophy is the negation of that double negation. In other words, its task is to jump across three abysses, to look across three negations, from being to knowing to the possibility of knowing, and to turn it into a single one that can be crossed.

Note 163

Why the philosophic life? The duty to know in the face of unknowability. Therefore, Strauss - to understand Socrates.

World state

He who invented natural law invented the world state.

Note 162

Every intelligibility is a negation, and a negation of its intelligible negation. Every duality is a singularity as a condition of its duality. We forget this obvious fact too often.

Because truth is relational, the conditions of truth must be given outside truth itself. That is, they must by definition be unintelligible, or Real, in order to be ordered. A discovery is by definition an ignorance, or an inevitability whose terms cannot be reached.

(Qua Callon)

Note 161

The self is the means through which agency is expressed in terms of identity. The mode of acting coheres with the mode of being in relation to the external world through the self. The self belongs not to the self, but to the structure of relation of modalities. Agency remains unknown.

Note 160

A truth as a justification of a fact, and a fact as a justification of a necessity, and a necessity as the justification of free will and its negation. Applied truth is a function of suffering.

***

Reflexivity is the mutual constitution of two nothingnesses.

***

Khan: Logic is positional. Language is directional. There is no position without direction.

***

Jung: Life in its purest form, the interaction of archetypes.

Note 159

Rationality is teleology, in the same way that atheism is religion. Specific utility theories are different sub-denominations that work in different circumstances.

***

Combining irreconcilible principles of might and right is a problem of politics. One branch is order, and within order, one branch is law. Another are norms.

We do not know what norms are. Therefore, all the so-called theories about norms are descriptive.

***

Morality calls out for an ontology which we lack.

***

The ontology of mind remains unknown.

Note 158

Qua Berger, there are only 2 self-legitimating things: truth and right. The authority of institutions rest on them.

Legitimacy is the security of both in a set of relations to each other. Outcomes combine both.

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Is this true? Legitimation is self-division.

Note 157

What is art? It is the isomorphic simulation of the soul finding its completion.

Note 156

In the end, we do not choose our fates. Our fates choose us. So do we not have agency? No: the fates have agency over the present. The future chooses the present. The opposing logics of cause and reason intersect within the paradox of time. Time is the coincidence of cause and reason.

Laws of cause and reason are given outside of time. But they are applied through each other in time, which just is their application.

Abstraction is the transcendence of cause and reason. It is negation without basis. Therein it is the basis for everything.

Note 155

3 kinds of real:
1) Projection
2) Cause
3) Thing-in-itself

Facts are not out there in the world. Facts are projections of the mind of things out there in the world to guide the mind in referring to patterns out there in the world. The correpondence is a positing of equivalence between the projection and the phenomena we observe. You cannot derive this equivalence from observation or deduction. Its not verifiable. This is not guided by derivation but by rules which are pragmatic.

Note 154

Civilisation as the intersection of past material as well as ideational technology and the concepts of agency defining the future.

Social concepts are given meaning through their orientation to conceptions of agency in the present in relation to the boundaries of past and future.

In this way the public and the personal conceptions of conditions of agency blend into each other through the construction of identities and institutions.