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.

###
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.

Note 153

What is an identity? It is a function of the systemic totality of things, which enables the particular pragmatic frames within which individual things acquire meaning. This is conditioned by principles of materiality, and principles of system-consciousness. Practice (forms of life) are the product of their interaction. Functionality is the motivating factor, at least in social forms of identity. (It is embedded in some way in other genres of thinking, perhaps as a condition for thinking itself.)

Human nature is a particular functional requirement in the system, due to human agency as the limiting factor and the value of work, so the evolution of society has often been traced to the use of principles and incentives that condition this. However, the role of consciousness in discovering new ways of identifying systems, increases the permutations within particular functional parameters. Here, materiality and resolution interact, but distribution of power resources tends to generate an equilibrium, which is constantly shifted from the role of new ideas and conditions about the role and nature of human agency.

Note 152

In the applied sense, a positive and negative freedom is embodied in a freedom.

Philosophical Investigations Note 8

Things are the intersection of systems, defined in terms of the ways they relate to each other.

So is meaning, a second-order relation of things (embodying the relation of systems of thought).

Descartes 1

Descartes was misguided. The world is simulation. Then why something not nothing? Existence is relative. So must the self exist? Only in relation to that which it exists in relation to. The self and the world only exist in relation to each other.

Note 151

What is culture? It is essentially a relation of one set of properties of a reflexive system to another.