L’impossible est-il réel?

existence !

L’humanité ferait un grand pas si elle se décidait enfin à ranger l’impossible parmi les possibles, et en inscrivant sur ces drapeaux ce qui est depuis toujours la maxime de sa part la plus créatrice « A l’impossible nous sommes tous tenus ». Mais elle ferait un pas plus grand encore si elle osait penser que l’impossible est nécessaire, proprement inéluctable. L’histoire enseigne aussi bien au chapitre des grandes inventions qu’à celui des grandes catastrophes humanitaires que l’humanité est incapable de s’empêcher de réaliser une idée qu’elle a imaginée, si magnifique, absurde ou monstrueuse soit-elle. Mais on gagnerait beaucoup plus de temps encore si l’on se décidait à admettre la grande conséquence de ces deux principes, a savoir que la réalité ambiante, qui résulte de toutes les créations accumulées de l’histoire, est une sorte de musée permanent des impossibilités, dont l’habitude seule nous préserve de mesurer l’inanité, l’incohérence et l’injustice.

Le ludicien…

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A philosophical education

1. Paraphrasing Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (where Cicero is himself paraphrasing Plato), Montaigne gives us the famous remark that to philosophize is to learn how to die. We prepare not only by banishing the fear of death through understanding, however, but because in contemplation per se we are most acquainted with death. While initially Montaigne calls contemplation a withdrawal from our bodies, contemplation is a sort of resemblance or mimesis of death by which we are ultimately liberated to our bodies (not from them) in the pleasure of life.

We prepare for death not by thinking about death but by a desire for the good. This is why, for example, Spinoza insists that one who is free “thinks of nothing less than death” (E4p67). The paradox is that thought is like death but it can never be of death.* The liberation of thought from death consists in being (of) death without letting death appear before us, which is why for the Epicureans the thought (of) death manifests as ataraxia instead of Angst, i.e., an affect of life as a dialectical negation of death (to think (of) death is only possible by not thinking of death).

*Significantly, in his allusions to the third way of knowing, Spinoza never satisfies his promise in the Ethics to discuss that part of the mind that remains after the body perishes.

2. If we learn how to die (which, instead of a “preparation” for death is actually learning a desire for the good) by thinking, it is necessary that we learn how to think. It is not surprising, then, that the same duality in thinking (of) death is that which we find in those who teach us most purely how to think. There is always and necessarily a sort of trickery involved in that lesson: we are led to believe that we are learning “about” something (else) when, in the end, we realize that the (real) object of our thought is simply “how” to think. It is true that philosophy per se enjoins us to think—by convincing us that we must think when and because we usually are not—but there are those who grasp that we cannot say that what we’re thinking about is how to think on pain of reflexive failure. Yet such reflection is precisely what essentially philosophical thought accomplishes, i.e., to show that ultimately what is thought “about” is (thought) itself but only by making it not “about” itself. In short, thought thinks thought (Metaphysics 1074b35) not by thinking itself.

Consequently, the problem of philosophical expression is intrinsic to the attempt to think. There are many ways—not all of which may be successful but a significant step is taken by the recognition of the problem—of thematizing the possibility of philosophical expression (e.g., (eidetic) intuition, the speculative proposition, more geometrico). The tendency toward mysticism results from a fundamental confusion either between (1) the limits of thought and what is actually constructive of it or (2) the relation between thought and being. The proposition that “the True is the Whole” or the ontotheological thesis of the One-All mistakes a reference to or representation of totality as if it were something other than (discursive) thought because of the timorous conviction that that which cannot be thought must be other to thought (which is correct) and whose otherness must fall on the side of being (in other words, the mistake is to posit that that which must be thought for thought to think “itself” is not itself, yes, but neither is it on the order of being). What all the pure thinkers (of) thought have grasped is that there are no forms of thought but there are only performances and repetitions.

Further notes on the line

There are no lines in nature.

All thought occurs in lines.

There are many lines

But all lines tend toward a single line:

This tendency is the texture of thought.

A line has no structure: it is itself tendency (élan).

Structures are lines—

In the indiscernibility of matter and form.

There are many lines—

Of words, steel, melodies, fields, worlds, and flight.

A line is not the terminus of a surface

But a plane is the limit of a line:

As the transformation of the insistence of a line to the existence of a point

(There is thus a stratification of point, line, and plane).