INTENSITY, INCONSISTENCY, HYPERCHAOS

These three terms refer to concepts developed respectively by Deleuze, Badiou and Meillassioux to describe the absolute productive principle of nature hidden underneath the world we can see and articulate.  It is important to grasp that they are basically talking about what Lao Tzu called Dao (and to resist the obscurantist asceticism that inspires many contemporary philosophers to foreclose the ancient/religious roots of these things).  Whatever it is - whether it is capable of contradiction or not, whether it it can be detected via inner intuition or not, whether concepts can capture it or whether they can onl be thought 'according to' it - it is basically a kind of monstrous and yet subtle creating and sustaining force that works underneath the laws of nature.   A thinker has to make a decision, it seems, about its relationship to mathematics, empirical science, and art - and then go from there. Or is there a way to know?  In any case, it is hard enough to even clearly recognize the nature of the question and establish its validity.  

Maybe metaphysic is fundamentally the question of the relationship between the infinite (defined potentially in terms of contemporary mathematics, but not necessarily) and the finite, the unlimited and the limit, the apeiron and the peras, the unseen and the seen.

Beyond metaphysics there is still always the question of cosmogony: the question of the one/real/wound that accounts for the apeiron/peras distinction in the first place.

TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC AND ITS LIMITS

One problem with developing a transcendental logic,  even if it is explicitly understood to be speculative and provisional, is that it puts limits on the possible.   As soon as we arrive at a universal law, we have to posit that it has always been and will always be thus

MATHEMATICS, REALITY AND THOUGHT

Probably the least controversial or 'speculative' sounding approach to metaphysics is the one that conceives of it basically as investigating the relationship between thought, mathematics and reality.  Mathematics is so interesting because its boundaries (the boundary between mathematics and thought and the boundary between mathematics and reality, respectively) are so mysterious.   

Consider first the boundary between mathematics and reality.  Here we'll take reality to be simply the physical, objective world as physics understands it.  On the one hand, we want to say that mathematics is a way of merely describing reality, as opposed to being really intrinsic to it.  Human beings, with their power of cognition, come up with mathematical formulas in order to master nature.  On the other hand, it seems we are required to think that in some meaningful sense mathematics really structures reality (rather than merely describing it).  Our formulas would not work if they were not, in some way, basically isomorphic with the actual world that they are being applied to.  Mathematical laws are discovered - they are part of reality itself - not simply made up.  

Now on the other end, consider the boundary between mathematics and thought.   On the one hand, we are tempted to say that mathematics simply is thought, or the highest form of thought.  It is minds that do mathematics.  On the other hand, math has quite a lot of synthetic content that seems to be arbitrary in a sense - it is not content that is merely true because of laws of thought, nor is it necessarily related to something physical.  

Mathematics, then, is a sort of 'cognition' that can't easily be located inside minds nor outside in the world.  

Structural Realism is the position (or constellation of somewhat differing positions, rather) that the physical universe is simply a special case of a mathematical structure.   One could imagine subsuming both the world and the mind in a kind of mathematical infinity.  This position is attractive and seems more and more likely the more we learn about computation.   But can it amount to a complete explanation with no gaps?  

It isn't so hard to imagine that human experience is at a certain level an illusion, and that we are wrong to feel that our ineffable and mysterious experiences cannot be quantized.  What is much harder, though, is to describe the mathematical totality in a way that doesn't require further cosmogonical explanation.  Even if there is an equation that could be unpacked to yield all of time and space, it must either have specificity (be one of multiple options) or not.  It if does have specificity, we can wonder why this equation was chosen and not others.  If it does not (if it is a sort of primordial A = A or Om), we are justified in wondering why it has produced the world at all.  

ACTIVE AND REACTIVE

Active and reactive, presentation and representation, kel valhaal and reign array.  If there is any 'cosmic polarity' it is between these two.  Naturans and naturata, spontaneity and deliberation, the one and the many, the smooth and the striated, binah and chokmah.   This 'polarity' is everywhere in society and ethics, but does it also penetrate to the absolute?

PROCESSION AND RETURN

The one - an utterly indivisible, non-temporal, unchanging nothingness - generates thought, which is equally unitary but somehow secondary.  A simple mark, an act.  It is only when this second principle (the peras) turns around and attempts to grasp itself (the apeiron) that multiplicity is born.  Procession and return - active and reactive force.   This type of dynamic or interplay can be described only by pure metaphysics.   Does it have any meaning?   Can we apply it to commodity fetishism, the symptom and the logic of representation itself, generating a product that hides the process that generated it?   Are there invisible, causal forms that hide behind that which they generate even as that which they generate turns around and seeks to emulate or grasp something that can no longer be found?

VERSIONS OF METAPHYSICS

I always think of metaphysics from two directions - you might say a constructive and and analytic direction.  Transcendental Qabala posits that there are four Alimonies, and names them:  OIOIOn, ANANON, YLYLCYN, SHEYMN.  The basic insight or proposal here is that an account of the world will not be complete unless it includes the four levels of reality that any (neo-)Platonic doctrine requires:  An absolutely transcendent Good, a world of ideas or forms, a temporal and intersubjective world, and a sort of evil, repressed remainder.   Attacks on this schema tend to fail eventually, no matter what their motivation.

That doesn't mean, however, that these four Alimonies are all eternal.   Probably the only truly eternal Alimony is OIOIOn.  It's also important to emphasize that this metaphysical picture does not come from direct access to absolute reality.  It is a synthetic construction drawn from the history of philosophy and religion as well as from reasoning.   If there is such a thing as direct apprehension of absolute reality, it is nevertheless not possible to articulate anything about it - or at any rate nothing that involves parts, enumeration, types, hierarchies and so on.  

The thing is, though, that I have never felt I was onto anything new when it comes to metaphysics.   If we accept that metaphysics is a sort of mathesis universals that is subject to revision over the ages - is there any basis for positing some new version?  It seems one could build a metaphysics from dynamic systems theory (with Deleuze) or from surreal numbers (with Badiou) - but what other discovery has there been that would motivate a new project?   New developments in genetic engineering and cognitive science have a massive impact on DEONTOLOGY and on ESCHATOLOGY - but they aren't  using structures that are essentially new.   

TWO ASPECTS OF PYTHAGOREANISM

Pythagoreanism postulates that number in some sense invisibly underlies all things.   Today this position is called 'structural realism'.    This can be formulated in a number of different ways, and is in any formulation controversial.  The basic intuition, though, is that, now that we are able to model and simulate nature so well, it seems that in principle our models are fundamentally isomorphic with  nature itself.  

Another postulate of Pythagoreanism is that, in a different sense, all is music.  This is in a way an epistemological claim in addition to being an ontological claim - because it means that by listening to music we are able to directly access nature.   Music is pedagogy.   Philosophy isn't even entirely possible without the experience of music.   The classic example is the ratios that generate pitch.   The truth of nature qua music goes very deep.  It is well known that atoms bond with one another to form molecules according to harmonic laws that are literally exactly the same as those that govern tuning.

Further, these two aspects of Pythagoreanism (the world as digital and the world as harmonic) can be seen as two sides of the same coin.   Think again of the atom - the term "quantum" refers to the fact that electron shells are basically digital.  An electron's distance from its nucleus must be a whole number - 1, 2 etc.   And this digital character  is required precisely because of the physics of waves.   The electron shell can fit one wavelength or two, but does not admit degrees in between.    In other words, atoms are digital because they are harmonic.  

But what exactly is to be gained from these speculations?  They support the attractive idea, proposed by Schopenhauer, Emerson and others, that we have a direct window to the absolute in our own experience.  We can grasp absolute reality in a way through our very emotions.

Nevertheless it is important to be careful with this - which is why the discussion of Pythagoreanism belongs to metaphysics rather than cosmogony.   It is not clear that even atoms and mathematics, much less subjective aesthetic experience, really participate in the absolute.    The absolute resists all hypostatization, reification and objectification.   The absolute does not need humanity, nor does need mathematics or physical laws - or at least we are able to imagine it as such.   

Then again, if we really posit such an utterly transcendent (OIOIONIC) absolute, we have sidestepped an important question:  why is there a world at all, rather than no world?   Is it really for no reason at all?   Doesn't the intuition persists that somehow the absolute needs the world, that the articulations of nature and thought are filling a void in God's own heart?   In any case, with this question we enter the properly Hegelian realm of the speculative

LOGIC

Is there an absolute logic, beyond language, tying the world itself together,  by which even God is constrained? If so, maybe it is a logic of computability: contradiction is impossible, because nothing contradictory can change.   This logic would be neither on the level of substance nor of subject. 

BELIEF IN YLYLCYN

People will believe what makes them feel, in spite of themselves, like they either already correspond to their ideal self-picture or that they have an opportunity for advancing towards doing so.  

Could this be the most profound secret about human nature?  The torsion of HAELEGEN:  crucifed by language, I am split into an alien ideal, the source of which is obscure to me, and an equally fantasmatic "real" private, wretched me who seemingly forever fails to live up to this ideal.   

The practical consequences of this near-universal fact are enormous.   Because it means that honesty, sincerity and clear communication are in some ways superficial.  The best of intentions cannot change the reality that most humans will literally believe to be true  facts that appear to them, unconsciously, to be either flattering or to present opportunities for advancement. 

I take it as a duty to, as often as possible, recognize that I myself am governed by these laws, and so are those around me.  Our core convictions - those beliefs that we see as precisely not in need of justification or explanation - have no basis in discursive reason or justice.   

That holds for basic presuppositions all across the political spectrum.    We on the left have to remember that even convictions about egalitarianism are shot through with historicity and power. 

Nevertheless, politics is not simply a value-neutral power struggle.  The left has science, practical reason and God on its side.  But this can only be established and re-established as Ark Work - historically situated, prophetic struggle, a contingency in the name of the absolute 

YLYLCYN and SHEYMN

Ontic reality is shot through with fantasy.  Nothing appears that is not a projection.  Nothing happens that is not a rationalization.   I am ruled by fantasy and habit in my relations to others, who are ruled by fantasy and habit.   We form constellations of order and rank, dominance and submission, lust and contempt.   This is the Alimony of YLYLCYN.   

SHEYMN is something different, something unspeakable as it simultaneously is the most shameful, the most sacred and the most pathetic and wretched.   Could there be a SHEYMN without YLYLCYN?  It is certainly not more  real, we can be sure of that.   SHEYMN pulses and bleeds, slurping and aching.  Or rather it is a cave inside of which The Genesis Caul lives - and it is the Caul that does the aching.   

OIOION and ANANON

These are two levels of heaven.  How to distinguish them?  OIOION is that which is utterly beyond comprehension - beyond materialism, beyond phenomenology, beyond perhaps even mystical apprehension.   I can't be sure that it really is beyond mystical apprehension, however, because I am not an ascetic and I don't know what it's like to really "experience" whatever happens during samadhi etc. 

we can suppose that OIOION has the highest actuality.  Surely she is omnipotent (though perhaps she obeys the principle of non-contradiction).   She may very well also be omniscient in a way that our finite knowing cannot conceive, but which is analogical to it (and which we will perhaps be capable of one day achieving using computers - I see no reason to suppose that just because we can't concieve her omniscience currently, we are doomed to never be able to) 

And we can suppose that she is in any case beyond both substance and thought.  OIOION is not extended, nor does she crystallize.  By the same token, she is beyond being and becoming.   And perhaps she is even beyond nothingness.

In some sense, though, OIOION is surely an Act  .  She had to make a choice.  If the universe runs on a particular, determinate code - who chose the code?   If the code is not determinate (if it is a tautology), then it explains nothing.  If it is determinate, it had to be chosen from among alternatives.  Maybe OIOION made that choice.   

ANANON is perhaps simply the code.  ANANON is Renihilation, the negativity with which everything is shot through.  ANANON is the world of difference, antagonism and becoming.    

Are OIOION and ANANON really different?  It is hard to be sure.   But it is worth supposing that ANANON is contingent as a 'whole', if only because we are not justified in presupposing it

RENIHILATION

Is renihilation a metaphysical principle, or does it operate only in the social field?  Maybe Renihilation is prior to nature, prior to matter, a heartbeat resounding between two deaths.  To know and affirm Renihilation, to situate whatever happens in terms of it - it is worth the effort.

NATURANS and NATURATA

I am not certain whether I believe the opposition between natura naturans and natura naturata, the age-old distinction that separated God from his creation in medieval philosophy, and in the work of Spinoza, Emerson and Deleuze came more and more to represent two aspects of an immanent nature.   Naturans is an invisible, immaterial creative source without form, on the side of the infinite, the virtual, the possible, and so on, and carries some kind of normativity - is is good for it to generate naturata, and it is good for naturata to resemble it as closely as possible.  

The opposition surely exists at some levels of nature - the best example is the human work of art. Metallica is a virtual, immaterial problem or essence.  The band has generated a series of albums which are not Metallica but participate in Metallica as a series.   The value of these albums is derived from their degree of participation in Metallica's essence:  Ride the Lightening, Master of Puppets and, arguably, ...And Justice for All participate perfectly in Metallica's essence and even, by their sequential production, allowed it to unfold and deepen itself (naturans is not necessarily eternal - it has its own way of becoming at the hands of its naturata).  Their later albums are bad because they failed to really touch the essence of Metallica - The Black Album abandoned important aspects of it in favor of finding a wider audience.  Load and Reload were an abortive departure in a Bob Seger direction.   There are more interesting and complex cases - Death Magnetic was also a failure, even though the band's intention was to return to the essential sound of the classical albums, because it was simply an imitation - a sort of abstraction.  On the other end, Kill 'Em All, Metallica's first album, is widely recognized as also a classic, even though on this album they hadn't really found their sound yet - but it displayed seeds of what was to come.  

We can seen then that in the case of art or culture, there is a dynamic life qua interplay between natura naturans and natura naturata.   There's a strong case to be made that we can find the same interplay in social structures, biological structures and even nonliving material structures at least at the anthropic level - geology, transformation between states of matter and so on.   The analogies are fairly easy to see, but - much stronger than that - systems theory is quite good at describing all of these things using the exact same formulas and abstractions.  

But is there a naturans and naturata at the subatomic and astrophysical levels?  It seems like those worlds are pretty different from ours - of course there are philosophers who are eager to totalize the principle and find a way to make it apply to these realms too.  I'm not sure I know enough about the science and mathematics behind quantum physics and relativity and so forth to make a meaningful guess about whether this is possible - but I'm inclined to be more conservative and to suggest that there is no such naturans at these levels.   Thus natura naturans isn’t a real  absolute in nature - it’s actually an emergent phenomenon that appears only at the macro-scale.  

Of course, then there is the entirely different (entirely?) question of whether at the ultimate macro level there is a single God-substance who is the naturans for the entire universe.  This God would not just the the source of individual entities and creations of various types, but also the the source of, say, mathematics.  Or he (or she) would be the reason why there is a material world at all rather than nothing.  A global naturans.  Also, this would be the God whose will we obey when we do the right thing - either in terms of interpersonal conduct or when we create.  So God's will would be unfolding through Metallica while they create their essential albums, and they would begin to sin once they compromise their artistic integrity.  

I want to actually answer this question in the affirmative - and am not entirely sure why.  It is certainly more elegant to adopt the Deleuzean solution, which basically amounts to an affirmation that there is a creator god who is also a source of normativity - but one that is not omniscient or unified - every virtual Idea is a little God of its own.   And then to whittle down the applicability of this picture to only include the world at the human scale.   But there could be arguments for the former view, and good pre-philosophical reasons for wanting to make them

NEOPLATONISM

I reject philosophies of immanence, not because they are demonstrably incoherent or false (yet), but because they foreclose questions about ultimate meaning rather than being open to addressing them in a perhaps non-discursive way.   To postulate that there is only one world and that it is made up solely of relations 'internal' to it is to fail to make contact with mystical questions on the one hand and questions around philosophy of science and mathematics on the other.  

It is more rational to suppose that the basic 4-world map provided by most cosmologies across cultures is basically accurate, to use this as a starting point and then to look closely at the nature of each world in light of modern developments in science and art.   Thus we have the nomination of the Four Alimonies:  OIOION, ANANON, YLYLCYN, S/HE/YM/N

However the burden falls to the tetrad-affirming thinker to explain why there are four worlds.   This is where Plotinus's theory of procession and return is helpful.  Each world has a sort of internal nature and an external nature - a naturans and a naturata.   But there is a principle generating multiplicity from this - because what is generated as naturata, or what proceeds, turns back around and attempts to re-create that which generated it - but fails to.   This is the basic tragedy of existence.  Comparisons can be made to the death drive and to the logic of representation - but we don't necessarily need to invoke modern concepts to support this.  We can simply name it.  Thus it has two names:  Kel Valhaal and Reign Array

STRUCTURAL REALISM

My current research in metaphysics is pointing me towards structural realism.  There are actually a number of different positions that go by the name of structural realism.  There are also positions that don't go by that name, but which could... Zuse, Wolfram, Tegmark, Ladyman have written books and articles that are relevant.   Structural realism, in all of its forms, is basically a contemporary pythagoreanism:  the world is made of mathematics.   This can be approached in terms of philosophy of science.  Here it would mean that the physical world is isometric with the mathematical formulas that describe it: it is the mathematics that describes it.  It can also be approached in terms of philosophy of mathematics. Something more or less like platonism - mathematical objects as we know them are simply real.  They're not derived from concepts or operations.   Finally, it can be approached from the direction of computer science:  the world is a computer program.  The universe is a giant computer.   I incline towards some kind of combination between all three of these versions.

For now I'm treating "metaphysics" as an effort to put together a coherent structural realist position.   My sense, though, is that even if one were able to describe the entire universe in terms of a single formula, one would still have the question:  why this formula?  And the most rational answer to the question would be in terms of some kind of subjectivity or decision.   

There would be a lot to be gained by the effort of putting Badiou's mathematical ontology in conversation with structural realism.  I'm sure most analytic philosophers and physicists would want to get rid of the subject altogether, but I'd incline towards actually transcendentalizing it even more than Badiou does, putting it in conversation with the cosmogonical ideas of Lurianic kabbalah.  

THE FOUR ALIMONIES

Form, cause, becoming, space, time: these are the topics to be considered by metaphysics.   There is good reason to offer a structure that has four levels, just as is found in neoplatonism and in kabbalah, but every thing depends on what these four levels are and do, and what their relation to one another is.  But the first task is simply to name them:  there are four Alimonies, and their names are 01010n, ANANON, YLYLCYN and S/HE/IM