@Miles,

Also, can it be "seen" as more than one such distinction,or is it "all else"?

extra smile

1. Is this a hoax?

2. Is it a real hoax, or a bot-generated one?

3. What or who is nihilsum.com?

I am full of sadjoy reading this thread. The postmodern seems entirely appropriate to interiority, projected as superposition/subjectivity.

"I am nihilsum, you are nihilsum they are nihilsum as we are all together;
See how they fly like pigs in the sky See how they run."

To consciousness, whatever is projected as the world is negated as self. Nihilsum is the god of the godless, that always says "Thou shalt(not) ..." and always after the event, because before the event, how could one know? One is, like Winnie-the-Pooh, always being dragged up the hill of awareness by one leg, one's head going 'bump, bump, bump' up the stairs.

I do see now how this Nihilsum doesn't actually provide anything for thought for lets say theoretical abstraction because it has no base at all, thus not very 'useful' or positing anything to our being and not. I also don't even think I understand it anymore or if I did, I think so but it expanded itself. — mlles

You need the concrete logical arguments with evidence based on the rational reasoning to put forward your ideas. But if you deny the logic and reasoning, then you have no feet to stand on to make your ideas and claim objective and acceptable.

At some universities postmodernism has become as scary as The Spanish Inquisition. — jkop

No, at some universities, the rhetoric and actions of some students and faculty have become repressive. Can you locate anything intrinsic to postmodernist philosophies taken as a whole (whatever that would be) that would necessitate such repressive behavior?

One of my favorite topics. We have had similar discussions before (see: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/905552).

is right that Aristotle looks at this quite a bit. One area would be the idea of prime matter as sheer, indeterminate potency with no actuality, no eidos (form), and thus absolutely lacking in any intelligible whatness (quiddity). Aristotle thought that being involved contradictory opposition. Something is either man or not-man, fish or not-fish. Contradictory opposition cannot serve to unify any thing and make it anything at all. But the "transcedental properties of being" in the medieval philosophy that grew out of Aristotle (the Good, the Beautiful, the True, and the One(Unity) all involve contrary opposition. For example, something can be more or less good, more or less unified (for Aristotle too). So the move from being to beings involves this sort of shift in opposition.


Plato's "Chora" in the Timaeus another example. Actually, you can think of the entire philosophical problem of the "One and the Many," which defined ancient Greek thought up to Aristotle, as being very much related to this same sort of interplay between being and nothingness, and the way it collapses our distinctions and ability to say anything about any thing.

Sugrue's lectures on the Parmenides capture this really well. He shows how what Plato is grappling with through the Forms is the slide towards a silent unity in Parmenides (who denies all becoming, all change and motion, and thus must deny all the evidence of the senses—speech collapsing into the one continuous "ohm" of Eastern thought) and the inchoate chaos of Heraclitus' world of ceaseless change, where we cannot say anything true about anything because our words always have different meanings each time we speak them and the things we refer to are constantly slipping into non-being. Obviously, there is overlap with a lot of post-modern and post-structuralist thought here.

There is an analogy to information theory here too. Parmenides unchanging being is like an endless bit string of just 1s (or just the same 1 measured over and over). Lacking any variance, it can hold no information. There is no "difference that can make a difference). By contrast, Heraclitus' inchoate change is more like an entirely random bit string. There is variance, but none of it ever tells us anything about what we can expect in the future, it carries no information (except about its own randomness). Of course, Heraclitus' arguably overcomes this slide into the nothing of unlimited multiplicity and difference with his concept of the Logos. However, in what remains of his work, this Logos concept is not very well developed. What Plato and Aristotle have to do is figure out how to develop this into an actual explanation of how being can be both many and one, to chart a sort of via media through the Syclla of a single, unchanging sound, and the Charybdis of inchoate noise.


Hegel's Logic famously deals with this too (and Hegel is quite the Aristotelian in many ways). The Logic is a bear, but Houlgate's commentary is a bit easier. The Being/Nothing chapter is available here: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://phil880.colinmclear.net/materials/readings/houlgate-being-commentary.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwividrY65yGAxUSJTQIHcJcDJkQFnoECCwQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0NPBNROaaCut1CwliwJj6N

Spencer Brown's Laws of Form interesting here too.

To quote from the other thread re information:

If you think about this in analog terms, you can think of a wave with infinite amplitude and infinite frequency. As you increase the frequency, the peaks and troughs begin to cancel each other out. At the point of infinity, you end up with total cancellation, a silence, but this is a pregnant silence. There is perhaps an analogy with quantum information here, where an infinite range between 1 and 0 exists prior to collapse.

So, we have the "pregnant" silence of the infinite wave and the silence of absence where there is no wave at all. This is essentially how Eriugena distinguishes between "nothing on account of privation" and the "nothing on account of excellence" that is God.

Anyhow, a key difficulty that seems to pop up for post-modern thought is the "slide into multiplicity" (as opposed to the slide into the silence of total unity). IMHO, this can be traced back to modern notions of freedom being grounded in potency as opposed to act—the "freedom to do otherwise," or, at the limit, "the freedom to choose anything." This itself grows out of Reformation Era voluntarist theology and the renewal of concerns over the Euthyphro Dilemma (brought on by the univocity of being and the fear that "if God only does what is good" then goodness has become a limit of divine sovereignty). What do largely atheist 20th century philosophers have to do with 15th-17th century theologians? I actually think quite a bit; we inherit our ideas. Hegel is interesting here because he is one of the great rearguard defenders of the classical/medieval view of freedom as "the self-determining/self-organizing capacity to actualize the Good."

This represents in a strong desire to tear down anything definite and actual as a limit to expression and freedom. We can think about the "body without organs" in Antonin Artaud's original sense. There is an important sense in which we aren't free to do anything without our organs. We aren't even free to be an organism, a unity unified by its goals. Without act, there is only the slide into multiplicity, just like language collapses without grammar, syntax, proper spelling, etc. We could consider here how even a 2,000 character short post using a few alphabets and basic mathematical and logical notation has something like 2,000^400+ possible configurations (vastly more than the number of protons in the visible universe by many, many orders of magnitude). Borges' short story "The Library of Babel" illustrates this really well. In the set of all possible 500 page books, almost everything is gibberish (and yet books that decide the gibberish into many different meanings must also exist).

No, at some universities, the rhetoric and actions of some students and faculty have become repressive. Can you locate anything intrinsic to postmodernist philosophies taken as a whole (whatever that would be) that would necessitate such repressive behavior?

Is this not a "no true Scotsman" or "'real communism/capitalism' has never been tried," situation? No doubt someone could argue something similar about "real Christian nationalism," being grounded in love and "what is best for everyone," or "real Marxism" freeing the university system.

a lens through which we can reconsider existence and the limits of logic — mlles

I suppose I would say this sort of notion works best for me, without pseudo-philosophical trappings, when I enjoy a work of art. In the last couple of weeks for instance I've seen Laurie Anderson do a live show (Let x=x), read a startling novel by Olga Tokarckuk, and been to an exhibition about Florence in 1504. All of these, one way or another, offered me marvellous lenses through which I (re)considered existence, and, sometimes, the limits of logic. Raphael picking up artistic tricks from Leonardo or Michaelangelo - it's pretty insightful, at least for me.

Postmodern fear of knowledge.
— jkop
I'm stealing that phrase. — Banno

:rofl: Same.

No, at some universities, the rhetoric and actions of some students and faculty have become repressive. Can you locate anything intrinsic to postmodernist philosophies taken as a whole (whatever that would be) that would necessitate such repressive behavior?

Is this not a "no true Scotsman" or "'real communism/capitalism' has never been tried," situation? No doubt someone could argue something similar about "real Christian nationalism," being grounded in love and "what is best for everyone," or "real Marxism" freeing the university system. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What do Christian nationalism and Marxism have in common? Both of them are grounded in forms of emancipatory humanism, which means that both posit a path of righteousness, on the basis of which it is possible to oppose and identify injustice and ethical depravity. The vast majority of the ‘woke’ community shares in this moralistic thinking, and justifies their repressive , language-policing tactics on its behalf. By contrast, the post-humanist work of writers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida rejects the idea of a righteous path of emancipation and the moralizing that goes along with it. They work not from grand narratives of emancipation, but within particular discursive systems to reveal openings for re-invention and alternative forms of interchange.

No, at some universities, the rhetoric and actions of some students and faculty have become repressive. Can you locate anything intrinsic to postmodernist philosophies taken as a whole (whatever that would be) that would necessitate such repressive behavior? — Joshs

Relativism of the postmodern kind does not work at university level, where people are expected to live up to certain standards and produce work that can be assigned monetary value.

Universities are, essentially, capitalist endeavors, with competition, standardization, normativization. And as long the people there, faculty and students, are business-minded, conservative, things work.

Postmodern fear of knowledge — jkop

What projection, and so authoritarian!

Other people feel whatever you say that they feel ...

By contrast, the post-humanist work of writers such as Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida rejects the idea of a righteous path of emancipation and the moralizing that goes along with it. They work not from grand narratives of emancipation, but within particular discursive systems to reveal openings for re-invention and alternative forms of interchange. — Joshs

But where do such alternative forms of interchange actually work?
Certainly not at university, nor any level or form of formal education, not in most businesses.

I suppose a freelancer in some fancy abstract
mostly artistic type of work-livelihood could practice those alternative forms of interchange. But for everyone else, I can't see how they could be anything other than socioeconomic suicide.

The Nihilsum attempts to challenge the understanding of existence and being by occupying a space that is neither fully ‘something’ or ‘nothing.’ It resists the either/or of categories that we people have used to define existence. Rather than being a specific state of being, it exists as a construct, that of which is meta-logical and transcends these boundaries. Its existence lies not in what we can categorize, but in its inherent ability to defy those categories. By existing in this paradoxical ‘state,’ the Nihilsum forces us to rethink ontological frameworks, where opposites are often required to be mutually exclusive. — mlles

This actually very much resembles Buddhist ideas of nirvana and what an "enlightened being" is.

/.../
"And so, Anuradha — when you can't pin down the Tathagata as a truth or reality even in the present life — is it proper for you to declare, 'Friends, the Tathagata — the supreme man, the superlative man, attainer of the superlative attainment — being described, is described otherwise than with these four positions: The Tathagata exists after death, does not exist after death, both does & does not exist after death, neither exists nor does not exist after death'?"
/.../

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn44/sn44.002.than.html

But where do such alternative forms of interchange actually work?
Certainly not at university, nor any level or form of formal education, not in most businesses.

I suppose a freelancer in some fancy abstract
mostly artistic type of work-livelihood could practice those alternative forms of interchange. But for everyone else, I can't see how they could be anything other than socioeconomic suicide. — baker

Groups of people form the kinds of social, economic and political structures that they understand. There are only a tiny handful of poststructuralists in academia or the workforce, so until which time that they emerge in larger numbers, these institutions will continue to operate the way they have. That doesn’t mean that individuals can’t apply poststructuralist ideas in their interactions with others within these institutions.

That doesn’t mean that individuals can’t apply poststructuralist ideas in their interactions with others within these institutions. — Joshs

You're so optimistic!

One area would be the idea of prime matter as sheer, indeterminate potency with no actuality, no eidos (form), and thus absolutely lacking in any intelligible whatness (quiddity) — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps that’s a precursor for what was to become the ding an sich of Kant (I don’t know if that’s a recognised theory.) The many arguments I’m having about idealism revolve around the idea that in the absence of the order which an observing mind brings to bear, nothing exists as such. Not that it doesn’t exist, but there is no ‘it’ which either exists or doesn’t exist. The delineation of forms and the differentiation of things and features one from another is what ‘existence’ means, it is the order that ‘brings things into existence’, so to speak. (For which the ‘observer problem’ is an exact analogy.)

That doesn’t mean that individuals can’t apply poststructuralist ideas in their interactions with others within these institutions.
— Joshs
You're so optimistic — baker

That’s what everybody tells me

Perhaps that’s a precursor for what was to become the ding an sich of Kant (I don’t know if that’s a recognised theory.) The many arguments I’m having about idealism revolve around the idea that in the absence of the order which an observing mind brings to bear, nothing exists as such. Not that it doesn’t exist, but there is no ‘it’ which either exists or doesn’t exist. The delineation of forms and the differentiation of things and features one from another is what ‘existence’ means, it is the order that ‘brings things into existence’, so to speak. (For which the ‘observer problem’ is an exact analogy.) — Wayfarer

This is a helpful formulation of the idea.

It’s taken some doing!

Aristotle thought that being involved contradictory opposition. Something is either man or not-man, fish or not-fish. Contradictory opposition cannot serve to unify any thing and make it anything at all. But the "transcedental properties of being" in the medieval philosophy that grew out of Aristotle (the Good, the Beautiful, the True, and the One(Unity) all involve contrary opposition. For example, something can be more or less good, more or less unified (for Aristotle too). So the move from being to beings involves this sort of shift in opposition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Where does relevance fit in here? Contradictory opposition defines the being of a thing, but never simply in opposition to everything else in the world that it is not. The contrast pole to a meaning establishes the criterion of sense on the basis of which the thing differs from what it is
not, the particular way in which it is like some things and differs from others.

Anyhow, a key difficulty that seems to pop up for post-modern thought is the "slide into multiplicity" (as opposed to the slide into the silence of total unity). IMHO, this can be traced back to modern notions of freedom being grounded in potency as opposed to act—the "freedom to do otherwise," or, at the limit, "the freedom to choose anything." — Count Timothy von Icarus

But in poststructuralist thinking there is no freedom to do just anything. Freedom is always constrained by its history. It is always a relative freedom, a freedom that is at the same time a break with respect to a prior discursive system and a move which is dependent on that system. Multiplicities are organized diagrammatically, consistently, as perspectival points of view. Deleuze says:

Between two diagrams, between two states of diagrams,
there are mutations, reworkings of the relationships of forces. Not because anything can connect to anything else. It is more like successive drawings of cards, each one operating on chance but under external conditions determined by the previous draw. It is a combination of randomness and dependency like in a Markov chain. The component is not transformed, but the composing
forces transform when they enter into relation with new forces. The connection therefore does not take place by continuity or interiorization but by re-connection over the breaks and discontinuities. The formula of the outside is the one from Nietzsche quoted by Foucault: "the iron hand of necessity shaking the cup of chance”.

The Spanish Inquisitors, like witch hunters, used a mix of secular law and religious scripture so that the basis for judgement appeared lawful yet depended entirely on the interpretation of some alleged witness, expert, or priest. Thus the judges could get away with accusing, punishing and executing anyone that someone didn't like, and by such terror maintain political and religious orthodoxy in an entire population. It served the interests of power.

Not unlike how some of today's political activists use postmodern "theory" (or theories). Granted that these activists are not the ones who think and write the theories, but if the theories have anything in common, it's their diagnosing and revelatory character which makes them intellectually intriguing, yet they are written in a style which is obscure enough to remain dependent on the authority of expert interpreters. Thus, any critic can be dismissed for misunderstanding the theory. Furthermore, when the theory attacks our intuitive and common sense views and rejects the existence of a shared basis for judgement (e.g. realism), it serves the interests of power.

Of course, any philosophy, theory, or science can be misused for repressive rhetoric and actions. Imperial colonialists misused Enlightenment principles, nazis misused biology, communists misused psychiatry as political means. But they could at lest be accused for being wrong. Some postmodernists, however, don't even admit that there is such a thing as being wrong, which is arguably more pernicious.

if the theories have anything in common, it's their diagnosing and revelatory character which makes them intellectually intriguing, yet they are written in a style which is obscure enough to remain dependent on the authority of expert interpreters — jkop

I have read Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida and don’t find any of them obscure. I find their ideas new and therefore difficult to grasp at first, which leads many to blame the messenger for the challenging nature of the message. If you need to rely on the authority of expert interpreters, then you aren’t actually understanding a philosophy. How can you use any set of ideas if you remain dependent on some other authority? And how would relying on what they say help matters if you are not able to understand what they are telling you?

when the theory attacks our intuitive and common sense views and rejects the existence of a shared basis for judgement (e.g. realism), it serves the interests of power… Enlightenment principles, nazis misused biology, communists misused psychiatry as political means. But they could at lest be accused for being wrong. Some postmodernists, however, don't even admit that there is such a thing as being wrong, which is arguably more pernicious. — jkop

No, journalists who spread cliches about Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze on Youtube claim that they say there is no such thing as being wrong. Now that’s what I call pernicious. Here’s what Derrida says about not being wrong:

For of course there is a "right track", a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.

You could try the Wikipedia page on qubits. It explains things better than I could. If Wikipedia does not meet your standards, well, qubits are a hot topic and there's plenty of other accounts.

In a another thread, you cited https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08775v1:

Oh, and there are paraconsistent logics that are being used in non-woo quantum mechanics. — Banno

Did you read it? Did you understand it? Did you feel an urge to ask the authors what the fuck they meant by equation (2)?

Where does relevance fit in here?

As Ricoeur puts it, Aristotle is primarily a "philosopher of quiddity." Aristotle does not have the clear distinction between a thing's essence (what it is) and its existence (that it is). This would be developed by his Islamic commentators and later scholasticism. He also thinks the world is eternal, without begining or end, and it seems, that Parmenides has a very good point about the idea that one cannot speak of or think non-being.

Being is most properly said of substance (things and thing-hood). One can have red light or a red ball, but never a red "nothing at all." Dogs can run or be blind, but one never has just "running" or "blindness." So the subject of predication, under essentialism (the idea that things are particular sorts of things).

Any thing is something. The contrary opposition is between being a particular sort of thing or not. Aristotle lays this out most clearly in Book IV of the Metaphysics when speaking on the principle of non-contradiction.

Husserl gets at something similar in his thought experiments on how much we can change the noema without making it cease to be what it is. Change a triangle's color or dimensions and it remains. Add a side and the "triangle" vanishes.

But in poststructuralist thinking there is no freedom to do just anything. Freedom is always constrained by its history. It is always a relative freedom, a freedom that is at the same time a break with respect to a prior discursive system and a move which is dependent on that system. Multiplicities are organized diagrammatically, consistently, as perspectival points of view. Deleuze says:

Sure, I am speaking to the earlier move to define freedom primarily in terms of potency, which is very wide reaching, beginning in late medieval nominalism and Reformation theology and then appearing in Locke, Spinoza, Kant, etc,. becoming philosophically mainstream. Part of what makes Hegel unique is how much he reverts back to the older model.

Acknowledging constraint isn't a limit of defining freedom as potency. Nietzsche is a fatalist, but he certainly inherited this tradition (the end of Twilight of the Idols is a particularly strong example). You can see it in moral realists like Sam Harris, who are also fatalists, or Sapolsky's new, popular "scientific" rejection of freedom. Incompatibalist fatalists, as much as libertarians, can think of freedom in these terms.

Whereas it's possible to view language, historicism, etc. as posing no real challenge to freedom, in the sense that what the free person ultimately chooses is always what is best, unless they are in some sense unfree due to ignorance or weakness of will. The free person has, ultimately, one unifying path, the unfree very many. The free person is free to walk this path for the same reason that being unable to crash is not a limit on one's ability to fly.

It is important to note that such a view need not wash away the particularity of the individual. Goodness, being a principle, might be more or less fully realized in different ways by different people, in different contexts. Authenticity can still remain a core element of human flourishing. Indeed, authenticity might be considered key to achieving a state of virtue—i.e., a state where one “enjoys doing what is best.” However, such a view does require a certain sort of moral realism, one that mirrors the epistemic conviction that, although there may be “many ways to be equally correct,” there are always “very many more ways to be wrong.” Additionally, that “all true descriptions of the world will share something in common.” Such a sentiment is in line with Leo Tolstoy’s famous observation at the opening of Anna Karenina that: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Any thing is something. The contrary opposition is between being a particular sort of thing or not. Aristotle lays this out most clearly in Book IV of the Metaphysics when speaking on the principle of non-contradiction.

Husserl gets at something similar in his thought experiments on how much we can change the noema without making it cease to be what it is. Change a triangle's color or dimensions and it remains. Add a side and the "triangle" vanishes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’re ignoring the rich normatively constituted relations that are unified through subjective (noetic) idealizations. The noematic content hides within itself these normative intentional shapings coming from the noetic side of the noetic-noematic synthesis. From the noematic perspective we see only a self-same object with its necessary attributes and properties, but from the noetic side we see the ‘plumbing’ undergirding such idealizations. Seen from the noetic perspective, there is no self-same object, but rather a constantly changing flow of synthetic senses , united moment to moment on the basis of similarities. Thus , the oppositional relation between an object and what it is not is subtended by an underlying normative sense making intelligible both object and its negation.

Here’s what Derrida says about not being wrong:
...
"..this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread." — Joshs

See, apparently one must read his numerous texts again until one gets it "right", which exemplifies my point about postmodernists thinking that there is no such thing as being wrong (in this case only their critics are "wrong").

See, apparently one must read his numerous texts again until one gets it "right", which exemplifies my point about postmodernists thinking that there is no such thing as being wrong (in this case only their critics are "wrong"). — jkop

Or perhaps you just ignored the part of the quote that denies your claim that postmodernists think there is no such thing as being wrong.

the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy.