Philosophy Portal

This conversation with Samuel McCormick is the second in a series titled "Reading Lacan's Ecrits". The first conversation prepared Philosophy Portal for teaching Lacan's Ecrits, and this second conversation opens up a post-course reflection and a deeper ritual conversation inspired by Lacan's writings.

In this discussion, David, Ann and I discuss the importance of thinking The Idea of the University in the contemporary neoliberal and digitised political-economic landscape.  The Idea of the University is a book by existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, and written to serve an educational reconstruction project in post-World War II Germany.  Now we discuss this book in our historical context, but with the aim the same: to think the Idea of the University as such.

Theory Underground's new course "The Idea of the University" starts January 14th 2023, learn more and sign up here!: https://theory-underground.com/courses/tiotu 

*Bonus: if you are signed up for the Science of Logic course and/or if you want to sign up for the Science of Logic course (starting January 16th 2023) you will get a Tier upgrade if you also attend The Idea of the University (I will be taking the course as well).

Bryan, Ann, and David talking about the course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNHemcJnLOU&t=3089s 

The Idea of the University audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysRXTmE5FsU 

The post about critique, theory, and ideology: https://theory-underground.com/critique-theory-and-ideology/ 

New Philosophy Portal course focused on Hegel's Science of Logic starts January 16th 2023: https://philosophyportal.online/science-of-logic

Johannes A. Niederhauser argues that death is a central notion in Martin Heidegger’s work on the questions being and time, and even takes us to the core of Heidegger's entire thinking path.  Thus, Heidegger is not merely approaching death as an existentialist problem, of how to become authentically mortal.  Heidegger is suggesting that the abstract concealment and exploitation of death is how the modern project attempts to bring in and enforce a different way of being human, an inhuman way of being human.  This is achieved via the exclusive absolutization of technical knowledge, which would perceive everything, even death, as a problem to be solved.  In contrast to this view, Niederhauser suggests that we must view death as an "utter non-availability".  This involves that we think the relationship between technology and death, and also language and death, in terms of the way death limits the powers of both to "make available".  From these ideas, he suggests it may be possible to “dwell in death” (as a cut), and in so doing overcome death's abstract concealment, by confronting the irreducible and singular personal relation to our concrete death, i.e. “that we have to die”.  What is to be “won” in this dwelling is potentially a real human ethics that can seriously entertain the question "what does it mean to die well?", thereby transcending epistemic instrumentalization of rationality.  What does it mean to become the type of being that, instead of unconsciously desiring to control, manipulate, eradicate or possess death with instrumental rationality, becomes the type of being that can really be, and that can really ground a new world in or as time.

G.W.F Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is often conceived as Hegel's classic work, and one of the most important texts in the history of philosophy.  How are we to conceive of this work?  This question can be framed in many ways: How are we to understand the procedure or methods by which it was written?  What are the main concepts that define this work and how are we to think of these concepts today?  Finally, can we say there is an overall project for this work, and if so, does this project still have relevance for self-consciousness in the 21st century world?

The commons is an ancient social structure of allowing for the exchange of value.  The act of commoning can be defined as the act of exchanging with the ‘whole’ (i.e. doing something for the self as part of a larger tribe, clan, family, rather than for the self itself).  Throughout the history of human civilization more complex structural layers for exchanging value have been built on top of commoning, e.g. including equality matching value (gift economy), distributing value according to social merit (authority rank), and most recently capitalist assignment of value (market pricing).  Commoning can be thought of as the foundation of inter-tribal relation of value, where the value-extension structures on top of commoning can be thought of as forms for intra-tribal relation and commodity exchange.  In the age of capitalism commodity exchange has overshadowed and eroded the importance of other forms of exchange value (i.e. merit-based rankings, exchanging gifts, and commoning).  But with the emergence of digital networks, commoning is re-appearing with a new qualitatively dimension, and a new social importance.  This can be seen in many online communities that operate on a peer-to-peer logic, i.e. where individuals can freely connect and communicate, exchange, self-organize and create new ‘value circuits’.  If these online communities can take advantage of new technological forms (e.g. blockchain, cryptocurrencies), there is the possibility for commoning to once again take center stage as the foundation for a global economy.  This new center would not eliminate other forms of exchanging value (e.g. gift economy, authority rank, market pricing), but could potentially rebalance them in relation to a common tribal relation.

There is an excess which repeats most easily when not observed (it does not want to be observed?).  This excess is its own knowledge as the center of enjoyment and truth of identity.  Of relevance to our on-going discussion, the excess seems to appear most deeply at the site of lack.  Being in touch with this experiential knowing seems primal, and brings one to sites or drives of the body, whether oral, genital, anal, nasal, visionary or vocal.  Does it make sense to say this excess is the place of "perfect" forms?  What is our relation to perfect forms in time?  What role do these forms play in our maturation as subjects?  How can we be in touch, or in-formed by these forms, while also maintaining separation?

Metaphysics concerns the study of first principles of being (e.g. identity, change, space, time, causality, necessity, possibility).  In other words, whereas physics studies the physical world, metaphysics is the study of the fundamental categories we use to make sense of the world in the first place.  For example, Isaac Newton structured much of modern physics with his system of categories; Immanuel Kant revolutionized philosophy by attempting to think of these categories as structures of the mind; and Georg Hegel introduced a higher-order dialectical movement to these categories as features of a historical process.   

Martin Heidegger, certainly one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, famously attempted to “overcome metaphysics”.  Heidegger’s project is marked by “returning to Dasein” (or our being-in-the-world), claiming that all of Western philosophy had “forgotten being” under different “metaphysical regimes”.  In our age Heidegger was convinced that metaphysics imposed a “techno-scientific-industrial” character onto our being-in-the-world.  However, even Heidegger admitted that we must return to being-in-the-world only in order to be able to “begin anew” (metaphysics).  In this discussion we seek such new beginnings, not only an affirmation of our being-in-the-world, but also a return to metaphysics.

The dating landscape used to be generally regulated by a traditional-normative symbolic structure which organized society towards a more-or-less clear value-form: marriage/pair-bonding.  The modern dating landscape has largely lost this symbolic structure, and consequently, it has become extremely complex and confusing: a disorienting digital marketplace of wild drives and images disconnected from long-term value-forms.  Javier Rivera and I attempt to philosophize about this complexity and confusion with a psychoanalytic perspective.  We discuss the possibility that an internal-intersubjective symbolic structure can be re-organized if we consciously accommodate the real as an impossibility.

We feel the lack of an absolute being, and reality itself seems to lack as a split between atom/void.  Here we play with the imaginary of the mind which exists in this split between nothing and everything: what would it look like if we could “subtract lack” or “become lack" and “connect to the absolute”?  Would we be “fucking everything”?  Would we exist in a “giant social orgy”?  To start this dialogue, I give the personal example of a psychedelic experience which "connected to the absolute", the feeling of such a state, as well as the after-effects.  We then spend the majority of the discourse discussing dialectical dynamics of our relations to the feeling of the absolute under the model of "oscillations and negativity".   From this we push towards the idea of a dialectical-historical understanding of the emergence of "perfect form".

We started our first discourse on lack in the context of the origin of philosophy in the Parmenidean presupposition of absolute being banishing the void; and its relationship to the emergence of psychoanalysis as a discipline that operates by necessity in the void of subjectivity.  In our second discourse, I propose to shift our context to Democritus, and his atomist ontology, which we may say is the spontaneous unofficial metaphysics of scientific materialism (i.e. the universe at base is divided between indivisible somethings and nothing (“the void”).  However, the complimentary opposite of atoms, the void, is often left unthought by scientific materialists, leaving open-ended the philosophical consequences of a presence that depends on absence.  For Democritus, a presence that depends on absence signifies an important distinction vis-a-vis thinking “the real” (or fundamental reality), namely, that the most essential cannot be either a being (atoms, something), and neither can it be a non-being (void, nothing), but a paradox of the two.  He referred to this paradox of the two as a “not-nothing”, or what we might call “Lack”.  What does thinking Lack as a fundamental reality mean for scientific materialism?