Alain Badiou - YouTube Lectures 2010 (current)

Philosophy's goal is subjective transformation, not new knowledge. Is dialectical in nature not rational progress toward better knowledge.

The conservative philosophical approach is one that frames philosophy as the acquisition of collectively better and better knowledge i.e. analytic or scientifically bent philosophies. They attempt at the closure of philosophy, Philosophy can answer the question.


More radical philosophies do not seek ultimate closer, but engage in dialog, a dialectic. They work off the notion that we are a dialectic between being and non-being. Even conservative closure seeking philosophies have to employ dialectics to do their "closing." So they are contained in the larger set of dialectical philosophies and therefore derivative of philosophy proper, dialectical philosophy.

The grand battle:

Analytic or conservative - gaining closure by reviving the past or remaining in the present
 vs
Dialectical - ongoing conversation of ever-churning interpretations of the past/present

5 conditions for a philosophical society:

1). The philosophers philosophy must be open for discussion, non dogmatic. Democratic.

2). Common rules of discussion or rationality.

3). The possibility of universality of philosophy. Its for everybody even other societies. Plato's slave could do philosophy.

4) ?

5) philosophies are bound to their creator and their transmission is not entirely rational. A philosophy needs to engender a new subjective desire, so the originators presence is very important.

Universality is the ability to be understood from another time or part of wold history. Not reducible to its historical context. Truth exist as human creations that escape their cultural contexts.

03/01/12

Philosophy comes from a negative state of radical negativity in doubt - a nihilism.

Only through a positive affirmation can this be overcome. 

6

Mysticism (eastern "philosophy"):

"philosophy without the work, immediate"

A kind of nihilism closed in on itself

"Radical solitude with God"

Pure experience in the infinite

Pure subjectivity

In-immediate Philosophy (western) deals with the describable, non-mystic

Creative Repetition:

Creation of the new from a repetition.

A repetition of a method to new objects

A repetition of 1+n results in a new number. A dialectic of identity and difference. (has something to do with Hegel).

Then an interruption in creative repetition. An event. A beginning before creative repetition. Something between the question of existence and to be.

7

The distinction between pure being and existence (appearances). What IS truth vs. the MEANING of truth. 

Two points of view of truth, from being or from existence. e.g. Hegel's two books,1st The Logic - is from being, and the 2nd, The Phenomenology - from existence. Or Plato's Parmenides from being-as-such, and The Apology from existence.

The "great" philosophers deal in both view points. English positivist dealt with only appearances or existence.

A philosophy begins from the nihilistic state in subjectivity presented with a choice between being or existence. There are differing reactions to the nihilistic state, from exstream frightfulness to resignation. The frightful want immediate escape and chose dogmatic being based philosophies. Descartes in his meditations is in this state of doubts then chooses being. Were Nietzsche or K may dwell more in the nihilistic state of subjectivity.

In science the scientist disappears in their works, not possible in philosophy because of nihilistic subjective beginnings.

-his two books conform to this dual view of truth.

Truth in first (Being and Event) was an answer to truth as proposition. Truth as otherworldly, that is truth existing non-concretely - un-touchable (with our normal senses).

Second (Logic of the World) Truth as a work of art not a confirmation or denial of a question. If truth exist then it must be concrete not other worldly.

Modern philosophy has been a criticism of the truth characterized as an equation to solve for.

Merleau-Ponty (on hold)

        

       Gestalt

Reason  ^  Cause

-Ponty is describing non atomistacly. Motive based as in a tendency for equilibrium. Gestalt - the whole determines what counts as a part. A middle way between the empiricist and intellectuals(rationalist/cognitivist). Middle C sounds different relative to the whole song. The duck rabbit. One grasp the word quicker than grasping the letters.

-The empiricist are explaining and analyzing atomistacly through associations of meaningless impressions, a causal account. Behaviorism account.

-Intellectuals atomist account is rule based,reason or rational based, kantian cognitive, symbolic representation.

The house and door knob. Our bodies get set for a perception. The hand shapes itself into the doorknob, we get set bodily to enter or walk around a house. At a fake house movie set, the body set to walk around, not into. The body not only gets set for the scene but copes with its surroundings i.e. whats in back of me.

Attention 

The intellectualist has a searchlight notion in that our attention toward an object reveals something truer after it has been decontextualized and it remains unchanged. By braking down the gestalt we see the latent truth. Ponty is against this for its destruction of the gestalt. A good use of attention is to recognize its creative element in that attention to an object can bring out its role in a gestalt.

The emperisis and inttelectuals assume that the kind of attention that gives us objects with properties reveals something that was there all along. Afordances are what we deal with in everyday coping, not objects with properties as the notion of a given (unordered building blocks) assumes.

Ponty there is no percepts or stuff to be interpreted or organized. What a object is depended on how its coped with.

Explicit suggest something implicit. Perception is not a making explicit of something implicit, but a making articulate the background (Heidegger's notion of the background).

Motive takes the place of intellectualist unconscience thinking.

Ponty an idealist similar to Kant in that perception depends on the phenomenal world and that that world will never be compleat, but that does not mean that the physical world depends on us.

What makes an object real is that it is both given (being-for-me) and transcending (being-in-itsself)

The body is the condition of objects as real. our perspective or our being-in-the-world.

Being-in-the-world is this tendency for optimal grip toward equilibrium 

Kierkegaard - From Herbert Dreyfus "Existentialism through film" Lectures and odds and ends.

A personal note, K IS THE DUDE!

The Greek tragic hero renounces himself for the universal (the ethical or the norm)

The knight of faith renounces the universal for there-self (non ethical or away from the norm)

One relates to oneself by there relation to an unconditional relation

Lecture 12 at 35:00

Despair is when one lives in the eternal (spirit, possibility, the future, negative) OR the finite (body, necessity, the past, positive) as true,yet we are a synthesis of the two. We are walking contradiction.

3 forms of relation:

1) Unconscious of the despair (spiritlessness) - Running away from the despair(the contradiction) Drinking, drugs, games, TV all are ways.

2) Living one side of the contradiction therefore becoming un-unified. 

3) Wanting in despair to be oneself - a self relating to itself without the relation to this relation. Trying to force the contradiction together under ones own power.

To be without despair :

Have a defining commitment - define yourself through the 

unconditional relationship where everything done is though this relation

Greeks say that there is no way to fit together the contradiction. It's one or the other. In the Christian Kierkegaard way you can. The eternal and temporal for the Greeks cannot meet. For K, there is a kind of eternity "in time the unconditionally committed person becomes eternal" eternity is forever and the unconditionally committed person is in the eternal. They will always be defined as this relation. Forever as long as it matters to you. Within the unconditional commitment you are no longer on the process of defining yourself. The unconditional commitment defines ones world and is eternal and completely open ended and makes finite things in the world meaningful and all that could mean anything meaningful meaningful

The necessary and possible are unified by the unconditional commitment being the self one is always while certain circumstances may change in ones commitment (Heidegger's factisity similar to necessity and freedom to possibility )

The knight of faith in the necessary and possible - can receive their new Issac 

The knight of resignation is stuck in the necessary 

Structural states:

1) Despair (cant deal with the contradiction) is what you have if your without a self

      b) life is not working and never           could work. ex holding on to a past that identifies oneself in a way that does not allow for anything new. K's example in Either/Or one tries to change the necessary (past) with all their energy instead of using that energy for the possible (future).

2) Anguish (not consciously dealing with the contradiction) is what you have if your a self. Away from the ethical or the "what they(das Mann) want me to be/do"

Existentialist against the enlightenment promise that detached analytic thought would save us. Would provide self efficiency and provide an absolute ethics.

K's the good life is in an unconditional relationship with another(person or activity)

Dostoevsky's good life in an unconditioned relation with all others in a agopy love mood

Nietzsche's the good life is the free spirit constantly gaining more power, changing their horizons. Solidity or an unconditioned relationship a sign of weakness. N's example would be an artist.

Existentialism vs existential philosophy:

Sartre - began existentialism in focusing on the aspect of our freedom to choose the best way to live. This introduced a sort 

of detached separateness from ones world to be able to have such a freedom which many like K or H would reject.

All existentialist and existential philosophers would agree that 1) there is no human nature or essence. 

2) the individual is higher than the universal

3) truth is subjectivity, perspectivalism, more points of view are always better than a detached rational view. There is no objective reality.

--------------------------------------From Palmer's book

"The subjective thinker cannot have her own existence as the object of thought. When something is the object of thought it is abstracted from experience and conceptualized. Only that which has been terminated and is complete cab be objectified. But the experience of existence is one of open endlessness  In fact, the experience is as much of something negative as it is of something positive. "

"Subjective thought is negative thought in that it ponders what is not (possibility) as opposed to what is (necessity). It ponders the 'nothingness that pervades being'"

"Descartes wanted certainty in immediacy and certainty of consciousness. However once an immediacy is abstracted from sensation its certainty is no more."

"Consciousness is the collision between actuality (what is) and possibility (what is not). So it is a form of doubleness or doubt. A collision of contradictions:

     Word - Sensation

     Possibility - Actuality

     Ideality - Reality

     What is not - What is

     Abstract - Concrete

"Thought is negative accentuated by doubt. Belief acts as a positive to this negative. Belief sustains thought and holds the world together."

Objectivity is grounded in belief, not certainty.

"Subjective truths are not pieces of knowledge, but are ways of arranging knowledge and activating it."

Heidegger - from Herbert Dreyfus's course on Being and Time 2nd half

3 types of anxiety:

1) life changing choice

2) death - knowing the possibility of world collapse 

3) guilt - the inability of getting behind background practices

Guilt- every dassein has it. Comes from the inability to get behind ones throwness or in other words get a clear understanding of ones background practices and justify them. This inability is good in that if decisions were clear and precise then there would be an infinite regress of decisions and thus final action would never be made. This is similar to Kierkegaard's leap-of-faith in that what ultimately moves rational beings is a "leap" from one choice to another as opposed to a linking of clear-cut reasons. A machine follows rules in this way, yet has no real room for action outside rules. No possibility to introduce into the machines world leaps across chasms of non-rationality and therefore has no capacity for Guilt in this sense. Guilt permeates human rationality. To realize this baselessness behind ones actions is upsetting in that if you can never really take possession or responsibility for your choices, have no ultimate, clear and distinct reason, then how is one to deal with that. H calls it fleeing when one attempts to hide or cover up this disturbing aspect of our selves.

The better one becomes at a skill the more they can respond to a particular situation rather than a general situation. This can only be achieved through gripping the anxiety of the groundlessness of knowledge. By not grappling with this anxiety is to fetishize rule based modes of action for particular situations, an aproch H resist.

Resolute Dasein - an expert in ones culture, yet unquestioning of their cultural background.

Death: we never get to death itself but live in dying (similar to how a teacher never becomes a teacher but continually does the things for the sake of which of teachering).

Perishing - an organisms physical death

Demise - bringing on the anxiety of non-existence or a world collapse. i.e. things one felt of a meaning no longer are from a world collapse e.g. the past love (world meaning maker) were you cant feel agin for them at all.

Death - possibility of no-more possibilities

Dying - the way of life that takes account of the vulnerably of world collapse

? - end of you

Anticipatory Resoluteness:

Antonioni movies about the uncanniness or unsettldness or groundlessness of the world, never feeling at home in the world.

Heritage not tradition is the stuff genius is drawn. No genius out of a vacuum.

Time onticly is secsesive a past, present, future. Primordially it is  non-secsesive. A verb is non-secsecive. There is no getting to your representation or goal. Ready-to-hand time

Heidegger (back burner)

Being is to be grasped by means of the phenomenological method. However, being is always the being of a being, and accordingly, it becomes accessible only indirectly through some existing entity. Therefore, “phenomenological reduction” is necessary. One must direct oneself toward an entity, but in such a way that its being is thereby brought out. It is Dasein which Heidegger chooses as the particular entity to access being. Hence, as the basic component of his phenomenology, Heidegger adopts the Husserlian phenomenological reduction, but gives it a completely different meaning. 

"if everything was clear about our presuppositions , our actions would lack seriousness. 'Every decision...bases itself on something not mastered,something concealed,confusing; else it would never be a decision'"

Being:

Not the most general category

Not a being itself

Not a process or event

The understanding of being is in our background practices

The Greeks called all "things out there" or just mere things pragmata. Heidegger wants to put the pragmatic back into mere things. They all have a use in the totality of uses or background of social practices or Referential Totality. "No such thing as AN equipment"

the "in itself" of an object is in how it is in it's readyness-to-hand.

Readyness-to-hand makes intelligible the present-at-hand, though only by there being something present-at-hand can there be something ready-to-hand casually. 

Unreadiness-to-hand is the way dasein can momentarily see something ready-to-hand in it's in-order-to structure. The readiness-to-hand is understood but not thematically in the unreadiness-to-hand. This process is called discovery.

disclosure  - at the level of readiness-to-hand - what Dasein always is doing.

discovery - at the level of unready-to-hand. Entities as they are only because Dasein has already disclosed them.

 Descartes - what is is that is unchanging and wholly independent. This cannot be accessed by perception but by maths. Heidegger - value predicates (for x'ing) cannot be mathematically modeled.

Unlike Locke who concerned himself regarding identity with the context of asking "who am I " in a self reflexive way, Heidegger thinks this is answered while we are in our everyday normal activity.

Who one is is who everyone is, what everyone does. Das man, the they.

Ontic truth - truth as uncovering . Something is "as this or that"

Ontological truth - dasein disclosing a world the hammer is withdrawn

Greeks - being is tied to an objects presents ie the table is this shape that color. Heidegger wants to reverse this.

Things are what they are authentically when they withdraw, so to Dasein is what it is authentically when it in anticipation(death) and repose(guilt)