Stop now. Before I begin, I want to thank the Organising Committee of the Philosophy Society for having organised this. So, members of the Philosophy Committee, could you stand, please? Barney. Just Barney. Just Barney. Okay, thanks Barney. The reason being that it's... The reason being that it is extraordinarily encouraging for us who have wasted our entire lives thinking about things that are not, to witness other people wishing to devote themselves to spending their entire lives thinking about things which are not. I think nothing could be more encouraging.
if we want a true exception to as it were the world of commodities if we want a true exception to the world of only dealing with matters that can be instrumental in self-promotion then I think thinking about things which are not is the best example so thank you for doing this I have something I want to talk about called the concept of creation can I what? can you zoom in a bit Magnify it. Magnify it. Make it bigger. Yes. . No, it's the short answer. .
. . it's exactly the same, I don't think I can sorry Will, but it's there so see you ok, what I'm going to talk about is the concept of creation the reason why is this, we are scared, philosophers are scared humanity scholars in general are scared of the concept of creation but it's because it's become the territory of those who dispute any form of naturalism concerning the origins of the universe. Meanwhile, however, the natural sciences, far from disputing it, I don't know if anyone saw the Guardian yesterday
with this announcement of early radiation waves finally lapping on the shores of actuality, the natural sciences have embraced this concept. They've even spent years constructing devices by means of which to photograph the creation of the cosmos. This entails 13.7 billion years in order to get us to a point where we can take a photograph of the universe prior to our existing. It's just brilliant. So the sciences are not fighting scared of the cosmos, and philosophers are. And the question is really why. Why are philosophers scared of the cosmos? The reason is we think that holding a concept of creation is likely to expose us to accusations of theologism. Fine, I say. So long as we can mean by that the thought about things which are not.
That's fine, I don't mind that. But why is that so scary? After all, it is the thought of a certain genera of existent. The thought of a deity, the thought of creation, is the thought merely of a certain genera of existent. It may be a very large genera, a very large kind of existent, but it is just that. It is a thought. And that is really a modern possibility. That idea that the thought of the genera that is the greatest of all generas insofar as it is that genera that exists only if it is the sum of all possible generas is a modern thought, insofar as precisely it separates the concept from the actuality. But that, of course, that separation of the concept from actuality is also a concept.
So the question arises, how to arrive at a concept of creation that does not fall victim either to merely being a concept, i.e. to not being a concept of creation, and at the same time to offer a concept of creation that offers sufficient guarantees that the concept of creation remain a concept of creation. So, that there is creation. What sort of a concept are we dealing with? That there is creation. I have an interesting citation which I'm going to use. Those of you poor students whom I have been subjecting to the most appalling, gruelling tasks during the MA classes on a Thursday evening will no doubt wince in pain when you hear this. Here is the hypothesis that I'm going to be dealing with. That a universe exists, this proposition is the limit of experience. That a universe exists, this proposition is the limit of experience.
That's a citation from Schelling from the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature from 1797. It occurs on page 18 of the translation by Peter Heath, the bad translation by Peter Heath and Errol Harris. That a universe exists. This concept is the limit of experience. Okay, now what sort, sorry, this proposition is the limit of experience. is what sort of thing then is the whole statement that a universe exists, this proposition is the limit of experience. First of all, the proposition occurs in a larger context. It is not a proposition on its own. It does not just say a universe exists. There is such a thing as an X, called a X of the universe, and this X exists.
Had this been the claim, had that been the proposition, it would have fallen victim to the dreadful torture to which Kant put the predicate existence in his refutation of the ontological proof. So it's not just that proposition, it's a proposition embedded in two other things. The second part, or rather the third part of it, the point about this proposition being the limit of experience places it in a Kantian frame, places it in the frame of talking about what is possible experience for us. The first part of it, meanwhile, the declaration that a universe exists by being placed in effect within the confines of a proposition, first of all, and secondly, of the limits of possible experience, becomes something altogether unrecognisable
if compared with the claim a universe exists. Namely, it is an hypothesis. So the proposition that is the limit of all experience, namely that a universe exists, occurs within an hypothesis. Now, why make this point? Why spend time analyzing the manner of words when what I want is a concept of creation? A concept of creation, I'm going to claim, is an hypothesis and is only an hypothesis, provided that there is such a thing as creation. So the total hypothesis I'm working with, the concept of creation is an hypothesis, providing that there is such a thing as creation. What do I mean by creation? That, for example, there wasn't always a concept of creation. If there was always a concept of creation, manifestly the concept of creation, while being a concept of creation, states something about a contradictory entity.
Insofar as everything was eternal, there is no scope, no place for creation. Insofar as that's the case, it cannot be possible that creation can have occurred in an eternal universe. Therefore, the concept of creation just is a concept of creation when it applies to a universe that is in fact created, or one in which the concept of creation is not an eternal feature. In other words, I deny that there is a universe in which the concept of creation is a permanent feature. There is no universe that contains always a necessary entity called the concept of creation. In fact, how long does it take to reach the concept of creation? Well, approximately 13.7 billion years. We might want to ask, do we get there by the time we've passed
this enormous span of time, this endless holiday between mere actuality, trivial empiricism on the one hand and conceiving it on the other 13.7 billion years to arrive at a concept that's an atrocious waste of time all the more triumph for it say I I remember hearing from an uncle of mine who had managed to spend 14 years without gainful employment by devoting himself entirely to education my I thought that's impressive I shall follow in his footsteps he was not the profligate one his brother had gone completely schizophrenic, jumped on a motorbike, married an Indian, and raced around the North American continent for his entire life. Very curious. So, wasting time, no bad thing. What is the universe but a giant waste
of time? Okay, so what do I mean then about this concept of creation that took 13.7 billion years to create? Well, it is of course an hypothesis, but it's an hypothesis given concrete form by an experiment recently conducted called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is a photograph taken of part of the cosmos, a constellation called Fornax, which is just beneath Orion in the night sky. It was a six-month exposure. The photograph took six months, in other words, between pressing the shutter and letting it go. Hold still. Marvellous. not 13.7 billion years to do that just 6 months which is quite good it's not so much of a waste of time
the object of the photograph was the most red shifted light in the universe, the most red shifted light being the oldest and they reckon according to the project leader that this photograph got them within a stone's throw the project leader says of the Big Bang so they managed to get a photograph within a stone's throw of the Big Bang okay now it's very tempting at this point just to throw up her hands in glee and explain, well, getting within a stone's throw of the Big Bang and photographing the Big Bang, you know, a miss by an inch, ring a bell? You know, idiots. You haven't photographed the creation of the cosmos. You've photographed what happened afterwards. That is not creation. It is not an image of creation. But we'd be wrong to take this hack, I think, because what's much more interesting is the mere fact that it is only now possible
to take a photograph so far back. Why is this interesting? Because it raises the prospect some might say speculative, others might say technological, of creating a photograph of the origin of the cosmos that places the photographer, as it were, prior to the cosmos having awakened. So we could picture our photographer in the void. The photograph of non-locality. Imagine what that would look like. The photograph prior to the singularity. Can I imagine our photographer there and so forth, waiting patiently, looking at his watch and thinking, what's the point? Time doesn't exist yet. When is the Big Bang going to happen? You know, I've been here all night. I want to see the Big Bang. Where are the fireworks, Dad? All the rest of it. All of a sudden, bang, the Big Bang.
And the camera closes at just the right moment. The photograph is taken. Wahey! We have salvaged, as it were, the creation of the cosmos from its own deep history. We have, as it were, acknowledged that there is a species of false memory embodied in the very history of creation. and we have a photograph to prove it. Now what we have to do is run back into the present and show creation its own image to make it shudder and be appalled at its folly and retreat back into the big crunch perhaps. That bit is speculative or entirely fictional. Now what's the point here? What's the point? Have we therefore, instead of a concept let's say, arrived at an image of the creation of the universe? No we have not, I will claim, for the following reasons.
An image of the creation of the universe is precisely what the creation of the universe makes impossible. Why? Because if there is a creation of the universe, it did not involve someone photographing it. It only now, i.e. consequently, involves someone photographing it. Insofar as it involves someone photographing it, it is not the creation of the universe, but rather the creation 2.0 of the universe, brought to you by Kodak. It is a photograph of creation, not creation itself. What does this tell us? It means the image of creation is precisely an instance of creation, not a recovery of creation, not a stretching back from the alpha to the omega. I remember your conversation in the union bar.
Not a stretching back of the alpha into the omega, or the omega into the alpha, but rather a new creation, a new element in the universe. And actually one of the people who got me to this point, to thinking about this point, the concept of creation is a concept of creation just when there is creation. There is creation when there is a concept of creation because it wasn't always there. Therefore, conceiving what was not hitherto conceived, i.e. creation, is indeed a concept of creation precisely because it's an instance of it. What got me to this point was thinking about the Russian avant-garde painter Kazimir Maligic, who wrote several manifestos for an art movement he called Suprematism. Suprematism, he managed to reduce to several drafts. Yes. This is an instance of my drawing skills.
That, he says, is Cubism. This is Impressionism. But Suprematism is that. The theory of the additional element can be boiled down to three simple axioms. If you want cubism, do that. What did cubism add to this? Precisely that. There were no candlesticks seen in four dimensions in Impressionism. In fact, I so hate Impressionism, not least because it's been overly photographed, that I'm quite glad, I would be quite glad, really, if cubism eliminated it. Also, it's, and I'm sorry, Katrina, I just have to confess that I love abandoning the southern isles for the northern wastelands of the concept. I like the elimination of sense that Kubrickson presupposes in relation to Impressionism.
Suprematism is the gravity-defying angle, the prospect of leaving the earth. Each of these is an additional element. The universe is qualitatively different each time a mark is made, in other words. That is a concept of creation. Now, what have I established? and established the claims that a concept of creation must satisfy if it is to be a concept of creation. Namely, a concept of creation must be such that, or is one, just when the universe is such as to support it. That is to say, when it arises, but was not always. Insofar as that's the case, the concept of creation just is a concept of creation because it's an instance of it. What, however, did we start from? We started from an hypothesis.
What is it that a hypothesis does? It does not state X about Y. It does not, for example, add the predicate exists to some subject whose state or whose nature we hitherto know and merely copy into our propositions. It's one thing that always struck me about the destruction of the autological proof as Kant displays it, that he says existence doesn't add anything to the concept. So we already know what the logical subject is, do we? We already know what the X that refers to absolutely nothing or absolutely everything is. The question concerning the subject of existence is not surely answered in immediate terms in the manner that existence would add nothing to it. For example, what is the X in X is P?
I'm going to put a question mark next to it. What is the X in X is P? We don't know. If we suddenly swap P for existence, X is existence. That adds something. That actually does add something because existence is the smaller category than X. Why? Because X might well include non-existence. So to say that non-existence exists is a different proposition from saying existence is a subject about which we already know everything there is to know, for we already have a concept of it. It's in the sense that guided, as always, by the immortal Schelling, the first photographer ever to be photographed, and thus responsible for my conceiving of the concept of creation by means of the Kodak moment. Not the singularity, the Kodak moment.
The first philosopher to be photographed asked this question at the opening of his last treatise on the philosophy of nature. The question is, what am I thinking when I think what exists? what am I thinking when I think what exists? Any answer to that question is an appropriate answer to that question because what I am thinking is precisely not given to me. The predicates that pile up on top of this merely logical subject we might want to claim add something to it simply because they subtract other possibilities. As I say, X exists is different from X does not exist, Meaning, therefore, that X exists adds something, adds a piece of information about whatever it is that this X is.
But there's no reason, of course, to limit the X to existence. In other words, existence never was a predicate. That was a foolish error on the part of some idiot from König's death. Some short idiot with clear behavioral issues and OCD. Why do I claim this? because of the famous anecdote about Kant having to tie his leg up in order to stop the blood flow to remind him to move both legs at the same pace. That's the craziness that we have to put up with when we read The Critic of Pure Reason. You want to know about ascetism? That is it. Anyway, he decided that existence doesn't add anything merely because he presupposed that the subject is already known. The subject is not already known. The subject is precisely a question. and any predication that takes place consequently upon that subject is an hypothesis.
That means the predicate is truly consequent on its antecedent. What that antecedent is, we do not know. However, that antecedent becomes an antecedent of the consequent just when a consequent issues. Thus, if concept of creation is itself the predicate, the logical subject is added to. there is an additional element in the cosmos because creation has taken place. Schluss. Can you read the footnote, by the way? Is anyone got any questions?
Yes. Oh, my God. With regards to the Kodak moment, or I think as you put it, first of all, singularity 2.0. Yes. So we get to the point where any point at which we reach or attempt to kind of take a photograph of that moment is a new creation in and of itself. I think that's what you were planning on. How could a picturing or a map of that kind of concept of someone taking a picture back in time of the Kodak moment, how bizarre and weirdly temporal and crazy could that picture get?
So how many different possibilities of different Kodak moments, and Kodak moments of Kodak moments, and Kodak moments of Kodak moments of Kodak moments? You are raising the problem of what I call the Wessex Red Bus route to the origin of the universe. In other words, in a non-local environment, how do we get to the place called before? There can be no map, So the being prior to, as it were, is not available in advance of taking the photograph. All the more reason why anywhere is good enough, even if anywhere is impossible. But this demonstrates in turn the fact that the creation of the universe takes place as a secondary or consequent entity within a universe that already exists.
But the creation of the universe that is being photographed is a creation of the universe, therefore consequent on a creation of the universe that already occurred, if the HUDF project has its sums right. So we're not going to get a bust there, but that isn't a problem. The location of the photographer, as it were, the location of what I called recently the third astronaut, Plato in space, is not a problem, because anywhere where it's taken from falls victim precisely to the same problem, i.e. it is a consequent location. So we shouldn't try and search for the original spacecraft, just keep trying to take new ones? No, precisely. This is part of it. The concept of creation is a concept,
and I said I wanted to respect both the concept and what it is not, i.e. let's say the actuality, or let's say nature, or let's say reality, or whatever name we want to give it. In consequence, the gap of 13.7 billion years is not really a colossal waste of time unless the entirety of creation, insofar as it spans galaxies and so forth, is a complete waste of time. This is rather a means of thinking about creation such that it becomes subservient of a larger philosophical project. But that does not mean that the philosophical project, being larger, subsumes the entire content of natural history, as it were, from the singularity to the present. Precisely for this reason, that the creation, let's say, of the concept, goes by way of the creation in many subsidiary stages. Not least the formation of amino acids, formations of planets, formations of amino acids, bonding of amino acids, emergence of organism, emergence of organisms with sufficiently developed crania, etc., to be able to conceive, and that conceiving occurring.
There is a natural history of precisely the concept of creation, in other words. The concept of creation cannot recover even if it attempts to record it all. Why? Because the recovery of the analysis, if you want, of the totality of that natural history takes place in a moment, futural, with respect to the projected terminus of the recovery. I.e., I when I start and not the same I when I finish, insofar as that finishing is impossible because I have to recover also my own recovery of the entirety of the natural history of the thought of the concept of the universe. If I understand you correctly, for me to have the very notion of creation,
creation must have taken place at some time in our universe. Because of the fact that we have the notion of creation, And it cannot be eternal. Yes. Because it will not be the concept of creation itself. Yes. So the concept of creation can occur in a universe only if the universe itself is created. Yes. Right? Well, it's plausible and it's very rigorous. But what about impossible concepts? It's a square triangle or a square circle. I dare not engage with you on the problems of squaring the triangle
squaring the circle rather the problem of the impossible concept is solved in exactly the same way there are impossible objects precisely, and there is only one environment in which there are impossible objects, namely that in which they arise whatever that environment is, in other words it is the environment that gives rise to impossible objects question are impossible objects eternal when you fight rock you will tell me please ok a universe in which there exists a concept of creation denied by the universe such a universe exists precisely in so far as it is a concept of creation and the concept of creation occurs or the whole hypothesis is rather the concept of creation occurs in the context of an hypothesis
concerning the origin of the universe so the same applies Ian, I just wanted to say I think it's interesting that actually for very different reasons Kant might be on your side because although he doesn't have he wouldn't, he couldn't possibly within the system have the concept of a God coming into being but he does nonetheless say that the claim God exists must be neither analytic nor synthetic and in some way that seems to be, for very different reasons, that seems to be what you're saying, or what you're claiming. The claim God exists adds something to, or might, adds something to
the concept of God. I mean, of course, that cannot be true that God is the sum of all possible properties, including existence. God cannot come into existence. But if you think of God in some other way, God might come into existence. And so the fact that to him, that claim is nighed, that and he ignores the fact that God isn't in the universe, in some way, what you want to be to argue for is a category of claim that isn't egos and aneurysm or sympathies. That's hypothetical. Even Kant acknowledges, I agree, Kant is on my side in various ways. The antinomies are couched for example entirely in the mode of hypotheses, if then. And he parses that as antecedents and consequence. So it's ignoring a part of to ignore one part of the critique
and just take or to ignore the majority of the first critique and just take this part of it out would of course be pointless but there is support for the claim moreover I agree that existence is not a predicate but who would have thought it was that's the craziest thing imaginable existence is a predicate in other words I confer in the act of thinking existence upon whatever it is I'm thinking about Well, yes, insofar as it's Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy, etc., or God, but no, insofar as I think a planet, and therefore there is planetary genesis. It does not happen that way. But if you look at this form, if you look at the history of the form where the subject precedes the predicate, in the form of the subject issuing the predicate of existence,
I think, therefore, I am being quite a good example. where the subject confers existence, in fact. That is the true problem that I think Kant was unaware of. And this is because, ultimately, I think, because of Kant's relationship to platonic ideas. He does not understand that the idea is something. He does not understand, in Frege's words, that it is something because it is precisely not a belonging of consciousness. It is not something that consciousness has. So the it, the X about which Kant speaks, was what was in Platonism precisely from which everything that issues issued. For Kant, that becomes, as for the moderns in general, this I take it is why Schelling says that the elimination of the concept of nature from philosophy is precisely a specialism of modern philosophy.
we find exactly the same shrinkage if you like of the subject from the it then to the logical subject then to the subject that is conscious and confers upon things existence in other words the sum total of modern epistemology is to arrive at the proposition I am the creator of the cosmos I'm not interested in the creation of the cosmos I'm interested in the cosmos and its creation so I agree moreover I agree that existence is not a predicate. But I think that the contrary hypothesis that existence is not a predicate because it's a subject is worthy of some consideration. Yeah, I mean, it would say, can I come back on each? No, you're not going to. No, go ahead. I'm getting some beer. Well, you should come back.
No, go ahead. I would go later. Okay, thanks, Eli. Yeah, I want to see if I understand. I wonder if there's anything so specific about the concept of creation, given what you said, were you suggesting that every concept is a kind of creation because it adds something radically new to the universe? And if so, I just wonder, I'm just trying to understand what you were saying really. So you were suggesting also that what Kant misses is that a concept of something is something. So it exists. Because what I was thinking was that I was trying to think about the beginning of all concepts, so the time the concept first came back. And that presumably is a moment of creation from nothingness. I mean, I'm just thinking of, Lacan says something about the symbolic order, i.e. the order of concepts as such.
We have to think of this, in order to be materialist, we have to think of that, the very beginning of concepts as such, or the beginning of thinking, we have to think that as a creation ex niolo. And I just wondered if, I'm just trying to be clear on what you're saying, so I was just wondering if you're trying to think about the origin of concepts as such, and whether we can conceive the origin of conceptuality itself in some way. And in which case, why are we talking about the creation of the universe rather than the creation of conceptuality? I think this is a version of the Wessex Red Bus problem. Right. I signed it over. So the Wessex Red Bus problem is just precisely the problem of locality. Let's say, for example, that we want only to locate the concept
of the creation of the concept. and so we have two concepts the concept of creation and the concept of the creation of concepts and we say that the call it matter exists just when the creation of the concept is thinkable as the blind spot of the concept when we have the correct concept of the creation of the concept so what is not in the concept precisely when we have a concept of the creation of the concept what is other than it must be conceived as being other than it in the concept of creation. The concept of creation, however, per se, cannot exclude, as it were, the concept of anything created. So to the extent that this is a concept of creation and nothing is specified, the creation of concepts is clearly part of that.
I would go further than claim about materiality involving the thinking of the non-existence of whatever it is that I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about it. I think materiality entails both the thinking of that, in other words, not the creation ex nihilo of it, but simply the creation itself, insofar as creation involves precisely the distinction, regardless of context, between inexistence and existence. But that betweenness, the conceiving of creation as such, is of course consequent upon any antecedent that the concept seeks to recover. So it's a generative process for concepts, insofar as they think about creation per se, rather than a generative process of concepts
insofar as they think about the creation of concepts. That's what I'm getting at. Really, it's an attempt to counter two things. One is generalized formalism. So we see this in Frege, for example, when he wants to say that he wants to be a Platonist. So the article, Thought, published in the Contributions to the Philosophy of German Idealism, issue number one, you don't do that by accident. when the issue der Gedanke, the thought, not thought as such, was published in this journal in 1919, Frege wants to claim that the thought is not a personal belonging or belonging of consciousness, nor is it a thing in the world. Therefore, what must it be? It must belong, concludes Frege, to some third realm.
This third realm exists precisely insofar as the concept is not reducible, we'll just use concept as a general term, not reducible to either personal possession or a thing. So what has been added? The creation of concepts entails the creation of an additional realm within which concepts are. Concepts are also not in the universe, because the universe is, and his hypothesis is, composed of things. You know, this is news. It's 1919, you know, it's not 1806. things? Why start so high up the scale of natural history as with things? Bizarre. Nor is it a personal possession in the sense of belonging to consciousness. So the resistance to psychologism, thingification, reification, entails the existence of an abstract domain.
So clearly, however, as a natural historical event, the emergence of the abstract domain has various precedents, has various instances that dot back through history. If Frigga's claim is correct, the concept doesn't depend on consciousness. It does, however, depend on some species of genesis. The genesis is not a genesis of things, so why, therefore, is there this third domain? Why, therefore, is this third realm in which concepts and concepts only are placed that differentiates them from things and thoughts? so that's really that's part of the agenda attack on specious formalism that ends up in constructing a number of worlds to house things that can have no communion between them thank you
there are no more questions I think you've probably finished thank you thank you Thank you for coming as well. It would have been way different if it was just me. Thank you. Thank you.
I'm not sure if you want to get a question. I'm not sure that's telling you this. If it's true that, that person's a team from just trying to understand the best part. The family is a group. You might be on a team.
It's the same thing that I've made from the lawyers. So, for example, It should be discussed in a way that it's not a set of examples called mathematics. It's a kettle of possible models for my politicians. Like a categorical, a children. If it's not that, then we are concepts. I suppose I'll claim about what concepts are the concepts. I've got page 14.
I don't know. So it's a very fair, but it's not anything where a concept is taken from each other, and used to buttress the idea, but concepts are one thing, every one is a member of genus X.
So the division X X X X seems to be a function called the meaning of genus, as if the X X division is concept-alism. It's a species of genus X X. Sorry Barney, what? The spirit that you think about. Oh, yeah, I'm going to pick it up. And there is, and do you mind if I make one? Yeah, sure. It's not the absolute thing that's absolutely true, is that it's not going to happen. The question of the absolute thing that's absolutely true. I think I'll take off the process. That's it Barney, C2 or 5. C2 or 5, yeah. Thanks Barney, thanks. Thank you. Cheers, I'm dizzy. I'm serious, I think it's genuinely inspiring to see people wanting to do this.