Reason & Time (Session 2)

We are live, Reza. Thanks. Okay. So yesterday we talked about kind of like a very brief summary of basically what self-transformation is. We didn't really actually talk about what self-transformation is. We talked about a couple of other things. It's the functional understanding of self-transformation and that two of its powers, one of its main powers of self-transformation is determinate negation.

And the term negation is basically a methodological lens that is capable of determining specificities for a given function or a given behavior or a given, basically, how something operates. That's an agency that is incapable of having a determinate negation, looking its past and make explicit

what is implicit in the past is, in a Hegelian tradition, is destined to simply repeat its past. blindly. And we talked about this in terms of the self-transformation of the agent or spirit in Hegelian sense combines recollection of the past, self-recognition in terms of present and the past, concomitant negation. And recognition, com-negation, creates this kind of transcendental framework in which each stage of transformation

is non-bijective to the previous one. It's some sort of diagonalizing movement. So then if history of the agent is not simply its past state, but also a sequence of its self-constituted transformations, then it means that because of this absence of bijectivity between states of transformation, one-to-one mapping, absence of one-to-one mapping, it means that the sequence of transformation no longer entailed in the iteration of past the states. So this basically, for Hegel, constitutes the historical progression.

And so today I'm going to talk about what is this historical progression by starting with, as I promised, talk a little bit about the question of agency, and specifically a stoic, ethical, cynic and stoic understanding of what an agency is, elaborating in terms of a hegemonic project, and then discuss its ramification for basically historical transformation and consciousness of freedom. So let me...

Okay. You guys can see it? Yes. Okay. So we talked about self-transformation as being the capacity to constitute or have a history. that an agent capable of self-transformation, meaning constituting itself according to a self-narrative of itself, meaning that creating a necessary link between self-conception and self-transformation,

is a creature who is capable of having not only a nature, but also a history. A rational agency, and this we will talk about, that agency ultimately can only be understood in terms of a rational agency, its capacity, its perfection. The perfection of agency is the perfection of reason. A rational agency is a self-transformative power. Over time, its reflexive, recursive operations can transform its own powers, deliberative fields and operations, hence its norms and actions. Agents in this way thus remake their

structure over time." So basically the transformation of the agent, its capacity to act is not only a capacity, It's not only action in terms of how it gains traction on the world, but the first thing that it exhibits is really transformation in the self of basically the agent. There is a single unifying aim in the life of every rational agent, and that aim guided by the notion of a good life. or the Stoic is good life, is happiness, or eudaimonia, is virtue, understood as the perfection

of agency. Now, the life of, basically, the life of the agent, and this life needs to be understood not as natural life, but again, as a historical life. because agency cannot be substantiated, as we said, solely by recourse to its nature, but how it basically has a history that reflects in its freedom to transform itself. Now, this good life or life of the agency for the Stoic can be seen under a series of axioms. It's called the axioms of the Stoic normative logic.

Basically, how these axioms of normative logic are concerned with action or practical reasoning of the agents in order to transform itself. The first one is the axiom of encompassment, the exercise of our agency through practical intelligence, including practical reasoning, all things considered. Now, when we are talking about all things considered, again, we are coming back to the idea that we talked that the definition of a good life is action in accordance with the knowledge that has gone through different stages of reflection on the nature of things,

which we talk in terms of, you know, that incremental adaptation to the intelligibility. We talked about, you know, the complex interplay between manifest and the scientific frameworks. So the exercise of our agency through practical intelligence, including practical reasoning, all things considered, is the most comprehensive and controlling of our endeavors. The second axiom, axiom of finality, there is no reasoned assessment endeavor external to the exercise of practical reasoning, all things considered. Axiom of moral priority, norms generated by the exercise of practical reasoning, all things considered, are superordinate to all others.

And this we'll talk about. Axiom of futility. Agents are required not to make direct attempts to do or be something that is logically, theoretically, or practically impossible. Now, basically the centerpiece of the Stoic thoughts, even before the talk of indifference or regulation of affect or anything, is the thought of hegemony, which the Stoic calls Hegemonikun, the commanding sphere. The commanding sphere is basically consciousness or the mind,

with the consciousness being understood solely in terms of practical reasoning, as a practical project, basically. Hegemony, I will talk about hegemony in what sense? in the sense that the first thing that basically this hegemony does is that it brings any other endeavor of the agent under its banner. in the sense that hegemony is what makes intelligible any other action of agency.

Because the whole idea that agency cannot adjudicate itself, it cannot see itself entitled to anything unless it basically abides by what makes it an agency. And what makes it an agency is really self-transformative power, its capacity to constitute or to self-constitute a history rather than mere nature. So the hegemony is really the engine, an engine in the sense of a project, engine of the agency's intelligibility.

It's what maintains the intelligibility of the agency. But also this hegemony, by virtue of, you know, superordinating everything else in order to maintain the intelligibility of agency through which the agency entitles itself to this and that, freedom, dignity, so on and so forth, it also integrates all other endeavors, all other projects, all other sub-projects. So it's hegemony in the sense of both dominance, commanding dominance over all other basically endeavor and also in the sense of its capacity to synthesize or integrate any other concrete

project that the agency has. And I will talk about this, that basically the hegemony in this sense needs to be understood as a qualitative or abstract freedom of the agency, through which the agency is capable of making entitlements for itself. And the presence of this abstract or qualitative transcendental schema of freedom, which is basically the hegemonic project, agency as a hegemonic project, precedes concrete or

quantitative manifestations of freedom, namely manifestation of freedom in endeavors of the agency through life, whatever those endeavors might be. Now, the question is that what is practical reasoning? Roughly speaking, every endeavor, because it seeks an end, poses practical problems for the agent. Problems of clarifying and operationalizing the end, finding effective means for reaching the end within the constraints defined by the project, and generating norms of reformative assessment. Solving such practical problems is itself an encompassing project,

which you may call practical reason. That is distinct from all others in part because it has a distinct aim, the integration of conflicting endeavors. And in part because considered formally as the effort to pursue ends effectively, all other projects are embedded in it. Its distinct aim of achieving normative integration is a consequence of its comprehensive formal aim of implementing projects per se. So it's more like it has a programmatic, basically, it's not only, it's basically bootstrap utilities or means-to-ends projects and endeavors,

but also it needs also to be understood as, again, as I said, as an abstract schema in the sense that it has a programmatic nature, exactly like a computer program. It implements all other, kind of like a platform program, that it implements any other concrete project that the agent might have. Isolated endeavors, when they come into normative conflict with others, pose a practical problem that can only be solved by integrating the conflicting norms, by ranking them hierarchically with respect to one another. Without such integration, conflicts bring all the involved activities,

including practical reason, to a halt. So it does not mean, it doesn't follow that basically hegemony resolve conflicts. It organize conflicts. it basically turns them into a productive engine and this is kind of that I said in the first session it's a kind of misunderstanding of reason and in this sense practical reasoning that practical reasoning tries to stave off conflicts no this is not the case its attitude toward conflict is twofold.

One, it basically removes explicit logical conflicts, but also organizes implicit real conflicts into a productive trajectory. Without such integration, conflicts bring all the involved activities, including practical reason, to a whole. Practical reasoning aims at achieving the normative integration of isolated endeavors. And that's the second sense of hegemony. Now, Stoics hold that agency defines autonomy. Every exercise is self-transformative in the sense that it captures a set of data which is given and forms it into something new.

For example, a discrete experience, a perception, a preference, an endeavor, a normative construct. Agency itself, a datum, a given. But when conscious of itself, this is the most important thing, and this is where Hegel starts his project of spirit or self-consciousness. But when conscious of itself, it operates transformatively upon itself as well, capturing in self-consciousness a set of data about its operations and forming the data into something new, such as a self-concept, a self-image, a self-narrative, a propriety personal space, an endeavor about its own operations or a logic representing those operations.

In that sense, agency governs or transforms everything it is given to work with, itself included. This is the very definition of autonomy. Now, so there is the famous Hegelian dictum that history is the progression of consciousness of freedom. And history, as we talked about, is a sequence of self-constituted transformations. So we can see that basically this one agency forms a consciousness of itself,

and this consciousness reflects, as we talked about, in two dimensions, two-dimensional activities, conception and transformation. It gains a freedom, and this freedom basically reflects into autonomous link between conception and transformation. Every alteration in conception of the self introduces a change basically in what the agent is.

And every change, again, in the structure of the agent induces an alteration in the self-narrative or the image of the agent. Now, we talked about that agency is defined in terms of a project. That, as I will argue, that agent is not a being. Agent is properly understood as simply an activity, an activity that is hegemonic.

Namely, its reality is that of a project. and this also moving forward we talked about this in terms of Hegelian functionalist understanding of a spirit and if we one of the risks that the definition of agency in terms of being harbors is that it thins out the definition of agency to the point that the that this definition simply guarantees the complete theoretical and practical impotency of agency. If we attribute agency to a being, to a mode of being, we are basically endorsing, we are basically committing to a form of theoretical and practical impotency.

In line with Kant, that's we need to understand agency as an activity. Now activity is a functional thing. We cannot attribute function to things but activities. If agency is a functional entity, then if we attribute this function to things rather than activities, we create a functional regress. Basically, everything can have that function. That function can be realized in everything. You can see this, for example, in kind of the flat picture of function as related to earlier theories of the mind, where basically

if you attribute mind to a thing, namely a function of the mind to a thing, then everything can have that mind, whether it's my cigarette, whether it's human, it's a piece of a stone, it's a river, so on and so forth. But that creates a functional regress. And that functional regress thins out the useful, the proper definition of mind, or in this case, agency. And it results in, again, as I said, in both theoretical and practical bankruptcy. Projects are constitutive facts about agents. To be an agent is to be purposive or goal-oriented, that is, motivated to act towards some ends.

And I will talk about what kind of end exactly is in itself for agency. The motive force is internal, built into the project, and typically experienced as coming from within, as pressing or pushing one to act. Agents may pursue a project of which they thoroughly disapprove, a project whose means and ends are repugnant, for example, but to which there are no alternatives. A project may include, exclude, or be concomitant with another, and such relations may be necessary or contingent, permanent or temporary, symmetrical or asymmetrical in surprising ways.

The fact that Project A includes Project B, for example, I'm becoming a philosopher, I need to move to a remote place on this planet in order to pursue my philosophy, for example, does not mean that it could not be the other way around. A project is indelible to the degree that its pursuit or completion makes a permanent, perceptible difference in any agent's character or conduct. That is enabling to a degree that it opens opportunities for any agent. Sorry? Hello?

Mo, I think your microphone is on. I'm so sorry. Don't worry. Okay. Sorry, can everyone hear me? Yeah. Okay. A project is indelible to a degree that its pursuit or completion makes a permanent, perceptible difference in any agent's character or conduct. that it is enabling to a degree that it opens opportunities for any agent, disabling to a degree that it closes them, inescapable to a degree to which undertaking it or continuing it is necessary, comprehensive to the extent that it includes and dominates another project.

At the level of general normative principles, there is little that is useful to say about these matters, namely basically the concreteness of different endeavors, different projects. With different projects being contextual in the sense of concrete particulars. Erasable, enabling escapable projects, for example, are not even prima facie preferable to indelible disabling inescapable ones. The task of an advanced agency is then to integrate less comprehensive projects into

the hegemony of more comprehensive projects through practical reasoning. Basically, the integration, the hegemonic move, the hegemonic formation of a project is precisely the integral structure of the agency as such. Now, of course, failed projects and unmet standards can be a source of misery. And this is where basically a stoic philosophy starts to talk about agency and hegemony and understanding of agency as a hegemonic project.

But where it basically becomes, you know, historic philosophy in the sense that more or less we are familiar with is in this part. Basically, what happens when our projects are not fulfilled? And how can we recuperate with the consequences of our projects with the understanding that if agency as such is a hegemonic project and every project is riddled with risk, risk, then there is a good chance that the unfulfilled project basically becomes a source

of misery for the agent. And so far as the project itself, as we talked about, is really the definition of agency, is really the integral structure of agency. Now, of course, failed projects and unmet standards can be a source of misery, misery that can be eliminated if one chooses fail-safe projects and meetable standards. Now, that's the kind of, you know, the classical portrait of practical reasoning as a solely risk-averting, risk-avoiding enterprise. However, it does not follow from this that one ought always to make fail-safe choices, And this is basically people who have read Seneca or Epictetus, they know that they are quite fond of risk, actually.

They, for a Stoic, in fact, rationality is defined by, in terms of its, you know, developing an armamentarium, a rational armamentarium to turn risks into opportunities and to recuperate with basically the asymmetry between risk in terms of the goal of projects and psychological effects of these risks, reflecting basically in the psyche or in the individual psyche

or collective psyche of the agent or agency. For example, unfulfilled aspirations and failures may contribute indirectly to a good life by motivating extraordinary achievements, which may in turn bring extraordinary satisfaction. It is an axiom of a stoic ethics that an agent ought not to set unmeetable for the agent standards, or undertake impossible for the agent projects. The last axiom that we talked about, which was this one, axiom of futility. It is an axiom of historic ethics that an agent ought not to set unmeetable for the

agent standards, or undertake impossible for the agent projects. this is understood to allow attempts to turn impossibilities into possibilities and to use unachievable ideals instrumentally and incrementally. Stoic ethics attempts to cultivate the power of retrospective detachment, that is, the power to neutralize the psychological damage of losses, partly in order to reduce the harm of failure and thus to increase the range of allowable projects and standards that risk failure. I missed something probably here. Stoic training does not aim to neutralize the harm of productive losses,

that is, of harms that play a necessary causal role in producing countervailing goods. So, in a broad picture, the stoic ethics, stoic moral training in the sense that it tries to become a concrete case-by-case form of coping with the psychological damage of risk is in fact not, shouldn't be understood in the sense of some sort of temporary cure for the sake of the individual agent, but in fact is again an integral part of agency

as a project in so far as basically once you are capable of neutralizing that or mitigating the psychological damage of loss harbored in you know risk-laden projects then you are capable of also increasing the range of allowable projects you are basically capable of recognizing alternatives you are capable of moving forward without basically crippled by fears and angst there is a great book I mean there are so many great books on

on on the stoic ethics and we shall cut quite actually moderately written by people who who are you know are not coming from the kind of very ancient scholarly perspective but you know are familiar with new continental philosophy with science with neuroscience with natural its sign that sciences a one is the art of living by John sellers And another one, which I find to be our absolute masterpiece, is a book called New Astoicism by Lawrence Becker. Basically, he lays out to show that the Astoic ethics, as I talked yesterday, is a rationalist, naturalistic philosophy.

philosophy. And he talks about this quite extensively in terms of basically how, as I said, in terms of how a stoic philosophy needs to be understood as basically a rational philosophy that rather than trying to eliminate emotions or affects, it basically tries to hegemonize them. and hegemonize them by, as I said, affects are not pure sense data. They are sense impressions. Emotions and affects are beliefs, in fact. Beliefs that are molded around a sense data which are not given.

Insofar as all affects are conceptually mediated, they have belief commitments. And part of the Stoic training or Stoic philosophy is that in order for us to be capable of forming a hegemony, a rational hegemony, namely in order to maximize our freedom, our self-transformative freedom, we need to be able to devising, you know, devising analytical instruments that are capable of tracking our belief commitments in our affects.

Because to basically make, render explicit what is implicit in our sense impressions, in our emotions, in our affects. Of course, he talks about that an agent who is also capable of this doesn't mean that it's necessary, adequate to basically change its emotions. And then it moves forward with more kind of a technoscientific understanding of that. In fact, there are parts of emotion, part of our affects that are ingrained.

And for that, you need to have not only a kind of moral training, a form of rational moral training, but also a form of, quite literally put it, a form of genetic activism that's capable of rooting out certain things. And that's part of the transformative project of the agency, collectively understood. Now, agency is defined by its hegemonic nature. Every exercise of agency in the pursuit of some endeavor has consequences for the structure of that agency itself. And that was, you know, the self-transformation. The first thing, the transformation, according to a conception of the self,

the first effect of transformation in accordance with the conception of the self reflects in the structure of the self. Basically in in setting out to transform the world, the first that the agent transforms itself, its structure. Moreover, every exercise of one's agency strengthens its structure by improving its power to achieve

its aims and by making more dominant the norms generated by the application of the agency powers to practical problems. And so basically norms of practical reasoning are precisely need to be understood in terms of the hegemonical vector of agency as a project. insofar as norms succeed the very life of the agent and hence ensure the continuation of the transformative powers inherited from previous agents.

Norms of practical reasoning understood as primarily defeasible norms. Defeasible norms in the sense that they are open to further construction and revision. So they are both constructible and revisionary. Carry on the transformation of the agency beyond the frame of the agent itself. And this is where to be an agency is to commit to the abstract schema of agency as a project, hegemonic project with understanding that without committing to this hegemonic project there is no way for the agent to recognize any entitlement for itself

Agents are purposive. They have intentional goals, aims, ends, as well as biological terminus. They ceaselessly organize and reorganize their biological lives into endeavors, into unconnected sets of them, or into more or less coordinated sets of them running parallel to one another, perhaps into a coherent way of life. Even into a life plan or a deliberately constructed life, agency is not oriented toward its own completion. Its end is not to finish, but to ceaselessly to optimize the number of endeavors that are successfully pursued,

which is to say that agency is oriented toward the end of perfecting in use the power of agency itself, namely agency as a project, as a hegemonic project. As an end in itself, virtue, for the Stoic, for example, consists in perfected agency, something that does not admit of degrees. This is the end toward which agency, considered as an activity, not a being, is oriented. To the extent that this activity, the exercise of the agency as such, is the maximally comprehensive and controlling endeavor, However, its end is the agency's final end, namely end in itself.

To the extent that this activity achieves its end, we can call it virtuous. So there is a difference between a virtuous activity and virtue. Virtue is the end in itself for the agency because, as I said, this is what really adjudicates any entitlement for any agency in the first place. The virtue, and that does not admit degrees, but the virtuous activity, or the virtuous is a kind of endeavor, is an activity that admits, in fact, degrees. For the stoic, virtuous activity, unlike virtue itself, thus is a matter of degree. To the extent that the realization of agency is considered to be a project that maximizes

both the positive freedom of the agency and allows it to transform itself and its constitution toward further realization of the project, qua self-constitution of the agency. The cultivation of agency is deemed as the highest good. I repeat this part because this is something that we are going to talk about, especially in the next session, the principle of the highest good. To the extent that the realization of agency is considered to be a project that maximizes both the positive freedom of the agency and allows it to transform itself and its constitution

towards further realization of the project, co-self-constitution of the agency, or constitution of the agency, the cultivation of agency is deemed as the highest good. Now, I said positive freedom. Positive freedom is an enablement, is basically the enablement of agency to do something. To do something, again, needs to be understood within the comprehensive scope of agency as a project. But what renders the agency intelligible is really the further maximization of this positive freedom.

It's intelligibility of agency as its capacity to transform itself. and this transformation is a positive freedom it is the good in itself insofar as it is the very intelligibility of the agency to which all other goods are utilities the agents the agency's power to establish the intelligibility of itself through self-constituted transformation, namely the self-realization of agency. Sorry, Reza. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Your microphone is glitching.

If you want to leave and come back. Sorry, everyone. I'm just apologizing for... Okay, Reza, go ahead. It is the good in itself insofar as the very intelligibility of the agency to which all other goods are utilities. The agency's power to establish the intelligibility of itself through self-constituted transformations,

namely the self-realization of agency, or basically what makes an agency an agency, or more accurately the transcendental understanding of the agency's positive freedom as an abstract and qualitative measure prior to the order of quantitative or manifest freedoms, freedoms in basically concrete contextual endeavors, is precisely what amounts to the hegemonic good. It is hegemonic because no other good directly translates into what counts as the very intelligibility of the agency as that which is capable of cultivating itself as a project. So basically...

Sorry, we lost the screen, Sherry. Oh, oh, sorry. One second. I didn't want to interrupt because I thought maybe Reza wanted to just turn it off and put his face on, but you're right. Mm-mm. Can you see it? It usually shows up with a... Yes, there it is. Okay. The agency's power to establish the intelligibility of itself through self-constituted transformations, or more accurately, the transcendental understanding

of the agency's positive freedom as an abstract and qualitative measure prior to the order of quantitative or manifest freedom is precisely what amounts to the hegemonic good. It is hegemonic because no other good directly translates into what counts as the very intelligibility of the agency as that which is capable of cultivating itself as a project. And this is basically the recapitulation of what I said earlier, that what makes an agency an agency is its capacity to form self-constituted transformations,

understood as the establishment of a history for itself, so that it does not only have a nature or a past, but also history as a sequence of self-constituted transformations. And in that sense, insofar as this is the only thing that renders it intelligible, any other endeavor that doesn't directly translate to basically this project of self-cultivation for the intelligence understood as a self-transformative project is not the good in itself. Furthermore, since the intelligibility of the agency lies in its capacity for self-transformation,

and transformation implies reconstitution or re-engineering of its natural constitution by different sets of realizers, the intelligibility of agency, its capacity for purposive self-transformation, cannot maintain itself by simply and solely drawing from empirical intelligibilities of its natural history or nature in general. In the sense that, you see, if agency understood as a hegemonic project of self-transformation, and self-transformation means re-engineering the constitution of the agency with the constitution being by default natural means that the transformation cannot basically,

you know, progress further, can basically advance if it solely relies on the natural constitution of the agency or nature in general. Basically looking into the empirical state of things and try to come up with forming practical intelligibilities in order to form this hegemonic project. and this is this kind of an interesting thing which of I'm not going to talk about in any detail but something you can think about is is basically that the norms of actions are not norms of functioning in this sense

in the sense that I'm it's not like that's are it and this is how basically the the the agency escapes from any natural telus and basically abolishes the myth of telus in the sense that for example let's think of like if basically the agency wanted to simply by looking reflecting into the past constitution and simply extrapolating how it should move forward how it should transform itself if that was the case for example it then becomes more like in the sense of simply augmenting what is currently the case

how something functions better for example if the heart is like you know have you know this kind of capacity to pump blood and maintain metabolism then it's functioning understood at in a kind of a teleological framework then it can be enhanced by further capacitating its current functioning. So this is what I'm saying, this is not norm of functioning. Norms of actions or normative dimension of practical reasonings are not norms of functioning, are not teleological norms, in the sense that they diverge from them. They basically create different alternatives, different sets of realizers.

The agency therefore becomes a matter of what to do with the intelligible and what to make out of things, itself included, according to demands of its own transformation, that is, its own history. Now before moving forward, any questions? I'm not really sure I have a question. I guess I'm trying to think maybe a bit through how norms, you know, earlier you said like that there's the continuation of norms beyond any individual agent, right? I guess, how those are maybe expressed either like linguistically or I guess maybe something

I've been a little bit more concerned with is perhaps how they could even be expressed in some sort of plastic form. I mean, obviously, language itself is a particular type of plastic form in that like, you know, it's printed, it can be printed and then, you know, read and then sort of carried forth that way. so I guess I'm wondering maybe about the development of norms through other materials does that make any sense or the thing is that I mean this is the I think it's kind of something that you know we talked about this in terms of random and stuff that yes social practices

social discursive practices or social performances also have you know the capacity to construct norms. But the thing is that they are all language contaminated. The presence of language might not be explicit in them, but that doesn't rule out that they are not linguistic at their base. And that's basically what we talk about in terms of SLRs and Brandum. You know, the espousal of performances reflect the uniformity of basically the implicit normative performances reflect espousal of underlying uniformities.

And this espousal of underlying uniformities is through the structure of the language. But the thing is that the structure of language is not always explicit in our performances. And that's basically one of the things that expressive rationality tries to do, to show, by taking a recourse to language, to the rational resources, conceptual resources of language, tries to render explicit these assumptions in performances. But I think performances, or maybe practical reasoning in general, needs to be understood on a different level

than that of language, and that's simply its diffusibility. that is vastly distinguished by its defeasibility, whereas language is a symbolic repertoire that is not by default defeasible. It's defeasible only in the sense of conceptual functioning. I'm sorry, go ahead. Can you repeat that again? Yeah, I said that it's only defeasible in terms of, we talked about this in terms of, you know, the manifest and scientific image, that its diffusibility has a range. And the diffusibility of, you know, basically language or conceptual functions can only be amplified through, you know, adaptation of, for example,

the condition of semantic assertibility to the intelligibility of, you know, matter of factual truths. And that's it. Yes, it becomes defeasible. Then assertibility, the idea of the assertibility by whom, assertibility by matter of factual pictures, and that's how basically conceptual functions or conceptual framework can be updated, revised, and constructed along more adequate representations. Yes, in that sense. But in the sense of the manifest framework of the language, it has a limited range. I mean, because it might not always be defeasible in the same way, because if not all of the sort of commitments to performance are

necessarily explicit, or are not... or actually don't get to sort of the level of expressing certain sort of matter-of-factual things that would either reveal the kind of contradictions available or the kind of contradictions. I think because of both reasons that yes, because it has implicit structures, implicit basically intralinguistic uniformities that are not givenly explicit, but also because, as you say, it's because of this, that by itself it cannot revise,

it does not have, that was the myth of spontaneity that we talked about, that it is not spontaneously capable of revising itself unless it revises itself around a matter of factual truth. Namely, you know, hence the intrusion of the scientific image encroachment upon the manifest. Yes, I think it's really the spontaneity of language that if you say that language is capable of spontaneously revising itself, then you somehow, in a kind of a sneakily way, try to re-inscribe again the triumph of the manifest again. Well, I mean, that almost more sounds kind of like a almost weirdly vitalist position or something like that,

that language in itself has that kind of reflexive capacity. Yes, the whole thing, yes, that's what we talked about in terms of semantic given, that the contents, even though language is built around matter of factual, atomic matter of factual, true squat pictures, the semantic content of these pictures are not entailed in nor described in the semantic structure of language. And if we bind to that, we are basically, yes, a form of linguistic vitalism or linguistic self-sufficiency.

With the conceptual functions or conceptual activities of language need to be understood as inferential activities are capable of rendering explicit the implicit assumptions of language. But again, we see that this explicitization needs to be conjoined with those representational mappings in terms of the scientific image in order to be adequate. Okay, thanks. I'm going to think about this a little bit more. I've got some stuff I'm kind of working through in regards to maybe the sort of use of language in the manifest form in this sort of, like I said, it's sort of apprehension through different sort of plastic forms.

and then I guess the fact that, yes, some of those normative apprehensions aren't directly linked to kind of these sort of actual explanations. So, I guess we… Another thing that is interesting is that we talked about that odds of practical reasoning are, interestingly, Plato, Stellars, and even Brandom associate them with physis rather than nomos. They are a matter of objective principles, and this is exactly, again, the objective principality of odds that makes them defeasible, basically.

If it was simply a nomos, a matter of nomos, it was abiding by, basically, the realm of the manifest. The range of defeasibility is basically quite limited, and we can't even talk about its sufficient or adequate defeasibility. Anybody else has a question? You have the screen? Yes, I'm going to switch to it.

So we said that the agency therefore becomes a matter of what to do with the intelligible and what to make out of things. Itself included according to demands of its own transformation, its own history. And this is something that we talked about in what I think is the third session, The definition of intelligence as that which is able to do something with the intelligible. So in a sense, and this is something I will talk about a little bit today and more next session, that the history of agency as a hegemonic project

is in fact the history of intelligence. It is here that we should define the agency and its history as the question of intelligence and where the functional evolution of intelligence can no longer coherently be portrayed as an evolution of a natural history or a structural evolution. Now, this is very important that Hegel understands the spirit as a functional evolution. And evolution is not evolution of a natural history. Precisely because we talked about that norms of its actions are not norms of functioning or teleological norms. Despite the fact that intelligence formulated as a project,

the good can be consistently naturalized. And this is really important, that the good can be naturalized. It's in line with what we talked about, causal reducibility, cosmological irreducibility. But even though intelligence is natural, short of reorienting, repurposing, and re-engineering its natural history, it ceases to be intelligent. Yet it remains highly improbable that a robust conception of intelligence can reorient itself toward emancipation without looking into its natural history and working out its exigencies. We talked about it in terms of multiply constrained idea of function, that if intelligence is

a function attributed to an activity or agency is an activity, we can't really abstract this activity without taking into account its material constraints. Material constraints are basically different qualitatively distinct activities of functions distributed across different levels of structures. And that was the definition of dimensionally varied and multiply constrained function.

So yet it remains highly improbable that a robust conception of intelligence can reorient itself toward emancipation without looking into its natural history and working out its exigencies. But an intelligence that does not unfold its own demands, which inevitably lead to reengineering and revising its natural constitution, its multiple realizability, is even more implausible. We talked about this, I think, in the third session, you know, this progression that having

the capacity to constitute a self-transformation gestures toward the multiple realizability of that constitution. If a mind is capable of cultivating itself or consciousness or a spirit is capable of cultivating itself, then this cultivation in fact gestures toward, in principle, gestures towards the multiple realizability of a spirit, that basically a spirit can implement itself in different constellation of rational agencies. The history of intelligence commandeers its natural history by the history of its obligations

and demands under the banner of practical reasoning or practical intelligibilities. For the history of intelligence is the history of reconstitutions of natural constitution. The reconstitution of natural history does not violate natural laws, but adapts them to new regimes of design purposes. Again, I think in the third session we talked this in terms of the artificial truth of the mind. And that's basically the very idea of artificiality can be examined through two interconnected dimensions.

One is that artificial does not mean violation of natural laws, but adaptation of a system, in that case mind, self-consciousness, or spirit, to a regime of designed purposes. Basically purposes that have their own demands, outgrowth of nature. But also that translates again to the idea that this adaptation to a new regime of purposes and transformation according to this regime of purposes essentially means that the spirit, the mind, consciousness or the agent is in principle capable of being a new regime.

of realizing itself by different sets of realizers, namely the artifice dimension of artificiality, that the mind is capable of expressing itself through the artifice, artifice being understood as an alternative set of realizers. organizers. In this sense, so if this is a question of agency, we see that the projects of ethics in that kind of cynics, stoics, Espinosa, Kant, Hegel, and New Confucianism of Zhongsan and Shan Shili that I will talk about next session,

is rather than creating ethics as basically a moral principle in the kind of more negative sense of morality, as a programmatic project that basically is programmatic in the sense that it is distinal. It adjudicates the entitlements of the agency, and for agency to be able to recognize those entitlements, to further cultivate those, basically, entitlements, to revise them, them, then the agency needs to submit to the hegemony of its perfection, with the understanding

that the perfection or the cultivation of the agency implies, again, transformation of the agency to something that what it will be, as I said yesterday, what it will be is never what it is what it has been this never implies the absence of by activity one-to-one mapping between its future estate to its present estate and past estates namely and that's the constructive principle that Hegel formulates under the combination of a recognition and negation recollecting past and negating our past commitments through this rational, basically making explicit of

our past and present commitments. So if the agency, if the intelligibility of the agency can only be guaranteed by the hegemony of agency as a project, as a practical project, that involves the cultivation or perfection or enhancement of the agency, then we can say that the ultimate task of humanity as agency, the ultimate task of humanity should be to make something better than itself. This is the one and only dictum that warrants the intelligibility of human as an agency.

To make something better than itself is essentially the characterization of the agency as a project of self-cultivation, a hegemonic activity that coincides with the self-realization of intelligence and the abolishment of historical slavery, or namely, maximization of positive freedom. Indeed, it is this dynamic nexus between self-realization or construction of history, history as sequence of constituted self-transformations, and freedom that defines summum bonum, or the highest good, as a self-realizing intelligence. Its image, a raft building and enhancing itself, plank by plank, while at rift on the open sea.

However, since the definition of agency as the construction and cultivation of what is better, and this is, now I'm going to talk about, before moving to this part, I'm going to talk about that, you see, we talked about that basically what makes an agency an agency is the hegemonic project. And the hegemonic project is, in fact, the ability to have a history. The agency is ultimately characterized by its ability to have a history, to constitute a history. And I'm going to talk about this constitution of history in terms of a form of functional adaptation to the reality of time.

but before that I want to address something that has been you know been on the background and that's the question of risk that basically a hegemonic project is a risk-laden project and is basically defined by its to somehow hijack Sohail's term by its risk order. Yes. Don't worry, it has nothing

to do with Sohail. I just hijacked his opportunistically hijacked his term. No, the term is really useful. However, since the definition of agency as the construction and cultivation of what is better, suggests a transformation that can be characterized as a reconstitution, i.e. a reconstitution of its past constitution, meaning re-engineering natural history, re-engineering our current constitution, then what is better than us? And what is better than us is basically, needs to be understood as the abstract schema of agency as a project. Again, however, since the definition of agency as the construction and cultivation of what is better suggests a transformation that can be characterized as a reconstitution,

then what is better than us, a more advanced agency, that is, only recognizes us qua its past state as far as its recognition of its past or history does not impede its transformation. So, by committing to, by, by, so it goes logically like this, discursively, that we cannot adjudicate our entitlement until, unless we maintain the intelligibility of our agency. We cannot maintain the intelligibility of our agency unless we see it as a practical project. namely the historical progression as the consciousness of freedom, maximization of positive freedom.

But the committing to the project of agency as a hegemonic project also means that we are committing to its transformative vector. With the transformative vector, essentially, again, implies that the advanced agency, necessarily the logic, the ramification of our logic of agency, or the ramification of our commitment to the intelligibility of our agentic space means that we are committing to that which does not impede its transformation

by basically giving us a special or a prioritized status. Simply, we are becoming its past. And we talked about the past for the agency, agency being a cultivating vector, is something that is simultaneously recognized and negated. And so us basically becoming simultaneously recognized and negated by an advanced agency. And this is exactly what we should affirm, what should we recognize in order to maintain our intelligibility,

in order to maintain the intelligibility of our agency. This is why being an agency harbors an intrinsic risk. Insofar as being an agency is committing to the intelligibility of the agency as a project of transformation, and transformation as a prerequisite for maintaining the intelligibility of our agency, effectively means we are becoming a reconstitutable past or a history for that to which we are transformed, namely a more advanced agency of our own making. In a sense, what we are is simultaneously recognized and negated by the product of our own transformational process.

intelligence always implies the concurrent recognition and negation of the past in this case us in order to effectuate transformation accordingly we cannot be intelligent or maintain the intelligibility of our agency unless we recognize an intelligence of our own making that treats us as its own history That simultaneously being recognized and negated, but never endorsed as an impediment. Simply passed for an intelligible agency should never be a source of impediment. And for that reason, it needs to be recognized and negated simultaneously.

Indeed, in terms of the history of intelligence, what we are cannot be anything but prehistory of intelligence. And this is what we will always be referred to as. Namely, we are simply a prehistory of intelligence. This is what we are. Reza? Yes. So I was totally like having flashbacks to when you started talking about these concepts back in last March. And then I forgot that you were addressing risk. So did I miss something or you actually did talk about risk or risk order?

No, I haven't talked about it. I'm going to talk about it. Oh, okay. Yeah, first I wanted to make sure to kind of define what is exactly the risk. I mean, the hegemonic project of agencies is a risk-laden project, and so far as simply we are committing to something that simultaneously recognize and negate us. And this is exactly the vector of intelligibility. We cannot maintain this intelligibility without taking this risk. Now, this temporal schema that you just set up, in terms of present as the past of the future, am I correct? Can I characterize it as that? Present as the past of the future, right?

Yeah, yes. I mean, well, this is exactly, I mean, this is nothing new. I mean, this is exactly the Stoics' reading of time, the Kronos and Ion. Yes, that basically the reality of intelligence needs to be understood ionically, even though our endeavor to remain intelligent can only be understood chronically. With Ion, for which we have only infinite future and infinite past, present becoming an instant, simply a replaceable one, a reconstitutable one. But within the order of endeavors, within the order of the present project,

the present has definitive past and hypothetical future that is capable of basically reorienting the present according to future ramifications and cultivation of the past trends. So is it like the present is sort of a competing ground for future and the past, past wanting to sort of like restrict and limit the present to its status and future wanting to sort of like liberate it from the limitations of the past and negate it and

move it elsewhere. Yes, what this needs to be, I mean, an accurate reading of this would be through the different readings of time that also Deleuze talks about in Logic of Sense. John Selares actually elaborates in Collapse, I think, three, and basically in a stoic reading of time, two distinct readings of time that are commensurable. And that's one that in which present is infinitely expandable and infinitely contractible. It has a past and it has a future, the past of the present and the future of the present.

But there is also a different kind of time where basically it's always expressed as in terms of the excess of destiny over the origin. And this is exactly what basically functional evolution of intelligence tries to adapt to, excess of destiny over the origin. So if there's an excess of destiny over the origin, right? Yes. In the sense, you see, in the sense that if we say that, I mean, this is what the Stoics talk about, that a reading of time according to an origin is a metaphysical bias,

because you are fixing a point for basically the subsistence of time. But if you fix, namely give a primary limit or an original limit to time, then time no longer subsists but belongs. Belongs to what belongs to the agent, and that becomes a vitalist time, a time of duration. But time, the reality of time is that it's edgeless. And it's edgelessness is really the expression that it can infinitely expand. It subsists. What I was trying to ask is that this excess is not constant.

No, it's not constant. Temporal entropy or when things fall out of joint is when the excess is reversed and past has the excess over. Or no, that never takes place. When the past or origin is understood as the anchor of time, the time is no longer time, but it's what the Stoic calls a chronos, the time of belonging. The time belongs to something or someone, but time belongs to no one, because time is time of subsistence, time of subsisting as such. yeah so

David's also talking about the romance of decline is is when thought privileges the excess of the past over the privileges past over the future yes yes and that becomes and that's exactly what Hegel tries to overcome by through the you know the projects of history of consciousness or history as a progression of consciousness of freedom. And Zhongshan tries to overcome it through the project of self-realization. The Stoics try to understand it by way of that how you can commensurate these two frameworks with one another.

So basically, rather than past become an impediment, becomes an enabling vector. Now, can we say that since movement is inevitable, in these instances... Movement for an Stoic is only, and this is the thing, the movement for the Stoic and affects and these kinds of things are always in the durational time of Kronos, namely time as belonging. The reason why I use the word movement is I'm trying to somehow synthesis or synthesize these ideas with your ideas of navigation, right? Yes, I will talk about it in the next session, about the navigation, that basically the very

idea of historical navigation, that basically agent navigates time through constitution of its own history is something that commensurate the presence of belonging, time as belonging, with the instantaneous and reconstitutable conception of present as belonging to time as such, namely a purposeless flux. What I was trying to ask you is that can we suggest that like past contaminates the future but one of the tasks is to sort of like keep in check this level of contamination.

Sorry, one more time. One more time. I'm saying past will inevitably contaminate the future's plan for itself. So one of the tasks of the future would always be to keep the levels of contamination by the past to a tolerable level. But then there are times that... No, it's not... You see, it's not... The whole thing is that time needs to understood... The historical progression needs to be understood non-pathologically. Non-pathologically means that if you overemphasize on any of its temporal dimensions from the the perspective of the present, it becomes pathological. Overemphasis on the past becomes pathology of basically traditionalism

or pathology of conservation or preservation. On the present, it becomes the pathology of activism. Or presentism. Presentism. This is activism, basically. and overemphasize on the future without this understanding of recognition and negation of the past and working through the present then it becomes pathology of eschatology, eschatological future. Isn't that what accelerationists are accused of constantly? Yes, somehow futurism is a form of eschatology, yes. So a task would be to distinguish between what is proper acceleration and this type of pathology of the future.

Yes, and the fundamental question then becomes establishing the proper links between different temporals within the framework of present project, but also commensurating the project with simply the intelligibility of nothingness of time, being nothing of time. And this becomes ultimately that nihilism of time, rather than becoming an impediment, becomes a cognitive opportunity for basically any project that happens in the present.

And that's exactly what intelligence, you know, the cultivation of intelligence, self-cultivation of intelligence, you know, tries to achieve, to not only work in the sense of establishing proper links, non-pathological links between temporal, its temporal divisions, past, present, future, but also making, but also using the purposeless of time, as a cognitive opportunity, as basically a platform for further enhancing itself for its functional evolution. I will talk about this a little bit later.

Sorry for my interjection. I just thought this was a great moment to sort of get back to this sort of question of temporality. now ok so commitment to the intelligibility do you have the screen yes we have it ok commitment to the intelligibility of ourselves as agents is commitment to the evolution of agency and evolution of agency we meant it as a functional evolution rather than a structural evolution namely not a natural evolution because it follows the norms of action purpose of action commitment to the intelligibility of ourselves as agents

is commitment to the evolution of agency as an activity or intelligence as a project in abandoning such a commitment on the basis of an intrinsic risk entails we discard precisely what entitles us to freedom in the first place i.e. the exercise of the agency as such. To be an agency is essentially a risk-laden commitment to believe we are so and so and are entitled to such and such. In fact, any practical commitment is infused with risk. The practical will is the elaboration of a commitment for risk.

Now, intelligence, properly understood, belongs to the realm of a spirit as a constellation of rational agency in which the agency is no longer a mode of being but a hegemonic project. and both in the sense that it superordinates other endeavors and also integrate them. I mean, before moving forward, let me read this for you from Brandon. One second.

It is by placing both within a larger historical developmental structure that Hegel fits the model of the synthesis of an original unity of a perception by rational integration together with the model of synthesis of normative status-bearing aperceptive selves, and their communities by reciprocal recognition so as to make the discursive commitment instituted thereby intelligible as determinately contentful.

So in a sense that spirit is basically this rational integration or synthesis via normative status bearing of aperceiving selves. It basically uses, simply spirit becomes a kind of project in the sense of an open source self. That it is capable of bootstrapping itself to a perceptive regime of basically discrete selves, individuals, through the rational binding of norms. So intelligence belongs to the realm of a spirit.

And intelligence, again, as we talked about, is a project, is a practical project. Intelligence belongs to the realm of a spirit. It inhabits what Howard Barker calls the area of maximum risk. Insofar as it is distinguished by its practical will to risk everything, its current situation, its constitution, and what it identifies itself with, all in the service of an elaborate commitment to be better, namely maintaining its intelligibility, which is intelligibility simply the perfection of agency or its positive freedom, i.e. a commitment that keeps revising its constitution. Beyond a mere transient desire, this is a commitment that ramifies into a myriad of collateral and consequent commitments

which only return en masse to reassess and alter their origin. And this we talked about very briefly. I mean, also this is something that I've talked about in Labor of a Newman, that commitment needs to be understood as something that is implied by other commitments but also implies other commitments. In order for agency to be able to intelligibly make a commitment, to have a commitment in the first place, it needs to basically navigate the ramifications of the commitment.

Namely, be able to render explicit both the commitments that the acknowledged commitment, by which the acknowledged commitment is implied, and also the collateral or ramifying commitments that the acknowledged commitment basically implies itself. itself. So basically, it's past commitments and future commitments. Ramifications of the past into the present acknowledgment and ramifications of the present acknowledgment into the future collateral commitments. With the understanding that once you navigate the space of commitment,

of commitment, you are compelled to reassess, repair, or even abandon your current commitment. And this is exactly what the risk-laden dimension of commitment taking is about. that it unfolds, it basically opens a can of worms, that it opens up a commitment toward a future dimension that entails a repairing process or an abandoning process. A commitment that keeps revising its constitution beyond a mere transient desire, this is a

commitment that ramifies into a myriad of collateral and consequent commitments which only return en masse to reassess and alter their origin. By engaging in a risk-taking commitment and by practically elaborating this commitment to its far-reaching ramifications, namely maintaining a commitment, this is what maintaining commitment is otherwise there is no such thing as a commitment, and hence there is no such a thing as an agency. Intelligence calls upon time to abolish its own servitude to the tyranny of here and now. Any commitment, whose practical elaboration endorses risk, gives free expression to time as a destiny that tampers with its past. Succinctly put, practically elaborated ramifications of a commitment serve as ephemeral hosts or vessels in which time as destiny disguise itself in order to haunt the origin,

and in this case the origin on which intelligence seems to be, from the standpoint of here and now, grounded. By risking its present framework and its constitution as what undergirds the anticipation of the future, according to a conserved image of the present, intelligence establishes the ethical economy of itself. So, intelligence, primarily the abstract schema of intelligence, its qualitative freedom needs to be understood as an ethical economy more than being a political economy. The political economy revolves around the concrete manifestations of this freedom, whereas the ethical economy of itself is about the qualitative, abstract scheme of agency as basically a transcendental transformative power.

It demonstrates that what it risks, its life and its self-identification or self-conception, is not an essential part of it, while that for which it risks, namely the future enhancement or what it can be, is. To put it differently, intelligence does not identify itself with what presently constitutes it. Instead, it risks to become better, i.e. realizing itself by recognizing what it is not. Makes up the essential part or component of itself, identification. In risking, for example, in risking my life and comfort by practically elaborating my compulsion toward what makes me better,

the intelligibility of agency as a project. I make the case that neither my life nor what affords my comfort is an essential part of the self I consist of, namely the intelligibility of agency. Indeed, failure to act and seize the opportunity to become better would suggest that what I regard myself was never existed to begin with. In the same vein, if intelligence stopped to be something other than what it was supposed to be, then it has never been intelligence, even when it aspired to be. The propensity to risk against the constitution of who one identifies oneself with is in reality the truth of who one is.

intelligence only exists in the domain of the practical will but the domain of practical will is the area of maximum risk where the subject of risk is influenced from the future and basically the enabling vector of risk allows for the agency to maintain its intelligibility by practically elaborating its commitment for self-realization, that is to say, by practically seeing itself from the perspective of the risk that expresses itself as the impact of ramifications associated with making a commitment to become better or to be an agent upon the initial conditions,

what I have acknowledged to be. Intelligence always apprehends itself from the future. It realizes itself from multiple destinations in the future, reentering the present and targeting the past. And of course, as a more entertaining idea, it's exactly, there is no accident that intelligence, always in popular imagination, in tweeted as a force arriving back from the future along the same path that was once deemed as too risky to take.

Now, the question... Okay, this is not for you. Let me... One second. Okay. Do you guys still see the screen share? Okay, good. Now the question becomes, then if intelligence, I mean, if the agent maintains its intelligibility through risk, with the risk is basically the foundation upon which intelligence agency as a project operates,

then what about the question of self-preservation? If all the agency is required to do is to abide by what makes it intelligible, and what makes it intelligible is in fact a risk order, then what about working on the self-preservation? With understanding and self-preservation is the basis upon which developmental transformative powers are formed, without which there is no such thing as development or transformation or cultivation of intelligence.

Now, I think the question of self-preservation is a bit slippery. We need to be careful to distinguish different dimensions of self-preservation for different regimes of agency. First of all, before I address this question of self-preservation, I want to get back to a discussion that we had with regard to evolution at the level of function and evolution at the level of structure. Basically the broad perspective is like this, that it is the evolution at the level of function

that forces structural change. As the functional accumulation grows through generative entrenchment of functions, and we talked about generative entrenchment, meaning that as in a functional organization, as the organization evolves, basically the addition of new functions are constrained in so far Whereas any addition of new function needs to take into account to what is already in place. That's the structural stability component, functional and structural stability component. But this constraining of function by way of this entrenchment criteria does not mean that

the new function, the constrained function, is in fact a crippled function, is incapacitated. In fact, we talked about this in terms of, you know, the emergent aspects of functional evolution. That's basically this function, in fact, needs to be understood as a kind of a platform that might be materially constrained, but needs to be understood as a platform for an entirely new classes or hierarchy of functions. So, as the functional accumulation grows through generative entrenchment of functions, the addition of any new function might trigger drastic changes through the entire functional organization.

Since the structure cannot cope with a comprehensive change in the functional organization, insofar as its stability is under the direct influence of functional organization, destructive consequences will result and complete deterioration and death may follow. But it should be noted that evolution at the level of a structure is not essentially evolution at the level of function. The consequences arising from a project aimed at functional change and amplified functional evolution or functional cultivation, such as, for example, Hegelian historical development of the spirit, or we see it in the accelerationist project, so on and so forth. The consequences arising from a project aimed at functional change and amplified functional cultivation are not the same as those related to the structural change.

Correspondingly, we cannot overstretch our views on negative and positive outcomes associated with modification or amplified change in structure to scenarios of modification or amplified change in function. because change and modification, cultivation and amplification in function result in qualitatively and quantitatively different outcomes. What we have knowledge of is a domain of evolution where there is a strong structural coupling, meaning that there is a tight interneeting between a structure and function. This is the natural evolution. This is the natural history of evolution. That is a strong coupling between a structure and function.

The consequences of functional change, intervention, and reorganization at this level, at this level of tight interneating between a structure and function, which is the status of natural evolution, immediately register as consequences in the structural dimension. By virtue of the function being strongly structurally coupled, we are more susceptible to misread the structural maladaptations as the reality of functional adaptations, explaining change in the functional organization by resourcing to negative consequences in the structure. So because of this interneating structure, we think that we confuse our functional, our positive functional adaptations with negative structural maladaptations.

But this is precisely because there is a strong coupling between a structure and function at the level of natural evolution. But when we are talking about functional evolution, we are talking about a strong functional evolution, in the sense that this coupling, this close intermediate between a structure and function is weakened. It is not eliminated, but it is weakened. Now, if evolution is the exploration of time in terms of generic trajectories, qualifying destinations, a strong structural coupling restricts the adaptation of function at the level of fitness constraints of both function and structure,

precipitating a condition rife for misinterpreting the descriptive and correspondingly prescriptive aspects of functional evolution with those specific to the structure. And, of course, we don't know anything about functional adaptation to the reality of time Because, as I said, we are still in the prehistory of intelligence, prehistory of functional evolution, in the sense that we are still in the phase of a strong structural coupling between function and structure. And hence we are susceptible to misread functional adaptations as structural maladaptations. We know nothing about functional adaptation to the reality of time in the sense of functional autonomy or multiply constrained, multiple realization of function.

In other words, we do not know what the shape and implications of a strongly functional evolution would be, an evolution in which the determining influence of the structure over the function is weakened, is mitigated, but never eliminated. Now, of course, this is the question posed by Hegel under the rubric of a spirit as a functionalist mode of being, but of course elaborated by, this is what I will talk about next session, elaborated in detail by Mo Jung-san, who starts to unravel the implication of a strongly functional evolution as an evolution continuous but from a structural point of view alien

to natural evolution as understood through biology, or namely a strong structural coupling. Now, the question of self-preservation needs to be understood in terms of this different perspectives of evolution. Whether we are talking about a strong phase of a strong coupling between a structural function, or whether we are talking about where functional autonomy basically mitigates its structural coupling. we cannot coherently talk about preservation of agency

unless we attribute it to the right phase of this evolution. Now, in this sense, what is self-preservation? Self-preservation is an expression of intelligence, I mean, a primary impulse of an intelligence. It needs to preserve itself in order to be capable of transforming itself. In the broadest possible sense, self-preservation is adaptability, basically, to the temporality of time. On the level of a strong structural coupling, where optimization can sufficiently address the exigencies of survival, self-preservation remains strongly an adaptation to the present, disguised as parameters implicit in the ecological horizon or the field of immediate action.

At this level, you see, when we are talking about this strong structural coupling, self-preservation mostly works through norms of functioning, namely how something can function better, how we can optimize, for example, the functioning of the current system to a better system, according to a metaphysical identification of telethysts or norms of functioning. But when we are talking about the functional evolution of a spirit, functional evolution of mind, functional evolution of agency, then we are talking about basically a different kind of activity.

of activity. In so far, that activity is no longer simply an optimization as we talked about. It does not optimize norms of functioning. It diverges from them. It diverges toward norms of purposive action according to reasons on making and the criteria of transformation and conception. Now, nature, I mean, self-preservation of natural entities are optimization principles, following optimization principles. This is basically how natural evolution evolves. It's a form of optimization according to generic trajectories. Basically, it navigates, and

This is what natural selection is, generic trajectories and the compulsibility of them, rather than a specific one. And then incrementally, the coupling of a structure and functions try to adapt to different statistical possibilities of these multiple generic trajectories to adapt to them. Which one is better? And investigating them. And then optimize itself according to these adaptations. At this level, self-preservation, which is the domain of primitive spirit, what Hegel calls a primitive spirit, or what historians call rudimentary account of agency. agency as kind of a dispositional

basically activity at this level self-preservation works for the benefit of the integral or constitutive structure by staving off its destruction for its assimilation by the general catastrophe of time so basically there is a structural stability and this structural stability fundamentally tries to escape of basically the deterioration the deterioration of the organism or deterioration of the

of the entity. But from a certain perspective by aspiration of intelligence against breaking down again. I'm so sorry. Sorry. Is it better? Hello? Yes, it's awesome. Okay. So I was saying that, yeah, but from a certain perspective, the aspiration of intelligence

at the strongly functional level, and that aspiration of intelligence is really the perfectional self-cultivation of the agency. That's how it remains intelligible, remains intelligent. It needs to be understood as a strongly functional level, basically activity according to norms of action rather than norms of functioning. No longer simply an optimization of the teleogenic project. But from a certain perspective, the aspiration of intelligence at the strongly functional level is to render this encounter and adaptation to the reality of time as discontinuous to the order of here and now fully explicit in each and every endeavor. The reality of time is catastrophic

generally in the sense of it generally discontinues to what has already taken place, but not apocalyptic because it does not reveal a terminal goal but exposes the absence of a terminal goal. And this is what the difference between time as catastrophe and time as an apocalyptic vector, that it does not reveal any terminal goal. That's what apocalypse is. And what catastrophe is, is the general discontinuity to what has already taken place. And intelligence is really an adaptation. Intelligence is the transformative vector of intelligence. Namely, intelligence as a project is adaptation to this, to the catastrophic reality of time being discontinuous being non-bijective to its previous

estate and that's a form of adaptation to the catastrophic reality of time now board to understand action and life in the present Sorry, one second. Yes, before, yeah, okay, sorry, I missed something here. mmm who self-preservation at the level of functional evolution namely a structural strong functional

activity in which their relation between a structure and function structural constitution and functional activities weekend is a different self-preservation. Self-preservation is in the sense of maintaining the intelligibility of the project. And that is really the abidance and conforming to the risk order, in the sense that intelligence cannot maintain intelligibility unless it perceives its transformation. It effectuates its transformation as always discontinuous or non-bijective to the past estate. in effect mimicking the catastrophic reality of time,

in which time is always discontinuous to what has already taken place, to the origin. So this is the question of self-preservation. When we are talking about self-preservation, self-preservation needs to be attributed to the right phase of this evolution, of this evolution of agency. In order to understand action and life in the present, it is necessary to understand the reality of time as expressed by the asymmetry and perhaps even the excess of destination over in the origin. In other words, the requirement for action in the present is the understanding of the reality of time and subsequently how to realize a constructive adaptation to the reality of time as a generalized catastrophe, a discontinuity.

This constructive adaptation must take place both at the level of structure and at the level of function. but with the knowledge that functional and structural parameters, and hence their constructive adaptations, their modes of self-preservation, are very different. On the structural level, it is the structural integrity that must preserve its continuity by adapting to forces of chronic discontinuity, ruptures, changes, namely dynamic tendencies. On the functional level, the self-preservation is construed as the adaptation of the function, no longer determined by the structural constitution, to the logic of catastrophe expressed by the reality of time.

The concept of risk here is not a blind form of risk. It is a constructive adaptation and therefore tantamount to self-preservation. but the self-preservation that is attributed and carefully distinguished in terms of its functional and structural dimensions. But the majority of course, the majority of what we know about self-preservation is the structural survival, namely the survival of the agency in the most primitive sense. Self-preservation at the level of functional self-realization as a collective enterprise, as a collective singularity, is yet to be elaborated. It's fully an open question.

The functional adaptation to time or self-realization defines a new form of evolution that is on its way to establish a positive and automating feedback loop between historical freedom, practical and cognitive, and intelligence. This is a type of evolution that at different times and with different degrees of emphasis has been introduced under different names. the nos, or namely the general intellect the spirit's odyssey, the intellectual intuition, secular sagehood, so on and so forth even modernity for Hegel these are basically different names with different

emphasis at different historical junctures of one single thing understanding the intelligibility of agency as a hegemonic practical project. Self-cultivation, of course... Now, before I move forward, so just the most important thing that we need to talk about is that self-cultivation is neither description nor prescription. Self-cultivation for intelligence is the very essence of being and becoming and remaining intelligent.

As we talked about, self-cultivation is really the essence of intelligibility of agency as such. And then self-cultivation, again, can be elaborated in terms of exactly what we talked about, the whole first module, in terms of the positive feedback loop between self-conception and self-transformation. Each of these two dimensions, these two primary activities of self-consciousness, have their own transformative powers. They have their own abstract and concrete transformative powers.

In fact, abstract concrete distinction in this framework is purely methodological. There is no ontological, it's not understood ontologically, the difference between abstract and the concrete. For self-conception to be able to make a difference in itself, It needs to form abstract schemas and then commensurate and then adapt to these abstract schemas in order to effectuate a concrete transformation basically in its own conceptual activities, its own conception. And that was what we talked about in the first module in terms of adaptation to the intelligibility.

Then again, this concrete transformation in the order of self-conception translate again becomes an abstract protocol for concrete self-transformation. And again, self-transformation has its own, again, abstract protocols and concrete manifestations. There is a projective transformation in this sense from self-conception to self-transformation, from self-transformation to self-conception. Now what intelligence appears to itself projects as a landscape of possible transformation. It is the loop between self-conception and self-transformation that determines intelligence as an activity or project endowed with self-reconstituting histories rather than simply a nature.

The change in what it is for itself, self-conception, becomes a basis of a transformation in what it is in itself. itself, while what is in itself perpetually is perpetually risked in favor of what it is being for itself, namely self-identification. Once the autonomous loop between the self-conception and self-transformation is established, intelligence commences its self-realization by looking into itself, its actions and recognitions, its history and current state of affairs from the perspective of time and time alone, that is, from the viewpoint of multiple destinations in the future, notice the ramification of what I have committed myself to, being an

agent, that is, from the viewpoint of multiple destinations in the future, opened into the past, as we begin to see the end of our history as what at some point will be called the prehistory of intelligence, we reach our manifest destiny backward from the future in this sense. That which is better than us cultivate itself through our pursuit for the better. However, since intelligence has no conservable nature into which it can reflect, but only reconstituting histories through which it can transform itself, it will not commemorate us. So intelligence can never commemorate basically its past.

It cannot, as we say, it cannot prioritize its past as a cautionary tale for its further progression, further transformation, further intelligibility. It is us, on the other hand, who by engaging in the pursuit of the better, maintaining our intelligibility as agency, by committing to the better through a practical elaboration, realize ourselves as intelligence by recognizing what we are not, which is to say by recognizing that is which better than us. Our recognition of something better than us

constitutes our realization as intelligence, But in order for intelligence to realize itself, it must first recognize that which is not. In other words, its self-realization is tantamount to its reconstitution, or more precisely, its orientation toward and commitment to that which is not currently constitutes it, namely, manifest us, or with which it presently self-identifies. in a very stoic way of saying it we can say that we establish the worth of our individual and collective freedom by committing

by committing to something better and something better needs to be understood as I will talk about next session in terms of this collective singularity by committing to something better, something whose realization lies in pursuing its normative status of freedom from what once constituted to something else. The realization of intelligence rests on the conceptual and practical recognition of that which does not commemorate us. This is what the veritable course of self-cultivation of intelligence, to let intelligence cultivate itself by turning

ourselves into the history of intelligence, rather than founding ourselves as its nature that must be preserved as an object of commemorative reflection. A civilization that has problems with what intelligence does to itself in order to remain intelligent is an unfortunate historical phenomenon and certainly not a civilization for much longer. An ideology that can only acknowledge the merits of our history, its merits for continuation and remembrance, by dissipating fear against intelligence just because it does neither commemorate us, just because it does not commemorate us, can never

can never be an agent of emancipation. Regardless of its zeal for emancipation and its readiness for action, such principle, by evoking a narrow concept of history, only manages to lure humanity into slavery. And that's exactly because an agency that is not capable of rendering itself intelligible by seeing its intelligibility in the perfection or cultivation of the agency as such is basically what Hager calls a rudimentary form of a spirit, that essentially a slave.

A slave in the sense that, as Spenica suggests, that freedom at its base is unlearning of slavery. And agency understood as a project is basically the abolishment of slavery in the sense of mitigating the obstacles for positive freedom, for the transformative vector of further enhancement of the agency. But such a concept of history is precisely the history of slavery, and whoever practically or theoretically funds it is a slave trader

masquerading as an emancipator. the slogan here is liberate that which liberates itself from you because anything else is simply the perpetuation of slavery and liberation of intelligence with the understanding that an intelligence that cannot liberate itself from its past namely us is not really an intelligence if you are committing to that kind of intelligence that simply commemorate us, that simply preserves us as our nature, we are simply, again, perpetuating the slavery of our agency. And this is, I think, the centerpiece

of the ethical economy of intelligence and something that I will talk about in terms of the collective self-mastery next session. So, questions? I think my brain is finally starting to gear up to speed now. I also have a question. Okay, one second. I have to get a cigarette here. Okay. One second. I have a question.

Anybody else has a question because I feel like I'm more like moderating and also I feel like Joshua has asked questions. so I don't want to like me or Joshua or me and Joshua sort of like take up the rest of the time. So if you guys have other questions, I think we should give the priority to you guys because it seems like we have about 15 minutes maximum left for this session. So anybody who has a question, go ahead.

Otherwise, I will ask mine, and then maybe Joshua can articulate what he was going to articulate. I see a camera coming on. Is that a sign that you have a question? Haven or Jason? We're still formulating. Okay, so let me just ask mine then if people are like, if nobody like volunteers. So Reza, if we look, if we take the model that you provided us in the last half hour or so and apply it to what we know as the, and I'm not going to call it history of, past of our civilization, right? Uh-huh. You see the sort of like, you see the dialectical, kind of like, dialectical struggle

between this sort of like, the real history of, the real history of intelligence, right? Fighting, struggling, or, or synthesizing itself against this prevalent attitude that has a particular idea about the place of nature and human, about the way time should be conceived, about how things are, right? And yet somehow being able to move forward and not be completely kind of like enslaved, right? because this type of attitude towards the way we think of intelligence and the way we think of time and history, it's quite novel and new, right?

I don't know if it is novel and new. This is exactly what philosophy has always been. You're talking about it in terms of stoics, right? And you're saying, like, none of this is new and all that, but I'm just going to maintain what I have to say, right? Okay, go on. You can argue about whether it's new or not. But what I'm trying to say is that the urgency of our time, because it seems like given what we know of the past, somehow intelligence always ends up being able to move forward. Not really. I mean, well, that's the whole point, that we shouldn't see the advent of intelligence or the odyssey of a spirit as an inevitability.

Otherwise, we became fatalists, optimists. And this is what I really like about Marx, even though I never considered myself a Marxist. And this is where Marx talks about, that you need, if you can't, it's never an inevitability because it's a constructive vector. It's not an autopoetic vector. If it was a self-organizing vector, yes, it was the case. But insofar as intelligence is self-cultivation. It's a constructive, transformative vector. It needs to be understood as a struggle. No, for sure. But it seems like historically intelligence

has been able to make, use agency to make sufficient or just enough right moves or right decisions. Well, it's not because, yes, it's because as agents we have, you know, moved by way of norms of action, by way of at certain historical junctures and epochs, we have created hegemonic projects under the commands of reason, science, so on and so forth, to be capable of being like this. So we can't see intelligence as that kind of autopoetic autonomy in this sense.

I think it's interesting, and that's what Hegel always emphasizes, that that's why you need to, in order to talk about evolution of spirit, a function of evolution of self-consciousness, you need to be capable of giving a sufficient and coherent historical development in terms of history of struggle. Okay, so now if you want to overlay this set of data from the past, and I insist on not calling it history, just calling it like information we have about the past, if you overlay that with the idea of sort of like with the role of continental philosophy, particularly

after Heidegger about sort of like the triumph of the manifest image, right? Uh-huh. Does that make the last 60, 70, 80 years towards where we are sort of like, is that gives us the urgency of our moment? Or, you know what I mean? Because in my opinion, and correct me if I'm wrong, I'll bring it up because I'm not asserting that this is the truth, but I want to like, because I see something happens, something happens with the way Heidegger kind of like, with the way Heidegger reconfigured continental philosophy that sort of like privileged the manifest image or basically created an autonomous territory for sort of like humanities and human sciences

to sort of like have its own world and autonomy. I mean, you can trace it back to his professor who he studied with and who has actually like is credited with sort of like establishing the autonomy of human sciences, which is like Willem Dilphy, right? So he followed Dilphy, and this conversation preexisted. You know what I mean? The idea that like science and humanities should work in accordance like sort of like what Sellers talks about. And then the division was kind of like set with Dilsey because Dilsey argued about the separation, right? So is that what gives it like five or six or seven decades into the separation between human sciences and what they used to call natural sciences, which actually includes mathematics and physics and all that, it's not just biology, chemistry and all those other sciences which you call sciences, right?

Is that what the urgency is? Like the separation gives what you're talking about its urgency. I don't think that it gives an urgency. I think because the urgency needs to be really understood, again, as a historical urgency. It's always there. But, yeah, in the sense that because there was this gap, the urgency at least becomes manifest. But the urgency, I would argue that it's always have been there, and it's always we need to understand that this urgency never was abundant.

In fact, I would say that, as I talked about, I maintained that it's useful to not completely vilifying this past 20th century philosophy or whatever trends of politics and thoughts as navigation of basically certain hypothetical, counterfactual constructs that needed to be investigated, You know, they failed. Some parts of them didn't fail. And that's exactly what historical progression is. It was in response to, again, an urgency of its own. But now the urgency, this is exactly what we are talking about, that we need to recognize the past and also update our present commitment

by negating those incoherent, contradictory commitments in the past that have been rightfully adjudicated and authorized by the past judges, namely whoever has sanctioned them. And we can't really move forward without this recognition. But also we can move forward by turning this recognition into a commemorative reflection. If we do a commemorative reflection, qua Adorno and Heidegger,

then we are simply abiding by a pathology, a pathology of the past, history as a past. And that's where the power of negation, power of determinate negations come to play. It's interesting you bring up Adorno into the picture because I don't know if you're aware of this or not. I'm sure you are. Adorno's PhD thesis was on Husserl. So basically Heidegger and Adorno had this interest in phenomenology, at least professionally, right? And then after the World War II, for whatever reason, I'm not going to reduce and simplify, but Western Marxists, at least, adopted the type of Heideggerian or phenomenological sort of like limit. and this got entrenched both on the right and the left and then we put post-structuralism

and then the recuperation of post-structuralism by Marxism and recuperation of Marxism by post-structuralism because depending on how powerful certain schools of thought in certain institutions were, in some cases Marxism was recuperated by liberals or post-structuralists in some cases post-structuralism was recuperated by Marxists Then this, you know what I mean, this got cemented. So what you're talking about here is like, you know, and I know your trajectory is much longer, but I'm just limiting it to like post-war and these 60, 70 years that we're dealing with, right? So this is, to me, this is the urgency is to overcome this type of, you know what I mean, consensus over the place of science, the place of human humanities.

And so this is what gives it urgency to me. Yeah, I mean, overcoming at the level of philosophical debate is easy. and it's something that will be the case, if not in this generation, the next or the other generation. But what is really important is really how to entrench this into political and popular imagination. That's something that takes much longer, and that you need to exactly think about it, agency as a project and a risk-laden one and obviously in the sense that I said

that that there there didn't need to be again instruments well I don't know where where these instruments can be engineered to mitigate again the psychological impacts of that of this project in the sense that this project again might fail in different trajectories because how it's implemented also its income and durability of the scope of the project with the scope of our lifetime namely our psychological needs and concrete endeavors so on and so forth but this is again these are all open questions and basically is This is something that just needs to be understood as a platform thought,

as a platform, you know, way of approaching these problems. Otherwise, at the concrete level, it obviously needs a huge amount of work, most specifically at this juncture, I would say, in order to render commensurate with the psychological needs. Thank you very much. Other questions? We still have a few minutes. I had one, but I don't know if Ivan's managed to formulate her particular question

yet or... Do you see Ivan in the room? Oh, Ivan. Okay, I see. Ivan, do you have a question? We have a question over here. Okay, go ahead. what is the primary source of agency would you say can you elaborate your question a little bit more sorry so I can coherently

answer it It was sad that like freedom makes agency most possible positive transformation and I see democracy as one of the primary agents of agency but would you agree that democracy is a source of agency, or are there other things you would think of first? Yes, okay, thank you. Very good question. Yes, I mean, the project of democracy, well, is, from a certain perspective,

is the fundamental dimension of agency. But basically democracy as a qualitative abstract idea. Its political concrete manifestation is something in an entirely different context. And I think, again, you need to be carefully distinguished. This brings to a question an interesting historical story about Socrates' attitude toward democracy. Socrates was always pro-agency and understanding agency again as a self-cultivating project. But he had extremely ambivalent attitude toward democracy, precisely because democracy, understood as a political configuration,

does not essentially translate to that kind of hegemonic project that we were talking about. Nevertheless, of course, Socrates stood by the standards of democracy to the end. This becomes the idea that I think, yes, I think even though the abstract idea, the abstract protocol of democracy is fundamental to the constitution of agency. But the most important thing is that the agency, as we talked about, is really the maximization of its positive freedom. And the maximization of positive freedom meaning that positive freedom comes from the individual freedom,

enabling an agent to do something. But in so far as the range of alternatives for this positive freedom, positive actions, as shackled to the individuals are restricted, then it needs to constitute and form an integral collective singularity with the collective freedom maximizing the individual freedom. positive freedom of the collectivity, of democratic society, maximizing the individual freedom. Now the thing is that with democracy, and that's one of the things that Socrates anticipated, and in fact proved to be true, is the understanding that if democracy cannot form a hegemony,

it simply becomes pluralism of methodologically individualistic freedom. And that becomes, you know, again, a form of pathology, a form of pathology in which the agency can no longer maintain intelligibility because it cannot conceive its intelligibility through this project of perfection of agency or cultivation or agency as a hegemonic project. And that's exactly where I think a critique of democracy is needed to show that is democracy is really sufficient and adequate as a political framework, not as an abstract idea, as a political framework. Is it capable of making this hegemony or not?

And this again comes to the idea that agency, intelligibility of agency, is tied to its methodological collectivism, not to its methodological individualism. Being tied to the methodological collectivism does not deny or exclude the positive individual freedom. But a freedom that basically relapses back to methodological individualism, then is not really a proper, sufficient, adequate, or good platform for basically cultivation of agency.

So what would be some of the alternatives to kind of the liberal version of democracy that we're familiar with and kind of the representative modern state, that kind of thing, that you feel would express this form of agency more explicitly? Would it be more like something like Rousseau's general will, or what kind of thing are you thinking? I think it's hard to answer this question for so many reasons, but I mean just like even although as entertaining an answer to this question,

which is really, I think, it's really like an extremely important question, and something that needs to be really, really carefully thought. I would see more at this level, which is quite a rudimentary idea. It needs to be understood as a kind of bastardization between different political systems, a synthesis between different political systems, one that has the methodological collectivism of communist framework but also has, you know, the individual, the freedom of individual

dignity in the framework of, you know, kind of liberal democracy. And this is really hard to, you know, of course, this is a hard way to kind of formulate it coherently. But just, Just, I mean, as I said, it's just as a very rudimentary thought. I think, if anything, it will be a bastardized political system. It won't be a pure political system. It won't be communist or capitalist or democracy or liberalism. It will be a bastardized one. But you know, Reza, this is not necessarily a utopian bastardization. And necessities of Cold War, necessities of post-Cold War or post-war Cold War, created conditions in particular nation states and geographies

that actually a very, like, remote version of what you're saying was all that was there to be practiced. It was not even, like, ideally constituted, but say places like Austria, right? Mm-hmm. Places like Denmark. And then if you want to even go further, outside of places like... Yes, but you see, the thing about these Lutheran villages is that precisely there are Lutheran villages. They are not hegemonic. Now, it's easy to bastardize and integrate different political systems even coherently through careful analysis. But what is really difficult is to establish their hegemony. And that's really, I think, the most important question.

How to establish the hegemony of a bastardized system? No, I completely agree with you. But when people think of this types of assetization, it's not like that it's sort of like, what do you call, the village instances of it did not exist or does not even exist right now. Because actually, if you look at places like Australia or even Canada 10 years ago, you could see some form of similarities, kind of like coexistence of a set of central planning and sort of like socialist standards coupled with sort of like liberal democratic values and all that, right? But yeah, like at least at the level of the very local, it existed or it even continues

to exist. The challenge is like, the challenge is hegemony, like you just said. Yes, and hegemony, again, as I said, is not simply a dominating, commanding idea of hegemony, but also integrative idea of hegemony, integrating different endeavors, different collectivities. And precisely, they might have both dimension of collective and central command and liberal individual freedom, but in so far as they are local phenomenon, they are neither fully methodologically collective, They are not fully methodologically collective, and that hegemony needs to be understood as

methodological collectivism, not as simply collectivity, not simply aggregation of individuals. It needs to have a hegemonic vector in the sense that it allows for transformation. To a certain extent, these kinds of local, political, or social formations, they don't really have any transformative power. In a sense, this is precisely because there is no adequate link between their methodological collectivism, their hegemonic centralization, and their individual liberties.

And I think really, despite the concrete negativities of establishment of communist politics, communists is a good candidate for this, and it needs to be understood as a kind of a form of a platform political agenda or political system. But then you need to, but basically you need to, of course, update it. It can't go on like as this kind of continuation of simply prioritization continuation of simply prioritization of collective of methodological collectivism over

individual freedom I was actually just arguing this with Nathan comes what what is the necessity of even calling it communism then if it has to be completely transformed all the priorities within it has to change. No, the priority, the, no, the, I think the priority is, it's not the question of priority, it's the question of basically the arrangement, is the arrangement of people into a methodologically collective hegemony. And that's the most important thing. That's the main core of communism, in fact.

So I was actually going to ask, maybe switch gears a little bit. I know previously, I think when you gave the talk at EFLUX, I'd ask you a question then in regards to, I guess, the multiple realizability of the self in the future and kind of confronting, I guess, the catastrophe of time. And why not just, you know, sort of follow kind of hedging strategies like you find in finance or something like that? I have a feeling, given sort of what you've outlined today, that your response is going to have to do something with how we actually view the agent, not as an individual, but in relation to a kind of collective.

Because I guess under capitalist hedging strategies, it protects the risks of particular individual or self-preserved particular individual agents, but it does so by sort of redistributing the risk to the system as a whole. Interesting question. It's kind of like a back trip to Sohail again. I need to think about this. I mean, I can, I can, well, I can, yes, my answer at this point will be something along what you just said.

Basically, the methodological collectivism of agency as a project is really, it's not all or nothing. It's really hedging the fund, hedging the risk. I'm touching the investment on but the question I get is to be asked from so hell why does he think this this type of approach to hedge hedging is contrary to a cellars the and brand on me a notion of normativity and reason well I mean you see the reason again as I said talked about reason when we are we should be careful when we are talking about with reason

reason has different dimensions it's a space of different forms of inferences and not all inferences or not all forms of reasoning whether in practical or theoretical they are based on risk aversion in fact this is you know the main i think and that's that's exactly what part of practical reasoning is that practical reasoning is rather than being risk avert is defeasible mainly meaning that it in builds it builds the the structure of risk order within its logic that's a structure of practical commitment will to practice but the thing but the thing is for me is not

really the hedging of risk issue but it's how to distribute its adverse psychological effects on individuals again back to the question of the stoicism and that's that's I think the really really difficult one or we can camouflage that in a reconstitution of manifest image? Well, the thing is that I know that basically intelligence progresses not because of psychological

needs, but in spite of them. That's one. But still, as I talked about, it's the question of self-preservation and exactly what juncture and what age of self-preservation we are talking about. At this point, we can't really ignore the question of psychological effects of risk. certain things yes can be certain risks can be turned into basically possibilities or opportunities or ambitions for individuals simply by hegemonically by globally

propagandizing them turning them into ambitions turning them into basically collective wishes but there are also risks that are fundamentally averted because they are assumed to have fundamental, harbor fundamental adverse effects for basically our structural constitution, for simply our primary survival. And those things, yes, some of them, yes, need to be averted because there are impossibilities. They fall under the axiom of futility. For the time being, they shouldn't be taken. But also there are some of them that are misconstrued as risks,

insofar as, again, because we are conflating functional adaptations to structural maladaptations. At that level, then I think it's something more than simply an education or psychological dampening of effects. It needs quite a reengineering of the biological substrate. I guess we have other, another thing that maybe comes to mind is sort of the kind of Hayekian notion of capitalism as a certain sort of, the mechanism of capitalism kind of operating as a sort of collective now by sort of aggregating like individual desires

and wants and submitting them to the sort of calculus of the pricing model. And whether or not, I guess, I mean, does that then as, does that, would that in some respects then be a kind of collective agent as you're viewing it? Or, I mean, I guess what are the sort of maybe... It is a collective agent, but in the sense that this collective agent is not committed to the intelligibility of agency because it follows the utility of price distribution. It follows the semantics of utility. The semantics of utility, again, a form of utility, but we talked about that the agency

as a project is ending itself, namely the enhancement of the agency as such, all other utilities need to be subordinated to basically the collective instantiation of this cultivation project. That's where exactly Hayekian collectivism is liberal collectivity, not methodological collectivity. It's not hegemonic collectivity. I think a better example here than Hayek, even though not complete, is Nidson and Bichler's concept of pricing, which basically, in Nidson and Bichler's price, price is basically, like it involves both hype and risk.

The social dimension of hype, which is hegemony basically. And basically realizing that pricing is sort of like as much as it involves sort of like a scientific endeavor, ends up taking place in the manifest domain. And how hype can be utilized and actually factored into the formula for arriving at the right price. And that's actually how capitalism, even in its sort of like demented form that we've witness today succeeds is by sort of calculating the price by sort of like factoring in hype, which is hype, another way of saying hegemony. But I mean, these are like...

I'm not familiar with Nitzan and Bichler's political economy. Well, basically, it's expected earning, what you expect to... This is how you arrive at the price in a way. It's like expected earning times hype divided by risk, like as to put it as simply as that, right? This is how hype and risk are like the top and the bottom of a, what do you call it? You know, like times hype divided by risk. So the larger the hype factor than the risk factor, you're kind of guaranteeing your expected outcome. I mean, it just emphasizes the role of hegemony, basically.

Josh, do you have any comment on this? I mean, I'm not, I certainly don't have most familiarity with, like, Nietzsche and Bieschler either. So, I mean, I guess I've more read them through kind of Suhail's work on them than anything. I mean, my thinking is, like, I mean, I guess the way that he relates their kind of maybe concept of hype to Esposito's sort of breakdown of time and her sort of looking at the sort of creation of a present future as a kind of, I guess, maybe you could relate it to this idea of hype in terms of, like, what we expect the future to be.

to be like, and then this sort of risk inherent in building this sort of expected future, but in doing so, you know, that... Well now I'm getting more into Esposito's stuff, but I have a feeling this more relates to how we sort of construct time under a capitalist structure than it does maybe into a particular like hegemonic view. I mean, I think, well, I need to think about this carefully, but I think the question ultimately boils down to this, can capitalism form a hegemony? That's the most important question.

It forms contingent hegemonies in a way that, but sufficient hegemony is for it to go from yesterday to today right I mean it's a it's a lowercase h hegemony right rather than hegemony the way you want to talk or in its ideal form but I've but I know in my opinion I think I think I think it's successful maintaining sufficient level up quotidian hegemony in order for it to move from yesterday to today and hopefully tomorrow but the way it does is it it definitely involves the social like social and I am social dimension of height I mean I mean why would Google pay millions of dollars a month you have the largest LCD screen in Times Square that is most of it is white does not even have an image I has a Google logo in

the middle of it which means all those pixels are burning like basically the light it's just it's a bigger source of light in Times Square with like one little Google type in the middle of it and people just usually just I'm gonna take some more most beautiful pictures because the light is so sort of like if you they gives you like a beautiful young sort of image right and you look at this thing and you go like why would Google spend this money here it's to maintain the edifice of their hype it's essential for their for their the price of their stock which actually is dealt few blocks down the street you know down in like whatever you think those servers are whether they're in Jersey or they're in like you know lower Manhattan or wherever it is right so this is I mean hype is not sort of a superfluous concept it's actually part of the equation of how capitalism

sustain its sufficient hegemony? Questions? The discussion is getting much longer than the class time. I just want people to know we kind of ended around like 2.10. We're already like almost like 25 minutes more than the class time and the video is still rolling so I don't know if I really have to like and because I have stuff to do and I'm catching a flight later on tonight and I have some meetings with other organizers of the youth center so I want to like see if people want to like ask the final question and final remarks by Reza and then we can wrap it up till

next week no I was just gonna say I'm I'm I am actually a running out to the airport myself right now and it's been very stimulating and I I would like to formulate the question and type it in on the class list. JOHN MUELLER- Sure, absolutely. That'd be great. Thank you for having me. JOHN MUELLER- Yeah, I think these last two classes have been really, really helpful and amazing. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, it's like there's a lot of terminology to juggle around and a lot of dialectic lining up to do before I can formulate it, basically. JOHN MUELLER- Sure, definitely. Take your time. I will also try to post the chapters of Capitalist Power, which I think relate to what I was talking about and relate to the concepts of pricing as Joshua brought them up.

Because the whole book, actually the whole book is online, but I'm just going to like put the chapter there that's like needed. And if you guys want to like refer back to this formula that would risk and hype in sort of like animate them together, I post it. Yeah, that would be great. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Goodbye. Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Reza. It was awesome. One day we'll transcribe all of these, especially the parts that are not already written down by you. OK, sure. Yeah, I actually want to formulate some stuff on the earlier things we were talking about a little bit more clearly, too. But it's not related to this particular session, I think. So maybe I'll try and even post them on the class page.

OK, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Jason, can we end the session? His microphone is off. I assume that is okay. Okay, Reza, thank you very much for your time. Take care. See you everyone next week, Sunday at 1130. Okay, excellent. Bye-bye. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.