Welcome to section 1.2 on the philosophy of the inside in relation to the work of the CCRU. Now, the entire CCRU, Nick Land, Mark Fisher philosophical vector is indebted to the work of Immanuel Kant, especially Immanuel Kant's critique of pure reason. Now, one of the arguments I can roughly put forward at this stage is that one of the sort of covert aims of the CCRU, wasn't just to figure out how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, but also to figure out the means of acquiring it and working with it and the methods we can use to actualize synthetic a priori knowledge. Now, if at this stage you already feel a little out of your depth,
don't worry, I'm going to explain what synthetic a priori knowledge is. But firstly, I'm going to put forward an overview of Kant's critique of pure reason and the important aspects of it in relation to the work of the CCRU. Now we're going to begin here with the human mind and the problems set out by Kant in his critique of pure reason, beginning with what's known as the transcendental aesthetic. The critique of pure reason by Kant is roughly split, there's a split between the transcendental aesthetic and the transcendental logic. Now admittedly I'm going to leave out the Transcendental Logic sections of the critique here. For what we need to use it for and the way it's used and utilised by the CCRU, sort of quite cryptically, what I've left out is needless
complexity. But for those who would like to look into it more, I would highly recommend Jay Rosenberg's Accessing Can. Now, let's begin with some Kantian distinctions. Firstly, between a priori and a posteriori, and then secondly between analytic and synthetic. A priori and a posteriori are known as epistemic distinctions. They relate to epistemology, the study of knowledge, or how we know what we know. Now let's take an example of each and analyze them. The statement it's raining outside right now is a clear example of a posteriori knowledge, because the knowledge itself is reliant on our experience of it. Whereas an example of an a priori proposition would be
5 plus 5 equals 10, which is not reliant on experience to be known. However, there are some complexities with this statement which I'll get into later. One relatively simple way of thinking about these distinctions, though it doesn't always work, but it works in most cases, and it'll work in these cases, is whether or not someone sat in their armchair would have to get up to figure out the piece of knowledge they needed. For instance, the sum of 5 plus 5 equals 10 can be done internally and you don't need to investigate your empirical experience to figure it out. Whereas the fact it's raining outside right now is something that needs empirical investigation to be worked out, whether or not it's true. And so a posteriori means knowledge which comes after or from experience and a priori means knowledge which comes before experience. It's necessary, it's universal.
Now, analytic and synthetic judgments are quite alike the previous distinctions, yet these are linguistic distinctions. Now, let's once again, I'll take a couple of examples to figure these out. Brothers are male is an example of an analytic statement, because it's true in virtue of its meaning alone. That is to say, the concept of brother contains the concept of male, so the statement is necessarily true in virtue of the definition of brother. Kant names this phenomenon conceptual containment. Now, synthetic statements are ones in which there is no conceptual containment. For instance, brothers tend to be unhappy. It's synthetic as the concept of unhappy is not contained within the accepted concept of brothers. So the truth of the proposition is not a matter of the definitions or concepts alone,
but is based on experience external to the definitions, which create a subjective statement. now the interesting thing that happens here is you can combine both distinctions for instance you can have analytic a priori statements and knowledge which is true prior to any experience and you could also have synthetic a posteriori statements statements which are entirely reliant on experience to make sense but most importantly Kant believes there is a third possibility that is synthetic a priori statements that is knowledge that is universally and necessarily true in itself, but can still be found out from experience. The famous example Kant gives is one that I said earlier had some complexities, which is 5 plus 5 equals 10. Now,
he argues that nothing in the definition of 5 plus or 5 gives us 10, so the statement is purely in our heads and there's no need of empirical observation, and yet it's universally true, and yet we can work it out internally. So Kant goes on to argue that the principles of science and mathematics contain synthetic a priori knowledge, knowledge which is learned from experience but is also necessary and universal. Now this fact of the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge suggests that we're capable of knowing further truths and that our reason and knowledge can be expanded, that is we can learn new knowledge without experience of it, which is universally true. We can learn the truth via ways of calculation and arithmetic and
scientific principles. However, Kant does make it clear that this isn't a continuation of rationalism. We can't grasp anything because there is another problem going on. We're actually locked into something else. Now, this is the most important section of Kant in relation to the CCRU. The mind, according to Kant, doesn't passively receive information provided to it by its senses. Rather, it actively shapes and makes sense of that information. Let's look at this. Kant argues that there are two a priori forms for our senses to make sense from. That is time and space. Now, time always comes first. Why is that? Well, for there to be space, for space to happen as an extension or for things to progress in or within space there has to be a time or time for the space
to be in therefore for there to be space there has to be time for space to happen it has to happen within time there has to be a temporal dimension but everything we perceive and sense happens within time and space but also everything that we sense within time and space which from now on or reality is first processed or synthesized in the terminology of Kant by our minds. Our minds arrange temporal progression in the same way they arrange spatial progression. If we perceive some events causing others or x coming after y it is only because our minds perceive it that way and cannot be taken as universal knowledge or a universal fact of causation. Let's briefly focus
on why this is. I'll be repeating myself a little here, but only because it's so important for any future understanding, and much of the terminology I'm using here will come in later on, and it'll allow you for you to very quickly understand extremely complex ideas later on. So I'm just going to go over this again briefly in sort of a different angle. So we posit time and space as a priority. They are just absolutely always already necessary for there to be anything at all. As I've stated, time is always prior to space because space has to be in time. Now, this sort of simplistic articulation of the transcendental aesthetic from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason allows for the following conclusions regarding the already mentioned theorizations in relation to man.
So man must exist within time and space along with the entire cosmos. but man due to his very nature can only attend to or perceive this reality via his processor his brain as such the way in which he perceives is a matter of synthetic process the forms of time and space he senses they're not pure they're not pure time and space as they simply are they are processed they are synthesized versions of spatio-temporality particular to the output of man's senses. So what man perceives then isn't the real. What man perceives is a representation of the real, a re-presentation of the real. He synthesizes both temporal and spatial reality and in doing so his perception or he creates his reality as he represents it. So from Kantian
critique we can thus make a clear split, two separate terms referring to two different spatiotemporalities or two different forms of space and time. There is the former time and space of which and from which man synthesizes, the one which is a representation. Now henceforth I'm going to call this the inside and there is the pure, the real form of time and space which is external to man's representation and this I'm going to call the outside. So when we hear the CCRU or Nick Land or Mark Fisher talking about letting the outside in, this is what they're referring to. So the subjective form of intuition, which we create via synthesized representations,
also known as phenomena, is called the inside. The objective or necessary and universal experience, exterior to our senses. That which our senses process and that which is processed is called the outside. So when Nick Lan talks about letting the outside in, what he's talking about here is forcing synthetic a priori knowledge. What we speak of when we talk with the outside, what goes on there and what can be found out there, and most importantly how to communicate with the outside, these are all, in my opinion, the direct aims of what it was the CCIU was targeting themselves towards. Kant's argument, in short, has a certain parallel with this idea of a person wearing blue tinted sunglasses. Obviously someone wearing blue tinted sunglasses sees everything in a bluish tint
or bluish light. According to Khan, the mind wears unremovable time and space tinted sunglasses so that all our experiences necessarily take place in time and space that obeys certain laws of causation and laws of representation which we process. What happens when you try rip those glasses off when you try and make them disappear or disintegrate? That's what we're going to look into. That's what we're going to try and find out here. And that, most importantly, is what the CCRU was trying to find out. But there's another interesting thing about the inside-outside dynamic, which is often forgotten or overlooked. It isn't really a clear split. This is something that's quite difficult to visualize because it goes against every bit of programming you have, which is trying to tell you not to fry your own circuitry. Because, of course, this is your
processor trying to grapple with the fact it's processing. Now I'll turn to a short quote from Anna Greenspan, who was a member of the CCIU. Her thesis is called Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine. And she states on page 39, in other words, the one thing that is not interior to time is the transcendental form of time itself. Thus, in discovering the abstract realm of the transcendental, Kant unmasks an unanticipated imminent exteriority, an outside that does not transcend the world, but there's no less alien for that. So time on the outside, as the transcendental outside, becomes internal to the subject, because time is still controlling the linear time that we
see via representation of the inside. Now I'll get into this idea of chronic linear time more later on. So as I've stated, time on the outside, as the transcendental outside, becomes internal to the subject. There's a connection between time and the time of the subject, and thus the subject is divided into two parts, empirical and transcendental, rendering its empirical half passive. So of course you have the empirical half of the subject, which empirically investigates its immediate representations. But then you also have the transcendental half of the subject, which in its inner sense, which another idea of Kant's, which I'll get into later, it is in connection with pure time, because you need the pure time of the outside for there to be time at all. So it is an
imminent outside, an outside that is already within us. Agency is located on the side of time on the outside, and the transcendental subject is the synthesizer of time. Time relates to itself, through itself and our being as human subjects is caught up in this relation. Thus time, a gate of virtuality, another concept of Deleuze which I'll get into later, links the two sides together. The side that is in chronic time and the side that produces time itself and the gate of virtuality which I'll get into later is the function which allows us to break them apart. However these two sides and the transcendental human subject is presented as a unity by Kant. But the reality of
the division still lies within us, and one can utilize Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy, which I come to in later lectures, and especially the philosophy of virtuality as I've mentioned, to begin to map out how one might exit their empirical reality, and begin to sort of grapple and find methods and vectors of working with these two divisions. So before I continue and we go into the next part I'll just go over some of the major points in relation to Kant which are needed for a clearer understanding of the CCIU philosophy philosophical trajectory so man cannot sort of trust his senses his senses are processed and synthesized by him by his brain therefore everything he sees feels and senses isn't the real thing in itself but is simply a representation or the very
lovely way of thinking about it a re-presentation of it what man experiences and senses as representation is known as phenomena and is on the inside. Everything outside of this is called the outside. One important thing to always remember with this that's often overlooked within readings of Kant and secondary readings of Kant is this is often taken and understood primarily in a spatial way and time is often left by the wayside but time is one of the most important things here because what this allows us to sort of understand is that time too is a representation and the way in which we experience time, which we believe to be linear. So, you know, B follows A and C follows B. And there's this long series of causation, what we call linearity or chronic time. This is a
representation. We simply sense it this way because it's the way our brain synthesizes it and the way our brain processes it. So what's interesting is, and what the CCI you are looking into is, how do we mess around with this how do we play around with this how can we sort of potentially find exit strategies and escape scratches and that's what we're going to be looking at in later lectures and some of these lectures but this this first whole lecture and all its parts are about getting to grips with these ideas and these topics so we have a firm foundation of terminology and theories that we can use to understand what it is the CCI you're trying to do. See you in the next part.