It's a great pleasure. I'm very excited having these two colleagues and friends here whom I invited several times in the past in Berlin and abroad, but never the two of them together and therefore not in a conversation. I'm really excited about this. They will, as you read in the announcement, they will just talk to each other roughly 45 to 60 minutes. And then I'm sure there's going to be time for questions. They agree about many things. They disagree about many things. We'll hear about that. Ray Brassier is a member of the philosophy faculty at the American University in Beirut, Lebanon.
Ian Hamilton Grant is a professor for philosophy at the University of the West of England in Bristol. So both of them are very well known for their book publications, Nahil Unbound, Enlightenment and Extinction, in the case of Ray Brassier, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, in the case of Ian Grant. Both of them dedicated a lot of work, especially early in their career, to authors that were central for them or still are central for them, other philosophers. Ian Grant translated Baudrillard's Sympolitics of Change and Death, as well as Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Libidical Economy. Ray Brassier translated April Affinity by Mayer Sue as well as La Ruelle and Badiou. Both of them have never been speculative realists, although maybe they've been speculative materialists or naturalists at one point.
We'll maybe have time to discuss this. Both of them have studied at CCRU in Warwick, which is, as many of you might know, a kind of postmodern pop culture, sci-fi, contaminated British university, analog to the famous Tübinger Stift that 250 years before, 220 years before, brought together people like Hegel and Schelling and actually my favorite Hölderlin. Maybe we hear something about him as well. This was a very elegant move towards the topic of tonight. An evening dedicated to two German philosophers who are often discussed in a terribly simplified opposition. One, Schelling as a hopeless case of a romantic naturphilosoph, nature philosopher, versus the other, Hegel as a bureaucratic rationalist, Prussian rationalist, even worse.
An opposition that you find both in academic histories of philosophy, but also as a general cultural cliché. Clichés, though, about them that make it unfortunately impossible to mobilize the full conceptual resources of German idealism, not just for philosophy itself and get it outside of a kind of deadlock between, for example, analytical and continental philosophy, but others as well. But also, cliches that disable a better understanding of our current reality or scientific development. A paraphrase from the announcement for tonight's event. What forms might Hegel and Schelling introduce to our own age? To grasp what really divides these two thinkers is not just a question of rectifying the historical record.
It can shed new light on contemporary debates about nature, history, reason, politics and the fate of the human. To grasp what unites them is to reengage the project of philosophical reinvention without abandoning truth, reality or reason. These are the topics that this conversation proposes to explore. What is unique about my two or our two guests tonight is that for them, close reading and interpretation of early philosophers never runs danger of becoming mere philology, but instead is always only an occasion for a radicalization of their own agenda. In Ray Brassier's case, a universalized nihilism, more recently questions concerning representation and a near-rationalist account of reality. In Ian Grant's, it's a reading of Schelling
that can only be compared, I think, to Heidegger's famous reading of Schelling's Freiheitsbuch. And here it's in order to show a natural philosophy is not an outdated way of thinking, but on the contrary, highly relevant also with regards to understanding contemporary science. I assume or I hope that it's also a topic that will be part of the discussion today. Other topics will be addressed, will surely be the relationship of ideas in nature, thought and world, the transcendental and empirical, or questions of conceptualization and representation in general. Is representation a part of nature, and if so, how? After having brushed aside a bit polemically before philology, let me finish with a quote
from a highly instructive paper on our two guests today. I haven't read, there isn't that much on the work of the two of them together. A paper by Ben Woodard, who's also here tonight. An article that's called The Ladder of Nature, Scaling Conceptualization Between Brassier and Grant, from which I briefly quote. As Brassier, following a Selaasian leaning, says the intelligibility of naturalism and the efficacy of the normative are co-constituting. Grant, following Schelling, argues that naturalism, properly conceived in a maximal sense, is a meontological and inflationary naturalism that absorbs the very separability of the methodological form from the ontological. End of quote. this just as a small starter for what's ahead of us.
Thanks a lot, the two of you being here. And as I said, I won't stop you if you talk longer. So maybe I lose my kind of contract here, but do go ahead. Thanks for coming. And yeah, looking forward to the discussion. Armin. Thank you so much for the introduction. I think we needn't be here any longer, actually. You've covered all the bases. I thought we were discussing earlier on, Ray and I, how best to begin this. And before we knew it, we were in the middle. So exactly what's going to happen now, I think, is that we're going to try and repeat that experiment. And I think the thing I want to start with is just a quotation from the middle of Hegel's De Frinschrift, as it's called.
It's really his, it's mistaken as a, let's say, a mere catalogue of contemporary philosophical forms that he encountered. It's the hush money paid by the unknown to the known, according to James Hutchison Sterling, rather elegantly, for the privilege of standing on his shoulders. That's Hegel basically trying to gain some credibility by standing on Schelling's shoulders. and at the same time, of course, trying to shut down certain avenues of inquiry there. So that's the standard reading of it. And I say standard, but there really aren't that many readings of it. There are very few detailed accounts of the different shift. We think that there's much more going on there. And to start, therefore, it seems appropriate to go right to the middle of the philosophical part of it
rather than the mere hagiographical or historical part of it and to begin directly by talking about the absolute. Why not? I mean it's a Saturday night we can do that. So for true philosophizing on the other hand even though it may be incoherent the posited and its opposites disappear because it does not simply put them in context with other finite things but connects them with the absolute and so suspends them. I think that line that last line connects them with the absolute and so suspends them gives us a direct insight into, let's say, the directionality with which Hegel thinks the absolute. Suspension auf Hebel is basically suspended to, let's say, a heaven already gained.
If this were Dante, paradise is there from the outset. So I think that directionality is vitally important in figuring out what it is that Hegel thinks the absolute is. and it might well be from there that we should start because I joked earlier about you know this being a Saturday night party time we can talk about the absolute but there is a you know caveating talk about the absolute or relativizing or de-absolutizing talk of the absolute is a situation we find ourselves historically in it's no longer credible merely to just immediately open a discourse on the absolute such as I just have and I wondered really why I think starting off with going through some of the arguments as to why it is that the absolute is, let's
say, discredited currency. It's no longer accepted legal tender, a little bit like sterling. So I wonder if we could start, if we could start, Ray, by just discussing why that is, why it's discredited currency. Yes, well, 20th century philosophy, especially in the post-Kantian tradition, a phenomenology, existentialism, post-structuralism is a critical theory as well. in Frankfurt School tradition is famously, you know, well, in the kind of the simplest possible term, there seems to be
a kind of a connection made between totality and totalitarianism. So that if the absolute is a totality, you know, the kind of totality of everything or the, you know, the unity of thought and being, This is taken to be both anachronistic because it's a theological kind of residue. So first of all, the absolute ascetality is just a kind of, you know, yet another kind of name for God. or it's been realized socially and historically as an abomination, the totalitarian kind of atrocities of national socialism on the one hand
and, you know, state socialism on the other hand. So a lot of contemporary, in the wake of the long fallout from post-structuralism, any kind of mention of the word absolute, in a way, kind of, you know, evokes a kind of suspicion that it's either, that it seems anachronistic, it seems straightforwardly anachronistic. But I think part of, in a way, both of us are interested in, you know, we were both drawn to philosophers, you know, who in one way or the other have tried to defend the absolute. Obviously Schelling and Hegel goes without saying, but even the philosophers who interested
me early on, at least the French philosophers I'm interested in, they all in one way or another kind of want to rehabilitate some notion of the absolute. so it was like La Ruelle it's kind of radical imminence what he calls you know the one with a philosopher like Deleuze it's kind of you know the absolute is not an entity but a kind of a kind of movement the earth the de-territorialized with a figure like Badiou well I mean the what he calls an event is not is a kind of a as universal singularity is another kind of conception of the absolute,
this time is an absolute cut with the established state of things. And Mea Su also defends, you know, Mea Su's kind of absolute contingency is, you know, yet another kind of attempt to reconceptualize or rehabilitate this notion. So I think both of us share an idea that there is some kind of connection, some kind of intimate link between the impulse to philosophize and an attempt to kind of think the absolute. and I guess given that much contemporary and in a way the contemporary philosophical currents that have relinquished the absolute or jettisoned the absolute
we think, well I think it's kind of a Hegelian point that in a way you can't but every de-absolutization surreptitiously re-absolutizes something else so now in a lot of these kind of anti-absolutist philosophies that are currently kind of prevalent you see whether it's kind of relationality or difference or alterity or whatever these are terms which are in a way they're juxtaposed against identity, totality sameness in a way which is a disavowed absolutization and in a way that's the worst form and I think the most insidious form of absolutization
So I think both what's at stake here is an attempt to kind of, is it possible to, you know, to think the absolute? But the question is, but obviously it's not a thing or an object. But what role, why does it play this necessary role in philosophy? And what Hegel in this paper calls the need of philosophy. the need of philosophy is it's not just that philosophy is compelled towards the absolute it's that a culture or a society gives rise to schisms and antimonies and divisions which in a way can't just be in a way which you can't just let be, okay, I think the
liberalism is the idea that all differences are peaceable, that you can kind of, you can all Every difference can be reconciled. But in a way, this, I think, is a lie. So if you recognize that antagonism and contradiction are inescapable, you can either, you know, in a way, both the disavowal and the affirmation of antimony involve a gesture of absolutization. So in a way it's inescapable. You have to confront the impulse of absolutization as soon as you begin to philosophize seriously.
Yeah, I think even the refusal to acknowledge the actuality of that, so that is always the case, regardless of when attempted, that any attempt at deabsolutization will entail a reabsolutization on other territories, so to speak. Any attempt to disavow that, even in the form of radicalizing difference, becomes the absolutization of antinomy. And thus, as Hegel would put it, does not get round the need for philosophy. And I think it's, so the other thing which is addressed apart from the relative antiquity of the problem. So it seems strange to be talking about the absolute except as you've just been talking about. Philosophers have never stopped talking about it.
Now I guess it brings to mind two things for me. The first is one of the things which captured my philosophical imagination when first I walked through Warwick, the philosophy department. was this ridiculous book by Lyotard, Eikon Emili Bidinau. And it starts by literally taking a body apart. It starts by this dissecting particularity, and it opens it onto a landscape of which that body is part, but no longer a part whose figure is replicated elsewhere in it. In other words, the transcendental conditions have been well and truly physiologically undermined and turned into merely part of a much larger environment. that too is a way of creating an absolute. And it just occurred to me that this is another way that, in fact,
is very close to what Schelling meant when he talked about the absolute, not as das absolute, but as das unbedichte. And he draws attention to this in his really earliest works on particularity. So, from Ich, for example, on the I, he is constantly working with the relationship between conditionality thing and unconditioned and unthinging therefore so ding unbedingt that that that gesture becomes for him an important way of realizing absoluteness but this time starting from as it were fact so the fact of particularity is insufficient not merely on its
own but is going to be an insufficient lens and therefore it's being taken apart is part of the attempt to think absoluteness and I guess this raises on you know quite simply the most pertinent question of philosophy for me which is the one that upsets and embarrasses I suspect the professional philosopher to the greatest extent namely what is the function of philosophy and in the end surely it is to think without boundaries to think absolutely and to think without, as it were, accepting conditionality as condition. In other words, the need of philosophy is continuously being prompted every time an absolute that is, let's say, recognizably distinct from any other context,
be it finitude, non-finitude, be it iteration, be it iterated finitude in the form that Fichte and Reinhold are both accused of by Hegel in this text. I think those instances are tremendously alive for anyone that gets involved in philosophical questioning. And I think the point where it becomes particularly vicious, therefore, is when we start to make a move, let's say, from what we've been talking about for the moment, which is in part history, in part motivation, and in part the framing of questions about, let's say, the central drives that make philosophy possible or make it actual or drive it into existence. its ontogenetic legacy, if you will, the need from which it arises, all of these things simply seem to dissipate all semblance of traction on a reality
the second we transform it into a metaphysics. And that's become a really interesting question, I think. Now, the extent to which the disavowal of metaphysics has become a central element of the choreography, of renegotiating the legacy of German idealism in contemporary philosophy. Because I think from everything you've said, contemporary French philosophy is more or less indistinguishable from the forms of philosophy described in here. Or at least that's an exaggeration. But there are distinct characteristics it shares with the forms of philosophy Hegel encounters in 1801. Yeah, I mean, yes, I thought this in a way, the destitution of the absolutes and the kind of the
the termination of metaphysics often, you know, are seen to kind of go hand in hand. And I mean, what's curious about the contemporary landscape is that on the one hand, you have it It seems that there have been all sorts of ends of metaphysics in 20th century philosophy. I mean, the most influential is kind of Heidegger's deconstruction. But I think for both of us, it's predicated on certain very dubious conceptual premises. So in other words, Heidegger's kind of attempted destruction of metaphysics is itself kind of freighted with all sorts of philosophical assumptions,
which are at least as kind of pernicious as a metaphysical presence, which he's constantly kind of trying to undermine. In the Anglo-American tradition, people like Rorty, obviously, in the pragmatist strain of American philosophy, which I find interesting, I mean, this Rorty's destitution of metaphysics seems to kind of assume that you can simply stop doing metaphysics by fiat. So in a way, both there's, you know, on the one hand, there's a tradition which sees kind of metaphysics, the European tradition which sees metaphysics as this kind of compulsion, which can
only be kind of staved off through the kind of, you know, hypercritical kind of self-consciousness. That's not the way they put it, but you know, that's what they mean. And you have to think in in a way, you know, think beyond metaphysics. And I think that the permutations on that theme were like, you know, I think exhausted in the kind of, in the philosopher's influence by Heidegger. And then on the other hand, in this kind of pragmatist, deflationary kind of account, you have the idea that, you know, you can simply kind of opt out as if metaphysics, and what's really striking in a way is the simplifications involved. The simplifications where, you know, whether it's the identity of being as presence or, you know, the idea of, you know, the idea that, you know, the mind is the mirror of nature and royalty.
It's always astonishingly trivial, you know, the metaphysical confusion which we're being asked to kind of, you know, to abandon. And this is why there's something very self-serving about these narratives. And they're politically disastrous in both versions. I mean, I think they're just both, you know, attenuated Heideggerianism as a kind of anguished social democracy. With Rorty, you just get these apologies, these increasingly, you know, incredible apologies for kind of American, you know, capitalist liberalism. So, yeah, I mean, metaphysics and then metaphysics has been rehabilitated, you know, in both traditions.
I think in the in the analytical tradition, it's a full blown neo-rationalist, a kind of, you know, pre-Kantian, you know, metaphysics. You know, you go straight from empiricism to kind of, you know, back to Leibniz in one way or another. And in this, so now the question is like, yeah, is there a kind of a possible alternative in the kind of the post Kantian tradition, which doesn't kind of, I think which is, you know, which doesn't simply kind of distinguish between the good metaphysics, which is all about relationality, difference, plurality, multiplicity, and the bad metaphysics, which is all about unity and totality.
yeah this takes me right I think to the core of the purpose I think behind the behind the text I mean there's a the first chapter the first full chapter is entitled to the various forms occurring in contemporary philosophy the situation we're describing is the situation Hegel confronts the need for philosophy is associated with for the first time a confrontation with a plurality of forms of contemporary philosophy. And that's a fascinating difference. For example, if you compare how Hegel starts this with how Kant starts the critique of pure reason, Kant merely says, down with Leibniz, I'm next. Kant has no trouble having to invent an Oedipal scenario. It's already
prepared for him. He just needs to act it out. By the time we come to Hegel, one would have to work incredibly hard to establish that Oedipal scenario. So even the fact that he deals here with three philosophers, namely Fichte, Reinholds, and Schelling, is itself a change, an index of historical change, which makes his situation, the situation of this book, the situation of the address to the various forms occurring in contemporary philosophy, as much contemporary of ours as it is of his. And I guess one of the things that I'm interested in about this text, and about what it offers us, is about what it offers us in the contemporary situation. Namely, if it is true that, for example, the dereliction of the absolute in the terms we've described it,
entail some need for philosophy, and if philosophy is not satisfied, let's say, with merely conditional responses to questions which animate it to begin with, then what are the forms that a Hegel offers and b how have they been taken up but further see what forms are possible that Hegel offers indicates or misconstrues here that might offer as it were a way of rethinking a way a way of reinventing philosophy and I guess one of the things I'm thinking of here is actually helpfully aided by the fact that Arman began by quoting a piece by Ben Woodard that began talking about ladders. I couldn't believe it, I haven't seen the text, but
the ladder idea, the anagogy, which is the ascent which is implicit in the language of Alfebun, which is an inheritance from Plotinus in the first place, but actually from Diotima's lessons to to Socrates in the symposium, that question of the ascent that is begun by the accumulation of many and indeed all beauties and not by their abandonment leads according to Diotima to absolute beauty, not as their sum nor as their replacement, but as the additional element that not merely ontically identifies them as a category would for Aristotle, but is the additional element that actually makes these things possible, i.e. the power that brings them about in the first place.
And I'm wondering, therefore, what possibilities there are in the text that we can identify as being cogently contemporary since the situations are so similar in the ways that we're setting them up just now. That's a huge order. I rotify in advance. And by Hegel here. No, by me. Well, I mean, I was just going to say, I mean, again, what's really striking about this, you know, Hegel's intervention in this different shrift is the way in which he, you know, obviously he's famous for, you know, the idea of the absolute as identity of identity and difference.
This is the kind of famous kind of catchphrase in terms of which these, not only Hegel's, but these various kind of projects are often encapsulated. But what strikes me is that it's already clear here, and it's already implicit then, I think, in the use of the term suspension in the quote you said. That the absolute identity, which is towards, you know, towards which philosophical reason is kind of drawn, you know, magnetically compelled. it can't be you know it must in a way it can't it must incorporate schism or antimony
and can't simply be you know the problem is how you kind of think its relationship to difference, how you think identity's relationship to difference, precisely without a kind of a peaceful or quiescent integration of difference into identity. And it's really striking in this text how, in a way, his whole Hegel's entire kind of critique of Fichte is that Fichte does not successfully articulate the absolute identity of self-consciousness and the not-I, the positing and the counter-positing,
can't be successfully integrated in some kind of identity which would incorporate positing the I and the not-I because the integration then becomes, as he puts it, infinite task. It becomes, you know, either the identity is, you know, postulated reflexively as an ideal identity, in which case it's pure, it remains kind of purely conceptual, or you try to kind of, or you emphasize the kind of, you know, the reality, you know, the activity which underwrites both positing and counter-positing but then the activity which would integrate both terms together
can only be an infinite task it's something that can never be kind of actualized or consummated and it becomes it's it's a you know you get the kind of this idea that's a infinity you know the kind of speculative infinity can only be you know, can never be, its actualization is indefinitely kind of deferred in a way. It's something that, you know, it gives rise to the bad infinity, okay, that Hegel immediately here kind of sets himself against. And in a way, so it's Hegel's, what Hegel calls the actuality of the absolute or his claim that the absolute is always, you know, proximate.
It's not over there, that the infinite is within the finite. I think this is this thought that you must think how these two things are articulated and emphasize the fission the splits or the dichotomy so that there's nothing that can be juxtaposed to the absolute so I think already he's kind of desubstantializing, in a way, unthinging it in the sense in which you emphasize. But precisely what's really striking about Schelling and Hegel is that the unthinking, you don't remain at the gesture of, it's not just a kind of a negative gesture of delimitation,
which would be the Kantian gesture, there's the knowable and the unknowable, but that the unthinging is itself positively characterized or must be positively characterized. And that's what it is. That's only that positive characterization and actualization of unthinging can satisfy philosophy's need, absolute need. And this is striking here because it means that this is why it's not just a kind of a, this whole discourse can't simply be dismissed as a kind of a theological relic. because theology is, you know, in a way kind of structured around, or traditional theology is structured around the kind of the boundary
between the finite and the infinite, or the creator and his creation. And what is scandalous about Schelling and Hegel is precisely their claim that, you know, we can think the unity of the infinite and the finite, which we can think what it was previously forbidden or what was blasphemous to think. And that reason is nothing but the articulation of this identity indifference. And that's why, in a way, the term God, in a way, it's a much less pious gesture, in a way, thinking the absolute than these kind of the postmodern kind of claim about the pathos of finitude, which is another thing I think that both, in a way, the kind of our sympathy toward,
or the idea that kind of philosophy is compelled towards absolutization, means that the kind of the, you know, the pathos of finitude, of limitation, of incompleteness, is the worst kind of, you know, religious mystification, basically. I think there's an interesting point at which the discussion, and this is clarified even in the early system program, you know, the authors there, Heldlin, Schaling, and Hegel, they talk about or discuss directly a monotheism of reason and a polytheism of imagination. This is a desideratum for the outcome of the philosophical revolution they hope to enact.
And I was always really struck by this monotheism of reason, but for the reasons you've just outlined, there is a sense in which theology has simply migrated in the forum you've indicated to become a species of reason that is, let's say, maximally antinomic with respect to its commitments. A reason that is to say which hypothesizes its own autochthony with respect to sources it disavows in the action of it. And I think we see this very much in contemporary philosophy. So there was a wonderful paper by Dennett posed to Brandon called The Evolution of Why, which basically adumbrated the point that the avoidance of the question of the advent of inference
as either a rational or, let's say, a non-rational, why not call it a natural structure, vitiated the entire conception insofar as that entire conception rested rather like fictis does on on a on let's say a differential equation between being and acting yeah or being in normativity or metaphysics and normativity you know the reduction of the former yields almost as a necessary consequence the enhancement of the latter so this seems to me something that it's worth discussing in the forms in the terms that he did the theology of reason that is that disavows its or that avows its owner at the expense of its disavowed inheritance let's say you know its historicity or its emergence and I
wonder whether there is scope for discussing that then you know the theology of Robert Brandon let's say okay this okay this is a very important points for me because one is you know I spent a few years working on sellers who in a ways brand them's kind of well brand them has a very you know interesting relationship to to sellers that you know profoundly influenced and indebted on the one hand but also you know very critical and I mean basically I think that contemporary kind of Pittsburgh neo-Hegelinism,
or it's sometimes also called Kantian pragmatism, for those who think it's an ersatz Hegelism and still a kind of disguised Kantianism. It's famous for upholding this kind of distinction between the space of reasons and the realm of causes, which are between freedom and nature. And people like figures influenced by Sellers, such as, in a way, Sellers as Rorty and Ayers, because I think Rorty is a key kind of intercessor here, like Branham and McDowell, insist that this is not a metaphysical distinction, it's not kind of an ontological binary, but it can be understood, you know, there's kind of, well, they attempt to articulate it
without wanting it to be a metaphysical dualism. And in a way, Brandom, that paper by Dennett, I think, puts pressure on this claim of Brandoms, that this isn't a kind of a disavowed dualism. At what point do causally determined habits or dispositions give rise to full-fledged kind of normative inference or giving and asking for reasons. And Sellers' entire philosophy is constructed around an attempt to articulate both these moments. So for Sellers, in a way, rule-governed conceptual rationality
is indissociable from pattern-governed behavior. And he really makes, I think, a kind of a heroic attempt to try to grasp, articulate those two moments without collapsing either into the other. But the points of articulation, the articulating hinge remains at least, I mean, well to me if not to sellers himself it remains kind of puzzling in other words rules um all rules supervene on causal patterns but yet rules are never patterns rules can't be identified with uh you know pattern governed sequences of of biophysical phenomena so then the question is
well how do you avoid ontologizing well of course so you don't want to ontologize a rule but if rules make a difference in the world, if conceptual self-consciousness makes a difference to the kind of, you know, the practical capacities of sapient beings, then there must be, you have to give some sort of account. And I think that a lot hinges on this kind of schism. And it seems one way of, I think, one unsatisfying way of articulating them in terms of appealing to the distinction between first and second nature, which McDowell does. So in other words, you rehabilitate this kind of Aristotelian distinction.
you say that yes obviously we are part of nature but just as you know you know non-rational animals have proper habits and capacities and potencies rational animals are endowed with these very distinctive kind of capacities and potencies which are not unnatural but simply it's a mistake to think that they need to be or rather in a way you make you, you know, you facilitate the task of integrating them in a way by undermining our science's cognitive traction on primary nature. In other words, the cost of attenuating the dualism between first and second nature or between causes and
reasons is by saying that, you know, on some level, well, nature isn't, how much do we really know about nature? Okay. And then the danger then is that you're going to sneak in the kind of some kind of metaphysical intuition of what nature really is, as if nature can be known in any way other than through, you know, kind of theoretical rationality, and he's most sophisticated expressions kind of, you know, physics. So that's what makes me dissatisfied in this kind of and in a way it's because I think that there's almost a kind of a seller's runs out of resources that's what I figure like like Hegel becomes really compelling because maybe as you
suggested that there's a way this the framework remains too Kantian okay you still have the kind of you have spontaneity and causal determination you know and you don't you haven't gotten you know You make it up to Fichte with practicism, with the idea that our practical concerns kind of resolve the dichotomy, but you don't seem to... Well, it seems that Schelling and Hegel are both problematic precisely because of what they say about nature, that there's this other way of, there's something else to say about nature,
about what nature is, other than the discourse of empirical natural science. And this is something, yeah, I'm very kind of, I think it's very important, but in a way, I think they've both been hijacked by kind of a neo-Aristotelian. It's easy to turn nature philosophy, or at least, you know in a way maybe Hegel's more than Schelling's into a kind of neo- Aristotelian schema. I think that's very fair actually though I think that probably Hegel does make nature in relation to freedom or nature in relation to consciousness two sides of the same circle in precisely a way that Schelling doesn't. So Hegel here for example talks about Schelling's
response to Eschenmayer's idealist critique is the is the phrase that Hegel uses of Schelling's Naturphilosophie and the and the critique roughly is that Schelling is attempting to tell a fable of the Sun when he should be offering some species of a radical account of freedom in line with Fichte and so forth. Schelling's response is there is an idealism of nature and an idealism of the eye and to me the former is primary in the latter derivative. And this raises a question, I think, that I was thinking about this in terms of rule and pattern, which I think is a crucial distinction. It's fascinating, however, that the distinction must fall somewhere. There must be a cut somewhere between a rule and a pattern, except that, of course, a rule must be a pattern if it's to be a rule at all. So patterning doesn't cease even when
rules obtain. But rules must nonetheless supervene, as you said, according to the theory. so it does entail, the existence of rule entails the persistence of pattern but does not entail as it were the conceptual monopoly in terms of the grasp of that pattern. What Hegel thinks is that there is a conceptual monopoly in terms of that grasp of the pattern, what Shalding denies is precisely that and so it's really the moment at which we separate rule from pattern and I think this raises an entirely pertinent question about what we think reason is. you know so well actually it raises two pertinent questions one what we think reason is to what we think nature is and it's so interesting that in terms of thinking about nature we think immediately about causal determinism the causal determinism of one stamp namely one of four Aristotelian causes
efficient causality it's still the case that we think like Newton as philosophers until every time we address causal determinism in nature because it's it's quite simply not the case that causal determinism is synonymous with the natural world, you know, according to the hypotheses that make the running in terms of many scientific enterprises. One of those, incidentally, is morphogenesis, although Rennie Tom is an interesting character in so far. He wrote Structural Stability and Morphogenesis in 1975. It's a brilliant book that basically says, yes, there is a mathematics of biology. It's not the case that life is somehow on the far side of patterning, if you will, but rather that it is a coherent yet somewhat catastrophic expression of the same patterns and so forth. And this raises a really interesting
question that although later Tom rebels against, is precisely the extent to which patterns in nature are, let's say, a finite set. Is there a finite set of patterns in nature? Because if there is, then the distinction between rule and pattern must be insuperable. That is to say from one side or the other, it's not possible to see the other. It's only if there's not that that's not the case. But that seems to me an entirely pertinent point. So if the reason that is manipulated by rational animals is subtended by patterning, which persists even in the conceptual grasp exercised by such animals, then it seems to me to follow that the patterning in fact exceeds and does not
therefore fall on one side or the other of the animals legislating for a second nature by rule alone. And that is a Kantian gesture, isn't it? I mean, it's entirely Kantian, leading Kant to question the bridge that might unite the worlds of nature and freedom and so forth. So, and it raises, I think the question is raised in a certain register in thinking about forms of philosophy. And I wonder, so I'm thinking here about philosophy as, let's say, a set of cogently self-related or interrelated patterns that warrant the use of a proper name. And insofar as that obtains in multiple instances, and we do not have, let's say, just one register, one Leibniz to overcome for a Kant, or, you know, one Aristotle to overcome for a Bacon, or what have you.
Insofar as we don't have that single patrilinear gesture or causal determinism of philosophical patterning, let's say, then to what extent are the patterns realized in philosophy realized elsewhere? So posing that question rather than from the perspective of consciousness, from the perspective of patterning, it seems to me might go some way towards undermining, as it were, the expectation or the anticipation, the philosophical anticipation, much as Hegel does already attached to the Aufhebung as connection to the absolute, as it were. the philosophical anticipation of complete conceptual articulation of all pattern by rule, which seems to me what's conceptually at stake, what's metaphysically at stake in the very idea
of a second nature. So I was wondering really about whether we could talk a little more about pattern and rule in the way that you began to set it out there. And I wonder if that's a way thinking about forms in philosophy as well as in nature and in freedom. Yes it is, but I think I run out of resources here because I think, I mean I think as you just said that the kind of it's not you know patterning continues all kind of of, you know, Sanders' kind of phrase is that espousals of principle are reflected in uniformities of performance. So there's nothing more to an espousal of principle. This is very interesting.
He doesn't say principles are reflected in uniformities of performance, the norm, the rule. He says espousals. So in a way, it's a kind of, I mean, the way I've tried to make sense, and people who know Salah better than I do might think this is entirely wrong, is that it's almost there's a kind of, something is going on, there's a kind of, I don't know, kind of recursive patterning going on here, which gives rise to the kind of, so it's almost as if there's a kind of you know, a patterning of patterns or a kind of recursion of patterning, which gives rise to this kind of, in a way, to a kind of a glitch or a kind of, you know, a kind of a discontinuity between two levels of description, okay?
Not some kind of ontological rift, but kind of two levels of description. And then, you know, and I take your question to be, well, do we, so does it fall upon philosophy to try to kind of, well, from where do we draw the conceptual resources to push further to kind of, you know, to think, to conceptualize these processes? And here, I mean, on the one hand, I think, well, I mean, a philosopher like Sellers says, like, well, you have to advert to kind of, you know, the most advanced, you know, in the last 50 years now they're all these kind of the discourses of complexity you know provide all sorts of very very kind of sophisticated
resources for thinking about these kinds of involutions of patterning and I and then I guess the philosophical thing but what's interesting is that they gave you know as you well know when those philosophical when those scientific discourses in a way they kind of they were philosophically over coded they They were philosophically over-coded by people interested in a certain kind of French philosophy, you know, and it was over-coded with like a kind of a philosophy of different, you know, obviously Deleuze most kind of famously. And so the question would be, is there, you know, well, in a way, I'm not satisfied by Deleuze's account of the relationship between philosophy and science. I mean, he seems to me to follow a, you know, a basically Bergsonian schema, where the task,
the philosophical task is to create the ontology required by the sciences. And although I think science and philosophy have to be articulated, I just don't find that the way in which it's done, I'm still very kind of dubious about that particular articulation. But I don't have a better one to propose. No, so it's exactly the situation you describe as pertaining to Deleuze pertains also, for example, to some of the new Aristotelian, self-proclaimed neo-aristotelians in powers metaphysics. So Stephen Mumford, for example, performs exactly the same gesture with respect to what he calls, and this, for obvious reasons, simply arrested my attention, the ungrounding argument. It's a very good argument.
It basically persists in the... It demonstrates that neo-essentialism, as a rule, persists in the assumption that there are simples that bear bodies, entities, finite entities, that bear powers. And that if that's what powers metaphysics means, then it is basically unreconstructed Aristotelianism, where all powers are accidents and substance remains whatever pre-hypothesized entity we might want to consider as being satisfying it. However, Mumford's procedure, and this is where it's interesting, is to append, as it were, his metaphysical reflections to the factual status of various species of scientific hypothesis. So he asserts quite overtly that it is key among certain theories and quantum mechanics that, for example, the powers do not have simple components.
That is to say the powers are as simple as things get. But of course, they're manifestly not simple. They're neither spatio-temporally particular. In fact, they can't be for various reasons and so forth. But Mumford repeats again and again that his hypothesis is therefore tied to the scientific enterprise. So you face on the one hand the dilemma of, like de Lezenguertari, both in Thousand Plateaus and particularly in the journal Chimère, which they ran for so many years and which contains so much interesting stuff. It is like the Journal of Speculative Physics, you know, republished after 200 years. It's quite extraordinary to look at it in that line.
But anyway, where they seek, as it were, let's say an alliance with scientific investigation on the grounds of the ontology that current scientific investigation seems to warrant them as offering, Mumford merely takes the other way around and seeks license for his hypothesis in scientific hypotheses from which he draws, therefore, what he proclaims to be metaphysical conclusions. I guess my question is, are those metaphysical conclusions? At all, you know, and that raises a really interesting question. We could frame it either in the context of being, let's say, a question of finite form, of entity, of fundamental units of ontology.
Or we could put it in terms of what it is that we think constitutes metaphysics. One way or the other, however, we're left with precisely a dilemma between, let's say, a legislative metaphysics that doesn't rely on precisely the kind of recursive performance that you, I think, compellingly described Sellers as offering. I think that sort of recursion alone can make sense of the program and doesn't propose exactly the break, but rather an emergent state of affairs. as you know so so it and that I don't think is merely as it were an alliance proposition but rather I think one that solves a certain species of problem but
rather perhaps on the side of quietism so I guess the same question persists you know is this metaphysics is this what we want is this is this what the need of philosophy is satisfied by you know at what point do we stop asking questions because it's like say intellectually inconvenient or embarrassing to do so simply because license over proclamations concerning matters of fact are culturally exclusively granted to the natural sciences in ways which you know philosophy seems quite willing in the two examples we've been discussing just now to Les Gontari on the one hand and Mumford on the other to accommodate. Yes, I mean, I'm undecided about this. On the one hand, well, I mean, on the one hand, I think
it's kind of easy to say, and I've said, you know, I used to say this as a kind of, you know, the way to kind of exculpate myself from the obligation to think more seriously about this, that every scientific discourse will kind of secrete, has disavowed metaphysical presuppositions. Where metaphysics just means kind of fundamental, categorial, or conceptual premises, which are not themselves explicitly kind of, you know, part of the theory or reflected or explicitly articulated within the theory. Now, so of course, on the one hand, I think so that philosophy
can do kind of useful work by kind of pinpointing those kind of, you know, those unstated kind of, you know, presuppositions. but then there's already an expert discourse. The philosophy of science doesn't really exist now. You've got philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, philosophy of chemistry, philosophy of cognitive science. There are these expert philosophical discourses that in a way that make these kinds of moves, do this work in a kind of scientifically informed way, where they really know the science, in a way in which, I guess, a speculative philosopher notoriously may not.
So, yeah, so I think it's, and I would, in a way, as much as I kind of find, I mean, the danger then is that there's a kind of, there'll be a timidity or a conservatism in the work being, the technical work being done because, you know, the philosophical resources available to these kinds of, you know, experts will themselves be kind of themselves be freighted with their own unavowed presuppositions or assumptions. But still, the alter, you know, my, I guess, you know, I'm still kind of sufficiently, you know, I still have a kind of a Kantian reflex which makes me fear, kind of
people just starting to kind of, you know, you know, arm share physics or you know or again well or even you know the you know there's a version of i mean i know you've written about you know panpsychism i know it's um you know it's a it's a deep problem that runs through the uh entire tradition but there is a kind of the idea that you can know nature from the inside which is one version of the um you know panpsychist claim that you know that what we know um you know we know consciousness that we have our kind of our acquaintance with what it is to be conscious gives us this kind of intuitive shortcut into the intrinsic nature of reality, where Russell famously says that science can only ever tell you about the extrinsic
properties of things, not their intrinsic qualities. And their intrinsic qualities would have to be something like qualities articulated in conscious experience, hence neutral monism and i've always been a bit yeah i mean i just um here it's the problem of like you know i don't see how well okay well um this hegel's text here famously defends um you know intellectual intuition transcendental intuition against the kind of the kantian interdiction in a way speculative ideas and begins by overthrowing the kantian interdiction on intellectual intuition but in a very, I think, very peculiar and interesting way.
Whereas it seems to me that there's a recourse to intellectual intuition in this, even in an empiricist philosopher like Russell, where you think you just have this kind of non-conceptual acquaintance with the kind of qualitative particularities, and this is knowledge. In a way, I think that there is work to be done about what intuition is, But I think that these idealists have much more sophisticated things to say about what it would be to intuit, for thought to intuit its own structure. Yeah, I mean, there are some interesting examples that they offer. I mean, the line with which I started, it's maybe worth just repeating it to tie us back into the text.
But it's occurred to me that it's acquired altered salience since we began. but for true philosophy, even though it may be incoherent, the posited and its opposites disappear because it does not simply put them in context with other finite things, but connects them with the absolute and so suspends them. I mean, the medium in which that takes place is presumably some species of intellectual intuition, except it's not. It's also a declarative act. It's a manifesto. to the extent that the intellectual intuition that Kant, for example, describes as pre-discursive is a matter of rational necessity for a rationalist such as Hegel.
I know there's a dispute about whether Hegel can be accurately called that, but he can be, I think, if we do not mean by rationalist someone who pursues, you know, one-sidedly reason in the context in which the rationalists that preceded him do. and it's clear that I think that's not the case but there is there is I think a question that he that you posed concerning the resources for exploring this antinomy between let's say metaphysics science and and philosophy conceived as giving of reasons yeah so three a tripartite antinomy so three competing rules, as it were, in a common context. And they meet at certain key phenomena, certain key arguments.
There is something that Hegel recognizes in Schelling that is exactly like this, and from which Hegel proposes, I think, on one reading at any rate, to rescue Schelling from, for which reason he goes on to characterize intellectual intuition as being something that illumines a world created only in reason and therefore makes this is why he makes freedom and nature two sides of the same coin or part actually more accurately part of the same circuit so in consequence the pursuit of reason will in sorry the pursuit of nature will inevitably be will inevitably give rise to the pursuit of the idealism of the eye which is the text actually that uh that hegel's working with there it's not any of shining other texts in the sense that all of nature insofar as
it's acknowledged by an eye capable of so acknowledging it is already so to speak part of the intellectual intuition that the eye seeks to reconstruct in abandoning its own particularity via the connection with the absolute um and i think what's what might be interesting here is to to raise where it is that Schelling might have disputed this. First of all, it's quite clear in the context of the citation I gave earlier, namely that in response to Eschenmayer's suggestion that Schelling should pursue a more overt idealism based, premised ultimately on the absoluteness of freedom, Schelling says, There is an idealism of the eye and there is an idealism of nature, but the idealism of nature is primary.
The idealism of the eye derivative. There is a sense in which you can read Hegel's cycle immediately from that. But there's another sense in which the cycle is immediately, let's say, topologically misconstrued. It's a different shape that Schelling is talking about. He's talking about a relation of antecedents and consequence in relation to the internal genesis of species of reason within philosophy. And that doesn't start or stop there. So rather like, I think, the recursive moment that you indicated in Sellers, I think that's precisely what Hegel seeks to rescue Schelling from. having misconstrued precisely the notion of the relationship between
philosophy of nature and philosophy of the eye. There are two other things I think which are worth raising at this point. One if the set of presuppositions that govern, let's say, that aren't part of the active vocabulary of the natural sciences but nevertheless govern the metaphysics by which they can be said to operate by a third party offering descriptive accounts of their metaphysical commitments bear a certain similarity that Mumford does in fact recognize in that paper as being vicious with respect to the powers ontology project namely they specify powers as in hearing in entities so in other words fundamentally ontology is categorized by whatever set of things we might construe an unnoticed consequence however of Mumford's ungrounding argument is that that does not obtain ontology needs to be rethought and I'm totally it's
significant to raise ontology in this context because it has I think being offered as a contemporary way out of precisely the problem of negating metaphysics maintaining let's say the the the normative rights of reason and the normative consequence or the consequences of normative reason as an existing entity or as an existing set of meta patternings that are world altering in ways conducive one would have hoped to the preservation of species that perform these acts, but ironically, perhaps not on the one hand. And on the other hand, the, no, I ventured an extension of my metaphor too far and can't work my way back now. I'll abandon my point. Should we, would this be a wise place to pause?
It's more like exactly an hour in dialogue. So we could reach on the floor. Right, OK. Yeah, good. I don't have anything to say. Someone took my microphone, so I cannot. There's a microphone here for the audience, right? Yeah. Umstimmen. Amit. I have a function. I have a function. Then I have a function. Then we have a speech. So, in Spanish. I will start with one because you will...
I can recommend it. Let's be democratic. No one has a microphone. Just while you were talking about the relationship between science and philosophy, beginning we were talking a lot about the absolute and others, and for them the science they refer to is mostly mathematics. In UIN you were talking about delusion for a period a lot, but for them it's more biology in a way. I don't want to over-black and white put everyone in a box, but you used a way... Physics is much more the key science when you're referring to something in your discussion,
at least in Nylon bound. Would it make sense also to think about this relationship individually, depending on what kind of science philosophers take as their example? independently of how they use it, whether as an example or intrinsic extreme. I think there's a lot to say about, in a way, the choice of biology or physics, especially in 20th century philosophy, was also philosophically over-coded. there's almost like an ideological kind of dimension
to whether you're kind of a physicalist, as many kind of as people, you know, like Quine Lewis and so on, or someone who thought, who defended, who said that kind of biological phenomena can't simply be kind of reintegrated using the existing, the then extant resources of physical theory. So, and a figure like Sellers, I mean, Sellers is, I think, a kind of emergentist. He defends, although he wrote one paper, he co-authored a paper on the concept of emergence, which I don't really understand. So, it's a stumbling block for my kind of understanding of the sense in which he is an emergentist.
I think with Measun, with Badiou in particular, mathematics is a paradigm of science and nothing else. Because science for him is a kind of, you don't define a science in terms of its subject matter. And he thinks it's because mathematics doesn't have an object domain that it's a paradigmatic science. And he thinks physics and biology are, physics is more scientific than biology,
but even then it's not, it is, he thinks it's kind of contaminated by these pre-scientific residues, by these ideological, these, you know, all sorts of kind of assumptions and presuppositions that it can't kind of, you know, expunge from its own kind of theoretical discourse. I don't, you know, I think... I think it's complicated. I think it's a mistake to kind of simply privilege... You know, I think that there's something very dubious about a philosopher simply kind of choosing to privilege one scientific discourse over another, but it happens both ways. In a way, in the 20th century, you know, when, you know, physics seemed to have the kind,
well, it seemed to be easy to kind of insist that kind of the ultimate description of reality would be physical. And then, you know, in the latter half of the 20th century, there was kind of biology, there's a revolution in biology, and all of a sudden, the idea that living systems were irreducible, the dynamics of living systems, self-organizing systems, couldn't be, or in some sense, couldn't be straightforwardly reintegrated into physics. But then, that's a complicated discourse in philosophy of science. Having looked into this, I know that there are lots of people, this gets very complicated very fast, and if you don't know the science, you really kind of, yeah, I mean, I think keep your mouth shut, you know. So, however, I will say that I am suspicious of a kind of biologism, you know, and a metaphysics, you know, of life,
which is prevalent. There's a philosophical discourse about the privileges, the living and the vital, which I think is, which I find dubious both philosophically but also politically, because I think it leads to all sorts of really horrible consequences. Again, this is why these issues are so complicated. that I think the real issue is about what counts as what is the status of these as Ian said, what is the relationship between philosophy and fact
and that's something that I'm rethinking fundamentally and I think I used to have a very naive conceptual relationship between philosophy and science and now I realize it's much more complicated. Yeah, I too would discount the prospect of a philosophy based on a single science. It just doesn't seem to me to answer a philosophical question, and it doesn't seem to me to answer a scientific question. Specifically, the biology issue is a moot point. I'm totally uncertain that there is any such thing as a coherent philosophy of biology. There are various problems that arise in the context of biology which are philosophically interesting.
But, for example, the idea of premising a full-blown Bergsonian species of metaphysics on vitalism seems to me, I think, conceptually vicious. I think there's something that ultimately undermines itself about that entire account. I call it transcendental narcissism in the sense that it wants only an echo of itself throughout eternity. and it is a way of arresting nature in the Anthropocene, let's say. Even the Anthropocene bears this hallmark of transcendental narcissism. The idea that we're causally responsible for the entirety of the world in which we now find ourselves seems to me to mistake an understanding of causality with one of effect in a way that is profoundly unhelpful. I also think that it doesn't ask the pertinent philosophical question,
which is, is the domain of fact reducible to a domain of inquiries conducted under the name of the natural sciences? The domains of fact extend surely much further than that. And if they extend much further than that, then to what extent do we get a question that answers... To what extent do we solve the problem of what is nature by collecting one, several, many, or just some, or all of the sciences together, and then saying, there, we have our totality of facts. and it also strikes me that in any context, call it what we will, wherein something occurs that is additional to that context, trying to understand it in terms of another part of that context seems to me to invite partiality. This is one of the motives I think that Hegel and the idealists
in general are pursuing philosophically. What happens if not only we don't have an object domain like but also the domain of objects is yet even to be constituted you know the the the genesis of the categories necessary in order to think the problem from the ground up is something that invites the kind of bold response that we see in a work like this which reads like a manifesto for precisely that reason so I think the the idea that there is any single or indeed collection of discourses that can tell us what it is that nature is, is probably philosophically misleading at best. And moreover, I would say that any totality of discourses about nature that purports to exhaust finally what nature is falls foul precisely of the difference between pattern and
instantiation. Because the instantiation of the pattern, aha, I now have the totality of discourses of nature, is itself a continuation of the pattern, which must of necessity be absent from the the pattern so constituted. Yes, is this working? Yeah, OK. Yes. I want to go back to the absolute, as it were, and so and also to the Hegel quote with which you began, Ian. So and Ray, you also you spoke about the unity of the finite and the infinite at some point, and the Hegel quote talks about the connection with the absolute. So, Andrei, you elaborated on the negative political stakes of the discourse of finitude,
which lacks this kind of connection, this kind of unity. So I'm wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on how you see this connection or unity with the absolute, with the infinite, and what the stakes, the political and metaphysical stakes of this are. Because even in the Hegel quote, but it seems like a very weird kind of connection, in a sense that is signalled by this index, by the word suspension of Hebron, like cancelling out in particular, because, and you know that like at the end of the phenomenology of spirit, for example, the absolute knowing is what completely cancels out this world as finite world, this world of temporality, thingness, negativity, whatever, or in the early Schelling,
the absolute as absolute identity is absolutely free of everything that we are used to think of as characteristic of this finite world in which we finite subjects live. That is, it's absolutely free of any striving will, negativity. It is being as such, the pure being. And even in La Roelle, if we take the contemporary examples, the world is negative and divisive. But to think the real or the one is precisely to think that which absolutely precedes and refuses the world. So this Bitcoin may assume absolute contingency is also what kind of like ungrounds the way the necessity of the way the world is. So I'm basically curious about how you see this weird kind of unity with the absolute,
your connection with the absolute, and what are the stakes of this for you? I think the question of the connection being odd is fabulous. It's quite explicitly stated there that it is a suspension and so forth, but it is a connection. So the Spenschen is a species of connection. But the translational choice is obvious. You point to one of the alternative translations, the elimination and so forth, or one of the things that we are to think in Aufhebung. But there's a third. There's the leverage problem. There's a directionality to the accounts here, which I think gives a model of Hegel's account of the same phenomena you're asking about, that, for example, Schelling disputes. So the connection with the absolute that Hegel proposes
is one that does illuminate in one sense, but preserves obviously in another. And I'm reminded of the preface of the philosophy of right. So towards the conclusion, philosophy paints it's grey and grey, etc. But the preceding sentences of that paragraph are all about the advent of philosophy. Philosophy is a late advent, and the world that is captured in philosophy is not therefore rejuvenated by it. There's a sense of the completion, in other words, of all things in reason. The suspension, in other words, and the elimination both serve a single trajectory. The other trajectory, the trajectory of the finite with the absolute, is realized, let's say, in a more orphic manner. That is to say, there's an entailment of descendentalism.
And this is exemplified in a modern register, for example, a contemporary philosophical register, by the opening of Laetar's Economie Libidi. now you know there's this the opening of finitude onto something that lacks the conditions that finitude would have supplied as a lens through which to examine it is precisely the exposure to the to unconditioning yeah and that stepwise process is a descent um so this descent it will be which and here your description of laraels you exquisitely concise description of laraels account as the true Neoplatonist he is, is to say that ultimately the one is a source of inexhaustible power, which is why it is all attempts to become like God.
God, I've forgotten the phrase. I can't remember. How can I forget what it's like to call becoming like God in Greek? I cannot remember. It doesn't matter. But this entailment, the upward entailment that's described there as being frustrated in La Roelle is in fact undermined at the outset in Schelling's account. Unconditioning is a state that, let's say, the patternings or the systems of knowing encounter in deprocessing the relationship between, let's say, a finite form and a non-finite environment, whatever satisfies that environment. So I think there's a difference in orientation. And I think the third meaning of Aufhebung as leverage is, in fact, quite crucial there,
because it does give the directionality. And the requirement for, as Hegel says in this text rather beautifully, for throwing oneself into the abyss of pure reason, a corps perdu, it's a beautiful account of it, precisely because it demonstrates that only where the ground is absent is it plausible to think about connecting with the absolute. I think one of the things that's, you know, I think very, in a way, or in a way, that's
kind of that Schelling and Hegel are striving towards, in a sense which might be missing from the reactivations of some sense of absoluteness in these recent French philosophers, is that that it can't be, it involves a kind of a radical, an overhauling of all of the resources of philosophical conceptualization and a way of the syntax of philosophy. And well, your question was also about
the kind of the finite and the infinite. And you know, Badiou's claim is that And we now have a scientific concept of the infinite, because after post-Cantorian kind of mathematics, we now have a rigorous scientific discourse that tells us about the structure of infinity, which is why it's not so that the way in which, so it doesn't fall to philosophy to kind of directly try to limb the structure of infinity, but rather to think about the way in which, to think about the kind of the splinters of the infinite within the finite, which is one way of thinking of truths in Badiou.
And I find this, one issue is whether kind of, I think to try to think the infinite non-privatively, not simply as the unthinked or unconditioned, but to try to think this un-eng positively, that's one of the most compelling aspects of Hegel's thinking. And also the absolute... I think that Rebecca Comey and Frank Rudel in their recent book on Hegel, especially on the role of absolute knowing in Hegel, shows that it's this moment of astonishing suspension and evaporation.
It's not this kind of standard critiques of pan-logicism as if absolute spirit is this stomach, this omnivorous kind of stomach that is ingesting everything. So absolute knowing is just when it's absolutely kind of stuffed. But it's absolutely not, it's absolutely almost, well, I was going to say the opposite. It's not the opposite, but it's this kind of moment of like pure, kind of almost, you know, like evaporation condensation. So it's a moment you only reach presuppositionlessness at the end of the process where you have, in a way, the kind of the coincidence of thinking and being. But it's this moment of absolute impoverishment.
It's a moment of, so the identity of thought and being with which the logic opens, this moment of contact between thinking and being is also a moment of complete impoverishment. It's a suspension in a sense because it seems to be the suspension of determination once again from which a further cycle of conceptual determination must unfold. So I think already in Hegel, well, I think both in Schelling and in Hegel, the absolute isn't just this very, very big thing. And I think that the danger and what they have to say,
again, so that we can think about infinity positively. and the question is whether it's still, you know, the question is does philosophy need to think infinity positively because, you know, the infinite has been hijacked once more by kind of obscurantist discourses. In other words, if you don't, if philosophy doesn't grapple with the infinite, will it become a kind of an authoritarian marker where others kind of lay claim to the authority of the infinite. And I think if the need of philosophy, the contemporary need of philosophy is, I think there is, ironically, the discourse.
I mean, one of the things I think that is right, I mean, there's about Mea Su's book After Finitude, is he points out how, you know, the kind of, there's a pathos of imminence which allows transcendence always to be kind of to be invoked or smuggled in but in a kind of in a very authoritarian and obscurantist way so I think that the so although I'm not sure if it still falls to philosophy to think the infinite I think that philosophy you know in a way has to kind of is compelled to kind of to think absolutization.
And here I think that in a way we haven't, it's not clear to me that we've advanced much beyond these figures. I mean, I think this is why, you know, there's a sense in which this has just happened, you know, it's still kind of, you know, 200 years is not a long time in philosophy. It's like it's the blink of an eye. So I think this moment is still, well, what has, I think that the figure who changes the coordinates of the problem is Marx, actually. And that's why his relationship to these two figures is also salient here. But that's another story. We have three more questions.
The last question and answer was like 15 minutes, so we got to be brief. Unfortunately, short. Thank you for this incredible conversation. My question kind of builds on Armand's question. Armand named particular sciences and how they relate to particular philosophers work. But the name that didn't come up was computer science. And if you actually want to go like one level higher, it's cybernetics and how from the mid-century cybernetics became an obsession for certain philosophers. And I'm not going to name names. We all know the names. We have certain aversions to these names, say Latour or others that I'm not going to name. But my my question, my question basically has to do with also how
first of all, so a commentary on like relationship between cybernetics and philosophy, because because back then there was this hope that like cybernetics as the science of all sciences would eventually like basically make philosophy redundant, which didn't actually happen. And the second one, second one is that In light of the cybernetician's obsession with singularity as their transcendental narcissism, and how it implicates both pattern and reason. If we can talk about cybernetics in terms of how it relates with patterns and reason, and how these two find themselves implicated in the figure of existing AI, and basically limitations of existing AI in its inability to deal with this and
and that so yeah so I'm sorry as I told many ones that I'm not a athlete but I like athletes I'm not a philosopher but I like philosophy so I'm content so I'm sorry I'm gonna answer very briefly with it doesn't matter it doesn't matter I Can you hear me at the back? They want to record it. Oh, I see. Okay. So I want to answer with a, not directly because your question would involve something that I don't think could be reasonably described as brief, right? But there is an interesting counter example to the imperative lodged in the question, which is offered, I think, by Whitehead.
So having spent ages trying to, you know, with Russell to reduce arithmetic to logic and deciding that was no longer the game, still persists in his interest in pattern. And his interest in pattern becomes philosophical precisely for the following reason. It's pattern is interesting at the point where there are dissonances, i.e. where patterns collide and are not the same pattern. Because it poses this question. if there are patterns that differ from one another, either there's a pattern of their differentiation, in which case they're part of one and the same system of patterns, or not. If not, what is the total context of pattern? And that really is the question, I think, which is at the root of both your question, but also I think Whitehead's skepticism
that it was going to be possible to find, let's say, a pattern that would satisfy all the demands made of it by, let's face it, the recurring examples of scientific end games that pester the rhetoric as it were of epistemic game. I have nothing to add, I agree, I disagree. Thanks, I'll try to make it brief. So in the interest of transcending or escaping this kind of perpetual chasing after the absolute and then batting it back and forth, who is entitled to it is the sciences or philosophy. I just wanna return a little bit to this picture of philosophy of science
that was offered here as critical of excavating assumptions and revealing them maybe in a useful way, but it's often the role that's assigned is found acceptable for philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of the so-called special sciences. But I wanna return a little bit to the normative role philosophy of science has had for a long time, from the natural philosophers to the Vienna circle, but even has had a resurgence in contemporary philosophy of science, and ask if we shouldn't rather think of philosophy of science as in a more experimental vein, as proposing rules and not so much in vying for looking for authority over the absolute or some such, either in philosophy
or in the natural sciences, but rather in kind of proposing the sorts of assumptions that would guide, you know, see what sticks, what leads us to a better investigation of the sorts of hard facts, so-called, or realities that the particular sciences have a grasp on. And I think there are good examples of this in, for a little bit in philosophy of physics, but especially in the more social sciences, like in philosophy of economics, you really see philosophers like Cartwright and her school sort of proposing an alternative metaphysics that would be more conducive to a better scientific inquiry. And I wonder if this is not the experimental vein of philosophy itself is not part of what's
missing from escaping or transcending this search after the absolute. Okay so you're quite right there is normative dimension to the to various developments in the philosophy of science which has been there for a long time and so forth i haven't really talked about that and i i wonder actually whether it ever attempts the whether that's why there are those questions are attempts to answer similar questions to the ones we're discussing and in some senses they are clearly because they do relate to what
the directional project is um but in another sense they don't so far as precisely the context you offer is one of experiments. And I think that there are really crucial, interesting examples of experimentation where outcomes are not known and experimentation which is proposed model, let's say. Does the model work? Or let's see what the model does. And those two approaches do offer different ways of thinking about, let's say, experiment. In the latter context, not just philosophy of nature, but philosophy in general, has consistently done nothing but, I think. so I think to limit the constraint as it were to the philosophy of science is probably unlikely to bear the fruit we might want it to if we want a more interesting approach to the question of what the absolute is
I think our point though has not been that the absolute is a necessary question and must be asked by all parties and that therefore we must all make some connection with the absolute I don't think that's been the case I think rather the question concerning the question concerning the relationship between the finite and the unconditioned, or the finite and the infinite, or the absolute and the particular, or what have you, is a question fundamentally about the form of difference, of inspiring, of how it is that, let's say, the syntax of nature, the patterns of nature, are, in fact, replicated in a variety of, let's say, of environments that we might not regard as being immediately natural amongst them, those, for example,
performative issuances of normative discourses. So when I say I keep a promise and I keep a promise, then the performative issuance is the ratifying example. I'm not sure that that escapes the problem we're talking about in precisely the way that we might imagine if we think normativity is the way out of this. Nor indeed if we posit forms of utility as basically being and guide ropes for thinking about what important questions are. It's the persistence of the question. Hegel's quite over it that it's about a need of philosophy. And I think understanding the question of that need is quite interesting. It's not a need, as it were, that's a reducibly psychological one. It's got to do with, let's say, ultimacy of conceptual patterning, however realized.
That's where I'd leave it. I'm not sure, just to be clear that I've grasped your question, could you just say the sense in which you were using the term normative and experiments, and you mean scientific experiments? I wasn't clear what the terms normative and experiment, the sense in which they were being used. Just repeat it. Well, in the sense that we could construe philosophy in general, certainly, but also particularly philosophy of science with its more direct engagements with the particular
science as being performative, as kind of giving the rule, not so much as in the kind of old fashioned offering of an ultimate ground and trying to justify that, but more as a kind of dialogue with scientific practice. So kind of proposing more abstract metaphysical or kind of epistemological assumptions that would guide scientific practice in certain kind of direction. And without sort of offering that as the only way, as all sorts of science have tried very hard to do, but I guess normative in that sense, normative in the sense of the unity of science movement of the Vienna circle in the early 20th century or the disunity of
science move of the last 10 or 20 years as kind of guiding the scientific aspect of this inquiry in a certain direction. Okay. Thank you. That helps. Yes, but then I can see how there would be... I don't know enough about the kind of the theory, the construction of experiments to to say to what extent these normative injunctions have had a,
you know, what role they've played in experimentation. And I mean, look, I know that, you know, the little philosophy of science I know is that there is the construction of a model is always kind of, you can vary the parameters of the model so that, you know, you can, The model itself is a kind of a schematic idealization, which is never a direct representation of reality. So the sense that the relationship between theory and reality, as mediated by models, is always going to be a kind of a construction. And that's why, famously, that's why both verificationism and falsificationism were like implausible philosophies of science,
because there's no way evidence, empirical evidence or experimental evidence never on its own does not suffice to determine, either to verify or falsify a theory. So, but then I'm not sure the sense of, I mean, someone like Ian Hacking talks about kind of experimental realism. He thinks that you shouldn't be kind of, you know, you should just accept, you know, the criterion for the reality of a phenomenon is its kind of, you know, its experimental ratification. If you can do something with electrons, the reason to believe in electrons are real is because you can do something with them. You can manipulate them. And he thinks that this kind of practical criterion overrides any kind of metaphysical or ontological considerations.
But then the sense in which you can successfully do something or fail to do it is itself overridden by all sorts of kind of usually socioeconomic considerations. So I think that, I mean, I take your point, but I think that talking about experimentation or experimental practice on its own, that seems to me, the danger is that that turns into another abstraction, as if kind of experimentation is something that happens, if it's not kind of, okay, it shouldn't be kind of subordinated to kind of normative, theoretical concerns. such as whether it's unification or disintegration or partial fragmentation.
But then what scientists, what it is that scientists are trying to achieve and the conditions under which they think that they've successfully achieved what they were trying to achieve is, there's all sorts of questions there. I think the danger would be to a kind of pragmatism that says the practice, the experiments are kind of almost like a law unto themselves. And I think that the danger then would be a kind of pragmatic abstractionism, which I think raises the kinds of... There's going to be normative... There are norms that govern practice and experimentation.
and if they're not superimposed by the theory, the question is, at what level can they be self-consciously examined? I take your point, but it's a complicated issue. I don't have a straightforward answer to it. There are many more questions now, as usual or as expected. I remember the idea for this evening was after I invited you in last time we went for dinner. And after giving you some drinks, I convinced you or forced you to agree to come again. But only if Ray would join.
So immediately I texted him like already from the restaurant. So I will do the same tonight. Hopefully convince you to come again. Ray seems exhausted. Come again next year. and maybe we can just start with questions. So thanks a lot, both of you, for this amazing dialogue, really showing what philosophy actually is or should be or could be or actually is in your case. Thanks for the questions and I hope to see all of you again soon. Thank you.