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een contingency different states throwing different lights on a changing and undefined world it s the people who try to consider it fixed that get it wrong this interweaving of journeys in literary and philosophic intensities with journeys in the extensities of space and history proved highly eventful joe was in nepal during the uprising that brought its monarchy to an end and was able to write vividly about it he also walked many miles in nepal visiting the base camp of everest and finding in such places further resources for his creativity he was in tibet when the recent uprising occurred and was one of the first out allowing him to spin some yarns to the journalists eager for accounts of what was going on inside tibet his journeys in the amazon and into the sahara provoked wonder in those of us who received his dispatches or who met the weary traveller when he arrived back for a brief stay in the old country he wrote this from south america i travelled up the amazon and saw the sunset at its basin i hunted caimon by torchlight found tarantulas in trees saw anacondas in the waters caught a piranah and one halcyon morning i took a dug out into the waters of a quiet tributary and read heart of darkness all alone in the wild centre of a lake i strolled the heart of colonial peruvian towns i took a small boat out in lake titicaca and met people who had for centuries lived on islands made of reeds just floating in the freezing wind i bought a charm from an old lady i took a dilapidated bus across the plains and saw unimagined forgotten villages enshrouded by snow capped mountains i scaled the height of machu picchu and looked down with heavy eyes upon a lost civlization now ratted with creeping tourists and i forged my own path down through the jungle my own way in thought and thought about neruda and solitude and the coming events of our world i sit here in an airport lounge and think of these things these things but a tiny piece of all that s happened every day over the last few months and i look at where i m going i can t seem to make sense of all the connections joe rarely sought to publish his writing and often deleted or destroyed his work echoing franz kafka and ludwig wittgenstein in his approach to his own oevre this stemmed from a creativity that always demanded a clearing of the ground that wasn t to be encumbered by any body of work he was never satisfied with what he had done in the past and practiced creative destruction in order that the ground should be cleared for unencumbered creativity in an e mail from laos he wrote i decided that the most important thing for me to do was strip away the layers in life and get back to the real core of my existence tear away the superfluous thought and rediscover some ontologically pure core and be satisfied with it use it as a platform for thought like jean paul sartre he sold or gave away books sometimes to people he met at the bus stop or in a café and with whom he had enjoyed a conversation related to this was a search for roots but not roots in the conventional or romantic sense instead it was a search for roots in the sense that martin heidegger professed when he sought the ontological rather than the ontic the source of the world s creativity and of the givenness of the world rather than what is given or accumulated in the world this source is not to be confused with what is given in the world but with the giving of the world as such hence the creative destruction that subjected even joseph s own work to critique and deletion this rigor and purity animated him in a creative practice that is extremely rare he perpetually moved on in his thought and experience in ideas and places so as to be equal to the creation of the world to be attuned to creativity on its own terms posted by edward willatt at 4 44 pm 0 comments tuesday july 14 2009 meillassoux kant and absolute contingency i would like to put forward a subject for debate on this site this is something that arises out of the speculative realism movement and that challenges transcendental philosophy in chapter 4 of quentin meillassoux s after finitude we find a critique of arguments from probability the basis for this is the rejection of the notion that we can totalise reality and then argue on the basis of probability or chance this opens the way for making contingency absolute because we don t have to secure either a metaphysical absolute such as god or transcendental conditions such as kant s table of categories to make experience possible we do not have to shore up experience in the face of the balance of probability the probability that conditions of experience that are contingent will not arise or will not endure if they do arise it is only if we totalise reality that we can consider the probability that there will be constant change if conditions of experience are contingent for meillassoux as for alain badiou the contingent event is absolute in its freedom from arguments from probability without totalisation there is nothing to rule out events that are contingent but secure reality in singular and enduring ways this leads to the question of the number and frequency of events or absolute contingencies is there one world event that must improbably provide conditions for a reality where human life can be pursued and consciousness is possible in fact there are multiple events for both meillassoux and badiou something that would seem even less probable if probability was applicable to this reality it is a contingent fact that multiple events extend conscious life rather than ending it yet the absoluteness of contingency means that its events are not undermined by probability it can therefore provide the basis for an enduring reality transcendental arguments seem to be doomed in this universe insofar as they seek to establish certain conditions of possibility for experience if we cannot totalise we cannot argue from the improbability of conditions of experience arising by chance their contingency is now the basis for their role as conditions for their enduring and explanatory role in experience meillassoux argues that for kant contingency is ruled out because if it held it would show itself it would be obvious because it would make reality unstable and undermine possible experience as such p 94 5 meillassoux seeks to reverse kant s identification of experience or sensation with contingency and the a priori with necessity p 95 he argues in favour of making the a priori structures of reality which happen to support conscious life at present contingent on the basis that probability or chance is no longer the measure of these structures contingency is now able to support the conditions that it provides it is now experience or sensation that provides us with necessities because it leads us to maintain certain habits of thought it actualises contingencies in determinate and stable ways this leads into meillassoux s reading of hume an alternative reading of kant s method of arguing can i believe be found in his metaphysical deduction in the critique of pure reason here we do not find kant arguing in the way meillassoux suggests in chapter four of after finitude there is a sense in which kant embraces an event in this short and under appreciated section of the first critique this argument can be understood as a response to the absolute contingency of a set of conditions presented in a table of categories the architectonic of the critique of pure reason can be understood as a wager as a form of fidelity to this event it is intended as a self supporting argument one that embraces an event that then unfolds in the text the proceeds it indeed those who argue that the metaphysical deduction must be supported by other parts of the text where the real argument allegedly goes on neglect this wager they seek to replace or supplement the metaphysical deduction with the first and second edition transcendental deductions and analytic of principles that follow it in the transcendental analytic they are extremely puzzled by kant s fidelity to the table of categories can we relate kant s framework for accounting for experience to meillassoux s understanding of a non totalisable reality was kant s metaphysical deduction a reaction or an active response to the chaos in which he saw the sceptic wandering the sceptic is portrayed as nomadic by kant does it respond to an unfathomable chaos in the way that meillassoux s concern with contingent events responds to the absoluteness of contingency the metaphysical deduction puzzles many readers of kant because it seems to have no reasoning behind it to be trivial artificial and underdeveloped could the metaphysical deduction be a creative response to contingency and not a retreat in the face of chance we do not have to absolutise the twelve categories of kant s table to take this deduction seriously but we can absolutise the event that the metaphysical deduction represents as an argument it would then embrace a series of events which are contingent but structure experience if we make a wager on them the a priori would be a wager on an event rather than warding of chaos these events would be its realisation the capture or realisation of chaos would be represented in the structuring of the account of experience given in the critique of pure reason these are merely some thoughts i wanted to put forward i think that the challenge represented by speculative realism is both formidable and stimulating it seems to bring out much neglected sides of transcendental philosophy the originality and force of speculative realism calls for a renewed and invigorated transcendental philosophy posted by edward willatt at 10 40 am 2 comments monday march 13 2006 sartre badiou and bad faith sartre badiou and bad faith some preliminary remarks 1 well the lack of activity on the site has prompted me to put some of my latest musings up on badiou yet again one day i ll write on something other than badiou but at least this time sartre is the centre of attention these remarks are not yet fully formed and after spending some time reading the critique of dialectical reason it is my first attempt to understand how the concept of bad faith has developed despite sartre s later book screaming out for an editor there is a considerable amount of interesting stuff in the sections on series and group formation my initial idea was to see how sartre s discussions had influenced badiou s and to situate sartre as a somewhat banal predecessor to badiou but i have come to see that sartre s theory has some considerable advantages over badiou especially for a political cynic like myself i find the pessimism somewhat refreshing after reading so much of badiou s enthusiasm for and belief in the possiblity of political action reveloution complexity and development of bad faith 2 badiou s philosophy of the event shares a great number of similarities to sartre s later work on group action found in the critique of dialectical reason in this later work the concept of bad faith does not appear and this is not without good reason the problem of bad faith is not a concept that is exhausted in being and nothingness it is an idea that is still raised as a problem on the final page of the book problematizeing the very possibility that a free for itself could ever live outside of bad faith in a totally authentic existence 1 the simple opposition of terms like good and bad faith or authentic and inauthentic existence become far too limited for sartre who needs a more carefully graded system to bring out the variety of forms of bad faith and their various transformations 3 these ideas are developed in the critique of dialectical reason a book which examines in great depth the relation between free individuals and their situation the idea of the situation is initially introduced in being and nothingness here the situation is introduced as how an individual apprehends the world in terms of his freedom this situation has an interior and an exterior the interior being the those in itself aspects of the world that the for itself can manipulate and change the exterior being the limit of the situation as delimited by other free for themselves 2 this exteriority is encountered within a situation every time the for itself finds a meaning in the world that it did not create generally speaking our entire social environment these aspects point beyond the situation to some other for itself who produced these meanings the exterior or limit is never directly encountered within the situation the discovery of exteriority leads to the recognition that our actions the meaning we give to the situation in our manipulation of it has an exterior for the other hence the meaning we give to something can be appropriated by the other and hence alienated this section of being and nothingness concludes with a discussion of death as a totalized way of considering the limit of our situation and hence that all our actions will become immediately alienated it is absurd that we are born it is absurd that we die on the other hand this absurdity is presented as the permanent alienation of my being possibility which is no longer my possibility but that of the other it is therefore an external and factual limit of my subjectivity 3 4 death as the total limit of the situation as constituted by the other and as the permanent alienation of all my actions seems a terribly pessimistic conclusion to being and nothingness is this the new type of inescapable bad faith that sartre worries about on the concluding page it is clear that this alienation occurs because of the relations that the free for themselves have with each other that is permanently mediated by the situation there is no reciprocity between the free individuals only via activity in the world in which their free action is alienated and becomes an in itself for the other sartre s aim therefore is to describe a form of relation between individuals that is not mediated via their alienated action in a situation a true reciprocity between free individuals 5 here we can see the problem of bad faith problematized by alienation although a free individual might not think of himself as determined by in itself qualities as an isolated individual acting in the situation the perpetual alienation that he suffers through his actions is a permanent becoming in itself the freedom experienced by the free isolated individual is a perpetual fight against this becoming rather than a positive becoming this positive notion can only be realised in group action 6 the point of the critique of dialectical reason is to develop these ideas key concepts that are developed are of the two types of dialectic or dialectic and antic dialectic which sartre uses to differentiate between individual and group action and these are called the constituent dialectic and the constituted dialectic the transcendent freedom of the individual is the motor of the dialectic t...