"Absolute is coercion."
- Allen Ginsburg
If you want to read on, watch out and duck the skeptic's mudball.
May 25, 1996
On the neutrality of philosophy.
We were supposed to have Paul Benacerraf give the seminar a lecture on the neutrality of mathematics as a philosophical language, but somehow it never happened. Schutt said that we had moved beyond that, but I'm not sure we ever cleared the starting gate.I've been repeatedly told that I have an extremely skeptical bent, especially by certain people who love to propose wild utopian systems. Given this predisposition, you should probably take my reservations about the architectonic with a grain of salt. (or at least throw it over your shoulder for good luck.) Yet I often felt as if the seminar took for granted the validity of creating an architectonic, without a close examination of why we should do so, or whether the structuralist justification (propounded by Peirce and others) is valid.
Having read deconstructionist philosophy for the first time last semester in a course on modern European thought, I found it continually creeping in to my thoughts on the architectonic. Is knowledge as a whole more like Peirce's house--continually rebuilt from inside--or Barthes's infinite web of meaning? Both visions seem in a certain sense too extreme, omitting the subtle differentiations between spheres of learning.
Philosophy's ability to achieve an objective distance from the world it describes is a problematic endeavor. Ever since Plato's cave, there has been a persistent effort to turn philosophy into the only form of knowledge that can lead the student to absolute truth. Yet Panofsky's analysis of vision as historically conditioned suggest the inherent problematics of this approach. From a primordial chaos the mind's habits absorb impressions and direct the universe into an evolutionary course that gradually approaches a state of perfect order. This to me seems the essence of formalism, but its dream of perfect rationali zation is like the entropy of a perfect crystalline substance- as it approaches zero, the entropy theoretically goes to zero.
Yet it is impossible to go to zero, and more than that, we should question the rationale for wanting to approach a system of perfect order. I'm reminded of Yevgeny Zamyatin's chilling novel We, perhaps the first true science-fiction novel; written in the 20's, it was banned from Russia largely because of its portrait of an all-powerful totalitarian, benevolent state rang ominiously true in Stalin's USSR.
Each citizen has his or her own perfectly numbered and assigned place in the system, yet this order still breaks down with the chance rebellion of a man driven by ambiguous motives. He is eventually destroyed, but the perfect formalism of the system is marred and seen clearly as philosophically repugnant.
If you want to read on, watch out and duck the skeptic's mudball.
May 25, 1996