Perhaps this will be my last post here? A simple reiteration of negative Platonism, situating its significance in the context of awakening from the wrong expectations performed so thoroughly and unconsciously in the second Critique.

To put it once again with maximal simplicity: The diagonal is what relates, without religious/imaginary synthesis, our mathematical/cognitive and ethical/existential lives.

We already live in both places: in consistency through calculation and consciousness, in completeness through care and the unconscious. What we suffer from, as both theoretical inadequacy and ethical alienation, is an inability to relate these in a way that makes sense and is good.

Thus it has suddenly become possible, after long stagnation, to say something rigorous and suggestive, something that opens logoi both mathematically lucid and existentially thick (again without synthesis: it's a matter of bridges and transitions, not of sovereign unities or systems) about the fundamental Socratic question: which knowledge, which part, of knowledge, would do us any good?

At stake here is exactly what gets talked about, prephilosophically, as "the meaning of life". It is good philosophical practice to avoid this question until one has something real to say about it, and instead, to work the problem from either side. But it is not good practice, once the relation has become clear, to remain squeamish about naming it: Idea of the Good, Diagonalization.

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I plan to delete this journal within a week. If this is our only line of communication, and you'd like to stay in touch, please let me know. J.

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murakami-grade multi-channel trap so tight. well after waking, i still couldn't believe it wasn't real without getting up, walking around, checking my email. (so here i am.) the feeling like: i also can't lift 80lb. weights lying in bed; rationally unraveling a too-densely-woven fabric fails, requires replacing it wholesale with another world? (=? the lacanian unconscious.) not sure that the term 'hallucinatory' captures what i mean unless accompanied by liberal quantities of dennettian exegesis... skip it. a disjunction of judgment and belief comparable in my (remembered) past only to experience with psilocybin.

to the extent that they can be dissociated, the disjunction more terrifying than narrative content including, inter alia: full text of an excoriating email from christina, a correspondent who begins contacting me on gmail with increasingly insistent self-help coursework (some of which is so convincing, no - capturing (python-style) that i try shouting out its key terms in a social-bureaucratic setting to cut through the red tape (and again as an open display of fear), a 2am appearance (drunk) by a plagiarizing duo, a cell phone that only dials numbers within 'the hospital' (a non-orientable-space sort of hospital into which my mother vanishes - topos of the whole mess).

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to rule oneself (as far as possible and not further) -> to reflect -> equivalence of reflection and the infinite -> to move at infinite speeds relative to tracking procedures and knowledge -> to escape control -> to be free

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...And then I thought, It’s a shame she won’t live—but then again, who does? With that I returned to work in a completely changed way that was not like resignation. An explosion in advance had neutralized success. Yes. That. But in a way that opened up the work. Does the imagined success, then, impede the line of flight that work is? Kant would have been one-hundred-percent wrong in the second Critique, and Sartrean despair would again command our attention, if what work “presupposes”—needs—above all is that final success be unimaginable, if the works of love are founded on nothingness and not on being.

I do think that’s my favorite line in film. The only line I know that belongs so thoroughly to film, since it needs the eye of the camera so desperately to assist in showing what shows itself in that line, but equally the only line that calls the eye of the camera so finally into question. In the succeeding moment of silence, the nod, the walk to the elevator (which amount to a couple of seconds on film) Deckard discovers his own impending death, chooses love, risk, flight, concealment and strenuous effort over the linked metaphysical privileges of knowing and killing, and passes, at the moment of renunciation, into his ownmost, where the eye can’t follow him. The elevator closes, the eye shuts, and we are all thrown upon our lives, characters and spectators alike.

The limit of reflection.

Or for us, the limit of observation. Isn’t it strange - and good - that that, at the utmost, in the ownmost, the difference between him and us is less significant than the cut in time that separates the ordinary regime of observation from this hyper-compressed, incompressible life? Someone who has this experience is not thereby set apart from the mass of others, not even from those others who are observers. To the contrary, there is, to an important degree, the same experience for the subject at the limit of reflection, and for the spectator at the limit of observation. It bleeds over, generously, at the same time that it enfolds each in herself. Silent communication or community of silence, it's contagious. Like the real katharsis of Greek tragic drama. (Never quite the one Aristotle puts to work redrawing the lines.)

Aristotle's failures are always topological. If we're getting closer then we're not getting farther, if we're identifying more, we couldn't be getting more individuated - thus speaks Aristotle's common sense, which is just an impoverished theory of logical space - or at best the sound theory of an impoverished logical space. How much does it matter whether Aristotle is the apt cartographer of a wasteland or the impoverished viewer of the world?

The integrity of the film rests on its ending immediately at that moment. Is there any other film that ends in exactly the right place? At the instant where the limit shows itself and ends showing?

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"What's he a judge of?" (135) Of what is Holden the judge as the blacksmith is of the forging of the shuttle, and the weaver of its use, if this apparent analogy were not already enough of a palimpsest. This very Platonic riddle. Repeated twice interrogatively, once in the declarative, as if the right to ask that question in the face of a sort of technological omnipotence needed to be separately asserted, or perhaps just as the most parsimonious way of negating all answers in advance. Either way, the only punctuation to the expriest's long, formally comic, yarn that both admits and stages the judge's mastery over all of nature qua nature. So if it is to be answered by a reader, as I suggest, along the lines of "everything but the Good", then it is of interest to us not because of what it tells us about Holden, but foremost for what it performs and reminds of the relation of the Good to the All. And that is? Its diagonality, or how the Good exceeds the closure of the All.

[Comment from AT:] "Would my lack of affect in response to such a book suggest that the representation of life without the good would stir no empathy? My first inclination was to suggest that horror films could be of this same sort, but it is precisely because we take the characters to have a sense of the good that we find these films horrifying."

affect. i don't know... we know that poverty of affect is part of the structure of this wasteland that is being shown. i think one wants to avoid the following risk: of letting the affect-provoking powers of the novel put the cart before the horse, ethically speaking - allowing us imaginative access to the effects of a contact with the ethical before working our way into the cause?

so what if it were more that becoming conscious of the lack of affect makes it possible to notice that one is not uninvolved in the very thing one is being shown, thereby that it is a problem, even/especially for a reader, not just a problem that a reader contemplates?

again, if affect is exclusively a foreground phenomenon, then i think rightly it's not what cmc is after. is a growing *thirst* for something essential that finally makes it past certain filters to become conscious - an affect? the sufferer of that thirst doesn't, i think, class it as one. what s/he sees, to the contrary, is the place - the desert.

and isn't the danger of a premature appropriation, commodification, of affect by art well-marked, unintentionally, by aristotle - a false participation that serves the ends of a false purification? the symptoms of trauma, of the trauma of existence and of the existence of the other, in the levinasian mode, cannot purge themselves so predictably in affect: unnamed thirst, boredom, flatlined despair, exteriority so total that it seems continuous with the being part-outside-part of space and time. whenever i grasp something of what the banality of unredeemed violence in this text points to, i feel ashamed for all the times i've been sucked in by a violence justified by narrative, yes, but also perhaps by affect?

and if the other alternative that i have to admit seeing obtains, that all of that is my being taken in by mccarthy who in fact has just written a purely postmodern novel - one whose moral temperature approaches absolute zero - then i'm the sucker.

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(if i don't write here what is not yet worked up for general comprehension, this notebook loses its purpose for me. i can only hope to have readers who expect just such a state of things. or it may be that the purpose of this journal has expired.)

1. phenomenology of truth

the true itself appears in the following forms: first as positive reflection or the desire for closure, at the risk of ontotheology, if the dialectic stops here. second as the contradiction in the first, or negative reflection, at the risk of constructivism unless an interpretive mutation accompanies this reversal of values. (the problem of nihilism found here.) third, as the void source of singularities, truths. the first sets the meaning of truth, which is negated in the second, which negation is the source of truths.

the ethical point is that transcendence is not founded in a transcendent source, but in the lack of one: the possibility of a meaningful life is not found in a meaning of life, but in the lack of one. the negative source here is not to be confused with negative theology. its voidness is not a metaphor for omnipotence, but is literally "nothing", and is by no means itself the Good, or even reliably good at all. the Good is not the void but diagonalization, that is, the metafunction that crosses the void with the true, and existence with the idea (i.e. a function).

this is not something anyone believes (feels...can orient him/herself to) without working it through mathematically. why turn here? because there is always a logic at work in one's thinking, but only when one gets to a point of questioning this fundamental is that logic equivalent to mathematics per se, rather than to FOL (doxa). but if one doesn't see this, the mathematical turn sounds like a change of subject.

2. function and metafunction, diagonalization as the anodos & kathodos of the idea

a superb question, which is much easier to answer than it is to arrive in the position to ask it: what are the functions of a function? (call these metafunctions if one likes, and if one is able to hear the prefix as indicating a change of register from first-order picture thinking to theory itself, rather than as an index of levels within representation.)

reply: dual. first, to differentiate itself from its terms, second, to differentiate itself from the differentiation. only the duality accomplishes conversion, which otherwise stops at a point of reification: the idea as another being, religion.

we see this just as clearly in the philosophy of mind, or with functionalisms generally, as in philosophy proper.

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i'm planning to move this notebook to a site with better accessibility to the rest of the philosophical and mathematical blogosphere. feedback is invited on the plan, and suggestions for relocation sites will be gratefully received.

-john

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"To affirm the duality supposes that we speak consistently. We can only think from the side of consistency to the side of (in)completeness."*

"Can we do anything in the other direction?'

"Perhaps care?"

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*(Or else the duality itself is covered up. From the side of completeness-inconsistency, there is no more reason to think the duality than to deny it and instead affirm a synthesis of the one-all. (Is this what happens to Deleuze? Does he want to be the Other?)... The only way to be rigorous about this is to insist that the completeness in question is a completeness without sense, thus a restricted completeness, and not complete at all... But just as certainly as there is no way to adopt this position, there is no possible reason to do so... The paradox of the Good with respect to maximality: the maximum is not the maximum - or - the Good is better than the Perfect.)

1. Gödel from a Platonic point of view. I mean to read Incompleteness from the point of view of the thesis (Timaeus and elsewhere, oft flattened into "like knows like", then empiricized into the vicious circles of Aristotlean perception) that knowing, requiring shared logical form, takes place within eidetic and choric metalogical folds. Diagonalization makes precise the degree to which (in partial agreement with the skeptical paradox) "knowledge of ignorance" is problematic, as it cannot just be some representation "of ignorance" but a participation in it, though without collapsing into simple ignorance (which from the Socratic metalogical/dialectical standpoint is read as "ignorance of ignorance"), and without collapsing into a mere potentiality read as a potentiality merely for future first-order knowledge. (Which is why the "perhaps it's really about ease/facility/motivation of learning" suggestion is never endorsed by Socrates - it's close to that, but not that. The metalogical is operative in learning, but the encounter with the Idea and the Good requires that what is operative in-itself in learning be grasped for-itself.) I want to defend the Socratic-Platonic constant that links this particular difficulty, even this failure of first-order knowledge, to both Truth and the Good.

2. From regulative Idea to negative Idea. The regulative Idea, as Kant speaks of it, seems to be a maybe, a may-be; its being can be hoped for, and philosophy's self-criticism is finally only a means to the end of exempting this from philosophical criticism. The "undecidable" form of the antinomies hides this fundamental decision for a deferred metaphysical imaginary. The negative Idea, as I propose it, building on Badiou, begins with a rigorous demonstration that the totalities in question are not antinomian but strictly contradictory. It is not a may-be but an is-not that we have in the Idea, not a "may-exist" but an "inconsists". But what must be fundamentally and resolutely negative "in general", at the level of FOL, nevertheless has productive metalogical consequences. That is to say, there is a whole class of phenomena, recognizable, and whose bad handling is recognizable as comprising the logical core of some of our more intractable philosophical and political problems, that are elucidated by the acquisition of a higher, metalogical, syntax. Rather than providing general rules, correlating with the categories of "world" and "use", etc. these phenomena show themselves as boundary problems, exceptions, folds, events, and, when obscurely seen, as paradoxes. If I think that my work has any relevance it is because I think that as the relevance of these phenomena continues to increase as a function of technological acceleration (the material engine of the noted phenomenon of the "normalization of the exception") our political future depends on becoming able to speak, in a clear way, about these phenomena. Only in this way can the essence of democracy be secured: if we have concepts that are faster, computationally speaking, than the changes that beset us, and which therefore can be used to talk, together, about what we otherwise unconsciously merely undergo.

3. Platonist and Aristotelian. At different times, both will invest in the familiar metonymy evil~sickness~nonbeing. But the homogenization of this thesis into a single "metaphysical" tradition misses the essential difference in its use in the two settings. For the Aristotelian, the biologist, nonbeing is lack, privation; it is imagined fundamentally in terms of an occurrent injury or deformity in an animal which, at least in the paradigmatic case of a healthy member of the species, is a cohesion or cooperation of matter and form. For the Platonist, nonbeing is folded essentially into being - though in a twofold way at the level of existence and of idea. As the different/other/choric, nonbeing is of the fabric of existence, whose internal relation to the Idea is given as simple coherence-toward-entelechy not for philosophy but only at the level of appearance/doxa, which homogenizes incommensurables. Ontologically, it is a matter of conjunction-disjunction, the two are always coming apart just as much as they are coming together. Likewise, both &Pi and A can identify the True with the Good, yet while, for the Aristotelian, the True is the consummation and totality of knowledge and the Good coheres with Being, for the Platonist the True opens up the hole in knowledge and Being that shows the Good its work, and so is finally as dependent on the function of non-Being as evil is (though without them becoming confused, in the impotence-producing style of deconstruction?) What is true, for the Platonist, is that it's just as right to say that Being is sick as it is to say that sickness itself refers us to non-Being. Equivalently, there is not, ontologically, an organism. What is for-itself can never be stabilized with respect to its being, even (especially) in principle; the healthy organism is not a regulative idea. (Sartre as obscure Platonist, confused by the Aristotelian account of the role of essence in relation to existence, i.e. as stabilization and telos.) (Note: Admittedly, one has to do some work to square the apparent eideticization of the perfect animal in the demiourgos-story with this disjunction...it's complicated by the fact that we're speaking on the plane of myth; once we reify the Good as the demiourgos, we perhaps have to reify the model as well...??) We do not advance the care of beings by ontologizing the goals of care, by writing them into Being. The animal is not an ontological given. Even at the level of the cohesion of the physical universe as the most stable animal (which again admits, in Timaeus, presents Aristotelian overtones) the animal is only the result (better: a node) of care's art of weaving. (The mytheme of the demiourgos, ridiculous if taken literally, is introduced, it seems, to preserve this difference even in the case (the universe, the world as a whole) where it seems most likely to disappear, but a mytheme, as we see, will not take care of the problem finally; religion can only be a reminder to philosophize...)

4. Our politics and Nature. Today's Talk of the Nation exemplifies the cognitive and moral debt-trap that our reflexive Aristotelianism involves us in. In order to deal compassionately with children who murder, we have to argue, as with the mentally disabled, for specific deficits, relative to that paragon of presumed competency, the responsible adult. These efforts of researchers/activists are well-meaning, but opening a space of compassion over here, in this philosophical-political environment, means closing the trap tighter over there. Mercy for these is correlative with demonizing those, and the conservatives rightly complain that this process of discovering deficits can go on forever with a disturbing arbitrariness. What is needed, of course, and "Socratic intellectualism" calls us explicitly to this, is not finally the discovery and special recognition of more and more exemptions, but a rethinking of the rule. In this respect, nothing draws better the disjunctive moral consequences of Plato's and Aristotle's thought than their contradictory evaluation of akrasia. The Platonist - it seems ironic at first - is a better doctor than the Aristotelian, who wanted to be a doctor right away and absolutely - to be a doctor (and not a mathematician). She is the better doctor because s/he begins by acknowledging that illness is not occurrent but structural. (Perhaps one way of reading the holism of the cure in Charmides is this: there are no finally specific deficits, so no finally iterable/effective potions, no algorithms for cures that one can carry away in pill or written form; illness is as global and complex as health; the talking cure is not a writing cure, a blogging cure, a mass-media cure....) The Aristotelian localization of lack, grounded FO-"logically" in the thesis of Metaphysics iota, which puts a cap (@ contrariety-steresis) on the power of difference, finally normalizes disability and marginalizes it in one stroke. It becomes possible to say what is wrong, to limit liability, to organize damages. Pain and blame are finite, traceable, occurrent for the Aristotelian, infinite, traumatic, and subject to an endless hermeneutic that is the work of Goodness itself for the Platonist - a work that mobilizes all of one's reflexive capacities for self-consciousness, humility, and responsibility, as well as the entire intellect; the doctor-technician must become philosopher, rather than the other way round, at the price of engineering only a life that fails globally to be worth living. Mercy is supererogatory for the Aristotelian, given this finite economy of responsibility, while for the Platonist, interpretive generosity (even if it looks to smaller minds like simple irony) is an attitude correlative with ontological insight: the sickness had, properly speaking, no beginning, it is not an isolate to be cut out, a local hole to be filled, it is coextensive with existence, and it is in the doctor as much as in the patient. In beings, the only meaning and glory of Being, Being is sick. Sick essentially and forever. Yet also in ways on which fundamental progress, empirically and at the level of an attitude, is possible, even infinite (and therefore revolutionary) progress, relative to slower algorithms of justice. This is the work of the infinite, which metalogically clarified as the work of the Void, can reconcile a purified Plato with a purified Levinas...

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1. for andy: if the minimal criterion of existence for a concept is consistency, that is, if any and all concepts that consist exist, then what we learn most essentially from the mutual exclusion of consistency and completeness in diagonalization is that a total concept, or idea in the hegelian sense, is a contradiction. then there are three positions: the 'modern' or irreflexive position (whose logic is positive and constructive), the hegelian or ontotheological position (whose logic is positive and reflexive), and the (true?) position of a negative platonism, whose logic is reflexive and negative. in the third position, the importance of the idea is maintained, but its function shifts from immanent totalization to detotalizing transcendence. the one continually withdraws from the transcendental illusion of a one-all or ontologization of the world, breaking it up in the event of truth. of course, hegel thematizes this function of the negative more clearly than any of his predecessors, up to a point. but can he imagine that there could be a rigorous thought of a negative dialectic, not as a retreat from logic to the poetics of the fragment, but as the philosophical interpretation of mathematics itself?

2. for my class: it's tempting to interpret machine functionalism and eliminative materialism as competing theories about the same phenomenon, but perhaps it's more perspicuous to say that the one is about the structure of systems of knowledge in themselves, and the other about brains in themselves, and that the point is the elimination on the level of ontology of a third thing in itself, call it mind, that would supposedly found and mediate the two.

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you might say it like this: the greek for translation is phronesis. and vice versa. of course. (slaps forehead.)

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The Turing/Derrida idea in brief: It may be that, as Plato observes, at the moment thought passes into writing a certain stupidity emerges through the inevitability of mindless repetition; nevertheless, we’re in a double bind here, because nothing is known without being written either, the metaphysical picture of thought and voice being critically understood as a fanciful dematerialization of writing. And is it true that what is not written anywhere (including in brains, in institutions, etc, thus the need for a general grammatology) is not pure but void, not superlatively known but entirely unknown? There's something in this, but as stated, does the thesis ignoree relational, reflexive and dispositional properties of signs?

It’s tempting to firm this up into a form of knowledge. To stage an experiment of the form “Suppose that only 100 characters can be written; what can be known?” That’s a mistake... Would it continue to be one if we asked only what can’t be known? Yes, I think it would...

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In an excellent article on the subject in the (MIT) Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks, J. I. Nelson asks, "When there are two similar objects in the field, to which representation [here understood materially - a representation is a subset of the cortex] does a feature detector's response belong?" Without at all denying the genuine conceptual interest of the 40-Hz binding mechanism (about which I wax poetic elsewhere) perhaps the full-force binding problem requires equal parts materialist (neurocomputational) solution and philosophical dissolution. Question: To what extent does this presumed individuation and self-identity of representations still take part in the myth of the (structured) given? One of the great things about Platonic philosophy is that it gives us not an alternative reconstruction of everyday experience (for this reduplicative and unnecessary task, there's no surpassing Aristotle), but instead opens up possibilities for radically transforming everyday experience by the elimination of its tacit metaphysics.

Subjects' unexamined belief that representations are ubiquitous does not lend much weight, in itself, against the thesis that they are perhaps rare. Perhaps genuine occurrences of unity are always exceptional (one way in which Plato's One is intimately related to what is most fleeting; don't forget that its modern name is Zero, the sense of the One having shifted to that of the One-All or law-governed Whole). Perhaps, indeed, it's only at peak cognitive and emotional points (think of Badiou's truth-procedures) that there is anything like real top-down organization in higher levels of processing, and perhaps an unexplored part of the background anxiety of everyday experience (unexplored except for the massive corpus of Buddhist psychology, that is) comes from projecting/sedimenting these exceptions into global norms. Of course, the latter is an interpretation just as much as the former, but it has the merit of acknowledging itself as such, of opening up lines of investigation and transformation, doing better explanatory work, and opening itself to criticism...

Surely the authority of unreflective accounts of the unity of objects are no more sacrosanct than unreflective accounts of the automatic unity and continuity of temporal flow, right? And it's now becoming acknowledged there that experienced meditators 1) reporting no longer having that experience, and 2) report insight capable of discriminating transformation from demystification here, i.e., that the latter reports are not simply a dramatic transformation of their experience, but the result of getting closer to the experiences themselves, of stripping back the actual metaphysical interpretations and projections from the given, seeing them for what they are, and seeing the act of their constitution of the "world".

Questions:

Does the representational paradigm fail to acknowledge that the institution/sedimentation of the given world is a real process, involving real transformation and decline from presence? In a way, does the jargon of information lend itself to this misunderstanding, by propagating the meme according to which intentionality is analogized to a commodity with infinite shelf-life, stored and retrieved at will?...

What should we make of the strong link, in meditation, just as in Plato, between taking on the challenge of the One itself and being able to let go of the fantasy-ones of the given world (e.g. between one-pointed attention and emptiness)... Just as, for example, someone doing philosophy intensely is freed (better: reflexively loosened) from the necessity (the reflex) to unconsciously project philosophy's stakes into situations... In Madhyamaka as in Plato, the concept that makes sense of the coordinating structure here is explicitly self-referential and explicitly negative: the emptiness of emptiness...

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perhaps two years old? filed away under ars memoria. i was looking for something quite different today, food for an anger, an argument, that there are irrevocable acknowledgments. the document is labeled simply "most beautiful dream".

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After staying up round the clock to systematize my Sartre notes—an effort that could only have been considered successful according to risible bureaucratic criteria—I slept for the better part of a day. Waking and dozing repeatedly that morning (three days ago), I then had what seemed to me to be the most beautiful dream I remember, though I’m aware that I can’t adequately explain why.

“We” were prisoners.

Alps in spring or summer
We’re ?
Walking back toward the castle or manor or whatever
And another of the prisoners escapes by following someone out on horseback
This guy grabs a horse and follows out before the doors close
Gallops away very quickly, in a beautiful sort of arc, my impression being that like he’s kind of at an angle and the horse even is running at an angle to the ground; it’s a tight turn
And the strange thing is that I know exactly what to do
I knew that it wasn’t my time to escape, and I knew exactly what to do
Am able to communicate that instantly to the others
And that is just that the prisoners who are walking back toward the castle all have to join hands and walk all the way across the road, and we start singing as we’re walking and they can’t chase after him and he escapes, and that’s it.

I don’t know why.
Something about the absence of jealousy—why is he escaping and not me, can I use this chance, the pure enjoyment of the arc like a bird in flight—leading to the bliss of knowing exactly what was needed, and the act happening like a ripe fruit falling, the needed act.

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I rather think Zen's celebration of spontaneity is only legible as a deliberate negation, i.e. against the background of the primary meaning, not only etymological but functional, of the term. Praise of spontaneity only to an audience presumed to have spent untold hours in silent reflection; a deliberate slap in the face to an audience presumed to have reached a sophisticated level of self-deconstruction.

In short, Zen spontaneity, Zen naturalness, as a negation of a negation irreducible to any global affirmation of nature, instead as as an exceptional supplement to a highly articulated and demanding reflective practice (vipashyana), even better as the negation of the apparent goal of the practice, disjoining the dunamis of the practice from its apparent rationale in its realization (a successful reflection).

To mk: While this seems to make good sense of the anti-teleological practice-realization thesis in Dogen, it comes at the cost, if it is a cost, of a highly anti-naturalistic Zen, one whose convergence with Daoism might be more apparent than real. I wonder what you'd make of the difference...

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(as i noted above, everything here is intended as a very small contribution to what's perhaps the guiding problem of zen thought, the paradox of practice-realization that launched dogen across the sea in search of a rigorous solution.)

my goal, to the extent that i have one in this searching note, is not a critique of spontaneity; it's a critique of the interpretation, implicit or explicit, of spontaneity as naturalness, as a mode of being, or a form of life. i suggest insisting on spontaneity as an intrinsically evental, local rejoinder to the genuinely modal practice, even a point of paradox / impasse / collapse in it. it would follow that spontaneity in the relevant sense is necessarily relative to the practice. (if we became convinced that this was false, that would be a reason for rejecting my hypotheses.)

if one plays up the side of anatman, as you suggest, then we could likely be brought to at least formulaic agreement quickly: relatively existent self practices and no-self realizes. but i still think there's a common temptation that has to be dealt with explicitly (or maybe it was just a temptation i had before starting to think this through) to imagine no-self as a subtle mode of the ego. traces of this interpretation would show up in a number of interrelated (though not strictly equivalent) figures:

--normalizations of spontaneity, as a 'point' reached, or a form of life that would be inhabitable -- as opposed to being a rhetorical figure presented as an impasse to the only form of life that zen recommends, that of practice

--the supposed actualization of a stage of cognition beyond reflection, as the telos of meditative practice, or as projected into the image of the 'realized' practitioner

--the persistent temptation to imagine nirvana as having the basic structure of a world, whether as a mode of being in the world, or even (a temptation brought to completion in pure land) as another world, rather than (to borrow a phrase from my platonic exegesis in full consciousness of the risks of such a translation) other-than-world.

i'm leaving aside (for the time-being) the difficult question of 'the present moment'.

i find your suggestion to attend to the institutional setting of the instructions helpful, though i'm not sure i see the difference working out in the same way as you... considering the addressee of the injunction to spontaneity, i suspect that the importance of the pragmatics here is not to be found either in the addressee's isolation from the web of consequences (which could only be apparent?) or in a factually accomplished benevolence (which would make a prerequisite of the aim, risking vicious regress?) but in a way just the reverse of these... isn't the crucial thing about the audience here to be found in the the productive contradiction between these instructions about spontaneity and the monastic form of life that they at once complete and instantaneously suspend? isn't the crucial thing that the one for whom these instructions are meant is not decoupled from the web of consequences, but subject, through the experiment of reflective practice, to a far greater intensification of it than the layperson experiences in the endless deferrals and changes of subject in daily life, for the sake of becoming aware of its operation in this lifetime? (i find the persistence of tropes of infinite speed in madhyamaka fascinating in this light, especially read in counterpoint with deleuze - the goal in one sense being the attainment of a mind whose velocity is adequate to thematize the shifting sands of samsara). again, the important thing about the addressee of the rhetoric of spontaneity must be that s/he is presumed to be intensely engaged in a durative and instituted practice of precisely the opposite nature, a practice of continual reflective mindfulness. (it's as if a discourse on infinite speed were addressed precisely to the physicist who knows perfectly well why such a thing doesn't exist, and in whose practice this non-existence plays a structural role.) it's only this addressee who would be able to gain access to the relevant kind of spontaneity without normalizing it, i.e. without turning it into a pseudo-practice, an intention, or a state of mind. because the body-mind of the practitioner is full to capacity, so to speak, with the very opposite of this spontaneity, the instant can act upon that body-mind without being falsely assimilated, without the endless vacillations and accommodations that seek a mean between structure and event in ordinary consciousness. this taut, fully activated body-mind can receive a blow from the instant, from the instant as other, without either ignoring or assimilating it, letting it remain other than mind, other than world. and between the ego-reinforcement of internalization and the exteriority of oblivious indifference, might we not find a shattering?

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i wonder...

1) about the relation of the shattering of the ego to dimensional collapse; the instant when everything is on the surface, or rather everything is surface, all modes of being-in negated...

2) how far the analogy between dogen's problem and plato's (meno's paradox) can lead...whether this problem can even be regarded as the axis of greek-indian (as opposed to greek-christian) philosophizing.

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Platonic dualism is actually innocent of the charge of covering up "ontological difference" in Heidegger's sense of the difference between Being and beings. The semantics of the image that structure Plato's the relation between phenomenology and ontology in Plato actually completely rule out the possibility of this mistake. To regard the individual thing, however apparently natural, as an image is to institute a rigorous and suggestive kernel out of which to construct a philosophical language in which the difference between the image and what it is an image of is built in at the ground level, while at the same time going further, in implying an additional duality, which we might alternatively regard as another name for the first, but only on condition that we recognize that its genuinely ontological status undermines any simple global order of rank between a "world of ideas" and a "world of becoming". This second difference is that between an idea on the one hand, and the medium of thought per se. The Timaeus is productively reticent about deciding, in a propositional way, whether these are two differences or one difference regarded in two ways. That is to say, if an image is an image of X in Y, we have three terms, three functions, three senses, but the number of referents remains undetermined. Is chora a third term of an ontology that already includes the idea and the image, or is it another relation between the idea and the image, even an ontological inverse of the relation that takes place when an image is grasped as an image? Is such an inverse as metalogically demanded as I suspect it to be, so that the basic relationship would be between being-of and being-in, and the basic question that of the relation between the way that beings are in a thought and a thought is in the world?

It so happens that the terms Plato chooses for the ontological duality are "being" and "becoming". Apart from the fact that there are some good reasons for the choice, Plato can choose his terms however he likes. It is easy to suppose that it's somehow analytic that only what gets called being is ontologically irreducible for Plato. this is a matter for some exploration and experimentation. We must simply refuse to assume that what gets called being and thought through the ideas has such a priority, for Plato's thought as a whole, over becoming that it would permanently degrade or eliminate becoming. If this were true, note, there would be no such thing as Platonic dualism. Plato would be actually a monist, for whom the other-than-eidetic is an illusion. This cannot possibly be right. Resolute dualism is something other than a "binary opposition" of being and becoming, as followers of Derrida would have it, where the duality proffered in the two terms is then undermined by the order of rank instituted between them.

We have resources in the Platonic text with which to think the persistence of the non-eidetic with the greatest possible philosophical dignity, at the pinnacle of eidetic investigation, especially in the difficulties with ethics that Plato raises in the metalogical setting of the elenchus, and on which he then puts the seal of the paradoxical name "Idea of the Good" as if not to announce their suppression but to prevent the appearance of their solution by anything less than an account of the relation between a hyper-eidetic language taking off from mathematics, and the total but inconsistent, overheated language that indexes and performs ethical reality rather than representing it, between the One whose pure consistency governs mathematical cognition, and the All whose pure completeness undermines all our attempts to distance ourselves from our care by placing it on the other side of a representation.

The Good is typically received as a figure of sovereignty, that is, of the synthesis of the One and the All, of theory and ethics, though in a way inaccessible to discursive description. There is, no doubt, support for this view in the text, and we need not suppose that Plato, some sort of demigod, resolved this most crucial point before continuing to think and to write. The question of the Good, of the relation between the Good and Being, or between the One and the All, is not simply treated at some point, but I think orients all Plato's writing and thinking.

Nevertheless, we can take some steps, with the aid of Sartre and Badiou, in advancing a genuinely non-sovereign, non-ontotheological theory of the Good. This has been hampered by assumptions that rational thought is somehow complicit in ontotheology. This is perhaps true of rationality understood as categorical or first-order logic but it is false of rationality understood as metalogic (or meta/mathematics).

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Without number, there seems to be no hope of distinguishing sense and reference.

We implicitly acknowledge this in using the term "numerically distinct" to mean "distinct at the level of reference".

Plato and Frege would seem to have a similar estimation of the philosophical centrality of this distinction, though Plato goes farther.

The opening question of the Sophist exceeds quantitatively-qualitatively any problem raised in the Organon.

Plato understands that access to the referent, though a large part of what we mean by truth, cannot be defined into language in general (into doxa) by fiat. It remains rare: the Idea as other-than-world.

The question of the eidos: under what circumstances can a sense be its own referent? Agamben misreads this, somewhat, as the (related but not identical) question of the signifier. The mistake is symptomatic. For lack of an understanding of metalogic, contemporary philosophy, in its critique of the signified as/of ideology, has known of nowhere to turn but to the signifier.

In analytic philosophy, on the other hand, model theory obscures the problem of the referent. A reactionary, empiricist, reading of the consequences of diagonalization.

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1. Understanding the placebo effect as a hinge between the reflexive and the irreflexive leaves of medicine.

2. Effects on medicine of the Platonic disjunction of being and the good. (Illness, even psychological illness, is by no means a sign that one is not going about living the right way.) We need to acknowledge the tension between this side of the reading, and the apparent totalization of the cure in Charmides.

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The descriptive accuracy of Kaye's summary of the role of the model in first-order theory serves to bring to light how troubling the division of proof theory and model theory, central to the ideology of FOL (ergo the meta-ideology, we might say, of contemporary life) is seen to be, when a clear statement of it is viewed relative to philosophical norms.

Given a first-order language, there are usually a number of structures in which we can interpret sentences. For example, corresponding to the first-order language with 0, 1, <, +, x, - we have the algebraic structure of the reals as an ordered field. The same language can be interpreted in other structures, too, such as the ordered field of the rationals, or the ring of integers, or something completely different. So ... we can have many different structures interpreting the same sentences - possibly making them true, possibly false. The common features of all such structures are that they all contain a non-empty set of mathematical objects or numbers, called the domain of the structure, they contain elements of the domain interpreting the constant symbols, relations on the domain interpreting the relation symbols, and functions on the domain corresponding to the function symbols. ...more Given a first-order language, there are usually a number of structures in which we can interpret sentences. For example, corresponding to the first-order language with 0, 1, <, +, x, - we have the algebraic structure of the reals as an ordered field. The same language can be interpreted in other structures, too, such as the ordered field of the rationals, or the ring of integers, or something completely different. So ... we can have many different structures interpreting the same sentences - possibly making them true, possibly false. The common features of all such structures are that they all contain a non-empty set of mathematical objects or numbers, called the domain of the structure, they contain elements of the domain interpreting the constant symbols, relations on the domain interpreting the relation symbols, and functions on the domain corresponding to the function symbols.

We read here the enforcement of a twofold parallelism characteristic of ideology. First, we have the deceptive reduplication of language and model, which tends to cover up all problems pertaining to the difficulty of accessing the referent, and proceeds as if we had the opportunity, as in the correspondence theory of truth, to compare language with the world. It behaves, in other words, as if the theory-ladenness of perception were merely a psychological or political problem, where in fact every significant psychological and political problem is also a logical, indeed a metalogical problem. We will suppose, though that ascription to this first parallelism in its explicit form has been pretty thoroughly demolished by Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and by the linguistic turn generally in post-analytic and continental philosophy. What characterizes these critiques for the most part is that they remain merely negative. Succeeding in displacing the primacy of knowledge as first-order theory, they do not succeed in relating themselves to what is rigorously rational in non-knowledge. That is to say, while drawing the consequences of the various asymmetries between language and the world that have come to replace the illusion of adaequatio, and even having successfully identified correspondence itself as one of them (logical good health as one of the perversions, first-order theory as founded on the form of the sophist) they have not retained the thought of a truly intimate relation between logical levels (sense and reference, cross-type relations, reflexive relations, etc.) in dialectic. Hegel and Plato both take off by subtracting from doxa assurance of that trivial relation obtainable between language and the world through the fantasy of parallelism that model theory formalises, instead putting identity into question as a dynamic category through reflexivity (i.e., by replacing the easy Aristotelian relation of sentence and species with the problem of self-identity and autodifferentiation operating both "within" language and in the real) while always thinking in terms of an internal relation of form and content. At least in Plato's case, this relation functions as a norm rather than a presupposition, and a general chiastic reversibility (thought of X, X-thought) rather than identity. So while it might be true that the thought of the self-similar is similar to it, as we commonly imagine when hearing that "like knows like", by participation in its logical form, the thought of the different must be different from thought and from itself.

All this, however politically depressing if, as Adorno and Badiou maintain, the schema for correspondence makes possible the seduction of ideology, is comparatively harmless, compared with the second parallelism, that of types, that is enforced by means of the first.

What the type-scheme hides: any folds, crumples, or singularities in the so-called relation of the logical language to the model. If thought as the detour of a Riemannian surface, that projection which enables us to grasp the necessary function of ambiguity on the plane of immanence, then we have a beneficent detour, proper to formalization. But there is always the danger that first-order theory, rather than being a route to diagonalization (as we may project its function in the Platonic corpus) closes over on itself. This danger is made all the more likely of realization by a certain surface-tension in FOL, expressed by the completeness theorem, which makes the web of sense trivially incapable (that is, on its own terms) of being punctured by a point of reality. Which has the paradoxical effect of making this closure in turn dependent on relations of force to which thought has absolutely no access, as in Meno's paradox, which makes language dependent on a purely nonlinguistic presupposition, and finally in Schmitt.

And just as the identification of the conjunctive form of the One-All (consistency + completeness, attainable in FOL) with the disaster of ontotheology-pragmatism (whose identity is again particularly evident in Schmitt) might lead one to suspect, it is indeed these singularities, foreclosed by the figures of violence, that make possible the dunamis of thought.

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