philosophy

resonance

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Resonance: when waves resonate, their amplitudes pile up on top of each other, as opposed to interference, which reduces their amplitudes.

A feedback loop creates a resonance that grows without bound.

The Desana Indians of Columbia describe the sky as a brain, its two hemispheres divided by the Milky Way. Their brains, they say, are in resonance with the sky. This integrates them into the world and gives them a sense of their role in the cosmos.

The qualitative aspects of pleasure have been difficult to formulate for psychoanalysis, which uses the "hydraulic" model of tension and release. Hans Loewald suggests that "resonance" between systems of psychic organization, (love, for example) forms of "hypercathexis," might help understand the pleasure in higher organization and unpleasure in less or lower organization -- of the exitation inherent in living substance. (this is similar to Kant's philosophical pleasures -- see critique of judgement )

Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers talk about the resonance between theological discourse and theoretical and experimental activity in the success of the clock metaphor of the universe. Gilles Deleuze proposes that "philosophy, art, and science come into relations of mutual resonance and exchange, but always for internal reasons." For Deleuze and Guattari, the interaction of actual and virtual is a resonance.

For Deleuze, "the central state is constituted ..by the organization of resonance among centers." (Thousand Plateaus, p.211) "a central computing eye scanning all of the radii."

Rupert Sheldrake believes that morphogenetic events resonate with each other, that it becomes progressively easier for a particular form to occur as its occurrences accumulate. He cites the formation of crystals as an example, in which occurrences of a new cristalline form seem to occur shortly after a first one is observed, in places with no direct relation to the first occurrence. For Sheldrake the probability of the new form occurring increases rapidly with each occurrence, starting with the first.

One wonders, however, why Chinese isn't easier to learn if so many people speak it.

ressentiment

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ressenti(e) is the past participle of the French verb, ressentir, and ressentiment is the noun form. NIetzche makes use of ressentiment constantly, in his own singular fashion, to describe the phenomenon whereby an active force is deprived of its normal conditions of existence, where it directs itself inward and turns against itself. "Pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within and finally able to discharge and vent only on itself." is the perfect definition of what is meant for something to be ressenti according to Nietzche's concept of ressentiment. In his Nietzche and Philosophy, Deleuze defines ressentiment as the becoming reactive of force in general. "separated from what it is capable of, the active force does not how ever cease to exist. Turning against itself, it produces suffering." Hence, Deleuze concludes, with ressentiment a new meaning and depth is created for suffering, an intimate, internal meaning. (Anti-Oedipus, translator's note p. 214)

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Rhizome

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The Rhizome is one of a panoply of concepts that Deleuze and Guattari deploy in A Thousand Plateaus to describe the dynamics of their nomadology. While they reject binarism, which they consider to be founded on the transcendence of the one, many of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts are detailed "in contrast to". 

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Representation

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Representation becomes a central issue in all theories of knowledge, whether realistic or idealistic, that start from the mind to go out to the world, rather than the other way around. In Bergson's phrase, all perceptions become "veridical hallucinations." (Matter and Memory, p. 68) In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault traces a sequence of epistemes, of relations between signifier and signified. According to Foucault, the preclassical relation was a "natural" one. To search for meaning within this episteme is to "bring to light a ressemblance." In the classical episteme , signifier and signified are no longer linked through analogy or similarity, but through representation. "Representation, therefore, does not belong to the natural order, but has its origins in convention: the sign becomes, in short, an instrument of the analytically controlled use of reason, of knowledge." In the 17th and 18th century vision of human thinking as representation, Reason represents that which Nature presents. The idea that the basic function of Reason is the representation of what is presented by Nature resulted in the metaphor of Reason as the mirror reflecting the light of Nature.

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sacred / profane

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"Surrounded by a world full of wonder and vigour, whose laws man will never understand (though he may sense their existence and long to know them), a world which reaches him in a few interrupted chords that leave his soul unsatisfied, man conjures into being the perfection that he lacks, and, creating a miniature world where the cosmic laws, though restricted, may appear complete in themselves, he gratifies the cosmogonic instinct within him." (Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonishen K nsten.)

"During the Middle Ages, spatial relations tended to be organized as symbols and values. The highest object in the city was the church spire, which pointed toward heaven and dominated all the lesser buildings, as the church dominated their hopes and fears." (Mumford, "the Monastery and the Clock"

Mircea Eliade locates the primary spatializing impulse of architecture the demarcation of sacred from profane. He studies sacred space and the ritual building of human habitation as parts of the modality of sacred experience. For Eliade, the sacred and the profane are two modalities of experience, each with its own world. The former experience takes place in a sacralized cosmos, while the latter desacralizes the world in order to assume a profane existence. An echo of this distinction is to be found in the relationship between philosophy and poetry. (see truth )

In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga, linking play to ritual, also emphasizes spatial separation from everyday life. (In a structuralist perspective, play and ritual are inverses of each other. eg. see time)

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science / philosophy

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For Ernst Cassirer, the tensions which emerged in the late nineteenth century between philosophy and science were between philosophy's "special task" to "oppose the intellectual division of labor" and the increasing difficulty of that task as a result of the constant increase in the specialization of the sciences. (see The Problem of Knowledge, Introduction)

Whitehead describes science as anti-rationalist (eg. medieval) and based on a naive faith in the relation between brute facts and general principles. Thus it has never cared to justify its faith or explain its meanings and has remained blandly indifferent to its refutation by Hume. For Whitehead in 1925, the stable foundations of physics had broken up and it was time for science to become philosophical and examine its own foundations -- specifically "scientific materialism."

In Order Out of Chaos, Prigogine and Stengers see the origins of modern science in a "resonance" or convergence between theological discourse and theoretical and experimental activity. (p.46) leading to the "mechanized" nature of modern science, that debases nature and glorifies God and man. Subsequently, triumphant classical science could say of God's place in the world system "Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse." (Laplace to Napoléon)

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari characterize some of the differences between science and philosophy. For them, philosophy is "the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts" (p.2), while the object of science is "not concepts but rather functions that are presented as propositions in discursive systems". (p.117) "Philosophy proceeds with a plane of immanence or consistency; science with a plane of reference."

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scientific space

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"I do not believe that there exists anything in external bodies for exciting tastes, smells, and sounds, etc. except size, shape, quantity, and motion." (Galileo Galilei, On Motion, p.48) When Galileo proposed his doctrine of subject and object and the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, he established the scientific prejudgement that the concept of space is of something geometrical and not differentiated qualitatively.

Newtonian "absolute space" was based on a realist conception of mathematics (see Jammer p. 95) To Newton, mathematics, particularly geometry, is not a purely hypothetical system of propositions...instead geometry is nothing but a special branch of mechanics. Newton's first law of motion, which links change in motion with force requires an absolute (or inertial?) framework. It requires a distinction between absolute motion and relative motion and links force to a change in absolute motion. For example, as the train pulls away from the station, the station may appear to be moving and it can be said that the station is in relative motion to the train, but the force is acting upon the train, and it is the train that is accelerating absolutely. Newton tried to establish an absolute frame of reference for the universe defined in relation to its center of gravity. (not necessarily identical with the sun) Absolute spatial movement and position could then be measured in relation to that point.

But is geometry an empirical or ideal activity? For Cassirer, the most radical removal of geometry from experience had already occurred with Euclid, which was already based on figures that are removed from all possibility of experiment. Not only the idealizations of point, line, and plane, but the idea of similar triangles, whose differences are considered inconsequential or fortuitous, and that become identified as "the same" mark an immense step away form ordinary perception.

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simple location

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"The characteristic common to both space and time is that material can be said to be here in space and here in time, or here in space-time, in a perfectly definite sense which does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time." (p.49) 

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simulacrum

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In "The Structuralist Activity," of 1960, Roland Barthes defines structure as a simulacrum of the object in which something new occurs: the simulacrum is "intellect added to the object," making something appear which remained invisible, or if one prefers, unintelligible. For Barthes, "Structural man takes the real, decomposes it, then recomposes it." 

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smooth/striated

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smooth/striated

In Mille Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari distinguish between two kinds of spaces: smooth space and striated space. This distinction coincides with the distinctions they draw between the nomadic and the sedentary, between the space of the war machine and the space of the state appparatus. According to Deleuze and Guattari, smooth space is occupied by intensities and events. It is haptic rather than optic, a vectorial space rather than a metrical one. Smooth space is characteristic of sea, steppe, ice and desert. It is occupied by packs and nomads. It is a texture of "traits" consisting of continuous variation of free action. The characteristic experience of smooth space is short term, up close, with no visual model for points of reference or invariant distances. Instead of the metrical forms of striated space, smooth space is made up of constantly changing orientation of nomads entertaining tactile relations among themselves.

Smooth does not mean homogeneous, however, but rather amorphous non-formal (cf formless) in fact, striation creates homogeneity. Homogeneity is the limit-form of a space striated everywhere and in all directions. According to Deleuze and Guattari, striation is negatively motivated by anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows, or varies and erects the constancy and eternity of an in-itelf. Thus A Thousand Plateaus recounts an "extended confrontation between the smooth and the striated in which the striated progressively took hold."

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space / place

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"Give place, let the prisoner by; give place." -- the first English use of the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionnary

In the Physics, esp. book IV, Aristotle proposes a theory of place (topos) that rejects Plato's theory of space. The topos is a place of belonging. It is distinct from the body, which is defined by length, width, and depth. Yet there is a definite relationship of community or conflict between the nature of bodies and the nature of places: every physical element seeks "its" place, the place that belongs and corresponds to it, and it flees from any other opposed to it. For Aristotle "the motions of simple bodies (fire, earth, and so forth) show not only that place is something but that place has some kind of functional significance (potentia also force)" (cf. posture) although this power is not definable (like the forces of attraction and repulsion in modern physics)

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subject

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At issue within the philosophical tradition is the relation of the subject to thought. (see also consciousness ) Ever since Aristotle the nous had been separate from the psyche. "At the moment of its manifest emergence in the Cartesian formulation, the subject is not in fact a psychic reality, but a pure Archimedean point." (Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History) 

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tech philos

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Alfred North Whitehead characterizes the scientific mentality as instinctively holding that all things great and small are conceivable as exemplifications of general principles which reign througout the natural order. He sees the alliance of science and technology as keeping learning in contact with irreducible and stubborn facts, and credits the Benedictine monasteries as providing much of this practical bent. (cf clock)

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teleology

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In the Timaeus, Plato pictured the natural world as the product of a divine craftsman who looked to the world of eternal being for his model of the good and then created a natural order that was as good as it possibly could be. ("Teleology", by James C. Lennox, in Keller and Lloyd, eds. Keywords in Evolutionary Biology ) This model is the origin of what is sometimes referred to as "external teleology." The "externality" is twofold: the agent whose goal is being acheived is external to the object, and the value is the agent's value, not the object's. (This is much closer to the idea of the machine) 

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truth

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Plato and Euclid developed an indissoluble partnership between geometrical and philosophical ideas of truth. The Platonic concept of the theory of ideas was possible only because Plato had continually in mind the static shapes discovered by Greek mathematics. On the other hand, Greek gemetry did not achieve completion as a real system until it adopted Plato's manner of thinking. (see Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge.) The concepts and propositions that Euclid placed at the apex of his system were a prototype and pattern for what Plato called the process of synopsis in idea. What is grasped in such synopsis is not the peculiar, fortuitous, or unstable; it possesses universal necessary and eternal truth. (see transcendence / immanence) This is the space of universal truth that differs from the spaces of a kind of truth that funtions only in the context of local pockets, a truth that is always local, distributed haphazardly in a plurality of spaces, with regional epistemologies.

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unity

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For Kant, the categorial principle of unity is a requirement for the very concept of nature. As he puts it in the Prolegomena to the Critique of Pure Reason, "nature is the existence of things, considered as existence determined according to universal laws." For Kant, the idea of God serves to symbolize or "schematize" the highest form of systematic unity to which empirical knowledge can be brought, the purposive unity of things. (B714)

According the Kant, the idea of space, a priori, is that of a unity. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defined space as "the form of all phenomena of the external sense, that is, the subjective condition of the sensibility, under which alone external intuition is possible." (p.26) (For Ernst Cassirer, the recognition of non-Euclidean geometries seemed to mean renouncing the unity of reason, which is its intrinsic and distinguishing feature." (see scientific space )

In the Critique of Judgement, he realizes that the absolute conditions of experience are not enough, and that experience depends on our ability to arrange the particular laws of nature according to the idea of a system. The empirical unity of nature in all its diversity is not identical with the categorical one, not constitutive of our experience, but a regulative one.

It is the business of our understanding to introduce unity into nature. For a scientist to succeed at his task, he must assume that something corresponding to this unity actually exists in nature to be discovered.

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visible/articulable

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In Deleuze's analysis of Foucault, the prison defines a place of visibility ("panopticism") and penal law defines a field of articulability (the statements of deliquency). In the same manner, the asylum emerged as a place of visibility of madness, at the same time as medecine formulated basic statements about "folly". (do the two always coincide temporally?) 

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