philosophy

idea

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Socrates first discovered the concept, or eidos as the relation between the particular and the general and as a germ of a new meaning of the general question concerning being. This meaning emerged in its full purity when the Socratic eidos went on to unfold into the (transcendental) Platonic "Idea." (see also essence) The eidos is absolutely and eternally real, but in respect to each single realization, it is the possible, its potentiality.

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.(see form.) Euclid's geometry was based on figures that are radically removed from experience. 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. On the other hand, Greek geometry did not achieve completion as a real system until it adopted Plato's manner of thinking, in which truth was understood as a correspondence with the world of forms. (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.

For Aristotle, the problem of the concept is transformed into the problem of teleology.

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ideal / real

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"Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it." Niklas Luhmann.

"My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of 'the idea', is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me, the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought." Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1,Preface to the Second Edition. (p.102)

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ideology

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The word "ideology" was originally coined by Count Destutt de Tracy, a French rationalist philosopher of the late eighteenth century to define a "science of ideas." For de Tracy, ideology formed "a part of zoology" (i.e. biology) The concept of ideology was developed in Marxian thought as a term through which to articulate the relation between the realm of culture and the realm of political economy. For Marx, the proper method for analyzing concepts is one which retraces the steps from the abstract concept back to its concrete origin.

"If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-processes as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-processes." Karl Marx, The German Ideology. (note the analogy between physiology in perception and social life in thought, both function as the concrete origins, if not as determinants.)

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image

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Albert Einstein described the motives for scientific study as a need to construct a satisfactory image of the world: "Man seeks to form for himself, in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of our world, and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. This is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative philosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way. Into this image and its formation he places the center of gravity of his emotional life, in order to attain the peace and serenity he cannot find within the narrow confines of swirling personal experience." (Quoted in Steven J. Heims, The Cybernetic Group.) 

The status of mental representation in general, and the mental image in particular, has been one of the main battlegrounds of modern theories of the mind. A mental image (one of the senses of the German Vorstellung , also translated as " representation") of an object in external reality is an inner, subjective semblance of the external object. Other figures for this relationship, developed through Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, are a mirror, a map, a camera obscura , or a surface for drawing or painting.

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mechanism/vitalism

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The prestige of mechanistic physics after Newton led to an extended confrontation between the norms of physics and other areas of science such as biology and psychology. Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophystood as a classical prototype, or canon, by which to judge all subsequent science. Newton's great achievement was to have produced a mathematical theory of nature that provided general solutions based on a rational system of deduction and mathematical inference, coupled with experiment and critical observation. Newtonian mechanics established "universal laws" that explained the movements of the planets, the tides, and whose predictive powers were given an overwhelming demonstration with the appearance of Halley's comet, just as predicted, in 1758, long after both Halley and Newton were dead. Even today, the exploration of space is a straightforward application of classical gravitational mechanics. 

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mind / brain

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How does the physical brain give rise to the psychological mind? How do the laws of mental life emerge from the brain?

The hypothesis of all those who examine the brain as "organ of the mind" is that a close enough analysis of the workings of the brain would, if we also had the key to psychophysiology, lead to a knowledge of consciousness. The psychophysiological hypothesis, at least in its narrow version of it, seeks point-to-point mappings of brain, consciousness, and memory.

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molar / molecular

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For Deleuze and Guattari, molarity is the site of coded wholes. It is a productive process: a making-the-same. Its attractor state is that of stable equilibrium. It is the mode of being, rather than becoming.The principle revolutionary objective of their writing is to break down molar aggregates in favor of molecularity, and the "microphysics of desire." They call for becoming rather than being, for becoming-other rather than being the same. For them, becoming-other is thoroughly political. 

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nature

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For Kant, nature is the existence of things insofar as they are determined in accordance with universal laws. 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) "God has put a secret art into the forces of Nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system."

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nomadic / sedentary

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For Deleuze and Guattari, nomads are characterized above all by the fact that their mode of existence is antithetical to the system of the State, of cultivation, and of striation, which they describe as sedentary. Because the nomads were so decisively defeated, history has always dismissed them, and indeed "history is one with the triumph of States." (p.394) Nomadism becomes, for D+G, a revolutionnary alternative to the State, although they are always careful to distinguish between their "de jure" or conceptual distinctions and all the "de facto" mixes and transitions that actually occur. 

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order/disorder

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"Our march towards order " (Le Corbusier)

All great philosophical and theological systems have been built around the question of order and disorder, and they have all priveleged order over disorder. 

For Claude Levi-Strauss, primitive thought is just as much based on the demand for order as is scientific thought, whose most basic postulate is that nature itself is orderly. For native thought, "all sacred things must have their place." Sacred objects contribute to the maintenance of order by occupying the places allocated to them. If they were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order of the universe would be destroyed. (The Savage Mind, p. 10) For Levi-Strauss, the aesthetic emotion is the result of a union "in miniature" in the work of art, between the structural order and the order of events. 

"Science is any attempt to bring facts into logical order". B. Bavink

The Middle Ages, with its insistence on the rationality of God, formed one long training of the intellect of western Europe in the sense of order. (an order in which reason was inseparable from revelation) Thus faith in the possibility of science is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology. -- Alfred North Whitehead. (cf the role of monasteries in establishing social order.) 

According to Kant, we make the principle of the unity of nature a regulative principle in order to judge nature to be so constructed that it corresponds to our needs for order. Thus the specific principle of Judgement is that "Nature specifies its universal laws into empirical laws in accordance with the form of a logical system on behalf of the faculty of Judgement." (see Critique of Judgement ) For Kant, form is "that which allows the manifold of appearance to be ordered in certain relations." (Critique of Pure Reason, section 1, 56) 
The idea of space is an idea of order. 

As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. Dirt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organise the environment. Rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience. (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger) 

"Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision. The benefits of order are incontestable. It enables men to use space and time to the best advantage, while conserving their psychical forces." (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p.40) "The anal eroticism of young human beings...is changed in the course of their growth into a group of traits which are familiar to us as parsimony, a sense of order and cleanliness." (pp 43-4) 

For Kurt Goldstein, the drive to overcome anxiety by the conquest of a piece of the world is expressed in the tendency towards order, norms, continuity, and homogeneity. (Goldstein, p. 238) Nonetheless, he rejects the notion that the "ordered" world of culture is the product of anxiety or as the sublimation of repressed drives, seeing it instead as expressions of the creative power of man and of the tendency to realize his nature, as a result of a primal tendency towards actualization. It was this idea of a lawful order realizing itself in nature, not imposed upon it by an ordering mind, and the search for the lawlike (das Gesetzliche) in the phenomena, that provided a model for the Gestaltpsychologists of the 20th century. The gestalt theorists attempted to introduce an aesthetic dimension of inherent order, meaning, and simplicity into the evaluation of scientific theories, and into the fabric of experience and nature itself. (Mitchell G. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890-1967, p.1) 

It is important to distinguish between the order which is part of a project of control (what Lewis Mumford calls the 'will to order") and an " immanent," or " self-organizing" order, what Stuart Kaufman likes to call "order for free." In Chaos Bound, Katherine Hayles asserts that contemporary criticism sees order as potentially repressive and seeks to find its limits or to undermine it, whereas contemporary science is extending the concept of order to describe conditions that were previously understood as disordered (eg. chaos). In a cultural context, the concept of order has been increasingly identified with repression if not terror (eg. Foucault, Serres etc.) Yet for natural scientists the living world is characterized by overwhelming and beautiful order. To appeal to natural form is to change the valence of order, whether this is the emergent order of complex systems or the " phase beauty" of the lily-of-the-valley. Stuart Kaufman suggests that much of the order in organisms may not be the result of selection at all, but the spontaneous order of self-organized systems. "Order, vast and generative, arises naturally. ... not fought for against the entropictides, but freely available." (At Home in the Universe, p. 25) 

see philosophy / chaos for some of the ambiguities of order and . 

Natural processes always move towards an increase in disorder, which is measured by entropy. The second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy can never decrease, is thus an argument for the irreversibility of time. From the beginning, it was thought that living organisms were a possible exemption from the Second Law. Kelvin referred to the power of the will in his 1852 essay entitled "On the Power of Animated Creatures over Matter" and suggested that "the animal body does not act as a thermo-dynamic engine."

" Natural selection operating on gratuitous random mutations is the sieve that retains order and lets chaos pass into oblivion...No idea derivative from Darwin lies deeper in our minds than this." (see evolution)

For Robert Venturi, "a valid order accomodates the circumstantial contradictions of a complex reality....When circumstances defy order, order should bend or break: anomalies and uncertainties give validity to architecture." Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, pp 46-47.) 

Order is not the law of things but their exception. To speak of disorder in a rigorously disordered manner: a journey among intersections, nodes, and regionalizations. To conceive of knowledge not in terms of order and mastery, but in terms of chance and invention. 




perception

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In the Aristotelian tradition of perception, inaugurated in De Anima , "sense is that which is receptive to the form of sensible objects without the matter, just as the wax receives the impression of the signet ring without the iron or the gold."

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phallus

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phallus

Herm at Getty MuseumIn classical antiquity, the phallus is the figurative representation of the male organ. It is the figure of hierarchy rather than reciprocity. For the classical Athenians, sex was not a private quest for mutual pleasure. It was rather a declaration of one's public status. Defined as the penetration of one body by the body (specifically by the phallos) of another, sex was conceived as an action performed by one person upon another. The elite corps of adult male citizens held to an aggressively phallic norm of sexual conduct, which lead to an ethic of sexual domination in their relations with males and females alike. (David M. Halperin, in Before Sexuality.) According to Michel Foucault, "The Greeks did not see love for one's own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior...Rather, they saw two ways of enjoying one's pleasure...They believed that the same desire attached to anything that was desirable -- boy or girl." (The Use of Pleasure, pp. 187 ff.) It is the persistence of this phallic model in psychoanalysis that feminists have come to resist (see below). It was the contribution of Christianity's radical ascetics to "strip the body of its ancient, civic associations...by means of an increased emphasis on its intrinsic sexuality...joined together in a somber democracy of sexual shame", and to "see the female body as the condensed essence of all human bondage and all human vulnerability. " (Peter Brown, "Bodies and Minds ," in Before Sexuality.) 

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philosophical space

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According to Egyptian myth, space only came into being when the god of air, Shu, parted the earth from the sky by stepping between them. The creation of a vast gap between earth and sky was called chaos in Hesiod's Cosmogony. In the Tao Teh Ching, Lao Tzu addressed the role, in fact the superiority of the contained over the container, of the space within, of the immaterial. 

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philosophy / chaos

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Within the Western tradition, chaos was associated with the unformed, the unthought, the unfilled, the unordered. Hesiod in the Theogony designates Chaos as that which existed before anything else, when the universe was in a completely undifferentiated state. Later in the Theogony , he uses the term chaos to signify the gap that appeared when Heaven separated from Earth. Eros appears in that gap as rain/semen. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, in The Presocratic Philosophers, see in Hesiod's account of chaos, not disorder, "not the eternal precondition of a differentiated world, but a modification of that precondition." (p.39) 

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plane of immanence

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For D+G, philosophy is at once the creating of concepts and instituting of the plane of immanence. (What is Philosophy?, p.41) (see also science / philosophy) According to Deleuze, " Immanence is the very vertigo of philosophy." (Expressionism in Philosophy, p. 180, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, "Absolute Immanence" in Potentialities, p. 226) Giorgio Agamben, calls Deleuze's book, What is Philosophy?, the theory of this vertigo. 

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Postmodernism

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"Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good." Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. IX. "We might say that postmodernism is what you have when the modern theory of social constructivism is taken to its extreme and all subjectivity is recognized as artificial." (Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 196) "The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration..." (Jameson, p. 62)

Any account of postmodernism must address the tangled relationship between its writing and its object. As Frederic Jameson admits, "I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters (of his book Postmodernism) are inquiries into the nature of such "postmodernism theory" or mere examples of it." Some disaffected critics claim that "A key to understanding the postmodern temper is that, for it, the distinction between truth and illusion has lost its purchase. " (Simpson, Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity, p.87)

Frederic Jameson is not quite so sure. He goes on to ask whether we can identify some "moment of truth" within the more evident "moments of falsehood" of postmodern culture.

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praxis

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The tradition of Platonic and idealistic philosophy separates theory from practice in much the same way as it does mind from body, privileging in both cases the "conceptual" (or moral) over the "material".

Praxis philosophies give primacy to a theory of action. The original expression is Aristotle's and refers to a symbolically meaningful activity, whose very doing, not its result, is the fulfillment of a cultural commitment. It can be defined as meaning rather than function.

For the Frankfurt school in its earlier period, prior to 1937, truth was defined as "a moment of correct praxis." Subsequently, in the face of Fascism and Stalinism, the relation between theoretical truth and the political praxis of specific social groups began to appear increasingly remote.

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