Skip to main content

Speculation and the absence of a sui generis realm of the mental


I'm lecturing a course on the new speculative philosophy (I nicknamed it 'History of Philosophy since 2007'). But we started out discussing some themes in Whitehead, basically prehensions and the nature of the speculative method. Last Thursday the discussion ended up being mostly around the incompatibility between a speculation strategy that takes coherence and broadness of a general scheme as a measure of success (the plane metaphor in Process and Reality) and the lack of space for any sui generis phenomenon or event (any anomaly, any element of its own kind etc). That led us to the long history of the anomaly of the mental - in a sense, the history of some version of skepticism - and the way Whitehead engages with Descates cogito seeing it as a revelation of a broader scheme rather than a discovery of a sui generis realm of things. The speculative method itself seems to prevent schemes that are insufficiently general, such as a sui generis realm of the mental.

Surely, one could take the realm of concepts as broader than the realm of nature or capable to encompass it. That is, one can be a monist of the spirit, so to speak.This, surely, is the classical form of a metaphysics of the subjectivity in Meillassoux's terms. But it is interesting to notice how Whitehead's take is the opposite view, it discards the sui generis by making the Cartesian scheme more general in nature and not by making it encompass everything. It is not that correlation runs amok but rather that correlation that teaches us a lesson (and, in a sense, a lesson about facticity) concerning the rest of the world. There is nothing special about the correlation between us and the world, it is not sui generis in any sense, but it is an example or a point of departure for the flight of the plane (Didier Debaise told me he doesn't like the word example in this context). Maybe speculation could go both ways but it in the Whiteheadian way, it leads towards absolutes, towards general schemes that are independent of *our* correlation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dismantling absolute contingency

I´ve been wondering about whether we can formulate something about contingency along the lines of a principle of irreduction: aucune chose n´est par elle-même contingent ou necessaire . The principle asserts that necessity is always contingent on underlying fixed things: something is physically necessary (or contingent) given the fixed laws of nature, something is deontically contingent - allowed - or necessary - mandatory - given the fixed ethical rules (or laws of the land). Finally, something is logically necessary (or necessary simpliciter) given a fixed logic. The irreducible diversity of ethical rules, the absence of eternal laws of nature and the plurality of logical systems, if accepted, makes necessity relative to those parameters. An aggiornamento of Heraclitus would have that nothing is necessary comes what may. Surely, of couse, if there is no absolute necessity, there is no absolute contingency. We can then say that in a broader, more abstract level, things are up for grab...
6 comments
Read more

Necropolitics and Neocameralism

It is perhaps just wishful thinking that the alt-right seemingly innovative and intrepid ideas will disappear from the scene as Trump's reign comes to an end. They have their own dynamics, but certainly the experiences of the last years, including those in the pandemics, do help to wear off their bright and attractiveness. Neocameralism, what Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land with him ushered in as a model of post-democracy that relinquish important ingredients of the human security system, is one of these projects that is proving to be too grounded in the past to have any capacity to foretell anything bright beyond the democratic rusting institutions. It is little more than necropolitics - which is itself a current post-democratic alternative. Achile Mbembe finds necropolitics in the regimes were warlords take over the state-like institutions (or mimick them)  to rule on the grounds of local security having no troubles killing or letting die whoever is in their path. Neocameralism pos...
Post a Comment
Read more

Memory Assemblages out!

  Memory Assemblages is out at Bloomsbury This is the book I wrote during most of 22 and 23. It proposes a spectral realism based on the idea that archives are ubiquitous - I call this pan-mnemism. It offers a conception of how memory related deeply with persistent addition of new events, thoughts and circumstances and this addends concoct varying assemblages of what is retained and what brings this archives to the fore. It also rejects the idea that there is an archeology to the archive - or an ontology to hauntology. Even if it boils down merely to postulate traces or forms. I have neglected this blog for a while and I don't expect myself to be very much back to it soon. But I will talk about the book in my youtube channel, in an English language playlist called "On Memory Assemblages" .  
Post a Comment
Read more