Skip to main content

The horizon of the concrete

I´ve been calling the horizon of the concrete that line that divides properties from objects. (In my square representation, properties are in the northern hemisphere in the universal and abstract corners while objects are south in the particular and concrete corners). Abstract things - like mathematical items or properties or even tropes - are such that the Leibniz law (that claims both that the identicals are indiscernible and that the indiscernibles are identical) holds. Leibniz, as a radical bundle theorist, takes it to hold all the way. There is no concrete, no horizon of the concrete. All items belong to the abstract hemisphere and their particularity satisfies Leibniz law. Leibniz finds a way to get rid of all concretude, it is the basis of a mathesis universalis.

To invert Leibniz up side down could be to consider no more than the side of concretude; to allow for no abstracta where the Law is satisfied. No indiscernible is identical and no identical is indiscernible. There is no principle of reason (maybe rather something akin to the principle of unreason put forward bu Meillassoux) or maybe no principle whatsoever. There is no more than history, the history of the processes of individuation. Only things being treated as individuals in a specific region of the process. This amounts to say that contingency is the mark of the natural. And the concrete is the harbour of contingency. But I suspect there are other ways to think about the concrete that finds alternative ways to keep the horizon of the concrete instead of dissolving it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev...

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I ...

The underground of concepts: my talk at the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School Conference

In few minutes I'll be presenting this talk in the Marxism and the Pittsburgh School conference in the UCL. I can still change the text but this is how it looks like now. The underground of concepts: McDowell on the productivity of Anschauungen Hilan Bensusan 1. Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed the idea that concepts do the productive work of thinking as a deception. It is not through a dynamics of concepts that conclusions are reached and it is not with the decisive intervention of them that conflicts between alternatives resolved. Lyotard compares the pretense that concepts think with the mystification that capital works. He argues that “what works is not the concept, […] the concept is [like] capital which pretends to work, but which [only] determines the conditions of labour, delimits the outsides and insides, the authorized and the prohibited” (Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, p. 13). This diagnosis, frequently lost in the middle of an ampler argumentation around t...