Skip to main content

Monism and grounding

Been somehow thinking about Schaffer's priority monism. I like his stress on the possibility of heterogeneous basic elements of the world - more for the heterogeneous element all the way through than for his stress on the need for basic elements. I'm still unconvinced that gunky worlds are more possible than junky worlds, as Bohn calls a world where everything is a part. I guess my problems lie mostly in what is connected to the acceptance of an ontological foundationalism. Schaffer thinks sometimes in terms of how to build a baseless world - where would one start? He also appeals to the Big Bang as a starting point for an entangled system that would constitute the cosmos. But foundationalism in ontology is far from being the only alternative - as creationism and a single common origin is not the only alternative.

I take, rather, that the relation of grounding is ontologically important. I think there is a relevant type-token distinction to be considered in the relation of ground - grounds can act on types, just like relations of requisite. One thing demands another but by demanding types. Myself and Manuel tried to put this in terms of Molnar's physical intentionality. It doesn't have to be put in those terms, I realise. But the type-token structure in grounding allows for something to play a role, to be used as something else - and for a different bunch of elements to come in the picture at any point. I guess this was Anaxagoras' point. Yes, things are connected in relations of ground - and the ground is something akin to a cosmos - but nothing, not even this cosmos, acts as a unitary whole.

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

The Cathedral and the axiomatics of capital

Today in my Cosmopolitics of Capital class, instead of discussing Lyotard´s evil book in connection to Moldbug and Land´s ideas, as planned, we spent hours considering bits of The Anti-Oedipus under the light of Neo-cameralist ideas and some remarks Land makes about the horror that is often triggered as an emotional response to (Neo-cameralist) statements about the Cathedral. We concentrated on the bit of chapter 3, section 10 where Deleuze and Guattari talk about class struggle and the bourgeoisie as a class eroder. There they describe how capitalism decodes the flows of castes, orders, and classes in the sense of feudal aristocracy, serfdom and peasantry. The erosion affects also the proletariat that is never associated with a specific job or type of service but rather a decoded abstract worker. This decoding is precisely what makes the proletariat universal and directly linked with the productive forces - which means, for Deleuze and Guattari, that they are potentially the schizo, ...
Post a Comment
Read more