Skip to main content

Concepts in the space of problems

Deleuze's ontology of problems, object-disoriented as it is, is an approach to process. Any thing came out of a problem and problems came out of repetitions. Rhythms bring about problems and it is in coping with them that things come about. It seems possible, in fact, to understand prehensions and the extensive continuum in subjective forms - and the overall image Whitehead presents - in terms of an ontology of problems. Also concepts can be understood as problems posed to detection machines (like our senses). We could take Sellars' criticism of the Given as a criticism of solutions that are not brought about by problems. To sense sense contents is not yet to know how to answer to a problem (or to apply reliably a concept) - one needs rather to find out how to use one's detecting devices to make empirical reports. Those reports cannot be made before we are inculcated with concepts - that is, inculcated with problems related to what ought to be salient in our experience. Experience without problems is like intuition without concepts: without concepts (and problems) humanity would not know what to do with the differentials of experience. In that sense, experience is transcendental. It provides us with the differentials when we pose the problems. Experience can be a tribunal but its verdicts are specific, there is no verdict ready somewhere (somebody sees but I don't yet) waiting to be accessed before the question is posed.

Differentials, on the other hand, are everywhere and can be explored by all sorts of problems. One could have problems without concepts and solve them by an appeal to differentials. Ticks have a matrix of differences and indifferences because they have problems. To solve their problem is to envisage a strategy of differentiating, say, mammals and non-mammals and then actualizing such a virtual solution in a way that relate first to a horse, and then to a cow, and then to a dog. The repeated solutions - actualizations - bring about differences and further problems. A form of life (like that of a conceptual life a Bildung inaugurates in us) is stable if its problems are solved by the same differentials that were previously available. Such is the like of a population in a closed niche: no need to further exploit the differentials that are virtually there. No need to experiment. All problems are already prefigured in the matrix of differences and indifferences. (Such could be our life fully immersed in the Lawrence's umbrella of our conceptual inheritance.)

Comments

Post a Comment

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...
1 comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
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