Skip to main content

Descriptive metaphysics as a departure port

The connections between metaphysics and grammar have been considered in different ways since Nietzsche. One could always believe that the descriptive metaphysics that is entailed by grammar and language rules can be put aside in a more revisionary, well-informed or speculative endeavor. But metaphysics has no other public language than ordinary grammar and its extensions, the suburbia built in it by added metaphysical propositions, like in Wittgenstein's image of an ancient city:
Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. (PU, 18)
New additions are not necessarily filled with regular streets or uniform houses, but they are additions to what they found already in town. The ancient town has architectural requirements over the new parts of town. It works as a parameter on which any added borough is gauged. Michel Haar’s diagnosis that music would be the medium for a Nietzschean metaphysics notwithstanding, metaphysics is tied to its grammatical umbilical chord. It can only break free to the measure that it can pervert the descriptive core that measures its development.

So, substances (needed for grammatical predication, see Kant's prolegomena, note 24), numbers and quantities (grammar still makes distinctions between 1, 2 and many), events being either with or without subjects (see Deleuze's insistence on indefinite articles) are primarily thought in terms of their grammar. What is needed then for ant metaphysically new intuition is to be translated into the public, shared language of descriptive metaphysics (or to make do outside the scope of grammar). This translation is very often a negotiation where some of the novelty in the intuition can be lost. It seems to me that this is one of the reasons why translation is a crucial element in any metaphysical endeavor. Having said that, a translation can make its port of departure – grammar of a public language – uncomfortable, weirder and makes it deal with the unfamiliar. It can betray descriptive metaphysics. In that sense, it is always indeed revisionary, and Strawson's dualism descriptive-revisionary seems indeed appropriate. Grammar is not something that metaphysics can simply bypass.

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