Yesterday, walking up and down my jet leg towards the El Capote waterfall in deep Veracruz I thought of my next project. It brings together few elements. First, the idea that there is a crucial separation between collections and collectives; that can be found in Latour's two-chambers model in Politics of Nature or in the eco-theology of Thomas Barry and is ultimately formulated by Arendt's formulation of the main question of politics: why is there someone instead of no one?. Second, the partial who-ification of whats (or someone-ification of things) that is common to both process philosophy and Descola's animism - how these positions compare with standard non-process philosophy and naturalism but also with other alternatives that fully exorcise the separation between something and someone (between the question of politics and the question of ontology). Third, the work on predication - placing subject and object together where someone is the subject and something is the object seems to be the locus of the distinction between whos and whats. There is a politics to predication - that could be an ontology of predication but it is rather what makes politics and ontology possible. And, of course, the issue of what is thinking emerges: is it all about predication?
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...
H. Arendt: Marz 1955, XXI, 15.
ReplyDeleteDenktagebuch, 1930 bis 1973
Piper Verlag GmbH, Munich 2002