No Borders Metaphysics

Today I finished a draft of a paper bringing together both Geist and Ge-Stell , which I understand as major elements of the nihilist adventure of intelligence. The paper is my take to begin thinking through what Carlos Segovia and I are calling 'post-nihilism'. The text sketches a realist, externalist conception of reasons where there is no convergence in Geist and this conception is the ground for a post-nihilist Marxism. The draft of the paper is here .

As muitas curvas da virada animista Hilan Bensusan Para Nurit Pela janela da cozinha, durante a quarentena, aparecem os micos todas as manhãs. Eles são de toda a vizinhança, e passam de casa em casa pelos fios elétricos, pontes urbanas entre as árvores altas onde eles moram e que atravessam a rua como se ela fosse um rio. Na beira da rua, eles aparecem grudados na esquadria e, se a janela está aberta, entram e pegam e comem as bananas, muito grandes para eles carregarem sozinhos. Fecho a janela e eles seguem olhando para dentro, sentindo o cheiro de alguma fruta que eles sabem que está do outro lado. Eles olham, olhos que se misturam com o lado de dentro da cozinha, com suas caras e também com elas soltam pequenos sons que não consigo escutar a não ser se olho também para a cara deles e meus olhos se misturam com o pedido deles. O encontro, através do vidro da janela, é entre eu e o rosto deles, um rosto que pede – lembro de um trecho de diálogo de Coetze. O filho de Elizabeth Cost...

1. Nihilism is a project for intelligence. Nietzsche understood it as a cosmic adventure, one that will leave its traces everywhere from where the distant stars lie to the human moral fabric. The adventure will forge a hero – the free spirit. The hero will fear no established structure of power which would have a command monopoly of anything – rather than a sedentary command power, the free spirit will struggle to make command nomadic; in other words, she aims to unveil the will to power as up for grabs. Her effort is to dethrone – and in that sense, to deterritorialize by leaving no command structure in place. Nihilism is a metaphysical melter – and in this sense is a metaphysical adventure if it is not, as Heidegger would claim, the very metaphysical adventure. Heidegger's account of nihilism is summarized by the episode in The Gay Science where a madman asserts in the market that God is dead and the deed was made by us.1 The assertion is then said to entail that we have drunk...

(This is the first bit - but not the beginning - of a larger text I want to write about Geist and Ge-Stell.) The unity of Geist cannot be determined but from the inside. It is therefore hard to say either that it is established or that it is assumed. This is because it is at the same time open-ended and closed to itself. It is open-ended because when we share a critical mass of commands – for instance in the form of a critical mass of beliefs – all the other commands become available to us, even if we don't follow them – if we don't share any other belief. On the other hand, it is closed to itself because it cannot, by definition, find commands or beliefs – or intelligence – outside itself. An exterior intelligence is by definition no intelligence and an interior intelligence is, also by definition, whatever Geist does. To share a command is a symmetrical property: if I can recognize a semantic rule among the Hopis, the Hopis can recognize their rule in me. Symmetry is cruc...

Imagine we do take propositions to be formed by (essential) indexicals. That is, sentences could have indexicals and non-indexicals (substantive) but: i. only indexicals directly refer - ouch, hard thing to state, but I'm conjecturing that substantive refer only through indexical definitions (the translation of a de dicto expression into a de re one is a step towards providing indexical definitions but cannot be the whole translation for, as Perry wrote (in The problem of the essential indexical , henceforth PEI): " De re propositions remain non- indexical. Propositions individuated in part by objects remain as insensitive to what is essential in locating beliefs as those individuated wholly by concepts." A complete translation of substantives to indexical descriptions would look like this: a proper name is replaced a rule for pointing (Hegel becomes "that philosopher who believed things abbreviate concepts" and then "philosopher" becomes "tho...