Metaphysics as Selection Procedure

Streetlight

Metaphysics as a discipline has always been an odd field to define, if only because of it's seeming broadness. My working definition for a while was metaphysics as being that which relates to the 'first and last things': where things come from (origins), and where things are going (ends/teleology). But I've never quite been comfortable with this, if only because of it's looseness as a definition. Recently, I've been drawn - thanks to my reading of Gilles Deleuze - to thinking about metaphysics as a matter of selection: to 'have a metaphysics' is to have a way to 'select' among the kinds of things that 'exist'.

Thus, one can speak of metaphysics proper beginning with Parminides, who advocates to think of things in terms of either 'Being' on the one hand, or 'non-Being' on the other: that which is and that which is not. For Parminides, his 'selection procedure' consists of only 'selecting for' things that 'are', while consigning to nothingness that which 'is not'. In Plato, similarly, it's a matter of 'selecting' between what best participates in the Idea or the From (of the True, the Beautiful, the Good, the Just, etc), and that which does not: Model and Copy, Reality and Simulacra. Finally, in Aristotle, it is a matter of 'selecting' what falls under a particular genus and a particular species: Being is 'distributed' according to what categories they fall under, and it is a matter of selecting between what falls where.

So much for the Greeks. This notion of selection can be found operating in Leibniz and Hegel too. Although the particularities of Leibniz's metaphysics won't concern us here, for him, it is a case of God selecting for the 'best possible world', according to a rule of 'converging series' (it's no accident that Leibniz was an inventor of calculus!). In Hegel, the selection plays a very strange role, because Hegel - to be reductive - selects for everything: but the price he pays for this is the valorization of contradiction. Whereas all the phliosophers before Hegel partition the world in (at least) two spheres in order to distinguish between them, Hegel simply grasps the nettle and instead of making a (metaphysical) distinction, says that contradiction belongs to the nature of being itself: all distinction becomes a matter of contradiction, which resolves itself in the 'Absolute' from which nothing is excluded (there is nothing to select between).

Apart from very nicely threading itself through the history of metaphysics, thinking of metaphysics as selection also has the advantage of making it fairly distinct from the question of ontology. Ontology - as the study of 'what' is - takes metaphysics for granted, as it were: insofar as metaphysics selects for 'what is' against what 'is not' (in all it's various permutations, as per the examples above), ontology studies how that-which-is 'works'. Ontology says: given that metaphysics has delimited the field of study, the job of ontology is now to figure out the manner in which that field operates. Thus one speaks of a Cartesian or Spinozist ontology, where being is thought of in terms of substance, and so on. At the level of ontology, it's no longer a matter of selection, but a matter of how what is selected functions.

Anyway, hopefully the historical part doesn't throw anyone off who isn't familiar, but part of this is a recapitulation of chapter 1 of Difference and Repetition, which I'm reading right now, and this is helping to organize my thoughts.

Moliere

I wasn't sure where you were going with it until you used the definition to mark a distinction between metaphysics and ontology. Then its value clicked for me. A question pops into my head though -- it seems that by saying 'selection' that you're also saying that metaphysics is a sort of procedure, but then it would seem to -- and perhaps this is unavoidable with any definition -- bleed into epistemology, no?

Deleteduserrc

The thing with chapter 1 of Difference & Repetition, though, is that, in it, the concept of selection isn't just a matter of metaphysical methodology. It makes the more radical move - and correct me if you disagree - of making selection ontological, of painting being itself as a kind of continuous process of selection. ( very much along the lines of Heraclitus' "War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free" & tied, I think, to Deleuze's ?-being) A preening aphorist might say, borrowing your usage, that Deleuze, as a metaphysician, has selected selection for his ontology.

Out of sincere, non-rhetorical curiosity, is your current reading of D&R especially colored by any particularly secondary source or interpretation?

Deleteduserrc

"Laying claim is not one phenomenon among others, but the nature of every phenomenon." p.62

I guess, if you wanna go whole-hog immanentist, that the metaphysician's act of selection must itself be ontologically explicable. & so this is how you avoid the perspicuous concern that @Moliere raises about metaphysics bleeding into epistemology - you make being itself a process of 'laying claim' or 'selecting', so that the metaphysican's act is but one instance of a universal process.

Streetlight

↪Moliere

I don't know if epistemology is the right word. In Plato, for example, the question of epistemology follows quite straightforwardly from the doctrine of Ideas (metaphysics). Knowledge is a matter of anamnesis/reeminscence, a theory which requires that one has already constructed the whole edifice of eternal souls and so on to begin with. What (I think) you're after is what motivates or justifies say, 'this' particular selection procedure over another, and in Plato at least, it's not entirely clear (Deleuze criticizes Plato for basically resorting to myth each time: the myth of the cave, the myth of the demiurge, the myth of the 'Shepherd-God', as he calls it).

One interesting thing that Deleuze's reading brings out is that each 'selection' procedure has what he calls a 'differentiator': In Hegel it's contradiction, in Leibniz it's what he (Leibniz) calls 'vice-diction', in Plato it's myth, and so on. There's always a kind of 'hinge' which sorts out what belongs where (what does the selecting - a kind of metaphysical Laplace's Demon). Anyway, it seems to me that your question bears upon what Kant will end up calling 'critical' philosophy: a matter of justifying one's initial pressupositions without falling into 'dogmatic metaphysics' (metaphysics which has not sufficiently justified it's own notion of selection, nor the 'hinge' which does the sorting). My suspicion is that after the critical turn, one can't - in the manner of Plato - have an epistemology simply 'follow' one's already-established metaphysics, and it needs to be entwined with it somehow (from the 'start', as it were).

It's an open question how one will go about doing this, and whether, after it is 'done', one can neatly parse 'metaphysics' and 'epistemology' as two separate spheres. My intuition is that to speak of epistemology as a kind of self-enclosed sphere of study is a 'pre-critical'/'dogmatic' (in the Kantian sense) kind of move, and there needs to be a transformation of what 'epistemology' itself is, if one is being properly critical about things. This doesn't quite answer your question, but eh...

Streetlight

The thing with chapter 1 of Difference & Repetition, though, is that, in it, the concept of selection isn't just a matter of metaphysical methodology. It makes the more radical move - and correct me if you disagree - of making selection ontological, of painting being itself as a kind of continuous process of selection. — csalisbury

Yeah, this is exactly right. If anything, Deleuze's problem with previous thinkers is that they aren't clear about the nature of selection: what is it's status exactly? Part of what motivates D&R - and why he relates the history of metaphysics through selection - is to provide that clarification which he finds missing in all those previous thinkers. Deleuze's doesn't simply want to provide another in a long line of 'selection mechanisms'; he wants instead to justify his. This is why univocity becomes so important: univocity 'ontologizes' selection, it gives it the status of being itself. Thus re: the 'hinge' of selection in my post above, Deleuze's own 'hinge' will be the eternal return: it's the eternal return that 'selects' what returns, and of course what returns is 'difference'. How to understand that though.... In any case, I'm on chapter 2 right now, and it's the 3rd upon which everything turns I think, as far as 'method' and it's implication with ontology goes.

I guess, if you wanna go whole-hog immanentist, that the metaphysician's act of selection must itself be ontologically explicable. & so this is how you avoid the perspicuous concern that @Moliere raises about metaphysics bleeding into epistemology - you make being itself a process of 'laying claim' or 'selecting', so that the metaphysican's act is but one instance of a universal process.

Yeah, Deleuze's account of individuation for 'things' will more or less parallel his account of the individuation of 'the thinker', who only ever thinks by way of an 'encounter', just as individuation only ever takes place by way of a 'heterogenesis'. It's univocity all the way.

Out of sincere, non-rhetorical curiosity, is your current reading of D&R especially colored by any particularly secondary source or interpretation? — csalisbury

I'm reading Henry Somers-Hall's philosophical guide along with the book atm (chapter-for-chapter), but what's really motivated me to pick up D&R again is having read Anthony Wilden's System and Structure a couple of months ago. Wilden doesn't actually talk about Deleuze at all (with the exception of a dismissive footnote in which he brushes Deleuze off as an uninteresting neo-Kierkegaardian), but reading Wilden (and his treatment of negation) really, really helped me figure out so much of what I think Deleuze is up to.

Also, having now read some of Gilbert Simondon's work (especially - vitally - the essay "The Genesis of the Individual"), I'm convinced that no one can read D&R without having read some of Simondon first. Like, you cannot read D&R without Simondon, you just can't. Everything Deleuze writes about affirmation, ?-being, 'problems', negation, the dialectic, etc, owes itself to Simondon (OK maybe not everything....) - but it's through Wilden and Simondon that I'm approaching D&R this time. Not exactly secondary reading, but yeah, definitely a set of lenses. Also maybe Zourabichvilli's book (Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event) which has been really important to me for a while now.

Re: this thread in particular, I don't know many/any secondary reading that really focus on the question of selection. Everyone seems to approach chapter 1 though the lens of difference (which, yeah, OK, the chapter is called 'difference-in-itself'), but it's real subject matter seems to me to be selection (of difference).

Moliere

↪StreetlightX

Heh. I don't know if I have a question yet, but the difference between, or lack thereof, metaphysics and epistemology is a concern I'm usually pretty sensitive to in reading philosophy -- just because it seems to happen often enough they co-define one another, not just among philosophers but even in common thinking (though the terms aren't the same or technical).

The only question I would have is that if I am correct in stating that there's a risk of bleed-through, then I'd be interested to see if there is a manner of differentiating the epistemology from metaphysics given said definition of metaphysics. (or if, in fact, this is not a concern worth having given said definition) -- I haven't read the book, but it's the question that your opening sparked.

Streetlight

↪Moliere

I guess with respect to epistemology, it's the status of selection that is in question: if it's status is unclear or unstated, there's no being sure about where one's metaphysics stands in relation to one's epistemology. As far as Deleuze goes, he will short-circuit the whole metaphysics/epistemology distinction by ontologizing selection itself: Being just is a matter of selection. Things 'are' to the degree that they make selections, and thus any 'metaphysical procedure' of selection is no different, and is continuous with what happens in nature anyway. It's important to emphasize though that 'selection' is anything but voluntary in Delezue, and selection is the result of an 'encounter' with a 'problem' which forces a selection one way or another. This last bit needs a bit of fleshing out to make proper sense (nothing has been said so far about what is selected for), but you get a flavor of what's at stake I hope.

Terrapin Station

The bulk of metaphysics, especially recently (as in the past few centuries) is ontology, which is simply philosophy of existence or "being" or we could more contemporarily say, "philosophy of what there is in the world/what the world is comprised of."

A way to get a handle on what that does and doesn't amount to, in contradistinction to science, say, is (1) to keep in mind the methodological distinctions between the sciences (which focus on empirical experimentation) and philosophy, and (2) to keep in mind Wilfried Sellars' definition of philosophy (which helps one understand philosophy's methodological approach): "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term."

Metaphysics is also technically comprised of "first principles" and philosophy of religion, but philosophy of religion broke off into its own field by the scholastic era.

Re "first principles," that is most easily understood in the sense of Kantian "transcendentals"--first principles are necessary preconditions for making what obtains possible. That's still a part of metaphysics, but it's more or less subsumed as part of ontology now.

wuliheron

Some claim modern metaphysics evolved from the ancient Greeks attempting to surreptitiously criticize their religion without being killed for heresy. Their pantheon of Gods had become so large and their mythology so bizarre it may have been part of the reason monotheism later become popular. Metaphysics are the antithesis of mysticism which asserts that first principles are subordinate to divine revelation, hence, the reason why to this day many Christians insist the earth is only six thousand years old. My own pragmatic view is that the two demonstrably form a dysfunctional relationship with metaphysics only being tolerated by the religious for whatever useful technology and knowledge it can produce.

Note, this can explain why both religious totalitarian and atheist communist countries are now largely relegated to the third world, while the US with its strong traditions of separation of church and state and rugged individualism has become the de facto empire of the world.

Streetlight

Wilfried Sellars' definition of philosophy (which helps one understand philosophy's methodological approach): "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." — Terrapin Station

I used to be impressed by this but now not so much. I mean, I like Sellars, and even then I find this a kind of nothing-definition of philosophy. One of those horoscope-like profundities that seems nice but really doesn't say much at all. Not a dig at you, it's just a statement I find far too trivial and overquoted.

Terrapin Station

I wouldn't say I'm "impressed" by it, but it just stresses the focus on generalized abstraction and a focus on relations.

Mongrel

Recently, I've been drawn - thanks to my reading of Gilles Deleuze - to thinking about metaphysics as a matter of selection: to 'have a metaphysics' is to have a way to 'select' among the kinds of things that 'exist'. — StreetlightX

Metaphilosophy, divorced from the social climate of any particular bout of philosophy, seems anchorless to me. I immediately suspect that some crap is going to be smuggled in. Is that true of Deleuze?

In time period P:

How did people sort out what's real and not-real? If a philosopher claimed that it's all a Magnificent Lie (whether it was Rumi or Dennett), what motivated that assertion? Did the people of the time assume divinity? Did they assume inner/outer? That kind of question is fruitful to me...

_db

↪StreetlightX

Interesting ideas. My own working definition of metaphysics comes from A. W. Moore (who is influenced by Deleuze and Wittgenstein): metaphysics is the most general attempt to make sense of things. I will take issue with your definition of ontology, if only because it contradicts what is basically the established norm. Ontology is like an "inventory" of sorts, and is used outside of metaphysics (often in science) in a similar manner as agnosticism is used outside of the philosophy of religion. It's a philosophical term that is not exclusive to philosophy.

But yes, I would agree that much of metaphysics is simply selecting what exists, I would just call this ontology. Meta-analysis of metaphysics, like metaontology, occurs during and outside of the ontology room.

Nagase

Finally, in Aristotle, it is a matter of 'selecting' what falls under a particular genus and a particular species: Being is 'distributed' according to what categories they fall under, and it is a matter of selecting between what falls where. — StreetlightX

I know this is not the topic of the thread, but I don't agree with this characterization of Aristotle (I think he's a much better reader of Plato). I don't think he was much concerned with "genus" and "species" (these are latter terms), this concern being much more the product of Porphyry (who was a neo-Platonist). Rather, I'd say that he was much more concerned with what is essential and what is inessential; in the case of living organisms, this distinction is rooted in the form of life of that particular organism (so he's very distant from current taxonomical paradigms, which focus more on anatomical features; for Aristotle, anatomical features are something to be explained, not what does the explaining). In other words, essential features of an organism are those which actively contribute to the organism's way of living, whereas inessential features are those which are a mere byproduct of the essential features.

This is not just nitpicking, because Deleuze's argument against Aristotle (in the first chapter of DR) depends on his Porphyrian reading of Aristotle (and here I think he may be operating under the influence of Le Blond), and I'm not sure if it can be patched once Aristotle's subtler points are in view.

Of course, that doesn't detract from your general point, namely that metaphysics is concerned with selection. I think that's an interesting thought, specially since you presumably select something for some purpose, and one could ask what purpose this is (I think Deleuze's reading of Plato is especially nice in this regard). But I'm not sure if I agree. Generally, one would say that one doesn't select one's metaphysical picture, but rather that that picture is somewhat forced upon one. Take, for instance, Lewis's argument for natural properties. Lewis's claims that his division of properties into natural and non-natural properties was almost forced upon him because they did much needed work in a variety of areas (he lists "duplication, supervenience, and divergent worlds; a minimal form of materialism; laws and causation; and the content of language and thought"). So I wonder if it's really about a selection.

apokrisis

My working definition for a while was metaphysics as being that which relates to the 'first and last things': where things come from (origins), and where things are going (ends/teleology). ....
.... to 'have a metaphysics' is to have a way to 'select' among the kinds of things that 'exist'. — StreetlightX

There's always a kind of 'hinge' which sorts out what belongs where (what does the selecting - a kind of metaphysical Laplace's Demon). — StreetlightX

Rather than selection and hinges - which both speak to transcendent mechanism, imposed distinctions - metaphysics has groped its way towards immanent and self-organising symmetry breakings. It seeks nature's own logic in terms of dichotomous separations - immanent distinctions in terms of reciprocal, dialectical or inverse relations where vague possibility is strongly separated into complementary limitations on actuality.

And this mode of thought already shows itself "naturally" in your OP. Metaphysics is divided into first and last.

Some similarly sharp reciprocal distinction is sought between metaphysics and ontology in terms of metaphysics being the hinge between what is and what isn't, then ontology becomes a sub discipline studying what is (with the unspoken implication that it then itself gets organised as a hierarchy of dichotomous symmetry-breakings in Aristotelean genus~species fashion).

And thus what also shows through in the OP is the Pomo urge not to acknowledge this naturalism. Pomo politically favours multiplicity over any totalising discourse. It favours equality over hierarchy.

This of course is merely further naturalistic symmetry breaking or dialectics - the dichotomy of the one and the many for a start. Or the part and the whole. But it encourages the misreading of Aristotle which Nagase picks up. It is an attempt to bend the argument away from the direction it naturally wanted to go.

The metaphysical thread that links the naturalism of Anaximander, Aristotle, Hegel and Peirce (I don't know about Deleuze :) ) is that the full story of self-organisation is triadic. In the beginning is the monadicity of a vagueness, a perfectly symmetric potential. Then that becomes divided against itself by a dichotomisation or symmetry breaking. That then results finally in a hierarchical state of stable asymmetry - a persistent state because the two critical aspects of the world are now arranged orthogonally as opposed limits.

So that is why for instance Aristotle pushed both the dichotomies - like matter vs form - and the hierarchies, like genus~species. The two are different aspects of the one whole. You need the symmetry-breaking to get the divisions started, then the asymmetric local~global state of organisation which can put these division stably at the "opposite ends of existence".

So the OP shows several prejudices in the reading of the history of metaphysics. First it thinks transcendently about what needs to be immanently self-organising. Then it wants to resist both the notion of the dichotomy and the hierarchy, and so falls somewhere muddled in between in Pomo fashion.

For the sake of post-dialectical politics, dichotomies are safely neutered as "teasing paradox". And hierarchical organisation is mistaken for "the egalatarian freedom of multiplicity".

mcdoodle

'Fundamental', there's a word I've been enjoying lately, especially as it also has a rude meaning. It is where one sits, on one's fundament. That's where my metaphysics is, fundamentally. But have I chosen to sit there, or did I somehow find myself in this seat only it took me a while to understand, once I was sitting here, quite where this seat was?

My current metaphysical problem relates to 'mind' in the analytic literature. There's a lot of talk about 'the causal closure of the physical', over there; and yet from Russell onwards there's a good century (as I'm discovering) of grave doubt about whether any philosophy can reasonably bottom out (forgive me) at a discipline like physics that has largely given up on talk of the causal and can barely bring itself to think much of time's arrow - except, that is, for the vital touch of (statistical) asymmetry between past and future that apo will like.

apokrisis

grave doubt about whether any philosophy can reasonably bottom out (forgive me) at a discipline like physics that has largely given up on talk of the causal and can barely bring itself to think much of time's arrow — mcdoodle

But isn't physics bottoming out in the statistical and the informational - the very turn that the last of the great systematisers, Peirce, foresaw?

The statistical is the ontology of self-organising emergence. Information is Janus-faced in talking about mind and world in the same coin - the inherent uncertainty or spontaneity of a "degree of freedom".

So science certainly is pursuing a naturalistic course when it comes to metaphysics. And it now describes "everything" in terms of propensities and distinctions - or Peircean habits and signs.

Wayfarer

↪apokrisis

Physics, however, does make a declaration about what is considered a valid object of analysis, namely, something which can be physically measured, something which registers on an instrument or plate or bubble-chamber. Where that becomes metaphysical is when it then claims that only what can be measured is real, or at any rate, whatever is real must supervene on, or be explained in terms of, the physical.

And again, I question whether C S Pierce sought to ground his metaphysics in what we take to be 'the physical'. A characteristic statement of his:

I have begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind. — C S Pierce

Schelling, to whom he refers, is in no sense physicalist. I think both of them wish to avoid a mind-matter dualism, but neither of them would subscribe to physicalism.

In respect of the OP, I found a pithy quotation the other day which I think speaks to it:

Metaphysics anticipates the general structures of reality by formulating the way our knowing operates. Science actually works out the explanation of the data by a never-ending process of research.

Even though 'the way our knowing operates' seems to be more the subject of epistemology, a systematic reflection on the nature of knowledge nevertheless seems fundamental to metaphysics generally, insofar as we have to be clear about what constitutes knowledge, before arriving at judgements about what it is of.

Deleteduserrc

@apokrisis *stands up nervously and accepts the mike from the emcee* I haven't read peirce or prigogine and i don't know much about biosemiotics, symmetry-breaking or thermodynamics -but the fuzzy, none-too-crisp vibe I'm capable of extracting from your posts is something like: what there is are these hierarchical and crystalline structures preciptated from formless potential (through the intervention of some sort of clinamen?), structures the equilibrium of which is ever-threatened, and inevitably disturbed, forcing them to reform, until eventually they don't and everything finally dissipates. Probably all wrong, but anyway it's striking that your own model is clenched and curled up super tight brooking only those findings and ideas which will reinforce (or add subtle shading to or furnish new examples of) a set and sedentary framework. *stutters into the mike, adjusts collar* could you, um, comment on that?

apokrisis

Physics, however, does make a declaration about what is considered a valid object of analysis, namely, something which can be physically measured, something which registers on an instrument or plate or bubble-chamber. — Wayfarer

So physics is then idealist in saying reality is only what can be measured by someone? If it ain't a number on a dial, it isn't real? :)

I think if you get beyond Scientism you will see that science (pragmatically) takes idealism more seriously than anyone else.

And again, I question whether C S Pierce sought to ground his metaphysics in what we take to be 'the physical'. — Wayfarer

As I say, the whole point is giving up on the lumpen materialism of the lay person. Do you think quantum physicists can believe in the reality of "stuff" anymore?

Quantum field theory - our most advance formulation yet - doesn't even pretend to deal with "real fields". The "field" only describes a spread of observer probabilities. It is a calculus of how we might expect the needle on the dial to bend.

And how many times have you now wheeled out that exact same Peirce quote and apparently forgotten my lengthy response on its proper contextual interpretation?

Even though 'the way our knowing operates' seems to be more the subject of epistemology, — Wayfarer

Yes. Metaphysics divides according to the classic dichotomy of epistemology and ontology - or the observer and the observables.

And Peirce was radical in finding a pan-semiotic metaphysics that could unite the two again. Quantum physics shows that now to be absolute necessary for any further progress.

apokrisis

Probably all wrong, but anyway it's striking that your own model is clenched and curled up super tight brooking only those findings and ideas which will reinforce (or add subtle shading to or furnish new examples of) a set and sedentary framework. — csalisbury

Alternatively, this is what all the possibilities distill down to. If you understood the natural sciences in their broad sweep, this is where we are at.

Wayfarer

Do you think quantum physicists can believe in the reality of "stuff" anymore? — Apokrisis

I've been reading a bit by, and about, Sean Carroll. He's a respected quantum physicist but also physicalist. Hey, I'm on board with a lot of what you say, but then you say you're a physicalist, and that's where you loose me, but I don't want to spoil this thread, let's take it up elsewhere.

apokrisis

but then you say you're a physicalist, — Wayfarer

But not in a strict materialist sense. I would be a pan-semiotic physicalist - meaning that my ontology involves both matter and sign (or matter and symbol).

So signs and symbols are "made of material" in some sense - but in the most minimal possible sense, as a sign is that which manages to isolate itself from the thermal entropic flow.

Thus a sign is the forrmal inverse of matter in the pan-semiotic scheme. It is "anti-matter" in the truest possible metaphysical sense, ;)

Metaphysician Undercover

↪apokrisis

Nonsense.

Streetlight

I know this is not the topic of the thread, but I don't agree with this characterization of Aristotle (I think he's a much better reader of Plato). I don't think he was much concerned with "genus" and "species" (these are latter terms), this concern being much more the product of Porphyry (who was a neo-Platonist). Rather, I'd say that he was much more concerned with what is essential and what is inessential; in the case of living organisms, this distinction is rooted in the form of life of that particular organism (so he's very distant from current taxonomical paradigms, which focus more on anatomical features; for Aristotle, anatomical features are something to be explained, not what does the explaining). In other words, essential features of an organism are those which actively contribute to the organism's way of living, whereas inessential features are those which are a mere byproduct of the essential features.

This is not just nitpicking, because Deleuze's argument against Aristotle (in the first chapter of DR) depends on his Porphyrian reading of Aristotle (and here I think he may be operating under the influence of Le Blond), and I'm not sure if it can be patched once Aristotle's subtler points are in view. — Nagase

I agree that it's almost certainly a Porphyrian Aristotle in the background here, but in truth, I don't think I did justice to Deleuze's reading in the OP. In reality, the engagement with Aristotle in D&R takes place almost exclusively with respect to Aristotle's impositions upon difference. If anything, what is 'selected' for is not where individuals fall under in terms of genera and species (as I put it in the OP), but the kind of difference which is given legitimacy in Aristotle. Aristotle 'selects for' specific difference, while ruling out, as ontologically illegitimate as it were, generic difference - hence the turn to equivocal/analogical Being.

Of course, that doesn't detract from your general point, namely that metaphysics is concerned with selection. I think that's an interesting thought, specially since you presumably select something for some purpose, and one could ask what purpose this is (I think Deleuze's reading of Plato is especially nice in this regard). But I'm not sure if I agree. Generally, one would say that one doesn't select one's metaphysical picture, but rather that that picture is somewhat forced upon one. — Nagase

As I said to Moliere earlier in the thread, the associations of language here might lead us astray, because despite it's 'voluntarist' tenor, 'selection' is anything but voluntary in Delezue, and selection is always the result of an 'encounter' with or 'interference of' a 'question-problem complex' which forces one to creatively engage and fabulate responses as a result (the quoted phrases are Deleuze's). The kind of 'phenomenology' - if we may call it that - of Lewis being 'gripped' by the necessity of imposing the sorts of divisions he does is very much in keeping with the Deleuzian conception of philosophy as involving a 'pedagogy of the concept', where creation - or in this case selection - is very much a matter of imposition, of 'subjective dissolution', if we may put it that way.

Deleteduserrc

↪apokrisis

Alternatively, this is what all the possibilities distill down to. If you understood the natural sciences in their broad sweep, this is where we are at.

Why 'alternatively'? I don't understand the natural sciences in their broad sweep, but I'm open to the idea that you may. Whatever leads to the model, the model itself is remarkably stable, quite satisfyingly fixed. What I'm interested in is your understanding of the status of this model in relation to all the other fragile, tenuous structures out there. Is the model itself of their kind? But how could something as fragile as they consistently and truly explain such a diverse range of phenomena? It's as though the tenuous, ephemeral, doomed dissipative structures were able to construct something quite-fixed.

Let's get romantic and non-crisp and quote yeats:

"Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come."

whatta dream right

But is your model that kind of non-natural enamel bird? or is it of a piece with nature?

apokrisis

What I'm interested in is your understanding of the status of this model in relation to all the other fragile, tenuous structures out there. Is the model itself of their kind? — csalisbury

My argument would be that I describe the meta-model. So it is the most general level description that captures the abstractly utterly necessary. And then - as the model itself models - it would support a hierarchy of increasingly less specified, increasingly freer, sub-descriptions. Thus the model indeed models itself in all its potential for local variety as well as its central certainty.

So if for example the discrete~continuous defines some ultimate dialectical bound on existence - in the limit, everything would be either discrete or continuous - then that also then means everything can then in actuality be some kind of mix of the continuous and the discrete. Everything would be intermediate cases in a freely various fashion.

So it is not a bug that the core metaphysics is a tightly curled mathematical knot that then becomes the generator of rich organic variety. That epistemology exactly mirrors the ontology it claims. It is its important feature.

If you think you have spotted a weakness in this regards, it shows that you are operating from - ironically - a classical, mechanical, mindset. You understands machines and their weakness. But then you still remain trapped in that paradigm in making that the antithesis you hope to reject.

You have accepted your enemy's legitimacy in his own terms by engaging me in those terms. Yet I've already long moved on to a fully organicist point of view (in which machinery, of the semiotic variety, is the useful emergent feature).

Let's get romantic and non-crisp and quote yeats: — csalisbury

I'd rather stick to mathematical rigour. It's more beautiful and true in the end.

But is your model that kind of non-natural enamel bird? or is it of a piece with nature? — csalisbury

It arises out of biophysics, for instance. So it is based on particular nano-scale facts that we couldn't even hope to measure 10 years ago.

Doesn't it worry you that you might be building your own confident world-view on very obsolete data?

apokrisis

Aristotle 'selects for' specific difference, while ruling out, as ontologically illegitimate as it were, generic difference — StreetlightX

Don't you mean he argued for generic sameness?

That's the logical point. The general and the particular are asymmetric or dichotomous in that one is about sameness, the other about difference - in the familiar "mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive" fashion required by fundamental thinking.

Wayfarer

Your worldview determines what you will regard as 'data'. That's what the thread is about.

Streetlight

↪apokrisis

Nope, I don't mean that.

Metaphysics as Selection Procedure

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Categories

More Discussions