...what that object can be thought and therefore be said to be. (para 29 and 45) — mcdoodle
but nevertheless holds to a version of objectivity (I infer, I didn't spot this word in the article) or object-independence. — mcdoodle
"Brassier argues that the thought of radical extinction carries with it an enlightenment. What might this enlightenment be? Why might this horrific thought of erasure, extinction, be enlightening and ethically invigorating? [Because] [t]he truth of extinction is not the gloomy thought that all is pointless because everything is going to be destroyed anyway. Rather, the thought experiment of radical extinction hopefully accomplishes three aims. Insofar as the truth of every person’s life is death (i.e., there’s no afterlife), we should not direct ourselves to an afterlife, but rather should devote ourselves to this life. How can we live in relation to ourselves, to others, and to the earth in order to best live this brief spark that we possess? How should society be transformed and organized to maximize this existence? — StreetlightX
Second, the truth of extinction with respect to the existence of the human species has the effect of decentering us. We can imagine a world where we are absent. As a consequence, we are not at the center of existence. We are one being– certainly important to ourselves –among others, and we are a being like the others destined to pass away. This discovery encourages us to both respect other beings, but also to recognize the fragility of ourselves and the world we rely on and therefore attend to the preservation of that world. Finally, the extinction of the universe cures us of messianism. There is no apocalypse, no final revelation of the truth, no final salvation, just this world. As such, we should squarely direct ourselves at this world and the work required to maintain this world, not at a world to come or an afterlife." (https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/entropy-and-me/) — StreetlightX
Second, the truth of extinction with respect to the existence of the human species has the effect of decentering us. We can imagine a world where we are absent. As a consequence, we are not at the center of existence. We are one being– certainly important to ourselves –among others, and we are a being like the others destined to pass away. This discovery encourages us to both respect other beings, but also to recognize the fragility of ourselves and the world we rely on and therefore attend to the preservation of that world. Finally, the extinction of the universe cures us of messianism. There is no apocalypse, no final revelation of the truth, no final salvation, just this world. As such, we should squarely direct ourselves at this world and the work required to maintain this world, not at a world to come or an afterlife." (https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/entropy-and-me/) — StreetlightX
Brassier's recent work is an attempt to flesh out how thought does in fact function if the above claims are in fact the case. As he himself puts it, "[Nihil Unbound] contends that nature is not the repository of purpose and that consciousness is not the fulcrum of thought. [Yet] [t]he cogency of these claims presupposes an account of thought and meaning that is neither Aristotelian—everything has meaning because everything exists for a reason—nor phenomenological—consciousness is the basis of thought and the ultimate source of meaning. The absence of any such account is the book’s principal weakness (it has many others, but this is perhaps the most serious)." (http://afterxnature.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/ray-brassier-interviews-with-after_26.html). "Concepts and Objects" is one of Brassier's attempts to remedy this short-coming (a remedy inspired by Sellars), and come up with an account of thought that is adequate to the image of it presented in NU (along with his other more recent papers like "That Which is Not", "Nominalism, Naturalism and Materialism", and "Against Flat Ontologies"). — StreetlightX
Yes, this is quite un-Schopenhauerian. He is trying to say that either a) there is no metaphysical ground (like a monism of some sort) or b) even if there is a ground, this ground is individuated particles and energy ergo no purpose can be imputed other than the necessary laws found in science and the contingent play of these objects in their seemingly infinite variations of cause and effect.
He is also saying that the mind does not impute meaning, but simply interprets it or categorizes it. It will never have the "full" truth of the object, nor are all interpretations the same. The one true interpretation can come close to the truth of the object by scientific explanation.
How in the world did you draw these staggeringly off base conclusions? And why ought anybody answer your questions when you can't be bothered to do some of the required work to have this discussion in the first place? You're approaching the whole exercise with an awful attitude, and it shows in your lack of any close attention to the text itself. — StreetlightX
Brassier is decidedly not a purveyor of mainstream secularism. To this end, StreetlightX, I think you're off the mark reading Brassier's extinction stuff as suggesting that we focus on enriching the here and now. That would be a pretty mainstream secular idea. The whole Nihil Unbound period in Brassier's career was an outgrowth of his dissertation work. At that time he was mainly concerned to criticize ideas prominent in mainstream French philosophy, which was at the time (and to some extent still is) dominated by theologically motivated phenomenology. He did make some initial gestures toward his current project back then, but he's distanced himself from the book since it was published -- so it's really not all that relevant to the "Concepts and Objects" paper. — Glahn
The entire point [of NU] is that the thought of extinction renders thought immanent to being, insofar as "the transcendental scope of extinction... levels the difference between life and death, time and space, revoking the ontological potency attributed to temporalizing thought in its alleged invulnerability to physical death." The reality of extinction erases any sort of transcendence, and the 'leveling' that Brassier speaks of corresponds to the collapse of time that I mentioned earlier. To that extent, "extinction is not to be understood here as the termination of a biological species, but rather as that which levels the transcendence ascribed to the human, whether it be that of consciousness or Dasein, stripping the latter of its privilege as the locus of correlation."
This is why, unlike the phenomenological understanding of death as that which orients our actions and provides an index of value, the 'death' in question - that of extinction - is thus an entirely impersonal death, a death always-already at work that in no way serves to individuate us: "the thought of extinction tokens an annihilation which is neither a possibility towards which actual existence could orient itself, nor a given datum from which future existence could proceed. It retroactively disables projection, just as it pre-emptively abolishes retention... extinction unfolds in an ‘anterior posteriority’ which usurps the ‘future anteriority’ of human existence." The point is resolutely anti-phenomenological, and aims precisely to do away with the (existential) obsession with personal death. Extinction isn't really the sort of thing that can be obsessed over, insofar as, at the level of thought, it has already happened: "terrestrial history occurs between the simultaneous strophes of a death which is at once earlier than the birth of the first unicellular organism, and later than the extinction of the last multicellular animal."
The very thought of extinction then, has massive ramifications for the status of thought itself. Uncoupled from life, thought has an autonomy that is not bound to the vagrancies of life; thought itself marks a latent inhumanity in those who take themselves to be "merely human" and bound by finitude; through the thought of extinction, thought can "think a world without thought": "Extinction turns thinking inside out, objectifying it as a perishable thing in the world like any other (and no longer the imperishable condition of perishing). This is an externalization that cannot be appropriated by thought – not because it harbours some sort of transcendence that defies rational comprehension, but, on the contrary, because it indexes the autonomy of the object in its capacity to transform thought itself into a thing... extinction indexes the thought of the absence of thought. This is why it represents an objectification of thought, but one wherein the thought of the object is reversed by the object itself, rather than by the thought of the object. For the difference between the thought of the object and the object itself is no longer a function of thought, which is to say, of transcendence, but of the object understood as immanent identity." It's the thought of extinction that underpins Brassier's commitment to realism" — Me, elsewhere
Mm, I quoted Bryant because he gives a nice reader's digest version of NU to the uninitiated. Brassier's take on his own work is in fact more interesting, but without the relevant background - one I suspect Schopenhauer does not share - it can be hard to parse. — StreetlightX
Decontraction [i.e. the anterior posterior dimension of extinction] is not a negentropic starting point to which one could return, or an entropic terminus towards which one could hasten. Its reality is that of the 'being-nothing' [i.e. the Laruellean One read through Badiou's subtractive ontology] whose anterior posteriority expresses the identity of entropic indifference and negentropic difference, an identity which is given to thought as the objective reality that already determines it (Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 238).
Against Reason, Sense, and Life, against the glorification of the human which underlies them, hyperspeculation must mobilise the non-individual, the impersonal, the void, the multiple, the insignificant, the real-nothing. It is a matter of opposing the impersonal to life and asserting liberatory destruction over blissful creation; affirming the non-being of the One and the insignificance of multiple-being while refusing any recourse to an evental supplement; claiming that annihilation according to the transcendental identity of the void has nothing to do with Dasein, consciousness, or man (Brassier, "Liquider l’homme une fois pour toutes").
[Laruelle] successfully conceptualizes the separation of the in-itself, but misidentifies it as an experience, refusing to recognise that no residue of experience can withstand determination by mediation. The rejoinder that the One is 'abstract without abstraction' begs the question, for it simply radicalises abstraction in an attempt to neutralise ('unilateralise') the dialectic of mediation and abstraction (Brassier, "Laruelle and the Reality of Abstraction," 118),
The transcendental difference between appearance and reality indexes a form of negativity that is at once the condition of objective truth in discourse, but also that which cannot be objectified without undermining the possibility of such truth. This negativity does not index a difference between recognizable 'things' or entities but a unilateral distinction between the structure of objectifying discourse and its unobjectifiable motor: the non-being of the real as 'irreducible remainder' implicated in the originary dehiscence between appearance and reality (Brassier, "That Which is Not," 186).
Brassier is decidedly not a purveyor of mainstream secularism. To this end, StreetlightX, I think you're off the mark reading Brassier's extinction stuff as suggesting that we focus on enriching the here and now. — Glahn
I still think there's a pretty huge discrepancy between Nihil Unbound and what we're seeing now, though, mainly owing to Brassier's rejection of nearly all of the commitments he took back then from Laruelle. — Glahn
1-5. To understand what is real, we also have to understand our own method of representing the world. The only way to get at what is real is through representation in thought. However, in granting this fact, we can't forget that objects (what is represented) are distinct from the concepts through which we know them (representation). Reality is not already carved up into concept-sized bits for us: we do not get the concept DOG, for instance, by encountering dogs and abstracting the concept therefrom. Thus our cognitive activity shapes how things present to us. Nevertheless, reality itself is not of our making, and the concepts we employ in representing the world are not chosen freely. We ourselves are physical beings, shaped by the material world, and our mode of representing the world is part of what is shaped. So even though the meaning of the concept DOG is not inherited from a concept-world relationship between DOG and dogs out in the world, the fact that we have the concept DOG is a product of our being shaped by the world in which we live. — Glahn
We should adopt a "methodological naturalism," which allows us to make use of concepts like "concept," "reason," etc, so long as we can make sense of those notions in more fundamental metaphysical terms (e.g. in materialist terms). — Glahn
How in the world did you draw these staggeringly off base conclusions? And why ought anybody answer your questions when you can't be bothered to do some of the required work to have this discussion in the first place? You're approaching the whole exercise with an awful attitude, and it shows in your lack of any close attention to the text itself. — StreetlightX
In an entirely literal sense, Brassier's argument is, from the advocate of the transcendental's point of view, suggesting we enrich the here and now. He is denying the absence of meaning in the world. Things are by themselves, not as the result of some transcendental force. If we start thinking in terms of Brassier's philosophy, we start taking part in an idea that the world is not nothing, is not "meaningless" itself. In our understanding, we leave behind the meaningless world of the transcendental position, where things only matter because of some other reason (i.e. the "Why" ), and take-up (from the point of view of advocates of the transcendental) a stance of an "enriched world," in which things exist on their own terms. — TheWillowOfDarkness
'm not sure about this - if anything, Brassier's ultimate charge in "L and the Reality of Abstraction" is that Laruelle basically loses his nerve at the last minute, rather than follow the consequences of his affirmation of the autonomy of the Real all the way to the end. This is why, among other reasons, C&O is so concerned about epistemology. Although his explicit targets are Latour and to a lesser extent Deleuze, in the background is also the Laruelleian gnosis which basically skimps out on furnishing the justificatory grounds of it's own position. Brassier's disillusionment with Laurelle is more or less that Laruelle doesn't follow through on his own insights - insights which Brassier holds to be singularly valuable. The whole post-NU 'turn' towards truth, negativity and representation is in some sense a way to remedy this lacuna and forge a Laruelleian inflected philosophy that throws out the bathwater without the baby of Laruelleian thought. — StreetlightX
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