Perhaps one thing to recognize is that the term 'image of thought' in Deleuze is not just an arbitrary poetic term, but a technical one; In Difference and Repetition Deleuze actually spends a whole chapter - what he elsewhere calls the central chapter of the book - defining what he means by the image of thought, which is determined by an adherence to thinking in terms of (1) identity, (2) analogy, (3) opposition, and (4) resemblance. Without getting into it, one only need to hear the specular, mirror-like resonance implicit in the idea of the 'image': so you're right that it's a matter of 'recognition' (as in - to recognize one's image in a mirror). To speak of an 'image of thought called philosophy' is the desire to feel one's (philosophical) writing 'mirrored' in the tradition, to appeal to that 'image' for recognition and continuity.

Even Deleuze's references to 'illusion, the false infinite and the infinity of religion' in your second quotation aren't just elements of an arbitrary list, and he elaborates on each of these things at length in his What Is Philosophy? (which I just started reading again a couple of days ago actually!). Irony abound!

Heh, the irony of course is that Deleuze's work is so absurdly technical that you kinda need a decent grasp of exactly that history to really understand most of what he's saying. If anything, his collaborations with Guattari were something like his own self-therapy, with Guattari allowing him a way of doing philosophy without reference to the canon of which he was otherwise entirely steeped in. In any case I suspect Deleuze's comments are motivated more by his own 'anxiety of influence' than anything else.

What classical logic does so is force you to specify a domain. But a domain is filled with actual things, after all, and if their identity is somehow not determinate, then the choice of the domain sill simply reflect that. I don't think the logic forces you to make this decision. The issues about identity seem to be just to have to do with simple rules of language, such as coreferential expressions preserving truth when swapped out for each other, or the intuitive 'logical truth' of all appropriate statements of the form 'I'm myself.' — The Great Whatever

I'll have to do some extended reading on this to give a proper reply; what I'm getting from this is that I need to focus on the notion of truth at play here, and while I've the germ of how to go about it, it's not enough for a decent discussion. I think I'm going to start a thread on the question of negation to try and discuss some of these topics in another capacity.

. Taken seriously at face value, it's clearly false: people do in everyday speech treat things as if they are themselves, and it's not clear behaviorally what the opposite would look like. — The Great Whatever

On this though, I'd have to disagree. I don't think that at any point during our usual day to day activity, we go around thinking 'that thing there is what it is!'. A bit like Heidegger's broken hammer, these sorts of thoughts only occur in a highly abstract environment disconnected from lived experience; as far as identity goes, for the most part we think things like 'these things are identical - with respect to their color', or 'those two things are identical with respect to their function (for my needs)'; in any case identity and equality are defined with respect to some external parameter or another. To say that a thing is identical to itself, when you think about it, is an exceedingly strange formulation. Wittgenstein had something of this intuition when he declared quite flatly in the Tractatus that "roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing."

What do you mean by a term? — The Great Whatever

Basically anything that abides by the law of identity ("a thing is equal to itself"). To be absolutely clear, to deny the law of identity isn't - for me anyway - to say that 'things aren't equal to themselves', but to deny that the very category of equality is properly applicable to 'things' at all; that is, it is a category error as such to invoke equality (whether it be to affirm or deny it) when speaking ontologically, other than as a heuristic of everyday speech. Or differently again: there is nothing 'equal' or 'unequal' in nature, no identities. And even in everyday speech, equality is always invoked respect to some quality or another, rather than as a 'brute fact' of identity, as it were.

The closest thing - that I know of - in formal logic that thinks along these lines in dialetheic logic, but even dialetheic logic seems inadequate to me to the extent that it simply denies the law of identity, rather than putting the very idea of equality into question (hence it's admission of contradictions, which are only ever contradictions from the perspective of identity). Thus for example, Deleuze's metaphysical project takes as it's starting point the attempt to think a concept of difference which is not parasitic or derivative of identity and equality, and hence contradiction. So in a critique of Hegel that might well be word for word written about dialetheism, he writes: "Hegelian contradiction appears to push difference to the limit, but this path is a dead end which brings it back to identity, making identity the sufficient condition for difference to exist and be thought. It is only in relation to the identical, as a function of the identical, that contradiction is the greatest difference." By contrast, Deleuze will look to explicate what he will refer to as 'difference-in-itself'. The exact details aren't important, but I just want to impart a flavour of where I'm coming from when I asked if analytic philosophy has the resources to question the nature of logic - I really mean this kind of absolutely 'foundational' stuff, as basic as the law of identity.

You can at least see, I hope, how a position like Deleuze's is even 'more radical' than dialetheism, and given the suspicion with which paraconsistency alone is viewed among the analytic community, I this sort of stuff is mostly viewed as beyond consideration. But for me, this is more or less the most important stuff, and most of the philosophical atmosphere in which I saunter in deals with things at this level, and at length. When I ask if AP asks after the nature of logic, it's at this level of generality that I'm referring to.

*I don't mean to ignore what you've said about the strategies employed in logic to deal with all the things you mentioned, but I'm simply too out of my depth there to have anything worth saying.

No, you're right, I need to explain my reservations better. Basically I've always wondered this: how does formal logic deal with individuation? I would appreciate being stopped and corrected at any point here given my relative ignorance, but to the degree that logic deals with already-individualized terms and the relations between them, formal logic seems constitutively unable to deal with questions of how terms become what they are. If, for example, one holds that individuation is a matter of process and that discrete individuals the results of such processes, formal logic always comes 'too late', as it were, to deal with it.

Thus someone like Gilbert Simondon, for example, will write the from the perspective of individuation, "at the level of being prior to any individuation, the law of the excluded middle and the principle of identity do not apply; these principles are only applicable to the being that has already been individuated; they define an impoverished being, separated into environment and individual. … In this sense, classical logic cannot be used to think the individuation, because it requires that the operation of individuation be thought using concepts and relationships between concepts that only apply to the results of the operation of individuation, considered in a partial manner". I'm being somewhat brief here because going into it would require explicating a whole metaphysics, which I'm trying to avoid for brevity's sake!

Also at the back of my mind here is Bergson's critique of the modality of 'the possible' as anything more than a 'back-formation', as it were, where 'the possible' is simply thought of as the double of the actual that simply 'lacks reality' somehow - again the implicit critique is that thinking in terms of 'the possible' is to forego thinking in terms of individuation. Anyway, it's these things that I've had at the back of the mind when I referred to 'the nature of logic'. Basically, the suspicion is that formal logic operates at the level of identity, and can't think in terms of becoming. Again, my ignorance may well mean that logicians have taken these kinds of ideas into account, but I'm kind of going off intuition here - which may be wrong. *In mathematics, the kinds of operations involved in category theory seem promising as a kind of 'logic' that would address these concerns (to the degree that category theory deals solely with relations), but again, I'm not well versed enough to speak authoritatively on these matters.

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*As an aside, I've recently picked up an interest in the notion of analogy, which deals with the question of the 'more or less', a notion that operates 'below' the level of the 'already individuated'. The basic idea is that the nature of 'being' or whathave you is not 'logical' but analogical. As a further aside, my hunch is that 'continental philosophy' has long been averse to formal logic precisely because kinds of concerns above, but I don't want to dwell on that.

I tend to find what little I read of analytic metaphysics more or less incomprehensible to me. I don't say this as a value judgement on my part, I just literally and plainly mean that I don't understand 'what's going on' when I read alot of that work. I imagine that it's a similar feeling to what happens when the uninitiated read some of some of Heidegger or Derrida for the first time. The conceptual anchor points are missing, and the significance of the results are lost on me.

That said, I do find the lack of engagement with science exceedingly puzzling. With the exception of some of the philosophy of mind crowd, it seems to me that analytic metaphysics is almost entirely devoid of any real scientific reflection. I used to admire the analytics for their openness to the sciences, but that seems to have waned in favor of going crazy with formal logic instead. I also often wonder about whether there is any sustained reflection on the nature of logic itself - rather than taking it for granted, as it were. But these are considerations I pose from a position of ignorance, rather than meant as a critique.

Check out Vox's article on the movement, which is pretty comprehensive: http://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained.

"The label blends together straight-up white supremacists, nationalists who think conservatives have sold out to globalization, and nativists who fear immigration will spur civil disarray. But at its core are the ideas of a movement known as neoreaction, and neoreaction (NRx for short) is a rejection of democracy. ... The purpose of government, in the view of neoreactionaries, isn't to represent the will of the people. It's to govern well, full stop. 'From the perspective of its subjects, what counts is not who runs the government but what the government does,' Moldbug explains. 'Good government is effective, lawful government. Bad government is ineffective, lawless government. How anyone reasonable could disagree with these statements is quite beyond me. And yet clearly almost everyone does.'

And democratic government, the neoreactionaries insist, is not effective, lawful government. Because the will of the people is arbitrary and varying, it cannot have the consistency of real, durable law, and it creates incentives for wasteful and, worse still, left-wing government. ... But while mainstream libertarians are outspoken about democracy's deficiencies, they rarely propose an alternative. The neoreactionaries do: monarchy. Well, not monarchy specifically, but some kind of nondemocratic system with rule-driven succession. Moldbug likes to use the term "formalism," or "neocameralism," a reference to "cameralism," the philosophy of government embraced by Frederick the Great of Prussia. Moldbug's vision is corporatist, where instead of a nation belonging to a royal family, it belongs to corporation with shareholders to whom it is accountable. 'To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country,' he writes."

I see what you did thar

"The first principle of philosophy is that Universals explain nothing but must themselves be explained"

- Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

I don't think that this makes any sense at all, to think that "the world" could be unintelligible, yet local structures are intelligible? Are you disassociating local structures from the world, such that they are intelligible but the wold is not? How would you support such a separation? — Metaphysician Undercover

You mistake me - I didn't say that 'the world is unintelligible'; I said that it may well be the case that something as abstract as 'the world' doesn't submit to the criteria of intelligibility at all - that it may well be neither intelligible or unintelligible; the very notion of intelligibility may not even apply to something as strange as 'the world' - whatever that even means. Put it this way - I know what it means to 'make sense' of this or that phenomenon: 'how does that work?', 'what contributes to function of that process?'; but when you ask these questions of 'the world', the questions themselves start to lose any cogency.

In any case, the idea is that sense is like any other thing in the world; something produced, the result - always provisional - of an (ongoing) process. For one thing, to make something intelligible is always to do so against the background of a certain (set of) interests - for whom, for what purpose, to what end is the intelligibility of the thing sought? Things and phenomena are not simply 'intelligible' tout court; there is no intelligibility-in-itself; it is always a question of relevance - in what context and under what circumstances does intelligibility come into question? 'We' tend to make sense of just enough of what we need to to get by; anything that doesn't bear on our living tends to get left by the wayside. And what makes sense in one context may not do in another. Sense might well be an acosmic phenomenon; local, context-bound, multiply overlapping, conflicting, fleeting.

There are two ways to look at the question of the world's intelligibility. The first is to ask about 'the world', how it works, its structure, etc, etc. The second - more interesting path - is to ask about the very notion of intelligibility itself. If one is to understand the notion of intelligibility in a naturalist light, then intelligibility cannot be something that 'looks down' upon a world separate from it, but must itself be engendered by that world itself. That we even have a concept of 'the intelligible' speaks to something about the world itself - something about it's intelligibility. Put differently, if we accept that sense doesn't come down from on high, the fact that we can and do make sense of things - however locally, however provisionally - can only speak to the fact that there is sense in the world.

This doesn't automatically mean that 'the world' is or isn't intelligible - 'the world' may not be an object of intelligibility at all. But things 'in' the world, local structures, as it were, of which we make sense of everyday in our interactions with them - perhaps sometimes because of our interactions with them - means at the least that if it doesn't make sense to speak of an 'intelligible world', there is at least a suffusion of intelligibility - sense - throughout it.

Karen Barad - Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (rereading)
Vicki Kirby - Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large

So maybe I am as dim as you keep trying to claim. Or maybe you really are quite confused in your position. And now I've helped you embrace a clearer understanding for at least a moment. — apokrisis

Bahaha, douchebag. But you're wrong to boot: I still take the inferential constraints required by modelling to be particularizations of a more general aesthetic without having to place them into opposition, as you are wont to do (or project onto me). The way I'd put it is this: the kind of rationalization you're after is - to use a clunky phrase - a linearization of a multidimentional aesthetic. The notion here is essentially anthropological: the emergence of linear writing, and the kind of abstractions it allows for, is an event in time, in human history. Here is Leroi-Gourhan, who traces the anthropology of writing through it's begging in pictograms, through to ideograms and then symbolization proper:

"The invention of writing, through the device of linearity, completely subordinated graphic to phonetic expression, but even today the relationship between language and graphic expression is one of coordination rather than subordination. An image possesses a dimensional freedom which writing must always lack. It can trigger the verbal process that culminates in the recital of a myth, but it is not attached to that process; its context disappears with the narrator. ... It still prevails in the sciences, where the linearization of writing is actually an impediment, and provides algebraic equations or formulas in organic chemistry with the means of escaping from the constraint of one-dimensionality through figures in which phonetization is employed only as a commentary and the symbolic assemblage "speaks" for itself."

What's interesting about Leroi-Gourhan's approach is that he does not simply and reductively oppose the aesthetic with the rational, but rather finds within the aesthetic a rationality of it's own, which is then progressively constrained for the sake of higher order abstraction; thus he condemns thinking of pictograms as 'mere pictures'; speaking, for example, of the arrangement of figures in Paleolithic cave art, he writes, "What we have here therefore is not the haphazard representation of animals hunted, nor "writing," nor "imagery." Behind the symbolic assemblage of figures there must have been an oral context with which the symbolic assemblage assemblage associated and whose values it reproduced in space."

The larger point is that rationality and aesthetics belong on a continuum, or rather, that there is a kind of aesthetic that just is rationality, which, from the perspective of the aesthetic, does not signify some sort of inexplicable and miraculous break: "Through an increasingly precise process of analysis, human thought is capable of abstracting symbols from reality ... Writing thus tends toward the constriction of images, toward a stricter linearization of symbols." (Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech). Modeling relations, which rely on very precise inferential rules, are enabled by this historical progress of aesthetic linearization, without, for all that, playing into silly distinctions like 'inside and outside', 'naked and rational' or whatever pseudo-dichotomies you see fit to foist onto me.

We self-move; as biological creatures, we self-relate; we not only sustain ourselves metabolically, we seek ways to sustain that metabolism; movement being an evolutionary strategy to help organisms do exactly that (one imagines - my evolutionary history is fuzzy - that it begins in the sea, with the development of fin-like structures to regulate movement in water currents, before taking off from there).

But what I objected to was your invoking of aesthetics or sensibility as a naked foundation for anything... So the argument against aesthetics in particular is that that is already a socially constructed state of conception — apokrisis

Again, you keep charging me with 'opposing' this, that or the other; 'naked aeshtetics' vs, 'social construction', 'inwardness' and 'outwordness'; there are all silly dichotomies constructed solely by you, and then projected, with no foundation, onto me. I fully accept - and I have no idea what you think I don't other than to put it down once again to your lack comprehension - that we can speak of 'socially constructed aesthetics' or that even that all our 'inward feelings' or what have you are a product of public habit-formation, etc, etc - in fact I would insist upon it. But because you're working with an incredibly narrow notion of the sensorial, you keep projecting that limited understanding upon me and think that I hold to it. I really don't. If you're talking about a socially constructed aesthetics, you're still talking about aesthetics. But that's exactly what I've insisted upon this entire time. Aesthetics is not some 'base level' of existence upon which everything is founded upon - whatever that would even mean; it is, nonetheless, paradigmatic, in the proper sense of the word - it 'stands beside' (para in the Greek) everything, it co-accompanies even the most abstract rationalisms and formal systemics, without which they would be/do 'nothing', would have no efficacy, etc.

I agree with you about the idea that sensation cannot be simply stated and have it understood without the context of being a fully embodied being who already has sensations that could understand its context. However, to me that is simply a given. It is almost a tautology, though I guess it could be differentiated with some philosophies that may say that this is not the case. Anyways, I think this is simply begging-the-question because your answer to my response of how is it that we can explain sensation otherwise "it exists as a brute fact" is that we need to be a (proto or actual) organism to know what sensation is. That really only answers "what" can explain this, but not "what" sensation is. — schopenhauer1

We can try this on for size: sensation is the qualitiy of/for a certain kind of existence. Part of what motivates many of the criteria I stipulate is the fact that (spatio-temporal/bodily) differentiation (neither the environment we live in is purely symmetrical, and neither are the bodies we are) and interaction are all inherently qualitative, or rather, they 'processually qualitative'. Key here is movement; to move is not only to feel changes in oneself and in one's environment, it is to define what counts as self and environment in the first place. To move is to be individuated. Moreover, movement is inherently qualitative; Consider what Maxine Sheets-Johnstone writes about the inherent link between the qualities of movement which are the grounds for - what else - 'qualia':

"Any movement has a certain felt tensional quality, linear quality, amplitudinal quality, and projectional quality. In a very general sense, the felt tensional quality has to do with our sense of effort; the linear quality with both the felt linear contour of our moving body and the linear paths we sense ourselves describing in the process of moving; the amplitudinal quality with both the felt expansiveness or contractiveness of our moving body and the spatial extensiveness or constrictedness of our move- ment; the felt projectional quality with the way in which we release force or energy. Linear and amplitudinal qualities obviously describe spatial aspects of movement; tensional and projectional qualities obviously describe temporal aspects of movement, what we recognize as the felt intensity of our moving bodily energies and the felt manner in which we project those bodily energies — in a sustained manner, for example, in an explosive manner, in a punctuated manner, in a ballistic manner, and so on. Temporal aspects of movement are the result of the way in which tensional and projectional qualities combine; that is, the temporal quality of any movement derives from the manner in which any particular intensity (or combined intensities) is kinetically expressed.

On the way to spelling out the nature of these qualities more precisely, I should call specific attention to the fact that movement creates the qualities that it embodies and that we experience; thus it is erroneous to think that movement simply takes place in space, for example. On the contrary, we formally create space in the process of moving; we qualitatively create a certain spatial character by the very nature of our movement — a large, open space, or a tight, resistant space, for example. In effect, particular spatial designs and patterns come into play with self-movement, designs and patterns that have both a linear and amplitudinal quality. The predominant shifting linear designs of our moving bodies may be now curved (as when we bend over), now twisted (as when we turn our heads), now diagonal (as when we lean forward), now vertical (as when we walk), and so on; the predominant linear patterns we create in moving may be now zig-zag (as in a game of tag), now straight (as in marching), now circular (as when we walk around an object or literally ‘go in circles’), and so on". (Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement)

This is why I keep emphasizing the kinds of bodies that we are as key; to be a certain kind of body is to be a qualified body; it is not enough to speak about 'matter' on the one hand and 'sensation' on the other, rather, we are already the kind of bodies that are sensate bodies thanks to evolution and our ability to feel the world that is not only necessarily 'around us', but that we in some ways are. So I refuse to see 'sensation' as 'brute' or 'tautological'; this, to me, is spiritualist empty air, the same kind of which says things like 'God did it'; it explains nothing and leaves us with mysticism and posturing. To leave you with another quotation, consider Brian Massumi's words on the subject:

"When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time, It moves as it feels, and it feels itself moving. Can we think a body without this: an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation whereby each immediately summons the other? If you start from an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation, the slightest, most literal displacement convokes a qualitative dif­ference, because as directly as it conducts itself it beckons a feeling, and feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying, all in unquantifiable ways apt to unfold again in action, often unpredictably. Qualitative difference: immediately the issue is change." (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual)

I think the point is more that on can imagine, at least in principle, explaining say, algebra to a disembodied being (assuming which we could get round the fact that a disembodied being couldn't 'know' anything at all*); "if you take one 'x' and you put a little multiplication sign between that and another 'x' you get 2x." i.e. you manipulate a few symbols and voila, you've learnt something. Whereas with affectivity, you're kind of left with a proliferation of synonyms; at the very least, if they ask 'what is a feeling?', and you reply by suddenly shouting in their face and asking 'did you feel that?' That's what it is." Sensation is what one might call 'indexical' in this sense. It's like trying to explain what the word 'here' designates; 'here' is a kind of performance in space and time, an ostensive act, a gesture towards a spot; sensation analogously is a kind of 'life-performance', you 'need to be there' to 'get it' as well - but to 'be there' is to be the kind of being that can in the first place.

*This math example is incredibly contrived, I should note: having a sense of spatiality - itself derived from being a moving body - is foundational when it come to being able to understand mathematical concepts.

This is getting close to panpsychic ideas. — schopenhauer1

Not at all; I listed some quite specific conditions that need to be met for anything of the kind to occur: spatio-temporal and bodily differentiation, as well as self-other (environmental) interaction, primarily in the mode of movement; bodily differentiation itself is generally the result of phylogenetic developmental trajectories (i.e. evolution), with motility also being an evolutionary development in the service of sustaining a metabolism. The panpsychic thesis anything and everything has some mysterious measure of mind can... do nasty things to itself in the butt.

As for the notion of sensation being referential, this is not entirely surprising. If to partake of the sensuous is to meet (at least) the conditions above, then only a being of that kind would be able to make sense of the sensible. Evan Thompson, speaking in the context of the theory of autopoiesis, and employing Hans Jonas's dictum that "life can only be known by life", puts it nicely: "In observing other creatures struggling to continue their existence—starting with bacteria that actively swim away from a chemical repellent—we can, through the evidence of our own experience and the Darwinian evidence of the continuity of life, view inwardness and purposiveness as proper to living being. … The proposition that life can be known only by life is also a transcendental one in the phenomenological sense. It is about the conditions for the possibility of knowing life, given that we do actually have biological knowledge. One way to articulate this transcendental line of thought is as follows:

(1) To account for certain observable phenomena, we need the concepts of organism (in the Kantian sense of a self-organizing and immanently purposive whole) and autopoiesis. (2) The source for the meaning of these concepts is the lived body, our original experience of our own bodily existence. (3) These concepts and the biological accounts in which they figure are not derivable from some observer-independent, nonindexical, objective, physicochemical description … To make the link from matter to life and mind, from physics to biology and psychology, we needs concepts such as organism and autopoiesis, but these concepts are available only to a bodily subject with firsthand experience of its own bodily life.” (Thompson, Mind in Life).

So when cells respond to genetic messages, you would call this "affective" in a regular phenomenological sense? — apokrisis

Put it this way: the quality of affect (and affect is nothing but a quality) is determined by (among other things) bodily differentiation, developmental history and spatio-temporal differentiation in an environment (primarily enacted through movement). As such, the human experience of language - or rather human language tout court - is shaped by the fact that we are motile, kinesthetic, haptically sensitive and habit-engendered beings. As the work of those like George Lakoff and Jerome Feldman show, our ability to language is constitutively premised upon our bodily experiences; the body is not just a 'vehicle' of a speaking, rational being, but contitutively determines, depending on the kind of body it is, the way in which language is used and understood (this lies at the basis of Wittgenstein's intuition that even if a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand it; the affective, sensorial worlds of lions and humans are simply too different). Here is Feldman:

"There is now very strong evidence that essentially all of our cultural, abstract, and theoretical concepts derive their meanings by mapping, through metaphor, to the embodied experiential concepts we explored in earlier chapters ... By linking abstract language to embodied knowledge, we are able to tap into all of our rich experience of the world and social systems as the basis for inference." To the degree that bodily - that is, affective - knowledge is our 'first' source of knowledge, language itself is built off of this primary fund of corporeal meaning: " Each primary metaphor is directly grounded in everyday experience linking our (often sensory-motor) experience to our subjective judgements. For example, the primary conceptual metaphor Affection is warmth arises because our earliest experiences with affection correlate with the physical experience of the warmth of being held closely." (Feldman, From Molecule to Metaphor).

This is what it means to speak of language as a 'superior form of sensibility', and what I mean when I say that symbols regulate matter to the degree that they are of the sensuous. It's simply not enough to speak of symbol and matter without taking into account the absolutely crucial role that sensibility plays in language. Sensibility is the very condition by which symbols affect changes - that is, communicate, regulate. So to bring it back around, I imagine that cells, to the degree that they both are and exist in less differentially structured environments, and possess a smaller range of interactive possibilities, would similarly inhabit an affective world of far lower intensity than, say, a human, without simply being a material vehicle for semiotic manipulation (a hylomorphic formulation, which, like all hylomorphisms, ought to strike one as immediatly suspect).

So this is about orientation. You wave the banner of embodied cognition as if you are anti-the notion of symbolic abstraction being still part of nature. — apokrisis

No, this is you projecting again; as is consonant with your Hegelian drive to turn all distinction into opposition and all difference into dichotomy. My whole point is that 'symbolic abstraction' is very much a part of nature, and one can only stare blankly at your so-called commitment to the "continuity of nature" while consistently pitting nature and culture, sensibility and intelligibility against one another. Where you see division I simply see mutual function - no wonder then that every time I lay the emphasis on something you reflexively think I must somehow be 'against' it's opposite. But your psychological quirks have little to do with anything I write.

In any case, I have no issue with symbols regulating matter and so on, but what you seem to miss is that they can only ever do so on the condition of them being sensible. Symbols would be nothing - empty formalism - without their capacity to affect make an affective difference. I would suggest that your blinkeredness to this matter is simply a lack of education; your conflation of sensation and phenomenology (when, in actual fact, it is well known that phenomenology has often been pitted against the notion of sensation), as well as your conflation of aesthetics with the notion of the Platonic Idea of Beauty (when in fact, aesthetics has a far wider and far richer history than it's Platonic one, as designating the sphere of the sensuous as such) seem to bear this out. I would offer you suggestions for further reading, but you wouldn't follow them up anyway.

I think something like 'the great chain of being' ... is absolutely essential. ... Otherwise, there is no room for levels of meaning, levels of reality, or kinds of being. — Wayfarer

I guess my most immediate reaction would be: why should there be 'levels of being' at all? To what conceptual exigency does the idea of 'levels of being' respond to? The traditional answer is of course something like, 'because God', but then, this is a philosophically useless answer as far as I'm concerned.

Moreover, it simply doesn't follow that without a 'GCB' we can't speak of 'levels of meaning' or what have you. There are plenty of hierarchies in nature that aren't divinely mandated, and they formed through perfectly 'natural' means. Contrary to what Apo - who in his incessant, nasty desire to read what I write in the most uncharitable manner - thinks, I fully accept that there are little chains of nature strewn through and across the universe, chains which come and go, each with their own immanent dynamics.

What bothers me is the the 'Great' and the 'Being'; every time a gay person is told that their sexuality is 'unnatural', what conception of 'nature' do you think is at work here? When a woman is told that it's only 'natural' that she be submissive to her partner, which nature is being appealed to? One where 'everything has it's place in the divinely ordained order' of course. I'm only barely being polemical when I say I think these ideas are venomous.

And what do you think language is if not a (particular kind of) aesthetic phenomenon? To use language is to know-how to employ concepts and words in the same manner in which we begin to know-how to walk, see, climb. We feel our way around the world no less than we feel our way around the thickets of language. In the words of Emanuele Coccia, "language is a superior form of sensibility." There's much to say about language - if not culture itself - as a fundamentally digital (and hence self-reflexive, hierarchically structured) form of behavior, but again, there's no fundamental break from sensibility that digitality effects; not to mention that language, contrary to popular understanding, is primarily phatic - concerning intersubjective relations between speakers - rather than non-phatic - concerned with the relaying information between speakers (although the relations between the two are complicated). Language is edification, command, promise, hurt and exploration first, and 'communication' later.

Yes, because claiming that we are sensate bodies means to "invalidate humanity's roots in the cultural". Seriously, when you're done making shit up, get back to me.

What argument? You have the reading comprehension of a fifth grader who continually extrapolates things I don't say from the tiny snippets of things I do and then has the gall to ask why I'm not defending myself in the face of your interpretive ineptitude.

Ah yes, I must be like those pesky feminists, who, in fighting for the equality of women, must hate all men. The logic is undeniable, thanks Dave. #notallphilosophy

I mean honestly, if you've any ear at all for for the history of philosophy you'd know that the idea of the Great Chain of Being is just about the most 'unnatural' idea there is: it is literally a divinely ordained order which, like Wayfarer's dictum, posits the 'order of nature' as beyond - outside of - 'the nature of order'. If you think this jibes well with your naturalism, then either you're a terrible naturalist or a worse reader of philosophy.

Who said it was careless? The idea of the Great Chain of Being is possibly among the most philosophically damaging ideas ever espoused. Don't think I can be more unequivocal than that. But I guess equivocation is kind of your thing, like how this automatically means all notion of heirarcy ought to be expunged. But then, your powers of projection and equivocation are surely higher up on the heirarcy of blunt thoughtlessness than mine.

Ah yes, because my acerbic off-hand comment about an ancient philosopheme is no different to my position on hierarchies tout court. Methinks you no inference-mong so good.

So more like a philosophical appropriation or expression of politics, rather than a political appropriation of philosophy. — jamalrob

I don't know if 'appropriation' is the right word - all philosophies lend themselves to certain political emphases over others, and appropriation suggests a kind of exteriorly of politics from philosophy, which I think can't be maintained.

If you think all of your examples cannot be met with counter-examples, then you are hopelessly naive. — Thorongil

Oh please, you may as well start your own hashtag: #notallphilosophy. If you think the systemic tendencies of philosophical history are simply refuted by a few counter-examples, then your accusation of naivety is itself hopelessly misplaced. And like I said, I'm not just talking about idealism in the sense of 'it's all in my head', but any kind of philosophy which would seek to idealize some aspect of reality over others as being the Really True Thing That Does All Of The Stuff Unilaterally, including atoms, spirit, Prime Movers, or, when it comes to the human, DNA and brain.

For instance, you seem to be appealing to nature and yet railing against hierarchical organisation. — apokrisis

Funny, I don't believe I've used the word hierarchy once in this conversation, but feel free to conjure up disagreements as you are consistently wont to do.

What political appropriation? If you think classical philosophy hasn't had it in for the body, if you think it hasn't constantly and repeatedly devalued sensation, if you think it hasn't, time and time again, denigrated the value of manual labour, if you think it hasn't consistently placed women in an inferior position to men, if you think it hasn't striven after the timeless and the eternal, and if you think these things are merely incidental to any philosophy which would 'find the cause of nature outside of nature' or somesuch, then either you've a poor grasp of the history of philosophy, or you're OK with those sorts of positions. These things are not 'political appropriations' - they're written right into the fabric of those philosophies. When someone says "this limited, tiny sphere of being is what I think matters more than anything else' (be it spirit or molecules or God), then by definition everything else is of a lesser value.

That time and time again what seems to 'matter' is what so happens to shore up the status quo is not just a happy accident. When, in the Great Chain of Being, women are placed a step or two above animals, but not so high as man, it doesn't exactly take a ingenious act of creative 'political appropriation' to translate into societal doctrine. And I say this about any doctrine of reductionism, into which I include idealism (it's in the damn name) no less than base materialisms.

If I may: I don't disagree with this, but I think there's another side to the story, which is that materialism has not--at least not so many have noticed--managed to correct "the chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism". Actually existing materialism demonstrates all the faults that Wayfarer criticizes: it is crudely reductionist, it erases meaning, and it renders human beings as passive billiard balls rather than as active agents--thus it is just as supportive of the status quo as the philosophico-religious tradition you rightly rail against. — jamalrob

True :( But at least now not even the science is on the side of the crude materialists; this is manifestly not enough of course, but that we can be educated on this stuff is the minimal, crude hope that I hold out.

You're reading many things into my posts that I never say. Any religious philosophy would say that 'nature doesn't contain it's own cause' (although, perhaps oddly, I'm not actually advocating theism). It's simply an observation about the limitations of naturalism, as such: that the things, entities, forces, forms of energy, which can be counted, quantified and measured, don't account for the order of nature; that the 'order of nature' is something different to 'the nature of order'. And from that, you get 'the divine right of kings' and repression of women? — Wayfarer

Yes, exactly right - religious philosophy, which has been instrumental in repressing the status of woman around the globe, and well, the 'divine' in 'divine right of kings' should tell you just how close that connection is. I'm not saying that you've said any of this - perhaps the chief problem is exactly that you haven't, that you don't recognize, in the horrible idea that "the order of nature' is something different to the 'nature of order', the lodestone of almost every and all justification of brutality and socio-political repression in history; a denial of agency and ethical responsibility - other than, of course, to the autocratic dictates of the so-called 'order of nature'.

I'm not just making this up - read up on the history of these ideas and the way they have been put to use - read something like Susan Moller Okin's Women in Political Thought or John Protevi's Political Physics, or Adriana Cavarero's In Spite of Plato, and see how the focus on the Ideal has came at the price of women, of manual labour, of the entire realm of the aesthetic - on basically the underprivileged and anyone who isn't a well off white dude.

Not with an attitude like that.

Check out something like Mark Johnston's The Meaning of the Body or Maxine Sheets-Johnston's The Roots of Thinking. Deleuze and Levinas have also written some wonderful things about this, but I would not expect that'd you'd ever read them.

You frequently treat my posts with loathing and disdain. What I am advocating is not venomous, it's not regressive or any of the other negative epiphets you describe it with. I don't want to get into a slanging match - if you have a founded criticism of my views then I would be open to it- but I really think it is simply prejudice. — Wayfarer

But they are, they really are - just because you don't see it doesn't mean these ideas aren't fucking horrible. I can honestly think of no more morally repugnant and irresponsible idea than the notion that "nature doesn't contain its own cause." Have you ever once stopped for a moment to think about the implications of this idea? Can you imagine a more repressive statement for the affirmation of the status quo? The divine right of kings, which held humanity down in the shitter for so long, is nothing less than this idea. The idea that women are inferior, that sex is dirty, that the body is base, that manual labour isn't valuable, that white people are better than the rest of the world, all these ideas and more have found their basis in the awful, disgusting notion that 'nature doesn't contain it's own cause'. It's vile, a repudiation of any possible happiness other than what is mandated by some extra-natural Idea which would, if it could, make the world itself disappear so as to be frozen in the image of of Timeless Beautiful Utopia where no actual things ever happen. It's a hateful, inhuman idea.

But is reductive modelling - the familiar division into generals and particulars, concepts and percepts, theories and measurements - a bad thing or the natural thing?

I argue that this philosophical/scientific practice is simply a formalisation, a conscious refinement, of how minds already work. We break the world apart into its formal structures and material events for a very good reason. This is how modelling works. — apokrisis

As we've been through elsewhere, I simply don't put all that much stock into this epistemology. I acknowledge it's usefulness - for the sake of science in particular - but I'm far more interested in other modes of knowledge which of which I think modelling is fundamentally parasitic upon. To use a reference you're familiar with, I take as symptomatic Robert Rosen's point that the very construction of the modelling relation cannot itself be entailed by anything in particular - he refers to it, specifically and often, as an art. This is not an accidental use of the term. As someone who believes in the primacy of the aesthetic as a grounds for knowledge, modelling relations constitute a highly constrained - that is, particular - form of knowledge, whereas my own interests lie in the direction of a more general understanding of what it is to know. We are sensate bodies long before we are inference-mongering, reflexive intellects.

Tied up in this are other, more philosophical considerations too; when you acknowledge the procrustean nature of the modelling relation, part of what this entails is never putting the nature of the 'questioning subject' itself into question. You say that it's enough to be 'aware' of it; I think we can do much more. Philosophy simply has a wider mandate than what is legislated for by science, and I think it's an artificial, artifactual limitation that would seek to constrain it's exploration to modelling relations alone. Not to mention that too often, reductive epistemologies are uncritically and naively projected into the world itself, making it all to easy to mistake method for reality. This is to say nothing of the socio-political and ethical considerations that might come into play with respect to who can be said to legitimately possess knowledge. There are just too many shoals upon which one can wreck oneself if one simply sticks uncritically to modelling relations as a paradigm of knowledge.

It's not 'hatred and fear of the world' but recognition and acknowledgement that nature doesn't contain its own cause. That is what is behind scepticism of the 'sensory domain' which according to reductionist philosophies is the only reality. The Allegory of the Cave is as apt now as when it was written. — Wayfarer

If by apt you mean the most irreparably destructive and philosophically regressive force of the last 2000 years, then sure. Hiding a noxious resentment of reality - generally coupled with a healthy hatred for the body, manual labour, temporality, and women (whatever doesn't reek with the stench of socio-economic privilege really) - behind a slogan doesn't make it any less venomous.

If I may, this is why speaking of reductionism in terms of context invariance can be so powerful: it defines a formal interpretive gesture that doesn't take for granted the 'nature' of the 'stuff' that everything else is being 'reduced' to. Whether it be mind or God's will or primordial stuff, the entire way of thinking is suspect from the get-go. Idealism and base materialism are just two sides of a rotten coin: in each case one aspect of reality is idealised over the rest, granted True Reality or some such nonsense which is more or less the defining gesture of metaphysics as such. Derrida's whole shtick about 'the metaphysics of presence' is about nothing else. In every case, the tangibility, the 'reality' and efficacy of the real, the here and now, is denied and referred to an (transcendent?) elsewhere which is meant to hold the 'key' to everything else.

If I'm feeling particularly 'reductive', the whole history of philosophy is more or less the history of a hatred and fear of the world, an attempt, in its search for 'first principles' and so on, to deny the sticky, messy substance of the world. That's the dark side of what it means to be defined as 'footnotes to Plato'.

Yep, same shit, different name.

I dunno, the whole hardware/software/projection just seems like a misplaced metaphor to me. It's not useful to speculate upon just-so stories like that.

Most definitions of reductionism are terrible, and tend to resolve into some sort of useless tautology; "reductionism means that everything can be reduced to..."; To treat reductionism rigorously however, is to recognize that 'reductionism' simply means context invarience. It says: here is an explanation of the thing, and this explanation holds irrespective of context. Reductionism means explaining the thing from the inside-out, and never the outside-in, hence the reductionist refrain, "such and such is only....

Thus, if 'material reductionism' means that 'things can only be explained in terms of material phenomena "(atoms, molecules, synapses, etc)", this in turn means that atoms, molecules, synapses and so on function as they do (however they do) irrespective of context. This is demonstrably, scientifically, false, at every level. Each and every one of these so-called 'primitive elements' have behavior which is profoundly context-sensitive. As such, despite the usual cries of science as being 'reductionist', the actual science of nature evinces no such thing. Reductionism is thus not just 'unscientific', but frankly anti-scientific - and it is so because it imports assumptions which are not empirical. As Isabelle Stengers says, science, as an empirical study ought to never say "such and such is only", but rather "this..., but in other circumstances that ... or yet again that..."

Nobody who knows anything about thermodynamics or synaptic plasticity could ever, in good faith, subscribe to the idea that phenomena in those fields can be explained only on the basis of atoms, molecules, or synapses. If anything, the triumph of contemporary science is to show how wrong was the emphasis on context-insensitivity in classical, Newtonian-influenced science. The very fact that 'atoms' are grouped together with 'molecules' in the OP (molecules being atomic compounds with properties very different from the elements which make them up), should show, on it's own, just how arbitrary and trivial is any demarcation between the 'primoridal elements' and 'epiphenomena' or what have you.

Ironically, I suspect those who want to save the idea of spirit or other mystical woo would prefer if science is the reductionist project of the 18th century, if only to carve out a little breathing room for their own immaterial phantoms.

What I am trying to get at is that it seems to me that without asymmetry there is no entropy and without entropy there is no asymmetry. — John

Yes, this is what we discussed, remember? Entropy plays necessity to the contingencies of asymmetries. You were asking after what could account for negentropic eddies, and I said it was precisely the play of necessity and chance, each given 'body' by entropy and material asymmetries, respectively.