Introduction to the Real; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 7

As real as it gets...really.

In the last post we learned from Brassier and Laruelle of the decision made by philosophers who make a division between something called "the real" and "the ideal" whereby empirical reality ("the real") gets moved into ideality by transcendental functions of the mind. This decision can most easily be traced to Kant's Critiques. We then bracketed this decision from the attempt to understand the real after the explanation of this decision. What then is "the real" independent of this correlation between empirical and transcendental conditions? Laruelle defines it as the "real of the last instance." We gave it a preliminary definition; "It's reality before it hits the fact that we are always-already thinking." In other words, it's whatever "is" independent of the fact that we are ideal beings. This post will be an attempt at an introduction to "the real" defined through Brassier and Laruelle. It will be an expansion of the "real of the last instance" which we elaborated on in the last post. Brassier starts this off in a distinction between objectivity and objectification. "'Objectivity' can be redefined to index the reality which subsists independently of conditions of objectification tethered to transcendental subjectivity, whether the latter be called 'Dasein' or 'Life.' What is original in Laruelle's work is in defining conditions under which thinking does not intend, reflect, or represent its object but rather mimes its unobjectifable opacity insofar as the latter is identical-in-the-last-instance with a real which is 'foreclosed' to objectification." This passage is enormously helpful in further understanding Laruelle's "real in the last instance" concept. At first Brassier distinguishes "objectivity" independent of "objectification" meaning that the real is independent of the mind taking something from something called "the real" and doing something with it. The word "objectivity" indexes reality independent of being's objectification of the former. It belongs to itself independent of all the abstractions nominated for the human being whether that be the Heideggerian concept of the being that is there, or the basic concept of an all encompassing spiritual-teleological life form enveloping the world. "The real" has nothing to do with these concepts. There must be more to "the real" though besides these gestures of de-objectification. We find this in the concept of the "real of the last instance." This real of the last instance is a place where thinking intends nothing nor does it reflect on anything. It does nothing, but it's there. It doesn't see an object for itself (like we would like to ascribe generally to the mind) and then take this object and represent it in mirror-form for us. The real in the last instance doesn't do what we think it does. Thinking as the real in the last instance "mimes its unobjectifiable opacity." Lets pause for a second to understand this. Reality is unobjectifiable and opaque. This "last instance" is not a matter of knowing anything about this last instance and hence is unobjectifiable because it's not matter of knowledge (epistemology). Thinking mimes this non-matter. It imitates what doesn't matter. It imitates what was never a problem for matter. The real in the last instance as "unobjectifiable opacity" is "foreclosed" to objectification. So whatever thinking is doing in this real in the last instance, it's not objectifying. Rather, Brassier gives us the verb of "mime" to describe the behavior of thought in this foreclosed reality. Brassier leads us to a concept of the mind that is imitating what is completely inimitable. Thus for Laruelle, "It is though we were to insist that the 'matter' of materialism should cognize itself and be capable of its own theorisation without having to pass through dialectical identity or some other philosophical apparatus designed to ensure the reversibility between the known object and the knowledge of the object." Matter happens to thought. Thought mimes the material which means absolutely nothing to us. The philosopher comes up with the idea that the mind "grabs" the material and puts it into ordered categories. This is the presumptive decision of the philosopher discussed in the last post. Thought "in the last instance" is merely something that mimes something that's unobjectifiable which is at an absolute distance from a "philosophical apparatus" that would create a dialectic between the real and ideal. Rather, there is no dialectic at all between the real and ideality. This is what is referred to as "identity without unity." "Identity without unity and duality without distinction are the hallmarks of determination-in-the-last-instance insofar as its structure is that of what Laruelle calls a 'unilateral duality.' By effectuating a unilateral duality between thought and thing, determination-in-the-last-instance manifests a non-correlational adequation between the real and ideal without re-incorporating the former within the latter, whether through the machinery of symbolic inscription or the faculty of intellectual intuition." Identity (ideality) happens to being not because of some unity to something that happened before it. Ideality was an occasional circumstance that happened that has no unity expect to itself which expresses "things." Nonetheless, we see "thing" and our "thinking" of the material thing that has no matter whatsoever. Seeing these two things though doesn't mean that there is a connection between the two. Because "thinking" sees something called "thing" that ostensibly happened to it, doesn't mean that this "thing" actually exists, nor does it mean that "thought" had anything to do with making this material into its own form. While there is certainly a duality for us in terms of making the assumption that there was a causality for our objectifying nature, this has nothing to do with the unilateral operation that happened on its own. The real is not ideal. No matter how much thinking at the very most mimes the nothing of the real, this miming has nothing to say about the real because the real by its very nature doesn't say anything. At the very most, thought comes to represent the real through symbols and even thinks itself the function that the real has to go through (absolute idealism). Thought thinks itself privy to something it can never know about. While this is a feature of thinking, this doesn't mean anything for the real. Because thought thinks it can distinguish between reality and ideality, doesn't mean that whatever is called "reality" is anything. "The real" is always at an absolute distance. The distance is so absolute that we understand Lacan's insistence in synonymizing it with "the impossible."

We have a couple different concepts happening here. We have "determination-in-the-last-instance" along with "unilateral duality." To be more specific, "determination-in-the-last-instance" is "unilateral duality." We have to be careful in describing this because of how easy it is to present a correlative sense to the process that is trying to be described. Fortunately, Brassier is very careful in his logic and words when describing this process. "Unilateralization is foreclosed to reflection: it can only be effectuated non-thetically, that is to say, non-auto-positionally. Being-nothing does not distinguish itself from being; it is not transcendent...it is not the real which causes thought, but rather objectifying transcendence. Thus determination-in-the-last-instance requires objectifying transcendence even as it modifies it." The unilateral process that happens to the occasioned subject is not open to reflection. Thought can't reflect on the unilateral process because it was never remembering anything in the process. It didn't exist as a "mind" (we will see the phenomenological function of memory in the next chapter with Brasser's account of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition.). Unilateralization doesn't happen from a "position." We are in a "position" as beings but reality is never in a position precisely because it's not beings. If we allow Heidegger to call being the being that is there, then we understand ourselves as positional beings. We are always somewhere looking around for something to do. This is our absolute limits. Reality though is not in a position where it's somewhere looking around for something to do. It's form isn't the form of the occasional Dasein. This is what Brassier means when he says "being-nothing does not distinguish itself from being." Reality knows nothing of us and we know nothing of it precisely because knowledge is not a matter for reality and is a matter for us. The salient point to be understood is that if we want to encounter whatever is ostensibly called "the real," it can't come from the classical sense of "who we are," meaning the positional-being well-elaborated by Heidegger in Book 1 of Being and Time. Reality doesn't matter. At the very least, when encountering "the real," it doesn't come from a position and obviously doesn't take a position. As was stated above, it's unilateral and we can further understand this by understanding that it's absolutely affirmative. It doesn't listen to anyone nor does it respond to anyone consciously. It happens on its own without the habit of memory getting in the way (the minds differentiation from reality comes fundamentally from memory and memory alone which we will go into in a future post). "The real" is not pacifistic, nor literally and figuratively understanding. It's totalitarian. We can infer micro-biological reactions in the process of unilateralization but these reactions wouldn't be dialectical and would only be our observations of the real of the unilateral. A question abounds. What is the real (as unilateral) under the guise of observation? More specifically what is the real to consciousness which is no longer dialectical? How much can "the real" still be understood even when the logic of "unilateral duality" usurps dialectical logic? At the very least, we understand that it's transcendence that causes thought, not what we call "material reality." Thought happens to itself. "Reality" doesn't cause thinking. Curiously though, "for thinking to effectuate the foreclosure of its real cause, it must be occasioned by its ideal cause." In other words, the only way we can know that we can't know about "reality" is by the transcendence of thought "letting us know" that we can't know anything called "the real" that we nonetheless ask about. Ideality provides the foundation for our asking of questions that are not a matter of the question-answer dialectic. At the same time though, sense is in thought. We have the sense to understand that while ideality has opened up the possibility of the foreclosure of "the real," we have enough sense to not keep asking questions about something called "the real," but instead to follow "the real" in its unilateral process without asking questions. In this sense, thought opens us to "the real" to be exactly what it's not; a miming dialectical representation of what we call "the real." This doesn't mean that we are in some sort of Hegelian circularity between the real and the ideal where thought would realize itself as what it's not. Instead no distinction is being made in what we call "the real" which happens to be "the real." "The real" doesn't stop for an answer nor listen to what "everyone has to say." It moves on without distinction from what the memory distinguishes as the past. Memory will serve as the difference to "the real." It will serve as the sole difference to "the real" which complicates thinking's being able to think unilateralization because it always remembers something from the past which makes it stop and reflect. The problem and explanation of memory will come in one of the next two posts.

The Decision; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 6

Lacan's constipation in trying to understand the real; 6:10 - 7:15

In the last post we ended off by saying "..we can make a good guess at where Brassier is headed; a non-correlation between between being and thought." We will understand this non-correlative thought more concretely through his elaboration of Francois Laruelle. We need to understand Brassier's theoretical acquaintance with Laruelle to fully understand the salient point of Laruelle's "non-philosophy," which will guide us to non-correlationism. There is much to gain from Laurelle's "non-philosophy" that comes across as a giant step for philosophy once fully understood. Laruelle identifies an essence of philosophy that leads him to analyze how philosophers think. Instead of coming up with a philosophical system in distinction and reference to previous philosophers, he instead analyzes how philosophers think. This analysis is a great step forward because of its originality and power. Laruelle does not rely on psychological concepts to define the philosophical thinker that tend to be turgid in description and lacking in precise rigor nor concepts of logic that would presume all the possibilities for philosophical thought. Instead, he finds one basic premise that every philosophers starts off at. What he finds is something he calls "the decision." As philosophers trying to understand something called "the real," this decision implicitly made by philosophers needs to be understood and open to bright lighting. Brassier explains Laruelle's position as such: "Every decision divides immanence between an empirical datum which it supposes as given through the a priori factum, and a transcendental immanence which it has to invoke as already given in order to guarantee the unity of a presupposed factum and a posited datum." First, lets understand the concept of "immanence." We understand immanence as a state of being within. The "real" of what is happening within is trying to be understood by philosophers. Now, a decision is made to how this immanence is to be understood. The implicit decision is a division between an outside and an inside. "The real" happens by a dialectical logic for the philosopher. This stems most notably from German idealism but find it's way into the neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology in the early 20th century. We first have an empirical datum which we only first come to know through a priori categories elaborated systematically in Kant's first Critique. We come to know this empirical datum through transcendental categories of the mind that synthesize this "hyletic data" into human conception. The unity of what is presupposed as already having to happen and what is posited by the human being naturally is a theoretical structure decided on by the philosopher. What is happening is an attempt by a philosopher at an explanation of pure causation between outside and inside. This correlation says very simply that "I can think and talk about something because something outside of myself happened to me that gave me the impulse to talk about this very thing that I'm positing, but I only know this thing to be outside of myself as I'm talking about it because I'm first able to think about it." What's privileged in this pseudo-steam of conscious statement is a synthetic causation between outside and inside; that I'm able to think only because something happened to me from outside of myself. Laruelle identifies three "distinct structural moments" which constitute this decision. First, there's an inventory of a priori's established by philosophers. These a priori conditions of experience are understood in Kant's first Critique as "transcendental categories." The most obvious one is the transcendental aesthetic that places space and time as the experiential grounds for the causal movement into concept (The Idea). Secondly, there is the "gathering-together" (synthesis) of a prioris by a single transcendental category. This synthesis is "said to be 'transcendental' then because it is supposed to exceed experience absolutely..." This transcendental synthesis then exists beyond the conditions of experience. This we can call the "correlative mechanism" that moves the conditions of experience happening to something other than itself into conceptualization (the Idea). Laruelle refers to this as the pure phenomenological Ego in Husserl's Phenomenology; "pure," meaning we have no choice that our mind synthesizes everything that is ostensibly happening outside of it. Thirdly, we have a unification of the single transcendental synthesis with the a priori categories of synthesis, meaning we see how the conditions of experience were understood through an extra-empirical mechanism of a single "gathering-together" mechanism. We make the connection (correlation) between the idea that there were things outside of ourselves that first needed to be the case and things inside of ourselves that had to be the case to make sense of what was outside of us. We remember this synthesis of rationalism and empiricism specifically in Kant's Critique when he states, "There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience...But though all our knowledge begins with experience it does not follow that it all arises out of experience." In other words, just because knowledge had a place where it first began for us, doesn't mean that this first place constitutes all of what makes knowledge necessary. For Kant, it arises out of the transcendental faculty unifying the conditions of experience. But lets keep something in mind in this analysis of Kant. Kant was specifically focused on epistemology, i.e. knowledge. So his analysis was always in reference to knowledge for us. Now, just because something happened to us where we happen to gain something called "knowledge," doesn't mean that this exteriority to ourselves is a matter of knowledge in itself. Certainly all experience can't be accounted for as a reference for us. We certainly only see experience for us, but we should also see that seeing experience for us is a relative "function" of something we happen to call "experience." The philosophers "real" is understood not through an empirical or contingent sense but through the sense that makes Ideas possible in the first place (knowledge). For the philosopher, the decision is made that reality conditions ideality without interest into how "the real constitutes itself." "The decisional complex of transcendence, immanence, and the transcendental is ultimately determined by unobjectifiable immanence which Laruelle identifies with 'the real.'"

Now that we have analyzed the decision the philosopher makes when trying to understand "the real," we can bracket out this philosophical decision when trying to understand something called "the real." "By suspending the premise that decision co-constitutes the real, thought comes to realize that it can have a relation to a real instance which is neither empirically presupposed nor transcendentally posited as determining, but defined by thought as already-determined and determining for it - a 'real of the last instance' in accordance with which thought can approach the circle of transcendental synthesis from a place which is 'always-already' outside of it." We can understand what we call "the real" then not in terms of a correlation between an empirical and transcendental decision made by philosophers that always must be in reference to our possibility, but the fact that thought is already determined independent of a theoretical system that would like to account for it. It's the case that we are already thinking. Kant's system isn't needed to understand "the real." In a certain sense this a return to the Cartesian method with a specific injuction not to move into the Kantian decision. We know in the "real of the last instance" that we are thinking beings and what happened "before" this is "always-already" outside of thought's purview. We know at the very least that we are always and already thinking. But what is this "real of the last instance?" It's reality before it hits the fact that we are always-already thinking. More precisely, it's the moment we are thinking at that exact moment we are thinking (without necessarily knowing we are thinking. Again, this "real" is at a distance from epistemology). The last instance of "the real" is already a thought, but it's at a shorter distance than the system built by Kant and Hegel to establish how thought came to be. It's this division from System that allows to find something called a "real in the last instance." Still, what is happening in this "real in the last instance, if anything at all?" At the very least, we know that "the use of the modifiers 'already' and 'without' in describing the 'real of the last-instance' is effectively shorthand for 'non-decisional.'" In other words, when we understand the "the real" in terms of having no choice in what happens, we understand that we make no decision in what happens to us, nor does "the real" assume some mystical/spiritual position that already makes decisions specifically for us. Neither what we call "the real," nor what we understand as Kantian synthesizing acts of the mind make decisions. "The real" happens independent of a decision. It happens in it's own way independent of what we would philosophically understand to be a "teleological presupposition." Lets let Laruelle speak for himself here. "To the extent that philosophy exploits 'transcendence' or 'being' in a privileged and dominant manner [...] the essence of transcendence or being according to their philosophical usage is the 'auto,' that is to say, the idea of philosophy's absolute autonomy in the form of a circle, of a self-reference such as becomes apparent in the dimensions of auto-donation and auto-position." From this, we understand that Laruelle sees the decision of the philosopher as privileging concepts of "being" and "transcendence" which is the essence of philosophy. What these concepts entail is a use of the concept "auto," meaning that the concept of being for example means that something automatically happens without decision. But this is what we understood above as Laruelle's non-philosophy. We understood it as non-decisional. We must distinguish between "auto-position" and "non-auto-decision." When Laruelle understands the decision made by Kantian and post Kantian philosophy, it's in the circularity between what's given (donated) and the position taken from the donation. Heidegger for example puts us in the position of the being of Being who thinks its own finitude by the modality of temporality. We are automatically in a position in other words with Heidegger's privileged-subjectivity . The idea conveyed by Laruelle in the form of a non-decisional non-philosophy is different from being put into an automatic position of being. The idea of non-decisionality obviates the correlation between subjectivity and objectivity as a duality (dialectical logic) in the first place. While Phenomenology would lay out what automatically happens to us without us having any knowledge of it, this non-decisional non-philosophy has no idea of "something happening to us automatically." This makes sense in the context of a "real in the last instance" because we are not yet at something we can identify as "being us." As was stated above, we are at a smaller distance with the "real in the last instance" than the system being constructed for the possibility of thought by Kant and Hegel. While "auto-positional" puts us in an automatic position we cant escape ("being"), "non-decisional" doesn't make available the philosophical decision to put us in an automatic place at all.

This analysis of the philosopher's decision relative to understanding "the real" will help us with understanding what Laruelle will specifically refer to as "the real" in the next post. Bracketing out the philosopher's decision of having to see "the real" in terms of a synthesis between ostensible empirical and transcendental conditions is a giant step for thought being able to think something called "the real" without the history of philosophy weighing so heavily on it.

Thinking and Being; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 4

Thinking about being....and botox. (Picture has nothing to do with the post)

In the last post, we finished by saying that Brassier would establish the thought of anti-correlationism by understanding the nuanced logic given by Quentin Meillassoux in regards to the principle of absolute contingency. This is established through Mellisassoux's "figures of factuality." Brassier will establish Meillassoux's "figures of factuality" in order to further establish the logic of anti-correlationist thought then. In this post we will go into the third figure under the name of the "inconstancy of nature." We will go into this because this is where the idea of anti-correlationism finds difficulty in establishing the anti-correlationist "perspective" it wishes to achieve. Firstly though, Brassier sites Meillasoux's nuanced argument in regards to the impossibility of contradiction which breaks the "law of contradiction" from giving certain and definite outcomes to phenomena in general (providing the first principle for contingency). The argument goes like this: "If something is at once what it is and what it is not, then it cannot undergo transformation for it is already what's not...a contradictory element always exists as what it's not. It remains self-identical in being-other than itself". In other words, contradiction exists so it's not a contradiction since it has an identity. There is no contradiction if it already exists. Even if we think of something right now, and can think of its contradiction, this contradiction already exists. At the very most, one can say that 'two specific things exist at a difference from one another' but even in this statement the subject is already defined as 'two specific things' and being predicated in difference from one another. In regards to Hegel's original perspective on this, "absolute identity is capable of sustaining contradiction, since only the absolute can be identity of sameness and alterity." What is "wholly other" is already identified as just that, "otherness." Its nature is solidified in the identity of what's not, which already exists in being what's not. With that being said, the absolute envelopes the possibility of any contradiction by understanding that everything is always identified. What is contrary to what is happening is identified as a contrary nature, so this contrary nature simple exists as what is already not happening right now for instance. This argument for the non-possibility of contradiction is in order to establish the next point in Meillassoux's principles of factiality which is the necessary existence of contingency. This principle will make the correlationist's attempts at understanding being through thinking difficult. This argument goes something like this: 1. the weak interpretation,"if and only if something exists, then it exists contingently" and 2. the strong interpretation, "that it is absolutely necessary that contingent entities exist." Brassier explains the infinite regress involved in the weak interpretation of the necessity of contingency which always relies on the idea of "existence," making contingency relative to something called "existence." When trying to prove existential contingency though, one will have to put the idea of "existence" in the contingency bracket itself. This will ultimately lead to the strong interpretation where regardless of something called "existence," contingency still exists (relative to whatever "entities" mean. "Entities" and "existence" need to be explained further.) The regress that manifests from the "if and only if something exists" in the weak argument is nullified when the contingency no longer is concomitant with the idea of "existence." So far then we have a non-contradictory contingency of phenomena that is being established by Meillassoux. In this sense, contingency is absolutely necessary. But is this statement included in a realism of non-contradictory contingency? If not, is this where the "speculative" in "speculative realism" finds its place? If it is, then "speculative realism," like phenomenology, is still a descriptive science. These problems we will move onto in this post with the third figure of factiality nominated as the "inconstancy of nature." Here we will run into problems with the anti-correlationist's hopes of absolute dissociation.

The idea of the "inconstancy of nature" is to further dissociate our experience from "what's really happening" thereby fulfilling the realist interpretation. There's no better place to start understanding this anti-correlationist perspective than in Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, specifically with his billiard ball example. Brassier explains it as such; "We cannot assume that any particular occurrence of AB - where A and B are bound together by contiguity, priority, and conjunction - instantiates a universal principle of causation...Hume's response is that our belief in causality and inductive inference more generally is merely a function of the association of ideas, and hence a psychological habit, nothing more. But habit does not provide a rational warrant for the inductive inference that the instance AB instantiates a universal law whereby it must follow A." To make this example more clear, lets establish the actual thought experiment that Hume made regarding billiard balls. When we see a billiard ball being hit into another billiard ball, we presume that the second billiard ball (B) reacted from it being hit by the first one (A) (This principle of causality is obviously established as "Law of Motion" for Newton). Hume assumes this much of the billiard balls in his thought experiment; 1. that they are in a position of contiguity (proximity), 2. that they are in a position of priority meaning that one ball is before another ball, and 3. that they are in a position of conjunction meaning that they are being perceived as being together. What's important to understand in these axiomatic relationships between billiard balls with this thought experiment is the fact that relationships first have to be perceived. But this is a problem for anti-correlationism that wants to firmly establish the dissociation between perception and reality. But if they follow Hume closely, they see that no matter how much it may be the case (high frequency) that "B follows from A", it isn't the case that this will always be the case, hence making this law of causality not a law because it can't be established universally. But who's establishing laws universally? We are establishing laws universally; The same "we" who perceive reality and are not reality. Maybe the contention put forward by anti-correlationism ought to be more in line with the desire to create laws in general. Newtons Laws of Motion are based on our never-ending perception of what always happens in experience. Newton took that much for granted in that there are beings that have to have perceptive phenomena in order to establish something like a universal law. The anti-correlationist has to think to themselves that this taking for granted of perceptual beings is a natural argument in favor of idealism. In other words, being never has to think that it's perceiving in order to perceive and ultimately come up with ideas. When Brassier states that the perception of billiard balls ostensibly showing a universal law is a "psychological habit, nothing more," what is the impetus behind seeing psychological habits as simply as "nothing more." Mental habits exists. That the association of ideas becomes a habit is something that exists. That this is then taken and nominated as a transcendental category is something else. Even if we eliminate this Kantian impulse to put habit into a transcendental category, the habit of perception still exists. Even if we nullify the universal laws understood by Newton, it's still the case that being will see things in high or low probabilities and instinctively react to these probabilities. But for Brassier and Meillassoux, these are all our presumptions, and that is the salient point in this thought experiment of dissociation. The unstated inference by correlationism is the one whereby the correlationist infers from the claim that "science's representation of reality requires the uniformity of nature the quite distinct claim that this uniformity - and hence the laws of nature- is necessary." In other words, because we (being) happen to represent nature in a uniform manner, doesn't mean that we can then make the leap to say that our representation is necessary and always the case. The difference here is between uniformity and necessity. For example, because phenomena happen all the time in high probabilities doesn't mean that it's necessarily the case that this high probability will always happen (necessarily). But this subtle distinction assumes a sort of quasi-metaphysical space for "necessity." If this is the case, then the concept of "necessity" will need to transcend its own conceptual limitations into the sphere of the arche-fossil for example. It will have to presume that what happened in the dispossessed time of the arche-fossil was necessarily contingent. While we can't assume uniformity to this arche-time, we also can't assume non-uniformity (contingency) to this time. In other words, the idea of the "necessity of contingency" has to allow for the possibility for uniformity in a time before the nervous system. This needs to be emphasized. The necessity of contingency ought not to entail a conception of a chaotic universe, but simply a conception of the universe that is completely unknowable, whose contingency could be uniform or chaotic or anything else that comes to the imagination of the thinker who can never know the contingency. For our representation though, we can't assume that uniformity is always necessary, solely because the concept of necessity "transcends" representative being. That everything can always be the case denies the possibility of uniformity, regardless of how much uniformity may always happen to us. In this sense, there's no problem with Kant's (correlationism's) transcendentalism as long as it knows that representable knowledge is always in reference to us. But this fact ought to be a harbinger for not being so interested in everything in reference to us (This is a simple question to put forward: "Why are we so interested in everything in reference to ourselves?"). By this principle of contingency, we (being) are not necessary, so why are we so interested with what happens to us? Brassier asks "Is uniformity a real feature of things-in-themselves or merely a phenomenal illusion generated by our relation to things?" The salient point for Brassier is establishing us (being) as "merely" contingent. The "merely" speaks for itself and instinctively guides the desire to wedge being from the arch-fossil.

Now the problem appears. Brassier establishes the fact that Meillassoux has established the diachronicity between thinking and being by destabilizing the necessity of uniformity that being and correlationism establishes for itself. What is left? There is a speculative opportunity that has not been reached yet for Meillassoux: "Thus, as Meillassoux sees it, the outstanding task yet to be accomplished by modern philosophy is a speculative explicitation of the dimension of diachronicity which subtends the Galilean hypothesis. It is philosophy's failure to recognize the speculative implications of science's Copernicanism which has resulted in the Ptolemaism of correlationism. In ratifying the diachronicity of thinking and being, modern science exposes thought's contingency for being: although thought needs being, being does not need thought." So then, what is the speculative opportunity for being independent of thought that Meillassoux wants to overturn in his perception of philosophy's Ptolemaism? To be more poignant, what is being without thought? If we refer to an arche-time, that's fine, but why then rely on a concept of ontology (being) in general? While we can understand the desire for a Ptolemaic counter-revolution in philosophy, what's more difficult to understand is maintaining a concept of being independent of the concept of thinking which is to be understood as concept-creation at an absolute distance from reality. But this separation of thought from being can't happen without a separation from the concept being. Being is thought because it's a concept. Brassier sees this in Meillassoux's thought. "Mellassoux's problem consists in identifying a speculative guarantor for this disjunction between reality and ideality which would be entirely independent of the evidence provided by mathematical idealization of the ancestral phenomenon in the ancestral statement." The problem is in the idea of "identifying" some sort of speculative guarantor ("guarantor": a word which we should be enormously suspicious of relative to an argument for a principle of absolute and necessary contingency) for the arche-fossil independent of being (thinking being). "If everything is necessarily contingent regardless of the truth of the thought 'everything is necessarily contingent,' then everything could be necessarily contingent even if we had no way of thinking the truth of that thought coherently." In other words, we have strong correlationism because we give ourselves the luxury of being able to say at the very least that "everything is necessarily contingent regardless of the fact of this statement being made." We are saying something about something before the evolution of the nervous system knowing that what we are saying has nothing to do with that time. If the speculative guarantor is the "ancestral statement" of absolute disjunction between thinking and "being," then the guarantor is simply a thought linguistically expressed, like every other philosophy that would like to establish a reality for a mind-independent reality. At the end of Part 1 in Enlightenment and Extinction, Brassier asks, "can we think the diachronic disjunction between real and ideal while obviating any recourse to a transcendental divide between thinking and being?" This is the question. And if it can be thought, can it be thought without being linguistically expressed, without it having to be expressed always to someone else, through a published book for example?


(At the very least, the concept of being shouldn't pertain to an arche-time. This arche-time wasn't "being.")

The Virtues of Neuroscience; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 2

The Virtuous Brain (always working for the benefit of itself?)

In the beginning of Enlightenment and Extinction, Brassier weighs neuroscience against the manifest image. Brassier finds the manifest image as a subtle theoretical construct that we can understand as our original pre-scientific understanding of the world always and already. We can understand the manifest image more specifically in the Heideggerian concept of Being, and Derrida's insistence of asking what the question of the question is. Both of these gestures are theoretical constructs that put the ontological question in the hands of a sphere that can't be accounted for. We rely on our original "seeing of the world" when trying to understand this pre-scientific sphere. In phenomenology, we rely on our first-person perspective to understand the world independent of the scientific understanding of the world that this manifest image would like to discredit for not understanding an ostensible wholly other that always and already happens to being. Brassier follows the argument of Paul Churchland that attempts to annex the manifest image to the scientific image. Instead of seeing the pre-scientific world as something that precedes science's understanding of the world, the pre-scientific world can be accounted for in the 3rd person by the observational disposition of scientific work. Both Brassier and Churchland are critical of the mysterious realm that post-Kantian philosophy would like to ascribe to this experience. Instead they find a less mystical, and more specific understanding of being before being in the neurocomputational alternative where we observe the kinematics of cognition through brain activation patterns and the synaptic structure that permits neurons to pass on electrical signals to other cells or neurons. In the last post we discussed Brassier relying on and privileging this "hard science" over the mystical proclivities of philosophers. While Brassier commends Churchland's work of eliminative materialism for showing that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena is wrong and naive (folk psychology), he finds problems with the metaphysical descriptions (virtues) he gives to brain patterns that were to annex the manifest image of consciousness. Brassier commends the reductionist gestures of eliminative materialism for showing that folk psychology is incapable of understanding "meaning" and "pre-scientific intuitions," but wonders if these ideas of "meaning" and "meaningfulness" are concepts that need to be called into question in the first place. Where Churchland will find cognitive science as being able to answer these questions, Brassier wonders if these are questions to even ask in the first places because they're at an absolute distance from knowledge. With Churchland's enthusiasm for the vector activation understanding (PVA) of consciousness comes an idealism. Churchland ascribes virtues to the brain and how it functions ostensibly independent of our linguistic formulations about ourselves as beings of consciousness without realizing that he's borrowing the terminology of folk psychology to make these claims. Brassier will take him to task for this in order to humble the hypostatic gesture of neuroscience that doesn't realize its borrowing gestures. Brassier wants to take Churchland's eliminative materialism further than Churchland took it to de-representationalize the neurocomputational model away from this hypostasis, or metaphysics of consciousness if you will. The virtues of the brain that Churchland thinks represent brain processes aren't virtues, but something below the linguistic and representative realm. To "understand" this, we first need to understand what the brain is not doing; being a virtuous substance.

"Churchland is perfectly explicit in explaining why he considers the PVA paradigm of cognition to be 'better' than its folk-psychological rivals, and he proposes a precise formula for gauging theoretical excellence. Global excellence of theory is measured by straightforwardly pragmatic virtues: maximal explanatory cohesiveness vis-a-vis maximal empirical heterogeneity purchased via minimal conceptual expenditure." For Churchland, there is a "better" way for understanding consciousness than others, specifically the PVA neurocomputational model instead of the manifest image which we talked about in regards to Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. Churchland asks us to move in the direction of pragmatism instead of trying to look for some universal truth in cognitive activity. In other words, he wants us to use a pragmatic theoretical model when explaining the brain. The put it more simply, the brain for Churchland is to be explained via the basic principle of Occam's razor; pragmatism's venerable grandchild. Now, what are these pragmatic virtues that are found in Occam's razor that define the ambitions of neuroscience (broadly speaking of course)? "In what sense precisely are theoretical virtues such as simplicity, unity, and coherence necessarily concomitant at the neurological level with an organism's reproductively advantageous behavior? Churchland simply stipulates that the aforementioned virtues are already a constitutive feature of the brain's functional architecture without offering anything in the way of argument regarding how and why it is that neural network's learned configuration in synaptic weight space is necessarily constrained by the imperative of unity, cohesion, and simplicity." The pragmatic virtues we are referring to then are "simplicity, unity, and coherence." To be as straightforward as possible, the brain is simple, coherent and unified because its behavior is in the service of advantageous reproduction. We will see later on that the idea of consciousness as reproductively advantageous is problematic. This will crumble the idea of the structure of consciousness being pragmatic because we will see it having no end, making our imputations of virtues upon its phenomena null. Churchland simply asks us to follow a pragmatic model with the idea in mind that this is more "beneficial" towards understanding consciousness. Essentially it's more beneficial to see consciousness as beneficial. But where do these beneficial pro-reproductive concepts come from? If they don't come from folk-psychology alone, they belong to a history of metaphysics that would like to see things simply and in a unified manner. But is this not a predilection of the ontology of literature? This is what Brassier takes Churchland to task on. "In order to make a case for the neurocomputational necessity of superempirical virtues, Churchland would need to demonstrate that the latter are indeed strictly information theoretic constraints intrinsic to the vector coding process, as opposed to extrinsic regulatory considerations contingently imposed on the network in the course of its ongoing interaction with the environment." How's it possible to say that the superempirical virtues of pragmatism operate in the brain without having a lexicon of pragmatic concepts to be able to execute this description? This lexicon of pragmatic concepts are the luxury of a historical world already developed. If Churchland were to play Hegel and find these specific pragmatic virtues as the development of the world into the recognition of itself (as a pragmatic one), then he would somehow have to contend with the fact that folk-psychological concepts for instance are more prevalent than pragmatic ones which he finds inferior to the nuerocomputational explanation. The problem is not in the neurocomputational explanation of consciousness itself. The problem is in attaching virtues to this model. The problem is really in saying "this model is better than this model," not because the neurocomputational model may be a superior model for understanding consciousness, but because many different descriptions and methods are available to an explanation of consciousness regardless of which model's enthusiasts think their model is "true." Brassier will want to lead science into not saying that it's a better model than a folk-psychological model of consciousness for example. It doesn't matter for the science of consciousness that there are other approaches towards the understanding of consciousness. Once it feels that it's in competition with something it ought to already knows it's not in competition with, then it will apply virtues to its method in order the strengthen its legitimacy. This justification of course ought not to be in the mind of the pure observational scientist. The question of this ever being possible needs to be asked (Derrida would be an obvious reference as someone who would say this is absolutely not possible). The more we move on in this text, the more we will gain a sense in which Brassier can or cannot operate as a pure observer. For now, "The trouble then is that in arguing that simplicity, unity, and coherence are constitutive functional features of the brain's neuroanatomy, Churchland is but one slippery step away from claiming that brains represent the world correctly as a matter of evolutionary necessity, i.e. that they necessarily have 'true' representations. Unfortunately, this is precisely the sort of claim that Churchland had swore to abjure: 'Natural selection does not care whether a brain has or tends towards true beliefs, so long as the organism reliably exhibits reproductively advantageous behavior.'" The problem again is in finding the brain as a "reproductively advantageous" organ. This is a true belief. What Churchland is erroneously saying is that natural selection does not care if a brain has true beliefs, as long as it has one true belief in being reproductively advantageous. So then, natural selection does care towards the belief in reproduction. There will be ample time in the next post to show how this is not the case (the belief in "Nature" being "reproductively advantageous"). The problem now is imputing belief to an organism that doesn't operate in beliefs a contrario to the human being who has developed beliefs in the manifest image in order to describe phenomena on its own terms. As we stated in the past post though, Brassier will need to explain how consciousness is able to come up with something like the manifest image instead of consciousness operating under the auspices of the neurocomputational model. In other words, how does the figurative explanation of phenomena (via lingustic formation through western philosophy through German idealism) happen by way of observation of the neurocomputational model? Is this a question that can be answered by the neurocomputational model? Is this a question to be answered at all? To be clear though, Brassier isn't saying that it's not possible to give a linguistic formulation pertaining to neuro-phenomenal experience. "That successful networks do indeed tend to exhibit these superempirical characteristics as a matter of empirical fact is uncontroversial, but it is a fact about cognitive ethology..." For us, we understand the microbiological structure of the brain in terms of superempirical characteristics which is to say it "makes sense only within the macrophysical purview of evolutionary biology." In other words, what happens in the brain is at an absolute independence from what we casually observe to be happening in the brain based on our macro-beliefs in evolution. "...it seems that the the superempirical virtues Churchland invokes in order to discriminate between theories must remain extra-neurological characteristics, characteristics which reveal themselves only in the course of an ethological analysis of the organism's cognitive behavior within the world, rather than via a neurological analysis of the brain's microstructure." In other words, our analysis through language of other organisms using our own lexicon of beliefs are beyond what happens on a neurological level. How the neurological level is to be understood at all remains to be seen, but applying pragmatic and evolutionary adjectives to its function is reasoning on the side of extrinsic considerations, those extrinsic considerations plainly being what's good for us (being).

The problem with phenomenology was always its own premise; philosophy as a descriptive science. The problem with this is a sense that there was a lack of rigor in understanding phenomena in our own terms. There was always the fact of having to borrow concepts from a developed language to try to describe something that happened independent of this historically developed language. If phenomenology exhausted one thing, it was the idea of how much linguistic description could be made of phenomena. Husserl's work is an archive of figurative descriptions of phenomena. Regardless of how extensive Husserl's work was though, there was the sense that linguistic expression couldn't "show" the micophysiology of consciousness. As we stated in the last post though, Husserl was without the luxury of modern cognitive technology, and so relied on pure reason as the method for science. As cognitive science develops though, it would help to have a reading of these basic readings to see how extensive the descriptive sphere could be exhausted when pertaining to consciousness. This would help in the fact that thinkers would be much less apt to apply "superempirical" terminology to something that was happening independent of it. While phenomenology acted as a descriptive science, it made sure not to act as a teleological science and Husserl took great pains to introduce much of his work with a Cartesian reduction so the reader could operate without the reader wanting to apply presuppositions to the work at hand, regardless of how innocuous these presuppositions may have been (pragmatic presuppositions). This much neuroscience could learn from phenomenology. It's this much that Brassier understands and how he is able to work within the extensive space of Heidegger and Churchland. He's able to see the benefits of a "pure science" when observing phenomena but also able to criticize a scientific method if it isn't aware of itself as relying on metaphor or applying a naive teleological presupposition to its work. His work on Paul Churchland thus far has proven Brassier as a faithful thinker in this regard. The question will be how he will be able to understand consciousness scientifically independent of metaphor, i.e language, or whether this is even possible. If not, the understanding of something called "consciousness" will have to be obviated when "seeing" anything in general pertaining to an "understanding of consciousness." It's here where a nuanced, subtle, but clear nihilistic disposition will pave the way for some very interesting thoughts. How to reconcile this nihilistic disposition with any "understanding" in general will be very interesting. As a preliminary question, what is the relation between nihilism and science?

Getting Well; Anti-Oedipus, Part 5

Far right is where you want to be

In the previous post on Anti-Oedipus we noticed invariable characteristics in the schizophrenic. Most specifically, we saw it's adaptations of sexual roles independent of a primary sexuality. This post will deal with somewhat of the same theme as the last. While the last post was a description of the schizophrenic, this post will do more to distinguish the schizo from the neurotic (oedipal-man). At the end of this post, the distinction will be even more clear. We will not only get help from direct expressions of each, but an understanding of the work of the primordial "biological egg;" more specifically, the distinction between induction and structure. The later will carry a symbolic and imaginative description while the former will carry no symbolic description at all serving as the space of the schizophrenic. The schizophrenic will find it's home in the inductors of stimuli that insight the biological egg. We will see where and how induction becomes symbolized in a mask that we know as structure, and more specifically, identity. Identity will be just about analogous to Oedipus. Identity will be the symbol for something that always and already happens. We may even sound like Plato in this post. We sound like Plato in this post but in a vastly different context; 20th century man and not Greek antiquity. And if we sound like Plato, it won't be a Plato that has been oddly solidified as the identity of Plato, but the dialects that ensued in the dialogues, without recognition for the winner. As a reader, I can stand in place for Thrasymachus in The Republic as I can stand in place for Aristophanes in the Symposium. At the end of the dialogue, I am not sure of what Plato is besides people being people. I am winner and loser, dialogue and a Greek bath; Whatever was in that text is up for connection...to be left as quickly as it was connected.

"If there is one problem that does not exist in schizophrenia, it is the problem of identifications. And if getting well amounts to getting oedipalized, we can easily understand the outbursts of the patient 'who does not want to be cured,' and who treats the analyst as one of the family, then as an ally of the police." This is a funny phrase here by D&G. The schizophrenic who has all the problems that needs to be solved doesn't have one problem, and that's the problem of identity. The schizophrenic doesn't ask themselves "Who am I?" The schizophrenic doesn't frantically run around doing things in order to establish an identity. The schizophrenic isn't even unaware of these actions making them go through a dreaded "existential crisis." It always and already knows that there's an oedipal place that it doesn't want to go in. The schizo goes into outburst mode when trying to be sat down. It doesn't want to stay in one place, it doesn't want to be told what has to be the case (you can open up possibilities to it though), it doesn't want you looking at it with a satisfied look. This look the analyst gives the problem of schizophrenia in which "everything is going to be ok;" this paternal look of consolation where consolation was never sought out, where paternal looks were never the case. For a second the schizo may see the analyst as a father, like I see a computer screen right now, in other words, as something that exists outside and that's it. It may traverse space to find the analyst as an ally of the police which in turn creates an outburst from the non-conscious sense of having to be sat down. It will be anything in one moment and something else the next moment, and any suggestions of staying put raises the anxiety level of the schizo to combustion. The schizo will break out of it's current "identity" not because it doesn't feel at home in the identity at the moment, but because it will get the sneaky suspicion that it can never leave. The analyst will reward the schizo for passing into oedipalization the second the schizo finds a home in an oedipal state. Reward though for the schizo is not part of their consciousness. It can only pass onto something else. As the patient, as the slave in the master-slave dialectic that is euphemized into pyschotherapy; is this schizo "lacking" something? If it's with the analyst, it's lacking oedipus. I am with the analyst as a patient because I am sick. I'm not there to just hang out with the analyst even though the session may be structured that way. I am sick and the analyst is there to cure me. But without oedipus, am I as a schizo sick? Is it not oedipus that makes me sick because I can't bear oedipalization? Because I can't bare knowing I have to stay in the same place for the rest of my life? Because I have to be the same "person" for the rest of my time? The schizo universe doesn't get well. It moves beyond an identity that would be in a state of illness. If I stay here, there are degrees in which I'm personally here. I may not be here at all and may be trying to find my way back to here, and this is where I'm sick. Instead of throwing off the shackles of the personality that I so coveted, and moving onto something I have never been through, I need to find my way back to myself. Always in this body is a sense of self; that glorified term that keeps me at a distance from others, but not too far to the point where I am not distinguishable; the identity/difference logic of Oedipus. You are not this, but you will be. You are not your father, but will be one day. You are not a teacher, but want to teach people about your experiences. The schizo is incensed by this logic. The schizo is one thing and one thing only, and fully, and then something else and something else only, and fully; an inclusive disjunction of eternal flows that break off just right when the identity "feels" expended. D&G compare the schizo to the "biological egg" where "stimuli are not organizers, but mere inductors: ultimately, the nature of these inductors is a matter of indifference." Inductions gets things on its way. Where it goes? Nobody knows. Stimulus is not teleological. It happens as quickly as I strike this keyboard, whereby I could have hit the wrong key making someone behind me laugh at my mistake, making me meet them, and then talking to them about what I'm writing about. This was not an organized process. This was a chaotic flow, Heraclitus's flow (Plato is just as much Heraclitus as he was Parmenides). What D&G say next is of crucial importance. "It was the beginnings of the development that favored the illusion: the simplicity of the beginning-consisting, for example, of cellular divisions-could lead one to believe in some sort of adequation between the inductor and what is induced. But we are well aware that, when considered in terms of its beginnings, a thing is always poorly judged because in order to become apparent, it is forced to simulate structural states and to slip into states of forces that serve it as masks." This strikes many chords. First is the speculative realist/empiricist anti-correlationism. The inductor doesn't know where the stimulus goes. What is induced from the inductor is not known. When something is divided, why is it the case that the division had to happen because of a presupposition? Why does a cell have to have consciousness? Why does it's division refer back to something that did the division, and not rather, the possibility that division didn't have to happen? We can't speak for the cell. We can't speak for the gap, but we do within our thinking, our correlationist thinking. I would go a step further than D&G (as would a speculative realist) in saying that not only is the beginning poorly judged, but can't be judged at all. But we would be correct in saying that we judged something. For something to appear, it has to take on a structural state that becomes the metaphor for something that was never a symbol, that was never a metaphor, but a pure induction, not pure reason, but pure non-identity. What happens at this level is not reason. The beginning is not a reason, just as much as it's new unknown beginning is unaware of something called "the place in which you came from." As a more direct analogy, if I happen to live another life after this one, "I" don't know that this one proceeded it. The mask that appears as the reason of the beginning is just that; our reasonable Kantian representation of something that always and already will happen. Of course, as we learned in prior posts, Kant was well aware of the always and already function of applying our own concepts to non-conceptual experience, so defining the proper name of "Kant" here is as tenuous as the proper name of "Plato" (It's all name-dropping as the desire of history. Infinite symbolization. This is for another day though). As was concluded with phenomenology (and this could be applied to Kant as the certain precursor to Phenomenology), we can have a hypothetical understanding of beginnings, and we can even have fun with it at the limits of philosophy, but it will always be just that; a hypothetical understanding. Whether this hypothesis should be called a mask with all the connotations attached to the word "mask" is another question. Personally, I think this classically understood Platonic verbiage of shadows and masks masks a mask. It gives comfort to some actual reality where the ego feels like they're in the know. The ego isn't hidden in the shadows, but in the light where it needs to admit freely that it's not in the shadows. This is what D&G will call a surplus-code. In this instance, it's the necessity of defining oneself as being in the know, implicitly serving the ego's own purpose of distinguishing itself from others exclusively. (On a side note, if Philosophy should understand it's own desire for understanding beginnings, it should realize the work of Kant and Husserl as hypothetical, not as trying to "unmask" something that was "masked" in reality. The cell can't be known. The beginning before differentiation and division can't be "known," but it can be hypothesized. The concept of the metaphor and hypothesis will serve as the death for the ego's love of unmasking things.) The schizo is aware of none of this. It leaves and enters bodies as quickly as Artaud would fill up notebooks of straight lines. As a final analogy to the nature of schizo, D&G de-oedipalize Oedipus by saying that "parental figures are in no way organizers, but rather inductors or stimuli of varying, vague import that trigger processes of an entierly different nature, processes that are endowed with what amounts to an indifference with regard to the stimulus." This goes back to our example of how we have relationships to the outside world which include parental figures, but the parental figures don't have total and absolute domination over the body. The body goes through it's own intensities and flows like the example of knocking into a toy truck and getting hurt by it. No parent was involved. Nothing was "involved." Something happened to be in the way of the path of a walker in which the walker moved into it. This is descriptive science, not teleological science (as if metaphysics could ever be called a "science.)" Later on we will learn of a distinction made by D&G between the Ethnologist and the Psychoanalyst that covers the distinction between finding the happening of something, and the meaning of something, but for now we see that the parental figures figure as much into the body as much as all other "stimuli of varying, vague import." Relationships will always be formed, but intensities and flows will always happen regardless of structure. The schizophrenic will always be intense in it's current flow regardless of how much it's being forced into oedipalization.

How do I know that I'm Well? I know it because someone else thinks they're well and want to resemble this wellness. And if I don't resemble this wellness? Well, I'm not well. Then I go into the analyst (or take drugs) to find out why I'm not well. I go into the analyst to find out about my sickness, to possibly find other sicknesses forming an oedipal dependence of the analyst which we went into in a post before this. I never say to myself though, "Maybe these people who appear well aren't well. Maybe "wellness" is a state that I just happen to pass through which does feel nice, but isn't always going to be the case." I can't always be "well." Sometimes I may be. Sometimes me and the analyst have something in common. Sometimes I can go out into the world and have a beer with an insurance agent. We talk about football. We have something in common. He is well and I am well. Then I tell him what I do and he realizes that I don't own a house yet, and then I am not well. Maybe he's not well either? Maybe he realizes that he doesn't like the fact that he's been stuck in the same place for the past 10 years. We both become sick. I am not him and he is not me. We can't be everything at all times. I can't be the insurance agent and the graduate student. I can be the graduate student and the lover of Giants football though. He can be the insurance agent and a lover of Giants football also. See? All is not so bad. We certainly are different, but not so different that we want to exclude each other into sickness and abnormality. I'm telling ya, disjunctive synthesis finds its experience best in competitive sports. Here's to the Giants and a road victory in Houston this Sunday. The sack attack; everyone gets sacks at different angles and different positions.

Anti-Oedipus; Introduction (Desiring-Machines)

Where Psychoanalysis gets psychoanalyzed by non-psychoanalytical methods.

The start of a school year; whereby one desires new things, different things or one desires the same things. The intensities of one's experience will sway the organized body regardless of the organized body desiring to see itself a certain way. Here we offer an introduction to these intensities that function in desire-spaces with Deleuze and Guatarri's Anti-Oedipus. Whether one is studying comparative literate, philosophy, or even physical art, these authors will find a way to show up on one's thinking screen. They don't just show up either, they command your attention for reasons you're not quite sure of because you haven't read anything from them. You have general ideas in your head of what "Anti-Oedipus" is trying to convey. At first glance you think to yourself that it's a book about a child not wanting to kill his father to confiscate his mothers love, and if this is your first thought about the book, you would be pretty much right on with the theme. To be more specific, this book starts a movement of sorts that tries to dissemble the Oedipus-complex of psychoanalysis; the Oedpus-complex that would like to understand everyone in terms of their rapport with their parents. And it's not just parents either, it's the paternal image seen in the geometrical "triangulation" of the psyche, a triangulation we will see that won't hold the ground it once had (Father-Mother-Child/Father-Son-Holy Ghost). The hierarchicization that psychoanalysis operates on stems from the emphasis given by Freud to parental complexes in the subject. Of course Freud needs to be distinguished as an author from his different periods like many authors. We will see that Deleuze and Guattari operate off the idea of random intensities much in the same way Freud spoke of intensities in his Project for a Scientific Psychology that we referenced before in the analysis of Derrida's work on Freud. Rather than trying to sum-up the entirety of this text while it's currently being read, we will continue to not be pithy by giving multi-part essays on the text in order to give due diligence to the author. Besides respect though, insights are really enjoyable, almost too enjoyable? The deeper one enters into this text, any text for that matter, the more insights will come to the forefront. It will be interesting to analyze the desire-for-insights within Deleuze and Guarttari's framework that sees desiring-machines as machines that are everywhere that attach to each other and most importantly, attach to something called a body-without-organs. To start off though, every post from now on pertaining to Deleuze and Guattari will be nominalized as "D&G." While respecting the idea of depth and length, it's also important to respect brevity in the form of acronyms for simplicity's sake on these posts, and future posts. Without name-dropping all the references that one will find when reading this text and finding analogies with previous or current authors (maybe even future authors), lets dive into the text, and find ourselves in D&G's world of organisms with drives that are much more complicated and spontaneous than the structure of Oedipus.

When trying to understand Oedipus's sway on classical psychoanalysis, we first have to uncover desire, more specifically ourselves as desiring-machines. Desiring-machines; pure operations of want. D&G state "the traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset...From the moment that we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialetical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of the real object." For D&G it is inappropriate to see desire as a lack. When one desires something, the traditional logic of this desire is that the desire wants something that it doesn't have. Not so for D&G and not so either for Kant who states "the faculty of being, through its representations, the cause of the reality of the objects of these representations" is the function of desire. In other words, desire is not a want, but a production. A production of desire. If lack is part of the logic of desire, it's because desire produces a lack. First and foremost, desire is a productive machine that afterwords happens to produce a lack in being. The Platonic logic of desire that "forces us to take, making us choose between production and acquisition" is wrong. This choice doesn't cover the whole of the logic of desire. How then does desire operate for D&G? "If desire is the lack of the real object, its very nature as a real entity depends upon an 'essence of lack' that produces the fantasized object." When we desire, we are desiring something that we don't have, but why is it that we feel we want this thing that we don't have in the first place? Any object, the fantasized object (meaning the object that we want but don't currently have so we fantasize about it) can be sought after because of something called an "essence of lack." More simply put, we can think of this "essence of lack" as a feeling that we aren't getting what we want either in a specific or general way. The nature of desire as lack depends firstly on the production of something we don't have. "The production of something we don't have" though is not simply some "real object" like a rock for instance, but the flow and force of desiring-machines creating (producing) an affect of something outside itself to obtain. This is juxtaposed to the body-without-organs whereby there is no smell, taste, or touch; in other words, a juxtaposition to nothing. At some point though, the body-without-organs becomes something. It becomes attached to desiring-machines where it "breaths, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks." These functions Freud would call the id, the representation of which D&G would call a "mistake" on the grounds that the representation of whatever is classified as the id didn't need to be represented (or it's representation by Freud and philosophy in general is grossly outside something called "the real" or what's called a priori experience). It's important here to clarify that desiring-machines for our purposes can be seen as human-beings. We at first will have to relate to ourselves as human beings much in the way that one has to understand Heidegger's concept of Dasein as Human-Being when the sense of the statement is meant to convey being-there, meaning being in a place where something happens which Heidegger would go on to describe. D&G will see the Human-Being as desiring- machines and they will make sure the reader sees this not as a metaphor but as an actuality which will create a distance between the subject seeing himself through the text of Anti-Oedipus and rather reading into themselves a pure production of desire ignorant of whatever would be classified in the classical personality traits of Freud's tripartite Oedipus-schemata. So for right now, we are reading into the text that something is desiring and by desiring, "we" mean a production of a lack that is first and foremost a production. And the lack that is the production is a production itself. In other words, it's a production of a production. Desire is then understood as production and at the lowest level, this means that "the real object that desire lacks is related to an extrinsic natural or social production, whereas desire intrinsically produces an imaginary object that functions as a double of reality, as though there were a 'dreamed-of object behind every real object.'" The "real object," whatever that is, is extrinsic. You can call it "natural," or "social." Whatever it is, it conceptually exists outside. Nothing can be said of it because it's not represented. This comes up against Husserl's problem in trying to understand the original motivations of the "first geometers" independent of language. It lies in a place that D&G call a "body-without-organs" meaning a non-represented being. Desiring-machines though operating under the production of desire produces "imaginary objects" that function as a double of whatever was this "extrinsic space." Desire functions not like the body-without-organs. Instead it looks for something else beyond what is already given. What this beyond is, is the "dreamed-of object behind every real object." This flips the Platonic ideal. Instead of seeing beyond representation into truth ("the real"), "we" as desiring-machines see beyond what's "real" into representation as truth. Truth for us is not whatever is called "the real," but the representation of it that is behind everything that's called the "real." This makes sense. Everything is in front of me, and then I (phenomenologically) look into it to find something else, for example, what's it's called, and when I find out what this "real" is called I mark it down on what D&G call the recording surface. Desire produces this reproduction. "If desire produces, its product is real." Desire produces our reality, our truth, and here we must distinguish what we just called "the real" from what the real is now being understood of as "the truth." D&G will regard the real here as something for us, the desiring-machines. The real (truth for us) happens after we are in "passive syntheses" (phenomenological) that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. Partial objects are likened to ruptures for example, and this means intensities independent of any truth value, meaning independent of the de facto situation of being able to represent it. These intensities are units of production. This all happens "as autoproduction of the unconscious." For example, I can have a nervous reaction to anything without anything "about me" influencing this. Desire will always happen. The body-without-organs will be attached to an organic body with desire. In these passive syntheses, "desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is rather the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression." In passive syntheses, in this productive desire, nothing is in lack in the original "real." Ruptures and flows "happen" without regard to an object being grasped. Desire as a machine of production though is a machine that D&G call a "subject," and like how production had to produce something (for D&G, desire), desire finds its own production in the fixed subject. The "residuum" of this producing and the product creates a detachment called "the subject." There is no fixed subject without repression though. This is the residuum of passive experience (passive syntheses), repression. In other words, in a process of passive syntheses, intensities happen to bodies and flows, and "something becomes detached" meaning a difference is setup. A difference from bodies and flows "happens" into something called the "subject" by way of a repression of these intensities that happen to bodies and flow (what D&G call "partial objects"). The detachment from the original "real" is the repression of intensity, and it's in these repressions of intensities that D&G will situate their concept of the neurotic. The neurotic: "the subject" who is always running away from "the real." The subject loses its desire "at the same time that it loses the passive syntheses of these conditions." When desire differentiates into a "subject," the subject sees itself as a difference from the passive syntheses that setup it's own detachment in the subject. The "subject" is the "countereffect" of the process of desire. Desire feels objective existence in all its intensity but just like how it's a machine of pure production (a machine of a machine), it differentiates itself from desire as a "space for intensity" into its next form of production ("the subject") where the form loses its "desire of intensity" and instead produces (desires) needs. In every aspect of this movement, from production, to desire, and finally to the subject, something is common, and that's pure production, in other words, something is made out of something else and differentiated from that previous form (The question of temporality in using the word "previous" is something that won't be addressed here but always stands as an open question). Desire then is not a lack, but a production of a need. One feels that desire is (Platonically) a lack, but this isn't the case. Desire sets out to withdraw itself into a subject that creates for D&G, surplus-needs which is distinguished from the needs of the penury or the dispossessed who "know they are close to grass." The dispossessed who don't feel the need of leftovers, but to live in the real, that they feel has somehow been taken away from them in the socius. The question of Anti-Oedipus then will revolve around the difference between desire that has very few needs (the need to live objectively) and the desire of leftovers (surplus-desire). In this distinction, we will find an absolute parallel between the psychoanalytically regarded "psychotic" and "neurotic" respectively. One can already tell that D&G will try to save the "psychotic" from its marginalized place in the socius by pointing to a more "pure desire" with few needs (which nonetheless are needs) and not a "lack" that classical psychoanalysis would like to find in its subject (Like thinking a psychotic lacks love and getting a hardy laugh from them afterwords). How the phenomena of over-abundant needs "happens," and how psychoanalysis addresses this psychosis as a lack in the subject (wrongly understood as a lack) is what will be the subject of Anti-Oedipus. We will gain further clarifications on the structure of Oedipus as it pertains to not just psychoanalysis but the socius as a whole, and how much psychoanalysis defines the categories of belongingness and distance from a privileged "normalized" center. All these concepts will need to be elaborated on. The fun thing about desire as a theme is that it can be seen everywhere. It is everywhere. Desiring-machines are everywhere. We will be able to go into themes on sexuality, capital, religion, and thought in general because of the all-encompassing nature of desire. We will be able to see it at work subtly and hopefully try to make these subtleties not so subtle.

This introduction then served mostly on a theoretical level defining D&G's understanding of how a pure process happens to a subject as a desire and how that desire changes into desiring more than just a few things. All of this is a production that happens to a production ad infinitum. This introduction can be understood as a general phenomenology of desire, if we are to understand desire purely at a distance from the existential connotations that it will end up taking as the text develops. This general overview of course can be expanded on phenomenologically. The idea of passive syntheses can of course be elaborated on independent of the idea of desiring-machines. A phenomenology of pure intentionality and a psychoanalysis of desire using non-psychoanalytical methods are of course two different approaches. Simply put, one can either read Husserl or D&G. If one isn't satisfied with the way D&G use "passive syntheses" then they can go into the depths of Husserl, but if they are satisfied in the concept of "passive syntheses" then they can move into the insights provided by D&G regarding the phenomena of desire and how it pertains to everything as desiring-machines and how classical psychoanalysis has made an incorrect model in trying to understand desire as a lack, and ultimately classifying certain types of desiring-machines as lacking something that is a "normalized center" for them. These next posts though will develop the themes of Anti-Oedipus. We will stray from the depths of phenomenology and enter into the human-being as desiring-machines. I have a feeling that the next posts will be more interesting for everybody. People would rather see themselves as desiring-beings rather than pure-intentionalities. What makes one interested into reading desire into things instead of intentionality? It's an open question that I think will become more evident as the text develops.

Can language carry the burden of Phenomenology?; Ideas I Conclusion

Is this what Phenomenology would "look like" independent of language?

These entire series of posts dealing with Husserl's Ideas I took for granted the use of language in being able to describe an experience that happens before language. I eluded to the fact that this would have to be addressed. It's something I instinctively wanted to stay away from because I wanted to be faithful to the authorship of Husserl here in one of his most elaborate texts pertaining to the work of phenomenology and because the problem of language for phenomenology is so obvious that I just didn't want to go after the obvious. In Ideas I the work of Phenomenology is all encompassing. There's certain things that we were able to say in regards to Phenomenology; for example, the lack of freedom in having harmonious experiences, and the imperfection of being able to see an "object" in its totality and how this imperfection is a satisfied constitution independent of phenomenological explanation. At the end of Ideas I, Husserl goes deeper into the problem of how these problems could look and herein lies the problem of how language can do the work that Phenomenology wants it do (more specifically the work that Husserl wants it to do). The question is in how much language is going to be able to carry the burden of Phenomenology. As we learned from Kant in earlier posts, we are always applying our own concepts to a non-conceptual experience if we are interested in understanding what a non-conceptual experience is, and by this he means we are applying a concept to a prior experience, an ostensible prior experience. Husserl honestly asks these questions himself and he starts to gain a sense of what phenomenology can look like in it's descriptive mode. He doesn't say "sound like" or "read like," but "look like" in order to stay consistent with his theme later developed in Experience and Judgment where language is a "mere mode of sense" in comparison to sense-happening that happens independent of language. We learned about this through Husserl's concept of the noema by trying to think about all the different way sense happens without having to talk about. Thinking about the tree as a tree put us in a place where we were intentional beings without linguistically having to account for this (even though we did in the description "intentional beings"). This post will try to flesh out not only the problem of language as it pertains to Phenomenology, but what Phenomenology could look like with or without language. Lets first though go into Husserl as he tries to understand what a descriptive phenomenology would look like.

Husserl asks "How are we to describe systematically the noeses and noemas belonging to the unity of the intuitively objectivating consciousness of the physical thing"? As beings, we are a consciousness that objectivates into a physical thing. We end up with a material at the end of all phenomenological processes; this is certain for Husserl. How are we to describe the sense process though that was touched upon in the levels of the noemas and it's correlate noeses that were the mental processes without saying they were the mental processes? What would this pure description look like? "How do the multiple posited intuitions, the 'intuitional posita,' look in which an 'actual' physical thing becomes given and, in the manner peculiar to intuition, shows its actuality in originaliter 'experience'",? Lets take a closer look at this statement. First we have the idea of "originality experience," meaning an experience that ostensibly happens "originally." When an experience happens originally, how does it look? We are given an actual physical thing, say for example a tree. When we first glance at the tree, how does this look? How does it look when I look at the tree? At first glance, we look like we are in some higher altitude where we are looking down at ourselves looking at something but this isn't what Husserl is interested in. He's interested in something called "multiple posited intuitions." In other words, he's interested in the way in which consciousness would "look" in its inner-happenings. How can we look inside consciousness to see what is happening? As an open question, if Husserl were still alive would he defer the authority of phenomenology to cognitive science and neurophysiology? To be more direct, would he find a pet scan interesting for phenomenological description? Modern brain-scan technology is able to tell when someone is in an "active" state of mind and when they are feeling or thinking a certain way. Even in biofeedback cognitive behavioral therapy, a patient is connected to electrodes that show a physical relationship between consciousness and it's outer activity in the subject. In biofeedback therapy, a patient is shown their states of mental activity and likewise, their states of non-active mental activity. The purpose many times is to have more control over themselves by recognizing how their body feels relative to a brain pattern action. Is this brain picture what "intuited posita" would look like? If I'm attached to electrodes and I intend a tree in fantasy, a part of a lobe in the brain will "light up." This certainly seems to me what a posited intuition would "look like." Of course I also have the option of simply describing it using language. I can say to myself that I posited this or that physical thing (in the region "physical thing") or I can do it on my own without saying it while being attached to electrodes and see a picture of my brain in which a certain part is lighting up. These are two different "looks" to what an "intentional posita" would look like. One "look" is language, the other is a picture of my brain. Husserl doesn't make himself clear on what he means by "look." He wants to see sense-happening in its independence but as a descriptive science we are always using a metaphor for what would be an "original positing experience." We are using something else to describe something that doesn't need to be described with this something else. Husserl is certainly able to elaborate for example on the noematic levels of consciousness in which a memory takes place. He can let language do the explanation but is this language that is doing the explanation what the phenomena "looks like." If we take "phenomena" in its classically understood concept as letting anything appear then we would need a more strict definition for "appearance." For Husserl, Phenomenology as descriptive science seems to carry this load. As descriptive science, we're certainly describing, meaning using language whether or not Husserl thinks we gain a privileged place in our description when we undergo his Cartesian Epoch where we gain insights for example that skepticism becomes a refuted in the fact that it posits its own position. This attempt for neutral consciousness in phenomenology is still using language though as descriptive science. The language may be more neutral so its still language, and that's fine if that's the way Husserl wants Phenomenology to look which we really never understand from him. Husserl will say "each physical thing-appearance necessarily includes in itself a stratum which we call the physical thing-schema: it is the spatial shape merely filled with 'sensuous' qualities--without any determinateness of 'substantiality' and 'causality.' The physical theme has its own "schema" that is a spatial shape that is filled with sensuous qualities. We note now that he parenthesizes sensuous in order to understand its noematic sense. But "seeing" a pure space with "sensual" qualities is a determination. Is it not? The parenthesized word doesn't do it's job. Certainly, we don't have to linguistically say anything when "seeing" something, but in this seeing, are we not already determining something? Even in neutral-consciousness whereby we have something in us that's not being posited, we don't have the freedom (as was stated in the last post) to not have a harmonious "unconscious" experience. This harmonious "unconscious experience" is already a determination. It's harmony is already on its way to reason. The schema of the spatial shape is already determined. The spatial shape itself is already determined. Husserl quickly gives us a clue to his thinking though that needs to be elaborated on. I think at this point in this Husserlian study, a psychoanalysis of the thinker becomes inevitable. If we are to understand what he means by the look of phenomena we need to understand how he's trying to use certain words. He opens himself up when he states "to 'us humans' a spatial thing always appears in a certain 'orientation,' e.g., oriented in the visual field of sight with respect to above and below, left and right, near and far; that we can see a physical thing only at a certain 'depth,; ;distance;'" The schema here then for Husserl is perceptive. We see things "above and below" for example. But he just spent his whole work eluding to something called the noema in which there were different levels of posita that didn't have a certain outward-appearance look to it. Husserl does make sure to say that this is relative to "us humans," meaning that there is sense independent of "us." For "us humans" we understand things in a sort of phenomenology of perception, but as phenomenologists we are concerned with the noetic/noematic structure of consciousness. This is the difference; essentially that phenomenologists aren't human beings. Regarding the human understanding of phenomena though, the problem comes down to the problem of space. Geometrical space is what constitutes any experience whatever it may be. Space is the region that underlies all regions like "Physical Thing" for example. We see things in space by a certain depth and in certain directions. How are we to describe space purely then? What is the origin of the idea of space? Husserl asks us this but the origin of the idea of space isn't space. It's the possibility of being able to have an idea in the first place. Certainly, the idea of space constitutes our visual perception of what we see in space, but space first needs to be ideal, meaning we imagine things to ourselves in a certain way. This certain way is ideal; a process of getting towards a satisfied "zone." What is the essence of space? Husserl asks us what is the "essence of all noematic and noetic phenomena in which space is intuitively presented and is 'constituted' as the unity of appearances, of descriptive modes of presentations of something spatial.'" How do we gain "space." The simple answer is that we open our eyes. When we open our eyes, we are always intuiting space. We are always feeling around this region of space and gaining more intuitions. We are always seeing a unity of appearances in the region of space. The questions has to be posed on why the idea of space has to be "constituted?" When I open my eyes and unconsciously see something why does whatever happens here have to be constituted in its own schema? Why does space have to have its own life whereby its given its own schema to be understood? Couldn't it just be the case that it's immediately understood as space without constitution? Certainly it's the case that I can show somebody a geometrical proof by way of axioms but this is after the fact that I have intuited space orginaliter. But if the problem of space is the problem of constitution as a "unity of what appears" then I am firstly a determinate being who's putting together a series of appearances, and then afterwords saying that it "happened in space." The problem is when Husserl asks us to "seize upon this theoretically." How can this possibly be understood theoretically? At most I can see a series of appearances as a series of appearances in the most general way possible meaning I don't see anything specific but something called "appearances in general." I can think of a series in the abstract but this thinking doesn't happen originally in experience. The problem with what Husserl wants us to do is in being able to think that theoretical thought can seize upon what he thinks of as an original experience. Theoretical thought will always happen after an original experience, or, original experience never actually "happens" and we simply have theoretical thought. Whatever way an intuition happens to us, we can describe it afterwords theoretically like in the case of understanding consciousness in it's specific noematic component(s). We can show this tree is "actually" being perceived, but this "actuality" is not what would be called "original." By giving us Eidetic truths which do happen to hold a ton of weight (which we went into in the past posts) , this doesn't mean we can elaborate on an original experience as if this experience happened by way of "rigorous descriptive science." At most, what we can say is that Husserl and language (Husserl's language) provides us with a way in which we can understand consciousness theoretically and we can ever gain a ton of insights into how consciousness happens, but in the end, every description is theoretical. This takes nothing away from the discipline but does limit it to the theoretical-determinate consciousness and seeing consciousness any other way is impossible. Husserl will even state this himself. "Law-conforming production of perfect correlation between what determinately appears as unity and the determinately infinite multiplicities of appearances can become fully seen intellectually and thus all enigmas can be removed." We see what Husserl wants us to see intellectually (theoretically) and Husserl admits this to us but are enigmas really removed? In understanding conscious experience "intellectually," is the enigma of what really happens originally in experience removed? Things still happen a priori and I can describe them "intellectually." But what is a priori experience "in itself" independent of my intellectual understanding of it? As a thinking being, no matter how much I operate independent of myself, I'm still the thinking being who's determining an a priori experience after the fact of the experience happening. No description, no matter how rigorous, can take away from the enigma of what we would call "original experience." We can say (as thinking beings/intellectually) that we do the things we do. For example, "One can effect such syntheses 'actually,' 'properly,; i.e., in synthetical orignarity; then, in accord with its synthetical form, the synthesized objectivity has the characteristic of being originarily given." The example Husserl gives when speaking of effective syntheses is collection, subsumption, and relation. We can "collect" and if I was given the command to "collect" something, I would be in some process of doing it originally that would be open to metaphor, i.e. would be open to being described independent of the act itself whereby the description could try its best to account for what was actually "happening" in the experience (in this case the experience of "collecting something"). The parentheses signify (as stated in a post before) the fact that "collecting something" as said linguistically is not "actually" happening in the experience and by that fact tries to show the sense of the statement by negating its signification that we nonetheless need to give a theoretical account of an original experience. And herein lies the real enigma, that as phenomenologists, we have a desire to describe experience knowing we are using a metaphor that serves its own purpose; to describe experience. How satisfied are we as phenomenologists knowing that we rely upon a metaphor to understand an absolute presence? Husserl tries to find our way out of metaphor by saying that at anytime we can effect the syntheses of collecting for example by actually collecting something and in this collecting of something there is a certain characteristic to it, a certain sense to it. We can eternally always collect and relate things. This last statement is not meant to be an eidetic truth even though it is one for Phenomenology. It's meant to show that at any time I can "effect" synthetic originality by doing the exact thing that I happen to be talking about. But when I'm doing this, how do I know that this collecting for example has the "characteristic of originality?" If I said to myself before hand that I want to collect something in order to show myself the original experience of collecting, is this really the characteristic of a collecting experience? There would be a difference between collecting without telling myself before hand that I want to show myself what collecting "looks like" and "actually" collecting without recognizing that this is what I'm doing, and without this recognition I don't know what I'm doing. After the fact I can place an ontological description upon the experience and say that I'm doing something and can even give an analytical account of this ontology of doing something, but of course this ontological account already presupposes a being, hence making the analysis not phenomenological. I can't go into the temporal and spatial phenomenological explanation during something I don't recognize because I'm not acting "intellectually." Phenomenology is an intellectual pursuit that is trying to give a description of how the mind works. It already answers its own question by asking about a working mind. Phenomenology, without knowing it, is always asking something. It always happens after the fact of what it wants to "know about", even knowing fully well that we know it "intellectually." In this sense there is no enigma when we delimit ourselves to understanding experience as an intellectual/theoretical pursuit. We can even be fulfilled knowing that experience has never been described this rigorously in the metaphor, in the symbolic realm.

To sum up, can we ask what consciousness "looks like" independent of its index at the "physical thing" object region, the symbolic region? As we learned before, we use "physical thing" as a region not to understand the object in an already constituted region, but to try to understand the "what it's like" of consciousness. This is phenomenological description; to ask what it's like to be itself. I can say "I see it." then I can say "I see it...as...a dog." The object-sense gets substituted (metaphorized) by a more precise object sense, the direct object of "dog." The "as" in the proposition supplements the ambiguity with a constitution; a structure towards a further defined category or class. "Constitution" implies "getting-somewhere." What's it like to get somewhere? We can give a temporal analysis of this process and Husserl will do this in his internal-time-consciousness work. He will elaborate on the possibilities (including non-possibilities) of time in a subject. He will do this in the name of phenomenology as a descriptive science. We will be shown eidetic truths about experience. We will be shown things that we think have to be the case regardless of whether we existed or not. We will be shown these things by the only way we can be shown things by way of descriptive science, by an act of the intellect. Will we ever be able to say that these things "happened" independent of our intellectual analysis? Does a primal pure experience happen as a linguistic description? I think I can say this is absurd. Phenomenology falters in its very essence; in making experience into a descriptive science. In thinking that a "description" is what happens in experience, it eludes its own sense, if there can even be called a "sense" to experience. Phenomenology provides us with an abundance of fruitful intellectual discoveries on space and time in relation to the subjective mind, and these are intellectual pursuits. If we as phenomenologists are satisfied in giving rigorous intellectual descriptions of experience then we will be phenomenologists. If we find though that description is at the service to a differentiation of "presence" into a metaphor (any metaphor for that matter; pictorial or linguistic) then we may not be satisfied as phenomenologists anymore. We may see the limits of phenomenology in a metaphoronic operation. We may enjoy the insights intellectually given to us by phenomenology. We may enjoy seeing how limited we are by what our intellect shows us about something called "experience." We may even get to know the limits of what the "intellect" can do in regards to its temporal structure for example. But we won't know how or why we had a desire in the first place to make an issue out of experience by way of "rigorous descriptive science." This initial impulse, this desire, is a place that classical phenomenology in the Husserlian sense can't reach because it's not necessarily an "intellectual pursuit" understood in the classical sense of what an "intellectual pursuit" is. We may ask at the end of Ideas I; Why do we desire to know about experience? What do we mean when we say we want to know about experience? Why do we want to know about anything in general? For better or worse, phenomenology is surrounded by an impulse to "be in the know," and the desire to "be in the know" is a desire. If Phenomenology wants to understand what it thinks it knows it's talking about in addressing "experience," it needs to be more open than its deferral to what's is classically called "science," into observing the non-systematic "happening" of an impulse, or desire. Afterall, desire grounds Husserl's work, a desire to "be in the know." A desire for knowledge about the self. Why does a self want to come to know itself? How does it come to know itself? These are speculative questions that Husserl would criticize as not pertaining to rigorous science. We can say that Husserl explores the limits of knowledge. The limits of the self however are not in Husserl's domain because they're speculative and not the work of the rigorous scientist. Husserl believes in science as the foundation for how anything can be known and from it we will gain immense insights, just not all the insights one can possibly have. We are always at a distance from the ultimate insight being a grasp of every insight that could ever possibly be grasped. Husserl knows this and so defers to science as the best possible method for insight into us. He calls his explorations and insight into us, Phenomenology.

I think I've just surrendered to the teleological presupposition of desire.