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serieses?
series of series.
lots of series.
asaris: i am working my way through a nice book at the moment--henri atlan's "enlightenment to enlightenment: intercritique of science and myth"--the book does alot of stuff and is really quite smart, so i'd recommend it--here directly as opposed to the indirect recomendation i am about to give the book by stealing from it....
atlan has an interesting chapter in which he looks at the split between scholastic and more mystical traditions--he uses judaism as the jumpoff, talking about the split generated by maimonedes' work that resulted in the separation of kabbala from "rational" theology---the argument that atlan runs out about this split is interesting enopugh--but i found his formalization of scholasticism useful in that it says what i already knew better than i had been able to:
the problem is not aristotle but the usage of aristotlean logic ex post--scholastic thinking builds deductive proofs around axioms that are simple assertions of faith---and you cannot demonstrate axioms from within proofs structured by them---so the assumptions that are worked into axiomatic statements are dragged through the whole of proofs generated on the basis of theses statements---for example that god is single (though infinite--but in principle, what would singularity mean outside a finite space?)---god would be Cause (singular)--can be understood anthropomorphically (why? the "mystical" traditions routinely deny this starting move---kabbalah seems more logical in this regard)---and so Acts (singular again)--for some reason, these Acts are posited as being comprehensable in terms of a reductive notion of causality (which does not even hold for the material world that we know about, via a range of genres)--that is they generate Effect(s)....
so the story would go that some god Acts...this act is singular and its result is the universe, which is itself singular.
the logic that would get you to this position is wholly tautological from the viewpoint of a metagame that would position itself and its evaluative criteria outside the game of scholasticism (perhaps this distinction is also that of faith and its inverse)....in that the proofs are simply the elaboration of implications contained in the axioms, which are themselves not amenable to analysis from within the proofs they shape. ok then, you said that already.
then there is the question of the nouns themselves.
universe is singular. it names an observable phenomenon and enframes it at the same time. from our viewpoint, the universe appears to be singular. understood through our way of naming the phenomenon, the universe appears to be singular. but is it? outside the structure of scholastic-style proofs, where the assumption of singularity follow from a sequence of meaphysical assertions, and if you control to some extent for the effects of naming, why does the universe have to be singular? it seems absurd, when you start to think about it.
it appears to simply transform into an absolute a particular viewpoint.
we are here.
here is a discrete place.
how do you know?
you name it as such, so it is.
what is not here is there.
there is a discrete place only because it is not here.
why is that?
naming again. noun-effects.
another way:
why would there be a requirement for a single cause? if you cannot assume the universe is singular apart from the attempts to make absolute what is obviously a particular relation-to, where does the desire to even think about cause come from?
relative to scholastic-style proofs, the question answers itself---it is axiomatic, and the effects of the structure of this axiom would simply repeat at every level of the proof structured by it--and the rules for combination/derivation that enabled the proof itself would function to disallow moves that strayed outside the purview staked out by the axioms. this outlines a self-enclosing, self-referential, self-confirming system of logic.
even if the above was not a list of problems--what would cause mean in this context?
sometimes i wonder if we are spinning around in some curious subatomic structure in some arbitrary sector of the body of some creature that is its timeframe may well being making a grilled cheese for lunch one thursday or its equivalent. maybe this creatures looks up and wonders if it too is spinning around in some curious subatmoc structure in some arbitrary sector of some creature that, in its timeframe, is doing something else. maybe at some point, the notion of increasing scale begins to flip into its opposite and efforts to position oneself in a hypothetical macrostructure begins to reverse direction and so sets up an enormous loop.
or maybe not.
the condition of possibility for this is the same language as enabled scholasticism. the abstract quality of language enables one to posit any number of scenarios. the trick is in the frame.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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