Monday, January 17, 2011

Note taking
Posted elsewhere rewritten slightly/still sloppy.
"the mathematics that is adequate to everyday life"
Mathematics is not adequate to everyday life. The experience of individuals is irreducible in the understanding of others.

The limits of philosophy are not the limits of thought. Philosophy concerns names not experience. Connoisseurship concerns the appreciation of distinctions that can be communicated only imprecisely. The philosopher Paul Grice discussed implicature. [the action of implying a meaning beyond the literal sense of what is explicitly stated, e.g., saying the frame is nice and implying I don't like the picture in it.] Are actors now supposed to give him credit for explaining why they all want to perform plays by Shakespeare, or why we watch and compare performances over and over again of the same texts!? Philosophers, Derrida included, consider literature "parasitic" but the focus on aperspectival truth leads to a philosophy of prescription. The limits of thought: why we have prosecutors and defense attorneys, paid factotums [actors again] and an adversarial system of justice. Rationalists prefer the inquisitorial system that credits their own sense of reason. The limits of thought: can you translate Mallarmé into English? No you cannot. Can you experience my life? No you cannot. The practice of fiddle playing precedes the philosophy of it.

The primary focus in democracy is not on objects or self or other but on relation between them. "Imperfect justice" is the result of a process whereby two agents loyal to their own bias and to process perform before an audience. I can see how Deleuze et al are trying to justify in terms of rationalism the necessity of empiricism but this reads as the desperate communalism of individualists. That's the tragedy of the hippies. Philosophy as such is individualist in the same sense that the rationalist defense of empiricism is not the practice of it. The focus on ideals and idealisms strengthens (as performative) esthetics that in the political world manifest as authoritarianism.

How can a prosecutor imagine him/her self as anything but 1/2 of a relation? How can an actor exist without at audience? Lawyers and actors, and historians, are craftspeople performing actions judged and contextualized by others, and as such neither irrationalist nor individualist.

As an aside, it's interesting that the reviewer of the book on Habermas [discussed on the same page here] argues for respecting original intent:
"Why does he deem it necessary to read Habermas’s philosophical lecture as containing a coded reference? Is something gained in this discovery?"

The return to humanism in modernity is a return to process over a fixation on objects and product. The desperation of DG is a part of that process of change. Again: the children of Luther and Descartes are not humanists. Humanism begins not in science (or the analogies of science as scientism) but history.

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