Monday, May 25, 2009

Perception of an absence where one misses something

[“Heidegger was one of the first people who thought in post-structuralist terms”. A new paradigm of philosophy, post-structuralism emerged in France in the 1960s, and is broadly understood as a body of distinct elaborations on structuralism, which attempted to explain the world as a neat system of inter-related structures. Structuralism was a manifestation of the culmination of modern thought, which turns the world into a series of mathematically articulated objects – essentially the precondition for technology. Heidegger rebelled at this attempt to control the earth through technology. Instead of setting upon nature in the form of an assault, Heidegger believed we must become like listeners to discover our place on this earth.” (title unknown) from enowning by enowning
In-der-Blog-sein Bert Olivier
profiled in paper.]

[Whether we are speaking of the creation myth in the Bible, the myth of the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, or chaos in Deleuze, Badiou, and any number of phenomenologists, there seems to be a marked tendency of thought to conceive the materiality of matter as a sort of pure chaotic flux without any internal structuring– or as Graham has put it “formatting” –principle within it. Following an Aristotlean protocol– though a protocol already present in the thought of Plato and perhaps even Parmenides –it seems as if matter is ineluctably conceived only in its negative, as the absence of form. This generates the entire problem or question of how form is generated or how matter comes to be “form-atted”. And, of course, because matter has already been conceived as formlessness, as the un-form-atted, as that which is without in-form-ation, the principle of form must come from elsewhere or outside of matter... Matter itself is treated as being without its own structuring principle or as being without its own ordering principle. As Gilbert Simondon observed, this way of thinking most likely arises as a consequence of technocratic thought where humans impose form on a matter that is thought or conceived of as a passive recipient of structuration.
However, it is not difficult to discern this move as already necessitated by the Parmenidean declaration. Here the whole problem emerges in relation to Parmenides’ declaration that being is and non-being is not. Now, if being is and non-being is not, we very quickly run into the problem of difference. For if to differ is to be what something is not, then it follows that differences are not for as we know being is. Yet if differences are not, then it follows as a consequence that entities are not, for to be an entity is to differ.
Perhaps it would be no exaggeration to say that an entire destiny of Western thought already lies within Parmenides’ fateful decision. Here the issue would lie not with the declaration that being is, but rather with the identification of difference with negativity. For in identifying difference with negativity, Parmenides insures that the principle by which being is form-atted requires an exteriority, another agency, another principle through which difference is introduced. We thereby get the interminable story of the Big and Little Demiurge imposing form on the world. However, in identifying difference with the power of negativity, has not Parminedes fallen into what Roy Bhaskar calls the “Epistemic Fallacy” or the conflation of the epistemic and the ontological? Between difference as it functions in representation, recognition, or the cognitive activity of identification and difference as it is ontologically, there is a massive chasm.
Sunday Afternoon Gardening
from Larval Subjects by larvalsubjects]

[abhava (Indian philosophy) -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia
place in Vaisheshika school ( in
Vaisheshika (Indian philosophy) )
To these six was later added abhāva, nonexistence or absence. Though negative in content, the impression it makes is positive; one has a perception of an absence where one misses something. Four such absences are recognized: previous absence, as of a new product; later absence, as of a destroyed object; total absence, as of colour in the wind; and reciprocal absence, as of a jar...]

[Abhava - Indopedia, the Indological knowledgebase The category
1. (
category) [A] Being not an inherence, abhāva is a non-inherence, which means that abhāva is empty of inherence and different from the inherence.1 [B] Different from being, abhāva is the object of a knowledge that is dependent on the knowledge of counterrelatum. [C] According to the followers of Mādhva, abhāva is the object of the adequate knowledge "there is not" (nāsti).
The author of
Nyāya-līlāvatī holds that the category of abhāva is a very useful one. Abhāva is explained as possessing the empirical potential of bhāva due to its being of help in the acquisition of the summum bonum. The usefulness of abhāva is an established tenet because all agree that in the absence of cause, there is no effect.
Types of abhāva
According to
Tarka-saMgraha, there are four types of abhāva: previous non-being, destruction, ultimate non-being, and disjunctive non-being. Others (BhP and TKau) hold that there are two types of abhāva: relational and disjunctive abhāva. The first one is of three kinds: previous non-being, destruction, and ultimate non-being. The second one is only of one kind. The traditional point of view is that the relational non-being is abhāva that has something identical as constituting the idea of counterrelatumness and is delimited by another relation to it (to the selfsame identity).]

The chasm between the Continental and the Oriental wings of philosophy persists despite technological breakthroughs. What is deplorable is that the reasons are political and economic and not academic. [TNM]

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