The writing style of Being and Time

Fri Intellektuell believes that Deleuze & Guattari, in their Anti-Oedipus, used perverted and sensationally irreverent language in order to intentionally make themselves a bit ridiculous. Having made themselves ridiculous thusly, they do not have to appear ridiculous in their pretention when the scope of their ambition in the book becomes clear. One doesn’t become ridiculous twice.

Heidegger’s Being and Time takes a different approach. The language is amazingly difficult most of the time. The reader is forced to desperately scrape and claw at the text in order to extract meaning. As a rule, Heidegger doesn’t reveal in advance where he is going with the text, other than quite subtly. The result is that as soon as we understand what he is doing, we also understand that he is capable of doing it. He explains the meaning of being to us, but we don’t understand quite how much that means until we have understood his explanation of being. Thus he escapes the trap of appearing pretentious: there is no initial announcement “we’re going to achieve X and Y” followed by an arduous attempt to achieve it. The achievement and the announcement are the same. He usually cannot be accused of promising more than he can deliver. The downside is that a lot of readers will simply not be able to put up with the book, giving up in frustration.

Nietzsche takes a different approach again in his works, promising heaven and earth at the outset, and then taking the reader on an aphoristic odyssey. If the reader has a sensitive stomach, Nietzsche will of course appear extremely pretentious. He doesn’t mind; he doesn’t write for those who can’t tolerate pretention.

The limitations and fundamental nature of systems are not understood

Recently, I’ve become more and more aware of the limitations of conscious thought and formal models of entities and systems. We don’t understand how political systems make decisions, how world events occur, or even how we choose what to wear on any particular day. Cause and effect doesn’t exist in the form it is commonly imagined. We do not know what our bodies are capable of. We certainly don’t understand the basis of biology or DNA. Aside from the fact that there are so many phenomena we cannot explain yet, the models of chemistry and physics are an artificial mesh that is superimposed upon a much messier world. They work within reason, up to and including the phenomena that they can predict, but to confuse them with reality is insanity. In this vein it is interesting to also contemplate, for instance, that we don’t understand all the capabilities that a computer might have. Its CPU and hardware, while highly predictable, are fashioned out of the sub-conceptual and non-understood stuff that the world is made of. One day we may stumble upon software that makes them do something highly unexpected.

What’s the purpose of all this negative arguing then? What I want to get at when I say that we don’t understand this and we don’t understand that is a new, deeper intellectual honesty and a willingness to face the phenomena anew, raw, fresh, as they really appear to us. There’s a world of overlooked stuff out there.

Towards a conception of space

Most beings around us that we recognise as beings, that we have concepts and names for, have a degree of variability in their existence. For example, a piece of paper remains a piece of paper even though it is folded or something is written on it. A man remains a man even if he takes a step forward or turns his head. But the variability is relative to what the being is conceived as. The piece of paper doesn’t remain an unfolded piece of paper if it is folded, though it will remain one even if things are written on it. A man doesn’t remain a man looking straight ahead if his head is turned to the side. And so on. We can imagine a conception of something that it could not possible continue existing in, for example a man who is alive but holds his breath indefinitely, or a man with a very specific blood composition, and so on.

This variability can be understood as being a kind of space. It can act as a medium, it can be occupied and appropriated. Beings can interact with each other and exist in a form of symbosis when they make use each other’s available space. However, this space is not always free for use in any manner whatsoever. The body’s immune system will attempt to repel invaders if the blood’s composition becomes suspect or threatening. Countries will attempt to keep their waters free of nuclear submarines belonging to foreign powers. A spring will try to return to its natural length if compressed or stretched, unless it comes to rest in an equilibrium with the force that acts on it. Thus, some forms of space are actively defended. On the other hand, some kinds of space are basically undefended. If I write something on a piece of paper and store it in a safe place, I can basically expect the writing to remain there even in the distant future. If I rotate the hands of a clock that doesn’t have a battery, they will remain in the position I put them in.

This notion of space is completely dependent on how concepts and beings are identified in the world in the first place. Thus there is nothing universal about it. It is grounded in a conceptual basis. This should not diminish its usefulness, however, since collections of concepts constitute practically everything that we deal with. If we accept this notion, next we may proceed to ask some interesting questions, such as:

  • Is there a link between this “generalised space” and other concepts that we may care strongly about, such as Nassim Taleb’s proposed “antifragility“, or culture, or life?
  • For a given space, is there a maximal degree of occupancy? Can the space be exhausted?
  • How is space best occupied and defended?

For another analogy, consider the collective biomass on earth to be an entity, and consider that we as human beings are a particular configuration of the space that it affords.

The genesis of new forms

How is the genesis of truly new forms possible?

Classical scientific thinking would have us believe that the principle of cause and effect explains the world. Thus I’m led to follow the trail of potential causes when I look for the reasons behind the emergence of something. Why did the wheat grow taller in one spot than in another? Investigate the soil composition and the farmer’s practices. Why do I get sunburned easily, but my friend doesn’t? Investigate the composition of the skin. Why is the American car industry not doing well? Look at the changing terms of trade and the changing competitiveness of other countries’ car industries over time, and so on.

If we follow this line of thinking, we are led to believe that all kinds of phenomena are basically reflections or refractions of other phenomena, linked together by the laws of the universe. Phenomena would thus undergo constant transformations, but there would be no synthesis of truly new phenomena. There would be no possible cause that could be their origin.

But even in this reactive world view, we sometimes say that things happen by chance. We use this term when the reasons behind a phenomenon are so numerous or hard to trace that they mostly defy our cause and effect logic. In theory, for example, it would be possible for the first cell or self-replicating strand of DNA to arise by chance in the “primordial soup”. And in theory, significant phenomena such as hurricanes can arise from minute perturbations of the air. Once the initial “chance configuration” of these phenomena has arisen somewhere, the emergent, stable phenomenon takes on a character of its own, seemingly severed from the conditions that spawned it. The situation is not unlike Conway’s game of life, for example, where the right starting conditions can give rise to extremely complicated patterns of evolution, even though the rules are deceptively simple. It also has similarities with group theory, where four simple axioms give rise to a rich but finite system of finite simple groups, culminating in the “monster group” whose size is around 10^53 elements. Here, the four axioms themselves are the chance condition that yields the massive new phenomenon.

But even though such phenomena originating in “chance” can be highly decoupled from their origins, the question continues to bother us: is it possible for truly new phenomena to be spawned in this universe, and if so, what is their origin?

A time to build barriers

Countries like Japan thrive on barriers to information flow. It is hard to overstate how deep and wide the rift caused by linguistic differences between Japanese and Indo-European languages is. The number of people who speak both very good English/German/French etc and very good Japanese is small and unlikely to grow dramatically. Yet there is a willingness from both sides to learn about the other side and push/pull information through that narrow channel.

One important consequence of this situation is that heterogeneity can develop and be preserved. Customs, the general way of thinking, the public sphere in Japan are different to their counterparts in the West. Among Western countries, these things are becoming increasingly homogenous thanks to ease of communication and the Internet. Not only will there be things on both sides of the divide that will never flow through the connecting conduit: the smaller partition, Japan in this case, can also act as a kind of catalyst and refinery for whatever comes in through the conduit, developing its own, highly refined versions of absorbed impressions. This is not possible if one has instant access to all information on the other side.

The Internet may yet turn out to be the greatest homogenising force mankind has ever known. For this reason, it is now an urgent task to erect new barriers on the internet and to restrict information flow. The wide open space must be partitioned into rooms with walls, doors and windows. The new barriers do not need to correspond to the old ones — it might even be preferable if they did not. Because the new barriers can be different from the old ones, the internet as a whole becomes a constructive step that we can endorse, and not something we are forced to react against. It is a stepping stone into a new world. Through restriction, we will be liberated.

An afterthought: barriers would be a negative addition that paradoxically has the potential to generate something new. But the negative aspect is certainly distasteful at first sight. If there is another way of achieving heterogeneity, which does not require barriers, then let’s hear it.