Posted on Sunday, January 03, 2010 10:29 AM
In a discussion elsewhere (Facebook) on a possible philosophy Nobel, Loren Cano and I have been discussing the works of Alain Badiou. Badiou is still relatively unknown in the English speaking world - his main text Being and Event only appeared in English around 2007. Badiou is interesting, and holds the potential to be the first philosopher to excite me again since my love affair with Derrida in the 1980's. It seems that, by basing his philosophy on mathematics (set theory) in stead of language, he poses a way out of the impasse post-modernism presented to critical theory and builds a philosophy that demands an active and radical politics. For me it would be a relief to once again be philosophically justified in taking an absolutist stance against evil.
I have started reading Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil – with my history struggling with the demands of praxis, this seems to be the area that really interest me most, and I am as always a bit afraid of the mathematics (which should once again explain why I was never happy in that IT career). An article in a (now unfortunately lost somewhere) Dutch magazine about Mehdi Belhaj Kacem and the Julien Coupat-affair first caught my attention. MBK seems even more interesting, but I have decided to wait till the hype surrounding him has died down somewhat and first digest his roots, namely Badiou and Agamben.
I am not ready to give an informed opinion about either MBK or Badiou yet – without someone around for discussions it remained an idle interest far too long. But thanks to Loren’s challenge I have set myself the target of gaining an understanding of Badiou that would enable me to make an honest and considered appraisal. In the mean time, here is a review of MBK’s L'esprit du nihilisme by Alexander Galloway. It reflects on MBK’s debt to Badiou at some length, and has provided most of my current understanding of their thoughts.
# (A)musings on Badiou
1/6/2010 2:49 PM by
As a young theoretical physicist I was concerned about the validity of my 'science' and started delving into philosophy with the aim of getting a deeper understanding of the nature of knowledge and questions, of decidability, verifiability and truth. This diversion, with the exception of Plato/Socrates and Rene Descartes ( still some confusion) left me more confused than before I started reading.
But then I heard about Kurt Goedel's omega inconsistency theorem. As mathematical logic was not a prescribed course (and the mathematics is rather elementary, or so I thought) I started to work through the main ideas in mathematical logic in order to get to the point where I could understand what the omega inconsistency theorem really meant.
I took me three years of hard dissiplined work. It was not the elementary mathematics of formal logic or axiomatic set theory that caused my suffering, instead, what tortured me even in my dreams was the bootstrapping (self referencing or recursive) arguments that constituted the proof as well as the meaning of the symbolism in terms of the knowledge theoretical questions which I was trying to answer. Conceptually understanding this theorem is one of the most difficult things I have conquered in my life and to put this in perspective my field of expertise, gauge theories, is understood to be the most difficult mathematical physics that you can attempt and by the time I reached sixteen I had already worked through and understood many of the different geodesics and solutions in general relativity.
Aside: Bootstrapping although contrary to any logical thinking exists and works, just read about those crazy Kaons ( particle physics) and think about the chicken and egg question in evolutionary terms!
When I finally finished with Frege, Russell, Whitehead and Goedel the orgasmic elation of finally understanding a very difficult theorem was first met with serious disappointment and only later when I realized that my unjustied disappointment was due to the realisation that the nature of knowledge is elusive, and that this theorem's brilliance lies in defining the scope and validity of our theories. Translated (rather naively) into English, it says; In some closed axiomatic systems (with some restrictive conditions) there will always be at least one undecided preposition and secondly the axioms of the arithmetic in question cannot be proven within the system. A second more English translation will illuminate the source of my disappointment. It says; If you base a philosophy on a set of ideas (assuming them to be true) and then argue using formal logic, you cannot come up with any new ideas (allthough expressing the old ideas in different ways may be very useful) in fact you cannot even prove the old ideas(axioms).
An old original joke of mine is 'Newton killed Merlin', but in fact it was Galileo Galilei ( the father of both theoretical and experimental physics) that delivered the death blow. Even after Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler did some of the groundwork, it was the Italian who in one fell swoop destroyed Aristotle's physics and commanded nature to yield her secrets to experiments, when he formulated and tested 'Newton's Laws of motion'. To my mind this obliterates the need to answer any of the Kantian questions relating to epistemology. GG created the link between the human mind and the external space-time in which it lives, allowing us to take the external universe and to encode it into structures which we had created in our own minds over centuries. Suddenly,fear of the natural world had been replaced by a limited command of it as well as the possibility to understand and model it all with numbers and axiomatic systems. Merlin and Yoda ( to be be fair they both told us to look within ourselves) were finally dead and the swamp has become a sharply lit mall.
So Badiou's ideas leaves me with some questions. Can we really use the structures (in this case Mathematical logic, set theories and algebras) created in the human mind to analyse structures created in the human mind. In the language of ML; Does A imply A?, of course it does, but it says nothing! Even more unkind is that ML is in itself an axiomatic system. A second concern that I have is that when we impose ML on philosophy, should we not just admit that we have come full circle and landed in Socrates's lap and unfortunately too close to Aristotle's Nicomachian ethics for comfort (remember his bad physics)!
But enough epistemological jesting, for the point that I am trying to make is that technocratic application of knowledge will get us nowhere. As much as I understand an appreciate the immense power of these axiomatic systems I always preach caution when we try an draw absolute conclusions from areas where the validity of our theories have not been tested. What is important is to see ourselves as a part of this universe and realize the events we experience are just that. Also the ideas we have are just that and even though experience and thought feed on each other and neither could exist independently, they are separate entities that could not be confused. In essence all mathematics ( a philosophy created in the human mind and encoded in a language, not a science) and therefore serious science is based on this kind of abstract thinking, but it is important to remember that we use our thinking to model our environment, even though our environment shaped our thinking in the first place. We are both and at the same time creators and products of our universe.
The only thing left is for us all to become good Buddhists, to realise that the Ying and the Yang are both the same and not the same, and grasping for absolutes in any endeavour will leave us empty handed. It is as if the universe is a large spider web and every move we make, sets off a vibration in the web that influences everything else in the universe including ourselves! Scary is that once, when writing about the way the human brain works, I used exactly the same spider web analogy to illustrate the workings of the human brain! Even our brains mimic the nature of the universe, which is not at all surprising since we are part of it, after all.
But before you follow my foray into ML remember that Goedel died of starvation, he would not eat for fear of being poisoned. How logical is that! For one of the great geniuses of our time? BTW he wasn't the only logician that displayed serious mental instability.
Footnote; I apologise to the reader for Bushi-yfing the translation of the IT into English. Also I recommend the reading of any standard ML text by anyone who would like to incur permanent brain damage. More fun and illuminating however would be to read be some English version of Euclid's elements, it is as far as I know the first axiomatic approach to knowledge and still valid after 2500 years (outside of the logical nitpicking) and is way more accessible. Another more accessible work is 'Goedel Escher Bach (an eternal golden braid)' by Douglas Hoffstaeter.