Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "The West Must Show Strength to its Enemies & Belief In Itself (New Culture Forum conference)." video.

  1. Part A2: We might say the data and the diagram, is the new rhetoric and image. One of the worries that got rid of this kind of rhetoric was the belief in its role in creating 20th century totalitarian states, the rhetorical power of the image to memorise in Eisenstein’s “October” and his counterpart in Germany Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”. The idea of the second half of the twentieth century was to replace old style rhetorical politics with science and data. I think the Vietnam War and Robert McNamara’s approach and presentations of the numbers on how the war was going displays not the absence of rhetoric but becomes a form of rhetoric itself. The mesmeric prescriptive power of the numbers, the claims to believe and base belief only in scientific facts, has become a new mesmeric power, one owned by those who collect data they choose and those who actually understand it and those who know how to get policy out of it. Indeed the idea that scientific data could determine political policy at all let alone impartially, is now rejected, different policy determine different constructible economy and legal sciences and sourced from non-governmental institutions with an obvious political agenda. All the axiomatic political concepts like right justice equality utility and the good are contested in terms of intension not just numeric extension. A rationally agree policy based in clear and distinct agree concepts and facts seems not just impossible but creates a new binary but kind of sorties problem: the experts their institutions and the rest of us. The left are clearly correct that the rational systems of science have extra rational origins and axioms. They are set up for an agenda that is justified with data projections. In a real way these are not disputes about the facts the numbers but about which institutions are to go forward. They are surly inseparable form power and politics they are not transcendent pure facts. The right basis of geo politics from Hobbes based in self interest and the search for security, is not so different from the left basis in Hegel’s notion of a dialectical struggle for recognition with but by the other. Another reason rhetoric and images were to be expelled from politics was, along with fear of the Caesar mob, was that they are too subjective, that is anyone can make one up, nowadays just put together two words or Photoshop two images people will think anything can be like anything else, hence they think we need definitions and numbers. But with the openness of images and metaphor there is also a closeness. Images are very culturally specific, which means some people might not or even will not be able to recognise the connection the meaning. In rhetoric theory this is just a bad bit of rhetoric, it doesn’t work, the speaker did not know their audience. But also this feature can be used to convey meaning only to a specific group while the others don’t see it at all.
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  2. Part A6 Just a reference for anyone who might be inclined to want to pursue an understanding of axiomatic formal systems in terms of the philosophy of logic and mathematics etc. Firstly, many of the people who devised these axiomatic systems started off as mathematicians, working on the problems of the late 19th century crisis in mathematics: the crisis of foundations. This was due to new mathematics of the 19th century like Gauss Reimann, which then seemed to create systems of mathematical axioms (like Reimann Geometry) that had the axiomatic closed notions of truth and proof, axioms and theorems but was not grounded in Kant's notion of intuition which only grounded Euclidean axioms in our intuition of flat space. The problem was the new non flat space axiom systems had the internal "properties" of a mathematics but its foundation seems to have nothing to do with our ordinary intuitions of flat space. So now in a kind of Hegelian move (the point is a special case of the line which is a special case of the plane, and graphs must be similarly categorizable as various relations of inclusion and extension on one view of Hegel as pure rationalism and structuralist speculative reason anyway) Euclidean flat space geometry and its axioms become a special case of a more general axiomatic system that is not then grounded in the nature of human intuition. it was decided then that a more structuralist group theory (Galois) approach was required for foundations in mathematics. But at the same time new work was being done in logic in Germany and Poland, which went on to be interpreted as a rejection of Aristotle's Term logic, which was believed to be assumed by Kant in the Analytic of Critique of Pure Reason. So now using Frege, Russell Whitehead sought to ground mathematics in this new logical system. now mathematics is autonomous of human intuition, and in fact sovereign over human intuition and reason since it is a higher structure we cannot experience or see. our intuition is a special case in an higher non intuitive axiomatic structure. They picked set theory axioms to do this which is strangely like Aristotle's term logic anyway. Following this then a number of competing programs followed many expanding on Russell's work such as Quine and some from Wittgenstein's Tractatus such as Carnap's application of it to science. Now from the 1950s another program was implemented, wanting to bring into the fray model terms like possibility and necessity, which meant that they had to devise a axiomatic system for them. C. I. Lewis is seen as inaugurating this project. For most of the later half of the 20th century these Quine Lewis systems though are seen as competitors in the sovereignty of proof battle for the axioms. note to follow (that is A7)
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  3. Part A8 I got two pieces labelled part A7by mistake earlier. The first A7 begins "Just a note on A6..." and the second A7 begins "Much of..." Look if the lefts Hegelian metaphysics can make two people appear as one and one person appear as two then i can.... whatever. To link what have said to the modern left i think involves genealogically to see it rooted in Hegelian reason and subtraction sublimation and the sub cultural revolution from bellow. They begin with the emphasis on the master/slave or lordship/bondage struggle for recognition. in Hegel's Phenomenology this is his take and critique of Kant's unity of apperception, where for Hegel the self is not a priori and transcendent of context, but is in a context and as such is a self in a struggle for recognition against the other, but only possible by another. This was taken by Marx through Hegel's logic (Alex Calinicos) as struggle between classes. Post-Marxism emphasises the struggle here for self recognition or identity between women and men and the West and the other to the West. (this is odd don't you think paradoxical) You can compare the Hegelian account to a pure materialism, which it is not, and to the epistemic work of replacing metaphysics by Russell in his account of the solipsism of the self, and then Moore and Strawson on this problem and finally (perhaps) Wittgenstein's dissolution of the problem. The left keeping this part of Hegel reject the rest for Marx and Adorno etc early on. later after the second world war is the turn to culture as both the hidden problem: real meaning is hidden by ideology and the superstructure of capitalism holding back Marxism. This is the familiar idea that science can reveal the exploited reality behind the apparent appearance of capitalism as freedom and democracy. This is not so different to the analytic notion that science trumps common sense, opinion and subjectivism. In the late 19th century the marginalism economic project i think was constructed as a defence of economic science but a criticism of Marx. the hidden mystery here is the desires of the self in an economy. here meaning is also hidden but up for scientific manufacture. This project was later grounded in neo Kantianism i think, particularly the praxiology of Austrian L. von Missis. The next move of the left was to see the cultural ideology of capitalism as also a possible Hill, a possible affording tactical place from which to bring about the revolution. Footnotes to Adorno follow until, Derrida Foucault and Deleuze, who basically see the legal system, political identity and a transcendental empiricism, as the new affording obstacle's to the revolution. this explains the shift of the left from subcultural freedom against the state, to legislative control by the state. There were, up until about 2010, much anti Hegelian-rationalism on the left eg Virginia Held on the domestic realm and the public and the private political spheres, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's subaltern (Derrida picked her to translate his "of Grammatology" from French into English because she couldn't speak French, was not a natural French speaker, i believe). it seem to me following the financial Crisis the left turned to a kind of "spirit of the laws" Hegelianism and with it all the Hegelian sublimation. That is i think, as the earlier example i gave on mathematics the point is really from the line, which is really from the plane. in politics ethical life and its spheres needs to be sublimated under right of reason, anything left over is expendable. hey can claim though that the free market does the same through Taylorism etc actually constructed in the domestic realm by a female genius industrial chemist: e.g Domestic science. Another way to view the left, i think, is as a bousware project to divide the working class, and using representation of minority identities in the ruling class to bluer or "appear" to blure the class distinction. Then through Rawlsian type arguments to infinity the left over identities are to be sublimated by right and equality projects: There ethical life to be brought to the rights of reason. Interesting here is on the left Alan Badiou who uses Z-F set theory (like Russell's set theory axioms) and the axiom of choice to articulate this move. Now they have Hegelian speculative realism as science doing the natural normative work. So you cannot set up a simple science verse culture distinction here to distinguish and make a project of the right conservatives against the left. An analytical metaphysics is developing called meta metaphysics much going back to Carnaps critic of metaphysics some 100 years ago. Zizek though perhaps is closer to Schelling's concept of nature and as forces in equilibrium, and freedom here, than Hegel. I used to know this but can't recall it now. but maybe Shelling has no infinite reason here no Hegelian speculative reason here. All from a 2006 conversance at Goldsmiths Collage London University. The Kantian anthropologist there has retired unfortunately some years ago. i would leek to end with my own image to capture this in essence, but i cannot find out how to get permission to use their work. So silence or a black slate, or space . Thanks Konstantin Kisin to for the great and inspiring talk. I hope my inspired comments have not gone into excess and too far off topic: A1-A8!
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  4. Part A1. This is a great talk. There's so much here to unpack: its feast of possible interpretations. As such i have a high degree of freedom in a certain choice as to which aspects of the talk to unfold and therefore which possible discursive direction i could take the discussion into. which way forward, and so, into which possible world i want my comment to access, is not just a choice an either/or but a judgement: like a judgement which way to go in a forest as opposed to a fork in the road. This allows me of course to draw on my own understanding on which way to go now, this understanding is, limited obviously by my education and educational choices etc. ,there will be unknown unknowns for me: paths through the forest i do not recognise, but also the freedom can allow me just to use the take as an excuse to just bang on about my own favourite thing: the possibilities in the forest, without a map, allow me to covertly plan a rout to the pub and claim its just a judgement. So I will try and respect the subject and claims of the talk in my comment but that does not mean just reiterating its content, this in a way is foreclosed since this is a move in a political discussion, and not a death sentence, and so implies or even obligates further connected moves. It is an event in a context that demands a response. First off then, i love the picture of the aero plane, and its is a brilliant immediate image to illustrate his point in language that takes many sequential sentences to unfold. On the use of this image now then i discern a reference or gesture back towards the old medieval rhetorical tradition of the past. A tradition dominated by three subjects: logic grammar and rhetoric, i think. The rhetoric part held Cicero works in high regard in this respect, he in turn held Plato and Aristotle on rhetoric in high regard. indeed even Thomas Hobbes of the English civil war and the 30 years war, used many metaphor and rhetoric devices even though he is certainly the father of the modern scientific world view in politics and human affaires. While metaphors have slowly lost their normative role in modern politics in exchange for data and the diagram, Hobbes, the arch to modernism, still picked a great cover for his book Leviathan. So in the modern world we have Hobbes the realpolitik the political realist in domestic and international politics. Hobbes as laying down the foundations or "axioms" of modern geopolitics and game theory, Hobbes the architect of both totalitarianism and "the people". Hobbes account of human nature as primarily determined in self interest and force alone, as we might say now, or human nature as determined primarily by the vice of pride as they would have said in his own day. Self interest is certainly held to be the axiomatic basis for all politics law and economic analysis in the twentieth century. It also dominates contemporary philosophy in the form of a naturalistic and realistic account of human nature. Alternative views on Hobbes can be found in Michael Oakshot's introduction to Leviathan (on line it was a few years ago), and Quentin Skinner's "From Hobbes to Humanism: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics" (2018).
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  5. Part A7 Just a note on A6, when Aristotle devised his logic he said is was a kind of general organisation of the the process of argument people actually do with each other in real time debate. Also Kant's notions of a concept as a function is somewhat alien to Aristotle's conception of logic. But also when Frege and Russell took the concept as function they meant sets within sets, not Kant's notion of a concept as a function in human time and human space. The bottom line is these axiomatic systems have come to dominate mathematics sand science as normative demarcations, and so they dominate the role for science and mathematics every where such as in the budget. The key point for me is this means truth is defined with these system and our ordinary notions of truth are subordinate to the axiomatic notion which eventually made "truth" redundant (Tarski). This means our reasoning and our body our place position and moment in time are subordinated to a higher and highly abstract standard of reasoning. Ordinary people are bereft of the modern notions of reason as axiomatics and so ordinary argument is crooked by its criteria. later work of interest is the attempt to view discourse and discussion (like Aristotle started out as doing) in terms of these axioms. When you put this with the program of a perfect language of definitions and object, you get something that subordinates our ordinary discourse especially in terms of degrees of freedom, to its reason as axioms. To paraphrase Konstantin Kisin, it starts to look like "what you say is true but your reasons are not logically correct not axiomatically correct." I think this begins with R.M. Hare but others cite Paul Grice through to Robert Brandom perhaps. This has had a massive impact on all most every area of economics since V. Pareto and K. Arrow (see Ian Shapiro Yale Course on Politics Philosophy and Economics. This guy was also a major player in the "real" world ). As you can imagine this is extremely difficult stuff. Anyone taking this on is in for the long term and probably will need to find a friend crazy enough to want to do it too. I think the best place to start is the YouTube lectures by KaneB. Good luck and remember George Malory.
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  6. Part A4 : just a note on the question concerning axiomatics. I have said a number of things in my discussion of the talk by Eric Kaufmann on data and auditing that concerns the standard view of auditing: that certain a priori principle's or axioms have to be in place for already, before the data and the laws can even be properly be said to have meaning in terms of knowledge and application. There are familiar distinction's between the Universal and the Particular, called Quantifiers in predicate logic and between Necessity and Possibility in model logic. These are presented as according to formal requirements of truth such as non-contradiction, decidability, bivalence, completeness, expressivity. These are a branches of mathematics with there's own criteria of validity. As axiomatic systems these model operators are increasingly seen as required for a logic expressing propositions and relations between propositions in reason. in this context they are symbols and the question is are they needed or can logic and language semantics do without them and still express formally an area of reasoning in language. this started off as a mathematical philosophical project over a 100 years ago to "represent thought or reason formally so as to draw a line between reason and unreason (valid and invalid reasoning and well formed formulae), in terms of human speech and so on, conforming to this logic or not. It rapidly became, or was really intended as a 1) project for institutionalists with the concept or general term been expressed as a rule rather than a transcendent thing (Platonic pure form) or a matter of mere psychological association (Hume), 2) the search for a perfect language and logic that not only institutionally had to stick to but all human speech had to conform to to be justified or legitimate. On Model logic notions of possibility and necessity are linked to normative claims like keeping a contract and keeping a promise and doing an appropriate duty. There is thus a relation here but with difficulty to notions of right and that to issues in regard to utility. Whereas for Kant these sorts of model concepts need an image in intuition and a transcendental unity of apperception, and for Wittgenstein they play something like part of the Criteria internal to language game, in mathematic logic they are rather than a set of axioms that define reasoning within a possible world. These ideas it seems have already found their way into law. i would say that just transposing the form of this modal logic onto an institution allows for the apparent disappearance of the subject Kant's unity of apperception and Wittgenstein forms of life. The axioms will not stand given a corrupt weak or hegemonic state, but expressed as mathematics it appears they would. This is the semblance of a political institution not a real one. Jean Cavesse and Peter Suber used the old predicate logic to relate logic to representing the state, it cannot represent something like hylomorphism. model notions are held to be as axioms that are the job of the institution alone, rues and or regulations, as if then we cannot do this ourselves , and as if the institutions would still have an effect if chaos reined bellow them in the sub culture the sublimated. given this the institutions then consider us all as on verge of destroying their axioms applicably, and so set about ordering us to conform to he a priori requirements of instituional axioms modality. This institutional ordering apparatus on people, Foucault called biopolitics. There is a link i think. Interestingly Foucault talks about genealogy and rethinking, re-enacting perhaps event from in the past so "as to be otherwise" , i.e. in logic the counterfactual, into the present. There is analogous work in model logic under "possible worlds semantics" . While Foucault sees the past events as radically contingent and could be otherwise, in model logic this is expressed in terms of "accessibility" relations between an actual possible world "v" and some future possible world "w". Here then the accessibility relation is expressed vRw. It means the notion of a limit relation between possible worlds and so a limit to possible propositions within them (mixing metaphors a bit there is now a model limit between propositions a limit other than just truth function). Its a highly sophisticated and contested area of mathematics. But for me Kant and Wittgenstein have already put an end to this sort of project. Model axioms here regarded as formal a priori closed systems, are like the shadow of the thing. they are there but the work is done both before them but expressible within them.
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  7. Part A5: If you follow me here then, the old political distinctions between ideal types of political systems collapse. They are rather idea limits unreachable as asymptote that ignore the other institutional functions in representational abstraction. these are also both internal and external foreigner and domestic and so these are not radical distinctions: ontologically. and this means all the other key concepts like freedom and law, individual and community have to be thought about differently. eg Kant talks of intuition and its space tie frame, Wittgenstein commentator reads him as claiming while stuff in our filed of view can be questioned and revised and re-interpreted a basic frame must be held constant. this difference is marked by effort or activity. it takes no effort of interpretation on the frame, to the frame we are in a way passive. this obvious demands has on our notions of freedom. for the left they see this as an unnecessary and illegitimate limit to freedom. in a way the liberal right who Foucault seemed to be sympathetic too at the end of his life, also see this as an unnecessary limit. the difference is the right think an axioms system written on paper can hold a country together, while the left think everything is possible. They are both expansionist with little understanding of internal limits. we can see these limits not in axioms but in analogies' of limits where the political reality comes loose from the axioms and the people. Law as universal requires greater and greater work and force to get people to conform to it "at a distance". But this institutional process of legal expansion also will take those legal ad hoc rule at a distance and applies them back as first laws to their country of origin. there is my diagnosis of the problem and the risks and hopefully a sign post but at least a piece of graffiti as to how to move forward, if not which way to go.
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  8. Part A3 So, for example: I know the point of the metaphor and image being used here. I know this is a political speech, which uses ideas and images to get the message across. But if I just came across say a short clip from 4:00mins to 4:10, I might think this is an anthropology lecture, or an attempt to get money for the third world, or primitive people are being mocked for being stupid, or believing in associative resemblance, hidden and at a distance, magic. From another point of view even that it’s an example of a low carbon aeroplane as part of the Save the Planet transport policy. So much for my long framing of the talk. Konstantin Kisin certainly uses the image to illustrate the difference between appearance and reality the real and the semblance the taste and simulacra. According to Nietzsche I think Plato’s forms are an inverted world were the appearances the forms are alone real, and now what we think of as the concrete real world has become appearance and forgotten. Plato was of course suspicious of poetry and art, not though anti-art (see Derrida Plato’s Pharmacon) and then there is Plato’s “myth of the cave” who could forget that. Kant and Wittgenstein both, warn their readers about the errors of thinking in terms of images while at the same time the image, as opposed to pure genera logic and singular deductive rules from axioms, has a constitutive role in human reasoning. Both like Plato perhaps are aware that pure reason deduction is in adequate and mere subjective psychological association is inadequate for both a descriptive account of thought and then an account of real thinking as opposed to its crooked two flanks of axiomatics and subjectivism. The semblance aeroplane is not so unlike a real aeroplane that it couldn’t do a semblance of a flight. That’s what’s interesting how something that is false, can even appear to work. Newton’s law are false but they worked to get to the moon. Very strange. For anyone interested, I intend to move to discuss the content of the talk next but it will take me a while because there’s a lot of stuff hear I was not previously aware of and I need to follow up on that first to do the talk justice.
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