Rustle in the Bush

I haven’t written anything in the entire month of February, and you might as well lump in March as well, this doesn’t count. I’ve met a fella who wants to start reading Anti-Oedipus with me. The only problem is he doesn’t know any philosophy. I’m hoping to extract some knowledge about computers from him, because I am completely illiterate. I feel like the last guy in the village who learned how to read Post-Gutenberg. Anyway, that’s besides the point and so the last 2 times we met, I’ve basically just giving him inspiration for reading, and how to approach concepts in philosophy. I’m mostly gonna try and introduce him through a Nietzschean side of things, which I’m more familiar with. Wtp vs WtK. Overcoming/Limit Functions. Life/Affirmation. Kant! Conditions of possibility! Grounding! Many many things of which I have barely been able to scratch the surface. My main goal is just to find someone else who feels like they understand this stuff intuitively and makes fun connections. (But not just for fun).

That leads me too my two goals for the month of April. The last month of community college, and the last month of my teenage years. I felt like my teenage energy has been gone for awhile. I’m afraid I’m caught up in a Nietzsche phrase I reread like 2 days ago, and has been terrifying me since…. An attempt to be profound from superficiality. I believe he said it opposite of the greeks “Those greeks, they were superficial out of profundity!” Maybe this is just the problem of the metaphysician. I would like to be a metaphysician nonetheless. Deleuze was, and he is Billy Big Bollocks.

April then! Schopenhauer and Anti-Oedipus and Nonowrimo. First, I’m going to hop into Schopenhauer. I think he is the point at which philosophy and nonphilsophy divulge. Between Kant and Hegel is a small gaggle I’d like to wrestle about out of an expert in the future, like Ficthe (Because of his ‘I’; also Deleuze says some things about immanence in late Fichte somewhere) and Shelling (To see why he was dunked on so hard). But, Schopenhauer and Hegel represent not just two major figures after Kant, but I also think they are the thinkers who take Kant’s work to another task. There’s a reason there’re only referred to as post Kantian, for conversation’s sake. In the same way everyone’s a post Platonist. I mentioned the profound bit from Nietzsche because I’ve been coming to a crossroads about the role of science and psychology, especially in the world of AO which is a psychoanalytic book in flavor. Also, logic! I still find it important. This is where I got back to the idea the I should read ol’ Schop, because who better to talk about grounding with then the writers of the Fourfold! I want to understand Nietzsche much deeper, and uncover the presuppositions of his work.

Part of this is because my interest for now, and go awhile I think is going to be over this question of ‘grounding’. You can’t really avoid that in metaphysics, but I’m also wondering how implicit the connection in to epistemology at this point, considering that if all these fields are under philosophy where does one begin and the other end? I don’t think they do, perhaps at that point it’s just better to start a new conversation, and establishing new relations to explore. I guess what Im saying is what is the move that establishes ontology as thrall or grounding.

If I had to make an attempt, I would probably go Humean towards a critique of the PoS (Principle of Sufficient Reason) because its kind of the lead forawrd from Descartes’ introduction of subjectivity as central top philosophy. After the Cogito, Spinoza and the rest quickly discovered “I think, therefore I am” tells you nothing about the first I being a presupposition for the second. Hume recognize this fact and introduces habit, as the central faculty in the operations of the mind, thereby throwing away all pragmatic hope of our certainty of the principle. However, Hume creates a paradox here that is resoundingly boy and British. Kant then introduces the transcendental functions of space time and causality, and the idea of transcendental functions as a whole.Or the representation of the I as a necessary condition for understanding experience (Kant; the synthetic unity of apperception, allows objects to be subjectified). Now we’re at Kant, and I forgot Maimon! I MUST study him too, for Deleuze and for myself. This makes my 3 great post Kantians

1. Maimon (Who acknowledges Kant did search for transcendental functions successfully, but does so formally -space/time as form of intuition. That makes it only epistemologically sound -conditions of possibility- but not REAL possibility because we can’t know things-in-themselves. This is why he can approach the synethetic unity of apperception necessary to a transecedntal subject. It’s the trap of consciousness! There’s no genetic account for the given, only the architectural speculation of the given from the viewpoint of the conscious. But from the non-anthropocentric, or the unconscious viewpoint we have no way to reconcile the principle of identity with groundless reasons (Reason understood in this light, e.g. Schopenhauer in reason vs cause) and thus the project of thought which follows is the ground of the real in the subjective.
2. Schopenhauer does this with the most personality (Maimon might be the greatest genius) and though I haven’t gotten to him yet I think he also deals with the subjective relations of the body and the will. I think he sees Kant’s quid juris and raises the stakes to say “What are the facts of the will, and its movements with/of the body that allow us to begin a claim to those through a sense in the understanding?” Maybe this is going to come in the form of the critiques of causality, and there is where where the direction of the movement of of sense is identified as will. Schop will say it is to life, starting Freud’s death drive. I’m just not sure why yet.
3. Hegel. I do not even know how to start. I don’t know how Hegel’s logic connects to the Real. Why Kant wouldn’t have already dealt with contradiction (Maybe because he said the work of Logic was already over?) I don’t know. And many other questions.

Welp! Now all there is to do is read. I’m going to still try to write more regularly, and I” post a link of the Nanowrmio project. (Maybe called ‘The Point’, time for a new Underground Man?