Time and relationships (or, consciousness per Martin Heidegger)

[ConradDJ]

Derrida's aim was to treat both writting and speech similarly.

An asymmetric reversal, with one side privileged at the expense of the other, would be at odds with Derrida’s anti-totalitarian stance. Derrida’s aim was to destroy the opposition in the relationship, not reverse it...

He treated speech and writing similarly, as “writing” in this case is about a signifier for as long as there has been one (including prehistory), which (imperfectly) points back to a signified, and so includes speech. Speech equally requires “reading” and interpretation.

Thanks for the clarification... your interpretation of Derrida is surely more accurate than mine... though he apparently denies not only the possibility of accurate interpretation, but even the relevance of considering what an author actually meant. But, it also seems that when he denies things, he likes to keep them on the table, “under erasure”... part of the dance of “absence - presence”.

Here’s the specific link. (I don’t do anything special to get the link... I just click on it at the top of the web page, and copy whatever shows up in the URL box on my browser.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_(deconstruction)#Heideggerian_Dasein_and_Derridian_Trace

This section has this summary at the end –

The sign never leads to the extra-linguistic thing, it leads to another sign, one substituting the other playfully inside the structure of language. We do not feel the presence of a thing through a sign, but through the absence of other presences, we guess what it is.​

I think this is only partly true, but I get his point. Of course, words can be used to indicate things that aren’t words, and our language everywhere assumes a non-linguistic world of things. But that world does come pre-interpreted through language.

On the other page there’s this section – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction#Speech_and_Phenomena

Derrida argues that language is a structured system of signs and that the meanings of individual signs are produced by the différance between that sign and other signs. This means that words are not self sufficiently meaningful but only meaningful as part of a larger structure that makes meaning possible. Derrida therefore argues that the meaning of language is dependent on the larger structures of language and cannot originate in the unity of conscious experience. Derrida therefore argues that linguistic meaning does not originate in the intentional meaning of the speaking subject.​

This makes sense to me too, though it sounds very one-sided. Certainly language isn’t a transparent medium on which the autonomous intentions of pure consciousness imprint themselves. But neither are the thoughts and feelings of people irrelevant to what they say to each other, or to the evolution of language. It’s just that our thoughts and feelings depend on the background of language.

By describing language as if it were essentially writing, Derrida emphasizes what I’ve been calling the “inauthentic” side – the aspect of language that’s already there before we’re born and already given in the culture into which we grow up, that we appropriate in order to learn to be conscious in the human way... the aspect of language that doesn’t “originate” in us. But that’s only half the story.

Derrida seems to want to “erase” the person who speaks to another person, and consider only the language itself as a system of signs. But I doubt there’s much that’s useful to be said about this kind of system, unless we’re thinking about how it serves the evolution of people’s relationships with each other.

The “authentic” aspect of language is what each of us has to invent in the moment, in order to say what we need to say, to someone we care about. The face-to-face aspect is key here – so that even when the communication is an email written to someone far away, what’s going on is more like speaking than writing and reading. For some reason Derrida seems to set this aspect aside as “naive”. But speech is only secondarily a matter of “signifying” and “interpreting” – at bottom I’d say it’s about creating and maintaining personal connections with people. Understanding a person is quite different from reading a text -- at least, in life outside the Forums.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

Sorry for the delay

Thanks for the clarification...

Pleasure, although I see some mistakes I missed during numerous edits, but hope it makes some sense.

…though he apparently denies not only the possibility of accurate interpretation, but even the relevance of considering what an author actually meant. But, it also seems that when he denies things, he likes to keep them on the table, “under erasure”... part of the dance of “absence - presence”.

I don’t know how we could be certain of totally accurate interpretation. “The experience of the other refuses totality”, is another view (Levinas, from Physicsphan’s link from earlier in the thread). Also this could include the idea of fragmented identity, and I’d guessed the relevance to Rovelli lay in these ideas. However, I understand that when discussing language like this, Derrida is talking of functional language. Yes, both are kept on the table, I understand it isn’t closure, it is like Heidegger’s Destruktion.

Here’s the specific link. (I don’t do anything special to get the link... I just click on it at the top of the web page, and copy whatever shows up in the URL box on my browser.)

Thanks for explaining about specific linking, I’ll try it sometime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_%...erridian_Trace

This section has this summary at the end –

The sign never leads to the extra-linguistic thing, it leads to another sign, one substituting the other playfully inside the structure of language. We do not feel the presence of a thing through a sign, but through the absence of other presences, we guess what it is.

I think this is only partly true, but I get his point. Of course, words can be used to indicate things that aren’t words, and our language everywhere assumes a non-linguistic world of things. But that world does come pre-interpreted through language.

Words can indicate things by what they are not: by distinguishing them from other possible, related things. A “cat” is not another word that sounds like cat, nor another animal with the name cat, from experience and context it is a domestic cat, and not another domestic animal, etc.

Derrida argues that language is a structured system of signs and that the meanings of individual signs are produced by the différance between that sign and other signs. This means that words are not self sufficiently meaningful but only meaningful as part of a larger structure that makes meaning possible. Derrida therefore argues that the meaning of language is dependent on the larger structures of language and cannot originate in the unity of conscious experience. Derrida therefore argues that linguistic meaning does not originate in the intentional meaning of the speaking subject.

This makes sense to me too, though it sounds very one-sided. Certainly language isn’t a transparent medium on which the autonomous intentions of pure consciousness imprint themselves. But neither are the thoughts and feelings of people irrelevant to what they say to each other, or to the evolution of language. It’s just that our thoughts and feelings depend on the background of language.

The experiences of a person in time may be part of the context.

By describing language as if it were essentially writing, Derrida emphasizes what I’ve been calling the “inauthentic” side – the aspect of language that’s already there before we’re born and already given in the culture into which we grow up, that we appropriate in order to learn to be conscious in the human way... the aspect of language that doesn’t “originate” in us. But that’s only half the story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity_(philosophy )

I think you have, as, following the structuralists, Derrida has, described various things aside from linguistics as language. Perhaps you would mention which you are talking of, how it is different to other language, and how the type of language you are referring to “originates” in us, differently to other types. I’m confused by what you said, you could be claiming oral/”phonocentric” authenticity on the grounds that it originates in us?

Much earlier in the thread I mentioned that Heidegger came to say that all language was “inauthentic”.

Derrida discusses functional language, “Because at its functional level all language is a system of differences, says Derrida, all language, even when spoken, is writing, and this truth is suppressed when meaning is taken as an origin, present and complete unto itself. Difference traces function, transforming texts. ”

However, the term “authenticity” itself is tricky, but I offered some suggestions of authenticity previously in the thread along historical lines of inauthenticity associated with reason, although I didn’t mention Heidegger’s discussion of death.

And, just btw, since I mentioned “function”, what is the significance of Heidegger’s view of objects as functional? That this occurs to people before they are even aware of it?

And another aside, since I have now mentioned Heidegger’s discussion of death, I’ll mention a problem Derrida discusses with this view.

“Mortals are they who can experience death as death. The animal cannot do so. But the animal cannot speak either. The essential relation between language and death flashes up before us, but remains still unthought.” (The Nature of Language, translated, Heidegger)

http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=12931

The concluding paragraph of Derrida’s response-

Against, or without, Heidegger, one could point to a thousand signs that show that animals also die. Although the innumerable structural differences that separate one “species” from another should make us vigilant about any discourse on animality or bestiality in general, one can say that animals have a very significant relation to death, to murder and to war (hence to borders), to mourning and to hospitality, and so forth, even if they have neither a relation to death nor to the “name” of death as such, nor, by the same token, to the other as such, to the purity as such of the alterity of the other as such. But neither does man, that is precisely the point! . . . Who will guarantee that the name, that the ability to name death (like that of naming the other, and it is the same) does not participate as much in the dissimulation of the “as such” of death as in its revelation, and that language is not precisely the origin of the nontruth of death, and of the other? (A 75-6/PF 336)

Derrida seems to want to “erase” the person who speaks to another person, and consider only the language itself as a system of signs.

In this balanced way, “…the name of the author is a signifier linked with others, and there is no master signifier (such as the phallus in Lacan) present or even absent in a text “(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Or if this refers to the one who is being, Heidegger was criticised for an emphasis on “Being”, “His infatuation with ‘Being’ is equal only to his devaluing of ‘Beings’” (Levinas, again physicsphan’s link). In being influenced by both Heidegger and Levinas, Derrida may have destroyed (not reversed) the error by instead concentrating on the connection here.

But I doubt there’s much that’s useful to be said about this kind of system, unless we’re thinking about how it serves the evolution of people’s relationships with each other.

Would “useful” things said about this system describe it “from outside” and talk

about the relationships between things from the standpoint of a third party.

?

However, as these sorts of ideas have been about for around 40 years, I think it has had some influence. There could be merit in redefining categories, as Heidegger suggested, which has met with some success in changing perceptions of others like females, etc., opening up new categories of study, or balancing pervading logocentrism, and, yes, a use may include “how it serves the evolution of people’s relationships with each other.” Was that last sentence meant as a criticism?

Whether or not it furthers the hopes of thread that it

may eventually lead toward some clarity on this matter of consciousness,

I think Derrida raises worthy objections and additions to Heidegger. Possibly being open to seeing things differently might help.

The “authentic” aspect of language is what each of us has to invent in the moment, in order to say what we need to say, to someone we care about. The face-to-face aspect is key here – so that even when the communication is an email written to someone far away, what’s going on is more like speaking than writing and reading. For some reason Derrida seems to set this aspect aside as “naive”. But speech is only secondarily a matter of “signifying” and “interpreting” – at bottom I’d say it’s about creating and maintaining personal connections with people. Understanding a person is quite different from reading a text -- at least, in life outside the Forums.

I think I’ve addressed this already in this post, asking for greater explanation of which speech or type of linguistic connectivity is primarily not a matter of signification.

 

[ConradDJ]

I think you have, as, following the structuralists, Derrida has, described various things aside from linguistics as language. Perhaps you would mention which you are talking of, how it is different to other language, and how the type of language you are referring to “originates” in us, differently to other types...

...asking for greater explanation of which speech or type of linguistic connectivity is primarily not a matter of signification.

I think about language mainly from an evolutionary viewpoint. So what’s basic to language in this sense is not the specific function that Derrida emphasizes in connection with writing – i.e. the way words and linguistic expressions get to have meaning in relation to different words and expressions. I don’t disagree that this is important – but I think this aspect of language evolved to support something deeper, which tends to fall into the background when things are written down instead of spoken face-to-face.

This deeper thing in language is the kind of relationship expressed in the word “you” – a word which is almost not needed in written language, but which is always implicit when we speak with each other.

To me the key thing that makes us different from other animals is that we’re born into a unique kind of emotional connection with other people. Just as one example, babies learn to recognize faces before anything else in their environments. And of course, human infants develop in a state of helpless dependency on others for much longer than almost any other animal, including our primate ancestors. So we’re biologically programmed to grow up into a web of “you-relationships” – which is what I take to be essential in language.

In this sense, language is the “software” that runs on the human brain – i.e. whatever gets installed in our heads through communication with others, as we grow up. That includes specific languages and other kinds of codes we pick up, along with all the rest of human culture.

The basic thing this communications software does, from an evolutionary standpoint, is just to communicate itself, from one brain to another, to another. Since only to the extent it succeeds in doing that, can it continue to evolve.

One of the main things about literate culture is that’s able to “freeze” ideas and expressions in writing, and conceive them as static objects to be analyzed. In pre-literate, oral cultures, there’s no way to “preserve” any aspect of language or culture. Only what actually gets spoken in the moment by one person to another, only what gets enacted in real time between people, can get passed down – everything else disappears. So during the greater part of its evolution, the language-software was developing the emotional dynamics of face-to-face interaction, rather than static sign-systems and the intellectual ability to “read” them.

Now if we’re interested in analyzing the results of this evolutionary process – i.e. the state of a language or a literature or a culture, at a certain point in time – it makes sense to imagine it as like writing, as a system of signs interpreting other signs. But if we’re trying to imagine the process itself, I think it’s important to think about all the things people do in trying to make (and break and repair) their relationships with each other. That certainly includes many ways of “signifying” and “interpreting”, but not only that.

To return to the question of authenticity and inauthenticity – these are built into the process I’m describing. We always begin by learning how other people communicate with each other, we pick up codes invented by others and try to behave the way other people expect us to behave. So yes, in that sense it makes sense to say that “all language is inauthentic.” The connection-software gets installed in us from outside.

But the basic functionality of “you-relationships” includes learning to be “me”, inventing your own point of view in the web of connections, as distinct and unique. This is the main thing we’re working on, as kids, from the time we begin learning to talk through adolescence. So the software evolves to promote authenticity as well as inauthenticity.

As adults also, and as philosophers, this remains a fundamental issue – how to take over a thought-system we inherit from others, and "appropriate" it by finding our unique point of view in it. And I think what’s been so vital about the Western intellectual tradition in particular, is just this recurrent insistence on the unique individual viewpoint, as well as the universal code in which we imagine the world to be written down.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

The arguments made here against Whitehead seem weak in light of discussions about authenticity, and this from me early in the thread, ‘it has been suggested that although “Being” is taken to mean human “Being”, that the conclusions could logically be extended to pertain to other “Beings”’, was ignored, so it seems that these ideas with without good reason given, exclude ‘the non-human world’.


The views expressed involve the idea humans have evolved a heritable mechanism from ‘real time’ present connections

“only what gets enacted in real time between people, can get passed down”

which applies meaning to signification other than that gained from contextual experience and difference, but which eludes other animals which have also evolved ability to signify on the basis that

"something "

got passed on. It might seem designed to exclude non-human animals.


However, these ideas are flawed by placing importance on the one being at the expense of other beings. Insistence upon face to face, real time connection with others as a means is the exclusion of the others not present in space or time. These ideas exclude the non-present Other.


And there remains a lot of confusion about how the ideas might be expressed "authentically", being variously described as opposing reason, the view of connections from the inside, and being inside your own head. The last has been used to criticize Whitehead, etc, yet is used for appraisal of the "results" . An "authentic" view has been used here in a one-sided way, excluding non-self areas of the relationship.


Further flaws exist regarding the method Heidegger uses the term “caring”.

‘But the basic functionality of “you-relationships” includes learning to be “me”, inventing your own point of view in the web of connections, as distinct and unique..’

Heidegger’s caring has been called a one-sided caring about the self’s personality, different to Levinas’ ‘responsibility’ to the Other. Given this the aim of the thread, too, appears one-sided

“But it’s not basic to human consciousness, which is essentially involved with the people and things it cares about.”

Heidegger’s ideas seem designed for the sake of own-most personality at the expense of non-Beings.

I think what’s been so vital about the Western intellectual tradition in particular, is just this recurrent insistence on the unique individual viewpoint, as well as the universal code in which we imagine the world to be written down.

Evolution and the vitality of western civilisation have been given as reasons to regard Heidegger’s ideas. I’ve mentioned some attempts by which Heidegger’s exclusive ideas have been learned from, how more balanced ideas been considered and have evolved and adapted, and yet evolution is the reason given to devolve back to the same ideas from almost a century ago. And further, these ideas occurred back, prior to vital Western civilisation committing “one of the biggest crimes against humanity ever made” (wiki). Heidegger, whose ideas are espoused here, became a nazi in 1933, and whose decrees as university fuhrer-rector applying nazi ‘cleansing’ laws were designed for the exclusion of non-aryans.


But it would seem, from the ideas written here about real time, present language over writing, that written communication about Heidegger’s writings would be considered unproductive anyway.

 

[apeiron]

To return to the question of authenticity and inauthenticity – these are built into the process I’m describing. We always begin by learning how other people communicate with each other, we pick up codes invented by others and try to behave the way other people expect us to behave. So yes, in that sense it makes sense to say that “all language is inauthentic.” The connection-software gets installed in us from outside.

But the basic functionality of “you-relationships” includes learning to be “me”, inventing your own point of view in the web of connections, as distinct and unique. This is the main thing we’re working on, as kids, from the time we begin learning to talk through adolescence. So the software evolves to promote authenticity as well as inauthenticity.

As adults also, and as philosophers, this remains a fundamental issue – how to take over a thought-system we inherit from others, and "appropriate" it by finding our unique point of view in it. And I think what’s been so vital about the Western intellectual tradition in particular, is just this recurrent insistence on the unique individual viewpoint, as well as the universal code in which we imagine the world to be written down.

This debate is hard to resolve as you seem to agree there is a irreducible dichotomy here (there is both the authentic and the inauthentic) but then keep returning to the hope that one pole of the dichotomy will be somehow the more important, the more fundamental, the more primary.

Yet the point about dichotomies is that both poles are needed to have anything (anything both persistent and dynamic). So the proper questions to be asking become 1) do I have a rightful dichotomy, 2) what is their mutual relationship, and 3) what is their equilbrium balance (the point at which they are dynamically mixing in a persistently stable fashion)?

To put all this back into a Peircean framework again , and deal with Derrida's concerns too, the fundamental relationship is always the dynamical/developmental one between local degrees of freedom and global constraints.

So in the Peircean triadic scheme, everything starts in vagueness or firstness - the apeiron or the pure unbroken symmetry of potential. Then it develops as an increasingly definite dichotomy. You have secondness - the local concrete events that equate to the authentic you-relations in the Heideggerian view. The degrees of freedom. Then arising out of secondness, but also coming eventually to regulate it, is the thirdness of Peircean habits, or the global constraints that act downwards to shape the local events. The realm of the inauthentic in the Heideggian view.

As an aside, the Peircean view is sharp contrast to the Derridian because Derrida argued that crisp structure (ie: habits) must arise out of some ground already crisply structured. So beginnings are already complex. But Peirce instead says both the impressions and the ideas, the phenomenology and the structure, arise mutually from out of vagueness via their own self-organising process of development. If we must ask what comes first, then secondness is slightly ahead of thirdness - as the fleeting spontaneous event that then immediately implied its own context and so made possible the beginnings of a habit. Or as they would say in condensed matter physics, the fluctuation that broke the symmetry. But really, it is not a very meaningful question (because what comes first is vagueness!).

Anyway, focus on the notion of global constraints acting on local degrees of freedom (thirdness interacting with secondness to stabilise or make use of its crisp possibilities). In the beginning, when things are still very vague, the degrees of freedom are almost infinite (because they are unconstrained). And so anything happening seems essentially spontaneous and meaningless. A long way from "subjective" - a crisp POV.

Take as an example a human newborn and its relations with its own hands. At first the baby is surprised by the actions of the hands. These are just spontaneous events in its world (like everything else, including all those faces looming in and out of view). The baby has no control over the events. They are unconstrained degrees of freedom and so essentially meaningless. But pretty quickly, the baby discovers it can constrain the freedom of its digits. It moves from a realm of the random to a realm of the willed. And it can constrain the freedom of other discrete events like the looming faces. It can wail and then later call out. Then point and even signify in words.

The more the degrees of freedom of the world become constrained, the more the child comes to feel like a subjective being, a locus with a POV. Differance is important also of course. What lies outside the child's conscious control - the unconstrainable facts like the redness of red, or the pull of gravity, or the unpredictability of fellow toddlers - is just as much a part of the subjectivity. The basis of self-other. If we could regulate everything, we would be the world (in the way racecar drivers feel the car as an extension of their own bodies).

So inauthenticity lives within us as well as without. The pure authentic would be just secondness alone - a fleeting, spontaneous, meaningless play of events. Any POV, any context, might be weakly implied (vaguely present). But by the same token, as absent as it is possible to be. Subjectivity arises as a locus (such as an infant) comes to accumulate constraints over the freedoms of what is, now, "its world". The inauthentic has to become locally resident for there to be a persistent and developing succession of authentic moments. You have to have ideas to contextualise the impressions, structure to organise the phenomenology.

Touching again on Derrida, his valuation of the written over the oral is drawing attention to something else really - the need to have a mechanism or technology to encode the constraints. A locale needs to be able to remember its history to accumulate a set of habits. The Peircean view is fundamentally developmental. But dichotomous to development is evolution. And as life and mind show, real complexity demands both.

So a biological level of mind has the coding machinery of DNA. And a sociocultural level of mind arose out of the coding machinery of syntactic language (yes, here comes Vygotsky once more).

Derrida was just pointing out that behind the highly situated and contextualised interactions of everyday orality (the you-relating) was this structuring machinery. A machinery that just becomes far more obvious in writing (as now the interaction between writer and reader has to contextualised in a more overtly "mechanical" fashion - the gaps have to be filled in explicitly).

But again - as always - becoming focused on one pole of a dichotomy leads to unbalanced scholarship. Deconstruction can quickly come to seem like an obsession with syntactical gaps. Whereas a theory of semiotics or meaning would be about the correct interaction between syntax and semantics.

And the story on that seems pretty obvious if you focus on the idea of local degrees of freedom~global constraints.

In the beginning meanings were vague. A caveman went "urgh". An utterance with a huge number of degrees of freedom - especially if written down as a word, but perhaps vaguely interpretable in an intra-personal context where you were out hunting and he was also gesturing towards some prey.

Then syntactical speech got invented. A systematic way to constrain degrees of free floating meaning. The caveman could grunt "animal". Already your interpretation would have a great reduction in entropy (and so the grunt is officially information - a constraint on entropy production).

Your fellow caveman might indeed increasingly precisify his grunt, going {animal {deer}}. He would of course only say "deer", but the point here is to draw attention to the hierarchical nature of this downward acting contraint on the freedom of your mental response - your semantic state. Animal is more general. Deer rules out a great number of other animals to focus you on one particular variety of animal. You have that much less freedom about what you might have in mind at that moment.

Further syntax produces increasingly constrained or specific states of mind. So {animal {deer {Bambi}}} reduces your available degrees of freedom still more.

Now trace this precisification in terms of the authentic~inauthentic dichotomy. With weak constraint, you get weak specificity. The grunt of {animal} is the inauthentic bit that puts you in mind of some authentic you-relation with...the animal kingdom. But {animal {deer {Bambi}}} is strongly contextualised and so strongly authentic. You are looking into Bambi's doe eyes right now in your mind's eye (you have no choice).

So again, the false move is to try and make one pole of a dichotomy your fundamental. Instead, discover your rightful dichotomies and then map them back to the general logic of dichotomisation (or Peircean triads - which is the fuller view where local~global scale dichotomies arise out of vagueness as a process of eternally dynamic development.)

[Sorry for the essay, but it's a rainy Sunday morning and now the sky is clearing...]

 

[cosmographer]

For another resource on time and Heidegger: Brassier here tries to work through Heidegger's time by means of Deleuze. Dense and compelling as usual. There are six parts to this.

 

[apeiron]

Are we Terrance Mckenna fans here?

No, he's a crackpot. (But very good in Twin Peaks.)

 

[apeiron]

How about Sitchin?

So crackpot I had to google to find out who he was.

Why are you posting the names of cranks which don't have any relevance to the OP?

 

[fuzzyfelt]

This debate is hard to resolve as you seem to agree there is a irreducible dichotomy here (there is both the authentic and the inauthentic) but then keep returning to the hope that one pole of the dichotomy will be somehow the more important, the more fundamental, the more primary.

Yet the point about dichotomies is that both poles are needed to have anything (anything both persistent and dynamic). So the proper questions to be asking become 1) do I have a rightful dichotomy, 2) what is their mutual relationship, and 3) what is their equilbrium balance (the point at which they are dynamically mixing in a persistently stable fashion)?

To put all this back into a Peircean framework again , and deal with Derrida's concerns too, the fundamental relationship is always the dynamical/developmental one between local degrees of freedom and global constraints.

Yes, as I understand Derrida, there is regard for dynamic, developing relationships between apparent dichotomies.

So in the Peircean triadic scheme, everything starts in vagueness or firstness - the apeiron or the pure unbroken symmetry of potential. Then it develops as an increasingly definite dichotomy. You have secondness - the local concrete events that equate to the authentic you-relations in the Heideggerian view. The degrees of freedom. Then arising out of secondness, but also coming eventually to regulate it, is the thirdness of Peircean habits, or the global constraints that act downwards to shape the local events. The realm of the inauthentic in the Heideggian view.

As an aside, the Peircean view is sharp contrast to the Derridian because Derrida argued that crisp structure (ie: habits) must arise out of some ground already crisply structured. So beginnings are already complex. But Peirce instead says both the impressions and the ideas, the phenomenology and the structure, arise mutually from out of vagueness via their own self-organising process of development. If we must ask what comes first, then secondness is slightly ahead of thirdness - as the fleeting spontaneous event that then immediately implied its own context and so made possible the beginnings of a habit. Or as they would say in condensed matter physics, the fluctuation that broke the symmetry. But really, it is not a very meaningful question (because what comes first is vagueness!).

Anyway, focus on the notion of global constraints acting on local degrees of freedom (thirdness interacting with secondness to stabilise or make use of its crisp possibilities). In the beginning, when things are still very vague, the degrees of freedom are almost infinite (because they are unconstrained). And so anything happening seems essentially spontaneous and meaningless. A long way from "subjective" - a crisp POV.

Take as an example a human newborn and its relations with its own hands. At first the baby is surprised by the actions of the hands. These are just spontaneous events in its world (like everything else, including all those faces looming in and out of view). The baby has no control over the events. They are unconstrained degrees of freedom and so essentially meaningless. But pretty quickly, the baby discovers it can constrain the freedom of its digits. It moves from a realm of the random to a realm of the willed. And it can constrain the freedom of other discrete events like the looming faces. It can wail and then later call out. Then point and even signify in words.

OK, I see, if orality equates to authenticity, and if pressed, you feel Peirce sees it is as somewhat prior here to thirdness, whereas I understand Derrida might say generally of apparent oppositions that they may not exist in isolation. I wasn't aware of this difference between them.

I like the "baby" analogy, but even this from the start talks of a relationship. It is about a relationship "with". The baby is surprised “by”, and then may “constrain”. Subjectivity “wills” something (or the absence of something).

I’m not sure I have the same interpretation of Derrida, and you have clarified our different interpretations for me before, thanks. How has he argued origination from crispness? I’m of the impression that he argues for always/already.

The more the degrees of freedom of the world become constrained, the more the child comes to feel like a subjective being, a locus with a POV. Differance is important also of course. What lies outside the child's conscious control - the unconstrainable facts like the redness of red, or the pull of gravity, or the unpredictability of fellow toddlers - is just as much a part of the subjectivity. The basis of self-other. If we could regulate everything, we would be the world (in the way racecar drivers feel the car as an extension of their own bodies).

I like this thought very much.

So inauthenticity lives within us as well as without. The pure authentic would be just secondness alone - a fleeting, spontaneous, meaningless play of events. Any POV, any context, might be weakly implied (vaguely present). But by the same token, as absent as it is possible to be. Subjectivity arises as a locus (such as an infant) comes to accumulate constraints over the freedoms of what is, now, "its world". The inauthentic has to become locally resident for there to be a persistent and developing succession of authentic moments. You have to have ideas to contextualise the impressions, structure to organise the phenomenology.

Touching again on Derrida, his valuation of the written over the oral is drawing attention to something else really - the need to have a mechanism or technology to encode the constraints. A locale needs to be able to remember its history to accumulate a set of habits. The Peircean view is fundamentally developmental. But dichotomous to development is evolution. And as life and mind show, real complexity demands both.

So a biological level of mind has the coding machinery of DNA. And a sociocultural level of mind arose out of the coding machinery of syntactic language (yes, here comes Vygotsky once more).

Derrida was just pointing out that behind the highly situated and contextualised interactions of everyday orality (the you-relating) was this structuring machinery. A machinery that just becomes far more obvious in writing (as now the interaction between writer and reader has to contextualised in a more overtly "mechanical" fashion - the gaps have to be filled in explicitly).

But again - as always - becoming focused on one pole of a dichotomy leads to unbalanced scholarship. Deconstruction can quickly come to seem like an obsession with syntactical gaps. Whereas a theory of semiotics or meaning would be about the correct interaction between syntax and semantics.

And the story on that seems pretty obvious if you focus on the idea of local degrees of freedom~global constraints.

In the beginning meanings were vague. A caveman went "urgh". An utterance with a huge number of degrees of freedom - especially if written down as a word, but perhaps vaguely interpretable in an intra-personal context where you were out hunting and he was also gesturing towards some prey.

Then syntactical speech got invented. A systematic way to constrain degrees of free floating meaning. The caveman could grunt "animal". Already your interpretation would have a great reduction in entropy (and so the grunt is officially information - a constraint on entropy production).

Your fellow caveman might indeed increasingly precisify his grunt, going {animal {deer}}. He would of course only say "deer", but the point here is to draw attention to the hierarchical nature of this downward acting contraint on the freedom of your mental response - your semantic state. Animal is more general. Deer rules out a great number of other animals to focus you on one particular variety of animal. You have that much less freedom about what you might have in mind at that moment.

Further syntax produces increasingly constrained or specific states of mind. So {animal {deer {Bambi}}} reduces your available degrees of freedom still more.

Now trace this precisification in terms of the authentic~inauthentic dichotomy. With weak constraint, you get weak specificity. The grunt of {animal} is the inauthentic bit that puts you in mind of some authentic you-relation with...the animal kingdom. But {animal {deer {Bambi}}} is strongly contextualised and so strongly authentic. You are looking into Bambi's doe eyes right now in your mind's eye (you have no choice).

So again, the false move is to try and make one pole of a dichotomy your fundamental. Instead, discover your rightful dichotomies and then map them back to the general logic of dichotomisation (or Peircean triads - which is the fuller view where local~global scale dichotomies arise out of vagueness as a process of eternally dynamic development.)

Nice explanation. But, just considering the last sentence for now, how does this eternal process arise?

[Sorry for the essay, but it's a rainy Sunday morning and now the sky is clearing...]

I enjoyed reading this!

 

[apeiron]

Nice explanation. But, just considering the last sentence for now, how does an eternal process arise?

What I have in mind here is the heat death universe for example - a process that is eternal in its striving towards the goal, but approaches that limit asymptotically, or with ever diminishing returns. The expanding and cooling of the universe need never stop, so it is eternal, but there is less and less actual progress being made all the time.

If you are asking more specifically how does it arise?, then the Peircean view would be that vagueness fluctuates and fleeting events can spark the start of a symmetry breaking.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

What I have in mind here is the heat death universe for example - a process that is eternal in its striving towards the goal, but approaches that limit asymptotically, or with ever diminishing returns. The expanding and cooling of the universe need never stop, so it is eternal, but there is less and less actual progress being made all the time.

If you are asking more specifically how does it arise?, then the Peircean view would be that vagueness fluctuates and fleeting events can spark the start of a symmetry breaking.

Thanks for the explanation.

Sorry, I’ve reread the post of yours that I quoted before and realize that I misunderstood. I was confused by the view expressed that Derrida argues that crispness arises from crispness, and was trying to guess at what that meant and how it differed to Peirce. Instead I’ll ask if you would explain the crispness which you say Derrida argues gives rise to more crispness?

And, I see now you had stressed the importance of the relationship in Peircean thought, too. I think in Derrida’s view the importance of relationships would remove prioritisation of any polarities.

And lastly, the seeming prioritisation of terms like “secondness” had me confused. I thought you were saying that the eternal process itself arose.

 

[apeiron]

Sorry, I’ve reread the post of yours that I quoted before and realize that I misunderstood. I was confused by the view expressed that Derrida argues that crispness arises from crispness, and was trying to guess at what that meant and how it differed to Peirce. Instead I’ll ask if you would explain the crispness which you say Derrida argues gives rise to more crispness?

In his critique of structualism, Derrida argues that beginnings must have "originary complexity". I am calling that crisp initial condition in the sense that something definite and already complexly structured exists. Whereas vague initial conditions would be a high symmetry fog of everything/nothing. A state of pure indeterminacy.

From Wiki...

In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?[44] In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.[45] At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.[46] It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida

And, I see now you had stressed the importance of the relationship in Peircean thought, too. I think in Derrida’s view the importance of relationships would remove prioritisation of any polarities.

Yes, but in order of priority it would still be first, the existence of a vague potential, then some differentiation or secondness that breaks the symmetry, then the thirdness of habits or law as this symmetry-breaking takes a widespread stabilising form. In vagueness, there is not yet either a polarity or a relating - just the potential for these things to start happening.

The Peircean scheme is quite difficult to get right because it is not a familiar way of thinking at all. And also, the scheme is a little lacking in how it deals with dichotomies (even though Peirce saw himself improving on Hegel).

So Peirce would stress the relationship of event with event (secondness or dyadic relations). I would stress the greater relationship between event and context (thirdness or the interaction of local free action and global habits or constrants). Though both things are going on in Peirce's causal scheme.

Note that the polarities or dichotomies always fit into a local~global format. They are asymmetric in scale and so result in the triadic organisation that is a hierarchy.

So for example any standard Greek metaphysical dichotomy like discrete~continuous or chance~necessity. Discrete is the the local pole (point-like, marked, definite, located) whereas the continuous is the global scale (the context for discreteness, the extended, the unbroken, that which gets marked). Likewise, chance is the local spontaneous event, the local free acts, and necessity is the global constraints, the ambient laws about what must be.

And lastly, the seeming prioritisation of terms like “secondness” had me confused. I thought you were saying that the eternal process itself arose.

Yes, secondness arises out of the pure possibility of firstness or vagueness in the Peircean triadic scheme. So firstness comes first. Then there is a first weak fluctuation that produces "an event" and so the possibility of relating with any other weak fluctuations that might be occurring. If this relating constructs anything more definite, then arises the possibility of thirdness or habits/regularities. And, to make things more recursively complicated, thirdness would have to be present at least weakly even for relating fluctuations to begin to find some stable expression.

So priority is given to vagueness. And in the beginning, there is both secondness and thirdness, though secondness is only tentative or weakly developed in the first moments, and thirdness is present even more weakly, more tentatively. But later, when the world has become crisply developed, the structuring force of thirdness or habit will be the dominant player. Local freedoms or play of events will be highly constrained.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

In his critique of structualism, Derrida argues that beginnings must have "originary complexity". I am calling that crisp initial condition in the sense that something definite and already complexly structured exists. Whereas vague initial conditions would be a high symmetry fog of everything/nothing. A state of pure indeterminacy.

From Wiki...

In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?[44] In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.[45] At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.[46] It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida

With caveats, as I understand Derrida, I agree that he writes of “originary complexity”, however as the quote says, “this must not be understood as an original positing”. I think, instead, it is a dynamic, open repetition, for example, interpretations changing over time and into the future, with no precise origin (" but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.[46]"). But in writing this I’m probably assigning it an amount of crispness which I think Derrida would avoid. So, I find it difficult to consider this a precise origin.

Although to quote out of context could make this sound a bit awkward-

“For example, the value of the transcendental arche [archie] must make its necessity felt before letting itself be erased. The concept of arche-trace must comply with both that necessity and that erasure. It is in fact contradictory and not acceptable within the logic of identity. The trace is not only the disappearance of origin — within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept of the trace from the classical scheme, which would derive it from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary trace or arche-trace."

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...&resnum=1&ved=0CBgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
(Peirce is discussed in these pages, too.)



I edited this link out, but not finding the one I want to replace it, have edited it back in again, as fairly relevant-

Yes, but in order of priority it would still be first, the existence of a vague potential, then some differentiation or secondness that breaks the symmetry, then the thirdness of habits or law as this symmetry-breaking takes a widespread stabilising form. In vagueness, there is not yet either a polarity or a relating - just the potential for these things to start happening.

The Peircean scheme is quite difficult to get right because it is not a familiar way of thinking at all. And also, the scheme is a little lacking in how it deals with dichotomies (even though Peirce saw himself improving on Hegel).

So Peirce would stress the relationship of event with event (secondness or dyadic relations). I would stress the greater relationship between event and context (thirdness or the interaction of local free action and global habits or constrants). Though both things are going on in Peirce's causal scheme.

Note that the polarities or dichotomies always fit into a local~global format. They are asymmetric in scale and so result in the triadic organisation that is a hierarchy.

So for example any standard Greek metaphysical dichotomy like discrete~continuous or chance~necessity. Discrete is the the local pole (point-like, marked, definite, located) whereas the continuous is the global scale (the context for discreteness, the extended, the unbroken, that which gets marked). Likewise, chance is the local spontaneous event, the local free acts, and necessity is the global constraints, the ambient laws about what must be.



Yes, secondness arises out of the pure possibility of firstness or vagueness in the Peircean triadic scheme. So firstness comes first. Then there is a first weak fluctuation that produces "an event" and so the possibility of relating with any other weak fluctuations that might be occurring. If this relating constructs anything more definite, then arises the possibility of thirdness or habits/regularities. And, to make things more recursively complicated, thirdness would have to be present at least weakly even for relating fluctuations to begin to find some stable expression.

So priority is given to vagueness. And in the beginning, there is both secondness and thirdness, though secondness is only tentative or weakly developed in the first moments, and thirdness is present even more weakly, more tentatively. But later, when the world has become crisply developed, the structuring force of thirdness or habit will be the dominant player. Local freedoms or play of events will be highly constrained.

So, here is where my confusion lies, that something without beginning might begin, and for the existence of a relationship between things before both those things come into existence, and see some address of this.