Author’s note: my quote was a reference to both Deleuze and Rorty –that is just so you know why I am posting this here.
“This is because I believe that, in evolutionary terms, the advancement of our culture must be a process of brainstorming (simple discourse between a lot of different people using a lot of different methods (without the constraints of transcendental criteria, of throwing it all on the table and picking through it to find what works and, ultimately, what keeps working: the gift that keeps on giving –a little like evolution.” –me: forum.philosophynow.org/posting. … 53#preview
“Your proposal of an infinite discourse creating evolution is not enough for me because it would be just the infinite return of the same discourse, the same order appearing in different angles (Derrida’s iterability in a sense). To perform must be to propose something different. It must demands a new reality “as if” it was possible/real (I believe current philosopher such as Ranciere and Nancy formulate this question).” –Yoni: ibid
Okay. But you’re going to have to explain how you are going achieve this end outside of the evolutionary process I am describing. I return to my point concerning language:
“And that makes perfect sense to me given that discourse is ultimately a creative act. One person strings a sentence together based on previous sentences they have strung together. Then the other responds with a sentence built off of other sentences they have previously strung together.”
The only other alternative to me is divine inspiration. It just seems that if there is any hope of achieving your goal, we will have to take our cue from the computer programmers who work mainly by working off each other. Here I have to take the Deleuzian approach of repeating what we know until the momentum and inertia push us beyond it through difference. Even Derrida cannot claim to have happened in a vacuum. As radical as his moves in the language game of culture may seem, he is still a product of the trajectory of that perhaps evolutionary process.
“But then it is all about seeing what the mind can do, isn’t it? The way I see it, Yoni, we believe in things like afterlives, higher powers, and higher principles; but our point A to point B is a given. And what better thing can we do with that than see what the mind can do and do some good in the process?”
“I don’t like to talk in concepts of mind, I prefer the notions of Being or presence/existence but spirit is the same I think: our reality is always limited/finite in a sense, so the meaning/truth of the world is always already despite barely being it. I think once we shift the question towards this finitude, we might be able to cope with the political issue of being-together since politics is nothing more that being this “togertheness” (am I clear or have I transited into ontological gibberish?)”
First of all, if anything seems unclear to me, it wouldn’t be because you were talking gibberish. The only reason I see for that is your training having given you a level of comfort with the terminology that is well above my pay grade.
That said, I have to respectfully challenge you again as to how you get to concepts of Being without seeing what your mind can do. I sense a spiritual element in your point. So I have to ask mainly so I don’t do anything to offend you: are you Jewish?
That asked, I have to take an off bounce/ trajectory on your point about Being as concerns my own experience with it (perhaps out of a desire to show off –that is mainly in the spirit of the experiment of seeing what your response will be. Back in my old Sartre/Existentialism days, I use to talk a lot about Being and Nothingness -not Sartre’s book, but the actual concepts. I actually formed a lot of my intellectual constructs around it. The problem I came up against was that while Being (via beings (was incontestable, the concept of nothingness or non-being was always contentious since we can never look at it directly. I eventually came to the tactic of talking in terms of presence/absence since absence seemed like a much more credible term. But, as far as I’m concerned, the two are not interchangeable. The Being/Nothingness dyad is an ontological issue. The presence/absence dyad, on the other hand, is a phenomenological one.
So I guess the only important question here is: any comments?