DIVINE ATHEISM & BAD I O U

(5-2-2019) The term ‘divine atheist’ was coined by Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950). What are divine atheists according to me? It are atheist like Nietzsche (1944-1900), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) or Alain Badiou. They all have in common that they destroy what is objective and make what is objectively true relative. Richard Dawkins only want to confirm the objective and cannot be called a divine atheist. That the objective is relative these divine atheists cannot but make everything subjective. After their divine power to destroy they take the wrong road to the subjective, rather than the road to what is absolute. Both the absolute and subjective are not objective, but the absolute is more objective than the objective, more true, and the subjective is defined in this context as what is not true, not-objective. Divine atheists have no way to argue for the existence of ‘objectivity’ ones they destroyed it.

Sartre argued ‘I am free, ergo God cannot exist’ for Sartre dualistically/binary opposed freedom and Almightiness. Badiou is more subtle. When I count ‘1’ I can count 2,3,4,..∞. He calls ‘2,3,4,…∞’ ‘consistent totalities’ and that implies that from which the ‘count-as-1’ ‘started’ must be a different kind of multiple that cannot be gathered by any method and he therefor calls this ‘inconsistent totality/totalities’ (a term coined by Mathematician George Cantor (1845-1918) who actually tried to prove the existence of God in mathematics). Badiou argues that if God is 1, the count-of-1, there is a fundamental reality preceding God that cannot be accounted for and is a plural of pluralities or he can argue that the subject counts (itself as) ‘1’ and immediately objectivity, 2,3,4…∞, is constructed or implied, but that the absolute, ‘God’, that is more plural than the ∞. Badiou is in the end very dualistic, just like Sartre is, in opposing ∞ and 1 for true ∞ embraces 1 and all other numbers (that can partake in how the ∞ embraces all numbers – translate this back to the jargon of the subjects, the absolute and the objective!).

Alain Badiou who is invited to the Netherlands by festival ‘Drift’ https://www.festivaldrift.nl/. I had a conversation with the organisers and gave them some ingredients to have that interview. Because I found so many faults in the first chapter of Alain Badiou’s book ‘Being and event’ by analysing it line by line I stopped reading so I am not an expert. I am an expert to say he is a fraud for each atheist that falls captive to the thought that objectivity is a subjective construction (held by many subjects to be true), thus subjective, intends that ‘subjectivism’ to be objectively true.

Personally as a monotheist I always say that God does not exist for he is beyond existence in the sense that the essence of red is more red than red is. The essence of existence is the One. As an ‘absolutist’ I am not into cultural relativism or cultural subjectivism, but for cultural objectivism. There are different kinds of objectivities or rather different kind of intersubjective communities that as a ‘fishing net’ catch some of the absolute that becomes objective (fish) in the net. More on how objectivity is the effect between the relation of a subject with the absolute: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/descartes-1596-1650-importance-security-policies-james-roolvink/. 

INGREDIENTS INTERVIEW ALAIN BADIOU

(15-1-2019 Amsterdam)

 On the four ‘a-causal’ principles/roots/ingredients out of which the event comes about

Does a count-as-1 the transcendental ‘enabler’ of either love, art, science and politics (your ‘fourfold’) and is the event ‘supervenient’ on that fourfold?

 Could you give a definition of the ‘event’? Could one say that being as a ‘inconsistent totality’ is the ontological basis, ‘non-ground’, of the event? How?

 You do not make a hierarchy between these four because that will imply the erasing of the event as being caused by an immanent cause (studied by science) or because it could imply a transcendent cause (making philosophy identical to theology). What is the difference between your idea of how the event comes about and for example Empedocles who also thought in terms of a fourfold (the four elements/roots)? What is the difference between you and Heidegger in regards the fourfold of Heidegger (being, becoming, appearance and thinking)? What is the difference between you and Wittgenstein his fourfold (commands/rule following/inference, customs/rituals/forms of live/symbols, pictures seen like faces, rearrange concepts)?

And if you would answer within the ontology of the actual versus the possible how would you answer the questions?

 What is the relation between ontology that gets inspired by the fourfold back to the fourfold? If a primary school would be based on your ontology what would you teach small children? Could your ontology be the basis of a better medical (science) or a better way to cure people? Could your ontology help mathematicians (to understand themselves, categories the different mathematics within mathematics)? Why not?

 How can these relations be drawn? By analogy? But can the fourfold and the event have real (causal) effect on each other? It seems the ‘space’ of the event is virtual and thus not real.

 What is keeping us from participating in the event? (Making one root primary?). Or creating an event from a fourfold? Is participation creating in your idea?

Love

All philosophers reduce eternity to the timeless as if you can reduce eroticism to 1-dimensional sex.

What is the mathematical analogy of longing, passion, love? If ontology is the ontology implied in mathematics please give us an analogy!

 Is there a difference between loving another human of loving politics in the ontological structure of what these loves imply?

 Who is the philosopher you love the most?

 What can make you angry? Injustice? Who is an ethics, freedom, possible within your ontology?

 Is being (as the ‘inconsistent totality’) transcendent for you? Could one say you believe in ‘God’, but think God is an ‘inconsistent totality’?

 Art

Counting one from within a plural plurality, many ‘manies’, the inconsistent consistency, implies you can start counting ‘1’ in many ways in order that you have many infinite different ‘1’s’! Yet you speak of one way of counting ‘1’. The pianist can start with even one key in infinitely many ways.

You seem to have an idea of 1 as an infinitsmal, a point which is a contradictionary non-concept for it is both spatial and nothing. What would happen with your ontology if the symbol of what is counted is a circle or sphere?

 What is the ontology of colour? You would not dare to speak of the one colour of colour, namely yellow as the most primary of the two primary colours (yellow and blue), but speak of infinitely many different colours, meaning there are not even types, categories, of colours as yellow opposed to blue or red etc..

 What is the colour of 1?

Science

You count one, but that counting is more not a subtracting of ‘1’ than an adding of ‘1’. A ‘1’ is finite and if you start with ‘1’ the ∞ becomes a negation of the finite, an in-finite, as Dutch mathematician Brouwer. You may well be aware that Descartes subtracted the finite from the ∞ making the finite a negation of the ∞. The ∞ has an ‘ontological’ primacy for Descartes meaning that the conscious of the ‘finite’ idea of the ∞ as a symbol of the Absolute, the transcendent precedes immanent ‘transcendental’ self-conscious, ‘ensouled spirit’, that precedes empirical physical consciousness.

The ‘inconsistent totality’ is the uncountable ∞ that you logically oppose with everything that is finite, the consistent totalities. You define the ∞ as not-finite, in-finite, and Hegel called this ‘the false infinite/bad infinity’. Real ∞ embraces the not-∞, which becomes more finite than finite, and in can partake in a finite way in how the ∞ totally, in an ∞ way, embraces, partakes in, the finite as more than finite. What is your response?

 You say that the category ‘unity’ is no more and no less than the number ‘1’? Could you say in analogy to that the finite is the not-∞ that the ‘1’ is the ‘not-inconsistent-totality’? If this is so there is no difference between 1 and the other numbers, meaning 1 is a consistent totality, that is an unity of a multiply, that one multiple over and against an other multiple. However these multiples are not given and it is not a questions of subjectively choosing different multiples. You seem to say that by the count-as-1 that you construct subjectively from an ‘objective’ chaos, an ‘inconsistent totality’ a ‘multiples multiple’.

 The Greeks did not count. Their primary experience with mathematics were geometrical forms. The ruler in Greece did not have traditional marks, to count, on it. Geometry preceded counting, preceded algebra. They asked questions as ‘how can I draw a circle in a triangle such a way that the circle and triangle touch each other in one point and vice versa’ etc.. The Greeks had an idea of one unit, but always already in the context of a relation between unites, ratio (for example in the question ‘how to I dived a line in two with a compass and ruler’). Art and mathematics were one for the Greeks.

‘Being and event’ is more about algebra (timeless time) rather than geometry (temporary timeless eternity). What is your response?

 You may think that you described the ontology of mathematics as Wittgenstein in the Tractatus described the ontology of logic, but you remain a logician for 1 as 1 is no more an no less that the logical law of identity A=A, thus 1=1.

Sartre would with simple rhetoric tell you that you as a 1 are a one because you are not a 1, ‘you are who you are because you are not who you are’, because when you become conscious of something that is possible because you are not that something, so if that something is your self, you are yourself when you are not yourself.

That you write in terms of a logical inconsistency (in regards to the totality/multiple) is a sign you think mathematics from within logic in the count-as-one. 

 You are actually present if you are not present. That non-presence you have to see as the past, rather than the future as an appearance of eternity in the presence. When you count 1 other numbers 2,3,4, etc. follow and even negative numbers, zero and imaginary numbers may follow. In retrospective that what ‘is’ before counting, the inconsistent totality, in in terms of time earlier than what is in terms of time later. Implicit in this ontology is the idea of two time-ecstasies. (Think of McTaggert). So time is presupposed, objectively given, in (rather than ‘with’) counting, yet you do not see mathematics as the form of our sensibility, as Kant would phrase it, preceding counting and makes counting possible. Time for you does not exist or comes into existence when counting. Time is just the timeless moment of counting 1 and 1 and 1…without any objective continuity of time.  

 I say that something (the soul) is counted (and expressed in ‘I think’), but for you counting seems to be counted making the counted an illusionary ‘I’, like the Buddhist believe (falsely). How would you make a distinction between what is counted, the counting and the ‘one’ who counts? How would you relate that to time? For Kant what is counted is an ‘consistent totality’ given by the forms of sensibility (for Kant time and space), the counting is the ‘synthetical unity of consciousness’ and by which you count (and that is already counted for) is the ‘I think’ (because for Kant the ‘I think’ is already an expression of self-conscious rather than a means to subjectively construct self-conscious).

Objectivity is not and is ‘objectively’ seen a subjective construction of which the ‘first stone’ is the count-as-1.

Are the negative numbers (-17, -16 etc.) negations of positive numbers and zero the negation of the negation of positive numbers. How would you construct (by negation) the imaginary number ‘i’? Is mathematics, certainly the latest developments in the last centuries, not turning its back on the immanent in favour of the transcendent?

 Ontology is about what is implied in X. X may be counting one or magic or a perfect sphere or love etc.. Ontology in that sense is about what is immanent. Primary philosophy cannot be solely reduced to the immanent and theology is about the transcendent. Even in mathematics there is an idea of the transcendent in transcendent numbers as phi and pi for example (that express a ratio within a unity, a beautiful form).

 The ‘inconsistent totality’ is a term from Cantor. Personally, I believe talking in terms of bigger infinities is flawed. One can talk about bigger numbers, but infinity is not a number. You could say that the ‘one’ infinity appears for us in different ways.

If you draw a circle it exists of infinite points and if you draw a bigger circle is exist of infinite points. There are two options: A) the same amount of infinite points can make bigger or smaller circles or B) circles that are bigger have a greater infinity. Both options draw on the inconsistent contradictionary idea of point, namely as what is spatial and what is not spatial, what is and what is not. How do you see this?

 So finally the undifferentiated, transparent, the ‘void’, undifferentiated impersonal spirit is zero as an egg containing everything: ‘0=∞’. (-1+1, -2+2, -3+3…-i + i,…etc….= 0). Zero is even, being between odd minus 1 and an odd 1. Everything being even one can get every (little or big) thing every being, from zero. The event has objectively seen zero effect. The event is objectively not, but it is. The event is and is not. The event is not objectively seen, but the event is subjective? No the event is not objective, but is in an absolute way.

Politics

What is the mathematical equivalent of democracy? It is counting votes? Yet counting votes is not democracy for no real democracy is a search for truth, an intersubjective dialogue that tries to gather different roads to absolute truth, and must express itself not in calculating, but in giving a vision on the truth, so all subjects can try and excess the truth from within that vision.

 One we include the ethical within politics you do not make a difference between counting apples, numbers or humans. Counting humans is about identifying bodies for the state to control those warm pieces of steak when they want.

 Your anthropological equivalent can be found in the works of Castaneda who did not solve the riddle of life either. Inconsistent totality is the nagual. Consistent totality is the tonal. Yet he knew that from within the nagual, a nagual man (a brujo, a diablero, a daemonic man), could manipulate consistent totalities, things. That means that the border between the nagual and tonal are not drawn from the inside of the tonal. How do you see that?

A man as a being being-in-the-world is for you a ‘consistent totality’ in a ‘consistent totality’, so you make no difference between a being and the world as the totality of beings. For you the world is the set in which all sets reside for a ‘consistent totality’ is defined by fitting into a set that can, via a certain truth procedure, gather the many into a unit, a set, making the many a totality. The set in which all sets are included is included in itself, but a set by definition cannot include itself, therefor the world must be different than what is in the world.

 How would you react if someone could manipulate by sheer will and destroy other consistent totalities?