The+First+Philosopher

The First ((Recorded) (Western)) Philosopher was Thales of Miletus who, in 600 BCE, decided that the world was made of water!



The Pathways School of Philosophy explains the innovative **desire** behind this declarative move as... "a tremendously bold **induction** from the observed fact that water has the capacity to change into different forms such as ice and steam, and quite unprecedented. At a stroke, **all that happens in the universe is given a unified explanation**. However complicated and difficult to unravel some particular process might be, we can now think of it as consisting entirely of water changing from one state to another, or of things breaking down their old structural arrangements and forming new ones according to their ultimate watery nature." [ [] ]  It is fascinating how this **desire** to know and explain and order has gripped minds for centuries. I can only guess, but I imagine that if I had been raised in a sterile environment where I had to, essentially, invent or explain my own philosophy for knowing and ordering the world, I would have declared Cows as the structure of the universe (being from Missouri and all).     Where do these ontological intuitions come from? A medley of culture, habituated thought, experimentation, and observation interacting in personal and shared mental schema (?).   At what point are the conditions met for a mind to contemplate the very mental structures which dictate and shape perception of the world? It seems like a rather challenging and unlikely position of inquiry to "think" yourself into. Several possibilities: 1. Mind Altering Drugs! or 2. Exposure to an entirely different group, perhaps through reading, travel, or second hand accounts. (Going to ignore option number 1 for now, I don't think RPI would //approve// of this as a 'teaching method'.)  Enter stage left, Claude Levi-Strauss Ethnology --- compare/ divide/ classify/ unify other ethnographic work. This could be promising for interrogating what we presume to know.  <span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 1.5;">Strauss is in Orange <span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 1.5;">, Derrida is in Blue <span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 1.5;">. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> “other cases are at the same time ignored which make it plain that richness of abstract words is not a monopoly of **civilized** languages.” <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> Civility? I say, " ** yuck!" ** I still cringe whenever I read “negro” or “negrito” in these 19th and 20th century texts. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> “the use of more or less abstract terms is a function not of greater or lesser intellectual capacity, but of differences in the interests – in their **intensity** and attention to detail – of particular social groups within the national society…”

“Every civilization tends to overestimate the objective orientation of its thought and this tendency is never absent. When we make the mistake of thinking that the Savage is governed solely by organic or economic needs, we forget that he levels the same reproach at us, and that to him his own desires for knowledge seems more balanced than ours.” <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> “the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is employed in denouncing them This necessity is irreducible; it is not a historical contingency… But if nobody can escape this necessity, and if no one is therefore responsible for giving in to it… this does not mean that all the ways of giving in to it are of an equal pertinence. The quality and the fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigor with which this relationship to the history of metaphysics and to inherited concepts is thought… putting expressly and systematically the problem of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary of that heritage itself. A problem of //economy// and //strategy//.” <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;">**Fecundity, Quality, Economy, Strategy** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;">I know it is bad to over functionalize single word choices Derrida makes, but these are excellent concepts for evaluating (as an ethic?) the role that reproduced discourse has in textual criticism. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;">1. Fecundity- the ability to reproduce- some intertextual discourse (parody or satire) which seeks to criticize the original text is actually working to reproduce its original notions. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;">2. Quality- reflexive and historicized notion of the discourse which one is adding to- drift. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> 3. Economy- political economy (?)- the politicized mechanisms of control which direct the production of official and sanctioned discourse; the interplay that counter readings and criticism must engage to survive. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;">4. Strategy- plan and know- tactics for dealing with this conundrum of borrowed, molded, and refereed criticism/ original. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;">**Context is king, but perspective is everything...** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> “The real question is not whether the touch of a woodpecker’s beak does in fact cure toothache. It is rather whether there is a point of view from which a woodpecker’s beak and a man’s tooth can be seen as ‘going together’ (the use of this congruity for therapeutic purposes being only one of its possible uses), and whether some initial order can be introduced into the universe by means of these groupings. Classifying, as opposed to not classifying, has a value of its own, whatever form the classification may take.”

“One can go further and think of the rigorous precision of magical thought and ritual practices as an expression of the unconscious apprehension of the // truth of determinism //, the mode in which scientific phenomena exist. In this view, the operations of determinism are divined and made use of in an all-embracing fashion before being known and properly applied, and magical rites and beliefs appear as so many expressions of an act of faith in a science yet to be born.”

“since scientific explanation is always the discovery of an ‘arrangement’, any attempt of this type, even one inspired by non-scientific principles, can hit on true arrangements. This is even to be foreseen if one grants that the number of structures is by definition finite: the ‘structuring’ has an intrinsic effectiveness of its own whatever the principles and methods which suggested it.”


 * Structurality of structure **

“The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality //has its center elsewhere.// The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure-although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the //episteme// as philosophy or science-is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire.”

“**Anxiety**… is being implicated… [something or someone is] __at stake in the game__.” <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> “This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse… when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.” <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> <span style="font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif;">Oh Derrida, how you so eloquently capture the emotional state I felt when I first battled with my own ideas and beliefs with religion. I was raised in a bizarre mix of two households, one atheist/ agnostic, the other devout southern baptist. The underlying argument for either position which I had to navigate weekly was __<span style="font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">faith. __<span style="font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif;"> Faith in the center, the ultimate, the divine. It didn't matter that one center was rational/ phenomenological and that the other was spiritual/ mystical. The center fell out- I stopped knowing what to believe in the same moment that I stopped caring. I turned my **desire** for knowledge towards a different goal and stopped worrying about the afterlife.

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;"> “We have no language-no syntax and no lexicon-which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.”

<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">The Neolithic Paradox

<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“It is moreover a fact that particular results, to the achievement of which methods of this kind were able to lead, were essential to enable man to assail nature from a different angle.”

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“For there are two heterogenous ways of erasing the difference between the signifier and the signified: one, the classic way, consists in reducing or deriving the signifier, that is to say, ultimately in //submitting// the sign to thought; the other, the one we are using here against the first one, consists in putting into question the system in which the preceding reduction functioned: first and foremost, the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. The //paradox is// that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needed the opposition it was reducing. The opposition is part of the system, along with the reduction.”

<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Intellectual bricolage

<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“The analogy is worth pursuing since it helps us to see the real relations between the two types of scientific knowledge we have distinguished. The ‘bricoleur’ is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions. The set of the ‘bricoleur’s’ means cannot therefore be defined in terms of a project… It is to be defined only by its potential use or, putting this another way and in the language of the ‘bricoleur’ himself, because the elements are collected or retained on the principle that ‘they may always come in handy’.”

<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“The engineer no doubt also cross-examines his resources. The existence of an ‘interlocutor’ is in his case due to the fact that his means, power and knowledge are never unlimited and that in this negative form he meets resistance with which he has to come to terms.”

<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“Mythical thought builds structured sets by means of a structured set, namely, language. But it is not at the structural level that it makes use of it: it builds ideological castles out of the debris of what was once a social discourse.”

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Opposition between nature and culture

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“Strauss-consists in conserving in the field of empirical discovery all these old concepts, while at the same time exposing here and there their limits, treating them as tools which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to them; there is a readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear more useful.”

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“every finite discourse is bound by a cenain //bricolage,// and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of //bricoleurs// then the very idea of //bricolage is// menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning decomposes.”

__<span style="font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif;"> Place of Art in this milieu? __<span style="font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif;"> The frame of mind where art is created closely aligns with the thinking involved in philosophy, perhaps? Maybe that is why they are so frequently joined in the same discussions.

<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“To understand a real object in its totality we always tend to work from its parts.”

<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“As we have already seen in the case of ‘bricolage’, and the example of ‘styles’ of painters shows that the same is true in art, there are several solutions to the same problem. The choice of one solution involves a modification of the result to which another solution would have led, and the observer is in effect presented with the general picture of these permutations at the same time as the particular solution offered. He is thereby transformed into an active participant without even being aware of it. Merely by contemplating it he is, as it were, put in possession of other possible forms of the same work; and in a confused way, he feels himself to be their creator with more right than the creator himself because the latter abandoned them in excluding them from his creation. And these forms are so many further perspectives opening out on to the work which has been realized.”

<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“Games thus appear to have a //<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">disjunctive //<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between individual players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality. And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and losers. Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse; it //<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">conjoins //<span style="color: #c45911; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">, for it brings about a union (one might even say communion in this context) or in any case an organic relation between two initially separate groups…”

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“The focus or the source of the myth are always shadows and virtualities which are elusive, unactualizable, and nonexistent in the first place. Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship.”

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Anaclastic

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Myth of mythology

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“If the mythological is mythomorphic, are all discourses on myths equivalent? Shall we have to abandon any epistemologica; requirement which permits us to distinguish between several qualities of discourse on the myth? A classic question, but inevitable. We cannot reply…”

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“empiricism is the matrix of all the faults menacing a discourse which continues, as with Levi-Strauss in particular, to elect to be scientific.”

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">This field is in fact that of //freeplay,// that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. This field permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and founds the freeplay of substitutions.”

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Ratio

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">“The concept //of episteme// has always called forth that of //historia,// if history is always the unity of a becoming, as tradition of truth or development of science or knowledge oriented toward the appropriation of truth in presence and self-presence, toward knowledge in consciousness-of-self.”

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Model of new must come from catastrophe- the materials for a bricoleur

<span style="color: #2e74b5; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small;">There are thus two interpretations of interpretation… The one seeks… a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and the order of the sign. The other… affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism… past the man… who has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation…” <span style="font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif;"> Desire for a concrete universal {or} some place where there is universally no desire for such a universe, acceptance of the arbitrary.

<span style="font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif;">Is this all a “ terrifying form of monstrosity”? <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; display: block; font-family: verdana,arial,sans-serif; font-size: small; text-align: justify;">