31 Dec 2019

Smith (ED) Ch.5 of Essays on Deleuze, entry directory

 

by Corry Shores

 

[Search Blog Here. Index tabs are found at the bottom of the left column.]

 

[Central Entry Directory]

[Deleuze, entry Directory]

[Daniel Smith, entry directory]

[Smith’s Essays on Deleuze, entry directory]

 

 

 

Entry Directory for

 

Daniel Smith

[Smith’s academia.edu page]

 

Essays on Deleuze

 

Ch.5

Pre- and Post-Kantianism

Logic and Existence: Deleuze on the Conditions of the Real

 

5.0

[Introductory material]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography:

 

Smith, Daniel. “Logic and Existence: Deleuze on the Conditions of the Real.” In Essays on Deleuze, 72–85. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2012.

 

(or simply:)

 

Smith, Daniel. Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2012.

https://www.academia.edu/20805798/Essays_on_Deleuze

 

 

Note that an earlier version of this chapter text (which is nearly but not precisely identical) is found in:

 

Smith, Daniel. “Logic and Existence: Deleuze on the ‘Conditions of the Real.’” Chiasmi International 13 (2011): 361–77.

 

Smith’s Academia.edu page

 

 

.

Smith’s Essays on Deleuze (ED), entry directory

 

by Corry Shores

 

[Search Blog Here. Index tabs are found at the bottom of the left column.]

 

[Central Entry Directory]

[Deleuze, entry Directory]

[Daniel Smith, entry directory]

 

 

 

Entry Directory for

 

Daniel Smith

[Smith’s academia.edu page]

 

Essays on Deleuze

 

Ch.5

Pre- and Post-Kantianism

Logic and Existence: Deleuze on the Conditions of the Real

[Entry Directory (Ch.5)]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography:

 

Smith, Daniel. Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2012.

https://www.academia.edu/20805798/Essays_on_Deleuze

 

Smith’s Academia.edu page

 

 

.

Daniel Smith (ED), entry directory

 

by Corry Shores

 

[Search Blog Here. Index tabs are found at the bottom of the left column.]

 

[Central Entry Directory]

[Deleuze, entry Directory]

 

Entry Directory for

 

Daniel Smith

[Smith’s academia.edu page]

 

(image source: cla.purdue.edu)

 

 

 

Essays on Deleuze

[Entry Directory]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image taken gratefully from:

https://cla.purdue.edu/directory/profiles/daniel-smith.html

24 Dec 2019

Deleuze (1) “To Have Done with Judgment” / “Pour en finir avec le jugement,” Paragraph 1, “[Introduction to the Doctrine of Judgment, Its General History, and Its Main Opponents (Spinoza, Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud)],” summary and explication

 

by Corry Shores

 

[Search Blog Here. Index tabs are found at the bottom of the left column.]

 

[Central Entry Directory]

[Deleuze, entry Directory]

[Deleuze, “To Have Done with Judgment,” entry directory]

 

[The following is a sentence-by-sentence explication and summary of Deleuze’s text. Proofreading is incomplete, so please forgive my typos and other mistakes. Boldface and underlining are my own, unless otherwise noted.]

 

 

 

 

Summary and Explication of

 

“Pour en finir avec le jugement”

“To Have Done with Judgment”

 

 

Paragraph 1

[Introduction to the Doctrine of Judgment, Its General History, and Its Main Opponents (Spinoza, Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud)]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brief summary:

The doctrine of judgment has been under development since its inception in Ancient Greek tragedy. It was originally instituted through the tribunals set up in these plays, with the judgments they pronounced being the real tragic elements of the stories. The first to critique the doctrine of judgment was not Kant (in his Critique of Judgment, which only grounds a subjective, aesthetic sort of judgment), but rather it comes from Spinoza’s ethics of practical physics (here, good and bad are determined not by judgment in accordance with law but rather by what increases or decreases compositional integrity and power). Following Spinoza are Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud, who each suffered but evaded judgment.

 

 

Explicatory summary:

(1.1) From Ancient Greek tragedy to Modern Philosophy, there developed a trend in the conception and implementation of justice that favors judgment, which Deleuze calls the doctrine of judgment. (1.2) The tragic element of Greek tragedy are not the “tragic” actions that characters take but rather the judgments that are made in the stories. And Greek tragedy instituted tribunals for such judgments. (1.3) Although the title of Kant’s Critique of Judgment suggests it might be a critique of the doctrine of judgment, it rather further grounds a subjective, aesthetic sort of judgment. (1.4) Spinoza’s ethics of practical physics (that is to say: doing things that increase the powers of our internal and external compositions) was the first case of a critique of the doctrine of judgment. In it, something is bad not because there is a rule handed out without practical considerations, like God giving commandments, with us being said to have done wrong simply because that authority judges us to have broken the arbitrary or unexplained rule. Rather, something is bad if it does us harm, in terms of the integrity of our internal composition and external social relations. Following Spinoza in the critique of the doctrine of judgment are: Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud. (1.5)  Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud all suffered from judgment in their own lives. (1.6) But although Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud all suffered judgment, they devised tactics for infinitely postponing that judgment, thereby having done with it, in a sense. (1.7) Nietzsche suffered judgment like a defiant condemned person; D.H. Lawrence was accused of immoralism and pornography even in his watercolor paintings; and, Kafka presented himself as innocent, but diabolically so, when a “tribunal” judged him unfit for marriage to Felice (for, he did not actually want the marriage, and in fact he fell in love with one of Felice’s friends, Grete Bloch, who was part of that tribunal.) (1.8) Artaud’s artistic genius was judged by psychiatrists as madness, and they subjected him to cruel treatments like heavy drugs and electroshock therapy. His situation was not unlike Van Gogh’s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contents

 

1.1

[The Historical Trend of the Doctrine of Judgment]

 

1.2

[The Greek Tragedy of Judgment and its Tribunals of Judgment]

 

1.3

[Kant’s Critique of Judgment as No Critique of Judgment]

 

1.4

[Spinoza as the Father of the Critique of the Doctrine of Judgment. Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud as his Disciples.]

 

1.5

[The Personal Suffering of Judgment of Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud]

 

1.6

[The Infinite Point of Convergence of Accusation, Deliberation, and Verdict]

 

1.7

[Nietzsche's, Lawrence’s, and Kafka’s particular judgments and escapes.]

 

1.8

[Artaud’s (and Van Gogh’s) Judgments by Psychiatrists]

 

Bibliography

 

 

 

 

Summary and Explication

 

 

1.1

[The Historical Trend of the Doctrine of Judgment]

 

[From Ancient Greek tragedy to Modern Philosophy, there developed a trend in the conception and implementation of justice that favors judgment, which Deleuze calls the doctrine of judgment.]

 

[Deleuze will discuss justice in the context of judgment, law, and related concepts. He will draw a distinction between two trends. The first one, which he does not favor, is a “doctrine” of judgment. His terming it such suggests already to us that in the first place it is something artificially fabricated and maintained by instituted systems of belief and cultural practice. He also here traces it historically from ancient Greek tragedy to modern philosophy (with the counter trend, as we will see in section 1.4 below, beginning with Spinoza).]

 

De la tragédie grecque à la philosophie moderne, c’est toute une doctrine du jugement qui s’élabore et se développe.

(158)

 

From Greek tragedy to modern philosophy, an entire doctrine of judgment has been elaborated and developed.

(126)

[contents]

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.2

[The Greek Tragedy of Judgment and its Tribunals of Judgment]

 

[The tragic element of Greek tragedy are not the “tragic” actions that characters take but rather the judgments that are made in the stories. And Greek tragedy instituted tribunals for such judgments.]

 

[Deleuze next writes, “What is tragic is less the action than the judgment.” It is not entirely clear what he means here by “the action.” What action? For instance, is there a distinction between the action of judging and the pronounced judgment itself? My guess is that this is not the idea here. He is talking about Greek tragedy. The question we might have in this context is: what is it in a Greek tragedy that we consider to be tragic? Is it the tragic action, perhaps for instance, Oedipus gouging out his own eyes? Deleuze’s answer seems to be that instead what is tragic is not such actions as these but the judgment that is made in the Greek tragedy. He continues to say that the Greek tragedy instituted the tribunal (we return to this later).]

 

Ce qui est tragique est moins l’action que le jugement, et la tragédie grecque instaure d’abord un tribunal.

(158)

 

What is tragic is less the action than the judgment, and what Greek tragedy instituted at the outset was a tribunal.

(126)

 

[contents]

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.3

[Kant’s Critique of Judgment as No Critique of Judgment]

 

[Although the title of Kant’s Critique of Judgment suggests it might be a critique of the doctrine of judgment, it rather further grounds a subjective, aesthetic sort of judgment.]

 

[Deleuze said above in section 1.1 that the doctrine of judgment historically developed from ancient Greek times to modern philosophy (with the counter trend beginning primarily with Spinoza, as we will see in section 1.4 below.) But someone might here object. Kant famously performed a “critique of judgment” in his book by that name. Does that not count as explicitly going against the doctrine of judgment? we might wonder. Deleuze says that rather than inventing a true critique of judgment here, Kant instead established a “fantastic subjective tribunal.” Let us substantiate this briefly with some ideas from Kant’s book along with ones from Deleuze’s Kant’s Critical Philosophy. We begin the third critique with an analysis of the beautiful. Let us all agree that we have experienced beautiful things. What is it that makes us experience them as being beautiful? Kant first says that we “decide” that the thing is beautiful, and this involves a judgment of taste. It is “not a cognitive judgment, hence not a logical one, but is rather aesthetic, by which is understood one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment p.89). And as Deleuze comments, “It could be said that a higher pleasure is the sensible expression of a pure judgement, of a pure operation of judging (CJ para. 9). The first aspect of this operation appears in aesthetic judgements of the type ‘this is beautiful’” (Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, pp.46-47). It would seem, then, that Deleuze and Kant are thinking of “critique” in different ways. For Kant, the critique might be more like a critical analysis that seeks the conditions of possibility or the like. But what Deleuze has in mind for a critique of judgment involves a critical valuation of it, showing its shortcomings and problematic aspects and giving reason to do away with it altogether for the sake of promoting what he thinks is a better sort of justice.]

 

Kant n’invente pas une véritable critique du jugement, puisque ce livre au contraire érige un fantastique tribunal subjectif.

(158)

 

Kant did not invent a true critique of judgment; on the contrary, what the book of this title established was a fantastic subjective tribunal.

(126)

[contents]

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.4

[Spinoza as the Father of the Critique of the Doctrine of Judgment. Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud as his Disciples.]

 

[Spinoza’s ethics of practical physics (that is to say: doing things that increase the powers of our internal and external compositions) was the first case of a critique of the doctrine of judgment. In it, something is bad not because there is a rule handed out without practical considerations, like God giving commandments, with us being said to have done wrong simply because that authority judges us to have broken the arbitrary or unexplained rule. Rather, something is bad if it does us harm, in terms of the integrity of our internal composition and external social relations. Following Spinoza in the critique of the doctrine of judgment are: Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud.]

 

[Deleuze’s next claim is that the critique of the doctrine of judgment (at least insofar as it is developed in the Judea-Christian tradition) was first carried out by Spinoza. Deleuze elaborates on this idea more in his Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, ch.2, section II. In this chapter, Deleuze is discussing three major resemblances between Nietzsche’s and Spinoza’s philosophies. The second one is “A devaluation of all values, and of good and evil in particular (in favor of ‘good’ and ‘bad’): Spinoza the immoralist” (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p.22). He begins by noting that for Spinoza, certain actions will concurrently either increase the powers resulting from improvements in our body’s internal and external relations, or they may decrease the body’s power by degrading those relations. This is more a matter of good and bad rather than Good and Evil, because the distinction here has less of a moral value and more of a pragmatic one, so to speak. What makes something good or bad is not the judgment of some being that transcends the given material situation, like God, but rather it is simply the effects of the immediate combinations of bodies. So we do have certain laws or rules that we live by. Suppose we consider the prohibition against adultery. The Spinozistic view would say that we should not commit adultery, because it will degrade our relations with our spouse (and also, we internally may suffer turmoil, especially as a by-product of the breakdown in our union.) (See Deleuze’s discussion of adultery and Spinoza in Course 1981.01.20). However, if we do not fully conceive the immanent context of this rule and its value in that context, then we might not see any immanent ground for it. We might then think of it as an inexplicable command from a transcendent God that we must follow simply because God orders us to. In the first place, we have an ethics. In the second, we have Morality. But note that in the second case, of a transcendent source of moral law, there is an element of judgment that will determine the moral value of our actions. Suppose we commit adultery. What makes it wrong? God gave us a rule, and now judges us guilty of breaking it. The wrongful action otherwise has no other basis for its immorality. But in the first case, of an immanent source of ethical guidelines, there is no judgment that we did something wrong: there is simply the adverse effects of the breakdown of our union and of our inner bodily integrity (as seen in the inner turmoil we might face). In other words, Spinoza has done with judgment by making ethics a matter of immanent physical consequences. Furthermore, if we can see the practical value of a rule, then we understand it properly. But if we do not, for instance, if we do not realize the physical consequences of committing adultery, then we misunderstand the rule and attribute its rightness to the judgment of the God who ordained it. Deleuze writes: “In this way, Ethics, which is to say, a typology of immanent modes of existence, replaces Morality, which always refers existence to transcendent values. Morality is the judgment of God, the system of Judgment. But Ethics overthrows the system of judgment. The opposition of values (Good-Evil) is supplanted by the qualitative difference of modes of existence (good-bad). [...] It is clear that we have only to misunderstand a law for it to appear to us in the form of a moral ‘You must.’ [...] Adam does not understand the rule of the relation of his body with the fruit, so he interprets God’s word as a prohibition” (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p.23). Next, Deleuze says that Spinoza had three disciples in this project of critiquing the doctrine of judgment, namely, Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud.]

 

En rupture avec la tradition judéo-chrétienne, c’est Spinoza qui mène la critique ; et il eut quatre grands disciples pour la reprendre et relancer, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud.

(158)

 

Breaking with the Judeo-Christian tradition, it was Spinoza who carried out the critique, and he had four great disciples to take it up again and push it further: Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud.

(126)

[contents]

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.5

[The Personal Suffering of Judgment of Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud]

 

[Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud all suffered from judgment in their own lives.]

 

[Deleuze next makes a biographical observation: Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud, the four critics of the doctrine of judgment, who descend from Spinoza, had in their own lives suffered from judgments placed upon them.]

 

Les quatre eurent personnellement, singulièrement, à souffrir du jugement.

(158)

 

These four had personally, singularly suffered from judgment.

(126)

[contents]

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.6

[The Infinite Point of Convergence of Accusation, Deliberation, and Verdict]

 

[But although Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud all suffered judgment, they devised tactics for infinitely postponing that judgment, thereby having done with it, in a sense.]

 

[Deleuze’s next point is not so obvious, so let us quote it first: Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud “experienced that infinite point at which accusation, deliberation, and verdict converge.” I am afraid I cannot tell you exactly what this means. But I will give you my interpretation, and you can suggest your alternative. I am going to guess that Deleuze is working with a geometrical intuition, one that he discusses in other places. The idea is that in projective geometry, all parallel lines converge at a point at infinity. (See for instance Wildberger’s explanation: 31.3 and 32.4. Or this video lecture.) So, an intuition here is that parallel lines – in any given finite vicinity – seem to be positioned in relation to one another such that they would never intersect; nevertheless, they are in fact convergent at infinity, regardless of the appearances to the contrary. Deleuze also mentions a similar idea in the context of Leibniz and Michel Serres’ studies. Think of a cone. On its sides are lines going from the circular base to the point at the apex. Now move that apex point away from the circular base. What happens to those convergent lines? They stay convergent, but they move outward, toward a state of being parallel with each other. Now take the point out to infinity. We still have a point of their convergence, but we also have parallel lines, which seem non-convergeable. So they are parallel but convergent at an infinitely distant place. Such a cone where the apex is out at infinity is a cylinder with the parallel lines of the sides still converging far off. (See Deleuze’s course of  1983.05.03: “si le cône est le point de vue fini, il y a aussi un point de vue infini. Leibniz le dira dans les textes sublimes ; qu’est-ce que c’est que le point de vue infini ? Et finalement les deux, d’une certaine manière, sont isomorphes, et en tout cas parfaitement communicant, le point de vue infini c’est le cylindre. Dieu c’est un cylindre”; and Michel Serres’ Le système de Leibniz, pp. 152-154.) Let us work with that image. We have three things which are not immediately convergent, namely, accusation, deliberation, and verdict. It is not clear in what sense they are separate. The most obvious interpretation is that they are temporally separated. First you are accused of something, next you are tried, during which there is deliberation (of a judge or jury) about your culpability under the law, and finally the verdict is passed upon you. If we take the temporal explanation, their convergence at infinity (whatever that may be) generally speaking would be their simultaneity. Even in that case, it is not obvious what their simultaneity would be. Perhaps it is like Judgment Day, and God conducts all three acts simultaneously. Or maybe the idea is simply that Judgment day is infinitely far off, and that is the moment when all three actions will happen (regardless of simultaneity). Another possibility with regard to temporality is that we are dealing with an eternal sort of temporality, where all three are so but not at some determinate temporal location, and in that sense they are “contemporaneous” in eternity. None of these temporal interpretations is especially compelling. The next interpretation I would offer is vague, and it is working with intuitions of the mysterious. Consider certain operations of judgment in Kafka, for instance, the indefinite postponement that we discuss later. (In the before the law parable (door of the law), there is always another door beyond any given one. The destination (judgment, consisting of accusation, deliberation, and verdict) cannot be attained, but the series of doors is only enterable by that one man standing before them. In other words, the path indeed does lead to the judgment, but the destination is unattainable. As Deleuze will note, in Kafka’s The Trial for instance, there are both the operations of judgment and K’s keeping those operations in motion in such a way that judgment is not finalized. It is a sort of evasive engagement somehow. It is an engagement, because the character is engaging with the mechanisms and figures of the judicial system. But it is evasive, because his manner of engagement (and the system’s manner of engagement) prevents the judgment from becoming determinate (of course at the end of The Trial the man is killed. The unfinished Castle might be more useful to illustrate this somehow). In other words, the process of accusation, deliberation, and verdict are placed into a process with an indefinite end, but the operations are in fact working toward that end as their destination. So it is again like the parallel lines of the cone converging at infinity. K, so to speak, “bends” or “twists” the mechanisms of adjudication such that they never complete but still cooperate together under the common aim of being realized. But if the destination is off at infinity, then how is it that Kafka can immediately experience that convergence? Perhaps it is the ongoing, present action of deferring in such a way that it is an ultimate deferral by means of which we experience both the immediate divergence of the processes, while also experiencing their coming cooperation toward an end that is what currently organizes their relations. Derrida has this notion of the “mystical foundation of the authority of laws” (Derrida, “Force of Law,” p.239). Deleuze here seems to be suggesting something like a mystical end of law. Normally the end of law is something temporally attainable. But this sort of operation of the mechanisms of the legal system removes those ends from finite temporality, even while keeping the present, ongoing operations in place and aimed toward that end. At any rate, the overall general thought here seems to be that these four figures all suffered judgment but devised tactics for infinitely postponing that judgment, thereby having done with it in a way.]

 

Ils ont connu ce point où l’accusation, la délibération, le verdict se confondent à l’infini.

(158)

 

They experienced that infinite point at which accusation, deliberation, and verdict converge.

(126)

[contents]

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.7

[Nietzsche's, Lawrence’s, and Kafka’s particular judgments and escapes.]

 

[Nietzsche suffered judgment like a defiant condemned person; D.H. Lawrence was accused of immoralism and pornography even in his watercolor paintings; and, Kafka presented himself as innocent, but diabolically so, when a “tribunal” judged him unfit for marriage to Felice (for, he did not actually want the marriage, and in fact he fell in love with one of Felice’s friends, Grete Bloch, who was part of that tribunal.)]

 

[Deleuze next seems to elaborate on his prior point that Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud all suffered judgment but also “experienced that infinite point at which accusation, deliberation, and verdict converge” (see 1.6 above for our proposed interpretation of that.) In this sentence, he addresses the first three figures. What he says about Nietzsche I cannot explain or substantiate, “Nietzsche moved like a condemned man from room to room, against which he set a grandiose defiance.” As a first possible direction of investigation, I would turn to Ecce Homo. Here we might find indications of him feeling condemned and defying accusation. In the preface, for instance, he writes: “Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else” (Nietzsche, Ecce 673); “I am, for example, by no means a bogey, or a moralistic monster—I am actually the very opposite of the type of man who so far has been revered as virtuous. Between ourselves, it seems to me that precisely this is part of my pride. I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus; I should prefer to be even a satyr to being a saint” (ibid., 673); “Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains—seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a ban by morality. Long experience, acquired in the course of such wanderings in what is forbidden, taught me to regard the causes that so far have prompted moralizing and idealizing in a very different light from what may seem desirable: the hidden history of the philosophers, the psychology of the great names, came to light for me” (674). But I am not sure what exactly Deleuze had in mind for this. The part about D. H. Lawrence is quite clear and straightforward, but I do not now have any good textual support for it: “Lawrence lived under the accusations of immoralism and pornography that were brought against the least of his watercolors.” But I would suggest looking perhaps at his “Introduction to These Paintings.” For instance: “The reason the English produce so few painters is not that they are, as a nation, devoid of a genuine feeling for visual art. [...] The fault lies in the English attitude to life. [...] What appeared to take full grip on the northern consciousness at the end of the sixteenth century was a terror, almost a horror of sexual life.” (Lawrence, “Introduction,” 551); “All this sounds very far from the art of painting. But it is not so far as it sounds” (ibid., 555); “the terror-horror element led to the crippling of the consciousness of man. Very elementary in man is his sexual and procreative being, and on his sexual and procreative being depend many of his deepest instincts and the flow of his intuition” (ibid., 556); “This movement against the instincts and the intuition took on a moral tone in all countries. It started in hatred. Let us never forget that modern morality has its roots in hatred, a deep, evil hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreative body. This hatred is made more virulent by fear, and an extra poison is added to the fear by unconscious horror of syphilis” (ibid., 558). However, the final claim about Kafka has a specific textual citation, so we can explore it further. Deleuze writes: “Kafka showed himself to be ‘diabolical in all innocence’ in order to escape from the ‘tribunal in the hotel’ where his infinite engagements were being judged.” It is from Elias Canetti’s Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice. The section in question begins: “Two decisive events in Kafka's life—events which he of all people would have wanted to keep especially private—had taken place in a way that was embarrassingly public: the official engagement in the Bauer family home on June 1, and, six weeks later, on July 12, 1914, the ‘tribunal’ at the Askanische Hof, which led to the breaking of the engagement. It can be shown that the emotional substance of both events entered directly into The Trial, which Kafka began to write in August. The engagement becomes the arrest in the first chapter; the ‘tribunal’ appears as the execution in the last” (Canetti’s Kafka’s Other Trial, 63). Previously, Canetti notes how “on June 16, he [Kafka] does finally send her [Felice] the ‘treatise,’ on which he has worked haltingly for an entire week. It is the letter in which he asks her to become his wife” (ibid., 45). Shortly after Kafka “begins his unrelenting struggle against the engagement. This persists for the next two months and ends in flight” (ibid., 46). “He pleads the case against himself like an advocate using all available means, and it cannot be denied that these means are sometimes ignominious” (ibid.). “Whenever it is a question of saving himself from marriage, all he can muster is eloquence directed against himself. It can at once be recognized as such; its main feature is the disguising of his own fears as anxieties about Felice” (ibid., 47). “On September 2, after two months of continuously worsening torment, Kafka quite suddenly announces to Felice that he is pulling out” (ibid., 48). “He wrote no more letters—anything, at that time, rather than her insistence on the engagement. Hearing nothing from him, she sent her friend Grete Bloch to Prague, with the request that Grete mediate between them. With the entry of a third person, a new and very remarkable phase in the relationship now began” (ibid., 49). “As soon as Grete Bloch enters the scene, Kafka becomes divided. The letters he was writing to Felice the previous year he now directs to Grete” (ibid.). “In some respects he has an easier time of it than he had with Felice. Grete Bloch is more flexible, more receptive, more passionate. So she follows his suggestions” (ibid., 50). “Since Grete Bloch soon opens her heart to him, and tells him about her own difficulties, he is touched by her sadness and comforts her; she comes to be something of a fellow sufferer, eventually even an alter ego” (ibid.). “Precisely this distance which he achieves through the correspondence with Grete Bloch, and certainly too his conversations with a new friend, the writer Ernst Weiss, who hates Felice and counsels against marriage to her, serve to strengthen Kafka’s self-will, so that once again he is wooing Felice. Now he is manifestly determined to go through with the engagement and marriage, and he fights for them with a singleness of purpose hardly creditable to him after his earlier conduct. He is certainly well aware of his guilt of the previous year, when, at the last moment, just before their engagement was to be announced, he suddenly dropped Felice and absconded to Vienna and Riva. In a long | letter to Felice written at the turn of the year 1913-14, he also tells Felice about the Swiss girl and, simultaneously, he asks her, for a second time, to marry him. Her resistance is no less tenacious than his wooing” (ibid., 51-52). “For two and a half months Felice remains adamant and indifferent” (ibid., 52). “He humbles himself before her ‘like a dog,’ but achieves nothing” (ibid.). “Then Felice became uncertain, due to the loss of her handsome brother [...]. Her defenses crumbled. Kafka at once sees his advantage, and after four more weeks he succeeds in coercing her into an engagement. At Easter 1914, in Berlin, they become unofficially engaged” (ibid., 53). “The warmth of his affection for Grete increases after the Easter engagement. Without her, he would never have brought the engagement about, and he knows this. She gave him the strength he needed, as well as detachment with regard to Felice” (ibid.). “During the course of his very hard struggle for Felice, there came into being his love for the woman without whom he could not have survived this struggle—Grete Bloch. The marriage would only be complete, to his thinking, if she were included” (ibid., 55). “In this regard it must be said that, for Kafka, who seldom felt free in conversation, love came into being through his written word. The three most important women in his | life were Felice, Grete Bloch, and Milena Jesenká. His feelings for each of them came into being through letters. So things turned out as he had expected: the official engagement in Berlin was a time of terror for Kafka. At the reception given by the Bauer family on June 1,1914, despite the much-desired presence of Grete Bloch, he felt ‘tied hand and foot like a criminal. Had they sat me down in a corner bound in real chains, placed policemen in front of me and let me look on simply like that, it could not have been worse. And that was my engagement; everybody made an effort to bring me to life, and when they couldn't, to put up with me as I was.’13 Thus his diary entry a few days afterward. In a letter written to Felice almost two years later, he describes another terror of those days, one that he still felt in his bones; it was the occasion of his going with her ‘to buy furniture in Berlin for an official in Prague’: ‘Heavy furniture which looked as if, once in position, it could never be removed. Its very solidity is what you appreciated most. The sideboard in particular—a perfect tombstone, or a memorial to the life of a Prague official—oppressed me profoundly. If during our visit to the furniture store a funeral bell had begun tolling in the distance, it wouldn’t have been inappropriate’ (462). As early as June 6, a few days after that reception, he wrote from Prague a letter to Grete Bloch which sounds uncannily familiar to the reader of the previous year’s correspondence: ‘Dear Fraulein Grete, yesterday was another of those days when I felt completely tied down, incapable of moving, incapable of writing you the letter that everything still alive within me urged me to write. At times—and for the moment you are the only one to know—I really don’t know how I, being what I am, can bear the responsibility of marriage’ (420)” (ibid., 55-56). Regarding Grete: “between Kafka and herself there were secrets concerning Felice, and certainly she had developed strong feelings for him. The dress she was to wear at the engagement was discussed in their letters; it is as if she were the betrothed. ‘Don’t try to improve it,’ he wrote of her dress, ‘no matter what it’s like, it will be viewed with the, yes, with the most affectionate eyes’ (418). He wrote her this letter one day before his departure and the official engagement” (ibid., 57). And regarding Grete and “the jealousy from which she certainly was suffering. With Felice nearby, since she was now living in Berlin, she could not but feel especially guilty. She could only rid herself of this guilt by crossing to Felice’s side. So now she suddenly became Kafka's adversary and began to watch suspiciously for signs indicating that his decision to marry might not be serious. But he continued to write letters to her, trustingly, and more and more he unloaded into his letters his fears about the ap- | preaching marriage to Felice. She began to urge him on; he defended himself with the old arguments of his hypochondria, and, since it was Grete to whom he was addressing himself, he put his case in a more convincing and collected way than in the previous year's letters to Felice. He succeeded in giving her the alarm, she warned Felice, and Kafka was summoned to Berlin to face the ‘tribunal.’ The ‘tribunal’ at the Askanische Hof hotel in July 1914 marks the point of crisis in Kafka’s double relation to the two women. The breaking of the engagement—although everything in Kafka was moving in that direction—seems to have been imposed on him from outside. But it is as if he himself had selected the members of this court, preparing them as no accused has ever done. The writer Ernst Weiss, though not present at the tribunal, at least lived in Berlin. He had been Kafka’s friend for seven months; together with his literary qualities, he brought to the friendship something of inestimable value to Kafka: his steadfast rejection of Felice. From the very beginning he had opposed the engagement. For the same length of time, Kafka had been seeking Grete’s love. He had bewitched her with his letters and brought her more and more to his side. During the time between the private and the official engagement, his love letters were being written to her, not to Felice. This placed her in a bind, from which she could only extricate herself by an about-face which would make her judge his case. She placed into Felice’s hands the points of the accusation; in Kafka’s letters to her there were passages she had underlined in red. Felice brought to the ‘tribunal’ her sister Erna, perhaps as a counterweight to her absent adversary, Ernst Weiss. The accusation, a hard and spiteful one, was brought forward by Felice herself; the scant records we have do not make it clear whether or not Grete Bloch then directly intervened. But she | was there, and Kafka felt that she was the real judge. He did not say a word, did not defend himself, and the engagement fell to pieces, just as he had wished. He left Berlin and spent two weeks at the seaside with Ernst Weiss. In his diary he describes his numbness during the Berlin days. Or one might quite well view it in retrospect as follows: Grete Bloch was trying, in this way, to prevent an alliance of which she was jealous. Kafka, it can also be said, with a kind of provident premonition had directed her toward Berlin and then, with his letters, induced in her a state of mind in which she, instead of he, found the strength to rescue him from the engagement. But the manner of this break, its concentrated form as ‘tribunal’—which is what Kafka called it afterward—had an overwhelming effect on him. At the beginning of August his reaction begins to formulate itself. The trial, which had been proceeding for two years in letters between him and Felice, now changed into that other Trial, which everybody knows. It is the same trial, he had rehearsed it; he incorporated into it infinitely more than the letters alone reveal, but that should not deceive us as to the identity of the two trials. The strength he had sought in Felice was now given to him by the shock of the tribunal. Simultaneously, the world came to judgment: World War I had begun. The repugnance with which he regarded the mass events accompanying the outbreak of war increased his strength. He did not have for his private and interior processes that disregard which distinguishes insignificant writers from writers of imagination. A person who thinks that he is empowered to separate his inner world from the outer one has no inner world from which something might be separable. But with Kafka the problem was that the weakness he suffered from—the occasional collapse of his vital pow- | ers—made possible only a very sporadic exfoliation and objectification of his “private” processes. To achieve the continuity that he thought indispensable, two things were needed: a very powerful, yet somehow still erroneous shock, like the “tribunal,” which mobilized his agonizing passion for precision as a defense against attacks from outside; and a bond between the external hell of the world and his inner hell. This came about in August 1914. He himself acknowledged the connection, and in his own way he gave distinct expression to it” (ibid., 57-60). In the next section, Canetti then shows the resemblance between these biographical events and certain features of characters and scenes in the Trial (for instance, Grete Bloch is like Fräulein Bürstner) (ibid 63-67). Then Canetti deals with more letter material, which will take us to Deleuze’s cited passages. “To understand now how the ‘tribunal,’ which had an enormous impact on Kafka, became the execution in the last chapter of The Trial, we must additionally consider several passages from the diaries and from letters. Toward the end of July, he sets out to describe the sequence of events, | hurriedly and provisionally, as it were from an external standpoint: ‘The tribunal in the hotel.... F.’s face. She patted her hair with her hand, ... yawned. Suddenly she gathered herself together and said very studied, hostile things she had long been saving up. The trip back with Miss Bl. . . . At her parents’. Her mother’s occasional tears. I recited my lesson. Her father understood the thing from every side.... They agreed that I was right, there was nothing, or not much, that could be said against me. Devilish in my innocence. Miss Bl.’s apparent guilt....’ ‘Why did her parents and aunt wave after me?’18 ‘The next day didn’t visit her parents again. Merely sent a messenger with a letter of farewell. Letter dishonest and coquettish. “Don't think badly of me.” Speech from the gallows.’ Thus, already by July 27, two weeks after the events, the ‘place of execution’ has fixed itself in his mind. With the word Gerichtshof (‘tribunal’), he had entered the sphere of the novel. With Richtplatz (‘gallows,’ or ‘place of execution’), its goal and end are foreshadowed. This early fixing of the goal is worth noting. It explains the sure development of The Trial” (ibid., 67-68).]

 

Nietzsche traverse en accusé toutes les pensions meublées auxquelles il oppose un grandiose défi, Lawrence vit dans l’accusation d’immoralisme et de pornographie qui rejaillit sur sa moindre aquarelle, Kafka se montre « diabolique en toute innocence » pour échapper au « tribunal à l’hôtel » où l’on juge de ses fiançailles infinies1.

(158)

1. Cf. Elias Canetti, L’autre procès, Gallimard.

(158)

 

Nietzsche moved like a condemned man from room to room, against which he set a grandiose defiance; Lawrence lived under the accusations of immoralism and pornography that were brought against the least of his watercolors; Kafka showed himself to be “diabolical in all innocence” in order to escape from the “tribunal in the hotel” where his infinite engagements were being judged.1

(126)

1. See Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, trans. Christopher Middleton (New York: Schocken, 1974), p. 68, translation modified.

(199)

 

[contents]

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.8

[Artaud’s (and Van Gogh’s) Judgments by Psychiatrists]

 

[Artaud’s artistic genius was judged by psychiatrists as madness, and they subjected him to cruel treatments like heavy drugs and electroshock therapy. His situation was not unlike Van Gogh’s.]

 

[Deleuze places the fourth elaboration, Artaud, in its own sentence, writing: “And who suffered more from judgment in its harshest form, the terror of psychiatric expertise, than Artaud-Van Gogh?” There is no citation here, but we might note, for instance how Artaud, at the asylum at Rodez, writes to a doctor (Jacques Latrémolière) “You have seen the hordes of demons which afflict me night and day, you have seen them as clearly as you see me. You have seen what filthy erotic manipulations they are constantly performing on me, and because of this and because of the revolt of your conscience which is that of a true and a great Christian, you have found yourself transported alive and awake into the midst of that occult battle which heaven has been waging against Hell for eternities in order to defend the immaculate empire of God.--But one thing has offended and unsettled your conscience: that God in time has not yet put an end to the appalling human depravity of a people, I mean the French people who have now passed over completely to the Antichrist and to Satan and who have kept a man locked up in an Insane Asylum for years for the sole purpose of feeding off of his seminal fluid and his excrement” (Artaud, Selected Writings, 423). To another doctor: “In order to find a little Love around me on this earth, Dr. Ferdière, I had to come to Rodez. I have suffered horribly from human wickedness in all the Asylums I have stayed in from 1937 to 1943. Only here have I found friends who have opened their hearts to me” (ibid., 431). “As a result of close confinement, solitude, isolation, I had lapsed into a stupor and I shall never tire of telling you the astonishing good that you and F. Delanglade have done me in showing your faith in and admiration for my writing and my work” (ibid., 435). “It was the confinement and the harmful treatments I underwent at the beginning which put me in that condition of a hunted animal that I was in when I arrived here” (ibid., 436). To Jacques Latrémolière, “It was you yourself who last August put an end to the electric-shock treatments which were so terrible for me, because you realized that this was not a treatment I should have to undergo, and that a man like myself did not need to be treated but on the contrary, helped in his work. Electric shock, Mr. Latremolière, reduces me to despair, it takes away my memory, it dulls my mind and my heart, it turns me into someone who is absent and who knows he is absent and sees himself for weeks in pursuit of his being, like a dead man alongside a living map who is no longer himself, but who insists on the dead man being present even though he can no longer enter into him. After the last series I remained throughout the months of August and September absolutely incapable of working, thinking, and feeling that I was alive. Each time it brings on those horrible splittings of the personality which I wrote about in the correspondence with Rivière, but which at that time was a perceptual knowledge and not a living agony as with electric shock” (ibid., 438). “[...] never in the world would you have agreed to inflict on me once again the torments of drugged sleep and the horrible mental torpor of electric shock” (ibid., 439). “[...] I do believe that there are on earth some very bad people who desire the reign of evil and who are organized in sects to bring it about and who, by committing their abominations and their crimes, are keeping life at the level of baseness, hatred, war, despair, shame.--And I know that it is the practice of the sins of all the criminals of this ill will that is the source of temptation for us who want to be pure and good.--I know it because it was for trying to denounce them as a body that I was accused of madness, and when Dr. Ferdière or you reproach me for conjuring, it is because you can no longer see the opposing conjurations which | were made against you by the whole army of evil to prevent you from judging me with your mind and your heart; my story, Dr. Latrémolière, is a nameless iniquity and a crime which people do not want to let you see and which they are sealing up in your own mind in order to reverse your judgment of me. I hope that Heaven will help you to understand everything I am trying to tell you, but if Dr. Ferdière refuses to continue to treat me like a sick person because I am leading here the same life that, as I said, I have lived since 1913, I am going to ask my family to come and get me” (ibid., 439-440). But, I am not sure what to do with the hyphenated “Van Gogh” to his name in the quoted Deleuze passage. Yet, Artaud wrote about Van Gogh in “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society.” He writes, for instance, “One can speak of the good mental health of van Gogh who, in his whole life, cooked only one of his hands and did nothing else except once to cut off his left ear” (ibid., 483). “No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of Greek fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision” (ibid., 483). “For it is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. [...] All the more reason why on the social level institutions are falling apart and medicine resembles a stale and useless corpse which declares van Gogh insane. In comparison with the lucidity of van Gogh, which is a dynamic force, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous terminology, worthy product of their damaged brains” (ibid., 484). “So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths” (ibid., 485). “Thus on the occasion of a war, a revolution, or a social upheaval still in the bud, the collective consciousness is questioned and questions itself, and makes its judgment” (ibid., 486). “Van Gogh searched for his throughout his life, with a strange energy and determination, and he did not commit suicide in a fit of madness, in dread of not succeeding, on the contrary, he had just succeeded, and discovered what he was and who he was, when the collective consciousness of society, to punish him for escaping from its clutches, suicided him” (ibid., 487). “For it was not because of himself, because of the disease of his own madness, that van Gogh abandoned life. It was under the pressure of the evil influence, two days before his death, of Dr. Cachet, a so-called psychiatrist, which was the direct, effective, and sufficient cause of his death. When I read van Gogh’s letters to his brother, I was left with the firm and sincere conviction that Dr. Cachet, ‘psychiatrist,’ actually detested van Gogh, painter, and that he detested him as a painter, but above all as a genius. It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius. Medicine was born of evil, if it was not born of illness, and if it has, on the contrary, provoked and created illness out of nothing to justify its own existence ; but psychiatry was born of the vulgar mob of creatures who wanted to preserve the evil at the source of illness and who have thus pulled out of their own inner nothingness a kind of Swiss guard to cut off at its root that impulse of rebellious vindication which is at the origin of genius. There is in every lunatic a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was | the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him. Dr. Cachet did not tell van Gogh that he was there to straighten out his painting (as Dr. Gaston Ferdière, head physician of the asylum of Rodez, told me he was there to straighten out my poetry), but he sent him to paint from nature, to bury himself in a landscape to escape the pain of thinking. Except that, as soon as van Gogh had turned his back, Dr. Cachet turned off the switch to his mind” (ibid., 492-493). “I, too, am like poor van Gogh, I no longer think, but I direct, every day at closer hand, formidable internal ebullitions, and I would like to see any medical science whatsoever come and reproach me for tiring myself” (ibid., 495). “And there took place between Dr. Cachet and Theo, van Gogh’s brother, how many of those stinking confabulations that families have with the head physicians of insane asylums regarding the patient they have brought them. ‘Keep an eye on him, make sure he forgets all those ideas. You understand, the doctor said so, you must forget all those ideas: they're hurting you, if you keep on thinking about them you’ll stay shut up for the rest of your life’” (ibid., 496). “I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want | to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat” (ibid., 496-497).]

 

Et Artaud-Van Gogh, qui a davantage souffert du jugement sous sa forme la plus dure, la terrible expertise psychiatrique ?

(158)

 

And who suffered more from judgment in its harshest form, the terror of psychiatric expertise, than Artaud-Van Gogh?

(126)

[contents]

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography:

 

Deleuze, Gilles. “Pour en finir avec le jugement.” In Critique et clinique, 158–69. Paris: Minuit, 1993.

 

Deleuze, Gilles. “To Have Done with Judgment.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel Smith and Michael Greco, 126–35. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 1997.

 

Or if otherwise cited:

 

Artaud, Antonin. Selected Writings. Edited by Susan Sontag. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976.

 

Canetti, Elias. Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice. Translated by Christopher Middleton. New York: Schocken, 1974.

 

Deleuze, Gilles. Course 1983.05.03, Part 2. Online recording at Bibliothèque nationale de France/Gallica; recording and transcript at La voix de Gilles Deleuze en ligne, Université Paris 8 (Transcription by Jean-Charles Jarrell); no transcript at Web Deleuze. Paris, 1983.

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k128341j ; http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article.php3?id_article=243.

 

Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone, 1995.

 

Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988.

 

Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’” In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, translated by Mary Quaintance, 230–98. New York: Routledge, 2002.

 

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2000.

 

Lawrence, D. H. “Introduction to These Paintings.” In Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers, edited by Edward McDonald, 550–84. London: Heinemann, 1936.

 

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. In Basic Writings, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, 655–800. New York: Modern library, 1968.

 

Serres, Michel. Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques, Vol. 1: étoiles. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968.

 

 

 

3 Dec 2019

Deleuze (ED) “To Have Done with Judgment” / “Pour en finir avec le jugement,” entry directory

 

by Corry Shores

 

[Search Blog Here. Index tabs are found at the bottom of the left column.]

 

[Central Entry Directory]

[Deleuze, entry Directory]

 

 

 

 

 

Entry Directory for

 

Gilles Deleuze

 

“Pour en finir avec le jugement”

“To Have Done with Judgment”

 

Paragraph 1

[Introduction to the Doctrine of Judgment, Its General History, and Its Main Opponents (Spinoza, Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, and Artaud)]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deleuze, Gilles. “Pour en finir avec le jugement.” In Critique et clinique, 158–69. Paris: Minuit, 1993.

 

Deleuze, Gilles. “To Have Done with Judgment.” In Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel Smith and Michael Greco, 126–35. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 1997.

 

 

 

 

5 Aug 2019

Priest (CBS) “Dialectic and Dialetheic,” collected brief summaries

 

by Corry Shores

[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

 

[Central Entry Directory]

[Logic & Semantics, Entry Directory]

[Graham Priest, entry directory]

[Priest, “Dialectic and Dialetheic”, entry directory]

 

 

 

 

Collected Brief Summaries for

 

Graham Priest

 

“Dialectic and Dialetheic”

 

 

Introduction:

Dialectics Requires Dialetheism

 

Priest will argue that Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectics were based on dialetheia, that is, on true contradiction.

 

 

1

Why It Is Necessary to Argue This

 

Many scholars argue that Marx’s and Hegel’s dialectics involve a non-logical notion of contradiction or that contradiction is conceptual and does not obtain in reality. Priest, however, will argue that the logical sense of contradiction is fundamental to their philosophies of dialectic.

 

 

 

2

The Argument Against this Interpretation

 

The main argument against reading Hegel and Marx as dialetheists is that it goes against the basic restriction of classical logic that you cannot have contradictions. But this restriction is based on an assumption and is thus not a necessary one.

 

 

 

3

Dialetheic Logic

 

Dialetheic logic is just like orthodox logic except that it allows for true contradictions, and when there are true contradictions, we cannot infer from them any other proposition we want.

 

 

 

4

Motion: An Illustration

 

One way we can illustrate how dialetheic logic can apply to dialectics is by accounting for motion in a Hegelian way. An object in motion is at a certain point at a certain instant, but since it is in motion, in that instant it is already leaving that point. Thus it is both true and false that the object is at that point in that instant.

 

 

 

5

The History of Hegel’s Dialectic

 

If we look at three of Hegel’s influences – Neo-Platonists, Kant, and Fichte – we see that Hegel borrowed self-contradictory ideas from each of them. Thus Hegel is a dialetheist, that is, he believes that true contradictions exist.

 

 

 

6

Contradiction in Hegel’s Dialectic

 

In Hegel’s dialectical movement, contradictory categories result from one another and are conjoined. It is in this ways that Hegel is a dialetheist [someone who thinks that there exist true contradictions].

 

 

 

7

Contradiction in Marx’s Dialectic

 

 

 

8

Identity in Difference

 

Hegel’s dialectic takes the form of identity in difference, formulable as (a=b)&(ab). This is a variation on the dialetheic formulation A&~A.

 

 

 

9

Dialectics and Epistemology

 

 

 

10

Conclusion

 

 

 

 

 

 

Priest, Graham. “Dialectic and Dialetheic.” Science & Society 53, no. 4 (1990): 388–415.

 

 

 

.

22 Jul 2019

Priest (CBS) Logic: A Very Short Introduction, collected brief summaries

 

by Corry Shores

 

[Search Blog Here. Index-tags are found on the bottom of the left column.]

 

[Central Entry Directory]

[Logic and Semantics, entry directory]

[Graham Priest, entry directory]

[Priest’s, Logic: A Very Short Introduction, entry directory]

 

[The following collects the brief summaries for Priest’s book. The directory of entries without the summaries is found here:

http://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2015/07/entry-directory-priest-logic-very-short.html

]

 

Collected Brief Summaries for:

 

Graham Priest

 

Logic: A Very Short Introduction

 

 

Preface

 

Logic is an ancient discipline that was revolutionized in the 20th century with mathematical techniques and is currently very useful in information and computational sciences. This book will give a brief, broad, and non-technical overview.

 

 

Ch.1

Validity: What Follows from What?

 

“Logic is the study of what counts as a good reason for what, and why” (Priest, 1). An inference draws a conclusion from premisses (or from a premiss). It is valid if the conclusion follows from those premisses. It is deductively valid if it necessarily follows, that is, if no other conclusion could possibly follow, and it can be determined as such when “there is no situation in which all the premisses are true, but the conclusion is not.” An inductively valid inference is based on reasoning given in the premisses, yet other conclusions could also follow instead.

 


Ch.2

Truth Functions – Or Not?

 

Our intuitions about the validity of inferences are often correct, but sometimes they are misleading. One such case is the inference: q, ¬q / p, for example, “The Queen is rich,” “The Queen is not rich,” therefore “Pigs can fly”. Since the conclusion seems logically unrelated, we might erroneously think it is an invalid inference. By rendering these sentences into symbols and computing their truth values, we can see that there is no instance when the premisses are true and the conclusion not-true (false), and thus indeed it is valid. But since there is no situation where both the premisses can be true anyway, it is called vacuously valid. We also learn the truth tables for negation, disjunction, and conjunction, which are based on the truth conditions for these operations. If a sentence is true, then its negation is false, and vice versa. A disjunction is true only if at least one disjunct is true. And a conjunction is true only if both conjuncts are true. But conjunctions and disjunctions in English do not always map perfectly onto these truth tables.

 

 

 

Ch.3

Names and Quantifiers: Is Nothing Something?

 

When we speak of things, we might refer to some specific thing by name, like if we say, “Marcus came to the party”. In this case, what we are saying refers just to this one named person or thing. Or we might speak broadly and universally of all of a group of things, like if we said, “everyone came to the party”. In this case, what we say of the people or things applies to all of them. Or, we might refer to some thing, but without designating it specifically with a name, like when we say, “Someone came to the party”. Here we are saying something about a person or thing, but we are not specifying which one. When we want to speak of some thing or another, as in, “someone is happy,” we could use the existential quantifier and formulate this as, ∃x xH, meaning, there is some x such that x is happy. Or if we wanted to say, “Everyone is happy,” we could write ∀x xH, meaning, for all x, x is happy. Note that from just one quantified sentence an inference can be drawn. For example, if all people are happy, then there is some person who is happy. By using quantification, we can settle debates in mathematics and philosophy.

 

 

Ch.4

Descriptions and Existence: Did the Greeks Worship Zeus?

 

A definite description specifies a thing satisfying certain conditions, for example, “the man who first landed on the Moon”. Descriptions can be formulated symbolically by the use of variables that are predicated. The overall formulation takes the form ιxcx. Here, the ιx means, “the object x, such that…”, and the cx gives the conditions specifying the object. In our example we could write ιx(xM & xF) to mean, “the object x such that x is a man and x first landed on the Moon”. Furthermore, we may treat the whole description as something that can take predicates, and we can use Greek letters to stand for the whole description, thus possibly making the above formulation simply μ. This abbreviation will help us examine the validity of the Characterization Principle (CP), which is used in the Ontological Argument for God. We describe God as having a variety of properties that specify God, with the final one being “exists”: ιx(xP1 & … & xPn). The CP says that a thing characterized by certain properties in fact has those properties, and thus the whole described thing is predicated by the properties given in the description. Symbolically this involves substituting all cases of x in the description with that description itself. In this formulation we would get: ιx((xP1 & … & xPn)P1 & … & (xP1 & … & xPn)Pn), which in part says that the object that is omniscient etc., and exists, is in fact omniscient, etc., and does really exist. Using the Greek letters we can render the above substitution as: γP1 & … & γPn. But there is an important rule this argument breaks, namely that any predication to a non-existing entity is false. If there is a God, then the predication that God exists is true; but if there is no God in reality, then this predication is false. This means that for the argument to work, it must assume the truth of its conclusion at the outset, and is thus invalid. Yet there are cases where this rule does not apply, for example in instances of fictional entities like Greek gods whose properties can rightly be predicated to their description even though the thing described does not exist.

 

 

Ch.5

Self Reference: What is this Chapter About?

 

Paradoxical and otherwise problematic instances of self-reference lead us to suspect that we have more options than the following two: 1) a sentence can be just true, or 2) a sentence can be just false. Consider the “liar” sentence, ‘This sentence is false.’ If it is true, then it is false; but if it is false, then it is true. Either way, it’s truth-value will contradict what it says its truth-value is. So we have option 3) a sentence can be both true and false. Or consider the “liar cousin” sentence, ‘This sentence is true.’ Normally the terms in such a declarative sentence refer to things or situations by which we may determine the truth or falsity of the statement, that is to say, whether or not the indicated situation holds in reality or not. So if we say, “this chair is red,” we look to the indicated chair and its color, and we determine if the sentence is true or not. However, the terms in “this sentence is true” does not point us to such a determining situation, since we are only able to make two equally viable assumptions about its truth value, namely, that it is either true or that it is false; but, we have no way to make the determination one way or another, since it will always be consistent with what it says of itself under both assumptions. It would seem that we have no grounds that would allow us to determine whether it is true or false, and thus we have option 4) a sentence may be neither true nor false. The classical assumptions 1 and 2 lead us to conclude certain inferences are valid when our intuitions say otherwise. For example, “The Queen is rich,” “The Queen isn’t rich,” therefore, “Pigs can fly” (q, ¬q/p). Our intuitions tell us this seems invalid. But by just using assumptions 1 and 2, it is valid, since structurally speaking there is no situation where the premises are true and the conclusion is false. For, the premises can never all be true anyway. However, under the new assumptions, particularly that sentences can be both true and false, q, ¬q/p can be valid, if q is both true and false and p just false. For, q is at least true and ¬q is also at least true. However, our intuitions tell us that qp, ¬q/p is valid, but the new assumptions deem it invalid. Yet, perhaps it only seems intuitively valid if we forget that there are exceptional situations where sentences can be both true and false. There are other problems with the assumptions. When we assume that the liar cousin, “This sentence is true,” is neither true nor false, that means it cannot be true, but it says of itself that it is true. And while we might go along with saying that “This sentence is false” is both true and false, we might not feel the same way about “This sentence is not-true”. Here, we might conclude that it is both true and not-true (and not just true and false), which is a stronger contradiction that we may not want to accept.

 

 

Ch.6

Necessity and Possibility: What Will be Must be?

 

We can modify a statement of fact to indicate whether or not the referenced state of affairs is possibly the case or necessarily so. Modal logic allows us to deal with these modifications formally. Suppose “it will rain” is p. We write, “Possibly it will rain” as ⋄p, and we write “necessarily it will rain” as ◻p. Unlike truth-functional operators (like negation and conjunction), these modal operators do not alter the truth values of statements in a mechanically consistent way. To formally examine modally modified sentences, we think of there being other possible worlds about which we may make the same statements of fact, and these statements may be true or false depending on which alternate possible world it is in. In one possible world, it does rain tomorrow. But in another, it will not. We say something is possible when in at least one other world this state of affairs is false. However, no matter what possible world we conceive of, in all of them, if it rains, then fluid is falling. Such things which cannot be otherwise, when for example they are governed by fixed laws of physics, are considered necessarily true; for, in every other possible world they are true. We can diagram these possible world situations using boxes. In one box we give the statements of fact and their truth values for one situation or world (this world for example), and in other boxes we give the statements and their values for the other possible worlds. This helps us see which statements are necessarily true or false in one world and which are possibly so. This manner of formulation helps with certain debates, for example, it allows us to see that Aristotle’s argument for fatalism is fallacious. The argument makes us think that there is nothing we can do now to change the future, and also, that there is nothing in the past that we can regret or feel responsible for. The reasoning is as follows. If it is true that something will happen, then it will happen no matter what. But if it is false that something will happen, it will fail to happen no matter what. Either way, whatever happens occurs no matter what. By formulating this using modal logic, we see that it infers something incorrectly. There is a difference between the following two claims: 1) it is necessarily the case that if it is true that tomorrow I will get in an accident, then I will get in an accident, and 2) if it is true that if I will get in an accident, then I will necessarily get in an accident. If we just look at the semantic references, both formulations seem to have the same meaning. But on the level of their logical structure they are making different claims, and also structurally the second claim cannot be derived from the first, which is what is needed for the argument to hold. Aristotle’s fatalist argument would want you to believe that in every possible world you will get in an accident tomorrow, which is not so. It even acknowledges that the opposite could happen. However, there is a way to twist this fatalist argument a bit to remove that fallacy, and we may wonder whether or not this modification provides a valid argument for fatalism. We first say that there is nothing we can do now to change the past. This implies that states of affairs in the past are irrevocably true and statements about those situations are necessarily true. Now, suppose we do get in an accident tomorrow. This means it is true now if we say that we will. Suppose further that we said it yesterday also. We can say now that in the past it was true that we will get in an accident tomorrow. This means that it is irrevocably true that in the past we will get into an accident, and thus it is necessarily true that we will.

 

 

Ch.7

Conditionals: What’s in an If?

 

Conditionals are of the form, “if a then c,” or ac. The first term is the antecedent, and the second, the consequent. Conditionals are false only if the antecedent is true and the consequent false, and they are true for all other value assignments. But there are many difficulties regarding conditionals, and some of which call into question the universal applicability of these value-assignments. For example, according to the truth table for conditionals, when the antecedent is false, then the whole conditional is true, regardless of whether or not the consequent is true. This means that the following two conditionals should both be true: “If Italy is part of France, Rome is in France” and “If Italy is part of France, Beijing is in France”. But intuitively, the second one seems false. So conditionals are not truth-functional, since a lot depends on the meanings of the terms. In order to evaluate them, we can use possible worlds, like with modal operators: “the conditional ac is true in some situation, s, just if c is true in every one of the possible situations associated with s in which a is true; and it is false in s if c is false in some possible situation associated with s in which a is true.” Since Rome is by definition in Italy, that means in no possible world would it not be in France, were Italy to be in France. So that is why the first sentence is true. However, since Beijing is by definition a city in China and not a city of Italy, then in some possible worlds Beijing will not be in France, were Italy to be in France. And that is why the second sentence is false. Another problem with conditionals has to do with ¬(ac), which has the same truth table as ac, and in fact is called the material conditional and is symbolized as ac. But although we might think that we can infer ac from ¬(ac), this is not in fact a valid inference, and we can show this using the possible worlds analysis. The important difference between ac and ¬(ac) is that ac involves the relevance of a to c, where there is no such relevance implied in ¬(a&¬c). For this reason we can think of situations where ac will be false but ¬(ac) will technically true, thereby invalidating the inference. There are other cases too of inferences using conditionals that seem valid, and yet there are troubling counter-examples that call their validity into question.

 

 

Ch.8

The Future and the Past: Is Time Real?

 

We can use tense logic to analyze the validity of inferences that are based on statements referring to different moments in time. We first think of a one-dimensional series of situations arranged in their proper chronological sequence. We then think of statements of fact. They may or may not be true for one temporalized situation or another. Suppose a statement h is true only for the temporally situated moment s0. This statement refers to an instantaneous state of affairs, like the moment the first bullet entered Czar Nicolas’ heart. It will be false for all situations coming before and after that temporalized situation, since the event did not happen at those other moments. However, at a succeeding moment in the future, we can say truly that the event happened in the past. And likewise for a preceding moment in the past, we can say it will be happening in the future. We use the modifier P for past (“it was the case that”) and F for future (“it will be the case that”). So in moment s1, Ph is true, and for moment s-1, Fh is true. We can further designate temporal relations by compounding the modifiers. PPh would apply h to a situation coming before some other situation that is already in the past. FPh would apply h then to some situation coming after some other situation that is already in the past. Now, P and F refer to some determinate situation in the past or future. We can instead refer to all future situations with the modifier G (“it is always Going to be the case that”) and all past ones with the modifier H (“it Has always been the case that”). We can also make a model  for this tense logic by arranging in sequence a number of s’s, placing s0 in the middle, and counting up and down the subscripts on both sides. This allows us to evaluate inferences based on tense modifiers. One example is McTaggart’s argument against the reality of time. If time is real, then the past and future are real, and thus they do not present logical contradictions. We then consider a sentence that is true just for the situation at one time-point. This means it did not happen in two temporally distinct time-points, and thus it did not happen both in the past and in the future: ¬(Ph&Fh). However, time flows, and so before it happened, it was in the future, and after it happened, it was in the past: Ph&Fh. The concepts of past and future present a contradiction, and thus time is unreal. One may object to the second formulation and say that it pretends that, for one situation that is located at one time point, the event can be both in the past and in the future. So to clarify the problem, we might then compound the modifiers and write ¬(PPh&FFh) to mean that the event did not happen at some determinate point coming before another in the past and at the same time happen at some determinate point coming after another in the future. Those following McTaggart’s reasoning can then say that still, because of the flow of time, PPh will be true and FFh was true, and thus, in contradiction with the prior, negated conjunction, PPh&FFh. But, by using the tense-logic model, we can display visually that the McTaggart argument is mistaken. There is never a singular temporalized situation where both terms in the past&future parings are true. Nonetheless, as this is a model that spatializes the flow of time, it might not be adequate for dealing with this argument about time’s non-spatial flow.

 

 

Ch.9

Identity and Change. Is Anything Ever the Same?

 

Over time, something’s properties might change. But it might either keep its identity or it might take on another one altogether. This presents a difficulty for philosophy and logic, especially since identity is a foundational concept in our thinking. We first distinguish objects and their properties, and we note that the properties may be variable while the objects remain constant. The ‘is’ of predication (x is red, or Rx) is different from the ‘is’ of identity (x is y, or x=y). However, Leibniz’s Law [of indiscernibles] uses properties to define identity. If two things share the same properties, then they are identical, and vice versa. This is a useful law in most applications, as for example when we use it for substituting terms in algebra. There are some other instances that at first seem to cast doubts on the applicability of the law, but these cases can be shown in the end to be mistaken for other reasons. However, there is one case that presents a big problem for the Law. We assume that identical things always were and always will be identical. When an amoeba A splits into amoebae B and C, then A has transformed into two other things in the sense of it having taken on new guises. This means that before the split, B and were identical to A and thus were identical to each other. However, after the split they are non-identical. This contradicts the assumption that things that are identical always are so.

 

 

Ch.10

Vagueness: How Do You Stop Sliding Down a Slippery Slope?

 

A thing can change gradually over time. A true statement about that thing’s status at the beginning can later be false at the end of the development. But in many cases, it is not clear when exactly during that development the status changes without ambiguity. “Jack is a child” is true when Jack is very young and not true when Jack is old; but, when precisely in his young adult years does it cease being entirely true and instead “Jack is an adult” becomes entirely true? This issue is related to sorites paradoxes. Consider that “Jack is a child” is true at the beginning, and “If Jack is a child at the beginning, then he is still a child one second later” also is probably also true. That means by modus ponens, “Jack is a child one second later” is true. Using this same sort of reasoning, we can then conclude that Jack is a child two seconds later, and so on, meaning that he never ceases being a child. (We reiterate the structure, taking the affirmed prior conclusion that Jack is still a child in the  succeeding second, and use it as a premise in an argument of the same structure, allowing us to conclude he is a child in yet the next succeeding second, and so on infinitely).  One solution to these issues is to use fuzzy truth values. We can say for example that when he is 3 years old, the statement “Jack is a child” has a full truth value of 1. At 9 years “Jack is  child” has a truth value of 0.75. At 14 years, 0.5. At 19 years, 0.25. And at 24 years, 0. And when we apply truth functional operators to statements with  values between 1 and 0, we can determine the different resulting fuzzy values. Also, we can say that an inference is valid when both the conclusion and the premises meet a certain minimum level of truth value, which is determined by the actual context to which the statements apply. What we find then is that the sorites paradox does not hold when we use this fuzzy system. [For, in order for the modus ponens inference to work in all steps, we will need the minimum value to be 0 (in order to accommodate the final transitional step), which is too low to be meaningful.] Also, fuzzy values do not clear up the situation entirely, because we have the same problem when we need to determine precisely at what point the values change from 1 to something less than 1.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Priest, Graham. Logic: A Very Short Introduction. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University, 2000.