[lbo-talk] reading badiou -- worth it? (was: Review of Badiou'sNumber)

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Tue Aug 11 12:55:54 PDT 2009


Two Cultures? Which two? Seriously, sincerely. You mean the science v. math, social science v. linguistics, techo v. humanist?, philosophy v. empirical science? I see maybe half a dozen different views all at odds, when there should be somekind of convergence.

One way to get into the spirit is to really get down on the concept of zero, and the concept of one. When I was going back to this, it occured to me that zero was not an element or object. It was something else. Maybe zero is something more like a relation or operation and not at all object like, even `empty' object. Similarly, infinity isn't an object, but more like an operation or relation. What suggests this latter possibility is the definition of a real number, as convergent series. This is an operational definition, that is imagined as completed, when in fact it can not be completed. So, then I think of it as and imaginary operation, or therefore a `pure' operation.

Do you see what I am trying to say here? Just like my concept of what was going on in plant hormone physiology was wrong, so too maybe the cosmology of the BB is wrong at a fundamental level, and so too in many other areas of thought.

There is also a kind of political agenda here. The more non-experts read this stuff, the more discussion is loose, open, unafraid of making mistakes, and the more theory making goes on. It was Feyerabend who brought this up. We need more hypothesis, not fewer. The enemy here is doctrine, dogma, accepted opinion, etc. Open societies, need open minds that tolerate many more than one, two, three belief systems all at the same time. This leads to the idea of a plurality of truths and falsehoods... which leads to a kind of relativity of everything. That is the provisional nature of everything.

Basically I don't think we are going to get answers, so I am living in a kind of relativistic fog. It's kind of fun. It's more like a kind of play, play with all sorts of interesting possibilities.

CG



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