Join the new world

While PQ continues his vacation from eRepublik, The Roar of the Lion is happy to present -- on the occasion of Labor Day -- a second set of observations delivered to us from yet another one of Phoenix Quinn's long-time friends. Today's semblance of a learned discourse on "things e-Rep-related" is provided to us by Dolorosa Materpater-Miller, a wise old crone who was with PQ in the mountains whilst most of you were still in diapers.





Love's Labors Lost... and Found

It is not uncommon for players to ask "Why is there Something rather than Nothing?".

Before I touch on that topic more deeply, I would observe that many of us revel in nothing. There is quite a good market for nothingness e-memes. It's fun to ponder nothing. It's even more fun to do nothing. That's because doing nothing opens up a free space. It accentuates the jouissance (meaning, roughly, "sexy pleasure") that lurks just around the corner of every obligation.

Our Mr. Chutley excels at celebrating the nothingness of everyday e-existence. See, for example, his chuticle ANNOUNCING MY CANDIDACY FOR PoDAN, wherein everybody's favorite cave man launches a campaign for being President of Doing Absolutely Nothing. Delightful!





Concerning Nothing, it is my view that there is only Nothing. (And in this opinion, I am unanimous.) All processes take place from Nothing through Nothing to Nothing. But this Nothing is not the Void. It is not the "unbroken ground of all being" of the vajrayana buddhist school. Rather, it is a Nothingness of the pure gap. It is a dislocation that e-ontologically precedes any dislocated e-content. (Ontology refers to nature of existence; e-ontology refers to the nature of e-existence.)

To put it simply: we can observe that within any "meaning", there is always an antagonism, a tension, a contradiction.

Common sense, as well as many with common opinions, tend to want to problematize this point of view. As a result, many of my friends quibble with me about this.

PQ, for example, has argued that I am confusing two meanings of immediacy: (1) immediacy as a starting-point and (2) immediacy as the result of a self-relating negating. He has said that my nothingness from nothingness is a circular argument that fails to demonstrate how a process itself retroactively posits its own presuppositions. When we going around and around about this, he proposed that there is an immediate absolute starting-point provided by the subject's self-acquaintance, which precedes any reflexive movement of self-consciousness.

But he is wrong. And let me explain why.





Lucretius referred to the unpredictable swerve of atoms as the clinamen. The term has stuck with us to refer to any kind of unforseeable action. For example, the very first words of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, a book which may be utterly incomprehensible on a rational level but is terribly fun to read out loud with an Irish accent, are a clever ode to Lucretius: "riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth, Castle and Environs." (Read "Eve and Adams" as "even atoms", then "swerve" takes on its special Lucretiusian resonance.)

Now, thanks to CERN, we have empirical evidence that not only was Lucretius right about the unpredictable swerve, but in fact atoms are nothing but their clinamen. There is no substantial "something" prior to the the clinamen which gets caught up in it. The "something" which deviates is created, it emerges, through the process of the clinamen itself.

A photon is said to have no rest mass. We can say it has no mass per se; its entire mass is the result of its acceleration. The paradox here is the paradox of a thing which is always (and nothing but) an excess with regard to itself. In its "normal" state, it is nothing. And it has no "normal" state; it is never at rest. It is never "nothing"; it is always "something" that emerges from nothing.

The same is true for our enjoyment of the Game. There is no "basic enjoyment" to which one adds some surplus-enjoyment. The focus of our regard, the "thing" that we enjoy is always only a surplus, in excess of the object-in-itself (the photon, the atom, the Game), which is not being negated or mediated by (as PQ would have it) some self-relating, temporally-constrained existentially-unique "starter". Rather it emerges as the retroactive result of its mediation.

Interestingly, this point is reinforced within a core meme of the game itself, eRepublik's own "riverrun": the presence of Plato as the universal mover and observer.





In his Parmenides, Plato unexpectedly evokes the hypothesis that there is only Nothing. It is a meditation on the corrosive all-pervasive force of nothingness. The dialogue proceeds by means of forcing Socrates to consider whether there is an Idea of the lowest material things: dust, hair, excrement, dirt. Not only does this raise an embarassing problem for Platonic Forms, but also a much more precise paradox regarding the nature of divisions of genus into species.

For example, Plato went on to argue that it is a categorical error to divide all human beings (for which we can read, all players) into Greeks and barbarians. "Barbarian" is not a proper form because it does not designate a positively defined group (species), but merely all persons (players) who are not Greeks. The seeming positivity of the term "barbarian" masks the fact that it serves as the container for all those who do not fit the form "Greek".

In my point of view, Plato touched on an important paradox, but then failed to see the full dialectical process he had discovered. Every genus, in order to be fully divided into species, has to include a negative pseudo-species, a "part of no-part" of the genus, which is all those who belong to the genus but are not covered by any of its species.

This is the gap, an "excess" group whose consistency is purely "negative". This is the nature of things and it is what sets a dialectical process in motion.





The Idea is the surface of an Event that shines through a unique physical constellation. This is why we can (and should) say that in the "sensible appearing of the Idea" in a work of art, we confront precisely the same paradoxical problem of organic categorization as when categorizing biological genus and species.

In other words: what object-content can be made into a genuine topic of art?

This is the problem of "the ineffable x", the secret treasure that is not only hidden, but also eludes prediction. It is the necessary counterpart of the Platonian missing half. In Parmenides, Plato posed the question of whether both the agalma -- the beatified, ineffable x -- and the junk, the crap, the dust, the whatever should ultimately be made to converge in a unity of opposites.

Furthermore, as we all know, Plato is widely criticized for many reasons, such as:
1. Plato is a disease.
2. The Platonic theory of Forms and of the independent existence of Ideas is crap.
3. Plato is a bourgeois apologist for zombified pixel-addiction slavery.
4. Plato promotes e-essence over r-existence.
5. Plato promotes technological nihilism.
and finally,
6. Plato recapitulates in detail the failed project of Clauswitzian e-totalitarianism.

Nevertheless, I would like to recommend the formation of "A Society of the Materialist Friends of Plato".




Here's why...

In order to break out of the vicious cirlce of the struggle between a postmodern "demoractic materialism" (which is to say, historicist relativism, typically expressed as a combination of spiritualist inner renewal and an accomodation to "the lesser of two evils") with "premodern" fundamentalisms (e.g., the American Taliban and so forth), we need to rediscover and yes, to repeat -- in a materialist vein -- Plato's assertion of "eternal Ideas".

The prima facie, properly meta-physical, gesture of Platonic philosophy is that truth cannot but appear as a proto-idealistic assertion that material e-reality is not all that there is in the GAme, but that there is another level of incorporeal truths.

My paradoxical philosophical gesture then is to defend, as a materialist, the autonomy of the "immaterial" order of Truth.

The question before us focuses most sharply on this use case: How can a human animal (a player) forsake its animality and puts its life in the service of a transcendent Truth? In other words, how is a free act possible? Or to put it in even more words, how can one break out of the network of the causal connections of e-positivist reality and conceive an act that begins by and in itself?

Within the materialist philosophical frame, this question re-states the elementary gesture of idealist anti-reductionism: that human Reason cannot be reduced to the result of evolutionary adaptation; that art is not just a heightened procedure for producing sensual pleasures but a medium of Truth; and so on.




How is this gesture even possible?

The key is to recognize that the predominant antagonism of today's ideological situation is not the struggle between idealism and materialism. That day is long gone.

The struggle today is between two forms of materialism: the democratic and the dialectical. Democratic materialism stands for the reduction of all there is to the historical reality of bodies and language (Darwinism, brain science, discursive historicism, etc.), while materialist dialectics adds the "Platonic" ("idealist") dimension of "eternal" Truths.

It is a matter of discerning the emancipatory potential of Plato's thought, particulary when set against the background of the sophist revolution he struggled against.

Sophistry is the appearance-making art: imitating true wisdom. Sophists produce appearances that deceive. They engage in empty ratiocinations and search for rhetorical effects; they obviously talk about something that does not exist. (Example: "Barack Obama is a fascistic-socialist tyrant", when he is obviously just another somewhat-likable, slightly-left-of-center, American-style technocrat. Another example: "Mitt Romney is an elitist devil who doesn't care about the common man.", when obviously he is just another Harvard-educated opportunistic politician, much like Barack Obama.)

Those acquainted with the dialectics of history -- and of e-history -- should find no surprises here.




What distinguishes humans from animals is their ability to pretend, as opposed to simply getting caught up in an illusion. Pretending is distinct from direct attempts at creating an illusion.

Scarecrows can be scary because they present us with the efficiency of a simulacrum, breaking down the line between illusion and reality. What makes them horrifying is the minimal difference which makes them in-human. There is "nobody at home" behind the mask, like a zombie.

The scarecrow is not a fiction; it is a semblance. The illusion works despite our awareness of it as an illusion.

Likewise, pretending may take on the form of a "polite lie", something that is merely a cynical instrumental use of the norms of the symbolic order ("Nice to see you!"), or it can be playing the other for a sucker. And both are contradictory. I can "lie sincerely" (I want it to be nice to see you) and in duping others, typically I become my own sucker.





So...

How do we distinguish pretending -- in the sense of "the truth in fiction" -- from pretending to pretend? The former is an imaginary lure: it draws us towards the truth. The latter is symbolic fiction proper: lying in the guise of truth.

The solution is a Platonic one: human language proper only functions when fiction counts for more than reality, when there is more truth in a mask than in the idiotic reality beneath the mask, when there is more truth in a symbolic title (judge, jazz legend, ...) than in the empirical bearer of this title.

The Platonic supra-sensible Idea is an imitation of an imitation, it is appearance as appearance -- something that appears on the surface of a substantial reality.





Semblance is a mask of nothing.

The site of truth is not the way "things really are in themselves" beyond the distortion of perspective, but the very gap or passage which separates one perspective from another, which is to say, in the social antagonisms which make the two perspectives radically incommensurable. This is why it is impossible to ever attain the "neutral" non-perspectival view of an object. There is a truth; and not everything is relative -- but the truth is the truth of the perspectival distortion as such, not a truth distorted by the partial view from a one-sided perspective.

The true ontology is a playful dialectic exercise in following all possible hypotheses ad absurdum. It is not hidden behind logical exercises and neither is it the negative-theological message of an ineffable One that is beyond the grasp of logic; it is simply that the absolutely real has a full share in movement, life and wisdom. It lives and thinks; it does not reside in solemn holiness, unpossessed of mind, entirely at rest.










I hope that this partial and incomplete review was of some use to a few of PQ's regular readers.

I realize that it may have been a bit obtuse in places, but I apologize neither for the big words (is there not a Google?) nor for the length of the essay, which is quite brief by philosophical standards.



I can assure you that PQ is enjoying his vacation and he wishes you all the best of health.


With my deepest respect,
Dolorosa Materpater-Miller