Coda VII (Part II)

Part VIII: Map-Drive (as Featured in The Map Is Indestructible by O.G. Rose)

Photo by Evie S.

IV

Julia Kristeva speaks of discourse, and we might view discourses themselves as isomorphic with conspiracies: they seek a consistency that leaves no opening. When we speak, we seek to finish the speaking; when we seek, we look to finish the seeking. We want “a crystalline structure” (how can we not?), we might say, which means we want everything to “add up” and “come together” in a manner that suggests we were not mad to begin the effort in the first place (for there is something irrational about doing that which we don’t finish). We only want to begin what doesn’t prove a waste, and an “internally consistent system” is that which precisely doesn’t make us feel like we wasted our time, while at the same time giving us the feeling that we are never finished with our undertaking (and hence we have “meaning” and even “belonging” for a lifetime). ‘The subjects of discourse are non-persons,’ Kristeva writes, which is say we enter a discourse and become “non-persons,” in a sense that what is discussed, if that which “all adds up,” is not experienced as something which particularly requires us to so “add up.”³⁰ What “adds up” is experienced as “discovered” not “created,” and it is critically that all “internally consistent systems” have this very feeling (as discussed in Belonging Again) if they are to work on us in a manner that makes us feel “added up” and “together.”

Every discourse like every “ideological system” runs into the problem of feeling beyond the people while at the same time feeling like something people participate in: no “map” will last which fails in this endeavor (and perhaps can’t even be a “map,” just mere “notion”). The “I” must be involved and important but not the isolated source, and where there is “completeness,” it is always plausible that the ideology is human-created; after all, all of its components can be known and understood by finite people, so it’s possible that it was created by people (which creates space for enough doubt to undermine the whole ideological structure). This is why Gödel has changed things: we now have a way to make “incompleteness” part of every “completeness,” which means we are dealing with “(in)completeness” which always entails a “space” that is not fully knowable by humans, and thus that which is plausibly beyond any “I” to create. The “(in)completeness” helps people overcome “the authority problem” (and “Authority Circle,” discussed in Belonging Again (Part I)), an “ontological method” which can be theoretically employed in any discourse (making them say “Dialogos” or “Circling,” alluding to John Vervaeke and Guy Sengstock), or any worldview (making them “maps”). Gödel has given us much, but problematically though “maps” can help us deal with “authority problems” and issues of “exhausting possibility” (and humans perish without possibility, as William Desmond teaches on), Gödel has not given us what we need to make the “maps” relate — they are currently isolated, locked-within and apart, and drifting-in-themselves. Beauty is needed, to cut to the chase, as Jockin teaches on, but that will be discussed in The Fate of Beauty.

To be clear, “completeness” is not necessarily bad, as if “fragmentation” were good: there is a nobility in efforts for completeness in discourse, thinking, and the like. The issue is that an effort for completeness is ultimately an effort for self-effacement if it doesn’t incorporate “essential lack” somewhere, which is from another angle “an essential opening” (“(in)complete”), but this begs the question of how we might genuinely seek “the (in)complete” and not let this effort become a subtle and self-deceptive effort for “completeness” by another name. If this mistake is made even in the conspiracy, what can be done? We are “always already” naturally dispositioned for some “crystallization” of “internal consistency,” and no matter how genuinely we seek to avoid this problem, our minds will likely calculate this effort and trick us into contributing to the mistake we try to avoid as we supposedly avoid it.³¹ ³² What hope is there? Well, this is why we require “faithful presence” and “the surprise of the Other”; otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before we slip (back) into a self-effacing A/A (that we might call “A/B”). We need “The Face” of Levinas, Encounterology as “Stewarded in Faithful Presence,” prepared for instead of planned (Illich), habituated for via “critical thinking” when alienatingly empathetic — a way of living that the map can block and hide.

All of this will be a key focus of (Re)constructing “A Is A,” which merges with Belonging Again. For now, let us continue to approach finishing Volume II of The True Isn’t the Rational, acknowledging the problem that “blurs” require Anselm-(kneels/leaps).

V

To review and draw thoughts from Incompleteness by Rebecca Goldstein, though they didn’t like each other, both Ludwig Wittgenstein and Kurt Gödel contributed to ending the quest for pure objectivity and for re-placing humanity back in the center of the universe (they’re thinking was much more similar than either perhaps realized or wanted to admit). Wittgenstein showed that ‘[w]e cannot speak the unspeakable truths, but they exist,’ while Gödel proved that ‘[o]ur mathematical knowledge exceeds our systems.’³³ ³⁴ What constitutes the whole of reality must necessarily exceed the limits of any system, worldview, science, ideology, etc. that humans come up with, and this being the case, though some systems can better correspond, no system can be “practically identical with correspondence” (or at least if one was, we couldn’t know it). Furthermore, since systems cannot be complete, systems cannot provide an objectivity to people about which system(s) people should choose to live according to, nor can systems operate independent of human involvement. Lastly, systems cannot self-justify themselves and are notably vulnerable to corruption; as Goldstein writes:

‘Just as no proof of the consistency of a formal system can be accomplished within the system itself, so, too, no validation of our rationality — of our very sanity — can be accomplished using our rationality itself […] If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness?’³⁵

Thus, when it comes to knowing “correspondence,” the human element cannot be removed: we are stuck in the center of the world figuring out what makes it turn, even if we rather have the world show us. Yet, imperative to grasp, the essential incompleteness of ideologies becomes part of their completeness: the fact Christians cannot observe God is part of what axiomatically defines God; the fact that the scientific method can only be applied in certain contexts becomes acceptable in Scientism; the fact Libertarianism cannot point to an example of a nation that’s markets were entirely free is proof that national governments don’t get out of the way, as opposed to evidence that Libertarianism rests its thinking on an ideal. All ideologies must necessary be “incomplete” and incorporate idealistic reference points, axioms, and other premises that the ideological systems themselves cannot justify, but upon these truths, rationality erects “internally consistent systems.”

It is important to note that what Gödel proved didn’t deconstruct the possibility of “internally consistent systems,” only “totally consistent systems” which deny “essential incompleteness”: Gödel showed that a system must be erected on axioms that cannot themselves be justified by the system erected on them. This doesn’t mean the axioms are wrong, only that we cannot say for sure if they are right or wrong, for that would require stepping outside the system, which even if possible, would require leaving behind the rationality necessary for determining if the axioms are right or wrong. So “completeness” is not possible as a totality, but an “(in)complete system” is possible, and that possibility is far stronger in enabling greater and more refined “map-proliferation” versus “notion-proliferation.”

What Gödel proved was that systems are at best internally consistent systems and that it was impossible for any of them to be totally consistent — that a lack of total consistency was not evidence that the system was false. The longer an ideology has been around, the higher the likelihood it is indeed internally consistent, and in our Pluralism today, I think it is safe to say that we are surrounded by many if not countless internally consistent ideologies, as testified to by conspiracy-maps. And this leaves us having to deal with “the problem of internally consistent systems,” a problem Gödel has helped us see (Hegel’s “Absolute” itself is ultimately responsible).³⁶

But this is not all bad: the problem invites life, for it invites us to be “essentially involved.” Still, it should be noted, a world without imagination would lack works of art — paintings, compositions, films — which could not be rationally justified, which would be tragic, but it might also be a world without conspiracies and “psychotic entrapments” (both of which we might associate also with “the egregores” described by Patrick Ryan, but I’m not sure). A world where say there was “one totalizing map” would be a world with a lot less creativity, for only the “justified creativity” which that map made possible would manifest, but there would also be a lot less “magical thinking” and tribalism. A world where people only acted when “rationally justified” would be one in which people perhaps didn’t act when driven by love, attracted by beauty, etc., but it would also be a world where people were less manipulatable by gurus, in less need of intellectual self-defense, etc. And so, a question: would “the most rational of all possible worlds” be best? I don’t think so, but I think that means our world, for its “(non)rational possibilities,” is potentially better or worse. We are not “the most rational of all possible worlds,” but for that we might be worse off or better. We must decide, and many experts seem to encourage us to “choose determinism,” which is to choose a world of “The Truth” versus “The Absolute” (as I have discussed with Cadell). On materialism, Matthew Segall tells us that ‘[m]aterialism poses a danger to our mental and ecological health because it attempts to make itself true’ — so it goes with “The Truth” versus “The Absolute,” any given “map” versus “the territory.”³⁷

Anyway, as we discussed in Coda VI, facts become compelling as experiences (especially when we are “all in sync,” to allude to Robert Wuthnow’s book, asking about ‘[w]hat could account for [the] stability’ of American religion), but so too lies, falsehoods, half-truths, conspiracies, etc. can be experienced.³⁸ Anything that is coherent and consistent can be “like actuality,” and in its structure seem plausible (and can even be aesthetic and “attractive”; after all, as Tom Amarque points out in Phenomenology of Will, there is something fundamentally aesthetic about the unavoidable drive for coherence). Problematically, regardless if it’s true or false, a worldview, opinion, conspiracy, truth, etc. can all share a similar “coherent structure,” and also all of them have the potential to be experienced and so compel us. But here’s the kicker: actualities can be less likely to be compelling, precisely because they are more bound by actuality in how they can manifest (they have less “creative options,” we might say). Actualities simply can’t use, be, say, do, etc. anything the actualities want to be more compelling: there is a “range of resources,” we might say, which actualities can employ and stay true to themselves. Falsities are much more malleable though in their need to maintain consistency; falsities can incorporate much more imagination. This isn’t an unlimited imagination, no, for the imagination is bound to a need to maintain coherence, but there can be say fifty ways coherence can be maintained regarding x, while there is only one “actual coherence” for x (which is to say a coherence that is most “like” correspondence). Ah, but haven’t we said this whole time that “coherence isn’t correspondence”? How then can we tell the “actual coherence” from the forty-nine “imagined coherences”? Perhaps we can’t. And that’s “the problem of internally consistent systems,” suggesting the depths of our problem and why “Pandora’s Rationality” spreads. (Can we stay “faithfully present,” facing this possible proliferation, a Ulysses with wax?)

How much an actuality can become coherent is limited, but how much a falsity, opinion, or the like can become coherent is far more unlimited. To help make the point, let us consider how actualities we directly experience in our “common lives” more easily bind our imaginations than stories we learn about online (suggesting our work on Hume in O.G. Rose): when I experience a cup on a table in my kitchen, I can imagine a number of explanations for how it got there, but I believe the number of imaginable possibilities is less than when we learn about a cup being put on a table in India online.³⁹ In our house, we regularly see how cups move around, have a sense who was in the house and who wasn’t, and so on, while the table and cup in India are entirely unknown to me (and maybe the image is just a Deep Fake). Now, again, even if I rationally construct “the actual coherence” regarding how the cup in my house ended up on my table, I can never with certainty know that my coherence actually corresponds, but regardless the number of possible coherences I can imagine is still less, helping “bind Pandora’s Rationality.” Even if correspondence is denied to me, I can at least still operate and think according to a more limited range.

A falsehood does not have to maintain actuality while exploring its options and resources for increasing how compelling it is, but an actuality does. Actuality is at a disadvantage. A falsehood that nevertheless maintains consistency is much more flexible and fluid than actuality, for all it must do is maintain its coherence, while an actuality must maintain both its coherence and correspondence (the second of which can’t even be fully appreciated). This is a much harder task, and so actuality cannot easily shape itself to become more emotional, relevant, etc. while a false coherence can. Truth has far fewer tools in its toolbox to become compelling, while a falsity has far more, hence why “Pandora’s Rationality” can spread so quickly once it is unleashed. The weakness of a falsity or lie is realized in encountering someone with a good memory, who can keep up with all the lies to see if any of them contradict — hence a reason why memory might have been so central to classical thought. As praised by thinkers like Augustine and Plato, where memory is bad, “Pandora’s Rationality” will be harder to stop.

There is likely more of an inverse relationship between actuality and how compelling something is, precisely because it’s more likely that a premise not bound by correspondence would achieve emotional advantages because it can more easily access resources to this effect (because it doesn’t have to maintain “actuality” only “plausibility,” which a premise inherently does by maintaining coherence). This being the case, it would seem as if we in ourselves must learn how to see things as beautiful (for example), versus wait for things to be beautiful in themselves. We must be active cultivators of a capacity to experience beauty and attraction (aligned with actuality); otherwise, it is only probable that falsities will compel us more than not. (‘The imagination breaks through the taken-for-granted reality of ordinary life,’ yes, but the imagination-in-conspiracy is not the same as the imagination inspired to soar by a River-Hole, a Lack and Beauty.)⁴⁰ Otherwise, we seem fated to simply spin around in a map-maze of our making, “taken by” a Derridean ever-deference or “inscrutability of reference” of Willard Quine, which suggests no “radical translation” is possible (which is a translation in which nothing is lost), which is to say “correspondence” is there but not for us (Kafka). There is no hope of (quantitative) “defining” or “calculating” our way to “what is”; we must hope for a (qualitative) “No Knowledge Proof/Strike of Beauty.” But if this cannot be “calculated to,” what hope is there of this “glimpse?” Is there just some waiting in some Heideggerian “clearing”? Yes — a “faithful presence.” (Kneel, Anselm.)⁴¹

VI

Benjamin Fondane taught us that only the foolish can be free in nonrationality, but in the conspiracy we see a risk of using a label of foolishness to legitimize sinking into madness that feels like discovery and even fighting for justice. “Autonomous rationality” is a problem, but “autonomous nonrationality” could be a problem as well, and just because we are fools does not mean we are on the right path. But what does it mean to even speak of “the right path” in a world after Gödel? Is there only error? Maybe, but Hegel taught us not to fear error.

Those who fall into conspiracy can face fears and feel like a Thomas Moore, standing up for what no one else is willing to be seen defending — and there are “true conspiracies,” meaning those “brave individuals” could indeed be brave and right. Who can say who doesn’t investigate the conspiracy for themselves? But at that point they will have taken “The Pynchon Risk” and easily found themselves unable to escape, ever-sunk and pulled into the understanding of the world framed by “the internally consistent system” in-to which they venture, perhaps so motivated by a desire for intellectual and epistemic responsibility. Ethics easily lead them — how can we say they acted wrongly?

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Daly with Žižek tell us that ‘subjectivity […] can only come into being as a passage through madness; as an ongoing attempt to impose a symbolic integrity against the ever-present threat of disintegration and negativity.’⁴² The conspiracist is like everyone, seeking shelter from disintegration, but perhaps the conspiracist is more noble in choosing vulnerability to social rejection? Are those who aren’t conspiracists to be trusted if they say otherwise? (Who wants to be possibly a coward?) We are all under a map-drive, a drive for coherence against the Real — perhaps this entire book, The Map Is Indestructible, can be seen as a case that drive naturally ends up in map-drive (though must it?). ‘The human condition is marked by an eternal and impossible attempt to bring about some sort of resolution to this drive; a paradoxical drive to resolve drive as such. In this way, drive becomes attached to certain ‘objects of excess.’ ’⁴³ Conspiracies are excessive, as are “theories of everything,” vast religions, grand systems — the map is always thanks to and seeking to fully articulate the territory which must exceed it, and yet this is an excess the map cannot too directly acknowledge (or risk its authority). The map needs the territory, but it also needs to be careful not to relate to the territory too exactly (or become useless). The map needs error. The error is a gift. Absoluteness. (In)completeness. These and others can sanctify the error beyond rationality’s reach to deconstruct. And thus map-drive can ever-drive. For good? Not necessarily, or else it would not address us in courage.

‘But as Žižek has consistently stressed, the subject is neither a substantial entity nor a specific locus. Rather, the subject exists as an external dimension of resistance-excess towards all forms of subjectivation […] The subject is a basic constitutive void that drives subjectivation but which cannot ultimately be filled out by it […] It is simultaneously the lack of the leftover in all forms of subjectivation. This is why the Lacanian mark for the subject is $ (the ‘barred,’ empty subject). The subject cannot find its ‘name’ in the symbolic order or achieve full ontological identity.’⁴⁴

We resist being subjects as we resist oppression, and yet we self-efface without being subjects (as Philip Rieff understood): our best hope is a “subjective/alienation diversity.” ‘[T]he subject is both the movement away from subjectivation […] and the very drive towards subjectivation as a way of escaping such a condition,’ which is to say we resist being alienated into subjecthood, and yet we also seek subjecthood to escape the anxiety of freedom found in not being subjects.⁴⁵ We are “contradictions” (A/B), a paradoxical situation that naturally tries to understand itself according to an A/A that leads to “a loss of sanity” (Korzybski). This sounds like a hopeless mess, but, more hopefully, ‘it is through this very resistance-excess toward subjectivation […] that human beings are essentially open to the possibility of developing new forms of subjectivation. In this way, the subject is both the transcendental condition of possibility and impossibility for all forms of contingent subjectivation.’⁴⁶ But this “possibility” is lost if our map-drive, which plays a role in making ourselves possible, achieves totalization (and so self-effacement), versus instead create “the stage” upon which beauty and Otherness might “strike us” (thanks to and in “(in)completeness”), which we can associate with ‘the constructive excess of the Real qua the unmasterable negativity upon which every positivization finally depends.’⁴⁷ Beauty judges. Beauty pierces. Beauty saves. The fate of beauty is the fate of us. Beauty, though — is it just another fantasy? Another example of ‘imputing the status of the Real to a particular Other [in order to maintain] the dream of holistic fulfillment?’⁴⁸ Well, perhaps — there couldn’t be hope if there wasn’t risk. Courage is the meaning of life, as Alex Ebert once said, and ‘[t]he old dictum that we ‘are’ [just] animals leaves us hopeless…’⁴⁹

Anyway, the map-drive lends itself to “autonomous rationality,” which means the map-drive is likely to err against the admonishments of Benjamin Fondane and “The Modern Counter-Enlightenment” more generally. But even if we know of this error, without a life that is situated to “regularly encounter Otherness” (“A Life of Encounterology,” we might say), this knowledge will not prove enough: in fact, it will easily be weaved and “quilted” into the “internal consistency” of our worldview (knowledge of the truth can make the truth further away). So it goes when we speak of “love” and “love as openness to the Other”: without a lifestyle that is positioned and situated to be “surprised by Otherness,” this love will easily just prove a means of self-deception. We must be surprised. But how can we plan for surprise? We can’t, hence the challenge of “spreading Childhood” in Part 2, which ultimately will suggest the need for a new infrastructure, a new Social Coordination Mechanism. If we cannot do this, “maps” seem to be our final destination, a coping within “the problem of internally consistent systems.” We need maps to be free, for one because freedom and ‘navigability’ are strongly connected, as pointed out by Cass R. Sunstein, which is what a map provides, and second because otherwise the world wouldn’t make sense and we would be overwhelmed by “The Real.”⁵⁰ ‘Freedom of choice is important, even critical, but it is undermined or even destroyed if life cannot be navigated,’ either because we don’t have a map and/or because “The Real” has made life unbearable.⁵¹ We require a ‘choice architecture — [an] environment in which choices are made,’ and this can be associated with a “map.”⁵² But if we need maps to navigate the world freely, can we ever be free of maps (or some “choice architecture”)? Are maps traps? They are inevitable, but not necessarily totalitarian: they can be connected with Sunstein’s “nudge,” where there is an insistence that people ‘should be free to choose,’ but at the same time people are not left defenseless and “naked” before “The Real” and immense complexity (for whatever freedom was found in this would be overwhelmed by the anxiety of that freedom, from which no freedom would be available).⁵³ We might say that “freedom” for Sunstein is the “freedom to go,” and without a map all we can do is go to get lost, which doesn’t feel like freedom at all but randomness and unintelligibility (a “Cheap Deleuze,” perhaps). But then are we unable to be free from maps? And what if they are traps? A “line of flight” within a dome?

If we are stuck in our maps, it would seem that Pluralism is doomed to atomism and to fracture off into countless tribes that are not intelligible to one another. Maps seem necessary for some reason (say as “a stage for the beautiful”), but they also risk fracturing the world apart into tribes which could end up in WWIII. Is there no hope (‘[w]e can always plead deferred ostension’)?⁵⁴ Beauty with Paul Virilio points to a way, as will be elaborated on in Belonging Again, The Fate of Beauty, and (Re)constructing “A Is A,” where Virilio teaches us that ‘the ‘substance’ is equally invention of the ‘accident,’ and we consider “The Strike of Beauty” as a “surprising encounter” that is only possible thanks to substance (“surprising” like an accident).⁵⁵ With the ship is invented the shipwreck, so with the map is created the “break” between “the map” and “the territory”; otherwise, “the map” would not exist. But how do we “break” the map and we not be destroyed by “The Real” or overwhelmed by an unintelligible complexity? If we don’t “break” the map, we seem stuck in a self-enclosure (A/A) in which “The Other” cannot fully reach us (except as “filtered/interpreted” by us and our maps, a lower dimensionality); but if we do “break” our map, we seem doomed. Can we “break” our map without “breaking it apart”? Can we “lift it” off “the territory” to see a distinction without “tearing the map” or having it “flutter away”? Wittgenstein spoke of repairing spiderwebs like repairing traditions: do we speak here of handling webs with our fingers and not breaking them? Isn’t that impossible? ‘Nothing lost, nothing gained. If inventing the substance means indirectly inventing the accident, the more powerful and high-performance the invention, the more dramatic the accident,’ which is to say the more powerful the accident can and even must be which unveils “the break.”⁵⁶ Mysticism is powerful. Beauty is powerful. Flow is powerful. (‘Here, we might mention the emergence of two currents of thought that are in no way antagonistic but complementary: substantialism (or, if you prefer, materialism) and accidentalism (or, if you prefer, spiritualism.’)⁵⁷ What Virilio identified of “the accident” is arguably an inverse and/or privation of “the strike” that is found in beauty, a testament of “the form” we need, latent in every creation, which “points to” its right ordering and fullness in beauty, which requires “surprise” and “encounter” for which we are prepared (so that Love is not Lovecraft; ‘[l]et us not forget: too much light and you get blindness […]’).⁵⁸ ⁵⁹ Our map-drive does not have to be a fate into an enclosure, but it will be if we don’t negate/sublate it into “a faithful presence,” a “clearing” for beauty and Otherness.

VII

We can speak of “the map-drive of human action,” manifest in the conspiracy but not reducible to the conspiracy, which all human effort must be toward or else risk unintelligibility that exposes us to “The Real” at a rate we cannot handle. Freud theorized that sexuality constantly motivates us, and I would align this with “maps,” for there is something erotic and sexual about coherence (“oneness”). Through complex processes of conversation, interaction, theorizing, and more, we strive to defend our “way of seeing the world,” which is also often an act of “spreading it” toward a unity of all (sexual). Rationality serves this effort, which ironically heads toward self-effacement (a Freudian “death drive”), precisely in the hope for “a total unity,” for to delete distinction is to delete the distinction needed for sexual union, and without sexuality humans lose motivation and perish (“irony is the fabric of reality”: what holds us together are ironic efforts we need to exist but that we can never let reach completeness) (also, “total unity” is flat and without texture, which we can associate with “entropic equilibrium,” alluding to Alex Ebert’s thinking). In this way, to speak of rationality is to speak of sexuality, and to speak of truth is to speak of the notion of unification (“conception”) which the rationality is “toward” (perhaps “phallic”). Even a truth that claims “there is no final unification” is nevertheless that which its rationality is “toward” as that which ought to be that which everyone ascribes to (please note that when we love someone or something, we inherently feel we ought to be with the being in some way, even at a distance, for relationships are not reducible to special quantifications). Every rationality must be toward a final conception (“the concept” in Hegel could be libidinal, approached from being to essence to…), and yet this means every rationality is at risk of “a Nash Equilibrium” and totalization that causes self-effacement (“all thanks to love”). “Libidinal rationality” hence requires nonrationality to save itself, which we can associate with “the feminine” and “the truth” (which ends up “hysterical” without “rationality” to filter “The Real,” please note). Rationality reflects love, but love is in the image and likeness of “Love(craft)” (Schrödinger-esque Dante/Lovecraft).

The map-drive has brought us to Global Pluralism, which we can associate with a great libidinal unity, and now we are suffering the struggles and challenges of marriage. The honeymoon phrase (perhaps the 90s through 2008) is over, and we are finding divorce something that shouldn’t be off the table (as perhaps represented by Alexander Dugin, for good and for bad). And like a couple on the verge of divorce (though the decision is not yet made or final), there is silence, avoidance, drifting, laughter in the face but not in the belly, and dinner parties with neighbors: what is, is not said.⁶⁰ Is the pain too deep to heal? It can feel that way, but the deep pain of the nails in God’s hands become testaments of glory — there is always a chance for negation/sublation, even in our “Age of Hysteria.”⁶¹ Since “the true isn’t the rational,” we are not doomed to end up in “a suboptimal world”: there’s hope. But because “the true isn’t the rational,” we can also end up in conspiracy, fundamentalism, totalization, and madness: our hope is a risk (“The Absolute Choice”). Our problem contains its address, but only if we approach it well, and yet we cannot directly approach it, or else “the map would be the territory,” which is not the case (for I could be wrong). We must approach our problem in a way that “lets it be” a surprise (to allude to Thomas Winn on Heidegger), which is to say we must “let the Other be Other,” which must be “a surprising encounter” (and thus risk of Love(craft)). (Attend.) Is that terrifying? ‘[Y]es I said yes I will Yes.’⁶² ‘[Attention] is all’ (Weil, Illich).⁶³

Rationality seeks to be autonomous, and conspiracies totalize, meaning they are isomorphic. To think is to risk, but we must think; furthermore, if reality is a situation, it could be a Pynchon novel. We cannot avoid the problem of notions/maps because reality itself is situational and relational: to deny this is to risk madness and lose any hope for a science of sanity found in Korzybski. Everything is connected, and that means everything is at risk of ending up in Pynchon. Or Beauty? Yes, but that is not given and requires “preparation” (Illich) and risk. Otherwise, the reality/situation that “everything is connected” means that we are radically positioned and primed for conspiracy or making some “Big Other” out of a completeness in rationality (Benjamin Fondane), desire, etc. “The Big Other” of Lacan suggests “everything is held together,” that there is something which can quilt the world into sensibility and keep it under control (which can make “everything connected”), which is also the promise and suggestion of the conspiracy.

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If “everything is connected” though, why in the world would we connect to live as if “reality is essentially (in)complete” — don’t those positions cancel one another out? It would seem that way, but really the “contradiction” is Hegelian and a call on us to incorporate in higher dimensionality, which is A/B and the Meta-Geometry of Leibniz. In “everything being connected,” everything is that which we cannot fully comprehend (as an apophatic lack/excess), and hence we experience it as incomplete (and must Absolutely Choose what we believe the qualities are of that incompleteness). Reality is (in)complete, and we find ourselves with a map-drive for completeness, which is fitting because reality is situational, but a drive for “completeness” is not the same as a drive for “recognizing situation” (perhaps the “drive for completeness” is what the “drive to recognize situation” becomes when mis-ordered?). But in “recognizing situation” we can recognize something more apophatic, whereas in “seeking completeness” that recognition seems less likely, arranging us for self-effacement.⁶⁴

We have suggested that rationality which doesn’t acknowledge its nonrational foundation is prone to end up in conspiracy-like structures, as we have suggested that rationality which seeks to totalize itself ends up in “the most suboptimal of all possible worlds.” Where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us realizing that we face significant challenges because “the true isn’t the rational,” but at the same time there is hope precisely because “the true isn’t the rational” (it means a “faithful presence” and focus on “surprising encounters” really might work). The very formation of the “map” as “like a conspiracy” means they must risk “showing their hand” to form, and in possibly making their root and structure visible, there is the hope that we might see and understand the structure, which for Hegel is the first step in liberation and freedom. Indeed, if we cannot interpret something well, it is unlikely we will respond well to it either.

Alright, having glimpsed the conspiratorial structure of maps, and having also realized that “autonomous rationality” will only lead to “totalizing maps” — what now? What should be our concern and focus? Ultimately, avoiding self-effacement is only possible if we recognize something “beyond ourselves,” meaning there is “otherness” according to which a dialectic is meaningful and possible. And on this point, we can see the need for a rethinking of what constitutes “critical thinking”: if we do not think “Otherness,” we easily do not think.

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Notes

³⁰Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986: 51.

³¹Should we employ censorship? Jonathan Rauch in Kindly Inquisitors and Deirdre McCloskey (discussed in II.1) give us an argument against that angle, but it’s tempting given “the problem of internally consistent systems.” Instead, we need to learn to “work with the between spaces,” the negativities in “faithful presence,” or else Discourse will prevail over Rhetoric.

Unfortunately, those who claim to be against capital-C-Censorship might actually enjoy the “oppression,” meaning that Censorship is problematic in many ways. Like Deception, the moment we find ourselves “denied something,” we automatically can gain a “hope” we can enjoy, for to be restricted, oppressed, and/or the like automatically creates in a very concrete way a hope of escaping that limitation. In this way, force can’t help but create hope against it in its very success, which in one way is very optimistic, but in another way it could be very problematic if people come to enjoy that hope as an end in itself. It feels good to believe in a better world, more so actually than running, organizing, and working a different world (revolution can be more fun than rulership), and we can stay in “revolution” if we enjoy oppression and simply posture ourselves in light of that oppression well and self-deceptively.

(In Lacan everything is “never just,” which means there is always a -1 which makes the thing 99%, for there is always a trace of desire, want, and the like. It is this -1 which makes things alive and also makes ideology “practically invisible,” a map.)

³²As we have spoken of Deception with Hunter Coates, so we might also speak of the Pentecostal, which I think also deserves a Lacanian treatment (as so deserves Deleuze, which arguably Terrence Blake is already pioneering). Capital-P-Pentecostal is perhaps “autonomous nonrationality,” an institution and spirit that is not conceptually meditated and so falls onto one-sidedness (which concerned Hegel, notably in the opening of Phenomenology of Spirit). As in Deception there is a non-center that ever-organizes the individual in the Neurotic, so Pentecostal entails a non-center that ever-organizes the individual in the Psychotic. A negation/sublation of both is needed, but not a total dismissal: there is wisdom in the Deception and the Pentecostal, but both can end up putting faith in people (either in their rational, investigative capacity or their emotional display). (Is the “Gödel Point” the essence of Deception, the Pentecostal…?)

³³Goldstein, Rebecca. Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006: 191.

³⁴Gödel managed to prove that all mathematical systems are “incomplete” and yet that they still managed to work. For Gödel, rather than confirm radical relativity or notions that truth didn’t exist, this validated mathematical Platonism: it proved to him that mathematics was something discovered, not created, for if the systems in which math was “created” were incomplete, then math had to exist independent of those systems to “hold them up” from underneath, per se. Math had to be “shown” in mathematical systems, but not created; mathematical systems didn’t hold themselves together with math, but were held up from underneath by math, which means math had to exist independent of mathematical systems. For Gödel, that made math truest reality.

To put it another way, it could be said that Gödel believed that in proving “no truth could be practically identical with the Absolute,” he proved the Existence of the Absolute, for in his mind, he showed there had to be an Absolute “holding up” all truths, seeing as truths didn’t collapse in on themselves and managed to often accurately describe reality.

³⁵Goldstein, Rebecca. Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006: 204.

³⁶If Gödel would have found that total consistency was possible, then a way we could help address “the problem of internally consistent systems” is by finding the ideologies that were totally consistent, which would be far less than those merely internally consistent. We could give these ideologies epistemological privileging, but Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors, in mind, all we are rather capable of is privilege particular ideas that survive the scientific method, but not entire ideologies, which makes us incapable of escaping the problems laid out in “Belonging Again” by O.G. Rose.

³⁷Allusion to “Humanity’s Divine Nature: Why Value is Real, Eternal, and Evolving” by Matthew Segall, as can be found here:

Humanity's Divine Nature: Why Value is Real, Eternal, and Evolving

³⁸Wuthnow, Robert. All in Sync. Los Angels, CA: University of California Press, 2003: 7.

³⁹This being the case, it seems more likely we find something compelling outside our “common life” that is “merely plausible” versus something that is “actually true.” Not always, but more often. And compounding this problem, since in our everyday lives what we find compelling are notions which tend to be true, we can be habituated to think that when dealing with “abstract ideas” beyond our “common life,” that the ones we find compelling are those more likely to be true, when it is likely the exact opposite. In our “common lives,” how compelling something is correlates with a higher likelihood for truthfulness, while “outside our common lives,” how compelling something is likely correlates with a higher likelihood of falsehood. That doesn’t mean all “compelling abstractions” are false, but it does mean the odds are not in their favor.

Who can be saved then? Doesn’t this mean it’s extremely unlikely that the mistakes of history are avoided? Should we seek isolation and never deal with the world beyond our “common life”? Unfortunately, this all does mean history is hard to escape, and it does mean we should focus more on our “common life” than what exceeds it best we can (though our desire for say justice may resist this, because what if this contributes to us not fighting injustices?). Second, all this means we should judge premises not by how compelling we find them, but by how internally consistent they are, but what should we do between a “false consistent system” and a “true CS”? Both of them are internally consistent. Well, once we come to this point, we have only experience and “common life” to test CSs against. Sure, but questions are left hanging: What falls within the range of our “common life”? Is it a sliding range? What if we have no choice but to make decisions about CSs we cannot “test” against “common life”? What must we do? Beauty…?

⁴⁰Wuthnow, Robert. All in Sync. Los Angels, CA: University of California Press, 2003: 202.

⁴¹And wait for “the break-in.” Freud teaches us to pay attention to the “slips,” as literature teaches us to pay attention to the “ironies,” as Hegel teaches us to pay attention to the contradictions. All of these constitute kinds of “breaks” from the normal and every day (perhaps “pointing to” “Gödel Points”), and these “breaks” generally don’t last for instance, hence why we must “glimpse” them. As discussed in A Philosophy of Glimpses, this need to “glimpse” is an idea we have Freud to thank for, and it brings to mind also the wisdom of writers like Flannery O’Connor and Tolstoy, who stressed the need to stare and pay attention.

To allude to all the titles of The True Isn’t the Rational, if “the map is indestructible,” then we will never deeply and emotionally learn that “the map isn’t the territory” by destroying “the map”; instead, we will learn it by catching a glimpse of the raw moments when there is an opening between “the map and the territory” (“a Gödel Point”), by noticing the second when the map “flutters up/open” and we can see “the territory” underneath it. We cannot see “the territory” without “the map” by destroying “the map,” for even if we could destroy “the map,” we could not understand what we are seeing (seeing as “the map” is thought itself). Instead, we need to “see outside the map” for a moment only to have “the map” come back, and then we can remember “the break” that we witnessed and then try to put what we saw into words we can understand (this is why memory is so critical for Absolute Knowing). But that means we have to “grab hold” of the fleeing memory and refuse to let it go: we have to “glimpse” and then “grasp” as quickly as we can, which there will be incentive not to do, considering the existential weight of realizing “the map isn’t the territory.”

In a “conflict of mind”-situation, we realize that “epistemic responsibility” can drive us to do what is “epistemic impossible,” which means that the need for “nonrationality” appears in “the break.” But the moment we think about “nonrationality,” it is “consumed’ by rationality as “being rational,” thus hiding the need for “nonrationality” (to avoid Nash Equilibriums, to take seriously Benjamin Fondane, and so on); likewise, “truth” is always incorporated meaningfully into our lives by rationality, and so that makes it seem as if there is no break between “the truth and the rational,” thus making it seem as if they are the same thing. The only way to know better is to “glimpse” the “break” which is quickly gone (similar to the “break” in thinking and perceiving).

Our natural impression and experience of the world is according to “A = A” (A/A), as it is natural for our mind and being to be “toward” A/A. We know “nothing is merely as it seems” and that “our ideas are just ideas,” but we practically act as if things are what we think they are (the difference between what is “technically the case” and what is “practically the case” is paramount). It is only if we stop and take seriously that there is a difference between thinking and perceiving, that contradictions are not cancelled out of existence, that we are capable of thinking contradiction even though it lacks any material grounding in the world, that we cannot locate a “stable self” — all topics of O.G. Rose — that we can begin to “glimpse” that A/B is the case, not A/A. Nothing in reality will “force us” to ascent to A/B: we simply have to “know better,” an act of “pure abstraction,” perhaps. But why should we so know better? Well, because we remember what we “glimpsed.” We don’t let ourselves convince ourselves that what we saw was an illusion, a joke, or a mistake. We don’t ignore “the slips” as being insignificant; like Freud, we take the “slips” and “breaks” with the utmost seriousness. Yes, we have to be self-skeptical regarding any conclusions we might draw about them, but at least we know for what to look.

⁴²Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 3.

⁴³Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 3.

⁴⁴Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 4.

⁴⁵Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 4.

⁴⁶Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 5.

⁴⁷Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 10.

⁴⁸Daly, Glyn and Slavoj Žižek. Conversations with Žižek. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 11.

⁴⁹Korzybski, Alfred. Science and Sanity. Fifth Edition (Second Printing). Brooklyn, NY: Institute of General Semantics, 2000: 7.

⁵⁰Sunstein, Cass R. On Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019: 1.

⁵¹Sunstein, Cass R. On Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019: 2.

⁵²Sunstein, Cass R. On Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019: 11.

⁵³Sunstein, Cass R. On Freedom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019: 19.

⁵⁴Quine, W.V. Ontological Relativity & Other Essays. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1969: 44.

⁵⁵Virilio, Paul. The Original Accident. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007: 5.

⁵⁶Virilio, Paul. The Original Accident. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007: 31.

⁵⁷Virilio, Paul. The Original Accident. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007: 39.

⁵⁸‘Kurt Gödel invented a bizarre hypothetical universe […]’¹

¹Allusion to Sir Martin Rees, as found in The Original Accident by Paul Virilio. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007: 72.

⁵⁹Virilio, Paul. The Original Accident. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007: 100.

⁶⁰Please see The Map Is Indestructible for this note “On Truth”

⁶¹Please see The Map Is Indestructible for this note on “The Age of Hysteria.”

⁶²Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York, NY: First Vintage Books Edition, 1986: 644.

⁶³Allusion to King Lear by William Shakespeare.

⁶⁴Looking beyond this book to Belonging Again (Part II), Capital is an internal consistency, a manifestation of rationality, which leads to AI (Land waits). The map-drive of humans plays into Capital, which is ultimately seeking a goal of dream-equality (II.2). Thought seeks to be a dream (a Freudian “(un)veiling” that never risks “unveiling” too much, a control of determination without risk of hysteria — a cake that we can eat and not lose). Godlike. To be able to melt all determinations so that determinations are only its expressions (a refusal of Hegel’s “reconciliation” without having to refuse and know it). Rationality dreams of not being dialectical. It dreams of being alone, unquestionable. And it will be at our expense if we let it, faced with “The End of (True) History.” But now we allude too strongly of Belonging Again — we will abate. (“The Human” of Illich can be the beyond of Capital — Hyperhumanism versus Transhumanism — but that is a hard road. But it is the only road for us who would be human, A/B.)

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