Noetic space

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Hobbes on man’s reason and his ends

January 15, 2011 in Hobbes, Individual, Noetic space | No comments

Samuel van Hoogstraten - Self-Portrait

Hobbes reacted against Descartes’ innatism and the pre-existence of the ideas of God and soul, all was experience and experience was about matter and movement. The mind could not have a different composition, it was rather integrated within the metaphoric system offered by the nova scientia. It became a coherent part of the new system, becoming incorporated in the plane of construction and thus allowing an easy roaming on the surface of the plain of consistence.

The cacophony of sensations adumbrated the turn from the Peripathetic influence in the vision of man’s end. For Aristotle, man as a rational creature had a certain télos or direction. The christianization of the Stagirite transferred the aim of man to God, to salvation. In Hobbes’s terms, there is no end in man’s action, life is a struggle without completion or finality: “Negotium, bonum: etenim vitae motus est. Itaque nisi sit quod agas, ambulatio pro negotio est.”(1) This absence of a terminus is rooted in desire.(2) At last, life is only movement, and it could not be accomplished in a straight line, it was done through a circular movement intended at the increase of activity and power in which desire was ineluctable.

Man had to follow his appetite to achieve his personal ends, for finality like desire was private and the possible frame of interpretation of actions, “Respice finem; that is to say, in all your actions, look often upon what you would have, as the thing that directs all your thoughts in the way to attain it.”(3) The formal character of reason had to provide with the means of achieving an always particular end, founding individuality morally. Individuality is not only a feature of the given ontology and epistemology but also extended to the realm of human activity.

(1) De Homine XI, 11. The semantic shifts and equation of negotio and ambulatio, absence of otium and movement.
(2) “Quant au bien principal, c’est le progrès le plus libre vers des fins toujours plus lonitaines. La jouissance même de l’objet désiré, au moment où nous joissons, est inclination; c’esta sans doute le mouvement de l’âme qui jouit à travers les éléments de l’objet de jouissance.” De Homine XI, 15.
(3) Leviathan I, 3, 4 in fine.

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Innovation as a a group activity

January 8, 2011 in Noetic space | No comments

Innovation has always been a group activity. The myth of the lone genius having a eureka moment that changes the world is indeed a myth. Most innovation is the result of long hours, building on the input of others. Ideas spawn from earlier ideas, bouncing from person to person and being reshaped as they go. If you’re comfortable with the language of memes, you could say a healthy meme needs an ecosystem not of a single brain but of a network of brains. That’s how ideas bump into other ideas, replicate, mutate, and evolve. Several authors have recently taken on this subject. Henry Chesbrough warns companies to adopt “open innovation,” Eric von Hippel speaks of democratizing innovation, showing how, for example, the kite-surfer community outinnovated the manufacturers that were serving it, and Michael Farrell describes “collaborative circles,” demonstrating that throughout history the best creativity has happened when groups of artists, reformers, writers, or scientists connected regularly with one another. So Crowd Accelerated Innovation isn’t new. In one sense, it’s the only kind of innovation there’s ever been. What is new is that the Internet—and specifically online video—has cranked it up to a spectacular degree.

TED Curator Chris Anderson on Crowd Accelerated Innovation | Magazine

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Hobbes on creation

December 24, 2010 in Hobbes, Noetic space, Religion | No comments

Luca Giordano- Creation of Man

Luca Giordano- Creation of Man

In De Homine an extensive account of the universe’s creation is given, and despite the fact of explaining it in terms of interaction of bodies and movement, a naturalistic explanation is finally equated to the creationist model.(1) This portrait seems to relay on the new aspects highlighted by natural philosophy, still Hobbes did not depart completely from the previous strata, there are still traits of the preexisting arrangement of elements, of their relations of order and meaning. Like in geological stratification, the process is not homogeneous or strictly differentiated but involves gradual sedimentation and erosion. Hobbes did not clearly assent with the ultimate logical consequences of his depiction: theism or atheism. They were, nevertheless, read between the lines by his adversaries. The definitive move shall be accomplished in the eighteenth century after Newton converted the universe into a self-regulating system and nature into a series of laws. Hobbes still hinged on the Thomist consideration of God as the artificer and first cause of the universe,(2) the efficient causes still required an external cause, Aquinas’ seconda via, ‘ex rationis causae efficientis’, remained expedite.

Nonetheless this sort of naturalism had a deflating effect on the image of God. Descartes’ response to Hobbes’s last objection on his Meditations pointed to the natural direction of Hobbes’s gnoseological inferences, for “atheists can infer that they are awake from their memories of previous events in their lives; but they cannot know scientifically that this is a sufficient indication for them to be certain that they are not mistaken, unless they know that they were created by an undeceiving God.”(3) The undeceiving God served Descartes for sustaining innate ideas and as a certification of reality. Hobbes’s analysis of God could not even warrant his own idea, paving the way to scepticism, natural religion, and atheism as would follow within English empiricism.4

(1) De Homine I, 1.
(2) Cf. Objectiones, objectio V, where he redresses Aquinas’ second way against Descartes’ proof following the immediate apprehension of God’s idea.
(3) Objectiones, objectio ultima.
(4) “Hobbes a bien été le premier philosophe des temps modernes à placer la religion naturelle au dessus des doctrines et des sects religieuses.” P.-M. Maurin, “Introduction”, De Homine, Paris, 1974, p. 169.

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Hobbes on God’s attributes

December 22, 2010 in Hobbes, Noetic space, Religion | No comments

Pembrandt- Apostle kneeling

Pembrandt- Apostle kneeling

Still, the classical vision of God as ultimate cause of the created world was maintained,(1) yet the idea of cause had to be observed within his notion of a science based on cause and effect. God lost His anthropological vest. He did not have a face, for about things invisible we can have no image or representation. We also could not represent Him, for all representations are necessarily finite, what we can certainly attribute to him is his condition of existence, his Being.(2) The attributes of God, individual, absolute and sovereign are dispersed, transferred, to other areas of the noetic space meanwhile his concept entered in new relations with other elements and became relativized in relation to other central metaphors.

This Deus absconditus could not be thought or represented by man, because He escaped all limits of experience. Above our reason, He still was able to inspire the most powerful human passions, fear and love. Love due to His goodness, to His excelling gifts; fear because of His omnipotence, His almighty power, symbol of divinity. He was acknowledged as Father, King and Lord.

The recognition of God’s existence was thus the counterpart to His divine inscrutability despite man’s endowment with natural reason. This ought to be an apt tool to understand God’s will, expressed through His word, by means of revelation. There was an assumption of rationality in God’s order or plan, beyond our capacity, yet partially understandable by it.(3) The book of nature, describing the physical realm, used the signs of mathematics; the Scripture, -canon of righteousness-, used the language of law. Reason was also the means to save the multiple frauds that circulated in his time, like in the prophets’ days, all quackery and prophecies, embedded in mystery and delusion, that called the attention of the gentry with a powerful grip on human emotions and fantasy. “If one prophet deceive another, what certainty is there of knowing the will of God, by other way than that of reason?”(4) The doubt casted on man’s judgment concerning divine matters displaced the centrality of the theological metaphors.

(1) T. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, 44.
(2) “For Reason dictates one name alone, which doth signify the nature of God (i.e.) Existent, or simply, that he is; and one in order to, and in relation to us, namely God, under which is contained both King, and Lord, and Father.” De Cive, XV, 14.
(3) “For though there be many things in God’s word above reason; that is to say, which cannot by natural reason be either demonstrated, or confuted; yet there is nothing contrary to it…” Leviathan, III, 32, 2.
(4) Leviathan, III, 32, 7.

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Hobbes rhetoric and nova scientia

November 9, 2010 in Methodology, Noetic space | No comments

“Je veux donc faire entendre ce que c’est que démonstration par le exemple de celles de géométrie, qui est presque la seule des sciences humaines qui en produise d’infaillibles, parce qu’elle seule observe la véritable méthode, au lieu que toutes les autres sont par une nécessité naturelle dans quelque sorte de confusion que les seuls géomètres savent extrêmement reconnaître. ”

B. Pascal, De l’esprit géométrique et de l’art de persuader (1657-58)

Pascal addressed in his tract two diverse currents that could also be identified in the work of Hobbes. Two streams that acted on a plain of consistence marked by the emergence and the centrality of a new approach to nature and a persisting substratum on which it necessary dwelt. On the one hand, the geometric spirit, the more geometrico, supported the new scientific inquiries; on the other, the art of persuasion, the ars rhetorica, stemmed from Renaissance Humanism and was taught as part of the academic curriculum in arts.

Both approaches had their antecedents in Antiquity, in Euclides and Aristotle. They remained mostly unaltered, what suffered an important mutation in the noetic space was their insistence in setting a proper modality of achieving new and indubitable knowledge, -their exigency of a method that could restore a stable link between man and world-, compensating the fatal consequences of the annihilatio mundi. The importance assigned to method, as the proper way to achieve an explanation and understanding,(1) was a common feature of the plane of construction developed also through Descartes, Leibniz, or Spinoza. According to the mechanistic conception, complex systems had to be reduced to smaller subsystems until arriving to the more simple elements –resolution- and then being rearranged to their original disposition –composition-, attaining complexity by means of reduction. Hobbes extended the two moments of this modus operandi, analytic and synthetic, to achieve the foundation of moral science.

Reason became an instrument rather than an essential constituent of man or a hypostasiation like the Cartesian res cogitans, its role was reduced to being purely methodological. Hobbes criticized the abundance of different opinions among his fellow men. He saw in the various pullulating convictions the seeds of the uncertainty and absence of power of his time. If experience was individual, how could it be assessed the righteousness of ideas? How could opinion be discerned from knowledge?

Rhetorica

Rhetorica from Margarita Philosophia, Basel 1508

(1) De Corpore, IV, 1.

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Post-modernism v Anti-modernism

September 13, 2010 in Epistemology, Modernity, Noetic space | No comments

Still the post-modern lack of a political agenda has been deeply criticized from the left side of the political arena.(1) Eagleton has insisted in the relation between an epistemological breach and the contemporary political crisis. Post-modern contradictions include both a radical and conservative approach; again post-modernism is regarded as a transitional period. In the same vein as Jameson, Harvey has canvassed the close link between a cultural form and an economic system, namely capitalism, under a general contraction of the time-space axis, implosing into superimposed spaces, producing text intersections.(2) Postmodernity coalesces with the shift from a productive model based on Fordism to a system of flexible accumulation.

A critical analysis of the social theory of the concepts of individual and sovereignty, in the sense of their recapitulation, and their intrinsic modern character, can help us assessing the extent of the postmodern question, of new planes of construction being implemented, founded on the erosion of the existing strata and configuring a new noetic space, a new conceptual scheme. In which sense have those two concepts been tied together and how do the alteration in their interplay conveys a novel configuration or a simple phase of development, a novel plane of construction or a simple process of sedimentation? Therefore we have to analyze the transitions of these concepts. The decomposition into two modern elements can reconstruct the range of modulations that still were referred as individual and sovereign and, most importantly, how these notions could be assembled and rendered coherent.

(1) F. Jameson , Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1984. T. Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Cambridge, 1997.
(2) D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the origins of cultural change, Oxford, 1995.

Network, post-modernity, post-industrial, globalization, are categories that might be transforming the tissue, the cording, of thought, instituting a new plane of construction. Have they dislocated the relation among elements so that both classical sovereignty and the individual have become obsolete, due to the striation of the given plain of consistence? Are they insisting or have they already proceeded to resist in our noetic space? Where they forged in an implication that conveys their simultaneous rejection or demise, do they belong to the same plain of consistence on which our thought still roams? Where they elements in the central configuration of the plane of construction put forward by a period we call specifically modern?

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Concepts and cognitive science

April 26, 2010 in Cognitive Science, concepts, Epistemology, Noetic space | No comments

In the two last decades among the cognitive devices to understand categorization, metaphor has helped to explain the utilization of a concept domain, a source, into a new cognitive map, a conceptual target.(1) Thus conceptual change appears as the result of transposing certain unities of meaning into a new semantic field and therefore acquiring a new denotation that ultimately ought to become central. One of the insights of our analysis is the use of metaphors to back arguments, images and even whole scientific systems.(2)

A metaphor is not a mere linguistig trope but a cognitive ubiquous scheme in human cognition. Metaphors like ‘knowledge is seeing’, ’causes are forces’, are able to explain a domain in terms of a diverse domain and thus constitute platforms that integrate diverse elements, showing an underlying plain of consistence. In this sense, it has been observed how thought occurs mostly unconsciously, dominated by concepts, yet at the same time abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.(3) Blended spaces also suggest the motion of two domains mapped onto each other, a decontextualized central concept and a superimposed space, obtaining multiple shades and aspects through the blended experience.(4) Concepts are always nested in theories, knowledge structures, these are both external, cultural, social, plains of consistence, and internal, partial, imperfect, mental models, schemas, whose interlocking conforms the noetic space. The cognitive stabilization of models that corresponds to the basic nodes accords the conditions of possibility of knowledge and remains at a meta-level to our current perceptual-cognitive experience.(5)

(1)Especially relevant is the work by G. Lakoff. Cf. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors we live by, Chicago, 1980. G. Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Chicago, 1987. G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, New York, 1999. M. Black, Models and Metaphors, Cornell, 1962.

(2)“Some people will no doubt think that we are interpreting these authors too literally and that the passages we quote should be read as metaphors rather than as precise logical arguments. Indeed, in certain cases the ‘science’ is undoubtedly intended metaphorically; but what is the purpose of these metaphors? After all, a metaphor is usually employed to clarify an unfamiliar concept by relating it to a more familiar one, not the reverse.”A. Sokal and J. Bricmont Fashionable Nonsense, London, 1998, p. 9. “But scientific theories are not like novels; in a scientific context these words have specific meanings, which differ in subtle but crucial ways from their everyday meanings, and which can only be understood within a complex web of theory and experiment. If one uses them as metaphors, one is easily led to nonsensical conclusions.” Ibid., p.177. Especially interesting is the emphasis of Sokal and Bricmont on postmodern non-sense regarding the use of scientific theories and their metaphoric extensions. One of the results of this work is precisely that Hobbes, Rousseau and Schmitt also did use vaguely, inaccurately, or superficially, scientific ideas. Thus it does not seem a peculiar postmodern fashion but a rather common stance of social thinkers because of the precise features of a noetic space that nowadays seems to become dispersed into different disciplines, eroding the sense of meaning, the facility to roam on a flta surface. The use of metaphors rather as illuminating than as exact descriptions allow a new arrangement of elements, a metaphor is never an equation but transposing a source domain to a target domain necessarily produces inconsistencies.

(3) G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, op. cit.

(4) G. Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language, New York, 1997.

(5) “Cultural forms stabilize because they are attention-grabbing, memorable, and sustainable with respect to relevant domain-specific devices. Of course, representations are also selected for in virtue of being present in any particular cultural environment. Domain-specific devices cannot attend to, act on, or elaborate representations that the organism does not come into contact with. For the development of culture, a cultural environment, a product of human history, is as necessary as a cognitive equipment, a product of biological evolution.” D. Sperber and L. Hirschfield, “Culture, Cognition and Evolution”, R.A. Wilson and F.C. Keil (eds.), MIT Encyclopedia, of Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts, 1999, p. cxxii. An example given to religious representations stems from P. Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: Outline of a Cognitive Theory of Religion, Los Angeles, 1994.

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Plains and Plane

April 22, 2010 in Noetic space, Ontology | No comments

The mirage of philosophical systems is to exhaust the whole plain of consistence. There always exist diverse modes of arrangement among its elements, of establishing planes on the ground of a given orography. It is the illusion of a static order, of a definitive instalment, undisturbed by other areas of knowledge, by other processes of sedimentation and erosion that amount to general changes in the noetic space. Systems act as if their central concepts would remain identical, not modifiable. All elements acquire a stable link, mediated by the central concepts, by the highest elevations that are the last ones to be completely coffined, buried, or erosioned, and achieve a compacity, a solidity, that impedes further restructuration, modulation, or morphogenesis.

The madman might be too early there, might probably be nowhere, his statography devoid of any solid soil, of any plateau or riff on which to rest, on the abyss. No order of elements affords this incorporation. What distinguishes him from the actual transformation of ideas is that these suppose a rather stable grounding in the actual noetic space and their connection with certain elements that make it recognizable but that are redistributed and combined also with peripheric areas of knowledge, provinces suddenly suffering an approachment, a reacroachment. Thus these novel combinations do not occur in the preexisting plain but require from a construction to be rendered coherent. They compose novel distributions, concentrations and dispositions that authors aim at rendering consistent and thus appear as novatores, they are but mutations, anomalies, aberrations, their conditions of possibilty, already present. Otherwise they remain illusionists, charlatans or simple fools, constructing remote planes, vain systems, castles in the air. Not only do ideas spread in a memetical sense, with a certain level of degradation, of noise, but they install a system of connections and references to other, apparently alien, areas of knowledge. It is the general incorporation of the system what allows criss-cross references and an activity in the plane of construction.

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Orography and Epistemology

April 12, 2010 in Epistemology, Noetic space | No comments

Ideas are always rearrangements of given elements that, conveyed on a plain of consistence, determine the conditions of possibility of judgement.(1) Thus the history of ideas has to clarify and focus on the elements that co-figure, configure, novel arrangements on the plane of construction, producing new emergences, new pingos, a salience of the orography on the existing plain.

Pingo

It can also occurr that this protuberance does not succeed in piercing the plain of consistence and remains as a mere accident, rather than producing a striation it becomes element of the very plain.

(1)Thus comes true the assertion of Valéry that a work is the activity of many things moreover an author.

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Conceptual change

March 22, 2010 in Epistemology, Noetic space | No comments

Conceptual change happens, an area of the orography is altered, and the stable structure of the world is shifted by rearrangements between the relations among concepts. New planes of construction attempt to integrate these morphogeneses, pre-existing planes suffer a striation. These new configurations allow new connections and therefore a new ideonomy, novel regulations of ideas. In Hobbes’s case the conditions of possibility of modernity are traversed and organised by encompassing and re-figuring several elements within the plane of construction. The implications between nature, religion, man and society, having altered the orography, are readdressed and composed into a coherent model attaining a recomposition of the noetic space: a new shareable understanding of the disperse, isolated, elements that become potentially disruptive, sustaining cognitive dissonance, the incongruency and instability of our conceptions, based on juxtaposed elements, that fosters new constructions.

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