2.18.15 Being is the Empty Set of Becoming

In this first week after the completion of the 367 days of commentary, I am drawn into the place of schooling, first, by my Ancient Greek class, and, next, through the post-2.0 exploration of the education offered by first philosophy as the thinking/writing that is categorized as techne and praxis.  That is, the post-2.0 exploration of the Sentence distilled on 2/16/15

4.  Writing is a technē of thinking (process, πρᾶξις)

So I’m ‘going back to school’ these days, and that means placing myself in a position of the first year undergrad with respect to understanding what is at stake with the focus on thinking through writing, which is a limited case of the larger ‘music-making philosophy’ and poiein (to make).  Indeed, poiein is the category the category that qualifies techne and praxis, which are called into service as a way of understanding the particular way of doing  philosophy, which is to say, learning from first philosophy.   If we are learning by doing, then the learning of first philosophy is done by making thinking, which is done both sonically (dialogically) and through what I want to call ‘composition’ (writing).   All to say that I am awaiting the arrival of Joseph Trimmer’s Writing With a Purpose.  This is the same Trimmer who offered me the fragment ‘writing as a way of knowing (process)’, from which I distilled the above cited Sentence 4 from 2/16/15.

In the meantime, I received yesterday Joseph Breuer’s 1958 Introduction to the Theory of Sets, which I ordered after reading somewhere that Badiou’s work is, in part, an application of Set Theory.   So I’m ‘back to school’ on Set Theory.   And after reading through the first few chapters I’m wondering if the symbolic language of Set Theory may provide the basis of an interesting experiment in the writing of Sentences?   I’ve declared to my music students my desire to express philosophy through musical notation.  Here, then, with the symbolic language of Set Theory is the opportunity to experiment with the rendering of a Sentence distilled from Being and Learning. 

What to distill?   The experiment arrived to me this morning when I was at the gym and was pondering the concept of the ‘empty set’:

“An empty set contains no element.”(Breuer, 5)

The example is the set of plums in a picture of a fruit bowl that has pears, apples, but no plums. 

Breuer adds: “We also agree that by definition:

                             The empty set is a subset of every set.”(6)

So from these two Sentences from Breuer I am speculating that fundamental ontological category of the Open (also described as the Nothing) might be candidate for an example of the empty set.   And, further, it helps to clarify the ontological order, especially, the aleithealogical (presencing/absencing) relationship between Being and Becoming.

1.    Being remains hidden, absent, ineffable.

2.    Becoming is the presencing of Being.

3.    Being presents in the Open by withdrawing from becoming

HERE is a most relevant commentary from 2.0:

OPM 239(40), October 11^th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 235-236

http://duartebeinglearning.blogspot.com/2014/10/opm-23940-october-11th-2004-2014.html

"The ‘Open’ (capitalized because it is proper, or an exclusive designation like Being or Logos) denotes the place where beings (ta panta) appear and are gathered together.   The Open grants the ‘in’ (the place) for a being to be together with other beings, so that when we say in media res the ‘in’ designates the place where we are in the midst of things.  While there is distinction between things when we think the ‘in’ (the place) we understand the many to be equal.  The open is thus “the ‘equalizing space’ where all beings are mutually related yet ‘infinitely unbound.’”(10/11/04 BL 233)

From this, today, the experiment in applying Set Theory: 

Ø :  empty set

Ø = {  }

U : universal set; set of all possible values

B (Being) Ø      

Being is the empty set, the subset of every set.

b (becoming) U

Becoming is the universal set; set of all possible actualization of Being

         O ⊂ b

The Open is a proper subset of becoming.

B ⊆ O  

         Being is the empty subset of the Open.

Does it then follow?:

B ⊆ b  or  B Ø b 

         Being is the empty set of all possible actualization