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 11th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 235-236
OPM 239(40), October 11th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 235-236
"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
Being is the empty set of all possible actualization
Being is the empty set of all possible actualization
