Dope

Headline in the NYT today Cosmic Laws Like Speed of Light Might Be Changing, a Study Finds begs the question: what are changeable cosmic laws? The very application of law to physis has been a hot philosophical topic since Hume - well, okay, since before Hume, but Hume is the modern touchstone. The modernity of Hume is, to some extent, his full acceptance of the law of non-contradiction - that P can't be both a and non-a. The mystic instinct has always been to protest against the straitjacket of that logic, but the objection, since Hume, has moved from statements about states to statements about events - since events bring up the question of possibility and necessity.

This, of course, is a vast subject. And it touches on today's dope, which will be about the Romanian - French philosopher Stephane Lopasco.

Stephane Lopasco was born in Romania, but came to France, like his friend Cioran, and like so many other Romanian intellectuals, did, because of the wonderful myth of France as the home of the free intelligence. He was the companion in the thirties of Lacan, the student of Bachelard (or was the relationship the other way around?), and in the sixties palled around with the veritable pope of the French intelligentsia, Edgar Morin. To get a sense of the man you can read this memoir by the painter Georges Matthieu. It is terribly funny � both of them addressing each other as maitre and expressing themselves in peremptory tones that tend towards the epigrammatic, mixing insincere adulatory exclamation with the dismissive diktat. I love the way Lupasco casually claims that Bachelard plagiarized him � evidemment! This conversational style, born out of the aristocratic cenacle of the seventeenth century, acquires a slightly ludicrous theatrical color in the absence of aristocracy � Matthieu and Lupasco could be characters in a Moliere play, servants playing the masters. The typical stance of the 20th century intellectual, huh?
Lupasco tried to develop a logic that would absorb the discoveries of quantum physics. My first reaction to that kind of project is that it mistakes the domain of logic, which is embedded in language rather than in objects. It is, in other words, a move back to the spurious Naturphilosophie of the 19th century, where even very smart people like Engels could talk of the flower �contradicting� the bud. But this reaction, conditioned into me by the logical positivists, presupposes a that language is autonomous. This supposition has become harder to argue for in 2001 than in 1935.
In any case, Lupasco�s big idea was what he called the tiers inclu � the included middle. I don�t know a lot about Buddhism, but I do know that there is a term in Zen � mu � which means neither yes nor no. These are ideas that my friend, Mary Beth Mader, who teaches in the philosophy department in Memphis, is working with. I think I should tell her about Lupasco.
Here�s a quote from le maitre:
"A tout ph�nom�ne ou �l�ment ou �v�nement logique quelconque, et donc au jugement qui le pense, � la proposition qui l'exprime, au signe qui le symbolise : e, par exemple, doit toujours �tre associ�, structuralement et fonctionnellement, un anti-ph�nom�ne ou anti-�l�ment ou anti-�v�nement logique, et donc un jugement, une proposition,un signe contradictoire : non-e ; et de telle sorte que e ou non-e ne peut jamais qu'�tre potentialis� par l'actualisation de non-e ou e, mais non pas dispara�tre afin que soit non-e soit e puisse se suffire � lui-m�me dans une ind�pendance et donc une non-contradiction rigoureuse (comme dans toute logique, classique ou autre, qui se fonde sur l'absoluit� du principe de non-contradiction)."

"To every phenomenon or element or logical event whatsoever, and thus to the judgment which thinks it, to the proposition which expresses it and the sign that symbolizes it, for example e, there must always be associated, structurally and fundamentally, an anti-phenomenon, an anti-element, an anti- logical event, thus a judment, a proposition and a sign non-e, in such a way that e or non-e can only be the potentialization or actualization of non-e or e, but not their disappearance, which would entail that non-e or e can suffice in itself in an independence and thus in a rigorous non-contradiction (as in all logic, classic or otherwise, founded upon the absoluteness of the principle of non-contradiction)."
I started this post by talking about law and whether law is the best term to use to describe the observed regularities of nature. The philosophy of science makes the ritualistic move to necessity at this point. But perhaps we should also consider what law is, itself, as a social phenomena. Philosophers of science usually casually think, well, law is what the government makes, just like a gene makes a protein. But there is a lot more controversy about the nature of law than that � for someone like Holmes, for instance, laws are about expectations � in other words, law, as a social phenomenon, also plugs into probability.
Well, I�ve written about this in a review of the Menand�s excellent book, The Metaphysical Club � link to the Austin Chronicle, look up the author archives, plug in Gathman and you will see the title of the piece.
To check out a Lupacian view of Marcel Mauss, click here.
Okay, I�ll stop now.