The Philosopher

In fact, an ancient story has it that the gods delight in this business, both as followers and spectators of the chase. —Xenophon, Cynegetica

The fox is a trap; when the right moment comes the dead creature becomes more alive than the living. But the skill of the fox lies in its ability to lie low, crouching in the shadows. This is how the author of the Treatise on Hunting sees it: ‘The most scheming (aiolóboulos) of wild animals…it lives, in its intelligence, in the depths of an earth which is admirably laid out. The dwelling that it digs itself has seven different entrances linked by as many corridors and the openings are situated a long way from each other. Thus it has less cause to fear that hunters, laying a trap at its door, will make it fall into their snares’. It is within this lair that it devises its plots. The misleading, enigmatic, polymorphic earth of the fox is matched by the animal’s equally impenetrable mind.

—Detienne and Vernant, “The Ploys of Cunning”, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society

Nagel’s… question, “Can there be really be something which gives point to everything else by encompassing it, but which couldn’t have, or need, any point itself?” is ambiguous. As shown above, it is incoherent to say or assume that the ultimate point within a theoretical framework T requires or is subject to explanation outside of the accepted or presupposed theoretical framework T.

—Puntel, Structure and Being 467 (“The World as a Whole”, 4.5.3.4.2)

Are not supratemporality and omnitemporality also the characteristics of Time itself? Are they not characteristics of the Living Present, which is the absolute concrete Form of phenomenological temporality and the primordial Absolute of all transcendental life? …Traditionality is what circulates from one to the other [logos and telos], illuminating one by the other in a movement wherein consciousness discovers its path in an indefinite reduction, always already begun, and wherein every adventure is a change of direction [conversion] and every return to the origin an audacious move towards the horizon.

—Jacques Derrida, Introduction to the Origin of Geometry XI

In a trilogy of dialogues (Thaetaetus, Sophist and Statesman, the latter two featuring the enigmatic Eleatic Stranger) Plato makes evocative use of the method of division to “hunt” the Sophist and the Statesman; that is, to seek an agreeable shared definition for them. In the method of division this is done by way of a series of more and more subtle divisions of the field of human endeavor; upon reaching the terminus, the sequence of cuts is then collected together into a definition. (For instance: among all arts, the angler is one who acquires rather than produces; among acquisitive arts, he captures rather than exchanges; among capturers, he fishes rather than hunts; and among fishers, he fishes with a hook rather than a net.) Despite several suggestions for a portrait of the philosopher to be drawn up by a similar division, Plato leaves this undone, as though offering an exercise to his readers. Just like a philosophical image, we are perhaps invited to complete the syllogism ourselves, to move from passive formal definition to real determinate action — to compose the likeness. Yet right away we run into trouble, the philosopher is “hard to see clearly” (Sophist 254); discerning her form directly is blocked because “the philosopher uses reason to stay near the form, being. She isn’t at all easy to see because that area is so bright and the eyes of most people’s souls can’t bear to look at what’s divine” (Sophist 254b). The philosopher is thus at least as difficult a quarry as the sophist, who is hard to discern for an opposite reason. The sophist is so difficult to distinguish because she dwells in darkness and disappears into the shadows of nonbeing: “The sophist runs off into the darkness of that which is not, which she’s had practice dealing with, and she’s hard to see because the place is so dark. Isn’t that right? —It seems to be” (Sophist 254) The philosopher is even challenged to differentiate herself from the sophist — the final definition of the sophist notably and ironically “represents” Socrates or is indistinguishable from him: the expert in dialectic who proceeds by brief responses, who “uses short speeches to force the person talking with him to contradict himself” (Sophist 268b); “contrary-speech producing, insincere and unknowing sort, of the appearance-making kind of copy-making, and the word-juggling part of production that’s marked off as human and not divine” (Sophist 268d).

Philosophical method aims to capture much more than a name. “Now in this case you and I only have the name in common, and maybe we’ve each used it for a different thing.” (Sophist 218c) We will learn nothing by names alone; we must also divide the field of human endeavor together with care. However we are not yet concerned with recognizing the philosopher. “Anyway we’re not concerned with the people; we’re looking for what’s true.” (Sophist 246d) Philosophy seeks a truth beyond recognition; it’s truly unrecognizable. Now if I mistake Theaetetus for Theodorus, I have simply made a student into a geometer, but if I mistake Gorgias or Thrasymachus for Socrates, I’m lost. “Maybe we’ve found the philosopher even though we were looking for the sophist?” (Sophist 253c)

We can see how a system of signs may permit an account to be given while itself remaining unaccounted for. The letter might remain elemental, still indivisible, or be perceived as inviolable. “Now, to begin with, one can give an account of the syllables but not of the letters — is that it?” (Theaetetus 203) These propositions are restless; they are written on a mobile plane. “But Socrates, I have no way of telling you what I have in mind, for whatever proposition we put forward goes around and refuses to stay put where we establish it” (Euthyphro 11b) Philosophy is to blame for the shifting ground. Perhaps we fly too close to the sun: “I am not the one who makes them go round and round and not remain in the same place; it is you who are the Daedalus; for as far as I am concerned they would remain as they were.” (Euthyphro 11c) Socrates Daedalus, who perhaps knows something about the strange workshop where propositions are weighed and valued. This stonemason’s wings are hard to lift by any other. The curious levity of the philosopher, whose singular difference is understanding the worthlessness of human wisdom (Apology 23b). “This is what I mean, that you do not believe in gods at all”; “he says that the sun is stone, and the moon earth”. (Apology 26c-d) The gods or stones. Natural philosophy will have immunized us against nonsense and despair. The philosopher is just like the brave son of Thetis, who was all heroism. “Hearing this, he despised death and danger and was much more afraid to live a coward who did not avenge his friends”; “Do you think he gave thought to death and danger?” (Apology 28d) The philosopher has no defense to make, their hands are tied: “I was attached to this city by the god” (Apology 30e). If I persuade it is only because I am concerned for your soul. “Be sure that if you kill the sort of man I say I am, you will not harm me more than yourselves… I think he is doing himself much greater harm doing what he is doing now, attempting to have a man executed unjustly. Indeed, men of Athens, I am far from making a defense now on my own behalf, as might be thought…” (Apology 30d) Philosophy, that means discipline in the teeth of events. We are undaunted by tyranny. “That government, powerful as it was, did not frighten me into wrongdoing.” (Apology 30d) We have been prepared for the worst, “and what happened was not unexpected” (Apology 36e).

Why is the philosopher so mixed up with this question of justice, with forms of equalization, with factors like iseogoria, etc, and especially Isonomia, equality before the law? —The order of time within the law or the philosopher. “The true philosopher thinks that this deliverance must not be opposed” (Phaedo 83b). In the company of the divine: inspired distributions, equitable division, moderation even in combat. “It seems that there’s something like a battle of gods and giants among them, because of their dispute with each other over being.” (Sophist 246a) Dubious battles between heavenly hosts, powers of the earth in conflict: “They each appear to me to tell us a myth, as if we were children” (Sophist 242c) It is remarkable that philosophy does not go far without images. “I’m only telling you my idea in all ignorance, but this is the kind of picture I have of it.” (Theaetetus 190a) Philosophical vision or humility.

Philosophy, groundless labyrinth of the unclassifiable animal. The rarest quarry: “Are you not aware that in all those cases the most extreme at either end are rare and few, but those in between are many and plentiful?” (Phaedo 90b) Does the rarity of consistency not elevate it immeasurably? But this rarity would mean nothing without its tenuousness. Hence the need for steadfast courage, as well as humor or irony, which hunt their own circularities. Universal liberation or the emotional uniformity of the philosopher. Eternal levity: “The soul of the philosopher achieves a calm… it follows reason and ever stays with it, contemplating the true, the divine, that which is not the object of opinion.” (Phaedo 84b) Philosophy as deathlessness.

We finally ask what to make of the whole Exhortation. “You appeared to me to rise above all other men with your magnificent speeches when you reproached mankind and, like a god suspended above the tragic stage, chanted the following refrain: ‘O mortals, whither are you borne? Do you not realize that you are doing none of the things you should? …How can you fail to despise our present education, and seek those who will rescue you from this lack of culture?’” (Clitophon 407b-e) We must be educated into innocence. What could be stranger to us, more magnetizing, than these paradoxes of justice and injustice? We have not yet thought clearly enough, we have fallen into the ignorance of imagining anyone could want injustice; but there is no moral error (there never was), there is only ignorance. “You say that men are unjust because they want to be, not because they are ignorant or uneducated. But then you have the effrontery to say, on the other hand, that injustice is shameful and hateful to the gods. Well, then, how could anyone willingly choose such an evil? ‘Perhaps he is defeated by pleasure,’ you say. But isn’t this defeat involuntary if conquering is voluntary? Thus every way you look at it, the argument shows that injustice is involuntary…” (Clitophon 407e) Anyone could only ever reach for what is good for them as they see and understand it; protagorean ethics. There was never any moral guilt or shame between humans and gods. It was “this dissonance, this carelessness” in education — in the comprehensional scope of our ethical predicates…? — that made “measure and harmony disappear between brother and brother, city and city, as they oppose each other, clash and fight, inflicting and suffering the utmost horrors of war” (Clitophon 407d) We did not reach the plane, we were caught in division: why does the city collapse, where have our soldiers gone? Burning immanence, fatal consistencies, riot of the forms. Agora in flames. “Or is this not training for death?” (Phaedo 80e) Above all the forms are forms of recognition, legible modes of expression. They are like remembrances; as it were an amazement or surprisal. Perhaps they are familiarities: “Is it not in reasoning if anywhere that any reality becomes clear to the soul?” (Phaedo 57)

It seems to us those philosophers who are championing orderly divisions — who are so strict about belief in forms, who exhort us to find them already inscribed in us — are responding to an incursion, threatened by chaos. Heraclitans bear the brunt of the critique: “According to the terser of these muses, in being taken apart they’re put together.” (Sophist 242e) But Theaetetus must be inoculated against sophistry as well: “And next, it seems, there will be another and another after that. A limit, it seems, never appears. —Even if you can only make a little progress, Theaetetus, you should cheer up. If you give up in this situation, what will you do some other time when you don’t get anywhere or even are pushed back?” (Sophist 261c) Plato’s found a way through the labyrinth, he discovers the formal reality of the Idea or consistency.

II.

Begin by considering the concept protection, which you can imagine as arrows — this group protects that group, so that society is mutual protection. And within protection, we have functions like the Academy, which protects society from philosophers. Now philosophers, in turn, protect humans from the forms, they shield us from ideas or the chaotic powers of the Earth. Philosophy therefore protects society from itself, just as society protects individuals. Divine coagulation. Philosophers protect us from themselves, either from the powers of the earth or their own ideas; philosophy in turn needs protection from society. The individual protecting society from itself — that is philosophy. Absolute protectivity which characterizes the social relation. The philosopher is this carrying, this bearing, this burden of knowledge or wisdom: look how it bends me over, look how I crumble beneath the burden of this divine knowledge. It’s this by which we recognize the philosopher more clearly than any other means. Socrates had a divine sign, but one which was only an intervention, only told him not to do things: stay out of politics. This negative space, is this the philosopher, is this how we recognize her: divine negation, aversion to moral error? Does a divine sign protect us? Now Plato produces Socrates of Athens as his Philosopher; but the importance of the stranger should not be overlooked — the old friend of Socrates, that friend of Zeno’s. It has been said that philosophy has friendship as an internal relation. We weave together the disparate atoms of the concept into a darkening singularity. Perhaps we can see the way having an idea draws a circle, distributes a boundary, uses division not just in order to introduce forms, but on behalf of formation itself; chimeric passages, divine transfiguration. Sublime awakening that the philosopher imbues us with, models for us by emitting signs that force us to think. Strenuous exercises of thought, twin sphinxes. Strange and unacceptable hypothesis: the philosopher protects us from herself. In the spiral movement of philosophy, you will find already this infinite difference inherent to it. The extremes, transurania, intercosmic and interatomic distances. We blame the gods, but the fault is human and never divine. Philosophy couldn’t emerge in a bare form, since there’s something about it that has to be disguised too… Society protects us from philosophers, but only philosophers can protect us from ourselves. Socrates claims he protects Athens from even more vicious philosophers (Apology). Until we pose the question at the level of our souls, at the level of our salvation, we will miss something about what it is that Socrates is trying to do.

Now Socrates is plainly full of black humor and mischief, so that of course he cannot be trusted, and is beloved. Plato infuses his voice with courage and cruelty — eternal mellifluousness. Immortal vengeance of the dialectic. How to establish a consistency which can stand up in the face of death, or before the dissolution of democratic forms of governance? Now these maladies may even seem to be caused by our very insistence on consistency itself, since the same plane that permits this free indirect discourse, the vertiginous field of conceptualization, also generates anxiety. The forms are dangerous because they bypass preconscious censorship and they generate anxiety because they carry powerful unconscious material. It’s imperative to recognize this about philosophy, that there is something dangerous which is not just a superstition or perspectival error; there is a real danger, caution is needed, although such injunctions are perhaps further incitement. “I sometimes get disturbed, and begin to think that there is nothing without an idea; but then again, when I have taken up this position, I run away, because I am afraid that I may fall into a bottomless pit of nonsense, and perish.” (Parmenides) Abyssal consistencies, strange animals. In philosophy careful steps are warranted, light feet: care for the soul of the city.

Have we caught sight of the silhouette of the philosopher? Or does it seem as though we have found only a landscape: rolling hills of Athens, bleached stonework bathing in the sun. Were we dazzled, a bit like Ion perhaps, caught up in his own exuberance? But even Plato had his romance: Symposium gives a better portrait than anyone could hope to find. There is no more fitting image of Socrates than a statue of Silenus: split right down the middle, overflowing with tiny icons of innumerable Gods. Isn’t that a bit like the underworld the philosopher protects us from? Will this be our thesis then — that it is the unconscious material that the forms repress which is what’s most interesting? The resemblances of the form suppress a more primal or urgent recurrence which is far more desperate, at once inspired and monstrous, more like a jagged, fractal coastline of Greece than the polyhedron; witch’s line of thought, from which we return with bloodshot eyes or find them missing… We only catch sight of the philosopher in motion, essence in question: in fusionability, a bit like the metempsychosis of the rhapsode. What is the strength of the courageous, the blessedness of the pious? I call upon a point beyond words, I exhort you to examine this matter for yourself: we are none of us doing what we should, for instead of asking how to become just and peaceful, how to improve our souls, remove our blocks, have we not chosen injustice, ignorance, bloodshed? How to achieve philosophical clarity and emotional calm in the face of death or the dissolution of democratic forms? How can we build up a courage and consistency like that, made of iron, stone and bronze, unless we are philosophical — unless we have cultivated innumerable cities in speech, unless we have divided ourselves in one and encounter at variance the immense figures of pure light we contain, the innumerable icons like gods that form the constitution of our soul? Alcibiades knows something about Socrates: he’s not like anyone else, there’s no “type” for him (of course he escapes any divisional method then…) This monstrous or absolute singularity, whose utter fascination gleamed in the ideas themselves, so that even a poor rendering retains their magnetism. Let us hear even a little of his puzzles about justice and we are attracted, we fall under his spell, our hearts are petrified. Do we yet grasp his strangeness, have we heard him yet, are we pierced to the ground by this sharp spirited sensitivity? Socrates Silenus, sibylline medusa.

III.

The idea insofar as it has an objective reality, insofar as it translates a real movement, should not be confused with verisimilitude or simulacrum. Now it is neither a reflecting abyss (chimeric expression of indeterminate anatomy) nor the destructive plasticity of pure essences (blinding interior reflections of an identity). It is true that the form suggests an endlessly-repeated resemblance. It generates an identical semblance. Dialectics synthesizes unities by dividing the essence: assembling atemporal and aspatial images by extending surfaces to infinity, compactifying expressive lines into images or analogies, collecting differences or asymmetries into definitions and introducing representational circularities to ground resemblances. Whether by reflection or division, I realize an essence, I have some idea. Now the ideas are not yet concepts, they are not defined as a predicate of unlimited comprehension. The form is like a geometric radiation of indirect expressive lines of affirmative likenesses, which operate upon the self-relation of the soul by way of ethos: friendship, democracy, love. Sophodynamics. What is essential in formal division is determination of lines of variation and negativity, which are vital principles or living lines that usurp the distribution or forge a new connection, collecting a charge as they carve their meteoric ascent towards the one. Forms set a frozen timeline in motion; fountain of youth. Is Dialectics then a synthesis of sophism and fluxism? The philosopher differentiates even herself, divides her own essence from the husk of its form; yet the ideas nevertheless inhere through the extensive history of mind’s self-modifications, they act as a direct reality in which we continuously participate. Ethico-aesthetics, speeds and slownesses: the form is like an eternal celerity. And do we not rediscover the forms are immediately elements of the local transcendental field? The philosopher, the one who addresses the forms familiarly, as it were, even as our friends and rivals. Even amid chaos, the philosopher is an inhabitant of the Earth. Division takes hold of matter by force, by development and multiplication of centers of power and capability in pure thought; philosophy produces sensible atoms in us, emits indivisible signs that inspire this athleticism of the spirit. Such a philosopher is neither idealist nor materialist but realizes an ideal material: Lucretius, Spinoza. Those who truly teach us know how to fuse the horizon — how to think as space or before essences, as it were teaching time how to pass seriatim — how to make the Earth light…

Isolating specific differences is not a matter of establishing broad generalities, that in any case aren’t true. (It is also not a hierarchical series of differences that division organizes, nor is it a purely theoretical analysis.) The method is more tentative, still at the speculative level; the outcome is uncertain. I think we don’t know. But perhaps we can suggest why the philosopher appears so threatening. Sophism endangers the future, but the dissonance of (in-different…) division itself makes a difference now. A sensible kind of differentiation expresses the sense of order in time, of coming to be and passing away; they are continuous with natural philosophy. When you coincide oppositions into a nonlinear singularity, you coalesce the extremes or place them alongside one another, so that you must either protect the singularity — or block it. Protagoras: the metric is human, or everything relates. Instead of endless flux, we recover intelligibilities as though deciphering a radiant halo. Man is nothing other than a black hole. (We should be cautious therefore of producing a hagiography. The philosopher is a dangerous paradox, at once iridescent and pitch black. Light steps are needed above all. Black humor and beatitude.)

The theory of forms is not even a genetic account but more like an architectural one. Geometric model of cognition. But that does mean a form is merely a proportionate agreement, or else some discursive phantom. A natural pattern can only be fixed or formalized as an indirect potentiality or capaciousness, as it were stated as a hypertask or as simultaneity of production and distribution; participation can only be effectively grounded in a consistent realization. The species are as fluid on the geological timescale as the stones are on the cosmological. If division seeks to analyze the field of human activity, the form is a synthetic experience of knowing how. Powers or ideas are not yet identity according to the essence. The idea is only a thought, Socrates speculates: “But may not the ideas…be thoughts only, and have no proper existence except in our minds, Parmenides? For in that case each idea may still be one, and not experience this infinite multiplication.” Once ideas are unlimited, you lose the boundaries of the form: everything is made of unthought thoughts or identities dissolve in admixture or dynamic synthesis. Ideas are grounded as an aerial section, they are as thin as the fabric of clouds — emerging through distillation, condensation, displacement… — aeolian crystals locked in a frozen underworld, rather than geometric division of the field of human activity.

Realization relates to natural ends like procreation; you are becoming consistent with an infinite task. There are only ever consistencies and their penumbra.

IV.

When you unfold an account, you distribute ideas or powers in a series; therefore you form fields of authorities and minorities, divide reality into split circularities or symmetrical spaces, a repeating series of dual objects: Justice and Time. Divisions are not yet at the level of the concept, they show strictly nothing: we split the one into a series of segments, or splice the flows from an invisible point beyond them. Philosophy is a spacetime diagram. Aren’t the forms a bit like a cinematic image? Mobile universals, Plato the playwright; is he not a consummate man of the theater — that is, a man who dreams of fashioning a new theater? Dramaturgy grounds the ideas, an Aeschylean register whose athleticism has subsequently strained the voices of all philosophers. Theater of essences. We do not claim Socrates split the atom or that he halted time so that infinite rapidities could be born. It’s like this: watching only the movements, you hunt for consistency, you map a cosmic animal, you distribute the senses of being back together. The philosopher: the conjunction of sonorous planes. Encyclopedism, cyclotomic passage, hyperception. O Ariadne.

Parmenides discloses an algebra governing something other than a rigid crystalline form. Here the theory of forms is politely passed over in merciful brevity, meriting hardly a rebuttal (we are given barely a sketch before it is even somewhat patronizingly dismissed) — but then we are treated to the fireworks of henology, henomics of the gods, divine or anarchic distributions. One finds Dionysus roaring. We realize we are thankful to have left the ideas far behind us, and that Parmenides in fact warned us about it. The forms don’t stand a chance amid this flux. Philosophy, formal extension of the transcendental field towards perplexity. Every dialectic divides. But it now seems like we have discovered two distributions, the one dialectical (synthesizing unities, extending surfaces, imbuing substances with the idea) and the other divisional (unfolding accounts, redoubling objects or extending fields, collecting differences to stabilize unities). We will discover elements of the one distribution repeated in the other, but the order of events has changed. In dialectics, the light is reflected from the essence within, we shine forth the radiance of innumerable icons, we quell a dubious battle and cultivate a harmonious city: friendship in the depths, equivalence principles and null coordinates. The geometry of morals: a world line is parameterized only by the motion of particles. Now, isn’t philosophy above all acceleration? Parmenides demonstrates the speculative method as clearly as perhaps it could be demonstrated. The one is, the one is not. At once we enjoy an immediately clearer portrait of the philosopher. We find ourselves at the limit of understanding, split backwards into one another’s lines, we discover a recurrence or permanent youth that gives immediately what it takes, distributes something that escapes from the circuit of dialogical exchange. The Sphinx: algebraic speeds or asymmetrical distributions. The visitor will have divided into complex roots of unity. The crystal thaws, the perplex accelerates: we are distributed along a curve plunging into formless or anonymous material, as it were a species in being… Have we achieved the fixed point at the heart of the cyclone? The philosopher’s indeterminate animality, her endlessly shifting diaphora, her unboundedness or formal incompleteness: it is precisely this cipher which authorizes passage to the transcendental ideas, by way of a wandering spiral line.

We can synthesize a concept at infinite rapidity without passing by way of conversation or discourse. The dialectic is precisely that which requires legibility — like the visitor hints, the law is too slow; we have to have more heuristic principles. Philosophy cultivates friendship in the city, justice in our hearts, to constrain the fluxes and voids, to harmonize our infinitesimal voices together in the frenzy of being. But there is something else roaring or rumbling beneath — Parmenides knows the game can be played quite differently than the careful divisions, we have divine distributions here of another order entirely, chaos of divergent series in superposition. The One seems to reflect all attributes and none; and in one moment seems to gather together the cosmos and in another to violently separate, now both at once. Have we not found a new danger — yet another vulnerability the forms protect us from — neither the chaos of the flux, nor the abyss of the void, but the very immanence of the one?

Could anyone go further than Parmenides, who is plainly the “real” portrait of a philosopher …? It is shocking to see a familiar patronizing irony applied now to Socrates himself — although a young man, still in formation… Who can ever recover from the brutal dismissal of the theory of the forms? Zeus, there do seem to be a lot of problems with those forms, don’t there… Maybe you should speculate more freely, young philosopher, and be less afraid of falling into your so-called pit of nonsense… Perhaps you will be pinned by philosophy one day, he seems to prophesy: you will be electrified also; one day to recognize none of the cases are beneath your attention. — Parmenides exhibits a method of absolute consistency or infinite continuity: following the hypothesis doggedly. This only works, Parmenides seems to say, if philosophy grips you completely — if it has become a matter of desperate urgency. But why would being and the one take on these intense and ineluctable transfigurations — unless this metempsychosis had another effect, unless by cycling through these pure figures of light — we ourselves are divided in one, we split backwards from the dialogue or illuminate a different path: we follow the speculative hypothesis to the edge, we seek rigorous consistency in the most extreme cases or intense movements, we superpose them: the one (is (not)). The one has no interior, and we are all one; this is like a deconstruction, it is like we have torn the “one” from a larger building or city, but have discovered it has a consistency entirely different. The one is much deeper, so much more problematic than the void or the flux; are the forms not revealed at last as rudimentary icons, relaxing contemplative hypnoses. We are passing towards a thought which is not yet thinking. What is it which remains unthought within thinking? The formation of a thought is like a condensation or contraction, compactification of expressive lines… but also must involve strenuous displacement and even repression. Philosophical formation has to embark upon a rigorous development of the forms it encounters: it measures their consistency, dividing each one into perplicating roots; we thereby tame the individuating geometry of the one. Do we retain an invisible consistency beyond words, have our signs been purified in combinatorial variation? Thought engenders an unthought within it, this is why we find these strangely expressive dynamics of perceptual and cognitive fields: the idea is visible only at speed, in accelerating fusion or distintegative flight, redoubling the field to infinity or dividing into itself… Philosophy is like a direct perception of formlessness, or of the pure variance of the form. Marvelous construction. Parmenides has seen the indivisible.

Do we sense the immense beauty that shines in the depths of this difficult exercise? Parmenides wants to know if a thing can become younger than itself. The one folds all discourse together; it is the order of time. It is geometric in a different way than Platonism. This exhibition of the powers of the one does make use of these absolute lines in a direct application of infinite rapidities that are otherwise repressed in dialogues, or channeled into the iconographic multiplication of forms, rather tiny images of forces, like little remembrances or reverences of one which has (not) been. These infinite rapidities are woven into a new stability. Consider the Meno, in which we are concerned with computing a geometric relationship. It is something like a base case. We’re interested in establishing the dimensions of a certain form, so that it is just like it were an architectural discipline that we are engaged in, even though we are doing dialectics. Given the target form, what words will serve best as foundation, which letters have the strongest legs? What should we say to fabricate a sturdy architectonic? Beneath every stable geometry, there lie unfinished depths of the earth.

A geometry is not yet a genetic account. The form cannot account for its own formation. Logos is giving accounts by way of a system of letters…yet cannot account for the letters in turn, which are like asignifying particles. A form is not yet or no longer a genetic account of being; not in any case in the way the one is immediately genesis. Do the Ideas perhaps play at pantomime, aping a universal history? Now aren’t they plainly continuous with mythopoiesis, the ritualistic forms of art and music? Whereas the one splits into complex roots, into a number of different perspectives; thus we unfold backwards into an infinitely-sided structure or apeirogon. Eternity, extreme consistency. Whereas the forms try to forward-construct the universe from first principles, as it were using geometry, with the one we encounter a different approach entirely. One doesn’t just divide into attributes, but combines them with transcendental effectuations: I rotate through the zones of the concept at infinite speed, or accelerate the divisions together. One splits backwards into complex roots. It is just like the one were ripped from a sentence, as it were a desemantified particle thereby imbued with an unstable spectral power, that is immediately psychological and immediately sociopolitical, immediately metaphysical and immediately theological. (Absolute immanence…) By superposing hypotheses, by following them into the depths, we achieve this state of mind or philosophical calm that is close to ataraxia. Is it not clear the speculative method is how you achieve that? Beatitude, courage, effortless passage. I speculate: I let the desperation loose, letting it appear fully just for a moment as it were in small doses. Letting the speculative method grip you, as Parmenides suggests, is the only way. It’s only when philosophy becomes a matter of courage that it makes any difference at all.

It is like the ideas assemble an essence by corrosion or subtraction, so that rather than manufacture perceptual and cognitive unities you produce by division a pure surface without interiority. The seer or astronomer marks out a section of the sky; they fabricate the manifold directly as an expressive extension of an extractive field, as a referential multiplicity, cautiously selecting from the aspects it passes through or that divide it. What patience is demanded to watch for signs… What a frenzy the forms sublimate (we can hardly say repress anymore), like a usurpation of the original divinities that organized territorial representations. This is why they are tiny stone statues, that is, remembrances of animalities, landscapities, vegetalities, facialities, elementalities; the crystallized variances of natural philosophy. Crystallogeneses of the sign, birth of form by interior reflection or cellular division.

Perhaps immanence will always generate unaccountable anxiety, with or without careful conception. Nevertheless it is clear the forms produce a new series of constraints, establish the workspace rigorously, define the range and domain of operations more carefully. (We have not yet reached a pure axiomatics of the concept in the forms; and the formlessness of primordial powers threatens relentlessly.) Now philosophical development — that is precisely a question of letting go, bearing or being willing to follow a hypothesis to the real horizon or genesis of a real experience, so that we catch sight of the truth and are gripped by philosophy; whereupon we submit every proposition to strict scrutiny, not thinking any of the cases beneath us. It is as though only by being electrified by the idea, in a desperate hunt rather than an orderly search, that we can attain this extreme consistency which Parmenides showed us — which passes even beyond words. By subjecting all hypotheses to the test of recurrence — can it pass through these extremes of reason and remain consistent? Can it be followed through to the very end? — we perhaps reach a beatitude of a very different kind than socrates shows us, like a point of stillness in the cyclone… æternal recurrence, seriatim passage. Philosophy represents and constrains the flux of psychosocial forms, enabling one to accelerate towards consistency or transmit it — to escape… — which therefore transforms the philosopher.

The idea synthesizes consistencies capable of withstanding quite intense and dangerous movements, for instance the ontological mutability of the heraclitan and the metric deterioration or black holes of the sophist. Now perhaps the subtle univalence of parmenides is a slightly different case… however, the threats it poses, the dangers a form must protect us from, are in some ways even more dire here; such that the painful terminus of the black hole and the wildly-liberatory and individuating field of pure difference… are in their way much less threatening than the very pure simplicity, the burning immanence of the one.

As we have seen, the visitor’s most penetrating definition of the Sophist has clearly and pointedly become indistinguishable from Socrates; so that finally the sophist even divides the philosopher from within. Now let us take one side of this autodivision, the black hole of sophism, Gorgias, Socrates’ shadow… — if this is in a way the clearest rival claimaint to philosophy the dialectician is in fact to face off against, (since the others perhaps do not even perceive the dilemma in the same way…) then perhaps we arrive at the following hypothesis. The philosopher is the one who asks language itself what to say. She slips between our letters, she asks the words what they mean. She therefore knows how to become what one really is. Now that can only emerge in an expressive dialectic. The philosopher fully appears only once real consistency has already been found, only once the dialogical arena of friends and rivals has been established. Amid all the danger and delirium of democracy… In the presence of the philosopher perhaps the idea is no longer permitted to wander freely but to give answer: bear the indirect responsibility of the proposition. Forms curl up, they compactify an unlimited reality into a finite representation which is not yet conceptual, or still in formation: younger than itself, still contained by itself. They are expressive figures or itinerant infinitives; imitations of modes of life or abstract personages. (Bildungsroman of the gods, universal history of the underworld.) Each makes use of pure variance to usurp an original power of the earth. Do they not appear to unfold into a combination of pure elements like a bifurcated figure full of tiny icons? (Perhaps the forms are still quite close to the frenzy of real formation; they still coalesce very rare consistencies with disparate intensities and finite extensions, they are not yet steel abstractions, they do not possess a universal comprehension but rather intensive zones of activity made up of functional surfaces, protecting against the monstrous variations lurking in abyssal depths…) Aren’t they a bit like temple pillars, legs of letters, pure monuments of thought or abstract memories? All the radiant powers of atemporal consistency, guardians fastidious against the anomalous repetitions that precede formalization, stammering gods inscribed at the cosmic horizon. Having an idea is like a friendship with pure immanence. A natural or spiritual power, an idea, only works if it grips one utterly — it has to operate on essences, dramaturgically, by contraction and emanation, drawing pure lines. An Idea (justice, beauty, love) corresponds with a distribution of powers in the soul, which it therefore illuminates, as it were in a mirror, renewing unlimited faculties of recollection (judgment, knowledge, desire). Forms express then the shaping or shining of the soul, even as it accelerates into matter; they delimit perceptual and cognitive domains by synthesizing expressive figures, conjoining sensory planes; transversal transmission. Aren’t they a bit like territorial icons, governing dangerous conjunctions of consistencies, which therefore double or redouble the city into an open field of interweaving parties in continuous variation, or else introduce such spherical continuities into one’s own roots, divide one’s constitution through infinite fusionability or combinatory flight of the philosophical mind, an advent which is after all levity and innocence? The ideas are split infinitives: they interpose a combinatory universality into the one’s posture in order to ‘divide together’ a natural and spiritual power. The ideas are therefore identifiable with specific differential aspects which may be enumerated, and which are like an exponentiation of their emotional-cognitive syntax, as it were forming a metaphysical grammar of poses.

The Ideas are not yet a concept (that is a predicate of infinite comprehension abstracted from a generative term in a language). Rather the ideas realize a universal history; they imbue us with powers of the earth, they are still close to the forms of theater, ritual, the arts and especially music. Instead of the infinite order of conceptual representation, which is constrained by a specific practice of abstraction and interpretation… with an Idea immediately we descend to the lawless depths of the earth — distributing consistencies across immanence, as it were, draping an animal fur across a table. The representation is in any case not yet fully conceptual: we are still struggling in dubious battle with the powers of the earth, the divisions aren’t yet smooth — what is more pure variances are let loose that recombine the ideas; philosophy, that is perhaps: eternal recurrence.
For instance, the form of the One ‘represents’ seriatim passage or consistency via infinite rapidity; it therefore ‘generates’ the intensities of bodies, it assembles compactifications of variations at speed or enables acceleration. Within the imparticipate function of the one, there are only world lines or particles in motion which in turn set the one in motion or recombine it. Thus the one ‘represents’ a flux of forms, or ontological generativity constrained only by consistency or the conditions of seriatim passage.
Passage or flux generates beings or times, pure variances or infinite voids that transform one in turn. The ideas are realizations. They format powers into natural or spiritual domains, still redolent of the territory and mythopoetic transport. The powers do not generate abstractions, they are not a practice, yet they involve a pure repetition which is like a consistency rumbling beneath abstraction, or rather constructs an independent surface across which variation drapes its contents for celerities to pass.
Philosophy represents and constrains society, giving time to generate new ideas, as it were: to gather together territorial powers into a protective sphere; how could the ideas in turn not transform the philosopher? Philosophy is this indirect transformation of individuation itself by way of recombining axioms, by generating and sustaining friendship in the city or democracy. We see what Plato is aiming to avoid: block the black holes of the sophists which seem to dissolve all the variances at once, for instance to mix up the territorial consistencies which support the political constitution or formal state (superposed bodies of the king, the earth and the factors of production). We can see maybe how the forms are a bit like protective guardians over these bodies, holding watch over the territorial consistencies they enfold or repeat, as though from the cosmic horizon…

VI.

Who is the sophist? But they secrete the night; the writer is an octopus, they will have disappeared into a night that they disseminate everywhere or in a darkness that resists or subverts the name, the definition, the image and the form — which achieves the idea by a new means entirely… Behind or beneath formal geometry, it is like there is a dark night which is nongeometric or even an immanent logos of the one (who realizes the synthetic character of) experience, by superposition of realities or accounts, by composition of worlds or compossibility. The book encompasses, it generates even, this nocturnal depth of experience itself… The encyclopedist, incompossibility in person. Can we see the way in which philosophy ceaselessly conjoins very disparate sonorous components, or rather one deconstructs the sonority into its complicating roots? Without reaching the system of letters, we nevertheless encounter a substructure or subsurface installation beneath the syllables, like divisions in being itself. A form is indexed to a molecular sonority, which is revealed to have a distinct consistency of its own, almost like an embryonic concept, although it is not yet (conceptual): it is still immanent to itself, contained within itself, bounded within a domain like a territorial consistency that brings together the powers of the earth into a single point… Perhaps the artist’s diagram is more unitary than the philosopher’s, more like an athlete’s — I protect myself from myself. Thus the division of knowledge here proceeds along an imperceptible curve which leads us downward into our being or our time, the cognitive-emotional syntax of our society: I divide into forms of territorial organization, I compose their powers. These powers are like sonorous verticalities that erupt as points pictorially, abyssal voids, which in ancient vision are not yet anchors; we are still lost in a stretching or torsional field… Only the geometer has perhaps attained the fused horizontality of a fully independent and mobile perspective. We are still participating: the urn cannot separate itself from us, our stone feet dissolve in the sun and sand… We are outside of the figure. It is like the work of art bears a shining sign across a boundless sea. But the desert and the cavernous depth are where it is born, in nocturnal fusion or immanent flight. (I mark a boundary or extract the mineral; I draw out an encircling force from distributed intensities. To make a sensation, an event, you press fluent perceptibilities into circulation or weave them into conjugation. It is just like spectral particles are here released to the outside, or bind together to form sensual or passional lines — novel mechanisms, hunting apparatus…)

To grow teeth and claws and nails; territoriality. Going away and coming back; was this not always the story? The underworld, territory of the dead-that-yet-live, contains as it were innumerable crystals, each with a bacillus that can — at any time — spring to life, as it were in a single place — thus setting the cycle of time in motion. Events are necessarily compactified, there is something indivisible in them. Forms repress even in what little they represent, they sublimate a dynamism into stabilizing postures: a polyhedral structure to capture the decrystallizing upsurge of invisible or inaudible powers of the earth. Therefore I conceal the very feature that I cast towards the future: recurrence. Life has a tragic character due to the nature of formation; it must wrench its time from the universe with teeth and tear its intelligence from the silent stones… Why does the living form seem to coalesce only at this unlimited rapidity, so that it must fold into itself, and possesses a curiously compactified temporality? As though each living being carried the whole universe. Protagoras discovers evolutionism amid pure variation, he sees how the flux of forms can be recollected; I divide in reverse to discover I myself form a complex root of the impersonal unity of life. Whereas in Parmenides, it is like the one is living form and cosmos at once, both polity and power: production and distribution achieve simultaneity as pure emanation of univalent light… Once in the Protagorean black hole of man we find nothing but endless night. Man as the measure means no measure, everyone as their own measure; now who is to say which opinions we should listen to? We have to discover for ourselves, we must enjoin the search. Which one has the wisdom to divide variation into passage — which one can accelerate a sign to infinite rapidity, carve an escape route back to wakefulness, shared reality? How is this immanent durability stolen from the heart of being, causing it to form and flower, to bud and efflorescence? It is as if language itself, as it were in its gentle curve, already contained the geometric unity we had sought in the ulterior reality we supposed was being modeled; the diagram turns out to show much more than we imagine, as if it were mobile instead of fixed or full of microscopic variations. —We recall Parmenides strange idea about thinking: all beings are thoughts and yet they are unthought. Philosophy or acceleration of the city towards new music.

Does the courage required for beatitude not emerge once again as a new gravity? The grace of the earth. Do we sense what immense strength, joy, health and beauty lie in these diagrammatic consistencies which fold cities and souls together… What sensitivity is needed to approach these depths, what sobriety before the exponentiation of consistencies to infinity; what rigor before the strenuous exercises of thought. How indeed can we avoid the infinite multiplication of the ideas? Intelligence is after all at least as much about escaping from traps as it is solving a puzzle. The labyrinth unifies the trap and the game, it forms an incomplete riddle; we need to hum to ourselves for a bit, seek a sonorous line to escape; music or the transcendental ideas… A labyrinth (such as the human ear) is like a gift of boundless time or eternal youth. We would be nowhere without Ariadne. The character of beauty is that it empowers, it draws thought towards wisdom…

Words contain keys or components of passage that release passional features (which are like crystalline or metallic lines singing in the depths, or vegetality erupting through the soil and sand …— semiotic mineralogy, botany, metallurgy…) How do words function? By coded frequencies, by redundancies. It is not possible to explain the matter more geometrically perhaps than Claude Shannon… The letters now account for themselves, as it were, by way of a statistical mechanism; a mathematical apparatus of capture for a spiritual power. Algebraic geometry of the alphabet; is this not how logicality has to ultimately find itself, lost amid propositional variability, with pure conceptual variances just beyond reach? Incompleteness…

It would seem the forms are wisps, the barest thoughts; nevertheless they stand tall like tiny courageous icons, limestone figurines stranded in the depths of the earth, yet nevertheless imbued with a spectral intensity or a resonating power … They fold together vital lines into consistencies, which are as dangerous as they as durable. Life once compactified a four-dimensional spacetime into a three-dimensional consistency by way of a one-dimensional sequence… —The living form is like a spiraling timeline or a folded calendar. Do we see how all of life is created in a continuous genesis that plays out, in a certain way, entirely within this seriatim passage, this pure movement of thought or zero-dimensional point of effective transcription…? The soul is a written language; a book binds its reader to speaking through its simplified signs, hearing their resonances, analyzing their frequencies. We will have been obligated into delivering the final consistencies, supplying the missing elements. A philosophy must have some spaces allocated for new assemblies and for heterogeneity; always a patch of new earth staked out. Life depends on nothing other than immaterial consistencies which are passing through us continuously. It is always as if we are newcomers to the immense variance which philosophy introduces, as it were drawing out of the river an infinite multiplicity… This perplication of realities or world we have never entered. Philosophers, they come to us like we are children; they tell us marvelous stories that seem to care only about consistency. When will they give us rigorous accounts? But absolute fixity ultimately belongs to theology…

Geometric method provides as it were an extensional field to reason, a model of formation that begins to blend with (but is not yet melded into) realization in the concept or formal equivalence of extension (in a way this model is perfect mirror to Parmenidean univalence, which is like its ‘aconceptual’ base and surely geometric if only in a very simple and direct way: one sphericality). Now let us recall this is precisely the black hole Clitophon was stuck in — he can’t escape the question-answering game, he can’t internalize or integrate since he’s stuck in the phase of insight, still blinded or dazed by flashes of logic, he can’t quite have an idea. (Is it that he lacks the discipline to “complete” the form, or find the daily practice that would let him reason for himself, ground himself without another guiding? Will Thrasymachus be any better help when it is after all something new and surprising that needs to happen — sudden eclipse, diagrammatic resonance?)

Forms arise from a river of flux, out of formlessness or from an underworld populated by protean figures still in formative flight. Unconscious polymorphism. But in this chaos where all directions are in motion — such as we find in Protagoras, but also Gorgias in another way… — do we not find in the cunning intelligence of the sophist something like a human virtue of obstinacy, the virtue of remaining consistent by introducing variances that are not yet pure, which mix together beings and nonbeings chaotically… in a way like hidden writing. Spherical dialogues or spiral resonances of sophism. The one that is not emanates nocturnalities. Is it clear the forms arrive as it were with the emergence of gravity? Indeed it is just like a gravitational field has suddenly settled in: pulling all the particles into smooth motion along geodesic lines, accelerating thought towards immanence; bringing us to earth…

How can we attain to the calm or relaxation of the gods, or be worthy of the laughter at their eternal feast, without philosophers? Can we not sense that this is at least one way in which the philosopher participates in the divine? Holy laughter, anarchic distribution, immanent consistencies; we discover in the gods nothing but human univocity: we divide a pantheon into ourselves, into one form or series of superposed bodies… It is almost as though we have discovered a kind of creature that can unfold itself infinitely — which cunningly reverses itself or folds all of reality around it, sloughs off organs into order to escape from the hooks of discourse. Philosophy is glare or transcendental fusion, it is like a magnet — one links the rings together or accelerates through the segments, mobilizing diagrammatic forces towards the fusion of horizons — in any case we seek to find an imperceptible reality beyond space and time — a fitting icon, a fiery voice, a form… Desert rivers flowing. Prometheus tears off the steel net that binds him to the earth…