Ep. 282: Alain Badiou: What Is Philosophy? (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 282 is something like, what is philosophy? We read the first three chapters of Alain Badiou's book Conditions, which make a part one philosophy itself, published in 1992. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer forgetting the forgetting of the forgetting of my lunch in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:34 Seth: This is Seth Paskin thinking the caesura between Judaism and Christianity in Austin, Texas.

0:40 Wes: This is Wes Alwan indicating the void of category of truth qua limit point in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:47 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey being crushed in the sublime pincers of truth in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:54 Mark: All right, Alain Badiou. We have not done anything in contemporary French philosophy in a while. He is a contemporary of Deleuze, which we did long, long ago. And in both cases, we're dealing with books that are dealing with just what is philosophy? Because he's got his own Badiou, has his own unique language, that for us to read anything that he might want to say about art, about love, about mathematics, requires that we get over this initial hump and just figure out what the hell he's talking about.

1:24 Dylan: Yeah. And he's still alive.

1:26 Mark: He has outlasted Deleuze. For me, this was kind of like the later Heidegger or reading Deleuze. It did not feel like Derrida, where I'm just missing pictures. And even though apparently this guy did really like Lacan, there was not enough Lacan sinking in here for me to feel like there's just a background that I don't have that I just don't understand. But I did have to watch some, like, lectures of his and just some other things to really make sense of the basic vocabulary.

1:50 Wes: Yeah, I didn't think it was all too difficult once I figured out what the void was.

1:55 Seth: And.

1:56 Wes: But I am out of patience with the French now. I think the French, there should be a moratorium. The French should just not be allowed to do philosophy for.

2:05 Seth: Wow, that seems harsh.

2:07 Wes: Sorry. Terrible thing to say.

2:09 Seth: Wow.

2:10 Dylan: I didn't think it was like that. Goodness gracious.

2:12 Wes: This could just be senility at this point. Like, I sent Mark a Roger Scruton screed criticizing Badiou. And I realized that, by the way, when I read that, I did have the same similar reaction to Mark, like, yeah, this is over the top. I mean, he's being a dick, basically. But the book's Name is what frauds,

2:30 Dylan: fools and fraud charlatans and other French philosophers.

2:36 Wes: He goes too far. But it is actually helpful for me to read the critiques, you know, in part because you can see gaps in Scruton's own education, right, and the way he critiques this stuff. But on the other hand, it's not like he doesn't have a point at all. His description of the whole void thing I thought was helpful, but. Yeah, so I'm ambivalent about the. Hey, here's a lot of fancy words to say some very straightforward things about how philosophy has certain modest goals and aims. And that annoys me.

3:04 Mark: Most of what we're reading is just this 20 page long first essay. The Return of Philosophy itself and the RE are in parentheses. So, yeah, that's.

3:14 Wes: That's already a mark against you and

3:19 Mark: itself is in italics.

3:21 Wes: Although he does himself criticize wordplay, the kind of wordplay of the post structuralists, the postmodernists. But it's not like he does an excessive amount of it. He does some of it, but drawing conclusions because certain words sound like each other, because you can do free association like you're lying on the psychoanalytic couch. That's what starts to annoy me in excess.

3:40 Dylan: I mean, I think that the title is pretty, a little too clever by half. It sort of falls in that category. It's not so complicated once you read it. I had never heard of Badiou until doing Pel and getting requests from listeners about him. And I found it somewhat refreshing because his first chapter is this Thing is sort of like his own commentary in thinking about what the project of philosophy is and what comes immediately out of it is the sense that a whole bunch of his other work is an activity of doing that thing. And so that this is sort of a reflection on. On philosophy and what it can be doing, which has that sort of, to me, that kind of early modern sense of let's talk about what we're actually doing, though. I mean, of course, lots of people, I guess, have reflections in philosophy about what philosophy is, but it has that to me, that kind of feel to it.

4:33 Seth: He's been a name, as Dylan mentioned, that it's kind of been floating around. He's kind of. I don't know if his face is on the philosophical Mount Rushmore, but he's somewhere in the pantheon of French intellectuals. So I don't know what I was expecting when I read it, but it wasn't what I got, or at least not a hundred percent. I mean, first of all, the project itself is very constructive. He's trying to essentially argue against the people who are talking about the end of philosophy or the people who are trying to sublimate it into other disciplines.

And I thought the way he puts out the theses and it's sort of chunked up in these. Thesis explanation. Thesis explanation. I found it very approachable, which I honestly was not expecting. And at some point in here, he talks about his master Lacan. And I thought if he'd never mentioned Lacan or if there had been no conversation, I would not have picked up that thread out of the way he writes or what he was talking about. So I'm hoping that through the course of this evening, Wes's opinion is swayed because I feel like there's something here, I just don't know exactly what.

5:45 Mark: It sort of sneaks up on you that, as you say, it's broken into these theses. And most of them are. The descriptions are pretty short. So thesis one, we've got a page. Thesis two, we've got a page. Thesis three, we've got. Well, more two or three pages. Thesis four, most of the rest of the essay. And thesis four is where he actually gives the definition of philosophy, is where he brings in his technical terminology. So everything before that is just setting up like a very understandable. Here is our point that his French fellows, these post structuralists, they're all relativists and they're all sophists, according to him, arguing that there ultimately is no truth, you know, at least no truth with a capital T.

There's no truth, only interpretations. Right. That is, he definitely considers that line of Nietzsche would make him a sophist. And that is the goal of the philosopher, is to argue that, yes, there actually is truth, but then he has to eventually explain what truth is, which is overall sort of reminded me of. So it's definitely not going to be a correspondence theory of truth. Like, I know that from a lecture that, you know, he was specifically saying, everybody since Aristotle, the correspondence theory of truth, we reject that. We reject Aristotle.

So what is his alternative? Well, I think it's pretty much what we saw in Heidegger, which is something like create a clearing in being, and then bam, there's truth there. You know, some. Some sort of the growth of a novel thing, what he calls an event, some sui generis thing that whereas knowledge is just like the sort of repetition, the socially accepted, the stuff that's already known. And what a philosophic truth is, is something that somehow breaks out of that. That is not Even comprehensible in terms of the old language. So you can see why like Heidegger built his own language from scratch and why all these other philosophers that I think Badiou really admires and then he himself feel the need to invent their own language because nothing is going to capture it.

It has to be something, you know, a fundamentally new thing to come in the world.

7:47 Dylan: I mean, I think the characterization is accurate. I think maybe we should just start going through it because there's a whole bunch of the way it evolves. I think you begin to get his points and I don't want to start talking about that. In some ways he's trying to bring back Plato. He wants to get us back to early Plato. He wants to throw out old Plato, late Plato accusing him of being law bound because of a bad response to Socrates death, which I think he might even have a Lacanian interpretation of this death of Socrates and its effect on Plato to the sort of more aporetic combination of poetry and analysis that's aimed at truth, the language of operationalization of truth, all that stuff.

8:32 Mark: I agree that we need to get into the language here, but I think we can say, as Wes was saying, like the political point, the ultimate point of this is actually pretty simple, which is that philosophy specifically what you were talking about is the distinction between, he says this is page 10 in Plato's work. I have for a long time been struck by the dreadful reversal that occurs between Socrates apology and let's say book 10 of the laws, which is a dialogue we have not read. After all, Platonic meditation was rooted in the question of why Socrates was killed.

But what it ends with is a sort of nocturnal terrorism, a repressive apparatus that clamps down on impiety and the corruption of the youth, that is the two charges that led to Socrates execution. It seems in the end as if Socrates was legitimately put to death. So we don't have to look to the laws. I mean it's in the republic too, right? Having all these laws against impiety. And you could, you know, I don't know again as an interpretation of Plato. Well, I don't think he would have seen Socrates a type of impiety as real impiety. And maybe that's the.

But just the fact that there's an open endedness to early Plato where, where they're refuting, they're arguing, they're being respectful as opposed to dogmatic these, you know, like in the Republic and then I guess more so in the laws where it's just stating or the Timaeus that we read, right? It's just stating sort of dogmatically, here's the doctrine. And so this whole thing is just about philosophy has a tendency to become dogmatic. And he has a technical way of putting that of it puts itself as a presence in the void. And you know, we need to get into that stuff.

But when that happens, disaster occurs and he blames Stalinism and Hitler sort of Nazism is represented through Heidegger, but that these are all different kinds of ways that a philosopher became dogmatic in some way. And then this disaster in the world of ideas led to an actual disaster in the political world. And he says actually all disasters in the political world come from disasters and ideas or have their ultimate source in disasters and ideas. So this is very much like our Arendt on totalitarianism episode in that he's ultimately blaming philosophy in various sorts.

You know, not that Arendt was doing exactly this, but he's giving his own diagnosis of sort of where we went wrong, where philosophy went wrong. And you know, that's supposed to explain why the modern philosophers, the post structuralists have all backed off and become oh no, no, we're, we're just, you know, we're just one discourse among many. There are all these things. You're just relativism because people think that relativism is the only alternative to tyranny of terror.

11:07 Wes: So he's pointing to a very real tension right in Plato, this tension between the Socratic skeptic, the zetetic skeptic, who behaves dialectically to sort of prune the tree of accepted opinion and to create aporias and puzzles and operate in mainly a. In a negative way where you're led, I think to skepticism in the sense of a sort of agnostic what is true and the sense that truth seeking is going to be something that happens in perpetuity and that we're never going to get the truth with a capital T in any final sense.

11:49 Dylan: But it's important that we're always aimed at truth with a capital T. We're

11:53 Wes: always aimed at truth. Yeah, so that's what distinguishes the skeptic from the relativist. So even the early, you know, even early Plato and Socrates, they're. Socrates is very anti relativistic but arguably very much a skeptic. And those two things, and skepticism and relativism are actually completely incompatible. And I think one can associate relativism with authoritarianism as well. But anyway, I think there's a real tension between that and between the Plato, if we take him, non, ironically, in the Republic, or if we take the Republic as more than a, as a straightforward statement of Platonic policy, then yeah, that's essentially dogmatic.

And once you, you know, if you reach that dogmatic point where you, you have a creed that is no longer subject to doubt, this is what's right and this is what's good and therefore we should implement this politically. I think he's right that that does lead to terror and all the rest of it. You know, I thought of Simone de Beauvoir and the ethics of ambiguity and the serious man. Right. So it's the point where instead of just asking questions and being engaged in inquiry and understanding that there's a sort of tragic aspect to that, that we're always going to be at a distance from the truth.

In some sense you develop this idea that you can be connected to the absolute and have it fill up your lack to use the Lacanian term. Actually, I think de Beauvoir uses that as well.

13:19 Dylan: So I think the trick is understanding how you have action, some kind of directionality comes in for this conception that maintains that activity, that operationalizes a direction of inquiry towards truth, but doesn't ossify into a philosophy. You know, it's philosophizing without ossifying into a philosophy, but also somehow doing stuff. So, you know, I don't think he wants to have philosophy fall prey to a kind of navel gazing ineffectiveness.

13:56 Wes: The question here is whether philosophy is possible. I think so the question of what philosophy is and whether it's possible and what it's for, these are all related. And what is it for if it's just never gets anywhere, but if it does get anywhere and the result is terror, then it's not for anything good. So is there something in between where it does something productive without doing something terrible? That's the question. I think he tries to flesh out that middle realm and we should just

14:28 Mark: throw out, I mean, this whole book, which is a collection of essays, is called Conditions. And it's got a treat of what he calls the four conditions of philosophy. So the thing that keeps philosophy from being navel gazing is it acts on these sources that produce truths, lowercase T, truths which are science, art, politics and love. And these things, they're disparate discourses. Philosophy is about somehow seizing these truths with pincers. He uses this. We'll get into the weirdness of that analogy, that image, and does something with them, thinks them in their compossibility, as he says.

In some places, sets them forth as a vision, Right? So it gets very excited by doing. It does not itself just, like, churn out truths. It is not a machine for cranking. It is a tool for dealing with its conditions. These sort of more fundamental things that are just part of everyday life and experience of the world. And like, by somehow transforming those things into truths but not interpreting. So this is sort of the big question that I couldn't even answer, coming away with this. Like, what exactly is its relation to these other things? Seth, did you have any other preamble or should we just get right into the actual.

15:44 Seth: Let's get into it.

15:45 Wes: Dive. Dive into the text.

15:49 Mark: So, Thesis one. Philosophy today is paralyzed by its relation to its own history, which sort of makes sense. You know, when you study philosophy, you're generally studying the history of philosophy. Is that all he's saying?

16:01 Dylan: You get a little bit of his language at the very, very beginning where he says, philosophy is affected by belays in what I shall term a delocalization. It no longer knows if it has a proper place. He threw me off, like, just calling that delocalization. Philosophy doesn't know what it's doing is essentially what he's saying, doesn't know how it fits in what its proper place is. And when he says that if it doesn't, no longer if it has a proper place. This is his sort of indictment of sophists and relativists, as that philosophy doesn't know if it has anything to say in the sense of being truth seeking. But I also would take it as not knowing your proper place. Having read through the rest of the essay, having the wrong sense of place, then you lead you down this sort of tyrannical route as well.

16:50 Wes: The key phrase, I think here is. This paralysis, to be sure, is closely linked to philosophy's ongoing and pessimistic relationship to its glorious metaphysical past. The prevailing idea is that metaphysics is historically depleted, but that what lies beyond this depletion is as yet unavailable to us. So that's very well put. There's a time when philosophers like Hegel, right, they're more courageous, willing to go out on a limb and just go for it. Say, here's being, here's the way all this stuff works. And now we're too sophisticated for that, and now we're too cynical for that.

And that sophistication and cynicism is a product of the length of the literate history of the discipline. And it's only going to get worse and worse. It's kind of terrifying to think of where things are going to be in 2000 years when there's no way in hell you could possibly keep up with the literature, so to speak. But yeah, it's a. We're too sophisticated to be metaphysicians, so then we have to give up that ambition and be more modest. Then why are we doing philosophy? What is it for? What could it possibly be? Something must of necessity happen.

17:59 Mark: Yeah, right. In the next paragraph, he talks about this thing from Heidegger, which I'm not so familiar with. In his testimonial interview, he states, only a God can save us. He meant that the salvation of thought will not come by continuing on with previous philosophical affairs. Something must of necessity happen. So having already known by this point what, having watched a lecture of him talking about what an event is, well, I thought that's what, like all good philosophy was, something happening, you know, sort of out of the blue that is disruptive.

The fact that then Badiou is saying that Heidegger was wrong here, that the way philosophy does what it does when it's doing it right is an ongoing, productive thing. And in fact, he says that these sophists, a lot of the stuff they do really resembles philosophy. It uses a lot of the same tools. The difference is just, do you at the end of it, is it merely a negative critical exercise? Is it merely a relativistic exercise? Or does it actually, at the end, try to say something, get at truth

19:04 Wes: with a capital T. So the way he puts a contemporary philosophy combines a deconstruction of its past with an empty weight for its future. And then he says, my basic intention is to break with this diagnostic. He's talking not just about the cynicism of deconstruction, of the sophisticated, of that postmodern posture, where I'm not going to be so naive as to claim that I'm talking about anything right outside of the text, outside of language. But there's a quasi religious tone to all that language where there's always something momentous about to happen.

Right towards a such and such of such and such is the title of my book. It's going to happen. There's going to be a second coming. We're going to figure something out. But right now all we can do is play with words. That's what I think he's getting at. And then he says, I want to break with this diagnostic, but not by becoming an analytic philosopher, right? So he wants to avoid the neoclassical style. He wants to critique continental philosophy without becoming a Roger Scruton so to speak.

20:09 Dylan: And also without trying to become a messiah of some sort, right? And just in a sense before the one you just read, philosophy gets caught between the depletion of its historical possibility and, and the coming without concept of a salvational turnabout, kind of an awkward, awkward sentence, basically saying that, responding to Heidegger's way in which Heidegger's wrong, is that you have this problem of the depletion of philosophy in general, which it's the weight of its history, but you also don't want to have a messiah or some other kind of coming of God that will save everything.

20:47 Mark: Well, I'm seeing in this a little bit of like Hegel's complaints about mysticism, right, that you need, even though it is the goal of philosophy to express the inexpressible, but that doesn't mean that the goal of philosophy. He mentions Wittgenstein, Badiou mentions Wittgenstein of his think at the end of the Tractatus, of which one cannot speak, one must be silent. And so Wittgenstein, of course, then later invents language games. So this is his. The analytic side of sophistry, according to Badiou. So it's either just when we, we were talking about things like what is an intention or whatever, we're just getting at.

I'm thinking of that Anscombe book on intentions, following Wittgenstein, where we're just really analyzing the language and sort of how these things are used. We're doing a sort of sociological analysis. We're not getting at anything deeper than that. Or we could be what are the things that we can't talk about? Right, that are not captured by sociology, that are not. Well, then we have to just point at them or maybe mystically become one with them. But no, that's a false choice that we either just stick with existing language games, existing language, or we just have to point to the mysterious beyond.

Right? It's the same thing in Kant that, oh, you know, we could just do straightforward science on the shared phenomenal world, or we could just point mutely at the noumenal world because there's really nothing we could say about it. It's a parallel distinction, and I do insist. No, philosophy has to do exactly point at the thing that has been so far unarticulable and articulate something about it, actually be creative, be disruptive to the current language games and innovate. And so there's always going to be room for that in each historical epoch.

We should not feel like just because Spinoza and Aristotle and those guys did their thing so long ago, like, no, there's a new kind of metaphysics for this particular current age available to us.

22:41 Wes: Kant did think, right, that we could be engaged with the noumenal world in a sense, in the sense that we could think about it in practical terms, in regulative terms and all those, in all those ways. And then the other aspect of that is just critique, right. We can live within this weird realm in between metaphysics and science, which we could call critique. So this whole activity of defining the limits of knowledge. But that's kind of what continental philosophy took off with that, right? And critique kind of ballooned into the thing that it is doing this. I don't even know you, what you would call, call it exactly. But the point at which you get to saying there's nothing but the text or something like that, you've taken this idea of construction to its limit, right?

23:27 Dylan: And part of that thinking again about the sentence you read about our pessimistic relationship to our glorious metaphysical past, there's a kind of self hatred going on. Like we were so unsophisticated before because in our earnestness to work to understand the world and have metaphysical dispositions, that now we just got to give all that up because we're too cool for that kind of thing.

23:53 Wes: Yeah, I mean, if you came up with a monadology today, he laughed out of, laughed out of the lecture hall.

24:02 Mark: I feel like Badiou and Deleuze and there's some people that have physics physicists slash philosophers do come up with stuff that's that wacky. I don't understand any of that. It's nothing that we've read in full such that I could make heads or tails of. But I, you know, at least I get that there is a space that he is pointing to that there's some acknowledgment of minority of the philosophical community.

24:28 Dylan: Well, just as a, as a preview, eventually we're going to, we'll get to having a podcast on some interesting quantum mechanics interpretations. One's called QBism. And the explicit aim of at least some of the people that are doing that is they're doing the work that's a prelude to a more accurate ontology.

24:47 Wes: A more accurate ontology.

24:49 Dylan: Ontology. Yeah.

24:51 Wes: Based on quantum mechanics.

24:53 Dylan: Well, based on a specific interpretation of quantum mechanics, they lean towards a structure based interpretation of the world that has to do with probability and stuff like that.

25:04 Seth: What he's driving at, he makes clear on page five, right before thesis three, where he says it is a matter of breaking with historicism so that we may endeavor, like a Descartes or a Spinoza, to produce an autonomous legitimation of discourse. So I'm assuming what he means when he says that is very unlike Hegel. He's thinking of, like, Cartesian Meditations or Spinoza's ethics, which purport to be a series of reasonings that are with assumptions and premises and rules or discovered truths, and then movement forward in the discourse without. And the argument without reference to the history of philosophy, which, you know, if you basically say he's saying my heroes are Descartes and Spinoza, you at least get a sense what he's driving at and what he thinks, whether or not you believe they're autonomous discourses or autonomously legitimated discourses.

26:04 Dylan: Yeah. He's basically saying philosophy should be breeding Descartes and Spinozas rather than Descartes and Spinoza scholars.

26:13 Wes: Yeah, I think that's part of it. But also, what do we mean by historicism? Right. I mean, one great example is Nietzsche's genealogical method, where you say, suddenly your approach to a text or to a previous philosophical theory is not, okay, let me work this out and present reasons for and against all that stuff. It's, let me do psychology. Let me look at historical causes. Where does morality come from? Morality comes from ressentiment. And we're all familiar with criticisms of the genealogical method. It's like an ad hominem fallacy. Right.

Just because morality is based in ressentiment doesn't mean that it's not also something that could be true. But the tendency. Right, yeah. Is to be Nietzschean genealogists or to evaluate philosophy in terms of its historical causes, its historical effects, and to sort of become more like scholars in that sense and less like people who want to be aimed at the truth. Still in a skeptical way. Right. Still in the sense that we're not probably not going to ever get there, but not like the relativist who just gives up on that and then hides in this kind of underbrush of, let me be a kind of playful scholar and I'm going to psychoanalyze this author and so on and so forth.

27:34 Dylan: Yeah. At the beginning of Thesis two, which is Thesis two, is philosophy must break from within itself. With historicism, he says at the end of the first paragraph, philosophy has to have the audacity to present its concepts without first arraigning them before the tribunal of their historical moment. I think your description, Wes, of the kind of genealogy that Nietzsche was doing overall is not one of arraigning them, but one of trying to unearth them. And those are two different things.

28:06 Wes: Yeah, he talks about making decisions of thought without turning back towards a presupposed historical meaning that has been set for these decisions.

28:17 Mark: I mean, when I was reading that, I was feeling like that is not actually how we use the history of philosophy. Maybe if you're just a student or really just getting into it, you might just kind of like, oh, you're putting forth an idealism here in the 20th century. Oh, that is so out of date. Like, you're not actually engaging with it on its own terms or engaging with it intelligently. Like, well, let's look at past types of idealism and what was wrong with them. And is this new version, does it have any advantages over Berkeley and Fichte and other folks like that, that if we intelligently use the history philosophy to, you know, you put forth a new idea, you're trying to give a new construction?

Probably the best thing I can do is, like, who else in the history has said stuff that's similar to that? How does the thing that you're saying actually differ from that? What was wrong with those things in the first place? And does your new version transcend that?

29:09 Wes: That's not what he means by historicism, though. I mean, like, I think a better example is, say, we're thinking about doing an episode on, say, the feminist philosophy of science that I see as a form of historicism, where we say that we can evaluate the ideas based on the social and historical context in which they are generated, including the power relations, you know, going to Foucault here, the power relations of those contexts and the way those power relations are expressed in the particular ideas. That's what I see as the historicist element here. So we're evaluating arguments not on their merits exactly, not on whether they are true per se, but based on some genealogical method that traces the root of the idea, again, to power relations or social context or so on and so forth.

30:02 Mark: Yeah, I didn't get very far. We had a secondary source, Alain Badiou, Key Concepts that goes through his. At least this chapter that I was looking at just on philosophy in general, was going through the history of his thought sort of from the 60s to the present. And we definitely need to read some Althusser or Althusser, as people who don't speak French often pronounce it. But I guess that was his, you know, someone that Badiou was directly a student of. And that started very much in his so a neo Marxist, right? Althusser was one of the guys that like, what is cultural Marxism?

Like, look back to him and Marcuse and other folks like that. And so that's all very historicist, right? That's all very. I'm not going to evaluate the philosophy in itself. I'm going to see it as that is merely bourgeois ideology. That is something that is reflecting the conditions of your relationship to the means of production. And, you know, let's stop being philosophers altogether really, you know, as Marx would want, and get back to considering the actual material conditions rather than this mere superfluous stuff. So I don't know Baidu's whole story in transcending that whole view or whether he really does transcend that, whether he just has a more subtle view of that.

31:21 Wes: If you want to look for the kind of nugget or the essence of historicism, I think that word ideology is perfect, right? So the sense in which an idea just sort of represents the interest of some class as opposed to, you know, even though it purports to say what is natural or what is the truth.

31:39 Mark: Are we to. Thesis three, A definition of philosophy exists. And this is the place where he talks about the Tractatus that I mentioned.

31:49 Dylan: And this is where he brings up sophists. He says, in my view, this definition is a historical invariant. It is not a definition in the sense that it is a result or a production of a loss of sense. This definition is intrinsic. It enables us to distinguish philosophy from what it is not and indeed from what it has not been ever since Plato. It enables us to distinguish philosophy from what it is not, but which resembles. It resembles it a lot. In which, since Plato, we have called sophistry.

32:22 Mark: I saw a lot of resonances in reading this to the philosophy of science stuff that we've been doing recently. Just that, you know, the demarcation criteria that Popper was concerned with science from non science. This idea of an event sounds like, you know, a break in the paradigm for Kuhn, but actually the way that it cashes out is it's being able to articulate an unexpected new fact. You know, kind of how Lakatos describes a progressive scientific program. It's not even a matter of its whole break with an ongoing paradigm or something, but it's just being able to come up with a fact that nobody have even thought to look for before, unlike a dramatic refutation or whatever. I feel like what I'm seeing in here in Badiou sounds a little more like Lakatos in that respect.

33:12 Wes: He gives this interesting definition of sophism that kind of captures both the continental and analytic sides of sophistry at once, right? So modern sophists are those who maintain, in the school of the great Wittgenstein, that thought is caught in the following alternative that it either consists in effects of discourse in language games, or that it consists in silent indication and the pure showing of that which is subtracted from language's grasp. Sophists are those for whom the fundamental opposition is not between truth and error or errancy, but between speech and silence, that is, between that which can be said and that which is impossible to say.

Or again, between meaningful and meaningless statements. Mark, you're talking about the demarcation criterion and the Popperian criterion. Between what is falsifiable and what is not falsifiable does line up pretty well with the sort of famous distinction between meaningless statements and meaningful statements. And Wittgenstein's wanting to dismiss philosophical discourse as meaningless in the sense, right, of not really referring to anything, not being able to line up the language of philosophy with anything factual.

34:26 Mark: I do recall when we were doing the Tractatus, that there was an image, sort of toward the end, about a. A sieve that, you know, it's sort of like William James's blooming, buzzing confusion of experience. But since Tractatus, Wittgenstein is doing basic metaphysics, ontology, he's concerned about the basic units or the atomic facts, right? But there are going to be lots of different ways that you could. Patterns that you could lay over them and create different conceptual schemes out of them. They're not going to be incommensurate because you could always boil them back down to the atomic facts.

So I guess this is one of the questions I had in Badiou as we go forward here is where do these unexpected events, these novel predictions, these new philosophic truths, where do these actually come from? Are they merely new interpretations of experience? Because he says pretty clearly that's not it. He's not doing phenomenology.

35:23 Dylan: The same answer is, where does love come from? How do you fall in love? Where does that event come from? It's a creative act. I mean, he almost says exactly that later.

35:32 Mark: The problem with love, and we were going to have the essay on love as part of this episode, and I read it and I'm like, no, this is way. There's a whole new batch of terminology that's introduced here that, like, we. We're not going to handle today. But I think in saying all these, you Know that in science and art and politics all generate truths, lowercase t. That is to say, maybe the. The event is not. You know, sometimes he does talk about an event as like, well, a revolution. There's like. So falling in love is an event in your life that seems like it comes out of nowhere. But in this context, as a condition of philosophy, it is a way of generating truths. So like, where the truths of this somehow you discover something through love, just like you discover something through art. And it is a creative act. Anyway, I'm speculating here, but the discovering

36:20 Dylan: language and the creating language are. Have tension with them. Right. And I think that he would say that just like, you know, love is a creative act, that you can make some kind of account of it. But I mean, he says in the paragraph after Wes read that philosophy only exists in maintaining precisely that it endeavors to say what cannot be said. So you are in that sort of creative act of these events that aren't mere knowledge. Those are guideposts because they're the most creative moments in human history, according to him, I think, where we come up with new ideas. There was a time in human history where the idea of justice came about. And there was a time in human history when the notion that some kinds of physical quantities are all conserved.

37:09 Mark: And if you're a historicist or a cynic about creativity, then you'd say whenever you invent something like that or fall in love, no, you're taking the basic stuff that's around you and you're reconfiguring it in some way. Like that's fundamentally what creativity is.

37:24 Dylan: Yeah. So what is the thing that you've added? You've added something new to it. The mere reconfiguring doesn't explain it unless you just deny that there's anything new. You could go down that route. And Badiou is adamant against the notion that there's nothing new. That's the meaning of. I guess this isn't the meaning of a destination of philosophy exists. I think it would be philosophy exists would be the answer to that. New things exist, things that never have happened before, things that have never been thought. And that requires something new over and above mere rearrangement. And if you don't believe that there's something new, if you don't believe you can fall in love, then you're basically your sophist from Baidu's perspective, I think.

38:04 Mark: And while you could have a sort of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts kind of thing and still have a model whereby we're, of course, picking the things around us and reconfiguring them. But that doesn't preclude making something new. You know, he uses this term of the void that. We'll get to the quotes on this where. So when you're. You're making love, as the Air Supply song says, making love out of nothing at all. Back to the text. Where are we here?

38:29 Wes: The other interesting thing about sophistry is this. You know what he says? The attempt to replace the idea of truth with the idea of the rule. And then he talks about ancient sophistry. The ancient sophists already replaced truth with the mixture of force and convention. So this is really important because there's a deep. Plato thought there's a deep relationship between relativism and the idea that justice is reducible just to force. Right. We all become a thrasymachus in which justice is reducible to helping our friends and hurting our enemies.

Because if you give up on truth, then you essentially give up on persuasion. Persuasion in the sense of making an appeal to people's rationality. And what's left is it's either manipulation or it's the use of force to do what you need to do politically to get people to do things. Plato plays around with an ambiguity in the ancient Greek word for persuade, where in one, not aspect, but in one. Dylan, what is it? It's in the voice. In one voice it means persuade. In one voice it means obey. So this is a very important Platonic theme that he gets out here.

39:43 Mark: I guess I have a suggestion, given that we're nearing the end of part one, can we just give the definition that he comes up with to kind of get it out there? And then we're going to have to, in part two, deconstruct it very slowly. In fact, chapter two is just definition of philosophy. So it gives the conclusion of number one. It's all in number one. It's purely repetition. But just laying it out is a three page essay in which you could take every sentence and sort of analyze it like, what is that element? Oh, let's look back to the first essay and pull that apart.

40:18 Dylan: You're talking about Thesis four. You're not talking about the second essay.

40:22 Mark: Well, the second essay sort of repeats. It is a three page summation of what? The conclusion of Thesis four. Thesis four shows the work is a show your work portion.

40:32 Dylan: I was getting confused about parts and chapters because you're saying we're getting to the end of part one.

40:37 Mark: Part one of this discussion yes, of us. Okay, anybody want to try to take a stab? So we've said a definition of philosophy is possible. We've given a lot of hints about what this is, that it has to do with, you know, actually aiming toward truth and a little bit of what truth is.

40:56 Wes: We could give his definition on page 14, which is probably just very confusing, but. So philosophy is the evocation under the category of truth of a void that is located in accordance with the inversion of a succession and the other side of a limit. To do so, philosophy constructs the superposition of a fiction of knowledge and a fiction of art. It constructs an apparatus to seize truths, which is to say, to state that there are truths and to let itself be seized by this there are. And thus to affirm the unity of thought. The seizing is driven by the intensity of a love without object and draws up a persuasive strategy that has no stakes in power. The whole process is prescribed by the conditions that are art, science, love, and politics in their eventual figures. Last, this process is polarized by a specific adversary, namely, the sophist Simple.

41:55 Mark: We could do a little bit to deconstruct that just in the next. So under the category of truth of a void. I've tried to say a little what that is just. But did you have a concise. Wes, it sounded like you had an actual concise definition of the void, maybe from Scruton.

42:10 Wes: From what I understand, the void is a reference to an idea that he got from set theory, which is that one can kind of deduce arithmetic and counting from the null set. So you start out with the set that. Not the set that has itself as a member. Or is that.

42:28 Dylan: Yeah, a set with no members is called empty or null set.

42:32 Wes: So the idea is that our ontology is somehow. It sounds like almost like he's thinking of an ontology based in nothingness by analogy to the idea that something important in mathematics can be grounded in the null set. Let's just put it that way.

42:49 Dylan: Just reminding myself on Wikipedia, right? If a null set is a measurable set that has measure zero, it can be categorized by a set that can be covered by a countable union of intervals of an arbitrary small total length. It's not to be confused with an empty set. So an example is that every finite and countably infinite set of real numbers is a null set. For example, the set of natural numbers and the set of rational numbers are both countably infinite and therefore are null sets when considered as subsets of the real numbers. So as soon as you say that, you begin to understand that there's something active about the null set if all the real numbers. Okay, so there's more to say, certainly, about understanding what you would mean by that. But when you say. When we say that the void is something like he's referring to a null set kind of idea, it makes a lot more sense to me. Now.

43:45 Wes: Shall I read the Scruton? Because it's very brief. Why should Badu take set theory as an authority for such vast claims about ontology? The answer is that he sees set theory as ontology, the science that tells us what ultimately exists. But, and here's the stunning part, set theory does not presuppose the existence of anything. It deals only in sets. And all the sets required by arithmetic, all the numbers can be constructed from phi, the empty set, the set of all things that are not identical with themselves. That's what I was searching for. Thus, for zero, put phi.

For one, the set whose only member is phi. For two, the set whose members are phi and the set whose only member is phi. And so on. This well known method of constructing arithmetic from no ontological assumptions is taken by Badiou in the opposite sense as showing that the ultimate reality is phi, le vide, or the void, as his translators put it. Since mathematics is ontology, he argues, we can conclude that the world consists in multiplicity and the void. That's the basic idea.

44:46 Mark: Okay, so we're still in the first part of the first sentence. I guess what I was trying to get at is it actually reminded me of Lacan. So in Lacan we have the symbolic order. So when he talks about a succession and a limit, like that's sort of the symbolic order, the normal language, the normal knowledge, the normal paradigm that we're in. And somehow out of the void, out of an unexpected place, out of an emptiness, a clearing of being, that you clear away all that stuff you say, I'm not going to let everyday language and, you know, the common sense so cloud my thinking.

I'm going to make a space, a void, where something actually new and original can come out, that is the other side of the limit, that is in the inversion of that succession. And so that's what philosophy is evoking, the void under the category of truth. To create something like that, to do so, philosophy constructs the superposition of a fiction of knowledge and a fiction of art. We'll have to get at what that is. That wasn't very clear to me. It constructs an apparatus to seize truths, to state that There are truths. And let it be seized by this.

There are. In other words, to find it fascinating to find it a mate like he uses. That's one of those double entendres. That seizure could mean grabbing something or could also mean having a seizure, being filled up by this thing. So philosophy is bringing forth something to dazzle us and to get a hold of and scrutinize. And the seizing is driven by the intensity of a love without object. You know, sort of the love of wisdom, philosophy for philosophy's sake. It is a creative purposelessness. It draws up a persuasive strategy that is no stakes in power.

Again, we're not doing this for any external pragmatic reason. We're just doing it for the love of the thing.

46:29 Wes: The no stakes in power is a hit at the historicist. Right. The reduction to power relations. But yeah, go ahead.

46:36 Mark: The whole process is prescribed by these conditions. In other words, art, science, love and politics. They require, they recommend, they prescribe that we do philosophy, that we somehow engage with them. And lastly, this process is polarized by a specific adversary, namely the sophist, which we'll have to get into. But, you know, it's basically that the sophist is doing similar things to us. You know, I was, I was thinking about this as I often describe philosophy to people that might think it's just a useless. Or like, why would you study philosophy?

Well, it's critical thinking. It's what the lawyers do. But that's the sophist definition. It's just a tool set. Like, you're not supposed to know that we use the same tool set as the sophist, but we actually try to get to this thing. And having the sophist there to bounce off of, according to Badiou, is like a requirement to keeping philosophy honest to keep it from becoming dogmatism somehow.

47:29 Wes: Yeah, philosophy is negative in that sense and dialectical. Yeah, subtractive, where we start with the sophistical statements and we reveal their internal contradictions and all the rest. And I think the void has something to do with the skeptical position. Right. Ultimately. But we should. I think we should work through thesis for. And yeah, some of this will actually be clear once we do that.

47:51 Dylan: But one quick comment is I, I think power might be. His reference to power is a hit at power relation theory. But I also took it as being more Socratic. Socrates didn't become a philosopher king and had no intention of doing so. I think it's that reference. You're not thrasymachus or callicles right? You're not Gorgias, you're Socrates.

48:12 Mark: I was being more influenced by Alwan because Wes was always, from the beginning of this podcast, I think, very much influenced by Socrates of philosophy. It should be an essentially useless activity. So this sort of the goal of life according to Aristotle ends up being just using our rational faculty, just doing philosophy, because that is our, our excellence. Not because you want to convince somebody of a law, court of something, or help science or help, you know, art or what, whatever. It's just a thing for itself.

48:46 Wes: I'm not sure if I agree with myself, but.

48:49 Mark: And we'll get into the details of this in Part two supporters, you should hear that as the next thing in your feed. If you are subscribed through Apple, you're going to have to wait till next week.

48:59 Wes: Sorry.

49:00 Mark: Maybe you want to subscribe to our website instead.