Towards Affective Metaphysics

The indomitable David Liu is presenting on his project to create an "affective metaphysics," and by affect he means far more than human emotion, but " anything suffered - physical, mental , or otherwise - by any subject, be it human, iron, or whatever." And to suffer is to interpenetrate, to interface. While it has been said in the past that there are few more mandarin pursuits than metaphysics, the need for metaphysical revival has become pressing as digital technologies tear down our common-sense - or should I say medieval? - divisions of the world into individual objects. This ebb and flow, the collapse of these once-sacred divisions of the world, while first brought to widespread attention by literary criticism, actually has much deeper roots, and any project to revise our metaphysics, as to not fall into simplistic nihilism or return to fundamentalist dogmatism, will require a keen sense of history. The study of "New Media" focuses far too much on the "new": As Liu puts it in his translation of the Hebrew Qohelet, "An age goes, an age comes go, but the earth ever stands."

Liu draws a line of flight to escape traditional metaphysics by drawing on the presocratic philosopher Paremendies of Elea, who in a little-known fragment destroys the traditional metaphysical mind-world distinction in one fell swoop: "because the same thing is there for thinking and for being". Then, Anaximander notes how the innumerable (apeiron), a sort of primordial flux, can be the basis of our metaphysics, leaving as Parmenides put it "the thing which seem had to have genuine existence, permeating all things completely". From this route, Liu inspects Plato himself, noting that even in his Republic, which traditionally makes the division between rational intellect and emotional affect, "this contradiction in Plato is made even more evident by his own admission that the implementation of his politeia requires a homopatheia (same feeling) and a homonoia (same mind)." He then goes onto examples ranging from Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia to Baroque music.

Interrupting thousand-year reign of Platonic anti-affective metaphysics, "the last humanist" Vico, who revives the banished poetic impulse in metaphysics: " Hence poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world, must have begun with a metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined as that of these first men must have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination. This metaphysics was their poetry..." This is brought to the a keel by Nietzsche, who in his "Birth of Tragedy" draws the Platonic division of the world into individual objects, which Nietzsche phrases as the principium m individuationis (similar to the individuation of Simondon), not into the metaphysic fabric of reality itself, but instead in the ephemeral world of dreams - "So in the midst of a world of torments the individual human being sits quietly, supported by and trusting in the principium individuationis. In fact, we might say of Apollo that in him the unshaken faith in this principium and the clam repose of the man wrapped in it receive their most sublime expression; and we might call Apollo himself the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis, thorough whose gestures and eyes all the joy and wisdom of "illusion," together with its beauty, speak to us." In fact, it is from these dreams, I would put it, that technology comes - technology is dreams made flesh - and in this day and age, digital flesh.

As myself and Paolo went over in our previous presentation on the history and future of knowledge representation, there are some things that are "fuzzy", difficult to categorize, and so reveal the gap between our cognitive understanding and the "Other" of the world: "The tremendous terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumbfounded by the cognitive form of phenomenon because the principle of sufficient reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to suffer an exception. If we add to this terror the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse of the principium individuationis we steal a glimpse into the nature of the Dionysian, which is brought home to us most intimately by the analogy of intoxication." Indeed, this inability to individuate can be a blessing, as it helps us realize the affective nature of our existence, and so replaces the loneliness of individuals, to quote Quine, lost in their "preference for deserts" with an affective metaphysical collectivity as rich as jungle of the Amazons.