Sorglose Nacht

Overview

Leibniz’s famous 1695 essay (in long form: A new system of the nature and communication of substances, and also of the union that exists between the soul and the body) was the introduction to a broad European readership of his original metaphysical ideas (many of which he had come to a decade earlier).

Outline

1. This paper is published in a scholarly journal - it is not written in the popular style.
2. Physics needs more than the concept of matter (”extended mass”), it also needs an operative concept of force.
3. At first, Leibniz favored an idea of matter and empty space (because it gives us a physics we can always “picture”).
   1. The matter itself, he realized, doesn’t yield any real unities. Because matter, by its nature is always divisible into smaller matter, and thus never a unity per se.
   2. Likewise, he thinks, geometrical points can’t yield existential unities, because points aren’t real extant stuff.
   3. In order to get a unity (a thing that’s deep down really just one thing), he needed a “real and living” point.
      1. These points, he realized, must be something like our idea of a soul - must be a force - that is, like appetition (desire and its low-grade analogs) and sentiment (belief, feeling).
      2. We can use these substantial forms to solve general (not particular) problems in natural science. Indeed, they are what Aristotle calls ‘first entelechies’.
      3. Leibniz calls them ‘basic forces’ for intelligibility, and because they involve actuality and activeness.
4. These forms and souls had to be indivisible.
   1. However, since this is the case, it also had to be the case that they were created and annihillated (rather than assembled/dismantled).
   2. This means that all substances were created with the universe, survive its duration, and will die with it.
5. There are at least two types of simple substances, though: rational souls (minds) and other souls. Compared with the latter, our minds are “like little Gods.”
   1. So, where God has imposed an order on matter, minds have special laws that raise them above that, or that matter works for minds (the punishment of the wicked, and the happiness of the good).
6. Since we are saying that souls (rather than atoms) last forever, one might be disposed to imagine that they pass from body to body. Because of microscopic observation, Leibniz is rather inclined to conclude that the animal simply begins and then just adds on other bits to itself in growth and development.
7. But what about the end of the animal, then? Since it is unreasonable to assume that souls just occupy a chaotic material station after death, the only tenable position is that not merely the soul but the animal is conserved (albeit in much smaller form) after death.
   1. This entails that rather than a transporting of souls, there is merely a continuous transforming, and that there is no death in a metaphysical sense.
8. God, however, has provided for rational souls so well that nothing can ever make them lose the “moral qualities of their personhood”.
   1. Thus it can be said that everything tends to not merely the perfection of the universe in general, but of these creatures in particular (who are destined to reach such a high degree of happiness that it affects the universe as a whole!)
9. Leibniz now attributes something like this view (that things don’t die, just appear and disappear) to Hippocrates, Parmenides, and Melissus.
10. The moderns take there to only be a quantitative difference - i.e. large and small - between the machines of nature and of humans, rather than a qualitative one. This is too far.
    1. For Leibniz the machines of nature and of humans differ not only by degree, but in kind. He isolates three differences:
       1. Nature’s machines are so well equipped as to never succumb to accidental destruction.
       2. Nature’s machines have a truly infinite number of parts.
       3. Nature’s machines remain the same, although they are (beautiful here:) “folded together differently.”
11. Furthermore, the soul is a true unity (which is what we call the ‘I’). Where human machines are more like armies of parts, and thus require unified parts somewhere.
    1. Since these unified parts clearly can’t be material (which for Leibniz is infinite in its compositional complexity). Rather we need something like “atoms of substance” (contra atoms of matter).
    2. These atoms of substance are:
       1. the sources of activity
       2. the basic reason for the composition of things (the explanation for material unities)
       3. the ultimate elements in the analysis of substantial things
    3. They might be called metaphysical points. They are not merely mathematical points because they have something alive in them (a kind of perception).
    4. So where material points seem indivisible but are not, and mathematical points are indivisible but are not things, only forms or souls/metaphysical points are both exact and real.
12. This generates a problem viz the soul’s communion with the body. The Cartesian/Malebranchean position is that senses and the motor behind actions is that God manually coordinates our activity/sensation with our volition, as well as causality in general.
13. Leibniz thinks that this is motivated right (its negative argument is good), but that its positive argument is wrong.
    1. In other words, it’s right that one created thing has no real influence on another and that all things are continually produced by the power of God, but relying on a deus ex machina is ostensibly the same as relying on miracles.
    2. Leibniz wants to explain how God coordinates causality.
14. Leibniz thinks that this happens because God initially created each soul to be spontaneous (aka. not causally affected by other monads), but meanwhile to just be in perfect conformity to things outside it.
    1. This entails that the internal perceptions of our souls are purely mental phenomena. The constitution of the soul “gives the substance a representative nature”: or, each substance reflects the entire universe in itself according to its particular point of view.
    2. Thus, the interaction of the body and the soul works by means of a universal spontaneous coordination that is the property of every substance.
    3. This theory has the charm of explaining how the soul resides in the body: e.g. in the same way that a unity is in a multitude.
15. Why couldn’t souls be like formal, free automatons? (This question will turn out not to answer itself.)
    1. Since the soul represents the entire universe (although with differing degrees of clarity), conversely, the body is adpated to the soul, and this gives us the sense of causal mind-body interaction.
16. It also has the advantage of showing that we are not susceptible to any kind of material causal determinism.
    1. Every mind is like a world apart: self-sufficient, independent of every other created thing, involving the infinite, and expressing the universe.
    2. It is also meant to be another proof of God that so many interacting substances do so harmoniously, a fact which implies that they share a common cause.
17. This system finally also allows us to understand “x acted on y and z” as “A change occurred in x which intelligibly explains changes in y and z, in such a way that we can conclude that when God was decreeing what substances were to exist he chose y and z so as to fit with the already chosen x.”
    1. That is, if matter is not substance, then something like this story is the only coherent way to explain the appearance of material causality.
18. This will prove useful in physics, despite its metaphysical character.

Overview

A Stranger, a student of Parmenides, will set out to define the Sophist. Upon reaching the conclusion that the Sophist is one who sells the appearance of wisdom, he will announce that in order to prove this conclusion, an investigation into the nature of non-Being will be required. This will be approached by an investigation into Being itself, which will be divided into five great kinds. By analyzing these, he will prove that the negation of not-being operates on the predicate being, not the subject. Further, negation simply implies difference, not opposition.

Background

This is a late Platonic Dialogue. After criticizing the Middle Period conception of the forms (the theory of separate, immaterial forms) in Parmenides. The Sophist and Statesman show the author’s increasing interest in mundane and practical knowledge.

The Setup

SOCRATES asks an Eleatic STRANGER to help him define the terms “statesman”, “sophist”, and “philosopher”. They start with Sophist. Socrates, remembering the method employed in Parmenides by its’ namesake, asks whether the stranger would like to proceed by Q&A. The Stranger indicates that he would, if someone would not give him a lot of sass-back, but just acquiesce to his points (qua young Aristoteles in Parmenides). Socrates proposes that THEAETETUS will do just that.

1. DIAIRESIS: Since Sophists are slippery to define, the Stranger suggests that they begin by using their proposed method on something easier; say, an angler.
   1. Str. defines two classes of arts: productive (or creative) and acquisitive. Anglers belong to the acquisitive class, which can itself be separated into two: exchange and conquest. Conquest may be further separated into hunting and fighting. Hunting can be divided into animal hunting and the hunting of lifeless things. Animal hunting can be divided into by-land and by-water. By-water into fowling and fishing. Fishing into enclosure (fishing by nets) and striking (by spear). Striking into firing (by night) and barbing (by day). Barb-fishing into spearing and angling (by hook).
   2. This method of definition-finding is called diairesis. Now we’re going to try this method on the Sophist.
   3. The Sophist is acquisitive, and further is a hunter. And a by-land hunter at that.
      1. Hunting on land has two divisions: Hunting tame and wild animals.
      2. Tame animals into hunting with violence [piracy, tyranny], and hunting with persuasion [lawyer, orator].
      3. Persuasion into public and private.
      4. Private into receiving hire and bringing gifts (lovers).
      5. For hire into those whose reward is virtue and whose is money. The latter of these is the Sophist.
   4. Alternatively the Sophist could follow the path of exchange. Exchange divides into giving and selling.
      1. Selling into the sale of one’s own productions (retailers), the sale of others’ (merchants).
      2. Merchants into those who provide food for the body, and for the soul (music, paintings, marionette playing, knowledge).
      3. Food for the soul -> display and (n). (n) -> sale of knowledge of virtue and sale of other kinds of knowledge (art-seller). The former is the Sophist.
   5. A third alternative is that the Sophist follows the path of the fighting arts. This into competitive and pugnacious.
      1. Pugnacious into violent (bodily strength) and controversy (words). Controversey into forensic and disputation. Disputation into without rules and by rules (argumentation). Argumentation into wasting and making money. The later of which is Sophistry.
   6. Fourth, we run down this line: Let’s start with the arts of discernment. This can be split into a) arts that split like from like and b) those that split better from worse.
      1. The latter is called purification, which can be split into purification of living things and of inanimate objects. The former can be split into purification of bodies and souls. The latter can be split into: the purification of vice and of ignorance. (Alternatively the former can be split into gymnastic and medicine.)
      2. The purification of ignorance requires instruction, which can be split into admonition (resolves stupidity - ignorance which thinks it’s knowledgeable), and the dialectical remedy for plain ignorance. The latter of these is the domain of the Sophists.
   7. Thus the Sophist is determined to be:
      1. A paid hunter after wealth and youth (c).
      2. A merchant in the goods of the soul, a retailer of these wares (and one who manufactures them) (d).
      3. A hero of debate (e).
      4. A purger of souls, clearing away notions obstructive to knowledge (f).
2. COMBINATION: With five definitions in hand, they set out to find the common elements of contained within the five.
   1. The Sophist is a disputer, and teaches disputation. That is, the art of argumentation about anything. This means that the Sophists (otherwise they would be bankrupt) are assumed to have knowledge about everything. Thus, Sophists are in possession of a conjectural, non-truthful knowledge of all things.
   2. Sophists thus imitate wisdom, he is like a juggler. And the imitative art, like anything, can be split: a) likeness-making (painters) and b) appearance-making (that is, where one could not get a broad enough perspective on the reality to even understand if there is a likeness or not.
   3. And now, if the essence of the sophist is that he produces appearances, and more precisely false appearances. He imitates the wise man (Sophist 268b-c). But how can we make sense of this appearing but not being, this stating things but not true things? We have to contend once again with Parmenides’ old doctrine: “He who says that falsehood exists has the audacity to assert the being of not-being.”
3. THE RETURN OF PLATO’S BEARD:
   1. To define the sophist as an expert in deception, as someone who produces false appearances by means of statements, the Stranger needs to show that Parmenides was wrong; he needs to demonstrate that it is possible to say and to think that things that are not are, and to do so without contradiction.
      1. We can’t say “things which are not” nor “what is not” because in doing so we attribute singularity or plurality to non-Being, which is inapplicable.
      2. This is the basic Quinean position on Plato: by admitting things that aren’t, you are already contradicting yourself. (Note that this is what propositional logic theoretically resolves - contra term logic - via bound variables.)
   2. Parricide?
      1. We can’t make the “image”/non-being analogy, because the Sophist will show that
         by defining images, we predicate non-being.
      2. False opinion seems to think that things are not are, or vice versa.
      3. Hence, the Stranger will be forced to test the philosophy of Parmenides.
   3. Investigating Being: Number
      1. First of all, all previous theories of being may have taken the concept of “being” as lightly as Theaet. used to take non-being. Thus, let us investigate being first.
      2. Both the concepts of multiplicity and unity run into problems when you assert them of being. Starting with unity, we go through the standard Purity-F regimen:
         1. If Being is one then it is both being and one, and hence not one.
         2. Being can’t parts (a beginning, end).
         3. Yet, if being is not one, it lacks unity, and hence is not whole (everything). Etc.
      3. Hence, maybe we need to throw away the idea that Being is either one or two.
   4. Investigating Being II: Essence
      1. Let’s appeal to various notions of essence (essentially: materialist and Platonic notions).
      2. Starting with the materialists, Str. wants to suggest that being is that which has any power to affect another. Now the appeal is that given bodies (changing) and souls (unchanging; essential).
      3. Further, Being must contain both the movable (insofar as it contains mind, life, and soul) and unmovable (insofar as it contains sameness, etc).
      4. Which is a bit like the problems of (c) above, insofar as both rest and motion require predication, which is thus a third term.
      5. But if the many cannot be one, and the one cannot be many, how again will we attribute being to motion or to rest? In other words, we need an account of how one thing can be called by many names.
   5. Return to Participation: To show that one thing can be called by many names and that some names specify the object but mis-describe it, the Stranger introduces some machinery. He proposes that some kinds can partake of other kinds (these terms appear to be synonyms and to introduce an asymmetrical relation between an object and a property it has), whereas some kinds cannot blend with each other.
      1. Further, there are great kinds that enable the blending of kinds, much as vowels enable consonants to fit together. Even as some expertise is required to determine which letters can associate with which, so dialectic is required to determine which kinds blend and which do not, and which kinds hold everything together and make them capable of blending, and which are causes of division.
      2. The Stranger announces that there are five great kinds. He will ask two questions about them: (1) what are they like? and (2) what capacity do they have to associate with each other? The kinds to be discussed are: motion, rest, being, sameness and difference. Note that these five are not claimed to be exhaustive of all great kinds. Presumably, there are others, such as are discussed in the second part of Parmenides.
4. THE FIVE GREAT KINDS: TWO QUESTIONS
   1. The Stranger addresses question (1): What is each of the great kinds like? He distinguishes each of the five kinds from one another, starting with being, motion, and rest.
      1. Motion and rest, as opposites, do not associate with each other; but being associates with both, since both of them are. Being must be a third thing distinct from them:
      2. Similarly, sameness and difference are distinct from motion and rest. Furthermore, being is distinct from sameness. They have to be different, because if they were not, when we say that motion and rest both are, we could substitute the same, and motion would be the same as rest.
      3. Finally, the Stranger distinguishes difference from being. This argument introduces a crucial distinction between two modes of predication.
      4. Difference is distinct from being, because difference is always in relation to other things (pros alla) and more precisely in relation to something different (pros heteron), whereas being is both itself by itself (auto kath hauto) and in relation to other things (pros alla).
   2. Question (2): The Blending of Kinds
      1. The Stranger carries out the analysis for one great kind, motion, and argues very systematically that motion is non-identical with each of the other four kinds (motion is not rest, not the same, and so on), but partakes of three of the four - all but rest.
      2. The whole analysis is implemented with two relations: non-identity (F is not G, because F partakes of difference from G), and positive predication (F is G, because F partakes of G). Note that this leaves out negative predication - which is what one would think Plato would want to use to handle the problem of false statement.
5. NEGATION
   1. The Stranger made a serious mistake about negation in the last two (constructive) puzzles about not-being earlier in the dialogue. The mistake was to suppose that the negation in “not-being” indicates the opposite of being (opposites are polar incompatibles, and these include polar contraries, like black and white, which have some intermediate between them, and polar contradictories, like odd and even, and motion and rest, which do not).
      1. The opposite of being (its polar contradictory) is nothing. Parmenides was right to object that we cannot speak or think about nothing. If any speaking or thinking is going on, we are speaking or thinking about something. The Stranger showed in the first three (destructive) puzzles about not-being that any attempt to refer to nothing fails.
      2. But Parmenides was wrong to suppose that all talk about what is not is attempted talk about nothing.
      3. The problem of not-being is solved by recognizing two things: (1) the negation operates on the predicate, not the subject; (2) the negation need not specify the opposite of the item negated but only something different from it.
      4. Now, the negation appears to specify part of a wider kind which is determined by the positive term (e.g. large) that is negated (in this case size). Like varieties of applied mathematics, whose content is supplied by the domain to which the knowledge is applied, there are kinds of difference whose content is supplied by the objects differentiated.
      5. A kind of difference (say size) contains two parts, which are opposites (polar contradictories), such as large and not-large. Let us call this kind an incompatibility range.
   2. The Stranger distinguishes between names and verbs. A verb is a sign that is set over actions (or properties); a name is a sign that is set over the things that perform the actions (or have the properties). There cannot be a sentence that is simply a string of names or a string of verbs. A statement must fit a name together with a verb.
      1. The central idea is very simple. Statements are structured.
      2. For instance, “Theaetetus is sitting” is true, because “sitting” specifies something that is about Theaetetus, who is currently sitting. “Theaetetus is flying” is false, because “flying” specifies something different from what is about Theaetetus.
      3. As noted above (§4.b.ii), we need negative predication to explain the false statement: If “Theaetetus is flying” is false, it is false because the negative predication “Theaetetus is not flying” is true.
      4. The analysis of negative predication (as distinct from non-identity) is complex. This is what scholars of the Sophist talk about; which is a lot more detailed than we care to be.
6. MUTATIS MUTANDIS…
   1. The Sophist was left closed in the imitative art, which was a kind of creation. But now, we’re going to go back and note that creation is of two kinds: human and divine.
      1. Inside the human kind of creation, we have a split (again) between representational creation and appearance-based creation. Now, from above we remember that the latter was to partake of falsehood, it it could be shown that falsehood was a part of real being. We have now accomplished this, and thus, it is so.
      2. This diairesis continues until we come to our definition of a Sophist: “he…who…is an imitator of appearance, and is separated from the class of phantastic which is a branch of image-making into that further division of creation, the juggling of words, a creation human, and not divine-any one who affirms the real Sophist to be of this blood and lineage will say the very truth.”

Continental Philosophy, several days ago, posted this video, for which I have taken pause several times:

The interviewer asks Cixous, “So particularity and universality are not … opposed to each other?” to which she replies, “oh, no.”

Oh, certainly no. On the one hand: Universality is “universally accessible” and particularity is “particularly located”. Nothing - which is to say no-thing in particular - is universally located or particularly accessible [JLN: “There is no meaning if meaning is not shared.”]. These adjectives are modal functors of Being separated from comparison or reciprocal measure by immediacy, access, immediacy of access. They don’t even occupy the same circuit.

Certainly not. On the other hand: One decides that in fact the difference is not located somewhere at the referent - of course, always, referents or nothing - of universality and particularity, that these circumscriptions do not describe or represent a world that is a circuit of their sameness and difference, but merely suture a gash at the heart of representation.

For instance, Ghandi’s “..way of being typical[ly] Indian was also a way of getting close to all other religions, and all other philosophies in the world…”

The strategies, the movements of any artistic or ideological work, for ontological reasons (and yes, that syntagm can only operate on an ontic register), can only get close to the irreducible difference (here: gender or cultural difference) of shattered and incontrovertibly particular being, because, although there is no being-in-general, political work must be done.

And of course, there is work (the work of representation, closure, the West), and then there is the nudge, the touch, of Being. All at once, universally in particular. Which is to say, operating here at the joint, we are all a little ambivalent.

Last year, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI wrote this document to commemorate the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Allied forces landing in Normandy in 1944. It is, as one might expect, an almost stoically well-written text. Toward the front:

They [the first-generation post-war politicians] did not want to found a state upon religious faith, but rather a state informed by moral reason, yet it was their faith that helped them to raise up again a reason once distorted by, and held in thrall to ideological tyranny.

Across Europe ran a frontier, and not just across our continent, but dividing the entire world. A great part of Central Europe and Eastern Europe came under the domination of an ideology that subjected state to party, in the end, effacing the difference. Here, again, the result was the rule of lies.

He writes then that if post-war Europe experienced a period of relative peace, South-East Asia, the Middle East, most of Africa, and parts of the Europe on the eastern side of “the frontier” experienced nothing less than a sustained and bloody arc of armed conflict. He suggests that two (somewhat) new symptoms seemingly common among these disperate conflicts were:

1. The collapse of the “cohesiveness of law” - that is, the usurping of conscience-based order by “the cynicism of ideology”, which he corrleates at least in part with the interests of big business. The “good,” he suggests, “is shoved aside by the expedient, and might setup in the place of right.”
2. The phenomenon of terror, which, as he notes, “so often has its source in standing injustice, not addressed by effective measures.” The forces which have access to “right and law” of course must also have access to “carefully calibrated force,” to combat the phenomenon, but, he firmly intones, “is it important to vouchsafe forgiveness in advance, in order that the circle of violence may be broken.”

He continues, “In all these cases it is important that no one particular power act as the champion of justice. All too easily can interest interfere with action, and contaminate one’s view of what is just. Most urgent is a genuine jus genitum, free from hegemonic predominance and action which follows from it: only thus can it remain clear that what is at stake is the defense of collective law and right, and those also of them who stand, so to speak, on the other side.”

A secular viewpoint of enlightened reason, he says, is opposed to a fanatical fundamentalist religious viewpoint. There are pathologies of reason (say, Pol Pot) and of religion. Both pathologies “are life threatening for peace - indeed, in an age of global power structures, for humanity as a whole,” a formation that I think Derrida himself would have liked. In the following jarring short paragraph, he continues:

To a reason fallen ill, all recognition of definitively valid values, all that stands on the truth capacity of reason, appears finally as fundamentalism. All that remains is reason’s dissolution, its deconstruction, as, for example, Jacques Derrida has set it out for us. He has “deconstructed” hospitality, democracy, the state and finally, the concept of terrorism, only to stand in horror in the face of the events of September 11th. A form of reason that can acknowledge only itself and the empirical conscience paralyzes and dismembers itself.

The fact that he seems to accuse Derrida of relativism must be put aside. It is an old and long-standing tradition to imagine that Derrida or deconstruction in itself clearly indicates a sort of ethical relativism. Doubtless, there is more to be said, but not here. Back to the Cardinal’s ontology: “God himself is Logos,” he says, “the rational first cause of all reality, the creative reason out of which the world came to be, and which is reflected in the world. God is Logos - Meaning, Reason, Word, and so it is through the way of reason that man encounters God, through the espousal of a reason that is not blind to the moral dimension of Being.” This theology will be the condition of possibility absolute and sovereign reason and absolute justice, which is commented on shortly in the amazing formulation, “There is a justice love will not annul.”

Again, ontological arguments between the Pope and Derrida are unproductive, and at any rate I am unqualified to arbitrate them. But, is there a justice love will not annul? What a question. I really don’t know how to even begin to think it. But it is now being thought. I am intrigued.

Meanwhile, I think that short of what might be called their respective theologies, Benedict might find himself much closer to what might be called the ethical Derrida than he seems to think. This fact is littered through the above quotes. It is clear. From one small example:

I believe it is necessary, by way of a philosophical, historical analysis, to deconstruct the political theology of sovereignty…But at the same time you shouldn’t think that you must fight for the dissolution pure and simple of all sovereignty: that is neither realistic nor desirable. There are effects of sovereignty which in my view are still politically useful in the fight against certain forces or international concentrations of forces that sneer at sovereignty.

And finally,

My intent here is not anti-religious, it is not a matter of waging war on the religious messianisms properly speaking, that is to say Judaic, Christian, Islamic. But it is a matter of marking a place where these messianisms are exceeded by messianicity, that is to say by that waiting without waiting, without horizon for the event to come, the democracy to come with all its contradictions. And I believe we must seek today, very cautiously, to give force and form to this messianicity, without giving in to the old concepts of politics (sovereignism, territorialised nation-state), without giving in to the Churches or to the religious powers, theologico-political or theocratic of all orders, whether they be the theocracies of the Islamic Middle East, or whether they be, disguised, the theocracies of the West…

It is always a fine moment when I pop down Clay Shirky’s newest addition to his Networks, Economics & Culture mailing list, and the newest edition is no exception. Titled Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags, it takes a well-balanced look at two organization systems that have existed for the web, one of which Shirky refers to as “ontological”, the other “organic.”

As it is clearly not Mr. Shirky’s intention to deal in any depth with what the “is” is, I thought a look at this document in terms of a more wide-scope “philosophical ontology” might yield something interesting, at least terminologically-speaking. To begin, let me show you how he delimits the term ontology:

The main thread of ontology in the philosophical sense is the study of entities and their relations … What kinds of things exist or can exist in the world, and what manner of relations can those things have to each other? … The knowledge management and AI communities have a related definition … something like “an explicit specification of a conceptualization.” … The common thread between the two definitions is essence, “Is-ness.” In a particular domain, what kinds of things can we say exist in that domain, and how can we say those things relate to each other?

Using this working-style definition, he proceeds to give some examples of “real-world” ontological classification systems: the periodic table of the elements, the Dewey Decimal System, and finally the DMOZ/Yahoo post-library heirarchy. It is interesting and funny, well worth a read for anyone interested in organization systems in general. After witnessing in pictures the transformation between the rigid heirarchy of the DDS and a graph that represents something like the “ontologically” unstructured reference map of Google, he goes through the del.icio.us system of classification by aggregation of user-”tagged” references, finally suggesting and for the most part convincingly showing that a combinatorial system of user-input works better than a dictatorially controlled “ontology” for a large unstable set of data accessed by a great many non-expert users, such as the web.

Ok. Now, the question I am asking myself is this: Ignoring unproductive definitional quips, and simply accepting Shirky’s last question for ontology, that is, “what kinds of things can we say exist in [this] domain, and how can we say those things relate to each other?,” to what extent is del.icio.us (un-)ontological?

Now, clearly, taking the scope of the question above as the entire scope of what Shirky names “ontology,” del.icio.us is nothing less than entirely ontological. It is a way in which someone, Joshua Shachter, answers the question “what kinds of things exist and how can we say these things relate to each other?” It is, to be sure, a distributed ontology, and our point as follows will be in general that ontology is already “distributed” in the first place.

Contemporary ontology is always an engagement with Heidegger. What is at stake in this particular case is the feasibility of Heidegger’s “authentic” and “inauthentic” Dasein. The “inauthentic” Dasein is the mode of being in which Dasein finds itself engaged (immersed) in the so-called “idle talk” (das Gerede) of the “they” (das Man) while in the “authentic” mode (eigentlich^*) Dasein hearkens to the call of and is individualized by its own uncanniness (cf. ¶40, 235/191). In an unsympathetic - or careless, or incomplete - reading of Heidegger, it is easy to allow oneself to read this as a sort of übermensch ontology - again in the popular and not properly Nietzschean sense - which would itself allow room for something like a fascist ontology (a danger one always skirts with Heidegger). Meanwhile, and in a seemingly contrary way, Heidegger had already explicity suggested the following: Being-in-the-world, that is, Being-in-the-world-with- others-in-the-world is the “basic state of Dasein by which every mode of its Being gets co-determined.” (¶26, 153/117)

Or, that the determination of Being is already co-determined. Given this, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand why access to Being, that which is most properly at play in existence, would be in the provice of an authentic understanding, that is, in a severing of Dasein from what has already been established as its co-constitutive condition of determination (it’s “I”) by its others in the first place. In other words, since “ontical experience takes place right at the ‘they,’ and nowhere else.” And as the ontological is nothing but the logic of the ontic inside the ontic, we can only frame the determinitive origin of the practice of ontology right at the “they” - better: “Moreover, there is no ‘elsewhere’: that is the ‘meaning of Being,’ …” (Jean Luc-Nancy, The Decision of Existence)

Or, again, ontology (the logic of existence) has already never been the province of some God-like categorizer, but has always indeed taken place right at the absolutely inescapable distribution of existence. I won’t, but I think you can basically find this thread in not only Heidegger and Nancy, but also Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and, as Heidegger himself displays, in the pre-Socratics as well. In another form, Richard Rorty and the American pragmatists say something just like this, albeit in a less strong sense.

As such, we might say that with something like del.icio.us, we can finally think the practice of categorization as properly ontological.

^* It has been suggested that “ownness” would be a more fair translation, inasmuch as the existential analytic specifically excludes something like a purity of origin or provenance, which the English “authentic” implies. So “authentic Dasein” is perhaps more properly thought as “Dasein in its ownness”. For what it’s worth.