/lit/ - Literature

>By ordering experience as he does in the “Transcendental Logic,” Kant remains within the tradition—stretching back at least to Aristotle—of what Gilbert Simondon calls hylomorphism. This is the dualism of form and matter. Hylomorphism presumes that materiality, or the “sensible” (that which can be apprehended by the senses alone), is passive, inert, and intrinsically shapeless, and that it can only be organized by an intelligible form that is imposed upon it from outside, or from above. Simondon argues that hylomorphism, with its rigid dualism, ignores all the intermediaries that are at work in any actual process of formation or construction. In fact, matter is never entirely passive and inert, for it always contains incipient structures. Matter already contains distributions of energy, and potentials for being shaped in particular directions or ways. (It’s easier to plane a piece of wood if you work in the direction of the grain, rather than across it). For its part, form is never absolute, and never simply imposed from the outside, since it can only be effective to the extent that it is able to translate itself, by a process of “transduction,” into one or another material. That is to say, form is energetic: it works by a series of transformations that transmit energy, and thereby “inform” matter, affecting it or modulating it in a process of exchange and communication. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan puts it; contrary to the hylomorphic assumptions of Shannon’s theory of communication, no message, or formal structure, can be indifferent to the medium by and through which it is transmitted.

"marshall mcluhan? gilbert simondon? in *my* process philosophy?"

>Kant led philosophy out of the fog of metaphysics, forged ahead and broke a path into a new pragmatics, by inventing a new relation between reason and action. For the significance of “practical reason” is not that it can purify morality or desire, nor even that it teaches us to act “as if” God or the fictitious Ideal were real; it is that by orienting the subject to a future of its own making, to living and acting guided by an image of desire, ethical procedure realizes a radical creativity that inherits the “life-force” it modulates, and becomes effective through ideas as it works through preference beyond reference. The Ideal is a fiction, but this fiction is a true creation (already real in mind) and has practical consequences according to what we make of it. Every society on Earth creates an image of its future and acts to realize that image.

>Perhaps God is the future, and the task life has assigned itself in the symbolic animal is to create God, to realize that Idea, that Spirit.