So far I’ve blazed on ahead, keeping my posts short and allowing each axiom to cascade into the next. Indeed, at the end of my last post I promised to turn to another axiom in the current post – After Two, Things Get Interesting Real Fast – but given the difficulties that an axiom like It Takes Two to Cogito offers, I am choosing now instead to dwell for a bit, to slow down, to offer examples and argue my case. The thing about the axioms I’ve been offering so far is that they are not, in fact, self-evident for most of my readers most of the time; in other words, they are not axioms in the “we hold these truths to be self-evident” sense, but instead in a utopian – or mutopian – sense of “if only we could hold these truths to be self-evident”. As I’ve suggested, the gistification of Axiomatix is actually to generate some new ways of thinking about and being in the world, since the ways that we modern humans have been going about things do not, it seems, have a very bright outcome in the near-to-middle future. In other words, I bring to the question of new ways of thinking – of new axioms – a lifelong concern with ecological ethics, and a recent turn to what I call the ecology of everyday life.
So, to make It Takes Two to Cogito a bit clearer, it might indeed help to draw on an ecological metaphor, one that also folds in the closely related axiom that Relation is the Smallest Unit. Consider that, in the common-sense way of thinking about things, the individual – the unique and separate being – always precedes the group, rather than vice versa. By this logic, in the beginning was the autonomic individual, and groups are only ever created by the social instinct that pushes these (suddenly plural) autonomic individuals together. And yet, many of our most basic experiences reveal this way of thinking about individuals and groups to be nonsense; as the fact of pregnancy and childbirth should well reveal, even “two” is not enough to begin with, for in the case of mammalian reproduction at least three separate individuals are always required! In no way does the individual ever precede the group – and yet, at the same time, how could the group ever precede the individuals that “make it up”? This is the classic problem of the chicken and the egg, a problem which can only persist if one insists that some particular unit is the smallest, most basic unit rather than, as I have, asserting instead that Relation is the Smallest Unit. Neither chicken nor egg comes first, but instead it is the relation between chickens and eggs that precedes them both, that makes them what they are. Feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad calls this kind of relationality between units that do not precede their relating “intra-action”.
I hope that these two axioms – It Takes Two to Cogito and Relation is the Smallest Unit – are starting to become a bit clearer now. As with the paradox of the chicken and the egg, the problems presented by Descartes’s Cogito axiom – “I think therefore I am” – simply evaporate when we replace it with “it takes two to cogito”. While the cogito is the ultimate expression of the autonomous self-creating being – leading to not only solipsism but to the infamous “mind/body problem” – the rejoinder that it takes two to cogito reminds us that without at least two there is no thinking, no tools for thinking, no language, no invention, no communication. This is not to say that you cannot have thoughts over there in your own little head, or me have thoughts here in my own little head, but it is only to say that the condition that makes those thoughts possible is not some purified, godlike space of absolute solitude and self-creation but instead a networked space of shared tools and materials for thinking. Indeed – as I’ll explore more in future posts – the notion that we “have” thoughts “in” our heads is itself an unfortunate offshoot of the Cartesian cogito: another implication of both Relation is the Smallest Unit and It Takes Two to Cogito is that thoughts, too, are relations, and so they can never really take place inside our skulls without also taking place "out there" in the world. Maybe thoughts don’t belong in “heads” at all! To again quote Rimbaud: “It’s wrong to say, I think; instead we should say, It thinks me.”
See you on the 23rd!
This reminds me of mushroom tripping. When engaged in such an activity my goal is usually to move towards a place of no-thought. If I am successful then the path there is one of gradually simplified symbolic thoughts, of anthropomorphic deities of various types, then shape/sounds then oneverythingness. However, as soon as somebody engages me in conversation my thought path is diverted towards the shared thoughtscape that is our normal "world". If "It thinks me" then I would say that the "it" is us. If there were only one person left on the planet, then I think (chuckles) that person would gradually stop "thinking" altogether, or invent another to think with if not thinking were unbearable. Though I imagine that would be much more painful since to whom would you present the pretty thought treasures you unearthed? If Descartes found himself in that position, I would guess that he would change his axiom to "I think therefore I am in pain" or a joyous "I am therefore I am" and be done with it.
ReplyDeleteA corroborating case is the wild child, AKA "forbidden experiment." Children who don't develop language in formative years never being able to grasp verbs and adjectives, for example. On the other hand, a single person in the post apocalypse scenario above might have reason to continue communicating, given, say, a harsh case of short term memory loss. This many in one person might go on writing notes, playing games, generally conversing with future selves. As in Momento, of course, or similar to Lem's star diary story where an astronaut gets stuck in a time loop and eventually has hundreds of copies, past and future, to deal with simultaneously.
ReplyDeleteWe are many in one, in some respects, and thought can't occur without past selves delivering us to our current thought, one could argue. These many in us are not only previous selves, but previous others, too, and projections of present and future others based on those passed. This is part of your point, Sha, if I'm reading it correctly, or closely related.
However, I see something to be said for loneliness too. we are all alone might be an alternate axiom (though not necessarily alternate), and though it may seem dark, it would be a path to humility and compassion. Emphatically, we, not i. We are still--each--various manifestations of roughly the same thing. We can feel loneliness and we can recognize it in others. Being is then quelling that loneliness, mutually.
Maybe.
I like your lines of thinking, Andrew. The simultaneous experience of being many in one, and all alone is something, I would imagine, we all (only humans?) have in common. I have spent much of my recent years intentionally "alone" with my many, and maybe ironically, this has seemed to have the effect of increasing my joy of others and myself. I wonder now if each of the many in one also, at their core, feel alone. Maybe the word I should be replaced by we. We, of the joyfully lonely world called James officially align ourselves with the many worlds of earth. We come in peace. ;)
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