Thursday, December 8, 2011

Meillassoux's re-installation of Bergsonian intellectual intuition

Per the realist-nominalist discussion, Brassier's article on the "enigma" of realism.  I don't think that Bergson is mentioned in the article but nevertheless the concept of intellectual intuition seems relevant.  

From Brassier's talk below:  "We must penetrate to the non-particular foundation of the particular and recognize that the qualities of sense are dynamics of a process which occurs only in connection with individual terms, which, when cut up [by the organism according to practical habit] become complex particulars [generals, universals] which register the complete nervous system."  This is not to say that universals, born of repetition in habit, are somehow not *real*, nor is it to say that they do not often take a predominate influence in the governance of life.

It is the fact that practical habit must adjust both to the extensities and intensities of the real, as well as nature's orders conceived of in their universality (equally *real*), which renders generality good.  This is both epistemic and metaphysical realism.  It is a controversial thesis to state that generality does not exist, and that metaphysics is *simply* a science of particulars.  That just begs the question:  science of x here really equals the speculation of physics, as in developing a generic but also genetic account from within the real - not somehow opposed and outside of it, taking its properties to be constructions of the mind, constructions of particulars, and so on.  In a surprising way, the analysis of lived experience is the bearing witness of the genesis and birth (and possible death) of (statistical) universality.  Thus the sort of generality, that for a time, transcends its own particularity, but then is subject to an ontological death.