The side-discussion about understanding and the prinicple of charity (see article and comments here) does not seem finished to me. In this context, Gadamer comes to my mind: He speaks about the prejudice of perfection (of sense) that gets irritated as soon as the attempt to consider the text as true breaks down (Wahrheit und Methode, Bd. 1., ed. by Mohr, Tübingen 1990, p.299). That such a breakdown is possible indicates that “understanding is primarily to understand the case” and not the text as sequence of strings. In understanding the case, it is possible that something resists to fully accept the text, because the text cannot (always) create the topic/case it is talking about. The resistance could stem from (fruitful) prejudices or because of explicitly formulated judgments. Anyway, if the attempt to consider the text as adequate breaks down, it can lead – as a plan-B – to the effort ‘to understand’ the opinion of the other psychologically or historically.
What irritated me today was an interview between Badiou and the translators of “Le concept de modèle” (1969) – “The concept of model” (2007). The interviewer starts with “some biographical questions”. I briefly read through the interview and I could not find where it stopped being biographical. They managed to mention the words mathematics, formalisms and logics, but I cannot find any ‘reality check’. Who was inspired by whom? What changed over the long distance between the “The concept of model” and “Being and Event”? Why don’t you mention Bachelard any more in your more recent work? This kind of questions.
The reader gets to know that Badiou received his mathematical training from the Bourbaki group, a collective of french mathematicians that had the “goal of founding all of mathematics on set theory” and which showed little to none interest in applied mathematics or probability. That might help ‘to understand’ why Badiou chooses ZFC instead of – say – non-well-founded set theory: because ZFC is more suitable for founding mathematics. Chris’ argument – that the main claim ‘mathematics is ontology’ is too general compared to what his focus is in Being and Event – is still convincing.
Not mentioned in the interview, but in the french introduction of “The concept of model” at least one point was interesting: Badiou speaks about what Matheme means for him in contrast to Lacan:
“We could say that the didactic changes in orientation. I no longer insist that it takes on a mathematized form, or that concepts must be transmitted in the form of mathemes. To the contrary, mathematical inscription and its theoretical context are, rather, points of departure or clarification, which co-present a concept in a formal ‘milieu’ different from that of philosophy. In effect, I seek to capture the power of mathematics for the sake of a conceptual development that this capture is capable of effecting. In this sense, formalization is not, in my text, what Lacan pretended it was for psychoanalysis: an ‘ideal’. It is a source of inspiration and a support, it being understood that, ultimately, the effects of a philosophical text owe their force and duration to the mere arrangement of concepts.”
The idea of having mathematical theories as source of inspiriation would at least fit to the question, why Badiou says, he is only citing mathematical formulaes like poems. But is it then sustainable to claim “mathematics is ontology”? Does he care about mathematics; in which way? Or are his references to mathematics a reminiscence of his training at L’École Normale Supérieure?
There are at least two more discoveries. I just enumerate them, because it’s beyond my horizon to judge on them at the moment 🙂
- Also in the tradition of analytic philosophy there are efforts to model situations with set theory. Badiou refers to them in the “Notes”-section in BE:
“It is quite remarkable that the Anglo-Saxon school of logic has recently used the word ‘situation’ to attempt the ‘real world’ application of certain results which have been confined, up till the present moment, within the ‘formal sciences’. A confrontation with set theory then became necessary. A positivist version of my enterprise can be found in the work of J. Barwise and J. Perry. There is a good summary of their work in J. Barwise, “Situations, sets and the Axiom of Foundation’, Logic Colloquium ’84, 1986. The following definition bears citing: ‘By situation, we mean a part of reality which can be understood as a whole, which interacts with other things.”
- The slowenic psychoanalyst Alenka Zupančič observes
“on the layer of formal description, astonishing parallels between Badious theory [in Being and Event, AK] of pure being as multiple – which is [1] inconsistent from the start, [2] ‘consists of’ the Void, [3] and is pure “excess of itself” – and Freuds description of Being as sexual.”
I end with Gadamer, which frames situation quite different compared to the closed notion of situation in Being and Event (p.307): To situation belongs a horizon that bounds you on a location and restricts your view. But it can be extended and one can discover new horizons. That extension is not a revolutionary event. Still, we might find Gadamers optimistic idea that in the end everything melts together to one singular horizon problematic (and Hollywood-like), but the possibility of expanding one’s horizon by looking beyond “the close and all-too-close, not to look away from it, but to see it from a greater whole” seems reasonable. From what I understand from Being and Event, the Count-as-One of a situation cannot expand, there is no law/mechanism of the extension of a horizon except through disturbance of the structure (as if the whole worldview had to change).