Copernican revolution

There are certain cognitive errors which are, so to speak, errors of perspective. That is, the way something looks from a certain place is said to be a direct property of the object itself. ‘How it appears from a certain place’ is, nonetheless, also of interest in its own right and belongs to what is sometimes called ‘the reality of the appearance’. That something does appear this way to us is not just an accident, but necessary within our particular situation. The appearance is a symptom of - and an implicit commentary on - the world to which it appears.

Anyways, all this is just padding, and a brief interlude from trying to puzzle out the essence of Para-costivism. In fact, I merely wanted to relay to you the following Wittgenstein anecdote.

W. and his companion are on a stroll through Cambridge.

‘I’ve always wondered why’, says W., ‘for so long people thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth.’

‘Why?’ said his surprised interlocutor, ‘well, I suppose it just looks that way’

‘Hmm’, retorted W. ‘and what would it look like if the Earth revolved around the Sun?’.

Comments

[Christoph]

Thanks Mark, a beautiful reminder of the need for reflexivity, if not the need for an observational logic that understands that all observation is an observation with its own blind spot.

Irrespective of what your political position may be (a harder and harder thing to define, I would argue): The real challenge is this ongoing happiness of even intelligent people to rush headlong into epistemological obstacles like Bart Simpson (or was it Homer) keeps reaching into that electrified biscuit jar.

That was (is?) one of the problems with postmodernism, of course: It has no future in its discourse, supplanting future with contemporaneous pluralism. So it can not, like modernism, project solutions beyond the present. D'oh. Cookies. D'oh. Cookies...

[Antonio Negri]

"Just yesterday, during a convention in Cambridge, I was arguing that the term 'revolution' could be changed. Ultimately, it is a term that is only two hundred years old. Still in the sixteenth century, when one talked about the *revolution*, one was referring to the revolution of the celestial bodies around the earth, the concept of revolution had not yet permeated the social language. At the time, the term *reform* was in use. The reform of social life was linked to religion and it ultimately sparked off the great revolution of the time, the *Reformation*. Hence, I would not be scandalized if we were to modify our terminology regarding the concept of revolution, the revolutionary phenomena and that of communist desires. Nevertheless, a fundamental issue persists, which is the relationship between poverty and love, a theme that is very dear to me from a philosophic point of view. Poverty intended as a condition in which man is born in and from which he needs to be protected by an act of love, by a social act. Man does not reach adulthood–namely, he does not escape povery–unless he is surrounded *by this permeating sociality, which is linguistic to start with, to then become physical and corporeal in the fullest sense of the word*. If this is what we mean by Communism, then certainly Communism is not a political programme but rather an ontological tendency. And that is why we are closer to it today, considering as we do the dimension of freedom, which is contingent part of the working activities of today."
-translated by Claudia Mancini

On this subject, the great French mathematicians Henri Poincare once wrote an essay exploring what our physics and mathematics would be like if the earth had been perennially covered in cloud. In other words, if we saw no sun, no moon, and no planets, mathematicians would have spent no time trying to predict their movements, and thus not developed the calculus et al.

[amie]

Antonio, thanks for your post.
I'm quite curious about what you say regarding Communism as an ontological "tendency" rather than a political program. Could you perhaps provide a reference to where you write about this?
I didn't find one in The Naked Punch interview to which you provided a link.
There is, however, something you say in the interview which surprises me. You seem to suggest that it is possible to separate two movements, the one moving towards the center, which you seem to privilige, from the other that moves towards the margins, works on/at the margins.
I don't quite see how one could seperate the two. As you know, the center cannot constitute itself without control of the peripheries, and so on....
Why do you want to marginalize the movement that works on/at the margins, dismiss it as merely "elegant"?
In doing so, don't you submit the multitude to unity, to the One?

[Antonio]

http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/printer_page.cfm?key=338

[Matt]

Last night I was looking at the half moon, slanting at its edges, and imagining, as surely everyone has done, the earth's shadow projected in full up onto the night sky, as if the earth's double were looking down on me from the same distance as the moon, dwarfing everything else in sight. And maybe somehow even more "real" than the moon, because it was a shadow and not merely the sun's borrowed, reflected light.

But is that even remotely realistic? Having never taken physics, I don't have the first clue about these things. Judging from the curvature of the earth's shadow on the moon, is it possible to "see" the full shape of the earth, as shadow?

[Leslie Gardner]

where does your story abt wittgenstein appear in his work, Mark? i am very interested, and thanks for reminding me of it...Leslie