Spinoza's Worm

The birth of philosophy from the spirit of helminthology

“Gorky” is launching a new column, “Castaneda Didn’t Write Anything About This,” where he will explain trends in modern humanitarian thought and talk about new philosophical books. The first issue contains the history of ontological ideas about the world. From time immemorial, philosophy, in an effort to comprehend everything that exists, operated with such terms as “world”, “reality” or “actuality”. However, recently philosophers are increasingly inclined to believe that all these are contradictory concepts that have no scientific force. Kiev philosopher Anton Tarasyuk from Pastiche Project , referring to the recently published book “Century” by French philosopher Alain Badiou in Russian, shows that the world does not exist at all, and explains why this is not so bad.

In a letter to Oldenburg [Secretary of the Royal Society of London, founder of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the oldest English-language scientific journal - approx. ed.], written in 1665, Spinoza offers an interesting thought experiment. Let's imagine a worm living in a person's blood. Let's be so generous that we will reward him with some cognitive abilities: he will be able to distinguish objects in the blood, navigate, establish connections between different objects. As Spinoza says, such a worm “would live in this blood, as we live in this part of the universe.” He is able to comprehend the individual components of his environment, but is unable to realize that the interconnection of these components can only be understood in the context of the entire circulatory system, to which he, unfortunately, does not have access. Thus, the worm's knowledge turns out to be incomplete - and, strictly speaking, is not knowledge at all.

Let's continue the experiment by assuming the existence of a superintelligent worm, which is still capable of understanding the circulatory system as a whole. Will this be enough for him to reach the truth? No! After all, the circulatory system itself is part of something larger, the human body. But you can’t stop at the body either. Man is part of the environment included in the planetary system, and so on. This series can go on and on until the final point is reached - an all-encompassing whole that includes absolutely everything. Only this region, containing the remaining regions as its parts, can shed light on the interconnection of subordinate components - and, as a consequence, on the final position of our worm.

This is a brief description of one of the main ambitions of philosophy - the attempt to comprehend the largest area of ​​\u200b\u200beverything and describe its properties. Traditionally, this area is called “world”, “reality”, “nature”, “universe”. This implies the same thing - as Wittgenstein said, “the world is everything that takes place.”

The world has only problems

Like the worm, philosophy is faced with a simple fact: often our judgments about the world are wrong. We see some things in front of us, sometimes the relationships between them. But when we make judgments based on this simple set of data, we are doomed to make mistakes. After all, by reducing everything to only what we know, we lose sight of the bigger picture. In professional jargon, this is called a cognitive limb . This leads to the first problem - the problem of the external world . It lies in the fact that cognitively limited beings who do not possess absolute knowledge are doomed to make incorrect judgments about the external world. The world is big and complex, and we are small and primitive.

Let us describe more formally what the tiny world of Spinoza’s worm consists of. For the purity of the experiment, we will exclude a growing number of contexts (the circulatory system, the human body, the environment, planet Earth, etc.) - everything related to the problem of the external world is taken out of the equation. The world in which Spinoza's worm lives consists of several components or facts:

(1) Worm.
(2) Blood.

This also includes the space occupied by these two:

(3) The space in which the worm and blood are located.

At first glance this seems to be a complete description. We have three components - (1), (2), (3) - and there is nothing outside this totality. But we're missing something: these components can be combined in various ways to form previously unnoticed facts about the worm's little world. These relationships between the simplest components will also be components of the world that we describe. Therefore, since a worm and blood exist, it is logically true that the relation between them exists in the same world:

(4) Worm and blood.

This is also part of the described world, which cannot be reduced to either (1) or (2). Combining two other facts about the world of Spinoza's worm, (2) and (3), also gives a new fact:

(5) Blood and space.

Now we are faced with a problem. After all, starting from the fact that the world consists of three components - (1), (2) and (3) - we came to the conclusion that there are also relationships between them: (4) and (5). It turns out that (4) and (5) are true for the world of the worm, even if they were not taken into account in advance. This means that the original description was incomplete; it is not a totality. Even though we deliberately limited the number of components to three, the laws of logic forced us to admit that there were more. In fact, there are even more than five of them, and the exact number is calculated by the simple formula 2 n , where n is the number of the simplest components of our world. That is, in the world of Spinoza’s worm, which supposedly consisted only of a worm, blood and space, we count eight components. Of course, it is natural to assume that we were simply mistaken in thinking that the worm's world consists of three components, when there are eight. Alas, this mistake will be repeated no matter what system we describe. Whether there are eight, twenty-eight, or any number of components in it, we will still encounter a contradiction - our primary and seemingly complete description will at the same time be incomplete. That is, the world will have mutually exclusive characteristics. And as has been known since the time of Aristotle, something that has contradictory properties cannot exist.

Thus we come to a new problem, different from the problem of the outside world. This second one can simply be called the problem of peace . And she, no less, threatens his existence.

History of the problem

The problem of peace is not new. Known already in antiquity, it arose in one form or another throughout the history of philosophy. But two turning points can be identified. The young German philosopher Markus Gabriel in his works on the problem of peace, the main and most accessible of which is “Why does the world not exist?” (Warum es die Welt nicht gibt, 2013), indicates the projects of Descartes and Kant as such.

Considering the problem of the external world, Descartes proceeds from the fact of cognitive finitude, that is, that we are capable of making mistakes when making judgments about objects. This position already presupposes the special nature of the relationship between objects and our thinking. On the one hand, objects are understood as something about which one can make a mistake. On the other hand, Descartes explains this possibility of making a mistake based on the fundamental difference between an object and thinking about this object. According to Descartes, an object is independent of the content of our idea of ​​it. It is stably present as some x , relative to which we judge that it is such and such . But what is important to us is not the truth or falsity of Descartes' metaphysical views, but how they lead to the concept of the external world. If objects are independent entities that are “somewhere out there” and accessible to thought, it is natural to imagine the total container of all these objects - this is the external world.

Kant takes the next step. Pondering whether the world is finite or infinite, he comes to the conclusion that both positions are equally convincing and unconvincing. Since it is possible to provide evidence both against the fact that the world is finite and against the fact that it is infinite, the solution should be sought on a different plane. And Kant is forced to do nothing more than deny the very existence of the world. In any case, the world, conceived as the totality of all objects: the world “does not exist either as an infinite whole in itself , or as a finite whole in itself .” It does not have an autonomous existence and functions only as an ideal to which human knowledge strives. In short, there is simply no such thing as peace. This corresponds to our experiment with the world of Spinoza’s worm (although, strictly speaking, we used only a logical argument, and Kant uses a metaphysical one): in both cases we run into a contradiction. But what conclusions should be drawn from this?

Peace and war

In his book “The Century,” recently published in Russian, the French philosopher Alain Badiou describes two approaches that avoid the concept of “the whole,” “universal completeness,” or, in our terminology, “world.” The relationship between them is tense and stretches through the entire history of thought - Badiou even characterizes it as a war. It's about the opposition between interpretation and formalization . The position of the parties in this war is expressed as follows.

The interpretative approach believes that the incompleteness that we encounter in descriptions of the world indicates some kind of remainder that cannot be formalized. Yes, we tried to develop a formal concept of the world, but without success - such a concept only leads to contradictions and its own impossibility. However, this indicates that there is something that cannot be represented formally, but can (and should) be interpreted. Interpretation makes an initially closed, opaque component open to meaning.

Hence there are two radical consequences that distinguish this approach from the second: first, the question of meaning replaces the traditional place of universal truth . If earlier philosophy was looking for what is true for all people - regardless of cultural, social, religious and any other differences - now the main place is given to the meanings born in the context of these differences. Secondly, language is recognized as the only carrier of meaning, in the area of ​​which all local battles of philosophy unfold. This aspect reinforces the first: there are many languages ​​and ways of using language - for example, we can easily distinguish between various cultural, religious, political “language games”. And since there are many language games, there are many spheres of production of meanings, each of which is “true”, but partially, fragmentarily - not for everyone and always, but for some and at a certain time. Philosophers can either endlessly describe the differences in language games and meanings, abandoning the idea of ​​a single truth, or recognize one of the languages ​​as the most important and fundamental.

Among the philosophical trends of the 19th-20th centuries, hermeneutics with its concept of the hermeneutic circle (the whole can be understood based on the parts, but to understand one or another part one must already have an idea of ​​the whole) and deconstruction, which gives voice to positions forcibly excluded by one or another, belong to the interpretative direction. other meaning-generating text. A less obvious example is the chapter “Kant’s Acosmism” in Slavoj Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject. Considering the problem of the world that Kant faced, he suggests reading it through the prism of the problem of subjectivity: “The only way to truly explain the status of (self-)consciousness is to affirm the ontological incompleteness of “reality” itself, that is, “reality” exists only insofar as the ontological a rupture, a crack in its very depths—a traumatic excess, a foreign body that cannot be integrated into it.” It is through the interpretive practice of psychoanalysis that we gain access to this excess - subjectivity.

The formalization approach draws a completely different lesson from the problem of peace. Accepting the incompleteness of any theoretical construction, he recognizes the possibility of many formalizations that go beyond the boundaries of private semantic spheres. The presence of some truths about the world only means that there are other truths that are not yet available (and may never be available). Despite the fact that we cannot get their full set, truths are not only meanings! - exist. This implies a rejection of the dominance of language and interpretation in philosophy and a demand for the construction of new logics, different axiomatics and other attempts at formalization. Badiou himself joins this opinion, having included Plato and Gödel in the same camp: the first brought philosophy closer to mathematics and established the formal divisions key for philosophy into being and appearance , truth and opinion , and the second proved the formal difference between truth and provability . (This also includes Marcus Gabriel and Quentin Meillassoux ).

So where is the worm?

So, if there is no world, where then is Spinoza's worm? On the one hand, the answer is very simple. The worm is definitely not at peace . Simply because there is no peace. On the other hand, the answer is complicated by the fact that we have not shown what exists instead. The non-existence of the world as a totality of all objects does not mean that nothing exists. The critical enterprise of eliminating the world comes up against the need to clarify what it is that exists, given that we can no longer refer to any single totality of everything. From this point of view, any views that try to single out some area as total are doomed to failure. Let's say, superficial natural scientific reasoning, which takes the set of physical objects or atoms for everything that exists. This is the same world as the world of Spinoza’s worm, which will face the same problems, and a huge number of others.

As for the worm, I will offer the following answer - not the most popular for current philosophy, but not the most original either. Firstly, the worm is in the human blood. Secondly, in the person himself. Thirdly, on our planet. Fourthly, in Spinoza's text. Fifthly, in this text. Sixthly, in a textbook on helminthology. And further: seventhly, eighthly, ninthly... In general, it is located in many places and, perhaps, in infinitely many places . But not in the world . Any attempt to limit this "many where" to one or more "where" must introduce a criterion for such a restriction. Usually they were served by a general statement in the spirit of: “The world is everything that takes place”, “The world is the totality of physical objects”, “The world is the set of all facts”, “The world is all thoughts about the world”, etc. But peace in this sense is impossible. So whoever introduces such a limitation will have to find a basis for it that is not based on the concept of a single area of ​​​​everything that exists. Perhaps there is such a reason. Perhaps he doesn't exist.

The worm, however, can sleep peacefully. His existence is certainly not threatened by the non-existence of the world.