Notes on ethics

[while reading secondary discussion of Spinoza and Kierkegaard]

Kant shows the limits of reason and its inability to form valid statements regarding the world beyond direct experience, i.e. the impossibility of speculative theology. We are left then with a phenomenal world open to observation by experimental science and a noumenal world, inaccessible but present (and as Deleuze comments open to constant imperial rape by German philosophy and its bsession with foundation).

So speculative metaphysics is irrelevant (unless we take a peculiar view of the field like that of Lakoff). And scientific observation only gets to the phenomenal impression of things, not the things-in-themselves.

And another option opening, the possibility of phenomenology, reaching the noumenal through deconstruction of the phenomenal experience.

But there is another option, neither reason nor scientific empiricism nor the assertion of a neutered perpetual present. There is the possibility of knowing the noumenal through forming a collective body with the other. This is as much a style of engagement as anything else.

Perhaps this is the way to open up the question of the multitude in Spinoza to a larger philosophical politics, i.e. reaffirm its connection to the "third type of knowledge," the intuitive(if can call it that) knowledge that allows blessedness.

The third kind of knowledge itslef offers an aeonic variation of the utopian idea of revolutuion, neither displaced into the future nor harkening back into the past. It is a style of knowing and engaging with the world, perhaps similar to Heidegger's? It relates to the dialogue of Bohm and Krishnamurti, amazingly enough, or rather their dialogue is an instance of it. The presence of this turn of thinking/engaging is revolutionary immediately, and need only agglutenate to reveal itself in full form.

The problem is that it doesn't tranform into words very easily, or does so only in effective poetic language, song, etc., which though redemptive of man does not lend itself to the formation of institutions, however tenuous.

If Being hides itself from thought, then what do we call the experience of Being unadulterated yet bound to a blessed understanding? How does memory connect to this experience?

Should we say that the traces of thought as vital memory allow the "quiet"necessary for this third kind of knowledge? That dynamic stability is its precondition?

I can see an anarchist philosophy branching out from this, focused around these questions, that of open engagement with the world revealed by forming collective bodies rather than deconstructing imperial encounters of reason/scientistic empiricism. And that we form these bodies by application of the third kind of knowledge, and hence must develop the preconditions for achieving this understanding. And that these preconditions suggest a political economy.

So we have then an ethics that follows from a "metaphysics" so to speak, not of the beyond but of the conditions adequate to allowing direct encounter with the noumenal world in its fecundity.

So,
Niether gods Above
Nor masters Within or Beyond
But the World alongside.

And ethics/political economy follows as the "study" of the conditions adequate to allowing the world to be lived alongside, revealed in its action.

[note: the tie here to syndicalism, the world revealed by action, simply not individualized action but the action of movement and difference that is the whole- so that to know the noumenal is simply to move with it, complementing its speeds and rests.

Action is the key here, and hence syndicalism, because it by action that the "noumenal", the world beyond instrumental analysis, reveals itself to intuitive knowledge and allows itself to be understood. So syndicalism+reverence+difference.]