One of the major ambiguities in Feyerabend’s pluralism is the complementarity between pluralism as a model and pluralism as a meta-model. In his early philosophy Feyerabend developped a pluralist methodology in the sense of a unitary model that applied to both the arts and the sciences and that included normative prescriptions such as to multiply alternatives (principle of proliferation). He recounts how various encounters led him to see that the concrete practice of scientific research and artistic creation could not be constrained by such abstract prescriptions. Pluralism then came to figure as a meta-model allowing us the freedom to follow and to combine or disrupt methods in an augmented field of non-normative potential prescriptions.

This complementarity of pluralism as model and as meta-model can be seen in Feyerabend’s treatment of Homeric polytheism and of Biblical exitential hermeneutics as both possible worldviews/forms of life and as meta-models indicating a type of attitude to all models that respects their plurality. Feyerabend describes Homer’s cosmology as that of an open world composed of events and processes in additive juxtaposition that occasionally coalesce to form aggregates and assemblages (the similarity to Deleuze and Guattari’s cosmology is obvious). This is what Feyerabend calls “cosmology A”. Its meta version is to be seen in Mach’s philosphy:

“There is a great similarity between this view and Mach’s cosmology except that the elements of the archaic world are recognizable physical and mental shapes and events while Mach’s elements are more abstract, they are as yet unkown aims of research, not its object.”

This Homeric cosmology (cosmology A) was virtually wiped out by the advent of a new cosmology (cosmology B) that finds eemplary expression in what Feyerabend calls “Platonism”. Here objects are no longer seen as additive multiplicities but as unitary essences underlying multiple appearances. Universal laws and abstract arguments come to be privileged and the notion of human identity is transformed. Whereas before a human being was an aggregate of the same type as the other aggregates of the world, containing no unified central “I”, now in cosmolgy B human interiority is set of against the external objective world, and contains special internal “mental” events.

Feyerabend’s second meta-model is taken from the Biblical cosmology and seems to be in contradiction with the Homeric model. He does not give it a name, but by analogy we can call it “cosmology Z”. The key difference with cosmology A is that cosmology Z allows for a multiplicity of apparent, or rather “manifest” realities, but at the same time keeps  to the possibility that “events conceal or hint at a hidden and perhaps inaccessible world”. All is dark, ambiguous, enigmatic, open to multiple interpretations. Feyerabend once again conceives this as an acceptable form of life, a possible model. But it is the meta version that occupies him in the later part of his life, in his evocation of an ineffable ultimate reality giving rise to a plurality of manifest realities. (Note: very little has been written on this side of Feyerabend’s philosophy. I can only recommend the excellent article and presentation of Ian Kidd on Feyerabend’s use of Pseudo-Denys and his exposition of what I am calling cosmology Z as meta-model).

Although the Homeric cosmology (cosmology A) and the Biblical cosmology (cosmology Z) are in many ways different, they share a common enemy: the hegemonic monist abstract “platonic” cosmology (cosmology B). Both give us useful suggestions for imroving our knowledge and enriching our lives in a pluralist context. Yet in Feyerbend’s thought they do not coalesce into a unified position, they are not convergent but remain complementary perspectives in Bohr’s sense, as each strictly excludes the other but both are necessary.

“In his earlier life Nietzsche was very much interested in the philosophy of nature and he intended at some point to write a systematic treatise on this topic. He adopted for some time Mach’s point of view and he interpreted this point of view as showing that the world in which we live (our perceptual world) is a mental construction, and that different kinds of mental construction are possible. This brings him at places rather close to Wittgenstein.” (NATURPHILOSOPHIE, p330)

I would add that this proximity to Mach existed all through Nietzsche’s philosophical development, and is not limited to his early work.

Feyerabend’s “character” resembled an assemblage of multiple personalities allowing an astonishing degree of empathy (Hoyningen-Huene speaks of his “warmth” and “helpfulness”), but also of independence and of evasiveness. To use James Hillman’s expression, Feyerabend was not so much an individual, a fixed separate egoic personality, as a series of “personifications”. His books and articles were written not from the unified perspective of a constituted author, but were as he claimed “collages” fabricated by just such a series of personifications and meant to be read in the same way, by a reader open to their own multiplicity.

These views are naïve and simplistic because they are examples of the pretention of intellectuals to speak in the name of humanity to justify the imposition of their categories and values without consulting the opinions and desires of the vast mass who are being imposed upon. In the eyes of intellectuals such as Parmenides and Plato, the “many” live in a world of illusion, cut of from true knowledge and true goodness:

“Their fears and joys, their political actions, the affection they have for their friends and children, the attempts they make to improve their own lives and the lives of others, and their views about the nature of such improvements are chimeras” (ibid, paragraph 4).

These views are also inhumane and dangerous because they ignore their own shadow:

“Philosophy is not a single Good Thing that is bound to enrich human existence; it is a witches’ brew, containing some rather deadly ingredients. Numerous assaults on life, liberty, and happiness have had a strong philosophical backing.” (ibid, para 2). Further, to impose their categories in a complex and variegated world intellectuals need the backing of power, influential institutions, government agencies and apparatuses, to give their directives force, to browbeat and brainwash people into submission.

For Feyerabend, the past is no dead matter to be studied and embalmed in intellectual history, but a living repository of values and ideas that can be drawn on at any moment to contest and even overthrow the status quo:

“There is no idea, however ancient and absurd, that is not capable of improving our knowledge” and, we must add, of enriching our life (cf AGAINST METHOD p33).

So in order to criticise and go beyond the Platonic tradition that is still with us today, Feyerabend turns to the Greek world before Plato, before even the Pre-socratics, and finds material for the improvement of our knowledge and the enrichment of our life in the Homeric world.  (Note: This is one of the many points of convergence between Feyerabend’s philosophy as expressed for example in CONQUEST OF ABUNDANCE, and that of Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly elaborated in ALL THINGS SHINING). In Homer, concepts such as the virtues are not static universal essences but complex assemblages depending on and varying with circumstances, best illustrated by examples rather than defined by principles, embedded in community practices and skills rather than in the autonomous will of the rational agent:

“The Homeric epics reflect this situation. They do not define, they use examples, including cases that show, without explicitly saying so, under what circumstances a virtue turns into a vice” (ibid, paragraph 5).

Virtues are not simple unambiguous entities, they are not only complex and context-dependent they also have their shadow side. Homer can show Diomedes’ courage sometimes veering towards madness, and Odysseus’s wisdom and intelligence merging into cunning and ruse. The virtues’ complexity implies also their openness, we can enrich them with our imagination and our spontaneity, we can apply them to new situations or in new ways in familiar situations. For Feyerabend, the Homeric epics do not define or regulate, they do not submit things to rigid rules and universal principles, they use examples and cases, their appropriation and their projection into other circumstances. Echoing Deleuze on Châtelet, we can say that for Homer:

“the universal does not exist, but only the singular, singularity, exists. “Singularity” is not the individual, it is the case, the event, the potential (potentiel). or rather, the distribution of potentials in a given matter ” (DIALOGUES II, p160).

In such an open field of examples and cases, of events and potentials, of singularities and their prolongations, the best way to learn is by immersion, we are learning moral (and perceptual and cognitive skills) not methods and algorithms. The best style to convey such immersive concepts, remarks Feyerabend, is not a systematic account aligning “conceptual artifacts” (which seemed to him a particular, and often very superficial, literary form) but the Homeric (and Biblical) style of telling stories. STORIES FROM PAOLINO’S TAPES is from this point of view a fitting form for Feyerabend’s exposition of various virtues and their exemplars.

One of Feyerabend’s aims from very early on was to outline a theory of knowledge that would present the sciences and the humanities on the same plane, as “different parts of one and the same enterprise”  (NATURPHILOSOPHIE, p347). He imagined this theory as more like a manual of rhetoric containing various illuminating examples, useful rules of thumb, and diverse observations and remarks on the suitability of the rules to various circumstances. He wanted to avoid “easy syntheses” and “facile generalisations”. He claimed never really to have achieved that goal, but he wrote and spoke out of that guiding polytheistic imagination.

One needs a shadow perception to see those in the dark and to pay attention to them, and not just fixate on the important people (and the important facts and ideas). The need for shadow perception shows itself again in the story of Falstaff in Verdi’s opera, who is too naive, too innocent. His innocence constellates the cruelty and vengeance of the two young women, Alice and Meg, who wish to punish him for his impudence. He falls for their ruse, no shadow warns him, he takes their ploy at face value, falling victim to a veritable conspiracy of ressentiment. At the end there is a recognition of life as “silly”, as containing both bright and dark moments, both innocence and cruelty, in a complex comedy regented by no transcendent value.

The darkness is there in the account of Schrödinger – saying no to power, refusing to accept the viciousness of the Nazi harassing the Jew and spitting in his face, perceiving the dangers of nuclear power and warning against it when opinion was in favour of it. Speaking your mind is not innocence or provocation but a “gift”, ie not the property of a heroic autonomous ego, but the outcome of sensitivity to a wider perception and the willingness to act on it.

Feyerabend’s account of Fritz Lang’s FURY is yet another example of the need for shadow perception. The innocent hero, Joe Wilson, is nearly lynched by an angry mob, but the sheriff shows compassion and violates the “law” to save his life. However Joe identifies with the fury for vengeance of the mob, and wants revenge against those who tried to kill him unjustly at all costs. At the end he has a “change of heart” and accepts the complexity of life and the need for compassion.

Compassion is paying attention to and valuing those who do not stand in the light, caring for the losers and the lost, for those who do not have the power and prestige accorded to the élite by the régime of light. As Feyerabend recounts these stories we can feel his compassion, his emotion at the the twists and turns of people’s lives.

In each story there is a moment where an awakening to immanence takes place, and oppression, viciousness and resentment, the tyranny of opinion and the authority of experts, the power of systems and of abstractions are undermined or provisionally overthrown. There is little personal confession, but we are given a rounded view of Feyerabend’s passions and personality, and of his lifelong commitment to freedom from obfuscation and domination.

Perhaps the best commentary on the recordings is given by Stephen Toulmin:

“As is clear to anyone who knows of Feyerabend’s personal life and interests, he had a passion for Science, just as he did for opera and for the cinema. At one time, he was recognized as being a passable operatic baritone, and considered going on the stage professionally; for the rest of his life, too, he used to say that he would have preferred to be a film director rather than a philosopher. So, when he spoke of being “against method” in the sciences, all he wanted was to protect scientists from unreasonable constraints.
There can no more be a set of fixed rules for making scientific discoveries than there can be for producing a great opera or a fine film. What was true of Verdi and Visconti was true equally of productive scientists: they must be allowed free rein, not criticized for a failure to conform to predetermined rules of composition.” (Toulmin, RETURN TO REASON, p85

This solution of mapping the networks of the economic system suggests two major questions:

Firstly, is this obfuscation of causal paths and thus of nodes of responsibility
1) systemic, ie intrinsic to the network once it attains a certain level of complexity or, on a more Althusserian note, inevitable in any social network given the inevitability of ideology in its practico-social functions (simplification, binary oppositions, imaginary constitution of “responsible” subjects)
or
2) tied to a particular vision of and management of networks, eg the argument of Zizek that capitalism is not necessarily tied to its liberal form where causality is veiled behind complexity and that an authoritarian form of capitalism is conceivable where causality could be more transparent without permitting a degree of resistance capable of destabilising the system?

Secondly, is the limiting of the problem to networks of the economic system a fruitful strategy? I think that the Deleuzian (and Latourian) objection is that the network is tied to the heterogeneity of its elements, and cannot be limited to one domain (here, the economy), but must involve psychic, social, technological, cultural and non-human elements if it is to be developped at the complexity necessary to engage with our real problems.
I am thinking of the example of global warming and Timothy Morton’s “theorisation” in terms of hyperobjects. I use the inverted commas as I think that this term is more a gesture at the scale and complexity of certain problems than a true conceptualisation of them. I think that this case shows that the determination of “degrees of responsibility”, while being important and necessary, is probably not a sufficient preparation for effective intervention.

ii) La “centaurisation”, plus explorée par la littérature fantastique, qui fait appel à des expériences de pensée prenant comme objet les nouvelles formes de subjectivation qui épousent des valeurs écologiques et de création d’univers virtuels. C’est ce que Ted Friedman appelle la figure du centaure (cf. http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=14&id=1138)..

Dick parle de cette société de surveillance notamment dans SIVA, où il l’appelle la Prison de Fer Noire. Nous sommes emprisonnés dans une fausse chronologie dont le but est d’empêcher tout imprévu, tout inconnu, toute nouveauté, tout événement. Ceci est associé aux affects tristes, à la dépression, à la pulsion suicidaire, à thanatos. La seule issue est ce qu’il appelle l’anamnèse, un travail constant de perlaboration et d’éxégèse de ce qui nous est arrivé. L’anamnèse s’exprime dans l’écriture infinie, dont le meilleur exemple est THE EXEGESIS OF PHILIP K. DICK, qui vient d’être publié. Mais elle s’exprime aussi dans une sorte de patience infinie, d’éveil, d’attente, d’ouverture à ce qui arrive. SIVA se termine avec le narrateur, Philip K. Dick, réconcilié avec le monde, devant la télé, fidèle à la mission d’attendre et de rester éveillé.
Jean-François Lyotard parle en termes très similaires dans ses derniers écrits. Le postmoderne a deux faces: l’une de complexification, où ne peut exister que le prévisible et le programmable, l’autre d’anamnèse, où on se tourne vers un reste qui ne peut pas être pris dans les rêts de la complexité.

J’aime

As Babich sums up this view: “Personal identity isn’t guaranteed after death, but continuity is … You lose nothing when you lose personal identity because you lose it all the time.”

You are not any of the collections of memories and experiences that are scattered throughout your life, but rather the “canvas” on which they are assembled. Babich remarks that this is an Empedoclean idea (and also a Heraclitean, Parmenidean, Anaximenean, and above all Vedic idea). These collections or assemblages are not “things”- not stable, separate, essential unities. All things ebb and flow, there are only waves and superpositions of waves. But a final ambiguity remains: is this vision an invitation to transcendence and renunciation, or an incitation to immanence and the affirmation of life? The combined portrait of Feyerabend and Babich seems to come down, in Schroedinger’s case, on the side of immanence: Schroedinger shines forth as motivated by aesthetic desire and erotic passion, courage and sympathy, a man who spoke his mind and acted on his beliefs, who was politically prescient in militating against the use of nuclear power, who declined the “stupidity” of the ascetic ideal that would reduce life to mere business and calculation. This is a gift, to live a life itself experienced as a series of gifts (and Babich exclaims at how much Schroedinger was given, that we may also construe as how much he was capable of receiving). The Vedantic exclamation is “Thou art that!” (you are the universe); its Feyerabendian equivalent is “What a person!”. One lives in the “faith” that they are equivalent, what Deleuze and Guattari called “the magic formula that we are all searching for: PLURALISM = MONISM”.