artefactphil

Ever since our mind fell, or rather, rushed headlong, into “die schlechte Unendlichkeit” (the bad infinity - Hegel) of empirical research and experimental science, and said bye-bye to any attempt to gain knowledge of the essence, there is no end of progress. There is always a discovery to be made at the cutting edge of the experimental sciences. Theoretical models have to be tweaked and modified to fit newly established empirical facts about movements begging for causal explanation, in which the sciences believe absolutely, even when some statistical fuzziness intrudes. Efficient causality, the bread-and-butter of science, works along the time-line, with cause preceding effect. Thus events are (conceived to be) generated causally into the future from behind. Some effects call for multiple causes. When all the necessary causal conditions are fulfilled, these are (conceived to be) sufficient to trigger the effect that is then effected. (Artificial neurons in today’s A.I. mimic this kind of additive causality that thus grotesquely models human intelligence.)

There is also always yet one more critically revealing story to be told about the empirical state of the world, as chaotic, unjust and gut-wrenching as it may be. Historiography and sociology continue to tell their factually based stories about how it came to be this way, to enlighten consciousness about how bad things are and what stories have been suppressed. They explain the world along a narrative time-line, drawing upon the facts gleaned from archives as proof of the story they tell. This event happened, then that happened. Some events call for multiple preceding events to explain them satisfactorily. Explaining the world narratively is never-ending. In our epoch, endless stories are told about capitalism, although the very different stories are essentially the same. Why this endless repetition? How can the truth of the essence ever be disclosed, since empirical knowledge can never get at it?

Explanations, whether they be causal or narrative or hybrid, presuppose that the world is understood, which amounts to how it is pre-conceived, i.e. conceived in advance, in an implicit interpretation, starting with the most elementary phenomena, the ones that do not presuppose any more elementary phenomena for their conception. The world only shows itself to the mind through its interpretation that consists, in turn, when laid out, of interconnected concepts that hang together for the mind. Thinking through this conceptual scaffolding of the mind’s interpretation of the world is what is called dialectical thinking that shows, first and foremost, how the most elementary phenomena hang together conceptually and thus how the world is built for the historical mind: an epochal hermeneutic cast of mind. This is the task of hermeneutic phenomenology: to disclose the world’s most elementary conceptual scaffolding.

Thus, everything depends upon how close the mind gets to interpreting the most elementary phenomena adequately through concepts. A misinterpretation of the most elementary phenomena leads to grave misunderstandings of more derivative phenomena, including their explanations by science’s theoretical models. Such models are built to explain movements in the world, starting with the physical, in order to predict and control them along linear time. The sciences, both natural and social, know only of linear time, along which they offer their explanations, both causal and narrative.

For hermeneutic phenomenology, however, that sets out to understand the world through careful conceptual interpretation, starting with its most elementary phenomena, the linear time of explanation cannot be presupposed and taken as self-evident. Therefore, efficient causality also cannot be taken as absolute. There are kinds of movement other than the physical, notably, the movement of the mind itself. The most elementary phenomena are being itself and time, and indeed, the very meaning of being itself is temporal, for we mortal humans are open to the world first and foremost through the openness of three-dimensional time (and not merely through sense perception in the present). To ‘be’ means to essence in the openness of three-dimensional time for the understanding mind as such-and-such which, in turn, is a faculty of the psyche. Our psyche belongs to, and resonates with, the shared openness of three-dimensional time. In this sense they are identical. Our resonating with the openness of time renders us mooded and thus musical; our psyche is attuned with the world.

Neither the sciences nor today’s philosophy know anything of this, but instead presuppose it implicitly, for we would not be human if we did not partake in three-dimensional time and ’see’, threefoldly ‘all at once’, into the three dimensions of time. We would be blind to any kind of movement as such whatsoever. Modern science and philosophy skip over apparently self-evident phenomena. The sciences deny that there is any deeper dimension to their causal explanations cobbled together by way of theoretical modelling. Such modelling is invariably judged by its effectiveness, i.e. its predictive power in explaining experience. They thus refuse to interrogate their pre-conceptions, by dint of which the phenomenal truth is covered up by correct empirical prediction as a substitute.

This is our predicament in the Modern Age, initiated above all by Descartes and Newton. It is the continuation of an historical trajectory that starts with Aristotle, who set up physics as the foundational science, providing the material-causal basis for our never-ending explanations of how the world moves. Physics has long since foundered on the rocks of quantum indeterminacy, owing to its misinterpretation of the phenomenon of time, that was stripped down to countable clock-time already by Aristotle. Even the most sophisticated, mathematized quantum physics and cosmology employ still this vulgar conception of time, suitably mathematized, or even try to eliminate the pesky time variable altogether from their equations of motion. The conundrums of quantum indeterminacy in mathematized physics are of its own making, by misconceiving, i.e. vulgarizing and spatializing, the phenomenon of time.

The conception of linear time first cast by Aristotle needs to be recast by going back to scratch. This is difficult and meets with savage resistance in the guise of complacency. Modern science and modern philosophy are too heavily invested in our reigning historical cast of mind to countenance such an unheard-of project. They continue to work instead at the cutting edge on the algorithmization of our mind and the world, i.e. on our self-abolition, through what is sold to us in our thoughtless gullibility as progress.

Neither empirically based science nor modern philosophy is able to fulfil any historical change of mind as articulated in the Greek phrase περιαγωγὴ ὅλης τῆς ψυχῆς, i.e. turning around the entire psyche. This the proper task of philosophy: to disclose the truth of the phenomena starting with the most elementary. But today’s philosophy has been thoroughly co-opted and corrupted by modern science; it serves as its handmaiden, entrusted condescendingly with ethical mopping-up that always comes too late.

Thus mathematization does make idiots of us all,
And thus the native hue of the phenomena
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of models,
And changes of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the urge of necessity.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld Appendix: ‘A demathematizing phenomenological interpretation of quantum-mechanical indeterminacy’ De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

Quantum indeterminacy and the will to precalculate motion.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

An Invisible Global Social Value.

E = m.c^2

KABOOM!!!

Further reading: Three laws of movement (again).

Sidere mutato,
mens eadem,
unfortunately.
M — C — M+ΔM
M — C — M+ΔM
M — C — M+ΔM
…
Keep digging,
keep drilling,
Sunburnt Country!

I come home
after many years’ absence,
bearing gifts,
greeting the jacaranda,
and there is no dog
in the Quad
to recognize
who I am.

The role of central banks as masseurs

Central banks worldwide have the important task of massaging the Medium without their knowing at all they are doing so. Their indispensable task is supposed to be primarily to manage monetary policy to keep inflation within bounds — neither too high nor too low. But central bankers as masseurs?! And why is money implicitly referred to mysteriously as the Medium with a capital M?

As any newspaper reader or radio listener or podcast subscriber knows, central bankers have to keep an eye on the empirical data about inflation coming in regularly from various sectors, and also on unemployment levels of the workforce in various segments. Central banks are able by fiat to set key interest rates at which other banks can borrow from the central bank and also determine how much capital banks must deposit at the central bank, thus restricting or loosening banks’ ability to lend, both of which determine interest rates throughout the given national economy. By adjusting interest rates post facto (after the data) they aim at a Goldilocks scenario of around two per cent per annum, i.e. 2% p.a. This rate is deemed to be healthy. It keeps the gainful game going.

All this is well-known and elementary for the practice of central banks. They want to contain inflation, avoid deflation, but also to prevent a credit crunch that will strangle economic activity. After all, it is money in various guises that lubricates a capitalist economy and keeps it ticking over. Is it money that is the lubricating medium? Not so fast. Since central banks do not control the economy by direct intervention into economic activity, they can only react to its movement through non-invasive ’soothing’ massage techniques which may or may not work, since it’s all a matter of timing, in much the same fashion as a surfer may catch a wave or miss it. The surfer has no control over the wave itself.

What’s left out of account in all this is that central banks, along with economists in general, do not know what money is. Sure, they know what it’s good for and what its various functions are and all the myriad sub-kinds of money such as government expenditure or capital expenditure or consumer savings and so on. Economists do not confront themselves with the question concerning the value of money and the relation of this monetary form of value to other forms such as, say, real estate or share capital. Questions concerning the various value-forms and their interconnection and what constitutes their unity are not posed, for they lead into dangerous, pre-empirical territory that calls for thinking. There are no data that could be collected to answer such questions, and therefore they are disposed of as somehow ‘metaphysical’ and, in any case, beyond the bounds of respectable science which, they say, is always ‘evidence-based’.

In this way they stubbornly overlook that all the various value-forms are forms of appearance of thingified value and also that this thingified value serves as the Medium of sociation (Vergesellschaftungsmedium) that mediates the movement of a capitalist economy. Thingified value as Medium can only be brought to light through careful, conceptual, phenomenological thinking. It has its very own kind of circular movement, namely, the endlessly accumulative movement of thingified value itself that asserts itself as the inexorable principle of movement of the global capitalist economy: advanced capital must return fattened with a surplus value. Otherwise, the economy’s in trouble. This accumulative movement of thingified value may be called valorization, a kind of movement sui generis that asserts itself behind the backs of all those caught up in our global capitalist economy — including the central bankers.

The principle of endless valorization asserts itself like a blind law of nature, on a par with Newton’s or Einstein’s laws of physical motion. Only ‘like a law of nature’ because economic activity is social, sociating. The valorization principle does not allow mathematized equations of motion like physics does to predict physical movement, but it nevertheless asserts itself like an iron law of nature, irrespective of how central bankers or politicians or economists may attempt to control the movement of the capitalist economy, whether partially or totally.

This inexorability leaves central bankers in the role of careful, soothing, non-invasive masseurs of the Medium, for a capitalist economy is based on private property that deprives the central bank of ways to directly intervene. The Medium itself remains invisible in all this, seeping as Medium of sociation into every conceivable crevice of social (including private) life. The encroachment of the Medium as such goes unnoticed; only its ubiquitous symptoms are perceived. It is not sufficient to identify the Medium with money; rather, money itself has to be carefully deciphered and conceptualized as one form (or ‘face’ or ‘look’) of thingified value, alongside others with which it intermeshes.

The pernicious, exploitative principle of endless valorization of thingified value circling through its intermeshing value-forms goes hand in hand with an insatiable need for physical energy to keep the economy itself moving. The latter is the material side of the value-formal movement. After all, the economic form-transformations require the corresponding physical movements in production and circulation processes and these, in turn, require physical energy to drive them. If sources of such physical energy become unreliable and supply falters through some contingent ‘external shock’ or other, such as war or drought, energy prices spike. This induces inflation to which central banks are obliged to respond by raising core interest rates which, in turn, reverberate throughout the economy. Higher interest rates adversely affect the valorization of thingified value advanced by enterprises (i.e. functioning capitals), by lowering the net profit, due to increased interest costs for loan capital. Enterprises may be forced to respond to this slump in net-profit generation by laying off employees, thus causing unemployment.

The central banks nevertheless have to raise the official core interest rates to dampen inflation, thus unknowingly massaging the mysterious Medium of thingified value itself to nurse it back to health, albeit at the price of causing economic pain for all the players. Whether it be a slump or a fully-fledged economic crisis, the Medium itself remains invisible, and the economic perturbations hit everyday understanding like a violent fit of nature. Blindness reigns as the normal state of affairs.

Further reading (selection): Laws of movement & Energy.

Three laws of movement (again).

An Invisible Global Social Value TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.

Critique of Competitive Freedom and the Bourgeois-Democratic State: Outline of a Form-Analytic Extension of Marx’s Uncompleted System Kurasje, Copenhagen 1984 580 pp. ISBN 8787437406. Third paperback edition with added preface CreateSpace, North Charleston 2015 722 pp.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.