For immediate consumption:
Wittgenstein Sheaves - Zalamea
//And after I had come up with the symbol of the “future species”, after I had given
the name “transpecial” to the “light from above” that could give my intellectual work its
meaning once again – then I started finding evidence for it everywhere! I began reading
voraciously again, and I was amazed to find that this exact same insight had been had
by so many thinkers before me! This is what Kant thought the critical philosophy was
to be applied to, this is what Nietzsche meant when he spoke about “the proposition ‘the
species is everything, one is always none”’ (The Gay Science, §1), this is what Kierkergaard
meant when he spoke about this or that, this is what Badiou meant when he spoke about
“generalized communism” etc. I found transpecial thinking everywhere around me! Hidden
in plain sight!
Of course, I very soon realized that I had as much right to be amazed at all this as one
has to be amazed to find the same reflection of oneself in different mirrors. For I was not
finding my ideas in these texts – I was merely seeing my own ideas reflected on them.
Had I lost my capacity to read and learn? Perhaps – but at least I was no longer transparent.
When before I saw nothing in the mirror that I held up against my ideas, I now
saw something – except now everything had become a mirror of my ideas. Or, put more
modestly: I has become a mirror myself – I was immitating everything around me.
And this, finally, is what led me to abandon the “evolutionary” model of knowledge in
favour of a model in which “mimicry” becomes primary. It is the idea of “mimicry” that
finally led me back to mathematics.//
and slightly earlier:
//“The beauty of mathematics! The divine in logic! We are cats! We are silkworms!” I
had to strip these clownish exultations down and place them in front of a mirror and keep
them there until they broke down in tears. I had to turn the mirror on myself not in order
to understand, but in order to pity. I had to stare long and hard but not in order for a new
“aspect” to reveal itself, but until what I saw could only fill me with grief and pity.
One of the strangest pronouncements I ever heard: “Knowledge begins with grief.” This
is now how I do justice to these words, which carry the unmistakeable form of a penetrating
insight.
I had to sit in front of a mirror long enough to be able to perceive my bliss (my exultations)
as something worth grieving over, indeed as something devastating. There was no sudden
insight, no “realization in a flash”, no discontinuity. There was rather an errosion, over a
very long period of time, at no point of which was I aware of the changing shape of my
reflection. But erode I did: and then – suddenly – I had become perfectly smooth, a perfect
reflective surface able to bounce back any idea: a thermodynamic “white body” – but not
a sceptic.
Looking in the mirror, I saw nothing: no idea could affect me but there was also no idea
I could hold on to.
What became clear then: the proper philosophical insight is that which you do justice to,
not attempt to communicate.//
