Space is literally the most stupid thing there is

>When Hegel defines nature, he says not only that it is the Otherness of the Idea, but that it is the Idea itself in its Otherness—however, what this “idealist” turn means is that Otherness should be displaced into nature itself: nature is not only the Other of the Idea, but Other with regard to itself. (So, insofar as the Idea returns to itself in spirit, one should raise the question: is spirit then also in some mode “Other with regard to itself”? Yes—precisely as what we usually call “second nature,” spirit petrified in spiritual substance.) This is why nature at its zero level is space: not only the Otherness of the Idea (the Idea in its Otherness), but Otherness with regard to itself—a coexistence of points (extensively side-by-side), with no content to it, no difference, the same throughout in its pure extensive in-difference. Far from being the “mystery” of something containing objects, space is literally the most stupid thing there is. And it does not get “sublated” in the sense that it is no longer there: natural objects which “sublate” space remain spatial objects! Where spatiality is negated is in chemism, magnetism, and then organism, where objects are no longer dead composites of elements-parts, where we get an “eternal” ideal unity which cannot be located at a certain point in space: there is no “center” of an organism at some point in space. Here, perhaps, Hegel points towards relativity (it has been noted that his critique of Newtonian space foreshadows the Einsteinian critique): if the zero level of nature is space, then natural objects should develop out of space, not be conceived as mysterious chunks of matter that from who-knows-where “enter” space. The only thing that can happen to pure space is asymmetry, its becoming de-homogenized, “curved”—so the idea that “matter” is the effect of curved space is implied by Hegel’s theory of space.

Citation: Less Than Nothing, pp. 461-462

Other urls found in this thread:

marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ru/kolman.htm
youtube.com/watch?v=X5rAGfjPSWE&t=612s
twitter.com/AnonBabble

isnt this guy a dumb living meme

No, he's a smart living meme.

pretty sure he's a post modern con artist

Pretty sure you have never read a book without being told too.

>if the zero level of nature is space
I actually understood this up to here

nice trips

no sarcasm: I can appreciate how he uses language creatively, and in a sense caricaturizes the way in which other writers who take themselves way more seriously (and who are not wittgenstein) claim to be using natural language to make statements about metaphysical reality.

But I also think he doesn't quite understand basic physical theories he's talking about:
>It has been noted that his critique of Newtonian space foreshadows the Einsteinian critique)
>The only thing that can happen to pure space is asymmetry, its becoming de-homogenized, “curved”—so the idea that “matter” is the effect of curved space is implied by Hegel’s theory of space.
Matter does not arise from the curvature of space-time, but rather causes space-time to curve, hence gravity.
It's also silly to imply that Hegel's critique of space being in any way related to einstein's insights into the nature of space-time (he calls them critiques lol - the dude literally invented an entirely new way to think about physics that is responsible for shitloads of things we take for granted today, e.g GPS)

Hegel and by extension Zizek are talking about the transcendental aesthetic, not space "as it really is, out there." He's saying that the traditional Cartesian-Newtonian conception of space as mere quantitative extension was critiqued by Hegel at the pure conceptual meta-level of its preconditions and the possible results of bending and changing those preconditions. The Einsteinian view of space as "de-homogenized," as not merely uniform quantitative extension but possessing of qualitative attributes (or at least relative difference), anticipates but does not necessarily influence Einstein.

If you look at neo-Kantian philosophers like Mach, Poincare, Bachelard, they say similar things about the relationship between our conceptions of space, whether conceptual or at the level of the transcendental aesthetic, and space "as it really is, out there." But the former is definitely what Hegel/Zizek are talking about here.

funny, I don't understand anything before that. I think I only get the rest because I came into philosophy through a scientism phase.

>The Einsteinian view of space as "de-homogenized," as not merely uniform quantitative extension but possessing of qualitative attributes (or at least relative difference), anticipates but does not necessarily influence Einstein
My point is that this view (that you call the Einsteinian view) does not in any way anticipate nevermind influence the contributions of the historical character named Einstein to theoretical physics.

>space as "de-homogenized"
>(or at least relative difference)
similarity in choice of words does not in this case imply any actual conceptual similarity. as far as understanding the conceptual and hence mathematical basis of relativity and space-time geometry, the only question that really matter is
>Do you even riemannian geometry bro

This makes more sense if you add miscellaneous sniffs and nose wipes.

>does not in any way anticipate nevermind influence the contributions of the historical character named Einstein to theoretical physics.

There is actually a direct influence, both in terms of conceptual architectonic, and in genealogical/historical terms. Einstein was operating within the German idealist tradition of science or Wissenschaft. He acknowledged his debt ten times over to Mach, even saying he only applied Mach's ideas to their conclusions. Mach was a neo-Kantian philosopher of science within the late 19th century German context that produced scientific naturalism, materialism, and logical positivism, beginning with the "Back to Kant!" movement (i.e., in reaction to a preponderance of Hegelianism), coalescing into the so-called Marbug neo-Kantian school, whose thinkers were instrumental in producing the Vienna Circle and 20th century scientific positivism.

To take just one example of the legacy of Einstein's intellectual milieu, one of the most important figures of the "Back to Kant!" movement is Helmholtz, who wrote on conservation of mass and many other topics, and was a very important interlocutor of Mach. Both Mach and Helmholtz wrote extensively on psychology, sensation, and science, but the underlying conceptual unity behind all their thinking is: German idealism. The underlying "paradigm" of their work was the idea that there is a distinction between external reality and our capacity to know and represent it in the mind. This is the tradition in which Einstein was studying.

A quick Google reveals that Einstein started a philosophy reading group in his youth that read Poincare, another major neo-Kantian philosopher of science within the same tradition. It is for this reason that Bachelard (in his _New Scientific Spirit_) describes Mach, Poincare, Duhem, and similar figures as the progenitors as the modern scientific worldview, finally completed by Einstein's synthesis: a Kantian structural realism where we cannot know external reality except structurally, mathematically, and probabilistically. We don't speak of "atoms" or say things like "matter is hard" except as heuristics or colloquial shorthand for describing phenomena which ultimately boil down to Einstein's mathematics. This is the logical conclusion of scientific Kantianism not only adumbrated by Kant but outright intended to be completed in this way.

Within the exact same tradition, Hegel is talking about the conceptual determination of the transcendental aesthetic - the intuition of objects in space and of space as a concept - and advancing Kant's simplistically static (and very often critiqued) transcendental aesthetic. All of the thinkers above would have been familiar with this relativising of the Kantian categories of possible intuition by Hegel, because it was a commonplace of the neo-Kantian movement (which wasn't a rejection of Hegel, but of certain ossified strands of Hegelianism).

So yes, the influence is direct.

If he 'means something else,' why doesn't he just say so? Oh I know, because when you translate the $0.10 words and obfuscation its actually just a big pile of nothing

Or maybe he just expects his readers to be familiar with Hegel since why the fuck would you read Zizek if you weren't?

This is actually pretty interesting stuff.

>The first book that Einstein suggested for reading was Karl Pearson's The Grammar of Science.
Pearson's relativity was based on idealism, in the sense of ideas or pictures in a mind.
"There are many signs," he wrote, "that a sound idealism is surely replacing, as a basis for natural philosophy, the crude materialism of the older physicists." "Law in the scientific sense is thus essentially a product of the human mind and has no meaning apart from man." (Ibid., Ch. III, § 4)[20]

>Poincaré
Poincaré believed that arithmetic is a synthetic science. ... His views were similar to those of Immanuel Kant (Kolak, 2001, Folina 1992). Poincaré held that convention plays an important role in physics. His view (and some later, more extreme versions of it) came to be known as "conventionalism". Poincaré believed that Newton's first law was not empirical but is a conventional framework assumption for mechanics (Gargani, 2012).[67] He also believed that the geometry of physical space is conventional.

Apparently Poincaré was a "conventionalist" contra some other ways of doing things. I don't know the lineage of all this though. It would be interesting to find a book on what the prevailing philosophies of mathematics were in Einstein's time. I can't quite figure out how it all relates to the debates I'm familiar with (e.g., psychologism).

This article is interesting but it's obviously from a biased source:
marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ru/kolman.htm

I'm glad I managed to take a personal interest in this subject seeing as you're only interested in defensively avoiding revising your own knee-jerk views. In an anonymous slapfight where there are no stakes whatsoever, and no one can lose face even if they completely fuck up.

Even when you have nothing to lose you still can't take an interest in new information. You only want to defend your own preconceptions because they're YOUR preconceptions.

Nobody is saying Einstein read Hegel and applied his ideas to mathematics. But the Kantian paradigm (as you can see in that link) was being tested in similar ways right from its inception.

motherfucker you're raving on about the emperor's new clothes while ignoring the big fat dick slapping you in the face

>We don't speak of "atoms" or say things like "matter is hard" except as heuristics or colloquial shorthand for describing phenomena which ultimately boil down to Einstein's mathematics
you're literally confusing quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity

are you some sort of trollbot from the future

who cares? it doesnt matter a jot to the study of physics

This, more or less...if something doesn't have any relevence or qoutability in other fields its just clear evidence that it doesnt matter.

>reading books makes you smart

The fag in the OP is an apathetic communist rat.

Well? Milton does refer to it as 'the great inane,' I believe..

Where did space come from?

>if the zero level of nature is space, then natural objects should develop out of space, not be conceived as mysterious chunks of matter that from who-knows-where “enter” space.
>Zizek's inability to understand esoteric conceptions of an idealist reality rests on spontaneous generation being the result of these realities a priori
I like his quote about fisting better

I may be wrong in this, but I think that this is describing how an Absolute Idealist would have to come to terms with space insofar there is (i) a divine Logos / Pantheistic God, and that the highest expression of (i) is that of Spirit, which is
self-consciousness itself and accordingly culture, religion, philosophy and so on, and space does not have the capacity in itself to develop such things, so space then cannot be considered the most primary thing.
Dialectically speaking (meaning the investigation of space in this case in a crude sense), nothing can logically follow from the concept of space or void. Space cannot produce anything by its own capacities or powers, hence is a dead-end.
This is not to say it has no causal effects, but it is only in virtue of other things that we can talk about space.

He just phrased it in an inaccessible way it seems to me.

> Matter does not arise from the curvature of space-time, but rather causes space-time to curve, hence gravity.

Could you elaborate just a bit on this? How is gravity the result of matter causing space-time to bend?

This but unironically

But space isn't actually a perfect void, there's all kinds of shit floating around in it. Hydrogen and meteors and gasses and shit. When we talk about space we're not talking about void, we're talking about the thing we perceive geometrically in which objects move. The class 'objects' is not confined to matter. Energy is also part of this class. Anything that can appear to consciousness, that is, undergo the conditioning imposed by the purely mental categories of time and space in the process of cognition, is an object; that to which things appear is the subject.
So when we talk about 'space' we aren't talking about a 'void' in the sense of a 'nothing' or a 'non-existence.' We are talking about the mode of perception in which it is possible for us to make sense of motion.
>Pantheistic
PanENtheistic*

einstein was a brainlet fyi
gravity contradicts inertia, elliptical motion is the real contradiction
organic matter is negentropic backwards in time negative-energy
inorganic matter is entropic forward in time energy
think about it

>think about it
o-okay

>gravity contradicts inertia, elliptical motion is the real contradiction
hmm

wtf I hate books now

tl;dr
what we observe as "gravity" is not due to a force exerted by objects on other objects (which is the newtonian view), but actually the consequence of an object taking the *straightest* path (called a geodesic) through 4-dimensional space-time. When you throw a ball in the air, it appears to follow a curved path in 3-d, but in the 4-d geometry of space-time, it's actually going straight in order to take the shortest distance to its destination. Sort of like how the straightest path and shortest flight (according to the geometry of the earth as a sphere) to get from one city to another might actually look like a curved path on a standard map. So that pseudo-explains how curvature of space-time causes the effects that we used to attribute to the force of gravity (admittedly poorly - thinking about your question made me realize i don't understand as well as i thought).
And as far as how matter causes space-time to curve in the first place, we have the einstein field equations. My pseudlet powers end there I'm afraid

cool i'm glad you cleared that up bro

there doesn't have to be 2 extremes, you simpleton fuck.

Wasn't Einstein wrong, though? Weren't there big developments in quantum physics that he refused to accept because 'spooky action at a distance' contradicted his theories of relativity special and general?

It's been a long time since I thought about these things and can't remember specifics - if you feel like googling it and sharing that would be great

Empty space is eternally nothing and unless reason to believe otherwise is infinite in extension, is the real natureal concept of grid, graph, dimension.

What appears to be 'physical' warp-able relativity gravity force capable ('')space(-time''') came from 'always existing in some form but transforming over time into its current form naturally or by Jove'

IN ENGLISH, please!

>When Hegel defines nature, he says not only that it is the Otherness of the Idea, but that it is the Idea itself in its Otherness
Continentals disgust me. Why do they have to mystify everything?

>he still believes in the analytic/continental divide

the jury is still out, and the jury is incapable of knowing how flawed they might be

Empty space is eternally nothing

unless there is reason provided to believe otherwise it is infinite in extension

'nothing space', empty space is the real natureal concept of grid, graph, dimension.

(3 dimensional void)(xyz axis)(3 dimensions of nothing that an object could move from a to b in, from C23 to Q76 in)


Einstein's theory of gravity depends on 'the black looking area' between the moon and the earth and the sun to not be a 'empty pure nothing space'

The mechanism of the theory of gravity is that 'outer space is not purely an empty nothing space', but is some type of substance, which curves, warps, displaces, when mass is in its presence (as a ball in water, or a ball on taught fabric, or a bowling ball on jello, or a child in a ball pit) so that Sun at point A, displaces the 'substance of gravity field space' at point A, and B, and C, and D.... all the way to where planet earth is at point R, and where pluto is at point Q.

The point being made I believe is that while there are things in space, it does not produce them by virtue of itself.
Which is to say, perhaps simplistically on my behalf, space does not itself give rise to hydrogen, meteors, gasses and so on.
These are things which are to be said within space, but are not organized into the forms they possess, to have actual being as they are, because of space.

Also, if we are speaking of this from a Hegelian perspective, subjects themselves do not impose categorical features upon objects because it leaves us with the dual problems of solipsism (as we can only claim to know what appears to us)
and an infinite regress of explanations as to how we can even know what the conditions of perception are in the first place (i.e. "How can we know I perceive x?", "Because we have criterion y which gives the unity of appearance", "How do we know criterion y?" ad infinitum).

>Panentheism
Acosmicism (not to be confused with cosmicism) tbqh

Well, it's actually panentheism, but you can go on being wrong if you want.

He's a literal neo-nazi, you idiot!

He wasn't wrong, he just didn't achieve full accuracy, which we still haven't. We don't know how quantum gravity works.

dont you dare slight me on an imageboard

>dont you dare slight me on an imageboard
>on an imageboar
are implications being implied?

>he doesn't

intredasting

cool

>about to post the obvious "except he's not living"
>Doesn't anyone remember all the news about him three months ago when he died?
>think twice
>look him up
>he's not dead

What the fuck I'm starting to believe in that Mandela effect bullshit.

Am I alone in remembering this? Am I getting him mixed up with some other Slovenian philosopher? Must have been a weird dream.

But he's a Marxist

It's 2017, user.
Nazis say he's a marxist.
Marxists say he's a nazi.
So what does that even mean?

It means he's on to something

something synthesized

It's called the third position
Marxism-Bannonism, Zizekism-Evolaism, National Bolshevism

>he thinks nothing is nothing
youtube.com/watch?v=X5rAGfjPSWE&t=612s

This makes no sense at all.

what

all memes existing currently are smart.
therefore redundant
hes not a meme, the representation of him in the collective mind is a meme.
who we/you/i think he is, he is not. who we/you/i think he is, is the meme.
he is the man.
therefore he is a man (not verified but highly likely)
smart he is not.
smart is the meme.
which he is not.
he lives tho

That is not what I said. I pointed out there was a lack of development and organization in space, and a lack of anything comparable to self-consciousness, or consciousness
within Hegelian framework.

If I hadn't just left my job at a library of hunt down a copy of the Philosophy of Nature and find something explaining Hegel's concept of aether to show you that you're wrong

That's from his Jena period you piece of SHIT

Both the meme quote and the full excerpt are true.

Hmm?

he ditched aether, along with a bunch of other notions like his philosophy/ethics of love, Schelling's naturphilosophie, view of Kantian Christianity and general Neoplatonism/mysticism
after he developed his dialectic post-Jena because he felt he could no longer justify them in a metaphysical system

>This makes no sense at all.
t. retarded idiot

He was an atheist, too

this

Space is only stupid if you are very ignorant about science.

ITT: people don't realize that the slav's whole career is built on using mental gymnastics to arrive at a statement that would seem ludicrous out of context, but in context mostly makes sense, and the discrepancy between these gives the illusion of significance, when actually the significant aspect was the graceful wit of the gymnastics itself.

Philosophy isn't for you, bucko

leave

You don't really need to eat shit to know it's shit. Shit has qualities that are apparent on first appearance and these qualities are integral part of shit being shit, they can't be removed from the shit and pretend it's not shit.

Zizek is is very much a con artist and pomo. He is a spineless faggot who shifts his position depending on which way the wind blows.

>and pomo
You wouldn't happen to be that idiot making the Peterson threads, would you?