Jeffrey Bell on The Limits of Human Knowledge

Jeffrey Bell is currently in the midst of posting some thoughts on his recent readings of the work Graham Priest. Bell’s posts are always economical and lucid, which makes me wonder why his blog Aberrant Monism (a title that tickles my brain) doesn’t get much more attention in the blogoverse? Regardless, you will be reading a lot more about Bell's work here over the next few months - and both posts linked below are certainly representative of his interests and clarity.

In the first post Bell tackles Priest’s notion of the ‘nondenumerable’ (here), while exploring the convergences between Priest's work and the thought of Deleuze & Guattari regarding contradictory insights and the limits of philosophical thinking.

Here is an excerpt:

On my reading of Deleuze’s Hume, or the Deleuzian Hume that accounts for the profound sense in which Deleuze was a Humean throughout his career, the impressions and ideas are not to be understood as a countable set but are rather a nondenumerable multiplicity that becomes, when actualized, the bifurcations of conceptual thought. In Priest’s terms, the multiplicity Hume thinks in his Treatise is a limit to thought itself and gives rise to contradictions when it is thought. For example, there is the well-known contradiction in Hume’s thought, and one Hume himself despaired of in the appendix to the Treatise, regarding the self. On the one hand the self is understood to be nothing but a bundle of impressions and yet, through much of the latter half of the Treatise and in his essays, the self is the assumed and unquestioned condition for many of his analyses of the passions, justice, politics, etc. If the multiplicity of impressions and ideas is understood as a nondenumerable condition inseparable from thought, then as this condition is thought it gives rise to the bifurcations and contradictions that attend conceptual identifications (or intellectual mitosis as this was discussed in an earlier post), as is evidenced in this case with Hume’s attempts to delimit the identity of the self – he too encountered the contradictory limit.

In the next post (here) Bell investigates the idea of the paradox of expressibility and concludes that it’s appearance is the result of an even deeper “ontological paradox” at the heart of things.

Here is a particularly juicy excerpt:

What I’m interested in is with the something that is going on, for I take there to be something ontological going on, a paradox at the heart of reality. In Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos and in my earlier book The Problem of Difference I argue much along these lines, adopting Deleuze as my ally for in Deleuze we find one who repeatedly affirms certain paradoxes. One merely need look through the table of contents to Logic of Sense to discover the importance of paradox in Deleuze’s thought – the first two chapters on becoming and surface effects are about the paradoxes of each, and these set the stage for the remaining discussions of the book. This is not to say that Deleuze and Priest are of the same mind. Priest sets out to incorporate the ‘true contradictions’ that arise at the limits of thought and expression into a broader and more encompassing logic, what he calls dialetheism; whereas Deleuze on my view is more interested in affirming the paradox at the ontological level, at the level of becoming and process rather than at the level of logic.

And in the comments replying to a sloppy question posed by yours truly Bell writes:

…if you push Humean empiricism to its transcendental limits, as I think Deleuze does for instance in his reading of Hume, and if you push Kantian rationalism to its transcendental limits, as Priest argues Hegel does, then in both cases you return to the ontological paradox that is the condition of possibility for the two branches, for this intellectual bifurcation.

Which I would push even further to argue that when acknowledged and affirmed the ‘ontological paradox’ jolts us back into a realization of the ontological intimacy (embeddedness) of things, and offers a cognitive being such as us an opportunity know just a little bit more than what the limits of conceptual knowledge can possibly hold.

ADDENDUM:

MICHAEL: Isn’t the first step towards an affective post-formal (full-bodied) logic an acceptance of “the ontological paradox that is the condition of possibility” for all thinking? I guess what I’m asking is if there is any room for non-conceptual experience (e.g., bodily, sensual) to become acknowledged in a way that helps us except or affirm the ontological paradox while also deploying some sort of reflexive-speculative pragmatism with regard to human activities?

JEFFREY BELL: [T]hat’s where I’m working through my own aporia at the moment. The Davidsonian, McDowellian, Sellarsian, etc. in me says no, there is no room for the non-conceptual. The Deleuzian side of me, or at least the Deleuze who says in a Leibniz lecture that ‘one can very well think without concepts’, as well as the Jamesian and Humean in me says yes, there is an important place for the non-conceptual. I suspect you side with the latter. I also suspect that if I were to resolve this aporia through a Deleuzian theory of concepts or some other form of conceptual innovation, I’d simply push the aporia (or paradox for Priest, which is why I think Priest’s arguments regarding the limits of thought are important) elsewhere. And this is fine.