If there are principles, they structure every proposition that speaks about them, including this one.
If the principles are related disjunctively, then their duality will divide every proposition about them, including this one.
Always-already, explicitly only eventually, and not only in one way.
We would discover the principles and their relation neither by using nor by asserting axioms, but through a felicitous interpretation of fixed points. Interpretation? A reflection, such one that finally learns to participate in the form of self-reference – finally the step back and the step in, semantic ascent and descent, bracketing and emplacement, coordinated in the right way.
Useful procedures of philosophy: to insert and remove the changes of vocabulary that defer this self-application of the principles. Inserting gives relevance by relation to the languages of existence, while removing risks a language apparently without referents, but actually clarifies, removes pseudoproblems, and above all, voids attempts to interpret the principles, as if they were mere content, from a lower formal-dialectical level. Such work of reinscription is valuable, but as periodized phenomenology, the form of a participation which, to be helped, also needs to be deconstructed, the only alternative being completion in the imaginary. The theoretical form of this goodness, the need of dialectic, is to continue to track the sameness of the difference of the principles as it mutates, incommensurably, through situations. This metalogical analysis is an intrinsically ‘creative’, temporal, chance-driven endeavor, since there is – demonstrably – no single mathematical standpoint from which the differences are equated simultaneously. Example: Where Leibniz fails to track the sameness of the difference sometime in the late 1680s, and appeals to a metalanguage to save us: supposing that the infinite serves as a place where the rupture of incommensuarability is repaired. But from the analogy between deduction and commensurability (from the self-application of deduction) follows just the reverse of the work he wants done, as will be shown in 1930 when the rupture repressed as content is forced to reappear at the level of theory itself.
“Without failure, no ethics.” What may I not hope? To escape the consequences of diagonalization. In the refusal of the arithmetization of syntax we find the form of philosophy’s emptiest desires.
Colloquy
I think you would be interested in Jean-Luc Nancy’s forthcoming work “Adoration.” He often cites Wittgenstein when he says, “The sense of the world is outside the world.” But this does not mean that W or N are thinking of some behind-world or back-world that would support this one. It becomes a question of thinking the “outside” of this world as it opens up in the very middle of this world — a question of tracking the different-in-the-same at every step. For Nancy, it is this sense of “constitutive alterity” (my phrase, not his) that we as a civilization have lost a sense for. I think this is what you are also getting at when you say (quite precisely): “The theoretical form of this goodness, the need of dialectic, is to continue to track the sameness of the difference of the principles as it mutates, incommensurably, through situations.”
Nancy also discusses how, with Leibniz, the ‘principle of sufficient reason’ both shows its full force AND gets suspended over its own incertitude (or abyss). As with Wittgenstein, the Reason for existence is not found “in” existence. Nancy writes how this is implicated with the founder of modern science, Newton, when he says “I make no hypotheses,” which Nancy interprets: “This is like saying: I construe an order of rational physical laws, but it’s not a matter of using them to render the reason for the existence of the world as such.”
This “reason for the existence of the world as such” is precisely the empty place (of difference) that we must “guard” — not unlike Blanchot’s phrase, “Keep watch over absent meaning.” Nancy insists that this means that we cannot render, once and for all, the “reason” for existence– i.e., the Good is outside the sphere of facts (and, as you add, outside of the discourse of principles and propositions). On the contrary, we must maintain our openness, suspended over the ‘nothing’ of the world that undoes its facts and its rendered reasons. “… the empty place will not be occupied,” he insists.
I’m not sure of your larger metalogical endeavor here, but I sense a deep continuity between it and my own projects as I envision them on my blog (esp. the post Nontology)– along with Nancy and the other ideas I’ve mentioned here. I can send you more clips if you’re interested (I’ve translated a personal copy of Adoration). I hope in time you’ll flesh out in more detail some more aspects of your idea of ethics as metalogic (or perhaps you have published more details elsewhere?). Your style of writing is concise and very economic, I would say, forcing me to re-read closely, which is good. And that final line really is great: “In the refusal of the arithmetization of syntax we find the form of philosophy’s emptiest desires.”
Tschuess,
Tim.