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the form of the good - immediate aspects of its enunciation

March 10, 2015

We have recalled the Form of the Good in three formulations: (1) The Form of the Good is diagonalization. (2) The Form of the Good is that there is not an Idea of the Idea. (3) The Form of the Good is that there is not a being which is exactly what it is of and is of exactly what it is

These are strange things to say, and the possibility of saying of such things may be an object of critical scrutiny, almost as much as what is said. Here are only a few immediate considerations. 

1. The Good has the logical form of a truth, not of a being. Thus, 'formulating the form,' 'enunciating the form,' etc. are not solecisms, but neither are they ways of formulating an essence in logos.  

2. The thesis itself, in any of these formulations, can be motivated but not proven, for a precise reason. Like the Church-Turing thesis, of which it is the complement, it proposes that we recognize in a matheme the precising of a notion of ordinary language, one which one has 'often heard' (pollakis akekoas). The thesis is not unfalsifiable; there are any number of ways in which it might be defeated. One of these is probably not, though, to object wholesale to this type of identification, unless one can formulate the objection in a way that doesn't apply to Church-Turing also (or unless one is willing to reject Church-Turing). 

3. The diagonal formulation predicts that the point of intersection of syntax and semantics is also a point of intersection with pragmatics. A first step toward this is to note the infinite debt incurred by the enunciation at a performative level. One articulates a maximally condensed expression of the form of the incompressible. The necessary next step is to place the enunciated and the enunciation side by side, and thematize their relation. (This process does not terminate. Speaking loosely, it amounts to a second stage of the halting problem.) 

4. We have recalled the form of the Good in three ways, not in ‘the’ three ways. In fact, all three are alternative statements of the second clause of the name of the Good, after 'the One.'  One has to imagine them stacked there simultaneously, in the same position in the signifying chain. (There are stricter ways using ordinals.) In each of these variant formulations, the second clause comes to the aid of the One by distinguishing it from the One-All, into which the One has always-already collapsed. 

5. By these formulations, one brings into the same semantic field the theories of value of Plato and Sartre (metaethics) and the diagonal theorems (metalogic). Here, we happily acknowledge the paradigm-shifting precedent of Badiou's work.