Manifesto of Haecceitics [electronic resource].

Gauss PDF 2013

Open access content

Manifesto of Haecceitics – or Some notes on helping to become a Dogmatic Metaphysician. A guide for the Artist (under erasure). Haecceity is the ‘whatness’ of an object, and a dogmatic metaphysician – pre-Kantian, founded his (and it was a he) knowledge on the grantee of God, that things could be known – for sure. Notably in Descartes – God being a clear and distinct idea, and a guarantor of certain (dogmatic) knowledge, and also in Leibniz… and the scholastic philosophers. This was critiqued by Kant famously in his first critique – where knowledge was based on a priori categories of (human) perception and not on any a priori proof of God. (he critiqued the ontological argument) Recently a group of philosophers have once again attempted to postulate an absolute removed from human intention, this time based on The One (Laruelle) and the idea of Objects – the OOO group of philosophers – who deny Dogmatic Metaphysics in favor of speculating the necessity of contingency (Meillassoux). Speculative materialism/realism. The problem is (it seems) rather than thus having an absolute knowledge of ‘the thing in itself’, they appear to remove these objects from us, and from themselves, in the unimaginable infinity of non totalizable possibilities. And one possibility in a contingency can be that this proposition is not true! The very polymorphism of post-modernity they sort to overcome re-appears even with the same correlationist problematics. How many uses can you find for a hammer or a paper clip, worse how can you be sure your list of uses is ever definitive and complete. They may think such an absolute is demonstratable, but it’s only useful in refuting any certainty about anything, so despite their best intentions still leaves ‘faith’ and ‘mysticism’ especially, with a free reign. How many interpretations can you have for a work of art or Finnegan’s Wake or for this text…
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Art criticism
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James Whitehead