In Praise of Mathematics by Alain Badiou & Gilles Haéri

Author:Alain Badiou & Gilles Haéri
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509512065
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

IV

An Attempt at a Mathematics-based Metaphysics

I’d like for us to talk specifically about the way mathematics has inspired your own work in philosophy. The metaphysics you’ve developed is, if not propaganda (!) for, at least an attempt at, re-entwining philosophy and mathematics. How are they connected to each other in your philosophical system?

What has my philosophical strategy been for about thirty years now? It’s been to prove what I call the immanence of truths. As I already mentioned, I call “truths” (always in the plural; there’s no such thing as “the truth”) particular creations with universal value: works of art, scientific theories, politics of emancipation, passionate loves. In a nutshell, let’s say: scientific theories are truths about being itself (mathematics) or the “natural” laws of the worlds about which we can have experiential knowledge (physics and biology). Political truths concern the organization of societies, the laws of collective life and its reorganization, all in the light of universal principles such as freedom and, today, primarily, equality. Artistic truths have to do with the formal consistency of finished works that sublimate what our senses perceive: music in terms of hearing, painting and sculpture in terms of sight, poetry in terms of speech … Last but not least, the truths of love relate to the dialectical power contained in the experiencing of the world not from the point of view of the One, of individual singularity, but from the point of view of the Two, and hence with a radical acceptance of the other person. These truths, as is clear, are not philosophical in origin or nature. But my aim is to salvage the (philosophical) category of truth that distinguishes between them and names them, by legitimizing the fact that a truth can be:

— absolute, while at the same time being a localized construction;

— eternal, while at the same time resulting from a process that begins in a determi-nate world (in the form of an event in that world) and thus belongs to the time of that world.

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