The Thinkers : Ideas and Concepts

"One day, someone charged with theft, who was guarded by a police officer, accidentally crossed paths with a judge, before the court hearing was started," Swara began with a story, before continuing a discussion about thinkers, after saying Basmalah and Salaam."

"'What are you charged with this time?' said the Judge mildly to the accused.

'I was just trying to get my New Year shopping done early, your honor!' replied the accused asking for mercy.

'Yes, it's true,' said the Police officer calmly, 'but ... before the store opened, your honor.'"

"Ideas are everywhere," Swara carried on, "In common usage and in philosophy, ideas are the results of thought. In philosophy, ideas can also be mental representational images of some object. The word idea comes from Greek ἰδέα idea 'form, pattern,' from the root of ἰδεῖν idein, 'to see.' Many philosophers have considered ideas to be a fundamental ontological category of being. The capacity to create and understand the meaning of ideas is considered to be an essential and defining feature of human beings.

Although Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare. Even a so-called 'knowledgeable' person usually has solid knowledge, only within some special area, representing a tiny fraction of the whole spectrum of human concerns. Humorist Will Rogers said, 'Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.'

How does an ignorant world perform intricate functions requiring enormous knowledge? These intricate functions include not only such scientific feats as air travel and space exploration, but also the complex economic processes which bring a slice of bread and a piece of butter to your plate at breakfast. Anyone who has studied the actual process by which everyday food items are planned, produced, and distributed knows that the complexity staggers the mind. Many highly intelligent and highly trained people spend a lifetime studying it, and learning more all the time. Among those who speculate financially in such commodities, economic disaster is commonplace, even after they have spent years studying the market. In short, individually, we know so pathetically little, and yet socially we use a range and complexity of knowledge that would confound a computer.

Physicists have determined that even the most solid and heavy mass of matter we see is mostly empty space. But at the submicroscopic level, specks of matter scattered through a vast emptiness have such incredible density and weight, and are linked to one another by such powerful forces, that together they produce all the properties of concrete, cast iron and solid rock. In much the same way, specks of knowledge are scattered through a vast emptiness of ignorance, and everything depends upon how solid the individual specks of knowledge are, and on how powerfully linked and coordinated they are with one another. The vast spaces of ignorance do not prevent the specks of knowledge from forming a solid structure, though sufficient misunderstanding can disintegrate it in much the same way that radioactive atomic structures can disintegrate (uranium into lead) or even explode.

Ideas, as the raw material from which knowledge is produced, exist in superabundance, but that makes the production of knowledge more difficult rather than easier. Many ideas—probably most—will have to be discarded somewhere in the process of producing authenticated knowledge. Authentication is as important as the raw information itself, and the manner and speed of the authentication process can be crucial: the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor succeeded despite the fact that knowledge of the impending attack had reached the War Department in Washington hours before it occurred. Still the bombing caught Pearl Harbor by surprise because the information had not yet passed through the authentication process established by the military institutions. Whatever the merits or demerits of those institutions as they existed on December 7, 1941, it is clear that any military organization must have some authentication process, or else any unverified idea that enters the system has the potential to set off a war. More recently, a flock of Canadian geese set off the American warning system to detect incoming nuclear missiles, and only subsequent authentication procedures prevented a 'retaliatory' nuclear strike which could have ended in World War III.

Various kinds of ideas can be classified by their relationship to the authentication process. There are ideas systematically prepared for authentication ('theories'), ideas not derived from any systematic process ('visions'), ideas which could not survive any reasonable authentication process ('illusions'), ideas which exempt themselves from any authentication process ('myths'), ideas which have already passed authentication processes ('facts'), as well as ideas known to have failed-or certain to fail-such processes ('false- hoods'—both mistakes and lies).

While these various kinds of ideas are conceptually different, in reality a given notion may evolve or metamorphose through several of these states. For example, we may start with a general impression of how and why certain things happen the way they do, without having any real evidence or any logically structured argument about it. But after we begin with such a vision, we may proceed to systematically determine that if this vision is correct, then certain empirical consequences will be observable under the proper conditions. The "vision" has led to a "theory." The proper conditions may be created in a laboratory or observed in history or otherwise constructed or discovered, and the validity and certainty of the results may be more or less open to criticism. The important point here is simply to distinguish such systematic authentication procedures from decisions based on consensus, emotions, or traditions.

On the continuum of human thinking, at one end is pure science; at the other end pure myth. One is sustained entirely by systematic logical procedures, the other by consensual verification by contemporaries, by their predecessors represented through prevailing traditions, or by posterity for those who expect historic vindication. The crucial distinction is one of procedures, not of end results. Science is no more certain to be correct than is myth. Many scientific theories have been proven wrong by scientific methods, while the great enduring beliefs which have achieved the status of myths usually contain some important—if partial—truth.

Both systematic authentication and consensual approval can be further broken down. Systematic authentication involves a testing of the logical structure of a theory for internal consistency and a testing of the theory's results for external consistency with the observable facts of the real world.

Consensual approval may mean the approval of the general public as of a given time, or the approval of some special reference group-a social class, a religious sect, an ideological movement, etc.-in the past, present, or future. Ideas which lack logical, empirical, or general consensual support may still sustain themselves as acceptable to a consensus of those who regard themselves as special guardians of a particular truth-i.e., as the consensual reference group that really matters. Sometimes the elitism implicit in such a position can be tempered by depicting the idea in question (religious salvation, political reconstitution, etc.) as beneficial to a broad sweep of mankind outside the group, so that the group is only a temporary surrogate for a larger constituency which will ultimately approve the idea. But, of course, this proposition is itself still another idea lacking either empirical verification or general consensual approval.

There are many variations on the two basic ways of verifying ideas, and many combinations of these variations are used-often involving combinations from both systematic and consensual methods of verification in the same argument. For example, a scientific presentation may avoid-indeed, must avoid—unlimited verification of every incidental aspect of its arguments by saying, in effect, 'everybody knows' this or that, and getting on with proving the things that need proving.' Similarly, beliefs resting essentially on consensual approval-religious beliefs, for example—may also employ logical and empirical techniques, such as the scientific 'proofs' of the existence of God, which were common in the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century, before Darwin. These more or less open combinations present no special problems. A problem does arise, however, when one method masquerades as another-for example, when the results of essentially consensual processes choose to present themselves as scientific, as in the case of much so-called 'social science.'

An idea or understanding abstracted from a concrete event is a concept. There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them. It therefore has a combination. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity is conceptual. There is no concept with only one component. Even the first concept, the one with which a philosophy 'begins,' has several components, because it is not obvious that philosophy must have a beginning, and if it does determine one, it must combine it with a point of view or a ground. Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin with the same concept, they do not have the same concept of beginning. Every concept is at least double or triple, etc. Neither is there a concept possessing every component, since this would be chaos pure and simple. Even so-called universals as ultimate concepts, must escape the chaos by circumscribing a universe that explains them (contemplation, reflection, communication). Every concept has an irregular contour defined by the sum of its camponents, which is why, from Plato to Bergson, we find the idea of the concept being a matter of articulation, of cutting and cross-cutting.

The concept is a whole because it totalizes its components, but it is a fragmentary whole. Only on this condition can it escape the mental chaos constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it.

All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges. We are dealing here with a problem concerning the plurality of subjects, their relationship, and their reciprocal presentation. Of course, everything changes if we think that we discover another problem.

Obviously, every concept has a history. On the other hand, a concept also has a becoming that involves its relationship with concepts situated on the same plane. Here concepts link up with each other, support one another, coordinate their contours, articulate their respective problems, and belong to the same philosophy, even if they have different histories. In fact, having a finite number of components, every concept will branch off toward other concepts that are differently composed but that constitute other regions of the same plane, answer to problems that can be connected to each other, and participate in a co-creation. A concept requires not only a problem through which it recasts or replaces earlier concepts, but a junction of problems where it combines with other coexisting concepts.

There is the nature of the concept or the concept of concept. First, every concept relates back to other concepts, not only in its history, but in its becoming or its present connections. Every concept has components that may, in turn, be grasped as concepts. Concepts, therefore, extend to infinity and, being created, are never created from nothing. Second, what is distinctive about the concept is that it renders components inseparable within itself. Components, or what defines the consistency of the concept, its endoconsistency, are distinct, heterogeneous, and yet not separable. The point is that each partially overlaps, has a zone of neighborhood, or a threshold of indiscernibility, with another one. Third, each concept will therefore be considered as the point of coincidence, condensation, or accumulation of its own components.

The concept is an incorporeal, even though it is incarnated or effectuated in bodies. But, in fact, it is not mixed up with the state of affairs in which it is effectuated. It does not have spatiotemporal coordinates, only intensive ordinates. It has no energy, only intensities; it is anenergetic (energy is not intensity but rather the way in which the latter is deployed and nullified in an extensive state of affairs). The concept speaks the event, not the essence or the thingpure Event, a hecceity (individuality, specifity), an entity: the event of the Other or of the face (when, in turn, the face is taken as concept). It is like the bird as event. The concept is defined by the inseparability of a finite number of heterogeneous components traversed by a point of absolute survey at infinite speed. Concepts are 'absolute surfaces or volumes,' forms whose only object is the inseparability of distinct variations. The 'survey' is the state of the concept or its specific infinity, although the infinities may be larger or smaller according to the number of components, thresholds and bridges. In this sense, the concept is act of thought, it is thought operating at infinite (although greater or lesser) speed.

The concept is therefore both absolute and relative: it is relative to its own components, to other concepts, to the plane on which it is defined, and to the problems it is supposed to resolve; but it is absolute through the condensation it carries out, the site it occupies on the plane, and the conditions it assigns to the problem. As whole it is absolute, but insofar as it is fragmentary it is relative. It is infinite through its survey or its speed but finite through its movement that traces the contour of its components. Philosophers are always recasting and even changing their concepts: sometimes the development of a point of detail that produces a new condensation, that adds or withdraws components, is enough. Philosophers sometimes exhibit a forgetfulness that almost makes them ill. According to Jaspers, Nietzsche, 'corrected his ideas himself in order to create new ones without explicitly admitting it; when his health deteriorated he forgot the conclusions he had arrived at earlier.' Or, as Leibniz said, 'I thought I had reached port; but . . . I seemed to be cast back again into the open sea.' What remains absolute, however, is the way in which the created concept is posited in itself and with others. The relativity and absoluteness of the concept are like its pedagogy and its ontology, its creation and its self-positing, its ideality and its reality—the concept is real without being actual, ideal without being abstract. The concept is defined by its consistency, its endoconsistency and exoconsistency, but it has no reference: it is self-referential; it posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created. Constructivism unites the relative and the absolute.

Finally, the concept is not discursive, and philosophy is not a discursive formation, because it does not link propositions together. Confusing concept and proposition, produces a belief in the existence of scientific concepts and a view of the proposition as a genuine 'intension' (what the sentence expresses). Consequently, the philosophical concept usually appears only as a proposition deprived of sense. This confusion reigns in logic and explains its infantile idea of philosophy. Concepts are measured against a 'philosophical' grammar that replaces them with propositions extracted from the sentences in which they appear. We are constantly trapped between alternative propositions and do not see that the concept has already passed into the excluded middle. The concept is not a proposition at all; it is not propositional, and the proposition is never an intension. Propositions are defined by their reference, which concerns not the Event but rather a relationship with a state of affairs or body and with the conditions of this relationship. Far from constituting an intension, these conditions are entirely extensional. They imply operations by which abscissas or successive linearizations are formed that force intensive ordinates into spatiotemporal and energetic coordinates, by which the sets so determined are made to correspond to each other. Concepts are centers of vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to all the others. This is why they all resonate rather than cohere or correspond with each other."

"So, what comes first, concept or idea?" Swara inquired, then she said, "An 'idea' is really part of or the beginnings of the process of creating a full 'concept'. An idea is a rough mental impression. It could be a thought, suggestion, opinion, belief or intention. Concept stands for an understanding drawn from a particular fact or logic. If you're redecorating your bedroom, you might want to start with a concept, such as 'flower garden' or 'outer space.' It's a general idea about a thing or group of things, derived from specific instances or occurrences. More generally, a concept is something we choose to define in a precise way; but it is not the same as a fact, which is something that is proved true. Concepts can be based on real phenomena and are a generalized idea of something of meaning. Examples of concepts include common demographic measures: Income, Age, Eduction Level, Number of SIblings, and so on."

"And as a closing, hear these short stories,

'A man walked into the office of a psychiatrist and sat down on the floor, to explain his problem. 'Doctor, I have this problem,' the man said. 'I keep hallucinating that I’m a dog. It’s crazy. I don’t know what to do!'

'A common canine complex,' said the doctor reassuringly. 'Relax. Come here and lie down on the couch.'

'Oh I can’t, Doctor,' the man said nervously. 'I’m not allowed up on the furniture.'

A doctor was examining a pediatric patient.

Doctor: That’s a horrible gash on your skull. What happened?

Child: My sister hit me with some tomatoes.

Doctor: That’s incredible. I’ve never seen a tomato cut before.

Child: Well, these were in a can.'"

It's time to go, Swara then chanting,

And I see your true colors

Shining through

I see your true colors

And that's why I love you

So don't be afraid

To let them show your true colors

True colors are beautiful

Like a rainbow *)

"And Allah knows best."

Citations & References:
- Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, Basic Books
- Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, Columbia University Press New York
*) "True Colors" written by Billy Steinberg & Tom Kelly
[Session 7]
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