#parmenides

This brings us back to Lacan’s notion of the objet a as surplus‐enjoyment: there is no “basic enjoyment” to which one adds the surplus‐enjoyment; enjoyment is always a surplus, in excess. The object‐in‐itself (photon, atom) is here not negated/mediated, it emerges as the (retroactive) result of its mediation.

This result brings us back unexpectedly to Plato’s Parmenides, which uncannily ends up evoking a hypothesis that points forward towards the thesis that there is only Nothing, that all processes take place “from Nothing through Nothing to Nothing”: “If one is not, then nothing is.” Is not Parmenides, even more than Plato’s Sophist, the dialogue on the corrosive all‐pervasive force of nothingness? It begins already in Parmenides 130c‐d, when Parmenides raises a question that perplexes Socrates and forces him to admit his limitation: are there also Ideas of the lowest material things, Ideas of excrement, dust …? Is there an eidos for “things that might seem absurd, like hair and mud and dirt, or anything else totally undignified and worthless?”.

What lurks behind this question is not only the embarrassing fact that the noble notion of Form could also apply to excremental objects, but a much more precise paradox that Plato approaches in his Statesman, in which he makes a crucial claim: divisions (of a genus into species) should be made at the proper joints. For example, it is a mistake to divide the genus of all human beings into Greeks and barbarians: “barbarian” is not a proper form because it does not designate a positively defined group (species), but merely all persons who are not Greeks.

The positivity of the term “barbarian” thus conceals the fact that it serves as the container for all those who do not fit the form “Greek.” Hegel’s (and Lacan’s) hypothesis is that this holds for all divisions of a genus into species: every genus, in order to be fully divided into species, has to include such a negative pseudo‐species, a “part of no‐part” of the genus, all those who belong to the genus but are not covered by any of its species. This “contradiction” between a genus and its species, embodied in an excessive group whose consistency is purely “negative,” is what sets a dialectical process in motion.

The School of Athens | Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1511)

“It is right that you learn all things — both the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth and the beliefs of mortals, in which there is no true trust.” — Parmenides

In a world rife with superficial relationships and digital interactions, trust has become a currency that is both devalued and yet relentlessly sought after. This paradox creates an unsettling backdrop wherein individuals often mistake the vibrations of social media engagement for genuine connection. What is deemed “likeable” often outweighs what is “trustworthy,” leading to a collective condition where the heart of truth is obscured by the smoke and mirrors of curated online personas. One might argue that as modern society embraces the fleeting dopamine hit provided by attention, it simultaneously compromises the very essence of trust itself.

Authenticity, in its purest form, is rapidly becoming an elusive aspiration. Individuals engage in a dance of façade-building, projecting idealized versions of themselves that are far removed from reality. This self-betrayal extends beyond personal identity into relational exchanges, breeding a climate of codependency. Rather than forging genuine connections, individuals become entangled in webs of emotional manipulation and parasitism—using one another as means to end. The moral ramifications of such behavior create ripples that undermine the foundational ethos required for healthy, fulfilling relationships.

Amidst these dynamics, we must ask: What does it mean to trust in a world where vehement likes eclipse heartfelt conversations? The delicate weave of trust is frayed by fleeting validations that occur at the speed of a thumb swipe. Amid the echoes of endless notifications, the quest for authenticity often finds itself buried beneath layers of curated commentary and attentiveness that serve selfish ends. The gravity of these choices stretches our understanding of interpersonal agency, raising profound questions that challenge our very conception of morality and connection.

Paradoxically, the price of this social currency is steep; it demands the sacrifice of depth for breadth. In an age where every interaction is structured to serve the fickleness of engagement metrics, the more profound human experience—characterized by vulnerability, reciprocity, and, fundamentally, trust—stands endangered. As we deconstruct the intricate ties that bind us, it becomes imperative to reassess not only our motivations for engagement but also the ethical frameworks that sustain our relationships amid chaos.

The Currency of Connection: Emotional Dependency and Social Parasitism

As Parmenides reminds us, the beliefs of mortals are often steeped in treachery rather than truth. The manifestations of emotional dependency in contemporary society reveal a troubling trend: humans are increasingly reliant on one another, not for authenticity, but for mere affirmation. This reliance is amplified through the dynamic of social media, where validation occurs at the cost of genuine connection. It is a paradox of modern life, where the abundance of voices drowns out the quiet power of meaningful discourse.

In this milieu, one must confront the uncomfortable reality of social parasitism—the phenomenon where individuals derive their sense of self-worth from the accomplishments and affection of others rather than fostering their own identity. Individuals become emotional leeches, thriving on the accolades initially designed to bolster communal trust. However, this destructive dependency ultimately erodes the very fabric of society, stranding individuals in a quagmire of unsustainable relationships and hollow connections that masquerade as fulfilling bonds.

Emotional dependency breeds a toxic environment wherein the intention behind interactions becomes muddied. As individuals align their worth with social media engagement, they inadvertently reinforce cycles of manipulation and disengagement. Such practices serve to attenuate the intricacies of ethical decision-making, prioritizing personal validation over collective responsibility. The foundation of mutual respect is undermined, giving way to relationships characterized by a transactional mindset, where emotional debts replace real connection.

To disentangle ourselves from this emotional mire, we must re-establish a hierarchy of values that prioritize depth over superficiality. Authentic connections must revolve around more than mere acknowledgment; they must root themselves in a shared commitment to truth and vulnerability. As social currency continues to proliferate, so too must our defiance against the corrosive impact of emotional parasitism, which threatens not only our relationships but the very essence of humanity itself.

Deconstructing the Ethics of Engagement

The landscape of moral engagement is fraught with ambiguity. Trust, once the cornerstone of productive relationships, now teeters on a precipice of peril, challenged by the fragmented narratives that populate social media. In this kaleidoscope of opinions, the individual voice often becomes an empty whisper devoid of moral grounding. In a world where every tweet and post serves as both a weapon and shield, the ethical dimensions underlying our engagements fall victim to the whims of societal approval.

In tracing the contours of ethical betrayal, we must confront our role as actors within this dynamic. Each user is an architect of their digital identity, wielding the power to shape their perceptions and, by extension, influence others. However, the clash between genuine engagement and performance raises a new dilemma that demand both introspection and accountability. Are we crafting honest-hearted narratives with integrity, or are we merely participating in a tragic masquerade designed to satiate a hungering and insatiable audience?

To build a restoration of trust, it becomes paramount to reevaluate our incentives for engagement. As the boundaries between virtual interactions and tangible relationships continue to blur, the ethical implications of our choices carve marks into the social psyche. Every engagement bears the weight of intention, summoning us to reflect—are we there to uplift our fellow users or are we doing so merely to preserve our status? Amid this reckoning, it becomes increasingly evident that the loss of trust is a consequence of collective inaction as we falter under pressures to conform rather than embrace authenticity.

Rebuilding relationships calls for the courage to engage in uncomfortable conversations, the willingness to dismantle harmful patterns, and the strength to resist the palpable lure of superficial engagement. Only by courageously questioning our motives and the ethics underlying our interactions can we hope to regain the trust frayed by years of emotional neglect and social manipulation. Escaping the clutches of social media-induced isolation requires a steadfast commitment to fostering genuine connections born from realness, empathy, and transparency.

The Renaissance of Resilience: Redefining Trust in the Digital Age

In recognizing the deficiencies propagated by the viral age, we face the exciting challenge of redefining trust. This effort calls for a revival of resilience as a principle, wherein the reclamation of real human connection stands as a primary goal. Acknowledging the pervasive fragmentation necessitates a conscious divergence from the familiar patterns of codependency and emotional parasitism that have marred our collective experiences so far.

At the heart of this quest lies the recognition that we, as individuals, possess the power to effect change. By fostering emotional independence and resilience, we cultivate environments that prioritize authentic connections over hollow affirmations. Such a transformation germinates from collective introspection, where honesty becomes the cornerstone of our interactions, and the delineation between genuine engagement and superficial dialogue is sharply defined.

A call to resilience urges us to dismantle the external validation mechanism that has permeated our relationships. Trust should embody a principle that transcends individual engagement, spreading its roots into the fabric of societal ethics. Cultivating a climate of open communication and shared vulnerability becomes imperative in this transformation, ensuring that our relationships are not merely transactional engagements, but rather profound encounters that affirm our shared humanity.

As we navigate the tumultuous waters of trust in the digital age, we must champion a commitment to authenticity, instilling hope and renewal within the morass of emotional dependency. The path forward illuminates the potential for deeper relationships, urging us to cultivate an understanding of trust that transcends its superficial trappings. The arduous pursuit of this remarkable transformation demands immense strength; yet, in its wake lies the promise of reinstituted kinship founded upon cooperation, compassion, and collective resilience—a true renaissance of trust.

Conclusion: Reclaiming Trust as the Cornerstone of Meaningful Connections

As we reach the culmination of this discourse, it becomes evident that trust transcends mere abstraction; it stands as the essential force that fuels human connection. The disintegration of societal trust compels us to scrutinize our moral compasses, demanding unwavering introspection from both the individual and the collective. We must become acutely aware of our roles in perpetuating cycles of mistrust and ethical decline, while fervently striving to nurture authenticity in a world rife with superficiality.

The harsh truth of our present circumstances—a society plagued by codependency and social parasitism—necessitates a confrontation with our own complicity in this chaos. We are not merely observers; we are challenged to dismantle the walls that obstruct genuine connection. It is crucial to grasp that the cultivation of trust demands relentless effort, the audacity to embrace vulnerability, and a resolute commitment to mutual respect and accountability.

Researchers claim breakthrough in study of 2000 year-old Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator found in sea.

From the moment it was discovered more than a century ago, scholars have puzzled over the Antikythera mechanism, a remarkable and baffling astronomical calculator that survives from the ancient world.

The hand-powered, 2000 year-old device displayed the motion of the universe, predicting the movement of the five known planets, the phases of the moon, and the solar and lunar eclipses.

But quite how it achieved such impressive feats has proved fiendishly hard to untangle.

Now researchers at UCL believe they have solved the mystery – at least in part – and have set about reconstructing the device, gearwheels and all, to test whether their proposal works.

If they can build a replica with modern machinery, they aim to do the same with techniques from antiquity.

“We believe that our reconstruction fits all the evidence that scientists have gleaned from the extant remains to date,” said Adam Wojcik, a materials scientist at UCL.

While other scholars have made reconstructions in the past, the fact that two-thirds of the mechanism are missing has made it hard to know for sure how it worked.

The mechanism, often described as the world’s first analogue computer, was found by sponge divers in 1901 amid a haul of treasures salvaged from a merchant ship that met with disaster off the Greek island of Antikythera.

The ship is believed to have foundered in a storm in 1st Century BC, as it passed between Crete and Peloponnese en route to Rome from Asia Minor.

The battered fragments of corroded brass were barely noticed at first, but decades of scholarly work have revealed the object to be a masterpiece of mechanical engineering.

Originally encased in a wooden box one foot tall, the mechanism was covered in inscriptions – a built-in user’s manual – and contained more than 30 bronze gearwheels connected to dials and pointers.

Turn the handle and the heavens, as known to the Greeks, swung into motion.

Michael Wright, a former curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum in London, pieced together much of how the mechanism operated and built a working replica, but researchers have never had a complete understanding of how the device functioned.

Their efforts have not been helped by the remnants surviving in 82 separate fragments, making the task of rebuilding it equivalent to solving a battered 3D puzzle that has most of its pieces missing.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, the UCL team describe how they drew on the work of Wright and others.

They used inscriptions on the mechanism and a mathematical method described by the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides to work out new gear arrangements that would move the planets and other bodies in the correct way.

The solution allows nearly all of the mechanism’s gearwheels to fit within a space only 25mm deep.

According to the team, the mechanism may have displayed the movement of the sun, moon and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn on concentric rings.

Because the device assumed that the sun and planets revolved around Earth, their paths were far more difficult to reproduce with gearwheels than if the sun was placed at the centre.

Another change the scientists propose is a double-ended pointer they call a “Dragon Hand” that indicates when eclipses are due to happen.

The researchers believe the work brings them closer to a true understanding of how the Antikythera device displayed the heavens, but it is not clear whether the design is correct or could have been built with ancient manufacturing techniques.

Badiou begins the second meditation of Being and Event with the central axiom of Parmenides philosophy: 'If the one is not, nothing is.' By contrast, in Badiou's own words, "My entire discourse originates in an axiomatic decision; that of the non­-being of the one." (Being and Event Pg 31) The dialectic of the one and the many and the concomitant question of the existence of the one concerns the problems inherent to the conception of totality and the various incoherencies that result from both the existence and the inexistence of the one.

In Badiou's reading of Plato's Parmenides, the dialectic of the one and the many results in aporia and has no conclusive resolution. For Badiou, Plato's verdict regarding the unthinkability of the many, what Badiou calls the pure multiple, is a result of what he calls the count-as-one, or the necessity of thought to present the pure multiple as one to render it intelligible. Badiou can assert that the one is not and that therefore nothing is, as for Badiou, the nothing or Void is the unthinkable pure multiple.

Therefore, what should be thought here is rather that 'nothing' is the name of the void: Plato's statement should be transcribed in the following manner; if the one is not, what occurs in the place of the 'many' is the pure name of the void, insofar as it alone subsists as being. The 'nihilist' conclusion restores, diagonal to the one/multiple opposition, the point of being of the nothing, the presentable correlate-as name-of this unlimited or inconsistent multiple whose dream is induced by the non-being of the one.(Badiou pg 35)

Badiou can endorse the Platonic theory of participation, that the non-being of the one participates in our sensible experience, but suspend Plato's verdict regarding the unthinkability of the Void. This is due to Badiou's view that the intelligibility of the pure multiple and its identification as non-totalizable infinity have only become possible following the advent of set theory and the notion of the transfinite found in the work of Georg Cantor. The unpresentability of the pure multiple, or Void, allows Badiou to endorse the Lacanian definition of the real as the impasse of formalization and leads Badiou to generalize the unthinkability of the pure multiple in Plato's philosophy to philosophy as a whole. Throughout Being and Event, Badiou seeks out the impasse of the real in thinkers like Spinoza and Aristotle, among many others. In this regard, Badiou's treatment of Hegel is instructive regarding Badiou's conception of real infinity (the transfinite), the real's relation to his overlapping theories of the event and the subject, his view of the purpose of philosophy, and what I refer to as a dialectic of division rather than a dialectic of sublation at the heart of his theory of truth and its relation to his affirmation of the multiple against the one.

In his Logic, Hegel famously distinguishes between "good" and "bad" infinity. "Good" infinity is "good" only in the sense of being a true infinity, which for Hegel entails an infinity that contains its own limitation, in contrast to the "bad" or false infinity, that whose limitation is external. Hegel's distinction between internal and external limitation is a result of Hegel siding with Parmenides and asserting that the one is; if anything falls outside the infinite, then it can neither be infinite nor one.

Hegel's notion of contradiction is not applicable to just any pair of opposites or contraries. Contradiction, for Hegel, is a relation of determinate negation: A and not-A. For example, on and off does not constitute a contradiction, but on and not-on does. Bad infinity, the not-finite, is not a true infinity as it has an external limitation in its negation, the finite, and the same goes for the finite, which has an external limitation in the not-finite or bad infinity (this is crucial for grasping Badiou's conception of the infinite). The bad infinity can become good only by sublating (to suspend and preserve) this contradiction in a whole that contains the contradiction of A and not-A as moments or qualities of the whole. For infinity to interiorize its limit, the finite must become a moment of the infinite.

Hegel identifies this double process as comprising the true infinite because it does not have any intrinsic limitation. There is nothing about it that brings it to an end. There is nothing outside it. Its determination consists in that very process consisting in the finite and the nonfinite reverting into one another and not being either just separated from one another or united with one another. (Richard Dien Winfield - Hegel's Science of Logic: A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures pg 137)

Hegel is not a thinker of synthesis but rather of syllogistic integration. As Mao says, the dialectic is a "one that divides into two". Hegel's one is without foundation or ground, and this causes it to collapse in on itself, split itself into two, and then subsume this split within a new whole that promptly splits again and again ad infinitum. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. The one is self determinative; as it cuts itself, it differentiates and expands without ever finding closure. This is why Hegel (and Marx) can think totality without rejecting change or becoming; just as the finite is a moment rather than the limit of true infinity, becoming is a moment of Being.

In the chapter of Being and Event devoted to showing the impasse of the real in Hegel's philosophy, Badiou attempts to defend what Hegel refers to as "bad" infinity in the guise of the non-totalizable transfinite. The importance of the transfinite for Badiou lies in its making possible the thinking of a quantitative infinity that cannot be sublated into the "good" Hegelian qualitative infinity. The absence of such a non-totalizable quantity is, for Badiou, the impasse and point of failure of Hegel's thought. Quantitative infinity is necessary for Badiou not only for rendering the Void of inconsistent multiplicity intelligible but also for providing an external limitation to Being and the dissolution of the one - the very thing that causes Hegel to dismiss quantitative infinity - that is integral to the true focus of Badiou's thought: the Event and the subject of truth. Throughout Being and Event, Badiou is at pains to establish that the event does not belong to the ontology of the pure multiple. "With the event we have the first concept external to the field of mathematical ontology." (Being and event pg 184) Without this extrinsic limitation to being there could be no event and no expressions of subjectivity in the fidelity to an event.