postscripts #6: in which i try to break your brain
on the philosophy of freedom and revolution, human belonging, paradoxes, and super duper cool math tricks
“The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.” - Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
ruminations
Hello friends <3 My Substack this week will be a bit more fragmented and scattered – as is what is demanded of my brain lately, pushed and pulled in every which direction like never-ending putty, as I continue to navigate my coursework. This, I am reminded, is what pulled me to academia: the ability to enter a liminal space in which time does not move and space does not exist except for the constellations taking shape in your mind as you chase one line of inquiry down straight to seven more. There’s a Chinese saying that roughly states that books only get thicker the more you read. It captures the fallacy of finality to learning and true wisdom: the more you learn, the more questions you will have; measuring what you know is just as much about realizing how much you do not.
A very unsolicited philosophy lesson. There’s a paradox in wanting to belong to something greater than yourself. Humans are social creatures: we sit with strangers as we build Lego blocks together, stumble up to strangers on the playground and ask if they’d like to be our friend even when we do not grasp what the word means. We get older, and the desire does not disappear; it only shifts — now armed with a developing sense of conscience, we find camaraderie through shared hobbies, experiences, enemies perhaps, and a pointed sense of justice. Whether through clubs, societies, associations, guilds … We are forever in search of a movement, cause, and community that will provide overwhelming evidence we are not alone, and neither are our fears, insecurities, and resentments. But if every human being was an arbitrary puzzle piece, is it possible to take any given group that shares perhaps one color or one corner, and successfully put together a jigsaw? Could you form anything coherent at all without needing to alter or tear what you have? If you hope to find your full, complete, understood self in any body outside of your own, you will fail. To belong to any group, you have to slice away parts of you that made you you.
(a short part of) Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit traces the dialectical means through which the French Revolution devolved into the Reign of Terror. Initially, the movement was aspiring to Enlightenment era ideas of utility and rational governance: striving towards an absolute freedom grounded in a universal will — or “we” — that embodies the collective freedom of all individuals. Sounds sweet, in theory, that a government should liberate and serve the needs of every person.
Hegel points out that this kind of abstraction ultimately fails; such an absolute freedom creates a reality in which individuals are subsumed under the “universal” — a “we” that means “everyone.” But just how do you go about satisfying all the needs of all the people? Are all these needs the same? Are all individuals, therefore, the same? When you turn every “I” into a mere moment within a collective, what happens to individual particularity? Is it realistically possible to simultaneously please the spiritual and material needs of every single person in existence? This is the crux of the dialectical conflict: the universal freedom that should liberate ends up negating the difference of individual selves. In reality, absolute freedom is antithetical to difference; a proverbial “we” cannot tolerate the plurality of individual lives. Hegel points out that this abstract universal freedom cannot produce positive, concrete works or deeds that embody true freedom without excluding some individuals (a strangely philosophical way to say: you cannot liberate “everyone” just as you cannot please everyone, because everyone has different things they feel they must be liberated from or to, and undoubtedly some will be left out in the process no matter what you do). This exclusion turns into domination and terror; as any individuality is seen as a threat to the universal, branded as enemies and eliminated, and then you get moments like the Reign of Terror: an ironically, destructive, negative action rather than a constructive realization of freedom — the whole point of revolution to begin with.
Hegel isn’t saying that liberation is impossible or that it’s impossible for a government or revolution to serve the needs of its people; his implication is a need for remediation outside of ideological abstractions — a recognition of categories or spectrums between universal and individual, such as social groups, classes with differentiated roles, to serve as guardrails to prevent abstractions like “absolute freedom” from self-destruction or performing spectacles of terror. Rather than go on for hundreds of pages, I admit, he could have just insisted on one word: nuance.
More than two hundred years ago displaced from the time this was written, I can’t help but think about what Hegel is saying. I think of Hegel’s “terror of death” (the negative nature of absolute freedom where the movement self-destructs in its effort to cast out any antagonists to the “universal”) and I think about the self-righteousness of Twitter discourses, “the left is eating itself,” the devastating fallout of the Cultural Revolution, the moral purity tests in online and political dialogue, Christian (and all religious) fundamentalism. Such is the paradox of human belonging: in our search for a perfect “we,” we fall into the trap of casting out “I’s” … and at what point do we look around and realize no one is left?
More on paradoxes. As excited as I was for its release, I realized too late it was a terrible week for me to read Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. Head swimming with thousands of pages of theorists and philosophers already, Kuang’s latest piece of work felt like an encyclopedic/bibliography echo of my school and work life. Although I didn’t take the time to read Inferno or Piranesi or any of the other classic works Kuang mentioned being strong references or inspiration for Katabasis, I suppose have my professor to thank for now being familiar with those like Kant, Foucault, Freud, Kristeva, the like.
But what thoroughly tickled my brain was Kuang’s inclusion of logical paradoxes into the plot. Growing up with a grandparent who was 1) extremely logical and 2) obsessed with math, meant I pondered logic problems, riddles, and paradoxes in my free time (I know, I know. I was pathetically, tragically, such a nerd). If I haven’t bored you to death with Hegel and you’re still reading this, humor a couple paradoxes with me (I promise it can be fun).
One of the most famous that Kuang goes into is the Sorites Paradox (the paradox of the heap). If you remove one grain of sand from a heap, it’s still a heap. If you remove two, it’s still a heap. If removing one grain doesn’t change the status of the heap, you could remove one grain at a time for hours and it would still be a “heap.” So how many grains of sand do you need to remove before it’s no longer a heap? If a heap is a heap and a heap with one less grain is also a heap, then a not-heap should also be a heap, and yet not-heap is not-heap. Fun, isn’t it?
I don’t recall Kuang including this one in the book. Marvel fans of WandaVision would know it: the Ship of Theseus. Imagine a ship (the Ship of Theseus) has every one of its wooden planks replaced over time; eventually, none of the original wood remains. Is it still the same ship? Suppose someone collects all the original wooden planks and reconstructs it into a ship. Which one is the real Ship of Theseus?
Or the liar paradox. “This statement is false.” Think about it. (Similarly, the Pinocchio paradox. Wherein Pinocchio says “My nose is about to grow.” Does his nose grow or not?)
While one of the most famous Chinese logical paradoxes is the white horse paradox (“A white horse is not a horse”), my favorite growing up was the paradox of the sword and shield. A tale of over two thousand years old, it tells of a swordsman who insists his blade is infinitely sharp, and another who claims his shield is impenetrable. What happens when the sword strikes the shield?
I’m very sorry if your brain is hurting. I promise I’ll deliver some fluff next time.
Yours in writing,
Cherie
in rotation
“The View Between Villages” Noah Kahan: Because apparently I absorb knowledge best when I’m listening to the most devastating of songs, this has been on repeat all week. Also, fitting as we slowly transition into fall. I’m counting down the days until I can pull out my sweaters, tights, and trench coat. “I am not scared of death, I’ve got dreams again.”
tiny joys
In the spirit of seeing how far I can push you all before I break your brain (and unleashing the full force of nerd), enjoy some tidbits of math proofs, theorems, little gems that I’ve retained from my math-loving days that bring me joy now (most of these are basics and essentials for surviving math competitions):
Gauss’s trick: The sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + …. + 100 = 5050. 5050 becomes ingrained in your brain, but Gauss’s trick works for any sum of regular sequences of numbers: Pair up the numbers from the ends, multiply that sum by the number of pairs, divide by 2.
2^10 = 1024. Also essential for competitions, apparently/allegedly also CS and binary … but that also means you can instantly know 2^9 (512), 2^8 (256), 2^7 (128), 2^6 (64), 2^5 (32) … you get the idea. Great for guesstimating, surprisingly.
If you know any three side lengths of a triangle, you can find the area with Heron’s formula. I don’t think Substack will let me format math equations here, so just look it up.
1/81 = 0.012345679[repeated]: so 0.012345679012345679012345679…
Infinite sums: This is, funnily enough, how you resolve Zeno’s Paradox (or the Achilles and the tortoise problem // to move from point A to B you must first cover half the distance, then half of the remaining distance, then half of that, and so you never reach B). While Achilles can’t catch the tortoise because he has to first reach where the tortoise was, … (½) + (¼) + (⅛) + … = 1. This could be a whole separate Substack (or math lecture) but if you’re curious how it works: converging geometric series.
Oh and also, the sound of locusts in the trees on my walk home from campus. Maybe they’ll be unbearable in a few weeks’/months’ time, but for now, they are a perfect soundtrack to a budding Philly fall.
loose threads:
The absolutely unacceptable reality that the air can get hotter during thunderstorms
The dying art that is apparently knowing how to use a dictionary
Feeling pretentious about using wired headphones, until they unceremoniously tangled in your pocket
Your soul cat purring on your lap as words begin to swim on the page (he clearly knows exactly what you’re going through)
Happy hours that don’t cost $12 a cocktail
See you next week <3
Cherie