[This is Part III of a three-part essay. Part I can be read here. Part II can be read here. — Ed.]
Is it worth it? Let me work it.
— Missy Elliott
PAIDEIA2: THE FORMATION OF THE INHUMAN
It is in the contours of the vacuum pointed at by the previous section’s questions that we find a lurking distinction between education and pedagogy. Coarse-universalism lies in the former. For the sake of brevity, the distinction will be clarified by opposing the the two concepts’ definitions and their contingent theoretical frameworks under the criteria of intelligence and intelligibility. The latter will also be briefly described. While we grant they may fall under various other criteria, we will deem these sufficient for considering the modal scope of the theoretical frameworks under scrutiny.
The best way to put this is to advance the claim that Bildung (the modernized conception of Paideia), is a socially mediated methodological framework for the formation into intelligence. The ideals of such methodology put forth the assumption that the universe into which one is formed and will be enabled to live in or to transform (a distinction which will be clarified in a moment) is composed of (and by) intelligibilities. A moment ago we took care to italicize “socially mediated,” in order to pick up on what is evoked by the Hegelian notion of Geist/Spirit, the synthetic commons of rational agency, and suggest it encompasses intelligence and intelligibility as a socially mediated methodological framework. Reza Negarestani elaborates upon this at length in the book Intelligence and Spirit. The following excerpt will hopefully be sufficient to help us convey what is intended in these criteria:
“It is the logical excess of the Transcendental that crafts intelligence. […] By recognizing what is universal and necessary about itself, mind becomes capable of revising the transcendental types or structures it previously deemed to be universal and necessary for the realisation of its abilities or cognitions. And in revising these transcendental types or structures, it moves from one qualitative level of abilities to another, from one mode of integration to another. […] What is essential for the qualitative transformation of intelligence are not simply modes of integration qua unities, but also the manners in which these unities are concretely established as models for the conduct and cognitive cultivation of those agents that constitute Geist and are encompassed by it. While modes of integration effect a qualitative transformation in the structure of geistig intelligence, their recognition as theoretical and practical models provides agents with access to the intelligibility of this structural transformation. […] Integrations set up a dynamic link between intelligence and intelligibility, between the conditions required for the realization of intelligence and the recognition or awareness of such conditions. […] This constructive spiral between intelligence and intelligibility expresses the logic of self-reference that is the constructive kernel of geist. […] [This is self-consciousness as] a logical form through which the self only recognizes what it is for itself from the perspective of a posited infinity — that is, an unrestricted intelligible world — which in its explanatory otherness renders intelligible what that consciousness is in itself, in its intelligible unity.”1
The following may appear pedantic, but should be put out of the way. Education and pedagogy will agree on one point: both set out to form or elicit mindedness or mind from beings understood as unminded or at least barely so. That such beings exclusively pertain to Homo sapiens is not a point of contention in this work. It is both theoretical frameworks’ foundational assumption that certain beings enter the world unminded while others are already in the world and mind has been developed in them. In the case of this author’s species, one can be said to be born Homo sapiens, but not yet human. A particular being’s entry into the participatory play of universal intelligence begins when one becomes able to recognize oneself as an intelligibility through the transformation of intelligibility into intelligence.
Under the assumption that such developmental interaction happens historically between differently integrated intelligences, we believe much of it hinges upon what is called a “proleptic or anticipatory mode of relating” to infant minds.2 When simply greeting an as of yet speech-less infant with the locution “Hello,” adults treat infants “as if” they are adults, eliciting an adult comportment from them. Across synchronic time along infancy and onwards, this counterfactual play between dramatis personae intelligibly models a diachronic intelligence. The proleptical relation is the logical form of infinite intelligibility, the development of which is the self-realization of intelligence. Prolepsis and socially mediated self-realizations are the conditions of possibility for the duality of intelligence and intelligibility, as described in Negarestani’s integrative spiral. The anamnesis of the geometry lesson in Plato’s Meno3 is demystified into granularized steps of development of abilities through an intentional ascent,4 whereupon the unintelligible (for the proto-person “begins” only nominally self-aware, much less able to be intelligible to itself as intelligence) is enabled by intelligibility to bootstrap, realize itself into intelligence, bringing its own pattern variations and quirks to enrich this open universal concept. Rational self-determining agency is then accessing the inhuman in oneself in order to become human all the while bringing new possibilities of transforming what the human can be.
Having honed the criteria, we can address the distinction between education and pedagogy. This will be done by inquiring which of these provides the conditions of possibility for intelligence in its proper logical form. The task is no stranger to philosophy, and this essay’s as of yet unwritten doctrine is that such task is perhaps indistinguishable from philosophy itself.
Throughout Plato’s complete works, the theme of paideia and education is persistent. Although its repeated occurrence does not prove much, we don’t think it is mere statistical aberration. In the context of the history of ancient Greek education, up to the arrival of Socrates, educational and formational activities were generally bound to conformity with an ideal: that of paideia, cultural formation. The genesis of paideia stems from the ideal of areté (via Homer),5 the aristocratic and divine social form, followed by the ideal of right (via Hesiod),6 and by the ideal of citizenship (via Solon).7 The latter two combined in a democratic state formation, followed by the sophists’ ideal of human nature as individuated in the formation of citizenship.8 It was against this last ideal that Socrates comes up. We can see in the Protagoras9 that despite their best intentions, the sophists had identified paideia into a generic labor of education: amassing facts and juggling them along with rhetorical grace for personal gain in the political arena. The Protagoras confronts us with the fact that despite marvellous and expensive education, there are still young politicians who are unwise, cowardly, impious, and unjust.
What does education accomplish, if it breeds contradiction between its purported ideals and their being carried out? Without theoretical, reflective support, how can practice be harmonized with any ideal? It seems that education is not learning, nor is learning being educated. In Socratic fashion, to learn is to strive for an ideal of the human that comes into being in the pursuit of wisdom, the grasping of knowledge. That is, an ideal of the human which, like Socrates, never deems oneself consummate, never deems oneself finally wise, nor totally all-knowing. As Socrates puts in the Republic, “education isn’t what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes.”10
The Republic itself explicates11 education1 into education2, thereby distinguishing one from the other. Socrates lived during the heyday of the sophists, an elite of educators, who saw the city-state as the educator, strongly focused on immediate effects on politics, and not so much of a scientific bent.12 Political areté was to be attained by spiritual formation,13 and, beyond focus on the formal and the material, the moral field was one of their main interests in the State, which, if unharnessed, could bring about a true mess of untruths.14 Such an organization is neither strange to our contemporary democracies, nor to what we have been calling coarse-universalism. Sophistic education was strictly of a practical aim, not theoretical or scientific; their politics was the practice of a blend of aesthetics and morals, to the exclusion of (ever-transforming) theory and science, buttressed in an ever more crystallized notion of human nature. One was educated not by example, but unquestioning mimesis: without any examination of the reasons undergirding said education. Like so, the method and the aim of education1 become unexamined themselves.
Education2 begins to form as a silhouette that Socrates delineates against this background:
“But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows that the power to learn is present in everyone’s soul and that the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body. This instrument cannot be turned around from that which is coming into being without turning the whole soul until it is able to study that which is and the brightest thing that is, namely, the one we call the good.”15
Against education1, and its forcible, unquestioning formation-into, education2 integrates agency in the model of the one being educated, or formed in the sense that one is proleptically engaged into forming oneself. Socrates’s “eye [that turns around by] turning the whole body” prefigures Negarestani’s “[self-consciousness as] a logical form through which the self only recognizes what it is for itself from the perspective of a posited infinity (that is, an unrestricted intelligible world), which in its explanatory otherness renders intelligible what that consciousness is in itself.”16
For Socrates, education2 (from now on, Pedagogy) “is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. It isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.”17
Pedagogy bootstraps a learner to their “turning around” to the gyroscopic spiral of interpersonal, diachronic reason.
Education presumes intelligence to be generic, arbitrarily defined. Its petrified generalisation cancels the true potential of unrestricted, universal intelligibility in the intelligence it allegedly forms in particular instances of the human, to the point that the particularity itself is put into question. This conforms to the traits of coarse-universalism. On the other hand, as described above, pedagogy enables, expects and trusts a particular self-consciousness to take itself as intelligible and participate in the active transformation of universal intelligence. We believe this gives us reason to claim coarse-universalism is merely educational, and totalizingly not pedagogical, reinforcing the suspicion that education is a mode of production of the human modelled only on the identificatory and generalizing pragmatics of value and labor, as opposed to the non-compressive craft of emancipating the soul through its own activity.
TOWARDS A DEVALUING OF INTELLIGENCE
Under the aforementioned suspicion, it becomes legitimate to reiterate the already old but always urgent question: if identifying and generalizing are a neurophysiological pattern-governed behaviour, what is that noble or novel in a normative enculturation based in a merely dressed up version of such base comportment? To J. A. Giannotti, these “[behaviors of] comparison and substitution”18 are all the way down, governing from the bottom of the Homo sapiens substrate (we’d add they may not even be exclusive to that species), not being a conquest of norm-governance over base instinct but actually the latter. It is unsurprisingly humbling to conceive the possibility that what education takes to be its finest aim may be an “ante-predicative synthesis”19 at the threshold of language. In a scenario where the universal is posited as such when a specimen encounters its particulars in activity, abstraction is on the verge of becoming real, in the sense that the posited equivalence of, say, two determinate activities, will make their self-identity appear as general, that is, glossing over their determinateness.
It is tempting to conjecture that education into labor, the social synthesis of the symbolic equivalence of different activities each with specific social import, was the prefiguration of commodification. Granted, patterns and their biological constraining aspects appear negative; but they are also conditions of possibility.20 With the advent of language, the ideal, the objective (that which is a universal abstraction in particular minds thanks to their social witnessing and co-constitution of a concrete item or practice) amplifies pattern-governed behavior into positive and negative objectivity. A pattern becomes a norm through what Giannotti calls “secondary reinforcement,” socially recurring happenstance practices or events which further generalize the pragmatic scope of a certain pattern. The ideal is a projectile tested in interactive behaviours where abstraction is at play; where “to determine is to negate by configuring,”21 configuring is to be understood as the synthetic social operation enacting of various particular abstractions re-converging upon the concrete. It is remarkable how this enriches the account of Form mentioned in Part 1’s Introduction.
The most humbling lies in this: only retrospectively is a norm theoretically (or preemptively) constituted as a norm; it starts out as a pattern. When “social practice [provides] the leverage point between the causal and the justificatory chain”22 real abstraction bootstrapped labor from a possible reason for the human into a given cause for it. Wherein lies the emancipatory possibility as well: if a norm is merely a generic institutional ghost covered with a causal sheet, its contingent status undermines any unexamined necessitation. Though we may come with a physiological package of logical forms of life, these can be sublated. Education reproduces the generalizing inductive logic and practically leaves no space for determinately negating oneself while participating in configuration. The fulcral matter is this: if formation does not make real abstraction transparent to those being formed, how can it be understood as real? Worse: how can one be realized if one’s particular abstracting is half-understood as merely equivalent to some other? Beaten into glazy-eyed fulfilment of mute compulsion, the embodied soul is ripe for theological overcompensation: not to worry, for there are “true” things one can arbitrarily submit to and desperately bark about.
One of the last historical resorts buttressing the coarse-universalist conceptual framework is a correspondence theory of truth. Simply put, the intelligibility gap cleaved by the 2-World system necessitates the metaphysical conundrum of access from the former to the latter, or even of the impingement of the latter unto the former. In a universe where “things” are separate from minds and the status of minds is left unquestioned, while it is still expected from minds to be able to relationally ascertain the truth about “things” and about themselves, truth can never leave the realm of minds. Outside of a 2-World framework, though, truth is context-sensitive, implicated in how it is contextually distributed in the inferential web which elicits it. The inferential web tasked with developing truth is itself integrated in a framework where (to put it coarsely) minds are a part of “things,” where the concrete grounds a metamorphic abstract which enables the former to navigate and transform itself through the local truths it projects as global in order to determinately negate variegated, novel, particular locals. In a 2-World framework, such navigation is not possible: truth is always global.
The Puntelian/Fregean slogan “A fact is thought that is true”23 may be useful here. In a 2-world framework, the identity of fact and thought posits facts enclosed by the world of mind, and so, excluded from the world of “things.” So it goes for the truth of thoughts. On the other hand, in a 1-world framework (can we say monism?), true thoughts and false thoughts will be intelligibilities among others in a world. In this scenario, facts, being true thoughts, are also among other intelligibilities in the world. Here, it won’t be a question of corresponding thoughts to “things,” but of inferentially linking determinate intelligibilities to other determinate intelligibilities. Correspondence (in a 2- or a 1-world theory) will only necessitate truth to itself. On the other hand, inference (through the historically specific normative frameworks under which it happens) can locate truth and falsity interchangeably, and assess the modal gradations between each other. The inferential rapport between thoughts-as-things and things-as-thoughts is what enables both to transform each other, developing truth along the way. Universalism as we have known it, while holding the 2-world framework to be true, disavows any falsity from ever occurring. In a universe without the possibility of incompatibility, no agent can be truly formed, unless it is for labor, that much is true when it is the only possible compatibility.
Education necessitates specialization, this institutionalized practice in schooling and high-brow academia, which we suspect to be a sort of “late stage” facet of the throes of universalism 1.0, entailed by a socially synthesised (all the more dangerous due to compression and information loss) understanding of the correspondence theory of truth. By not giving themselves to critical examination, eternalized knowledge and tautological truth disavow inferential transits between conceptual frameworks, up to the point where it may be impossible to claim there is more than one conceptual framework, given bodies of knowledge are kept separate from each other by self-imposed intelligibility gaps. Interdisciplinary cross-examination is cut short by an insincere local modesty subjected to a global mandate for instrumentalization.
Decontextualized from the bundle of activities intended as the modular composition of the form of the human, those who are formed are forbidden from self-consciously recognizing themselves as logically bound to an unrestricted intelligible universe. If knowledge operates in a vacuum, what is it knowledge of? Furthermore: if knowledge (unsurprisingly held as precious to the point of fanaticism) is socially mediated into immediacy, how can it know that it is knowledge?
The underdeveloped universalist universe is a totalised, low-resolution image of its ideal. Allegedly formed under the strictures of the sort of universe as envisioned by universalism, persons cannot possibly distinguish themselves from it. This implies that the universe cannot determine particulars and so cannot configure itself: that it is not a universe, but a bundle of indiscernible affirmations. If it can appear to itself, it is as toothless ourobouros. Seen through the lens of formation, such a universe cannot form itself, for that would implicate the formation of a particular that would be able to reflect, go beyond the universe. It cannot be said of such universe that it can synthetically form; it only replicates its own pattern of abstraction. Any presumption of striving for an ideal falls short of itself, having no conditions of possibility for being abstractly, much less determinately negated from what is expected to be formed into it. In this framework, history is congealed; the past is hypostasized into the future; contradiction is impossible and unintelligible; learning, as the developing of new knowledge and concomitant agency, is cancelled, laboring towards the unexamined and axiomatized past.
CONCLUSION
Pierre Guyotat’s Eden, Eden, Eden opens with a Tuareg proverb transcribed in Tifinagh script: “And Now We Are No Longer Slaves.”24 Apart from this, there is not a single instance of negation in the whole book. The point made here is not for comparing labor to slavery, but on the insufficiency of freedom. What we read is freedom unhinged, of those who are free to be bound by labor, and freed from self-determining agency. It is a logic without disjunction, but not necessarily with full-fledged, intelligible conjunction: the placid violence of a continuity oblivious of its constitutive discreteness, one face of abstract universality, bearing the name of affirmation, the Form of Stupidity, embedded in material practices of epistemic occlusion. To say the Form of the Good would be opposed to that of Evil would appear to suggest that the former is about being kind unto others whereas the latter is not. But when educating is a kind act that begets universal stupidity, Evil dies off as a particular aspect of an abstract negation of intelligibility. To a certain extent, there is even a beauty in its intelligibility, for none are blessed in ignorance. It is not the Form of the Nice nor of the Wholesome.
Facing this, the Form of the Good takes shape as the form of negation, abstract and determinate, mobile of transformation and developer of intelligibility. When upholding that affirmation forbids synthesis of abstract and concrete, and only negation permits synthesis, we can see that no matter how universalism belabors itself, any of its contingent forms are condemned to abstract negation reified in affirmation. As Adorno would have it, “what Hegel calls synthesis is not simply the downright new quality leaping forth from [determinate] negation; it is the return of what has been negated,”25 whereupon the continuous is made wealthier through intelligibility of the discrete, in an ever finer-grained logic. Logic cannot produce time by itself: it has to look outwards in order to return able to organize possibility out of necessity: something that biology has taken care of when happening upon pattern-governed behavior and various expressions of the Spinozan “thinking body”26 across species, no matter how simple they were. To be intelligent is to be time,27 modally organizing intelligibilities: configuring the thermodynamic history of logical movement. Logic (technê is alright too) activated intelligibility, which activated intelligence, which re-activated logic (configuring time), thereby enacting intelligence to itself. Simply put: intelligence, if universally, synthetically understood, is always proleptic. Ethically (meta-logically) understood, those generic forms of life, such as the form of life of labor under value-mediation, that leave the “thinking body” they pattern-govern in a barbaric state at the gates of possibility, under our account, cannot be said to be intelligence.
We have to thank Adorno for accusing the German translation of the Greek maxim “o mi dareis” (“the person who is not abused is not educated either”) of being bad-Hegelian in its submission to the asphyxiating pseudo-universal spirit: if there is a slogan for the sadism-without-a-masochist disciplinary “forming into” for abstract universalism, that is it. A process of enculturation into a second-nature that disavows learners from turning around and transiting between local and global is simply that: abuse. If abuse is to end as an historical aberration and domination is to be dominated,28 let us propose an alternative: reject education, embrace pedagogy. In the timely words of Cássia Siqueira, learners, instructors and instructees, have to “Fuck Culture,”29 in order to unfuck the world.
“But universalism begat the public school!” That is all very well, and as is what is salvageable in universalism, the public school is certainly worth preserving. But can it be said to be public if its axioms are obfuscated from those whom it forms? Or is it public when the classroom is constructed, demolished, reconfigured inside the playground of the commons, where axiomaticity is made transparent and the “hiatus” of pedagogical experimentation is “the interval within which history is made”? Ideally, the playground may become everywhere and and the hiatus everywhen.30
In practice, proleptic intelligence is the perversion of young minds into autonomy as soon as possible. Reaction’s greatest fear is that which localizes the global purchase of the family and devalues it into its naked falsity: an emancipated child. That is, nothing is more terrifying to reaction than a child that subsumes history’s arrested development and naturalized “adulthood” with the glaring gaze of rationality, developing the missionary fetish of abstraction into the synthetic demystification processed by dialectics. For what does more to show the parochiality of a historically contingent ideal, an abstract moment of nature, than universality undermining itself through the critical recognition of interpersonal dialogics of time-unbound proleptic intelligence? Even we, defending profound and continuous abolition, shudder to think of the organizational implications of a pedagogy unhinged from labor. What we need is not an essentializing, dehumanising education, but an ethics of the inhuman logics of formation: a transpaideia.
Portimão, August 2023 – Porto, 16 Fev 2025