Difference and Universality

An Assemblage of Internet Randomness

08.18.2023

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Notes on Quentin Meillassoux, Difference and Universality

"a contradictory entity is absolutely impossible because if an entity was contradictory, it would be necessary." - Meillassoux.

Meillassoux argues that a contradictory entity would not be able to become other than it is because it would precisely always already be other than it is; if that were the case, then it would destroy any possibility of determination of entities and change. Unable not to be other to itself, this being would be necessary.

This is precisely why contradiction in itself shows the necessity of contingency, the birth of difference. Meillassoux uses the principle of non-contradiction to illustrate this. A being could not be “A” and “not-A,” simultaneously, as this would undermine the necessity of contingency by being necessary. It would be necessary as it would always have subsumed that which It otherwise could be.

However, suppose a necessary being was to “annihilate itself” and become lesser, giving rise to difference and, thus, contingency. In that case, it opens up the possibility for change to enter our world, a schism in reality but not in “Being” proper. We, however, shouldn’t see this movement as “difference from” but instead as “difference in itself.”

Parmenides 139d: The One is not identical to itself, for its process is not identical to that of Identity. 

141 b-c: The One is Difference that must become different and not be otherwise.

This would be kin to the relationship of eternal begetting, which is not the birth of particularity but instead the universality of particularity and, therefore, of differentiation, that which is always unique to the One. So difference as a universal is necessary, for we know there is contingency.

Meillassoux peruses a radical contingency to open the space to a pre-critical philosophy after the environment of philosophical inquiry post-Kant’s Copernican turn. But this shows that we must not naively turn away from metaphysics; metaphysics isn’t dead. It is barely beginning to be grasped.

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Parmenides 139d: “The One is not identical to itself, for its process is not identical to that of Identity.”

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