The Sublimity of Permanent Collapse and the Leibnizian Problem of Monadic Optimization Inherent in Neoliberal World-Modeling

I’m working on Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds as a von Mises calculation problem, and about Kantian technics producing world-images (Weltanschauung) as a toxic waste byproduct that German sociology was developed to process. The world illusion. World-Judgement as modeling. The internet as the grandest scale simulation/game theoretic model of “The World” ever created, which ultimately produces in society a sense of permanent collapse as a feeling of sublime world terror.

The concept of Weltanschauung as many manifestations. It is generally understood to primarily emerge out of Hegel, and figured fairly consistently into the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and within the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, who treated Weltanschauung as a central part to his historical philosophy and hermeneutics of historical reconstruction. World-View. Each society has its own. Each era has its own. To penetrate a different era of history, one must reconstruct and adopt the World-View through which its inhabitants saw it.

From the Neo-Kantian academy developed German Sociology, which, by the 1920’s, through the work of Max Weber in particular, became of enormous significance to social problem-solving, especially as the Great Depression broke out and the second World War began to loom. It was in the world of Karl Mannheim in particular that the theory of World-View as “Total Ideology” was fully articulated. But from Freud and Jung to Husserl and Heidegger, World-View had become a central point at issue in contemporary debates regarding Psychology, Sociology, Phenomenology, etc.

When the Office of Strategic Services was established, one of the first tasks was to assemble dossiers regarding everything the Nazis were doing with regards Sociological Engineering and “Warfare”. In these documents somewhere General William J Donovan came across the term “Weltanschauungskrieg,” World-View-Warfare, and he quickly appropriated it and transformed it into the familiar idea of “Psychological Wafare”.

Going much further back though, it was Kant who first coined the term “Weltanschauung,” but typically etymological histories of the concept have tended to dismiss Kant’s invention of the term as philosophically irrelevant. Heidegger actually is generally quoted as the authority here, as in his 1927 lectures, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, he sketches the history of “Weltanschauung” and says essentially this about Kant’s usage, that it was philosophically irrelevant. In my reading though, this is far from the case.

Weltanschauung for Kant is best translated not as World-View, but as World-Intuition. “Anschauung,” which Kant uses specifically to mean “Intuition” in his writing, carries with it multiple interrelated connotations, and is alternatively translated like “Image,” “Picture,” “Idea,” “Representation,” etc. To obviate this ambiguity, later thinkers often formulated their own derivations of the term, and for his part Heidegger did so with his concept of “Weltbild,” or “World-Image”. This then becomes the basis of his later essay, The Age of the Weltbild, which pairs quite nicely with my entire conception and actually compliments exactly my own understanding of Kant’s usage of the term. So strangely, though Heidegger dismisses Kant’s innovation of Weltanschauung, he comes to echo exactly all the implications Kant’s invocation of the concept seems to me to entail.

In any event, Kant considers Intuition to be a class of representations. And what this means is essentially this, that human sense perception encounters, and is affected by a “sensory manifold” of impressions arising from outside of ourselves. From the World. The faculty of imagination then “binds together” these impressions, and “represents” them as a unified “object” to the mind. This imagined object, as it exists within our consciousness, is called an Intuition.

This reconstruction is very tricky, and I imagine the technical nuances will be lost in all of this, so I apologize.

But ultimately, in the Critique of Judgement, Kant is most concerned with science. And he defines Science as Organized Knowledge. Botany or Zoology, for instance, comprise an organized system of concepts. These concepts being those of species and genus, etc. In this way a given Science is really best thought of as an encyclopedia of Concepts.

How do we know this system of concepts which we produce is internally consistent and coherent, though? And how do we know the structure of such a system has any meaningful relationship to the part of nature being conceptualized? Kant wishes to establish this, using his typical procedure of transcendental deduction. In Kant’s philosophy, this means he is looking within the logical structure of cognition for a grounding principle of some kind. It is upon such principles that all of our various mental capabilities are established, and these principles not only function as the basic conditions of cognition, they also establish the limitations of those very same cognitive powers in terms of what they can know and accomplish.

Kant, therefore, is searing within the different forms of Judgement he has logically identified and classified, for a transcendental principle capable of ensuring the internal order of the conceptual systems out judgement manufactures. In the end, it is in the idea of the “Purposiveness of Nature” that he finds what he’s looking for.

To do so, as I said, he must logically classify the different kinds of possible Judgements and formulate “pure” versions of them. Specifically, in this case, Kant considers a special class of judgements in looking for his transcendental principle: Judgements regarding the Beautiful, and the Sublime.

Under Kant’s basic model though, Judgements can, in general, be either Determinative, or Reflective. Determinative Judgements subsume Intuitions under concepts to produce knowledge, by means of classification. An example being the classic model judgement: “Socrates is a Man”. Here “Socrates” is subsumed under the category of “Man,” and in so doing, we gain knowledge of Socrates, that he is, in fact, a Man.

Reflective Judgement, on the other hand, compares intuitions to one another, and from this, generates the abstract categorical concepts we use in determinative judgements. Concepts like those of species, which we use in Zoology to classify animals.

Here then you can see, the two basic kinds of Judgement compliment one another. And the process of science may actually be thought of in this way as a wheel of development. An engine eternally modulating between two poles, like a piston. To be developed, this “Engine” of Science will have to turn over millions of times. As our concepts become more clearly refined, we in turn can draw finer separations in nature, and perceive more nuanced distinctions. Likewise, as our perception becomes more delicate and sharper, our concepts find greater meaning within the field of objects that fall under them, and refer more exactly to the things comprehended through them.

Though it is in neither Determinative Judgements, nor in Reflective Judgements in general, that Kant determines to seek out Science’s transcendental principle of conceptual cohesion, rather, Kant focuses in on very special class of Judgements, what he terms “Merely Reflective Judgements”.

In Reflective Judgement, as noted above, we compare an Intuition to other Intuitions, inside our imaginations, and we by means of this comparison, we discover underlying similarities between distinct intuitions. From these similarities, we can develop conceptual abstractions through which these similarities can be articulated.

In the case of Merely Reflective Judgements, however, we compare an intuition, not to other intuitions in imagination, but to the “form of the faculty of representation” which generates those Intuitions in the first place. These Merely Reflective Judgements are, of course Aesthetic Judgements regarding artistic beauty, natural beauty, and the sublime. In particular, it’s in Natural Beauty that Kant finds his desired principle, which, again, is the idea of the Purposefulness of Nature.

But for our purposes, it is Kant’s account of Sublime Judgement that we’re ultimately really interested in, as this is where he introduces Weltanschauung.

According to Kant’s transcendental method, he insists that when considering judgements of the sublime, he must use the most fundamental, “pure” version of such judgements to discover the transcendental principles underlying them. Essentially then, not just any version of Sublime Judgement will do. And he considers ultimately two further subcategories of the Sublime, concentrating primarily on the first. The first here being what he calls the Mathematical Sublime, and the second being what he calls the Dynamical Sublime.

By our sense of the Sublime, for clarity, Kant is referring to the sense one gets watching a natural disaster. A volcano, or a hurricane, for instance. These examples he classifies as cases of the “Dynamical” Sublime.

The Mathematical Sublime, however, arises from our estimation of the Magnitude of very grand objects. Mount Everest. The Grand Canyon. Etc. The human mind always can come up with larger and larger units of measurement for the empirical calculation of the actual, physical size of something. Yet beyond that, we’re also able to estimate the Aesthetic Magnitude of an object.

A definite unit of volume can be applied to the interior of the Grand Canyon, but when one looks at the Grand Canyon, as a romantic vista, we feel, aesthetically, its immensity. This for Kant is the essential distinction.

It is in the treatment of a Pure Judgement of the Mathematical Sublime, then, that we finally come to Kant’s introduction of the concept of Weltanschauung. This is what I refer to as the Judgement of the World.

In such a World-Judgement we are called to represent The World to ourselves — that is, we attempt, in imagination, to form an Intuition of the World (Literally Weltanschauung) as a unified object of sensation. The World, however, is constituted by an effectively infinite number of causal interrelationships which the Imagination is ultimately unable to render faithfully as a unified Intuition. This representational incapacity causes the Imagination to stretch itself thinner and thinner, inevitably to a breaking point, and it is precisely this failure of our representational abilities which results in our feeling of the Sublime in this case.

It is from this failure that arises a sense of smallness, of insignificance, of incapacity before infinity. The imagination is unable to raise intuition to an infinite totality. But what is the “infinite totality” we fail to arrive at? It is in the Critique of Pure Reason, in the section on the Antinomies of Pure Reason, that the full import of Weltanschauung becomes clear.

The Critique of Pure Reason, briefly, is composed of three basic divisions. 1.) The Aesthetic, which is about Space and Time as the form of inner and outer sense. 2.) The Logic, which is about the faculty of the understanding and the table of the categories. And 3.) the Dialectic of Pure Reason, and it is only in this third part that Kant finally deals with Reason specifically.

As Kant derived Space and Time in the Aesthetic, and the Categories in the Logic, in the Dialectic he derives Three Ideas of Pure Reason. These are: the Psychological Idea (Soul); The Cosmological Idea (World); And the Theological Idea (God). Each section in turn deals with the manner in which Reason arrives at these pure ideas, and in diagnosing the errors and contradictions that result from Reason’s attempts to grasp them.

In each case is a different form of syllogism is taken by Kant to be the basis of each respective Idea. The Categorical Syllogism (“Socrates is a Man”) leads Reason to Soul. The Hypothetical Syllogism (If → Then) leads Reason to World. The Disjunctive Syllogism (Either/Or) leads Reason to God.

The Antinomies are Kant’s discussion of the errors that arise from the contradictory ways in which Reason can approach a Pure Idea of the World, the Cosmological Idea of Pure Reason.

What Kant is really saying between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgement then, is that the World-Judgement, in which we form a representation of the World, or Weltanschauung, leads us in Imagination to attempt an illicit extension of a chain of If → Then propositions to infinity. By means of such an infinite chain, a fully conditioned causal model of all relationships within the World is attempted.

As World-Judgement involves our attempt to absolutely simulate the world, including ourselves within it. It is therefore a model. A scale model. Like Hitler overlooking his perfect city Germania with Albert Speer. This Weltanschauung is not inside of us, like a passive software of thought. It is, quite literally, a scale model we construct of the World that we present to ourselves for inspection.

This is idea is further developed by Schiller and Schelling. This moment of representing such an image-model of the World to ourselves, as something distinctly apart from consciousness, is for Schiller and Schelling the moment of passage from animality to rationality. As we hold the world apart from ourselves, like a little scale model, we discover within its confines a tiny, miniature version of ourselves. In such a moment the thinking subject “frees” itself, and progresses into self-consciousness, and stands outside of Time in contemplation.

Schiller makes this totally explicit in the following passage:

Tellingly, he employs the metaphor of Zeus overthrowing Saturn to understand World-Judgement. As in, the thinking subject, by thrusting the World away, and turning it into this scale model, places itself outside of time.

As I said, though, this whole analysis of the Third Critique ultimately concerns the foundation of Science. Determinative and Reflective Judgement. This is the engine of Science. The wheel. And what is the axis around which the world turns? World-Judgements. World-Modeling. World-Simulation. And so, the progression of Science necessities the creation of models, obviously, but it is these that are nothing less than the World-Views, the Ideologies of Modern History.

For an individual having a perfect world model, that’s more or less tantamount to controlling destiny. Understanding how your every move would result in different outcomes. For Science, the perfect model, that’s the ultimate global warming supercomputer model capable of fully simulating the complexities of the clime. For the State…

For the State such a model is a total social information system capable of simulating how all changes in social conditions affect the condition of society. What is this? Social media control systems. Palantir. This is the ultimate outcome: RAND Corporation. Wargaming. Sociological simulation. Human Terrain System. Mass data collection.

We are not ruled, as thinking subjects, we are ruled as animal brutes within the scale miniature of the state’s simulation. And this little scale model is endlessly expanded to attempt to include as much of “us” as is possible. As much of our lives. As much of our existence. In order to scale us down. To model us as much us. To govern us more totally.

The starting point of this entire history is Leibniz’s characteristica universalis. And the basic reading here is that Kant’s technics are a continuation of the Leibnizian project to automate Scientific conceptualization:

Ultimately I’m working on connecting fully the history of worlds, worldviews, world-models, world-simulations, world-images, from Leibniz to RAND. And reading everything as a single overarching problem, perhaps first articulated by Leibniz, in his desire to create an algorithmic combinatorics of post-scholastic logic, where a universal symbolic language could be automated to generate all possible metaphysical, logical, and mathematical concepts, and then procedurally predicate them to populate an infinite encyclopedia of all possible knowledge.

The Leibnizian idea of the “best of all possible worlds,” has worlds as thoughts of God, whereby he harmonizes the teleological unfolding of Monads. And so, the point is to read such a Leibnizian problem in light of “Economic Calculation” problem of Ludwig von Mises, where he attempts to prove that, given the limitations of economic calculation methods, an economic planner can never allocate capital as efficiently as the market.

Neoliberalism has become “God,” and seeks to create the best of all of possible worlds through its enormous modeling efforts. It attempts to maximize the utility of the world. And its incapacity to do so drives it to ever more expansive models. To the point where all of human life is swallowed up and reduced to a kind of miniature existence, like little figures in a model train project.

Because Neoliberalism is engaged in this endless attempt to achieve a model of the world that is fully conditioned as an infinite totality. And Neoliberalism therefore produces in society a background noise of sublime terror. Like one feels looking at a raging storm, or a natural disaster. A World-Terror, or Weltterror. And this is the sense of permanent collapse which pervades all our lives and drives political conflict and continuously justifies ever greater public opinion management and large scale sociological engineering