Freeing Time: A Propositional Calculus

Abstract

This chapter formulates a geometry of propositions from the immanent perspective developed in earlier pages. Here, the so-called human is nothing other than a terrain, a set of boundaries and topological limits within which interchange between anonymous forces take place continuously, creating and modifying affective states. The problem of maximizing vision on this terrain invites the geometric method of propositions that is able to stretch beyond itself and point to something beyond language. In Spinoza’s Ethics, we find the geometric method put to the most effective use. Deleuze comments: “The geometric method ceases to be a method of intellectual exposition; it is no longer a means of professorial presentation but rather a method of invention. It becomes a method of vital and optical rectification. If man is somehow distorted, this torsion effect will be rectified by connecting it to its causes more geometrico. This optical geometry traverses the entire Ethics.” The geometric method is an attempt to present a force of logic that moves toward an invention rather than exposition that takes the turn toward praxis rather than description. The construction of these propositions here relies principally on Bergson’s The Creative Mind, and Matter and Memory, aiming to generate a praxeological framework that can intercalate with teacher experience that follows in the next chapter. Together these demonstrate why the insights into time and intuition are pedagogically invaluable, and how their proper understanding could make important contribution to teacher lives and teaching practice as well as help in the emergence of a different kind of pedagogical rationality.