(11:06 PM) | Anonymous:

Is Mathematics a Language?: Questions Concerning Badiou's Ontological Project

Blog posts should never begin with a stuffy and obscure academic title. For that I must apologize.

I've been reading Badiou for over two years now due to the influence of Jared and Adam when I was beginning to the play with the idea of studying Levinas. His Ethics was the clearest piece of philosophy I had read in quite some time and, though I wasn't convinced, I was interested. His Manifeste pour la philosophie was the first complete French text I read while studying in Paris (in a list far too short). The clarity of his philosophy always appealed to me, but also continues to give me pause as I am suspicious of clarity when it comes to thought. His politics, however, I have nothing but admiration for. Though I have doubts concerning the four conditions of truth (it seems too myopic and he doesn’t allow for enough interplay between the four), I think that the idea of fidelity to an unexpected event as a condition of truth is incredibly helpful, to put it in generic terms. Over the past two days I finally read Infinite Thought (in the new sand-fist edition, anyone know what that's all about?) and it helped me to think through some questions I've had for quite some time. I present them to you, the blog-o-sphere, in hopes that someone can help me to understand if Badiou's ontology is as he says it is.

My problems with Badiou always collect around his main thesis that mathematics is ontology (or the understanding of being as being). That is, mathematics speaks of being, that being is understood through mathematics (specifically set theory). This may be due to the fact that I've never been very good at math, I've never been able to understand the rules because they were not explained at the time as axioms and so I was looking for their justification (what can I say, I was a Kantian high schooler), but I simply can't warp my head around this. While I understand that being can be explained through math, I don't see why this would so important because, as I understand it, math is simply a language and, as Badiou states, philosophy privileges no language not even the one it is written in (in this case math).

Furthermore, he sets mathematics in opposition to religion as math can think infinity rationally. However, this is a rationality that is for those initiated into the mysteries (for all axioms are essentially mysteries to those outside) of set theory. I'm not saying that we should not look to science for truth, not at all, but I don't understand how Badiou's philosophy escapes religion or how the language of mathematics is better at explaining the nature of being than religious language is. If it is a matter of understanding or creating truth (we should keep these separate as Badiou does) then why is one language necessarily better than the other? Furthermore the very notion of faithfulness to an event, which can be translated into set theory, is still religious language or is at least borrowed from religious language.

Can anyone help set me straight here? Obviously this is highly contigent on mathematics being a language (doesn't Chomsky say that?), so if I'm wrong on this count then everything else I've said is questionable.

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