Rethinking Logical and Political Normativity

ABSTRACT

The focus of the article is the notion of normativity in logic and politics and their possible intersections. The twentieth-century divide between the analytical and the continental idea of logic is explored, by noting that they both – with significant differences – can be seen as proposing a ‘bottom-up normativity’, which may have immediate political effects. Logical normativity postulates universality, and a connection between reality and reason able to orient actions universalistically. For a bottom-up conception (as specifically advanced by Deleuze’s logic of sense), the universalistic approach does not descend from above on an elusive reality but is a self-organization of multiple processes occurring in a horizon which is typically affected by political facts and choices.

KEYWORDS:

• Normativity
• analytic and continental philosophy
• Gilles Deleuze
• logic of sense
• logic revision

Notes

1 The definition of ‘sense’ in Deleuze 1969 is not completely identifiable with Frege’s notion of ‘Sinn’ in Frege 1892, the connection between the two notions I am advancing will be clear in what follows.

2 We are not referring here to a crisis of the idealistic method in political philosophy, rather to the crisis of transcendental idealism (i.e. that movement of contemporary philosophy which begins with Kant and became dominant in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century) after Hegel’s death.

3 The term is used here as in Lyotard 1979.

4 Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 142.

5 Then see Meltdown, text with music (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=fiaWsgtJrNI).