Thoughts are the totality of the world. The capacity to think, beneath rationalisation or abstraction, is both creative and deductive. We create things with thoughts deduced from the prior apparatuses of logic and reality in which we find ourselves. Thinking is exploratory but bounded, our being always limited by the obstacles that explorers meet – vast oceans, jagged peaks, hostile environments. This is the irony of the will – to be creatively enmeshed in its limits. “The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world”[1].

How then does one think the unthinkable? What are the limits of this creative exercise? The limits of thought are the limits of logic according to Wittgenstein. To think the illogical is to go beyond the bounds of reasoning as we are attempting to formulate relations that cannot have a meaningful structure. “It is as impossible to represent in language anything that ‘contradicts logic’ as it is in geometry to represent by its co-ordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space, or to give the co-ordinates of a point that does not exist”[2].

Logic is truth-invariant. A tautology derived via its structure as propositions.  Logical origins are pure structure. Intermediately, there are states of affairs as sets of combinable objects that can scale from elementary propositions to greater complexes of logical formation. This is a structure beyond the will, unalterable due to its expression being linguistically determined. The limits of thought are the limits of language. What cannot be said cannot be thought. It’s a declination of logics, from full tautologies of truth-invariance to the contradictory mass of unfalsifiable nothings. Contradictions as the impermissibility of thought as they allow no truth conditions. But where is the world in this?

Ending up at a question of origins, the logical apparatus exists beyond the mind-body dualism as its own module, a discoverable entity derived from the facts as they are. But facts are malleably defined, thought out along strings of reasoning that can be esoteric and differentiable. Our thoughts are space-forming, splitting spatial structure toward an extreme atomism that is self-referential and beyond the bounds of observation. It then becomes structure upon structure – logical structure an adjunct of mathematical structure and physical structure. Geometry and mechanics become definable by their relation to equilibrium. The relations of moving bodies through a phase space defined by their inherent drive toward rest[3] – the enclosure of dynamics within a structural equilibrium.

Serres’ invocation of morality as a physics[4] is a mirror of the equilibrating tendency. Morality concerns the relations of beings in intertwined settings, the structurating of being between systems and autonomy. Serres notes the structure of an Archimedean geometry of spirals and vortices, of indeterminable forces that do not come to rest. Life and thought then are negentropic bifurcations, breaks in atomistic declination that flow through the spiral. In contrast, the mechanical sciences’ primacy of rest suggests a logical morality, a pre-existing tendency to equate. History as teleology rather than cyclicality.

Quantum mechanics is caught in the same battles. Logical structure dictates coordination (the placing of coordinates) between its elements (microphysical and macrophysical). Points must have their own integrity. Yet superposition and nonlocality invert this logic with points (particles) existing in a multiplicity of potential positions. “The transition from the absolute unity of Being to the multiplicity of the macroworld passes through several stages. Across these stages, the world’s differentiation into distinguishable regions of space and distinguishable objects with definite properties is gradually realized. There is a stage at which Being presents itself as a multitude of formless particles. This stage is probed by high-energy physics and known to us through correlations between the counterfactual clicks of imagined detectors, i.e., in terms of transition probabilities between in-states and out-states. There are stages that mark the emergence of form, albeit a type of form that cannot yet be visualized. The forms of nucleons, nuclei, and atoms can only be mathematically described, as probability distributions over abstract spaces of increasingly higher dimensions. At energies low enough for atoms to be stable, it becomes possible to conceive of objects with fixed numbers of components, and these we describe in terms of correlations between the possible outcomes of unperformed measurements. The next stage—closest to the manifested world—contains the first objects with forms that can be visualized—the atomic configurations of molecules. But it is only the final stage—the manifested macroscopic world—that contains the actual detector clicks and the actual measurement outcomes that have made it possible to discover and study the correlations that govern the quantum domain”[5].

Differentiation as a negentropic realisation of possibilities. Probabilisation underlies a halfway point between negentropy and entropy. It limits the potential of possible forms in a retrojection of modern understanding. We know the forms as they are, and we know they formed due to existing (exiting) from the probability space provided. But we are far from the logical structure of scaling propositions. Logic is only an accident of discovery, of the splitting of reasoning from the equilibrium of atomistic declination in the clinamen. It is tautological in the extreme, its truth conditions derived from the perspectival lens placed upon reality-as-it-is. Working backwards to move forwards.

Logic is a system of rest that is always restless. In structuring relations, structures become ends in and of themselves, autonomous entities that restrict capacities and possibilities inherent in the variety of forms that can be conceived. A telos of physics that can conceive neither of irreversibility nor indeterminacy. The many-worlds hypothesis or theories of white holes indicate a logical imposition of forces at rest – if ours is a universe that is expanding, a correlative force of dark energy must exist to inhere this. If black holes are the destruction of matter, white holes are their corollary as producers of matter. Multiversal relations cohere a picture of interacting exchanges of matter/antimatter. All of these are tautologies, inventions of a mathematised universe trending toward a multiversal equilibrium.

Thought meets its limits by becoming unthinkable. How is being quantised? A quantum ontology of multiplicity trends toward schizophrenia or the body-without-organs – disembodied intelligences whose logics of cause and effect exist on a different plane of reality. Reality as perspective, logic as the limitation of possibility. This isn’t to say that by means of the will the universe can be changed, that physical laws can be broken and reformulated. Limits to anthropic being are attested to by the nature of the unthought and the entropic decline of Anthropos. But the structures of logic grow beyond their initial boundaries, becoming constructures of self-referentiality – pure tautologies or pure contradictions.

Mohrhoff goes back to pre-classical physics for explanation[6], invoking the infinite void and the splitting of lines through it as the explanandum of physical reality. Now we are at the unthinkable as it is inherently unknowable. How does one prove the infinite? Terminal decline of our reality does not mean its absolute totality. Wittgenstein similarly notes the finality of death and the finiteness of the soul as outside the existent. As being ends, structures unfold. “How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher”[7]. It is what cannot be put into words that makes itself manifest, mystical. This is the unthinkable.

“To acknowledge and respect consists in letting every thinker’s thought come to us as something in each case unique, never to be repeated, inexhaustible and being shaken to the depths by what is unthought in his thought”[8]. Unthought as the shadow of thought, the unassimilable and innately unequal. It is that which breaks the chains of determinacy, recognising logical structures not as the parapets of anthropic facticity or universal reasoning, but independent realms of self-referential definitions. Interdependent with being and space, constructuring the limits of the possible in equal propositions. The unthinkable is inverse and converse of thought i.e. it is an opposite always in communication with thinking, with conceptualisation. The limits of being in thought mean the possibilities of things, hybrid machinations extending beyond the perspectival lens and forming new relations with the structures of logic. Entropic decline begets negentropic creation – being and thought fall into void of the infinite and constructure.

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[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

[3] Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics II

[4] Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics

[5] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10699-016-9487-6

[6] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10699-016-9487-6

[7] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

[8] Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?