Let’s say philosophy has two modes. We can suppose as few or many as we want, we’re not scientists. So let’s suppose two. A natural division here is between the descriptive and the normative, or prescriptive. A nice division, buttressed firmly by Hume’s famous is/ought divide. Who can argue with a left slash? But immediately this seeming clean division becomes complicated.
Of course we can consider how even purely normative premises need to make use of things and terms, each composed and tangled within descriptions. Kant’s moral law is binding for rational agents, but it’s a separate, descriptive, question of what is and isn’t a moral agent. Also, we can switch to the other parts of the sentence, the moral terms themselves, and wonder where they come from? Here we have a descriptive enterprise digging into the origins of the moral layer: what juices spit it forth, and so on. The grand meta-ethical project of trying to find the descriptions of ‘good’ that would show it to be a perfectly ordinary term like ‘hot’ or ‘bright’ or ‘even’.
There’s all that, so one may think that the normative can simply reduce to the descriptive project. It’s a special holiday, a set of fluoro tones to supply dazzle and spark, future and possibility, to the description of the world. But even when we begin describing, the prescriptive looms large. Sure, there’s the question of what to pursue, what is base and what is lofty, for the guidance of thought. What is relevant, what is beneath it. But even more pressing is the question of how to think. This is a much more important question than what to think or where to go with a thought. One faces the world, and one wants to speak. Immediately the question is how one should speak. That’s up to one, and no one else. And this question makes of every description a confession and a project. One is always up to something. There is no ‘data’, only data ‘points’. Why do we want to carve a distinction between data and points? Points are elements of a geometry, of a project of proof. The point is supposed in the project of making a line, a curve, a form. On the other hand, the myth of data, ‘raw data’, is the myth of information that exists beyond any and all projects, some material that could be at the same time data yet not be a series of points already carried away in this or that project, this or that triangle or curve to be traced. One supposes the points they want out of this mythical plenum, but should recognize the prescription in every supposition, even if its just the prescription of a norm of good-natured rationality enabling us to all think together, accepting the same points (and how vociferously is this prescription policed and defended, by all of us).
We supposed two modes for philosophy, and failed in shoring up this distinction. We could suppose more; five, seven, or twenty eight. Perhaps the higher diversities capture more, a more bendable net with more points of articulation surely captures more fish. Perhaps philosophy, and perhaps poetry and painting too, is the mode of thinking where we want as many points of articulation for our nets as the fish themselves; a net that no longer captures, but just is, a fish – the knowledge here would then not be a mapping, a model or representation, but a becoming: being speaking for itself. Or, at least us, as a chorus stood upon the stage, repeating in unison the rhythm of events we stand somber sentinels to.