Another interesting point of comparison is Lovecraft’s shoggoths and the philosophical ‘chimera’. The latter is used as the exemplar of nonbeing, “that which in no case actually is” from Plato through the Scholastics and Hume up to present idiom. The Chimera of myth (a lion with a goat-body extending from its back and a serpent for a tail) like the shoggoth implies a sort of arbitrarily, horrifically recomposable living matter (=X) or concrete hallucination, which can bear all empirical predicates in its domain just on the condition that none can be specifically true. Which has, on the one side, a clear relation to the Kantian thing-in-itself and its successors, and on the other, of the gray goo and paperclippers of technological speculation; not to mention, in our present, the versatility and power to assimilate of capitalist markets and commodity production. There’s a weird coupling of nonbeing, beingness itself, and artifice—an artefactual, protean nothingness—here that seems to echo Heidegger’s view of ‘modern technology’ as dissolving the world of singular things into an on-demand stock of thingsness; and stories like The Thing, The Andromeda Strain, and Annihilation.
Not going anywhere in particular (necessarily?) with this, just a pet subtopic...
Another interesting point of comparison is Lovecraft’s shoggoths and the philosophical ‘chimera’. The latter is used as the exemplar of nonbeing, “that which in no case actually is” from Plato through the Scholastics and Hume up to present idiom. The Chimera of myth (a lion with a goat-body extending from its back and a serpent for a tail) like the shoggoth implies a sort of arbitrarily, horrifically recomposable living matter (=X) or concrete hallucination, which can bear all empirical predicates in its domain just on the condition that none can be specifically true. Which has, on the one side, a clear relation to the Kantian thing-in-itself and its successors, and on the other, of the gray goo and paperclippers of technological speculation; not to mention, in our present, the versatility and power to assimilate of capitalist markets and commodity production. There’s a weird coupling of nonbeing, beingness itself, and artifice—an artefactual, protean nothingness—here that seems to echo Heidegger’s view of ‘modern technology’ as dissolving the world of singular things into an on-demand stock of thingsness; and stories like The Thing, The Andromeda Strain, and Annihilation.
Not going anywhere in particular (necessarily?) with this, just a pet subtopic...