Chapter 2 - Quantity: Calculo Ergo Sum

Summary

The invention of the laws of numbers was made on the basis of the error, dominant even from the earliest times, that there are identical things (but in fact nothing is identical with anything else).

—Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

One More One

Nothing adds up—everything does not—and yet we keep counting. From the mysterious event of every individual being to the immeasurable reality of the visible and invisible universe, plus all the measurements in between, there is no proper count of things. And even if there were a way to add things up, individually or universally, to count something or everything, what could the sum possibly be—save one more enumeration? One more … one. That we are living in a world irrationally attached to counting things (and the error of identity on which it is based) is clear from the endless array of crises articulated day by day in numerical form as well as the innumerable critiques of quantification altering us to the perils of continuing further down the road of number. With tragicomic circularity, our calculations predict catastrophes caused by humankind's addiction to quantification, our habitual ruling of life with “the regime of governance by numbers [which] loses all contact with reality, and substitutes the map for the territory.”

And in the background and foreground of this crowded, inversely panoptic world-theatre, behind and ahead of the day's reckonings, we point to the collective shadow of all the ones counting, a global mass projection of human numerousness onto the screen of life (a.k.a. “the Anthropocene”), as if the destiny of the human were to fill the cosmos with its own quantity. Indeed our very dubious unthinking assumption that there is a world, in the sense of a single total sum of all things, is itself an ironic shadow of Homo numerans: “the postulated domain of unified total overall reality corresponds to the idea of unrestricted quantification.”