Number and Numbers

by Alain Badiou, translated by Robin Mackay

POLITY: NEW YORK, 2008, 240 PP., US $24.95, ISBN 978-0-7456-3879-9. FIRST PUBLISHED IN FRENCH AS LE NOMBRE ET LES NOMBRES, EDITIONS DU SEUIL, 1990 REVIEWED BY REUBEN HERSH

he name Alain Badiou may be unfamiliar to some readers of The Mathematical Intelligencer, but Slavoj Zizek calls Badiou much more than the most inuential French philosopher at this moment, and his work announces a new epoch in philosophy (back cover). Zizek, of course, is the most formidably brilliant recent theorist to have emerged from Continental Europe (The International Encyclopedia of Philosophy). To readers of the New Left Review, Badiou is well known as a post-Maoist revolutionary thinker. After retiring from the Ecole Normale Superieure ` and the College International de Philosophie, Badiou became afliated with the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Although this isnt a new book, its newly translated into English. As far as I have been able to learn, it has so far received little notice in the Anglophone world, either by mathematicians or philosophers. An excellent review by John Kadvany did appear in the Notre Dame Philosophical Review. Badiou isnt what Anglophone academia calls a philosopher of mathematics. He pays no attention to old bickerings between Brouwer and Hilbert or Quine and Carnap. Hes after bigger sh, as they say. His question isnt, What is mathematics? but rather, What is Being? And his answer is, Being is Mathematics. The big news, in brief, is that Alain Badiou is in love with John Conways surreal numbers! Badiou is not a deconstructivist or postdeconstructivist. Hes a metaphysician, a creator of speculative systems in the tradition of Leibniz, Hegel and Heidegger. His concerns are Being and

Event. Being, I think, is roughly the same as All that Is or perhaps Pure Existence or simply Absolute Reality. Event, on the other hand, seems to mean, I think, the unpredictable inexplicable radical break from Being, which is exemplied by the sacred and ineffable highest moments of Art, Science, Love, or Revolution. Badious earlier masterpiece, Being and Event, helpfully includes a dictionary. I found no entry for Being, but here is the denition of Event: An eventof a given evental site is the multiple composed of: on the one hand, elements of the site; and on the other hand, (the event). Self-belonging is thus constitutive of the event. It is an element of the multiple which it is.The event interposes itself between the void and itself. It will be said to be an ultra-one (relative to the situation) (pp. 506507). If this sounds quite unfamiliar, it may in part be because Anglophone philosophy has for a century or so been controlled by the descendents of Bertrand Russell, who practice something called Analytic Philosophy, which aspires to be Scientic, is obsessed with Logic and Language, and has long ago kicked Metaphysics, including Ontology, into the garbage can. But Badiou is practicing Ontology and Metaphysics! Not, however, in the traditional vein of Hegel or Heideggerhe does it with Mathematics. He is after a version of the surreal that doesnt show any trace of human hands, a version that one can believe is eternal, extra-humanpure Being. This book starts out with interesting philosophical summaries and critiques of Frege, Dedekind, Peano and Cantor. There follows a careful and, so far as I can tell, correct presentation of the system of ordinal numbers, using the construction often attributed to von Neumann. Starting with the rst ordinal, as represented by the singleton {U}, one then gets the second ordinal, with its representative {U, {U}}, and then continues to build the next ordinal by adjoining to any given ordinal a new, nal element, namely, itself. After one gets up to the familiar ordered set x of natural numbers, comes the decisive step: One constructs the next ordinal by introducing a new element as the last

elementnamely, x itself! Then begin again, and continue, dening, after any given ordinal X, the next ordinal, namely: {X, {X}}. And again, after doing this a countably innite number of times, create a new limit ordinal by dening a new last element following this new countable innity. This construction is explained in ve chapters, with admirable detail and patience. I would be tempted to recommend it for beginning students of set theory, except that they would be deterred, not to say repelled, by Badious extravagant Heideggerian metaphysical language. But, you say, what does this standard set-theoretic material have to do with Conways surreal numbers? As presented by Conway, the surreal numbers dont seem at rst to be about the ordinals. Theyre about the cutDedekinds famous trick, by which he created the real numbers out of the rationals. Conway starts with NOTHING, and uses a kind of cut to create 0. Then, cutting away, he gets 1, and -1, and the integers, and the dyadic fractions, and nally, of course, like Dedekind, the real numbers. But why stop there? Make one more cut0 on the left, and the positive reals on the rightand what do you have? An innitesimal, of course. Contrariwise, make a cut with all the reals on the left, and what do you have? A positive innite surreal number! Go all the way, cut as many times as there are ordinal numbers. You get a new incredibly rich and complex number systemthe surreals. These surreals are what Badiou wants, but he doesnt want them in this step-by-step, bottom-up ingenious and elegant constructive fashion of Conway. No, Badiou has a metaphysical ax to grind, an ontology to establish (as well as a political-social agenda). Our philosophical project designates where Number is given as the resource of being within the limits of a situation, the ontological or mathematical situation. We must abandon the path of the thinking of Number followed by Frege or Peano, to say nothing of Russell or Wittgenstein. We must even radicalise, overow, think up to the point of dissolution, Dedekinds or Cantors enterprise. (p.212) If we truly wish to establish the being of number as the form of the pure multiple, to remove it from the
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schoolroom (which means also to subtract the concept from its ambient numericality), we must distance ourselves from operational and serial manipulations. These manipulations, so tangible in Peano, project onto the screen of modern innity the quasisensible image of our domestic numbers, the 1, followed by 2, which precedes 3, and then the rest. The establishing of the correct distance between thought and countable manipulations is precisely what I call the ontologisation of the concept of number. From the point at which we presently nd ourselves, it takes on the form of a most precise task: the ontologisation of the universal series of the ordinals. To proceed, we must abandon the idea of well-orderedness and think of ordination, ordinality, in an intrinsic fashion. It is not as a measure of order, nor of disorder, that the concept of number presents itself to thought. We demand an immanent determination of its being. And so for us the question now formulates itself as follows: which predicate of the pure multiple, that can be grasped outside of all serial engenderment, founds numericality? We do not want to count, we want to think the count. (p. 58) Since Badiou rejects the bottom-up constructive point of view, and since he dislikes, not to say despises, the view of mathematics as a calculus, he is lucky that Harry Gonshor provided an exposition of the surreals that takes the ordinals as given and then denes a surreal number as a mapping of an initial segment of the ordinals into the pair {+, -}. (The empty sequence is included as a possibility.) To understand this, rst imagine the familiar binary expansions of the reals to be continued or extended, past omega, all the way through the ordinal numbers. Then, for example, we would get the rst innitesimal, as the binary sequence which is 0 in all the nite positions, and 1 in the nal position that comes after all the nite positions. Now to get the surreals as Gonshor does them, replace 1 and 0 by + and -. Having presented the surreals in the Gonshor way, as {+, -} valued sequences (up to arbitrarily far out in the ordinals), Badiou is ready for his big coup. He denes the surreal numbers in a way intrinsic to Being, free
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from any construction or representation! How does he do it? Im afraid his answer is quite a let-down. A simple trick. He says a surreal number is just a pair {A, B} where A is any ordinal number, and B is any subset of A. How does this work? Well, to get back from Badiou to Gonshor, take the subset B as the places in A which receive a +, and take the rest of A (the complement of B with respect to A) as the places which receive a -. In the opposite direction, starting with a surreal number given, a la Gonshor, as a mapping of an initial segment of some ordinal A into the pair {+, -}, you can elevate it to the high metaphysical level of a Badiou surreal {A, B} simply by choosing as B the subset of A which receives the value +. This simple relabeling is presented by Badiou as a deeply signicant achievement in the understanding of not just Number, but of Being itself! Why? Because, for Badiou, instances of Being are Multiplicities, and Multiplicities are completely catalogued and described by ordinal numbers and surreal numbers. I have two distinct objections to this claim of Professor Badiou. My rst objection is based on the fact, admitted by him, that the construction of the ordinals, as also the construction of the surreals, is not compelled by either experience or logic; it is a decision that we make. We could decide otherwise. My second objection is based on the fact that any well-ordered set, or number system based on a wellordered set, is grossly inadequate and insufcient to represent, describe or model Being, Reality or All That Is. As to the rst objection, I quote Badiou: There exists no deduction of Number, it is solely a question of a delity to that which, in its inconsistent excess, is traced as historical consistency in the interminable movements of mathematical refoundations. These concepts arise from a decision whose written form is the axiom; a decision that reveals the opening of a new epoch for the thought of being qua being (p. 212213). Prof. Badiou is right. Going beyond the countably innite is just a decision, Cantors decision and our decision. Our choice, to extend Number by the repeated use of limit ordinals, thereby creating the whole

system of ordinal numbers, is not compelled, by either experience or logic. It is merely our decision, and we could decide otherwise. But this admission destroys the whole claim that Being is manifested in the ordinals and the surreals! If one had the privilege of presence at Prof. Badious lecture, one would try to ask a question: Since this decision is our free, arbitrary choice, how can it claim to be a mirror or picture of Being, that which IS, regardless of us and independent of us? Now to the second, and even more fundamental objection. What is the basis for Prof. Badious claim that the surreal numbers sufce to represent or depict Being itself? Here his dictionary is helpful. One of his important terms is situation. I take situation to stand for any concrete specic manifestation of Being. Being perhaps is just the sum or union of all possible situations, and situation is the Being that is present perhaps at any particular time and place. On p. 522 of Being and Event, we nd a denition: Situation. Any consistent presented multiplicity, thus a multiple, and a regime of the count-as-one, or structure. We also have a denition of structure. What prescribes, for a presentation, the regime of the count-as-one. A structured presentation is a situation. And Multiplicity, multiple: General form of presentation, once one assumes that the One is not (p. 514). This seems to me to be the key fallacy of Badiou: This bare statement that the general form of every presentation is multiplicity. Badiou seems to actually say that the Multiplicity of a Situation is a complete description or specication of it! On the contrary, even a mathematical situation beyond abstract set theory is described mainly by the relations, the operations, which are dened on some set. So much more so is any real-world situation described by many more attributes than its mere multiplicity! Take these three situations: a bowl of 9 apples, or the rst 9 prime numbers, or a session of the 9 members of the U.S. Supreme Court all equivalent, with respect to multiplicity. But by saying that a situation is simply a multiplicity, Badiou can say that the surreal numbers are sufcient for a complete description of Being, and indeed are already an aspect of

Beingindependent of our knowledge or understanding, now or ever at any time. He has characterized Being, above and beyond all human knowledge! To my mind, this one-dimensional reduction of reality to a well-ordered set is embarrassingly simplistic. Indeed, it is in essence already too familiar, as a way of caricaturing reality. Anyone acquainted with Marxist analysis will recognize its similarity to the onedimensional universal ranking of everything by Price, which is the essence of the Free Market, the reign of Capital. Yet it is the reign of Capital that Badiou imagines he repudiates! Badiou repeatedly explains the opposition between number (small n) and Number (big N). By Number (big N), he means the surreals, in his metaphysical-ontological representation. They are admirable and excellent. By the numbers (little n), he means the numbers that Capital uses to oppress us, in its commercial-militaristic degradation of humanity. In our situation, that of Capital, the reign of number is thus the reign of the unthought slavery of numericality itself. (p. 213) Well and good. But according to a well-established Marxist insight, Capital brings the commodication of all aspects of human life. It puts a price on everything, thus making any two entities comparable in value. If we reject this commodication, this putting a price on everything, then we escape the one-dimensional thinking of

our time, as manifested, for instance, in ranking everything (even mathematicians), or in the tyranny of grades and tests in school, of IQ in psychology, etc. Real situations are not one-dimensional, they are multi-dimensional, even innite-dimensional. Mathematics used in a serious way to study nonmathematical reality cannot limit itself to any one-dimensional scale, no matter how extended or how rened! If it werent presumptuous to advise the most inuential philosopher in France, Id be tempted to suggest that Professor Badiou go beyond the set theory which he has mastered so well. How much benet he would gain by learning some geometry, or even by just leang through the beautiful new Princeton Companion to Mathematics! If he checks around among the mathematicians there in Paris or Switzerland, he will nd that our best attempts to model Reality (or Being) require all the resources of mathematics as it has advanced so far. Set theory, and even the surreal numbers, impressive and beautiful as they are, constitute but one small sector of the vast eld of mathematical tools and concepts that Being demands of us. I see Badiou as a modern Pythagorean using the latest incarnation of Number to provide objects of adoration. He calls himself a Platonist, but not a religious Platonista Materialist Platonist. (Multiplicity is a material phenomenon, you see.) Nevertheless,

to me his rhapsodic Meditations on Set and Number are a bit reminiscent of Georg Cantor, who knew that his mathematical innite was the theological innite of the Lord God.

REFERENCES

A. Badiou, Being and Event, Continuum, London, 2006. Originally published in French as LEtre et levenement, Editions du Seuil, 1988. J. H. Conway, On Numbers and Games, Academic Press, London, 1976. J. H. Conway and R. K. Guy, The Book of Numbers, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1996. J. W. Dauben, Georg Cantor. His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Innite, Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1979. H. Gonshor, An Introduction to the Theory of Surreal Numbers, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1986. T. Gowers (ed.), Princeton Companion to Mathematics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2008. J. Kadvany, Review of Number and numbers, Notre Dame Philosophical Review, (10:2), 2008.

Department of Mathematics and Statistics The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131 USA e-mail: rhersh@math.unm.edu

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