Wolfendale and Object Oriented Philosophy: Some Remarks and Questions

Wolfendale and Object Oriented Philosophy:
- Some Remarks and Questions -
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Following up on some of Pete’s excellent commentary on OOP over at deontologistics, some further issues may be raised about the status of withdrawal in both Graham and Levi’s respective accounts. Pete raises doubts about whether OOP has provided justification for the thesis that ordinary knowledge is finite and inadequate, i.e. in order to advance the thesis that real objects are always in excess of our knowledge of them (which Pete calls the excess principle of withdrawal; the other one being independence: that things exist independent of their relations). The worry arises for Harman’s account in particular, since it is supposed to be the phenomenological ground for the purchase of intentionality extended to all objects. If phenomenologically grounded withdrawal cannot be established, then it becomes less clear how Harman can make good of the epistemological claim that access to things themselves is impossible.

Pete argues that at this juncture Harman brings in unjustified ontological assumptions, which can ultimately vitiate his own position. Interestingly enough, Pete centers his argument in a single assumption, an assumption which he claims may also be used to undermine Meillassoux’s own 'hijacking' of the correlationist argument. For this, Pete claims that what is common to both speculative realism and Harman's OOP is a certain way of understanding what it is for something to be in-itself, and in order to map this common understanding he distinguishes between two possible senses of what in-itselfness could be taken to mean:

Mind Independence: Something is in-itself is if can exist independently of the existence of ‘minds’.

Attitude Independence: Something is in-itself if the way it is is independent of the way we take it to be.

Pete writes:

“I’d suggest that Meillassoux and Graham adopt the former, more traditional way of understanding in-itselfness, although in Graham’s case it modifies to the claim that something is in-itself if it can exist independently of its relations to other entities (insofar as all entities effectively play the role of ‘minds’). The important point is that the former is an ontological way of conceiving in-itselfness, whereas the latter is purely epistemological (insofar as it says nothing about existence).”

The central claim here is that adopting Mind Independence leads both into an ontological grounding of epistemology, and to correlationism finally. But he has certainly not established that both theses are necessarily incompatible with each other, nor shown where Meillassoux or Harman would clearly stand with respect to both theses: he merely asserts they both endorse mind independence.

Now, Meillassoux certainly adopts Mind Independence, insofar as not only the in-itself can exist in the radical contingency of all beings, but since a contingent entity must exist. Pete then claims that in establishing the general contingency of all there is Meillassoux must deny that any knowledge of particular entities is possible. He writes:

"In each case, the fact that we cannot know anything about particular entities functions as an important premise in an argument that establishes something about entities in general. What thus unites speculative realism and OOP is that they hold that all knowledge about particular entities is relative/uncertain/impossible, but that we can thus know something absolutely about the structure of entities as such, namely, the ontological fact which underlies this relativity/uncertainty/impossibility."

But this seems a bit baffling, although I could be wrong in my reading here: Meillassoux does not think it is the absence of any knowledge about particulars which entails knowledge about them in general, it is the knowledge that every particular could not exist that grounds the absoluteness of facticity and solicits its extension to all beings. This he does by saying that any attempt to relativize the absoluteness of contingency invariably results in its re-absolutization at a higher level. Certainly, this entails no entity or quality can be said to be necessary, and therefore such knowledge is disavowed. But it by no means entails that nothing can be known of particular entities; on the contrary, it simply annihilates the gap between the thinkability of an absolute and thought so as to facilitate the purchase of being by thought. Once absolute contingency is deemed thinkable and necessary, nothing prevents from deriving knowledge which would shed light about particular entities or their qualities, so long as they don’t imply their necessity, i.e. the violation of absolute contingency.

In other words, Meillassoux would most certainly reject the Attitude Independence thesis, insofar as there is no necessary epistemological gap between how we take entities to be and the way they are; i.e. we can take the in-itself to be as radically contingent, but immanently thinkable. The problem for Meillassoux becomes rather to elucidate the structure of this coincidence of world and word, being and thought, since it is left provisionally as an unexplained legibility based on the congruence between the formal inferential rules of logic and mathematics, and the structure of thought itself. This congruence between thought and thing, objective structure and conditions of thought, follows from what appears to be underwritten by the Badiouan endorsement of the Parmenidean thesis that being and thought are the same. The problem for Meillassoux thus pertains to the essential obscurity of the relation between inferential logico-mathematical discourse and thought, a clearly ontological relation which is apparently anchored in Badiou’s own mathematical Platonism, which is itself articulated around the dissolution of the form/content distinction (See The Concept of Model) and the thesis that mathematics is ontology.

Although Meillassoux admittedly restricts the ontological scope of mathematical discursivity, it should be noted nevertheless that, like Pete surmises, this remains unexplained in his preliminary account of correlationism in After Finitude. (Pg. 103). Whatever else Meillassoux specifically anchors on set-theoretical strictures (and in particular the Zermelo-Fraenkel axiomatic Badiou draws upon), it is clear these underlying ontological commitments also underlie his epistemological positions: for example, in appealing to Cantor’s theorem to advance the non-thinkability (and impossibility) of totalizable being. Since the latter is critical for Meillassoux’s arguments against the possibility of applying probabilistic reasoning to the universe as a whole, in his way to assert the ontological contingence of the laws of nature, Pete does well to take notice on these shortcomings.

On the other hand, Graham would apparently endorse both positions. Like Pete states, it is clear he defends the Mind Independent existence of the in-itself from thought, insofar as the object withdraws from all relations, and so the real object/qualities remain forever withdrawn from their sensual doubles. But he would also, I take it, defend the Attitude Independence thesis, since the way any object appears to me, or to any other object, is in sensual (intentional) form, and these phenomena are absolutely separated from real objects and qualities.

On Levi and Withdrawal

Here I’d like to fast forward to Pete’s series of posts answering Levi and presenting his many qualms with the latter's version of OOP. One of the main targets of Pete’s critique pertains to the status of how ‘translation’ operates in Levi’s account, in order to advance the excess thesis; which as we stated above, claims that objects exceed knowledge of them. In Levi’s particular account, this comes down to the claim that communication between distinct systems is necessarily destined to fail, since every actual manifestation or 'perturbation' which occasions a change in another system involves a process of translation which necessarily depends on system-specific features (its ‘virtual structure’ in Levi’s own Deleuzean words).

Although Levi’s precise adoption of the Deleuzean frame has not been made excessively clear (indeed, I am hoping Democracy of Objects will deliver on this account), we can stipulate that this entails that a) every object has a unique virtual structure or ‘proper being’, and b) translation invariably ‘involves’ the whole of the object’s virtual structure, The reason why both (a) and (b) are necessary is that if two identical systems exist then direct communication appears possible, insofar as the information transmitted between two systems could result in identical information, and nothing prevents us from saying transmission has taken place without loss or excess. But if direct communication is possible on occasion, withdrawal is threatened wholesale.

On the other hand, Levi would also need to say two systems cannot achieve direct communication on the basis of some common features which can be the only ones involved in a particular relation or transmission. Levi must either require additional metaphysical criteria for why failure would obtain in such cases (since dissimilar features of the system would presumably not take part of the relation), or else stipulate that the entire being of the system is implied in every relation. This last point is needed to make local manifestation invariably system-specific insofar as the total set of features involved in a translation process will be unique to the system performing the translation, even if common features in their virtual structure are shared, and so the actual manifestation will also be always unique. But of course this seems to entail that no two systems can ever share a common quality, nor that common qualities could ever be shared among two different systems. The problem is that since we have not yet been given an account of the general architecture of an object’s being or virtual structure, it seems entirely obscure whether we can gauge similarity is possible at all between systems and their qualities. It also becomes incredibly hard to measure where exactly translation in their causal interaction entails information loss, i.e. that the excess thesis holds. In order to gain greater clarity on this juncture let’s review what Pete writes:

“Translation is the manner in which substances transform the perturbations of other substances according to the substance’s own endo-structure or internal organization, producing new qualities as a consequence.

In essence, Levi holds that causal interactions between objects involves some form of communication between the proper being of each object, but that this communication is indirect, or subject to translation, insofar as the information involved is dependent upon the specific virtual structure (i.e., proper being) of the affected (or receiving) object. The withdrawal of each object’s proper being in relation to the other thus consists in the system specificity of information.”

Here we can raise innocently our questions again. First, we should ask straightforwardly: can there be two identical systems? If so, why would the information imply withdrawal at all, given that the virtual structure of the two systems would by hypothesis be identical and therefore the translation of an actual manifestation into another system would result in the same manifestation, or output? Perhaps an account of temporal separation between endogenously identical objects could do the trick, but it’s far from clear Levi’s account is equipped to take such a move. If Levi wants to deny that translation between identical systems results in identical outputs, and therefore that there is still something like an ‘excess’ involved, he obviously needs an account of how the processing of information based on a system’s actual state may produce different states or actualizations once translated into another identical system. Nothing of that sort seems available at this point, so this thesis seems resolutely implausible.

Alternatively, if Levi wants to deny that two systems are ever identical, and that this accounts for the inevitable withdrawal of all entities, he needs an account of how non-identity in virtual structure entails excess upon translation, i.e. why it is not possible for two non-identical systems to at least sometimes translate information identically or, put differently, for the translation process to result in identical manifest system states in two non-identical (virtually specified) systems.

Finally, if Levi wants to deny that a manifestation or actual system-state is identical to the translated information of a system, he needs an account of the difference not only between virtual structure and actual manifestation, essence and accident, but between the manifest accidents and the manifest information manifested upon contacting perturbations in the environment. Since this position runs against the idea that information produces new system states, Levi would presumably simply say information is identical to a manifest system-state. But then he needs the account to show how information exactly entails loss in its translation from system to system, which of course, as Pete notes, presupposes a standard for direct communication which fails every time. Since it is out of the question that two systems could be completely identical, the question rises whether at least they could share some features. If so, we might stipulate translation involves the actualization of the virtual being of the system, and that every system has a distinct virtual structure, while claiming that direct access would be possible in the way of a communication which only involves shared features between systems in their being, which would entail identical local manifestations. In order to deny this, not only must the virtual structure of every system be unique, but every manifestation must be native to the system.

The problem is that if all systems are distinct, and all manifestations are not only system specific but unique to the system, then for Levi there would be no shared qualities or manifestations between objects. Each and every object entails its own set of manifestations, and it becomes increasingly hard to see what a description of an object or its qualities would be like given any descriptive recourse would undoubtly have to be utterly specific to the system. Whether objects are absolutely dissimilar in their being or admit of similarities at the virtual level, Levi must at least claim every act of translation between two entities will involve dissimilar features in order to save the withdrawal thesis.

An alternative would be to say that there are common qualities insofar as they can be separated in accordance with general features, while it nevertheless remains the case that every instantiation is unique and specific to the system. Thus two systems might exhibit similar abstract features, while nevertheless preserving an inexhaustible void of difference in its depth differing every manifestation from all others. This indeed would be a more predictable Deleuzean line.

But in order to avoid the virulent proliferation of qualities and their non-transmutability, Levi must then produce an account of how not only objects have virtual structure and accidental manifestations, but how manifestations themselves have essential and accidental features as such. This means that for Levi the distinction between the accidental features of an object and its differential strata cannot be said to be a mere function of representation, since presumably the pure being has particularity and is endowed with definite qualities, i.e. is not just a virtual differentiating field without objective specificity. Presumably, then, it would be the difference in these accidental elements which always differ form system to system, which would be left to ground the possibility of generic qualities to be expressed between different systems, thus saving the withdrawal thesis, i.e. translation always involves loss insofar as no two systems and system states are ever identical; even if they might be sufficiently similar so that the essential aspects of a quality are actualized from system to system. So the gap is not so much between the object and its manifestations, as much as how these manifestations produce information in other objects.

Following with his analysis, Pete writes:

“Levi initially described withdrawal as being a split between proper being and local manifestation, much as Graham describes it as a split between real objects and sensuous objects. However, the way it is described here suggests that it is a split between the local manifestation (or perturbation) and the information it produces. This is reinforced by Levi’s suggestion that information plays the same role in his system that sensuous objects play in Graham’s.“

Levi must say that information is just a manifestation understood as caused by a perturbation; but that there is no categorical difference between the two. A good question arises as to whether all manifestations are then caused by perturbations or whether there are system-intrinsic induced manifestations possible. This of course pertains to the core of questions of causality in Levi’s version of OOP: are all relations and causal chains between systems, or are there also relations and chains within systems, i.e. between their virtual proper being and actual manifestations as system-states? How would these latter occur, seeing they would seem to be relations that would not be indirect insofar as they wouldn’t require translation between different systems, and therefore no information in Levi’s sense? Seeing Levi would probably choose to say all system-states or manifestations correspond to complex exchanges with the environment (and thus causal relations upon perturbations) there seems to be a chicken-egg problem insofar as all manifestations presuppose their actualization as information, and therefore that all system states which serve as perturbations for other systems to translate themselves presuppose a perturbation which actualized them, etc. To quote Pete again, at length:

“The difference is that substance must have something like properties that are distinct from the qualities it manifests, because there must be particular features of objects’ virtual structure that distinguish them from one another, which are nonetheless distinct from their actualised qualities. Whatever is analogous to sensuous qualities for Levi must be part of the information communicated in causal interaction… the key issue is whether Levi can account for this idea of directness and indirectness in informational terms. Levi seems to have done this by appealing to the idea that information is system specific. However, Levi has actually used the metaphor of translation, and the corresponding talk of directness in order to cash out the idea of system specificity”

While I agree mostly with Pete here, I find the claim in bold to be a bit baffling. System specificity is cashed out in terms of an objects endo-structure or virtual features; while a standard for directedness has simply not been described, unless one draws the intuitive idea that a direct communication would be the manifestation of identical qualities between two systems, which we have seen entails a host of problems. Pete does well to ask then what would non-system specific information be? Here we might surmise a few things.

Presumably, essential properties of manifestations which can be identified across objects/systems, even if every manifestation has accidental manifestations which are necessarily system-specific. This would mean information is always system specific, but still exhibits general features. If not, as we considered before, every manifestation or quality would be system-specific and there would be no ground for common properties between objects. As we have seen Levi has no grounds to say these general features are any only representational on pains of avoiding de-specifying the object wholesale, which would make of systems nothing but the Deleuzian virtual diced up into a plethora of objects, and where what an actual object or quality would be must be necessarily meaningless. But this seems to deliver Levi’s account to the same kind of problems I described about Harman previously on individuation, insofar it seems to make of reality nothing but an anonymous multiplication of possible entities on the basis of infinitely conceivable actualizations brought about by conception. In any case, it seems Levy must elucidate his relation to Deleuze more expressly to make sense of all these claims. In any case, Pete seems to arrive at somewhat similar conclusions on this point:

“One could claim that although the qualities produced are similar to those that brought them about, they are not for that matter identical However, in order to do this, one either has to claim that all qualities are haecceities (i.e., purely unique), which would be metaphysically disastrous, or one has to claim that it is the fact that they are qualities of a different object (and thus part of a different set of qualities) which makes the cause and effect non-identical. This amounts to saying that for their to be direct contact between entities, one entity would have to become identical to the other.”

Lets fast forward again and dive into Pete’s discussion of Levi’s account of meaning and its structure. The latter argues that knowledge should be understood primarily as production and not mere reporting; knowledge involves grasping information so as to produce a new actual state rather than the transmission of an already existing one. Pete disagrees violently with this reading, but I think his objection doesn’t quite cut it here:

“This [claim that knowledge involves primarily production and capacity of using knowledge to produce new states of affairs] could be interpreted as the claim that although knowledge can be communicated in linguistic form, you only grasp this knowledge if you can actually put it to use. However, this would need to be reconciled with the claim that much newly produced knowledge has no immediate use at all, at least by ordinary standards. Theorems discovered at the forefront of mathematics are understood prior to the discovery of any application they may have, and this means that understanding them cannot be a matter of understanding their application. Similarly, at the forefront of physics their are often different theories that have no difference in real world practical applications (to the extent that we can’t even experimentally choose between them), but we can nonetheless understand how they differ in content.

The important point here is that if one is going to try and reduce knowing-that to knowing-how, you need to actually specify precisely what kind of knowing-how the former consists in. If you don’t do this, then you’ve simply abandoned the distinction rather than explaining it.”

This objection doesn't work, insofar as it rests on an excessively narrow sense of production and use. Since Levi’s distinction between reporting and producing is primarily anchored in the distinction between repetition and innovation, the procedures which produce local manifestations apply to newly developed theories in experimental sciences just as revolutionary political movements. Doing theory is a form of production, and as long as it can be distinguished from merely repetitive activity, it necessarily concerns actualizing local manifestations. The key question is, then, whether Levi is actually equipped to advance the distinction between repetitive and non-productive reporting and innovative productive inventing. Since even ordinary knowledge transmission, in non-experimental science for instance, must involve translation, Levi is thereby forced to distinguish between translations which produce new manifestations from merely repeated ones. But given the withdrawal thesis, it seems his account of information-system is ill equipped to make this distinction. As we have seen, for Levi systems are unique and specific, and every communication is miscommunication insofar as they produce unique information. To this extent, every local manifestation is decidedly a new system-state, produced by a perturbation.

Here, however, we must look into Levi’s account of particular systems which involve meaning: since in these cases Levi seems to allow for common meaning between different systems. It would then be a matter of distinguishing which meanings are simply reported in the sense of translating them in such a way they are preserved as the same meanings after the translation process, and those translation processes which produce new meanings. This seems coherent enough, although I’m not aware if Levi actually endorses this possibility. In any case, this does seem to retain the anthropocentric dimension of human-knowledge which allows meanings to be communicated between systems, and non-human communication in which qualities are never transmitted, but information inevitably indirectly produces new-states. The problem is that this seems to awfully hypostasize human knowledge into the sole case in which something like a direct relation is possible, insofar as meanings can be transmitted between systems as such.

Now, Levi might want to say the dimension of withdrawal nevertheless remains in much the same way as quality transmission remains in non-human relations between objects. For example, we can admit that different systems have similar qualities, while preserving their uniqueness to their native systems, by distinguishing essential from accidental features of qualities themselves: systems might share features in their virtual structure or actual manifestations with other systems, while each might nevertheless has distinctive features which affect the process of translation and thus the account for the distinctiveness of local manifestations. In the same way, meanings might be translated from system to system in such a way they are qualitatively preserved (report), while we may easily imagine a process of production which involves previously unspecified local manifestations and meanings. This scenario seems to collapse the presumably unique character of meaning which is human into relations between all objects.

But since in Levi's account only humans produce meanings insofar as only humans engage in reflexive consideration of alternate possibilities, to claim knowledge is produced in the same way new system states occur seems to either radically collapse the distinction between the human domain of meaning and the more broadly non-human domain of translation. Indeed, the 'subjective form' of meaning production which constitutes knowledge seems no longer separable from natural processes, or general relations between different entities. This seems a thesis Levi would be happy to endorse, insofar as it places objects and humans in the same metaphysical footing and preserves both the possibility of novel production, repetitive transmission, and withdrawal. However, Levi has no real account of how the 'productions' put to use in novel-meaning events are distinguished from reports in the more basic strata of proper being of the object (virtual), local manifestation (actual) and in the translation of information between the two. How are reports categorically distinct from 'productions' (or novel actualizations)? Even if Levi claims the crucial distinction lies in how meaning-producing systems are endogenously specified to discern information in the projection of alternative possibilities, how this projection allows the proper distinction between report and production remains obscure. We have stipulated how Levi could reply, but this is all sheer speculation at this point, since the account of novelty is missing.

It is no surprise then that Levi’s account faulters precisely at the point of specifying what specific know-how reduces knowing-that. This is where the distinction between human and non-human systems becomes unsustainable, insofar as at this juncture either can only be described as know-how in the sense of information processing systems, which as we have seen, share the same structural features in communicating meaning as non-meaningful events.

The Pure and Empty Form of Love - On Inertia

I wonder if all the time spent reading books and agonizing over how to perfect my technique to write clearly and lucidly, without pretence or aloofness, has paid off. When I reread the pages from my younger years I feel an invading sense of pride, as if I had been then somehow in touch with something deeper, more substantial, than the petty excavations into the fabric of "metaphysics"  or whatever else has come to adumbrate my pallid hours. If anything, those hours drag on, with a feeling of dread, if not burdensome boredom, as if the ceaseless rambling over every minute nomological contraption that emerged at the hands of some bearded aristocrat sufficed to entice me away from the fleshier pleasures incarnated in the inane words I here produce. But such is the seriousness of adulthood; one which I've abhorred and delayed to the point where its deferring has resulted in, perhaps, its inevitable banishment. I remain a child, encapsulated in my trite quibbles about nothing except my own deep sense of dissatisfaction with anything orbiting my self-absorption.

I always begin these ever-more infrequent lapses of writing with the necessity to purge whatever keeps me from writing at the time. There's inevitable rust when one sporadically attempts to return to writing after being confined to reading, or any other activity besides. Strangely enough, now that the pages I've read have multiplied beyond any reasonable calculation, and in spite of the fact that I'm older and (should be) wiser, I perceive no superiority to my writings now than in those early attempts. My vocabulary is dimmer, my imagination drier, and my tone  unmistakably less confident. Perhaps this will serve some pragmatic purpose in the future: perhaps my lack of confidence will translate into a more useful channeling of my cognitive powers to some public medium, not restricted to the useless prattle that does well to remain within the confines of adolescent drama. But nevertheless, I feel ill-equipped to assume such a task; to relinquish my egotism and deliver myself into an all-too publicized egalitarian cause, as my recent leftist-ramblings purport to announce, seems ridiculous, even to myself, deep down. I can't foresee myself at becoming anything but a confessor of inanity. I don't care for books as much as I would like to; I can't relate to them as directly or empathize with their contents. They don't quite fit. There's something missing there; something unquestionably less fascinating than to idly sit and contemplate in armchair manner, and without concern for those starving in the cold, the spectacular parade which waltzes before my thought; its wicked imagery, its pitiless capacity to conjure the most viscerally upsetting forms and successions, its irreproducibility in act, which in some way tracks down a delightful voyeuristic quality to anything that ought to remain but purely immaterial catharsis.

I feel charged, filled up with angst and dread, and want to unleash some eardrum-shattering shriek onto the world. I'm fucking fed up with this ever elongating routine of misery, its monotonous stupidity which only delivers me to the promise of being the perpetual critic; casting anew my dissatisfaction through the mechanical repetition of the same gestures that have become utterly impervious to unruliness. But of course I've learnt that to remain encapsulated in such self-perception of unruliness is in truth a mere procreation of the most mechanical and isolated of realities: the expressive paradigm which knows of no creativity or production. At best, it indulges on the dull clichés of the epoch; at worst, it simply contents itself to destroy whatever is being fought for, as the bitter shadow of him who in lack of a foreseeable road sees no better option than to preach the universal pinching of all tires, so as to advance the thought of the only world possible: that of inertia. Those contributing to the world of inertia, woven by dream-crippled bitterness and resentment, would rather be elated to witness the entirety of existence come to a halt and break down into uniform, pathetic motionlessness than to face the contrasting evidence of a realized spirit; of a mobile collective, of a single lively attempt to amend things through a fair dose of work or action. What's amazing is that deep seated belief in Inertia will confabulate enormous work, incrusted in thought obviously, to stop things from being set in motion. This is not so much philosophy, since it doesn't concern the love for knowledge, but mere 'praxisphobia': hate for whatever moves or wishes to move, for all dynamic becoming, for all life, for all the stupid birds and hatching eggs, for the wave-riding surfboarders swirled by the tides and their even dumber resilient repetition; contempt for all that keeps a promise, waging against every feeble sketch for something to be built, against every project or axiom, shattering anything that might allow one to fling before all eyes the gold sprinkled medal of self-earned realization; the beauty of unrest.

Love for inertia is not a fidelity or love for thought, but is borne out from an utter distrust for any love whatsoever; incarnating disappointment so that one becomes nothing but the pure form of love itself, consummated in anonymous anxiety, dwelling without an object or fantasy, but consumed in the negation of all particularity, severing all ties with the worldly so as to assume the wholesale paralysis of the world as such. For I'd sit here forever, trying to devise ever more seductive phrases and metaphors to lure those with a taste for the facile and the slothful, for the love of plain, dried-up weakness. To indulge in weakness requires, doubtlessly, one to become ever more adroit at setting all aspirations to rest, at hijacking every positivity from its glittering charm. That's why the cynic before you cannot content himself with mere post-modern ramblings against "totalitarian injustice" in favor of democratic parades, nor even the neo-Marxist celebration of universalism against obscurantist sects.

No, I offer no promise of egalitarian salvation, no rain for the fields I cast salt upon. I merely use my cognitive magnetism to paralyze that which, being set in motion, can only jeopardize my own disdain for motion. To expand the force of magnetism as pure negativity, not in Hegelian fashion, but dissenting with the totality of beings traversing the air. Only then one renounces all hope to find hope within the vibrant world, and sets off in the delightful crusade of accelerating its morbid decay.

To pinch balloons as a form of living.

Harman on Individuation: Some Further Questions on Objects and Relations

Harman on Individuation:

- Some Further Questions on Objects and Relations -
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Following up on the question of individuation in OOP, here I write a schematized reply to Harman’s own reply to my original inquiry, since Prof. Harman is unfortunately too busy at this point. I'll just lay them out for whoever might be able to give an answer.

The question of individuation is anchored in how objective essences can be specified beyond the anthropocentric intentional domain; specifically as one advances a theory of objective quiddity and intentional relations beyond the anthropomorphic circumscription to eidetic constitution in human consciousness. The issue seems to surround the distinction between sensual/intentional and real objects; how we are supposed to gain epistemic warrant to speak of 'real' subsistent objects independent of all relations, and at the same time gain a resolutely non-anthropocentric theory of intentional relations for sensual objects. The proponents of scientific realism (the ‘science oriented’ guild of SR) are concerned with a similar question I asked before, concerning individuation: if objects as we encounter them are configured within intentional consciousness, and yet we want to posit intentionality is not limited to meaning-giving human-conscious acts, then these would presumably have to be described as being something different than the objects sensed by us, scientific or otherwise (for these remain circumscribed to our intentional sphere). To quote something Harman wrote to Pete:
"All I mean is this: experience exists. Simple. Why is such a banal statement so important to me? Because my sense of reality is of a realm so withdrawn from all access and all contact, that if real objects were the whole story then there would be no experience at all. And yet there is experience. We do not hover in a void of darkness, encountering nothing, as all entities slip away into vacuous concealment. There is in fact an intentional realm. Within this realm we find rocks and mountains, and we also find Popeye and HAL."
Everything turns on whether this intentional domain warrants occasion by real essences, and how it would do so outside anthropomorphic conditions where description corresponds to real essences. If I understand correctly, then all experience of objects and relations provides sensual objects/qualities, but these don't exhaust the real object or qualities targeted under them by ostentation (which is why imagined objects are void of reality). Ostentation through perception is thus tacitly an anchor on the Real populated by objects, even if in our-sense endowing relations to them we inevitably are destined to distort them. The point is that ostentation allows us to gain traction on real beings which purely sensual objects don't obtain. 

The obvious question here leads back to Shaviro's indictment that this kind of metaphysics delivers us back to a form of Kantian agnosticism about the Real: if all we know are sensual objects, then what epistemic warrant solicits the assumption of real objects at all, or even intentional encounters between objects which are cognitively accessible and yet not supervenient on our very peculiar human intentional constitution? Since 'real qualities [or objects] never appear'; how do we know they are there as such, independent of their sensual eidetic presentations in human consciousness? And if real qualities can never be conflated with sensual ones; what provides warrant for us to say there are such things as tables and tigers, rather than table-part independent objects and tiger-parts? Harman responded to my earlier question on individuation, which roughly tracks the same issue, as follows:


"I would have to be God to know what the real object is that lies beneath Incan religious beliefs. You seem to think that the up-to-date science of the year 2010 should be allowed to serve as the privileged judge of that question. I don’t see why. Our science of today will perhaps look as antiquated in a thousand years as Incan beliefs do today.
Your worry seems to be: if no direct access with objects is possible, then anything goes. I can claim that my worship of fairies is just as good as quantum theory. But why does this follow? Who says that there can’t be standards of better and worse even in a world where direct access to the things is impossible?

But this dodges the real issue. We can certainly think of standards to differentiate for 'better or worse' in conformity with current scientific principles, pragmatic interests, and a variety of other things. But the question is how any of these standards is adequate to discern real objects/qualities from purely sensual ones. It is certainly not sufficient to say we can come up with standards for 'better or worse', since in all fairness it's far from clear what relation could any such standards within the human intentional domain solicit us to derive about real objects. Since we cannot be sure, at this point, of their existence, we seem to fare no better through the appeal to our 'standards' to judge.

Next, the 'anything-goes' worry seems a bit closer to what Ray Brassier has expressed in terms of the equivalence between saying "the claim that nothing is metaphorical is ultimately indistinguishable from the claim that everything is metaphorical." But the question here would be for OOO: what specific standards allow us to stipulate that the restricted eidetic unity of our intentional domain (which gives us on occasion, say, tigers) solicits there are such things as tiger-essences, independently of such restricted access? Similarly, what solicits that the restricted intentional objectivation which gives us relations between tigers and pray-rabbits can occur independent of such human constrictions, without recourse to a descriptive register which would surreptitiously configure them in unexplained coincidence to the intentional human sensual domain? How can we ever transpose our descriptions onto the Real, and on what basis, once we have renounced all forms of reductionism in favor of a 'democracy of objects'? At this stage, the argument I am presenting is starting to sound a lot like reinforcing a 'strong correlationist' position, whereby the in-itself seems radically inaccessible, and I cautiously suppose that Harman might simply deny such epistemic constriction exists. Harman writes:
"In the sensual realm it is we ourselves who decide that the stickman is one sensual object. It is simply a matter of descriptive phenomenology to decide whether I’m encountering one stick figure or many isolated parts (I doubt that an “infinity” is possible for perception; that’s an exaggeration). In the realm of real objects, the stickman is one if the stickman is a unified reality that has properties not found in its pieces taken in isolation. But I don’t believe in real stickmen, of course."
But this conditional clause which states that 'any object X is X if it is a unified reality that has properties not found in isolation' is obviously circular: X is a Real unified object just it is a Real unified object. Having said that, Harman still doesn't tell us on what basis we know individuated entities exist as such, beyond a mysteriously specified baptism by ostentation. It also doesn't tell us how exactly real entities are unified as individuated realities with properties (rather than, say, the infamous flux of becoming prior to individuation), since Harman cannot hypostasize any one descriptive domain given his irreductionist position. How then does real objective unity obtain so we don't merely make of them annonymous objects, thinkable only as a (potentially infinite) plurality of noumenal phantoms veiled from our (sensual) phenomenological sphere?
A similar concern arises when I consider the case of a non-relational state of an object, such as the 'sleeping person' Harman frequently proposes. Notwithstanding the status of dreams and whatever is presented in them; we can wonder in what sense there is a withdrawal from relations. Isn't my body, for one, engaged in several relations with its environment (pillows, air molecules, and so on...) in spite of my non-awareness during sleeping? We certainly want to say these things are happening whether I’m aware of them or not, or else we revert right back into idealism. So when particles collide against my body, and in lack of an eidetic presentation of myself or the particles as unified objects in my conscious intentional domain, what allows me to locate myself as a real unity, withdrawn from the intentional relation between subatomic particles (since real objects must withdraw, the relation must constitute an intentional object)? In other words, how can I stipulate that I subsist as a real object when I am not reflectively presenting myself to myself in thought, i.e. as an intentional object. What allows me to say I am free from relation, and not just a bundle of Daniel-parts, like Quine's famous rabbit? And if I can stipulate all it takes for there to be a 'real object' is a concept individuating on the basis of an perceptually anchored act of ostentation, there's seemingly no limit to how many real entities I can hypothetically posit this way. I can divide or patch by body in indefinately many ways, corresponding to an indistinguishable act of ostentation. A subatomic scientist might deny there are such middle sized objects as bodies, just like a pantheist or Spinozist might deny there are any real differences between the floor on which I stand and my body standing over it. Which of these 'unities' are real? All of them? Some of them? Harman's suggestion that we could host standards for individuation remains opaque, since any such standard would have to be borrowed from one or many descriptive registers available to us. But to hypostasize human sense-endowing intentional acts into real objects surely vitiates the irreductionist position, and delivers us right back to Husserl.

Harman's metaphysical substances, in order to advance his 'irreductionist' position, must entail that the eidetic unity of the middle sized objects such as sleeping bodies target real essences, in the same way science's thought of microphysical particles do - through acts of ostentation. Granted, this can happen in a variety of ways: either of perceptual middle sized objects, or through laboratory conditions of 'microscope' observation and assigned indexes, or perhaps formal abstract conditions identified with imperceivables in complex relation to perceptually accessible objects, as Sellars develops. But then of course the realm of essences seems inhabitted with a multiplicity of objects which virulently follow from any description which I happen to have rendered operative by ostentation's 'baptism', and there's seemingly no limit to the amount of real entities I can produce in such a manner, using standard Quine-like examples. Yet this presupposes our concepts and terms are somehow sufficient to constitute reality, i.e. essence follows from eidetic conception through ostentation. In short, it's not simply that Harman cannot say there's a single real referent underlying all the cases of intentional ostentation; but that there's no resources to distinguish on what basis these real objects consist independently of descriptive criteria which immediatly fold us back to the intentional domain of humans.

Ostentation's baptism, direct or indirect, is pressumably set to provide some sort of restraint limiting the multiplication of possible entities through pure conception. This is why ostentation is set to remain an anchor between the real and the sensual for Harman. And he would claim this holds true even for scientific discourse and practice, insofar as formal descrpitions targetting a field of imperceivable entities merely specify real objects as expressed in formally intuitable descriptions/formulas, in turn tethered to perceptually accessible objects. Thus even imperceptible entities may remain tested against intuitable realities. For as Sellars advances, and Brassier admitts, the natural sciences pressupose complex connections between perception and the unintuitable domain described formally. And this is precisely why scientific realism must go hand in hand, for the naturalist, with perceptual realism; where the relation between object and intuition (or essence and eidos)is still anchored in ostentation.

This is a mere stipulation of how Harman would try to advance the argument against the desappearance of non-intuitable scientific phenomena, by insisting on ostentation's capacity of discernment. Even if science is counter-intuitive in its challenge to the manifest image, it is still, the OOPhilosopher will claim, thus tethered on the intuition which constitutes formal symbols and perceptual realities, while they will claim against the naturalist that the strata of formally specified entities is not to be priviliged metaphysically from other essences. This is the twofold axis of phenomenology and irreductionism. Harman considers that scientific realism leads to an unavoidable reductionism operating over its specific choice of scientism: reducing everything to the operational formality of the natural sciences, even as it links to perceptual reality in order to describe it (and not something different, as an irreductionist, democratic ontology of objects should).

At this juncture, however, the scientific realist may ask: so if the phenomena described by the formal apparatus of the natural sciences is negatively defined as resolutely non-manifest, and yet real in virtue of acts of ostentation and sensible reality: couldn't the same hold for all formal systems relating intuitable realities to non-intuitable ones? Doesn't the possibility of indirect ostentation through all formal symbols open up a potentially infinite domain of possible realities? Here the problem is no longer just the endless proliferation of middled-sized entities through direct ostentation, but also the proliferation of non-intuitable realities corresponding indexes in a formal system which relates in complex ways to perceptual conditions, and so grounded on such indirect ostentation. But this clearly is not limited to contemporary scientific formal discursivity, but to negative theologies, and all sorts of metaphysical postulates about transcendent realities. While ostentation was supposed to restrict the limit for the proliferation of entities, it all of a sudden seems to allow for an even more violent proliferation, extending as far as the formal domain, unless we want to deny any such postulates of reality tout court; which would quickly devolve into anti-scientism just as easily as it would sever theories with transcendent metaphysical postulates. The 'negative' domain opened by the scientfic realist must force Harman to accept the reality of non-intuitable realities behind any formal description related to an act of ostentation, which aims to target non-intuitable domain of entities: and this seems to once again make description sufficient to produce a virulent multiplication of essences, ad infinitum. Description is thus not just virulent when eidetic intuition is supposed to grasp middle sized objects directly through perceptual ostentation, but also when it formally assigns non-intuitive realities in relation to perceptually anchored acts of ostentation. Essences are thus multiplied both downstream (potentially infinite non-intuitable realities formally described or otherwise) and upstream (middled sized objects identified in perceptual direct ostentation). Beyond intuition, and because of its irreductionist democracy, ideation becomes sufficient to limn reality in any way we want it; but thus ends up finally anthropomorphizing the world, or what turns to be the same, idealising it. This leads me to the last point of clarification on something I said earlier:
"Next: “But since you have renounced naturalism, then surely you must say that the imagined or conceived stickman is not really physical anymore than it is really eidetic. For to deny its physical reality in order to assert its purely eidetic existence (as imagined stickman) would seem to run with the imposition of a matter independent ideality.”
I’ve only “renounced naturalism” in the sense that I don’t think physical explanations and entities should be privileged over other kinds. You seem to think I am taking a kind of Platonic position and saying that eidos is more real than physical. That’s not true at all."

My concern was simply the following one: when I imagine X, the physicalist neurobiologist tells me X is reducible to a specific neurological state. Harman claims the stickman is purely sensual. This is underwritten by the irreductionist thesis: which implies that what the physicalist describes as a multitude of entities does not exhaust the entity to which I grant eidetic unity. But of course when I am imagining X, something happens in my brain, irrespective of my imagining being different. Consider the case of the imagined stickman read from a neural-activity sensor at a doctor's dispatch. The stickman isn't real, but the brain-state presumably is. But why? Since OOO has renounced reductionism, and accepted science is reviseable, how can it claim that it follows from the doctor's reading, which is surely given as  intentional objects, is more real than the unified stickman in my thought? If the answer is that my thinking is not anchored on perceptual ostentation, then we are still don't know why the doctor's attribution of unity to the neurons corresponds to a real object, and not just to an imagined one. For there could be real stickmen shaped objects behind my intentional apprehension in my thought. Since the reviseability of science puts no limit to how reality might appear under the lights, we cannot shut off the possibility all intentional objects target real doubles behind thought, since no discursive register is better equipped to tell the real from not, and ostentation here makes no difference since it doesn't specify how the real object is individuation, but only entails there must be a real object. It seems that if realities potentially lurk behind my conscious apprehension, I would have to accept all sorts of possible descriptions of what is going on are also tethered to all intentional objects-relations, and we seem to obtain an infinity of possible real objects. The real seems so elastic in this view that to say 'everything goes' is hardly an understatement. Harman implies this must be accepted, as a consequence of science being reviseable, and our current concepts being potentially updated.

Intentional objects are also not relative to human cognition, since they constitute non-human relationality between objects. The next question is how we know which intentional objects obtain, not just real ones. The relations between neurons for example, don't exhaust the real being behind them. But what can we determine of intentional relations between nonhuman objects if they are always apprehended as an intentional relation for us?  Can one say that the intentional object in which neurons relate/meet happen independently of how these objects appear to me in my own intentional relating? How can we determine this? If, on the other hand, one wishes to say that as long as I’m not conceiving the relation as, say, that between brain-states these do not occur just as the stickman doesn't, then it seems that  relations obtain only as consciously apprehended by us, which starts sounding an awful lot like a Husserl inspired idealism.

To sum up, on the one hand we get every description potentially targeting a real essence; in the latter nothing ever targets even a non-human intentional object. Having lost all power for thought to gain traction on reality or being, Harman's position delivers us right back to Brassier's indictment: that nothing is metaphorical is indistinguishable from that claim that everything is metaphorical.

That the proliferation of entities also easily follows from these considerations can be seen without much trouble: Harman could claim neural states do embody real entities, since the neural-sets qua objects baptized by ostentation which make up my intentional object in relation to my thought do have real referents in the world[1]. However, this possibility would either force Harman to claim that any description which targets objects/relations defined by ostentation (even is supposed extended to the formal) are on equal footing, and are all thus real, or else claim there are criteria for discerning between non-intuitable real objects and non-intuitable merely sensual objects. But Harman has not yet produced such a distinction, or a basis on which it could be developed.

We are thus led back once again to individuation: if my description of the sun as a heat emitting astral body, as a collection of subatomic states, or as a light-weaving God, succeeds at being real by virtue of ostentation identifying withdrawing realities, then there do not seem to be one set of real/objects and relations underlying my potentially infinite sensual configurations, but an infinity of real objects and relations corresponding to each and every possible intentional configuration in human minds. For how else are we supposed to say the sun really is a thing which has not just eidetic unity but objective essence, and that therefore transcends its non-unified subatomic configuration, or any other descriptive division of the object into a multitude? Harman must preserve this sort of independent objective reality, if he doesn't want to destroy middle sized objects like physicalist reductionists do, or relativize subatomic realities in idealist form. Just as the reality of the subatomic is 'ostended' through the specification of the formal, the intuition of middle sized objects is granted only in eidetic specification in thought and propositional/nominal description or attributions. Without the constitution of consciousness attached to the phenomenological domain, either any category will do (which idealizes the world through descriptive virulence) or none will do (reinscribing a field of anonnymous objects to which we have no epistemic access, and yet remain thinkable). For which epistemic criteria would allow us to safely allot the unity of the sun to the domain of the real without thereby specifying the continuity between the intentional human-relative phenomenon as consciously presented in its eidetic unity, and the real object that it corresponds to?

In pains of avoiding reductionism, Harman seems forced into accepting the former option: that the eidetic unity of sensual objects follows from ostentation directly from real objects. But this comes at the cost of rendering impossible the discernment between descriptive registers founded in ostentation vis their adequacy to the real objects, and those which are merely ideal. Trying to place all objects on the same footing, the acceptance of entities through ostentation ends up soliciting a virulent idealism where real objects occassion their sensual doubles, while ostentation identifies essence with any descriptive register, irrespective of its ontological commitments. Without further criteria for dictinction, description seems sufficiently exhaustive, precisely because it is insufficient to exhaust the object: there is always more than what we intuit, and yet what we intuit reveals potentially infinite realities on the basis of description. Just like the reality of the glass cannot be reduced to a multiplicity of glass-parts, so the latter guarantee under the irreductionist light that the eidetic unity nominally attributed to an object via ostentation can always be made to correspond to an essence, object or part. Non-anthropomorphic essence would have to be thinkable apart from its specific eidetic constitution, to avoid all descriptions from sufficiently constituting reality. But what would such a reality be, then, if Harman's irreductionism forbids us to privilige one descriptive register over another? How are we to distinguish between what some registers tells us is real, from what others do? Either real objects/relations remain anonymous and become thereby noumenal phantoms, or their reality seems to directly follow from the particular intentional configurations for humans, delivering us right back to Husserl.

This obscure coincidence between sense and reality is what Ray Brassier has described as ‘a miraculous congruence between metaphysical individuals and the meanings of our singular terms’[2]. Outside of the strictly anthropomorphic domain for description, metaphysical essence remains opaque. In any case, we obtain both an endless proliferation of possible intentional entities and relations, as well as an endless proliferation of withdrawing real objects/qualities[3].

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[1] Of course, in order to follow this route, given real objects in themselves withdraw, one must also stipulate the corresponding series of non-anthropomorphic intentional objects for the relations, say, between neural sets, to remain a function of the objects and not of mere human mediation. So it seems Harman really can’t escape from positing the sensual object(s) apprehended as neural sets correspond to another sensual object which is not strictly that presented to my consciousness, i.e. real objects (neurons) by themselves cannot form relations (neural sets) by virtue of their non-relationality.

[2] Personal correspondence.

[3] See footnote above.