Thoughts on Identity, Multiplicity, and Withdrawal
by Adam Robbert
I’m writing the following in response to Levi Bryant’s most recent post on “Some Scattered Thoughts on the Problem of Substance.” There is much to read in Bryant’s post and I am only going to focus on two of his points here. First, Bryant wants to emphasize the multiplicity of entities over and against their unity or identity. Second, Bryant is arguing for a distinction between ontological withdrawal and epistemological withdrawal. Being as influenced by Whitehead as I am, I find natural affinity with many of Bryant’s arguments (implicitly I think Whitehead and Bryant hold similar positions on many issues), however I’ve long been arguing for the acceptance of identity and withdrawal (a la Graham Harman — though I suspect that my position may be too Whiteheadian for his tastes). Interested readers may also want to check out THIS post which nicely sums up some of the discussion so far. In what follows I will attempt to sketch out my own position regarding Bryant’s points in terms of some ecological principles I think we should be attentive to.
(1) Levi wants to distinguish between epistemological and ontological withdrawal, and I agree that there are two (recursively linked) domains operative to distinguish — though whether these are ontologically distinct is up for debate. Levi also rightly points out that the perception of unity for any entity is achieved after a process of enactment. This implies that within the perceptually unified field of an organism, there is actually a multiplicity of processes, functions, and events occurring. No disagreements here. However, where we differ, I think, is how we relate the enactivist paradigm to ontology. I read Whitehead’s ‘ontological principle’ and ‘prehension’ as ontological arguments for why enactivism makes sense. In other words, rocks and tables ‘enact’ a world in the same way that humans and squid do. Of course enactivism is a theory that responds to issues in cognitive science, and prehension is an ontological theory dealing with issues in metaphysics. However, I think bringing the two together as variations of an analogous activity is a tenable position and has some consequences for the distinctions Levi is drawing between epistemic and ontological withdrawal:
(i) In the enactivist paradigm, it is the whole organism’s body that is involved in enaction rather than a specific set cognitive/neural processes exclusively (surely the nervous system is key here, but so is the fully embodied organism in question). This in turn means that it is the organism’s being that relates to its environment, rather than a cognitive/perceptual subset of the organism operating abstractly. In other words, organisms do not have knowledge of their environment, organisms are fully integrated with their knowledge of their environment. I see enactivism as an ecologized version of McLuhan’s statement “the medium is the message;” organisms are what they know and perceive; deploying this knowledge as the enactment of a specific world configuration.
(ii) Given (i) it seems that enaction is primarily an ontological process of relations, rather than an epistemological one. For me, this analysis fits quite nicely with Whiteheadian prehension (which posits three moments nonlocally participating in each actual occasion; the occasion, the datum, and the subjective aim). In short, then, enaction is more like an ontological principle of relations than an epistemological one (and here I break with how the enactivist paradigm has been concieved historically, which has mostly been in the realm of cybernetic approaches to epistemology). My hypothesis here is that enactivism is a biological version of Whiteheadian prehension (which is an organismic cosmology anyway…) This leads me to further suggest that;
(iii) While it is true that epistemology can be considered a distinct realm of philosophy that shouldn’t be collapsed into other areas per se (e.g., ethics or metaphysics) it is also true that — if we except something like enactivism or prehension as ontological principles — epistemology starts to look more like an ontological theory of knowledge wherein knowledge itself enacts different world configurations (and recursively constitutes different kinds of bodies) given different sets of knowledge ecosystems. Thats a short way of saying that knowledge (or epistemes in this case) are embodied in specific media (e.g., brains, books, and bytes), are not “other than” those media and, in this way, also share the same ontological qualities as ‘physical’ interactions between, say, tornados and barn doors. Thus I think prehension and enactivism lead us to an ontological understanding of (a) beings; (b) beings relations to each other; (c) the relationship between beings and knowledge; and (d) the relationships between different kinds of knowledge enacted by different kinds of media. With these points in mind, I would argue that;
(3) Object-oriented philosophy’s account of withdrawal holds true for both ontological and epistemological domains, where the ontic and the epistemic can be distinguished analytically to perform certain philosophical tasks, but are ultimately integrated in the embodiment of beings such that epistemic and cognitive ecosystems are ontologically real in the same way that other ecosystems are. This leads me to suggest that;
(4) Positing the withdrawal of identity on ontological and epistemological levels is actually a move to secure the integrity of individuals through their irreducibly real character (contra Levi’s claim that a focus on withdrawn identity necessarily leads to marginalization or oppression). What is essential to highlight here is the hugely important role Levinas plays in object-oriented philosophy’s account of relations. Recall that in object-oriented philosophy the Levinasian face, understood as an ethical imperative that calls forth and constitutes the subject, becomes radicalized such that all beings (human or nonhuman) issue ethical imperatives based in an infinite alterity, rather than a subsumable political essence which can be totalized through political acts of subjugation. (Of course subjects can be subjugated regardless of philosophical ideals, but I would argue that this is true whether we think the subject as singular or multiple. Thinking that positing subjects as either singular or multiple will determine the political outcome of those subjects ignores the ecological character of knowledge and also presupposes that oppression is somehow based in logical thinking, when clearly such a thing has never been the case). This also has some consequences;
(i) In the case of ecological ethics, for example, we are tasked with ‘speaking for’ (in the Latourian sense) beings for which our current political legislatures and ethical practices cannot account for. Thus we find the political task to be centered around preserving the worlds of beings who meanings we cannot fully translate. The crucial imperative is thus to build political structure around the needs of individuals with actual identities and real needs rather than multiplicities that cannot be accounted for in the space of the social.
(ii) In other words, an ontological concept of individuality and identity, rather than being regressive moves to essences that can be policed on the basis of proximity and marginilization, can move us into a political structure where the center/periphery dynamic is broken into an account of agency distributed throughout individuals that are variously human/nonhuman or biotic/abiotic. In this sense it is the social collective that is better aided by being thought of has a multiplicity rather than the specific individuals that constitute that collective.
I’m a bit unclear as to what you might mean when you claim I’m trying to argue for a distinction between epistemological and ontological accounts of withdrawal. My thesis is a bit different. What I am saying is that the fact that something is withdrawn epistemically withdrawn does not entitle us to infer that it is ontologically withdrawn. The question here is whether withdrawal is a relative or absolute determination of substances. In other words, is withdrawal merely a feature of how I experience of substances such that substances in themselves are not withdrawn, or is withdrawal a feature of substances in and of themselves regardless of whether or not anyone experiences them. It is easy to establish the first thesis, but we need a very different argument for the second thesis. Now it would seem that we could simply argue– as you attempt to here –that epistemologically withdrawal is simply a subset of ontological withdrawal so there really is no problem. However, this plunges us into a circularity. We must first know ontological withdrawal to make the claim that epistemological and ontological withdrawal are the same, yet this is precisely the thing that needs to be established. Additionally, it is not at all clear that all relations are ontologically of the same type. It seems to me that there’s a great difference between relations of representation such as we encounter in knowing and relations of causation such as we encounter elsewhere. I don’t think we can treat these sorts of relations as identical.
Couldn’t we make the case — experimentally — in which we can observe that our knowledge of a thing doesn’t ever exhaust a thing in the same way that a physical interaction with a thing doesn’t. This is the gist of Harman’s argument anyway and I’ve always linked it implicitly with Whitehead’s treatment of epistemology and ontology. Perhaps this is ultimately where I’m going wrong but I see no reason to discredit this view yet.
Also, my treatment of enactivism would also have to examine the representational model of cognition more closely. I haven’t done the homework here but my sense is that representing a world is different than enacting a world in that enaction already presupposes the types of representation possible. Thus representation is an effect of certain modes of enaction, rather equal to enaction. I’d have to unpack this more though.
How would you treat the difference between representational relations and ontological relations in the context of a flat ontology? Pointing me to some resources would be fine if you’ve already addressed this.
I think the problem of understanding the difference between epistemic relations and causal relations is crucial here. First, notice, however, that I don’t assume a distinction between “ontological relations” and “epistemic relations”, because I think epistemic relations are simply one type of ontological relation. I don’t oppose epistemology and ontology because I believe how we know is a function of what there is. Thought is immanent to reality. I use the term epistemic in a more Foucaultian way as opposed to, perhaps, Kant.
With my unfinished exercise of thinking ‘precarious causation’ I want to suggest a distinction between causal relations and epistemic relations. Where ‘causal’ is meant to refer to structural integrities and material-energetic influences (affect generally) and ‘epistemic’ is meant to signal animal imagination and symbolic representations. In this sense, imagining or visualizing or hallucinating punching someone in the face is ontologically different that punching someone in the face. Both the imagining and the punching are Real, but they are deployments of very different capacities.
My problem with “withdrawal”, then, is based on this distinction. Objects are absolutely withdrawal (in an ontological sense) from our thoughts about them (as Wittgenstein and Derrida both claimed), but are only partially withdrawn from our capacity to directly affect or intervene in their substantial configurations.
And the (non)problem of circularity here is short-circuited through an attenuation to the pre-theoretic powers of Being-flesh-in-the-world…
Hi Adam,
How would you incorporate Whitehead’s ‘conceptual prehensions’ into the above? I ask because conceptual prehensions makes your ‘enactivist’ reading of Whitehead problematic:
“I read Whitehead’s ‘ontological principle’ and ‘prehension’ as ontological arguments for why enactivism makes sense. In other words, rocks and tables ‘enact’ a world in the same way that humans and squid do. Of course enactivism is a theory that responds to issues in cognitive science, and prehension is an ontological theory dealing with issues in metaphysics.”
Rather than an ontological or epistemological subtraction (OOO withdrawl) that makes a certain sense for non-human or non-squid enaction, those entities capable of an epistemology (standard analysis involves belief, truth and justification), which may include the squid (why not!), always incorporate into experience *more than* the prehensions of the immediate sensory data. There is a surplus of experience ‘in-acted’ (as Massumi recently describes it); ‘surplus’ compared to the immediate ‘now’. An edited and further developed version of what I wrote on Michael’s blog that makes a similar point (partially as a response to a comment from Jason Hills and Michael’s example of a fire):
The experience of the fire, to some degree, implicates previous experiences of fire. Briefly, memory is in-acted as a biosemiotic, possibly consciously or possibly not (to various degrees and mixtures). What modalities therefore constitute the event of ‘this’ fire that extend beyond the conventional spatio-temporal coordinates of the fire ‘here’? The thisness of the fire here implicates more than (and less than, at different levels of consciousness) the physical semiotic of the fire ‘here’.
Or, perhaps, a better example is regarding the modalities of comments on blogs. To what degree is ‘this’ comment read as not only the comment ‘here’ on the screen, but involving an ‘amodal’ surplus not present in the comment ‘here’, but which is an in-action of the experience of all/my previous comments on OOO or whatever, of reading on a computer screen, of reading at all, of thinking at all, consciousness. (Textually, this would consitutate a in part (my) ‘signature’ in the Derridean sense.)
To what degree is such a transversal distribution of such elements a function of the specific capacities of the human (or any other entity that can fold the cosmos)? Does this invite a distinction and possibly a ‘dualism’ depending on how it is defined?
Any ‘entity’ capable of an epistemology necessary invites such intensive involvements from problematically contiguous experiences. (Problematic contiguity of ‘modalities’ as compared to the Aristotelian spatial or temporal contiguity of ‘substance’.)
Great questions, Glen. I shall try to respond as best I can. I haven’t gotten into very much Massumi and so I will have to stick with the Whitehead that I do know.
First, I don’t see conceptual prehensions as being problematic for my reading of enactivism. Conceptual prehensions are not limited to cognitive apprehension and so don’t necessitate any kind of nervous system or higher-order self-awareness (eternal objects, which are the datum of conceptual prehensions, are not exclusive to cognitive apprehension). So, if we view enactivism as a sophisticated account of prehension in organisms than I don’t think the conceptual/physical distinction poses any kind of a barrier. Is this what your question was leading at? If not, please clarify and I’ll be happy to try again.
Second, there is reason to think that surplus and withdrawal are features all the way up and down the scale complexity. A helpful thought here — when Whitehead says “organism” he means “self-organizing systems” of the kind studied by complexity theorists and these, of course, do not have to be ‘alive’ to be self-organizing or enactive. I know I’m taking some liberties by grafting enactivism and prehension together but, provided the time and space to do so, I think I can continue to build a good case for it. In this sense the “physical semiotic” of the fire is not just “physical” for the seem reason that conceptual prehension isn’t just cognitive, except for the reverse reason. I think this amounts to a truly radical empiricism that integrates prehension with enactivism.
Third, the question of the human is open for me; a distinction is necessary, yes (Whitehead says the human “has crossed the rubicon” what ever you want to make of that), but dualism? I still think no. In this sense the ‘surplus’ exhibited by epistemology is perhaps not unique to beings with epistemes and, as you say, is also true of fires, which are always nonlocally implicated with previous instances of fire (and nonfire) just like all other occasions of experience. The real rub for me here is the relationship between thought and time; Whitehead seems to think that thought occupies time more than space, a provocative idea he opens the door to but I’m not sure he really gets to in detail.
You are asking some great questions and I apologize if I didn’t answer you fully enough, this is more or less at the edge of my thinking.
I think it is on the edge of everyone’s thinking!! (puns, oh dear)
‘Eternal objects’ are weird! I agree with Shaviro’s updating of this perculiar Whiteheadism in thinking about ‘eternal objects’ as what can be referred to as ‘singularities’ (or ‘virtual singularities’ in Deleuzian terminology, which would make ‘conceptual’ roughly equivalent to ‘virtual’). I agree with you regarding the prehension of eternal objects as the datum, if we translate ‘eternal objects’ into a slightly different conceptual terminology and imagine them as singularities; hence, ‘eternal objects’ (‘virtual singularities’) are ‘ingressed’ (‘actualised’) in every actuality.
To be more specific regarding conceptual prehensions, Whitehead refers to ‘valuations’ in the context of conceptual prehensions, for example with regards to ‘appetition’ (P&R 32-33) involving the conceptual valuation of the immediate physical feeling combind with the urge towards realization of the datum conceptually prehended. In this context, Whitehead suggests that the basic operations of mentality are ‘conceptual prehensions’ (33). I agree that Whitehead clearly states that consciousness does not have to be involved in the conceptual prehension of eternal objects. Hopefully this can clarify the point I was raising.
The ‘time freedom’ (is probably a more useful way to think about it, rather than time occupation) of the valuation of conceptual prehensions is an element of Whitehead’s argument regarding the subject as determinant of its own concrescence. Whitehead writes:
“Every actual entity is ‘in time’ so far as its physical pole is concerned, and is ‘out of time’ so far as its mental pole is concerned. It is the union of two worlds, namely, the temporal world, and the world of autonomous valuation. The integration of each simple physical feeling with its conceptual counterpart produces in a subsequent phase a physical feeling whose subjective form of re-enaction has gained or lost subjective intensity to the valuation up, or the valuation down, in the conceptual feeling. [...] The effect of the conceptual feeling is thus, so far, merely to provide that the modified subjective form is not merely derived from the re-enaction of the objectified actual entity. [<-This is very important for Whitehead's next major sub-section in P&R regarding Conceptual Reversion and 'creativity'.] Also in the complex subsequent integrations, we find that the conceptual counterpart has a role in detachment from the pjhysical feeling out of which it originates." (P&R 248, 249)
This re-enaction is a certain kind of integrated repetition ('subsequent phase') as an effect of the relation between subjective intensity and the valuation of the conceptual feeling. The temporality here is very weird. Does this mean 'time' or some valuation of time is integrated as a valuation of the *number* of repetitions which the subject has endured as a kind of passage. So rather than being 'out of time' perhaps it is better understood as incorporating a sense of temporality (valuation of the passage of repetition) as a subjective intensity. I suggest that Massumi's work can be fruitfully read as developing a problematic around this question of time freedom.
But to return to the main point, I would challenge your reading of Whitehead (and I challenged Harman's reading of Whitehead in PoN on similar terrain, too! Harman has never properly addressed it.) based on two points:
1. A clarification, where I totally agree with you. Conceptual prehensions are the prehension of an 'eternal object' as the datum. To the extent that 'eternal objects' can be understood to be 'virtual singularities, then I agree that eternal objects are part of every actualisation. Whitehead argues that consciousness is not necessary.
2. Here is a clarification of my initial point. Conceptual prehensions are necessarily a specific case of prehension involving 'time freedom' of the valuation of conceptual prehensions by a 'mental pole'.
If we were only concerned with the actualisation of entities and situations involving entities without the capacity to determine to greater or lesser degrees their concrescence, and necessarily 'fold' the cosmos into thir being via past (and imagined future) experience, then the point I am making would be irrelevant.
But if we make assertions regarding how "rocks and tables ‘enact’ a world" then I am arguing we ned to make clear the ontological and epistemological limits of such assertions as inanimate objects (objects without a 'mental pole' in Whitehead's terminology) do not integrate valuations of conceptual prehensions.
Ah hah! Very good, some serious questions about Whitehead. I’ll try and think slowly hear so as not to miss any of your points while I try and rephrase some of my own.
(1) My argument is not that rocks have epistemologies (so sorry if it came across that way). My argument is that epistemology is a subset of a more general process of enaction which is in turn a subset of a more general process of prehension.
(2) Insofar as there are no objects without a mental pole (they are ingredient in every actuality) I would wager that valuation is a part of prehension as such, though in different degrees.
(3) I take issue with Harman’s reading of Whitehead as well, though I’m not exactly clear whether you are saying my reading is (a) the same as Harman’s and therefore wrong for the same reason; (b) the same as Harman’s but wrong for a different reason; or (c) totally off on the wrong path, just like Harman. I’m open to all of the above being the case, I’m just not sure why you think so, yet!
An aside: my own reason for disagreeing with Harman on Whitehead (and if its not clear yet I largely agree with Harman on other issues) lies in the fact that Whitehead does actually have a concept of objects that endure beyond their relations such that space/time are features of events and events are features of objects lying outside of their moments of duration (Cf. The Concept of Nature)
Perhaps you could clarify where my reading is going wrong in a sentence or two?
I’ll readily concede the following:
(1) Enaction was never designed to be an ontological principle
(2) Nothing about enaction necessitates panexperientialism
Here is what I am arguing:
(1) When Whitehead says “organism” he is referring to any self-organizing unity that shares common principles whether (a) living or dead, or (b) cognitive or noncognitive
(2) All actualities, for Whitehead, have physical and mental poles and thus have both physical and conceptual datums populated by entities of experience.
(3) Given that (1) the organism need not necessarily refer to living organisms and (2) that all modes of causality are physical and conceptual (or material and experiential if you like) then it seems that a kind of enactivism could be ontologically basic (or the reverse, enactivism is a kind of biological prehensivitiy).
Thoughts?
Hey guys,
This discussion of Whitehead is interesting but way outside my range. I do have a few comments about ‘mentality’ though.
Adam, I find it perplexing when you assert that “there are no objects without a mental pole”. So you are committed to the thesis that paint chips have mentality? Frankly, that leaves me speechless. Not only is there absolutely no empirical evidence to support such a claim, the fact that adapt such a position makes me realize that you are operating from a very different frame of reference than I am. Exactly how is that paint chips form mental representations?
Then you argue “that all modes of causality are physical and conceptual (or material and experiential if you like)”? Are the terms mental, prehensive, imaginal, and conceptual all just synonyms? So exactly why do we have all these different terms then?
If all materials are both physical and mental then we are left with idealism by any other name. I understand now why you agree so strongly with Harman. Thought is projected onto all aspects of the real as the real and quanta is confused for qualia.
I know you are mainly working within Whitehead’s metaphysics here but honestly all I can read from all this is the constant blurring of distinctions. It is assumed that all scales of reality exhibit mentality and everything flows from there..? Human imagination is assumed to be identical chemical catalytics, primate perceptual systems are no different in a way that matters from cellular processes, etc, etc? I’m lost here.
I think the only way I can frame it that won’t directly clash with your Whiteheadian worldview is that I believe there is ample evidence for emergence. Human conceptual imagination is an emergent feature derived from but irreducible to the primordial sensitivities of matter and energy. Conceptuality or thought enacts realities (call it the noosphere if you like) that extend the capacities of matter beyond the physical substratum. It is in this sense that epistemic relations (knowledge) are distinct from causal relations (perception). Rocks have sensitive causal relations (what you might call prehension) but they certainly do not have the emergent capacity for epistemic relations.
More detailed arguments for the paragraph directly above are forthcoming, but what is important here is that so far all I see with Whitehead is confusion and projection.
And I apologize for my frustration here, as I just can’t seem to get a grip on what possible assistance panpsychism can provide us with understanding the real…
As an added bonus please consider the following from Ray Brassier (The Speculative Turn, p. 47-48):
“We gain access to the structure of reality via a machinery of conception which extracts intelligible indices from a world that is not designed to be intelligible and is not originarily infused with meaning. Meaning is a function of conception and conception involves representation… If we are to avoid collapsing the investigation of being into the interpretation of meaning we must attain a proper understanding of what it is for something to be in- dependently of our conceiving, understanding and interpreting its being. But this will only be achieved once we possess a firm grip on the origins, scope, and limits of our ability to conceive, understand, and interpret what things are.”
and
“Some might be tempted to think that this arduous epistemological detour through the analysis of the conceptual infrastructure underlying our understanding of terms such as ‘what’, ‘is’, and ‘real’ can be obviated by a doctrine of ontological univoc- ity which dissolves representation and with it the tri-partite distinction between rep- resenting, represented, and reality. Proponents of a univocal conception of being as difference, in which conception is just another difference in being, would effectively supplant the metaphysical question ‘What differences are real?’ with an affirmation of the reality of differences: differentiation becomes the sole and sufficient index of reality. If being is difference, and only differences are real, then the traditional metaphysical task of ‘carving nature at the joints’ via an adequate conception of being can be supplanted by re-injecting thought directly into being so as to obtain the non-repre- sentational intuition of being as real difference. This would be the Deleuzean option. However, the celebrated ‘immanence’ of Deleuzean univocity is won at the cost of a pre-Critical fusion of thinking, meaning, and being, and the result is a panpsychism that simply ignores rather than obviates the epistemological difficulties signaled above. The claim that ‘everything is real’ is egregiously uninformative—and its uninformativeness is hardly palliated by the addendum that everything is real precisely insofar as it thinks since, for panpsychism, to think is to differ.”
I also enjoy involving a close reading of texts into discussion. Not for the sake of authority, but so we have a resource from which all participants can share and enjoin!
I agree with your point 1 above. Point 2 I’d like to push a bit further. You write:
“All actualities, for Whitehead, have physical and mental poles and thus have both physical and conceptual datums populated by entities of experience.”
Indeed! Again, you force me to make further clarifications, which I appreciate as a measure of a very worthy discussion.
Whitehead discusses ‘grades of mentality’ in P&R 101-102, and brings together a series of arguments and points developed elsewhere in his text. In Section VI of this lecture (‘the Order of Nature’) he compares unspecialised and specialised societies. He suggests the problem for ‘Nature’ is “the poduction of societies which are ‘sructured’ with a high ‘complexity,’ and which are at the same time ‘unspecialized.’ In this way, intensity [of satisfaction] is mated with survival.” He then discusses this problem in terms of grades of mentality. To summarise these grades into a list:
1. The ‘mere reproductive stage’, i.e. “crystals, rocks, planets, and suns” (102). To what extent he means, say, a planet as a celestial object vs a planet as a complex ecosystem, he clearly means planet as a celestial object, i.e. a rock in space. I don’t think it is accurate to describe all planets as such. There is some ambiguity in Whitehead’s text around whether this is a separate grade as compared to the next. However, I am making it a separate grade as I am incorporating the distinctions he makes shortly after this section, with regards to the ‘inorganic’ and ‘entirely living’ nexus (as discussed below).
2. Beyond this is an incorporation of the first phase of the mental pole, ‘conceptual reproduction’ (see P&R 249). Involving “some initiative of conceptual integration, but no originality in conceptual prehension” (101). This initiative in conceptual prehension is associated with appetition (102). Whitehead indicates that, at best, there is a ‘transmutation’ as “simple physical feelings of many actualities into one physical feeling of a nexus as one” and that the “analogy of the physical feelings consists in the fact that their definite character exhibits the same ingredient eternal object” (251). I understand this to refer to ‘societies’ such as a plant, that has a conceptual valuation of degrees of intensity of sunlight, but each ‘experience’ (to use the terminology we seem to agree on in this discussion) of sunlight forms a nexus distributed around the ‘eternal object’ (or ‘virtual singularity’) of the Sun. The sun comes out and the plant (if it can) turns to it. Deleuzian philosophers discuss this in terms of the affects that characterise events. Sunlight is an affection of the plant. What Whitehead describes as the “thoughtless adjustment of aesthetic emphasis in obedience to an ideal harmony” of the “lower organisms” (102).
3. What is excluded by this process of ‘conceptual reproduction’, and found in ‘higher order organisms’ is the ‘originality’ belonging to what Whitehead calls ‘reversion’. Reversion is a complex process of the valuation of conceptual feelings, etc. To begin with, transmutation for ‘higher organisms’ is a “conceptual initiative [that] amounts to *thinking* about the diverse experiences” (* original ital, 102). This solution to the problem (of the distribution or ratio between intensity of satisfaction and survival) involves both ‘reversion’ and ‘transmutation’.
Whitehead then goes on to make a number of distinctions between which modes of the solution are relevant for ‘inorganic’ societies (‘conceptual reproduction’) and for ‘living’ societies (combination of ‘reversion’ and ‘transmutation’). He also includes a further distinction specifically regarding those societies that incorporate an ‘entirely living’ nexus. An ‘entirely living’ nexus is such that its members have “*original* reactions” (103, ie. the process of reversion). He explicitly states that these ‘entirely living’ nexus are not societies in themselves, but also have an attendant (he calls them ‘subservient’) nexus, which together form a society. I think this would be particularly useful for your project, as much as I understand it and without knowin if you have already engaged with it, as these attendant societies constitute the living entity’s environment.
So the principle that I am trying to isolate in Whitehead’s thought that is different for inorganic versus entirely living nexus is the capacity for ‘reversion’. ‘Reversion’ is a valuation of a conceptual feeling that selects from the experience as such and from which living entities develop the capacity for creativity as an autonomous selection of difference from repetition. As I discuss in an earlier comment, experience of ‘here’ (or ‘now’, belong to a particular occasion, i.e. yesterday at midday) for a living entity capable of ‘transmutation’ and ‘reversion’ becomes an experience of ‘this’ involving previous (or I would also suggest future) experiences.
To put it very succintly then, regarding my original point, when you take into account conceptual prehensions, the complexities around ‘valuation’ (reversion and transmutation) and their role in concrescence in inorganic and living entities, rocks are not capable of ‘creativity’, while humans (and squid) are.
Phew… epic comment!
I’ll need to chase up your point re events, objects and duration as I do not have my copy of CoN here. Could you point me in the right direction re which section etc.?
More from Brassier:
“Kant underscored the difference between knowing, understood as the taking of something as something, classifying an object under a concept, and sensing, the reg- istration of a somatic stimulus. Conception is answerable to normative standards of truth and falsity, correctness and incorrectness, which develop from but cannot be col- lapsed into the responsive dispositions through which one part of the world—whether parrot or thermostat—transduces information from another part of the world—sound waves or molecular kinetic energy. Knowledge is not information: to know is to endorse a claim answerable to the norm of truth simpliciter, irrespective of ends. By way of contrast, the transmission and transduction of information requires no endorsement; it may be adequate or inadequate relative to certain ends, but never ‘true’ or ‘false’. The epistemological distinctiveness of the former is the obverse of the metaphysical ubiquity of the latter.” (The Speculative Turn, p.49)
The link between Varela’s autopoietic/enactive approach in biology/cogsci and Whitehead’s ontology has been of interest to me for several years. In his last published essay before dying (“Life After Kant” 2001), Varela attempted to overcome the dualism Kant arrived at in the “Critique of Judgment” regarding our ability to know the causality operative in living beings. Kant felt that he could not affirm the immanent telos implied by self-organizing beings as constitutive of those beings without thereby construing the whole of nature as a teleological system. Such a construal goes beyond the transcendental limits of the understanding and experience. All the same, he could not deny that something more than mechanical causality was operative in plants, animals, and certainly humans. He ended up affirming self-organization as a regulative principle of our judgment of organisms, rather than constitutive of their activity independent of our attempt to know them as such. Varela, in his last paper, argued that self-organization was indeed constitutive of organisms. His argument rests upon the generalization of our own experience as living beings to other such beings. I recognize the purposefulness in other organisms by analogy to my own felt sense of agency. He doesn’t extrapolate from this affirmation of immanent teleology in organisms to the place of teleology in the universe as a whole, which is why I think we need Whitehead’s cosmological scheme to ground Varela’s biology. Whitehead allows us to recognize that organism is basic to nature, whether we are talking about plants and animals or carbon atoms and galaxies. All self-organizing unities are organisms. Rocks are not self-organizing unities, but aggregates of molecular and atomic unities. A rock, then, does not have a mental pole, since mentality is a product of highly coordinated societies of actual occasions. The atoms the rock is made of, on the other hand, could conceivably be described as autopoietic systems, wherein the parts reciprocally produce the whole (and vice versa), and where the system is defined by the relative boundary of its electron shell. The boundary is only relative, since quantum theory suggests that the same electron could potentially be anywhere in the universe. Statistically speaking, however, it will tend to stick around the nucleus it has come into relationship with. This strange feature of quantum theory is generalized by Whitehead, such that the concrescence of an occasion of whatever scale incorporates the entire past universe in each moment of its present actualization.
Harman outright denies such internal relations, since to him it implies that organisms are nothing but the sum total of their relations with the rest of the universe at any given moment. I think he is leaving a crucial component of Whitehead’s scheme out, however. The internal relation of an organism to the rest of the universe is built up only of that universe’s past. The organism is not reducible to these relations because it also has a self-generated feeling for its own future. What withdraws from relations is this valuation of the future, the freedom an individual occasion has to determine (relatively speaking) its own fate.
Great comments everyone. A few responses:
Michael —
The difficulty in understanding Whitehead’s concept of mentality is, I think, mostly lexical (i.e., he chose a word loaded with other connotations). But we shouldn’t be obliged to continue to carry such baggage once we have understood what is meant by the term. “Mentality” is being reworked by Whitehead so that we can understand how it is that human cognitive functions can be understood to not break with the larger cosmological functions (“a bifurcation of nature”) within which they are immersed. We should understand this as a cosmologizing of human functions, rather than as a anthropomorphizing of cosmic functions. In this sense nothing I have said challenges emergence, it just challenges what it is thats interacting and what it is thats emerging.
I’ll make one point clear on its own: Whitehead is not an idealist, nor am I. The appeal to mentality does not collapse anything into mentality; mentality is not primary. Whitehead’s is a radical empiricism in the vein of William James, CS Pierce and, much later, Bruno Latour.
There are many good sources for exploring how prehension, mentality, or panpsychism can be deployed in effective, counterintuitive ways (I say counterintuitive but, if we follow Whitehead, it is the dominant hypothesis — that mentality is found only in humans — that is the counterintuitive one that should demand explanation). I suggest exploring the work of Galen Strawson (Cf. Consciousness and its Place in Nature), David Ray Griffin (Cf. Unsnarling the World Knot), or David Skrbina (Cf. Panpysychism and the West). This in addition to the work of other contemporary Whiteheadians like Roland Farber, Catherine Keller, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, or Donna Haraway.
I appreciate the appeal to Brassier as I think that his position and the one I have expressed above share an interesting tension and its one that Steven Shaviro has already begun to explore here:
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1012
And I have had my own had at tending to here:
http://knowledge-ecology.com/panpsychism-and-eliminativism/
In short, there is much dialogue on these topics in the future and I look forward to engaging with you and anyone else who wants to discuss further!
Glenn —
The passage I was referring to from The Concept of Nature can be found on pp. 70 – 71 of the 2007 Bibliobazaar edition where Whitehead writes:
“An object is an entity of a different type from an event. For example, the event which is the life of the nature with the Great Pyramid yesterday and today is divisible into two parts, namely the Great Pyramid yesterday and the Great Pyramid today. But the recognizable object which is also called the Great Pyramid is the same object today as it was yesterday. I shall have to consider the theory of objects in another lecture.
The whole subject is invested with an unmerited air of subtlety by the fact that when the event is the situation of a well-marked object, we have no language to distinguish the event from the object. In the case of the Great Pyramid, the object is the perceived unit entity which as perceived remains self-identical throughout the ages; while the whole dance of molecules and the shifting play of the electromagnetic field are ingredients of the event. An object is in a sense out of time. It is only derivatively in time by reason of its having the relation to events which I term ‘situation’…Furthermore ‘wherever and whenever’ in themselves presuppose an event, for space and time in themselves are abstractions from events”
So, sorry for the long quotation but I think its worth sharing since it seems to indicate the following: (1) Objects are something deeper than events, (2) We only access objects through their manifestations as events, (3) Space and time are ingredient in events, but objects themselves seem to recede from both events and space/time.
I definitely agree with Harman that Whitehead spends most of his time focused on events and processes, but I think we can at least make the case that Whitehead recognizes the problem of objects even if he doesn’t spend enough time on it (and here is where Harman becomes key).
Matt–
I’m fully with you, your own work has of course always been instructive and influential on my own. I only have a small comment here: I agree that the rock as rock doesn’t have a mental pole, but phrasing it in this way can hide the fact that each of the occasions that make up the rock do have mental poles. Here I might also be tempted to side with Harman and question whether or not we should consider a nexus (or aggregate) just as much an “object” as a society. I think Harman is a benefit to future thinking in these areas.