12 January 2007

Lautman on Problematic Ideas

For those interested in Deleuze's account of the virtual and the process of actualization, an article by Albert Lautman, one of his major inspirations, is now available online. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that Ideas or Multiplicities-- the virtual half at work in the process of individuation --are problems of which individual entities or beings are solutions. Lautman was among the central inspirations for Deleuze's conception of multiplicities and the virtual, so this article is well worth reading. To date there has been only a rudimentary understanding of Deleuze's account of individuation and why it is of central importance to his philosophical project. I would argue that the best articulation we have so far is to be found in Beistegui's Truth and Genesis. Much of this has to do with the fact that Deleuze relies on a number of untranslated and hard to find references, such as the work of Simondon, Lautman, and especially Solomon Maimon. Forays into this body of research reveal just how misguided the characterization of Deleuze as Humean empiricist are, and why Deleuze's ontology should be understood as a radicalization and transformation of post-Kantian German idealism.

UPDATE: Some have expressed difficulties getting the link to work. It's working fine from my end, so I'm not sure what the problem is... Perhaps that it's a PDF file? If the problem persists, you can find it in the "files" section here. Often the discussion is quite good on this list as well.

UPDATE 2: Mystery solved. As N.Pepperell points out, you must be a member of the list to access the files. With Yahoo lists you can opt not to have messages sent to your account, thereby allowing you to access the files without having to clog your mailbox. There are a number of other interesting files in the file section as well.

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23 December 2006

On the Concept of a Universe of Reference

For a long time I've thrown the term "universe of reference" about without clarifying just what I have in mind. I first came across this concept in Guattari's Chaosmosis, though I have no idea whether I'm using the term correctly as Guattari's language is very dense and he seldom takes the time to slow down and develop his concepts thoroughly. According to Husserl's phenomenological method, the transcendental epoche consists in carrying out a reduction where one suspends all questions of whether or not the datums given to consciousness actually exist or what they are as they exist independently of consciousness (in themselves), and instead resolves to describe what is given simply in terms of how it appears or gives itself.

In certain respects, the concept of a universe of reference is a correlary of such a phenomenological reduction, but for a community of subjects. That is, a universe of reference is composed of the entities and relations posited by a certain community of persons, without raising questions as to whether this universe is an accurate representation of reality or not. Thus, for instance, one universe of reference might include God, demons, ghosts, signs from God, Satan, and so on; whereas another universe of reference includes none of these things. In one universe of reference there might be a category known as "terrorists", such as in the film V for Vendetta where the government classifies any enemy of the State as a terrorist, where one and the same person classified as "terrorist" by the State might be classified by another group of people as a revolutionary or an activist. In the universe of reference inhabited by the neuropsychologist, repetitive handwashing is a sign of some neurological disorder and presents itself to the eyes of the observing clinician in these terms. Here a causal claim is made that implies a particular mode of treatment-- Medication. In the case of a psychoanalyst, repetitive hand washing is a symptom of a betrayed desire, implying the concepts of the unconscious, desire, intersubjectivity, objet a, and so on. Jacques-Alain Miller has a very nice article on just how symptoms differ from signs. The point here, of course, is that although at the level of sense-experience the neurologist and the psychoanalyst are viewing one and the same phenomenon, they are nonetheless talking of ontologically distinct entities. For the neurologist (barring the neuropsychoanalyst) there is no category of the symptom as the psychoanalyst understands it, while the psychoanalyst can have both a category of the neurological (indeed, Freud's original Project essay was articulated in neurological terms) and a category of the symptom.

The concept of a "universe of reference" is thus an ontologico-sociological category designed to capture the "folk ontologies" shared by different groups of people and that diverge from one another. The aim here, of course, is not to promote some sort of facile relativism. There might be one true and genuine ontology such that these folk ontologies are just various illusions or falsehoods. However, in developing rhetorical and discursive strategies with regard to various groups it is necessary to be familiar with the universe of reference they inhabit so as to formulate those speech acts capable of making a difference with regard to them. A speech act formulated on the horizon of post-Newtonian physics isn't very effective when speaking to a community that inhabits an Aristotlean universe.

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20 December 2006

Grounds and Sophists

Wanting to write a post on Hegel's understanding of ground, I've been reviewing the Science of Logic and Encyclopaedia Logic. I came across the following marvellous zusatze discussing the relation of ground and the sophists and thought I'd post it here. Hegel writes:
When we say that ground is the unity of identity and distinction, this unity must not be understood as abstract identity, for then we would just have another name for a thought that is once more just that identity of the understanding which we have recognized as untrue. So in order to counter this misunderstanding, we can also say that ground is not only the unity but equally the distinction of identity and distinction, too. Ground, which we encountered first as the sublation of contradiction, therefore makes its appearance as a new contradiction. But, as such, it is not what abides peacefully within itself, but is rather the expulsion of itself from itself. Ground is ground only insofar as it grounds; but what has come forth from ground is the ground itself, and herein lies the formalism of ground. The ground and what is grounded are one and the same content; and the distinction between them is the mere distinction of form between simple relation to self and mediation or positedness.
If ground is the unity of identity and distinction, then this is because, as Deleuze argues in the first chapter of Difference and Repetition, something emerges from the ground as itself and distinguishes itself from that ground. Ground expells itself from itself insofar as it produces effects. For instance, electricity as ground produces a series of electrical effects. Ground is "formal" at the outset in the sense that the initial posited ground is identical to what is to be grounded. For instance, I say wine makes me sleepy by virtue of its dormative properties. No genuine cause is given. Hegel continues:
When we ask about the grounds of things, this is precisely the standpoint of reflection that we mentioned earlier (paragraph 112 Addition); we want to see the thing in question duplicated as it were: first in its immediacy and secondly in its ground, where it is no longer immediate. This is indeed the simple meaning of the so-called principle of sufficient reason or ground. This principle only asserts that things must essentially be regarded as mediated.
I think this passage shows just how distorted Deleuze's critique of Hegelian mediation is. When Hegel here talks about mediation (he uses the term in other senses elsewhere) he is talking about causes or grounds. For Deleuze individuated beings would be thoroughly mediated in Hegel's sense in that we must refer to a problematic context or horizon as the sufficient reason of the thing (cf. chapters 4 & 5 of DR). The virtual itself is a form of mediation. Continuing:
Moreover, in setting up this law of thought, formal logic gives the other sciences a bad example, since it asks them not to take their content as valid in its immediacy; while, for its own part, it sets up this law of thought without deducing it and exhibiting its process of mediation.
Here we get glimmerings of phenomenology or the return to the things themselves. The problem here seems to be akin to what we find in neuroscience. The neuroscientist looks for the way in which mental phenomena are mediated (caused) by brain events, without pausing to first elaborate the content of these conscious structures for themselves. As such, it begins from a series of unfounded assumptions as to the nature of the phenomena to be explained that may or may not be true. Hegel goes on to say:
With the same right that the logician asserts when he maintains that our faculty of thinking happens to be so constituted that we must always ask for a ground, the doctor could answer that people are so organised that they cannot live under water when he is asked why a person who falls into the water drowns; and in the same way a jurist who is asked why a criminal is punished could answer that civil society is so constituted that crime cannot be allowed to go unpunished.
Hegel makes a joke. The point here is that these are not real explanations at all, but only beg the question. However, as Hegel points out in the Science of Logic, these "tautological grounds" (as he calls them) are nonetheless a necessary moment in inquiry as they mark the site of something to be genuinely explained. In short, with this first moment of ground, tautalogical ground, the object or state of affairs is no longer taken in its immediacy, but as differing from itself and therefore in need of an account or explanation. Thus, while the explanation given is here vacuous, it is a step along the way towards genuine philosophical or scientific elaboration. Continuing,
But even if we prescind from the demand, addressed to logic, that it should furnish a grounding for the principle of sufficient reason or ground, still it must at least answer the question of what is to be understood by "ground". The usual explanation, that a ground is what has a consequence, appears at first sight to be more illuniating and accessible than the determination of this concept that was given above. But if we go on to ask what a consequence is, and we get the answer that a consequence is what has a ground, then it is clear that accessibility of this explanation consists only in the fact that what in our case has been reached as the result of a preceding movement of thought is simply presupposed in that explanation. It is precisely the business of the Logic, however, to exhibit the thoughts that are merely represented, and which as such are not comprehended nor demonstrated, as stages of self-determining thinking, so that these thoughts come to be both comprehended and demonstrated.
Hegel gives a nice example of what he has in mind here in his discussion of Zeno in the first volume of his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. There he makes the surprising claim that philosophy first became genuinely philosophical not with Thales, nor with Parmenides, but with Zeno. This is because Zeno had properly discovered the concept in the sense that he saw that despite the evidence of all experience and the sense, motion nonetheless had to be demonstrated in its concept or for reason. The passage is well worth reviewing. Hegel goes on to say,
In ordinary life, and equally in the finite sciences, we very frequently employ this form of reflection with the aim of finding out, by its use, what the situation of the ob-jects under examination really is. And although there is nothing wrong with this way of looking at things, so long as it is only a matter of the immediate housekeeping needs of cognition, so to speak, still it should be noted at once that this method cannot provide definitive satisfaction, either in a theoretical or in a practical regard. his is because the ground still has not content that is determined in and for itself; and in consequence of that, when we consider something as grounded, we obtain only the mere distinction of form between immediacy and mediation. Thus, for instance, when we see an electrical phenomenon and ask for its ground, we receive the answer that the ground of this phenomenon is electricity; but this is simply the same content that we had before us immediately, translated into the form of something internal.
Thus in the first step towards unfolding grounds, a shift in form takes place-- a shift from the form of immediacy which treats the object as self-same and identical to itself, to conceiving the object as mediated or having a ground or cause outside of itself. The problem is that the content remains the same in both instances, and we do not yet have the object genuinely differing from itself.
Now, of course, the ground is also not just what is simply identical with itself; it is also distinct, and for that reason various grounds can be offered for one and the same content. So, in accordance with the concept of distinction, that diversity of grounds no leads to opposition in the form of grounds for and against the same content.-- Suppose, for example, that we consider an action, let us say, for arguments sake, a theft. This si a content in which a number of aspects can be distinguished. Property has been violated by the theft; while the thief, who was in need, has obtained the means for the satisfaction of his wants. It may be the case, too, that the person from whom the theft was made did not make good use of his property. Well, it is certainly correct that the violation of property which has taken place is the decisive point of view before which the others must give way; but this decision is not entailed by the principle of thought according to which everything must have a ground.
Skipping ahead,
We may also remark at this point that to go no further than mere grounds, especially in the domain of law and ethics, is the general standpoint and principle of the Sophists. When people speak of 'sophistry' they frequently understand by it just a mode of consideration which aims to distort what is correct and true, and quite generally to present things in a false light. But this tendency is not what is immediately involved in sophistry, the standpoint of which is primarily nothing but that of abstract argumentation. The Sophists came on the scene among the Greeks at a time when they were no longer satisfied with mere authority and tradition in the domain of religion and ethics. They felt the need at that time to become conscious of what was to be valid for them as a content mediated by thought. This demand was met by the Sophists because they taught people how to seek out the various points of view from which things can be considered; and these points of view are, in the virst instance, simply nothing but grounds. As we remarked earlier, however, since a ground does not yet have a content that is determined in and for itself, and grounds can be found for what is unethical and contrary to law no less than for what is ethical and lawful, the decision as to what grounds are to count as valid falls to the subject. The ground of the subject's decision becomes a matter of his individual disposition and aims. (Geraets, Suchting, Harris, pgs. 188-191)
In the transition from tautological ground to what Hegel calls real ground, we find not only a transition from a mere difference in form, but also a difference in content. For instance, when I explain why wine makes me sleepy due to alchohol and how alchohol reacts with my body, I am no longer tautologously repeating the content to be explained ("dormative qualities"), but have now encountered the content of ground differing from what it grounds. However, with the emergence of real ground we encounter the figure of the Sophist, for the Sophist is the one who shows both that all real grounds can be contested and that more than one real ground can be posited for anything to be grounded.

It seems to me that this perfectly describes the situation of postmodern relativism and its uncanny twin, neoconservative cynicism. The postmodern relativist shows how it's impossible to establish any ultimate ground, all the while implicitly contradicting herself in arguing that "culture" is the tautological ground common to all different disputes about grounds. Is this not exactly what is being said when Wittgenstein tells us that all engagement with the world is mediated by different "language games" or when Foucault shows us how epistemes the sort of knowledge we produce. Of course, the evidence amassed by ethnography and linguistics is, at this point, indisputable such that there can be no question of dismissing it or treating it as false. We are subjects individuated in cultural fields that relate to the world in and through cultural fields. The question is rather one of how, given this, a potent truth is possible.

The neoconservative cynic, by contrast, proceeds by casting doubt on any proposed grounds, such as the way in which the Administration uses minor statistical deviance to cast doubt on global warming, or the way in which tobacco companies use statistic to cast doubt on the claim that smoking causes cancer. This form of sophistry, I think, has been far more corrosive to the public sphere, for as Hegel points out above, any choice among grounds becomes a matter of individual preference. The neoconservative practice of casting doubt on all grounds has turned information and news into something consumed on the basis of personal preference and decisions of what is likable or unlikable, undermining the very possibility of civil discourse as there's no longer a shared world for persons to discourse about. For instance, the news consumed by participants on the blog Free R-publ-c (I really don't want their traffic) is almost entirely different than the news consumed over at Dailykos, making it almost impossible for there to be any discussion between the two groups of participants. All one can do today is assert and stand by ones assertions, without possessing a common world that might decide between different assertions. What we have then, today, is a massive struggle over grounds and what counts as a ground and whether there are any grounds at all. The question then becomes one of how to escape this endless to and fro of proposing grounds, critiquing grounds, and contesting grounds that is ineffective and functions to promote the very thing it disputes.

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12 December 2006

Rough and Tumble Theory: The Individuation Edition

In an act of great kindness, N.Pepperell over at Rough Theory has emailed me a a series of questions that tie together various themes I've been developing on this blog since I began writing here in May. I call this a great kindness as it spurs me to try to think through some things and articulate my intuitions more clearly. N.Pepperell writes,
I've been trying to backtrack an issue through your blog (if you see fifty thousand hits from me over the past couple of days, this is what I've been trying to mine the site to find - I've really enjoyed the back posts, by the way: beautiful formulations - it's always a real pleasure, reading your work...).

What I've been trying to tease out if the strategic purpose of a distinction you periodically make between your approach - which you characterise as making "ontological" claims about, e.g., the impossibility of totality, and other approaches, which you criticise for making similar claims, but only at the level of "epistemology". Your strategic intention would probably be clearer to me, if I were more familiar with the works to which you are replying. My guess - but this may simply be ill-informed - is that you are concerned to distinguish your approach from approaches that view totality just as being something that humans (with their limitations, etc.) could never *know* - whereas you are trying to assert that totality is something that could never *be*? But I may be completely missing the point - apologies if the question seems exceptionally obtuse...

My question - and I think this would still be relevant even if I've misunderstood your strategic intent - is: given that you wish to make ontological claims (I'm sympathetic to this desire), isn't it then necessary also then to move into an epistemological theory, in order to explain how it becomes possible for us to achieve a particular ontological insight - if that insight can itself be demonstrated to be historical in character (if the insight, in other words, has not always been available to humans cross-culturally)? In other words, questions of how we can make ontological assertions - of what I would tend to call our standpoint of critique - necessarily imply the need for an explicit epistemological theory, at least if we remain within a materialist (in the sense of secular) framework.

The tricky thing then becomes how one thinks this within a framework sympathetic to Enlightenment ideals - how we can relativise our insights historically, without the experience of vertigo that often follows from relativisation. I've had a few conversations back and forth with Kerim Friedman on this, relating to the possibility for cumulative knowledge- my working concepts involve trying to think about the ways in which exposure to particular historical experiences make certain things easier to think, cause certain concepts to be readier-to-hand. (Ironically, my recent volley into a Derrida discussion at rough theory seems to be pointing in a similar direction, which I wouldn't specifically have expected when we selected those readings...)

My instinct would be that this form of historicisation leaves open questions of truth - it doesn't automatically debunk a concept, just because we make a case that a concept leaps to mind more easily in a particular period. Recognising how we might find it more tempting to think in specific ways at specific times, though, can make it easier- at least, this would be the hope - to obtain a useful degree of working
scepticism that better positions us to think about the validity of our concepts and insights...

This may simply be an unworkable tangent on my part... Among other things, I find it difficult in particular to communicate the very abstract level of historical experience at which I expect such "priming" of perception and thought might take place - such that a number of different (and, at times, conflictual) categories of perception and thought can nevertheless be recognised as homologous due to their implicatedness in specific forms of social practice... In spite of these problems - and they may ultimately be insurmountable... - I keep circling around this issue, because I can't get past the problems historical specificity can cause for ontological claims - with the challenge of how we make ontological claims (and how we then adopt, for example, a particular critical standpoint in relation to matters of truth or goodness), while still not resorting to metaphyics...

At any rate, you may already have thought these things to death - I'm always very conscious of the breadth and depth of your background compared to mine. I was just struck by your periodic criticisms of others for engaging in claims about epistemology, rather than ontology - and, among other things, I suppose have used the email to write myself through to a sense that you might have been criticising epistemological theories that have a somewhat different "target" than the sorts of epistemological theory I tend to worry about in my own writings...

Sorry to pepper you with an essay. And all the best with the job search!
Let's see if I can make some sense. There's a lot here and I can't respond to it at all, but the short answer is that I'm not myself entirely sure where I'm going with the distinction I draw between ontology and epistemology with regard to the non-existence of the whole. In part I'm simply making a stab at a new beginning in philosophy and seeing where it leads, and quite honestly I sometimes find myself thinking it all a bit absurd. There are two distinct issues here: On the one hand, there's the issue of the distinction between ontology and epistemology, and my hostility towards epistemology. I feel better able to defend my animosity towards what I loosely refer to as "epistemological stances". On the other hand, there's the thesis that being is not One, that it does not form a whole or a totality. This I find far more difficult to think about, though I will say that much of this follows from my Lacanianism, as a consequence of my take on the real and the non-existence of the Other.

In a vague sort of way, I think three intuitions are at work in this impulse: First, I take it that the epistemological tradition which I mark as beginning roughly during the 18th century has today come to an impasse with various forms of skepticism or relativism. Unable to establish any determinate ground of knowledge, we're now in the position where knowledge is thought as construction and no claim to knowledge enjoys any more privilege than another. Knowledge has become sociologized, while nonetheless maintaining a distinction between being-as-it-is-in-itself and being-as-it-is-for-us. Second, despite the fact that this distinction is made and we are forever unable to know being as such but only being as it is in and through our distinctions, the fantasy of being-itself is nonetheless maintained. There is a being as such, but it is thought as forever out of reach. I take it that this is what sustains the thesis that all "knowledge" is on par as a sort of fiction or construction, as the idea of construction implicitly evokes the idea of the unreachable, unconstructed. Ideologically I see this discourse as allowing the theorist to maintain distance from all knowledge constructions by devaluing them, thereby maintaining an imaginary illusion of mastery. That is, it works as a sort of metalanguage. Third, I take it that the discourse of epistemology implicitly maintains a distinction between the knowing subject and the known object that treats the subject as outside the domain of being.

I take it that the sociologization of knowledge is based on the correct observation from sociology and anthropology that when we examine different cultural configurations, the categories defining the relationship of the agent to the world differ from culture to culture. This was a thesis that Hegel masterfully articulated in a variety of his writings, such as the Phenomenology, as well as his writings on history and the history of philosophy. You will notice that much of what I've written on in past months has to do with the problem of individuation in the history of philosophy. What I'm trying to get at by shifting these questions from epistemology (how do we represent the world) to ontology, is the thesis that there is no further object beyond our engagement with that object insofar as subject and object are simultaneously individuated through their interaction.

A good deal of what's lurking in my thought here is Hegel's discussion of Essence in the Science of Logic and force and understanding in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hopefully I can clearly condense a good deal of difficult material to make these points. Without going into too much detail, in the second magnificent volume of Hegel's Science of Logic, Hegel writes that,
Essence that issues from being seems to confront it as an opposite; this immediate being is, in the first instance, the unessential.

But secondly, it is more than merely unessential being, it is essenceless being, it is illusory being [Schein].

Thirdly, this illusory being is not something external to or other than essence; on the contrary, it is essence's own illusory being. The showing of this illusory being within essence itself is reflection. (394)
The translation of "Schein" as illusory being is unfortunate. "Schein" can just as easily be translated as "appearance", and has connotations of what is "on the face of something" or "keeping up appearances". The point that Hegel is making is that a distinction has been drawn between how a thing appears or shows itself and what is in the true nature of a thing or its essence. That is, we come to encounter being as containing a true nature that accounts for its appearance. For instance, I no longer encounter my coffee as just the bundle of properties it presents to me such as its color, taste, scent, and so on, but now see these properties as reflecting a nature that makes this coffee what it is. There is thus a distinction between the "coffee-in-itself" and "coffee-for-us".

Difficulties begin to emerge when this relationship between essence and appearance are treated as external and opposed to one another, such that the essence of the thing is something held in reserve. We only ever relate to appearances, so how are we ever to form a relationship to essence or the internal nature of a being (note that Hegel uses the term "essence" in a very unique and unexpected way, that shouldn't be confused with abstract form)? The essence of the thing is thought of as its inner nature in distinction from its appearances, yet what is this inner nature? In an enigmatic and famous passage from The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes that,
The inner world is, for consciousness, still a pure beyond, because consciousness does not yet find itself in it. It is empty, for it is merely the nothingness of appearance, and positively the simple or unitary universal. This mode of the inner being [of Things] finds ready acceptance by those who say that the inner being of Things is unknowable; but another reason for this would have to be given. Certainly, we have no knowledge of this inner world as it is here in its immediacy; but not because Reason is too short-sighted or is limited, or however else one likes to call it... but because of the simple nature of the matter in hand, that is to say, because in the void nothing is known, or, expressed from the other side, just because this inner world is determined as the beyond of consciousness. (88)
When we draw the distinction between essence and appearance we also try to determine what belongs to the object as such and what is contributed by us (or language, or culture). Hegel's point seems to be that we quickly discover that we must subtract all predicates from the object of knowledge to get at the being-in-itself as it is unrelated to us, yet in doing so the object evaporates into nothing or becomes a void. The question of epistemology can be treated as the the question of how we get to the thing itself, while skepticism and relativism can be seen as positions arguing that the thing in itself is unreachable. It's notable that skepticism does not reject the idea that there is a thing in itself-- indeed, it is crucial to its position --but it does claim that we are forever unable to reach this thing in itself.

Hegel's strategy is to argue that 1) essence is relation. This is a part of the idiosyncracy of his concept of essence I mentioned. The second volume of the Science of Logic is a careful analysis of the various types of relation structuring being, and makes a case in which beings must be understood as networks of specific and embedded relations. And 2) that essence must appear (478). In short, Hegel makes the obvious point that essence is only encountered in and through appearance, and that there is no quality-less essence beyond appearance. I cannot go through all the steps of this argument, but in a representative passage, Hegel remarks that,
A thing has properties; they are, first, the determinate relations of the thing to another thing; property exists only as a mode of relationship between them and is therefore the external reflection and the side of the thing's positedness. But, secondly, this positedness is in itself; it maintains itself in the relation to the other and is, therefore, admittedly only a surface with which Existence is exposed to the becoming and alteration of being; but the property is not lost in this. A thing has the property of effecting this or that in another thing and of expressing itself in a peculiar manner in its relation to it. It demonstrates this property only under the condition that the other thing has a corresponding constitution, but at the same time the property is peculiar to the first thing and is its self-identical substrate; it is for this reason that this reflected quality is called property. In this the thing passes over into an externality in which, however, the property is preserved. Through its properties the thing becomes cause, and cause is this, that it preserves itself as effect. Here, however, the thing is so far only the quiescent thing of many properties and is not yet determined as actual cause; it is so far only the implicit reflection of its determinations, not yet itself the reflection which posits them.

The thing-in-itself is, therefore, as we have seen not merely thing-in-itself in such a manner that its properties are the positedness of an external reflection; on the contrary, they are its own determinations through which it enters into relationships in a determinate manner; it is not a substrate devoid of determinations and lying beyond its external Existence, but is present in its properties as ground, that is, it is identity-with-self in its positedness... (SL 487-488)
In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel will discuss this relatedness of entities producing properties in terms of the "solicitation of force". Things "solicit" one another evoking properties in relation to one another. For Hegel the thing can never be thought in isolation from its relationship to other things, and moreover, while we may talk about entities containing potentials-- indeed, Hegel himself does so in the cited passages --we cannot speak of a thing in-itself that does not appear. The thing exhausts itself in appearing and appears in and through relation. For instance, in psychoanalysis there is not one thing, the unconscious, that is in-itself, and another thing, the symptoms/parapraxes, that are appearances. Rather, the two are on a mobius strip with one another and the symptom is evoked in relation to the Other and others. Lacan is very Hegelian in this regard.

So this brings me to a first point: There is a tendency in epistemological frames of thought to subtract the knowing subject from these basic principles, rather than seeing the subject as an element in these interrelationships. This creates the irresolvable problem of how it is possible to know the thing itself. However, everything changes once we recognize that the subject itself is caught up in these networks of relations, and it becomes possible to see knowledge as an ontological result of a process of individuation (here and here and here and here). To try to put the point a bit more clearly, knowledge must be seen as resulting from the milieu in which it is individuated, or its field of engagement. I take it that this responds to your remarks about material and historical conditions. If this is ontological rather than epistemological, then this is because there is no further being in-itself beyond these interactions and relations that would be a true object of knowledge. None of this is to suggest that I am a Hegelian or that I follow him in all the claims he makes. I do find, however, that the Doctrine of Essence in the Science of Logic, is a model of clear thinking (though not clear writing), and of great interest to anyone committed to relational ontology and fatigued by ineffectual epistemic critiques.

Consequently, my proposal is that rather than asking which is the right form of knowledge or claiming that there is no knowledge, we instead look at how knowledges are individuated and produced in a specific field of relations. This would also amount to a theory of learning rather than a theory of representing. Of course, this raises significant questions with regard to the Enlightenment project of critique and demystification that I have not yet worked through.

Fatigue is overtaking me and I find that I'm no closer to giving a persuasive account of just why I think it is important to advance the thesis that being is not One. The intuition lurking in the background seems to be the point that since the conditions of individuation are always specific and unique, and since there is no self-identical thing in-itself that would serve as a measure for ways of relating to beings, there is no one being or whole in which all beings are contained. Rather, we just have divergent topologies of networks of relations that perhaps converge at points but which do not form a totality or whole. If you go back to my very first posts in May you'll find some attempts to make formal arguments for this claim in relation to my discussions of the death of God.

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