In class last week we began discussing Aristotle’s Metaphysics and the debate between Aristotle and Plato. For Aristotle, it is basically what he calls “primary substances” that are really real. Primary substances are basically what we call things. Persons are primary substances, as are rocks, trees, gods, stars, etc. Anything that is an individual is a primary substance. Aristotle says 1) that a primary substance is that which exists in and through itself, and 2) that every primary substance is a subject of predication that is not itself predicated of anything else. Thus, for example, we say of Joe that he has brown hair, but we don’t say Joe (the person, not the name) of anything else. Joe exists in his own right. What Aristotle refers to as “secondary substances” exist only in primary substances. These secondary substances are basically anything of the order of a predicate. Colors are secondary substances, as is “human”, as are shapes, as is justice. These are all things that can only exist in objects.
For Plato, by contrast, what is really real are not individual things, but rather patterns (what he calls the “forms”). Thus, for example, justice is not merely a predicate of just acts, just persons, just institutions, etc., but rather is itself an entity that exists in its own right independent of all these things. Perhaps this is best thought in terms of The Matrix (yeah, I know, you’re all groaning… “not another Matrix reference by a philosopher!”). When you’re in the matrix you experience a world populated by objects. You’re eating this steak, talking to that person, hold that phone, driving that car, etc. In reality, however, all of these entities are expressions of a more fundamental reality: the computer code composed of zeros and ones. These zeros and ones are true reality. The entities that we encounter are just expressions of that more fundamental reality.
read on!
At the end of the day, one is really a Platonist or an Aristotlean. This is not to say that you hold to their particular philosophies avant le lettre, but rather that you either hold that the world is composed of individual entities or that patterns are the fundamental reality. There are lots of variations in between and many have worked out various orientations of these philosophies. This might seem to be a minor academic issue, but where you fall makes a real difference. For Plato, for example, what we really desire is not the beautiful person but beauty itself (the form or the pattern of beauty as such). As a consequence, my desire for the beautiful person, painting, etc., is pure folly. All of these things are pale copies of the form of beauty itself. In the political realm, of course, this will mean that what we desire is justice itself, not just institutions, persons, laws, actions, and so on and so forth. In Aristotle, by contrast, the situation is just the opposite. It is beautiful persons, paintings, novels, flowers, etc., that we desire precisely because beauty is a predicate and not an entity in its own right. Likewise with justice.
At any rate, when teaching Aristotle’s critique of Plato, I teach it in terms of reification. In a nutshell, Aristotle argues that Plato is guilty of reifying predicates. Reification is that operation whereby someone treats something that is not an object as if it were an object. Thus, for example, a couple years ago South Park had a great episode about the financial downturn, where the citizens of South Park reified the economy. When the economic downturn took place, they concluded that they had angered the economy. If times were to look good again, they reasoned, they would have to show their devotion to the economy. To do this they decided to sacrifice all of their spending habits, adopting an ascetic life, so as please the economy. Here’s a clip that gives a sense of the episode:
The full episode can be found here. The joke, of course, is that they are the economy. The economy is not an entity over and above their actions, but rather is those actions themselves. If they elect not to spend, they will “anger” the economy all the more as no money will circulate making things worse. Such is the nature of reification. In the case of Plato, the reification is different. The problem with Plato– if there is one –is that he treats predicates, adjectives, as if they were entities in their own right. But I’ll set this aside here.
Now as I gave this lecture I began to get a sense of just why people get worked up when all of us object-oriented ontologists talk about objects. The worry, I suspect, is that we risk reifying all sorts of things, personifying them in the way that the citizens of South Park reify the economy. I share these concerns. However, for me this gets to the fundamental point. When I speak of any object, I am not speaking of a sodden clod that just sits there doing nothing. Rather, my objects are processes, dynamic systems, or networks populated by all sorts of processes. Economy (or better yet, economies) are not entities over and above the transactions that take place within them. They are these activities. However, these activities are irreducible are also irreducible to the entities that participate in the activities within them. It is the assemblage, the organization, the pattern that characterizes these activities that constitutes the being of the object. Yet without these ongoing processes, the object would be nothing. This is no less true of stones, stars, trees, organisms, and so on than it is of economies. In a way, every object is a bit of a vampire. Each object perpetually draws inputs from other objects to sustain itself, even while being independent of these other objects. Economy can’t exist without economic transactions of a variety of sorts. But it is rather indifferent– horrifically –to those entities making the economic transactions. Likewise with the way in which a body draws on the outputs of the cells that compose it. There’s lot more to say here, but I have to leave off for the moment to go make dinner.
February 21, 2011 at 6:27 am
“In a way, every object is a bit of a vampire. Each object perpetually draws inputs from other objects to sustain itself, even while being independent of these other objects. Economy can’t exist without economic transactions of a variety of sorts. But it is rather indifferent– horrifically –to those entities making the economic transactions. Likewise with the way in which a body draws on the outputs of the cells that compose it.”
Yeah, but unlike a body, which in virtually all cases stops growing at a point (reaches maturity) though it may require inputs to sustain itself, isn’t our and the people of South Park’s economy a different sort of vampire? It’s all about growth and the abstraction/reification of labor and use-values through exchange. They are the economy, but how does the object-orientation allow us to deal with their alienation qua participants in the economy?
February 21, 2011 at 2:19 pm
my sense is that what is seen as stability in social relations is some admixture of our Wittgensteinian ability/disability to see family resemblances and the conservative aspects of the habitual/socialized embodiment of individuals(there would be some neurophenomenology of somethings akin to filtering/prehension and cognitive biases). From both clinical and ethnographic work I have found more in the way of negotiations/differences than true repetition and teaching attention to these differences is part of what I believe enables analysands to find their way forward, to engage their active imaginations,response-ability to forge new and meaningful assemblages/alliances. I’m way in over my head in terms of markets but the recent crash seems to show that behind the curtain we found not mathematical laws/structures to be quant-ified but the kind of biases/they-say/moods and technological manipulations of the world into resources that Heidegger warned us about, which when wired-in/up and amplified had wide-scale reverberations/effects. Just as the crowds in Egypt had many different hard to detect/out-of-sight/back-room effects that are only now coming to light, there is, for humans, no organizational other to politics/negotiation.
February 21, 2011 at 4:28 pm
Dear Levi-
I like your clear way of distinguishing between Platonic and Aristotelian temperaments. However, I think something much more radical than Aristotle is required in order to see objects as metaphysically fundamental. That is, Aristotle is a bit more Platonic than you seem to be saying here. He too ‘reifies predicates’ (if I understand what you mean here), and thus is perhaps less of an object-oriented philosophy than might seem to be the case initially.
For Aristotle forms are not, as they are for Plato, alien to the material world – a world of flow without the kind of stability something would have in virtue of exhibiting a form. However, forms are still *prior* to the objects which they in-form. That is, for Aristotle, substantial form is always prior to the process in which some matter acquires that form – i.e. the process of a substance’s coming into existence. Thus, kinds like ‘human’ and ‘oak tree’ (or any other kinds corresponding to substantial forms) can never themselves come into being as the result of the coming-to-be of objects.
The historical genesis of the kind ‘oak tree,’ for example, can never for Aristotle be understood as an object *dependent* process: e.g., as a process dependent on the unfolding of a natural history involving the interaction of particular organisms (i.e. the populations from which oak trees descended). For Aristotle, forms are always explanatorily prior to objects – never the other way around.
As I see it, Spinoza is the philosopher who rejects the priority of form over object. This might seem paradoxical on some standard readings of Spinoza, but I have in mind especially Deleuze’s Spinoza, for whom – if I understand him correctly – finite modes (i.e. objects) and the essence of substance (i.e. Nature as a whole) are coeval and interdependent.
I wonder if you would object to these further observations (briefly sketched though they are) of Aristotle or Spinoza…
-Mandel
February 21, 2011 at 6:13 pm
“But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances. ” -Aristotle
“pictures that placed besides one another invite the mind to intuitively establish new relationships and connections-new forms of meaning. In the same way that I ‘come to see’ that ‘this man can be terrible’ from noticing his ‘tone of voice and facial expressions’, his general gestures, I come to discern the significance of a ritual practice or of an ethical utterance, not by means of definitions, but in the impressions that these ‘pictures’-their tone, their expression, their synonymous affinity, etc-make on my imagination. The impression (Eindruck) that I receive here is so ‘deep and extraordinarily serious’ that it transforms the significance of what I see…to vicariously experience them…not from any form of intellectual deliberation-but, as Wittgenstein puts it, ‘from inner experience’. immediately and imaginatively. ” -Victor Krebs
“l’intempestif”;
“The term tries to capture a striving to bring something forth, something that could be actual but does not yet exist. Of course, this claim does not mean that there is something waiting around to come to fruition but only that, taken up in a distinctive way, the things of the actual and existing world can be made into something appropriate as well as inopportune. Such an event would be appropriate at least retrospectively in that it reconfigures existing things and relations, and inopportune in that it disrupts those existing things and relations and changes their tone, register, directionality.” -Paul Rabinow
February 21, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Hi Levi
I am teaching 16 year olds Epistemology at the moment and we are watching Cronenburgs Existenz, because I am sick of The Matrix. When the characters are ‘inside the game’ you would say that they experience a reality, but which is in fact the expression of a binary code of the programming capacity of the game, a variation of your reading above. I follow the Metaphysics here, as the true reality can never be accessed, but the Epistemology confuses me. The characters in these films ‘know’ the objects in the films but they only actually ‘know’ the expressions of the objects. So far so good. The real objects are code, or in the case of Existenz organic matter that expresses itself as a virtual reality. Are we here expressing a form of phenomenalism? But if the characters are seeing real expression of the machines creating the (coded) reality the sense data in this case matches the expression of the machine creating data. This seems to be a form of representative realism. I follow the OOO down the rabbit hole of Metaphysics, it’s the epistemology which trips me up.
Russell
February 21, 2011 at 9:58 pm
Outstanding post! I recall having a heated conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago in which he tried to argue that nationalism was ‘foolish’ because nations are ‘imaginary communities’. Using OOO, I argued that the common Leftist-eliminative contempt for nations in favor of ‘humanity’ was ridiculous because it was merely replacing one abstraction with another. Instead, I argued that both nations and humanity are very real objects and the fact that an entity is imaginary or not was of little relevance since the ability to create DIFFERENCE is the minimal criteria for an entity to exist. This being said, the conversation evolved into the strange realm of integralism and fascism, in which the nation is seen as a living entity that can expand, contract, decay, die, regenerate and so on. It is instructive that Mussolini implied the nation was always a myth and must be constructed where no nation first exists. Here I think I reach a philosophical impasse. For Marx, the material condition determines the super structure and hence everything beside (nation, volk, so on) is residual and imaginary, but for the fascists, Marxism is a reductionism because it denies the reality of the objects produced BY the very material structure. This isn’t to say that Marx doesn’t recognize the power of ideology (church, state, so on), but he appears to bracket it into a secondary and ultimately transformable importance. The brilliance of OOO, then, is allowing us to finally realize that we can have our cake and eat it too! We can easily acknowledge that Marx was right, but that the superstructural elements, despite having their genesis in the material structure, are objects in their own rights that cannot be reduced as such. Nations are real, and they do ‘live’ in a sense, and I think it is high time we perform an analysis of nationalism (and other political positions) that gives justice to such entities.
February 22, 2011 at 12:26 am
Mandel Cabrera’s comment points out that Aristotle seems to have difficulty speaking of the morphogenesis of primary substances. Mandel speaks of forms as ‘explanatorily prior to objects’ in Aristotle’s epistemology, which leads Mandel toward analyzing the role of an epistemological framework in honoring an object-oriented ontology. Mandel’s suggestion is that a Spinozist framework is more object-oriented, a framework in which Nature is explanatorily ‘coeval and interdependent’ with the formal morphogenesis of assemblages. The benefit of an epistemology in which form and object are ‘coeval and interdependent’ is precisely that objects become aspects of Nature, and thus, for Mandel Cabrera, a more object-oriented framework emerges.
However, there is some question about the ontological views of Aristotle that Mandel Cabrera deals with only indirectly. Mandel is focusing on the epistemological framework of Aristotle when he states that ‘forms are still prior to the objects they in-form’ for Aristotle.
Mandel mixes this epistemology-oriented view with an apparently ontological view when he asserts:
“That is, for Aristotle, substantial form is always prior to the process in which some matter acquires that form – i.e. the process of a substance’s coming into existence.”
Here, in fairness to Aristotle, one would need to delve into the Metaphysics, in which the substantial form originates in prime matter QUA potency. Aristotle’s ontology is, I would suggest, more dynamic than Mandel’s initial ‘explanatorily’-focused objections might lead one to believe. The view of prime matter QUA potency, as a clue to the ontological structure of the morphogenesis of social assemblages, may be just as powerful a view as the Spinozist view claimed superior as an object-oriented framework by Mandel Cabrera.
The eternality of the Aristotelian cosmos is problematic for an object-oriented approach rooted in the historicity of objects. If, for example, the form of the human is not an eternal kind, but rather an evolutionarily self-organized epochal tendency, there is a question — and this may hold for all objects — of the structure of the self-assembled potency of ‘prime matter’ — updated here to include an integrated view of nature that has yet to establish consensus.
Spinoza has the same problem, in that the structure of Substance/Nature/Power is a conundrum. We examine the modes and attributes of Substance, and the epistemological ground of Nature organizes our knowledge, but the essence of Substance escapes us just as readily as does the unknown-withdrawn aspect of objects. As an object-oriented approach, Spinoza’s framework organized around Substance/Nature/Power may clean up the question of what is explanatorily prior to or coeval with the assemblage of objects, but at the same time Spinoza leaves much to be desired.
I myself am curious if the Speculative Realists will apply Harman’s Tool-Analysis, Levi’s systems-theoretic approach, and Aristotle’s derivation of objects from Potency, to begin to explore in greater detail the self-organization of social assemblages of objects.
February 22, 2011 at 1:24 am
WoW! New insight into Rembrandt’s painting of Aristotle Contemplating Homer’s Bust thanks to this remarkable post and comment thread. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/61.198
Before today I wouldn’t have up and thought, oh, Rembrandt’s critiquing Aristotle’s reification critique of Plato. But costuming him out of period, out of his own time, and in the attire of the Dutch expansionist moment? There’s an intensely political rebuke there, I think. For being too poor a student of Plato and too good a teacher of Alexander. Foregrounding historical consequences via anachronistic fashion statement.
The official rap on this painting is that it’s a comment on material reward, selling out, purity in art, etc. But as much as I love the Metropolitan and respect many of its painting curators, I don’t think so; not now; in fact those comments seem impossibly glib.
Rather, I suspect that Rembrandt painted an epic internal struggle, an intellectual and moral one with its measure of shadow and pain, pain derived from the act of rejecting a teacher’s valuable lessons, as Aristotle did to Plato. Billowing sleeves not as literal material excess, but rather an internal canvas on which to throw the light on this very issue of patterning; and to ask what if? What if Aristotle had been a Platonist and not an Aristotelian in this regard?
One hand on Homer’s head –that great patterner of language and narrative–the other on links in the chain. It’s subtle, but Rembrandt has him groping, feeling his way, almost as if Aristotle was as blind philosophically as Homer was physically.
What fuels the kind of greed that propels a mercilessly bloody and violent campaign such as Alexander’s, such as our own em/vampirish adventures, if not lust for the goddamned things themselves?
February 22, 2011 at 3:30 am
Dear Cameron-
My talk of explanatory priority might have suggested something epistemological, but I take it that Aristotle is a realist about explanatory priority. That is, if we say that x is explanatorily prior to y, this isn’t in the first instance an epistemological observation, but a metaphysical one. For Aristotle, that is, epistemology tracks ontology. For example, major premises – which concern universals – have a foundational place in our knowledge precisely *because* they have a foundational place in the order of things.
-Mandel
February 22, 2011 at 3:44 am
Frances, that’s inspired. And Levi, talking of reification:
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/02/clunk-causality-or-cynical-reasons-for.html
You are in this post!
February 22, 2011 at 3:57 am
Mandel,
I’m just not sure how relevant the peculiarities of Aristotle’s own positions are to this discussion. The claim that one is an Aristotlean or a Platonist is not the claim that one endorses all aspects of their position. Leibniz is Aristotlean insofar as his universe is composed of discrete monads. Likewise, Deleuze and Whitehead are largely Aristotlean in their orientation by virtue of their commitment to this world. Kant is Platonist in the emphasis he places on the categories. Etc. I’m with Cameron in his claim that Aristotle was attempting to think genesis. This is what the Physics is all about. We can, of course, hold that his account of genesis falls short (this is what I think) and we can also critique him for treating forms as eternal and unchanging then the result of a genesis themselves as someone like Darwin argues (this is also what I think). This doesn’t change the fact, however, that there are philosophical orientations that defend the primacy of individuals and the sufficiency of the world to itself (Aristotleans) and those that bifurcate being and those that undermine or overmine the world in a variety of ways (Platonists).
February 22, 2011 at 1:07 pm
Dear Levi-
Thanks for this. My reply to your post was intended (though I wasn’t clear enough about this) to mark the thought that getting past Platonism, as you describe it, is quite tricky. I think of Aristotle as being a philosopher who accords a fundamental place for objects only when contrasted with Plato. In other lights, he looks – to me, at any rate – much less object-oriented (in contrast to Spinoza, for example).
However, yours is of course a very helpful and clear way of dividing up the territory. Thanks again!
-Mandel
February 22, 2011 at 8:46 pm
Frances:
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/02/aristotle-homer-rembrandt.html
February 23, 2011 at 6:39 am
Raymond Ruyer (La Genese des formes vivantes, 1954.) My trans (maybe it has been translated now).
I quoted Ruyer in an old and amateur essay ‘Subjectless Subjectivities’.
I guess it’s more complicated than this. Ruyer doesn’t make any distinction between empscyhed beings and non-empsyched beings. Neither does onticology.
It is also similar to the distinction between structure and organization (which is not transcendent to the actual structure in Maturana and Varela.
the question is going to be the distinction btwn the ‘identity’ – ipseity – of different kinds of beings. Constructed (brick), aggregate (pile of sand), emergent, and cadacaultic (psyche) (each-onehood) – that which is both one and not another…..
But that is too hard for comment boxes….
Congrats on the forthcoming bk