Throughout its history, philosophy seems particularly prone to three interrelated errors– or perhaps they would be better referred to as “transcendental illusions”? –that it shares with doxa or common sense and that plague thought.
First, in approaching the explanation of phenomena in the world, philosophy perpetually has recourse to the primacy of the Concept, the Form, or Essence, to the detriment of the individual or actually existing entity. Perhaps the most famous example of this primacy is to found in the opening sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology, entitled “Sense-Certainty”. There Hegel begins with the epistemological thesis that all knowledge originates in the immediacy of sense-certainty or the sensible given. Taking this thesis at its word, Hegel goes on to show how our attempt to say the sensible immediate or given always fails insofar as language is only composed of general terms that are unable to grasp the individual given presented within the sensible field. I say that the individual given is this given, here, at this time, yet these same terms can apply indifferently to any number of other objects, such that I am only apply to express the universal, never the individual. The outcome of this contradiction or deadlock within sense-certainty is that Spirit comes to recognize that the individual given was never the object of knowledge, that it is always-already mediated by the universal, and that these universals are the true object of knowledge.
A similar moment occurs in Plato’s Phaedo. Seeking to defend his thesis that knowledge is recollection and therefore hoping to demonstrate that the soul existed prior to birth, Plato evokes our knowledge of the Form of the Equal or the Identical to show that this knowledge could not have been derived from experience.
Now see if this is true, he went on. Do we not believe in the existence of equality– not the equality of pieces of wood or of stones, but something beyond that– equality in the abstract? Shall we say that there is such a thing, or not?
Yes indeed, said Simmias, most emphatically we will.
And do we know what this abstract equality is?
Certainly, he replied.
Where did we get the knowledge of it? Was it not from seeing the equal pieces of wood, and stones, and the like, which we were speaking of just now? Did we not form from them the idea of abstract equality, which is different from them? Or do you think that it is not different? Consider the question in this way. Do not equal pieces of wood and stones appear to us sometimes equal and sometimes unequal, though in fact they remain the same all the time?
Certainly they do.
But did absolute equals ever seem to you to be unequal, or abstract equality to be inequality?
No, never, Socrates.
Then equal things, he said are not the same as abstract equality? No, certainly not, Socrates.
…
Then we must have had knowledge of equality before we first saw equal things, and perceived that they all strive to be like equality, and all come short of it. (74a – 75a)
If, according to Plato, we must have knowledge of absolute equality prior to knowledge of equal things, then this is because all equal things differ from one another in certain respects. Between two equal pieces of wood, there will always be differences in grain, slight differences in shape, etc. If we approach the issue phenomenologically, attending to the noetic pole of our experience, we will notice that as we move about the pieces of wood observing them, their shape and size undergo variations as a function of perspective, now such that one appears longer than the other, now where one stick of wood disappears behind the other, now with a constantly shifting play of colors like a harliquin’s cloak. In the phenomenological fly of experience, the “erlebnis” of perception, the sticks of wood are encountered as constantly differing not only from each other and constantly differing from themselves.
To see this, it is necessary to think the perceived object as unfolding in time like Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Yet if the erlebnis perpetually varies in this way both from the object to which it is compared and in itself, it follows, according to Socrates, that Equality cannot be learned from experience. Rather, I must already have the concept of Equality to recognize things as equal, for the things of the world perpetually differ. Already, in larval form, we encounter the beginnings of transcendental philosophy in this passage. Later, in the Second Meditation, Descartes will repeat precisely this argument with respect to the famous wax, pointing out that the identity of the wax as a substance is something that cannot be drawn from experience or sensation, but requires an act of intellection so as to grasp the identity of the substance beneath its changes.
The outcome of this move is clear. On the one hand, difference is effectively banished from the world and reinscribed in the concept itself. On the one hand, the differences that compose the world themselves contribute nothing to being. The differences between the pieces of wood and in the piece of wood itself are literally no-thing– or nothing for the philosopher, at any rate –but are filtered out in relating to the wood. All that matters is what is invariant. As a result of this move, we get the strange bestiary of philosophical ontology that is led to posit a priori essences, Forms, universals, categories, etc. Why? Because these things cannot be found in the world or experience itself. As Nietzsche will point out later, the world becomes denigrated to mere appearances. Difference is precisely that which philosophy all too often seeks to eradicate. Perhaps it could even be said that the philosophical will par excellence consists in the desire to either eradicate or tame difference in the name of the Same and Identical.
On the other hand, as a result of this decision in favor of Form over the individual in time, being itself now becomes Moral. Having subordinated the individual entity to the Form, all beings now come to be measured in terms of their proximity to the invariance of the Form. In a variety of places Aristotle will speak of monsters and the monstrous. When is it that something appears as a monster? Something is monstrous when it deviates from its proper Form. The platypus is a monster because it the junction of opposed forms. The giant and the dwarf are monsters because they respectively represent and excess and deficiency in the ideal Form of Man. Individual entities are only measured in terms of whether they con-form to the differences inscribed in the self-identical form, such that any differences in the individual outside this form are monstrous.
In short, the differences contributed by the individual entity are only relevant in terms of how proximally they con-form to the differences prescribed by the Form. Anything else will be folly, deviation, and no-thing from the standpoint of onto-morality. This premise will pervade all branches of philosophy, whether we are speaking of “laws of nature”, where violations of these principles are routinely overlooked, or whether we’re talking about moral philosophy where the universality of moral principles demands that everything pertaining to the individual be abolished (Kant’s Categorical Imperative, Mill’s Greatest Happiness Principle). It is not until Kierkegaard, with his passion for the absurd or all that lies outside of the Universal, that the singular and difference will again assert itself– But only in the form of the monstrous (Abraham). Nor is it until Darwin and Complexity Theory that difference will again be awarded its rights. Judging by the practices of our Anglo-American colleagues and their ways of posing questions, these rumblings have not yet been heard by many philosophers. The question with regard to this first error would be that of how it might be possible to accord difference its right, how it might be possible to escape onto-morality or the extrinsic measure of beings, so that being might become self-measuring, self-positing, self-differentiating.
The second great error of philosophy lies in naturalization. A human body explodes and turns into ice if it is released into space. A human body implodes if it descends too deeply into the ocean.
The lesson to learn from these simple and facile observations is that bodies are always framed. Yet all too often the philosophers approach the world as if it were without frames. Practices that result from a history and a genesis are treated as natural and innate. Ways of feeling, ways of experiencing, ways of seeing, are seen as perfectly ordinary and universal. Certain types of enunciations are seen as universal and without any dependence on a context or position of enunciation. The philosopher all too often takes it for granted that the object of knowledge consists of the measurable spatio-temporal properties of objects, overlooking that this way of encountering objects, this aesthetic or givenness to sensibility, itself emerged at a particular point in history, in a particular part of the world. What were the mutations that had to take place for the world to become visible in these terms? Following Bourdieu, what social institutions have to be in place and functioning, for academics to view themselves and their role in the way that they do? Along these lines, in an astonishing chart, Bourdieu will correlate the political stances of academics towards May of 68 with the positions of prestige they occupy with respect to the French university system. The jaw dropping result is that those at the most prestigious institutions also had the most reactionary politics, suggesting that one’s position of enunciation within a social system is determinative of ones politics, not principled intellectual positions (which are, no doubt, retroactively projected onto these positions as rationalizations). Deleuze, in Nietzsche & Philosophy, will argue that all enunciations, even when syntactically and semantically identical, are inhabited by a distribution of forces that determines their sense such that one and the same identical expression can have entirely different senses.
Yet all too often these dimensions of situatedness and genesis are completely occluded in philosophy, naturalizing ways of seeing, forms of practice, affects, and norms of evaluation as natural properties of “human nature”. Rawls, for instance, will propose his “veil of ignorance” as a way of determining justice. Here we are asked by Rawls to imagine ourselves behind a veil of ignorance: we are to imagine that we do not know our gender, or ethnicity, our health, our economic status, our social position, and so on. Under such circumstances, what sorts of institutions would we want in society? The assumption is that the answers to these questions will be universal premised on a ubiquitous human nature that is shared by all and all alike. Yet who is it that thinks of themselves in such unmarked terms? Who is the subject that erases all of these differences? It is precisely that subject that already has power, that moves fluidly through the world, that is free of those marks pertaining to ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, etc. Formulations such as those we find in Rawls end up becoming an apologetics for the reigning order by virtue of how they cover over or clothe antagonism, rendering it invisible, and thereby preventing it from speaking. While the philosophers might engage in “transcendental analysis” after the fashion of Kant or Husserl, reflecting on the a priori structures of the transcendental ego, they cover over the historical and social factors that underly their position of enunciation, ignoring, after the fashion of Aristotle, the manner in which this very position of enunciation is dependent on the system of slavery so that the philosopher Aristotle might posit the aims and goals of his moral philosophy as if they were “natural”.
Closely related to this second error is a third error: abstraction. Abstraction, it seems, is the constant enemy of thought and perpetually haunts engagement with the world in its everydayness. Abstraction is not the mathematical notation of category theory that is difficult for the ordinary person to understand. Rather, abstraction lies in that mode of comportment towards the world that approaches the objects comported towards in isolation from their horizon or background. Thus, drawing on Hegel’s example, we hear tell of a man who robbed a store and, if we think abstractly, we judge the man as an intrinsically immoral man without attending to the horizon under which this action was committed. That is, we treat the action and the man as discrete entities and events hanging in a vacuum without investigating the context or milieu in which this action took place. Or again, noting the decline in school performance among students in the United States, we judge that students must have become stupid or teachers must be incompetent, without raising questions as to how the developmental milieu in which the development of cognition takes place in children might have changed in the last twenty years. Or perhaps we are zoo keepers and we receive a new polar bear that soon dies in its cage. We investigate the dead body of the polar bear, cutting it open, looking at its cells under the microscope, thoroughly baffled as to why it died, all the while forgetting that polar bears exist in a particular milieu or field that was absent in the zoo’s cage.
Essentialism, naturalization, and abstraction form the three figures of Identity and onto-morality, each grounding itself in a specific form of spatio-temporal relations that occlude difference. Each is a figure of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. The question is that of what it would mean to depart from these figures, to articulate an ontology that moves not from the abstract to the individual, losing the individual in the process, but from the individual to the abstract.
January 24, 2008 at 12:29 am
[…] Given that Marx finds it relevant to replicate this comment in two works quite dispersed in time, and given how this critique dovetails with other sorts of critique Marx offers, evidently this is an abiding and somewhat central concern for Marx. My impulse is to take from these sorts of comments the notion that Marx does not intend to engage in this sort of political economic manoeuvre himself – that he is not simply, so to speak, criticising the political economists for being wrong in viewing their specific position as an emanation from God, but is instead arguing that it would be wrong to regard any position as such an emanation: I take Marx’s argument, in other words, to be that critique should be reflexive and provide an account of its own position of enunciation (I take Marx, in other words to share some of the sorts of concerns with abstract “philosophical” forms of critique that Sinthome has raised this morning over at Larval Subjects). […]
January 25, 2008 at 12:19 pm
A question: in what way does physical appearance, that is, what makes one body/face sexually attractive to another, work as a sign?
January 25, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I may have difficulty articulating this question clearly – apologies (it’s been a long day). You mention:
Would you like to comment on this in relation to Hegel’s attempt (I’m thinking here of Phenomenology, since you referenced it above) to capture the ways in which essence might emerge as a moment within appearance – so that we aren’t talking about “mere” appearance, or distributing appearance and essence across two separate substances or worlds, but are talking about a particular kind of flux that generates essence as a moment of its movement.
Marx uses an argument like this to talk about a specific kind of abstraction – an abstraction that wouldn’t always exist – a pattern enacted in social practice over time. In this sense, the notion that one would move from individuals to the abstract is somewhat relativised – or at least gains a particular meaning that is relativised: in Marx, “appearances” don’t necessarily generate “essences” – when aleatory processes generate something that can be grasped as an “essence”, then something interesting is happening, something that requires a particular theoretical approach to grasp adequately.
I’m much too tired to develop the point adequately, and I’m not so much asking you to comment on Marx – or, necessarily, Hegel. I suppose I was curious whether your concluding formulation, though, about moving from the individual to the abstract – whether you would “locate” this approach (such that, in a sense, it is not just a mirror of the sort of abstract and general philosophical method you criticise, but itself understood as a response to a particular field of problems that suggests this shift)?
Apologies for the scattered character of the comment…
January 25, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Overall Hegel’s conception of essence as developed in the Logic doesn’t fit the model that I’m talking about here. In the Greater Logic, Hegel argues that essence is relation, not an abstract form common to the many. In some important Zusatzen from the Lesser Logic, Hegel draws on some resources from the German language, comparing essence to postal systems, etc. (I’d have to track down the exact reference) The idea seems to be that essence is a network of living relations among things that organize them. This, then, is a very different conception of essence. Truth be told, my concept of abstraction is drawn almost entirely from Hegel and especially his essay “Who Thinks Abstractly?”
January 25, 2008 at 10:45 pm
I understand that Hegel’s model doesn’t fit what you raised here – that’s why I mentioned it :-) My question was more along the lines of whether you might intend to embed the form of abstraction of which you are critical, as a sort of plausible moment within a broader dynamic or relational system – and then whether doing this more explicitly might provide a way for you to reflect on the relationship of the sort of alternative you are posing, to the practices of which you are critical.
January 25, 2008 at 11:00 pm
P.S. If it’s unclear in what I’ve said above: the model in the Phenomenology doesn’t differ from the model in the Logic in the sense you’re somewhat implying in your phrasing above. There are some differences in the order of presentation through which Hegel unfolds his argument in the two works, and some difference in which the apparent object of analysis is, but it’s not as though he treats “essence” in the Phenomenology as a “form common to many”. The argument in both works, though, seeks to embed and understand how “essence” comes to be split off from “appearance”, and the two treated as though they reside in separate substances or worlds – Hegel is critical of this position, but also explores its plausibility, as a sort of hypostatised moment of a relation, when the relation itself has not been grasped. So my question, in a sense, was how you would make sense of the positions of which you are critical.
January 25, 2008 at 11:44 pm
I’m not sure what you mean by embedding the form of abstraction in a broader dynamic or relational system. If you mean embedding it in something like the dialectic, certainly not, I have no intentions of doing such a thing. I agree that Hegel’s account of essence is, in many respects, close to his discussion of force in the Phenomenology, however, my criticism of the dialectic of sense-certainty is another matter entirely. On the issue of Hegel’s discussion of sense-certainty and the dialectic of being (in the opening of the Logic), there can be no compromise whatsoever between the Hegelian and the Deleuzian.
I develop a detailed account of why regimes of representation develop as inevitable transcendental illusions elsewhere. In the context of the issues I develop in this post, I am not interested in this question, but what I take to be the more interesting and pressing question of how one goes about developing an ontology of difference.
January 26, 2008 at 2:25 am
How is the question of developing an ontology of difference, separable from the question of how you make sense of what you are calling transcendental illusions? In other words, you are criticising, across this series of posts, a form of philosophy in which the philosopher abstracts themselves from a world (I realise this specific line is contained in another post, not above, but these three pieces, written in a short space, seemed to speak to similar concerns).
You suggest in this post that this form of abstraction is a sort of universal – that philosophy is, in a sense, unified by this practice over an extended period of time. And yet, you are possible – as are a few alternatives – perhaps Deleuze, perhaps Plato – that you suggest in your posts. This suggests questions about how you understand that particular world that generates the abstractions of the philosophers: a continuous “world”, through the history of philosophy? Or itself a fragment and not-always available “world” (given that standard histories of philosophy, making judgments about what gets to “count” as philosophy, often exclude or underplay discontinuities and the thought of periods in which we don’t as easily recognise what are now perhaps paradigmatic “philosophical” concerns)?
The intense concern with “difference”, posed in these terms at least, is relatively new: has a new world emerged? Is the “world” that individuates this form of thought understood as some sort of latent tendency, latterly realised?
You are suggesting a need to historicise ontology – this is a question that interests me, and so I’m just trying to get a sense of how you intend this. It’s clear from your posts that you don’t intend this as a simple historicisation of, e.g., belief – you’ve described us as being individuated out of problems. I’m asking, in a sense, what the problem is?
January 26, 2008 at 2:50 am
I think that we’ve had this discussion on a few occasions before. The questions are separable in the sense that one can distinguish between color and space. There’s no such thing as an uncolored space or a non-spatial color, yet we can nonetheless discuss the properties of color or the properties of space independently of one another. I believe your questions are very interesting ones, but they just are not the ones that I’m working on at this particular moment. Consequently, I have little to contribute in responding to those questions and am little inclined to pursue those questions.
January 26, 2008 at 3:14 am
I do, incidentally, make reference to one picture that I find persuasive in responding to these sorts of questions: Bourdieu’s sociological analyses of some of these phenomena. Basically, I just don’t have a global answer to the sort of question you’re asking and am concerned about getting bogged down in the details of such self-reflexive questions. I think it’s possible to gesture towards such issues without working out their nuts and bolts. As I mentioned already, what interests me primarily is the questions of individuation and difference as such or how it might be possible to think beings emerging from constellations without making reference to forms, essences, etc. That is, working out the contours of such an account and ontology. Consequently, while it is certainly true that the ontologies of difference that we’ve seen emerge in the last fifty years are themselves individuations out of a certain problematic field, the question of what that problematic field might be is not the question I’m here thinking about, nor one that I’m inclined to think about at this particular moment. Again, we’ve had this discussion quite a few times with predictable results, so I’m not at all clear as to why we’re having it again. Of course, we all have our idee fixes. Mine tends to be these questions of individuation, yours these questions of theoretical reflexivity. I think the reason I respond in this way is because I get the sense that once we go down the route of these reflexive forms of analysis, we never seem to get out of the domain of sociology to discuss the really neat things in metaphysics and ontology. There are a variety of models, however, that I do find interesting along these lines: Foucault’s historical analysis, Bourdieu’s sociological analyses, Marx’s economic analysis (with a good deal of concern about the determinism of the base), the work of figures like Latour and so on. What I’m doing here, however, is a sort of broad mapping of a territory. Details and decisions can be made later and can rebound back on that broad mapping, modifying what is found in relation to those details.
January 26, 2008 at 3:47 am
Or to put the point somewhat differently, if it is taken seriously that thought emerges from constellations (a field of pre-individual or pre-personal singularities or a problem presiding over the genesis of actualities), it follows that these sorts of questions are empirical in nature, rather than deductive. Responding to such a question would thus require a very fine grained analysis of relations of power, the historical field, and so on which can’t be answered deductively. There won’t be a pat answer as to why thought takes such and such a form in a particular field. In my book, I approach this question very abstractly. I’m hesitant to speak about it here as it’s about to be released, and I think there is both something correct in the analysis there and something problematic about the analysis. There I take an approach that could be said to be “a priori” and transhistorical, in the sense that I look at our relationship to time, space, and intersubjectivity as a way of accounting for what Deleuze calls “the Image of Thought” or “good and common sense” (the things that an ontology of difference must overcome). I argue that the Image of thought isn’t something that is simply contingent that could be overcome once and for all, but is rather a transcendental illusion internal to being (not the subject as in Kant) itself. That is, being tends to efface or erase the field in which it individuates itself, making the object a locus of intentionality. This account, while partially correct I think, is nonetheless far too broad. It doesn’t explain why abstraction, essentialism, and naturalization occur specifically in a western context (not that I’m suggesting other contexts are free of transcendental illusions by any means), nor does it explain why these things take the specific form they take in various constellations in this history.
It is interesting, however, that a sort of paradox emerges in these questions. On the one hand, I think that reflexive questions necessarily presuppose the sort of ontology I’m proposing. They assume it as their “unthought”. I recall in graduate school taking a course with the Foucault scholar James Bernauer. I brought up this point again and again with Bernauer, arguing that Foucault presupposes an ontology, only to be told that no “he’s just doing history”. But the sort of “history” Foucault is doing nonetheless presupposes both an epistemology and theory of being. The antinomy emerges when we recognize that both an ontology is presupposed and this ontology itself is an individuation.
January 26, 2008 at 5:35 am
I agree with you that the way in which questions of reflexivity are generally thought, presupposes an ontology that, for whatever reason, many theorists are reluctant to admit: I’ve made very similar critiques of this move. I tend to think that the way to overcome it, though, is to think reflexivity and ontology in tandem – that, absent this, a one-sided approach will tend to involve the other as an unthought presupposition. I push on these questions out of an interest in how they might be thought in tandem, rather than in a one-sided way – and I tend to push on them in relation to your work specifically (although this one of my research interests, it doesn’t come up often in my discussions with other people about their own work), because you often seem to be writing criticisms of other forms of work, for their failure to thematise these issues. I think these criticisms are perfectly fair – but the form in which the criticisms are articulated sometimes mirrors the form of presentation of what is being criticised – so I push a bit to draw out the question of how you articulate this theory, in a way that it embodies the principles it espouses.
As to whether we’ve had this conversation before, and whether it has predictable results: yes, this issue comes up often – in this particular instance, perhaps for somewhat more specific reasons than it usually would. As to whether this conversation leads in predictable directions: my experience of this line of interaction is that it tends to oscillate between two different types of results, depending on whether you decide to assimilate my position to experiences you’ve had with various Foucaultians, and therefore make the sorts of casual criticisms of my position that you imply above, or whether you decide to encounter my position in a way more adequate to how I formulate it in my own work, and in other conversations we have had in the past. One pole of this oscillation leads to more productive conversations, as it acknowledges a commonality of interest that underlies our projects, and tries to build something from those similarities – and from the clarifications of the differences that remain.
You know that questions of reflexivity for me are not questions about cognition – they are questions about the properties of the field, and therefore intrinsically ontological questions. I also agree that a global answer is not possible – that’s one of the things that interests me, and drives me to the sorts of questions I am posting to you: I’m curious as to how you localise the problem on which you’re working now.
Although I understand the general idea that you are trying to speak programmatically, nevertheless, something about this suggests that you are holding onto a sort of form/content distinction – that you think that you can sort out the form of your analysis by working in abstraction from its object, and then apply the analysis to various sorts of more specific content – and yet I assume this isn’t what you mean, because this is precisely the sort of move, I would take it, that you are criticising in others.
So I’m trying to understand how you understand the programmatic work you are attempting to do, particularly in light of, for example, criticisms you’ve occasionally written of philosophy’s indifference to problems of the political or the social: do you think this indifference can be resolved, by treating specific political or social material as, in a sense, “content” – something only considered in its specificity, after a certain form of analysis is separately worked out? I have no strong reaction to how you might answer – you may think this isn’t the right way to describe what you’re doing – that’s fine. I’m asking exploratory questions, to get a sense of how you see your project at this time.
The way out of paradox, though, it seems to me, is to see questions of reflexivity and questions of ontology as mutually-constitutive: intrinsically arising and only making sense together.