Let's generalize abit.
Is it true that "process" is a word that really dupes one into
believing the world is some mysterious "underflow" or nothing else? Hardly.
It's simply a bad read of Bergson, Whitehead, or even Deleuze to say that that is how they
conceive process. Moreover, it's a false
dilemma to state that there are *only* two ways to look at becoming: pure
monistic flow or are pure plural flow of entities. This isn't "process" philosophy at
all. At least not any that I've ever
read. Yes, concepts (for Bergson, or
Deleuze) cut away from more primal conditions; but primal conditions link to
and establish concepts and how they cut.
They aren't relativists, so it is not the other way around. It is not as if however I cut the flow of the
world with my arbitrary concepts that the world is concretely. No way.
Whitehead states individuals are primary, but not in the sense
under discussion in this conversation.
Primacy has different meanings here.
Primacy as in most efficacious, or as in the last things of the world,
or eternal objects? Of course actual
entities do not become (in the ways described above), they only perish in the sense that, as actual, they are final things! Actual occasions are not endurances like substances, they are activities. But one only needs to pause a moment and ask why they are the final things of an activity. Answer? Creativity. "The many become one and are increased by one."
To say that there is no becoming in Whitehead? Come on.
Certainly there is subjective aim, and those grasping
desperately for objects avoid this nearly always, what of creativity and
time? What of future temporal relations? If individual entities are
absolutely self-contained then change and future temporal relations becomes a
BIG problem. I've argued about this ad
nauseum. The world simply isn't a
composition of static frozen instants,
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Why is this debate so important? It's what's at stake here: ideas like
"substance" or "fully-formed individuals" aren't to be
rejected because they are fossilized, they are to be rejected for their reductionist
tendencies to foreclose what things are within their own abundant identities, regardless how
one's ontology tries to orientate toward what is. These identities have temporal natures; not frozen and static natures that are magically hidden yet mysteriously revealed through the eyes of a grand wizard with the right ontology.
Finally, if the Deleuzio-Whiteheadian axis
is "non-existent," then I must be suffering hallucinations when I read books like Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections; the work of Keith Robinson, Keith Pearson, John Mularkey, Isabelle Stengers, Didier Debaise, Steve Shaviro, or even Iain Grant (a Deleuze-Schelling connection, but I am seeing more and more Whitehead in Grant); let alone other
philosophers who have blogged incessantly about process in the past few years
regarding this debate (Jason Hills / immanent transcendence comes to mind). Face it: process just works better than object when it come to possessing an adequate ontology of what is. I mean, yes, you can clutch and cling desperately to a category of "object," but when it comes time to account for creativity, time, change, or subjective aim, it won't do you much good.
I'll balance the tongue-in-cheek snarkiness of this blog post (in good fun to keep the debate going) with a more sober and careful approach to the debate which is a forthcoming publication that I'll excerpt below. It's the introduction to a book chapter that will be appearing in November as part of a broader anthology.
I'll balance the tongue-in-cheek snarkiness of this blog post (in good fun to keep the debate going) with a more sober and careful approach to the debate which is a forthcoming publication that I'll excerpt below. It's the introduction to a book chapter that will be appearing in November as part of a broader anthology.
***
"Ecology Re-naturalized”
“Nature is intricate, overlapped,
interweaved, and endless.”
-
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate” (1860)[i]
“This isolated line and the
isolated fish alike are living beings with forces peculiar to them, though
latent….But the voice of these latent forces is faint and limited. It is the environment of the line and the
fish that brings about a miracle: the latent forces awaken, the expression
becomes radiant, the impression profound.
Instead of a low voice, one hears a choir. The latent forces have become dynamic. The environment is the composition.”
- Wassily Kandinsky, “Writings on
Art” (1935)[ii]
Introduction
I open this essay with the above quotes
for a reason. For too long now recent
contemporary philosophy has isolated the objects of the world from their
internal (temporal) and external (aesthetic) relations, from their nurturing source(s)
of generation (natura naturans or the
“producing activity” of nature), from the expressive forms of semiotic
communication and the corresponding “overlapped” nature of perspective associated
with semiotic expression within environments (natura naturata or the “products” of nature), and most profoundly, from
what it means to be an agency within an ecological network among other agencies
in general. In short, looking at the
fecund agents of the world as nothing
more than isolated objects
hinders one from accomplishing a truly ecological
metaphysics.
Philosophies of nature, reacting
against the view that nature is a “whole” or a “container” have become obsessed
with the items of the world in an ontological “discretism,” which is to say,
for these object oriented ontologies only discreta
are real. While “nature” does not
exist, particulars of the world do. This
may be true, however such a reaction has placed so much emphasis on the particulars
of the world that it is claimed that there is nothing but particulars in the world. Excised from these ontologies (in favor of
the object alone) are internal and external relations; the complexity of nature
founded by the reality of aggregates and compositions that group together agencies
into meaningful societies or wholes; the future-oriented temporal nature of any
agent’s identity; the contours of nature which are established by nature’s orders
and always changing classes of forms; the very powers and agency of the
particulars of the world which draw upon a sustaining a-temporal ground of natura naturans (or, at the very least, the
nature of agency that is exhibited in the activity of agents themselves); the
semiosic processes that govern the communication of perspective between and
among agencies; or even the variable relationships or laws that govern agents within
larger-scale ecological networks of identity.
These rich facets of the natural world all have been lost when absolute
preference is given to the objects of the world alone.
In short, philosophical ecology is
no longer truly ecological - it has become categorically “naturalized” in the scientistically
pejorative sense of the term, as in nature is “nothing but” (Nature is nothing
but matter; Nature is nothing but spirit; Nature is nothing but monads; etc.
etc.) where Nature (with a capital “N”) is “nothing but” objects. Then, what
of these objects? Particular objects
of the world are now collected for ontological orientation and analysis and are
spoken for (instead of allowing the objects of the world to semiotically speak for
themselves). Any object oriented ontology
that sees already-individuated objects of the world as its sole focus
necessarily misses out on what nature is: an ecological network of processes,
relationships, and agents drawing
on sources of generativity, including the ultimate a-temporal ground of natura naturans. Indeed, these agents’ perspectives may be
plural and diverse (“alien”) in the sense that each agent’s perspective is
uniquely its own, however for a truly ecological metaphysics to be in place those
perspectives must be recognized to be always subsisting within larger networks
of activity and relationship; that is, as agents of the world located by other agents’ as much as they actively locate other agents in turn. Thus, one must always transcend the nature of a particular agent’s identity to establish a more general conditioning feature that
establishes particularity qua particularity.
Indeed, containing transcendental features, nature is overlapped and interwoven:
it is endless in capacious scope of relation, identity, and activity; it
contains within it features that are common among and between all or that
support and sustain all. As radical
object oriented pluralism cannot accommodate such a capacious scope of the
natural nor account for how the items of the world are enmeshed within larger
environments. There may be no
“container” of nature but it is impossible to establish that for any agent
which exists that that agent is absolutely unrelated or unsupported by at least
some other agent or more generally by a cosmic environment (something that is
not a particular). Thus, even though nature is not a “thing” an
absolutely “relationless” universe cannot be.
The dangers of the object
oriented view and the pernicious form of pluralism it espouses (as opposed to
an open and ecological process form of pluralism) are numerous. Whatever is is already individuated and
stamped as an object standing ready for data collection and analysis. The perspective of a said agent is always
filtered through and spoken for by the ontologist orienting their perspective
toward that agent (which is just as observer-oriented as the phenomenologies
that these ontologists critique). Moreover,
agents of the world are cut off from other agents in any meaningful
relationship to affect positive ethical or political change. It is difficult to see how things affect
other things (“magical” forms of vicarious causation must be imported if
internal and external relations cannot be accounted for), and it is impossible
to establish how communication is possible, for a minimum of some kind of
relation must exist for information to transfer from one to any other. From my perspective, I cannot say that this a
truly ecological metaphysics – one that allows environmental philosophy and
ethics and politics to proceed in any positive way where change is accomplished
in the world – at least according to a view which recognizes objects and
nothing else: not the relational features of the universe, not the processive
nature of identity that is agencies in process, not the transcendental and
generative aspects of the non-particular that enables particulars to be what
they are. This is all to say that one
must account for relationships and all that relationships entail in their ontological diversity. This not only means accounting for any diversity
of agents in relation, the processes that structure and permit that agent to be
as a particular among other particulars (natura
naturata), but understanding those relationships to sources of generativity
that permit agents to be (natura naturans).
Of the problems just mentioned, this
paper seeks simply to articulate the transactional,
related, and nested form of identity
that constitutes any particular agent in the world in hopes of providing a
fuller ecological metaphysics of nature.
Given the form of identity adopted in this essay, then, it may be better
to use the label “process” (as in “human process,” or “creaturely process”)
rather than “object” in order to describe the nature of agency and actors
within the natural world. I wish to
understand agencies in the world as processes, as embedded creatura or organisms, rather than as inert objects with some
isolated, substantial or essential fixed nature toward which one ought to
orientate their ontology. In order to
“re-naturalize” ecology, then - in order to better describe nature as an ecological
network of agents - I will turn to the value
of recognizing relationships and their reality within an ecological
metaphysics. My goal is to simply
analyze what these relationships may afford and discern why opting for the
reality of relational universe actually may enhance and affirm the notion of
agency and identity rather than detract from it.
[i] Cited in
Robert S. Corrington, Nature & Spirit
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), insert.
[ii] Cited
in John J, McDermott, “Deprivation and Celebration: Suggestions for an
Aesthetic Ecology” in The Culture of
Experience: Philosophical Essays in the American Grain (New York: New York
University Press, 1976), 82.
