Meillassoux’s work should not be taken as a rigorous anti-theist materialism

Over the past few days discussion has sprung up about Meillassoux's relationship to theism.  Two blogs in particular - I'll note them in a moment - have pointed summaries of how Meillassoux relates to non-classical theism (for example, process theism - this seems to be a positive relationship) as well as fideism (correlationism - this is Meillassoux's major critique of "traditional" theisms).  

Paul Ennis has rightly pointed out that Meillassoux's take on religion has been out there for readers to look at since 2007, long before translation of excerpts of L'inexistence divine appeared last year.  Paul acknowledges that there are "choice" readings: in other words atheists will mute or "scale back" what are perhaps key M texts that open up possibilities for new types of theisms, including developments of "process theism."  In the discussions one comment sums up this idea well:

[C]urrent Meillassoux fans will avoid reading this text [L'inexistence divine] for as long as humanly possible.

 Adam / An und fur sich notes: Meillassoux's work is religiously oriented.   

He cites the following reasons.  

1. The belief in creation ex nihilo 
2. Anthropocentrism: the contingent becoming of the universe reaches its pinnacle and unsurpassable goal in humanity  
3. Faith in the resurrection of the dead  
4. Hope in a coming mediator figure who, though possessing the divine power necessary to inaugurate the resurrection, empties himself  
5. An ethics based on living in joyful hope of the resurrection 

Another comment states:

Meillassoux explicitly says that his target is fideisim, but he pretty consistently uses fideism, theism, and religion interchangeably. And it’s definitely fair to ask whether he’s neglecting non-fideist (as well as non-classically-theist) theology, because the answer to that question is certainly “yes, he is.”

I think that a construction of what Meillassoux could mean for theology (given many of Meillassoux's ideas that constitute speculative realism) is fair game, and it has been neglected.

Currently I am writing a paper for EN 2012.  The title is "Meillassoux's God and Process Theism."  I hope to clarify why and how reading Meillassoux as an anti-theist materialist is simply wrong.  It's a choice reading to focus on AF (where his relationship to non-classical theism is scaled back) and it is not a cogent claim that to say that Meillassoux is somehow atheistic.  Brassier absolutely, I would take it.  But Meillassoux?  No way.

From duncanlaw blog we get the following.  Note, I love his post and my sarcasm in what follows isn't directed at him.  His post is largely spot on.

1.) Meillassoux’s work is religiously oriented. Indeed it seems to me that one of the main motivating forces of his work is the desire to guarantee the possibility of physical resurrection. I’d be inclined to argue that you can infer this from After Finitude – but in Spectral Dilemma he pretty much comes out and says it. I’m puzzled by the way Meillassoux’s work is being received as a rigorous anti-theist materialism, or even as compatible with same.

 Agreed.

6.) Meillassoux is able to move from the ‘logically’ necessary to the ‘ontologically’ necessary. ... Hallward’s Radical Philosophy review of After Finitude emphasises this nicely: Meillassoux doubly conflates ontology and epistemology. FIrst he reads a lot of thinkers who are making essentially epistemological claims about reality-for-us as making ontological claims about reality itself. Then Meillassoux argues that something like logical necessity gives us access to ultimate reality – the absolute – without making it clear how this claim of ontological knowledge is meant to be guaranteed or justified. Meillassoux thinks that his sense of necessity is able to do what Descartes’ ontological argument failed to: guarantee knowledge of ultimate reality through the simple structure of thought. 

I don't see this as a bad thing, quite.  Conflating ontology and epistemology has been looked at at length.  I intend to do some fancy footwork along the "logical" meets "ontological" lines using Hartshorne (hint: it paradoxically seems to ditch necessity as traditionally understood).  To the Absolute we go.

11) This in turn makes me suspicious when Meillassoux inveighs against creationism. I’m not totally clear what’s going on here...

 This sounds right, but the creationism argued against would be the "traditional" biblical theists that seem to be the straw man subject to many attacks.  I've gone beyond being annoyed at these "fight all forms of transcendence!" types, lumping any advances in process thought (Stengers, anyone?) along with those evil 'ole transcendence types.  Yep, gotta get them "creationists," Paw.  

Wait...isn't Whitehead a sort of creationist?!?!?  He is, in a completely different sense.  But we'll just choose to casually ignore that.

12) For what it’s worth, you can play the Being-as-capital parlour game with Meillassoux, too. “If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power – something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm. We see an omnipotence equal to that of the Cartesian God, and capable of anything, even the inconceivable; but an omnipotence that has become autonomous, without norms, blind, devoid of any of the other divine perfections, a power with neither goodness nor wisdom…” Remind you of anything?

Yep.  And why aren't the folks mentioned above getting this?  Oops, that's right!  They'll be busy railing against those "transcendence" types.

12) Finally – this is a bit of a low blow… “[I]f we assume that the segment of the sequence has this very great length – or in other words, that the ‘world’ lasts long enough – then our assumption of randomness entitles us to expect the occurrence of a cosmic period in which the law of gravity will seem to hold good, although ‘in reality’ nothing ever occurs but random scattering. This type of ‘explanation’ by means of an assumption of randomness is applicable to any regularity we choose. In fact we can in this way ‘explain’ our whole world, with all its observed regularities, as a phase in a random chaos.” The Logic Of Scientific Discovery, p. 190. I’m aware, of course, that Meillassoux sees his original contribution as the distinction between probabilistic chance and ‘absolute’ contingency (a distinction that unfortunately rests, imo, on massive confusion about how probabilistic explanations work); and I’m aware that The Logic of Scientific Discovery isn’t making any ontological claims. Nevertheless – as a general rule of thumb: if Karl Popper sounds a lot like a precursor, you’re probably not as radical as you think.

Again, this is brilliant.  Finally I find out that I am not the only who sees Peirce and Whitehead, Bergson, and just a very few others, as having outlined the steps for this dance already.  

Wait!  Oh, that's right.  I say that "just because I have an interest" in those figures.  Has nothing to do with their arguments.  

Leibniz. Whitehead. Peirce. Bergson.  It's called reading them instead of casually (and often arrogantly) using their philosophy to warm over what you say or to set up as a straw man to knock down.  

So let's call a spade a spade.

An important corollary, is that those who scoffed at the idea that Meillassoux’s work had a religious component – and, indeed, those who strenuously insisted that no true anti-theism was possible without an engagement with Meillassoux’s epochal, unprecedented theoretical breakthrough – were idiots.

Agreed.  And this goes out to those idiots who scoff at the religious component to Whitehead's work, as well (because the trend involves not only Meillassoux).  Obviously there is no religious component here to wrestle with, afterall.  Not just idiots Duncan, utter stupidity.  The complete opposite of what sort of dialogue concerning religion that someone like Whitehead would have endorsed.  (As a note, I bring up Whitehead because I would dislike very much to see the same sort of "cut God a priori from Meillassoux!" response that one often gets with Whitehead.)  

trip to Northwoods (part 2)

passing through Necedah Refuge, Wisconsin winter darkness

I've posted before on my previous trip to the Northwoods of Wisconsin (Wausau area and further north - see here, here, and here).  One of my favorite parts of the four hour drive is passing through the Necedah Wildlife Refuge.  The photo to the left was taken while passing through the refuge on the way home this evening.

While I passed through this area, the song "The Fool" by Coolrunnings happened to come on my iPod radio mix that I was listening to.

the marrow of incarnation

Came across this from erratic impact/ecologic blog and thought that it was interesting enough to post:

[Merleau Ponty]  writes: "Our goal is to understand the relations of consciousness and nature: organic, psychological or even social." (SB, p. 3) And it is evident this theme was still with him at the end of his life, for there are numerous references to this selfsame goal in his last work-in-progress, The Visible and the Invisible. For example, he writes: "Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother." (VI, p. 267) 

And on the very last entry of this unfinished work, he jots down an outline to a threefold scheme. It reads:

 

I The Visible
II Nature
III Logos (3)

Under this he puts down a few clarifications to what he means by these words, and given them, we can see that Merleau-Ponty is attempting to reconsider these 'concepts' in light of what has been handed down to us through the Western tradition, but in such a way as to escape all the presuppositions embedded within them. He says:

Since the enigma of the brute world is finally left intact by science and by reflection, we are invited to interrogate that world without presupposing anything. (VI, p. 157)

And, in working though what he means by "the intertwining," it becomes evident that these three interrelated words (visibility, nature, logos) were to become cornerstones of a new philosophical paradigm, one which was to be set against traditional concepts such as "mind," "matter," and "logic." This new paradigm was to overcome many of the traditional dichotomies which have plagued philosophy from the very beginning. It was to be a phenomenological ontology of nature, one which would call into question the whole tradition of western metaphysics, not only as it pertains to the persistent and irreconcilable dispute between rationalist and realist conceptions of the world, but also as it pertains to those 'postmodern non conceptions' as well. Once set free, this new ontology would be able to shoulder the task of interrogating directly "the mute or reticent interlocutor of our questions" (VI, p. 129).

This return to preobjective Being is no easy task, since it seems to demand a reinstatement of the original wonder in the face of our being in the world which spurred philosophy in the beginning. "We do not even know in advance what our interrogation itself and our method will be" (VI, p. 158). It seems to insist on our being satisfied with the absence of both grounds and explanations, for it requires, not only the exclusion of formal logic, but all concepts which have been tainted by objective thinking. As he says, "We must, at the beginning, eschew notions such as 'acts of consciousness,' 'states of consciousness,' 'matter,' 'form,' and even 'image' and 'perception'" (VI, pp. 157-158). This statement strikes us as incredible since the directory of concepts he is flagging for us includes a term which epitomizes Merleau-Ponty's entire philosophical career: the "primacy of perception." But he makes clear what he means here:

We exclude the term perception to the whole extent that it already implies a cutting up of what is lived into discontinuous acts, or a reference to "things" whose status is not specified, or simply an opposition between the visible and the invisible (VI, p. 158).

This fragmentation of the world is the problem which this return to ontology is addressing. But, we are caught within our questioning stance, hemmed in on one side by our metaphysical concepts which shatter experience and destroy our faith in the body's aboriginal ability to tell the truth; hemmed in on the other side by the fact that this new beginning can only be activated through an interpretation, one which dangerously, though Merleau-Ponty claims superficially, resembles the perpetuation of the very idealist enterprise we are intending to destroy. We must find a way back to a certain attitude, and thus a certain relationship we indwell towards the world.

Let us therefore consider ourselves installed amongst the multitude of things, living beings, symbols, instruments, and men, and let us try to form notions that would enable us to comprehend what happens top us there (VI, p. 159; VI, p. 183).

We must find our way back to that opening which exists before our "perceptual faith" becomes stained by the presuppositions of science and religion. We will refine our meaning of the term 'perception' so as to bring it into a new vocabulary which will address the very encounter between language and Nature, language and Being...

Notes: Works by Merleau-Ponty: VI, The Visible and the Invisible.

And, in a similar vein ... 

Nature and Logos: A Whiteheadian Key to Merleau-Ponty's Fundamental Thought

Exploration of Alfred North Whitehead’s influence on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of nature.

"This is the first book-length account of how Maurice Merleau-Ponty used certain texts by Alfred North Whitehead to develop an ontology based on nature, and how he could have used other Whitehead texts that he did not know in order to complete his last ontology. This account is enriched by several of Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished writings not previously available in English, by the first detailed treatment of certain works by F. W. J. Schelling in the course of showing how they exerted a substantial influence on both Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead, and by the first extensive discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the Stoics’s notion of the twofold logos - the logos endiathetos and the logos proforikos. This book provides a thorough exploration of the consonance between these two philosophers in their mutual desire to overcome various bifurcations of nature, and of nature from spirit, that haunted philosophy and science since the seventeenth century." - SUNY Press (June 2011)

50 best ecology blogs

Forensic Science Technician states, "You can check out these blogs in order to get information about animals, the environment, and ecology in general. These are particularly good for those who just want to know the basics about this topic, but there are also some specialty blogs for people with an interest in specific subjects within ecology."  50 best ecology blogs Link HERE.

I'd like to recommend Talking Nature and Ecology Today from that list, and Rob's Idaho Perspective, not on that list but should be!

Metaphysical and Religious Naturalism: CFP

Highlands Institute Conference, 2012

Metaphysical and Religious Naturalism:
Present Forms and Future Prospects
June 11-14, 2012
Manitou Springs, Colorado

 
Keynote Speakers

Lawrence E. Cahoone, College of the Holy Cross
Nancy K. Frankenberry, Dartmouth College
Ursula Goodenough, Washington University in St. Louis
Robert C. Neville, Boston University

Intellectual Autobiography

Nancy R. Howell, Saint Paul School of Theology

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

Submission Deadline: January 15, 2012
Submit proposals to: pcrosby@fsu.edu.

Proposals should contain a descriptive title and brief (no more than 500 words) but informative and readable description of the paper to be presented, with some indication of why the proposer considers the paper to be an important contribution. Proposals should also include a brief (150-word) biographical sketch of their authors.

The theme of the 2012 HIARPT conference encompasses exploration, defense, and criticism of the various forms of metaphysical and/or religious naturalism that have been proposed in the past, are being argued for in the present, or are thought to be inviting possibilities for the future.

Part of the task of the conference will be to address issues concerning the nature of naturalism itself as a metaphysical position or religious outlook and commitment. For example, was Aristotle a naturalist? Why or why not? Is panentheism a naturalistic position? Does adequate explanation of the present existence and character of the universe require the positing of an ultimate source or ground that is not itself a part of the existing universe—and if so, does this mean a departure from naturalism? Did the universe begin at some point, or has it always been, in some shape or form? Is natura naturans a part of nature, or does it transcend nature? What is the relationship of naturalism and materialism? Can an idealist be a naturalist? Does naturalism simply mean rejection of anything that could be termed supernatural? How are metaphysical and epistemological naturalism to be distinguished?

Other questions to be considered might include the following: What are the specific merits or strong points of a naturalistic outlook? How can such an outlook be criticized? What is the relation of metaphysical or religious forms of naturalism to the findings of the natural sciences? What sort of case could be made in favor of some sort of transcendent theism or spiritualism as over against various forms of naturalism? Which, if either, is primordial or emergent, matter or mind? What is matter and how does an adequate metaphysical or religious definition of it relate to current physics? How does naturalism relate to scientism? How does it relate to the natural sciences in general? How does naturalism account for evil or provide resources with which to respond to and cope with the menace of evil? Does evil exist only among human beings or is it a feature of nature itself? How do humans relate to the natural order? What are their responsibilities to that order?

These questions are only suggestive. Proposals relating to the history of naturalism or the future prospects of naturalism are welcome, as are constructive or critical attempts to come to terms with any aspect or aspects of a naturalistic metaphysics or religious naturalism. Proposals for panels on the theme are also invited.

As in the past, proposals are also invited in areas different from the theme of the conference but relevant to HIARPT’s mission statement and will be considered on their merits.

For a printable page containing the information above, click on this link:

HIARPT 2012 Announcement.

life and matter

I've been making my way through Bergson's Matter and Memory, and on the side have been reading some related articles from the Cosmos & History issue dedicated to the question, "What is Life?"  

In addition to that I've latched back into some books concerning Hegel and the philosophy of biology, glancing back through relevant sections of Hegel's own book on the philosophy of nature.  

In essence I have been posing Hegel's necessitarianism against Bergson's emphasis on creativity, decision, and free will (found also in Bergson's Creative Evolution and Time and Free Will) as I wrangle with the question, "what is life?"  Perhaps I would say that my broader interest in that question concerns the relationship between life and matter. 

Bergson's Matter and Memory is a tough book, but well worth the labor.

Zizek - "The Reflection of Life in Hegel"

Beginning at 3:33, The question of the arbitrary (and nominalistic) division of nature into identities and their predicates is addressed; that is, whether identity truly has its ground in nature.  The broader question is one of organic form and relationality versus the self-determination of thought and self-same identity.  

The minimum of identity, its first moment, Zizek theorizes, is the difference between "inside" and "outside," given a border that emerges.  Life, we are told, presupposes a minimum of self-relation; of a self "on the inside" and anything "on the outside."  Relation-to-other is thus always mediated by self-relation.  However, this is fundamentally organic; that is, the living organism is the basic element.  

In speculative terms on the other hand, onto-logically (rather than bio-logically), identity is a category of reflection.  It is not the most simple thing.  One may talk about identity only when one has "the one" - some unifying feature that cannot be problematically reduced.  Hegel believes that it is the function of the name to designate that "oneness."  

the viability and impossibility of Whitehead's God

I've only met Robert Cummings Neville once, and he is such a friendly, intelligent, and generous man.  Robert will be presenting the keynote at EN 2012, and he has contributed an introduction addressing the other Robert (Corrington) in the forthcoming A Philosophy of Sacred Nature: Prospects for Ecstatic Naturalism, edited by Nam T. Nguyen and myself.

Reading Neville's article on Whitehead, "The Impossibility of Whitehead's God in Christian Theology" (a response to Lewis S. Ford's "The Viability of Whitehead's God for Christian Theology") is inspiring me to go and track down some of his other work.  As you can see HERE, Neville has produced an amazing amount of work and established quite a remarkable career.  It will be an honor to hear him speak at this year's conference.

For those who don't know, Robert Neville is a Professor in the Departments of Religion, Philosophy and Theology at Boston University, as well as Dean of the Boston School of Theology, and President of Highlands Institute for American Religious and Philosophical Thought, an organization which helps to publish the American Journal of Theology & Philosophy (published through Indiana University Press).

who's afraid of realism? (post 5): immanence and transcendence

From Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 3-4.

In my judgment, the modality of possibility (or, pre-ordinally speaking, the infinitely dense layer of reality that is the supreme power of generation, potential—as opposed to mere conceptual possibility) serves to function as a basic, yet crucial, mechanism, if not primal ground, for such a disclosure. Many philosophers throughout the history of philosophy, for example Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Schelling, Heidegger, Sartre, and Jaspers, have struggled to clarify just how the modality of possibility relates to transcendence, whether personal or divine. These were philosophers of the natural, the existential, and the immanent, yet they acknowledged the possibility for transcendence, too. That thought can grasp the divine in some significant way was the philosophy of Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Hegel, and Emerson. They were philosophers of the transcendent, but they also recognized the importance of the historical, existential, and embodied conditions that are required for what is transcendent to appear, to be disclosed, or to “immanentize” within human experience. Yet, in all of these accounts, a tension still remained between what is of this immanent world called “nature,” and what was thought to be a wholly other transcendent world, the supernatural “beyond” (even after Kant, who attempted to mediate such tensions through his “correlationism”)  


[...] 


I believe that it was the American philosopher C. S. Peirce (1839-1914) who was one of the first philosophers to be sharply clear about the issue as he developed in a fully open triadic metaphysical structure one of the most evocative and insistent descriptions of a divine nature capable of mediating the tensions between natural and supernatural, immanent and transcendent, or finite and infinite. It was Peirce who, in his trichotomous metaphysics, ventured to articulate how a “beyond” (for him, God) may find disclosure through a primordial ground and modal category of real possibility (potential, spontaneity, chance, power, freedom, and creativity; that is, “Firstness”) that is accessible from within nature.  Because this ground is not purely abstract or rational, as in Hegel, it presents itself first as a feeling, and this, I think, helps make room for naturalized forms of transcendence to occur ... 

[...] 


A distinction should be made between the transcendental (a metaphysically subterranean and infinitely dense layer of sacred potential or power, i.e., a ground of real modal tendencies that help to constitute the divine life, or, as called by some, nature naturing) and a plane of the actuated immanent (the existential representation of actualized divine potential). Stated in different terms, as Peirce fashioned his metaphysical categories, including the category of Firstness, he attempted to better understand the divine and cosmic relationship between the real modal conditions that establish the very possibility of nature/Being which underlie all of experience and these conditions’ corresponding interplay of existential actualization. It is important to note that these modal conditions underlie nature and establish its possibility as such, and so they are transcendental, but they are also “beyond” the sheer immediacy of any actualized experience, and so they are also transcendent, but not entirely so, for they are not absolutely disconnected from the wider realm of nature’s reality (here Jaspers’s notion of the Encompassing, an all-enveloping yet ontologically borderless reality, may be of aid). “Ecstatic transcendence” affords a glimpse into the transforming power of an infinite nature—the divine life—and in this transcendence Peircean Firstness, I think, is key.

notes:

[1].   In the American philosophical tradition the debate between what should properly be called “natural” or “nature” as opposed to what is deemed “supernatural” or “beyond” nature (what cannot be or even be meaningfully experienced and known) is a debate detailed in American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century, ed. John Ryder (New York: Prometheus Books, 1994). “Correlationism” refers to the idea that the real of the world is to some extent unknowable (Kant’s noumenal, or perhaps the supernatural or transcendent) because human knowing is always to some extent conditioned. The term may be attributed to Quentin Meillassoux. See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (New York: Continuum, 2008), 5, 19, 20.

[2].   I use the term “structure” with intent. To say that Peirce maintained an “open” metaphysical philosophy with a triadic structure alludes to Hegel’s triadic system and the debate whether a metaphysical “system” by its very nature and definition should aim for closure (totality) in the description of what is most general. Peirce’s philosophy was an architectonic and its systematic features permitted revision to the overarching vision of the structure, thus the “openness” to his system (I see this trait in Whitehead’s philosophy as well, though it is more systematic, strictly speaking). Mainstays to Peirce’s architectonic were the general features and categories dictated by reality. Details of this debate may be found in Hegel and Whitehead: Contemporary Perspectives on Systematic Philosophy, ed. George Lucas (New York: SUNY Press, 1986); see especially Neville’s “Hegel and Whitehead on Totality: Failure of a Conception of System,” 86-109 and Van der Veken’s “A Plea for an Open, Humble Hegelianism,” 109-21. In handling the tensions between finite and infinite and immanent and transcendent, 20th-century philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze did grapple with the virtual or possible’s relationship to the plane of immanence, as well as with empiricism and transcendentalism, although I do believe that Deleuze did owe much to philosophers such as Whitehead who did not leave one wondering what is transcendental about the empirical, at least in clear or succinct terms (and thus the lack of a systematic approach in Deleuze). To add an additional point, interestingly Bergson’s and Whitehead’s ontologies are remarkably Peircean, and so given Deleuze’s indebtedness to Whitehead this makes Peirce’s treatment of possibility all the more important in this context. See Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections, ed. Keith Robinson (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2008).

 

who's afraid of realism? (part 4): immanence and transcendence

Continuing on with my thoughts in this series, let me turn to an unlikely source: a review of Charles Hartshorne's Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method.  In the review, theologian Robert Neville discusses the problem of participation with process philosophers in mind.  The actual review is HERE, but pertinent to the transition from the realism and nominalism debate to questions of transcendence I have copied below the following excerpt. 

An Aristotelian realist -- and Hartshorne is one -- holds that the problem of universals has to do with accounting for how similarities and identities develop in the concrete flow of events. Along with Peirce and Weiss, Hartshorne holds that particulars are completely determinate, and therefore can only be past events, and that universals are somewhat indeterminate, and can therefore characterize only the future. ‘When universals are abstracted from the concrete particulars, characters are derived from the past as vague potentialities for future realization. In this sense, all potentiality derives from concrete actuality, an Aristotelian thesis. This makes sense of Hartshorne’s contention in his chapter "Abstraction the Question of Nominalism," that the novel forms emergent in a creative event are not determinate before the event but become determinate by decision in the event; to deny this is to deny any real meaning to creativity. For the Aristotelian position, the real problem is to explain how forms get into the temporal process, and it makes sense to say that they emerge. 

The Aristotelian story of how the universals come to be relevant to and function in the process of concrete events is compatible with the Platonic account of how change depends on its formal possibility. Platonists like Whitehead provide theories about the ingression of forms in things through prehension of the past as well as theories about the constitution of formal possibility as such in terms of eternal objects, the divine primordial decision, and the like. Whitehead unfortunately failed to emphasize the fact that eternal objects are norms, and had to say that eternal objects are empty except insofar as they are graded as relevant to the world by God. But his theory of propositional valuation is congenial for interpreting the eternal objects as norms, given determinate shape by the components they must measure together.

What sense does it make to say a universal is contained in a concrete particular? It is clear that an instance of a universal can be so contained. (Perhaps it is better to say that the concrete particular itself is an instance of the universal, and perhaps of several other universals also. Or perhaps the preferable language is to speak of the particular as instancing the universal.) In what sense is the universal contained in the particular when the latter is an instance of it? To this kind of question, two kinds of answers falling within the "realist" camp have been given. They can be called, for historical reasons, Aristotelian realism and Platonic realism.

An emergent universal is nonsense to a Platonist, however. For a Platonist the only things that can change or come to be axe those essentially related to the existential temporal process, e.g. things that make decisions -- events, and the like. A universal is that by which we measure change and diversity as well as continuity. As Plato argued in the Parmenides, instances of forms can be alike or similar, but there is no similarity between the instances and the universal itself; otherwise you get into a third-man argument. So in a sense universals are not things, desiccated shapes imaging or being imaged in concrete particulars; rather they are norms, indeterminate in themselves, but determinate as measures of how the particular components of a complexity ought to go together. For a Platonist it is possible to abstract the pattern of a concrete thing and call it the form of the thing; but this is a shortcut to speaking the truth. The pattern is no more the universal than is the concrete thing so patterned; the only advantage of the pattern is that we can imagine it to be found in other particulars. But as Hartshorne. Weiss and others so well point out, concrete particulars always differ in their overall patterns; in fact, difference in individual identity comes down to difference in determinate pattern. The universal or form itself is the value finding embodiment in the world in "a certain way."

Two particulars are alike because the same value measures their similar components with a pattern ingredient in both. Their components are similar by virtue of being measured by the same component values, and so on down. The causal reason why things are similar may well be that they both prehend the same past events, and therefore have the same components to be measured in their own subjective forms. But the metaphysical reason for the possibility of similarity and difference, according to the Platonic realist, consists in the fact that value can be ingredient with multiplicity in different parts of a process only by virtue of different structures or patterns. As a Platonist would say, the structured world is a compromise between chaos and the Good. There is ultimately only one real universal, the Form of the Good. We distinguish different forms because there are similar patterns of complexities recurring and therefore exhibiting similar patterns, each one of which seems to name a universal.

Whereas the Aristotelian story is about how universals appear in the historical process -- and in that sense they do seem to emerge -- the Platonic story is about how determinateness is possible. Regarding the latter, a decision to make pattern X ingredient in oneself as a measure of components a, b, c, is not possible unless X is indeed a way of measuring a, b, c, . . . together. Whether a, h, c,.. are measurable by X is totally irrelevant to whether a, b, c, . . . are in fact actual in the temporal process. The relation between the pattern in which the form measures the pattern’s components and the patterns of the components is quite eternal. Of course, if the components are never actualized in the real process, that relation is totally irrelevant to the course of events. But whether universals are relevant to the world makes no difference to the universals, conceived in this Platonic sense.

Aristotelians, however, have been less charitable in allowing the importance of both kinds of problems about universals. They assume that universals themselves must be like the instances of them in particulars, and then say the Platonic account ascribing independent existence to them is forced to believe in ghostly, wraithlike, disembodied essences. In discussing Platonism Hartshorne himself says, "I do not believe that a determinate color is something haunting reality from all eternity, as it were, begging for instantiation (p. 59). In light of what the Aristotelians are trying to explain, universals can be treated as patterns derived from past actualities. But thc function of universals to explain the Platonist’s problem of formal possibility precludes their being conceived as proceeding from actuality; they are necessarily the antecedent condition of actuality. The Platonic universal for some determinate color is the value that would be actualized if certain refracted light waves and certain conditions of perception are patterned a certain way; in no sense does the universal beg for instantiation, although the concrete world might be better if the color were instantiated.

And so whereas I have no important complaints to make about the positive things Hartshorne says about universals, since he is giving a good account of the Aristotelian problem, his negative points are ill-taken. It is a great mistake to reject all Platonic theories of universals, such as Whitehead’s regarding eternal objects (not that Whitehead’s particular account is necessarily satisfactory). This mistake has serious ramifications for Hartshorne’s view.

Return to his claim that the abstract is contained in the concrete exhaustively, that is, that the union of the abstract and the concrete is simply the concrete. With respect to how universals are ingredient in the world, this claim presents no problem. Universals are structures in the past abstracted as potentialities for actualization in the present, and they have no reality in the world except as potentialities; the concrete realization of them contains them. But with respect to the formal possibility of those universal structures, Hartshorne’s theory gives no account. That they are actually possible is not the issue, since they were actualized in the past. From the Platonist’s side, the interesting question is why certain forms of togetherness are coherent and others not, why certain forms have great harmony and others little or none. Unless this kind of question is addressed, the ontological structure of the world is taken for granted, not made intelligible. Although the question of how this or that form gets ingredient in the world is interesting, the more interesting question is what structure is, how it unifies multiplicity, how it stands related to chaos.

Pushed far enough -- and Hartshorne would surely push it that far -- the claim that structure itself needs an explanation might be thought self-contradictory. First principles are structures, and what could lie behind a first principle? But then, as Peirce said, the only thing that does not need an explanation is pure chaos; order is most of all in need of explanation, and the explanation of a state of affairs in terms of first principles is not as penetrating as the explanation of the first principles themselves. Whereas Hartshorne cites Peirce’s categories as illustrations of eternal metaphysical principles (in contrast to emerging ones), Peirce himself thought his categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness evolved, evolution being the only way to explain the origin of order from chaos (7: pars 12-13). Whitehead in his turn, as Lewis Ford has pointed out, claimed that anything complex needs an explanation in a decision somewhere, and even the metaphysical structures of the world are the result of the divine primordial act giving order to the otherwise chaotic eternal objects (cf. 2). Admitting that difficulties can be raised with both Peirce’s and Whitehead’s accounts, some account of the formal possibility of potentialities is necessary.

who's afraid of realism? (part 3): realism and nominalism

John Duns Scotus (1265-1308)

The realist-nominalist conversation has forced me to go back and look at some of the work on John Duns Scotus that I did within our Medieval philosophy seminars, during graduate school at SIUC.  Scotesian realism seems to defeat nominalism, but only by accommodating it.  Scotus was a nominalist (for some) only by "a hair."  In Mayorga's book on Peirce she has a chapter or two about this.   While current speculative appropriations of Scotus are not thoroughly "classical," the conversation is fitting as Scotus can be a resource for clarifying what nominalism means philosophically. 

This is from Peter King's article on Scotus that Jed gave us: 

In his Oxford writings, Scotus typically asserts that within one and the same thing (res) there are formally distinct realities (realitates), entities (entitates) or formalities ( formalitates), as he variously terms them, corresponding to our discrete concepts of it.3 Scotus calls this distinction between such entities ‘real’ in the sense that it does not arise solely from the mind but exists in the thing (ex parte rei ) prior to the action of any intellect whatever, human or divine. At the same time, he says that these formally distinct entities are really identical, since they can never actually exist apart but only as united within the same individual. Scotus argues that genera and their differences, species and their individual differences, and certain kinds of relations and their foundations, are in each case formally distinct. 

I think the point in question is whether there is an essence in the thing distinct from the thing.  If I remember correctly Scotus states that generality is not even a distinct thing, but is found in the particulars that instantiate it.  Still, there is a difference between the particular and the instantiated general.  So, there is no form "white" but "whiteness" is the general instantiated by objects with that power.  "Whiteness" is not the *product* of the object, the object does not trump the general even though the general depends on it for instantiation.  It is a matter of contracting the general that is dormant within the object.  I would add that it is impossible for eternal objects (per the reference to Whitehead) to be created products of any finite particular.

Jason's response is as follows: 

I am continuing the discussion of realism and nominalism.  Here I make the distinction between genera (genus-species relationships), generals (e.g., Lockean abstractive processes), and universals.  I also explain the importance difference between a realist and nominalist on several key points of metaphysics and phenomenology.

Leon and I were discussing the basics of Duns Scotus, etc., and my own appropriations of the terms that adds some Aquinas.  Below is an edited portion of our discussion.

The terms are “real distinction,” “formal distinction,” and a third term I do not know off the top of my head.  We often just say a “mere distinction" or "merely formal."

Universals and genera are of the second kind.  I forgot what the perfections are, which are special cases of this ontological problem.  Note that genera and generals are distinct, whereas the latter refer to principles arrived at via an inductive process, e.g., Locke’s “abstraction” or logical induction.  The former refer to genus-species relationships, e.g., categorical logic.

Correct, generality (generals) is neither a real nor formal distinction.  Hence, a nominalist often thinks that generality is all we have—not universality or genera of being.

As for essence vs. thing, you are right.  If we are Hobbes-style nominalists and think that all things are (corpuscular) particularities, then we deny essences.  Recall that essences are a kind of universal, while quality is another kind of universal.  Also, "essentiality" is not the category of uniquity (uniqueness); the latter is "quiddity."  As I wrote in my post, nominalism gives up on substantial or essential identity—identity is a best a function of something.  It does not necessarily give up on absolute particularity.

As for whiteness, it is a universal and a general, but not in the same way for both.  Insomuch as whiteness has reality, it is a universal.  Insomuch as we experience or know whiteness, it is a general; we infer from experience that this encounter is of the category of whiteness.  Now, if we are not realists about universals, then we know merely the generality “whiteness.”  The problem here is that we no longer experience the real thing, but merely a generated appearance.  If one is a nominalist, one does not think that there is anything “under” this generation.

In my Peirce-Deweyan position, for instance, we add to the idea that whiteness is a universal and general.  We talk about the generation of the phenomenal quality, so we are talking about a generated quality.  However, since we think that generation is a real process, then the generated quality maintains a real, non-arbitrary relation to the thing experienced.  (Note that the “thing experienced” is not an entity or object, but I’m keeping it simple for now.)  A nominalist, on the other hand, can merely say that the phenomenal quality was generated, full stop.