My materialism is an ongoing process, so I welcome criticisms–I’ve decided I want to embrace an emergentism and a flat ontology. What follows is a collection of working notes.
Atoms are as real as feelings are as real as corporations are as real as signifying systems are as real as movies and religious organizations. Opus Dei is as real as the people that make it up–as a collective, it can be explained in terms of those people, as well as their capacities to interact, but it cannot be “explained away” by them–it cannot be reduced to them. As an organization, it’s also capable of forming an assemblage with other things, giving birth to higher levels of emergent qualities and capacities. Maybe a thing is real insofar as it is capable of entering into an assemblage? I don’t know yet. Perhaps a religious organization, itself an assemblage of devotees, might enter into an assemblage with a political party, itself an assemblage of politicians and mottos and corporate funding and systems of belief, to form a collective that seizes governing power over a specific society, itself an assemblage of laws and residents and geography and so on. I’m undecided as to how far I want to push the assemblage idea: people are assemblages of body parts and memories and dispositions and music taste. H20 can be explained in terms of hydrogen and oxygen, but it also contains properties and capacities that neither hydrogen nor oxygen do–it freezes at different temperatures; if we throw H20 on a fire, it’ll react differently than if we throw hydrogen or oxygen on it, and so on. H20 is an assemblage that consists of hydrogen and oxygen, as well as the specific way the two interact. The new qualities and capacities emerge out of the combination. The emergent entity is as real as the parts that make it up, and it contains powers that cannot be located in the parts that make it up. I think each level of emergence calls for its own level of analysis: we fail to understand the affective qualities of poetry with speak of brain chemistry. It can only be properly explained at the level of Rilke, so to speak.
Assemblages, or groups, are irreducible to the individuals, or components, that compose them because they consist of two things. First, the individual components that, taken together, make up the assemblage. Now, if this were all there was to be said of the assemblage, then it would indeed admit of the potential for reduction. But the assemblage also consists of the complex and often unpredictable qualities of the relations of its components to each other. The assemblage is both dependent on its parts (this is what I mean by 2) as well as in possession of powers or capacities that cannot be located in any of its parts themselves (this is what I mean by 3). We cannot know ahead of time how components will react and relate to each other. Their relational capacities are not fixed but rather themselves emerge in the process of relating. The identity of the assemblage is not given, it is forged—the assemblage is an ongoing becoming of emergent properties (Spinoza’s affects—It is here worthwhile to note Deleuze’s refrain, adapted from Spinoza: we still do not yet know what a body can do!) That these emergent properties are dependent on the constitutive parts of the assemblage does not entail the reduction of the assemblage to its parts. Water doesn’t lose its power to wet or put out fires because it’s dependent on the complex interaction of a certain set of molecules. The emergent entities contain powers and capacities that cannot be located in any of its constitutive parts, but it is nonetheless dependent on these parts to constitute it. We have to take a detour through water itself to discover its powers.
The reason why this isn’t reductionism is because we can’t ever know the nature of that interaction in advance—we will always have to take a detour through the emergent entity itself. I also want to stress the complexity of assemblages: a society isn’t made up only of a group of individuals as well as the complicated and unpredictable way they relate with each other; it’s also a whole slew of other factors—it might also involve geography, music, dreams and expectations, job opportunities, norms, weather patterns, the way bad television has shaped one’s relationship with a domestic animal and so on and so on. The more nuanced a look we take at the assemblage the further we move from the possibility of reductivism. But it’s strange to say that we can’t explain a society by describing in detail each of its citizens. We can. We just can’t explain it away—we can’t exhaust its meaning; we can’t eliminate it.
Against Correlationism. The Correlationist proclaims thus: to speak of being, we must know being, and to know being means to situate ourselves within the inescapable finitude of human knowers. For Heidegger, this means that before we can formulate the question of the meaning of being, we must investigate that being for whom being is a question. Here’s Bhaskar, from “A Realist Theory of Science” (39): “this defense trades upon a tacit conflation of philosophical and scientific ontologies. For if ‘what we can know to exist’ refers to a possible content of a scientific theory then that it is merely a part of what we can know is an uninteresting truism. But a philosophical ontology is developed by reflection upon what must be the case for science to be possible; and this is independent of any actual scientific knowledge. Moreover, it is not true, even from the point of view of the immanent logic of a science, that what we can know to exist is just a part of what we can know. For a law may exist and be known to exist without our knowing the law. Much scientific research has in fact the same logical character as detection. In a piece of criminal detection, the detective knows that a crime has been committed and some facts about it but he does not know, or at least cannot yet prove, the identity of the criminal.” Thus, I think the way out of the finitude of the human knower is a transcendental inquiry. Whereas Kant asked: what must the subject be like for X to be possible? I (and the realists upon whom I draw) want to ask: what must the world be like for X to be possible? A transcendental materialism/realism as opposed to a transcendental idealism/correlationism.
The correlationist insists thus: well, in the very act of thinking about the being of the world without us, we make ourselves present to that world–for, are we not precisely the ones formulating the thought! I recall reading this in Berkeley: try to picture the existence of a tree apart from the existence of human knowers–you can’t, because as soon as you picture the tree, it becomes a thought in the mind of a human knower. Meillassoux offers a pretty interesting response. He writes that, according to this trajectory of thought, “I can only think of myself as existing, and as existing the way I exist; thus, I cannot but exist, and always exist as I exist now” (After Finitude, 55). Even if I imagine a world within which I’ve recently died, I make myself present to that world in the act of thinking it. But this is, of course, absurd. You will die, regardless of whether or not the fact of your death is thinkable to you. What’s more, if you concede this claim (and how couldn’t you!), then you’ve conceded that the mere fact that we can’t think a world without making ourselves present to that world says absolutely nothing at all about the nature of that world apart from us. Instead, if you want to insist that the fact of your death is indeed thinkable (which seems to be evidenced by the fact that we’re all anxious about our deaths), then you will have conceded that a world without humans is in principle thinkable–for to think a world in which you don’t exist is to think a world without making yourself present to that world.
