Google Flu Diagnosis: Clustered atomization of Symptoms

“Ginsberg and Mohebbi explain that Google’s “model tries to filter out search queries that are more likely associated with topical searches rather than searches by those who may be experiencing symptoms.” Thus the spike shown in the graph [April 19 – 25] on the Experimental Flu Trends for Mexico Web page should correlate with actual flu activity rather than searches prompted by worry.”

–  Information Week

Google has made available “for the world” the search data that surrounds the outbreak of the dreaded, humanity-threatening Mexican Swine Flu (otherwise named), part of a contribution announced last November. This particular flu brings together the vast confluence of expressive connectivity which marks out our world village of intimacies. News programs post updates of great theatre, practically begging for a disaster so as to ensure rating spikes (symptoms = ratings), as the “conception” of the disease spreads like ideological wildfire; while the actually flu, yet very deadly, alerts us to how physically proximate we truly are, as transmissions body to body, leap borders, cross classes, and trace the planet. Despite its model filters, Google brings these two phenomena, the conception of “flu” and its symptomology, as “real time” data for related searches are expressed in mappings that seem to photograph both mind and body as “real” as silver halides suspended in gelatin catch the light from our loved ones. The idea is that Goggle has been able to in some sense literally see the flu spreading in the way that one might be able to see a frost spreading from space, as people becomes sick, become concerned and search for their symptoms on the internet.

Besides the connectivity issues – the laminates of activity layered in epistemological sedimentation that create our pictures of what IS – how does this new diagnostic, modeling tool of Google impinge upon or  free us? When we Google anything, it is intriguing to think that we are entering pixels of information into a vast reservoir of sociological data. Real time desires for information will be linked to public events with more precision that ever before, but as well, the neat pictures captured will likely in their very vividness obscure any number of excluding factors. The “picture” will shape who is represented, and policy towards them. Never before is it more important to Google, it seems. Of course, social monitoring, in particular under the metaphor of health concerns, carries its darkside.

The data-picture of the desire for information. What if we could “anonymously” record the time and place of every page turned in every book and pamphlet read in the Dutch Republic in the mid 1600’s? In France during the late 1700’s? What is this new picture of humanity? And, does not this mediation put mind and body into every greater proximity to each other (if we ever thought that that was possible), with greater speed than ever? As the notions of events, and events themselves race across braided to each other…

The Fantasm of the Point: Vico, Plotinus, Campanella and even Badiou

(ca. 204-270 AD)

To return to the diagram of my last post on Plotinus I want to think along with a confluence of ideas that condense upon the very center of it, the infintesmal locus of “matter” which exists merely as a privation, yet also which alternately can be considered as a radiating center (under a different analogy).

The direction I want to go in this is a rumination that first starts from Badiouian notion that Being is not of the One, or “the One is not,” and that mathematics in a sense speaks Being,  pronouncing what is expressible of being-qua-being. The principle that the non-numerical One is beyond Being is of course one that Plotinus holds at the pinnacle of his Ontology, for Being starts with the varigated particularization of the Nous. It is there that the predication of Being takes hold. The way that Plotinus tells it, the Nous is produced by the plentitude/emptiness of The One, and necessarily breaks it apart into a kind of representation which divides it into parts. The reason that Plotinus gives for this division into likenesses is interesting. It is that the Nous struggles with the fact that it has no control over that upon which it ultimately depends, a control which expresses itself in the desire to preserve:

The hypostasis of the Intellect [Nous] cannot maintain its vision of the One in primal unity, but “being being unable to preserve the power which it was procuring, it broke it up and made the one [power] that it might bear it part by part [katà méros]” (6.7 [38] 15.20-22). In so doing, Intellect constitutes itself as an imitation of the Good, as a many-hued and varigated Good (agathòn poíkilon).

F.M. Schroeder, citing Plotinus in Form and Transformation

Now there is a great and dissatisfying danger of simply reading these particularizations as mere abstractions of an esoteric philosophy, the most gripless of metaphysics, but Plotinus’s reasoning as to why the Nous indeed breaks up the One has strong affective, phenomenological correlates. It is the very dependency of the unity of the Nous upon what lies beyond it, and inclusive of it, that generates a corresponding particularization. In drawing power from what is outside, the inside distinguishes itself. If we turn to the simple figure of a circle (for millennia a favorite of philosophers, and think in terms of systems theory, we understand that whatever system there is, it necessarily is less complex than its environment. This is to say, as all systems (the inside) depends upon a more complex outside, the very inside/outside boundary issue of dependency drives the very divisions of the inside in regard to what lies beyond it. If we allow the observations of evolutary theory, life has moved from less to more complex, and with this increase of internal divisions (differences that make differences) it has relatively gained a greater role in the preservation of the power upon which it depends (and, notably, which it is also an expression). Plotinus’s story of the Nous serves as a metaphysical directionality which prescribes how any person (organism) might orient themselves to conditions which are beyond it, like the Nous with totalizes these relations, the move is towards a complexification of differences that make differences.

For Plotinus, this process of particularization comes from what he calls “beholding” or “witnessing”. Whereas the first particularization beholds the One/the Expressed, those of Soul and Sensation are even more narrow in what they behold, all the way down to matter, which simply exists as a non-existent privation. A speck of darkness.

A Retreat to Vico’s Conception of Mathematics: the ficta of points (1668 – 1744)

I find this speck of nothingness interesting because its very non-divisibilty division reflects something of mathematics, the way in which points or numbers are non-existent distinctions that operate as a kind of limit. What I have in mind is Giambattista Vico’s interpretation of mathematics as the most divine of human acts, because in the invention of the point and the unit human beings act just a God did, creating something out of nothing in imitation of divinity, scientia humana divinae sit imitatrix. For Vico, a forerunner to some themes found in Kant, human beings cannot truly know things that they have not created. Only God truly knows what is created. The reason why human beings can have perfect knowledge of mathematics is that its creation is wholely their own. In a sense, mathematics operates “within” the circle of human articulation.

To quote some Vico, and then a commentator, to give perspective on his position:

…man defines the names themselves, and on the model of God with no underlying thing he creates (creat) the point, line and surface as if from nothing, as if they were things…to establish (condidit) for himself a certain world of forms and numbers, which he embraces within himself: and by producing, shortening, or composing lines, by adding, substracting, or reckoning numbers, he effects infinite works because he knows infinite truths within himself

But the point of the human imagination is not the point we draw with a pencil: “the point, when you draw it, is not a point: the one, when you multiply it, is no longer fully one.”

“man, containing within himself an imaginary world of lines and numbers, operates in it with his abstractions, just as God does in the universe with reality.”

With something of Plotinus’s reasoning, the very imaginary abstraction that human beings creates is a coping mechanism for that which lies beyond them and upon which they depend. Here Robert Miner provides a good overview of Vico’s approach to the knowing of human understanding:

Abstraction is the mind’s way of coping with its estrangement from things. Because he cannot possess ‘the elementa rerum by which things themselves exist with certainty,’ he resorts to the fabrication (confingere) of elementa verborum, elements which, despite their unreality, are able to ‘stimulate ideas with no controversy.'”

Vico has described human truth as a factum that is arrived at through a synthesis of elements that are only partially grasped, because they exist outside the mind which grasps them. If the human mind is essentially outside the elementa rerum, how does it manage to grasp even their outside edges? Vico proceeds to answer this question: “God knows everything, because he contains within himself the elements from which all things are composed; man seeks to know these elements by a process of dividing (dividendo).”

What is the relation of “dividing” to making? Is dividendo creative or destructive? Vico’s answer is “both.” De antiquissima 1.2 begins with an homage to the fecundity of dissection. The “anatomy of nature’s works” gives birth to a range of human scientiae. It does so by inventing their objects. One can divide man into body and spirit. From body, human science has “picked out (excerpsit) or, as men say, abstracted figure and motion, and from these, as well as from all other things, it has extracted (extulit) being and unity.” The objects obtained through abstraction give rise to the human scientiae metaphysics (whose proper object is ens), arithmetic (unum), geometry (figura), mechanics (motus from the edge), physics (motion from the center), medicine (corpus), logic (ratio), and ethics (voluntas).

The fecundity of dissection comes at a cost. Man creates the human scientiae by fragmenting, and therefore destroying, the whole…The entities created by abstraction – being, unity, figure, motion, shape, intellect, will – are “one thing in God, in whom they are one, and another thing in man, in whom they are divided.” Ripped from the whole in which they have life, humanly obtained elements are disiecta membra. “In God they live, in man they perish.” Our efforts to understand nature by cutting it up supplies us with theories rather than works: “in nobis sunt ratiocina, in Deo sunt opera.” All that man acquires through dividing the whole, is like man himself, nihil prae Deo; all finite and created beings are nothing but disposita entis infiniti ac aeterni. Etymology confirms the connection between division and diminution: Vico asserts that minuere means both “to lessen” and “to separate.”

The limitations of abstraction ensure that we have access only to the extrema of the elementa rerum. In what is likely to be an illusion to Lucretius, Vico declares that when man starts to investigate the nature of things (naturam rerum vestigabundus), he finds that “he does not have within himself the elements from which composite things exist.” This lack (brevitas) is not a morally neutral feature of the human condition, but a “vice of the mind” (mentis vicium). It is an effect of fallenness, a decline from a primordeal state in which mind and nature where integrated. (Vico uses nefas to characterize physicists who think they can provide real defintions of things.) Man responds to this condition by turning the mentis vicium to good use, by performing an operation that relies solely upon the mind and bypasses, as it were, the material world. “By abstraction, as they say, he fabricates (configit) two things for himself: the point that can be drawn and the unit that can be multiplied.” The association of abstractio and configere suggests that abstraction is creative. The suggestion is confirmed in the Prima Riposta, where Vico writes that mathematics [move to quotes on mathematics].

Truth in Making, Robert Miner

The Terminus Point of Nonbeing: Campanella (1568 – 1639 )

There is another evocative figure of radiating being, that which Campanella uses to characterize how each thing is but a point from which non-Being radiates, a kind of photographic negative of Plotinus’s conception:

 What we are concerned with is something that has an actual bearing on the existential order [not “relative nothingnesss” (nihilum secundum quid), the essence of a thing prior to existence], i.e., the composition of an infinite nonbeing with a finite being in existing realities. This is the point at issue, and this Campanella tries to illustrate by means of an analogy. Just as we can conceive a line stretching from the center of the earth beyond the circumfrence of the sky in infinitum, so, he says, man, like any other creature, is but a little dot where infinite nonbeing is terminated. Man is in effect the negation of an infinite number of other things and of God himself, being surrounded, as he is, by an infinite nonbeing (Bonansea, Tommaso Campanella, citing Met, II, 6, 3, 7)

In this Campanella presents something very close to Spinoza’s letter 21 claim that “all determination is negation,” something that Hegel made quite a bit of. Only in Spinoza any particular determination/negation is not a negation of God/Substance, but rather its Substance (Campanella always heretically veering towards collapsing God and Creation into one panpsychic whole, like Spinoza, but careful to walk the line).

What I am inspired to say about these circular analogies for Being and coherence of action, with their distinct and performative inside/outside designations, is that somehow mathematics in coming out of the pure fictiveness of human creation, in inventing the Non-Being of the immaterial point, somehow grasps whole the entire matrix of radiating conceptions, and is able to map out with great fecundity the very Oneness which is beyond Being (in a Plotinian sense). Weaving out the very absence, the infinitesimal (as my wife tells me, what is the decimal point which divides the infinitely large from the infinitely small, made of?), we get a glimpse of the very varigatedness that Plotinus attributes to Nous likeness taking.  The whole thing is sutured closed, or at least remotely closed, for one imagines that there are many kinds of mappings that can be woven from the nothingness of the point.

Further though, even in its appropriation of the infinite nothingness, mathematics owes Alfred Korzybski’s adage “The map is not the territory,” while keeping in mind that mapping, and map-following is itself part of the territory (one hunts through the map, as one hunts through the territory). All organisms seem to in some form follow Plotinus’s thoughts on why the Nous mirrored the One, being unable to preserve that upon which they depend. The semiotic relations that make up an organisms internal relations, and then thus relations to other organisms, are not only performances, but also are duplications (not necessarily representations), “picking out” (intelligere, to choose out) certain aspects of the world, and it is always a tension between picking out the most important, valued features, and sheer numericity, since these two are intimately related. In a certain sense, mathematics too needs to be seen as a vast material organism/organization, as material as any map, appendage to the human species.

The Cone of Plotinus: Ontologies of Profusion and Particularization

I believe it is helpful when understanding how Plotinus viewed the degrees of Being, how the problem of how the production of the Many from the One is to be resolved (referred to here), it is helpful to picture to two, end-to-end comes often used to illustrate conic sections, above. For Plotinus uses two kinds of complimentary images. The first is that the Hen (The One, The Expressed) is comprehensive. It is the kind of totality which even transcends numericity, not even having Being predicated of it. It stands as a kind of outer limit, the widest circle which contains (gives birth to) all that is within it. In this way, most simply put:

1. The Hen is completely empty, so empty it overflows, producing something other.

2. This is the Nous (mind) which is born of looking at the Hen, in a kind of mirroring contemplation which constitutes its existence, producing a varigated Being.

3. And through this perfect mirroring gaze it achieves the productive capacity of the Hen, and produces the Soul.

4. The Soul is an activity which does not merely abide, but compelled to motion produces her opposite, sensation.

The movement is towards the particularized. The Hen has all things moving through it, perhaps in a Deleuzian vein we can call these intensities, though it is perfectly empty. From this are narrowings of hierarchies of existence, which can be viewed as if the upper mouth of the cone were heading towards it point. And the very end of this process is “matter” which may be said to have no-being, in the sense that it exists merely as a privation of the One, the absence of Being, something that Augustine took up in his analysis of Evil as a privation and that can be seen in Spinoza’s epistemology where falsity consists in privation.

A diagram to clarify these relations:

Plotinus’s heirarchy of Being is more famous than his thinking of any unity at all as a kind of profusion. In a wonderful analogy he compares the activity of the soul to that of a mirror. In this way we can say that the ultimate profusion of the One/Expressed (Hen), acts as something like both a great descending circle (the upper half of the diagram), but also as a kind of central point, that radiates out, growing weaker as it goes, as light would, until it reaches its outermost limit in a darkness (matter), which exists merely as a privation. In this sense anything that has being has it to the degree that it expresses/reflects the totality of the One, its activity consisting of what fills it. And in this way as well, matter serves as both an infintesmal point (the very nexus of the two cones), which does not exist, but also as an outer ring where the radiation of the Hen does not reach.

How did it come to be then, and what are we to think of as surrounding the One in its repose? It  must be a radiation from it while it abides unchanged, like the bright light of the sun which, so to speak, runs round it, springing from it continually while it abides unchanged. All things which exist, as long as they abide in being, necessarily produce from their own substances, in dependence on their present power, a surrounding reality directed to what is outside them, a kind of image of the archetypes from which it was produce; fire produces the heat which comes from it; snow does not only keep its cold inside itself. Perfumed things show this particularly clearly. As long as they exist, something is diffused from themselves around them, and what is near them enjoys their existence. (5.1 [10].6 27-37)

But one must consider light as altogether incorporeal, even if it belongs to a body. Therefore, “it has gone away” or “it is present” are not used of it in their proper sense, but in a different way, and its real existence is an activity. For the image in a mirror must also be called an activity: that which is reflected in it acts on what is capable of being affected without flowing into it; but if the object reflected is there, the reflection too appears in the mirror and it exists as an image of a colored surface shaped in a particular way; and if the object goes away, the mirror-surface no longer has what it had before, when the object seen in it offered itself to it for activity. (4.5 [29] 7.33-49)

These analogies of light and reflection, along with the hierarchies of Being risk becoming highly abstract, uninteresting, arcane structurings, if we take them as simply esoteric truths. But the hierarchies of Being are not just ontological strata, they are guideposts for how an investigating thinker should think of their own position in the world. They entail a phenomenology of projects that each person should engage in, the vision that oneself and one’s consciousness too is hierarchical. Part of this prescription is to the way that we “see” other objects, in particular how we binarize ourselves into subject/object relations. Plotinus’s analogies of light are more than analogies in that they invite us to see that any object that we orient ourselves toward is necessarily in existence through the same sharing of the field as we. Plotinus presses us to collapse the subject/object binary.

This is captured in his dichotomy of “looking at things” and “looking with light”. One might look at things in the world and never notice that light that illumines them, but if one learns to look “with” the medium, one participates in the very processes of illumination and is no longer captured by the illusions of particularization, the largely assumed cut-off nature of things.

One thing is an object of vision for it, the form of the sensible object, another is that by which [i.e. the light] it sees the form of it [the sensible object], which [the medium] is also an object of sensation for it, while being other than the form [of the sensible object] and the cause for the form of being seen and is concomitantly seen both in the form and with the form; for this reason the light does not yield a clear sensation of itself, because the eye is turned toward the illuminated object; but whever it [i.e. the light] is nothing but itself, it sees in an immediate intuition…This then is what the seeing of Intellect is like; this sees by another light the things illuminated by that first nature [i.e. the One or Good as the sun of the intelligible universe], and sees the light in them; when it turns attention to the nature of the things illuminated, it sees the light less; but if it abandons the things it sees and looks at the medium by which it sees them, it looks at pure light (5.5 [32]. 7.2-8; 16-21).

Such an investigative approach allows one to trace out the continuities which exist between oneself and what one investigates, something he compares to the radii of lines from the center of a circle, only apparently detached from one another:

[The One] is contemplated in many beings, in each and every one of those capable of receiving him as another self, just as the center of a circle exists by itself, but in every one of the radii in the circle has its point in the center and their lines bring their individuality to it. For it is with something of this sort in ourselves that we are in contact with god and are with him and depend upon him; and those of us who converge towards him are firmly established in him (5.1 [10]. 11. 9-15)

I do not really view this rather spiritual-sounding account to be spiritualized at all, but rather aimed at the concrete dynamics of power itself, the way in which things vividly express themselves in what for us is the most realized terms. If nothing else these metaphysics must prove themselves pragmatically, as means to find connections between parts which help us explain and read the world (and ourselves).

The Bristling of Wheat, The Warming of the Thymos

I was talking with my wife today about how our Cattle Dog pup’s fur bristles with fear/excitment when she steps out at night and smells the air, to howl or bark. She was saying how we all know what this feels like, despite our species differences, and what came to mind were a wonderful word-image of Homer’s on how the thymos of an angered man can come to be “warmed” or “softened”. This has consequences I believe for a general theory of Thymotics, as I joined Sloterdijk to advocate perhaps a different notion of economy. 

…and his spirit (thumos)
was warmed (ianthē), just like the dew upon the ears of corn
of a ripening crop, when the ploughlands are bristling (phrissō):
even so, Menalaos, was the spirit (thumos) in your heart warmed (ianthē)

Trans. Nicholas Richardson (Chapter 23 @ line 600)

Richardson translates these lines beautifully, showing their circular structure. The image is that of a thumos (heart, spirit, passion) that upon being warmed by the sun, simply evaporates, bringing the crops to grow. This is in restorative relation to the other images of desire, earlier in the Iliad describe as being vapor-like (kapnos) in the context of loss: the honey-sweet thumos that waxes like kapnos in anger at 18.110 where Achilles savors his anger over his lost Patroklus, and then Patroklus’ psuchē which goes into the earth like kapnos vapor, where Achilles cannot grasp it, 23.100. Instead here, in the shadow of Achilles’s adjudication, the thumos is warmed like dew is, under a divine sun. The bristling of the corn-wheat, phrissousin, has rich meaning; the word can mean anything from physically bristling to having a chill or a shudder, or even holy awe.

What does it take to see the whole world as bristling?

The Assurance of Hyundai: The Care of Corporation

In this marvelous take on the corporate saftey-net offered by Hyundai we experience both the rich, music-filled world-view of a partnership community, and the ludicrous ambiguity of a corporate sensibility that learned that it must invest in the health of its customers.

Beautifully done. But also not the occasion to lose track that the corporate realization of an identity of “care” and fostering also reflects a change in the ideological figure that corporations cast in our society, and a change in ideological figure is a change in powers. I think it is easy to polarize what this spoof brings out, but perhaps something akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s orchid/wasp is in order.

Radix Philosophy and Knowing Your Kant

The Talk Around the Pub

It seems that the Kantian sore of Perverse Egalitariansm and Larval Subjects is festering a bit. It is it a symptomatic lesion in the Body of Philosophy, or just a bloggist scratch that got an impurity or two in it, and in need of a little antiseptic. It brings to mind though something about argumentation, even in a bloggist environment, that goes right to the body of a philosopher, the way in which we experience the wholeness of arguments with the very sense of our well-being, when we think that we understand what we are arguing for. 

In the comments section  of Larval Subjects attempt to deal again with Kantian normativity, Mikhael repeats the authority of his reading of Kant, after the claim that someone simply is an embarassment:  

“You either don’t get it, or your pretend to not get it – you don’t understand such simple matters as “form” vs. “matter” in Kant’s philosophy in general – are you serious? For such a great reader of Kant, you seem to be spewing nonsensical readings of him right and left, I mean you’ve become a joke around the pub with “Have you read this latest comment by Levi about Kant?….I interpret my Kant the way most of Kant scholarship does, I’m not a genius with innovative ideas, I’m dull and boring – if you knew your Kant, you would see how regular and annoyingly mediocre my views are.”

It is not particular to Kant that I want to speak, but to simply the way that philosophy is discussed. I suppose we all feel this way. If someone disagrees with us (or “us”), they simply do not understand us (it is not that we are wrong). When they show us that we were wrong, if ever, we realize that we didn’t understand us. We all grow frustrated when disagreement cuts to the very roots of our suppositions. And the same may be said when it cuts the very roots of a thinker we greatly admire.

Personally, I find it difficult though, in the particular case of the Kant Krew at Perverse Egalitarians, is that the appeal is ultimately to a kind of “you are an idiot”, “you don’t even understand the very basics of Kant” when Kant is criticized to the root. All this, while they also fall back upon the idea that they themselves are not even Kantians, that they are just telling the world the orthodox position of Kant, in fact regurgitating it in a fashion. It is not so much the entrenchment of such a position I am troubled with (“I am simply repeating Kant Orthodoxy to you, if you question it it is merely that you do not understand him”), but the unengaged nature of this kind of talk. It is as if one is no longer even actively thinking about Kant, taking a critical view, pulling the threads apart, running it through your fingers. If the thought is dead in your hands, and one is simply repeating Orthodoxy stuff you read in commentaries (and how much of philosophy is done like this, wherein one talks like one knows because one repeats what someone “who knows” says), what is the point?

The Inculcation of Vision

On the other hand, I too have had my difficulties with Levi’s appropriations, on occasion; they can seem wild, shoot from the hip, ripping passages/principles out from the rest of the living argument. And certainly many people grow frustrated with the pinpoints of my own criticism, not seeing the value that I see in taking down the building at this one particular mortis and tenon at which I may hammer endlessly. I think that part of the problem is that much of philosophy is actually ecstatic. That is, we go through the discipline of rigorous argument, architecturally linking an entire network of propositions, defitions, axioms, conclusions, so that we can SEE something. Once you have inculcated yourself within a philosopher, or a school/branch of philosophy, the world is seen differently. It glows with potentialities and connections it did not otherwise have. (Are these chimera, or radiations of the Real itself, how things really are but as hidden?) When others question the very foundations of our observatory edifice, hacking at the base before the argument can even get off the ground, they are questioning our experience, our visioning of the world, a world we see more coherently (ultimately, more beautifully) than before.

This is the case I believe even with the most austere of analytic school logic chopping, and of course with the poetic intoxications of Continental melodizing and remixing.

When people question to the radix, they cut to the Umwelt of the philosopher, perhaps we can say. Proponents find this disturbing because “Just wait! Look and see what it can do, before you try to destroy it! Let it get off the Ground!” Or, more so, “No, you don’t see it! You don’t see how it works!” The radical questioners though say: “Not that world!” In this way our philosophical disagreements are not much different than those that make up the rest of discussions with others. They are a question of seeing.

Crescent to The Whole Creature

Beginning to read Wendy Wheeler’s The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture. I have to say that when the level of my enthusiasm is this high during the first few pages of a book quite often I disappointed at its close. At the very least, the enthusiasm is quite high, and the potential for this line of thinking sparkles. (Thanks to the recommendation of Immanence.)

How Sad is the Weeping Willow?: Human Projections and the Powers of Objects

The Powers of an Apple

Larval Subjects in his debate with the Kantians over at Perverse Egalitarianism draws on what he sees as a Spinozist distinction, what he calls the “metaphysical” and “value”

Considered metaphysically, the apple is value neutral. It just is what it is, much like Yahweh in the Bible. Metaphysically, if the apple is ripe this doesn’t make it “good”. Likewise, considered metaphysically, if the apple is rotten this doesn’t make it bad. The ripeness or rottenness of the apple is purely an outcome of physical cellular processes that are, in and of themselves, value-neutral. When we wish to understand or know the apple, these processes are what we are after. Nature, then, is in and of itself a kingdom without ends or purposes.

The value of the apple only emerges in relation to bodies. If I say the apple is bad, I am not making a claim about a property of the apple as such, but a claim about how a property of the apple relates to me. The apple is bad because these properties produce a highly unpleasant set of sensations in my body when I eat it. In this respect, the “badness” of the apple is a secondary property of the apple. Were no one to exist, the apple simply wouldn’t have this property. (the rest)

I have to say that though the elements of this distinction are found in Spinoza, it would be wrong to decide this as merely the difference between metaphysical and valuational aspects, for if Spinoza had any tractional point, it was that valuations themselves reflect real metaphysical changes in power. Epistemological changes are ontological changes, and vise-versa. Part of the problem I have with their debate, and Larval Subject’s approach in general, is this tarrying with the “thing-in-itself” and all our supposed attempts to attach “properties” to it. (In general, I do not find the concept of properties very helpful, and I suspect it is beneficial to see that Spinoza spoke of “modes” which are ways of being, ways of expression. The ideas are closely related, but the “picture” of each directs our investigative attention in different directions.)

I order to discuss the nexus of the metaphysical and valuation, it seems important to state that the valuations we make of things in the world reflect/express real world conditions, and as such when we make a valuation claim upon an object in the world, we are also making a claim about its powers to bring that object into the relations that make that claim substantive. This is to say, the distinction that Larval Subject makes here, ultimately turns again to the metaphysical states of the objects we investigate. While we may feel more comfortable saying that the “The apple is red” is an objective statement referring to properties of an apple, because we take those properties to be expressions of the capacity to enter into the relations that give talk about its color its strength, a statement like “The apple is bad” also in some sense expresses the metaphysical powers of the apple to combine with us and our value system.

Spinoza-influenced and father of Deep Ecology, Arne Naess, who unlike me prefers talking about properties, has an interesting take upon the Gestalt of properties, one that at least levels the property playing field (like attached):  

Gestalt thinking combined with nominalism results in saying that the subject/object dualism is simply a projection of subjective states of consciousness on the outside world. But the joyfulness, liveliness, threatening size, dejectedness, gravity, or solemnity of a tree are properties of a tree on par with tallness, weight, and chemical structure. More precisely: the properties refer to situations or states of the world (Nature) which have gestalt character. The chemical or physical tree is an abstraction referring to elements, subordinate gestalts of the total gestalt.

If A says “The tree is mournful” and B says “The tree is jubilant” there is no contradiction as long as “the tree” is not meant to characterize the same gestalt, but only elements (identified through social conventions: pointing to “the tree,” mapping it, touching it etc).

“Reflections on Gestalt Ontology [click here to dowload]” Arne Naess

Not Properties, Profusion

For my part, I think that when one speaks of the world in an immanentist fashion, such as the one that Spinoza is advocating, it is much better to speak of the profusions of an object, rather than its properties. The attempt to talk about apples and suns as if nothing else in the world existed is, I think, a (perhaps cherished) philosophical mistake. It is a bit like talking about the properties of the number 5 if no other numbers existed. All properties are relational if the world is an expressive thing. Spinoza’s point is that our ideas about the relations can be more or less powerful, more or less free.

I suggest that when we think of the properties of thinking, if we turn our mind to the idea of profusion offered by Plotinus we can be getting somewhere. Plotinus’s thinking is often equated with emanantism, but he careful to qualify his gradated thinking of being away from a simple, ocular emanant model (even arguing against the use of the term). Here he draws on non-visual analogies for the power of profusion, something that we can apply all the way down to subjective valuations:

All things which exist, as long as they abide in being, necessarily produce from their own substances, in dependence on their present power, a surrounding reality directed to what is outside them, a kind of image of the archetypes from which it was produce; fire produces the heat which comes from it; snow does not only keep its cold inside itself. Perfumed things show this particularly clearly. As long as they exist, something is diffused from themselves around them, and what is near them enjoys their existence. (5.1 [10].6 27-37)

So how sad is the weeping willow? Well, if we follow the usual philosophical tendencies we would want to say, not sad at all. We only project the sadness upon the tree which by accidents of nature produces something of the gesture of melancholy. And down this path we find ourselves trapped in our own heads, along with the rest of the Idealists, as we find that anything we want to say about things in the world are somehow only “inside” us. What a Spinoza-inspired reading would tell us is that yes, we do project and anthromorphize the willow tree, but the invocation of sadness within us is a real power of the willow, given our historical circumstances. It may be an imaginary relation, but as such it is a fully concrete determination. In fact, the powers of sadness within the willow tree, its profusion of being, very well may lead to its success as a species, as human beings work to propagate its organism through bitter-sweet poems and plantings by ponds. I think that when discussing the powers of a body one always has to keep in mind that even the most subjective-seemingly projections are, at least from a metaphysical perspective, best taken as a power of the body to act (affect) in specific conditions, and as such must also be taken to be expressions of the very objective kernel of what the thing is, part of its profusion, ultimately understood to be the profusion of the world itself.

Plotinus and the Degrees of Being Conception: Ennead V ii, 1

Ennead V ii, 1: On the Genesis and Order of Things Following The Proto

The Hen is all things
but not a single one [oudè hén];
for the arche of all things is not all things,
but in that particular way it is all things, that is to say thither
they run.
Rather, they do not yet exist,
but they will be.

How then does [it all] come out
of a Simple One which has in itself
no intricate appearance,
nor any kind of folds whatsoever?

It is because there is no-thing [oudèn] in itself
that through this out of itself come
all things,
that Being [tò òn] may be;

through this
he himself is not existing [ouk ón],
he, the progenitor of itself. But as such
this is the prime engendering.
Being complete,
to not seek, to not hold, to not need,
in some kind of overflowing,
and overplenteousness of itself
it has made [pepoíêken] another.

So the becoming to itself
is turned and filled,
born toward itself gazing, &
this is the Nous.
& the-standing-towards-that,
the Being of itself she made, as her view
towards itself is Nous.

As it stood towards itself, that it may see,
out of the same nous it becomes and Is.
This one
now being such as that one,
The likeness [tà hómoia] creates the potency [dúnamin],
pouring out the many
– and this image is of itself –
just as before

the prime of itself poured out.
& out of the substance [tês ousías] this energeia
Is the Soul, the becoming of that abiding
& so the Nous-of-the-abiding-before-itself
has become.
Yet not abiding she creates, but
Motioned she is born
a phantom [eídôlon].

However looking there, whence born,
she becomes full,
Advanced into another motion her contrary she engenders ,
a phantom of herself, sensation [aísthêsin],
the nature [phúsin] within natural things [en toîs phutoîs].

& not one thing before itself has been hung up, or cut off.
For this reason
it appears that the upper Soul comes
all the way into natural things.
For in any way she comes,
as if something of herself is in natural
things.

But surely not all of her is in natural things,
but her coming
into being [gignoménê] in natural things
is in this way,
as far & so much as she advanced downward,
into the sub-stasis [hupóstasis]
her other
creating in her going out

and her eagerness [prothumía] for
what’s worse.
Then that before this,
that coming right out of the Nous,
Allows the Nous to abide in itself.

[the Greek text, édition Kirchhoff]

Why Plotinus?

Some recent posts on panpsychism, Spinoza and the such had me returning to the Ur-panpsychist, as least as I read the history of the thought. It was Plotinus who helped structure the very influential, non-dualistic, Neo-Platonist Christian theology of Augustine, to some degree safeguarding from heresy the conception of an ontology of degrees of Being throughout the Medieval ages and the Renaissance. But Plotinus is dramatically under-read, especially in view of his pivotal, and quite influential position within the history of philosophy. Part of this problem has I believe been due to the translation of his work, his writings/lectures compiled and edited by his student Porphry, The Six Enneads. This is not to say that the translations are poor (there are several recent translations out after a historical dearth), but rather that for me they often still grasp at something in the text emphasizing the wrong, or at least importune, threads. They can either verbosely, or somewhat sterilely isolate the “concept” in the writing, and ignore the texture of it, the dexterity and one might say, the luminosity.

For those interested in the history of panpsychism the above is a translation of a passage that is quite important to many of the thinkers that follow. One may recognized immediately aspects of Hegel (reflexivity to the One), Spinoza (radiating degrees of causal dependence upon the One), and even Deleuze (that things that will be “runs through” the One) and Badiou (how Being is created via the Nous) in the framing of the emanation of Being from the Hen. I hope to discuss some of these in future posts, as they are quite intriguing. I present this passage precisely because, although the Enneads is quite long (more than a 1,000 pages in some editions), it may all really come down to this passage (and a few others). If one grasps this, one grasps a whole historical thread of though stretching nearly 2000 years to the present, a thread that has repeatedly dipped beneath the fabric which is has sewn, only to appear again.

Also, this short passage allows one to deal with metaphysics straight on, in a condensed, small space, to try to take it whole and see what one can draw from it. One asks often, what good is metaphysics? Perhaps with this short passage (and another I hope to post), we can see what is being proposed, and even look to what it means for our very lives, the way that we look at and solve problems.

Notes on the Translation

Obviously, I put it into verse. The purpose of this is several fold. The first that the Greek itself if quite condensed, as the language tends to be, but also as the philosopher can push it; and poetry actually is probably the best formal approximation of this condensation of meaning and effect. The verse form forces a reader to pause and consider the kerneling of phrases, just as the Greek would require. In this sense, the line breaks hopefully serve to translate the relationship between the ideas present such that mere prose could not. In this vein I also tried to steer clear of excessive explication within the text itself. Translators of philosophy in Greek often “fill in” the meaning that they think is implied by word-use and word-choice, in effect erasing the fullness of what is being invoked. (With Plato this is disastrous.) Where the implications are open I tried to leave them as open as possible so that one could continue to think along with the writer.

As to the text itself there are several basic decisions I made:

To Hen: This is Plotinus’ crowning concept, and is universally translated as The One. Quite accurately of course. But because “hen” is also the aorist (past) participle of the verb “hiemi” which means anything from  “to set in motion,” “to hurl,” “to let flow, burst” even in context “to speak”, the Hen is The One, but also The-Having-Set-In-Motion. To restrict its conception merely to the former is to dramatically cleave its implicit, associative meaning. Even this simple translation difficulty I think has lead to a misreading of the very core conception of Plotinus’ view. So when thinking about the Hen, think of both a Oneness, but also a flowing out, an activity.

arche: Is both the principle and the origin. It is something like a foundation, but is more active.

(phuton) phutois: I translate this “natural things” instead of “plants” as many rightful translators do (as in the section that follows he makes the distinction between phuton and the animal without logos, the latter having the power of sense-perception. This is because I believe that Plotinus is not thinking of this plant or that, but rather of the entire profusion of “growth” that is shown in both plants and animals, the raw aspect of what we regularly call and imply by “Nature” per se. This is an important translation point for the general argument of panpsychism that I believe that Plotinus holds.

Nous: Of course this is “mind” often translated as “intellect”.

autos, etc.: Plotinus uses the reflexive to great degree here, and in more than one gender. I direct the meaning toward this itself, himself, herself, though it can also mean “the same” with obvious philosophical precedent.

There are several other points of translation where I differ from the main line, so perhaps as always, check with other translations to get the full spectrum of possible readings. For instance, I take care to maintain the shifts in gender accomplished here, where Plotinus moves from neuter Hen, to a masculine progenitor to a female engendering and a female soul, always looking back upon the neuter, itself.

The translation is not meant as anything to be taken as authoritative, but rather an experiment in form so as to largely provide a gateway for those interested in Plotinus who have not read him directly, and perhaps an occasion for thought, for those who have studied him more closely.

Finding Spinoza: The Genetics of Reading

How Larval Subjects found Him

I really enjoy when philosophy is written about like this, as a human experience with context in the world:

That aside, when I was younger, perhaps around the age of 15 or 16, I discovered Spinoza’s Ethics. I am not sure why I found myself so obsessed with this book at that time in my life. That year I read the Theologico-Politico Treatise, the Ethics, and the Treatise on the Endmendation of the Intellect. These are certainly strange texts for a 15 year old filled with raging hormones to become obsessed with. Perhaps it was that Spinoza dared to say “One” in his description of the universe. I have always gravitated towards holistic conceptions of the universe, fascinated with the interdependence or interconnection of things among one another. That same year I found myself [trying to] read Whitehead’s Process and Reality, and Leibniz’s Monadology and Discourse on Metaphysics for similar reasons. Although I had standard teen fascinations with existentialism, devouring Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Nausea, Heidegger’s Being and Time, and the standard works by Camus, Kafka, and Dostoyevsky, my real love was these wild and wooly metaphysicians. Spinoza, Leibniz, and Descartes motivated me to buckle down and actually learn mathematics so that I might read them.

Yet in addition to Spinoza’s beautiful holistic and process oriented metaphysics, I was, no doubt drawn to his work due to the magnificent appendix to Part I of the Ethics, and the biting and corrosive critique of religious belief in the Theologico-Politico Treatise. The time was the early 90s. I lived in a small coal mining town in Ohio (having lived all over the country). At this time the Religious Right was in full ascension- quietly growing in power and pervading the country without anyone really knowing. I was raised in a rather secular family. Although my father was raised my Southern Baptist and my mother was raised devoutly Catholic- the Bryant boys had, like all good Southern Baptists, been forbidden to date Catholics, but let’s be honest, who can resist those uniforms? -and although I was raised in the Episcopal church (they cut the difference), religion was never a real presence, as far as I can recall, in our family. Yes, I went to church on Sundays- I think -but I don’t really remember much if anything about it beyond groaning when I had to get out of bed and sneaking out of the services under the alibi of having to use the restroom so that I could explore the enticing forests around the church in New England and in Ohio; primitive feeling, primordial forests with grounds covered with ferns, muted sounds of animals, the greening of green speaking to some hidden vitality, and towering pines all about. A much better form of worship, I think.

I remember digging in the garage where all the philosophy books from my mother’s college classes were keep, on these large, metal, ratcheted, industrial shelves, where boxes of clothing and unneeded objects filled the standing space, and a small bulb burned high and incompletely to fill the room. These were text books I would rumage through to occupy my bored, slightly intrigued mind. I was maybe 10 years old, and probably had gone through some of the compilation texts, no doubt thumbing randomly after drawing them back to my bedroom, when I came upon Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I was certainly in no place to understand it, but I vividly recall when I got the worn, handsized volume alone – I can still see the thread-fray at the maroonish binding – how extraordinary the first paragraphs were. They were like heiroglyphics, wherein you know that each substantive word meant something, that the entire meaning of the paragraph, the page, turned upon each word, snaking. And if you figured out what that word/term meant, the place it took, one understood just what such a paragraph, such a page, could do. That was when I came to love philosophy. When I knew it to be more condensed, more word-sure poetic than even a poem, each phrase catalevering higher.