The Problem with Spinoza’s Panpsychism

Stones that Think, Imagine and Have Ideas?

Any serious confrontation of Spinoza’s supposed Panpsychism runs right up against some very hard ground, in particular how his ontological descriptions – meant not only for human beings, but for all of existence – are to be taken on down the scale, all the way down to the smallest, micro-existential level. By virtue of how Spinoza defines modal expressions of Substance it seems that from the widest of views anything that does exist would in some sense “think” ; that is, due to Spinoza’s parallelism, even the most minute speck of dust, every tumbling molecule or atom, is an expression of Idea which seeks to preserve itself and stays in existence out of this striving. Yet, when we apply the very terms and analysis which Spinoza applies to the weakness of human cognition, the descriptions which reveal the aspects of man that push him further down the chain so to speak, making a human being more passive, more in-animate, these are very difficult things to apply to animal, then plant, then mineral, and then even lower forms of modal expression. For what would it mean for a Table to possess inadequate Ideas? Or a fishpond? And while we might be tempted to see that higher animals like wolves and giraffes could be dominated by Spinoza’s first form of knowledge, confused, Imaginary Knowledge, condemned merely to a world of images and association traces, is this how we imagine earthworms to be, or bacteria, or even more incomprehensibly, viruses? The categories that Spinoza gainfully employs to criticize the human condition, when brought over to all of existence, simply seem to break down. And the difficulty arises when this disintegration of terms comes to grip with the genuine decentralization of human beings that is meant to guide his ontology in the first place. What we are looking for are descriptions of the variability of human capacities which can also be applied to all things in existence, and these Spinoza does not seem immediately to give. In part this is because he is in particular concerned with the nature of Human Bondage, and so his conceptualizations are in some sense decidedly human (are we to talk about the Passions of the Animus 0f the cactus, the love, jealousy and hatred of the sedimentary rock?) And partly this could be because although Spinoza certainly had a vitalist-like conception of the world as one huge animate expression of Substance/God, in which every part vied with every other part, becoming free only through rational cohesion, how this played out beneath the human level really was not of much importance to him. Man was to use the environment for his benefit, just as man uses man.

So how are we to conceive of the mental actions of the sub-human, and sub-animal in Spinoza’s own terms if we cannot readily apply concepts such as the Inadequate Idea or Imaginary Knowledge to a piece of slate? The answer to this I think comes back down to Spinoza’s definition of the body which I have been dwelling on here for some days. I’ll reprint it.

Definition: When a number of bodies of the same or different magnitude form close contact with one another through the pressure of other bodies upon them, or if they are moving at the same or different rates of speed so as to preserve an unvarying relation of movement among themselves, these bodies are said to be united with one another and all together to form one body or individual thing, which is distinguished from other things through this union of bodies.

or, as Curley translates the important middle phrase: “that they communicate their motion to each other in a fixed manner”.

If we begin with this notion of Body as any continuing and communicative ratio of parts (or even the sedimentary-like vision of parts pressed close to each other, as Spinoza opens the description); understanding that for Spinoza this activity, this persistence must be mental activity as well as extensional activity we are forced to ask, What is it about these relations themselves that give us to see them as somehow “thinking”? What does it mean for a bowling ball to think?

Not Representation

I think we go a long way towards our answer if we give up the notion that for Spinoza an Idea Represents  ssomething, for we really are at a loss if we want to say that the internal relations in my pencil are in some way representing (that is, re-presenting) some aspect of the world to the pencil. (I think a great disservice was done to philosophy when it made its turn toward seeing the Scholastic notion of Idea as a Representation, ssomething that I think even comes to a wrongful interpretation of what Descartes meant by Idea.) So let us explore a bit what kinds of things that can be happening inside a taken to be inanimate object which might in some sense give a clue for how Spinoza conceived of Idea. What is a viable connection between the inside of things, and the outside of things that presents some kind of traction to the mental?

Well, let us take a deeply over simplified model, one that will emphasize the notion of border that seems implicit in Spinoza definition. Take an object to be something like a water-balloon. If we strike the balloon with our finger there is a certain reverberation of internal effects which we might say “reflect” the external or at least boundary-bound event. That is, as the balloon wobbles back into relative stability of form, there are a transfer of balances between parts within the balloon which are at least roughly coherent unto each other. Any one event within the baloon, or even subset of them does not so much represent the finger strike at it surface, as somehow express it unto the very nature of its internal relations. This is, in my thinking, a semiotic relation, an indication (I use the term semiotic not in its strict Peircian nor Saussaurian Idealist sense, but in a pre-modern Augustinian fashion). This semiosis indicates to the internal relations a consequences of changes (differences), but also is somehow oriented towards the boundary of the balloon. I think something of this is required to give sense to the cognitional capacities of the bodies so defined by Spinoza. It is not that the ideational changes (that is to say, recursively organized semiotic differences) represent  the world to the Body, so much as they indicate to the internal relations themselves how to react, a chain of reactions which in turn can be seen as a reaction to events external to the body. For Spinoza it key to see that the horizon-defined semiotic differences are determined, internally referential actions (ratios which preserve)…thus, Ideas are best seen as mental actions  of the physical, not representations per se.

This internalization of ideational changes, the way that a body can only “perceive” the outside world with reference to awareness of its internal states is precisely what Spinoza has in mind when he says of human beings:

The human Mind does not know [cognosit] the human Body itself, nor does it know that it exists, accept through Ideas of affections by which the Body is affected, E2p19

The object of the idea constituting the human Mind is the Body, or a certain mode [certus modus] of Extension which actually exists, and nothing else, E2p13

It seems that this essential notion of mental closure, in parallel to physical closure is something that Spinoza would take to be all the way down the ladder in the order of things, for Spinoza, which work from the most active to the least. In keeping with this “affections” [affectio] are the material changes within a body, and their Ideas are their semiotic relations to each other (and relation to all materiality in general). Necessarily, though the semiotic relations which help constitute the body as a closed body may be adequate to that purpose, that mind, they are inadequate to the preservation of that body in all conditions it may and will find itself in (thus, there is an answer to the disputable question  whether human beings, or any finite being, can hold completely adequate Ideas: in a certain sense complete adequacy simply does not make sense as a semiotic, finite relation).

So what is the difference at the level of the take to be inanimate between an Inadequate Idea (semiotic relation) and a slightly more Adequate Idea? For Spinoza the question is of the nature of preservation. I think it safe to say that for Spinoza the internal relations of stones and fingernail clippings are essentially Inadequate, the inadequacy a reflection of their fundamental passivity to the world. Yet, these things are also things that in some sense press their existence forward. They do not act in any intentional way (showing beliefs, or fears, or even needs), but they to persist in time, both against countervailing forces, and with forces sympathetic to their cause. This calls to mind one of the more overt panpsychic passages of Medieval Philosophy, Augustine’s notion that each thing is cognizant in that it finds ways to preserve itself:

For if we were cattle, we should love the carnal and sensual life, and this would be our sufficient good; and when it was well with us in respect of it we should seek nothing else. Again, if we were trees, we could not, of course, be moved by the senses to love anything; but we would seem to desire, as it were, that by which we might become more abundantly and bountifully fruitful. If we were stones or waves or wind or flames or anything of that kind, we should indeed be without both sensation and life, but we should still not lack a kind of desire for our own proper place. For the weight of bodies is, as it were, their love, whether they are carried downwards by gravity or upwards by their lightness. For the body is carried by its weight wherever it is carried, just as the soul is carried by its love. – The City of God, Book 11 chapter 28

Adequacy to Landscape

Upon this gradation of capacity to act Spinoza has grafted a more precise internally semiotic notion of degrees of freedom. It is not just that things find their place in the world, and thus persist, but that the internal relations within a thing express a degree of freedom possible for that thing (whatever its boundary), and thus that bodies as their in an increase in the adequacy of their semiotic relations become more powerful, more active entities. (As a sidenote, we can see something of this notion expressed in Stuart Kauffman’s Complexity Theorist take on the self-organizing systems of closure that gave rise to life, not a connection I wish to pursue here though.)

But the question remains, just how are we to conceive of changes in adequacy in internal semiotic relations at the inanimate and then near inanimate level? If we take clue from how Spinoza has divided up imaginary knowledge from rational knowledge, perhaps we can get a sense of this. Despite Spinoza all out and categorical denial of contingency, it is very much the case that a particular body can and does have completely random experiences of increases of power (and hence Ideational adequacy, and thus Joy). This can happen in two ways. One is that a body may find itself in local circumstances which favor it. Suddenly the finite internal relations which have thus far been preserving it suddenly are even more adequate to their local environment (one has a strong sense that Spinoza has presaged a logic of Darwinism here, several hundred years early). The second, in the same vein, is a change in the nature of the internal relations themselves which makes them more adequate to local environments. In either case there is no necessity that the advantage be preserved…it can be pure happenstance…a dust ball might fall into a whole corner of dust balls in an abandoned house. But the way that Spinoza understand it, there are ways to pursue this advantage, either through improvements of the internal semiotic relations (an increase in the adequacy of ideas), a change that would lead to an orientation toward more favorable environments (including the shaping of one’s current environment). In this regard, rivers that shape riverbeds, gene populations which carve out ecosystems, seem to possess systematic increases in an adequacy of internal relations to their environments. There is a strong sense that their determinations of what is outside of them are expressive of determinations which are inside of them. How far down the ladder we can push this, I am unsure, but someone like Kauffman would tell you that the autocatalytic processes which formed the simplest of organic compounds exhibit both organizational closure, and also shaping effects upon their environments, something which seems to suggest a very elemental kernel of an increase in semiotic relations at the heart of even the most random of our material processes (at least in our material history).

Adequacy to Totality?

But Spinoza wants to go beyond questions of adequacy toward local environments (fitness landscapes), but adequacy as per the Total (which for human beings or any other finite body serves as a kind of aysmptotic limit which principally can never even come close to being reached). For this he provides a material/numerical vector by which we might be able to judge  the relative sufficiency of internal semiotic relation of any particular body:

Whatever predisposes to the human Body that it is affected in a great number of ways, or renders it capable of affecting external Bodies in a great many ways, is useful to man; the more it renders the Body capable of being affected in a great many ways, or affecting other bodies, the more useful it is; on the other hand, what renders the Body less capable of these things is harmful. E4p38

Now interestingly there is nothing in this proposition which guards against the contingent local manifestation of destructive forces. One could conceivably increase the number of ways your body can be affected (or affect) at a moment in time it would be advisable not to be susceptible to those influences, at the ludicrous level, taking a Joyful walk outside just when a piano was falling. And there is some question on just how to read this numericity. Does a monk in seclusion mediating increase the number of ways he/she can be affected…perhaps? But in terms of the inanimate/animate nexus, it is a general call toward the real consequences of complexity (a multiplicity of folds, if we literalize it). The cockroach might not be a very complex creature as far as animals go, but its grouped expression nested into all the worlds environments might be quite so; a water molecule may only be able to be affected or affect other things in a few ways, but rich is the number of ways that water itself interacts and manifests shaping the world to give two open questions of the application of this definition.

You can recognize in this Spinoza offering a development of Plato’s own definition of Being as offered in the Sophist (the dunamis/capacity to affect or be affected), and Bateson’s own modern cybernetic “difference that makes the difference” definition of information or Latour’s idea of gradated and Networked Being.

In terms of Spinoza, it seems to be that deeply inadequate semiotic relations are those which hardly register events beyond them so as to be fundamentally passive to those events, subject to any random occurrence whatsoever, yet still adequate enough to have preserved the body, the thing (res) to that point. The expressive conditions of its internal relations are in enough harmony with the relations around it so as to maintain its existence in harmony (opening up the question which Spinoza is always turning to, by virtue of what do we isolate a body from the forces and patterns of others). Under these descriptions it seems possible to stake that all things do think, that is there is some internal relation of which we find things composed that preserves itself in sympathy to events outside of it under a variety of circumstances of increasing complexity and self-reference, much of it involving the mutuality of coherences between bodies which become more and more communicated. This is something of what I believe Spinoza means when he thinks about the whole world being a vital and coherent expression of Nature, God, Substance.

It is not really for Spinoza that we are all One, with an emphasis on the meld of Great Oneness (if that were so he would have written mystical treatises), and this Hegel got wrong. It is rather the incredible distinctiveness, the concrete contours of our separations, under the logic that anything that separates must also necessarily join. His determinative reading of causation and immanation is an attempt to locate the joints of Being that when recognized lead to real shifts in power, in a real world (not imagined to be later or beyond rewards). A change in power is immediately its own reward and consequence. If the world is panpsychic for Spinoza, and I do believe that it is, it is because each and every little thing, each speck of Being is something with which we have the potential to combine (and not just instrumentally observe or detachedly use). The reason why things think for Spinoza is linked to his emphasis that for a person to think is to materially change yourself. When you think a thought you are changing your brain, your body (we don’t often think like this). And when we enjoin a material thing, place it our hand, press its button, flip its pages, we are necessarily joining to its mentality. Things think because we in thinking are akin to them, such that we cannot be kept apart.

The “ens reale” and the “ens rationis”: Spelling Out Differences

The Pleroma and Creatura: Bateson

Gregory Bateson, a father of modern cybernetic has some very important things to say about the nature of differences, and has been fruitfully appropriated in any number of ways, primarily due to his very powerful defintion of Information as “a difference that makes a difference”. But it should be noted that Bateson’s approach to differences is one that drives a very firm, dualistic line between Mind and Matter, one that follows Carl Jung’s categories of the Pleroma and Creatura:

The significance of all this formalization was made more evident in the 1960s by a reading of Carl Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead, of which the Jungian therapist Jane Wheelwright gave me a copy. I was at the time writing a draft of what was to be my Korzybski Memorial Lecture and began to think about the relation between “map” and “territory.” Jung’s book insisted upon the contrast between Pleroma, the crudely physical domain governed only by forces and impacts, and Creatura, the domain governed by distinctions and differences. It became abundantly clear that the two sets of concepts match and that there could be no maps in Pleroma, but only in Creatura. That which gets from territory to map is news of difference, and at that point I recognized that news of difference was a synonym for information. (Angels Fear, Introduction)

For Bateson, the separation is one of processes, and not one of Substance like it is for Descartes, but all the same, it imposes a strict heirarchy which privileges the mental over the physical. A stone simply is restricted to the domain of the Pleroma, while any differential making process, even the simplest of biotic discrimination is given over to the realm of Creatura:

It is, of course, true that our explanations, our textbooks dealing with nonliving matter, are full of information. But this information is all ours; it is part of our life processes. The world of nonliving matter, the Pleroma, which is described by the laws of physics and chemistry, itself contains no description. A stone does not respond to information and does not use injunctions or information or trial and error in its internal organization. To respond in a behavioral sense, the stone would have to use energy contained within itself, as organisms do. It would cease to be a stone. The stone is affected by “forces” and “impacts,” but not by differences. (Mind and Nature, Chapter II)

To most of us this is a perfectly acceptable, perhaps even obvious designation. There seems a powerful instinct that tells us that a stone simply is not in any sense like an amoeba, which is to say, what a stone does (if it does anything at all) is somehow categorically different than what an amoeba does (though both can kill you). The difficulty arises for anyone who wants to theorize in a way that does not privlege the Mind over Matter. This begins perhaps as a desire to not privlege human realities over animal realities, and then ultimately to give over to even the animate some kind of “right”, some play in the game in determining what is “real” and thus “what matters”. When Mind (in some form of Idealism) becomes the heirarchial source point of what matters, somehow this all slips back into a remote solipsism of the merely human world (and then even, the Western world, or the American world, or white upper middle class academic world). If one instanitates a fundamental primacy between the Pleroma and Creatura, wherein the Creatura determine the status of the Pleroma in hierarchical, a priori fashion, something of the Mind/Body, Spirit/Matter dichotomies that have long haunted philosophy are dragged forward (often with explicit political consequences of such binarism).

The Difference that makes a/the Difference

For this reason one must keep in mind the essential metaphysical base from which Bateson is employing his work (Marx makes just such fateful Nature/Culture distinction from the start as well).  If one is going to grant equal footing to the non-human (and non-biotic) actor in the world, this essential binary must be categorically undone. As long as one has divided up the entire world into realms, one realm becomes paramount, and the line merely shifts.

What Bateson has in mind when he speaks of “a difference that makes a difference” is the way that information connects what is “out there” in the world to the “in here” of a cybernetically organized system. To put it most simply, the internal relations within a system form a boundary which is sensitive to only particular kinds of disturbances (a blind person does not turn his head to see someone waving to him from across the street, a tick does not drop from its leaf when a breeze blows). The difference out there in the world that makes a difference in here, is for Bateson the difference that makes a difference, it connects inside to outside.

But out of a completely unintended difference in the way that Bateson has framed his definition of Information, I would like to use his notion of difference differently. Because I am not interested in giving priority of mind over matter, I am less concerned with the way that mental systems exercise dominance over physical structures (picking out what matters so as to eventually predict and control it), I am not going to follow the breadcrumbs of difference from outside to inside. This is far too Idealist for me. Rather, I want to see if we can talk about differences in such a way that the things a stone is doing, and the things that an amoeba are doing, are in someway signficantly related (and such that the actions of each are given footing).

Bateston states his defintion of Information in at least two ways in separate works.

1. A difference that makes a difference.

2. The difference that makes the difference.

It might sound trivial, but in the spirit of acknowledging even the smallest of differentiations, of this variation between the definite and indefinite article, I would like to spin out a profound distinction which maps onto a fundamental ontological distinction of Medieval Scholasticism. Much of Scholasticism spent its time trying to iron out the remarkable, but underdeveloped semiotic point that Augustine made, that signs transcend the Culture/Nature dichotomy. There are natural signs, and there are signs of convention. And (natural and cultural) signs are defined as:

“a sign is something which, offering itself to the senses, conveys something other to the intellect,” (Signum … est res praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus, aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire) (Augustine De doctr. chr. II 1, 1963, 33)

Attempting to work out the full consequences of an ontology of the semiotic which transcended the Nature/Culture barrior, Scholastic philosophy realized that there must not only be material signs “out there”, but also mental signs “in here,” and much ado was made on how to connect the two (until in modern times gradually questions of signification became a questions of representation…many like to put this at the foot of Descartes, or even the Locke, but it is not altogether clear that this is the case).

A product of this debate was the two classifications Ens Reale and Ens Rationis. A real thing, and a rational thing. These are treated in various ways, often as the difference between “physical being” and “logical being”, but I want to speak much more broadly, without precision. An ens reale is a thing in the world, and an ens rationalis is a thing in the mind. Is here that I want to propose a loose though hopefully enlightening homology.

1. A difference that makes merely a difference  is an ens reale.

2. The difference that makes the difference is an ens rationis.

Leaving behind Bateson’s use of information as the thing that connects inside to outside, as an ontologist I want to speak of differences in their variety of states. Following Plato’s initial definition of being as the capacity for anything to affect or be affected, as found in the Sophist, the general sense of the reality of differences is that anything that makes a difference in general, “a difference” has being, and is ens reale. But any difference that is strictly internal  to a closed horizon relation of parts, is an ens rationis, that is which is to say, it is a difference that makes the difference, recursively. In this way, and event out there in the world, perhaps lightning strike, is an ens reale difference insofar as it is not taken with in an overarching internal circuit of relations, and its effect upon the human organism, that actual internal differences which are within the horizon of person, are each ens rationis. It is important to keep track though, that every ens rationis is an ens reale. The question is: Is every ens reale also an ens rationis. I think they are.

Spinoza’s Bodies as Certain or Fixed Ratios

As I mentioned previously, Spinoza’s defintion of Body is far more rich that it is often taken to be. More than simply a billiard ball image of circulating motions (which is how it appears at first glance), his panpsychic metaphysics grants some degree of mind (Idea) to any extensional expression, such that even the simplest of bodies in composite have a foothold in the mental. Here is the definition in bodily terms:

Definition: When a number of bodies of the same or different magnitude form close contact with one another through the pressure of other bodies upon them, or if they are moving at the same or different rates of speed so as to preserve an unvarying relation of movement among themselves, these bodies are said to be united with one another and all together to form one body or individual thing, which is distinguished from other things through this union of bodies. E2p13a2d

It is quite interesting that Spinoza finds what separates out one body or individual from another is a certain or fixed ratio, certa ratione. It seems safe to say that not only living things preserve for Spinoza through a certa ratione, but also taken to be inanimate things. We have here the potential for categorical description that crosses through the Pleroma/Creatura divide that Bateson privleges. The ultimate question is: Do abiotic wholes which do preserve through a certa ratione, also achieve within that horizon of “individual” an order of differences that allows us to say that they are each ens rationis.

It is hard to know exactly what Spinoza has in mind: when he describes this perpetuation of communicated motion, for instance, is it a different sense of body than that brought about by external causes in the earlier part, When a number of bodies of the same or different magnitude form close contact with one another through the pressure of other bodies upon them, or it is simply the internal specification of those external forces? What we can do is use the definition as tellingly as possible. What I suggest is that differences that are internal to an object or body as Spinoza sees it, are differences that are indicative of a mutuality of effects. A change in this part of the body effects a change in another part of the body, and then another, and so forth, such that the whole is still maintained. And there need not be the cybernetic closure that Bateson enjoys with Creatura. The entire world would seem vectored with communicated balances between bodies that however briefly or enduringly remain in ratio with each other. These mutuality of communications I hold is the threshold for an ens reale to be an ens rationalis. The cybernetic closures which map a territory are certainly different kinds of internal organizations of horizons, but rocks, breeze patterns, neuron rhythms, photon pathways, planetary equalibriums, dust corners, electron loops, all possess an internal coherence of differences which is preserved, and in which a single difference (I would say) semiotically indicates consequences of internal coherence. Stones “think”.

Stone Cognitum

There is a perspective of stones, one that is not reducible to the way in which differences in stones make differences upon us. In this sense, as Graham Harman says in Latourian fashion, stones translate other stones when they encounter each other. (I do not see how such a claim can be separated out from panpsychism.) The internal relations that make up a stone (semiotic, of each an ens rationalis), are also each an ens reale (a difference that makes a difference) which can make a difference that makes the difference to us (or some other internal set of relations), is itself also a difference as ens realis.

There are several interesting ways to proceed from this, but the one that I would like to take up follows through from my last post on Spinoza, and that is that any ens realis (a difference that makes a difference), is not only already a difference that makes the difference in the internal expression of Substance as a modal whole, and thus an ens rationalis. But it is already caught up in any number, perhaps an infinite number, of ens rationalis horizoned closures. In this way, differences which are semiotic to an internal whole of differences, are also because real, differences that are internal to a plethora of bodies that cross cut that body. That “fixed ratio” is tugged at from any number of other “fixed ratio” directions, as parts of its coherence respond not only to an external horizon of differences, but also to their participant share in a cross-sectioning fixed ratio, communication whole. Any ens rationalis is Semiotically Conjoined to a variety of mentalizations.

Conjoined Semiosis: A “Nerve Language” of Bodies

For this reason, it is not just that the totality of coherent differences that make up a body are occluded from us, selected out by our cybernetic, ratioed closure, but also that the semiotic investment of those differences is occluded from that body itself, the coherence of its inside/outside closure. And the same is said of our own body (bodies, really).

There is another aspect which should be grasped so that we don’t fall too deeply into any Subject/Object binary. And this is something I will develop later. Because ultimately an entia rationales closure is itself a perspective, when one or many entia rationales closures come into supportive relationships to each other they can be read as forming new bodies. This is to say, when we come to know something else and intimately relate to it in a bodily way, the boundary between us and it at least is semiotically problemized (if we seek to keep them completely distinct). Thus, it is not merely the case that the “kernel” of relations of an object we engage is kept from us, like a forever retreating shadow, but also the case that as we engage an object (an aspect of our environment), we at a very real, semiotic level (that is, at the level of entia rationales), become it.

Thus, as the carpenter uses his hammer, or the lens grinder his grinding lathe, there is a communication of motions which exceed the boundary of bodies, forming one of two (to some degree). (Descartes on the blind man’s cane.) The world is felt, mutually, through the performance union of both bodies. It is for this reason that Tommaso Campanella tells us: To know is to be, cognoscere est esse. This is not a metaphorical transformation of the subject into the object, but rather a real, substantial in-form-ation, binding the two bodies both epistemologically and ontologically, through the ordering of their mutual coherences. If the object of the hammer remains somewhat blind to the carpenter (some of its variety of aspects still hidden), these aspects must be accorded their place within the causal, and hence semiotic, internal relations of the body (body + body). Ultimately, these differences can only be the differences of Conjoined, and thus often silent, Semiotic inherence at the bottom of any entia rationales closure, the way that an ens rationalis is necessarily polyvalent to a variety of cognitioning, and therefore persisting, bodies.

Campanella’s Three Primalities – Potentia, Sapientia, Amor

I would like to post here some commentary text on an almost entirely forgotten metaphysician, one whom in the longest of runs I would like to rehabilitate. He is forgotten, one might say, partly because he was drawfed by the memory of his contemporary Giordano Bruno, who had the historical good fortune to be burned at the stake in the year 1600, marking for many the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of modernity; and even Bruno has nearly been forgotten. Campanella’s thought lies wedged in the twighlight of the proto-modern, embarassingly marred by primatives  of a belief in Natural Magic and an adherance to the authority of the Bible (two fatal sins), yet not systematically Medieval enough to be considered for serious classical study. In the story of modernity as advance, Campanella’s metaphysics and epistemology had fallen into an aporia as deep as the pit of Castel Nuovo. [ A sign that this is quietly changing is perhaps the inclusion of five pages on Campanella’s metaphysics in David Skrbia’s recent Panpsychism in the West (2005)]

Campanella et Spinoza

I post these in part because there is next to nothing available on Campanella’s metaphysics in all of the Internet, a few summations, a critical outline, and little more. What spare literature there is often concentrates on his remarkable biography of imprisonment and torture, or his influential science-fiction political treatise The City of the Sun (even the worthy Stanford Encyclopedia’s entry has but a half paragraph on his opus Metaphysics and its theory of the Primalities). If nothing else, there should be more. But I post them as well because I believe that Campanella has a specific importance for the light he can shed upon the thought of Spinoza, in particular for the contemporary application of Spinoza’s thought. The detailed reasons for these I will not specify here, other than to draw a few comparisons. Both thinkers worked out a synthesis of the divisions that had plagued Scholastic thought, in the end producing a panpsychic view of the world. Both thinkers employed Duns Scotus’s Formal Distinction to a powerful ends. Both thinkers can be positioned unto Descartes’s Cogito ergo sum, bracketing it: Campanella’s Cognoscere est esse, Spinoza’s “the object of the mind is the body as it actually exists”. And both thinkers employed metaphysics that trades upon reading the world in terms of what might be called a degree-of-Being vectorization of power and knowing, understood in utopian terms. It is my view that Campanella’s metaphysics in some sense brings out the unspoken, or rather unemphasized consequences of Spinoza’s thought, in particualr its cybernetic, post-human, assemblage oriented ideas about knowing, sensing, imagining and acting in the world. In short, Campanella’s panpsychism casts a cross-light upon Spinoza’s panpsychism, making more full what the latter is capable of in modern, and post modern times.

The text I quote form is Bernadino Bonansea’s Tommaso Campanella: Renaissance Pioneer of Modern Thought (1969), which is the only rich treatment of Campanella’s philosophy I know of in English. (Campanella’s most significant texts remain untranslated in this tongue.) The subject is Campanella’s notion of the Three Primalities of Being, which he distinguishes formally, just as Spinoza does his two Attributes of Substance. Between these Primalities and Augustine’s posse, nosse, amare  strong parallels can be drawn, parallels that work to an inheritance of a Plotinian conception of the Emanance which understands Being under the analogy of light spreading out through darkness (non-Being), something of which Spinoza himself takes up in the register of the epistemological as he defines falsity as privation. At the very least this affords you to get aquainted with the mind of a philosopher come from a pivotal time in Western thinking.

“Since the constitution of every being can ultimately be reduced to these principles [power, sense, love], which are constantly found in all things prior to any other principles, it follows that power, knowledge [sapientia], and love are truly the proprinciples of being and may be called primalities, first entities (primordia), and pre-eminences of being. Although our knowledge and love are only accidental and transitory, Campanella insists that the primalities are not mere accidents. In effect, not all love, knowledge, and power are said to belong to the essence of things, but only those which are innate and hidden, as it were, in being itself [Metaphysics II 6, 11, 3]. Nor are the primalities physical principles which can be separated from their own effect. On the contrary, they are metaphysical principles inherent in the very effects which they produce. In short, a primality is that by which a being is primarily “essentiated”.…They are not essences, but entities, or “essentialities” of the same essence. Their identity results in a supreme unity: were they not one, they would not have one and the same essence. They might well be called “unalities” of one and the same thing. That the primalities are essentially the same is manifest from the double consideration that they cannot be outside of the essence of things and that the essence of things cannot be without them. For no essence can exist, unless it has the power to be, and also knows and wills its own being [Ibid]…

…Such a process is not one of participation, whereby one primality is shared partially by another, but one of toticipation and coessentialization, so that one primality is totally and essentially communicated into other. To give a concrete example, love proceeds from wisdom [sapientia] and power [potentia], for what is unknown and incapable of being loved cannot be loved. At the same time love already is in wisdom andn power, otherwise it could not proceed from them; for nothing can come from nothing in act, and no being can give to others what it itself does not have. Furthermore, in proceeding from power and wisdom, love does not recede from them. That is to say, even though love proceeds from power and wisdom, these latter do not cease to be essentially love, any more than love is essentially power and wisdom.

[Campanella:] “How it is possible, it may be asked, that they [the coprinciples of being] exist together at one and the same time, and that they proceed one from another? If power is both wisdom and will, how will it be able to produce wisdom and will? My answer is that it produces then because it already has them. If it did not have them within itself, it would be able to produce them. But if it already has them, why should it give what it already has? To this I reply that it does not give it to others, but to itself. But why and how does it give to itself what it already possesses within itself? My answer is that it does not give to itself in order to be what it is giving, but in order to be what it is given.

Yes, [one may insist], if it itself already was that which is given, why would it still have to be produced? I reply to this by saying that just as it always was, so it always was being produced. For this is exactly [the kind of] being that proceeds from another being: because it is not by itself, it is necessary that it also be given and produced by the producing subject.

But what is the reason for not being by itself? My answer is: it is not because of any external being, but because being as such a nature that it contains both that which proceeds and that from which it proceeds without receding. It is thus that being is integrated as a whole.

Metaphysics II, 6, 11, 9

“A…second difference among the primalities involves their specific entity [a first difference, is a difference of origin from each other], since the ratio of one primality is different than the ratio of the other two. This difference, Campanella remarks, is not great enough to justify a real distinction, but on the other hand it is not so negligible that it can be accounted for by a mere distinction of reason. The only type of distinction that would account for such a difference among the primalities is Scotus’s formal distincdtion ex natura rei, in as much as they are not three different things but three different realities of the same thing. This distinction, while providing an objective basis for our concepts of the primalities as distinct entities, does not distroy the essential unity of being. It is precisely to save the objectivity of the primalities and the unity of being that Campanella the Scotus formal distinction.

In closing the discussion of the nature and mutual relationship of the primalities, Campanella seizes the opportunity to make an earnest appeal, both to Scotists and Thomists, to desist from their centuries old dispute about the primacy of intellect or will. For just as radical will [amor?] is not superior to radical intellect [sapientia], so intellect is superior to will, nor will to power, the three primalities of being.

Beings exist not only because they have the power to be and know that they are, but also because they love [their own] being. Did they not love their own being, they would not be so anxious to defend it, but would allow it to be destroyed immediately by their opponent [i.e. non-being]. They would not seek the friendship of beings helping to keep themselves in existence, nor would they distain their enemies or generate a being similar to themselves in which to be preserved. All things would either be chaos or they would be utterly destroyed. Therefore love, not otherwise than power and wisdom, seems to be a principle of being as well as of its preservation, operation and action. (Metaphysics II, 6, 10, 1)

(Tommaso Campanella: Renaissance Power of Modern Thought, Bonansea, 147-149)

I hope in the future to develop the wider conceptual bridgings between this last pre-Cartesian thinker, and the first post-Cartesian one, hinted at above. As a starter though I would like to put forth the unargumentative suggestion that Campanella in his three Primalities divided up the same thing that Spinoza divided up in his two Attributes, and the conatus. In a purely homological fashion, Campanella’s Power, Sense and Love can be compared to Spinoza’s real world Power, Adequate Ideas and Joy; or, to make another point of interpretation, the standing of the conatus which is the essence of a modal expression for Spinoza, achieves a certain coherent relevance, as essence, when the two Attributes (themselves the essence of Substance) and the conatus third is put in juxtaposition to the Three Primalities, a comparison which brings forth the affective capacities of bodily knowing, what we call sensing: ideational things not only think, they sense, a necessary tenet of panpsychism.

Key to this may fall to Campanella’s claim “Action is the act of the agent insofar as it extends itself into the recipient” (Real. phil. epi. p.30) Actusque extensus in patiens est actio.

Many on Panpsychism: The Mind that Abides

 

Professor Skrbina, in response to my thoughts on his book below, writes telling that a new book is due out from Benjamins Publishing in late 2008 or 2009. It has 17 contributors, including Galen Strawson and David Skrbina, who is editing as well. Here is found a synopsis of its proposed collection of essays, and likely contributors:

Mind That Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millennium

Here is a selection from the proposal:

The book then follows with 15 dedicated chapters written by leading-edge thinkers of mind and consciousness. In each case the writer moves beyond a basic defense of panpsychism, and toward new positive theories as they relate to mind, consciousness, and reality. Writings are targeted at a broad audience, with minimal use of jargon, and yet penetrate deeply into the subject matter. Topics covered include mind-body interaction, the physical basis for consciousness, the ‘combination problem’ (on how lower-order minds can combine or merge into higher-order ones), the psychology and phenomenology of panpsychism, and process philosophy perspectives (as per Whitehead and Russell).

 

Panpsychism in the West: From There to Here

Panpsychism: The position that all things, to some degree, think, or cogitate, or experience, or feel

I neglected to note the spur of my interest for the post Spinoza’s Degrees of Being: A History. For some time I had been tracking the sources of Spinoz’a conception of degreess of privation and power, and when I came to read David Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West I was pleasantly surprised to find such an informing history. In it professor Skrbina attempts to locate all historical Western Panpsychic positions, and to show their relation to each other, up to contemporary times.

What was missing in his story I thought was the vital link between Plotinus and Augustine (he would I believe agree), which helped bridge Scholasticism to Neo-Platonism, until Plotinus was retranslated by Ficino in the early Renaissance. This period of history simply remained under-addressed. In my thinking it really is this Plotinus-Augustinian connection which puts Campanella and Spinoza into conceptual relation, and more so, it is the epistemological answer, in particular how the skeptical question is resolved in degrees of being, as degrees of power, that provides the fulcrum of most panpsychic approaches.

The book is highly recommended for those interested in the position of panpsychism, as there really is no contemporary example of such a study. Of note he characterizes the existing contemporary positions to be:

1) Process Philosophy (stemming from Bergson and Whitehead: Hartschorne, Griffin, DeQuincy and Clarke).

2) Quantum Physics approach (Bohm, Hameroff).

3) Information Theory (Bateson, Wheeler and Chalmers).

4) Part-whole hierarchy (Cardano, Koestler, Wilber).

5) Non-linear Dynamics (inspired by Peirce: Skrbina).

6) Real Physicalism (Strawson).

To these I would add a seventh:

7). Neo-Spinozist, Onto-politicism (Deleuze and Guattari, Negri, Hardt, Balibar, Montag, Gatens).

 

A Worm in Cheese

Campanella and Spinoza On Perspective

It has long been my suspicion that Spinoza had read, and has a debt to the much forgotten Tommaso Campanella. There is evidence that Descartes’ most central contributions have in some way be under this influence, and Spinoza’s position indeed is in many ways a response to Cartesianism. But it more than this. There is in the thought of Campanella a particular panpsychic, and cybernetic understanding of what is epistemological, and power, which reads open, and corrects, the overly rationalistic reductive reading of Spinoza’s many propositions.

Here I take up only a tangential connection, one that moves from the sharing of a single, (if common), trope. It does not prove the influence of the one on the other, but at the very least it operates as a happy coincidence, or even an expression of a continuity of Geist, (however delineated), between thinkers and times. This is the figure of the “worm in cheese”.

It was a prevalent image Headly tells us, a part of the “folk culture” of the Late Renaissance, the cosmological idea that we are all severely limited in our perceptions and knowledge, locked within a localization of understanding, surrounded by our food source, on which we blindly feed. But Campanella lifts this picture of the world up to larger purposes, sharpening it to both epistemological and political effect, drawing forth the consequences of such an instructive image.

First, there is his famous sent letter to the Emperor of China. It should be known at first that Campanella really was in a worm-in-cheese predicament. He had endured acute torture at the hands of the Spanish authorities, in which he had to feign, and therefore prove his “madness”, and thus avoid an inquisitional burning at the stake as heretic. And then he had suffered multiple years locked away in the worst dungeon of Italy, chained and manacled in a nearly lightless cell of the formidable Castel San Elmo, where he worked would work free sonnets on bits of paper, and access his prodigious, certainly photographic memory, sketching out his metaphysics. It is a story I really do have write, but it is the not purpose here. Rather, only, if anyone knew what a worm in cheese was, Campanella had a sort of privileged view of the condition.

But back to the letter to the Emperor. Campanella was fast on the idea of restoring in the papacy some sort of universal, indeed Catholic, governance, one that put the whole world into communication with itself, so that there were to be a free flowing of knowledge and sciences that would help liberate men from their ignorance. Ming China, by Campanella’s understanding, had cut itself off from outside influences, and turned itself inward. This is something extraordinary that gives us a piece of the so-called “volcanic” mind of Campanella, that a monk of no importance, under years of imprisonment, would even concern himself with the notion of a world history, and take it upon himself to compose such a letter.

Campanella writes to the Emperor:

Those men [your subjects] are lacking in aspiration; they seem like men but like worms born inside a cheese, who reckon nothing more or better there to be in the world beyond their own cheese from which they are nourished, sustained, hidden, or as worms born in a man’s stomach who know nothing of man, nor his mind, but cocooned away, complacent, not wanting to be disturbed, jealous of their remove. So, oh King, [the monarch of China], you seem to us… Stick your head out beyond your cheese, beyond the stomach of your land (TC-QR, 221).

It is a powerful call somehow, extending far beyond the prison walls, and the walls of history, into history. Campanellla makes use of a similar worm-image, to a different effect in his utopian vision “The City of the Sun”. Here, describing the conceptions of the people of La Cità del Sole, ones who live in a kind of blissful perfection of knowledge, in a city that is shaped with concentric ramparts so that it is the shape of the Solar System:

They [the Solarians] assert two principles of the physics of things below, namely, that the sun is the father, and the earth the mother; the air is an impure part of the heavens; all fire is derived from the sun. The sea is the sweat of earth, or the fluid of earth combusted, and fused within its bowels, but is the bond of union between air and earth, as the blood is of the spirit and flesh of animals. The world is a great animal, and we live within it as worms live within us. Therefore we do not belong to the system of stars, sun, and earth, but to God only; for in respect to them which seek only to amplify themselves, we are born and live by chance; but in respect to God, whose instruments we are, we are formed by prescience and design, and for a high end.

Here we have the more benign, and perfecting simile of the world as an immense and sensate animal, with we but like parasitic worms, feeding on it, but also part of its expression, its system. And lastly, in concert with Campanella’s notion the importance of empirical knowledge, direct experience, the testings of science and observation, come from his study of Telsio, we have another use of the worm-in-cheese metaphor, that expressing the historical linking of observations, the importance of communicability:

Just as namely, through individual perceptions, the mind adds to truth, so too with what belongs to others. Otherwise one would be like a worm in cheese, knowing nothing, except those parts of cheese that touch it. Every narrator, whether by letter, or in mouth stretched, or in movements, a historian is.

And lastly, we come to the worm of Spinoza. Memorably, after writing to the founding secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg, about his arguments and notions of God, as being both a totality and expression of parts, all of which fit together. If we, in our experience on thing or part as a complete entity, this is a kind of selecting out of the whole, from a perspective of ignorance. This he compares to the kind of knowledge that a worm in the blood of the body has, as it goes about bumping into something so vast it has no possibility of understanding. One has to keep mind that Spinoza was an early maker of microscope lenses (attested to be of rather high quality), and it is perhaps likely that he had stared into lenses, looking at blood and the what must have seemed infinitesimally small forms therein.

This was an extraordinary time, when the smallest and the most distant were coming into view (Spinoza would become a companion of Christiaan Huygens, the discoverer of the rings of Saturn, and it is imagined to be likely that he would then look through his telescope too, when they spent time together at Huygens’ country estate). It is said by Colerus, his first biographer, than he would lift his magnifying glass and stare at mosquitoes and flies. All the vastness was opening itself up, and closing in.

Let us imagine, with your permission, a little worm, living in the blood¹, able to distinguish by sight the particles of blood, lymph, &c., and to reflect on the manner in which each particle, on meeting with another particle, either is repulsed, or communicates a portion of its own motion. This little worm would live in the blood, in the same way as we live in a part of the universe, and would consider each particle of blood, not as a part, but as a whole. He would be unable to determine, how all the parts are modified by the general nature of blood, and are compelled by it to adapt themselves, so as to stand in a fixed relation to one another. For, if we imagine that there are no causes external to the blood, which could communicate fresh movements to it, nor any space beyond the blood, nor any bodies whereto the particles of blood could communicate their motion, it is certain that the blood would always remain in the same state, and its particles would undergo no modifications, save those which may be conceived as arising from the relations of motion existing between the lymph, the chyle, &c. The blood would then always have to be considered as a whole, not as a part. But, as there exist, as a matter of fact, very many causes which modify, in a given manner, the nature of the blood, and are, in turn, modified thereby, it follows that other motions and other relations arise in the blood, springing not from the mutual relations of its parts only, but from the mutual relations between the blood as a whole and external causes. Thus the blood comes to be regarded as a part, not as a whole. So much for the whole and the part.

Letter 15 (32), 1662

There are obvious wide-sweeping parallels, none of which create an argument of influence: comparison to worms living in the body, and the locality of perceptions which seal each person off from the rest of existence, and contingency of our immediate sense knowledge. And there is the political character of communications itself, the sharing of descriptions across countries and the globe, and the kind of epistemic building (albeit from a difference in emphasis or even process: Spinoza looked for a rational grasp of “common notions” which joined bodies and minds, Campanella appraised observation and a species of synthetic becoming what one observed), by grasping the larger and larger wholes, of which one is participating. At the very least there is something shared; it is that animate sense that one is within a psychic, sensate thing, when one is in the world, and that knowledge consists in identifying with, and constructing epistemic conjoinings, as part of an over-arching, and yet un-understood entirety. And in this service, a catholic freedom of exchange becomes the nexus for that building of communications, a Renaissance notion of political and ideal creation.

1. A notable annex to this comparison of worms in cheese and worms in blood is Kircher’s microscopic observation that the blood of fever victims was worm-filled:

The “dust” on old cheese was found to be not dust at all but little animals, and swarms of minute worms were discovered tumbling about in vinager (Fontana 1646, Borel 1656, Kircher 1646). Kircher announced that the blood of fever victims also teemed with worms, and there was talk that they infested sores and lurked in the pustules of smallpox and scabies. (Ruestow, 38).

This is likely the main triggering thought in Spinoza’s mind – though I have never seen it noted by scholars – as Oldenburg mentions the very same Kircher’s later work Subterranean World in the previous letter which Spinoza is answering.

Chalmers’ Rough Thoughts On Spinoza and Panprotopsychism

Below is a question and answer over the idea that Spinoza may have been the first to present the idea of a Zombie World, not while considering a logical hypothetical, but in describing our own world, expressed here Does Spinoza present a Zombie World? 

David Chalmers: Interesting. I don’t think that a spiritual automaton world is a zombie world, though. Such a world has consciousness, where a zombie world has none. Perhaps the spiritual automaton world is more like a world with epiphenomenal consciousness, or perhaps it is a world in which consciousness is governed by deterministic laws. I can’t tell for sure from the passages. The link between Spinoza and panprotopsychism is certainly interesting.

Myself: It would depend what you mean by Spinoza’s spiritual automaton world having “consciousness”. Viewed from the totality, it definitely “thinks” as a whole, but it has no “affects” (that is, it would have no qualia) ideas without qualia. Would you hold that things thinking without qualia are still conscious?

David Chalmers: Well, there’s a broad sense of “qualia” in which consciousness requires qualia. But then it’s not obvious that Spinoza’s “affect” means the same as qualia, in this sense.

Myself: I am not sure how one could insist that qualia exist under Spinoza’s description. Affects are either the thoughts (inadequate ideas) we have about the body being in a certain state, or one could say, the body being affected to be in that state (affection), under an inadequate idea. Because God-Substance has no inadequate ideas, it has no affects. There is no way to squeeze qualia in, it would seem. God-Substance (of which everything is just a modal expression) is a thinking-zombie, one huge non-affective expression. That is, God-Substance acts like it thinks (extensionally) and has thoughts (ideationally), but feels nothing. That you and I “feel” things is just an illusion of our inadequate state of being. I say this only because you seemed to deny that Spinoza’s was a zombie world on the basis that there was consciousness in it; but when asked if the thinking of a non-feeling being (Substance) still qualified as consciousness, you suggested that just because Spinoza denies affects, he might not be denying qualia. This would mean that unless someone could argue that Spinoza indeed embraces the reality of qualia, indeed Spinoza’s is a zombie world, a world where Substance “thinks” but is not conscious (has no qualia).

Here is a short essay by Lilli Alanen, (considered here: The Reality of the Affects: Spinoza’s Plotinian Real ), which is a comment on Michael Della Rocca’s essay “Rationalism Run Amok: Representation and the Reality of the Emotions in Spinoza”. In his essay Della Rocca argues that affects themselves are illusions for Spinoza, and he does so in a denial of qualia. Alanen takes on Della Rocca’s position, while also denying qualia for Spinoza, attempting to embrace some reality of what is felt. I think Alanen misses some important points in regards to how Spinoza qualifies “being real”, but in either case, qualia are denied as being held by Spinoza.

This would seem to put Spinoza’s depiction of the world to be a zombie world, under your loose definition of consciousness.

David Chalmers: Thanks for the paper. On a quick look, I don’t see much direct evidence that “affect” is being used as broadly as you suggest. It seems to be used for some fairly limited aspects of consciousness, tied to emotion and to the body. Also, although the author rejects qualia, I suspect that she is using this term in a narrower sense than you, i.e. for nonrepresentational states only (whereas consciousness may well be representational). Of course i am no expert, though.

Myself: I suppose to restate my thoughts: I agree that the author is speaking of non-representational states, but the difficulty comes when assessing Spinoza’s representational states (adequate ideas), and deciding whether to call them “qualia”. If you take “qualia” to be durative in nature, that is coming to and passing away, then I don’t think that Spinoza ideas qualify for this. If you take “qualia” to merely be representations (and necessary absence of feeling or affect), then perhaps yes, there are qualia in Spinoza’s world. But this seems like a very extended use of the term “qualia” for “what it is like” simply would not appear to apply.

 

[correspondence reproduced with professor Chalmers’ permission]

Teiresias and Sophocles resolve Non-Being

 

And I find it so curious, for those that follow Heidegger (and even those of a Phenomenological bent in general, descendents of Brentano’s intentionality thesis), how fully the optical metaphor of “appearance” is embraced, as if this were the only mode of doing, thinking, acting. While it is certain that we, as a species, are a visual creature, to be so dominated by just one trope, just one mode, is striking to me.It recalls something that blind Teiresias says in the Antigone (a play often over-read in terms of presence and exclusion, following Hegel’s appropriation), something I think that en-LIGHT-ens the limits of the optical trope.

Sophocles for Teiresias wrote:

…We came by a common road,

Two-out-of-one seeing. With the blind so

It is this path, out of the fore-leader it moves.

lines 988-991
 

In this way Sophocles unlocks the binary dynamics of non-being. For going forward as a human being is much more tactile, much more omni-sensical, and affective, than any over-riding metaphor of seeing and darkness demand. In this Teiresias talks of how as a blind man he must see through the eyes of the sighted boy who leads him [two out of one seeing], in a way that is combinatory. Thus for those who cannot see [all human beings] this is the only path that there is, a path that literally moves, goes, comes-out-of the one that goes before [ek proegetou]. The “path” literally moves by those that are ahead. Our contact with them is more polyvalent than simple binary being and non-being will allow.

Plotinus, notably, offers similiar combinatory, cybernetic understanding. The notion of vision as knowing leads to a physical synthesis of eyes:

Beholding (theöria) and the beheld (to theõêma) have no boundaries (peras)…For it is not spatially limited (perigegraptai). It is, of course not present in the same way in every soul, since it is not even in a like way in every part of the soul. That is why the charitoteer gives the horses a share of what he sees (myth of ambriosia and nectar, Phaedrus: 247E5-6); and they in taking it obviously would have desired what they saw, for they did not get it at all. And if in their longing they act, they act for the sake of what they long for; and that the beheld and that beholding (Enn. 3.8.5).

If they are two, the knower will be one thing, and the known the other, and contemplation (theõria) has not yet made this pair akin to each other (õieiõsen) (Enn. 3.8.8).

The non-spatial quality of presencing, is taken up in blind man talk of the ubiquity of voice:

…just as if there was a sound filling an empty space (katechousês epêmian), or with an empty space (meta tês erêmias), with men too, and by setting yourself to listen at any point in the empty space, you will recieve the whole sound, and yet not the whole. Enn. 3.8.9)

This does not mean that Being and Non-being should not be discussed, and teased out into the thinnest of their threads. For long as one follows the dominant metaphors of Sight, Appearance, Phenomena, there must be room for Non-Being in the discussion.

 

But any philosophy of presence, appearance and negation, has to take advise from Teiresias’ immanent “by a common road”, a material enfolding of perception, the path out of which grows from its lead and combination. The two-out-of-one seeing.