Graham Harman’s “Evil Twin”, The Quality-Loving Positor

Shadow Jumping

Graham Harman’s embrace of what he takes to be a coin-flip reading of his project begins,

No one can jump over their own shadow, but it’s a feasible reading of me as my own “evil twin” (without the value judgment, of course).

I say, this impossibilty of jumping over one’s shadow notion may point the way forward, for one really can jump over one’s shadow if one simply moves in relation to a new light source (vocabulary set). One may then have a differently oriented shadow, but then understands the solution to such shadow-staring is keeping an eye upon a multiplicity of light sources, and the nature of their varying strengths.

I’m glad that Graham sees the possibilities of this redescription of his work, and love the notion of a philosophy Federation of “Evil Kirks and Spocks.” I say that we embrace somthing of this, but in fine Nietzschean fashion retain the value judgment, the BGE evil of it (if I recall, Evil Spock was able to think himself out of his evil universe, finding common ground with Good Kirk). What I hope is that if indeed Graham is only attempting to save Qualities, and is merely presenting an OOP as a means for a QOP intention, something more is being achieved than flipping a coin around by pointing out this fact. What Nietzsche wants us to know is that the thing that is evil, that seems like the dark side of something, is really its potentiality masked. Without Hegelian pretension, if indeed Graham is seeking to save qualities, and not objects, we can stop asking questions about the exact metaphysical nature of objects, and start asking questions about what is the best way to save, or as I say, ennoble, qualities. It may well be that positing empty, regressing objects IS the best way, that it does more for the stature of qualities than molten postmodern/post-structuralist fantasy, or even another approach, but until we get to the program itself, we can never properly frame the question.

In this way, I am saying more than the common place that makes of everything a coin. Rather, it is if we get to the real, or at least determinative motivation of a philosophical project, its “evil-twin” underside, we can then open up the project to possibilities that a blindness to that underside undershadows. In Graham’s philosophy this limit, as he admits, comes down the occasionalism-like collaspe of objects which fails to account for the nature of their change. What I would say is that it is of the very nature of the armature that Graham has passionately and insightfully constructed, so as to save qualities, that limits the force of their salvation. If he, I and others come to agree, if we make a value judgment that what we are really after is the esteem of qualities, then we can discuss more precisely the failures of esteem in others’ approaches, and invent better strategies for that esteem, rather than simply looking to shore-up and solve what we thought was the central focus of our attention.

Instead of making a nice pair of things, a doppleganger of inseperable concepts, such as those seen in Graham’s wonderfully titled Count Magnus Effect, one proposes a means for satisfying discourse, for finding agreement. There may be some fun in pointing out to others that they are accomplishing one thing when then thought they were accomplishing something else; Nietzsche had tremendous pleasure in this, and modern day Zizek just loves this game. Such a reversal is not really all that valuable unless one returns it to the question of valuation itself. Do we value the same things and just have different projects on how to achieve it? This is not to say that agreement is guaranteed, but at least the nature of disagreement changes.

Campanella: Knowing is Being

The essentializing dyads that Graham expresses himself in, come from a strong Heideggerian genus, retain a certain human-centric heritage which Graham is pushing against. But I suspect that it is the nobility of the quality that keeps Graham on this  side the panpsychist Gate. As I dig like a Latourian engineer attempting to meet up with the tunnel that Graham has dug in the same Ontological mountain, and trace out each of my excavation, and to the best that I can, his own, it is on the question of the salvation of the quality that I think we can find a common ground. What I will propose that instead of instantiating the rights of qualities upon the nothingness of a retreating and empty object, a consideration of Tommaso Campanella’s proto-Cartesian “Cognoscere est esse,” to know is to be. This a core, quality-directed principle which undercuts in history and object some of the founding theoretical dyads which inform a human-centered picture of consciousness. Much akin to the objects of Graham’s fascination with Late Scholasticism, and Late Renaissance theory (Bruno, Suarez), Campanella’s rationalization of Natural Magic, which is the attempt to synthesize the lived (Quality) emphasis of Telesio’s empiricism to the metaphysics of immanent and unified Being (Augustine), provides the substance of the rescue of Quality without the collapse into molten origins. Campanella’s metaphysics are rough-hewn, though voluminously written, and appear to modern commentators often as a hodgepodge of irreconsilable positions and influences. Campanella comes off as a pre-modern fantasticist, as confused by astrology as he was by the Political situation of which he was a victim. But rather, it is Campanella’s love for the world, its embodied, animal-like quality, its magic of effect, which produced the theoretical possibility for a contemporary salvation of qualites, of the sort that I think that Graham pursues. It is not so much that qualities are granted their rightful power because they are in a tension with Substance Objects which invariably retreat from all investigation, a mark of characterized experiences of human consciousness. It is rather, in surpass of any categorical reduction of human consciousness, that qualities has their own nobility and powers. Campanella wanted us to know that when I come to know something (an entity), I literally am transformed into it (an interesting pre-sage of Latour’s Principle of Translation). When I know a cold thing, I literally become cold. Or, if we want to postmodernize it, when I know Capitalism, I literally become Capitalism, I am transformed into that entity. How exactly to read this transformation I think comes from the notion of assemblage, of bodily (and therefore following Spinoza, ideational) combination, under a figure of power.

What I suggest is that once we identify the hidden, as Graham says, evil valuation behind his project, it is towards a panpsychism that qualitative embrace leads. That is, one needs not rent out high-priced object Real Estate on which Qualities are then permitted to live. Instead, qualities become the very mechanism for embodied agreement and power-assemblage, no more warring in tension with the landlord.

Graham Harman’s La-deigger and Hei-tour

The Synthesis of Heidegger and Latour

Recommended is Graham Harman’s introductory November 29th, 2007 lecture on how Heidegger’s tool-oriented, human-centered conception of Being is strengthened by de-centralization of Latour‘s panoplies of actor networks (human and non-human), and Latour’s pure ontology of relations (an occasionalism), is deepened by Heidegger’s Four Fold Substance cryptology (pictured signficantly below).

Any Latourian actor (entity) in a Network is also claimed to have these four Heideggerian “dimensions”

The lecture mp3: “On Actors, Networks, and Plasma: Heidegger vs. Latour vs. Heidegger” [provided by Anthem]

PDF of the slides for the Lecture

To give a few immediate responses to the ideas presented: I was quite surprised by the points of correspondence between Harman’s Heidegger-Latour Synthesis, and my own attempt to expand Spinoza through the cybernetic potential of Campanella’s pansensism, and a dialectic with Davidson’s notion of epistemic Triangulation. Like Floris van der Burg’s treatment of Spinoza and Davidson in which Spinoza is used to deepen Davidson through a metaphysical appeal beneath description, Latour is seen here to be deepened in relationship to Heidegger’s notion of hiddenness. In both cases Substance provides a ground for real articulation.

There were some off hand homologies. Latour’s “any two things are always linked by a third thing”, something that Harman finds to be one of the most original of Latour’s thoughts, is in my opinion enlightened by Davidsons rational triangulation, which he grounds through regularities of response to regularities of stimuli, only confirmed through a third set of regularities. For this reason it is my intution that Spinoza’s imaginary triangulation of the world through the imitations of the affects (by which I mean to open up Davidson’s rationalism of translation and objectivity) fits neatly into this essential Latourian triangulation (“its the third actor that has to say its the same thing”). Further it is of interest that not only does Latour alleviate Heidegger’s human-centricism, but Spinoza would as well. In this Latour and Spinoza share. In this vien, Harman’s “tool analysis” post-human reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time, reflects quite well on the product of my proposed application of Campanella’s “cognoscere est esse” (to know is to be) to Spinoza’s bodies in epistemic composition, in an ontology of constructed freedom.

An apex of the lecture perhaps comes to the quandary Harman finds in Latours occasionalism, as he says, “If a thing is defined solely by its relations, I just don’t see any way to move from one step to the next”. The mode of becoming (which I believe he argues would just become another actor), is missing. It is not clear how Heidegger’s Four-Fold view of Being at all helps Latour answer this question though. Harman regularly returns to Leibniz, in his journey into pre-Kantian waters, but I cannot help but think that it is not Leibniz that would aid him, so much as Spinoza. It is Spinoza’s vectorial notion of Being, that is, an immanent Being of degrees that is played out on the register of knowledge which would provide dimension to the flat networks, not to mention an additional ethical texture. At times Harman approaches this principle of greater reality in his lecture, but it is not linked directly to the Spinozist principle of self-causation, freedom through the understanding (and embodiment) of cause. That is to say, Spinoza reads the change of things through a contant striving, the conatus, manifested directly as a capacity to act, which is itself a bodily affirmation. Networks in this way themselves persist through self-affirmations of their relations. What differentiates networks and the actors within them, and propells them to the next moment, from a Spinozist pov is the striving of God itself, expressed in degrees of freedom, along the fluxuations of action itself. Harman tells us that Latour knows that something called Plasma exists because networks collapse. One might ask, how is this Plasma differentiated from Spinoza’s Substance, other than to say that it has no formal Attributes (which are collapsed to the level of networks, in matter and the semiotic). It strikes me that Latour’s actor networks are simply the modal expressions of Spinoza(semiotic/material matching the mental and the physical in Davidson), without the depth of Substance. Much as how Harman sees Latour enriched by Heidegger, it strikes me that he would be even further fortified by an engagement with a cybernetic Spinoza, one in which all bodies are seen to be bodies in knowing assemblage, exercised on degrees of freedom.

This being said, Harman’s points about Latour’s networks do something rather signficant to Spinoza’s notion of bodily idenity (a shadow thought inherent in many of Spinoza’s positions). Because Spinoza defines a body as a particular communicative ratio of parts (something we might call a network of actors), and because Substance is one great consummate ratio of parts in communication, any notion of absolute identity, aside from a fleeting essence/conatus, must be denied. The networks extends out, and the bodies in communication do not cease.

I would add as well that Harman’s excellent unveiling of Heidegger’s notion of tool (unbroken and broken, like Spinoza’s adequate and inadequate idea), dovetails wonderfully into a Spinozist sense of bodies that are continually in assemblage (causes always being horizontally displayed toward the external, for nothing but Substance is the cause of itself), a cybernetic view of perception through combination with other bodies upon which we must depend (and thus mutually express in combination). Spinoza too, I feel, is tool-oriented in his metaphysical construction (as he even compares the development of thoughts to the making of tools), in which the limits of a human body’s capacity to act cannot be separated out from the tools used and engaged. In a symmetry to Harman’s metaphysical correction to a purely logical pragmatist reading of Heidegger (the use of tools does not fully reveal them, any more than theory does),  Spinoza’s often disembodied rationalist metaphysics needs to be re-embodied along tool-combination, lived-relation of bodies in combination as pragmatism, where pragmatism is understood to be an ideational expression of material power.

I am unsure though why Harman resists panpsychism, from which he distances himself at several points. But perhaps Spinoza’s panpsychism would prove more palatable to his project of deepening actor networks, or perhaps Campanella’s pansensism.

Harman’s Prince of Networks  forthcoming

Mark Fisher’s somewhat helpful, somewhat world-weary commentary on Harman’s Latour for Frieze magazine: “Clearing the Air”

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.

Campanella and Vico, very briefly

Two very important (and under considered) epistemolary dicti written on truth and knowing:

Campanella: To know is to be, cognoscere est esse  (1638).

Vico: The true and the made are transposable (Or…The true is the made), verum et factum convertuntur.  (1710).

The first of these communicates the objective transmutation and assimulation that occurs through coming to know something, the second circumscribes truth within the horizon of made criteria. The first expresses an affective immanence under a panpsychic view of assimilation, the second, historical contingency within a human truth. I believe only an embrace of both these views respectably fulfills the scope of both knowing and truth, as we have come to read them. We are transmuted into the very thing we come to know, founding a cybernetic exercise of power; we know something to be objectively true through reference to criteria we as human beings have created.

Other thoughts  on Vico