More is More

After those long technical discussions of Hume and Whitehead, I'm feeling the need for a Plain English interlude.  I've been mulling this one for at least a month or two now, ever since I read Todd May's Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (thanks to CF for ferreting this out of the rhizomatic spread of secondary literature on Deleuze) right after zooming through Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything.  While I read the latter too quickly to really understand all the subtleties of OOO, and it is anyhow only intended as an introduction, I think I got the basic gist of his "theory of everything".   

I would summarize my understanding of it as follows: the world is made up of objects.  Consider your mind blown.  But seriously, the idea is actually not too far from what we were talking about with Whitehead -- all objects are real.  Physical objects like tables and scientific objects like electrons and mental objects like Justice and fictional objects like Sherlock Holmes are all real.  Reality, in turn, is nothing but the collection of all objects, all of which are equally real.  There aren't any special objects whose distinction in kind give them higher status in some hierarchy.  That is, OOO has a flat ontology.  In particular, for Harman, subjects are objects too.  Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that he thinks that objects are subjects too; he's not claiming that every object is conscious, but he does say that every object has a sort of real interior self, just by virtue of existing.  All real objects have an "inwardness".  

So, how do we interact with and know about the real objects that make up the world?  Or, since we ourselves are also objects(/subjects) in this theory, how do any two objects interact with one another?  Basically, they don't.  Real objects, defined as the sort of inner being or essence of objects, never touch.  When we interact with an object, we can never interact with the real object in itself.  We merely encounter a sensual representation of the object with certain sensual qualities.  "The table", as we normally use the term, is a sensual object that holds together all the sensual qualities like straight legs and coffee rings that we experience in everyday life.  But we never directly interact with the real table, the essence of what the table really is, in-and-for-itself.  No matter how closely we look, its inwardness withdraws from us.  The best we can do, according to Harman, is to use metaphors and art to trick ourselves into thinking a bit about how the inwardness of the table must be something sorta like the inwardness of our own experience of ourselves.  Through art, we substitute the direct experience of our own inwardness in for the withdrawn essence of the object.   All of our everyday experience of the table, whether we are using it to change lightbulbs, or carefully admiring the way its slight wobble has just resulted in another coffee ring, is just experience of the sensual table and its sensual qualities.  We only start to approach the real table when we break with our everyday experience of using or examining the table and try to have an aesthetic experience of the table.  Even through the method of aesthetics though, we can never actually reach a direct experience of the real table.  Inspired, I guess, by that late Heidegger's idea that Being "withdraws" at the same time that it "discloses a world", Harman thinks that the world of real essences exists, but continually runs away from us.  It is impossible to experience it other than through our abstractions.  

It's an interesting theory, approachably presented, and the book is pretty short.  But I spent the whole time feeling like this concept of withdrawal was needlessly vague and entailed an almost mystical belief that the real world was out there ... somewhere, just beyond our grasp.  The initial trajectory of the theory makes sense to me.  I like the idea of a flat ontology that doesn't put the human subject in some sort of privileged position.  Once we dethrone the mind and start asking how it got built, we're going to find it very hard to justify why it alone, of all the objects in all the universe, is somehow uniquely capable of knowing the true nature of reality.  Every experience for a finite being is partial, essentially incomplete.  No object knows the true nature of reality.  All objects experience all other objects through the abstractions of what part is relevant for them.  I buy this so far.

But why would you attribute this fact to some hypothetically final real world fleeing off into the distance?  Why would it do this?  Wouldn't it make more sense to say that the process is never complete simply because it creates more world as it goes?  What if there's no essential real object there to withdraw, but there is more object created every time we interact with it in a new way?  If we just keep looking, we'll see more.  Naturally, this creation of more stuff through interaction doesn't require humans.  But couldn't we just say that any time two objects interact, they create more of themselves, extend themselves, get deeper, maybe "realer"?  Wouldn't this be a much clearer explanation of the mechanism of "withdrawal" that would also obviate the need for postulating any finished object doing the withdrawing?  Why would we want to believe in a static world that dangles in front of us like a carrot when we could believe in a dynamic world that we can expand into.  I would definitely prefer to be inside an indefinitely expanding ball to being stuck outside a closed one I can never reach or penetrate.  Being doesn't withdraw -- but there is always more Being.

The idea that there is always more is rightly central to Todd May's introduction to Deleuze.  I think this is the most important thing that Deleuze teaches.   There is always MORE than you think.  Don't settle for explanations that give you less, that put limits on what can be or what can be thought, that turn your experience into illusion.  Be an empiricist.  An open ended pluralist.  Here is how Todd May phrases it.

     There is one world, one substance, a single being.  It is not governed or judged by a world or Being outside it.  There is no transcendence. "The idea of another world, of a supersensible world in all its forms (God, essence, the good, truth), the idea of values superior to life, is not one example among many but the constitutive element of all fiction." Being is not something other than the world we live in.  It is that world.

     This does not mean that there is only what is present to us.  There is more than meets the eye.  Being folds itself, unfolds itself, refolds itself into the specific forms that constitute the world of our experience.  Being, or substance, inheres in what presents itself to us, but is always more than any presentation.  To understand this we must think temporally rather than spatially.  Spatial thinking can give us only the phenomenology of our world, the structure of appearances. Temporal thinking can penetrate that world to show us what those appearances might be made of, and how they might become different.

Perhaps I've sold it short, but my impression of OOO is that it believes the real world is out there, existing at some determinate location, finished.  Our experience of it may change over time, but that's an epistemological, not an ontological question.  For Deleuze, by contrast, the world is growing, or at least unfolding.  It becomes different.  It doesn't just move.  It changes.  May sums it up pretty well in his final paragraph.

      Deleuze's ontology is not a resting place; it is not a zone of comfort; it is not an answer that allows us to abandon our seeking.  It is the opposite.  An ontology of difference is a challenge.  To recognize that there is more than we have been taught, that what is presented to us is only the beginning of what there is, puts before us the greater task of our living.  We have not finished with living; we are never finished with living.  However we live, there is always more.  We do not know of what a body is capable, nor how it can live.  The alternatives of contentment (I have arrived) and hopelessness (There is nowhere to go) are two sides of the same misguided thought: that what is presented to us is what there is. 

       There is more, always more.

 

I think the deep reality of this more, the actuality of all these infinite possibilities, is the cornerstone of Deleuze's philosophy, the thing he never wanted us to lose sight of.  Interestingly enough, Stengers comments on a very similar Plain English core to Whitehead's philosophy.

Thus, on December 15, 1939, when he was quietly discussing the Bible with Lucien Price, Whitehead
[ ...] I suddenly [ ...] stood and spoke, with passionate intensity, "Here we are, with our finite beings and physical senses in the presence of a universe whose possibilities are infinite, and even though we may not apprehend them, those infinite possibilities are actualities" (DANW, 111).

 

... there is a risk of losing the movement and neglecting what philosophers seek to bring to life, thanks to their concepts, and especially what they are trying not to lose, what they are afraid to lose, that which, as the case may be, they cry out. Whitehead will not ask, will never ask of experience that it admit its finitude. Any resemblance between one Whiteheadian statement and another coming from elsewhere will be declared null and void if the latter orients thought, in one way or another, toward a mode of judgment that turns the infinite possibilities that haunt our experience into a temptation that must be resisted.

What are these possibilities which are actualities if not our thoughts?  And not just ours, but all the thoughts of all the things.  Thinking makes more reality.  It is more reality.