The Beginning of the End

We're almost at the point where we can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel of the individuation project that began last October.  And it's clear now that it was the light of an oncoming train.  Thinking more deeply about the individual has led us to collide directly with the weirdness of non-duality, where we are forced to confront the reality of a world completely 'beyond' this one, that nevertheless is somehow identical to it.  I have only just begun Ruyer's Neofinalism, the next book on our list, but it already looks as if this one will put a very fine point on the paradoxes of non-duality.  Right away, it posits the irreducible reality of a subjective, qualitative, purposive, and, for lack of a batter world, spiritual, dimension.  And it immediately demonstrates the contradictions inherent in any purely step-by-step causal materialism which attempts to deny the reality of this dimension.  So from the beginning, we are directly confronted with a reality that we would usually call 'out of this world'.   The result is such a challenging change of perspective that I thought I should start writing about it before I even see how it will fully develop.  I suspect there will be many twists and turns along the way.

Ruyer begins with a thought I would have considered unpromising: Descartes's cogito.  There are all sorts of problems with "I think therefore I am".  The supposedly incontrovertible truth contains a number of dubious assumptions.  For example, we can ask how we know that the "I" doing the thinking is the same as the one doing the being.  And we might wonder whether "thinking" is really the crucial activity here -- does Descartes not exist anytime he doesn't think?  And then of course there's the dubious conclusion Descartes reaches as a result of his experiment -- "I am a thinking substance".  Where did a substance enter in?  This hardly seems like a self-evident postulate.  Why does thinking require an "I" to possess it, why must it be a property of a subject?   Today, I think we see Descartes argument as closer to a sophism than a certainty.  Nevertheless, we sense that Descartes is onto something.  There really is some sort of self-actuating circle here that seems hard to deny.  It seems similar to the way the statement, "I promise ..." actually creates a promise upon its very utterance.  After all, wasn't Descartes at least justified in concluding: "there is thinking", even if he instead decided that all your thinking are belong to us?  The activity of thinking does seem to self-actualize. Of all the 'things' that might be said to exist, it seems to hardest to self-consistently deny the reality of the activity of thinking.  It's pretty hard to think something like: "I do not exist".

This self-validating or self-enacting activity -- what he calls the "axiological cogito" -- is Ruyer's starting point.  And even though his handling of it is quite a bit different from Descartes', he wants to point out the relationship between the circularity of his argument and that of earlier versions like the cogito or the ontological proof of the existence of God.  In all of these cases, the very fact of imagining that something exists is meant to prove that it exists.  In Ruyer's case, though, the proof applies to an activity, rather than to a thing.  The activity this time is not thinking in general but something like making sense or creating meaning.  So Ruyer's reworking becomes: "It is absurd to claim and to signify that nothing has a sense" (NF, 11).  Claiming and signifying are forms of making sense, so denying that they exist is as self-contradictory as thinking that thinking isn't happening.  If the universe is only a meaningless succession of causal steps feeding forward in time, then we are certainly in no position to complain about it in a meaningful way!  This is another flavor of the nihilism overcomes itself argument that we've seen many times now.  Nihilism is exhausting only because it insists on attempting something it believes to be impossible.  Ruyer not only sharpens this point to a syllogism but also shows us why it can only apply to an activity, and so why the ontological proof of the fact of God's existence as an entity is sophistic.  While I won't explore the details of the latter demonstration here, the logic of the former is concise enough to quote in its entirety.

It immediately proves that there is a sense in human activity and that a totalitarian philosophy of the absurd is absurd:

1. Being a pure set of processes, I affirm that my activity is senseless.
2. Pursuing senseful ends, I affirm the absurd nature of my activity.
3. Being a pure set of processes, I affirm that my activity has a sense.
4. Pursuing senseful ends, I affirm that my activity has a sense.

Assertions 1 and 3 eliminate themselves. [A pure set of processes cannot "affirm" anything, because that activity presupposes or co-supposes sense]. The fact that assertion 2 is an assertion completely undermines it. [This is not because of the logical contradiction but because of the active or existential contradiction.  You cannot assert that you are not asserting anything any more than you can promise you aren't promising].  So assertion 4 remains. (NF, 7)

So making sense or creating meaning is a self-realizing activity that proves its existence even in denying itself.  But exactly what type of activity is this?  Is Ruyer constructing a sort of subjective idealism or a dualism akin to Descartes', ie. one that rests on the certainty of the conscious thinking subject as proof of its own existence?  The answer I think is no.  We will see as it develops that this initial equation of the activity with conscious thought is only a convenient starting point where we can immediately see that this activity cannot consistently be denied.  That is, thinking is not that foundation of this activity, but merely the easiest place for us to see it and convince ourselves that it must exist.  

Accordingly, Ruyer's second step is to provide a list of characteristics of the sort of activity he has in mind.  Freedom, Existence, Work, Finality, Value.  These are all different aspects of what Ruyer frequently calls "finalist activity".  For some reason he doesn't ever use the term purposeful activity, but we could think of it that way as well, so long as we don't confuse purposeful with instrumental.  We're not talking here about just any activity that accomplishes a goal, or at least, it's not the accomplishing itself but the ability to establish the goal that constitutes the self-realizing part of this activity.  The major point is to distinguish between activity that moves step-by-step, forward in time along a causal chain, and activity that posits some sort of "end", in the sense of a meaning or point.  Ruyer illustrates this with a discussion of calculators that foreshadows (NF was published in 1952) Simondon's comments on the relations between machines and teleology.

The case of calculators, in which the norm of calculation becomes an assemblage of material organs, provides an invaluable guiding thread for understanding the very nature of free and finalist activity. This activity essentially consists in improvising and establishing cerebral or physical connections that allow the incarnation of the good sought-after results in the physical order. The example of calculators also helps us understand the connections between the order of signifying activity and the order of determinism and step-by-step causality. Here the machine borrows its sense from the man who built it in view of a specific end. Just like the results it yields, this machine can be considered good or bad. It is the organ of a free center of activity. (NF, 9)

I've put the most important words in bold here.  The calculator only borrows its teleology from the human programmer.  It operates as an organ of this activity that instantiates a means to its successful execution, just as the brain operates as an organ of our organism's finality.  The activity we're talking about is not the activity of the organs (regardless of whether these are industrial or biological).  Each of these can be deconstructed to reveal its step-by-step causal structure.  These mechanisms can only execute on goals, not posit them.  Finalist activity operates at the level of the whole that establishes what the individual organs should do and thereby improvises a means of striving towards some overall goal.  For the moment, Ruyer has deliberately left the level of this 'whole' quite vague.  I think we're going to discover that it is an ever-moving target, given that wholes can appear as parts of larger wholes.

This distinction between setting or conceiving a goal and accomplishing it strikes me as the essence of intention.  Curiously, this is exactly the point where Buddhism locates our freedom -- we are utterly determined to experience sickness, old age, death, and impermanence, but we are utterly free to shape our karma.  We're accustomed to understanding freedom as the opposite of step-by-step causal determinism.  While Ruyer might not wish to use the term "opposite", he clearly agrees that the essence of free activity, the thing that makes it free, is distinct from the causal instantiation of that activity.  But free activity in this sense is equally distinct from causal indeterminism.  An activity that comes from nowhere, as a spontaneous surprise with no sense or meaning (cf. existentialism) is not free or finalist activity in Ruyer's sense.  Finalist activity isn't demonstrated by the mere absence or incompleteness of step-by-step causal determination, but by the presence of some other dimension of determination.  Ruyer's freedom is not freedom from meaningless causal chains, but freedom to establish the ends, meanings, and values realized by those chains.  He immediately acknowledges that this leads us to the idea of a dualist conception of the world. 

So a dualist conception of two worlds, real world and ideal world, is necessary for understanding sense, finality, work, invention, and conscious existence. If the schema of classical physics is taken to the letter, it is clear that activity proper requires the positing of an ideal domain that is irreducible to the plane where causes and effects succeed one another. In this ideal domain, conscious intention can move and survey (without strict spatiotemporal localization and by exploring possibilities) the plane of causes and effects so as to influence the unfolding of means toward the ideal end. This duality of two worlds is not the last word on the question; but if we want to correctly describe and "situate" senseful activity, then the compensatory hypothesis of an ideal world is the inevitable counterpart of the fiction of a world of universe-lines or of pure causal lines. (NF, 14)

Many years ago, I probably would have considered this type of philosophy as beyond the pale.  But it has been quite a while since I found monist materialism -- scientism -- a compelling philosophy.  In fact, as my little Socratic dialogue indicates, I now find the position incoherent.  Nevertheless, I've noticed in reading Ruyer that I still have a few reactive reservations upon hearing someone articulate the need for dualism so forcefully.  I mean, what are we invoking here? Immaterial Magic? Platonic Forms?The Soul?  What do these even mean?  I call these responses "reactive" because I can think of the many ways they fall apart when their assumptions are carefully examined.  In fact, it's just as easy to take this ideal realm as the self-evident one and question the reality of the torturous, and, given the replication crisis, tenuous, path by which science claims to tell us that the world is "really" just standard model particles.  But if we set aside, for a moment, the instinct to try and establish either side of this dualism as more fundamental, we are still left with the question that plagues any dualist theory -- how do the two sides interact?  This will be the subject of the next post.