Absolute Domains

Chapters 9 and 10 move into a deeper exploration of the structure of the subjective unities Ruyer argues are indispensable to an understanding our world.  He defines these more precisely as absolute domains that are self-surveying in the sense that they do not need to stand outside themselves to see their entire form at once.  This definition has the curious byproduct of letting us see that these things we have been treating as pure all-at-once unities are nevertheless always unities of multiplicities.  While they are unitary, they are not simple, but instead cover a whole domain, pulling together into a single form things we would usually refer to as parts.  This unity of multiplicity is Ruyer's concept of an individual, and its clearly the profound idea at the heart of his philosophy, the one whose influence on Simondon and Deleuze explains why we're reading this stuff to begin with.  But it's also where the book starts to get more difficult.  In particular, understanding the relationship between absolute domains and finality is complex because it involves the noodle-baking idea of an absolute survey in time. 

The concept of an absolute surface is relatively straightforward.  Many readers will undoubtedly be familiar with Edwin Abbot's classic Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.  To perceive the entirety of a two dimensional shape like a square, we have to occupy a third dimension orthogonal to it.  Conversely, a two dimensional being can only perceive a three dimensional one as the set of its sections appearing in the plane.  This geometric law is of course valid for any number of dimensions we discuss.  For example, as beings with three spatial dimensions, we have a very hard time imagining a fourth dimension as anything but successive slices of present moment, whereas a four dimensional being would be able to encompass what appears to us as an entire temporal succession with a single glance.  So to 'comprehend' a N dimensional surface, we need to observe it from an N+1 dimensional vantage point; it only appears as a whole relative to this perspective.  Obviously, this creates the infinite regress which the concept of the absolute surface is designed to solve.  An absolute surface sees itself as a whole from within its own dimensions.  It comprehends itself without needing the addition of an observer in another, higher dimension. 

At first we may think that an absolute surface is about as real as a square circle.  But in fact every moment of our experience testifies to the existence of this mysterious non-geometric surface.  Each experience is given to us as a whole.  For example,  cannot help but experience the entire visual field as a unitary form.  Obviously, we can move our attention around this visual field and successively examine various elements within it, which makes us sometimes think that we are outside the field, observing it from a distance.  In reality though, these shifts in attention don't happen from outside the field, as if we were moving our attentional spotlight across a poorly illuminated scene.  They each constitute a new whole experience.  Each instant of experience is an absolute surface.

Let us return to the surface of the seen-table. It does not obey geometric laws. It is a surface seized in all of its details, without a third dimension. It is an "absolute surface," which is not relative to any point of view external to it, which knows itself without observing itself. If I were to place my eye on the table, I would see nothing, but I need not be "at a distance" from the sensation to see it extended. In contrast, I cannot turn around the sensation to consider it from various angles. "I" (my organism) can turn around the table to obtain different sensations, but "I" cannot turn around my sensation once I obtain it. (NF, 92)

Admittedly though, we commonly picture ourselves at a remove from our experience, which we then observe like the homunculus who lives in the screening room of our brain.  However, while Ruyer doesn't discuss it, there are also very direct ways to see the absolute surface in meditation.  The simplest of these is simply to pay careful sustained attention to some part of the body at a remove from the head.  Consider the feeling of your sit bones pressing into the chair as you read this.  At first, it may seem that 'you' are situated somewhere behind your eyes, and that to have the experience of sitting, this central controller must send out messengers to your bottom in order to bring sensory information back to where it is experienced in your head.  It appears as if the content of the sitting experience happens in one place and the knowledge of it, its form or sense, happens in another.  If you wait for a while though, it will dawn on you that this is entirely an illusion.  The position of your head and its distance from the supposed location of the experience is irrelevant.  Your ass experiences itself right where it is, without needing your head to get involved.  Or perhaps it would be better to say that the experience itself has no physical location at all, locating itself neither in the object nor the putative subject.  We overlook this fact because we usually want to do something about an experience, to act on it though a sensory-motor chain, which does imply organizing a movement through space (such as, for example, scratching my butt).  So the apparent distance between object and subject is not given but entirely constructed according to what I want my next experience to be.  

The other way I've found to directly experience the absolute surface is through MahaSati Awareness practice.  By opening the aperture of our awareness, as it were, and letting go of its center, we can actually glimpse of state of global awareness that has no distinct objects or subjects at all.  The traditional analogy for this all-at-once and encompassing Awareness is space.  But this remains an analogy -- we construct geometric space through the movement of attention.  Whether this movement reaches out to physical objects, or to energetic flows, or even to mental talk, the space that results is constructed step-by-step.  The movement of attention can be very rapid, which can sometimes fool us into thinking that geometric space is simply given as a Kantian a priori of experience.  But no matter how fast this attention moves, or how totally it appears to 'occupy' all space, it still infers space from its constant shuttling motion.  By contrast, the 'space' of Awareness is not geometrically constructed step-by-step, but given all at once whenever we turn towards it.  This is an absolute experience, referring us to a 'space' that knows itself without having to examine or observe its own content and without requiring a separate subject that would serve to successively illuminate this content.  People sometimes characterize it as a completely still, but we could just as easily think of it as infinitely fast.  Either description points to the same idea -- a non-dual experience of direct unity that seems to have no boundary or location.  Awareness is an absolute surface that is aware of itself from within, without the need for any observer.  That is, Awareness is empty of self.

Interestingly though, the unity and simultaneity of an absolute surface, what Ruyer aptly calls its "self-survey", doesn't mean that, "all is one".  The non-dual is not some formless grey goop that results from melting down and mixing white objects and black subjects.  This empty and still Awareness contains a wealth of diversity held together as a unity.  All of the details to which I can later successively attend are given at once in my visual field.  These details aren't objects in the proper sense until this field later splits into subject and object, actor and action, but all the difference necessary for their construction is given as part of the initial experience.  So while unified, the absolute surface doesn't exclude multiplicity.  

This is Ruyer's second main point about absolute surfaces.  They are a form of binding that tends to blur the individuality of the bound parts without, however, averaging them into a statistical mush.  The simplest analogy for this is quantum superposition.  When hydrogen and oxygen bind to form water, their respective free electrons enter a shared state where we can no longer really say which electron belongs to which atom.  It's this overlapping of the atoms' quantum wave functions that allows a binding between H and O. 

Is a water molecule (does it consist of) two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, or does it have, as its unity and being, three component atoms? We see straight away that this problem has the same solution as the problem of the bonding of elements and the partial loss of their individuality in the unity of the interacting system. According to wave mechanics ... in the schema of the water molecule, the wave functions of the three atoms partially overlap. Then an interaction energy appears. But this partial overlapping implies a partial loss of the individuality of the electrons involved in the valences. This loss is gained by the molecular system, which is thus a genuine unity and, in this sense, "possesses" the three atoms. If there were no zone of overlapping, the molecule would only consist of three atoms—or rather, there would be no molecule at all. (NF, 108)

Ruyer argues that we need this kind of binding to stop the same type of infinite regress we saw when it was a question of observation.  If we say that A and B are bound together by an interposed third term C, then we are forced to explain how both A and C as well as C and B bind.  Introducing terms D and E responsible for binding A to C and C to B, respectively, just multiplies the problem.  To explain any potential for binding, we need to reach a surface which is "self-binding" just as we needed a surface that was "self-experiencing" to prevent an infinite regress of observation.  Quantum superposition responds to exactly this demand, because it creates one thing that is paradoxically two things at once.  The unified state and its ability to bind are really two sides of the same coin.  The quantum analogy makes clear that this unification is not simply a statistical collection of individuals, but a true form in its own righ,t with properties that could never result from any number of separate individual interactions (consider the double-slit experiment in this light). 

Naturally, quantum effects are not the only way an absolute surface can be both a unity and a multiplicity at the same time.  The brain and the embryo are each also a unity of multiplicity.  They contain the entire complex organization of an organism or an experience in one succinct form.  Any of these absolute surfaces constitute a unifying activity that connects and organizes its parts, at the same time that it knows these parts as unified.  These activities of binding and knowing are in fact the very existence of the surface, which Ruyer refers to as a "being-together" or a "being-having".

As a unity in the multiplicity, an absolute domain or a true form realizes the otherwise inconceivable synthesis of being and having. Is the system ab a and b, or does it have a and b as parts? Does the surveying unity have the details it surveys, or, because the survey is purely metaphorical, is it the very totality of the surveyed details? (NF, 107)

Though we already saw at the outset that the axiomatic quality of the cogito can only be posited of an activity, and not of a substance, Ruyer reiterates this point here in the context of absolute surfaces.  We often speak as if the surface were an actor or an agent, because we tend to model its unity on that of our own psyche.  And this psyche frequently appears to us as a sort of homuncular interior substance.  As a result, we are led to the idea that there is a difference between actor and action, a difference that we often invoke when we discuss the counterfactuals of freedom (I could have had ham, but I chose turkey).  For Ruyer though, there's no actor over and above the action carried out.  His freedom has nothing to do with the indetermination of a merely observing inner will that has no assignable properties.  Instead, it is a self-determination that is necessarily active, that knows itself as it binds its parts together, in a sense creating itself on the spot.

Cerebral equipotentiality gives the impression that the mind is detachable from the brain it uses (whether this brain is damaged or not). In reality, once the brain is totally destroyed, the "user" vanishes.  It is often inevitable—we have done it ourselves—to personify the "surveying unity" of an absolute domain, to realize the division into unity, on one hand, and into multiplicity, on the other. But we should always remember that we are only dealing with metaphors here, because survey is "absolute," without "distance." (NF, 121)

So an absolute surface is an overall form that isn't held together as a series of step-by-step links in space and time.  And it is an activity, a simultaneous knowing and binding together.  These features already connect the absolute surface to Ruyer's earlier definitions of finalist activity.  Nevertheless, I found this connection (roughly, the connection between chapters 9-10 and chapter 11) rather tenuous until I realized that I was conceiving the absolute surface in spatial terms, just as the name implies.  I thought the "survey" involved flying over a landscape in a third dimension.  And that the "binding" surface was a region of the plane that separated two others.  But now I get it.  My thinking had become very uptight.  The absolute surface is a unity in time as well, which is why Ruyer introduces the more general term "absolute domain".  The unity in question here surveys both time and space without needing a supplementary fifth dimensional vantage point.  This is precisely why it appears slightly mysterious to us -- we find it very difficult to conceive of time as anything other than to irreversible march of a step-by-step process.  An absolute survey in time, however, just like finalist activity, seems to posit that the future can somehow precede the past, or at least that an entire temporal trajectory can be experienced all at once.  This experience seems to be out of 'my' reach as I normally think of myself, but it is no more mysterious than the life of Sphere in a world of Squares.

Understanding the absolute domain as a spatio-temporal survey helps make sense of the more obscure parts of Ruyer's description of the idea.  For example, in a moment that reminded me of Spinoza (NF, 102), he discusses  how it doesn't really make sense to say that an absolute domain has a beginning or an end.  While he doesn't quite say that absolute domains are eternal, its clear that something which surveys time cannot be in it in the same sense that step-by-step causality happens within time.  While it won't have a fifth spatiotemporal dimension, its full organization can't be expressed as anything other than a trajectory that we see as changing or evolving, even though this whole trajectory is absolutely surveyed in advance from the perspective of the domain.  This seems to open the door to something like an absolute domain called Life, which develops through an evolutionary finality by differentiating into various organisms in much the same way Ruyer saw the development of the embryo as an expression of the organism.  It's still not clear to me how this would work, but we can immediately dispense with one confusion if we observe that the finality of Life or Organism is not simply the last state of these systems.  The absolute domain does not have a goal in our normal sense of the term -- it is not developing towards or maintaining an equilibrium endpoint that could only represent one particular location in a surveyed terrain.  Ruyer has probably avoided the word "goal" for precisely this reason, because it potentially distracts us from the fact that the 'end' of an organism includes its entire development as a unit.

This perspective also helps us make sense of the other puzzling connection between absolute domains and finalist activity -- the way Ruyer characterizes the domain as expressing an Idea in the Platonic sense.  Since it is a survey of time the Idea that a domain expresses isn't of any particular moment in its development.  The Idea isn't like any of the states it organizes, which makes it a true metaphysical entity standing outside of space and time. 

This is the most delicate point of our difficult question. We should vehemently deny the existence of a geometric dimension that provides a point of observation external to the sensory field. But we should affirm no less vehemently the existence of a sort of "metaphysical" transversal to the entire field, whose two "extremities" are the "I" (or the x of organic individuality), on one hand, and the guiding Idea of organization, on the other. (NF, 99)

Since the Idea of an absolute domain organizes a whole trajectory at once, every moment along this path becomes a sign of its activity.  I don't think Ruyer means to entirely exclude the existence of chance with this notion, but he certainly wants to argue against our materialist habit of relying on chance as an explanation of any order we see (eg. evolutionary explanations).  

In order to dramatize how the mysterious Idea could be hidden in plain sight at every moment, Ruyer develops a thought experiment invented by Norbert Weiner (NF, 118-120)--  one not unrelated to Chiang's Story of Your Life.  Weiner observed how difficult it would be to communicate with intelligent aliens if their sense of time ran in reverse.  For both species, time is defined as the statistically inevitable progression towards greater entropy.  Milk spreads throughout our coffee, and never again concentrates itself and jumps back out.  Alien time is similar but runs in the reverse direction.  Let's say the aliens built a great pyramid on Mars but then faced the sort of dynastic trouble that beset the Egyptians.  Eventually, this unattended pyramid would erode and be covered by the sands.  Obviously, as we saw, if we discovered this pyramid in its full glory, we would immediately infer the existence of pyramid building extraterrestrials who were spying on us and cutting secret deals for cow lips with the NSA.  But since our entropic timelines runs in reverse, what we see is the wind and water blowing around, slowly acting to shape something that looks surprisingly ordered like a pyramid.  From our perspective this unusual shape would appear to be the simple product of chance, of an unlikely, but presumably entirely natural, phenomenon.  Perhaps we couldn't explain exactly how it formed, but we certainly wouldn't invoke alien intelligence. 

So the absolute survey of consciousness and an inversion in the direction of entropy and in the course of thermodynamic time have similar effects. (NF, 120)

The finalist activity of an absolute domain is thus, strictly speaking, inobservable.  When we see and interact with a structure from the outside, we can always explain things as the mindless casual interaction of parts.  We cannot know it from the 'inside', that is from a transtemporal perspective.  In fact, if the absolute domain is a survey in time, we are never actually interacting with the whole domain at once.  Interaction, observation, always proceeds step-by-step in space and time, so it seems we are always forced to infer the Idea in an imaginative leap.  While Ruyer has distinguished it from observation, he hasn't really discussed the structure of a knowing that would allow us to interact with Ideas, with full absolute domains, as such.  Actually, it seems this same caveat would apply even to ourselves.  I mean, my felt "I" of this moment doesn't seem capable of grasping the entire trajectory of my life as a unit.  And when exactly did this life start?  So do I even really know my self?  An absolute temporal survey brings up as many new questions as it answers.