Having dropped his main concept -- subjective unities are absolute domains -- Ruyer uses the next few chapters (12 and 13) to explore how these domains are structured very similarly to Plato's Ideal Forms. They express a norm or ideal or end that literally stands out of the spacetime of the material world as a "metaphysical transversal" (NF, 99), but nevertheless acts to organize this world. The unity of these subjective forms dominates the multiplicity of their instantiations. While this is clearly an old idea, Ruyer's version adds a new twist by conceiving this Ideal realm as something that progressively differentiates itself into our material world. That is, instead of being forever divorced from one another, the two realms form a continuum. The material world is actually the limit of the ideal world -- spacetime is the limit of the differentiation of the transindividual.
Ruyer begins to explore the structure of the transspatial by focusing on a theme dear to Plato's heart -- memory. Since the unified end which holds together an absolute domain stands outside of time, the relationship between this transtemporal essence and a particular instantiation of it appears as a form of memory. The essential Form or Idea acts like a sort of stitch in time that sews together actual forms as parts in its self 'development'. The scare quotes are meant to indicate that its really a question of an ideal repetition, a repetition of a problem, rather than any progressive solution in the normal sense. Any number of actual instantiations, however distinct and sequential they may appear from within time, can be seen as manifestations of the same singular Idea that stands outside it. Ruyer insists that this transtermporal realm is necessary to account for all the types of psychic repetition that we commonly recognize. [For the sake of brevity (too late) the following discussion centers on psychic repetition. However, to be clear, Ruyer considers this just one form of a more general organic repetition. The whole organization of an organism is a 'memory' repeated by the embryo.] Our evocation of a memory, its ability to subsist through time, our ability to recognize a resemblance between any two experiences, our ability to imitate another's action -- all these everyday phenomena testify directly to the existence of a subjective 'dimension' that links together forms within time and must therefore be somehow orthogonal to it. And these phenomena of psychic repetition are also directly related to the main characteristic of finalist activity -- it makes sense, meaning. Consider how poor our memory is for random scattered facts, and how good it is for things that mean something to us or fit into some framework. This is precisely why something like the memory palace is such an effective mnemonic technology. Or think about the way we decide that two objects resemble one another based on their ability to serve the same role; despite potentially large differences, they are of the same type. Or contemplate the allegedly hardwired capacity humans have for mimesis. Children don't imitate just any action of their parents, but immediately pick out the ones that seem to have some special meaning. When you look at any of these phenomena through a materialist lens, they appear rather inexplicable. Somehow we parse the endless never-repeating diversity of the world into the recurring patterns of a much smaller set of meaningful forms. It's hard to fathom how this sort of compression could arise without invoking our need to perform some action, an end which a strict materialism and evolutionism would seem to preclude (we will not rehash how this type of explanation pushes everything back to chance). From Ruyer's perspective though, the whole question moves in the opposite direction. The unity of the essence, the idea or "mnemic theme" as he often calls it, is our real starting point. The diverse instantiations of memory are all immediately included as part of its transspatial unity, which, as it were, unfolds in time through a process of ideal repetition that it synonymous with ideal differentiation.
All these facts thus exhibit the same schema. They have this in common: they set in play a resemblance within the actual, without invoking a mechanical tracing to explain it. Memory without engrams, the action of resemblance, imitation without tracing—all of this is contrary to the laws of ordinary physics and cannot be explained by them. To account for these phenomena, we have to resort to transspatial themes or essences. The resemblance of two actualizations of a single memory requires the idea of a mnemic theme; the organic resemblance of two individuals of the same species requires the idea of a specific potential. (NF, 131)
There are still a bunch of questions this schema raises, the most obvious of which seems to be why time and space appear to us to exist at all. Ruyer seems to suggest that space-time is a mere illusion produced as the limit created by the differentiation of ideas, a place where one idea can collide with another (perhaps even collide with itself?) from the outside, as an abstract confrontation between two actual parts divorced from the wholes from which they derive.
A development has no causes that can be localized in space-time. The domain of space-time is nothing more than a limit; it cannot even really contain existents, because their subjectivity "straddles" the two regions and because their instantaneous structure and even the whole series, moment by moment, of their instantaneous structures is just an abstraction. (NF, 132)
This development or differentiation of ideas is progressive only in a logical not a temporal sense. Each idea spans and unifies an entire region of space-time, an already complete absolute domain. Nevertheless, certain ideas have 'larger' domains, a description that can only mean that domains are nested inside one another. There are thus Ideas and sub-Ideas and sub-sub-Ideas, etc ... While Ruyer doesn't explicitly say this, it seems that this nesting, since it cannot be measured by spatio-temporal extension, must involve some sort of intensive or topological definition (see note below). Though he's not clear on exactly how this logical or intensive ordering ("ordinalization" doesn't appear to be a word) works, Ruyer does make clear that this process of differentiation is what creates a continuum between the poles of pure Idea and pure Matter.
The region of the transspatial is not opposed to the space-time of classical physics in an abrupt way; it presents several kinds of sub-regions that become less similar to space-time and its content as they "distance themselves," as it were, further and further from it. We can distinguish at least four regions:1. the region of actual consciousnesses with the extensive sensations and the specious present, limited ubiquity and eternity
2. the region of individual psychological memories
3. the region of specific organic memoriesTo these we can add the "region" of the "Sense of senses," the tran-scendent Unity, the supreme Logos, the unnameable Tao that no longer has a nature. (NF, 134)
4. the region of essences and values
While he's listed these regions as ascending towards the pure Ideal, it's clear that the process really works in reverse, and that the limit we spoke of as corresponding to a pure SpaceTime would need to appear above 1 on this list, as some species of sub-sub-consciousness (at least, if all the Ideas can appear in monotonic order). He later provides a drawing that captures this perfectly.
As we move away from the realm of pure transspatial Ideas, as we progress towards more and more differentiated Ideas, the subjectivity of each one gets 'smaller'. Nevertheless, each of the curly brackets regardless of size is still an absolute domain, a transspatial unity, in short, a mind. Our material space-time only appears if we take this process to the limit, repeating the sub-division of brackets ad infinitum. Strictly speaking then, it would seem that space-time is only the set of points at the intersection of the brackets. However, since only the encompassing brackets themselves are real for Ruyer, these points are more like spaces between real entities, a set of measure zero as it were, an abstraction we only take to be real if we imagine it "straddling" two real regions.
[
Since I'm reading Ruyer in the shadow of Deleuze in general and Difference & Repetition in particular, I'm finding it almost impossible not to understand some of Ruyer's concepts apart from the filter of Deleuze's modifications of them. For example, Ruyer talks about the ideal end that 'dominates' an absolute domain (NF, 150). In fact, since the domain is always a unitary activity, it's not really different than the end that dominates it. This end is not a point or goal or particular state, but rather, because the domain is absolute and transtemporal, it's more like the shape or form of the entire trajectory of multiple states that are unified in the domain. This ideal pole that organizes an entire surface is what Deleuze will call a singularity. It works a lot like an attractor in phase space, not so much because it is a central point to which things converge, but because it gives the space a particular topology that distinguishes it from other spaces. To consider a concrete image, we might think of the attractor as a black hole that organizes the curvature of the spacetime around it. Different masses can orbit this black hole on different trajectories depending on the mass and the initial conditions, but in a mathematical sense all of these orbits are solutions to the same problem, a problem defined by the existence of the black hole's gravitational singularity. There's much more than this to the concept of an Idea in D&R, but I think this is its crucial core.
I find Deleuze's modification (or perhaps specification) of Ruyer's transspatial εἶδος very useful for a few reasons. First, it makes clear that the forms we find in space and time are not copies of ideal forms. A topological singularity is categorically different from a particular state or even a whole step-by-step succession of states. The two look nothing like one another, so the question of copy or resemblance cannot even arise. Instead, it's a question of instantiation or actualization. Second, this notion that the Ideal constitutes the structure of a problematic space while actual forms are solutions within it, makes it much easier to understand how forms that don't resemble one another can nevertheless actualize the same idea. Two trajectories may look nothing like one another externally, but may both be solutions to the same problem that structures them internally. That is, this schema creates a concept of repetition that doesn't rely on tracing or copying or resembling or analogy, but constitutes a sort of ideal repetition that can be exact without being at all similar. Finally, interpreting an Idea as a topological 'type' gives us a way of thinking about the difference between Ideas without simply relying on the external differences between the actual forms that instantiate these Ideas. The relation among Ideas, the internal structure of the ideal realm is something that Ruyer has yet to address very precisely, but we need to have a way of passing from one idea to another. Ruyer conceives of this in terms of a differentiation of Ideas analogous to the embryo. Deleuze's image of a set of nested topological forms created through a cascade of symmetry breaking is helpful when it comes to applying the embryogenesis analogy in a non-material setting. So we might say that the structure of Ideas is mathematical.
]
No comments:
Post a Comment