Apostasis of the Archons: ur-Ontology:
I was sitting atop a big, beached log, with Jim Beam and a can of beans, by an estuary just south of Crescent City, picking my guitar in the key of G, when I happened into conversation with a big-hipped gal who was there. I was angling to manifest an occasion of that frictive jouissance one wants after many days alone on the road, but she wanted to discuss philosophy.
So too, again today I’d rather just reproduce my species essence in a simple sense but instead will try to talk philosophy to you, dear reader.
I told my new friend of this thing so beautiful I could not stop thinking about it yet could hardly describe it adequately, even to myself. I told her that the fundamental problematic of the modern western mind is the separation of substance from being and that this problematic is confronted rigorously but not quite solved in Kant’s perfectly autistic epistemology, that Hegel the Hysteric, following a half century of lesser German mages, finally solves the problem in form, and that Marx, the cranky badger, gives real content to this formal solution, thus fully sublating philosophy as we know it.
She was all confused and shit.
“Well, what makes the trout the trout,” I said, gesturing at the estuary (though she assured me that, on account of the sediment, there had not been any such Salmonidae there for some time).
“Its DNA” she replied immediately.
As a dyed-i-the-hemp Лысе́нко-ist, I was a little miffed by this response. The Communist world-view, I think, comes with a different answer to this question. In short, it says “the trout is a trout because of its species history and its life activity.”
In fact, the response “its DNA” belied in my friend a latent Mendelianism about life and its motions. Although biologists tell me that recent advances in genetics undermine Mendel (and, it seems to me, vindicate Лысе́нко), the world-view associated with Mendel remains a basic reflex in most of the population, including amongst many scientists. According to this world view, organisms are determined by an underlying genetic material, a non-apparent substance that gives rise to and controls the physiognomy and behavior of the organism. Indeed, the outward being of the organism is basically phenomenal. Books such as Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene even go so far as to consider the organism a sort of flesh-sack that is just an instrument for the proliferation of an underlying genetic substance
The dialectical, materialist view on the other hand does not separate appearance from reality in this way. The Marxist-Hegelian does not see a genetic substance giving rise to an automaton-like organism. The Marxist-Hegelian sees a specific contradiction in material reality with a specific resolution. There is no “true reality” outside of the totality made by the two poles of this specific contradiction.
The most basic contradiction, that which characterizes life itself, is the contradiction between an organism and its environment; no living organism finds the material requisites for its existence and reproduction in a form immediately available to it. All organisms must, eat, photosynthesize, digest, labor, etc so as to transform the physical environment around it into a suitable form.
As each organism does this, through its very life activity, new oppositions and resolutions emerge– the body of the tree becomes the life of the aphid, the aphid becomes the life of the bird, and so on. The result is the the ever-renewing, always simultaneously solved and unsolved, lineage of contradictions we call evolution.
(it is a contradiction for a thing to fall away and towards a fixed point at the same time, but this contradiction finds its resolution in the ellipse)
The trout, then, is a trout because of the particular way in which it resolves this basic contradiction between organism and environment. That is, because of the specific way it feeds and fucks. Because the trout has a specific form of life, because it transforms this environment this way, it is a a trout. This activity gives rise to a species essence (what we might call “troutness” in general), but this species essence is both stable and always changing because of and through the life activity of each particular trout. Because particular trout face certain specific contradictions (quotidian problems, such as hunger, or extraordinary ones, such as a sudden influx of silt into Northern California estuaries, for example) and each trout endeavors to resolve the contradictions it faces in its specific way, that is, to continue living and reproducing, the species both perdures and evolves, perhaps eventually becoming something else.
The trout, then, is a trout because of what it does. Essence and appearance coincide here (although it is important to emphasize, lest I’m misunderstood, that essence and appearance are not here the same. Rather, essence is immanent in appearance, more on this is a bit). Moreoever, the trout’s being is not just something that is simply explained, determined, or reduced to its DNA, but the activity of the fish is itself crucial. The fish is not simply a passive explanandum. Consciousness and essence are mutually immanent and co-creating.
It is well established in the historical record (although not sufficiently remarked upon) that Marx was pretty obsessed with Darwin’s Origin of Species. He read it intently, filling his copy with annotations and comments. He even wrote an effusive letter explaining the similarity in their projects and a copy of Capital to Darwin. Marx had spent his youth critiquing the Hegelianism he had been raised on and trying to figure out where to go after Hegel. I think Marx saw that Hegel’s system was the necessary culmination of philosophy (its solution, if you will), and that, therefore, no advance in philosophy was really possible after Hegel. Nevertheless, Marx could also see like no other the inconsistencies in the Hegelian system and its absurd idealism– its utter alienation and annihilation of the real world of material things. For Marx, Hegel’s system was thus both the Truth and a preposterous lie. Marx’s solution was to posit a materialist dialectic that retained the structure of Hegel’s ontology yet stood i
In Darwin, Marx saw a perfect vindication and practical discovery of the materialist dialectic at work. Consider the concept of a “species” in evolutionary biology. A species is a real concept that works in the world. It is something that you can point to, describe, and characterize; it is really there in the world, and it both explains and causes other things that happen in the world. It is, if you will an active essence. Nevertheless, there is no static essence to a species, no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that makes a species a species or one different from another. Instead, a species is what it is just because it occupies a particular ecological niche, and that particular niche is only there as the result of a whole historical development in nature. – And what is an ecological niche besides a specific resolution of the general contradiction between organism and environment?
Moreover, the relationship between a species and an individual member of that species is a perfect illustration of Marx’s inverted Hegelianism. There is a definite sense in which an individual does the things it does because it is one of that species, but at the same time the species is what it is only because of, in, and through the activity of the individuals that belong to it; the individuals do what they do because of their species, but the species is what it is because the individuals do what they do (how’s that for a koan!).
Thus, while species do have definite natures or essences, that essence is not something outside of or prior to life itself. It is something immanent in life, immanent to the particular manner in which a particular set of material contradictions find their resolution. Herein lies another contradiction– the contradiction between the individual’s activity and its species essence. This contradiction, however, is the motor of the species’ development.
(“Communism is the resolution of the contradiction between freedom and necessity”) (“Motion itself is a contradiction between presence and absence”)
The Mendelian metaphysic really can’t comprehend this. If organisms are determined by an underlying genetic substance, why does that genetic substance change, and why is that genetic substance the way that it is? The obvious answer is that it is because of and through the life of the organism.
As I’ve already alluded to, the Mendelian metaphysic, wherein a trout is a trout “because of its DNA” is an instance of a more general ontological problem in the western mind. Beginning at least with Plato, the western mind has tended to separate substance from being. This separation is principally a reflex of the development of commodity society, for the commodity form presupposes exactly this separation in its alienation of a commodity’s “value” from its social and sensuous characteristics. “Value” is an intangible reality outside of the commodity that, nevertheless, for the bourgeois mind, is more real than the real commodity itself and which the real commodity merely reflects or expresses. Thus it is no coincidence that the ontology of substance alienated from being emerges and entrenches in the western mind beginning with the Ancients' invention of the civic binary of freedom and slavery and legal instrument of absolute and alienable ownership.
This separation of substance from being is fundamental to the western mind and the capitalist mode of life, and it finds expression not only in the value form but in modern science, liberalism, religion, and even contemporary identity politics. This is what I mean by “ur-ontology”: the very fabric and substance of western though and capitalist society has this separation at its core. This separation almost certaily lives within you, dear reader.
(“the table stands on its head and grows grotesque ideas out of its wooden mind”)
The separation of substance from being consists in this: that being i.e. that which appears in the world, is relegated to a subordinate position, becomes not fully self sufficient and instead must find its truth or its reality in something outside of and different from it. This something outside of being but nevertheless prior to it is its substance.
Consider Plato’s doctrine of form. Plato’s doctrine of form is most straightforwardly an argument about the relationship between the one and the many. That is, what makes many different particulars nonetheless one? Even in our most simple concepts we have a problem: disparate particulars which may have no sensuous, material features in common, we nevertheless regard as “the same.” What makes all the shades of red “red”? What makes all the different chairs a “chair”? etc, etc. Plato’s solution to this problem is to posit a realm of forms. These forms are not something you can touch, see, hear, or smell. They are abstract and outside of being, nevertheless they are real. In fact, they are more real than that which you can see, touch, smell, and hear. These empirical things are reflections of their form and have reality or truth insofar as they are reflections or copies of some form outside of themselves. For example, a chair is a chair insofar as it reflects the form of a chair.
While Plato uses these sorts of examples for illustration, he is not really so concerned about chairs and colors. Plato is really worried about things like Justice, and Justice definitely has a form. Plato is conversing with a decadent and self centered bunch of young aristocrats who think things such as that “Justice” is just something made up by the strong in society to dupe the weak into believing and behaving in accordance “with the advantage of the stronger” (that’s right, Nietzsche and Foucault basically just cribbed their ideas from Thrasymychus) and that “Justice” is just what brings about pleasure (Callicles, fore-bearer of both the utilitarians and today’s campus anarcho-leftoids). Plato is trying to get these wayward ephebi to see that Justice is something real, that it is something greater than the perspective and inclinations of any one individual or even community and that these future rulers are bound to Justice whether they see it or know it. He is trying to instill in them a humility to always strive to grasp Justice but never to believe that they have fully achieved it. He wants them to live towards this holy and transcendent good that is real yet never fully knowable.
There is a laudable historical significance to this project, but notice what it does. It sets reality outside of being. In Plato’s doctrine, only the form attains to the highest reality and truth. Everything that seems to be real only is insofar as it approximates a form outside of and different from itself. Moreover, the form is a universal form. The form for all chairs is the same, and the differences between the myriad particular chairs are defects, divergences from the one really true form. There is a uniform, super-sensuous one that subsumes and gives being to an imperfect many. The whole world becomes a defective reflection, as through a mirror darkly, of the realm of forms.
Another manifestation of this separation of substance from being is much of Christian doctrine, and this is the separation that Marx makes so much of and sees by analogy in everything from the liberal political state to the value form. In Christian doctrine the true significance of life does not reside in life itself but in Christ. The Christian attains salvation when he is saved through Christ, when he attains salvation in a realm outside of life. The Christian can never know this other realm but can only ever question after it, through prayer. The rightness and truth of a Christian’s life does not depend on this life, but on that life. Indeed, the best Christian negates this life and his being in it, for his true being, his true substance, lies in God and in Christ’s salvation. The Christian’s salvation is a mediated salvation, and his being a reflected one.
As I’ve already described, Marx diagnoses the value form as a religious myth, albeit a kind of pagan totem rather than that of the Christian’s absolute. As with the Christian’s salvation and Plato’s forms, the reality of the commodity, its value, is outside the commodity’s real being. This is what Marx means by the “commodity fetish” that he describes in Ch.1, Sec. 4 of Capital. In this way, the imagined value substance comes to control the production of real commodities themselves and takes up diabolical residence in the minds of men.
Similarly, liberal democracy too separates substance from being and offers an otherworldly, un-real form of liberation. Marx most famously analyzes this in On the Jewish Question, and his basic point is not that the democracy and rights promised by the liberal state are incomplete or unrealized given capitalism but that these are a superstition, a separation of substance from being similar to that of Christianity.
Consider liberal democracy’s basic criterion for legitimacy: whether the proposition has been voted upon through the correct procedures. According to the basic doctrine of liberal theory you are free (have acquired salvation) if the state’s decisions conform to certain formal constraints. Moreover, the subject of the liberal state is not the person but the citizen. The citizen is a sort of abstract point, devoid of all distinguishing features or social relations and perfectly equal to all other citizens. The formalism of liberal democracy and the abstraction of the citizen of course conflicts poignantly with the reality of life. Real people are not equal, voting does not mean you’ve had a real choice much less a real say, and the liberal state’s insistence on abstracting from the real relations and distinctions amongst people actually enables these relations and distinctions to control real life (meanwhile the liberal state declares us all free).
The liberal state enforces the sanctity of the contract with a perfectly neutral hand, taking no notice of the distinction between the person of a bank and the person of a farmer. In a liberal state there will never be a debt jubilee because every contract is as good as another and every dollar the same as every other.
(“The citizen is liberated through the intermediary of the political state just as the Christian is liberated through the mediary of Christ”)
There is one last manifestation of the separation of substance and being that should be mentioned, as it is responsible for pervasive mis-construals of Marx’s materialism and is the one that perhaps has the most contemporary legitimacy in the west; that is the modern “scientific” world view. I have already touched on this in my characterization of the Mendelian world view, but it bears generalization. The modern scientific world view is one of reduction and explanation. A set of phenomena is reduced to and explained as an emanation of some more basic process or entity. For example, smug dumbfucks such as Sam Harris will try to say that consciousness is “just” neurons firing and reduce emotions to pictures on an fMRI device. Sam Harris aside, this is the basic paradigm of science from its inception in about the 15th century through much of the 20th century– to see the apparent phenomena as less real, as a dumb expression or emanation of underlying, non-apparent but more real, process or substance (water is just H2O, an orgasm is just an evolutionary rewards system, etc). It is this worldview that has caused many to interpret Marx’s materialism as a sort of scientific reduction– a reduction of an “unreal” politics, culture, and ideology to the “real” material of economics. This is incorrect, however. Marx’s materialism is an active materialism, and he is in love with consciousness. Marx’s materialism does not say that the trout does trout things because a genetic substance is working to reproduce itself through it but that the trout is a trout because it does trout things; and the trout does these things because it is alive, and all living things, even the trout, have the spark of creative labor in them.
What then of substance and being if we are not to alienate them from one another? One mistake is to abolish the distinction and to affirm that only appearance is real. This is reactionary and a retreat from reason. It is the tack taken by Hume and the empiricists as well as today’s campus identity mongers and chronic offense takers. This philosophical paradigm dispenses entirely with the distinction between appearance and reality and says that only subjective appearance is real. Hume observes, “I see no cause; I see not but constant conjunction” and concludes that there is no such thing as a cause.
The materialist dialectic does not do away with essence and the distinction between truth or appearance. Rather it sees essence and truth as something that is particular, specific, and immanent to activity itself (and this is the sense in which Marx’s dialectical materialism returns to Aristotle). Thus, the truth of humanity, its telos and its good, is not something given from without and reflected imperfectly but is a truth that emerges from the life activity of human beings themselves qua cooperative, consciously laboring beings.
In short, the marxist materialist dialectic does not negate the distinction between being and substance (as does empiricism) but overcomes and sublates it. This is why dialectical materialism is a philosophy that leaves philosophy behind, since philosophy, as it developed in western culture, is itself a product and reflex of this very separation.