Tuesday, February 27, 2018


358. Existence

What exists? There are two questions: an ontological and an epistemological one. The ontological question is: what things exist in the world, and what are their relations with humans and with each other? An epistemological question is: to what extent and how do we have access to those things, how, if at all, can we know them? The latter question has long been dominant, and that makes sense, because if you don’t know if you can know things, what sense is there to speculate about them? However, some contemporary philosophers (Harman, Gabriel, Garcia) now aim to escape from the preoccupation with access, to take things at face value and see. Here I go along with that.

However, the issue of access is still relevant, and I will turn to that later, as I have done in previous items in his blog. In fact, the dynamic, relational ontology that I will argue for covers both questions, which cannot be separated, because ideas about things develop in interaction with those things, which does not mean that they are without error. 

As Harman and Garcia do, I allow for a wide scope of ‘things in the world’: skates, a musical score, a concert, an organization, an ideology, a policy, an opinion, ….[i]

Ontology entails a number of issues, and here I give only an introductory survey, to be developed later. To cut a long story short: Reality is what we can interact with. Largely in agreement with Harman, I believe that:

1.      Objects yield affordances: things we can do with them (tools, furniture, etc.).
2.      Objects are always partly hidden; do not reveal all their features (Harman adopts this principle from Heidegger). One cannot specify all its features, and what is revealed depends on the context, absorptive capacity and intentions of a subject.
3.      Objects have an existence beyond our experience with them.
4.      We can do things to objects, but do not necessarily control them (e.g. the environment).
5.      Many objects are emergent: are not merely assemblages of components but have properties that their components don’t have.
6.      Objects and humans develop in interaction with each other. Affordances are not constant: there may be unrealized potential, and that potential can change.
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Harman proposed that objects are to be looked at in two basic ways: in terms of their components, and in terms of experience or use of them. The first is the realm of science, with its analysis of components, the second that of phenomenology, with its view of use and experience. Garcia put it as follows: one can look at ‘what is in’ the object, and at ‘what it is in’. Harman claims that they are both reductionist, and need to be combined. They are combined, I propose, by virtue of affordances that objects yield (point 1). The first, looking at components, does not recognize emergence (point 5), and neither of the two deals with change (6).

Concerning point 1, objects can also yield opposition, the negative of affordances, resisting actions and ideas. An ‘object’ can literally object to them. And the ‘subject’ is literally subjected to an environment of objects.

Concerning point 2, features of an object may be hidden in several ways. One is tacit knowledge, wre one can do more than one knows. In one form, knowledge once was explicit, but is now taken for granted and cannot be specified. An example is the grammatical rules of a language learned at school, now correctly used without the ability to specify them. In another form, the object could never be fully specified, as in skill learned from a  master, in ostentation rather than specification of a practice. 

Concerning point 6, in this blog I have pleaded for a process philosophy, seeing objects as processes (item 342). In my view, and that of Andrew Benjamin, not singular objects but interaction is primary, since that is how objects, in particular people, are constituted, in relations. However, objects do have an existence that is stable relative to those relations. How that could work is a crucial issue to be discussed in a later item in this blog.

In human and social affairs I have pleaded for a restoration of Aristotelian multiple causality of action (efficient, final, material, formal, conditional and exemplary causes).

Objects form the material cause of the formation of ideas. As I discussed in the preceding item in his blog, it is because of their existence outside our knowledge and control that they can contradict ideas and thereby contribute to their correction and change. If they were not to some extent independent of our ideas, our ideas would not develop. I think that is the most convincing argument for objects to have an existence of their own, beyond our ideas.

The formal cause of conceptualization is ways of thought, partly predisposed by evolution.
Idea formation is not per se reliable. In particular, abstract ideas, such as ‘meaning’, suffer from an ‘object bias’ (item 29): they are conceptualized according to a metaphor of objects in time and space, resulting from the predominant need to adequately deal with such things during much of human evolution. I will elaborate on that in the next item.

I also like Harman’s idea of ‘hyperobjects’, with three properties:
7.      we get entangled in them, unable to get out
8.      they are not only local (the climate, markets)
9.      there can be object-object interaction without human involvement (in the weather)

In this blog I have discussed the notion of ‘system tragedy’, where people get entangled in social structures (organization, institutions, markets), in a complex of positions, roles, and interests, where they lose autonomy and freedom of ethical choice. This is an example of emergence. Such systems can be non-local (financial markets, for example).

This is a major problem for political economy: system tragedy arises, in particular, from multinational corporations that cater exclusively to shareholder interests, and can dodge government regulation or press for advantages, under the threat of moving business abroad, yielding a race to the bottom between nations, concerning social, legal and environmental conditions.

Now, do objects have an essence? That is the subject of a later item.  


[i] Harman and Garcia call this a ‘flat ontology’, because all these different things have an equal claim to existence. However, this term may suggest that there is no hierarchy of things, and I will argue that there is.

Saturday, February 17, 2018


357. The success of failure

A Hegelian principle is that one gets to know something best in its failure.

This appeared in my discussion of what I made of Levinas (item 61 in this blog): in order to achieve the highest level of freedom, which is freedom from pre-conceptions and errors, one needs opposition from the other. 

It also appears in the Popperian principle of falsification in science. One cannot prove the truth of a proposition on the basis of evidence, but one can falsify it. Criticism of failures in science is needed, in the forum of science, for science to succeed.

It appears in democracy: cumbersome and often inefficient as it is, political opposition is needed to prevent survival of failed policies. In a centralized, non-democratic, authoritarian regime such failure is not recognized or acknowledged, to protect the prestige and position of the regime. The strength of democracy is that it can fail (item 339).

It appears in innovation: the failure of an innovative venture is not waste, but has value in showing what does not work, as a basis for further research and development. Entrepreneurs serve society in their failures.

The necessity arising from failure of what exists is the mother of invention.

Evolution arises from a selection environment that eliminates failures to fit. Humans, however, have a distinctive capacity to deliberately and consciously select or construct a favourable niche, and there failure may fail to succeed.

Similarly, a virtue of markets is that competition ensures that no waste of resources arises from failures that survive.

The present perversions of capitalism serve to clarify why and how capitalism fails, and to understand some of the sources of populism (item 47) and shortcomings of the political left.

The most fruitful failures are those that could not be foreseen, and were in that sense uncertain (as opposed to risky), because they most radically close off existing avenues, to open up new ones.

However, failures need to accumulate, to clarify the boundaries of validity of the old, to build up motivation to drop the old and search for the new, and to give indications of directions for the new. This progressive form of conservatism was recognized in a famous debate in the philosophy of science, between Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend, in the 1960’s, in which Popper consented that instantaneous falsification, at the merest falsification, was not rational.

In ontology and epistemology, the need for outside opposition to success, in order to recognize failure, to motivate and indicate avenues for novelty, is the most convincing argument for objects in the world to exist independently from ideas, as a selection environment for the evolution of ideas.

Žižek argued that strict, universal rules demand too much from people, who are imperfect and are also caught in the vagaries of contingency, so that for the rules to succeed there must be some space for deviance, failure to conform (item 337).

All this is consistent with my argument for ‘imperfection on the move’ (items 19 and 127).     

Saturday, February 10, 2018



Žižek tells us[i] that Hegel’s dialectics has been falsely interpreted as a closed circle: he intended the end as a new beginning.[ii] This goes beyond the old Aristotelian idea that things have a potential that is realized in the end. With Hegel, on the path to realization of potential a new potential is created. The question now is how this works. Unless I missed something in Hegel, he gives no explanation how, by what logic, dialectics works, produces novelty, from opposition or tension.

In a later item in this blog I will discuss ontology: the philosophy of being, of things in the world. There, I will use the idea, shared by Graham Harman and Tristan Garcia, that there are two dimensions to objects in the world: first, how they are composed, ‘what is in them’ and second their position in their environment, ‘what they are in’[iii].

The first is the analytic view of science, breaking things down into their components, the second is the phenomenological view, considering the lived experience of things. The latter connects with philosophical pragmatism and Wittgenstein’s notions of ‘meaning as use’. I will now claim that the two arise from each other: how something is composed determines, in part, how it exists in its context, and that, in turn, affects how it is composed. How does that work?  

For transformation, in this blog (item 31), and in a book published in 2000), I proposed a ‘cycle’ of discovery or invention. I did not develop it with Hegel in mind, at least not consciously, but was perhaps fed by prior readings of Hegel. I was inspired, more explicitly, by the theory of the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget concerning the development of intelligence in children. The basic idea there is that when one is confronted with new experience, the attempt is made to assimilate it in existing mental frames, and when that fails such frames are accommodated. I now wonder if it can be seen as a further development of Hegelian thought. In a later item in this blog I will propose that it clarifies ontology, in what I call dynamic ontology.

To recall, I proposed that the cycle of change starts with generalization, defined as application of a practice in novel contexts. In the novel context, the practice is challenged by new conditions of survival. What had been adopted as a universal is confronted with novel particulars.

Note the link with evolution here, with the idea that novelty, in speciation, arises from challenges in a new selection environment. The classic example is the emergence of new species after the disastrous crash of a meteor on earth, which made the dinosaurs and other species extinct. In innovation policy some firms now actively seek novel markets to find out limitations by identifying failures, as a source of innovation.  

Faced with failure in a novel context, the first step, which stays as close as possible to the existing frame, is to ‘tweak’ that frame, in differentiation, in trying out different variants of the same, with recollection of earlier forms that were at play in the emergence of the present practice.

This may not suffice for survival in the new context. Here is where Hegelian opposition or contradiction kicks in. In the failure of the practice one gets to really know it, with its limitations that call for renewal.

From the conflict between practice and the novel context, experiments arise, in what (adopting the terminology of Piaget) I call reciprocation, inserting elements from practices met in the novel context that seem to succeed where the old practice fails, into the logic of the old practice. This yields misfits between the old and the new, novelties that conflict with existing logic.

This, I think, is the fundamental step in dialectics: experimenting with hybrids of the old and the new, to discover ways of relieving the tension between them. It allows for the exploration of the potential of novel elements, and of the limitations of the old logic that obstruct the realization of the new potential, which gives hints in what directions a novel logic might be explored.  

Necessity is both the mother and the midwife of invention.

Novelty, as it emerges in a new basic logic, is hesitant at first, labouring with inconsistencies or frictions that remain, with fall-backs into the old, requiring further adjustments in the constellation of the new basic logic and its elements, until it settles into what in the innovation literature is called a ‘dominant design’.

In sum: in moving to a new place or context one encounters the need and insight to open up content to new possibilities. What was taken as a universal is confronted with deviant particulars (see the preceding item in this blog). Note the similarity to the hermeneutic circle (item 36, 252).

Note that the cycle is in fact a spiral, not a closed loop.             

 Is this helpful as an elaboration, elucidation, or twist of Hegelian dialectics?



[i] In his Parallax view.
[ii] The Latin word terminus can mean ‘end point’ as well as ‘starting point’.
[iii] Tristan Garcia, 2014,  Form and object; A treatise on things, Edinburgh Press.

Saturday, February 3, 2018

355. The universal and its particulars

Žižek adopts Hegel’s view of the ‘concrete universal’: the universal should be seen as incorporating all its particulars, which may be in conflict which each other, and inevitably there are anomalies that do not quite fit the universal.  

Repetition, in the manifestation of the universal in its particulars, is never quite repetition, duplication, but always differentiation. And this may erode or explode the universal, in what Hegel called ‘aufhebung’.[i] Žižek suggests (in his Parallax view) that such dynamics forms the essence of the universal. I will return to the issue of essences in a later item in this blog.  

The philosophical significance of this is that it deviates from the Platonic idea of the universal as transcending the messy world of particulars, and being fixed.

That is also of significance for politics, where the totality of the state should leave room for variety of individuals in the state as well as a variety of states.

Žižek also reminds us that Christ is the personification, particularization, of God the universal.

I now want to compare the Hegelian view with the view of the universal and its particulars presented in this blog (in items 16, 17, 135).

In my view, the universal is not the totality of its particulars, but an abstraction from them, from the rich variety of contexts where the particulars reside. This is in contrast with the Hegelian view that the particulars ‘fall’ from the universal. In my view they ‘feed’ it, form its roots. In its use, to become real, the abstract universal needs to be re-embedded in the richness of the particular context at hand. With a flourish, I would say: the abstract is a hermaphrodite, inserting itself in the context and being impregnated by a host of particulars that may give birth to a novel abstraction.  

For sceptical David Hume the abstract, the universal, is a fiction. I think it is a little more than that. It is rooted in the reality of its particulars, and is a wager on what is invariable across contexts, but this is open since there is no end to possible contexts. Unforeseeable contexts may arise.

An abstraction is itself a universal, an abstraction from varieties of abstraction. The abstraction of abstraction is, as I would now formulate it, that one drops features that do not systematically return in different contexts, in search for what seems essential, though that will never be found. It falls under what in this blog I have called ‘imperfection on the move’. The terms of the abstraction are ambiguous and themselves variable. What, precisely, is a context; is that notion liable to shift? What is essential: does that not imply some judgement of relevance, and how fixed is that? And other criteria may arise: some form that a formalization should have, perhaps. 

The universal is often supported by a prototype that yields an exemplar, that guides identification of particulars as belonging to the universal. I read somewhere that for the English the robin is the exemplar of ‘bird’, while for the Dutch it is the sparrow.

From Lacan, Žižek adopts the notion of a ‘master signifier’ that symbolizes the universal. It is not necessarily an adequate characterization and often serves to bend thought in a certain direction, or hide incongruity, as a support of ideology. For an example, in item 348 of this blog I used the idealized model of perfect competition, as the master signifier of market ideology, while in fact it is never achieved and the endeavour of firms as market participants is to block competition.

The implication of this view of universals is that typically one cannot give necessary and sufficient features for something to belong to a category. For an example, I have used the example of ‘chair’. Once, in a newspaper I saw a man in a stuffed cow with a dent for the seat, with the caption ‘watch me sitting in my cow’. After that, when walking past a field with a cow one might say ‘look what a beautiful chair’.  

For further analysis, I used the notion of the hermeneutic circle, in item 36, as Heidegger also did. Words for concepts, abstractions, along the paradigmatic axis, are inserted into sentences, along the syntagmatic axis, and there are connected with other concepts, and this unique configuration may yield a novel perspective on the concept.

The variation of meaning is one of both context and people. In my discussion of meaning (item 32) I used the distinction, going back to Frege, between denotation/reference and connotation/sense. For Frege, sense was ‘the way in which something is given’: how does an object present itself? I reconstruct it as the way in which reference is established: how does one recognize or select something as a chair? That, I propose, happens on the basis of associations that one has with the concept, collected along a path of life, by which one recognizes something as belonging to the concept. Which connotation is picked out, or triggered, depends on the context. And then, misfits will appear, anomalies, which may occasion a shift of the universal, or a split, or absorption in a novel one. This yields a constitutive role for the individual, not as subjugated to the universal but as feeding it.

How, next, does dialectical change work? That is the topic for the next item.


[i] There is an English term for this: ‘ablation’, but I don’t like it and leave ‘aufhebung’ untranslated. It means at the same time ‘lifting up’ and ‘elimination’.