notes on vertical and horizontal causation

Throughout neo-Platonism, causation is primarily vertical in nature, and this is popping up again in avant garde philosophy today.

Emanations proceed from higher/deeper realities to derivative ones. This is clear enough in Plotinus, and it takes on even more tangible form in Islamic neo-Platonism, where the actual planetary spheres are treated as emanations. (In some of these systems, Prophets gain their insight directly from the moon.)

As I said in Bristol, the same happens in Giordano Bruno (and in Nicolas of Cusa, his inspiration). A specific thing gains its nature via “contraction” from something that is pre-individual without being entirely indeterminate.

One objection in Bristol, while interesting enough, missed the main point. He claimed that it’s wrong to say that the actual is merely something sterile atop the virtual, since the actual is able to affect the virtual. But this is merely retroaction going upwards, and Plotinus already allowed for that sort of retroaction through the work of knowledge, reascending the scale of emanations.

The real question is horizontal causation. How does one specific entity affect another. And here, I insist, philosophy remains intimidated by the thought that the natural sciences have monopolized this question. It is primarily treated as a matter of collision between material masses, secondarily as interaction by way of fields, and then a number of “trippy” complications can be imported from quantum theory. But metaphysical discussion of “horizontal” causation has been out of fashion since Descartes, with occasional uprisings from other great thinkers. But even most of those uprisings have either mediated horizontal causation through God (Leibniz, Whitehead) or through matter and its philosophical heirs (much more popular now than God, but serving largely the same causal role).

Whenever people ask me where I think the strictly metaphysical importance of Latour can be found, I say that it is here. He’s the first in awhile to raise the metaphysical question of interaction between two utterly concrete, actual things (say, Adidas shoes and freight trains). I’ve given reasons for why I think the solution he provides won’t quite work, but Latour does deserve to be called the first “secular occasionalist,” grasping the vast and problematic gulf between any two entities while not positing some infinite God or infinite matter as the solution. If you see this as one of the key problems of philosophy, then Latour automatically becomes a pivotal figure; if you don’t see the problem, then he’s a clever sociologist and a metaphysical relativist. I think the latter view is a failure of imagination, and that’s why I’m willing to place heavy bets on the future reputation of Latour. He’s offering something important that no one else can provide. I suspect a lot more people are going to be wanting it a few decades from now than want it in 2009.

And this is why I don’t much care for his “plasma”, because I see it as a relapse into the Giordano Bruno sort of solution– no real communication problem because everything is already in communication at a deeper level anyway. No, there is a communication problem after all. And it’s not just between people and “the world”. It’s between all parts of that world, all people, and all parts of all people. Why? Because a thing is an animated core that systematically unifies properties, but any translation of that thing elsewhere inevitably reduces it to qualities. No model of a thing *is* that very thing. There have been claims that realism is threatened by quantum phenomena, but why? Heisenberg shows that the position and momentum of a particle are uncertain until measured. He doesn’t say the particle may be a sunflower or a shark. And besides, what philosophy could be more compatible with quantum findings than one that holds that no qualitative or quantitative measurement corresponds to an exact state in the thing itself?