Gibbon on the decline of the army

Under Constantine, while the border legions remained tough but underpaid, the legions stationed in cities showed signs of decay:

“The most flourishing cities were oppressed by the weight of quarters. The soldiers insensibly forgot the virtues of their profession, and contracted only the vices of civil life. They were either degraded by the industry of mechanic trades, or enervated by the luxury of baths and theatres. They soon became careless of their martial exercises, curious in their diet and apparel; and, while they inspired terror to the subjects of the empire, they trembled at the hostile approach of the Barbarians.”

on Levi’s response

As usual, Levi is quite engaging in responding to his readers. Here, he responds to a reader who claims he’s merely reworking Deleuze’s ontology in different terms. (Also, I am happy to sign on with Levi’s answers here):

” First, Deleuze’s being is a continuum that gets parceled or congealed into discrete bits at the level of the actual. The actual, as it were, is a sort of epiphenomenon of this continuum and really does nothing of its own. Rather, all the work takes place at the level of the continuum. Between the options of a continuum and atomism, I side with Whitehead, proposing an ontology composed of discrete objects, rather than congealed actualizations of a differential continuum. Second, and in a related vein, for Deleuze all processes of actualization move from the virtual to the actual, without there being actual-to-actual interactions. As Deleuze clearly states, movement does not take place from actual object to actual object, but from the virtual to the actual. By contrast, in my ontology all interaction takes place between objects, not from the virtual to the actual.”

Once I made a similar point, and someone rather testily informed me that the actual can also affect the virtual in Deleuze. But even if this were true (and Levi seems to disagree, as do I), we’re still talking about a vertical relationship, not a horizontal relationship between actual and actual.

This is Deleuze’s Neo-Platonist side. Neo-Platonism is all about the vertical emanation from higher to lower. And even though people are quick to point out that Plotinus also allows us to reverse this movement and ascend back toward the One by thinking and living well, it is still always an up-and-down movement, not a side-to-side movement.

It’s the Aristotelian strand in philosophy that honors horizontal causation between equals. Deleuze, whatever his wish to reverse Plato, keeps a more Platonic model.

Levi on flat ontology

Levi has a nice post up about FLAT ONTOLOGY, and I especially like his photosynthesis analogy. The post is also lavishly, even hilariously illustrated.

I need to get back to chapter revision, but two of his commenters make interesting points that I want to respond to very briefly:

“glen: I am reading Harman’s book and he makes a similar argument. The problem I have with this, and which I have been trying to express for a while on your blog if you go over my previous comments, is that this is a profoundly humanist interpretation of reality. A dog/coral reef/waterfall/whatever does not engage with the things in the world formed through the same process of concrescence as that of human prehension (percept+affect). Even calling a dog a ‘dog’ does not engage with the dog as the animal-human’s-use-language-and-call-a-dog would. The realist would take into account the affections of actants through which hey relate to each other. Discounting the mind-body split is going the wrong way. There should be an infinite number of ‘mind-body’ splits if the mind and body are not reduced to a simple binary but the complex continuum between mind-brain-nervous system-body is taken into account and understood as a series of transformative affordances. If so, then language, perceptions and affections of all actants would need to be incorporated into a truly ‘flat’ analysis.”

To this I say:

1. “this is a profoundly humanist interpretation of reality. A dog/coral reef/waterfall/whatever does not engage with the things in the world formed through the same process of concrescence as that of human prehension (percept+affect).”

No one is saying that it’s the same process of concrescence. Humans have language, dreams, and cognitive processes that I would never wish to ascribe to cotton or fire. But this continues to ignore the major question: is the difference between human and non-human relations to the world worthy of giving rise to a basic ontological dualism?

The entire Kantian tradition says (or rather, assumes): Yes.

I say No. So does Whitehead, whose term “concrescence” glen uses without signing up for Whitehead’s explicitly anti-Kantian position. The whole point of the term “prehension” in Whitehead is to put the human and non-human back on the same ontological level. Of course there are differences between humans and stones. But that doesn’t mean it’s justified to view human experience as a special rip in the cosmic fabric, incomparable to anything else.

What I do instead (and so does Whitehead, and so for the most part does Latour) is to start with something more primitive. The relation to any reality does not replicate that reality. It translates, distorts, transforms it. Whichever word you prefer. And by necessity, this is true of any relation, not of special, poignant features of human psychology or neurology.

2. “Even calling a dog a ‘dog’ does not engage with the dog as the animal-human’s-use-language-and-call-a-dog would. The realist would take into account the affections of actants through which hey relate to each other.”

Yes, and that’s what my philosophical position does. Calling a dog a “dog” is quite harmless; it’s a rigid designator for whatever it is that we’re talking about when we refer to an object outside its relations. Most likely it is something altogether different from what we mean by “dog” in everyday life, which is a certain set of properties. The dog itself is much darker than that. We can call it pre-dog, if you wish.

3. “Discounting the mind-body split is going the wrong way. There should be an infinite number of ‘mind-body’ splits if the mind and body are not reduced to a simple binary but the complex continuum between mind-brain-nervous system-body is taken into account and understood as a series of transformative affordances.”

What is discounted is not the mind-body split, but rather the narrower human mind-physical body split. There is still a dualism in my position between real objects and sensual objects (i.e., objects that appear in experience).

4. “If so, then language, perceptions and affections of all actants would need to be incorporated into a truly ‘flat’ analysis.”

I don’t get this objection. All of these things are already built into the heart of my position, which is all about transformation from real into sensual. But by sensual I don’t just mean human experience, or even animal experience. I mean any experience, including that of cotton or fire.

A lot of people pull this move of saying that I’m retrojecting special human traits into the non-human realm, but that gets it backwards. What I’m actually doing is saying that the fundamental rift is not body and mind, but object and relation. This difference occurs in every least corner of reality, and that very complicated assemblage we call “human experience” is built up out of those primitive relations without being ontologically separated from them by some sort of magical gulf just because we have language or can ask “why is there something rather than nothing?” These are certainly leaps in nature, but so is the formation of stars or the emergence of heavier elements.

Next comes alan:

“Maybe Harman’s OOP is more definitively non-D&G if it’s ‘objects, all the way down,’ but then again, Deleuze’s beloved Spinoza is also ‘bodies, all the way down’… Harman also denies a Bergsonian concept of time, but I think he and philosophy in general needs to be more explicitly and rigorously engaged with relativity and quantum mechanics if claims about space and time are made. Does Harman’s time as a consequence of object relations stack up with the latest conceptions of space-time? If not it’s surely just a nice idea. (Mind you physics is full of speculation as well – dark matter etc.)”

To this I respond:

1. “Maybe Harman’s OOP is more definitively non-D&G if it’s ‘objects, all the way down,’ but then again, Deleuze’s beloved Spinoza is also ‘bodies, all the way down’…”

Everybody wants to pretend that there’s no monism in Spinoza. Let’s not overlook the obvious. There is one substance in Spinoza. One. In my position there are an infinity of substances locked in an infinite regress (but not an infinite progress upward– there is a surface to the cosmos but not a bottom). If there is any philosopher I definitely do not resemble, it is Spinoza. I’m also not a stoic when it comes to the passions, and not a determinist.

2. “Harman also denies a Bergsonian concept of time, but I think he and philosophy in general needs to be more explicitly and rigorously engaged with relativity and quantum mechanics if claims about space and time are made. Does Harman’s time as a consequence of object relations stack up with the latest conceptions of space-time? If not it’s surely just a nice idea.”

Right point for the wrong reason.

Yes, it is true that “philosophy in general needs to be more explicitly and rigorously engaged with relativity and quantum mechanics,” but only because such a dialogue would be fertile. What alan is implying here is that physics is the Master Discourse when it comes to matters lying outside the human mind, and philosophers should simply lie prostrate before the sciences and not dare to say anything about what lies beyond the human prison.

But why? That certainly wasn’t Einstein’s or Bohr’s attitude toward philosophy. Leibniz and Kant are all over Einstein’s picture of the world, and Bohr explicitly made use of Kierkegaard when thinking about quantum leaps of the electron inside the atom.

To try to divvy up the turf so that science gets to talk about nature and philosophy gets to talk about the human sphere is precisely the modern constitution that Levi, following Latour, disdained in his post, and rightly so.

3. “(Mind you physics is full of speculation as well – dark matter etc.)”

Exactly.

Philosophy is not the handmaid of the natural sciences. And furthermore, we have little idea what the sciences will look like in 50 years. They could be pretty weird by today’s standards. They could be object-oriented. Who knows? It is important to maintain some level of contact with what is going on in contemporary sciences, and attempts of philosophy and science to intervene in each other should be welcomed. But I do not recognize relativity and quantum theory as having the power of life and death over philosophies. They simply haven’t been around that long, and so far they can’t even be unified.

One final point: my ontology isn’t quite as “flat” as either Levi’s or Latour’s. Although I put all object on the same footing, there are two side to every object: its autonomous, integral reality, and the way it appears in a relation (which for me means on the interior of that relation, but never mind on that point for now).

Despite Latour’s high degree of contempt for Husserl, they have some important things in common. One is their allergy to reductionism of any sort, since they both let a trillion flowers bloom and allow fictional characters and so forth to have reality of a sort. Also, though Latour condemns Husserl’s idealism, there’s a more important similarity– both find the notion of non-relational entities to be nonsense. For Latour, nothing is real if it’s not affecting other things. And for Husserl, nothing is real if it’s not the potential correlate of consciousness.

Latour’s version is less idealistic insofar as, in principle, there doesn’t need to be an observing human on the scene, but he still thinks there has to be some “observer”– some actor that is affected by the hammer if the hammer is claimed to be real.

But does there have to be a human observer on the scene for Latour as well. Opinions vary on this point.

The case for Latour as a non-human-centered philosopher is strongest when you emphasize, as I do, the passages in Irreductions that say “things interpret each other as much as we interpret them,” that sort of stuff.

The case for Latour as human-centered is based on two points:

1. The fact that almost every case he analyzes involves a human as one of the ingredients, which isn’t true of his philosophical hero Whitehead. But I take this to be an artifact of Latour’s discipline, the anthropology of the sciences. You can’t talk about science without talking about humans, though you can talk about nature without talking about humans.

2. His occasional flagrant statements such as “microbes did not exist before Pasteur discovered them,” or “Ramses II couldn’t have died of tuberculosis, because it wasn’t yet discovered in ancient Egypt.” I’ve interpreted these statements as simply a bridge too far. Why? Because Latour could withdraw these statements while losing nothing important from his position. This is quite unlike his relationism (“tuberculosis isn’t real unless it affects something, even if not humans”), which is the very core of his position.

In other words, if Latour were to say: “I shouldn’t have said that. Of course microbes existed before Pasteur discovered them,” then his philosophy is still recognizable.

But if he were to say: “I’ve changed my mind. Actors are not just the effects that they have, they are also substances partly withdrawn from their relations with other actors,” then he will have made a change so drastic as to make the early/late Heidegger split look like a 1-degree drop in temperature. (And as many of you know, I don’t think much of the supposed early/late Heidegger split.)

Most importantly, though, if you take the “Latour is human-centered” line, then you’ll have to explain those passages from Irreductions that very clearly place inanimate entities on the same level as humans.

Kripke

This point will be completely superfluous for any blog readers with a background in analytic philosophy, but important for those who are primarily of the continental tribe.

If you haven’t read Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, please put it high on your list of things to read soon. It’s a masterpiece of philosophizing, done by someone who was rather young at the time– 30 years old, I believe. It teaches lessons that you will never forget.

It’s also written in a nice, informal style, since it is actually the transcript of a spoken presentation, which makes it all the more miraculous.

And though Kripke apologizes in advance for occasional moments of corniness, I don’t find his style corny at all, not even when he coins terms such as “schmidentity.” (As in “Identity, schmidentity.”) In fact, I find Kripke’s sense of humor to be excellent.

I’m not reading Kripke at the moment. The reason for this post is that I simply happened to be thinking of him this afternoon, apparently at random. Naming and Necessity is the only work of analytic philosophy that I’ve read 5 or 6 times. And I’ve loved it every time. In fact, whenever I teach Contemporary Philosophy I use the following “strange bedfellows” reading list: Heidegger, Levinas, Whitehead, Kripke.

speaking of the Parkman family

Parkman’s uncle, George Parkman, was the victim of a SORDID 1849 MURDER AT THE HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL.

Harvard Professor John White Webster was convicted of the crime (justly correctly, it seems) and was hanged in public the next year. [ADDENDUM: I changed “justly” to “correctly” because, although it seems pretty clear that Webster was the murderer, some procedural objections have been raised to the conduct of the trial.]

This case was a very big deal internationally at the time. Charles Dickens even wanted to tour the murder site on his visit to the United States.

classic Francis Parkman diatribes

I’m not currently reading Francis Parkman, having finished his massive history of the England-France rivalry in the New World just two years ago. But he’s one of the finest American prose stylists, and it’s always worth sharing good writing on this blog.

Parkman’s strong anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish feelings are well known. Regardless of your take on that, he’s an incredible writer. Two samples on roughly the same topic:

“In the middle of the sixteenth century, Spain was the incubus of Europe. Gloomy and portentous, she chilled the world with her baneful shadow. Her old feudal liberties were gone, absorbed in the despotism of Madrid. A tyranny of monks and inquisitors, with their swarms of spies and informers, their racks, their dungeons, and their fagots, crushed all freedom of thought or speech; and, while the Dominican held his reign of terror and force, the deeper Jesuit guided the mind from infancy into those narrow depths of bigotry from which it was never to escape.”

That’s not enough to satisfy Parkman. Just fifty pages later comes this:

“The monk, the inquisitor, and the Jesuit were lords of Spain,– sovereigns of her sovereign, for they had formed the dark and narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse. They had formed the minds of her people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy, and given over a noble nation to a bigotry blind and inexorable as the doom of fate. Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a rich, strong nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of that day a scourge as dire as ever fell on man.”