on disappointing realisms

One form of disappointing realism, in my opinion, is the kind that cares more to valorize certain forms of knowledge than to safeguard the reality of the real. My views in this point are already known. The real is something never perfectly translatable, or even percentage-wise translatable into some model of it. This does not mean that the real is an ungraspable thing-in-itself with knowledge reduced to a relativist free-for-all. What it means, rather, is that access to the real is oblique or indirect rather than through some sort of isomorphic resemblance.

And this is one of the reasons why the use of “poetry” as a synonym for anti-philosophy is so unfortunate. When scientistic philosophy dismisses certain forms of philosophy as poetic, one of the things it forgets is that there’s a big difference between different levels of quality in literature. “Poetry” does not mean “arbitrary and entertaining aesthetic creation, devoid of truth-value.” There are good reasons why Aristotle called the gift for metaphor not just an important gift, but the highest gift. And let me repeat: that’s Aristotle, my friends, not Hölderlin or Mallarmé. Any theory of truth that doesn’t say a lot about metaphor is going to fail, because that’s the stuff of which truth is made.

But there is another form of disappointing realism, all the more disappointing because it comes so close to what needs to be said about the real. This type of realism goes very far toward the key Platonic insight that what something is lies deeper than any qualities of that thing (see Socrates in virtually every dialogue; the point isn’t that he “asks for definitions,” but that he will only be satisfied with definitions that lie deeper than any qualities of the thing– the central and fertile paradox of Platonism; and by the way, Plato must soon be revived, and he’s probably still the best we’ve ever had in our discipline).

One example is Kripke, who may be my favorite analytic philosopher. He goes so far in the direction of saying that gold lies deeper than its manifest qualities, such as color. But then, what is gold? The answer he ends up with could hardly be more disappointing: gold is that which has 79 protons. Sigh. This is obviously only a partial answer, since 79 protons could be spread out in space in such a way as for their no longer to be gold. Furthermore, even if suitably refined this could only be a partial definition, since it only explains the compositional structure of gold, and there’s a lot more to gold (and to anything else) than the conditions of its genesis.

He continues further with this disappointing strategy when he says that the essence of each of us is– what? That we are the product of two specific parents. As far as I am aware this is not even genetically true, since (though the chances are minuscule) you might have ended up with the same DNA from two different parents, by the laws of chance. But more importantly, it’s yet another 79 Protons Maneuver (for so I will term this copout which replaces the question of the essence of a thing with the question of its composition).

But I don’t want to pick on analytic philosophy here. Zubiri, who is one of the most original continental thinkers of the past half century (his major work, On Essence, dates from the early 1960’s). He too does so much to say that the essence of a thing must be subtracted from any of its relations (whereas Kripke is talking about subtraction from manifest qualities, but the intellectual dynamic is similar in the two cases).

This goes so far that Zubiri holds that neither a knife nor a farm have an essence, since they are a knife or a farm only for someone. This is false in my view, since it overidentifies the state of being a farm with the state of being a specific farm with highly specific qualities for specific agents at a specific moment. In other words, qua farm, Zubiri’s view entails that the farm cannot change any of its properties at all and still be the same farm. If Farmer Haynes kicks a chunk of dirt out of the way, the farm now has a slightly different relational structure for him and for his partner Farmer Hackman. The farm is set adrift in that relational sphere where each tiny fluctuation changes the thing as a whole. The farm is not allowed the leeway for unimportant changes, unless that is pasted on as a pragmatic fact: “for all practical purposes, Haynes and Hackman notice no difference just because of the one chunk of dirt.” Humans are left as the ultimate arbiter of farmhood.

I answer that the fact that farms exist only for humans does not entail that farms have no ontological independence from humans. Sure, if all humans were exterminated by some calamity, farms would no longer exist, because they are a composite entity. But this does not mean that farms are upwardly reducible to the sum total of their effects in any given instant.

A marriage would be another good example. Obviously, the marriage immediately ends (both legally and otherwise) as soon as one partner dies. The marriage is a composite entity, just like gold or anything else. But this does not mean that a marriage is nothing other than its current effects on both partners and on the rest of the world. See what I mean?

These sorts of theories ignore what in Dundee I called the “mezzanine” level of the world, which is wedged between the ground floor and the first floor (or first floor and second floor in the U.S. system of naming). The gold, the marriage, the knife and the farm all have components of which they are built. They all have effects on their environment, too. But that’s not the whole story. The real action is wedged in between the two floors. An object is a mezzanine or at least a crawl space between its pieces and its effects.

I don’t expect immediate assent to this, because I didn’t give it my immediate assent either. It comes from years of wrestling with various paradoxes in my mind, and perhaps I’ve not explained it well enough in any given piece of writing; all I can do is keep trying, and hope to improve as an expositor over time.

But to get back to the point of how Zubiri manifests the same form of disappointing realism as found in Kripke… What Zubiri says is ultimately essential is “the atomic-cortical structure” of a thing. It’s more vague than 79 protons, to be sure, but it’s the same last-minute failure of nerve, or perhaps of imagination.

To point to an object, or to its essence (the two are different for me) requires an unyielding awareness of the fact that an object is reducible neither downward to its components nor upward to its effects. It is not merely “potential,” because when you say “potential” you’re really talking about potential future effects, and that shifts the hot potato forward in time without specifying what about the thing right now allows it to have new expressions in the future. (In fact, I don’t think potential is a real category at all, and in this I agree with the early Latour.)

Nor, in my opinion, is the object “virtual.” I still don’t think anyone (including Deleuze) has formulated this concept with the necessary degree of precision. For that reason, it functions in contemporary discourse mostly as a negative trope: “oh, you’re still confusing the potential with the virtual,” etc.

Furthermore, every version of the virtual I have seen so far (I await Levi’s version in his forthcoming book to see if he escapes this trap) plays a bit of a shell game by trying to let the virtual function as both discrete and continuous simultaneously, without facing up to the problems that this generates.

In other words, they tell us that the virtual isn’t a One. It’s, I don’t know, “clusters of intensities,” or “constellations of singularities,” or something of the sort. So, it has distinct zones of some sort and doesn’t represent a monistic apeiron.

But then if you point to the (occasionalist) problem of how individual zones can communicate then suddenly we encounter the monist move again. You see, the parts of the virtual don’t bleed entirely together, but they’re also not separate either.

In other words, the virtual is simply a way of positing a magical concept that, somehow, gives us both the discrete and the continuous simultaneously.

In short, I reject both the potential and the virtual in favor solely of the actual. But the actual is much weirder than people think. It is located higher than its components but lower than its effects. It is a sort of ghost, but it’s a rock solid ghost that burrows between the known floors of any building.

My concern is that 15 years of the virtual have been 15 years of sidestepping a key philosophical problem.