This strikes me as an extremely promising angle of approach and one which could easily yield a book-length treatment, perhaps under the title Ariadne’s Thread: Deleuze and the Song of Sufficient Reason. For me this approach represents tangible progress in the study of Deleuze’s thought.

I can only feel humbled by such praise, and would love to write this book one of these days. Alas, I am stuck in the same position as many of my compatriots, unsure as to which aspects of my work will lead to stable employment, so it’ll have to wait for now. That being said, I do intend to extend the ‘Ariadne’s Thread’ paper for publication at some point, once a few other commitments are out of the way. As such, the comments in Atheology’s post are very helpful and useful. However, there are a number of possible misunderstandings and points that can be addressed quickly, and so I will endeavour to do so here. I’ll try to number the points to keep them brief and organised.

1. The Existence of the Plane of Immanence

Atheology slightly misunderstands my position on this point when he says:

Deleuze’s atheism requires that we remove the last vestiges of equivocity from Spinozism, which means that Deleuze’s equivalent of Substance “cannot under any circumstances be said to exist.” (p. 14) Given this requirement, the first question to ask is this: does the virtual or the plane of immanence exist? The answer, apparently, is that they exist but not qua Whole, i.e. not qua actual infinite.

The problem here is that I think the question of whether the plane of immanence (POI) exists is parallel to the question of whether the world exists, or more specifically, to a question like whether space exists. I think there’s something fundamentally problematic about all these questions, because to exist is in some sense to be situated in the world, or a space of some kind. This is a theme that I work out quite explicitly in the paper, and it’s crucial to my interpretation of how Deleuze transforms the problem of universals. To recapitulate this briefly, Deleuze says that we should cease to think of universals (e.g., doghood) by analogy with individuals (e.g., fido), and instead to think of them as conditions of individuation (i.e., space and time). This is to say that we should think of universals not as existents within the world, but as conditions under which things exist within the world. The plane of immanence is just the limit of this, insofar as it is supposed to encompass all universals and the information that they immanently encode within themselves.

So even if we can sort of make sense of questions as to whether a particular universal exists (e.g., does doghood exist? or does humorousness exist?), analogously to the question of whether a particular space exists (e.g., is there an absolute edge of space?), these are really questions about the structure of the world understood as the set of conditions in which entities are individuated (e.g., are these dimensions (x/y/z) finite in extent, infinite in extant, or do they loop back upon themselves?), rather than questions about discrete entities. Put simply, we are asking ‘is the world like this?’ rather than ‘does the world contain this?’. Once we understand this, it’s clear that there is no analog for the question ‘does the world exist?’ insofar as it doesn’t ask about any structural feature of the world. To make sense of it, one would have to have some set of conditions outside the world in terms of which to locate it (or fail to). One would need to treat the world as contained within a sort of meta-world in order to raise the question of its existence, which is obviously a terrible metaphysical regress.

Another way of thinking about this is to treat it as analogous to the question ‘where is space?’, to which the only sensible answer is ‘here’. The conditions of individuation don’t need to be individuated in terms of some meta-conditions of individuation, but are self-individuating, in precisely the sense that space contains itself. It is understanding this point and developing it properly that I take to be the crucial advance that Deleuze makes upon Spinoza.

2. Potential Infinity and Sufficient Reason

The next problem is in the way my claim that Deleuze moves from understanding the PSR in terms of actual infinity to understanding it in terms of potential infinity is interpreted. I think this is largely my own fault for not making explicit the delicacy of the interface between epistemology and metaphysics that the PSR deals with. Here is the relevant quote from Atheology:

To posit a potentially infinite series is in effect to say that we can approximate to an arbitrary degree the consequences of God’s existence. More prosaically, a potentially infinite series is usually understood as one that could continue. But how to understand the modal term (‘could’) here? My worry is about whether it makes sense to distinguish sharply between potentiality and possibility. That is what you have to do if you are serious about using potential infinity as a surrogate for actual infinity, i.e. if you are serious about replacing Spinoza’s Substance with something that cannot under any circumstances be said to exist qua actual infinite. But then it follows that every potentially infinite series is finite in every possible world, and the potentiality of such series begins to seem ephemeral and dubious. On the face of it, it looks like potentiality has possible being in some other sense than possible existence per se. But that seems to violate PUB. I don’t know – maybe I’m making a mistake somewhere here. In any case, I would like a little more light to be shown on Deleuze’s appropriation of this strategy.

This is a very good objection to a position that, alas, is not mine. To see this it is important to understand what the principle of sufficient reason does: it makes the actual state of the world in principle intelligible. This intelligibility is a matter of providing every state with a ground (metaphysics) that can be understood as a reason (epistemology). These grounds are then understood either temporally as efficient causes or atemporally as immanent causes, though I’m going to sideline this distinction for now and focus principally on efficient causes. All the problems result from how we interpret the ‘in principle’ aspect of the above stated goal. This is because the metaphysical side confronts us with an infinity of causes (at least, Spinoza, Leibniz and Deleuze are agreed on this), while the epistemological side confronts us with a finite procedure for articulating and understanding these causes as reasons. The difficulty of the PSR is reconciling the infinity of the world with the finitude of the mortal mind.

Spinoza and Leibniz overcome this difficulty through ontological equivocity – they insist that thought/mind/reason comes in two flavours: temporal/mortal/finite and atemporal/divine/infinite. It’s important to recognise that this is problematic not just metaphysically, insofar as it falls into the trap of onto-theology, but also epistemologically, insofar as it relies on an implicit understanding of the genus of reason that is not tied to anything like an account of procedures for reasoning. To describe this in another way, Spinoza and Leibniz make the world in principle intelligible by positing an absolutely distinct form of intellect that is capable of grasping the actually infinite chain of causes as an actually infinite chain of reasons. This is an ad hoc posit, because they do not develop their conception of infinite reason out of a conception of finite reason.

I can now frame my interpretation of Deleuze’s transformation of the PSR properly. Unlike the position that Atheology criticises above, I do not think that Deleuze overcomes the above difficulty by simply substituting potential infinity for actual infinity across the board: taking there to be a potentially infinite chain of causes that is graspable as a potentially infinite chain of reasons. He is entirely right that this position is incoherent, insofar as its not clear that we can make sense of a potential infinity on the metaphysical side here. Rather, I interpret Deleuze as taking there to be an actually infinite chain of causes that is graspable in terms of a potentially infinite process of reasoning. This has to be cashed out a bit, because it is a completely different approach to the ‘in principle’ discussed above. The crucial concept is that of limit. This provides the connection between finitely specifiable procedures and actually infinite results. Take the procedure ‘beginning with n=1 add n/2 to n and repeat’. This is the classic example used to introduce the concept of limits to young mathematicians, insofar as, although the procedure will go on indefinitely (a potential infinity), we can understand it as approaching a fixed result (an actual infinity), in this case n=2. This idea can of course be worked out in more detail than I am capable of accounting for, but this should suffice for now. I interpret Deleuze as holding that the finitely specifiable procedure of reason, through which we successively uncover the chains of causation underlying given state of affairs, can be indefinitely iterated in this way, and that, as such, we can conceive it as approaching the actual infinity of causes as a limit. This contrasts to the ad hoc approach of Spinoza and Leibniz insofar as the connection between metaphysical infinity and epistemological finitude is generated out of finitude itself, as an immanent projection of its procedure, rather than a transcendent supplement to it.

This doesn’t answer all the difficult questions by any means. I think that this strategy requires a lot more detailed work on the actual structure of the finite procedures that constitute causal reasoning than Deleuze ever did. However, I do think that it is the right strategy, and that it is a key part of avoiding the metaphysical pitfalls of onto-theology on the one hand and negative theology on the other.

3. Time and Emergence

The questions of time and emergence are where Atheology has the most legitimate concerns. This is largely because the bits of the story that are supposed to deal with the details here haven’t yet appeared, for the above discussed reasons. I’m not going to make them magically appear here, but I will make a few suggestive points:

i) Space and Emergence: One of the crucial things I didn’t really have time to address in the MMU paper was the claim that Deleuze sides with Leibniz on the question of space. The point I was trying to make is that the extensive spaces that must be added to the qualitative dimensions of the phase spaces in order to get a concrete universal (i.e., to adequately individuate the instance of that universal) are not independent of the qualitative dimensions, but are co-determined with them. This is the really tricky stuff that Deleuze gets into in chapters 4 and 5 of Difference and Repetition in talking about the intensive spatium and the generation of extensity. There is so much work to do here it’s almost painful to contemplate it, including some serious exegetical work on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on space. However, the basic intuition is very simple: new spaces emerge along with new qualities, as different perspectives upon (or ways of individuating discrete entities within) the same unitary informational surface. This is basically Deleuze’s reinterpretation of Spinoza’s notion of an attribute on the one hand, and his appropriation of Leibniz’s concept of ‘world’ in Logic of Sense on the other. This does not mean that space is an epiphenomenon by any means.

ii) The Unity of Time: I want to council against a certain reading of my account of the pure and empty form of time (Aion) Atheology puts forward:

In a nutshell, unlike space time is not an epiphenomenon or near-epiphenomenon for Deleuze. What is spatially divergent is temporally unified by the enigmatic pure and empty form of time. What this means is that time is not only inscrutable but irreducible or emergent in some sense.

Aion isn’t emergent in any useful sense. The point is that it binds the various universals together insofar as they must lack a time dimension in order to encode the information they encode, both about the virtual potentialities (the pure past) and actual states (the pure present) of systems. It is this single time that opens these systems to external shocks the modality of which is not encoded within them, though demonstrating this point is going to take a lot more work. Regardless, I should probably complicate the single time/many spaces schema I presented at the end of the paper, as it can cause a lot of confusion. In truth, it is more like Deleuze’s metaphysics incorporates a fourfold distinction between plurivocal space (Ideas), plurivocal time (Chronos), univocal space (POI), and univocal time (Aion). The reason I emphasise plurivocal space and univocal time in the paper is that these are the aspects of the schema that seem to have explanatory priority.

Another way of thinking about this (which I owe to discussions with Reza Negarestani) is to understand the plurivocal/univocal distinction in both cases in terms of the discrete/continuous distinction. We start from thinking about how we individuate discrete entities in local contexts (Ideas), and the moves necessary to think the real modal features underlying this individuation then necessitate thinking about a continuous global time (Aion), which forces us to think about the continuous global informational surface (POI) which encodes all of the limited informational viewpoints contained in the discrete local contexts, and its continuous transformation in this global time, which finally leads us to try and understand how the temporally discrete procedures through which we individuate this information are themselves situated (Chronos). This is an awfully complex metaphysical path to follow, but I’ll endeavour to work out a better way through it in the future.

However, I will close with the tantalising suggestion that this path represents the proper approach to the ‘in principle’ of the PSR discussed above. The point is to move from an epistemological understanding of the discrete processes of causal reasoning and the finitely specifiable procedure they instantiate to a metaphysical understanding of the projected limit which these processes approach, and this limit is nothing other than the continuous informational surface of the POI and its continuous transformation in the empty time of Aion. This is an approach to emergence which aims to reconcile it with the PSR by adequately balancing the methodological demands of epistemology and metaphysics that it bridges.

This post is in many ways long overdue. I received a free copy of Sinead Murphy’s The Art Kettle last year, with the promise that I’d review it. The book made an instant impression on me, but for various reasons (personal and professional) the review went by the wayside. I returned to the book recently with the intention of finally finishing the review and submitting it to the British Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics. However, I found it even richer than the first time I read it, and the piece quickly spiralled beyond the word limit of a short review (it was meant to be 2000 words, and is now around 6000). Re-reading the book and writing the review has helped me to focus and develop some of the ideas about aesthetics and beauty that I’ve been discussing for a while now, and which I discussed with a number of people at the recent Speculative Aesthetics event in London. It thus contains a brief, but reasonably thorough overview of my more mature thinking on these topics, and may be of interest to those who read this blog.

As such, I’m putting up the current draft for people to read: ‘The Ends of Beauty: Sinead Murphy’s The Art Kettle‘. This should get edited and adapted for publication soon (possibly in Pli, possibly elsewhere), and so comments are thoroughly welcomed. Finally, it should go without saying that I think you should all buy this book. If you’re interested in art-theory, and particularly if you’re fed up of the state of contemporary art, The Art Kettle will stimulate you and give you new theoretical tools to deal with it. Plus, it’s cheap, short, and well written. What’re you waiting for?

The title of the paper is ‘Is there a TV in my head?: Content, Functional Mapping, and the Myth of the Given’. This is my first real foray into the philosophy of perception, and my goal was twofold: a) to articulate a worry I have with much work on perception, namely, that the notion of perceptual content is all too often implicitly defined in such a way that it vitiates the possibility of productive debate regarding whether or not it is conceptual, representational, or anything else for that matter, by outlining an alternative methodology that begins by outlining the explanatory role that the notion must play, and the resources available to it as a form of content per se, and b) to use this alternative methodology to clarify Sellars’ account of what Jim O’Shea calls the myth of the categorial given. I don’t think the paper entirely delivers, but it’s certainly on the right lines, and I aim to return to those lines when I have the time. It may also be of interest to those who’ve read my paper on Sellars and Metzinger (here), and vice versa, as it deals with some of the same issues from a different angle.

Dr Pete Wolfendale from Helen Darby on Vimeo.

Now that I have a whole two videos online, I’ve created a new page to index them. Hopefully there’ll be some more of these put up at some point.

I don’t have a lot of new material to put up here right now, as I’m currently working on the second half of my paper on Graham Harman (the first half of which is available here). However, after having some very interesting discussions with people on the topic of freedom (which I’ve written about in various ways: here, here and here), I realised that I had some old material languishing in a blog comment somewhere that some people might find interesting. As such, here’s some thoughts on the topic and its misappropriation by voluntarism.

1. Defining Freedom

I think it’s possible to define what freedom is in a reasonably helpful and comprehensive way, and that doing so cuts through a lot of unhelpful debates in which the notion is deployed in an one-sided fashion. The first step in this process is to split the discourse of freedom into its qualitative and quantitative questions.

Qualitative questions are precisely what thinkers like Kant, Heidegger and Sartre are dealing with when they talk about human freedom in its various guises. They’re talking about what it is for something to be a rational agent, which is meant to distinguish rational agents from other things (contra Spinoza). The problem is that this is often abstracted from causal questions regarding the genuine functional structure any causal system would have to have to count as such. Heidegger and Sartre (who is the most crude here) tend to collapse this into a brute ontological distinction between modes of Being (existence/occurrence, for-itself/in-itself, respectively), whereas Kant’s transcendental psychology tends not to be understood as the abstract functional architecture that it is (leading to Schopenhauer, Schelling, and other vulgar Kantians). The work of Wilfrid Sellars is crucial here insofar as gives us the resources to develop Kant’s functional account of rational agency in a totally naturalistically permissible fashion (see here).

It’s important to recognise that qualitative questions are not simply binary matters, such as: is this system an agent or not? They also deal with qualitative distinctions in the form that rational agency takes, including distinctions regarding better and worse forms that it can take. I tried to deal with some such distinctions in my comments on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (see here) under the heading of ‘the pragmatics of spirit’, showing that there’s important distinctions between the ways rational systems are structured to process their own motivations, thereby showing that what he calls ‘hedonic depression’ is characteristic of a fairly impoverished form of rational agency. This was pretty impenetrable I recognise, but it can and will be developed in a clearer way. This kind of qualitative differentiation becomes much more important and useful when we start thinking about collective agency, insofar as the differences between functional forms of social organisation are much more apparent (e.g., various forms of democracy, oligarchy, economic organisation, etc.), and much more stark in their normative consequences (e.g., with regard to the extent that a populace can be held responsible for the actions of its government).

Quantitative questions are precisely what thinkers like Spinoza, Foucault and (to some extent) Berlin are interested in. The reason they are quantitative rather than qualitative is that they are empirical rather than transcendental questions. This is to say that they’re interested in the specific causal mechanisms that instantiate the abstract functional structures that the qualitative questions deal with. There are two important distinctions to be had on the quantitative level: one between positive (Spinoza) and negative (Foucault) freedoms, and one between actional (mainly Spinoza) and rational capacities (mainly Foucault). The former distinguishes between bare capacities to effect results and the independence of these capacities from external influences (both in terms of affection and prediction), and the latter distinguishes between capacities to act upon the world and capacities to reason about one’s action upon the world. The former distinction is essentially dealing with two sides of the same coin, this coin being causal reasoning. The positive side corresponds to the default causal inference (A -> B) and the negative side to the potential defeasors that would undermine such an inference (C -> ~(A -> B)). The latter distinction deals with the capacities we have for producing effects at our disposal, which is to say, the choices we can make, and the capacities we have for deploying these capacities, which provide the conditions of the possibility of action.

These quantitative margins of freedom can all be increased, by increasing our abilities to do things, our ability to reason about which things we do and how we do them, and making these abilities counterfactually robust in the face of varying external conditions. The most interesting dimension of all this for me are the positive and negative rational capacities, which function as conditions of the possibility of action. As you may or may not know, I’m kind of obsessed by the idea of cognitive resources and the way these constrain both individual and collective decision making. For instance, I think it’s possible to define attention in functional terms as a quantitative positive rational capacity. It’s something one can have more of less of (in different kinds no doubt) and it is consumed as a resource in making decisions about how to deploy one’s other actional capacities. I’m equally interested in defining quantitative negative rational capacities, such as resistance to the hijacking of one’s attentional mechanisms (e.g., information filters) thereby conserving cognitive resources. These are the sorts of things that Foucault was interested in, insofar as Power is essentially defined as action upon decision making.

There’s a whole lot more that could be said here about how this ties into the Sellarsian/Brandomian account of free will based on RDRDs, but I’m going to leave it there. I think the qualitative/quantitative, positive/negative, rational/actional distinctions are pretty helpful in organising talk about freedom for now.

2. Diagnosing Voluntarism

Given these definitions, we can see that the real problem with voluntarism is that it occludes the causal (i.e., quantitative) dimensions of freedom. It essentially says: stop worrying about how free you are, because freedom is always a pure qualitative break in the causal order, an upsurge of noumenal causality that brings about change in the causal/social/historical order. The disastrous consequence of this is that it discourages us from actively working upon ourselves (both as individuals and as collectives) to make ourselves more free, by increasing both our positive and our negative freedoms.

Of course, some voluntarists partially mitigate this by adopting a loose sort of Spinozism, insofar as they’re willing to talk about what I’ve called actional capacities. This is motivated by a recognition that we actually have to engage in instrumental reasoning regarding the means at our disposal to achieve our ends. However, they fall short of dealing with rational capacities, which they close off in favour of some noumenal freedom of decision. This leads to them being unwilling to consider the ways in which our decision making abilities are both internally limited, and externally influenced. When applied to the level of collective freedom this is even worse, because it precludes thinking about organisational structure in any way whatsoever (i.e., the ‘will of the people’ will just spontaneously coalesce and then deploy the resources available to it).

On this basis, I think we can draw a loose distinction between theoretical and practical strands of voluntarism. The former is an academic perspective (e.g., Badiou, Zizek, Hallward, etc.) that claims freedom has nothing to do with our causal constitution, and thereby licenses ignorance about causal factors that effect and affect our freedom. The latter is less often explicitly defended  than implicit in the rough patterns of discourse and action within a wide variety of left-activist groups (which I’ve elsewhere called pseudarchy). It holds that our freedom actually consists in (or is at least enhanced by) our ignorance of such causal factors: Don’t think too hard, because our freedom from Power is proportional to our ignorance of ourselves! This is a manifestly stupid insofar as it depends on viewing freedom in quantitative causal terms in order to license its demand for ignorance of this causal basis, but it’s depressingly common nevertheless.

3. Dislocating Subjects

There is a further dimension to the above discussion of qualitative freedom and rational agency that is worth considering here. This aims to determine which causal systems are capable of being counted as subjects, insofar as it determines which causal systems are capable as being counted as responsible for their thoughts and actions, insofar as they are capable of providing reasons for them. The additional dimension that complicates things consists in the fact that, although there are necessary functional constraints on what can count as a subject (e.g., we can’t decide to count the chair I’m sitting on as a subject, call him ‘Neil’, because he’s not capable of doing what he needs to do to be one), these do not provide sufficient criteria for subjective individuation (e.g., they don’t decide whether a human being is the same subject before and after an amnesiac episode). I think what fills the gap are socially instituted norms for determining who counts as who, i.e., for counting whether the same meat counts as the same person between two times. It’s as if causal systems capable of reasoning are counters moved about in the game of giving and asking for reasons. They have to have certain features to be a counter, but ultimately who they represent in the game is a function of the playing of the game itself.

An interesting way of thinking about this is that it turns the usual arguments about personal identity on their heads. Usually, the argument is a matter of what underlying feature makes a person a person, such that we can count an animated body at one time as responsible for the same thoughts and actions as an animated body at another. I’ve always hated these bloody debates. Now I know why, insofar as they get everything arse-backwards. The subject is nothing but the locus-of-responsibility, the being-counted-as-the-same-as in the relevant way. There can thus be different socially instituted criteria for determining how we divy up responsibility, and thus for how we individuate subjects. These are constrained by certain factors (e.g., ‘Neil’ can’t be subject on any reasonable criterion) but we can imagine all kinds of bizarre sci-fi scenarios that would challenge the current boundaries of our practices of individuation and force us to develop better ones (e.g., the uploading, copying, and merging of ego-patterns (check out the ideas found in Eclipse Phase)).

There’s two interesting upshots of this I think:-

i) I think Ray Brassier is right that we have to dissociate the rational subject from the phenomenal self (see here). Metzinger is right that there are no phenomenal selves as once understood, only self-models. The question is whether these self-models are limited to being models of the biological processes of the organism, or whether they can extend to be subject-models of the responsibilities that individuate that organism as a given subject. I think they can and do. Moreover, I think this is still perfectly consistent with Metzinger’s picture, insofar as we can imagine cases in which someone is mistaken about just who they are, not simply in the sense of asylums filled with people convinced they’re Napolean, but in the more disturbing sense of the same organism being systematically altered in such a way that it did not see the discontinuity involved in this alteration. For instance, if I was kidnapped and given elaborate neurosurgery (a la Neuropath), my self/subject-model could be hijacked in such a way that I could have all my beliefs, desires, and behavioural tendencies modified, and yet have my memories left in tact in such a way that the phenomenal continuity between the past self in those memories and the present self in my new experience is retained. I could be an empty vessel, a Manchurian candidate, no longer ‘Pete’ in any significant way, and yet be convinced I was.

Metzinger might be right in this case to say there really isn’t a question about whether I’m the same ‘self’, as all such selves are generated by precisely this kind of internal phenomenal continuity, for which there is no external standard by which to judge it. However, he would be wrong to extend this to subjectivity, insofar as we’d have social criteria (constrained by hard functional criteria) that could settle the question of whether causal system A and modified causal system B really count as the same person, regardless of what they think.

ii) It also reveals the somewhat counter-intuitive possibility of a subject-without-freedom. If subjects are just socially individuated loci of responsibility, then these loci needn’t be constantly in play, as it were. Temporary madness is a good example here. We downgrade the status of someone who is severely cognitively impaired, such that we no longer count them as fully responsible for their thoughts and actions. We give them truncated forms of responsibility, in much the way we do for children (what I’ve previously called sandbox responsibility). This doesn’t preclude us from giving them their status back once their cognitive machinery is functioning properly again. This is also a good example of how social criteria for individuating subjects and functional criteria for individuating rational systems can interact. However, this limbo status into which we place unembodied subjects can become more permanent.

The status of ‘being-Pete’ that would be taken away from me in the case of a severe psychotic episode would still be in some way attached to my body, given our reigning social criteria of subjective individuation, but upon the destruction of my body’s capacity to ‘house’ me, as it were, I’d be free floating. We currently have nothing in place to reinstitute such a status (e.g., cloning me a new body with sufficient similarity to do the job), but we do have ways of relating to such ‘defunct’ statuses. We do relate to the dead, and we do treat them as having certain rights, even though they may no longer have any active responsibilities. This is most clear in the case of past thinkers, such as Kant, who know stands for us as the exemplar of a certain set of theoretical ideas, which in his time he was responsible for defending. Any of us may stand in for Kant. We may take up his responsibility for him, in absentia. The very possibility of being able to do this, so that we can argue with the figures from our cultural past, who helped set the standards that we live by today, is essential if we are to be conscious of the content of these standards, the way they have developed, and the way they may yet develop. I think this is an interesting Hegelian insight that naturally follows from the above considerations.

My own paper was entitled ‘The Parting of the Ways: Political Agency Between Rational Subjectivity and Phenomenal Selfhood’. The principle aim of the paper was to elucidate Ray Brassier’s recent distinction between rational subjectivity and phenomenal selfhood, by showing how the Sellarsian and Metzingerian philosophies of mind that he takes as the respective models of these can be integrated with one another. The paper was then supposed to draw some consequences of this for understanding political agency. However, as is unfortunately common, in writing the paper I found myself bound up with the preliminaries, albeit it in an enormously interesting fashion. Alas, 20 minutes is a short time to cram such a thing into!

I was hoping to do a bit of work extending the paper to compensate for this, and add some further examples and diagrams while I was at it, before posting it here. However, I’m buried under other writing commitments, and haven’t had time to do anything more than tidy it up a bit and add some notes about the potential consequences for the theory of political agency. Hopefully I’ll get to expand on these ideas at some point in the future. Anyway, for those still interested in the paper, you can get it here.

This is one of those topics on which people are even more liable to disagree with me than usual, and even potentially to take offence at my opinions, so I should probably add a few qualifiers. The piece is very short (600 words), which is a very small space in which to express an argument. If you think it’s glib, well, that’s the reason. It also makes appeals to a few important notions: action, value, beauty, art, freedom, that I have almost no space to define adequately, though I give it my best shot. They’re all used fairly precisely, so, if in doubt, read it a couple times (it is short after all!). Finally, although I’m arguing for the ethical soundness of eating meat, I’m arguing for a general principle, not for the specifics of its application. There are all sorts of exceptions and qualifications that could usefully be added to what I say, but again, there’s no space for them.

Those points aside, I’m fairly pleased with the piece, and rather enjoyed writing something short for a change. May try more of it once my current standing commitments are out of the way. Till then, enjoy!

However, courtesy of my good friend (and prominent Deleuze scholar) Henry Somers-Hall, I recently got invited to give a paper at Manchester Metropolitan University on Deleuze’s theory of time. This was part of a larger workshop on Deleuze that was very successful indeed. A great event all around. Lots of things kept me from writing my paper until far too close to the deadline (I was working on it right up until the last minute), but it was a cathartic experience from beginning to end. Three years or so of pent up Deleuzian ideas came out all at once, and it produced a paper that is very dense, but not for that matter unaccessible. Moreover, the paper served as a wonderful vindication of my methodological detour, insofar as it displays the power of the critical framework I’ve been developing here and elsewhere. I’ve sometimes been accused of getting stuck at the level of critique, and never getting to the actual metaphysics. I think this is a pretty performative refutation of those criticisms.

I’m enormously pleased with the paper, and I was enormously gratified by the positive reception it received from the people at the workshop. There were some excellent questions and some great discussions afterwards. I’m reliably informed that the video of the various talks will be going up online soon, including Q&As, but I’ve decided to make minor revisions to my paper and post it up on the blog (here) while it’s still at the forefront of my mind. It’ll no doubt get revised further and turned into a proper publication at some point, but for now, enjoy!

However, the ideas have slowly built up over time, and I have now been handed the excuse I needed to work on it. My girlfriend is studying Chinese/English translation, and has asked me to provide her with a piece of work for a translation project. Despite my prodigious writings on here, I don’t have anything I consider either polished or accessible enough to warrant translation, so I have decided to write something with this purpose in mind. I’ve wanted to write a small book summarising my ideas about fundamental deontology for a while, but haven’t had the excuse. Now is the time.

Today I finished writing the outline of the book. Following the subtitle of the blog, its working title is: The Demands of Thought. It’s going to cover quite a lot of ground, but I hope it’ll still be concise. It’s also going to deal with some pretty abstract concepts, but I hope it’ll nonetheless be accessible. These are tough constraints to meet, but I think that it’s best to aim high and revise downward. Moreover, I hope that by posting the outline here I’ll tie myself to the project in such a way that I can’t extricate myself from it. I have too many ideas for projects like this, and at some point they need to be given a fixed form and pushed out into the world. So, please do hold me to this commitment! It’ll be good for me, even if I can already see myself regretting it. Also, if you happen to know somewhere that might fancy publishing it, do let me/them know!

The Demands of Thought

What should we think? What should we do? These are the fundamental questions that any kind of theorising engages with, and ultimately, they collapse back into theorising about theorising, which can only be called philosophy. Here we confront the timeless questions: What is Truth? and What is Goodness? The only way to think about these questions properly is to approach them by way of the difference between theoretical and practical reasoning, respectively. This is to say, by way of the difference between thinking as something we do, and thinking about what we do. In doing this, we must be very careful not to make any unwarranted assumptions about the nature of thought or action. This means making explicit the methodological assumptions we cannot but make in pursuing these questions.

So, what do we assume here? We aim to assume nothing but the fact that we can think, to some extent. This does not mean that we are capable of thinking well, simply that we think at all. The next assumption, implicit in this one, is that thinking is something that is done by us. Thinking is not only possible, but it is possible as an activity we can think about in the same terms we think about other activities. The last implicit assumption is that the principal aspect of this activity is reasoning. We will aim to make clear precisely what ‘reasoning’ is as we go on, and thus what the consequences of this assumption are. For now, we must accept that reasoning is a matter of giving and asking for reasons for what one thinks and what one does, or the justification of thought and action. The difference between these respective justificatory activities is just the difference between theoretical and practical reasoning discussed above.

Given these assumptions, we can see that the question of what we should think can be subsumed under the question of what we should do. It becomes a question of what thought demands of us. This is the topic of this book, and it must be pursued by considering the nature of demands as such. However, the methodological constraints we have placed upon our inquiry mean that we cannot assume anything about demands other than that we can think about them, and that this thought about them has its own specific structure. The seemingly paradoxical approach we will take is thus to think about thought generally by way of thinking about thought about demands specifically. We begin by thinking about thinking about what we should do.

Here is the crucial question around which all of this turns: Is there anything we should do? This raises the issue of what it would be to be bound to do something, or to be subject to a demand. Putting this in different terms: what would it be to have a practical commitment to do something?

Our methodological principle of principles is that of autonomy. We must assume that we are not bound by any practical commitment unless we undertake it ourselves in some way. This is to say that our practical commitments are always consequences of the choices that we make. However, what makes practical commitment different from choice and the desires that motivate it? The answer is that it provides us with a reason to act over and above our desires to do otherwise.  This is the split between force of a commitment and its content. It is our choice that gives the commitment the force of a reason to act, but the content of the commitment, and thus the act demanded of us, cannot be determined by either our explicit choices or our implicit desires. The principle of autonomy is this: we are always the source of the force of our commitments, but we are not always the source of their content.

If there truly are demands of thought, then these must not be demands that we can simply choose to abandon without thereby abandoning the capacity for thought itself. They would be practical commitments we are bound to not by the specific choices we make, but by the act of choice itself: fundamental commitments that we could never shake. They would be conditions of the possibility of commitment as such. Put another way, these fundamental demands would specify the very structure of Freedom itself. We will call the project of uncovering these demands fundamental deontology. In pursuing an account of the conditions of the possibility of thought and action, it is equally a form of transcendental philosophy. The aim of the present work is to provide an outline of this project, and thereby also to begin it in ernest.

What follows is a summary of the various chapters. Each chapter addresses a particular concept (Value, Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Freedom, and Justice) and provides a methodology for approaching it (Deontology, Epistemology, Aesthetics, Ethics, Psychology, and Politics). These chapters successively build upon one another in order to unveil ever more of the demands of thought. The overall aim of the book is to provide us with a unified framework for thinking about what is required of us as free thinking beings.

1. Value (Deontology)

The topic of this chapter is Value, which we define as whatever it is which provides us with reasons for action. It is under this general heading that we will differentiate between the practical commitments whose content exceeds our authority to specify it, and the choices and desires whose content is ours to specify as we wish, more or less. This enables us to further differentiate between kinds of practical commitment: individual tasks, joint tasks, and norms. These are distinguished on the basis of their content, which can only be explained in terms of their specific roles within practical reasoning, or the particular kinds of reasons for action they provide. In addition, we can distinguish between two types of force these commitments may have: institutional and transcendental. This is to be explained as the difference between those commitments whose force derives either from our own authority, or the authority of a community of which we are a member, and those commitments whose force derives from no authority of any kind. The latter are binding upon us simply insofar as we are able to bind ourselves to any other commitment, or insofar as we are free.

On this basis, we may introduce the fourfold root of autonomy. This is our answer to the question of whether there is anything we should do. It amounts to an existence proof that there are some practical commitments that we are bound by, simply insofar as we are capable of thought and action. This splits into four separate existence proofs, corresponding to the different kinds of practical commitments it demonstrates:-

1. The Primary Bind: we are bound by some transcendental norms.

2. The Secondary Bind: we are bound by some institutional norms.

3. The Tertiary Bind: we are bound by some transcendental joint tasks.

4. The Quaternary Bind: we are bound by some institutional joint tasks.

The point of this fourfold schema is merely to show that there are some practical commitments, but not which commitments they are. This is a matter of demonstrating that there are some things we should do, even though we have yet to demonstrate what they are: it is a matter of force rather than content. The challenge that we face is to determine the content of these commitments as best we can, by devising an adequate methodology for revealing them. We name the general discipline which studies practical commitments deontology, and the specific branch of it that deals with these core commitments fundamental deontology.

The crucial issue that must be tackled in order for this project to get off the ground is just how to understand differences between forms of Value. The distinctions between forms of practical commitments and the force they are subject to that we have already drawn are only one aspect of this. The important insight that must be acknowledged is that there are such things as defeasible reasons for action. These are reasons which motivate us to act in a certain way unless we have better reasons to do otherwise. The prevalence of such defeasible reasons for action is what constitutes the sheer plurality and complexity of forms of Value (e.g., legality, fashionability, politeness, etc.). What makes all of these differing forms of Value species of the same genus is that we can understand the relations of defeasibility between the reasons for action they provide. For example, the fact that, all else being equal, we should act on the basis of ethical motivations over aesthetic ones is what enables us to see both kinds of concern as forms of Value.

The topics of the remaining chapters will all be particular species of Value. The principal species are the classical trinity of values: Truth, Beauty and Goodness. We will then break down Goodness into the subspecies of Freedom and Justice. Our aim will be to explain each of these by way of a certain form of reasoning to which it corresponds, and to explain the relations between them by way of the relations between these forms of reasoning. We will begin by discussing theoretical reasoning, which is governed by the value of Truth. This will in turn give us the resources we need to think about practical reasoning, which is governed by the values of Beauty and Goodness.

2. Truth (Epistemology)

The topic of this chapter is Truth, which we define as whatever we’re seeking in attempting to justify the claims we make, or in playing the game of giving and asking for reasons. Moreover, as the ideal that the process of justification aims at, it must be distinguished from any aspect of our actual practice of this process. This means that there is always some sense in which we can be wrong in taking our claims to be true: the possibility of truth implies the possibility of error. The question is simply how we are to describe the fine grained normative structure of the process of justification within which the ideal of Truth is implicit. We will do this by taking seriously the most challenging form of skepticism about the possibility of truth: Pyrrhonian skepticism.

This will provide us with our most important methodological tool, which we will call the deontological reduction. This is a direct parallel of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, with the crucial difference that it takes bindingness as its object rather than givenness. Like Husserl’s reduction, it comes in two distinct stages: a transcendental reduction and an eidetic reduction. The first reduction involves a bracketing of the truth of all claims we could make, with the exception of those claims that we cannot deny without falling into pragmatic contradiction. This gives us a procedure for describing the transcendental norms governing the process of justification itself: we begin with the minimal claim about the possibility of error already established, and then proceed by way of successive pragmatic contradictions to uncover those claims we cannot deny (or commitments we cannot abandon) without thereby undermining the possibility of error and thus the ideal of Truth itself. The second reduction is a localised operational truncation of particular forms of reasoning, which enables us to grasp the essential normative features of that localised form of thought. This is the move most famously deployed in Socratic dialectic: we bracket questions of which particular things are [good/wise/just/etc.] in order to inquire into the essence of [Goodness/Wisdom/Justice/etc.]. It is this secondary stage of deontological method which will be carried out in the remaining chapters.

The final thing that must be established in this chapter is that the distinction between different species of Value, and the different forms of reasoning that they correspond to, itself corresponds to a deeper distinction between species of Truth (objective (e.g. mathematical and empirical), and non-objective (e.g., transcendental and interpretational)). It is the fact that there are truths about values, and thus different types of truths about different types of values, that lies at the heart of the seemingly paradoxical approach we have taken up to this point. This means that the remaining chapters do not simply provide the taxonomy of Value, but also part of the taxonomy of Truth.

3. Beauty (Aesthetics)

The topic of this chapter is Beauty, which we define as that form of Value which motivates us independently of instrumental concerns. This is what Kant means when he says that Beauty is disinterested. In order to understand the nature of Beauty in more detail, we must explore an important insight of Plato regarding the genus of Value, before applying it to the species of Beauty as we have defined it. We will call this Platonic reflexivity, or the idea that the prevalence of Value (i.e., the fact that there is Value) is itself the exemplar of Value (i.e., what is most valuable), and furthermore that the exemplar of each principal species of Value is its own prevalence (e.g., that there is Truth is what is most true, that there is Beauty is what is most beautiful, and that there is Goodness is what is most good). This will enable us to further describe Beauty in terms of its role as the first stage in the genesis of Value.

4. Goodness (Ethics)

The topic of this chapter is Goodness, which we define as that form of Value which motivates us in the last instance. This is what Kant means when he ties Goodness to a categorical imperative. In order to understand the nature of Goodness in more detail, we must return the idea that the relationships between forms of Value is determined by the relations of defeasibility between the reasons for action they provide. It is on this basis that we will explore Kant’s understanding of hypothetical imperatives and their relation to the categorical imperative. This will enable us to further describe Goodness in terms of its relation to Beauty, as the second stage of the genesis of Value.

5. Freedom (Psychology)

The topic of this chapter is Freedom. Although this is a species of Goodness (and thus a subspecies of Value) must define it in a different way to Truth, Beauty and Goodness. This is because it is not attached to states of affairs in general, but to particular entities (agents) and events (actions). It must also be separated into qualitative and quantitative, and positive and negative varieties (allowing for quantitative positive freedom, qualitative negative freedom, etc.). In order to understand freedom in all its forms, we must understand the relationship between the demands of thought and its instantiation. We do this by examining the famous principle of ought implies can, and using it to sketch a picture of the essential functional capacities that a causal system would have to exhibit to be counted as an agent. The various distinctions between kinds of Freedom can be derived from this functional description, in terms of the way the normative and causal dimensions of agency interact.

6. Justice (Politics)

The topic of this chapter is Justice. Although this is viewed as a species of Goodness in opposition to Freedom, it is itself derived from Freedom. The crucial insight from which this derivation begins is that the functional description of agency provided in the last chapter is abstract enough to be recursively applied to agents in order to construct collective agents out of individual agents. This gives us a distinction between  deontological composites and deontological monads, respectively. We are then confronted with the dual question of how the Freedom of individual agents is to be understood in relation to one another, and how the Freedom of collective agents is to be understood in relation to the Freedom of their parts (at all scales). We define Justice as the mereological ideal of collective Freedom: the maximisation of the Freedom of the the parts through maximising the Freedom of the whole, where the maximal whole is understood as what Hegel would call Absolute Spirit and the minimum parts are the deontological monads just described. Justice is a joint task we are all confronted with: the task of constructing out of ourselves collectives that maximise our individual freedoms.