Ravaisson as a Philosopher of Chemistry

In my M.A dissertation project I highlighted the fact that Schelling and Ravaisson had strong parallels insofar as they were both philosophers of chemistry. Unfortunately I did not have room to explore this fully, but I will explain the why I think it is important to highlight this aspect.
In what sense does Ravaisson use chemistry in Of Habit? In Chapter 1 he discusses existence, simply as existence. Every body, or thing that exists, every extended mobile or element, persists in its movement and in its own self-preservation as such a being. However Ravaisson distinguishes between these lower levels of beings or simple bodies against that which has a real existence where habit can take root. Habit for him can only occur when there is a unity, an identity. What brings about the particular entities and forms we see in the world is determined or created by the 'synthesis of elements: from external union in space to the most intimate combinations, from the mechanical synthesis of gravity and molecular attraction to the deepest synthesis of chemical activities.' (pg. 27). These processes constitute/create the world and all its discrete entities up to the most complex bodies. What is important is that he uses the term elements to account for such a process. These elements form the basis of everything and out of them something new is created. But what are these elements? I would argue that the term element itself is not given a concrete definition or explained adequately by Ravaisson, however the three processes such elements go through are. 'But, in the whole of this primary realm of nature, either the elements that come together, in coming together, change only the relations between themselves; or they reciprocally annul each other in balancing each other out; or they are transformed into a common result, different to the elements. The first of these three degrees is mechanical union; the second, physical union (of, for example, two electricities); the third, chemical union or combination.' These elements then are prior to the processes they undergo, and they only undergo three such processes - mechanical (gravity, laws of attraction), physical, or chemical. It is only with the introduction of chemistry that these elements no longer remain just what they are, but differentiate into something new, something more than the elemental level. Chemistry is the active process that transforms or creates the transition from the elemental to actual entities or extended beings in space/time. This transition, this passing from the elemental to existence cannot itself be explained or seen according to Ravaisson. The processes that occur do so outside of measurable time, 'between what could be and what is, we see no milieu, no interval; there is an immediate passage from potentiality to actuality.' The activity of the process is spontaneous and immediate, like a flash of lightening, as it passes from this underlying potential to what is actual - what exists. This movement cannot be charted or followed, it just happens. 'The immediate realization of their potentialities' (the basic elements that form existence) 'in a single actuality is that all the differences of the constitutive parts disappear in the uniformity of the whole; mechanical, physical or chemical, the synthesis is perfectly homogenous.' The elemental level, the differing degrees or intensities of these processes is flattened out or eliminated as soon as a unified, identifiable being is created out of the interaction of such elements, so much so that the process itself becomes homogenous and no real identificable element can be found to be the underlying cause to such processes. The actuality of the created being overrides the potentiality, disguises or destroys it. All that then exists is the product itself, the process has disappeared. Homogeneity exists because there is no difference in time as what passes from the potential (of the elements) to the actual (what exists/discrete entities). This transition cannot be seen or fully explained except with reference to chemistry. The elements themselves are not identifiable or locatable prior to such chemical processes. In effect it could be argued that Ravaisson has a conception of an indeterminate chaos of elements, outside space-time, an abyss replete with virtualities and potentialities that are waiting to be determined into concrete forms through one of three processes, one of which is successful in creating something other than it.

A return back to blogging. Some notes and ideas...

The beginnings of well thought out principles of existence, life and what it means to be. These remarks are only outlines of a beginning in the style of John Fowles aphorisms...

Where are we? This situation is not that and not there, but here right now in this moment. Has it a master? No, we must master it.

All that exists is, by existing and by not being the only existent is an individual.

Affirmation is negation

We are a living contradiction. Is self-contradiction a logical possibility?

Emptiness higher up than nihility? Delving into absolute nothingness.

Reflection a constant doubling.

Feeling before thinking. 

Law is the supposed organising principle and chaos the disorganized destructive one. The two in play constitute existence. Chaos is wonderful – not purely destructive but creative allowing new forms of organization.

Seriousness is a form of sincerity. To be sincere is not to joke, but to offer something real and authentic. To be sincere is to be truthful, therefore seriousness is a display of truth.

Seriousness is one of the greatest forms of authenticity. It is not possible to be inauthentically serious. A display or mask of seriousness always carries with it a laugh inside the head of the one who tries to be seriousness.

Integrity. What is integrity? A true self.

Your being only comes from your actions.

Space is the universal language of the human race.

Seriousness is looked down upon, it is not popular. To be seriousness makes others uncomfortable. It can be a form of coldness, a detachment and distancing from the trivia and unsubstantialalities that form so much of modern life.

Eroticism is a breaking of a taboo, a crossing of a boundary psychologically or personally in moral terms.

Sex is the motivating desire of all things.

All reciprocal love is selfish. It is love of oneself through the eyes and mind of another. It is love of a favourable opinion of another upon oneself; it i iion of another upon oneself. reign to oneself is absents and mind of another. It is love of the opinion of another upon oneses pure self-involvement and self-glorification. The other as an unknown separate entity entirely different and foreign to oneself is absent. All that matters is the reflection.

A lack is the lack of something but that lack itself is that which is most full and excessive.

To like others minimally and with the least effort is easy, but to like others for what they are is hard.

To like others at all is hard.

The older one gets, the older one feels. 25 shows signs of weariness.

Re-visiting Ravaisson with Aquinas

In Of Habit, Ravaisson argues that habit is an ontological force that affects and constitutes the very being of the individual. It holds a plasticity, in Malabou's sense of the term of being both a cause and result of change. Habit becomes self-sculpting for the individual through a  process of trans-differentiation with a form of plasticity that stands between the before and after, between the actual and the possible. In speaking for Ravaisson, the plasticity that forms the base of habit 'is the uninterrupted current of involuntary spontaneity, flowing noiselessly in the depths of the soul, that the will draws limits and determines forms', and 'Being infinitely divisible the milieu can never be exhausted, and consequently we can never penetrate it.' (pg. 75).
Habit for Ravaisson is an acquired nature, a second nature. With its element of plasticity it is a flux, a movement, a middle term that demonstrates the tie and convergence of will and nature, or man and his primordial and basic origin. In a Spinozistic and Schellingian way, it is always a natured nature, a product of primitive nature naturing. At base it is nature working through us. It is us. Habit is an internalized effort that is no longer effort-full, so much so that actions occur with ease allowing consciousness room to focus upon other things. Habit has the potential to develop our initial tendencies into virtues so that our behaviours and actions come naturally to us, without effort and in doing so become integrated with our own way of being. We make ourselves moral agents through repetition and practice; we become what we do. We become what we are and what we practice. This is similar to Thomas Aquinas' idea of connaturality. Connatural operation is an operation that, when unhindered and uninterrupted so that it achieves its proper object, is in accord with the nature of the agent which is acting, or of the principle which is in operation. In a closely related sense to Ravaisson, Aquinas speaks of a thing's connatural end (or connatural good). The connatural end or good is the end or good to which the thing tends in accordance with its nature - with which, in this sense, it is said to have 'a certain conformity.' Both these senses relate to the being of the individual insofar as actions, deeds, tendencies become natural to us through habituation. In other words they eventually become our own way of being, and are not opposed to or distant from our own natures. Ravasisson has within his text Of Habit, the ethical idea that habit can be cultivated into virtues; that nature is divine love and the desire for the good exists, as a final cause. Habit operates as grace, where grace is a principle of nature. It works to facilitate and ease action for the individual, moving from it's operation in the undetermined freedom of spontaneous and spiritual nature to concrete bodily action, or 'the law of the limbs'. Aquinas speaks of the divine nature of which we partake, and of a 'sympathy or connaturality for divine things' acquired through the gift of charity. Again Ravaisson has the idea of spiritual growth that can occur through action towards the good because nature is in a state of prevenient grace, a vibrant plentitude that can be drawn upon. As much a part of nature ourselves as natural products of nature we become in and through grace. We can become graceful beings, acting with ease and power. Habitual practice which may start out as a conscious decision that requires effort and determination eventually transforms into an ability that becomes second nature. A close cooperation between nature, habit  and being continually operates and they feed into one another. For both Aquinas and Ravaisson man becomes and is his action.
I will try to expand upon this comparison at a later date, as more can be said on the topic linking Aquinas and Ravaisson.

Revisiting Ravaisson

For Ravaisson there can be no identity without difference. Identity itself (as the being of the individual) is always a process of differentiation. A becoming-other occurs within the self. A continual juxtaposition, contrast or imbalance is always in operation. Subjectivity arises from and is produced from this intermediary play between self and other, between past and future, its previous way of being and its future potential becoming which always work through habit, the guarantor of this concept of subjectivity. The self or the individual is formed from and acts from this middle ground of neutrality, of identity. Ravaisson describes it as a milieu, a place of balance, non-opposition or betweenness and it is within this gap, this fluctuating movement between the desire for presence, the desire to be, from what has passed and gone that the individual exists. The subject constantly works and operates around this gap, this gap of what is lost, absent, past, and remembered and habitual and what is to come, what is new and unknown. The subject strives for as a fully actualised, complete self analogous to Absolute Identity's own ground but it's attainment is never really possible. True presence, balance and stillness can never fully occur for the self. Habit works through and as this primordial milieu or gap, between receptivity and spontaneity, passivity and activity, presence and absence and binds them together. Habit is the true relation of the subject as a mediated and mediational being. Habit is the work of the individual or self upon itself. For Ravaisson there can never be a subject without desire. Desire always works from lack, limit, and absence. The self feels this and strives to fill their lives, exist without imbalance or tension and attain full actualisation and presence. But this can never be achieved for the subject always functions between what is, or what was and what could be. Desire along with habit, always operates as a disequilibrium.
Schelling's individual also is struck by an inability to find 'the reconciling and mediating basis' of itself, of its original ground. In order to find it's true self and the place where it originated from as a natural product it turns towards that which is not itself. In doing so it takes a flight from the centre of Being, and it's being. It steps outside of itself and dies to a centre, an orginiary centre or primordial centrum that such particularity can never truly know. This centre of  abyss that resists thought even as it is being thought is never fully present. It is a space that always slips away as thought tries to catch it. It remains a lost or masked concealed point, an indivisible remainder. This 'proteus of nature' (WS, 78) or the prototype of existence is formless. But it has to be conveyed by a symbol which for us can be nothing other than a circle, a silent centre, or zero-point which betrays pure space by determining it as something with form, shape and time. The subject intuits this originary point, this undifferentiated, formless, balanced milieu, or non-ground of it's own self, existence and world. Therefore negation is the process by which this formless no-thing, non-ground, is transformed into an external limit, into a spatial concept and into difference. This symbol encapsulates the contradictory presence of absence, it hints at the infinite depths of a boundless indeterminate origin yet cannot escape its ties to finitude, limitation and representation - it is the circle.
The individual rests on desire. Schelling's individual experiences the infinite lack of being that it is, which at the same time is not a sheer absence but rather an inability and impotence at laying claim and fully appropriating this other, which stands beyond it grasped intuitively as the indeterminacy of its own origin. We could argue that the subject is an inversion of the One, the other, the origin of nature and of us. What the individual lacks is a lack of desire for not accepting its own nothingness. Instead the individual wants to be something real and actual and fully present to itself, not composed of mediating relations between things, not in constant disequilibrium and tension. This is why 'our highest endevour is the destruction of our personality and crossing into the sphere of Being' (M, 127). We only fully gain ourselves when we recognize the emptiness, gap or void that lies between and beneath ourselves as ground for our very being. Only when one becomes nothing can one love, can one begin again. The elimination of ourselves as a discrete entity, vernichtigen, the return to our primordial essence brings us back full circle to our own being of nothing, our own nihility. Yet we can never completely be or return to nothing, it would end in our own annihilation through the stoppage of our own process of becoming. This sphere, circle or centrum is the evocation of a primordial site, an indeterminate open space that eternally and spontaneously disperses everything. These infinite folds cannot contain themselves, complicating, expanding and contracting outwards into the conceptual and known universe.
The process of the subject, its own constitution, can never be present-ed. It is always a self-othering between binary oppositions. The underlying nothing present in and through all things as the middle ground, milieu or gap is never fully transparent or realised as we are subject to the constant oscillatory movement or wavering fluctuation between self and other. In trying to name the void, whether it be zero, a circle, a centrum, milieu or indifference we change it and make it other than what it really is. But in ignoring it, glossing over it we mask, ignore and gloss over our very selves, our inner essence. Indifference only manifests itself in the process of differentiation. Indifference is our condition, our basis.

The darkness of identity and difference

'From one end of experience to the other, finitude answers itself; it is the identity and the difference of the positivities, and of their foundation, within the figure of the same.’ What could be more Schellingian?

'Man has not been able to describe himself as a configuration of the episteme without thought at the same time discovering both in itself and outside itself, at its borders yet also in its very warp and woof, an element of darkness, an apparently inert density in which is it is embedded, an unthought which it contains entirely, yet in which it is also caught.’

Both quotes from Foucault 

Catherine Malabou on Derrida

At the SEP & FEP joint conference in Manchester in September, Catherine Malabou presented two papers as guest speaker. Not knowing much about Malabou's own work I found her talk on Derrida interesting and unexpectedly relevant and pertinent to what I have been considering. Discussing the necessary and contingent, she argued that natural necessity is a priori posited, but the necessity of nature consists only in its facticity so to access the necessary we have to go outside the correlation. Absolute contingency is often defined as pure possibility which is a speculative concept of contingency that remains within chance. The transfinite is the impossible, it totalizes the possible. Radical contingency is an opening of reason that is transfinite which brings a notion of otherness that transcends the possible, or a radical alterity. She argued that Meillassoux cannot escape the fact that the contingent is for him stable where chaos is not disruptive and where the world remains the same. There is a plasticity of the transcendental and the significance of metamorphosis were everything becomes other than itself and where radical otherness can be accounted. Speaking on Derrida this otherness or alterity is an a-topic place that is irreducible and in need of construction. This gap, opening and origin is impossible to access as it is a non-rational other, it cannot be founded on rationality, reasoning itself remains contingent. But it remains possible that it could be deconstructed, but doing so calls for a new language is. Such a language can only be either one of two - the mathematical or the poetic.

Morphogenetic fields

A discussion of morphogenetic fields, taken from the biologist D'arcy Wentworth Thompson and mathematician and topologist Rene Thom, will both be pertinent and useful in explaining how we can apply ontogenesis to a Naturphilosophie.

Rene Thom gives a geometric vitalism where a formal geometric structure is given to a living being to explain its stability. He is also founder of catastrophe theory. This is a branch of bifurcation theory. Using dynamical systems he gives us a dynamic Platonism where forms or geometrical structures are characterized mathematically and shows how the potential functions in phenomena alter and change at unstable points of broken symmetry. The bifurcation point is where the difference between two extrema become so unstable that they annihilate resulting in new or different behaviour of the system. It is a site or fold that 'tips' the system resulting in novel actualizations.
Historically the concept of morphogenetic fields developed within the study of embryonic development. A field or unit of cells, rather than specific individual cells, assist in the development of organs, resting somewhere between genes and evolution. I think, however that the idea of morphogenetic fields could be extended. I would argue that the principles and operation of morphogenetic systems can exist not only as a field of thought, a collective or a creative consciousness. To borrow a term from Coleridge these could be called 'esemplastic' in the sense that they help form or mold phenomena (qualitative geometrical structures)  issuing from the intuitive imagination. They exist not as products originating in the mind and issuing from consciousness, imagination or representation. Rather, I argue, they are necessarily prior to but immanent within phenomena, not as last in the genetic series of nature's products in Schellingian terms. 

What exactly are these morphogenetic fields? In itself we can describe them as the formless form of all forms. As Whitehead says, forms are possibilities of definiteness. We might say that they are possibilities for definiteness. We can link these morphogenetic fields to quantum physics, where they are the void. The void is definitely something, it exists. It is a site of virtuality, particles appear as quickly as they disappear, motion, fluctuations of energy and vortex loops operate. Linked to the quantum gravitational field which pervades all space, it interacts with matter/energy known as 'symmetric second-rank tensor' it is linked to symplectic manifolds and symplectic geometry.
Matter or energy is already structured, it contains form. Structure is immanent to matter argues Deleuze. This means that we do not have an empty, hollow nothingness or void but a structured nothingness. One that has form. It is  the task of physicists to map this out. 

There are obvious questions to that arise from this proposition. Does there exist a single field or many, perhaps for each type of biological form or genera? - but this leads to Aristotelianism.   

Linking morphogenetic fields as described here to Simondon's theories of individuation may add to our ideas. Simondon argues that the individual is always more than itself. There exists an ongoing potential or virtuality within and surrounding that entity that lies in excess of it. The individual is a dynamic entity centering on instable disparities, tensions, and problems and is always seeking a solution to them which drives and forms it, it is meta-stable and never static or inert. Simondon uses the term transduction - the coming together of heterogenous forces into a new provisional unity, a structure which surrounds an entity, its milieu or field. This can be described as the chaos of the pre-individual. The pre-individual is pure difference, a difference without distinction or disparity so that it is almost the same or identical with itself. It is an unordered givenness of forces, tendencies and singularities. Such matter is not formless but multi-formed, it contains potentiality or virtuality for producing many different kinds of forms or individuals. The individual is a resolution or transformation or a solution to a problem within this field, a form of entlechy that contains a plasticity. The individual is an occurance or event. It is a becoming of activity between the poles of subjectivity and objectivity, always in operation process or phase-shift. Matter is not in-formed, by something outside of it. It's own forms change and evolve through different elements that resist it, and it occurs always through an asymmetrical tension or imbalance in equilibrium. This results in a pluralism of phases. As a product of these processes and as a product that undergoes these processes the individual or subject is always incompatible with itself. It constantly searches for resolutions and solutions which causes anxiety - the impossibility of actualizing the pre-individual in us. But such emotion is an opening that allows possibilities to enter, it is a sign that not everything is given all at once, that the subject is incomplete. This calls for activity on the part of the subject. Similar to Whitehead's argument that all entities feel the world and apart from this there is bare nothingness. The present is always activity. A form -taking activity is immanent to the event of form taking. The pre-individual is morphic for the individual and as such the individual has a primary relationship to it. For Simondon being is always relational, properties are relational. The whole is not the sum of its parts but always alongside and in addition to them, and it too has an effect on the parts. Nevertheless the whole lies in excess of the individual parts without ever annulling diversity or difference. 

To cast these mixed and brief arguments in Schellingian terms I would describe the morphogenetic field as the dark aspect that is held back from thought. It underlies nature and the individual; as an excess of forces or energy that surpasses finite rational consciousness comprehension it becomes a threshold or summit as well as an indeterminate ground. These morphogenetic fields are a site or point of primeval indecision or indeterminateness who's determination into matter/products/difference would be contingent/chance. Only after the f -act (or act or determination, which then makes it necessary) do they become aprori and necessary. A contingent necessity. As an archetype, design or blueprint these morphogentic structures, energy, fields and resolutions allows the possible to become actual and determine natures products. They are a site, medium or milieu that is indifferent or neutral as to its products. In effect they act as ground but also a middle ground which contains auto-morphic functions. The SILENT MIDDLE.