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. 

Noah Horowitz: Reality in the Name of God

Having finished reading Noah Horwitz's Reality in the Name of God I will present a few points I found interesting:
Horowitz aims to combine Badiou, Cantorian set-theory, Lacan and the computational theory of Stephen Wolfram to argue that reality is information (or bits) emerging from the universe as a supercomputer processing the divine name. For him reality is mathematizable, Kabbalistic and God's name is really nameless or cannot be said ______.
1) God is one, but not number. Rather this oneness denotes a quality, a quality of being the absolute other or transcendent, 'insisting' outside the illusory whole.
2) Badiou's thesis concerning the one confirms Horwitz's inclusion of Kabbalistic thought, namely Shvirah - the breaking of the excess of the infinite which results in fractured or broken products 'all vessels of creation and creatures are exploded by what they cannot contain - the absolute infinite as such' pg 70.
3) The zero is the mark of the empty set or void, which is the necessary nothing or non-being out of which God creates all things. This is taken from the Cantorian set of the transfinite and Badiou's unpresentable.
4) The nothingness designated by the empty set is included in all other sets, 'the void is thereby everywhere and in everything, as much as not belonging to the empty set is universal' pg 117.Other sets, numbers, entities are forms remarking zero, emptiness or void. He says the matter of numbers is zero, or we could say their essence. This theory of number gives the mystical nothingness from which everything unfolds according to Kabbalah.
5) This nothing is a metaphysical void, a real lack, which is unpresentable. God is needed to allow information and things to arise, through an act of absolute givenness or love. God withdraws from creation to allow nothingness as a point to emerge - the nothingness left by his disappearance - tzimtzum. This tzimtzum is a primordial and singular point, a pure mark, a center, nothing's nihilation, it is the Name of God which constitutes the beginning of creation. Zero is the trace or remains of the void/nothingness, or 'primordial ooze'. There is a gap in God, and him and his name are not one, as he withdraws his name or mark makes present his absence.
6) We are made in the image of God, therefore the subject is zero in a Lacanian sense (premised on desire and lack, difference within incomplete identity) as that which signifies. But the subject for Horwitz becomes the empty set itself, thereby granting importance to the subject and its own constitution of itself and reality through speaking and language. The subject is not being, but becoming and desires/lacks being.
For me this Horwitz's work has many Schellingian parallels that have the potential to be drawn out, despite him trying to offer a structural realism, rather than a speculative physical realism/naturalism.

This is what Paul. J. Ennis had to say about the book at a panel discussion entitled: 'God, Futurity, Justice' at Thinking the Absolute Conference, Liverpool.

‘Only a Digital or Temporary Messiah can save us now’

Paul J. EnnisIn his recent monograph Reality in the Name of God (2012) Noah Horwitz, building on insights from Chalmers, Tipler, and Wolfram, argues that the messiah may turn out to be nothing more than the person who builds a powerful enough computer to simulate the information that constitutes us. He speculates that in the far-flung future the resurrection of the dead will be a gift from our curious descendants.According to Horwitz’s kabbalistic reading of the world as number/naming/informatics there isnothing more to resurrection than having all our bits in order. This digital messiah shares many features with the temporary, not-quite-divine messiah of Quentin Meillassoux’s fourth world of  justice. And just like Horwitz, Meillassoux is drawn to how number and symbol allow us to speculate on futural outcomes because through them we are able to access something absolute.And it is in thinking the absolute in this way that Horwitz and Meillassoux seem, on the surface, to distinguish themselves from the weak theologians – the stated opposition of both thinkers. But as many have come to notice, the same straining for justice, the same hopefulness, and the same taste for the future is evident in both thinkers. Where they stand apart is in the trust they share concerning the force of mathematics, language, and reason to bring us outside ourselves.Philosophy in their hands is not the merging of thinking and thanking, or a guard against the pernicious effects of calculative thinking, but, rather, it is only with calculation that there is any reason to hope.

First paper, presented at the SEP in Manchester Met, Sep 2012

Ravaisson and Schelling

In this paper I propose that there are inherent similarities in the work of Schelling and Ravaisson, and that there exists a morphogenic zero point, or synthetic archetype, when both of their philosophies are combined.

Writing on Schelling, Bruce Matthews says Schelling’s universal archetype or ‘centre of gravity’ is ‘a form of thinking, which, like Kant’s schema, straddles the boundary between literal and figurative and is, in this sense, more of a symbol than a formula…Schelling understands the universal archetype of philosophy as mediating the maximum of the absolute.’[1] Insofar as the universal archetype is that which mediates Schelling’s Absolute, A=A, it can be marked as the zero point before Absolute Identitiy fractures into two opposing potencies, or that which lies behind the Absolute’s antithetical activity. The zero point denotes that which grounds the ground of Absolute Identity – the Ungrund. For Schelling the Ungrund forms Absolute Identity’s essence and its complete indifference to that which is produced from it. In his Freedom Essay Schelling says, ‘there must be a being before all ground and before all that exists, thus generally before any duality – how can we call it anything other than the original ground or the non-ground (Ungrund)? Since it precedes all opposites, these cannot be distinguishable in it nor can they be present in any way. Therefore it cannot be described as the identity of opposites; it can only be described as the absolute indifference of both.’[2] And, ‘Indifference is not a product of antitheses, nor are they implicitly contained in it, but rather indifference is its own essence separate from all antithesis, an essence against which all antitheses are ruined, that is nothing else than their very not-Being [Nichtsein] and that… has no predicate, except as the very lacking of a predicate, without it being on that account a nothingness or a non-thing.’ (VII, 406) For Schelling this Ungrund is the ‘unthinged’, the unconditioned, or ‘no-thing’, yet not nothing, but something, somehow. It is a primordial site of non-being, or the not-being in any way predicable or antithetical. Essentially it is the dark, chaotic abyss that precedes all. Zero is apposite as a symbol of the Ungrund, as it signifies nothing/‘no-thing’ in itself, or the dark empty void which thought runs up against in trying to conceive of absolute foundations. The zero is not the Ungrund itself, because zero itself can be cognized and thus is a product of nature as identity,  as much as everything else is for Schelling. Yet, this cognition results in a Schellingian way of thinking that which vastly exceeds the human subject as a singular finite product, a thinking of the unprethinkable that always arrives at zero. Accordingly, the search for the generative core of nature gives us not a being, nor nothingness, but, more precisely, the zero of non-being from which being itself must have arisen, and thus the preconditions or the grounds for a physical idealism.

In what way can we say that this archetype is synthetic or morphogenic for Schelling? Unlike the Kantian analytic ideal, confined to the unchanging realm of the noumenal, Schelling’s archetype is synthetic insofar as it forms Absolute Identities own being, which is itself a dynamic unity. Through its autopoesis and own self-organization it informs the evolution and development of all of nature.[3] Schelling's transcendental ideal is ‘made immanent to account for how the integration of the physical and metaphysical might occur and thereby engender a wholeness and completeness in philosophy that would make it capable of realizing’[4] the very same archetype whose metaphysical status is necessarily prior to it being thought consequently. The zero is synthetic and morphogenic in the sense of being a prototype and reiterating the Ungrund into a conceptual form at a higher level, i.e nature ideates with the conscious individual. For as Schelling argues ‘Reason is not activity…but rather indifference; the measure and, so to speak, the general place of truth, the peaceful sight in which primordial wisdom is received, in accordance with which, as if looking toward the archetype [Urblid], understanding should develop.’[5] Insofar as the archetype is described as primordial, indifferent and the direction towards  which reason should develop this can be nothing other than the zero point, because it is nature, as reason, arriving back at the sign that designates what grounds its very being, much like the Kantian ‘form of all knowledge’ which provides systematic unity.

Archetype derives from the Greek term Arche, meaning first principle, beginning or origin, the active cause. It also means the ‘original pattern, from which copies are made, arkhetypos – ‘first moulded’. It is morphogenic in the sense that the zero is carried forward through nature, to its highest product – man. Schelling argues ‘the human will is to be regarded as a bond of living forces; now, as long as it remains in unity with the universal will, these same forces exist in divine measure and balance. But no sooner than self-will itself moves from the centrum as its place, so does the bond of forces as well; in its stead rules a mere particular will that can no longer bring the forces to unity among themselves as the original will could and, thus, must strive to put together or form its own peculiar life from the forces that have moved apart from one another.’[6] And ‘Man, even though born in time, is nonetheless a creature of creation’s beginning (the centrum)’[7] ‘Thus, in general, I-hood, individuality is now admittedly the basis, foundation or natural centrum of any creature’s life’’[8]
Again the idea of a centrum is similar to the zero point in so far as it denotes a void, sphere, or gap of emptiness demarcated by a line, border or horizon, which cannot be stepped beyond i.e (a horizon or limit to thought) from the position of the individual, which blocks attempts to find or comprehend what lies within this original and primordial dark zero-void. We can say that for Schelling the centrum is both the primordial and original site, but also the individual.  A person can have its unique ground or centre and yet be linked to a larger meaningful whole and creation’s centrum. A person is something both similar and different to Absolute identities essence, a difference of Absolute identities power of iteration, and a difference in repetition. Both close to yet far removed from it's own beginning, historically, naturally and intellectually, which can only be recovered partially through intellectual intuition, but never fully. This also means that the individual can be dislocated or removed from the absolute whole and thus far removed from nature. It is within this gap or distance from the absolute and the Ungrund to the ontology of the individual that allows Schelling to conceptualise the freedom of individual emergence and self-determination.[9]

If the zero morphs from the Ungrund, to nature’s highest product – man then it’s structure is also analogous to the biological properties of a living cell. If the human individual is conceived as a large dynamic membrane (in the sense that Simondon uses it) which folds interiority and exteriority upon itself, it is also that which is continually folded with what is not it, or what lies outside or beyond it– an otherness then exits within identity, an element of non-being, or the absolute zero of being. 

The zero can also be conceived as the structure of the psyche and existential experience of the individual (in a Lacanian sense) insofar as there exists a void/hole/or emptiness designating a lack at its centre, and thus a lack of complete identity. We can then argue that an element or hidden remainder of non-being which is made immanent is carried forward from the Ungrund. This missing portion of identity twists experience into a topology of un-presence.[10] For Schelling man is not God, or Absolute being and thus is not complete but is always in a process of becoming. Neither is he non-being, but occupies a middle-ground between both where an obscure bond between the divine and the individual is established, as well as a new synthesis between self and creation, or the universal and individual.

In what way can we say that the zero exists for the French philosopher Felix Ravaisson? He too uses the term archetype where,  in French, ‘type signifies ‘type’ or ‘form’ not only in the philosophical sense of the essence of a being, but as mentioned, in the sense of a prototype, mould, figure or symbol’.[11] Ravaisson uses the term with reference to habit and consciousness – that which forms the being, or essence, of the individual. Throughout his text Ravaisson makes numerous reference to the ‘middle term’, ‘middle ground’, ‘site of equilibrium…the common limit of opposites…where extremes touch’[12], ‘its dividing line is everywhere and nowhere’[13], ‘it is a moving middle term…which advances by an imperceptible progress from one extremity to the other’[14]. It is in this mediating centre that habit operates, that reveals the ‘intimate essence and necessary connection’[15] of the real and ideal, subject and object, spontaneity and necessity. For Ravaisson habit is defined as a way of being of the individual and if the archetype is found principally in consciousness as effort, which constitutes the experience of the individual through felt activity, then we can equate the individual with this middle ground.  If for Ravaisson the middle ground is a medium or milieu then no opposites are present in it, and neither in a Schelligian way is it predicable or contains any qualities or properties. Rather it is a site or source in which two forces acquire their opposition through it.

An important question, then, is the ontology of such a structure, rather than what it is or means for consciousness alone (e.g the felt phenomenality of such a middle ground for the individual). We would argue that such a structure is the zero itself, but one that has morphed from the Ungrund as Absolute indifference to modal plenum or point of balance within the individual. Harmony or equilibrium exists where it is neither one thing or another, and still not specifically  any-‘thing’. Therefore in a Schellingian way it remains the ‘unthinged’. Again it denotes a site or point of non-being. It could be argued that Ravaisson seems to offer a correlationist account due to the fact that he has a tendency to ascribe this middle ground to that which pre or already exists – life- however, we would argue that the generation of opposition is acquired through the activity of the individual. This is confirmed by Ravaisson describing the individual’s soul as ‘the centre of opposing forces on a lever…with the capacity to measure and dispense force.’[16] It is the individual as centre, as zero or mediation itself analogous to the primordial, self-caused initial act between antithetical potencies of Absolute identity or its mediating between two polar forces before it is ruptured or sundered into difference, i.e. before unity is broken into opposition. Again this establishes an intimate connection between what is necessarily prior to what is and the individual. Yet, for both Ravaisson and Schelling, the individual must always traverse/waver/oscillate between any divide, it must always feel a predominant degree, or asymmetry between either element to constitute experience, life, activity, effort and dialectical striving. Subjectivity is what is after this event, an activity of becoming between poles.
For both philosophers nature, and thus life exists as difference, a differentiation of all inclusive sameness.  If there were no divide or difference in what is, then nature and the individual would be like the inorganic, primordial Ungrund, in which it would be impossible to experience anything, including ourselves (essentially there would no-thing/nothing). What this middle is is, for Ravaisson, that which is ground laying [zu Grunde liegend], denoting activity to-wards in a directional sense – a thinking towards that which precedes thought – the Ungrund. Again this recalls a Schellingian cyclical re-turn to the zero.
This reveals that what exists – what is as identity – is founded upon a ground: the ground of Absolute Identity insofar as it is the ground of existence. But the essence of that ground itself is grounded in something other than it - that which is antecedent to all ground – which cannot itself be ground but ungrounded. Thus the activity of identity always moves towards grounds that in the end are ungrounded precisely because if a ground exists it must be consequent upon what is neither grounded nor already ground. The antecedent is thus always antecedent to a consequent, of which the realisation of that antecedent is consequent. Does this mean that there is the antecedent zero only because there is a consequent at all – i.e. it being thought? If there were no consequent there is no sense in which the antecedent could be either. However this is an isolated antecedent which would offer a similar sense of no-‘thing’/non-being/Ungrund, and the real antecedent in question – the Ungrund, or zero– is that which is necessarily prior to what is, if what is has come into existence at all, for Schelling, and as it has just been argued, for Ravaisson. The thought of the antecedent is thus included in the production of all things, yet this does not mean that the Ungrund is imagined or is just a correlation of thought, it is necessarily prior but always consequent within nature.
It is the zero that is a symbol or sign denoting the evolutive and organistic aspects of the Ungrund that are later trans-figured i.e. put into a figure denoting the Ungrund’s very being. The zero is thus both product – nature as thought- and productivity, a productivity of mediative activity between opposition that is generative. It exists prior to nature as ground, but which is thought consequently (it has morphed), and as such exists within/immanent to nature as grounds, existing last in the genetic series of nature’s products. We can never reach the unprethinkable in itself, but only zero. Nature’s historical past, its sheer excessive productivity is non-totalitizable. It points to an intellectual and rational limit of thought and a darkness that attempts to block nature’s apriori status. It also demonstrates the transfinite, temporary and limited status of being. In trying to think the unprethinkable the individual’s ego is disrupted and it is thrown back into the chaos that is outside thought but which precedes it, which threatens the dissolution of the grounds of individuality. There is always a missing part or experience, or rather an absence or latent otherness that is never made present, where a portion of identity is concealed creating an internal difference and an external opposition between our very finitude against that which lies beyond – infinite and eternal complete being. For both philosophers the individual exists always slightly off balance or de-centred. In a process of continual becoming it is contrasted against the necessary completeness of God’s form of Absolute being, an insurmountable otherness, yet intractably related. Premised on lack, and desire for complete fullness we want to move beyond becoming, but this demands the very annihilation or dissolution of the self, the ungrounding of the subject and the complete takeover of non-being – where opposition and difference is undone, neutralized and erased into the void. Our highest aspiration becomes the destruction of our personality in trying to reach beyond. Schelling admits as much quote ‘The fear of life itself drives man out of the centrum into which he was created: for this centrum, as the purest essence of all willing, is for each particular will a consuming fire; in order to be able to live within it the man of all particularity must become extinct [absterben], which is why the attempt to step out of this centre into the periphery is almost necessary in order to seek there some calm for his selfhood.’ If man were to stay in this zero-void of non-being, in this centrum, then his self would be extinct, in order to be and become he must always be partly outside it, always slightly distanced from it.
Finally the zero, analogous to non-being, ‘no-‘thing’, is that which, in both Schelling and Ravaisson, is the goal towards which finite rational consciousness strives towards, and which is the cyclical turn or re-turn of nature back upon itself : the site of primordial univocal oneness, a void of open ambivalence and indifference, a return to a whole where all particularity is dissolved including the self, a black horizon ungrounding and undoing all difference, a complete affirmation of negation.
So to finish. What exactly does this zero give us? It demonstrates that a form of nothingness is originary and also consequent philosophically when thinking speculatively. But does nothingness exist in being or is Being really nothing? I would answer for both philosophers being is not any-‘thing’, but what is in itself as itself, it is therefore not entirely nothing, but somehow exists – the how indicating for Schelling, the importance of modes of being that arise from a powers metaphysics and the activity of forces that produces an ontology. Nothingness exists in beings in terms of non-being being reiterated within nature from the dynamic zero, where nothing is just a negative determination of being or that which is not x. Does this give us a topography of nihilism – where being and nothing come together, the essential null place of the origin of nihilism? It is not a question of reducing everything to zero, which would obliterate the plenitude, the creativity and vibrancy of the world but to offer something far more positive. Yes zero has been couched in negative terms – nothing, void, lack, incompletion which says something essential about life, but it also positive at the same time. It indicates the void which contains all the potential of the universe and all the potential of empty space, a zone of indetermination but which has the future potential to be determined. Insofar as the zero is that which mediates, always occupying a centre ground or field beneath and within nature, it forms a milieu that is morphogenic for individual themselves. They can draw upon its background layer that lies in excess of themselves. It is virtual field of latent possibility waiting to be actualised. The zero then becomes an open zone, a rupture or gap in thought that has yet to be traversed or articulated fully, a symbol standing for something beyond itself where being and nothing are gathered together.

---

[1] Matthews, B (2011) Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema for Freedom. g. 222.

[2] Schelling, F.W.J. (2006) Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom trans. J. Love & J. Schmidt. 406, pg. 68.

[3] B. Matthews, Life as a Schema for Freedom. pg. 16.

[4] Ibid., pg. 17.

[5] Schelling, F.W.J. (2006) Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom trans. J. Love & J. Schmidt. 415, pg. 76.

[6] Schelling. Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. J. Love & J. Schmidt, 366, pg. 34.

[7] Ibid., 63.

[8] Footnote in Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. J. Love & J. Schmidt, 367, pg. 35. From the treatise ‘On the Assertion that There Can Be No Wicked Use of Reason’, Morgenblatt, 1807, No.7, and in ‘On Solids and Liquids’, Annuals of Medicine as Science, vol. III, No.2.

[9] Ffytche, M. The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche. pg. 195.

[10] Ffychte, M. pg. 166.

[11] Carlisle, C. & M. Sinclair (2008) Commentary on Ravaisson’s Of Habit. pg. 89.

[12] Ravaisson, F. (2008) Of Habit. trans. C. Carlisle & M. Sinclair. pg. 43.

[13] Ibid., pg. 57.

[14] Ibid., pg. 59.

[15] Ibid., pg. 67.

[16] Ibid., pg. 37.

Zeroing

Terrortology

The blackness of terrortology.

Contemporary speculative philosophy has been tainted with a black streak that worms and slides on its underbelly through its currents, its propositions and its mediations. This darkness that seeps into its very pores has slowly crept upon us. It is no longer latent, hidden, lurking behind words, a presence implied by its absence. Now it is an absence made present, exploded into the present for all to see and marvel at. The language of blackness has proliferated unashamedly, it has taken over; devouring and conquering the interesting corners of philosophy it has made itself known in all its thick opacity. Linked by many to Lovecraftian horror, the darkness of unknowing, the unthinkable, and esoteric thought, it metaphorically demonstrates the precise current concerns and fears of the psyche of those utilizing it. Are they really horrified at the blackness itself and what it implies or does the blackness merely hide a more pertinent and deeper horror, a horror masked and seduced by blackness?

The blackness being talked of comes from the work of Ben Woodard, Eugene Thacker, Nicola Masiandaro, and Reza Negerastani, to name just a few. For some it is an indication of that which is other than the human, an insurmountable presence that exist beyond the borders of thought, indicating our limited and finite capacity to comprehend it in all its vastness. It is alien because it is not us and because we cannot reach it in our attempt to step beyond our ties to our human chains. It is the unpre-thinkable, the dark void or abyss that precedes nature, life, the human. It is the seeping, malignant oil that lies in the earth’s crust causing apocalyptic wars, terrorism and violence. It is a force of chaos that creates a cosmic horror-fiction replete with mysticism and indeterminate exteriorized absolutes. Completely unhuman – therefore dark and unknown. This abrupt and violent and slow and insidious black essence smacks of neo-paganism, the unavoidable disintegration of the human and its world. It re-examines the place of the human in a world and a nature which have the power to create and destroy life itself. The human and the individual have to escape from and remove themselves from anthropocentric thinking and turn towards ecological nihilism, the grim void and rupture onto an abyss replete with vampirish nightmares, demonology, corpses and childish fears. It is over the top, indulgent, exultant in its affirmation of the negative, seriously taking itself seriously in its theory-fiction, in its poetic and literary eloquence while remaining oh so mythological, yet trying to be advent-garde. Is it just a load of already obsolete jabber? Well, yes and no. Some of what it says sounds ridiculous and far too fanciful. For example when you are handed a small black booklet that says ‘NOTHING’ on the front, and you flick through its matt black pages to come across this sentence ‘In the Beginning there was Nothing, In the End there will be Nothing, In between is irrelevant’ and ‘Have you ever wished you could have a closer Personal Relationship with the Great and Infinite Blackness?’ You think this is amazing! After typing in the website and you find this, you cannot help but think, with a sense of disappointment, how cultish/perhaps even religious this is, almost certainly oh so very Harry Potter:

The Order of the Black Mark as it exists today is an outgrowth of the End Luminous. A nihilistic spiritual organization in the Hermetic and Western Esoteric tradition, which works toward a greater understanding of the void, the Order was founded by the Dark Prophet A. Euripides Shmawls (1903-1986) who broke off and cultivated the Order after having a Grand Vision of Darkness in 1922.

The current Spiritual Leader of the Order is the Artist and Prophet Vincent Como who, after being inducted into the Order’s highest rank: the Circle of None in 2007, was instrumental in consolidating the Order’s assets and moved the headquarters to New York City where he resides. His Darkness is currently working with select members to recruit new devotees and has pledged a commitment to re-printing the seminal texts of the Order as well as ushering the organization into the 21st century. In the meantime, the Order is developing new events for initiates and holding regular rituals in its US and UK Chapters.

Yet philosophical writing on blackness works to think this beyond; this black nothingness, to move philosophy and human thought forward, to strive and claw at its frayed borders. This either entails moving philosophy away from its strict academic and musty confines into something more interdisplinary, where backing is received from fiction, psychoanalysis, music (including black metal), and aesthetics and seeing where and how these disciplines will take it. It also demonstrates the importance of speculation, whether that theorizing is true or false in any objective sense. It  acts to blur the boundaries of validity and of thought. This ‘black’ has implications that are far reaching and so should be examined more deeply – not what the blackness is saying on the surface but the blackness that precedes or lies behind this very blackness. The question 'why are we talking of blackness, and why now?' What is the underlying cause of all this? And is this really anything new? Whether it’s new or not, it still calls into question our current ‘negative’ thinking.

Traditionally teratology  is the study or marvel of that which terrifies: the monster, the abnormal, the not quite human that is all always given as much too human; that which frightens, an appalling thing or person leading to terror, horror or anxiety.  Focusing not upon teratology as such, and not, therefore upon the scientific study of the abnormality of the specific thing or person, I propose a new term for speculative philosophers: the study of terror itself – terrortology -the study of that which darkens thought, blackens goodness, that clouds and swarms our thinking. It demonstrates a new emerging branch within philosophical thought using language riddled with blackness. But this blackness it not as horrific or terrifying as it, or we, make it out to be. In fact we are drawn to it. It beckons us to take a closer look. We revel in its discovery; we think it will lead to the answer of the all. We want more of it; we immerse ourselves in its deep mysterious embrace and vainly seek it out. But to what avail - to test ourselves? To see if we can stand up to it, overcome, triumph and conquer? Would this not just be to triumph over ourselves, to hold ourselves up as shining beacons of light, wisdom and knowledge? How presumptuous and sickening of us. If this blackness is not really that terror inducing, not really that terr-ific what is it? It is a grand opening for philosophy itself, a new presence that opens the path to a new futurity. It is not really all that negative but the most profound speculative space within philosophy that is a rupturing of thought replete with potentialities and virtualities not yet actualized. It reveals to us the beginnings of timid steps that circle around the borders of an edge before it either topples off or leaps too quickly into the chasm. Either it ends with its own premature demise or it, and we, find a way to climb down into its centre, bit by bit, tethered with the guides and ropes of the past, with the ideas of philosophers long dead making adjustments and small leaps into deep, dark depths. Finding a way down into the meaning of blackness is not really that terrifying. It surely has to be collaborative, not solitary. Progressive and adjusting, dynamic and interdependent, we push ourselves into such darkness. No longer pale and blind we might find it not that dark after all. 

'I think...at the edge, between where language fails and where it's at its most powerful.' A.S. Byatt.


'Of course if you step beyond words
you'll fall into the abyss

Between the idea and the word
there is more than we can understand

I was always looking for a word
that had to be spoken only once
or a word that had not been
spoken at all
I should have looked for ordinary words' Vladimir Holan


Caught within motions

Spera, primum mobile, the beyond, divide and pass beyond

Which sphere is within which – ambivalence!!

Exteriority folded within, a TURNing.

The line says of a boundary that we trip up, fall before, cannot get beyond, 
But in conceiving the line we are already past it

Logic of piu – n+1

The unity of the double

Flow beyond and a return back

Spiritual motion

In this Arc

'Using Kierkegaard in the process, and installing themselves in this arc between "the moment and eternity"; no longer just with "dialectical theology" and its tension between moment and eternity, but with so-called present 'eschatology'. This being so, revelation is taken all the more as awakening self-knowledge in its proper form, rather than as concealing within its covers some great goal of history and of the world; though qua Kierkegaard, it is true, this does take place in the topos, even if not in the darkness and unconstruable question of the Moment. Which, as such, precisely because of its utter closeness, its most immanent immanence, appears to be more than just human; and is in fact the Immediate in all its driving force, the Immediate which is not yet even mediated to itself, and which exists in everything. This unpassed Moment, beneath all else, contains in fact the secret of existence - or, rather, is that secret plain and simple. And for that reason its Hic et nunc is not only formative of individual Christians, but remains intact and undissipated in all existing being.' 

Ernst Bloch - Chapter 11: Discernment of Myths in Atheism in Christianity