“Substances all the Way Down”

Posted on August 10, 2010
Filed Under OOP, Philosophy | 5 Comments

Levi and Graham made some comments about OOP today which were quite helpful for clarifying things. As Michael noted yesterday, Derrida has signs all the way down in terms of a basic ontology. Levi has a nice post related to Aristotle and determinism in this context. In response to one of my questions about tying OOP to substances and prime matter Graham clarified things further.

So in a sense, OOO’s position is not relations all the way down, but “substantial forms all the way down.” (The best treatment of Substantial Forms is in Francisco Suarez, by the way.)

My question then became whether this is a difference without a difference. I probably ought clarify that.

If a substantial form is itself made out of other substantial forms plus relations then that is itself a relation. To give an example a table is a substantial form made out of the substantial form of the constituent molecules and their relations. However it is more than that in that this is itself a relation. (i.e. a relation between the table and the molecules) Now one can dispute the reality of this relation or make a distinction between kinds of relations. It’s not clear to me that OOP does this though. (As I mentioned after reading Prince of Networks it seems like “relations” are dealt with a tad too broadly and it’s a point I’ll confess to being confused upon. It’s the one element I’m looking most closely at if I can get back to my second reading.)

The reason this seems to be a difference without a difference is that it seems like you could characterize this purely in terms of relations since each substance is actually a set of relations plus other substances which have the same kind of constitution. As a practical matter it’s not clear to me that one gains a whole lot by saying there are substances if one doesn’t stop with substances.

Perhaps I’m just biased here from my Peircean background for whom it’s (in one sense) signs all the way down. But a sign for Peirce handles relations while substantial forms are an example of a sign. Now Peirce doesn’t reduce everything to relations since signs for him are an example of Thirdness while he thinks there is also irreducibly Secondness (pure force or action) and Firstness (pure quality or feeling). But in terms of the relation/substance distinction present in Aristotle I confess that sort of view of substance only makes sense in certain ways. At least as I see it. But perhaps I’m just missing something obvious to everyone else.

Related posts:

  1. Derridean OOP
  2. Philosophical Focus
  3. Detecting Chance
  4. Intentionality and Potentiality
  5. Davidson: The Myth of the Subjective 2
  6. Some Quick Thoughts on Derrida and Plotinus

Comments

5 Responses to ““Substances all the Way Down””
1 Mark Crosby on August 10th, 2010 7:04 pm

Hi Clark, I’m inclined to agree with you. It seems to be a rhetorical preference. Every time someone points out a variant of relationism, Levi & Graham are quick to return the discussion to a critique of the canonical version of relationism (‘internal relations’ of the early 20th-c). Perhaps there are a lot of New-Agey folks who believe in that sort of wholism, but I just don’t see that at all in the blog discussions of OOP and OOO..

I share some of your Peircean ‘biases’. I found the following, in the translation by Protevi of Gilbert Simondon’s section on “Topology, Chronology, and Order of Magnitude of Physical Individuations”, to be very much along the lines of a Peircean trichotomy:

“From this point of view it seems possible to understand why the antagonistic representations of the continuous and the discontinuous, of matter and energy, of structure and operation, are not utilizable other than in the form of complementary couples; it’s because these notions define the opposed and extreme aspects of orders of reality between which individuation is instituted; but the operation of individuation is the active center of this relation; it is this operation which is the unity that self-duplicates into aspects which are for us complementary while in reality they are coupled by the continuous and transductive unity of the intermediary being …”

But, on the other hand, I’m probably a rather aberrant Peircean..
Best, Mark

UPDATE: After posting this, I went to look at the Wikipedia article on Francisco Suarez. Wow! That’s pretty eximius! Graham is right: This guy is the Father of Individuation..

2 Michael Dorfman on August 11th, 2010 3:09 am

Personally, I think the notion of “presence” is perhaps more instructive than “substance”; it seems to me that Derrida would reject any traditional notion of substantiality as implicated in a metaphysics of presence.

(And, just because I happen to be up to my neck in Nagarjuna these days, svabhava (inherent existence, essence) would be the corresponding term in his domain.)

Good point. OOP does avoid pure presence (they have a strong sense of withdrawal) but I’m not sure it goes far enough.

Mark, the nature of relation is what I’m looking at most in my second read of Graham.

To add to my post, Levi has a recent post where he says:

The substantiality of an object lies not in its actualized qualities, but rather in its powers. Qualities, by contrast, are actions on the part of an object.

However I think for Peirce at least power or potentiality is caught up in the aspect of a sign in terms of what it does. (This loosely developed out of Peirce in linguistics into what Morris called pragmatics and what Searle calls a perlocutionary act although Searle’s notion is more limited than Morris’)

In any case if substantial forms are powers it’s even more unclear to me how that isn’t a kind of relation. After all I’d say my ability to lift the box beside me is a kind of relation between the box and myself. I’ll fully confess I know very little about the details of Levi’s own form of OOP. I have been reading his Lexicon of Onticology though in spare moments.

I should note that Levi made a helpful response in the comments to my question of “isn’t it reducible to the other objects plus relations?”

nope, that’s the point. Substantial form is not nothing and it can’t be found in the parts. This is why Graham criticizes leibniz’s distinction between aggregates and monads.

I’m still pretty confused over what the excess is. In Leibniz this is easy, which is why I immediately qualified my question to Graham. For Leibniz all relations are non-real. He’s a nominalist in that sense of their being imposed by mind. But if one accepts real relations (which is what I got out of OOP) then I just don’t understand what the excess is. (Perhaps this is where the Whitehead influences enter in)

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