Being in Flux: A Post–Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self [1 ed.] 150954951X, 9781509549511

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Being in Flux

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Being in Flux A Post-Anthropocentric Ontology of the Self

Rein Raud

polity

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Copyright © Rein Raud 2021 The right of Rein Raud to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2021 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 101 Station Landing Suite 300 Medford, MA 02155, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4950-4 ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4951-1 (pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Raud, Rein, author. Title: Being in flux : a post-anthropocentric ontology of the self / Rein  Raud. Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2021. | Includes   bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A cutting-edge   contribution to the philosophical debate about how to conceptualize   reality”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021000209 (print) | LCCN 2021000210 (ebook) | ISBN   9781509549504 | ISBN 9781509549511 (pb) | ISBN 9781509549528 (epub) |   ISBN 9781509549740 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Ontology. | Self (Philosophy) Classification: LCC BD331 .R26 2021 (print) | LCC BD331 (ebook) | DDC  111--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000209 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000210 Typeset in 10.5 on 12pt Sabon by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

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CONTENTS



Acknowledgements page vi

Introduction 1 Ontology: Some of the Story So Far 2 An Ontology of Processes and Fields 3 Me, Myself and My Brain 4 The Self as an Extended Decision-Making Network Concluding Remarks

1 12 55 113 160 208

References 213 Index 227

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book started out as a few explanatory sentences at the beginning of an article, as it seemed necessary for me to clarify my ontological views. Sentences developed into paragraphs, then into passages and chapters. This is the result: the article remains to be written. My sincere thanks go to Michael Krämer, Vanina Leschziner, Graham Parkes, Chiara Robbiano and Fernando Vidal, who read and commented on previous versions of the book or sections of it – the argument has benefited so much from your input! A deep bow is also due to the anonymous reviewer of the book for Polity, who found only praise for it, despite acknowledging that they disagree with me on all philosophical counts – I am very glad to know that such breadth of mind is still to be found in this world. I am also truly grateful to John Thompson for hosting me as a visiting scholar in Cambridge in the spring of 2019, as quite a few among the central ideas of the book came to maturation during that period, and to everyone at Polity for their usual excellence and dedication in helping this book to see the light of day. Special thanks are due to Sarah Dancy for her sensitive and precise copy-editing. This project was financed by the research grant PUT1365 of the Estonian Research Agency as well as the School of Humanities, Tallinn University.

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My soul is a hidden orchestra. I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is a symphony. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (1991: 8)

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INTRODUCTION

Perhaps the most pressing task standing before the philosophy of our times is to articulate a worldview that would not have human beings at its centre, as the ongoing ecological catastrophe, on the one hand, and the emergence of artificial intelligence, on the other, are raising the need to rethink the role of humans in the bigger picture with increasing urgency. At the same time, ground-breaking discoveries in the natural sciences have shattered the very fundamentals of the way in which we think about being as such. It is therefore no wonder that ontological and epistemological debates have again acquired a resonance reaching a much broader audience than the circle of professional philosophers, and have started to engage intellectuals whose primary domain of work is something else, such as social theory, ecology, economy, or even health. The need to rethink the basics of our ontology is also the primary motivation behind this book. Its aim is to provide a rational discursive framework for a post-anthropocentric1 view of human subjectivity, its ways of manifesting itself in sociocultural identities 1 I

take the distinction between the terms ‘posthuman’ and ‘post-anthropocentric’ from Rosi Braidotti’s work (2013), but I will be attributing a slightly different sense to them. For Braidotti, ‘posthuman’ signifies the rejection of the traditional ‘humanist’ paradigm based on a restricted, Eurocentric and male-centred view of what counts as human (2013: 13–16), while post-anthropocentrism is the upgraded version of this critique that extends, mostly by technological means, its perspective beyond that of the human species, integrating the dimensions of ‘becoming-animal’ (2013: 67ff.) and ‘becoming-machine’ (2013: 89ff.). The two thus form concentric conceptual circles, with posthumanism as the core. For me, ‘human’ signifies broadly all the specifically human contributions to the current state of the world, both good and bad, while ‘post-anthropocentric’ designates an order in which the human point of view no longer forms the natural centre of gravity. Thus, for example, the idea of ‘animal rights’ cannot be a part of the posthuman paradigm, because the idea of ‘rights’ as such is specifically human, but it is nonetheless

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introduction and ethical responsibilities – a view that would not postulate humans as discrete, strictly bounded individuals, whose perspective on reality would be established as the proverbial measure of all things. My goal is nonetheless to provide the prolegomena, so to speak, for a social philosophy first of all – a discourse and context in which we can discuss primarily human interaction, but without divorcing it from the broader environment, parts of which we are. I have tried to pursue this goal by developing my theories of subjectivity and culture (Bauman and Raud 2015; Raud 2016), supplementing and contrasting them with ideas coming from various different schools and disciplines of thought. In other words, this inquiry aims to present a systematic and thoroughgoing philosophical groundwork for the processual/ relational turn in social science, advocated over the recent decades by many theorists (see, e.g., Abbott 2016; Crossley 2011; Dépelteau 2018; Dépelteau and Powell 2013; Donati 2010; Donati and Archer 2015; Emirbayer 1997; López and Scott 2000; Powell and Dépelteau 2013; White 2008). This turn has its roots in such discourses as Ernst Cassirer’s ‘relational concepts’ (1953: 309ff.), the theory of ‘trans-action’ formulated by John Dewey and Arthur Bentley (1949: 107ff.) as well as Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, and in particular his concept of ‘relationism’, which he opposes to relativism (1985: 239–44). Coupled with the embodied/enacted approach that has recently risen to prominence in cognitive sciences (see, e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Fuchs 2018b; Gallagher 2017, 2020; Haugeland 1998; Johnson 2017; Thompson 2007; Varela et al. 1992), this view of social phenomena distances itself from the postulation of self-identical and continuous entities as the primary building blocks and participants of the dynamism of social reality. Together, these approaches have already made a significant contribution to how social processes and the individual person can be described and analysed. In this book, I have tried to integrate and develop these views into a discourse that places both the self and the social into a still broader dynamic and relational context. What I am going to propose is a processual ontology of selfhood, seen as a momentarily existing field of constitutive tensions that refracts a multitude of heterogeneous causal chains, which are coming together to produce it, into a range of possible futures. This, as I hope will become clear in due course, post-anthropocentric in that it has extended the domain where rights apply beyond the borders of the human species.

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introduction is not as complicated as it sounds. We are real in every moment of the present, and only in the moment, but we are what our past has made us, and what our relations with others let us be. Our being acts as a prism, in which the various paths coming from the past and the multiple links to our others converge and act together to transform the sum of all these circumstances into a cone of possible futures, from which one will happen, and if all is well, we have a share in choosing which one of them is going to be the actually taken road. This prism of our instantaneous being is itself also in constant movement from one moment to the next, as various forces on the field of our selfhood are struggling with each other in order to increase their influence on the decision of picking the most appropriate future from those available. A self is never in complete balance, but neither is it ever completely unstable and still a self. However, in a more basic sense, this way of being is not unique to the human subject. If there is one central thesis to this book, it is this: on every level, ‘being’ consists in fluctuating tensions that constitute relational patterns, and the imagined stability of entities is derived from flattened images of such tensions observed from an outside perspective. This does not mean that entities are somehow ‘not real’, if by ‘real’ we mean the capacity to participate in causal linkages. Nonetheless relations never occur between self-same and continuous things, stable objects, or egocentric particulars, but only between fields of constitutive tensions, and they are always formed on many different bandwidths simultaneously. While I hold this to be true on all possible levels of observation, this is of particular importance for the study of social, cultural and political phenomena. In those domains, the proposed theory will suggest a new way to approach the classic antagonism between the determining supra-individual forces (‘structure’) and the pre-social egocentric particulars (‘agency’ in the traditional sense of the word). Current literature seems to offer only two main alternatives to their dichotomy: either to solve the binary opposition in favour of either side, or to move them so close to each other that they end in a dialectical confluence, co-determining or mutually comprising each other to the extent that neither ‘structure’ nor ‘agency’ can be really identified any longer. But a third option emerges from a field model of causality. If action is taken to ensue from the discharge of tensions, which always occurs on several relatively independent levels simultaneously – for example, when the judgements passed in court depend not only on the legal details of the cases, but also on whether the judges are hungry, as shown in a study undertaken by Danziger et al. (2011) – we can dismiss 3

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introduction the antagonism altogether and say that identifiable ‘structures’ and ‘agents’ only emerge as a result of conceptual extraction.2 But this does not imply that processes just go on of their own accord in one great and smooth flow. Differences are ubiquitous and tensions evolve from them constantly. Causal linkages emerge from these tensions and the momentary attainment of a relatively stable state at one point always upsets the balance or creates new tensions for another. It is natural that we ‘zoom in’ only on those states and circumstances that are relevant for our own circumstances and agendas, but we should not forget it is our perspective that this relevance depends upon. Thus, regardless of whether we are talking about nations or cultures, large corporations or small groups, or individual persons, bacteria, stones, stars, galaxies or, conversely, the minimal ‘particles’ of elementary physics – none of these ever abides in a stable balance, even if the speed of their change may be either too quick or too slow to be noticed from the limited human point of view. This limitedness is also the reason why we tend to impute an objectively existing structure to the outside world – this helps us to navigate it with the least cognitive costs. It is simpler to live amidst flat and mostly solid surfaces as well as abstractions of a mostly black-or-white, yes/ no type. The feeling that these structures are mind-independently real is the more persistent because it is possible to construe narratives with their help that have quite formidable explanatory power. And yet there is a limit to this power that is much narrower than the reach of abstract thinking that the human mind is capable of. More importantly, the belief in the self-sufficient existence of such mind-constructed structures makes it impossible for us to emancipate ourselves from the anthropocentric perspective they tacitly imply. Throughout this inquiry, my quarrel is therefore not with the assertion, correctly identified as realist, that there is a reality which 2

Christopher Powell formulated a similar solution to this problem when he proposed that ‘the concepts of “agency” and “structure” be understood as opposed yet complementary ways of parsing the same phenomena … This is not to say that any given phenomenon has both structural and agential qualities, mixed together. It is to say that any given phenomenon is entirely, completely structured, and at the same time entirely, completely agential’ (2013: 198). However, in his radically relationalist vision, which is very close to mine in most aspects, this dichotomy is not really abandoned, but only reconceptualized in a less explicit form as the opposition between ‘actual’ and ‘potential’ relations, where the latter pre-exist the former and determine the scope of the possible – ‘a relation exists as a potentiality prior to its being actualized through interaction’, Powell writes (2013: 193). Thus, all of what happens has existed previously in virtual form, but not all of what exists virtually will happen. With this, I have to disagree, as it could be argued that a certain order surely has to reign on the plane of potential relations, and that can easily be extracted as a modified idea of ‘structure’.

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introduction exists, as it is, independently of any observers. Nor do I doubt the fact that science provides us with the most adequate possible tools of gathering data about this reality. The problems start with the further claim that reality is structured in a way that approximately corresponds to our ideas about it, although, according to its proponents, this is a necessary characteristic of any realist worldview. This, I would say, is nonetheless not realism in the fundamental sense, but only in the sense given to the term by medieval scholastic philosophers. In the present context it should be more appropriately called ‘idealism’, because such an objective logical structure is an ideal thing claimed to exist independently of our minds. Against this view, I will follow feminist philosophers of science such as Donna Haraway who maintain that the world is disclosed in a multitude of ways to different potential vantage points, regardless of whether there actually exists an observer who is physically present in these points and able to assemble the data available to it into a systematic vision. In other words, I hold that the claim of entities being real3 and existing in the world as ‘objects’ roughly in the way we perceive them cannot be substantiated without taking it for granted that our view of the world necessarily has to be the standard one. Therefore, I will argue that whatever we know about our world is actually conceptual extractions4 from it that have been formulated in a language that is particular to us. Neglecting this, I will try to show, has undesired and mostly unnoticed consequences, one of which is precisely that the structures we form in our mind, which often consist of clear-cut binary oppositions on different levels of abstraction, are projected onto the real world and thereafter perceived to be the reality that our minds and languages are imperfectly reflecting. A paradigmatic case of this is the tendency to credit anything that can be an object in the syntactic sense of the word, that is, appear in a sentence as the target of an action or observation, also with being an ‘object’ in the ontological sense of the word. It is quite 3

Throughout this inquiry, the term ‘real’ will be used in two connected senses: (1) to be real is to be an indispensable part of a causal linkage; (2) to be real is to take place even if unobserved by parties that are affected by that particular causal linkage. This is not to say that airwaves are real, but sounds are not; the claim is that sounds only become real as ‘sounds’ when they reach someone’s ear and elicit a response. Thus, the same happening in the world can be ‘real’ in several different ways, as a part of different causal linkages, depending on the vantage point. 4 I will be using the term in a way similar to that of Robert A. Wilson, who constantly emphasizes that a cognitive procedure is not something that spontaneously reflects the world, but ‘an activity that individuals perform in extracting and deploying information that is used in their further actions. It involves an agent enmeshed with the world not prior to or following but in the very act of representing’ (2004: 183–4).

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introduction legitimate to say ‘I can see the sky’, but it does not follow from this that a thing called ‘the sky’ objectively5 exists. One of the methodical cornerstones of the discourse articulated here is the replacement of all distinctions of a black-or-white, yes/no type with gradients wherever possible. Such gradients may indeed have distinct, clearly definable situations (phases, stages) at either of their conceivable ends, or in the middle, as well as thresholds of significant transformation, but nonetheless they also contain grey areas, vague states, and intermittent becomings, and these arguably often form the bigger part of their existence span and/or are the parts of it where most significant changes are likely to happen. As the endpoint of this inquiry I would like to arrive at a discursive framework that bases human society and culture on a continuum not only with other lifeforms, but also with things, natural phenomena, and any other way of existence, because only this, and not the premise of cutting us off from all other types of entities,6 makes it possible to describe what are the specifics, if any, of being ‘human’ in this world. It should be clear by now that I am going to reject the set of methodological axioms of ‘hard’ physicalism (‘everything that is real can be most adequately described in the language of physics’), which is considered to be the prerequisite of scientific thought by a large number of philosophers. At the same time, however, I will admit the possibility of ‘weak’ physicalism (‘everything that is real can also be described in the language of physics’), without, however, considering it to be very informative. The problem with ‘hard’ physicalism consists in its self-centredness – I am going to argue that there are real phenomena with real causal powers that cannot be adequately accounted for by their reduction to underlying specific physical processes, while a physical description, albeit often a clumsy one with little or no explanatory power, can nonetheless be constructed for them. In other words, I will argue that the mental and physical vocabularies 5

The privilege accorded to the human perspective has caused a shift in the meaning of the word ‘objective’, from ‘what exists unperceived’ to ‘what exists as perceived by humans also when not perceived by any human’. Needless to say, I will not be using the word in this latter sense. 6 I use the word ‘entity’ to refer to singular things extracted from the reality process by something or someone external to them and forming a relationship with them through this act, while the word ‘object’ is reserved for the traditional view of stable, self-identical and continuous things that exist as they are in the world independent of any mind and gaze. As said, I think that discourses relying on the existence of pre-given objects impose a structure on the world that is not really there, but which reifies and naturalizes the human perspective of things as the only correct one.

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introduction we normally use need not match each other on a one-to-one basis. Moreover, we need to be very wary about the tacit conceptual luggage the opposite view often brings with itself. For example, we may freely admit that all mental processes that we can think of are somehow also physical processes that occur in the brain – that is, individual mental events have an equivalent in the physical structures of the brain. But this fact does not mean that we are entitled to posit a self-same ‘neural correlate’ for any occurrence of a (similarly reified) particular ‘mental state’ or experience processed by the mind. More importantly, it does not follow from this that each aspect of the mental process we are accustomed to identify as one of its recurring elements has a precise, always co-occurring neural correlate across individuals – so that all fans of a specific football team, for example, have a number of neurons of exactly the same type associated with one another in exactly the same way located in exactly the same area in their brains. A claim of this type, put forward in the nineteenth century by the amateur physiologist and philosopher George Henry Lewes (1877: 313) as a conjecture, has indeed not been substantiated by neuroscience, and yet the impression one often gets from neurocentrically oriented philosophical literature is that this is how things really are.7 Another often-met presupposition that the present inquiry will do its best to avoid is the Aristotelian view that any particular individual, thing or object as such pre-exists any relations it may enter into and should therefore be most adequately analysed on its own, removed from the context that entangles it in contexts that compromise the purity of its being.8 I will be joining those who advocate the opposite view, according to which things without context are like the 7 Alva

Noë, introducing his highly convincing critique of this view, formulates as the doctrinal consensus of most neuroscientists the claim that ‘for every experience there is a neural structure or substrate whose activation is sufficient for the experience’ and therefore ‘experience supervenes on the brain’ (2006: 209). He goes on to show how this view is produced by an unwarranted shift from claiming that experience as a whole is partially dependent on the brain as a whole. 8 This is reflected in Aristotle’s theory of change, which is the actualization of a potentiality a thing has in itself that comes about as a result of a contact with an agent of change (Physics III, A201a9–202a13). Consequently, ‘only in a fixed thing-like substratum, which must first be given, can the logical and grammatical varieties of being in general find their ground and real application … The category of relation especially is forced into a dependent and subordinate position by this fundamental metaphysical doctrine of Aristotle’ (Cassirer 1953: 8). While Cassirer (as well as many others) has gone on to point out the incompatibility of this view with modern mathematics and natural science (1953: 36ff.), the Aristotelian view has proved to be remarkably resilient. Thus, Graham Harman, for example, formulates the ‘Rule No. 1’ of his ontology as ‘Things pre-exist their activity rather than being created by it’ (2016: 114).

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introduction unstable chemical elements that can be extracted from compounds in laboratory circumstances, but are not actually met in nature. Or, from another angle, they are like words in a dictionary, which can be supplied with definitions, but which only acquire real, functional meaning in phrases that are actually uttered and interpreted. A cleansing of contexts is not providing us with more clarity, but, on the contrary, obscuring our view. ‘Things’, in other words, should be viewed not as independent entities by themselves, but as elements of processes, where they are determined by their relations with other things, which they determine in turn. A theory that strives to account for things as they actually occur in reality cannot cast aside the embedded nature of their being in their world. Nor can we do that to ours. A person, it follows from this, does not need to be continuous in time as a substance or ‘thing’, or even as a pattern, which persists even when the parts it arranges are replaced one by one, until nothing from the original remains. The only kind of ongoing stability that selfhood must have, on this view, is what I have called ‘processual continuity’, or significant overlap with immediately preceding and immediately following stages. The significance of this overlap, as I will be arguing in Chapter 1, is for any process inevitably bound to a vantage point, from which it can be observed and conceptualized. Such a vantage point, comprising the parameters according to which we can call something – a segment of a process, a part of the reality flux – an entity in the first place, need not be occupied by a real observer. It can be completely heuristic, such as the imaginary gaze that moves around among quarks and bosons, or travels in space at nearly the speed of light, or describes to us from the inside the life in an anthill or a bee swarm. Nonetheless, we need to conjure it as the perspective from which certain phenomena can in principle be observed and evaluated. To repeat: one of the central claims of this book is precisely that the human perspective – complete with the speeds, sizes and observed differences between, say, solid and liquid things – is just one of such perspectives among many, and the reality in which we are inextricably immersed can, in theory, legitimately be described from an infinite multitude of vantage points and not just the one our perceptual apparatus is suggesting to us. Moreover, it is our immense privilege that our mind enables us to transcend the boundaries of our own conceptually structured environment and at least wonder what is it like to be a different kind of creature or entity, as Thomas Nagel (1974) and David Chalmers (1996: 293) have famously done for bats and thermostats, respectively. 8

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introduction It is perhaps trivial to observe that things do not, in fact, pre-exist the reality that they are a part of, and should therefore not be described as standing still in an imaginary vacuum. Nonetheless, this is a circumstance often acknowledged and then immediately forgotten. It has been my ambition to present an argument that would consistently adhere to the habit of seeing things in flux, as parts of processes, frozen into bounded entities not prior to, but during their interaction with other parts of their reality, which come to appear as continuous things to them in turn. A process ontology, discussed in detail in Chapter 2, is also more compatible with contemporary theoretical physics than our common-sense view of material thingness as the paradigmatic case of ‘being’. We know that, at the ground level of being, physics no longer claims to see indivisible, but nonetheless material and graspable, object-like building blocks, and philosophy should not so so either. Building up from that base level, and always emphasizing the vectorial character of minimal instances of being as well as their selective openness towards some, but not all, of their others, I introduce a version of process ontology that develops certain insights of Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Nicholas Rescher and other process theorists into a broader discourse that includes accounts of internality, individuality, temporality, causality and other relevant phenomena. This discourse credits only the immeasurable ‘now’ with absolutely real, material existence, which nonetheless contains the past as traces of causal processes and the future as a range of possibilities. From any perspective, this ‘now’ is disclosed not as an organized structure, but as a field of constitutive tensions – a field without a stable centre, but with a multitude of points vying for this role. Just as, in the cultural semiotics of Yuri Lotman, a work of art cannot be captured in full by any particular reading of it, but exists as a space of multiple contradictory interpretations (1970: 86–7), the momentary state of any entity always consists in both striving for balance and falling out of it at the same time. Process ontology has a long-standing association with theories of selfhood, as our own subjectivity can be seen as a process, the only process to which we have privileged access from the inside (Seibt 2018). Selfhood is thus the topic that I will address in Chapters 3 and 4, first turning to some presently widespread views of the mind, in particular its relation with the physical brain. Following the critical, but currently still minority, view that rejects the physicalist theories of mind and advocates a broader perspective, I present a number of arguments in defence of this position, while also claiming that 9

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introduction a process-ontological stance is better equipped to account for the various phenomena collectively called ‘the mind’ in the first place. I then move to briefly discuss several recent theories of selfhood and subjectivity in the context of the present discourse, showing how these, too, can be constructively read in dialogue with it. I conclude the chapter by summarizing the idea of self/subject as a field in constant transformation. The final chapter of the book is dedicated to the problematic of agency and decision-making, which is viewed as taking place in an extended network comprising not only the whole body, but also its outreach into the environment and the significant others to which it binds itself. I will be joining the theorists who argue that the selfhood of real people is always embodied, embedded and enacted, as well as a part of an extended network, in the spirit of the ‘4E’ cognitive theory (Newen et al. 2018). True to the process-ontological principles of my account, I see the existence of things taking place only in a context of dynamism, viewing instances of standstill simply as movement at zero speed. This is also the background against which, I suggest, an account of agency needs to be formulated – an embedded selfhood torn between different trajectories and motivations, rather than an isolated, sovereign mind forming intents and acting on them. In my view, agency consists ultimately in the capacity to stray from seemingly predestined courses of action (so that consciously staying on them also becomes an agentic choice), and I provide an account of mental causation to support the argument about how this can happen. The final sections of Chapter 4 turn to group theory, and I will argue, contrary to the prevalent view, that it is feasible to see individual selves as structurally similar to groups in which the members relatively strongly relate to one another, to the point even when we can say that individual selfhood, with its internal dynamic, is a particular case of collective self, simply encapsulated in one human being. Before moving on to the actual inquiry, I need to apologize to those (most appreciated) readers of this book who are taking it on from the beginning to (it is hoped) the end, for I will be somewhat repetitive and occasionally come back to some of my most central claims for the benefit of those who only have time for separate chapters or sections. I will indeed also take it for granted that many readers, especially those accustomed to view these topics in the terms of the analytical philosophy of mind, may have disagreements with my argument already on the very axiomatic level, or in the way problems have here been formulated. But the world is changing at an 10

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introduction incredible speed and our efforts to keep up with it may often require adapting to or adopting the unexpected, so that alternatives to the habitual may potentially turn out to have more explanatory power than the received view, while being just as consistent and coherent, and possibly even in a better accord with the views of frontline hard sciences. Moreover, what I have to say is a contribution to an emerging and ever stronger, even if polyphonic and not always harmonized, choir of voices. The main influences on this book will be easy to discern and include the classical process metaphysics of Bergson and Whitehead, the proponents of actor-network theory, primarily Bruno Latour (1993, 2005); feminist philosophy, in particular new views of materiality and the body (Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Braidotti 2013; Grosz 1994); interdisciplinary comparative philosophical studies with a strong theoretical bent (Culliney and Jones 2018; Kasulis 2002); new approaches to ontology and epistemology (Bryant 2011; Gabriel 2015a, 2015b, 2017, 2018; Harman 2011, 2016, 2017); some advances of recent cognitive science and related philosophical analyses of selfhood (Chalmers 1996; Gallagher 2017, 2020; Korsgaard 2009; Noë 2006, 2012; Rovane 1997; Thompson 2007; Zahavi 2005, 2014); and, in particular, theories of extended mind (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Haugeland 1998; Menary 2007). The argument has further been significantly shaped by efforts at a dialogue between philosophy and ‘hard’ sciences. Last, but quite definitely not least, this inquiry is heavily indebted to recent work done in the field of social ontology, in particular the ‘Cambridge School’ (Elder-Vass 2010, 2012; Lawson 2019; Lawson et al. 2007; Pratten 2014), but also other theorists of similar topics (Jaeggi 2018; List and Pettit 2011; Tollefsen 2015; Tuomela 2013; Wilson 2004). Needless to say, my debt to Jeffrey Alexander, Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Umberto Eco and Yuri Lotman has been carried over from my previous work to this book as well. As readers more familiar with Asian thought will no doubt immediately notice, this inquiry also bears traces with my long-time involvement with various streams of it, and particularly the thought of the thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist philosopher Dōgen, to the engagement with whom I owe many of my central insights. Nonetheless, for fear of diminishing the intelligibility of the text for the Western reader, I have kept the discussion of non-Western thought traditions to the absolute minimum.

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1 ONTOLOGY: SOME OF THE STORY SO FAR

The main aim of this opening chapter is to establish a working relationship with those sets of terms and views that have been most influential for the discussions of selfhood. I will start with an investigation of the fundamental and close-to-consensual assumptions that the majority of philosophers of mind share with one another, and proceed from there to other ontological discourses. Process philosophies, with which I will side, are treated rather cursorily in this chapter, however, because they will be the topic of the next one. In general, this chapter is not dealing with the ideas of particular thinkers and schools, but mainly points of view shared between them, with one exception: the ‘object-oriented ontology’ of the group of speculative realists receives more attention here, because it has raised a similar objective of providing a non-anthropocentric framework on which further theoretical speculations might rely. I will, however, try to show that the ontological premises of the theory place serious limitations onto what it can accomplish in this respect. The argument will proceed from a look at how ‘objects’ have been traditionally understood and some problems this metaphysical discourse entails, namely difficulties in dealing with change and vagueness without resorting to essentialism. I will propose a double view of existential continuity in time, proposing that it may rely either on the substance (matter) of which the entity consists, or the pattern of how this substance is arranged. After a brief look at alternative views I will turn to a new and influential formulation of the primacy of objects, proposed by the school of speculative realists, who are my main opponents in this chapter, in spite of our sharing a common goal, that of displacing the centrality of the human viewpoint in metaphysical discourse – a goal which, I argue, they fail 12

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ontology: some of the story so far to attain precisely because of their strong attachment to ontologically self-same objects. The last sections of the chapter discuss varieties of perspectivism and gaze, mainly relying on insights borrowed from feminist philosophy, as well as the theory of assemblages formulated by Manuel DeLanda. My own position here is that of methodological perspectivism, which takes note of the fact that all entities appear as they are only to particularly cognitive architectures, and refuses to universalize the human viewpoint as the true measure of things – but this move is precisely what the belief in objects entails.

Objects and properties A large part of twentieth- and twenty-first-century continental philosophy has been a critique of traditional ontology, even though attempts to defend it continue to be occasionally undertaken as well. In the analytical tradition, however, the ontological debate has mostly concerned details, while the foundational principles are mostly accepted as common sense. It is normally accepted that the world consists of objects, which have properties, or characteristics in the broad sense of the word. Objects can relate to each other and participate in events and processes. An object, naively defined, is something that has an existence independently of our perceptions of it, is self-identical and continuous in time; in other words, it can be claimed to be the same even if it occurs in different contexts at different moments. Objects are captured in concepts, which relate to the words we use about them as types to tokens. Although there has been, predictably, quite a bit of debate about the ontological status of objects, in the ‘wide sense ‘object’ approximates to ‘thing’, though usually, when the ‘independent existence’ meaning is dominant, objects are limited to particulars’ as opposed to universals (Lacey 1996: 234). A classic formulation of these latter principles has been given by Bertrand Russell: We have thus a division of all entities into two classes: (1) particulars, which enter into complexes only as the subjects of predicates or the terms of relations, and, if they belong to the world of which we have experience, exist in time, and cannot occupy more than one place at one time in the space to which they belong; (2) universals, which can occur as predicates or relations in complexes, do not exist in time, and have no relation to one place which they may not simultaneously have

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ontology: some of the story so far to another. The ground for regarding such a division as unavoidable is the self-evident fact that certain spatial relations imply diversity of their terms, together with the self-evident fact that it is logically possible for entities having, such spatial relations to be wholly indistinguishable as to predicates. (1911: 23–4)

But universals, too, come in many guises – for example, metaphysicians often make a distinction between properties and kinds. As one of them puts it: Kinds are things like the various biological species and genera. Whereas objects exemplify properties by possessing them, things exemplify kinds by belonging to them. Philosophers who draw this distinction frequently tell us that while kinds constitute the particulars that exemplify them as what they are, properties merely modify or characterize particulars antecedently so marked out; and they often claim that kinds are individuative universals. What is meant is that kinds constitute their members as individuals distinct from other individuals of the same kind as well as from individuals of other kinds. (Loux 2001: 20)

What the theory tacitly assumes most of the time is that this description corresponds to the way in which the world is structured, independently from our minds and from the way our minds see it – in other words, that the way in which things are distributed among kinds from our point of view is the only relevant way for this to happen, and is therefore also valid for any other putative point of view. This is one assumption that will be rejected throughout this inquiry. However, the scheme just described entails several other important and well-known difficulties. In particular, the view of change entailed by this position presumes some metaphysical commitments we might not necessarily be ready to make. The classic formulation of change comes from Aristotle (Physics I 7), who argues that a thing can remain itself and change, because some of its properties are essential (such that it must absolutely have them), while others are ‘accidental’ or contingent.1 But essentialism, were we to endorse and develop it, raises more questions than it solves. First of all, there is the matter of vagueness. An essentialist needs to be able to say how many trees form a forest, as simply ‘many’ is too ambiguous a property to qualify as essential 1 In

Aristotle’s own words, ‘there must always be an underlying something, namely the thing that becomes, and though this thing is one in number, it is not one whole structurally’ (Physics I, 7, 190a13).

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ontology: some of the story so far to define ‘forest’. An essentialist also needs to be able to say at which exact moment a tadpole becomes a frog, or an acorn an oak, because a ‘tadpole’ and a ‘frog’ are defined by different sets of essential properties, as are ‘acorn’ and ‘oak’. This is notoriously impossible and constitutes the problem of vagueness (see Keefe and Smith 1997). Moreover, an essentialist needs to counter examples that show how an object changes even while remaining ‘itself’, so to say. A carrot can be grated and boiled, as a result of which it has changed its shape, colour and taste, and to some extent also its chemical composition, so that presumably the only remaining property that it without doubt has in common with its initial form is its Platonic ‘carrotness’, whatever that means – and that is not accessible to perception. We can add a second floor and a terrace to our house while demolishing parts of the previous structure in the process, and it still remains our house. Similarly, there is the famous paradox of the ships of Theseus. In a tale, they were replaced detail by detail until nothing from the initial ships remained and it became no longer possible to say that these were the ships that had sailed to Crete. But at which point did that happen? The cells of a living organism are constantly replaced by new ones – and yet we do not question whether we are dealing with the same individual. How can it be said that there is a difference? Andrew Abbott’s ingenious suggestion that the nature of a thing is that which changes most slowly (2016: 25) may provide a good framing for the concept in conventional discourse, but ultimately this view, too, entails a rejection of essentialism as an accurate view of reality. Essentialism thus has a reifying effect on our view of things, imposing strict borders and clear-cut categories on phenomena that should more appropriately be seen as a flux. As objects are, on this view, entirely ‘out there’, essentialism naturalizes the distinction between contingent and essential properties of things, joining the latter in bundles that allegedly form mind-independent structures of reality. However, in addition to the ones listed above, there are many more reasons for rejecting the division of the characteristics of a thing into essential and contingent properties. For example, some properties of a thing can appear essential from one particular perspective and not from another. Food gone bad may look quite appetizing to a fly. On the other hand, a property considered accidental might, at a certain moment, acquire a decisive role in changing the existential trajectory of that thing. A minor technical issue in the engine of an airplane can cause a major accident. Of course, there are different 15

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ontology: some of the story so far metaphysical strategies available for clarifying these issues, but they would not be needed at all if we abandoned essentialism altogether.

Two kinds of essentialism If we don’t want to do that just yet, we might as well distinguish between two kinds of essentialism, as one can, in theory, be endorsed without the other. A particularist essentialism is the view that the properties of a singular object can be divided into essential, or constitutive, properties on the one hand, and contingent, or transient, properties on the other. All of these properties need to be present if we are to claim that something corresponds to its individualizing label. It may share some of these properties with other objects, but an individual object has a unique list of constitutive properties that does not completely overlap with any other object. This list is maintained by the object through any changes. As opposed to this view, reductive or sortal essentialism is not concerned with the unique individuality of anything, but only considers properties shared between the members of a set, or class, as defining them. Reductive essentialism is what makes it possible for us to use terms such as ‘house’, ‘dog’, or ‘book’ for a large variety of objects – the ‘prototypes’ of Eleanor Rosch (1978) – that share only a certain number of properties with one another. However, let me state this clearly: realism does not entail essentialism. I completely disagree with DeLanda’s assertion that ‘not believing in objects with an enduring identity … is unacceptable to a realist’ (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 75). On the contrary: such an assertion of the fundamental correctness of the view how reality appears to our very particular perspective – endowing Husserl’s intentional objects with an intrinsic, natural permanence of their own, if you wish – is going even beyond idealism. In no way does the admittance of a mind-independent reality imply that our descriptions of it can ever be gaze-independent.2 Therefore, a view of reality, which is not already intrinsically structured into objects, properties, and relations as we encounter it, is completely compatible with realism in the primary sense of the word. I can fully believe in the existence of a mind-independent reality – that is, agree with the science fiction 2

These terms, as used here, are not synonymous. ‘Mind-independence’ is an ontological characteristic pertaining to, or claimed of, the way reality is, while ‘gaze-independence’ is an epistemological notion referring to, or claimed of, certain representations of that reality.

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ontology: some of the story so far author Philip K. Dick, who has said in a widely quoted 1978 speech that ‘reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away’ – without deriving any further claims for the existence of any particular thing from this belief. As a consequence, I think it is wrong to impose on this world any kind of logical structure, division into objects, qualities and events, in which the essential properties of objects persist and contingent ones may change. Moreover, the acknowledgement that logical structures are products of the mindobserving reality and not intrinsic to reality itself credits this reality with more, not less, independence from the mind. Conversely, the ascription of a logical structure to reality itself is closer to the medieval scholastic ‘realism’, which held that ideas (universals) were just as real as the material world was – and this view is more properly called ‘idealism’ in the present terms. We should therefore handle the term ‘realism’ with care: when used in an anti-essentialist sense, by Karen Barad, for example (2007: 55–6), it means something quite different than when used in the vocabulary of Graham Harman, a self-confessed essentialist (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 12–13). One argument sometimes put in favour of natural, mindindependent structures is the notion of ‘species’, groups of living beings able to procreate with one another, but not with members of other such groups. It is true, of course, that elephants do not produce offspring with mice. However, offspring is possible between animals of different species that lie next to each other on the taxonomic gradient – horses and donkeys, for example, are perfectly capable of having foals called mules and hinnies. Borders between species are not therefore strict by definition. Moreover, the entire idea of evolution works on the assumption that the ‘essential’ characteristics of certain species can be replaced, like the elements of the ships of Theseus, so that new species emerge while some of the older ones go under. ‘Dogs’ – all different breeds of them – have been produced out of ‘wolves’ by (mostly artificial) selection. It is therefore clearly more adequate to view the whole spectrum of animals not as divided into strictly distinguished ‘species’, but instead as a range of beings that have a family resemblance in the Wittgensteinian sense of the term. Each member of a ‘species’ shares more properties with those closest to it, but less with the animals on the other end of the spectrum. Those animals may, in fact, already be just as close, if not closer, to a representative of another neighbouring ‘species’ than the specimens at the opposite end of the range in its own group. To recapitulate: the reason why I am opposed to essentialism is that any essentialist discourse necessarily postulates things about 17

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ontology: some of the story so far reality that diminish the explanatory power of this discourse, instead of increasing it. Such discourses cannot handle vagueness or spontaneous transformations. Moreover, in social contexts the idea of essentialism quickly leads to undesirable results. Essentialism is, of course, not the only or even the main cause of social injustice, but it is nonetheless a necessary component of all the narratives legitimizing discrimination, inequality, or social phobias. All in all, the traditional ontological position presents us with problems that are impossible to solve in a satisfactory manner without metaphysical commitments (such as the real existence of universals, or ideal properties, a necessary distinction between the essential and contingent properties of any object that changes, and the ‘naturalization’ of structures of reality that we produce in our minds), which have to be made either separately or together in order to develop that position into a coherent worldview. But even these commitments are not sufficient for resolving certain issues and contradictions with our experience.

Identity and continuity Let us now return to the tentative definition of what an ‘object’ is – an entity that exists independently of our minds, is self-identical and continuous in time. Strictly speaking, the two conditions of identity and continuity, taken jointly, already smuggle the essentialist claim in through the back door, as existence is not possible in time without some change, that is, the loss of some properties and the acquisition of others. But let us consider them separately for a moment, taking ‘self-identity’ to have the meaning implied by the law of Leibniz – ‘no two substances are entirely alike, and differ only in number’ (1998: 60); in other words, only if two objects have exactly the same properties can it be said that they are the same object. Quite clearly identity is not posited in terms of essential and contingent properties here – the entire list of properties of something that is identical with something must coincide completely. This should include their age, to the nanosecond, as well as their physical location, as both of these can be legitimate predicates of any object that exists in a timespace (as Russell’s formulation would have it). But even if the location stays the same, nothing is ever identical to itself through time.3 I am 3

Elsewhere, I have used the term ‘ity’ to designate the exhaustive list of properties of a given entity at a given moment, ‘an idiosyncratic quality that a thing has that makes it

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ontology: some of the story so far not identical to the myself of yesterday, nor even to the myself that started to write this sentence. What we need to add to the definition of the object is thus the temporal clause: it has to be self-identical at any given moment. Does this actually tell us something important? Yes, it does. Two clones, which share their DNA, should be considered the same thing from an essentialist position, at least if we accept that the information encoded in the DNA is a passable candidate for what an essence of an organism could be. But this is obviously counterintuitive. The law of Leibniz posits that the claim of self-identity implies that each object necessarily has to be unique. There has to be at least something that separates it from any other thing. Leibniz famously argued, during an evening walk with princess Sophia and some others in the Herrenhausen Palace Park in Hanover, that there are no two leaves of a tree that are exactly alike, sending a courtier of the contrary opinion to look for two identical leaves, which he never managed to find. Self-identity understood as unrepeatability or uniqueness is a necessary characteristic of an object and is maintained regardless of the changes it undergoes. It is therefore separate from the other side of the definition, the continuity through time. But when we say that identity can only be claimed of an object at any one given moment, not several separate ones, we simultaneously concede that continuity in time is not dependent on self-identity, or the entire list of properties the object has. On the other hand, we need to describe it without resorting again to the ‘essence’ of what continues. One way around this issue has been suggested by a number of philosophers, who oppose the endurance of a single object through time to its perdurance, or four-dimensional self-identity. Richard Taylor, for instance, has proposed the idea of ‘temporal parts’ of things in analogy to spatial ones. Just as a street might be broad at one end and narrow at another, so an apple may be green at one moment and red at another. One part of the street is broad, another narrow; one part of the apple is green, another red (1963: 69–71). Elaborating on this idea, Judith Jarvis Thomson has proposed (and then rejected) the notion of a ‘superobject’, a ‘thing’ as a process in its entire existence-span, with its whole trajectory of movements and what it is, as a certain “reinraudity” is what makes me, and no one else, Rein Raud at any given moment. As I am not totally identical to myself at every given moment, this “reinraudity” is obviously not an immutable essence. On the other hand, it does also not consist of a limited set of ‘essential’ properties that I have, but necessarily refers to the sum total of all the characteristics that pertain to me, however fleeting’ (2015: 3).

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ontology: some of the story so far the changes it goes through (1965: 4–5). All the changes that happen to it (in our view) would be an integral part of it. This insight has been developed into a full-fledged theoretical standpoint by Mark Johnston, who has coined the terms ‘endurance’, which means the presence of a self-identical object at different moments of time and ‘perdurance’, which equates the full identity of an object with its entire existence span and claims only certain temporal parts of it can be present at any single moment of its existence (1983: 58ff.). Johnston’s ideas have been given wider currency by David Lewis (1986: 202ff.) and have inspired a lot of discussion (see, e.g., Gallois 2016; Hawley 2002; Sider 2003). In this debate, the endurance theorists often appear as the moderate or even conservative defenders of common sense, while the perdurance theorists seem to be its radical challengers, but it seems to me that there is nothing really radical about this attempt to rescue ‘objects’ as the building blocks of an objectively structured real world. After all, the idea of perdurance can perhaps even be traced back to Hegel’s ‘concept’ of a particular thing, which encompasses all of its becomings. Moreover, while perdurance theories can be argued to have a certain advantage over endurance theories in accounting for change, they create other problems that are not solved so easily. For example, let us take responsibility. We normally attribute responsibility to the whole of an agent rather than a part, so we cannot say that the hand is guilty of striking, but the feet are innocent. We also quite correctly consider a person responsible for acts they have committed in a past stage. However, if we take these two presuppositions together, the perdurance view of the whole would imply that a person is guilty of certain crimes even before committing them, because it does not make logical sense that certain temporal parts are innocent and others are not (even though, unlike the spatial parts, the temporal ones indeed do not have to suffer punishment for things they did not commit). Therefore, although perdurance theories offer a way to save the idea of self-identity of objects through time, they also set quite severe limits to what we can say about them, which, in turn, diminishes the explanatory power of any discourse (about social reality, for example) that relies on these theories.

Substance vs. pattern continuity At this point I would like to introduce two possible approaches to the idea of continuity of physical objects. Let us call the first of these 20

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ontology: some of the story so far substance continuity. This is what we have when the material constituents of an object are not suddenly replaced with other matter.4 However, the composition of the material thing does not have to stay identical through time. Some new substance can be added and bits of old substance got rid of. In the case of living beings, at least, it is happening constantly through breathing and metabolism. The new substance, moreover, is absorbed by the thing, accommodated or ‘naturalized’ in the sense that someone can become a citizen of another country. It is in this way that, for example, tooth implants or artificial limbs gradually become functional parts of the organism so that it is no longer conscious of their external provenance. Substance can also undergo different changes due to physical events involving it. In this way, a tadpole can have substance continuity with the frog, an acorn with an oak and a raw carrot with a grated and boiled one. However, there is also another kind of continuity. One of the most important shrines in Japan, the Ise shrine dedicated to the Sun goddess, is reportedly more than 1,300 years old, by some records its age might even reach 2,000 years. And yet, any visitor to the shrine is struck by its fresh outlook. This is because every twenty years – at least according to the rules – the shrine is torn down and rebuilt from new material in exactly the same way (Coaldrake 1996: 37ff.). You might want to object that this is not the same building. But if you look at the list of its properties more closely, you have to acknowledge that the overlap between the properties of the Ise shrine of 2019 and, say, 696, is much bigger than the overlap between the Hōryūji temple in nearby Nara, reportedly the oldest surviving wooden architectural structure in the world, and any past version of itself. The colour, the smell, the chemical composition of the Ise shrine are more or less the same, while in Hōryūji all of this has changed considerably, leaving nothing but substance continuity to vouch for its self-sameness. 4

The concept of ‘substance’ is here used uncritically and in the colloquial sense, although the independent reality of such substances has been questioned already in pre-quantum physics: ‘The reason the desk feels solid, or the cat’s coat feels soft, or we can (even) hold coffee cups and one another’s hands, is an effect of electromagnetic repulsion. All we really ever feel is the electromagnetic force, not the other whose touch we seek. Atoms are mostly empty space, and electrons, which lie at the farthest reaches of an atom, hinting at its perimeter, cannot bear direct contact’ (Barad 2014: 156). As will be seen below, I therefore hold that the concept of substance describes nothing but an appearance of what a relatively stable pattern has produced for our gaze. Thus, in principle, all continuity is pattern continuity on (roughly) two levels, one of which is observable and the other non-observable from the human vantage point. Nonetheless it seems prudent to retain the substance–pattern distinction for purposes of clarity, so that ‘substance’ will refer to relatively stable patterns of organization of constituent elements on levels where any change consistently remains below the threshold of our perception.

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ontology: some of the story so far Let us call the way in which the Ise shrine is continuous through time pattern continuity – the persistence of the way in which the component parts of an object relate to each other even if those parts are being replaced by structurally and functionally similar ones. I use the word ‘pattern’ here as more or less synonymous with ‘emergent organization’ in the sense the Cambridge social ontologists have given to the word (Elder-Vass 2010: 20ff.; Lawson 2019: 38). We may disagree on whether pattern continuity is indeed sufficient to provide an object with sameness – even if the Japanese think it does – but we should nonetheless see how this helps us describe some of the situations presented in the previous sections. The ships of Theseus, for example, have pattern continuity, but gradually lose their substance continuity. We can say that while their parts were replaced in the docks of the harbour at Athens, they became ships that had never sailed to Crete. But imagine such ships during a long journey, with some bits and pieces substituted after each rough storm in a new harbour, indeed so that, in theory, they might return to their port of departure with each of their constituents replaced. Are they the same ships or not? Did these ships visit all the harbours they docked in during their journey? Or should we say that the mast went to Naxos, for example, but the steering wheel did not? How could a mast visit an island without being a part of a ship, of which a particular steering wheel is currently a necessary part? It makes much more sense to say that the ships have remained the same throughout, on the basis of their pattern continuity. This is the idea behind the view that elderly war criminals can be prosecuted for their crimes even after their cells have been replaced with new ones many times over. Importantly, this also implies that the pattern of how things are organized is just as much a component of these things as their ‘substance’. The pattern is not an ‘idea’ residing on a higher plane of reality or a ‘description’ available in language. Pattern continuity can accommodate a degree of change just as substance continuity can. We could call such change ‘modification’, using ‘mode’ here in the Spinozan sense of modus (Ethics IV, A7, IVC), or the way of being of any entity vis-à-vis its substance, or material base. Modifications, in this sense, are adjustments of pattern that do not affect its continuity, but, on the contrary, guarantee it by constantly adapting the entity to the changes taking place on its outside. Slightly running ahead of things, we might say that ‘modification’ can also be understood in its literal sense of ‘producing the mode’, constantly reinventing the pattern that ensures the nonmaterial continuity of the thing, but without disrupting the pattern itself. 22

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ontology: some of the story so far However, when something is suddenly deprived of its pattern continuity, although its substance continuity remains, we often say it has changed into something else. A car completely smashed in a crash is no longer a car, but a wreck, even though the matter of which the wreck is composed is the same as what the car was built of. In other cases, as with the carrot, such substance continuity is nonetheless considered to be sufficient to guarantee a degree of sameness, because we do not normally start to use a different word for it.5 And in others, as in a living organism, it is the pattern continuity that matters. We could even say that the ‘relation R’, or having continuous views and memories of oneself, which is, in the view of Derek Parfit, the only criterion of the sameness of a person (1987: 215), is basically the same notion that I have here called ‘pattern continuity’, as in both cases it is not the persistence of the physical substratum that matters, but the information it carries within it. In the vast majority of cases, however, we expect an object to have both substance and pattern continuity. For social institutions, such as universities or governments, which are neither entirely substance (buildings) nor patterns (ways in which people are organized in them and what they do), substance and pattern continuity can even be observed or broken separately from each other – the same people may move to a different place and continue to do what they did, according to the same rules, or the rules may become different while the goals stay the same, or the people may be replaced while the place and activity patterns remain intact. A final point: in both cases of continuity, we have admitted the possibility of certain minor changes, as in adding new substance to what was, or adjusting the pattern ever so slightly to changes in the environment, while the continuity itself is not disrupted by that change – otherwise the concept would not be very helpful. Let us call the relationship between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of such cases significant overlap, and pose this, rather than identity of sameness, as the criterion of whether continuity has been preserved. This view is nonetheless also not without problems. Consider a situation where you have just ordered a jug of tap water in a restaurant. What is brought to you turns out not to be 100 per cent water, but contains a few slices of lemon floating in it, so it might be correct to say that it is 99 per cent tap water and 1 per cent lemon juice. Most people accept this as normal, as they perceive there is 5

Cultures may differ in this respect: for example, in Japanese, different words, kome and gohan, are used for rice that is unboiled and boiled, respectively.

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ontology: some of the story so far a significant overlap between the two liquids, and the change in its consistence is minor, even if it alters the taste. However, if the 1 per cent were not lemon juice, but a powerful neurotoxin, the significant overlap would no longer be there, as one of the liquids would be deadly. The significant overlap must therefore be not between the quantities of substance, nor even between its observable properties (lemon-juice infused water, as said, tastes quite different from simple tap water, while the neurotoxin might be tasteless), but in their capacities to cause further change that is more significant than the overlap. Such change, moreover, is tied to perspective. If the jug contains 99 per cent water and 1 per cent highly concentrated peanut extract, for example, the beverage would only have a harmful effect on people with severe nut allergy, while others would gladly concede that there is a significant overlap between simple water and ‘nut water’. A similar case can be quite easily argued for patterns. It is therefore important to add a caveat to the continuity concept so that two states of a thing or situation can be considered continuous only if there is significant overlap between them that is relevant from the perspective of the observer. Continuity, therefore, cannot be considered a gaze-independent property of things, but is contingent on the vantage point from which it is stated. To recapitulate: we can extend the naive definition of an object and develop it into two versions: in the strict sense, an object is something identical only to itself at any given moment, opening up to its past and its future with both substance and pattern continuity; in the weak sense, an object is self-identical in the same way, and needs to have at least one kind of continuity through time. That it needs to exist regardless of our perceptions goes without saying.

Process philosophies However, some cases remain of objects that we consider to be self-same, but which nonetheless fail to satisfy even the weak definition of an object just proposed. For example, if we decide to rebuild our (currently one-storey) house and demolish one part of the ground floor, add another floor as well as a terrace, so that the new structure will retain, let us say, 20 per cent of its original substance and even less of its pattern, it would be seriously straining things to say that either kind of continuity has been maintained. And yet we say that we have rebuilt our old house, not that we have erected a new one (which even so would still be ‘our house’, i.e. have the same 24

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ontology: some of the story so far relation of property to us). This means there is a limit to the explanatory power of an object-centred ontology that wishes to describe change without resorting to essentialism. The same applies to philosophical discussions of vagueness and indeterminacy. Analytical philosophers engage in mind-twisting intellectual games, discussing, for example, whether the object ‘Kilimanjaro’ is vague or not when it is indeterminate whether an electron affectionately called ‘Sparky’ is a part of it or not (Barnes and Williams 2009; Weatherson 2003), all the while not even considering the possibility that both ‘Kilimanjaro’ and ‘Sparky’, as we know them, are only extracted from processual contexts and turned into abstract generalizations by a set of analytical tools at the disposal of someone looking at them from a very particular perspective (in this case, a philosophical laboratory). The problem of vagueness is largely self-inflicted, by prioritizing certain ways of how things are (stable) over others (in transition). The question, however, is not whether objects are somehow fundamentally vague or not, but whether it is legitimate to presuppose the existence of these objects as self-identical continuous identities in the first place. Note that this is not at all necessary for thinking of entities as causal agents or (interim) results of processes, or as objects (in the grammatical sense!) of perception. For all these reasons, I’d like to turn now to a few alternative ontologies that do not posit the self-identical, independently existing continuous object as their starting point. There are three main varieties of such approach, the process-centred, the multiplicitycentred and the one based on mutual conditioning, and it is important to note that they do not rely on each other – i.e., they can all occur both separately and in conjunction with other(s). A process philosophy is any view of things ‘based on the premise that being is dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive philosophical account of reality and our place within it’ (Seibt 2018). Stasis, on this view, is not the absence of movement, but movement at zero speed. In Western thought, the view originates with Heraclitus, was developed by Leibniz and Hegel, came to be formulated as a systematic critique of substance metaphysics by Bergson, James and Whitehead, and is, more recently, especially in response to recent developments in physics, gaining more and more proponents (Braidotti 2006a, 2006b; Rescher 1996, 2000). In Asia, process philosophy has always had the upper hand in Buddhist-inspired metaphysics as well as nearly all varieties of Chinese and Japanese thought. For most varieties of process philosophy, the point of departure is 25

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ontology: some of the story so far the fairly self-evident observation that objects never exist without a context, without being entangled in relationships with other objects, purely on their own. But if that is so, then speaking about objects without context is an abstraction, a sort of laboratory experiment during which it is possible to extract, from nature, an unstable chemical element that normally needs to connect to some other elements in order to occur in a more stable form – just that an object can never be really extracted from its natural embeddedness, except in a mind-game. Under the circumstances, it is empirically justified to consider the workings of reality as a process to be primary, and its constituents, available as they are to us in a context-free form only as products of our mind, to be secondary. Note that this move does not necessarily do away with objects at all, only qualifies their ontological status. At the same time, it takes a step towards redefining ‘the real’: we cannot require of anything that, in order to be real, it needs to exist separately from everything else, as this simply is not happening. Mere conceptual abstractions do not participate in the reality process in any way. If we speak of a surplus that any particular existent needs to have in addition to its contextual entanglements, this surplus needs to be defined more strictly than simply postulated as its being-itself, objecticity, nessity-hood or haecceity. Until this has been done in a rigorous and satisfactory manner, there is no need to assume that an ‘object’ has an existence apart from or in addition to its involvement with reality seen as a process, a flux.

Multiplicities and networks A different line of approach is applied by multiplicity-centred ontologies, which also have an impressive pedigree from the atomists of the ancient world down to the set theory-based ontology of Alain Badiou. A number of ancient philosophers, such as Leucippus and Democritus, assumed that all existents can be broken down to indivisible components, or atoms, either alike or different, which alone can be credited with independent existence, while what appear to be ‘objects’ are simply combinations of these components. Indeed, the quest for an underlying unity, be it embodied by water or air or derived from the ‘boundless’, is what started philosophical speculation in Greece in the first place. The view, met in many cultures around the world, that all things are just mixtures of a few primordial elements, is a variation of this belief. Natural science 26

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ontology: some of the story so far supported an atomistic ontology until subatomic physical research became possible, but has now rejected the view that, on the most fundamental level, ‘things’ are composed of infinitesimally small ‘things’ that nonetheless behave just as the things available to us also do. Therefore, the multiplicity-centred ontologies of the present (like, for example, that of Badiou) do not postulate a ground level of solid existence at all, but assume that each component of a multiplicity can itself be described as a multiplicity. The consequences for particular existents remain the same, however. If we think of an ‘object’ as more than just the organized totality of its components, the ‘excess’ still needs to be defined rigorously and satisfactorily, and until that is done we need not assume there is any. Again – this does not mean that the objects, as they appear to us, are not ‘real’, only that their reality is not relying on their own being, some enduring immaterial aspect that each thing necessarily has by itself. The third line of critique of separate, self-sufficient objects is that of mutual conditioning. This view is somewhat younger than the other two and was first systematically developed by Fichte and Hegel as the metaphysics of entities dependent for their being on other entities. A strongly articulated ethical dimension has been added to this view in the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber, while a conjunction with East Asian thought traditions has been highlighted in the version of this view formulated by the Japanese philosophers of the Kyoto school. It can often be met together with a version of process philosophy, but the two do not necessarily presuppose each other. It is true that most accounts of mutual conditioning deal with selfhood in the first place, but there are versions of it, such as the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour, John Law and their followers, which do not privilege humans over beings who have traditionally not been regarded as conscious agents. An important subvariant of the mutual conditioning ontology is the idea that things, at least as they are available to us, are conditioned, in part or in full, by our mental processes involving them. This should not be taken as a single theory, because its proponents range from full-blown subjective idealism to those who only assert that we can never experience reality independently of our own being, which means that any mindindependent reality can only exist as a Kantian thing-in-itself.6 In 6

On this view, experience is a relation, or an enactment of one; numerous philosophers, starting with ancient Indians right up to Whitehead or Deleuze and Guattari, have expressed the idea in their particular idioms, showing how the ‘I’ that experiences comes into being together with the things (or, more precisely, the situation that these things

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ontology: some of the story so far the latter case, what is mutually conditioned is only the phenomenal world that emerges in the interaction of reality and our minds, while truth claims about the noumenal world simply cannot be made. I will return to some of these views in later sections. At this point it should suffice to say that endorsing the mind-conditioned nature of things as they are accessible to us does not necessarily lead to the belief of George Berkeley that esse est percipi, ‘to be is to be perceived’, and a weak version of the view that objects appear to us only in a gaze-dependent form is not really in contradiction even with an object-oriented ontology. It is therefore reasonable to set the debate on the relationship of the mind and the world aside for the time being. While multiplicity-centred ontological accounts reduce things to their constituents and process philosophies to the events they participate in, accounts based on mutual conditioning only see any particular as dependent on the interaction with other things it is not. For Fichte, the idea of a self is brought into being as a reaction to other selves; for Hegel, the master–slave dialectic similarly characterizes the emergence of self-consciousness through encounters, and struggles, with others. This view has been developed into the critique of self-same objects by showing how existents go on conditioning and determining one another on all levels, so that it becomes more productive to see the primary existent not as a self-same object, but as a ‘hybrid’, as Latour famously does (1993). A hybrid is something defined not by its own temporal continuity and identity with itself, but precisely by a multitude of heterogeneous entities coming together to form it for a limited period of time. Moreover, a hybrid cannot be reduced to a systematic array of components, as these components themselves follow different rule-sets and belong to different orders of being. On this view, self-same objects, egocentric particulars standing apart from networks and not embedded in their activities, are necessarily abstractions, because embeddedness is one of the necessary features of their existence. If an ‘object’ is more than its embeddedness, the residue that can exist independently of others

make up) that it experiences in its unique and particular way at that very moment. When Steven Shaviro writes of Deleuze and Guattari that they are ‘rigorously Kantian when they assert that desire produces the real’, but ‘closer to Whitehead than to Kant, however, in that they place the subject not at the beginning of the productive process of desire, but at the end’ (2009: 8), what he actually rephrases is not a Kantian-WhiteheadianDeleuzian view, but the second ‘noble truth’ of Buddhism. What the rephrasing shows, however, is that there is nothing mystical or irrational about this.

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ontology: some of the story so far and bears no trace of their influence again needs to be described in a rigorous and satisfactory manner. What these three approaches have in common is the privilege they grant to relations over the participants of those relations. An ‘object’ in the traditional understanding of the word relies, from this point of view, either on an abstraction extracted from its involvement in the processes in which it inevitably participates in the world, or on an excess postulated over the arrangements of its constituents, or a residue not exhausted by the relationships of mutual conditioning that have determined it in its manifest form. All these three, it is claimed, are mental facts without self-same continuous referents in mind-independent reality.

Back to objects? The ways of thought briefly summarized in the previous section have recently come under attack by a school of thought called ‘object-oriented ontology’ that includes such prominent thinkers as Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Levi Bryant, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux, and several others. Drawing on the work of Heidegger, and engaging in dialogue with more recent authors such as Latour, this school of thought proclaims a return to a view of reality that once again establishes a world of ‘objects’ as the point of departure, rejecting the constitutive roles of process, multiplicity and/or mutual conditioning in its formation. The speculative realist view of ‘objects’, however, is far from simplistic or even the commonsensical, as one of the main points argued by this school is that the human mind should be treated as any other object and mindreality relationships are not privileged – on the contrary, according to this school, all objects should be credited with a primordially similar capacity to relate to other objects that the world-observing consciousness has. It does thus not endorse the strong definition of the object presented above, but a case might perhaps be made for the weak definition. I have an ambiguous relationship with this school. I wholeheartedly endorse some of the end results of speculative realist reasoning, in particular the implications of its views on ecological thinking, its programmatic de-anthropocentrizing of the reality we inhabit, as well as its readiness to grant the status of a perceiving entity to all things, human and nonhuman, conscious (in the traditional sense) and nonconscious, which is done in a way fully concordant with 29

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ontology: some of the story so far natural science. This, I think, is a lasting contribution, and something for which, alone, speculative realism deserves serious attention. However, there are serious problems in both the style and the theses of object-oriented ontology. For example, it is not uncommon for Graham Harman, one of the main proponents of this school, to dismiss his opponents by saying, offhand, that their position is ‘the diametrical opposite of truth’ (2011: 61–2), without giving us any arguments for why this is so. Simply not endorsing his discourse of objects seems to be a sufficient criterion. Indeed, his own reasoning often considers something that he states to be proven if it can be reduced to a list of axioms he presents (2016: 15–16). All that said, speculative realists have advanced several strong ontological theses that deserve careful scrutiny. The point of departure for this system is the notion of ‘object’, which is defined rather differently from how it is described in traditional metaphysics. For Harman, an object is ‘anything that has a unified reality that is autono­mous from its wider context and also from its own pieces’ (2011: 116); thus the category of objects includes not only distinct physical things such as diamonds and ropes, but also armies, monsters and square circles (2011: 5). Moreover, these objects have priority even over space and (physical) time, which are constituted by relations and the absence of relations between them (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 123). Events, too, are encompassed under the notion of ‘object’ (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 58), as are relations between two objects, because these, too, can withdraw from personal experience, as do marriages, partnerships and enlistings in the Foreign Legion (Harman 2011: 113). On the other hand, Harman’s metaphysics, though proudly essentialist, recognizes neither substance nor pattern continuity as a basis of sameness for its objects. Water, ice and steam are different objects for him, in spite of their identical chemical composition (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 66). As Harman himself concedes, the notion of ‘object’ is somewhat misleading, as it evokes, for many, primarily physical solids that have long duration, while for him, the term refers to ‘individuals, however transient, with an innate consistency’ and ‘a certain durability that is by no means permanent’ (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 57–8). As a case in point, Harman dedicates a large section of one of his books (2016) to the history of the Dutch East India Company as an ‘object’, precisely because Leibniz has stated that viewing this company as an object would be absurd (1998: 127). This does not disprove Leibniz, of course, because the term ‘object’ has a different meaning for him, and it seems to me that the sense most other philosophers assign to 30

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ontology: some of the story so far the term is closer to that of Leibniz than to that of Harman. Thus, if, for Harman, events are just fluid and impermanent objects and, for me, objects are solid and slow processes, we could even assume that our disagreement boils down to a matter of terminology and leave it at that. But it doesn’t. In fact, it would be more appropriate to call Harman’s system an essence- rather than object-oriented ontology, even though it does not sound so nice. The basic characteristic of Harman’s objects is not their continuity or even self-sustainability, but their unknowability. All ‘objects’ have something that is not available to perception, an inner individual nature that is withdrawn from our experience of them. This concept of ‘withdrawnness’ Harman takes from Heidegger’s analysis of tools (1926: 66ff.; 1996: 62ff.), which can be either ‘ready-to-hand’ or ‘withdrawn from consciousness’, which Harman posits as two basic modes of being – exposed to others and withdrawn from them (2011: 39). This ‘withdrawnness’ is the reason why Harman is opposed both to the reduction of objects to their constituent elements and to their equation with their network of actions and relationships (2016: 8–11). Objects necessarily have to pre-exist the actions in which they are engaged (2016: 114). This also means that Harman’s essentialism is particularist. It has even been suggested, to distinguish his view from reductive essentialism, that it is not essences that he is talking about, but haecceities, ‘thisnesses’,7 enduring bundles of qualities that make an object this particular object and not any other of its kind (Wolfendale 2014: 147). Each of Harman’s objects (including the same water in fluid and frozen form) has its own essence and is not reducible to a general, shared set of constitutive properties. Nor are his objects reducible to their constituent parts or to the sum total of their effects or the actions in which they participate. Harman calls the epistemic strategies that claim these reductions ‘undermining’ and ‘overmining’ respectively, and uses the term ‘duomining’ for explanatory discourses that combine them, such as Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. His main objection to these discourses is indeed not that they fail to explain reality, but that they do it without resorting to self-same objects (2009: 215). With a certain impulse in this stance, I agree – nothing can indeed be exhausted by any descriptive language, but this is a view that can 7 The

term was first used by followers of John Duns Scotus; it has been resurrected by Harold Garfinkel (1988) and given more currency by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987). Garfinkel replaced the word ‘quiddity’ with this term after ‘quiddity’ was used by Quine in a different sense.

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ontology: some of the story so far well be held separately from a belief in self-same objects. However, what Harman as an essentialist simultaneously claims is that most of the properties any object has are trivial and they need not be ontologically inscribed in its essence, and he also insists that this difference between significant and trivial properties is real and not one dependent on the human observer’s point of view. This is similar to structuralist treatment of a certain part of any communication as ‘message’ and other parts of it as ‘noise’, the task of the analyst being to identify the former and to discard the latter. But when structuralists started to apply this method to works of art, they were quickly undercut by poststructuralists asserting that it is not theirs to say whether, for example, an endorsement of sexist stereotypes in a novel can be dismissed as noise when it works painfully as a message for female readers. Nonetheless, Harman insists that on a more basic ontological level, a belief in real structures can be combined with the rejection of privileged viewpoints.

Critique of the critique of critique: excess and change In sum, what Harman opposes are ‘theories that reduce things to their impact on us or on each other, denying them any excess or surplus beyond such impact’ (2017: 49). On this view, it is not enough to acknowledge that whenever an entity is engaged in a relation with another entity, it is not all of this entity that is affected by it, so that nothing enters any particular relationship completely. The excess or surplus is posited above all possible relations that this entity may engage in – it is outside all its contextuality, and at the same time it is precisely what makes this entity what it is. I believe this idea of excess is an important one. What is not so clear, however, is the ontological status of this excess. For example, if we look at the colour green as an excess over a mixture of yellow and blue, this would not explain some of the characteristics of green, such as the capacity to reflect light at 490–560nm (Bohren and Clothiaux 2006: 213) or being the complementary colour of red. Neither of these characteristics of the green is in any way deducible from the properties of the yellow or the blue. If it pre-exists any real occurrence of the green colour in reality as a Platonic idea of ‘greenness’, we have returned to the initial problem of essentialism and cannot really do without a duality of worlds that Harman himself rejects in strong terms (2016: 32). But if it emerges in the world process, it can just as well be explained by process philosophy and mutual 32

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ontology: some of the story so far conditioning: ‘greenness’ does not exist as a timeless universal, but only appears as such to the human eye and is therefore encapsulated in the relationship between a light-reflecting surface and the retina, while this relationship itself becomes possible when the retina has attained, in the course of the evolution process, its present form. We can admit the reality of the excess without positing its self-sufficiency. In other words, the notion of excess does not entail object-oriented ontology; it is quite enough to accept the reality of emergent properties, that is, properties of a whole that are not reducible to the properties of its parts. This phenomenon of emergence has been noted and discussed by philosophers since John Stuart Mill, who pointed out that the phenomenon of life cannot be reduced to any of the properties of the (inorganic) parts that make up a living body (1974: 371). Similarly, one of the emergent properties of water is the ability to extinguish fire, while its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen, are both highly inflammable. The interaction of components produces a novel situation in which entities with previously nonexistent capacities evolve. However, emergence, understood in this way, is a conceptual move in the opposite direction from what Harman suggests. For Harman, any ‘object’ must itself pre-exist any relationship it engages in, and this implies that it must first exist in a ‘dormant’ phase (2016: 63–4). This conclusion follows from his axioms, and his example material is modified to fit the claim rather than vice versa. Such a requirement also explains why Harman insists that transformative changes ‘must of course be distinguished from the birth and death of objects’ (2016: 50) – if an ‘object’ has to be dormant before entering an embedded phase, and its emergence were also a transformative change, we would be able to say that the separate heterogeneous causal chains that bring about the birth of a new thing, taken together, constitute its pre-existence phase. For Harman’s ontology, this is inadmissible, while for a process philosophy this is a legitimate way of seeing things. In the vast majority of cases, however, a ‘dormant’ object is difficult to describe in the proposed terms: in addition to specifying at which particular point the process of the transformation of an acorn into an oak tree passes from acorn stage to oak stage, the theory now also has to specify how the oak tree is dormant before entering into the multitude of relationships with its environment that has made its emergence from the acorn possible in the first place.

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ontology: some of the story so far

Ontological priority, antigradualism and counterfactuals Timothy Morton has proposed another way out of this predicament by claiming that the irreducible excesses of ‘objects’ are ‘‘withdrawn’ prior to their relations – not temporally prior, but ontologically prior. O[bject]-O[riented]-O[ntology] is a form of weird realism, in which objects have an essence that is profoundly withdrawn’ (2012: 207). And yet, the qualification ‘ontologically, not temporally prior’ raises quite a few issues. The expression is taken from P. F. Strawson’s work, who writes (originally in 1959): ‘It seems to me also unobjectionable to use the expression, ‘ontologically prior’, in such a way that the claim that material bodies are basic particulars in our conceptual scheme is equivalent to the claim that material bodies are ontologically prior, in that scheme, to other types of particular’ (1990: 59). However, as is apparent from this definition, ‘ontological priority’ relies on ‘our conceptual scheme’ (which privileges material bodies) – in other words, a theory – which only exists in the consciousnesses of the people who are committed to it. Consequently, ‘ontological priority’ describes a view that thinking humans impose on the reality they are thinking about, and is therefore already a part of the relation between the observer and the observed. I am afraid most of the arguments in support of object-oriented ontology, like Morton’s, entail that the discourse of this ontology is already endorsed. For example, Harman’s claim of explanatory power, stating that ‘though a relational metaphysics can only handle relations and not objects, a non-relational metaphysics can handle both, since it is able to treat relations adequately as new compound objects’ (2016: 17) does not amount to much more than saying that ‘though theory X can handle consciousness, it has nothing to tell us about the immortal soul’ – but the burden to prove that there exists some kind of immortal soul in the first place should lie with the plaintiff. From my point of view, the postulation of both an immortal soul and of objects with withdrawn, but immutable essences makes it possible to formulate discourses that have a certain amount of explanatory power, but no more than their alternatives and certainly not enough to justify such strong claims. Concerning gradualist accounts of change, Harman dismisses them with the help of a widespread, but logically incorrect move favoured also by the critics of postmodern thought, who claim that if nothing we say is truth absolutely, then everything we say is (un)true equally (Ferraris 2014: 4ff.). In Harman’s view, any gradualist account of 34

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ontology: some of the story so far change analogously insists that ‘every moment is just as important as every other’ (2016: 45). As I have argued elsewhere (2019), the claim that any representations of reality are necessarily situated, made from certain perspectives and in the framework of certain descriptive languages, in no way implies that they are all equally incorrect. What is attributed to the critics of ‘truth’ here is indeed erroneous. They are depicted as saying that if statements are situated in contexts, (and therefore necessarily at variance with the putative Absolute Objective Truth), then they should all be considered equal – their not-absolutely-true character places all of them at an equal distance from this supposed Truth. But this is logically equivalent to the claim that since none of London’s airports is situated in Hyde Park, all of London’s airports are at an equal distance from it. Such a conclusion simply does not follow. Similarly, from the claim that people are equal before the law, it does not follow that they are also equal in all other respects. There is a gradient here, too. One account of historical events may be more precise than another, for example, but still mistaken. Similarly, some changes that occur on an individual’s trajectory may be more important than others, which does not make these others automatically trivial. Moreover, the life-altering role of an event may become relevant only much later than at the moment of its occurrence, and a similar experience may have a deeply transformative effect on one person and barely be noticed by another. It is precisely the beauty of gradualist accounts that things may be of unequal importance rather than either important or not, or that statements may have an unequal degree of proximity to reality (a.k.a. truthfulness) rather than just be true or not. Of course, some events may leave their participants seemingly unaffected. This does not mean that they can be ignored. A superficial skin wound, untreated, may, in interaction with other processes, develop into a much more serious condition. Moreover, the importance of an event often depends more on its broader context than on its immediate impact. When Vera Zasulich shot the governor of St. Petersburg, she was arrested, tried and found not guilty as charged; when Gavrilo Princip shot the archduke Franz Ferdinand, this launched a devastating world war that changed the fate of millions and ushered in the era of nation-states as opposed to traditional empires. But nobody could predict that with certainty at the very moment of the shot. In both cases, moreover, the event itself, or the pulling of the trigger of a gun by a radical, taken separately from its consequences, must ‘structurally’ have been fairly similar. We cannot therefore assess the importance or the triviality of a change-event without noting 35

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ontology: some of the story so far its place in a multiplicity of causal chains. Again, the importance or triviality of a change is not a Boolean value, but should be assessed on a gradient. Another of Harman’s arguments for the autonomy of objects consists in the claim that they are constituted, among other things, by counterfactuals: they could have remained the same even if the relationships in which they are entangled had been developing otherwise. Harman employs the Aristotelian example of the housebuilder (2017: 50): it is possible to be a housebuilder, but not to build a house at a given moment. That is, a defining property has stuck with the person from previous acts, and it is therefore irrelevant whether the person is engaged in the corresponding activity at a given moment. However, the argument of counterfactuals, too, can easily be turned around, once we do not exclude gradualist accounts of change. No one is a housebuilder at birth. If the event that turned a particular person into a housebuilder had not occurred, that person would be something else under the conditions of the discourse that presently labels them ‘housebuilder’. Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that the event was not just a simple moment in the biography of any housebuilder, but also changed them, as did the subsequent experience and honing of skills. For example, when housebuilders look at landscapes or particular kinds of rock, their gaze may surely have been influenced by their work. ‘A housebuilder’ never captures the entirety of a person, nor is every housebuilder a housebuilder in the same way, nor is it easy to pinpoint the moment when that property first became applicable to the person in a series of events, say, from the part-time job to earn some money to the first satisfaction of having done it well, further to the invitation to join someone’s team through to the first job of leading the construction of a new building. When we take counterfactuals seriously, any one of these moments might not have taken place, which would have stopped the causal chain.

Methodological perspectivism ‘The New Accelerator’, a short story by H. G. Wells (1901), tells us about a drug concocted by the eccentric professor Gibberne, which speeds up the perception of the world by anyone who has taken it, up to a thousand times or more. The narrator takes a drop of it, and as the chemical starts to take effect, the professor lets his glass drop out of his hand. Instead of falling to the floor, as the narrator expects 36

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ontology: some of the story so far it would, it stays in the air. But this is only natural, given that the perceptions of the characters of the story have been accelerated and they manage to have a discussion about what is taking place during the fraction of a second that the glass is suspended in mid-air. It seems to them that the universe is standing perfectly still: We went out by his gate into the road, and there we made a minute examination of the statuesque passing traffic. The tops of the wheels and some of the legs of the horses of this char-a-banc, the end of the whip-lash and the lower jaw of the conductor – who was just beginning to yawn – were perceptibly in motion, but all the rest of the lumbering conveyance seemed still. And quite noiseless except for a faint rattling that came from one man’s throat! And as parts of this frozen edifice there were a driver, you know, and a conductor, and eleven people! The effect as we walked about the thing began by being madly queer, and ended by being disagreeable. There they were, people like ourselves and yet not like ourselves, frozen in careless attitudes, caught in mid-gesture. (1901: 627)

The shared time of all these people stays the same in the story. What has been altered is the speed of being of the professor and his narrator friend, the amount of experience that fits into any unit of their time has increased a thousandfold. While they saw their fellow humans as frozen in mid-gesture, these people did not see them at all, as they were moving around at a speed that appeared natural for them, but would have seemed super-fast for anybody else, had they been aware of their presence in the first place. It has been noted long ago that such differences in perception are actually common across vantage points of different kinds of being. ‘The question arises as to whether there are animals whose perception time has shorter or longer moments than ours, and in whose environments the motion processes occur more quickly or more slowly than they do in ours’, Jakob von Uexküll asks, in his 1934 study, and responds in the affirmative. He then tells us about experiments showing how some kinds of fish see the world in ways that would resemble to us slow-motion film, while in a snail’s environment events take place more quickly than in ours (2010: 71ff.). That some things which seem rather small for us might be very big for an ant and even smaller for an elephant goes without saying. All of this indicates that different creatures live in different spatiotemporal frameworks. And each of these frameworks would consider a different outlook on the world to be ‘natural’. Similarly, DeLanda makes a strong argument in favour of an event- rather than object-oriented ontology: 37

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ontology: some of the story so far [O]rganisms are transitory coagulations in the flows of energy and matter coursing through ecosystems, and, more generally, I deal [with] … objects as temporary structures appearing and disappearing within this fluid reality … [O]ver a long enough time scale many things can be treated as events; at the level of geological time scales, in which a significant event such as the clash between two tectonic plates may take millions of years, an entire human life becomes a bleep on the radar screen – that is, an almost instantaneous event. (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 58–9)

Thus, while object-oriented ontology claims that one of its aims is to de-anthropocentrize our worldview, Jane Bennett points out that in fact such a theory is adjusted to the human framework by default: [T]he stones, tables, technologies, words, and edibles that confront us as fixed are mobile, internally heterogeneous materials whose rate of speed and pace of change are slow compared to the duration and velocity of the human bodies participating in and perceiving them. ‘Objects’ appear as such because their becoming proceeds at a speed or a level below the threshold of human discernment. (2010: 57–8)

‘This is because to live, humans need to interpret the world reductively as a series of fixed objects’, Bennett concludes. And this we can indeed do, as long as we remember the reduction is performed by our particular gaze. The thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist philosopher Dōgen often invokes the example that a body of water seems to be quite a different entity for a fish, a human being and someone observing it from the heights of heaven (1972: i, 338). When we compare a city (from our perspective) to an anthill (as seen from the perspective of the ant), we assume as much. What should not be forgotten here is that all these entities are in the world as ‘objects’ only in the way that it seems to us, but not to others. In a certain technical sense, a perspective boils down to a set of decisions (or parameters) about what is being entified and how. Entities are disclosed, always from a perspective, which is always particular.8 Consequently, a separate perspective is also constituted 8

As Varela et al. emphasize, current models of cognition nearly always presuppose that the cognitive apparatus approaches a world that is composed of pre-given objects, which, on closer investigation, turn out to be false: ‘the determination of what and where an object is, as well as its surface boundaries, texture, and relative orientation (and hence the overall context of colour as a perceived attribute), is a complex process that the visual system must continually achieve’ (1992: 167). Similarly, Alva Noë keeps insisting that perception is an activity, a way to explore the world, not a passive reflection of it (2006: 164; 2012: 59).

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ontology: some of the story so far by what James J. Gibson has called ‘affordances’ (1986: 119ff.), or opportunities that a particular animal can make use of in a particular environment, from the possibility to stop and rest (a thin branch may offer that to a sparrow, but not a hawk) to the possibility of eating certain things, or using them as building material for their nest, and so on. An affordance, Gibson notes, couples an animal and its environment together – at particular moments, we might add – and it can be perceived, but not quantified. But the effect of perspectivality is not even limited to how the world appears from it. As Evan Thompson has argued, the way the world is disclosed also corresponds to a type of self-organization (2007: 159) – in other words, the principle according to which the holder of the perspective entifies themself. Thus, when we speak about natural kinds and the structures they form, the claim of a perspectivist such as myself is not that there do not really exist any, or that they are irrelevant, but that there is an infinite multitude of ways in which entities can be organized into them, all valid, each from a certain perspective. However, it should be immediately noted that this is a bounded infinity, similar to the number of points on a geometrical shape or the quantity of decimal numbers (including all the irrational ones) between 0 and 1, which nonetheless all share the ‘property’ of being greater than 0 and smaller than 1. The human point of view is most certainly not entitled to a privileged status on the basis of a claim that it is the most correct or the most adequate one; however, it is the only one we have access to, which means we are simply unable to dismiss it – whether we want it or not, any model of the world, including one in which humans are not central, can only be constructed by us from the human point of view. But its particularity and limitations should always be kept in mind, instead of being naturalized as the way the world ‘really’ is. This, however, is precisely what object-oriented ontology fails to do.

If disease is not a ‘thing’, then what is it? One moment when the problematic nature of object-oriented discourse becomes particularly apparent is Harman’s critique of Annemarie Mol’s discussion of medical practices. Mol’s view, based on long fieldwork in hospitals, is that a ‘disease’ we call by one general name often refers to multiple different disorders and that, given the conditions and the moment of their discovery, certain aspects of these 39

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ontology: some of the story so far disorders are highlighted and others downplayed. It may even be that different versions of a ‘disease’ identified by the same name are not even theoretically compatible with each other. In practice, this comes to mean that even the disease diagnosed and the disease treated are not necessarily the same one (2002b: 94 and passim). Harman rejects this carefully argued view without further argument: Mol’s claim is not that a single disease simply manifests differently in different contexts: the more radical claim of her work is that different disorders are produced when one employs different methods of detecting them. She cannot accept the notion of a single real world viewed according to a multitude of perspectives. (2016: 23)

But precisely how should ‘disease’ be an object that pre-exists any relations it has with other objects, such as the infected bodies? Of course ‘diseases’ are produced in medical practice, but not in the sense of being willed into existence out of nothingness, but by an act of naming, unifying a number of phenomena into a whole that can be assigned a certain designation. Or, as John Shotter sees it, ‘in placing the agential cuts, i.e., the distinctions we make between subjective and objective ‘things’, in different places at different times, we do not uncover pre-existing facts about independently existing things; instead, we ourselves bring such ‘things’ into existence’ (2014: 305). This view is precisely what ‘the notion of a single real world viewed according to a multitude of perspectives’ is about, just minus the assertion that the perspective of the language we currently use for describing it is the only correct one. As Mol has put it herself elsewhere: [Medical discourse] implies simplification. But there is not just one kind of possible simplification: quite different things may be skipped, bracketed, smothered, or left out. There are simplifications that flatten the world and others that do not. And depending on the site where and the moment when comparisons are made, the effects of making them show variety as well. (2002a: 218)

Whatever we call by the term ‘disease’ is thus nothing but a bundle of processes selected from among all the other processes that are going on in the organism. This is the case for many of the most fundamental terms describing our biological being. Thus, Susan Greenfield cautions us that even ‘memory’ is nothing but ‘an umbrella term for a diverse range of processes that may well be quite distinct’ (1997: 157). Sure, in the case of diseases, some of these processes have been caused by microorganisms separable from the substance of our bodies, but 40

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ontology: some of the story so far neither could we digest our daily food without the similarly separable gut flora, which we consider to be a part of ourselves. Should we then say that our metabolism is equal in status to the diseases we might have? Moreover, as Evelyn Fox Keller reminds us, ‘disease’ is relational even on a more fundamental level. There has been a general understanding among researchers for more than a century that a disease is not even locatable in the processes themselves, but in the difference between how processes run in the majority of organisms and a particular one (2010: 45–6). The standard of health is itself an abstraction that has no particular referent in nature, as no organism is completely in agreement with it. What we call ‘disease’ consists of alterations in the course of the usual processes of the organism as compared to this standard, disturbances of the metapattern, so to say, not new processes that would otherwise not have happened at all. Next, it is only from the human point of view that these alterations are pathological. From the bacterial point of view, they should rather be called responsibly cultivated living environments. There is no reason why we should call a situation a ‘disorder’ simply because its implications do not agree with us. In no way is it inscribed in the nature of things that our team should always win. And finally, even the human viewpoint of what constitutes a ‘disease’ is not constant. Some cultures treat as a mental disorder a bundle of processes that may guarantee the person inflicted with them the prestigious position of a seer or a shaman in others. Other complex differences from the majority, such as homosexuality, have in the recent Western cultural past been viewed as disorders that can be treated. All in all, claiming that a bundle of partially similar processes constitutes an ‘object’ that pre-exists any of their occurrences simply does not make sense. In the same way, it is much more reasonable to talk about ‘art’ or ‘poetry’ as relationships taking place between the observer and the observed. ‘Art’ is not the sum total of objects that have been deemed beautiful for their own sake. ‘Poetry’ is not the sum total of linguistic utterances shaped in a certain way. As I have argued elsewhere, developing the views of Pierre Bourdieu (1993), ‘art’ and ‘literature’ are constantly redefined in a cultural ‘bidding space’ by new bids that contradict previous definitions, but are able to accommodate all the phenomena that correspond to them (2016: 50ff.). To a significant extent, the history of these cultural domains consists of battles for the right to such redefinition. As a result, efforts such as the Russian formalist endeavour to establish formal criteria, by which one could judge whether a text is literary or not, are always doomed to fail. However, despite what some sociologists might perhaps want to 41

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ontology: some of the story so far claim, the ‘artfulness’ is not arbitrary: it needs a particular kind of relationship – the state of mind Aristotle called katharsis – to occur between at least some observers and the artworks they observe. The idea that literary meaning emerges in the mind of the reader and is not fixed in the text has been a commonplace in literary theory since the turn instigated in the 1970s by Roland Barthes (1970, 1977) and Umberto Eco (1979), or the move, as Barthes put it, from selfidentical closed ‘works’ to open-ended, constantly reinterpretable ‘texts’, accompanied by the death of the ‘author’, understood as the sovereign who has determined what a text contains, and the birth of the reader as the ultimate generator of literary significance (1977). Structurally, the move equals the shift of the ontological view from self-identical ‘objects’ to open-ended ‘relations’. Moreover, at this point it seems plausible that it is a much broader scale to which we can extend the observation of cultural theorists regarding the gaze of the interpreter as the provider of meaning to what is interpreted. We can indeed assert that from the admission that reality is mind-independent ontologically, it does not follow that it is gaze-independent epistemologically. There is no one single privileged perspective from which reality can be appropriately observed. Thus, the admission that the whole, internally controversial, and therefore constantly dynamic reality process is not a product of the mind is not in contradiction with the view that any description of this reality process, any structuration of it into, for example, objects with properties, can only be carried out presuming a gaze, a directed perspective. That gaze need not even be that of a factual observer, equipped with a cognitive apparatus – it is any other point or segment within that reality process from which, abstractly, we can conceive of such a gaze to be directed – a gaze complete with its own dimensions of scale and speed of being. This gaze perceives the world of ‘things’ as a structured whole consisting of autonomous parts, held together by certain laws and principles, a certain order. Some of this order is indeed deduced from the relations between entities as they appear to this gaze. But some other aspects of this order may well be imputed on reality by this gaze, because it needs to see ‘things’ in a certain manner in order to relate to them. Be that as it may, it is a major mistake to confuse ontological mind-independence with epistemological gaze-independence – to assert the latter is nothing less than naturalizing one’s own viewpoint as that of the absolute.

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ontology: some of the story so far

Social constructionism The view that certain, if not most, of the shared ideas we have about our world are involved in the collective construction of the entities that underlie them is known as ‘social constructionism’. The roots of this position lie in the ‘sociology of knowledge’, a subdiscipline inaugurated by the work of Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim, and later brought to maturation by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, who combined their ideas with phenomenological concepts developed from the work of Alfred Schutz. The cornerstone of this approach is that not only explicit social contracts, but the entire ‘world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as reality by the ordinary members of society in the subjectively meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these’, which is why an effort to understand society has to start with an ‘attempt to clarify the foundations of knowledge in everyday life, to wit, the objectivations of subjective processes (and meanings) by which the intersubjective common-sense world is constructed’ (Berger and Luckmann 1991: 33–4). When the book of Berger and Luckmann was first published (1966), it met a grateful audience in the emancipatory movements, who were no longer prepared to take the rules of their everyday life for granted and were very grateful for a theory that claimed it originated in their thoughts rather than in a natural, but conservative, unjust and oppressive order. Berger and Luckmann (or any of their sensible followers) have never said anything about the physical reality being a collective creation, only about its appearance in the intersubjective world. Nonetheless, the term ‘social constructionism’ has been associated with the postmodern attack on gaze-independent truth regimes and transferred to a rather more radical set of views that credit social discourses with much more power of conjuring causally efficient realities into existence. More recently, such excessive belief in the power of discursive world-construction has been brought into question by Karen Barad (2003), Paul Boghossian (2007), Maurizio Ferraris (2014), Markus Gabriel (2015b), Donna Haraway (1991), Susan Hekman (2010), Rob Moore (2009), Stephen Toulmin (1999), Michael Young (2008) and many others, although not all these critics share the same agenda. Some of them reject the idea of social constructionism outright, calling for a return to a modernity-driven hard science standard of objectivity in which there is no place for situated ‘voices’ (Moore 43

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ontology: some of the story so far 2009). There are even those who accuse postmodern thought of legitimizing ‘post-truth’ society (Ferraris 2014). But quite a few of these thinkers actually share the concerns of social constructionism, in particular about the problematic nature of any claim to an objective position. Similarly, they refuse to accept the view that language can reflect real structures transparently (Barad 2003: 802; Gabriel 2015b: 38; Haraway 1991: 187). However, what they also reject is the other extreme, or the alleged denial of a wholly mind-independent reality. I do not think ascribing the latter view to social constructionism as a theoretical position is actually justified. No doubt, there are people in the social constructionist camp, perhaps from Jean Baudrillard (1995) to the peer reviewers of Alan Sokal’s hoax article (1996), who are ready to embrace the position that an adequate view of things is impossible, on the grounds that there is no way that reality can be conceived of without linguistic interference. But this is not representative of most social constructionists at all. By and large, this claim is a strawman, at least as far as serious theory is concerned. Thus, when Rob Moore describes his vision of social constructionism as a situation where, ‘in the array of perspectives that emerges, each is equal but each is also exclusive unto itself because each is incommensurable with all others because specialized to and authorized by its particular experiential base. There is no knowledge, only a plurality of knowledges or ‘voices’’ (2009: 11), he makes the same mistake as Harman does when he says that a gradualist account of change necessarily credits each point on the axis of development with the same importance. This is a non sequitur, possible only in a black-and-white picture: from the statement that none of the available assessments of a situation is completely accurate, the conclusion does not follow that all of them are at equal distance from the truth. You can win quite a bit in the lottery even when you get one number wrong. The acknowledgement of the embeddedness of all discourses, including those claiming value neutrality, does not make them equally true or false. The general claim of social constructionism – that certain things and concepts, as they appear to us, are a product of sociocultural processing and do not exist in the same way in nature, by themselves – affects, first of all, primarily social realities, or things that can only be observed in the context of social practice.9 Thus Dave Elder-Vass, 9

John Haugeland’s analysis of the ontology of chess pieces (1998: 280ff.) provides an excellent clarification of what social construction is, although he does not use the term. Chess pieces have no universally applicable substantial properties; they can be made of any material and vary considerably in form. And yet they are ‘genuine, full-fledged

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ontology: some of the story so far in his very balanced and carefully argued analysis of the phenomenon, distinguishes two steps in the social constructionist attitude, the first of which amounts to the recognition that the norms, conventions, cultural habits, and so on of the shared social world inescapably influence the ways in which we think about it, while the second step, in a converse move, provides us with the means to address that influence. Together, these two steps do not yield a circularity, but a cycle, which, as Elder-Vass remarks, has been repeatedly recognized and analysed by realist social theory as well (2012: 258–60). Second, it is also evident that political institutions have, from their inception to the present, made efforts to ground their legitimacy in a ‘natural’ order, a view of how the world is, articulated according to the best knowledge available about it at the time. As Rahel Jaeggi has very accurately observed: ‘The facts remain the same whether we identify them as socially constructed or not. However, they do change as regards their form as soon as they are deciphered as social (and not natural) facts that can be shaped (and do not occur of necessity)’ (2018: 303). In other words, what social constructionism enables us to challenge is the constant bias in favour of the powers that be, which has been characteristic of the institutionally endorsed knowledges for most of recorded history and is so to this day.

Accommodating anti-representationalism The problem with social and linguistic constructionism is not that it is wrong in crediting language with a fundamental role in defining the coordinates of the lifeworld we unescapably inhabit.10 The problem is, rather, that it raises language itself out of that world and assigns to it a place where it is shaping the real without itself being a part of it, a view that Karen Barad calls ‘representationalism’, or ‘the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing’ (2003: 804). If we say that we only encounter the real in a form that has already entities’, determined fully by a taxonomy and a set of rules for how they can, in principle, be moved in relation to each other in a specifically organized space during a specifically regulated practice; they are ‘recognition patterns serving as the elements of rule-constituted games, themselves understood as orderly arrangements’ (1998: 282). In other words, while chess pieces undeniably exist as chess pieces, there are no chess pieces in the world of brute facts, only in a socially constructed one. 10 I use the words ‘language’ and ‘linguistic’ here as a shorthand for a multitude of signifying systems and their ramifications.

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ontology: some of the story so far been mixed up with language, we imply that this language is not a part of this real, but something else that gets mixed up with it. Uncarefully posited social constructionism is therefore likely to slip into the Cartesian fold and to construct an observer-position that is not embedded in the reality it observes. To single out language or a broader signifying system as the primary machinery that does the constructing, while everything else, starting with the material environment, is not much more than the raw material that language engages with, is, of course, wrong. But this does not mean that the role of language in the production of our lived experience is not fundamental. As Susan Hekman puts it: Privileging reality over construction, the modernist settlement, is not preferable to privileging construction over reality, the social constructionist alternative. What we need is a conception that does not presuppose a gap between language and reality that must be bridged, that does not define the two as opposites. We have learned much from the linguistic turn. Language does construct our reality. What we are discovering now, however, is that this is not the end of the story. Language interacts with other elements in this construction; there is more to the process than we originally thought. What we need is not a theory that ignores language as modernism did, but rather a more complex theory that incorporates language, materiality, and technology into the equation. (2008: 91–2)

In other words, we should ground our gaze on reality in our own fundamental embeddedness. This is not yet quite accomplished by the admission of the fact that we, as individuals, can never be fully extracted from the social, cultural and political contexts that we inhabit, with all the prejudices, power-structures, traditions and ever-changing challenges affecting the way we think. We should also remember that the thinking core of the individual itself only comes about as a meeting of heterogeneous streams, material and mental, of which language is one. At the same time, we should remain aware of the fact that any ‘language’ (used here as a general term for all culturally constructive signifying systems) acquires its immense efficiency at a cost. It points to essentialist conceptualizations of things, and not to things/processes themselves (which is impossible because of their fluidity and intangibility), and therefore always ignores a certain very notable part of what those things/processes are. It refers by simplifying. It does not designate pre-existing things – it freezes the multiplicity of processes into stable and distinguishable units. And it is never obvious which of the aspects it ignores may, 46

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ontology: some of the story so far in a certain situation, become important. Signs, as we know since Saussure, are arbitrary relations, and just as any relation does, they simultaneously transform the parties they connect and reify them into terms that have to remain stable for the duration that the relation takes place. Cultural and social construction is therefore always creative and dynamic, on the one hand, and reifying, ‘flattening’, on the other. Unlike Hekman, I believe the thinkers of modernity did not ignore language; they just assumed language was transparent and reflected ‘things’ as they were. Social constructionism has shown us that, not unlike mirrors, lenses and retinas, it does not. What we need to remember is that, not unlike mirrors, lenses and retinas, language itself is also a part of the reality it seeks to reflect. Again differing from Hekman, I do not agree with her assessment that social constructionists do not believe ‘that concepts and theories have material consequences’ (2008: 109). If anything, they are overstressing the power of discursivities to organize and transform the material world into a version not only naturalized for our experience, but in fact even co-produced by them. How else, one might ask, should we read Butler’s famous claim of the priority of the discursive to the physical body?11 But the options of what language does to reality are not limited to the two extremes of a totally adequate description of allegedly gaze-independent logical structures on the one hand and random language games on the other, games that reflect primarily the gamers’ intent, rather than the underlying, undoubtedly self-identical and mind-independent, process of reality itself. There is no need to commit the error of saying that if something is not gaze-independent, then it is also false. On the contrary, to remember Mannheim and Haraway, as we are only able to produce gaze-contingent statements about reality, those that acknowledge their gaze-contingence are closer to precision, not further removed from it. Thus, to say that ‘the body’ is constituted by the word does not mean that it is somehow called into existence by this naming act, but that the reality we refer to has been extracted from ongoing causal chains and entanglements, constituted as a node or site where different processes significantly intersect. When we think of ‘the body’ 11 ‘The

sex/gender distinction and the category of sex itself appear to presuppose a generalization of “the body” that pre-exists the acquisition of its sexed significance. This “body” often appears to be a passive medium that is signified by an inscription from a cultural source figured as “external” to that body. Any theory of the culturally constructed body, however, ought to question “the body’” as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse’ (1999: 164).

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ontology: some of the story so far as an abstraction, we credit it with an autonomy that the physical body of an individual never has. A physical body cannot be separated from the processes of which it is a part – it is always interacting with microbes both on its surface and inside its internal network of communication, digesting food, producing sweat, battling with the effects of stress and fatigue, distributing energy within itself and processing information that it accesses through a variety of channels. While most of it is biological, it also often has artificial components, some of them stable, such as pacemakers, others detachable, such as eyeglasses. It does not move around without paraphernalia, such as clothes and shoes, and is the object of constant grooming to varying degrees, such as haircuts, nail-clipping and makeup. The unity that the word ‘body’ denotes highlights some of these aspects and downgrades others. Clearly, an abstract body from which all these particularities have been removed to an arm’s length only exists in the mind as a conceptual extraction from the empirical flux of reality. Of course, this does not mean that such abstractions would be violent distortions that impede rather than enhance our take on reality. It goes without saying that our discursive practices are indispensable, even if not perfect and transparent. The ability to carve ‘things’ out of reality and identify their causal roles in the processes they are involved in is vital for navigating our world – it is one of the ways in which being self-conscious has empowered us. From our particular perspective, it provides us with a shareable and operationally efficient view of our environment. But as our history has now brought us to a stage where we need to transcend that particular vantage point, we also need to distance ourselves from the ontology that the structures of (primarily Indo-European) languages have naturalized for the discourses that are claiming to formulate the universally valid.

The theory of assemblages The tacit privileging of the human perspective in theoretical speculation is thus a problem from which, as I hope to have shown, any theory that imputes a priori logical structures to the world is not free. That also goes for object-oriented ontology, despite its claims to the contrary, as its view of objects is imputing to all nonhuman others a gaze that is structurally similar to the human vantage point. There exists, however, another discourse that is more consistently opposed to essentialism, which suggests a way out of this predicament, and 48

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ontology: some of the story so far that is the theory of assemblages in the form advocated by Manuel DeLanda. As it is well known, ‘assemblage’ is a term that has been coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and become current in theoretical discussions to refer to loosely integrated and temporary arrangements of heterogeneous components that nonetheless have distinct emergent properties and real causal effects, but, unlike complex totalities, they need not be imagined as self-sufficient entities closed in on themselves.12 This is indeed a very productive approach for social ontologies: a court, for example, can be described as an assemblage placed in a specific location, composed of different kinds of people, with different roles and rights, wearing specific clothes and using specific instruments (such as the gavel), and having the power to cause life-altering moments for their participants, which none of its elements separately has. Each of the involved people can participate in other situations, and most of them are parts of the assemblage because of their status and position and not because of who they are as human beings. Moreover, if these same instruments and clothes were to be used outside the specific location of the courtroom – for example, on a theatre stage — they would not produce the same effect, but become a part of a wholly different assemblage. DeLanda stresses that a group of entities forms an assemblage only in cases where the relations between these entities are extrinsic,13 that is, they do not affect the entities themselves (2006: 10–11). This idea, too, is developed from Deleuze, who writes: Relations are external to their terms. ‘Peter is smaller than Paul’, ‘The glass is on the table’: relation is neither internal to one of the terms which would consequently be subject, nor to two together. Moreover, a relation may change without the terms changing. One may object that the glass is perhaps altered when it is moved off the table, but that is not true. The ideas of the glass and the table, which are the true terms of the relations, are not altered. Relations are in the middle, and exist as

12

The term is nonetheless one of those runaway words in contemporary theory with which one needs to be careful: George Marcus and Erkan Saka point out the fairly broad range of senses in which it is used, from ‘a subjective state of cognition and experience of society and culture in movement’ to ‘objective relations, a material, structure-like formation, a describable product of emergent social conditions’, and further on to ‘a perspective on the heterogeneity of a distinctive heterogeneity of a form or object in a phase of development or “becoming”’ – or all of these at once (2006: 102). 13 I will here follow DeLanda (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 30) in using the words ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ for the distinction of relations that involve/do not involve significant change in the participants of the relation.

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ontology: some of the story so far such. This exteriority of relations is not a principle, it is a vital protest against principles. (Deleuze and Parnet 1977: 55)

I believe, however, that DeLanda is reading the claim in too strong a sense here, confusing ‘term’ with ‘thing’, even though Deleuze and Guattari caution us not to,14 and here, too, Deleuze explicitly speaks of the ‘idea’ of the glass that is not altered when the object is moved off the table, not the glass as a thing – and it is the ‘idea’ of the glass and the table that are the terms of the relation. For example, if the glass was on the table as part of a composition set up by an artist to paint a still life – a collection of objects that acquires its assemblage-ly nature through the de-randomizing gaze of the artist — the removal of the glass from its particular spot changes the relationship between the artist and the glass quite significantly. The ‘becoming-artist’ of one entity and ‘becoming-glass’ of another are fully dependent on the relationship that obtains between them, and this relationship is instantiated in the ‘becoming-still life’ of an array of certain objects on the table – an assemblage par excellence. This, I think, is what Deleuze had in mind when he wrote, a few lines before the passage quoted above, that ‘[t]hings do not begin to live except in the middle’, that is, precisely in the relations. However, what DeLanda accomplishes by this interpretational strategy is the reification of the components of an assemblage to a certain extent, crediting them with a life outside this middle. This moves them from a situation where the participation in the assemblage simply does not extinguish their potential to participate in other relationships independently from each other to a situation where the component things are self-subsistent and participate in assemblages by virtue of their defining properties (2006: 18–20).15 DeLanda evokes this axis of sameness and difference for underlining the replaceability of components, for example, when someone is dealing with an organization it does not matter (in theory) by whom the organization is represented (2006: 37), or when you are paying for your purchases in a supermarket, which cashier it is who takes 14 ‘What

is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 238). 15 Elsewhere, DeLanda talks about ‘surfaces’ as opposed to things themselves that meet each other in the constitution of a relationship between two entities (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 56), which, I think, is more appropriate, but still a step away from conceding that ‘terms’ in an extrinsic relationship as understood by Deleuze are reified concepts of its participants rather than parts or wholes of self-subsistent relata.

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ontology: some of the story so far your money – unless, of course, it is someone with whom you have a different, personal relationship (as if the absence of one were not a type of a personal relationship as well). This is a significant move which, again, only comes about as a result of the establishment of a privileged vantage point for the observer: we conceptualize assemblages simultaneously as togethernesses of entities, and as independent entities with a status of their own, which means that anything that can be described as an assemblage can be viewed, so to say, ‘upwards’ from the level of components – as the entity that emerges from their togetherness – and ‘downwards’ from the level of that togetherness, as the components that make it up. (These are the attitudes criticized as ‘undermining’ and ‘overmining’ by Harman.) At every level of a nested multiplicity of such entities – such as the social reality DeLanda describes first as persons, then interpersonal networks, then organizations and then governments – the assemblage looks like a multiplicity and the components look like reified parts of it. Should we move one level up, whatever looked like a multiplicity a second ago now looks like the reified component of that next-level multiplicity. And in the analysis of any level, the heterogeneity of the subcomponents, or the components of the components of an assemblage, those placed on the next level below, is thereby cancelled out. The resulting multilevel picture has been called ‘the laminated individual’ by Dave Elder-Vass (2010: 49), as opposed to the flattened image that acts as a ‘term’ in every particular relationship.

Gaze and relationality Clearly, the necessity to choose and stick to a particular perspective when observing an assemblage is only the observer’s problem, however, because in a gaze-independent reality all these entities would act like singularities and multiplicities at the same time, and even the description of one level as ‘lower’ and the other as ‘higher’ inserts a hierarchical relationship into the picture that is not actually there in that reality. When a cow grazes on a pasture, we most likely do not think of the two in the same terms as when we describe the relationship of a malicious microorganism with the body of a person, but probably give preference to the cow in the first instance and to the infected person in the second. Levels and hierarchies are thus as often as not constructions contingent upon the ways we observe the world from our own position. 51

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ontology: some of the story so far Of course, we have at least a limited capacity to move between different level-based viewpoints as situations require, but conceptual clarity nonetheless keeps demanding that we adopt one of those viewpoints for every theoretical moment. This is the ‘natural propensity of the mind’ that Bergson warned about (1944: 341), the reifying tendency that makes it difficult for us to conceive of reality in terms of processual becoming rather than a series of reified stopping points that follow one another in succession. Here, the effect of this tendency is to cast light on one half of the relation while keeping the complexity of the other in the dark. In other words, reality goes on outside our existence mind-independently, but whenever we relate to it, it ceases to be gaze-independent. The word ‘gaze’ is being used here and elsewhere in this inquiry metaphorically not just for how entities appear in visual perception, but for all directed cognitive operations that have an effect on the consciousnesses on behalf of which they are performed. DeLanda uses the term ‘scale-independent’ for a similar sense (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 22–3), but that may be too weak, as it only takes the physical characteristics into account. ‘Gaze’, as said, goes beyond that and involves all the specifics, from the size and capacities of the viewpoint up to desires, repulsions and ideological distortions that may enter into the relationship of any two entities – in a sense similar to that of Laura Mulvey (1975), who identifies ‘the male gaze’ as the transformative drive that has affected cinematographic representation of reality in mainstream cinema almost without restraint until the advent of feminist film-making. So the editors of the journal Chautauquan, when asked the question, ‘If a tree were to fall on an island where there were no human beings would there be any sound?’, were completely right to respond: ‘No. Sound is the sensation excited in the ear when the air or other medium is set in motion’ (1883). But why not raise the stakes a little: if a time-triggered radio started to play at a certain moment on that island, would it be playing music? Of course not. In addition to an ear, which is required for the sound to exist, music also requires a mind – or possibly some other receptive apparatus – capable of three separate operations: first, remembering the sounds that have been heard up to the present moment; second, discerning rhythmic and melodic patterns (or the absence thereof) in their sequence; and third, developing an emotionally tinged response to them (as opposed to noting the rhythmic ticks of an old clock, for example). This is what ‘gaze’ here designates. A gaze is thus not only inevitable whenever a relationship between an observer and 52

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ontology: some of the story so far an observed takes place, it is also necessarily structured and thereby distorting, wilfully or unwilfully.16 However, this is still not yet the whole story. Karl Mannheim has argued that the only way for us to overcome our inevitable ideological bias is to become aware of it, because this is the pre­requis­ite of minimizing its effects (1985: 78–80). Analogically, if we acknowledge this perspectival limitation of our conceptualizing apparatus, we may as well try to live with it. The ontological status of subatomic particles need not concern us when we are dealing with, say, the criteria of management malpractice or specifics of urban planning. As Donna Haraway has argued, it is only situated knowledges and embodied views that can pretend to be objective in the first place (1991: 188–90) – not because they would provide a viewpoint superior to the all-encompassing, allegedly ‘empty’ one, but precisely because neutral gaze is impossible as such, the limits of objectivity are themselves always defined by the embeddedness of the observer’s vision. From a very different perspective, Tony Lawson comes to precisely the same conclusion and states that ‘we must always seek to advance understanding starting from who we are/have become, what we have been through and where we happen to be … The disinterested spirit relates to the manner in which analysis is approached, not to overall relations to the world’ (2019: 24). For the present purposes, this entails that we cannot use the same descriptive language for all levels, as it would impose a mechanical similarity on them, which is fundamentally incorrect. The ‘levels’ of reality only emerge as different when they are viewed from different perspectives. This is not to deny that a connection between all those levels exists, but only to insist that any type of ‘things’ should be talked about in a language best suited for them. It is nonetheless important to stress once again and in the same breath that different ‘levels’ have no crude, gaze-independent existence. What is happening ‘on’ them, takes place simultaneously, and all ‘levels’ are involved in it equally, while differences between them are being articulated solely by the perspective-embodying descriptive discourses we use for them. Assemblages indeed have emergent characteristics, and we are apt to see more of these characteristics from the perspective that the assemblage discourse has provided us with by treating temporary togethernesses of heterogeneous entities as next-level entities of 16 Harman,

too, acknowledges this, when he writes that ‘[t]he existence of mindindependent realities is one question, but our ability to know or say things about those realities is quite another’ (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 44).

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ontology: some of the story so far their own right. But the advantage they provide us with as heuristic, analytical tools is lost when we assign a self-same status to them, instead of viewing them as highlightings of particular aspects of the reality flux, as patterns flickering in the process.

Summary In this chapter I have argued that object-oriented ontologies, old and new, are only able to retain explanatory power as long as we are happy to remain limited by the human perspective on reality. If, however, we want to rise above it, then we have to abandon the idea that reality consists of things that are, by themselves, such as we perceive them. Accepting, with feminist philosophers of science, the thesis that knowledge is necessarily situated is the main pre­requis­ite for overcoming the negative effects of such embeddedness, or the illusion that we, humans, are the measure of all things. What I have proposed therefore is a methodological perspectivism, which acknowledges the multiplicity of speeds of being alongside with the gradual nature of all interweaving processes and causal chains. Instead of self-sameness and continuity in time – be that of physical substance or of organizational patterns – I have suggested we talk about significant overlap between certain stages of the existential span of an entity, significant again only from the perspectives of particular observers. I have also tried to show how this position by no means entails the rejection of a mind-independent reality; the only thing it does not accept is the imposition on nature of mind-made structures and hierarchies. Reality is mind-independent in spite of its slices appearing to us always and only in a particular, perspectivebound and gaze-dependent form.

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2 AN ONTOLOGY OF PROCESSES AND FIELDS

In this chapter I will try to formulate a functional alternative to the mainstream ontology of objects, properties and type-token relations between concepts and their manifestations – a process ontology that relies on gradients and fields. I will argue that the account to be proposed does not suffer from many of the deficiencies of the received view and, moreover, has a greater explanatory potential for the elaboration of a non-anthropocentric paradigm of entities and the relations between them. After a brief look at the process-ontological tradition, I will present a version of one-tiered, or ‘flat’, ontology in which all existents are supposed to exist equally, albeit not necessarily in the same way. Such a one-tiered reality is not supposed to be static or monotonous, but, on the contrary, dynamic and characterized by tensions, which are better described with the help of a matrix of gradients than with Boolean values. Being, according to this view, is carried by momentary minimal instances, which relate to one another in a variety of ways and form patterns and sequences of significant overlap that acquire emergent capacities to form new relations. It is important to note that, once we do not think of minimal existents as self-identical separate ‘things’, we can also see their propensity to form certain patterns as a necessary part of their very being, not an added and contingent characteristic. Matter itself, following the theories of quantum physics, is not perceived to be an existential primitive, but an emergence that takes place in a ‘web of relations’ (Rovelli 2016: 150). Within this singular and total reality process, separate processes can be identified as bundles of sequences that depend on each other’s input and simultaneously provide output for each other. Such processes are separated 55

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an ontology of processes and fields from the rest of reality by borders that are neither hard nor entirely permeable, but membranic, in analogy with the membranes that enclose the cells of living organisms, which can both let through food and other substances necessary for the functioning of those cells, and also repel, to an extent, such matter that would be dangerous to them. This distinction entails that an internality comes with a perspective from which it evaluates the outside. In a minimal form, this perspective represents the focus of methodological perspectivism defended in the previous chapter. One of the central concepts of this discourse is the field. Ever since the discoveries of Faraday and Maxwell, the idea of the field has been deployed in a variety of ways by explanatory discourses and models of phenomena from the very minimal to the macro levels of social reality, which testifies to its versatility. The common denominator between all these uses is the idea of the field as a configuration of constitutive tensions, including both attractions and repulsions, and this is what the concept of field refers to in this inquiry. These tensions can and do occur between positions of various kinds, and the position of an individual element on the field is constantly changed as its relations with other elements also change. The main argument of this chapter consists in the claim that every cross-section of every process of any kind at any given moment is best represented as a field. This also provides the context for an understanding of temporality and causality: the field is always a momentary occurrence, but it bears in itself the traces of the past and refracts them into a scope of possible futures.1 Causality, on this view, does not emanate from agentic ‘things’, but from patterns. At any given moment, some of the specific tensions on a field strive for release, which rearranges the field to a certain extent and keeps it in constant dynamism, as new tensions inevitably result from this new configuration. As I will argue, this version of process philosophy will enable us to extract singular phenomena from the overall flux of reality and to analyse them, while simultaneously eschewing the dangers of excessive reification and essentialism.

1

The Western tradition of this kind of thought is outlined below in more detail, but my own understanding of this matter relies more on my reading of the thought of Dōgen (see Raud 2012).

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an ontology of processes and fields

The tradition Although process philosophy, too, has roots in ancient Greece, going back to the thought of Heraclitus, in its current form it has established itself mainly as a response to recent developments in science, from physics to biology, and it has been argued by many that process ontology is in a better situation to accommodate these developments than the received view (Barad 2007; Eastman 1997; Kuhlmann, Lyre, and Wayne 2002; Nicholson and Dupre 2018). It should also be stressed that it has been the mainstream view in most East Asian philosophical traditions as well as a strongly represented one in India. After the dialectics of Hegel had reintroduced a primordial dynamism into the understanding of the very fabric of being, modern Western process philosophy started to develop in different forms, from American pragmatism to the thought of Henri Bergson, for whom things and states are only views, taken by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, there are only actions. More particularly, if I consider the world in which we live, I find that the automatic and strictly determined evolution of this well-knit whole is action which is unmaking itself, and that the unforeseen forms which life cuts out in it, forms capable of being themselves prolonged into unforeseen movements, represent the action that is making itself. (1944: 270–1)

While the representationalist philosophy of early Bergson still concedes that ‘there is no image without an object’ (1990: 44), he later arrives at a much more radically processual idea of how reality works: ‘There are changes, but there are underneath the change no things which change: change has no need of a support. There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves: movement does not imply a mobile’ (1946: 172). Nonetheless these ontological glimpses appear only in a somewhat scattered manner throughout Bergson’s work, and it is with Alfred North Whitehead that a really systematic process-ontological system emerges in Western thought. A well-tested starting point for a brief summary of Whitehead’s views is his discussion of Cleopatra’s Needle, an obelisk standing on the Charing Cross Embankment in London, which could be taken for a paradigmatic example of a self-identical and continuous object. Whitehead, however, casts it as primarily a process, ‘a certain stream of events which maintain permanence of character, namely the character of being the situations of Cleopatra’s 57

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an ontology of processes and fields Needle’, of which the timelessness is ‘pure illusion’ (2015: 106). An ‘actual entity’, in Whitehead’s parlance, is what we normally call an event; single actual entities can relate to each other and form a larger series, each of which is called a nexus, ‘a set of actual entities in the unity of the relatedness constituted by … their objectifications in each other’ (1978: 24). These can evolve by mutually providing input to one another in a situation called concrescence, meaning the ‘production of novel togetherness’ (1978: 21). Having established the character of reality as a processual series of events, Whitehead nonetheless immediately proceeds to define an object as the recurring core of such series: ‘You cannot recognize an event; because when it is gone, it is gone. You may observe another event of analogous character, but the actual chunk of the life of nature is inseparable from its unique occurrence. But a character of an event can be recognized. … Things which we thus recognize I call objects. An object is situated in those events or in that stream of events of which it expresses the character’ (2015: 108). Whitehead develops this view into the fundamental perspectivality of actual worlds: ‘[T]he meaning of the phrase ‘the actual world’ is relative to the becoming of a definite actual entity which is both novel and actual, relatively to that meaning, and to no other meaning of that phrase. Thus, conversely, each actual entity corresponds to a meaning of ‘the actual world’ peculiar to itself’ (1978: 28). The term ‘actual world’, initially taken to refer to the processual reality as such, thus becomes a multiplicity of worlds, each of which is contingent upon a particular actual entity and the way in which the world is disclosed from its vantage point (1978: 61–2). Whitehead does posit a fundamental reality beyond what is disclosed, which he calls ‘atomic’ and which corresponds to the ‘ultimate metaphysical truth’, but it is inaccessible to our perception, which needs to view the world in terms of continuity (1978: 35–6). However, having set up an almost perfect system of processual ontology, Whitehead then unfortunately has to spoil the beauty of it all by introducing the idea of ‘eternal objects’, which are a constant presence at every event, every concrescence, and which shape their unique and unrepeatable character by ‘ingressing’ into them, that is, participating in their self-becoming (1978: 23). Even though these eternal objects have been opposed to Platonic essences in that they are ‘adverbial, rather than substantive’ as they only ‘determine and express how actual entities relate to one another, take one another up’ (Shaviro 2009: 38), they nonetheless constitute a second tier to Whitehead’s ontology, and one consisting of mind-independent and 58

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an ontology of processes and fields continuous self-identical entities – he states in no uncertain terms that ‘the fundamental types of entities are actual entities, and eternal objects; and that the other types of entities only express how all entities of the two fundamental types are in community with each other, in the actual world’ (1978: 25), and acknowledges that he uses the term ‘eternal object’ as a substitute for Platonic form (1978: 44). It would therefore be legitimate for a hostile critic to ask how Whitehead’s ontology, in the final analysis, really differs from an abstract idealism that would see the flux of reality as not a process per se, but a process of interaction of eternal, self-identical objects that constitute a multiplicity of events between them. A more recent systematic version of process ontology has been presented by Nicolas Rescher, who, in his own words, prefers it over an ontology of substances because ‘one can only observe what things do – through their discernible effects – what they are, over and above this, is a matter of theory projected on this basis’, and in process ontology ‘things simply are what they do’ (2000: 8). Defining a process as ‘an orchestrated series of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functionally’ (2000: 22) and positing the unity of these stages as well as a spatio­ temporal coherence, Rescher states that any process necessarily has a structure (2000: 24), and swiftly moves on to characterizing the necessary features such a structure must have. Soon enough, these processes start to look suspiciously like temporally extended things. For Rescher, the task of process philosophy indeed seems not to lie so much in clarifying the nature of what processes are, but in developing a descriptive language of how particular processes relate to one another, can be distinguished from one another, of how they can be productive or transformative, owned or unowned, and so on. All in all, Rescher’s processes are spatiotemporal actualizations of self-same describable patterns rather than event-series in principle capable of changing their character as they unfold. As a result, Rescher’s theory, although presenting a compelling critique of traditional ontology, has little to offer conceptually to the present inquiry, as it is too strongly bound within the traditional categories of thought that it has inherited from its opponent.

Ontological tiers One pervasive trait of the habitual ontological theories of the Western tradition is the division of everything into two separated 59

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an ontology of processes and fields tiers of being, one of which is concrete (tokens) and the other abstract (types). Perhaps the most succinct recent formulation of such a two-tiered view is W. V. O. Quine’s famous aphorism ‘to be is to be the value of a variable’ (1963: 15), which assumes that there are two planes of existence, one housing pure type-variables and the other their token-values, or actual entities. But the idea has a long history. From Plato’s classic vision of ideas/forms opposed to the material world to the medieval disputes about the ontological status of universals, from the Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa to some contemporary formulations of the mind-body problem, from the discussion of types and tokens by Charles S. Peirce and the phenomenological view of the noetic and the noematic to contemporary debates on social constructionism and structural realism, the vast majority of Western ontological theories make a clean break between materially embodied being and the category of terms such as the law of gravity, a pure triangle, number 7, redness, negativity and many others that are present in thought, but have no actual referent in physical reality that would be just them and nothing else. We can observe some of these abstract entities, such as the law of gravity or the concept of redness, as presences in what takes place. We can explain events by the agency of others, which remain unobservable to us directly, such as gods and radiation. It is only natural that we tend to speculate about the similarities and differences between the ways in which such entities participate in our experience. The strict division into what is autonomously present in the world and what takes place only in the mind seems like a sensible conceptual tool to approach and clarify the situation in which we find ourselves. To consciousness, on this view, falls the task of discovering abstract existents – or, according to others, their actual production. As a part of recent theory has started to argue, however, this strict division of the mental and the material may nonetheless itself tacitly imply stronger ontological commitments than we should necessarily go in for. For example, Gilles Deleuze has proposed, in his early work, the idea that being is univocal, which means not that Being is said in a single and same sense, but that it is said, in a single and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. Being is the same for all these modalities, but these modalities are not the same. It is ‘equal’ for all, but they themselves are not equal. It is said of all in a single sense, but they themselves do not have the same sense. (1994: 36)

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an ontology of processes and fields Manuel DeLanda suggests another term, ‘flat ontology’, which has found wider currency: an ontology based on relations between general types and particular instances is hierarchical, each level representing a different ontological category (organism, species, genera), an approach in terms of interacting parts and emergent wholes leads to a flat ontology, one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status. (2013: 51)2

I would like to reserve another sense for the term ‘flat’ within the context of this book (a ‘flattening out’ of internal tensions), but otherwise I agree, albeit for somewhat different reasons: a one-tiered view of reality has greater explanatory power than its two-tiered alternatives simply by not imposing mind-made (or just simply minddependent) structures on reality. In brief, this is the view that ‘all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally … things can be many and various, specific and concrete, while their being remains identical’ (Bogost 2012: 11). In other words, ‘to exist’ means the same for all things, but it does not follow that they are all alike, nor that they might not have a different ontological status for us, nor that their individual, particular modes of being in the world should all be reducible to some single general pattern. A one-tiered ontology simply holds that the very being of things does not come in different hues and is not itself hierarchically structured, despite the fact that it can take on a bounded infinity of different forms, modes and ways of being-in-the-world. On this view, efforts to separate being into two constituent tiers that are conceptually opposed to each other can be seen as linguistic operations meant to foreground specific aspects of the reality process, which can indeed be fruitfully analysed with their help (and not otherwise). We can indeed continue to speak about types and structures, but recognizing them as extractions that we have distilled out of our reality, according to what seems natural from our particular perspective. Language is a tool that can dissect reality just as a prism can disperse unitary white light into a visible spectrum. The different colours of the spectrum do not pre-exist the white light so that they would make it up by joining forces. But nor are they produced by the process of dispersion. They are what the white light is in its being; 2

The term owes its popularity primarily to the work of Levi Bryant, who has developed the concept of flat ontology further, rejecting not only any kind of transcendence, but also the privileged position of human consciousness in reflecting reality and any suggested hierarchy of ways of being (2011: 245ff.).

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an ontology of processes and fields the prism is an instrument that carves this being up, just as language does by extracting ‘things’ from the reality process. We also need to be aware that the human retina reflects only a part of the spectrum, while bees, for example, are able to see a different part of it. Nor can we be certain that the experience of colours is the same even for those beings whose cognitive apparatuses are built similarly. Therefore, when we reject the distinction between ‘tiers’ of being, this does not commit us to disregarding ‘levels’ of being, which are perspective-bound domains that relate to each other hierarchically in such a way that different regularities can be observed on a ‘higher’ level than on a ‘lower’ one. The speed, the dimensionality and all the other characteristics of Uexküll’s Umwelt are relevant to how we conceive of the thingness of particulars, or how they are disclosed, depending on which side we take. ‘High’ and ‘low’ are used here in quotation marks as there is no real structure out there that would enforce this separation of levels; ‘higher’ simply designates here a perspectival domain in which the multiplicities of a ‘lower’ level appear as unities in their relations to other such unities. But, as Inês Hipólito observes: There is no privileged level of description. Depending on the level of enquiry, any level constitutes an appropriate level, with many internal microscopic states lying below. For example, on a descending scale: a star, a planet, an environment, an organism, a brain, a neural network, a neuron, neuronal processes, exchanges among intracellular organelles, and so on to atomic and subatomic levels. Crucially … what unifies these systems is that all of them self-organize. (2019: 81)

‘Things’, on this view, consist in clusters of self-organizing lowerlevel multiplicities and the same reality therefore necessarily looks fairly different on a molecular level from how it appears on the level of social interaction or tectonic shifts. This is also the reason why different sciences entify their reality in different ways, and it should be noted that the evolving ‘scientific ontologies’ of Bhaskar (2008: 146), ‘regional ontologies’ of Ted Benton and Ian Craib (2019: 5) and ‘domain-specific’ ontologies of Dave Elder-Vass (2010: 68) are the prerequisites for the discoveries of particular scientific disciplines, not constructed on the basis of these discoveries in retrospect. This is also why scientific knowledge is necessarily domain-specific: being predicated on ontological commitments made from a particular perspective, it cannot and should not claim authority over all levels of observation. When DeLanda prefers chemistry over physics as the scientific paradigm for social analysis (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 62

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an ontology of processes and fields 82–4), he implicitly affirms this point – while simultaneously claiming that there has to be a specific domain of science that can act as the foundation of an ontological discourse that is valid for at least some other domains as well. We can, however, agree with his former point without conceding the latter.

Gradients and thresholds Another opportunity – and a problem to be solved – that process ontology presents us with is the shift of attention from essencedefined entities to their entire existence spans. In this context, what also need to be considered are the leaps, the breaking points, the thresholds that occur on the existence span of an entity – the moments before and after which we can say that some kind of fundamental change has happened to it.3 For example, on a certain birthday an individual citizen in most contemporary political systems acquires the right to vote. On the day before, that person did not have the capacity to express political will; next morning, they do. In theory, the contingent fact of someone’s being born one day earlier than their designated time may thus decide the outcome of an election and perhaps even the historical fate of a multitude of people. Again, many railways allow you to purchase a train ticket that is valid until a certain date. Until that moment, it guarantees you entry to a train; after that moment, it becomes a useless slip of paper. And when we talk of emergent properties in assemblages, there has to be a moment before which they are not yet. After all, emergent properties can only come about in a processual (and therefore gradual) manner, but become apparent at a certain moment on its trajectory. In other words, the existence span of any entity is characterized by significant status changes, or leaps, which occur at certain moments of their development processes and designate the shift from one stage to another, which cannot be described fully in the same terms. Still, even a clear threshold such as the melting degree of ice entails a gradual melting process, or a ‘vague’ state in which what was solid becomes liquid – it does not happen in a dimensionless flicker of time. 3

Deleuze and Guattari present the example of an alcoholic’s last glass for making clear the distinction between a ‘limit’ and a ‘threshold’ as they understand these concepts: a ‘limit’ is a last glass in the sense that the alcoholic can resume drinking (after some sleep), while a last glass as a threshold is one after which they quit drinking (1987: 438). In other words, for Deleuze and Guattari, a limit is the point which an entity can still tolerate and remain itself, while a threshold brings with itself a transformation into something else.

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an ontology of processes and fields As noted above, for some critics of gradualism, such as Graham Harman, the obvious existence of such breaking points is sufficient to reject any version of this view, as he claims that gradualists see every moment on the existential trajectory of an entity, or any stage in a process, to be equally significant (2016: 45). Such a view would indeed be mistaken, but it is in no way a necessary condition of gradualism and, as far as I know, not really put forward by (at least most of) its representatives. On the contrary: it is through the acknowledgement of such points as important thresholds on the trajectory of an entity that we can conjoin into one process things that would, on a more essentialist view, appear as distinct objects that turn into each other. However, if a crystal of a chemical and its solution in water have substance continuity, they can clearly be seen as stages of the same process. A murderer cannot be exonerated on the grounds that the solid crystals of poison they dropped into a glass of water were actually not the same thing that their victim drank, while in Harman’s view (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 66) they would have to be different objects. We could thus say that processes of transformation have distinct and vague stages. Our cognitive apparatus prefers distinct stages (‘acorn’, ‘oak’), because it is easier to identify them by their characteristics, to lock onto them and to recall them during new encounters. We therefore tend to dissect reality in ways that would yield as many distinct entities instead of vague ones as possible, and, as Eleanor Rosch has shown, tend to classify them according to a taxonomy of prototypes, so that we produce ‘maximum information with least cognitive effort’ (1978: 28). Vague stages (‘no longer a tadpole, not yet a frog’) pose a problem in that they do not readily succumb to such definition (at least in a language that has words for ‘tadpole’ and ‘frog’, but not for the creature between them). But the fact that such entities are undetermined does not make them random: a birch never emerges after the vague stage that has overtaken an acorn.4 4 This

point resonates with feminist critiques of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s account of femininity (1987: 106ff.). Thus, Rosi Braidotti writes: ‘Although I can see the consistency of Deleuze’s argument – from his global rejection of binary opposition to the rejection of the man/woman dichotomy in favour of the continuum of interacting embodied subjectivities – I am puzzled by the consequences this may have for women … Is the bypassing of gender in favour of a dispersed polysexuality not a very masculine move? … Deleuze’s multiple sexuality assumes that women conform to a masculine model which claims to get rid of sexual difference. What results is the dissolution of the claim to specificity voiced by women … In other words, only a man would idealize sexual neutrality, for he has by right … his own place of enunciation as the subject’ (1991: 120–1). In other words, the de-marginalization of vague states should not evolve into the denial of the endpoints of the continuum on which they stand, nor of the tensions that make it up.

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an ontology of processes and fields The opposition between distinct and vague is thus in the eye of the beholder, it is gaze-dependent and therefore contingent. There is nothing that is ‘distinct’ or ‘vague’ by itself in reality – everything just is as it is at every particular moment. The acceptance of thresholds not as breaking points, but as integral parts of gradients has important consequences. For example, we can argue that though neither rock nor milk is alive, milk is closer to life than rock is, and though neither amoebas nor trees are conscious in the same sense as humans are, trees are closer to this state than amoebas. Chimpanzees are closer to having language than fish – at least as far as we know. Bees may be closer to language than flies. And so on. Where cultural considerations intervene, the situation is even less clear, as, for example, the abortion debate indicates: anti-abortionists claim that the living subject with the right to life appears at the moment of conception; the pro-choice camp relies on the medical definition of humans from the first movements (sixteen weeks). In fact, this was also the view of early Christians, notably St Augustine, as this was the moment when it was thought that the embryo has been endowed with a soul – the distinction between embryo inanimatus and embryo animatus (not endowed or endowed with a soul) was dropped by the Catholic Church only in 1869 (Dunstan 1984). Other moments, such as the appearance of brain activity, or ability to survive outside the womb, have also been proposed. Finally, the Japanese tradition did not consider even newborn babies to be fully right-endowed human subjects, and their deaths were treated as miscarriages rather than real deaths (Harvey 2000: 334–41; LaFleur 1992). This would suggest that even though these thresholds are mind-independent as they occur, their significance for how the transformation process should be understood is not gaze-independent. We get to decide, culturally, which is the moment that separates one distinct stage from another. Nineteenth-century Westerners defined art, music and literature in terms that excluded non-Westerners of having any that mattered. In 1899, the first English-language history of Japanese literature by William Aston was published, and it stated in no uncertain terms that this literature was inferior to Western ones on all counts, as it did not correspond to the definition of literature that he endorsed himself (1977: 24). Just a couple of decades later, translations from Japanese became one major input into the development Pitting vague and distinct states against each other on an either/or basis is itself a binary opposition.

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an ontology of processes and fields of Western modernism. The influence of African art on the transformation of European ways of seeing is similarly paramount, and new practices of contemporary art continue to challenge the views of what art is to this day. In the body of brilliant cultural critique by Adorno, his oft-repeated idea that jazz is not really music stands apart as an embarrassing anachronism (see Goehr 2005: xxv). And some Western philosophers still insist that only their predecessors have ever created thought worthy of being called ‘philosophy’ and taught in their departments. In most such cases, the obstinate clinging to a ‘distinct’ form of a cultural practice does not allow it to evolve and to respond to the new developments in its environment, which is rather counterproductive. Similarly, when we see ‘language’, for example, as situated on a gradient rather than defined strictly in the terms of human natural languages, we open for ourselves a perspective for seeing forms of communication that are currently labelled ‘pre-linguistic’ as lower forms of it, and it also becomes possible to think of more advanced forms of language than those currently available to us. For example, two chatbots created by Facebook developed their own language soon after they were introduced to each other – and were then shut down, as their speech became intimidatingly unintelligible to human observers, while seemingly remaining meaningful for the chatbots (Griffin 2017). While it is to be doubted that this particular language indeed represents an advance over our current linguistic resources, as the domain of its functionality was rather limited, it is nonetheless possible to imagine that, in the future, artificially intelligent creatures will become able to develop new ways of linguistic patterning and categories that are hitherto nonexistent in natural languages in order to tackle the realities they are engaged with – and which may be inaccessible to the human point of view in principle.

Properties and capacities For the purposes of this inquiry, every entity that has a beginning and an end, and is not identical to itself at both these points, is more adequately described as a process than as an object. This does not mean that we cannot or should not talk about ‘things’ or ‘entities’, only that we should always remember that ‘things’ are neither manifestations of higher-level enduring ‘ideas’ nor self-subsistent, actual, gaze-independent objects with varying degrees of autonomy. Thus, whenever we speak of things, we should only do so while 66

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an ontology of processes and fields remembering that language has carved these things out of the flow of reality for us, creating ‘islands of meaning’ (Zerubavel 1993: 6), or chunks of space and/or time, slices of experience that we are henceforth going to see as discrete and self-same objective existents. Of course, this has been done in a way that agrees particularly well with how our cognitive apparatus organizes its sense-data, fits them to our particular speed of being, spatial reach and purpose-oriented gaze. However, as anyone who speaks more than one or two closely related languages knows, different languages perform this operation of carving sometimes in wildly different ways. In this sense, concepts are never innocent. But, as Adorno points out, ‘objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder’ (1973: 5). This position makes even more sense when we forsake the idea of self-subsistent objects and think of things only as causal nodes that have been linguistically carved out of the process of reality for the purpose of describing and analysing them. Of course, these slices do not enter concepts without remainder. This would be inconceivable from the standpoint of an ontology that takes constant flux seriously. On the contrary, it is precisely the fluidity of things that compels us to think of this remainder. However, unlike Harman and other object-oriented ontologists, I find no reason to imagine this remainder as a static, enduring and self-identical essence. We very carefully have to distinguish between approaching a thing on its own terms – which the recognition of its remainder purports to be – and the extraction of this thing from its own reality into an abstract, purely conceptual reality that is only constructed by our minds. However, such a conceptual reality is the only place where a thing can be viewed without its context, and the ‘excess’ or ‘remainder’ may be assigned a self-same, static character.5 This move, I argue, contributes nothing to the explanatory power of our discourse; on the contrary, it exacerbates a host of problems, discussed in previous sections, that can be resolved 5

In an interesting moment of self-determination, J. David Velleman states that a philosopher ‘must specify whether his object of study is the concept or the reality’, and that his own aim is to explain the former, although he has not ‘given up hope of finding that the two are in accord’ (1992: 466–7). His position implies that there has to be only one concept that is in accord with reality, and it exists separately from both the reality and the thinker studying it. This captures rather neatly the set of premises for philosophizing that are at the other extreme from the present inquiry. For me, ‘being in accord with reality’ is the sine qua non of every well-formed concept, while there can be an endless multitude of them for every context of reality, as there can be an endless multitude of possible legitimate perspectives to approach it from. A concept thus encapsulates the relationship between the situation and the perspective from which it is conceptualized.

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an ontology of processes and fields by treating things as unstable multiplicities that only acquire their object-like appearance from a specific, unambiguously human point of view. Mind-independent reality should not be forced into a gazedependent structural mould. At this point, we should ask the question: what are these properties that objects are being defined by? Gabriel Segal distinguishes between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘relational’ properties (2000: 1–2), of which the first are restricted to the qualified object itself, such as chemical constitution, and the second are defined in respect to a background system that involves other things (location, being shorter than Muhammad Ali, or being someone’s nephew). Manuel DeLanda suggests a distinction between properties and capacities (2006: 10–11), of which the latter include non-actualized relationships that the object in question is capable of entering into, even if it never does. In his view, properties are the qualities of a thing that endure in time and thus maintain its identity.6 Capacities, however, are not really properties; they are virtual in the Deleuzian sense of the world, since they can, but need not, be realized.7 An acorn has the capacity of becoming an oak, but it need not – it may end up in a child’s necklace. But it does not have the capacity of becoming a birch. The capacity of becoming an oak is thus an essential characteristic of an acorn, even if not really a property. However, on closer scrutiny we might question whether the distinction between intrinsic and relational properties, or properties and capacities, is in fact so fundamental in the first place. What is the chemical composition of a thing, if not a formula specifying what chemical elements it consists of, and in what proportions? And what is a chemical element, if not a shorthand for a certain atomic structure, that is, a pattern of relations between subatomic components? And what are the constitutive properties of that pattern, if not its capacities to enter into a certain type of chemical relationships with certain other structures of subatomic elements? What else is the colour ‘red’ than the capacity to reflect light at 630–700nm (Bohren

6 Actually,

DeLanda’s position is a bit ambiguous here. He seems to consider these properties to be mind-independent on the one hand (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 64–5), but, on the other, he concedes and indeed emphasizes the scale-dependence of how ‘things’ appear to any observer that encounters them (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 22, 58–9). But if there is no neutral vantage point from which time-enduring properties are disclosed, they should be considered context-specific and thus relational. 7 There are authors, however, such as Dave Elder-Vass, who define ‘properties’ precisely in the sense reserved for ‘capacities’ in DeLanda’s terminology, as synonymous with ‘causal powers’ (2010: 17).

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an ontology of processes and fields and Clothiaux 2006: 213)?8 Can something in this case even be ‘red’ when light never falls on it?9 We can also say that a green maple leaf, reflecting light somewhere at 490–560nm (which both people and horses can see) has the capacity to become red (but not blue), that is, to enter into a certain different light-reflecting relationship with the human retina (but not that of a horse, which does not see red).10 Charles B. Martin has very aptly stated a similar view that all the distinction between ‘structural’ and ‘dispositional’ properties does ‘is pass the metaphysical buck’ (2008: 49), so that the claim that structural properties are ontologically real whereas dispositional properties are not cannot really be justified. This leads us to conclude that the relation of ‘sameness’, posited between individual entities, which is what allows us to refer to them by the same general term, can actually be described as replaceability under specified circumstances – significant overlap, defined from a certain perspective, and not identity. Clerks in the bank can replace each other when they serve customers, but not when they go on a date. In the present terms, this is because the ‘sameness’ stated in the terms of the bank requires only pattern continuity, but not substance continuity, and the clerks have significant overlap with one another from the perspective of the bank customer, but not of their respective partners. 8

This is a simplification, since, in fact, ‘red’ emerges in a more complicated relationship between the surface, light and the perceptual apparatus (Varela et al. 1992: 157ff.). However, this more detailed analysis only reinforces the present argument. 9 On a physicalist view, it evidently can. Thus, for instance, Uriah Kriegel writes of ‘the (genuine) puzzlement over the fact that a bunch of neurons vibrating inside the skull is associated with a yellowish qualitative character [of phenomenal experience] is no different from that surrounding the fact that a bunch of atoms lurching in the void is associated with a yellow colour. It is no more surprising that neurons can underlie yellowishness than that atoms can underlie yellowness’ (2009: 9). Kriegel develops this view from a question posed by Shoemaker, who, although also believing that external objects have colour by themselves (2003), in this particular case (1994: 23) only asks about how phenomenal experiences and scientific theories can be of the same thing. However, what matters here is that neither of Kriegel’s statements actually describes a fact – in reality, ‘yellowness’ emerges only in the process of certain surfaces being perceived and processed by a cognitive apparatus of a certain type, and neither can be claimed to underlie the colour on its own, as argued, for example, by Christopher D. Frith (2007: 134). 10 Of course, colour designations such as ‘red’, ‘green’ and ‘blue’ do not actually correspond to self-same realities, as witnessed by the variativity of colour vocabulary across languages. In Japanese, for example, much of what an English speaker would consider ‘green’ is seen as ‘blue’ (aoi), while the Japanese word for ‘green’ (midori) is reserved for only the lighter and warmer shades. Thus, the green colour of traffic lights is often blue in Japan, while trees are just as green as in English. In Russian, on the other hand, the English range of ‘blue’ is separated into two colour areas designated by different words, which translate as ‘light blue’ (goluboi) and dark blue (sinii).

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an ontology of processes and fields Any individual entity can thus be replaced in some contexts by some other entity with which it is ‘same’ according to a set of criteria – that is, perspective-dependent significant overlap – but there is no entity that can take the place of another in absolutely all contexts, as the law of Leibniz stipulates. It is another matter that some of the properties, such as the individual shapes of tree leaves, may remain completely irrelevant for their whole span of existence, except, of course, for the occasion when someone comes looking for two exactly alike ones, as the opponent of Leibniz did in the famous story.

Relations In his Intimacy or Integrity, Thomas Kasulis discusses the ways in which togetherness is imagined in different cultures, and how this affects their thinking about the broader arrangements of things. The two words of the title, ‘intimacy’ and ‘integrity’ represent the imaginary ends of a conceptual gradient. The first of these is dominant in Asian, the other in Western thought, but neither completely controls the worldview of anyone, and a certain amount of the other is always also present. Intimacy, in Kasulis’s terms, does not designate the closeness of a relationship, but ‘most essentially a sharing of innermost qualities’ (2002: 28), personal as opposed to public, a relation in which ‘the self and other belong together in a way that does not sharply distinguish between the two’ and ‘not generally self-conscious, reflective, or self-illuminating’ (2002: 32). Integrity, on the other hand, is impersonal (2002: 56), characteristic of relationships that do not define its participants, but are independently chosen (2002: 61), and intellectual rather than emotional (2002: 63–4). Typically, we may add, integrity as a baseline characterizes the understanding of relations that relies on an object-oriented ontological discourse, positing the priority of self-contained agentic individuals. Kasulis is careful not to express a preference towards either of the extremes, but shows how both can become functional in dominating a situation, which in any case has a certain dose of both. We could compare the two principles to the opposing aesthetics of such architects as Le Corbusier and Friedensreich Hundertwasser: Le Corbusier’s straight lines and regular shapes and his general disregard for the landscape in which a building is supposed to stand are at the other extreme from Hundertwasser’s flexibility, adaptation to and blending with the environment, variativity of forms, rejection of straight lines as well as idiosyncratic, creative, ad hoc solutions to 70

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an ontology of processes and fields different particular problems. Nonetheless, Le Corbusier also had to take factors such as the movement of daylight into account, while Hundertwasser needed to base his buildings on structures that would be sufficiently geometrical not to collapse. In short, intimacy- and integrity-based relations correspond roughly to ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ relations as DeLanda uses the terms: entering into an intimacy-based relation changes the participants and will be defining them henceforth, while integrity-based relations can be entered and exited at will. The strength of the approach of Kasulis as opposed to that of DeLanda lies in the fact that his paradigm is a gradient, while DeLanda’s is a binary opposition. In empirical reality, all relationships affect their participants to a certain degree, and they nonetheless preserve their status in them, or otherwise we would speak about them merging into a new unity rather than being in relation to each other. This also means that each relationship can be described both as intrinsic and extrinsic, depending on the perspective we are observing it from. As we saw in the case of bank clerks at work and on a date, the same person can have different types of relationships. But it is entirely possible for a clerk and a customer to flirt with each other, as it is for someone to have many successive dates with different people without even a thought of entering any serious commitment. This is why the paradigmatic case of a relation is best described as membranic. In the course of evolution, a special type of biological entity called the membrane developed to separate two areas from each other, making it possible for cells and cellular life to emerge. Membranes are just a few nanometers thick and may contain just a couple of molecular layers, and they consist of a type of chemical compound called lipids, which are insoluble in water, and can therefore encapsulate small amounts of water. This creates the preconditions for an internal process, if organic compounds necessary for it are contained in that water. Membranes can open up to the extent that they let certain alien bodies through (such as minimal amounts of food), but they hold up to other alien bodies, which the cell would not be able to digest. It is also the specific structure of the membranes of brain cells that makes the transmission of information, in the shape of electric signals, possible between them (Purves et al. 2004: 79ff.). Some membranes, like those of skin cells, are tough and much less permeable than others – again, a gradient. For our metaphoric view of membranes, it is important to note that what has permeated through them should henceforth be considered a part of the stuff that the cell consists of. Similarly, when we eat, 71

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an ontology of processes and fields then what we eat becomes a part of us and continues to exist only as us, while our bodies reject or eject what cannot be absorbed. Biosemioticians have pointed out that together with this primary condition for the emergence of life, meaning also makes its first appearance: the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and the necessity to distinguish what enters and what does not produces a primary act of coding and decoding, as well as the prototype of what will at a much later stage of evolution develop into the distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’ – in other words, semiotic relations begin at the moment when organic functions appear (Kull et al. 2011: 16). This is an important aspect, which should be transposed onto the metaphoric idea of membranic relationships: in each of these, an element of communication is involved, which in turn implies a certain minimal code. Each of the participants of the relation constitutes their own perspective, from which the relation is viewed. There is a well-known series of photos in which a father is throwing his child into the air, and the mother is watching: the photo where the child is lowest and very safe is how the father views the situation; the next one, with the child a bit higher up, is how it is in physical reality; the third, where the child is quite high in the air but still quite safe, is how the child sees it; and the final one, where the child is thrown so high as to be in imminent danger, represents the view of the mother. This is how every relation appears to its participants, and in practice no one ever sees it in a neutral way. Thus, every relation, even the most intimately desired one, always entails a certain degree of tension. This is not meant in a negative sense, at least not necessarily: attraction is a form of tension just as repulsion is. Pure attraction would result in the collusion of the relata, of course, and pure repulsion would move them away from each other, but in empirical situations a relation is never constituted by two relata in a vacuum. People who do not like each other may be forced to work on a common project, and people who do like each other may be forced apart by a multitude of circumstances. A feeling of hatred may tie adversaries together almost as strongly as love unites a couple. A relation, to sum it up, is the actual enactment of a bundle of compatible capacities that two entities have, and when we want to talk about these capacities abstractly, we always resort to our conceptual abstractions of these, extracting them from actually occurring relations.

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an ontology of processes and fields

Matter as emergence Based on the discussion so far, it seems fair to say that all properties, both intrinsic and relational, are in their conceptual structure not different from capacities as they can be described in relationindependent terms only linguistically, but actually occur (if they do) only in relations. This fundamental relatedness as a precondition of the existence of entities is also compatible with certain theories in recent physics that assert that particles, imagined as analogical to self-identical and continuous material objects, only infinitely smaller in size, do not actually exist – ‘they are effectively emergent forms of organisation displaying particle-like behaviour’ (Lawson 2019: 43) rather than such objects – and a quantum field, described in terms of ‘operators’, ‘states’ and ‘observables’ rather than tangible components (Friebe et al. 2018: 225), presents us with a more appropriate picture of the basic level of being than an empty space populated by minuscule objects. Indeed, the expression ‘field ontology’ is normally used as shorthand for ‘quantum field ontology’, a theory developed in ongoing discussion (Kuhlmann et al. 2002). However, I would like to claim this term for a broader use. Indeed, as contemporary physics tells us, the most basic level of being can be most appropriately described as a field; it should be considered at least puzzling to assert that somehow, on higher levels, mind-independent forms of being emerge out of these fields that correspond to the objects most conveniently perceived by the human cognitive apparatus. Perhaps we would do better by adopting a more radical relativization of perspective when we try to achieve a non-anthropocentric point of view for the description of the entire reality process and see it as relational on all levels, not only the most basic one. Of course, only a certain range of relation-entering options, Delanda’s ‘associated possibility space’ (DeLanda and Harman 2017: 65), is present at each point and level of the reality process. Just as certain animals can only have offspring with a certain range of other animals, we can well imagine a certain valence of interactions for anything, down to the ground level. And yet it is always a range of probabilities that characterizes a minimal instance of being, not a list of properties, as it were. Quantum field theory tells us that there indeed exists a granularity in nature, just as the ancient atomists thought (Rovelli 2016: 111), except that these grains are not selfidentical, minimally material entities, but events, transitions between fields, encounters and the participants of these encounters do not 73

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an ontology of processes and fields exist outside them at all. Therefore, as Carlo Rovelli summarizes the issue, for the contemporary physicist ‘there are no longer particles which move in space with the passage of time, but quantum fields whose elementary events happen in spacetime’ (2016: 110), whereas ‘[a]t an extremely small scale, space is a fluctuating swarm of quanta of gravity which act upon each other … Physical space is the fabric resulting from the ceaseless swarming of this web of relations’ (2016: 150). Moreover: We must not think of time as if there were a great cosmic clock that marks the life of the universe … At the extremely small scale of the quanta of space, the dance of nature does not develop to the rhythm kept by the baton of a single orchestral conductor: every process dances independently with its neighbours, following its own rhythm. The passing of time is intrinsic to the world, it is born of the world itself, out of the relations between quantum events which are the world and which themselves generate their own time. (2016: 153–4).

Philosophically, therefore, we could perhaps think of these minimal events simply as intersections of the flows of being. They are neither strictly material nor, of course, mental or ideal – both what we call ‘matter’ and ‘mind’ arise only in their interaction. Ground-level reality is consequently thus neither necessarily reducible to minimal units of substance, as materialism would have it, nor a manifestation of higher-level ideas or generative laws, as different strands of idealism from Plato to structural ontic realism propose, nor is it an interplay of the two, as suggested by dualist theories: it does not have to be described as any of these – that is, it does not fit at all into the terms of the dichotomy of matter and ideas. A similar view is expressed by Elizabeth Grosz, who writes: I do not want to privilege ideality over materiality, but to think them together, as fundamentally connected and incapable of each being what it is without the other to direct and support it. Ideality frames, directs, and makes meaning from materiality; materiality carries ideality and is never free of the incorporeal forms that constitute and orient it as material. (2017: 12)

I would like to go even a bit still further and argue that ‘materiality’ and ‘ideality’ – as shorthand for lists of properties that all entities we think of as matter and ideas should necessarily have – are themselves not even intertwined ontological primitives, but emergent properties of persistent patterns of the configurations of the minimal instances 74

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an ontology of processes and fields of being.11 After all, we know that solidity is an emergent property of structures, rather than characteristic of the components of these structures, which can also relate to each other in patterns that, from our point of view, are perceivable as liquids or gases. Why not think of ‘materiality’ as such in the same way?

Minimal instances of being What we can take with us from the debates of contemporary physics, I think, is that we cannot and also do not actually need to spell out what these minimal occurrences of being ‘essentially’ are – it should suffice to say that at any particular instant, it would, in principle, be possible to indicate any point in the boundless pluridimensional spacetime and assert that there is a way how being occurs at that very instant, at that very point (even if there is no universal enduring system of coordinates for a map to put it on). This way how is precisely what I mean by a ‘minimal instance of being’. We can never access what is minimal and dimensionless and it can therefore only be judged by the emergent causal effects that take place on the next levels. The inherent dynamism of the reality flux entails the continuous reconstitution of the minimal instances of being as they are described in quantum theory: their self-identity is momentary, which is why, fundamentally, the same pertains to any higher-level entities that are actually available to us.12 This is not to be confused with an imaginary life-span – the events on a quantum field are not yet ‘entities’ themselves, but encounters, intersections of directednesses and the energetic charges that characterize them can be seen as the traces of the causal chains that have resulted in 11 Even

mass, without which it is difficult to imagine any materiality, is a relatively late arrival in the history of our universe – not in our contemporary measurements of time, of course, in which the so-called Planck epoch only lasted about 10-43 seconds, but in terms of temperature drop, as it fell from the astounding 1032 to a mere 104 degrees on the Kelvin scale, that is, cooled down to the level where what we call subatomic particles started to form. 12 Whitehead takes a more conservative view on this and warns us that we ‘must not think of the world as ultimately built up of event-particles’ or ‘instantaneous point-flashes’ (2015: 110, 111), because he sees them as abstractions, liminal points that can only be approached by zooming in on what takes place, but never actually reached. But this implicitly presumes that our own perspective, complete with its limitations, is inherently the one from which the discourse about being should be articulated. However, if we want to grant real dimensionlessness to the ‘now’ on the continuum of the time-arrow, which has been the standard view since Aristotle, I don’t see why the same should not be applicable to an identifiable point in space as seen in such a ‘now’.

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an ontology of processes and fields them – chains that reach into the past and, accordingly, also define a spectrum of possible futures to which they can contribute. We could think of the minimal instance of being itself as a pure charge, or a differential of its energetic vector at an exact moment. In a philosophical rather than physical sense, such a charge could be seen to determine a preferred direction of successive being-instances following it on an existential trajectory, and would also specify the available avenues of openness towards other being-instances. That is, these charges determine to which other points any one of them can link itself and how. It is a concomitant (and, I believe, mistaken) view of object-centred ontological approaches that randomness is somehow primary and patterns of any level only emerge as a result of an act of organization of primordial minimal ‘things’. Minimal instances of being, as understood here, are neither isolated individuals, nor tightly fixed in their contexts. The charges they carry consist in a range of potential connections, a sort of minimal set of possible futures, which guide their entrance into patterns when other minimal instances with a complementary range of connections are available. I would like to use the term valence for this exclusive range of possible connections that a minimal instance of being (and, by proxy, an emergent configuration of them) can have to others, in the sense in which this word is used across a range of disciplines from chemistry to linguistics,13 and to suggest that this valence is, in principle, another way to designate its charge. Unlike other disciplines using the term, however, I would like to distinguish between positive and negative valence; that is, in addition to attraction, I also consider active avoidance of certain others to be a form of valence. For example, groups that thrive on hate may disperse if the object of their hatred disappears. Valence comes in degrees, so that certain others are more attractive among the ‘liked’ ones, and certain others more repulsive in the ‘disliked’ category. No relation of valence between two instances of being occurs only in the state of complete indifference. As none of the points is ever isolated from all others, they form entities – normally thought of as ‘things’ – that is, configurations, patterns or networks, which have (on various levels) different emergent causal properties, including their particular chronotope and range of perspectives from which various views of other configurations become possible.14 Although I think it is misleading to call 13 Note

that this usage differs slightly from the sense in which Kurt Lewin used this term in his influential theory, for whom valence is a characteristic of a point on a field, not of an entity on it (1936: 218). 14 Although this view is more characteristic of Asian thought, as a minority view it also

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an ontology of processes and fields such configurations, which include ‘fire’ or ‘the Dutch East India Company’, objects, as Graham Harman does, because of the connotations of objectivity, self-sameness and subject-object distinction, it would certainly be all right to call them entities in the present qualified sense – segments of reality that have been extracted from it and appear, from at least one certain perspective, to be coherent wholes with a perceivable existence span. They should nonetheless not be thought of as distinct and bounded, but as something more akin to nodes in networks, always blending into other entities in the grey areas on their margins (regardless of whether our perceptual apparatus can capture such blending). Humans differ from many other types of entities here in the sense that we have the capacity to transcend our natural range of perspectives and, even though unable to directly experience the reality of someone very different from ourselves, at least admit that such experience is possible. This also allows us to realize that the view that opens from our own point of view is not the only and ‘natural’ one, but just a range among others, determined by the valences by which we, as entities, are configured – a range, however, which we can artificially enhance with microscopes, telescopes and other technological devices. Depending on the perspective we adopt, we can view the same ground-level existent-points as parts of different-level patterns, from a carbon atom, to a biological cell, to a spleen, to an individual organism/person, to a project team, to a nation, humankind, or what we imagine as the universe. And we need different explanatory discourses for making sense of any of these levels. The connectivity of individual points can be called their expressivity: the formation of relations takes into account the traces retained in the individual loads and simultaneously alters the trajectories reaching into the potential futures. As Steven Shaviro puts it: [E]very entity becomes what it is by ‘appropriating’ what is left behind by other entities that precede it. Most crucially, an entity perpetuates itself by appropriating its own prior states of existence. But an entity also appropriates other entities in its surroundings. It picks up whatever it encounters: whatever affects it, or provides conditions or resources for its own continued existence. (2015a: 16–17) has a long history in the West. It can be traced as far back as fragment 10 (according to the Diels-Kranz edition) of Heraclitus, who terms such configurations syllapses, from syllambáno, ‘to bring together; to understand’. For Heraclitus, this seems to indicate the primary way the being of entities takes place. It is also notable how Heraclitus has conflated the coming together of elements with the understandability of the resultant entity, its availability for conceptualization.

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an ontology of processes and fields Some of such spatial (and temporal) relations can be more stable, others more evanescent. Some traces of the past evaporate and some encounters remain fleeting, others produce more lasting characteristics and relationships, and some end up, as Andrew Abbott puts it, as ‘encoding … sometimes in bodies, sometimes in memories, sometimes in records, and sometimes simply in the shape of social interconnection in the moment’ (2016: 75), and even more than that, sometimes such encodings persist in the curves of mountain ranges that reflect the tectonic shifts of the past, and sometimes in the genetic predilections of individuals whose life courses these may significantly affect. And each time configurations enter into relations with one another, they necessarily open up, at least minimally, as atoms do when they form molecules. These relations, by themselves, are nothing but what they are in their immediate reality – singular and unrepeatable in their immediacy and completeness, as is each falling in love or personal hatred. They can, however, be described in patterns, abstract representations, which are themselves second-level relationships between the primary relation and a hypothetical observing party, the ‘third-person perspective’ or the carrier of ‘objectivity’. Such an observer, should it exist in reality, would of course also be reducible to a bundle of relationships (with its observables). More often, however, we posit this point of view in an abstract space that has no actual correlate in the real world.

Field ontology Some of the patterns that describe actual relations are recurrent in time, others occur repeatedly in space. We can thus posit yet another level of relations – between patterns. In the discussion of diseases in Chapter 1, I called them ‘metapatterns’, but the same kind of generalization is at work in terms such as ‘concepts’ and ‘natural kinds’, which credit themselves with a more fundamentally entrenched status and thus obscure their dependence on lower-level processes. A relation of sufficient similarity between primary patterns is what, in usual parlance, allows us to categorize two different entities under the same general concept. We deem the similarity sufficient when these patterns correlate with such emergent capacities that give the entities comparable causal efficacy. It should again be noted that the significance of the overlap depends on the perspective of the observer. From all of this, it does not follow that the proposed ontology would not have a place for one of the core concepts of the metaphysics 78

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an ontology of processes and fields of objects, namely Harman’s ‘excess’, Adorno’s ‘remainder’, or the in-itself-ness of the Kantian Ding an sich. This excess that is particular to ‘things’, above and beyond the actual relationships that characterize them, is normally thought of in static terms, as their self-sameness. However, within the present ontological framework, it seems much more natural to think of this excess, too, in dynamic terms – as a field.15 In the context of the present inquiry, this term stands for a space of constitutive tensions, both negative and positive (attractions and repulsions of various types) between particular elements or positions, which have come together so that emergent capacities are likely to appear. A position refers here to a point on the field that can be taken by different entities that have little or no significant overlap except for their capacity to occur in that position, while an element is something with at least noticeable pattern continuity. The metaphor of ‘field’ has, of course, a long history in the social sciences and the humanities going back to the moment following the discoveries of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. A decisive metaphor-building potential was given to it by Ernst Cassirer, in a book originally published in 1936: The field is not a ‘thing’, it is a system of effects (Wirkungen), and from this system no individual element can be isolated and retained as permanent, as being ‘identical with itself’ through the course of time. The individual electron no longer has any substantiality in the sense that it per se est et per se concipitur; it ‘exists’ only in its relation to the field, as a ‘singular location’ in it. Since Faraday the concept of ‘lines of force’ has replaced and pushed aside the concept of the persisting thing on which classical mechanics was constructed. (1956: 178)

While Cassirer here is still addressing the domain of physics, the implications for the use of the term in social sciences are obvious. During the following decades, ‘field’ has been given a variety of meanings depending on the discipline, which, as noted by John Levi Martin in his detailed critical account of the history of its uses (predominantly in the social science context), share three common features: a field is an analytical space in which the studied phenomena 15 Readers

familiar with the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) will recognize a certain affinity of the concept as it is used here with his basho ‘place’, which Nishida describes, on the elementary level, as the locus of existence where the ‘absolutely contradictory self-identity’ of beings is formed in mutual determination. Nishida then goes on to ground this existence in ‘absolute nothing’. (For a lucid exposition of his thought, see Kasulis 2018: 464ff.) Nishida’s basho is nonetheless the locus where entities take place and relate to each other, while in the present context the term ‘field’ refers to the internal field of constitutive tensions that lets us speak of any entifiable individual at all.

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an ontology of processes and fields are positioned, it is a pattern of organization of forces and, finally, it is an arena of contestation, a battlefield (2003: 28). Indeed, these three features can together be considered as the commonality between various uses of the term, which has proved its efficiency in different disciplines, from the sociology of Kurt Lewin (1936, 1951, 1997), Pierre Bourdieu (1993; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) and Fligstein and McAdam (2012), to psychology, where it has been used by authors such as James J. Gibson (1986), Aron Gurwitsch (2010), Carl Rogers (1947), Donald Snygg and Arthur Combs (1949; Combs 2006) and, finally, even certain theories of mind advocated by neuroscience (Libet 1996, 2006). A detailed discussion and comparison of all these ‘field’ studies will have to remain beyond the purview of this inquiry, but their proliferation alone should indicate the crossdisciplinary productivity of this term. In an effort to synthesize these traditions, the term will here be used in a somewhat broader sense that would be applicable for all levels of phenomena, from the ground level of being, to the organization of inorganic matter, to the consciousness of an individual, to large social processes and phenomena. As said, I understand a field as a space of constitutive tensions, but also of partially determined undecidedness, of a chaos struggling to organize itself and an order constantly dismantling itself, with different structuring principles or forces of varying, but often comparable strength vying for control of this process. These principles are not manifestations of causes external to the field, however, but emergent within its borders, even if they mostly fall under metapatterns of broader validity. A field is in constant dynamism, and therefore better envisaged as a momentary cross-section of a process than as a more or less self-same environment within which elements move around according to its rules. Each move of an ‘element’ alters the balance of tensions on that field somewhat, even if this does not yield a significant transformation at any time soon. Each ‘element’, moreover, is not a self-same entity, but an abstraction (extraction), a designator for a superficial unity that is itself to be described as a field on a lower level as well, and is partially determined by its position on the field in addition to its own history and internal tensions. It has to be noted immediately that a field, as posited here, is not co-dimensional with those actual occurrences in physical reality that it is a model of – whenever we discuss entities as elements of a field, the relations they have between them are (unlike in physics) not the representations of their actual spatiotemporal organization. For example, in a political situation, when power centres in state capitals 80

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an ontology of processes and fields talk to each other, they form a field, whereby those engaged in a more intense dialogue are closer to each other than those driven to the margins, and some, despite the relevance of the process for them, may not be included in the field at all. A field is thus not a map or a picture of the situation, but an organizational pattern of relations. It most certainly is not a self-identical object of some kind, which would ‘manifest’ itself in the process of reality, or ‘determine’ the trajectory of becoming for individual entities. When we speak about the ‘inner life’ of people – or other entities, for that matter – we are referring to the ‘field’ behind the flattened image they present to us. From another angle, the field is what makes gradual pattern and substance modification possible: since it is by definition unbalanced, a field has to constantly shift its shape, and its shifts are reflected in the ways it appears as an image. And yet, a field is neither a closed entity, a pack of cards that can be arranged in many different, though still numbered ways, nor like a waiting room of a large railway station, structured, but open to anyone who enters. Its structure is susceptible to change as it undergoes pattern modification, and its contents/components are being renewed through substance modification. To use a phrase coined by Brook A. Ziporyn, a field takes place as ‘constitutive openness to alterity’ (2016: 159) – its openness to what it is not is precisely the constitutive feature of the field as it is. A complete and objective view of any field – not to mention understanding – is impossible for two reasons: it does not stay selfidentical for longer than any dimensionless now-moment, and it is not available as a whole to an outside gaze nor even to itself. There simply is no identifiable ‘self’ that could legitimately oppose itself to the rest of the field. Thus, when I speak of an entity, what I have in mind is a bundle of processes that (usually) have heterogeneous origins, but that overlap significantly in spacetime and produce effects predominantly influencing each other for a certain duration. A cross-section of any such entity at a particular moment is another way to describe a field. To sum up: anything we call a ‘thing’ is already a multiplicity, organized by a pattern, which is observable from some particular vantage point, but not necessarily from others, at least not in the same way. The actual causal efficiency of a ‘thing’ and its capacities to relate to other entities are always emergent from the ground level up. ‘A mug’ and ‘an army’ are not fundamentally different in this respect. On the other hand, whatever is organized distinctly and stably enough to merit the designation of a ‘thing’ from some particular vantage point is nonetheless never stabilized into permanence, at least not from 81

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an ontology of processes and fields some other particular vantage point, possibly one more in agreement with its own speed of being as defined by meaningful encounters with other ‘things’.16 In this sense, it might be said to resemble a Deleuzian multiplicity. A field is never in complete balance, nor ever without any (while still providing the foundation of what appears as a ‘thing’ to its others). A certain propensity towards an internal balance as well as an inclination to disrupt this balance, whenever some form of it has been achieved, are both always simultaneously characteristic of any field.17 For example, a mountain range instantiates the way in which tectonic shifts, differences in temperature above and below ground, as well as the erosive capacity of life-forms come together in a long-term process that may look like stability from the human point of view, but is nonetheless in perpetual, albeit extremely slow, change (again, slow only from our point of view). A living organism functions always as a battleground of different smaller bodies, themselves also multiplicities, some of them organic, others not. The field of consciousness is another example of a process of constant internal controversy, and, similarly, ‘society’ is primarily a term that encompasses, as an entifiable, unitary process, all the various types of activity involving both humans and nonhumans that characterize their collaboration as well as struggles for survival and/or domination. If we need a general name for the excess that characterizes an entity, but always retreats from our perception and is never wholly accessible in its entirety to any of its others, it is this ‘field’.

What is a process? The question of what allows us to distinguish a particular process from the general flux of reality has been identified by Johanna Seibt the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard, there is a moving scene (spoiler alert!) where the protagonist, the Nobel-prize winning mathematician John Nash, played brilliantly by Russell Crowe, recognizes that he has schizophrenia because the hallucinatory figures that have been accompanying him throughout the years never change, never get older, even when he himself does. What we should note, however, is that these hallucinations satisfy the definition of substances put forward by Ruth Garrett Millikan as ‘things that retain their properties, hence potentials for use, over numerous encounters with them’ (2000: 2) better than anything that actually exists mind-independently. 17 Fukuoka Shin’ichi, in his discussion of Rudolf Schönheimer’s work on metabolism, defines life as ‘an order which, in order to maintain itself, must constantly disrupt itself’ (2007: 166). I think that, in a broader sense, the same can be said of all existence, especially if we take different timescales into account and concede that the order that is being maintained does not have to remain structurally the same throughout the process. 16 In

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an ontology of processes and fields as one of the principal challenges of process ontology (2015, 2018). Indeed, if being in the final analysis boils down to instantaneous dimensionless minimal instances, and all the higher levels of existence consist in patterns of their organization and, furthermore, each of these is connected to at least some others, which are connected to yet others, it seems logical to assume that the only whole that emerges from this scheme is an interconnected totality, even if the relations between the most distant elements of this whole are so minimal that they are almost completely irrelevant to each other. On what grounds can we speak of distinct processes in this context, and classify sets of processes into groups the members of which are primarily related to each other, as opposed to groups the members of which are parts of a bigger whole? How can we make a distinction between a singular process and the flux of reality as a whole without concomitant reification or presenting them as twin brothers of the ‘objects’ of traditional ontological discourses? A simple answer to this question would be that we cannot: whether two things are parts of a whole, or separate entities depends, of course, on the vantage point. But this is not quite enough. Why are they parts? Why not just components or aspects of a single process, pure and simple? A good starting point to approach this issue might be the empirically observable degrees of permeability of different membranic relations. Sea waves lashing against a rock might get the better of it over centuries, but sand absorbs their water quickly, without offering much resistance, even though, substance-wise, sand and the rock might have quite a significant overlap in their constitution. Obviously, the less permeable the membranic exterior, the more justified it seems to be to separate what is going on behind it into a distinct process. But even if there is no boundary, lightly permeable or not, this view suggests to us a criterion of what can appropriately be designated as a distinct process. No process goes on as a single causal flow; all of them rely to some extent on input from their outside and also produce output that branches off from their imaginary centre of gravity. It seems, therefore, that one plausible way to identify a distinct process is to see one in a bundle of causal chains that regularly or primarily produce output that serves as necessary input for another process in that same bundle. A factory, for example, in which different lines produce details that are necessary for other lines, and are finally assembled into a finished product at a place that does not produce any details itself, embodies one production process – even if the production of certain details, or quality control, 83

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an ontology of processes and fields or research is outsourced to another legal entity, the process remains unified. A plant that absorbs nutrients from the soil and converts sunlight into energy by different parts, and ensures its procreation by yet others, is again a single process, as all these parts are dependent on each other. While examples like this leave the impression that each single thing in the traditional object-oriented sense would probably correspond to one process and each single process to one thing, this is not so at all. In object-oriented terms, for example, we would consider zooxanthellae, a certain species of unicellular algae responsible for the colour we see in coral reefs, to be separate entities from the corals they inhabit – and yet they ‘live, photosynthesize and reproduce inside the cells of the coral animal’ (Osborne 2000: 323) and are essential to the normal functioning of the latter. At the other extreme, bee colonies have been likened to single vertebrate animals since the nineteenth century; in 1911, William Morton Wheeler coined the term ‘superorganism’ to designate a bee colony, ‘an indivisible whole, a single integrated living organism’, a unity, with single insects, technically separate beings, only forming composing elements of it, without having an independent status of their own (Tautz 2008: 3). ‘The tendency of ‘independent’ life is to bind together and re-emerge in a new wholeness at a higher, larger level of organization’, writes Lynn Margulis (2001: 15), and what remains to be asked is only why we should consider the separate organisms, observable as distinct entities only on the lower, disorganized, and not always even empirically available level, to be the paradigmatic forms of their existence. What I would thus like to propose as the criterion by which to single out a distinct process is that it corresponds to an entifiable unity, a technical term signifying a domain surrounded by an imaginary membranic boundary, which grants a degree of internality to the processes occurring within it, as well as a certain capacity to initiate or limit its relations with its outside and thereby to participate in causal chains. Let us now look at the building blocks of this definition one by one. A domain, in this view, is any set of particulars, whose ranges of possible futures have significant overlap or involve persistent relations with each other. These particulars (each of them again analysable, from a different perspective, as a bundle of processes, of course) may be adjacent to each other and constitute a spatial arrangement, but they need not be. The relations between them may be amicable and collaborative, but also competitive or even downright hostile, such as the politics of a country that constantly 84

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an ontology of processes and fields defines itself in opposition to a neighbour. They do not even need to actually relate to each other; an overlap in their ranges of possible futures is quite sufficient. For example, when someone enrolls in the biology department of a university, they become an element of a process that involves a multitude of people, books, instruments and white mice they currently know nothing about, and will only ever come into contact with some of these. The idea of domain comes naturally to an effort to theorize in a processual vein. For example, the concept bears a certain resemblance to the term ‘ecology’ as used in the tradition of the Chicago School of sociology and defined by Andrew Abbott as ‘a set of actors, a set of locations and a set of links between the two’ (2016: 43). Locations here refer not only or not even primarily to actual places, but to the sites of action and mutual engagement of actors – for example, in state politics the ‘locations’ are debates, policies and decisions. But it is the links that provide the structural continuity to the ecology, because they are what turn certain slices of experience into ‘locations’ and, more importantly, cast particular persons in the role of actors. In Abbott’s view, ecologies so defined should take, in a processual paradigm, the place that previous, object-oriented traditions of sociological research allocate either to persistent social structures or to groups of autonomous rational individuals who constantly set up and dismantle social institutions in their mutual engagement. While the urgency of the climate crisis has made the term ‘ecology’ currently somewhat misplaced when used, for example, to describe the university world or the state, Abbott’s conceptual apparatus certainly provides a workable toolkit for the processual analysis of social phenomena, in particular, for the relationships between different ‘ecologies’ and their occasionally conflicting temporal regimes. Nevertheless, there are also important differences. First of all, Abbott’s actors are all human, or at least have to be conscious and goal-oriented, while in the domains, as proposed here, the processes where change originates do not need to be. Second, for some reason, in Abbott’s ecologies only one type of ecology-specific linkage is allowed between the actors and the locations, while in domains such connections can be manifold. Finally, in the model of ecologies everything irrelevant is discarded, while in the domains every particular with an overlap in possible futures is included, as the impetus for change may often come from the least expected direction. As an example of a domain, we could thus view the set of all the commuters residing in a particular city and its outskirts, who may theoretically bump into each other at some point during their day, 85

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an ontology of processes and fields and everything they are engaged with in the process of commuting. Another example might be anything floating in the interconnected seas and oceans of the world, including the innumerable molecules of water. While we can summarily describe a domain in this manner, its being is not reducible to any single perspective from which it is disclosed. All the particulars that are involved in the process are not necessarily even observable from one single vantage point. We may certainly think of a view that contains all the commuting inhabitants of a geographical area, for example, an electronic map where they appear as blinking red dots. But even so, the germs they carry remain invisible to this perspective, although these certainly participate in the process and may provide substantial input to it by confining an amount of the commuters to hospitals and, as we now know, even shutting the whole system temporarily down. Similarly, whales and water molecules are only observable from fairly different vantage points.

Internality The terms ‘internality’ and ‘initiation/limitation’ of relations with the ‘outside’, used above in the definition of a particular process, do not indicate that there is a central commanding point in any process, nor that the process is aware of itself. What I mean by internality is perhaps best understood if we consider the difference between a domain (a set of particulars with overlapping possible futures) and a field (a space of constitutive tensions), and picture this not as a binary, but as a gradient, so that there can be more and less internality in a bounded situation. Let us take the example of (social) groups. Theorists distinguish between aggregative groups, which are made up of elements sharing a distinctive quality (such as all college graduates, or all speakers of Urdu), and corporate groups, which function like fields in that they are defined by a pattern or structure and are often involved in the pursuit of common goals. Corporate groups may, but need not, involve power relations, and are sometimes additionally characterized as persistent regardless of the composition of their membership, that is to say, some members can exit and others enter and the group still remains the same.18 It is easy to see how the corporateness of a group is a matter 18 This

usage follows Tollefsen (2015), but the distinction is made, with slightly different definitions and terms, by group theorists generally, thus Peter French distinguishes between ‘aggregate’ and ‘conglomerate’ collectivities (1984), Dwight Newman between ‘sets’ and ‘collectivities’ (2011), etc.

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an ontology of processes and fields of degree: soldiers living in barracks are subjected to much more regulated joint routines and much tighter forms of behaviour control than, say, the regular buyers and sellers at a flea market that meets once week or a month. And yet, both these groups would conform to the definition of a social group given by Iris Marion Young: A social group is a collective of persons differentiated from at least one other group by cultural forms, practices, or way of life. Members of a group have a specific affinity with one another because of their similar experience or way of life, which prompts them to associate with one another more than with those not identified with the group, or in a different way. Groups are an expression of social relations; a group exists only in relation to at least one other group. Group identification arises, that is, in the encounter and interaction between social collectivities that experience some differences in their way of life and forms of association, even if they also regard themselves as belonging to the same society. (1990: 43)

But Young’s definition is no longer applicable (nor is it meant to be) for ‘imagined communities’ as defined by Benedict Anderson, or groups of people such as nations, the members of even the smallest of which ‘will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (2006: 6). Note that the communion does not necessarily signify the ‘specific affinity’ of Young – members of an imagined community may hate each other for a number of reasons, such as their political views or lifestyle preferences, and yet be significantly affected in their self-perception by their shared membership in the group. Therefore, nations, in spite of being ‘imagined’ as communities and not really functional ones, are still not merely aggregative groups, even though they are not strictly corporate ones. But not only can social groups be distributed along the axis leading from ‘aggregative’ domains to ‘corporate’ fields: a group can also move on that axis. For example, when the defining characteristic of an aggregative group, such as skin colour or sexual orientation, is suddenly picked up by other more powerful groups as a reason for discrimination, the aggregative group may turn either into a more corporate community, the members of which offer silent support to each other, or even into an openly organized civil rights movement. Conversely, the alumni of a certain class, who were very close to each other during their studies, may initially come together on an annual basis after graduation, but then, little by little, let that membership – which they still assert whenever it becomes relevant – fade into the 87

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an ontology of processes and fields margins of their CVs, as their shared experiences come to mean less and less for their actual present lives and, in particular, occasions for joint action become rarer and rarer. What this example shows is that, in order to manifest an entifiable unity, a process needs to have a degree of internality in that its different subprocesses (such as members of a social group) relate to each other and are constituted by each other. A group of processes, the output of each of which serves as a significant source of input to one or many of the others in that group, can again be called a single process on the next level. Or conversely: when we take apart a single process so that the result makes sense analytically, the result is a set of subprocesses that primarily interact with one another. A forest, to take another example, is a coherent process precisely because what happens in the forest stays in the forest, literally. Others – raindrops, birds, hunters – may enter the forest and leave it, but most of what is going on in its ecosystem consists in processes that rely on each other and produce output for each other. As environmentalists like to put it, ‘in living systems, one species’ waste is always another species’ food’ (Litfin 2012: 424). In this sense, the question of how many trees make up a forest is posed mistakenly: it is not the number of trees that counts, but the ability of the interrelated processes to provide for a joint symbiotic continuity that can comfortably go on, undisturbed by temporary incursions from the outside, unless these involve multiple forest harvesters and a crew in the employ of a greedy and eco-unfriendly capitalist. There is no such process, of course, that would be totally contained by impermeable borders, and some external input may even be of vital importance, as food is to the body. What passes through the boundaries that surround it may, in time, even come to change its course decisively (for example, when you contact a viral infection), but until that happens, there is more significant overlap between the components inside its boundaries than with any other processes outside it. Internality thus comprises such relations as collaboration, mutual dependence, but also constitutive tension and competition between subprocesses. All in all, we may assert that the degree of internality that allows us to speak about a particular process also endows it with its own perspective, or a set of parameters that determine what is being entified and how. The concept of internality allows us to distinguish, in a newly meaningful way, between two different forms of change, which I would like to call reorganization and transformation: the first of these implies a reconfiguration of the processes within the boundaries 88

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an ontology of processes and fields in a new way; the second, however, involves a reconfiguration of the boundaries that hold the internality together. A reorganization of sections and shelves in a supermarket exemplifies the first type, while a transformation of a bookstore into a café that also sells books is an instance of the second. This does not mean that reorganizations might not produce very significant changes, as when synthetic diamonds are created with the help of the HPHT process, by altering through high pressure and high temperature the structures connecting the molecules of coal. On the other hand, the idea of transformation allows us to think of processes that always have significant overlap with their immediately previous stages, but may end up having almost none at all, at least not any significant shared features, with some much earlier ones. An idea of continuity that corresponds to this criterion, but has neither substance nor pattern continuity as defined in Chapter 1 could be called processual continuity, a chain of modifications that end up substituting the substance and changing the pattern to the point of unrecognizability. And yet, this kind of continuity is what characterizes, for example, some political institutions that have replaced their constitutive rule-sets, moved to other sites, and now employ not only just other people, but a very different type of people compared to their initial stages. It has to be emphasized, however, that the internality of a process in no way implies an overarching purpose, a Whiteheadian ‘subjective aim’ towards which the process is ultimately headed, nor a Hegelian Begriff that would normatively hold it in one piece throughout its existence. In other words, an internality is not teleological and this is precisely what gives its perspective the potentiality to shift, to change and to recalibrate. Actual, and therefore temporary, aims and goals can be posited, of course, and a perspective is a pre­requis­ite for doing this, but the idea of an overarching purpose implies that the internality is designed according to it, derived from it and governed by it – summarily, secondary to it, which, it seems to me, is an idea developed backwards from the anthropocentric naive view of how consciousness supposedly relates to the world. When we give up the centrality and naturality of our human perspective as the correct way to see how ‘things’ objectively are in the world, we will have to acknowledge the mistakenness of the nineteenth-century idea of evolution as having the goal of leading up to the perfection embodied in us, and concede that the time will come when someone or something else will have a decisive evolutionary advantage over us. And that, too, will not happen as a result of a goal-oriented process that has followed its track from the very beginning, but as 89

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an ontology of processes and fields an unintended consequence of how things have turned out, partially because of our own activity. Throughout this inquiry, the word ‘perspective’ has not implied the presence of a consciousness, and the context here is no exception. The initiation or limitation of relationships with the outside is not to be understood as deliberate activities on the part of a subject. If we think of an amoeba, a life-form, whose body consists of a single cell, surrounded by membranes, we surely see that the very membranicity of the boundaries is a condition of viability for this life-process. This is because the way it is in the world also makes it either possible or impossible for other elements (such as food on the one hand and alien harmful bodies on the other) to enter it. In this way, an amoeba is in control, to a certain extent, of that of which it consists. This control is not an ability of a conscious subject, but a characteristic of the amoeba as a life-form, as such, of how it is rather than what it does. It is thus not a question of an amoeba having a reflective mind, but, as I am going to argue below, following another of Whitehead’s insights (1978: 162), it is a matter of defining consciousness as a gradient rather than a binary. On this view, the highly evolved mental capabilities of higher animals such as humans can be treated as a highly developed and very complex form of a characteristic that an amoeba, as a life-process, has at a much lower level, namely, as an internality that determines, by its very mode of existence, its relations with its outside, at least to a certain extent. Obviously, quite a few thresholds have been crossed during the evolutionary process that separates these life-forms from one another. And yet, the control the amoeba exercises over its relations with its outside and the sophisticated strategies we, humans, use to dominate our environment can still be thought of as stages on a gradient. When we have now thought ‘up’ from the amoeba stage to humans, we might also want to think ‘down’ to nonorganic entities. A rock, in terms of a process ontology, is a slow, tedious and uneventful process. The movements of the rock are not visible from our point of view, and a constant drip takes perhaps tens of thousands of years to carve a hole in it. This is because, compared to the amoeba, the rock has much harder boundaries that are difficult to penetrate, at least when we consider them at our speed of being. But, just like with the amoeba, these hard boundaries are a characteristic of how the rock is. Physically, we can explain them in terms of the rock’s molecular structure, which boils down to the constitutive tensions that bind the molecules to each other as a stable, static field – again, stable and static at our speed of being, from our point of view. 90

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an ontology of processes and fields

Game changers The steady unfolding of processes along predictable trajectories characterizes, of course, only a certain, even if substantial, part of the reality flux. At some point during their existence span, every process is affected, potentially disrupted, or may even be terminated by something that, for lack of a better term, I propose to call game changers. Simply put, a game changer is something that interferes with a process to the extent that it cannot go on as before – the fields that make up its cross-sections before and after the encounter with a game changer are structurally quite different, that is, they have some significant overlap that ensures their continuity, but the non-overlapping areas are much more significant from their own internal perspectives. In spite of the degree of control that a process has over its boundaries, it cannot withstand the intrusion of a game changer. I would like to use this term both for change-inducing events and agents that are awaited and welcomed by the process and for those that threaten its existence as well. On a personal level, a serious car crash, or diagnosis with cancer is a game changer, as is winning the lottery. On a larger scale, foreign military occupation or a pandemic can have a restructuring effect on the whole society, similar in degree to the development of affordable commercial air travel or the invention of mobile phones. All these occurrences have the potential to completely restructure the situation that they enter, which in practice means that the scope of possible futures for all participants in the situation is significantly altered. But even mostly positively evaluated game changers may have disruptive side effects. Hitherto unattainable geographical spots become well connected to metropolitan centres, which may upset traditional lifestyles and value systems when local communities need to adapt to the tourist business, and online sales outlets may cause a wave of bankruptcies in more traditionally oriented sectors of economy, leaving a large number of people unemployed. Thus, in most cases, the question whether the effect of a game-changing event is ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ cannot be separated from the perspective from which it is evaluated; a technological innovation, such as selfservice supermarket checkouts, which allows a corporation to lay off many employees, is obviously viewed differently by someone who has lost their job and the CEO preparing the annual report for the meeting of stockholders. 91

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an ontology of processes and fields Game changers may appear as if out of the blue or be long predicted, they may be eagerly awaited or feared to the point of denial, but never do they turn out to be exactly like the ideas that people had of them prior to their arrival, if they indeed had any. We normally think of game changers as if they were single events, and try to designate them with nouns as if they were entities, but we should be aware that game changers are also just stages of processes that have their own histories, normally consisting of multiple and heterogeneous causal streams. It may be that the game-changing effect of such a process is its own preferred possible future – for example, in the case of a long-planned and successful military operation that ousts the government of a hostile country – but it may also appear as the result of the confluence of contingent (and previously insignificant) aspects of processes that converge – such as a rhesus conflict or a violent allergic reaction to a previously unknown chemical agent. A process may acquire a game-changing force unexpectedly, as a joint effect of multiple converging causal streams. It is possible that a number of changes, each of them manageable on its own, together produce something Yuri Lotman calls a cultural ‘explosion’ (2010) – a situation where all bets are off and a multitude of incompatible scenarios is being proposed for the restructuring of the shared lifeworld, as it happens in a society during and after a political revolution. All in all, game changers should be evaluated and analysed on the basis of the effect they have and cannot be predicted with certainty on the basis of their antecedent history. The need for a concept like this has been signalled in the work of fairly different authors. It approximates the idea of ‘event’ in the philosophy of Alain Badiou (2005) and the term ‘black swan’ used by the businessman-turned-essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007). Badiou has given the word ‘event’ a specific meaning of an occurrence capable of transforming the structure of how the world is known from the standpoint of an individual, which will then initiate the process that changes that individual into a subject in the full (that is, Badiouvian) sense of the word: For the process of truth, something must happen. What there already is – the situation and knowledge as such – generates nothing other than repetition. For a truth to affirm its newness, there must be a supplement. This supplement is committed to chance. It is unpredictable. It is beyond what is. I call it an event. A truth thus appears, in its newness, because an evental supplement interrupts repetition. (2005: 46)

From this it is evident that the Badiouvian event is necessarily 92

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an ontology of processes and fields personal, so that the same actual occurrence can become an event for one observer and leave another quite undisturbed. It is also an occurrence to be celebrated, as it initiates the ‘process of truth’19 that transforms an individual from a mere human being into a proper subject, who maintains their status precisely by remaining faithful to the event. Badiou’s own long-time refusal to rethink his wholehearted endorsement of the Khmer Rouge may serve as an example here, and it also indicates the perils of this approach. In contrast with this, Taleb’s ‘black swans’ include both positively and negatively evaluated turning points that only need to meet three criteria: they are improbable and unpredicted at their moment of occurrence; they have extreme impact; and they are rationalized in retrospect in terms of what was, in fact, supposed to happen (2007: xvii–xviii). In spite of Taleb’s smug mockery of philosophy as ‘something we, practitioners and decision makers in the real world, leave for the weekend’ (2007: xxvi), the idea is certainly philosophically valid, even if Taleb’s own concern is not so much to understand, but to know how to make a profit by relying ‘less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves’ (2007: xxi). But this attitude is only appropriate for someone, so to speak, at the receiving end of such game changers; the processes themselves, from any new disruptive technological invention to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, quite often take place as a result of careful planning and meticulous execution by subjects faithful to the Badiouvian event that has set them on their course. Many of the game changers are therefore better understood as successful bids to change our understanding of things, promises of higher cognitive adequacy (Raud 2016: 46–8). From the point of view of process ontology, these terms of Badiou and Taleb nonetheless share a common core of having a deeply transformative effect on how things unfold, which causes the appropriate field to restructure itself in irreversible ways, to go through a transformation that cannot be undone. Certain previously possible futures become impossible, some that were not possible under the previous configuration are impossible no longer. If there is still enough significant overlap between the internalities of these two stages, we can 19 Needless

to say, the word ‘truth’ here is used in an idiosyncratic sense, as the authenticity of a transformed experience of reality that has nothing to do with statements about it, a restructuring of consciousness rather than ‘a relation of appropriateness between the intellect and the thing intellected’ supposing that it is ‘localizable in a proposition’, which, in turn, manifests ‘the decline of thought’ in Badiou’s view so that ‘nothing of the truth, in its authentic sense, remains accessible’ (2005: 44–5).

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an ontology of processes and fields speak of the same process, but if not, then the game changer has overtaken and terminated what was, so that something completely new has come into being.

Time regimes The problematic of internality is closely related to that of temporalities, or time regimes. While most of us probably still habitually think of the view of objectively linear time that encompasses, but is independent of, all entities as the scientifically correct vision of what time is, we should note that modern physics is actually more inclined to agree with Eugène Minkowski in that, ‘while there are phenomena which flow in time, they also contain time in them’ (1970: 17), that is, time is co-constituted by the different streams of reality rather than grounded in an objectivity outside all of them. We can perhaps exemplify this by a different take on the worn-out saying ‘time is money’: time is indeed like money in the sense that there is no absolute, objective money, all currencies can be expressed in terms of each other, and fluctuations in exchange rates between every two of them are measured in the terms of every third – but there is no universal base to which all the ‘money regimes’ could be reduced so that one could take stock of their relations with a fully neutral yardstick. This does not mean that money could not perform a number of quantifying functions within a particular sociopolitical context. In the same way, ‘time’ is a characteristic of the internality of a process, rather than a universally self-same background system of coordinates, within which all systems can be located and delineated gaze-independently – thus, to avoid confusion, I would prefer to speak not about time as such, but only about particular ‘time regimes’, or internal temporalities. We should note, however, that these processes, which are going on within a bounded domain, can also advance at many different speeds of being – in fact, we can perhaps define the speed of being of an entity as the relative capacity to accommodate and process the input from other processes within its home domain, and to produce output that is not only relevant, but also speedwise accessible to them. An internality is therefore characterized by a configuration of different time regimes that are adjusted to each other. The lifecycles of the microflora in my gut or the viruses that have the capacity of confining me to bed, if not worse, are obviously different from the time regimes of my university, for example, or the temporal constraints on my 94

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an ontology of processes and fields time in traffic, and yet together they all produce what can perhaps be called a field of temporalities, in which the different time regimes are arranged into an ensemble held together by constitutive tensions similar to those that operate on any other field.20 In an ideal situation, the balance achieved and continuously contested between these tensions can produce a joint time regime that enables a smooth coordination between all the processes in question. In empirical practice, we witness how the tensions inside a time regime often result in the whole internality coming apart at the seams. Thomas Fuchs (2018a) has offered a frightening insight into the genesis of a number of psychical disorders such as burn-outs and depression, explaining them as the results of what he calls ‘chronopathology’, or excessive desynchronization of personal and intersubjective time regimes as a result of a quantification, homogenization and acceleration of shared time. Fuchs emphasizes that the concept of linear time is a product of reflection, which gradually came to dominate over the range of personal as well as interpersonal (collectively synchronized) cyclic time regimes in the course of social modernization. With the technologically induced release of data traffic and financial transactions from the previous temporal constraints to near instantaneity, the speed of the allegedly shared social linear time has irreversibly escaped from the grasp of the individual, producing a situation that we are no longer capable of handling with the psychological resources at our disposal. This exposes more and more people to crises of mental health, and the facilitation of such desynchronization of individual lives by institutional and other collective practices should be resisted vigorously. Also, psychiatrists and psychologists, Fuchs concludes, should ask themselves to what degree their activities are actually serving the manic interests of certain social forces rather than the patients they treat (2018a: 75). 20 This

should be taken into account when evaluating the separation of emergent consciousness from its relata by Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret Archer, who write: ‘Consciousness and its relata do not emerge simultaneously … Rather, they emerge through different temporal phases in which consciousness and relations influence each other in turn. Human subjectivity and the external context are different strata of reality that reciprocally condition each other over time through the phases constituting the morphostasis/morphogenesis schema’ (2015: 54). But this suggests that human subjectivity and the external context both have clearly identifiable separate time regimes, while empirically neither does, and it could well be argued that some of the temporalities determining human subjectivity interact with particular time regimes of the outside world more directly than with other human time regimes. Therefore, it seems more appropriate to say that both fields of temporalities co-constitute each other for the human conscious process.

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an ontology of processes and fields A diametrically opposite conclusion has been drawn from a fairly similar diagnosis of our present situation by a group of thinkers who have been called accelerationists and include people with both rightwing (Nick Land) and left-wing views (Alex Williams, Nick Srnicek, and many others). The goal of accelerationism, in the words of the latter two, is to accelerate the process of technological evolution. … We declare that quantification is not an evil to be eliminated, but a tool to be used in the most effective manner possible. … Our technological development is being suppressed by capitalism, as much as it has been unleashed. Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist society. (2014: 356, 361)

The result of accelerationist policies, from this left-wing point of view, is supposedly both an overheating of the capitalist mode of production allegedly leading to the possibility of its substitution with some other more socially just mode, and the liberation of the oppressed for the sake of a revolutionary transformation of society. The accelerationist position, or ‘the argument that the only way out is the way through’ (Shaviro 2015b: 2) may, perhaps, be the cure for some social illnesses, but it can certainly also prove to be lethal for other conditions, and ours is a complex disorder that most probably contains ailments of both kinds. Therefore, I am much more inclined to agree with Fuchs on the damaging effect of speeding up the time superimposed on personal, lived time regimes. What these views share, however, is the idea that heterogeneous time regimes are able to disrupt the underlying processes – in other words, that those processes have a ‘natural’ time regime inherent in them (or consistency with the perspectives for which they are relevant), and fall apart when unable to follow their own course. I would even argue that this view has broader validity: the internality of a process is always maintained by a synchronicity of its subprocesses, so that they are able to depend on one another, they can reasonably expect each other’s input and output, as the lifecycle of flowers needs to be in synchronicity with the lifecycle of bees. On the other hand, when a machine is operated for a long time at its borderline capability, it will overheat and break down because of the chronopathological effect of the overdrive. In short, processes need to maintain their characteristic time regimes in order to proceed according to their different, but mutually synchronized internal time regimes – these are just as vital for their unfolding as are their membranic boundaries. 96

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an ontology of processes and fields But this raises the problem of how time can be present in the dimensionless present, which, as I have argued, is the only actual locus of the real. This issue, as I will try to show next, can be treated in conjunction with the question of causality.

Causality If we maintain that the universe is neither completely determined nor wholly random and only a range of possible futures is therefore open to any particular point of spacetime, we have to admit that diachronic linkages occur between these points in addition to synchronic ones – or, in other words, that causation is a part of the reality process, a basic characteristic of any relationship between different minimal instances of being and the patterns that emerge from their interaction.21 A processual account of causality would therefore not speak about causal relations between independently existing, seemingly self-reliant things, but about the factors that cause the redrawing of the boundaries of the process and a significant alteration of its course. Take the example of a pill that cures my headache. When I take the pill, it is not that thing-1 (‘I’) is affected by thing-2 (‘headache’) and enlists thing-3 (‘pill’) to battle it. On a processual account, a development within the internality of the dynamic and complex process of ‘I’ has evolved that is affecting the rest of it so that it is seeking to rearrange itself in a way that would eliminate this subprocess. As it has the capacity to manipulate its own chemical constitution, it makes a rather static process of a pill cross its membranic boundaries and become a part of itself. From the perspective of the pill, this event is a game changer that causes its process to alter its course significantly – the pill dissolves and enters my bloodstream, that is, its spatial distribution and physical form become quite different. On an object-centred account it might even be possible to say that the object ‘pill’ has ceased to exist. On a processual account, it continues to exist now as a subprocess of ‘me’, and as such, it can carry out its work in rearranging my internal 21 We

should note that the range of possible futures is necessarily a bounded infinity. Let us symbolize a causal chain that leads from one moment to another with a straight line defined by two points, one of which is in the present and the other one is in the future. We can think of the point in the future as being situated on a circle that stands for the range of possible futures. The number of points on this circle is infinite, and so is the number of straight lines leading from point-present to point-future. The infinite number of points is not boundless, however, as all of them have to be on the circle.

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an ontology of processes and fields field in a manner where the previously annoying subprocess ceases. If we look at it from the perspective of a larger timescale, the event is insignificant, but on a smaller scale, both ‘my’ boundaries and ‘my’ trajectory have been affected to a degree that is significant, at least from the perspective where headaches matter. This example should make clear that a large part of received views on causation do not make sense in the process framework, as they rely on the axiomatic view that causal relations obtain between discrete, identifiable events or situations (and there are usually only two of these, the ‘cause’ and the ‘effect’), which in turn are described as relations between discrete things that pre-exist those events or situations. Anjum and Mumford have traced this view back to Hume (2018: 61) and, indeed, Hume’s ‘copy principle’, or the need to isolate singular (‘simple’) impressions that would serve as the blueprints of all ideas, works only on the assumption that the real world is made up of elementary and inherently unrelated building blocks. Rejecting this premise, they have developed a highly original theory of causality of their own, taking their cue from the work of Charles B. Martin, who has argued that it is wrong to consider ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ to be two different events rather than one, a manifestation of a ‘dispositional partnership’ (2008: 48ff.). Martin defines dispositions along lines somewhat similar to the ones I put forward about ‘properties’ and ‘capacities’ earlier in this chapter, namely as the propensities of an entity to manifest particular states – thus the ‘elasticity’ of a rubber band signifies its ability to stretch. Martin’s dispositions are the real properties of objects, but only some are manifested at each given moment, while others remain virtual. ‘Dispositional partnerships’ are matching dispositions of two entities that can manifest an event jointly, simply by coming together: You should not think of disposition partners jointly causing the manifestation. Instead, the coming together of the disposition partners is the mutual manifestation; the partnering and the manifestation are identical. This partnering–manifestation identity is seen most clearly with cases such as the following. You have two triangle-shaped slips of paper that, when placed together appropriately, form a square. It is not that the partnering of the triangles causes the manifestation of the square, but rather that the partnering is the manifestation. (2008: 51)

What this move implies, however, is the removal of the temporal dimension from an account of causation, something that Anjum and Mumford are careful to avoid. For Martin, it does not matter that a single event may be stretched out in time and look quite different in 98

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an ontology of processes and fields its different stages, but Anjum and Mumford designate the beginning stage of the process of manifestation as ‘cause’ and the end result as ‘effect’, so that all the properties of the cause-stage can be gradually replaced with effect-stage properties after a certain amount of time. Moreover, consistent with their view that causal relations do not obtain between two discreet situations, but always involve a multitude of different factors, they argue that parallel cause–effect relations can produce inputs to each other, so that the effect of one process can contribute to the change occurring in a neighbouring one (2018: 66–9). However, careful in their striving not to extract single-factor causes out of an eminently more complex set of circumstances, Anjum and Mumford end up taking into account everything, including the most contingent participant processes as well.22 But while they are entirely correct in dismissing, say, Gavrilo Princip’s pulling of the trigger (or more precisely, the bullet entering the body of archduke Franz Ferdinand, as Princip might have missed as well) as the game changer that resulted in World War I, their account does not specify on which grounds certain events should be counted among the causes and others not. For example, had the mechanic who tended to the car of the archduke failed to show up at work on that morning due to indigestion caused by too much pepper in his stew, meaning that the time needed to produce another car led to a change in the archduke’s schedule and thereby to Princip not being able to shoot him, we would not be able to claim that the mechanic’s wife prevented a world war because of a culinary mistake. (We do, however, say that Japan attacked the US naval base in Pearl Harbor treacherously, without declaring war, which happened because the only Latinscripted typewriter in the Japanese embassy in Washington was not working, and the Tokyo authorities’ intended declaration of war 22 John

Levi Martin raises this argument against any variant of what he calls ‘simple counterfactualism’, or the widespread account of causality that recognizes any previous circumstance without the occurrence of which an event would not have taken place as the cause of this event: ‘From every event, a cone of causes extends backward in time, whereby pretty much everything that occurred a month before within a 5-mile radius of some event X is a cause of X, everything occurring within 20 miles a year ago is a cause, everything within 80 miles 5 years ago a cause, everything within 300 miles 10 years ago a cause, and so on’ (2011: 39). But how we look at this depends on how we see what the links of the causal chain are. If we want the cause of an event to be everything that has led to an event to happen exactly as it did, then we have no choice but to accept that indeed the whole cone is necessary. If we are looking for what caused an element of the event, something that we identify as significant from our perspective, then we need a procedure to discard the parts of the cone that may have been vital in the production of other elements in the situation, but not the one we are interested in.

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an ontology of processes and fields could therefore not be delivered in time.) All of this is to say that the account of Anjum and Mumford seems to leave us with only two alternatives: either to point at causal relationships between single events, which they rightly consider false, or to posit them between complete situations, which is not very helpful. This account of causality offered by Anjum and Mumford is still possibly one of the best to date among the process-philosophical treatments of the matter. Its chief weakness consists in its inability to distinguish between spontaneous change and transformation induced by an external agent. In other words, I think they do not provide us with the means for distinguishing a causal account of a process from any descriptive account of the same process. What exactly is the agent of the cause? Why are the properties of the ‘cause’ situation replaced by these particular ‘effect’ properties, and not others? We can answer the first of these questions with a causal theory of dynamic patterns: a causal process, I argue, consists in the release of particular tensions that make up a field in its striving towards a balance, which, however, inevitably has the seeds of other tensions in it. Just as any solution to a problem (for example, replacing dysfunctional empires with nation-states) leads, in due course, to a set of new problems (such as aggressive nationalism), any micro-level tension release never does away with tensions as such, only reorganizes the field into a different configuration, where these particularly ‘itchy’ tensions no longer dominate the situation. Identifying a stage of this process – or pointing a particular set of tensions within it – as ‘cause’ and another stage as ‘effect’ is necessary to provide us with narrative clarity. However, we should not forget that it is, again, a perspective-bound extraction, which helps to conceptualize the process. Moreover, such extractions also act back on the process, as agentic decisions made by its participants always rely on their understanding of their context. To exemplify, let us look at the classic solution Bruno Latour has offered to the dispute between advocates of gun control and the National Rifle Association (NRA) (1999: 176–80). Those resisting guns do so on the grounds that guns kill people, and are opposed by gun enthusiasts who claim that it is not guns but people who kill other people, and when they do that without good reason, it is they who have to be held responsible. Neither of these claims is strictly true, asserts Latour, because the agent is ‘hybrid actor comprising … gun and gunman’, in which both the gun and the person have a certain causal efficacy, because it is the gun that, in the first place, has changed the individual into a gunman (1999: 180). But we should not stop there. Even a person holding a gun need not be a 100

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an ontology of processes and fields killer if they are, for example, instructing police school students at a shooting range. The causal efficacy is born out of the situation, which is constituted by tensions between the gun, the would-be shooter, the person the gun is being pointed at and a number of other circumstances. The triggering input that releases these tensions is normally itself the release of the tensions on another field, that of the shooter’s consciousness, where various elements, such as strong emotions like desire or hatred, or past insults, and maybe also internalized moral codes working against these emotions, are outbalancing each other until the tensions are released into a decision to act. This is to say that while all these entities are the components of the situation, processually understood causality originates in the patterns/fields they form rather than these ‘things’ traditionally credited with causal potential. All in all, the entire flux of being is constituted by such tensions forming, discharging and then forming again in new configurations. It may well be that the whole universe is on its way to a final stage of complete entropy, but while this point has not yet been reached, tensions between separate parts of the reality process, however vast or infinitesimal, continue to tend towards release and thereby produce new tensions.

Causal laws This leaves us with the second question posed above to Anjum and Mumford’s account of causality: why are certain ‘cause’ properties replaced by precisely these ‘effect’ ones that we observe, but not others? One way to answer this question consists in trying to capture causality in metapatterns, or repeated (as well as predictable) trajectories of how a typical ‘situation A’ evolves into a ‘situation B’, which can be identified as causal laws. What these laws can do for us is identify the relevant parameters of situation A that need to be present for a causal process to run according to a particular metapattern. However, I would argue that if we put the actual flux of reality first, as we should, and do not want to claim an ontological status for mind-dependent models of it, we need to concede that such laws are extracted from the reality process by our minds and are not the actual agents that define its course. This, however, is by far not the only possible way to think of causal laws. According to the influential views of Roy Bhaskar, for example, causal laws are ontologically real and distinct from mere patterns that can be extracted from events. In brief, Bhaskar claims that 101

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an ontology of processes and fields ‘failure to mark the ontological difference between causal laws and patterns of events issues in absurdity’ and ‘the ontological distinction between causal laws and patterns of events allows us to sustain the universality of the former in the face of the non-invariance of the latter’ (2011: 16). He agrees with transcendental idealists in that ‘a constant conjunction of events is not a sufficient condition for a causal law’, noting, however, that ‘the problem has always been to ground this intuition in such a way as to sustain a concept of natural necessity, that is a necessity in nature quite independent of humans and their activity’ (2011: 16–17). In his view, ‘it follows from this that there must be an ontological distinction between such regularities and the laws they ground’ so that ‘a sequence A.B is necessary if and only if there is a natural mechanism M such that when stimulated by A, B tends to be produced’ (2011: 17). This all hinges on Bhaskar’s axiomatic postulation that ‘if experimental activity is to be intelligible, the world must be structured and differentiated’ (2011: 14), and his claim (2011: 17–18) that this view is the prerequisite of the possibility of a nonhuman, but nonetheless structured, world, that is, a world in which human perception and its corollary ability of formulating laws of nature is not present. This view makes quite a few tacit commitments that I find completely unacceptable. First of all, it presupposes two tiers of reality – an empirical multitude of As and Bs needs to be opposed to a real and causally efficient, but hidden, reality of ‘natural’ Ms, a network of hidden marionette strings that holds the world together. Second, their interdependence is not mutual: As and Bs may or may not exist, but the Ms have to be there since the very beginning and, whatever causal efficacy can be discerned in the world, it is the hidden Ms’ collective doing and does not occur between the As and Bs themselves. Whatever appears as an emergent causal power to us is simply another, hitherto hidden, M manifesting. Third, therefore, the world must be logically finite, and nothing fundamentally new can ever appear, because it has been virtually prefigured by the set of Ms that bring it into existence. Indeed, these views can together all be held rationally, but although they are posited as a deduction, they in fact constitute a postulation, namely the voluntarist attribution of a real ontological status to causal laws, or their distinction from observed patterns of regularity, and crediting them with causal efficacy that is real even if never manifested in empirical reality. Perhaps the problematic nature of these views becomes more obvious when stated in less abstract terms. Dave Elder-Vass, who endorses Bhaskar’s view of causality with minor qualifications, 102

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an ontology of processes and fields presents as an example of a real causal law a species of birds, which evolves as a result of evolution, but is able to fly because it has a structure of parts making this possible, claiming that, it is true independently of the existence of any such bird that if a creature appeared with the requisite parts in the requisite relations to each other, then that creature would have the power to fly. This is a fact about reality that is true independently of what actually exists in the world. (2010: 46)

But perhaps this does not follow so easily after all. First of all, the ability of the bird to fly is dependent on many other factors, such as the density of air and the gravity of the planet it is on – if the gravity were fifty times stronger than that of the Earth, and the consistency of the atmosphere significantly different, the same set of properties might not be at all sufficient for flying. Next, the ability of the bird to fly depends on its capacity to produce the required energy by a system of metabolism, and the availability of food – and the capacity of the organism to use particular things for food, which are also species-specific and need to have evolved through other evolutionary processes. In other words, the totality of the circumstances by which the ability of the bird to fly comes about needs to branch out far into the environment, where the bird interacts with a multitude of processes that is well-nigh infinite for all practical purposes. However, all these circumstances are necessary for flying to occur, and the actual parameters of the aerodynamic qualities of the creature are completely dependent on them. None of these co-occurring circumstances, on the other hand, is a necessary feature of the environment. Therefore, the only meaningful way to refer to the necessary properties for any particular creature to fly is to point to this creature and to say that it flies because it has all of precisely those properties that it has, and the same applies to its environment. The real causal laws of Bhaskar, if one wants to retain them as distinct from actually occurring causal processes, can therefore only take the shape of an endless multitude of conditionals, unless we think of the Real as a self-same absolute existence, to which all of them can be reduced – something like the Brahman of Advaita Vedānta or the absolute Idea of Hegel.23

23 Incidentally,

for this reason, I think that Bhaskar’s turn to spirituality in his later work (rejected by most philosophers influenced by him, Elder-Vass included) is a direct continuation of his earlier philosophy, not a break with it.

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an ontology of processes and fields

Initialism What, then, is the ontological status of a causal law? In particular, is it necessary to posit it as existing separately from any and all of its enactments, as well as from any of its formulations? A positive answer to this question, as said, would commit us to a recognition of mind-independent ideal entities. On the face of it, only three positions offer themselves in regard to the issue of whether the patterns of what takes place pre-exist the events they characterize: (1) idealism, or ‘realism’ in the scholastic sense of the word, which grants them the status of timeless Platonic ideas, which are more real than the world of our experience, so that all token events are to be regarded as their manifestations; (2) radical indeterminism, according to which what happens is completely random and patterns can only, if at all, be inferred from what happens post factum (I don’t think anybody actually holds this view, although Meillassoux is close to it,24 but it is a logical possibility); and (3) what I would call, for the lack of a better term, virtualism, which holds that these patterns are constantly there in the nature of the reality process, but only in a dormant form, so that they become real only when their actualization is taking place. Virtualism, as understood here, differs from idealism in that its abstractions do not cause what happens, but only provide the context for it, positing the range of what can take place rather than producing actual events as their manifestations. For example, Christopher Powell’s dichotomy of potential and actual relations (2013: 190–3), in which potential relations ontologically precede their actualizations, presents an example of virtualism. Nobody, as said, holds the second view, and the first and third share the problem of separating patterns from their actualizations into higher-tier, separately existing entities, which implies crediting them with a degree of reality – even if their manifestations might never appear – and that is not possible if we want to maintain the commitment to a single-tiered ontology. This is why I would like to propose a fourth view, which might be called initialism: patterns do not pre-exist their initial, that is to say we are seriously maintaining that everything that seems to us to have no reason to be the way it is, is actually devoid of any necessary reason to be the way it is, and could actually change for no reason, then we must seriously maintain that the laws of nature could change, not in accordance with some superior hidden law – the law of the modification of laws, which we could once more construe as the mysterious and immutable constant governing all subordinate transformations – but for no cause or reason whatsoever’ (2009: 83).

24 ‘If

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an ontology of processes and fields inaugural, actualizations. Before this happens, they have no virtual form. Nor are the patterns completely random. They are not eternal, but only emerge as the world goes on. This happens at the intersections of shared ranges of possible futures that are open to different processes. What we call ‘causal laws’ are therefore not eternally there from the very beginning, but contingent, though not completely, as the ranges of possible futures are always limited by their past trajectories, and therefore only a certain array of patterns can appear at any spatiotemporal point in the history of the universe. Whatever comes into being as something completely new (such as matter, life, consciousness, love, or something less noticeable), only does so complete with a causal regimen, that is, a set of causal laws, nested conditions and caveats that regulate its possible linkages to whatever was there before. Some parts of this causal regimen normally pre-exist the phenomenon (as it necessarily contains parts of what came before) and are adequate for the description of the processes of its emergence, but whenever there is something that has not been seen in this world before, we may presume that a new twist of regularities has also made its debut.25 And as such, new, game-changing phenomena always appear as particular entifiable unities; it is not that Life itself makes a grand entrance, but an entifiable unity emerges that is alive – we may take this to be a view regarding particulars in the first place. Indeed, from this perspective, it makes sense to argue, with Emmanuel Bourdieu, that the trajectories of individual entities are governed by individual laws (which is the status he assigns to what are traditionally called ‘dispositions’) so that no two individuals are governed by a completely identical causal regimen – and, moreover, that these laws do not describe an individual in isolation, but in their interaction with their environment, or in social situations in the broadest sense of the word (1998: 55–9). In other words, they encompass the how of being, the charge that actuates the what. Initialism is thus the proper way to view the Aristotelian example of a housebuilder, discussed in the previous chapter: someone becomes a housebuilder through an inaugural, game-changing event 25 There

is a certain analogy here with the ‘logic of practice’ as described by Pierre Bourdieu (1992: 101ff.): social interactions do not proceed as a game based on strict rules, with concretely defined stakes and codes of conduct, but people often change the rules on the go, provided these changes are endorsed by other people, analogously as in the logic of cultural bids (Raud 2016: 45ff.). While such bidders abide by the narratives formulating the basics of their practice, they twist their interpretations so that these start to justify the adjusted, not the previous version of how things are done.

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an ontology of processes and fields of building a house, and can henceforth be called one even if they are not engaged in building a house at a given moment – just as a murderer was not one before committing their first murder, but remains that regardless of what they do afterwards. The idea of initialism is indeed the complementing double of the concept of irreversibility, which characterizes such change that cannot possibly revert to the status quo ante. Life did not have to emerge – and there are so many places in the universe where it has not – and even when it did, it was not inevitable that it exhibited itself in the combination of only six biogenic chemical elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur).26 The range of possible futures open to the atoms of these elements, at the time when there was as yet no life, certainly included the option of combining with one another into more complex structures, and when they did, the range of possible futures of these structures contained the possibility of evolving into cells, and so on. But this does not mean that the same option was not there at all in the range of the possible futures of some other chemical element, perhaps not so strongly. And if it so happened that this other element, rather than sulphur or phosphorus, for example, had been present on Earth in larger quantities – silicon, perhaps, which stands next to sulphur and below carbon in the periodic table – and had come into contact with the other five on a massive scale, the structures of life-generating chemical compounds might indeed have been different. It is by no means certain that when a pattern appears, it will become sustainable. We do not know how many aborted biogenic processes might have occurred in the universe or even on Earth, when the initial conditions were met and compounds with life-potentiality arose, but other factors did not contribute to their maturation. And when Aristarchus of Samos first articulated the heliocentric worldview in the third century bce, his theory was rejected by followers of Aristotle, only to re-emerge many centuries later in the work of Copernicus. Nonetheless, when a pattern has made its initial appearance, it has set the preconditions for the articulation of laws and regularities that can be extracted from its behaviour. From being a random occurrence, it has evolved into a possibly reoccurring phenomenon. We can compare this process to the way in which cultural phenomena emerge: a combination of designs and colours that would not have seemed very attractive to anyone acquires a label, the backing of a 26 On

the chemical prerequisites of life, see Deamer 2012: 55ff.

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an ontology of processes and fields fashion house and a visual association with a famous model, and is launched as a bid to become the craze of the day. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. A poet publishes verses that do not make sense to anyone except themself – until they do. An artist brings a urinal to an exhibition, and is initially turned down even by his radical friends – and at the next moment, a new type of artistic production, the ‘readymade’, has been brought into existence by this game-changing, inaugural act. What was not art a moment ago, is now – that is, what the accepted norms of the cultural community would have excluded before has suddenly come to be included (see Raud 2016: 45–53 for a more detailed discussion of this process). By no means can we take this to indicate that urinals had the capacity to be aesthetically intriguing from the moment of their invention. In other words, we can say that regularities characterize and laws govern, but neither of them causes. This is because the very being of both regularities and laws is contingent on the processes they characterize and govern – were these not to take place at all, then there would be no regularities and laws either. When processes constitute what exists, then regularities and laws are embodied in the way it exists. The difference, on the face of it, is comparable to that between what is served for dinner and the way it is served. But if the what, as we have seen, refers in every instance to an emergent pattern that connects minimal units of being, then the way has to be inherent in this pattern – is their separation not again tantamount to the constitution of a second ontological tier? Isn’t the problem, again, in the insistence of our gaze to think of the actual being apart from a principle behind or above it that determines what it can do – which means a return to the two-tiered ontology we are trying to avoid here? Perhaps without good reason? And yet, if ‘to be’ means ‘to be in movement’ and the movement is empirically not random, then the trajectory of the movement is precisely what ‘to be’ encapsulates. To separate what is from the trajectory of its movement is to posit, again, an abstract, contextless stasis, viewed from an objective nowhere, as the primary state of being for each entity – that is to say, to return to the starting position of an objectoriented ontology. However, as we saw with the example of the bird, at every instance of the reality process there are always multiple causal laws in operation, so that any unique trajectory (and all trajectories are unique in some sense) takes form as a result of their interaction, or, as we could also say, at the intersection of multiple causal chains. Any articulations of singular causal laws, generalities that apply across a 107

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an ontology of processes and fields broad range of processes, are descriptions of metapatterns, and the explanatory force of their generalization comes at the cost of being removed from each particular situation they describe, just as H2O is never an exhaustive description of actual, observable, empirical water, except in laboratory circumstances. Whatever exists is never there in pure form. Of course, whenever an object falls to the ground, we can say that the law of gravity is at work, but the difference between how a sheet of paper and an unopened pack of 500 sheets do this is accounted for by other laws of physics. And there are always factors irreducible to the metapattern. As Stuart Kauffman says: ‘Small fluctuations will cause vast damage avalanches that yield very different future behaviour. Then the system cannot act reliably in the presence of slight noise. Worse, there is always slight noise, meaning the system cannot ever act reliably’ (2010: 115). Metapatterns emerge, intersect and produce new metapatterns, and there are always so many of them at work, interfering with each other, that the reality process, though far from chaotic, is never entirely predictable.

Memory and desire, cell and lens I have argued that whatever is ultimately, mind-independently real is what occurs in the dimensionless now-instant. What is gone is gone, what is not yet, is not. A picosecond can matter a great deal, as this was all the time needed for cooling down the universe from the moment of the Big Bang to the moment when patterns of materiality started to consolidate. The duration of this was, of course, completely imperceptible from the human point of view (which, let me add, was indeed wholly irrelevant at the time) and yet, with a little bit of imagination, we can conceive of a heuristic perspective and speed of being that is so slow that the picosecond lasted many, many times longer than the lifespan of mountain ranges does from our point of view, and the change in temperature perceived from that perspective was therefore so slow that it was not really noticeable for the imaginary observer during all of that time. When we think of the way causation works at a singular, dimensionless being-instant, we can picture it as a kind of sandglass. Multiple causal chains lead to it and are inherent in it as traces of its past, and a bounded infinity of avenues is open to it as its future trajectory. It is thus what it is not only by virtue of its ‘horizontal’, synchronic connections, which enable its inclusion in patterns and fields at a particular moment, but also by its ‘vertical’, diachronic 108

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an ontology of processes and fields connections, which relate it to what was and what will be. As soon as we depart from the dimensionless ‘now’ and time enters the picture, we can no longer put our virtual finger on it, as its dynamic nature implies its constant becoming-itself. This happens as the enactment of the traces of its past interaction with others that it has retained, and prefigures its future interactions. Metaphorically, we can say that even the minimal instance of being has a memory, as well as what we could call desires, or propensities to gravitate towards certain attractors27 and not others, and all these together form what I have called its charge. At the far end of memory-vectors (leading from the past to the now) are causal patterns, of which the present state is the effect, and at the endpoint of the desire-vectors (leading from the configuration of the now to its possible futures) there are the effects, of which the present state is the cause. On this view, the phenomenon of causality does not depend on causal laws that are somehow there separately from the processes they govern, but is inscribed in the very way of existence of the entities that participate in causal chains. The tradition of seeing the reality process in similar terms is long, ranging from the Buddhist view of karma and ‘thirst’ for being to the views of Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze. What is perhaps new in the present articulation of this view is that it does not suggest that certain 27 In

mathematics, the term ‘attractor’ signifies a point, or a set of values, towards which a system tends to evolve regardless of what its initial parameters are. Typically, the attractor is never reached, but nonetheless governs the behaviour of the system. According to DeLanda, ‘unlike trajectories, which represent the actual states of objects in the world, attractors are never actualized, since no point of a trajectory ever reaches the attractor itself. … Despite their lack of actuality, attractors are nevertheless real and have definite effects on actual entities’ (2013: 23). I have used the term in a slightly broader sense, to designate any entity that may influence the development of a process to which it is not directly related, by pulling its course towards itself. For example, a city may serve as an attractor in that people with otherwise different backgrounds, inclinations and skill-sets who are growing up in the proximity of a city have a greater probability of their life-courses somehow being affected or even absorbed by it than those who live farther from it (or in the proximity of another attractor). On a slightly more abstract level, we can think of certain metapatterns or their elements as attractors as well. For example, political activism or recreational drug use can be attractors that appear in the metapatterns that affect the typical life trajectory of a university student in one academic climate, but not in another.   On the other hand, I disagree with DeLanda on the issue of the attractors’ ontological status. In mathematical modelling, it may indeed be useful to think of them as real, but I think it is overreaching to think of them as real in the world. That is, cities and cannabis parties are real entifiable unities, of course, but, so to say, their attractor-ness is not – they do not, in themselves, possess this type of causal efficacy. In other words, the fact that moths fly into the fire is not caused by the fire, but by something in the moths. This is why I have said that attractors are not directly related to the processes they affect. The fire does not need the moth, the city can (most of the time) get by without the recently urbanized villagers, and the joint is indifferent to the life of the student who smokes it.

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an ontology of processes and fields causal chains should be privileged and certain tendencies towards particular possible futures thought of separately as constitutive virtualities. While it is true that the natural trajectory of an acorn, so to say, is to become an oak, it is nonetheless the case, as Roger Ames has observed, that many if not most of them actually become squirrels (2010: 162) – by joining their existence-processes after having been digested by them – and yet other acorns turn into beads in children’s necklaces. One could say, of course, that the ontogenetic potentiality is in one case subverted by a food chain type of causal nexus and by a certain cultural ethos in the other, but both these explanations are retrospective conceptualizations of what has come about as a result of chance and circumstances. Similarly, it is only from a human perspective that events are either lawlike or random; whatever happens empirically always becomes necessary at the particular moment when it happens, and in the circumstances where it takes place – if it did not, something else would occur. If we want to maintain that there is only one, mind-independent reality, then we have to concede that everything that takes place in it is contingent only up to the moment of its actually taking place. This lets us think of the event-field simultaneously through two further metaphors. One of these would be a biological cell. On this view, an entifiable unity is bounded from all others by membranic borders, and is able to regulate to a certain extent what can join its internal process and what has to stay outside. The multiplicity of the internal process contains different elements (as the cell has organelles), in this case different current states of various causal processes (also entifiable as fields from their own internal perspectives), which proceed at different speeds. These processes constantly rearrange themselves in relation to each other, and transform themselves to a certain extent by accommodating what is entering into their midst. These different ‘organelles’ have different functions – or ‘agendas’, if you wish – so that there are tensions between them, and the current state of the field-as-cell is always constituted by the pattern these tensions create. The membranic boundaries also let the processes expel a certain amount of ‘stuff’ through them, or exclude such subprocesses that have terminated or are no longer viable within this field for other reasons. The other metaphoric view of an entifiable unity sees it as an optical lens, except that what gets diffracted is not light, but the multiplicity of the causal processes that are bringing it into being. Each point on the lens is functional only because it is situated on a curve, or related to other points in a specific way. Unlike on a real 110

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an ontology of processes and fields lens, the pattern connecting the points is irregular and also changing all the time, so that each point has a certain role in determining the overall refraction scheme, but none of them establishes it on its own. This pattern thus corresponds fairly precisely to how Nick Crossley defines a relation: ‘to say that two actors are related is to say that they have a history of past and an expectation of future interaction and that this shapes their current interactions’ (2011: 28) – only the number of points constituting a pattern is never two, but more likely a bounded infinity. The causal flows that arrive at the lens on the side of its past are multiple, but united in their contribution to the becoming of this particular field-as-lens exactly what it is at this particular moment; on the side of the future they immediately become multiple again, but not in the same way – the field has ‘refracted’ them so that none of the causal chains remains unchanged and untouched by the moment, as they now spread out as possible futures. On this view, the internal constitutive tensions of the field, frozen in the frame of the dimensionless now, are what make up the particularity of the curve and consequently the way in which the causal flow is refracted. The metaphor of the biological cell is more useful for depicting the synchronic, horizontal connections of the field with its outside, and that of the lens for the diachronic, vertical relationships it has with its past and its future. Within the field itself, however, there is no difference between ‘modes’ of being – the very entifiability of a cross-section of a process emerges out of their simultaneous relevance for each other. Like an artistic text, which, in Yuri Lotman’s view, is never fully exhausted by one single interpretation, but only acts as the site of multiple, internally coherent but mutually incompatible readings (1970: 86–7), the field can never be completely captured from one single point on it – and is constituted precisely by the tensions that make it up.

Summary In this chapter I have presented a version of process ontology that, I believe, is able to perform all the analytical tasks that traditional ontological discourses have been designed for, while avoiding their main problems. The central concept on which this account lies is that of field, or a space of constitutive tensions that hold together a number of elements (subprocesses) that are dependent on each other’s output for their input. A field, as understood here, is a 111

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an ontology of processes and fields momentary cross-section of any process. As it is momentary, it can, in principle, be represented by an imaginary diagram, but this does not make it static, as it is loaded with tensions between its elements. These tensions bear the traces of the past, or all the circumstances that have contributed to its emergence in its present shape, and they also determine the range of possible futures that the process may be moving towards. This view suggests a new, third type of continuity in addition to the ideas of substance and pattern continuity, discussed in Chapter 1, namely process continuity, or significant overlap with the preceding and following stages of the process, without implying any such continuity with more distant past or future. Thus, even though all change is here viewed as gradual, it is possible to accommodate in this vision such concepts as thresholds, or significant changes that follow the internal logic of the process, and game-changers, or such unexpected events that reconfigure the space of possible futures beyond recognition. In the next two chapters, I will apply this ontological account to the mind, and by proxy to the idea of selfhood and agency, trying to show how a processual understanding of reality can contribute to a fuller and more holistic picture of being in the world, which does not foreground a reified, self-same ‘I’, an egocentric particular, at the expense of the polyphony of its actual experience of reality.

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3 ME, MYSELF AND MY BRAIN

The remainder of this inquiry will try to formulate a discourse on selfhood that would be consistent with the field ontology formulated in the previous chapter. I will be using the term ‘self’ here roughly in the sense David J. Chalmers gives to the ‘phenomenal’ as opposed to the ‘psychological’ mind (1996: 11), that is, for the way in which one experiences what and how one is, rather than for a third-perspective view that can be used for the analysis of someone’s behaviour – in other words, as in ‘self-reflecting’ as opposed to ‘self-inflicting’. In this chapter, I am going to discuss various approaches to the idea of selfhood and, in particular, the relationship between individual consciousness and the physical brain, while the next chapter will take up the relationship between the personal self and the ‘outside’ world, starting with its immediate reality of the body and then branching off further into the environment, including the sphere of social relations. I am going to show how the self, understood as a field, or a crosssection of the mental process, can be analysed as an emergent reality over the various types of relations on various levels of existence, an agentic entity that has processual, but not substance or pattern, continuity, and is not self-same, but constituted by tensions between positions and elements both internal to its flow and external to it. Selfhood, as Johanna Seibt notes (2018), has indeed been a favourite topic of process philosophers for the reason that the ‘inside’ view of our consciousness grants us privileged access to how a process develops – it allows us to conceptualize our own existence as a processual entanglement with the world we inhabit, and to observe ourselves as dynamic multiplicities constantly active on multiple levels. Thus it provides us with an experiential grounding to the abstract framework of process metaphysics. My aim will be slightly 113

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me, myself and my brain different, however. I will follow Jane Bennett (2010: 120) in trying to construct a discourse of selfhood that ultimately does not privilege the human point of view, that is, precisely to avoid adopting and naturalizing the perspective suggested to us by our particular way of being in the world. The notion of the human subject as a field will also help to avoid the temptation to think that humans actually have an adequate understanding of themselves, and that the centres of gravity they project into their mind, such as the rational ego-consciousness, are real entities that structurally dominate other entities present in their minds.1 On the contrary, I am going to argue that the human mind is itself a field without a stable condition of balance, an undecided (yet not random) space within which different centres are vying for control, most of them capable of producing rational-sounding narratives about ‘me’ and ‘my world’, and none of them able to permanently oust all the others. A non-anthropocentric view of the human mind acknowledges, among other things, the untenability of a discourse of the human subject as a well-structured unity, which has been the norm in the Western tradition to such an extent that the idea of a self-identical, basically rational and continuous human being, or an egocentric particular, is used unproblematically by a large majority of social philosophers and economists, for example. This field of selfhood, even though never fully revealed to any outsider, is open and liable to be dominated, for shorter or longer periods of time, by external influences, which can be both frightening and painful, or otherwise disagreeable, or, on the contrary, bring various kinds of pleasure. However, I am going to argue that it is not very productive to try to distinguish the sources of external input from what is taking place in the mind itself, or to break these 1 Thus,

my approach will sharply diverge from the one exemplified by Michael E. Bratman’s theory of shared intentions: ‘If you and I share an intention to paint the house, I am in a position to reason roughly as follows: I intend this joint activity, and so do you; these intentions are interdependent in their persistence; and we both intend that this proceed by way of these intentions of each, mutual responsiveness, and sub-plans that mesh … And if you were knowingly to fail to coordinate with me in this way I could point out to you that this would be out of sync with what you (and we) intend, and so a kind of rational breakdown on your part’ (2014: 109). I cannot say I have ever met an individual in my life who would actually reason that way, and I hope I never will. What Bratman has in mind is, of course, a nonverbal internal thought process that he has analytically unfolded. However, I think it is overreaching to develop aspects of a theory of subjectivity by crediting individuals with such undiluted, even if unconscious, formal rationality at every moment of their interaction with their worlds, or, for that matter, even with an ability to rationalize their actions from an unchanging and stoically neutral perspective.

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me, myself and my brain processes down into separate material and mental facts. This is because, following the ontological premises of this inquiry, the mind itself is not an entity separable from its relationships with the outside, a relatum antecedent to its relations, but it consists in precisely these relationships as well as intrinsic processes that would also not be possible without them, or traces of them. Furthermore, I will argue that just as we have to abandon the anthropocentric point of view in our observation of reality, we also need to distance ourselves from a view that privileges the rational calculating capacity of our mind as the ‘real’ self at the expense of emotions, desires and unprocessed reactions to the outside world. Decisions made on the spur of the moment are just as much ours as those reached after careful deliberation, and the narrative that says there exists a ‘real me’ not responsible for some unfortunate choices is not much more than a comfortable discourse of self-excuse. People will often explain their inappropriate drunken behaviour by saying that ‘it was the booze talking’; however, that booze was a part of them at the time of that talking, and managed to gain control of their field of consciousness in cohort perhaps with repressed anger, envy, or excessive desire. There is thus no objective ‘real me’ (apart from our own self-image that we like to imagine this way) in control of things at some moments and exiled from the dominating position at others. Or, in other words, all of ‘me’ is real all the time – it is just that some parts of this ‘me’ are less happy than others to live with this knowledge. It should be easy to see how this view suggests itself from within a gradualist and process-centred ontology. Theories that are based on the self-sameness and temporal continuity of distinct individuals do acknowledge, of course, that these individuals are ‘laminated’ (Elder-Vass 2010: 49–51) in principle, but even when they refer to the biological structures that underlie the social subject on lower levels, they tend to view them as subservient or simply as the physical base on which the individual supervenes, and can therefore be faded out with only occasional mention as sources of input for human needs and desires. As Benjamin Libet (2004) has shown, however, the body actually performs a much bigger role in decisionmaking than is usually acknowledged. Therefore, I believe that the separation of ‘mind’ and ‘body’ into distinct and even opposable levels of personhood is fundamentally incorrect, and though there are processes that are predominantly corporeal or predominantly mental, the other side is never absent from them and the shift of the centre of gravity from the body to the mind would be better described 115

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me, myself and my brain in gradualist terms. Again, when we (correctly) acknowledge the emergent nature of certain capacities by which human beings are characterized, this does not mean that they have only emergent capacities and no others, or that all the capacities they (or their constituents) have on every level of their laminated bodymind would act in unison and not interfere with each other. Thus, for example, I would argue that in spite of their damaging effects, cancer cells should be considered a constituent part of the individual’s body in which they develop, an aggressive and deformative pattern that disrupts the regular process rather than an alien intervention, as, for example, a knife or a bullet would be (although a bullet, permanently lodged in an organism, can on rare occasions also be accommodated in it and thereby become a constituent part of it). In just the same way, it should not be too difficult to imagine a view from which we, humans, can be likened to cancer cells in a larger ecological system of which, in principle, we consider ourselves to be a part. A somewhat similar view could be held about food, in which the gradualist view has an even greater explanatory power: entities to be eaten exist separately from the body, but their digestion constitutes their gradual transformation into constituent parts of the body, as they start to contribute to its processes.

Consciousness and mind From Descartes to the present, the relationship of consciousness to its immediate material reality has in Western philosophy mostly been cast in the form of the ‘mind–body problem’. Even though the way in which both sides of the ‘mind–body’ problem are understood has undergone a series of changes over the centuries, it nonetheless continues to posit the mind and the body as separate types of entities, which function according to different rules, and the site on which the problem occurs is their imaginable interface. From the point of view of the present inquiry, however, the fact that the mind–body problem is a problem is the problem. Just as a thought experiment, I would urge all readers to consider the logically analogous poetry–book problem and, in particular, to substitute ‘poetry’ for ‘mind’ and ‘book’ for ‘body’ or ‘brain’ in short summaries of various positions that different thinkers hold. We will see that, for some, poetry is an ‘epiphenomenon’, that is, it does not exist by itself, but only through the letters printed in the book. Some others, in the meantime, suggest instead that poetry is ‘supervenient’ 116

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me, myself and my brain on the patterns of how black and white spaces alternate on the page. We will also learn that poetry is ‘multiply realizable’ in that it can occur both in written and oral form. And all the time we are given to understand that correspondences are likely to be discovered between various kinds of poetry – from overwhelmingly joyous celebration to the disturbing undercurrents of melancholy and depression – and the patterns of how lines associate with each other on paper. I would say that theories explaining what poetry is in one of these ways are just about as successful as theories that do the same for explaining the mind. Luckily, speculation about what the mind is does not end there. I completely agree with Markus Gabriel when he attacks the ‘framework which assumes that there is one thing, “the mind”, on the one hand, and another thing, “the brain”, on the other, such that we can ask how they are related. In reality, there are events that we pick out with different vocabularies, including a mentalistic vocabulary’ (2017: 76). Similarly, Thomas Nagel has argued that a universe with conscious beings in it cannot be described with the same conceptual apparatus that is adequate for one without them (2012: 41). Over recent decades quite a few philosophers have slowly come to the same conclusion and started to recast the mind/consciousness landscape in entirely different terms. In the same year, 1998, that Andy Clark and David Chalmers published their possibly best-known paper, ‘The Extended Mind’, a no less seminal book appeared by John Haugeland, Having Thought; both of them radically questioned the way in which matter and mind are supposed to interact. Clark and Chalmers famously argued that our mind extends beyond our body and also encompasses the resources that our cognitive processes depend on (such as notebooks, smartphones, libraries, or other forms of external memory), while Haugeland went even further, claiming that our navigation of reality takes place not simply by virtue of our own intelligence, but in collaboration with a world that is by itself meaningful (1998: 233ff.). In other words, according to all of them, our conscious activity does not take place in ‘the mind’, but only in the process of interaction this mind has with its environment – no Cartesian res cogitans that remains as a unity entirely outside that environment should even be posited. Moreover, as even a little introspection quickly shows, the internal reality of a person, ‘the first-personal givenness’ as Dan Zahavi calls it (2005: 122), may perhaps phenomenologically present a kind of totality, but as soon as we try to grasp it, we see that it is in fact a far cry from a unitary ‘thinking thing’. Indeed, the history of modern 117

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me, myself and my brain subjectivity theories can be summarized as a slow disintegration of such a focal point. Thus the indisputable unity of the res cogitans posited by Descartes was replaced by a structured a priori in Kant’s thought, permeated by the necessary consciousness of the Other in Hegel’s view and then broken down into a struggle between the superego and the id in Freud’s psychoanalysis, followed by the resurrection of the eighteenth-century mechanistic materialism of La Mettrie (1996) in efforts to reduce consciousness to the patterns of brain activity in the work of such neurophilosophers as Daniel Dennett (1979, 1993, 2010) and Patricia and Paul Churchland (1986, 2002, 2007, 2013), as well as their followers. But even the ego of Freud, squeezed between the two poles of internalized norm and the wild unconscious, is still more of a unity than the internal reality of consciousness actually displays. Similarly, Dennett’s information-processing virtual machine (1993: 216ff.) can be opposed to the information it processes as a kind of a self-same structure, a ‘thing’ locked onto a physical brain (though, in all fairness, Dennett admits of a centreless multiplicity of operations that the brain is carrying out). For a more precise picture of the self in its empirical, processual reality, we might instead of these models adopt the same attitude to ‘consciousness’ that Jane Bennett proposes for ‘eating’: ‘What difference it would make to public health if eating was understood as an encounter between various and variegated bodies, some of them mine, most of them not, and none of which always gets the upper hand?’ (2010: viii). Let’s paraphrase: what difference would it make to our account of subjectivity if consciousness was understood as an encounter between various and variegated minds, some of them mine, most of them not, and none of which always gets the upper hand? In other words, we might describe consciousness as a field of tensions between different types of mental vectors – that is, all our perceptions, desires, instincts, memories, (mutually incompatible) values, hunches, inklings, imaginations and intuitions that constantly collide, each possessing its own ‘logic’ and capability to establish itself as a source of behavioural legitimacy, often, but not always in rational terms – or following competing registers of rationality, or unexpected input from its environment. Some of these vectors are in focus, others peripheral, but the balance might change at any moment. The alignment or ‘unification’ of all these vectors is possible only for brief periods, if at all, and normally requires a lot of effort. And even then, it cannot always shut out random disturbances such as irrelevant thought associations or sensations of itching. 118

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me, myself and my brain There is no natural order on this field. We have a tendency to internally hierarchize, on a more or less permanent basis, all our sensations, memories, desires and values according to one criterion or another, such as their tenacity or efficiency for achieving what we perceive to be our aims. But when we do, this inevitably occurs from one particular point of view, the centrality of which is nonetheless never natural, even if socially or ethically preferable. This becomes evident from efforts to show the contrary. Harry Frankfurt has introduced the concept of ‘second-order volitions’ (1988: 16), that is, something we could perhaps call a ‘metawill’ to will certain things and not others, which he considers essential to being a person. Frankfurt then presents us with the example of two drug addicts, one of whom would like to get rid of their addiction, while the other does not care. The metawill of the first addict is to get well, and it may indeed motivate that person towards better health. Nonetheless, while the concept is eminently useful, there is an inherent paradox involved in it: according to Frankfurt, we achieve personhood, or internal balance, when our first-order volitions are subjugated to the second-order ones (1988: 18). But it is precisely the case of the second addict, who wants to keep taking drugs (and does), to whose case this balance applies. Frankfurt calls such people ‘wantons’ because they are unable to conceive of second-order volitions that would overtake their addictions, and concludes that ‘when a person acts, the desire by which he is moved is either the will he wants or a will he wants to be without. When a wanton acts, it is neither’ (1988: 19). However, as Gary Watson has observed, it is wholly arbitrary to ascribe to the second-order volitions a special relation to one’s true self, and that there may even be a similar conflict on the second order, which is then to be resolved on the third order, and so on (2004: 28–9). As a result, the ‘true self’ escapes to infinity. In other words, Frankfurt’s reasoning is applicable only if we absolutize a value system (which, incidentally, I prefer to its alternatives) according to which succumbing to unhealthy addictions is bad. But to any such absolutization we should not agree. For example, I am fully able to imagine an internally coherent system of values bent on selfdestruction, a Jim Morrison-like ‘going all the way’, which is indeed a very far cry from inert wantonness. We can therefore only conclude that there is nothing absolutely commendable in a mental balance that aligns the will with the metawill, unless we want to hierarchically and prescriptively privilege certain features of consciousness over others, so that social efficiency would take control of the field of 119

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me, myself and my brain tensions a person inevitably is. But I am running ahead of things here; I will return to the problem of agency and its ethical implications in more detail in Chapter 4.

Thresholds of evolution Zoltan Torey probably echoes the mindset of many of his colleagues when he, as a neuroscientist, sarcastically dismisses humanistic theories of what it means to be conscious and the philosophy of mind in particular as ‘much ingenious speculation and erudite debate’, which nonetheless has remained (and will remain) unresolved. This, he says, is due to the fact ‘the neural process that generates these phenomena [of consciousness, awareness, mind, etc.] lies outside the reach of these disciplines’ (2014: 26). Torey’s disdain is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what philosophy is about – resolving debates once and for all is not quite its fundamental goal. And yet there is a serious edge to Torey’s critique, perhaps not necessarily shared by many other hard scientists, when he says that, in philosophical debate, ‘the phenomena are regarded as entities in their own right, when they are in fact mere aspects of the same underlying process’ (2014: 26–7). As a card-carrying physicalist and determinist, Torey himself also lapses quite often into the metaphysics of distinct entities, but he is certainly right in questioning the attribution of an object-like character to aspects or stages of consciousness as a process, both in its evolutionary development and its individual flow. According to Torey, ‘the self-replicating and metabolizing system that is life … [is] a continuous single event’ (2014: 15), and the eventual development of consciousness was inevitable since its inception (2014: 7). (On the ‘initialist’ account of natural laws presented in Chapter 2, we can agree with the former without conceding the latter point.) In Torey’s view, this is because consciousness provides the organisms that have it with a competitive evolutionary advantage over other entities, as it enhances their capacity to process information. That, in turn, is something that the first cells already did, yet the process towards self-reflexivity has involved a long journey with many distinct stages identifiable on the way. Torey distinguishes, for example, between ‘awareness’ that is characteristic of lower organisms capable of producing an ‘endogram’, or an internal summarizing picture of the external world, and self-reflexive consciousness, which is capable of re-scanning and storing elements of such endograms through language-based concept-forming. He stresses, however, that 120

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me, myself and my brain neither awareness nor consciousness should be considered an entity rather than a stage in an ongoing process (2014: 16ff.). A similar view is articulated by Terrence W. Deacon, who argues that ‘sentience is a typical attribute of any teleodynamic system’ (i.e., a system capable of acting in its own interest), but there is a gradation in the development of sentience where ‘there is no possibility of reducing these higherorder forms (e.g., human consciousness) to lower-order forms (e.g., neuronal sentience, or the vegetative sentience of brainless organisms and free-living cells) … Nevertheless, human consciousness could not exist without these lower levels of sentience serving as a foundation’ (2012: 508). As to subjectivity in particular, it is, according to Deacon, ‘almost certainly a specially developed mode of self that is probably limited to creatures with complex brains’, but nonetheless ‘derivative from (or rather, emergent from) features exemplified in different ways in the more basic form of self that constitutes organism individuality’ (2012: 466). And yet, both Torey and Deacon posit a threshold of fundamental kind at the point where life emerges. Thus, Deacon dismisses such theories that assume that protoforms of what eventually became mental phenomena might be inherent also in prebiotic processes as panpsychism. ‘Even if the fundamental incompleteness of physical entities is a necessary precondition for a universe including teleological relationships, panpsychic assumptions do not explain why the character of physical processes associated with life and mind differs so radically from those associated with the rest of physics and chemistry’, he writes (2012: 79). Then again, what does? The physicalist/neurocentric discourse on life and consciousness is not really consistent on this issue. On the one hand, it wants to explain all mental phenomena exhaustively in physical terms, not granting conscious ones any special status. On the other hand, however, it refuses to treat all reflective processes equally and even to consider that all of them might be endowed in a minimal degree with what conscious entities have. Again, a gradient with thresholds seems to me a better way to describe these phenomena than a strict classification into discrete groups with no grey areas between them. Nonetheless, this is not really what is at stake here. Of course, conscious phenomena cannot be reduced to prebiotic processes just as higher-order forms of sentience cannot be reduced to lower-order forms. The question is, rather, whether a radically new beginning takes place with the emergence of life, or whether ‘life’ is, in itself, a continuation of previous processes on a higher level. Deacon himself admits that the features that constitute life had to ‘emerge 121

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me, myself and my brain spontaneously by natural laws from physical and molecular processes devoid of these properties’, ‘fitted to its environment by chance alone’ (2012: 291). In other words, the processes that resulted in life evolved by themselves, following their internal logic. For example, we know that the turning of ice into water is a distinct threshold on the scale of warming, but the process of warming itself has started before and may go on after this threshold is reached, until, perhaps, it attains another threshold where water turns into steam. For most metals, nothing notable occurs at either of these thresholds. The existence of entities such as viruses, which have some, but not all of the characteristics of what current consensus defines as ‘life’, similarly suggests that there is at least some kind of a grey area between the distinct stages of ‘life’ and ‘nonlife’.

Mind on a gradient An analogous approach might be adopted for ‘mind’, if we could use that word in a broader sense as a comprehensive term that includes human consciousness, animal awareness, vegetable sentience, cellular info-processing, and so on. This resounds with the views of thinkers as different from each other as, for example, John Searle, who writes that ‘above all, consciousness is a biological phenomenon. We should think of consciousness as part of our ordinary biological history, along with digestion, growth, mitosis, and meiosis’ (1993: 4), and Steven Shaviro, in whose words ‘we should regard thinking, not as something special, but as a particular physiological life process alongside all the others’ (2015a: 206). But we might go even further and include on the gradient of ‘mind’ the selective openness towards the Other of nonbiotic entities – as, indeed, was suggested by Chalmers in his celebrated account of the thermostat (1996: 293), and also by Shaviro (2015a: 222). ‘Selective’ here is another word for valence (the range of possible others an entity might connect to), implying that the set-up of entities is such that it naturally favours certain kinds of contact and precludes others. Thus, the atoms of certain chemical elements are able to connect to some, but not other, chemical elements – they only speak certain languages, so to say. As Karen Barad writes: When electrons meet each other ‘halfway’, when they intra-act with one another, when they touch one another, whom or what do they touch? In addition to all the various iteratively reconfiguring ways that electrons,

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me, myself and my brain indeed all material ‘entities’, are entangled relations of becoming, there is also the fact that materiality ‘itself’ is always already touched by and touching infinite configurings of other beings and other times. In an important sense, in a breathtakingly intimate sense, touching, sensing, is what matter does, or rather, what matter is. (2014: 160–1; italics in the original)

This ‘touching’, or ‘intra-action’, opening up towards an Other in order to co-create a (higher-order) whole, is, as I understand it, the very first step in a very long process that has currently reached the stage of human consciousness (but does not necessarily have to stop here). Any aspect of this should not be conceived of as a mystical or spiritual presence or connection to a higher plane, but simply as a rejection of the dualism of ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ phenomena. In this context, we should note that physicalism is not really opposed to the dualist paradigm, but is actually its upgraded form – it continues to insist on the separation of the material and the mental, only denying the reality or efficacy of the latter, which, as Inês Hipólito and Jorge Martins point out, results in its theoretical claims often diverging from how problems are posed in practice (2017: 434).2 A genuine overcoming of dualism need not insist on the primacy of either of the two terms of the material–mental axis, but should instead do away with the whole opposition. Mental phenomena, as we know them, can be seen as the continuation of processes that take place on fundamentally the same level as the being of things. Of course, we can still speak about the distinct stages of ‘mental’ and ‘non-mental’ (in the traditional sense of these words), but we should simultaneously acknowledge the gradient on which both of these are situated, a basic process on which ‘mentality’ fundamentally relies and which is at work in both ‘mental’ and ‘non-mental’ phenomena. Therefore, separating entities into fundamentally different categories according to distinct stages on this gradient – ‘agency to humans, instinct to animals, and the deterministic forces of nature to everything else’ (Alaimo 2010: 143) – is misleading in a certain sense. Of course, this does not mean that mountains and rivers would be sentient or capable of cognition in some mysterious way, but that the 2 In

particular, this is evident in the discussion of the role of cultural representations. Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega have shown how neuroscientific discourse contradicts itself by assuming programmatically that cultural values are encoded in the brain and shape the behaviour of people, while the research aims to show how the brains provide additional information about that behaviour that cannot be acquired through the analysis of social and cultural practices alone (Vidal and Ortega 2017: 96–7).

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me, myself and my brain capacities of mountains and rivers to form different types of either fleeting or enduring relationships with other processes/entities are points on the same gradient that has reached the stage of reflexive consciousness in us humans. Consequently, the question of whether one or another detail in the physical set-up of the body has cognitive capacities is therefore in itself wrongly formulated. Everything that is structurally open and has the capacity of relating to anything else should be credited with a minimal range of the same capacities that are termed ‘cognitive’ from a certain level onwards. The spot on the gradient where we choose to situate this threshold is a matter of discussion – or philosophical taste. This should not be confused with the idea of panpsychism, which ascribes the faculty of cognition to all instances of being. What I am asserting here is merely that the capacities to form representations (for example, as enduring imprints, or traces of encounters carried on to further stages of existence) and to connect them to new emergent patterns are qualities that are also pertinent to other forms of being, albeit, of course, in their specific ways. We do not call the view that ice and steam consist mostly of H2O molecules ‘panhydrism’, because ‘water’ has important characteristics that ‘ice’ and ‘steam’ do not have. Similarly, crediting all forms of being with an openness towards their others and the ability to enter into relationships with them, which, in us, take the character of conscious activity, only rejects the view that the presence of this activity sets us, its possessors, fundamentally apart from all other beings. The emergent properties of a pattern are not inherent in its subpatterns, but only rely on them. There is another reason for not treating consciousness in yes/no terms. From fMRI studies, we know that the states of being ‘fully conscious’ and ‘dead’, if judged by brain activity, are endpoints of a gradient rather than Boolean values (Beauregard et al. 2009a; Naccache 2006). And yet, we continue to judge the state of an individual mind in terms of distinct stages, for example, by saying that a patient is either conscious or not. But this is clearly imprecise: between the extremes of a fully alert, concentrated and agile mental state of attention and a minimal awareness, as in a coma, there are many interim stages which fluctuate and cannot be maintained for any length of time. For example, a person who has been deprived of sleep and is struggling to stay awake may drift into sleep and back into awareness so that the boundary between the two states is not quite clear, just as there are different levels of depth within sleep itself. Thus, although the difference between the distinct stages of sleep and wakefulness can be established (just as those of an acorn and an oak), 124

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me, myself and my brain we cannot quite put our finger on the moment when the one turns into the other. While listening to music or a lecture, one’s mind often wanders, even though it remains conscious of the sound, and one can return to it by exercising a moment of mental effort. We can characterize these changes in the quality of attention as moves towards and away from the extreme of alertness. Similarly, the states of mind conditioned by direct or emotionally mediated biological factors (hunger, desire, etc.) empirically have a smaller degree of rational regulation than states characterized by full intellectual agility.

Are we our brains? But let us return briefly to the reductionist consciousness theories that take it as a given that consciousness, or mind, are just fancy names for certain processes of the brain – the title of a book by Dick Swaab We Are Our Brains (2014) is symptomatic in this sense – and some of them use the word ‘brain’ habitually as a synonym of ‘mind’, so that the difference between the materiality of the ‘grey cells’ and mental phenomena is first metaphorically and then programmatically erased. The brain thinks, the brain feels, the brain makes decisions – in short, the brain is the essential ‘me’. Zoltan Torey even goes as far as to name the subject whose consciousness we are talking about: ‘the brain-user’ (2014: 49). In Daniel Dennett’s view, ‘[c]onscious human minds are more-or-less serial virtual machines implemented – inefficiently – on the parallel hardware that evolution has provided for us’ (1993: 218). Nick Chater states in similar terms that ‘[t] he brain is, after all, ultimately a biological machine – specifically, a machine constructed from a network of about a hundred billion brain cells, densely wired together’ and formulates our task as ‘to understand how electrical and chemical activity in our neural circuits can somehow generate our stream of thoughts and actions’ (2018: 35). But probably none other than Sir Francis Crick himself has put it even more bluntly, stating that: ‘“You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’ (1995: 3). But – to address just this final utterance for now – this claim is quite obviously incorrect on two counts. First, it is somehow taken for granted that the myriad neurons work as they do to produce the human self as the result of their action, while it should be clear that this action can only be efficient if coordinated and not random. 125

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me, myself and my brain Should the pattern of coordination somehow predate the activity it coordinates, however, then it cannot be seen as its result, and even if we see this pattern as emerging simultaneously with this activity, there is still no reason to posit the activity as primary and the pattern – on which the existence of an ‘I’ ultimately relies – as secondary. The other problem with this view is, as Mary Midgley has pointed out (2014: 26), that it is completely arbitrary to stop the reduction at the level of neurons, and not proceed with it down to the more basic level of quarks. Midgley may have intended this as a characteristically sarcastic jab, but I would say that this is indeed the way to think of the process of self-awareness as something emerging in a web of relationships that originate on the basic level of existence, as characteristics of the charges that make up the minimal instances of being. While it would certainly be an overstatement to assert that these minimal instances of being already somehow contain or predict consciousness, they have what are its prerequisites, and the patterns that make up neural cells, or those that connect these cells into ‘vast assemblies’, are simply more elaborate configurations of patterns that take place on the lower level. Let it also be noted in passing that, as Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega point out (2017: 16), this identification of selfhood and brain is relatively recent and can be traced back to the 1990s, when the brain replaced the genome, which had previously occupied the position of the biological equivalent of personal identity. They go on to look at the prehistory of what they call ‘the cerebral subject’ and conclude that ‘at a certain point, the self was defined in terms of functions that were associated with processes located inside the head’ so that, as a result, ‘by naturalizing historically contingent definitions of self and personhood, the received accounts turn the metaphysical claim that “we are our brains” into a factual statement’ (2017: 22). Make no mistake: I have no intention of denying, disregarding, or belittling the enormous advances of neuroscience and the ever more precise mapping of the intricate physiology of the brain. My problem is rather with a certain philosophical and popular discourse, aptly termed ‘neuromania’ by Raymond Tallis, a distinguished neuroscientist (2011), in the terms of which the results of the scientific experiments are all too frequently conceptualized. It is axiomatically presupposed that the neural circuits of the brain can, for the purposes of this explanatory discourse, be correlated with all of the compositional elements of the mind, so that the phenomenon of consciousness would be exhaustively described just by reducing all of its processes 126

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me, myself and my brain to patterns of the intracranial interaction of neural cells.3 For example, in an experiment conducted by Mario Beauregard and associates (2009b), assistants to intellectually disabled people were told to look at a series of pictures of disabled persons, first neutrally, and then with the feeling of unconditional love. The instructions on how to look at the picture (‘View’, ‘Unconditional love’) appeared at the centre of the screen for two seconds, printed in white on black. Their brain activity was measured and the ‘neutral’ picture was then subtracted from the ‘unconditionally loving’ picture of what went on the brains of the test subjects, resulting in what the authors claimed to be images of neural correlates of unconditional love. On the basis of this experiment, Beauregard et al. claimed that ‘unconditional love is mediated by a distinct neural network relative to other forms of love and attachment. This network includes brain regions not implicated in romantic and maternal love’ (2009b: 97). ‘Romantic’ here probably refers to love with sexual overtones. The study is based on several erroneous premises. First, it supposes that it is possible to start feeling unconditional love just two seconds after receiving a command to do so, and to switch it off in the same way. Why should we think that the brain scans reflect unconditional love rather than irritation with the scientists? Next, it assumes that there is a general, shared concept of ‘unconditional love’ felt by all people in approximately the same way, and that it is part of the make-up of the human psyche which can be exercised towards anybody, rather than something that develops in the course of an individual long-term relationship. Finally, the presented scans show that the alleged ‘correlates’ are situated in different parts of the brain, and yet the authors talk about them as generalizations, as if they had discovered something common to all human beings. Moreover, 3

The term ‘neural correlate’ is often used loosely to designate the brain state that corresponds to, and is believed to cause, a specific mental state. But while it is entirely reasonable to talk about the neural correlate of consciousness as a whole, that is, the set of brain processes that accompanies consciousness in principle, it is certainly overreaching to posit neural correlates, in the strong sense of the word, of specific mental events, or identifiable patterns of brain activity that are alone responsible for their occurrence. As Raymond Tallis points out, neuroscientific research in fact indicates that ‘even the simplest of tasks – never mind negotiating a way through the world, deciding to go for a mortgage or resolving to behave sensibly – require the brain to function as an integrated unit’ (2011: 81; italics in the original). It is likely that the idea of neural correlates might be based on the uncritical acceptance of Hume’s ‘copy principle’, or the view that each idea necessarily corresponds to a particular impression (specific sensedatum), which, in a broader sense, posits a one-to-one correspondence between single, isolated, discrete units of the world and their counterparts in the mind (or the brain as its presupposed material form).

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me, myself and my brain as pointed out by the editors of the New Scientist (2009), ‘a good chunk of the papers in this field contain exaggerated claims’ because fMRI scans are not a reliable method by which to identify specific, small-scale brain activity, as they simply register increases in blood flow, which are much slower than neuronal activity (Tallis 2011: 76). Edward Vul, Christine Harris, Piotr Winkielman and Harold Pashler – all acknowledged researchers in the field – go even further. Having analysed a large number of articles on neural correlates, they are led to conclude that a disturbingly large, and quite prominent, segment of fMRI research on emotion, personality, and social cognition is using seriously defective research methods and producing a profusion of numbers that should not be believed. Although we have focused here on studies relating to emotion, personality, and social cognition, we suspect that the questionable analysis methods discussed here are also widespread in other fields that use fMRI to study individual differences, such as cognitive neuroscience, clinical neuroscience, and neurogenetics. (2009: 285)

And yet, such research continues to thrive. Scott Vrecko (2010) has listed twenty-four human characteristics allegedly reduced to neural correlates by this type of experiments, and many more have been published since his writing. While popular discourses predominantly still operate with a naive notion of neural correlates, some philosophers, too, have started to distance themselves from more pretentious versions of the idea. Thus David Chalmers, in search of a viable definition, quickly strips away the initial idea from many of its claims. He starts with the way the concept was imagined in a call for papers: a neural correlate of consciousness is a ‘specific system in the brain whose activity correlates directly with states of conscious experience’ (2010: 61). Note the ‘specific’ (self-same) ‘system’ and ‘directly’, which will all have to go, as it turns out in his subsequent analysis, yielding ‘a minimal system whose state is sufficient for a given conscious state and whose state is not wholly correlated with the state of any other system’ (2010: 73), which ‘cannot be expected to correlate with consciousness across abnormal cases’ (2010: 80) and ‘may lie in a system further down the processing chain’ (2010: 76) than where the reaction to its causes is first formed. However, if we do not accept the supervenience thesis and prefer to view consciousness in process-ontological terms (which the substitution of ‘state of a system’ for ‘system’ entitles us to do), we might well ask how this processed neural state has come about – the most logical answer seems to be that it has been significantly 128

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me, myself and my brain transformed by other intervening processes. Therefore, crediting only the primary neural pathway with the status of the minimal system is not justified, and most likely the entire brain and perhaps even the entire sensorimotor system must be taken into account. As Raymond Tallis summarizes the issue: ‘The unifying organization necessary to complete even the simplest task – such as keeping an appointment – reaches down to the smallest details’ (2011: 123). All in all, as Evan Thompson writes, the very idea that neural systems described neurophysiologically could match conscious states in their content seems inadequate. Experiential content and neural content are different kinds of content, and so it is a category mistake to confuse the two. Experience is intentional (worldpresenting), holistic (constituted by interrelated perceptions, intentions, emotions, and actions), and intransitively self-aware (has a nonreflective subjective character). Neural content as standardly described has none of these features. (2007: 350)

Moreover, it has also been shown that the direct neural correlate theory is not only wrong, but directly harmful and conducive to suffering, as it has seriously set back our knowledge of mental illnesses (Fuchs 2018b: 251–5) and led to the replacement of effective therapies with chemical interventions by ever more readily available antidepressant and antipsychotic medication, in other words, a mechanical treatment of symptoms rather than the conditions themselves. Therefore, whatever its genesis, the identification of selfhood and brain cannot be considered just one philosophical view among others, but one directly serving and generously fueled by the commercial interests of pharmaceutical companies, which ‘largely draw on biased ghostwriting, make sure that only positive results are published while reframing or concealing the negative outcomes of clinical trials, and exaggerate the effectiveness of medications’ (Vidal and Ortega 2017: 133). As said, all of this is not to deny the role of the brain in mental processes; quite the opposite. And obviously it is not difficult to construe a perspective from which the brain is indeed an entifiable unity that can be investigated separately from the systems it is connected to. Its tissues have a specific substance pattern, consisting only of neurons and specific other cells that support their activity. It is compactly located within the skull and connects to the main body only through relatively narrow channels. Presumably the bigger part of the processes that take place within the brain rely on each other more than on their relationship with processes that go on outside the 129

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me, myself and my brain brain. All in all, successive brain states physically overlap with each other more significantly than the states of the entire body need to. However, it is not difficult, and possibly more illuminating, to consider the brain only as a part – the most important part, but nonetheless a part – of the entire nervous system (and, by proxy, also the rest of the processes it is involved in) reaching to the physical borders of the body. As Shaun Gallagher puts it, ‘rather than representing or computing information, the brain is better conceived as participating in the action, enabling the system as a whole to attune to changing circumstances’ (2017: 161). Although there exist neurons of different types, they share the same basic pattern. The entire neural process depends directly on the brain and cannot be imagined separately. Nor has anything the brain does have any relevance without the nervous system. From another perspective, when we think of neurons as capable of transmitting electric charges on the micro level, it might be just as productive to think of a particular neuron itself as a relatively big structure, which does not necessarily operate as a single-pattern machine. There is, for example, a category of neurons called the Purkinje cells, the workings of which involve different types of parallel input (Purves et al. 2004: 442). These cells might therefore be pictured as ecosystems where multiple processes run synchronically, occasionally supporting each other to produce emergent effects and at other moments interfering with each other’s smooth flow. Finally, separating the brain from the rest of the nervous system is by no means the only logical way to divide this system into semiautonomous parts. Relying on the criteria of an entifiable process, we could just as well imagine the separate functionalities of the brain – processing sensory information, coordinating movement, and so on – as separate subsystems that would consist of a part of the brain and the channels that connect it to the appropriate other subsystems of the rest of the body. When the train station, the coach terminal, the local bus stop and the taxi stand are situated next to one another in a city, and perhaps even connected with covered walkways, we may think of the whole hub as ‘the station area’, but each of the end-points of traffic lines, operated by different companies, can still claim the status of a separate entity, if seen from another angle. The shops and cafés in the station area (the glial cells) support the smooth traffic of people and things (neural and chemical signals moving through the body system) through the station area and from one channel of transport to another. The usefulness of the analogy 130

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me, myself and my brain probably ends here,4 as people do not change into other persons when they change trains, while neural signals might, and, unlike the brain, the station area might actually have a central police station that supervises the orderly nature of the traffic, with CCTV screens in one room. And yet, why not think of the separate nervous functional systems in roughly the same way?

From brain to mind All the while, an even bigger question looms on the horizon. While the brain is obviously necessary for mental processes to occur, do the efforts to reduce the latter to the workings of the former have any real explanatory power? We could just as well study the big humming servers and their wiring in the server room in order to understand how their electrical activity creates certain particular images, and not others, that appear on the monitors of the workstations. Quite obviously, the monitors would not show us anything without the input of the mainframe, but this does not mean the content on screens could be reduced to the mechanics of the machinery on its own, or even to the circulation of information-carrying mini-units in input– output cycles. Or, as Tiziana Andina puts it, ‘knowing what areas of the brain are active when we see an artwork is unlikely to help us understand what art is’ (2016: 21). The existence of psychosomatic conditions shows that there are occasions when granting causal powers to the mind leads to the technically lightest explanation of a phenomenon of the real world. And so on. The claim put forward on behalf of the brain to be the sole carrier of selfhood, mind, consciousness and whatnot thus rests in principle on the assumption that the physicochemical constitution of the brain is somehow substantially more important than, for example, the relationships that perceiving, embodied subjects have with their environment. On the contrary: I would much prefer to agree with those who say that it is the brains that have evolutionally developed in parallel with the ability to put self–other relationships 4

Nonetheless, it seems to me that it is just as adequate, if not more so, as Damasio’s view of the brain constantly constructing and updating maps of the body in their particular state (2012: 63ff. and passim). For example, this idea entails a mapmaker as distinct from the maps, and subsequent map-readers. The problem is avoided by conceptualizing an active brain primarily as a process, a cross-section of which is a field of tensions constantly reorganizing itself in accordance with the dynamism of its relations to various processes occurring outside it.

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me, myself and my brain into a higher gear. And this process is ongoing, as brain studies have proved. For example, it has been shown that the hippocampi of London taxi drivers, the areas of the brain primarily involved in spatial navigation, have typically been considerably larger than the same areas in the brains of people of the same age, education and background who do not drive taxis, including even bus drivers, whose overall activity is otherwise fairly similar (Maguire et al. 2006; Woollett et al. 2009). In other words, socially and culturally enforced mental activity (such as learning to navigate the maze of the streets of London in order to acquire a taxi-driving license) may directly affect the physical structure of an individual brain. No doubt similar micro-scale alterations result from different types of mental activities all the time. Granted, a self would not be able to exist without a brain, but neither would the brain exist as the hub of the relevant physical and chemical processes without the pattern that organizes and unites them and mediates between the organism and its others, in short, without the mind. And, seen thus, the mind is more relevantly accessible on another level of being, from another perspective rather than through the lens showing us the chemical reactions or subatomic movements, which are restricted to their immediate others and the patterns of which they are able to be meaningful parts.5 Markus Gabriel compares the category mistake implicit in this position to reducing the activity of cycling to the object called bicycle: Bicycles do not cause cycling; they are not identical to cycling; cycling cannot be theoretically or ontologically reduced to bicycles; certainly, cycling cannot be eliminated by claiming that there are only bicycles. At most, cycling supervenes on bicycles, where this just means that no cycling can take place without events materially realized at the level of bicycles. But this is not very informative, as it merely repeats the claim that bicycles are necessary conditions for cycling. (2018: 43).

But Gabriel’s critique (which I endorse in principle) could perhaps be countered by saying that cycling involves another agent in addition to bicycles, namely the cyclist. (Note that Torey, when he speaks about 5 I

would still like to note that this position does not amount to what Owen Flanagan adopts when, convincingly advocating a processual view of consciousness he writes that ‘mind and brain are one and the same thing seen from two different perspectives. The gap between the subjective and the objective is an epistemic gap, not an ontological gap’ (1993: 220–1). As I have argued above, the thingness of an entity is perspective-bound – what makes something conceptually ‘mind’ or ‘brain’ is its embeddedness in networks of completely different sets of processes.

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me, myself and my brain ‘brain-users’, is actually separating the subject of consciousness from its process in a similar manner.) Bicycles, in this equation, are just passive tools, as Jocelyn Benoist also points out (2018: 55), while brains are constantly at work, and their activity, or so neurocentrists claim, is the reality of mental phenomena.6 One way to reformulate the question here is thus to ask whether all the processes we normally refer to as conscious are indeed restricted in their entirety to the activity of the brain, or, alternatively, whether the brain is where only one, albeit a crucial part, of these processes takes place. I will discuss this range of problems in more detail in Chapter 4; for the time being it should just be noted that the holders of the first, or ‘internalist’, position differ from their opponents, or externalists, in their understanding of what these processes consist of. In particular, many of them support, at least on the level of the descriptive language, a strict dualism, or a separation of mental and material or physical aspects of consciousness, which leads them to the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, or the question of how the physical processes that take place in the brain can in principle be experienced as a mental process at the same time. As opposed to this, the ‘externalist’ view, which I support, does not restrict mind to the inside of the skull. Accordingly, this view is also compatible with a still broader understanding of the cognitive process, seeing it not as the interaction of separate entities, that is, the mind and the reality it cognizes, but precisely as the process in which they both come into being in the particular form that they have for each other. A good term to characterize this situation is John Haugeland’s ‘specific complexity’ (1998: 227), which does not seek to reduce a phenomenon to a single causal process, but takes into account all the specific contingencies that need to coincide in order for this particular phenomenon to take place. 6 In

a certain sense, the phenomenon of brain activity brings out the limitations of the traditional ontological paradigm: the brain consists of a number of regions, each of which has particular functions, and these, in turn, consist of billions of (primarily) neural cells. The processes taking place in a particular region of the brain, or in a particular neural circuit, always affect the whole of the brain, which may produce reactions in another part of the brain that in turn result in processes that have no other causal connection to the initial ones. A normally functioning brain is one in which all such processes occur in reasonable harmony. And yet there is no coordinating centre in the brain that would be responsible for maintaining this balance. The stability is provided, as neuroscience tells us, by correlations and relations between processes simultaneously going on in different areas of the brain and relying on different inputs, and not by a single ‘homunculus’. So the whole is constantly doing what each part of it is doing, while different parts are doing different things. In a world of self-identical, continuous objects this should be hard to grasp, while for a processual field ontology this is completely natural.

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me, myself and my brain On that view, the separation of the mental and the material is not just unnecessary, but clearly counterproductive, and we do not need two separate accounts of the causal chains taking place on each level, as the same process may have both mental and physical aspects simultaneously. For example, we can identify a message as being the same regardless of the different physical means of conveying it, even though a telephone call and a letter answer to completely different physical descriptions. In both cases, the message is not encapsulated in the vehicles that carry it, but only arises in the mind of its recipient as the result of the interaction with its conveyor. The term ‘multiple realizability’ has been coined to rescue the sameness of the message in this context, but this concept amounts to nothing less than a pseudonym of dualism, trying to conceal the incapability of the object-oriented vocabulary to describe the situation with sufficient explanatory power. As a result of this gambit, the idea of a single-tiered mind-independent reality is actually forsaken – for example, a sequence of letters on paper and a sequence of sounds are considered to be multiple realizations of one and the same message. But quite obviously the sameness of a message conveyed in different ways cannot be noted by anything except a mind that is able to interpret it. Moreover, in textual theory it has long ago become a commonplace that the ‘meaning’ of texts is produced in the process of interpretation and is not inscribed in the text itself, as Roland Barthes (1977) and Umberto Eco (1979) have argued to a consensual satisfaction. Elsewhere I have shown how all meaning elements, including the most elementary ones, arise in the individual minds as claims that connect externally learned vocabulary with personal experience (2016: 38–45). These accounts of meaning as emergent in interpretational practice can do quite well without the quasi-Platonism emerging from the idea of ‘multiple realizability’, or multiple manifestations of the same, independently existing, but empirically unobservable idea that they are supposed to be the manifestations of.

And I think to myself … On this broader externalist view, thoughts really cannot occur without something that they are about; even Gilbert Harman’s ‘brain in a vat’ that can be imagined to have thoughts about an illusionary reality (1973: 5ff.) must still receive signals from outside itself that suggest this illusionary reality to it. In a certain sense, we are all 134

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me, myself and my brain brains in vats stimulated by computers under the conditions of this thought experiment; it is just that the vat is called ‘skull’ and the computer goes by the name of ‘world’. And in thoughts where only memories are involved, be they of experiences or of linguistic nature, the outside is still present in thought, as traces, in a processed form. It is therefore inaccurate to state that the process of thinking is confined to the site of the brain – it can only take place in a broader framework that involves the brain, but also the rest of the person as well as the environment in which that person lives. From this perspective, a more acceptable explanatory strategy would be not to isolate the process of ‘thinking’ into a strictly neuromental domain, but to consider it as emerging in a relationship between what we call the subject and its reality. Once again, the relationship is neither extrinsic nor intrinsic, but membranic, allowing processed sense-data to penetrate the field and internally constructed attitudes to be imposed on reality in the process of perception, but so that the movement in neither direction goes on freely, without having to pass numerous ‘checkpoints’ on its way. Therefore, when John Searle writes that ‘one can then ask where in the anatomy are the conscious processes occurring, and the obvious answer is that they are occurring in the brain’ (2007: 109), it is not obvious at all. Searle presents us with an example of someone silently reciting the alphabet in their mind. It seems uncontestable to him that this process is fully encapsulated in the brain, similar to the way in which the event of someone kicking a ball in a room is contained in that room. But this is not as simple as it seems. When someone kicks a ball in a room, there are, in that ‘room’, this separate ‘someone’ as well as a separate ‘ball’. Neuroscience tells us, however, that an ‘I’ and an ‘alphabet’ (or, more precisely, the neural image of the alphabet) cannot be similarly identified in the brain, nor can a distinct interaction between these two separate items (and nothing else) be observed. On the contrary, it is much more probably the case that the physical constituents, the networks housing the image of the alphabet, and those contributing to the experience of the ‘I’ all actually rely, at least in part, on the same neural material. When one shifts to an only slightly more complicated example of reciting a poem to oneself, the complexity of the situation becomes even more obvious. I may not remember the poem correctly, and need to make an effort to reconstruct the image in my mind in order to recite it to myself, which means that the poem as the object of the action is not present from the start, but only (re)produced in the 135

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me, myself and my brain process. And this process can go on even after ‘I’ have given up the effort, but suddenly remember the correct line a couple of hours later. More than that – it may come to me the next day, when I go out for a walk and arrive at the exact spot where someone recited this poem to me for the first time. Maybe I even tried (in vain) to re-evoke the atmosphere of that place during my effort of remembering, as a mnemotechnical aid. But my memory of the place was incomplete, and only the experience of its reality (together with the countless details I never consciously registered) did the trick of triggering my mind. It may work both ways: the place is idiosyncratically associated with the poem in my mind so that every time I happen to go there, the poem pops up in my mind for no other reason. I am sure many readers are familiar with such experiences, which Andy Clark has discussed in more analytical detail in one of his articles elaborating on the extended mind thesis (2010). All in all, it seems not only quite permissible, but actually rather helpful to conceive of conscious processes in such terms that allow not only the neural reality of the brain, but also other factors, such as the atmosphere of the place to be counted as active participants of the conscious process. After all, I might not have remembered the missing line without the walk at all. At the very least, we should agree that the difference between internalist and externalist views is not about how the mind-independent reality is structured, but what kind of gaze-dependent conceptual systems we use for its description. It seems to me that we have a basic choice here between the internalist position that separates mental processes from the world in a strict, dualist manner, and the externalist one that does not. For the internalist, the ‘I’ does not really reach out to the outside world, but only has access to it via representations of it, which have been formed by the cognitive apparatus at its disposal, as a part of the body within which it resides. This processing facility, too, is placed, so to say, at an arm’s length from the ‘I’ encapsulated in the brain. In other words, the process originates in the encounter of the outside world and the cognitive apparatus of the body. Then, once the visual, aural, tactile, olfactory and gustatory images have been formed, the mind relates to these in a secondary act of processing. When the ‘I’ silently recites a poem, it is not engaged with this poem as an outside entity known to it (and others), but with an internally stored (possibly incomplete or mistaken) image of it. When ‘I’ feels pain, it is engaged in a relationship not with the cause of this pain, but with the processed version of this cause, provided to it by the neural machinery. Note that the representations are not really a part 136

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me, myself and my brain of the ‘I’, but something presented or given to it, and though they can be stored in and retrieved from memory, they are fleeting presences compared to the relative stability of their observer and evaluator. For the externalist, the ‘I’ is not the prisoner of the skull, but distributed over a network, which, as argued by the extended cognition school, may include not only the body, but also its outreach into its habitat. Needless to say, on such a view, the ‘I’ should be conceived of as not having distinct boundaries that make it into a separate ‘object’, a relatum antecedent to any relations it could be involved in, but (the imaginary centre of) a network involving multiple heterogeneous processes. The latter is not a necessary corollary of the externalist position, but a development of it. We might well consider the ‘I’ to be a helpful, but fundamentally heuristic designation of the responsibility-bearing agent, the maker of decisions and the carrier of a will, involved in and constantly influenced by multiple heterogeneous processes – and only thereby real. In this case we need not worry about the porous nature of its boundaries and the membranic character of its relationships with the mind-independent ‘outside’ – these relationships are precisely where the ‘I’ itself takes place. Therefore, it is needless to talk of ‘representations’ that are separate from both the things represented and the ‘I’ who observes them. As Haugeland puts it, ‘The meaningful is not a model – that is, it’s not representational – but is instead objects embedded in their context of references. And we do not store the meaningful inside of ourselves, but rather live and are at home in it’ (1998: 231). Even more than that – we take place in it.

The decision-making focus Most of the subjectivity theories available to us tacitly assume that there is, within the field of consciousness, a locus we can safely call the ‘real me’, as opposed to the unconscious interferences, outside disturbances and thought chains gone astray because of internal inconsistencies of various kinds.7 A ‘pure’, ideal self-standard is opposed to the multiple practical manifestations of it, all of which deviate from it to some extent. This assumption of a pure ideal 7 In

his classic study of public and private selfhood, Erving Goffman points out how people, ‘performing’ for their others, may sometimes manage to convince themselves that the presented version is their ‘real’ self and, as it were, become their own audience, while concealing from themselves things that, in a deeper layer, they nonetheless most likely know about themselves (1956: 49).

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me, myself and my brain follows the same type of thought for which, first, there are natural laws that regulate how things really should be (and actually are in laboratory circumstances), second, that social norms (such as traffic regulations) should ideally function in a similar manner and, third, that pure types form the background against which the deviations of tokens should be measured. But this assumption is profoundly mistaken. The water we encounter in nature is never just H2O, but always includes other substances, some of them vital for our bodies to be able to absorb it. So, when we say ‘people should regularly drink water’, we cannot substitute ‘H2O’ for ‘water’ in this sentence, because if people regularly drink only H2O, they will die. Real triangular shapes are never absolutely correct triangles. Traffic never follows its rules to the letter. And no one is ever and fully their ‘real self’, because what a person is always includes interference from their environment and relies on the active relations with their others. All in all, processes we encounter in the natural world always present us with correlations rather than strict instantiations of particular natural laws – not because these laws themselves would be ineffectual, but because there is always a multitude of causal chains based on them in operation, and these chains necessarily interfere with each other at every single moment. We should stop thinking that all these are deviations, but realize that this is how the world actually is, and our mind is no exception. Instead of positing a ‘real me’ as the standard, I suggest we speak about a constantly moving ‘decisionmaking focus’ within the mind, conscious or not necessarily, where the determination of what we do next actually occurs. This view can be traced to Friedrich Nietzsche: The I is not the attitude of one being to several (drives, thoughts, etc.) but the ego is a plurality of personlike forces, of which now this one now that one stands in the foreground as ego and regards the others as a subject regards an influential and determining external world … Within ourselves we can also be egoistic or altruistic, hard-hearted, magnanimous, just, lenient, insincere, can cause pain or give pleasure, as the drives are in conflict, the feeling of the I is always strongest where the preponderance is. (Quoted from Parkes 1994: 292)

‘The passage suggests that the I is not something stable that is independent from the drives’, Parkes comments, ‘but that any preponderant drive (or group of drives) may “stand in the foreground as the ego” and complain, or prevail, as “I”’ (1994: 292). What is important here is that any of these subsections of the mental field can act as the centre in which decisions are made – the word ‘decision’ 138

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me, myself and my brain will refer here to the act of determination of what course of action the subject will select from those available. Philosophical discussions of decision theory normally see its task in providing a minimal account of rationality (Steele and Stefánsson 2016), as if decisions were paradigmatically rational, and made in a mechanically describable conceptual space. When we think of actual, empirical decisions of our own and their relationship with rationality, we should honestly acknowledge that their rationalization very often occurs ex post facto, when we have, for example, given in to a temptation and need now to explain to ourselves why this was, in fact, wise and perhaps even necessary, while we suspect at the same time that this rationalization is fundamentally flawed. This situation can be described as an acting out of the constituting tensions of the selfas-field, with variously directed processes trying to overwhelm each other. At every given instant, micro decisions are made, which are never entirely the fruit of conscious rational deliberation, emotional spontaneity or internalized social pressures, but always include elements of all of them, as well as memories of previous similar choice situations and so on. What seems more appropriate to posit in these circumstances is not a central and rational decision-making authority that rules over the entire subject at all times, but a shifting focus for each decision, a point of balance between the different subprocesses of selfhood, from which that particular decision ensues (and may be overruled by a subsequent decision at the next moment). It cannot be emphasized enough that none of these potentially focal points has a separate, self-same and continuous existence – it is interacting with all the others at any given moment, contributing to the momentary configuration of constitutive tensions while simultaneously being created by them. In the words of Pamela Hieronymi, ‘as we change our mind, our mind changes’ (2009: 140). And when something changes, it is no longer the same as before. If, as I am going to argue below, thoughts, intentions, beliefs, and so on are not separately identifiable ‘mental states’ the mind has, but collectively and inseparably form what the mind is, then it becomes possible to see the mind itself as a series of momentary states of balance constituted by tensions between possible points on the field, each of which could potentially act as the decision-making centre – with this role shifting constantly from one point to the next. However, it is possible to argue that there is a significant overlap in time between the focal points on a well-balanced field from which decisions are being made, and that there is an ideal configuration of those points, which produces the decisions always judged best (by 139

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me, myself and my brain itself) in retrospect. For example, Carol Rovane has distinguished the rational unity of selfhood from its phenomenological unity (1997: 127), or more precisely postulated it as the ideal centre of normative gravity over the experience of oneself as oneself, as someone who is credited with personhood only when their agency is guided by this rational centre. Rovane goes on to argue: [T]here is a conceptual tie between personal identity and the normative ideal of overall rational unity, a conceptual tie that consists in the fact that the ideal defines what it is for an individual person to be fully rational. It follows from this conceptual point that if persons are committed to being rational, then they must be committed to achieving overall rational unity within their rational points of view. (1997: 129)

This further leads her to posit that in intersubjective, rational engagement, ‘persons must aim not to hinder one another’s agency’ (1997: 129–30) and, even more strongly, ‘to be regardful of the agency of others, one must refrain from acting on one’s own ends if acting on those ends will influence others in ways that fail to accord with their own rational points of view’ (1997: 138). This, especially the latter, I find difficult to accept. For example, a wise person who has taken on the responsibility of adviser to a mad dictator during the time of, say, a pandemic, which will surely affect the lives of multitudes if not countered efficiently, may well find themself in a situation where they need to walk a rather hazardous tightrope between the irrational whims and the incoherent, but religiously held, convictions of the leader, on the one hand, and the pressure of their more or less equally wise peers, on the other. Denouncing the dictator would upend the policies carefully set in place to address the pandemic – but praising their infinite wisdom may lead to disdain from colleagues and even backfire if competitors later use such praise against them as proof of their spinelessness. So, even if we assume that a strategy of overall rationalization is in place in such a person’s mind, it cannot manifest itself in their actions, because, were it to do so, these would remain unsuccessful. At the same time, while we, from our point of view, condemn the mad dictator as irrational, it is fully possible to construct a picture of complete rational unity of their actions from their own point of view.8 Therefore, it seems that Rovane’s axiom can hold while we 8

This, of course, might strain the idea of rationality too much and perhaps it is indeed wise to agree with Owen Flanagan, according to whom our internal conative constitution is neither rational nor irrational, but arational (2007: 55), and yet can be both consistent and coherent.

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me, myself and my brain are discussing an ideal situation inhabited by fully rational subjects, but in the actual world we find people who need to navigate between a multitude of situations in which partly rational, partly passiondriven, partly prejudice-holding, partly self-deceiving agents with mixed motivations are engaging with each other. We can certainly think of a society maintained by the norms of overall rationality that are endorsed both collectively and individually as ideal (although personally I much prefer a society tolerant of some irrational creativity as well), but if we do, we need to be aware that this is an ideal that has no referent outside our minds. (In all fairness, Rovane’s argument is much more sophisticated and I will return to its other aspects below.)

The core self Rovane’s view of personhood is based on distinguishing the overall perspective of rational unity from the phenomenological givenness of self-experience. But if the former cannot be seen to perform the role of the centre of the individual mind, perhaps the latter can. For example, Dan Zahavi has identified precisely this first-person perspective as the core self: Whereas we live through a number of different experiences, the dimension of first-personal experiencing remains the same. In short, although the self, as an experiential dimension, does not exist in separation from the experiences, and is identified by the very firstpersonal givenness of the experiences, it may still be described as the invariant dimension of first-personal givenness throughout the multitude of changing experiences. (2005: 132)

In other words, whatever we are experiencing at any given moment – and, consequently, whatever regime we have adopted for reacting to it – all these experiences are related to the first-personal givenness in basically the same way throughout my existence span. This patterning of experience has to take place on an extremely basic level, as I know from experience that my experience of the world has undergone significant transformations in the course of my life. It must be so basic, indeed, that there is nothing much there apart from what Zahavi has called a certain ‘mineness’ (2005: 16). In a strict sense, this word implies a circularity. Something can only be said to be ‘mine’ if there is a concept of ‘I’ that I feel as referring to myself, and therefore it cannot serve as the ground on which this 141

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me, myself and my brain concept of ‘I’ has to be based. That is, if someone’s experience has a constant, unifying characteristic, but that someone does not have a concept of ‘I’, it can be construed as ‘mineness’ only from a thirdperson perspective. Moreover, if this ‘I’ is indeed an unchanging invariant, it also cannot be fully embodied and embedded, because both the bodily circumstances and context of embedding are in constant transformation. However, the phenomenological tradition takes it as a given that ‘the three dimensions “self”, “others”, and “world” belong together, they reciprocally illuminate one another, and can be fully understood only in their interconnection’ (Zahavi 2005: 176). On the face of it, this sounds suspiciously like having a cake and eating it too, as the self can be either fundamentally embodied and embedded or invariant in the strict sense of the word, but not both. Zahavi escapes this difficulty by conceptualizing minimal phenomenological consciousness as a pre-reflective and prelinguistic version of the Cartesian cogito, rephrased in the tradition of Sartre (1978: 84ff.): there is ‘my’ experience, therefore ‘I’ exist. The invariant character of Zahavi’s ‘mineness’ is thus limited solely to its presence, one way of another, in the act of experience, while the manifestations of this presence might differ wildly in different situations (2005: 92; 2011: 56–7; 2014: 11–12). In sum: Experiences necessarily involve an experiential perspective or point of view, they come with perspectival ownership, and rather than speaking simply of phenomenal what-it-is-likeness, it is more accurate to speak of what-it-is-like-for-me-ness. Importantly, this for-me-ness of experience doesn’t denote some special kind of I-qualia; rather, it refers to the first-personal character or presence of experience, to the fact that we have a different pre-reflective acquaintance with our own ongoing experiential life than we have with the experiential life of others and vice versa. (2014: 88)

This perspective is posited as ‘ubiquitous’ (2011: 60) and ‘an intrinsic feature of the primary experience’ (2014: 36), pointedly independent of linguistic self-reference (2014: 28). Even so, this position remains a described intuition rather than a theoretical model of selfhood. It seems to me that in the pre-reflective stage, someone would not reify their experience to the extent that it would have a distinct identifiable and constant character. Moreover, I find it way too bold to make claims about the universal nature of human prelinguistic experience, and to do so from a very particular ‘postlinguistic’ position. Indeed, even the presence of a situation-independent 142

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me, myself and my brain first-person pronoun is far from being a linguistic universal. In many Asian languages, one can only refer to oneself according to the situation in which one speaks and particularly to whom one addresses. David Marr reports how the Vietnamese who had received some French education (in which, incidentally, je pense, donc je suis was ‘one of the first classical quotations learned’) started to use the French pronouns moi and toi in colloquial Vietnamese ‘as a way to avoid using a variety of pronoun dyads based on age, rank, status or gender’ (2000: 777). Indeed, the typical way of expressing persons in Vietnamese was and is by kinship terms, and ‘younger brother thinks, therefore younger brother is’ would hardly make much philosophical sense. Concepts extracted from the flow of experience with the help of a specific linguistic system and retroactively construed as universal characteristics of the human mind should therefore be viewed with suspicion. Even though Zahavi writes that ‘when talking of first-personal self-givenness, one shouldn’t think of self-reference by means of the first-person pronoun; in fact, one shouldn’t think of a linguistically conditioned self-reference at all’ (2011: 60), it still seems that this is exactly what he does. A possibly even more serious objection arises from the fact that in spite of stressing that phenomenological self-consciousness is a ‘how’ and not a ‘what’ (2011: 59), Zahavi still often slips into an objecttype or at least unitarily agentic conceptualization of this minimal self. So, when he rhetorically asks, ‘Who would deny that pain experience is sufficient for the reality of pain?’ (2011: 72), he seems to posit that there is something real that is ‘pain’ but that exists outside this experience and even causes it – while it seems to me much more appropriate to say, with Wittgenstein (1997: 92), that ‘pain’ is simply a linguistically available name given to a certain sensation, rather than an entity in its own right. But a similar slip also occasionally occurs when Zahavi discusses the idea of minimal self. For example, when he writes that ‘the minimal self might be intertwined with and contextualized by the intentional acts it structures’ (2014: 89; italics added), he credits his minimal self with a greater degree of ontological independence than warranted by his argument, in particular, with such agentic capacities that a self-same centre of the individual mind might be imagined to have, or acting as the organizer and structurer of the flow of experience on a continuous basis. On the other hand, we can admit a ‘core self’ if processual continuity can be considered its sufficient condition, but pattern continuity is not a necessary requirement that should be met during the entire span of the self’s existence. In other words, a continuity can be said 143

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me, myself and my brain to be there if it has significant overlap with its immediate past stages and will continue into its immediate future stages, but this overlap does not need to define it throughout the lifespan of the continuous entity. Therefore, even though we may speak about a weak theory of ‘core self’, there is hardly any ground for thinking of it as the control centre of an individual’s actions in the world, or even as the norm of self-awareness to which any form of it should be reducible, and the organizing level it can be credited with in our process is so basic that it has no bearing on what I have described above as the decisionmaking focus, always contested and in constant movement.

Combat vs. constitution It is certainly not very probable that, as a rational and generally wellbalanced person, I would make a decision of life-altering magnitude on the spur of a moment, just on a whim, rather than after careful deliberation. But it is just as certainly not impossible, especially if I remain unaware at the time of what the consequences of my choice will be. For decisions of lesser importance, the probability that technically irrelevant factors weigh in is even higher. In any case, there is no standard position to which my mind would return constantly, a static base as it were, from which any particular movement, any actually occurring momentary rearrangement of elements, any shift of the centre of gravity would be a deviation. We might perhaps compare this shift to the way in which a camera lens can focus on a certain point in its field of vision at one moment and on another at the next, except that there is no camera. Each of these points is itself always constituted – and therefore informed – by all the processes that contribute to the present state of the field. In a certain sense, then, the field can also be metaphorically described as holographic9 in that any particular focal point can recast the entire system of tensions, and subject them to the logic of just those causal chains, just those subprocesses of the self that have formed this focal point through their convergence. More simply put, we may act following our sense of duty at one moment, succumb to our desires at another and resort to dry rationality at yet another. We can even distinguish between different modes 9

I am taking my cue here from David Hall and Roger Ames, who use this terminology to describe the Chinese view of how cosmic patterns are enacted in particular individuals (1987: 238).

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me, myself and my brain of rationalization or appraisal of our actions, in which different background factors weigh in and different rules apply so that at each of these moments, the other possible motivating processes are evaluated differently. What is seen as an evil temptation from one of these focal points may look like the only thing that makes you feel really alive from another. This point is, indeed, persistently argued by Rovane, who holds that multiple rational persons can, in principle, inhabit the same body, each of which has an overall rational unity of its own. Developing the argument of John Locke, Rovane uncouples the notion of the person from the human being by claiming that a person, defined as a perspective of overall rational unity, is not born together with a human being, nor does a human being become a single person that is coterminous with their body – in her opinion, the reverse is the case, as ‘human beings are, rather, the site of personal lives’ (1997: 185). In Rovane’s terms, ‘an individual person exists just in case there is a set of intentional episodes standing in suitable rational relations, and the set includes practical commitments to unifying projects that bring in train a commitment to overall rational unity within the set’ (1997: 183). Therefore, it is quite possible that a number of such unifying projects can coexist within a human being. It seems that the degree of unity Rovane demands of such persons is too high to actually credit, for example, the different and occasionally conflicting social roles of a human being with the status of such personhood, which is why she remains sceptical about whether such multipersonal humans actually exist, despite their metaphysical possibility (1997: 186). However, on a process-ontological view, which does not require such persons to be self-identically continuous in time, we can be more generous and apply the idea on a sub-individual level. This means that any point on the subject field (the human mind as the site of personal lives), which can provide an overall coherent perspective of it, can take on the role of (Rovane’s) person at a given moment. It would be an overstatement indeed to view the constant shifting between internal perspectives as a monumental struggle between separate persons, each pursuing their own unifying project, but it is nonetheless possible to describe each of the flickering vantage points in terms of a single set of parameters which, given the power, could possibly govern the entire individual for some time. From my point of view, it is the sign of a functional psyche that none of them does. While Rovane rationalizes her argument with a rational reconstruction of the multiple personality disorder (1997: 169ff.), the opposite extreme of paranoia should not be the recommended alternative either. 145

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me, myself and my brain It could thus be that, for someone, say, a student who is relatively undisciplined and therefore lagging a bit behind in their studies, the issue of whether to go to see a film with friends or to properly complete the home assignment – a conflict between desire and duty – may be resolved by the third factor of stinginess, when it becomes known that the tickets to the film are more expensive than usual, even though the student could still comfortably afford them. The decision not to go is nonetheless falsely rationalized as obeying the sense of duty. But fairly soon, this decision is easily overturned by another call from another friend who suggests bowling and proposes to pay for it. As argued above, a theory of decisions that limits itself to criteria of rationality and ignores all this belongs to the world of impeccable triangles and drinking H2O, which has little to do with the one in which we live. Even though the stingy, remorseful and happy-go-lucky aspects of the student do not each amount to a fullblown person, each of these, in the absence of the others, could in theory still take charge of the decision-making field quite efficiently. This may look as if I am arguing for what Christine Korsgaard has called the ‘combat model’ of self (2009: 133ff.), or the idea that practical reason as well as different passions are equal players on the field, so to say, and each of them may have fair chances to win the game. To this, Korsgaard opposes the ‘constitutional model’, according to which the (continuous) self is identified not with reason or any other point in the field, but with the general laws that govern it, just as the life of a state is regulated by its constitution. Korsgaard argues that the constitutional model is superior to the combat model in that it is able to ‘explain how an agent achieves the kind of unity that makes it possible to attribute her movements to her as their author’ – this follows from the assumption that if ‘the agent conforms to the dictate of reason, it is not because she identifies with reason, but rather because she identifies with her constitution, and it says that reason should rule’ (2009: 135), in line with her general argument that genuine actions are those that accord with the principles of practical reason (2009: 45). This is indeed an important insight, and if we take the constitution to represent the structural pattern of the whole person, Korsgaard’s account is clearly superior to those views that postulate either a centre of control within the field of the subject, or see it as a battleground of equally powerful and mutually opposed stimuli. However, to proceed with Korsgaard’s analogy, in a democratic republic the decisions of the parliament, the government and the supreme court are reached as a result of discussions between forces opposed to each other, but 146

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me, myself and my brain nonetheless all acting under the aegis of the constitution. Although the constitution of Plato’s republic, which inspired Korsgaard’s idea, did not do it, constitutions of modern states do stipulate the separation of powers. We can thus say that the constitution in this model can even more precisely be likened to the field of constitutive tensions between different elements that still belong together and make up an internality. In other words, I both do and do not agree with Korsgaard: on the one hand, it is indeed possible to identify the continuity of the individual self with the overarching pattern that holds its various subprocesses together; on the other hand, I do not think that such a pattern can in dynamic practice actually guarantee the degree of continuous internal unity that Korsgaard expects of her carrier of agency. What is thus called for, on the present view, is an account of selfhood that would be both more integrated and holistic, but at the same time not centralized around a point of control. This would also help us to conceive of decisions and agency without uncoupling a decision-making mechanism from the rest of the person. What we can call a decision, in this sense, is the recalibrating of the constitutive tensions of the field in such a way that it alters significantly the course of the selfhood process, including those of its subprocesses that would have pursued a different course under the circumstances prevalent before the decision was made. This can indeed be likened to a parliament passing a law, a government issuing a regulation, or a supreme court reaching a verdict on an important case – each of these acts changes the entire framework of the state in some way.10 Each decision also relies on a certain focal point, and there may be some points in the field that get to be relied on more than others, but it is important to stress that none of them is ‘properly’ the decisionmaking centre and in some situations certain points are more likely to be cast in that role than others. At the same time, it is not a struggle between the different strongholds of duty, desire, rationality, and so on, but a united process – a bit, perhaps, like the game of ball maze, where tilting the wooden board causes the little ball to move between different obstacles and the player’s task is to get it to fall into the hole that gives the greatest number of points, except that the numbers written next to the holes change as the board moves and the balance shifts with it. 10 This

is probably also where the usefulness of the analogy ends. It would be very misleading to think of separate aspects of the human mind as the counterparts of legislative, executive and judicial powers.

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United states of mind The term ‘mental state’ is constantly used in writings about the philosophy of mind, and yet it has no entry in the 1,001-page Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Audi 1999), nor is there an article dedicated to it in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Influential discussions of whether mental states have logical form (Fodor 2000) or whether they can also be unconscious (Weintraub 1987) can conveniently proceed without defining what mental states exactly are in the first place. Even otherwise quite detailed introductions to the philosophy of mind (Feser 2006; Lowe 2000; Salazar et al. 2019) can take the term as self-explanatory without providing a precise definition of what a mental state is instead of an open list of examples. Most of the time, it is used as an umbrella term covering the whole range of very different individual, but nonetheless typifiable elements of the mental process: beliefs, thoughts, sensations, memories, emotions, intents, items of knowledge, and so on. Some theorists take mental states apart and describe them as complexes consisting of certain necessarily present elements, so that statements such as ‘Aziz believes that he can afford to buy this house’ and ‘Toshiko intends to go for a walk’ can be dissected into subjects (Aziz, Toshiko), propositional attitudes (belief, intent) and contents (ability to afford the house, going for a walk). Others prefer to use for the same purpose the phenomenological terms of intentional quality (how we experience something) and intentional content (what it is that we experience). As can be seen from this description, mental states are tacitly entified and designated by nouns – thus they come to resemble things one can have or cannot have. What I find to be extremely problematic in this usage is that ‘mental states’ nearly always refer only to parts of the cross-section of the mental process at any given moment. This reflects the atomistic attitude of earlier philosophical language that not only held that the world consists of ‘simple objects’ which, in combination, made up ‘complex’ ones, but that the same structure also applies to cognition so that ‘simple’ facts of sense-data make up ‘complex’ perceptions. Since the work of Gestalt psychologists in the early twentieth century, it has nonetheless been recognized that whatever is the nature of the operations going on at the ground level of cognition, ‘simple’ sense-data are not accessible to the mind other than as a result of goal-directed mental operations that always also rely on 148

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me, myself and my brain other resources such as memory and language to perform this work. Therefore, linguistically extracting ‘mental states’ as self-identical autonomous constituents of the mental process and identifying them as tokens for separately existing types is not really justified.11 This is not to say that we cannot speak about ‘anger’ or ‘greed’ as conceptual abstractions – only that we need to treat them as such, that is, as the products of extraction and articulation that we are ourselves performing on our state of mind.12 We can speak about significant (and therefore perspective-bound) overlap between such states of mind at different moments, but not about the presence of a self-identical (and therefore perspective-independent) element that is present at different moments. The structured picture of the mind, with individualized mental states floating around an empty centre, is only something we create while analysing our self-experience, and projecting it to others. Moreover, these individualized mental states somehow also seem to exist outside the mind of the individual person, so that two different people can have the same belief, or an individual has a mental state at one point, then does not, and then has the same mental state again. Particular instantiations of a typified mental state, as experienced by 11

Some neurophysiological studies of emotions, which identify a set of basic and universal emotions that have physiological correlates, seem to be at odds with this claim. Summarizing the work of Ekman (1992) and Damasio (1999), Tim Lewens presents this view of emotions ‘as a complex syndrome of bodily changes, which may include changes in blood pressure, facial expression, posture, and so forth. Changes to cognitive states might be elements of these syndromes, but they are merely elements. On this view, emotions are partly constituted by bodily reactions to stimuli of various sorts’ (2015: 170). However, just as in the case of diseases, what we can talk about here is a metapattern consisting in the co-occurrence of a number of deviations from the habitual states of certain bodily and cognitive processes – a how, not a what. If anything, this work further strengthens the case for treating the body and the mind together as a single process. Moreover, Lewens goes on to show how anthropological work has demonstrated that ‘the felt character of the emotion is affected by exposure to a specific set of emotion terms’ (2015: 178); in other words, emotions are, at least in part, culturally conditioned and there is no necessary significant overlap between the distribution of these emotion-symptoms in all cultures (2015: 180). 12 In principle, we can liken this difference to the ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ degrees distinguished by Lynne Rudder Baker for first-person phenomena (2000: 61ff.). In Baker’s view, a ‘weak’ first-person consciousness is characteristic of any sentient being who experiences the world from a first-person perspective, without needing a first-person concept for themself, while a ‘strong’ consciousness is that of beings who are able to think of themselves as themselves. This implies the ability to analytically separate the ‘I’ in sentences such as ‘I am happy’ and ‘I am angry’ from the ‘happy’ and ‘angry’ states, or, as Baker puts it, ‘not just to have thoughts expressible by means of “I”, but also to conceive of oneself as the bearer of those thoughts’ (2000: 64). Some of such thoughts are conceptually extracted in introspection and entified as individual, distinct mental states.

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me, myself and my brain a person, or qualia, remain the topic of intense debate, as a large number of mainly neurocentrist analytical philosophers continue to insist that qualia are not real (since they cannot be reduced to physically describable phenomena). This, of course, depends on what we mean by ‘real’. If the word refers only to phenomena that are exhaustively describable in physical terms, it has one meaning, but if it designates phenomena that are entifiable from a particular perspective as links in a causal chain, we get a different picture. In the first sense of the word, most of the things in this world that matter to me would not be real; in the second, they would very much be so. We should therefore probably agree that both definitions are legitimate, but incompatible, so they should not be imposed on any argument framed in the other sense of the word. I would certainly subscribe to the second definition, not least because I think ‘the sequence of flickering colour patterns reflected on the retina triggered a reaction of the lacrimal glands’ has less explanatory power than ‘the film made me cry’, not to speak of its inability to clarify why my companion in the cinema, albeit in possession of similar retinas and lacrimal glands, was completely unmoved by what they saw. Accordingly, ‘qualia are real’ and ‘qualia are not real’ are not negations of each other, because ‘real’ has a different meaning in these two sentences. (‘Beethoven is a composer’ and ‘Beethoven is a dog’ are both true sentences from different perspectives, and yet ‘a dog can be a composer’ cannot be inferred from them.) It seems that the way in which a ‘mental state’ continues to be conceptualized is strongly influenced by some early articles by Hilary Putnam (1975a, 1975b). Writing at the dawn of the age of computers, Putnam compares the human mind to a computational machine, claiming that there is a structural resemblance between the hardware–software and brain–mind pairs of machines and people. A computational machine, Putnam says, is in two different states at every moment. On the one hand, it has been programmed to have a fixed number of ‘logical states’, or positions in which it needs to carry out a certain sequence of operations in a specified manner, which includes instructions concerning which other logical state it should proceed to after the job is done. The instructions also contain a procedure for accessing input and rules for producing output. On the other hand, however, the machine also has a ‘structural state’ of its physical functioning. Some parts of it (Putnam speaks of vacuum tubes) may not work, which would cause errors in its computations. Therefore, such a machine can be equipped with a diagnostic system that it runs before producing any output. However, there is a twist: 150

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me, myself and my brain when the machine presents us with an assessment of its structural state, it may be mistaken. It may be saying that this or that part has malfunctioned, but this statement may be erroneously delivered precisely because some other part has malfunctioned, causing the error. But when a machine is claiming to be in such-and-such a logical state, we cannot contradict it. This, says Putnam, is analogous to sentences such as ‘Jones says he is in pain’ and ‘Jones says he has fever’; a doctor can measure Jones’s temperature and ascertain whether the second sentence is correct, while in the first case we cannot contradict Jones’s assessment. It may be the case that Jones is lying, of course, not being a machine, but there is no way of accessing Jones’s state (1975a: 370–2). The structural state of the machine corresponds to the brain state of a human being, while the logical state corresponds to the mental state. However, since computers with innumerable parallel processes and subroutines running at the same time and the discoveries of parallel neural networks still both lay ahead at the time when Putnam originally made these claims (1960), the suggested analogy, whatever its other merits, glosses over an important asymmetry. While the entire ‘structural state’ of the machine could not be embraced by a unitary, clear descriptive statement – there were so many vacuum tubes that in theory could malfunction simultaneously, just as there were millions of neurons in the brain – the ‘logical state’ of the whole thing fits neatly into a small formula on a simple table. It would therefore seem wholly appropriate to compare it to a single, reified mental state such as ‘pain’. But what about a situation where someone would simultaneously feel pain, be afraid that this is going to be an increasingly frequent condition now they are getting older, reassert their disbelief in god and evoke a memory of their childhood during which they believed in god, and feel melancholic that they no longer do so, since this belief might, perhaps, help them to cope with the situation (which, again, is another belief that they have at the same moment)? The ‘logical state’ of such a mind would be in a number of mental states simultaneously, while in empirical experience these are all intertwined and dependent on one another.

The mind and the world Nick Chater, in the course of his detailed argument against ‘inner worlds’, often underlines that ‘the external world is, of course, defined in precise detail and full colour, irrespective of where we 151

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me, myself and my brain happen to be looking … or whether we are even present at all’ (2018: 59) and ‘the outer world consists of pre-formed stable objects which we can inspect from various directions with a fair expectation that these different views will fit together’ (2018: 85). Indeed, we can, but that still does not mean anything for how the world is without us, because, as I have been arguing, the composition of the world that we take to be natural is necessarily gaze-dependent, hinging on the observer’s perspective and speed of being. The way the world appears to us is thus dependent on the relationship between our specifically human perspective and the multileveled edifice of reality, rather than the way things ‘really’ are. If we approach Chater’s main argument from this set of premises, it ends up leading to entirely different conclusions. Chater shows how experimental psychology has proved that our perception has a relatively narrow focus, but the neural apparatus servicing it compensates for this lack with an amazingly rapid processing capacity. Drawing on the work of Huang and Pashler (2007), he argues, for example, that the eye is capable of seeing only one colour at every moment, but these are united into a single picture by the neural networks so quickly that our internal consciousness does not notice (2018: 65–6). This is not restricted to colours only: all in all, ‘we perceive only the parts of the image that we are processing, not those we are not processing’ (2018: 70). But if the image of any setting that we have in our minds is indeed a continuously produced and reproduced work in progress, in which the mind complements the imperfect sense-data by improvising all kinds of details on the basis of its previous experience and generalizing from its expectations, then it is clearly justified to consider this image to be dependent on input both from the mind and the world. Or, as Hilary Putnam has neatly put it, ‘the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world’ (1981: xi). In other words, the world is not ‘defined in precise detail and full colour’ and does not ‘consist of pre-formed stable objects’, especially as ‘colour’ only occurs when light is reflected on a specific retina. Reality is, of course, mind-independent and does not need us in order to exist, but any form of it that we come into contact with, any image we have of it, is never gaze-independent. During cognition, we ‘extract’ objects from the flux of reality precisely by processing them into images that are themselves distributed in time, over moments that we need in order to access different single features of them. Perception is more than simple reflection; it involves (but is not constituted by) an element of construction, which in turn, in 152

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me, myself and my brain addition to our conceptual background, might be motivated by our desires, fears and other emotional filters that colour our relationship with reality, as well as rational arguments about it that we endorse or principles that we adhere to. According to Chater, however, our emotions and rationalizations are also improvised narratives made up as we go along. James A. Russell and his associates (Posner et al. 2005; Russell 1980, 2003; Russell and Barrett 1999) have proposed a model whereby only two variables actually make up the ‘core affect’ on which all emotional structures rely – the level of arousal and the like–dislike switch. Chater summarizes many findings of experimental psychology, concluding that it is the particular situation, the context in which we find ourselves, that gives form to our emotional state, not an intrinsic gamma of various types of feelings (2018: 106–7). An emotion, all in all, is nothing but ‘the interpretation of a bodily state’ (2018: 144). Similarly, he shows how the capacity to rationalize one’s actions and decisions can be manipulated, so that people, believing (falsely) that they are required to explain their previous choices, actually start to argue for their exact opposites (Johansson et al. 2014; Tsetsos et al. 2012). Moreover, it appears that these argued opposites become entrenched in motivation guarding the future behaviour of these subjects. Thus, for example, one study has shown that if a questionnaire on political topics had an American flag on it, the respondents from among a random sample were more likely to endorse Republican values, and not just that – a whole eight months later they were also likely to actually vote Republican (Carter et al. 2011), because this choice was what they made their own during the deliberation of political problems. ‘Pre-formed beliefs, desires, motives, attitudes to risk lurking in our hidden depths are a fiction: we improvise our behaviour to deal with the challenges of the moment rather than to express our inner self’, Chater concludes (2018: 123). This, if true, would indeed be good news for all the brainwashers of the world. And yet, when we read Chater carefully, we see that at least three tiers of mind emerge from his own descriptions, while memories and entrenched patterns of past behaviour are excluded from this model of perception processing altogether, even if argumentatively alluded to (as in the case of a chance encounter with the flag influencing a person’s actual political behaviour months later). On the ground level, there is the input of data, a large amount of which is duly received and even acted upon, but which never reaches the level of conscious processing (2018: 110ff.). Then there is an interim level, on which an ‘interpreter’ is located, or Chater’s ‘improvising 153

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me, myself and my brain mind’, which processes the data. It is this level of consciousness that has the capacity to fill in the blanks and organize the sparse data into a coherent narrative, or an illusion of a full picture. This mind operates at a lower speed than the processing facility, and its ability to produce coherent and holistic perceptions of the world depends on this slowness of perspective, just as the eye’s inability to see single, quickly alternating pictures on a screen is responsible for the capacity of the mind to connect them into a film. Finally, there is the highest level of the conscious ‘I’ to which the narratives and the pictures are presented. This ‘I’ has an even lower speed of being and field of vision, as it is unable to observe what is happening on the previous level. When Chater writes that ‘we are … perpetually creating meaning from sensory input’, but at the same time ‘we are only ever aware of the meaning created; the process by which it arises is hidden’ (2018: 145), the two ‘we’s’ in the quote have to refer to different levels of the self, one on which the production process takes place and the other that is possibly inclined, but technically unable, to oversee the process from above. The crucial question that follows is, of course, why should we equate the thinking ‘I’ with the brain in the first place, if what takes place in the brain is not directly available to the mind at all. We thus only get to isolate a ‘flat mind’ here if we, first of all, treat this system as a structure made up of discrete, separable components, and second, define ‘the mind’ as a certain isolated and autonomous level in this structure. Neither of these moves is justified. On the physical level of neural networks, this means the deliberate postulation of thresholds between parts of what would otherwise appear as a single, connected whole, as Chater describes it himself (2018: 128–9). And not just that: as neuroscience has hitherto been unable to locate a single region of the brain as responsible for the housing of the ‘I’, to whom the illusionary picture is presented, influential physicalist accounts such as Dennett’s have accordingly rejected all forms of the so-called ‘homunculus hypothesis’ (1993: 253ff.). And if we are inclined towards a broader definition of the subject, then the identification of the mind with a certain mechanism of presenting updated versions of sense-data to the internal eye/‘I’ makes even less sense. The ‘I’ is a process that takes place in interaction with the world and does not predate, in any of its momentary manifestations, the relationships it enters – but neither is it a randomly manipulated pseudo-entity, inasmuch its range of possible futures is limited to what the multiple causal flows that make up its past have determined. 154

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The self as a field It should be evident by now why a field ontology is well suited for the discussion of selfhood and subjectivity. ‘I’ have neither substance nor pattern continuity with myself when we take the entire span of ‘my’ existence into account. ‘My’ biological cells have been completely replaced several times, and the pattern according to which they are organized is quite different now from what it looked like when I was born, although the change has been achieved as a result of gradual modification. Similarly, my ideas, memories and knowledge – especially if taken in their causal efficacy – have been modified beyond recognition, although some of my beliefs and items of knowledge are more persistently parts of me than others. Even so, the aspects of ‘my’ actual behaviour produced by such constancies may not have much in common. For example, the feelings I have for ‘my’ country may prompt ‘me’ to strongly criticize its particular political institutions at one point and be fervently supportive of them at another. Moreover, such feelings may even occasionally change a person’s political value system by prompting them to abandon, say, liberal values and to embrace conservative ones, if they think that a current predicament is the result of too much liberalism in political practice. From the point of view of a process ontology, ‘I’ can nevertheless be assumed to exist, even if not as a self-identical and continuous entity, but as a node that has been caused and has causal powers itself precisely because of its unrepeatable pattern of interacting subprocesses.13 However, the ‘I’ of any given moment is not describable only in the terms that synchronically characterize it in its relationships with the rest of reality, but also needs to be evaluated in terms of its possible futures. As I am going to argue in the next chapter, some of these possible futures (as well as impossible imaginary ones) acquire a certain degree of causal efficacy by being articulated in the internal dialogue. These imagined trajectories and the visions of the self in them contribute to the constitutive tensions of the self-as-field, pertaining to the excess, the remainder of what the ‘I’ is as opposed to the multitude of its current entanglements with reality. 13 Dan

Zahavi has quite correctly observed that the views that claim an individual ‘self’ does not exist at all, such as Thomas Metzinger’s process-ontological critique of the idea, normally operate with a reified and outdated concept of selfhood, which they have no difficulty in overturning, but that concept is far from being the only available alternative (2005: 103).

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me, myself and my brain Is it possible to reconcile this account with a neuroscientific view of the emergence of the self-conscious subject? It would seem so. The eminent neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet, for example, whose experiments and their implications for the ideas of free will and human agency will be discussed in the next chapter, has modelled the ontology of mental processes in terms of what he calls the ‘conscious mental field’ theory (1996; 2004: 157ff.). Libet notes ‘a growing consensus that no single cell or group of cells is likely to be the site of a conscious experience, but rather that conscious experience is an attribute of a more global or distributed function of the brain’ (2004: 165) and proposes that ‘we may view conscious subjective experience as if it were a field, produced by appropriate though multifarious neuronal activities of the brain’ (2004: 168). This ‘conscious mental field’ (CMF), in Libet’s view, has two main qualities: on the one hand, it would be the ‘mediator between the physical activities of nerve cells and the emergence of subjective experience’ and, on the other, ‘the entity in which unified subjective experience is present’ with ‘a causal ability to affect or alter some neuronal functions’ (2004: 168). He concedes that the CMF is not measurable, but nonetheless asserts that its reality can, at least in theory, be experimentally verified. However, although Libet is careful to formulate his position in a way that would not violate the physicalist dogma and has later even changed the term to ‘cerebral mental field’ (2006), others have argued that the ‘conscious mental field’ cannot itself be physical in the same way we think, for example, of electro-magnetic fields (Lindahl and Århem 2019). Be that as it may, the theory has inspired a lot of discussion about the ontological status of consciousness, and its sheer existence suffices here to support the present claims as not, in principle, objectionable from a natural science point of view. A field ontology of subjectivity further allows us to construct internal tensions and contradictions not as conflicts between the ‘true self’ and its externally caused adversaries, but as the dynamism of the field itself, one of its necessary characteristics. A ‘true self’ here amounts to nothing more than a view that the ‘I’ produces of itself, as has been noted before. Thus, for example, Gerd Rudolf differentiates between a ‘me-experience’, which results from the realizations of one’s bodily and mental individuality, and a ‘selfexperience’, a slowly achieved reflexive coming to terms with one’s existential situation (2018: 299–300). This ‘self-experience’ is always inescapably an elusive and internally dynamic totality, which never allows itself to be wholly captured by a neat and abstract model or formula, or reduced to a single, unchanging perspective. 156

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me, myself and my brain In his critique of excessive cognitivization of the discourses on selfhood, Steven Shaviro suggests that this elusive dimension of experience might be its aesthetic aspect: When philosophers squabble over the value and significance of phenomenal experience, the ‘properties’ it possesses, the ‘dispositions’ it displays, and even over the question of whether it ‘exists’ or not, they fail to consider this experience in any terms other than cognitive ones. There is a dimension of experience missing from the philosophical account; it is missing precisely because it cannot be conceptualized in philosophy. We might well say that this missing dimension of experience is the aesthetic one; aesthetics in this sense is cognitive philosophy’s other. (2015a: 36)

Shaviro goes on to identify the aesthetic dimension of experience with the remainder, or the trace that remains after the conceptualization of qualia on a cognitive basis. I would like to argue that this remainder (excess), discussed in Chapter 1 as what cannot ever be captured by a concept, is unavailable from any particular internal vantage point precisely because all these vantage points are constituted by it. It is distributed across the whole field – it is, it takes place as the field of consciousness. The field cannot be conceptualized, because a fully functional concept always appears as a result of a choice between what is relevant and what is not, while the field is nothing but the momentary cross-section of the entire process that an idea of experience is to be extracted from. All in all, it is almost as if we could describe the subject field in the same terms that Maurice Merleau-Ponty has used for the experience as a football player on an actual playing field: The field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the ‘goal’, for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his own body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes in it new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field. (1983: 168–9)

What should be especially noted here is Merleau-Ponty’s stress on the dialectic of milieu and action in producing the field as it is

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me, myself and my brain experienced. This is precisely the range of topics to which we will turn in the next chapter.

Summary In this chapter, I have addressed a number of approaches to selfhood and the mental process, in particular its much-discussed relationship with the physical brain. I have argued that the physicalist view, which denies consciousness any ontological independence, is dependent on a view that takes objects as the prototypical units of being, but a processual ontology that sees entities as fields of constitutive tensions has no problem with granting consciousness an ontological status of its own. Moreover, I have tried to show how our understanding of consciousness might benefit from being placed on two conceptual gradients. On the one hand, we might see consciousness not as something that is radically different from the way of being-in-theworld of nonconscious entities, but rather as something that has emerged gradually during the evolutionary process, as the currently highest empirically observable form of openness towards others. This process has passed many previous thresholds, the most significant of which has been the emergence of life, but there is no reason to assert that its present form, or a range of emergent capacities characteristic of certain living organisms, is the endpoint of that development. On the other hand, however, we might also pay attention to the varying degrees of presence that consciousness may exhibit in a body. While lay usage normally only distinguishes between ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ as two distinct states, there are gradations and thresholds within both of them, and the border between them is not really fixed either. What thus emerges is a view of consciousness that is not an entity (and therefore cannot be equated to ‘selfhood’) nor a measurable quality, but a stage on a gradient that has led from an imaginary starting point of self-contained isolation to the multiplicity of forms of engagement with others that we witness in the world around us. The idea of self I propose relates to the flow of consciousness in the same way as a field relates to a process in the ontological model described in Chapter 2. It is not an enduring and self-same entity or an egocentric particular, but an internality, which is held together by constitutive tensions. Importantly, none of the points in this self-field is entitled to the position of the ‘real’ centre of control, but the focus 158

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me, myself and my brain from which decisions regarding immediately succeeding actions are made is constantly shifting from one part of it to another, resulting in consecutive reconfigurations of the field. As any field, it is never in perfect balance, even if it may be always striving for it.

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4 THE SELF AS AN EXTENDED DECISION-MAKING NETWORK

In this final chapter I will be moving on from the problematic of what the self is to how it is, first to its embeddedness in the world, in the immediacy of the body, and then further on in its larger environment, followed by an account of how the self acts, or agency. However, as argued in the previous chapter, I do not think that the self exists somehow separately from its environment, nor that it is an entity that has a status outside its acts. On the contrary, I will be defending a view, in itself not new, that I have here termed ‘bodythink’ – a view that we should not, except for heuristic purposes, try to bracket the core process of what we call ‘thinking’ off from all its peripherals and reduce these to mere props and accessories, or, even worse, targets of this activity. Nobody thinks without a body – as argued in the previous chapter, even the ‘brain in the vat’ has a body, namely the vat and the connected computer providing the simulation of its world. In real-life situations, we may and do make efforts to exclude the ‘peripheral’ bodily input from our thought process, but it nonetheless continues to influence, and, as I am going to argue, may even sometimes provide what is necessary for the completion of a task at hand. But the being-in-the-world of the self does not stop at the skin. Following and developing the ideas of John Haugeland, the ‘extended mind’ school of cognitive studies, as well as the Latourian actornetwork theory, I will be defending the view that not just the activities of cognition, but also agentic selfhood on the whole is only realized as an activity that takes place on a broader field, on which it is a node (albeit a relatively autonomous one), not an intruder from the outside. Here – as, incidentally, in the case of the body system – the question can be posed about whether the self/mind and its environment should 160

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the self as an extended decision-making network be best seen as connected, but nonetheless initially distinct, processes, or merging into a unified process from which either of them can be extracted. Both answers to this are feasible and depend on the perspective. The borders between the self and its others are necessarily membranic: on the one hand, the self has an internality of its own; on the other, however, this internality (unlike that of a stone, for example) is unsustainable without input from the outside. The account of agency I will be proposing is derived from this view: the setting in which a person develops, together with the causal linkages from their past, provides a trajectory, defined by the most probable possible future towards which their process might lead, but it is both the greatness and the weakness of the (human) agent that they can make the choice to stray from this course, for reasons both noble and base, and sometimes even a mixture of both at the same time. Given this possibility, remaining on the trajectory by choice, not by inertia, also acquires the status of an agentic decision.1 In the final sections of this chapter, I will discuss the notions of individuality and collectivity, proposing an alternative to the normally accepted view of methodological individualism. It is generally assumed that cognitive functions are solely attributable to individuals and therefore, if at all, collectivities can be thought of as agents or subjects only in a limited sense of the word. I will be arguing for precisely the opposite view, developing the notion of ‘relational subject’ as proposed by Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret Archer (2015: 58ff.): just as the individual subject is best seen as a field of constitutive tensions, with different potentially focal points vying for control, so, too, is a group a field on which different points of view compete and collaborate to attain supra-individual takes on reality. By opening up to their others, individual members of the group can adopt their gazes, to see their world in a way they would 1 This

constitutes my main difference with the ‘deep’ version of relational sociology as outlined by François Dépelteau (2013), who contrasts this position with what he calls the determinist (= social structures determine agents) and the co-determinist (= social structures and agents define each other) views. In the ‘deep’ view, social structures and agents are both perspective-dependent abstractions and do not exist separately from each other (with which I agree), but I think it does not follow from this view of individuals that ‘none of their actions can be reduced to their own capacities’ (Dépelteau 2013: 180). I will defend the view that, paradoxical as it may sound in this context, human individuals are able to break with their trajectories as a result of internally made decisions, casting off the expected logic of their behaviour that follows from the multiplicity of processes that have produced them. For me, this is precisely the constitutive feature of what a ‘person’ is. It is true, of course, that the internal process does not run autonomously from the rest of the world – no process does – but the mental pattern that yields the agentic result has no existence elsewhere than the agent’s mind.

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the self as an extended decision-making network not normally be able to do, and even acquire modes of reasoning not grounded in their individual persons at all. In this paradigm, we should be able to think of individuals and groups in the same way – as fields in perpetual search of balance, constantly disrupting any balance they can momentarily achieve, as they stay tuned to the changes of the world.

The body In typical neurocentric accounts of the mind (as a shorthand for the experience of brain processes), the body usually figures as an other, an outside entity, connected to, but distinct from the brain/mind. Antonio Damasio neatly sums up this doctrine: The brain states, which correspond to certain mental states, cause particular body states to occur; body states are then mapped in the brain and incorporated into the ongoing mental states … The body tells the brain: this is how I am built and this is how you should see me now. The brain tells the body what to do to maintain its even keel. Whenever it is called for, it also tells the body how to construct an emotional state. (2012: 96, 94)2

This indeed comes as no surprise. Neither is this attitude new: Bergson already pointed out in 1896 how the received view on the matter is ‘too much inclined to regard the living body as a world within a world, the nervous system as a separate being, of which the function is, first, to elaborate perceptions, and, then, to create movements’ (1990: 44). What is puzzling, however, is that the way in which the social sciences and the humanities treat the body in relation to the mind is curiously similar. In social theory, there are two customary ways of imagining the body. On the one hand, there is the biophysical body, an entity simultaneously participating in the objective processes largely beyond our control that are going on in the outside world and also providing its input into the internal subjectivity process. On the other, there 2 To

be fair, at other moments Damasio acknowledges the limits of this account, albeit reluctantly: ‘The machinery of emotion … is likely to influence processing of body signals … directly and indirectly. Exactly what is added in the process is not known, in neural terms, although the addition is likely to contribute to the experiential quality of the feelings … The brain mapping of the body state and the actual body state are never far apart. Their border is blurred. They become virtually fused’ (2012: 100). And even here, though he approaches the view that the separation of body and brain is a conceptual manoeuvre rather than a description of reality, he still emphasizes the machinic character of emotion production.

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the self as an extended decision-making network is the discursive or sociocultural body as the site of dispute, social inscriptions of meaning, discriminatory or privileging norms, and so on. Importantly, the separation between the two is itself something that has to be learned by the subject in the process of socialization and enculturation. Initially, as we become aware of our own bodies, they are always already both discursive and biophysical for ourselves, the two poles seamlessly integrated. The patterns of behaviour we learn to follow from the earliest age have always combined and balanced what is prompted by our internal drives and dispositions with what is expected by our peers and elders. By internalizing these patterns, we internalize also the distinction between the two sides of the equation that we have become. As a result, the end-points of our nerves and the sensitivity of our skin are relegated to the outside of our proper cognitive process and the body itself becomes an other for the mind, which now has to look for an explanation of how the two are united at all. The ‘mind–body problem’ thus results from an act of conceptual violence, of separating the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’ into two distinct entities which, even though they cannot exist without each other, are somehow still thought of separately, simply because we think of them in object-like terms. A similar act of conceptual violence, as quite a few feminist philosophers have argued, is perpetrated already in the initial separation of the body into the two planes described above.3 Obviously, this does not mean that the sociocultural aspects of the body are negligible – after all, only the social conventions can be changed as a result of a collective decision, not the physical reality – but that they 3

According to Elizabeth Grosz, ‘all the effects of subjectivity, all the significant facets and complexities of subjects, can be as adequately explained using the subject’s corporeality as a framework as it would be using consciousness or the unconscious’ (1994: vii). Moira Gatens seconds this view in her critique of the sex/gender separation: according to her, both the view that the mind is determined by the body and the view that the consciousness of a subject about their body is completely acquired ‘posit a naive causal relation between either the body and the mind or the environment and the mind which commits both viewpoints, as two sides of the same coin, to an a priori, neutral and passive conception of the subject’ (1996 :8). While these earlier accounts are inclined to discuss bodily self-consciousness in terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, more recently, as in Elizabeth Wilson’s critical account, it is precisely the psychoanalytical model that is held responsible for the view ‘that the most compelling analytic registers for thinking about the body are symbolic, cultural, ideational, or social rather than biological’ (2015: 49). Be that as it may, what these (as well as so many other) thinkers have argued forcefully is that ‘the subject is always a sexed subject. If one accepts the notion of the sexually specific subject, that is, the male or female subject, then one must dismiss the notion that patriarchy can be characterized as a system of social organization that valorizes the masculine gender over the feminine gender. Gender is not the issue; sexual difference is’ (Gatens 1996: 9).

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the self as an extended decision-making network are not primary either. What the feminist critics are saying is that the downgrading of biological difference claims to create a mental image of a body that is allegedly neutral, but paradigmatically male, a ‘disembodied objectivity’ (Haraway 1991: 184) to which femininity can only be added as a marking attribute. As opposed to this, they emphasize that all bodies are necessarily marked, and we are all necessarily and irreducibly corporeal precisely by virtue of these markings. To speak of the ‘body’ as something neutral and abstract is not to speak about it at all. In addition to the primary difference of biological sex – not a binary, of course, and not even a smooth gradient, but a field of tensions forming between the two poles of masculinity and femininity – bodies are further always marked by a large number of secondary, but nonetheless important, characteristics. They can be allergic, athletic, diabetic, clumsy, addicted to substances – or to exercise. They can be sensitive to sunlight and any number of other irritants, or, on the contrary, numb and relatively irresponsive. Transient states – some of them always present – complement the more enduring ones. Bodies feel pleasure and pain, they constantly react in a number of different ways to what happens to them, from ecstatic bliss to cold sweat and throwing up. The absence of any of these marks is not the ‘standard’, paradigmatic state of the body, but its death. While it is normal to notice the alteration of the more superficial and transient corporal states and their correlation with mental states, such as associating fear with cold sweat, we are less likely to note how the more enduring markings build up a background system that constantly participates in our subject process as a similarly constitutive presence. This is especially relevant for markings that are more enduring or even permanent because, unable to compare our own bodily experiences with anyone else’s, we cannot perceive their specificity or evaluate their role in constituting ourselves – or, consequently, understand them. As Mark Johnson puts it: Mind and body, as well as mental and physical, are therefore just terms we use to pick out certain aspects of the integrated processes of organism-engaging-its-world … what we are able to think about, and how we think and reason about it, are the result of how our bodies monitor our interactions with our environments and how we act within those environments, both via accommodation and adaptation. In short, the very nature of thinking and reasoning is shaped by our embodiment. (2017: 221–2)

Therefore, remaining consistent in our rejection of the bifurcation of 164

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the self as an extended decision-making network body and mind, we need to reverse the scheme of relations between the biophysical and sociocultural aspects of the body. It is not that our mind, as it matures within the biophysical body, gradually colonizes it with the help of its acquired sociocultural representations of it. On the contrary, the mind itself emerges through the interface of our bodily and sociocultural presence as a part of our whole being. There is no ‘pure reason’ or rationality that gets contaminated within a particular bodily self – or a pure soul imprisoned in the weak flesh, torn by animal desires – but all reason is immersed in and engaged with its environment to begin with. Ideas do not pre-exist a body in a self-identical form in some higher realm, but only appear as idiosyncratic schemata and linguistic frames co-determined by a particular body in its particular spatial arrangements, on the one hand, and the history of their usage, on the other. To be sure, meanings are shared, as they reach individual subjects together with other causal flows that are contributing to their forming, but the way they take place and contribute to the internal process of this subject is always co-determined by their particular, embodied situation. ‘The subject’ thus here refers to the whole individual, the whole human being, their body and mind, which are inextricably intertwined and growing together, forming an entifiable unity, a single process, albeit with various types and channels of input. Any effort to exclude the body from this subject amounts to what Elizabeth Grosz has neatly termed ‘somatophobia’ (1994: 5).

Bodythink This has enormous consequences. For example, we know that adrenalin, which the adrenal glands pump into our bloodstreams during mental states of agitation, also acts as a powerful analgesic, so that wounded soldiers, for example, do not feel the pain of their wounds with the normal intensity while the battle is raging. On the neurophysicalist account, this adrenalin, once released, somehow becomes autonomous, independent of ourselves, almost an external agent similar to an analgesic we might have taken as a pill, and its effect on us becomes describable as its effect on our body, of which it is no longer a part itself. But wouldn’t it be much more logical to see this as an internal process, where the body itself prevents itself from feeling pain, because it needs its full resources deployed in a critical situation? If so, then we might not want to see the pills we take as analgesics as ‘external agents’ that somehow enter our body, 165

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the self as an extended decision-making network since they do not infiltrate our bloodstreams independently of our own actions, but rather as an example of our ability to change our chemical constitution and to use external resources for the purpose. The same, as I have argued before, also applies to eating and drinking. As a result, we should take a different view also of how information is produced and transmitted. Perhaps the succinctness of a key passage in a philosophical work, or an atypical nastiness exhibited by a fictional character in a crucial scene of a novel do not necessarily result from disembodied mental calculations, but are co-caused by an itch or a back pain of the author? When a presenter is nervous during a Q&A session and has a glass of water, is it not obvious that the water participates in the formulation of their answers to the next questions?4 On this view, it is no longer tenable to think of ‘propositions’ as contextless and emotionally neutralized semantic cores of actual speech-acts. It may be that the embodied character of an utterance or the embodied circumstances of its interpretation do not significantly distort the information exchanged, but they are certainly a presence in the process that has produced precisely this information in the first place. By proxy, this view also delegitimizes Saussure’s ‘language’ as a higher-level entity pre-existing any occasion of ‘speech’, into which it descends and is corrupted by the contaminated interpersonal environment. More properly, language should be seen as an extraction that we produce when we compare and analyse actual speech situations. These situations are thus not deviations from a natural normality, but arise at the encounter of particular idiolects, which in turn are produced by the ‘lens’ of the embodied individual.5 The same applies to any cultural and conceptual systems. The ‘meanings’ they consist of are not something we passively learn; they 4

Shaun Gallagher, commenting on a study that shows how legal decisions made by judges gradually become, on average, less and less favourable during a session as the lunchbreak approaches, and then return to being more favourable once the judges are no longer hungry (Danziger et al. 2011), notes that ‘affective factors, although clearly extraneous to the formal aspects of legal reasoning, are “extraneous” to cognition only if we think of cognition as something disembodied. In any case, it seems reasonable to think that this embodied-affective aspect of hunger has an effect on the jurist’s perception of the facts, as well as on the weighing of evidence, and doesn’t appear out of nowhere just when the judicial decision is made’ (2017: 152). 5 It is, of course, possible to decree and establish norms of orthography, as is being done in the process of nation-building, for example. But these norms are quite often topics of controversy, since they are used as instruments of cultural pressure on dialect-speaking local communities, or as ways of entrenching class distinctions. In any case, they are the product of conscious choices and a lot of work, and should not be confused with a pristine and natural form of language that somehow hovers above the unworthy, but empirical linguistic reality of the world inhabited by embodied human beings.

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the self as an extended decision-making network are themselves claims that a unit in the available repertoire of signs corresponds to, or significantly overlaps with, the meaning we have ourselves given to a slice of our experience. It seems the argument so far entitles us to two important uncouplings: on the one hand, we should separate actual, experienced ‘thought’ from verbalizable and thereby disembodied significations, and, on the other, at least distrust the link posited between ‘propositions’, or the abstract statements of ideas with truth-values, and their verbal articulations, as these are always dependent on particular linguistic structures and vocabularies. To reiterate: what if, instead of positing a high and pure realm of ‘propositions’ above the already contaminated system of ‘language’, which, in turn, becomes dirtier still in its actual use as ‘speech’ and disintegrates altogether on the level of corporeal, unarticulated existence, we start instead from ‘bodythink’ as the full and unadulterated reality of the mental process, and acknowledge that by recognizing repeated and repeatable patterns in it (simultaneously positing a vantage point from which these are significant), we actually distance ourselves more and more from the actual praxis of the embodied mind? Note that, on this view, there is no reason to disdain these patterns – on the contrary, they are vital to any analytical activity and therefore to our mental fitness as a whole. Similarly, concentrating our thoughts by pushing interfering thought processes and bodily impulses to the margins of the field of consciousness is what we often require of ourselves for the solution of problems at hand, and failure to do this may result in decisions to be regretted later (as the focal point from which they ensue is not the most trustworthy one). However, to see this as a sort of psychomachia, to use a neologism coined by the fifth-century Latin poet Prudentius, that is, a battle between a pure, rational mind and hostile emotions supported by bodily urges and discomforts, is highly misleading. A conceptualization of the mental process as unified bodythink that is engaged in self-organization and self-control, I argue, provides us with a clearer view and helps us to avoid the positing of numerous pseudo-problems that arise from our way of describing the matter rather than from the matter itself. For example, this standpoint seems much better suited to negotiate a middle path between the Scylla of cognition as the recovery of a pregiven outer world (realism) and the Charybdis of cognition as the projection of a pregiven inner world (idealism). These two extremes both take representation as their central notion: in the first case representation is used to recover what is outer; in the second case it is used to project what is inner. Our intention is to

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the self as an extended decision-making network bypass entirely this logical geography of inner versus outer by studying cognition not as recovery or projection but as embodied action. (Varela et al. 1992: 172)

The idiom of bodythink thus takes the rejection of the ‘mind–body problem’ one step further: when, in its usual formulation, it is mostly directed towards the brain as the bodily equivalent of mind, and solutions are sought to the problem of how to describe the relationship between consciousness and the brain cells that are the carriers of mental activity, bodythink sees the entire body, and all of its activity, as conscious praxis, even if the majority of it takes place outside the shifting focal point that has taken on the role of the individual’s self-perspective for a given moment.6 We acknowledge the special role our feet are playing in the process of running, but we do not assert that feet are running while the rest of the person is not. The analogy should apply to the role of the brain in thinking just as well. This point can be well exemplified by the counterexample of quasi-memories, a concept coined by Derek Parfit. In his view, quasi-memories are recollections of experiences that someone has actually had, but it is not necessary that the recollecting person be the same as the one whose experience is recollected (1987: 220). Ordinary memories are thus a subclass of quasi-memories, in which the recollecting and experiencing person are the same. Although the discussion of quasi-memories often takes the form of abstract thought experiments with no explanation provided as to how they could actually come about, I think people also have real quasimemories, for example, when a past event has been recounted to them so vividly and repeatedly that they have absorbed it into the fabric of their own memory, especially when they recall and reframe it after a lot of time has passed. Parfit proceeds to describe the quasi-memories that Jane has inscribed in her brain of Paul’s experiences in Venice, so that Jane remembers seeing a church she recognizes and even a bolt of lightning, even though she has never been to Italy. The only problem with the situation would be a possible false attribution of these actual experiences to herself in a first-person mode, but on the whole,

6

Or, as James J. Gibson originally wrote in 1979, much ahead of his time: ‘We are told that vision depends on the eye, which is connected to the brain. I shall suggest that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system’ (Gibson 1986: xiii).

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the self as an extended decision-making network quasi-memories would provide a similar kind of knowledge about other people’s past lives. They would provide knowledge of what these lives were like, from the inside. When Jane seems to remember walking about the Piazza, hearing the gulls, and seeing the white church, she knows part of what it was like to be Paul, on that day in Venice. (1987: 221)

Parfit concedes that Jane might realize the experience is not hers when she remembers herself shaving and seeing Paul’s face in the mirror – but the effect of this discrepancy is simply the realization that the remembered experience is not hers. But what if her memory is of Paul seeing an attractive lady and feeling a flicker of desire? Would that make Jane doubt her sexuality? What if Paul has seen an animal’s entrails in the market and felt nauseous as a result, but Jane, a surgeon by profession, would not normally have such a reaction? Does she have it now? For Parfit’s model to work, it seems necessary that the experiences are recollected only as semantic representations of their visual and possibly aural aspects, and not in their total form. While extracting such representations from our bodythoughts is indeed what we constantly do, they should not be equated to the actual memories of our experiences. This is not to deny that quasi-memories are possible – I think I have quite a few of these, actually – but I only develop them when a semantic representation of a past experience, related to me by someone else, gradually acquires an internally produced experiential husk, something put together from remembered aspects of actual experiences I have had. Jane might get them both about a trip she actually made but does not remember all the details of, and about a trip she never actually made but does not remember having skipped and has heard lots of details about. However, she would hardly remember herself desiring another woman if not inclined to do so, as the cognitive dissonance would prevent such a recollection from evolving. Bodythink thus has a role to play even in the production of false memories.

From movement to agency Traditional ontologies conceive of movement in opposition to stasis, and the latter is considered to be the default form of how the entities are in the world. Movements characterize things, mark them, are added to them, but in their pristine form the things are thought to stand still. From a process-ontological point of view, such a position 169

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the self as an extended decision-making network is not even theoretically possible. Processes take place in movement, and when something appears to stand still, it is just moving at zero speed at a particular moment and in relation to something else. Considering something to be real and not moving is similar to a geo- or heliocentric view of the world, where the Earth or the Sun is considered to be stationary, while all other celestial bodies move around it. Being at rest is thus conceivable only in relation to the internality of a contextual system, as zero movement within it. The same obviously also applies to any human body that takes part in the reality process. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone has argued in rather strong terms that it is clear that movement is absolutely foundational not only to perceptual realizations of ourselves as doing or accomplishing certain things or making certain things happen – such as ‘grinding something to pieces’ – and to correlative cognitive realizations of ourselves as capable of just such acts or activities, but to perceptual-cognitive realizations of ourselves as alive, i.e. as living creatures, animate organisms, or animate forms. Aliveness is thus a concept as grounded in movement. (2011: 116)

This means that any account of cognitive processes and being in the world in general that omits speed from among its fundamental parameters is automatically wrong. We are told in elementary mechanics that bodies are affected by the speed and trajectory of their movement in ways that are taken as deviations from how they are ‘naturally’, that is, in stasis. But if we now admit that stasis is itself just a form of movement, not the ‘natural’ state of an entity, we might want to recalibrate our view of things. Mark Johnson has indeed proposed a theory of enacted cognition that is based on ‘image schemas’, or ‘recurring interactional patterns that make up our intercorporeal communal experience’ (2017: 99) and participate in the structuration of shared meanings. Sheets-Johnstone elaborates an even more thoroughgoing theory of kinesthetic consciousness showing that ‘to affirm the possibility of thinking in movement is to regard movement neither as a vehicle for thinking nor as a symbolic system through which reference is made to something else’ (2011: 427), as ‘movement forms the I that moves before the I that moves forms movement. Spontaneous movement is the constitutive source of agency, of subjecthood, of selfhood, the dynamic core of our sense of ourselves as agents, subjects, selves’ (2011: 119; italics in the original). But this view can still be taken further, as the ‘I’ need not be separated from movement at all, if it only takes place as movement 170

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the self as an extended decision-making network and there is no ‘I’ outside of this movement, just as there need be no self-same, continuous and distinct carrier for the elementary charge of being at its minimal occurrences, as discussed in Chapter 2. This is not to say that the movement cannot turn into a subjective memory, or a constitutive trace of a (differently moving) subject at a later date. The idea is that the ‘I’ is not separable from its movements when these occur. The postulation of a stable, self-identical ‘I’ as an egocentric particular is a mirror move to the view that entities have a natural state of stasis. The position that such a postulation is false and ‘I’ only occurs as the process of movement in which it is engaged is perhaps not a necessary concomitant of one-tiered ontology, but certainly agrees with it better than its opposite. This raises the fundamental question of agency, which incidentally is one of the key issues for a philosophical paradigm where the human perspective is not the measure of all things.7 Unfortunately, the received theory of agency is of little help to us, as most articulations of it ‘share the central doctrine that action is to be explained in terms of the intentionality of intentional action’ which can take place when ‘the instantiation of certain mental states and events (such as desires, beliefs and intentions) would cause the right events (such as certain movements) in the right way’ (Schlosser 2019). If, however, we reject the atomization of mental states into particular, but selfidentical, propositional attitudes, as I have proposed, and prefer to conceptualize the mental process in the terms of extended bodythink, on the one hand, while sticking to the agenda of dethroning the human gaze, on the other, we need a more holistic account of agency that does not conform to these premises. Another reason for this is the fact that the conceptual foundations of the received account of agency have been thoroughly discredited by the influential work of Benjamin Libet. Over the years, Libet and his associates have conducted a series of experiments measuring the time certain impulses of the body and their conscious correlates occur. Test subjects were told to perform a simple movement and to say aloud when they are going to do it. The assumption was that the intent to perform the movement arose before the movement 7

Stacy Alaimo, among others, has pointed out ‘in terms of interconnected entanglements rather than as a unilateral “authoring” of actions’ for the discussion of the Anthropocene and climate change (2016: 156), that even environmentally informed representations of causal flows that are causing climate change are, most of the time, centred on the human gaze. For example, they map human habitation, commerce and transport, as well as information flows, while leaving the migration routes of birds or whales as well as winds, tides and currents without attention, even though these are significantly shaped and affected by the represented processes (2016: 145).

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the self as an extended decision-making network was actually performed. However, Libet’s results proved beyond reasonable doubt that the opposite was the case: sensory awareness of the will to act developed about 400ms later than the processes that led to the act had already started (2004: 124). In other words, the decision to move was taken by the body before the mind actually became conscious of it. Supporters of determinism like to quote Libet in support of the view that we are not really the conscious subjects of our actions and a physical account of causality is all that matters for processes we normally think of as mental (see, e.g., Wegner 2002: 52ff.). But this claim makes sense only if we accept the premise that the brain is the only locus of consciousness. Libet’s findings can also be interpreted to confirm a broader view, according to which, ‘when the embodied agent interacts with the world or with others, that engagement doesn’t generate sensory input for the brain to process; what it generates is already, on the elementary timescale, a response by the whole organism’ (Gallagher 2017: 162). In other words, when we conceptualize the relationship between our minds and our actions in terms of bodythink, then, instead of undermining the idea, Libet’s conclusions offer powerful support for it: the entire body is involved in the decision-making process; it is just that certain parts of the conscious field of the bodymind have a large degree of autonomy. Libet also goes on to show that after the focal mind has become aware of what is going on in the entire body, it still has enough time to put a ‘conscious veto’ on the decisions taken by the body without its approval (2004: 137). This might remind us of the idea of conatus, especially as understood by Spinoza – the striving of a thing to remain itself in spite of all the changes happening to it, which he identifies with the thing’s essence (Ethics III, P6) – or Bergson’s view of any thing’s making of itself, which manifests in its effort to retard the processes leading to its decay (1944: 268). In a certain sense, the idea that we have of ourselves is enacted precisely by refraining from any act that is not in accord with it. The difference between the received view of consciousness as the initiator of all acts and the view that ensues from Libet’s work, where consciousness has the more restricted role of policing the body’s actions, can, perhaps, be likened metaphorically to that between public and private law in many countries. When public institutions have to follow the logic that everything not prescribed by the law is prohibited, private law operates on the premise that everything not prohibited by the law is permissible. Similarly, the received view holds that all activity proceeds along procedural rules stipulated by 172

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the self as an extended decision-making network a conscious centre of control, while, in actual reality, as Libet has shown, conscious control only has the possibility of stopping the activity it considers ‘illegal’. As a result, we can see that the received account of agency based on ‘forming intents’ and ‘carrying out corresponding actions’ relies on outdated science – unless, of course, we also see intentionality as something distributed all over the body (Gallagher 2017: 80).

Agency as self-realization In view of the above, it is only natural that critiques of the received view of agency are gaining the upper hand in more recent literature. For example, Komarine Romdenh-Romluc has shown, in a manner highly relevant for the present inquiry, how the intent–action correlation is in contradiction with the dominant view that agency belongs to ‘persons’ – in Charles Taylor’s sense of self-reflective agents both rationally and emotionally engaged with their lifeworlds (1985) – rather than all living beings in general. If there is a corresponding intent to any action, Romdenh-Romluc argues, this means that actions performed as reflexes or otherwise without conscious initiating decisions need to remain outside the domain of agency. However, it is easy to see how allegedly intention-driven actions (such as taking a shower) can be broken down to single sub-actions (‘testing then altering the water temperature, washing the parts of one’s body, selecting a shampoo, applying it to one’s hair and then rinsing it away, singing, and so on’), which are performed without a decision or initiating intent (2011: 87–8). Accordingly, if an action consists in unintentional subactions for which intents are not formed, it needs to be shown how their sum can be cast as a single action performed as a result of a single, initiating decision. Therefore, Romdenh-Romluc concludes, it is more reasonable to adopt a phenomenological model of agency such as that of Merleau-Ponty, for whom action ‘is a piece of behaviour that is initiated and controlled by the agent’s apprehension of her environment’; action may entail a differentiation of meaning for particular elements of that environment, and the contribution of thought processes is only the addition of semantic value to certain elements that would not otherwise elicit a particular behavioural response from the agent (2011: 89–91). Romdenh-Romluc’s critique of the received view makes even better sense when we rephrase and develop it in terms of the present inquiry. We can cast the level of the Taylorian ‘person’ as an emergent 173

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the self as an extended decision-making network phenomenon that evolves out of the interaction of various causal links guiding subpersonal actions, and see it not as the controlling centre of the entire field of the mind, but only as one of the recurrently active focal points on that field, one that competes for control with other such points. This is also the leading idea in Dan Silver’s theory of the ‘moodiness of action’, which attributes significant causal efficacy to recurring patterns of internal disposition or ‘moods’ such as anger, enthusiasm, or joy, as well as the strength of these ‘moods’ and their hold over the actor. As Silver emphasizes, ‘actors do not inhabit situations neutrally. Rather, moods disclose situations as containing some sort of significance or another; actors are always tuning into the import their situations hold for them’ while, in any situation, ‘some aspects of the situation stand out as salient, others recede as unimportant’ depending on the internal disposition of the actors themselves (2011: 209). Action-influencing ‘moods’ are thus not necessarily governed by a rational core, but come to be produced largely also by unconscious reactions to the situation. When we now add Libet’s account of movement-initiating decisions to this, it seems more and more reasonable to attribute actiondirecting powers to the entire field (including the parts of it that we normally do not consider to be actively conscious), and think of agency as originating in particular states of equilibrium that can take place on it, and not in egocentric self-same particulars. And yet, even relational sociologists such as Nick Crossley, when discussing the relations of individual agents with their outside, credit the agents with full autonomy in their decision-making and relegate the role of the patterns of their environment to mere ‘constraints’ and ‘opportunities’ with no causal efficacy, comparable to the rules of a game as opposed to actual games (2011: 142), quite in line with the standard minimal definition of agency as nothing but the capacity to perform intentional actions (Schlosser 2019). A less rigid view of agency has been proposed by Martin et al., who argue that it comes about through the self-realization of an individual person (2003: 114), in which the self is not a readymade individual, but more of a ‘work in progress’. A person, on their view, is someone whose actions are not fully determined by their physical, biological and sociocultural environment, but is able to form alternative narratives about its possible future states, which are all compatible with the present, but not with each other, and then to choose as their course of action from among these narratives that one which best corresponds with their understanding of themselves (2003: 111–13). The concept of agency is thus relevant only for those decisions that 174

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the self as an extended decision-making network are not made tacitly and do not follow univocally from the obtaining circumstances – it concerns only the decisions that could have been otherwise and therefore primarily reflect what is going on within the field of the subject and not on the field on which the subject is situated. Martin et al. posit the ‘self’ as an evolving, but nonetheless relatively stable entity taking command of ‘the gradual understanding of one’s embodied being in the world as a centre of experiencing, understanding, intending and acting. In this way, “self” understanding emerges, and continues to develop, within the historical, sociocultural contexts into which humans are born as biological individuals but come to exist as psychological persons’ (2003: 114). This ‘self’ is dynamic inasmuch as it is cumulative and able to absorb and include new experience onto its previously crystallized structure, but it is not inclined to break with its unfolding trajectory of development, which is why its agency consists in choosing courses of actions that are most consistent with its current understanding of its place in the world. Such a view has indeed a good explanatory potential for stable circumstances and solid, self-contained persons, but might be put to serious test by borderline situations and the mental states of people torn between reason and passions or mixed loyalties. In such contexts, we could argue, the self is produced by game-changing actions just as much, if not more, than these actions realize (or disclose) the self. Nonetheless, if we are to view the self as a processual unity without a designated centre of control, as argued in the previous chapter, we need an account of agency that would be able to accommodate such situations or even rely on them in the first instance as those where the role of agency (as opposed to the regular and mostly predictable process of the self) should be most clearly discernible. What I am referring to here are moments when agents need to assert themselves over their habitual reactions to their environment, doing the unpredictable deed that is yet more in accordance with how they are, or believe themselves to be, at the particular moment. For example, when someone who has thoroughly internalized the need to obey state laws is startled by a recognition that these laws may be conducive to injustice rather than preventing it (say, through the obligation to report on members of a persecuted minority) and decides to disobey them, that person is asserting and realizing their self at a higher degree than when they are simply enacting the norms considered as just by the state and which they have hitherto also believed to be just. The key term here is trajectory, or the predictable route of unfolding 175

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the self as an extended decision-making network of the self as process. I am taking my cue from Pierre Bourdieu, for whom a trajectory is ‘the set of successive movements of an agent in a structured (hierarchized) space, itself subject to displacements and distortions, or, more precisely, in the structure of the different kinds of capital, which are at stake in the field, economic capital and the specific capital of consecration (in its different kinds)’ (1993: 276). In this particular context, Bourdieu is speaking of artistic figures and their movements from certain social settings and positions to others as well as their attainment of recognition either from their peers and the symbolic powers-that-be, or the forces of the market, the first representing the standards of taste and the latter commercial allure. However, it is quite clear that not only creative artists, but each one of us has to go through life by navigating different social constraints and balancing the gravity of various attractors. Unlike Bourdieu, who observes actual trajectories of particular people, I would nonetheless want the term to designate an ideal, abstract trajectory (or a set of these) that are made socially available to a particular agent, needing a decision between choices at certain crucial moments and unfolding more or less unproblematically when that choice has been made. And while I wholeheartedly agree with John Levi Martin, who criticizes the French sociological school for their preference for abstractions as the standard and empirical social reality as deviations from it (2011: 28), I would nonetheless argue that we can meaningfully speak about ideal trajectories in this context as attractors towards which individual life courses might gravitate, or, conversely, which they would seek to avoid. Such ideal trajectories can take different forms, from models and paths discussed in career theory and implemented by various institutions as policies of ‘people management’, to a Japanese bank commercial from 1972, quoted by David Plath (1980: 89). This remarkable ad proposed a lifelong engagement to someone who has just started work in a company, with all the important life events mapped out, such as the birth of the son at the age of 26 and the daughter at 30, up to the daughter’s wedding and a trip to Europe a few years after retirement (see also Bauman and Raud 2015). Agency, in this context, can be opposed to following a trajectory, and is not really exercised mindlessly moving along in accordance with it. In other words, to be free means to be able to behave unexpectedly – while deciding not to can nonetheless similarly amount to an exercise of freedom. This, I believe, is simultaneously one of the greatest strengths – evolutionary advantages, if you wish – of us human beings as well as the source of the greatest dangers threatening us. 176

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the self as an extended decision-making network

Agency and temporality At this point, we need to recall the discussion of time regimes in Chapter 2, and the idea that processes do not roll out in absolute time, but within internal temporalities that may or may not be in accordance with all other processes to which they relate. The character of the relationship between two entities may, in fact, often be determined by the difference in their time regimes – such as a ‘stone’, with a much slower speed of being, dropping into a ‘river’, which is quicker. When we think of ‘personhood’ as an emergent level of an entity we now credit with agency, we have to keep in mind the various different internal temporalities by which the subprocesses of this entity are characterized, and how the patterns of these different temporalities coexist in the field that the agent entity consists in. The maintenance of the synchronicity of time regimes, I argued, is at least as important for the preservation of processual internality as the status of its membranic borders. Shaun Gallagher has argued along similar lines: [A]ction involves an intrinsic temporality … [which] can be found in bodily movement and action, and manifests itself at both the subpersonal and the personal levels of analysis … [as each] experiential event arises, flourishes, and subsides in the flow of consciousness in a structure that integrates experiential phases into and across cognitive acts and basic action activity … This intrinsic temporality arises in these dynamical processes, not in the order of objective time tied to an external or internally ticking clock or a fixed integration period, but in a nonlinear manner, contingent on the integration of variable numbers of dispersed cell assemblies. (2020: 25–6, 30)

It is against this background that, I suggest, we could re-read the classic views on agency of Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische. According to them, agency should be reconceptualized as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented towards the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and towards the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment) … [T]he structural contexts of action are themselves temporal as well as relational fields – multiple, overlapping ways of ordering time towards which social actors can assume different simultaneous agentic orientations. (1998: 963–4)

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the self as an extended decision-making network Emirbayer and Mische rely on George Herbert Mead’s ideas of time as a multiplicity of nested, emergent events, grounded in, but not bounded by, the present (an idea that in is accordance with the processual account of causality I have presented in Chapter 2), as well as his view of sociality as the embeddedness of people in parallel and temporally evolving contexts (1998: 968–9). They define agency as ‘the temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural environments – the temporal-relational contexts of action – which, through the interplay of habit, imagination, and judgment, both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situations’ (1998: 970), distinguishing iterativity (‘the selective reactivation by actors of past patterns of thought and action’), projectivity (‘the imaginative generation by actors of possible future trajectories of action’), and evaluation (‘the capacity of actors to make practical and normative judgments among alternative possible trajectories of action’) as its three constitutive aspects (1998: 971). Iterativity roughly corresponds to the inference of the past and projectivity to that of the future in the present, where evaluation leads to agentic choices. All three aspects are universally present whenever agency occurs, but one might dominate over others at any given moment. This necessary interplay of the three aspects leads Emirbayer and Mische to ‘conceptualize the self not as a metaphysical substance or entity … but rather as a dialogical structure, itself thoroughly relational’ (1998: 974). For the discussion of the views of Emirbayer and Mische in the present context, we should first note two things. On the one hand, the social context in which their agents are embedded is without doubt the human world, and the relationality of the agent consists in their entanglement with other similar agents, not with a world at large that would include nonhuman actors. On the other hand, in their view, the past and, to a certain extent, also the future are more real in that they possess independent causal efficacy, which bestows on the agent a greater degree of self-identity and continuity than what the context of the present inquiry would allow. The prerequisite of this claim seems to be that the agent making decisions in the present is in some significant manner the same person who made certain decisions in the past, and who now has now a basically undisturbed access to this past, which can be reactivated. Emirbayer and Mische avoid committing themselves to a more elaborately articulated ontology of the self, but it is fairly clear that they envisage its dialogical nature as taking place within its boundaries, and not enacted in its relationship 178

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the self as an extended decision-making network with its outside. All that said, their account of agency provides a well-defined context for addressing the problematic of agency in the context of time regimes, whether personal, willingly shared, or forcefully imposed. Let us begin by asking about the nature of the past that is causing the present. There is indeed one actual past, which has to a large extent determined the state of things for every moment of ‘now’. However, as has been repeatedly argued by a host of scholars from historians to psychologists, this actual past is inaccessible from the present on the axis of lived time, as the memories of all of those who have experienced it are gaze-dependent. Building on the work of Michael Dummett (1978), Ōmori Shōzō has coined the term ‘pastin-itself’ (1996: 71) – like the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’, it cannot be reached, it is inaccessible to our consciousness, as it is irrevocably gone. Therefore, this real, actually happened past has no causal powers over the decisions we take – only our impressions, the inevitably distorted memories, do so. Following Ōmori, we can speak about the effect of the past on our agency in two different senses: the traces in the present of the actual, gaze-independent ‘past-in-itself’ (evident, for example, in the material state of our world) should be separated from the retrievable ‘past-for-us’, which affects our agency directly by presenting (edited) memories of successful and failed strategies and decisions that are relevant for the current situation.

Future-in-itself But, perhaps even more importantly, we can extend the same logic in the other direction. There will only be one actual future, a ‘future-initself’, which is always inaccessible to us, as it has not yet happened. If we want to designate the present situation metaphorically with a point and the range of possible futures with a circle that is at a certain distance in time from it, then the ‘future-in-itself’ is a line leading from point-present to one of the points on the circle – we just do not know which. For a determinist, this view must be false, as they only admit of one possible future – the actual one, and our mistaken views of what is going to happen are always merely the fruits of our imagination. For a virtualist, it seems to me, all the futures corresponding to the lines from point-present to all the points on that circle should be virtually or latently existing at the present moment, even though only one of them is going to be actualized. For a presentist such as myself, neither the ‘past-in-itself’ nor the ‘future-in-itself’ have any 179

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the self as an extended decision-making network real ontological status except as traces and projections lodged in the patterns of the actual ‘now’. However, regardless of which of these views anyone subscribes to, the question remains of how we should appreciate the causal efficacy of the future for our agency in the present, or the role of projectivity as defined by Emirbayer and Mische. In their view, actors attempt to reconfigure received schemas by generating alternative possible responses to the problematic situations they confront in their lives. Immersed in a temporal flow, they move ‘beyond themselves’ into the future and construct changing images of where they think they are going, where they want to go, and how they can get there from where they are at present. Such images can be conceived of with varying degrees of clarity and detail and extend with greater or lesser reach into the future; they entail proposed interventions at diverse and intersecting levels of social life. Projectivity is thus located in a critical mediating juncture between the iterational and practical-evaluative aspects of agency. (1998: 984)

Again, it seems that Emirbayer and Mische credit agents with a higher degree of rationality that they normally possess, in that the agents are supposedly able to project the course of their action wholly within the range of possible futures. This is quite obviously not the case. Among the thousands of youngsters arriving in Hollywood with the dream of becoming a big star, only some actually have the potential for that. The circle of imaginary futures, in other words, is not contained by the circle of possible ones, and a large part of our views about the future are indeed just imagination not sustained by reality. Not only do we not know which line from here to a point in the future is going to be the ‘future-in-itself’, but we also often cannot tell which of our conjectures about the future fall in the range of the possible and which do not. We might even say that the overlap between the circle of possible and the circle of imaginary futures can be taken as a measure of the rationality of a particular individual. In any case, it seems that it is not the ‘future-in-itself’, but only certain conjectures we have of how things might unfold that influence our agentic decisions, as Ann Mische has argued in later articles (2009, 2014). But this has another implication. Clearly, nobody is ever able to take all possible futures into account when deliberating their course of action. Academics, for example, were highly unlikely to have designed their courses for the 2020 spring term in such a way that they could be seamlessly switched over to online teaching when their university had to be shut down because of quarantine, even 180

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the self as an extended decision-making network though initial news about the devastating effect and rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus might have alerted them to the possibility of this happening. Most of the time we simply cannot know what might and what might not affect us among all the events that are going on. In our agentic deliberations, we only take into account a select few of the lines linking the present to a moment in the possible futures, and we can never know how adequate this selection is. Consequently, in accordance with the view of initialism proposed in Chapter 2, it can be argued that causally powerful conjectures about the future (both possible and imaginary ones) emerge as inaugural articulations in the mind of the agent, and only thereafter acquire the capacity to modify their behaviour. Whenever an agent asks themself ‘what if I were to … ’, they articulate a particular trajectory from their present to the future. This idea enters the field of their mental process and becomes entangled in the web of constitutive tensions that make up this field. In due course, it may start to vie for control with other such ideas, and end up in the decision-making focus, so that this trajectory will be chosen for the desired course of action. Again, it is not important whether it leads to a point on the circle of possible futures or to the circle of imaginary ones, in which case the agentic decisions lead to failure and disappointment – but this does not make them less agentic.

Mental causation This leads us to the issue of ‘mental causation’, understood here as causal linkages involving at least one stage that is not mind-independent, that is, one that has no existence outside the consciousness of at least one particular individual. Mental causation is denied by many theorists, but I am going to propose an account of it that, I think, has more explanatory power than its alternatives. In accordance with the processual view of causation outlined in Chapter 2, when we think of bodyminds as processual unities, ‘mental causation’ needs no self-identical mental ‘objects’ to serve as causal agents acting on the material world – it is sufficient for it to work if we can identify an element in a causal chain that needs a consciousness in order to perform its role. Those who oppose the idea of mental causation (see, e.g., Kim 2008: 441; Wegner 2002: 64ff.) argue that what we see as mental phenomena can always be reduced to the physical underpinnings of the processes we describe in these terms. One of the questions this 181

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the self as an extended decision-making network account leaves unanswered is where and when exactly the emergent causal powers of these phenomena, mental or not, do actually come into being. A phenomenon to which mental causation can, in theory, be credited, originates in a certain moment and at the crossroads of various causal processes. If the latter are fully explainable in physical terms, then, the story goes, the former must be so too, as that phenomenon – the brain state corresponding to the mental state – is also the result of the interaction of physical happenings. But can this story actually explain what takes place during the formation of an agentic decision? I think not, and here is why. This argument against mental causation can be recast as causal reductionism, as formulated, for example, by John Searle. In his view, causal reductionism obtains ‘where the existence and a fortiori the causal powers of the reduced entity are shown to be entirely explainable in terms of the causal powers of the reducing phenomena’ (1992: 114). Searle presents as an example the solidity of an object, which can be explained by the character of the movements of the molecules in its structures. Similarly, he claims, mental features can be reduced to neurobiological processes. As Tony Lawson has argued, however, this construction involves a category mistake. Whenever we speak of emergent entities, he writes, ‘there is always a distinction to be drawn between any emergent system or totality and the organising relational structure of the system’s components; the latter is a property of the former, but the two are not identical’. Therefore, when we see an occasion of emergence as a move between two conceptual levels, supposing that ‘an emergent entity as a whole is designated higher level and that anything on which it depends (or out of which it is formed) is regarded as lower level, then by this criterion the organising relational structure seemingly lies at the lower level’ (2019: 216). In other words, the pattern of organization of the components that make up the emergent entity is itself also one of its components. But this is a mistake, because ‘an emergent totality and its structure emerge simultaneously … an emergent totality and its organising structure both lie at the higher (or same) level, that underpins problems or paradoxes surrounding uses of the conception of downward causation’ (2019: 216; italics in the original). A similar argument is made by Bruno Latour, who points out the absurdity of describing the scene of a battle in terms of ‘a group of soldiers and officers stark naked with a huge heap of paraphernalia – tanks, rifles, paperwork, uniforms’, but claiming the organizational 182

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the self as an extended decision-making network pattern that relates them to each other is somehow external to their materiality.8 When we now take this argument to the process of agentic decisionmaking, it becomes rather obvious that the patterns that serve as the causes of the decisions reached have no referent outside the agent’s mind. Take the example of someone who has to choose between two job opportunities. One of these will offer splendid chances for self-realization, the other will include lots of boring administrative duties – but it comes with a much higher salary, and possibly also lets the person influence the future development of their organization in a direction they consider favourable. Moreover, this person has recently been talking about having a child and moving into a larger home with their long-time partner. However, the better-paying job is in a town at some distance from bigger metropolitan centres and with a fairly meagre cultural life – though it is great for outdoor activities. All in all, there is a host of factors to be considered. And then there are those that should not be relevant at all, but sometimes still end up as the straws that break the camel’s back, such as the utterly tasteless necktie the prospective boss was wearing during the job interview. What is important here is that the decision will emerge from a situation that instantiates a pattern of connections, but these connections exist nowhere else than in the decision-maker’s mind. The two prospective employers are unaware of the each other’s offers. Neither of them has met the person’s partner. The sports facilities in one town have no relationship with the jazz clubs of the other. And yet they are all linked to each other for the period when the person is considering which point on the possible futures circle to choose for defining the line leading to it from their present moment. When we additionally take it into account that it is completely unimportant whether certain answers to clarifying questions are given to the person in a phone call or sent to them by email – that is, whether the series of neuron firings in their brain are caused by the processing of acoustic vibrations in their aural perception or the patterns of light reflecting on their retina – we would perhaps also be entitled to think that at least certain crucial linkages between the 8

This argument has a venerable history and was used, for example, by the Buddhist monk Nāgasena in his discussions with the Hellenic king Menander reportedly around 150 bce. A chariot, Nāgasena insisted, does not consist of any one of its components – the pole, the axle, the wheels, and so on – nor in the heap of them; the name serves only as the denotation of the pattern according to which they have been put together. The same also applies, in the Buddhist view, to the human self as the pattern combining the body and different mental functions (Horner 1969: 37).

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the self as an extended decision-making network physical realities involved cannot be designated as necessary causes.9 Whatever the nature of mental phenomena, an account of agentic decision-making that ignores what only takes place in the mind loses out on explanatory power – what has decisive importance for the result of the deliberation is the final balance achieved between the constitutive tensions that make up the subject field of the agent. If we take Lawson’s argument against Searle seriously, as we should, then we have to admit that mental causation is real in that a pattern that is best described as this balance is the factor that ultimately determines the outcome of the process and leads to the emergent situation where the decision will be made.

The extended network Individual agency has necessary limits. ‘When I interpret myself in terms of a life story, I might be both the narrator and the main character, but I am not the sole author’, Dan Zahavi writes (2005: 109), and I would join those who want to share the authorship of the self-narrative not only with other human agents, but all significant other processes that we are interacting with on a continuous basis.10 In fact, the ‘I’ of this story is not bounded by my body, but in a significant way extends into its environment. This is the phenomenon that Stacy Alaimo calls ‘trans-corporeality’, a concept highlighting the fact that ‘the human body is never a rigidly enclosed, protected entity, but is vulnerable to the substances and flows of its environments, which may include industrial environments and their 9

In Chapter 3, I presented my arguments against the concept of ‘multiple realizability’ that is usually invoked to explain this problem away, but which amounts, I argue, to nothing else than the reintroduction of dualism through the back door, by postulating an ideal, mind-independent, self-identical and causally efficient type-object that is present in the actual world only in different token-manifestations (as is a Platonic idea). 10 Lambros Malafouris has described the idea of agency in similar terms: ‘In the dynamic tension that characterizes the processes of material engagement, sometimes it is the thing that becomes the extension of the person. At other times, it is the person that becomes the extension of the material agent. There are no fixed agentive roles in this game; there is a constant struggle towards a “maximum grip”. Agency as an emergent property cannot be reduced to any of the human or the nonhuman components of action. It can only be characterized according to that component that, at a given moment, has the upper hand in the ongoing phenomenological struggle … The important question is not “What is agency?” (as a universal property or substance). The important question is, rather, “When and how is agency constituted and manifest in the world?”’ (2013: 147). The truth of this should be fairly evident when you think, for example, of a situation where you, a sharp knife and a stubborn piece of wood are collectively engaged in the act of carving out a simple figure.

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the self as an extended decision-making network social/economic forces’ (2010: 28), relying, on the one hand, on ‘a recognition that one’s bodily substance is vitally connected to the broader environment’ (2010: 63), but, on the other hand, also on the awareness of the body as ‘a space of intrusion’ where unwanted external factors, such as harmful chemicals, may enter the body without its consent (2010: 83). Needless to say, these interactions also shape to a significant extent the processes that are going on in the mind. A systematic theoretical elaboration of this position is presented by the theorists of the extended cognition school. The inaugural text of this approach is an article by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, which, since its publication in 1998, has inspired a lot of debate. What they propose is the uncoupling of the idea of cognition from the traditional neurocentric view that it is limited to the activity of the brain. They argue for what has become known as the ‘parity principle’: ‘If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process’ (1998: 8; italics in the original). In support of this claim, Clark and Chalmers present a thought experiment about two persons, Inga and Otto, who both intend to go to the Museum of Modern Art. For Inga, this is no problem, as she can easily retrieve the address of the museum from her memory. Otto, however, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and therefore relies on a notebook he constantly carries with him, writing down every bit of new and relevant information and looking it up later, when he needs it. Hearing about an interesting exhibition, Otto cannot recall the address of the museum, but can look it up in his notebook. In principle, Clark and Chalmers argue, there is no difference between how Inga and Otto get to access the information they need. Finding it in a notebook is just as efficient as retrieving it from biological memory. Similarly, I could say that my library, with books full of scribblings in the margins, is a part of my memory rather than an external resource only to be consulted, and its difference from eyeglasses or dental implants is, in functional terms, quite minimal. This view has predictably been rejected by neurocentrist theory. Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa, the most vociferous opponents of extended cognition, consider it axiomatic that ‘the difference between the cognitive and the non-cognitive ought to be made out by reference to the nature of the underlying processes’ (2010: 58) and maintain ‘that there is some principled basis for 185

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the self as an extended decision-making network cognitive scientists to assert that the processes that occur within a neuronal core of the brain are distinctly cognitive in a sense in which transcranial and extracranial processes are not’ (2010: 60). In other words, the critique is formulated in normative terms. Adams and Aizawa constantly reiterate that it is in the nature of the cognitive processes to go on in the brain, which is why the label simply cannot be applied to anything else. As it is pointless to argue with someone who claims their view of the world correctly reflects the nature of things, I will not do so, and a line of reasoning opposing this view has also already been articulated in the previous sections. Let it just be pointed out here that some of Adams and Aizawa’s central arguments have actually been experimentally proved to be false by biologists (Wheeler 2010: 250). There is, however, an added dimension that processual ontology can bring to the debate about whether the thesis of extended cognition is justified. Michael Wheeler redefines the stakes of the debate by making a distinction between, on the one hand, the simple embodied-embedded view of the mind, which can hold that things such as Otto’s notebook are ‘noncognitive environmental props’, and, on the other hand, what he calls ‘extended functionalism’, which posits ‘the constitutive dependence of mentality on external factors, the sort of dependence indicated by talk of the beyondthe-skin factors themselves rightly being accorded fully paid-up cognitive status’ (2010: 246). The first view, he argues, is vulnerable to critical arguments such as those of Adams and Aizawa. However, if we do not think of the cognitive process as an interaction between self-identical, continuous particulars, some of which have certain properties and others which do not, then the question becomes irrelevant in the sense that none of the elements of that process has ‘cognitive status’ while that process is not going on. As Richard Menary has very astutely observed, the view that Otto’s notebook is ‘coupled’ to Otto is itself a residual form of internalism, because it assumes a discrete, already formed, cognitive agent. And this is precisely the picture we are arguing against. If we accept the picture of a cognitive agent as implementing a discrete cognitive system, before they ever encounter an external vehicle, then we will have accepted the very picture of cognition we set out to reject. This does not fit with the aim of cognitive integration which is to show how internal and external vehicles and processes are integrated in the completion of cognitive tasks. (2007: 62)

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the self as an extended decision-making network Indeed, a brain that is uncoupled from all sources of input and output also has no cognitive status whatsoever.

From cognition to action There is thus no self-same cognitive system or apparatus that can be switched on at one moment and off at another, except in our linguistic extractions. Cognition is the name we give to a specific way in which certain processes can proceed, and cognitive subjects are points on the field that we can picture as mapping every cross-section of this process. The only conceptual device that will help us to single out the parts of a cognitive system, when we wish to extract one, is the significant overlap between different moments of cognitive activity. Everything that is involved has cognitive status, and Otto’s notebook most certainly fits the bill. And when we consider cognition not as a separate and somehow self-gratifying activity, but as a prerequisite and component of action in the wider sense of our fundamentally dynamic being in the world, we can see how the subject spreads out into its engagements with reality. John Haugeland presents the example of driving from one city to another not as a functional use of available infrastructure, but as a collaboration between the driver and the road. I am able to find my destination ‘in part because much of the “information” upon which the ability depends is “encoded” in the road’ (1998: 234). It is the road that knows how to navigate the landscape, how to cut the corners, and how to maintain the proper course. And when I take a certain route so often that the movement requires almost no conscious presence (as in observing signs, looking for the right turns and so on) on my part, I can say that it has been internalized as a part of me – what was and still is encoded in the road is now a part of myself, inasmuch I am made up not only of flesh and blood, but also of memories, attitudes, skills, habits and competences. It therefore makes sense to say, from the perspective of an extended network and in Alaimo’s sense of trans-corporeality, that not only am ‘I’ not the prisoner of my skull, or of my body, nor am ‘I’ limited only to the notebooks and other resources I carry with me; I also access those distributed around my house, I internalize my trajectories in my city and other cities I like to revisit, and my walks in the woods, and quite obviously also my interactions with my significant others. And although I would argue the case for giving a special status to people, this circle includes nonhumans, from the computer and the 187

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the self as an extended decision-making network car to certain paintings in museums I like to visit, or certain stones on the beach on which I like to sit. As I move through the world, the traces I leave – from the more notable things I have done to some words I might have said and forgotten, but which are remembered by the person I told them to, and then on to my credit card payments, appearances on security cameras, or webpages I have visited that the algorithms of social media base their advertising on – all constitute parts of me, as they influence how I am seen by others and inform the possible futures that are available to me. And naturally, my presence lingers in places where my DNA can be discovered. Even though this may sound as if it is grossly overextending the reach of my processual existence, this is actually the view taken by recent legal discourses of copyright as well as data protection and privacy: I am entitled to set the boundaries of my trajectories, as well as to the benefits that the traces of my being might engender. Perhaps even more importantly, this view also grounds the process-based understanding of responsibility. In other words, this position is very similar to what Rosi Braidotti has neatly captured when she defines the critical posthuman subject within an eco-philosophy of multiple belongings, as a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable. Posthuman subjectivity expresses an embodied and embedded and hence partial form of accountability, based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community building. (2013: 49)

However, although the actual occurrence of the ‘I’ in the world takes place as an extended trans-corporeal network, there is also a perspective within this network that holds it together – a node, so to say, which cannot exist without the rest of the field on which it lies, or without the constitutive tensions that make up this field, but which nonetheless instantiates the perspective from which the network can entify its elements – and itself as the result. Connections between the outlying points of the network necessarily run through this node, and patterns linking them to a whole acquire causal efficiency only as they emerge in it, and initialize certain trajectories of possible futures that will subsequently be sending ripples to some of the faraway parts of the extended network. This node is an area of significant overlap that has processual continuity with its immediate past and future stages, but does not need to have pattern continuity with the more remote ones, and is thus a modified version of Zahavi’s ‘core self’. It necessarily contains a decision-making focus; nonetheless, this is not a 188

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the self as an extended decision-making network constant entity or point, but one constantly shifting from one position to another. This node is self-aware in that it internally constitutes the perspective from which it can entify itself. The self-awareness proceeds in various ways and different degrees – from simply being able to experience its unique ‘what is it like to be me’ to becoming the ‘centre of narrative gravity’ of the stories it tells itself about itself and its relations with the world. And it is this self-awareness that also makes it responsible for the agentic decisions it makes.

Responsibility Throughout this inquiry, I have occasionally brought up the example of responsibility as a test criterion for ontological views, since a satisfactory account of how and why we can hold any agent responsible for their actions is a necessary prerequisite for an acceptable ontology, even if it is otherwise able to deal efficiently with all other problematic issues. But a processual ontology, which considers only the momentary interface between the causal flows of the past and the range of possible futures to be ultimately real and rejects the idea of unitary self-identity, is also vulnerable to an accusation that it discredits the foundations of any ethical theory. Indeed, if the person who committed the crime is no longer the same person as the one who was later arrested, then how can we place responsibility on them, especially if any significant overlap between them is inevitably linked to a particular perspective? Why should we consider one perspective to be superior to another? Regardless of whether the explanatory power of a theory is stronger than that of its alternatives, if a theory cannot answer these questions, it is ethically unsatisfactory in that it cannot support a discourse on how human societies should conduct themselves and why the suggested way is better than any other. One way to pose the question of responsibility would be to ask whether this category relies on criteria that are internal or external to the agent we are talking about. Internalist ethical theories, which claim that moral agents are endowed with an inborn, intuitive capacity to evaluate their actions in regard to norms, again internal, are basically removing the question from the table. On this view, ethical consciousness is an emergent property that necessarily appears at a certain threshold, when the agentic entity acquires sufficient autonomy, and no further explanation is needed. Being moral, simply put, is being true to oneself. A religious discourse that sees ethical norms in behaviour as the purity of the soul, or an evolutionary 189

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the self as an extended decision-making network theory that posits the emergence of ethical consciousness at a certain stage of development do not differ in this respect. In both cases, moral consciousness is structurally intrinsic to the agent. The Kantian idea of a universal moral law that is accessible to us as the concomitant of our own rationality can be considered a formulation of this view, and many versions of virtue ethics and theories of self-cultivation also fall into this category. Matters are more complicated with views that see moral norms as external to the agent, either imposed on them or voluntarily and knowingly acquired. Externalist moral theories operate with a heavier concept of responsibility, because they concede to the individual the liberty of not endorsing these norms. This involves an important distinction. The internalist, when judging someone whose behaviour does not abide by norms, will put the blame on the individual for deviating from their original course, breaking with their moral trajectory, so to speak. The externalist, however, does not presuppose that the individual was destined to follow any such course in the first place. On the externalist view, people can act as moral agents out of fear, self-interest or some other reason, but it does not make them less moral, because morality is external to them in the first place. Ethical deliberations obviously still take place in their minds, but these internal polylogues are not supported by an inborn moral instinct. They are conceptualizations of and reactions to external influences. Sometimes, such systems credit the individual with the capacity to internalize the external norm – or ethical principle – and typically evaluate those individuals who can live a law-abiding life more positively than others by, for example, judging only such people to be suitable for social leadership. Other theories, such as social constructionism, stress the external and humanmade character of moral norms in order to demonstrate their malleability. There are also some combined systems that posit the existence of a universal moral law available to the individual through self-reflection, which is nonetheless not automatically in accordance with externally imposed norms and may occasionally even justify breaking them in the name of a higher idea of moral good. It seems fairly evident that an emergentist, processual and fieldbased ontology cannot be internalist in respect to the question of responsibility. In the opposite case it would have to posit some sort of nonprocessual, both mind- and gaze-independent constant presence in the consciousness fields of agents of whom responsibility can be expected. But these agents are not self-same egocentric particulars, 190

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the self as an extended decision-making network they have only been entified from an (ethically charged) perspective. As a result, such a presence is not really compatible with the terms of this discourse in a more solid form than that of a conceptual extraction, and not what its proponents claim to be. While it may seem that the downgrading of ethical norms to conceptual extractions is a way of diminishing their importance and role in our lives, this is not necessarily so when we approach them from the opposite, externalist-processual position. The ontological status that most readily offers itself from among the terms I have been proposing is that of the metapattern, or a pattern of significant overlap to which various individual entity patterns approximate themselves in their continuous transformation. One of the proposed examples of metapatterns discussed in previous chapters is ‘health’ – a state in which no living organism finds itself completely and absolutely, and yet one that deviations from which can be observed, measured and treated. Similarly, we can think of ‘wholesome ethical behaviour’ as something none of us is able to observe continuously and without any exceptions. As a metapattern, it nonetheless performs the role of an attractor of sorts, a point towards which other patterns can gravitate or model themselves on. Consistent with the rest of the present ontology, a metapattern is processual (consider how certain conditions, such as depression, get added to the list of illnesses while others, such as homosexuality, are deleted from it) and reliant on internal tensions (two equally valid moral principles may yield incompatible requirements for one’s behaviour in a situation of mixed loyalties). Metapatterns on which the functioning of society is based – such as the idea of justice and the rule of law – also give rise to whole professions – such as politicians and lawyers – who change them and interpret them for the purposes of a given situation. And above all that, metapatterns are, as said, conceptual extractions that do not have a mind- or gaze-independent existence. Nonetheless we can posit them as perspectives from which the responsibility of particular agents for their actions acquires a background. We know that in actual social practice, legal and moral responsibility do not amount to the same thing. Moreover, taking political responsibility for some calamity may amount to a person’s standing down from their office, for example, even though they did not even theoretically have the possibility of averting it. What unites all instances of responsibility, on this view, is the conscious placement of one’s agency into

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the self as an extended decision-making network a relation with a metapattern that one has endorsed as the ‘guiding star’11 for one’s actions.

The flattened image Before moving on to the discussion of how agency transcends the boundaries of the individual and becomes a collective affair, I need to touch briefly on the question of how individuals, in practice, are perceiving each other. As opposed to the idea of the subject as it is to itself – a field – in the construction of mutual relationships we appear to each other as surfaces or unities, and by proxy this is also how we often come (or want) to self-conceptualize ourselves. This unity of the subject is a derivate of the idea that we should appear to others as others appear to us – as ‘flattened images’. The term is borrowed from image-processing software such as Photoshop, which can employ ‘layers’ on which different operations are carried out without affecting the whole image. After the task is completed, the image is ‘flattened’, that is, all layers are merged together into a single image. Here, simply put, a flattened image signifies the unity which, for others, each of us (or more broadly, anything) appears to be from an observer’s perspective. It is, so to speak, the term to which the relationships within an assemblage are external. A flattened image is the neutralization, or deliberate freezing, of all the tensions on the field of selfhood, of all the struggles between contradictory internal processes vying for control of the focus, and the forging of a relationship between the external appearance of the person and that flattened-out field. This does not mean that a flattened image would necessarily be without controversies – on the contrary, these can be among its primary defining features, as, for example, in a tortured genius. But these controversies can themselves be articulated and described without difficulty. A flattened image may thus be unpredictable, but only in a predictable way. 11

In this context it is perhaps useful to invoke the account of Thomas Gladwin (1970) and Edwin Hutchins (1995) of the navigation system used by some Micronesian cultures. The seafarers use the idea of reference islands, the position of which is calculated according to its relationship with how the stars are, and the distance to which is known to them. At each point of their voyage, the navigators have to be able to establish their position in relation to these islands. However, it is often more convenient to posit such an island instead of using an actually existing one. Thus these imaginary reference islands become the landmarks that determine their ships’ course, and guarantee their arrival to their desired destinations. The analogy with posited metapatterns as guides for action should be apparent.

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the self as an extended decision-making network Nonetheless, a flattened image is not necessarily a stable and unchanging entity – it can be redefined constantly, but in a manner that includes all of its previous redefinitions and is compatible with them. Even when we encounter someone as a flattened image for the first time, their history is necessarily available to us as an essential part of what they are. Still, at each point of their temporal exposure, flattened images are unitary, undivided, and describable, unlike the human being, on whom the imprint of the image lies. A flattened image is not to be confused with a public persona – or a social media presence, for that matter – which may be cultivated by private individuals themselves or even carefully designed, managed and coached by professionals. Mediation always hides some layers and adds others to what a direct gaze would see. Such persona images are signs rather than representations; they are meant for interpreting against a repertoire of other signs, they carry meaning by highlighting certain characteristics of a particular person and downplaying others, combining minimal meaning-units in a language of personal image construction, similar to the ‘vestemes’, or minimal meaning-units of clothing (Barthes 2013: 44ff.). In a flattened image, as suggested here, the conscious semantic aspect cannot be present, as it is directly available to the gaze of the observer, and the efforts of self-grooming are a part of it, not the productive impetus guiding its formation. Such phenomena have been well described by social studies of performativity. When Erving Goffman speaks about the need of ‘dramaturgically prudent’ social performers to adapt their performance to the information conditions under which it is staged (1956: 142), these ‘information conditions’ refer to the flattened image of those performers. Similarly, when Jeffrey Alexander discusses ‘authenticity’ as the key to success in social drama, he defines it as ‘an actor’s ability to sew the disparate elements of performance back into a seamless and convincing whole’ (2011: 54), in other words, as the ability to control how one’s flattened image is perceived. And when Judith Butler describes gender ‘as an enactment that performatively constitutes the appearance of its own interior fixity’ (1999: 89), this ‘appearance of interior fixity’ is precisely what the flattened image refers to. However, all the three theorists just quoted, writing, as they do, from immensely different perspectives and with different goals in mind, share a view of such performance as modified behaviour. Goffman speaks about ‘impression management’ (1956: 132ff.) as techniques necessary in order ‘to prevent the occurrence of incidents and the embarrassment consequent upon them’ (1956: 193

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the self as an extended decision-making network 135). Alexander maintains that ‘[w]hile performers must be oriented to background and foreground representations, their motivations vis-à-vis these patterns are contingent’ (2011: 30), that is, it is not necessary for social drama to be successful that its participants actually believe in what they say. Butler, in turn, writes: That gender reality is created through sustained social performances means that the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity are also constituted as part of the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and compulsory heterosexuality. (1999: 180)

In other words, the performative nature of gender makes it a part of both oppressive and subversive power-games involving strategies of their own concealment. I agree with the substance of all these positions. People certainly make efforts at restricting their immediate urges in order to maintain social cohesion, politicians often claim allegiance to values and agendas they do not much care about, and gender configurations are quite evidently social constructions rather than natural facts. And yet this view should not lead to the construction of a dichotomy between an ‘authentic’, self-identical subject onto which social roles are imposed, and the strategically designed social armour this subject takes on as it confronts the world. There is no natural mode of behaviour onto which performances are grafted as additions or modifications. In other words, all behaviour arises in engagement with the world and the performance it involves is emergent in this process, and it cannot be compared to an abstract ‘ideal’ form of behaviour this subject would otherwise embrace. Consequently, if we conceive of the subject as a field of tensions, all of which are legitimate from a certain, particular, internal point of view, then there is nothing wrong with anyone’s effort to bring such coherence to this field that would produce a long-term balance. Trying to leave an adequate and possibly positive impression on one’s peers is just one way of moving in that direction, and it is perfectly all right to deploy available sociocultural resources towards achieving this goal.

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the self as an extended decision-making network

Collective selves? The mental act of flattening does not apply only to our views of each other. In particular, we often entify groups of people in just the same way we flatten out single individuals, when we say ‘the management has decided’ or ‘the market did not react’. It has indeed become customary among group theorists to argue that although it is only single persons who can be called agents in the true sense of the term, as this presupposes actual mental states, groups can nevertheless be likened to persons, and therefore agents, in an extended sense of the word (Gilbert 2014: 134ff.; List and Pettit 2011: 59; Tuomela 2013: 21ff.). What I would like to suggest now is precisely the opposite: groups, or even broader collectivities, are the paradigmatic case of a purposeful agent, and single individuals can be described as such only metaphorically, so that what normally occurs in a group discussion and formation of a collective intent also goes on, albeit mostly nonverbally, between the various aspects of an individual person, between conflicting perspectives that are trying to assume the role of the controlling focal point in their mental process. It could even be argued (consistently with the social assemblage approach) that membership in a group does not extend to the entire individual, but only to a set of their relevant subprocesses: it is mostly irrelevant what they do in their spare time or how they like to dress from the shared point of view, unless this starts to interfere with the group process, so that we can imagine an internal membranic boundary between the parts of the individual that are involved in the collective activity and those that are not, input from which may occasionally disturb the smooth continuity of the group process (but sometimes also provide it with an inspiring insight). In other words, if I conceive of myself as a field, never in perfect equilibrium, of a multiplicity of loosely integrated and occasionally conflicting patterns, then I can nonetheless assume in principle that there is a possibility of significant overlap between parts of this field – which can therefore be seen as semi-autonomous elements of me – and similar elements in the fields where other people are, or at least where they appear to be from my perspective. It is in such overlap that, I argue, any internal idea of an enduring ‘we’ is grounded, and we can say that a group acts when the decision-making focus of the field is being occupied by an aspect of me that I share with a certain collective – a team, an institution, a nation. On the other hand, the other members of the group, including those with which I am in 195

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the self as an extended decision-making network contact, will at least initially appear to me as flattened images of themselves, reified and unitary individuals. The question of how the distinction between an emergent entity can appear in the relationship of an ‘I’ with these distinct others is the core question of group theory, and different solutions to it have been proposed. Most leading group theorists, regardless of whether and how much agency they grant to the collectives they study, are nonetheless committed to the idea that whatever it is that groups jointly believe, intend, or do can only be enacted by their individual members (Bratman 2014: 98, 125; Gilbert 2014: 9; List and Pettit 2011: 64ff.; Tuomela 2013: 52). On the other hand, the position of ‘methodological individualism’, or the view that whatever groups do can be reduced to or explained in terms of what their members do, is a topic for debate, and in recent literature the opposite position of methodological collectivism, or the view that groups can have emergent properties not reducible to the characteristics of their individual members, seems to be gaining the upper hand. Still, the issue of distributed cognition remains a topic of controversy, so that advocates of emergent ‘relational subjectivity’, such as Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret Archer, still admit that ‘only individual persons “think” (reflect). Extending the concept of the single human individual’s reflexivity to a social group (of primary or Corporate Agents) appears to be problematic’ (2015: 59). Even Deborah Tollefsen, possibly the most outspoken advocate of group agency and group cognition, still underscores her commitment to ‘ontological individualism’. According to her, groups can have what has been called ‘access consciousness’, but not ‘phenomenal consciousness’ (2015: 52–3). These terms, coined by Ned Block (2007: 275ff.), refer to impersonal representations available for processing and personally experienced states of mind, respectively. It is easy to see how a group may share, for example, a set of materials to be discussed at a meeting, so that each member has the same kind of access consciousness about them, while their ideas and interpretations of that material in their phenomenal consciousness may differ wildly. Tollefsen’s gambit makes sense against the backdrop of methodological individualism, but in a field-ontological context sacrificing the rook of group phenomenological consciousness to salvage the king of group consciousness as such may have been unnecessary. After all, we remember that neurocentric theory similarly maintains that it is the brain that thinks, while the rest of the individual does not par­tici­pate. On the whole, many accounts of group beliefs that are not in principle committed to methodological individualism are nonetheless operating 196

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the self as an extended decision-making network with the notion of an individual, who is fully rational, self-identical and continuous over time, and because the groups they analyse are composed of such individuals, collective beliefs are derivates of the distinct and specific mental states these people have. Two objections can be raised to this approach from the point of view of field ontology. First, if we consider members of the group as parts of a process, and therefore, in that particular status, determined by their relations to other members, we may well expect them to behave in a different manner than they would in some other situation. This is, of course, not only recognized, but actually emphasized by group action theorists. There is a considerable tradition from Gustave Le Bon’s work at the end of the nineteenth century up to current analyses (Lawson 2019: 215ff.; Wilson 2004: 281ff.), which testifies to the fact that people may act very differently in an anonymous crowd from how they would do otherwise. These works show that groups have emergent properties that their individual members do not have – or at least do not manifest in ordinary situations – and it is therefore unwarranted to reduce collective beliefs and dispositions to those of single individuals.

Modes of joint action Raimo Tuomela has developed his view of this issue into the cornerstone of his highly influential theory. According to him, individual selves can take on two basic modes of action, which he terms ‘I-mode’ and ‘we-mode’. Personal dispositions can incline an individual towards one or another of these, but normally a person is able to switch between them, depending on the context. These two modes are also not quite binarily opposed to each other, and something he calls ‘pro-group I-mode’ (2013: 24) is to be found in between. In Tuomela’s view, the we-mode is defined by a shared realm of concern and a ‘we-perspective’ that can be taken on it (2013: 27), but first and primarily by their joint – voluntary or enforced – commitment to an ethos, which he defines as ‘the group’s central, typically actionrelated constitutive properties, and other group-related properties that are collectively accepted as true or right for the group by some persons who become the group’s founding members’ (2013: 26). In practice, this ethos includes goals, norms, beliefs, values – in short, everything that is relevant for making a coherent decision about how to act in a particular situation. (The decision need not be ‘rational’ in 197

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the self as an extended decision-making network the common sense of this word – a cult’s ethos may require waiting for a sign from their god before committing collective suicide.) Tuomela’s ‘I-mode’, on the other hand, occurs when an individual puts his or her own needs and values first. Still, he asserts, people can form functional groups when acting in this mode if they ‘privately accept some goals, beliefs, standards, and so on as constitutive for the collective, forming the privately shared ethos’ and consider themselves members of the group, regardless of whether they believe this of other members (2013: 33). An example of such a group could perhaps be the assembly of regularly meeting political leaders from a troubled region, each of whom is both genuinely interested in securing peace and in maintaining as much influence as possible in the situation where this has happened. In Tuomela’s view, however, an assembly of such members cannot act fully as a group, because their commitment to the group is not as strong as in ‘we-mode’ collectivities. In other words, the efficiency of the group is dependent on the right balance between the autonomy12 and heteronomy of their members’ actions. To sum up, the gist of Tuomela’s approach is thus the distinction between the autonomous ‘I-mode’ and the heteronomous ‘we-mode’, different ways to coordinate thinking and action, of which the first is directed towards the achievement of personal, the other towards collective goals. There are intermediate positions between these two poles, but in order to be efficient, they have to cancel each other out. This, I believe, is also where the key weakness of Tuomela’s approach lies. Instead of conceding that autonomy and heteronomy are two different perspectives on a situation that can simultaneously frame the field on which the position of an individual emerges – so that, in actual social practice, a balance between autonomy and heteronomy is the paradigmatic case – Tuomela makes an effort to disassociate the dominating interests of the individual from the notion of personal agency as such and to explain the resulting split in terms of these two ‘modes’ of behaviour. Where the interests rule, there is the ‘I-mode’, where the ethos does, the ‘we-mode’ sets in. Switching between ‘I-mode’ and ‘we-mode’ is thus just a skill that is part of this predominantly rational and in any case well-oiled mental apparatus. Moreover, in Tuomela’s scheme, individuals are presented as static and ordered in their mental states and motivations, which may help to facilitate analytical rigor, but distances the theory from

12 Tuomela

himself uses the word ‘autonomy’ differently, for indicating the degree to which a group can make its decisions itself.

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the self as an extended decision-making network actual social practice – as his critics have also pointed out (Priest 2014: 296). It seems to me that in the making of actual agentic decisions – not only in group situations, but there as well – neither ‘we-mode’ nor ‘I-mode’ ever occurs in a pure form.13 The theoretical concept of a group composed of rational, self-identical and unitary individuals is an ideal construction with little relevance for the real world. If we step out of the abstraction for a moment and consider a group as a field of tensions, things start to appear otherwise. Only some of these tensions are articulated in a group’s constitutive structure and recognized by all of its members (for example, the procedural statutes that specify how power is distributed within the group), while other tensions may often emerge from hidden agendas, personal characteristics and internal contradictions of the members of the group as human beings. For example, think of a meeting chaired by a despicable career administrator with no coherent views or values of his own, who is always likely to conform to the actual or implied wishes of his bosses, and who is also a compulsive womanizer. During the meeting, he may, for example, at first support a proposal put forward by an attractive young lady (who may be quite unaware of the chairman’s inclinations), but then retreat from this position when another senior colleague says this would probably not go down very well with the upper tiers of the management (which is not even true, but will spare that colleague a lot of tedious work). All this happens while other members of the group are answering their emails and not paying much attention to what is going on, because the matter does not concern them vitally, and yet they have to attend because of their status as ‘operative members’ (Tuomela 2013: 56) of the larger group, and their absence might be exploited by some other operative members for pushing through decisions that are contrary to their interests. Some such circumstances – as the tendency to treat serious 13 This

is also my main objection to Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret Archer’s otherwise remarkable theory of ‘relational we-ness’. Donati and Archer argue that such we-ness is arrived at by a couple (or group) not on the basis of personal reflexivity, or thinking like the rational minimal subject that evaluates future action options on the basis of their personal interests, nor through adopting the other’s point of view and giving it the same level of importance, but through ‘relational considerations’, which foreshadow their joint future, the ‘relational goods’ that they are aiming at achieving together (2015: 70–2). It seems to me that we cannot select any one ‘mode’ of consideration as dominating the entire process, but, on the contrary, all these positions and possibly even a few others are simultaneously present in the internal polylogue. But Donati and Archer are certainly correct to highlight the importance of relational considerations in this process.

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the self as an extended decision-making network matters fairly quickly when a lunch break is approaching – are not even caused by any enduring specific characteristics of particular members of the group. And yet all of the members of this group share a certain degree of commitment to the group’s ethos, in that they believe, in general terms, that the work they do is relevant for their society and they are also personally interested in the prosperity of the organization, as this is what provides them with material benefits they would otherwise have to forfeit. In addition, we should also not forget that the way in which a group thinks is affected, in a Latourian sense, by the setting and circumstances as well as all the concomitant processes – whether they are wearing ceremonial robes at a solemn hall, or casually standing up to refill their coffee cups in a meeting room that has a kitchenette, or discussing things over a beer in the front room of a sauna.

Performative inclusion One further thing to be noted is that the concept of ‘we’, or firstperson plural, is not as innocent as it seems to speakers of European languages. In other parts of the world, there are quite a few languages that distinguish between two different types of ‘we’, the inclusive ‘we’ that refers to both the speaker and the addressee (and possibly others, but at least these two) and the exclusive ‘we’ to which the addressee does not belong. In languages that have separate pronouns for these two, any sentence involving the first-person plural can be uttered in two ways – in one situation, ‘me and you’ are going to do something together; in the other, it will be ‘me and my friends, but not you’. For the sake of simplicity, let us use the two pronouns of the Indonesian language for the purpose of exemplification, kami for the exclusive and kita for the inclusive mode (Sneddon 2010: 165). We can now legitimately ask the question whether the ‘we-mode’ of a group is ‘kami-mode’ or ‘kita-mode’ from the perspective of an observer. The first answer that suggests itself is that any member of the group, committed to its ethos, will think of it in the kita-mode, while, when a member of the group addresses a non-member, they will do so in the kami-mode. But things may be more complicated. For example, take the majestic plural that Western monarchs normally use when referring to themselves while articulating the will of the state. What is its range of inclusion? Does it implicate the listeners as the subjects of the sovereign into a whole of which it is the legitimate voice? Or does it suggest that ‘they’ – the dynasty, perhaps, or the 200

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the self as an extended decision-making network government formed in the monarch’s name – are the subject of the utterance, while the subjects are excluded from the formation of their will (as has been historically more often the case)? What about a democratic government, then? When, for example, a prime minister, pushing a controversial agenda, says that ‘our aim is to take back control’, they must know that while they are speaking to a nation that has mixed opinions about the matter, they would be wrong in using both pronouns: saying kami would exclude their supporters, but saying kita would be wrong, since their opponents cannot be included in the group – at least not of their own free will. But this is precisely the strategy. As Western languages allow for glossing over the difference between the inclusive and exclusive senses of the first-person plural pronoun, it becomes possible to use it in the kami sense while appearing to use it in the kita sense. Alternating between the two senses of ‘we’ while speaking on behalf of the group, or more broadly in the ‘group mode’, is a linguistic strategy to manipulate the membranic boundaries of the group, leaving someone out and counting someone in. And this is not limited to people speaking from a position of power only. In fact, seen this way, every single use of the word ‘we’ is a minimal performative act of power, or more precisely a bid for the rearrangement of the ‘we-field’ in a way that would have a bearing on the speaker’s perspective. Of course, the speaker’s perspective does not remain unaffected by the act, as it may need to be adjusted in order to make its alignment with that of the rest of the field possible. What also need to be considered are the frameworks and controlled settings that Jan Slaby and Shaun Gallagher have called ‘cognitive institutions’ (2015: 35ff.). These include, for example, legal and educational systems, which facilitate and thereby shape the ways in which a ‘we-field’ can be formed in any sociocultural situation – but such institutions can also elicit dissent, protest and even rebellion. Thus, what ‘we’ are is never an assembly of discrete and disconnected individuals, but a constantly fluctuating field that is constituted by tensions between different perspectives, which are both competing and collaborating with each other, both instantiating a pattern and diverging from it. This view has another important implication, namely that a functional ‘we-field’ cannot consist of individuals who continue to perceive each other in terms of flattened images. What Tuomela has glossed as being in the ‘we-mode’ amounts to the opening up of the individual to its others, in a certain sense even becoming its others since they are now linked in an extended network, at least for the duration of the ‘kita-mode’. Again, the performative power 201

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the self as an extended decision-making network of the ‘we’ as a linguistic tool tentatively linking different persons within one field is to be taken into account here – the opening up of the borders of an individual process can even be thought of as an analogy to Louis Althusser’s ‘interpellation’ (1971: 174) as the response to an address, a hailing, when (in Althusser’s example) someone hears a policeman shouting ‘Hey, you!’ and instinctively recognizes themself as the subject addressed. In Althusser’s view, this is how the ideological subject is formed and perpetuated, and on a certain level, the same can be said of the performative formation of the members of any group, which is done by addressing them in the ‘kita-mode’ (just as the ‘kami-mode’ would leave them feeling excluded). An acceptance of the hailing leads to self-inclusion, the putting on of a mental uniform, which is a necessary condition of the subsequent commitment to what the group believes in and the goals it pursues. A certain amount of agency is transferred to the group, with the capacity to influence the overall trajectory of the group as the expected trade-off. This act of acceptance thus also transforms, to some extent, the very pattern of the self-as-field, which is now conjoined with the broader process of the group and starts to partake of its internality as a subprocess with a certain degree of autonomy. This degree depends, among other things, on the character of the group – a terrorist cell would expect its members to follow orders without questioning, while an association of academics that regularly meets to discuss a common topic and may occasionally organize a more formal workshop does not even enforce the opinions held by the majority of the group on all of its members. We can perhaps imagine all possible groups to have a position on a gradient between ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ relations among their members – the warmest being those where the (membranic) borders between members are the least efficient, and the coldest those in which the members share nothing but a momentary commitment to a shared action, but can disperse immediately when that minimal goal is accomplished.

Shared or joint cognition? This brings us back to the oft-debated issue of distributed cognition. Speaking of full-fledged group selves as emergent agents implies that the group has an internality that differs from the internality of each of its members, but is nonetheless structurally equivalent to it – that is, it can do the same things an individual self does. If an individual self cognizes, deliberates and makes agentic decisions, a group self has to 202

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the self as an extended decision-making network have the capacities for the same. Deliberations and decisions present no problem. But cognition seems to. The majority view on this issue is that, as a group does not possess a cognitive apparatus of its own, it can only use those of its members, and therefore groups do not cognize as individuals do. The accounts of why this is so and how shared cognition emerges are different, however. For example, List and Pettit evoke the concept of supervenience, normally used in physicalist accounts of the mind, or the dependence of higher-level facts on lower-level facts – the higherlevel facts may have emergent properties that none of the lower-level facts have, but changes in the higher-level facts only occur when the lower-level facts change. List and Pettit argue that group perception supervenes on the individual perceptions of its members: what the group perceives is determined by what its members perceive (2011: 66). Robert A. Wilson, who in principle accepts the idea of extended cognition in distinguishing between ‘entity-bounded’ and ‘wide’ realizations of mental properties (2004: 112) so that an agent who has a psychological property ‘either physically contains an entitybounded system or systems, or is part of a wide system or systems, that realize the processes that generate or physically constitute’ this property (2004: 289), nonetheless insists that we should not ‘ascribe psychological states themselves to entities, such as the group, the community, or the nation, larger than the individual and to which the individual belongs’ (2004: 301). Wilson’s alternative to the idea of group cognition is what he calls the ‘social manifestation thesis’, or the claim that ‘individuals have properties, including psychological properties, that are manifest only when those individuals form part of a group of a certain type’ (2004: 281), which, he argues, satisfactorily accounts for the variativity of the behaviour of individuals when acting in concert or alone. Even someone as committed to the idea of group agency as Deborah Tollefsen concedes that group mental states are not classically internal, but dispositional states (2015: 103), that is, systemic states that only determine what the agent is going to do and contain no equivalent to the ‘what it is like’ that individual minds can feel. On the other hand, as the analysis of Emmanuel Bourdieu shows, such behaviour-determining higher-order dispositions cannot act without relying on constant adaptation to circumstances and self-reflection (1998: 136–7), which in turn is dependent on at least a degree of cognitive activity on part of the agent whose dispositions they are. What all these views on group cognition have in common is that they rely on the traditional idea of self-identical and continuous 203

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the self as an extended decision-making network individuals, who are defined by a more or less constant list of properties, some of which are manifested in some, others in other situations. As usual, when we replace this concept with a processual view, the picture changes. The act of inclusion of an individual process into a sufficiently ‘warm’ group, resulting in increased permeability of the individual’s boundaries, brings about a rearrangement of their subject field. The constitutive tensions are recast, the individual is no longer precisely the same person as before – at least for a time. The effect is similar to what happens when, expecting a visit from an obsessively neat relative, you look at your room – what seemed to be in perfect functional order a moment ago, now appears to be in disarray. Or when you think of what you are going to do with your notoriously snobbish colleague, whom you will have to entertain after a meeting, the cosy restaurant you normally frequent suddenly looks cheap and jejune. You have opened the membrane that separates you from the individual field of your relative or colleague, and the tensions emanating from there have started to co-define your gaze. You have entered minimal group cognition mode. Apart from the axiomatics, how does this account differ from Wilson’s thesis of social manifestation? On a strong interpretation of Wilson’s view, the gaze that sees my room in disorder and my favourite hangout as a shabby canteen is a constant presence within me, which only raises its ugly and disruptive head when I occur in a situation that provokes it. This I find difficult to accept; it would mean that somewhere within me lurks a compulsive neatness freak and a snob whom I do not recognize in myself, as well as their complete opposites, who will be woken up when my redneck friends come to town. This view also leads to consequences that we might not be prepared to accept – for example, a member of a notoriously cruel criminal gang has to have had an evil streak within them from the very beginning, instead of drifting towards this way of life under the influence of their circumstances. On a weaker version of Wilson’s view, what I have is not these gazes themselves, but a capacity to temporarily adopt them, or many others to which I am not completely averse. In this case, what should we make of my habitual view of things? How is that, then, not just another temporary gaze that is chased out of its position as soon as the environment requires it? It could be argued that this ‘host’ gaze stays with me alongside the ‘guest’ gazes that occasionally disturb it. Perhaps, in the case of the view of order in my room, this would indeed be the case, but it seems to me that a full-fledged person has necessarily had at least one occasion in their life when a course of action 204

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the self as an extended decision-making network that they have wholeheartedly endorsed at one moment (say, in the evening) may not appear as such soon afterwards (in the morning). Even so, the capacity to adopt the gaze of the other is something different from containing the gaze of the other as a potential in the first place – in other words, the weaker reading presumes the idea that an additional element is included in ‘my’ subject process at any moment when it crosses its habitual boundaries. If we acknowledge that the opening-up of the internality of my subject field to another constitutes a shift in my mode of cognition, it is easy to see how a group is formed by the simultaneous occurrence of many such shifts. A number of previously separate subject fields, each with constitutive tensions and decision-making focal points of their own, are connected in a higher-level field, where some of these tensions merge and others are left in marginal areas (just as processes taking place on the margin of my consciousness have a minimal effect on my personal focal point most of the time). What emerges should actually satisfy Wilson’s criterion of a wide system, or network of systems, that realizes the cognitive activity in question. What I perceive is weighed against the memory of one colleague, the ethical concerns of another and the irrational fears of a third. For a group to function not just as an aggregate of people or a contractual association of singular agents, each pursuing an agenda of their own, I argue, the appearance of such a group self is a necessary condition. Logically, it seems to me, this argument has the same form as Carol Rovane’s claim that ‘there is a difference only of degree between the shared perspective of a group of human-size persons who engage in joint activities and the single rational point of view of an individual group person who comprises many human beings’ (1997: 138). Rovane softens her case by admitting that a unity of group self might, in theory, perhaps be achieved in an ideal marriage, yet not in any marriage we know of (1997: 141), but I think that her requirement of (rational) unity is simply too strong and, as I have argued, also one not met by individual selves.14 It can, however, be turned around: if we admit of a group self that emerges through the connection of multiple viewpoints into a field, on which individual 14

In this context, we should note the very appropriate development, by Deborah Tollefsen, of Andy Clark and David Chalmers’s ‘extended mind’ thought experiment of astute Inga and the notebook-dependent Alzheimer patient Otto. Tollefsen introduces a third person, Inga’s absent-minded husband Olaf, who depends on his wife’s memory just in the same way as Otto depends on his notebook (2015: 74). Tollefsen argues, and I concur, that if we accept the claim of Clark and Chalmers that Otto and his notebook form a coupled system (as Wilson also does), we should not have any problems in admitting the same for Inga and Olaf.

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the self as an extended decision-making network viewpoints only act as formative nodes for constitutive tensions, how is that really different from an individual self, which similarly consists in an ongoing effort to integrate multiple potentially controlexercising points on a subject field into a functional balance? In both cases, the cognitive processing of sense-data that arrives through various channels (or, in the case of groups, individuals) takes place in their joint effort and agentic decisions emerge from the balance that is momentarily established between them.

Summary In this chapter, I have elaborated on the way in which the self emerges in its relations and through its interactions with its environment, without taking it for granted that the individual (human) mind is the self-contained elementary carrier of the mental process and the sole site of agency. Starting with the inclusion of the whole body into the framework of the conscious process, I moved on to a discussion of the extended network of the mind as distributed over the borders of the skin into the environment of ‘things’, and finally into the network comprising other persons. I ended up suggesting that groups of people and individual minds can both be conceived of as fields, in which different points represent different agendas, motivations, histories, competences, moods and attitudes, so that there are more commonalities than differences between individual and collective modes of determining future courses of action. This move completes the argument of ‘dethroning’ the human perspective from the status of the measure of all things. While it is certainly true that humans can only act in the world as humans, this does not mean that the structures they attribute to objective reality – and which have an important role to play in their navigation of their reality – are the only correct ways to experience or to describe this world. Conversely, when we cease to think of ourselves as standing over and above reality, or even as ‘thrown’ into it from its outside, but instead acknowledge our emergence from a multiplicity of heterogeneous causal flows, as nodes within a network of interweaving processes, distributed over the range of processes that we are involved with and that constitute us, always in search for balance and always upsetting what momentary balance we have found – and, last but certainly not least, with a considerable, but nonetheless limited autonomy to influence our own future course of existence – it becomes much easier to think of the multitude of other, nonhuman 206

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the self as an extended decision-making network perspectives as sharing in (mostly) lower degrees of what we have in abundance, namely the ability to meaningfully engage in various ways with others of so many different kinds. All in all, it is only in these engagements that we take place.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS

Imagine someone sitting in the sun on the deck of a cruise ship, enjoying a long-awaited and well-deserved vacation. They are reading a novel that has been put aside for just this occasion, and have been carefully sipping a glass of wine, when they feel that their back is slightly itching from sunburn. They are also slowly discovering that they might be falling in love with a person they have met during the trip. The itch is actually pretty bad and they are therefore deliberating whether to go and fetch a lotion that they have in their cabin, but they are feeling a bit too comfortable for that, at least for the time being. They are also a bit sorry, because the book, although by their favourite author, requires just a little too much effort considering the circumstances, and they have trouble following it with people constantly passing back and forth, and – they admit this to themself, but reluctantly – they are also scanning the idle walkers to see if the object of their emerging affections is among them. At the same time, they advise themself that this emotion is very likely going to hurt them in the long run, as the person to whom this is directed is probably – no, definitely – not the type they would normally prefer to have in their life. This, incidentally, is one of the factors why they have decided not to give up the book just yet – it has a character in it with a similar romantic predicament and they are curious to find out what will happen in the story. Another reason why the book might seem difficult is, of course, the glass of wine, but they are not sorry for having it – on the contrary, they are considering whether to indulge in one more. Finally, they decide to use the need to fetch the sun lotion as an excuse for putting the book back in the cabin and spending the rest of the pre-dinner hour in the bar, where more 208

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concluding remarks wine will be available and a chance encounter with the object of their affection more likely. We can say, of course, that the mind of this person is constantly flickering back and forth between all these separate thought processes, but the speed of this flickering is of the same character as the one that combines separate sound moments into a melody and separate static pictures replacing one another on a screen into a smoothly moving image. And this, not the scientific theory, is what matters from the person’s point of view. If we can speak about a ‘specious present’ (Clay 1882: 168) at all, then the entirety of these considerations, deliberations, emotions, bodily signals and mentally initialized trajectories to possible futures needs to be present in it simultaneously, and all of its elements bear, in their own way, on the decisions the person is making both about their immediate next steps and about their more distant future. And, if we look for the physical location where this process happens, only some of their decisions are taken solely by the brain – at least their hormonal system is very much involved as well, so much so that it seems quite senseless to look for a single spot in physical reality that corresponds to a moment in the mental process, instead of attributing the whole of the latter to what I have called ‘bodythink’. At the peril of becoming reified beyond comprehension, this mental process also cannot be divided into building blocks that have an independent, self-same existence, and coupling these to the material world on the basis of a strict one-to-one correlation is neither scientifically justified nor good for increasing the explanatory power of the account. But neither should we stop, while looking at the situation, at the boundary of the person’s skin. The shrieking of seagulls and the mild breeze, the absence of familiar surroundings and colleagues from the office, the delicious, even if occasionally unfamiliar, food, and the complete revamping of daily routines and trajectories have created an environment in which it is quite possible that certain possible futures start looking eminently more sensible to this person than what they would normally think. In other words, the agentic decisions of the person are also, at least to a certain degree, embedded in the environment where they are made. Indeed, had they encountered the object of their affections somewhere in their habitual settings, there might have ensued no sympathy at all, not to speak of more tender feelings. And quite possibly the behaviour patterns of the other person, who now appears as they do, so to say, from the cruise perspective, might also have been quite different had they to 209

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concluding remarks be more stringently determined by their own usual constraints. All in all, what is taking place is not the interaction between self-same and continuous individuals, egocentric particulars who just happen to have entered their current setting, but the emergence of relations between processual nodes, self-tilting mazes that bear in them the traces of the diachronic causal processes that have brought them to the present moment, on the one hand, while being determined by the constitutive tensions that link them to their synchronic environment, on the other. This, I would claim, is grounds enough to credit our nonhuman significant others on the whole with a nontrivial role in our existence. We are not readymades entering into contact with them, but are constantly, even if marginally and imperceptibly (as in the case of a virus joining an organism), being reconstituted by our relationships with them. I have argued that this is the paradigmatic situation in which agentic decisions are made, and, moreover, that this applies to groups just as it does to single individuals. Indeed, extrapolating from the well-known saying that a chain is as strong as its weakest link, we might say that a group, as a collective self, can be as mentally young as its youngest member and as old as its oldest; it can be as stupid as its least intelligent member and as clever as its smartest. The only thing this depends on is who is successful in convincing others and consequently occurs in the focal point when an important decision is being made – not unlike whether it is the hormones or the memory that wins the argument about starting a new relationship. Of course, both the articulated dialogue in a group and the mostly nonverbal internal dialogue that goes on within the internality of a person follow certain patterns, and in a certain sense we might want to consider these patterns to be the backbone of the person or the organization that they characterize. However, we know that, in the present world, all the legal systems, balancing power checks, democratic traditions and public watchdogs have not blocked the completely legal ascent of certain people to the position of being a leader of many, including in some of the strongest nations of the world – people who are blatantly defying sound reason, constantly challenging the very backbone of the political systems they are in charge of, and nonetheless enjoying significant support among their fans. Similarly, it is not infrequent that a person whom we consider to be wise and well balanced on the whole might make a monumentally stupid, completely irrational and nonetheless life-altering decision, prompted no doubt by a focal point on the field of their subjectivity that does not represent its otherwise commendable characteristics. It is therefore incorrect, I argue, to 210

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concluding remarks identify the habitually efficient patterns as some kind of a structural essence of a process. Processual continuity, unlike substance and pattern continuity, only needs for an entity to have significant overlap with its recent past and near future stages in order to stay the same, and I would say that both persons and groups can be reasonably considered to remain themselves under processual continuity without evoking either of the stricter criteria. Whatever the processes we are involved in, we can look at ourselves as regulating nodes through which pass the constitutive tensions that make these processes up. Speaking of straying from the expected trajectory, I have argued that what enables rational agents to do this is mental causation. On the emergentist, processual account of causality that I have provided, causal powers are not properties of things, but emerge in situations, and are attributable to patterns (including metapatterns, or patterns that describe regularities in patterns). Mental causation accordingly occurs when one of the patterns involved in a causal linkage can only form itself in someone’s mind, bringing together and connecting processes that would otherwise go on quite independently of each other. In mental causation, ethical values (broadly understood as metapatterns with an intersubjective provenance) can override the most predictable outcome that would result from the current confluence of causal laws, but this needs an agent making the decision. This possibility is also the reason why we can hold agents responsible for the decisions they make. Causal laws and ethical values indeed resemble each other in that they both have a bearing on the trajectory of the process but neither of them exists mind-independently (‘objectively’, if you prefer) – I have argued for an ontological status for both of them that sees them as extracted from the processes that make up the reality flux, articulated in particular languages, and therefore dependent on particular perspectives (even if they do indeed correctly describe the processes running throughout the universe – they could not have been generalized without an embedded, perspective-bound position from which to do the job). On this view, natural laws do not pre-exist the phenomena in which they are instantiated and therefore there are currently no natural laws in existence that have not yet been manifested throughout the history of the universe. I concede, of course, that the opposite position can be defended coherently and adequately; however, in my opinion it is not reducible to axioms that are self-evidently true, but relies instead on a certain form of idealism or dualism that is secretly admitted through the back door. Therefore, we will take leave of our cruise-enjoying vacationer at 211

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concluding remarks the moment when they have comfortably installed themself on a bar stool, ordered a glass of wine, and made eye contact with the object of their emerging feelings, who has just walked in through the door – and they have no idea of what they are going to say next.

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INDEX

Abbott, Andrew 15, 78, 85 abortion debate 65 accelerationism 96 access consciousness 196 acorn and oak 15, 21, 33, 64, 69, 110 actor-network theory 11, 27, 31, 160 actual worlds 58 Adams, Frederick 185–6 Adorno, Theodor 66, 67, 79 adrenalin 165 affordances 39 agency 3, 4, 10, 60, 140, 147, 156, 160, 161, 169–92, 195–206 action-influencing moods 174 agentic decision-making 10, 100, 183, 184, 198, 199, 202–3, 206, 210 autonomy 174, 195, 198, 202, 206 causal efficacy 178, 180, 188 collectivities 192, 195–206, 210 distributed cognition 202–6 as emergent property 184fn 10 ethical implications 120, 189–91 extended network 184–7, 188 future-in-itself 179–81 I-mode 197, 198, 199 intent–action correlation 173 joint action, modes of 197–200 moral agents 189, 190 performative inclusion 200–2 phenomenological model of 173 rationality 180 received theory of 171, 173 responsibility 20, 189–92

self-identity and continuity 178 as self-realization 173–6 standard minimal definition of 174 temporality and 177–9 trajectories 175–6, 181, 187 we-mode 197, 198, 199, 200, 201 Aizawa, Kenneth 185–6 Alaimo, Stacy 123, 171fn 7, 184–5, 187 Alexander, Jeffrey 193, 194 Althusser, Louis 202 Ames, Roger 110, 144fn 9 amoeba 90 Anderson, Benedict 87 Andina, Tiziana 131 animal rights 1fn animal species 17 Anjum, Rani Lill 98, 99, 100 Anthropocene 171fn 7 Archer, Margaret 95fn 20, 161, 196, 199fn 13 architecture 70–1 Aristarchus of Samos 106 Aristotle 42, 106 theory of change 7fn, 14 art, music and literature 9, 41–2 cultural phenomena 107 poetry–book problem 116–17 structuralist view 32 Western-centric views of 65–6 artificial intelligence 1 assemblages 13, 48–51, 53, 63 Aston, William 65 atomistic ontology 26–7

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index attractors 109fn 27 Augustine of Hippo 65 authentic self 193, 194 autonomy 30, 36, 48, 66, 85, 172, 174, 189, 195, 198, 202, 206 awareness 120, 121, 122 self-awareness 126, 189 Badiou, Alain 26, 27, 92, 93 Baker, Lynne Rudder 149fn 12 Barad, Karen 17, 21fn 4, 43, 45, 122–3 Barthes, Roland 42, 134 Baudrillard, Jean 44 Beauregard, Mario 127 A Beautiful Mind (film) 82fn 16 bee colonies 84 being-in-the-world 61, 112, 114, 160, 170, 175, 187 being-instances 75–8 Bennett, Jane 38, 114, 118 Benoist, Jocelyn 133 Bentley, Arthur 2 Benton, Ted 62 Berger, Peter 43 Bergson, Henri 9, 11, 25, 52, 57, 109, 162, 172 Berkeley, George 28 Bhaskar, Roy 62, 101–2, 103fn 23 Big Bang 108 biological cells 110, 116, 130, 155 biological difference 164 birds and flight 103 ‘black swans’ 92, 93 Block, Ned 196 the body 113, 160, 162–5 as abstraction 47–8 biological difference 164 biophysical body 162, 163, 165 body–mind bifurcation 115–16, 162–3, 164–5 culturally constructed 47fn 11 decision-making process 172 discursive/sociological body 163–4, 165 movement 169–71 superficial and transient corporal states 164 bodymind 116, 172, 181 bodythink 160, 165–9, 171, 172, 206, 209

Boghossian, Paul 43 Bogost, Ian 61 boundaries 88–9, 91, 98 membranicity 56, 71–2, 83, 84, 90, 96, 97, 110, 135, 161, 177, 195, 204 bounded infinity 39 Bourdieu, Emmanuel 105, 203 Bourdieu, Pierre 41, 80, 105fn 25, 176 Braidotti, Rosi 1fn, 64fn 4, 188 brain and the body 162 ‘brain in a vat’ 134–5, 160 ‘brain-user’ 125, 133 identification of selfhood with 125–9, 131, 158 micro-scale alterations to 132 neuroscience 80, 120, 126–31, 133fn 6, 135, 136, 152, 154, 156 processual view of 131–2 relation with mind 9, 113–59, 168 see also consciousness; mind Brassier, Ray 29 Bratman, Michael E. 114fn 1 Bryant, Levi 29, 61fn 2 Buber, Martin 27 Buddhism 28fn 6 Buddhist-inspired metaphysics 25 Butler, Judith 47, 193, 194 cancer cells 116 capacities 68–9, 73, 78, 79 car crash 23 Cassirer, Ernst 2, 7fn 8, 79 causal reductionism 182 causality 3, 9, 56, 97–111, 172 causal chains 2, 4, 5fn 3, 33, 47, 54, 75–6, 83, 84, 97fn 21, 99fn 22, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 134, 138, 144, 150, 161, 174 causal laws 101–3, 104, 105, 107, 109, 211 causal patterns 101, 108, 109 cause–effect relations 98, 99, 101 diachronic connections 108–9, 111 mental causation 10, 181–4, 211 processual account of 97–111, 178, 181, 211 synchronic connections 108, 111 Chalmers, David 8, 113, 117, 122, 128, 185, 205fn 14

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index change 15 Aristotelian theory of 7fn 8, 14 game changers 91–4 game-changers 91–4, 112, 175 gradualist accounts of 34–5, 44 importance or triviality of changeevents 35–6 reorganization 88–9 spontaneous 100 transformative 33, 88, 89, 100 chatbots 66 Chater, Nick 125, 151–2, 153–4 chemical elements 68 chess pieces 44fn 9 Chicago School 85 chronopathology 95, 96 Churchland, Patricia and Paul 118 Clark, Andy 117, 136, 185, 205fn 14 Cleopatra’s Needle 57–8 clones 19 cogito 142 cognition 187 distributed 196, 202–6 extended 185–6, 203 cognitive institutions 201 collectivities 161, 192, 195–206, 210 colour 32–3, 61–2, 68–9, 152 combat model of self 146 Combs, Arthur 80 computational machines 150–1 conatus 172 concepts 13, 67fn 5, 78 conceptual extractions 4, 5, 48, 191 conceptual reality 67 conscious mental field theory 156 consciousness 34, 60, 82, 89, 90, 93fn 19, 113, 121, 122, 168 access consciousness 196 as biological phenomenon 122, 126–7 ego-consciousness 1114 emergent 95fn 20 ethical 189–91 evolutionary development 158 externalist view 133, 134, 136, 137 gradients 90, 121, 122–5, 158 ‘hard’ problem of 133 the ‘I’ 135–7, 138, 141–2, 154, 155, 156, 170–1 internalist view 133, 136 kinesthetic 170

loci of 172 mind and 116–20 minimal phenomenological consciousness 142, 143 ontological status of 128, 156, 158 processual view of 132fn 3 reductionist theories 125 self-consciousness 28, 143, 156, 163fn 3 self-reflexive 120, 124 tensions between mental vectors 118 ‘weak’/‘strong’ 149fn 12 see also brain; mind constitutional model of self 146 continuity of objects 18, 20–4 overlap see overlap, significant pattern continuity 21fn 4, 22–4, 69, 79, 112, 143, 155, 188 processual continuity 89, 112, 143, 211 substance continuity 21, 22, 23, 64, 69, 112 Copernicus, Nicolaus 106 copy principle 98, 127fn 3 core self 141–4, 188 counterfactuals 36, 99fn 22 court judgements 3, 166fn 4 courtrooms 49 COVID-19 pandemic 180–1 Craib, Ian 62 Crick, Sir Francis 125 Crossley, Nick 111, 174 cultural construction 47 cultural explosions 92 cultural phenomena, emergence of 106–7 cultural representations 123fn 2 cultural semiotics 9 Damasio, Antonio 149fn 11, 162 de-anthropocentrization of our worldview 29, 38 Deacon, Terrence W. 121–2 decision theory 10, 115, 137, 138–40, 144, 146–7, 153, 174 agentic decision-making 10, 100, 183, 184, 198, 199, 202–3, 206, 210 micro decisions 139 rationality and 144–5, 146, 147 ‘deep’ version of relational sociology 161fn 1

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index DeLanda, Manuel 13, 16, 37–8, 49, 50, 51, 52, 61–3, 68, 71, 73, 109fn 27 Deleuze, Gilles 27fn 6, 31fn 7, 49–50, 60, 63fn 3, 64fn 4, 109 democratic government 146–7, 201 Democritus 26 Dennett, Daniel 118, 125, 154 Dépelteau, François 161fn 1 Descartes, René 118 desire-vectors 109 determinism 172, 179 Dewey, John 2 diamonds, synthetic 89 Dick, Philip K. 17 diseases 39–41, 149fn 11 dispositions 98, 105, 197, 203 dispositional partnerships 98 distributed cognition 196, 202–6 Dōgen 11, 38, 56fn 1 domains 84–6 domain-specific ontologies 62 Donati, Pieraolo 95fn 20, 161, 196, 199fn 13 dormant objects 33 driving 187 dualism 74, 123, 133, 134, 136, 184fn 9, 211 Dummett, Michael 179 Duns Scotus, John 31fn 7 Dutch East India Company 30, 77 dynamism 10, 56, 80, 156 eating and drinking 15, 41, 88, 90, 103, 116, 118, 166 Eco, Umberto 42, 134 ecologies 85 ego-consciousness 114 Ekman, Paul 149fn 11 Elder-Vass, Dave 44–5, 51, 62, 68fn 7, 102–3 embeddedness of objects 26, 28, 33, 54 embeddedness in the world 8, 160, 178 emergence 33 entities 182, 196 matter as 73–5 organizations 22 properties 33, 49, 63, 196, 197 Emirbayer, Mustafa 177–9, 180 emotions 127, 128, 149fn 11, 153 machinic emotion production 162fn 2

endograms 120 endurance 19, 20 entities 5, 6, 9, 25, 49, 76, 77, 81, 114, 120, 122, 123, 169 abstract entities 60 actual entities 58, 59 assemblages 48–51 emergent entities 182, 196 metaphysics of 27, 120 mind-independent ideal entities 104 non-anthropocentric paradigm of 55, 73 nonorganic 90 particulars 13 as processes 66 sameness 69, 70, 77 thingness of 132fn 5 trajectories 10, 15, 35, 63, 64, 175–6, 188, 211 universals 13–14 see also objects essence-oriented ontology 31 essentialism 14–18, 31, 32, 46, 48, 56 particularist 16 problem of spontaneous transformations 18 problem of vagueness 14–15, 18 reductive/sortal 16, 31 reifying effect 15 undesirable results 18 eternal objects 58–9 ethical consciousness 189–91 ethical values 211 events 58, 92–3 event-field 110 event-oriented ontology 37–8 evolution 17, 71, 72, 89, 90, 106 thresholds of 120–2 excess of objects 27, 32–3, 34, 67, 79, 82, 157 experience 7, 18, 27fn 6, 35, 37, 62, 67, 69fn 9, 77, 85, 88, 112, 113, 128, 129, 134, 135, 136, 140, 141, 142, 156–7 aesthetic dimension 157 me-experience 156 self-experience 156 experimental psychology 152, 153 expressivity 77 extended cognition thesis 185–6, 203 extended functionalism 186

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index extended mind thesis 11, 136, 160, 205fn 14, 206 extended network 10, 184–7, 188 externalist moral theories 190 Faraday, Michael 56, 79 femininity 64fn 4 feminist philosophy of science 5, 11, 13, 54, 163fn 3, 164 Ferraris, Maurizio 43 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 27, 28 fields 56, 73, 78–86, 111–12 balance 82 constitutive tensions 56, 80, 111 dynamism 56, 80, 156 field ontology 73, 78–86, 113, 155, 156, 157–8, 190, 197, 206 field-as-cell 110 field-as-lens 110–11 metaphor-building potential 79 mind-as-field 114 pattern of relations 81 self-as-field 113, 114, 139, 155–9, 202 Flanagan, Owen 132fn 3, 140fn 8 flat ontology 61 flattened images 3, 51, 81, 192–4, 195, 196, 201 Fligstein, Neil 80 flux of reality 8, 9, 15, 26, 54, 56, 75, 82, 83, 91, 101, 152 fMRI scans 127, 128 forests 88 Frankfurt, Harry 119 free will 125, 156, 201 French, Peter 86fn 18 Freud, Sigmund 118 Frith, Christopher D. 69fn 9 Fuchs, Thomas 95, 96 future-in-itself 179–81 Gabriel, Markus 43, 117, 132 Gallagher, Shaun 130, 166fn 4, 172, 177, 201 game changers 91–4, 112, 175 positive and negative 91, 92 Garfinkel, Harold 31fn 7 Gatens, Moira 163fn 3 gaze 13, 52–3 gaze-dependence 28, 54, 65, 68, 136, 152

gaze-independence 16fn 2, 42 gaze-independent reality 16, 24, 42, 47, 51, 52, 65, 94, 152 gender 193, 194 performativity 194 sex/gender distinction 47fn 11, 163fn 3 genome 126 Gestalt psychology 148 Gibson, James J. 39, 80, 168fn 6 Gladwin, Thomas 192fn 11 Goffman, Erving 137, 193 gradients 6, 35, 36, 55, 63–6, 70, 71, 86, 90, 121 consciousness and 90, 121, 122–5, 158 see also thresholds gradualism 21, 22, 34–5, 36, 44, 54, 63–4 anti-gradualism 34–5, 64 Grant, Iain Hamilton 29 Greenfield, Susan 40 Grosz, Elizabeth 74, 163fn 3, 165 group theory 10, 196, 197 see also collectivities Guattari, Félix 27fn 6, 31fn 7, 49, 50, 63fn 3 gun control 100–1 Gurwitsch, Aron 80 haecceities 31 Hall, David 144fn 9 Haraway, Donna 5, 43, 47, 53, 164 ‘hard’ physicalism 6 Harman, Gilbert 134 Harman, Graham 7fn 8, 17, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34–5, 36, 39, 40, 44, 51, 53fn 16, 64, 77, 79 Harris, Christine 128 Haugeland, John 44fn 9, 117, 133, 137, 160, 187 health 41, 118, 119, 191 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 20, 25, 27, 28, 57, 103, 118 Heidegger, Martin 29, 31 Hekman, Susan 43, 46, 47 heliocentrism 106 Heraclitus 25, 57, 77fn 14 heteronomy 198 Hieronymi, Pamela 139 Hipólito, Inês 62, 123

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index homunculus hypothesis 133fn 6, 154 housebuilding 36, 105–6 human perspective on reality 2, 4, 6fn 5, 8, 12, 48, 54, 77, 89, 114 humanist paradigm 1fn Hume, David 98, 127fn 3 Hundertwasser, Friedensreich 70–1 Husserl, Edmund 16 Hutchins, Edwin 192fn 11 hybrids 28 id 118 idealism 5, 16, 17, 27, 59, 74, 102, 104, 167, 211 ideality 74 identity 18–19 self-identity 18–19, 20, 24, 75, 81, 114, 189, 203 image schemas 170 imagined communities 87 impression management 193, 194 in-itself-ness 79 indeterminacy 25 individuality 9, 161 initialism 104–8, 120, 181 inner worlds 151 integrity-based relations 70, 71 intentionality 173 internalism 186 internality 9, 86–90, 94, 95, 96, 158, 161 intimacy-based relations 70, 71 irreversibility 106 Ise shrine, Japan 21 iterativity 178 Jaeggi, Rahel 45 job opportunities 183 Johnson, Mark 20, 164, 170 Kant, Immanuel 28fn 6, 79, 118 karma 109 Kasulis, Thomas 70, 71 katharsis 42 Kauffman, Stuart 108 Keller, Evelyn Fox 41 Khmer Rouge 93 kinds 14 kinesthetic consciousness 170 knowledge, sociology of 2 Korsgaard, Christine 146, 147

Kriegel, Uriah 69fn 9 Kyoto philosophical school 27 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de 118 Land, Nick 96 language 61, 67, 149, 166–7 gradients 66 linguistic constructionism 44, 45, 46, 48 linguistically-conditioned self-reference 143 role in production of lived experience 46, 47 Latour, Bruno 11, 27, 28, 29, 31, 100, 182–3 Law, John 27 Lawson, Tony 53, 182, 184 Le Bon, Gustave 197 Le Corbusier 70, 71 legal and moral responsibility 191 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 19, 25, 30, 31, 70 law of 18, 19 Leucippus 26 Levinas, Emmanuel 27 Lewens, Tim 149fn 11 Lewes, George Henry 7 Lewin, Kurt 76fn 13, 80 Lewis, David 20 Libet, Benjamin 80, 115, 156, 171–2, 173, 174 like–dislike switch 153 List, Christian 203 Locke, John 145 London taxi-drivers 132 Lotman, Yuri 9, 92, 111 Luckmann, Thomas 43 McAdam, Doug 80 Malafouris, Lambros 184fn 10 male gaze 52 Mannheim, Karl 2, 43, 47, 53 Marcus, George 49fn 12 Margulis, Lynn 84 Marr, David 143 Martin, Charles B. 69, 98–9 Martin, Jack 174, 175 Martin, John Levi 79, 99fn 22, 176 Martins, Jorge 123 mass 75fn 11 master-slave dialectic 28

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index materialism 74, 118 materiality 9, 11, 74, 75, 123 mathematical attractors 109fn 27 matter 55 as emergence 73–5 Maxwell, James Clerk 56, 79 Mead, George Herbert 178 mechanistic materialism 118 medical discourse 39–41 medieval scholastic ‘realism’ 17 Meillassoux, Quentin 29, 104 membranic boundaries 56, 71–2, 83, 84, 90, 96, 97, 110, 135, 161, 177, 195, 204 memory 40, 109, 135, 136, 149, 171 quasi-memories 168–9 Menary, Richard 186 mental causation 10, 181–4, 211 mental events 7, 127fn 3 mental illnesses 95, 129 mental phenomena 121, 123, 181–2 mental states 7, 127fn 3, 139, 148–51, 164, 171, 195, 198 group 203 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 157, 173 metapatterns 41, 78, 149fn 11, 191, 192, 211 metawill 119 methodological collectivism 196 methodological individualism 161, 196 methodological perspectivism 13, 36–9, 54, 56 Metzinger, Thomas 155fn 13 Midgley, Mary 126 Mill, John Stuart 33 Millikan, Ruth Garrett 82fn 16 mind 9, 10, 113–59 body–mind bifurcation 115–16, 162–3, 164–5 computational machine analogy 150–1 consciousness and 116–20 embodied-embedded view of 186 extended mind thesis 11, 136, 160, 205fn 14, 206 external input 114–15 interaction with environment 117 mental states 7, 127fn 3, 139, 148–51, 164, 171, 195, 198 mind wandering 125 mind-as-field 114

mind-independence 16fn 2 physicalist theories of 6, 9, 120, 150, 154, 156, 158 process-ontological stance 113–59 relation with physical brain 9, 113–59, 168 see also consciousness mind-independent reality 4, 5, 15, 16–17, 29, 42, 44, 47, 52, 53fn 16, 54, 65, 68, 108, 110, 134, 136, 137, 152 mind–body problem 60, 116, 163, 168 see also dualism mineness 141–2 minimal instances of being 75–8 Minkowski, Eugène 94 Mische, Ann 177–9, 180 Mol, Annemarie 39–40 money 94 moodiness of action 174 Moore, Rob 43, 44 moral agents 189, 190 Morton, Timothy 29, 34 mountain ranges 82 movement 169–71 spontaneous 170 movement-initiating decisions 174 multiple personality disorder 145 multiple realizability 134, 184fn 9 multiplicity-centred ontologies 25, 26–8 Mulvey, Laura 52 Mumford, Stephen 98, 99, 100 mutual conditioning 25, 27, 28, 29, 32–3 Nāgasena 183fn 8 Nagel, Thomas 8, 117 Nash, John 82fn 16 nations 87 natural kinds 39, 78 natural laws 120, 122, 138, 211 networks 28, 77 extended 10, 184–7, 188 neural correlates 7, 127, 128, 129 neuromania 126 neurophilosophy 7, 118, 121, 150, 162, 165, 185, 196 neuroscience 80, 120, 126–31, 133fn 6, 135, 136, 152, 154, 156 Newman, Dwight 86fn 18

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index Nietzsche, Friedrich 109, 138 Nishida Kitarō 79fn 15 Noë, Alva 7fn, 38fn 8 noetics 60 non-anthropocentric view of the human mind 114 object-oriented ontology 12, 25, 28, 29, 34, 48, 67, 76, 107 problematic nature of 30–54 ‘objective’ 6fn 6 objects 12, 13–16 autonomy of 36 change see change concepts 13 continuity see continuity of objects definitions of 13, 18, 24, 30, 58 dormant 33 embeddedness 26, 28 endurance 19, 20 essentialism see essentialism excess of 27, 32–3, 34, 67, 79, 82, 157 identity 18 ontological status 13 perdurance 19, 20 primacy of 12 problem of vagueness 12, 14–15, 25, 64, 65 properties see properties self-identical 18–19, 20, 24, 42, 59 speculative realist view of 29, 30 superobjects 19–20 withdrawnness 31, 34 see also entities one-tiered ontology 55, 61 ontological individualism 196 ontological priority 34 ontology 12–54 atomistic 26–7 essence-oriented 31 event-oriented 37–8 field 73, 78–86, 113, 155, 156, 157–8, 190, 197, 206 flat 61 object-oriented 12, 25, 28, 29, 30–54, 67, 76, 107 one-tiered 55, 61 scientific 62–3 social 11, 22, 49 traditional 13

see also process ontology optical lens 110–11 Ortega, Francisco 123fn 2, 126, 129 Other 118, 122 overlap, significant 6, 23–4, 54, 69, 70, 78, 79, 81, 84–5, 86, 88, 91, 112, 139, 144, 149, 167, 187, 188, 191, 195, 211 pain 143, 151, 165 panpsychism 121, 124 Parfit, Derek 23, 168–9 parity principle 185 Parkes, Graham 138 particulars 13, 14, 84, 86 Pashler, Harold 128 past-in-itself 179 patterns 3, 8, 55, 56, 59, 76, 78, 81, 83, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109, 163, 183 causal 101, 108, 109 continuity 21fn 4, 22–4, 69, 79, 112, 143, 155, 188 dynamic 100 metapatterns 41, 78, 101, 108, 149fn 11, 191, 192, 211 modifications 22, 23, 81, 155 patterning of experience 141 primary 78 randomness 76, 105 subpatterns 124 Pearl Harbor 99 Peirce, Charles S. 60 perception 37, 38fn 8, 152–3 perdurance 19, 20 performative inclusion 200–2 performativity 193, 194 Pessoa, Fernando vii Pettit, Philip 203 phenomenal consciousness 196 physicalist theories of mind 9, 120, 150, 154, 156, 158 ‘hard’ physicalism 6 ‘weak’ physicalism 6 picoseconds 108 Planck epoch 75fn 11 Plath, David 176 Platonic forms 59, 60 poetry 41, 135–6 poetry–book problem 116–17 political responsibility 191

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index post-anthropocentrism 1–2 ‘post-truth’ society 44 posthumanism 1fn poststructuralism 32 Powell, Christopher 4fn 2, 104 prebiotic processes 121 Princip, Gavrilo 35, 99 process continuity 89, 112, 143, 211 see also overlap, significant process metaphysics 11, 113 process ontology 2–3, 9, 10, 55–112, 158, 186, 189, 190 capacities 68–9, 78 field ontology 73, 78–86, 113, 190, 197, 206 game changers 91–4, 112 mind and 113–59 ontological tiers 59–63 process-ontological tradition 57–9 processual account of causality 97–111, 178 properties see properties relations 70–2 task of 59 thresholds process philosophies 12, 24–6, 28, 32, 33 processes defining 59 distinct 83–4 internality 88, 94 subprocesses 88, 96, 97, 98, 110, 111, 147 processual account of causality 97–111, 178, 181, 211 processual continuity 8, 89, 112, 143, 211 properties 13, 14, 18, 68 capacities and 68–9, 73 contingent 15, 16, 18 dispositional 69 emergent 33, 49, 63, 196, 197 essential 15, 16, 18 intrinsic 68, 73 relational 68, 73 significant 32 structural 69 time-enduring 68 trivial 32 propositions 166, 167 protoforms 121

prototypes 16, 64, 72, 158 Prudentius 167 psychomachia 167 psychosomatic conditions 131 public persona 137fn 7, 193–4 public/private law distinction 172 Purkinje cells 130 Putnam, Hilary 150–1, 152 qualia 142, 150, 157 quantum field ontology 73–4 quantum theory 55, 75 quiddity 31fn 7 Quine, W.V.O. 60 radical indeterminism 104 randomness 76, 105 rationality 139–41, 144–5, 146, 147, 153, 165 realism 4, 5, 16, 17, 34, 104, 167 speculative 12, 29–30 structural ontic realism 74 structuralist 60 reality 2, 4–5, 16, 28, 29, 34, 35, 52, 53, 58, 64, 73, 74 flux of reality 8, 9, 15, 26, 54, 56, 75, 82, 83, 91, 101, 152 gaze-independent 16, 24, 42, 47, 51, 52, 65, 94, 152 human perspective on 2, 4, 6fn 5, 8, 12, 48, 54, 77, 89, 114 ‘levels’ of reality 53 mind-independent 4, 4–5, 5, 15, 16–17, 29, 42, 44, 47, 52, 53fn 16, 54, 65, 68, 108, 110, 134, 136, 137, 152 one-tiered 55, 61, 134 structuration 5 regional ontologies 62 reification 50, 56 reifying tendency 52 relational subjectivity 161, 196 relational we-ness 199fn 13 relationality 51–3 relationism 2, 4fn 2 relations 70–2, 77, 78, 84, 111 causal 97–102 initiation/limitation 86 integrity 70, 71 intimacy 70, 71 membranic 71–2

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index relations (cont.) social groups 86–8 spatial and temporal 78 tension 72 relativism 2 remainder 67, 79 reorganization 88–9 replaceability of components 50–1 representationalism 45, 57, 137 anti-representationalism 45–8 res cogitans 60, 117, 118 res extensa 60 Rescher, Nicholas 9, 59 responsibility-bearing 20, 137, 188, 189–92 rocks 90 Rogers, Carl 80 Romdenh-Romluc, Komarine 173 Rosch, Eleanor 16, 64 Rovane, Carol 140, 141, 145, 205 Rovelli, Carlo 74 Rudolf, Gerd 156 Russell, Bertrand 13–14 Russell, James A. 153 Russian formalism 41 Saka, Erkan 49fn 12 sameness 69, 70 Sartre, Jean-Paul 142 Saussure, Ferdinand de 47, 166 scale-dependence 68fn 6 Scheler, Max 43 Schönheimer, Rudolf 82fn 17 Schutz, Alfred 43 scientific ontologies 62–3 Searle, John 122, 135, 182, 184 Segal, Gabriel 68 Seibt, Johanna 25, 82, 113 self-awareness 126, 189 self-consciousness 28, 143, 156, 163fn 3 self-cultivation 190 self-experience 156 self-identical objects 18–19, 20, 24, 42, 59 self-identity 18–19, 20, 24, 75, 81, 114, 189, 203 self-image 115 self-reflexivity 120 selfhood 9, 10, 12, 27, 113–59 4E cognitive theory 10

agentic selfhood see agency authentic self 193, 194 brain, relationship with the 125–9, 131, 158 collective 10 combat model of self 146 constant transformation 10 constituted by tensions 113, 119–20, 194 constitutional model of self 146 core self 141–4, 188 embeddedness in the world 10, 160 emergent reality 113, 116 first- and second-order volitions 119 flattened images 3, 51, 81, 192–4, 195, 196, 201 internality 161 minimal self 143 no objective ‘real me’ 115 phenomenological unity 140, 141 publicly presented version 137fn 7, 193 rational unity 140, 141 relations with ‘outside’ world 113, 160–207 self-as-field 113, 114, 139, 155–9, 202 see also agency; brain; consciousness; mind sentience 121, 122 shared intentions 114fn 1 Shaviro, Steven 28fn 6, 58, 77, 96, 122, 157 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 170 Shin’ichi, Fukuoka 82fn 17 ships of Theseus paradox 15, 17, 22 Shoemaker, Sydney 69fn 9 Shotter, John 40 Shōzō, Ōmori 179 signs 47 Silver, Dan 174 situated knowledges 53, 54 Slaby, Jan 201 sleep and wakefulness 124–5 Snygg, Donald 80 social constructionism 43–5, 46, 47, 60, 190 social groups 86–8 aggregative 86, 87 boundaries 88–9 corporate 86–8

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index social injustice 18 social manifestation thesis 203, 204 social ontology 11, 22, 49 social relations 87, 113, 160–207 sociology of knowledge 43 Sokal, Alan 44 solidity 75 somatophobia 165 sound 52 spacetime 74, 97 species 17 specious present 209 speculative realism 12, 29–30 Spinoza, Baruch 22, 172 Srnicek, Nick 96 stasis 10, 25, 67, 169, 170 Strawson, P.F. 34 structuralism 32 structure 3, 4 subjectivity 1–2, 9, 10, 95fn 20, 118, 121, 137, 156, 161, 163fn 3, 188, 196 see also selfhood substance continuity 21, 22, 23, 64, 69, 112 substance–pattern distinction 21fn 4 superego 118 superobjects 19–20 superorganisms 84 supervenience 203 Swaab, Dick 125

constitutive 2, 3, 9, 56, 79, 80, 86, 90, 147, 158, 161, 181, 204, 206 fields of tensions 79, 80, 111, 118, 119–20, 139, 144, 158, 181, 194 fluctuating 3 new configurations 100, 101 relations 72 release 100, 101 time regimes 95 thing-in-itself 27, 179 thingness 9, 62, 132fn 5 thisnesses 31 Thompson, Evan 39, 129 Thomson, Judith Jarvis 19–20 thresholds 63, 64–5, 90, 112, 120–2, 158 time regimes see temporalities Tollefsen, Deborah 86fn 18, 196, 203, 205fn 14 Torey, Zoltan 120–1, 125, 132–3 Toulmin, Stephen 43 trajectories 10, 15, 35, 63, 64, 76, 81, 91, 98, 105, 107, 155, 161fn 1, 175–6, 181, 187, 188, 211 trans-action theory 2 trans-corporeality 184–5, 187, 188 transcendental idealism 102 transformative change 33, 88, 89, 100 truth 35, 92, 93, 167 Tuomela, Raimo 197–9, 201 type-token relations 55, 60

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 92, 93 Tallis, Raymond 126, 127fn 3, 129 Taylor, Charles 173 Taylor, Richard 19 teleodynamic systems 121 ‘temporal parts’ of things 19 temporalities 9, 12, 56, 74, 84–7 accelerationism 96 agency and 177–9 chronopathology 95, 96 cyclic time regimes 95 existential continuity 12 fields of 95 intrinsic 177 linear time 95 as multiplicity of nested events 178 tensions 95 tensions 2, 3, 4, 88, 100, 101, 112, 113, 156

Uexküll, Jakob von 37, 62 Umwelt 62 universal moral law 190 universals 13–14, 17, 18, 60 univocal being 60 unknowability of objects 31 vagueness, problem of 12, 14–15, 25, 64, 65 valences 76, 77, 122 Varela, Francisco 38fn 8, 69, 168 Velleman, J. David 67 fn 5 Vidal, Fernando 123fn 2, 126, 129 virtualism 104, 179 virtue ethics 190 viruses 122 voting behaviour 153 Vrecko, Scott 128 Vul, Edward 128

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index Wacquant, Loïc 80 water 23–4, 30, 33, 38, 108, 122, 124, 138 Watson, Gary 119 ‘weak’ physicalism 6 Wells, H.G., ‘The New Accelerator’ 36–7 Wheeler, Michael 186 Wheeler, William Morton 84 Whitehead, Alfred North 9, 11, 25, 27fn 6, 57–9, 75fn 12, 90 Williams, Alex 96 Wilson, Elizabeth 163fn 3

Wilson, Robert A. 5fn 4, 203, 204 Winkielman, Piotr 128 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 17, 143 Young, Iris Marion 87 Young, Michael 43 Zahavi, Dan 117, 141–2, 143, 155fn 13, 184, 188 Zasulich, Vera 35 Ziporyn, Brook A. 81 zooxanthellae 84

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