Eyre Lines

There is a line of thinking, including Slavoj Zizek, Todd McGowan and Peter Rollins, very much based in one interpretation of Hegel, which claims that there is a split, or divide, or rupture, or antagonism, or inconsistency which is ontologically part of existence – in other words, it is fundamental to things as they exist.

I have difficulty with this concept for a number of reasons. Firstly, I’m a mystic, and a part of many if not all mystics’ viewpoint of the world is that it is fundamentally non-dual, i.e. not essentially divided at all. I don’t, of course, have any basis for claiming this to anyone who isn’t themselves a mystic. They don’t have access to the mode of perception which yields this insight (and yes, I acknowledge that that insight might be flawed, though it is massively difficult for me to work on the basis that it is).

Secondly, I’ve a strong tendency to accept Kant’s determination (inasmuch as I understand him) that we cannot know things in themselves (ding an sich) and thus any ontology we may put forward is inevitably speculative, something which may or may not be the case but which cannot be proved to be the case. In this Kant is very much in agreement with David Hume, who I can read much more easily than I can Kant. Under this proviso, the most an ontology of division or antagonism could be is a speculation – but in that case, the only reason for adopting it would be that it was useful in producing other concepts about reality which had practical application.

What, however, is the outcome of assuming such a division? Principally, it might possibly help to explain such phenomena as wave-particle duality, quantum uncertainty or even, perhaps, the outcome of Godel’s incompleteness theorem. Possibly also the “bicameral mind” or the ego/superego conflict in human psychology.

And yet, my own assumption about our conceptual structures is that language (which is, let’s face it, what we have to work with – I don’t think painting a picture would assist all that much, nor writing a piece of music) is fundamentally inadequate to express the fullness of what actually exists. Again, I’ll pray in aid Godel, this time as a fundamental principle – any system of thinking (ok, any system sufficiently complex to incorporate mathematics) cannot at the same time be consistent and complete. Either there will be an inconsistency or there will be actualities which the system cannot describe adequately.

What’s more, human thought always starts with a division into this and not-this (the archetypal essay question which starts “compare and contrast…” springs to mind. Derrida famously opined that all concepts are dependent on other concepts, this being the simplest example – defining something by what it is not. It brings to mind an issue I had when I started working with a UV-vis spectrophotometer in the lab where I worked part time for a while. I noticed rather rapidly that all my traces for a particular chemical had a radical disconinuity in them at one point, and was musing aloud about what might produce that, when my partner-in-chemistry told me that at that wavelength, the machine switched bulbs. Thus, the discontinuity was not in the spectrum, it was an artefact of the measuring apparatus. Of course, it is only reasonable to consider our minds as part of the measuring apparatus as well – and if our concept-structures have a radical discontinuity (i.e. an inbuilt desire to divide and separate, rather like an old bra advert claimed of its product) then we should be cautious in speculating that there is also a radical discontinuity in what we are observing.

My third difficulty is that among the various speculative ontologies on offer, Whitehead’s process ontology seems to offer the best fit for modern Physics (my degree subject before I went over to the dark side and studied Law). Process emphasises movement and development rather than static things (substances) with qualities or essences and relation, such that it is difficult to “think process” and also think that there are hard and fast divisions between things. It fits wonderfully, for example, with quantum non-locality (which is so far away from substance ontology as to be near-opposite). Incidentally, Kant regarded substance as a fiction – but bearing in mind that any speculative scheme is, in a way, a fiction, that doesn’t say as much as it might appear to. Of course, I don’t rule out the possibility that more than one ontology may be needed to explain what we observe – after all, I cut my teeth on wave-particle duality!

I have a substantial sympathy with the position of nominalism – not so much that of the mediaeval scholastics, but as espoused by Carnap, whose ideas about scientific method seem pretty reasonable to me. It does seem to me that what we can actually claim exists is particulars (granted, under process, those are moving targets…) and that generalities (universals) are drawn from those and have something of the character of a cartoon image – they are recognisably linked with the real things, but lack something in the process of making it more widely applicable. We can agree that yes, Tom and Jerry are respectively a cat and a mouse, but not any actual cat or mouse – which enables the cartoon characters to do things which would be impossible for real animals.

Here’s my question, though. How would you go about deciding whether any particular division/split/rupture/antagonism/inconsistency was baked into the structure of reality, or was an artefact of human cognition with no actual reality? I’m at a loss to see how we could…