The Democracy of Objects

2.3. The Paradox of Substance

As we saw in the last chapter, the ontological category of substance is indispensable to rendering our account of experimental practice intelligible. The practice of experiment is premised on the existence of generative mechanisms, difference engines, or substances that act in open systems, that they can be out of phase with the events they are capable of producing, and that they are separable from their relations to other substances. Nonetheless, it is clear that the concept of substance has fallen into disrepute within philosophy, often being equated with a metaphysical ghost or fiction with no warrant whatsoever.

One of the roots of the disdain with which the concept of substance is today received can be found in Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. There Locke writes that,

Locke's criticism of the concept of substance spins on the manner in which substance and qualities are split. Within the Aristotelian framework, substance is the ground of qualities, yet we never encounter substance as such, but rather only ever encounter the qualities of substance. From this observation, two problems emerge for Locke: first, what warrant is there for supposing the existence of substance at all? If substance is never encountered at all, if all we ever encounter are qualities, how is substance any different from a reference to Zeus to explain lightning? Second, if substance differs fundamentally from its qualities, what could it possibly be? If substance is stripped of all its qualities aren't we left with a bare substratum, leading to the bizarre and absurd conclusion that all substances are ultimately identical?

Elsewhere, in The Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke, in a discussion of Locke, will call this “the paradox of substance”. There Burke writes that, “the word ‘substance,’ used to designate what a thing is, derives from a word designating something that a thing is not. That is, though used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it”. [66] Burke's point is that substance is supposed to be that which is intrinsic to an object, that which makes an object what it is, but that oddly substance ends up being external to the object. If substance, according to Burke, turns out to be external to the object, then this is because we only ever encounter the qualities of the object, and never the substance of the object. If, then, the object is equated with its qualities, then substance turns out to be strangely other than the object.

Locke's critique of substance precipitates something of a crisis that reverberates all the way down to contemporary philosophy today. As Meillassoux remarks, in prior philosophy “one of the questions that divided rival philosophers most decisively was, 'Who grasps the true nature of substance? He who thinks the Idea, the individual, the atom, God? Which God?'” [67] However, with Locke's critique of substance, this entire debate is thrown into crisis as there no longer seems to be any epistemic warrant for the ontological concept of substance. However, while the ontological concept of substance seems to be banished to the world of occult and unwarranted suppositions with no place in philosophy, individual things nonetheless persist in the world of our experience. Having banished the ontological concept of substance—viz., substances as they exist in their own right, independent of any cognition—philosophy thus finds itself confronted with the question of how to account for individual things without recourse to mind-independent substances inaccessible to experience. Hume, for example, will argue that substance is not a feature of the world—or, at least, any world that we can know—but rather arises from the operations of mind. Having experienced the combination of many similar sensations occurring together in the past, the mind comes to associate these impressions or sensations with one another. In this respect, the object itself, for Hume, is not a substance, but rather the sense that one encounters a substance when encountering an object is instead an effect of how the mind associates impressions and ideas together in a unity. In this way, Hume responds to Locke's challenge by making no reference to “occult entities” independent of what is given in sensation.

We encounter a similar move from world to mind in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. As Kant observes,

For Kant, the realm of empirical intuition (sensation) is a sort of confused chaos and therefore cannot, contra Hume, provide us with any ordered or structured experience. “[O]ur entire sensibility is nothing but the confused representation of things, which contains solely that which pertains to them in themselves but only under a heap of marks and partial representations that we can never consciously separate from one another”. [69] Or, as Kant will write when discussing the first analogy, “[o]ur apprehension of the manifold of appearance is always successive, and is therefore always changing. We can therefore never determine from this alone whether this manifold, as objects of experience, is simultaneous or successive”. [70]

It will be noted that Kant fully carries over the premise of Locke's critique of substance, leaving this critique itself unquestioned. Beginning with the premise that we have no access to substances but only qualities as they are experienced, and with the thesis that the “manifold of intuition” or empirical sensation is unformatted, Kant has no other recourse than to claim that the substantiality of substances is not an ontological feature of objects themselves, but rather issues from our mind. To be sure, Kant endorses the thesis that things-in-themselves exist, but maintains that we have no access to these objects and therefore no means of determining whether, like the objects of our experience, things-in-themselves are autonomous, individual unities, or whether the things-in-themselves are, in reality, really a thing-in-itself, a primordial unity or One, that is then subsequently formatted or “cut up” by our minds. Since the substantiality of substance must issue from somewhere, and since we cannot appeal to being itself to ground substance, Kant contends that substance is instead an a priori category of mind that is imposed on the chaotic manifold of intuition giving it structure or formatting it.

What we have here is what Harman has referred to as the “overmining” of substances. Where undermining dissolves objects in a something that is purported to be more fundamental such as atoms, water (Thales), the One, the pre-individual, and so on, overmining dissolves objects in something that is treated as being more immediate. Of overmining, Harman writes, “it is said that [objects] are too deep. On this view the object is a useless hypothesis, a ‘je ne sais quoi’ in the bad sense”. [71] In the case of Hume, substances are overmined in favor of impressions or sensations that are then bundled together by associations of the mind, while in the case of Kant, substances are overmined in favor of the manifold of intuition (sensations), along with the pure a priori forms of space and time and the a priori categories of the mind. In both instances, objects or substances are treated as effects of something more immediate or accessible (empirical experience and mind).

It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Locke's critique of substance and Hume’s and Kant's proposed solution to the paradox of substance on the subsequent history of philosophy and theory. For while direct reference to Locke, Hume, and Kant in subsequent philosophy and theory will often be absent, we nonetheless encounter Locke's critique of substance as an implicit presupposition, and Hume’s and Kant's style of solving this problem throughout contemporary philosophy and theory. Wherever, for example, we are told that it is language that structures reality, we are encountering a variant of Kant's response to Locke. While, to be sure, the content of the critique and the proposed solution differs, the form of the critique remains the same. Here the premises that 1) the ontological category of substance should be banished because we have no direct access to substance, and 2) that the manifold of intuition is a chaotic rhapsody of sensation have been fully embraced and Kant's mind and a priori categories have been replaced by society and language.

Ironically, however, Kant's reasoning is based on an amphiboly, though of an ontological rather than a transcendental sort. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant tells us that a transcendental amphiboly is, “a confusion of the pure object of the understanding with [an empirical] appearance”. [72] For Kant, there is both a rationalist and an empiricist way of falling into amphibolous reasoning. Drawing on Leibniz and Locke as examples, Kant argues that “Leibniz intellectualized the appearances, just as Locke totally sensitivized the concepts of the understanding, i.e., interpreted them as nothing but empirical or abstracted concepts of reflection”. [73] Kant's charge is that Leibniz is guilty of amphibolous reasoning by virtue of finding, directly in sensation, what only issues from the a priori concepts of the understanding. Leibniz treats sensations as if they were identical to what is found only in concepts. For example, sensations are always particular and require the presence of a thing, whereas concepts allow me to think a plurality of things with a shared characteristic in their absence. By contrast, Locke, according to Kant, falls prey to amphibolous reasoning by virtue of arguing that categories that can only be found a priori in the understanding, concepts that can only be generated by mind, can be abstracted from sensation or the domain of the empirical. In both cases, Kant contends, Locke and Leibniz conflate the transcendental structure of mind and the empirical dimension of sensation.

If Kant (and Locke) are guilty of amphibolous reasoning, this arises not from conflating the transcendental (as understood by Kant as a structure of the mind) and the empirical, but rather from conflating the ontological and the empirical. For on the one hand, Locke infers that because substances are not given in experience but rather only empirical qualities are given, we are warranted in banishing substance from our ontology. Likewise, Kant infers that because substance is not given in the manifold of sensation, we must reject the claim that substance pertains to things-in-themselves, but must instead see substance as a category issuing from mind. An ontological amphiboly thus consists in confusing two distinct domains of inquiry: the ontological and the epistemological. The ontological is here subordinated to the epistemological, and the epistemological is then used to determine what is and is not. The problem is that what we can and cannot know cannot be used to legitimately legislate what is and is not. The being of a thing is independent of our ability to know a thing.

However, the problem with the Humean and Kantian solution is much more serious than a mere conflation of two distinct sets of questions or domains of inquiry. Let us take the example of Kant to illustrate this point. Kant's thesis is that the manifold of intuition, being a sort of rhapsodic chaos, cannot deliver the determinations necessary for experience. Rather, this delirious manifold must be structured by a priori categories of mind. And for this reason, these a priori categories of mind cannot be drawn or abstracted from experience, but must instead spring from the mind alone. Whether these categories represent reality as it is independent of our mind is, according to Kant, forever beyond our knowledge because we cannot sneak up on ourselves from behind to see how we see reality and determine whether our experience corresponds to reality. Consequently, whenever we experience an individual thing or speak of an individual thing, this thing is the result of how our mind has formatted the chaotic manifold of intuition through the application of the a priori categories of unity, reality, substance, and existence. And here we must note that these four categories issue from mind not world.

Initially it would seem that Kant provides a clever solution to the question of why our experience is formatted in the way that it is, thereby evading Locke's critique of substance as a sort of occult concept by showing how these concepts issue a priori from the mind (to which we do have access). However, a moment’s reflection reveals that Kant's solution is far more problematic than it first appears. Speaking in the context of Heidegger's early 1919 discussions of being where being is distinguished between “being as a whole” and “something at all”, Harman observes that “no explanation is offered of why certain specific qualities should be assigned to one 'something at all' rather than another”. [74] This same criticism applies equally to Kant's proposed solution to Locke's critique of substance. Kant has no way of explaining how or why a priori categories such as unity, substance, and existence get applied to one manifold of sensations rather than another. Why, for example, are the categories of substance and unity not applied to an aggregate consisting of my daughter, my parents' dog Rula, and the United Nations? Insofar as the categories are purely a priori, they themselves have no content. What is it then that leads an a priori category to be applied to one thing rather than another? The same problem emerges with those variations of the Kantian solution that would have language rather than pure a priori concepts of the understanding do this work. In both cases we are left without the means of explaining how the “something at all” is ever specified as a concrete entity. As Deleuze puts it in the context of his discussion of Bergson's critique of dialectic and the category of possibility, these categories are “like baggy clothes, [that] are much too big”. [75]

The point here is not that we have incorrigible knowledge of substances and access to them in our experience, nor that the way we parse the world is the way the world is actually formatted. Rather, the point is that 1) questions of substance are ontological questions absolutely distinct from how we know substances, and 2) that questions of substance cannot be dissolved in questions of access or knowledge. As we saw in the last chapter, ontology cannot be erased by epistemology, nor can ontological questions be transformed into epistemological questions revolving around our access to beings. Wherever one attempts to erase ontological questions in this way, we end up with a variant of Harman's “something at all” problem.

Locke, Kant, Hume and much of the subsequent philosophical tradition ends up where they do precisely because they fall into what Bhaskar calls the “epistemic fallacy” and actualism, confusing questions of our access to beings with questions of what beings are. Beginning with the actualist thesis borne out of a desire for secure foundations (i.e., a desire secondary to the demands of ontology), they restrict discourse to what is given in experience. They then find that they are unable to account for the furniture of the universe precisely because substance is that which withdraws from any givenness, experience, or, indeed, actuality. As such, substance is not something that can anywhere be found in experience—no one has ever seen or experienced, I contend, a single substance—but is rather an irreducible ontological premise necessary if our commerce with the world and experimental activity is to be intelligible. The existence of substance is not something that can be arrived at through an experience or a direct observation, but can only be arrived at as a premise through transcendental argumentation. When we adopt the actualist gesture of restricting knowledge to what is directly given in experience, this way of reaching substance is irrevocably foreclosed.

Returning then to what Burke called “the paradox of substance”, we should not so much argue that Burke is mistaken in his characterization of substance, as that Burke articulates the very essence of substance. In short, we should embrace Burke's characterization of substance as split between qualities and substantiality. It is only when we begin from the standpoint of epistemology, from the standpoint of what is given in experience, that substance appears paradoxical. And if this is the case, then it is because beginning with epistemology leads us to simultaneously claim that the object we experience is its qualities and that it is something radically other than its qualities. However, if we begin from the other end with ontology and note that substance is such that 1) it can actualize different qualities at different times (Aristotle), and that 2) it can fail to actualize qualities (Bhaskar), we can now argue that the very essence or structure of substance lies in self-othering and withdrawal. Insofar as objects or substances alienate themselves, as it were, in qualities, they are self-othering. They generate differences in the world. However, insofar as objects are never identical to their qualities, insofar as they always harbor a volcanic reserve in excess of their qualities, they perpetually withdraw from their qualities such that they never directly manifest themselves in the world. As Harman remarks, it's as if all objects are vacuums populating the universe. It is precisely for this reason that the being of substance is essentially split.

And here it should be noted that onticology and object-oriented philosophy are both metaphysics or ontologies that thoroughly escape what Derrida refers to as ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence. Far from being a signifier that denotes presence or the fullness of being, the very essence of substance is to withdraw from presence and to be in excess of all actuality. However, this overturning of the metaphysics of presence occurs not through a demonstration of the manner in which being always harbors deferral and difference for us such that presence is forever unobtainable, but rather by showing that being as such, being in itself, withdraws in this way. Let us look more closely at this split between virtual proper being and local manifestation through a concrete example.