Gnosis 13.1 by journalgnosis

GNOSIS

A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST

Volume XIII, Number 1 2014

Editorial Committee EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Eben Hensby MANAGING EDITOR Deanne Beraldo REVIEWERS Adam Schipper Dennis Papadopoulos Jeff McQuiggan Mel Mikhail Paul Jackanich Yasmeen Daher ASSISTANT EDITORS Daria Saryan Edyta Niemyjska

Special thanks to the following Professors for their assistance: David Morris Gregory Lavers Matthias Fritsch

Vol 13, No 1 (2014) ISSN 1927-5277 Gnosis (Online)

Table of Contents 1.

Material Interests as Ideology Eric Lutzuk

The Self as Rooted in the Ambiguity of Time: Merleau-Ponty on Temporality and Subjectivity Shahrzad Ghanooni

Monism vs Logical Pluralism: the Impact of Substructural Logics SĂŠbastien Poirier

Spinoza, Panpsychism, and the Image of Thought Tano S. Posteraro

Words in the Wallpaper: A Critical Reflection on Madness and Literature Claris Figueira

Material Interests as Ideology Eric Lutzuk

Abstract: The problem of the probable success of transformation beyond capitalism toward more just forms of social organization has been a topic of interest amongst leftist political thinkers for centuries. More recently, sociologist Erik Olin Wright tackled the issue in his work Envisioning Real Utopias where he concludes that a successful transition beyond capitalism is improbable given capitalism’s ability to fulfill people’s material interests. In what follows, I argue that capitalism’s functioning in the material interest of people is less about the efficiency of capitalist organization and more about the way material interest is a normative concept and thus ideologically determined by the social context from within which it is conceived. Unlike Wright’s fixed objective treatment of the concept of material interest, an ideological conception of the conditioning of the way people conceive their material interest suggests that a transition beyond capitalism can indeed be successful, as people’s perceptions of what is or is not in their interest changes over time.

In his Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright identifies material interests (MI) as the fundamental mechanism of capitalist social reproduction (Wright, 287). He attributes the success of capitalism to its ability to organize the MI of people in such a way that nearly everyone fares better when the capitalist economy is doing well (Wright, 287). Wright bases much of his analysis of strategies for social transformation on the potential fluctuation in the MI of the citizens of a capitalist society; the assumption is that in order to successfully overcome capitalist social reproduction, a social change must be in the MI of people if it is to be sustainable over time (Wright, 311). Using this criteria, Wright comes to the conclusion that given that the fulfilment of people’s MI would in the short term decline in the event of major structural changes to the capitalist economy, social transformation in advanced capitalist societies is improbable unless historical circumstances change to make capitalism less able to function in the MI of individuals (Wright, 365). These changes might include environmental degradation which make capitalist expansion immediately harmful to the short term MI of individuals, or technological innovations which open up new, more efficient means of fulfilling people’s short term MI while remaining immune to capitalist hegemony. In this essay I will suggest that in advanced capitalist societies—those societies most commonly associated with North America and Europe where the organization of capitalist production has been in place long enough to create large surpluses of wealth—the barrier presented

by MI to social change in Wright’s analysis is not the consequence of an objectively “real” condition of people’s lives, but is rather the result of Wright’s decision to separate MI as a mechanism of social reproduction from ideology. I will argue that in advanced capitalist societies where the biological minimum for social reproduction is easily met and surpassed, there is reason to believe that the concept of MI is itself properly ideological because people’s beliefs about what is or is not in their MI is conditioned by, and contributes to, the reproduction of the capitalist environment in which they exist. The ideological nature of MI calls into question the implausibility of successful social change predicted by Wright’s analysis. This is due to the way in which the very meaning of MI could change fundamentally as a result of a break with capitalism. The ideological nature of MI would mean that an ideological struggle over its meaning would be a crucial if not primary part of a strategy for social transformation beyond capitalism. If one can change people’s conceptions of MI from that which serves the profit pursuit of capitalist firms, one might be able to undermine a fundamental mechanism of capitalist social reproduction. People’s MI may depend on the pursuit of profits by capitalist firms; however, the successful pursuit of profits by capitalist firms also depends on people harbouring a particular belief about what is in their MI. The following demonstrates the way in which Wright’s distinguishing of MI from ideology creates a barrier to social change, and how this barrier might be overcome by adopting an ideological interpretation of MI. I will begin by briefly outlining why Wright thinks MI are the primary mechanism of capitalist social reproduction, his reasoning for why MI should be a criterion for the viability of social change, and how this leads him to be skeptical of the viability of strategies for social change beyond capitalism. I then explain why I think Wright separates MI from ideology as a mechanism for social reproduction, a distinction I believe to be rooted in his commitment to the “reality of harms,” or the idea that the harms specified in his diagnosis of capitalism are experienced by people as real harms which are objectively identifiable. I then borrow from the work of Göran Therborn to demonstrate the normative nature of the concept of “interests” and how MI could be conceived as a normative notion subject to a particular framework of pre-established rules. I will argue that even if we accept the “reality of harms” as Wright does, it is reasonable to think that there is a limit to what is in people’s “real material interests,” defined by a normative framework couched in people’s biological being, and that there is reason to believe that advanced capitalist societies easily fulfill said interests. Based on this fulfillment, I argue that

in order to ensure the reproduction of the “relations of production,” in advanced capitalist societies, the concept of MI as a mechanism of reproduction must be framed in such a way as to both subject and qualify people to act in ways which serve the need for constantly expanding markets. The resulting conception of MI is one which creates interdependence between capitalist firms and citizens. This interdependence makes MI as they exist in advanced capitalist societies an impossible criterion by which to measure the possibility of social transformations, as they are a product of capitalist ideology and thus lose their meaning outside of the capitalist context. I end by suggesting that the ideological struggle over the meaning of MI should be taken seriously by socialist or communist strategists, as the ideological nature of MI opens up the possibility for fostering alternative visions of MI which serve to undermine capitalist social reproduction. In the final section of Envisioning Real Utopias, Wright examines the topic of theories of transformation. He maintains that theories of transformation rely on the assumption that “real harms” exist and if they are caused by a particular social or economic arrangement, people would be reasonably motivated to overcome said harms through a change to the social arrangement (Wright, 277-278). Since the harms generated by capitalism are “real harms” (things like environmental degradation which causes illness or the fuelling of militarism for profit which proliferates warfare) and people have not been motivated on a wide enough scale to overcome the harms, then there must be obstacles hindering people’s motivations to do so. A theory of transformation must explain the mechanisms inherent in the social system which act as obstacles to social change (Wright, 278). Wright identifies four primary mechanisms of capitalist social reproduction: coercion, institutional barriers, ideology, and MI which he singles out as the most daunting obstacle to social change (Wright, 279). Wright adopts an expansive understanding of MI which includes: leisure, consumption, quality of work, and earnings (Wright, 311). He identifies MI as the primary mechanism of capitalist social reproduction in that, “within a well functioning capitalism the material interests of almost everyone depends to a significant degree upon successful capitalist activity” (Wright, 287). This dependence of people’s MI on a prosperous capitalist economy makes it a powerful mechanism of social reproduction, as it mobilizes people as well as governments to encourage capitalist flourishing because it is in their individual and collective interests to do so.

Based on the overarching power of MI as a mechanism for uniting capitalist profit interests with the interests of ordinary people, Wright uses it as a necessary criterion for evaluating the potential success or failure of collective movements of social transformation. His reasoning for this is largely due to his goal that social change be a movement toward democratic egalitarian socialism and not simply a movement beyond capitalism. This need to respect and reinforce democratic ideals leads him to insist that movements for social change must have broad popular support amongst a majority of people if they are to be successful (Wright, 311). Due to his assumption that people are motivated to better their conditions unless hindered by obstacles, Wright asserts that a necessary condition of broad sustainable popular support is that socialism will be in people’s MI (Wright, 311). Much like capitalism ensures its reproduction through the linking of people’s MI to the flourishing of the capitalist economy, socialism must also link its flourishing to the fulfillment of people’s MI. This requirement of socialist social transformation to be in the MI of people acts as the primary obstacle to strategies of transformation in Wright’s analysis. This is due to his reasonable assumption that any break with the existing order of capitalism would lead to, at the very least, a short term decline in people’s MI (Wright, 318). In other words, every revolution or major change to an existing order of economic organization will lead to a temporary disruption as the new order seeks to achieve stability. A socialist revolution backed by popular support would need time to organize the new institutional and economic frameworks in such a way as to begin operating in people’s MI. Wright represents this interim period as a “transition trough” where the MI of people declines for a period after the break with capitalism (Wright, 317). Due to Wright’s democratic egalitarian requirement for social change, he concludes that it is highly improbable that a transformation toward an alternative social order will be able to endure the sudden dip in the meeting of people’s MI, as oppositional forces will be able to rally broad popular support for a return to the status quo (Wright, 317-318). Wright fears that in face of the opposition that may develop as a result of the decline in people’s MI, a democratic socialist movement may easily degrade into a form of tyranny that legitimizes its power by insisting that it is safeguarding the transition to socialism (Wright, 310). Since MI seems to be the primary motivator in people’s decisions to support or oppose a social order, the probability of a revolution that remains faithful to democratic ideals is highly unlikely.

But why does Wright distinguish MI from ideology? I believe that the answer lies in Wright’s commitment to the “reality of harms” as a condition for a theory of social reproduction and transformation. Wright points to ideology and culture as the mechanisms that shape the subjectivities of actors. Ideology refers to the conscious aspects of subjectivity: beliefs, ideas, values, doctrines, and theories; whereas culture refers to the non-conscious aspects: dispositions, habits, tastes, and skills (Wright, 283). Wright adopts Göran Therborn’s view of ideology, which is characterized not by a fixed worldview, but rather by a matrix of ongoing processes which form the medium through which consciousness and meaningfulness operate (Therborn, 77). These processes operate to constantly constitute and reconstitute the way individuals understand themselves (Therborn, 77-78). Ideologies are not possessions but are rather constantly in flux and competition with one another. In this way individuals act out their lives according to different forms of subjectivity, which change over time (Therborn, 16). Unlike Therborn however, Wright distinguishes MI from ideology as MI act as the base upon which ideologies are built (Wright, 311). Wright’s expansive understanding of the concept of MI which encompasses leisure time, quality of work, consumption, and earnings, seems to indicate that its existence is objectively measurable, with people being able to assess its increase or decline outside of ideological frameworks. This suggests that while ideologies are processes that constitute and reconstitute subjectivities, MI are objectively measurable, based on the presence or absence of materials necessary for individuals to act out various forms of subjectivity. Wright’s understanding of MI seems to be that of a static measurable property which structures the very functioning of ideologies. Whereas ideologies are understandable only within the subjective or “inter-subjective” realm of people’s beliefs about themselves and the world, MI are empirically verifiable by the presence or absence of the material necessary for actors to live their lives. I believe the objective character Wright grants MI is tied to his belief in the “reality of harms,” which acts as an epistemological foundation for social change. The “reality of harms” maintains that the harms specified in his diagnosis of capitalism are not due to particular values or ideas of theorists but rather exist and are experienced by people as real harms which are objectively identifiable (Wright, 277). The claim that capitalism is destructive to the environment derives its truth not from a particular ideological perspective which champions the environment as a realm to be protected, but rather from an objective scientific truth that the well-being of the environment is

a prerequisite for the well-being of humanity. The “reality of harms” thus allows social theorists to make objective claims as to why the social structure should be changed in order to put an end to objectively measurable harms that are the product of a particular social structure. For a theorist maintaining the “reality of harms” as Wright does, having an objective way of measuring people’s abilities to remedy those harms would be an asset in demonstrating the superiority of one social or economic system over another. Within Wright’s analysis I believe it is MI that fulfills this role, as he seems to think it provides an objective standard by which to judge social orderings (Wright, 311). Given Wright’s expansive understanding of MI, an increase in people’s ability to fulfill their MI would correspond to an increase in their ability to address and remedy harms. An increase in a person’s MI in the form of earnings, free time or improved work conditions, might help that person to remedy the real harms of stress related illness from overwork or financial burdens. This is why I believe Wright separates MI from ideology as a mechanism of social reproduction. Unlike ideology, which is a process in constant flux that operates to shape the subjectivities of actors, MI is an objective criterion that can serve the epistemic role of demonstrating the superiority of one social ordering over another. This role MI fulfills, however, seems to neglect the normative nature of the concept of “interests” and the way this normative functioning might operate in advanced capitalist societies. Göran Therborn points out the normative nature of “interests” in order to distinguish himself from utilitarian Marxists concerned with interests as an explanation for class struggle: “‘interests’ by themselves do not explain anything. ‘Interest’ is a normative concept indicating the most rational course of action in a predefined game, that is, in a situation in which gain and loss have already been defined” (Therborn, 10). In other words, agents can only make sense of what is or is not in their ‘interests’ from within a framework of rules that tell them what exists, what is good, and what is possible (Therborn, 18). It is this predefined game that determines agents’ interests and it is in the defining of the game which ideology operates. Therborn describes ideology as being dialectical in nature as it both subjects and qualifies the subjectivities it interpolates (Therborn, 18). That is, ideologies subject individuals to the preestablished rules of a game and qualify them to act in ways which conform to those rules. ‘Interests’ can thus be seen as dependent upon the game to which a subject is subjugated and what

a subject’s role or identity within that game qualifies her to do. An agent’s interests only make sense or have meaning from within the way an ideology interpolates the subjectivity of an agent. Some might argue that despite the normative nature of the concept of ‘interests,’ MI is a far more objective category of interests whose ‘predefined game’ is not based on some ideological perspective but rather the biological realities of being a member of the human species. Unlike the interests of something like ‘the working class,’ which depend on agents viewing themselves as part of said class and thus qualified to act in ways which conform to their roles within their understanding of the greater social structure, MI find their meaning in the necessary requirements for human flourishing or well-being. Few would argue that access to more or less medicine, food, shelter, clean water, etc., are ideologically determined interests based on the way subjects are interpolated. On this objection, MI can be considered as that form of interests which cuts across ideological interpellations of subjectivities and appeals directly to the interests of the human animal; after all, it seems reasonable to suppose that no matter what type of subjectivity agents are interpolated into, an increase in their material interests would only better serve their functioning in the world. This makes MI a good criterion for evaluating whether a movement for social change can rally enduring broad popular support, especially if a social theorist chooses to endorse the “reality of harms” and requires objective criteria by which to evaluate how those harms would be remedied. Within the context of advanced capitalist countries, however, the use of MI as an objective criterion to assess the probable success of social movements becomes problematic. This is due to the way in which the “biological minimum” for social reproduction is easily met and surpassed in advanced capitalist countries, and the way the growth of the economies in advanced capitalist countries depends on capitalist firms’ ability to predict and more importantly create frameworks from within which citizens conceive what is or is not in their MI. In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser outlines the various requirements necessary for capitalism to ensure the reproduction of the “means of production” (Althusser, 128-134). One of the primary means by which capitalism ensures its reproduction is through the reproduction of the labour power necessary for production. Successful capitalist reproduction must thus provide for the biological minimum of what workers (the forces of production) would need to survive and reproduce (Althusser, 131). In this sense, MI as a

mechanism of reproduction must meet the biological minimum requirements for the reproduction of the workforce. This biological minimum is enough to avoid the “real harms” created by things like starvation, disease, natural disasters, etc., to the extent that it guarantees a steady supply of labourers as well as consumers for the capitalist system to ensure its own social reproduction. I assume that in advanced capitalist countries this biological minimum is not only met but has been surpassed. That is not to say that major problems with poverty do not continue to exist within advanced capitalist societies. What I want to emphasize is the far more obvious point that flat out famine is not a real problem, and if it is, much like poverty, it has to do with the distribution of wealth and not the inefficiency of productive forces. The implication of such an assumption is that people’s MI becomes no longer couched in a normative framework concerned with biological well-being. In fledgling capitalist countries, the MI of people is directly correlated to the elimination of “real harms” in the biological sense through capitalism’s ability to organize people and produce in such an efficient manner as to be able to provide the biological minimum, making the success of capitalism in the “real” MI of people. In advanced capitalist societies, however, MI as a mechanism of social reproduction is more or less severed from people’s biological well-being. This means that when Wright uses the increase or decrease of MI as an indicator of the probability of the success of a transition to socialism, it is no longer a criterion based in a normative framework concerned with the objective well-being of members of the human species. Rather, in advanced capitalist economies, the way people conceive of their MI is through normative frameworks that go beyond what is necessary for survival, making MI a far less objective criterion upon which to argue for one social system over another. MI in advanced capitalist countries can be said to be couched in people’s beliefs about what exists, what is good, and what is possible—the three fundamental modes of ideological interpellation outlined by Therborn (Therborn, 18). In other words, due to the biological minimum being easily met and surpassed, MI of people in advance capitalist societies becomes a product of the processes of ideology. Althusser recognized this in the work of Marx when he wrote: the quantity of values (wages) necessary for the reproduction of labour power is determined not by the needs of a ‘biological’ guaranteed minimum wage alone, but by the needs of a historical minimum (Marx noted that English workers need beer while French proletarians need wine)- i.e. a historically variable minimum (Althusser, 131).

MI in advanced capitalist societies can be said to be subject to the 'historically variable minimum' as people’s conceptions of what is or is not in their MI becomes couched in a variable normative framework determined by social history, including factors such as ethnicity, religion, or cultural backgrounds. The lowering in the price of oil might be in the MI of those people who rely on automobiles, but not in the MI of those who have adopted an environmentally friendly lifestyle and wish to see less people on the road as they interpret this as hurting the environment and their MI. The interpretation of MI is thus different depending on the way people are interpolated by a particular ideology. This variability in the conception of what is or is not in people’s MI makes it in the best interest of capitalist firms to predict and create frameworks from within which people understand their MI. When Wright correctly points out capitalism’s ability to tie the MI of people to smooth running capitalism, it is important to note that capitalism conceivably runs at its smoothest when it can create the frameworks through which people understand their MI. Capitalist firms could then ensure steady consumption, avoiding the problems of overproduction, as well as fulfilling the need for constantly expanding markets. Capitalism runs at its smoothest when it produces the supply as well as the demand. Nowhere is this need to create demand more true than within the context of advanced capitalist societies. In advanced capitalist societies, the historical minimum described by Althusser becomes one directly conditioned by a history within the capitalist system itself. MI is conditioned by decades of living within a capitalist system whose smooth functioning lends itself to defining and redefining what is or is not in people’s MI. The result is that a smooth running capitalism is in the MI of people not by virtue of capitalism’s ability to better serve people’s MI than a socialist alternative, but rather by the way MI are defined by the capitalist system in which people exist. This can be seen in the way certain products operate in the dialectical manner similar to the way Therborn characterizes the operation of ideology. The growing popularity of personal computers in the later part of the twentieth century might serve as an example. What began as a “free choice” for citizens to own or not own a computer has arguably become a requirement if a person wishes to function adequately in today’s society. Initially, owning a computer qualified a person to participate in digital communities on the internet, while it also subjected that person to keep up with software innovations and upgrades if they wished to continue to participate in that

community. This would make it in the MI of computer owners to keep the price of software low. This subjection eventually went beyond the realm of individual computer owners. Given the popularity and efficiency of computers, the use of the internet has arguably become institutionalized to such an extent that all citizens must own a computer and have access to the internet in order to fully function within advanced capitalist economies. Here we see the creation of a new historical minimum for social reproduction, as it becomes in everyone’s MI to keep software prices low because it allows people to better function in the world they find themselves thrown into. Access to computers thus becomes part of the normative framework through which people understand what is or is not in their MI. Due to the way MI is defined by a normative framework conditioned by capitalism, a new social system’s ability to fulfill people’s MI becomes a near impossibility as people’s MI only have meaning from within a capitalist historical normative framework. Wright’s conclusion of the implausibility of a sustainable transformation beyond capitalism based on broad popular support generated by the fulfillment of people’s MI, becomes inevitable if people’s MI are defined by a capitalist normative structure. When a political party addresses voters with the claim that a rupture with capitalism will be against their interests, they are invariably telling the truth insofar as people understand their interests from within capitalism and not from a third person perspective outside of it. MI are 'always already' understood from within the context of a particular economic system and lose their meaning outside of it. If we accept that people’s MI are ideologically conditioned by a history of living within capitalism, this would mean that people’s understanding of MI would be conditioned by a capitalist framework of rules that tell agents what exists, what is good, and what is possible. Alternatives would always fall short as they would not be able to satisfy the predetermined capitalist framework, making Wright’s requirement for sustainable social change to be in people’s MI impossible to fulfill. How, then, are revolutionaries to get around the problem of people’s conceptions of their MI being a product of capitalism? If we accept as Wright does that broad popular support is a requirement, and that broad popular support can only be secured by convincing people that socialism is sufficiently in their MI, then it would seem that broad popular support would become an impossibility as long as capitalism runs smoothly enough to fulfill the MI it simultaneously creates.

One option might be to couch the MI of people within a normative framework closely connected to their biological well-being. This is largely the strategy used by environmentalists or those fearing nuclear holocaust. If one can convince people that capitalism is leading to the destruction of the environment to such an extent that everyone’s MI will eventually diminish significantly, then it might be possible to secure broad popular support for pre-emptive action. The major drawback to this approach is the argument’s reliance on a long-term prediction of the possible negative effects of capitalism, predictions that can easily come under scrutiny. The longterm approach also must carry enough weight to convince people to sacrifice their short term MI. Another approach might involve an ideological struggle over the normative framework within which people conceive what is or is not in their MI. This might be done through the creation and pursuit of lifestyles that are incapable of being appropriated and marketed by capitalist firms. If capitalism’s greatest strength is its ability to make people’s MI dependent on the successful pursuit of profits by capitalist firms, and capitalist firms are most successful when they can either predict or create the frameworks within which people conceive of their MI, then if people began to conceive of their MI in such a way that cannot be predicted or appropriated for profit by capitalist firms, this would destabilize capitalist relations. This new conception of MI could then be used to garner broad popular support for a rupture with an economic system that no longer serves the MI of the population. A potential historical example of this process occurring might be the American counterculture movement of the nineteen sixties. The popularization of recreational drugs such as LSD, and the sexual liberation granted by the birth control pill, created new ways in which people could conceive of their MI. People began to no longer conceive of their MI in terms of having steady employment and earnings in order to buy various consumer goods, but rather began to think of their MI within a normative framework conditioned by new forms of self-understanding and expression, which often involved drug use and sexual exploits. The taboo nature of sex and drugs prevented, at least for a period, the appropriation of these new lifestyle conceptions by capitalist firms to create profits, and thus represented a threat to capitalist reproduction which was met with oppressive state measures. Though the counter-culture did not lead to a rupture with capitalism, it can be said that the new ways of conceiving MI that emerged did fuel some revolutionary sentiment, capable of securing broad popular support for major social change. Perhaps if a greater

portion of the American population had adopted these new lifestyle approaches the possibility for revolutionary change would have been greater. It is important to keep in mind the origins of our conceptions of MI and that they are conditioned by capitalism as well as other historical factors. To attempt to think of MI outside of ideological processes which work to shape the framework from within which people evaluate their interests, carries with it the risk of neglecting how capitalism is a factor in the way most people understand the world and its possibilities. In advanced capitalist societies where the forces of production have far surpassed the production of what is necessary for mere survival, people’s interests can be said to be caught up in a large array of ideological frameworks which all work to serve capitalist reproduction, as they are a product of existing within a capitalist society. When considering the role MI might play in garnering support for collective social movements we must keep in mind that such concepts will be considered by people from within the capitalist system, making it hard for people to conceive of their MI from within an alternative framework. If we are to convince people that a transformation beyond capitalism is in their interests we must also take into consideration the way those interests are created by capitalism.

Works Cited Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. Therborn, Göran. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. London: Verso, 1980. Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso, 2010.

The Self as Rooted in the Ambiguity of Time: Merleau-Ponty on Temporality and Subjectivity Shahrzad Ghanooni Abstract: In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty develops his account of time in opposition to traditional conceptions of temporality. He does not lay these conceptions out explicitly. Instead, he makes references to them throughout the chapter on temporality while developing his own position. In the first section of this paper, I lay these out briefly and explain Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of them. I then provide a detailed explanation of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of time by drawing on his notions of transition synthesis, passive synthesis, perceptual field, and sedimentation. In the second section, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s account of time has significant consequences for his account of subjectivity, and, in order to understand the two, it is essential to understand the role of ‘ambiguity’ in them. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s ‘ambiguity’ must not be understood as something that the subject is enslaved in; instead, it is through intentionalities stemming from the ambiguous subject, rather than the perceiving of individual isolated instances and things, that a conception of the world and of time as a whole becomes possible.

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty examines two conceptions of time that he draws from empiricist and intellectualist traditions. He uses the terms ‘classical’ and ‘commonsensical’ to encompass both these traditions through their general presuppositions. Time, as seen in these classical conceptions, is the linking together of distinctive ‘now points’. From this standpoint, the opening chorus of Bach’s cantata, for instance, would be composed of different notes we hear one by one, in ‘now points’, and then link together in our mind. Reading the famous opening sentence of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is an experience involving ‘now points’ in each of which we read one word of the sentence and contains an act of intellect that links these words together. In what follows I attempt to explain how Merleau-Ponty, as part of his project of describing how perception truly occurs, develops an account of time that is different from this commonsensical conception. Perception of ‘the whole’ of the opening chorus is not the result of connecting up the notes that we have perceived in individual ‘now points’. Neither is it the case that we perceive each note while having stored up the previous ones in our consciousness. I argue that by drawing on his phenomenological notions of transition synthesis, sedimentation, intentional arc, perceptual field, and embodiment, Merleau-Ponty succeeds in developing a theory of temporality which provides us with new grounds to explain perception. Moreover, MerleauPonty’s conception of temporality, I argue, has important consequences for his account of

subjectivity, or what he takes the ‘self’ to be. As the concept underlying both his theory of temporality and his theory of the self, ‘ambiguity’ is a recurring theme in his work that has a positive sense. It is through intentionalities stemming from the ambiguous subject, rather than the perceiving of individual isolated instances and things, that a conception of the world and of time as a whole becomes possible. Ambiguity enables human subjects to reshape their past experiences, and conceive of the present as something that is flowing towards a future, as something open and in movement, and not as something determinate. As polarized ways of thinking, intellectualism and empiricism each establish their principles by entirely ignoring the other tradition and thus remaining one-dimensional. Intellectualism, as the tradition associated with “the sphere of interiority, the sphere of conscious life,” (Dillon 1988, 36) ignores the truth that exists in the world before it becomes one’s object of perception. Empiricism too, as the tradition associated with “the sphere of exteriority [and] the universe of things [as] existing in themselves and independent of consciousness,” (Dillon 1988, 36) misses the truth that exists in the world as the subject perceives it, or the world as one’s object of consciousness. Intellectualism and empiricism, then, each shed light on one aspect of an overall truth. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty seeks to find a middle ground in between these two traditions. Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodiment and his particular understanding of temporality play a significant role in finding this middle ground. The classical or commonsensical account of time is one that presupposes the subject in order to define time. A “pre-established conception of subjectivity” underlies this account (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 477). According to the empiricist tradition, this subject observes time or goes through time as if from the outside, whereas in intellectualism, time only exists in the conscious mind of the subject. For the intellectualist, the subject links the different moments of time by means of a conscious mind. The intellectualist, then, would explain consciousness of the past in terms of memories and consciousness of the future “in terms of the projection of these memories ahead of us” (Ibid., 479). Both traditions share one and the same error: they both ignore the simultaneousness of time and the perceiving subject. Elaborating on the classical conception of time, Merleau-Ponty makes a parallel between time and a river. The classical view, he claims, conceives of time as running from the past towards present and future, in the same manner as the water passing by today has been prepared several

days ago when the ice on the mountain melted and will subsequently flow towards the sea. For Merleau-Ponty, such an account already assumes a subject standing outside the process of time observing it; this account attempts to understand temporality while having presupposed subjectivity. According to this classical view, the past, as the origin of present, occurs before it and ceases to exist when the present comes to exist. Present, as the ‘now point,’ exists before the future and will cease to exist when the future comes. In this classical conception, the past exists in the present only in the form of memories. Memories, as copies of an original inaccessible past, make access to the past possible. Consciousness plays a crucial role here in the sense that it makes a link between past and present by concentrating attention, turning into itself and remembering. In order for this to happen, an outside sign is needed. This sign reminds one of something past that no longer exists. For instance, the smell of Chrysanthemums might remind one of one’s grandfather’s funeral. An outside sign links objective ‘now points’ to one another through what Merleau-Ponty refers to as an “intellectual synthesis [of identification]” (Ibid., 485). According to the classical view, then, memories are evoked through various signs that catch our attention and are mere copies of the actual past. I argue that ‘intentional arc’, and more generally, intentionality, play a key role in MerleauPonty’s arguments against the classical conception of time. In order to understand what MerleauPonty means by ‘intentional arc’, it is helpful to draw attention to the case of Schneider, the WWI survivor and patient of psychologist Adhémer Gelb and neurologist Kurt Goldstein, who had been seriously wounded in the back of his head in combat. Schneider was able to make simple daily actions such as taking his handkerchief from his pocket, but he was unable to initiate or complete a sexual cycle – a kiss or a touch had no sexual significance to him. Merleau-Ponty explains that the loss of desire on behalf of Schneider in the face of visual or tactile stimuli containing sexual content is not simply due to a failure of touch or visual representation. Rather, Schneider’s illness can only be understood when the relationship between him and the stimuli is no longer conceived of as that of a subject to some objects, but as involving a mode of intentionality. It is both the case that stimuli have ceased to “locate him in a sexual context” (Ibid., 181), and that Schneider has become incapable of taking a hold upon them. To perceive the stimuli is not to simply be aware of them; rather, it is to bring them together in an erotic situation and “adapt sexual conduct” to them (Ibid., 181). The example of Schneider sheds light on the way in which the body and the world

must gear into each other in order for perception to take place. Intentional arc can be defined as the capacity to act, with one’s body, in such a way as for this connection to sustain. In an earlier section of the book, Merleau-Ponty employs the term intentional arc to refer to a unity that is already there in the world and is already accomplished, that is, prior to being posited by knowledge or any intellectual synthesis. Intentional arc, he claims, is what “projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation, or rather which results in our being situated in all these respects” (Ibid., 157). For Merleau-Ponty, it is necessary that the present experience first took on a form and a sense “in order to recall precisely this memory” and not any other one (Ibid., 24). According to the classical accounts, for instance, one recognizes a picture seen upside down because one has a memory of it as it originally is. What this classical account fails to see, however, is that what one sees must first be so organized as to present itself as a picture in which one can recognize those former experiences. For Merleau-Ponty, to perceive is not to perceive distinct objective points that consciousness links together after they have each been individually perceived by the senses. There is, in other words, no transcendentally assigned activity given to the constituting consciousness. Following Gestalt psychology for Merleau-Ponty, to perceive is to insert oneself “into the world in its entirety” (Ibid., 384). The fact that in perceiving a countryside landscape one is able to say that this is a mountain and this other thing is a river is due to these individual natural phenomena each having been derived from a single perception of the whole landscape. This means that I do not perceive parts and then link them together, but rather that I perceive the landscape as a whole before perceiving the parts. If there is to be any synthesis, then, we must refer to it as a ‘transition synthesis’—an Übergangssynthesis (Ibid., 487). By the term ‘transition synthesis,’ Merleau-Ponty means that one must take time as a single phenomenon that unfolds and “bursts forth” (Ibid., 478), rather than one that is comprised of individual moments that are linked together by a conscious mind. For Merleau-Ponty, there is a way in which we perceive past, present and future as a whole. It is important to note the significance of the perception of the whole and how one is directed towards the entire world through one’s point of view, as it is only by understanding this that one will grasp how the past continues to exist in the present. A further term Merleau-Ponty associates with this synthesis is that of ‘passive’ (Ibid., 496). He uses this term in order to refer to the way in which the world is present for us and ‘in our hand,’

without us constantly having to look back and search for it. For instance, the back of a house whose front one is looking at is present to one without one having to go and look whether or not it is there. Intentionalities stem from this perceptual field that make one certain of the back of the house being there. It is through ‘passive synthesis’ that the world becomes for us a perceptual field, and ceases to be an object of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on passive synthesis, however, do not end at this point. He proceeds by a claim that appears to complicate the above. A passive synthesis, he explains, is not something that is undergone passively, but rather something that happens because of the condition of humans as situated beings that constantly start over: “What we meant by passive synthesis was that we make our way into multiplicity, but that we do not synthesize it” (Ibid., 496). The perceptual field or the perception of the world as a whole is neither merely something that I undergo passively, nor something that I completely make up by a conscious mind. But is it then the case that this is both a passive and a non-passive synthesis? And is this claim then not going to be paradoxical? I believe that by his account of temporalization, Merleau-Ponty succeeds in developing a theory of perception that is capable of explaining how perception is neither completely passive nor completely constituted by a conscious mind. I will return to this idea in the ‘Consequences’ section of this paper while discussing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ambiguity. For the moment, it must only be stressed that the middle ground between intellectualism and empiricism is to be accessed through the fact that the present slips away into past as soon as one seeks to posit it as present. Time, moreover, constantly puts a distance between the subject and what the subject is about to be, but in doing so it allows one to grasp oneself from a distance and actualize oneself (Ibid., 496). I have, so far, been explaining the idea that past, present and future do not exist in a linear form, and that there is a way in which neither is the past completely behind us nor is the future completely ahead of us. The manner in which this is the case remains to be discussed. How is it that the past exists in present? How is it that one ‘remembers’ things? It is by means of the notion of ‘sedimentation’ that Merleau-Ponty argues for these. This notion refers to the manner in which the past remains present to one and shapes the present, without remaining as such in the manner of explicit memories. While sitting in the kitchen in one’s apartment, for instance, one is aware of the precise place of the bathroom and the living room because the passive synthesis that grounds

perception results in a certain familiarity with the milieu of the apartment. There is, in other words, a “primordial field” that grounds the primary sense of one’s experiences (Ibid., 281). The same idea can be applied to the relation between past and present. The past remains present to the subject without the need for any intellectual synthesis. Merleau-Ponty stresses the idea that the word sedimentation does not refer to “an inert mass in the debts of our consciousness” (Ibid., 150). The milieu of one’s apartment will only be familiar to a person so long as he or she feels ‘in his or her hands’ and ‘in his or her legs’ “the main distances and directions involved, and as long as from [their] body intentional treads run out towards it” (Ibid., 150). Merleau-Ponty, then, argues against the intellectualist tradition, according to which the past remains in the form of memories in “consciousness,” as well as the empiricist tradition, according to which the past exists in itself apart from the subject. He introduces instead embodied perception and bodily intentions. Merleau-Ponty succeeds in occupying a position in between these two because of his particular account of the body. The body, for him, has an ambiguous status in the sense that it is both an object in the world as well as the object with which I go about perceiving the world. The body, while being an ‘object’ of consciousness, an ‘object’ in the world, is not in space exactly like things, it rather “inhabits or haunts space, [...] it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 5). I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s famous example of “the next-door house” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 77) can be used to explain this idea. While standing in front of a house, as mentioned before, we do not need to check the back of the house, in order to be able to say ‘there is a house out there.’ This is precisely in the same sense that one does not need to check one’s own back in order to refer to oneself as an ‘I.’ My relationship to my body is such that while it is an object (it consists of parts that can be individually seen and studied), it ceases to be in space like an object in the sense that I do not move it like an object and I am not aware of it as I might be aware of an object. It is through this particular quality of the body as both an inside and an outside that Merleau-Ponty succeeds in securing a position in-between the empiricist and the intellectualist positions. I suggest that one of the other concepts that allows Merleau-Ponty to find a middle point inbetween the aforementioned traditions is that of ‘motivation,’ a concept he suggests is better suited to explain phenomena than causality. Merleau-Ponty takes the phenomenological notion of

motivation to be “one of those ‘fluid’ concepts which have to be formed if we want to get back to phenomena” (Ibid., 57). In order to be motivated, there has to be something by which one gets motivated. However, motivation is not a one-sided process, as it requires some contribution on the part of the agent: One phenomena releases another, not by means of some objective efficient cause, like those which link together natural events, but by the meaning which it holds out—there is a raison d’être for a thing which guides the flow of phenomena without being explicitly laid down in any one of them, a sort of operative reason (Ibid., 57). It is not by concentrating attention that images of the past are evoked. The past event, while no more existing today, has not been completely lost. It is not, moreover, stored in an ‘unconscious’ to which one must return in order to access it. The brown rocking chair does not cause one to remember a scene with one’s grandfather. Rather, it motivates this memory. For motivation to exist, it is required that there be an objective point of reference, but at the same time, this is not merely a passive process that the agent undergoes. The notion of motivation is rich enough to let us grasp the complexity and ambiguity of sedimentation. The past remains in us and continues to shape our present, but this does not happen in the form of explicit memories; the past sediments in us. Having explained how Merleau-Ponty argues against the classical conception of time and the commonsensical account of memory, I now proceed by explaining in more detail MerleauPonty’s philosophy of time. For Merleau-Ponty, every prospection1 is a retrospection as well as an anticipated retrospection (Merleau-Ponty 2012 436). By prospection as retrospection, MerleauPonty refers to the necessity of having understood the relation of past to present in order to understand the relation of future to present (reproduction presupposes recognition). By prospection as anticipated retrospection, Merleau-Ponty is claiming that in going towards the future, one recognizes the past, and does so with knowledge of the future. The future, however, could not have just been constructed with the contents of consciousness, as it has never existed. The experience of listening to and enjoying a piece of music does not involve listening to individual notes that succeed one another. Rather, there is a way in which the previous note remains present to us while we are listening to the current note, and there is a sense in which we anticipate the succeeding note while we are hearing the current note. These protentions and retentions are the intentionalities that 1

The word is borrowed from French, meaning to look ahead, to explore.

anchor one in an environment and they all stem from a single perceptual field (Ibid., 439). In order to make this clearer, I will now explain Husserl’s diagram of time, which influenced Merleau-Ponty. In this diagram, Husserl uses the letter A to mark the past, the letter B to mark the present and the letter C to mark the future. Looking at the diagram 2, it becomes clear that A′ symbolizes the retention of A, and A″ means the retention of A′. However, Merleau-Ponty insists that it must not be inferred from this that there is an ideal unity between the three or that there is a synthesis of identification that connects A, A′ and A″. The result of any such intellectual synthesis would be to negate time, for Merleau-Ponty, because by avoiding the passage of time, one loses the very sense of the before and the after. I do not follow A″ to get to A′ as if A″ is a sign that leads me to A′. Rather, “I am presented with A as seen shining through A′, and then this ensemble shining through A″, and so on and so forth, just as I see the pebble through the volumes of water that flow over it” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 441). This means that I experience A as already falling into the past (becoming an A′) and that at B, I am already projecting C, not in-itself but as something that I am anticipating. It follows from this, that I experience the present as something that is already falling into the past, and as something that once belonged to the future. As soon as I try to posit something as present, it has slipped away from me into the past. There is, therefore, no distinct moment as present. What we call present becomes past as soon as one attempts to posit it as present. The same thing is true of all the moments in time. What we now call present is a passage from future to present and is also a passage from the previous present to the past. There are in fact no individual retentions and protentions. Present is both a moment that is becoming past and a moment that was once future. There is therefore a sense in which retentions and protentions co-exist. It is essential to note that, for Merleau-Ponty, A, A′ and A″ are not one and the same thing. Rather, they all belong to a single phenomenon of flowing [écoulement], that one recognizes in one’s “field of presence” (Ibid., 483). My field of presence is the current moment that I spend typing, along with the horizon of the day that I spent typing my paper, together with the horizon of the night that is going to follow, which I will also spend typing. It is through one’s field of

Look at Donald A. Landes’ very helpful endnote regarding the different versions of the diagram in MerleauPonty’s Phenomenology of Perception, p. 560. To see the diagram that most resembles Merleau-Ponty’s version, look at Husserliana X, p. 230.

presence that everything appears as self-evident. I do not need to think about the day that just followed in order to make sure that it did in fact follow. I am just sure that it has. As for the night that is going to occur, of course, I do not know explicitly how it would be but I know at least the style of this night. I have an idea of what it is going to be (Ibid., 483).

Consequences for Subjectivity As I mentioned before, there is a way in which the passive synthesis is the basis for all perception and is what makes intentionality possible. Passive synthesis enables one to understand the world as a whole and have a perceptual field. The problem that I discussed in the section on passive synthesis concerns, more generally, perception. How is it that perception is neither completely passive nor completely constituted by a conscious mind? In the previous section, I discussed the significance of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas regarding embodied perception and motivation in adopting a middle ground. In this section, I explain the way in which MerleauPonty’s very concept of temporality enables him to develop his theory of perception in a middle ground between the empiricist and intellectualist positions. I believe that this becomes possible for Merleau-Ponty through the idea that time is ambiguous, and that perception has an ambiguous rather than a contradictory status. Before explaining what I mean by these, it is essential to explain Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of ‘ambiguity’. Generally speaking, an ambiguity can be understood in different ways. In this paper, I will only discuss two of these. First, a thing may be called ambiguous if it undergoes radical development through time, such as when a caterpillar turns into a moth (Sapontzis 1978, 538). Second, an entity may be called ambiguous when it can be identified as “A” and “not A” simultaneously. In “Man and Adversity”, referencing Melanie Klein, Merleau-Ponty makes a distinction between ambivalence and ambiguity, claiming that the former refers to the same object having two alternative images coming consecutively, whereas the latter “consists in firmly and truly thinking that the same object is [both] good and bad” (Merleau-Ponty 2007, 217): that it has two irreconcilable aspects to it. I believe that it is the second sense of ambiguity that MerleauPonty has in mind in the ‘Temporality’ chapter of Phenomenology of Perception. It is this sense of ambiguity that I will elaborate on in this paper. For Merleau-Ponty, any attempt at rectifying or ignoring ambiguity is destined to fail as the ambiguity always “reappears a little further on”

(Merleau-Ponty 2007, 219). However, essential in Merleau-Ponty’s account of ambiguity is its non-negative character. There is a way in which ambiguity, while remaining unsolvable, ceases to be a problem. The precise manner in which this is the case remains to be discussed. Time is neither something, in an empiricist sense, that exists in itself and that one undergoes passively, nor is it something, in an intellectualist sense, that one constructs by means of a conscious mind. Merleau-Ponty’s particular understanding of temporality allows him to claim that passive synthesis is ambiguous and yet exists, because he takes temporality to be inherently ambiguous. The ambiguity of time lies in the fact that being and passing by are synonymous within it (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 488). Merleau-Ponty’s conception of time has as its basis the concept of flowing. There is always a ‘passing by.’ For him, time is inherently such that one cannot posit determinate points of ‘present,’ ‘past’ and ‘future’ in it. One experiences present both as already falling into a past, and as already projected towards a future. But moreover, one experiences each moment as shining through its various retentions, in the same manner as one sees a pebble through volumes of water. It is in this sense that the manner in which time is perceived is ambiguous. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied perception plays a crucial role here. The ‘I’ that sees a moment through its retentions is the ‘I’ of a body and an incarnate life. While sitting in the kitchen, one is familiar with the milieu of one’s entire apartment because of the bodily intentions that have connected one to it through the days and years. Now the problem with the classical view of time, as I explained, was that it assumed a subject outside the process of time, a subject that would link past, present and future to one another by means of a conscious mind. Such an account disregards the idea that temporality is not an “external […] attribute” (Ibid., 477) of subjectivity. To analyze time is not to discuss it as something that lies outside subjectivity, it is rather to gain access to it through subjectivity (Ibid., 477). It is precisely in this way that Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of time provides us with a new conception of subjectivity. One never succeeds in positing oneself at a ‘now point’ because the present slips away into the past as soon as one tries to posit oneself as such. The subject, therefore, must essentially be understood in a certain direction of motion. One can conclude various things from this. For instance, one can claim that it is always in striving towards something that the subject becomes a subject. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty has this idea in mind when he speaks of how the subject grasps herself at a certain distance from herself: “[Time] withholds me from what

I was about to become, and at the same time provides me with the means of grasping myself at a distance and establishing my own reality as myself” (Ibid., 496, emphasis added). Here one can find traces of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of good ambiguity. Ambiguity, while remaining unsolvable, ceases to be a problem because the self is the self in so far as it is indeterminate, in movement, grasped ‘at a distance,’ and thus inherently ambiguous. The self must be sought at an intersection of different dimensions rather than in its “pure form” (Ibid., 477). The ambiguity of the self must be understood through the ambiguity of time, and through embodiment: The passage of one present to the next is not a thing which I conceive, nor do I see it as an onlooker, I effect it; I am already at the impending present as my gesture is already at its goal, I am myself time (Ibid., 489). I have explained how Merleau-Ponty’s conception of time, as understood in Phenomenology of Perception, enables us to develop a notion of positive ambiguity that provides us with a new vision of the self. I suggest that this phenomenological vision of the self, i.e. the self as understood in this direction of experience, reflects what the self first and foremost is. Calling to mind the imperative, Zu den Sachen selbst, I suggest that going back to this conception of the self can be an essential step in dealing with philosophical problems pertaining to subjectivity.

Bibliography Dillon, M. C. 1988. Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. Bloomingdale and Indianapolis: Indiana UP. Husserl, E. 1969. Zur Phänomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917). Vol. 10 of Husserliana: Edmund Husserl – Gesammelte Werke. Edited by R. Boehm. The Hague: Nijhoff. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2007. “Man and Adversity.” In The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Edited by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, 189-240. Evanston: Northwestern UP. --- . 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge Classics. --- . 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. --- . 1964. The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the

Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics. Translated and Edited by James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern UP. --- . 1945. Phénoménologie de la Perception. Paris: Gallimard. Sapontzis, S.F. 1978. “A Note on Merleau-Ponty’s Ambiguity.” In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 38: 538-543. Waelhens, A. de. 1967. “Une Philosophie de l’ambiguïté.” In La Structure du Comportement, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, v-xv.

Monism vs. Logical Pluralism: the Impact of Substructural Logics Sébastien Poirier Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of revisionism in Logic from the standpoint of monism and logical pluralism. The underlying problem can be summarized succinctly: “Is there only one correct logic?” I begin with a brief critical summary of this debate, and then introduce the issue by presenting basic formal distinctions between logics outlining rivalry. After this exposition, I turn to our major concern: the argument that there is no actual rivalry between apparently rival logical systems. While ensuring a sort of territorial immunity for both the monist and the Carnapian pluralist, this position renders the debate about revisionism sterile. I hope to show that the reasons offered to support this argument are challenged by Gentzen’s sequent calculus. While offering a conceptually richer framework for the study of non-classical logics, the sequent calculus allows us to give an account of one crucial aspect of the logical practice: plurality of logical systems. Finally, I will sketch how one may think of logical pluralism in such a framework. To Jean-Pierre Marquis

1. The playground About a hundred years before the invention of modern logic by Frege and Russell, Kant said, in his Critique of Pure Reason, that Logic—here Aristotelian logic as amended by the medieval logicians—was incorrigible and immutable, i.e., that it was a completed science. We do not need to argue for the possibility of revisionism in Logic because it has already happened: Aristotelian logic has not been completed by classical modern logic but rather revised and replaced by it. The former is inconsistent with the latter.1 Today, the existence of a plurality of logics is a simple fact of science and this plurality contains (but is not exhausted by) the set of non-classical logics, logics that claim to revise classical logic in one aspect or another. Despite this acknowledged multitude of formal systems, it is open to anyone to argue and endorse philosophical positions such as monism or pluralism and play with the idea that one’s logic may be correct or incorrect (in a sense that needs to be specified). The philosophical question we are dealing can be put succinctly: “Is there only one correct logic?” The perspective in which this question arises is that of the canonical application of a logic: a modelling of our inferential practices whose purpose is to separate valid inferences from invalid inferences through the use of a logical theory. Following Resnik (1996), I think of a logical theory as “a quadruple consisting of a formal system, a semantics for it, the

Priest, G., (2003), “On Alternative Geometries, Arithmetics and Logics: A Tribute to Łukasiewicz”, pp. 454-455.

attendant metatheory, and a translation method for formalizing informal arguments.â&#x20AC;?2 The monist asserts that there is only one such theory that is correct, and the pluralist, that there are several. All logicians who advocate a non-classical logic do not declare the â&#x20AC;&#x153;incorrectnessâ&#x20AC;? of classical logic with the same force. Some say that their system is to replace classical logic in the sense that it should be used at the expense of the latter (either in a local or a global perspective of application), others say that their logic should be used in addition to classical logic. This observation led Susan Haack (1978) to distinguish between systems proposed as rivals and systems proposed as supplements (or enrichments). By â&#x20AC;&#x153;non-classical logicsâ&#x20AC;? we mean, according to Haack's distinction, all of the logics that present themselves as rivals or supplements to the logic created by Frege and Russell and then refined by several generations of (Polish) logicians. 3 Advocates of rival systems typically argue that classical logic is flawed for three reasons: it holds â&#x20AC;&#x153;validâ&#x20AC;? certain inferences that are intuitively not; it accepts certain theorems that are intuitively undesirable; and some of its metatheoretical concepts (conception of validity, truth, etc.) are inadequate. Each component of the logical theory is likely to be revised. 4 Advocates of systems that supplement classical logic generally argue that it is inadequate: its logical vocabulary is too poor to generate theorems or valid inferences that are desirable. Following our definition of â&#x20AC;&#x153;non-classical logics,â&#x20AC;? it is clear that certain uses of a rival system will be incompatible with the use of classical logic. On the other hand, the use of an enriched system poses no compatibility problems since the modification of classical logic consists in an addition or enrichment of the logical vocabulary. 5 That being said, our concern will center on the more substantial issue of rivalry.

Resnik, M., (1996), â&#x20AC;&#x153;Ought there to be but one logic?â&#x20AC;?, p. 491. This definition is standard and quite straightforward. More recently, it is found in Priestâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s (2008) introduction manual to non-classical logics. 4 For instance, some will challenge the metalogical concepts of classical logicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s metatheory. This is the case for Dummett (1991), who rejects the classical notion of truth (principle of bivalence), and Read (2006), who rejects the classical notion of logical consequence (Tarskiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s analysis). 5 A good example is that of Lewis and his strict conditional. By introducing đ??´ â&#x2020;Ł đ??ľ â&#x2030;? â&#x2013;Ą(đ??´ â&#x2020;&#x2019; đ??ľ), Lewis pretended to adequately formalize propositions of the type â&#x20AC;&#x153;If A then Bâ&#x20AC;? by revising the classical conditional (â&#x2020;&#x2019;), which allows for certain theorems that â&#x20AC;&#x153;appear suspect to common senseâ&#x20AC;?. Thus he was not trying to offer a treatment of modalities (â&#x2014;&#x160;, â&#x2013;Ą) as such. Nonetheless, this revision gave birth to some modal logical systems (Lewisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s S1-S5) and they are entirely compatible with the use of classical logic since, in the end, they consist in an enrichment of logical constants. 2 3

According to these distinctions, a useful but non-exhaustive list of non-classical logics frequently discussed in the literature could be the following (note that most of these logics were motivated by â&#x20AC;&#x153;philosophicalâ&#x20AC;? considerations)6: Rival systems: Intuitionistic logic Linear logic Relevant logic

Enriched systems: Ontic modal logics: N, K, T, đ?&#x2018;&#x2020;2 , đ?&#x2018;&#x2020;3 etc. Non-ontic modal logics:

Paraconsistant logic

- Epistemic logics

Polyvalent logics:

- Deontic logics

ď&#x201A;ˇ ď&#x201A;ˇ

đ??ż3, đ??żđ?&#x2018;&#x203A; (Ĺ ukasiewicz) đ??ž3 (Kleene), đ?&#x2018;&#x192;3 , đ?&#x2018;&#x192;đ?&#x2018;&#x203A; (Post) etc.

- Temporal logics etc.

Fuzzy logic Quantum logic

The advocates of rival systems tend to be global revisionists: the non-classical logic they put forward is thought to be the only correct logic and should therefore be applied globally (with the faulty logics being inappropriate in all domains of discourse). On a different argumentative basis, this is the case for Putnam and quantum logic, Dummett and intuitionistic logic, Ĺ ukasiewicz and his trivalent logic, Read and relevant logic. Historically, monism has been defended more often than not in the context of a global application of the preferred logic. Despite this, the advocate of a rival logic need not endorse this form of monism since he may, quite consistently, admit that classical logic is only inappropriate locally. That is to say, it is only inappropriate when it comes

Note also that one could add Gentzenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s natural deduction systems to â&#x20AC;&#x153;rival systems.â&#x20AC;? One could argue that when it comes to a modelling of our inferential practices, axiomatic systems are incorrect because they ignore that inference is primarily an act, which is a key feature of our inferential practices: axiomatic systems only record the results of the acts that are proofs. Anyone who has ever done a proof in an axiomatic system can testify to this. Furthermore, even within the natural deduction framework, one could argue that one should prefer the intuitionistic system (đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2014; ) over the classical one(đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2DC; ). The difference between đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2014; and đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2DC; is found in the intelim rules for negation and it reflects the exclusion of the rule for the elimination of double negation in the first of the two. This exclusion is both motivated by a criterion of formal elegance (symmetry in the intelim rules of đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2014; ) and a criterion on natural adequacy in that Gentzen thought đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2014; to be closer to (mathematical) reasoning than đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2DC; . See Gentzen, G., (1964), â&#x20AC;&#x153;Investigations into Logical Deduction,â&#x20AC;? p. 294. 6

to applying it to a particular domain of discourse (physics, mathematics, etc.). Brouwerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intuitionism seems to go in that direction: classical logic is flawed when applied to mathematical reasoning because it allows for non-constructive existence proofs since we can assert â&#x2C6;&#x192;đ?&#x2018;Ľđ??´(đ?&#x2018;Ľ) by proving ÂŹâ&#x2C6;&#x20AC;đ?&#x2018;ĽÂŹđ??´(đ?&#x2018;Ľ). Thus, intuitionists had to revise classical logic by rejecting the universal validity of the law of excluded middle: đ??´(đ?&#x2018;Ľ) â&#x2C6;¨ ÂŹđ??´(đ?&#x2018;Ľ). I think this â&#x20AC;&#x153;local revisionismâ&#x20AC;? amounts to a form of dependent logical pluralism7: there is more than one correct logic and the choice of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;goodâ&#x20AC;? logic depends on the domain of discourse it is to be applied to and, to a certain extent, on oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s theoretical goals. The whole debate about revisionism in Logic presupposes that there is a difference or variation between two allegedly rival logics. In the perspective of the canonical applications of logics, variation can occur within one or more of the four components of the logical theories in opposition: the formal system, the translation manual, the semantics, and/or the metatheory. However, no matter the differences between rival theories, we can generally observe that they have implications at the syntactic level. That is, at the level of the class of theorems/valid inferences of the formal system as such.8 If we start with this definition: Definition 1.1 A logic â&#x201E;&#x2019; = (đ?&#x2019;&#x153;â&#x201E;&#x2019; , đ?&#x2022;&#x2039;â&#x201E;&#x2019; ) is a set đ?&#x2019;&#x153;â&#x201E;&#x2019; of well-formed formulas (wff) taken together with a relation đ?&#x2022;&#x2039;â&#x201E;&#x2019; â&#x160;&#x2020; đ?&#x2019;&#x153;â&#x201E;&#x2019; , the class of â&#x201E;&#x2019;â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s theorems. Then we can offer the following one: Definition 1.2 If â&#x201E;&#x2019;1 = classical logic, then â&#x201E;&#x2019;2 rivals â&#x201E;&#x2019;1 to the extent that â&#x201E;&#x2019;2 â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s class of theorems is not equivalent to that of â&#x201E;&#x2019;1 : đ?&#x2022;&#x2039;â&#x201E;&#x2019;1 â&#x160;&#x2020; đ?&#x2019;&#x153;â&#x201E;&#x2019;1 â&#x2021;&#x17D; đ?&#x2022;&#x2039;â&#x201E;&#x2019;2 â&#x160;&#x2020; đ?&#x2019;&#x153;â&#x201E;&#x2019;2 . The essential clause to distinguish two logics consists in the non-equivalence of their consequence relations, or, to put it differently, in the non-equivalence of their set of theorems/valid inferences. For example, the consequence relation of a relevant logic will not contain the wff "đ??´ â&#x2020;&#x2019; (đ??ľ â&#x2020;&#x2019; đ??´)"

The term â&#x20AC;&#x153;dependent pluralismâ&#x20AC;? was coined by Cook (2010). Although some revisions are directly aimed at classical logicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s metatheory and semantics, for instance, they also have implications at the syntactic level. For example, Dummettâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rejection of the principle of bivalence comes to a rejection of đ??´ â&#x2020;&#x2019; ÂŹÂŹđ??´ and ÂŹÂŹđ??´ â&#x2020;&#x2019; đ??´, and the addition of a third truth value in Ĺ ukasiewiczâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s đ??ż3 system (ontic indeterminacy) reduces the class of theorems/valid inferences of classical logic: đ??ż3 is syntactically included in classical logic. 7 8

while that of a classical logic will. Note that two logics that differ in the sense of 1.2 are only said to be rivals if they both seek to codify our inferential practices. Although syntactical variation between logics does not seem to be a necessary condition for rivalry, 9 the question whether it is a sufficient one remains open. This last question is closely connected to another: is the rivalry between classical and non-classical logics real or only apparent? The ability of 1.2 to offer a sufficient condition was contested on the following grounds: could it be the case that the wff "đ??´ â&#x2020;&#x2019; (đ??ľ â&#x2020;&#x2019; đ??´)" means one thing in a classical logic and another in a relevant logic? Those who want to suppress or ignore the debate about revisionism by claiming that rivalry is, in some sense, illusory tend to answer â&#x20AC;&#x153;yesâ&#x20AC;? to that question. If the arguments for the inexistence of rivalry turned out to be convincing, the debate about revisionism would appear fundamentally sterile.

2. Rivalry and the semantics of logical constants Suppose we have in mind a classical logic â&#x201E;&#x2019;1 and a paraconsistant logic â&#x201E;&#x2019;2 . Following 1.2, the incompatibility between these two logics is, among other things, shown by the fact that the principle of explosion "đ??´ â&#x2C6;§ ÂŹđ??´ â&#x160;˘ đ??ľ" is valid in â&#x201E;&#x2019;1 but invalid in â&#x201E;&#x2019;2 . The strategy of those who refuse the authenticity of rivalry between classical and non-classical logics is not to deny that â&#x201E;&#x2019;2 has revised â&#x201E;&#x2019;1 but to claim that if there is syntactical variation in the sense of 1.2, then there is change of meaning of the logical constants. In this sense, the incompatibility between these two logics would only be apparent since we are presented with logical theories that do not â&#x20AC;&#x153;talkâ&#x20AC;? about the same things. That is, the logical constants of â&#x201E;&#x2019;2 differ in meaning with those of â&#x201E;&#x2019;1 . Quine seems to have suggested something like this in his Philosophy of Logic10: My view of this dialogue is that neither party knows what he is talking about. They think they are talking about negation, "ÂŹ", "not"; but surely the notation ceased to be recognizable as negation when they took to regarding some conjunction of the form "p&ÂŹp" as true, and stopped regarding such sentences as implying all others. Here,

It seems possible that a revision takes place at the semantic level while having no consequences at the syntactic one. I refer to Haackâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s claim about van Fraassenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s presuppositional languages. See Haack, S., (1996), Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic. Beyond the Formalism, p. 6. 10 As well as in â&#x20AC;?Truth by Conventionâ&#x20AC;? (1936) and â&#x20AC;?Carnap and Logical Truthâ&#x20AC;? (1954).

evidently, is the deviant logician's predicament: when he tries to deny the doctrine he only changes the subject.11 By admitting that some occurrences of đ??´ â&#x2C6;§ ÂŹđ??´ can be true, the paraconsistant logician simply changed the subject; he started to speak another language. By rejecting đ??´ â&#x2C6;§ ÂŹđ??´ â&#x160;˘ đ??ľ, he has, according to Quine, stopped talking about negation as such. This gives us two possibilities: either the advocate of a rival system means something different by "ÂŹ" or what he or she is saying is (logically) false. Indeed the â&#x20AC;&#x153;doctrineâ&#x20AC;? Quine is referring to is first-order classical logic; he is defending its supremacy and universality. However, we need to notice that the situation he refers to is perfectly symmetrical: the classical logician faces the same two possibilities as the nonclassical one. That the situation is asymmetrical and that it speaks in favour of classical logic is hardly convincing. Are we not just presupposing that the behaviour of negation in natural languages is correctly modelled by the "ÂŹ" of classical logic? Quineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s argument can, at most, shield classical logic from rivalsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; critics, and vice versa.12 One point that seems to emerge from Quineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s argument is that any difference between the consequence relations of a classical logic and a non-classical one can be attributed to a difference between the languages of the logicians in question. A variation in the sense of 1.2 implies a change of meaning of the logical constants, and, consequently, a change of subject on the part of the nonclassical logician. Carnap had made a similar point when he argued in The Logical Syntax of Language that two opposite analyses regarding the validity of an argument are due to differences in languages, the basis of this argument being the metalogic point of view, which led to the principle of tolerance. More precisely, as Restall put it,13 Carnap seems to suggest that if đ??´; ÂŹđ??´ â&#x160;˘ đ??ľ is valid in â&#x201E;&#x2019;1 and invalid in â&#x201E;&#x2019;2 , then the two logicians do not speak of the same argument: the analysis of the classical logician is made in a language C, and that of the paraconsistant logician in a language P. Thus the variables A, B... of an analysis in â&#x201E;&#x2019;1 range over C, in â&#x201E;&#x2019;2 over P and the logical constants differ in the sense that negation is classic in C and paraconsistant in P. (Note that

Quine, W. V., (1986), Philosophy of Logic, p. 81. To establish his monism, Quine will have to show, despite the indeterminacy of translation, of theories, and the relativity of ontology, that classical logic is the simplest and most economic one (from an epistemological and ontological point of view), and that, even more, it is the condition of possibility of the universality of language. The shortcomings of the Quinean approach were argued in detail in Crocco (2008). The failure of this approach can also be seen in Haack (1996), Restall (2002), and Priest (2003). 13 What follows in this section owes a great deal to Restall (2002). 12

for Carnap any language is and needs to be governed by one and only one particular logical consequence relation.) In other words: đ??´; ÂŹâ&#x201E;&#x2019;1 đ??´ â&#x160;˘ đ??ľ đ?&#x2018;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;&#x203A;đ?&#x2018;&#x2018; đ??´; ÂŹâ&#x201E;&#x2019;2 đ??´ â&#x160;Ź đ??ľ. The two formulas are not two incompatible analyses of the same argument because that would entail that the two logicians are speaking the same language, while their divergent verdicts clearly show that they are committed to different logics. The two formulas are two different forms of arguments couched in two different language forms. Here, Carnapâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s key ideaâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as well as Quineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, even if he strongly rejects Carnapâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pluralismâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;is that by endorsing different logics we are forced to endorse different languages. This offers us a radical pluralism, a pluralism of forms of language. Advocates of different logics talk different languages and once this fact is fully recognized there can be no disagreement between them (assuming they know which language they speak). Tolerance towards different choices should therefore be adopted. The monist somehow obtains territorial immunity. In a Carnapian framework, since there is no notion of justification or â&#x20AC;&#x153;correctionâ&#x20AC;? antecedent to the adoption of a form of language, it is impossible for us to appeal to something (a criteria) outside of a language which could enable us to assert that the logical consequence relation fixed by oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s language is correct. The choice between, say, classical logic and paraconsistant logic is purely instrumental and not answerable to any criteria of â&#x20AC;&#x153;correctnessâ&#x20AC;? that could be said to transcend the possible forms of language. A pluralist like Restall is right to find this state of affair unsatisfactory. In this context, the pluralist is constrained: â&#x20AC;&#x153;I can read the argument according to language P or according to language C.â&#x20AC;?14 He or she may only add: â&#x20AC;&#x153;given my theoretical goals, which of these forms of language is the most efficient, fertile, economic, etc.?â&#x20AC;? Nonetheless, he or she cannot say that the argument is valid in one sense and invalid in another without appearing to be confused, jumping inconsistently from one language to another. Similarly, he or she cannot ask the question of the correctness of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s logic. Carnapian tolerance has the peculiar, not to say undesirable, consequence of denying any grounds and reasons for rational discussion and justification. But given this plurality of logics, should we not try to assess and argue whether one logic could be deemed correct for one task and another incorrect for that same task? To keep the In a sense, the monist and the Carnapian pluralist could satisfy themselves with saying: â&#x20AC;&#x153;I want to read the argument according to that language.â&#x20AC;? 14

debate about revisionism in Logic alive we need to admit the possibility of there being different logical consequence relations within a single language. In other words: đ??´; ÂŹđ??´ â&#x160;˘â&#x201E;&#x2019;1 đ??ľ đ?&#x2018;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;&#x203A;đ?&#x2018;&#x2018; đ??´; ÂŹđ??´ â&#x160;Źâ&#x201E;&#x2019;2 đ??ľ. Thus, the thesis, according to which there is no rivalry between classical and non-classical logics, impedes the development of a more engaging pluralism that would answer â&#x20AC;&#x153;no, there are severalâ&#x20AC;? to the question of whether there is only one correct logic. 15 To compare two logical theories in opposition, to evaluate their correctness, we need to endorse the existence of rivalry: that it is possible for two different logics to talk about the same logical constants while offering incompatible analyses of the same argument. To reach the conclusion that there is no rivalry between two allegedly incompatible logics, one must still give reasons to support the claim that syntactical variations in the sense of 1.2 imply a change of meaning of the logical constants. Two influential theses have been put forward: (1) the meaning of the logical constants is given by their rules of inference; (2) the meaning of the logical constants is given by their truth conditions. Implicit in these theses is the hypothesis that the identity of meaning between two logical constants is the identity of their truth conditions or their rules of inference. If we follow this line of thought, there is little doubt that, in many cases, the meaning of some of the logical constants of two alleged rival logics differs. Take the following example: the only difference between classical natural deduction (đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2DC; ) and intuitionistic natural deduction (đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2014; ) can be found in the introduction and elimination rules for negation:

It also blocks the road to any monist who wants to assume the existence of rivalry. This is the case for Read (2006) who seeks to convince us that the only correct analysis of the notion of logical consequence is that of relevant logic.

[đ??´] (đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2DC; :IÂŹ)

(đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2DC; :EÂŹ) ÂŹÂŹđ??´

ÂŹđ??´

đ??´

[đ??´] (đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2014; :IÂŹ)

(đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x2014; :EÂŹ) đ??´, ÂŹđ??´

ÂŹđ??´

Note that since this is the only difference between the two, we cannot say that the meaning of the logical constants differs. Consider a second example: when formulated in terms of Kripkeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s possible-world semantics, the truth conditions of negation in classical and intuitionistic logic are as follows: ÂŹđ??´ đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;Ąđ?&#x2018;&#x;đ?&#x2018;˘đ?&#x2018;&#x2019; đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018;&#x203A; đ?&#x2018;Ąâ&#x201E;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;&#x2019; đ?&#x2018;¤đ?&#x2018;&#x153;đ?&#x2018;&#x;đ?&#x2018;&#x2122;đ?&#x2018;&#x2018; đ?&#x201C;&#x152; đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018;&#x201C;đ?&#x2018;&#x201C; đ??´ đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x203A;đ?&#x2018;&#x153;đ?&#x2018;Ą đ?&#x2018;Ąđ?&#x2018;&#x;đ?&#x2018;˘đ?&#x2018;&#x2019; đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018;&#x203A; đ?&#x201C;&#x152;. ÂŹđ??´ đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;Ąđ?&#x2018;&#x;đ?&#x2018;˘đ?&#x2018;&#x2019; đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018;&#x203A; đ?&#x2018;Ąâ&#x201E;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;&#x2019; đ?&#x2018;¤đ?&#x2018;&#x153;đ?&#x2018;&#x;đ?&#x2018;&#x2122;đ?&#x2018;&#x2018; đ?&#x201C;&#x152; đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018;&#x201C;đ?&#x2018;&#x201C; đ?&#x2018;&#x201C;đ?&#x2018;&#x153;đ?&#x2018;&#x; đ?&#x2018;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;&#x2122;đ?&#x2018;&#x2122; đ?&#x201C;&#x152; â&#x20AC;˛ đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;˘đ?&#x2018;?â&#x201E;&#x17D; đ?&#x2018;Ąâ&#x201E;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;Ą đ?&#x201C;&#x152; â&#x2030;¤ đ?&#x201C;&#x152; â&#x20AC;˛ , đ??´ đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x203A;đ?&#x2018;&#x153;đ?&#x2018;Ą đ?&#x2018;Ąđ?&#x2018;&#x;đ?&#x2018;˘đ?&#x2018;&#x2019; đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018;&#x203A; đ?&#x201C;&#x152; â&#x20AC;˛ Here it is obvious that the conditions and the rules strictly differ and therefore that, in accordance with the identity of meaning hypothesis, the "ÂŹ" of classical logic does not mean the same thing as the "ÂŹ" of intuitionistic logic in both formulations of these logics. The problem seems to be that two different analyses of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;sameâ&#x20AC;? logical constantâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;here negationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;entails that we are talking about two different things. However, this problem is better addressed with the more powerful conceptual resources of Gentzenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sequent calculus, in which classical logic corresponds to the full structural logic and non-classical logics to substructural logics. The major advantage comes from the fact that Gentzenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sequent calculus allows us to analyse the usual logical constants in a single way through the use of an invariant group of logical rules specific to classical and nonclassical logics, while at the same time offering us the means to single out their logical consequence relations by the use of structural rules. Following the hypothesis according to which identity of meaning between two logical constants is identity of their rules of inference, we can say that, within the sequent calculus, all of the logical constants of alleged rival logics have the same meaning. Thus, the problem disappears. This is a change of perspective that enables us to

reformulate and re-conceptualize the debate about revisionism: as a deductive metalanguage (a metacalculus), the sequent calculus makes explicit structural assumptions on deductions (codified by the structural rules) that were implicit in the formal systems as such, i.e., in the axiomatic, natural deduction or model-theoretic formulations of the logics in question. Furthermore, from an algebraic point of view, formalizing logics in sequent systems makes explicit residuation relations that would have been otherwise hidden in Hilbert-style systems.16 In what follows, I hope to briefly show how the debate about revisionism would benefit from being addressed in such a framework and, moreover, how Gentzenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sequent calculus opens the way for logical pluralism.

3. Non-classical logics as substructural logics Gentzenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sequent calculus contains three groups of rules: identity rules, structural rules, and logical rules.17 It provides us with a new perspective to address rival logics by offering a common denominator between them: the logical rules. Substructural logics, corresponding to certain nonclassical logics, are obtained by keeping fixed the logical rules while modifying the class of structural rules (weakening, contraction, and exchange). Of course, one may wonder whether the structural rules could be said to give the meaning of the logical constants, therefore reintroducing our problem. However, this objection runs into the following difficulty. Structural rules govern the behaviour of a series of information encoded by the semicolons in the premises and the conclusion(s) of an inference: Î&#x201D;; đ??´ â&#x160;˘ Î&#x2DC;; B. Thus, the structural rules give the meaning of the semicolons but not that of the logical constants. The semicolons on the left of the turnstile can be interpreted as conjunctions and on the right as disjunctions: Definition 1.3 A sequent đ??´1 ; â&#x20AC;Ś , đ??´đ?&#x2018;&#x203A; â&#x160;˘ đ??ľ1 ; â&#x20AC;Ś đ??ľđ?&#x2018;&#x161; is provable in LK if and only if (đ??´1 â&#x2C6;§ â&#x20AC;Ś â&#x2C6;§ đ??´đ?&#x2018;&#x203A; ) â&#x160;˘ (đ??ľ1 â&#x2C6;¨ â&#x20AC;Ś â&#x2C6;¨ đ??ľđ?&#x2018;&#x161; ) is provable.18

Ono, H., (2003), â&#x20AC;&#x153;Substructural Logics and Residuated Lattices â&#x20AC;&#x201C; an Introductionâ&#x20AC;?, p. 209. Residuation relations are attached to residuated lattices, algebraic structures that give a suitable semantics for substructural logics. From a conceptual point of view, residuation relations allow us to establish some important links between fusion, a logical constant found in relevant and linear logics, and implication. 17 For a short and clear presentation of the sequent calculus, see Girard, J.-Y., Lafont, Y., and Taylor, P., (1990), Proofs and Types, pp. 28-40. 18 Ono, H., (2003), â&#x20AC;&#x153;Substructural Logics and Residuated Lattices â&#x20AC;&#x201C; an Introductionâ&#x20AC;?, p. 181. 16

More precisely, structural rules express certain algebraic properties (commutativity, associativity, monotonicity, etc.), seen here with the contraction rules which express the idempotency of conjunction and disjunction (đ??´ â&#x2C6;§ đ??´ = đ??´; đ??´ â&#x2C6;¨ đ??´ = đ??´): Î&#x201C;; A; A â&#x160;˘ Î&#x2DC; Î&#x201C;; A â&#x160;˘ Î&#x2DC;

Î&#x201C; â&#x160;˘ A; A; Î&#x2DC; (đ??ś â&#x160;˘)

Î&#x201C; â&#x160;˘ A; Î&#x2DC;

(â&#x160;˘ đ??ś)

Their importance appears very clearly when we consider the deduction theorem, which holds for the vast majority of formal systems19: Î&#x201C;; đ??´ â&#x160;˘ đ??ľ đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018;&#x201C; đ?&#x2018;&#x17D;đ?&#x2018;&#x203A;đ?&#x2018;&#x2018; đ?&#x2018;&#x153;đ?&#x2018;&#x203A;đ?&#x2018;&#x2122;đ?&#x2018;Ś đ?&#x2018;&#x2013;đ?&#x2018;&#x201C; Î&#x201C; â&#x160;˘ đ??´ â&#x2020;&#x2019; đ??ľ The mode of combination of the premises being here encoded by the semicolon, the theorem tells us that a change in this mode will produce a modification of the conditional (â&#x2020;&#x2019;). Now the structural rules dictate precisely the properties of the mode of combination of the premises. Thus, modifying the set of structural rules allows us to single out different conditionals (or different sorts of deduction). Since logical consequence and implication are intimately related, as Herbrandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s theorem shows, we will be brought to consider different logics. Classical logic (LK sequent calculus) is the only full structural logic (the one admitting all of the structural rules). A logic is said to be substructural if it rejects one or several of the structural rules admitted by LK sequent calculus. If we accept Kosta Dosenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thesis that two logics are rival if, and only if, they differ only in their assumptions on structural deductions, we can identify substructural logics with the rival systems of the non-classical logics group.20 Rival logics are specified not by directly modifying the logical rules, but by playing with the rules that codify the structural properties of proofs, thus modifying what it will be possible to prove with the logical rules. As already mentioned, this procedure allows us to single out classical and non-classical logical consequence relations. We obtain intuitionistic logic by restraining the sequent calculus to sequent of the form "Î&#x201C; â&#x160;˘ đ??´" (sequent with only one conclusion in the consequent), by rejecting both contraction and exchange on the right, and then by replacing weakening on the right by:

Properly speaking, Herbrandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s deduction theorem tells us that â&#x20AC;&#x153;if Î&#x201C;; đ??´ â&#x160;˘ đ??ľ then Î&#x201C; â&#x160;˘ đ??´ â&#x2020;&#x2019; đ??ľâ&#x20AC;&#x153;. The reciprocal is trivial given modus ponens. 20 Dosen, K., (1989), â&#x20AC;&#x153;Logical Constants as Punctuation Marksâ&#x20AC;?, p. 376. Enriched systems are said to supplement LK in the sense that they add logical constants thus logical rules while conserving the same structural assumptions. 19

Î&#x201C;â&#x160;˘ Î&#x201C; â&#x160;˘ đ??´, which is to keep đ??´ â&#x2C6;§ ÂŹđ??´ â&#x160;˘ đ??ľ â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the principle of explosion. The rejection of the contraction rule amounts to a rejection of complementation, i.e., đ??´ â&#x2C6;¨ ÂŹđ??´ = đ?&#x2018;&#x2030; and đ??´ â&#x2C6;§ ÂŹđ??´ = đ??š. One crucial feature of the rejection of structural rules is that some logical constants that were equivalent in classical logic now appear distinct. In the intuitionistic case, negation loses the (classical) involution property, ÂŹÂŹđ??´ â&#x2020;&#x2019; đ??´ and đ??´ â&#x2020;&#x2019; ÂŹÂŹđ??´, and implication is modified to the extent that đ??´ â&#x2020;&#x2019; đ??ľ is not equivalent to ÂŹ(đ??´ â&#x2C6;§ ÂŹđ??ľ) or ÂŹđ??´ â&#x2C6;¨ đ??ľ. Relevant logic is obtained by rejecting weakening rules on both sides (here on the left): Î&#x201C;â&#x160;˘Î&#x2DC; Î&#x201C;; A â&#x160;˘ Î&#x2DC; The desired condition of relevance between the premises and the conclusions is expressed through this rejection: we should not be allowed to move from Î&#x201C; â&#x160;˘ Î&#x2DC; to Î&#x201C;; A â&#x160;˘ Î&#x2DC; because the new formula A may not be relevant for the deduction. Ĺ ukasiewicz polyvalent logics are obtained by a rejection of contraction rules on both sides (here on the right): Î&#x201C; â&#x160;˘ đ??´; đ??´; Î&#x2DC; Î&#x201C; â&#x160;˘ đ??´; Î&#x2DC; To give a final example: linear logic (the multiplicative-additive fragment) is obtained by rejecting weakening and contraction rules altogether. 21 Even though linear logicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s primary application is in theoretical computer science, Girard thinks of it as a dynamic model of our inferential behaviour in terms of actions and reactions as opposed to the static situations of classical logic that allow us to re-use formulas ad infinitum.22 In this logic of â&#x20AC;&#x153;actions,â&#x20AC;? where deductive moves cost something, assumptions in proofs are thought of as resources that will be used and â&#x20AC;&#x153;burnedâ&#x20AC;? during the derivation process; the resources may only be used once. Note the intuitive interpretation of đ??´ â&#x160;¸ đ??ľ (linear implication): to deduce B, I pay with A and in doing so, I no longer have A. Thus, we can prove đ??´ â&#x2020;&#x2019; đ??ľ only if A is the proper resource to obtain B, in the

See Girard (1987) for the original paper which introduces linear logic. Girard, J.-Y., (1997), Du pourquoi au comment : la thĂŠorie de la dĂŠmonstration, du programme de Hilbert Ă la logique linĂŠaire, pp. 33-37. 22

sense that it should be neither too strong nor too weak. In this context, contraction and weakening rules are problematic. For Girard, the first ones correspond to the (classical) principle of “inoxidability”: we use A to obtain B but A remains intact. This fact shows up in the permission to move from Γ ⊢ A; A; Θ to Γ ⊢ A; Θ. Weakening rules create a similar problem as they allow us to move from Γ ⊢ Θ to Γ; A ⊢ Θ. But if we managed to prove Γ ⊢ Θ in a linear context, chances are that we had the proper resources, leaving no superfluous formula “A” behind. Logical pluralism goes as follow: these different logics are said to be “correct” in that they specify differently, through the modification of structural properties, the concept of proof given by the sequent calculus. A proof of a sequent is defined the same way for all classical and nonclassical sequent calculi, i.e., as a series of deductive moves all authorized by the application of a rule. The rules of the sequent calculus tell us that if certain formal structural deductions hold, then certain others will too. By admitting different structural assumptions on proofs, different calculi accurately specify different types of proofs: intuitionistic proofs, classical proofs, relevant proofs, linear proofs, etc. That there is only one correct logical system modelling our inferential practices, or, worse, that there is only one correct logic in all domains of discourse, is hardly convincing. As Shapiro puts it: […] with mathematical models generally, there is typically no question of ‘getting it exactly right’. For a given purpose, there may be bad models – models that are clearly incorrect – and there may be good models, but it is unlikely that one can speak of the one and only correct model. There is almost always a gap between a model and what it is a model of.23 The (global) monist requires too much of one logical system and ignores that we require different logics for different tasks. Proof systems are autonomous logico-mathematical structures and have been studied as such for a long time now. Formal logic is the study of logical consequence, at the heart of which lies the concept of proof. Perhaps we should now concentrate on philosophical problems that deal with the impact of categorical logic, computer science or substructural logics, and with the consequences of the Curry-Howard isomorphism or denotational

Shapiro, S., (2006), Vagueness in Context, p. 50. Our emphasis.

semantics, for instance,24 instead of arguing for the recognition of a certain formal system as the normative embodiment of valid arguments in natural languages.

4. Conclusion As I have tried to show, the sequent calculus framework gives us good reasons to believe that the premise relied on to support the thesis that there is no rivalry is unsatisfactory. Not only can we define all the usual logical constants by the use of an invariant group of logical rules, but the sequent calculus makes explicit structural assumptions hidden at the level of the formal systems as such while giving us a symmetric, mathematically elegant and simple account of Logic. Our point is: the monist argues from a level that is conceptually too poor to formulate such an account of the usual logical constants. Sequent calculus’s level of generality and abstractness makes it part of a general theory of Logic, along with categorical logic, in that they make explicit logical properties and principles of constructions. Following Gentzen’s formulations of the principles and concepts of logics, and in the absence of convincing arguments from the premise—logical constants change their meaning from system to system—to the conclusion—there is no rivalry between systems—we should not persist in our belief that logical rivalry is, in some sense, illusory. It is more convincing to say that the non-classical logician is actually doing what he thinks he is doing: speaking about negation as such for instance. The sequent calculus allows us to give an account of a crucial aspect of the logical practice: the existence of a plurality of formal systems. In this precise sense, the monist ignores an essential feature of the practice of the discipline. Different logical consequence relations (hence different logics) are generated by different “proof systems” that admit different sets of structural rules. The existence of a set of rival logics is founded internally. That is, in the conceptual apparatus offered by Gentzen. The study of the acknowledged plurality of logics would

For a brilliant and exciting synthesis of these fundamental problems of contemporary philosophy of Logic and mathematics, see Joinet J.-B., (2009), « Ouvrir la logique au monde », in Ouvrir la logique au monde – philosophie et mathématique de l’intéraction, (dir. Jean-Baptiste Joinet et Samuel Tronçon), collection Vision des sciences, Éditions Hermann, Paris.

greatly benefit from such a standpoint. Finally, we should follow Beall and Restall in saying that “monism artificially restricts the development of logic.”25

Works Cited Beall, J. C. and G. Restall. (2006). Logical Pluralism. Oxford: Oxford UP. Carnap, R. (1934). The Logical Syntax of Language (Amethe Smeaton, Trans.). London: Routledge, from Logische Syntax der Sprache, 1964. Cook, R. T. (2010). “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom: A Tour of Logical Pluralism.” Philosophy Compass, 10, 492-504. Crocco, G. (2008). « Substitution, concaténation et grammaire : Quine et le problème de l’universalité de la logique. » Noesis, 13, 5-43. Dosen, K. (1989). “Logical Constants as Punctuation Marks.” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 30, 362-381. Dosen, K. & P. Schroeder-Heister (eds.) (1993). Substructural Logics. Oxford : Oxford UP. Dummett, M. (1991). The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Engel, P. (1989). La Norme du Vrai, Philosophie de la Logique. Gallimard, NRF essais, Paris. Galatos, N., Jipsen, P., Kowalski, T., & Ono, H. (2007). Residuated Lattices: An Algebraic Glimpse at Substructural Logics. (Vol. 151). Elsevier. Gentzen, G. (1935). “Investigations into Logical Deduction.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 1, 288-306, 1964. Girard, J.-Y. (1987). “Linear logic.” Theoretical Computer Science, 50, 1–102. --- . (2003). Du pourquoi au comment : la théorie de la démonstration, du programme de Hilbert à la logique linéaire. Leçons de mathématiques d'aujourd'hui, eds. Cassini. Rédigé par Pierre Castéran et Eric Charpentier, d'après un exposé du 5 Juin 1997. --- . (2006). Le point aveugle, tome 1 : vers la perfection, tome 2 : vers l’imperfection. Visions des Sciences. Hermann, Paris. --- . (2007). Le point aveugle, tome 2 : vers l’imperfection. Visions des Sciences. Hermann, Paris. 25

Beall, J. C. and G. Restall. (2006), Logical Pluralism, p. 123.

Haack, S. (1978). Philosophy of Logics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. --- . (1996). Deviant Logic, Fuzzy Logic. Beyond the Formalism. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Joinet J.-B. & S. Tronçon (Dir.). (2009). « Ouvrir la logique au monde – philosophie et mathématique de l’intéraction », collection Vision des sciences, Éditions Hermann, Paris. Marion, M. (2007). Philosophy of Logic, in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies/The Columbia Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies. C. Boundas (ed.). Edinburgh/New York: Edinburgh UP/Columbia UP, 252-269. Ono, H. (2003). “Substructural Logics and Residuated Lattices – an Introduction,” in V. F. Hendriks & J. Malinowski (eds.). Trends in Logic: 50 years of Studia Logica (pp. 193 228). Springer Netherlands. Poirier, S. (2011). La Logique et les logiques: la question du pluralisme, https://papyrus.bib.umontreal.ca/jspui/handle/1866/6066. Prawitz, D. (1965). Natural Deduction: A Proof-Theoretical Study. New York: Dover Publications, 2006. Priest, G. (2003). “On Alternative Geometries, Arithmetics and Logics: A Tribute to Łukasiewicz.” Studia Logica, 71, 441-468. --- . (2008). An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic. 2nd ed., Cambridge UP. Putnam, H. (1968). “Is Logic Empirical?,” in R. S. Cohen et al. (dir.). Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 5, Dordrecht, D. Reidel, 216-41. Quine, W. V. (1986). Philosophy of Logic. 2nd ed., MA: Harvard UP. Read, S. (2006). “Monism: The One True Logic,” in A Logical Approach to Philosophy: essays in honor of Graham Solomon. Netherlands: Springer. Resnik, M. (1996). “Ought there to be but one logic?,” in B. J. Copeland (ed.). Logic and Reality: Essays on the Legacy of Arthur Prior. Clarendon: Oxford, 489–517. Restall, G. (2000). An Introduction to Substructural Logics. New York: Routledge. --- . (2002). “Carnap’s Tolerance, Meaning, And Logical Pluralism.” The Journal of Philosophy, 99, 426-443. Shapiro, S. (2006). Vagueness in Context. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Spinoza, Panpsychism, and the Image of Thought Tano S. Posteraro Abstract: For Spinoza, we, as human knowers, have access to but two of substance’s infinity of attributes: thought and extension. To every mode of extension, a body, corresponds a mode of mentality, an idea. The Spinozistic idea is a concept of the mind. As such, all bodies are thinking bodies; all bodies are also minds. This doctrine is generally referred to as panpsychism. Surrounding it are a few common streams of interpretation. They all share one thing in common: an assumption of what it means to think, an assumption by which to render palatable the initially startling nature of panpsychic theories of consciousness. By turning to Deleuze, we will see that this sort of assumption constitutes what he calls the image of thought. In elucidating Deleuze’s critique of the image of thought, we will set up for ourselves an image against which to make sense of Spinoza’s panpsychism. This is to say that while Deleuze’s discussion of the image of thought turns on a critique, an analysis, our discussion of Spinoza will turn on a creative explosion of ideas that undermines, in its own distinctive way, the image of thought and creates anew the conditions for what it means to think. This new modality of thought will be emphatically bodily, and will have less to do with representation than with the affective encounter with that which forces thought to think.

…as though thought should not seek its models among stranger and more compromising adventures.1 Of substance’s infinity of attributes, for Spinoza, we know only two: thought and extension. And for every mode of extension, a body, there corresponds a mode of thought, an idea. By idea, Spinoza means “a concept of the mind which the mind forms because it is a thinking thing.” 2 As such, every extended body has, on Spinoza’s account, a concept of itself, an idea, a mind. Every body, Spinoza suggests, is also a thinking thing. This is what I will refer to as Spinoza’s panpsychism: an account of consciousness that ascribes to all of nature the ability to think. There are, as we will see, a few streams of interpretation surrounding this panpsychism. But they all share one thing in common: a set of assumptions governing what it means to think. On this basis, they proceed to make sense of what it means to say that apples think in the same way—albeit perhaps not to the same degree—that humans do. In Deleuzian terms, Spinozists have hitherto taken for granted an image of thought, an image of what it means to think. It is here that I intervene.

1 2

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 135. Spinoza, Ethics, IID3.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that “[t]he conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself.”3 In accordance with the strictures imposed by this image, Spinoza’s panpsychism appears counterintuitive; it is the work, then, of secondary commentators to make it palatable by reading into it, for example, a hierarchical distribution of the powers of thought over different bodies. But in so doing, I will claim that these commentaries aim only to reconcile panpsychism with the image of thought, with what it already means to think. My aim, on the contrary, will be to make plausible an account of Spinoza’s panpsychism that frees it from the stifling, pre-philosophical restrictions of the image of thought. Now, while Deleuze’s discussion of the image of thought involves a critique,4 the ambition of my discussion of Spinoza will be to foreground the primarily creative project at hand in his theory of consciousness. 5 The aim of this essay will therefore be threefold: first, to unpack briefly Deleuze’s concept of the image of thought;6 second, to elucidate, by means of recent scholarship on the topic, Spinoza’s theory of consciousness; and third, to rework the interpretations at hand in a way that undermines the image of thought and creates anew the conditions for, and implications of, what it means to think. This latter aim will serve as the culminating point of the essay. Before turning to Spinoza’s theory of panpsychism, let us turn first to Deleuze’s discussion of the image of thought, for it is on the basis of this image that the implications of Spinoza’s thought are, I claim later, insufficiently appreciated. In his commentary on Difference and Repetition, Bryant writes that, “in the most simple terms, the Image of thought is an image or set of assumptions about what it means to think.”7 This set of assumptions is pre-philosophical: while it shapes the course thought will take, it itself is not an object of thought—it is simply taken for granted. In Deleuze’s own words:

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 139. Critique is understood here in the sense that one draws out the presuppositions and implications of the object of one’s criticism. It stands toward its object not with the intention to refute, but rather to engage, to problematize, to call into question. 5 Creation here refers to the way Spinoza is content to explode assumptions of what it means to think, not by way of attacking them directly—or even by acknowledging them at all—but rather by conceiving new forms of thought, new ways of thinking: by creating concepts. 6 This is, to be clear, an essay on Spinozistic panpsychism. Deleuze’s image of thought will serve only as a point from which to begin an examination of what it means for bodies of differing degrees of complexity to think. 7 Bryant, Difference and Givenness, 81. 4

[I]t has the form of ‘Everybody knows …’. Everybody knows, in a pre-philosophical and pre-conceptual manner … everybody knows what it means to think and to be. … As a result, when the philosopher says ‘I think therefore I am’, he can assume that the universality of his premisses—namely, what it means to be and to think …—will be implicitly understood, and that no one can deny that to doubt is to think, and to think is to be.8 This is the primary architecture of the image of thought: “everybody knows” and “no one can deny.” Out of this basic structure emerges a multiplicity of assumptions that help constitute the image of thought. For the purposes of this discussion, we will focus specifically on the element of recognition or representation. To recognize an object, it is necessary that the faculties of thought— “perception, memory, imagination, understanding”9—each relate in a harmonious manner both to a given object, as well as to each other. While each faculty has a particular style by which it acts upon its own given, “an object is recognized […] when one faculty locates it as identical to that of another, or rather when all the faculties together relate their given and relate themselves to a form of identity in the object.”10 Consequently, the faculties of thought are taken to harmonize with each other (they each relate to the same object, although by means of different styles), 11 and this harmonious operation is taken to represent the object of perception. “For the philosopher,” Deleuze writes, “the form of identity in objects relies upon a ground in the unity of a thinking subject, of which all the other faculties must be modalities.”12 The object is, in other words, self-identical. And the representation of this identity is made possible on the basis of the unity or harmony of faculties in a thinking subject. The defining feature of thought’s representative nature is, for Bryant, “a sort of cross-modal relation between the different faculties which establishes the identity of the object in question.”13 Without this cross-modal relation, an accurate recognition or representation is impossible: “From the perspective of representation or identity, each of the faculties, when taken alone, is

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 129-30. Ibid, 133. 10 Ibid. 11 As Bryant puts it: “Memory is unreliable insofar as it contains additions and subtractions betraying its origins in the present. Imagination, when exercised alone, is prone to all sorts of flights of fancy and dissimulations” (Bryant, 84). What is required, then, is that each faculty is brought into harmony with each other. The resultant unity is most commonly subjected to the primacy of understanding or rationality—as in Descartes, the Ancient Greeks, and so on. 12 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 133. 13 Bryant, Difference and Givenness, 84. 9

unreliable.”14 But this is, on behalf of representation, an illegitimate assumption—one that takes the empirical object for granted, tracing the transcendental conditions for its possibility from the way it appears. Instead of giving a genetic account that begins from the operation of the faculties and moves toward the appearance of the object, it “simply gives an external account of the collaboration of the faculties to account for this arbitrary identity [of the object] after the fact.” 15 This is Kant’s unity of apperception and the self-identity of Descartes’ cogito. Its fault lies not in the observation that we often represent things to ourselves in sensing them, or that we often recognize the objects of our perception. Its fault lies in a universalization of these forms of thought, a universalization that renders unthinkable other forms, methods, or styles of thinking. When we take for granted that in order to think we need to recognize and represent, we acquiesce in a restrictive conformism. We take for granted a model of thought that is incapable of accounting for anything beyond what is already known, what is already accepted and acceptable. In a characteristic polemic, Deleuze writes that “the form of recognition has never sanctioned anything but the recognisable and the recognised; form will never inspire anything but conformities.” 16 The form of recognition is, in other words, nothing but common sense. Its presuppositions are common, its implications uncontroversial, its pronouncements unsurprising. But “what need,” Deleuze asks, “has common sense of philosophy?” Indeed, “common sense shows every day—unfortunately—that it is capable of producing philosophy in its own way.”17 This is, for Deleuze, nothing short of a danger for philosophy: “[W]ho can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts, and that when we recognise, we are thinking?”18 We can see, then, the way the model of thought precludes from the outset any semblance of the new, the creative, the unrecognized, the unrecognizable. It is a conservatism. In sketching the possibility of thought without image, Deleuze seeks to avoid the assumption of a harmonious exercise of the faculties, the assumption of a unified, self-identical subject, and the assumption that thought consists in the direction of this harmonious play of perception toward an object that the subject is capable of recognizing and representing to itself. “Do not count upon

Ibid. Ibid. 16 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 134. 17 Ibid, 135. 18 Ibid. 15

thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks,” warns Deleuze. “Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think.”19 It is here that we find our point of departure.

1. Panpsychic Images There is no difference in kind, for Spinoza, between any two modifications of the same substantive attribute. This means, since they are of one substance, that there exists an unbroken continuum uniting human beings with tables and chairs. And all bodies are as much modifications of the attribute of thought as they are modifications of the attribute of extension. 20 This is to say that human powers of cognition correspond, under the attribute of thought, to the human body conceived under the attribute of extension. It follows, therefore, that if human beings are thinking things insofar as they modify extension and therefore thought as well, then the same must be said for tables and chairs. That is, since tables and chairs are modifications of the attribute of extension, then so too must they exist as modifications of the attribute of thought; so too must they think. Indeed, after a significant discussion of the human mind and the claim that it is “united to the body,” Spinoza proceeds to stipulate that these concepts “are completely general and do not pertain more to man than to other individuals.”21 Of this claim, Michael LeBuffe has recently written (in a way representative of popular interpretation) that it has: strong, unattractive implications: not only am I conscious of absolutely everything that happens in my body; all stones, tennis balls, toasters, apples, and frying pans are also conscious of absolutely everything that happens in their bodies. In order to avoid these implications, Spinoza needs a theory of selective consciousness, a theory about which minds and which ideas in minds are conscious.22 LeBuffe claims to find just this kind of selective theory in the recent work of Don Garrett and Steven Nadler. But before turning to these interpretations, we should pause to take note of the way LeBuffe characterizes them.

Ibid, 139. Indeed, a modification is simply one thing, whether understood as an idea, through the attribute of thought, or as a body, through the attribute of extension. They are distinct only in name. 21 Spinoza, Ethics, IIP13schol. 22 LeBuffe, “Theories about Consciousness in Spinoza’s Ethics,” 532. 20

It is absurd, LeBuffe seems to say, to ascribe conscious ideas to bodies like stones and tennis balls. We must be selective about which minds (of which bodies) we call conscious. The image of thought is at work here, determining from the outset our intuitions about what thought involves and what it means for a body to think. It is an unattractive implication of Spinoza’s theory, to borrow LeBuffe’s own words, that it seems to ascribe the same kind of thought to humans as it does to toasters and apples. But why should this be the case? It is because, I claim, LeBuffe already has an idea of the way thought thinks (by directing a harmonious exercise of the faculties toward a self-identical object), and what this movement necessitates (recognizing and representing that object mentally), that he is able to so easily dismiss the unattractive implications of a total panpsychism.23 In contrast to what LeBuffe calls a “theory of selective consciousness,” Garrett’s interpretation of Spinoza actually involves something closer to a theory of continuous gradation. Instead of accounting for which bodies, minds, or ideas are conscious (and which are not), Garrett allows that all things are conscious, and seeks to account instead for differences in degrees of consciousness across different bodies.24 These differences will proceed, as we will see, by way of a progressive gradation in terms of conative power.25 Garrett calls this gradational approach an “incremental naturalism” that treats “important explanatory properties and relations not as simply present-or-absent but rather as properties and relations that are pervasively present to greater or less degrees.” 26 The aim of Garrett’s article is to account, on the basis of this incremental naturalism, for the pervasive presence of the first and lowest kind of Spinozistic cognition: imagination. For Garrett, if we can maintain a conception of the imagination that coheres with Spinoza’s incremental naturalism, then we have gone some way toward resolving the puzzles that plague the popular interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of consciousness. Since the imagination is, for Spinoza, a form (albeit the lowest) of cognition, therefore a theory of the imagination that By “total panpsychism,” I mean a panpsychism that is not selective across bodies/minds. As we will see, LeBuffe seems to mischaracterize the interpretations of Garrett and Nadler, for neither of the two is selective about which minds are conscious. On the contrary, they truly are panpsychists: they attribute consciousness to all things, just to differing degrees. A Spinozist panpsychism is, for these two interpreters, less a selection, and more a continuum. 24 The term “thing” will be used interchangeably with “mode” throughout this paper. Both refer to finite modifications of substance, whether conceived through thought (as minds or ideas) or extension (as bodies). 25 By “conative power,” I mean the power or degree of a mode’s conatus—its ability to persevere in being. This is a concept that will find a more complete expression as the essay progresses. 26 Garrett, “Representation and Consciousness in Spinoza’s Naturalistic Theory of the Imagination,” 18-19. 23

works within a naturalistic account will allow us to hold that inanimate objects think insofar as they imagine.27 Before turning to an analysis of Garrett’s argument, let us pause briefly to index the concepts around which Spinoza’s theory of consciousness turns. In Proposition 13 of Part II of his Ethics, Spinoza claims that “the object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body.” 28 In the proposition prior, he writes that “nothing can happen in that body which is not perceived by the mind.”29 Thus, the mind is the idea of the body, and perceives everything that happens in the body—including, it would seem, the chemical reactions in its pancreas.30 Spinoza immediately radicalizes this account with the statement that forces us to read his theory of consciousness as a panpsychism; he writes: For the things we have shown so far are completely general and do not pertain more to man than to other individuals, all of which, though in different degrees, are nevertheless animate. […] And so, whatever we have said of the idea of the human body must also be said of the idea of any thing.31 Consequently, every body—whether human, animal, vegetable, or what otherwise might have been considered inanimate—has an idea of everything that happens in or to it, and this idea constitutes its mind. Spinoza calls the lowest form of mental cognition the imagination. Every body imagines. It is the ubiquity of this claim on which Garrett’s article will focus. In the scholium to Proposition 17, Spinoza explains imagination as follows: The affections of the human body whose ideas present external bodies as present to us, we shall call images of things, though they do not reproduce the [NS: external] figures of things. And when the mind regards bodies in this way, we shall say that it imagines.32

See Margaret Wilson’s “Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge” for an explanation of such puzzles. Wilson holds that Spinoza’s theory of consciousness is, if applied across all things, simply incoherent. 28 Spinoza, Ethics, IIP13. 29 Ibid, IIP12. 30 I take this example from Della Rocca’s Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza, 9. 31 Spinoza, Ethics, IIP13schol. 32 Ibid, IIP17schol.

As Garrett notes, Spinoza’s concept of imagination “is broad enough to include sensation as well as mental imagery and to include modalities of bodily representation that do not represent shape.”33 As a result, this concept seems loose enough to allow for a differentiation in capacity between different bodies. Garrett seeks to do precisely this. If a body is conscious inasmuch as it has an idea of itself and what happens to it, and if all bodies are conscious in this way, then how are we to account for the difference in mental ability between a toaster and a person? After all, this difference does exist for Spinoza. In Part V of the Ethics, he attributes this mental difference to a corresponding bodily one. In the scholium to Proposition 39, Spinoza writes that bodies capable of few things will be conscious of almost nothing, while “a body capable of a great many things, has a mind which considered only in itself is very much conscious of itself, and of God, and of things.” 34 On this account, mental sophistication is simply the conscious correlate of bodily capacity. If humans are more conscious than plants, it is because our bodies are more complicated. 35 However, for reasons that seem unclear, Garrett dismisses this account of gradational consciousness. He writes that “upon examination, this suggestion does not seem to offer a promising approach,” although why this should be the case (or where such an examination has been undertaken) is left to the reader. As a consequence, Garrett turns to a consideration of the concept of conatus as a means by which to help distinguish differences in degrees of consciousness. A body is defined, for Spinoza, by a characteristic relation between the motion and rest of its parts. Put differently: a body is its structure or the way it is organized. It takes in material, it loses material, but the organization that defines it persists. I, for example, consume and digest food, shed skin, grow and shed hair—but the structure that defines me persists through these fluctuations. It is this endeavour or striving to persist in structure or being that Spinoza calls conatus. He writes that “the striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.”36 In the Demonstration that follows Proposition 7, Spinoza holds that this essence as perseverance is also the thing’s power. Different bodies have different conative resources, methods by which to maximize their power or to strive in perseverance. I can 33

Garrett, “Representation and Consciousness in Spinoza’s Naturalistic Theory of the Imagination,” 5. Spinoza, Ethics, VP39schol. 35 This is, as we will see, precisely the sort of view adopted by Steven Nadler. 36 Spinoza, Ethics, IIIP7. 34

break the pencil to my left in half, and it will sit dumbly. But organic bodies of sufficient complexity are capable of self-defense, evasion, healing, and so on. The power of the pencil is static and far less sophisticated than the power of my cat, who can either succumb to lethargy and passivity, or maximize her activity and the health of her body. Her power varies; the pencil’s does not. Such is the nature of bodily conatus. Conceived through the attribute of thought, conatus is no longer primarily a power of bodily action or perseverance in physical being, but rather a power of thinking. This power is, for Garrett, the power of an idea to aid in bodily preservation (as opposed to the activity of bodily preservation itself). This is the formula with which Garrett attempts to resolve the puzzles of Spinoza’s theory of imagination. The question is, as we have seen: what does it mean to say that all bodies perceive (or imagine) everything that happens in them? To this extent, Garrett notes Spinoza’s claim that “the parts composing the human body pertain to the essence of the body itself only insofar as they communicate their motions to one another in a certain fixed manner.”37 As a consequence, the position that the mind perceives everything that happens in the parts composing its body does not commit Spinoza to the more radical claim that the mind perceives every chemical reaction in its body’s pancreas. On the contrary, these chemical reactions do not pertain directly to a change in the essence of the body; they are changes only in the body’s parts considered independently of the functional whole. As this kind of whole, the body does not undergo a qualitative change every time it sheds a strand of hair. To say that the mind perceives everything that happens in its body is to say only that the mind perceives a change in the qualitative character of the relations between the parts that constitute the essence of its body. And these relations are far from static. They are processes that structure and underlie flows of changing material.38 Garrett has narrowed the scope of that for which the imagination has to account. But what of the affections perceived by the body in question? An apple is, presumably, altered qualitatively by a bruise that renders half of its body flat and lifeless. Are we to say that the apple perceives this change, forming an image of the body that affected it? Again, Garrett softens what seems at first to be an untenably radical account: “A mind’s perception of what happens in its body,” he writes,

Ibid, IIP24Dem. The body pumps blood, sheds skin, digests food, and so on. These are all processes constituted by ceaseless changes in material (food, for example, is ingested, broken down, drained of its nutrients, digested and excreted). 38

“may be very highly confused.”39 Any affection of the body will be brought about either by a change internal to the body itself (a heart attack), or by way of an interaction with something external (a blow to the chest). The apple’s bruise is, for Garrett, “due partly to the nature of the apple, as an individual self-preserving mechanism; partly to the nature of its parts; and partly to the external causes that operated on it.”40 This is because the nature of the apple will determine the way it is affected: the less ripe the apple, the harder its flesh, the less it will bruise when struck. But the bruise is equally a result of the external cause that operated on it: the harder it is struck, the heavier the body that strikes it, the more it will bruise. The apple, however, cannot be but extremely confused as to the causal factors that determine its change in state. To this extent, its power of representation is marginal. Recall Garrett’s addendum to Spinoza’s concept of imagination: it “is broad enough to include sensation as well as mental imagery and to include modalities of bodily representation that do not represent shape.”41 The apple does, indeed, perceive the bruise as a change in the nature of its body. But it does so confusedly, unable to distinguish between any of a variety of potential causes. More importantly, however, imagination is not confined to pictorial representation. As such, the apple perceives a change in its body in a way that probably involves something closer to a sensation than to a mental image that reproduces the figure of the body that affected it. We now have, Garrett holds, the tools we need to account for differences in degrees of consciousness across bodies of differing capacities. Why is it that some bodies are less conscious than others? Because their ideas or representations are more confused and therefore have less power to aid in or determine their conative activities. Do all bodies have the same capacity for representation? No, rather, “a given internal state of a thing represents its external cause insofar as its production by that cause is able to play a role in determining the self-preserving behavior of a self-preserving individual.” 42 Put differently, my idea of the coffee I am currently drinking represents the coffee itself to the extent that I can enlist the idea in, as Garrett says, determining my self-preserving behaviour. To push the example: if I drink the coffee and mistakenly represent it as water, I may turn to the coffee for hydration—an act harmful to my endeavour to persist in 39

Garrett, “Representation and Consciousness in Spinoza’s Naturalistic Theory of the Imagination,” 21. Emphasis in original. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid, 5. 42 Ibid, 22. Emphasis in original.

being. Consequently, the degree of confusion in a body’s representations influence the power those ideas have for determining conative activity. Moreover, if Spinoza seems to equate mental ability with bodily capacity, it is because more complex bodies will have less confused images and therefore more conative power—which is to say that they will be able to do more with their perceptions. Correspondingly, their ideas will also be able to determine, to a greater degree, their self-preservatory activities. In sum, panpsychism, taken on its own terms, remains a counterintuitive doctrine. But we have far less trouble believing that all things tend to strive to preserve themselves, albeit by way of a greater or lesser confusion in sensation, in more or less complicated ways, and to greater or lesser successes. Garrett’s fundamental interpretive move consists, as we have seen, in equating conscious capacity with conative ability or degree of power, an equation intended to cohere with the doctrine of incremental naturalism and to make more palatable the claim that all bodies think. We should take care, however, not to pass too quickly over the details of Garrett’s interpretation. Recall that his argument turns on an equation of mental capacity with the conative usefulness of a mind’s ideas or its power of thinking. There is a shift away from an analysis of the contents of consciousness, its images or ideas, toward an analysis of the conative usefulness of those contents. For instance, Garrett writes of “the pictorial internal state of a high-resolution camera” that although its causal representation is quite clear—that is, that while the camera is indeed representing to itself clear ideas—it “may still have very little power of thinking, because it is capable of little in determining the individual’s striving to persevere in being.” 43 It is this marginal degree of power that is supposed to explain the camera’s minimal mental capacity. It is even supposed to do so in spite of the camera’s ideational clarity. But this does nothing to assuage the counter-intuitiveness of such a doctrine; indeed, if the camera has clear ideas, but a low level of mental complexity on the basis only of the conative impotence of those ideas, then we might still ask: does the camera really know the cause of its pictures? Does it really comprehend the fact that the pixels on its display resemble the tree in front of it? On these questions, Garrett’s account is confused. Knowledge is a question of consciousness, and consciousness is, for Garrett, a question of an idea’s conative potency. So, if the camera is

Ibid, 21-22.

only minimally conscious, then its ideas are clear, distinct, and representatively faithful, albeit basically unconscious. But how can this be so? The more powerful the role an idea can play in the conatus of a mode, the more conscious that mode is. But representative clarity is itself also a correlate of conative potency.44 That is, the more clear an idea is, the greater the role it can play in the mode’s conatus. This is, however, precisely what Garrett must deny if he is to maintain both that the camera’s internal state, as an idea, “is very distinct with respect to representation of its cause”45 and that the camera is only minimally conscious. Indeed, it is only because the clarity of this (otherwise clear, distinct, representationally faithful) idea is conatively impotent46 that we can rest assured that the camera has nowhere near the mental capacity that we do. That is, the relatively low level of sophistication of the camera’s mind is a correlate of its inability to utilize its ideas— no matter their clarity—to help itself persevere in being. Consciousness remains, however, a correlate of representational clarity, because representational clarity is a correlate of conative potential, and conative potential is indicative of mental capacity. It would, as such, seem as if the camera, far from minimally conscious, expresses a rather sophisticated level of cognitive ability. To think, then, is still to represent the object of one’s thoughts to oneself. It is still to recognize, whether more or less clearly. The image of thought continues to operate in silence, unacknowledged in the way it shapes our intuitions about which activities get to count as thinking. Garrett’s contribution to this traditional image consists in the addition and imbrication of the conative usefulness of an idea with its clarity of representation. The clearer, the more distinct the mind’s representations, the more likely it is that they will aid in the body’s conative behaviour.47 But this is still the same model. Thought continues to mean the same thing. The differences in conscious sophistication across bodies are accounted for in terms of conatus (itself a fluctuation of degrees of efficacy), not in terms of thought itself—the way it thinks, or what it means to think (for this remains static across bodies).

Ibid, 22. Ibid, 21. 46 This is to say that although the camera can represent the object of its idea quite clearly, that representation does nothing to aid in the camera’s self-preservative activity. 47 This equation does not, however, hold up in all cases—cf. the camera example. This example is crucial, for, in the last analysis, differences in conscious bodies are consequently reducible to the conative potency of their ideas, not to their clarity or representational fidelity. 45

Garrett’s turn toward conative usefulness seems unhelpful if we wish to speak of the camera’s consciousness of itself or its understanding of the things it is made to photograph. He is content to address, instead, the camera’s (lack of) ability to use its ideas to aid in its striving to persevere. Since it is basically incapable of thinking or acting differently on the basis of its ideas, its mental capacity must be marginal. But I want to insist on this point: any reasonable panpsychism must account for an ascription of ideas to basic things and for what it means to say that these basic things think. Whether the camera can use its ideas toward its own ends is not what is at issue.48 What is at issue is the question of those ideas themselves. Garrett’s argument moves too quickly here: he takes for granted that cameras have ideas, even clear ideas, and addresses instead the fact that these ideas are conatively impotent. Steven Nadler writes of Garrett’s account that “it does not go deep enough in explaining what consciousness is for Spinoza.” 49 This is precisely the point. Garrett’s article addresses what it is that makes an idea or mind more powerful than another, but it does not go nearly far enough in explaining the nature of those ideas or minds themselves. As such, he mystifies what remains, in the last analysis, an unhelpful panpsychic account of consciousness. Steven Nadler’s “Spinoza and Consciousness” also offers an incremental naturalistic interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of consciousness. But while Garrett’s focus is conatus, Nadler’s is the correlation between bodily complexity and conscious sophistication: for Nadler, “human consciousness just is the greater complexity of the human body as this is manifested under the attribute of Thought.” 50 Accordingly, the less complicated the body, the less sophisticated its consciousness. This is not a causal interaction: an increase in bodily complexity does not cause a corresponding mental development. Rather, conceived through the attribute of extension, a body will be more or less complicated (e.g., its neurology will be more or less elaborate); conceived through the attribute of thought, a mind will be more or less sophisticated—they reflect each other, two ways of describing the same mode. If consciousness is just the mental correlate of bodily capacity, then, if we want to understand consciousness, we need to turn toward an analysis of the

Indeed, in isolation, this is a question hardly worth asking. Garrett uses it as a means to explain the differences in mental capacity across modes. It is, however, a panpsychic account that addresses the ideas themselves (rather than only their conative usefulness) and what it means to ascribe them to all bodies that Spinoza’s doctrine necessitates. 49 Nadler, “Spinoza and Consciousness,” 594. Emphasis in original. 50 Ibid, 591. Emphasis in original.

body. Indeed, Spinoza himself writes that “no one will be able to understand it [i.e., the union of mind and body] adequately, or distinctly, unless he first knows adequately the nature of our body.”51 Similarly, of this priority, Deleuze writes: “Thereby, and thereby only, can we know of what a soul is in itself capable, what is its power.”52 This is, in fact, also the point at which Nadler’s analysis culminates. He takes issue with Garrett’s interpretation, he offers an outline for what he takes to be a less convoluted and stronger reading of Spinoza’s theory of consciousness, and he makes brief mention of the potential affinity this reading might have with contemporary embodied-mind-cognitionism. 53 But beyond this, 54 Nadler is unwilling to venture much speculation on the particular details of a Spinozistic panpsychism. This, then, is a point from which to turn more decidedly toward the nature of bodily complexity—and, accordingly, toward a discussion of Spinoza’s concept of affect. It is in the doctrine of affect that I wish to locate a Spinozistic theory of panpsychic thought without image, a destruction of the image of thought by way not of critique, but rather of creation.

2. Affective Encounters Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.55 The essence of a body is its power, and its power consists in its affective capacities. “A mode’s essence is a power,” writes Deleuze. “[T]o it corresponds a certain capacity of the mode to be affected.”56 Affects, for Spinoza, are affections, interactions, or encounters in which a given body’s power of acting is increased or diminished. 57 A body’s affective capacity is always

Spinoza, Ethics, IIP13schol. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 256. 53 “Our thoughts, perceptions, and states of conscious awareness have the properties they do not just because of the occurrence of certain events in our nervous systems, but because of the form our body has […] and because of certain conditions of systems in our body that one ordinarily would never have connected with our mental lives (for example, our viscera). In short, according to the thesis of embodied cognition, human minds and human consciousness are what they are because human bodies are what they are” (Nadler, 598). 54 Nadler does, of course, address more than these three issues in the course of his article. He also briefly sketches the historical backdrop for Spinoza’s theory of consciousness and indexes a number of misguided interpretations of Spinoza’s theory (Garrett’s among them). 55 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 139. Emphasis in original. 56 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 93. 57 Spinoza, Ethics, IIID3. 52

exercised, whether actively or passively. In activity, a body produces an affect in something external to it. If it is passive, a body is being affected by something external to it; it is suffering an affect. The two powers (to affect and to be affected) stand in a continuous proportion to each other; they “vary inversely one to the other, but [their] sum is both constant and constantly effective.”58 In the terms of our discussion of Garrett’s article, we might say that for a body to be affected, it must undergo a qualitative change—an increase or diminution of its power to act. To affect, a body must produce a qualitative change in another. But even in passivity, even in its capacity to be affected by a body external to it, “a power is always an act or, at least, an action.” 59 As such, all bodies are active, even when their powers consist only in a capacity to be affected. Or, put differently: there is activity even in the capacity to be affected. There are, therefore, no wholly passive bodies. Consider again the apple we referred to above. Dropped, it bruises. The apple is affected by the ground: its bruise is an effect of the way the density of the ground acts upon the apple. In its very capacity to be bruised, however—in the fact that it can absorb a degree of impact and retain a trace of the event in the form of a bruise—the apple is exercising a power. Now, to be sure, this exercise is predominantly passive. But it is not absolutely passive. To exist, after all, is to deploy a power, whether in more or less active or passive a form. Since the apple suffers its bruise because of the way it is acted upon from the outside, this affect is almost entirely passive. But since the apple’s own body (the density of its flesh, its size and weight) plays a role in the way it is affected, there is still some activity in the event. The apple’s capacity to be affected shapes the outcome of the event, and it is in this sense that we can call the apple active, to at least some degree. On the other hand, a predominantly active affectivity is to be found in the apple’s growth, as this kind of change flows primarily out of the apple’s own body, its own power of existing. But even here, the apple is not active absolutely: it still requires nutrients and sunlight if it is to flourish, and is therefore still reliant, to some degree, on bodies external to it. In his article on the topic, Donald Davidson writes that “it is a matter of degree how far an event can be regarded as an action

58 59

Ibid. Ibid.

or as a passion, a matter of the extent to which the causes of certain events are in us and the extent to which they are not.”60 As there are neither events the causes of which are in us (as finite modes) absolutely, nor events whose causes exist independently of us entirely (as we have seen with the apple’s bruise), power is the expression of a proportion of affectivity. Further, the proportion of affective capacities that defines a body’s essence also corresponds to the relations among the parts that constitute it. In Nadler’s terms: “Any body for Spinoza is individuated by the particular and stable ratio of motion and rest among the particles and collections of particles of matter composing it.”61 A body is, in terms of structure, defined by a set of basic kinetic relations between its parts. These parts may change, but so long as the characteristic relations among them hold, the body will persist as the body it is.62 The superiority of an animal body over a vegetative one is to be understood in terms of “that body’s greater number of kinds of parts and greater number of kinds of motion/rest relationships among those parts—in short, greater complexity.”63 Spinoza often speaks of these differences in terms of bodily capacities or affective capabilities. In other words, it is what a body can do, what it is capable of, that distinguishes it from other bodies. But in his Short Treatise on God, Man & His Wellbeing, Spinoza makes explicit the correlation between bodily complexity and capacity or aptitude. He writes that “the differences between [one body and another] arise only from the different proportions of motion and rest, by which this one is so, and not so, and this and not that.”64 As such, a body is defined by its power or aptitude, but this power is itself rooted in the complexity of the relations between the parts that constitute that body. As we have seen, for any given mode, its body will be the object of its mental perception. The mind does not, however, perceive every single change that affects its body, but rather only those changes that affect the body qualitatively, increasing or diminishing its capacity to act. Crucial to this account is Spinoza’s anti-interactionism: bodily affects do not cause mental perceptions; the two attributes (thought and body) do not interact at all. Indeed, Spinoza writes that “the body cannot determine the mind to thinking, and the mind cannot determine the body to

Davidson, “Spinoza’s Causal Theory of the Affects,” 95. Nadler, “Spinoza and Consciousness,” 587. Cf. Spinoza, Ethics, IIA2”def. 62 Cf. Ibid, IIL4. 63 Nadler, “Spinoza and Consciousness,” 588. 64 Quoted in Nadler, 588. 61

motion, to rest, or to anything else.”65 If we recall that the mind and body are two conceptions (under different attributes) of one and the same modification, then it is clear that the former cannot interact with the latter. Indeed, talk of mind and body as if they were separate or distinct things at all is mistaken. “The order of actions and passions of our body is, by nature,” for Spinoza, “at one with the order of actions and passions of the mind.”66 There is only one order, whether conceived in mental terms, under the attribute of thought, or in bodily terms, under the attribute of extension.67 So, what of bodily affect’s correlative mental order? If the body is the object of the mind, and if all bodies are defined by a proportion of affectivity, then what of consciousness? What does it mean to think? It is in Spinoza’s concept of affect that I locate his answer. Deleuze writes of affects that they “are therefore images or corporeal traces first of all […]; and their ideas involve both the nature of the affected body and that of the affecting external body.”68 In bodily terms, the apple’s bruise is a corporeal trace of the affective change it suffered in falling to the ground. In mental terms, the apple retains an image of that same affect. To be clear: there is one change, one event, one affect. Bodily, the apple retains a corporeal trace, a bruise. Mentally, the apple retains an image, an idea. We can see, then, why this is not an interactionism: it is neither the case that the apple’s bruise causes an idea of that bruise to form for the apple, nor is it the case that the apple’s mind represents its bruise ideationally. There is only one affect and the trace it leaves. It is unhelpful to speak in terms of conscious representation, for the apple’s bruise represents the affect it suffered to the same extent as its idea does. If we do not consider bodily affective changes representative of the events that cause them, then neither should we consider mental states representative of the objects they perceive. Now, the more complicated the body, the greater its capacity for retaining the corporeal image of that which affects it. The apple is, for example, capable of retaining impact in the form of a bruise. But reading it poetry will not affect in it any sort of qualitative change. And so too for thought. Just as corporeal traces are structured by a body’s affective capacities, so too are images or ideas structured by the sophistication of a given consciousness. A more complicated body will 65

Spinoza, Ethics, IIIP2. Ibid, IIIP2schol. 67 This position is often referred to as Spinoza’s “parallelism,” as if the order of ideas runs parallel to the order of bodily affects. But this is not the case. In order for two things to run parallel, there really must be two things. 68 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 48. Emphasis in original. 66

have a greater conscious capacity. It will be able to be affected by poetry: it will retain images and ideas of Shakespearean soliloquies while its heart rate fluctuates alongside turns in the drama. Thought, then, is an affective encounter. To think is to affect or to be affected. It is to perceive a change in one’s body that corresponds to an increase or diminution in its capacity to act. It is not to represent or recognize this change, but rather to think alongside it, parallel to it.69 Correlative with the bodily difference between passive and active affects, the mind, “insofar as it has adequate ideas, […] necessarily does certain things [i.e., it is active], and insofar as it has inadequate ideas, […] necessarily undergoes other things [i.e., it is passive].”70 Put simply, an active, adequate idea understands its cause. An inadequate one does not. Much like the distinction between activity and passivity, the two are bound up irreconcilably. They are the poles of a continuum, not two terms in a binary opposition. Of adequate ideas, Deleuze writes that their forms are “not sought in a psychological consciousness but in a logical power that surpasses consciousness; the material of the idea is not sought in a representative content but in an expressive content […]”.71 Adequate ideas express the ideas that cause them, which is to say that “[t]hey are not representative of states of things or of what happens to us, but of what we are and of what things are.”72 Adequate ideas are not representations of a corresponding bodily affect. Rather, they express the nature of that body such that it can be affected in a way particular to it. A body is defined by the affective capacities that correspond to the characteristic structure of its parts. Insofar as a body is active, it expresses its own nature; it suffers a relatively lower number (and intensity) of affects from the outside. The adequacy of an idea is the mental correlate of the activity of this self-expression. In Spinoza’s own words: “it is determined internally.”73 On the other hand, “the inadequate idea is like a consequence without its premises.”74 It is confused as to how it has come about, confused as to its own nature and the structure of its affective capacities. It does not express itself; rather, it symbolizes, in an unclear (and passive) way, the affects caused in it by an external body whose nature it does not know. It is, as Spinoza says, determined externally.75

Keeping in mind, of course, the danger in speaking in parallelist terms. Cf. footnote 67. Spinoza, Ethics, IIIP1. 71 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 75. 72 Ibid, 74. 73 Spinoza, Ethics, IIP29schol. 74 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 75. 75 Spinoza, Ethics, IIP13dem. 70

The apple retains a corporeal trace of its encounter with the ground in the form of a bruise. But at the same time, it retains an image of the encounter in the form of a confused idea that does not properly understand its cause. Because of the relatively uncomplicated structure of the apple’s body, most of its affects will be predominantly passive. If, however, its growth is an active affect, a change that increases its power to act, then the corresponding images or ideas will be less confused. This is perhaps why plants tend toward the sunlight, because they are capable of less confused images (and therefore a more conatively beneficial level of activity) than are things like apples. It is, however, unhelpful to speak as if the plants know to do so, because these ideas will still be, for the most part, inadequate and confused. Their affects are still predominantly passive. But as bodies become more complicated, as their capacities for action increase, their ideas become clearer, more adequate. Higher animals, for example, know to seek certain things to eat. They learn the causes for those affects that increase their powers: they learn, for example, that water hydrates. Similarly, they learn to avoid those things that ultimately diminish their activity. Further, the passage from activity to passivity, adequacy to inadequacy, of the order of images or ideas (and its correlative order of bodily affects) will correspond, for Spinoza, to a feeling: a degree of joy or sadness. “The passage to a greater perfection, or the increase of the power of acting, is called an affect, or feeling, of joy.”76 Similarly, its opposite, the passage to a lesser perfection or a decrease in activity, corresponds to a feeling of sadness. We begin to get a sense for how rich the concept of affect is: a body’s capacity to act increases or diminishes, the mind perceives (whether clearly or not) and forms an image or idea (whether adequate or not) of its cause, and this whole movement corresponds to a feeling of joy or sadness.77 What it means to think is precisely this: to perceive an affect, a change, a difference—to some degree of adequacy or clarity. Now, the image of this affect will involve the nature of the affected body, as well as the body that affects it. Indeed, “it is certain,” Deleuze writes, “that the affect implies an image or idea, and follows from the latter as from its cause.”78 The affect, the change in the body’s capacity to act,

Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 50. Emphasis in original. While it may sound at first counterintuitive to speak of the apple’s feeling of sadness, it must be kept in mind that the apple can be said to “feel” to the extent that it can be said to “think”—which is to say, minimally. In this respect, Spinoza’s panpsychism is equally a panaffectivity. 78 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 49. 77

follows as much from the external body that causes it as it does from the idea it implies. Again, this is a reiteration of the fact that consciousness does not consist (solely or necessarily) in phenomenal representations. The mind does not represent a change in the body to itself, after the fact. Instead, in Deleuze’s terms, joy follows from the adequacy of an idea as much as the adequacy of an idea is implied by an active expression of affect. Since any of our adequate ideas will express our own natures, Deleuze writes that “we do not have an adequate idea without being ourselves the adequate cause of the feelings that result, and that consequently are active.” 79 These changes are all different ways of speaking of the singular difference in a mode as it suffers or expresses a given affect. So, a body encounters a body external to it. It suffers an affect. Its idea or image of this affect is confused as to its cause; it is inadequate. Its power to act is diminished. It is sad. Affectivity is an encounter with that which forces a body to act or subjects it to a diminution in its capacity to do so. In the same way, thought is an encounter with that which forces it to think. To reiterate, in a given movement of affectivity, there is but a single event: a qualitative change in the mode. Bodily, this means its capacity to act is either increased or diminished. Mentally, this means it retains traces or images of those affections whose adequacy corresponds with the body’s activity of affect. It is enlivened and feels joy, or diminished and feels sadness. These images are not necessarily representative or recognitive of the body’s changes. Rather, they just are the body’s changes, conceived in a different way, under a different attribute. This is Spinoza’s panpsychism. By tying thought to affect in this way, Spinoza reconceives what it means to think. Thought becomes a correlate of affective capacities, the product of an affective encounter. Since all bodies are animate, since they all deploy a power or capacity to affect and to be affected in ways specific to their characteristic structures, they are all conscious—albeit only to a degree correlative to the complexities of their bodies, just as they are active or powerful to a degree corresponding to their affective capacities. This is a thought without image. Thought no longer consists (solely or necessarily) in representation. It does not share a natural affinity with adequacy. 80 Further, the movement of thinking no longer involves a harmony of faculties that focus on recognizing an object external to them. Indeed, the mind perceives only its body. It does not focus its faculties on

79 80

Ibid, 76. Cf. Spinoza, Ethics, IIP24-31.

an external object at all. Precisely the opposite: the mind conceives only its own body’s capacity to act and the affects through which this capacity is altered. Granted, through this self-conception, the mind is capable (perhaps at a certain level of a correlative neurological complexity) of producing images of external things. But this is no longer the sole function of what it means to think.81 In a recent paper on Deleuze’s image of thought, Scott Balasak writes: This view rejects the idea that thought’s main function is to represent objects in the world for recognition. Instead, thought is understood as a nonrepresentational activity that is not structured in advance, or encumbered by what it already means to represent something. […] Thought is creative, not representative.82 Thought is not, as we have seen, an after-the-fact. It is not a photocopy or representation. To a degree correlative with the activity of its body, thought is active. Indeed, Spinoza prefers to speak of mental activity in terms of conception rather than those of perception for precisely the reason that “concept seems to express an action of the mind.” 83 It is this dimension of Spinoza’s panpsychic account of what it means to think that I have sought to highlight. As we have seen, Garrett’s interpretation falls some length short of an adequate interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of consciousness. It continues to work within the confines of the image of thought, and, as such, it is incapable of appreciating fully what it means, for Spinoza, to think. Nadler’s account takes us closer to the affective approach I have ventured to outline above. But it does not do enough to concretize what it means for a mode’s degree of consciousness to reflect the complexity of its body. It is, as I have argued, in terms of the body’s capacity for affect that we can understand its correlative conscious ability. Understood on the basis of the encounter, Spinoza’s theory of consciousness subverts the image of thought and changes what it means to think. Deleuze is wont to invoke the fact that we do not yet know what a body can do. 84 In much the same way, freed from the restrictions of its traditional image, made to subvert the conservatism within which it is supposed to operate, it seems to me that we do not yet know what thought can think.

Indeed, Spinoza is quick to claim that the imagination “[does] not [necessarily] reproduce the [NS: external] figures of things” (IIP17schol.). 82 Balasak, “Deleuze, The Image of Thought, and Virtue Ethics,” 8. 83 Spinoza, Ethics, IID3exp. Emphasis in original. 84 Cf. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 218.

Works Cited Balasak, Scott. “Deleuze, The Image of Thought, and Virtue Ethics.” Unpublished manuscript, 2011. Referenced with permission from the author. Accessed November 20, 2013. http://www.academia.edu/423940/Deleuze_The_Image_of_Thought_and_Virtue_Ethics Bryant, Levi. Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2008. Davidson, Donald. “Spinoza’s Causal Theory of the Affects.” In Desire and Affect: Spinoza as Psychologist. Ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel. New York: Little Room Press, 1999. 95-111. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. --- . Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Zone, 1990. --- . Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988. Della Rocca, Michael. Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Garrett, Don. “Representation and Consciousness in Spinoza’s Naturalistic Theory of the Imagination.” Interpreting Spinoza. Ed. Charlie Huenemann. New York: Cambridge UP, 2008. 4-25. LeBuffe, Michael. “Theories about Consciousness in Spinoza’s Ethics.” Philosophical Review, Vol. 19, Number 4: 531-563. 2010. Nadler, Steven. “Spinoza and Consciousness.” Mind, 117.467 (2008): 575-601. Spinoza, Benedictus De. A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994. Wilson, Margaret. “Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge.” In The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Ed. Don Garrett, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 89-141.

Words in the Wallpaper: A Critical Reflection on Madness and Literature Claris Figueira

Abstract: This paper examines a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which narrates a female writer’s descent into madness. I aim to explore the complex relationship between literature and madness that appears in her story. To do so, I examine Michel Foucault’s work History of Madness and a polemic between Foucault and Jacques Derrida that emerged in the wake of its publication. Derrida questions Foucault’s attempt to write a history of madness, claiming that madness is the very thing which language, as a structure that embodies reason, cannot grasp. Yet is there a way that transgressive language can subvert this seemingly stable correspondence between reason and language, particularly through a work of literature such as Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper”?

Introduction This essay is concerned with the relationship between language and madness, and the possibility of gaining access to madness through literature. I begin with Michel Foucault’s early work History of Madness, and examine the polemic between Foucault and Derrida that followed its publication. Although their debate brings up many interesting questions, I will focus mainly on the issue of language. In History of Madness, Foucault claims that through a process of historical conceptions and structures by which madness was understood and addressed, it came to be silenced by classical reason. This silence made possible the language of psychiatry, “which is a monologue by reason about madness” (Foucault, xxviii 1 ). In History of Madness, Foucault attempted an “archaeology of that silence” (Foucault, xxviii) in order to avoid what he saw as the imperial or dominating language of Western reason, which silences and suppresses madness in order to know it and speak about it. However, he writes: “in that simple problem of elocution, the greatest difficulty that faced the enterprise hid and expressed itself” (Foucault, xxxv). Foucault faced the challenge of writing a history of madness, figured as that which has been silenced by the language of Western reason, without silencing it again with the same language. Derrida’s criticism in “Cogito and the History of Madness” addresses this paradox, arguing that Foucault cannot put

The original preface is the clearest articulation of the conceptual issues in History of Madness, and Derrida largely bases his general criticism of Foucault’s project on this preface.

Western reason on trial since “by the simple fact of their articulation the proceedings and the verdicts ceaselessly reiterate the crime [….] Order is then denounced within order” (Derrida, 35). “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre” can be read as one of Foucault’s several responses to some of the methodological problems raised by Derrida’s critique. This idea of madness as the absence of an oeuvre first appears in relation to artists such as Artaud and Van Gogh at the end of History of Madness. For Foucault, the works of these artists seem to establish a connection (or perhaps confrontation) between madness and reason in which reason does not automatically triumph. The works of these artists express the tension between madness and an oeuvre, in the sense that their work both emerges from their madness and at once separates them from it. Foucault insists that where there is an oeuvre there is no madness. In the final pages of History of Madness, Foucault suggests these works are able to provoke or unsettle Western reason. Where the world of reason typically measures and justifies madness, when faced with these works the inverse occurs: reason is forced to “justify itself when confronted by madness” (Foucault, History of Madness, 2009a, 538). With reference to “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre,” I will examine further this element of Foucault’s work, and ask what kind of potential literature has to blur the line between reason and madness. I will analyze Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” in light of these considerations, a story that addresses language, literature, and madness in a fascinating way. I will argue that her work illustrates how literature might challenge the dominion of reason—even if, as Derrida writes, “one can protest it only from within it” (Derrida, 36). In this story, Gilman explores the limits of language at the edge of madness, and manages to destabilize the walls of reason within which she is confined.

History of Madness History of Madness was published in 1961, and was Foucault’s first major book; his subsequent writing and thought departed in many ways from this early work. Nevertheless, History of Madness belongs to Foucault’s general project in that he attempted to examine Western culture not on the basis of what it says it is, but on the basis of what it excludes. In History of Madness, he does this by examining changing conceptions of madness in the Renaissance, Classical age, and Modern age. He traces the way that madness appears in art and culture, as well as the way that madness was physically dealt with, from the ships of fools of the Renaissance to the psychiatric

asylums of modernity. Changes in the way madness was institutionalized were expressions of conceptual shifts, which provided justification for a certain reaction to madness. For example, madness seen as a moral fault was put in prison, whereas madness understood as sickness was put in hospital. These changing conceptions and institutions are not seen as coherent sections of history, but as overlapping movements. Thus old conceptions of madness continue to be at play even when the understanding of madness seems to have shifted—for example, madness is still treated as a moral fault in the psychiatric hospital, though the original institution establishing it as such may have changed. Essentially, Foucault wanted to show that madness had no final, fixed reality, but that it was a shifting entity, constructed through the systems by which societies variously exiled, imprisoned, liberated, studied, or reviled it. In doing this, he aimed to show how our conception of madness as mental illness became possible. Central to his book and his claim that madness is the absence of an oeuvre is his argument that in the Classical experience of madness (during the 17th and 18th centuries) there is a rupture in the dialogue between madness and reason. This rupture initiates the transformation of the mad person into an entity about whom the truth could be known, culminating in modern psychiatry. In this formulation, the truth about madness can be known and expressed— but not by the madman. This is in contrast to other historical interpretations of the madman, sometimes as a possessor of divine truth or as providing insight into the truth of the human condition. Foucault argues that this rupture was instigated in part by the great confinement, during which people seen as socially deviant were rounded up and interned in institutions such as the Hôpital Général, subjected to moral and religious control, and made to work. Social deviance was linked to the failure to work and to participate in the world of production; those confined were indiscriminately criminals, vagabonds, the mad, and the unemployed. Essentially in the great confinement those considered ‘abnormal’ were excluded from the ‘normal’ social world. This rupture made possible the silencing of madness and its capture by knowledge and also strengthened the association of madness with criminality and moral fault. The silencing of madness in the Classical age made possible the later emergence of psychiatric language, and with it a certain way of knowing madness. Foucault’s concern is that our understanding of madness has emerged from only one side of this rupture, that of reason and language. As he writes in his preface, his intention in History of

Madness “was not to write the history of that language, but rather to draw up the archaeology of that silence” (Foucault, xxviii). Foucault’s desire to do the archaeology of the silence of madness brings us to the central methodological problem of History of Madness, with which Derrida’s criticism is concerned. Derrida argues that Foucault’s attempt to write a history of madness “by letting madness speak for itself” (Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” 33) is a contradiction. Derrida writes: To say madness without expelling it into objectivity is to let it say itself. But madness is what by essence cannot be said: it is the “absence of the work,” as Foucault profoundly says (Derrida, 43).

Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre Foucault’s claim that madness is the absence of an oeuvre is present in several ways throughout History of Madness. Seferin James (“Derrida, Foucault, and “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre,”” 2011) outlines three meanings of the absence of an oeuvre as it relates to madness. First, madness is connected with the absence of work in the sense that the mad were characterized by their inability to work and produce things in the workshops of the great confinement. Secondly, it refers to “the absence of a body of work representing madness as madness” (James, 386). This is due to the division (which Foucault claims occurs at the point of the Classical age and the great confinement) by which the discourse of the mad and the discourse of reason decisively split, and madness was silenced by reason. Thus the challenge is to find a language that does not derive from this division, what Foucault somewhat vaguely calls “a language without support” (Foucault, xxxv). This is part of Derrida’s contention in “Cogito and the History of Madness.” He writes that this language would need to be “a language declining, in principle if not in fact, to articulate itself along the lines of the syntax of reason. In principle if not in fact, but here the fact cannot easily be put between parenthesis” (Derrida, 37). Essentially, Derrida argues that Foucault cannot escape his participation in the reasonable language with which he constructs his work simply by noting it. Equally, for Derrida, Foucault’s claim that he is doing not a history but an archaeology does not solve the problem; as he writes, “is not an archaeology, even of silence, a logic, that is, an organized language, a project, an order, a sentence, a syntax, a work?” (Derrida, 35). If Foucault

argues that madness is silent, it must be what cannot tell its history. The danger of trying to write this history, then, as Foucault notes in his preface, is that “any perception that aims to apprehend [the mad] in their wild state necessarily belongs to a world that has captured them already” (Foucault, xxxii). In this sense the attempt to tell the history of the mad risks becoming a kind of subtle and insidious violence enacted on the other. Perhaps Derrida’s most crushing accusation is that Foucault’s project might in fact “be the most efficacious and subtle restoration, the repetition, […] of the act perpetrated against madness—and be so at the very moment when this act is denounced” (Derrida, 35). This issue with language ties into the third sense of the absence of an oeuvre, as “that which makes history possible” (James, 385). Foucault is explicit about this in his original preface: The necessity of madness throughout the history of the West is linked to that decisive action that extracts a significant language from the background noise and its continuous monotony, a language which is transmitted and culminates in time: it is, in short, linked to the possibility of history (Foucault, xxii, emphases in original). Derrida’s argument rests on the notion that language, as language, is already an exclusion of madness, and that this is not a single event, as Foucault claims, but “an essential and universal necessity from which no discourse can escape, for it belongs to the meaning of meaning” (Derrida, 53). It is not a historical moment, but the difference between meaning and nonsense; as such, it is the condition of historicity itself. If this division between meaning and non-meaning is linked to the possibility of history as Foucault claims, then “what does it mean, here, ‘to write the history of this division?’ To write the history of historicity?” (Derrida, 43). For Derrida, this is simply a paradox. If the possibility of history is linked to the extraction of a significant language, then the mad noise it effaces is “not a determined silence, imposed at one given moment rather than at any other, but a silence essentially linked to an act of force and a prohibition which open history and speech” (Derrida, 54). That is, it is not a pre-historical condition or a moment in time but a constantly repeated necessity. For Derrida, the division Foucault associates with the Classical age and Descartes, as the philosophical counterpart of the great confinement, is just one example of a continuing condition of history and language. This disagreement is at the heart of their different readings of Descartes. While Foucault sees an exclusion of madness linked with Descartes, Derrida claims that madness is not excluded at all in the Meditations. Far from excluding the madman, he writes, “the Cogito escapes madness only

because at its own moment, under its own authority, it is valid even if I am mad” (Derrida, 55). In this sense, Derrida considers madness internal to the truth of being that Descartes offers. For Foucault, Descartes is the conceptual sign of the wider cultural process of the great confinement, in that Descartes excludes the possibility of madness from his meditations and thus from the cogito. For Descartes, Foucault argues, one “cannot suppose that one is mad, even in thought, for madness is precisely a condition of impossibility for thought” (Foucault, 2009a, 45). The exercise of Reason has banished madness: “while man can still go mad, thought, as the sovereign exercise carried out by a subject seeking the truth, can no longer be devoid of reason” (Foucault, 2009a, 47, emphases in original). Derrida argues that Foucault misreads Descartes, and that madness is not excluded from the cogito, but that it is included in the more universal hypothesis of dreams and then in the ‘hyperbole’ of the evil genius.2 Madness is not excluded before Descartes reaches the cogito, Derrida argues: the cogito is true even if I am mad. It is rather in the incapacity to communicate the truth of the cogito to another—even if that other is myself—that Derrida situates madness; the capacity to communicate clear and distinct thought through language protects one from madness. Derrida writes, “it is through this relationship to the other as an other self that meaning reassures itself against madness and nonmeaning” (Derrida, 59). According to Derrida, if Descartes’ method of radical doubt provokes no real anxiety or disturbance, it is because he conducts his entire exercise within a shared language. The threat of madness is preemptively neutralized by his act of communication (even if it is merely to himself)—his use of words that carry normality within them: “In its most impoverished syntax, logos is reason, and, indeed, a historical reason” (Derrida, 54). As long as Descartes is within language, he excludes the meaninglessness of madness and is defended against it: “through his own language, he reassures himself against any actual madness” (Derrida, 54). From this point of view, any attempt to speak beyond reason while using language is impossible. Madness is figured as a failure of communication, or more directly, as the very point at which language fails.

Derrida’s attack on Foucault’s reading is extremely detailed, and a large part of his criticism centers around the difference between the Latin version of the Meditations and its French translation. Foucault responded specifically to Derrida’s textual criticism in “My Body, this paper, this fire” and “Reply to Derrida (‘Michel Foucault Derrida e no kaino’).” In both, he scathingly and effectively counters Derrida’s argument. 2

Part of Foucault’s response to Derrida’s argument is that the Meditations do not only form a set of propositions but also an exercise “by which each reader must be affected” (Foucault, “My body, this paper, this fire,” 2009c, 406). This is a fascinating point: Foucault argues that Derrida simply reads a set of propositions and forgets that this is a meditation, a process of doubt in which the reader is implicated. Thus, for Foucault, madness is excluded in part because Descartes cannot both seriously entertain madness and persist in his search for truth: it would disqualify the subject, and hence poses too much of a risk. I think this is an important distinction between the two thinkers. Where Derrida sees language as a shield against madness, for Foucault there is the possibility of the reader being implicated and affected by the exercise of reading in a potentially dangerous way.

The Possibility of Literature The main problem with Foucault’s text is that by claiming that madness is silence or the absence of an oeuvre through a historical division, Foucault makes his own project impossible. In other words he (ironically) finds himself on the wrong side of an impassable void of silence that he himself claimed had been instituted by classical reason. However, in 1964, after History of Madness, Foucault wrote “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre,” which can be read as one of several responses to Derrida’s criticism (James, 2011), and which resituated his approach toward madness, language, and literature in certain ways. Importantly, he no longer describes madness as totally silent, but claims that, with Freud, it came to be understood as a certain kind of language transgression. In light of this, it is worth questioning whether transgressive language—that is, disordered or contorted language—can subvert this absolute dominion of reason. In “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre,” Foucault lists four such language prohibitions and transgressions, linked with historical periods: language faults, in the sense of grammatical error; forbidden or blasphemous words; statements whose meaning is intolerable to the community; and finally, a form which is “transgressive, not in its meaning, not in its verbal matter, but in its play” (Foucault, “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre,” 2009b, 544). This fourth form emerged with Freud, when madness “appeared as speech wrapped up in itself, saying, below everything that it says, something else, for which it is at the same time the only possible code” (Foucault, 2009b, 546). It is a non-language because its words have doubled over on themselves: “its language is contained inside a speech that ultimately says nothing other than this implication” (Foucault,

2009b, 546). In other words, it is a language that implies nothing other than its own non-language, its madness. Foucault then draws an interesting parallel between this experience of madness and literature. He describes a movement in literature that he thinks began around the close of the 19th century (since Mallarmé) where writing had become “a speech that inscribed inside itself the principle of its own decoding” (Foucault, 2009b, 547). Rather than solely aiming to establish speech in language so that it was cohesive with the language in which it operated, literature supposed “the power to modify the values and meanings of the language to which despite everything (and in fact) it belonged; it suspended the reign of language in the present of a gesture of writing” (Foucault, 2009b, 548). This transgressive gesture in writing, in which language is closed in on itself, seems to mimic the transgression of madness in its refusal to communicate meaning. Foucault also claims that the language of literature has a being beyond what it says and the structures that make it signify.3 In “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre,” he writes that this being, at present, is something “related to auto-implication, to the double and void that is hollowed out within it,” and it is in this sense that literature “attains the region where, since Freud, the experience of madness has been enacted” (Foucault, 2009b, 548). In this shift from madness as silence to madness as excluded or encoded language, it seems that madness becomes accessible in a different manner. Yet Foucault also cautions that while there is a “strange proximity between madness and literature” it “must not be interpreted as a psychological kinship that has been laid bare at last” (Foucault, 2009b, 548). Foucault still clearly asserts that a work and madness are incompatible. Madness cannot be an oeuvre, but rather “designates the empty form from which such an oeuvre comes” (Foucault, 548). The two are at once mutually exclusive and yet strangely linked, derived only against, or in light of, each other. “Madness is the absolute rupture of the oeuvre […] it delineates the outer limit, the line of its collapse, its outline against the void” (Foucault, 2009a, 536). Like Derrida, Foucault also seems to think that a work can be something like the last defense of reason against meaninglessness, words thrown up against the threatening absence of language. Yet, for Derrida, all language, even and

Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside (1966), in which Foucault writes about Maurice Blanchot’s work, explores this notion of the being of language more thoroughly. 3

especially at the brink of madness, functions as a tighter incarceration of it; for Foucault, this is not necessarily the case. Foucault writes: When it enters another region of excluded language (one that is circumscribed, held sacred, feared, erected vertically above itself, reflecting itself in a useless and transgressive Fold, and is known as literature) madness releases itself from its kinship […] with mental illness (Foucault, 2009b, 549). In this sense, it appears that literature engenders an escape of sorts, in which madness is not immediately subject to the same interpretative framework as that of mental illness. For Foucault, psychiatry relies on a silencing of madness in order to objectively know it, to categorize and diagnose it as mental illness. Where psychiatry questions madness, the works of literature that Foucault is interested in question reason, not by opposing it directly but precisely through their proximity, their familiarity. He asks: why had Western culture “accepted the words of Nerval and Artaud, and recognized itself in their words but not in them?” (Foucault, 2009a, 542). In other words, there seems to be a point of communication in literature, in the work of these artists, that is silenced by the psychiatric designation of these men as mentally ill. Furthermore, where psychiatry defines the subject by finer and finer classifications, literature implicates the reader in an uncertain subjectivity where the divisions between real and imaginary, narrator and author, reader and character, are somewhat blurred. Essentially, in literature we find a different and more ambiguous relation to madness, where the lines are not so sharply drawn as they are in psychiatric language about mental illness.

The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” explores this proximity between madness and literature in a remarkable way. Published in 1892, “The Yellow Wallpaper” chronicles a woman’s experience with a ‘nervous condition’ and the rest cure that exacerbated it. “The Yellow Wallpaper” was semi-autobiographical; Gilman herself had suffered from depression and was prescribed the same cure of rest and inactivity that the narrator of her story, a writer named Jane, undergoes. In the story, Jane is brought to a remote estate by her husband, who is also her physician, and interned in an old nursery to rest and recover. She is forbidden to engage in any activity, including writing. In spite of this, she does write, and through her narration we follow her

declining mental state as she becomes intensely fixated on the wallpaper in her room. The story culminates in a delusional episode in which Jane tears the wallpaper off the wall to release the woman she believes is trapped behind it. Gilman’s story is often heralded as a feminist social critique that was remarkable for its time; certainly it is a decrial of the patriarchal society that confines figures of otherness, here embodied by Jane—the unreasonable or hysterical woman—to silence and non-participation. In this sense, her story could be seen as part of a marginalized history, the voice of a figure who is ‘other’ by virtue of both her madness and her gender. Yet I think that her work also addresses the subtler problem of writing literature, and the strange proximity of language to madness. In this sense, it correlates with Foucault’s concerns in an interesting way, particularly through the destabilization of the subject and the strange double dimension of the wallpaper that undoes her narrator, Jane. Narrated by a writer who is forbidden to write and yet who feels that work improves her condition, the story is clearly concerned with writing, as both danger and potential cure. 4 The writing is transgressive, both since Jane is prohibited from writing, and because of the style and structure of the writing itself. The multiplying of doubles, the confusion of fiction and autobiography, and a narrative structure that seems to lose grip and change voices by the end of the story, all serve to confuse and confound an easy and comprehensive conclusion. Language, Derrida argues, is the communication of meaning. Yet here meaning is not apparent, despite language; rather, it seems to have played a trick on us. While the story is comprehensible, it is not reassuring; the end of the story, far from furnishing a safe return to one’s own identity, leaves the reader jerkily stranded in a double (who is perhaps the double of the author’s double) obsessively circling the playroom over her husband/physician who has fainted on the floor, and with no apparent intention of exiting through the now open door. From the outset of the story, Jane’s confinement functions as both a physical and psychic entrapment. We can think of the house as the epitome of social order, symbolizing structure and confinement; Jane is trapped in the societal conventions of her femininity, her nervous condition, and her marriage. Yet, to think in line with Foucault, subjection is also a productive process, and

It is interesting to note that both in the story and in “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper,” a short piece Gilman published in 1913, she emphasizes her work as crucial to her recovery. This correlates very strongly with Foucault’s insistence that where there is an oeuvre there is no madness. 4

identity depends in many ways on the structures that confine it (Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 61). In this sense, Jane cannot simply will to be outside of the structure she is in, and cannot literally or psychically jump out the window: as she says, “the bars are too strong to even try. Besides I wouldn’t do it” (Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” 19). In this sense, hers is not simply an external confinement, but an internal one, a confinement within will. Trapped in the playroom, Jane attempts to decipher the confused and illegible scrawl of symbols on the wallpaper that conceals the interior walls of the house, trying to “follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion” (Gilman, 10). Her frustration stems from her inability to uncover meaning in the inconsistent looping designs in the wallpaper, as she tries to uncover a pattern that it seems to promise and yet fails to provide. I would argue that the wallpaper with which Jane is so concerned is meant to depict language, in all its ambiguity. If we take up this interpretation, we have the superimposition of language over the walls of social structure that interns her, yet which can be pulled loose in certain places. Over time, as Jane stares at the wallpaper, she begins to see a “provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (Gilman, 9). Finding that this figure is clearer at night, Jane becomes increasingly nocturnal, drawn into a world in which the underlying image, of an obscure figure beneath the wallpaper, dominates. Whereas by “daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind” (Gilman, 13), by night the outside pattern transforms into bars, imprisoning the increasingly clear figure of a woman. Jane wonders whether these two patterns move together or separately, and whether the top one can be removed from the bottom. This gathers urgency until at last she rips away the wallpaper, releasing the woman from which the pattern had divided her. Jane attacks the wallpaper not to get at the walls that confine her, but to release the shadowy other lurking between the solidity of the wall and the complex scrawling symbols that mask its blankness. Derrida argues that language makes the cleanest break with madness “if it pits itself against madness more freely and gets closer and closer to it: to the point of being separated from it only by the “transparent sheet” of which Joyce speaks, that is by itself” (Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” 55). The moment Jane tears away the thin sheet of wallpaper separating her and the silent other woman, the thin mess of linguistic symbols dividing madness and sanity, we lose the writer Jane, who had been narrating the story up to this point. Yet we are carried just

past this line and implicated in the uncertainty that follows, which is what makes the story so unsettling. Suddenly, Jane is taken over by her own double: turning to her husband, she says “‘I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’” (Gilman, 20). Who is this “I,” this nameless woman who has suddenly claimed the right to speak? ‘It’ says nothing other than this single line, a voice that speaks only to destabilize its own identity, occupying the narrator’s voice only to vocalize its own ambiguity and its escape. In speaking, it has another effect: it causes Jane’s reasonable, and prototypically reasonable, husband to faint in the doorway. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” of course, has another protective layer; Derrida might argue that it is insulated by the last ‘transparent sheet’ of the story itself, which divides the reader from this strange figure that emerges so uncannily from the wallpaper. Nevertheless, Gilman’s story brings us to the thin brink of language, where it is broken down and overcome by a strange and ambiguous figure lurking within it. What are we to make of this image? Language at its surface level, seen by daylight (or the light of reason) appears finite, if flawed: a pattern that one might decipher with enough effort, as Jane tries to do. Yet, as she stares at it for longer and longer, she begins to see what moves beneath it, which is not pattern but possibility—the uncertain implications of shadows, possible but indeterminate meanings, what might be said, an uncontrolled and unending flow of language. As Foucault writes elsewhere: [M]adness appeared, not as the ruse of a hidden meaning, but as a prodigious reserve of meaning. But ‘reserve’ here should be understood less as a stock than as a figure that contains and suspends meaning, which furnishes a void where all that is proposed is the still-unaccomplished possibility that certain meaning might appear there, or a second, or a third, and so on to infinity (Foucault, 2009b, 547). In this sense we could understand the figure as non-meaning, not as the opposite or contrary of meaning but precisely as its possibility, its excess: almost as if the wallpaper (language) is the attempt to cover the absence of a wall. The external pattern appears as positive or certain only in the form of limit, as bars; not, as it turns out, imprisoning the madness within us through the instrumental application of grammatically ordered thought, but masking us and barring us from its other side, where language is undone by the disorder and threat of its own infinite possibility. With Jane’s help, this other side of language eventually emerges, only to undermine the story itself. At this point, when the bars

have been torn away, the story can no longer be narrated. The now hollowed-out narrator is left in a self-referential gesture of cyclicality, inside a double that will not move forward or outside of itself. Yet despite this stagnancy we have no sense that the story ends or concludes, exactly— rather, it has somehow swallowed itself. This seems to relate closely to what Foucault hoped literature might do through the movement of doubling and auto-implication he describes. Not that it could tell the untellable history of the other, but that in its play, as it haunts the walls of the seemingly impenetrable house of Reason, the proximity of madness might be felt; not as the contrary of language, but as the void of non-meaning that both underlies and undoes it. Thus the play of literature might wake Reason from its self-assuredness and bring it into an awareness of its close and uneasy relation to that which it most vehemently excludes; perhaps, as Gilman does, that it might make Reason faint.

Works Cited Derrida, Jacques. “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass. New York: Routledge, 2009. pp. 36-76. Foucault, Michel. History of Madness, edited by Jean Khalfa, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. New York: Routledge, 2009a. --- . “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre.” Appendix I of History of Madness, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, 544-549. New York: Routledge, 2009b. --- . “My body, this paper, this fire.” Appendix II of History of Madness, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, 551-574. New York: Routledge, 2009c. --- . “Truth and Power.” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Random House Inc., 1984. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” New York: Modern Library, 2000: 3-20. --- . “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper.” The Forerunner (1913). Stable URL: http://csivc.csi.cuny.edu/history/files/lavender/whyyw.html James, Seferin. “Derrida, Foucault, and “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre.”” Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy 3 (2011) 379-403. Metajournal. Web. 12 Nov. 2013.