Michael Kosok

[Balder]

I recently learned about the work of Michael Kosok (via a discussion in Bonnie's Magellan course).  I've only cursorily reviewed his website this morning, but his work certainly looks worth a gander.  He touches on a good number of themes that we have explored on this forum (intersubjectivity, paradox, embodiment, the myth/metaphysics of identity, quantum theory, post-Marxist social theory, etc).  Given the nature and scope of his work, and the early date of his writings (some of this stuff dates back to 1975), I'm surprised I haven't come across references to him in Wilber's writings (that I recall).

 

The New Dialectics (Introduction)

 

 

[Balder]

In the context of my relationship with you, yes, I also see me-and-you as inseparably and mutually arising (and co-influencing), but I can certainly imagine that you can and do have an experience of yourself -- a me-sense, or multiple me-senses -- quite apart from me, which arise inseparably in/with other relationships and contexts about which I know nothing.  I also imagine but do not know for sure that you are probably sitting at a desk somewhere typing, and thus have an existence which transcends and exceeds my direct knowledge or sensory reach; I imagine that I am not conversing with an entirely self-generated apparition, in other words.  Similarly, while I agree that it is difficult and perhaps simply impossible to account for regularities in relationship unambiguously, and do not imagine you to be an isolated, self-existent little atom or unit of being apart from all relationship, I admit that I also automatically presuppose that "you" are not simply coterminous with my present knowledge of you.  If I believed you were, then the notions of "getting to know you" or "coming to an understanding with you" would be meaningless to me, and I wouldn't bother trying to communicate; I would presuppose that there is nothing else to know of you beyond that which I already know.  In other words, it seems communicative acts and relationships presuppose a je ne sais quoi that exceeds present/immediate apprehension -- at the least, a potential for unique and surprising contact or unfolding that transcends whatever I myself "bring" to that whole-moment of our meeting. 

[Balder]

If I'm humourous around Joe, is that humourousness "me"?

I could answer that both "yes" and "no," and wouldn't want to say one without the other.  The humorousness is not "you," or a "you property," if by you or you-property we mean some permanent or independent self-abiding thing or entity quite apart from Joe and everything else.  But the humorousness is not "Joe" either.  It is Joe-and-you.  But it is not just Joe-and-you, in that both Joe and you are, together and apart, interwoven contextually with boundless other relations.  But it also is not simply reducible to those "background" relations (ancestors, formative relations, genetics, culture, etc).  It is a boundlessly "resourced" newly whole-arising event that simultaneously has a unique, irreducible particularity which I am comfortable colloquially addressing as "you."

[Balder]

Are you referring to my first or second post?  If the first, does the second help clarify it?  (No, I am not referring to an uncontexted/non-relational thing-in-itself).

[Balder]

For me, there is no particularity-in-itself.  Particularity requires difference, or in other words relation, to appear.  Difference, in that sense, *is* relation.  Otherwise there'd be no difference.

Well said.  I agree with this.

I also regard the notion of an isolated thing-in-itself untenable.  In what I was writing above, I was trying to explore my sympathy with one of Bhaskar's contentions -- that we do act as if our immediate perceptions are not the end of the story, with regard to people or really anything else we interact with -- without my actually taking the particular metaphysical step of positing a non-related thing-in-itself.  But if we identify the "real" only ever with what is immediately present in an experimental situation or experience, then it does seem hard to account for this sense of "more yet to know about this or that" that informs our projects, relationships, and modes of interaction in the world. 

I'm trying to feel around for a way to explore this intuited "depth" or "more" to particulars that does not involve thing-in-itself thinking.  One way I tried to do that, in a recent discussion with Ed, was to appeal to one of Joel's notions, the paradoxical claim that infinite divisibility = indivisibility.  In OOO-related thought, there is the Latourian claim that everything is absolutely particular and thus irreducible to anything else.  Rather than holding that this irreducible particularity is related to island-like thing-in-itselfness (wholly withdrawn from all relationship), my suggestion was to hold reducibility and irreducibility at once, where each particular is (as Bortoft says) the unique and particular bodying forth of the whole, and thus each particular is infinitely reducible (there's no end to the relational lines we can trace out), which (following Joel's principle) is the same as saying that it is irreducible.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Rather than holding that this irreducible particularity is related to island-like thing-in-itselfness (wholly withdrawn from all relationship), my suggestion was to hold reducibility and irreducibility at once, where each particular is (as Bortoft says) the unique and particular bodying forth of the whole, and thus each particular is infinitely reducible (there's no end to the relational lines we can trace out), which (following Joel's principle) is the same as saying that it is irreducible.

I understand now what you meant earlier and something like this is what I ineptly struggled to say. Thanks for the recent clarifications.

[Balder]

The scandal of particularity ...


That is originally a theological term (the scandal of Jesus being the Only Way), a term to which I was at once quite resistant.  But I like it in this context.


Tom:  Also for me, particularity expresses the discontinuous aspect of the continuity/discontinuity dual.  Your world, your being, is discontinuous to mine.  There is no overlap in real particularity.  And somehow, two particulars, each with his or her own, private, singular consciousness-screen, interact in what they feel is a common space.


Ah, yes ... this voices what I was intuiting, and wanting to take up with you:  that there is a "quantum" way, so to speak, to interpret or render the intuition of incommensurability -- of the non-overlapping singularity and privacy of particulars -- that I believe OOO is attempting to address, without having to invoke thing-thinking.


Theurj:  I understand now what you meant earlier and something like this is what I ineptly struggled to say. Thanks for the recent clarifications.


I in no way regarded your posts in our previous exchange about this as inept, but I'm glad these more recent posts of mine were clarifying.

[Balder]

Are you comparing the relationship between people (or other things, like fruits or tools) to the relationship between polar opposites like black/white or particle/wave?

[Balder]

Yes, as we discussed on the Machine thread, I agree with you about the difference between organisms and tools (artifacts).  I was asking my question because, in your earlier post, you had described people in terms of discontinuity, singularity, particularity, non-overlappingness (while still being able to "interact in what they feel is a common space"), and I was wondering if you viewed person-to-person relationship (or any particular-to-particular relationship) as akin to the relationship between polar opposites, since you appealed to the latter in your second post.

[Balder]

Good, thanks for the clarification.  I agree that the relationship of particulars to each other would be a different kind of relation, at least in important respects, than the relation of two duals.  If you look back at our conversation, you had been talking about people as particular/non-overlapping but appearing to meet in shared space, and I had observed that this might be a "quantum" way of honoring a notion important to OOO philosophers -- the privacy, singularity, and irreducible particularity of objects, one from another; i.e., a kind of withdrawnness -- without having to invoke thing-thinking, and so I was a little thrown when you then responded with an example of polar relations (such as particle and wave).  This seemed to me to be a different kind or order of relation.  But your response above clarifies your views for me -- so thanks!

On the OOO thread (OOO is ooozing all over the place and getting into all our threads!), I had brought in the video by that physicist, discussing how each particle has to have a different (unique) energy state, and thus when one changes, all others in the universe must change simultaneously.  While we may not be able to get a lot of philosophical mileage out of this, I liked the way it showed difference in/as relation: allowing each thing to be particular, but not at the expense of relationship (not invoking absolutely withdrawn, self-existing things).  I get the same sort of "picture" from your description above.

[Balder]

Ah, excellent connection (and back on topic!).  Which essay of his is that from?

[Balder]

Tom:  There are a number of constants and other important numbers in present day science---the speed of light, the size and age of the universe, Planck's length, and so on---that show a remarkable correlation.  Many authors, including several scientists, have noticed this correlation and have written that in light of it, any small change to any of the physical constants, like the Planck length, would in their estimation prevent life from having appeared.  The universe, they therefore say, is as if designed for life. (Of course it is.)  There's a subtle implication here that relates to the question of universal wholeness-in-relation.  In the correlation noticed among the above numbers, there are a few, like the age and size of the universe, that are changing.  If physical constants in fact correlate with changing such numbers, what we know as laws in the universe are actually themselves relations in constant change, in differentiating development.

Yes, there are some remarkable correlations -- such as variations even by a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent in the speed of the original expansion rendering the formation of a stable universe of stars, galaxies, etc, impossible (because either gravity would have quickly pulled everything back into a black hole, or else particles would have expanded too quickly ever to gather together into stars and other objects).  Real knife-edge precision (which is found in many other "constants" or relations).  I mentioned some of the correlations discussed by Laszlo and Swimme on the OOO thread, because they demonstrate, to me, a deep relatedness that challenges OOO's contention that there is no "universe" to speak of, and that the thesis of holism is done for in modern thought.  Following Swimme, I'm comfortable with both pluriverse and universe language, and prefer to toggle between them, or use both at once, than to say once and for all that one side has "won the day."  I do think Morton, Harman, Bryant, and others, have a point when they challenge container-like models of a simple, uniform wholeness or inclusion, but I see this as a complexification in understanding of whole-part relations, which renders the linear "world as container" models obsolete (or too simplistic to be very useful), but which is still deeply informed by other modes of wholeness or deep-relation.

Tom:  Laws are changing all around us.  Human social laws are in constant motion---they are now, and have been, changing and expanding within all recorded time.  We could say with Kosok that laws differentiate extensively to reflect more intensive states of social interrelatedness, coordination and complexity.  So, too, laws of the universe---of necessity, I think, so I think the implication above is correct.  Laws express relations, and where relations change, the laws must change.  I suggest this dynamic of extending differentiation is the core reason why attempts to comprehensively explain or define fail in contradiction. 

Are you familiar with Peirce and his notions of tychism and universal habit?  I think he would have found a kindred spirit in Kosok, in this regard.

Tom:  If movement is creative, and if that creativity, as I think it is, is relationally developmental and embodied, the new will never be defined by something old.  Any attempt to comprehensively define therefore misses the central point that becoming is truly creative, per Whitehead, Hartshorne, etc.  There therefore cannot be a theory of everything, because that which is not yet cannot factor in any such theory.  Everything-statements, "it is just X" statements, nothing but statements---all fail for the same reason.  Explanation, definition, subsists in the realm of expression, and something as simple as a circle cannot, by a kind of Gödel proof of mathematics itself, be expressed: Pi is infinite, provenly so.  Symptomatic of this failure is the generation of self-contradiction (per Kosok, "contradiction is inevitable if we attempt to express the completeness of that system").  Self-contradiction of course leads to infinite regress: a dog chasing its tail down some disappearing spiral.

I think this is a good insight.  I've tried to suggest something like this in my use of the term openness -- that, from an enactive/evolutionary POV, the shape, form, nature of the universe (inside or out, epistemologically or ontologically) is not absolutely fixed or determined; which, as you say, puts the nix on ever coming up with a completely comprehensive and final "theory of everything." 

Tom:  And here's another implication of the above view.  It kills that lousy notion that theory follows an asymptotic to path to truth, a self-contradiction if I've ever seen one.  Stick that one in a pipe and smoke it a while.  The implications are immense.

Yes, I recall a good discussion of this back on our old "status of states" thread(s).  Although the usefulness and applicability of this term is limited, we could say that theories are in some sense invocational: creative in their own right.

[Balder]

Some of your and Kosok's statements about the limitations of theory also remind me of this essay by Finkelstein, which I shared with you before (especially the conclusion).