Do We have Essences?

Graham Harmon has helpfully outlined the problems with both what AN Whitehead called "substance ontology" and the lack of substances in Whiteheadian Process Philosophy and Saussarean Structuralism.  In most contemporary philosophy there are no essences or "natural kinds" as there once were in classical philosophy, but substances are hard to get rid of entirely, probably because the "natural stance" of our subjective experience categorizes the world, or divides it up into discreet objects, which seem to reflect "real" divisions of types of things. However, these "clear" borders between types are growing confused as the intrusions of the Lacanian "Real" cause the identities of things to fail. It is hard to ignore how traditional categories no longer work, as the particularly predominate example of gender shows. In the US a nostalgic longing for the return of easily identifiable types has played no small part in the return of authoritarian populism. The desire for the "Big Other" to tell us what we are is strong here, which is the desire for repression and control that is imagined as the return of the lost Eden of a once great America.

But this Eden in which "men were men and women and minorities knew there place," like all other fantasy, lost objects never really was. There has never been a time when the categories of the "Big Other" didn't encounter their failure in the Real. It is just that the repression of this failure has been more or less successful, and with the distance of time, it becomes easier to imagine through the lens of nostalgia that there was a halcyon time when the world knew what it was. But what about the a priori categories that Kant taught were necessary to have even our most basic perceptions? Do those internalizations of the natural laws also fail? Harmon shows that something is lost in what he calls the "overmining" of Structuralism and Process Philosophy, which is for him the withdrawal of the "thing-in-itself" from the relations of symbolic difference so essential for language users to make a world through the copulation of the signifiers and concepts of the Symbolic with percepts. The thing-in-itself also famously withdrew from the pre-conceptual, or intuitive, perceptions of Kant's phenomenal representation in the subjective intention, which he saw as the synthesis of the things that appear to us from the intuitive relations of the categories and the noumenal things-in-themselves. 

This "withdrawal" at the level of the natural laws had been the focus of much of Zizek's recent work on Quantum indeterminacy in which the causal categories of perception fail to determine the things-in-themselves. This failure at the level of the internalized natural laws is mostly due to the unavoidability of the most basic category of cause and effect and its basis in space-time for perception, which is sometimes described as the "observer effect." Quantum fields do not seem to be determined by causes in the same way that the macro level of reality is, which means that they do not seem to be in space-time in the same way either. How can observers totally dependent on causality to either perceive or conceive, know anything about a thing-in-itself that withdraws beyond the a priori categories of quantity, quality, mode, and relation? Let's get into it.

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Transcript

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Welcome back to Failure Is Freedom. Last time we were talking about how the Kantian intuition synthesizes through the a priori categories the world that appears for us, the phenomenological world that appears to us on our subjective screens. We're going to talk more now about how this relates to our previous conversations about binary oppositions and some of the difficulties that we get into with this understanding of how our world appears to us in both the phenomena of the exterior and the mentation or the concepts of the interior. And also the relation between the two of those things, how our concepts also act something like the a priori categories as sort of filters or synthesizing mechanisms to make the world appear as it does to us. So the a priori categories are like the internalized physical laws mostly centered around the relation of cause to effect, which is just sort of like basic relationality of two things touching in a metaphoric or a literal sense or a physical sense touching each other, two objects uh touching each other and the way in which they interact with each other. So the most basic uh would be the Humean uh two billiard balls hitting each other, and then the sort of transfer energy that takes place, um, and then using cause and effect as a sort of description uh of what happens between uh the two balls uh when they touch each other, basically. So the Kantian a priori categories, as I said last time, have been basically uh whittled down or grouped together under four. Uh the first one that would be relevant to the um billiard balls would be the category of quantity. So there's all kinds of quantitative measurement that's possible of this cause and effect relation. Quantities that matter in terms of the trajectory of these two billiard balls uh coming into contact or touching each other. So, of course, there's speed or momentum, and then the size of the balls, their mass, their volume, uh, the um trajectory, the surface of the uh table, all of these things are quantities uh that can be measured uh according to one sort of um measurement or another. But notice that all of these measurements are relations, and so that there is no uh in itself uh here, which is why for any phenomenon to appear in this cause and effect sort of a relation, you cannot talk about or describe uh any of it without uh quantities that are not like standalone properties. So that just for example, uh you know, the momentum of the billiard ball is a relation between uh mass and velocity. And then velocity is a relation between distance and time, or mass is a relation between weight and gravity, or density and volume, or force and acceleration, depending on how you define your terms. But there you're that there is no measurement that isn't relational. So that the a priori category, any of them that uh include uh quantity, um is going to be the ability to see uh phenomenally a relation of some kind. The sort of discovery of Immanuel Kant is then that seeing these relations phenomenally means to see them as phenomenal objects or to see them as objects, uh, to see them as objects in motion, to see them as unified multiplicities, so that the billiard ball is full of all these measurable uh quantities to some extent, but it doesn't really contain those within itself uh as a classical substance would uh contain its attributes uh in a way previously understood by what was called substance ontology by uh Alfred North Whitehead. A billiard ball acts as a one in the take is one function of set theory uh by unifying in a sort of temporary way uh all of its uh quantities, all of its measurable quantities. Um, but this unification is not a one in the sense of an in itself, it is a one that is given by relations. Uh, you know, in the example of the billiard ball, uh this would include the relations, the myriological relations of parts to whole, just as it would for a body, so that when we uh move uh our arm or something like that, um our arm is a temporarily unified uh multiplicity, uh, but it is a part-to-hole relation that can be taking all different kinds of ways depending on how we decide to group together those relations. So that the arm is in a sense uh a one that unifies um all kinds of molecules, cells, depending on how you think about the parts of the arm, uh if the hand is a part of the arm, if the bones of the forearm, if the shoulder uh that uh actually is like moving the arm, the elbow, um, all these different things. But then if we take any one of those things inside the arm, like it's bones as a one, they unify all kinds of multiplicity so that the bones, you know, unify, I don't know, calcium molecules or whatever they are, and then the um bone marrow, whatever comprises all that, but that has all different kinds of parts, and then you can just keep going further and further down into this cellular level, and how you know all these cells are unified by you know this bone uh or the structure of the bone. Uh, but then you know, the bone is only a part uh to the arm, even though it's also a whole to uh you know whatever it unifies, and then the arm is only uh a part to the whole of the body, and that its motion maybe isn't located in the arm, uh, maybe it's actually located in the the brain, or it's located in some automatic, you know, reflexive system or whatever. These kinds of things they become impossible to pin down as in itself uh because they are all relationally defined, but they appear uh as if a one or a substantial uh substance uh that unifies all these different attributes. But then we find out that whatever it was that we thought this uh substance, this one in itself uh was, this non-relational thing that stands by itself, we find out that it also gets its uh identity, uh including its oneness, um, from uh its relation to other parts and uh also its relation to the whole. Which brings us to the next thing. So starting with uh quantity or the next grouping of categories, um, you move then to quality, which for a lot of people uh kind of takes uh the jump out of measurable scientific uh realm. But um, you know, in within the sciences there is a great effort to uh reduce uh whatever uh appears as a quality or qualia, especially the qualia of experience, the what it's like to be of experience, um, try to break that down into some kind of numerical value, to some sort of quantity that can be measured. So that this is the sort of thing that happens, just for example, uh like in a um psychological science where people are trying to measure in some kind of qualitative way because they realize that you know the physical measurable states don't always, you know, directly at any rate, tell uh about psychological states. There has to be this sort of correlation or this mapping uh of you know uh brain chemistry or electrochemical um data measurements uh that can be seen in a MRI or a CAT scan or whatever, with um actual uh qualitative uh mental states. So, like a part of this effort is that you know you'll see things like happiness scales or uh pain indicators where you've got like all kinds of uh numbers, and then you have to rank your level of happiness or your level of pain as the case may be. In a lot of uh psychological um surveys within you know uh the DSM or whatever, you'll have like 20, you know, uh salient qualitative characteristics of a category like uh of a depression or something like that. And then if you you know have like 10 of them or whatever, then you know you're officially in some sense considered uh depressed. But everybody kind of acknowledges that there's some serious slippage between in whatever ways depression can be quantified and its qualitative experience, which is why oftentimes the poet is more apt at expressing some of these psychological states uh than the um scientist or than the uh neurobiologist or whatever, the neuroscientist. The scientist can see the brain state, uh measure its electrochemical uh properties, but um they cannot experience it or feel uh the feels of it, the uh qualia of it, uh, as it's sometimes put. So a depressed person, for example, you know, might say uh my depression on a scale of sadness or something like that from one to ten is a ten, and that may give some very good information uh to somebody trying to uh work with uh quantities or well types of medication and those kinds of things, but it doesn't really say a whole lot about uh the experience, the actual qualitative experience of the of the person uh in the depression. But the uh poet I you know personally think is in a better position, but um notice that even the poet or the author, uh the narrator of a of a story or who uses imagery or whatever, all of these uh images again are relational. So the you know primary strategy uh of the poet is you know the analogy or the metaphor, which are all comparisons and and relations that compare terms in order to uh create a sense of what it's likeness. Uh but again there is no you know perfect accuracy here, although I think uh it gets a little bit closer. But for many in the sciences, it's just a matter of getting the uh quantities right, and if you have the quantities correct, um you just are gonna have this A for A equality uh between a biologically measurable electrochemical brain state and whatever the condition is you're describing, or whatever even the thought is you're describing. Um right now, you know, it's just a kind of temporary thing that you uh need to build up uh enough information about, enough experimental data, enough third-person observable um kinds of um bits of information, and then eventually you're gonna be able to perfectly correlate in a cause and effect uh A for A, this happens, then this happens, if then uh relation between the chemistry and the uh experiential uh aspect of the chemistry. But then there are those like me who feel that the difference between uh descriptive um quantities uh and uh the description of the poet uh of the qualia really point to this unbridgeable gap. Just to choose a very simple cliched example, um, love uh could be measured in brain chemistry and the presence of certain, you know, dopamine uh chemicals and whatever uh pheromones uh and all these kinds of things that people in the neurosciences, you know, say, oh, if you have these things, then you have a person that's in, you know, a state uh of affairs that we call love. But then there are many of us who just kind of think that's pretty ridiculous, um, that while that's all fine and well and that's good, and there's certainly no denial on my part or probably any poet's part that, you know, all those brain chemistry things can be true and there can be some sort of correlation between them and love, but that they do not describe in any significant way uh the experience uh of being in love. And so this is what we've talked about before is Graham Harmon's idea of undermining, which I find very useful when talking about the scientific reduction. Not that anybody any longer does it quite this reductively, but it was sort of the thing I would hear when I was a kid, and somebody would give a scientific description of being in love and all the chemicals and the brain uh electro uh chemical mista uh states that were you know relevant to you know supposedly being in love or just describe it, you know, uh its effects on the body and the the eyes dilating and the pheromones and all these kind of things. Or even those uh books that still come out sometime that just talk about the uh anthropological, biological um origins of love, and some of them even you know are so bold as to suggest you need different things that you can do, you know, just anthropologically to attract and mate, you know, based on our evolutionary history, you know, for dudes, it's normally something like, you know, showing some kind of uh confidence and you know the ability to uh groom yourself and to procure um the funds to buy a nice car and provide and all these kinds of things that you know some of these um descriptions of love come down to, you know, very biological or perhaps economic, transactional, all that in the end are related to some sort of evolutionary biological uh depiction of you know what love actually is. So you get this kind of description, um, and sometimes you still hear people say stuff like, you know, love really just is this uh chemical, neuroepinephrine or something like that. So that you really are just um getting, you know, hormones uh as a description uh of love. So hormones are love, so it really just is this whatever minimal reductive thing it is. You want to see love from a third person, objectifiable, verifiable, falsifiable, um, the real um depiction of love, and put the in-love brain in a CAT scan uh or an MRI and you know, take a look at uh the state of the brain, and and that's what love is. So that quantities are really just qualities, uh in different sort of like modal relation. Which brings us to the next relation um that the Kantian categories, a priori category is necessary for uh experience or for the most basic uh perception of the world, uh which is you know modal relation. So again, this is a sort of uh cause and effect relation, all these are. So it is the um relation between identity and difference. So that the common example of modal relation that just keeps it real simple is water uh when it's a liquid, and then when it's a gas or a vapor, it's still water, or when it's uh uh cooled to the point of freezing, and it's ice, it's still water. Uh, but it has just different modes, different ways of appearing, so it retains the same identity, uh, but it has just a different way of appearing or a different phenomenological uh appearance. So that uh modal categories allow us to see uh continuity uh even among even among um great change or difference or the uh continuity of a flow, so like of a river or something like that, to uh realize that it's the same river uh even though it's molecularly you know made up of totally different uh water molecules and perhaps uh whatever else it contains from one moment to the next. So for the uh material reduction in the sciences, uh basically what you're saying is that everything is a mode uh of quantifiable uh material uh relations. Which of course brings us to the last sort of way of grouping together according to the a priori categories uh necessary for experience, which is relation, relationality. Um and so the concept of relatedness is like the most basic thing for understanding uh the world as um operating according to the mechanism uh of cause and effect. And it is the determinations uh of these measurable uh relational properties uh between objects, however they are grouped together uh in part to whole kind of continuums, we are going to see determination, total determination uh of the universe, of the phenomenon that appears before us, um, according to predetermined uh physical laws, uh according to the ways in which uh quantities uh interact with uh each other when they are grouped together in um unified multiplicities or in assemblages of machinic processes or however you want to think about it. So any object will just take a body um which would be something like uh or could be something like the uh human body. Um it has completely determinate physical relations as an assemblage of uh machinic processes that are determined by the physical laws, and that the physical laws become actually visible to us. Uh well, they're first internalized as the categories, but then they are projected back outward, and we are able to, you know, see a world and interact with it, um, see our body even of whatever perspective we have on it uh from a third person. Um, we're gonna experience it in the first person, but we can act on it um, you know, in the third person or act on it uh, you know, with other people in our relations with other human bodies, our other our relations with other uh unified multiplicities, uh unifications of machinic processes that have their own. Seemingly independent intentions, but none of these intentions are actually independent. They're all relational. And they are physical, so that they are going to be related physically, one way or another, according to measurable quantities, predictable outcomes, and that if things are uh unpredictable uh about any of it, it's only because of a lack of the knowledge of variables, something like Laplaza's demon, where you know you don't know uh all the variables, uh, but if you did, uh then you could you know completely predict you know how everything was gonna roll out. Um, no matter how free or unpredictable uh human bodies may appear to behave, um, they are just as determined as any other uh body, um, whether that body uh suffers from the illusion of a subjective intention as human bodies do, like the illusion of self or of person that is in control uh and is somewhat independent of its environment, or whether that body is just this blind, physical, you know, law-abiding, you know, citizen that is not burdened with any kind of illusion about choice or about um decisions and uh whatnot. Those simpler bodies uh that we have a pretty good hold on with our mathematics and uh the equations of physics, um, you know, those are more easily determined only because um, you know, we know uh all the relevant variables, so we can say with you know various levels of confidence um what's gonna happen next. So the causal chain is uh much easier to work out. But uh human bodies, animal bodies in general, uh, but you know, certainly very clear in human bodies, what appears to be this sort of uh unpredictability that might even mean that not everything is completely determined yet, uh, because of a conscious choice of some kind, or even an unconscious choice, uh that there's actually some indeterminacy is inconceivable from a scientific determinist materialist perspective. And what becomes particularly important about this, and particularly about the binary oppositions uh of symbolic systems of differences, namely language, uh using signifiers to presence and absence of some kind, or to be in hypothetical situations, or to imagine across a gap or lack of information, to be able to project oneself uh into the future without total uh determination. Seems to be a particularly bad and persistent and maybe even necessary illusion for uh language users, probably for uh other animate things as well, uh, and who knows how far down this goes, but this uh illusion uh really uh gets going hardcore for language users, and part of it is this ability to project meaning or to project intention uh across a gap, which is what a signifier within a language does. It basically indicates something in the symbolic uh register, uh it makes something present uh that isn't uh necessarily uh directly in front of you. So it also plays the role of mediating things that are uh directly in front of you. Uh it also mediates our experience or how those things appear to us. Um, and this has to do with the phenomenological intention on one level. In other words, it has to do with what our relation is to whatever is appearing to us. It appears according to our relation to it, just like there may be all kinds of other natural laws out there that we have no idea about because we don't have any relation to them, so that we only know about the sort of uh causal nexus of relations that uh affect us and our intention for ourselves and for you know the others uh that we encounter in the world. So our signifiers certainly refer to a referent, but they refer to whatever they are referring to uh via a symbolic system of difference. Another way to think about that would be even when we are looking at something directly, we aren't looking at it directly, we're looking at it through our concepts that are given to us uh via whatever symbolic system of difference we have been born into, whatever language uh we we use. And so, whatever sense of an in itself uh a language user has, um it is really illusory uh because we have this uh totally relational understanding of whatever there is, of whatever object we are to ourselves or whatever objects we encounter outside of ourselves, those relations are mediated through through language, um through concepts that are not things in themselves, uh all concepts uh for language users, uh this might be the only type of concept there is, but is a uh relation, a relation of difference. So that what the Kantian intuition does on the most basic level, using intuition in a different way than we normally do, is to synthesize a whole out of difference. So it's a way of putting into relation uh two different uh things. Uh I like AF uh Alfred North, sorry, Alfred North Whitehead's um uh def uh definition of uh of a concept or even of a basic perception, you cannot have a perception that's just one percept. Our perceptual apparatuses, our sensory systems, are only activated uh when they are unifying some kind of difference. So that when baby is in the womb and the temperature is totally constant, baby has no experience or concept of temperature. But they have the system uh ready online, um, you know, towards the end, especially with all the uh temperature sensing skin cells, you know, coming online uh throughout the pregnancy. And then by the time they're born, uh they uh are able to experience temperature for the first time when uh the temperature of the delivery room is different. So their uh perceptual apparatus or their uh their uh sensual apparatus of touch is able to uh unify that difference um in order to create the experience of temperature. Alfred North Whitehead talks about the um unification or the putting into relation of two percepts uh according to a rule. So the rule uh, if it were a uh central apparatus, would be the central apparatus uh itself, which is non-linguistic, non-conceptual. So that's why, for the most part, the a priori categories for Kant are not concepts. But once past that sort of most basic level for language users, uh once language is introduced and the signifier uh becomes a part of the body, then we have a situation in which all kinds of difference can be unified or made whole. Uh in this take is one way. So these again are temporary unifications of difference or temporary unifications of multiplicity through the concepts uh of uh the given symbolic or the given language or the given culture or whatever. So this reflects two of the primary um binary oppositions uh that we've already discussed. Uh the first one, the most basic one in some ways, is the relation between the one and the many. And then the second one here is the relation between uh presence and absence, uh, which is the sort of unification of multiplicity that um the symbolic gives through the signifier. The uh signifier presence is an absence through uh a concept. But this to me brings on a sort of uh secondary um difficulty that um is really um the problem with the sort of structuralism that I'm proposing with uh binary oppositions uh at the base. Uh this is the structuralism of Ferdinand de Sassier, of Claude Levy-Strauss, of just French structuralism in in general, of Derrida. And um there is no such thing as post-structuralism as far as I'm concerned. But anyways, the um structuralism and the problem with it um is that everything is relational and there is no in itself. So what was I just doing all this for? Well, I wanted to show that the structuralism of uh Saussier's uh famous linguistic um description uh of language, of the signifier, um, is actually the same structuralism uh that structures what is before language. Uh so things can appear uh phenomenologically without language, but uh they still appear to us through the unification of multiplicity, through the presencing of an absence in the system that uh Kant outlined uh as the a priori categories uh quality, uh quantity, modality, and relation, all of which are grounded in space-time and cause and effect, and obviously those two things uh go hand in hand. You can't have the everything all at onceness of the numeral world of the in itself, because that is without relation, and it is space-time that allows for there to be relation, uh, the relation of cause and effect specifically. Whatever being in itself is, uh, which would be the Kantian, I mean the Hegelian version of the numinal world, which would be like being all in one place, a singularity, a complete oneness, you basically have nothing at that point, uh, nothing accessible, uh, because you don't have any relationality. And even if you are clever and call it difference in itself, as Deleuze did, it's meaningless to say that it's being or that it's difference, because it isn't either one of those things, because uh there is no relationality. Difference is a relation. Uh being is a relation. This is the point. So it really doesn't matter whether you call it being in itself or difference in itself or numina or whatever. Uh for all intents and purposes, uh, whatever it is, it's nothing. But it is the pregnant nothing, as has been noted, uh, from which everything comes. Or it is the nothing that uh gives us the relation of nothing and something that we uh call the universe. Now, if you are a process structuralism sort of person, it is the relation of difference, it is the difference itself uh that uh is primary and gives everything uh that there is. If you are a substance in itself sort of a person, then it is the thing uh before the relation, the substance without relation that gives everything uh that there is. Uh so this is the problem. Uh which one is primary, it doesn't matter. They're they need to be together, they need to be um put into uh this binary opposition of something and nothing, uh of relation and non-relation, uh, in order to be anything or to be nothing for that matter. Non-being uh without being uh is it's unspeakable, whatever, it's just blank. Same with being. Being without non-being, whatever that is, being all in one place, whatever, what that's nothing to. And there's really no way to say it without using these words that are only uh meaningful because of their place within a system of differences, which is what structuralism is. And so this can be a symbolic system of differences, or it can be um just a more basic system of differences, the perceptual differences uh or the differences that give us uh perception, uh, the unification of different percepts that gives us perception, uh, the a priori categories, uh, the categories, the most basic categories of the physical laws, uh, that are all relations that need to be relations in order for them to appear, for uh anything to appear. And now we have a problem, and that is that there is no in itself, uh, or at least one that uh can be spoken about or accessed in any way. And so the question is just like um how is this um in itself uh relevant to uh modern life uh to those of us who see everything now uh defined relationally rather than uh substantially? And so uh we're gonna wind up with this problem, but I just want to frame it with uh Graham Harmon's overmining and undermining distinction. So that we talked about undermining as this thing where you know you reduce some uh qualitative experience uh like love or uh even uh an object like a tree in uh one of Herman's examples, so that you know, if you reduce the tree to like, you know, it's really just this, you know, collection of biological processes, cells uh related to each other according to these materially determined uh ways or whatever, then you kind of lose the tree. In a phenomenology, this is called withdrawal. So there is something uh about the tree that withdraws from that um analysis, that undermining that scientific material reduction. Now, Harman would call what redraws uh the in itself of the tree. Uh so in all uh object relations for Harman the relation is going to be defined by uh the intention of each object toward the other, including you know how the object appears and how it is grouped together according to its parts and holes, and all those kinds of things are going to be determined by uh each intention for the other. For example, one of Harman's uh more controversial examples would be the Civil War taken as an object. So, like depending on who is relating to that object, that historical object, if you can see how this could be taken as an object in a sort of like non-physical way, but as a sort of like mental or conceptual object, um, you know, there could be uh a way of seeing the Civil War as kind of starting all the way back, you know, with the first slave ships or the founding of the Americas. Um, you could see it starting, you know, when a lot of people do in uh 1861. Uh you could see, you know, its starting point different. You can also see its ending point different. You can see the meaning of it differently. You could organize it around the principle of state rights, or you can organize it around the principle of uh emancipation uh of sl uh from slavery. But whatever uh your intention is for this object, uh in this case a conceptual object, um, this is um going to be how you see it. And however you see it, something's going to withdraw from that. So if you see it as a state's rights person, it's a very motivated sort of way of seeing it, um, you are going to uh lose uh you know the fact that for many people uh this war, especially from the perspective of enslaved individuals and their ancestors, uh, is going to be uh about you know emancipation uh and that states' rights is just kind of a convenient sideshow um excuse. Now, for Harman, there is a fact of the matter, uh, which is not true uh from my perspective, but there is a fact of the matter about this um object called the Civil War and how uh it should be defined, where it actually started. And but for Harman, these things, you know, uh can be argued about, and then you just come closer and closer through dialogue and uh through um research, uh through you know, gathering information to you know getting it right. Um but you know, uh I also agree that um there is you know better interpretations than another than others, so that you know, states' rights is you know, for the most part, idiotic and super motivated, whereas um you know emancipation you know affords us a lot better understanding of what was going on uh you know for the people there. Um but you know, it might be simpler to think of it, you know, back to the tree. The uh tree uh seen by the artist is going to be seen uh in a qualitative way, in which you know the actual measurement of its quantities are going to kind of uh withdraw from, so that the way that the scientist is going to approach the tree, the botanist, whatever, the forester, or whoever else is in relation to this tree, the hiker, whatever, they're all going to see the tree in certain ways, but there's always going to be this withdrawal, and that has to do with the backgrounding and foregrounding of presence and absence. So whatever is presented is going to be uh presented against the background uh of whatever withdraws, uh backgrounding and foregrounding of binary oppositions, which is just another way of saying that the tree can't appear in all of its aspects all at once because of the nature of how things appear through relations, through these categories, through these a priori categories, and for language users through concepts. Which became sort of the issue with at least Husserlian phenomenology, uh, which was kind of seeking, you know, the thing as it gave itself according to its own uh way of showing itself from itself, uh, and this kind of uh, you know, idea of a thing uh showing itself as itself, uh, so sort of like the thing in itself appearing. But again, the problem is that can't happen in that way. Uh it has to appear through uh these relations. Uh that is what the intention does. The intention sets up which relations, which categories, which concepts uh are going to uh foreground uh whatever becomes uh present, either you know, through uh a signifier or through a perceptual apparatus or whatever. And so Harman points out that um in this relational structuralist um uh process way of understanding um how things appear, which would be phenomenology, uh, a phenomenology that Harman for Harman is object uh relations or an object-oriented ontology, so that we're now talking about recovering a sense in which objects show themselves um from their own intention or according to their own uh way of being, so that this is sort of a recapturing of a sense of substance or essence, uh, however temporary, but uh something that is uh truly uh independent. Of relation, something that is an in itself, showing itself as itself or according to its own essence or according to its own substance or according to its own identity or its own concept of itself. So that not all concepts of self, not all selves, not all self-identities, not all identities are completely relational. So they're somehow outside of uh the binary opposition, or at least not uh totally subject to it, um, not totally um you know non-relational, but at the same time there has to be some core uh that isn't in uh relation, that isn't in relation even when it appears, so that there is sort of this um non-interpretation. Uh the thing just is what it is, uh we're back to a kind of A equals A showing uh of identity. So that Harman puts overmining this way, he just talks about, you know, process and the problems with process philosophy or structuralism and any of these, you know, relational, sort of like constant uh movement, constant becoming sort of philosophies where there is nothing um that you know remains uh over the long run at any rate, I uh perhaps unhelpfully immediately think about this theological debate, which may be too complicated to be very illustrative, but it's the thing that hits me the most. There's this question in theology uh is you know the good reliant on evil to be good, or is uh evil just a parasite on good, and that good can uh is such an in itself that it can stand substantially without relation as the good? So that you know, this saying that people commonly say, well, we know you know the good times because of the bad is sort of a cliched way of putting it, but there are you know much more intense uh debates that develop around this. For example, you know, could uh God or a creator or whatever have made a world um that was you know all good? And if God is an omnibenevolent or all-powerful, omniscient creator who really you know could have done anything, um then, you know, would it have been possible for God to have created a a world without evil, without the bad? Um, and then the question is, well, if that were possible and God didn't do it, then that means that God intended evil. And then you can look at this problem all kinds of ways, because people often want to know, like, on this question of is evil just a privation of the good or is it a thing in itself? So that like things that appear to be truly evil, not just relationally evil. Uh, you know, the most obvious example that gets brought up is the Holocaust, something that is just clearly um incomprehensibly bad. That is this bad because you know, we say it's bad, you know, in relation to our own, you know, intention for the good, or is it actually bad in itself, stands alone as a substantial uh and real evil? And this is actually what demotes God in uh first process philosophy, but then in uh process uh theology tradition uh to uh no longer being um omnipotent or all-powerful, but to um being um in relation to the same sorts of necessity uh that you know anything uh is, any being is at any rate, the possibilities of a creator um are now limited. Whatever degrees of freedom were there, um there may be none, because the creator may have had to uh make the world uh that it did uh according to the uh relational principles of binary oppositions, for example, so that no, the uh creator could not have made a girl a world without evil uh because you need the evil to have the good, and the good is somehow um you know dependent uh on there being evil. And you know, this usually gets played out uh in terms of you know a concept of uh freedom within creation, which is sort of like uh in order for there to be uh good, then you need a free choice. Uh you need to be able to choose between things, and in order to be able to choose between or among things, you need options. Uh so you need to be able to choose bad or evil so that evil you know is necessarily in this world um so that you can um have uh the choice uh for the good. But also the good is meaningless without uh evil. So what Harman is saying is that in uh overmining the overmining of process philosophy and of structuralism, you have a withdrawal uh as you look at things in a totally relational way, and that that is the withdrawal of the in itself. Uh the whatever it is that is substantial uh about the thing that isn't um just given by its binary relation. The goodness of the good is not given by um the evil, evilness of evil. We won't be able to get into this in this episode, but this goes for any of the binary oppositions, and we see this playing out now uh in the question of gender as a binary opposition between male and female. There's more and more sort of like rejection of gender as you know binary, um, but also uh there is this interplay between undermining gender gender scientifically. So you you'll often get this thing like uh in scientific discourse, like uh, you know, biological male. So that like this is a biological definition of male. It means something in itself, you know, they have their this XY chromosome situation and a penis or whatever. And then you have the um symbolic kind of male, which is like more of a of a choice uh in the sense that you know signification uh involves more degrees of freedom uh than biology does. Uh but uh this is the exact question, the interplay between uh undermining and overmining, so that when you are overmining and you're in the symbolic uh relations of structuralism and symbolic difference, um, you know, there is something about gender that withdraws, namely it's like substance, you know, reality. So like now we're back into like this idea that there are, you know, essences, like uh natures uh of gender, so that you have, you know, like somehow a natural kind is the way this often gets put uh of male uh or female. And what's interesting about that is that um that is the way in which uh some folks, uh some trans folks uh and some non-trans folks, uh some non-binary folks, whoever, um, they uh imagine um you know gender as having some sort of natural kind, some sort of essence, uh, some sort of substantial reality, so that when somebody is labeled a, let's say, biological female at birth, but their gender, their essence, uh, this thing that's withdraws from that scientific naming uh is male gender. So that they have this gender dysphoria or this mismatch between what they find to be their essential somehow uh gender versus uh what they say is biological. Um and so like you can see this constant interplay between uh this is a substantial reality versus this is a relational reality reality. Um and oh, and or are these relations, are these binary relations in nature itself, or are they in only the symbolic? Um and so you know the question for Harmon is um, or just his kind of setup, is that it doesn't matter which way you look at it, you're gonna lose something one way or the other, um, you know, either in undermining and overmining. Uh, and that's fine. It's just that you have to acknowledge that we need to see the world in those uh kinds of ways in order to have a world. Um, and then you know, we're always going to see something, but then there's always gonna be something that backs away, uh withdraws uh from the way that we see it. We just can't see everything all at once. And so the most interesting category for me is the non-binary category, or is the trans as trans category as like um a non-gendered or maybe beyond gender category? Um, and so like, is that an in itself, or does something withdraw uh from that? Um, and so in other words, is there like male people, essentially male people, uh, and then female people, uh, and then non-binary people, people who have a different sort of uh essence. And so, like, this is the sort of idea you get in which trans itself uh is uh a gender, like a third gender or something like that. Um and uh, you know, this is just like such a live debate, um, and uh it really matters, I think, uh, that we talk about it and think about it, you know, for for people's lives. Um uh I tend to be on the side of um, you know, trans as all of our categories. I'm I'm on Z Zek's side with this for the most part. But you know, I've recently been um uh kind of like hit over the head with uh you know trans individuals who self-report that you know they're really do feel like essentially to be uh of a gender that they were not assigned at birth, that they're not trans, that they are actually female or they actually are male. And so this is um this is uh you know just a really important way into you know how we understand uh reality, how things appear to us um phenomenologically, um how things appear to us culturally, and how like our intention uh really affects uh how we see ourselves and how we see others. Um so many of my claims about binary oppositions being like absolutely necessary, um, maybe over the moment and maybe something.