I
One thing that did astonish me about henology is how it dissolves physicalism (and pretty much any ontology) from the inside. At once it affirms their irreducibility qua their units, and yet also reveals their limitations. Once you have reached the point where you see that the root of a thing’s actuality is its individuation, then you can no longer be a physicalist, since the “realness” of things is no longer exclusively tied to the methods of physics, but to the manner of their individuation. Suddenly, the entire talk of “chains of being” or more expansive “psychic” and “noetic” entities, even the question of “consciousness” as something not reducible to physical emergence, suddenly makes sense to you. New worlds open up. You see the objects of various sciences (social, physical, psychological, etc) as methods of piecing apart and bringing together ontologies and the units those ontologies find basic (or the basic units or principles the ontologies still search for). You might finally see how the “social body” stable over time is, as a unit, one of the formal ways of speaking of what ancients might call “daimons”. You begin to see how you can value the object of the science as itself. Even concepts are units, and so are existent “conceptually”. The “conceptual” is their manner of individuation, the way it “appears” or is “present”. You can now try to do metaphysics without the reactionary impulse that sees modern disciplines as deficient in relation to some imagined ancient purity. You can see their conflicts and changes as processes enfolded within the “empty” nature of unity as a first principle, for no ontology can escape the question of individuation. The many Gods becomes apparent, and you suddenly see temples where there were academies. Temples defiled in some ways maybe, but temples nonetheless, and they are everywhere; and in their light, you see a reason to know.
II
One question that fascinates me about the possibility of modern myths is how we would interpret modern weapons if they were to appear in the myth. The ancient sword, spear, chariot, etc, are usually associated with myths involving violence, but how would you interpret a myth where some characters held guns? How would one understand a divine organization that looks (at least a bit) like a modern liberal democratic state? I think these questions are salient, because these political structures have their ideal counterparts, and ideals are always individuated, ultimately by the original basic individuals. For instance, who is the America’s Demiurge? What are the possibilities of their Pantheon’s structure? Of course, America is not Rome, but one could argue that in glimpsing whatever ideal organizes their nation, they glimpse Gods who shine through them. So, if, hypothetically, America was to be an explicitly polytheist state, what would its structure be like? I honestly do not have any detailed answers, but to focus on the question of modern weapons in divine hands, the gun and the thunder do seem related in symbolism to me. The gun, like the lightning, destroys rapidly, and the gun even has a flash of light associated with it. Personally, I could see a God’s demiurgy being “wrathful” with guns. For instance, Ogun hacking open the bushes can be seen as his demiurgy, organizing a material multiplicity with the very instrument of destruction, which is also transformation. Ogun links knowledge and embodiment using mortality. A gun can do something similar, causing transformation (death into new life) by giving many logoi-bullets that keep the entity in motion, and in existence.
III
Back to the topic of daimons, one idea that came to mind recently is the question of the “mechanics” of daimonic life. The notion of “angels” of the nations is a useful image, and indeed the depiction of these angels in humanoid form does make them somewhat more intelligible to the average person, but if I want to be more accurate, perhaps it would make sense to find an analogy for these things in single-celled organisms or simple multicellular organisms. The very “dense” space of a “social body”, with its thin flexible and porous boundaries, the “memes”, “tropes”, and language, in their transformations and “interactions” seem to fit something more like the very complicated mechanics of cellular biology and microbiology in general. There is also the possibility of a “computational” view of these entities, which we will get to in the next section. These can be considered different related ways of viewing the daimon. It certainly highlights the “inhuman” aspects of such entities, their logic with respect to the individual human, and so on. The state is perhaps best seen in this light. The state is, in some respect, inhuman. It also makes sense of Butler’s point that Daimons are “infrastructural”, they make up the conditions and structures of being in which other entities live. If we then stretch this abstraction to the complicated multicellular organisms, we can catch a glimpse of the way in which a very great number of daimons, in an almost unthinkable co-ordination of activity, from the social bodies to the very activity of physical phenomena, can embody some God, whose psychic presence can encompass a whole universe, or many.
IV
In connection to the previous point about daimons, Stephen Wolfram’s ideas on “consciousness” are particularly apt:
“And rather than consciousness being somehow beyond “generalized intelligence” or general computational sophistication, I now instead see it as a kind of “step down”—as something associated with simplified descriptions of the universe based on using only bounded amounts of computation.”
In the entire essay, one thing that stands out is that for human intelligence, we know things in terms of cause and effect, generalized as “attempts to “integrate and sequentialize” everything. For Wolfram, “Consciousness is not about the general computation that brains—or, for that matter, many other things—can do. It’s about the particular feature of our brains that causes us to have a coherent thread of experience.” However:
“If we were the size of planets, though, this would no longer work. Because—assuming our brains still ran at the same speed—we’d inevitably end up with a fragmented visual experience, that we wouldn’t be able to think about as a single thread about which we can say “this happened, then that happened”.
What’s interesting is the way embodiment, which includes size and shape, affects experience. What is formally the same set of units in relation is experienced very differently by different embodied observers according to their mode of embodiment. Now, let’s generalize his notion of intelligence to the notion of intelligibility in the widest sense, which is beyond computation. Let’s also skip right to the Parmenidean unity of Being, Knowledge, and Intelligence. Finally, let us move to the Platonic conclusion that the most basic intelligibility is being some unit (the One) prior to any sortal category (Being). What we can see in this schematic is the infrastructural manner of understanding the “descent of the Soul”.
To elaborate, there is first the supraessential unit(s), then there is that unit as an object, the most generic category of objects, Being. Then there are the various eternal categories that “dirempt” the unit in various ways. Then there are the many temporal elaborations and transformations of those eternal diremptions. Then there are the proper embodiments of those elaborations. Beyond this are simply alternate ways these embodiments and elaborations might come together. This “noise” of alternatives is “matter” in the metaphysical sense.
The priority of individuation means that no individual is just the aggregate of constituents, and hence, in the case of humans (as a species), no human is just a “biochemical machine”. However, being human does include being some “biochemical machine”, but more than this, a human is also an intricate tapestry of language, ideas, and relations. The human soul is composed of all of these. There is the material “consistency” of the body’s constitution (its “program”, as Steinhart likes to put it), which might be called its “material soul”. There is its “imaginal” consistency, the body’s appearance as “soaked” in its social medium, the aspect where one’s body is (at least in part) “made” by the community. This might be considered on several levels, such as the human level and the level of higher entities, the spirits, daimons, etc, one is in relation to (such as, and including, the State). There is the “rational soul”, which is perhaps considered as the soul’s “higher whole” that co-ordinates its parts. Then some Neoplatonists posit a “one of the Soul”, the Soul as a unified unit in “contact” with the Gods. According to the Procline schema of “One-Whole-All”, we might see the “one of the Soul” as corresponding to the first, the rational soul to the second, the various imaginal souls as the third.
Given the priority of the unified soul to any single body, reincarnation is possible and probably inevitable. This validates Plato’s belief in reincarnation across species of animals. It also brings to mind the way family does and does not transcend death. For the former, it would seem that at death, one is liberated from the constraints – computational and simply intellectual – of a small body, and one can “remember” far more than his life in the body, including family, which would expand exponentially. For the latter, it would complicate and restrict blood ties to the physically biological plane. While they are important in their own place, the more powerful concept of family is that forged by a collective will to live and love together.
The “space” of this psychic out-of-body existence is exactly the space of “social constructs”, of ideals, language, and symbols, both human and beyond human, given that this space is the result of collaboration of many different agents, eternal and temporal. This (at least partial) grounding in eternal and also long lived or everlasting agents is what prevents these constructs from being “ephemeral”. The priority of individuality grounds non-material entities, these non-material entities ground non-material “places”.
You are amazing, man. You’re writing is just enthralling
Profound, precise and technical yet conversational and approachable
logi-bullets is a fun phrase