Tag: Real

Causes: Real, Heuristic?

The neoplatonic and scholastic traditions tended to treat causes as hypostatized real metaphysical principles, either inferred or simply given. Modern science in its more sophisticated statements has generally treated causes in a more heuristic way, as useful for the explanation of lawful regularity in phenomena.

I read the “causes” or “reasons why” in Aristotle as a sort of hermeneutic tools for understanding. This would encompass the kind of explanations employed by modern science, as well as much else that is helpful for understanding things in ordinary life, and for realizing our potential as animals involved with meaning and values.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics treats causes in Book V, in the context of “things said in many ways”. I will here quote the short first chapter, which introduces causes indirectly through the related concept of arché (governing principle, beginning, or as Sachs translates it, “source”):

“Source means that part of a thing from which one might first move, as of a line or a road there is a source in one direction, and another one from the opposite direction; and it means that from which each thing might best come into being, as in the case of learning, sometimes one ought to begin not from what is first and the source of the thing, but from which one might learn most easily; or it means that constituent from which something first comes into being, such as the keel of a ship or the foundation of a house, and in animals some say it is the heart, others the brain, and others whatever they happen to believe is of this sort; or it means that which is not a constituent, from which something first comes into being, and from which its motion and change naturally first begin, as a child from its father and mother, or a fight from insults; or it means that by whose choice a thing is moved or what changes changes, in the sense in which the ruling offices of cities as well as oligarchies, monarchies, and tyrannies are called sources, as are the arts, and among these the master crafts most of all. Also, that from which a thing is first known is called the source of the thing, such as the hypotheses of demonstrations.”

“Causes [aitiai] are meant in just as many ways, since all causes are sources. And what is common to all sources is to be the first thing from which something is or comes to be or is known; of these, some are present within while others are outside. For this reason nature is a source, as are elements, thinking, choice, thinghood, and that for the sake of which; for the good and the beautiful are sources of both the knowledge and the motion of many things” (Sachs translation, pp. 77-78).

What is emphasized in the notion of “source”, which Aristotle uses to provide insight into that of “cause”, is what is ultimately — or at least relatively ultimately — behind something, not that which is immediately behind it. By contrast, what I have been calling the “modern” (common-sense, not properly scientific) sense of “cause” is supposed to “operate” in an at least relatively immediate and direct (proximate) way.

Imaginary, Symbolic, Real

I’ve been feeling a need to say something about the controversial French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Due to his provocative personality and style, he evoked extreme hostility from some quarters, not all of which was unjustified, but I still think he is important. (Wikipedia has a relatively balanced summary article.)

American psychoanalysis has been much more narrowly medicalized than Freud’s original work. While trained as a psychiatrist, Lacan went in the opposite direction and engaged even more extensively with philosophy, literature, the arts, linguistics, logic, and mathematics. Among many other things, he developed a rich notion of three orders — Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real — in which we simultaneously participate.

The Imaginary seems to me to elaborate on Spinoza’s poignant words about human illusions in the Ethics. Lacan notably maintained — against the implicit mentalism of the American ego psychologists — that the ego is a product of alienated Imaginary identification.

The Symbolic or the “Other” is the order of language and culture and social relationships, within which I would place what I have been calling second nature and the transcendental. Lacan argued that speech originates neither in the subject nor the ego but in the Other. The unconscious for Lacan is not something primitive, and is not a deep interiority. He said the unconscious is the “discourse of the Other”, and is structured like a language. “I” belongs to the Other. We are our words. He even said our desire is the desire of the Other. Lacan was associated with many famous avant-garde writers and artists, and himself spoke and wrote in a linguistically experimental style with much wordplay, while embracing a structuralist view of language.

The Real in Lacan’s earlier work seems to me to recall a sort of Spinozist whole. In his later work, it especially foregrounds what Brandom called the world’s “stubborn recalcitrance to mastery and agency”. Earlier in his career, Lacan had tended to emphasize a therapeutic transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic. Later, he began to stress the importance of the Real as something that is impossible and contradictory from the point of view of the univocal synchronic order of the Symbolic. He developed a series of topological and other mathematical metaphors for characterizing things like subject/object relations in terms much richer than simple duality.

Lacan’s seminars, the main primary source, are now mostly available in English. The vast secondary literature is very uneven in quality. I found the biography by Elizabeth Roudinesco and the works of Bruce Fink helpful for getting some orientation. (See also Meaning, Consciousness; Therapy; Primary Process; Mutual Recognition and the Other; Pure Negativity?; Split Subject, Contradiction.)

My own thought about subjectivity is summarized in Ethos, and related articles directly or indirectly linked from there. See the Subjectivity section for more.