Reshith has undergone some modifications since I first employed the term to respond to Catherine Keller's 'tehomic' creatio ex profundis---not a creation from nothing/no-thing, ex nihilo---but from ruach's oscillations over the deep (Face of the Deep). My concept of reshith maintains the otherness of God, maintains his freedom from a chain of being, from a causation in the scheme of things, from being merely another being among other beings. This is an admittedly anti-metaphysical gesture, one that I had hoped would operate in the spirit of Jean-Luc Marion's God Without Being, which seeks to avoid conceptualizing God within the category of being. The goal is admirable enough, to prevent dissolving God into a hapless idolatry of ontological difference. Still, causality grips God in the metaphysical causa sui, which Marion demonstrates to be a 'conceptual idol,' an idol that locks God into an impoverished likeness of being. Instead, reshith situates the eternal giveness of God on the horizon of Love, through which creation itself must pass before it enters the horizon of being. Just as God loves before he is, creation is loved before it appears.
The very giveness of beings is democratic in precisely the manner Levi Bryant has suggested in his Democracy of Objects. Objects enjoy their being prior to their becoming known to sentient beings. While it is the very nature of the human mind to interpret objects ontologically, that has no effect onticologically upon them. Causality is an irrelevant category for the way things are in themselves, and the way God is in itself. God's own giveness, his infinite nature, creates as love loves, bringing things into existence from absolutely no-thing. Love always already has its object, which makes its appearance ex nihilo as a new creation.
Creation ex profundis is a shaping; wonderful as it is, it binds the lover into causality: shaping through the hovering above the deep. What a tehomic creation has got going for it, is its self-evident relationality. But this relationality is also and already in reshith. Analogically speaking, reshith is there already, anterior, before (a temporal adverb, but meant atemporally) tehom, which is simply there to be acted upon to become what it will become. Analogically, God is the observer of the no-thing, giving appearance to the material world in an erotic reduction of pure will, act and love. God, therefore does not act within the created order upon some pre-existent substance, but a true creation from pure thought, yet in an image and likeness. This creation is one whose origin is in relationality apart from a causal nexus, not an origin in causality: creation without causality.
As reshith comes into focus, so does a creation that is itself atemporal and one in which conservation and concurrence is already a part. While the theory of rapid expansion of an occurrence in time 14 billion years ago is appealing for its suggestion that the beginning of the universe can be extrapolated to a singularity, that beginning is not reshith, which disabuses us of a God at the head of a moment, the first cause in a series of causes. Causation, like spacetime, is a function of the category of being, which in a strange way, tends to relocate, metaphysically, the notion of causa sui away from God and into the plane of existence.
Reshith, then, trumps tehom in the gentlest of ways. Analogically, it is the condition for the appearance of the there-ness of tehom that establishes the relation of ruach to matter. Indeed, analogy itself is the very oscillation between ruach and tehom. As Karl Rahner has noted in his Foundations of Christian Faith (57-80), analogy is the hovering (is hovering) that constitutes the finitude of creation. And, analogically again, Rahner identifies this hovering/oscillating (Schwebe) with the human creature itself, as the thing that oscillates between spirit and matter. As image and likeness, the human creature is already the analogy of God, and this event is the revelation of the first lines of Genesis. And though Rahner would not countenance a creatio ex profundis, he would likely marvel at the transformational and generative quality of Keller's 'tehomic' theology, and quite possibly delight in the shape his Schwebe has taken in her theological turn in general. Certainly the centrality of relationality and dialectical method to his entire theological project links him to the apophatic entanglements in the Cloud of the Impossible.
Showing posts with label Democracy of Objects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Democracy of Objects. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Thursday, February 12, 2015
On the Materiality and Phenomenality of the Body
Levi Bryant has presented the case for the importance of materiality in philosophical discourse in much of his work, but he has just posted an interesting short version on Larval Subjects , "Critical Reflections on the Humanities and Social Sciences." In a brief response, I suggested that Heidegger has already begun the work of maintaining a distinction between materiality and phenomenality, but Levi balked at this assertion, and reaffirmed the primacy of materiality, while maintaining the validity of experience. From an example he provides, Levi concludes that the "material body is not the phenomenal body" and that a "substantial transformation of our concept of phenomenality" is called for. I have always found Levi an original and provocative thinker (our acquaintance began several years ago on a YahooGroup on Lacanian psychoanalysis), and even more-so lately. He is the author of the fascinating Democracy of Objects and other works in the 'object oriented ontology' field of inquiry. I have written what I have written on Larval Subjects in response to Levi's recent post, and my purpose here is not to engage his thesis any further, but instead take his conclusion as noted above as a point of departure for this blogpost.
I do not take the distinction between 'materiality' and 'phenomenality' as some irreducible dualism. That strategy is dead in the water and does nothing to release the event harbored in the application of these terms to the human body. I do want to interrogate how medical therapeutics ('medicine' henceforth) approaches materiality and phenomenality in the management of diagnoses. Let us look at cancer from this perspective.
While cancer presents itself as symptomatology within the experience of the patient, it also acts upon the material body by invading tissue and causing a cascade of biochemical occurrences that conduct the appearance of the symptoms which the patient experiences as disease. At first blush, 'cancer' has both its material and phenomenal dimensions that conspire in its appearance. Symptoms are said to be subjective (what the patient experiences and communicates) and Signs are said to be objective (what the investigator observes). These terms are not construed to be in competition.
I cannot fathom a scenario in which any method worthy of its name would privilege one term over another. If materiality and phenomenality are even temporarily placed in binary opposition, the 'bar' would regardless be the locus of treatment. The oncologist (cancer specialist) diagnoses the particular cancer affecting the patient and directs treatments determined to be effective in eradicating or controlling the cancer process with an eye to symptom resolution as the cancer milieu dissolves under treatment. The experience of symptoms such as pain, fatigue, depressed mood, shortness of breath resolves as their causes are quelled.
For patients whose cancers are cured symptoms may still persist. Survivorship medicine is based on the need to address symptoms that can no longer be traced to an existing materiality. Pain, which during the active disease process traces its materiality to the cancer milieu, persists in phenomenality in the absence of materiality. This pain is certainly a consequent of the materiality now absent, but its appearance is located only in its own phenomena. It is purely subjective (pain is solely determined by its subjective presence by definition). Some oncologists are reluctant to treat that which has no objective reality in materiality. The subjectivity of pain has not changed from the active cancer milieu to the survivorship phase. What is the diagnosis?
Similar observations can be made for disease processes other than cancer. But a certain kind of pain might drive home my point more dramatically. "Phantom pain" is a deafferentation pain many patients locate in amputated limbs. Barring from the discussion that patients still experience pain located in limbs that no longer exist (they have been incinerated), just what kind of pain is this? The experience of the pain is of burning, lancinating, electrical sensations in the space where the limb 'was.' All materiality of the body-part is gone, only the symptom of the diseased limb presents itself to the experience to the patient. Here the diagnosis is 'neuropathic pain,' and the treatment is an appropriate dose of an anti-convulsant drug, most often the drug 'gabapentin,' but also 'pregablin' and 'duloxetine' within a program of rehabilitation and interdisciplinary support and management.
Some neuroscientists, armed with their functional MRIs, suggest that such pain has its locus in the play of neurotransmitters in neural tissues, and that the subjective experience of such 'phantom pain' is all a function of mind. Such a conclusion at least tends to collapse phenomenality into materiality, or the converse. I resist the reduction of the body to the mind in this scenario, though I am open to further elucidation, even if this entails Levi's call for a transformation of the concept of phenomenality.
I do not take the distinction between 'materiality' and 'phenomenality' as some irreducible dualism. That strategy is dead in the water and does nothing to release the event harbored in the application of these terms to the human body. I do want to interrogate how medical therapeutics ('medicine' henceforth) approaches materiality and phenomenality in the management of diagnoses. Let us look at cancer from this perspective.
While cancer presents itself as symptomatology within the experience of the patient, it also acts upon the material body by invading tissue and causing a cascade of biochemical occurrences that conduct the appearance of the symptoms which the patient experiences as disease. At first blush, 'cancer' has both its material and phenomenal dimensions that conspire in its appearance. Symptoms are said to be subjective (what the patient experiences and communicates) and Signs are said to be objective (what the investigator observes). These terms are not construed to be in competition.
I cannot fathom a scenario in which any method worthy of its name would privilege one term over another. If materiality and phenomenality are even temporarily placed in binary opposition, the 'bar' would regardless be the locus of treatment. The oncologist (cancer specialist) diagnoses the particular cancer affecting the patient and directs treatments determined to be effective in eradicating or controlling the cancer process with an eye to symptom resolution as the cancer milieu dissolves under treatment. The experience of symptoms such as pain, fatigue, depressed mood, shortness of breath resolves as their causes are quelled.
For patients whose cancers are cured symptoms may still persist. Survivorship medicine is based on the need to address symptoms that can no longer be traced to an existing materiality. Pain, which during the active disease process traces its materiality to the cancer milieu, persists in phenomenality in the absence of materiality. This pain is certainly a consequent of the materiality now absent, but its appearance is located only in its own phenomena. It is purely subjective (pain is solely determined by its subjective presence by definition). Some oncologists are reluctant to treat that which has no objective reality in materiality. The subjectivity of pain has not changed from the active cancer milieu to the survivorship phase. What is the diagnosis?
Similar observations can be made for disease processes other than cancer. But a certain kind of pain might drive home my point more dramatically. "Phantom pain" is a deafferentation pain many patients locate in amputated limbs. Barring from the discussion that patients still experience pain located in limbs that no longer exist (they have been incinerated), just what kind of pain is this? The experience of the pain is of burning, lancinating, electrical sensations in the space where the limb 'was.' All materiality of the body-part is gone, only the symptom of the diseased limb presents itself to the experience to the patient. Here the diagnosis is 'neuropathic pain,' and the treatment is an appropriate dose of an anti-convulsant drug, most often the drug 'gabapentin,' but also 'pregablin' and 'duloxetine' within a program of rehabilitation and interdisciplinary support and management.
Some neuroscientists, armed with their functional MRIs, suggest that such pain has its locus in the play of neurotransmitters in neural tissues, and that the subjective experience of such 'phantom pain' is all a function of mind. Such a conclusion at least tends to collapse phenomenality into materiality, or the converse. I resist the reduction of the body to the mind in this scenario, though I am open to further elucidation, even if this entails Levi's call for a transformation of the concept of phenomenality.
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