4
Mining Conditions: A Response to Harman
Iain Hamilton Grant
First of all, let me reiterate the substantive lines of agreement Harman notes between
us, and specifically the first of these lines, from which all the others stem—that the ‘inanimate world’ is a crucial orientation for any realist metaphysics. We both disagree,
then, with Hegel’s stupefying judgment in the Encyclopaedia (§ 339) that there is nothing
philosophically pertinent in geology. And we agree on the necessity, as Harman pithily
puts it, that metaphysics think a reality beyond our thinking, because if thinking is not thinking reality, there is not thinking at all.
Secondly, before I rush into a reply so brief as to be ungracious, let me express my
profound thanks to Graham for transposing the problems addressed in my Schelling
book into the richer philosophical world his thinking inhabits; and for risking ridicule
by nominating me alongside Giordano Bruno as the co-authors of an option in metaphysics. Although it will appear churlish to scruple at such fine company, yet I must,
since Bruno in the end proves too attached to the Aristotelian concepts of the ultimacy of substance onto which, as Harman delightedly catalogues, he nevertheless pours
such scorn. Yet in so doing, Bruno identifies precisely the nature of the problem—is
there a relation of anteriority between substance and potency in the nature of matter?
Accordingly, while I agree with Harman’s assessment of our agreements, I disagree with him as regards our disagreement. I do not think, that is, that the difference between our realisms can be mapped onto the undermining One, as against a
self-subsisting Many, substance problem as he does here. Rather, the difference lies
between two conceptions of actuality, one of which I will call the depth model, and
which consists either of objects all the way down or of a single ground from which all
emerge; and the other, the genetic model, which makes depth regional with respect to
anteriority. Moreover, although Harman identifies his disagreement with me as lying
in the advocacy of a philosophy of nature in general, which he does not share, and in
a dynamic or powers-ontological philosophy of nature in particular, since this has the
effect of rendering form extrinsic or derived, a major element of his criticism of the
undermining position is that it ‘strip[s] all power from horses and minerals’. In other words, it is clear that it is a requirement of Harman’s metaphysics that objects pos41
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Mining Conditions: A Response to Harman
sess ‘productive force in their own right’.1 My question to him is therefore exactly the
one he poses to me: how are such powers-possessing objects to be conceived on the object-oriented model?
To clarify both my reasons for scrupling at Bruno and disagreeing with Harman’s
disagreement with me, I will first outline the manner in which Bruno equivocates over anteriority with respect to substance and power, and the reason for it. I will then briefly explore the problem of anteriority before situating the problem of the extrinsic determination of objects from which our disagreement, on Harman’s account, radiates, not in
terms of the One-or-Many-substances problem as Harman presents it here, but rather
in terms of the problem of the possibility of powers on the object-oriented model. My argument is that actuality must be “virtually” expanded if the objects whose metaphysical status Harman gloriously defends, are not to be rendered as impotent as he fears.
As Harman notes, Bruno does not so much abandon substance as maintain that
it is one. It is precisely in order to maintain a single substance from which everything
derives that Bruno’s metaphysics is ‘ambivalent’, as Werner Beierwaltes has argued,2
between substance and powers. In Cause, Principle and Unity, Teofilo stipulates that
‘matter … can be considered in two ways: first, as potency; second, as substratum’,3
and in fact maintains both. If the substratum is eliminated in the interests of potencies,
and objects therefore undermined, the substantial unity of the universe is eliminated
by the same token. Hence Teofilo’s assertion that the ‘one indivisible being … is the
matter in which so many forms are united’.4 If, conversely, potencies are eliminated in
the interests of the substrate, then no differentiation, no formation or information, of
this unique substantial continuum may arise. Hence Bruno’s conclusion that both substance and potency must be integrally maintained to form the One, Great, self-differentiating Object: it is only ‘in the absolute potency and absolute act’ that matter is ‘all
it can be’,5 and only ‘as a substance’ that ‘the whole is one’.6
The problem is, however, that Bruno does not resolve this substance-potency bipolarity of matter, but resorts to making substance and potency coeval; more exactly,
he denies the anteriority of potency with respect to substance: ‘the power to be accompanies the being in act and does not come before it’.7 This is, however, an asymmetrical denial of anteriority: none such is issued with respect to substance. In the end, Bruno is simply not anti-Aristotelian enough, because he maintains that there must be a
ground to mine in the first place.
Mining as Such
Now I do not dispute that ground is so mineable, nor indeed do I dispute the actuality
of grounds. What I dispute is their metaphysical sufficiency. What happens when this
ground is mined? Take any object whatsoever, on the Schellingian condition that it is
1. Graham Harman, ‘On the Undermining of Objects’, in Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, re.press, Melbourne, 2010, pp. 21-40, p.
33, my emphasis.
2. Werner Beierwaltes, Identität und Differenz, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1980, 188.
3.Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, trans. R. de Lucca, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1998, p. 65.
4. Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, p. 77.
5. Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, p. 79.
6. Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, p. 69.
7. Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity, p. 66.
Iain Hamilton Grant
43
not impossible in nature—a mountain, a phone, an idea, an animal, a hallucination—
and ask what is involved in its existence. The conditions on which its existence depends
do not belong to that object—they are not “its” conditions, but conditions that possibilize it. Since conditions exceed the object, they are equally the conditions involved in
other existing objects, and that cannot therefore be specified as belonging to that object alone, nor as terminating in it. That is, the causes of mountain-formation are also
causes of geogony, of ideation, of animals, of fever-dreams and of telecommunications.
Were this not the case, then each set of objects would envelope its own, wholly separate universe. Either backtracking the causal sequence terminates—even if ideally—
in a ground prior to all grounds, i.e., in substance or the ‘ultimate subject [hypokeimenon
eschaton]’ (Metaphysics 1017b24), or it does not. If the former, we have the source of Bruno’s problem in refusing to abandon Aristotelian substance in the philosophy of matter
and the consequent yet insufficiently determining asymmetrical denial of anteriority to
powers; and if the latter, then either substantial existence is self-limiting and inherently particular (‘objects’), or it involves sequences that exceed it in principle and in fact.
The problem is, I take it, that self-limiting particular substances involve the hypothesis
of an irreducible object-actualism that rejects any prospect of the ‘becoming of being’,
in the interests of a universe the actuality of which is eternally what and as it is. This is
because if it does not involve such a hypothesis, then the question of what is involved
in particular substances opens up onto their genesis. If the actual involves genesis, then
at no point do presently actual objects exhaust the universe.
The denial that actuality involves genesis, and the question of the extrinsicality of
form, is not confined to speculative metaphysics. A similar actualism formed the background to the epigenetic critique of preformationism in the late eighteenth century life
sciences, in which proponents of the latter view argue for an ‘emboîtement infini’ of
organism by organism, with no upper or lower limit, with the result that ‘organisms
are and remain through the centuries what they always have been [so that] the forms
of animals are unalterable’.8 Although Kant disparages preformationism as ‘deny[ing]
the formative force of nature to all individuals, so as to have [it] come directly from the
hand of the creator’ (Ak. V: 423)—that is, as asserting form as extrinsic to the individuals that possess it—Leibniz, similarly noting that here lies the problem of the ‘origin
of forms’, argues exactly the converse: ‘exact inquiries … have shown us that organic
bodies in nature are never produced from chaos …, but always through seeds in which
there is, no doubt, some preformation’ (Monadology § 74). The origin of form problem
thus encounters the problems of genesis not extrinsically, but intrinsically, since either
substantial forms—the ‘non-accidental forms of individual things’, as Harman puts it—
are always what they are, or they become what they are.
The same problem is echoed in Hegel’s resolution of the neo-Platonist problem of
the Eternity of the World, which Proclus advocated and Philoponus disputed. ‘Eternity’, says the Encyclopaedia, is the ‘absolute present, the Now, without before and after’.
Rather than denying, with Kant, the possibility of a solution to the problem of whether the world has a beginning in time, Hegel eliminates its actuality. That is, where preformationism denies actuality to genesis, Hegel expels the ‘before and after’ from an
actualized eternity: ‘the world is created, is now being created, and has eternally been
created’ (Enc. § 247). Anteriority becomes an ideal differentiation within an actual eter 8. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, ‘Divers mémoires sur des grands sauriens’, Mémoires de l’Academie Royale
des Sciences de l’Institut de France, no. 12, 1833, p. 89.
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Mining Conditions: A Response to Harman
nity, so that it is only within this ideality that ‘the planet is the veritable prius’ (Enc. §
280). Geology isn’t simply philosophically irrelevant to Hegel, but fatal to the eternity of the world, precisely because it necessarily posits an anteriority even to the becoming of the planetary object.
Putting both problems together, we can see how preformationist arguments for the
homunculus-in-the-egg having a homunculus in its egg9 involve the incorporation of
anteriority and posteriority into just such an eternal present. The differences between
all these antagonists lie not only in their assumptions concerning a One or a Many of
substance, but in the means by which anteriority is eliminated by it. That is to say, anteriority does not remain extrinsic to substance, but is incorporated within it, suggesting a topological asymmetry between container and contained, with the former always
in excess of the latter, or the product in excess of its production, from the ground up.
The Geology Lesson
So we begin to recover geology’s philosophical significance from Hegel’s dismissal of
it. We should not, however, hold Hegel alone responsible for this, since although he
doesn’t draw directly on them, his theses echo James Hutton’s famous declaration, in
his ‘Theory of the Earth’ that, in investigating the formation of the planet, ‘we find no
vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end’.10 Hutton is not, like Hegel, joining the
arguments concerning the eternity of the world, but pursuing the consequences of reasoning about its formation on the basis of observable causes. Despite its antipathy towards cosmogony, and to ‘questions as to the origin of things’,11 the precise difference
between the Huttonian and Hegelian actualisms lies in the assertion of the former
that ‘the oldest rocks’ are ‘the last of an antecedent series’,12 an antencedence that Hegel eliminates because it attests to anteriority as non-recoverable exteriority. Because
the geological series cannot complete the real-time recovery of its origins, and because
neither can it avoid opening onto cosmogonic questions, geology makes the depth of
the earth’s crust into a relative measure of an antecedence exterior to it, sculpting it.
Thus the earth is not an object containing its ground within itself, like the preformationists’ animal series; but rather a series or process of grounding with respect to its
consequents. If geology, or the ‘mining process’, opens onto an ungroundedness at the
core of any object, this is precisely because there is no ‘primal layer of the world’, no
‘ultimate substrate’ or substance on which everything ultimately rests. The lines of serial dependency, stratum upon stratum, that geology uncovers do not rest on anything
at all, but are the records of actions antecendent in the production of consequents. Were
this not the case, how could inorganic nature be the philosophical protagonist that
Harman and I both argue it is?
Moreover, the antecedents in question are necessary if geology, mining, are to be
possible at all. In other words, geology retrospects a production antecedent to its beginning, but does so as a new production dependent on that same beginning. “No planet, no geology” is not just a truism with regard to the definition of that science; it
9. According to Gould, this as a ‘caricature’ of preformationism which he sets out to correct. Stephen Jay
Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1977, p. 19.
10. James Hutton, ‘Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of Land upon the Globe’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, no.
1, 1788, p. 304.
11. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, James Secord (ed.), Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1997, p. 8.
12. Lyell, Principles of Geology, p. 16.
Iain Hamilton Grant
45
also stipulates the physical conditions of ideation—meteorological metastasis, chemical complexification, speciation, neurogony, informed inquiry, and so forth—and that
they have taken place. The geology lesson therefore teaches that objects or substantial
forms depend on an anteriority always more extensive than them, and that such anteriority is always the domain of production.
The Bruno Problem
This brings us back to the Bruno Problem, which consists of the asymmetrical denial
of anteriority to powers in respect of substance. Positively construed, it amounts to the
assertion of a substantial anteriority, of Aristotle’s ultimate hypokeimenon, a ground
as the base of each or of all things, and is the source, therefore, of Bruno’s equivocation. The problem is, such a ground cannot be mined, as it is only on the basis of this
ground that depth, the medium of mining, becomes possible. Undermining, in other words, becomes impossible on the basis of substantial anteriority. Since it is not
substantiality as such that Harman seeks to defend against under- and over-miners,
but substantial forms, the defence of objects ‘all the way down’ entails the abandonment of anteriority, not depth. Mining, for Harman, must always encounter objects
(amongst which, he notes,13 relations are to be included) without end. His assertion is
therefore that there are always substances in the plural, which is how he resolves the
Bruno problem.
The other way to resolve the Bruno problem is not to make the denial of anteriority symmetrical, which simply displaces the issue along an infinite chain, or brings
it to an arbitrary halt, but to replace it with the assertion of anteriority as such. In this
way, however, the endless displacement of the symmetrical denial already entails the
necessity of at least relative anteriority, as we saw with Hutton’s geological series: anteriority in no way negates the existence or possibility of substantial being, but is its necessarily ongoing production. At the very least, powers are entailed by the very possibility of an anterior and a posterior, if these are not merely relative; but these powers are
the articulation of what is in particular and contingent ways. Otherwise, we have the inert being that Fichte, for instance, makes into a categorical imperative of the science
of knowledge, and that Schelling’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature struggles against in his
diagnosis of the dualisms entailed by the passivist theories of matter common both to
Fichtean subjectivist idealism and Newtonian mechanical materialism. Accordingly,
mining is not undermining, but uncovering the necessary anteriority for any and all
objects. This is the route that Kielmeyer’s theories of natural history took, and that
drove Schelling’s investigations in the philosophy of nature. The philosophical pertinence of natural history consists therefore in the demonstration of the constancy of
production, of powers always at work, always intrinsic to the formative process.
As in Bruno, so in contemporary philosophy of nature, powers are more often
than not considered to be the properties or dispositions of objects, and to be grounded therein. The suspicion is that, were powers ‘ungrounded’ in such objects, all prospect of individuation would be lost. What this illustrates is the dualism that lies at the
root of Bruno’s post-Aristotelian substance-power problem and its modern proponents:
powers, conceived in abstraction from substance, ‘never travel’, that is, they do nothing. Accordingly, substance, conceived in abstraction from powers, must somehow re 13. Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Chicago, Open Court,
2005, p. 90.
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Mining Conditions: A Response to Harman
ceive articulation from a non-substantial exteriority in order to compose a powers ontology that can account for discrete dispositional particularities.
Clearly, then, the problem stems from the mutual abstraction of becoming and
thing, a problem whose solution Plato already foreshadowed in coining the principle
of immanence in the form of ‘the becoming of being [genesis eis ousian]’ (Philebus 26d8): it
cannot be other-than-being that becomes, or becoming would not be at all. In the present context, this means: ‘the mark of all being is power’. Powers are inseparable from
their products; if no products, then there were no powers, but not the reverse. It is neither the case that things ground powers, nor the converse; rather, powers unground the
ultimacy attributed to substantial being and necessitate, therefore, rather than eliminate, the becomings of objects. Powers accordingly are natural history, in the precise
sense that powers are not simply formally or logically inseparable from what they do,
but are what they do, and compose being in its becoming. The thoroughgoing contingency of natural production undermines, I would claim, any account of permanently actual substantial forms precisely because such contingents entail the actuality not
simply of abstractly separable forms, but of the powers that sculpt them. This is where
Harman’s retooling of vicarious causation will become the focus for discussion, but
which must take place elsewhere.
Nonseparability or immanence is not therefore fatal to objects, but only to their
actuality being reducible to their objectality. It is for this reason that I think the problem on the different sides of which Harman and I find ourselves needs to be played out
at the level of the limits of the actual and the actuality of antecedence. What nonseparability is fatal to is any metaphysics of the ultimacy of impotent substance, whether of the One or the Many. If we are genuinely to take the ‘inanimate world as a philosophical protagonist’, as Harman and I both do, then its actions must involve powers
that refuse reduction to the inert substratum that made matter into ‘almost nothing’
for Aristotle and Augustine.