Deep-Field Logic

Logic in an environment

Deep-field logic is Grant's account of a logic that cannot be isolated from the nature that produces, contains and exceeds it. A field logic depends on connected resistants that environ it; it therefore contests the transcendental demand that whatever exists first meet thought on thought's own ground (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/iain-hamilton-grant-everything-is-primal-germ-or-nothing-is-the-deep-field-logic-of-nature-1.pdf, pp. 1–4). Logic is an extraction from nature, but the extraction itself remains a natural event.

The depth is consequently not a hidden logical stratum beneath appearances. It is the upstream environment that a proposition cannot reproduce inside itself. For Schelling, as Grant reads him, inquiry begins with an acknowledgement that the source of knowing remains unknown without thereby turning ignorance into a defect to be eliminated (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/iain-hamilton-grant-everything-is-primal-germ-or-nothing-is-the-deep-field-logic-of-nature-1.pdf, pp. 3–5). Deep ignorance preserves the positivity of what exists against procedures that make being dependent on its availability to knowledge.

The unknown root

Grant's central figure is Schelling's unknown root of the forms and living phenomena of matter. If the root is active in every form, it cannot be isolated as one separable entity; finding it everywhere means never finding it by itself (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/iain-hamilton-grant-everything-is-primal-germ-or-nothing-is-the-deep-field-logic-of-nature-1.pdf, p. 6). Darkness and unground name this structural asymmetry between generated forms and their generative source, not a merely temporary shortage of information.

The resulting problem is deeper than inaccessible origins. An account of the unknown root is itself another generated form and therefore adds to the universe it attempts to exhibit. Any claimed totality is at least one form short because its own exhibition is a further local event (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/iain-hamilton-grant-everything-is-primal-germ-or-nothing-is-the-deep-field-logic-of-nature-1.pdf, pp. 16–18). Grant calls this an ultra-deep-field problem: no fixed set of necessary conditions can serve as the final metric of generation.

Everything is primal germ

The primal germ is not a first microscopic object. It is a morphogenetic antecedent produced as antecedent by what issues from it. Grant takes Schelling's formula that everything is primal germ or nothing is to mean that totality itself must be generative, incomplete and environed; a domain counts as a domain when it produces another (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/iain-hamilton-grant-everything-is-primal-germ-or-nothing-is-the-deep-field-logic-of-nature-1.pdf, p. 18). Primacy is thus relational rather than chronologically absolute.

This explains why the logic is a logic of nature rather than a doctrine about an original seed. Matter, spacetime, chemistry, planetary formation and positing all have morphogenetic histories. Each emergence divides nature into a before and an after while remaining within nature; none supplies an uppermost environment containing all environments (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/iain-hamilton-grant-everything-is-primal-germ-or-nothing-is-the-deep-field-logic-of-nature-1.pdf, pp. 19–21).

Relation to the transcendental

Deep-field logic makes nature transcendental with respect to its own sources. The ideal is not eliminated in favour of a mute real; ideation adds another real form to the catalogue of forms because it is a natural consequence with real antecedents (Iain Hamilton Grant/Texts/Essays/iain-hamilton-grant-everything-is-primal-germ-or-nothing-is-the-deep-field-logic-of-nature-1.pdf, pp. 20–21). The page therefore belongs beside transcendental materialism and antecedence criterion: all three refuse to let thought recover its material prius as though it had manufactured it.