Descartes and Having Infinite Ideas

In Descartes we encounter an interesting argument, the so-called Causal Argument (CA) from the Third Meditation. It is the first of two arguments Descartes provides for the existence of God, and in my opinion it has the more interesting implications (the other is, of course, the more famous ontological argument).

The CA goes something like this:

P1. I have an idea of an infinite being, God.

P2. An effect cannot have more reality than its cause; it must have just as much or less reality.

1. My idea of God could not have come from:

         A. anything finite

         B. nothing

2. My idea of God came from an infinite being.

3. God exists.

Step 1 follows from the premisses by P2, where we define infinite things to have more reality than finite things (Descartes is a rationalist, after all), and finite things in all likelihood more than nothing. Step 2 follows by a process of elimination: If my idea didn't come from a finite thing or from nothing, all that's left is an infinite thing. Step 3 just names that infinite being as God as says that if my idea came from an infinite being, that being must therefore exist.

So here's an objection to Descartes' argument (expanded from Gassendi's objection): An idea of something infinite has just as much reality as the idea of something finite, because both those ideas are finite. The idea of the infinite being is just a finite idea. It's content, that it is an idea of an infinite being, does not affect this. The content of the idea was created by a process of adding or amplifying various perfections one has experienced in the world. In other words, it is a spurious infinity; one cannot experience or even intellectually apprehend infinity, even though it is possible to trick oneself into thinking such a thing is possible.

In other words, there are two major objections: Step 1 is illegitimate because something finite can indeed come from something finite; and P1 is false because the content of the idea is not a truly infinite God, but a spurious infinity. This first objection is the most interesting, so I will begin with it.

To make sense of Descartes' argument, we can make the following (initially strange) assertion: the idea of an infinite thing is itself infinite. In other words, in the context of the CA, step 1 is justified because the idea of God is infinite and thus by P2 it could not have come from a finite source. I believe this is what Descartes is trying to say, and that this is not a simple confusion of form and content.

But what does it mean to say that an idea itself is infinite? How can an idea held by a finite being be infinite? How could the mind grasp an infinite thing not only in the content of an idea but in its very form? As Descartes notes in his reply to Gassendi, one cannot “grasp” the infinite, and that is the whole point. It is not something possible through the senses or through the imagination, but only through the intellect. The intellect is the only way to access infinity. But, as noted, this is not a simple question of content, of having an idea of infinity, but of having an infinite idea.

An interesting implication: God is inseparable from the idea of God, or rather, the idea of God is God. But it is not our understanding of our idea of God, because this is fuzzy and, as Descartes notes, similar to a student's idea of a triangle—the student knows a triangle has three sides, but he is ignorant of the many more advances properties possessed by the triangle. This is a refutation of Gassendi's objection that we only know a part of God, because we cannot apprehend him as a whole. Rather, our imperfect idea of God is not the idea of a part of him, but akin to the student's idea of a triangle.

In any case, the idea of God is God also because his essence is existence. Here we have an interesting bridging of thought and being, which corresponds perfectly with the above idea that an idea of an infinite being is itself infinite.

So we have three terms: God, the idea of God, and our idea of God. The first two, strictly speaking, are one and the same. But our idea of God is still infinite—it is not exactly limited by anything, as a part would be limited by another part. Rather, there are no parts in its content, and therefore nothing to limit the form either, due to the weird coincidence of form and content.

This has only been a brief exposition of what I think is a very interesting thread in Descartes. In the future I hope to better explore what having an infinite idea means, as well as move a bit away from Descartes' dogmatism. In any case, I found the account of the role of the intellect to be quite lacking in Meillassoux (in his terms, he did not explain how it is that mathematics/science/whatever can do what it does, etc. etc.).

Actor-Network Shenanigans in Recent Anthropology

I'm not very familiar with actor-network theory, but I have come across it in several anthropological texts I have recently read—Elyachar's Markets of Dispossession, Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy, and On Barak's On Time. I admit that in these works sometimes I can't find the connection between the theory and the barrage of stories and facts. Each of these texts has many elements that are quite difficult to disentangle, and which could each warrant in-depth review. However, I will keep this rather superficial for now, as I have to continue reading On Time... Anyway, I've been reading Graham Harman so I'll see if I can casually and uncritically apply his philosophy to these texts—maybe a decent (though unprofound) exercise, but still I apologize for vulgarity and simplicity beforehand.

First, identifying non-human actors in historical processes is nothing revolutionary or even very interesting. This is not where the problem lies, however. It is rather when the focus on “objects” or whatever is made at the expense of ideological configurations or modes of consciousness (as for example in Mitchell's book). There is no place for human agency, which I presume to be at least as important for direct political action and the articulation of demands (in the general strike, for instance) as is the positive power of the workers to have those demands met. In other words, a strike may be effective towards its particular goals because of (or rather, largely because of) technical considerations—this would be Mitchell's determination of the vulnerability of the networks of coal or oil production as the primary factor. However, what demands are made is a matter of consciousness, and unless Mitchell is a technical determinist (he says he isn't) then that ought to be accounted for. I mean, his book is about democracy, however poorly he defines it.

Second, there's the irritating exultant mode of writing that Barak resorts to when he switches over from telling us a story to discussing his theoretical framework. For example, he writes, “Close attention to these connections may open up new paths of inquiry, such as a marine biology of the Arabic novel, an electrical engineering of neoclassical poetry, or an agricultural science of Arabic semantic fields. What follows is an attempt to flesh out some of these connections” (131).

Quite aside from the exultation, there's the problem of flattening, which happens in two ways: first, there's “vertical” flattening, such that levels of abstraction are hopelessly confused, and second, there's the “horizontal” flattening, in which causal interactions are reduced and intermediate actors eliminated.

The vertical flattening is of course intended, though I don't exactly know why this would be desirable in this context. As an example, let us take the “underwater linguistic environment” (39). Is there anything linguistic in this environment? Well yes, Barak might say, the submarine cables through which telegraphs are sent. But the sea termite cannot interact with the cables linguistically, but only indirectly through, for example, chewing through the cable and preventing communication. We might ask what properties the termite is interacting with when it does so—none of these turn out to be linguistic in nature. There are certain qualities, in other words, that the termite cannot abstract (where I take abstraction in a realist sense of engaging certain properties or distorting a certain object in a certain way). So this doesn't make much sense to me.

We could also take Barak's enthusiasm as that not for “vertical” flattening but “horizontal” flattening. For example, take the line, “Along these lines, and in a much more literal sense, our worm [the sea termite] may almost be able to write... the teredo [the termite] opened the door for my own entry into the narrative, thus participating in the writing of its own history” (39). Or alternatively, he earlier declares the termite to be “semi-literate”. Horizontally, this could mean that the worm as an actor caused someone to write about it, and thereby somehow wrote its own history. The problem, of course, is the compression of the causal chain. The worm caused someone to write about it, but this does not mean the worm wrote or has any direct engagement with writing or reading. Things in a causal chain need to be alike in some sense in their interactions, but the further effects of that (the writing) need not be related whatsoever.

In other words, to sum up: some properties may elicit the effects of other properties through the medium of the object to which they belong, and those properties need not be the same or commensurable. The termite chews the cable, which affects some physical properties of the cable, which properties effect the linguistic properties of the cable through the medium of the cable-object. The termite is not linguistic and cannot interact with linguistic reality, and there is no “underwater linguistic environment”.

A better use of the theory, in my opinion, is to be found in Elyachar. She claims the Egyptian Master (craftsman) is not separate from the market he creates, and that the failure of neoliberal programs in Egypt can be related to this fact (though it does not just apply to craftsmen, there it is most visible). Here, there is a good reason to bring in actor-network theory, whereas in the other two books I've mentioned it seems to be only weakly-related to the actual arguments provided—aside from the commonplace denunciations of subject-object distinctions that are not sufficiently relational or anti-humanist enough (strange how those two charges go together, given recent work in speculative realism).