The Immanent Turn

Bringing it all back home

I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. To that end I write this newsletter and host a podcast called Clerestory. I’m also writing a book called Neither/Nor and I’m a founding member of Liminal Learning. In London, I host a book club, a writing group, and other events. My work looks at how abstract concepts relate to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.

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I understand, in part, why Plato wants there to be a realm of forms.

His hope, through Socratic method, is to resist the Sophists’ “man is the measure” (Protagoras) and “might makes right” (Thrasymachus in the Republic and Callicles in the Gorgias). And in the Theaetetus, Socrates seems to think that basing knowledge on the senses will lead inevitably to such positions of relativism and aggression: If each person’s knowledge comes from their senses, then each person’s knowledge is unique to them. We will end up with different truths, and sort ourselves into groups without much discussion. Then the largest group will triumph, without the need for anyone to discuss anything or change their minds.

Socratic dialectic, then, is meant to avert the threat of violence. This works by positing a “view from nowhere,” accessible to reason, which appeals to rationality to prevent mob violence. So far so good. Then the only question that remains is how reason works, and why we need a magical realm of forms. And Plato’s student Aristotle, solved that, right? He gave us formal logic, plus he got rid of the realm of forms. Right?

Well… Let’s back up for a minute.

I’ve objected to Plato’s placing love up in the clouds, and to his deep disembodiment. I’ve also written about the problematic trajectory from Socratic elenchus to “collection and division.” Part of my issue is that the Socratic method starts out social, but in the later dialogues seems increasingly individualised. He makes it seem as if a special and motivated person might glimpse the forms through private effort and employment of an individual intellect, rather than in conversation. To me, there are clear dangers here, of certain individuals claiming to have accessed the Truth. The potential for conflict after such an encounter seems high.

One would think I would welcome, then, what I’ll call Aristotle’s “immanent turn.” This brings everything back to earth, not positing a realm of forms, where the one true Dog precedes every individual dog, and lives in the One True Dog House. Instead, for Aristotle, the form of a dog inheres in each individual dog. There’s no magical realm. Instead, everything is “immanent,” which is just a fancy way of saying “present” or “here in front of us.” Isn’t this an improvement?

Plato points up, Aristotle gestures down, in Raphael’s School of Athens (1508-11). Aristotle’s earthiness brings its own problems though.

The problem with the forms (or substances, or essences) being immanent is that they are then assumed to be obvious. It’s just obvious that I am a human, my primary substance is my body, my secondary substance is my status as “human” (species) and another secondary substance is my status as “animal” (genus). Then categories like genus keep stacking up, in non-overlapping hierarchical fashion.

This would be great, if nature came to us labeled. The problem is that nature does not actually come labeled. After Aristotle, Pyrrho of Elis makes a big deal about this. He labeled things as adiaphora, or undifferentiated. And it’s true, it seems to take effort to agree on taxonomical structures, and they tend to be revised a lot. I don’t know that much about biological taxonomies, but I’m pretty sure they have been constantly and radically revised since Linnaeus’ time (~1735). If so, this means that, while the organisms may be immanent and obvious, their species is neither immanent to us nor obvious.

In future posts, I want to argue that Aristotle’s move makes the forms seem obvious, and that obviousness itself is a dangerous thing. For one thing, calling one’s own taxonomy obvious will bring one into immediate conflict with those who have different taxonomies. And if taxonomies are seen to be “immanent” or intrinsic rather than determined by a culture, it will probably also generate a level of contempt for other systems. Conflicts will inevitably follow, and then we’re back to precisely the “might makes right” that Plato was trying to avoid. In a roundabout way reminiscent of Oedipus Rex, Plato’s attempt to avoid conflict has actually produced it.

As always, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Bryan

P.S. If you want to read the article I wrote about last week, please get in touch!

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For some reason, while looking for the image of Plato pointing up at heaven, Sparks’ “Here in Heaven” (1974) got stuck in my head:

Further reading: