Towards a Relational Ontology

Philosophy's Other Possibility

Andrew Benjamin

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438456348, 9781438456331
• eBook ISBN: 9781438456355
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

In this original work of philosophy, Andrew Benjamin calls for a new understanding of relationality, one inaugurating a philosophical mode of thought that takes relations among people and events as primary, over and above conceptions of simple particularity or abstraction. Drawing on the work of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Heidegger, Benjamin shows that a relational ontology has always been at work within the history of philosophy even though philosophy has been reluctant to affirm its presence. Arguing for what he calls anoriginal relationality, he demonstrates that the already present status of a relational ontology is philosophy's other possibility. Touching on a range of topics including community, human-animal relations, and intimacy, Benjamin's thoughtful and penetrating distillation of ancient, modern, and twentieth-century philosophical ideas, and his judicious attention to art and literature make this book a model for original philosophical thinking and writing.

1

Being-in-Relation

1.

What is a relation? What are relations? The project of developing an understanding of being-in-relation starts with the supposition that the limit of the first question is established by the inevitability of the second—an inevitability to be encountered and then recovered. In other words, the second question opens up an importantly different proposition. The difference is clear. What the second question holds open is the possibility that the truth of relationality brings a form of plurality into play, and therefore what is true of relationality, correspondingly, could not be given by any one form of singularity in which that singularity would have been taken as primary. Were singularity to precede relationality, then the truth of relationality would have already been provided. Its truth would be found in the coming into relation of two founding singularities. While the positing of a founding form of singularity exerts a pervasive hold on philosophy, it contains a dimension—what will emerge as an ineliminable dimension—that remains unthought within it. What is yet to be thought is the possibility that plural relations are original and therefore that both singularity and relations between singularities are always secondary. In other words, the opening question has been attributed an automatic viability. However, there were two opening questions. The force of the second is that it brings another project into play. What was initially unthought—unthought despite being present—comes to be thought in the move from the first to the second question.

Moving beyond the first question, therefore, or seeing that question merely as a step toward the second, is to allow the second question to open up the position that both informs and structures this entire project, namely, the proposition that the truth of relationality inheres in what is always at work within relations, namely, the effective presence of a founding and irreducible plurality. Within the structure of this general argument, singular relations, which can be more accurately described as pragmatic occurrences within relationality, can only ever be secondary (and this is the case despite the possibility of attributing a form of originality to them). Such occurrences always depend upon the presence of an original form of multiplicity or plurality (even if the presence of the latter is not affirmed). While an assertion of this nature may seem to be an imposition on the philosophical, the contention structuring this project is that this is not the case. Indeed, the overriding position advanced throughout the varying engagements with texts and figures from the history of philosophy that form the basis of this book is that relationality is always primary and that it continues to appear in this way. Moreover, what is fundamental to the argument developed in the course of this project is that relationality has always been there as a possibility. Relationality is not a lost possibility to be viewed nostalgically. It can be recovered. And yet the argument goes further. Not only can relationality be recovered from within the context of this overall argument, but relationality also is there as philosophy’s other possibility.

The contention at work here is that relationality has an original presence. At times it has what might be described as an almost archaic presence. Nonetheless, the presence of relationality, no matter how the presence of a founding form of relationality is understood, is often excised or effaced in the name of a posited founding singularity (to which it should be added that it is a singularity that can only ever be posited as founding.) The feint of original singularity, or more accurately the latter’s emergence as a feint, is part of this process. That such a singularity is posited and thus only ever there, and therefore only ever present as an after-effect, is a central aspect of the general argument. It should be added here that the presence of this conception of the after-effect when recognized as such, that is, when recognized as coming after rather than as actually original—needs to be taken as attesting to the primacy of relationality. It is important therefore to deploy the word “after-effect” as part of a rethinking of relationality.

The founding singularity, given that it emerges as a putative possibility, will only ever have occurred after the event. The event in question is what is called henceforth a constituting “plural event.” As a result, the “plural event” then becomes one of the names for the quality of this founding form of relationality.¹ The plural event is that which allows for singularities. As is argued throughout the course of this book, the term “plural event” has a double ontological register. In the first instance, that register identifies the presence of a founding ontological irreducibility. Secondly and consequently, that register marks the place of a founding set-up that needs to be explicated in terms of a relational ontology precisely because it is the site of already present and irreducible relations.² Irreducibility is a term that is fundamental to this project. Irreducibility is an essential part of relationality (in the way that the term is deployed here). If a relation is original, then there cannot be any element of the relation that precedes it. Irreducibility is central therefore to any thinking of the plural when the latter occurs with a relational ontology. The reference here to ontology is also of fundamental importance. The plural event refers to modes of existence (and thus to what is). The claim made in connection to a relational ontology pertains therefore to “being”—the domain of the ontological—and consequently the plurality in question refers neither to the hermeneutic nor to the interpretative, except to the extent that they are both effects of the ontological. Taken more broadly, what the reciprocity between the plural event and an occurrence entails—where the occurrence is understood as that which is what it is only after the event—is that singularity is an after-effect. However, one consequence of its presence as an after-effect in which that presence is not recognized, but which takes the apparently singular as both original and founding, is the excision of a founding event of plurality. Within such a context, namely, the context in which singularity is asserted as an end in itself, the plural event, while it remains the condition for singularity, can always be excised. To the extent that this excision takes place, the plural event remains unthought. To reiterate one of the positions with which this project began, it needs to be emphasized that the recognition of the failure to think both plurality and thus the primacy of relationality is equally, it can be argued, the recognition of that plurality as having a constituting and therefore founding presence. This position, the effacing of relationality, where effacing has a form of actuality, has continually and importantly different formulations in the texts to be considered in the course of this study. Fundamental to the position to be developed both here and in the chapters to come is that neither the means of excision nor the presence of relationality has a generalized and generalizable presence.

At this stage, what needs to be developed is the doubling within relationality insofar as the plural event as a site of original relationality is that which allows for the singular. A beginning can be made with the recognition of this doubling. While the position to be worked out will become increasingly more complex, and complexity here pertains to the detail of specific philosophical projects rather than the position itself, it is important to begin with this doubling. In the first place, there are forms of relationality that have an original quality. These forms are described henceforth as having “anoriginal” presence. The term “anoriginal” is used here to underscore a doubled presence at the origin and therefore a locus of irreducibility. Again, this doubling is an ontological claim rather than one determined by semantic concerns.³ The origin can no longer be thought in terms of a reductio ad unam; the resultant shift in thinking occasions a terminological one. Hence the original becomes the anoriginal. This overcoming of a posited unity as constituting an original ontological position accounts for why there will always be an interpretive plurality. Again, the semantic is an effect of the ontological. With regard to the doubling under consideration, the implication of the secondary nature of the semantic has a twofold presence. In the first instance, the semantic has its conditions of possibility in this anoriginal relation. It is thus that this relation has a constitutive presence. The second is that within this doubling there is a movement in which a relation that had forms of original presence—that is, anoriginal relationality—may come to be excised. And it should be remembered that what is always at stake is the anoriginal presence of modes of relationality, relations in the plural, whose excision occurs in the name of the singular. There is an important additional point that needs to be made here, namely, that this removal has to involve the invention, after the event, of an original form of singularity. The latter is, of course, the already noted positioning or positing of the origin—or the original—which has as its precondition the effacing of the anoriginal. There is a form of necessity at work here.

The principal aim of this project is to outline the aspects of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Heidegger that are integral to the development of the argument for the operative presence of both anoriginal relationality and the plural event. Prior to this, the terminology as well as the first stages of this argumentation stand in need of greater clarification. The detailed engagement with texts can wait at this stage. Nonetheless, an opening is essential. An opening in which it is possible to clarify what at the outset appears as no more than a set of general claims. It is this “generality” that holds the key. The presence of the general therefore provides a beginning. Indeed, a start can be made with the question of the essential and thus the possibility of the general. In other words, a point of departure need not inhere at this stage in the truth of the set of claims noted above concerning relationality—as though such claims existed as ends in themselves. Rather, a point of departure can be found in the assumption that the overall argument would seem to admit, if not necessitate, the equation of relationality with a form of generality in which each instance—each relation—would then be an example of the general. Accepting this position—that is, the positioning of apparent generality as providing an opening—gives rise to a specific point of departure. Following from its acceptance, again the initial acceptance of what will emerge as no more than semblance, is the need to move from a concern with the general (which can always be understood as the relationship between the universal and the particular) to a preliminary sketch of what is entailed by the terms “anoriginal plurality” and “plural event.”

2.

While the problems posed by generality, or abstraction, are clear, beginning with them has an additional significance. The significance concerns the relationship between abstraction and generality on the one hand and the terms “anoriginal plurality” and “plural event” on the other. The effect of these terms—the effect of their operative presence—is that they need to be understood as distancing, if not interrupting, the hold exercised by the continuity of the oscillation between universal and particular where the elements—universal/particular—are defined in terms of each other. What this means is that while the terms “anoriginal plurality” and “plural event” admit a type of generality, their clarification brings to the fore the limits of any recourse to forms of generality as providing the only basis of the philosophical. Moreover, within universality as it is usually understood, there is an inherent aporia (which is identified at a slightly later stage as the impossible possibility of abstract universality). The consequence of this aporia is that it gives rise to the necessity to think the relational. In other words, what arises here in terms of the impossible possibility of abstract universality indicates that it (abstract universality) is also posited after the event of a founding relationality and, in addition, the presence of that limitation delimits the presence of a different mode of philosophical thinking. It is a mode of thought to which allusion has already been made in terms of philosophy’s other possibility, namely, that mode of thought that holds to the primacy of relationality. It should be added here that, integral to the construction of this other possibility for philosophy, the primacy of relationality has a determining effect on the nature of the philosophical task. Philosophy, as a result, is linked to a form of recovery, where what is recovered are anoriginal forms of relationality. Any argument that is centered on overcoming the effacing of anoriginality, rather than the simply projective, defines futurity in terms of modes of recovery. However, it is a conception of futurity in which openings are connected to what will go on to be developed as the yet-to-be-determined.⁴ (The latter—the yet-to-be-determined—forms an integral part of the process of coming into relation.)

The question of what constitutes either the universal or the general (and at this stage there is no automatic need to distinguish between them), when taken as preexistent and self-complete entities, yields a specific path of investigation. Taken more broadly, what this specific investigative direction opens up are different modalities of philosophical questioning. They are modalities that have an already well-defined role within the history of philosophy. Perhaps the most emphatic form that this questioning can take is the one in which the project of the philosophical is presented in terms of the development of either a definition or a description of the universal. This is a position that, in both its historical location as well as its actual possibilities, has positive as well as negative determinations. Even though the negative forms are not directly central in the context of this project, they can be understood as comprising two specific elements. The first involves the concession of the possibility, if not the necessity, of the universal while simultaneously arguing—and this is the second element—that the content of the universal is unknowable. A clear example of this position is the Kantian conception of the “idea” as that which cannot be an object of knowledge because it transcends “the possibility of experience.”⁵ On the other hand, the positive aspect is the determination of the philosophical, not just by the question of the universal but also by the related supposition that this question can be asked—perhaps should be asked—independently of a direct concern with particulars. Or—and this is the argument that is clear from Plato—the provision of an example or even repeated instances of particulars (as though they were instances of the universal) do not provide an answer to the question of the universal itself. This set up accounts for the insistent nature of the distinction identified by Socrates in the Hippias Major (287E), for example, in terms of a distinction between “what is beautiful” (τι εστι καλον) and “what the beautiful is” (ο τι εστι το καλον). Indeed, it is that very separation that both gives universality its Platonic construal and simultaneously yields the specific conception of particularity proper to it. There is an essential reciprocity here. Moreover, within Platonism, the universal accounts for the identity of the particular. There is, in other words, an implicit conception of causality.⁶ Posed in this way, the question of universality—universality in its Platonic form—raises the possibility of the counter-measure to such a conception. The latter, the “counter-measure,” is the move in which what is countered is universality’s apparently unassailable ubiquity. Though it should be noted that the possibility of a counter-measure will always be, indeed has to be, an argument defined in relation to specific forms of universality. This necessity will prove to be significant because it exposes the already present impossibility of universality or the universal tout court. The counter-measure is, in sum, an argument that counters Plato or Kant as examples of a philosophical understanding of universality that would be advanced as part of the process of recovery. In sum, the opening up of the philosophical occurs as a recovery; an occurrence that is, of course, dependent upon the primacy of potentiality insofar as recovery is not a simple repetition but the uncovering of a possibility—thus a potentiality—whose actualization awaits. Actualization here becomes a form of affirmation. An affirmation of anoriginal relationality is dependent upon its potential to be affirmed. The interplay of recovery and potentiality rids philosophy of the threat of “eternal return” insofar as, once they are taken together, recovery and potentiality comprise a form of transformation. Transformation is both an opening to thought and an opening for thought.

As the project of thinking the anoriginality of being-in-relation continues to be worked out, the possibility of a counter-measure—which is once again the move countering the assumed presence of the oscillation between universality and particularity, and where such a move is to be understood initially as an opening given within recovery—raises an interesting problem. The problem is simply that there is already a response to universality (in both its Kantian and Platonic formulations). However, the contention here is that it is no more than a response in name alone and as such does not have the quality of a counter-measure. (The difference between the two—response on the one hand and the counter-measure on the other—is of fundamental importance.) The two conceptions of universality that have already been identified define the universal, firstly, as either external to particulars but unknowable (Kant’s distinction, for example, between the noumenal and phenomenal, in which the noumenon, despite its necessity as the ground of appearance, “is not at all positive and does not signify a determinate cognition of any sort of thing”⁷) or, secondly, external insofar as externality defines the object to be known, and, as such, delimits the nature of the philosophical task (Plato). The response to both conceptions of universality in such a setting would become the response to universality itself—a response that, as shall be suggested, is not a countermeasure. As such, it would be incorrect to attribute critical force to it. In other words, the response would have to be an argument made against the possibility of relationality as a general claim and thus as having a form of universality in the first place. At work here is a more general argument against universality as a philosophical possibility, where universality has a necessary presence with regard to the identity of particulars (providing the conditions of possibility in the case of Kant or their identity in the case of Plato). The consequence of such an argument—one in which any form of universality is called into question—would have the following form. The argument would be that relationality would ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Being-in-Relation
• 2. Recovering Relationality: Contra Heidegger’s Descartes
• 3. Relationality and the Affective Structure of Subjectivity: Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”
• 4. Democracy, Relationality, and the University: Fichte’s “Some Lectures concerning the Scholar’s Vocation”
• 5. Justice, Love, and Relationality: The Figure of Niobe in Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art
• 6. Anonymity and Fear: The Refusal of Relationality in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
• 7. Animal Relations: Modes of Presence in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason
• 8. Obdurate Love: Intimate Relations: Toward a Metaphysics of Intimacy
• Conclusion: Opening Relations
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover