Substance is the most real, the anchor-point for being-in-the-world. Its attraction for proponents has been its permanence and versatility – it can be anything and is implicated in everything. It is no longer no-thing, but is not quite yet some-thing, and its attraction for metaphysicians is therefore that its thingly quality is logically and conceptually prior to the actual things of the material world. By bringing together in substance the previously disconnected aspects of material constitution and intelligibility, Aristotle narrowed the gap between creatures, since matter was now an irreducible element of their being and their form was at least shared with related creatures. The combination of form and matter has an inner energy resulting in beings that act, and their activity is an expression of their individual natures, though it is their essence which makes them what they are. The combination of perceptual immediacy and essential definition results in clarity of experience for normal, socialised people. The cost is a persisting belief in the necessary separateness and self-sufficiency of the objects of experience, but a moment’s reflection on the nature of substance can be sufficient to counter this.
In the work of later innovators the intimacy of the connection between constitution and intelligibility in substance is lost. By separating the two and placing them side by side Spinoza achieves unity only in God’s nature, while in making the two so closely identified as to be one thing Leibniz reduces everything to the formal
118 Letter to Arnaud, April 30, 1687. 119
Ibid.
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unity of God. Both developments result in the loss of substance’s active principle, or its inner power, and it tends towards an inertness that culminates in modern materialism. After Kant there is matter, there is reason, and there are transcendental objects, like God, to be connected in complex architectonic structures that are to become the proper subject matter of metaphysics. Until Kant signals the end of the aspirations of rationalist metaphysicians and their alignment of the infinite with the understanding, God increasingly becomes the supplier of worldly activity, but not directly. Spinoza allows the productive divisibility of the infinite, which expresses God, to drive the production of dynamic reality. Leibniz finds it necessary to give the monads an analogue of “life”, an urge to perfection, which is a limitation of the expression of God’s perfection. These “god-given” elements, expressed as intensity and density, realise the inner nature of substance as act, and go some way to resurrecting the unity thought by Aristotle. Together they provide some resources for considering an individual as a thickening or intensification of surrounding flows of material, and as not essentially differing from that material except insofar as the local concentration must have a focus, or centre. Hence they provide alternatives to the notion that an individual must be bounded and discrete, two concepts I will consider in more detail in the following chapter.
The conclusion of this chapter is that substance no longer has the right kinds of characteristics to sustain connection. It is a critical component in any metaphysic of discreteness because it is the very discreteness of the everyday which is its task to explain. Rationalist systems of metaphysics that align reality with the expressive power of God allow a subtle understanding of how part-whole relations result from divisions within the real, but these divisions remain tightly bound to the pre-metaphysical understanding of individual identity, and any teleological powers they exert remains subservient to the unifying role of such a god. Dissolution of the notion of substance, to be commenced in the next chapter, will be literal, and this has already been hinted at – substance itself allows that individual boundedness can become permeable, and that the divisions of the real can leak and blend with the real divisions of other entities. Chapter Three will therefore investigate the implications for connection of these weakenings of substance’s grip, while Chapter Four will look at examples of philosophical positions which have a liberal understanding of substantiality and discreteness, in the direction of a strengthened understanding of
connection. A final element in substance’s dissolution has not yet been canvassed. This is that these features which are constitutive of dissolution are actions, and as such they are temporal beings which are happenings. This vital element will bring the potential for change and the production of the new occurring in duration to what was once substance. This deconstruction of substance has occurred before, in the guise of process philosophy, so Chapter Five will pay some attention to process and other attempts to reintroduce continuity to metaphysics.
Chapter Three – Discreteness, Continuity and In-discreteness
This chapter will give an explicit account of a family of concepts that are presupposed by the structural solutions to the nature of reality surveyed in the previous chapter. The role of essence and substance in grounding connection and disconnection was cashed out, negatively at least, in terms of the association of these “most real” things with the notion of discreteness. The two fundamental aspects of reality, its constitution and its intelligibility, were found to be most supportive of connection when at their most tightly integrated – notably in Aristotle’s formulation of substance as a principle of structure. This chapter will look in more detail at a core element of structure; the extent to which it is discrete or continuous.
This dimension of discreteness-continuity is prior to any structure in two ways which reflect the constitution-intelligibility distinction. For one, an assumption about the prior necessity for discreteness or continuity can be seen operating as an intuition about the very possibility of the intelligibility of something; typically the assumption is that discreteness is a necessary condition for intelligibility. This can be seen in an extreme form in Parmenides’ dictum that “It must BE totally or not at all”, and in a much less extreme form in Aristotle’s frequent comments about the nature of his project in the Metaphysics, for example “…all that ‘is’ is related to one central point, one definite kind of thing, and is not said to ‘be’ by a mere ambiguity.”121 A second form of priority concerns the nature of the proposed structures themselves – the fact that their constitution depends on their discreteness or continuity in a gross, strongly determinative fashion (in other words, discreteness or continuity is said to be constitutive of a structure). On this understanding of priority it is a priori, so to speak, that a discrete structure will be radically different from a structure informed by continuity. This chapter will argue that while continuity is a productive presupposition for intelligibility it cannot operate as prior in structure because it is not a concept capable of underwriting any useful structure. However an approximation to continuity, I suggest, is a productive concept when investigating structure, and I call this approximation in- discreteness. To recognise the structural priority of the discrete-continuous-in-discrete
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family of concepts I will call them proto-structural, since they are seen to operate as conditions for the possibility of any structure at all.
This chapter will now look in more detail at the internal characteristics of connection and non-connection. It will do this by investigating the core proto-structural feature of objecthood that underpins non-connection, discreteness, and its contrast term which is constitutive of connection, continuity. It will become apparent that continuity in itself is of limited metaphysical utility in sustaining connection, but a reworking of the antagonistic relation between discreteness and continuity, which I have termed in- discreteness, can result in a more suitable grounding for connection. I start with the nature of discreteness, then will have a detailed look at some of the implications of a discrete metaphysic and what current alternatives to it offer. The examples will come mostly from cognitive science, a discipline in which an unacknowledged battle against discreteness has raged for decades. This will prepare the way for a discussion of continuity and my suggested compromise between discreteness and continuity, in- discreteness.