419. Essential capacity
A central issue in ontology is whether in order to exist a thing must have an essence, something that it must have to be what it is. At several places in this blog I discussed the question whether essences exist. Here I sharpen my arguments, based on reading a debate between Graham Harman and Manuel DeLanda[i], and a book by DeLanda on ‘assemblage theory’.[ii]
I am suspicious of essences, for ontological but especially for moral reasons.
The essence of swans was their whiteness until black swans were found. The essence of cars was that they burn some form of gasoline, until electric cars came about. The human being was defined as a rational animal until its irrationalism became clear. The essence of democracy was elections, until autocratic regimes manipulated them.
Too often, essentialism imposes a familiar category on unfamiliar contexts. The freedom of markets is imposed as the essence of democracy. Essentialism feeds the identity politics that present society is suffering from. It reduces people to membership of a category, with a corresponding imposition of shared views and conduct. It hides, even disqualifies, variety between individuals.
There is a distinction between the general essence of a universal, or general concept, say that of ‘chair’, and the specific or individual essence of a specific chair, say the one I am sitting on. In earlier items in this blog (e.g. 36, 416) I rejected the notion of a general essence. Here I focus on the possibility and nature of a specific essence.
The most straightforward idea of such an essence is that of a quality that an object actually has and always has had, in fact or by necessity, during its existence. But this is open-ended: if the object has had the quality until time t, this does not prove that it will have it at t+1. In that sense one can never know for sure whether any quality is essential. In that sense one cannot know (for sure) what an essence is (as Graham Harman has argued).
This problem is similar to that of causality. As David Hume argued, consistent sequence does not prove ausality. For a claim of causality, or essentiality, one needs an argument, or theory, of why or how it arises as causal or essential.
Now, how about a feature that is not actual but virtual, a potential to manifest a quality, or a range of them, depending on the context in which the object manifests itself. Could that be the essence of an object? I adopt the argument from DeLanda that an object has actual properties that yield the potential to produce features, in events of interaction with other objects.
Now there are several possibilities. One is that the range of possible manifestations is pre-established, as a repertoire of possible qualities from which one is selected according to the context. DeLanda talks of tendencies, understood as repetitive, limited in variation.
Another possibility is the capacity to produce new qualities, depending on the context. This more flexible and adaptive than a tendency. As Delanda noted, and I agree, this requires that the capacity to affect is coupled to the capacity to be affected.
Harman objected to potentialities and capacities because they would yield an excess of possible manifestations, a ‘slum of possibilities’ as Harman called it (quoting Quine). DeLanda accepted capacities only if one had a way of clearing the slum by separating ‘significant from insignificant’ manifestations. That seems a bit odd to me. What is significant appears to depend on purpose and context, and so one would quickly repopulate the slum with possible significances.
I see the problem of the slum only if one postulates that all possible manifestations have to be there (where?) from the start. But in my view possible manifestations are not predetermined but produced in context, in interaction with objects, while the range of possible interactions and their effects is open-ended, open to new interactions, and appearance of new objects and forms of relations.
However, the potential of capacity is limited by the structure and properties of the object’s components and those of objects it interacts with, and laws of nature, logic or mathematics, legal laws and other institutional conditions. I think this may have to do with DeLanda’s notion of ‘relevance’.
One of DeLanda’s proposals is to think of capacity in terms of possible trajectories in the state space of the object. The dimensions of that space are features the object can have. There is some process or logic that determines trajectories.
This notion of possible and actual trajectories in some space of possibilities is the kind of notion needed for the dynamic ontology that I try to pursue.
It is this constrained potential, I propose, that constitutes identity, the continuity of an object across contexts and relations. Perhaps one can call this constrained capacity its essence, if one wants.
DeLanda used the example of water. It has the capacity to be a fluid, which can have different structures, a piece of ice or a gas (steam), depending on outside temperature and atmospheric pressure, but it cannot turn into gold.
Earlier in this blog (item 8), I associated the identity of a living thing (human, animal, plant), with the coherence of different features in the ‘body’, needed for the body to exist. It must maintain homeostasis, keeping metabolic variables (temperature, fluids, feeds, disposals) within certain ranges for the organism to maintain existence. DeLanda also used that example.
The genome is a good example of a capacity, with neurons generating amino-acids, yielding cells, building organs, and thereby ‘expressing’ themselves, in interaction among neurons and their local metabolic environment as well as external conditions of the organism.
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