Ontology, Ethics, Chance

Sometimes, things don’t go our way — our childhood pet dies, a parent falls ill, a horrible injury leaves us unable to care for ourselves. The accidence of chance reminds us that we are not in control, and never truly were: “the total character of the world… is in all eternity chaos — in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom.” (GS §109) Sometimes, the worst thing possible happens for no reason at all; or, worse, for a reason we find totally unfair, just “bad luck.” At first, it might seem that chance, the apparent randomness of events, is in tension with the absolute determination of things, as randomness implies a degree of freedom, that things could have been another way. However, chance is not a lack of necessity, but a lack of sufficient reason: “necessity does not suppress or abolish chance.” (N+P 1. §11) [[[ Insert 1st Critique dynamic antinomy ]]]

Nietzsche recognizes this in our craven need for just deserts — accidence always requires explanation. As he writes in his conclusion to The Genealogy of Morals, “suffering was not his problem, instead, the fact that there was no answer to the question he screamed, ‘Suffering for what?’” (OGM 3. §28) It is not the mere fact that we suffer by necessity, but the arbitrary contingency of chance which drives us towards the question “for what?” Whereas necessity exists on the level of ontology, describing the way in which we find ourselves determined by material forces, chance introduces the question of ethics. We may accept the arbitrary determination of the world as such, but this determination cannot answer the question of fate — however arbitrary, why this body, why this force?

Between guilt and causality

Nietzsche answers that our only recourse is guilt. Guilt provides an interpretation, which despite brining “new suffering with it” — i.e. the suffering of the guilt itself — provides an answer: “any meaning at all is better than no meaning at all.” (OGM 3. §28) It is in this sense that the claim “God is dead” is not some triumphant rebellion, but a horrifying realization:

“‘Wither is god?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? He could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from the sun? … How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?” (GS §125)

This expression of guilt is the cry of the madman for Nietzsche — it is the original sin of secular thought for which we must all answer. While we may find meaning in guilt, the loss of the organic grounding of truth in the transcendent is still tragic; it is a paltry meaning, sufficient only to provide justification for our suffering.

Indeed, as Freud reminds us, the dead father is always the strongest. Lacking a final cause, “the field of ethics, which is so full of problems, presents us with another fact: namely that ill-luck — that is, external frustration — so greatly enhances the power of the conscience in the super-ego” (CD 40). However, Freud remains puzzled by the causality of this guilt. Since guilt “presupposes a conscience — the readiness to feel guilty — was already in existence before the deed took place”, guilt as such “can… never help us to discover the origin of conscience and the sense of guilt in general.” (CD 43) To explain this apparent paradox, how the possibility for guilt can pre-exist it’s own cause, Freud invents a cause, namely “remorse” as an “ambiguous” relationship of eros and aggression towards the father.

Lacan provides a corrective here in his analysis of the dream of the father whose child is burning: this guilt must be understand as an expression of properly immanent and not transitive causality:

“For the true formula of atheism [i.e. secular thought] is not God is dead — even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father — the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious.” (XI 5.)

Lacan describes the metaphor of murder, “conflict, struggle, … the exploitation of man by man” as leading to “an ontology of tendencies”, i.e. a description of human psychology that leads towards the direction of “idealism.” (XI 5.) This kind of narrativization of the subject is a function of the imaginary [[[ insert Hegel PoS ]]]: “the subject in himself, the recalling of his biography, all this goes only to a certain limit, which is known as the real.” (XI 3.) In opposition to this idealism, Lacan poses the “Spinozian formula” that “an adequate thought, qua thought” is defined by its failure to encounter the real in its own thought — it is defined by its failure to reach beyond representation to touch the Thing-in-itself.

As such, returning to the question of chance and causality, Lacan draws the distinction between the Aristotelian concepts of tyche and autonomaton — whereas autonomaton describes a general kind of accidence, an ontological causality, tyche is always a function of virtue and thus is a kind of causation that is properly ethical: “the real is beyond the autonomaton.” (XI 5.) On the level of autonomaton, the level of ontology, the death of the son has no sufficient explanation, its cause is purely accidental. Sometimes, illness takes your son, and, in light of the death of God as final cause, there can be no recourse to a purely transcendental explanation of what is ultimately a necessary consequence of organic life.

Yet, on the level of the Real, the unconscious structure of the dream, by putting himself in the position of the cause through his own guilt, the father finds some justification, however terrible: “Desire manifests itself in the dream by the loss expressed in an image at the most cruel point of the object.” (XI 5.) We can thus understand the statement “God is unconscious” — by finding ourselves capable of assuming the cause, i.e. becoming God at the level of the unconscious, we find transcendence folded within immanence. However this cause never finds its way into representation, it is fundamentally missed, and only becomes apparent in the structure of the dream: while the father rationally understands as a thinking subject that he is not cause of his sons death, he nonetheless is capable of assuming the guilt.

Force and consciousness

In understanding Lacan’s claim that “the status of the unconscious… is ethical” and not ontic, it’s important to separate the ontic from the ontological. Ontic here can be understood in the Spinozan sense as representing the modes given to experience, i.e. appearances given in representation, the for-itself rather than the it-itself. The unconscious cannot, and should not, be understood as being present to experience — the real exists at the level of substance itself, a pure differential structure that has a negative ontological status.

The unconscious is defined by the failure of knowledge. As Deleuze writes, “consciousness is never self-consciousness, but the consciousness of an ego in relation to a self which is not itself conscious.” (N+P 2. §1) In other words, consciousness is not a pure movement of self-consciousness, capable of realizing itself as an active force. [[[ Tie back to earlier Hegel ]]] Consciousness, the res cogitans, is always subordinated to a body, and the materiality that comes with it. As the expression of forces which constitute the body, consciousness is “always the fruit of chance,” since the body is always “the ‘arbitrary’ product of the forces of which it is composed. (N+P 2. §2)

However, Deleuze suggests we are never truly capable of apprehending the active forces which constitute the body — from the perspective of the organism, we can only understand forces as fundamentally reactive, as “mechanical or utilitarian accommodations” — what Lacan might call at the level of instinct and not drive. As such, “consciousness is essentially reactive” and “it is inevitable that consciousness sees the organism from its own point of view and understands it in its own way; that is to say, reactively.” (N+P 2. §2) To be able to fully comprehend the active forces that constitute the body, or for the subject were able to encounter the symptom at the level of the real, would be to experience the Thing-in-itself as a pure transcendental quality. This would misunderstand the nature of immanent causality: the negative ontological status of a pure differential structure does not mean that it is “outside” or extrinsic to immanence, in the sense of a final cause, but rather than it is capable of being both cause and effect — its negative status does not prevent it from having effects on given experience.

So, while Lacan suggests, “the gods belong to the field of the real,” this is not a topographical field that has no relationship to experience. The gap between perception and consciousness has a temporality “that must be constituted in simultaneity,” while representation and appearance, as a function of experience, are always “introduced by a diachrony.” However, while the content of signifiers is arbitrary, “a network formed by random and contiguous association,” it is on the basis of this arbitrary chance that the synchronic, differential structure is able to be formed: “The signifiers were able to constitute themselves in simultaneity only by virtue of a very defined structure of constituent diachrony.” Yet, this diachrony is still “oriented by the structure.” (XI 4.) In other words, the differential structure is both cause and effect of an arbitrary series of signs presented in experience.