7. The Unknowable Is the Ground of Whatever Is Known

Individuation as Differentiation Versus as Convergence on an Identity 

The Universe is an open process of self-differentiation according to thinkers like AN Whitehead and Giles Deleuze because each time a possibility is realized, new virtuality is actualized in its wake. This is the difference between the differentiation of difference into constantly new objective individuations versus the convergence of difference onto the equalities of identity. These newly differentiated individuations weren’t merely withdrawn from the object relations of a possibility space, but they didn’t previously exist. When each new physical relation between matter-energy and when each new conceptual relation between the thinkable and the unthinkable is realized, whatever there is,increases in terms of both new physical objects and possible objects as well. Realizing possibilities doesn’t decrease the overall number of possibilities but only increases both physical and virtual possibilities because the physical and the virtual have a monistic self-relation with each other like matter-energy. When physio-virtuality is realized, it is a self-relation of unrealized potential to realizable possibility that actuates more physio-virtual possibility. Whatever ontological status unrealized potential has, it is related to whatever has been realized physically or conceptually, which is to say that it is related to whatever there is because it is the pregnant void from which whatever there is, is birthed. There is a finite amount of matter-energy in the Universe at any given time, but what there is in the Universe increases because of the new possibilities that are continually actualized by relating determinate being to the infinitenothingness of the void.  

The indeterminacy of open space isn’t yet the accessible indeterminacy of actual possibility because potential must be brought into relation with the limits of determinate being. Whatever is “before” this most basic relationship must be spoken of metaphorically because to speak of it is to positivize a pure, non-relational negativity. The void that is before any relation is indefinable because it is the non-relative, or absolute, “nothing” that is before the relation of nothing to something. It is the relation of something to nothing that allows one to first perceive and then to speak of both something and nothing. There has been an ongoing debate in Philosophy since at least Ancient Greece, andprobably well before then, about what was “before” the determinations of what is. Many thinkers have speculated that whatever it was, it must have been something like the indeterminacy of nonbeing, or of open space, or of nothing.  

But most thinkers who have contemplated the void from which everything there is, comes also have noticed how speech falls apart when one tries to articulate this nothing before there was the relation of something to nothing.The necessity of the relation between something and nothing is the foundation of the possibility of perception as well as of representation of any kind. So, this “absolute” nothing “before” there were the relations of something and nothing might be another articulation of the irreducible mystery at the center of whatever there is. What can be known are the continuous relations of something to nothing, or of presence to absence, but what can’t be known is whatever it is that grounds these relations. 

The sort of incompletion that is associated with the “Copenhagen Interpretation” of Quantum Physics briefly touched on above holds that the most basic level of reality is a “quantum field,” which is described as a probabilisticpossibility space seemingly without the necessary and sufficient reasons of macro-level causality. At the level of the quantum field, electrons appear to flicker in and out of existence without the sorts of causation that science would need to offer a “complete” account of the Universe’s necessary and sufficient reasons. The quantum field is like a light wave. Waves are possibility spaces, but the quantum wave seems to spontaneously collapses into an electron particle without a detectable cause, which is like realizing an actual possibility without a necessary and sufficient reason. Einstein's famous rejection of the Copenhagen Interpretation was because of this inherent lack of determinate reasons, which if constitutive of these basic fields would undermine the causal determinations of his “Block Universe.” But a field is a horizon that relates what is to what isn’t, or what can be counted as a part of what is, and what can’t,or of what is but can’t be counted because it can’t be determined by representation or detected by the measurement devices of scientific quantities. A quantum field is grounded in this uncountable, imperceivable, undetectable, and unspeakable nothing, so the causal chain of necessary and sufficient reasons ends there with an abrupt, impenetrable and irreducible mystery. 

A field is a “plane,” which coordinates space-time with matter-energy according to the natural laws to individuate a phenomenal or conceptual object, but a field might also be thought of as a wave-like possibility space where something appears as the determinate foregrounding of an object against the background of indeterminate homogeneity. This foregrounding must have been caused for it to be counted as a material determination, unless matter has some sort of nonphysical or nondetectable aspect within it that can affect the foregrounding of an object against a background. If the quantum “Observer Effect” describes how an observation influences whether a wave or a particle appears, then the quantum field seems to describe a possibility space in which something similarly nonphysical is affecting a physical state. If consciousness can have an effect at the quantum level, then perhaps a quantum field ismatter-energy's very basic awareness of itself. If whatever causes a field to individuate a particle can’t be observed or measured, then it must be either without a cause or with a nonphysical but nonetheless material cause. If there is a non-physical cause, then matter-energy is something like how a “Panpsychist” imagines it. For the panpsychist even the most basic level of matter-energy contains an unimaginably simple awareness that affects matter-energy'sphysical appearance.  

Regardless of what is “actually” happening with quantum fields, if they can only be described probabilistically, then there is a gap in knowing that might reflected in a gap in being. Probabilities aren’t necessary and sufficient reasons. They are measures of certainty, and incomplete certainty is incomplete knowing that may witness to the undetermined actual possibilities of quantum “inter” or “super” position, which isn’t indeterminacy per se, but theindeterminate determinacy called “degrees of freedom,” because how this possibility will be realized is open but it is still a structured or “actual” possibility, so it isn’t completely open. For example, at the level of the quantum field the possibilities are either a particle or a wave, but not whatever. But nonetheless knowledge is fundamentally incomplete because it seems to be the observation that decides the appearance as either a particle or a wave, so there is a constitutive gap in knowledge, which prevents complete knowing. 

To individuate an object is to make something appear on a field, so individuation is a foregrounding, or unification, of what had been an undifferentiated multiplicity. The terminology “collapsing the wave function,” means to disambiguate a particle from a wave by locating its “particular” space-time coordinates. It is as if the wave were the background that “collapses” as the particle is foregrounded. Individuation differentiates by unifying an object against a background of undifferentiated multiplicity. Undifferentiated multiplicity is the ultimate ground of whatever there is for most process thinkers, which is a notion that replaced the classical idea that the ultimate ground was an undifferentiated unity. The collapse of the wave function seems to support this idea that what grounds the individuation of what is, is the difference of multiplicity. For example, the multiplicity of a wave function collapses into a unifiedobject, that of the single particle of light called the “electron.”  

However, process thinkers posit that this undifferentiated differential field differs from itself inconsistently, so that repetitions spontaneously arise, which allow for the temporary differentiation of an individuated repetition. Thisprocess of individuation might be thought of as the process by which objective determinations are made from an undifferentiated and indeterminate background. What is undifferentiated and indeterminate, or prior to determination, isin an “inter” or a “super” position, or a “non-locality,” often described by wave / particle duality at the quantum level and by the famous image of the “duck-rabbit” at the level of perception.  

In looking for the particle, the wave is lost, and in looking for the wave, the particle is lost. And to perceive the duck, it must be foreground at the expense of the rabbit, and to perceive the rabbit, the duck must recede into the background. The indeterminacy of the field is relative, so it isn’t the total indeterminacy of whatever is before the relation between the indeterminacy of space-time and the determinations of matter. Matter-energy is the most basic description of a field. In physics energy and space-time are equivalent and matter is whatever resists or limits energy, so the field of matter-energy is the relation between the indeterminacy of space and determinations of matter’s resistance that is described relationally as the movement described by the second law of thermodynamics as entropy.  

Energy is indeterminate potential and equivalent to the nothing of open space until it is put into relation with matter. Matter in-itself, as in the Singularity “before” space-energy, is completely determined and therefore a kind oftotal compaction that is also equivalent to nothing until it is put into relation with the nothing of space-time's potential. Thought about in this way matter’s relation to energy is a kind of double negation akin to the double negation of theHegelian dialectic. The unity of the singularity describes a very special circumstance or state because this unity is without entropy because it is without that space-energy to enter into the relational disunity of change. The singularity’s is a complete double negation that reduces to zero, which is why it is equal to nothing.  

To have multiplicity, unity can’t be total or complete, but rather it must always be provisional, or an incomplete unity. The Singularity’s state of complete unity reflects the phenomenal or conceptual unity of any object, except that all other objects are subject to entropy, which means that the double negation of matter by energy or of energy by matter according to the natural laws isn’t complete. It is this remainder that forms the gap of incomplete knowing and possible of incomplete being as well. The movement of matter-energy given by the second law of thermo-dynamics may create a constitutive incompletion in being because entropy is probabilistic but determined like any chaotic system is. This combination of probabilistic but determined is the formula for actual possibility. An actual possibility space is formed in the field of matter-energy's processual, rule-governed relations with itself. 

The phenomenal and conceptual objects that we perceive are always incompletely unified because the movement and change given by entropy is always picking away at what has been reified or frozen by perception or by the conceptualization of whatever there is. But what is, is the continual flow of being described by entropic processes, which is another way to understand the constitutive incompletion of knowing. There is a mismatch between the unification necessary for the determination of something in space-time, and the continual flow of becoming given by entropy.  Because entropic processes are an inconsistent flow, representation is possible through the temporary formations of repetitions. The probabilistic formation of repetitions within the difference of multiplicity given by entropy are like habits that produce temporary structures. These temporary structures can be used as a sort of unifying frame for the multiplicity of difference when some of that difference is made particular by foregrounding it against the homogeneity of the background. Again, the background isn’t homogeneous in-itself by only in relation to whatever difference is foregrounded. 

The relation of difference to itself coordinates the unity of a repetition with the multiplicity of flow that makes perception possible, and it is this same juxtaposition that makes thought possible as the coordination of conceptual objects. The immediacy of perception collapses into the mediation of concepts for the language user. What language users perceive is immediately mediated through their concepts, so that perception becomes is the unification of difference just as thought is. The relation between “direct” sensation and thought is fraught with philosophical controversies that can’t be gotten into here. However, Perception is the unification of sensory difference into a temporary phenomenal object through a concept, and thought is the unification of semiotic difference into a temporary conceptual object.  

Both are forms of representation because both are the unification of difference into a temporary object “containing” semiotic value. Language users unify difference or make whole phenomenal and conceptual objects through the unity of concepts. The intersection of making whole and setting apart is where language users make meaning. What is foregrounded is made whole by its difference from the background. The background in-itself is difference, but difference is made different from itself by the processes of foregrounding called “differentiation,” and differentiation is the unification of difference called “individuation.” An object is the cut in the continuity of difference that forms the unity of a whole. 

The inconsistency of entropy forms probabilistic repetitions, which might be thought of as AF Whitehead’s “Generals,” which are forms or patterns that spontaneously arise from within the background of difference. Objects arewholes formed by relating a repetition or general to the parts of difference. For Whitehead an object is a concept that is formed by relating two percepts according to a rule. The rule is the regularity, or repetition, that is used to relate different percepts, which are the relata that make whatever phenomenal or conceptual objects there are. The inconsistency of entropy is also why there is a universe at all. If entropy wasn’t “clumpy,” then none of the planets or stars could have been formed. The repetition of the form of planets or stars is a good example of how repetitions emerge from a background of inconsistent multiplicity. Consistent entropy would not have allowed for the formation of anything.  

Representation is a repetition related to difference just as a background frames a foreground. For process thinkers representation follows the same procedures as the individuation of difference into a conceptual or phenomenological object. A sign is the semiotic frame that foregrounds a repetition against the background of an inconsistent multiplicity. A sign temporarily unifies what is fundamentally inconsistent and multiple into a consistent one. All objects are individuated in this way. 

When a continuous flow is represented, this foregrounding or frame captures a moment that is immediately lost. Objects are representations that appear as if solid, but both phenomenal and conceptual objects individuatethemselves incompletely, so that an object is not only what is in the framed or foreground but also what is continually overflowing it. Another way to put this form of the disjunction between being and knowing is to say that being is always overflowing knowing because representation is necessarily incomplete because signification makes present retroactively, and so representation is about something that has already passed. So, the necessity of the retroactivity of representation is yet another way to think about the constitutive incompletion of knowledge and possibly of being itself. 

Being seems to be representational in nature because what is, requires relation to be. The necessity of being to “know” itself through the relations of representation has been a general formulation of many philosophers and theologians. The primary form of representation may also be found in the primary relation of matter to energy through the natural laws. The impression that energy makes on matter or the deformation of matter’s resistance to energy is a sort of representation of one’s presence on the other, which means that cause represents its relation by its effect. It does not matter whether the pure relation of space-time precedes the pure non-relation of the singularity because there is a non-relational nothing until either of these pure negativities is put into relation with the other. 

It is easy to imagine that what can be counted or measured exists. But this is the mistake made by what Whitehead called “Substance Ontology.” The essential role that the present absence, or “presenting absence” of the background plays to presenting whatever is foregrounded has been adumbrated above. It is the relation of the background to the foreground that is the present absence most essential to whatever there is for a process ontology of the relation. Another example of how what is can be grounded by what is not there, is a black hole. A black hole is only visible by its effects on what is around it. It is a kind of negation that positivizes itself through its negative effects. It is as if the background foregrounds itself by warping the foreground. The effects of the black hole can be observed and measured but always indirectly through how it distorts the foreground. This is how all representation works, which is why modern semiotics describes the signifier as making present through the absence of difference. The Real is the limit of the Symbolic, but it is the impression, or deformation, of this limit on the Symbolic that makes symbiological meaning. The limit on knowledge is the limit of the necessary unification of difference according to the “count as one” procedure of set theory. The limit on being is the nonbeing internal to it, which paradoxically gives being the space-time of becoming to know itself through what isn’t there. 

In this view what there is, is composed of the relation between determinate being and indeterminate mystery, which is the processual relation that produces whatever being from the incontinency of the void. 

Being All in One Place Needs Some Space to Become 

Hegel started with the singularly of all being compacted in one place, which he called “Being-in-itself,” and then followed the negativity or indeterminacy internal to this singularity, which he called “nonbeing,” into the dialecticalprocess of becoming, which is the field or plane of becoming that he called “Being-for-itself.” This plane of becoming is comprised of being’s relation to nonbeing, but it isn’t necessarily directional. It might just as well be nonbeing’s relation to being, which is the “out of nothing, something,” formulation. Being is given to itself by the relation of itself to itself through the distantiation given by nonbeing, which allows being to become an object for itself. But being is both an object for itself as well as the failure of objectification because as being is objectified, it becomes too excessive for objectification.  

The constitutive incompletion of knowing reflects this lack of objectification, which at the same time is too much being to objectify or to be known through conceptual objects. This lack of objectification reflects being as a process of becoming. Becoming is a continual flow of indeterminate change related to the determinations of the past and framed by the retroactivity of concepts. Indeterminacy is given by the nonbeing internal to being, which actuates a possibility space that is a part of what is, but which is difficult to count in terms of quantizable bits as well as ontological status because the modern sciences only count what can be quantized as ontologically real. Mathematicians have devised ways to count possibilities in terms of combinations and permutations, but when these numbers become “irrational” or “imaginary,” then possibilities have reached beyond the determinacy of mere complexity or chaos and into the beyond of necessary and sufficient reasons, which is the part of what is that isn’t related to a determinate causes, such as the electrons that flicker into and out of existence at the quantum level without causal explanation, but only probabilistic descriptions. 

Knowing like being is a relation of the openness of potential, or nonbeing, to the closedness of determination, so the unknowable is the mystery necessary to ground knowing as its horizon. If a part of what is, is its relation to what is not, then what is the ontological status of what is not? And how does one count what isn’t? What can be know is known through its difference from whatever it isn’t, which is why the semantics of semiotics requires binary oppositions to express meaning. There is no understanding of light without the simultaneous understanding of darkness. For light to be foregrounded in the understanding, darkness must actively background it as a present absence. This interplay of presence and absence reflects the interplay of presence and absence in being as a becoming, which is the relation of determinate being to the pure potential of nonbeing to form the dialectic of becoming as an indeterminate possibility space. 

Mathematics has methods of quantifying nonbeing as negative numbers for its operations, but how much nonbeing is there really? One would have to count nothing to determine such a thing. In mathematical determinations,nothing is quantifiable only within the operation as its quantifiable relation to the positive variables of the equation. Again, what is the ontological status of these quantizable bits of nothing? How much nothing does a negative number like “–5” count for outside of the formal operation of the equation? Five bits of nothing? The relation of something to nothing is an imaginal relation that requires imaginary numbers if it is a mathematical equation and the Imaginary itselfif it is a semiotic relation. The Lacanian Imaginary imagines wholes where there are none by projecting a virtual object like an imaginary number into the nonbeing of the Lacanian Real. The equations of physics imagine a whole as the equalities necessary to bring the difference of variables into relation. This sort of imaginary physical whole is used to explain the causal structure of physical relations as if parts of this whole. The “broken symmetries” of physics are the inconsistent multiplicities of asymmetrical difference related to an inferred or imagined symmetry.  

Semiotics uses imaginal wholes to put the multiplicities of difference into the semantic relations of meaning. A signifier in semiology refers to a conceptual object and not directly to its referent. When being makes itself an object, it must do so as a semiotic object, which means that it must know itself through a concept before it can know itself as its own referent. A conceptual object does not contain its semantic meaning within itself. It is given its meaning, which CS Peirce called its “Interpretant,” by its difference from other signifiers and not by a direct correspondence to its referent. Derrida famously explained the signifier in terms of “Differánce,” which is the textual structure of knowingthrough the difference of a symbolic system of the signifiers. Peirce thought of the signifier as a relation of difference also, but as a tripartite relation of difference, so that semantic meaning was produced by its differential relation to the referent, as an imaginal whole, through the signifier. This formulation makes clear how the sematic meaning of the Interpretant isn’t a direct knowing of the referent, but a relational knowing of difference through the signifier, which is embedded in a system of symbolic differences. The semantic meaning of a concept is this Peircean relation between the arbitrary difference of the signifier and the imaginal whole of the referent. There is never a complete knowing of the referent because the knowing given by the Peircean Interpretant is a differential relation across a necessary gap of distantiation from arbitrary symbolic differences to the imaginal whole of the semantic concept, which is the relation that both mediates and objectifies the referent as if whole. Each component of the Peircean semiotic triad is defined by the other two, so that the referent isn’t whole or semantically meaningful in-itself but given analogically “as” a differential relation of the difference of the signifier to the conceptual sematic whole of the interpretant, which is then projected “as” the objectified referent that appears on the phenomenological screen of the subjective intention.  

Lacan also used a tripartite symbiological relation to explain the gap between being and knowing. Knowing is always through the Symbolic for Lacan, which is the basic Strucuralist take on knowing outlined above in which knowing is through the distantiation of the differential relation between what is known, or the object of knowledge, and the symbolic system of differences by which it is known, or the signifier. Lacan called this differential gap between the signifier and its referent, the “Real.” For Lacan the semantic meaning of the Peircean Interpretant was an imaginary projection of a conceptual, or virtual, object into the gap between the Symbolic and the Real. Lacan’s famous triad of the three registers might be thought of in Peircean terms as the Symbolic as the signifier, the Imaginary as the Interpretant, and the Real as the referent. Each register is the relational product of the other two in the same manner as the three semiotic components of the Peircean triad. The gap between the Real and the Symbolic is the gap between being and knowing into which both semantic and existential meaning is projected as the virtual object of the Imaginary register. This conceptual object is constructed by signifiers and is the knowing of being, which characterizes the differential dialectic of being’s becoming through nonbeing.