The Significance of Indeterminacy

Perspectives from Asian and Continental Philosophy

Robert H. Scott, Gregory S. Moss, Robert H. Scott, Gregory S. Moss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351383301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

While indeterminacy is a recurrent theme in philosophy, less progress has been made in clarifying its significance for various philosophical and interdisciplinary contexts. This collection brings together early-career and well-known philosophers—including Graham Priest, Trish Glazebrook, Steven Crowell, Robert Neville, Todd May, and William Desmond—to explore indeterminacy in greater detail. The volume is unique in that its essays demonstrate the positive significance of indeterminacy, insofar as indeterminacy opens up new fields of discourse and illuminates neglected aspects of various concepts and phenomena. The essays are organized thematically around indeterminacy's impact on various areas of philosophy, including post-Kantian idealism, phenomenology, ethics, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and East Asian philosophy. They also take an interdisciplinary approach by elaborating the conceptual connections between indeterminacy and literature, music, religion, and science.

Part I

The Significance of Indeterminacy in German Idealism

1 Overdeterminacy Affirming Indeterminacy, and the Dearth of Ontological Astonishment

William Desmond

From Indeterminacy to Overdeterminacy

Looking back to ancient metaphysics, the indeterminate was dominantly seen in the light of the absence of intelligibility. Intelligibility was seen in terms of determinability or determinacy which, so to say, keeps at bay the formlessness of the indeterminate (to apeiron). The epistemic process by which being is made intelligible involves the movement of thought from the indeterminate to determinacy, the former being left behind in the process. We begin with an indeterminate wondering, pass through a more definite questioning or inquiry, and end with a more or less determinate answer to a well-defined question. The exploration here is of a more complex process than a teleological process from indeterminacy to determination. Among other things we need to invoke the self-determining and more importantly the overdeterminate in a sense to be explained. The point here will be not to negate the indeterminate but to offer what one might claim is an affirmative sense of the indeterminate, no longer as a formlessness to be transcended but a “too muchness” in being that calls forth our ontological astonishment. In the thoughts offered below I want to connect relevant issues here with Hegel’s understanding of thinking as negativity, claiming in connection with this that a dearth of ontological astonishment marks this understanding. First, I offer an overview of how we might look at the determinate, the indeterminate, the self-determining and the overdeterminate, and how they are related. The question of the dearth of ontological astonishment will then be addressed.

In everyday realism, we think that things and processes have a more or less fixed and univocal character, and that this constitutes their determinacy. Nevertheless, determinacy cannot be understood purely in itself, but refers us to the outcome of the process of determination, a process not itself just another determinate thing. We tend to separate the determinate outcome from the determining process, and so take what is there as composed of a collection of determinate things. Determinacy is bound up with the fact that things and processes do manifest themselves with an immanent articulation, but whether that immanent articulation can be expressed entirely in univocal terms is an important question. If we put the stress only on univocity, we can cover over the process by which the determinate comes to be. Equivocal, dialectical and metaxological¹ considerations enter into a fuller account of determinacy.

By contrast with determinacy, the notion of indeterminacy is invoked. This might seem to be essentially a privative notion, referring us to the absence of determinate characteristics, and so hard to distinguish from what is void. A more affirmative understanding refers us to the matrix out of which determinate beings become determinate. As a kind of pre-determinate matrix, this reveals determining power in enabling the determinate things that come to be. I want to suggest that this more affirmative sense makes us think of the idea of overdeterminacy. Void indeterminacy refers us to an indefiniteness that is only the absence of determination, rather than the more fertile matrix out of which determinacy can come to be. These two senses of the indeterminate are often mixed up. If overdeterminacy is presupposed by indeterminacy, our general tendency to oscillate between the indeterminate and the determinate is shown not to go far enough. If determinacy is often correlated with univocity, and indeterminacy with equivocity, we need further dialectical and metaxological resources to do full justice to what is at play.

An important consideration here that we need to consider also is the notion of self-determinacy. This refers us to a process of determination in which the unfolding recurs to itself and hence enters into self-relation in the very unfolding itself. This is particularly evident in the case of the human being as self-determining. The notion cannot be fully understood without reference to the ideas of the indeterminate and the determinate. Frequently self-determination is seen as the determination of the indeterminate in which a process of selving comes to achieve a relationship to itself. The human being is the most evident example of this, and particularly in modernity the idea of self-determination has received central attention. Both self-determinacy and determinacy refer back to something that cannot be described in the terms of self-determination or determination. This something other, I suggest again, is not just the indeterminate understood in the privative sense, but the more affirmative sense which is the overdeterminate. Self-determinacy comes to be out of sources that are not just self-determining. Our powers of self-determining are endowed powers. There is a receiving of self before there is an acting of self. This makes the process of selving porous to sources of otherness that exceeds selving.

The matter can be illuminated in a number of ways but I will refer to the speculative logic of Hegel where the triad, the indeterminate, the determinate, and the self-determining (sometimes via reciprocal determination) governs process as ultimately mediating itself in a self-becoming in which the other to the selving is the (self-)othering of the selving itself. The overdeterminacy does not enter systematically into the articulation of this understanding. By contrast, I will suggest that the overdeterminacy, as the affirmative sense of the indeterminate and not as the negative sense of the indefinite, refers us to the enabling matrix that makes possible determinacy and self-determination. The overdeterminacy has an excess more than all determinations, as well as more than what we can subject to self-determination. There is a “too-muchness” that has a primordial givenness that enables determinacy, that companions self-determination, yet also exceeds or outlives these. It is not to be equated with overdetermination understood as necessitation by an excess of determining causes. It allows rather the possibility of the open space of the indeterminate, and hence is not hyperbolic determinism, but hyperbolic to determinism in enabling the endowment of freedom. If Hegel’s dialectic tends to be defined by the triad of the indeterminate, the determinate and the self-determining, metaxology exceeds this triad in the direction of remaining true to the inexhaustible overdeterminacy. This inexhaustible overdeterminacy is multiply incarnated, for instance, in great artworks, or persons, or communities.

Ontological Astonishment and Hegelian Negativity

To return to the widely present view throughout the philosophical tradition: to be intelligible is to be determinate; indeed, to be, properly speaking, is to be determinate. The status of determinacy and determination is at issue here. One might ask: How comes the determinate to be determinate? How does it come about that being as determinate is determinable by thought and hence rendered intelligible? The issue of a becoming determinate is at stake, not just some entirely static sense of being. One can see Hegel’s connection of thinking with determinate negation, or more generally with subjectivity as self-relating negativity, as answering to such questions. What is simply given to be is not intelligible as such; it is a mere immediacy till rendered intelligible, either through its own becoming intelligible, or through being made intelligible by thinking. Thinking as negativity moves us from the simple givenness of the “to be” to the more determinately intelligible; but the former (the “to be”) is no more than an indeterminacy, and hence deficient in true intelligibility, until this further development, determination has been made by thinking as negativity. A further complication in Hegel’s view is that thinking as a process of negation is not only a determining; it is in process toward knowing itself as a process of self-determining. Hence, his more complex description: self-relating negativity. The operation of negation is not only a determination of what is other to the thinking, for it is the coming to itself of the thinking process. In that sense, the return of thinking to itself, in the process of determining what is other, is not just making determinate, it is self-determining. Hence, the determining power of thinking in negativity is inseparable from Hegel’s understanding of the meaning of freedom. But there is logic overall that governs the movement of thinking as negativity: thinking moves from indeterminacy to determination to self-determination.

In all of this there is a dearth of ontological astonishment, some aspects of which I propose to explore. For instance, given being as a mere indeterminate immediacy can barely be said to be, and even less said to be intelligible till rendered so by determining thinking that mediates by negativity. Hence, being becomes the most indigent of the categories that is all but nothing, till thought understands that it has already passed over into becoming. I don’t want to rehearse the famous opening of Hegel’s Logic, but want to suggest, among other things, that Hegelian negativity, via a logic of self-determining thought, is born of and leads to a dearth of ontological astonishment. Instead of a sense of being as the marvel of the “too much,” we find rather an indigence of “all but nothing.” I think we need to distinguish between three different modalities of wonder relevant to the issue: first, a more primal ontological astonishment that seeds metaphysical mindfulness; second, a restless perplexity in which thinking seeks to transcends initial indeterminacy toward more and more determinate outcomes; third, more determinate curiosity in which the initiating openness of wonder is dispelled in a determinate solution to a determinate problem.

Determining thought answers to a powerful curiosity that renders intelligible the given, rather than to a primal astonishment before the marvel of the “to be” as given—given with a fullness impossible to describe in the language of negativity, though indeed in a certain sense it is no thing. Heidegger, for instance, has a truer sense of this other nothing. My focus is less defending Heidegger as to suggest the need to grant something more than a logos of becoming and self-becoming—there is an event of “coming to be” that asks of us a different logos. It asks of us a different sense of being, a different sense of nothing—not the nothing defining a determinate process of becoming, or a determining nothing defining a self-becoming: a nothing in relation to which a coming to be arises—a coming to be that is more primal than becoming. In a way, we can say nothing univocally direct about this nothing; rather we need to attend to how becoming and self-becoming presuppose this other sense of coming to be. A sense of this is communicated in the happening of a primal astonishment before the happening of the “to be.” I call this “overdeterminate” rather than just an indigent indeterminacy. In light of it, every process of determination and self-determination are secretly accompanied by what they cannot entirely accommodate on their own terms. This granting of the overdeterminacy of the “to be” has significance in relation to the dearth of ontological astonishment coming from understanding thinking as determinate negation, or self-relating negativity. It has a very important implication for the practise(s) of metaphysical thinking, especially one that tries to stay true to metaphysical wonde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• The Emerging Philosophical Recognition of the Significance of Indeterminacy
• Part I The Significance of Indeterminacy in German Idealism
• Part II The Significance of Indeterminacy for Phenomenology, Natural Science, and Ethics
• Part III The Significance of Indeterminacy for Hermeneutics and Aesthetics
• Part IV Asian Perspectives and Cosmological Concerns
• List of Contributors
• Index