Law and Excess

 Oh my what the world is right now.

I almost wrote the title here as 'law and order', but thought better, given the situation. 

I want to document some brief thoughts here that concern the meaning of 'law' or 'rules'. I want to understand this word both politically and ontologically. It is one of our important words that does heavy lifting in both of these heavy territories. 

Understanding law politically means looking first at institutions, and then individuals.

Politically, the meaning of law is more obvious. Every society we have ever seen has rules of some kind. Often these rules are unwritten, constituting the embodied field of 'culture'. All of us are undergoing significant reworkings in our unwritten rules around how close we stand to one another. Then of course there is written law. The documents, the procedures, the hard written prescriptive stuff. When person does 'X' then 'Y' follows. Simple!

One of the lessons of the Trump era is that functional political process relies on a host of norms and unwritten rules. How could it be otherwise? The whole thing is governed by flesh and blood human being who have attractions and aversions unique to their nature and cultivation. Laws and rules are always guides. When they are imposed with violence it is called 'Draconian', after a particularly brutal lawmaker of ancient Athens. 

Politically, there is always reality that is in excess to what the law describes. Laws and rules are by nature general. But human situations are always particular. Thus we have judges that hopefully wisely preside over the nuances and exceptions in the law. 

The politics of individual experience is tightly captured in the notion of 'role'. A role is a socially designated, recognizable, public appearance that one occupies. The occupation of roles fills the entirety of a human life. In the morning I prepare to go to work, I am in the process of fulfilling that role. Simultaneously, I am a partner, a friend, a sibling, and son. All of those roles are implicit in my sense of my life. When I walk out the door I am a pedestrian and likely a customer (god bless America). When I arrive at work I am there, in that 'capacity', one might say. 

The filling of a role, however, just like law, is always enacted with excess: i.e. it is always this particular person who happens to be filling this general role at this time. The role only describes a highly specific feature of my reality. I remember finding it painful to work as a barista because I felt my spirit, or excess, to be so obscured or wounded by the general role. The general role allowed people to talk over me; to thrust empty cups in my face and bark harshly; to mistreat my coworkers over petty things. But people find ways to allow the excess to live. Coworkers have fun while doing the things they have to do (hopefully). Some customers are fun and the day can be a pleasure.

Different roles allow different potential paths through life, and harsher rules and constrictions. This includes the familiar gambit of privilege: race, class, gender, sexuality, disability. Then down to particular workplaces where certain roles are more 'mechanical', and others more 'creative' or free. Individual relationships, too, all have different sets of roles that offer different constraints. Put tightly, different roles have different sacrifices, some better than others for each person and in general.

Nothing in the foregoing analysis should be taken as disparaging of the existence of roles. Roles, and I think even hierarchy, are necessary for human life. Any serious conversation about justice has to do with the various roles that are available, and what are sacrifices demanded by those roles. I.e. is our system forcing poor and POC families to sacrifice education for the sake of survival? Is our society creating conditions in which someone in an abusive situation has to sacrifice their safety for the sake of shelter? Sacrifice and roles are of the essence of the political dilemma. 

The relationship between sacrifice and role is the relationship between excess and rule: for it is the 'excesses' of our being that we 'sacrifice' to the role. I.e. I sacrifice taking a vacation, or resting, or going to the bathroom, because of my professional role. I hope the point is clear.

I want to suggest that the relationship between law and excess can be applied as a general ontological principle. We know that the world contains efficient or mechanical elements: we can apparently map them and predict them with great precision through mathematics.Yet it also seems as if there are more 'excessive' processes at play: i.e. the messy business of living, where idiosyncratic being accomplish general tasks in always idiosyncratic ways. The living beings, the many plants and animals, stretch out into the world with gratuitous diversity. Such diversity seems hard to explain in terms of efficient causation.

Therefore there seems to be more at work in nature than simply efficient causation. If we cannot fill our roles with perfect precision, i.e. we cannot become law-governed machines, then why would we expect the natural world to have a simply 'efficient' structure?

This otherwise than 'efficient' causation I'll call 'teleology', a clumsy word that means causation in terms of ends, reasons, or goals.An example will help.

Suppose that a biologist is given a dish with a single living cell in it. They are asked, 'what is this?' At that moment they can certainly truthfully answer 'a single cell'. But suppose the cell immediately starts dividing. What do we answer then? We see 'a single cell in the process of development.' At what point can our biologist now answer the question, 'what is this?' Say it is a familiar species that has been cloned in a lab, and it is a sheep. We could perhaps recognize that it was a sheep in an embryonic or fetal stage. If not, certainly after birth. But say that it is a new species. At what point is the biologist able to sufficiently  say 'it is this sort of critter'? Do they need to witness the entire life cycle of the being? Perhaps it is an insect that goes through several stages? A caterpillar-not-yet-butterfly. 

The point is this: it is not fair to say that you understand or have knowledge of a living thing unless you have witnessed the entirety of its life. I would say, moreover, that you don't know a living things nature until you have seen a healthy or thriving version of that thing. I.e. only seeing abused and exhausted tigers is not the same as knowing tigers in an environment that is conducive to their sustained thriving for a lifetime. This is what I mean by 'teleology', right here and now: this sense of 'wholeness' without which life is not intelligible. 

 

This means that value is a real feature of the world that arises naturally out of an organisms relationship with its environment. I see no reason to suppose that this value or goodness is somehow illusory or secondary compared to some 'more real' material or efficient reality. That layer of gratuity (I dislike the word) is just as real as the efficient layer. Why would it not be?

Teleology is thus understanding the relations of value that constitute a beings whole passage through the world, from birth to death. Teleological analysis, in other words, fundamentally concerns itself with developmental psychology (psuche). For developmental psychology (in the broadest sense) must concern itself with the conditions of growth unique to each species. Environmentalism largely concerns our reaction to our own destruction of the conditions whereby other beings can reach their natural teloi.

Teleology as a feature of nature establishes the validity of non-reductive analyses of human analysis. For the last several hundred years there have been grand plans to radically reformulate the sciences along positivist lines. All will be revealed to be efficient, determined business. The social sciences are an attempt to make good on these promises by adopting the quantitative and physicalist practices of the natural sciences. Behaviorism and its cousins are one of the obvious outgrowths of this. The reductive project has not gone well. But if we understand nature as teleological, we see that each organism, each species, has unique features whereby it thrives. Therefore each species presents a unique set of criteria, a new framework, by which we have to analyze its well being. I would never ask 'why is this crab suffering under these conditions that are so good for an elephant?' The thought literally makes me smile and want to laugh. So then why would I try to answer the question of human value in terms of other animals? There are lessons, no doubt. It is useful to see that there are other social creatures and that they navigate hierarchy in different ways. We may learn something from observing them. But there are uniquely human problems.

Teleology, in the sense I have discussed it here, therefore provides a rational basis for a nonreductive approach to human affairs. I perceive myriad implications in this for psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, and other places. 

 

(I must note, it seems to me that this account of teleology is connected to but distinct from a cosmic teleology. I am confident that the cell can not be known until its life cycle has been completed. But I am not sure of the extreme implication, i.e. that the universe cannot be known until it has reached its 'conclusion'. It does seem reasonable to follow Nagel and say, however, that the big bang and consequent material process need to be understood in light of the generation of life; i.e. it may be possible that there is a cosmic telos towards life [that does not imply a creator]. It seems to me that discreet structures and processes can be verified within reasonable times and distances. I.e. you could give a history of Rhode Island that is relatively self-sufficient, although it will tacitly be a history of America, and tacitly a history of many other things. Similarly, you could talk about a certain period of time, say 5 days or 5 years, as intelligible in their own right, even though they are implicitly part of a larger whole life. It is legitimate to abstract from parts of the whole; this is a necessary way we understand. But how could we speak to the whole thing? I've lost myself here)

 

To conclude:

 

Both human affairs and nature at large seem to possess a structure of law and excess. In the human world we are familiar with our roles; but we know how our experience and nature exceeds those roles. We always fill roles in unique ways. Similarly, the world of nature seems to consist both of efficient process that is rigid and predictable, as well as growthful biological processes that are less predictable. These growthful processes, moreover, need to be understood teleologically, i.e. in terms of the whole life and possibility of a being's flourishing. 

We are a particularly intense manifestation of this natural structure of law and excess. All beings must make sacrifices. But we are stuck with a particularity difficult instance of this natural variety, sacrifice, or a concept that is implicit in sacrifice, dilemma.

The quintessentially human dilemma is the problem of justice. Justice is a problem that arises from the fact that all human affairs are conducted jointly. Very few of us are self-sufficient as individuals. Taking up action in concert means inventing roles. For work in concert will require different work to be combined into a unified total work (i.e. I'll fix this boat if you go deliver this message). Human nature, in other words, demand that we be highly bound up with artifice; for the invention of a role is really the creation of a type of artifice or structure in the mind. When I say 'go deliver the message' I create a psychological imperative that shapes action and has a peculiar binding quality. This is part of the magic and mystery of human language.

 

All I'm trying to offer here is an analysis of nature that should allow for a more frank reckoning with what I see as constitutive political dilemmas. We are not some anomaly. We are part of the large meaningful churning of a natural world that, like ourselves, possesses a structure of law and excess, which is not the same as, but is related to, surface and depth.

 

That's all. I'm tired.