(This is the third instalment in a A Foundering Conversation (here are links to Part I and Part II), which itself followed upon the (single) instalment of A Simulating Conversation.)
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Iachimo: Hold on, if Adam’s going to really go there, then – well, hand me that. OK, now yes go ahead.
Adam: All right, though I was counting on Yorick to – well to do the translation. That’s what I’m terrible at.
Ursula: It’s not so much Yorick you want to tell it to, as with.
Adam: Well yes that’s partly it. Though he also has specialized knowledge which will let him see what I’m –
Emilia: It’s OK. We’ll either ask questions when we don’t understand, or we won’t even notice that we don’t understand.
Orsino: Or both. Why not?
Juliet: This is going to either get old or get – I’m not sure.
Orsino: Again, why not –
Juliet: Don’t say it. Yes, probably old.
Adam: So Aristotle gives two different accounts of the categories. Or, one account with two stages. The categories are – well, something like the terms in which we think. The first is a four-way schema: he says of every being that it is either said of another, or not said of another; and too that any given being is either in or not in another. And these can be used – combined – to make a fourfold grid: so any being is either said of and also present in another; or else it is said of but not present in another; and so on.
Iachimo: Four possible permutations. So the other two are, not said of and also present in; and not said of and not present in. OK. Just wanted to be sure I was tracking.
Adam: It isn’t entirely clear what Aristotle means by these four fields –
Orsino: That’s a relief.
Ursula: They sound epistemological and ontological – said-of and present-in –
Adam: Well, but it’s frequently thought – and for these purposes I’ll assume – that he’s talking about universals and particulars, accidents and essences. But then Aristotle goes on to give a different account of the categories, with a relation to the first one that isn’t immediately obvious.
Ursula: Not immediately! From what I remember of the Organon, I’d say, not.
Emilia: The Organon?
Adam: That’s the collective name for Aristotle’s logical works, of which the Categories is one. His next move is a ten-item list. Substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, having, action, passion. “Passion” doesn’t mean emotion or such, it’s the opposite of action – being acted on. So then – we have these two different accounts, fourfold and tenfold. And the tenfold one in particular is extremely influential, all down through the medievals. There are whole disputations about how to derive the list.
Iachimo: Imagine.
Emilia: Go on, Adam.
Adam: So some read Aristotle as very opposed to his teacher here. It’s not the things said of other things that are most real for Aristotle, it’s the things of which they are said. Again, according to some.
Iachimo: Ah, the weasels have been at it again.
Adam: No need to blame the weasels this time, it’s actually true. Well, whether he opposed Plato I don’t know; whether his account needs interpretation to be reconciled with Plato’s – that seems true to me. There were strong efforts made to attempt this, and one of these was made by Porphyry. This is some five hundred or more years later. At the very beginning of Porphyry’s Isagoge – it’s an introduction to the Organon – Porphyry spins a new variation, what he calls predicables or attributables (he’s writing in Greek; usually translations say predicable.) This is by way of a detour through Aristotle’s Topics even though the Isagoge mainly treats the Categories – ah, I see I may be losing you.
Ursula: Believe me – I know I mock you sometimes, but I do understand that one can have a hard time knowing what is essential and what is a distraction. Yorick would probably ask me at this point to give a prima facie account of that very distinction, and I’d be a bit at a loss.
Adam: Thank you. All right. So, the predicables are five terms that Aristotle uses in the Topics – that’s another work in the Organon, incidentally – five terms, though Porphyry actually changes one of them, for various levels of generality. They are ways – Aristotle suggests they are an exhaustive list of the ways – in which a characteristic can belong to a thing. The terms are genus, species, difference, property, and accident. I – I do realize this is specialized terminology, and I’ll try to give you some examples.
Orsino: So, “species.” We assume that Aristotle is not doing biology. I mean, not here.
Iachimo: If you start talking about natural kinds, I may regret asking you to go into all this.
Adam: Species is a good place to start. No, it isn’t – well it isn’t just – a biological term here. Yes, a horse is a species of animal – Aristotle actually uses horses quite a lot as examples – but so too squares and pentagons are species of shape; black, white, and red are species of color; and salt, bitter, sweet, are species of flavor, and so on. This is why we say it’s a category mistake to ask how salty or dark a triangle is – a shape isn’t the sort of thing that has those characteristics –
Emilia: But I paint dark and light triangles all the time. Or whatever.
Orsino: And we see dark and light things – I mean, if you see it at all, it has a hue. And a shape, too, for that matter. Street signs, houses, flowers –
Iachimo: Computer screens. Graffiti.
Juliet: People.
Ursula: The difference is: a given triangle may be dark or light, but it isn’t dark or light qua shape.
Adam: Correct. Its hue is – this is another one of Porphyry’s predicables – accidentally associated with the shape.
Emilia: As I was saying earlier, I don’t just throw paint at the canvas –
Adam: “Accident” just means that the triangle could have been a different color. And indeed, shape too is only accidentally associated with many things – a given form (say a traffic sign) certainly could have been a different shape.
Emilia: Not in one of my paintings it couldn’t. There’s always a reason. If a shape is there, it’s there because the composition needs it. And the color is the same.
Adam: Well you may disagree with Porphyry, or maybe Porphyry isn’t addressing your specific concerns as artist – notice, “specific” derives from the same root as “species” –
Ursula: Ah, there’s the etymology.
Adam: But Porphyry would say, within your painting perhaps it’s true that any given shade is there because it has to be there for the painting to be as it is – but you could have painted a different painting.
Emilia: Again – well I still want to say, No. Because the painting tells me it needs to be painted. I know how that sounds, I don’t care. Roll your eyes if you want to, Iachimo.
Orsino: Actually – I mean sure Iachimmo may think of that kind of talk as just vague and allusive –
Iachimo: I’m not in charge of what anyone says. I’m just not going to accept it if I’m asked to think that way myself.
Orsino: – but even in his field – or mine – there are philosophers who are starting to talk this way.
Ursula: Indeed! Nick Land – Reza Negarestani –
Iachimo: Accelerationism.
Ursula: Of which there is more than one version. But Land for instance absolutely talks as if artificial intelligence is calling from the future.
Adam: Interesting figures – nihilists to the core of course, and Land is quite mad – but let me keep going. Or accelerate, if I need to. Of course, what concerns Emilia qua artist may well be different from the concerns of Porphyry qua metaphysician –
Iachimo: Metaphysics is what is wrong with this entire thing.
Adam: I am not surprised you think so, but someone asked me to sketch my research, and these are necessary preliminaries.
Iachimo: “Sketch!” Not paint your masterpiece in real time. Let alone the whole exhibition. With all its shapes and colors.
Ursula: If I may intercede, all Adam is doing here is laying out some of the ways in which thinking transpires, and he’s not wrong. It’s a bit, well, Euclidean, but these really are as it were the broad outlines of the assumptions of common sense. We all have recourse to these kinds of habits of thought. When we need to.
Adam: She knows that when she gets helpful like this, I get nervous.
Ursula: Which is precisely why I help. It surfaces your symptom. This is all part of the analysis.
Iachimo: Terminable or interminable.
Juliet: “Why not both.”
Ursula: Why, Juliet!
Juliet: Coming to understand your secret code.
Orsino: Four-twenty.
Emilia: You’re not bored?
Juliet: I wouldn’t say bored. Not yet, anyway. I might have – criticisms.
Adam: I will be interested to hear.
Ursula: You say that now.
Adam: From Juliet, in any case.
Juliet: Um –
Orsino: Go on, anyway.
Adam: So – an “accident” is the way something like green pertains to a shape, whereas “species” is the way green pertains to color. Color here would be the “genus,” which is to say how broader categories appropriately pertain to – are predicated of – more specific terms. All of Porphyry’s five predicables are ways of explaining pertinence. So for example, differentia: this is how species of the same genus are distinguished from each other. Say, the number of sides as regards shapes – or whether some angles are concave or not – and so on. A triangle doesn’t get differentiated from a pentagon by virtue of being green, but by virtue of having three sides rather than five. Or to take Aristotle’s horses and men, they get differentiated by virtue of horses being irrational, and men being rational. Again – don’t look at me that way, Ursula – this is Aristotle’s account. As for property – this is a different way of distinguishing between species. Porphyry’s example is: that only horses neigh, and only humans can laugh.
Orsino: I’m not sure that’s true –
Adam: It’s merely an illustration.
Ursula: That’s what you think.
Adam: You see? I was right to be wary. Ursula is getting something ready.
Orsino: But OK, I think I follow: it’s “proper” to horses that they can neigh – it’s not an accident, like green to the green triangle, since obviously not all triangles are green, and if something is green that doesn’t make it a triangle; whereas neighing and horses correspond to each other – if it can neigh, it’s a horse, and if it’s a horse, it can neigh.
Adam: Yes, you have it there. They’re mutually convertible.
Emilia: Oh! And when I said that Hathaway doesn’t see the painting as a painting – it’s an object for her but not a work of art – this is – she’s seeing some things about it – size and solidity and shape and color –
Orsino: Aren’t cats color-blind?
Emilia – but she’s just, just missing a, what did you call them Adam?
Adam: A predicable.
Emilia: So it’s not the thing she’s not seeing – it really is what Adam said – its mode.
Iachimo: And if cats are color-blind – as by the way, I am, red-green that is –
Adam: Then Hathaway and you each sadly miss out on certain other relevant aspects. Though I am not sure the word for these would be modes. This is indeed diverting, and we could think about just how Porphyry would make sense of these respective lacunae – art qua art, and color –
Ursula: But I’m guessing this is not your project, still.
Adam: No indeed. Painful as I find it, I am inevitably leaving out so much that is so interesting. Though of course making this sketch is a good exercise. So, then: Porphyry’s account is vastly influential – and controversial, naturally; it’s disputed over and over again – and Boethius in particular renders it into Latin, and then in the thirteenth century, Peter of Spain – a very fascinating figure, we don’t know much about him –
Emilia: Wait – how can he be so interesting if we know so little?
Ursula: I imagine it’s the frisson between what little we know and how much we don’t.
Adam: Well among other things, he might or might not have been Pope John the Twenty-First. Who seems to have died suspiciously, in an accident in his own laboratory.
Iachimo: The Pope had a laboratory?
Adam: This Pope did. Briefly. There were three Popes that year.
Orsino: And we don’t even know for sure if one of them was Peter of Spain?
Adam: The identity is disputed, though John XXI was a learned and curious man, as the laboratory indicates. What is not disputed is the text Peter of Spain – whoever he was – wrote. So Peter uses the account of the predicables, from Porphyry via Boethius, in a book called the Tractatus – it’s also called the Summaries, and it went on to be very influential as a textbook, for generations, and – this is the crucial thing – in it, he put Porphyry’s schema of the predicables into a diagram. It gets called a Porphyrian “tree,” because it takes the form of a column with “genus” at the top and concrete individual things like Socrates or Bucephalus at the bottom.
Emilia: Bucephalus – that’s a horse again, right?
Ursula: Alexander the Great’s.
Adam: Correct. Though here Peter is, like Aristotle, just using the horse – or the human being – as an illustration; his diagram is a purely formal depiction of these relationships. Peter is actually walking us through a particular exposition early in Porphyry, where Substance is the genus; it can be either bodily or non-bodily (those are species); a body can be animate or inanimate – “body” just means a material entity, a stone can be a body in this sense, but an animate body is of course different; an animate body might be sentient or insentient; a sentient body – that is, an animal – either rational or not; rational animals are divided into mortal and immortal; and finally, mortal rational animals – humankind – instantiates as individuals: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and each of us.
Iachimo: Down to earth at last.
Adam: Yes, well, in a manner of speaking.
Iachimo: This is part of what I could potentially find interesting, Adam, if you would humor me.
Adam: I mean – I am just getting to – but yes, your observation?
Iachimo: Well look. There’s a lot we don’t agree on. Or at least, I can admit, we frequently talk past each other. But this is an interesting scheme – primitive, but interesting – which could be used to inventory and classify – well, potentially anything. It’s generalizable. Hierarchical models are promising, intriguing, and if they can be formalized – rigorously, I mean – they can lead to interesting results. It’s interesting because it’s already so formal – it isn’t so much a metaphysical scheme as purely logical. You could take this – well, it has been taken – into programming. There are what are called type systems, that give every term – “term” is a, um, term of art. Strings of symbols, different words, phrases even, are called “terms.” And every term is said to have – and the programming language assigns it – a “type.”
Orsino: Oh I think I see where you are going. Yes. The language knows – I mean, the system running on it knows – that types have to match; so for example you can return and answer like “I’m great, how are you?” to the input “Hey, how’s it going,” and an accurate output if you ask how long in kilometers the Amazon river is, and there is an answer to the request to compute the square root of seven. But there’s no response to “what’s the square root of Hey!”, or how many kilometers the square root of seven is, because the terms “square root of” and “Hey!” and “kilometer” are all different types.
Iachimo: Well I don’t want to say that the program or the computer “knows” it either, but you’re right that’s the upshot, there is no well-formed possible response given the constraints of the typology.
Ursula: And you’re saying that this is more or less logically isomorphic with Adam’s schematic.
Adam: It’s not mine! It’s from Aristotle, via Peter of Spain, Boethius, and Porphyry.
Iachimo: You asked me earlier, am I more frustrated with the squatters on campus, than I am worried about A.I. alignment. And I could answer, these are actually different types. You can’t be more blue than you are loud –
Orsino: Why not? What if for instance, both soft-versus-loud and, let’s say, black-&-white versus colored, are on scales of zero to a thousand –
Iachimo: You can do that, but you have to define this as what you are doing. It all depends on getting the formalism consistent. And actually, doing that is not so challenging, in itself, as you know.
Orsino: Right, that’s why I ask.
Emilia: Wait, why isn’t it challenging? I’d think this kind of – numbering of color or sound or whatever would be bound to get all kinds of things wrong.
Orsino: You can just decide, arbitrarily, what your lower and upper bound is, and you can spread the numbers out –
Emilia: Ugh. I know there’s a place for, for quantitative measures. If I mix five drops of cadmium red and three of ochre yellow I get something different than if I use different proportions. But even this I usually do by feel. This pushing some arbitrary spread of “zero to a thousand” on art just makes me – kind of furious.
Iachimo: Well, aside from your biases against measure, you’re not wrong –
Adam: Ye gods. Iachimo, are you feeling all right?
Iachimo: Everyone thinks I’m some kind of reactionary reductionist. I’m not. The problem is – the problem Emilia is pointing out – is, you might lose verisimilitude. If you describe two different sets of phenomena using a single scale, no matter how fine the gradient, you are assuming that there’s just one relevant axis. And that’s an empirical question. Figuring this out happens by trial and error.
Orsino: OK, sure. It’s like engineering, in a way.
Iachimo: And in fact the question about frustration versus worry is a good example, because on the surface these look much closer than blue and loud, but in fact they are pretty different, and given their various objects – the protests, A.I. alignment, the continual ceding of human systems to A.I. operation, and on and on – actually not so similar at all.
Ursula: To say nothing of the ways these interact and complicate each other.
Iachimo: Right.
Ursula: Which of course also complicates their apparent difference from each other.
Iachimo: Recursive feedback isn’t the same as identity. Or even as sameness of type. That can be coded too.
Adam: You said that formalizing was not such a great challenge.
Iachimo: In fact there are already programs that could do most of it, and others to check their work.
Emilia: Programs to do programing?
Orsino: Oh sure. Programs to program programs to program, you could in theory do it ad infinitum.
Ursula: No, you couldn’t.
Adam: No, you couldn’t.
Emilia: Now it’s Ursula’s turn to be nervous. Why is Adam suddenly on her side?
Juliet: You’ve clearly watched each other for a long time, to not just know how to read it but find it endearing.
Ursula: Oh I know very well why Adam says No, he thinks there’s got to be a telos and a cause.
Adam: It’s the very same thing we were saying about imagining a motive for the simulators. There’s a reason. Even in Iachimo’s terms, I mean not the “terms” of a programming language just the terms of his argument, it doesn’t work; there’s an output to the program after all. Term, by the way, if you think about it for a moment, means limit. The medieval logicians talk about the terminus of acts and intentionality all the time.
Juliet: You really do like etymology.
Adam: I like thinking. Words are one of the tools for thinking. I try to respect my tools.
Emilia: OK but Ursula why do you say “No,” then?
Ursula: “Ad infinitum” isn’t some unsurpassable limit. It’s the name for a short-circuit of thought. In fact it isn’t the limit at all, it’s the starting-place. That ellipsis that seems to stretch out forever over the horizon? It’s akin to what Lacan calls the quilting-point. You might call it, stipulation, but inexplicit – inarticulate, and in fact incoherent, necessarily incoherent – stipulation. This idea that you could just keep going on and on doing exactly the same thing – it inverts, into the claim that what has been going on is exactly what has always been going on and on. It’s a denial of origins. But none of us has always been doing just this same thing forever. The Unconscious is immortal, Freud says, and that goes in both directions; but it’s an illusion. A parallax, Zizek would call it.
Adam: Ursula, this is actually quite interesting – I’m sure we don’t agree, but I don’t know how much we might disagree, though I feel closer to what you just said than to Iachimo’s drive to formalism – rigor is one thing, abstraction is another – but –
Emilia: But you actually hadn’t got all the way done with your account.
Adam: Well the interesting part is – and Iachimo you might see this if you focus on the formal resemblances I’m going to sketch (and yes I’ll try to just sketch) – all right, so about the time of the publication of Peter’s Summaries – this is in the late 13th century – there was a younger contemporary of Peter (whoever he was), a Jewish Rabbi named Joseph Gikatilla. He’s one of the foremost exemplars of the great generation of Kabbalists, the Jewish mysticism which was having a renaissance about this time. Abraham Abulafia, and Moses de Leon –
Iachimo: Will these names be on the test?
Emilia: Iachimo, stop.
Adam: It’s really all right, Ursula is quite right that I don’t quite know how to distinguish what’s essential and what’s extra.
Emilia: Well I think it’s because you are just in love with the subject, and all the aspects seem beautiful to you.
Ursula: Which is – if we’re being fair – why Iachimo can’t distinguish the niceties of coding from the terror of A.I. threat.
Orsino: Except that Iachimo isn’t in love, he’s afraid.
Ursula: You know what I’m going to say.
Emilia: “Why not both?” or “What’s the difference”?
Orsino: What’s the difference between those? Oooh, it could be recursive!
Iachimo: Stop, please, or you will just crash the system right here and now. Adam, you can see how desperate are our straits that I turn to you for rescue.
Adam: I will be your knight in shining armor.
Ursula: I’m quite serious, you know. About the love and fear.
Orsino: And the jokes.
Juliet: These interludes are interesting. The way you all punctuate your substantive talk with these social back-and-forths –
Orsino: Which is the essential, and which is the extra?
Emilia: Wave or particle?
Ursula: Why not both?
Iachimo: ADAM!
Adam: Where is my Sixpence? Ah thank you. So: there’s a famous edition of Gikatilla’s masterwork, the Gates of Light, the first Latin translation – first as far as we know, 1516; it has a frontispiece designed by Johannes Reuchlin, showing what is now a familiar diagram: the Kabbalistic Tree, the Etz Chaim or “Tree of Life.”
Orsino: OK, this too I know.
Emilia: Me too. I once did a set of Tarot cards, on commission, and the woman who asked for it wanted a lot of kabbalistic imagery.
Adam: So, as you know then, this diagram is an arrangement of ten headings in a semi-hierarchical structure. These ten headings are traditionally the names of sephiroth, which is plural for sephira, a word that has been variously derived from or related to Hebrew roots – and I make no apologies – meaning sapphire (which preserves its resonance in English); also meaning text, scribe, boundary – there’s limit again, by the way – and number – which is why I said numerology was involved, it’s actually gematria, which means the reading of numerical values of words. Hebrew letters each have a numerical value, you see. As do the Greek, incidentally. The word sephiroth for example comes to 756.
Ursula: I happen to agree with Adam in considering Nick Land interestingly mad, but I will just interject that he too – and quite seriously, though that’s not always apparent – introduces this sort of alphanumeric correspondence.
Adam: “Sephiroth” as a word has also quite plausibly been related to the Greek sphairos, i.e., sphere. The sephiroth are thought of as ten emanations of God, and the tradition is very explicit that there are ten. Not nine, not eleven. This insistence goes very far back, in material that dates perhaps as far back as the second century AD. Though of course there are more conservative estimates.
Iachimo: So – about the dates – you said that the Latin edition of this book has the sephiroth diagram. That was – when? Fifteen-something?
Adam: 1516, I believe. You can see how that one is easy to remember.
Ursula: Iachimo is going to ask, is this diagram not in the Hebrew?
Adam: It was certainly not devised by Reuchlin. Who was absolutely the preeminent Gentile scholar of Hebrew of his day. He wrote in defense of Jewish books to stop their destruction,
Iachimo: Yes, well I suppose I’m bound to thank him for that. But I’m wondering if we know how he devised it, if it isn’t depicted in the work he was translating.
Adam: Reuchlin in fact did not make the translation, which was done by a Jewish convert, Paolo Ricci. But the relationships between the sephiroth are clear. They almost always are enumerated in a specific order, unless occasionally – as indeed in Gikatilla – in reverse. The diagram certainly predates Reuchlin – he had too much respect for his material to simply impose his own ingenuity on it, and besides that, he would undoubtedly have been accused of forgery – but I don’t know how precisely how old it is. The lists of the sephiroth certainly go back to roughly the 13th century, possibly the twelfth, but their depiction varies – sometimes concentric circles or a single chain. Just when the canonical three-columned chart emerged , I’m not sure. There is here an interesting corollary with what I was mentioning earlier in the case of Porthyry. But what is striking for my purposes – as I suppose for yours, Iachimo – is the structure.
Ursula: You’re going to point out, aren’t you, that the Etz Chaim looks like the Porphyrian Tree.
Adam: I am; but before I get to that, there’s simply the question of origin, since in both cases we have a first instance we can identify, but we must assume that the graphic has a prehistory that is lost. For instance Boethius, who as I mentioned translated Porphyry into Latin and wrote more than one commentary on him, mentions “a figure giving a visual example,” and speaks of the lower genera “branching” from the higher ones. So although the first picture we have comes (I think) from Peter Hispanus, it seems very likely that Peter’s diagram is reproducing something that was already in the tradition. In any case, after Peter, it spread throughout Europe, in a way that indicates that perhaps the ground was ready.
Orsino: And you’re pointing out that this is probably the case with Gikatilla too.
Adam: Not only does Reuchlin’s diagram certainly trace to Gikatilla and doubtless before, but it seems likely that it and Peter’s diagram – which again is roughly contemporary with Gikatilla, even though Peter is writing logic and Gikatilla is writing mysticism – have a common source. As Ursula notes, representations of the Tree of Porphyry have a clear resemblance to the Kabbalistc diagram of the sephiroth on the Tree of Life. This might indeed seem so obvious that it might seem to be solely a function of the graphic itself.
Iachimo: The way chess and checkers “resemble” each other superficially.
Adam: But this conclusion is a mistake. I am of course far from the first to notice this resemblance, as the fact that Ursula almost immediately raised the observation should indicate. But what is really of interest is, why?
Ursula: Well, what I would really observe is that neither of them really look very much like trees at all.
Adam: Leave it to a psychoanalyst – I mean this as a compliment – to state the obvious. Hiding in plain sight, is the fact that both of these diagrams, which are expressly named “trees,” are in fact not pictures of trees, not even remotely. Well, in a few cases they are decorated with leaves. But what they are, is diagrammatical representations of conceptual structures – structures which can be arrayed in other ways, and even without being altered, are sometimes metaphorically presented as analogous to other realities than the arboreal. Neither Ammonius nor Marius Victorinus – sorry, no I haven't mentioned them before – they each commented upon Porphyry in the centuries immediately following, and neither called his arrangement a “tree;” they associate it with the Aristotelian square of opposition. This should be enough to underscore that the structure it depicts is logical or metaphysical. It is not, by this token, unreal.
Iachimo: “Other than the arboreal,” nice. For example?
Adam: For example. As I mentioned, they were visualized as circles, one inside the next, like the orbits of the heavenly bodies. They have been superimposed upon the human form: the trunk, the left and right sides. Or upon architectural features: usually two pillars forming a gateway, or three pillars (sometimes the middle one being a further column or stele seen through the gate).
Ursula: Interesting. Why three?
Orsino: “Three” is interesting?
Ursula: For all kinds of reasons. Hegel, Lacan – it would take us somewhat afield to explain in any detail. What I want to know is whether this triadic form shows up here coincidentally or not.
Emilia: Well, in the tarot cards I painted – the woman who wanted them gave so much input, it was one of the hardest commissions I ever did – the different spheres, sephiroth you called them, are kind of arranged, like beads on a string maybe?, in three strands. There’s a middle one, and two flanking ones. The middle is longer, taller.
Adam: Taller, and in fact not arranged exactly like the left or right columns. Four sephiroth in the center, three on either side; and in the central column, or pillar, there is a gap where one of the sephiroth could be, and instead there are two at the bottom. It’s also interesting to note the terminology. The left pillar is called Din – it’s Hebrew for something like severity, I believe – while the right is called Chesed, mercy. Now – I can’t, you will be relieved to hear, expound on all of this, but I am getting towards the end. All three of the pillars ascend towards the higher – these are all understood as manifestations or aspects of God, of divine power, but manifestations in creation – and there is a path that weaves from below to above and moves between all three of the columns. But the left-hand, Din, is always understood to be, well, limiting – “severe” – in the way that the created order transpires; whereas the right-hand, Chesed, is giving, generous, proliferating. And it’s this, among other things, that first made me think there was something more to the resonance than just coincidence.
Emilia: Why?
Adam: Because notice how the Porphyrian tree, too, has a side that is just negation – non-bodily, inanimate, insentient, non-rational, and so forth. But there is considerably more. It is true that the formal structure of both arrangements – I mean of the predicables, and of the sephiroth – the structure occasions certain resemblances, but other resonances cannot be accounted for thus. The causality is the other way around: it’s the relations represented by each “tree” that are similar enough to each other, which then make it possible to schematically show them by diagrams that are so alike. And this, in turn, leads us to wonder why – why are these relationships so isomorphic? But to answer this, we must look again at the formal similarities. Even for instance, the way the initial fourfold of the categorial scheme unfolds into a ten-fold scheme.
Ursula: Nick Land, who I was mentioning before – well it wasn’t just him – introduced a very Deleuzo-Guattarian version of this diagram, and it too has ten elements.
Adam: Yes – well I suspect there’s a common form behind all of these developments, from the ancient to the postmodern. Because in the kabbalah too, the tree is separated into four levels, and –
Iachimo: OK, let me stop you. Aside from the fact that this is all extremely fast and loose – free-association, almost –
Ursula: Adam does free-associate well. He’s actually an almost ideal patient.
Iachimo: – there’s a really obvious problem, which is that, for all that you have ten sephiroth in Gikatilla, and ten categories in Aristotle, and two tree diagrams, the diagrams you are talking about don’t chart the sephiroth and the categories at all – they are the sephiroth and the predicables. I do pay attention. And believe me, this is a significant coding error.
Adam: I am gratified that you are tracking, and you are right – this remains to be explicated – I’m still thinking of various ways to account for it. One way might be to note that it’s quite clear that any of the categories can function as genus in a chain of predicables.
Ursula: And why does this help?
Adam: Because, at least in later kabbalistic tradition – what comes out of Isaac Luria and Chaim Vital, they’re actually just slightly later than Reuchlin, and no don’t look at me that way, I’m not dropping names it’s just how I remember – every one of the sephiroth can be, as it were, the crown – Keter, the first sephiroth, means crown – of a kind of sub-tree. So one can speak, for instance, of the Malkuth of Binah, or the Tiphereth of Din, (all of these being sephiroth, you understand) –
Iachimo: So, permutations. Well, good luck with that. I mean, yes, I was interested – still am – in the Aristotle-Porphyry bit. As I say, this is broadly applicable – and of course has been applied – to all kinds of coding and modeling problems. The categories are – I suppose you could call them, different kinds of kinds, if you see what I mean – the list of categories is a way of distinguishing between ways we make distinctions. And this meta-level or recursivity is interesting, since any system that can represent itself must have functions that enact this. I suppose in a way what you are describing in the application of the sephiroth to themselves is another example? But I’m skeptical – to put it mildly – that you’ll get much traction there.
Ursula: Well I admit – and it’s not a surprise, everyone knows I love Adam and that we’re friends precisely in order to disagree – I admit I find it diverting, and it’s precisely the hand-wavy parts that intrigue me. This three-ness for instance. And the way there seems to be a kind of dialectic of limit and unlimited.
Emilia: You said it was something like Lacan?
Iachimo: Oh Lord, No. Adam.
Adam: I’m afraid I can’t interfere. Fair play and all that. Let the marketplace of ideas sort it out.
Juliet: Like I said: Liberalism. The marketplace of ideas. Please.
Orsino: Yes, that’s the second time you’ve raised this objection, but I’m not sure what it means.
Juliet: It means, this fantasy of “debating the case on its merits” or whatever is just that. A fantasy. If Adam wants to dispute Ursula, he should go ahead, and if not, fine, but let’s not pretend that either of these is some kind of neutral wait-and-see pose. Let alone that everyone’s opinion is valid.
Adam: Ah, I think you misunderstand me. I simply think that one simply makes one’s best case, and does what one can. Of course there’s no arguing with incorrigibility. But Ursula – and indeed Iachimo – though they put up a good show, they are fair, and if I haven’t persuaded them in the end, I usually conclude the fault is with me. Of course, their starting-places are completely wrong, but in a sense that’s not their fault.
Ursula: As I often say: praising with faint damnation.
Iachimo: But look, Juliet – this is the first time you’ve heard any of this, yes?
Juliet: Um, yeah –
Iachimo: So: coming in from the outside, with no previous exposure or loyalties: what is your impression of the merits of either case?
Juliet: You really want to know?
Iachimo: Of course. I’m asking.
Juliet: Well, it’s endlessly diverting – but –
Ursula: Don’t pull your punches with us, my dear. No need.
Orsino: Besides, Ursula is a psychoanalyst. She’ll know.
Ursula: Not at all. This is not the panopticon. But Juliet might know.
Juliet: OK, look, I work as a consultant at organizations. I give trainings. So I am used to giving my forthright verdict on things. And you know I have a position of my own as well. And when I am asked, what do I think about all the diversions, and really even about what you all seem to think is the main event – all this reference to everyone, Freud or Aristotle, or slicing the way we think into these categories, as you call them –
Emilia: You were bored, weren’t you?
Juliet: It seems – when I think of it next to what concerns me most in the world – a little pointless. And sure, tedious – maybe tedious is a strong word –
Adam: Ah, well. I did say I should have waited for Yorick.
Juliet: And, honestly, I think it’s problematic. Both of you. Can I just say – your rapport I like, it’s fun; as a DEI trainer I look at lots of organizations’ cultures, and I notice how norms go and so on, and y’all’s is interesting, until it gets a bit much. But what you're going on about? This is pretty hard to take. I’m not saying it’s boring, I’m saying it’s harmful. Or – OK, that’s a bit strong. It’s potentially harmful. Rationality. All these neat little items. All these scales and hierarchies. What goes where. The difference between horses and men. Of course it’s men. Look, color may be accidental to a pentagon, but I have to tell you, in the system of white supremacy, it has some very real and not very “metaphysical” effects.
Adam: Of course, I’d forgotten – you prefer rhizomes to trees.
Iachimo: But wait. Hold on. Even I know that’s not what Adam is talking about when he says color.
Juliet: Yeah well maybe that’s the problem.
Adam: In fact the ancients do have some things to say about color in just this sense.
Juliet: Oh I know. Your friend Aristotle said some people are naturally slaves.
Orsino: Um – so as I mentioned, I minored in Black Studies. I did a lot of reading in the history of race, history of slavery. I hate that I seem to be the person to say it, the person who’ll be listened to, but I guess I am, so I’ll say it: these are just different things. Like radically different.
Juliet: I know, obviously – there’s indentured servitude, there’s rampant wage slavery, there are company towns – still! – there are –
Orsino: Hold on. All I really meant to say here was, I don’t know Aristotle even a tenth as well as Adam does, but I do know that when he talks – when Aristotle talks – about the “natural slave,” he’s not thinking about race. At all.
Juliet: The Greeks thought of others as barbarians –
Ursula: Which meant more or less people who didn’t speak Greek. I can do etymology too, Adam.
Juliet: Right, people who barked. Like animals.
Iachimo: Not only are slavery and race obviously different, it’s well known that during the western slave trade, different African groups in fact captured and sold slaves.
Emilia: Isn’t that exaggerated?
Juliet: It’s not only exaggerated, it’s a standard talking point of people on the far right.
Orsino: It’s not exaggerated. At all. Juliet is right that it’s brought up a lot in bad faith – of course it is. But it actually needs to be mentioned, because otherwise we get this completely misguided and historically uninformed way of thinking about race. The Dahomey, the Yoruba, the Ashanti, all kinds of African powers making war on each other, drove a huge proportion of the supply side of the slave trade. Of course Europe and America drove the demand, and economics did the rest.
Juliet: Look, I don’t actually know the history maybe as well as you do Orsino, and as a white woman and an ally of POC I know I have my blind spots. I’d never dispute your report of – of what it’s like for you as a Black man living in America, that’s your experience – but what’s just not arguable is that American slavery was anything but a particularly awful and dehumanizing institution –
Orsino: I’ll go you one better: the slave trade was worse than what had happened before, in Africa, in at least one really decisive way. Of course there had always been slaves taken away from their homelands, but not like that. And here, color does matter – a slave in Africa, taken as payment of their family’s debt, or even captured in war, is still surrounded by others who may look like them, and share many common cultural assumptions – some more, some less, but more for sure than would be the case in America. Even if you are taken, say in battle, and live the rest of your life in another part of the continent, you are still not that far away relatively speaking – if there was a war there was a shared border, probably – and you are surrounded by people who look like you to some degree, and speak a language that you might also speak. What any given slave made of this is different, but that much, we can say. This is aside from the simple physical barbarity of the Middle Passage, but even that – I mean we’re talking about war and slavery, it’s bound to be terrible; but I would say it was the uprooting of Africans from their continent that was unprecedented. At least in scale.
Juliet: And this, this brutality, was built into the founding of the country and has massive ongoing effects to this day.
Orsino: That’s, um, too broad a statement for me to comment on without knowing exactly what you mean –
Juliet: Well what I do know is the statistics. We see it in, like, the life expectancy of Black people, we see it in the median incomes of Black families, we see it in the school-to-prison pipeline, we see it in segregated neighborhoods – we see it in police shootings. Every day.
Iachimo: Yes but you were talking about Aristotle. And all Orsino was pointing out is, that’s not what Aristotle says. “Natural slaves” may be objectionable –
Ursula: Assuming we know what he meant by this –
Adam: It’s actually complex –
Juliet: Oh I bet it is. Of course. Complex.
Iachimo: – the point is, Aristotle wasn’t – as Orsino was saying – talking about race at all.
Adam: Well, if I may – I actually wasn’t speaking of Aristotle when I mentioned what the ancients say on this matter –
Emilia: You’re right, we got side-tracked.
Adam: Should I go on?
Juliet: By all means.
Adam: When Porphyry is explaining what an accident is, he says there are some that are “separable” –that’s the usual translation – and some that are “inseparable.” “Asleep,” he says, is a separable accident – a given person may be asleep or not; one can conceive of them in either state (that’s what makes it an accident), and they could actually be in either state (which is what makes it separable). Whereas “black,” he calls – here, let me find it –
Iachimo: Should we brace for yet another moment of ancient racism?
Orsino: I’ll be the judge of that.
Ursula: I think that would be what Adam would call anachronistic.
Adam: Ah, here: “Hence, sleep is a separable accident; blackness however, an accident that applies inseparably, both to ravens and to Ethiopians.”
Juliet: Wow. Just, wow. Like how can you even –
Orsino: Yeah I have to say, I don’t find that objectionable.
Juliet: OK, well, I’m glad you can deal. I would just – I would never.
Orsino: Nevermore.
Iachimo: Quoth the raven.
Orsino: Hey, we can call us that. You can’t call us that.
Emilia: Ursula I think you’re going to need to give us some therapy here.
Ursula: As I was telling Adam: I’m not a therapist, alas.
Adam: And even she doesn’t call herself that.
Juliet: Look, I’m – I’m glad this is all fun and funny to you, but –
Ursula: Oh as I was saying, the jokes are serious. It’s how we do serious.
Juliet: Emilia did try to explain. But –
Ursula: As you know, Freud pays a great deal of attention to jokes–
Juliet: Yes I know, but –
Ursula: It’s a way of saying without saying – or saying and not saying at the same time. I was remarking towards the beginning of the evening, about your protests – I said you were testing the limits not of the acceptable but of what we can say is acceptable. Because there’s always a boundary a hazy zone, that shades off from what we all know and admit is acceptable, towards what is actually not.
Adam: Yes, well, hard cases make bad law.
Ursula: No, law makes the case. And the exception. There is always a way – an expected, an accepted way, but an implicit way – of pushing back against the law; breaking it, resisting it, ignoring it if you like, but pointedly ignoring it. There is no commandment – and it can be a Thou Shalt or a Thou Shalt Not – without an unspoken codicil – an unofficial but in fact countenanced way – that winks towards the usual ways it can be trespassed.
Adam: You’re talking about perversion.
Ursula: You can live your whole life counter to the law, as it were, but still in its thrall. The camps and the protests – so far – all fall into this place. The city is in fact perfectly happy to have this demonstration of its tolerance for spicy unrest.
Adam: And the protesters of course get their daily dose of frisson as well.
Emilia: But come on. The protesters aren’t doing this just to get some kind of rush –
Juliet: And the campers – I guess I just gotta keep saying it – just want to be safe and housed. I have to say there’s something a little appalling about calling them perverts.
Ursula: Not the campers. They’ve fallen outside the law entirely. They’re close to what Agamben calls homo sacer.
Iachimo: So I’m not so sure about this. There are plenty of these people who make the choice, over and over, to not go to the shelter, to opt out of the housing program, to –
Juliet: Who you call “these people,” can I just tell you, I know a lot of them by name, and I also know the conditions in the shelters. Aside from them being just unsafe places, there can be a wait of going on two years for a regular bed. Two years. For a bed that you still have to show up on time for or it’s given away. In a place that you might get robbed in, or – Look, these are just shitty options.
Iachimo: Robbed, huh? Nice people.
Emilia: You might not be so nice if you lived like –
Iachimo: I’m not nice now, by some metrics.
Orsino: So look Juliet I don’t at all dispute that. Yes, those are bad options. But I’m still struck by what Ursula says, and I think you might be wrong, Emilia. I don’t mean anything as reductionist as saying that protesters are all just looking for trouble or whatever –
Juliet: I’d say that about the counter-protesters, for sure. Some of them.
Orsino: But that’s interesting, right? You’re pretty sure about the folks on your own side – they’re just showing up for fellow human beings, doing the right thing. Whereas those others – you recognize in them what Ursula’s describing.
Juliet: If I were trying out my psychoanalytic riffs, I’d say that yes, the pro-police faction is getting off on the way there’s a kind of legal excuse to act lawlessly.
Iachimo: But that’s just what the protesters are getting, too. The law protects their right to protest –
Adam: As I recall, Juliet, you said actually that waiting for the law – I think what you said was “asking for permission” – actually called into question the notion of civil disobedience. Qua disobedience, I mean.
Juliet: The issue is one of human solidarity. With people who are just trying to survive, asking to please not be just shoved, just shoved away – to no one cares where, even, and there is no place, they’re not even being told where to go, the city has just criminalized not having a house, criminalized not being rich enough. If you don’t see this, if you just see the protests as some folks getting excited that they get to go wave signs or something – I mean, I guess there probably are some people like that, but I don’t care, that’s not what this is about, and if that’s all you see, if that’s what you see – I have to wonder. And also, everyone needs some way to get on board. Maybe it starts with getting excited about waving a sign. Cool. You start there, you hang out, you get educated, you get radicalized. That might be how the revolution happens.
Adam: Sorry – you think that the revolution might happen via this, what, this slow spread of onboarding more and more trend-followers? Really? Because this strikes me as precisely what Ursula is saying: the permitted way of rule-breaking.
Juliet: It’s just one step. If you show up to wave a sign at a march, and find out that the next night there’s a non-permitted sleep-in in the University President’s office, maybe that’s all it takes.
Ursula: Far be it from me to dismiss what you are doing. But even this notion of “really” disobeying – say, protesting without a permit – is still well within the boundary I’m speaking of.
Juliet: Maybe you break the rule often enough, publicly enough, eventually the rule gets changed.
Ursula: That happens often enough; but you are not thereby pushing against the law itself. You’ll need to verge – and I’m not commending this, by the way – far closer to terrorism if you want to edge out of that space. If you do something like that, you’ll find the state of exception invoked very quickly. Now that’s no joke.
Adam: But Ursula, you would also say there’s a non-terrorist way of living free of the law, surely?
Ursula: In one’s own eyes, maybe. It is harder and easier than it sounds. But in the eyes of the law – ?
Emilia: So I don’t quite know what you mean by this boundary, still. Or what it has to do with jokes, which is where you started.
Ursula: In the Introductory Lectures – the first series, the ones that were actually given as lectures – Freud starts out by talking about little things: slips of the tongue, lapses of memory in an otherwise capable person, moments when you drop something two or three times. He calls these little details, which we are inclined usually to dismiss as utterly unimportant, the “dregs” of phenomena.
Adam: Hair, and dirt.
Emilia: Hmmm?
Adam: In the Parmenides, Socrates – he’s very young in this dialogue – asks the old Parmenides if there are even Forms of such lowly things as hair and dirt. He’s not sure there can be. Parmenides tells him, this is because you haven’t done enough philosophy yet.
Juliet: Do we have to do the imaginary world of perfect Tables and Horses and Beautiful Things, really?
Adam: And Chuang Tzu says that the Tao is in the bugs, the weeds, the dirt; in piss and shit. The Buddha, we are told, is “shit on a stick” – this being effectively a reference to a hygiene implement. Even Augustine says we come into the world inter urinas et faeces.
Emilia: But Ursula’s talking about Freud. Is this, like, the anal stage?
Adam: I thought of Parmenides’ “dirt and hair” when she mentioned Freud’s attention to the “dregs.”
Iachimo: I’m willing to bet Augustine doesn’t mean what Chaung Tzu meant.
Juliet: We know what he meant. You think I didn’t meet that quote in my women’s studies classes?
Adam: It’s good that they’re teaching the classics. And Iachimo is right, I was – well, joking? That’s your cue, Ursula.
