Randal Auxier
(Professor of Philosophy and Communication Studies Southern Illinois University Carbondale; Visiting Full Professor, Department of the Philosophy of Culture Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw)
Abstract:
Does anything ever really “go away,” completely? This paper is a search for real deletion, and the metaphysics that must accompany real deletion. Bergson argued that the full past is active in the present. The issue is access. Metaphysical annihilation is not possible, even for a divine being. Whitehead took a softer line: the past is “objectively immortal,” but its “subjective immediacy” and “relevance” to the present “perpetually perishes.” No real deletion. These are convictions about past actuality. What about possibilities? Presumably past possibilities once had some active relation to some actual present, but, if their moment passed without their being actualized, are they now really deleted? Are might-have-beens truly gone? And in what sense? I will argue that insofar as anything intelligible to us can be “really deleted,” it must belong to a constellation of possibilities (my term) that never ingresses (Whitehead’s term), due to its incompatibility with a collection of possibilities that does ingress (again my term). Not ingressing is not real deletion until actuality has drained such a constellation of might-have-beens of all potency. It is a process. Real deletion is, therefore, enacted in the present, as actuality is related to possibility in any moment. There must come a moment when a constellation of un-enacted possibilities loses all potency, and the act (sometimes quite dramatically) whereby a constellation loses its last measure of potency is all we can mean by “real deletion”: the end of a process. To “delete” in general, then, is to devalue some clusters (my term) of possibilities in their relation to other clusters possibilities, until a constellation is separated from the clusters possessing some potency, and becomes a “constellation.” It is the only deletion consistent with the continuity of the actual and the possible. This argument therefore crosses the digital/analogue divide and shows one feature of their continuity.
Randall Auxier is a Professor of Philosophy and Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University and a Visiting Professor at the Department of the Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. Among his research interests are philosophy of culture (including popular culture), aesthetics, process philosophy and theology, post-Kantian continental philosophy, and pragmatism. His publications include: Time, Will and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce (Chicago, Open Court, 2013), The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism (with Gary L. Herstein) (Routledge, 2017), Metaphysical Graffiti: Deep Cuts in the Philosophy of Rock (Open Court 2017), and numerous articles on Vico, Bergson, Dewey, Cassirer, Langer, Whitehead and others. He is also Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture (www.eidos.uw.edu.pl).