All actions offer two different types of description of what happens. This fundamental Anscombian insight follows directly from her claim that intentions are immanent to actions themselves, rather than something in the mind of the subject. Whatever I do, it can always be accounted for both in causal terms (the physical and chemical reactions in my muscles, my hand pushing against the air resistance and force of gravity), as well as in the form of a totality bound together by a purpose—that is, intention (me raising my hand).1
Typically, this descriptive dualism poses no challenge to our daily lives and activities. Indeed, whenever one does something, the divide is crossed without any philosophical effort at all—more precisely, it disappears altogether. It is easy to see why: even though actions might invoke multiple descriptions of what happens, they do not actually produce multiple realities. Still, the existence of such dual descriptions can sometimes generate issues at the level of theory. For instance, it suggests that no causal narrative can ever account for the particular form of any given intention. In art and literature, this means that a causal account of how a particular work came to be might be complete (on its own terms) and yet remain insufficient (from the standpoint of meaning or interpretation). This might seem like a theoretical problem, a contradiction in terms.
However, the most obvious solution—some would say, the best kind of solution to any theoretical problem—is to explain why it is not, and has never been, a problem at all. In our case, one only needs to point out—pace Anscombe—that the apparent contradiction is just a limitation in a specific (causal) mode of analysis, inevitable in the sense that it follows by definition from the structure of action itself. If intention is in the act, we need to look at the latter to figure out what the former is.
In True Materialism, Jensen Suther attempts the exact opposite approach. His ambition is to abolish the (descriptive) dualism in question by finding a crossing point of sorts, a way of naturalising purposiveness itself, a kind of normativity given by nature. A stand-in or a correlate for intention, in other words, but one that could be (or should be) accounted for from the standpoint of the causal.
He finds this moment where intention and causality mingle in the notion of biological life. On his account, life itself is already formally structured, as it establishes a natural purpose for all living beings: to maintain their species-specific standard or to flourish as what they are.2 In this sense, life as such is already normative: a member of a species can succeed or fail at being or doing what it is they are supposed to be or do. This is why plants react not to sunlight but to the “goodness” of light (TM, 31), a “horse maintains itself as a horse in accordance with standards specific to its species” (TM, 4), and a “sick lion or a lion with a damaged paw is not what a lion ought to be” (TM, 78). The same applies even to parts of living organisms: glaucoma prevents the eye from “actualizing its power its power of sight” and a “hand separated from the body … is no longer ‘actually’ a hand: it ceases to be a hand … because it has lost its potential for doing what it is supposed to do and begins to literally fall apart” (TM, 30). In this way—and I set aside here the manifold references to Aristotle and Hegel deployed by Suther—function takes the place of intention: a hand obviously does not “intend” anything, but it can fail or succeed at fulfilling its function. This way, it seems that what it does as a purely biological entity is already inherently purposeful, and any need for dual description disappears: either in the sense that the causal is already bound together by a natural purpose or perhaps in the sense that a strictly causal description becomes impossible.
The notion of life as naturally normative or purposeful is in fact the underlying theoretical stake at play in Suther’s book. Insofar as True Materialism makes other major claims in philosophy, politics, or aesthetics, they all seem to hinge on that initial idea of biological life as a kind of form in itself: from Suther’s picture of social utopia (which is to follow naturally from people mutually recognising one another for rational animals that they are [TM, 69–70]) to his account of the universal function of literature (“artistic self-representation” as reminiscent of, and “partly constitutive of the organic self-maintenance of animals like us” [TM, 17]). To see how central this issue is to the entire book, one needs only to look at Suther’s recounting of the famous “amphibian problem” in Hegel and his following polemic against Robert Pippin:
Yet while Pippin does note Hegel’s emphasis on the historical character of the amphibian problem … at other points, he seems to accept the metaphor as a reading of what we ontologically are: “both corporeal bodies like all others and yet also meaning-making and reason-responsive subjects, not merely objects.” By contrast, as we have seen, Hegel holds that the living body of a rational animal is itself already a source of meaning and refuses to separate the question of embodied unity from the question of the unity of the body. For Hegel, our concepts are not just present in our bodily movements but articulate those movements—and indeed our organic members—into a rational, living whole. Crucially, Hegel understands rationality not as something added to animality but rather as a distinctive form of it. (TM, 81)
It is telling that although True Materialism presents Pippin’s reading of Hegel as an important part of its philosophical foundation, on this crucial point Suther rejects it outright. Famously, in After the Beautiful, Pippin sees the amphibian problem as “not a ‘problem’ of the sort that will ever allow a ‘solution’”; rather, the solution lies once again simply in understanding why and how the “problem” emerged in the first place.3 Suther, on the other hand, seeks to genuinely abolish the tension between the two sides of our amphibian nature by seeking out a spot in which the “meaning-making” could be tied down to the “corporeal”—with the former fully accounted for from the standpoint of the latter. In this way, the amphibian problem appears as a version of, or a proxy for, Anscombe’s problem of dual description. If the notion of biological life as purposeful and normative solves one, then it should be able to solve both.
The idea of biological life as a natural source of normativity does not work. His argument for seeing life as inherently purposeful and normative is conceptual rather than empirical (TM, 78). This is to say that it rests not on the claim that specific living organisms seem to behave in a purposeful manner (this would amount to simply ascribing intention to them) but that we cannot conceive of life outside of a purposeful, guided process—that of fulfilling certain functions, satisfying certain standards, or maintaining certain forms. Whenever we think of life, in other words, it is allegedly necessary to see it as a process of striving towards survival, reproduction, or flourishing.
It is perfectly possible to conceive of life—its reproduction, growth, homeostasis, et cetera—in terms of purely causal chains, that is, something that happens under a certain set of conditions rather than something that is trying to happen and can thus meaningfully succeed or fail. In fact, this has already been pointed out by Walter Benn Michaels in his polemic against the idea of “teleosemantics.”4 One of the takeaways from Michaels’ argument is that turning effects into purposes, or natural signs into meaningful signs, requires posing action and intention as factors in play. So, while we can talk of, for instance, magnetosomes in terms of them purposefully directing bacteria towards a low-oxygen environment beneficial to the latter’s sustenance and reproduction, what this logically entails is ascribing intention to magnetosomes; otherwise, although they still point in a certain direction and the bacteria react to that, there is no purpose to any of it; it is just something that happens and has a certain effect. And if it does not happen—that is, if magnetosomes do not point in the direction they usually do—it simply produces another effect rather than any sort of meaningful failure. In other words, we could say that at the level of the causal or biological, there are no purposes, just effects—no norms, just laws similar to the laws of physics. And even though we can always decide to talk of effects in terms of purposes, in order to have a reason to do so, we need to introduce an intentional account.
So, even if we accept that all life “requires” survival and self-maintenance, it is still not clear why we should think about it in terms of purposes and forms. It is perfectly possible to say that living beings simply sustain themselves and reproduce, and once they no longer do, they cease to be alive. Conversely, something that does not do these things is simply not alive. A dead horse is not a failed live one.
Unless, of course, we assume that it was trying to stay alive and failed. But in that case, we have already committed to intention as the source of normativity—that is what “trying and failing” means. Similarly, glaucoma may cause an eye to be unable to satisfy its function, but it is the function desired and imposed by its owner (who presumably intends to use their eye to see things). No notion of natural, biological form is necessary; either intention is present (and calls for interpretation), or it is not (and a causal account is all that is needed). The question of whether horses (or bacteria or trees) are capable of intentions is beside the point at the level of theory.
However, by relocating normativity from action to life as such—from intentions to natural functions—Suther suggests that there is an internal standard inherent to living organisms that is independent of anyone actually imposing (or not imposing) that standard in practice. Purposes without purpose-givers; biological organisms striving for goals that have never really been set by anyone. Insofar as the dead horse helps Suther avoid or conceal this issue, it becomes the skeleton in his theoretical closet.
The question “whose purpose?” thus remains the obvious missing piece in most of True Materialism, and it becomes even more central in the context of Suther’s account of evolution, which essentially—and predictably—poses the latter as a guided process. The “notion of a ‘species concept’ ought to be grasped not as an eternal essence standing outside of time but as a purposive form revisable through the evolutionary process of natural selection. Indeed, the inner purpose furnished by a species concept renders intelligible the contingently acquired trait as a trait conducive to self-reproduction” (TM, 79). Or, “In evolution, the embodied activity characteristic of a species undergoes a contingent transformation that, under the circumstances, is conducive to the species’ survival” (TM, 79). This is simply not how evolution works—or, to put it in Suther’s terms, there is nothing in the concept of evolution that makes it necessary to conceive of it this way. Instead, evolution may—and should—be grasped as a causal process: certain traits make it more likely under certain circumstances for their owners to survive longer and have more offspring; because those offspring inherit traits, over time this leads to a more general change in the species, as its members become more likely to possess those traits. Again, no purpose, no internal standard, no normativity implied or necessary.
To this point, my argument has been that Suther’s basic claims hinge on the validity of his account of biological life as normative. This is not exactly true. Rather, it is as if Suther himself wanted to tie them to that central notion without it being strictly necessary for the rest of the argument. For instance, his account of class could be very well made into a separate argument about the role of mutual recognition in class politics and class formation (TM, 54–72). Similarly, the chapters on Kafka, Mann, and Beckett—which together constitute the majority of the book—could be transformed into an historical argument about modernist autonomy as self-legislation.
But this would be a very different book and not the one Suther has written. From terms such as “bio-aesthetics,” to detailed (if perhaps less than necessary) typologies such as “p-” and “c-autonomy,” to even the title of the book itself, it is hard not to see Suther’s intervention as an attempted methodological opening of sorts, a proposal aimed at establishing a new field, tendency, or school of thought. Such attempts require as foundation a new philosophical discovery—and the notion of extended, natural, biological normativity would certainly qualify. Suther’s polemic against Nicholas Brown is telling in this regard: a series of misreadings aside,5 his only real disagreement with Brown seems to hinge on the original purposiveness of life as such (and hence the universal role of literature as self-narration constitutive of our own species-concept). Indeed, if we were to set that particular point aside, Suther’s claims about autonomy and form—how a work of art, as a totality bound by purpose, reflects the structure of action as such and how, under capitalism, this reminds us of what is irreducible to commodity-form—seem uncontroversial, if not original.
What does not help, in this context, is that Suther operates mostly under the correct account of action and intention; that is, he explicitly and repeatedly rejects the notion of intention as a mental state preexisting or accompanying action and instead insists on it being immanent to the form of the act (TM, 37). However, as we have seen, the good picture of intention tends to produce theoretically deflationary arguments that do not provide much in terms of analytic tools or inventions and instead insist on the importance, necessity, and the always-unpredictable nature of particular interpretations. True Materialism is about theoretical inflation: in typologies, terminologies, and definitions.
This ultimately brings Suther in line with some unexpected allies. For instance, the idea of non-intentional, natural purposiveness of life itself opens the way to the non-intentional agency of non-human actors as proposed by Bruno Latour and a range of writers associated with both vitalism and object-oriented ontology. More importantly, the account of form as an internal, constitutive standard that is only conceptually determined and inherent to various objects or living beings, rather than imposed by a specific intentional agent, inevitably recalls Caroline Levine’s new formalism.6 Indeed, when Suther mentions the “constitutive standards” of knives, hammers, and newspapers (TM, 30)—while seemingly ignoring the fact that those standards can only be established through use or design, which is to say, through someone’s specific actions—it becomes hard to see why the entire notion could not be rewritten in the language of “affordances.”
This is not to say that Suther’s “true” materialism is indistinguishable from its various “new” counterparts. Rather, the point is that blurring the divide between the causal and the intentional inevitably leads to the same place, one where normativity materialises out of thin air, while forms and purposes float freely without anyone having established them first. And as this is a matter of what is logically entailed by a certain argument, for once, even the best of intentions do not matter.
Notes
All actions offer two different types of description of what happens. This fundamental Anscombian insight follows directly from her claim that intentions are immanent to actions themselves, rather than something in the mind of the subject. Whatever I do, it can always be accounted for both in causal terms (the physical and chemical reactions in my muscles, my hand pushing against the air resistance and force of gravity), as well as in the form of a totality bound together by a purpose—that is, intention (me raising my hand).1
Typically, this descriptive dualism poses no challenge to our daily lives and activities. Indeed, whenever one does something, the divide is crossed without any philosophical effort at all—more precisely, it disappears altogether. It is easy to see why: even though actions might invoke multiple descriptions of what happens, they do not actually produce multiple realities. Still, the existence of such dual descriptions can sometimes generate issues at the level of theory. For instance, it suggests that no causal narrative can ever account for the particular form of any given intention. In art and literature, this means that a causal account of how a particular work came to be might be complete (on its own terms) and yet remain insufficient (from the standpoint of meaning or interpretation). This might seem like a theoretical problem, a contradiction in terms.
However, the most obvious solution—some would say, the best kind of solution to any theoretical problem—is to explain why it is not, and has never been, a problem at all. In our case, one only needs to point out—pace Anscombe—that the apparent contradiction is just a limitation in a specific (causal) mode of analysis, inevitable in the sense that it follows by definition from the structure of action itself. If intention is in the act, we need to look at the latter to figure out what the former is.
In True Materialism, Jensen Suther attempts the exact opposite approach. His ambition is to abolish the (descriptive) dualism in question by finding a crossing point of sorts, a way of naturalising purposiveness itself, a kind of normativity given by nature. A stand-in or a correlate for intention, in other words, but one that could be (or should be) accounted for from the standpoint of the causal.
He finds this moment where intention and causality mingle in the notion of biological life. On his account, life itself is already formally structured, as it establishes a natural purpose for all living beings: to maintain their species-specific standard or to flourish as what they are.2 In this sense, life as such is already normative: a member of a species can succeed or fail at being or doing what it is they are supposed to be or do. This is why plants react not to sunlight but to the “goodness” of light (TM, 31), a “horse maintains itself as a horse in accordance with standards specific to its species” (TM, 4), and a “sick lion or a lion with a damaged paw is not what a lion ought to be” (TM, 78). The same applies even to parts of living organisms: glaucoma prevents the eye from “actualizing its power its power of sight” and a “hand separated from the body … is no longer ‘actually’ a hand: it ceases to be a hand … because it has lost its potential for doing what it is supposed to do and begins to literally fall apart” (TM, 30). In this way—and I set aside here the manifold references to Aristotle and Hegel deployed by Suther—function takes the place of intention: a hand obviously does not “intend” anything, but it can fail or succeed at fulfilling its function. This way, it seems that what it does as a purely biological entity is already inherently purposeful, and any need for dual description disappears: either in the sense that the causal is already bound together by a natural purpose or perhaps in the sense that a strictly causal description becomes impossible.
The notion of life as naturally normative or purposeful is in fact the underlying theoretical stake at play in Suther’s book. Insofar as True Materialism makes other major claims in philosophy, politics, or aesthetics, they all seem to hinge on that initial idea of biological life as a kind of form in itself: from Suther’s picture of social utopia (which is to follow naturally from people mutually recognising one another for rational animals that they are [TM, 69–70]) to his account of the universal function of literature (“artistic self-representation” as reminiscent of, and “partly constitutive of the organic self-maintenance of animals like us” [TM, 17]). To see how central this issue is to the entire book, one needs only to look at Suther’s recounting of the famous “amphibian problem” in Hegel and his following polemic against Robert Pippin:
Yet while Pippin does note Hegel’s emphasis on the historical character of the amphibian problem … at other points, he seems to accept the metaphor as a reading of what we ontologically are: “both corporeal bodies like all others and yet also meaning-making and reason-responsive subjects, not merely objects.” By contrast, as we have seen, Hegel holds that the living body of a rational animal is itself already a source of meaning and refuses to separate the question of embodied unity from the question of the unity of the body. For Hegel, our concepts are not just present in our bodily movements but articulate those movements—and indeed our organic members—into a rational, living whole. Crucially, Hegel understands rationality not as something added to animality but rather as a distinctive form of it. (TM, 81)
It is telling that although True Materialism presents Pippin’s reading of Hegel as an important part of its philosophical foundation, on this crucial point Suther rejects it outright. Famously, in After the Beautiful, Pippin sees the amphibian problem as “not a ‘problem’ of the sort that will ever allow a ‘solution’”; rather, the solution lies once again simply in understanding why and how the “problem” emerged in the first place.3 Suther, on the other hand, seeks to genuinely abolish the tension between the two sides of our amphibian nature by seeking out a spot in which the “meaning-making” could be tied down to the “corporeal”—with the former fully accounted for from the standpoint of the latter. In this way, the amphibian problem appears as a version of, or a proxy for, Anscombe’s problem of dual description. If the notion of biological life as purposeful and normative solves one, then it should be able to solve both.
The idea of biological life as a natural source of normativity does not work. His argument for seeing life as inherently purposeful and normative is conceptual rather than empirical (TM, 78). This is to say that it rests not on the claim that specific living organisms seem to behave in a purposeful manner (this would amount to simply ascribing intention to them) but that we cannot conceive of life outside of a purposeful, guided process—that of fulfilling certain functions, satisfying certain standards, or maintaining certain forms. Whenever we think of life, in other words, it is allegedly necessary to see it as a process of striving towards survival, reproduction, or flourishing.
It is perfectly possible to conceive of life—its reproduction, growth, homeostasis, et cetera—in terms of purely causal chains, that is, something that happens under a certain set of conditions rather than something that is trying to happen and can thus meaningfully succeed or fail. In fact, this has already been pointed out by Walter Benn Michaels in his polemic against the idea of “teleosemantics.”4 One of the takeaways from Michaels’ argument is that turning effects into purposes, or natural signs into meaningful signs, requires posing action and intention as factors in play. So, while we can talk of, for instance, magnetosomes in terms of them purposefully directing bacteria towards a low-oxygen environment beneficial to the latter’s sustenance and reproduction, what this logically entails is ascribing intention to magnetosomes; otherwise, although they still point in a certain direction and the bacteria react to that, there is no purpose to any of it; it is just something that happens and has a certain effect. And if it does not happen—that is, if magnetosomes do not point in the direction they usually do—it simply produces another effect rather than any sort of meaningful failure. In other words, we could say that at the level of the causal or biological, there are no purposes, just effects—no norms, just laws similar to the laws of physics. And even though we can always decide to talk of effects in terms of purposes, in order to have a reason to do so, we need to introduce an intentional account.
So, even if we accept that all life “requires” survival and self-maintenance, it is still not clear why we should think about it in terms of purposes and forms. It is perfectly possible to say that living beings simply sustain themselves and reproduce, and once they no longer do, they cease to be alive. Conversely, something that does not do these things is simply not alive. A dead horse is not a failed live one.
Unless, of course, we assume that it was trying to stay alive and failed. But in that case, we have already committed to intention as the source of normativity—that is what “trying and failing” means. Similarly, glaucoma may cause an eye to be unable to satisfy its function, but it is the function desired and imposed by its owner (who presumably intends to use their eye to see things). No notion of natural, biological form is necessary; either intention is present (and calls for interpretation), or it is not (and a causal account is all that is needed). The question of whether horses (or bacteria or trees) are capable of intentions is beside the point at the level of theory.
However, by relocating normativity from action to life as such—from intentions to natural functions—Suther suggests that there is an internal standard inherent to living organisms that is independent of anyone actually imposing (or not imposing) that standard in practice. Purposes without purpose-givers; biological organisms striving for goals that have never really been set by anyone. Insofar as the dead horse helps Suther avoid or conceal this issue, it becomes the skeleton in his theoretical closet.
The question “whose purpose?” thus remains the obvious missing piece in most of True Materialism, and it becomes even more central in the context of Suther’s account of evolution, which essentially—and predictably—poses the latter as a guided process. The “notion of a ‘species concept’ ought to be grasped not as an eternal essence standing outside of time but as a purposive form revisable through the evolutionary process of natural selection. Indeed, the inner purpose furnished by a species concept renders intelligible the contingently acquired trait as a trait conducive to self-reproduction” (TM, 79). Or, “In evolution, the embodied activity characteristic of a species undergoes a contingent transformation that, under the circumstances, is conducive to the species’ survival” (TM, 79). This is simply not how evolution works—or, to put it in Suther’s terms, there is nothing in the concept of evolution that makes it necessary to conceive of it this way. Instead, evolution may—and should—be grasped as a causal process: certain traits make it more likely under certain circumstances for their owners to survive longer and have more offspring; because those offspring inherit traits, over time this leads to a more general change in the species, as its members become more likely to possess those traits. Again, no purpose, no internal standard, no normativity implied or necessary.
To this point, my argument has been that Suther’s basic claims hinge on the validity of his account of biological life as normative. This is not exactly true. Rather, it is as if Suther himself wanted to tie them to that central notion without it being strictly necessary for the rest of the argument. For instance, his account of class could be very well made into a separate argument about the role of mutual recognition in class politics and class formation (TM, 54–72). Similarly, the chapters on Kafka, Mann, and Beckett—which together constitute the majority of the book—could be transformed into an historical argument about modernist autonomy as self-legislation.
But this would be a very different book and not the one Suther has written. From terms such as “bio-aesthetics,” to detailed (if perhaps less than necessary) typologies such as “p-” and “c-autonomy,” to even the title of the book itself, it is hard not to see Suther’s intervention as an attempted methodological opening of sorts, a proposal aimed at establishing a new field, tendency, or school of thought. Such attempts require as foundation a new philosophical discovery—and the notion of extended, natural, biological normativity would certainly qualify. Suther’s polemic against Nicholas Brown is telling in this regard: a series of misreadings aside,5 his only real disagreement with Brown seems to hinge on the original purposiveness of life as such (and hence the universal role of literature as self-narration constitutive of our own species-concept). Indeed, if we were to set that particular point aside, Suther’s claims about autonomy and form—how a work of art, as a totality bound by purpose, reflects the structure of action as such and how, under capitalism, this reminds us of what is irreducible to commodity-form—seem uncontroversial, if not original.
What does not help, in this context, is that Suther operates mostly under the correct account of action and intention; that is, he explicitly and repeatedly rejects the notion of intention as a mental state preexisting or accompanying action and instead insists on it being immanent to the form of the act (TM, 37). However, as we have seen, the good picture of intention tends to produce theoretically deflationary arguments that do not provide much in terms of analytic tools or inventions and instead insist on the importance, necessity, and the always-unpredictable nature of particular interpretations. True Materialism is about theoretical inflation: in typologies, terminologies, and definitions.
This ultimately brings Suther in line with some unexpected allies. For instance, the idea of non-intentional, natural purposiveness of life itself opens the way to the non-intentional agency of non-human actors as proposed by Bruno Latour and a range of writers associated with both vitalism and object-oriented ontology. More importantly, the account of form as an internal, constitutive standard that is only conceptually determined and inherent to various objects or living beings, rather than imposed by a specific intentional agent, inevitably recalls Caroline Levine’s new formalism.6 Indeed, when Suther mentions the “constitutive standards” of knives, hammers, and newspapers (TM, 30)—while seemingly ignoring the fact that those standards can only be established through use or design, which is to say, through someone’s specific actions—it becomes hard to see why the entire notion could not be rewritten in the language of “affordances.”
This is not to say that Suther’s “true” materialism is indistinguishable from its various “new” counterparts. Rather, the point is that blurring the divide between the causal and the intentional inevitably leads to the same place, one where normativity materialises out of thin air, while forms and purposes float freely without anyone having established them first. And as this is a matter of what is logically entailed by a certain argument, for once, even the best of intentions do not matter.
Notes