The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism by Elizabeth Grosz

The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism Reviews

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  Campbell Rider

  Really enjoyed reading this. Gives a great introductory overview of the Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Simondon and Ruyer. The only chapter that didn't feel 'introductory' was on Deleuze, where the discussion was a bit more advanced and less like a survey of his thought.
  
  The thread connecting these thinkers is a really interesting one, and I like that Grosz has pretty much found a way to make immaterialism cool again. her approach is to say that the best theorists of the relationship between mind and matter have a vocabulary that allows them to talk and think about these two categories without reducing one to the other. She talks about 'incorporeality' rather than idealism or dualism in order to distinguish this third way, which sees the material as very much real but always in some way conditioned or directed by incorporeal forces, potentials, virtualities etc. Grosz describes the incorporeal as an inassimilable surplus or excess that a body carries with it as its condition of being.
  
  what interests her about Spinoza, for example, is his insistence on the genuine reality and irreducibility of the dimension of the mental as an attribute of substance, but as a thing that's always linked to bodies rather than a separate entity entirely.
  
  my own interest is in the biological angle to all this – specifically the lineage connecting Spinoza (and leibniz, who doesn't figure prominently) to Deleuze, Simondon and Ruyer. The only thing that would've improved this book for me would have been some brief engagement with contemporary science, to put to rest the accusation that these thinkers are just unscientific mystics. There's a bit of biology in the Simondon and Ruyer chapters, but given that only in the last ten years or so have biologists begun to talk seriously about 'top-down' models of organ growth and epigenetic mechanisms of gene expression etc., a chapter on how these theorists of the "incorporeal" might be brought to bear on those issues would've added a lot.
  
  anyway. cool book
  
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  Matthew Law

  I was very excited about this book but found that it ultimately fell short by failing to either situate itself in time/space or to take any kind of stand. As the book progressed, it felt more and more like sterile intellectual masturbation.
  
  What I thought Grosz did well was provide an overview of a number of philosophers that grapple with the questions surrounding, and implications of, an ontology of immanence. Excellent. Ruyer and Simondon’s thought are new to me and I understand why Grosz put them with the likes of Nietzsche, Spinoza, Deleuze and the Stoics. Generally speaking, I find an immanent ontology far more philosophically interesting and compelling than a transcendental one. (Which is about as good as it gets without some kind of divine intervention leading me to course correct.)
  
  What I thought was sorely lacking here was any account of why anything here matters. While intrigued by possibility of an ethics built around an immanent ontology, it seems that Grosz can only do this through the sterilization of ethics that removes any and all of its normative power. This could have been avoided if Grosz made a few normative claims about this world of ours. Nietzsche, for instance, is great because he situates his philosophy in response to a stifling modernism that is crushing our potential for growth, expansion, and creativity. Is this Grosz position? Probably, however, it remains unstated.
  
  What makes all of this worse is the pretentious hierarchy of being/becoming that Grosz leaves unexamined or unchecked from the philosophers she brings into the work. (Looking at you, Nietzsche - though this is true of Deleuze and the Stoics as well.) Throughout the text there is this background assumption that one who recognizes the immanent ontology of our world (philosophers, of course) are somehow a step above the stupid masses insofar as they at least know that their being is produced by forces beyond their control. The recognition of this condition by the philosophers is supposed to bolster their ability to act differently; which seems to be a good in itself but, again, without defining a context or problem, does not follow.
  
  Does the wise philosopher (or grad student) have more agency because of they recognize their ontological condition? No. In spite of all this wisdom, their creativity is amplified by resources that are so often beyond them - resources that likely come from either masses or the same elites responsible for stifling creativity in a capitalist hellscape. Instead, the wise philosopher asserts their intellectual high ground in sterile academic circles while those ignorant to philosophy live their lives and (re)produce the broader sociocultural fabric of their world in spite of their ignorance.
  
  What is the point of a non-normative ethics? Perhaps my pragmatism and political bend are to blame for my negative perception of this.
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  Steven Peck

  One of the most intriguing and thought provoking philosophy books I read this year. Love what she did merging stoicism, Bergson, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Simondon. A fascinating book I'll return to again.
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  Adam Carter

  Grosz confronts the matter/form dichotomy--perhaps most prominent in contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind--by tracing a tradition of thinkers who refuse to accept this opposition but also refuse to reduce it. Grosz finds in the Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deuluze, Simondon, and Reuyer a metaphysics that exposes matter as always conditioned by or containing 'incorporeal' forces. This form-taking nature of matter opens the way for an ethics of becoming and possibility; an ethics that is informed by imminent values as opposed to transcendental ones.