Likely by the light of the candle we are in-turn about to discuss, René Descartes wrote in 1641 Meditationes de Prima Philosophia; a seminal work, which along with other things introduced Cartesian dualism and the ever-pervasive cogito sum.
Even in this age of the postmodern, few have been critical of Descartes without offering some respect to the first great Continental Rationalist, be it Wittgenstein or Heidegger, even Nietzsche, one must face the fact of contribution. But, in fact, perhaps it is Nietzsche who gets closest in suggesting to us that the history of philosophy is a history of conflated ideas. His may be the argument in the degradation of a Platonic Hinterwelt, but I aim instead to examine one of the incorrect assumptions made by Descartes in his Wax Argument, and in part refute an understanding of the world held by any popular view since after the Heracliteans.
First though, a repetition of the contents (the very same contents already explored by Husserl). Suppose you remove from a box, a hunk of wax. Be it candle or useless hydrocarbons. You are aware of wax, of what it is, of its properties. When you place this lump of wax by the fire, suddenly it changes. It melts and becomes a different shape, a different colour, in many ways a different substance.
Descartes is right to admit to all this. The exterior properties of the wax has changed, but because he is following in the endless Western tradition of Platonistic Essentialism, he must also claim, because it is still recognisable to him as wax, that there must be an unchanging characteristic to the piece, an aspect only assessable through pure reason.
In a way, Descartes here is right, though not for the reason he necessarily asserts. It is not "pure reason," the endless love of wisdom which allows the character in essentia to remain unchanged, but rather it is only the categorisation which remains untouched by the phenomena of the world.
It is impossible to claim the wax is unchanged. It is melted. It is different. If we are to understand this through means of ontology, we need only conceptualise our reaxion to a human recreation. If a person is placed inside a fire and melted down into a massive lump of charred flesh, are they still the same person (perhaps absurd because this certainly entails death, something not needed to be considered in the case of the wax).
In fact, it is different wax. It is missing some of the atoms which formed the original object and others have been transformed into separate molecules--if you are following along, you will see the natural conclusion of this argument. The only unchanged element, the only "essential characteristic" to the wax is the very idea of the wax, the abstraxion.
Our perception as it has developed through means of biological evolution and cultural emergion, (and as Kant highlighted in his original critique) is based on a series of categorisation, on abstraxion, on the usage of signs to contextualise the world of the signifcat, both representational and immaterial. Failing to acknowledge this fact is an act of intellectual dishonesty used as epistemological justification for post hoc philosophising.
But, who is to say this is intentional. Most of history, us humans have viewed the world in very stringent ways, which defined by this very system of abstraxion.
Let us return to the wax. What is the wax in actuality? Is there a wax to be spoken of? This all derives from our understanding of the world as subjects and objects (an understanding derived from a similar system existent in many of our languages). In viewing the world as a system of objects, we see the wax necessarily as an object, and we see the object as the abstraxion, as the significat, as the concept of immovability. When the wax melts, it is changing forms, in the same manner water does when boiled; the steam in the air is still water, we still conceptualise it this way. There may be a differing word for the abstraxion--in the case of water, steam--but the abstraxion itself remains static.
What then, is the flaw of this conceptualisation? Why is there error in viewing the world this way? Let me ask you, is it wrong to view a river as an unmoving stream? To look at a person as a single character immutable to change? What is the flaw in seeing the sun or moon as the same entity every day, every night, every minute; even in that respect we know it's not. The sun is never the same sun. That eight minute old light has outdated its source which burns and bubbles, turns and changes with the intensity of a human personality. That is the flaw. The world is never static. A river, even when dammed, never stops its flow.
In reality, the world as experienced through the subjective, that is on a mechanical plane, moving through linearity (there's moving again), is one process after another. There is no rest.
Look at the abstraxion of the object again (we will consider the lump of wax for consistency). In the thought experiment of its melting, we already made the assumption of stagnation at the beginning at end, even when claiming the form of the melted was is different from that of the full bar. In truth, in every immeasurable 'moment', each increment of Chronos which passes in the mechanical plane, the wax is different. A breeze (a process in itself) blows an intangibly small sub-sexion of the wax onto the ground; atoms and molecules rearrange themselves invisible to the eye; our hands leave and imprint where we touched. In each of these snapshots, these chronological moments we choose to view the "object" its characteristics have changed, and since we are already refuting the "essence" of it as nothing more than a linguist, semiotic and psychological construxion, in each of these moments, the wax has ceased to be and begun anew.
This goes for the wax post-ignem as well. Here, we think it has reached some final form. As if an object ("object", I should say) oscillates between states of causal start and effectual conclusion. As if, like we often view history, there is some base and some ending, with the line of causality playing out along its axis. In fact, this process of sojourn from origin (if origin can even be observed [a point I will return to]) to conclusion continues in infinitum, and the "object", as we conceptualise or abstract it, is nothing more than this very process.
But, again revisiting the example of the wax, we have already shown this process to be a totality in itself. There are sub-processes to each of its movements. The atoms which make it up, rubbing against, creating molecules. The wind blowing off the fragments. The fire moving it from one perceived final state to the next. And each of these are infinitely divisible into sub-processes too. The atoms perpetuate through the jumping of electrons, gluons hold together the nucleus. The fire and the wind, both primal elements in are conception, are both made of countless (infinite, in fact) processes. That is why there is no "single process". There is no building block for the mega-system that is "the world", der Welt. Each one divides itself infinitely, beyond the ἄτομον of Democritus, Epicurus or Lucretius. There is no ultimate force, no ultimate process. Instead, the ultimate process is the mega-system, is der Welt, the totality of all totalities, the Spinozian "God".
Where then, does this leave us; what then, is an "object" (that is, in acutality and not abstraxion). An object is a super-process. A totality. But not to the degree of a machine (what might be accurately called a mega-process, a collexion of super-processes). There is no static object. In fact, there is nothing static in der Welt. How could there be stasis in the flowing rapids? The stasis is only in the mind.
Instead, this lump of wax is constantly moving, constantly changing, constantly fighting back through its own defined willed. In the mechanical plane, in the funxion of our perception, in the view of subjectivity and the chronology of linearity, the wax is a super-process, a constant flip beneath uncreation and creation, viewed at each snapshot, at each immeasurable moment as something consistent, the same flaw we apply to our own existence and subjectivity.
Semper movere. That is the truth of the world. Our system of abstraxion (the semiotic web of our existence whose most pervasive and notorious actor is that of language) can only funxion in respect to immobilis. Our concepts and worldviews are that of stasis (such is the reason for "societal danger" of post-structuralism, deconstruxion and postmodernism, all attempts to move away from stasis to process [see Bergson, Deleuze, Wiener]). Even the signs which hold significance as building blocks to cultural conceits (see "Democracy", "Freedom", "Capitalism") have the lost the cybernetic element in their analysis which was, in essence, the first attempt to view abstraxion as something outside of the system of signs.
All of this is Language Enframement; the way our system of signs superficially allows for a complexity of understanding (language is the basis for the love of wisdom) while actually restricting the "essence" or freedom by severing a connexion to the world; it is the erasure of potential and the flattening of the modal, or possible modal, into the strict and determinative mechanical. Time will go as it is programmed. We will not see the line, we will only see the stops it makes along the way, at each of these immeasurable snapshots.
There is no causa sui for super-processes ("objects"), as there is no cause. It neither began at the start nor at the end, rather its causality exists at each side of the process moving inwards, concretising as the abstraxion. When the points of its existence meet in the middle (the effect being a cause as much as the starting cause) it is seen as the immutable and static "thing". The thing is a vector charting its own causality, or presumption of causality, and in doing so, each "thing" (abstraxion as viewed in a snapshot) contains the entire history and potentiality of the process.
To answer the question previously posed, an "object" is nothing more than that: a collexion of history and potentiality viewed at a linear point (and as such viewed by a linear being, see Convergence: 3D beings in a 4D world) in the same way "t" funxioned as the variable for an immeasurable snapshot (see Time After Time: mechanical-linear enframement and modal temporality).
And, finally to answer Descartes, the wax is not the same. There is no essential character which is retained in its clear transformation. Rather, the unchanging element of the wax is only the abstraxion of the wax in the mind of the subject, refusing to view the world as anything other than stagnant and unchanging.
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