Absentials or Absential Features - Deacon

Deacon contends that one cannot relate the phenomena of “a function, reference, purpose, or value”

to physical matter and each of these phenomena “is in some way incomplete (p. 2)”. “Longing, desire,

passion, appetite, mourning, loss, aspiration—all are based on an analogous intrinsic incompleteness,

an integral without-ness (p. 3).” Each of these phenomena cannot be explained in physical terms or

linked to physical processes which is why Deacon suggests that there is something missing which he

labels as an “absential” or an “absential feature (p. 3)”, his neologism for what is missing from our

understanding of the physical dimension of these phenomena. Absential features are the “defining

property of life and mind (p. 3).”

There is another kind of absence that Deacon deals with namely the absence from scientific

consideration for subjective things such as beauty, values, ethics, thought and consciousness. “Our

scientific theories still have to officially deny them anything but a sort of heuristic legitimacy (p. 12)….

[They] have failed to explain what matters most to us: the place of meaning, purpose and value in the

physical world (p. 22).”

Deacon’s formulation of the absential represents what McLuhan would call a figure/ground reversal

in which instead of focusing on matter one focuses on their interactions or as Deacon puts it:

A counterintuitive figure/background reversal, focusing on what is absent rather than

present, offers a means to repair some of the serious inadequacies of our conceptions of

matter, order, life, work, information, representation and even consciousness and

conceptions of value …. It requires reframing the way we think about the physical world in

thoroughly dynamical, that is to say, process terms, and recasting our notion of causality in

terms of something like the geometry of this dynamics, instead of thinking in terms of

material objects in motion affected by contact and fields of force (p. 44).

Deacon suggests that organization be thought of in terms of constraints or what is not

there: absences.

But although the specific absences that constitute a constraint do not suffer the

epiphenomenality of descriptive notions of organization, they are nevertheless explicitly

not anything that is present. This requires that we show how what is absent is responsible

for the causal power of organization and the asymmetric dynamics of physical or living process

(p. 195).

Elsewhere he writes, “Intrinsically emerging constraints are neither material nor dynamical—they

are something missing—and yet as we have seen, they are not mere descriptive attributes of material

processes either (p. 535).”

At the very end of his study Deacon for my mind nails his concept of the absential when he writes,

“There is more here than stuff. There is how this stuff is organized and related to other stuff (p. 544).”