Triad 2 of 32 · 2026-09-25 · Difficulty 4 · Shared figure or motif, Genealogy/influence, Conflict, Oblique/structural
The thread
How do two things that never touch stay in step? Geulincx’s two clocks chime together ‘without any causality’ because one artificer built both. Bell (via Casimir’s egg and alarm clock, ‘I, the great chef, imposed a structure on my kitchen’) meets the same structure as option (3), superdeterminism, and refuses it. Harman names the tradition, occasionalism, and makes Latour its ‘first secular occasionalist’: the gaps are real and local mediators close them, fallibly. One artificer, no artificer, many small artificers.
The three books
- Ethics, Arnold Geulincx, Samuel Beckett (contributor), Martin Wilson (translator); 1665 (Treatise I); 1675 complete; Brill ed. 2006. Anchor and source of the figure: the two clocks, the baby in the cradle, occasionalism as the ground of ethics (ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis).
- Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics: Collected Papers on Quantum Philosophy, John Stewart Bell; 1987 (2nd ed. 2004 with Aspect intro). The oblique edge: a physicist who meets the two-clock structure (egg and alarm clock; option 3, superdeterminism) and refuses it.
- Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Graham Harman; 2009. The lineage named and decentralized: occasionalism made secular and local (‘vicarious causation’), where any actor can be the mediator and the bridge can fail.
Notebook
- The will’s clock: using Geulincx’s ‘I do not know how such a thing is brought about…’ (p. 33), write a gesture of your own (a hand lifting a pen) three ways: occasionalist, Bell’s option 3, Latourian. What does the gesture mean in each?
- Superdeterminism as an ethics: Bell treats option (3) as a reductio (‘our apparent free will is entangled with them’); Geulincx builds a morality from the same premise (ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis). Write the ethics Bell refused; which Beckett sentence is its motto?
- The chef: Casimir’s ‘great chef’ arranges the coincidence; Harman says a Latourian bridge can fail (‘an interesting tragic side of causation that was always denied … to God’). Write a short fiction of a failed synchronization.
Rabbit holes
Links as checked on the day of the reading.
- Sukjae Lee, ‘Occasionalism’, SEP https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/occasionalism/
- ‘Geulincx, Arnold’, IEP https://iep.utm.edu/geulincx/
- ‘Bell’s Theorem’, SEP https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bell-theorem/
- Hossenfelder & Palmer, ‘Rethinking Superdeterminism’ (2020) https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462
- Harman, ‘On Vicarious Causation’, Collapse II https://www.urbanomic.com/chapter/collapse-ii-graham-harman-on-vicarious-causation/
- Prince of Networks, re.press (open access) https://re-press.org/title/prince-of-networks-bruno-latour-and-metaphysics/
To carry
“In this matter of causality it is a great inconvenience that the real world is given to us once only.” — John Stewart Bell, ‘Free variables and local causality’, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, paper 12
Themes
Beckett · correlation vs causation · free will · gesture · mediation · occasionalism · pre-established harmony · superdeterminism · two clocks · vicarious causation
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