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30 responses to “2014 will be breakout year for Continental Philosophy’s return to metaphysics”

1. 

   Terence Blake

   January 5, 2014

   Hello Jon, it looks like an exciting year and it is good to see you so enthusiastic. I think we can add Peter Gratton’s “Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects” to the mix (http://www.amazon.com/Speculative-Realism-Prospects-Peter-Gratton/dp/1441174753/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1388920165&sr=1-1&keywords=peter+gratton.Also) Katerina Kolozova’s “Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy” (http://www.amazon.com/Cut-Real-Subjectivity-Poststructuralist-Insurrections-ebook/dp/B00H12FLS6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1388922315&sr=1-1&keywords=kolozova) looks very interesting.
   I am glad you are talking about Continental Philosophy in general, and not limiting it to one particular movement. I think Alexander Galloway has announced a book on Laruelle, and that further translations of and commentaries on Laruelle are in the making. Bernard Stiegler is certainly one to watch, as his online class and seminar is devoted to exploring the origins of ontology (http://pharmakon.fr/wordpress/category/cours/) and its pertinence for the digital revolution.
   I see you are very proud of your coinage “the sneer from nowhere”, but as you like paradoxes I am sure you will be amused at the simple remark that the word sneer is itself a sneer-word and participates in what it purports to condemn. It’s as if I were to condemn condescendingly the opposite attitude of “my smug is legion”.

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2. 

   Michel X.

   January 5, 2014

   Just because you singled him out by name… would you mind blurbing a titch more on how you see Schopenhauer fitting into the above? I’m all for re-introducing Schopenhauer (as you know/may remember, I’m a huge fan of his), but I have to confess that I’m a tad foggy about how he fits into that first footnote of yours (it sounds entirely applicable to Hegel instead).

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3. 

   Terence Blake

   January 5, 2014

   Hello Jon, I have now read your article presented as part 3 of your reply to Nathan Brown’s “execrable” article. Brown’s article asserts the conceptual incoherence of OOO, and concludes as an after-thought that it is only a passing fad. You are right to assert that this is not very charitable, and in fact outside Brown’s competence, as it is a sociological claim about the life-expectancy of a philosophical movement. Be that as it may, nothing you have said in the above blog post (which I find very inspiring, as I said in my first comment, which has unfortunately disappeared) contradicts his appraisal, which concerns the fate of OOO. Your post concerns a lot of interesting publications in SR and related domains, so only time will tell. On Brown’s second point (conceptual incoherence of OOO) you seem to imply that your article with Ohm, ACTUAL QUALITIES OF IMAGINATIVE THINGS, replies.It is a very interesting article putting emphasis on the historical problem context and on the progression of arguments, this context and argument based approach is very commendable. But as to the ontology of OOO, your text remains on what I would call the meta-meta-level. You compare and contrast 3 sorts of OOO: withdrawal ontology (Harman), capacity metaphysics (Bryant, Cogburn, and Silcox), differential ontology (Garcia). Yet you do not say much about the actual ontologies, especially Harman’s (remember Brown’s main point was the conceptual incoherence of Harman’s OOO). You then go on to say that these 3 positions are “pure” ontologies giving rise to a multitude of “regional” ontologies. I am glad you say so, as it has been my analysis from the very beginning that Harman’s OOO is not so much an ontology as a meta-ontology. So I am glad to receive indirect confirmation from you on this point. A second thesis that I argue for is that the by now classic “withdrawal” ontology is in its very nature incompatible with regional ontologies, unless they are asserted as belonging to the realm of illusion, of “phantoms and simulacra” as Harman calls it in BELLS AND WHISTLES. This is also what Brown’s discussion adumbrates. You give indirect credence to this in your discussion of Harman’s possible critique of capacity metaphysics as reductionist. I think this confirms as well a third thesis of mine, that capacity metaphysics is not in fact a “pure” ontology in Harman’s terms, but is already only one possible instantiation of Harman’s meta-ontology (I have constantly made this claim in comparing Bryant’s and harman’s ontologes). That is to say that capacity metaphysics is an instantiation of pure OOO, and so necessarily in conflict with it, and necessarily criticised as being reductionist, despite its being at a higher level of generality than the various regional ontologies. Your exposition of these three ontologies, despite remaining fairly allusive, does not dispel the claim of conceptual incoherence, but rather confirms it.I can see no way out of this problem as long as one retains Harman’s notion of absolute withdrawal. I think you did a great job of explaining withdrawal in terms of a primacy of normative modal properties and relations. But absolute withdrawal doubles up not just objects (into real and sensual) but also properties and relations. This produces too much clutter, and the real objects, properties, and relations tend to de-temporalise the world, whereas your alethic and deontic possibilities and permissibilities comport a temporal aspect. This seems to be behind your unwillingness, as you indicate, to take on Harman’s full-blown fourfold ontology.

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4. 

   Carl Sachs

   January 5, 2014

   There are several reasons to be excited about the resurgence of “Continental realism”, not the least of which is that it promises to drive one more nail in the coffin of “the analytic/Continental divide”. From my point of view, all the arguments against the Divide have had their day — including many developed by peple here at NewAPPS — yet the Divide has a tenacious grip on the sociology of the profession.
   For 2014 (and beyond), I’d like to see more conferences and workshops that undermine the grip of the Divide by taking an inter-traditional approach to shared philosophical concerns, such as whether moderate realism can be satisfactorily reconciled with moderate constructivism, the metaphysics of time and/or modality, differing approaches to the philosophy of cognitive science, the legacy of German Idealism, and so on.
   One way of going about the last would be to focus on Schelling in particular, because “the Pittsburgh School” (as they are called) does a really nice job of bringing insights from Fichte and Hegel into contemporary ‘analytic’ philosophy, but Schelling goes missing, whereas there is resurgence of serious interest in Schelling among ‘Continental realists’. (And Schelling is also one of the hidden influences on ‘classical’, as distinct from ‘analytic’, pragmatism.)

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5. 

   Eric Schliesser

   January 5, 2014

   Perhaps, with a variety of analytical interest in Spinoza, some will be encouraged to look at Schelling, too.

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6. 

   Jon Cogburn

   January 5, 2014

   Terence,
   Thanks so much for the citations and really helpful comments. I think we’ve already litigated our view of Brown’s article in the earlier discussion, and it was really stupid of me to add another adjectival dig in the above footnote.
   Nonetheless I’m glad I did, because your comments isolate a central part of why people are talking past each other. Part of the issue is how to define OOO. Once you add Garcia to the mix you can’t define it in terms of objects’ absolute withdrawal. Rather Harman’s vision of withdrawal is one way to try to work out the claim that objects are very strongly autonomous with respect to attempts to reduce them downwards to their constituents or upwards to their relations. I think if Brown had read Garcia, or read more Bryant (and had his piece not been dictated by the polemical ends he describes in the earlier notes) he could have produced an interesting paper along the lines you suggest (I think there are ways to defend Harman, but in my own work I’m more interested in the aspects of his views that allow us to rethink German Idealism (1) externalizing Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit as a kind of inverse Maimonism, and (2) the problem of vicarious causation as thus an externalized version of the affection problem).
   Now Harman is not always consistent on how he defines OOO, sometimes OOO is just his model of withdrawal and sometimes it is object’s autonomy vis a vis undermining and overmining, and his fourfold ontology is one instance of this. Of course this wasn’t an inconsistency before Bryant and Garcia’s work illustrated different ways to run with Harman’s initial insights that don’t involve the fourfold ontology.
   With the advent of Garcia (and I think being charitable to Bryant as a self-described object oriented ontologist, though he does hedge) you just have to go with the latter and define OOO as a movement of metaphysicians who take one of the primary jobs of metaphysics to describe what reality must be like so that objects are autonomous with respect to their own undermining or overmining. This is Harman, Garcia, and Bryant’s projects, and it’s what other sympathetic humanists are getting from OOO.
   Anyhow, thanks again for the perceptive comments on my article. As far as it being a bit too vague, I think that’s fair, but also think that the footnotes and citations help with respect to it. In addition, the translator’s introduction to Garcia’s book and some other stuff I’m working on now will provide considerable concretization.

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7. 

   Jon Cogburn

   January 5, 2014

   Michel,
   Your Schopenhauer is quite a bit better than mine, so I won’t be at all offended if you tell me various ways the following is batty.
   One can read Schopenhauer’s basic move with respect to will as simply being an instance of Schelling’s speculative move when he declares that since he is nature, that contra Kant, we can have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. This may be heretical in all sorts of ways, but I read Schopenhauer as a much clearer development of this key Schellingian insight.
   Then once the thing in itself is identified as will, you have the epistemic and metaphysical abilities to defend a capacity metaphysics realist account of modality (contra Hume, Kant, the postivists, and Leibniz/Carnap/Kripke/Lewis). Nietzsche’s Schopenhaurian borrowing can be read in this light too.
   I realize that Schopenhauer is a fascinating philosopher for all sorts of other reasons, and I hope to be able to dedicate a couple of years to his study in the next decade. Nearly all of my metaphysical intuitions about modality and modal logic come from dipping (thusfar too) lightly into his work and reading secondary work on him. After my next two books I am going to do the kind of work on modality involving continental and analytical philosophy that Carl Sachs describes above. There’s just so much rich stuff.
   One more thing- Schopenhauer is often taught as being motivated by his teacher Scholze’s affetion argument critique of Kant (that in order to state transcendental idealism Kant has to violate the limitations imposed by transcendental idealism, in Scholze’s case this was with respect to the role of causality and how things in themselves affected sensibility to give rise to intuitions). Given how this critique relates to Graham Priest’s “Fifth Antinomy” and take on Hegel, as well as the relations between Priest’s work and the Speculative Realists, there are lots of other points of contact between Schopenhauer and the authors listed above by Terrance and me.

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8. 

   Jon Cogburn

   January 5, 2014

   Yeah, I went to the Pittsburgh Summer School on Schelling this summer at Dusquene (http://pghsummersymposium.wix.com/pghsummersymp2013) and it blew my mind. I would have loved it if some of the Pittsburgh Hegelians had come to the talks but I don’t think any graduate students of faculty attended.
   Graham Bounds and I are giving a paper on Schelling and intellectual intuition at the forthcoming Pacific APA in the German Idealism group. Bounds’ grasp of Schelling, and how the evolution of intellectual intuition from Fichte to identity philosophy era Schelling relates to McDowell and Heidegger, is vastly better than mine and I’m extremely lucky that he’s letting me work on the paper with him.
   I too hope that the divide disappears. It’s absolutely crazy with respect to modality. Nobody in analytic philosophy reads or even provides footnotes to Nicolai Hartmann’s groundbreaking “Possibility and Actuality” which has been translated now (http://www.amazon.com/Possibility-Actuality-Nicolai-Hartmann/dp/3110246678/ref=sr_1_sc_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1388955565&sr=8-2-spell&keywords=nicolai+hatrmann). The guy is one of the greatest German metaphysicians* and his work treats the history of philosophical thinking about modality up to the time and also makes a distinction similar to contemporary two-dimensionalism (for Hartmann between ideal and real modality).
   I think that exciting new work in analytic philosophy defending modal realism without possible worlds is going to help bridge the divide, because then the great tradition in capacity and process metaphysics in continental philosophy just completely opens up. I wish I had time to think deeply about this now, but hope to dedicate five years to it starting two years from now. I know from Protevi that someone has already published a really interesting book on Deleuze that compares Deleuze’s account of modality to Kripke’s but I can’t remember the name of it (I’ll ask him this week). This is the kind of thing that I think will be happening hugely in the next decade, hopefully coming from both directions.
   And I agree with you that Schelling is the historical cause of much of this and that a greater Schellingian renaissance is a necessary part of the way forward. I’ve heard large bits of Ian Hamilton-Grant’s new book on Schellingian metaphysics and it’s absolutely dynamite. I hope that analytical metaphysicians will pay attention in a way that is less dismissive than has been the blogospheric reception to Speculative Realism thusfar.
   Dismissiveness of analytical philosophers towards continental metaphysics is just stupid. We’re cutting ourselves off from all of this great stuff. Maybe that was the point of the whole execrable ordeal though. . . it’s scary to me how few analytic philosophers working in the tradition of process metaphysics exist at English language PhD granting institutions that specialize in analytic philosophy. Rescher at Pittsburgh and Seibt at Aarhus (is that English language?) come to mind, but no one else does. I’m sure I’m missing a few people, but it’s surely still too few when one looks at the top Leiter schools and considers the historical importance of process metaphysics from Schelling and Hegel onwards through Deleuze and beyond.
   [Notes:
   *Hartmann helped bring Heidegger to Marburg but then they couldn’t stand each other. Hartmann did not disgrace himself during the national socialist period and actually served in the German government after the war. His published critique of Heidegger is brilliant (Roberto Poli, who wrote the SEP article on Hartmann: http://www.amazon.com/Possibility-Actuality-Nicolai-Hartmann/dp/3110246678/ref=sr_1_sc_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1388955565&sr=8-2-spell&keywords=nicolai+hatrmann , is fascinating on this). Hartmann does a kind of imminent critique on Heidegger showing how Heidegger is caught up in the very kind of propositional representationalism that he claims to be deconstructing.]

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9. 

   Terence Blake

   January 5, 2014

   Are people talking past each other? I think not. I thank you for confirming my tentative suggestion that the way out would have to be dropping the notion of absolute withdrawal. However, you seem to neglect the price that must be paid for that. The price is the recognition that Harman is talking past himself i.e. that Harman as meta-metaphysician (ontology of withdrawal) is talking past himself as metaphysician (ontology of autonomous objects) and vice versa. A higher price is paid in what you euphemistically call “externalizing”, and that is, in Harman’s case, the generalization of the bifurcation of nature into every single interaction. I look forward to your introduction to Garcia, I read his book in French and, while I found it impressive, I did not find that it went anywhere. If as you call it “the advent of Garcia” helps you in your struggle to redefine OOO as an autonomy ontology rather than a withdrawal meta-ontology, I can see the advantage in strengthening that movement. Finally, I wonder at how your valorization of “sympathetic humanists” at the end squares with your externalization-thesis and your inversion of Maimonides.

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10. 

    Jon Cogburn

    January 5, 2014

    Sorry, it’s Salomon Maimon, not the guy he took his last name from.
    The externalization thesis as it is hitting humanities is not that deep at the outset. A lot of philosophical phenomenologists rightly take umbrage at Meillassoux’s analysis of correlationism. But if you follow, say literary theory (to be fair, really meta-literary theory in your sense) to its Stanley Fish nadir, you see exactly what Meillassoux is criticizing, various regionalized versions of the inability to say anything about the world as it is and only to talk about our conditions of access to it (for Fish we can’t talk about a text’s meaning but only the interpretative strategies which are then characterized so loosely so as to render the discourse a con job*). This kind of thing has been dying its own death across the humanities but as a result there has been an extended crisis concerning what will replace it (see the “Theory’s Empire” anthology). Various strains in the new metaphysics (and object oriented ontology more narrowly) have been found to be very helpful both in rebutting the initial correlationist impetus, and also in suggesting new engagements with the objects of study.
    Again, I’ve seen this myself at theology, theatre, and narratology conferences. I should be fair and note that Deleuze is coming on like gangbusters too. The interesting thing is that it is the meta-physically realist post Delanda/Protevi/Bell/Bryant Deleuze (as opposed to the earlier orthodox phenomenological/verificationist versions of Deleuze such as Dorothea Olkowski’s) that is hitting, just because this Deleuze helps so much as a place to go after correlationism is destroyed. But this is the Deleuze that intersects with people like Johnston, as Bell shows in his review, and Speculative Realism as is clear from the pieces in the Simondon book I reviewed (there’s some discussion in the review).
    [Notes:
    *Mark Silcox and I discuss Fish in “Computability Theory and Literary Competence” in the British Journal of Aesthetics.]

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11. 

    Evgeni V. Pavlov

    January 5, 2014

    Have you seen Brady Bowman’s Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity? It came out in the spring – it’s pretty good (if you’re making a list of books on Hegel to tackle).

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12. 

    Carl Sachs

    January 5, 2014

    That sounds like a very interesting session at the Pacific APA! I’ll definitely stop by.
    In case you (or anyone else here is interested: The Wilfrid Sellars Society is doing Pacific APA panel on Hegel and idealism in the Sellarsian tradition. Paul Redding will be talking about Hegel’s theory of perception in relation to McDowell and Sellars, Chauncey Maher will be talking about Rorty and the idea of the Pittsburgh School as a “tradition”, and I’ll be talking about why C. I. Lewis and Sellars both thought that positing nonconceptual content was necessary in order to avoid British-style ‘absolute idealism’ — though Lewis stops at Kant and Sellars at Hegel.

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13. 

    Jon Cogburn

    January 5, 2014

    Evgeni,
    Oh man. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This semester I’m just trying to get a very basic competence in the secondary literature on the phenomenology. It will be great to read Bowman after that.
    Jon

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14. 

    Alan White

    January 5, 2014

    Jon–
    Have you studied/taught Schopenhauer’s Prize Essay on Free Will? I have for many years in my free will-focused introductory course (highly edited). It is at once the best and worst work on free will ever. Its definitional work on “freedom” is truly awful, but its response to the Norwegian Royal Society’s question on proving free will by introspection is inspired, if too generalized. His anticipation of the inductive argument for the determinism of human nature from science’s perspective is brilliant. His final speculative section defending a transcendental freedom is hokum. But two out of four ain’t bad., to rephrase Meat Loaf.
    His Prize thesis can be psycholographically particularized and his determinism thesis updates to 2014 brilliantly. So I’d say.

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15. 

    Jon Cogburn

    January 5, 2014

    Thanks so much for sharing this. I’m extraordinarily hyped about attending all the papers you describe. I’m a novice on both Sellars and Hegel, but love them both and will learn a ton from you guys.
    Your paper sounds dynamite and jives with my intuitions. It will be great to see it.

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16. 

    Jon Cogburn

    January 5, 2014

    Oh fantastic, I need to go back and reread it.
    I read it about seven years ago and it was one of the things I read by him at the time that shocked me in how much Schopenhauer actually prefigured sorts of naturalism we associate with post-Quineanism now. For a while I thought about writing a book arguing that Schopenhauer was the first analytic philosopher, but I realized the idea was a little bit silly.

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17. 

    Jon Cogburn

    January 5, 2014

    Oh, one more thing. The second book in Johnston’s transcendental materialism trilogy (to be titled “A Weak Nature Alone”) is described by him thusly:
    “The second volume unfolds via a historical narrative running from Hegel through Marxism and up to current Anglo-American analytic philosophy (especially the neo-Hegelianism of Pittsburgh and Chicago).”
    To see a Lacanian Zizek scholar pull this kind of thing off in such an interesting and fruitful way (I’ve seen Johnston give talks that go over some of the material from the trilogy and was able at a conference to talk with him about McDowell and Nancy Cartwright) gives me immense hope for a future where the analytic-continental distinction doesn’t do the harm that it traditionally has.

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18. 

    Jon Cogburn

    January 5, 2014

    Shoot. A third thing I forgot to mention. The paper Graham Bounds and I will present in the German Idealism section interprets the changes Schelling made to Fichte’s notion of intellectual intuition to do the same work that non-conceptual content is doing for McDowell.
    Bounds actually has a fascinating interpretation of Heidegger along these very lines which is in part supported by Heidegger’s appropriation of Schelling.
    So you can see why your paper will be immensely helpful for both me and Bounds.

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19. 

    Terence Blake

    January 6, 2014

    Given the time gap I wrote my reply and went to bed (11H30PM) and then had trouble sleeping, thinking “Oh no, did I slip and write Maimonides instead of Maimon?”
    On the empirical question of the existence of “correlationists”, I have encountered such positions, but I have no respect for the word “correlationism” used to analyse them. This was actually one reason I left Sydney to study in Paris. After living through the dominion of the Althusserians in my philosophy department for six or seven years I was glad to see signs of change with the rise of Lacanians, Derrideans. To my horror, where before I had to deal with dogmatic scientism I now was also confronted with a rising linguistic idealism. I chose Deleuze as a way of responding in their philosophical language, but noone was interested in Deleuze then (1979-80), and so I moved to Paris. With Deleuze’s seminars I had no such problem. One of Deleuze and Guattari’s big themes was the tyranny of the signifier and how to escape it by means of the concept of assemblage. So I was quite surprised years later to see English-speaking philosophers making such a fuss over Meillassoux, whose ideas seem so primitive. I could understand the enthusiasm for Latour, who has Stengers behind him, and so, despite his denegations, a substantial Deleuzian influence. So Stengers, who is a realist, has the added advantage of not rewriting the immediate past to make Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault disappear or seem unacceptably idealist. Stiegler too is intent on giving us resources to rethink that past, without Meillassoux’s reductive spectacles. Kolozova too, using Laruelle, is attempting to think outside the limits of postmodern and poststructuralist linguistic constructionism. So there is a very interesting constellation of thinkers trying to undo the damage that wrong-headed interpretations of post-68 Continental philosophy has wrought.

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20. 

    Jon Cogburn

    January 6, 2014

    I don’t know. I think Meillassoux is getting a little too beat up on now in part because like an analytical philosopher his clarity makes him so much easier to go after. This being said, I do think his view about contingency is unstable. In the argument to contingency helps himself to what he himself should regard as correlationist responses to Russell’s paradox to block the idea that we can think about an absolute set of possible worlds. But if you are really after finitude this is exactly what you can do (albeit dialethically, as with Priest).*
    This being said, I think there is a lot of really rich philosophy in Meillassoux, especially with the intersection of his thinking with current strands of postmodern and radical theology in the United States (Caputo is huge among theologians right now). I am also fascinated to see where Johnston is going with his appraisal of Meillassoux in “The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy.” For all four thinkers he considers in depth (Zizek is in earlier books) Johnston uses imminent critique to bring the positions to the “diginity of their notions” in the Hegelian sense. So for his project Meillassoux is hugely important, yet precisely because he must be worked through and overcome.
    I also have just read Meillassoux’s Berlin lecture and I find it pretty amazing. Unfortunately, with the last two SPEP sessions on Meillassoux people are just reacting to After Finitude and Harman’s translations of parts of Divine Nonexistence. No one’s even talked about his fascinating article on Deleuze, which has been available in English for over five years or the Berlin essay (which should come out officially in an anthology soon).
    I have just started Johnston’s book so I don’t know how plausible are his claims about Meillassoux’s role in matter becoming spirit (sorry for Hegelian shorthand), but I find Johnston to be generally pretty remarkable so I’m pretty a priori sure that it’s not batty (and Bell’s review of this book verifies it while also making a less strident version of the Deleuzian claim that you are making).
    I don’t mean to be insulting by saying this, but I think your philosophical animus towards Harman’s views paradoxically leads you to undervalue the significance of many of your own insights! You present the way you disagree with Harman as if Harman is just obviously mistaken, but in fact you yourself have an interesting set of philosophical commitments and articulations that are inconsistent with Harman’s. But if Harman is just obviously mistaken then your own interesting insights inconsistent with them end up getting presented by yourself as trivial.
    This kind of blurring is not at all uncommon. What I see in your posts is nowhere near as weird as when, for example, Chomksy at his worst arguing that alternative non-transformational approaches to syntax are both radically mistaken and merely trivial notational variants of his own work. Of course this entails that his own work is radically mistaken, but Chomsky is such a bulldog that he can’t let go of his own leg (how this has really concretely hurt approaches like Government and Binding and Minimalism is another story that has been chronicled by historians of linguistics such as Randy Allen Harris).
    In any case, I think what you were seeing with Deleuze at the time was a deep insight into the Zeitgeist that certainly wasn’t seen nearly at all by many English speaking philosophers prior to Delanda’s work getting over (I forget the years, but I think it’s the same year as Harman’s Tool Being). And I’ve had beers with enough bitter older Deleuzians who are picture perfect correlationists in Meillassoux’s sense to know that there is something to this.
    I wish I knew the background between the connections between Badiou and Deleuze (or anything beyond a caricature of Badiou for that matter) because I think Meillassoux being Badiou’s student plays a huge issue with respect to all of the anxiety of influence issues you raise. It will be fun to read through Johnston’s chapter on Badiou over the next few weeks.
    [Note:
    *Not to myself endorse possible worlds.]

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21. 

    Terence Blake

    January 6, 2014

    An amusing anecdote on possible worlds: In 1974 I was an ardent defender of possible worlds and I had some long discussions with George Molnar on the analysis of counterfactual conditionals where he defended his “capacity metaphysics”, to use your term. The outcome was that he eventually conceded that possible world theory was OK, but that it was equivalent to his metaphysics of powers, and I conceded that his capacity metaphysics was OK, but that it was equivalent to possible world theory. He proceeded to argue that applying Occam’s razor I should accept the ontologically less florid theory of powers, which I sort of did, using possible worlds only heuristically for conducting philosophical thought experiments. Unfortunately the Althusserians gained ideological dominance, and as in my analysis of Harman’s contradictions (which apparently you share, but express more diplomatically) had to supplement their meta-ontology of real and theoretical objects with something that could instantiate it in regional ontologies (their term). They turned to a combination of Kripkean causal semantics, Bhaskar’s critical realism, and a capacity metaphysics, which had as a consequence the reinforcing of their epistemological dogmatism with an ontological dogmatism. At the time I used the post-Popperian epistemological tradition and the emerging sociology of science (Mulkay, Bloor) to argue not so much that this Althusserian synthesis was obviously wrong as that it was dogmatic, rigid, and unwittingly constrained science in the making (what I called, outside the disjunction of the context of discovery and the context of justification, the “context of participation”). I think this epistemological commitment to a more sophisticated realism is what made me see Deleuze as a realist and try to resist the “Derridean” idealist reading of of Foucault and of Deleuze that was cropping up at that time. All this played out in the late 70s for me, so I certainly didn’t need Delanda to convince me of the value of a realist reading of Deleuze.
    Meillassoux’s analysis of correlationism is a horrible regression for me, and so I find him not only obviously wrong, but unclear (his style is more of a self-conscious gesticulation of rigour and clarity than the real thing) and historically inaccurate. Don’t forget that he wrote in French, and came out of the post-Althusserian tradition. He may be of use in English in criticising linguistic constructionism in the humanities, but he wrote in ignorance of that trend, and presumably in full cognizance of the Althusserian ancestry of his concept of correlationism, which the Althusserians called the “problematic of the subject”, and had deconstructed. Later theorists such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard took that critique for granted. Thus in proclaiming a hegemony of correlationism, Meillassoux may seem a necessary corrective in Anglophone Continental Philosophy to the linguistic constructionists, but in his original context it amounts to obliterating half a century of contributions and advances, not to mention that Popper (“Epistemology without a knowing subject”) and the post-Popperians cannot be included under the correlationist label.

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22. 

    Jon Cogburn

    January 6, 2014

    I’d love to read your take on Johnston’s new book. He traces a lineage straight from Lacan to Badiou to Meillassoux. I think it’s consistent with your experience and reading of the history, but it might not be.
    Some of this just ends up being a question of how pragmatically useful one finds a philosopher and certain Whig histories involving those philosophers. Generally, I think that philosophy is much stronger when inconsistent Whig histories have lots of breathing room. I mean, it’s clear enough just from me and Ohm’s Speculations piece just how central Harman is for the Whig history I need with respect to my own research. The end question is largely then the pragmatic value of such histories (just as the question is with respect to Johnston, or Rorty’s, or Derrida’s, or Carnap’s, etc.).*
    Again, I find the philosophical interestingness of much of your critical engagement with Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology over these past few years to paradoxically increase the pragmatic value of the history where Harman’s Tool Being is a decisive moment of the modern recapitulation of Schelling’s “I am nature.” At the very minimum it radically increases the cash value of your Whig history over the earlier constructionist appropriation of Deleuze in the English language world. That still would seem to me to be no small achievement. And of course I think there is much more to it than that given my sympathy and interest in what I take to be essential and original in Harman’s post-Tool Being writings on causality and aesthetics. I realize that I have nowhere established this yet though.
    During this discussion I’ve realized just how much irony this is here in that I would have already published my takes on Harman on causality and aesthetics if Harman himself and EUP hadn’t let me change my contracts so as to get the Garcia translation out ASAP (even though I just helped Ohm, the translation consumed everything for a year and neither of us are fully recovered). And now I’ll be working on a secondary work on Garcia with Ohm for the next year. Harman’s been exceedingly selfless in this, putting in all this work behind the scenes to get out other people’s works in English (not just Garcia but some of the books in other European languages as well). The Garcia translation was a huge amount of work for him; I think he read two full drafts of the ten or so it went through. I have absolutely no idea how he could be so helpful given his speaking schedule. Garcia was also extraordinarily helpful and kind (given my respect for him as a novelist and philosopher it was at first a bit like trying to talk with a mountain), but it’s his book so there’s obviously a lot of self-interest there. But Harman allowed publication of a sympathetic critical reception by an analtyic philosopher of his own work to be pushed back for two years because he thought it was more important to the dialectic to have Garcia’s work available in English. Given the repeated incredibly nasty dismissals by, for example, Brian Leiter (in his role of the judge of all philosophers’ value) of Harman, and what I see as repeated double critical standards applied to his work** this was no small sacrifice on his part.
    Sorry about the digression. I don’t want to open up a space of debate about Harman’s personal qualities, because there is so much toxic stuff out there (and there are personal histories with respect to the Brown debacle that I’ll continue to do everything possible to not allow to enter into the blogosphere, even banning posts by people overwhelmingly sympathetic to my critique of the piece).*** I should have just concluded that of course reasonable people can disagree about Whig histories, and the jury is of necessity always to some extent out in philosophy. With respect to the way the one I use to situate my own work might be inconsistent with yours (and Johnston’s for that matter) I don’t feel the need to get to the real one. This is perhaps a benefit of pushing Priest’s dialetheism into areas where he might not want to see it go.
    [Notes:
    *Brandom on the necessity of Whig histories in Reason and Philosophy: Animating Ideas (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=robert%20brandom&sprefix=robert+brando%2Caps&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Arobert%20brandom) is brilliant and true. It’s actually at the core of his fascinating engagement with Hegel so clearly articulated in that excellent book.
    **Clearly much schadenfreude concerning how his work has gotten over outside of philosophy departments and sometimes in the popular press and with science fiction writers like Bruce Sterling. When people who routinely discuss Brian Leiter (ridiculously, unfairly, and dangerously) as if he were the anti-Christ (I am not exaggerating) gleefully quote Leiter’s nasty quips about Harman at you, something has gone deeply awry.
    ***I should repeat that nothing I said was meant to be personal specifically with respect to Brown, and to the extent that it was I erred (I let him have the last word in the earlier thread and will here as well).
    My own greatest regret as a philosopher is the overly polemical nature of two of my earliest articles. The horrible thing is that the reason they were so polemical is that I was so incredibly frustrated that I couldn’t get them published, and the failure to get them published would have had potentially life altering effects onto my career (I don’t think I’d have one in academic philosophy had they not been published). This frustration led each rewrite (all based on suggestions of reviewers that were themselves often dismissive, hostile, and unfair) got shriller and shriller. Once the articles reached what in retrospect seems to me to be a completely unacceptable level of toxicly negative polemicality, they got accepted by top journals.
    I don’t think I’m one whit better than Brown here, and I’m not in a position to judge what selective pressures the editor of Parrhesia is under to have done the same with Brown as was done to be by journal editors that leads to such things. As with Brown I’ve worked to ensure that none of the personal back-story with respect to the editor end up being part of the discussion I initiated about Brown’s paper. In my case I was a jackass because the cost of not being a jackass was potentially career ending. I didn’t realize I was doing this at the time, but I was. So who am I to judge? I assume there is more to the story with respect to journal editors and reviewers with respect to their share of the routine jackassery in the biz.****
    I should also note that a dear friend of mine who would rightfully publicly be recognized as a much more important philosopher than me has exactly the same regret with respect to one of her earliest pieces as being led into gross stupidity just because of inevitable imecility of polemic. We both feel these things deeply as moral stains and have done concrete things in our personal lives and in what we’ve published to try to make up for them.
    ****Whenever I review for a press or journal I go to great lengths to be helpful to the author. But the end result of this is that now I find myself forced to turn down the majority of review requests because of time constraints. This alone might explain why so many reviews are so curt in their dismissal and why, even worse, editors increasingly don’t even share the reviews with authors now. I only do a review if the remarks will go to the author, but again, I have to reject most review requests now, so who am I to judge anyone personally about this stuff? This really isn’t personal. What needs to change are the systemic pressures we face.
    I think most of us that started Newapps (to be clear, it’s Protevi’s boat) still hope that discussion of philosophy on blogs and the internet might work as correctives with respect to many of the structural dysfunctions of the profession. This is of course naive; most of what Evgeny Morozov writes in condemning techno-utopianism is important and correct. But this is no excuse not to try to wrest these tools out of the hands of capital. O.K. I promise to stop bludgeoning anyone still reading this with any more digressions for the time being at least. Sorry for going on so long. You have the last word on any of this here with respect to our dialogue in this string.]

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23. 

    Terence Blake

    January 6, 2014

    I have gone out of my way on several occasions to say that I have nothing against the man Graham Harman. Further, I censor very little on my blog, but I will have no truck with personal denigration or accusations of Nazism etc., and have said so. I have stated that given all this, I use “Harman” to refer to a conceptual persona in Deleuze’s terms (similar to your notion of pragmatically useful philosopher) based on my contextualization of his texts (your “Whig” history, mixed with some Hesiodic history). I may have been “strident” on some other occasions, but I don’t see any stridence in our discussion in this thread, and certainly not in my Deleuzian claims. While I do not particularly appreciate TOOL BEING (although when I first read it I thought the externalization move was brilliant, and it almost convinced me), I can see why you would prefer it to THE THIRD TABLE, and THE QUADRUPLE OBJECT (not to mention “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer”). I have begun to read Johnston’s new book and I find it more satisfying than Ray Brassier, for example, as he finds transcendental room for your “modal soup” (i.e. your alethic and deontic modalities), although he does not make them originary, as you would seem to wish; I find it amusing that he refuses new religious fusions with Continental Philosophy yet he talks of his key concept of “weak nature” in very similar terms to Caputo’s weak God. There is lot’s of room for divergent historical narratives, so I don’t need to rule out anyone else’s history, nor submit to it, but I feel free to evaluate it in my own terms. I do not need Graham Priest’s “dialetheism” to explicate this attitude, Feyerabend’s pluralism is already a good guide. I certainly disagree with most SR/OOO accounts of the last half century. This is my problem with Garcia’s book: unlike Johnston’s book which is impressive and I feel I can dialogue with, Garcia’s FORM AND OBJECT is impressive but has no place in any of my histories. I see how one can climb to the meta-level and compare his ontology with Harman’s or Bryant’s, but this sort of thing rapidly becomes uninteresting. If dialogue (its richness and complexity, its surprisingness and its transformative power) is an important criterion, which it is for me, then Garcia’s book seems to favourize a fairly poor game of meta-comparison and , at best, to contribute to the long overdue de-absolutization of OOO.

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24. 

    dmf

    January 6, 2014

    While I appreciate the efforts&interests raised by this latest turn in continental philosophy it is I think worth noting the projects of folks like Don Ihde on post-phenomenology, Paul Rabinow’s anthropology of the contemporary, and the variations on ANT/STS that have been plugging away on our being in the midst of things for some time now and with some substantial results.
    http://darkecologies.com/2014/01/04/adrian-johnston-a-godless-discipline/

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25. 

    Jon Cogburn

    January 6, 2014

    Oh certainly. Thanks for the cool link.
    Harman actually introduced me to ANT/STS through his work on Latour. I hope to learn more of the tradition.
    My ignorance of Ihde’s work is pretty inexcusable. From what I’ve heard from talking with friends, if he’s successful I’m really, really sympathetic to what I take to be the way he deconstructs of the spirit/matter fact/value science/culture distinction without falling into vulgar relativism (as Rorty) or any other form of correlationism in Meillassoux’s sense. I have no idea the extent to which he’s successful (the project seems to me to be one of the most important contemporary ones, as does an understanding of technology).
    If I get back into writing about video gaming in a serious way the first thing I’ll do is teach a course on him. I think I also remember reading a paper of his castigating the normal French phenomenological linguistic idealist appropriation of Heidegger that has (in various permutations) become an ossified null hypothesis among most analytic and continental Heideggerians. Ihde made the same point that Okrent does in “On Layer Cakes” (google the pdf, it’s not paywalled) that the entire tradition rests on French and English mistranslations of the word “Rede” combined with a disastrous ignorance of the initial German critical reception of Heidegger that motivated his last pre-Nazi lecture series on animals (his ‘linguistic turn’ after the period of Nazi lectures is only relevant to the extent that it further supports Ihde’s point). Also, the Okrent/Ihde Heideggerian view of cognition is much more plausible. But I might be misremembering and the paper wasn’t by Ihde but somebody else who also leaves a big wake when treading in these waters, and whose work I should be reading.

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26. 

    dmf

    January 6, 2014

    yes do check out Don’s work, this is a whole other tangent but I think that Rorty’s ‘radical’ behaviorism (shaped by his Kuhnian/Bloomian reading of Davidson)is easily fleshed-out with a bit of neurophenomenology/extended-mind-ing to be in line with the post-Wittgenstein enactivists, the pragmatist Heideggerians (including Bert Dreyfus and his disciples) and more continental thinkers like Andy Pickering and Stengers who says that ” The reliability of …science’s results is relative to experimentally purified, well controlled laboratory experiments.
    And competent objections are competent only with regards to such controlled environments.
    Which means that scientific reliability is situated, bound to the constraints of its production. Which also means that when the eggs turn golden that is, when they have left their native environment,
    they have left behind this specific reliability and robustness. What reliability they
    will have now is no longer an issue of scientific judgment only, but rather a social and political issue.”
    http://threerottenpotatoes.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/stengers2011_pleaslowscience.pdf

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27. 

    Carl Sachs

    January 6, 2014

    That’s very interesting about Johnston! I’ve read his article on McDowell, Cartwright, and Lacan — it came out in Umbr(a): The Worst (2011) as “Second Natures in Dappled Worlds: John McDowell, Nancy Cartwright, and Hegelian-Lacanian Materialism.” But I hadn’t realized that he was going to continue that line of thought in his second volume.

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28. 

    dmf

    January 6, 2014

    http://societyandspace.com/material/interviews/interview-with-adrian-johnston-on-transcendental-materialism/

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29. 

    Jamie

    January 6, 2014

    Hi Jon (if I may),
    Very thought-provoking post; I will steer clear of commenting on OOO because of my ignorance on the topic. I would like to respond some of your claims and suggestions about German Idealism and 20th-century phenomenology.
    1. I’ve never really understood why synthesis of sensuous manifolds in accordance with intellectual categories became such a problem for the post-Kantian generation. Perhaps someone can enlighten me on this issue.
    2. Phenomenology never attempted to dissolve the question of the relation between transcendental philosophy and the philosophy of nature. Rather, various phenomenologists came up with new answers to the question. For instance, Heidegger in his early period sought to ground vorhandenheit on zuhandenheit, and finally both on Dasein.
    3. Obviously, many of Hegel’s insights were provocative and profound and continue to be relevant to contemporary dilemmas and conflicts. But he also conveniently suppressed a great deal of facts to construct his dialectical interpretation of history. More importantly, given the troubles of the 20th and 21st centuries, I find it very difficult to see history as the dialectical movement towards freedom in rational self-consciousness. I am curious as to what you think is tenably salvageable, either partly or completely, from Hegel’s system.
    4. That being said, I think philosophy has an ineradicably aesthetic dimension – even in work that is resolutely positivist or formal. One can still have an aesthetic appreciation of metaphysics – Hegelian or otherwise – that may be found to be deficient when judged according to other philosophical criteria.

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30. 

    Jon Cogburn

    January 6, 2014

    Jamie,
    Fantastic all around. I’ll do a top level post on these four points in the next few days (I hope I’m up to answering 1 and 2; I might make a mash of 3 because my Hegel is so rudimentary and even though I love Hegel at the end of the day I probably will continue to get more from Schelling and Schopenhauer). In any case, I think the questions are absolutely central and will move the discussion of them into a post of its own by Wednesday.
    Thanks tons.
    Best,
    Jon

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