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7 responses to “Quote of the day #5,642 Adrian Johnston”

1. 

   Terence Blake

   January 7, 2014

   Hello Jon, I think that there may be a link between what I call your concept of “weak withdrawal” and Johnston’s notion of “weak nature”. The consequence is that Johnston is not as free from theism as he may think, as there is a “homology” between his weak nature and Caputo’s weak God. (Note: Johnston’s argument against scientism and materialism that duplicates the structure of theism makes massive use of “homology” arguments, but everyone seems to find that normal, which it is). See: http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/jon-cogburn-and-weak-withdrawal/

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2. 

   Terence Blake

   January 7, 2014

   On where Johnston fits into various Whiggish or Hesiodic histories: http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/divergent-histories-and-conceptual-personae-graham-harman-tristan-garcia-and-adrian-johnston/

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3. 

   Jon Cogburn

   January 7, 2014

   Oh, thanks.
   I should probably note at the end of the day it’s extraordinarily unlikely that my engagement with Johnston’s work will waken me from my dogmatic (Presbyterian) slumbers. Your tie to Caputo is really fascinating not just because it might help me a little bit with my recurrent insomnia, but also because it involves making Johnston’s own imminent critique move against him (meta-imminent critique?). But it also might help me understand Caputo better.*
   One of the things I would change about the paper you discuss after reading Johnston is that I think that OOO divides up into two main schools: capacity metaphysics and what Johnston calls “conflict ontologies” with Garcia, Johnston, and Harman all being instances of conflict ontologies, and what Bryant, Silcox, and myself have been doing as being more in the broader tradition of capacity ontologists (though motivated by the OOO problematic, Deleuze might be interesting here because he could be the only instance of a worked out view that is both a capacity metaphysics and conflict ontology).
   Again, while Harman often characterizes OOO just as his model of strong withdrawal, he also characterizes it as a meta-ontological project of discerning what objects must be like such that they are autonomous with respect to attempts to reduce them either downward to their constituents or upward to the relations in which they occur.
   Garcia and Bryant also explicitly characterize their projects in these terms. Interestingly Johnston to some extent does his own as well. On page 23 of the book when he discusses materialism as being a kind of “theism from below” you have homologies to Harman’s undermining and overmining. And Johnston’s whole project as motivated by the Lacanian insight into how scientistic materialisms replicate key religious terms (God’s eye view, etc.) thus also becomes to some extent OOO as Harman sometimes has defined it. And then on page 25 you get the discussion of conflict ontologies. It will be interesting to compare Johnston’s “gaps” and Garcia’s differential model of being.
   On weak versus strong withdrawal, I do want to get clearer about this as I don’t have a settled view. The problem is that we really just have a spatial metaphor here, where “absolute withdrawal” is a kind of metaphorical infinity. I don’t find this ultimately helpful (and it’s possibly perverse, given Harman’s quite clear and helpful contrast between himself and Meillassoux explicitly on the issue of finitude in the Meillassoux book). The question is what is going on beyond the metaphor then.
   Some have argued that there aren’t really any substantive issues here, what Harman discusses with his notion of absolute withdrawal are just the results of the bad metaphor taking on a life of its own (the way some Wittgensteinians think all philosophy problems are). As with all such Wittgensteinian silencing maneuvers, this leaves a bad taste of positivism in my mouth. But besides that, I think it’s untrue with respect to Harman.
   I am especially taken with Harman’s discussion of allusion as a solution of how we can epistemically access a reality that is radically non-textual. This seems to me to get some of the non-metaphorical meat behind various levels of withdrawal. I also think that the problem of vicarious causation arises for what you call “weak withdrawal” and the aspects of Harman’s view that get expressed as absolute withdrawal should be seen as an inventive solution to the problem (as I form it in a paper I’m working on, the problem is just what happens to the affection argument once you do the externalization).
   I realize I haven’t given an argument for anything here. I’m just sharing where my intuitions are about this stuff and how I’m working on it in places where I am trying to produce arguments.
   [Notes:
   *Re Caputo: At the radical theology conference I presented at with Ohm last year part of me felt that “radical theology” was a way for priests to keep their employment after they no longer believe in this stuff any more. This was horribly ungenerous, both because it’s not fully true and because one should be sympathetic to priests in such situations. Some of the talks bordered on fideism too, and I think that Meillassoux’s contemptuous attitude towards fideism (which, as Johnston notes, fits uncomfortably with M’s own Caputoean theology) is wholely correct. Some were in the tradition of neo-Wittgensteinian attempts to redefine what “religious belief” means in some non-cognitive way, which I find to be wrong for the same reasons that positivism in general fails. The best talks had a lot of practical friction and were “radical” in more political senses.
   It’s hard for me to get too worked up though: (1) evidentialism seems right to me (though probably wouldn’t if I didn’t actually believe big chunks of the Reformed tradition), and (2) at the same time I don’t believe that belief in theological propositions is nearly as important as most Christians take it to be (to the point of idolatry I think). Rather, if God really is not like Christopher Hitchens describes her to be, then she’s not going to discriminate based on what mental boxes we stupid creatures tick off next to sentential beliefs. I should note that the seeds of this view are actually in the Second Helvetic Confession (just as canonical for Presbyterians as the Westminster), which explicitly denies double predestination and comes very close at multiple times to noting that if Grace is a gift of God that your belief or not may not have much to do with it. Belief certainly isn’t a work itself that makes you deserving, and the non-believing are explicitly discussed in the Second Helvetic with the possibility of reconciliation held open.
   Crap. Sorry for going on so long about this. You brought up Caputo. I really enjoyed his talk and want to teach him some day. The connection you see between him and Johnston makes me want to do this even more.]

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4. 

   dmf

   January 7, 2014

   http://anthem-group.net/2013/07/12/john-caputo-on-speculative-realisms-latour-zizek-and-more/

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5. 

   Carl Sachs

   January 7, 2014

   I’ve been chasing after the Holy Grail of “non-scientistic naturalism” (NSN) for ten years or more, and every time I think I’m getting close — with Nietzsche, Dewey, McDowell, Adorno, or Merleau-Ponty — I lose my grip. Even after reading both of the De Caro and Macarthur volumes, I still can’t tell how NSN counts as naturalism.
   I’m beginning to suspect that “scientism” is itself a problematic notion wherein “science” (or “technoscience”) is blamed for the social and psychic ills produced by capitalism. And if that’s anywhere near right, then the problem isn’t to disentangle naturalism from “scientism,” but to keep naturalism and scientific realism wedded together and disentangle those from their complicity with what capitalism does to technology.
   If reading Johnston will help me think through these problems, I will run — not walk! — to my on-line book purveyor.

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6. 

   Eric Winsberg

   January 7, 2014

   just to say that that’s my favorite clip on youtube.

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7. 

   Jon Cogburn

   January 8, 2014

   I’ve always been with Eddie Murphy’s interlocutor on this one (NSFW! – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0_vTUnokNU ).
   This performance is wonderful in so many ways. The music builds and builds like a symphony until the kids are rocking out beyond all reason. You viscerally long for some of whatever those kids had in the room in that decade, the confidence and happiness radiating out from their dancing and drumming. And at the fifth or sixth time where you think everybody can’t possibly rock any more Wonder just starts singing “Sesame Street” over and over again and at that point you realize that the gods of rock have in fact descended from their mountain fortress and are filling the world with song once again via incarnation in the demi-god who was once known as little Stevie Wonder. But at that very moment it becomes negative theological and there is simply nothing to be said. Then he lifts his hands off the keyboard and the music abruptly stops.
   The whole thing justifies the existence of youtube I think.

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