Jon Cogburn's Blog

Rosenbaum on Billy Joel

I missed THIS ESSAY when it came out a few years ago.

While I tend to have respect for anyone who can write catchy melodies as Joel can, Rosenbaum is really on to something with this:

I think I've identified the qualities in B.J.'s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness: It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt's backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.

Then Rosenbaum goes through hit after hit illustrating the thesis.

A couple of observations:

1. Graham Harman has written about the "sneer from nowhere" that ironic Gen ex hipsters perfected pre-internet and that came to characterize an awful lot of the early blogosphere. I think Rosenbaum's "unearned contempt" is pretty much the same thing.
2. Academic philosophers give in to unearned contempt much more than people in other fields. For some reason, we feel justified saying nasty things about thinkers and movements we don't know very much about. This is probably worst with analytic and continentals who view the distinction in Baby Boomer culture war terms (not to say only Baby Boomers do this). I think this comes from a kind of anxiety in philosophy that if other people are right about certain things, then your life work might be worthless. I mean, you can't get started on a project unless you presuppose an awful lot. But if those presuppositions are kicked out, then there's no point to what you've been doing. 
3. Incidentally, I think this bit about presuppositions is why orthodox Heideggerians don't make time for Harman. What is overwhelmingly offensive to them is not Harman's critique of correlationism, nor his neo-Aristotelian views, but rather his claim that most of Heidegger's work is just a repetitious restatement of of the tool/broken tool dichotomy. If Harman is correct about this (and he gives arguments, e.g. the discussion of time in Tool Being) then thousands and thousands of books and articles by orthodox Heideggerians might end up being beside the point. This kind of thing is pretty terrifying if you are on the receiving end of it.

Anyhow, the Billy Joel article is really interesting. Joe Bob says check it out.

Harman and the issue of an infinite intellect

One of Graham Harman's commitments that is most difficult for many people to accept is the view that there are no perfect recipes.

It's one thing to say that the chair and a description of the chair are two different things. But Harman holds that any description of the chair will leave something out. So even God could not have a cookbook that would allow him to produce the chair such that she can predict all of the chair's possible interactions, and the properties that emerge as a result, with everything else.

There are two connected ways to take this, both of which I think Harman endorses: (1) as a claim about metaphysical emergence, where there is always the potential for genuinely novel, genuinely surprising (even to God) properties called forward when the chair interacts with other things, and (2) a claim about the limits of representation.

I'm very interested in the extent to which these two claims mutually re-inforce one another.

Mark Silcox and I have a paper in American Philosophical Quarterly that I think is relevant to further working out (1) (or at least working out a Harmanian, perhaps to be contrasted with Deleuzian, theory of emergence).

But (2) itself is a little bit delicate. Again, could an infinite representation (shades of Maimon and Hegel here) of the chair allow one to predict all of its possible interactions with other elements (by "interactions" I don't just mean movement through space, but all of the properties that emerge as a result too)? For Harman, such a representation would just be another identical universe! So it would not in fact be a representation.

Another way to put the objection, not involving a mirror universe, might be to say that the "infinite representation" would be nothing like actual human languages, with recursive syntaxes. I mean there would be no computer program to determine whether something was a sentence of the language. But then the "representation" would be so transcendent that it would at the very least be as weird as the paired universe.

I lean towards this view, and it in fact follows from my piece with Silcox, but it is one that scientistic philosophers would lean against. They would say that the representation might be in some sense infinite, but in the kind of way computers can generate infinities through recursion.

I don't know of a knock down argument against the scientistic philosopher here. On the other hand, I can't think of one plausible reason to believe it, and naturalism's bad track record with respect to mathematics, the advent of matter, normativity, and run of the mill emergent phenomena such as colors, makes me deeply skeptical here too. I mean, I do not think that the null hypothesis should be that Harman is wrong. Rather, I think one can (and I intend to, actually) argue that the burden of proof is on Harman's opponents here.

Some preliminary thoughts on Meillassoux's theology

I think I might be teaching the first graduate seminar on Graham Harman in the United States. At least two of my students are applying for this awesome summer institute at Bonn on the new ontology (teachers including Hagglund, Brassier, Harman, Grant, and Zizek!) and as part of a class on Derrida with my colleague Francois Raffoul they should get a chance to work through some of Hagglund's work.*

We've started the semester with a huge dollop of Meillassoux and Harman on Meillassoux (many notes thus far are HERE, this week I'm going to include more stuff on Harman on Meillassoux). Two Springs from now I'm scheduled to teach a class on Meillassoux and Graham Priest which will be awesome, awesome, awesome and which Insha'Allah might form the genesis of some collaborative work with Levi Bryant (at the very least it will form the genesis of some solo work on Bryant, which would also be awesome).

One of the things we've read this semester is Meillassoux's "Spectral Dilemma" essay and Harman's exegesis of parts of Meillassoux's second (currently unpublished) magnum opus L'Inexistence Divine. Strangely, I was able to lead a discussion of some of the material in the article in the current adult sunday school class I'm doing on the Meaning of Jesus.

So I think today, February 12, 2012 might be the first time Meillassoux has been taught in an adult sunday school class (notes on that class HERE; Meillassoux is mentioned multiple times in different contexts).

I do not think my teaching bits of Meillassoux today will be the last time that conscientious Christians will struggle with his ideas in churches though, for a couple of reasons.

more development of Meillassoux's argument in modal logic, plus a possible dialtheist problem

I've had a couple of fantastic discussions with Levi Bryant about Graham Priest's connection to a slew of continental philosophers that Priest doesn't even mention in Beyond the Limits of Thought, and a bunch of weird things are popping out with respect to my current reading of Meillassoux.

The most important connection is that Meillassoux several times makes the kind of argument Priest diagnoses and logically regiments, where it is shown that just articulating a limit (Closure) forces that very limit to be contradicted (Transcendence). Given my teaching rotation, I should be able to teach a class on Meillassoux and Priest two Spring semesters from now, and the course notes for that class might be the genesis of something collaborative with Bryant (Insha'allah).

Weirdly, in Chapter 3 of After Finitude. Meillassoux does have two discussions of the possibility of true contradictions, first in arguing that a contradictory being can't exist, since it would have all properties it would nto be contingent in the way Meillassoux has argued that objects are, and second in admitting that his argument uses ex falso quodlibet, something not valid in paraconsistent logics. It's pretty clear Meillassoux hadn't read Priest at the time he wrote After Finitude, because much of Priest's work can be read as picking up the challenge Meillassoux lays down in his discussion of paraconsistency.

Tonight I initially thought that I could prove that Meillassoux actually may need it to be the case that truths that escape the correlationist circle are all true contradictions, but as I dug deeper into the modalities, I actually came up with even more formal logic derivations of Meillassoux's key arguments. At the end of this post though, I do show how actual dialetheist worries arise, but then raise a couple of issues concernin whether the resulting form of dialetheism may not be a problem for Meillassoux.

In THIS POST I showed that Harman's interpretation of a central Meillassouxian argument was provable in modal logic.

The key lemma is that Verificationism (Strong Correlationism), the position that all truths are knowable (P --> <>KP), entails that if it is impossible to know that something is impossible, then that fact is possible (~<>K~<>R --> <>R). This latter statement forms the core of Harman's reconstruction of Meillassoux's argument to absolutize facticity.

Updated post on Chapter 1 of Meillassoux's After Finitude, with what I take to be the master argument against correlationism

After lecturing on the material today, I realized that I hadn't really clarified how the chapter presents a sustained argument (with some fascinating tangents). So I rewrote the lecture and edited the earlier post that is HERE. There's lots of cool stuff there, including some of Harman's criticisms. The biggest thing is that I take Meillassoux's master argument against correlationism to actually be the following.

1. Let A be the sentence, ‘Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.’ A seems to undermine the correlationist claim that being and thought cannot be separated, as scientists are thinking of truth-making events existing in the absence of any thinkers.

2. The correlationist can say that the sentence is always false, in the manner of contemporary creationists, but they understandably don’t want to do this.

3. Instead, they typically give an account of such scientific statements being part of a “founded mode” defined over something more originary involving human practices and perceptions. In this manner, they actually double the meaning of the sentence. The error is thinking the sentence is true and originary, but understood as founded it can be true.

4. So according to this strategy, A is true for the scientists, or more broadly for us, but not true from an external, absolute “God’s eye” perspective that does not involve human thinkability. So we must distinguish A^us versus A^absolute. A^us is true, while A^absolute is false or meaningless.

5. The claim that A^us  is true and A^absolute is false or meaningless directly contradicts the scientist's own understanding of the meaning of A! When the correlationist says A^us  is true, the assertion gives rise to a Euthyphro dilemma. (5.1) A^us  asserts the following: “Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans” correlates with a set of verification procedures followed by scientists that lead them to assert A. (5.2) Scientists hold that this is the case for the following reason: The set of verification procedures followed by scientists leads them to assert A because event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.

6. The correlationist could outright deny 5.2, but this would be to lapse into Idealism, holding that scientists’ verification procedures caused reality to be the way it is.

7. Or the correlationist could just refuse to assert 5.2, perhaps because it is meaningless, or perhaps out of some kind of Wittgensteinian quietism, but this again leads to a contradiction of what the scientist means.

8. In any case, the claim that A^absolute is false or meaningless contradicts Finitude. Saying anything about A^absolute requires claiming knowledge about an absolute, which the correlationist claims we cannot have.

Again, full details (in addition to an overview of the other great things in the chapter as well as a discussion of some really nice related points and criticisms by Harman) are HERE.

(modal logical) Meditations on the Meillassoux versus Harman

Yesterday I provided a preliminary formulation of a key lemma in Meillassoux's argument that correlationism absolutizes. I'd wanted to do this in a full natural deduction form today, but my thinking got both ahead and behind the argument. Let me get behind the argument first.

I. Correlationism, and the contrast between Meillassoux and Harman

From the position of an analytic philosopher (and I pray that this is not too distorting), Meillassoux's correlationism is best presented in terms of the following three positions.

(1) Verificationism- We cannot coherently think of reality as unthought (from the British empiricists originally, though Berkeley actually argued for it). Note that this arguably entails that if P is true, then it is possible for someone to know that P is true, but that in itself it places no restriction upon who is doing the knowing, it could be "knowable by an infinite mind." Only arguments concerning finitude force the verificationism to be knowable by something human-like.

(2) Embodiment/Embeddedness-We cannot coherently think of humans without thinking of them as embedded in a reality ( Schopenhauer and then later Heidegger developing Kant's claim that concepts without intuitions are empty, Schopenhauer with respect to the body and Heidegger with respect to a reality experienced as in some sense pre-existing, modal (involving possibilities), and valuative).

(3) Finitude- We cannot coherently think of self-subsistent totalities/absolutes (from Kant’s dialectic, but Graham Priest has discovered the true nature of this argument).

Before I go any further I must make absolutely clear the contrast between Harman and Meillassoux. Harman rejects (1) the Verificationism and maintains (3) the Finitude (if I could write an aria I'd write one in praise of this insight!) by radically externalizing the manner in which Finitude is expressed by Heidegger. Meillassoux rejects (3) the Finitude while keeping the (1) Verificationism. This is in some sense the titanic strugle at the heart of Speculative Realism.

II. Meilllassoux Needs (some form of) Verificationism

As I briefly (much more is needed exegetically) argued yesterday, the way Meillassoux gets to his rejection of Finitude actually uses Verificationism as a premise.

III. Meillassoux Rejects Verificationism

Here is a big problem. As far as I can make out, Meillassoux's argument that correlationism need not entail Berkeleyan Idealism is inconsistent with the very Verificationism he uses. Meillassoux's worry is that correlationism renders the thing in itself unthinkable/unconceivable, but then we might think that it is impossible, which is the position of Berkeleyan idealism.

So Meillassoux argues, persuasively to me (and this actually has powerful resonances with Lovecraft that are in common to all of the first generation Speculative Realists, and many of the second generation ones such as myself), that unthinkability does not entail impossibility.

But I'm not sure he can argue this. First, notice that Meillassoux is arguing against a strawman. To stop Berkeleyan Idealism, he must argue against the proposition that unthinkability does not entail falsity. For the Berkeleyan Idealist need only be committed to the claim that it is false that things in themselves exist, not that it is impossible that they do so. But the proposition that unthinkability does not entail falsity is much harder to argue against than the proposition that unthinkability does not entail impossibility. In fact, it is not a proposition that I think Meillassoux can argue against (though Harman and myself, following him, can).

No Verificationist of the sort we've been considering can argue against the calim that unthinkability entails falsity! For surely unthinkability entails unknowability. But this claim, plus Verificationism, is provably inconsistent with the claim that unthinkability does not entail falsity! Let me explain the formalism before giving the proof.

One of Meillassoux's key arguments is formulizable in modal logic (and valid)

[Note: (1) Meillassoux's argument to contingency is further developed in modal logic HERE, with some dialetheist worries thrown in. (2) A clearer explanation of the difference between Meillassoux and Harman is HERE, including a distinct worry.]

Reading page 26 of Graham Harman's Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, and just put the key argument (of which Harman writes, "This apparently hair splitting point point is actually the key to Meillassoux's entire system, and is worthy of closer attention") in modal logic. If I have not fudged too much by putting things in terms of a knowledge predicate, it definitely works. And in a very weak modal logic to boot, I think classical K but in the next few days I will put it in natural deduction to check. 

Basically there is a simple proof from P --> <>KP (if P, then it is possible to know that P, to which the correlationist is arguably committed) to Meillassoux's conclusion ~<>K~<>R --> <>R (if it is not possible to know that R is impossible, then R is possible). Contraposing the correlationist claim gives you ~<>KP --> ~P. But then substitute in ~Q for P and you get ~<>K~Q --> ~~Q, which via classical logic entails ~<>K~Q --> Q (if it's not possible to know that something is false, then it is true). Now substitute in <>R for Q, and you get ~<>K~<>R --> <>R (if it is not possible to know that R is impossible, then R is possible).

That's it. I'll do a proper natural deduction proof (without the substitutions) in the next few days, in part because I want to find out if I had to use classical negation rules above (if I was a better logician I would know this without having to formalize it; but full formalization sometimes yields unexpected interesting things so I don't mind).

The reason this is so mind-blowing is that so much does follow from the incredibly simple point, once you think about it in a way informed by knowledge of German Idealism, as Harman and Meillassoux do. More on that soon. I have to get clearer on how this fits with Meillassoux's other key argument in this context that unthinkability does not entail impossibility. This is how Meillassoux rejects Berkeleyan Idealism while still being a Verificationist (correlationist). But then the Verificationism entails ~<>K~<>R --> <>R, and then some other commitments entail that there are a lot of Rs for which the scheme applies.

It's the fact that for the correlationist the antecedent is maintained for lots of philosophically Rs that entails much of the weird and fascinating aspects of Meillassoux's philosophy (let R equal "humans will survive their death" or "things in themselves exist"), which is why I'm going to get clearer on that next. As far as I'm getting it now, the reason we can't know so many things is from Kantian Dialectic type Finitude arguments (the Verificationism follows from Berkeleyan type arguments).

Interestingly, Meillassoux, like Graham Priest, ends up exploding the Finitude arguments while staying with the Verificationism, and Harman (to some extent like a certain period John McDowell) keeps the Finitude but jettisons the Verificationism. I should note that by saying this I'm not reducing any thinker to any other thinker or just understanding the continental philosophers as shadows of the analytic ones (a horrible, horrible tendency of a lot of analytic "pluralists"). I'm learning all sorts of new things from Meillassoux and Harman, and there are essential respects in which the two differ from the analytic analogues (among other things, Harman is not hobbled by McDowell's quiteism, and this makes a humongous difference).

It's really cool stuff. Any logician readers will have intuited interesting issues involving Fitch's Paradox as well. I have a couple of lines on that (one from Tennant, one from reflection on Moore's Paradox) that I want to try out on Meillassoux this semester.

Speculative Realism is neither continental nor analytic in the deeper substantive sense

Characteristically nice post about the analytic-continental divide from Graham Harman HERE.

Whenever Harman posts on this issue I find myself agreeing with everything he says. With Harman I think it is much more healthy than not that there are different traditions, and that they remain different

In place of thinking the division should disappear, I would instead make the following claims: (1) an a priori unwillingness from members of one tradition to learn from members of other traditions is problematic, (2) almost equally problematic are people from one camp who are only open to people from the other tradition to the extent that those people articulate views that seem to support those of the supposed pluralist's,* and (3) whatever you think about the different styles, the thinkers covered by continental philosophers should be taught in analytic programs (especially German Idealism and 19th Century more broadly, but also the things Leiter derides).

I should note in passing that one of the things I like about Speculative Realism is that its main practitioners do not embody any of the above vices. Analytic and Continental describe first and foremost training regimes for academic philosophers. But at a certain point you should put on your big boy pants just try to do philosophy, which requires following the muse wherever she wants to take you.

Avoidance of the above vices is not accidental, since Speculative Realists reject two substantive positions at the heart of the most significant continental and analytic philosophers, positions that started with the Positivists and Heidegger, and that rise up zombie-like over and over and over again.

This becomes crystal clear if one realizes that the divide between analytic and continental philosophers is much less philosophically important than a couple of other deeper divisions (1) between anti-metaphysical thinkers and at least anti-anti-metaphysical thinkers,** and (2) between naturalists and non-naturalists.

Weirdly, analytical philosophy's founding sin was combining naturalism and anti-metaphysics and continental philosophy's founding sin was combining non-naturalism and anti-metaphyiscs! But naturalism is false (see Michael Ruse HERE) and anti-metaphysics is incoherent (read the early critics of Kant or Graham Priest for that matter!).

In analytical philosophy anti-metaphysics is where naturalism goes to, if not die, continue some kind of a zombie-like existence. This goes all the way from Marburg School Neo-Kantianism to Robert Brandom, currently holding the office of the last positivist (after Bergmann then Quine and then Rorty before him). Brandom-type Pittsburgh Hegelianiasm, for all of its manifest virtues, almost constitutively returns to the kind of view that Heidegger derides in his very first (emergency war) lectures, of the universe as some valueless hunk with humans (in the guise of social practice) guilding and staining it. This is properly neo-Kantian, not Hegelian, as is the quietistic anti-metaphysics*** that obscures the basic move.

But, on the contrary, in continental philosophy anti-metaphysics comes from the Heideggerian view that science itself is a founded mode over something anti-metaphysics phenomenology reveals to be more originary. So while analytic naturalism leads to anti-metaphysics (because one must deride as meaningless questions that the natural sciences cannot answer), continental anti-metaphysics leads to anti-naturalism.

One is actually tempted to join the two above observations to make the following sort of argument. Analytic philosophy shows that naturalism refutes metaphysics. Continental philosophy shows that the refutation of metaphysics refutes naturalism. Therefore naturalism refutes naturalism.

In any case, I raise my flag with anti-naturalist anti-anti-metaphysicians. We're a tiny minority in both analytic and continental philosophy. With the possible exception of a non-trivial set of Christian apologists (usually working in a dialectical setting horribly tainted by either fideism or its opposition, IMHO), analytical philosophers who are not anti-metaphysicians are almost all naturalists (argument above notwithstanding)! And, with the notable exceptions of the Speculative Realists, Deleuzians, and some other heroic figures, continental philosophy by and large continues to chug along wearing the same old phenomenological straightjacket, with its attendent quietism and other forms of recycled neo-Kantianism. Note that this is perversely a straightjacket that any proper reader of the German Idealists would have thrown off long ago. Well with Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Priest's readings of this tradition,as well as Graham Harman's indefeteagable labor, at least some of us have begun to wiggle our way out of the damned thing.****

[Notes:

*It's very hard not to fall into this trap, perhaps impossible. Some strategies for an analytic philosopher who wants to be a "pluralist": (1) You must, must, must avoid the temptation to use your continental friends to give yourself a patina depth by simply adding a footnote when one of those continental friends tells you that someone you've never read has an idea kind of like yours, (2) You must go to talks about thinkers you don't like and be vigilently open to the idea that informed people of good will disagree with you about your assessment, (3) As much as possible, maintain an active reading life that has nothing to do with whatever current project on which you are working; this helps in all sorts of ways.

**The distinction between anti-metaphysics and anti-anti-metaphysics should not be confused with the distinction between anti-realists and anti-anti-realists. John McDowell is both an anti-metaphysician and an anti-anti-realist. See the next note.

***John McDowell is, like most continental philosophers, actually anti-metaphysical and non-naturalist. Brandom claims to be non-naturalist, but he really is not, at least in the important sense that the early Heidegger adumbrated. This is the entire reason, I think, that Crispin Wright famously put John McDowell down as not really being an analytic philosopher, but (as far as I know) has never said anything remotely similar about fellow Pittsburgh Hegelian Robert Brandom.

****Just because nothing above makes this sufficiently clear- I think Heidegger is one of the most important five philosophers in history and also that Brandom is easily in the top five of living philosophers.]

David Auerbach on Derrida

I don't know how I missed THIS PIECE a few months ago. Discovering it now is a cool synchronicity, given Harman's nice (and definitive) recent post on "Derridean realism." Key point, that remains absolutely devastating:

But Derrida has cheated. He’s gone from an atomic relation of sign to sign and assumed that because a single signification is bereft of meaning, the entire system must be. This is a negative claim–that no meaning is possible–and he’s achieved it by narrowing the gap on both sides. First, he’s abandoned consideration of the holistic view in which a system of significations could have a meaning which is not contained in isolation in any single signification. (This is basically Quine’s argument in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism“: “The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science.”) Second, he’s insisted that a particular type of meaning, Husserl’s, is the only one possible, so any problem with Husserl’s admittedly naive theory extends to language in general.

So Derrida silently assumes logical atomism and a naive theory of reference, then posits that position as one side of a dichotomy and his endless deferral of meaning as the other, with no middle ground.

Anyhow, Joe Bob says to check out the whole post.*

It's a real honor to have been linked to by Auerbach, a TLS (!) critic of enviable analytical and literary powers.

[Notes:

*In the spirit of fairness, please also get a copy of Samual Wheeler's excellent Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy and Martin Hagglund's equally good Radical Atheism. I love both these books, but still think that Auerbach is correct, and moreover that the problem he isolates is even more pressing with Derrida's later (and I think ethically monstrous) Schmidt inspired political writings.**

**Another caveat- All this being said, I think there is something importantly correct and deep about Derrida's view of the necessary impossible, and the manner in which this ties in to negative theology as visualized by important philosophers like Caputo. People like Wheeler, Hagglund, and Caputo (and Rorty too for that matter) just make it impossible for me to whole heartedly jump on an anti-Derrida bandwagon.]

affection type problems concerning modality?

It's weird to me how easily the Jacobi and Schultze's noumenal affection problem can generalize.

With Jacobi and Schultze it only concerned applying the category of causality to the thing in itself. Transcendental idealism both prohibits doing this and seems to necessitate it.

But you get a similar problem with causality and the understanding. Kant over and over again uses "imposition talk" (see Bennett's Kant's Analytic, section 38 for a plethora of examples) concerning how the understanding imposes categories on phenomena. But this is really weird, and yields another affection type argument. By transcendental idealism causality is just a relation between phenomena. But if the mind is imposing causality then something like a causal relation must exist between the mind and the phenomena. Since the mind is part of the noumena, we could call this the noumenal imposition argument, exactly analog to the noumenal affection argument (I'm sure Kant actually has more to say about this because it is so close to the way he wants to reconcile free will and determinism; which on some readings do involve a non-temporal kind of causality that determines whole deterministic causal sequences from outside of time).

Likewise, there is an analogous (and to me more interesting) problem about possibility itself. Can  we really make sense of critical philosophy as the transcendental inquiry into conditions of possibility when at the end of the day possibility is nothing more than something imposed by the understanding on phenomena? I think for Kant you get the same kind of issue as the affection and imposition arguments here. [There's also an analogous Priest type argument that John Divers talks about in his fantastic book Possible Worlds.]

Note that all three problems illustrate the Russell Paradox type inconsistent mix of what Graham Priest calls Transcencence and Enclosure. 

With possibility the problem arises for Heidegger too. Next semester I'm going to reread the stuff about possibility (if I remember right, he calls it "founded possibility" or something like that) in Being in Time and explore the extent to which that model of possibility is consistent with his own characterization of what he's doing as a transcendental project.

I'm really interested to study the history of the noumenal affection problem and see the extent to which the original players glommed onto an imposition problem and an analogous problem about modality. I don't think it's an accident that Schopenhauer was Schultze's student and that he has such a rich theory of modality. One of my projects the next four years is to read Schopenhauer the way Harman reads Heidegger, and then apply that to analytic debates about modality. Unfortunately this is going to take a few years of just getting up to speed on background. The stuff with Kant and the affection problem is just laying the groundwork for my next richer engagement with Schopenhauer. I'm starting teaching our early modern this spring, then in spring 2012 I'll teach our Kant and then spring 2013 our 19th Century class on Schopenhauer.

I know that the big project may sound flaky, but it's already in large part yielded a cowritten paper on vagueness that Frankie Worrell and I are presenting at the next Easter APA. I mean, Frankie and I got the idea from working through some Schopenhauer. So I have some evidence that the big project will yield all sorts of cool stuff along the way.

meditations on Harman and transcendental idealism

Sorry the blog is marginal notes on Graham Harman's blog today, but there is a fascinating post HERE in response to Shaviro  post (HERE). [In contrast to Levi, who actually does lots of philosophy via dialogue on his blog, I often use this space to take notes for things I might write about in paper or book form in the future]. Anyhow, here's the relevant bit from Harman.

Here’s one of his key passages:

“In other words: I do not see the point in maintaining, simply because interactions (or relations) are always partial and limited, to therefore hypostasize whatever was not grasped (prehended) in the event of a particular encounter as a shadow object that exists in and of itself apart from the encounter. (Quite ironically, this means that Harman and Bryant are more Kantian than I am — in spite of what I have said on this subject before).”

As for the Kant point, I already agreed with Shaviro last summer that my position is in agreement with Kant’s on the things-in-themselves. It’s the other side of Kant (privilege of the human world relation) which is more dominant these days, and on that point I have nothing to do with Kant. Shaviro knows and concedes this; I’m just adding the clarification for others.

This makes me happy because it fits very well with the way I situate Harman's work in terms of John McDowell's update of Davidson's problematic about the scheme/content distinction. Kant, of course, invented the distinction via his insistence on the hard and fast distinction between intuitions and concepts (he accused both empiricists and rationalists of collapsing this distinction but in characteristically different ways; it's actually not clear that we would differentiate philosophers into empiricists and rationalists had Kant not made this claim).

I realized while reading Tool Being that Harman's radical externalization of the Heidegger Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit distinction (where the play between presence at hand and objective presence takes place between objects themselves) could be read as a strategy for radically externalizing the scheme-content distinction. If I understand the Shaviro-Harman debate correctly, the extent to which Harman is a Kantian is actually in virtue of two things: (1) the externalization of scheme-content, and (2) thinking of content in similar ways as a Kantian would think of intuitions (as blind, or empty? I always get that confused).

The second part gives rise to what many regard as the overly Leibnizian weirdness of Harman's views, but I think a lot of people who disagree with that are uncharitable in that they don't recognize the philosophical import of the first point. I mean, you may not agree with the way he works out the insight, but it is a fundamental insight and to work it out in any way at all to the extent he has is important, and should become part of the story of these issues.

I think this is really pretty obvious with some historical background. The major part of Maimon's central importance was that he invented the trope picked up by Fichte, then (arguably) Hegel, and then a lot of phenomenology. This is the radical interiorization of transcendental idealism, where the distinction between appearance and the thing in itself is thematized as being a distinction within the realm of appearance.

Graham Harman turns this upside down (I want to say that Harman is Marx to Maimon's Hegel, but that would be confusing since Maimon ultimately gave rise to Hegel). Instead of radically interiorizing the relation between appearance and thing in itself, Harman radically exteriorizes it. Take whatever it is that is independent of humans in the sense that it existed long before human beings. These things have appearance/reality with respect to each other in precisely the neo-Kantian way Heidegger captures with Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit.

Again, whatever you think of the details, the guy gets a spot in dialectical space named after him.

I would be very happy if the dialectic proceeded to where lots of philosophers followed Harman and radically externalize scheme-content, but try to do this with different models of scheme and content. I think that some of the debate in the Object Oriented Philosophy blogosphere is exactly on this point. A lot of the interesting things Levi Bryant writes about can be understood in exactly these terms.

[Two things to think about: (A) And the potential ontological prize is huge. Phenomenology's (broken) promise of dissolving the problems of the external world and the mind-body problem will be redeemed. In this light I disagree with Gary Williams and see Alva Noe's enactivist philosophy of perception as actually being part and parcel of Harman's program. I also disagree with Harman in seeing Dreyfusarian approaches to Heidegger as being part and parcel of the Harman's program. Again, this is because I separate two facets of his program: (1) the radical externalization of scheme/content, and (2) Harman's particular model of scheme and content. Dreyfusarian/pragmatist approaches to Heidegger can be reinterpreted in terms of (1). (B) Maimon in many ways reintroduced Leibnizian tropes into post-Kantian German Idealism. It would be very interesting to compare the pressures for him to do this with the way that Harman's metaphysics ends up recapitulating Leibnizian themes.]

Clarification of some remarks I've made about Graham Harman

Anyone who reads the philosophy posts might be surprised about the majority of stuff on which I've published (abstracts of all published work HERE).

I pretty obsessively don't blog about whatever papers I'm working on. For example, I have eight papers under review right now (half of them in S knows that P epistemology), and haven't blogged about any of them. The problem is that in anything at all related to logic some people are really, really good at proving things. I'm not, but I'm still pretty good at coming up with (to me at least) marginally interesting ideas. If I put one of those ideas out there, it is not plagiarism for someone else to come up with the relevant argument. This is so ingrained that I always work in private on coming up with specific arguments, even when logic is not involved. [Side note: I don't recommend this practice at all. It has served me badly professionally, it is much better to get your ideas out there at every stage in presentations and networking. Almost nobody is just going to pick up a published article of yours out of the blue, no matter what journal it's in.]

I've kind of been throwing around in my head a book length project on Graham Harman and trying out some of the constituent ideas here, but my aversion to putting arguments that I'm shepherding to publication (even in a project that is going to take me half a decade, because of all of the history) has made some of these posts a bit cryptic.

Anyhow, I guess a book idea is different from an article, so I'll get over this neurosis briefly enough to write something. I've claimed to see two promising realist traditions in post-Kantian continental philosophy (construed broadly enough to include Wittgenstein, John McDowell, and Graham Priest!) and also claimed that Graham Harman's philosophy represents a culmination of both. But I've not been at all clear about how this works and also left the impression that I think Schopenhauer was not  a transcendental idealist. So here's a very brief overview.

The philosophical project since Kant has been to free ourselves of the problems with transcendental idealism without falling back into the very problems that led up to it (Hume's problematic about deontic and alethic modalities, paradoxes of totality, Berkeley's problematic). We have to get through Kant, not prior to him. So the null hypothesis is a strict division between mind and world, with it being totally unclear what we can claim to know or even say about the world side of this (this latter point against Kant motivated Maimon, Fichte, and Schopenhauer).

There have been two broad ways to get free of this view without returning to a pre-critical metaphysics (and I think a lot of analytical metaphysics is pre-critical in what I mean as a pejorative sense). The first is an outside-in strategy, where you are led to posit a real world precisely because any attempt to come up with a fixed set of categories for the mind (when the mind is doing the work Kant envisioned) is always overturned by things that surprise us. The phenomenology of surprise is evidence that there is something totally beyond the constitutive powers of our mind. Kierkegaard is the patron saint of this strategy and one can read Derrida as a version of it (and I should note that Lee Braver has a mind-blowingly fantastic paper on this). I call it "aporetic realism." [This is a much longer story, but I should also note that another anti-anti-realist strategy of quietism about transcendent reality ("apophantic anti-anti-realism") in common to McDowell, Wittgenstein, and late Heidegger (on some readings) actually leads to aporetic realism. Graham Priest's work shows this.]

The second broad way of getting at the real is an inside-out strategy. Schopenhauer made this strategy both possible and plausible (with Barbara Hanan I see Schopenhauer as in partial, and ultimately unsuccessful, revolt against Transcendental Idealism). Even though he remained a transcendental idealist he gave us enough building blocks to go through Kant to what I'm now calling "pantheistic realism" (terrible title, I'm sorry). In this strategy you take properties associated with the mind in the Kantian tradition and externalize them to the world. For Schopenhauer (in a certain moods and when read with some liberty) the human body is what licenses this. We ourselves experience frustrated will in our body. But this is experience of modal aspects of an object in the world. When will is frustrated something is not possible. So we have a post-Kantian answer to Hume's problematic about alethic modality. Necessity and possibility are, contra Kant, not things added to the world by the mind but really out there in human bodies and other objects.  [This is a much longer story, but I should also note that the other anti-anti-realist strategy of historicism that some people attribute to middle period Heidegger, can be seen as a precursor version of this. One that I think fails, we are moving against anti-realism from the inside out, but all we get to is a community of minds changing in time. And every problem you can raise about the Kantian mind can be raised about a community of Kantian minds.]

Where does Harman fit into this? Well, aporetic realism is constitutively unable to account for different things. It always falls into the real as some kind of spooky undifferentiated other (obviously, this is the view Schopenhauer could never ultimately break free from, though Hanan shows surprisingly that his ethical views do not require it). It collapses back into transcendental idealism in this regard. Pantheistic realism is constitutively unable to accommodate the independence of other objects from Mind, and hence collapses back into some form of idealism.

One of the things that is so fascinating about Harman is that he appropriates Heidegger in a way that allows him to craft a form of realism with the virtues of both aporetic and pantheistic realism, but that by combining the two, avoids the failings of the other. [Related side note: Heidegger owes much more to Schopenhauer than he ever admits; his account of how metaphysics started, his reading of Descartes, and the main Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal are all riffs on Schopenhauer's strange form of platonism, his 1919 critique of the neo-Kantians (that gives rise to the Vornandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal) is similar to Schopenhauer's critique of Kant, and his account of Gelassenheit is very little different from Schopenhauer's ethics]

One of the key ideas in Harman's Tool Being is that Heidegger's phenomenological account of mind and world (forget for now whether "world" really is the world or still a part of mind for early Heidegger; I think Heidegger wrote a lot of incoherent things because of this problem) can be externalized in the inside-out strategy of pantheistic realism. The Zuhandenheit-Vorhandenheit reversals happen whenever two things interact with one another.

This allows Harman's philosophy to satisfy the Realism thesis that he adds to Lee Braver's in his review of Braver's book.

R7 The human/world relation is just a special case of the relation between any two entities whatsoever (from his review of the book and brief note at http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/05/16/realism-through-the-eyes-of-anti-realism/#comments). This is contrasted with A7 which would say that the human-world relationship is the ground of all the others.

[For a discussion of Braver's Theses, and how they relate Harman's and Crispin Wright's, go HERE.] 

But wait a minute, how do we know that Harman's philosophy is not vulgar anthropomorphism and as such collapses back into a form of idealism? This is a long story I can't recapitulate here (in part because I'm learning it now as I read his other books), but the way in which Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversals work allow Harman to recapitulate the strengths of the aporetic tradition. The real always is and always will surprise us with new things that spookily gesture towards a plenitude that transcends what we could shove into our meager conceptual schemes. But since discrete objects are doing this with respect to each other, they do this in a  way that does not force us to posit some undifferentiated other as the real.

Anyhow that's the basic story. (1) Berkelyean arguments applied to perception, deontic and alethic modality, totality, (2) Kant produces transcendental idealism in response. (3) But this doesn't work because he has to claim to know (or say or think) things about the world that by his own philosophy he can't know (or say or think) about it. (4) This motivates apophantic/quietist and historicist anti-anti-realisms. (5) These either collapse back into idealism, or get transformed into the aporetic (Kierkegaardian) and pantheistic (Schopenhaurian) traditions. (6) But the first of these collapses back into transcendental idealism, and the second back into idealism. (7) Harman shows how to combine these two to produce a genuinely novel form of realism that (imho) does not collapse back into idealism and also does not ignore (as most analytical metaphysics today does, I'm sorry to say) the genuine philosophical problems that led to Kantianism.

Part of what makes a great philosopher great is that they drag new histories of philosophy behind them in their wake. One can imagine a world without Kant where the early modern period is not read as consisting in a fight between empiricism and rationalism. One can imagine a world without Carnap where the important task after Kant is not to come up with an account of necessity free from Kant's view of the constitutive powers of the mind. One can imagine a world without Heidegger where Being is not that big a deal. But a great philosopher's books are alike a time machine that reconfigures what came before. Tool Being did this for me and Guerrilla Metaphysics is fleshing out the story. And I should note that my "history" does involve time travel, as late Heidegger and Wittgenstein historicism is part of what motivates Schopenhauer on my view! And then Schopenhauer motivates early Heidegger. I see no problem with this.

Great philosophers also open up new questions because their thoughts have friction with regards to lots of other areas. Which is why something unprecedented has happened with the object oriented philosophy version of speculative realism. Neither Graham nor Levi Bryant have PhD students. Yet some really smart graduate students from around the world have been drawn to their work.

There are lots of questions in these areas that could motivate a Ph.D thesis (honestly I've seen dozens of posts by Levi that could do this). What is a good philosophy of science for object oriented philosophy? What is a good theory of truth for object oriented philosophy (Levi has some great posts on this)? We want to say that special relativity dynamics is more true than newtonian dynamics, but we don't want this to commit us a kind of mechanistic view of the real that gives rise to Hume's problems of deontic modality. How do we accommodate both sets of intuitions? And speaking of deontic modality, what are the ethical and meta-ethical implications of all of this? A recent post by Levi and the ensuing discussion just begins to hint at some of the interesting issues involved.

Anyhow, once I start working on this book in earnest this Summer, expect my blogging about things related to Harman to fall way off. My tendency to separate my writings for publications and blogging is very deeply ingrained at this point. But at least I hope this post explains some of the otherwise cryptic things I've said here and in comments on friend's blogs.