Jon Cogburn's Blog

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.]

American Nietzsche

Really interesting review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche by Ross Posnok for the Nation. I have no idea how competent it is, because my Nietzsche isn't good enough.

This week I sat in on a MA defense on somebody writing on Nietzsche and the unconscious, and the discussion of the relation between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer was really interesting. One of the key questions was the extent to which The Birth of Tragedy was already anti-Schopenhaurian. I thought it was anti-Schopenhaurian in that Nietzsche associated the Apollinian with Schopenhauer's strange kind of Platonism (and, if I remember right, his account of representational art), and while the Apollinian is certainly a necessary part of tragedy for Nietzsche, the way it leads to late tradgedy and Socrates strikes me as a veiled criticism of Schopenhauer. On the other hand, Nietzsche's early model Dionysian is exactly what you would expect from someone who bought Schopenhauer's theory of music.

I'm sure there's a scholarly consensus on this very issue, and hope to know about it at some point in the next few years.

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.

Some thoughts after finishing Alan Campell's trilogy

I just finished Alan Campell's excellent Scar Night, Iron Angel, God of Clocks trilogy.

One of the interesting things in it is that for most of the three books, the world is  pretty relentlessly hostile to human beings in a way that is just profoundly disturbing. The gates of Heaven have been closed so everybody ends up going to Hell after they die. The gods expelled from Heaven are pathologically awful. And Campell's Hell is really very convincingly hellish. And this goes on for centuries across many possible universes (new universes are opened up when time travel goes awry). And when heaven is finally reopened (only because of our heroes, and it is clear it could have gone the other way), all but one of the universes in the multiverse has to be left to die out in order for reality to be saved.

Good fiction almost always makes you look at things a little differently. Campell's books made me realize how incredibly bizarre it is that almost all of the popular debate about theism concerns the extent to which the universe is either fundamentally benevolent, on the one hand, or, on the other, just indifferent to sapient life (Spinozism being the best one can (and should!) do with a fundamentally indifferent universe). In the popular press, it's almost always someone like Dawkins or Dennett (really just impoverished Spinozism) versus theists with their benevolent universe.

What's weird is that if you can conceive of the universe as being benevolent or indifferent, then you can certainly conceive of it as being fundamentally malevolent. I think that Schopenhauer is the only Western philosopher who really saw things that way, with the basic amount of animal pain on earth just sort of damning any possible justification for existence. Of great classic prose writers, perhaps only Lovecraft really calls forth a fundamentally maleficent universe. But he is a tremendously influential fiction writer. Both he and Schopenhauer are sort of literary equivalents to the Velvet Underground. Only a couple hundred people bought their albums, but every one of them went out and started a pretty good band.

But the popular debates about theism never consider the possibility that our actual universe may embody the most frightening aspects of Lovecraft and Schopenhauer! It's always a war between indifference and benevolence.

I don't know how any of this fits in with my own Christianity. For very selfish reasons I often equate my own faith with the belief that things are ultimately beneficent, that at the very least (and perhaps one can hope for more than just this) the universe is evolving the way it should. 

But the evidence we can measure certainly supports Schopenhauer's assessment of reality. And I'm not sure how the many comforts I get from Christian worship and faith fit in with Jesus' injunction to pick up the cross if you want to follow him.

I think the only way to square that circle is if you really do only enter into a state of grace (which Leonard Cohen likens to one ski sliding down a hill) when you manifest Jesus' love. The beneficence is that if you can manifest this love, then your suffering can have meaning and be justified. And the proper pleasure of Christian worship is when it inculcates this love.

Perhaps that's too nakedly utilitarian. I don't know. It fits with Schopenhauer to the extent that when in a state of grace we experience a loss of self. Though he would properly find it really perverse to describe that as union with God. I'm not sure too much hangs on whether it's described that way or not (certainly people who would not describe it that way have been in states of grace).

In any case, I highly recommend Campell's books. Great steampunk, fantastic characters, wonderful understated love story between an angel and failed assassin, and also one of the best extant literary descriptions of Hell.

Speaking of being in a state of grace, here's an example (keep watching if it's not clear at first; this kid really owns Cohen's masterpiece; it's a tremendously beautiful thing).

Wolfendale's challenges

I'm moving a comment of Pete Wolfendale from the previous thread to the front, because it raises so many things worth thinking about. And I'm putting my response as the first comment. Here's Wolfendale's comment:

 
Levi: I should point out that most of these claims have been made in more detail in my most recent post (http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/hijacking-correlationism/) although some of them are backed up in earlier posts which are all linked to. This post also includes a very rough parsing of Meillassoux's argument from facticity if you're interested. However, I'll try to address your points in order, and bring in the relevant arguments without making this comment too long.

1. The idea of translation is a nice metaphor, but that's what it is - a metaphor - and it needs cashing out. The simplest way to cash it out is that the effect the affecting object has upon the affected object is in some way dependent upon the affected object, i.e., that the same object will produce different affects upon different things. However, this is something that everyone accepts, and they can accept it without having to talk about 'real objects' or 'proper being' that withdraws. Maybe you can enlighten me as to the correct stronger way to cash this out, and how this solves any of these issues.

Assuming you can provide an enlightening account of translation, you still have to explain how exactly translation can 'fail', as this is far from obvious. What is it that provides the normative standard for translations? Is it the withdrawn object and its unknowable real properties? If so, how do these actually constitute a standard if they are inaccessible? An inapplicable standard is no standard at all. Moreover, if the withdrawn object sets the standard, the standard cannot be to correctly represent it, as it is by definition unrepresentable, and we can't be bound to do something we can't achieve (ought implies can), unless this obligation is constituted out of some finite achievable obligations.

Schopenhauer to the rescue in a neat issue raised by Austin and Harman

There's an interesting exchange between Michael Austin of Complete Lies (HERE) and Graham Harman (HERE). Both are really clear, so I'll just quote the relevant parts.

Both Graham and Levi say that objects can't be simply nothing more than their relations or else change is impossible, so Graham (I'm not sure how Levi does this, so I'll speak only of Graham here) takes the position that we need some substance-like-thing, that is, substance that is not inalterable or eternal, but some dark untapped core at the heart of things in order for there to be potentiality and change (while saying also, like Leibniz, that finite things contain infinity or maybe it's closer to Nicholas of Cusa's "relative infinity...") Graham also says that it is this problem that causes Latour to move to his talk of plasma, which approaches monism or at least quasi-monists like Deleuze and Bergson, essentially the idea of an infinite reserve underlying all objects). It seems to me though that another option besides positing infinity either within all objects, or underlying all objects, is to work with an idea of drive, will, or conatus. In this way, I think you get a model of change which better reflects reality. I suppose this is the option I've chosen to explore, which is why I tie myself to the vitalist tradition so strongly, since they, along with certain neo-Platonists (the ones who claim the world-soul to be more primary than the divine intellect) and voluntarists also seem to make this move, or at least a similar one. I'm hoping to write more about this tradition soon.

Harman responds-

The reason I’m never sympathetic to calls for conatus is that they seem to me to amount to a vis dormitiva. “Objects change by means of a changing force.” “Objects change by means of appetite.” “Objects change by means of drive.”

In all of these cases, it would need to be shown where this supposed drive for the new is inscribed in what the thing is now.

Harman's response is really interesting. I want to say that the figure they are both leaving out is Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer doesn't get enough credit for being the first "philosopher of the body" (usually Merleau-Ponty is cited as the forefather of embodied cognition), and the relevance of his discussion of body for the realism anti-realism debate is really quite big, in part because it provides an answer to Harman's challenge, one structurally isomorphic to Harman's own position.

Harman radically externalizes Kant's scheme-content distinction (as this distinction occurs in Heidegger's Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal, which Kant himself prefigured in his critique of Hume). Epistemically, attempts to get at reality in itself always involve abstracting away from what our conceptual schemes add, but when you do this enough the reality disappears. If one thinks that that is all the metaphysical story, then one ends trying to defend some form of transcendental idealism. But Harman radically externalizes this by presenting a metaphysics where our the Kantian subject-object epistemic situation is just an instance of fundamental processes that occur whenever two objects interact (this may seem weird, but it does a lot of philosophical work).

I think Schopenhauer is doing something exactly analogous with the bodily experience of will. One way to approach the Kantian problematic is via Hume's problematization of necessity, alethic necessity in the case of causality and deontic necessity in the case of value. In both cases Hume gives you a valueless world where causality and norms are somehow added by the subject. Kant argues that this isn't possible, that the very idea of a purely actual world doesn't make sense. For something to be a cat actually is in part for it to have a bunch of counterfactual properties (again, this is the predecessor of Heidegger's Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal). The problem for Kant then is to explain where necessity comes from (Heidegger in 1919 notes that Kantianims (through the Southwest School) has led to the repeating of exactly what Hume was doing; so he radicalizes the initial anti-Humean move in Being and Time).

Schopenhauer can be understood as answering this question in a way analogous to Harman. The body is an object in the world, and it experiences frustration when the will is blocked. But this is an experience of something not being possible. From "not" and "possible" you can get necessity, as what is necessary is just that which is not possible not to obtain. But then, like Harman, Schopenhauer suggests that this is not merely epistemic, but rather metaphysical, and the thing our body experiences with frustrated and successful will is taken to be an instance of something pervasive in the universe. But then the Kantian problematic, of answering Hume's challenge about necessity, can be answered in a realist manner.

If we just have a root experience of frustration, then I don't think this is a case of dormitive virtue, any more than the epistemic basis of Harman's move (and the basis does *not* make either correlationist in Meillassoux's sense).

So I think both that Austin is correct and that Harman's challenge can be answered.

Incidentally, I should note that: (1) the late Heidegger adopts a number of Schopenhaurian themes in precisely around this area, and for similar reasons as I've discussed above (Dale Jacquette has gone over some of this), and (2) I've long thought that Schopenhauer deserves pride of place among continental realists, and should be considered perhaps the founding figure of the Speculative Realist tradition. The other tradition of continental realism starts with Kierkegaard and goes through Derrida (on a realist reading of him) and stresses how aporia and radical surprises impinge upon the phenomenal realm (of course, elements of late Heidegger here too). Lee Braver has a fantastic essay on this tradition. I would call the Schopenhaurian vein the Speculative Realist tradition (for obvious reasons, though this is unfair to Brassier) and the Kierkegaardian one the A-poretic Realist tradition.