After grading all day and making substantial progress (hopefully I’ll be done tomorrow, yay!), I sat down and read the introduction and first chapter of Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. Although I am of the realist orientation myself, I can already tell that this book will be deeply valuable to my own philosophical project. Braver begins the first chapter with a brief survey of the five core theses he sees as characterizing realist thought. An examination of these theses might be useful in clarifying just where my own Object-Oriented Philosophy diverges from anti-realist positions, but also diverges from classical forms of realism.
The core thesis of any realism is what Braver refers to as the Independence Thesis or R1 (where the “R” presumably denotes “Realism”). As Braver puts it,
The first component in the Realism Matrix is metaphysical: a set of objects or state of affairs, which does not rely upon us in any way, exists. The furniture of the universe does not rely upon us for existence or for essence, excluding trivial examples of things we have made or which depend upon us in a relatively obvious and uninteresting ways such as thoughts and beliefs. (15)
Here I think Braver identifies the shared position of any and all realist ontologies. To be a realist is to endorse the thesis that there are beings that exist independent of any correlation between mind and world. In other words, for the realist the verb “to be” is not shorthand for “to be correlated”. Rather, the questions of metaphysics involve an inquiry into being that possesses no dependency relation within a correlation. Such beings would be what they are regardless of whether or not we relate to them.
read on!
Understanding this point is of central importance to understanding the realist position. When the realist asserts that there is being independent of correlation or the relation between mind and world, the emphasis is not on the term relation, but on the term dependency. The realist, of course, recognizes that we must relate to the world to know the world. What the realist rejects, however, is the thesis that the being of the object related to in the relation of knowing is dependent on the subject relating to that object. Realists, of course, differ as to just what the nature of this independent reality is.
A second important point to note is that this is the metaphysical or ontological thesis of realism, not its epistemological thesis. In short, the question of how we can know these objects or whether we can know them at all is independent of the question of what these objects are. As Michael Devitt puts it,
An object has objective existence, in some sense, if it exists and has its nature whatever we believe, think, or can discover: it is independent of the cognitive activities of the mind… It is not constituted by our knowledge, by our epistemic values, by our capacity to refer to it, by our imposition of concepts, theories, or languages… For the realist, the world exists independently of the mental. (Quoted in Braver, 15)
The realist does not dismiss the epistemological question of how we come to know objects, but she does distinguish the epistemological question of how we come to know from the ontological question of what objects are. This is a point that must perpetually be kept in mind in debates between realists and anti-realists, because anti-realist positions, holding that objects are inseparable from their dependence in a correlation, run the ontological question and the epistemological question together. Quoting Devitt from Braver again,
…Devitt insists on defining realism solely in terms of its metaphysical commitments [my emphasis]. ‘Realism does not entail any doctrine of truth… No doctrine of truth entails Realism. I conclude that no doctrine of truth is in any way constitutive of Realism… Realism is about the nature of reality in general, about what there is, and what it is like.” (16)
In her vocation as a metaphysician, what interests the realist is not how we know objects, but rather what objects are. I, for example, fit Devitt’s description of the realist very well. While I am metaphysically committed to the existence of mind-independent objects, I have nonetheless learned the lessons of sociology, ethnography, the linguistic turn, hermeneutics, etc., and endorse a version of a coherence model of truth and knowledge. I have no qualms with the thesis that there is a difference between reality as it appears to us (constituted in a variety of ways by our cognition, the processes of our perception, language, our relation to the social, history, etc) and reality as it is in-itself. I even believe that these questions of constitution as explored by the phenomenologists, philosophers that have taken the linguistic turn, sociologists, historians, etc., are vital to any realist project. Moreover, it is my position that we only grasp the mind-independent real in bits and pieces and never immediately or without a good deal of work, and that much of what we take as knowledge can subsequently be discovered to be mistaken (something I believe is entirely mysterious for the anti-realist). What I do not endorse is the anti-realist thesis that all objects are constituted (in the non-Berkeleyian sense) by mind or some other agency like culture.
One final point, Braver’s initial description of the realist’s metaphysical thesis help to distinguish different orientations among Speculative Realist orientations of contemporary realism. The realist, as Braver describes her, is committed to the thesis that there are objects that are not dependent on humans. As Roy Bhaskar and Quentin Meillassoux so beautifully put it, we must conceive a world without humans, a sort of wild open. However, Braver then goes on to distinguish between trivial dependent entities like beliefs and real independent entities. Attitudes towards this distinction actually define something of a fault line among Speculative Realists. Speculative Realists like Ray Brassier, Nick Srinicek, and perhaps Quentin Meillassoux (I can’t speak to Iain Hamilton Grant’s Position here) would wholeheartedly endorse Braver’s description. To be real, for these realists, is to be independent of humans. Object-Oriented realists such as myself, Graham Harman, and Bruno Latour adopt a more egalitarian ontological position. Our view is not that the puff of matter on the other side of the universe is somehow more real than the United States (an entity dependent on humans). Rather, the Object-Oriented Philosophies are united around the thesis of a flat ontology in which there is no hierarchy of being or modernist distinction between culture and nature. There is just being. Being is pluralistic and differential, coming in many kinds and flavors, but it is no less real for all that.
Us Object-Oriented Ontologists thus occupy a strange position in this matrix, taking heat from both sides. With other Speculative Realists we hold that there is nothing privileged or special about human beings, such that they are included in every ontological relation. To be is not shorthand, for us, for “being-for-us”. On the other hand, with the correlationists, we include human phenomena (minds, culture, language, institutions, artifacts, etc) among the furniture of the real. We simply do not endorse the thesis that these human phenomena are constitutive of the real.
The second core thesis (R2) Braver attributes to realism is far more contentious, I think. This second thesis is epistemological, and revolves around the nature of truth.
[Realism] defines truth as the correspondence between (to cast my net widely– the difference don’t concern me at this point) thoughts, ideas, beliefs, words, propositions, sentences, or languages on the one hand, and things, objects, states of affairs, configurations, reality, or experience on the other; that is between something on the side of mind or language and something on the side of the world. (15)
While this is certainly a common realist position, I do not think it is the only realist position where truth is concerned. In A Realist Theory of Science, Roy Bhaskar develops a realist metaphysics of science and theory of inquiry that both integrates the mind independence of objects and integrates the findings of philosophers of science like Kuhn, Feyerabend, Foucault, etc., that accentuate the role that politics, history, the social, power, training, etc., play in the process of inquiry. For Bhaskar, scientists aren’t born but must be built. They are the result of an ontogeny. However, Bhaskar argues, this ontogenesis of scientists, while resembling certain aspects of anti-realism, does not lead to the anti-realist conclusion that we can never “grasp a bit of the real” through scientific inquiry.
In my own case, my ontology forbids or prohibits anything like a simplistic correspondence theory of truth based on a sort of mirroring between world and object. The basic principle of my ontology— what I call the Ontic Principle –states that there is no difference that does not make a difference. To be, I hold, is to make a difference. Not necessarily to you or me or anyone else (I’m a realist, after all), and not necessarily to any other object in the universe (the object could be completely unrelated), but nonetheless a difference in some manner, way or form is made in being. To be is to act. From this principle follows what I call “Latour’s Principle”. Latour’s Principle states that there is no transportation without translation, or that no object is ever simply a vehicle for another difference. “Transportation”, of course, refers to the transport of difference from one object to another. “Translation” here should be understood in terms closer to the translation of DNA into RNA, than the translation of something into another language.
To say that there is no transportation without translation is to say that there is no difference imposed on another entity wherein the target or receiving entity does not contribute its own differences translating the difference from the source object (cf. my recent post on Category Theory). My skin does not simply transport sunlight as I weed my garden, but rather it translates that sunlight, creating a dark pigment that constitutes a tan. Likewise with the relation between mind and world. In the relation between mind and world, just as in the case of any other relation between objects, there is a translation that takes place that cannot be characterized as a simple transport of the difference embodied in the object to the mind as a simple wax table.
This is also why I believe that Braver’s fifth realist thesis (R5), the passivity of mind with respect to the world (the Aristotlean analogy of the mind to wax receiving the imprint of an object), is also mistaken. No relation between objects is passive, and this certainly holds for the relation between mind and world. Realists such as Roy Bhaskar, Isabelle Stengers, and Bruno Latour, for example, emphasize the manner in which the production of knowledge is a highly complicated and active process. It involves the formulation of models, the creation of new technologies, the isolation of variables in a controlled environment, and so on and so on. Yet despite all these “mediations” or translations, the fact that bar patterns appear on both sides of the screen when only a single particle has been shot through the split panel comes is a surprise and discloses something real about our world. Those realists that emphasize the passivity of mind, of a mind passively regarding the world and copying it like a video camera, are philosophers that have never been in a laboratory or practiced as a psychoanalyst. They do not discern the work, the thermodynamics, behind the production of knowledge. Knowledge is constructed yes, but it is always constructed out of real objects, out of materials, and like any house that is constructed, it has the power to fall down or surprise us.
The third realist thesis (R3) in Braver’s portrayal is that of Uniqueness. In many respects, I find this thesis to be the most contentious of all. Braver quotes Putnum to articulate this thesis:
The metaphysics of realism traditionally included the idea that there is a definite totality of all objects… and a definite totality of all “properties”… It follows, on this picture, that there is a definite totality of all possible knowledge claims, likewise fixed once and for all independently of language users and thinkers. The nature of the language users or the thinkers can determine which of the possible knowledge claims they are able to think or verbalize, but not what the possible knowledge claims are. (17)
In a post-quantum, post-Darwinian world it is difficult to know what it could possibly mean to claim that there is a totality of all objects, for we have learned that new types of objects come into being at both the atomic level and at the species level. Indeed, if we go with Gould’s biological orientation, our ontology becomes even more exotic, including a variety of different ontological levels differing in scale and temporally individuating themselves (i.e., differing from themselves) in natural history.
But setting aside appeals to history, we can refer to the positions of various realists as well. Realists such as Deleuze and DeLanda would object to this thesis on the grounds of systems thought, as assemblages of objects themselves, in turn, form objects that possess their own properties. As a result, there are no grounds on which there could ever be a complete catalog of beings. Moreover, this thesis seems to be premised on the idea that beings or entities are unchanging, yet if beings or entities are processes, events, verbs or becomings– as most current evidence seems to suggest –this thesis seems to be significantly challenged. In the case of my ontology, such a thesis couldn’t possibly hold by virtue of Latour’s Principle. Like Leibniz’s universe where each monad represents the entirety of the universe from a particular point of view, Latour’s Principle entails a sort of ontological relativity that is ontological (and not simply epistemological). That is, quoting Deleuze, it entails a Truth of Relativity rather than a Relativity of Truth. Yet this Truth of Relativity holds not simply for subject-world relations, but for any object-object relation. My skin grasps the sun from a particular point of view and under a particular translation. Finally, in the case of Graham’s metaphysics, the infinitely withdrawn nature of objects that only touch through a sort of vicarious causation undermines the possibility of a privileged point of view on the universe. Another Leibnizian.
I’ll leave off here for now.
Larval Subjects . 
May 16, 2009 at 6:16 am
It makes me happy that you are digging this book too.
This is really weird. I had very similar thoughts while reading the first chapter.
Keep Independence (R1)
Sort of Keep Correspondence (R2)- taking it to be derivative of something more primordial/aletheic (the discussion in the last couple of posts concern in part whether one can do this; part of what excites me about speculative realism is the prospects that you can).
Sort of Drop Uniqueness (R3)- but not for idealist reasons, but rather due to the creative nature of matter itself, maybe in particular the creative non-algorithmic nature of ontological emergence (I’ve got a couple of papers on this with Mark Silcox and one with Jason Megill, all involving Goedel’s Theorem in a way that irritates some philosophers of mind who are happy to think limitation results in logic are irrelevant).
Sort of Keep Bivalence (R4)- maybe take it to have a different normative status (something like a regulative ideal on discourse) than other logical laws.
Sort of Keep Passive Knower (R5)- some weakened version of it true to the extent that we do have knowledge of the universe as it is in itself. Stronger versions are false not for idealist reasons but in virtue of non-passive nature of all interaction.
I’ve got some more stuff percolating in my brain about the logical relations between the theses and how they relate to a couple of other “realist” theses out there (from Wiggins and Wright, albeit I do think Braver’s selection is correct for the purposes of his book), but I’m waiting to develop that for the Perverse Egalitarian reading group which is going to start June 15th.
In any case, I’m hyped to read whatever you think about the book before, during, and after pervegalit reading group. I may be wrong to take Braver and Harman as two distinctive poles about how to react to the way the early Heidegger was still implicated in problems of transcendental idealism. I don’t know if either of them would see their own project that way (which isn’t to say it’s not a healthy perspective nonetheless). That’s something else I’m going to try to sort out.
May 16, 2009 at 6:24 am
Jon,
Damn it, send the papers on R3!!! I look forward to seeing the other stuff that is percolating.
May 16, 2009 at 6:27 am
I should add that based on what I’ve read so far Lee seems to see something of a beyond in the later Heidegger. Now I’m no Heidegger guy. I had my Heidegger addiction in late undergrad and early grad, but am not very familiar with his later stuff, so I’ll be very interested to read Graham’s later work on the fourfold and Lee’s take here.
May 16, 2009 at 7:04 am
Braver’s book is valuable indeed. I devoured it in a few days, despite disagreeing with Braver on all philosophical matters.
The power of this book lies in the fact that he raises realism/antirealism as an issue at all. Continentals tend to avoid the problem, as if it were annoyingly unsophisticated. If you press them on it, they’ll give a sort of haughty correlationist model as their preferred one, but basically they don’t think about these issues at all. (I spent a decade in the continental universe, and I know what I’m talking about. It took a hell of a lot of effort to figure out what I thought about realism, because I grew up with that same continental blind spot to this issue. I was nearly 30 before I decided I was a realist. Before that I was stuck in the same old continental agnosticism.)
Levi, not sure if you know that I published an article-length review of Braver’s book in Philosophy Today last year.
I *adore* Braver’s numbered list of possible realist theses. However, I think he misses the most important one, which I call R7. A7 would say that the human-world relationship is the ground of all the others, while R7 flips this and says that human/world is just a special case of the relation between any two entities whatosever. (And by the way, DeLanda read my review and agreed with that point.)
R7 realists would include Whitehead, probably Latour, and I myself. For Latour I only say “probably” because there is some ambivalence here. There are passages in Irreductions that say things interpret each other, which is an R7 thesis. But then he slips into saying things like “there were no microbes until Pasteur discovered them; or rather, after Pasteur there microbes before Pasteur *for Pasteur*” which is just textbook A7 correlationism.
You could choose to read Latour either way on this point, but as I read it, his Pasteur statement (as well as his claim that Ramses II couldn’t have died of tuberculosis, because tuberculosis wasn’t discovered yet) is just a bridge too far, not a central core of Latour’s doctrine. But here I’m just repeating what anyone will be able to read in Prince of Networks. (They’re still designing the cover; otherwise the book is ready to roll, and could still be available in May).
May 16, 2009 at 7:07 am
Graham,
One of the things I like most about Braver’s book is that he recognizes the productive function of debate and says that the book is designed to spur such debate at the beginning. I’d love to see the review if you could send it my way. Great 7th thesis! We’re all waiting for PN, so get’er done!
May 16, 2009 at 7:10 am
As for Braver and Heidegger, I disagree with his reading. He makes far too big a split between the early and late Heidegger (Braver’s a smart and serious guy, I simply disagree with his reading).
Also disturbing is the complete absence of Husserl from Braver’s picture of continental philosophy. He goes Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger.
My final disappointment with the book (and I want to emphasize that it’s a very important and excellent book) is that the treatment of Foucault and Derrida as the final monumental figures of continental thought is nearly 20 years out of date. It is too reminiscent of the SPEP/Perugia cocoon that still imprisons much of continental philosophy in America. Given that Braver wants to read continental philosophy as an antirealist movement, does he think this continues in Deleuze and Badiou? Where does Bergson fit in his story? Lots of questions to ask.
Anyway, those questions would largely be nitpicking, because my disagreements with Braver are more fundamental. And yet, I really admire his book. I was expecting to despise it, but was deeply impressed by it. It could turn out to be a landmark. People should be encouraged to read it. It’s a bit long for classroom use, unfortunately. But I could easily imagine the phrase “pre-Braver American continental philosophy” coming into use, to refer to a period of agnosticism on the realist question and a general insularity and lack of metaphysical self-awareness.
May 16, 2009 at 7:37 am
Braver’s book on the latter Heidegger is on my reading list.
I think that’s going to be an area of pretty strong disagreement, given Graham’s exasperation with some of the late Heideggerian tropes of unearthing more and more levels of horizonal presuppositions and originary whatnots.
Harman interprets the key late insight as the fourfold (understood as Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit on one axis and being as a particular thing versus being in general on the other) in terms of how each object manifests these four areas.
Braver takes the key late Heideggerian insight to be the further relativization of conceptual schemes to historical epochs, which makes way for Foucault and ultimately Derrida’s casting of conceptual schemes as deeply unstable.
Harman can be presented as breaking off at the same problem point by having Heidegger do something else with the scheme content distinction instead of historicizing it, Harman/Heiddeger (to be read like Kripke/Wittgenstein) makes it a property that holds as a facet between any two objects’ interacting (getting this exactly right is somewhat complicated by Harman’s further substance view). In any case for Heidegger the “world” is the scheme, and we exctract contents from this word by prescinding from our practical commitments and maybe also by tarrying in a certain way. This is one of the ways Heidegger turns the neo-Kantian picture on its head.
One of Graham’s fundamental insight is that human beings aren’t the only objects that do this to other objects. Causal interaction is best understood as objects doing it to each other.
So both Graham and Lee see problems with the role Dasein is playing in applying Heidegger’s new inverted scheme-content distinction (given how different their prescriptions are, I don’t know how different their analyses of the problem are). Lee inteprets Heidegger as correctly responding to the problem by historicizing scheme. Graham argues that there is a consistent less Dasein-o-centric Heidegger that doesn’t have a problem, because scheme-content is relativized to any two objects specific interactions. Objects make explicit as-structures (schemes) to one another and exploit them in various ways. Of course any making expicit enforces the silencing of other possible as-structures that the object is not presenting.
Please correct me if I’m getting this wrong.
May 16, 2009 at 12:53 pm
“Harman interprets the key late insight as the fourfold (understood as Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit on one axis and being as a particular thing versus being in general on the other) in terms of how each object manifests these four areas. Braver takes the key late Heideggerian insight to be the further relativization of conceptual schemes to historical epochs, which makes way for Foucault and ultimately Derrida’s casting of conceptual schemes as deeply unstable. Please correct me if I’m getting this wrong.”
No, you’ve got the differences right. I see the later Heidegger as pushing even further in the realist direction that was already implicit in Heidegger’s critique of Husserl. For this reason I don’t see Foucault and Derrida as innovators on Heidegger at all; I see them as backsliders. And even if someone still likes them both, it has to be admitted that their stature isn’t quite what it was 15-20 years ago.
In the meantime, I heard from Braver, who has understandable qualms about intervening in blog discussions about his own book. But he did say that he thinks I’m casting him too much as a foil, that he did hint at the end of his book that perhaps anti-realism is somewhat exhausted, and so forth. I read his book differently, but will try to portray him less as an enemy in future posting (though I’ve offered unflagging support to the book as an important piece of work that deserves much more attention than it has received).
May 16, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Thanks a lot for this discussion. Let me address a few of this comments.
As to correspondence truth, I argued that there is a natural fit between this definition of truth and realist metaphysics, but I did allow for alternative conceptions: “there is no relation of logical entailment between the metaphysical and epistemological components; reality can be mind-independent, while truth could be coherence or verification or aletheia or what have you” (p. 16).
Your discussion of translation is very intriguing and, when applied to mind-world interactions, it does sound a death knell for passive correspondence. This seems to be a version of Kant’s position–our mind’s activity (A5) in organizing experience rules out capturing (R2) the way the world is independently of our experience of it (R1). Then the question becomes, what sense can we attribute to the existence of this independent world (R1) if it remains forever closed off to us. Even the bits and pieces are heavily constructed and interpreted. I take your response to be something like, the existence and nature of an object consists in its interactions with other entities, something like some of Nietzsche’s musings on WTP, and this includes the mind, so that what an entity coughs up in our interactions with it is part of its very nature. Is that right? Of course, if an entity is the totality of its interactions (a la Leibniz), then it isn’t truly independent of us, since interactions with our minds make up 1 of its essential properties. Also, how do we differentiate between accurate/true/illuminating bits and pieces and false/misleading ones? Why go to all the trouble of setting up experiments if my mundane interactions with a thing are just as valid and real? But maybe I haven’t got your idea at all. BTW, Joseph Rouse is also really good on the construction of artificial environments in science.
Your thoughts on R3 Uniqueness are really interesting. My first reaction is to slightly reformulate it to read, at any particular time there is a determinate set of states of affairs whose constitution is also determinate. The problem with this is that Einstein took away the notion of simultanaity across distance. Perhaps it could be reapplied to the entire history of the universe–God can write a book telling exactly what happened at every moment, thus taking change into account? One could also retreat from knowing all states of affairs to capturing the basic nature of reality as rhyzomatic (isn’t that the word?). In other words, it is a fact that the universe/matter is creative rather than static and inert.
And yes, R5 passivity makes a reformed come-back in Heidegger’s later work. I really want to read Harman on the fourfold because that’s always been a trouble spot for me.
I fully concede doctorzamalek’s objections to the gaps in my book. I’m only now beginning to get a sense of what’s been happening since the ’80’s as well as Deleuze–gigantic embarrassing holes in my knowledge. But I think of my book as not antagonistic to Speculative Realism. I worked hard to defend these continental anti-realist positions as intelligible (esp. when placed within the context of the ongoing conversation) and reasonable positions, in opposition to analytic knee-jerk dismissals of them as stupid, silly, crazy, etc. But I’m no counter-revolutionary–if these new positions grasp and take into account the various correlationist arguments, then I’m perfectly happy with a new turn. In some ways, my concluding analysis of Derrida shows the movement’s exhaustion; I don’t see where it could move forward (tho, we non-geniuses rarely do). So I’m perfectly happy with my book serving as a prologue to the present, providing useful tools and an informative history of the background.
May 16, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Welcome to the party, Lee. Maybe you were just being polite, but in case you didn’t know, doctorzamalek *is* G. Harman.
May 17, 2009 at 3:33 am
[…] Philosophy, Ontic, Ontology, Real, Realism, Relation, Truth No Comments In a generous response to my post “Realism Through the Eyes of Anti-Realism“, Lee Braver writes: Your […]
May 17, 2009 at 3:09 pm
As you can see, I’m working on overcoming my hesitancy. It is very gratifying for my work to get some attention.
And I had figured out your identity, but I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of referring to or possibly “outing” nom-de-blogs.
May 18, 2009 at 4:55 pm
[…] from Levi: “Braver then goes on to distinguish between trivial dependent entities like beliefs and real […]
May 18, 2009 at 9:04 pm
It seems that if “microbe” names an object that is an assemblage of natural and discursive elements, and thus names itself as a discursive actor and the assemblage as a whole, but not a natural object abstracted from its discursive effects, then “microbes” could not have existed before they were called “microbes.” This does seem confusing and problematic, but not necessarily idealist or non-realist–or am I wrong about that? It’s a bit confusing. The problem would be to name something without letting that naming become part of the object, and the impossibility of doing so would seem to be an essential implication of “No transportation without translation” and not, as far as I can see, a “bridge too far,” but I may not be getting the whole picture of what Dr. Z is saying.
In other words, if “NTW/OT”, and naming something is transporting it, then no microbes before “microbes.” q.e.d.
Am I wrong?
May 19, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Sorry, I thought about it a little more–the reason I hesitated when I said this wasn’t necessarily idealist or non-realist is confusion regarding definitions, what exactly it is the realist wants. I don’t think that saying there were no “microbes” before Pasteur, the way I understand the statement, commits Latour to a position that Levi would have to reject as non-realist because it is not necessarily the same as saying that microbes are socially constructed, or that there is a unilateral determination going from the discursive side to the “natural” side.
June 9, 2009 at 2:17 pm
[…] new paper I have started to work on. I think it will be helpful in settling some of the fascinating realism debates taking place in the philosophy blog world right now, especially in regard to Heidegger’s […]