Over at Love of All Wisdom Amod has an interesting post up on OOO and Asian thought. I wanted to zero in on this particular passage. Amod writes:
The first comparison that came to my mind when I read about this was one that I doubt Speculative Realists would find flattering: Ayn Rand. Rand blames Kant for most of the perceived evils of contemporary society, including even its supposed irrationalism, going so far as to call the austere Prussian “the first hippie in history.” Why? Because, in a word, of Kant’s correlationism! What most irritated Rand about Kant was the turn toward the subjective, away from the objective facts of the world; from here, she thought, it was a short slide into Communism, sacrificing human beings’ rational faculties. The merits of Rand’s interpretation of Kant and of post-Kantian intellectual history are dubious; nevertheless it intrigues me that in some respect she has found an unlikely bedfellow in the Speculative Realists.
I can’t speak for all the speculative realists as we’re a diverse group, but I do think I’m in a position to speak generalize about the object-oriented ontologist wing of the SR camp. It seems to me that few things could be further apart than Rand’s “objectivism” and OOO. On the one hand, Rand’s objectivism is not genuinely a variant of object-oriented thought but is instead a continuation of the Biblical narrative of the centrality and primacy of man with respect to all other beings. Like Adam and his dominion over all other creatures in the Garden, Rand emphasizes the dominion of man over the earth. This is also why Rand refers to her ethical thought as an egoism, and it is certainly a humanism to boot. By contrast, far from celebrating the centrality of the human, OOO speaks to how humans are amongst beings, no higher or lower than other beings. On the other hand, when Rand speaks of “objectivity” what she is emphasizing is the epistemological thesis of the identity of concept and object. For Rand objects are passive matters to be dominated for man’s ends (and I’m using gender marked language intentionally here), whereas OOO emphasizes 1) that objects are actants in their own right and not simply passive matters awaiting imprint from men, nor screens for human concepts. Additionally, where Rand repeats Bacon’s fantasy of dominating mother nature for human ends, OOO emphasizes the perpetual withdrawal of objects, which is, somewhat, equivalent to Adorno’s thesis of the non-identity of concept and object. OOO would make Rand twitch.
I think Amod’s post reflects the connotations of the term “object-oriented”. Upon hearing this term the hasty reader might immediately conclude that “object-oriented” signifies the opposition of being “subject-oriented”, such that we are to be “objective” or “scientific”, as opposed to examining the human element. This thesis seems to be confirmed when Amod goes on to write that OOO wants us to be “less Indian and more Chinese”:
A while ago I noted that South Asian and East Asian thought are in many respects further from each other than they are from the West, and I’d like to expand on the point in the context of Speculative Realism. A central concern, possibly the central concern, of Indian (or more generally South Asian) thought has been the psychology of the human subject. One begins with the suffering subject, already conceived in some sense as separate from the world, and then that subject tries to detach even further from the world. The Yoga Sūtras and the Jainism of the Tattvārtha Sūtra take us even further than Descartes: we are trying to become pure subjectivity. Even Pali Buddhism, focused on the subject’s unreality, nevertheless focuses its attention on the inner subjective world. Reality in the Pali suttas is composed of five “aggregates”; only one of these (rūpa, matter or form) is physical, while the other four are all primarily within the mind. I’m not sure that this all is correlationist per se, but it is anthropocentric and privileges the subject in ways the Speculative Realists seem to oppose.
Turn to China, on the other hand, and one finds a philosophy concerned above all with the outer world, one that often speaks of the exterior world in interior terms. The closest word classical Chinese has for “emotion” is qing, which has more of a sense of “disposition”: one’s emotions are imagined in an almost behaviourist way, based on the way that they predispose one to react in the outer world. I say “almost” behaviourist because there’s some dispute about how much interiority one finds in the work of thinkers like Confucius: Ted Slingerland has argued there is a little, while Herbert Fingarette has argued there is none at all. (On Fingarette’s account Confucius begins to seem an eliminative materialist like Paul and Patricia Churchland; and at least according to the “Pathfinder” list of links I found above, the Speculative Realists are quite sympathetic to eliminative materialism and its attack on subjectivity.)
Yes and no. Remember that for OOO there aren’t two categories or domains of being: the domain of the subject and the domain of the object. Rather, for OOO there’s only one species of being: objects. The consequence that follows from this is that humans are objects too. As a result, humans can’t be excluded from ontological questions. They are every bit as interesting to the object-oriented ontologist as the relationship between, to use Harman’s favorite example, the relation between cotton and a flame. Consequently, the battle cry of OOO is not “eradicate subjectivity!”. Rather it’s quite different. The battle cry of OOO is “don’t reduce objects to subjectivity!” What OOO objects to is not the thesis that when humans relate to objects they color it with their subjectivity in all sorts of ways. This is one of the reasons that OOO is so sanguine about correlationist critiques of realism. It’s not that we think that what these theorists are pointing out is outright false (as Whitehead and Leibniz liked to point out, there’s truth in every philosophy and what philosophies suffer from generally is not falsehood or bad argument but overstatement), rather it’s that OOO theorists can integrate all of these claims while maintaining a realist stance. It’s already built into our ontology.
What OOO objects to is the fetishistic privileging of human-object relations in all matters metaphysical and the claim that objects are nothing but appearances, as Kant put it, for humans. However, were there a cage fight between Kant and Rand (and no doubt Rand would win as she’s the “real man” of the two), the OOO theorist would be rooting on the side of Kant because the OOO theorist supports, as a matter of course, that whenever two objects enter into a relation with one another they distort one another. Kant is closer to the truth as OOO understands it than Rand on this matter because at least Kant understood how relations between human objects and nonhuman objects led to withdrawal, whereas Rand does not understand this and reduces all objects to mere passive means. The gripe with Kant is not this thesis, but his refusal to extend this thesis to all objects, such that the difference between a human relating to an object and a flame relating to cotton is a difference in degree not a difference in kind. I believe Amod’s post is a testament to how deeply the connotations of words (like “object”) and certain oppositions (subject-object) are embedded in our metaphysical unconscious.
Larval Subjects . 
February 25, 2010 at 10:34 pm
Good points, especially on Rand.
I started to comment but the length got out of hand, so I put it here instead:
http://speculumcriticum.blogspot.com/2010/02/object-oriented-orientalism.html
February 25, 2010 at 11:16 pm
Hi Levi – thank you very much for this post. As I mentioned, my understanding of SR is very limited, and I was really hoping an SRist or OOOist would come in and trip me up to help me figure out what I wasn’t yet understanding.
That said, I’m not entirely sure that I did misunderstand, though I suspect I didn’t state my points clearly enough. There are clearly a vast number of nuances and subtleties I don’t yet know, some of which your post helps explain; but I have a feeling I may still have been right on the basics.
First on Rand. I certainly didn’t mean to say that Object-Oriented Ontologists were basically Objectivists (and actually hadn’t even been thinking of the “Objectivism” name when I wrote the post). I was focusing specifically on the idea of correlationism. While Rand’s thought is certainly anthropocentric in a way that OOOists would oppose, it still seems to me that she would share the opposition to correlationism qua correlationism, as it is found in Kant. Things in the world – including humans – are real things, and while it is a noble and heroic task to dominate them, we can only dominate things in a way that they themselves allow room for. Things resist our attempts to make of them what we want. To leave the things themselves out of the picture and be entirely anthropocentric, allow human subjectivity free rein whether in a broadly Sophistic or more narrowly Kantian sense – that is what leads to “mysticism,” one of her favourite pejoratives, which is something that (to her) hippies and Christians share. This mysticism leads in turn to a lazy refusal of productive work, a refusal to engage in a transformative relation with the physical world; and if one doesn’t want to do productive work oneself, one will end up siding with the “looters” who appropriate others’ productive work, the communists and socialists. Now obviously these reasons for rejecting Kantian correlationism are very, very different from OOO’s reasons; I admit that and should have been clearer about it. But it seems to me that the critique itself remains similar: Kant is refuted by the persistence and obstinacy of “the things themselves.” Is there something I’m still missing here?
On to China, a comparison which I think is much less of a stretch. It strikes me that the way you characterize OOO in this section of your post still describes classical Chinese thought quite well. Especially: there is no question, to my mind, that humans are among the objects of the world for Chinese thinkers. The concern of classical Confucian thinkers was very much with the human – but with the human conceived relationally, as an object (in this sense) interacting with other objects, especially with other human objects. Thus the question of statecraft and good government is perhaps the preeminent question in the thought of Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi (just as it is peripheral – at best! – to the Upaniṣṣshads or the Buddhist Pali canon). How can one create harmony in the world, among humans and the other things they are a part of? In this respect I neglected to mention an important aspect of Chinese landscape painting: those landscapes do usually involve a human figure somewhere, but very small (finding him is almost a matter of playing “Where’s Waldo?”). Humans on this line of thought are integrated into their environment, whether the human environment or the natural environment. As I mentioned in the post, there is debate among modern interpreters as to just how much subjectivity or interiority remains (as, perhaps, there might be among the circle of SR, especially if the Churchlands are included in the picture…?) But I don’t think that changes the point that subjectivity is not the focus of the picture here. Now there isn’t a critique of the Indian or Western subject, since the classical Chinese hadn’t encountered those yet (although later Confucian thinkers, with whom I’m less familiar, might be very interesting on this point). Rather, it seems to me that the starting point of Chinese thought is much, much closer to SR/OOO conclusions than are either Indian or Western thought.
February 26, 2010 at 12:50 am
Amod,
The only reason that I can surmise that you would compare object-oriented ontology to Rand’s objectivism is because rhetorically you’re engaging in a rather underhanded attempt to besmirch OOO and SR with the disapprobation generally directed at Rand’s despicable philosophy. Here are some other thinkers that are critical of Kant: Marx, Whitehead, Deleuze, Bhaskar, Latour, and Stengers. Each of these thinkers is more or less realist, yet none of them advocate a metaphysics or epistemology even remotely like Rand’s. I’m not sure why the comparison would even come up unless for rather unappealing reasons, hence my strong response. The line of reasoning here seems similar to arguing that members of the Tea Party are critical of the American government, Marxist socialists are critical of the American government, therefore members of the Tea Party and Marxist socialists are the same.
The reason that there has been a focus on Kant isn’t out of any particular animosity towards Kant, but rather because Kant invented correlationism.
February 26, 2010 at 3:27 pm
No, I’m not trying to “besmirch” OOO and SR. I disagree with the vast majority of what Ayn Rand has to say, but unlike many, I do take her seriously as a philosopher. If nothing else, I have found her work extraordinarily useful as a hermeneutical aid. Rand has constructed what might be the simplest complete contemporary philosophical system out there. That simplicity has the obvious drawback of making her work lack (rather severely) in depth or nuance, but its advantage is the ease of knowing where she stands. And I have found that that in turn makes it much easier to understand other thinkers. When I was first trying to probe into difficult thinkers like Hegel, I would often find it easier to understand them by asking “what would Ayn Rand make of this?” It would give me a much better sense of the concrete implications of any given philosophy. And one of the things that struck me most about the critique of correlationism is that, as far as I can tell, it is indeed a critique that Rand makes, though clearly for very different reasons. I’m sorry if I didn’t stress those differences enough in the post; I just thought that the differences were obvious enough that the similarity was far more interesting and illuminating.
I’m aware that the focus on Kant is about correlationism and not about an attack on Kant himself. And that’s exactly why I mentioned Rand and not Marx, Whitehead, Deleuze, BHL, Peter Singer, or anybody else who is critical of Kant. As I noted in my comment to Skholiast, what’s interesting about the Rand comparison is not at all that she happens to criticize Kant – I mean basically everybody after Kant does that! – but that what she singles out for criticism in Kant is precisely his correlationism. It is his reduction of knowable ontology to the human subject that she finds most objectionable – even though what makes it most objectionable to her is supposed consequences that many SRists probably wouldn’t mind much (hippie nature mysticism, communism of some stripe).