ive been reading your blog with some curiosity for a while now, and would like to ask you a couple of questions, some related directly to this article, some more general that touch on other themes and ideas you have written about in other posts. all of this is coming from a place of growing understanding and interest in the different political and philosophical musings of OOO and political ontology.

i wonder, do you think that your notion of pluralism parallels with that of multiculturalism? coming from a more anthropological disciplinary background, i see many congruities with what you criticize pluralism for and what others have criticized multiculturalism for. namely, that it reduces all difference to that of culture – or the way peoples ‘experience’ and make sense of the world. ultimately, it is about perspectives, of which the pluralist, or the multiculturalist, cannot abide because how to we abandon our experience? i agree with you here, and see the dangers in such a position, the threat of relativism and so on. i suppose the main thing to be said from my point of view here is that we have to know what culture means and implies here. it seems like you are clear about your thoughts on culture by referring directly to naturalism and that you are a proponent of it, or that you side with it at the very least when it really comes down to it. and, from what i know of the history of philosophy and science, this is a very fraught question – culture and nature; where does one stop and the other begin? i take naturalism to be that we humans, or other beings like the animals you refer to, interpret the ‘real’ world, the true nature, and this has, to be sure, characterized the main assumptions of anthro methods and theory for a very long time. but, recently, as im sure you are aware, there have been many oppositions to this philosophical standpoint in many disciplines because of the way it ultimately separates subject from object, culture from nature, modernity, from non-modernity. so, i would be curious to know your thoughts on that particular question of culture and nature (maybe you have another post on it, but i havent come across it?) is it the case that we are all striving, though in different ways, for the one external element, the environment or nature, as the truth? pluralism is but one way of acknowledging the multiple ways people are seeking to comprehend this reality, and i mostly agree with your critique of it. but where i diverge from your critique is in how you separate “true reality” and metaphysical beliefs, which you distinguish based on empiricism and observation and note that its the best method we’ve got. can empiricism account for everything? what about love and so forth? has this not been one major function of phenomenology, to actually provide us with tools for addressing such saturated objects? furthermore, i also dont think that empiricism necessitates direct ‘observation’, but more so experience. if empiricism were to be taken as a tool for directly observing phenomenon and explaining the world only on what we can see and break down, wouldnt this just be positivism?

personally, Latour’s notion of “factishes”, whereby what exists is not reduced to “fact” (the external real world) or “fetish” (reifications of our subjectivity) but to an understanding that what exists is always mediated between subject and object, has been a helpful way for me to think through difference not in a strictly perspectival or cultural way – it is about worlds, or ontologies, and how they develop and clash with other worlds. “facts”, in this sense, are real because they are being done, performed. this, i think, can help us think about morality in a more productive way. for instance, im not sure how you would justify, or ‘prove’, your argument at the end of this piece that stated it is “wrong” to let a child die because of religious belief? an extreme example indeed… but, in any case, perhaps it would be better to think in terms of your own ontology (world) and how things are organized and related within it that makes this morality? that its ‘wrong’ to let a child die for a belief is certainly not a scientific explanation or proof, or even empirically verified fact, is it?

Thanks for the remarks.  You’re questions are difficult and I’m still working through them.  First, my holy grail is a perspective that integrates phenomenological, semiotic, and naturalistic perspectives.  My philosophical work began with the phenomenologists and I still highly prize their descriptive methods.  Later it evolved into semiotic perspectives influenced by Peirce, Eco, and Saussure, inflected by the work Lacan, Zizek, Derrida, and Levi-Strauss.  For me, ethnography, linguistics, and semiotics are every bit as significant as things like contemporary physics and neurology.  Finally, I feel that we need to integrate the perspectives of physics, chemistry, biology, neurology, geology, climate science, etc.  I don’t think we can just wave these things away.  When I criticize something like Lacanian psychoanalysis or Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, it is never to dismiss these things and suggest that we should instead be doing neurology and abandon these things (after all, I use phenomenological and semiotic styles of analysis all the time.  Rather, it is to show that these methods of analysis have blind spots, things that they can’t account for within their theoretical framework, and that we need other frameworks to supplement them.  It’s not a question of choosing between these three different orientations, but of thinking them together.  For example, in a Lacanian context, sometimes cigarette smoking has nothing to do with the unconscious and linguistic structure of ones desire.  Sometimes it really is a matter of ones brain chemistry.  I think we need a framework that’s capable of recognizing the interpenetration of these different spheres.

read on!

With Latour, I don’t like the nature/culture distinction.  It gives us the impression that there’s a realm of nature that we can investigate outside of culture; yet all natural science involves politics, cultural assumptions, and all the rest.  Likewise, it gives us the impression that there’s a domain of culture that is somehow outside of and immune to nature that we can investigate in its own terms.  Yet there is no society or culture that isn’t intertwined with nature at every point, whether we talk about the biology of humans, the impact of epidemic diseases on culture as during the Middle Ages, the need for energy to sustain bodies, social relations, cities, etc.  Take your example of love.  You seem to suggest that things like neurology and biology have nothing to teach us about love.  I readily recognize that there’s a phenomenology of love and that there is also a culturally diverse and changing set of semiotics about love.  However, I think it would be mistaken to conclude that this means love is somehow distinct from, for example, neuro-chemistry and the way brains are structured.  I don’t know.  The issue is one of not foreclosing that possibility.

As I’ve argued in a number of places, I think the humanities and social sciences have a pre-modern concept of nature.  If you’re interested in some of my arguments on this you can consult my preface to this work.  Under the premodern concept of nature, nature was conceived as essence or that arises ineluctably and inevitably in the things by virtue of their “nature”.  For example, it is in the nature of an acorn to produce oak trees and it is in the nature of spiders to spin webs (without any need for education or learning).  By contrast, the domain of culture is conceived as techne or that which is imposed on something from the outside.  It is not in the nature of a piece of wood to become a table, but rather the form of table is imposed on the wood through the agency of humans or craftsmen.  Techne is therefore treated as the domain of the historical and accidental (cultural variation), whereas nature is treated as the domain of eternal and unchanging species or essences.  In the case of humans, the question then becomes that of whether our being is techne or “constructed” or whether our being is “natural” or, for lack of a better term, innate.

I believe that modern science has demolished this conception of nature and that the humanities and social sciences have not caught up to this.  Astronomy has shown us that atoms themselves are historical, that they are the result of fusion processes taking place in the heart of stars.  Biology has shown us not only that species are the result of a history, not only that species don’t really exist but that when we use the term “species” we’re really making a claim about the statistical predominance of certain traits in a population of individuals, but also that individuals are developmentally plastic.  There isn’t one set of things, the genes, that function like a blueprint and that ineluctably unfold in the development of an organism, and then another set of things, “environmental influences” that give organisms their unique form, there is plasticity all the way down.  One and the same genome can develop in very different ways in different environmental contexts.  Genes are not a blueprint, but one set of tendencies, among others in the organism and environment, that can be actualized in a variety of different ways (epigenetic theory, evolutionary and developmental theory, and developmental systems theory are sublime on these points).  We’re now even learning that “culture” can actually change genes.  The nature/culture split endlessly harped on in the humanities just is not at all representative of what actually takes place in the development of organisms.  In this regard, nature begins to look a lot more like culture than anything described as nature under the old essentialist conception.  For me it’s construction all the way down.  It just so happens that construction isn’t exclusively cultural or linguistic, but involves contributions from geography, biology, plant life, other animals, and so on.

Recognizing this, my strategy has been to argue that everything, including culture, is nature.  In making this move, I hope to diffuse the essentialist concept of nature that contrasts it with techne.  There are regularities in being that move and change at a slower pace, but they are no less historical and accidental than the quickest cultural changes.  I also hope this move helps us to diffuse the knee-jerk (and highly defensive!) rejection the humanities and social sciences so often have to discussion of anything pertaining to the natural sciences and biology.  Increasingly I am trying to replace the words “culture” and “society” with the word “ecology”.  Cultures and societies, I say, are ecosystems.  Notice that ecosystems such as Amazonian rain forests, are every bit as historical and contingent as any particular culture you might look at.  Cultures, I argue, are just particular types of ecosystems embedded in broader ecosystems.  By shifting to this sort of pan-ecological view, I hope to both preserve all that we’ve learned through the semiotic analyses of culture that we find in ethnography, while also drawing attention to the way in which every culture is embedded in a broader natural world without which it couldn’t exist and that perpetually has cultural effects as in the case of the black plague.

It’s true that at the end of the day I feel compelled to preserve a distinction between our theories of reality and reality itself.  I can straightforwardly say that I think the Aztec theory of reality is wrong.  However, believing that the Aztecs (or the Greeks or Romans or Kahluli, etc) got their theory of reality wrong doesn’t somehow prevent me from recognizing that this is how they interpret the world around them and that if I’m going to communicate with them and get along I need to understand something about this world.  Is this some sort of horrible form of ethnocentrism?  I don’t think so.  I think every cultural framework draws a distinction between its theory of reality and reality itself; thereby recognizing that it could potentially be mistaken in how it understands the world about it.  Positions that don’t draw such a distinction or that don’t recognize fallibility are what we refer to as psychoses.  I don’t think we give other cultures enough credit when we fail to recognize that they two draw this distinction and that they are open to persuasion (just as we are).  Part of the problem with radical pluralism is that it tends to forget that both subjectivities and cultures are porous, instead treating them as solipsistic little bubbles that people can never get out of.  However, it seems to me that we manage to communicate across cultures all the time and that this is part of how change takes place in cultural ecologies.  Moreover, believing that someone else is mistaken doesn’t amount to calling for them to be killed or eradicated.  I have a friend, for example, who passionately believes in astrology.  I think astrology is nonsense.  That doesn’t prevent us from having interesting discussions about astrology and for me being fascinated by the way he interprets me through the stars.  It just means that I think his picture of reality isn’t true.

All that aside, if I’ve been harping a lot about the biological and neurological these days, then this isn’t because I think these things are the only truth, but because I’ve already written reams on semiotics and phenomenology (neither of which I’ve abandoned), and because I think these things are huge blind spots for Continental theory.  It’s my hope that by writing about these things I can contribute to others complicating their own views more to develop richer theories and to do a better job responding to the things we’re quickly seeing take center stage in popular culture (genecentrism, evolutionary psychology, the new eugenics, climate change, etc).  We can’t respond to these things if we comport ourselves like proverbial ostriches and simply trying to pretend they’re not there.  We need a framework that takes materialism seriously and that develops sound critiques of these things.

There’s also pluralism at the level of universes of meaning.  A Christian fundamentalist, for example, interprets the world differently than a naturalist such as myself.  If he’s suffering from alcoholism, for example, he might explain this in terms of demonic possession (in the United States there’s been a huge increase in exorcisms to treat such issues).  Whereas, the naturalist would explain alcoholism either in terms of neuro-chemical addiction or in terms of attempts to deal with difficult life circumstances, past trauma, or some combination of both.

Now were I still practicing as a psychotherapist, treatment would be different in both cases.  As an analyst, you bracket your beliefs about “true reality” and work within the universe of meaning held by your patient.  Your job as a therapist isn’t to teach your patients what true reality is, but to work with their symptoms.  Were I treating a Christian fundamentalist, I would probably work with their universe of meaning and perhaps even suggest that they get an exorcism because I would be working within the constraints of how their transference is structured.  Of course, none of this would be because I think their ontology is true, but because I understand how meaning works in relation to symptom formation in people.  It just happens that what is true or false here isn’t particularly relevant (for treatment).  The situation is the same with the ethnographer.  The ethnographer doesn’t go to the new tribe and try to disabuse them of their metaphysics.  The ethnographer merely attempts to understand that metaphysics.

read on!

The question, however, is to what degree any of us can genuinely be pluralists.  I can very well understand another person’s or groups ontology, but that’s quite different than treating it as true.  At the end of the day, I’m going to think that the ontology of the Christian fundamentalist or the Aztec is fundamentally mistaken as an account of reality and I’m going to side with naturalism.  I readily recognize that my naturalism is fallible, that I too can suffer from all sorts of biases, and all the rest; but I also feel that in matters pertains to nature, biology, and psychology, it’s the best method we’ve yet devised for getting somewhere close to reality and that I’ve never seen similar successes from religious doctrines and whatnot.  I just can’t bring myself to see it as legitimate or even plausible to explain yesterday’s tornadoes as divine punishment.

The other problem I see is that pluralism as a philosophical position often seems to be non-pluralistic.  The radical pluralist says that there are only competing theories of reality and we can’t decide between the truth of these various points of view.  In this way, the pluralist hopes– I think –to establish something like tolerance for differing and competing worldviews.  If we only understand the epistemic limits of our own worldviews and recognize that there are different worldviews, the pluralist says, then we will be more tolerant and there will be less war and violence.

The problem is that pluralism as a position seems incapable of genuinely appreciating the plurality of perspectives, because it misses what is crucial to something being a perspective.  The crucial feature of something being a perspective is that it is lived by the critter or person that has that perspective as reality, as what is real and true.  Yet it is precisely this that the philosophical position of pluralism cannot abide.  Confronted by any claim of something to being real or true, all the pluralist ever seems to say is that that person’s position is “just a perspective” and that there are others.  In other words, the pluralist paradoxically calls for every perspective to abandon its perspective, thereby abolishing the very thing that makes a perspective a perspective.  In the worst cases, we get a sort of “pluralist superego” that commands “let no one claim that something is true!”  What began as a defense of perspectives or different points of view, ends up erasing all perspectives.  “Thou hast defended a perspective and therefore violated the commandment of the pluralist superego!”  If a pluralist is truly a pluralist, for example, how can they ever argue with another position, for if they are logically coherent they have to recognize that position as being as legitimate as any other.

The problem, then, is that we simultaneously need pluralism but that pluralism is an untenable position that is impossible for anyone to genuinely hold.  One thing worth noting is that there are different pluralistic issues.  When we’re talking about how the perceptual experience of different critters is organized, it doesn’t make much sense to argue about which form of perception is “more true”.  Temple Grandin’s way of perceiving the world is not false, it is just different.  Mantis shrimp or bat perception is not more true than wolf perception.  We need to be attentive to these differences to properly attend to beings other than ourselves.  This is a very concrete and basic thing.  My ex-wife is a pediatric nurse.  Every couple months she’ll get an infant that was brutally beaten by its mother’s boyfriend (it’s always the boyfriend) and that is either brain dead as a result or has suffered severe brain damage.  The story is always the same.  The infant was crying too much so the boyfriend beat it to shut it up.  These sad stories are examples of what happens when someone is not a pluralist.  The boyfriend believes that the infant is cognitively structured in the same way he is and that it is thus capable of drawing cause and effect associations between being beaten and crying.  Yet infants just haven’t reached that point yet.  A person who has some awareness of the world of infants would understand that beating the crap out of them will make the crying worse.

When we enter universes of meaning or theories of reality, however, matters become different.  Recently some faith-healing parents allowed a second child to die because they held that it is sinful and contrary to god to pursue medical treatment, and that if it is God’s will the sick will be spared.  Here we are dealing with a theory of reality and causality.  It is one thing to understand another person’s or group’s theory of reality or ontology, and sometimes it is appropriate to even leave that ontology unquestioned as in the case of psychotherapy I outlined above, but it seems difficult and wrong to just take these theories at face value because we recognize the fallibility of our own positions.  Death resulting from ontologies such as those advocated by the faith healer are probably pretty unusual, but we find similar phenomena in the case of the anti-vaccination movement.  There a series of doubts about the soundness of vaccination science, discredited beliefs about the link between vaccination and autism, and somewhat justified views about pharmaceutical corporations, are leading thousands of people to refuse vaccinations for their children.  Not only does this endanger the children, but it endangers entire communities of people.  Can we really say that vaccination denialism and studies of vaccinations that indicate their safety and efficacy are on equal footing?  Are we really willing to take our pluralism that far?

Before responding to these claims, it’s first important to get clear on some points.  The ontological nihilist like me doesn’t deny that we experience all sorts of meaning in the world.  The idea that we would think this is one of the oddest ideas to ever sprout from anyone’s mind.  We’re wired to find meanings, purposes, and motives in everything that takes place in the world?  Why?  As Alex Rosenberg suggests, probably because being able to predict the behavior of others, how they would respond to this or that, was a life or death matter when we were back on the savannah.  You had to have some reliable way of deciding who would help you, who wouldn’t, who was a potential enemy, who might be a friend, who was a potential mate, and all the rest.  Of course, the blind watch maker of natural selection, random variation, and heritability doesn’t do such a good job at being distinguishing.  It gave us the capacity for thinking in terms of narratives, motives, and purposes, but didn’t restrict the use of this capacity to speculations about other humans and animals.  As a consequence, we would inevitably come to see faces in clouds, anger in storms, and favor when something surprising and good happens to us.  So it goes.  That’s how our lizard brains are wired.  Fortunately we’ve begun to develop techniques for getting around this in the last few centuries or so.

Nihilist that I am, I’m no different in this respect.  When something randomly bad happens to me, the thought flits through my mind that perhaps I’m being punished.  When a nice thunder storm happens as I was wishing for a couple days ago, the thought flits through my mind that perhaps I pleased the divinities in some way and they answered my prayers.  When I look at the barks of trees, I sometimes think I see faces or animals.  Us nihilists are wired the same way as everyone else and thus have the same fleeting thought.  The only difference is that we don’t take these speculations about motives that occur to us when we think about nature as veridical statements about the natural world.  We say “that’s a trick of my cognition, not something that’s really there.”  It’s the same with a nicotine fit.  Once you become aware that the absence of nicotine changes your brain chemistry, you no longer say “that person is being a bastard!”, but instead say “my brain chemistry is a mess at this moment leading me to think this person is being a bastard.”  Sure, we still experience the other person as driving like an asshole, but we know this is coming from us not them.  We consequently moderate our response to the other driver because we recognize this is a peculiarity of our cognition of the other person, not a motive on the part of the other person.

So back to the “religion as mytho-poetic thought” line of argument.  Here are my problems with this line of argument:

1)  It’s simply not true that belief is experienced in this way for 99% of the people that have it.  Folks don’t say “the story of Job is a potent story that teaches me a valuable lesson about life”.  No.  They say this is a theory of reality that explains why this or that happens.  I’ll never forget a discussion with an evangelical friend of mine.  A few years ago there was a string of bizarre weather events here in Texas.  We were talking about this and I alluded to climate change.  She chuckled knowingly and said “I don’t worry about such things because I know how the world will end” (alluding to end times theology).  For her– and I’ve heard this countless times since –Revelation is not merely a potent set of poetic stories, but is something like an insurance man’s actuarial table.  It’s a real prediction about what will happen.  It’s a theory of reality and causation and why events are happening.  This effects her entire politics and attitude towards things like climate change.  Outside of the United States, I’m sure there are a lot of folks have a hard time understanding US foreign policy concerning Israel.  What they don’t understand– and don’t believe when they hear it –is that there is a huge voting block that relates the Jews returning to Israel with Biblical prophecy and that any policy that interferes with that means a tremendous loss of votes and campaign donations.  Ergo, certain issues just can’t be discussed here.  I kid you not.  And don’t even get me started on the impact of these beliefs on science education and embodied politics here in the States.

I loves me some John Caputo, but I just can’t share his view that these myths are potent stories that help us to make sense of the world.  They’re full blown theories that make truth claims about the nature of reality, what will happen, why what has happened has happened, and what sorts of policy and practices we should adopt.  These are theories that have had a profound effect on our ability to respond to climate change, science in the states, as well as all sorts of gender politics.  It’s hard to escape the mytho-poetic theory of religious belief is a lot of hand waving by well meaning academics and enlightened people who just can’t bring themselves to believe that their neighbors really believe these things, that have sentimental feelings about the ritual they grew up with in their churches, and that have the misguided view that they can somehow persuade these people if they just talk about their beliefs in a nice way.  They don’t seem to realize that the lay will always bristle at the thought that their theory of reality is just a set of potent myths to be interpreted after the fashion of Levi-Strauss or, gag, Joseph Campbell.

2) If the mytho-poetic theorists are right, then they’re saying nothing different than the social constructivists and literary critics have been saying all along.  They’re saying that these things aren’t representations of reality or the way things are, but are social constructions, effects of the play of the signifier, creations of cognition, and all the like.  In other words, they’re rejecting the referential dimension of these things and giving culturalist explanations.  But this is what secular-naturalistic orientations have argued all along.  One then wonders why the mytho-poeticists continue to defend religion if they really believe all these stories are referentially false as theories of reality.  Why aren’t they busily deconstructing them?

3)  If it is true that these stories or theories of reality are just potent literature, why do they still continue to privilege sacred texts which have historically caused so much mayhem.  If religion was really just great literary works all along, why not instead find mytho-poetic meaning in great literature like Kafka, comic books, television shows, films, paintings, music, and so on?  Why hang on to these particular stories that were written by sheep herders that barely understood anything of the universe 6000+ years ago.  It’s bizarre that one would hold the theory that these things are just a way in which people create meaning in the world through narrative and then not consider just abandoning those particular stories that have been taken as theories of reality for so long.  After all, no one ever burned a witch, stoned a woman, or sacrificed a daughter over Kafka, but they certain did over these stories and have justified slavery and a variety of other egregious things to boot based on this particular literature.  Let’s make a clean break

4)  The mytho-poetic theory of religion just muddies the waters.  As I said, the vast majority of believers don’t advocate this theory.  Women, GLBT folks, scientists, etc., are all oppressed in very real ways by these things, and they affect American climate policy, scientific research (evolution, stem cell research, etc), and a variety of other things too.  The mytho-poetic theorist comes along and says “but that’s not really what they mean, these are just powerful stories that give life meaning!”  In doing so they provide cover for the worst manifestations of mytho-poetic thought (even though that’s not their intention).  These folks should be looking to what the lay believes, not what they read in their sophisticated journals and by theologians.

Yes, I too find the story of Jesus very potent and inspiring (as I do with Buddha and a lot of Greek and Roman mythology as well; especially the story of Apollo and Daphne).  Moreso, however, his life and not his death.  I’m also all for reading the Bible in exactly the same way as we read Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, and in the way ehtnographers interpret the religious beliefs of other cultures.

Me:  Because to explain is to reduce.

Matt:  This is wrong from a philosophy of science point of view, or at least, an oversimplification. It is noteworthy that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Scientific Explanation (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-explanation/) includes no mention of reduction or reductionism. It is true that in order to explain we need to make some relation between the phenomenon and its explanans, but the explanans is not generally thought of as a reduction to phenonema at a more basic level. Main candidates for explanans include laws of nature (at the same level as the explanandum), causal mechanisms (most of which again are not reductions, e.g., mary throwing the rock explains the broken window), or unifications (again, many of which are not reductions, e.g., Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism).

It is also worth pointing out that one of the most canonical articles on reductionism (Oppenheim & Putnam’s “Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis”) argues that microreductions can be explanatory, but takes other things (deduction from explanatory law) as definitional of explanation.

Me:  The sciences explain the powers of H2O by reference to the features of hydrogen and oxygen.

Matt:  This example actually doesn’t work for you. While some features of hydrogen and oxygen, and some quantum mechanical principles like the Pauli exclusion principle, are part of the explanation of the features of water, but there are other chemistry-level parts of the explanation, including especially chemical bonds and related structural properties which are not part of atomic physics.

Me:  Indeed, even Latour’s own actor-network analyses are reductions.

Matt:  This looks true if you only focus on one moment in ANT analysis. (I just did Reassembling the Social w/ my grad class so this is fresh.) When Latour turns to look at actants, he recommends that we follow all of the connections that “make up” the actants, that make them do things. So while he might have us follow all of the parts of the Corporation as part of an ANT study of the Corporation, he’d also point out that the actants themselves aren’t themselves on a more basic level. Also, his point about the ways the Corporation “speaks” (wholly in documents) vs. how the person in the customer service department speaks to you on the phone seems relevant.

Unfortunately I wasn’t quite clear in my post on Latour and left out the central point I was trying to make:  there’s a difference between explanatory reduction (ER) and ontological reduction (OR).  Let’s take the materialism of Peter van Inwagen to illustrate OR.  If I understand Inwagen correctly, only elementary particles (whatever they turn out to be) and animal individuals truly exist.  Thus, for example, when a baseball shatters a window, neither the window nor the baseball really exist.  These are just fabrications of our crude perceptual apparatus.  What’s really occurred is an interaction between a plurality of different elementary particles.  There are no windows nor baseballs, only elementary particles.  This is an ontological reduction insofar as it’s basically making the claim that baseballs and windows don’t exist, only elementary particles.  OR’s deny the existence of some set of entities.

read on!

An explanatory reduction is entirely different.  An explanatory reduction doesn’t deny the existence of the entity to be explained, but merely says that the entity being explained has the powers it has because of the powers of the entities that compose it.  Returning to the example of H2O I used in my previous post, H2O has the powers it has because of the powers of hydrogen and oxygen and what takes place when these elements bond.  Why is this not an erasure of H2O?  For the simple reason that the parts that compose H2O don’t have these powers when taken in isolation.  You have to have the relations between these elements for powers such as freezing, boiling at certain temperatures, putting out fires, etc., to emerge.  All that’s said is that this entity wouldn’t have these powers without these parts.  This doesn’t somehow conjure water out of existence.

Here I disagree with Matt.  In my view, every explanation is a reduction in the sense that it traces one thing back to more elementary elements and laws.  Take the example of a dream my partner had when I was writing my dissertation in graduate school.  During this time I was writing 6-8 hours a day and became more or less autistic or dead to the world because I was so absorbed in my thoughts.  One night she had a dream that went as follows:

I’m being chased by a faceless man who has cerebral palsy and who is trying to rape me.  He catches up to me and we begin to struggle and fight.  I break his left-hand and then wake up.

For Freud, every dream is a veiled wish or desire (veiled because often these wishes are things our egos don’t feel proud of and that our superego forbids).  To interpret a dream and find the veiled wish (and they can have multiple, contradictory wishes), you break the dream down into its elements and associate on each element, i.e., “what’s the first thing that comes to mind, no matter how seemingly unrelated, when you think of that element?”  The reason you break the narrative apart into its elements is because the dream-story or manifest content is part of the veil or lure to draw attention away from the latent dream-thought.  When she began to analyze the dream (no one can analyze your dreams for you) the first thing she zeroed in on was “cerebral palsy”.  At this time, I went by the name “Paul” and she often referred to me as “Pauly”.  “Cerebral palsy” is an association by resemblance to “cerebral Pauly” or “brainy Pauly” (I was writing a dissertation).  Yet why had her unconscious transformed my alleged braininess into a disease?  Because, she said, my research and writing was taking me away from her and was therefore a sickness.

This association provided the key to the rest of the dream.  I was faceless, she said, both because I hadn’t been around (even though my body was there), but also so she could exercise violence on me (one of the dream-wishes) without guilt.  She breaks my left hand in the dream because, being left-handed, he would not be able to write and would then pay attention to me.  In the dream I was chasing her to rape her both to give her a guilt-free alibi for taking revenge on me for neglecting her, and also so that I might desire her (no matter how twisted the desire to rape is).  The explanatory reduction we can thus give for the dream– if Freud is right –is that the dream is the wish to 1) take revenge on me for neglecting her, 2) the wish for me to stop writing so I might pay attention to her, and 3) the desire to be desired.  This is a reduction of the complexity of the dream to a simpler set of dream thoughts.

I personally think that Latour is much closer to an ontological reductionist like Inwagen than an explanatory reductionist.  It’s just that where Inwagen’s truly real entities are elementary particles, Latour’s tendency is to privilege mid-sized entities like staplers, memos, people, speed bumps, etc.  I know that Latour says he believes that entities like corporations, government agencies, churches, etc., are real actants, but take the example of his critique of Marx.  Again and again he critiques things like Marx’s concept of classes, effectively saying that they don’t exist and that what’s really real are networks of individuals and persons.  This is an ontological reduction.  If it weren’t an ontological reduction it would be very difficult to explain Latour’s hostility to Marxist analysis given that it seems so amenable to actor-network theory.  I hasten to add that I also think that Latour’s ontological reductions are often very illuminating and valuable, even if I think he’s ultimately wrong to erase the existence of these larger aggregates.

There can, of course, be extremes between these two poles and all sorts of intermediary variants.  On the one hand, there are radical ontological reductionists like Inwagen that seem to deny the existence of emergent entities altogether.  On the other hand, there are radical anti-reductionists that seem to see emergent entities as a sort of magical leap that can’t be explained at all in terms of the power of their more elementary parts.  Most of us, I think, are probably a combination of OR’s and ER’s.  In my case, for example, I’m an OR when it comes to things like rainbows.  I just don’t think that rainbows have any substantial ontological existence of their own and that in the absence of organisms that have the right perceptual wiring they just aren’t there at all.  Rainbows are variants of optical illusions.  While they have material conditions (raindrops and the properties of light) they’re in us, not “out there” (people have taken umbrage with this thesis in the past; boo!).  On the other hand, I’m only an explanatory reductionist when it comes to things like trees and corporations.  Trees can be explained in terms of their cells, molecules, atoms, etc., but as aggregates they have powers that only exist when these things are combined in these particular ways.  They can’t be conjured out of existence by saying that “elementary particles are really real”.

A lot of this discussion about irreduction arises from ways in which I see OOO put to use.  I’ve sometimes heard people say that the mere relation between two entities is sufficient to establish the existence of a third entity.  I don’t think this is the case.  In my view, we only get a new entity out of a relation between other entities if new powers emerge.  Others, following Whitehead, have said things like sunsets are intrinsically beautiful regardless of whether anyone is about to perceive them.  I don’t think this is the case as things like beauty strike me as relational qualities that only exist through the coupling of a sentient entity and other entities.  My cats seem delighted by the odor of my shoes, me not so much.  Yet others want to use these sorts of arguments to say that entities like God exist.  They say that you’re tendentiously reducing God if you explain him in terms of peoples beliefs rather than treating him as a genuine independent substance.  However, if ontological reductions of this sort are barred, then we’re led to the conclusion that the mere fact of imagining and thinking about something is sufficient to establish that the thing exists as a substance.  We’d have to say that John Nash’s belief in a communist plot and the existence of his college roommate, the general, and the young girl refer to real things that exist in their own right, rather than being creations of his mind.  We’d have to say with the Nazi’s that there really was a Jewish conspiracy and that this wasn’t just a fantasy of their own paranoid  minds.  I’m just not willing to go there.  Latour doesn’t tell us reduction is impossible or always false, but that we have to do the work of showing how one actant can be explained in terms of a set of other actants as in the case of my partner’s dream.  As in mathematics, you have to show your work, the series of transformations, and not just conjure things out of thin air through vague appeals to “power”, “social forces”, “capitalism”, and so on.

What doesn’t it mean to say the universe is without meaning, design, or purpose?  Obviously it doesn’t mean that humans and other critters don’t create meaning.  We’re up to our eyeballs in meaning every minute of our lives.  When I use a hammer to pound nails I’ve assigned a purpose to it and given it a meaning.  When a person reflects on the significance of their cancer for their lives, they’re giving it meaning.  We set all sorts of goals for ourselves.  We wonder about the significance of Hurricane Katrina for culture.  We wonder what the impact of 9-11 will be on society.  We write novels and philosophies.  In everything we do we do so in a world of meaning.  The thesis of naturalism and nihilism is not that there isn’t meaning.  It’s a thesis about where meaning comes from.  The naturalistic thesis is that meaning arises from the play of the signifier and our embodied, lived, cognitive experiences.  It’s the thesis that they aren’t in the things themselves.  When my daughter sees ponies in the clouds, they’re not in the things themselves.  We can only talk about the world meaningfully, but one of the neat things about meaning is that it can talk about the non-meaningfulness of existence itself.  Obviously a person’s cancer means a lot to them, but in the order of nature itself independent of their cognition, relation to language, and so on, there’s no meaning to their cancer in the sense of some metaphysically inscribed purpose, plan, or meaning to that cancer.  Nope.  They just suffered a sad genetic mutation as a result of some substance like uranium they were exposed to.  It wasn’t some divine being teaching them a lesson or placing them in some dire straits for some grand cosmic plan.  What I’m saying is no different than anything Spinoza or the Stoics said:  nothing in itself is beautiful or ugly, good or bad, purposeful or purposeless, only our evaluations make it so.  Good/bad, right/wrong, and all the rest are purely relational predicates.  My cats seem to take great delight in resting their little heads in my stinky shoes.  Me not so much.  Is the shoe’s odor loathsome?  Apparently not to my cat.  It’s my cat that gives value to that odor.  It’s value isn’t in the shoe itself.

The problem with the principle of reduction when taken at face value is that it leads us to treat every entity as an ontological given.  “God, is but a set of beliefs, you say?  Well by Latour’s principle of reduction this is an illegitimate reduction!  Therefore we must include God in our ontology!”  “Your depression is a chemical imbalance, you say?  Well that’s an illegitimate reduction and it really means all that your confused says it means!”  And while you’re at it, us Jews really were what the Nazis said we were because, well, it would be reductive to say otherwise!

I suspect that Latour himself didn’t think this is what the principle of irreduction means.  After all, all of his actual analyses speak against this as he perpetually carries out reductions.  What does Latour actually say?  He says, “[n]othing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else” (The Pasteurization of France, 158).  It’s the second part of the proposition that’s important.  When he refuses reduction he’s challenging bad sociology.  Like the mathematician, he’s saying you have to show your work.  Somewhere or other he gives Freudian dream interpretation as an example of virtuous reduction.  What’s good about a Freudian dream interpretation.  It shows all the transformations (the dream-work) that lead from the dream-thought to the manifest content of the dream.  It doesn’t just say “dream x means y”, but shows how the thought or repressed desire gets elaborated into y.  Similarly, in the domain of Marxist social theory, it’s not enough to say “capitalism causes r”.  You have to show all the mediations and mechanisms by which we get from the dynamics of capitalism to a particular social phenomena.  We have to show our work.  However, showing your work is a reduction nonetheless.  A bad reduction is merely one that doesn’t show the mediations or how you get from point a to point b.  Not everything exists.  Sorry folks, there are no rainbows, though we certainly experience them as a result of the properties of light, raindrops, and our own neurological systems.  Whiteheadian nonsense aside, in the absence of those neurological systems rainbows just ain’t there.

I find these propositions intriguing but I have a few questions I would like you to address if you can.  You stated in two of the responses that you’re using ‘axiom’ not as ‘self-evident truth’ but as ‘constraint or rule w/in types of math’ and that if the term ‘axiom’ is unsatisfying then feel free to replace it w/’thesis’. Two questions: one, if axiom is used with little or no problem and in this instance for types of ontological issues, how would axiom as ‘constraint or rule within types of mathematics’ apply here? When referring to axioms of set theory for example, there are procedures (and I’m not using that term in any badiouian sense) and operations I could do; there are problems to be solved, and so forth such that it makes sense that this constraint, rule, or what have you productively governs my behavior as it pertains to specific types of mathematics. Here though, #12, and #15 for example, I’m not aware of how if they constrain certain moves within a discourse or are rules w/in a discourse that could do anything; be operationalized. How would they do any work? Like, how would #12 change discursive behavior? Would we stop singling out the Greeks in terms of past civilizations; would attempts to retrieve aspects of the past that some find potentially beneficial in a non-christian/post-christian setting be deemed/regarded as non-helpful? Same w/no. 15, would admitting the inability to resolve the climate crisis (or even alleviate it), do anything, produce an effect, in the way that certain rules within specific mathematic discourses produce effects?

Second question: if ‘axiom’ gets changed to ‘thesis’, what then occurs? How is thesis being used here? If thesis is simply retaining its’ everyday, colloquial use or meaning, then aren’t there supposed to be examples, or arguments, evidence of some sort, or just something to “back this up”? I mean how do you back-up number 12, or 15, or 16? Classicists view a lot of religious texts simply and utterly as literature, and isn’t it reasonable to suppose that a majority of religious believers view other religious folk’s text(s) as simply literature when reading them (albeit they don’t see their own as just literature)? Plus, a lot of literature comes from these prior texts. If I use ‘thesis’, should I be thinking ‘claims/propositions given where various knowledge-projects are currently’ or more ‘hypotheses’, or maybe, ‘speculations’?

Thanks for the difficult questions!  With respect to the use of the term “axiom”, my position is that sciences such as physics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, and neurology as well as social sciences such as sociology, ethnography, cognitive science, and psychoanalysis have shown us certain things about ourselves and the world that function as constraints within which philosophical questions must be posed to be legitimate.  We can’t just brush these things aside, pretend they don’t exist, or that we can continue to pursue philosophy in the same way in the way we did in the 18th century.  Certain positions just aren’t feasible anymore.  What I’ve tried to outline here is the framework within which questions of ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy ought to be posed.  The list, of course, is subject to revision and some of the claims might be abandoned.

Regarding your questions about the Greeks and past civilizations, I’m certainly not suggesting that we just abandon antiquity and pre-contemporary philosophy.  Certainly I’ve spilled plenty of ink writing about Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius (the best of the bunch), Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, and a host of others.  When I talk about the splendor of our particular moment in intellectual history with respect to artistic accomplishments, the sciences, mathematics, politics, and the social sciences, I’m responding to a particular attitude I’ve often encountered among those working in the phenomenological tradition (inflected by Gadamerian hermeneutics) that speaks with an almost religious fervor about the Greeks as being an originary event, unparalleled in all of history, and that tends to be dismissive of anything contemporary.  My view– shared with Badiou, I think –is that we are living in the midst of the most exciting time in human history and in the middle of an unprecedented renaissance in knowledge-producing practices, politics, and art.  Antiquity and modernity just don’t hold a candle to the discoveries of mathematics and the sciences in the last century, the daring adventures of contemporary art, and the entirely new form of politics we’ve discovered.

The things we’ve discovered in biology, metereology, physics, neurology, sociology, psychology, ethnography, and mathematics are simply unprecedented in human history.  Comparing ourselves to the Greeks is a bit like comparing Euclid to the working knowledge of geometers possessed by craftsmen.  There’s simply no comparison, nor should we grant the geometrical knowledge of carpenters to the splendor of Euclid’s accomplishment and the manner in which it created mathematics.  My contention, then, is that these radical transformations and inventiveness in science, mathematics, art, and politics, are what ought to provoke contemporary thought in philosophy and theory.  Rather than dwelling in a dusty archive that perpetually tries to pretend these things haven’t occurred by endlessly engaging in a pious commentary on the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and so on, our age calls us to be the new Descartes’s, Spinozas, Leibniz’s, Rouseau’s, Kant’s, and Hegel.  Far from trying to defend the sovereignty of philosophy by protecting it against science, we should embrace the new age and ask what it calls us to think.

21.  Humans are a particular type of animal among other animals and are not the pinnacle of being or existence.

22.  All human cognitive powers are biologically rooted or grounded.

23.  These cognitive powers evolved for the sake of getting around in a hostile world pervaded with other predators and for         reproduction.  It does appear, however, that our nervous systems are able to deploy themselves in ways that go beyond these original evolutionary aims.

24.  Our cognitive systems did not evolve for the sake of knowing the world or representing it as it is; which is why we must perpetually engage in critique in our knowledge-producing practices to protect against the insufficiencies of our cognitive structures.

25.  Consciousness has no special insight into the workings of the body from which it arises, nor any special insight into the causes of its cognitive and affective states.  As a consequence, evidence drawn from introspection has to be treated with caution.

26.  Given that all minds have a neurological substrate, we can no longer speak in generic or general terms about human minds as neurological structures are diverse in our species.  This is also attested to by the developmental plasticity of the brain.

27.  No philosophy can ignore or bracket the findings of the sciences and be legitimate.  Some basic scientific literacy is necessary for good philosophical work.  Similarly, basic literacy in the findings of ethnography, linguistics, sociology, and psychology are also necessary for good philosophical work.

28.  Philosophy is not a foundation for any other discipline, nor does any other discipline require philosophy to grant them legitimacy.  Each discipline develops its own epistemic criteria and protocols as a function of its investigation.  While philosophy can, of course, engage in critique of these protocols and render a service in doing so, other disciplines are in no need of the epistemological work of philosophy.  Indeed, philosophical epistemologies are often a hindrance to research in other disciplines as the philosopher is seldom aware of the specific questions and methodologies pursued and used in these disciplines and therefore arrives at them with a highly distorted understanding of what knowledge is in these disciplines.

29.  Everything that exists is the result of a genesis or development.

30.  Religions are not beliefs but are political institutions that exert power in the world in various ways and that organize people in various ways.  As a consequence, discussions of religion at the level of belief and whether or not those beliefs are true often miss the fact that religions are sociological entities.

31.  Theology seldom contributes anything to our understanding of religion and often muddies the water by presenting a rationalized version of popular belief and religion.  The claims of theologians are seldom reflective of what the population believes.  As a consequence, we have more to learn about religion from the ethnographer and the sociologist of religion than we do from the theologian who is generally what Deleuze called a State Thinker, even in his most progressive moment.

32.  There is no religion that does not involve the supernatural.  Those theologians that attempt to persuade us that religion is really about meanings and symbols do not understand what they’re talking about.

33.  Culture is not a domain outside of nature, but is a formation within nature.  Cultures are one more ecology among others.

34.  Nature is not harmonious nor does it strive for harmony, though harmony does occasionally happen for a brief period of time.

36.  The world is riddled with antagonisms and always will be.

37.  In ecologies and societies, there is no one cause for any particular event, but rather all events are “overdetermined” or the result of multiple causes.

38.  Everything is in a constant state of disintegration.  For this reason, work, energy, and operations are required for any ordered existence to continue enduring in time.

39.  Existence is indifferent to us, our sufferings, how we live our lives, and whether we continue to exist.  We aren’t, however, indifferent to each other.

40.  If aliens ever visit our planet they won’t be nice and they’ll be up to no good.  Star Trek is not a documentary.

41. Molecular biology has discredited vitalism and all its variants.