The danger faced by any object-oriented philosophy, especially in its beginnings, is that readers will conclude that the aim is to speak of things as they are in themselves, independent of any humans, thereby denying all that is human. Those prone to dialectical thought will conclude that where the last three hundred years of philosophy have been characterized by philosophies of access or correlationism in one form or another, whether that form be Kant’s transcendental idealism, linguistic idealism, phenomenological givenness, or social constructivism, those advocating an object-oriented ontology are by contrast shifting to the domain of objects and are now eradicating all culture, society, language, and subjectivity. In other words, we are here faced with the old choice between nature and culture.
Here the interminable, inexhaustible, objections will begin. “But it is still you, a subject, a human being, talking about objects! How do you propose to overcome the manner in which your mind gives form and structure to the world?” “Yet you are thrown into a tradition, determined by categories of culture, language, and society! How can you talk of a world independent of humans, tradition, culture, language, and society?” On and on it will go. We are given the alternative of either living inside a submarine known as mind, tradition, language, culture, or society, where we only ever encounter the world through the mediation of our “sonar machines” (i.e., in a way that fails to represent them as they are, or of directly touching objects either themselves. We are given the stark alternative of mind or world, culture or nature, language or object.
Yet this stark alternative misconstrues the entire problem. The issue is not one of escaping the human, culture, or language to touch the world as it is in itself. It is not a question of shifting from one form of difference, culture or mind, to another form of difference, the objects themselves. Or, put differently, it is not a question of an alternative between Lucretius or Derrida. What object-oriented philosophy opposes is not culture, society, or mind, but rather those metaphysics– and they are metaphysics –that declare that one difference makes all the difference. Were object oriented philosophy to reject language as in the case of Lacan, for example, and shift entirely to Lucretian atoms, this move would be equally egregious from the standpoint of the Ontic and Ontological Principles. For here we would simply be replacing one difference that makes all the difference (language), with another difference that makes all the difference (atoms). I call this reduction of difference to one difference that makes all the difference or one difference that makes the most important difference, the hegemonic fallacy. The hegemonic fallacy can occur in more or less extensive forms. Thus, in the case of those theologies where everything is dependent on God as in the case of Leibniz or Spinoza, we have a rather extreme form of the hegemonic fallacy. By contrast, the relationship between form and matter as conceived by Aristotle or categories and intuitions as conceived by Kant are both less extensive forms of the hegemonic fallacy insofar as matter and intuition still contribute some difference, but in a less important way with respect to form and the categories.
Read on
What the object-oriented philosopher seeks, at least in my formulation, is not the reduction of the number of differences, but rather the multiplication, pluralization, or proliferation of differences. The aim is not less difference, but more difference… A contagion of differences! Thus, when the Ontic Principle declares that there is no difference that does not make a difference, it affirms not only language, tradition, culture, mind, technology, economic production, etc., but also stars, atoms, pebbles, fossils, street signs, a bolt of lightning causing a wildfire, and all the rest. When the Ontological Principle declares that being is said in a single and same sense of all that is, it is making the injunction to recognize the pebble that killed the emperor causing the empire to collapse. In emphasizing difference, the point is not political (this too would be a form of the Hegemonic Fallacy insofar as everything gets reduced to the political), but rather ontological. Politically difference will not save us. Fascist ideologies will make differences as well as democratic and socialist ideologies. The ontological does not imply a particular politics. The Ontic Principle is, above all, a modest principle. It asserts that to be is to differ and to produce difference. Even the epistemologues being with a difference in developing their epistemology, thereby entitling us to declare that the Ontic Principle is prior to and more fundamental than any epistemic principle.
Object-oriented philosophy, in my formulation, vigorously rejects all those ontologies where one difference makes all the difference or where one difference makes the most important difference. Of course, it must also be self-reflexively declared that these ontologies, as well, make differences in the world. It matters little whether that overdetermining difference is God, the signifier, Platonic forms, Aristotlean essences, society, power, minds, subjects, the human, sets, atoms, or whatever other difference we might wish to place in the position of ultimate ground. Likewise, the object-oriented ontologist, as I formulate it, will be more than happy to grant that God makes a difference, signifiers make a difference, Platonic forms make a difference, Aristotlean essences make a difference, society makes a difference, power makes a difference, minds make a difference, subjects make a difference, sets make a difference, and atoms make a difference so long as these things exist and often even when they don’t exist. What will be denounced is the idea that they make the only difference. I will also denounce any difference that is constitutively immune to differences being made on it, such as in the case of Platonic forms or Plotinus’ One. God may exist, but in existing God would both affect other act-ualities and be affected by other act-ualities. This, in part, is what is intended by the Principle of Irreduction.
As such, when an object-oriented philosopher talks about society, for example, he or she will not only refer to people, language, power, and culture, but also roads, hammers, computers, atmospheres, weather, pebbles, oceans, rivers, streams, etc., etc. For all of these things belong to society as well, all of these things contribute differences as well, and these things are not simply cultural or vehicles of signifiers. All act-ualities contribute differences and are not merely vehicles of some difference that makes all the difference. All act-ualities push back, which is the ground of Latour’s Principle or the thesis that there is no transportation that does not involve translation.
Thus, when the object-oriented philosophy adopts the stance of Methodological Anti-Humanism, observing that we must imagine a world without humans, the point is not to claim that humans make no difference (how could this be given that humans are?), or to get at true reality beyond the human, but rather to open a space where it might be possible to make room for all differences in a flat ontology that accords with the requirements of univocity. The human is to be decentered, according to the requirements of a genuine Copernican revolution, where humans are no longer at the center of being or treated as a difference that makes the most important difference. The question then becomes one of thinking alliances or assemblages of objects or act-ualities, how their differences are woven together, how they constantly produce and reproduce certain constellations or forms of organization, while avoiding any position that subordinates, hegemonizes, or hierarchializes all the rest under one difference. Of course, many differences will strive to hegemonize the rest, to totalize the whole, to make all of being “speak their language”, but something will always push back and ruin the totality. Such as the lesson to be drawn from Lacan’s discourse of the master. While it is indeed true, from the standpoint of the Principle of Reality, that the degree of reality or power embodied by a being is a ratio of the extensiveness of the differences that entity produces, this is by no means a reduction of all other entities to that entity. As I learned last night, electricity is a very powerful entity that produces many differences. My entire life, the life of my neighbors, and the life of many gadgets that inhabit the world was suspended in a variety of ways by a power outage that lasted hours. However, the recognition that an entire constellation of processes depends on electricity is very different from the reduction of the entities belonging to this network to electricity. All of these other entities have an autonomy from electricity even while entering into relations with the power line enabling all sorts of activities within these act-ualities.
This is entirely different than a Kantian making all objects, in the form of appearances or phenomena, depend on mind, or Leibniz’s God sustaining all monads. In the first case we have an assemblage where act-ualities equally contribute those differences that are within their power to contribute, while in the latter case we have one entity contributing all the difference (Leibniz’s and Spinoza’s God), or nearly all the difference (Kant’s mind). Indeed, in Kant the in-itself contributes no discernible difference or no difference that could intelligibly be talked about. Yet if any of this is to be thought at all, it is above all necessary to overcome the Epistemic and Ontological Fallacies. The first, as articulated by Bhaskar, consists in “…the view that statements about being can be reduced to or analysed in terms of statements about knowledge; i.e. that ontological questions can always be transposed into epistemological terms” (A Realist Theory of Science, 36). By contrast, the Ontological Fallacy consists in the view that Being and Thinking are identical. It is only when these fallacies are overcome that it becomes possible to consistently think both the Ontic and Ontological Principles.
Larval Subjects . 
January 13, 2009 at 10:19 pm
[…] 14, 2009 And, Levi with ANOTHER POST THAT CAUGHT MY EYE just before bed, but which I’ll have to leave till […]
January 13, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Way to set up some real straw men there! [Alternative opening: C’mmon now! Give the imagined objectors some real objections!] I feel like a Kantian cop here policing the “internets” and fighting the losing battle. I’m not sure where to even begin here, I’m taking this to be a sort of manifesto, so more details and nuanced analyses to follow, right?
January 13, 2009 at 11:26 pm
Well I do hope to develop better arguments, however I’m not sure how possible it is to do so. It might be that the Ontic Principle is a sort of primitive beginning such that the unassailability of the beginning point is not the issue, but rather the results that follow are the issue. In this respect, the Ontic Principle would be axiomatic in Badiou’s sense of the term, or would be part of something like a “categorical scheme” as in the case of Whitehead. I do think that the Ontic Principle has the virtue of being exceedingly modest in a manner that’s far more modest than, say, a Cartesian starting point with mind, a Derridean/Gadamerian starting point with language and tradition, or a social constructivist starting point with culture or power. All the Ontic Principle states is that there are differences and differences are made. It initially remains agnostic as to what those differences might be. The next move is to ask the innocent question “does x make its own difference or doesn’t it?”
I have, I think, made some more substantial arguments. Especially in my post on Hegel and Existence, though I don’t know how convincing that argument is. Anywhere in particular that you’re discerning straw men? And isn’t the correlationist gotcha question– “but aren’t you thinking these beings?” –a bit of a straw man in its own right, failing to distinguish the epistemic and the ontological, endlessly reducing the latter to the former?
January 14, 2009 at 4:37 am
If by “correlationist” you mean someone like Kant, then there’s really nothing wrong with thinking (about) objects without having you thinking about them – if by “objects” you mean “things,” then I’m not sure what’s so great about thing-oriented philosophy. But objects in Kantian traditions are not just things, things have a perfectly fine “empirical realist” treatment for Kant – there are also more interesting issues like “justice” or “freedom” or even “God”…
As for “endlessly reducing the ontological to epistemic,” then it’s just not so, not in Kant who has a very elaborate system that includes both, yes in his own “correlationist” way. I suppose I am a bit puzzled by crude generalizations when it comes to the position you are apparently working against, that’s all.
January 14, 2009 at 4:47 am
I don’t think it’s crude or a generalization at all, of course. Nor am I sure where the simplification is. Kant’s empirical realism still does not do the work I’m calling for as mind and the a priori categories and structures of intuition do all the work in his empirical realism. The matter of intuition still remains a passive matter that contributes no difference of its own beyond dough for the cookie cutter, and which ultimately provides no resistance. Of course Kant himself can’t consistently advocate such a position, which is why in texts like his writings on metaphysics of material nature he has to depart from these thesis in a covert way. Do you find any things in Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Zizek, even Badiou, or Foucault? Do the things themselves speak, as Husserl demanded, or are they mere bearers of either power, language, signifiers, history, etc. Is it possible to be surprised in these ontologies? Is there resistance?
Now, of course, there will be simplifications here. A friend of mine told me the other day that Descartes didn’t accomplish anything, that he simply repeated the scholastics and Aristotle, and that his arguments against his predecessors were gross generalizations and simplifications. So be it I suppose. I’m not sure how we get anything done by being good hermeneuts; unless the aim is tantric sex in the domain of philosophy (if you know what I’m alluding to). One has to start somewhere and I’ve chosen to start with a pluralism of differences.
My humble suggestion would also be that we can’t even begin to adequately address questions like justice, the good, and even God unless we address these sorts of questions. Without raising these sorts of questions we remain within the two world hypothesis, spirit and nature, that thoroughly distorts the real assemblages within which these questions arise.
January 14, 2009 at 6:10 pm
I suppose this isn’t really a place or time to get into the discussion of Kant’s philosophy, I’ll say only one thing – your version of Kant sounds very similar to the early reactions to Kant accused him of basically continuing Berkley’s idealist tradition in terms of active mind and passive matter. I think there’s plenty of evidence from subsequent Kant and others that it is not the case.
However, again I’m not sure I follow you here – are you equating “objects” and “things” here? is object-oriented philosophy basically a thing-oriented philosophy? What’s the opposite of “object-oriented philosophy”? Is it “subject-oriented philosophy”? Why do things have such a strange allure for you? What about processes, forces, relations (without things), concepts, ideas (of reason)? I suppose I am at pains to see why we need to go back to pre-critical Kant and then dismiss most of the work Kant and others have done dealing with metaphysics (again, negative critique is just a part of Kant’s project, of course)…
January 14, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Mikhail, I’m not sure where you’re getting the impression that I equate Kant’s philosophy to Berkeley’s idealism, nor am I sure as to what the distinction you’re drawing between objects and things is. In reading your remarks it almost sounds as if you didn’t read the post. On the one hand, you’ve read Meillassoux’s After Finitude. In part you can approach what I’m up to as something similar to what he’s working on, without arriving at the same conclusions. On the other hand, it seems to me that the post is quite clear as to what the issue is. Following from the Ontic and Ontological Principles I’ve developed in previous posts, I argue that there is no difference that doesn’t not make a difference, and that being is said in a single and same sense for all that is. As a consequence, it follows that any philosophy that either a) treats one difference as making all the difference, or b) that treats on difference as making the most important difference, must be mistaken. The issue here is ontological, not epistemological. Or rather, it is an issue of what being is (difference) for itself, not for us. It just so happens that Kant violates these principles. For Kant mind is the difference that makes the most important difference, thereby silencing all the other differences that belong to being or shackling all those differences back to mind as a difference that overdetermines these differences.
You ask,
You’ll note that I’ve said exceedingly little as to what an object is up to this point. All I have said with the Ontic Principle is that there is no difference that does not make a difference. Now, if this is the case, then it follows that any difference that makes a difference is. Consequently, it follows that if processes, forces, relations, concepts, and ideas make a difference, then they are, and fall within the scope of the Ontic Principle. A concept here would be an example of an object as I understand it insofar as it makes a difference. On the other hands, as a philosopher it is not my job to legislate what is and is not a priori (i.e., being and thought are not identical). The scope of what is is something that can only be found out by directly engaging with the world.
I think, throughout these series of posts, I’ve been fairly clear as to why it’s important to move past correlationism and philosophies of access, so I am at pains to see why you feel it is so important to remain within this tradition. Any form of correlationism simply cannot be consistent with the univocity of being dictated by the Ontological Principle.
January 15, 2009 at 12:53 am
Fair enough, I’m not trying to be annoying, just sort of thinking along – let me get back to your issues in a longer more thought through response once I get my mind around it a bit…
January 15, 2009 at 4:01 am
Mikhail, I’m not sure where you’re getting the impression that I equate Kant’s philosophy to Berkeley’s idealism, nor am I sure as to what the distinction you’re drawing between objects and things is. In reading your remarks it almost sounds as if you didn’t read the post.
I did read the post, but I did not say you equate Kant and Berkley, I said that your version of Kant is a caricature similar to early misunderstandings of Kant that linked him to Berkley’s tradition. For example, you write:
This is entirely different than a Kantian making all objects, in the form of appearances or phenomena, depend on mind…
Kant makes all objects as they appear to us depend on mind? With all due respect, but what does that mean? I am not saying that it is completely false, but it is such a general statement and it can mean so many different things – I am by no means an expert of Kant, but such formulations make me feel uneasy because a rather complex thinker is reduced to a cliche, a catchy term that is consequently easily dismissed…
January 15, 2009 at 4:29 am
[…] or two in a form of a post. Alright, let’s start from the end of the story, a post called Hegemonic Fallacy. It opens with a rather strange sentence: The danger faced by any object-oriented philosophy, […]
January 15, 2009 at 5:02 am
The central Kantian thesis is that objects conform to mind rather than the mind to objects. As a result, we can only speak of phenomena or appearances rather than objects as they are in themselves. Consequently, ontology becomes the question of being qua mind rather than being qua being. For Kant we can never speak of beings as they are in themselves but only as they appear to us. Consequently, when I make the assertion “wine causes drunkenness”, I am making a claim about phenomena or appearances.
What does it mean to say that Kant makes all objects as they appear depend on mind? It means that mind imposes the a priori forms of time and space within which objects appear on object and that mind imposes the a priori categories of the understanding on objects. In the case of my proposition above– “wine causes drunkenness” –the relevant categories would be those of causality and substance. We could go on to discuss the axiom, anticipations, schemata, and analogies and the role they play in our knowledge according to Kant, but I hope I don’t have to as that’s not really the point of this post.
Insofar as these forms of intuition and these categories are imposed by mind, it follows that we have no idea of whether or not objects themselves, independent of mind, have any of these properties (causality, substance, spatiality, temporal properties, etc). This is the essence of Kant’s “Copernican” revolution and his critical philosophy, i.e., we can only speak of appearances or phenomena, not things in themselves. We can only speak of objects as they appear for us, not as they are in themselves.
As a consequence, according to Kant, I must remain skeptical as to whether anything like this takes place at the level of the in-itself. Kant’s empirical realism is no different, for the whole point is still that we can only speak of beings as they appear for us and not as they are in themselves. I’m really surprised that I have to explain any of this, for while I certainly see it as legitimate to argue that I cannot escape correlationism, it does not seem to me that what Kant claims about the nature of appearances and the limits of knowledge is in much doubt.
This is what I mean when I speak of the hegemonic fallacy in the case of Kant. One difference (the a priori structure of mind) counts more than all the other differences. Put a bit differently, one difference is necessarily included in all of the other differences and is treated as the most important difference among these differences. In the case of Kant this hegemonic difference is mind. For whatever we talk about according to Kant, the thing talked about will include in some manner, shape, or form the a priori structures of mind. As such, we can only speak of beings as they appear for us and not as they are in themselves.
I am perfectly happy to discuss the merits of the metaphysical position that I’m trying to develop, but I can’t say that I’m interested in detailed interpretive questions about Kant; nor, I think, will I satisfy the desires of the hermeneut that demands a detailed textual engagement tracing the relationship of a particular thinker to his historical setting, the nuances of the language he spoke, or his relationship to the history of philosophy. On the one hand, the picture of Kant I’m putting forward here is a fairly standard and uncontroversial gloss on his philosophy. On the other hand, perhaps you are making the suggestion that Kant is a realist, that he doesn’t advocate a correlationist position, and that when Kant evokes something like the causal relationship between a match and fire he is talking about matches and fire as they are in themselves regardless of whether or not humans exist and independent of any a priori categories of the understanding or forms of intuition. If so, this is a highly original understanding of Kant’s epistemology that I have never before encountered and you should develop it in detail and make that case.
January 15, 2009 at 8:21 am
[…] Egalitarianism, has had enough regard for me to write a rather snarky post responding to the posts I’ve been developing around the Ontic Principle. Since I consider Mikhail a friend, […]
January 16, 2009 at 8:35 am
What would happen if you translated all this into the language of causality?
I’m thinking of the way in which causality is central to Hardt’s account of Deleuze. And the difference between causes and quasi-causes.
I’ve been thinking about hegemony (and I realize you mean something somewhat different by that term) in terms of quasi-causes.
And if Spinoza (or Spinoza’s God) is an extreme instance of the hegemonic fallacy, would that also go for Deleuze?
But is Spinoza’s God a difference, rather than a principle of differentiation?
Thinking out loud here…
January 16, 2009 at 7:17 pm
I am perfectly happy to discuss the merits of the metaphysical position that I’m trying to develop, but I can’t say that I’m interested in detailed interpretive questions about Kant; nor, I think, will I satisfy the desires of the hermeneut that demands a detailed textual engagement tracing the relationship of a particular thinker to his historical setting, the nuances of the language he spoke, or his relationship to the history of philosophy.
Levi, no one demands “textual engagement” or any sort of “tracing,” just a more or less correct representation of Kant’s project – before I write a whole Kant 101 post showing how your interpretation of Kant is simply partial and therefore missing the point for the most part, let me ask you one simple question: In your version of Kant with intuitions and categories, and I’ve noticed you use this pair all the time, where are the ideas of reason, where is reason in general? We can speak of things in themselves all we want, by the way, you are speaking of them right now, we can’t have them as objects of experience, we simply posit them because otherwise we would have appearances without that which appears. For someone who is not interested in engaging Kant, you spend much time denouncing him.
January 16, 2009 at 7:24 pm
The central Kantian thesis is that objects conform to mind rather than the mind to objects.
So by rejecting Kant’s insight do you then go back to mind conforming to objects? Passive mind? Things impressing themselves on mind? I mean you don’t have to be a Kantian to realize that the most fundamental ideas coming from neuroscience already told us about how we impose color, shapes and causality (among many other things) on the objects, we know of abnormal cases demonstrating all of these simple facts. My point: be careful – in undermining Kant you could be very well cutting off the branch on which you sit, as they say in Russian…
January 16, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Hi Mikhail,
You’ll find a detailed discussion of the ideas of reason in chapter 6 of my book. The ideas of reason, of course, play a unifying and systematizing role in experience, transforming the dispersed elements of experience into a unified body of knowledge. I’m not sure, however, why this is relevant to the current discussion.
You seem to be misconstruing my thesis a bit. If you read the post “Of Assembly”, I think you’ll find an articulation of what I’m arguing towards the end in the context of Shaviro and Harman. The issue isn’t about the mind imposing content on experience– though I have problems with the details of his account –but with Kant’s privileging of the human or placement of the human at the center of things rather than treating humans as one object among others in nature. Moreover, Kant posits the relation between human and object as a unilateral relation where mind is doing all the work and the object is contributing little or nothing. However, as the Ontic Principle and Latour’s Principle dictate, there is no transportation without translation which entails that there can never be unilateral relations among entities in this way.
January 16, 2009 at 8:43 pm
As I already noted in my short and lively exchange with Harman, the language of “Kant’s privileging of the human or placement of the human at the center of things rather than treating humans as one object among others in nature” is misguided because it assumes that Kant has made a conscious choice to emphasize one aspect and ignore the other, i.e. to “privilege” humans which is impossible because there are no other relations for Kant but the human-world one. See http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/object-oriented-philosophy/
Kant posits the relation between human and object as a unilateral relation where mind is doing all the work and the object is contributing little or nothing.
No, he doesn’t. I’m afraid I have to write another post about it very soon, but for now, how about this:
In order to talk about “mind” and “objects” the way you propose Kant is talking about them, you have to have “mind” and “objects” first, if mind is “doing all the work” then does that not also mean that “objects” simply do not exists before mind or outside of mind’s work? if your version of Kant is correct, Kant would only have mind and its workings to deal with and no objects at all. To say that “Kant posits the relation” implies that there are the entities between which the relation is going to be posited. There must therefore be a third point of reference from which you, Levi, can look at both mind and objects and then posit a relation between them, but if all you have is mind and its active creation of objects, you have not moved anywhere and your Kant has not “Copernican revolution” at all.
I know you don’t seem to like to be bogged down in specifics here, and you probably think I’m nitpicking and slowing you down, but unfortunately I see such huge logical and explanatory gaps that I am surprised that you don’t…
As for ideas and their role, I’m not sure if this comment will be construed as a personal attack, but when was the last time you looked at the first critique? it’s ALL about ideas of reason, in fact, Kant’s fundamental problem is how to deal with ideas of reason. All that talk of intuitions and categories is a small step on the way to the big resolution of the problem of reason. I mean, c’mmon, I feel like an idiot reinventing the wheel here, I thought it was all common knowledge. Even a glance at the two prefaces shows that Kant is concerned with physics and mathematics as much as he is concerned with the nature of human cognition. Epistemological concerns are means to an end, I’m afraid in your vigorous rejection of Kant you forgot what that end is. Again, I’m not saying you should spend time and read Kant and produce a large scholarly hermeneutical treatise, I am saying that in order to reject someone as complex as Kant, you might want to make sure it’s not just some abstract straw man called “correlationism” – and finally:
However, as the Ontic Principle and Latour’s Principle dictate, there is no transportation without translation which entails that there can never be unilateral relations among entities in this way.
Excuse me? As the principles dictate? if I remember correctly, you simply proposed your principle and then mentioned Latour’s without any deduction, without any argument that your principle is true. Now after you’ve dogmatically proposed your principle, you are using it as an argument against Kant? “There can never be unilateral relations” is a unilateral statement about the relations, it’s a sophisticated yet still flawed version of “never say never” – how is this all not obvious to you and your readers? Now that is a rant!
January 16, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Mikhail, I have neither the time, patience, nor desire for this sort of discussion with you. Nor do I see anything productive coming out of it. If you really think that I’m suggesting that for Kant the mind creates objects I really don’t know what else to say. Actually I have proposed a number of arguments for the principles. How many times do I need to repeat them?
January 17, 2009 at 12:37 am
As many times as you have to in order to persuade a skeptical reader like myself. Your blatant misreadings of my comments indicate that indeed there is no real reason to continue this discussion – please go on proposing principles and then making them dictate whatever it is that they proposed as you clearly see no issue with that kind of philosophical “argumentation”…
January 17, 2009 at 1:09 am
You’re a truly frustrating ass, you know that? First, off, this is a project that is in the process of unfolding, not something that is complete and finished. Second, I did give an argument for the Ontic Principle. You’ll find it towards the end of the post “Response to a Snarky Critic” where I also talk about Parmenides. Third, the Ontic Principle is a principle in the spirit of Parmenides’ “being is” or Hegel’s “Being, pure being”, where you start from there and develop what follows from it. I have not, perhaps, shown how each of my subsequent principles follow from the Ontic Principle, but I have at least begin developing these interconnections in the series of posts unfolding these principles. Fourth, it is odd that you’re making demands for a careful discussion of Kant’s concept of reason as this is really irrelevant to the whole issue. The only relevant issue with respect to Kant is his basic thesis that objects conform to mind, not the mind to objects. You’re good when you’re making points like it only makes sense to talk about something like the Hegemonic Fallacy with respect to Kant if we have a choice with respect to the differences involved– those are productive criticisms that might lead somewhere –but when you’re making these demands to deal with all sorts of intricate aspects of Kant’s system you’re truly boorish and bordering on trollish.
January 18, 2009 at 9:10 pm
[…] ideas, under the headings of speculative realism or object-oriented philosophy, e.g. at Larval Subjects. The prism hasn’t gotten rectified yet for Mikhail, as illustrated there and at Perverse […]
January 22, 2009 at 7:57 pm
[…] here’s my first critique: Levi selectively emphasizes difference. And I take this to be a paradox, one that Mikhail caught a fair amount of […]
February 4, 2009 at 3:02 pm
[…] After reading Larval’s post about the hegemonic fallacy and thinking about object oriented philosophy and Bruno Latour I came up with the thought that what […]
February 5, 2009 at 1:14 am
[…] named Struggleswithphilosophy, Edward proposes the sort of analysis necessary for avoiding the Hegemonic Fallacy and demanded by object-oriented philosophy. Meanwhile, Carl, over at the amusingly named Dead Voles […]
April 29, 2009 at 2:18 am
[…] because, with Graham, I think Latour presents a new philosophical epistemology and ontology consistent with a realist position, but which also allows us to retain the best of a critical tradition arising from sociology and Continental linguistic philosophy from the last century. It is sometimes said that you must be doing something right or original if you manage to upset everyone from all different orientations of thought. This is certainly, above all, the case with Latour. Some readers of this blog will recall that, a few months back, I proposed what I called the “Hegemonic Fallacy“. There I wrote that the Hegemonic Fallacy consists in “the reduction of difference to one difference that makes all the difference or one difference that makes the most important difference. This fallacy arises from failing to observe Latour’s Principle and the Principle of Irreduction, thereby ignoring the singularities of the assemblage to which differences from another assemblage are being transported.” A more detailed treatment of this principle can be found here. […]
May 15, 2009 at 8:16 pm
[…] would look like in very schematic forms in my post Principles of Onticology (and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). In developing this ontology it should be noted that I […]
July 27, 2009 at 11:51 pm
[…] on! Benoît, criticizing what I call the hegemonic fallacy, remarks that he’s never heard anyone defend the position that there is one difference that […]
February 19, 2010 at 2:51 am
[…] is this problem I was getting at when I proposed “the hegemonic fallacy” as treating one difference (in this case the human) as overdetermining all other […]
March 26, 2010 at 5:48 pm
[…] the Hegemonic Fallacy (and […]