Mikhail, over at Perverse 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, I’ll choose to ignore his snarkiness, assuming that it arises out of a place of befuddlement rather than hostility, and instead take this as an opportunity to further clarify some of the claims I’m making. Mikhail begins by remarking that,
In a series of posts, Larval Subjects is trying to articulate a sort of new philosophical approach that, he argues, is necessary to consider. Since posting a comment is usually a matter of an immediate reaction, at least for me, it is easier for me to tackle an issue 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, 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.
What is this a “danger”? The readers are in danger, I am assuming, of making their assessment of this “object-oriented philosophy” in terms of old philosophical habit of separating the in-itself from for-us. Actually, it seems as though it is the danger for the new philosophical position, not so much the readers, the danger that from the very beginning it will have to address the issues of already-posed philosophical problems. I don’t see how this is a danger at all or even a problem – why shouldn’t a “traditional view” expect, in fact, demand explanation of any “newcomer”?
Mikhail is right that I could have made this point more clearly. What I was targeting in my post entitled “The Hegemonic Fallacy” was variants of the nature/culture, science/culture, objective/subjective, and fact/value divide that often characterizes Modernity. For those who work implicitly within these categories, it is often assumed that if one rejects one side of these dichotomies then they must be affirming the other. If, for example, you reject subjectivity you must be endorsing objectivity. If you reject culture you must be endorsing nature or science.
read on!
When we work within these dichotomies– dichotomies that are often unconscious in our thought like the glasses Heidegger describes in Being and Time that are so near they are further than the far –it often happens that one side of the dichotomy is used to explain the other side of the dichotomy. In semiotic terms, one of the sides of the dichotomy is marked and the other is unmarked. To illustrate my point, compare the difference between evolutionary psychology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The evolutionary psychologist chooses the side of nature as his explanatory principle. Nature is the marked term. All allegedly cultural formations are then explained in terms of evolutionary adaptations. I here refer to cultural formations as being “alleged” because, from the standpoint of the evolutionary psychologist these cultural practices are in fact natural results of evolutionary adaptations. By contrast, the Lacanian treats culture as the marked term within the binary, thereby explaining allegedly natural human behaviors as, in fact, the result of cultural formations such as the signifier.
Now, if I say that object-oriented philosophy faces this particular danger, then this is because talk of objects tends to be assumed as falling on the side of nature, objectivity, and science as opposed to culture, society, and subjectivity. This is a result of our Modernist inheritance that divides the world into two kingdoms. In the post to which Mikhail refers, my immediate aim was to head off this assumption from the outset, underlining that the aim of object-oriented philosophy is not to choose nature over culture, objectivity over subjectivity, or science over culture. Rather, what object-oriented philosophy seeks, at least in my formulation, is an ontology that is rich enough to make a place for a variety of different types of difference, whether these be cultural differences or natural differences, without reducing one form of difference to another form of difference. My version of object-oriented philosophy is interested in the gears of things, how they fit together, how parts work together and at odds with one another, and is thus opposed to principles that contain all the other differences in advance. For example, my version of object-oriented philosophy looks dimly on both the Lacanian tendency to reduce all other beings to the product of signifiers, but also looks dimly on the evolutionary psychologists tendency to trace all cultural formations back to natural principles of evolutionary psychology. In my view, both of these forms of thought would be examples of the Hegemonic Fallacy. By contrast, an object-oriented approach would be robust enough to recognize both that the movement of the planets about the sun is not simply a product of signifiers, and that all sorts of cultural processes were involved in this discovery. In other words, it would recognize the reality of both the movement of the planets and the cultural processes. It would think the assemblage and assembly of these differences without reducing one difference to another. Where the one approach looks for one principle, one ground, from which all the rest arises, an object-oriented approach instead advocates a flat ontology where beings exist in assemblages without one element of that assemblage defining all the rest.
Quoting more from my post, Mikhail goes on to say,
Here the grumpy tradition is speaking for itself:
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?”
Is that not a legitimate question? Just because one might not like it or consider it bothersome to explain oneself, or be annoyed by the obligation to respond to such questions, does not mean that one can simply dismiss the questions. How are these issues addressed?
In order to stave off any suspense, yes it is a legitimate question and I don’t believe I’ve ever said otherwise. Nor, I think, have I simply dismissed the question or attempted to “wish it away” as Mikhail has suggested. When Mikhail originally posted an equally snarky response to my diary insulting my knowledge of Kant, my very first response to him was that indeed, I need to develop a stronger argument against correlationism. Moreover, a number of arguments against correlationism can be found throughout my diaries devoted to the development of my object-oriented metaphysics and in the various discussions that have ensued following those posts. What makes Mikhail’s own response so interesting is that rather than suggesting ways in which a stronger argument might be made, he simply dismisses the attempt altogether and “defends tradition” against those “young upstarts”.
Rather than suggesting that Mikhail is dishonestly representing my actual position in suggesting that I am simply dismissing or wishing a way the arguments that underlie the various forms of correlationism or philosophies of access, the principle of charity dictates that Mikhail must simply be unaware of the arguments I’ve made. On the one hand, I have evoked Roy Bhaskar’s arguments surrounding transcendental realism, while on the other hand I have continuously evoked my argument developed around Hegel’s critique of the in-itself in The Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic. I have, however, conceded that I am not myself entirely convinced by these arguments and am still working on the issue.
Quoting me again, Mikhail goes on to say,
LS argues, or at least boldly states, that the above-mentioned “traditional” question misconstrue the main “problem”:
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…
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.
Ok, I like all this whole “metaphysics that declares that one difference makes all the difference” stuff, but I am afraid that I have absolutely no idea what it all means. Let’s take Kant as presented in the above paragraph: “[the relationship between] categories and intuitions as conceived by Kant [is] a less extensive form of the hegemonic fallacy insofar as matter and intuition still contribute some difference” – let me be honest here, I have absolutely no clue as to what this means.
Here, finally, we’re getting somewhere. Rather than impugning my understanding of Kant and situating the issue around hermeneutics or interpretation, making the unreasonable demand that in order to criticize another position one must first give a detailed analysis of that position rather than simply referencing its root claims (one wonders why this charge isn’t made against Kant’s references to Hume in the Critique), Mikhail finally raises a point that might have to do with philosophy. Mikhail admits that he doesn’t understand what it is that I’m saying (it’s a shame he didn’t simply start with this in our discussion). I will set aside a more detailed discussion of just what I’m getting at with my Ontic Principle until later, and instead focus for a moment on the Hegemonic Fallacy.
Let us, for the moment, set aside philosophy and instead take an ordinary historical example. I take this example from Latour’s Irreductions. A missionary returns from the New World and declares that his success in converting the “savages” was the result of the word of the Bible. Here the word of the Bible is treated as the ground of the entire success. This would be an example of the Hegemonic Fallacy. One difference, in this case the word of the Bible, is treated as the difference from which all the other differences (the conversions) arise. What the missionary fails to notice is that he would not have been able to successfully convert the “savages” without the soldiers that forced the savages into church, the scientists that diminished the value of their “idols”, the engineers that created their guns, etc. The Hegemonic Fallacy occurs when we attribute the movement of a car to pushing the gas peddle. Again, the strategic aim of the Hegemonic Principle is to draw our attention away from ultimate foundations that purport to function as the ground of all other differences to inter-linkages in an assemblage.
We see something similar in Kant. The matter of intuition or sensation is treated as– to use one of Graham Harman’s words –“unformatted matter”, matter without structure, that only takes on form through the imposition of categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of intuition. Like a cookie cutter that imparts form to dough, the matter of intuition is treated as purely passive. Here we have one difference contributing all the difference, such that sensibility is simply a place holder like a variable in a mathematical function. Likewise with the relation between form and matter in Aristotle’s physics, or God and creatures in Leibniz’s metaphysics. I don’t know how to say it more clearly than that. The strategic aim of the Hegemonic Fallacy is to give voice to all differences, without one difference overdetermining all the rest. In other words, those who seek to avoid the Hegemonic Fallacy seek to examine the interrelationship of assemblages of beings, each contributing their differences, investigating how these difference vie with one another giving rise to various beings and forms of organization.
Mikhail goes on to say,
This is pretty clear – not one privileged difference, one difference that makes all the difference, but many differences, as many as possible, I suppose. Now look, I’m not very up on the recent philosophical jargon, but I always thought that something like “proliferation of differences” would eventually result in no difference clear enough to discern any difference.
I agree that we must avoid a “night in which all cows are black”, where we can only speak of chaos or noise without differentiation. I have spoken of this often on my blog. However, the thesis that there are many different types of differences or that there are a plurality of differences is entirely different than the declaration that there is only chaos. Following Bergson, I hold that chaos is a sort of transcendental illusion where one form or order is measured by another form of order and found lacking of that order.
By way of example as to what I’m getting at with the Hegemonic Fallacy, I simply want to avoid those forms of thought where, for example, it is held that everything about a person can be explained by their DNA (another form of the Hegemonic Fallacy). DNA, of course, contributes an important difference, but so do rates of development whereby proteins reach one another, the availability of materials in the environment for the assembly of cells, the altitude at which a body develops, etc. Likewise, not only does DNA make a difference, but the body that develops in part based on a particular set of chromosomes also makes a difference that can’t simply be reduced to DNA. That body is dependent on its DNA but can’t be reduced to that DNA. It too “makes a difference”. This is far from a night in which all cows are black, though admittedly it can get pretty complex.
I have said this before, but the aim of “more difference” as oppose to the aim of “less difference” only makes sense if there is a choice, i.e. the traditional reduction of all differences to one difference (that makes all the difference) is problematic if it is an actual choice to emphasize one relation and ignore all the others – that it is not the case is easy to show from Kant: we do not choose to be confined to the proverbial submarine, we are whether we like it or not, he provided arguments, all I see in this new object-oriented philosophy is a frustration with the situation, but no real way out as of yet.
Once again, I agree, it only makes sense if there is a choice. Any philosopher making such a claim is obligated to make an argument demonstrating this, and I believe I have made a few arguments along these lines. Additionally you’ll find yet another argument showing how this might be possible in my book Difference and Givenness. Moreover, I would argue that Kant is caught in the midst of a confusion that results from the Epistemic Fallacy. Kant believes that questions of being can be reduced to questions of our knowledge or access to being. However, the ontological cannot be reduced to the epistemological. It is one thing to develop an account of how beings appear to us, it is quite another to argue that this is what beings are. Now Kant himself is caught in something of a contradiction. On the one hand he restrict being to appearances, yet on the other hand speaks of the in-itself. Yet if he evokes the in-itself he is already evoking a signification of being that isn’t simply for-us.
Mikhail remarks further that,
But maybe I misunderstand the phrase “to make a difference” – admittedly, there might exist some sort of a wordplay here between “making a difference” as “changing” and “making a difference” as literally “creating a new difference” – in another place LS uses a difference formula of “one difference that truly matters” – how to make sense of all of this?
And
I am personally all about signing hymns, and I sense some passion behind LS’s pronouncements, but I fail to see what I am most desperately looking for, that is, an argument: my main problem not just with the citations, but the whole excitement over this new object-oriented philosophy is a simple (and arguably grumpy) attitude: wishing that it be so does not make it so.
I have purposefully left the phrase “there is no difference that does not make a difference” vague and underdetermined to allow the greatest possible scope or plurality of differences. I do not wish to formulate an ontology that predelineates or predetermines what sort of entities there are. That aside, let me attempt to show that the Ontic Principle is not simply a wish. Now, I confess that the Ontic Principle is, for me, a beginning point. That is, the question is if we grant the Ontic Principle, what implications or consequences follow?
However, for those who aren’t convinced by such beginning points, I’ll try another strategy. Perhaps Mikhail will accept this as an argument– even if it’s a bad argument; a weak argument is still a weak argument, after all –and will refrain in the future from suggesting that I’m merely wishing things away and instead address my actual arguments. I wouldn’t, after all, expect anything less from someone who so tirelessly defends the virtues of close reading.
So here goes. Suppose that we ask ourselves what constitutes the most basic thing we can say about any being, object, or entity. Parmenides asked this question and returned with the answer that “being is and non-being is not”. I applaud Parmenides for this answer because it is truly modest. Who could deny that being is and non-being is not? Well, with my Ontic Principle, I am attempting a similar gesture. What, I ask myself, is the most basic thing I can say about any being? And when I ask myself this question, the answer that returns to me is that every entity differs. Not only does an entity differ from me and from other entities, but it itself differs. It is a difference or a number of differences. Now, I think this is a modest principle, a minimalist principle. I do not say that beings are monads or forces or appearances or forms or sets or expressions of the will to power or syntheses of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real or effects of differance. I leave all these further determinations aside for the moment so as to not prejudge the issue. Beginning with the Ontic Principle I simply state that beings are difference. Due to the minimal intension of this proposition I am thus able to establish a maximal extension for the reference of this proposition, guaranteeing in advance that no entity will be excluded. Try, if you like, to deny that minimally beings are difference. I don’t see how anyone can. If the principle is guilty of anything it is not lack of argument, but rather triteness. However, from this beginning point difference can be further and further specified allowing us to examine a variety of different relations and beings.
Taking Parmenides as my guide, I can now, based on this modest, trite, principle, begin to ask what follows from it and develop reductio ad absurdem arguments against contrary positions just as Parmenides developed reductio ad absurdum arguments. Just as Parminedes asked what would happen if non-being is, I can ask what can happen if beings weren’t difference. For example, perhaps I can begin to construct an argument against the primacy of epistemology in philosophy since the 17th century. I can, for example, point out that wherever the thinker strives to articulate an epistemological principle, a principle of knowledge, they are evoking a difference. On these grounds, it can be said that the question of difference as such is more basic than the question of epistemology which instead asks what the most valuable difference is.
Likewise, in response to the correlationist I can point out that the object of knowledge either differs from knowledge of the object or does not differ from the knowledge of the object. If the object of knowledge does not differ from the knowledge of the object, then the object of knowledge is not distinct from knowledge and is therefore nothing at all. For how could something be that does not differ? However, if the object of knowledge differs from the knowledge of the object, then it follows that questions of ontology cannot be reduced to questions of epistemology or that being cannot be reduced to our knowledge or access to being. In other words, through this difference we have already passed from the domain of epistemology to the domain of ontology proper, where we are no longer talking about being for-us but the being for-itself. We might discover that we cannot say a whole lot about this being for-itself, but we might also discover that we can say a great deal once we begin to explore it. Such would be yet another argument against correlationism.
Mikhail goes on to say,
I will call it the Downer Principle. So according to the Downer Principle the statement such as “the Ontic Principle is, above all, a modest principle” just cannot be so because one proposed that it is, especially since it “asserts that to be is to differ and to produce difference.” I mean we are dealing with old, very old, philosophical concepts that are reinterpreted and rethought which is terrific – trust me, I am all about it – but to say that something determined what it is “to be” and somehow it is also “modest” is not doing it for me. However, my issue here is that – admittedly to simplify a bit – we are taking words like “being” or “difference” and we basically say: “Old philosophy sucks, man! It’s oppressive with its arguments and its systems and its hegemony, I wish we could do something different!” And then, of course, anyone who suggests that old ways might have their reasons is a defender of the authority of tradition, a sort of a downer who demands at least a resemblance of an argument, not just poetic pronouncements.
Mikhail must not think very highly of me to describe my motives in such a way. Or perhaps, insofar as Mikhail is interpreting my motives based on what would reasonably lead him to write things such as what I’m writing (how else does one interpret the motives of another?), perhaps he’s giving us insight into his own secret thoughts and desires. Whatever the case may be, it is odd that he would make such a charge against a blogger who has written so widely on various figures in the history of philosophy on his blog, who has shown so much respect and delight for the history of philosophy. That aside, I assure Mikhail that my motive in working these things out doesn’t simply arise from the feeling that “the tradition of philosophy sucks” and “the desire to do something different”. I notice that Mikhail gets a little defensive like this whenever the tradition of commentary in Continental philosophy is challenged. One gets the sense that for him philosophy is the practice of intellectual history. One wishes that he would simply admit that this is what he enjoys and not berate others for doing other things. Just as Mikhail gets the sense that those caught up in new trends of philosophy just think “the tradition of philosophy sucks, man”, it’s hard to avoid the impression that Mikhail is deeply threatened by any philosophical engagement that isn’t simply an engagement with the history of philosophy or a book report.
At any rate, the issue that motivates me here arises from a set of quite traditional philosophical concerns pertaining to questions about the nature of reality, the nature of being, questions of knowledge and truth, etc. More specifically, in the domain of political thought, I am especially concerned by a set epistemo-metaphysico assumptions that tend to ignore the role played by anything inhuman or non-cultural, and that reduce all social relations to language, culture, etc. In my view, questions of change become irresolvable when posed in this way. I invite Mikhail to use his hermeneutic skills in reading my paper critiquing these positions to get a better sense of what I’m after. I see these positions as direct heirs of Kant’s “Copernican” revolution. Finally, there is the simple delight and fascination with these questions themselves, with following the lines of a thought, and allowing that thought to go where it will even if it isn’t ultimately grounded. One risks, of course, reinventing the wheel and developing nothing of interest. However, the case is no different in that dusty tradition of philosophical commentary. We get a lot of bad commentaries filled with cliches and then a few luminous, highly valuable commentaries. Why not try one’s hand at philosophy?
I think Mikhail for giving me the opportunity to clarify some of my views and acknowledging that some of my assertions are poetically expressed.
Larval Subjects . 
January 15, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Let me be the first to reassure you that it was all meant in good (even if snarky, that’s just how I write) spirit, I hope others will take it as a friendly challenge, not mocking. Again, a lengthy engagement solicits an appropriate response – I will see if it moves the masses, I’ll try to find time to respond after I get back from
important things I do all dayoh who am I kidding, I’m going skiing…January 15, 2009 at 2:25 pm
I consider Mikhail a friend, I’ll choose to ignore his snarkiness, assuming that it arises out of a place of befuddlement rather than hostility,
well this is exactly what Baloo the bear would say about Bageera
January 15, 2009 at 4:39 pm
does “all beings are difference” equate with “each being exists via how it differs from all other beings”? and then how would you answer Harman’s argument that saying that an object is nothing but its relations to other objects equates to saying “there is nothing real in the world” because “the tree passes the buck of its reality to roots, branches, birds, and snakes, and these entities in turn pass the buck of their reality back to the tree and other neighboring pieces and objects. Everything will be mutually dependent on everything else. I know this sounds fresh and liberating to most people, but it’s not– it slides straight into monism”?
post was 2009/01/12/more-on-objects/ and I’m sure you’ve read it already. I feel like D&G’s emphasis on speeds and slownesses comes into play here but I can’t quite articulate how that gets away from monism.
January 15, 2009 at 4:42 pm
LS,
Not to get into the middle of anything here, but I was wondering if what you are trying to achieve with your object-oriented philosophy is not in some way akin to what Donna Haraway is attempting with her “ becoming-with” in _When Species Meet_ (2008). If you haven’t read it, I’ll leave you with a few nuggets from her work.
She states that:
“… I remember that “becoming with” is “becoming worldly.” _When Species Meet_ strives to build attachment sites and tie sticky knots to bind intra-acting critters, including people, together in the kinds of response and regard that change the subject – and the object. Encounterings do not produce harmonious wholes, and smoothly preconstituted entities do not ever meet in the first place. Such things cannot touch, much less attach; there is no first place; and species, neither singular nor plural, demand another practice of reckoning” (287).
And early on:
“Figures help me grapple inside the flesh of mortal world-making entanglements that I call contact zones. The Oxford English Dictionary records the meaning of “chimerical vision” for “figuration” in an eighteenth-century source, and that meaning is still implicit in my sense of figure. Figures collect the people through their invitation to inhabit the corporeal story told in their lineaments. Figures are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material – semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another. For me, figures have always been where the biological and literary or artistic come together with all of the force of lived reality. My body itself is just such a figure, literally” (4).
Albeit, Haraway is working from a biological, cultural studies, and ecological viewpoint, but it seems to me that her main argument, that we should begin to recognize that any “becoming” is always a “becoming-with” and any “becoming-with” is also a “becoming-with” is similar in some way to your idea of the importance of difference and act-ual objects.
At any rate, the above is more an observation than an argument, so carry on.
January 15, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Forgive me I’m just a dumb anthropologist, more conversant with ethnography and ethnology that the writings of philosophers. I would suggest that a good way to frame the philophical question anthropology worries has to do with differences and similarities of human beings and that perhaps vice versa the anthrpological question that philosophy worries is much the same. Some I’m not sure about priviledging difference in quite this way, though I agree you’re onto something. As I know little of Lacan, let me put it this way. The evolutionary psychologists seem to assume that because we are a single human species we must be all alike, even though as say our students reading about the kaluli demonstrated we’re not all alike all the time. Yet we are alike enough to recognize some aspects of kaluli life–like trying to do what’s best for one’s kids even if you or I wouldn’t think feeding semen to boys precisely the way to go about it–that we have to reframe the difference to include similarities if we are to go about trying to further understand it. All too often the evolutionary psychologists and those like them, by ignoring these differences which also involve similarities, reduce adaptation (which since the Gestaltists has been reasonably clearly an active process) to an activity of and within the environment. If I’m making any sense here, and not just rumbling around in my own paperbag, in the case of the evolutionary psychologists one might have to as why Rappaport’s acccount in Pigs for the Ancestors was a failure, why he knew it was a failure and how we come to grips with the existance of entities we, here, do not experience as part of getting to know how we are like other people.
January 15, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Hi Ejypt,
Thanks for the comment. These are good questions. First, with Harman, I hold that the universe is “lumpy”, which is to say that entities enjoy autonomy from one another. I thus do not see the universe as composed of one substance such that entities are merely expressions of that one substance. If there is a One-All, it is not the One-All of a single substance or a monism, but is a set or collection of the heterogeneous and autonomous. As Deleuze occasionally puts it, the whole is a part alongside all the other parts that must itself be made. In short, the parts and the whole are not identical to one another. This is one of the strange consequences of my metaphysics where an entity can both contain other entities and where these other entities are also autonomous or independent of that entity. At any rate, following Cantor’s and Russel’s paradoxes, we cannot form a set of all sets, so the whole is always a construction.
Moving on to your question about difference, the Ontic Principle states that there is no difference that does not make a difference. This is different from the claim that each entity is a function of its difference from all other entities. When we claim that an entity is a product of its difference from all other entities, I think we do indeed fall into a night in which all cows are black. Indeed, we are necessarily led to a dualistic ontology, despite striving to maintain a monism, because we necessarily end up having to distinguish the world as it is as composed of diacritical differences, and the articulated world that so plainly doesn’t have this characteristic. We end up with the distinction between, for example, language (as the realm of diacritical difference), and speech (as the realm of autonomous speech-acts). Following this, I am inclined to hold that there is not a world, but worlds, not logos, but logoi.
It is certainly true that every entity differs from all other entities, but this is entirely different than the claim that every entity depends on its difference from all other entities. I suspect that right now, somewhere in the world, someone I don’t know is reading Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound. While this person differs from me, this persons existence does not depend on me nor does my existence depend on this person. Were I or this person to be destroyed, neither one of us, in turn, would be destroyed by the destruction of the other.
By contrast, I hold the position that any entity is selectively dependent on certain differences in a world. Alternatively, I hold that there is no entity that does not enlist the differences of some other entities in order to perpetuate the adventure or continuance of its existence. A tree, for example, enlists the existence of carbon dioxide, but not of the person reading Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound. This activity of enlisting differences can be referred to as the conditions of a thing. However, while all entities are situated in a world, it does not follow that they are not simultaneously autonomous from their conditions. Somehow I have to find a way to simultaneously say that it is a necessary or essential feature of any entity that it belong to a world and that an entity is also independent of its world.
In an extremely productive email exchange with Graham, I playfully quipped that he would be rather flat on Saturn, underlining the point that entities are necessarily attached to a field or conditions as opposed to his thesis that entities are infinitely withdrawn from all other objects. However, in a way Graham is right to assert the autonomy of entities as well. It is conceivable that Graham could, perhaps, explore Saturn given the proper technology. For example, while I cannot move about at an ocean depth of three thousand feet because I would be crushed by the pressure, I can move about in a submarine at this depth. In other words, entity shares a great deal of flexibility with respect to the relations it maintains with its conditions or field, and this warrants the conclusion that entities possess autonomy.
Conversely, it can also be said that not only do other entities make selective differences on an entity, but entities make differences on other entities. I hold that there is no entity that does not make a difference on some other entity. I take this as a corollary of the thesis that all entities are situated in a world. However, once again, it must be emphasized that an entity does not make a difference on all other entities, but only some other entities. If this were not the case, then my Principle of Reality would be entirely superfluous. The Principle of Reality states that the degree of power or reality possessed by an entity is a function of the extensiveness of the differences it makes. If all entities make differences on all other entities, then there would be no distinguishable difference or degree of difference possessed by individual entities. At any rate, the point is that all entities affect other entities in some respect or capacity.
Now, if I’ve understood Graham correctly, this would be a major difference between my position and his. On the one hand, Graham– and he’s to be commended for this –holds that because entities are infinitely withdrawn or vacuum packed it is entirely possible to conceive of an entity that is thoroughly withdrawn from a world and any relation to anything else. For me, by contrast, there is no entity that is not attached to a field. Likewise, on the other hand, for Graham it is entirely possible that there are entities that make no difference on other entities. Again this is because objects are vacuum packed and infinitely withdrawn and therefore capable of withdrawing from all relation or interaction. By contrast, I hold that there is no entity that does not make a difference to some other entity.
All of this is something I need to work out in much more detail, but hopefully this is a start in showing how it is possible to simultaneously conceive of relational being that isn’t swallowed up in a monistic being on a dark night where all cows are black.
January 15, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Hi NrG,
Nice to see you commenting. I haven’t read Haraway since undergrad, which is going now on 15 years. However, from what you describe here, there would be a lot of crossover between an assemblage based ontology and what Haraway is getting at. The important caveat would be that the relevant relation isn’t human/non-human but simply assemblages regardless of whether or not they include humans. In other words, by the Ontological Principle, humans would possess no special or privileged place within being and there would be assemblages that didn’t involve humans at all. Of course, I didn’t take you to be saying anything other than this.
January 15, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Jerry!
Great to see you! First, let me say that the ethnographers, as opposed to the sociologists, are good guys in this whole stories. Where the sociologists all too often work within a strict divide between the social on the one hand and the natural on the other, the ethnographers generally recognize that things are assembled together, associating the natural, the political, the economic, the religious, etc., etc., etc. The ethnographers recognize that there’s an assembly where things cannot be demarcated in such nice and tidy compartments. Following Latour it could be said that if sociology is possible it can only be as a study of associations. These associations are not simply associations among people but include the non-human as well.
On to your point about differences and similarities, I adopt the Principle of Irreduction, which I also draw from Latour, which states that nothing can be reduced to anything else. This is a corollary of what I call “Latour’s Principle” which states that there is no transportation without translation. I do not at all disagree with the thesis that we must attend to similarities. However, in rendering one thing similar to another there must be a translation or labor that takes place that produces work. In the case of those things that we refer to as human, it takes work to produce similarity. We see this in the classroom every day where students labor to translate or produce some similarity with their material and where professors struggle with a similar problem with respect to their students. Similarity, in my view, is thus a hard won product that requires a great deal of work both for the theorist studying something foreign and for people themselves. This process of producing similarity is ongoing and, I think, always precarious. Other beings are constantly being enlisted to fall under the equivalences being created or produced, and these other entities often misbehave and refuse to be silenced under the equivalence. What I object to in something like evolutionary psychology is not so much the assertion of equivalences or similarities, but their treatment of these equivalences as metaphysical primitives that are already there, rather than the result of a laborious process of translation that produces them. In one respect, I think, we can look at the ethnographer as being deeply interested in, among other things, how a particular group of people produces similarities within a heterogeneous set of people. Bateson seems to describe something akin to these processes in, if I recall correctly, his analysis of the idea of national character types in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Likewise, we can think of developmental DNA sequences and the production of cells as a natural process in which something strives to produce similarities, with a number of enlisted environmental factors pushing back in their own way as well, never quite agreeing to fully be enlisted, but always asserting their own ends. Hopefully that makes some sense.
January 15, 2009 at 9:12 pm
[…] responding to Mikhael at Perverse Egalitarianism, Dr. Sinthome addresses my same question about how the proliferation of difference would not in some way result in no […]
January 15, 2009 at 9:44 pm
LS, this is all fascinating to me and I can see why for some sorts of work it will be productive. But I’m a little perplexed by the “Hegemonic Fallacy.” Since all the illustrations you offer are examples of reductionism, which you also mention directly in relation to Latour, I wonder if the hegemonic fallacy is in fact something different than reductionism; if so, what would be an example of such; and if not, what difference (other than the pleasure of naming or, heaven forbid, the deferral of hegemonic logocentrist gesture, how’s that for a pastiche!) is made by calling it so?
January 15, 2009 at 10:53 pm
[…] Resistance, Speculative Realism Bryan, over at the marvelous Velvet Howler, weighs in on my response to Mikhail, remarking that, I want to give Dr. Sinthome as much credit as is due to him, but if his […]
January 16, 2009 at 12:02 am
LS, I do think it makes sense, and for me its pretty helpful.
For those not familiar with Pigs for the Ancestors (and why should you be), Roy Rappaport went off up a mountain in New Guinea to live amongst a group called the Maring if memory serves. He took all sorts of fancy gadgets to measure calories while people walked up and down the mountain etc….all very scientific. He came back and provided a cybernetic account in which ecologically speaking (using a not very complicated western sense of ecology that is) all entities were accounted for. So he said, periodically when there get to be too many pigs and the pigs get to be too unruly knocking down fences around gardens and stuff like that the maring have a big feast notionally for the ancestors. So its all pretty transparent, except for the ancestors who are dead and we don’t need to take up the problem of what the consequences of our lives coming from outside ourselves might be. Its a mastepiece of cultural ecology, and unfortunately a kind of model for evolutionary psychology and cultural materialism.
But it does not work as a description because there is no good ecological reason to let the pig population get to be so large that they endanger the gardens so no ecological reason to have feasts at some given time instead of some other given time, i.e. in LS’s terms no translation. And there is the wee problem of the ancestors (not to mention save in passing a whole set of stuff about pig fat moving thru the system against semen).
Rappaport’s later work influenced, in the ways that talking with another counts as influence, by Bateson takes up ritual (perhaps more powerfully that anyone else)and what I understand LS you are calling production, meaning the generation of difference and similarity which comes into being, lumpy as it may be (and I like that lumpy business) as the pertinent similarities and differences come into being….so pigs, ancestors, sweet potatoes, Maring themselves all together…..anyway I digress into ethnograpy as is my want.
January 16, 2009 at 12:18 am
I notice that Mikhail gets a little defensive like this whenever the tradition of commentary in Continental philosophy is challenged. One gets the sense that for him philosophy is the practice of intellectual history. One wishes that he would simply admit that this is what he enjoys and not berate others for doing other things. Just as Mikhail gets the sense that those caught up in new trends of philosophy just think “the tradition of philosophy sucks, man”, it’s hard to avoid the impression that Mikhail is deeply threatened by any philosophical engagement that isn’t simply an engagement with the history of philosophy or a book report.
You are so observant, Levi, I’m sorry you are so sensitive as to take my honest attempt to engage you – my way, not your way – as some sort of offense against your intelligence or an insult. Trust me, if I wanted to insult you or mock you or make any sort of disrespectful run-along mocking commentary (surely, to mask my own discomfort with all the new real philosophy), I would have done so. I honestly thought better of you. I guess I better stick with my “book reports” and my philosophical trivia. One hopes that you eventually mature and can take some (even if completely unjustified) criticism without psychoanalyzing the critic’s person in response. And here I thought that maybe if I put out some of my concerns out, I don’t know, a real conversation might take place.
January 16, 2009 at 12:38 am
Mikhail, pot meet kettle:
Couple that with an entire post that suggests I’m simply rejecting all that tradition, wishing it away, and ignoring it, when I’ve constantly said otherwise. Finally, consider your final paragraph where you discuss what is philosophically valuable, leading to only one possible conclusion: that was is being done among the object-oriented philosophers is not philosophically valuable and is only a mere wishing things away. You seem surprised that inflammatory rhetoric such as this might produce some ire in response. What do you expect when you call someone’s work worthless and based on wishing things away. Flowers? I’m glad you didn’t intend it that way, but it certainly came off as an outraged rant, psychoanalytically speculating about my motives and desires and situating those working on these questions as a bunch of hipster know-nothings that simply don’t want to bother with the history of philosophy. As for not being able to take criticism, it strikes me as notable that you received a 4000+ word post trying to carefully respond to the non-ad hominem points you were making that didn’t speculate about my motives or desires. Given that that’s a pretty substantial commitment of time and thought I would take that as a sign of respect and regard for one’s interlocutor. What I object to is the unreasonable demand that we first engage in an elaborate interpretive discussion of a philosopher’s position prior to engaging in any sort of criticism. Kant didn’t do it that way with Hume, Spinoza with the scholastics, etc. I also object to the notion that people are just “throwing out the tradition” rather than simply engaging with the tradition and continuing to do what philosophy has always done… Work through these questions.
I apologize for offending or disappointing you; however, it’s also true that whenever questions have come up expressing discontent with the way in which current American Continental philosophy is practiced and the way in which it privileges commentary, you’ve reacted in a visceral manner. It seems that for you there isn’t room enough in the academy for both good commentary and more direct philosophical engagement. I think there’s a real problem with how we are training our graduate students and the manner in which we’re locking them within this way of doing philosophy in the classroom, continental conferences, and continental journals. I don’t think it’s at all healthy. Am I trying to banish the art of commentary or work on the history of philosophy? Absolutely not. As someone who only teaches from primary texts and who’s written his fair share of commentaries, I belong strongly in deep engagement with the history of philosophy and education that acquaints students with that history. However, there is room for both.
January 16, 2009 at 1:04 am
1) notice the “we” in the citation above – I meant if we as people who think about philosophy etc etc, I am not sure why you took it as a personal attack at all. If you email me with more evidence of my supposed personal attacks, I will be more than glad to explain them to you.
2) I thought that over the time we’ve encountered each other online, you would have learned a bit of my style. Of course, that’s maybe assuming too much, but I think I had a nice exchange with Harman over at Speculative Heresy and I did not use any sort of a different style at all – repeat: this is how I talk and write, that’s what blogs are for, to express your opinions in any way you like, it was not “snarky,” you took it to be “snarky.”
3) Again, it was not about you or about “psychoanalytically speculating about [your] motives and desires,” it was about your openly expressed motives and desires, the ones you blogged about and the ones I quoted in my post – I seriously doubt you mean it at all, how can you survive any criticism at all if every time someone even raises an issue, you jump to conclusions that it is directed at your person? I mean seriously – again not meant as a personal insult – this is the first thing I learned in college when it came to discussing philosophy – I’m genuinely puzzled that we are even discussing these things.
4) I appreciate your 4000+ post and I would really like to respond to it, I’m just not sure if it will result in more psychoanalyzing of my person or more sulky responses. The reason I posted my “reaction” to begin with was to suggest that I am uncomfortable with things like proposing a principle without any sort of an argument – why is the Ontic Principle a better principle than my Downer principle? etc etc In addition, your language is very confrontational and inspired by some sort of a battle you are fighting, I really don’t care, no offense, I just want to talk some philosophy now and then.
5) Since I’m numbering things, and five looks much better than four, I have to say that online communication is frustrating and often prone to misinterpretation – if I say I was not attacking your person, I mean it, but I was attacking some of the things I perceived you’re doing, you responded to them, thanks, I appreciate your time and effort. [Bush is saying goodbye on TV, I must witness this historic event]
January 16, 2009 at 1:12 am
… however, it’s also true that whenever questions have come up expressing discontent with the way in which current American Continental philosophy is practiced and the way in which it privileges commentary, you’ve reacted in a visceral manner. It seems that for you there isn’t room enough in the academy for both good commentary and more direct philosophical engagement.
good lord, I should probably just go away but seriously – I react viscerally to everything! there were onions in my soup the other day, you should have seen me then. I think there is plenty of room for all kinds of philosophical exercises, when did I ever say otherwise? Why can’t I react “viscerally” to things I disagree with or find annoying like the recent Kant-bashing as if all the present philosophical problems are his fault? Seriously, can we just hug it out or something, otherwise I won’t be able to sleep and all. May I remind you that this is just blogging, just shooting some shit about philosophy, where did all the fun go?
January 16, 2009 at 1:17 am
Thanks for the response and for the interesting posts.
In your response, however, you state, “The important caveat would be that the relevant relation isn’t human/non-human but simply assemblages regardless of whether or not they include humans. In other words, by the Ontological Principle, humans would possess no special or privileged place within being and there would be assemblages that didn’t involve humans at all.”
This is exactly what I am trying to wrap my head around. For it seems to me that even in Haraway’s world of assemblages, or becomings-with, the human is still privileged. This shows through in her incessant need for ethical treatment of non-human beings. Which leads me to question, what (if any) sort of ethics would apply in a philosophy where there only exists differences?
Do we need some sort of hierarchy of differences according to impact (length and violence)? Or can we just assume that there exists a general/generic ethics that applies equally to all things?
January 16, 2009 at 2:15 am
Hugs Mikhail. Yes, I’m a prickly porcupine.
January 16, 2009 at 3:11 am
Seriously, this show of affection is disgusting – can I get back to being an asshole? I will try to address the legitimate issues you raise in the response tomorrow in a separate post…
January 16, 2009 at 7:32 pm
“Again this is because objects are vacuum packed and infinitely withdrawn and therefore capable of withdrawing from all relation or interaction. By contrast, I hold that there is no entity that does not make a difference to some other entity.”
I have a question, which suggests perhaps an empirical problem (not a metaphysical one?) for Graham’s idea that entities are sometimes capable of withdrawing from all relation, “vacuum-sealed”. The question is: if we actually tried to name an entity that withdraws from all relation (which I understand for Graham would be any entity whatsoever), then isn’t that entity already making a difference, entering into some kind of relation with other entities (namely, we who name this entity, who are now focusing our thought and changing our discourse in some way based on this entity)?
I suppose Graham’s solution to this would be to say that when we describe an entity (which is infinitely withdrawn in its executant tool-being) we’re creating a new entity on the inside of a third, namely “me-describing-this-entity”. I’m just wondering, and maybe this point isn’t valid, isn’t it problematic to say with Graham that an entity can exist outside of any relation to other entities and without making any difference, since when we describe such an entity it’s already making a difference and entering into relation?
January 16, 2009 at 8:55 pm
I’m clearly out of my depth here and deficient in the foundations of the arguments, and I’m even more objectionable because I’m not interested enough to expend much effort curing my ignorance. But as near as I can tell from the allusions here this idea of vacuum-sealed entities looks a lot like a kind of solipsism minimally generous enough to grant irrelevant patents of existence to irrelevant other existents. If it seems like it might be fun or good practice to stoop to an undergrad explanation, how am I wrong? Or am I ‘not even wrong’?
January 16, 2009 at 10:27 pm
“..as near as I can tell from the allusions here this idea of vacuum-sealed entities looks a lot like a kind of solipsism minimally generous enough to grant irrelevant patents of existence to irrelevant other existents.”
This isn’t quite right, as far as Graham Harman’s account of vacuum-sealed entities or tool-beings goes. The idea of tool-being is an ontological notion that applies to all entities, not just some irrelevant class. And the Heideggerian insight taken up by Graham- that an entity’s being, in its execution, is more than just its relation to human consciousness (or than its relation to other entities, as well)- actually makes a lot of sense, rather than being some mysterious, obscure form of object-solipsism. But instead of speaking for Graham Harman, maybe it’s better to quote from one of his papers available online:
“Beings are tool-beings. To refer to an object as a “tool-being” is not to say
that it is brutally exploited as means to an end, but only that it is torn apart by the universal duel between the silent execution of an object’s reality and the glistening aura of its tangible surface. In short, the tool isn’t “used”; it is. What saves the bridge from being a mere pile of iron and asphalt is not the fact that people find it convenient, but the fact that any pile of anything exerts some sort of reality in the cosmos, altering the landscape of being in some distinct way. If this reality happens to be useful for people, so much the better. But natural mountain-passes and natural obstacles have no less equipmentality than an artificial tunnel. Zuhandenheit is an ontological term.”
Click to access OOP1999.pdf
January 16, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Mike (@20) as you asked an empirical question, any living entity, even an austicist one, responds to its environment, perhaps not the way we do, but responds noe the less. In at least some cases, though my cats and a lot of critters with nervous systems suggest these shouldbe pretty common, this also means that living creatures anticipate. Alternatively, one way of talking about what living entities are is that they are systems which can somehow reproduce themselves and which therefore cannot be isolated from the world within which there life emerged and from which their life comes. So I think perhaps that calling entities “vacuum packed” or”vacuum sealled” doesn’t make a lot of sense for most living entities at least. I do not know if LS has written about what I call Margaret’s Pepper Principle or not. If he hasn’t (and LS please let me know), I’ll recount it. If he has then if he’d provide a link, I’ll provide commentary if needed.
January 16, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Hi Jerry,
I’ve never written on Margaret Pepper’s Principle, nor have I heard of it. It would be great to hear a bit.
January 16, 2009 at 10:43 pm
“So I think perhaps that calling entities “vacuum packed” or”vacuum sealled” doesn’t make a lot of sense for most living entities at least.”
First, calling entities “vacuum sealed” is Graham Harman’s notion. Another term he uses is “tool-being,” an ontological notion that tells us that entities withdraw from their relations, their being is never exhausted by their relations with other entities- tool-being simply refers to the idea that entities are more than their relations, they’re also autonomous executant realities with their place in the cosmos.
And Harman’s idea here is NOT that entities are totally non-relational through-and-through, so your criticism is not really hitting the mark as far as I can tell. The idea of tool-being as I read it is simply that there a fundamental, non-relational layer of executant reality inherent in all entities. This doesn’t rule out relations. In fact, Harman develops Heidegger’s insight of the fourfold to explain how entities are both relational and non-relational.
I would suggest reading his book on this, which is called Tool-Being, or one of his many articles available online for free.
January 16, 2009 at 11:12 pm
LS, you jest. Every semester I begin every class by bringing in two peppers: a bell pepper and the pepper closest to a west African pepper. Long ago (in 1961 0r 1962) my mother, Margaret. was asked to plant bell peppers in Kaduna, northern Nigeria by the US Department of Agriculture. The first fruiting led to sweet bell peppers just as you might expect. The second fruiting of the same plants produced very very hot peppers just like all the peppers for some considerable distance around. So something in the environment and something in the underlying system conjoined to produce something I call FORM. I take this to be a general principle pertaining to everything we can observe including ourselves.
Mike, I’ll grant that the idea that entities are exhuasted by their relations may not hold. As to whether “tool being” as Mike describes it can come into being, well not one like you ar me. We have parents.
January 17, 2009 at 12:54 am
[…] has evoked Margaret’s Pepper Principle in the course of a discussion pertaining to the Hegemonic Fallacy. Although I have referenced this anecdote often here on the blog, I have never devoted a post to […]
January 17, 2009 at 1:18 am
Try, if you like, to deny that minimally beings are difference. I don’t see how anyone can.
Sorry, I meant to leave this comment earlier and I thought I did, thus assuming I already pointed out that your “argument” is not really an argument, even a weak one. I’m surprised that you take Parmenides as your guide, by the way. The above-stated proposition is easily denied – you don’t see how anyone can deny that beings are difference? Here it comes: beings are all various manifestations of the same substance, all the differences that we see are illusory, in reality, everything is one. It’s called monism. When you describe simple beings, entities, things etc, you assume a whole lot of things, assume them dogmatically and so forth. I’m sorry you’re no longer interested in discussing issues, if you’re looking for simple cheerleading, I’m afraid I’m not really interested either.
January 17, 2009 at 1:22 am
Um, there’s quite a bit more in the section you’re citing from. But no, I’m neither looking for cheerleading nor looking to continue this discussion.
January 17, 2009 at 1:29 am
Yet– and I must be a masochist –I can’t refrain from responding to your argument about monism. In order to make the claim that all beings are one and that differences are illusory you minimally need a difference between reality and illusion. That is, already within this monism difference is at work generating an inconsistency within the position that prevents it from maintaining itself.
January 17, 2009 at 1:48 am
You respond because you know that I’m not commenting to annoy you or to abuse your willingness to respond, but because I really care about the arguments and the issues, even if most of the time we manage to talk past each other, at least I am going to assume that.
You’re not really refuting monism argument – monist argument is as dogmatic as your Ontic Principle demonstration, I mention it to show that if you simply state that “beings are different” in response I can always say “no, they are not” – none is a real argument, it seems to me.
I know that there is more in your section, but it is based on the cited proposition, so if I can simply show that it cannot be shown to be necessary, I don’t have to deal with the rest of the argument. You might or might not be correct, however, in order to construct a proof you must show that it is necessary, you know all of this, of course, and yet you insist on producing arguments that even you probably would never accept if someone else proposed them.
January 17, 2009 at 2:03 am
I think the short argument I just produced goes a long way towards refuting the monist argument. It’s a variation of a Hegelian dialectical argument showing that such a monist– in this case a Parmenidean monist –already stands in contradiction between what he wishes to say and what he actually says. All you do is ask the question of whether there’s a difference between these appearances and the monistic one and the monist’s position withers because he needs that difference to get off that ground. But if he admits that difference he’s already ruined his monism.
As for the Ontic Principle… Work in progress. I’m more interested at the moment in seeing where the principle goes or what follows from it. Hopefully as it goes along, those arguments can be developed and made more tidy. Your remark about what is necessary to refute an argument is interesting because you clearly recognize that you can refute an argument by showing a premise is fails to hold up (that’s not entirely true as true conclusions can still emerge from false premises), yet you don’t seem to extend that same principle to those who are discussing Kant here and over at Speculative Heresy. Here and in the discussion there you kept demanding detailed discussions of Kant’s thought rather than simply addressing his central claim about correlationism. Anyway, I am thoroughly exhausted by this discussion.
January 17, 2009 at 2:07 am
Incidentally, in your view what is it that distinguishes a dogmatic position from a critical position? Or put a bit differently, what is it that you find so convincing about a critical position such as Kant’s, compared to a dogmatic or speculative position such as my own? What is the argument that he makes that sways you in all cases?
January 17, 2009 at 2:12 am
I don’t think I demanded detailed discussions of Kant’s thought, I simply wanted to state that I disagreed with some oversimplifications of Kant. If you read a discussion about Deleuze, for example, would you not be tempted to interfere if you saw something you thought was off or at least arguable?
The question of necessity is an important one. I admit that this exchange probably exhausted itself, however, I am still wondering how you can work with a principle before you’ve convincingly demonstrated its correctness? If you believe that you did, then by all means move ahead, but if you have even a small doubt, then isn’t there a danger of wasting valuable time?
January 17, 2009 at 2:41 am
It’s of course possible that I could be wasting valuable time, but I suspect that throughout the history of philosophy what I’m doing is the rule rather than the exception. When you read a theory blog it’s a bit like looking into a person’s notebook. You’re getting to see all of the messy experimentation, vacillation, sketches, retractions, repetitions, etc., that precede a polished work. I think, in a lot of ways, blogging is unprecedented for precisely this reason. Sure, in the past thinkers would talk to friends in person or through correspondence in hashing things out, but these friends were generally carefully chosen interlocutors who were chosen because they were simultaneously both sympathetic to the project and supportively critical of the project. Blogging differs fundamentally from this– at least the sort of blogging that I do, others use their blogs to different ends –because it opens one’s sketches up to a completely anonymous public and invite that public to collaborate in that work. Anyway, as for being uncertain about beginning points I can’t help but think of Spinoza’s Short Treatise or Leibniz’s endless drafts, Nietzsche’s notebooks, etc.
I also note that with your question, you seem to shackle everything to the epistemological or the criteria of certainty. There are a few options here. One option would be to give a demonstration or proof of the ontic principle at the outset. The drawback of this is that it seems to draw us back into the primacy of the epistemological and its endless disputes that’s characterized the last three centuries. With a few exceptions, philosophy has become more and more marginal precisely because of these disputes, of interest to only a few who call themselves “philosophers”, while in the meantime the age old project of metaphysics has been overtaken by popularizers of science in mass published books like Capra’s Web of Life, while we, who have such a hefty background of the history of metaphysics, sit back and twiddle our thumbs, engaged in our epistemological disputes that only others of our kind care about. Another option would be somewhat Hegelian in character, without being dialectical. Here the thesis would be that proof or demonstration, truth, is not at the beginning but is a result. Even Kant seems to support something like this model. You’ll recall that at the beginning of the Critique, Kant doesn’t give us a demonstration for his “Copernican” beginning point, but proposes his thesis as a thought-experiment. “Let us see whether we don’t get further by adopting the hypothesis that objects conform to mind rather than mind to objects.” The “proof” for Kant’s epistemology is not found at the beginning, but in its ability to resolve a host of metaphysical issues and problems. A third option would be to treat the ontic principle as a primitive and irreducible starting point from which one proceeds, not something one demonstrates. Here the ontic principle would be something like the Husserlian reduction or Parmenides’ “being is”, or Hegel’s “being, pure being”. It would not be a question of how you demonstrate the principle, but of what the principle entails or what follows from it. A fourth option would be akin to Badiou’s, where the ontic principle is treated as an axiom or a declaration, rather than something to be demonstrated. And, in a similar vein, a fifth option would be Deleuzian, where it would be claimed that the aim was not to demonstrate, but to produce concepts.
I haven’t chosen among these options so far.
January 18, 2009 at 9:24 pm
[…] philosophy, e.g. at Larval Subjects. The prism hasn’t gotten rectified yet for Mikhail, as illustrated there and at Perverse Egalitarianism. So it […]
January 19, 2009 at 10:36 pm
[…] Levi has stated that he has “purposefully left the phrase “there is no difference that does not make a difference” vague a… Yet, some understanding of the notion of difference implicated here is required in order to at […]
January 22, 2009 at 9:00 pm
[…] rephrased: Levi selectively emphasizes difference. And I take this to be a paradox, one that Mikhail caught a fair amount of flak for […]