Over the next few weeks I will, as time permits, be writing a commentary on Bruno Latour’s wonderful We Have Never Been Modern. In part, this is in preparation for the final release of Graham Harman’s long awaited Prince of Networks. If Graham’s study of Latour is so unique and exciting, then this is because he approaches Latour not as a sociologist, but as a philosopher. In form of reading not unlike Deleuze’s approach to Foucault or to great artists, novelists, and cinema, Harman reveals a highly original– and relevant –philosopher in his own right. Thus, extending the comparison of Graham’s Prince of Networks to Deleuze’s Foucault, Deleuze in his great Foucault book, approaches Foucault’s thought not as a series of historical or sociological analyses of various things such as madness, discipline, the human sciences, etc., but rather as the work of a great philosopher proposing a very new and highly original account of the nature of knowledge. While Deleuze certainly touches on all of Foucault’s great archeological and genealogical studies, it is this question of the nature of knowledge that is at the heart of his book. Likewise, while Graham certainly delves into Latour’s various sociological investigations, his approach to Latour is so unique insofar as he reads Latour primarily as a philosopher proposing a new ontology. In part, I am also writing on Latour as I will be teaching We Have Never Been Modern for the first time and this will help me to prepare for that course.
However, finally, I am undertaking this close reading of We Have Never Been Modern 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.
read on!
Part of what makes Latour so interesting is the way in which he resolutely avoids this fallacy in his way of analyzing the world. This can be seen in section 1.2 of We Have Never Been Modern, where he briefly discusses the perplexity with which is work and the work of other “Science studies” figures has been met. As Latour writes,
…the critics imagine that we are talking about science and technology. Since these are marginal topics, or at best manifestations of pure instrumental and caluclating thought, people who are interested in politics or in souls feel justified in paying no attention. Yet this research does not deal with nature or knowledge, with things-in-themselves, but with the way all these things are tied to our collectives and to subjects. We are talking not about instrumental thought but about the very substance of our societies. (4)
Thus, on the one hand, we have a strange study of science and technology that is not a study of science and technology, but somehow about the fabric of our society. Yet it gets worse.
‘But then surely you’re talking about politics? You’re simply reducing scientific truth to mere political interests, and technical efficiency to mere strategical maneuvers. Here is the second misunderstanding. If the facts do not occupy the simultaneously marginal and sacred place our worship has reserved for them, then it seems that they are immediately reduced to pure local contingency and sterile machinations. Yet sciences studies are talking not about social contexts and the interests of power, but about their involvement with collectives and objects. (ibid.)
In other words, these objects, technologies, and studies, while forming part of the fabric of the social are nonetheless absolutely real and cannot be reduced to politics or strategic maneuvers. Again, the situation becomes more perplexing yet.
‘But if you are not talking about things-in-themselves or about humans-among-themselves, then you must be talking just about discourse, representation, language, texts, rhetorics.’ This is the third misunderstanding. It is true that those who bracket off the external referent– the nature of things — and the speaker –the pragmatic or social context –can talk only about meaning effects and language games. Yet when MacKenzie examines the evolution of internal guidance systems, he is talking about arrangements that can kill us all… [R]hetoric, textual strategies, writing, staging, semiotics– all these are really at stake, but in a new form that has a simultaneous impact on the nature of things and on the social context, while it is not reducible to the one or the other.
Epistemology, the social sciences, the sciences of texts– all have their privileged vantage point, provided that they remain separate. If the creatures we are pursuing cross all three spaces, we are no longer understood. (5)
Naturalization, socialization, and deconstruction-semiotics, Latour proposes, without one of these approaches overdetermining the others or being that which functions as the condition for all the rest. The thesis of modernity, Latour argues, is that of a strict division between the human world and the natural world. The natural world is governed by its own principles, completely separate from the human world composed of subjects, power, language, the social, etc. Yet everywhere we look, Latour observes, we find hybrids, networks, relating these things together in one continuous fabric. Hence the lower portion of Latour’s diagram to the left, where beneath these two pure worlds of nature and culture, we instead have zigzagging and intersecting lines connecting all of these elements together. As Latour writes in the beautiful opening paragraph of We Have Never Been Modern,
On page four of my daily newspaper, I learn that the measurements taken above the Antarctic are not good this year: the hole in the ozone layer is growing ominously larger. Reading on, I turn from upper-atmosphere chemists to Chief Executive Officers of Atochem and Monsanto, companies that are modifying their assembly lines in order to replace the innocent chlorofluorocarbons, accused of crimes against the ecosphere. A few paragraphs later, I come across heads of state of major industrialized countries who are getting involved with chemistry, refrigerators, aerosols and inert gases. But at the end of the article, I discover that the meteorologists don’t agree with the chemists; their talking about cyclical fluctuations unrelated to human activity. So now the industrialists don’t know what to do. The heads of state are also holding back. Shouldn’t we wait? Is it already too late? Towards the bottom of the page, Third Would countries and ecologists add their grain of salt and talk about international treaties, moratoriums, the rights of future generations, and the right to development. (1)
“Once again”, Latour writes, “heads of state, chemists, biologists, desparate patients and industrialists find themselves caught up in a single uncertain story mixing biology and society.” All of these things are tied together in networks that cannot be neatly separated and where we cannot claim that there is one world of nature completely independent of politics and another world of culture where these questions of the political and the social emerge. However, in making this claim, Latour is not making the claim that the natural world is a product of the human or that it cannot exist apart from the human. It too is real, but is also woven in with our social networks. Latour will go so far as to argue that nonhuman objects are actually actors in our social networks or in collectives that contain both humans and nonhumans. I’ll discuss this in greater detail in my next post.
Latour’s thesis, then, is that we cannot neatly separate the questions of epistemology, discourse analysis, and sociology, compartmentalizing them and maintaining their purity. Philosophy, for example, is not simply a set of questions and texts, but is also instutitions tied to the politics of the state, the discipline of human bodies, connected to a broader culture and material world, etc., etc., etc. For this reason, Latour proposes to approach the analysis of modernity from the standpoint of anthropology. For unlike sociology that tries to neatly separate the social from, say, the natural, or discourse analysis that brackets the referent, or naturalism that tries to bracket the social and linguistic, ethnography, according to Latour, has always understood that these things form a tightly woven fabric. As Latour writes,
This [situation of hybrids] would be a hopeless dilemma had anthropology not accustomed us to dealing calmly and straightforwardly with the seamless fabric of what I call ‘nature-culture’, since it is a bit more and a bit less than a culture. Once she has been sent into the field, even the most rationalist ethnographer is perfectly capable of bringing together in a single monograph the myths, ethnosciences, genealogies, political forms, techniques, religions, epics and rites of the people she is studying. Sender her off to study the Arapesh or the Achuar, the Koreans or the Chinese, and you will get a single narrative that weaves together the way people regard the heavens and their ancestors, the way they build houses and the way they grow yams or manioc or rice, the way they construct their government and their cosmology. In works produced by anthropologists abroad, you will not find a single trait that is not simultaneously real, social and narrated. (7)
Latour’s scandal is to approach our culture through this sort of anthropological lens, rejecting the thesis that modernity constitutes a break where such networks and intermixing do not apply to us.
Larval Subjects . 
April 29, 2009 at 8:02 am
[…] Speculative Realism workshop in Bristol: one by Ben Woodard and another one by Andrew Osborne. Levi Bryant also has a nice post up on Latour’s We Have Never Been […]
April 29, 2009 at 12:08 pm
In your considerations of Latour, you might be interested in looking at Anna Tsing’s account of friction (see her book of that same title) as manifest in the deforestation of Borneo.
You might also want to bear in mind that Latour would perhaps be understood anthropologically as one in a line of people who have tried to bring an ethnographic gaze back upon us.
April 29, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Honestly Levi, hyperbolically, in your one page of writing I have found more “unique and exciting” study of Latour, then I did in the whole of Graham’s book (minus the last chapter, which may be provocative). Most of the book was really banal recapitulation in summary of positions, which certainly are helpful and recommended for a introduction to the concepts in Latour, but, in themselves as explications are anything but sparkling. I think that in academia there is a tendency to be either rather profuse with praise, or biting in criticism, seldom just straight-shooting. As exciting as it is to consider Latour as a philosopher (and I do find it exciting), Graham’s book seemed rather light fare, basically setting up his appropriation of it for his own metaphysics. To compare the quality of thought and investigation there with Deleuze’s treatment of Foucault is really out of place. Just an opinion.
April 29, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Kevin, you know nothing about hagiography, do you?
April 29, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Mikhail,
You are hilarious.
April 29, 2009 at 10:14 pm
I think to fully explore your point, Kevin, you need to write a series of posts outlining exactly how hilarious I really am (series of posts is the latest craze in the blog writing, I’ve noticed)…
April 29, 2009 at 10:49 pm
You’re pretty hilarious, until it comes to Kant. Then you’re funny in a different sort of way.
April 30, 2009 at 3:27 am
I’m eagerly awaiting Harman’s book, and also looking forward to more of your analysis of Latour. But while I’ve been very influenced by him myself, once the initial excitement of We Have Never Been Modern wore off I was left feeling there’s too much slipperiness and even sloppiness in his arguments. The overall philosophical move is brilliant and necessary – performed more dramatically by him than by others (though I prefer Donna Haraway’s more explicit politicization of the same themes). But, in a kind of Gallic cafe style, I suppose (nothing wrong with Gauls or with cafes, of course), he relies on too many straw figures to make points that don’t require those straw figures. That’s why I think I ultimately prefer his more empirical work, where he substantiates the theorical arguments by showing their practical value. Much of the ANT community seems to have moved on to a plurality of “post-ANT” methodological moves (see, e.g., John Law’s wonderful “After Method”).
But for all his influence in certain fields (science studies, geography, anthopology), Latour has not really been studied as a philosopher by philosophers – so I’m glad to see this thread emerging.
April 30, 2009 at 3:42 pm
ai,
I think this is right. Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern is more like the work of Nietzsche than, say, Meillassoux’s After Finitude. It’s a work you read for concepts and different trajectories of thought, not necessarily careful and rigorous argumentation. It’s a shame John Law’s book is so expensive.
April 30, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Law’s book is not really philosophical, actually – more ‘philosophy of social science,’ with a good argument supported by some very good examples, but I don’t know what philosophers would make of it. My review of it (along with Latour’s Reassembling the Social and a few other things) can be read at http://www.uvm.edu/~aivakhiv/Social_nature.pdf
April 30, 2009 at 6:48 pm
LS wrote:
“I think this is right. Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern is more like the work of Nietzsche than, say, Meillassoux’s After Finitude. It’s a work you read for concepts and different trajectories of thought, not necessarily careful and rigorous argumentation. ”
I have a hard time seeing this with Meillassoux’s work, which seems to have inspired a lot of people but comes up shaky on the details, exactly as you suggest with Latour. But with Latour’s work, it seems as though a hard-core realism would rely on a hard distinction between in-itself and for-us that Latour doesn’t seem prepared to accept, at least not in We Have Never Been Modern. I can see the argument that the culture-nature or thiking-being relations are just certain relations among others, and not in that sense unsurpassable, but just as with Meillassoux, that begs the question of just what it is we’re thinking when we’re thinking something such as it is without us thinking it. I hope to check out Harman’s book soon and see how he deals with this…
April 30, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Frank,
I don’t care to repeat the whole debate over correlationism, but I will say that I think you’re misconstruing QM’s claim here in your final sentence. Nowhere, as far as I can tell, is M suggesting we’re “thinking something without thinking it”. Rather, he is claiming that the thing that we’re thinking is not dependent on our thought of it in the case of the ancestral. That’s an entirely different claim. As a longtime reader of Kant and the tradition he’s targeting– indeed, I’d describe myself as a recovering correlationist –I haven’t yet seen any convincing arguments that he’s misconstruing correlationism. Rather, just as Kant targets Hume at the heart of his philosophy, QM is targeting the key thesis of the correlationist position. Now, whether or not that argument holds up under scrutiny is another question entirely. I do think, however, that it is deeply refreshing– and healthy for Continental philosophy! –to see a philosopher arguing in the “old style” of a Hume, Descartes, or a Kant, rather than spinning his argument through a massive hermeneutic analysis of various texts from the philosophical tradition. Too often what we get these days from our Continental thinkers are either a) arguments from authority (Husserl says this, Hegel says that, Lacan says this) or b) arguments over texts rather than what texts are about, i.e., the nature of the world. Continental thought really does look a lot like Scholasticism endlessly pouring over Aristotle and other great Scholastic thinkers such that the world outside these texts disappears.
April 30, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Levi,
I think you misconstrued me, I didn’t want to hijack this thread by getting into an argument about the basic validity or coherence of Meillassoux’s project. I did not say that Meillassoux said we could “think something without thinking it,” what I said was he wants to think something such as it is without us thinking it, and that line I actually got from his book, although I can’t give you the page number right now (if it becomes important, I’ll find it). I only brought this up because it seems that Latour, at least in that particular book, is after something else that might not be fully satisfying for the speculative realist.
I agree that the return to the “sachen selbst” is always a good thing, and too lacking in continental thought these days. As for whether Meillassoux misconstrues (or unfelicitously invents) correlationism, I think that would be a wonderful thing to debate, although perhaps not on this thread, since as I said I didn’t intend to hijack it. As fruitful as the debates have been recently, they’ve centered around Kant, but I think a good argument can be made that Heidegger does not fit the correlationist mold (although I wouldn’t call him a realist either in just the way Meillassoux wants to use the term). I’m not sure if I’ve seen the “correlationist thesis” formulated unambiguously…perhaps you could either direct me to where you’ve seen it formulated on one of your other threads, and I could respond there if I wish, or you could start a new thread about it if you like? Again, I don’t want to repeat the whole debate either, I’ve read a lot of it on these blogs lately, I’d rather just find what more is to be said, not for the sake of polemics, but for the sake of thinking and knowing. Feel free to decline this invitation, I’m not trying to hit you with a “Gotcha!”
My point about Meillassoux here was mostly that, it seems even you beg off on a lot of the details of his argument, except the diagnosis of correlationism and the desirability of realism, so it seems more loosely inspiring than anything. And what I take exception to most in Meillassoux’s work is the characterization of correlationism–I disagree that it’s accurate, it’s like a composite photo that shuts off certain options and interpretations to make its point (sort of a mixed metaphor, I know). Of course, this type of thing is as old as the history of philosophy itself, so I’m not trying to bum you out about it…
April 30, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Frank,
If you go into the archives of this blog you’ll find four posts on Meillassoux that analyze his argument in great detail. I don’t want to get into a discussion about Heidegger, but I find the thesis that somehow the thinker that rejects science as “enframing” wouldn’t fall into these traps. Harman’s treatment of Heidegger aside, I think the big H guy is one of the worst offenders where these issues are concerned. All that aside, I don’t think you’re accurately characterizing Meillassoux’s question or position. As I mentioned over at Speculative Heresy, in the end I don’t think these shifts will come down to argument. Rather, I think these shifts in Continental thought, should they occur, will come down to simply ceasing to pose questions and do philosophy in a certain sort of way. Just as the Moderns did not “refute” the Scholastics, but simply stopped asking questions in the way they asked questions and doing philosophy in the way they did philosophy, while also employing all the techniques of rhetoric to paint the schoolmen in an unpalatable light, I think something similar will ultimately happen with the dominant trends of phenomenology and linguistics inflected postmodern thought in Continental thought.
May 1, 2009 at 12:49 am
I think you’re right, and that’s what we see happening (if Speculative Realism is indicative of a new trend in philosophy). It seems like a normal way for a transition to happen, I agree. For that very reason, though, it leaves certain things undealt with or elided.
I think I’ve read all the posts about Meillassoux, my point was that I don’t think there is a pithy thesis that can be ascribed to all so-called correlationists. A lot of times it comes down to statements about the mind constituting reality or the primacy of the subject that don’t really work for Heidegger. And I disagree that Heidegger rejects science or equates it with enframing. I don’t really want to argue whether he’s an “offender,” though, I’m sure he is in a lot of ways. My point is that, even if this is a normal way for a paradigm to shift (if indeed it is shifting), there are still things to be pocked over, and that for the sake of asking about the things themselves, not just for philological or hermeneutic reasons.
I understand if you’re a bit shell-shocked from the way these debates have gone lately, and we don’t have to get into these questions on a thread about Latour. I don’t necessarily want to debunk Meillassoux or revive a tired debate, I just question the accuracy of the “correlationism” handle as it stands, whether or not it is useful for articulating a new position.
May 1, 2009 at 1:40 am
Heidegger talks about science in these terms in “The Question Concerning Technology” and his lectures on Nietzsche. While anecdotal, I’ve always encountered a strong “Luddite” temperament among Heideggerians where science tends to be equated with metaphysics and ontotheology. All of that aside, I think it’s interesting to note that Kant himself doesn’t refute dogmatic philosophy, nor does he give a fair shake to the thinkers he’s targeting in the second half of the critique. What he does do is present a way of posing problems and questions differently that dissolves certain prior philosophical questions and debates rather than refuting the arguments of those positions. If we were to imagine ourselves all living in the midst of Kant’s time sitting around in a Salon, the defenders of the correlationist move in our current context would be defenders of, say, Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, whereas the defenders of Speculative Realism in our current context would be the defenders of Kant. We can imagine the defenders of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza arguing passionately against the new Kantians, their eyes bulging, veins popping out of their necks, vigorously dismissing Kant for not writing a refutation of Descartes, Leibniz, or Spinoza on the order of Leibniz’s attempt to refute Locke in his New Essays on the Human Understanding. They would be outraged that Kant begins with the “unsupported thesis” about the necessity of knowledge requiring the dimension of intuition. They would marshal all sorts of arguments in support of innate ideas and analytic a priori reasoning, mocking the Kant-supporters for just not “understanding these arguments”. When the Kantians would point to this or that passage in Descartes, Leibniz, or Spinoza that supported their characterization of the arguments, they would resolutely deny these passages and even reject textual support as evidence in the debate despite having called for it before. In the meantime, the audience in the salon, witnessing the arguments and exhausted by the endless disputes between the Cartesians, Leibnizians, and Spinozists, and impressed by the ability of the Kantians to simply dissolve these problems would side with Kant and move on asking new sets of questions and dealing with new types of issues.
May 1, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Heidegger never says science=gestell, or dismisses science. What he does say is “science itself does not think,” by which he means that science–as it should–operates from out of a predecided stance toward beings. In the process of doing science, a scientist may “think”–in H’s sense–and do so partly on the basis of scientific findings–but this would not, for Heidegger, be science qua science. Anecdotally, yes, it’s probably true that many Heideggerians are anti-science. This doesn’t seem to mean as much to me as it does to you, because now we are talking about the doxa accreted to a philosophy, and not the philosophy itself.
Kant dissolves problems by offering up an entire system that leaves no place for them. Meillassoux dissolves problems by declaring that there will be a system or position without offering much in the way of details–where is the theory of time/temporality, or the account of primary qualities? Both things are announced but not worked out. And all you seem to take from the book is a diagnosis–“correlationism”–and the declaration that this illness must be cured. I disagree with the diagnosis–I don’t think there is such a thing as “correlationism,” at least not as it is described by Meillassoux–and your answer is that problems have been dissolved. I find that answer lacks relevance to anything I’ve said.
May 1, 2009 at 5:48 pm
I don’t see how a quote like the following squares with Meillssoux’s account of Heidegger and ancestrality:
“By contrast, a material thing–a rock or any item for use, like a chair–has no world; its mode of being is devoid of any comportment toward a world. This kind of being is merely extant. What is extant is of course one of those beings toward which we can comport ourselves. This being may be extant within our world, it may belong to what we come across in the world and be an innerworldly being; but it does not have to be that way […] Physical nature can only occur as innerworldly when world, i.e., Dasein, exists. This is not to say that nature cannot be in its own way, without occurring within a world, without the existence of a human Dasein and thus without world. It is only because nature is by itself extant that it can also encounter Dasein within a world.”
May 1, 2009 at 5:56 pm
The claim that science doesn’t think is bad enough. That aside, Heidegger does claim that the essence of science is technology.
May 1, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Meillassoux’s analysis here is well supported by Heidegger’s analysis of the worldless, the poor in world, and being-in-the-world in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. There Heidegger clearly analyzes the being of the rock and bees relative to Dasein’s being-in-the-world. In other words, extant entities and animals are measured relative to Dasein’s world.
May 1, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Heidegger may say that the essence of modern science is technology, but this is a historical claim and not anti-science per se. I’m not sure why you think the claim that science doesn’t think is “bad.” When Heidegger says science doesn’t “think,” he means that science qua science does not bring the Ereignis or the event of presencing to language. This may be wrong, or even just nonsense, but I’d be interested to hear which and why, or whether you’re simply interpreting the statement out of context as a condemnation of science, which it is not.
May 1, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Meillassoux seems to be claiming that for the “correlationist,” an arche-fossil is retrojected, constituted ex post facto, or inserted into a fictive “past” by the thinking-being correlation (which is sometimes sloppily equated with mind-nature or subject-object). This is absolutely, categorically, 100% false as a claim about Heidegger, as borne out by the above quote.
As for whether extant beings are “measured relative to Dasein’s world,” I have no idea what this means the way it’s formulated. What Heidegger does think is that “world” gives us access to things. What he does not think is that it constitutes them, or creates them. “Being” is the opening up of possibilities, the opening of a space of sense where beings can meaningfully appear. Being does not create beings.
This is “correlationist” in some ways, in other ways not, which is why I think the “correlationist” handle is ill-formed.
May 1, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Meillassoux does think this is the logical conclusion of the correlationist position, though almost no correlationist, save Husserl, would explicitly claim this, i.e., Husserl’s claim that Nature cannot a condition for consciousness.
The point about Heidegger’s sorting is simply that beings other than Dasein can’t be formulated in terms of their own positive characteristics, but rather in terms of their degree of worldhood relative to Dasein. With respect to your remarks on the “opening of a space”, etc., where beings can appear, would you be willing to argue that beings are the condition for Being in the sense that Being is open as a result of natural processes such as those described by neurology or quantum mechanics? In other words, would you be willing to argue that these are the conditions under which Dasein can meaningfully appear insofar as they cause Dasein?
May 1, 2009 at 8:58 pm
First, Heidegger. I have not yet seen an argument that doesn’t distort Heidegger that argues that the logical conclusion of his position is temporal retrojection. In fact, far from arguing for a particular theory of temporality, Meillassoux argues from an already implicitly assumed theory of temporality in order to make this point at all. After all, the entire notion of ex post facto constitution or retrojection makes no sense unless I already have a particular notion of a linear time that would be more primordial than phenomenological time.
Beings other than Dasein can indeed be characterized by their own positive characteristics, this is what science does. Nowhere does Heidegger say that science is false or that its object domain is fictive or (unlike Kant) merely phenomenal. This is why “correlationism” is an inapt straw man, although it may be a fruitful one for Speculative Realism and I may be voicing the effete concerns of the wrong side of the salon.
May 1, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Now, the second part of your post takes me beyond Heidegger, since you asked what -I- would argue. This is of course more difficult, since you’re asking me to actually take a position. I would argue that in a sense yes, these beings are a conditon for being, but I cannot fully grant neurology or quantum mechanics the transcendental role you seem comfortable giving them, for several reasons. The primary one is that each of these discourses assumes a limited object domain (from which everything expelled is either bracketed or condemned as unreal or epiphenomenal), and occupies a normative field that cannot be meaningfully grounded in the field itself that is in question without circularity or question-begging. In other words, there is still the question of truth, which cannot be reduced to knowledge. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think these fields talk, with a degree of probablility that I would hope is high, about real things as they are in themselves. That doesn’t mean that I think the empirical has no transcendental role. But it cannot be given the sole transcendental position. To sum up, I think the question of truth is irreducible and uncircumventable, but that doesn’t mean I think human beings are actually magical supersensible truth machines who constitute the outside world with their mind-lasers.
May 1, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Sorry, I’m using “truth” to designate the semantic-existential normative field(s) within which there can be knowledge.
May 1, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Frank,
I think your second post here about quantum mechanics and neurology is reflective of exactly what the realist is objecting to and is exactly what Meillassoux is describing as the object of his critique. At any rate, this is mostly a rehash of the Kant debate but now in terms of Heidegger. I’ve already stated my positions and have no desire to repeat that whole debate.
May 1, 2009 at 9:23 pm
My second poet is not reflective of “exactly” what Meillassoux is objecting to, since he is objecting to the truth-machine with its mind-laser, i.e. the “correlationist” who thinks the subject constitutes the object, or that the Earth’s accreting was retrojected, whereas I agree with Meillassoux that this is nonsense. I agree that this may not be enough to put me in the realists’ good books, however. But, OK, we don’t have to debate this any further, thanks for your time.
May 1, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Quoting from Meillassoux:
Compare this passage with what you wrote:
The sequence Meillassoux describes could be easily replaced with your response arriving at the same conclusion. You are basically claiming that statements that pertain to a world independent of humans– or in your Black Forest venacular –are meaningless such that every entity in the world implicit includes a reference to the human in such a way that we cannot literally say that the world is “like that” apart from humans. Y’all get all worked up when this is pointed out because you simultaneously want to bat your eyelashes and say “we believe in neurology too! etc”, but it’s all too clear where you really stand and where your position logically leads. The correlationist’s answer to these questions is a bit like the answer of the recent Miss America contestant that wanted to have it both ways regarding gay marriage. “It’s real but not really!” Not only is it a matter of clear deductive inference from these claims themselves, but it is clear in terms of how philosophy is practiced by correlationists. The fact that we do not find discussions of the role that things like neurology play in the “opening of Being” indicates that implicitly the correlationist finds these things irrelevant to the question of Being. The correlationist thinks that they can blithely talk about the conditions under which beings can show or manifest themselves (Heidegger’s aletheia) without having to look at any of these pesky empirical details. What would someone have to implicitly believe in order to proceed in such a way? They would have to implicitly believe in an idealism in which things such as synapses and neurotransmitters are not real conditions capable of undermining the claims the phenomenologist makes about the nature of how the given is given. Them’s just the shakes.
May 1, 2009 at 9:43 pm
I would also like to point out that the position you’re advancing is no less question-begging than the position you’re attributing to the neurologist. It assumes certain things about givenness and consciousness and then proceeds to read the world in those terms. The realist, by contrast, at least has the good graces to strive to verify his claims in an experimental context, allowing for the modification of his position as new discoveries contradicting previous claims are discovered. Here Laruelle on the question-begging nature of transcendental philosophy is well worth the read.
May 1, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Or to put it differently, the realist position only appears question begging because you’re cutting out the experimental practice that functions as premises in arriving at its inductive conclusions, i.e., you’re treating it as a body of free floating propositions not grounded in a practice.
May 1, 2009 at 9:53 pm
No, I think the Earth really, actually, truly accreted 4.5 billion years ago. My answer to Meillassoux is yes, yes, yes, no ifs, ands , or buts. Of course, I think this statement is revisable, based on empirical findings. I don’t think that statements like this derive their validity solely from universal intersubjective verification (nor do a good many of M’s “correlationists”, its hard to keep up with the shell game).
I also think that statements like this are possible to make based on norms of discourse (which allow objects to appear, but don’t constitute them), a delineated object-domain (the creation of which doesn’t invent what’s real, but decides what counts as real), and a historical bindingness of certain types of discourse (which doesn’t produce what’s true, but mediates between various truths and determines how much weight they are going to have for us).
I also think that empirically-discernible phenomena are conditions for the possibility of any of the above happening. I just don’t think one can determine the norms of discourse about empirical phenomena solely with recourse to those phenomena themselves without falling into paradox, question-begging, circularity, and confusion.
May 1, 2009 at 9:55 pm
“The realist, by contrast, at least has the good graces to strive to verify his claims in an experimental context, allowing for the modification of his position as new discoveries contradicting previous claims are discovered.”
What in the real self-evidently dictates that this is a good thing?
May 1, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Then why doesn’t your philosophical practice reflect these convictions on your part? Why do all these points about accretion, physics, biology, neurology, etc., fall out of the correlationists discussion?
May 1, 2009 at 10:44 pm
I’m not sure what “my philosophical practice” is that you’re talking about, and I don’t think pointing out that “correlationusts” don’t talk about these things, while valid in itself, does all the work you want it to. I think I can agree that these things could be talked about more to fruitful effect, however. Everybody can’t do everything, but I think the experimental data you are fond of can tell us important things that impact the way we think philosophically; I don’t think philosophy should carve out a hermetically sealed transcendental realm for itself. That’s just speaking for myself, however. I’m not saying that, say, Husserl would agree with me (he would not, although many modern-day Husserlians would).
May 1, 2009 at 11:11 pm
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May 2, 2009 at 12:25 am
I guess I really don’t see this distribution of labor thesis as an excuse. I am not, of course, suggesting that a philosopher should be a physicist, neurologist, biologist, chemist, mathematician, anthropologist, economist, engineer, psychoanalyst, etc. But a philosopher should, at least, be well acquainted with what is going on in these fields. Compare Heidegger’s intellectual background with that of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and more recently Deleuze, Badiou, and even Foucault. Does it come as any surprise that Heidegger comes to raise doxa (everydayness) to the level of a transcendental structure that would legislate everything else? Here we have a guy presuming to speak about Being (always with the capitals) who knows next to nothing about anything. This guy is asking the questions of “fundamental ontology” that would be prior to all of the “regional ontologies”, yet seems to believe he can ignore all of these regional ontologies. Despite the fact that he read Aristotle every day, it seems to be that he failed to learn the most fundamental lesson of Aristotle with respect to observation and the natural philosophers. No wonder Carnap was exasperated in their discussion.
May 2, 2009 at 2:24 pm
I like that little scenario about Kantians and anti-Kantians arguing it up in a “salon” – as you know, Kant’s philosophy in fact was very much debated with much heat and mostly in epistolary exchanges. However, to claim a parallel (even if for the illustration’s sake) between QM’s little book, or “speculative realism” that consists of four/five very different philosophical approaches (even if united by some earning for new philosophy) and Kantian establishment is really stretching it. I know you believe that this is a real new breakthrough in philosophy that we will remember for a long time, but it seems to only exist on the blogs and in small gatherings, I don’t see much real change in philosophical circles a la Kantian revolution. Plus, interestingly enough almost none of the issues from your imaginary scenario were in fact discussed vis-a-vis Kant’s new philosophy…
May 2, 2009 at 10:52 pm
I don’t really have much more to say on all this, I feel like I was partly agreeing with your appeal to science in my last post, and there’s no real interesting philosophical argument to be had about the “distribution of labor,” since our disagreement there is a matter of degrees. I just reread your last post, though, and will make a couple of small remarks, which you can ignore or respond to as you wish–in Being and Time-era Heidegger “everdayness” is an existential, but one that largely keeps us from having an authentic relation to beings. “Sein” is always capitalized because every German noun is always capitalized, so there’s no points to be scored there, and many translations of Heidegger do not capitalize “Being” (and the ones that do, do so to differentiate Sein from seindes, not to deify being). Heidegger’s methodology in BT is hermeneutic, which means that he doesn’t just concoct transcendentals to legislate everything else, but begins from what he thinks is the factical situation and tries to read off structures which are again revisable with reference to facticity. On the other hand, once we accept that this is Heidegger’s methodology, you are probably correct that empirical findings get short shrift and should be brought into consideration. I need to think about this more, but I’m sympathetic to what you’re saying.
Carnap was frustrated with Heidegger on the basis of a logicism that also has little to do with empirical findings, since grounding logic in the “real” or in empirically verifiable phenomena is psychologism, which is precisely what the logical/semantic tradition, at least since Frege, militated against.
May 2, 2009 at 11:50 pm
Frank,
The point is that Heidegger is making extremely strong claims about the nature of mind, life, human beings, etc. In my view, such claims are to be regarded with suspicion if they don’t take reference to psychology, anthropology, and so on. Having once been a Heidegger addict myself, I know what Heidegger was up to I just object to how he proceeds. As for the Carnap-Heidegger discussion I have a different read on what was going on there. While I certainly find Carnap’s logical positivism repugnant, I can see why someone such as Carnap gets frustrated when encountering someone like Heidegger. Here you have this arch-academic thinker who more or less only recognizes philosophical texts and his phenomena such that when you enter into discussion with such a person they are completely unable to even recognize the problem being pointed out to them because this sort of empirical work doesn’t even exist in their philosophical universe. I sympathize with this sort of reaction among empirically minded folks like Carnap because I see the same thing occur all over the place in these discussions. The Continentalists smugly look down their nose at the empirically minded while not having the faintest clue about the nature of what they claim to be grounding. Meanwhile, the woman in her lab-coat who has spent hours and years concretely working with, say people suffering from various neurological disorders, treating people suffering from various psychological problems, working with various forms of technology that help her to better understand what’s going on, etc., etc., etc., can only shake her head in wonder at the generalizations and claims being made without recourse to any real observations save the introspection of the philosopher in question.