I was delighted to wake up this morning– um, well, really this afternoon… I was up very late grading and have much more yet to do –to find a comment by Lee Braver in response to my post Problems of Immanence. Lee writes:
This is a really interesting topic, and one at the heart of my book. Its 2 epigraphs directly raise the issue:
“The all-decisive question… [is] What happens when the distinction between a true world and an apparent world falls away? What becomes of the metaphysical essence of truth?”
~Heidegger
And, somewhat as a response,
“Truth is a thing of this world”
~FoucaultOnce Kant closes off the possibility of correspondence with a reality that transcends our grasp of it, the notion of truth must undergo profound revision, which I take to be one of the core projects of continental thought. Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and early Heidegger all wrestled with new understandings of truth but were still entangled in the traditional sense. It was Heidegger’s later work, building on “aletheia,” that decisively broke with traditional understanding on my reading, freeing the post-modernists to experiment more radically.
Nietzsche correctly diagnosed the danger of swinging from absolute metaphysical foundations to complete nihilism (to which many relegate po-mo), which leaves the problem of how to carve out a path between these extremes. What does truth mean where there is no transcendent umpire to issue infallible rulings, or even a realm of objects existing in absolute separation from us to supply even a conceptual foothold for comparing our beliefs with their objects? In classes, I call this a “just-us-chickens” epistemology: how do we determine what’s right when it’s just us humans, endlessly squabbling? On one reading, this is what Hegel’s absolute (ab solus) knowledge teaches us.
Okay, back to grading as I’m way behind right now!
Jon, I have a lot of sympathy with what you’re sketching out–it sounds a bit like Rorty’s picture of animals making complicated noises at each other. The problem in reducing discussions to the level of causality is that normativity falls out of the picture. Builder A can respond positively or negatively to B’s bringing him a block upon A’s speaking “block,” but Wittgenstein wants to maintain the idea that B’s action’s being right or wrong is not determined entirely by A’s satisfaction or lack thereof. This correctness cannot lie coiled within the command or A’s mind, of course, but Wittgenstein frequently claims that it must still be there, somewhere (in wider society’s reactions, according to some). Now, we may want to simply jettison this evaluation; all there is is people’s interactions and reactions and the demand for over-arching normativity is just a metaphysical hang-over. My sense is that the vast majority of analytic philosophers emphatically demand retaining it, while continentals get a lot less excited over its loss. But it is something to consider.
I haven’t read Lee’s book yet, but I’m very much looking forward to it over the summer. In response to Lee’s remarks, what I’m looking for is something that retains the best of correlationism or anti-realist positions– preserving their kernel of insight –while nonetheless situating it within a realist framework. In other words, in adopting a realist position I think it would be a mistake to re-inscribe the division between culture and nature, where the “real” is on the side of nature and the side of culture and spirit is somehow something other than the real. Here I find Latour’s critique of this distinction in texts like We Have Never Been Modern and The Politics of Nature to be deeply compelling and right on the mark. Moreover, if the split between nature and culture is inscribed in this way we will eventually, as Alexei points out, find ourself back at all the questions that first motivated the Kantian position. I think this is one of the major differences that distinguishes the Object-Oriented Ontologies of Graham and I, from the realist ontologies of folks like Brassier and perhaps Meillassoux. What is needed is not a sharp reinscription between mind and world, culture and nature, but a flat ontology where all of these things are elements of the real. I have outlined what such an ontology would look like in very schematic forms in my post Principles of Onticology (and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). In developing this ontology it should be noted that I proceed experimentally in much the same way that Freud proposed the Death Drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. That is, in proposing the Ontic Principle (the principle which states “there is no difference that does not make a difference), I do so in the spirit of a hypothesis, saying “suppose we were to begin with difference as the ground of being rather than sameness or identity as Parmenides did, what would follow and how would we have to rethink our understanding of Being and beings?”
read on!
In avoiding the perils of a two world ontology divided between mind and world, I think a self-reflexive gesture is required where mind and the social are no longer seen as something other than the real, but rather as elements of the real itself that are immediately situated in the real. In other words, what’s needed is a sort of flat ontology where all beings are on equal footing rather than treating the real as a transcendent beyond that is to be reached by getting through the “filters” of the social, the linguistic, and the mental. Deleuze and Guattari nod in this direction at the beginning of Anti-Oedipus when they write,
…we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man. not man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine into an energy-machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his mouth, a sun into his asshole; the eternal custodian of the machines of the universe. This is the second meaning of process as we use the term: man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other– not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather, they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product. Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent principle. (4 -5)
While grumbling a bit at Deleuze and Guattari’s description of man as a “custodian” of everything else in the universe, I nonetheless think they get the relationship between man and nature right in this brief passage. The social and the natural are not two self-enclosed spheres operating under a condition of “operational closure”, such that the question is that of how we can relate to nature is a question of how we can escape the self-enclosed sphere of mind, culture, or language, but rather these are all elements of an assemblage that are on equal footing with one another and in immediate relation to one another. My desk is not a piece of matter that is a mere vehicle for cultural significations and “intentions”, but rather enters into an assemblage with cultural significations and intentions that are both objects themselves and related to other objects. As Alexei might say following Adorno, there are always non-conceptual differences that haunt any object.
I confess I do not understand the issue of normativity that Lee raises above. In treating everything in terms of a flat ontology, it does not seem to me that everything becomes a matter of cause and effect interactions such that normativity disappears. What this misses in my view is the fact that we have emergent systems at both the individual and the social level that have memory as one of their dimensions. Culture is, in part, a memonic system that maintains a relationship to its own past in the ongoing reproduction of itself as an object across time. As we can amply see here in the blogosphere, there are no real transcendent norms governing our interaction that we can appeal to to resolve disputes and determine the true and the false, the right and the wrong, etc. We have, as Lee puts it, the “just-us chickens endlessly squabbling”. However, that squabbling is not nothing. Rather, just as we refer to legal precedent in court, drawing on results generated in a past, that squabbling is generative of norms– if only fuzzy ones –that feed back into the network of ongoing relations, contributing to the manner in which the future of the system or network re-produces itself. In other words, in the course of these squabbles new objects are invented or produced that enter into the assemblage of actors in that network.
Larval Subjects . 
May 15, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Being in no position to make requests, and assuming that “the period of great sensitivity” (as Chinese Communists used to call it) is still on, I wonder if you could say more about what you do think of normativity. If I recall correctly, at some point of Realism Wars you have stated that you don’t see how normativity is important at all. I think I sympathize with “flat ontology” idea, in as much of it as I can understand, but I’m not clear who suggests that in “cause-effect” relationship normativity disappears – I think that the idea of “cause” that necessarily produces a very specific “effect” is very much what normativity is, no?
All these question are sincere and are not attempts to troll or anything, although I’d understand if you would rather not engage me at this point.
PS. Jon (Cogburn) and I were thinking of reading Braver’s book together later in June, I’m sure he mentioned it already, so maybe these issues will come up then and Lee can address them directly.
May 15, 2009 at 11:36 pm
Mikhail,
I don’t know that I ever made the claim that normativity doesn’t matter, but rather what I tried to say– perhaps unclearly –is that being as such is normatively neutral. A rock is neither good nor bad. It is only in relation to the domain of human involvements that the rock takes on normative value as being good or bad. My claim was that when addressing ontological issues we have to set aside questions of normativity because they belong to a distinct philosophical domain. That’s not the same as claiming that normativity is unimportant. Lee makes the remark about cause and effect in the post above. We’ll see if I can participate in the reading group. Right now I’m a bit overcommitted with two articles to write, a response to a set of reviews to write, and a review to write in addition to teaching my classes.
May 15, 2009 at 11:55 pm
I stand corrected, there were some many things discussed at once then, it’s hard to recall exactly. I think what Alexei and I were attempting to do with this issue of normativity then – admittedly, it might be an idiosyncratic use of the term – was to suggest that “good/bad” (as a moral judgment) is only one aspect of the larger issue of “the ought” – I agree that evaluative statements such as “good/bad” stone are certainly only making sense in a human domain, but I think the issue for me is, as it came out of our previous exchanges, whether it’s meaningful (and useful) to attempt to talk of normativity in terms of (an aspect of) necessity: cause must produce effect (otherwise it’s not really a cause, right?) is necessity, but cause must produce this effect might be thought of in terms of normativity, although, of course, there are all sorts of issues here which are, I think, worth tackling at some point…
If I recall Alexei’s final example or two, he was suggesting something like this: if we decided that realism is better than non-realism (by whatever means and arguments), then how is this “better” grounded? It could be more useful, or better argued, or more beautifully constructed and so on, but what is it that allows us to not simply distinguish these as various ways of evaluating a position (would that be an example of “flat” position?) but also to suggest that one is “better” (or more “truthful”), i.e. to give it a special status? Not sure if it makes sense or if I remember the last phase of discussions correctly…
May 16, 2009 at 12:30 am
Heidegger’s very first lectures from 1919 are on this exact issue. He frames it in terms of the historical/cultural sciences versus the naturalistic sciences. His Southwest School neo-Kantian habilitation adviser Rickert had defended a view where value was something added by the subject to the phenomena, and Heidegger that this gets the phenomenology upside down. We first experience a value-laden useful world and only get something valueless when we carefully abstract from this context of use. This of course becomes the tool-being analysis of Being and Time.
But with Heidegger’s stress on the centrality of Dasein, he is still doing the very thing he attacked in Rickert. “Beings” still exist without Dasein but they are without “Being,” wholely lacking the value laden world that he claimed was primary.
I think Harman and Braver (I’m only in Chapter 2 of Braver’s book, the reading group starts June 15th) both push Heidegger in different directions given this tension in his early thought. Braver describes how it is resolved though late Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. Harman’s “realist Heidegger” takes the Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit duality and sees that as operating whenever any two objects are related to one another (and this is, I think, independent of his views on substance, and hence consistent with the ontology of relations Levi defends).
Though I’m tending towards Harman and Levi’s positions (what McDowell would probably call anti-anti-realism), I think Braver’s work is essential for getting clear about the dialectical burden of such views.
In recent analytic philosophy almost all the thinking about semantic normativity is done in the context of worrying about the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradox (from Kripke’s book, “Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Languages,”). The paradox is this say you add two numbers larger than any two numbers you’ve added before. You get the correct answer as dictated by the addition function. But a skeptic says you should have gotten “25” arguing that the real function you have been computing all along is just like addition except it returns 25 for numbers larger than some x (he specifies the x as being just larger than any two numbers you’ve added before).
Now what facts are there such that the skeptic is wrong and you are right? Kripke very lucidly argues that neither dispositions, mental occurrences, nor simplicity cannot answer the question. Then he much less lucidly argues that society can somehow enter (the problem of course is that you can run the paradox on whole societies too).
To see the full scope of this, note that one can run the argument for any concept. Say I call a new blade of grass “green” and a skeptic says I should call it “red” because the real concept I’ve possessed was such that this green object was under the extension of “red.”
The early anti-Kantian Heideggerian (this is the Heidegger that I think only Graham is true to) hope is the problem of normativity only arose because we started with an impoverished non-valuative account of the world, and try to show how value can be imposed on that in some way. In contemporary analytic philosophy John MacDowell (the “Pittsburgh Hegelian”) is the only one who defends something like this view. He’s not optimally clear in part because he combines this animistic strain with the kinds of Kantian quietist moves (thinking the problems arose because of trying to talk about what we can’t talk about).
Anyhow, from the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradox most people think if you can give a coherent account of making a mistake (explaining why the answer 25 or “red” is wrong here) then you can give an account of getting it right. I take Braver’s initial comment to be skeptical about whether Graham’s Heidegger is going to be equal to doing this in a satisfying way with regards to the philosophy of mind/language.
As Mikhail has noted in other posts, part of the solution is giving a satisfying account of modality, if for no other reason that ought implies can (and not being able to do x implies not having an obligation to). Surely here Deleuze has a lot to offer (assuming I am correct from reading your posts that Deleuze offers a purely immanent ontology that is nonetheless modally robust). The quotes you gave from Deleuze on error are pretty tantalizing too.
One place I want to look further is Millikan’s “Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories.” Also Evan Thompson’s naturalized phenomenology makes similar moves. Though as I said, trying to get the relevant kinds of normativity from natural selection may not do it. I don’t think MacDowell thinks it will.
Sorry this post is all over the place. There are so many fundamental issues here, not least of which is the connection between ontology and the philosophy of language and mind. Again, my fundamental thought is that the way you guys (Levi and Graham) really do get out of the problem of the external world (that is, without the theft over honest toil characteristic of most dissolution solutions) will allow one to get out of the problem of reference in a similar manner.
But in the philosophy of language (not to mention ethics) the kinds of problems of normativity that Mikhail and Braver raise are pretty daunting.
May 16, 2009 at 3:45 am
“It could be more useful, or better argued, or more beautifully constructed and so on, but what is it that allows us to not simply distinguish these as various ways of evaluating a position (would that be an example of ‘flat’ position?) but also to suggest that one is ‘better’ (or more ‘truthful’), i.e. to give it a special status?”
Mikhail – I wish I’d been around for that particular discussion, because it’s right up the alley of what I’ve been thinking about lately. It seems to me that to say something is “better”, one is forced into saying what it is better in terms of (its context). Otherwise, it’s the normative equivalent of using a transitive verb without a direct object.
If one tries to determine what the “best” context is, one is caught in a circular kind of reasoning — which is the sort of thing that raises red flags for me.
I also think (intuitively) that making normativity a larger issue of “the ought” (rather than just “good/bad”) is going to end up being a profitable approach. In English, at least, we tend to overlook it, because we often don’t include the context in a normative statement (For example, we say “You ought to correct your spelling” when we mean, “You ought to correct your spelling if you want to get a good grade“).
In the end, I think that most of what we would call “truth” is basically normative. That is, to say something is true is to say that it’s an apt metaphor, or an accurate description, or a resonant evocation or whatever. Like in Maddy’s weird “creator world”, certain logical entailments (like modus ponens) are not true. They’re only true in the context of the particular logical system being used.
Anyway, I’m sort of thinking out loud here, but I think it’s an important thing to figure out.
May 16, 2009 at 5:23 am
Mikhail,
I would certainly be very interested in hearing an answer to such questions, but working primarily on questions of metaphysics primarily, I just don’t have answers to those questions myself.
May 16, 2009 at 1:37 pm
My initial objection was aimed at Jon’s comment, not the main discussion. I agree with Asher Kay that we’re dealing with the old problem of squeezing an ought from a bunch of is’es. Even a very rich, sophisticated notion of causality among minds, brains, words, and catfish (the flat ontology under discussion) would encounter the problem.
Jon’s brief sketch was of Wittgenstein’s builders where A says “block” and B brings him a block. The question is, what makes this response correct? Jon was leaning towards something like the idea that A’s acquiescence–a grunt of satisfaction or just not correcting or beating B–is not an indication of its correctness so much as what its correctness actually consists in. Wittgenstein repeatedly rejects this idea, which Russell entertained at one point (let’s face it–what didn’t he entertain at some point or other?). W’s objection is, if A asks for an apple because he’s hungry & B gives him a banana which then successfully sates his hunger, B’s response is still wrong. Hence this evaluative moment cannot be located in A’s satisfaction. A common thought experiment is giving someone an injection that makes them agree with you (a frequent temptation when teaching freshmen). While you have brought the person into agreement, this has not been done through rational persuasion but mere causality, a distinction that, e.g., Kant insists on maintaining.
Witt seems to have 2 answers: 1) normativity lies in the wider society’s evaluation of the exchange. Even if A shuts up, we can see that B gave him the wrong fruit and our communal reactions determine its falsity. The problem with this answer is, if an individual cannot generate these values, how does aggregating such impotent individuals confer this magical power on them en masse? 2) It lies in our trained responses to stimuli, like automatically responding “4” to the question “2+2=?” Of course, this remains causality.
As I said, I’m of two minds about this. I do see the problem, but part of me wants to say, well, so much the worse for normativity. Cravings for it are just unfortunate metaphysical hold-overs from when we were God’s children. We need to grow up and accept our status as epistemological orphans. While it’s certainly true that our practices have memories, who determines the right way to interpret and apply those past instances to a present situation (the old rule-following paradox that, as Jon points out, Kripke owns; also, Goodman’s grue & Aristotle’s phronesis).
This also relates to a possible misunderstanding I had. The discussion was about what happens to truth, or more particularly to falsity, when we dispense with the 2-worlds hypothesis. I had taken this hypothesis to mean the difference between the world as we experience it and the world as it really is (the rejection of which results in immanent ontology), but perhaps you mean the division between the really real physical world and the quasi-real subjective meanings humans project onto it (the rejection of which results in flat ontology). I take the latter to be pretty decisively obsolete. Hegel talks about Geist as having a reality, even if of a different kind from physical objects. Heidegger’s early work dealt this notion a death blow, replacing it with what I call Phenomenological Ontology–if we experience it, it’s real. This is still Dasein-centric, of course, but, as Jon points out, from the start Heidegger never takes this ontological division seriously. In his later work, he even defines metaphysics as the making of distinctions between the real and the less or non-real and his project is to overcome metaphysics.
Have I understood you correctly?
May 16, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Since my name’s come up a few times, I might as well clarify a few things. First off, I don’t quite remember the discussions Mikhail refers to, and so I don’t quite remember what context I may have made the argument concerning evaluative, normative criteria. I would say that folks like the Churchlands do in fact run into a problem of the sort Mikhail identifies precisely because their view seeks to eliminate the criteria or principles their arguments rest upon (e.g. if there’s no such thing as ‘belief,’ what sense does it make to talk about true beliefs? — and so the whole thesis concerning theory-theory simply becomes incoherent). The point here is simply that if you come up with a theory that involves a performative contradiction (in terms that mirror Kant’s Refutation of problematic Idealism: when your activity and argument rests upon conditions that you then deny), you’ve got a problem. And I take it that most forms of realism — especially the naive ones — involve something of this sort.
Now Jon is totally right in picking out the Kripke/Wittgenstein paradox as the source of the major problems concerning semantic normativity (although I’m not sure there’s any other kind, really. Everything else seems to be a sub-division thereof), and I suppose the argument I just presented concerning performative contradiction depends in large part on being able to give a compelling response to it. But contra Jon, I don’t think modality is really going to give us an answer, since, to quote Brandom quoting Sellars (See Brandom’s Between Saying and Doing and the so-called Kant-Sellars theses),
That is, normativity is the key to modality, not the other way around (According to Brandom, modality = material incompatibility, which is a function of our ability to use concepts in truth-apt manners). The question, of course, is how to make sense of the transposition.
Leaving the idea of ‘transposition’ aside, however (I’m not sure I can explain it quickly — Brandom also employs category theory….) and to switch conceptual registers, we might even say, perhaps paradoxically (but therefore in a philosophically fruitful way), that normativity is ontologically primary. That is, insofar as ‘ontology’ = the categories that make the existence intelligible (think of early Heidegger’s Analytic, and his Existentiale etc), the ontologist’s job doesn’t involve things in-themselves (if it were, then you might as well be a natural/theoretical scientist), but rather the conceptual frameworks (Jon’s Schemata) that make our various practices, theories, concepts, etc. intelligible and truth-apt. But I honestly think we make a mistake when we push further and say something like, “Furthermore, the conceptual structures we’ve articulated really are the way things are in-themselves.” We have no license or warrant to draw this final conclusion. So no matter how revolutionary it may be to say, for example, that we can relativize the scheme-content distinction to objects themselves, I have no idea what that could actually mean (as far as I can tell, it means that there is no such thing as a scheme-content distinction in the first place, and that the expression of some phenomenon is a mereological product involving environment and the causal powers of ‘objects,’ but for which we cannot identify all of the ‘partial causes’ that precipitate a given bservable phenomenon), nor how such a claim could be plausibly argued for should it turn out to be coherent (Harman’s approach, if I may say so, truly is that of Pure Reason: it’s inferentially valid, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to determine whether his premises or conclusions are true. To that extent it’s speculative — but it’s also outside the bounds of everything we can know — including any notion of schemes and contents).
Finally, just to wrap things up, I want to say something about non-conceptual differences (from an Adornoian perspective): I think the idea of a ‘non-conceptual difference’ is a contradiction in adjecto. ‘Difference’ is identifiable. and by appeal to Leibniz’s principle (cognition = re-cognition; identification = re-identification), you can’t apply the label ‘difference’ unless you have a concept ‘the difference = x.’ Adorno’s ‘non-identity’ is thus a limit-concept — a check against speculative excesses, or the transformat in of thought into ‘the real.’ Contra Hegel — and this is one the distinguishing features for Adorno’s thought, can mark the limits of thought without thereby overstepping them; like Heidegger’s alethea, Adorno’s ‘non-identity’ is an alpha-privative collocation.
I hope this isn’t too much of a ramble.