I’m feeling pretty demoralized this evening, so the only thing to do is try and distract myself so I don’t have to think about things.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about transcendental arguments and their status. I have written this post a few times already in the past, but like a person working through a trauma who must repeat it endlessly in the form of nightmares or neurotic symptoms, I believe I must go over this ground once again. And if I must repeat, then this is because I am myself a reformed transcendental idealist who must therefore marshal arguments convincing to myself. In many respects, the transcendental argument is Kant’s central contribution to thought, his ultimate secret ninja judo move. Outside of philosophy I get the sense that there’s a lot of confusion as to what a transcendental argument is. I often hear it confused with an appeal to the transcendent. However, in many respects, the transcendent and the transcendental are opposites. When we appeal to, for example, Platonic forms to account for justice or to God to account for moral laws we are making an appeal to the transcendent or that which is beyond and independent of both the world and the subject or mind. Take the standard Platonic argument for the existence of the forms (and here I’m presenting a vulgar, cereal box version of Plato).
The argument runs something like this: When faced with all the the things to which justice pertains, we note that they are very different and share no resemblance to one another. For example, in what way do serving one’s function within the polis and getting a coke out of a coke machine when you put a dollar in the machine resemble one another. Both of these events are instances of justice, yet when we examine the properties or qualities of these events, we find no quality shared by the two. Similarly, when we enter into debates and discussions about justice, we seem to all approach justice in different ways. However, apart from the crassest Protagorean relativist, we all nonetheless agree that while we might not know what it is, there is a truth of the matter or fact of the matter concerning justice. In short, justice is not simply a subjective sentiment or opinion, but something real that exists in its own right. But what is this real thing that exists in its own right? Plato’s proposal is that the just is a form, a universal, that exists in its own right, independent of all instances of the just and all opinions about the just. The form of the just is ideal, but its ideality is not a subjective ideality. Indeed, as Derrida likes to point out, the ideal is the most objective of all. It is neither an object in the world (a material object), nor an idea in the mind (a subjective entity), but an ideal entity that is entirely real, eternal, universal, and so on. For Plato, even if all humans ceased to exist, even if there were no individual objects in the world, the form of the just would continue to exist for all eternity. The forms are thus transcendent to subjects and objects. They are the most real things of all.
read on because having arguments for abstruse and abstract issues is concretely important!
In this way Plato is able to secure a referent for claims about the just that would allow for a selection between the true and the false. Interestingly, for Plato, it is not simply beliefs or propositional attitudes that can be true or false, but objects themselves can be true or false. The measure of the truth or falsity of an object will be a function of its ontological distance from these ideal forms.
The transcendental, by contrast, is something entirely different. Where things like Platonic forms (and God) are transcendent or independent of both subjects and objects, the transcendental is, strictly speaking, immanent. There have been a number of proposals as to just what the transcendental is immanent to. Kant’s famous answer was that the transcendental is immanent to mind. Where Platonic forms are mind independent, Kant’s transcendentals are a priori structures of mind. On the strong reading, they do not exist independent of mind, but are structures of mind, not unlike rules governing a computer program, that structure human experience. On a weak reading, we cannot determine whether or not the world itself, independent of humans, is structured according to these a priori structures, but we do know that mind is structured in this way. If Husserlian phenomenology is a transcendental phenomenology, then this is in the sense that it is structured by the intentional structure of consciousness. However, in Husserl the issue is vexed insofar as the relationship between Husserl’s eidetic phenomenology, constitutional phenomenology, and genetic phenomenology is rather Byzantine and difficult to untangle. In Habermas, the transcendental is immanent to communication or dialogue.
Why, then, appeal to the transcendental? What work is it doing? The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy gives a better gloss on the nature of transcendental arguments than I can must right now in my demoralized state. As the author, Adrian Bardon, so nicely puts it:
Transcendental arguments are partly non-empirical, often anti-skeptical arguments focusing on necessary enabling conditions either of coherent experience or the possession or employment of some kind of knowledge or cognitive ability, where the opponent is not in a position to question the fact of this experience, knowledge, or cognitive ability, and where the revealed preconditions include what the opponent questions. Such arguments take as a premise some obvious fact about our mental life—such as some aspect of our knowledge, our experience, our beliefs, or our cognitive abilities—and add a claim that some other state of affairs is a necessary condition of the first one. Transcendental arguments most commonly have been deployed against a position denying the knowability of some extra-mental proposition, such as the existence of other minds or a material world. Thus these arguments characteristically center on a claim that, for some extra-mental proposition P, the indisputable truth of some general proposition Q about our mental life requires that P. (my emphasis)
In short, a transcendental argument is an appeal to a condition that explains how a certain form of knowledge, judgment, experience, or activity is possible. The example of causal judgments is perhaps clearest. Here we are not talking about any particular or specific causal judgment. For example, we are not talking about judgments of the form “the match lit the paper”. What is at issue here is not the question of how we have a knowledge of the myriad causal phenomena we make judgments about. Rather, what is at issue is the question of how it is possible for us to make causal judgments as such. Put differently, what are the conditions under which causal judgments are possible?
So why is this an issue? Well, when we make a causal judgment we’re not simply making a judgment about temporal succession, but about a necessary relation between two events. To understand this point, consider the difference between the following two judgments: “I made my coffee and the sun rose.” “I lit the paper and it caught on fire.” Both judgments involve succession in time, but in the case of the first judgment there is no dependency relation between coffee being made and the sun rising. The sun would rise regardless of whether I made my coffee. The case is not the same when discussing the relationship between lighting the paper and it catching on fire. Here the paper would not catch on fire unless it was lit by the match. In short, there is a relationship of necessity in the latter event.
So why the problem? Well the issue here is that of how we are able to cognize this necessity. Note that from the standpoint of sensation our two judgments are indistinguishable. Both experiences consist in one event following another. What I do not have is a sensation of the necessity of the relation itself. So the question is, “how can I make judgments about empirical matters (matters pertaining to sensations) that involve necessity?” If we begin from a Humean conception of sensations (and the thesis that experience is structured as Hume or the classical empiricists described it is tendentious), then any judgment involving necessity should be impossible. How would the idea of necessity (truths who’s denial would imply a contradiction) possibly arise from disconnected (for Hume) sensations? This seems impossible.
It is precisely here that we get the super-ninja transcendental judo move. Kant’s move– and here I’m simplifying tremendously –is to point out 1) that we do make such judgments, 2) that we can’t account for how such judgments are possible on empirical grounds or arising from experience, therefore 3) since 1 and 2, the condition under which such judgments are possible must be an a priori category in the mind, specifically the category of cause-and-effect, that the mind imposes to experience. In short, since we can’t get the idea of necessity from our sensations (there’s no intrinsic connection between the redness of an apple and its delicious causal powers as I discovered much to my dismay at my grandfathers in an unfortunate encounter with a very realistic wax apple), but we do make judgments of necessity, therefore the capacity to make these judgments must arise from a structure of the mind, not something we learn from the world. These categories, of course, are strictly immanent to the mind. Voila! We have grounded necessity.
Now note, once again there is a strong and a weak reading of this thesis:
Weak Reading: The transcendental argument is simply explaining where our idea or concept of necessity arises from. Since nothing in our experience of particular entities and events itself suggests or grounds the idea of necessity, and since the idea of necessity must come from somewhere, and since it cannot come from sensation, it must come from mind.
I am not sure whether anyone advocates this sort of weak reading, though when I reflect back on my discussions with Alexei-Tuffini (who really knows his Kant) before they went sour, I can only make sense of his objections to my characterization of Kant based on a weak reading such as this. While I might disagree with this solution to the problem of how we get the concept of necessity given that I hold that developmental or what are called “genetic” accounts in philosophy (not to be confused with what takes place with DNA) are more plausible, I would not a priori exclude such a thesis as there’s nothing particularly anti-realist about this thesis. In short, here one is simply making claims about how we get the concept of necessity, not making the claim that mind constructs reality. Perhaps Graham or someone else can explain to me why this weak reading is objectionable.
However, I do not think this weak reading really gets at the spirit, letter, or manner in which Kant’s texts have been appropriated. This for two reasons: First, in responding to Hume’s skepticism I take it that Kant wasn’t simply attempting to account for our ability to make judgments of necessity, but rather was seeking to account for what renders our causal judgments reliable. Second, I do not believe that the letter or subsequent appropriation of Kant’s text supports this reading. Ergo the
Strong Reading: Mind structures the world through its a priori structure, such that we are forever prohibited from speculating as to whether the world itself, independent of humans, has this structure, but are instead restricted to how the world is for-us.
Note that the weak reading does not really address Hume’s skepticism. Hume had argued that based on sensation alone, we are unable to arrive at anything more than a probabilistic grounding of causal claims. Moreover, we are unable to establish a rational ground for our belief in relations of necessity in causal judgments. From an Enlightenment perspective this must have been devastating as so much of the critique of superstition was premised on causal claims. If the weak reading does not address Hume’s skepticism or the thesis that we have no grounds for establishing that the future must be like the past, then this is because while it establishes how we might make judgments of necessity, it does not establish why relations between events are structured in a necessary fashion. In other words, while the Newtonian convert endorses the thesis that Newton has stripped nature bare, revealing her alluring secrets, we are still left in the position of being able to rationally demonstrate that the future must be like the past. The weak reading remains in this quandary.
It is only a strong reading that holds that the mind actually structures reality that is able to avoid Humean skepticism. Hume’s thesis was never a thesis aimed at undermining our ability to make judgments of necessity. No. Hume’s skepticism was directed– in a very healthy fashion –at our ability to know necessary relations. And if we adopt the weak reading of Kant, we have no more responded to this quandary than we have solved the problem of cold fusion. It is only if we adopt the thesis that the mind structures reality, that reality is like a turtle’s shell that we carry about on our back, that we can respond to Hume’s challenge. This would be the anti-realist version of the transcendental argument, for now the claim is that we have no access to reality as it is in-itself, but only reality as it is for-us. And why? Because if we are the one’s structuring reality then we can never speak of what that reality might be apart from us. Therefore all of our claims about reality necessarily possess an “asterisk” in the sense that they are necessarily for-us. We can see why Meillassoux will be lead to claim that anti-realist arguments necessarily founder on physics and evolutionary theory, for insofar as these domains require us to talk about a time of being prior to the human we are necessarily prohibited from such claims as we can only speak of what being is for us. Ergo creationism.
Having unfolded the transcendental argument in crude outline, here I would like to shift gears a bit and raise the question of why, precisely, transcendental arguments are not circular or question begging. In Deleuze’s Logic of Sense we encounter precisely this criticism. Deleuze writes:
The presupposed primacy of signification over denotation, however, still raises a delicate problem. When we say “therefore,” when we consider a proposition as concluded, we make it the object of an assertion. We set aside the premises and affirm it for itself, independently. We relate it to the state of affairs which it denotes, independently of the implications which constitute its signification. To do so, however, two conditions have to be filled. It is first necessary that the premises be posited as effectively true, which already forces us to depart from the pure order of implication in order to relate the premises to a denoted state of affairs which we presuppose. But then, even if we suppose that the premise A and B are true, we can only conclude from this the proposition in question (let us call it Z)– we can only detach it from its premises and affirm it for itself independently of the implication –by admitting that Z is, in turn, true if A and B are true. This amounts to a proposition, C, which remains within the order of implication, and is unable to escape it, since it refers to a proposition, D, which states that “Z is true if A, B, and C are true…,” and so on to infinity. (LS, Continuum Edition, 19 – 20)
This argument sounds obtuse, but is basically Deleuze’s argument against transcendental arguments of a particular variety. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze will refer to this as “tracing the transcendental from the empirical”. Now why is this problematic. Remember that the whole point of a transcendental argument, whether in the domain of physics, mathematics, moral theory, communicative theory, or political theory was to ground the necessity and universality of its claims. It does this by recourse to a shared condition that must be presupposed to render a particular experience or activity or capacity intelligible.
However, if transcendental arguments trace their conditions from the empirical, if they simply double what we encounter in recognition by pushing a formal and abstract version of this empirical actuality back into mind, consciousness, or communicative interaction, then transcendental arguments beg the question. Why? They assume the truth and universality of the experience from whence they begin and then simply double it. But this necessity, truth, and universality was precisely what was at stake. Consequently, if we arrive at the transcendental through an exercise of tracing it from the empirical, we risk simply enshrining prejudice, habit, recognition, rather than getting at real necessity. This would be especially the case in normative transcendental theories in politics and ethics where we sense, all too clearly, that it’s simply a question of grounding specific prejudices about what one believes ought to be right and just, rather than genuinely grounding the right and just. This would be the reason that Deleuze was led to claim that thinkers like Kant and Habermas are defenders of the State on the grounds that they simply present a mythological ground for the “right” and “justice” of the State rather than a genuine philosophical grounding of the right and the just. In other words, what we get is an argument to the effect “we make these arguments, we can’t ground them by recourse to experience, therefore there must be a necessary a priori structure at work in x” (where x is mind, consciousness, communication, and so on). Yet if this is the case, the question that inevitably arises as to why this isn’t the worst form of speculative dogmatism or merely a version of the standard informal fallacy of wishful thinking and rationalization (which, no doubt, advocates of transcendental approaches will vigorously reject on the grounds that “they teach critical thinking courses too”– not well, we’d respond).
Larval Subjects . 
October 20, 2009 at 10:57 pm
Let me start at your end (BTW I love your lucidity even as I disbelieve in lucidity’s ground). I doubt there is a real necessity for “real necessity.” Why cannot the grounds of truth, both referential as well as formal (I do not believe these are separable except by fiat), be local and contingent? When I play a game — say this one — do I need absolute conviction in order to operate? What is added by such unmerited certainty? What is lost? I know you, Levi, have eschewed the human and semiotic (except as subsets of flat ontology: they are not, if I understand, inconsequent when they are in play since they too differ but they are — “theoretically”?? — avoidable or even irrelevant to a given state of affairs and not valorized generally) but for me, these form unavoidable aspects of my knowing/being not because I think they are “special” or “inviolate” or “central” but because I do not even understand what others mean “really” when they talk as if they are separable from difference as it pertains to sense or sense. You often waive your hand and say, “That’s epistemology” but I do not understand that as anything other than a rule you enforce nominally and violate even in its rejection implicitly. Every time you talk about objects in words, I think what does he mean by postulating person-less and semiotic free world? I can understand that as a game played in contradiction to its circumstances but not as anything that could ever be the case “really.” Now to put many of my stupid cards face up, I have the same objection with science. You often cite it as if it had unquestioned authority while I read it as a useful fiction that has a status close to a hegemonic theology, and I am agnostic. I see faith where most see proof. What seems most evident to you, that there are objects, seems to me completely understandable as a common sense assertion and completely impossible except as a given of usual human discourse. I do not mean that I cannot understand the functioning of the object concept but that it is less than transcendental but rather an attribute of a discursive function. It seems perfect to me then that Monadology seems to lurk here, as what I see in Leibniz is a desire to “keep the faith” with soul and truth as immutables though what seems shown is anxiety at a certain historical conjuncture. BTW, I say all this because I really appreciate your work and am grateful for this blog, but I really do not seem to share what to me appears to be “transcendental” to you, and that’s the topic today.
October 21, 2009 at 2:29 am
Hi Dan,
There’s a lot here in your post so I’ll try to clearly address a few of your points. You write:
In my view, nothing is lost. It is the transcendental philosopher, not the realist that calls for this sort of certainty. Thus, in the case of Kant, he seemed to think that inquiry is completely undermined if we can’t ground the necessity of Newton’s claims about the physical world. The realist, by contrast, is much more modest in their claims about causal relations between entities. The claim of the realist is that “based on the evidence we’ve gathered it is likely that there is a causal relationship between events of this sort.” In short, she leaves open the possibility that subsequent inquiry will show him wrong.
You write:
Dan, I feel that we’ve been over this ground before, so I’m unsure of why you’re suggesting it again. I do not eschew either the human or the semiotic. Signs are objects or entities. Humans are entities or objects. I do not make the claim that they are either avoidable or irrelevant. My claim is quite different. What I claim is that no object is merely a vehicle for another object such that the other object contributes no differences of its own. The problem with anti-realisms is that they make all other objects mere receptacles for human categories, signs, social forces, etc. Other objects contribute no differences of their own. There is a problem of parity here. The anti-realist presents a good critique of the naive self-evidence of objects, yet does not reciprocally apply that critique to his own basic concepts such as “social forces”, “power”, “signs”, “cognitive categories” and so on. Why is it that all these categories are capable of bestowing or giving difference whereas all other objects contribute no differences? What is it, for example, that gives language this omnipotent power to form all matters without reciprocally being acted upon by non-linguistic actors? My proposal is not that language, ideas, concepts, signs, etc., don’t exist, but that we should practice parity with respect to all objects and actors, placing humans, nonhumans, signs, and all the rest on equal footing in an immanent field where they interact with one another.
You write:
I do not reject epistemology but the thesis that epistemology is first philosophy. Every epistemology, in my view, is premised on an implicit ontology or thesis about what exists. Moreover, I take it that the issue of what something is and the question of how we have access to it are entirely distinct. Thus, for example, causality, is a necessary relation between two events such that if the first event does not occur then the second event cannot occur. That, ontologically, is what causality is. The epistemological question of how we have access to causal relations or whether we can establish once and for all that “no y without x” in a specific instance is an entirely different question. Epistemologically it is entirely possible that we cannot know the causal relation between lighting a match and a piece of paper catching on fire such that this must hold for all times and places (necessity) under relevant conditions. I am more than happy to concede this point, holding that where knowledge of these causal relations is concerned we only have the more or less probable knowledge of these things. However, this does not undermine the ontological point that causality is a relation of necessity. In fact, the epistemological point that we only know probabilities (not necessities) is only significant in relation to this ontological thesis. In many respects, object-oriented philosophy is an inverted transcendental philosophy. Roy Bhaskar referred to it as a transcendental realism. Where the transcendental idealist asks “what must be true of our minds to be capable of making these sorts of judgments?”, a transcendental realist asks “what must be true of objects for them to act in these sorts of ways?” Unless one believes we have a special access to our minds or language premised on immediacy— a thesis thoroughly demolished by the last two hundred years of philosophy as well as psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, and neurology –then there is no reason to suppose that mind should have any special privilege of philosophical priority.
You write:
This is easy, I am not talking about a person-less and semiotic free world, so it comes as no surprise that you have difficulty knowing what I might mean by such a thing. Rather, I am talking about a world where persons and signs are objects alongside of other objects like trees, beetles, stars, and so on. What I reject is the thesis that somehow signs and persons overdetermine all these other objects such that all these other objects are passive lumps of clay for a brick makers mould. Again, parity.
You write:
I am not sure where you get this impression. The sense I get from the comments you make here and some you’ve made in the past is that you equate realism with materialism and science (you’ve also made a number of references to Newton and my position in this connection). In my view, following Harman and Latour, materialism is not a realism but a form of idealism. Philosophical materialism begins with an idea of what is real, and then proceeds to reduce the rest of the world to that idea. By contrast, I do not begin with a dogmatic thesis as to what is real, but start from the premise that if something is real it produces differences. These differences can be semiotic in nature, they can be contractual agreements, they can be love encounters, they can be mythological, and they can also be of the physical-material variety as in the case of volcanoes, stars, plants, galaxies, brains, and so on. The latter list following the “and also” clause is no more real than the former list. They are all equally real within the framework of my ontology. Nor do I grant science special or unquestioned authority. As I remarked above, I see these claims as probabilistic. Evolution could turn out to be wrong. Neurology could turn out to be wrong. Quantum mechanics could turn out to be wrong. It is the correlationist or anti-realist that demands apodicticity for any knowledge claims. I’m content with what is most likely based on the available evidence. On these grounds, given the massive bodies of evidence from chemistry, genetics, geology, the fossil record, and so on, I believe it is unreasonable to discount something like evolution based on the fact that it could be mistaken. Rather, if someone wants me to discount evolution, biology, neurology, physics, or chemistry they have to marshal a compelling body of evidence that provides good reason to discount these things. Note that my position here is no different than how we reason about our doctors and stock brokers in day to day life. We’re all agreed and aware that our doctors could be mistaken in their diagnosis. However based on this possibility alone we do not go to a new age doctor or Dr. Nick from The Simpsons to get treated. Instead we go with the laws of probability based on past record. When I hear some talk about the sciences I get the sense that they seem to hold that unless it can be apodictically grounded it should be dismissed or discounted. This seems to conflate deductive models of reasoning with inductive models of reasoning.
October 21, 2009 at 12:26 pm
“Now to put many of my stupid cards face up, I have the same objection with science. You often cite it as if it had unquestioned authority while I read it as a useful fiction that has a status close to a hegemonic theology, and I am agnostic.”
Except, I presume, when you operate a microwave oven, use a computer, talk on a cell phone, get onto an airplane or drive a motor vehicle.
October 21, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Reading all this I wonder what the reasons are that ANT is, historically speaking, a relatively late philosophical account?
Maybe we just tend to be more relaxed about our theories, because many of those we do believe in, have turned out to be robust under attacks – or at least attacks of a certain kind. Pioneers like Descartes didn’t have a safety net to begin with as a researcher and attempted to construct one from pure thought as methodology. We however relax conditions from “proofed” to “well tested” for pragmatic reasons or because it is impossible to give strict proofs. It is a bit like moving from mathematics to engineering which is “good enough” in terms of reliability in the common case but too complicated to be expressed in a closed form.
We are relaxed about “quantum mechanics can be replaced” because we do expect it to be replaced by something more advanced but of the same kind, essentially. Of course, science is socially constructed but its content lives in a great attractor of interconnected knowledge and attempts to escape from it are less promising as our parents still might have believed.
I see the same relaxation at work in our indifferent responses towards criticism. Maybe Slavoj Zizek is the last one who believes in the perils of bourgeois ideology and he successfully turns intellectual disgust into entertainment. No one truly believes in the economy or that free choice is not simulated. It is just that it can’t be replaced by something else and those who drive the system can’t be replaced either. There is no revolutionary army equipped with better knowledge and higher moral to take it over, guided by intellectuals with a sixth sense. We have lowered our expectations in those a long time ago and have recently lowered our trust in experts, who are, after all the most knowledgeable among us. We have become dark toned Aristotelians who believe that a good stock broker is one that makes lots of money but we do not really believe in solid criteria of its existence. The postmodern expert is one who is serious about skills and profession but cool and ironic about ultimate capabilities. You have to know your tools but they only get you thus far.
No one would call the hidden machinery, the cognitive system and its biases and limitations “the transcendental” today and expects from “categories a priori” anything but being mental encodings which originated in a very special ecological niche. This notwithstanding we do rate the expressive powers of our minds very high, because we found ways to translate/compile/encode reality within a process of signification and hence make it accessible beyond direct experience. This happened so well that we can now look deep into the history of the universe, into the subatomic particle regime or into the living brain. We can also observe that our cognitive system smooths reality for us.
I don’t believe Kant would have argued against anything of this ( or against Latour and actual scientific practise ) but simply insisted that encodings are necessary – we cannot leave the limits of our cognitive systems – and that reliable encodings can be produced using science and criticism. There is no direct access to the world and speculations about how it would be beyond our capabilities of encoding and the web of facts which is spanned, are moot.
October 21, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Kay –
Totally kick-ass comment.
Maybe one other reason why we’re more relaxed about quantum mechanics is that it’s so weird. When you look at particles in a “classical” way, with electrons orbiting around a nucleus like little moons, it starts to arouse the suspicion that we’re bringing too much over from the macroscopic world at which our basic-level concepts operate. In a way, it’s reassuring to know that quantum mechanics will simply not accept that sort of conceptual transfer.
On the other hand, when I first started to read about particle physics, I had an almost visceral reaction to the multiplicity of particles. It almost seemed like particles were being invented so that the maths would work out. I was palpably relieved when I read that many of the particles were extremely ephemeral — as if the briefness of their existence made them less real, or less problematic.
Another “relaxed” feature of quantum mechanics is its constraints (in formulations like the Copenhagen interpretation) on what we can say about the reality of things like wave functions. Whereas much of physics reads like it is making ontological statements, quantum mechanics has an almost built-in view of itself as an abstraction, due to the role of measurement and probability. Perhaps this serves as fodder for anti-realists, but to me, it just underscores the fact that being a realist means taking a provisional stance.
I also agree with you about Kant. As Harman, I think, has said, it’s not so much Kant himself, but how Kant has been appropriated.
October 21, 2009 at 3:28 pm
[…] some of the other (from my perspective) problematic claims he’s been making (e.g., vis a vis transcendental philosophy), but I can’t resist questioning his recent claim (here), which Graham Harman perhaps (?) […]
October 21, 2009 at 4:02 pm
[…] (a sort of anti-realism), and I’ve been looking at reactions to blog posts like this one and this one at Larval Subjects, and I start to roll my eyes about the whole realism […]
October 21, 2009 at 5:23 pm
[blockquote]I see faith where most see proof. What seems most evident to you, that there are objects, seems to me completely understandable as a common sense assertion and completely impossible except as a given of usual human discourse. I do not mean that I cannot understand the functioning of the object concept but that it is less than transcendental but rather an attribute of a discursive function.[/blockquote]
I do not see the problem, objects have a discursive emergence does not deny that there are object independent of mind. The cliché “There is nothing outside of text” (or “There is no outside of text) is for me interchangeable from a flat ontology or a plane of immanence.
Enjolras.
October 21, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Levi, thanks for the good reply. There is very little in your responses I differ with in major ways. I even agree with you on the idealism of the usual forms of materialism, including most Marxism. Given that agreement, let me try to give a slightly more focused problem. You say: “Rather, I am talking about a world where persons and signs are objects alongside of other objects like trees, beetles, stars, and so on. What I reject is the thesis that somehow signs and persons overdetermine all these other objects such that all these other objects are passive lumps of clay for a brick makers mould. Again, parity.” I do not believe in demeaning objects or one sided differences. I am monist, so everything is always with everything else but that does not mean that the demands of everything are equally on everything else in every place. Whatever one images as the point at issue, that establishes a positionality within the field of differencing that has consequences and that such locality is the necessary precondition of any sense at all. You seem to attribute to me a pre-arranged ordering or set of priorities — rather the opposite is my interest. I want to work from locality and proximity, not structure or predetermined valorization. That notion of the “givenness” of location within becoming as a determinative arbitrary is what I hold, and this is different I think than the tendency toward structure found in most realism. The dichotomy Brassier offers in Collapse III is to me part of the problem (320). BTW, I think Kay’s “rebuttal” “Except, I presume, when you operate a microwave oven, use a computer, talk on a cell phone, get onto an airplane or drive a motor vehicle” is quite funny both because he does not know how inoperative I can be but also because it strikes me as a late capitalist reenactment of Johnson kicking the rock — and with equal philosophical force.
October 21, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Dan – it’s not to do with operability, but with how much faith you unconsciously have in the practical, logical applications of principles you claim to be agnostic about. If that seems to you like kicking rocks, then understand that to me it seems like ignoring rocks.
“a late capitalist reenactment”
Everything’s got to be political…
October 22, 2009 at 3:22 pm
[…] Ontic, Ontology, Realism, Speculative Realism Leave a Comment Returning to the theme of transcendental arguments once again, why is it that these arguments have taken the form of a transcendental idealism rather […]
October 23, 2009 at 4:32 am
Asher, I’ve just seen the latest issue of Nature published this paper about information causality and discrimination of theories being compliant with it.
To me it seems we are slowly converging to a state where information theory becomes one of the foundations of our understanding of nature. This is, intuitively speaking, about “difference making” but we aim at a more rigorous understanding. Note that “differences that make no difference” are also fundamental in spelling the rules of nature. They are called symmetries and lead to the conservation of quantities.
November 26, 2009 at 2:44 am
Necessity seems to be a property of mind, i.e., as a categorical structure. I contend that the categories are learned (Piaget’s states confirm this) and the only source, other that God, is the thing itself manifesting structure. Transcendental idealism is an stage of cognitive development until it reaches transcendental realism that shows that the mind fails in imposing categories. The thing is the transcendent. The Copenhagen interpretation is little more than a retreat into idealism as stated by Zukav “…what we perceive to be physical reality is actually our cognitive construction of it.”