Returning to the theme of transcendental arguments once again, why is it that these arguments have taken the form of a transcendental idealism rather than a transcendental realism. Recall the basic form of transcendental arguments as nicely articulated in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Transcendental 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.
Thus, for example, we indisputably make causal judgments (proposition Q). Judgments of necessity or causal judgments cannot be derived from sensation. Therefore, there must be a category of causation in our mind that functions as the condition for the possibility of making these judgments. I develop this line of argument in more detail here.
Now, the question I am asking is why mental life, consciousness, mind, language, society, or communication is being granted a special privilege in these arguments? I suspect that the answer lies in some thesis about the immanence of mind to itself. In other words, we locate these transcendental conditions in mind (or language, or communication, or perception, or the social) because we implicitly hold that we have direct access to these domains whereas we do not have direct access to objects transcendent to us.
However, if the last 300 years of philosophy have shown us anything, it has shown us that we do not have any direct or immanent or immediate access to our own minds. As Lacan liked to say, following Freud, the subject is split. This is true even in Kant, as can be seen in both the paralogisms and the the deduction where Kant distinguishes between the subject as phenomena to itself, the transcendental unity of apperception, and the subject in-itself. Similarly, phenomenology increasingly discovered just how elusive givenness is in intuition, or how there is no immediacy in consciousness.
Yet if we follow through the implications of these points, then it would seem that there’s no reason to privilege mind (or some variant thereof) in our transcendental arguments. In other words, all things being equal, why is it less plausible to argue for a transcendental realism? Rather than inferring a category of causality in the mind when noting the indisputable fact that we make causal judgments. Why not instead point to the indisputable fact that things change and therefore this change must have a cause? Inquiring minds want to know.
Larval Subjects . 
October 22, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I’ve been too busy to participate online lately, but have been enjoying reading along. Just wanted to say ‘yes, yes, and yes’ to this:
“Returning to the theme of transcendental arguments once again, why is it that these arguments have taken the form of a transcendental idealism rather than a transcendental realism.”
And if I may say so, this is a large part of what Brassier sees Laruelle doing – hence the Real as immanence becomes the ultimate transcendental condition. Whereas Laruelle places this real aspect in the immanence of non-phenomenal, non-reflexive ‘Man’, Brassier locates it in the object qua being-nothing.
But beyond that, yes, the question you raise is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. At some point I’ll put something online to hopefully flesh out my thoughts on it.
October 22, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Hey Levi,
These last couple of posts have reminded me of a line in Heidegger’s _What is a Thing?_ when he is trying to suss out the meaning of the title question. After briefly discussing what Kant means when he (Kant) calls God a “thing”, Heidegger states:
“Whenever Kant calls God a thing, he does not mean a giant gaslike formation that acts somewhere in hidden depths. According to strict usage, ‘thing’ here means only ‘something’ (etwas), that which is not nothing. […] God is a thing insofar as He is something at all, an X. Similarly, number is a thing, faith and faithfulness are things. In like manner the signs > < are 'something', and similarly 'and' and 'either/or." (5-6).
So, what I take away from Heidegger and your understanding of realism is your true commitment to the ontological question of "why is there something (etwas) instead of nothing?" Realism in OOO is concerned about something, not a specific set of things.
And as far as science is concerned, I think OOO can go along with Heidegger when he later states that:
"With our question [What is a thing?], we want neither to replace the sciences nor to reform them. On the other hand, we want to participate in the preparation of a decision; the decision: Is science the measure of knowledge, or is there a knowledge in which the ground and limit of science and thus its genuine effectiveness are determined?" (10)
OOO seems to me to not want to use or abuse science, but seeks to understand the grounding of scientific claims as well as philosophical ones. Anyway, just a few thoughts.
Cheers.
October 22, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Am fairly certain Roy Bhaskar used the term Transendental Realism to describe his argument from the success of science to the existence of mind independent objects with certain tendencies in A Realist Theory of Science. Ages since I read it, but I think those were the words.
In fact it was reading that book a few years ago that jolted me out of my own anti-realist slumber, and made me realise that, as you often point out on this blog, although it may not be possible to know particular things about particular objects independently of me (or perhaps even any particular things about any particular objects), you could know things about independent objects, including that some of them must exist. Which eventually led me to find SR and this blog.
October 22, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Splitter,
Yeah I had Bhaskar lurking in the back of my mind. I should have mentioned him! There are actually a few posts devoted to him on this blog.
October 23, 2009 at 1:00 am
Kant has only three or four points in CPR where he mentions transcendental realism but he quickly aligns it with empirical idealism and states that such a position assumes the separation of concepts and objects through the latter’s externality. This externality assumes a non-intuitive account of space time and that change must be directly rooted in human sense. Basically in one paragraph he dismisses ooo/oop and process philosophy.
October 23, 2009 at 1:18 am
Right Ben,
How strong do you think Kant’s arguments are here (I assume, in particular, you’re referring to the transcendental aesthetic)? It does not seem to me that Kant really saves causality from Hume’s skepticism (which we could also describe as humility in inquiry). While Kant perhaps grounds where the concept of necessity comes from, he is no more able to demonstrate that the future must be like the past than Hume is. As a consequence, I’m a little unclear as to why, precisely, Kant’s transcendental idealism is some profound victory over skepticism. Right now I’m working– and it is work! –my way through Grant’s Philosophies of Nature After Schelling and it seems to me that he stomps all over anti-realist arguments on these sorts of grounds.
October 23, 2009 at 1:37 am
There and when he is cataloging idealisms…and it should come as no surprise that I find Kant completely unconvincing there. And yes you are certainly right about Iain’s book – his Schellingian injunction would be what is the ground of that Kantian ground? For Schelling it is Kant’s inability to face the terror of the absolute and Kant’s use of the transcendental subject does not meet Schelling’s qualifications for the prius or origin, or first ground.
Stuck between the over externality of the rationalists and the over internality of the (ideal) empiricists Kant seems to ground conceptualization itself as ground and, as Iain makes very clear in his book, this does says nothing about the genesis of ideation or, in Hume’s case, its limit.
Basically, I think, since transcendental realism indexes a non ideal (in the naive sense) source of the transcendental function, it is unpalatable to Kant. This is why Schellling attempts (particularly in his naturephilosophie and the system of identity) to produce a speculative physics where the strata of ideas and the strata of geological investigation are different in degree and not necessarily in kind.
October 23, 2009 at 2:45 am
We have a problem Houston.
We have landed on planet 000 where they have an ontology that claims that ‘objects’ exist to the extent they make a difference.
This looks like some kind of statement about the causal powers of objects (but we may be wrong on this).
We have noticed that there may be some objects that initiate causal series rather than reacting to them (in very olden times they were called semovient psyches).
Should this new ontology simply include these putative objects as simply more of the same – that is exhaustively defined by the common denominator of making a difference.
“Again, just as in the other views discussed here, what makes in every case “my own owness” [or cadacualtez) is assumed a distributable general difference.” (Mario Crocco, Palindrome).
They also claim that ‘if the last 300 years of philosophy have shown us anything, it has shown us that we do not have any direct or immanent or immediate access to our own minds.’
We were thus surprised to recently read the claim that
(M. Crocco, Palindrome).
Inquiring minds want to know (what an apt expression)! The tick and oyster and this computer do not.
(We also remember G.Bateson and his famous non-sent tax form which caused a difference without the expenditure of any effort – the absence of action was thus an ‘object).
‘If’ OOO were to accept that some objects make a difference conatively and initiate a causal series making a difference, 000 might be then led to inquire if there is also something about these semovient objects that cannot be accounted for by a common denominator ontology:
Palindrome.
Inquiring minds have to take the last 300yrs with a pinch of salt. Maybe minds are ‘true forms’ as Ruyer defined it. –
‘copresent to all its determinations without without proximity or distance…'(D/G WIP, 210).
October 23, 2009 at 2:53 am
I’m not sure what the problem is you’re citing here, Paul. Nor do I find your example of the non-sent tax form at all convincing. As a semiotician you should know better than to evoke such an example. It was not the non-sent tax form that caused the difference to be produced, but the sign or signifier allowing from a distinction between presence and absence to come into being that causes the difference. Just as a book can’t be missing from the shelf in the library without a sorting system that assigns it a place, a tax form cannot be missing without such a system. But of course, for OOO signs are one example of objects, so there’s nothing particularly interesting or enlightening in such an example.
October 23, 2009 at 7:16 am
I think its pretty plain. You are claiming that the last 300yrs of phil have proved that we cannot have immediate access to our own minds (invoking partic Lacan and Freud).
There are inquiring minds that doubt this. Including the psychobiologist Ruyer, invoked in the conclusion to the last book written by D/G – which is hardly conclusive… That’s fine. Enjoy the witches’ broom.
October 23, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Hi Paul,
I suppose the question would be whether they doubt this on good or sound grounds. There are inquiring minds that doubt evolution, but that doubt isn’t enough to discount the mountains of evidence that support evolution. In philosophy, between Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan the idea of immediate access to mind is pretty thoroughly demolished. Deleuze is far from rejecting this psychoanalytic trajectory. In the sciences proper, neurology and cognitive psychology pretty decisively undermine the idea of any direct access to mind. Consequently, all things being equal there’s not a whole lot of reason to grant privilege to mind. We find precisely the same epistemic quandaries emerging with respect to claims about our own minds and how they function as we do with respect to objects. Thus, all things being equal, the points about transcendental idealist arguments, I think, stand.
October 23, 2009 at 9:42 pm
I’ve also been thinking about transcendental realism, and I look forward to Nick’s thoughts on the matter. Hopefully I’ll contribute my own at some point soon.
The important point to make for the moment is to underscore the difference between garden variety realism and transcendental realism. Transcendental realism must not simply posit the existence of the in-itself, and its character, but must justify this through arguing that this is a condition of the possibility of some fact that is at least harder to dispute than this, and at best indisputable.
However, this means that such transcendental realism cannot appeal to facts about the in itself (no matter how obvious), including the obvious fact that there is change, in order to thereby argue for the necessity of a realist position. It is precisely the fact that transcendental arguments cannot decide upon the question of the nature of the in itself (including if there is an in itself) if they are to answer it, that causes both transcendental idealists and most transcendental realists to fall back into taking facts about the structure of thought as their starting point.
This is of course very dangerous, as it can quite easily lead to correlationism (perhaps even for those who argue for realism in this transcendental fashion). It is not clear to me that this danger is insurmountable however, but I’ll leave this to another time.
October 24, 2009 at 8:54 pm
It is possible to doubt Kant (who has no ontology) and the proposed genealogy on sound grounds.
Freud was a gifted writer.
There is a minor, or completely unknown tradition, rarely discussed in any university. It is also a ‘realist’ tradition.
For example: Maine de Biran’s doctrine of immediate apperception.
Zubiri (altho he ignores cadacualtez -as does nearly all neurology).
The Argentine/German tradition of Neurobiology, largely inaugaurated by Christfried Jakob:
http://electroneubio.secyt.gov.ar/
Interestingly, Jakon studied at the Univ. of Tartu, Estonia, where von Uexkull worked.
Contemporary Anglo-american cognitive psych and neurolgy our basically philosophically bankrupt and turning in circles.
For an alternative view see e.g. ‘Ontology of Consciousness: Percipient Agency’ ed. Helmut Wautischer, MIT Press.
Another related text would be: ‘Irreducible Mind: a psychology for the 21c.
Deleuze and Guattari’s invoking of Ruyer in ‘WIP’ and The fold’ is certainly an affirmation of absolute survey = immed awareness or ‘self-enjoyment’ – a term from the groovy Australian, Samuel Alexander, that they use. This seems to be ignored – like Kant’s posthumous work…
(Mario Crocco)
This neglected tradition – a kind of modern hylozoism – recognizes psyches or minds as having voluntary semovient causal power – something modern neurology still has headaches with.
October 25, 2009 at 4:17 am
i think we have much less of a stable “self” than what we are accounting for. there is a range of distant lingering caricatures and emotions that i can hold on to in the present moment, but really ive had periods where i half-purposely made my personality change on a day to day basis. it is just scary to let go and see ourselves for what we are. biological mechanisms in a virtual sandbox world with the ability to reconstruct memories.