Well here I find myself at the airport again. I wanted to draw attention to Harman’s three responses to Vitale and Robert Jackson’s excellent summary of the discussion. I’m writing from my phone at the airport, so I’ll have to add the links later. The only thing that I wanted to add to Graham’s post is that there seems to be a common tendency to conflate our ability to identify or categorize objects with objects themselves. Vitale, for example, asks who gets to decide what an object is and criticizes me for using the passive voice in my abbreviated account of the genesis of objects. In another discussion he asks whether his 7 year old nephew is right in referring to two distinct species of frogs or whether the biologist is right in her more detailed categorizations. But this way of posing the question conflates the being of objects with how they are categorized. Moreover, if Vitale is right and the being of an object is identical with its categorization, some pretty ugly consequences immediately follow. At the risk of violating Godwin’s law, for example, Vitale’s position commits him to the view that the Nazis were right about the Jews as being-Jewish is nothing more than another being’s perspective on Jews. If he rejects this implication, then this can only be because his position harbors implicit ontological assumptions that he’s not thinking through, i.e., that objects have independent existence.
August 5, 2010
Identification, Categorization, and Objects
Posted by larvalsubjects under Uncategorized[5] Comments
August 5, 2010 at 3:38 pm
I’m Jewish. I’ve always thought that part of my being-Jewish was the Nazis ability to determine my Jewishness. I could identify as Jewish or as not-Jewish, but if the Nazis said I was Jewish, off I’d go into the cattle-car, regardless.
August 5, 2010 at 3:52 pm
That’s quite different than saying that one entity constitutes another. This is one entity doing something to another. Nor am I denying the existence of classification schemes. I am denying that they make entities what they are.
August 5, 2010 at 11:17 pm
Well, Zizek (sorry) indicates that “understanding” (i.e. categorizing) may be an uncanny way of “disrupting” the object respectivly it’s pre-symbolic impression/semblence.
The “naive” impression of a 7-year-old (“2 frog categories”) is DISPRUPTED by the biologist unterstanding (who “as an adult” knows everything better of course).
So we obviously have a notion of social hierarchy/antagonism here belitteling the ontology of a 7-year-old.
The implications for science/philosophy: anybody who makes it more complicated rises in social hierarchy.
The dialectic twist (negation of the negation) is “ockham’s razor”: if possible posit everything as easy as possible.
BUT regarding to what an object IS: it may depend on our passionate attachment. If it’s not of special interest to we may categorize in dry categories, while however it is OF INTEREST we are likely to render it in terms of meaning, truth and transcendence.
August 6, 2010 at 3:28 am
You write: “The only thing that I wanted to add to Graham’s post is that there seems to be a common tendency to conflate our ability to identify or categorize objects with objects themselves.”
That’s exactly what I went and did, ain’t it? Sorry. Thank you for being patient with me while I get my education.
August 6, 2010 at 3:50 am
[…] under Uncategorized Leave a Comment It would appear that Vitale is upset with my last post, arguing that I’m “going personal”. This is, of course, coming from the guy who […]