Graham has an interesting post up responding to some remarks by footnotes2plato. Footnotes2plato writes:
But in order to avoid spinning into the nihilism of some speculative realists, where human values are a fluke in an uncaring and fundamentally entropic universe… I think OOO needs to unpack its own theological and anthropological implications.
Over the years this issue of nihilism has come up a few times with respect to OOO and SR. To be quite honest, I’m not sure what exactly is being asked for or what exactly it means. How, precisely, does anything change with respect to values and meanings by arguing that humans are amongst beings, that they are one type of entity among others, rather than arguing that all other entities are correlates of humans? If humans and all other rational entities cease to exist, all sorts of other entities will continue to exist. There will still be frogs, the sun, asteroids, and octopi. What OOO refuses is any ontological framework that reduces entities to correlates of human beings and that renders all other beings dependent on human beings.
read on!
Yet how does the claim that fire ants are no less entities than humans lead to nihilism? This is something that I don’t understand. Indeed, I’m unclear as to what, exactly, is meant by nihilism here. Despite the fact that humans are on equal ontological footing with other beings, this in no way leads to the disappearance of values and goals for human beings. We still value things. We still set goals for ourselves. We still evaluate things about ourselves, the world around us, society, and other people in terms of these goals, and so on. Why would all of this suddenly disappear? It’s not as if I come to suddenly experience my daughter as being equivalent to a stone because she is no more a being than the stone is. It’s not as if I suddenly become indifferent to my home, happy to sleep in the sewage treatment plant, because my house is no more an entity than anything else. It’s not as if we suddenly conclude that because humans are no more real than the planet earth we ought to go and start eating humans.
I thus find these questions about nihilism really perplexing. In a certain respect, I find it perplexing that these charges seem to arise in particular with respect to OOO. If overcoming nihilism means evoking the existence of values and meanings inscribed in the very fabric of existence itself, then it seems to me that the only orientation that escapes nihilism would be a theological orientation that sees values and norms as issuing from some sort of divine being. However, I see no reason to entertain such a hypothesis. Again and again we’ve witnessed the triumph of naturalistic explanation, yet I can’t see that there’s ever been any support or evidence for the existence of some sort of divine being that grounds values and meaning. Do I know that such frameworks are untrue? No. But I also find no compelling reason, arguments, or evidence that would lead me to believe them. In my view, this leads to the conclusion that the only credible and legitimate framework within which to pose questions of meaning and values is the naturalistic framework.
Some might say that this leads to the incomprehensibility of why, for example, we don’t just kill and eat other people. “If there’s no transcendental ground that forbids killing and eating other people, then why don’t we kill and eat other people?” I’ve always found this line of argument rather strange. The first point to note is that those living in a framework that is naturalistic and atheist still find it wrong to kill and eat other people. Such people still find meaning and purpose in their life, still evaluate things, still think certain things are right and certain things are wrong, and so on. The fact that these phenomena persist in the absence of transcendent guarantees indicates that transcendent guarantees are not a necessary condition for finding meaning, purpose, and for values and normativity. Indeed, those Northern European countries, which are highly secular, look like pretty damned good places filled with people concerned with justice, the value of human life, etc (hey, anyone up there looking for a philosopher?). Second, it’s unclear to me how transcendental guarantees ever prevented abuses of others or horrific acts. It seems to me that within cosmologies that have a central place for the transcendent divine as a transcendent guarantee of meaning and value, we find that humans are every bit as wretched and awful as they are within secular cosmologies, and that often they are even worse because these transcendent guarantees and declarations are used as a reason for the brutal oppression of other groups of people. Here we need only think of the treatment of women and homosexuals within many religious frameworks, the use of religion to justify slavery, the Inquisition, witch burnings, the treatment of the Celts by Christians, and on and on. I am not, suggesting that secular cosmologies are immune to these sorts of things (the Stalinist and Maoist regimes were pretty awful), but I am pointing out that I see no correlation between belief in transcendent values and decreed by a divine being and recognition of the dignity of humans, the planet, and other creatures that populate the earth.
Along these lines, I’m inclined to go so far as to suggest that a recognition of finitude, that this is it, that you die and that worms will eat you, that there’s no ultimate teleology towards which history is moving, that there’s no ultimate salvation, that this planet is all we have, and so on actually fosters a greater reverence for other humans, life, and the planet. If I believe that a God is going to save me someday, that history will culminate in some final confrontation, etc., it’s easier to have no regard for the present, this world, other people, and the planet. If I believe that I am acting on behalf of a God, if I believe that God commands heteronormativity or that he commands this way as the only true way, it’s easier to kick the shit out of a homosexual or destroy a group of people that practices a different religion. If this is all there is, however, if every life is a singularity that will never be repeated again and that utterly ceases to exist with death, if there’s no escape hatch from this planet whether through the “end of days” or interstellar travel (I’m pretty skeptical about the possibility of interstellar travel given the great distances between stars and limitations of technology), I think you tend to value life a bit more and this world a bit more. Most importantly, within an immanent framework, goals, norms, values, etc., are not given and absolute, but are things to be deliberated over and discussed collectively so as to determine whether they should be followed and endorsed. One will respond that life was cheap for the Stalinists and that they were secularists. However, that’s just it: they thought that there was the possibility of a secular salvation, a final point in history where all would be reconciled, and therefore saw anything as being justified in the present to produce that salvation. Life becomes cheap when the present is subordinated to the future in this way. Yet if we are without any ultimate future, without any final reconciliation, such a teleology becomes a little less compelling. It seems to me that without theological frameworks life is often very cheap. It’s hard, I think, to find life cheap if it is essentially rare in the universe and this is it.
July 13, 2011 at 3:05 am
[…] An eloquent post HERE. […]
July 13, 2011 at 3:45 am
From what I’ve read and heard of many people’s first responses to OOO and “speculative realism” generally, the focus on “nihilism” does seem inexplicably prevalent, and I have never understood it. It’s hard to tell what is MEANT by the term, as you pointed out. Brassier is really the only one from the original speculative realism conference to have ever CALLED himself a nihilist–yet he accepts the label in the sense of his project attempting to subvert the vitalist teleology that he reads in Heidegger, Deleuze, etc., since even a vitalist teleology arguably commits itself to the same faults as a theological one (the universe as imbued with values, which you point out above). Even this, however, hardly seems to be the “nihilsm” meant in these types of comments. It really does seem to be the worry of the cosmic “meaninglessness” of human meaning–and I think that Zizek, in the interview from The Speculative Turn, best sums up the proper response to that worry: “I think the cosmological notion of the ‘purposelessness of life’ is a useless metaphor with no cognitive value.”
The fact is that any philosophy which pays any respect to science is in this sense “nihilist,” but at that point the term is just useless. If anything, this type of nihilism simply denoting the fact that human values and meaning emerged WITHOUT necessity–that they were not guaranteed by the structure of the universe–is, I think, a far stronger argument in favor of their persistence and growth.
I am made curious, however, by Graham saying “I’m certainly not a nihilist.” He’s unambiguous about NOT being a nihilist, but what “nihilist” means is still unclear by the end of his post.
July 13, 2011 at 3:46 am
Nietzsche welcomed the onset of nihilism because with it arises the possiblity of its self-overcoming by various Ubermenschen. Suppose for a moment there is something to Footnotes2Plato’s suggestion: why does he imply that nihilism must be avoided? If — and I emphasize If — SR and OOO lead to some form of nihilism (that the accuser should by rights elicit from the documentation, rather than foisting this interpretive burden onto SR and OOO theorists), perhaps this sets a stage for a new version of the overcoming of some clearly elucidated version of nihilism, one that will inform philosophy and lead to interesting manifestations?
The problem with this exchange, all will agree, is a glaring lack of disambiguation. One hopes the experts will clarify the murk.
On the question of whether some animals are dependent upon humans, it is important from a history-of-philosophy perspective to engage the non-identity problem from Darek Parfit’s famous book, Reasons and Persons.
Consider this passage from the overview of the problem from the Stanford Encyclopedia (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nonidentity-problem/), and consider applying it to domesticated animals, specifically.
“When the act of conceiving a child is moved forward or backward in time by months or even moments, or when the manner of conception is itself altered (accomplished, e.g., via in vitro fertilization in the lab rather than in some more ordinary way), the result, very probably, will be the conception of a distinct child altogether. After all, any difference in timing or manner very probably will place a distinct inseminating sperm cell (out of hundreds of millions!) in proximity to the ovum or even result in a distinct ovum being inseminated. And a distinction in gametes would seem to mean a distinct child (Parfit 1987, 351–55). Moreover, the exact timing and manner of conception is itself highly susceptible to variations in whatever complex chain of acts and events it is that has happened to come before. Much of what has been done in human history, had it been done differently, would surely have undone the conceptions of vast numbers of persons. “[H]ow many of us could truly claim, ‘Even if railways and motor cars had never been invented, I would still have been born’?” (Parfit 1987, 361).”
Parfit’s entry in Wikipedia explains it this way: “By this we can see that any actions taken today, at time T, will affect the resulting people that exist after only a few generations. For instance, a significant change in global environmental policy would shift the initial conditions of the conception process so much that after 300 years none of the same people that would have been born are in fact born. Different couples meet each other and conceive at different times—different people exist. This is known as the ‘non-identity problem.”
This strikes me as an absolutely crucial argument for SR and OOO theorists to engage.
The ecological thought, for example, still places us squarely in the midst of this line of thinking. Simply put, the objects that exist, despite our realization that causality is aesthetics, are not the same objects that would have existed if the initial conditions that led to their spontaneous self-organization and withdrawal had not obtained.
As I am not an expert on the SR and OOO frameworks, my powers of extrapolation are limited. Nevertheless, it appears that human actions, specifically in terms of domestication of animals and such, are influencing which animals are born. This is a serious issue, isn’t it?
July 13, 2011 at 4:21 am
Tremendous post, Levi.
July 13, 2011 at 5:30 am
I respond somewhat here.
July 13, 2011 at 8:47 am
[…] SR/OOO and Nihilism: a response to Harman and Bryant 13Jul11 I’ve already posted a short response to Harman, but I wanted to re-visit the issues explored in that post concerning the difference between Homo Sapiens, as an object among objects, and the Anthropos, as an ideal toward which every object tends. I will also try to disentangle my own “cosmotheandric” position from the generic anti-nihilism Levi Bryant has rightfully critiqued. […]
July 13, 2011 at 8:59 am
Hey Levi, I’ve posted a response to some of your concerns here: http://footnotes2plato.com/2011/07/13/srooo-and-nihilism-a-response-to-harman-and-bryant/
-Matt
July 13, 2011 at 2:46 pm
I was with you right up until you got to this:
“and so on actually fosters a greater reverence for other humans, life, and the planet. If I believe that a God is going to save me someday, that history will culminate in some final confrontation, etc., it’s easier to have no regard for the present, this world, other people, and the planet. If I believe that I am acting on behalf of a God, it’s easier to kick the shit out of a homosexual or destroy a group of people that practices a different religion. If this is all there is, however, if every life is a singularity that will never be repeated again and that utterly ceases to exist with death, if there’s no escape hatch from this planet whether through the “end of days” or interstellar travel (I’m pretty skeptical about the possibility of interstellar travel given the great distances between stars and limitations of technology), I think you tend to value life a bit more and this world a bit more.”
this just isn’t how peoples’ relationships to their beliefs work (I have been going back and forth a bit around this with michael-archivefire), one’s intellectual commitments/justifications, in and of themselves, just don’t lead to such logical orientations in practice/life-style, which is one of the serious limits of most formal academic/humanities education, and other forms of cognitive-behavioralisms..
July 13, 2011 at 2:59 pm
[…] was triggered by Footnotes to Plato who has already drafted a response to the posts of Harman and Bryant. Morton and Niemoczynski have also weighed in. Perhaps the main reference of such a discussion is […]
July 13, 2011 at 3:24 pm
[…] response to my post on nihilism as well as Graham’s there’s been some follow up around the blogosphere. […]
July 13, 2011 at 4:26 pm
dmf,
Can you spell out what you have in mind here a bit more. I would agree that people often act in ways that are not in keeping with their beliefs, but I think it’s too string to suggest that there’s no relationship between belief and action.
July 13, 2011 at 5:27 pm
I’m just saying that it isn’t such a one to one relationship between intellectual/social commitments and any one person’s other actions/reactions. The answers that one might give in response to say church setting, saying a creed or in bible study or such, might have little to nothing how one responds in the bathroom or the parking lot after the service. So of course there are relationships between one’s various commitments/orientations but they are multiple, contextualized, and evolving. The idea that we are One across settings/relationships is itself a bit (historically/sociologically speaking) puritanical, no?
July 13, 2011 at 5:42 pm
dmf,
Absolutely no disagreement here. In Deleuze-speak, there is a difference between the “plane of content” (relations between actions, events, and bodies) and the “plane of expression” (beliefs, language, meanings, and so on). The two intersect and influence one another in a variety of ways but can be (and often are) out of line with one another and are not the same.
July 13, 2011 at 6:33 pm
see I wouldn’t see those examples as separate/separable, for me these are all things that we do/take-part-in, and doings are expressive, such that we don’t add up in some logical way, according to some equation/law/principle or even according to our egosyntonic desires.
I think I posted this when I 1st arrived here but seems relevant in this context.
http://www.torilmoi.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Moi_They-Practice-Their-Trades.pdf
July 13, 2011 at 7:28 pm
[…] up in response to Footnotes2plato’s post regarding OOO, theology, and nihilism. Levi Bryant (here and here) Tim Morton (here – love the phrase “theism-nihilism tango” BTW) Tom Sparrow […]
July 19, 2011 at 3:48 pm
[…] see also these posts at Footnotes to Plato (and this one), Plastic Bodies, Immanent Transcendence, Larval Subjects, and After […]