The central failure of Continental philosophy has been the rejection of naturalism. With few exceptions, Continental thought, since the 19th century, disavowed the naturalistic revolution that began in the 16th century. Rather than choosing nature– which is to say materiality and efficient causation –as the ground of being, again and again it has made obscurantist gestures based on a recoil to the naturalist revolution: subject or lived experience as the ground of being (phenomenology), spirit as ground of being (Hegel), economics as ground of being (Marx), signifier as ground of being (structuralism and post-structuralism), power as a ground of being (Foucault), history as a ground of being (Gadamer), text as a ground of being, ect. We even get romantic visions of nature evoking the will to power and élan vital.
In Freudian terms, these are so many responses to the narcisstic wound of nature and materiality. It is not the subject, lived experience, history, intentionality, the signifier, text, or power that explains nature, that explains nature, it is nature and materiality that explains all of these things. If these things aren’t treated as natural phenomena, then they deserve to be committed to flames. The point is not that these other orientations have failed to make contributions to our understanding of the natural world, but that they have mistakenly treated these things as grounds of the natural world, rather than the reverse.
It’s difficult to escape the impression that these rejections of naturalism and materialism are a massive reaction formation on the part of the humanities. On the one hand, the humanities still suffer from a theological prejudice, and fear the dislodging of human privilege or exceptionalism that naturalism and materialism betokens. Great apes such as ourselves cannot stand the thought that we are contingent beings among other beings and, in our narcissism, cannot bear the thought that everything else isn’t for us and dependent on us. On the other hand, the humanities are terrified by the thought that our areas of inquiry might be usurped by the natural sciences. We worry that physics, biology, chemistry, will steal our work. In typical narcissistic fashion, we then try to argue that some specific to what we inquire into is the ground of everything else: the subject, politics, text, the signifier, culture, lived experience, will to power, élan vital, etc. We do everything to evade the truth of our age, to preserve our privilege.
The truth of the matter, however– and I won’t even bother to make arguments here –is that naturalism and materialism are the only credible philosophical positions today. If you find yourself explaining being in terms of the signifier, text, rhetoric, culture, power, history, or lived experience, then your thought deserves to be committed to flame. If you don’t begin from the premise that we are evolved to get around in the world and reproduce– and that we are put together to do this in particular circumstances –then your thought deserves to be committed to flames. Your thought is a reaction formation to the narcissistic wound of the fact that your existence is contingent and that you are only the third of the three great apes.
This does not entail that what you’ve said is entirely useless. Nothing entirely misses the truth, including your secularized theological conception of being. There’s even a bit of truth in Christ, Paul, and Buddha. All you need to do is abandon the notion that humans aren’t an animal, that somehow being is dependent on humans and culture, and that somehow we have ends like knowledge and transcendence. All you have to do is re-interpret the entirety of your claims about lived experience, the signifier, culture, power, etc., in naturalistic terms. Then you might make a real contribution, rather than engage in one more reaction against the narcissistic wounds of Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, and neurology. Absent this, you deserve to be treated as apologists suffering from narcissistic denial.
Larval Subjects . 
October 26, 2012 at 3:17 am
All these other strategies, as you write, express a truth; perhaps more pointedly, they are methods or gestures toward getting at being. Nonetheless, being is not predicated on these maneuvers by which we literate humans in the 21st century attempt to get at it. This particular defense of this particular naturalism is indeed greatly needed now.
October 26, 2012 at 4:55 am
Spoken like a true Lucretian! bravo…
October 26, 2012 at 4:56 am
Reblogged this on noir realism and commented:
Levi comes out fighting for naturalism and materialism… bravo! A true Lucretian!
October 26, 2012 at 7:25 am
I’m very sympathetic to this, but I have to ask: how on earth is Marx, of all people, in reaction to naturalism? He is a naturalist. ‘Economics’ isn’t some mysterious non-material thing, it’s human animals – sociable, talkative, tool-using, child-rearing East African planes apes – getting around the world and making a living.
October 26, 2012 at 7:28 am
Hi Levi. This is very refreshing – I agree that reflex anti-naturalism of much recent continental philosophy is horrible.
I’d be interested to know this means in terms of the future of philosophy. Just to take a chestnut that has exercised me for a while, does your naturalism line up with the philosophical naturalism of writers like Dennett, Churchland or Papineau? Do you think we need a naturalistic theory of representation or meaning such as a Fodorian psycho-semantics? Should we be eliminativists about meaning instead?
Best, David
October 26, 2012 at 11:54 am
Marx fares better than most, but I would are that historical materialism is a very anti-naturalist position.
October 26, 2012 at 12:09 pm
Shoot, I burned all of my work before I got to the last paragraph that said I’m allowed to re-interpret it!
October 26, 2012 at 12:45 pm
Great post, Levi, which I tweeted. A response I usually get to this observation attempts to point out my latent wish for and reliance upon transcendence in my use of language, argumentation, reduction and synthesis to make the point about the material and contingent nature of language itself. It’s hard (for me, amateur philosopher) to refute this, acknowledging that there seems to be something I am trying to ‘get to’ in my language, that goes beyond the material truth of it, and something in the form of argumentation that seeks a redemption of MY thought. Is it that these forms (argumentation) are simply contingent outcomes of my material need to communicate (what I believe), or is there a latent transcendent wish embedded in this (or any) use of language? Forgive my naivete here.
Warmly, Jeff
October 26, 2012 at 1:59 pm
Rousing post, Levi. I am also worried about characterizing Marx as “anti-naturalist.” I think there are unusually difficult exegetical problems when drawing any sort of philosophical positions out of Marx (as opposed to sociological or political-economic positions), but it seems to me that the two main explanans that Marx relies on, means of production and relations of production, are natural facts (about technology and social relations, respectively).
I also think there is room for a productive blending of the kind of naturalism you think is prerequisite (“begin from the premise that we are evolved to get around in the world and reproduce”) and some form of the phenomenological emphasis on the centrality of “lived experience.” I take it that showing that these things can be held together was Dewey’s great achievement (though some will argue that Dewey is unsuccessful in this).
October 26, 2012 at 6:36 pm
Really good post. You have been one of the best articulators of philosophical ideas that I have read in some cases. I would like to reply by saying that naturalism and materialism (I would love to hear what the distinction is between these two isms) are useful and interesting ontological views which I as a former natural scientist embraced fully myself. However, I think that a certain kind of reductionism is wrong (if not wrong possibly mad). It would be odd for me to reduce you, a person, for example, to being merely an entangled collective of individual cellular bodies i.e. biological cells. Persons like us are embodied in corporeal and material forms but to reduce us to primates, mammals, reptiles, or even lower life forms is wrong. There must be some excess with respect to nature that characterizes man qua man. We are fundamentally different from other animals while retaining a full animality simultaneously. My point is that we go beyond, exceed or transcend the purely natural constitution. Also a full reductionism to the natural and the material has always led to a subsequent and thoroughgoing determinism regarding all things including human affairs. So you completely lose the apparent phenomenon of human freedom which is testified to by many philosophers and thinkers. At any rate, I would argue that a wholesale reduction to matter or nature fails to acknowledge man’s excess with respect to nature (and to all structures or forms for that matter which is the condition for the possibility of a certain kind of human freedom). I would argue that any kind of ontological finitude will be overcome by the possibility of the non-finite – even if it is just the fact that there are an infinite number of numbers or something. Anyway, this last bit is a little disorganized sry.
October 26, 2012 at 7:45 pm
What if I imagine that nature and culture have an exactly equal claim on me?
Though I acknowledge the truth of evolution, I in fact do not “begin” (my emphasis) “from the premise that we are evolved to get around in the world and reproduce– and that we are put together to do this in particular circumstances”. The reason for this is simple. While evolutionary theory explains species survival, not all the traits of an individual are adaptive. That means we will have desires that are not “put together” to “get around” in the “particular circumstances” we actually face. We are largely, or more or less, or approximately, “fit” to survive. But the meaning of our lives is as much about how we are unsuited to these particular circumstances into which we have been thrown as how we are suited to them.
October 26, 2012 at 10:58 pm
fighting words and largely credible. but it’s a belief to believe that everything has a naturalistic ‘explanation’ – that is which can be described in terms of some nomic (lawful) generative mechanism.
Even nat science ‘finds’ fundamental forces that have no explanation….
October 27, 2012 at 12:30 am
Thomas,
If naturalism is true then nature and culture can’t be opposed in the way you suggest as culture is a natural phenomenon to the same degree as anything else. When I say we’re evolved to reproduce and get around, I’m not saying this explains everything, only that we need to remember our biological being. We are not, for example, evolved to be knowers. Recognition of such things is important to giving accurate accounts of mind, ethical psychology, etc. This does not of course mean that we can’t become knowers and whatnot.
October 27, 2012 at 12:38 am
Matt,
I do think it’s possible to articulate a form of Marxism consistent with naturalism, however I don’t think Marxist theory has been particularly good at doing so. Here I’m thinking particularly of the Frankfurt school and cultural Marxism that tended to see culture as the ground of all else, not the reverse. These positions have tended towards idealism.
October 27, 2012 at 7:44 am
Yes, Levi, I think my objection here is an objection, not to natural science (specifically, evolutionary biology), but to naturalism as a philosophical position. Naturalism says culture is a natural phenomenon. Natural science just studies nature as nature. I guess I don’t think naturalism is true in the sense that our biological being is the first truth about us. I think my communal becoming is just as important. So I don’t “oppose” nature and culture, I see them as supplements to each other. They make equal and different claims on me. I study nature as nature through nature, and culture as culture through culture.
As I say on my other blog: there is a tension in the clearing.
P.S. I remember similar rhetoric about committing non-naturalist ideas to the flames when reading E.O. Wilson’s Consilience. As rhetoric, it leaves me a bit a cold.
October 27, 2012 at 11:17 am
While I love what you are doing with naturalism in your own philosophy, I have to respectfully disagree. I think the real problem in Continental philosophy is the pose that maintains that issues between naturalism and opposing views are pseudo-problems. Ironically, if you take this pose, then you are more likely just to be a bad naturalist (compare the manner in which people who pretend the idealism/realism is a pseudo-issue are almost always really just vastly less sophisticated idealists).
I realize this sounds perverse, but I (along with Tristan Garcia and Graham, to various extents) think social constructivist views are paradigm cases of badly reductionistic naturalism. The picture put forward (often, at the end of the day, by phenomenologists and post-structuralists!) is little different from logical positivism in this regard, with norms being human projections on the world and descriptive social theory being used to account for those.
This is rejected by anti-naturalists and more sophisticated anti-reductionist naturalists, which is why I think anti-naturalists like Graham and myself often find ourselves more sympathetic with naturalists like you and Protevi than many people who loudly proclaim that science is a founded mode, yet recapitulate the most regressive aspects of old school, naturalistic sociology..
October 27, 2012 at 3:10 pm
Thomas,
I’m not endorsing the sorts of claims you’re attributing to me. First off, naturalist positions such as developmental systems theory that I advocate would agree with your claim about communal development. That doesn’t mean we can somehow ignore biology. Let’s take the example of cognitive science. Much of cognitive science has adopted a representationalist view of mind where cognition takes place inside the head. In the computer models we’ve made we notice that such cognition takes a tremendous amount of energy, and above all, time. From the standpoint of organisms that need to respond quickly to the world about them, this is unfeasible. Enter philosophers of mind such as Andy Clark that take these biological limitations into account. Clark attempts to show that cognition does not take place solely in the brain, but is a relation between body, brain, and features of the world. When doing mathematics, for example, we don’t keep all the steps of the equation in our mind, but allow the *paper* to remember for us and focus on whatever step we’re on at that point. The paper is literally a part of our cognitive apparatus. It’s a naturalist orientation that allows Clark to discover this. While I have no doubt that there’s a grain of truth in what Wilson suggests, I am by no means suggesting everything can be explained by biology, genetics, reproductive drives, etc because signifiers, tools, language, archives, institutions, etc are also real natural entities that have causal powers and play a key role in development. They are features of hominid ecology in which we develop. We can’t, however, separate culture and nature as you suggest.
October 27, 2012 at 3:14 pm
Put differently, reduction and naturalism aren’t synonyms. Reductionism is one possible theorization of naturalism; one I happen to think is mistaken.
October 27, 2012 at 5:49 pm
[…] pleased that my last post on naturalism has generated some interesting discussion– pro and con –about naturalism. As I […]
October 27, 2012 at 6:01 pm
Levi,
I suspected you might not want to be seen as a reductionist, actually. And I thought I was careful not to suggest anything other than what you had said yourself, namely, that any account of being must begin with biology (“the premise that we are evolved to get around in the world and reproduce”).
To take your example of cognitive science: Your position, I take it, is that any account of mental representation must “begin” with biology. (I haven’t proposed to ignore biology, by the way. I’ve just said it’s not necessarily the place to begin to think. I.e., I’ve objected to the project of committing thoughts that did not begin with biological assumptions to the flames.)
Now, the specific example you site, that of calculating in the head and on paper, makes me think immediately of Wittgenstein in the Investigations. Surely, I could begin there and entirely avoid the fallacy of “representations in the head”. In the case of mental representations more generally, I might begin with Proust and develop my understanding of how “cognition does not take place solely in the brain, but is a relation between body, brain, and features of the world” from there. (Or rather I might not even worry very much about the brain and talk instead of body, mind and society.)
I choose those two figures advisedly because they clearly predate the rise of cognitive science. It’s only after we’ve bought into cognitive science as a point of departure that Clark’s observations about our use of paper to help us calculate can count as a “discovery”. Indeed, it’s only after we’ve bought into the reductionist naturalism of early cognitive science that this non-reductionist “naturalist orientation” “allows” anything at all. It is entirely unnecessary for those of us who have resolutely kept representation out of the head on the advice of our artists (including writers, of course, and a good number of philosophers). That’s all I mean by using culture to understand culture instead of trying to figure it out on naturalist assumptions, whether reductionist or not.
October 27, 2012 at 7:54 pm
“The central failure of Continental philosophy has been the rejection of naturalism.”
Is this really an accurate characterisation of Continental philosophy?
Aside from ignoring notable instances such as Gaston Bachelard, Rene Thom, Jacques Monod, perhaps even Michel Serres, all of whom have been hugely influential in ‘Continental philosophy’, it is insensitive to philosophy’s obligation to consider all claims, all positions, all traditions, and not to presuppose the privilege of any one of them, just because of a measure of any popular success…
October 27, 2012 at 8:05 pm
AK,
I certainly wouldn’t say that the thinkers you list have been *hugely* influential at the institutional level. They’ve been marginal at best. There are always exceptions to any claims about societies. Anti-naturalism has been the dominant position in Continental thought for the last few decades. There are systematic reasons for this having to do with the suspension of the natural attitude in phenomenology, Heidegger’s critique of enframing, and the linguistic turn and rise of social constructivism. I do not think naturalism is just another position to be evaluated on equal footing with others. Note, I’m not suggesting we should *reject* things like phenomenology. Rather, these things need to be reworked within a naturalistic framework.
October 29, 2012 at 3:32 am
Levi, you write: “In Freudian terms, these are so many responses to the narcisstic wound of nature and materiality. It is not the subject, lived experience, history, intentionality, the signifier, text, or power that explains nature”. But might it not be possible that the “lived experience” and “history” of Europeans goes some way towards explaining European (continental european) philosophy? The only trouble I have with anything you say here is that, e.g. Hegel or say Marx are taxed with not being naturalists (or in the case of Marx not naturalist enough) when maybe at the time they wrote there were other more pressing concerns on their mind. In Hegel’s case the French Revolution and the rise of the Prussian state. In Marx’s the horrors of industrializing capitalist modernity. I don’t know that it’s really their “fault” that they were more concerned with the problems of their day than with the concerns of those of us living in the early years of the 21st century (waiting, say for something like FrankenSandy)
October 29, 2012 at 1:02 pm
[…] at Larval Subjects Levi has posted a ringing endorsement of naturalism and “materialism” designed to provoke a few readers within the Continental […]
October 29, 2012 at 3:29 pm
Hi John,
My remark about narcissistic wounds was really a throw-away comment. I do, however, think that there’s been a lot of anxiety in the humanities regarding the rise of the natural sciences consisting in fears that our turf if being taken away, and that this has led to a sort of hostility towards naturalism. You are certainly right to suggest that we have to discuss why European thought developed as it did in terms of its history, but we also have to explain why this history has tended to systematically exclude naturalism (there are notable exceptions to this such as the thought of Deleuze and Guattari and Bergson, among others).
I believe it’s quite a stretch to suggest that Hegel is in any way a naturalist. Naturalistic orientations do not admit of totalization or teleology in the form he aims at, nor can they privilege the subject in the way he does. As I’ve said in comments, Marx fares much better, but when we look at the history of how Marxism developed among the cultural Marxists, we see an implicit and sometimes not so implicit disavowal of naturalism. I don’t think we can simply say theorists were attending to more pressing issues. As we see among naturalists like Spinoza, naturalism will have a significant impact on how we pose political questions. Just as I argue that naturalism modifies how we pose questions in philosophy of mind, naturalism would have a number of implications for how we pose political and ethical questions. In other words, it can’t be treated as a merely regional issue that can be set aside in other areas of inquiry.
October 29, 2012 at 4:59 pm
I am relieved to hear you say that this bit about narcissistic wounds was ‘throwaway,’ Levi, because (as I wrote in my response post) I think it attempts to paint your non-naturalist opponents into an unfair corner in which they must either concede the legitimacy of your critique or defend themselves and confirm your analysis. I see this as a very distracting tactic that does not forward the actual conversation, which is about the validity of various philosophical positions, including naturalism — a validity which (pace your own uncompromising stance, which I can admire but cannot share) is very much in question. I will in fairness update my post to reflect this acknowledgment on your part.
October 29, 2012 at 5:26 pm
Skohliast,
I think there have been a variety of reasons for hostility towards naturalism, including narcissism. I think we see effects of this narcissism particularly in theological orientations towards thought that wish to see humans as metaphysically privileged beings. Certainly we seem to hear this in creationist and intelligent design narratives, anyway. At the end of the day, however, I just don’t see how one can credibly advocate a non-naturalist perspective given the success of the natural sciences in explaining the world, biology, and our minds. As I argued in my follow up post, this doesn’t entail rejecting culture, only that we need to rework cultural and phenomenological analyses in naturalist terms.
October 29, 2012 at 5:29 pm
“Institutional levels” are not necessarily indicative of significance at the level of ideas and discursive production.
Monod’s “Chance and Necessity” was a bestseller, and its themes would have certainly been in the air after he won the Nobel prize in 1965.
Perhaps Derrida’s: “The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end.” alludes to it?
Who knows?…
October 29, 2012 at 6:27 pm
AK,
My point is that we have to examine how ideas disseminate throughout a population to determine how much impact they’ve had. The situation here is similar to that in ecology and species. Indeed, we are talking about a particular ecology here. In a natural ecology we’ll have certain species that are dominant, with others that have a very minor presence. Likewise, in the population of a species you’ll always have some members that are outliers such as black moths in Manchester preceding the industrial revolution, and others that display more generic phenotypal characteristics such as grey moths. Just as it would be absurd to suggest that grey moths weren’t the norm in Manchester prior to the industrial revolution because there was a small population of black moths, it’s also absurd to suggest that somehow because there have been certain outliers in intellectual thoughts we’re warranted in denying that there have been dominant tendencies and that these dominant tendencies haven’t functioned in ways to suppress other tendencies through the way in which training, conferences, the publication industry, editorial boards, etc., function. Basically you’re saying that we should just reject the Foucaultian theory of power and Althusserian theories of ideology when it comes to the ecology of ideas.
That said, things can always change. With the advent of the industrial revolution, buildings and trees became covered in soot. This gave black moths an advantage as they no longer stuck out like a sore thumb to their predators. By contrast, grey moths became more visible to their predators. As a result, black moth populations became dominant or the norm, whereas grey moths became more rare. The same thing can happen in intellectual ecologies. The new feminist materialisms and SR have contributed to creating an intellectual climate more hospitable to materialist and naturalist orientations, allowing though like that of Serres, etc., to exercise greater influence.
October 29, 2012 at 7:28 pm
Levi,
Pointing to the great success of the natural sciences does indeed count as an argument, and this is (in my opinion) a better tack than remarks about privilege. I did not take you to be “rejecting culture”. But I think it is possible to be, say, a theist and also believe that humans are not the center of the universe. I also want to say that it is also possible to think that naturalism is not the most important question (which is not quite the same as seeing it as a pseudo-question). Perhaps we are still looking for the terms in which to frame the issue.
October 29, 2012 at 8:05 pm
Naturalism or materialism are hardly perspectives struggling to disseminate novel insights to a population ignorant of their ‘virtues’. Their outlooks are well-known…
October 29, 2012 at 8:16 pm
Skholiast,
I think my position is that the success of the natural sciences reveals that we don’t need the sort of argument you’re calling for. Argument seems to be something that’s required only where there are incommensurable explanations that have equal explanatory success. Yet we see nothing like that in the face of the natural sciences. Take the example of neurology. As per the post over at your blog, I certainly agree that hard problems such as the problem of consciousness and qualia have not yet been solved. Fair enough. However, I fail to see why this should be taken as grounds for endorsing a dualistic theory of mind such as we find in Descartes. Why? Because we now know that we can both stimulate qualia in the mind by perturbing the brain in various ways and that certain functions and conscious abilities (such as remembering and time-tracking) disappear altogether when the brain is damaged in various ways. This is grounds enough for endorsing the thesis that mind and brain are the same thing and that we need entertain Cartesian dualism as much as we need continue entertaining the four humors theory of disease or the phlogiston theory of combustion.
As for theism, two points. Yes, of course one can advocate a non-humanistic theism and there are those that do, but this is a rather marginal tradition and not at all representative of dominant theological positions throughout the world. I wish the non-anthropocentric theists luck in becoming mainstream, but I also fail to see why the naturalist should spend her time bothering over these when it is humanistic theisms that are overwhelmingly dominant throughout the world. Second, and more to the point, God is getting rather small, no? At one point, God presided over everything ranging from the events of nature that were punishments and rewards for how people lived or divine signs, to the movements of the heavens. Now, even most theists would deny that things like Hurricane Sandy are divine punishments, that the appearance of comets are omens, etc. We now have highly successful naturalistic explanations for these things. Given that, why do we need the hypothesis of God at all to explain the world? Because we can’t explain what initiated the Big Bang? We’re to understand that God is merely the finger that lit the match? It just seems that there’s no real need for this hypothesis and that, given, the psychological suffering and social turmoil that theology causes in the world, we would be far better off without it. This is not to say that I’m on some sort of crusade to put an end to religion. I’m not. It’s just not an ontological hypothesis I think we need.
October 29, 2012 at 8:37 pm
AK,
You’re changing the goalposts. The discussion before was whether or not naturalism and materialism are dominant positions within Continental thought or whether they are rather marginal. Now you’re discussing something entirely different and contentious to boot. Certainly many have a general idea of what naturalism and materialism claim, but often those pictures are caricatures.
October 29, 2012 at 9:00 pm
You seem to be responding only to the first sentences of my responses?
The links lead to the full responses. I don’t wish to overburden your comment area. I could post them all here, if you like?
October 29, 2012 at 9:11 pm
AK,
I am trying to keep comments here for the benefit of other readers. That said, I find that your comments are getting increasingly aggressive and condescending, and will not continue to post your remarks if you are unable to maintain civility.
October 30, 2012 at 12:10 am
Thanks for your answer, Levi. I get what you’re saying. When you write “You are certainly right to suggest that we have to discuss why European thought developed as it did in terms of its history, but we also have to explain why this history has tended to systematically exclude naturalism …” Might not c18-9 Europe’s commitment to Christianity be part of that explanation? Obviously that wouldn’t apply to Spinoza. I don’t think it applies all that much to Kant, either. But it certainly applies to Hegel. Anyway, I get your general point about how one’s attitude towards naturalism would color one’s way of doing humanities, politics, etc. Thanks for writing such thorough blog posts.
October 30, 2012 at 1:13 am
Levi,
Thank you for the engagement on this. I think the whole notion of God and anthropocentrism is a crucial one, but much more for reasons pertaining to the old fashioned meaning-of-life question than anything pertaining to cosmogenesis, let alone hurricanes or comets. I suppose this does leave me partially open to the charge that I’m anxious over just being an ape, but that’s not really what it’s about for me. it’s about whether the universe is a fluke in a hyperchaotic froth or whether there is meaning to be wrung from it despite the suffering of a seal being eaten by a great white shark, or, yes, a human whose loved ones have been drowned in a tsunami. I don’t think these questions must be answered in theistic terms, but philosophy has always been about the meaning of life and I really do see walking away from that question as an abdication, not an accomplishment. This doesn’t mean to draw an equals-sign between materialism and this abdication — I just wanted to explain some of where theology enters in here. If this is just a “sop for human self-esteem,” as Brassier puts it, oh well. Seems to me that if encounter is ubiquitous between objects, suffering might well be too. Here is a place where the question of trauma might indeed be meaningfully raised.
October 30, 2012 at 1:33 am
Skholiast,
I guess I’m in the “universe is a fluke and hyperchaotic froth”, not the “these events had meaning” camp. I don’t think there’s any cosmological or theological meaning to the loss of a loved one, a natural disaster, getting cancer, or the heat death of the sun. I think that’s just what happens. On the one hand, I see something indecent in the suggestion that Rwanda, the Holocaust, or Hurricane Katrina have some sort of cosmological or theological meaning, or in the idea that the loss of a child, loved one, or terminal cancer are a “test”. I also think these ways of thinking have led to tremendous human cruelty and insensitivity, and deeply ineffective ways of responding to events. We look for a scapegoat for example, a sacrificial being that represents the way we’ve offended the gods, or we “repent” treating our sinful ways as being responsible for the hurricane or the volcano or the earthquake or 9-11.
I guess I thus think we’re adrift in a universe that doesn’t care about us, where our existence is contingent, where natural events are the result of natural causes (including our own destruction of the environment), not how we’ve lived our lives and organized our society. Meaning is not cosmologically or theologically guaranteed or grounded, but arises from us, how we relate to one another, and the projects that we set for ourselves. Nothing ever expiates the loss of a child, a loved one, or the destruction of our bodies as a result of nature, social abomination (Holocaust, Gulags, pograms, the Inquisition, etc). The best we can do, in my opinion, is remember these things, remember what caused them (including superstition), and find ways to prevent them in the future.
With that said, while I don’t share your theology and find aspects of the idea that these things have meaning repugnant, I’m not on any crusade to destroy your beliefs and do not see people who hold beliefs such as yourself as my enemy. These are interesting debates and conversations that we have on the internet or over a nice glass of wine and dinner. In those conversations I say that I admire the way in which your spiritual beliefs are able to organize collective action in ways that my naturalistic views are not, and we have a debate about these intricacies relating to one another like scholastic schoolmen and enjoying that debate. I largely share your ethical commitments and politics, and therefore see the ontological underpinnings as secondary to those share commitments. So when I express my ire over these things, I hope you’re not seeing yourself as my target. As one of my theologian friends, for whom I recently wrote a forward on his latest book about grace, said in response to my question “why religion rather than politics?”, “I think religion is able to mobilize people in ways that politics so far is not.” He has a point.
October 30, 2012 at 3:34 am
I am largely on board with most of what you are doing, but I find the following claim suspect “Argument seems to be something that’s required only where there are incommensurable explanations that have equal explanatory success. Yet we see nothing like that in the face of the natural sciences.” This does not match my experience of the natural sciences at al. Science progress by argument–yes argument rooted in materiality–but argument none the less. Scientists, like rhetorical scholars, speek in terms of “evidence” and “support”. Knowledges is not posited as absolutes we have access to, but normatively as what we ought to believe based on what he can observe. To say one theory has superior explanatory success is to engage in argument. Let us not behave like the anglo-american philosophers of “scientism” who would treat science as revealed religion rather than the wondrous space of contestation and become that can be so easily found taking to scientists.
Although trained in the continental tradition, I grew up in a family of scientists and now work in the “mathematical sciences”. I am essentially a naturalist and certainly a fan of empiricism. But, much of my own curiosity in philosophy comes from things that both clearly exist (in the sense of having causal power) and are not directly material–that is, things like language and computation have material consequence and manifestation but are somehow not essentially material. So, I think an anti-reductionist naturalism is possible, but it is hard, and much of the continental thought you criticizes (say Derrida and Foucault) has utility at this level in the same way that we can recognize the essential role of mathematics in enabling science without immediately succumbing to Platonism. I’m sure reading Foucault can make one a better scientist. This is particularly true because much of the natural world has a surprisingly textual character (Haraway’s point that DNA reduces biology not to “chemistry” in the naive sense but to questions of coding). To the extent you agree with any of this (which I think you do), I’m not sure what you makes you see a need for “fighting words.” One can take a “social constructivist” view, and belief that the “social” construction is an emergent phenomenon in a natural process (society).
You sight Andy Clark approvingly, but who better represents what Continental (and for that matter Anglo-American) philosophy has to offer to naturalism. Clark is a master phenomenologer of the Heideggerian tradition. Many of his insights come across as arm chair philosophy par excellence, but I can’t help but think that his work will have profound consequences on the course of cognitive science, neurology, and artificial intelligence.
October 30, 2012 at 4:31 am
Levi,
The challenge of pointing to meaning without rendering it indecent is indeed a pressing issue — sometimes I think it is the issue. (And psychoanalysis obviously has something to say about this too.) I absolutely see the pertinence of this. I also appreciate your graciousness about this debate.
October 31, 2012 at 3:10 am
I recall hearing that Edmund Husserl’s primary motive for initiating his phenomenological method was to combat something called psychologism in logic. Something about the natural attitude and the version of naturalism that he was dealing with led to an undermining of the absolute and objective character of logic. I wish I had been able to get a better understanding of the problem of psychologism but I wonder if this reworking of naturalism that you (Bryant) are discussing can deal with the possibility of psychologism that so strongly motivated Husserl’s production of his version of transcendental idealism. All in all though, I definitely see nature as a storehouse of untold mysteries many of which have been somewhat uncovered. Yet, we humans still do not understand nature completely and thus I see a justification for a renewed interest in and a reworking of traditional naturalism in the interest of understanding that which is still largely unknown to us. It would need to be a neo-naturalism which overcomes the problems (like psychologism) of traditional naturalism. It would be a naturalism to come. That being said my main concern would be any possibility of some finite enclosure. As long as this neo-naturalism or this naturalism to come remained somehow open to at least the possibility of the infinite, and to the possible coming of something other than nature then I could take that position.
October 31, 2012 at 3:54 pm
[…] Hard Problem. The Hard Problem breaks the back of Levi Bryant’s argument against continental transcendentalism. Otherwise I want to show you the lion that shares the litter […]
October 31, 2012 at 8:12 pm
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