I’m just catching up with this interesting exchange between Gary Williams (Minds and Brains), Graham Harman, and Tom Sparrow (Plastic Bodies). Williams takes issue with Harman’s and others’ portrayal of Speculative Realism as “revolutionary.” “The narrative of ‘finally’ moving beyond the ‘Kantian nightmare'”, he writes, “is tired and overplayed.” He argues that it’s not a big revelation that there is a world that’s independent of human minds. In reply, Harman and Sparrow defend the Speculative Realists’ originality and claim that Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and others did not sufficiently break with Kantian “correlationism.”
I sympathize with Williams’ position on this (and with some of the commenters to Sparrow’s post here). Anyone who studies the “natural” world, and most people in general, don’t need much convincing that there is a world autonomous from human subjectivity. It’s true that many twentieth-century philosophers have tended to ignore that point, taking an interest instead in how we know what we know, the role language plays in that, etc., and that social constructionists of various kinds have routinely rejected the idea of direct “knowledge” of that world, arguing instead that whatever knowledge we think we have of it is shaped (to one extent or another) by social processes, discourses, ideologies, cultural practices, and so on. But these are methodological and epistemological, not really ontological, moves.
Williams, in his studies, seems to draw on J. J. Gibson’s ecological psychology, alongside other forms of what we might call “sophisticated realism” — a category in which I’d include cognitive scientists like Maturana and Varela, ethologists like von Uexkull, and others. He also notes the use of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty by ecophilosophers to make exactly the same points the Speculative Realists raise. The SRs, on the other hand, are, to my mind, responding to a philosophical context dominated by precisely those philosophers and social constructionists who focus on language, discourse, and human projects (in general), so they’ve banded together to critique this hegemony and propose a new ontological realism in its place. Both positions are, therefore, understandable, and there’s no reason why reasonable dialogue couldn’t result in some mutual understanding between them.
I’m encouraged by the fact that Graham (and not for the first time) acknowledges Whitehead as “the one who did” overcome “the Kantian nightmare.” What’s interesting to me, however, is that the critiques Graham makes of Husserl and of Merleau-Ponty could also be applied to Whitehead. For instance:
Merleau-Ponty says the world looks at me just as I look at it. But that’s the very definition of correlationism. You don’t overcome Kant by saying that human and world always go together rather than being separate, you have to do it by no longer treating human and world as the two poles that are always in question. [. . .]
For Husserl there can be no independent object that is not the possible correlate of some consciousness, whereas for OOO no real object at all is the possible correlate of some consciousness, because real objects can be grasped only in translated/distorted form.
With respect to the first point, I interpret Merleau-Ponty as saying that the human-world pole is in question for the human in the same way that the dog-world pole is in question for the dog, the electron-world pole is in question for the electron, etc. In other words, the idea that “the world looks at me just as I look at it” is really an epistemological statement rather than an ontological and general one. With respect to both points, however, Whitehead also thinks of “objects” as being “correlated” to “subjects,” though since this subject-object relation is one that emerges with every actual occasion — and certainly not only with the “societies of actual occasions” called humans — this correlationism is a feature of the universe all the way down.
It seems to me that the difference between Whitehead/Husserl/Merleau-Ponty and OOO on this issue has to do with their respective definitions of an “object.” For the former it is part of a relation with a subject: for Husserl that’s a human subject, because that’s what he focused on; for M-P I don’t think it’s necessarily a human subject (especially in his late work); and for Whitehead it quite explicitly isn’t just that. For the OOOs, on the other hand, the object stands on its own, independent of any subjects, subjectivity, process of subjectivation, or whatever else. But that’s just how OOOs define “objects.” As was established in my earlier exchange with Levi Bryant, they don’t mean the word in its everyday sense, but in a philosophical sense that’s specific to the ontology they present.
As for whether SR is revolutionary or not, it’s too early to say that either way, since the revolution has not occurred. If, in twenty years, most philosophy departments are dominated by some version of (what we now call) speculative realism, then it will clearly have been a revolution.
Wow! I’m so “withdrawn” I didn’t realize there was MUCH more in your Google reader than appears under your IMMANENCE “Shadow Blog”..
Anyway, just finished reading Ned Block’s 2007 BBS article, “Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh Between Psychology and Neuroscience” – which was linked from the excellent 6/17 INTEGRAL OPTIONS CAFE review of Alison Gopnik’s THE PHILOSOPHICAL BABY: WHY BABIES ARE MORE CONSCIOUS THAN WE ARE. Block has a nice summary of the CORRELATIONISM that still haunts contemporary cognitive science.
Speculative Realism and its criticism of correlationism isn’t my area, but these issues have been worked over with great sophistication in the post-analytic literature on metaphysical realism and its alternatives (anti-realism, pragmatic realism, etc.). Some stuff I’ve found very helpful:
Anything by Hilary Putnam
Michael Lynch: Truth in Context (highly recommended)
Michael Luntley: Contemporary Philosophy of Thought (technical, but very worthwhile)
Frank Farrell: Subjectivity, Realism, and Postmodernism
Michael Devitt: Realism and Truth
Horgan & Potrc: Austere Realism
One of the lessons that emerges very clearly is that the debate over metaphysical realism is not about whether there is a reality that is causally independent of (and pre-existent to) human subjectivity. Critics of MR are usually denying other types of indpendence (Putnam, Lynch, and Luntley all address this).
On the phenomenological side, I agree that it is a mistake to take the phenomenological notion of an object to mean on ontological entity, since non-existent things can be objects in this sense. ‘Object’ in this sense is by definition the correlate of some intentional act, but it doesn’t follow (even for those who deny MR) that entities are metaphysically dependent on intentional acts. (I think this point holds independently of the complex debates about the noema in Husserl’s thought.)
Finally, I worry that SR is not revolutionary, but is just another iteration of svabhavic thinking.
This is probably a redundant comment but the expression (kantian) ‘science-fiction nightmare’ comes from “Latour’s Pandora’ Hope.”
But surely no-one is saying that Kant did’t believe in an external world (an idealist reading!!! For the later ‘Critical’Kant you just can’t know it as it really is…it has withdrawal symtoms.
Exactly the scenario that Latour, Stengers and many others sidestep
Mario Crocco
‘Kant intended to provide a new explanation of cognition by retaining certain aspects of the rationalism of idealism, on the one hand, and the receptivity of empiricism, on the other. (Critique of Pure Reason, A13/B61ff.) In this he had somewhat limited success.
The weight of his descriptions is heavily on the side of how we process sensible information rather than on the constraints that nature imposes on us. An inquiry into the primacy of relations demands a more positive approach to such ‘constraints’, or encounters, rather than the minimalist acknowledgement that Kant accords them.
One place to look for such a positive approach is in the work of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers for whom the main partner to be questioned in our arguments about the world is, funnily enough, the world. A world which is not a self-identical, formless matter that cannot be known in any positive way, but a richly articulated collective of humans and non-humans where no-one is in command.’ ‘The Primacy of Semiosis’.
Kant regarded things-in-themselves as the ‘true correlate of sensibility.’ Ontologically what we experience (for Kant) is not a world separate from the noumenal, but rather its specific human reflection. A non-dualist reading.
This reminds me of Stanley Rosen’s reversal of Heidegger:…’the more carefully we inspect beings, the more clarity we achieve about Being..The is so because there is no diff btwn the Being of beings and Being.
I made this comment at Larval Subjects yesterday. Not sure if the comment by Levi addresses the issue.
“I’m sure this question has been clearly dealt with before but I must have missed it.
When an object is eaten and digested – e.g a cat eating a mouse (‘life is theft’ – the mode of existence of cats involves the death of mice) – where does the ‘withdrawn’ whole that was the mouse hang out?
Surely the no longer existing ‘organization’, or ‘virtual’, of the mouse was encountered in some way. Its potential was in fact digested. Even the existence of a single cell involves the destruction of complex chemical structures.
I guess you could argue that when something is decomposed into something else – mouse into heat and excrement, this shit being a transient state of biomatter – it was not encountered ‘in-itself’, But what ontological merit is there in this claim?”