Shaviro’s book

Steven Shaviro ANNOUNCES THAT HIS NEW BOOK IS AVAILABLE.

His whole post is worth reading.

However, I find his counter-complaint to my complaint about Whitehead to be misleading. (Toscano makes the same point, citing Rorty, though without aiming it againt myr eading.)

That point, namely, is that the “subjective aim” in any prehension means that the prehension is not purely relational. To this I make several points in rebuttal…

1. Subjective aim, like everything else in Whitehead, must follow the ontological principle. In other words, subjective aim belongs to an actual entity. And that entity was produced entirely by the previous concrescence, or set of prehensions of the entire universe. That concrescence can be said to pre-exist to its next set of prehensions, which in turn gives rise to a new actual entity, but that doesn’t make it non-relational.

2. It would have to be shown that there is something in subjective aim that exceeds the prehensions at which it arrives. I don’t think that’s what Whitehead is up to. The point of “subjective aim” is just to let us know that while all actual entities prehend the same universe, each does it in its own way. It is important not to forget Whitehead’s constant digs at vacuous actuality, and vacuous actuality means a thing considered apart from its prehensions.

As Shaviro admits, he is trying to avoid anything like my concept of substance. He does this by holding that it’s enough to have a succession of entities defined by their relations, so that I right now have a “subjective aim” that prevents my being reduced entirely to my prehensions in the next instant. That won’t do, because I right now am still nothing but a bundle of prehensions. There is no moment in Whitehead when a thing has surplus beyond its prehensions. I right now am a concrescence of prehensions, and I right now is what makes the prehensions that lead to me one instant from now. But that’s not a non-relational concept of me.

Perhaps an easier way to see this is to look at how Shaviro’s appeal to subjective aim fails to answer my two basic complaints about relationism, but I just returned home and am too exhausted to do it. The short version of my argument is that subjective aim is no real surplus beyond prehensions, but is locked in a sort of CORRELATE with prehensions. There’s nothing magical about subjective aim. It just means that a bunch of entities don’t get concresced together unless some other entity is doing it to them.

Let me just add, before going off to sleep, that Shaviro is pushing another point (the Kant point) further than he has before. In the past, he was trying to claim that *my* philosophical position can be viewed as pro-Kant rather than anti-Kant. I conceded that point immediately, because there’s never been any doubt that it’s true…

a. I’m pro-Kant insofar as I have something like things in themselves outside all relations to them. (My Heidegger side, actually.)

b. I’m anti-Kant insofar as I don’t think the human-world relation deserves privilege over any other relation. (My Whitehead side.)

But notice that my Whitehead side is my ANTI-Kant side! That’s why I find it strange that Shaviro even reads Whitehead as a Kantian. I haven’t read the book yet, because it was just published, but Whitehead seems to be a full step more anti-Kantian than I am. Calling Whitehead a Kantian would be like calling Latour a Kantian.