a meme to nip in the bud

I’ve seen a few suggestions in the past six months that the object-oriented model is a kind of “folk ontology,” by analogy with Churchland’s “folk psychology.” However, this is a weak suggestion.

The true folk otnology in Western countries, if there is one, would be materialism. The default model of the universe is one of hard, resistant material bodies on one side and fabricated human realities on the other. (Or as Badiou puts it in Logics of Worlds, “there are bodies and languages.” He should have been more sarcastic about this than he was, but that’s an issue for another time.) Churchland, the great critic of folk psychology, also strikes me as a great champion of folk ontology. Put differently, it seems to me that “eliminative materialism” is a contradiction in terms. If you’re truly committed to elimination, then you can’t also be committed to any particular entity that might survive elimination. Think of how ridiculous it would sound if we called Husserl an “eliminative phenomenologist.”

But if we drop the notion of material objects, and treat objects more generally as whatever has autonomous reality and exists in polarity with its qualities, relations, moments, traits, parts, whatever, then it should be clear that no “folk” known to anthropology has ever been committed to an object-oriented metaphysics.

If you’re going to eliminate objects from your philosophy, I can promise you that you’ll end up embracing something much worse.

As I argued in Bristol (and even a bit in Prince of Networks at the end) all standard “radical” moves in philosophy involve saying the object is “nothing more than X.” It’s nothing but how it manifests itself to humans. Or it’s nothing but a bundle of qualities. Or nothing but its relations with other things. Or nothing but a family resemblance of closely linked sensory bundles across time. Or nothing but hard physical matter with frivolous secondary qualities emanating from that. Or nothing but a derivative encrustation atop some dark and churnign pre-individual realm.

All of these moves, in my opinion, are simply ways of dodging what the mission of philosophy has been since the Meno. “How can I know what qualities virtue has if I don’t first know what it is?” This apparent paradox (that we should be able to know a thing without knowing any of its qualities) is the founding philosophical insight that all o fthe falsely “radical” approaches reject.

If you find yourself saying that the object is nothing more than X or Y, then I believe you are on the wrong track.