Bristol echoes

Just finished revising my Bristol paper so that I could send it to Iain Grant again (he’s planning a short response to it in the anthology). The style of the paper seems too dense, and there is too much exposition. That said, I like several features of it, and think they will be a permanent addition to my toolbox.

One of them was my realization, while writing the article, that the realism/anti-realism divide might not be so important… NOT (!) for reasons of the kind stated by people like Davidson. No, I do indeed think there’s a big difference between realism and anti-realism. But the fact is, the anti-realists do take something to be real, and that something can be grouped and/or contrasted with what the realists take to be real.

I’ll be a bit more specific… For me it is individual objects that are real. And what’s becoming more important to me is this question: for all those positions that call objects a useless fiction, what are they granting reality in its place?

On the one hand there is what I called, in Bristol, the “undermining” approach to objects. In other words, objects are superficial encrustations or actualizations. What is real is either a boundless apeiron, or a churning matter laced with cryptic forms, or a primordial flux, or a topological pre-individual realm.

On the other hand there is what we could call, by analogy, the “overmining” positions. For such positions, the object is not a superficial encrustation, but a pseudo-deep and spooky fiction that explains nothing, since reality is much more evident. Reality is how it manifests itself to us. Or it is a thing’s relational involvements with other things. Or it is just a bundle of qualities. And so forth.

What’s interesting is that, on the overmining side at least, you can find both “realists” and “anti-realists.” But I’m starting to doubt the usefulness of that venerable and very real distinction, because the fact is, both Whitehead’s relationism (which is realist) and classic correlationism (which is anti-realist) are in fact guilty of the same error as I see it. Both reduce the object upward, seeing it as nothing more than its relations. (With the one important difference being that the relations can be purely inanimate for Whitehead, with no humans anywhere on the scene.)

This is actually sort of similar to what I was getting at three years ago in some drafts on what I whimsically called “School X” and “School XXX”. There is a mistaken tendency to group people together who in my view really don’t go together much at all. For instance, you can obviously throw Deleuze and Bergson in the same basket without too much violence, but then Whitehead often gets thrown in with them under some such rubric as “the philosophy of the event,” completely forgetting that individual entities are at the core of Whitehead’s philosophy in a way that is not at all true for Bergson and Deleuze. Latour should actually go in the “X” basket with Whitehead, probably Serres, and a couple of others, while it would make more sense to group Bergson, Deleuze, Simondon, and James together.

Anyway, so much for historical groupings for the moment… I think the undermining/overmining distinction is crucial when it comes to rejections of objects. “Overmining” is as slightly annoying as all neologisms, admittedly, but I’m already getting used to it.

a Levi classic

Here is possibly Levi’s MOST INTERESTING POST OF ALL TIME. About halfway through, he tells stories about which he has previously hinted obliquely (I didn’t know them until now)–

(a) his real name was withheld from him until age 9 or 10

(b) he wrote his dissertation before his M.A. thesis (he overshot the mark and wrote a long and excellent M.A. that his advisors urged him to safeguard for his Ph.D. while writing something shorter for the Master’s; it’s a story for the ages)

notes on vertical and horizontal causation

Throughout neo-Platonism, causation is primarily vertical in nature, and this is popping up again in avant garde philosophy today.

Emanations proceed from higher/deeper realities to derivative ones. This is clear enough in Plotinus, and it takes on even more tangible form in Islamic neo-Platonism, where the actual planetary spheres are treated as emanations. (In some of these systems, Prophets gain their insight directly from the moon.)

As I said in Bristol, the same happens in Giordano Bruno (and in Nicolas of Cusa, his inspiration). A specific thing gains its nature via “contraction” from something that is pre-individual without being entirely indeterminate.

One objection in Bristol, while interesting enough, missed the main point. He claimed that it’s wrong to say that the actual is merely something sterile atop the virtual, since the actual is able to affect the virtual. But this is merely retroaction going upwards, and Plotinus already allowed for that sort of retroaction through the work of knowledge, reascending the scale of emanations.

The real question is horizontal causation. How does one specific entity affect another. And here, I insist, philosophy remains intimidated by the thought that the natural sciences have monopolized this question. It is primarily treated as a matter of collision between material masses, secondarily as interaction by way of fields, and then a number of “trippy” complications can be imported from quantum theory. But metaphysical discussion of “horizontal” causation has been out of fashion since Descartes, with occasional uprisings from other great thinkers. But even most of those uprisings have either mediated horizontal causation through God (Leibniz, Whitehead) or through matter and its philosophical heirs (much more popular now than God, but serving largely the same causal role).

Whenever people ask me where I think the strictly metaphysical importance of Latour can be found, I say that it is here. He’s the first in awhile to raise the metaphysical question of interaction between two utterly concrete, actual things (say, Adidas shoes and freight trains). I’ve given reasons for why I think the solution he provides won’t quite work, but Latour does deserve to be called the first “secular occasionalist,” grasping the vast and problematic gulf between any two entities while not positing some infinite God or infinite matter as the solution. If you see this as one of the key problems of philosophy, then Latour automatically becomes a pivotal figure; if you don’t see the problem, then he’s a clever sociologist and a metaphysical relativist. I think the latter view is a failure of imagination, and that’s why I’m willing to place heavy bets on the future reputation of Latour. He’s offering something important that no one else can provide. I suspect a lot more people are going to be wanting it a few decades from now than want it in 2009.

And this is why I don’t much care for his “plasma”, because I see it as a relapse into the Giordano Bruno sort of solution– no real communication problem because everything is already in communication at a deeper level anyway. No, there is a communication problem after all. And it’s not just between people and “the world”. It’s between all parts of that world, all people, and all parts of all people. Why? Because a thing is an animated core that systematically unifies properties, but any translation of that thing elsewhere inevitably reduces it to qualities. No model of a thing *is* that very thing. There have been claims that realism is threatened by quantum phenomena, but why? Heisenberg shows that the position and momentum of a particle are uncertain until measured. He doesn’t say the particle may be a sunflower or a shark. And besides, what philosophy could be more compatible with quantum findings than one that holds that no qualitative or quantitative measurement corresponds to an exact state in the thing itself?

Royce

Sometimes your reading instincts fail you, and this was one of those times. Too bad Shakespeare and Origen weren’t available for the trip, because Royce was a definite misfire, on this occasion at least, and I was reminded of why I can never make it all the way through his books.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s a serious author with a bit of a philosophical spark. But he really meanders around the point for many sections at a time. He seems to offer nuclei of good ideas rather than full-blown ideas. For instance, his point about the central importance of loyalty to all forms of maturity is interesting, but now after many pages it still keeps slipping away from me. It’s hard to put my finger on why, but I suspect it goes back to the following sorts of points.

Ortega has a gripe against Balzac. (I don’t have strong feelings about Balzac one way or the other.) But Ortega calls Balzac a “dauber,” meaning that the more pages of his you read, the more you feel that his characters and situations aren’t really there. That’s sort of what I think about Royce. His books are like the ghosts of philosophical systems. Your eyes aren’t tricking you — there’s something in the room, but you can’t grasp it, and when you turn on the lights you don’t see it anymore.

Another way of putting it is this… The really great philosophers evoke something that is deeper than their own sentences. With Royce I am always somehow stuck on the level of his exact words.

This may seem somewhat paradoxical, given that we think that a great stylist is one who adds something over and above the mere piling up of ideas. But I think it’s the opposite– the great stylist (of ideas, and not just of language) obliquely awakens something that language can never touch, yet is still very much there, and very much palpable. But Royce’s ideas are too often exhausted in the stating of them.

Again, he’s not that bad. And in many ways you feel like he’s ahead of his time a bit, given that his Gifford Lectures are from around 1899-1900 (early success for someone from such a humble background). But even though I feel more sympathy for Royce’s speculative temperament than for the temperament of his friend William James, I think there’s a good reason that the reputation of James is immeasurably higher today. It’s not just because pragmatism is more fashionable than absolute idealism. Even if the fashions flip all of a sudden (as they invariably do at some point), James’s will still be a voice we want to hear.

And of course, that’s always a good test for depth– “will the book I am reading still be of interest once its claims are completely out of fashion?”

using the toy a bit more

Partly because I like having a built-in camera on this laptop, and partly because it’s amusing that technology today allows us to share distant places and experiences almost immediately, here are the inside and outside of the train.

sharing beautiful images

I’m sitting on the train in Alexandria, and it will pull out in about 10 minutes.

In the meantime, here are some beautiful photos taken in Micronesia by my friends Veronica and Yves Dumoulin, who live near Geneva.

http://picasaweb.google.fr/dumoulin.yves/Palau

We are all asked to look at thousands of images these days, but I promise you, these are special.