aesthetics as first philosophy

Levi with ANOTHER GOOD PIECE, this one on the relation between aesthetics and ontology.

Aesthetics has long been treated as a fringe discipline of philosophy, a moderately respectable diversion for the aesthetes in our midst. But I like Santayana’s point that considerations of beauty play an overwhelming role in our day-to-day lives, despite being only a minor part of philosophy.

My own sense is that aesthetics perhaps deserves to be the central philosophical discipline. (Perhaps Levi didn’t mean to go quite that far, but I am happy to go that far.) I’ve already claimed in print that aesthetic phenomena and physical causation are first cousins, even though they lie on two opposite sides of the great divide created by modern philosophy (“subject” and “world”). I’ll continue to push this idea further in writings to come.

the Bogost view

Ian Bogost weighs in with A VERY INTERESTING POST ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF OBJECTS. At the bottom is a nice photo from the bottom of one of the Giza Pyramids pointing upward. I was already in England by the time Ian was at the Pyramids, so I wasn’t his guide for that particular event.

Busy morning in the office, but let me make a few brief replies to his post:

1. Ian, who also designs videogames as well as writing about them from a philosophical perspective, is one of two people I know from the computing world who dislikes the phrase “object-oriented philosophy,” which he thinks draws misleading analogies with object-oriented programming. My response to this is that not all people I know from the computing world agree that it’s a poor analogy (though I’m not qualified to speak on this issue in detail). Indeed, several have called it an excellent analogy. Furthermore, I don’t see the problem even with a poor analogy. So few people in the philosophy world have an ingrained sense of the details of object-oriented programming that the term has always functioned effectively for me as a provocative analogy. And anyway, I’m not attached to names. Marshall McLuhan always used to quip hilariously: “You don’t like that idea? I have others.” In the same spirit I would say: ‘You don’t like the name ‘object-oriented philosophy’? I have others.”

2. Ian’s claim that speculative realism inherently opposes phenomenology oversimplifies a fairly diverse range of reactions to phenomenology within the group. At one extreme is Brassier, who can barely utter the name “Husserl” without a scowl of contempt. Then comes Meillassoux, who is politely dismissive. Then Grant, who merely seems uninterested in phenomenology. And then you have me, a rabid defender of Husserl’s greatness. True, I agree with Meillassoux that Husserl is a correlationist who has nothing to say about object-object interactions. But I have gone to the mat for Husserl many times, arguing that he is not just an idealist, but also history’s first and perhaps only object-oriented idealist. No need to repeat the argument here.

3. On this blog post as in an earleir draft article I read, Ian takes me to task for just giving lists of objects without giving analyses of specific objects. This criticism is understandable coming from him, since the very nature of his work is that it confronts specific entities and gives very nice analyses of them. (If you are at all skeptical that videogames can be discussed in a philosophically interest way, you need only read his books to lose your skepticism.) But in the first place I think this underestimates how much work is done by the “list of objects” maneuver on a continental landscape that has really never had much time for objects. And in the second place, Ian simply isn’t giving me enough time. I’m still puzzling over some of the foundational problems, but in my future you can expect to see boatloads of analyses of specific entities.

4. I love his idea that philosophers might produce arifacts other than written texts! Within the next ten or so years, I hope to covince him that a metaphysics videogame ought to be produced. And I don’t mean as some sort of cheeky Baudrillardian anti-establishment gesture– I mean as a tool for genuine philosophical labor.

What makes Ian’s object-oriented perspective so interesting (my term, not his) is his past life as a hardcore Derridean studyign in Paris, which I think I knew nothing about until our conversations in Cairo.

In any case, he is welcomed as a comrade-in-arms, and I was also glad to see him spending some time on Levi’s board.

the lone doomed tool

May have to use that phrase if Joe at Menticulture allows it:

“Following Harman, I understand the fate of the broken hammer not to be merely an event in the life of a lone doomed tool, but to be caught up in the being of all things that do their ‘being’ – the ‘thinging’ of things, people, starfish and coconuts – the dichotomy between Vorhandenheit (presence-at-hand) and Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand).”

Lone doomed starfish.

Lone doomed coconut.

another resonance

ZSDP points out that “The Composition of Philosophy” has an additional resonance with the title of the most famous work by Boethius (“The Consolation of Philosophy”). I hadn’t thought of that one, but now I can feel that it was rattling around the back of my mind. These things are important when dealing with titles.

The title “Prince of Networks,” for instance, was definitely meant to capitalize on the symbolic power of the phrase “Prince of Darkness.” That effect is purely and deliberately comical, of course, since few philosophers have had less of the sinister about them than Latour (in person as well as in his writing). But still, the shadow of the phrase “Prince of Darkness” is there for dinner along with the rest of the book, and adds some additional borrowed gravitas to the theme.

Freudian slip of the night

I’d somehow lost the link to Levi’s Larval Subjects blog. So I put it in the search engine, but accidentally typed “Larval Objects” instead. I guess I must be trying to cement his conversion into the very title of his blog.

Not that it matters much, because if you Google “Larval Objects” as I did, you get Larval Subjects anyway, along with the usual:

“Search Results Did you mean: larval subjects”