more on the Taxonomic Fallacy

A couple of days ago I mentioned the Taxonomic Fallacy, which is the term I use for taking basic ontological structures and trying to claim that they are embodied only in some particular entity.

The first example that came to mind was Heidegger’s tool-analysis. It is sometimes assumed that this analysis is a shrewd assessment of a limited class of entities called “tools,” as if other entities would be exempted from this structure. As I tried to show in Tool-Being, this is impossible. The basic features of Zuhandenheit can be found in all entities, including Dasein– not because people can sometimes be exploited like tools, but because human reality withdraws from access and tends to become visible mostly in cases of malfunction, just like any hammer or drill.

The second example was the tendency to think that the human subject must embody some radical split from the fabric of the cosmos, or some special flaw in the cosmic jewel. The fact that there is a difference between reality and how that reality appears in translated or distorted form to a viewer is converted into a rather monstrous taxonomic model that still cripples philosophy today. According to this model, inanimate collisions merely happen (if even that), while humans magically transcend these collisions in a way that other entities do not. Sometimes this power is expanded to include a few smart animals such as dolphins or monkeys, though even that gesture is rare among the “Copernican” philosophers. The fact that humans may have numerous dazzling features does not imply that a special ontological rift is among those features. (And incidentally, Heidegger’s treatment of the as-structure in the 1929/30 course, which some take to be a shining moment of philosophical consideration of the human/animal split, really tells us nothing at all. Heidegger’s claims as to what the as-structure means are all over the map: sometimes it means full-blown conceptual knowledge, sometimes only Angst, sometimes the unconscious appropriation that takes a hammer “as” a hammer rather than as a drill. He was a pioneer, and pioneers should not be expected to describe their subject exhaustively. But those who follow can certainly be expected to remember that he was a pioneer. Why use Vasco da Gama’s map when sailing from Portugal to India?)

At any rate, I’ve now remembered an important third example of the Taxonomic Fallacy, and it concerns causation. Occasionalism is the clearest example. After claiming that there is a problem with substances being able to relate, that all entities are forbidden the power of direct relation, a single exception is made. And that exception turns out to be an entity– God. It barely matters that some philosophies claim that God is not an entity like the others, because that merely emphasizes the point about which I complain. There is an attempt to make one point in reality a “state of exception” from the general ontological problem with relation.

But before you start chuckling at the supposed naiveté of occasionalist theology (which is actually one of the monumental strains in the history of philosophy, and one that haunts mainstream philosophy today), consider that it’s really little better in Hume and Kant, who are still as prestigious as can be. For the latter, human habit or human categories are also a “state of exception” in a landscape otherwise marred by the lack of relations. Claiming that this is merely epistemological caution in the interests of rigor misses the point: even if a Humean or Kantian were somehow to deduce that genuine relations occur between non-human entities, they would remain subordinated to human experience, that upside-down occasionalist God of modern philosophy.

The alternative is that the problem of relations needs to be solved locally, in such a way that all entities can partake in it. Otherwise, we’re stuck with just another taxonomy of beings, placing one special being upon a throne that no others can approach.