supplement to the last post

My night class is coming up in a few minutes (only a night class during Ramadan, actually) so this will be a quick one. I just wanted to add a few supplements to the previous post.

1. The difference between real objects and intentional objects cannot be identified with the frequent and rather unintelligent distinction between “genuine physical entities” and “false representations of the human mind”. Though I disagree with the total flatness of Latour’s early ontology (since I do distinguish real from unreal objects, and don’t think it’s all a matter of allies), one thing Latour gets right is his demolition of the (modernist) idea that nature provides all the reality and people provide all the distortions. Plenty of human-made objects are real.

2. Why speak of intentional objects at all? Why not just speak of real objects outside the mind and qualities inside the mind? Because in the Logical Investigations, Husserl showed us the problem with bundle-of-qualities empiricism. Experience is object-giving, not experienced content. In other words, when I experience a tree this is not a flat experience in which all parts of the experience or on the same level. No, there is an invariant eidetic core that lets us experience the tree as the same tree even though its profiles are constantly shifting. As I see it, this is what makes Husserl different from his predecessors in the Austrian school. When Brentano says that all experience is grounded in presentations, Husserl says: “no, all experience is grounded in object-giving acts.” The Husserlian tension between intentional objects and their specific profiles is not to be found in Brentano, as far as I can see. (Hence Brentano’s “late” turn to reism, in which everything is very concretely defined by all the features that it has, isn’t such a surprise: there was always a tendency by Brentano to downplay the essential/inessential distinction, whereas for Husserl the distinction is crucial.)

A non-negotiable point with me: anyone who thinks Husserl is not one of the greatest philosophers of recent centuries simply isn’t working hard enough. They are relying on caricatures and impressionistic diatribes. They are not doing their homework. He’s not always fun to read (though his wit is badly underrated). But if you read him with even a modicum of care, it should be evident that there is much more going on in his work than is found in the off-the-shelf caricature of Husserl that his most arrogant and facile critics delight in offering. (And here I am referring to critics within the continental community, in the broadest sense.)

*The distinction between two kinds of objects (in my own position) is not a distinction between two different worlds. That would merely be to repeat the error that Latour demolishes of thinking that on one side there is a genuine untainted reality, and on the other side are a bunch of humans who mess up and misrepresent those things until they finally grow up and learn to correspond with them, according to the rules and regulations of epistemology. The real and the intentional are not two places on a map, but two modes of every entity, descending perhaps without limit.

(By the way, Shaviro is wrong to say that I am inconsistent in allowing this sort of infinite regress while being horrified it in the case of Latour’s mediators, where Joliot mediates between politics and neutrons, but further mediators will be needed between Joliot and neutrons, and so on infinitely. Using the phrase “infinite regress” for both is an equivocation, as I will explain in my response to Shaviro in The Speculative Turn. The first of the two is merely strange, but contradicts no obvious facts. Latour’s infinite mediators, however, contradict themselves: if there is a problem with politics touching neutrons directly, then there will be just as big a problem with Joliot touching either of these, and so on to infinity, with the result that no contact between any two things will ever occur. But this is absurd, while the infinite regress of objects is merely strange, not illogical.)

Off to class. Republic Book I.