Phil. in a Time of Error

Hey, that Senate Faculty Affairs Committee Chair is going to be enjoyable after all. That was a lively first meeting.

I returned from the meeting to find my fellow Gibbon-lover PHILOSOPHY IN A TIME OF ERROR weighing in on my recent exchange with Levi. I actually haven’t had the leisure to digest either Levi’s or Peter’s posts fully, but let me make a quick response to this part of Peter’s.

“Now, I think it’s clear than any OOO needs to make the distinction that Husserl refused, namely between ‘intentional’ and ‘real objects,’ which Husserl believed could never be distinguished rigorously. Now, to make a quick point before leaving this post for now, ‘intentional’ objects are ‘independent’ for Husserl in several key senses that are well known. (Who, for example, would intend pain?)”

As for the first part of this: yes, Husserl refused the distinction. That’s why he’s an idealist. He’s an object-oriented idealist, since his idealism (unlike most and probably all others) allows for an object-pole that exists in tension with its various manifestations, and doesn’t just treat objects as hypothetical real unities that underlie nothing but qualities before the mind. The intentional object is there before the mind, even more directly than the qualities are. That’s the strangeness of Husserl: the object part of him. (I’ll write something soon about Husserl, Twardowski, and Brentano.)

As for the final part, I’ve heard Peter talk like this before, and I don’t like it now any more than I ever did. It’s too reminiscent of the notion that “Husserl isn’t really an idealist, because humans don’t produce the phenomena. They remain outside my control.” Dominic made a similar point to claim that Badiou is not an idealist, and that didn’t work either.

In order to avoid idealism, you can’t just say “the subject doesn’t produce the non-human.” You can’t even just say “the subject is in fact produced” (the latter is Foucault’s feeble claim not to be an idealist).

The real point is, forget about all the games of arguing who produces what and what does or does not produce what. If a human is required as one component of any situation described by your philosophy, then you remain stuck in idealism.

This is why I always call for the following litmus test when assessing any philosophy that claims not to be idealism: does it allow for the interaction between any two entities to be treated ontologically in the same fashion as relations in which humans are a component?

The standard phenomenological move of saying “being is given to the subject” fails the litmus test. The defenses of Badiou that I’ve heard all fail the litmus test (hence my annoyance that Badiouans are always the first to rage in opinionated fashion against Husserl’s idealism.) Foucualdian “materialism” fails the litmus test. Husserl and Heidegger fail the litmus test. Even Latour fails it sometimes, as in his notorious “microbes did not predate Pasteur” and “Ramses II could not have died of tuberculosis because it wasn’t discovered yet” sorts of statements, though I have argued in Prince of Networks that these are merely moments of excess rather than central to Latour’s position.

So then, what are some examples of philosophies that pass the litmus test?

1. Whitehead

2. Scientific naturalism

3. OOO itself

And I’m in definite agreement with the other two positions on this point. But you all know I have different problems with them.

Whitehead: dissolves everything into relations.

Scientific naturalism: treats human interactions with the world in the same fashion as inanimate ones only at the crippling and insupportable price of reducing the human interactions to those of neurons or chemicals.

That’s why OOO is neither a process philosophy nor a naturalism (or “positivism”, to use the poor terminology of some SR opponents).

In any case, the passivity of a being that is given to us is not enough to pass the litmus test. That’s why I’m not really a phenomenologist anymore, because I think to do justice to Husserl we have to admit that he’s a full-blown idealist but a great philosopher nonetheless.

Husserl is great insofar as he is object-oriented. Remember, again and again… Husserl is certainly an idealist. Yet he feels like a realist. Why is that? It’s because of the strife between the unified intentional objects and the swirling carnal surface with which they are encrusted at every moment. This tension is a genuine drama for Husserl, and it is genuinely strange. I distrust any reference to Husserl that shows no sign of a struggle to comprehend (and here I am not thinking of Philosophy in a Time of Error, but of people who, unlike him, are deeply unsympathetic to Husserl).