p.s. on Shaviro on Kant

p.s. Just because I was reading the Shaviro chapter on Kant on the bus back from campus, let me put my thoughts on “paper” before forgetting them. Knowing Shaviro, he probably won’t feel persecuted or anything if I do another critical post on him. And besides, it’s a really good book that moves the discussion forward.

As opposed to what I usually do and what Latour does quite vehemently, Shaviro treats Kant as an ally rather than an enemy. His reasoning in doing so is that Kant provides a “constructive” model of experience (he credits Stengers for this), and insofar as experience is constructive, Shaviro also suggests in a footnote that this even links Kant with Latour (Latour would be appalled by that suggestion, but that doesn’t really matter– philosophers are not always their own best interpreters).

Along the same lines (citing an unpublished paper by Keith Robinson that I haven’t read) Shaviro also says a few times that Whitehead must be viewed as a Kantian or post-Kantian thinker, not “as some people claim”, a pre-Kantian thinker.

The problem here with the “as some people claim” gesture (I’m quoting it from memory, and Shaviro’s exact wording might be a bit different) is that it misleadingly suppresses a very important statement by Whitehead. For instead of “as some people claim,” as though it were merely a question of a few boring mainstreamers, the proper phrase would be “as Whitehead brazenly asserts on the first page of the Preface to Process and Reality.” There, on page xi, Whitehead tells us that a careful examination of the works of Descartes, Newton, Locke, Hume, and Kant “disclosed that in the main the philosophy of organism [i.e. Whitehead’s own philosophy] is a recurrence to pre-Kantian modes of thought” (emphasis added). I still have about 70 pages to go before finishing all of Shaviro’s book, but so far there is no trace of that daring and infamous sentence, which sets Whitehead apart from almost all thinkers of the 20th century (a century that continued to slave in the shadow of Kant).

In short, it is his flouting of the Copernican tradition in philosophy that makes Whitehead so special. Shaviro is always free to try to portray things a bit differently, of course. But it’s not clear that the payoff warrants blunting the sharp edge of Whitehead’s daring anti-Coperncanism, which is so powerful.

What Shaviro seems to think he gains is some traction for the “constructive” model of perception. Kant’s things-in-themselves, for example, are said by Shaviro to be a positive symptom of Kant’s recognition that no experience ever exhausts its terms through correspondence. And to this extent, Shaviro was right in his earlier blog claim that Kant is the ally of my OOP just as much as my enemy. I have been accused of “Kantianism” just as much as I’ve been accused of “pre-Kantianism,” and there is a good reason why “Kantianism” has sometimes been the insult of choice.

So, why do I choose to portray Kant as an enemy rather than an ally? Largely because of how Kant has been appropriated. Allow me to repeat a thought experiment I’ve made here before. It is well known that German Idealism assimilated Kant largely by amputating the things-in-themselves as a useless residue. And that is the side of Kant that I treat as an enemy.

Now, imagine another possible history of philosophy, one that was in fact quite possible, but didn’t happen. In this alternative history, Kant’s first great follower was not Fichte, but a more Leibnizian-minded successor. Instead of saying “the one problem with Kant is that he naively retained the Ding an sich,” this successor (let’s call that person “Tannenbaum,” to choose a different tree from “Fichte,” which means “spruce” in German) made the Leibnizian/pre-Whiteheadian point that “Kant’s only mistake was to limit the teachings of critical philosophy to humans, when in fact they govern the relations between all entities whatsoever.” Instead of the Fichte-inspired “German Idealism,” we could have had a Tannenbaum-inspired “German relationism.” In fact, it would probably look a good deal like Whitehead’s philosophy. The present state of philosophy would be entirely different.

But my point is… that’s not what happened. Kant did not inaugurate a global philosophy of things-in-themselves withdrawing from one another’s access. He inaugurated, though largely due to the efforts of his successors, an idealism in which the human-world relation has remained paramount to the point of seeming obvious, and to the point of Whitehead seeming like a weirdo to mainstream post-Kantian continental philosophers, as he still does. Under these circumstances, where is the compelling tactical value of calling Kant an ally? I think Shaviro is misreading the polemical landscape, and making a tactical error of emphasis.

Again quoting from memory, there are one or more places where Shaviro says things approximately like this: “So, Kant and Whitehead both believe that experience is constructed. The one difference between them is that Kant restricts this to human experience, whereas Whitehead makes it universally applicable even to inanimate relations.”

To repeat an earlier analogy, this is like saying: “So, bats and birds both fly, which distinguishes them from snakes, lizards, moles, and other creatures that stay on or under the ground. The one difference between them is that bats are mammals, but birds lay eggs.”

No taxonomist would group bats with birds or hornets just because all of them fly, and I would suggest again that no philosophical taxonomist should group Whitehead with Deleuze.

Why not? Because the star of Whitehead’s philosophical show is– concrete individual entities. The same holds for Latour. Everything else that can be said to exist is produced by concrete individual entities. And this cannot possibly be said of Deleuze any more than it can be said of Bergson or Simondon, or even DeLanda (unless you read his virtualities as equivalent to my objects, which I have shown elsewhere to be impossible). In short, we are dealing here with two different genera of philosophical animals.

All right, now I’m going to lay off of poor Shaviro for awhile, because I know he likes to digest things slowly and carefully. I’m not quite that way myself, but for reasons of schedule and energy I am starting to drift more in that direction too.