more Shaviro on Kant

My apologies to Shaviro for picking on him again (and it really is an interesting book), but this almost made my eyes pop out:

“In removing the noumenal realm from any possibility of cognition, Kant in effect endorses a version of Whitehead’s ‘ontological principle,’ which asserts that ‘there is nothing in the world which floats into the world from nowhere. Everything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity.’ In Kantian terms, this means that phenomena can only be referred to other phenomena– and not to noumena as (supposed) underlying causes. Everything that affects us, everything that matters to us, falls within the realm of mutable appearances.” (page 75)

Though I’m willing to entertain a sense in which Kant might be recast as an ally for the new philosophy, a passage like this sounds like it was written by Kant’s lawyers. It reads like spin (again, I’m a Shaviro fan and don’t like dumping on him in public).

Kant’s phenomena are not Whiteheadian actual entities. There is not even a remote relationship between the two, and if this is not seen, then the Kant/Whitehead link has simply been posited as unfalsifiable. There’s nothing more I can say here. Page 75, and still no citation of Whitehead’s bald-faced insistence, on the first page of his preface, that his philosophy is in the main a recurrence to pre-Kantian modes of thought. In comparison with this, I think the Whitehead/Deleuze link is really quite harmless. Nothing against Kant (#3 on my all-time list of greatest philosophers) but he is simply not a philosopher of concrete individual entities. If he is, then who isn’t?