Austin speaks

HERE IS A LUCID POST BY MICHAEL AUSTIN on my theory of vicarious causation. Mike seems to be a pretty modest guy: he emailed me several times today on an unrelated matter, and never even asked me to look at it. But his words are as clear as it gets (and as you will see, he is not even a believer in my theory).

Austin’s references early in the post are to a handful of hecklers in the blogosphere (and I do mean a handful: about 3 or 4 people, and the same people every time) who claim not only that my theory of vicarious causation is wrong, but that:

(a) it is completely nonsensical. Apparently they also claim Levi as an ally in that assertion simply because he said that that part of my theory, as well as the fourfold part, made him scratch his head. And so what? Who besides me doesn’t scratch their head even at Heidegger’s fourfold, for instance? Levi’s ontology is different from mine (but more on that in a moment, since Austin makes an interesting point about it).

(b) it is dishonest and has capitalistic motives. According to this particular theory, I am a devious charlatan and manipulative empire-builder who doesn’t even believe in his own ideas and am merely trying to build a business out of flashy but empty ideas. The best response here is that if I’m a careerist, then I’m a pretty bad one. I’ve never been associated with any university ranked by Leiter, for instance. Going to a continental philosophy program at a Catholic university in the States, and staying away from SPEP for 16 years and never going to Perugia in the summer (the only possible career routes in American continental philosophy circles), and taking an initially non-tenure track job in freaking Egypt, and writing a first book that essentially burned all of my bridges with SPEP Heideggerians in the second section… If a good academic career is your goal, then please do not follow my model, because it isn’t going to get you anywhere. Until quite recently, my life has been a How-Not-To Manual for the academic career. This probably has something to do with the household hippie irreverence amidst which I was raised, but no matter.

Things are starting to go well for me as I enter my 40’s because even many of those (like Austin, Shaviro, Meillassoux, and Bruno Latour) who think my ideas are completely wrong recognize them to be stimulating, fresh, sincere, and lucidly presented. And on top of that, I’ve worked very hard to become an appealing writer, and I think I’ve had some success at reaching that goal. But it took me a very long time to escape from obscurity: 9 years ago today, I still had nothing but internet sports articles to my name. The reason grad students like to read my “advice” posts is because I struggled as much as if not more than most of them, and in fact have been quite candid about my early struggles on this blog. A careerist would be far more likely to hide those struggles, no doubt.

I have already said on this blog that if there is one “secret” to where I am now, it is this… In my 20’s, a time when I had many mental blocks hampering my work, I always admired people who were getting more done than I was, and wanted to be like them when I grew up. That never wavered. Never did I hate or envy them for a second– that I can honestly say. Productivity remained holy to me even when I didn’t have it. I did have my share of anger in those days, but in no case was it directed against the productive. Those people (Lingis was #1 on the list) were always my heroes, and the old adage is probably true that over time you tend to become more like the things that you have invested energy in admiring and emulating. I say this because I truly don’t understand why someone who has never even met me would mention my name insultingly some 20-30 times in a single blog thread, spitting venom and bile rather than trying to get work done.

(Actually, a good topic for another post some time would be: what could I have done that would have made my career much easier? And I’m not talking about ways in which the system could have been gamed, I’m talking about wise and legitimate things I could have done that would have benefitted me more in the long run than the path I chose– though the latter is starting to pay some dividends after many setbacks over the years.)

But back to Austin…

This point in his post seems true to me: “While he is a realist, it is a different kind of realism, with Harman being connected with the Aristotelian-substance tradition and Levi being connect[ed] with the Structuralism-difference tradition.” I’m not sure what Levi would say in response, but I think it’s basically true, and does much to illuminate whatever head-scratching may occur between me and Levi.

As for Austin’s claim that I can ground my theory by going only through Aristotle and not phenomenology, this seems both right and wrong. It’s right in the sense that I’ve been able recently to describe my theory in ways that don’t draw as much on Husserl/Heidegger terminology.

But it’s wrong in another sense. For instance, here is the one passage in Austin’s post that I think isn’t quite right: “When Harman talks of ‘Real Objects’ versus ‘Sensual Objects’ we can replace such language easily with substance and accidents.”

This is close to right, but still misses something. My theory is a fourfold, after all, and not a twofold of substance and accident. And what makes Husserl such a key player is the fact that his sensual realm is made up of objects. (Husserl speaks of an “intentional” rather than sensual realm, of course, but I changed the term partly for reasons of sonority and partly because in my opinion the word “intentional” has led to a lot of needless chaos about realism/anti-realism issues.)

In other words, what Austin calls the substance/accident distinction happens in two different places. Husserl’s intentional objects aren’t substances, after all. They cannot exist in autonomy from all possible intentional acts, and they also don’t have the same power to interact with other objects that they do to appear in mental acts to us (Husserl doesn’t like naturalism, after all). Nonetheless, his intentional objects do have the substance-like feature of being able to support many different adumbrations at many different times. They are not bundles of qualities. (And you’d be surprised how many people, even anti-empiricists, simply assume that the objects of human experience are nothing but bundles of qualities with nothing over and above them.)

Some people still shout a lot about how useless or meaningless the fourfold structure is, but we’re also making progress on that front. People are paying attention to it. And in most of my lectures and essays in 2009, I’ve made the point that if you don’t accept the fourfold structure, it’s because either:

(a) you reject the difference between human experience and the real beyond it: you’re a correlationist at heart

(b) you reject the distinction between objects and bundles of qualities: you’re an empiricist at heart

My reading of the two separate axes in Heidegger claims that both (a) and (b) are bad positions, and are even worse when combined.

Now, we can have arguments about both of these points. But why not have them? If you think I’m wrong about either of these points, give an explanation as to why. Don’t just go on the internet spitting bile and venom about how insane and corrupt I am: because deep down, you know it isn’t true, and you also know full well that my position is gaining some ground.

Thanks to Michael Austin for a very useful post.