my own response to Levi’s response to Austin

We’re really cooking tonight, but I’m just as dead tired as Levi, and moreover have some grading to do (of tests on the Apology and on Aristotle’s Physics). But I want to make a very quick response to the following useful question by Levi. And the part about the occasionalist God is especially funny:

“Now here’s where I have a lot of difficulty following Harman’s idea. In traditional occasionalism where God serves the role of this third, I presume God has the power to link the completely unrelated because God is a whizbang, superpowerful, grand poobah powerhouse that can surmount any distance or separation. In other words, the appeal to God in this tradition is a sort of appeal to magic. In the secularized versions of occasionalism in Hume and Kant, mind is capable of acting as the third relating to the separate because mind is not relating objects but something strictly immanent to mind, namely sensations. The big debate between Kant is whether it is arbitrary association that effects this linkage or whether it is a priori categories. For Hume a causal claim is just a habit. Kant argues that we can’t get necessity from habit, so we need an a priori category containing necessity that mind contributes. But in both cases– setting aside Whitehead’s compelling arguments against Hume’s theory of association in Process and Reality –the linkage is possible because the impressions to be linked are already linked in the mind by virtue of being ‘in’ the mind or immanent to mind.

What I have a hard time understanding in Harman’s position is how a similar move can be made for a secularized realist version of occasionalism. It seems to me that Harman’s ‘[Joliot]’ must still link to uranium and must still relate to French politics in order to function as the mediator between the two. But [why] doesn’t the same problem that plagued occasionalist thought still plague these two relations? That is what I don’t get.”

As I explained in Prince of Networks, this is precisely my objection to Latour’s theory that every relation must be mediated by a third term. In other words, if only Frédéric Joliot-Curie (“Joliot” for short, in Latour’s book Pandora’s Hope)… if only Joliot can link politics with neutrons, then why isn’t a further mediator needed for Joliot to link with politics and to link with neutrons? There is a Zeno-like problem here for Latour, in the sense that no two things can touch because you will always need to pass through an infinite number of mediators, and hence no contact ever occurs between any two things.

Oddly enough, Aristotle’s solution to this problem and Latour’s basically pragmatist solution to it are effectively the same thing (and both are wrong in this particular case, I hold).

Namely, Aristotle’s solution to any problem involving a continuum (whether of space, time, change, or number) is to say that the continuum is only potentially made of infinitely many parts, not actually so. (This is arguably the major concept in the Physics other than the four causes themselves.) In other words, Zeno’s paradox about being unable to reach the classroom door because I first need to go halfway before I go all the way, and from there to the door I must go half of the remaining distance, and so on, is false according to Aristotle for the following reason: the motion to the door can be considered as a single movement, and only potentially, or as a matter of thought, can it be analyzed into as many tiny components as I please.

Latour handles the Joliot paradox in a similar way, though with a more pragmatist flavor. [ADDENDUM: He doesn’t actually say this in Pandora’s Hope, but it’s what he always says during in-person debates about the problem.] Namely: we can analyze however many situations of mediators are interesting. In other words, it is interesting to tell the story of how Joliot, working in the early French nuclear program, tried to link neutrons with politics for the first time (by trying to convince the French Minister of Defense, Raoul Dautry, that neutrons were important to the national safety of France: a previously laughable claim). But it is not so interesting, if telling a nuclear history, to ask how Joliot’s eyeball is able to touch scientific instruments, etc.

I think these solutions fail. If we’re talking about substances, for instance, even Aristotle does not assert a continuum there… Aristotle does not say that “all substances are a single whole, and only potentially separated as a matter of thought.” No, substances are real individuals for Aristotle rather than a continuum, and actors are also individuals for Latour. And if you want to explain the contact of two individuals via a mediator (as Latour does) then there’s no reason to think any two mediators (Joliot and neutrons) can touch any more effectively than any two others (politics and neutrons).

But… that assumes that the theory puts all individuals on the same footing. And this is where Levi is simply conflating my position on mediators with Latour’s. The problem exists for Latour precisely because of his “flat” ontology in which politics, neutrons, and Joliot are on the same plane of reality.

And that’s not the case in my theory. In my theory, sensual objects serve as the mediator between two real ones. (No such distinction between two kinds of objects exists for Latour, and I daresay no such distinction exists for Levi, which was my point the other night when explaining that both of them are puzzled by the fourfold for the same reason.)

In short, the basic outline of my approach to causation is this:

*real objects can never touch, because by nature they must withdraw from each other

*but sensual objects always touch real ones, because they exist only insofar as they are confronted by a real object (real objects are never real “for” something else, but sensual objects are only real “for” something else)

*hence, the way that two real objects interact is through the mediation of the sensual realm

A pretty simple idea, really, and all of my work is designed to try to show the mechanics by which this can happen. (And hence the key role of “allure,” and of aesthetics more generally in my position.)

My approach differs from occasionalism because I don’t try to lay it all on God as “a whizbang, superpowerful, grand poobah powerhouse that can surmount any distance or separation” (and that’s not sarcasm, Levi: I loved this phrase).

My approach differs from Hume’s and Kant’s, because while it is true that “in the secularized versions of occasionalism in Hume and Kant, mind is capable of acting as the third relating to the separate because mind is not relating objects but something strictly immanent to mind, namely sensations,” in my model it is a matter not of relations between sensations, but between real objects that happen to be using sensual media as their means of indirect contact.

As Mike Austin charitably noticed, the whole point is that I’m not appealing to one special, privileged entity to do all the causal labor in philosophy. And I happen not to see “mind” as being any more rigorous a solution than “God”. Hume/Kant simply turn the mind into a secularized God, and their solution is the more dangerous precisely because it is so much more socially acceptable these days (at least in the West) than to claim that God moves every hair on your head directly. But the social prestige of Hume/Kant on this point comes solely from the correlationist dogma that human relations with the world are on a higher philosophical footing than object-object relations. (And just wait till you read my Meillassoux book, where that issue is really going to get hammered out!)

There is also the even more mainstream solution of simply denying that any causal problem exists at all. Two things slam into each other and push and damage each other, or interact through fields. But the occasionalists and Hume/Kant are more philosophical than that, even though naturalism deserves praise for putting mind and bodies on the same level.

All right, I spent too much time on that. But I hope you won’t be scratching your head anymore, Levi.