another Levi blog mini-treatise

He’s really made a genre out of this– the 1,800-word blog treatise.

In any case, HERE IS LEVI’S LATEST POST, which touches on enough interesting ontology to occupy the rest of your day if you’re in the mood for it. Figures covered include Latour, Hjelmslev, and Aristotle, plus more peripheral references to others.

And this is right:

“In Harman’s language, content can be understood as the ‘withdrawn’ being of an actant, while expression could be understood as the ‘sensuous vicar’ by which this withdrawn being is expressed for another being. Why, then, the additional dimension of matter for each of these actants? Because in addition to the internal composition of each actant or its content (what I call the endo-consistency of a being which is roughly analogous to Suarez’s ‘substantial forms’), the being of any actant is infinitely decomposable into other actants or entities.”

My only hesitation is when he goes on to call it a kind of “hyper-chaos,” since for Meillassoux this refers to the total disconnection of all things from each other, given that the principle of sufficient reason disappears and everything loses its reason for existing– loses all connection with other entities. (Hence, my early review of After Finitude in Philosophy Today called Meillassoux a hyper-occasionalist.)

I never thought of enlisting Hjelmslev as an ally, but now I’m interested in doing so after Levi’s presentation.

But here’s what I really like about Levi’s post (and he made a similar point recently in his “history of S.R.” post)… For Aristotle, substance is that which is capable of having different qualities at different times: Socrates can laugh or cry while remaining Socrates, whereas crying cannot be laughing and still remain crying. For Husserl, an intentional object is that which remains identical for our intentions despite wildly shifting adumbrations: a tree can be viewed from many different angles and distances, in different lighting conditions and different moods, while still remaining the same tree for us.

By analogy, any person, thing, city, or philosophical movement is more real the more it is capable of having different features at different times or in different respects. S.R. was like this, and as the variants of Bogost, Bryant, and my own prove, OOO is like this too.

And this is why I detest all dogmatism in philosophy. Just as Hume reduces an apple to a bundle of qualities, so does dogmatism reduce philosophy to a bundle of opinions. The dogmatic, opinionated person is one who insists on surface agreement with explicit propositional claims, not realizing that the soul of the thing needs a bit more finesse than any list of accurate claims can ever approach.

Another bad side effect of this attitude is that the dogmatist tends to overestimate those who agree with him (the dogmatist is usually male, hence the deliberate lack of gender-neutral language here), no matter how flimsy the reasons for agreement. And he tends to wildly underestimate those who happen to disagree with him.

Here’s a good litmus test for deciding whether you are too dogmatic or not… How many people do you admire despite disagreeing with them completely? A good, healthy mind will have a long list of such figures. A narrow, cramped, crabbed, dogmatic mind will tend to admire only those who it deems to be right. But in the end, none of us can hope to be right for very long. There is a reality, but our formulations of it are always going to be somewhat tentative and inadequate. Hence it is foolish to attach oneself too closely to “bundles of opinions,” and to call this philosophy.

In fact, this might even be a good initial definition of politics as opposed to philosophy: politics is the realm of content. In the political sphere, you make coalitions with people based on bundles of overlapping opinions. Here, what matters is whether people agree with you or not. A certain degree of dogmatism must always be found in politics, but it’s poison for philosophy.