“nothing more than”

There are a number of ways in which objects can be dismissed as naive fictions rather than as the pivotal subject matter of philosophy. Here are three examples:

1. “the object is nothing more than a surface-effect of something deeper” (monism, materialism, and their more sophisticated variants)

2. “the object is nothing beyond its accessibility to us” (correlationism)

3. “the object is nothing but a nickname for a bundle of qualities” (empiricism)

I find Husserl decisive against point #3. And that’s the best part of Husserl, and the most precious thing that is lost as a result of his current exile from the circle of fashionable authors. People are too hung up on the “idealist” part of Husserl (which is admittedly there, but no more so than in other, currently more popular authors: is Husserl really more of an idealist than Zizek, for instance? “The only true principle of materialism is that the external world does not exist.”) No great philosopher is treated more unjustly in our time than Husserl. Plato has faded to second on the great injustice list.

Point #1 can fail for a couple of different reasons that I’ve addressed in recent lectures.

But point #2 is the one that so many people swear by: “If we try to think a horse outside thought, then it is thereby thought, and is no longer a horse outside thought.” It is still strange to me that so many people are willing to build entire philosophical systems on such a principle, but indeed some very bright people have done it. The problem is that this is really no different from Meno’s paradox. Something can’t be sought unless it is already possessed; something can’t be thought unless it is already contained by thought. Same idea. Calling someone Meno may not be an “argument” in itself, but if you find yourself on Meno’s side in a quarrel with Socrates, then perhaps you ought to think twice!

As everyone knows, philosophia means love of wisdom.

Correlationism seems to hold that philosophy should be a wisdom about thought. It’s not. It’s a love of wisdom about that which exceeds thought.

The basic gesture of Socrates is not to knock people down while being a smartass. That’s only a means to an end (except in a few dialogues, such as the Gorgias, where he is being exceptionally rude.)

No, the basic gesture of Socrates is to remind us paradoxically that we can’t itemize the qualities of virtue, rhetoric, piety, justice, until we first know what each of these is. (Which can never fully be actualized, of course. Socrates never actually gives us any adequate definitions.)

The correlationist is the one who, against Socrates, thinks that everything is nothing more than its itemizable qualities. The materialist is the same in this respect. And so is the empiricist.

Socrates’s view, by contrast, is that everything real is something more than its qualities. And that’s all that object-oriented philosophy seeks to defend. If you want to map everything in terms of mathemes, the brain, the one, language, or any other such first principle, then you are no longer on the side of Socrates. And maybe that will work out, but I myself don’t think it’s a very good bet.