a belated link to Deontologistics

Deontologistics MADE THIS POST ON NOVEMBER 20, but for some reason I missed it until now.

It’s largely a response to my interchange at the time with Michael Austin at the Complete Lies blog. The key paragraph from Deontologistics is probably this one:

“So, Harman tries to back us into a corner, by showing that we have a list of mutually exclusive options: you can adopt correlationism, empiricism, correlationist empiricism, or you can adopt object-oriented philosophy. I quite like this form of argument as it makes our options very clear. However, it also gives us the opportunity to reveal hidden premises upon which the set of options is established. If we can identify and reject such a premise then we can get out of the bind Harman puts us in. Looking at the options presented above, I think we can identify such a hidden premise: that ontology must start with experience.”

It’s a stimulating paragraph. I wouldn’t use the metaphor “back into a corner.” What I’m trying to show is that the other options are already in a corner without realizing it. But Deontologistics recognizes that the method is perfectly fair. Like most methods, this one didn’t develop in a vacuum, but was a response to the constant complaints made to me (never with sufficient argumentation) that the object is somehow an invalid category. My response is that if you think the object is an invalid category, then you have to claim to replace the object with something else. You have to make some sort of reductive move (reducing downward to something supposedly deeper than objects, or reducing upward to the correlationist standpoint– all objects are objects only insofar as they are for us). And I’ve tried to give reasons for why these are all bad moves. The main reason OOO has had to branch off from the rest of S.R. is because the rest of S.R. simply does not accept objects as a fundamental category, whereas I can’t do philosophy in any other way at this point. The anti-object sentiment comes heavily from Badiouians, and just as heavily from the cognitive science crew (these are sometimes the same people), and while I have some interest in both Badiou and cognitive science, I’m not remotely as impressed with either as many people in our midst are. At the same time, I remain stunned by the way it is taken to be perfectly obvious that Husserl has little to offer.

In the U.K., the recent history of continental philosophy is heavily Deleuzian. Even the Badiou-oriented people today mostly cut their teeth on Deleuze in the 1990’s. And of course Deleuze never really takes Husserl seriously. The anti-Husserlian points I hear from those of a Deleuzian background are generally inadequate. This is no surprise: we tend not to think carefully through our arguments against figures who we are not encouraged to take seriously by the tradition in which we work. For example, I don’t have a whole slew of good arguments prepared against Quine, simply because he’s never been an important figure for me, and I’ve never spent time around devotees of Quine, or even much time around analytic philosophers more generally. There were no environmental pressures for me to develop arguments against Quine. In similar fashion, if you grow up in a basically Deleuzian intellectual environment, it’s unlikely that you’re going to have to piece together a serious set of arguments against Husserl. You’re more likely to be content with passing digs at “qualia,” and other remarks of that sort.

And here Deontologistics makes an interesting point:

“It’s entirely understandable that Harman would assume this. He is, after all, a phenomenologist (albeit a very heterodox phenomenologist). However, it seems to me that its possible to reject this assumption, and thus that it’s possible to reject Harman’s fourfold structure without thereby falling into either empiricism or correlationism. For instance, it seems that we can allow for the possibility of an in-itself that does not collapse back into an in-itself-for-us (contra correlationism) without having to conceive this by contrast with the experiential or sensual. This means understanding the for-us in non-phenomenological terms (perhaps in discursive terms). Moreover, if our understanding of reality is not indexed to some notion of experience, then we need not think of the real properties of entities in terms of any model of experiential qualities, be it an empiricist model or the Husserlian model Harman advocates. It might be that a proper analysis of the discursive structure of predication is a better way of getting a handle on the nature of properties, rather than a phenomenological analysis of quality. At least, this is the path I’m heading down.”

I’ll eagerly await his further development of these points because, frankly, I don’t think my usage of Husserl has ever received a fair hearing in the basically post-Deleuzian environment one now finds in the UK. No one has even tried to engage me on these particular points. The rising/ruling discourses there now are of the Deleuze, Badiou, Metzinger, Laruelle variety: essentially the views represented regularly in Collapse. (And remember, I have long celebrated this mixture as refreshing compared with the repetitive Heidegger/Derrida/Foucault stew that I was force-fed during my twenties in the USA.)

What I like about the post by Deontologistics is that he is actually making some attempt to grasp what I’m saying and to formulate a sensible alternative to it.

Just a couple of points for now…

1. My fourfold structure results from two separate dualities, not one. Like most other critics, Deontologistics seems to ignore the second dualism: that between an object (whether of the real or sensual level) and its multitude of traits. All of my critics seem to take it for granted that of course an object is nothing but a bundle of traits. This is the core doctrine of empiricism, and even of much realism I’m afraid, and this is a point on which people still have a great deal to learn from Husserl’s Logical Investigations. As Husserl puts it, my friend Hans is not my friend Hans here and now in all his specific detail; Hans is an object that withstands numerous fluctuations in that detail. If you don’t follow Husserl here, then ironically you end up in a position resembling that of Whitehead or Latour, in which there is no real distinction between the essential and accidental properties of a thing. A thing is all its detail at any given moment. And that has pernicious consequences that I have tried to show elsewhere.

2. Deontologistics admits that to counter my model, there is the need of “understanding the for-us in non-phenomenological terms (perhaps in discursive terms).” That’s right: that’s what it would take. And this would surely entail denying even the existence of the phenomenological sphere, and so far I’ve simply never seen that work (including in Metzinger).

3. “Moreover, if our understanding of reality is not indexed to some notion of experience, then we need not think of the real properties of entities in terms of any model of experiential qualities, be it an empiricist model or the Husserlian model Harman advocates.” This gets me slightly wrong. I don’t think that the real properties of entities can be experienced. For me there is an absolute gap between real properties and experienced properties. It’s not I, but rather the cognitive science wing of S.R. that insists on the correspondence theory of truth (which is not an essential part of realism, incidentally; I’d even say the opposite– if you think the real can be exhausted by knowledge of it, then you aren’t a genuine realist).

But these are small quibbles with a critique that isn’t even finished yet. More importantly, I really like that Deontologistics post, because it pushes to the heart of the matter. There hasn’t been a real debate on these points yet, for the reason that phenomenology is viewed as simply passé in most quarters of recent whatever-continental-philosophy-is-now-called.

I’m also not sure what “understanding the for-us in discursive terms” would mean, but it sounds like the point where the debate needs to occur. People can’t just get aggressive about Husserl because they’re annoyed at having to deal with a figure they thought was safe in his coffin. They also need to deal with some of the figures, such as Barry Smith, who do take phenomenology seriously. You can’t just cherry-pick the ones who think Husserl is a laughing stock. There is not one note to Barry Smith in Brassier’s book, for instance. Husserl never gets his day in court in Nihil Unbound: it’s a drive-by shooting.