a plug for Bogost’s S.R. aggregator

For many months, my homepage on Safari has been this very blog. I’m not sure why, because obviously I’m never going to hear any news by opening up to a page all of whose posts I made myself. So, I’ve just changed the preferences to make my homepage BOGOST’S USEFUL SPECULATIVE REALISM AGGREGATOR. If I’d been consulting it more regularly, I wouldn’t have missed the Deontologistics November 20 post until December 15, for example. [ADDENDUM: Link fixed.]

Currently at the top of the Aggregator’s list is THE LATEST POST BY PAUL ENNIS ON VICARIOUS CAUSATION. I find that it’s best not to get too involved when other people are discussing your own work, because it’s often better to see where the conversation goes without your shaping or interfering with it. But I’m grateful for the serious attention Ennis has paid to the concept.

And I still like that essay. It was written mostly in November 2006, however, and there are a few points in the essay that I now think are false. There was also quite a bit of movement in my theory in 2007-08. (As for 2009 it may be too early to tell. Sometimes it takes me a year or two to realize that I’ve moved on from a certain idea.)

But just a couple of quick thoughts…

1. Ennis is more willing than I am to find the real object already present in Husserl. He does this cleverly:

“Most phenomenologists will not be startled by Harman’s distinction between real and sensual objects. These objects are both found in Husserl and Heidegger – or one can at least follow where Harman has derived them from radical, possibly reductive, readings of each thinker. Real objects are not much different than the things-in-themselves in terms of their features: they are inaccessible or unencounterable. Husserl calls such objects the hyle or matter that consciousness finds utterly alien and nonetheless manages to make cognitions about. Husserl also develops the idea of monads in his later work and it is about as close as one gets in Husserl to non-ideal objects and rationalist metaphysics on a Leibnizian basis.”

This could be debated, but Husserl remains a correlationist, and even if Husserl can be said to allow for objects that are “utterly alien,” it would still only be a question of objects that are alien for us. What about for each other? I see no room anywhere in Husserl for dealing with object-object relations in which a human is not one of the participants. Could any Husserlian truly take Whitehead seriously? It is for this very reason that I’ve never been too interested in the claims that Husserl allows for realism insofar as things are given to us. Not only does this downplay the strongly constitutive role of the subject for Husserl, it misses the point that passivity doesn’t solve the problem. In other words, the point is not that “idealism allows the subject to construct the world, but phenomenology accepts that it is partly given to us, and therefore goes beyond idealism.” You could say the same thing about Kant. But that doesn’t mean Kant frees us from the correlational circle, and Husserl certainly does not. The litmus test is simple: can a philosophy account for object-object relations in a way not referred back to a subject that is observing or measuring or speaking of this relation? If not– then it’s correlationism, baby.

And there is this:

“The claim that aesthetics must be first philosophy does not strike me as convincing and it is hard to know how serious Harman is with this claim. Clearly Harman is not afraid to use rhetoric, metaphor, and ‘litanies’ as philosophical tools but the problem here is that object oriented ontology might be nothing more than a hermeneutics of the object (and not really post-Heideggerian/Gadamerian at all).”

There are two points here. In response to both:

1. Yes, I am serious. Aesthetics for me is a matter of rupturing the relation between an object and its qualities, and since such rupture for me is the engine of the world, then aesthetics does become first philosophy. Aesthetics should not be a marginal discipline that tells us about why people enjoy pretty paintings and songs; instead, these topics should be seen as a limited region of a far wider problem, which I have shown to relate also to such issues as time, space, essence, eidos, causation, theory, and perception. None of this is complete, but there has been a lot of progress since late 2006 when that V.C. essay was written. (There are also a couple of points in that essay that I think are simply wrong, and I discuss this in Prince of Networks near the end.)

To the critics who say that the account isn’t complete, I answer: of course it’s not yet complete! But it already opens up a lot of doors and windows. Name one philosopher whose system was ever complete. Just yesterday in class, as we were reviewing Plotinus, we found all sorts of things that were never explained in the Enneads. It is legitimate to raise these points as weaknesses in his system. What is not legitimate is to say something like: “Plotinus never really explains how souls can return to the world-soul and still retain a small number of memories that enrich the world-soul even after they lose their bodies. He died an old man and still never managed to explain it. Therefore, the system of Plotinus is useless.” The procedure is especially illegitimate if one is the lackey of some other past philosopher who also never explained everything in the world.

Theories are developed and presented piece by piece. You put together one version of it, and you see problems with it. You then put together another version of it, most likely on the basis of the older version that was not quite right. And so forth. There are a number of points in the V.C. essay that I think are wrong, and a larger number of points that are by no means exhaustively accounted for. But what’s news about that? The alternative would be to remain silent until age 70 or so, and then publish one thoroughly polished masterwork.

The only problem is, I doubt it would be a masterwork in that case. As I’ve said before on this blog… What if I had not published Tool-Being in 2002? What if I had kept polishing it until 2009 before publishing it? I don’t think it would have been better. By publishing it in 2002 I received positive and negative feedback. I met many people and was invited many places to speak in the past 7 years. I was invited to write other things by people who liked the book and its successors. And the same is true of the “vicarious causation” essay. It was largely through having to defend it that I was able to see its shortcomings and improve it. But I still think it’s a good and interesting essay, and I am pleased that it may soon appear in a number of different languages in a variety of different venues. It can be nitpicked as all work can be nitpicked, but it has also done some important work for many of its readers.

2. “but the problem here is that object oriented ontology might be nothing more than a hermeneutics of the object (and not really post-Heideggerian/Gadamerian at all).”

For Heidegger and Gadamer, hermeneutics concerns our interpretation of things. It is a human-world correlationist theory. Nowhere do Heidegger or Gadamer attempt to say that objects interpret each other just as we interpret them (you have to go to Whitehead or Latour for that). In that sense OOO is about as non-hermeneutic a theory as you can get.

But if what Ennis means is that I don’t move past Heidegger and Gadamer’s view that all knowing is interpreting, then yes, I’ll gladly sign up for hermeneutics in that sense. I wouldn’t even call that “hermeneutics,” I’d just call it philosophia. Love of wisdom that we will never quite have, not the supposedly already available wisdom found in language, mathemes, natural science, or analyses of “power.”