recent philosophy

Different philosophical views generally go hand-in-hand with differing views on the significance of recent philosophers, and of course the two points shape each other in such a way that it can be hard to disentangle cause from consequence.

If I had to characterize how my views of recent philosophy differ from those of many others in my circle (and I’m talking about friends here), it would be something like this.

Pretty much everyone in my vicinity agrees that Heidegger was an important figure, and many will concede the point about phenomenology. However, there is a certain sense in which these currents are seen as already belonging to another era. We have moved along…

What has made things difficult for me is that I’m not sure how much we’ve really moved along since Heidegger. There have been some important things, including many that I admire greatly. But I tend to see recent philosophy as largely in a holding pattern since Heidegger. This isn’t that strange a view, since many orthodox Heideggerians hold the same view. I simply disagree with them about what makes Heidegger significant.

One of the consequences of this way of looking at things is the much higher status I give to Levinas than most people do. His attitude from the start seems to me the right one: “we cannot go back to pre-Heideggerian philosophy, but there is something out of order about the climate of that philosophy.” When he says this he means more than politics. And Levinas then proceeds to deliver the goods, giving us a philosophy that is steeped in Heidegger (despite some rather unorthodox ways of presenting him), while in fact escaping the climate of Heidegger. And I mean more than just ethics.

I’m not always sure what others see in Husserl and Heidegger. It can be strangely difficult to know what’s happening right next to you. But what I see as most important in both of them is that they begin to free us from the correlationist deadlock, and from the monopoly it grants to the human/world relation as the sole legitimate topic of philosophy. This may sound strange for a couple of reasons. First, Meillassoux depicts both Husserl and Heidegger as correlationists (and not wrongly). Second, Whitehead seems obviously more deserving of the credit for this step. And I think readers of this blog know that I’ll be the first to give Whitehead as much credit as possible: he’s a genuinely great philosopher, and any given century doesn’t have too many of those.

It is possible to call both Husserl and Heidegger correlationists, and clearly impossible to call Whitehead one. As stated in Prince of Networks, I also think Meillassoux misses the realist dimension of Heidegger: the fact that Sein and Dasein form a correlate for Heidegger in no way entails that Sein is nothing more than its series of appearances to Dasein. Some people try to read Heidegger this way, but that’s more like a Hegelianized version of Heidegger. No, there is something impenetrably real about Sein in Heidegger, unfathomable by humans.

But back to the point… If I dislike correlationism, and admit that Whitehead is much less a correlationist than either Husserl or Heidegger, why do I still prefer the latter figures?

It is known that explosions in confined spaces are often the most powerful. In similar fashion, we often find powerful philosophical insights emerge in cases where thinkers have confined themselves in too narrow a space. Another and even more common analogy would be the formation of diamonds only under conditions of extreme pressure.

Whitehead finds it fairly easy to escape the correlationist fetters (or at least there are few signs of strain in Process and Reality itself). The world is awash in concrete actual entities in relation with one another, mediated of course by the eternal objects. And this ease of existing and relating gives these entities a certain flatness. They are all perfectly immanent in the same world, and they are fully concrete.

But the correlationist pressures under which Husserl and Heidegger operate allow them to see a greater richness or duplicity at work in entities. In what sense are they philosophers of entities? Or rather, philosophers of objects?

In Husserl’s case, “object” is used as a positive term. Experience is made up of objects, not of “experienced contents” (a.k.a. bundles of qualities). Never before has the phenomenal sphere had such a realist atmosphere to it, because as far as I can tell, no one else ever tried to import the object/content distinction into the phenomenal before. Part of why Huserl was able to do this is because he didn’t think he was doing it. He thought his intentional object “Berlin” was in fact the real Berlin, as real as it is possible to have; Berlin as the correlate of a possible consciousness is the very meaning of Berlin. But the results are wonderful. Instead of a phenomenal geography made up of obvious experienced qualities, we have a strange quantized landscape of centaurs, chairs, blackbirds, and mailboxes, all of them present according to some specific profile at every moment. (But note: we should not say only according to some specific profile. We are not missing anything when we only see the centaur from one side. Simply by intending the centaur, it is fully there before us. The one side we do sensibly experience of the centaur should be viewed as an extraneous bonus, not as a mere partial payment. I realize that Husserl himself doesn’t quite see it this way, but that is the force of his analyses.)

In Heidegger’s case, the word “object” is obviously no longer positive. But in the tool-analysis, we have hammers and rail platforms with a life that exceeds that of their accessibility to us. Heidegger remains a correlationist despite not being an idealist, because he still works within a basically Kantian framework: there is no possibility of speaking of the interactions between tool and tool outside the system of human purposes. The role of the tool is to withdraw from humans and to surprise humans by breaking. It does not become a global free-for-all, as Whitehead’s philosophy does. And of course I support Whitehead on this point. But merely by pressure of confinement within the human/world correlate, Heidegger again discovers another drama at work that Whitehead never encounters: the strife between the object’s withdrawal into shadow and the manifold surface-effects by which it is announced. No such tension exists in Whitehead, any more than a Husserlian tension between objects and their palpable qualities exists in Whitehead (for Whitehead, like Latour, and entity basically remains a bundle of qualities; both are heirs of British Empiricism in this respect– Whitehead explicitly so).

Now, it must not be thought that both Husserl and Heidegger speak of hidden objects (and here I find Meillassoux incorrect). There are no hidden objects in Husserl. A mailbox is not hiding behind its successively visible profiles. For Heidegger, the mailbox does obviously hide behind those profiles.

The two thinkers give us complementary models of objects. As I have argued, Heidegger senses this, and constructs a fourfold model out of it: explicitly so from 1949 onward, but really as far back as his early struggles with Husserl in 1919.

What has happened since? The tension required to maintain these ambivalent models of objects dissipated somewhat. Either the object was overmined by a return to the German Idealist downgrading of reality-an–sich, or it was undermined by appeal to a more indeterminate continuum, with actual individuals stripped of autonomy.

For this reason, I hold that what we need is not more philosophy of the subject (overmining), and not more natural science (undermining). What we need instead is the object-oriented spirit of phenomenology mixed with the more cosmic object-oriented spirit of Whitehead.