Shaviro and Kant

Jan 16, 2009 3:20 AM
response to Shaviro
by doctorzamalek

No way I can go to sleep without responding to STEVEN SHAVIRO’S POST , which is on the money and asks several good questions.

First, let me re-emphasize that the question of whether to spin Kant as a hero or villain is a purely tactical one for me, and always has been. Since I like the things in themselves but dislike Kant’s human/world correlate, I am comfortable speaking either well or ill of Kant as circumstances dictate…

*If in the company of Latour and Latourians (who have no interest whatsoever in the Ding an sich but share my frustration with the correlate) I’m happy to share in their anti-Kantian rhetoric.

*But if in the company of “Kantian humility” types who regret the pillaging of the real by German Idealism, I’m happy to call Kant a hero, because here I’m on the same team as they are.

The point is, Kant has a good side and a bad side for me. And while circumstances have generally conspired to make it necessary to focus on his bad side, rhetorical opportunism is in order (for me) when it comes to Kant. No harm is done anyway– he is not some fragile flower whose reputation is in danger from me, but a mighty member of the Western pantheon, his reputation secure for the ages. I just ranked him as the #3 philosopher in history, you know.

But Shaviro raises a valuable question:

“How would Harman’s argument change, if it were to credit Kant instead of Heidegger with the discovery of a subterranean reality beyond, and irreducible to, representation and presence?”

The easiest answer to this point is that Heidegger’s fourfold is not to be found in Kant, and I’m on record as calling the fourfold Heidegger’s most important philosophical achievement– the crowning summation of his career. And though Kant has his 4 groups of categories, it must be remembered that 4’s are rampant in the history of philosophy and they are not all the same. Among other things, Kant’s 4 are all categories, and have nothing to do with the noumenal realm of tool-being where two of Heidegger’s four (earth and gods, in my reading) reside.

You can’t get to Heidegger’s fourfold without passing through Husserl. I still hear lazy assertions that Husserl is merely warmed-over Kant, but there is no distinction between an intentional object and its properties in Kant. Husserl was the first to split the phenomenal realm into object and content. For past thinkers, the “object” role was always played by some real thing outside of experience, and those who focused on experience always saw only bundles of qualities there, not objects. It was a perverse stroke of genius on Husserl’s part to bring Twardowski’s “object” onto the same plane as “content”– so perverse, in fact, that Husserl thought he was doing something else.

However… making the point that Kant misses Heidegger’s fourfold is to dodge the tougher question of whether Heidegger’s withdrawn reality is any different from Kant’s thing-in-itself. How is Heidegger’s hammer different from a Kantian Hammer-an-sich?

No one before Shaviro posed the question to me that clearly, so I’m responding by gut instinct 10 minutes after hearing the question. (But sometimes gut reactions to questions are clearer and more long-lasting than later over-subtlizations). My gut reaction, namely, is that there is less of a rift between the two realms for Heidegger than for Kant.

In other words, Kant’s noumenal realm doesn’t do very much in his philosophy. It’s there for us to have hopes about. Maybe it also “generates” the phenomenal realm, though even in Kant’s lifetime plenty of people observed the paradox of saying that noumenal “causes” phenomenal even though causation is supposed to be restricted to the phenomenal, as a category.

In Heidegger, the relation between being and beings seems far more intimate (and again, I’m working on gut reactions at 3 AM here, now just 15 minutes after reading Shaviro’s post).

For one thing, being sends itself in various historical epochs for Heidegger, so it participates in human history to some extent, whereas Kant’s things-in-themselves say primarily, as Latour brilliantly puts it: “We are here! What you eat it is not dust.”

For another thing, at least in my reading of Heidegger, the causal link between the two realms is beyond all doubt, even if its mechanisms are never explained. The hammer as vorhanden is a translated version of the hammer as zuhanden.

In short, if I were to try to develop my ontology in terms of Kant rather than Heidegger, I’d lose not only the fourfold and the intervening achievements of Husserl (which are profound; have no doubt). I would also have less hope of building the sort of relation between the two worlds that is needed. Kant’s Ding an Sich feels more static in its remoteness: Heidegger’s tools may be “invisible,” but they press up against us with a shocking intimacy at all times.

As for Shaviro’s claim that a Kantian approach might force me to abandon my model of autonomous objects and hence vicarious causation…

First, he cites this passage from Whitehead:

“Such an account… renders an interconnected world of real individuals unintelligible. The universe is shivered into a multitude of disconnected substantial things, each thing in its own way exemplifying its private bundle of abstract characters which have found a common home in its own substantial individuality. But substantial thing cannot call unto substantial thing. (Adventues of Ideas, p. 133)”

In order to “get away with” this, Whitehead would have to show us that he’s paying a lesser price than my own. And in fact, Whitehead pays through the nose for his relationism, much more than even Latour does. For Whitehead, one thing prehends another through “eternal objects,” and these eternal objects are found in God. In short, Whitehead keeps the least convincing aspect of classical occasionalism (God is meddling in everything) while abandoning the most convincing aspect (the highly problematic character of relations between autonomous things).

And this is how Latour differs from Whitehead, despite their very close link. For Latour (who as a person may be even more religious than Whitehead was) God is never invoked as a privileged causal medium. Latour’s theory is a strikingly secular one when it comes to relations. A melon or a freight train can be mediators between two other entities, whereas for Whitehead, God is always in the picture. (ADDENDUM: Shaviro admits at the end that he needs to say something about this side of Whitehead, which I like others find refreshing yet also deplorable.)

Latour, in short, is the world’s first “secular occasionalist”– and I think I’m the second! (Shaviro says: “Harman argues, for the very first time, for a non-theistic occasionalism”, a flattering compliment, but credit where credit is due– Latour got there first.)

The problem of links between objects must be handled locally, not with the Ave Maria of the occasionalist God, a trap into which Whitehead falls as much as Malebranche (the difference being that Malebranche believed in substances and Whitehead relationalizes entities completely, but you know I prefer the substances).

A nice block quote from Shaviro:

“Now, substantialism and occasionalism are the aspects of Harman’s thought that most perturb his readers (myself included). One would like to accept his “object-oriented,” anti-correlationist argument, his refusal to place “human access” at the center of things, or to give such access a uniquely privileged status, without thereby having to accept the radically anti-relational consequences that he draws from this argument. To think this way, however, is to do Harman an injustice: his substantialism/occasionalism is not a bug but a feature; it is precisely the creative core of his metaphysics. So what follows might well be just another attempt to evade the full audacity of Harman’s argument.”

A high-minded concession, and a humble masking of Shaviro’s interesting suggestion right afterwards:

“For Kant, noumena lurks inaccessibly behind phenomena, just as for Heidegger, the hidden tool-being of all entities lurks inaccessibly behind those entities’ presence-at-hand. But for Kant (unlike Heidegger?) the limitation which grasps of noumena only their reduced phenomenal profile is not only a loss or a reduction, but also a positive act, a construction, a bringing-into-relation.”

This is probably a fair criticism of Heidegger’s position but an unfair criticsm of mine. Remember, for me it’s never the case that a translation is merely a distortion. I also think that every relation instantly creates a new object! If I perceive a “distorted” tree, this merely occurs in the interior of a real object called “HarmanTree.” It may sound weird, but the basic idea is that it’s silly to claim as Brentano et al. do that my perception of a tree is immanent “in my mind.” Why just in my mind? In fact, I enter into relation with the tree, and the tree-image is not in my mind, but somewhere in between me and the tree. (See my contribution to David Skrbina’s Mind That Abides for a fuller explication of this, and of why this shows that I’m not quite a panpsychist despite a close approach to the position.)

But more importantly– thanks Steven. That was one hell of an attentive reading!