Levi weighs in

When making that last post, I didn’t realize that LEVI HAS A LONGER POST UP about Nick’s Indieoma piece.

I agree with everything that Levi says there, except for one minor quibble. He says this:

“In more candid moments, Harman has remarked that far from being a refutation of Kantianism, OOP is a hyper-Kantianism.”

Although the sentences that follow are all definitely true, I wouldn’t agree that I declare hyper-Kantianism in “more candid moments.” That was just a diplomatic concession to Shaviro for the sake of argument, because Shaviro prefers to focus on Kant’s positive side.

But whether to be positive or negative about Kant’s position with respect to the emerging philosophies is not just a question of charity, as I see it. The point is that Kant’s effect has been to assure everyone that philosophy is all about the human-world correlate, and that’s why I think it’s far preferable to treat Kant as a figure to be overcome, rather than as an ancestral hero of OOO. (And I say this as someone who rates Kant as one of the handful of greatest philosophers of all time.)

Last year on the blog, I imagined what would have happened if instead of Fichte, another person named Tannenbaum had been Kant’s immediate major successor. Tannenbaum would have been more of a Leibnizian. Instead of emphasizing the correlationist stance like Fichte, Tannenbaum would have extended the inaccessibility of the things-in-themselves even to inanimate causal relations. Instead of there just being a possible rose-in-itself inaccessible to humans, there would have been a rose-in-itself inaccessible even to raindrops and dust. In short, Tannenbaum’s position would have been pretty similar to my own current position.

If that had happened, if that had been the history of it, then we could surely say that Kant was one of the founders of OOO. But that has not been the reception of Kant. The reception of Kant has emphasized the feature, which is explicitly there in Kant, that the human-world correlate is the only legitimate topic of philosophy. For this reason, I think it just confuses matters when Shaviro treats Kant as an ally of the new philosophies.

Incidentally, when I originally made the “Tannenbaum” post, one or more people wrote in to say that Schelling was Tannenbaum. Here I would disagree. Where are the object-object relations in Schelling? Schelling’s influence always tends to degrade the status of individual inanimate entities: see I.H. Grant’s “anti-somatist” position. Iain wants to de-emphasize individual bodies in favor of a dynamic productive power. That’s what Schelling tries to do, and obviously it’s quite compatible with Deleuze. But neither Schelling nor Deleuze are philosophers of objects, whereas my fictional “Tannenbaum” character is, just as Leibniz is.

Anyway, I disagree that it’s “in more candid moments” that I emphasize my agreement with Kant. The true formulation would be more like: “in moments of pleasant discussion with Shaviro.”