Deontologistics weighs in

Here’s A RESPONSE FROM PETE AT DEONTOLOGISTICS to my Dundee paper. This is an appendix to our longer ongoing discussion, in which I haven’t done my share of the work yet. Pete is a really smart guy, and also a very intense one, in the sense that he is able to formulate very lengthy and technically involved objections to anything he hears in a matter of minutes. (And by the way, my teasing of him for “pouncing” on me after my paper was meant in a friendly spirit. Giving a paper and then handling the questions from the floor usually burns me out so much that I usually just want to take it easy for a couple of hours afterwards; even as a teacher, my least favorite time to take questions is right after class, for the same reason.)

Pete actually has detailed objections to almost the whole of my reading of Heidegger, but let’s get into that some other time. I just spent the day editing yet another draft of The Prince and the Wolf, and so have a little bit of “relaxation” time here to touch on a few points in Pete’s latest response.

One of his points after my paper was that Deleuze is both a materialist and escapes my conception of materialism. Could be; I don’t think I mentioned Deleuze at all in the paper. But in fact, I do think Deleuze skips the domain of objects, and if you do that I don’t see how you can escape materialism in the broad sense in which I defined it at in the paper.

A quick riposte: Pete tries to distinguish between two kinds of reductionism (further splitting the first into a strong and weak form). I don’t see how this bears on my Dundee paper, since I don’t think I talked much about reduction there. In my Zagreb undermining/overmining paper I did, but deliberately avoided (I think) the term in Dundee, for the special reason that Ladyman/Ross use the word differently from how I did in Zagreb and from how I normally would. They don’t see themselves as reductionists at all, because: (a) they don’t believe in a final layer, but in “real patterns all the way down”, and (b) they don’t see any particular pattern as truly reducible to another. Some patterns can be eliminated (namely, if they aren’t validated by science, and that includes sensory qualia for them, unsurprisingly given the general camp to which they belong). But one pattern can never be reduced to another; the patterns have a complete autonomy from each other in causal/mereological terms.

However, I don’t care if they don’t believe there’s a final layer of real patterns. They still do have a final layer: structure, and they “refuse to answer” (their phrase) the question of how the physical structure of the real differs from the mathematical structure of knowledge. Take a moment to note what a shock this is. It’s not just like me saying that we can’t list the attributes of a withdrawn hammer. It would be more like me saying: “there is a difference between the real hammer and the phenomenal hammer, and I refuse to say what that difference is; the real hammer just is.” (And that’s not what I do at all. I list all kinds of differences between real and sensual objects.)

I don’t get this part of Pete’s post:

“The second sense of reductionism, which Graham is directly concerning himself with, is characterisable independently of any particular relation to the sciences. Indeed, Graham introduced it by using the example of the presocratics, who tend to ‘reduce’ entities to some deeper metaphysical principle, but one which is obviously not conceived in terms of the sciences (e.g., apeiron, water, fire, etc.).”

I don’t get it because the pre-Socratics are scientists. It’s not science that would pass muster in the 21st century, but it’s not different in kind from what we know as science. It simply looks a bit primitive now. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think the Ladyman/Ross structure gets us any further than the apeiron.

And in a sense, that’s becoming the only role of materiality in recent philosophies: an indeterminate apeiron that serves only to provide a false realist alibi for philosophies that are in fact idealist in character.

Pete’s post is interesting, but I think it could be a bit more charitable. For instance:

“I want a better grasp of what Ladyman and Ross, Anaximander, Ian Hamilton Grant, and others have in common, and I’d really prefer us to use a different word than ‘reductionism’, given the complicated relation between this and the primary sense of the word.”

The reference to Grant makes me realize that Pete is not referring to my Zagreb paper, but to my Bristol paper of two months before that (S.R. II). There I was indeed using “reduction” as a key term, and Pete was in attendance in Bristol. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t use it in Dundee, and precisely for the reason that Pete is laying down: in Dundee I was speaking of authors who use “reduction” in a very different sense.

Furthermore, I don’t think it’s all that difficult to see what “Ladyman and Ross, Anaximander, and Iain Hamilton Grant” have in common. That’s pretty clear, actually: all are committed to a real, but a real that is not carved up into distinct objects. In fact, that’s what drives all three of these philosophies. For Ladyman and Ross the world is a relational structure and objects are replaced by real patterns that exist pragmatically (while also somehow being “real,” in thoroughly unconvincing fashion) at different scales. Anaximander’s apeiron is broken into pieces historically through rapid rotation and vibration. [ADDENDUM: My screw-up, due to fatigue: I was speaking of Anaxagoras there. But the same holds for Anaximander, with the apeiron simply lying in the future rather than the past. It’s still the real for him in comparison with the fleeting opposites that will be destroyed over time by justice.] Grant’s real is a productive force that breaks into object only through retardations. All three philosophies are committed to a mind-independent reality devoid of what we know as individuals. They seem to have a tremendous amount in common. (However, Grant’s position is far closer to mine than Ladyman/Ross, because Grant strongly resists the mathematization/scientization of the real. He’s simply not a materialist in my Dundee sense, which does however encompass both Brassier and Meillassoux, coming from opposite directions. Grant and I have a different disagreement: see my paper and his response forthcoming in The Speculative Turn. Briefly, Grant thinks my commitment to “substantial forms” doesn’t work; he thinks a “productive force” is needed over and above individuals.)

[ADDENDUM: Yes, I realize that Ladyman/Ross would deny the charge that they think the real is scientifically exhaustible. After all, they claim that much information is irretrievable: the exact number of hairs on Napoleon’s head, the interior of a black hole, what came before the Big Bang. But I regard this as a rather feeble sense of an inexhaustible real, and am not persuaded that there is any difference between information lying beyond current telescopes and information lying beyond all possible telescopes. The point of the real is not its inaccessibility to earthly humans, but its inaccessibility to any relation at all, including the inanimate kind.]

One last thing:

“Rather, the point I want to make is that the epistemological commitments that cause these problems aren’t essential features of materialism qua materialism. The core of materialism must be some form of explicitly metaphysical commitment. Now, I think we can identify such a core metaphysical commitment, although I also think what it shows is that the first kind of materialism Graham identifies (that of Zizek and others) isn’t actually materialism in any useful sense.”

This is actually a bit unfair. I made it very clear at the outset of the paper that the word “materialism” gets used in all kinds of different ways, some of them even applying to my own position (the sense of “materialism,” namely, that Jane Bennett uses). I was as scrupulous as possible in Dundee in saying that materialism gets defined in all kinds of different ways, and that the way I will choose for this particular occasion is the kind that applies both to science-minded realists and to people like Zizek/Badiou/ Meillassoux. The latter trio use the term materialism themselves, and I have said repeatedly on this blog, in agreement with Pete’s sentiments as expressed above, that I didn’t think they should. But while writing the paper, I realized that they were in fact historically justified in using the term, in a sense derived from Marxism. And in fact, the Marxist sense is obviously their reason for choosing the term, and I feel silly for not having realized that much earlier.

So, Pete is simply wrong and unfair to say that I’m confusing different senses of terminology. I stated the ambiguities of the term as clearly as possible on page 1 of the paper, gave my reasons for choosing the one I did, and then (in a conciliatory spirit) said “OK, the dialectical materialist sense of materialism has a right to exist too.” And then I tried to show that the two start from opposite sides and end up agreeing on a philosophy in which the real is in fact commensurate with the knowable, but then a vague outside is posited to avoid the slippage into outright idealism. And I think the argument works. Pete’s trying to trip me up on terminological issues that my paper already clarified in the opening paragraphs. In all fairness, of course, he was only listening rather than reading, and it’s easy to miss things while listening.

Oh my God, have I just committed to a 7-message exchange on this?! The man is relentless. And again, I want to emphasize that anyone who meets Pete surely realizes that he is inordinately smart and serious and sincere. He just keeps coming and coming, which is great. But he also has a way of expressing his disagreements by telling you that you’re confused or making mistakes, and that’s not a style of disagreement that makes me especially comfortable about the possibilities of a useful lengthy exchange. (I realize that that manner of debate is much more common and much more valued in analytic philosophy). I’d rather focus on disagreements: on assuming that the other person is not making confused mistakes, but simply missing something that you think is crucial. Otherwise, you’re putting the other person on the defensive all the time to try to prove that they’re not irrational, and it just creates stress.

No offense, Pete. I thought your points in Dundee were brilliant, after my paper and all others. I just find it tiring to try to prove that I’m using terminology precisely enough all the time. [ADDENDUM: especially when Quine himself couldn’t have shown more precision than I did in the opening paragraphs!]

AND A FINAL ADDENDUM: I’m really looking forward to reading Pete’s current project, which he told me a bit about in Dundee. He’ll be using Brandom to elucidate Heidegger in what sounds like a very fresh way.