quick second reply to Vitale

Vitale has posted a RESPONSE TO MY RESPONSE, and it’s perfectly friendly. But it feels now like we’re arguing in circles. The part of his message that really surprises me is summarized at the end:

“This is what has concerned me all along with object-oriented approaches. When Graham says that a real grenade went off by the real Ahmadinejad, well, not to an electron nearby. That electron knows nothing of this, it only ´knows´ (and I use that word VERY liberally here) patterns of density of charge off which it ricochets. To say that there is a real guy here and a real grenade, you either 1) import your own filters, which is fine, so long as you call it that and stick with the limitations this provides, OR, 2) you import a god´s eye view. I worry that object oriented approaches do the former, in the mode of the latter, but call it neither. This has always been my concern, for the reasons described above.

HOWEVER, if 1) the phenomenal realm were described completely in terms of perspective, even in the incompossible, semi-overlapping manner described by Whitehead, and 2) we could say nothing about divisions, genesis, change, distinction, or anything of the sort about the realm of the real, WELL, then I´d have a lot less problem with object-oriented approaches.”

Where to start here? Let’s start with the final two points.

1. “if the phenomenal realm were described completely in terms of perspective… then I´d have a lot less problem with object-oriented approaches.”

For OOO the phenomenal world has always been described completely in terms of perspective. That’s why it’s the phenomenal world and not the real one.

2. “if we could say nothing about divisions, genesis, change, distinction, or anything of the sort about the realm of the real… then I´d have a lot less problem with object-oriented approaches.”

But in that case it wouldn’t be an object-oriented approach. It would just be standard perspectivism.

Now let’s go back to the beginning of the passage just cited.

The fact that Ahmadinejad does not exist qua Ahamdinejad for the electron does not mean that Ahmadinejad doesn’t exist. Entities exist at all different scales, and no one can recognize them all. We can see this without even going outside the human realm. I have access to a whole range of objects of which my 6-year-old nephew Rainer is unaware, but this doesn’t mean that whether or not they exist is simply a matter of perspective. It is certainly true that I can pay attention to metaphysical systems, university administrative business, and a few weird marine species I just read about, in a way that my Rainer cannot. He probably knows nothing about any of these things, and (even though his mother was a Philosophy major) he probably has no idea what metaphysics is. But why would one conclude from this that whether or not metaphysics exists is a matter of perspective? Rainer might possibly not have heard of the city of Alexandria either, but I go there all the time and can assure you that it probably exists outside my mind.

I also think Chris is too quick to give the Deleuzian virtual a free ride in his post, just as so many are quick to give Deleuze a free ride these days:

“Furthermore, doesn´t the Deleuzian notion of the virtual do just this, but without the metaphysical baggage of assuming we can separate out objects?”

Who says it’s “baggage”? The fact is, a philosophy needs to account for individuals, and it is Deleuze who ends up with the “baggage” in the form of a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too virtual in which everything is magically both one and many simultaneously. (It can’t be just a unified glob because then you couldn’t explain how it has diverse effects, but it also can’t be made up of totally distinct and individuated regions because then Deleuze would have to face the occasionalist problem of communication, which he doesn’t even recognize as a problem.)

And here’s another issue that continually resurfaces among many people, not just Chris:

“Graham says that just as with a black hole, we can intuit its effects, even if we can´t experience it directly. Now I completely agree that these sorts of indirect or virtual presences (and I use the word virtual here in the sense its used in physics, such as a virtual focus in optics, and not in the specifically Deleuzian sense) exist within the phenomenal world. But how much can we know about distinctions within that which creates these virtual effects?”

It’s asking too much to ask for real objects to be known in the same way as phenomena. The whole point is that they’re not. But that’s far from proving that we can’t say anything intelligible about them at all. A philosophy that contains withdrawn real objects looks very different from a philosophy that does not.

If you try to claim that everything is either completely withdrawn/unknowbale or completely present/phenomenal, then you fall into Meno’s Paradox: “We can’t look for something if we don’t have it and can’t look for it if we do.” But this is sophistry in the bad sense, and undercuts the very etymology of philosophia: love of wisdom, not a simple wisdom about presence or a simple ignorance about absence.

But it’s really even simpler than that, Chris: the fact that my experience of Paris depends on my presence here doesn’t mean that Paris is dependent on my presence here. I can’t spell it out any better than I have here, but I do think you’re not being sufficiently critical in sizing up the defects of the “everything is perspective” view of the world.

The main problem the object-oriented approach faces is, I believe, a cultural one. People are so used to thinking of autonomous reality as being a tool of bad essentialism, oppressive patriarchy, bland traditional school philosophy, and boring rich heterosexual white people, and so used to thinking instead of process and relation as being the flower of liberation, creativity, experiment and diversity, that they instinctively react against any theory involving anything that has reality in its own right. But you have to fight those prejudices. You have to work through the logic of the two theories, and then I think you will see that there is a crippling incoherence at the heart of all theories of process and relation. You will find that the world is filled with discrete individuals (and contra Shaviro’s ongoing critique, they are perfectly capable of development— unlike Whitehead’s, which perish automatically with each passing instant).

And once you have a world filled with truly autonomous individuals, you find yourself with a world of objects much, much weirder than the primary substances of Aristotle. Why? Because Aristotle never saw that the autonomy of substances is so deep that it’s quite problematic that they should ever be able to make contact. And so you need to account for the indirect contact between things. (Which is ultimately an Islamic insight, not a Greek one.)

If you flatten everything out onto the phenomenal plane, as different philosophies do in different ways, then you’re amputating half of the world. Saying that you “don’t see how it’s possible to say anything about the withdrawn real” is sort of like saying that you “don’t see how we can see the color of a house while not looking at the house.” Well, you can’t. But that doesn’t mean the house doesn’t have a color. And it doesn’t mean the interior of a black hole is beyond all scientific treatment. And it doesn’t mean that the tool-being of the hammer is merely ineffable for all metaphysics: it isn’t. You just can’t expect knowledge about the withdrawn hammer to resemble knowledge of the hammer sitting on a table right in front of you.