Levi on realism

Levi has a FUNNY POST ON REALISM up now.

Not only is everyone claiming to be a realist now, they’re also claiming they (or at least their ancestral heroes) have known about this for decades.

Funny, but that’s not the continental philosophy scene I know. I seem to remember Husserl and Heidegger always calling realism vs. idealism a pseudo-problem, and seem to remember a very intense effort required on my own part as a graduate student to force myself to start taking the problem seriously. (Students in analytic circles would have had an easier tome, though in a different way.) I also don’t seem to remember most Derrideans during the 1990’s giving a warm welcome to the topics discussed in Tool-Being.

It’s also not the continental philosophy apparently familiar to Manuel DeLanda, who told me in an email (with a tone of surprise at having met another realist in the woods): “For decades acknowledging one was a realist was equivalent to acknowledging one was a child molester.” That’s the situation as I remember it too.

But it’s also worth remembering a few important distinctions here:

1. It’s not enough to say something like: “Sure sure, I never said everything is just an appearance in our minds.” This sets the hurdle too low, since only a handful of Western philosophers will fail this test. Heidegger already passes it, of course, with his critique of Vorhandenheit.

2. OOO never claimed to be the first to say that non-human objects interact with each other at the same ontological level that humans interact with non-humans. On the contrary, OOO has always credited Whitehead with this refreshing move, and there are plenty of pre-Kantian and arguably some other post-Kantian examples (Lotze, along with parts of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for instance). But where were all the Whitehead-loving deconstructionists during the 1990’s? I didn’t meet any.

3. Where are the deconstructionists defending the principle of a real world already carved in advance into autonomous districts? I seem to remember this being called “essentialism” and “naive realism.”

I’m all in favor of counterintuitive readings of familiar thinkers. But the sine qua non of such attempts (as found in Tool-Being for instance) is that you can’t get away with saying “obviously this is the right way to read this thinker.” As John Searle used to say on his TV show: “You gotta do the work.”