now Peirce got there first

Mormon Metaphysics has always been a nice guy, even though he’s never had much good to say about OOO. However, he’s now at least PROMISING TO DO THE LEGWORK of showing that pragmatism (by which he seems to mean Peirce) already anticipates OOO’s major features.

He starts by saying that it’s not a question of priority:

“Which brings me to my biggest point. I just don’t see anything new in OOO. This isn’t an issue over ‘who got there first.’ Nor is it to ignore the very real metaphysical differences between the various parties.”

But then, in flagrant and immediate contradiction, it turns out that it is a question of priority after all:

“It’s just that by and large this concern with objects especially as so broadly defined is part and parcel of pragmatism in the late 19th and early 20th century.”

He has a lot of work to do to make this case. I’ve never met a pragmatist who could swallow the idea of essence or of objects apart from their relations. Indeed, these are the very ideas that pragmatism prides itself on knocking down.

Step right up and let me know… Who else has already said everything that OOO says? First we were beaten to the punch by 40 years (Derrida). Now we were beaten to the punch by 100 years (pragmatism). Anyone want to go for 200? But that’s already been tried with the “Kant knew all of this” riposte of Manfred Poser and others.

Why not just go for broke and say 2,500 years? Aristotle is actually a better bet than any of these people, since at least he’s genuinely working in an idiom of real individual substances (unlike the others who supposedly punched first) and more generally, Aristotle does anticipate a lot of what other people say much later. That’s why he’s one of the two greatest philosophers of all time, and possibly the very greatest (though I lean slightly toward Plato at the moment).

There’s one other part of MM’s post that makes no sense to me, and it comes right at the beginning:

“That is I don’t think there is a heavy engagement [in Prince of Networks] with the issue of time. It’s just taken as a clear and uncomplex background in which objects reside.”

No it’s not.

In Latour’s case I present time as something generated by objects, not a background in which they reside; one could hardly claim otherwise about Latour, who states as bluntly as possible that time is produced, not pre-existent.

As for the parts in the book on my own philosophy, time is also not presented as “a clear and uncomplex background in which they reside.” Indeed, it would be hard to say anything more false about my position. Time is presented, instead, as the tension between withdrawn real objects and the turbulent sensual features that they present to other objects. There is no uncomplicated spatio-temporal background in my system. In fact, the opposite critique would have a lot more traction: i.e., one ought to complain, instead, that there is no way to get from my model of time to the sort of time utilized by the natural sciences. (Which I can also answer, but at least it’s an understandable objection.)

Now, back to the “nohing new” point… As Kant notes at the beginning of the Prolegomena, it’s always possible to find precursors for any given idea. In that sense we can never refute the “nothing new under the sun” maneuver by anyone who wants to use it badly enough.

So, let’s take a different tack. Let’s rephrase the “What’s new about OOO?” question as this: “Why am I not satisfied to be a simple disciple of any other past or present philosopher? What is missing in these thinkers that has prevented me from simply jumping on an existing bandwagon?”

There are, of course, countless dead and living philosophers whom I admire greatly, but I would also have serious objections to make to any of them. The model of OOO, at least in my version, runs something like this:

1. objects are irreducible to any relations with other objects

2. while dependent on their component pieces, they are also irreducible to those pieces

3. objects merely encounter caricatures of each other, and in ontological terms this happens in the same way whether a human or animal is involved or not

4. the fact that objects cannot encounter each other directly means that only indirect relation is possible

5. however, we cannot follow either the occasionalists (who make God the sole medium of relation) or Hume or Kant (who invert occasionalism by making human habit or categories the only known site where this occurs)

6. there is an infinite regress of objects, but not an infinite progress toward ever larger ones, up to and including the “universe as a whole” (which doesn’t really exist for me)

7. both real and sensual objects are polarized between an object-pole and a quality-pole

8. this yields a fourfold structure, which generates not only space and time, but their previously disowned sisters which we might term essence and eidos

There are other points that follow from these, but this is a perfectly good start (and a perfectly unusual one, I daresay).

Now, there are certainly philosophers who “beat OOO to the punch” on one or more of these points. Who would want to have a philosophy that learned nothing from 2.5 millennia of great predecessors?

But you’re going to have a hard time not only finding a past or present philosophy that agrees on all of these points (perhaps that’s setting the bar of resemblance too high) but even of finding one that matches the basic model: a cosmos of objects at countless different scales, all real regardless of whether anyone or anything is currently interacting with them, and all withdrawing from one another and interacting only indirectly through a sensual medium.

Heidegger doesn’t do it, because his model of withdrawal is a model of withdrawal from Dasein, and I suppose you could make a tepid argument that animals might fit too (though his analyses of animal life in 1929/30 are overrated, in my opinion).

What about Whitehead? Here some people are trying to say that Whitehead beat us to the punch, because there’s a “subjective form” over and above the prehensions of a thing. My best arguments about this have been with Steven Shaviro, and as luck would have it we’ve been paired again at the Claremont conference in December, so I’ll try to settle the issue again there if possible. But even if you think that Whitehead is a full-blown object-oriented philosopher who allows for non-relational entities, there’s still no fourfold structure in Whitehead, who on this point (as on so many others) is the perfect heir of the “bundle” theory of the British Empiricists he so admires. (He calls Locke the English Plato, after all.) You need Husserl to get that polarization between object and adumbration.

What about Husserl, then? Some people claim Husserl is actually a realist, or at least as much of a realist as we’ll ever be allowed to have. Even if so, it’s still a one-layered model he gives us, though again it’s a model ingeniously polarized between intentional objects and their adumbrations, with the further interesting complication that each of these objects has an eidos and it needs to be accessed categorially rather than sensually. But I think you’re going to have a tough time calling Husserl anything but a pretty severe idealist, even in the Logical Investigations.

Who does that leave? Aristotle and Leibniz? Both are among my innermost circle of heroes, no doubt. But they simply don’t allow for objects of all different scales, for reasons obvious to anyone who has ever read a few pages of either thinker. No chance that either of them would allow Microsoft to be an object, for instance. Leibniz even backtracks from Aristotle’s great insight that primary substances can be destroyed, by making monads indestructible.

We also shouldn’t forget Latour, the one living thinker to whom I feel by far the closest. Even beyond his magnificent attention to specific entities and the procedures by which they are formed, what I most love in Latour (and Prince of Networks says so) is that he is surely the first philosopher in history to say that all relations must be mediated rather than direct, but without invoking some deus ex machina or mens ex machina to make this possible. All mediation of relations must occur locally for Latour, which is why I called him “the first secular occasionalist,” and I do believe that’s how he will be remembered in histories of philosophy someday.

Now Latour, I should also add, sometimes refers to himself as “the only French pragmatist.” If Latour is a pragmatist, and I like Latour, does that mean that OOO has been entirely anticipated by pragmatism? Hardly. For the moments when Latour calls himself a pragmatist, in our discussions, are always the moments preceding his renewed assaults (which are relentless) on my ideas of essence and withdrawal. Simply put, Latour rejects these notions, and we have been arguing about them pretty much non-stop during the 11 years of our personal acquaintance. (See The Prince and the Wolf, set to appear in March or April.)

Why is everyone, all of a sudden, so eager to deny that there’s anything new in OOO? It’s quite remarkable.

I look forward to MM’s posts on Peirce. I’ve stopped reading some websites that critique OOO, because a number of them are either boring and condescending, or outright vicious and therefore useless. But MM isn’t like that, and I plan to read his posts (though not the comments on them).

However, I also need to repeat that his misreading of the model of time in Prince of Networks strikes me as alarmingly bad, and I hope his application of Peirce to OOO concepts will be a bit more adroit than that. I’ve seen him make good points before.