20 years later

If all goes well with these flights, I’ll be spending some hours this afternoon in an appealing city I last saw two decades ago, as a cub grad student.

anecdote heard

From a reliable former student of Searle: “Searle said that the reason he got into philosophy was because he likes destroying people in arguments.”

There are actually some things I enjoy about Searle, but this isn’t one of them, if true (and who could doubt it?). There is no more reprehensible motivation for becoming involved with philosophy than the wish “to destroy other people in arguments”. If you’re that aggressive at the core, then why not just take up boxing or become a special forces commando? Just put your cards on the table and really destroy people.

Alas, philosophy as currently constituted has become a special refuge for the over-aggressive.

come on, Expedia

Can’t you print the terminal number on my itinerary? In some places it might not matter, but in Cairo it really does, given the physical disjunction of the three.

Thanksgiving

Since Thanksgiving has always been a vegetarian’s hell for me, a crushingly boring and repetitive memory of biscuits and corn while surrounded by turkey eaters, I have no sentimentality about this holiday at all. Thus, I am pleased to avoid it by being on airplanes all day. (Although to be fair, I am missing a very nice vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner to which I was invited in Cairo.)

I’m facing a weird itinerary, however, involving not one but two European stopovers (7 hours and overnight, respectively) and it’s going to take a very long time to get to L.A.

life by the 8 ball

Here is Mattel’s ONLINE VERSION of its popular 8 Ball novelty toy, which tells fortunes in response to yes/no questions. (Incidentally, only now did I realize that the responses aren’t equally distributed: affirmative responses are far more frequent than neutral or negative ones.)

While clicking it a few times, I was wondering what life would be like if everyone made major decisions according to the 8 Ball. It seemed at first like a Borgesian scenario of sorts.

But then I realized: it might not change much at all. After all, none of us ever face the same yes/no decisions, and the ones we do face are deeply revealing about or own character. For instance, I would never have occasion to ask the 8 Ball: “Should I go deer hunting this weekend?” It simply wouldn’t ever occur to me to go shoot animals for sport as a recreational option, and thus I would never find myself doing it.

In short, we are probably more defined not by the choices we make, but the choices we face. Once we face a conscious decision about something, that’s really what shows who we are, and at that point perhaps the actual option we choose is just about as random as an 8 Ball response would be.

Maybe I’ll try it one day as an experiment: guide my entire day according to the edicts of the 8 Ball, and see how unusual that day ends up being compared with one of my normal days. But the key lies in knowing how long to wait before consulting it on any given issue… On any given day, any of us will have a number of crazy, fleeting thoughts that we know better than to act or decide on. It generally takes at least a few minutes of considering something seriously before we begin to consider it as a genuine question, and perhaps only at that point would we dare to ask the 8 Ball its advice.

For example, you might wake up cranky one morning and ask yourself the fleeting question: “Should I quit my job and go set up a café in Cambodia?”, or whatever. And it may sound good for ten or so minutes, but ultimately is so ridiculous an idea that you don’t even remember it an hour later. One wouldn’t want to submit to the 8 Ball quite that early.

One of the most charming aspects of the little work of Tacitus on the ancient Germans is his discussion of their ironclad submission to the laws of chance. Sometimes a German would make a bet under the penalty that he would become a slave if he lost the bet, and his sense of honor was such that he would actually deliver himself to slavery after losing. I’m not recommending any questions that extreme to the 8 Ball, however.

the UCLA event page

Can be found HERE.

Turns out I’ll be speaking twice. In the morning I’ll give a general historical/theorteical overview of SR/OOO, and in the afternoon some reflections on method.

The idea of the latter is as follows. It is sometimes falsely claimed that I think that “unicorns are just as real as atoms,” or something of that sort. That’s the early Latour, not me. The early Latour (in Irreductions and also later) thinks that all actors are equally real, but not equally strong. For the early Latour, then, being is strictly univocal. All things are real in the same sense: namely, they are able to affect other realities. Since an atom has effects on other atoms, and since the unicorn has effects on the 8-year-old girl who demands unicorn items for her birthday, the unicorn turns out to be just as “real” (in the early Latourian sense) as atoms.

But that has never been my own position. All I say is that philosophy must account for all real and unreal things. Philosophy can’t simply sneer at unicorns, Batman, Pizza Hut, and armies while praising neurons, quarks, and mathematical structures.

Nonetheless, I don’t believe that being is univocal at all. Instead, I hold that it is bivalent (or even tetravalent, but nothing more than that). Most relevantly here, there is a difference between real and sensual objects. Sensual objects exist only as the correlate of some perceiver, while real objects withdraw from every perceiver.

This confronts me with a problem that the early Latour never needed to face: namely, how in methodological terms do we try to distinguish between real objects and pseudo-objects? (The latter can be described more positively as sensual objects.) In fact, we can never be entirely sure on this front. All of our best current scientific theories might be falsified. All of our true friends may turn out to be backstabbing machinators and sophists. Everything we hold dear may turn out to be nothing but a hollow shell. We are masters of nothing.

That said, it is not entirely beyond our human powers to develop methods for sorting the relatively solid, real things from the relatively superficial and transient ones. In my second talk at UCLA I’m going to take a first crack at laying down some rules for doing this.

soon

I’ll be in Los Angeles quite soon, as in Friday, but will be staying in Malibu with the family of friends.

why it is a mistake to say that the analytic/continental rift has already been bridged

Just read THESE COMMENTS by Brian Leiter’s readers. And I say this as someone who agrees that there’s been a whole lot of crap on our own, continental side.

As long as the people commenting on Leiter’s blog exemplify the tone of “mainstream” philosophy, then I think abandoning continental philosophy as an institution is a big mistake. I’d rather drink with the damned pretentious Derrideans than with the typical Leiter reader.

When Michael Rosen is applauded and flattered by nearly a half-dozen fellow commenters for his sneering and fatuous remark that Badiou deserves to be nothing more than a portion of the Sokal Hoax, then I say it’s way too early to give up the continental philosophy label. And I say this as someone who has plenty of problems with Badiou, and even as someone who thoroughly enjoyed the Sokal Hoax. That doesn’t make Rosen’s haughtiness and ignorance any more admirable.

what I’m teaching in an hour and a half

Žižek, The Parallax View. Last book of the semester; hard to believe.

May in Oxford

Looks as though I’ll be spending 5 days in Oxford in May for an academic event. Details soon.