Roland Faber, Theology, Claremont

11:32. Higgins introduces Faber, who’s one of the main people behind the Whitehead culture here at Claremont.

11:32. Faber was stumbling over Harman’s “Vicarious Causation” essay. It touched him in a way that was going way beyond intellectual argumentation. [Note: aw, shucks.] Something in it had a poetic quality that he found very moving. “Soul meditation” came to his mind when reading that text. It put him into a strange land. It was a Whiteheadian conjunction. There was a kind of religion to it that was not necessarily human, sort of like zazen in Zen.

11:35. Maybe we are only touched from within by what Harman calls the “molten core” of objects. This world of Harman’s is a world of objects that asks about how things can touch. It gives an ontology of touch without special entities such as God. Harman avoids “theological high-checking” and also avoids naturalism. [note: had no idea Faber was going to talk about my essay; big disarming surprise; papers were sent out beforehand but I had no time to read any of them and decided I would be surprised while hearing them instead]

11:36. We cannot grasp things, but allude to their inwardness. Harman’s concept of allusion reminds him of Whitehead’s concept of speculation.

11:37. Harman’s occasionalism, hinting at Malebranche and al-Ghazali. Comparison of Harman’s occasionalism with Whitehead’s. Both have too little sympathy for the theological side of the problem.

11:38. Vicarious causation is a brilliant concept.

11: 38. Harman vs. “the dull realism of mindless atoms and billiard balls”, and in favor of the “duel between canaries, earthquakes, tar, etc.”, whose poetry Faber likes and sees as comparable to Whitehead’s own.

11:40. Harman’s speculative realism resonates with Whitehead’s provisional realism.

11:40. Now a disturbing departure of Harman from Whitehead. Harman denies that entities are naturally connected with each other. He defends vicarious touch without touch.

11:41. Whitehead understands relation as a warrant of universality throughout all experience.

11:41. Whitehead precludes what Harman affirms: that objects are cut off from each other.

11:42. For Harman, real objects have no realism and for the most part don’t even seek them. Utilizing Heidegger’s tool-analysis, he says that objets withdraw from contact.

11:42. Would Whitehead disagree? Judging from his abandonment of substance, absolutely so. However, this is merely an obvious level of the analysis.

11:43. Whitehead does not defend a mirror-like holism as Harman claims; Foucault does.

11:43. Like Whitehead, Harman asks the profound question of how one substance can exist in another substance.

11:44. Harman extracts the distinction between real and sensual objects from an empiricist world. Under Harman’s wizard wand, both Husserl and Heidegger turn into realists. Husserl’s human I becomes the place where sensual objects exist on the interior of an entity.

11:45. Harman’s philosophy= anthropo-de-centrism.

11:45. Harman turns causality into a kind of formal causality.

11:46. Objects by relating enter modally into a new object, à la Whitehead’s subjective form.

11:47. Door left open for solipsism? Maybe no real objects, but only projections of our sensual objects. Harman tries to escape this calamity by separating the real from the sensual, and here is the connection with Levi Bryant’s paper (Faber looks over at Levi to his right).

11:48. Harman dissociates essential qualities from essence. [not sure I get this; will have to read Faber’s paper]

11:49. By contrast, Whitehead abandons substance. Whitehead’s symbolism is the counterpart of Harman’s allure. The difference is that Whitehead’s symbolism does not point to a substantial je ne sais quoi, which has no place in his philosophy.

11:51. Whitehead’s God is not a cause, but causes nothing. Harman admits that substance as inaccessible essence is based on a theological conception. Harman follows al-Ghazali’s theological concept of God’s absolutely unknowable essence.

11:51. Difference of al-Ghazali from Malebranche. Malebranche leaves room for physical causality, but for al-Ghazali it is “Bism Allah Al Rahman Al Raheem.” (In the Name of Allah the Most Gracious the Most Compassionate). Islamic aspect of Harman’s philosophy.

11:54. Maybe the contrast between Harman and Whitehead is a too little or a too much.

11:55. For touch to happen, the hidden depth of self is irreplaceable.

11:56. We should not privilege Western thinkers. al-‘Arabi was an Andalusian Muslim, Derrida a Sephardic Jew.

11:57. Harman teaches close to al-Azhar [note: I live a 10-minute taxi ride from al-Azhar], and it’s good that he draws on Islamic occasionalism rather than French sources. Whitehead also gestured toward Indian and Chinese thought.

11:59. Faber praises Nicholas of Cusa’s doctora ignorantia or learned ignorance.