quick response to Michael Austin

Michael Austin blogs as follows at Complete Lies:

“Something that Jim mentioned in his talk at Claremont (that unfortunately didn’t make it into the wonderful live blog) was a little comment about my work. One of his criteria for truly ‘speculative’ philosophy is a strong principle of activity, and he mentioned that my work is an attempt to push OOO in this direction, but that it otherwise isn’t there.”

Sorry, Mike, Jim Bradley simply listed so many points that I couldn’t possibly catch them all. Judith Jones’s paper was similar in that respect: both technical and fast. Those two talks gave me problems with live-blogging, and so did Nathan Brown’s but for a different reason: summarizing Nathan’s words just didn’t make much sense if you couldn’t see the slides he was talking about.

But on to the content of Michael’s post. Since I’ve said a number of positive things about James Bradley, I guess I should also add that I found his talk to be filled almost entirely with philosophical falsehoods. That’s not meant as an insult to his competence, because he’s obviously highly competent. It’s simply meant to say that I didn’t find either convincing or new his views that we need Peirce in OOO because entities are relational, or that a principle of activity is needed. What the latter always amounts to, in my experience, is some sort of dictate that “conatus” is needed, or something like that. The whole mission of OOO is to say that change exists but is precisely not primary.

In short, this is not some temporary oversight that OOO has not yet addressed. It is the target of OOO’s central polemic. There isn’t really a compromise possible here.

That said, the term OOO may eventually become more generic as more people crowd into the tent. And in a sense it already is. I would call both Latour and Whitehead object-oriented philosophers, though both are relationist through and through. I’m not sure whether Mike would call himself relationist or not, but process is definitely his angle, and I’ve given reasons in my publications for why I think process is the wrong way to go. It is yesterday’s rallying cry, not tomorrow’s.

I’m also eagerly waiting Mike’s systematic account of Schopenhauer, which sounds interesting. But it’s not quite the Schopenhauer I remember, who very early in his major work dismisses all realists as naive realists and says that no one is a true philosopher who doesn’t first make the Kantian maneuver.

In any case, it was nice getting to know Mike in Claremont. What you can’t tell from his blog is that he has a phenomenal natural ability to answer audience questions on the fly, and always in a relevant manner. I think everyone was impressed by that.