another good post from Dark Chemistry

HERE.

He starts off riffing on Circus Philosophicus, and by the end is talking about Guerrilla Metaphysics.

It’s a serious post and I still have a busy day going but let me make two quick and relatively trivial responses.

1. Normally the pun “Gorilla Metaphysics” leaves me even colder than most puns. However, Dark Chemistry’s screaming gorilla image made me laugh for the first time in the history of this pun. (And it’s a long history, I’m afraid, and repeated anew with each generation.)

2. “He has told us that he is decentering the human from his new phenomenology or Object-Oriented Philosophy, yet his use of anthropomorphic analogies such as ‘handshake or fleeting kiss’ to qualify how objects extend their notes toward other entities seems a more human gesture rather than a move toward an inhumanist vocabulary. Is this a good thing”

To me this has been and remains a non-issue. What’s the problem with using human metaphors for inhuman things? Or inhuman metaphors for human things? It would be a problem only if I were actually misleading myself into thinking that objects literally shake hands and kiss one another.

In general, I see this as a part of a much larger Puritanism of Metaphor. Just as some churches won’t let you conduct business transactions on Sundays, some intellectual currents are as horrified by metaphors as many people are by hardcore pornography. As I complained on Levi’s blog recently, many analytic philosophers can’t even use the most innocuous and bland metaphor without adding “so to speak” at the end, as if they were nervously looking around the room and trying to assure everyone else that they aren’t crazy.

On the continental side the problem is different. Over here, it’s the human/nonhuman line that must not be crossed, and to cross it with a metaphor is treated with as much horror as if one were marrying into an animal species and giving birth to terrifying hybrid offspring.

We’re not “doomed” to “remain trapped” in human language to describe the inhuman. We’re not “trapped” in the first place; when used skillfully, language escapes its own conditions. Nor is it any sort of “doom” when we replace bland pseudo-mathematico-symbolic utterances with vigorous metaphorical prose.