re: unicorns

From one of Levi’s recent posts:

“It would never be a substance in its own right (this is why claims that Harman argues unicorns are real are so unfair).”

Yes, completely unfair. Unicorns and Popeye in the usual sense are not real in my position.

Then why do people keep misrepresenting my position in this way? Two reasons, I think.

1. Some people take my account of Latour’s Irreductions in Prince of Networks to be a presentation of my own position. It’s not. I do not think that something is real simply because it has an effect on something else. For me, many real things have no effects now or perhaps ever (dormant objects) and many unreal things have effects (sensual objects).

2. Some people are in such haste to destroy utterly every image humans encounter that they don’t like it if you spend even a few minutes trying to figure out the internal mechanics of how those images actually work. They want to rush ahead to the question of who is guilty of mistakes. But even mistaken people (and after all, that includes all of us from time to time) aren’t empty holes of non-being: something is going on in their minds, and philosophy needs to account for it.