the term “withdrawal”

Tim Morton has a POST UP ON WITHDRAWAL, and I don’t see anything I disagree with at first glance.

There’s nothing magical about this word. Remember, my whole position comes out of an attempted radicalization of Heidegger’s tool-analysis, and I’ve simply retained his term Entzug while trying to extend it to purely inanimate interactions.

Tim is right that withdrawal is not merely temporal or spatial. It’s not something you can fix by going to a different time or place. It simply stems from the fact that no model or representation of a thing is itself that thing.

Theories that are obsessed with epistemologies of representation never come close to accounting for this fact. They always fall back on some sort of structural isomorphy between representation and thing, and in so doing they always fail to provide a good theory about what the difference really is between a tree and an excellent scientific theory about a tree.

They also fail to explain why the magical rift of “representation” should ever have arisen, except through some vague claim that neuroscience might some day explain it. Žižek is far more honest and tries to come up with a wild speculative theory of how the subject must have emerged, and I have to say, it’s a lot wilder than anything in my own metaphysics. Meillassoux simply tells us that it can’t be explained, but that matter, life, and thought simply emerged as radical cuts in the cosmos for no reason at all, just as the World of justice and its corresponding virtual God might some day arise for no reason at all.

Those are big problems, every bit as real as the supposed slippery slope towards panpsychism in my own theory, which is really a pan-translationism, not a panpsychism. Or, since “pan-translation” is an inept mixture of a Greek prefix and a Latin root, perhaps pan-hermeneuticism would do the job if not that hermeneutics already has completely different connotations in contemporary philosophy. No, I don’t think that rocks actually interpret each other in exactly the same way that humans interpret them, but there’s a root phenomenon common to both cases: namely, the fact that the thing itself is not present. Rocks do not engage in collisions with real rocks any more directly than you or I do. And I’ve given arguments for this in multiple places, incidentally.

Nor is it even clear why this supposedly runs counter to the spirit of the natural sciences. It is quite conceivable that some future physics might find merit in a concept of indirect causation; far weirder things have happened. But that’s not even the point. The point is that philosophy has a different subject matter from natural science, that neither was born to be the handmaid of the other, and that philosophy’s job is to follow its own findings wherever they may lead, not to limp along after the known textbook science that is generally a bit behind the cutting edge anyway. To give just one example, if Leibniz’s metaphysics had merely limped along after the natural science of his day, we would never have had his relativist doctrine of time and space. He simply would have been reduced to flattering Newton if not even earlier figures. It’s important to respect science and draw inspiration from it. It would be appalling, however, to turn philosophy into its voluntary handmaid. No good reason has ever been given for doing so. In authors such as Ladyman and Ross, for instance, it is merely asserted. I’ve already published an article on that book, and that article can already be read, in Society and Space.

But back to an author I enjoy much more: Meillassoux, whose speculations are fettered by nothing but the demands of his own concepts. In Meillassoux as well, as I have mentioned, the reality-in-itself of entities is merely a possible reality outside the human lifespan. There’s a similar move underway in Badiou in those passages where he says that the world could certainly exist without humans. What he means, however, is “without humans” in a purely temporal sense. If we all die, the world would still be there.

The question, however, is how the world differs from our interactions with it while we are still alive and dealing with it. If you don’t think there is any such in-itself beyond human access, then you have to make the case. You can’t simply rely on an unthematized metaphysics of immanence, or a deep desire that direct knowledge of the world be possible in order to be able to tell alchemists and Christians to shut up. We’ll never be in a good position to tell people to shut up, I’m afraid. That’s not the sort of knowledge we have at our disposal, nor does it seem especially desirable to tell other people to stop talking; we never know what good ideas might come even from false premises. But this doesn’t entail a free-for-all of relativism. It simply means our criteria of truth have to be much subtler than the notion that one type of person –the scientist, the epistemologist– stands before the naked in-itself and that all others must bow reverentially before this priestly ability. Scientific practice looks nothing in real life like it does according to this ideology. Latour, among others, has done a nice job of showing why not.