Steven Galt Crowell interview

By Laureano Ralon, HERE.

There’s one question in the interview where Ralon asks Crowell to respond to an idea from Guerrilla Metaphysics.

I have no wish to debate Crowell here (the blogosphere has proven itself to be a horrible medium for debate), but blogs readers who saw that interview may wonder what I would say in response, so here are a few quick points. None of this will add much to what I’ve written elsewhere, but perhaps brevity will be of some use.

First, I really love phenomenology, and am one of the few people in speculative realist circles to contend that phenomenology is the most important philosophical movement of the 20th century and among the most important in the entire history of philosophy. It’s a heroic enterprise in many respects, and some of my least favorite moments in early speculative realist history involved listening to repeated dismissive remarks about Husserl from people who simply don’t know what they’re missing.

That said, intentionality is not enough to escape idealism. When phenomenologists claim to be beyond the vulgar old realism/idealism opposition, it’s because they’re offering an idealist –or at least correlationist– position and don’t see it. (The same goes for Merleau-Ponty, who does some nice things, but who is stunningly unoriginal on the realism/idealism question: his concept of “the flesh,” in particular, has an undeservedly futuristic reputation. It’s really just the same old Husserlian correlationism, sexed up a bit.)

1. “[Harman’s] characterization of phenomenology seems insensitive to the crucial distinction between transcendental-phenomenological idealism and metaphysical or subjective idealism.”

I don’t recognize any such distinction, and see it as merely a terminological artifact of the sort that phenomenology often constructs in order to avoid facing up to the consequences of its idealism.

2. “In simplest terms: I reject the idea that phenomenology does not give us the world as it is. It is indeed a ‘philosophy of access,’ but it is access to the world as it is.”

This sounds harmless enough, but phenomenology actually makes a more extreme claim than this. Phenomenology claims not just that we have some sort of access to the world as it is, but that the world is isomorphic with this access. That is to say, for Husserl it is nonsensical to speak of any reality that is not in principle accessible to some consciousness. But for me, the whole point of reality is that it differs from any relation to it, whether by consciousness or anything else.

But oddly enough, it is here that some other variants of speculative realism share something in common with orthodox phenomenology. For example, see Meillassoux’s claim that the thing-in-itself is knowable, or that the primary qualities of things are mathematizable. I see this as a dangerous flirtation with idealism, for reasons explained in my forthcoming book on Meillassoux from Edinburgh. The same holds even more for naturalistic/epistemologistic brands of SR, which see no difference between images and things, and merely want to praise good epistemological images and denounce bad “folk” images. These latter positions are ultimately idealistic, and don’t deserve the name of “realism” at all.

3. “As for a ‘democracy of objects,’ where does the ‘subject’ fit in? If it is just another object, then we have lost our grip on the distinction.”

No one denies that there is a “distinction” between the human subject and other kinds of objects. But it does not follow that we are ontologically different in kind from other objects, such that the difference between us and other objects deserves to be made into a founding pillar of philosophy. That’s what the “democracy of objects” in Bryant’s sense means.

Too often people slide from the evident fact that humans seem very different from other entities, to the groundless though familiar principle that the human/non-human distinction is so pivotal that it needs to be the cornerstone of all philosophizing. We’ve been conditioned to think this way throughout modern philosophy, and it will take awhile before this is no longer an automatic reflex.

4. “As Husserl pointed out, the ‘transcendental subject’ is not the ‘human being’ as this is envisioned in the question, and I would argue that the same holds for Heidegger’s position. I am not impressed by positions that try to circumvent this point by appeal to primordial ‘events’ or to a kind of post-humanism that most often merely borrows – very selectively – from biology and the like to answer philosophical questions.”

This point is evidently aimed at Deleuzians (“primordial ‘events'”) and at scientistic versions of SR (borrowings from biology), not at my own position.

In any case, Crowell’s interview is interesting, and Ralon has built up a nice supply of interviews on his website.

“pay with a tweet”

Diarmuid emails:

“Regarding your post about the success of you open access work (which surely is great news!) – last night I came across ‘Pay with a tweet’ which I thought was a brilliant idea (and so does this year’s Cannes Lions awards ceremony). The details are here (http://www.paywithatweet.com/) but essentially you download a book or a piece of music or a film free of charge by agreeing to share its details via social media (the assumption being, I guess, that if someone wants your stuff for free they’ll find a way of doing it illegally so why not offer it to them anyway and get vastly increased visibility for your product too). I’d love to see how / if it works for those businesses that use it…”

It’s not a bad idea, and will work well in some situations.

good news for open access

With re.press book contracts, the first X number of sales go towards cost recovery for that small press. That, combined with the fact that anyone can download Prince of Networks free of charge, made me simply assume that I’d never see a penny of royalties from that book.

Now, the first royalty check is on its way. These are always tiny when philosophy books are involved, but the point is that it’s an excellent sign that open access books are economically feasible.

I wasn’t quite expecting this to happen, but it does look as though people having the option to freely browse books in their entirety may actually increase sales of the corresponding paper book.

Granted, this is just an anecdote based on my own experience with one book. Someone may have hard data on this question that draw different conclusions from my own. But this particular anecdote is quite heartening for those presses, like re.press and OHP, that use the open access model.

easygoing mornings in Providence

It’s easy to see how a low-key impoverished gentleman like Lovecraft could have become addicted to the genteel silences of this city. I’ve not gotten out of the area near Brown University much yet, but over here it’s very charming.

View from the bedroom window:

possible protest in favor of new Constitution before election

HERE.

My feelings are mixed here. On the one hand, the people I like best are mostly (though not entirely) urging that the Constitution be written before elections. These are largely the young, educated, forward-looking, secularist types.

But on the other hand, these people got completely thumped in the March referendum on precisely this question, and I’ve not heard serious claims that the vote was rigged.

So, although it makes me cringe to hear the Salafists demanding that we stick with the referendum results, in a way I think it has to be done just like that. There’s also the point that the Army should get off the street pretty soon. Never a good idea for the Army to get used to being in control of a country.

James “Whitey” Bulger captured

Wow, I thought they’d never find him. HERE.

Finding unfindable people (bin Laden, Mladic) seems to be a theme over the past couple of months.

jetlag worse over the years

West-to-east travel has always messed me up for a couple of weeks, even when I was 21. And it still does.

But east-to-west travel, by contrast, used to give such an energy burst that I always looked forward to it.

That’s no longer the case. This is now the third straight U.S. trip that’s been hard to handle. It’s just a matter of fatigue in this direction now, which is much better than the the put-your-psyche-in-a-blender effect of the west-to-east direction. But the big energy bursts of coming from Egypt or Europe to the U.S. are now gone.

I’ve mentioned this before, but some people are the opposite, having more trouble east-to-west. It apparently has to do with whether your body clock is longer or shorter than 24 hours, and I think I was in a 70% or so majority that finds it much easier to travel from Europe to America than vice versa.

Then there are a few people who have no trouble at all. The President of our university, for instance, seems able to fly between Cairo and New York at will without any ill effects on working schedule. I wish I could do that.