Levi’s latest take on the anti-substance sentiment

Read it HERE.

What I mean by “objects” differs in many ways from what is classically termed “substance” (though there are numerous variations in that tradition- cf. the major difference between Aristotle and Leibniz, to give just one example).

My own preference for frequently using “substance” as a synonym for “object” is thus partially responsible for some of the complaints (though I usually take care to note the differences whenever I do so).

So, why do it at all, if it sparks confusion about old-fashioned essentialism and other such bogeymen? The reason is that, in my opinion, the cost of occasional misunderstandings is a small price to pay when the reward is a demonstration of continuity with the tradition. I’m not in favor of the gratuitous use of neologisms to give a forced air of novelty to everything.

The fact is, Aristotle can be viewed as the first object-oriented philosopher. The pre-Socratics are underminers. Either they reduce the vilified mid-sized objects to tinier physical elements such as water, air, or atoms (thus paving the way for mainstream materialist reductionism) or they reduce them to the lump-like apeiron (thus paving the way for today’s fashionable philosophies of the “pre-individual”).

Plato, in turn, can be viewed as the first “overminer,” reducing objects upward to the in-principle knowable eidei that inhere in base matter.

Aristotle is the one who let individuals be the main star of philosophy, though (like Leibniz) he did this at the unacceptable cost of not allowing artificial aggregates as high a status as things found in nature.

The present high prestige of flux and flow and relation makes sense only if it is believed that rock-hard, timeless individual things are still the biggest threat to philosophical innovation. In my own opinion, that fear is more than 200 years out of date, and perhaps even more than that (given that Leibniz already relationized substances in his own way).

But more than this, it seems to me that a false idea of how the history of philosophy works seems to be at the root of the continued objections to substance. Namely, it seems to be widely held that the struggle of opposite philosophical positions on one topic ends when one side is revealed permanently to be a reactionary view that will henceforth be abolished for all but reactionary thinkers. For example, it seems to be thought that substance is an idea that has been “overcome,” with the implication that from here on out, for centuries and millennia to come, anyone who defends individuals will automatically be a reactionary, while anyone who critiques them in favor of process and dynamism will automatically be a cutting-edge avant gardist, bravely blazing new trails for the future of thought.

But this isn’t really how things work. The reason there are debates between diametrically opposite positions in the history of philosophy is because there’s generally a grain of truth in both sides, and the work of the philosopher is to strike a temporarily stable balance between the two. This balance never lasts forever, and that’s why philosophy has to be done from scratch in every generation (and some generations fail in the effort, while others do it in brilliantly innovative fashion).

However, it is generally the case that one side of any opposition will be the lazy “establishment” or “academic” orthodoxy at any given time, and it seems to me that flux and flow and dynamic relation have now reached that point of orthodox cliché, even though its adherents still see themselves as being the latest word in metaphysical breakthrough.