Critical Animal with a fun little post

He briefly responds HERE to my remarks on the Adrian Johnston interview. The post is brief, so I’ll quote the bulk of it here:

“I’ve been telling people for the past few months that I feel the anti-anthro crowd, in all various and contradictory forms, is gaining ground within the academy. And because the cutting edge is always to be opposed to whatever the cutting edge is, I assume to see a pro-anthro backlash. I’m not blaming Johnston of any of this. I’ve never meet him, and everyone I know who knows him says he is a great guy and a sincere intellectual. However, I really do assume that the pro-humanism or pro-anthropocentrism conference is on the horizon. The special issue for anthropocentrism will be coming out in journals soon, In Defense of Humans or whatever will be a title forthcoming book. You know it’s coming.”

Yes, it’s probably coming, because Critical Animal is basically right that the cutting edge is always to be opposed to the cutting edge.

However, it’s a good thing in this case if a pro-anthropocentric conference and/or movement were to arise, because it would force them to have an explicit pro-anthro position rather than a tacit and unargued one. Adrian Johnston happens to be one of my favorite people in contemporary philosophy–- fun, energetic, enthusiastic, hyper-productive. But when they hold a conference they’re going to have to do a lot more than accuse us of being self-hating humans. That was my point.

Ultimately, I think there are two kinds of pro-anthro philosophy floating around these days:

1. There’s the kind you see, for instance, in Meillassoux. For all Meillassoux’s critiques of correlationism, he remains basically quite positive about the correlationist argument, he simply doesn’t think it goes quite far enough. Meilassoux does think that you can’t think the unthought without turning it into a thought. He simply tries to work from there to a new concept of the in-itself (which, I have argued in my book, is not a true conception of the in-itself). Ultimately, I think the strongest case to be made for a pro-anthro position is to defend the correlational circle to the hilt and contend that we can’t possibly get out of it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s that strong, but I do think it’s the best you can do when trying to defend a human-centric ontology.

2. But there’s a more insidious form of human-centric ontology, as found in many version of scientism. On the one hand, scientism insists that human consciousness is nothing special, and should be naturalized just like everything else. On the other hand, it also wants to preserve knowledge as a special kind of relation to the world quite different from the relations that raindrops and lizards have to the world. Another way of putting it… for all their gloating over the fact that people are pieces of matter just like everything else, they also want to claim that the very status of that utterance is somehow special. For them, raindrops know nothing and lizards know very little, and some humans are more knowledgeable than others. This is only possible because thought is given a unique ability to negate and transcend immediate experience, which inanimate matter is never allowed to do in such theories, of course. In short, for all its noir claims that the human doesn’t exist, it elevates the structure of human thought to the ontological pinnacle.

Either approach could serve as the root of a pro-anthro conference of the sort that Critical Animal is foretelling.