Shaviro on the Metzinger debate

You can read Steven’s take on it HERE, which shows his usual balance and fairness.

It seems that we largely agree, except insofar as some of our old and well-travelled disagreements about “process” flare up in connection with Metzinger.

I’m especially glad that Steven agrees with me that in a sense, Metzinger’s best passages make the self even more real– by defining the self in terms of certain constraints, Metzinger opens up a possible landscape of countless alternate species, in much the same manner as science fiction. And those passages are inevitably my favorite in the book.

There’s only one place where I think Steven misreads me:

“But I am not convinced that Metzinger is wrong when he argues that mental states ‘intentionally contain an object within themselves.’ I am more inclined to think that this is indeed what happens…”

But I’m the one who says that, not Metzinger. What Metzinger says is not that intentionality contains an object within itself (that’s the classic Brentano/Husserl view, which Metzinger explicitly rejects). Instead, Metzinger (mis)reads the intentional object as the real object– as that which lies outside the mind. And here he has a problem, because after his insistence on “autoepistemic closure,” it remains difficult for him to get outside that closure.

Now, I’m not criticizing Metzinger for reaching that problem, since it’s pretty similar to the one I reach with the withdrawal of real objects. What I don’t like is Metzinger’s quasi-magical solution of saying “somehow, we pulsate outside the closure once in awhile and make direct contact with reality.” But it’s completely unclear how that is possible within a theory of autoepistemic closure– and unlike Steven, I like that aspect of Metzinger.

What I most dislike, of course, is the supposed spooky ominousness with which we are told we have no selves on the flimsiest of grounds. I think people simply like the tone of it, and sorry to say, I don’t think all of these people have actually read the book. Otherwise, they would see that the arguments in no way justify the tone. They consist largely of table-pounding assertions and a series of sneers against phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and the like.

Steven also finds it “unsurprising” that I accuse Metzinger of a dual game of undermining and overmining. While I always like to provide surprises when possible, if this critique is becoming monotonous then it’s only because that which it criticizes is so monotonously re-asserted by so many authors. The usual materialist/functionalist double game is, in my view, a deeply unphilosophical gesture, because it stipulates the entire subject matter of philosophy out of existence. It replaces the love of wisdom with a two-timing love of particles and of events.