Berlin

It’s still a bit too cold, but warm enough in comparison with February that I now find it more walkable than remembered from past visits. Sure, Berlin sprawls endlessly, but you can walk the central parts of it well enough.

All in all, not a bad place to spend a Spring Break, even if there’s work involved and not just a break.

what Facebook is for

I’m never sure why people think Facebook is a good medium for heated philosophical debate. I’m even less sure why someone would forget that I’m on their friends list and engage in a multi-dozen wall post assault on my philosophical position. And finally, I’m completely unsure why such a person would unfriend me simply because I discover the posts and go there to defend myself from a rather confusing and muddy list of charges (quite politely, I thought). How disappointing. I thought he was a nice guy.

Here’s what I think Facebook is for: light social banter and keeping many dozens of acquaintances of varying levels of closeness informed as to basic personal news. And yet I still get other people popping in now and then to take shots at object-oriented philosophy in front of various cousins and high school acquaintances of mine. Seems self-evident to me that this is a social misstep.

Actually, Facebook’s privacy violations are so maddening that I wouldn’t even have rejoined, if not for the need to keep posted on events during the Egyptian Revolution last year. (But by the way, why are we still calling it a Revolution? Omar bleeping Suleiman is running for President now.)

WordPress now ranks readers by country frequency

Many of the recent changes made by WordPress to the blog software have been regrettable. But I greatly enjoy the new feature that gives country-by-country readership statistics.

In the past 7 days, my largest number of readers have come from these places:

 

1. USA

2. UK

3. Canada

4. Sweden

5. Ireland

6. Australia

7. Germany

8. France

9. Norway

10. Israel

11. Netherlands

12. Belgium

13. Japan

14. Slovenia

15. Austria

16. South Korea

17. Bosnia & Herzegovina

18. Brazil

19. Finland

20. Russian Federation

 

Just out of the Top 20= Greece, Switzerland, New Zealand, Egypt, Denmark, Turkey, and India

 

One hit only in the past 7 days=

Macedonia, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Syria, Romania, Bahrain, Latvia, Kenya 

two recurrent lazy critiques of my philosophical position

I keep running into these, so it never hurts to address them again.

1. “Panpsychism.” Look, there is apparently a very big difference between human experience, animal experience, and the reality of stones, desks, and railroads. No argument from me on this point. The question is why we’re supposed to assume that humans are so utterly completely unique that the difference between human and non-human (or some other nearby rift that is more inclusive of apes and dolphins) deserves to be a basic ontological dualism. There is no evidence whatsoever that this status is deserved, but if you’re following in the footsteps of one of the modern idealisms (like most of the leading continental thinkers at the moment, and their disciples) then you have no choice but to insist on it, and to caricature any opposing position (such as my own) as some sort of wild pantheistic carnival, untethered by the constraints of scientific rationality.

As for the word “panpsychism,” I could take it or leave it. Initially I was quite hostile to the term (see Guerrilla Metaphysics), precisely because I don’t think we should retroactively project human mental traits into other objects. But then came David Skrbina’s book, Panpsychism in the West, which (a) showed that the term “panpsychism” has a very broad use that makes room for even the most primitive forms of relationality, and (b) showed that panpsychism isn’t a fringe doctrine, but leaves traces throughout the Western philosophical tradition, even in such flinty intellects as that of Bertrand Russell.

By analogy with the red scare, we could speak of a sort of panpsychist scare, widely promoted by those who are overinvested in the utterly central character of “the subject.” (Which is just a disingenuous way of saying “the human,” whatever accompanying gyrations are added to distance oneself from the human.)

2. I’m also still seeing claims to the effect that my position is basically OK, except that (a) I push things too far by denying the possibility of direct contact between. The counterclaim is then made that (b) objects affect each other all the time.

Let’s start with (b). Well, no kidding, objects affect each other all the time. That’s precisely what I’m trying to explain. The question is whether that contact is direct. I’ve made the case that it cannot possibly be direct. The usual method in recent philosophy is to describe certain traditional problems as “pseudo-problems.” I reverse this method and try to show that there’s a real problem as to how anything can affect anything else. Yes, it happens constantly, but that doesn’t mean that we understand it.

If you’re on board with thinking that all relation must be translation, then you also need to be on board with thinking that all relation is indirect, otherwise you’re just adopting a watered-down, sugar-free, postmodernist-friendly version of object theory. The words that must be used to describe relationality, I have argued, are words such as translation, caricature, distortion. But this is not just a result; it’s also a starting point. You can’t say that objects start it making unproblematic direct contact and only then translate one another. Why on earth would such a thing happen if direct, unmediated contact with reality was already there to begin with?

In short, the impossibility of direct contact is not a step too far, but the very heart of the object-oriented position. It’s a paradoxical thought, to be sure, but paradox is generally the sign of truth. We water down paradoxes at our own peril, perhaps with phrases such as “pseudo-problem.” If you think that direct contact between objects is possible, then you’re saying that objects exhaust one another (the “direct but partial” compromise is incoherent, since to touch part of an object is to touch a part, not the object; the two are not the same thing). In that case, you’re really a relational metaphysician at the end of the day. “Translation” isn’t enough if it’s only a result. It’s also a starting point.

lecture at the University of Oregon

I’ll be speaking at the Department of Comparative Literature, next January 24. Though my brother lives in Portland, I’ve never been to Eugene.