Braver on transgressive realism

I’ve just had a quick skim of Lee Braver’s article “A History of Continental Realism,” which Jon Cogburn links to HERE. Obviously I can’t post a Springer article in its entirety on this blog, but there’s no harm pasting in the abstract:

“A brief history of continental realism. Lee Braver.

Abstract: This paper explains the nature and origin of what I am calling Trans- gressive Realism, a middle path between realism and anti-realism which tries to combine their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. Kierkegaard created the position by merging Hegel’s insistence that we must have some kind of contact with anything we can call real (thus rejecting noumena), with Kant’s belief that reality fundamentally exceeds our understanding; human reason should not be the criterion of the real. The result is the idea that our most vivid encounters with reality come in experiences that shatter our categories, the way God’s commandment to kill Isaac irreconcilably clashes with the best understanding of ethics we are capable of. I explain the genesis of this idea, and then show it at work in Heidegger and Levinas’ thought. Understanding this position illuminates important aspects of the history of continental philosophy and offers a new perspective on realism.”

First, the title of the article is a bit misleading. It’s not a history of realism within contemporary continental philosophy (which has a short history indeed– around 10 years). Instead, it traces a history through Kant and Hegel up to Kierkeggard, whom Braver takes as his model of a transgressive realism that charts a middle course between realism and anti-realism.

Braver has certainly done enough important work that his views are worth taking seriously. However, I have found all “middle ground between realism and idealism” projects to be dead on arrival, for the same reason that Rorty wittily put it: “Every ten years or so, someone publishes a book with a title that goes something like ‘Beyond Realism and Idealism.’ And it always turns out that what lies beyond realism and idealism is– idealism.”

In fact, I liked Braver’s approach better in his big book (an important work of scholarship) when he just said flat-out that all continental philosophy has been anti-realism, and that he, Lee Braver, completely agrees with that approach.

The danger, now that speculative realism has finally raised “realism” above swear word status in continental circles, is that many people are trying to claim a realist or quasi-realist position who in fact have nothing of the sort. Braver, for all his intelligence, strikes me as one of these. (I want to read the present article more carefully before possibly making a second post on it.)

You can see a more extreme version of this phenomenon in the “Derrida was obviously a realist all along” movement, as represented by Michael Marder and a few others. The problem with such tactics is that instead of trying a radical re-interpretation of Derrida, they end up doing nothing more than trying to change the meaning of the word “realism”– which has some room for nuance and degree, but in the end it’s not that much room.

To be specific, you never find the “Derrida is a realist” crowd attacking past Derrideans. They’re never saying: “Past Derrideans were completely off the mark. Derrida must be read as a realist, contrary to what the preceding generation of Derrida interpreters wrongly assumed.” Instead, they stick to roughly orthodox interpretations of Derrida, while simply trying to declaw the word “realism” as a potentially dangerous enemy by claiming that Derrida has always already encompassed it. And this just isn’t intellectually honest. If you want to be intellectually honest, you have to come right out and admit that you know what realism means and that you yourself think realists are wrong– that’s what philosophical argument looks like. But don’t try to claim that it’s impossible to disagree with Derrida because he says both everything and its opposite simultaneously– a “middle course” between all oppositions.

I have a few more thoughts about Braver’s approach, and will save those for after a good, thorough read of his piece.