Braver’s CPR article

In 2007, Lee Braver published A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism.

I reviewed the book in 2008 in Philosophy Today, HERE. My impression was that it was one of the most important and ambitious books in Anglophone continental philosophy in recent decades, and I still have that impression today.

It is, first of all, a fairly encyclopedic treatment of post-Kantian philosophy. He doesn’t cover everyone, of course, but does cover enough people in enough detail that you can gain a fairly sweeping conception of Braver’s view of continental philosophy as an anti-realist project.

And he’s largely right: if you can find any straight-faced, blunt declarations of realism by continental authors prior to 2002, let me know, and you will earn a prize. (Did DeLanda take a hard line on this question prior to Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy? That would be the one possibility I can think of, and it’s been awhile since I read his first two books, and there are plenty of pre-2002 DeLanda articles I don’t know.)

In any case, Braver’s article is accessible via HERE, and is worth reading for the same reason his book is worth reading. He’s always very well read, lucid in setting up the terms of any given problem, and like the proverbial analytic philosopher is always making arguments. Moreover, they are quite often arguments about the world itself, rather than just debates over how to interpret a given author. The inherent danger of continental philosophy, particularly in its Anglophone variety, is a timid deference to the assertions of people who happen to have written in French and German. Braver does not show that timidity, and this will continue to make him a valuable voice in the coming decades. He already ought to be a more central figure in the Anglophone continental world than seems to be the case, though the reception of his work is obviously starting to reach the level it rightly deserves. It’s rare to find books as thought-provoking as A Thing of this World.

His article, “A History of Continental Realism,” is also well worth reading. (This afternoon I’ve finally had the chance to read it more carefully.) But the title is misleading. Rather than being a “history” of continental realism, the article is the outline for a project of continental realism, based on Kierkegaard’s reaction to the familiar Kant/Hegel dispute about noumena (though Braver does apply the insights gained there to Heidegger and Levinas). An emblematic sentence from Braver’s article occurs on the 10th page (the PDF I’m reading doesn’t give us the genuine journal pagination):
“Not only is there an outside, as Hegel denies, but we can encounter it, as Kant denies…”
This is Braver’s project for a middle ground between realism and idealism, which I suggested yesterday is impossible. Another sentence from the same page:

“The most important ideas are those that genuinely surprise us, not in the superficial sense of discovering which one out of a determinate set of options is correct, as the Kantian model allows, but by violating our most fundamental beliefs and rupturing our basic categories. God doesn’t insert new content into Abraham’s mental template, but shatters the categories of right and wrong as he had understood them up to then, indeed as our most thorough investigations could discover.”

And from the following page:

“Humble acceptance of our finitude entails accepting not just unknown facts, but the possibility of ideas that cannot fit into the conceptual scheme that structures our most basic ways of thinking, thoughts that exceed our thinking. Let us call this third step Transgressive Realism.”

An example of transgressive realism, for Braver, is the later Heidegger. But first, allow me to disagree with his interpretation of the early Heidegger:
“Heidegger points to the way altering our attitude from absorbed coping to disengaged observation induces a correlative change-over in the being’s mode of being from ready-to-hand tool to present-at-hand object as evidence of Active Mind.”
This is now a pretty standard reading of the tool-analysis, but it is one that I usually fight against within the first few paragraphs of any lecture or article, because I think it misses the most important lesson we can draw from the tool-analysis. To say that the analysis shows a duality between “absorbed coping” (how I hate that word “coping”) and “disengaged observation” misses the rather striking fact that being must withdraw beyond coping no less than it does beyond observation. To swing a hammer does not exhaust the being of a hammer any more than staring at a hammer does. I’ve been making this point for over 10 years, and am at times a bit frustrated that there’s been no debate about it whatsoever in the Heidegger community, which continues with the standard coping vs. observation duality, as though there were some sort of ontological difference between unconscious and conscious human behavior. It was bad enough that modern philosophy beginning with Descartes placed a basic ontological rift between people and everything else, but now the standard reading of Heidegger does even worse by simply booting res extensa from the picture and drawing a new ontological dualism between practically behaving people and theoretically observing people, an even narrower and more anthropocentric duality than in the Cartesian tradition.

What Heidegger actually shows in the tool-analysis, despite his own ambiguous grasp of the fact, is a duality between being (whether it is singular or plural is another ambiguity in Heidegger) and our theoretical or practical grasp of it. The latter two are on the same side of the ontological fence.

To reach my own position, all that is needed is the additional and often controversial step of saying that this duality is not produced by some peculiarity of humans or smart animals, but happens in any relation between any two entities at all. Like in Whitehead, all relations are on the same footing; unlike in Whitehead, nothing is analyzable into prehensions, and everything is a “vacuous actuality” (a pejorative term for Whitehead but not for me). The world is filled with countless objects that withdraw from each other.

Stated differently, instead of looking for a “middle ground” between realism and anti-realism, I advocate an even more extreme form of realism than the usual kind– one in which realism doesn’t just mean the view that there is a reality external to the mind, but also that there is a reality external to what is causally accessible to inanimate beings.

Reality isn’t just something that haunts humans and perhaps dolphins, crows, and monkeys due to our highly developed and category-mongering brains. Instead, reality is that which is untranslatable into any cognitive, perceptive, emotional, or causal translation of it. Hence all the fuss about indirect contact, allusion, vicarious access, and so forth. There would be no need to go to so much trouble if only direct access were possible. But it is not.

In short, when Braver claims it is possible to escape Kant’s limitations by moving to Kierkegaard’s more shocking experience of the exterior in the story of God and Abraham, you will note one unchanging element: both are about the experiences of people. Kierkegaard may be a more absurdist version of Kant (and I rather enjoy Kierkegaard, by the way), but he doesn’t get at the true root problem with Kant. That problem is not (contra the German Idealists, Žižek, and Meillasoux) that to speak of a reality outside thought is to think it and thereby convert it into a thought. Instead, the problem is that finitude should never have been limited to a constraint on humans. Finitude is an unavoidable fact about relations as such. This finitude of relations can be deduced as easily for cases that we don’t see (inanimate interactions in distant galaxies) just as easily as it can be deduced for humans that are not me. The conflation of the finitude problem with the problem of human access is what set Kantian philosophy towards the dead end of German Idealism, explicitly resurgent today in much contemporary continental thought. The bogeyman of “panpsychism” is now being used to distract everyone from the crippling flaws of such thought. What post-Kantian philosophy really needed was a weird Leibnizianism without mirrors. Someday there really ought to be a branch of philosophy called Counterfactual History of Philosophy, and if I ever try to work in such a genre, perhaps my first experiment will be to explore what might have happened if Kant’s human-centrism had been dumped rather than his finitude.

Another sentence from Braver:

“(Heidegger’s) background in phenomenology, which equates beings with phenomena and being with appearing or manifesting, places him squarely among the enemies of noumena.”

This statement is one that I find fairly shocking. In no way is Heidegger straightforwardly a phenomenologist when it comes to the question of noumena. Braver can only think so insofar as his reading of the tool-analysis reduces it to a coping vs. observation duality. Neither of these terms is noumenal; Braver certainly gets that part right. To swing a hammer is not to make contact with a thing-in-itself.

However, I would like to ask what Braver thinks about the following two points from Heidegger, which are just two among many:

1. Heidegger’s complaint, at the end of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, that the problem with German Idealism was its forgetting of the things-in-themselves, its forgetting of finitude. (If memory serves, Braver did address this somewhere, but unsatisfyingly so, by explaining it away in some fashion.)

2. Heidegger’s massive critique of presence in Husserl in the first 100+ pages of History of the Concept of Time. This work is by far the most important source for understanding Heidegger’s conception of Husserl and his own differences from Husserl, and it is here that we see a definite realist flavor in Heidegger. Husserl turns everything into presence, but the question of being, which Husserl misses according to Heidegger, is the question of what remains absent from all phenomenal presence. I see no way, after reading History of the Concept of Time, that you could possibly write: “(Heidegger’s) background in phenomenology, which equates beings with phenomena and being with appearing or manifesting, places him squarely among the enemies of noumena.” The fact is, the early Heidegger isn’t squarely among the enemies of noumena.

And again, this:

“Phenomenology’s implicit ontology, which Heidegger considers the only legitimate ontology, agrees with Objective Idealism in restricting reality to what we can encounter, which means the kinds of beings that fit our pre-ontological understanding of being.”

Hardly! In no way does Heidegger “restrict reality to what we encounter.” This is about as wrong as you can get it. If this were the case, we would see no Heideggerian critique of presence in Husserl, and we would also likely see abundant praise of the greatness of Hegel throughout the early Heidegger– which is not at all what we say. There is a rather negative flavor to Heidegger’s remarks about Hegel, and not just in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.

Among other consequences, this misreading of the early Heidegger leads Braver, in turn, to see a much bigger shift from early to late Heidegger than actually exists. This is especially unfortunate since Braver is emerging as perhaps the “go-to” guy on later Heidegger, a figure he treats with much talent, but on the basis of a basic misconception of what the early Heidegger was about in the first place.

This much is plausible, at least:
“Whereas Hegel’s new shapes of consciousness grow rationally out of previous ones, (later) Heidegger sides with Kierkegaard’s non-linear leaps, which he fashions into incommensurable epochal understandings of being lurching through a Hegelian history with its head cut off, without goal or rationality.”
True enough. But as stated earlier, I don’t see how shifting from rational growth to incommensurable lurchings escapes the main problem with Kant, which was the fact that he made finitude a purely human problem.

Braver then turns to Levinas, whom he treats skillfully in my opinion, though I’ve already spent too much time on this post and need to get back to the day’s main projects.

At any rate, you will find Braver’s article enlightening, and ought to read it. Though his proposed Transgressive Realism, in my view, does not significantly move the ball forward beyond Kant’s position, it is a serious effort that deserves to be considered. No doubt Braver has a number of important books still to give us. He remains one of the people to watch in continental philosophy.