possible 20th century continental realists

Some readers are trying to rise to the challenge.

Cameron says Patrick Heelan was describing his own position as realist a long time ago. Quite possible, given Heelan’s interest in the sciences. I’ll await some definite quotes to be sure. But given Heelan’s phenomenological roots, I’m also skeptical.

John finds this passage from Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida:

“The realists, of whom I am one and of whom I was already one when I asserted that the Photograph was an image without code-even if, obviously, certain codes do inflect our reading of it-the realists do not take the photograph for a ‘copy’ of reality, but for an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art.”

Nice quote, though I find it hard to see Barthes as any sort of metaphysical realist. In the same email, John links Barthes’ “realism” to Lacan’s sense of “the Real,” which isn’t realist at all as far as I can see.

Keep them coming, if you can find them. But the point is, it’s a difficult exercise. If I were to say “give examples of bona fide 20th century realism in analytic philosophy,” it would be child’s play. There are droves of them. But in continental philosophy, realism was rarely even raised as an option and then dismissed. There were occasional attempts to twist the word around to mean something else, but generally speaking, the whole realism/anti-realism question was viewed in continental circles as so vulgar as to be hardly worth mentioning. That’s why Meillassoux really hit the target with his term “correlationism.” It was a watery, middle-ground position that was always there but never quite labelled with the appropriate name until 2006.

Speaking of Meillassoux, he’s speaking this weekend in Berlin in their ongoing serial reconstruction of speculative realism (i.e., inviting us one after the other rather than simultaneously). I’ll wait until his paper is published before responding to it. It breaks some new ground in Meillassoux’s philosophy, but doesn’t really break any new ground at all in our disagreement.

I’ll just say as follows:

*Saying that I “project human traits into non-human things” is a critique that gets no traction at all, as far as I can see. First of all, we don’t really know what traits are specifically human. I make no claims that rocks speak, dream, have socio-political life, or any other things that seem to belong to humans and at most to certain portions of the animal kingdom.

All I say is that the apparent special properties of human do not mean that these properties are ontologically special. I argue for a neutral ontolgical ground where we can reflect on the properties of all relations, not just human-world relations.

The problem with the specialness of the human in philosophy is that, insofar as it wants to be compatible with naturalism (as it must, unless it wants to concede Berkeley idealism or some sort of special soul substance) always has to make use of some sort of “catastrophe” concept. Hence Žižek’s admirable candor in speaking of an “ontological catastrophe,” one that he doesn’t even come close to explaining for the simple reason that there is no possible explanation for it.

But whereas Žižek has only one catastrophe, Meillassoux allows for four: the emergence of matter, life, thought, and justice. I think it’s questionable how one can specify that precisely these four would be the radical breaks in question. Weren’t the emergence of stars, for instance, or of atoms heavier than hydrogen, just as radical changes as the emergence of life or thought? Why not see a radical break in the emergence of vertebrate creatures, or the domestication of animals, or agriculture? It would be necessary to explain precisely why matter, life, thought, and justice are the big jumps, and also to explain why they must be ontological jumps rather than just huge events within a pre-given ontological structure. Moderncommon sense may see the emergence of life from matter as being a bigger jump than that of black holes from stars, but I’m not so sure. For this reason, I’m unwilling to draw an ontological line at any given point on the cosmic historical map.

*Second, it is not a valid criticism to say that I complain about the “philosophy of access” but then trap us within access just as much by refusing absolute knowledge. After all, the full phrase is “philosophy of human access,” and it is always clear that I complain about human ontological privilege in Kant, not about finitude in Kant. Indeed, I seek to spread finitude into the realm of inanimate interaction. So, my leaving us in finitude is only problem if you agree with Meillassoux in advance that finitude is a problem. The real problem, in my view, is the very acceptance of the correlational circle as if it were a deeply challenging argument: “you can’t think an unthought X without turning it into a thought X.” The problem with this argument is that it simply neglects the distinction between thought and thing. The fact that I can’t think a tree without turning it into a thought tree does not mean that “tree outside thought” and “tree that I’m thinking” have the same meaning. To say this is to fall into Meno’s paradox– either you already know something or you can never know it. The alternative provided by Socrates is called philosophia.

I’ve heard it objected to my philosophy that if it’s true, then absolute knowledge would be impossible. Well, who says absolute knowledge is possible? Here again, the alternative is philosophia, and in a sense the quest for absolute knowledge is a betrayal of the very meaning of philosophy. We are lovers of wisdom, not wise.