Garcia on Meinong

I’ve now read Tristan Garcia’s essay distinguishing his own position from Meinong’s (and to a lesser extent from mine). It’s a wonderful essay, lucid as usual. If you’re comfortable in French, you can find the essay publicly available HERE.

If you want to hear Garcia deliver the lecture in person at the marvelous seminar series of the Atelier de métaphysique et d’ontologie contemporaines at the ENS in Paris, or if you just want to hear what Garcia sounds like in speech, click HERE. (Hat tip, Martin Fortier.)

A simple summary of the essay would go as follows:

*The deep intuition of Meinong’s philosophy is that there should be complete ontological equality (flatness) between everything, including non-existent and contradictory things. This leads to paradoxes that are preyed upon by the likes of Russell and Quine, who oppose their strong ontological constraint on what can exist to what Garcia celebrates as Meinong’s weak ontological constraint.

*Garcia defends Meinong against Russell and Quine. But he also thinks that Meinong is not true to his own intuition, and is imprisoned in a triangle of motivations. First, Meinong (like Husserl) is an heir of Brentano in the sense of wanting to view objects as the correlates of real or possible intentions. Second, he wants to be as liberal as possible in what counts as an object, which ought to encourage him to acknowledge non-representable objects as well, though the first impulse prevents him from doing so. And third, he feels the need to classify objects into various types.

*Garcia sees the second point as Meinong’s true impulse, and the other two as tending to undercut it. He criticizes various neo-Meinongians for launching a scholastic program of classification (the third impulse) and has little sympathy for the Brentanian first impulse for the reason just mentioned– to say that all objects must be the objects of real or possible intentions is to make a decision in advance to limit the field of objects.

*Garcia has a number of positive things to say about speculative realism (he cites both me and Meillassoux), and holds that speculative realism has liberated us from the intentional/correlational view of objects.

*Nonetheless (and he’s talking about me here), Garcia dislikes the tendency to split objects into two different types (as I do). This leads him to make the foundational gesture of his book Forme et objet, which is to distinguish between things (which enjoy a purely formal flat equality, and exist in solitude from one another) and objects (which exist inside of other objects, comprehended by them [in the sense of encompassed by them, not necessarily as cognitively understood by them]).

*Garcia dislikes the concept of substance (apparently even in my reformed version of it) for this reason. A substance is both solitary and has specific properties, and this makes it compact, which is Garcia’s chief polemical term just as correlationism is Meillassoux’s and vorhanden is Heidegger’s.

*Garcia also challenges the excessive emphasis in recent philosophy on events at the expense of things.

If you missed my long review of Garcia’s book in continent, it can be found HERE.

It’s always a pleasure to read Garcia. His erudition and innovation, his style both lucid and personally warm, and his unpretentious and effortless thoroughness, all make him a philosopher to keep a close eye on.

Also, I can’t recommend strongly enough that you also keep a close eye on the ATMOC website, HERE, to see the rigorous and interesting things they are doing in that group in Paris these days. There will be plenty more important French philosophy in the decades to come, though it will have a rather different flavor from what we’re used to from the 1960’s and 1970’s. And Garcia will be in the thick of it, for sure.