Andrew Cole, “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies”

This is another nicely written article. Despite the subtitle, I didn’t find the critique to be all that harsh. What negativity is present seems to pertain to a subtext of professional dispute between Cole and some other medievalists (many of them friends of mine) who have made abundant use of Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology (as in THIS FINE ANTHOLOGY). I’ll let the specialists settle those disputes, and will just briefly mention the things I liked more and less about this article.

*I’m grateful to Cole for paying attention to my essay on Chalmers, HERE, which I think is one of my better articles, but isn’t widely read.

Some of his criticisms seem wrong to me. For instance:

*He says we all ignore Fichte. I wouldn’t say that’s true at all. Meillassoux’s talk at the inaugural Speculative Realism workshop makes explicit use of Fichte, and my response to Meillassoux in the second half of Prince of Networks deals with this explicitly use just as explicitly. Iain Hamilton Grant can fairly be described as locked in a career-long polemic against Fichte. Cole’s link between Fichte and the medievals is interesting, but also quite a bit quirkier than he acknowledges (I’m all for quirky claims, having made many myself, but when you do that you can’t act like those who haven’t seen it are missing the obvious; the burden is on you to persuade).

*Cole also accuses object-oriented ontologies of ignoring pre-modern philosophy, and medieval philosophy in particular. This too is hard to understand. There is an explicit debt to Aristotle that is visible in my books (especially the pages on the Metaphysics in Tool-Being and in many positive references to the Aristotelian aspects of Leibniz). Suárez is also important to me, though that’s not very visible in my publications so far. And I’ve had an awful lot to say about medieval Islamic occasionalism.

*At times, Cole also seems to conflate my philosophy with Latour’s (though of course he is right to note Latour’s deep influence on me and others working in the object-oriented idiom). He uses Latour to show that object-oriented ontologies start by proclaiming things in themselves but end up saying that we can only talk about that which can be talked about, resulting in a univocity of being that seems to contradict any hidden things in themselves. This is all true of Latour (his is a univocity or flat ontology of actants). But Latour, unlike me, has never been remotely sympathetic to the things-in-themselves, while I have never been remotely sympathetic either to total flatness (I have two kinds of objects, after all) or to the notion that things in themselves are superfluous fictions.

*”To wit, when these new philosophies exclude the Middle Ages, they foreclose the possibilities of generous reading…” But there is no such exclusion. Cole might fairly complain that there has been no object-oriented treatise specifically devoted to medieval philosophers, but we can’t do everything at once. There is plenty of sympathy for medieval philosophy in object-oriented philosophy, certainly a lot more than can be found in most other strands of present-day continental thought.

*”The deconstructive lesson about the identity of thought and being…” Calling it a “lesson” is a way of loading the dice and saying: “As any intelligent person knows, deconstruction already demonstrated the following…” But Derrida merely asserts the point, which is not a good way to teach a lesson. (I’m not exaggerating. Try to find a passage where Derrida demonstrates “the identity of thought and being.”)

But no matter. I appreciate that Cole put the time into this, and I liked reading his prose.

D. Vance Smith, “Death and Texts: Finitude Before Form”

Smith’s article is also enjoyable to read. Though it’s mostly about the theme of death in Chaucer, it starts off with a discussion of Speculative Realism. And it’s a good discussion, though I would make a few comments:

*Smith holds that my treatment of objects as “substantial forms” marks a retraction of my earlier views on the withdrawal of objects. I don’t see how. Here’s the key passage: “…but it rests on a seeming retraction of what he also says about the incommensurable depth of objects, for form is precisely the designation of the limit and inseparable from finitude.”

Here, Smith seems to be identifying finitude with human finitude, whereas I push Kant in a different direction so that finitude belongs to all objects.

Along the same lines, Smith says that I tend to flatten out death in my own work so that it becomes just one kind of finitude among other. But in fact, I’ve had nothing to say about death in my own voice so far. I’ve only discussed death in the context of my reading of Heidegger, and in that context I try to argue that it’s Heidegger who tries to speak about death (just like time) in its concrete specificity, but really gives us nothing more that wasn’t already available in the tool-analysis. My strategy for reading Heidegger is a flattening strategy, one that I think is warranted by the facts, but does not imply that I don’t think human death is any different from anything else (I’m just not in agreement that it should lie at the very foundation of ontology).

*One historical point, since this comes up a lot: “Quentin Meillassoux, the other philosopher usually identified along with Harman as a founder of speculative realism (which Harman later reshaped as object-oriented philosophy)…”

Object-oriented philosophy dates to the late 1990’s, at a time when I had never even heard of the other three original Speculative Realists (unless I knew of Iain Grant from his translations of Baudrillard and Lyotard, but even then he would only have been a name to me). So, it’s not true that object-oriented thought was a later offshoot of Speculative Realism. Nor is the converse true. Speculative Realism was a fairly big tent for four completely different philosophical orientations that diverge more and more as time goes by, as must always happen.

But it’s a nice essay, Smith’s, and reminds me that I wish I spent more time reading literary criticism.

I’ll get to Cole’s article as soon as I can.

Bruce Holsinger, “Object-Oriented Mythography”

From the title, I had assumed it would be a fairly critical piece, but it’s actually warm and positive. It mentions a number of relevant authors, but deals in most detail with Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter and my own Circus Philosophicus.

Holsinger mentions a possible tension between myth on the one hand and both secularism and realism on the other. I don’t see it that way. The point of myth and metaphor (for me at least) is not to move towards the realm of theology or of creative inner ideas at the expense of reality, but to indicate that reality itself fundamentally cannot be expressed in discursive terms. This is no artsy-fartsy turn away from mathematism and scientism, but simply an attempt to revive Socrates, who adamantly resisted both claims to wisdom and claims to reduce virtue, friendship, whatever to bundles of discursively accessible qualities. (“But Meno, how can I know the qualities of virtue before I know what virtue is?”)

This is why I find the present fashion for rationalism in continental thought to be both regrettable and transient. Too many philosophical difficulties result from thinking that objects can be dissolved downward into their natural underpinnings or dissolved upward into their formalizability, and double the difficulties arise when the attempt is made to do both of these simultaneously (“duomining,” as I call it, which is perhaps a  bigger problem in the history of Western philosophy than is the “presence” that Heidegger disdains– and Derrida in a way that is completely different from Heidegger’s, though too often conflated with it).

Plato wrote myths because Plato like his teacher was a lover of wisdom (not primarily a mathematician, a knower). There is a cognitive value to myth that is too often overlooked. It is ironic that, as Holsinger mentions, analytic philosophy has done a much better job of producing myths in recent decades than the continental tradition, since one might have expected precisely the opposite.

Anyway, I enjoyed Holsinger’s piece, and look forward to reading some of the others in the new issue of The Minnesota Review.