noir realism on time

In an interesting post, HERE, he weaves a reflection on Gratton’s critique of my concept of time into a discussion of Julian Barbour.

As for Gratton, he’ll reportedly make a more detailed critique of my concept of time in his forthcoming book on Speculative Realism, so I’ll wait to respond until reading that book. (I’m going to do a book-length collection of responses to various critiques, including Wolfendale’s behemoth– especially if Part Two of his critique comes out somewhere soon.)

I’ll just make one point for now. Gratton writes, in his Speculations article:

“Above we find precisely what Heidegger and Derrida diagnose as the ‘metaphysics of presence’: the view that there is an eternal present beyond or behind the appearance of things, whether that’s the forms in Plato, the cogito in Descartes, the transcendental ego in Husserl, or indeed, the non-material, transcendental objects in Harman.”

As Peter knows, I’ve addressed this point at length in connection with Heidegger (maybe he responds to my reading of Heidegger in his book). I don’t agree that the metaphysics of presence means the same thing for Heidegger as it does for Derrida. For Derrida it would be nonsensical to speak of things existing outside time (Martin Hägglund is a great resource here), but I have argued extensively, in more than one book, that it’s quite different for Heidegger.

The metaphysics of presence, for Heidegger, means the metaphysics of Vorhandenheit, or presence-at-hand. I have argued that presence-at-hand means relationality in Heidegger’s thought, even though Heidegger wouldn’t see it that way himself. For Derrida, by contrast, presence is a matter of non-relationality, of the assumption that there can be a self-presence or identity free from dissemination. Even the early parts of Of Grammatology make this clear. Derrida credits Heidegger there with something I don’t think follows from Heidegger at all– namely, Heidegger’s supposed critique of the claim that there could be being outside its manifestations. I hold that Heidegger shows precisely the opposite, that being is precisely the non-relational.

There is a philosophical argument to be had here. But I’ve tried to make my side of the argument many times in all of my work, and thus it’s not correct to say that I’m blindly following a “traditional” line of argument from Plato through Descartes to Husserl.

The reason Gratton (and other Derrideans) don’t think time is “epiphenomenal” is not because they think that time is deep down in the nature of things, but because they don’t think there is a deep down nature of things. They put time at the surface every bit as much as I do, they simply deny that there is anything more than a surface (no matter how much they try to finesse the terminology, perhaps by saying that “surface” is already a metaphysical concept that they would refuse to employ). That’s why I’m a realist, and Derrideans are not (despite the recent odd fashion of claiming that Derrida was a realist all along).

I have no objections to Gratton’s rhetoric. It’s a time-honored tradition to say that one’s opponents are trapped in an old traditional way of looking at things while one is not thus trapped oneself. I’m just trying to point out that I have long since tried to turn the tables on this point, since I hold that the relational conception of reality –whether in its undermining or overmining forms– is the most crusty and petrified of traditional concepts, no matter how hip Derrida may still appear to some. (And no, I don’t agree that it’s the structuralists who were relationalists and that Derrida escaped this. Derrida simply denied that anything’s place can be fixed in any particular structure; he never allowed for anything to exist outside any structure at all, which is precisely what object-oriented philosophy aims to do.)

I’m actually planning to have a chapter on Hägglund in my book as well, and the same issue arises in connection with his very interesting view of survival.

[ADDENDUM: Furthermore, I have never described objects as “eternally present,” nor could I describe them in that way. Objects are completely destructible, completely vulnerable to the ravages of the world. I simply deny that this overthrows the concept of identity. Nor have I ever used the term “transcendental” for objects, and this term is inapplicable to my position in the Kantian or any other sense of “transcendental.” Gratton may have meant “transcendent” in Kant’s sense, and I could probably go for that.]