p.s. on the Gabriel video

My recent visit to Bonn included fascinating discussions with Maurizio Ferraris and Markus Gabriel about the extent to which metaphysical realism requires a realism of knowledge. (Obviously, my position is: quite the contrary.) Both of them gave interesting counterarguments.)

One thing we find in both authors as well as in OOO is the “Latour Litany,” a listing of objects that is by no means an “argument,” but is a powerful rhetorical means of invoking a certain flatness in things. This in itself signifies a deep agreement between the three of us.

Ferraris’s position, which you can now read about in English in his wonderful book Documentality, involves a distinction between natural and social entities that is foreign to my own views. Ferraris seems influenced by Vico in his contention that since social objects were produced by us, they are not impenetrable to logos in the same way that natural entities are. This led him to object, to his friend co-author Derrida, that there is nothing social outside the text.

In Gabriel’s case, let’s wait for the publication of his forthcoming book Fields of Sense, which will give the latest version of his own realist position. My sense of Gabriel’s position in Bonn was that he sees problems with privileged mathematical or scientific attempts to grasp the real (as found now in a number of continental rationalist positions), but that he also thinks direct access to the real is nonetheless possible. This has something to do with his unorthodox reading of German Idealism, and culminates in his theory of fields.

The latter point interests me especially, insofar as we are now seeing an explosion of theories of fields or zones of existence. Latour’s new book is one example, Souriau’s modes of existence (reborn largely through the hard work of Latour and Isabelle Stengers), Sloterdijk’s discussions of spheres, Badiou’s theory of worlds, and, let us not forget, Luhmann’s theory. Tristan Garcia is a more ambiguous case, but in some sense his philosophy is also meant as an encyclopedic theory of zones of being.

I’ll have something to say about these new “zonal” ontologies (which differ somewhat from the regional ontologies that grew up in the phenomenological crib) in the second half of Prince of Modes, the sequel I’m now writing to Prince of Networks.

But for now, three cheers for Gabriel’s contention in the Tedx video that the maxim that “all things are connected” is a bad one. Holism has had a good run, but is now reaching the point of exhaustion.