On Wolfendale and his Critics - OOO

- ON WOLFENDALE AND HIS CRITICS -

\-On OOO-/

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      I have become quite upset at the recent criticism directed at Pete Wolfendale's comprehensive critique of Harman's philosophical program, criticisms waged by both Jon Cogburn and Harman himself. Now, I am good friends with Pete and with some of the folk more sympathetic to OOO and its philosophical virtues (Levi Bryant notably, is my friend). And, despite some agitated polemics with their crowd, I have tried to express my disagreements always in a civil manner, on philosophical grounds.

    What is conspicuously missing from all of this recent commentary on Wolfendale's work is an actual engagement with the philosophical contentions made by Wolfendale, though Cogburn has gone through it. Instead, his post and Harman's read like severe indictments to Wolfendale's motivations and temperament as a thinker, alongside those of Ray Brassier, who was a direct inspiration - as well as the most sympathetic figure among the original SR crew - to Wolfendale's project. To be fair, Harman has not read Wolfendale's book, so he's working on the provisional previews offered by Cogburn. This is problematic in itself, since he is endorsing a criticism of a book which he hasn't read, and is more explicitly disputing Ray's contribution though he hasn't read it. But let's leave that aside.

     Let me get right into the issue; Cogburn questions the motivations behind Wolfendale's monograph, by drawing attention to the lyrically charged verdicts posed in the preface of the book. Now, obviously ,the justification for these severe verdicts would have to be supported by the book itself. Yet Cogburn preemptively writes:""only the already converted give the polemicist a pass on the uncharity needed for the polemic to be rhetorically effective"

    That is just not true. One can be polemical and yet genuinely impartial or even sympathetic to the views one is raising polemics about without being uncharitable. Why assume that polemics entails uncharitability? Can no one disagree on charitable grounds? That seems gratuitous to me: if that is true, then it threatens not so much 'polemics', in the sense of agitated debate, but disagreement or consideration of counter-argument tout court. Unless we pathologize critical engagement, it will be necessary to accept some debate is charitable and fair. Cogburn claims about any text being addressed that " If it's worth reading, it's worth reading charitably." So either charitable criticisms are possible, and then he is just begging the question about why Wolfendale is uncharitable, or else the only charitable engagements are non polemical ones.

    Cogburn continues questioning the motivations and pertinence of the background debate that led to Wolfendale's book. He calls attention into the claim that this extensive engagement seems oddly against the verdict that Harman's work is unworthy of philosophical esteem. What Cogburn misses from Wolfendale's account is that it was Harman who requested that if a debate were to be had with the philosophical detail Wolfendale imposed in the blogosphere, such a debate would be better suited for a formal kind of publication. And this because the payoff for such a discussion in the blogosphere and with a relatively unknown interlocutor would be not be appropriate or sufficiently beneficial for Harman. I cannot but conclude that, in writing these background considerations, Wolfendale is simply making clear that by writing the long book he is in fact just agreeing to carry out the polemics in the medium Harman himself determined, with the degree of rigor expected of the medium.

     But why do this if you so much consider Harman's position as fundamentally confused and unworthy of philosophical esteem, you ask? Well, one might think it is important to make explicit why a particular position that is gaining relative influence be addressed concretely on its perceived philosophical grounds and virtues, so as to deem whether this popularity is warranted or not. That is, to evaluate whether Harman's work is persuasive because he has actually cogent philosophical theses, or whether instead it is merely because, as he says, "I write often, in an engaging fashion, and don’t imply to my potential audience that they are irrational idiots. If you seek influence for your ideas, these three steps are a good start."  That seems like a healthy enough philosophical practice. 

   Next, Cogburn targets those who, from outside academia, take issue with the fact employed professors might not have time or desire to respond to every objection leveled at them. Cogburn writes:

"Yet a whole bevy of people routinely heap scorn on people like him because they doesn't stop everything to respond to every blog post or paper ever written about them."

     This is fair and true. But the question that rises becomes: is Wolfendale one of these people? I don't think so; he is not demanding a response from anyone, but simply engaging Harman through the medium that the latter deemed most fitting for the debate to ensue.

      But again, what is most conspicuous about Cogburn's text is that no serious mention is made on the philosophical indictments leveled against Harman, though they comprise the bulk of the book in question. This is particularly serious considering Harman's own response. I agree with Harman that Brassier's aversion to the blogosphere goes too far, that in doing so he is rhetorically excessive, and that it must accept at least of exceptions deemed of quality lest he deem Wolfendale's own ventures as obsolete.

     The issue is this: Harman accuses Brassier of resenting that his plot to make those involved in the Goldsmith conference more visible worked. Brassier, so we are told, is the victim of a mixture of dogmatism and resentment. Dogmatism, because he refuses to accept the philosophical import of the social sciences and praises the reality of physics only (something, to my mind, which Ray has never endorsed; he in fact thinks the connection between the social and natural sciences to be of paramount philosophical interest) Resentment, because others publish more works and have fallen behind the OOO cause than his own program. Thus, Harman concludes, Brassier cannot but be but the most interested party in seeing the whole Speculative Realism house burn down, while Harman and his copious readers run the show.

    But Ray's text, which again Harman has NOT read, does not complain about the relative popularity of OOO, or criticizes the exposure to the work of the authors involved in Goldsmith's: he questions not the desire to expose the body of work of those involved (a generous enough goal), but the feasibility of characterizing "speculative realism" as a philosophical movement on the grounds of actual philosophical content, and more particularly, Harman's philosophy, since all the other three members have parted ways with the term.

    First, because the term 'speculative' does not bind these authors in any meaningful sense. Meillassoux explicitly calls 'speculative' any philosophical position that is non-metaphysical in scope, to designate a kind of dialectics that makes no assumptions about what there is. In this sense, neither Ray, Iain nor particularly Harman, are speculative, since the latter explicitly endorses metaphysics as first philosophy. That the conference was named after a particular program should indicate nothing but an anchoring of the congregation on Meillassoux's own program, but not the sudden emergence of a movement.

   Second, because the 'realism' involved in each case is immensely different, and incompatible. Grant proposes a process ontology following Schelling, Harman an ontology of objects, Brassier a scientific realism, and Meillassoux a kind of mathematical Platonism inspired by Badiou. There is more in common between Badiou and Meillassoux, or between Sellars and Brassier, than between Meillassoux and Brassier on what they take realism to be (or 'materialism', for Meillassoux). The aversion to correlationism is common to many realists, analytic and continentals, even if they do not share the same terminology or address the same authors. 

     So, Brassier argues, 'speculative realism' designates little but a sociological construct, not a philosophical movement. That much interesting work has resulted from this sociological construct is not in dispute, but only that the phenomenon as it stands does not exist as a philosophical movement, but as a series of divergent positions grouped for contingent reasons, and specifically an identification of it with OOO and Harman's project.

What is truly baffling to me, is thus the following line of attack:

"Meanwhile, Brassier has not published a substantial piece of work since 2007, an eternity in our fast-moving period of blog-driven philosophy discussion. There have been perhaps 20 new books by OOO authors in that same time period, 8 of them written by me. Brassier writes deeply unpleasant, insecticidal prose, filled with expressions of contempt for the irrationality and pathetic emotions of others. He proclaims derision for the blogosphere, yet inhabits it as he pleases through biannual angry interview eruptions and through the daily work of his surrogates. He truly believes that physics is a real discipline but sociology is not, and that an object does not exist unless it is the object of a possible (natural) science. He has expressed a significant degree of contempt for the role of aesthetics in intellectual life. In my admittedly more limited experience of Wolfendale, he shares each of these traits."

     Does publishing less books or articles show one is less productive or relevant philosophically? Does this not obliterate questions about the standard of what is being published? If anything, this confirms Brassier's thesis that, according to Harman, an author's philosophical import, or that of the position he-she defends, should be measured against the standard of the amount of talk about it or publications on the subject by those who address it critically or in support. But this assumption is  truly perverse: Wittgenstein might have written a fraction of the books written by Deepak Chopra, but this says nothing of philosophical accomplishment, or the cogency and virtue of the their respective projects. What is again conspicuously missing from Harman's post, as it is from Cogburn's, is any real engagement with the philosophical content of Wolfendale's contentions with OOO. These should be the grounds for debate: after all, they comprise basically the totality of the book's content.

      Much more could be said about this unfortunate first wave of responses to Wolfendale's work. It is no secret that I am sympathetic to both Brassier and Wolfendale's Sellarsian tendencies; but that is well besides the point. The point is, it is the philosophical content of Harman's work that is being examined, and it is to this examination that criticism or endorsement should be primarily addressed. With that said, whether Wolfendale's position is charitable or uncharitable, whether it effectively is the work of philosophical fairness or of a compromisingly 'colored' vendetta, is an open question. But this should be decided on philosophical grounds, not on those Cogburn and Harman present in these posts.

Response to Levi Bryant: On Methodology and Dispositions

RESPONSE TO LEVI BRYANT:

On Methodology and Dispositions

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   Levi has recently made some preliminary comments about my article-review, published recently in the new issue of the journal Speculations. I thought I would use his response as an opportunity to say a few things left pending after writing the review, as well as to respond to some of Levi’s salient worries about the first half of the paper.

I – Behind Doors

Before tackling the philosophical issues, and considering that Levi begins his post with some rather generous comments, I thought I should reiterate my general opinion on Bryant’s work, and his temperament as a philosopher. Levi’s work has been a perpetual source of inspiration for us, aspiring philosophers, for many reasons. I think his appetite for learning from new sources, his intoxicating passion for philosophy, and his willingness to reinvent his positions time and time again, are all examples of philosophical virtue. His blog has been a constant reference point, sometimes crystallizing better than most secondary literature on the subject, the views of some notoriously obscure figures from the Continental tradition. He has a virtue for demystifying the impenetrable nature of philosophy, making it approachable and fascinating. It is no wonder that his work has become a source of inspiration for many outside the academia, and his sometimes fastidious insistence in that philosophy should always listen to what occurs outside of its academic ivory walls, is invaluable advice.

    As someone who has been deeply influenced by Badiou, as Levi notes in his post, I find such an attitude in tune with what I take to be a necessary part of any truly contemporary disposition in philosophy: it can only recover its synoptic ambition by being attentive to the procedures that condition it, and which occur independently of it. For all of these reasons, Levi has been, and continues to be, a mandatory interlocutor and someone for whom I feel much warmth and admiration. So hopefully, we can continue having a philosophical conversation without vitiating our mutual respect and affection. With that said, I want to address some of the philosophical issues raised by Levi, in response to my review-piece.

II -  On  Philosophical Methodology

    It is no secret by now that Levi expresses much hostility to philosophical schools which emphasize the need and importance of epistemology, at least as the latter has been understood by the post-Kantian analytic tradition, and more recently, by some of those who try to integrate concerns proper to this tradition with questions and ideas proper to the Continental tradition. In his book, Levi targets what he labels ‘epistemological realisms’, which emphasizes the idea that realism ought to begin by an examination of the conditions under which we can say that thought gains traction on being, rather than by an examination of being itself.

     But Levi also targets all forms of anti-realism that result from an exacerbation of critique, such as has been emblematic of many Continental figures during the 20^th Century, some of which are among Levi’s own intellectual heroes.

    This brings me to my first point: I think that Levi often construes epistemology as complicit with forms of anti-realism, or at the very least, that it collides with the prospect of giving a realist philosophy by way of ontological premises. But it should be always remembered that the anti-realisms that are in the process of being examined also include the positions of philosophers who thought they were restituting the priority of ontology in some form or other.

    Of course, Levi himself is well aware that the term ontology acquires a somewhat different meaning in the work of someone like Heidegger, where it becomes more a radicalization of the question of access rather than a positive metaphysical program. And I think that while Levi subscribes himself to the critiques advanced by such Continental figures against epistemology proper, he thinks that the preponderance of the question of access remains complicit with anti-realist thought. Nevertheless, epistemological realism remains the main point of contrast to his own ontological realism

   Levi expresses that he is somewhat amenable to my points about realist epistemology, and even that these might end up nurturing his thought in unforeseen ways. For this I am humbled, and grateful. Nevertheless, I should say that my concern in the review was not so much to defend a version of epistemological realism, but simply to say that epistemology as a whole is not susceptible to some of the objections that Levi proposes. In the book, Levi criticizes the priority of epistemology mainly by referencing the work of Roy Bhaskar, and against classical empiricist accounts which relativize knowledge to the givenness of perceptual or sensory data. My rejoinders to this part of Levi’s strategy were simply to indicate both that Bhaskar’s arguments for ontological realism are questionable when motivating realism, and that there exist a multiplicity of epistemological accounts that do not seem sensitive to the criticisms Levi levels against classical empiricist epistemology.

   Levi expresses himself somewhat strongly with respect to what he takes to be accusations of irrationalism that function more like a Stalinist bullying, and emphasizes that we just have different questions in mind, and different concerns. He ends his piece in a somewhat effusive declaration, which I quote:

“Daniel takes this claim as the claim I think everything is up to individual, subjective, human whim. Indeed, the claim that everything is up to individual whim is a claim that Daniel often attributes to me. I’m surprised by this and wonder if Daniel has read Koyre, Lakatos, and Kuhn. All I’m pointing out when I say such a thing is that certain research projects are incommensurable with one another. I’m surprised that Daniel, who has read and been influenced by Badiou so deeply, has difficulty seeing this point. Daniel seems to miss the point that the Galilean who has resolved to try to see if nature can be mathematized, cannot respond to questions within the Aristotlean-Ptolemaic context.”

 Indeed, one of the lessons I have learned from Badiou is that philosophy should be sensitive to paradigm shifts (to use Kuhn’s phrase), that it should develop a dialectics of change, and that it must include a theory of novelty and creation. But I do not believe that the reasons for why I insist on epistemology are explained because I am still operating within an Aristotelian framework, while Levi in a post-Galilean one. To understand this, I should perhaps say a few words about my own philosophical history, which might resonate with some of the affective declarations Levi makes.

      I started my studies in a Continental-oriented department in Peru, where philosophy was mostly aligned with the social sciences rather than with the ‘scientific’ vision proper to analytic schools, and where figures like Heidegger, the late Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Habermas were most influential. I remember at one point my good friend and excellent philosopher Erich Luna (who runs the blog Vacio) came to me with an article on Plato by Gail Fine, from Cornell. Fine was my first explicit encounter with contemporary analytic philosophy, and at the time I couldn’t but feel that I had been indoctrinated all along. As Levi emphasizes, one of the deficiencies of the Continental tradition is that it breeds generation after generation of historians of philosophy more than philosophers as such. They tend to nod patronizingly towards any form of critical engagement with the canonical figures, and prefer a more reverential approach geared towards hermeneutic precision rather than to argumentative polemics. But Fine was doing something else: she was actively discussing the cogency of the philosophical theses in Plato, and doing so in an extraordinarily rigorous manner, while preserving stylistic clarity, freeing itself of some of the bombast in the Continental rhetoric.

  Little did I know, I would end up transferring to Cornell, and studying under Fine as my advisor. During my years there, I became quickly astonished and intimidated by the methodological scrutiny of the analytic tradition, and Cornell’s heavily analytic-oriented department. I found myself out of my depth in most conversations, and I strived to learn from this tradition its formal tools for the making and defusing of arguments. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel that something was off. I couldn’t see why this linguistified philosophy wasn’t subject to the kind of criticisms that Heidegger leveled, and which detected unsaid ontological assumptions underneath every attempt at an epistemology. After reading Rorty, I became somewhat convinced that although the rigor and clarity of the school was of invaluable support when entering the trenches, the tradition was fundamentally misguided, and that it continued, somewhat obliviously, to dwell in the shadow of Kant, whereas Continental philosophy had moved far beyond it, and waltzed merrily into post-Modernity. The result? I ended up writing a thesis on Husserl and Heidegger, at Cornell.

   I returned to Peru fairly confident in my Heideggerean proclivities, which I found were fundamentally correct even in the wake of figures that were critical of Heidegger: Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas, Lyotard, etc. It was not until I read Zizek and encountered Lacan that my confidence in the Heideggerean project was first shaken. And it was not until I read Badiou’s Being and Event that my thinking underwent a full blown ‘paradigm shift’. What was most striking in Badiou is that he began his treatise by making a significant concession to the analytic tradition, understandably in avowing the valence of formal thinking. But Badiou did something else too; he summoned from the dead specters that Continental philosophers had purportedly buried for good: words like ‘truth’, and ‘universality’, and the methodological valence of argument and proof, without the obscurity of style that characterized the tradition. The most important lesson I learned from Badiou was that philosophy could and ought to reinvent its central concepts in accordance with the procedures of its time, that no word was a ‘bad’ word in philosophy, that no view was forbidden in principle, and that one couldn’t bury corpses for good without the possibility of their return. Like Putnam emphasized apropos science, history brings us to retake theses that we had thought to have discarded in the course of progress: the idea that the universe had a beginning being a prime example.

   Having laid this out, the work of Meillassoux and Brassier further radicalized this sentiment. Both at an stylistic and philosophical level,  Brassier insisted on demolishing the sociological barrier that separated concerns proper to analytics and to Continentals, by demystifying the caricatures that each projected about the other. Just like Heidegger and Gadamer offered a ridiculous shadow of the analytic tradition as preoccupied with logic and language games only, Carnap and Searle did nothing but reinforce the suspicions of Continentals that analytics didn’t know how to read. From the beginning of his doctoral thesis, Brassier called into question the very patronizing of knowledge in the name of ontology that had been emblematic in 20^th Century philosophy, both in phenomenology and in vitalism, characteristically. 

 In the end, my diagnosis is that the affective antipathy that Bryant senses apropos epistemologists can be balanced out by reminding ourselves of some of the attitudes in Continental philosophers. Philosophical mediocrity begins when one thinks to be beyond learning, and one's opinions to be beyond revision. Just like the Continentals thought that to be concerned with issues of formal logic and proofs was myopic, analytics were seduced by the idea of progress and often patronized history and tradition. 

    But I believe in progress, and I think that just like Badiou and Sellars were perspicuous enough to realize there was much to be learned from the opposite tradition, we are now in an even better position to realize how this is so. I think that Bryant’s amenities to art, psychoanalysis, and media theory are resonant with concerns classically characteristic of the Continental tradition. But I think that the analytic tradition has done much work in the formal and natural sciences, to which it always remained close, and that we must learn from both. Recently, I criticized both Badiou for eliding epistemology and Brandom for eliding ontology. And I don’t think we have to choose between the two.

    More recently, Brassier’s work on Sellars persuaded me to revisit the work of analytic epistemology, under a more mature, fresh light. And the result was expected. The idea I had formed myself of the analytic tradition was indeed a caricature, and soon I realized that the interests that drove philosophers like Badiou were not incompatible with those of someone like Sellars, but congruent and indeed although in disagreement, potentially reinforcing. It showed me that, far from precluding the possibility of ontology in the name of epistemology, the analytic tradition, less encumbered by anti-realism, had actively pursued manifold metaphysical programs. 

    This brings me to my second crucial point: Levi writes as if I was interested in the question of truth, and of knowledge, at the expense of ontology. I think this is a brutally unfair caracterization, and one that forces one to choose between two things which in my mind are complementary.  The relevant quote is the following one:

“Daniel is obsessed with the question of how a human being knows what he says (it’s always a “he”) about the world is true. I find this question to be rather uninteresting as I think it contributes little to any real practice; scientific, artistic, personal, political, or otherwise. I see it as the question of a hall monitor. By contrast, I’m interested in making some small contribution to shifting the issues we discuss. I’d like to see theorization of how mercury from rain fall affects fish populations and enters human populations. I’d like to see discussion of why people aren’t buying hybrid or electric cars, and what this has to do with availability and semiotics. I want to talk about how sanitation technologies affect the economic and cultural development of a people. I’m interested in how mantis shrimps or bees experience the world. If I make claims about how they do, I’m fine with providing reasons for why I think this is true and how we might come to know this about bees, but I take umbrage at the suggestion that I’m just basing these claims on wild speculation and haven’t engaged in any research or inquiry that might justify these conclusions. I think knowing a bit about bees might go a bit further in addressing real issues such as their disappearance in the States than abstract epistemological questions about how we know in general. I’m not interested in legislating what “true reality” is, but in shifting discussion from an obsessive focus on how we know, on how our minds relate to the world, to a discussion of how things, including humans, interact with one another. Assertions made within this framework are not a mere “subjective whim”, as Daniel suggests. He’s welcome to question claims and ask for reasons. It could turn out that various accounts are mistaken. Be specific. Critique the account. That’s how accounts become better. Don’t, however, throw sand in the engine of inquiry. Daniel, I’m sure you miss this, but the basic point is that we’re tired of discussing your issue. We want to ask other questions and attend to other issues. That doesn’t mean we’re unwilling to provide reasons.”

     I cannot agree with Levi on these points, I’m afraid. First, my argument was not to claim that Levi did not provide reasons for his claims. The entirety of the first part of my review goes over Bryant’s arguments against epistemological realism, and for ontological realism. What I aimed to show was that his arguments do not do justice to the real work done by epistemologists today, and that the solutions he proposes to the critical problem about the connection between thought and reality remain pending and unresolved. It is no mystery that Levi wants to propose a concept of knowledge that amplifies the traditional scope on representational accuracy in favor of an account that takes practice and production as pivotal. But what my review intended to show is that the idea that concern with representation elided concern with practice was misguided. Indeed, one just has to read the work of someone like Tyler Burge to realize how proximate his questions go in hand with the practicing activity of perceptual psychologsts, for instance. My fundamental argument is that in spite of his arguments for ontological realism, the problem of representation remains, that the account he offers does not resolve it, and that furthermore his own account must tacitly accept representation, even if it doesn't explain it.

Levi questions the utility of these investigations, but such concerns can be answered without problems on a case by case basis: in asking about how our perceptual  faculties work and those of animals, for instance, taking Burge's project as an example, we explore the extent to which we share facultative capacities with other living beings, assisting us in understanding better the relation between primitive functional capacities and higher cognitive functions. These relations are fundamental in understanding both how we act and react to our environments, as well as how other animals do so in relation to their environments. We learn which kinds of operations we carry out according to which kinds of process, and we develop formal resources to comprehend the intricacies involved, allowing us to understand ourselves and the natural world better.

    Burge, Fodor and Carey, for instance, construe a concept of representation that includes conditions for veridicality and objective representing that precedes strict linguistic representation, and which expands our traditionally anthropocentric conceptions of how we access the structure and features of reality. These are not questions fundamentally about sentences or propositions; they are questions about the kind of things natural scientists are concerned with on a daily basis. Use of propositional logic is no more instrumental in this regard than the use of sentences to express our views about things: just because we write sentences to express a given claim, one couldn't make the suggestion that we are bound to remain in talk about talk, or become enclosed in an anthropocentric prison. And the same goes for using propositions to express the formal structure of thoughts, sentences, states of affairs, and whatever else.

    But Levi oscillates between saying that he has resolved the methodological questions indicated above by way of Bhaskar, and saying that he is not interested in these questions altogether. It is the latter which I find objectionable as philosophical practice: just like a person cannot call themselves an ontic structural realist and claim at the same time to be disinterested with the queston about the distinction between mathematical form and content (like Harman notes), the question about how our thoughts about things are distinct from the things we think of is a necessary critical filter to all forms of dogmatic metaphysics, and cannot be obviated by any claims to realism in ontology.

Put differently: there is a distinction between the question about WHAT are our ontological theses, and the question about WHY we should advocate an ontology with such theses. The latter is not itself an ontological question, but is set to explain the grounds under which we ought to endorse an ontological program over another. Without understanding the semantic proprieties of words such as 'being', or 'real', our discussions are bound to be too fuzzy to be of any use, or too lax to be appropriately answered. And such a propadeutic, methodological investigation, is the condition so that our metaphysics won’t be arbitrary or dogmatic. 

But if before we say what out metaphysics is we must say on what grounds metaphysical theses are adjudicated, dissuaded or encouraged, then we must accept that metaphysics is not first philosophy. This part of the critical legacy remains, I think, and leads one to ask: what status does such a propadeutic discourse have, if not epistemological? If one has no such account, then one’s metaphysics become precisely dogmatic. I think that Levi attempts to have such an account, but also wants to say he is ultimately not willing to engross himself in this issue.

    Levi formulates his propadeutic methodological enquiry by appears to Bhaskar, and the  first part of the review expresses why in my estimation: a) his argument does not succeed in motivating realism, b) it does not succeed in motivating an ontology of objects, c) it does not succeed in establishing the priority of ontology over epistemology. As a result, my contention was not that Levi was being irrational because he gave no reasons, but that a) the reasons he provided were not satisfactory, and that b) he seemed to relapse into pragmatic considerations when claiming that he could dismiss further argument, and let the epistemology police bitterly scold him from a distance.  But if the latter criteria for dismissal are what drives his obviation of epistemology, then Levi has surrendered his ontological program to a kind of subjective whim, to pragmatic considerations of the sort caracteristic proper to instrumentalist approaches, nevermind the talk about bees and Jupiter.

    The important point is that Levi’s motivations for his onticological program were problematic, and that without such resolution the program’s feasibility was suspect. When Levi emphasizes that he is just ‘not interested’ in the same kind of questions that I am interested in, I think he touches precisely on the point of concern.

It is not that I believe all philosophers should do the same thing, or that everyone should ask the same questions. But from this it is another thing to say that there are no questions that philosophers ought to answer, or be accountable for. Certain things must be done in order for us to be doing philosophy rather than something else. The question of whether we can sidestep the critical quandary about the connection between thought and reality by way of ontology, or whether epistemology can be motivated before ontology, are open questions. Indeed, towards the end of the first part, I acknowledge Levi’s virtuous considerations about this knot, and offer some arguments in the way which I won't repeat.

In any case, the problem about the connection between thought and reality is at the heart of any philosophy that claims allegiance to post-critical realism, and against dogmatic metaphysics. My idea, developed elsewhere, is that the epistemological corollary to ontology is necessary in order to proscribe the authority of subjective attitudes as admissible in philosophical argumentation. One can be as disinterested in epistemology as anyone else, but this this not mean that the cogency of one’s project remains without an answer to these questions. To say these questions are quixotic concerns of a pre-Galilean spirit seems to me a convenient scapegoat.

   Again, this is not to say that Levi does not offer arguments for his claims. It is to say that if the arguments he offers are inadequate in establishing what he intends them to establish, then not being interested in addressing these shortcomings surrenders one’s account to volitive grounds. It is not that I am not interested in ontology, or that I think epistemology is the telos of philosophical activity. It is simply that to acknowledge the separation and connection between thought and reality remains a necessity, and my arguments insisted in that these are not problems that Levi can sidestep. 

I refuse to accept that epistemology is ‘my issue’ simply because someone is tired to discuss it. I don’t believe philosophical legitimacy can be subjected to one’s interests, precisely because I believe philosophy must be synoptic. It is those who think they can afford to ask one set of questions at the expense of methodological clarity that end up making careers out of how many grains of sand make a heap, or whether Gadamer’s reading of Heidegger is good. One of the lessons I take from Heidegger, is that the beginnings are the most difficult, and that methodology is required. Finally, this does not mean that Levi’s ontological theses are false simply because they lack a proper methodological footing. Nor does it mean that they won’t help certain people do certain things, perhaps admirable ones. That’s all fine.

       But it does mean that without proper grounding, these theses are still not obviously yielding the kind of realism that he considers as a goal. Levi’s Spinozism seeks to inspire creative practices, and assist our negotiation with a material world in multiple forms. Yet it is important to remember that the desire to serve the interests of our kind, however noble, will only motivate philosophical positions at the expense of other considerations if one ascribes to philosophy primarily an instrumental status. Needless to say, as an aspiring realist and materialist, I think Levi should contend this possibility. The question is whether he is in a position to.

As Badiou mentions in his latest presentation from the EGS, I think we cannot begin from anthropologically configured considerations about practice, politics, creation, and whatnot. We need a new logic, in the primitive sense in which the latter entails the articulation of the conditions for what is thinkable. In this respect, I find that the projects of people like Badiou (thinking of a generic form of novelty) and Brandom (thinking of the articulation between semantics and pragmatics) can mutually reinforce each other, and therefore that ontology and epistemology can be reconciled in making a truly contemporary philosophy, beyond classical sociological dividing lines, and without stale strawmans thrown in each other’s way.

      To close up, I think that Levi has been negatively impressed by epistemologists to the point where his skepticism against the discipline is total. My only rejoinder to his remarks on affect would be to say that in patronizingly dismissing the work that drives many without having a solid grip on the field’s present state, it is he that seems to emulate Stalinist tactics: maligning thinkers for their thwarted temperaments, accusing them of endorsing positions they effectively don’t, and misconstruing their claims so as to effectively dismiss anything that might appear, even coarsely, as a challenge to one’s position. I know Levi is far better than this, so I don’t think we need to reduce the best of us to the worst representatives of each tradition. Lest, that is, if we want to return idiocy with idiocy, like the analytic lab rat who thinks Continental con artists do nothing but eloquent sophistry, or the pious Continental that thinks looking to the past suffices to skeptically dismiss or warn against novelties in the present. The real obscurantism comes in facile dismissals, in unwarranted disavowals, and in overconfidence in one’s assumptions about the other.

With that said, I think that Levi’s project is one that is just beginning, and that in the company of great thinkers, it will only continue to grow and nurture itself. Finally, we are all in this together, and if Levi can learn a single thing from my sincere attempts to find out what works and doesn’t in his incipient project, then I may have returned a fraction of the wealth he’s given me.

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Appendix - Added Friday, September 7th

Levi made a further response, to which I thought I would attach the following:

I think the claim that epistemological concerns are anthropocentric because they ask about relations between humans and the world is a bit like saying that questions about bees are beecentric because they ask about bees. In other words, it tautologically follows that in asking the question about the relation between humans and the world we are, well, asking a question or set of questions about humans. But epistemology is a bit broader that this. And I think anthropocentrism should entail something a bit stronger: namely, not only that a set of questions take place which are about humans or the relations between humans to other things. Rather, anthropocentrism entails that in asking these questions, these thinkers preclude or de-prioritize other considerations.

   I think that here it is important to distinguish methodological priority and general priority: to say that certain questions must be resolved before others does not mean that the former questions are more important than the ones which can only be answered on condition that the former have been. Epistemological priority, if it obtains, should be understood in the logical sense in which it conditions how we understand and adjudicate metaphysical theses, not in the sense that it favors or precludes metaphysical theses.

I think Levi is right in that much epistemology has been anthropocentric in that it construed its concept of representation on the basis of typical human faculties, and often using the linguistic capacity of humans as determining all forms of knowledge. But epistemology need not follow this route. Epistemology need not restrain itself to asking about language, or it need not suppose that only humans know. A good example is Burge's critique of what he calls 'individual representationalism', which he accuses of over-intellectualizing objective representing, in a way that precludes us from understanding how we share representational cognitive functions with other, non-sapient animals. Similarly, epistemology need not preclude connections between practice and discourse, like Sellars and Brandom propose in articulating semantics with pragmatics.

In this regard, I think epistemology is not so different than other scientific fields of investigation. From cosmology to biology and physics, our first theses are encumbered by assumptions, overdeterminations, etc. Epistemology has also had such faults, and one of the virtues of contemporary epistemology is its proximity to advances in cognitive science, in perceptual psychology, in neurophysiology, in ethology, etc. Epistemology today in fact is not constrained to asking questions about how we represent the world, even if the question about our relation to the world conditions this understanding, as the paradigmatic examples of Fodor or Burge show. In any case, epistemology does not in general preclude ontology, but conditions it, while allows us to distinguish between levels of priority by distinguishing ontological from logical priority.

This is a point that I think Sellars does well to emphasize: even though there is an ontological dependency of the logical on the causal (sentient and sapient creatures couldn't exist without the proper evolutionary conditions obtaining), there is an epistemological dependency of the causal on the logical (without the capacity to have beliefs, make claims and so on, we don't have theories). Burge and others suggest that, although knowledge in this strict sense depends on sapience, there are pre-linguistic forms of objective representation which we share with non-sapient creatures, and which they set out to investigate. In other words, human knowledge does not exhaust the question of knowledge, indeed of representation.

Finally, I would just say that in no way an exploration of the conditions under which we, as knowers, represent or know the world forecloses metaphysical investigation of the sort Levi wants to do. Just like asking about bees might become necessary at a certain stage of our argument without making our entire philosophy beecentric, we can acknowledge the question of our access to the world has a necessity and methodological priority with respect to other questions, without for this reason accepting that there aren't other questions, perhaps ultimately more interesting to us, to be answered.

In short, I don't think epistemology either: a) constrains us to ask questions about human knowledge, even if this is constitutive of its investigation, b) that it doesn't foreclose other kinds of investigation, including ontological investigation.  My concerns are that by eliding the epistemological component in philosophical thinking, we run into methodological quarrels of the sort I have been exploring, and that ultimately render suspect the status of our ontological claims.

   Now, ontological propositions can get off the ground without such footing, but at the price of rendering our metaphysics dogmatic, in the sense that it does not answer as to why we ought to endorse a given metaphysics, or it relies on instrumental considerations as the ultimate court. I think that these two ways are much more deserving of the label 'anthropocentrism', because they subordinate ontological theses to pragmatic concerns about our activities, our creative elan, our search for political emancipation, etc. But I think we can, and should, be concerned with exploring the world in ways that exceed considerations of the human. While scientists can carry an exploration suspending all kinds of questions, and have instrumental efficacity work on the background of no fixed ontological position, the distinctiveness of philosophy is that it, to use Badiou's phrase, begins with the beginning.

The Positive Side: Amends With OOO

- The Positive Side -

Amends with Object Oriented Ontology

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   I am compelled to answer Graham Harman’s reply to my post about some of the problems I perceived in his version of OOO, given my doubtlessly incomplete and probably defective understanding of it. As some of the ensuing discussions with Levi, Joseph and others have encouraged, there is much more to be learnt from Graham’s wonderful work than I have been able to capture thus far. So, I should first say that I owe Graham an apology for being exceedingly critical, and not being as vocal about the aspects I find commendable in OOO; especially for not taking into consideration arguments in support of the claims I purported were either without justification, or bearing a defective one.

   By way of mitigation, I can only say that I never intended to project a caricature of Graham’s philosophy, but merely express my quibbles as I understood the arguments. Unfortunately, he expresses that I ended up misconstruing his position and obviating essential parts of his argument. For this there is no excuse. I can only say that I will attempt to do better in the future, and try to pick up on crucial missing details in my future readings. Also, I must confess that even if Graham was indeed kind enough to share with me some of his manuscripts in advance, I was only able to review these briefly, and I felt  that implying that I had possession of these in the commentary might have been improper for obvious reasons. But this is no excuse, since I  knew and did acknowledge for example that Graham’s Quadruple Object presents a series of diagrams illustrating his ontology, in much richer and thorough fashion than I did in my post. As a student, I am still occasionally imprecise in my adjectives, because of a lack of intellectual maturity which allows for precision. Part of why youngsters are polemic and energetic is because they are uncivilized still. I hope Graham doesn't forget that he is dealing with a first year graduate student, who has a long, long way to go before he can even hope to stand in the same position he is! I say this not necessarily with respect to knowledge about philosophy or skill, but also personal wisdom. I have a bad reputation for being a bit improper sometimes when I simply intend to be inquisitive, but I can see retrospectively why Graham got this impression.

So for all of these misgivings, I reiterate to Graham my apologies, and want now to rise up to the very pleasing invitation to formulate some of the aspects of OOO that I find most commendable. It is difficult for me, however, to state points of agreement between OOO and my own position because, alas, I do not really have one. Graham infers I have a love for Badiou’s work, which is very true, but I wouldn’t straightforwardly call myself a Badiouean at this point. There are aspects of the scientific realist guild of SR which I find very appealing (Brassier's work is notably influential on me), a lot of Deleuze is reverberating within me, and I find a lot in psychoanalysis and Zizek’s forays. This is where I see myself most comfortable, but at this point I would just really be modest and say I am learning and working towards a position. It might be constructive to try and formulate an own position, instead of perpetually debunking, but I feel I need a better grasp of things in the tradition before I do this. And clearly, if my understanding of Graham was so apalling, chances are I must be doing equally as bad in other terrains. Somewhere in-between this bundle of opinions, eventually, I hope, I might be able to say Iwith what I agree and not just what I like find inspiring. 

   Formulating discrepancies and signaling gaps has become for me a didactic tool to force me to formulate and disentangle my muddled intuitions, and has helped me a lot in progressively gaining clarity on the issues I entertain. After all, as a student, I am more than likely going to be wrong about plenty of things when commenting before I get them right. The beauty of the blog is that it allows you to formulate a preliminary understanding without getting too serious about it. In this case, it seems my reading was faulty for reasons I need to assess with further study. I don’t mean to have arrived at this result in bad spirit, even if I should have been more attentive to detail, particularly when it was expressly made available to me! I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to see the details of your work passed over in favor of facile dismissals, so I must take future precautions to be more empathic and rigorous.

That being said, I enumerate those features of Graham’s philosophy (and not just his ontology), which I find most inspiring, as well as OOO more generally:

1)      The insistence on the importance of vividness in philosophy, and highlighting its historical link to an imaginative, architectonic ambition, which furnishes for us novel ways of thinking and approaching the world in its complexity. This image of philosophy is what I most enjoy about the vibrant style and passion in OOO, and something which I also find stimulating in peculir ways in thinkers such as Deleuze (for whom importance is greater than Truth).

2)      I find the idea of a realism compatible with the withdrawal of real objects very interesting; insofar as it attempts to render compatible a full blown thought about the external world, and at the same time acknowledge that our knowledge/activity is partial and distorting. This is something which I think moderates realism in philosophy from becoming entirely insensitive to the very important lessons of critical philosophy, which often show us how painfully inadequate even our most cherished emblems of knowledge can be, inviting sobering modesty with respect how we view our thinking and footing in this world.

3)      Its seemingly boundless curiosity to explore different fields of discourse as a sine qua non for philosophy, de-localizing it from its restriction to the human cohort, but also from the strict philosophical text. Thus Graham embraces insights from Latour, McLuhan, just as Ian thinks robustly about video games, Levi about Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Tim Morton about Ecology. These are not fields external to philosophical interest, but all of the OOO members are willing to step outside the usual stock of heroes of the philosophical canon, and bring in fresh new air to the mix. This is again something which I think Levi would agree has prefigured some great advances in philosophy: Heidegger’s odd appropriation of Don Scotus, Deleuze’s bizarre stock of forgotten 18^th Century philosophers (Wronski anyone?). OOO repeats this gesture, expanding the contours of the field in which it plays, without losing grip on the philosophical benchmarks of our recent times. Thus Graham’s appeals to thinkers like Zubiri, his intrigue for the occasionalist tradition, Aristotle, Lingis, Latour and others, supplements his absorption of aspects of thinkers like Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas.

4)      Not to fear transforming an author, hijacking his thought from himself. This is a great philosophical move, from Aristotle's violence to Plato, onwards. Just like Meillassoux hijacks correlationist philosophy and exacerbates facticity to unearth an unforeseen realm of possibilities for philosophical thought, Graham attempts to not simply surrender a pious reverence for Heidegger (like so many of his ‘followers’) and takes a turn at the point where his philosophy does not merely give us an Idea to defend, but a crossroad to explore. The idea of the withdrawal of being is appropriated in Graham’s own idea of a withdrawal of objects. This articulates a philosophical problem presumably exhausted in a novel way, allowing us to see anew a face which had become worn out by predictable interpretations. Thus resists the sterile academicism that resembles the zombie-esque following of a sect (believe me, I grew up in Peru, where phenomenology dominates the philosophical scene).

Thus Harman, as well as the other OOO folk, are not principally interested in getting absorbed into a downward spiral of academic technical debates to prattle exclusively among specialists. This passion for philosophy to be accessible and open, and not secluded and esoteric, is a commendable passion which many great philosophers were right to uphold (James, Dewey, Heidegger, Deleuze, Lingis, Zizek, DeLanda…).Although I think there are indeed many theoretical problems with Graham’s thesis of withdrawal, those certainly don’t make it less interesting or worthy of thought.

  I don’t think, for example, that Ray Brassier’s appropriation of Laruelle allows for the kind of scientific realism he seeks to advance, not that his usage of Stove’s Gem to deflate the circle of correlation works either. Nor do I think Meillassoux’s bold absolutization of facticity on the basis of the contingency of thought works. Nor do I think Badiou's theory of Truth can be realist while the truth procedure remains circumspect to the disruption of an exclusively human act, and foreclosed to natural occasion. But these are all fertile, thought inducing ideas which even in their presumed error become catalysts for thought. Indeed, OOO is adamant in teaching us that it is better to be wrong but bold, comprehensive, and imaginative; than to be myopic, inane, and uninteresting, just to avoid being wrong. That is why so many people seem obsessed with refuting it: they are infuriated by what they perceive to be wrong, but also in a strange way fascinated by it. This is already a great classic of philosophical drama: Husserl and Heidegger, Plato and Aristotle, Putnam and Rorty...

5)      The stylistic embrace of clarity, without compromising vividness. Analytic philosophy is notoriously petulant in its purported claims to bear the field's standard for ‘good writing’, when as Graham rightly puts, it confuses technically coherent prose with good prose. Of course, obscurity is a no-no for philosophy. But there is no reason why philosophy cannot be tilting the emotional membranes of people: in fact, it should! Thinkers such as Plato, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Rousseau,Descartes, Benjamin, Deleuze, Zizek and Badiou are all emblematic figures which knew how to use vibrant prose and literary imagery to the service of philosophical illustration and argument. By the same token, OOO represents a good case for how being literary and not just literal bears a philosophically interesting magnitude: Graham’s Guerrilla Metaphysics discusses the role of metaphor, humor in a philosophical manner, while his notion of allure makes an argument at the core of the process of discerning the opaqueness of the real in its resistance to fuse with other objects. Tim Morton recently delivered in OOO what was a tantalizing anticipation of an OOO theory of rhetorics, poetics and language. And Ian’s talk was an exemplary occasion of how a lyrical narrative, which touches an audience emotionally, can be conducive to triggering a lasting effect in the thought of people. Graham’s Circus Philosophicus doesn’t shy away from experimental form to communicate  and present a reelaboration of his familiar ontological thesis. This is one of the aspects that I conjointly enjoy between Harman and Badiou: the latter’s hypertranslation of Plato, his little book about love, the Pocket Pantheon of philosophers, Circus Philosophicus… all of them weird, enjoyable, passionate texts. And I also enjoy this experimental style developed in some authors following Deleuze-Guattari, like Reza Negarestani, and others.

6)      The reiteration that however we may want to endow science with an authoritative position in describing the structure of the real, this must be in a way that is never refractory from revision. OOO here goes further however, and claims that science seemingly enjoys no putative authority in the ranks of what we know and before the real, in favor of a democratic ontology. In spite of my uncertainty and doubts about this last move, which I attempted to explore in my post, I think that the fallibilism towards knowledge accentuates the philosophical modesty I spoke earlier, and is part of the de-anthropomorphizing function which begins with the contestation of correlationism. This in spite of my fundamental disagreements with the theory.

7)      The material embrace of the form of the blog for communication: engaging with a multitude of audiences, in a variety of forms, not shying away from discussion and even conflict. Of course, the blog format in its liberties is more conducive to error, misinterpretations, redundancies, lax analyses, and other shortcomings. But at the same time it de-privatizes speculation, opens the debate up to new audiences, allows authors to experiment without being pressed by the demands of publishing agencies, to participate and communicate with other think tanks, and produce new forms of discourse, art, and thought. The emergence of the journal Speculations, as well as the exemplary blogs by Graham, Levi, Tim and Ian, are all testaments to a new age of philosophy, to which we are lucky to be the heirs and opening acts.  

8)  They are all great people, and a fantastic group in their composite quality.  But they all have radically different styles and personalities, and are all very unique thinkers in their own right too. What they share only becomes stronger in time because of the things they don’t share. And in spite of the young age of the movement and some of its members, they have been very prolific and kept readers with new stuff to chew on. They are all very pleasant in conversation, and do not shy away with their humor and eccentricity. Levi made some really funny remarks about me being Peruvian. Graham is a great storyteller, as you can tell from his books. Tim is bonkers and outlandishly courteous and nice. And Ian is very cool, and down to earth guy who seems he'd be fun to get drunk with (that's a compliment in my book). I think Lacan was right when he said that the madman is also the king who thinks he is a king. I’m not saying these guys are kings,  but they certainly very nice folk, casual people, with whom who can speak freely without feeling daunted by their position in the academia.

It might seem like these points address mostly stylistic/personal impressions than philosophical agreements. But I must reiterate that at a loss for a position, I can only explain why it is I take the trouble to respond, however defectively, to OOO, and why I keep coming back to it. Even if it appears that my ‘disagreements’ are located in the more substantive issues, albeit in a distorted and unjustly understood manner, I hope this does some good to amend the wrongs that Graham perceives I did to him and his work in my last post. I must say that with respect to Graham's observations about my arguments' shortcomings, my lingering concerns persist, for the reasons formulated.

    And yet although I must not shy away from saying that the preoccupations I expressed back then still remain now, at this stage, I can say that I acknowledge the necessity to go ahead and review Graham’s work to see where those missing arguments lay, and how they might assuage my concerns. I can’t say they do, but at the very least, right now, I can’t say they don’t. And that means that in saying there were no further reasons where there were, defective or not, I was, plainly speaking, wrong.