Exciting Happenings
Posted by | Chris | 5.8.10 | No Comments
Urbanomic presents Late at Tate: THE REAL THING
Urbanomic presents performance, film and other interventions exploring the emerging philosophical paradigm of Speculative Realism and its impact on contemporary art practice.
While looking around Urbanomic's website I also found this: "Fanged Noumena" by Nick Land. Land would have been teaching at the Univeristy of Warwick while Iain was doing his Phd and it's interesting to see where their interests cross over. "Mad black deleuzianism" (may be drop the black and accentuate the mad) and "cybergothic" sound very Grantian.
I'm going to be spending time trying to think what the "necessity of contingency" sounds like. I hope it's more horrible than I can imagine!
The Segregation of the World
Posted by | Chris | 4.8.10 | No Comments
Chapter three of Prince of Networks looks at Latour's book "We Have Never Been Modern". Latour's arguments puts him forward as an exciting metaphysician and a philosophical ally to any speculative realism. The central theme of Never Been Modern is to identify the division of nature and society and to resist this division.
Modernity tries to purify the world by dissecting it into two utterly opposed realm. On one side we have the human sphere, composed of transparent freedom and ruled by arbitrary and incommensurable perspectives. On the other side we have nature or the external world, made up of hard matters of fact and acting with objective, mechanical precision (Prince of Networks: 57).This modernity, bequeathed to us by the enlightenment, for instance in the work of Kant and the physics of Newton, has a terrible legacy. Responses to the human/world divide often work within the split rather than attempting to work before it.
[Latour is not] anti-modern, since this sect oddly accepts modernism's claim to have transformed everything that came before, and merely adds the minus sign of pessimism [...]. And he is also no postmodern since this group severs itself from the reality of actants to float pretentiously amidst collage and simulacrum (PoN: 58).To refuse the modernist segregation of the world we begin a project in philosophy that takes us to be a part of and product of the world.
All of which reminded me of this cartoon and its translation into a fun Youtube project:
Karl Rove Vs. Kant's Copernican Revolution
Posted by | Chris | 1.8.10 | 1 Comment
I’m reading Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks at the moment. I realised recently that by following his blog I read Harman every day. He writes clearly and wittily which is a great advert for his books and so I decided it was time to read a fuller work than just a blog post.
The subtitle to Prince of Networks is “Bruno Latour and Metaphysics” which precisely explains the purpose of the book: to present Latour, a sociologist and anthropologist, “as a key figure in metaphysics – a title he has sought but rarely received” (5). Divided into two sections, the first presents an overview of four of Latour’s most important works; the second is an appraisal and criticism of Latour in light of Harman’s own Object Oriented Ontology.
Chapter one examines Irreductions and introduces Latour’s metaphysics through four key terms: actants, irreductions, translations and alliance. What makes Latour such an interesting philosopher is his ontology of actants. For Latour there is no dividing line between humans and the world, everything is an actant and in this flat ontology all actants enjoy the democracy of objects. Latour is then an ally in any speculative philosophy wanting to overthrow the orthodoxy of post-Kantian metaphysics.
A rhetorical flourish used by Latour and emulated by Harman is what Ian Bogost has called a “Latour Litany”. Latour Litanies are lists of disparate objects strung together, their juxtaposition in any sentence and the equality of written expression reflecting the fact that no object or actant is metaphysically distinguished. “[F]rozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales outfitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesizers, audience analyzers” (We Have Never Been Modern: 49-50), all these things are actants and humans are actants too.
Irreduction is a concept I find more difficult but my understanding is that no actant can be reduced to any other. There are levels of complexity and actants may be complex alliances composed of other actants but there is no fundamental substance or form. All actants are equally ontologically valid.
Translation is the causality of Latours metaphysics. Latour is an actualist, there are no portentials or uninstantiated powers and every actant is an event that happens only once. Translation is then the way in which actants are made mobile, stable and concrete by a causal chain of abstraction.
Finally, alliances are the ways in which actants increase their power and reach in the world. Since actants do not have potentiality or substance it is only by enlisting other actants that changes in any system are affected. For Latour every relation between actants is a conflict and it is the more powerful (better connected) actants which win out and get to organise things their way. Networks of this type do not have centres or tyrannical actant dictators however since every part of the network is a relation between actants all networks and all communication are mediated.
Harman’s writing is even better in an monograph than it is on his blog. I have found the book so far to be illuminating, exciting and a really great pleasure to read. It’s unusual to laugh out loud while reading philosophy but I have done precisely this on more than one occasion.
One section in particular describes the way in which alliances of actants may be dissolved by attacking the strengths which hold it together. “Severing an actant from its allies is easier than it sounds, since allies are never as submissive […] as we think” (51). Yet to sever an actant from its alliances one must be an actant in an alliance capable of such a translation.
To illustrate a clash of actant alliances Harman describes Karl Rove taking on Kant’s philosophical legacy:
Let’s imagine that, in our efforts to counter the dominance of Kant’s Copernican Revolution we, we hire Karl Rove as a consultant. Since Kant has the reputation of a quiet, ascetic seeker after truth, Rove might begin by spreading rumours of Kant’s secret moral turpitude (52).
The rumours might even turn out to be true with a correspondence between Kant and the Marquis de Sade uncovered “[b]ut even with Kant unmasked as a shocking hypocrite, no one’s philosophical position will change very much” (52).
Rove’s next ploy involves uncovering documents revealing Kant’s published philosophical work to be a hoax. A document proven to be in Kant’s hand reveals the whole edifice to be an elaborate ruse. Yet:
in the end most observers would probably conclude that it is not so important whether Kant meant what he said. Kant’s arguments would still be taken seriously insofar as they have genuine merit independent of Kant’s sardonic intent (53).
Finally Rove learns of the criticisms made of Kant’s philosophy by a few dissenters. He begins to study philosophy.
Within a few years he prepares his first philosophical case against Kantian philosophy […]. After another two decades of research, the elderly Rove is now a philosophical juggernaut, hailed in many quarters as the most original metaphysician of the century (53).
To assemble the [alliances] needed to defeat the great philosopher Kant, Karl Rove had to become a great philosopher himself […]. Rove’s attempt to ‘socially construct’ the reputation of Immanuel Kant has failed. Instead, the ideas of Kant have constructed the new life of Karl Rove” (53).
Reasons?
Posted by | Chris | 18.7.10 | 1 Comment
“We may now move on to the genetic or causal claim on the part of externalism”; the first step in this is to move beyond empirical philosophy to embrace a realism concerning causes in nature. Hume has shown that empirical in experimental philosophy causality can only be grounded in “anthroponoetic habit”, which is not grounded at all. Alternative to empirical philosophy then a realist metaphysics must ground causality in something else. Iain argues that Leibniz provides a principle potentially able to do just this.
I’ve read very little Leibniz and have only vague feelings about the kind of work he produced. Looking things up for this post I read interpretation of the principle of sufficient reason (PoSR from now on) as an argument for determinism. The first example given by Iain is from the Monadology: “there can be no fact can real or existing, no statement true, unless there be a sufficient reason why it should be so and not otherwise” (my emphasis). This certainly seems to imply determinism. However, it is not determinism which we are concerned with (not at the moment anyway) but reason and existence and the relationship between them.
Another statement of the PoSR comes in the Theodicy: “nothing ever comes to pass without there being a cause or at least a reason determining it, that is, something to give an a priori reason why it is existent rather than non-existent, and in this wise rather than in any other”. This is halfway to the other formulation given in the chapter (from the Principles of Nature and Grace Based on Reason): “the full cause is equivalent to the entire effect”. That the Theodicy links cause and reason gives some weight to the argument for “equivalence relations between reason and existence and cause and effect”. This argument in the chapter is conditional on the statements from the Monadology and Principles of Nature and Grace being one and not two different principles, a condition for which little argument is made. The formulation of the Theodicy supports the reading of the PoSR as principle of reason and causality. If we accept then that reason and cause are equivalent it is argued that “the reason for existence is a causal one and […] existence is always the effect of a reason”.
The externality thesis taken from Bosanquet coupled with the dynamic interpretation of Parmenides’ identity thesis is suggested as satisfying reason in the equivalent way of the PoSR. I do not fully understand externality but as I read it externality refers to the temporal dimension of nature, the activity (which is genetic) of priors in posteriors (which are complementary) or the metaphysical process of becoming; it is about time, activity and causality then. Causality in this sense is productive and equivalency is then understood generatively: “being = thinking entails that being generates thinking; in naturalistic terms, nature = reason entails that nature generates reasoning” (emphasis in the original).
Three conclusions are drawn from the argument so far:
- “[N]ature thinks, or reasoning is one of the powers causally operative in nature”.
- “[T]hinking is finite with respect to the that generates it”
- Consciousness is the product of reason which is the product of nature. Consciousness is not self creating but is generated by and forms a part of nature.
All this, so far, I think I understand. But I still don’t now what kind of power “thinking” or “reasoning” are. Obviously I experience my own thoughts or reasons but this does not seems the same as a simple cause, the kind active in every event in nature. Two lines of thought may expand this for us. First, the equivalence/generativity of reasons and causes to existents and effects is asymmetric in that “there is more in reason than in existence […] and more causes than have actual effects”. As I mentioned in a previous post I argue that a realist metaphysics will make reference to forms or powers that exceed their particular instantiation. This is a metaphysics in line with Plato (dynamically, not dualistically, understood), an ontology of universal and particular, virtual and real, eternal entity and actual occasion. Whichever way you choose to describe it reality is wider, or deeper, than actuality. In this sense then reason is a power of this depth.
Pierre Hadot’s The Veil of Isis is a history of the idea of nature from Heraclitus aphorism “nature loves to hide (phusis kruptesthai philein)”. These words have been variously understood: that all that lives tends to die; that nature is hard to know; that it wraps itself in sensible forms and myths; that it hides occult virtues within it, and that nature folds and unfolds forms from and infinite or ineffable Being. It is related to this final sense that towards the end of the book Hadot quotes Nietzsche from The Gay Science: “We should have more respect for the modesty with which Nature hides behind enigmas and colourful uncertainties. Perhaps Truth is a women who has reasons for not wanting to let her reasons be seen” (preface §4). The word translated as “reason” is “gründe” in the German. Reason is grounded in reason and these reasons (grounds) extend all the way down. No final reason can be given, for this would deprive reason of its power, and power is ungrounded. This is the second potential line of thought, that reason is the grounding of power and it is from this ground that posterior reasons are generatively powerful.
My etymological dictionary defines “reason” as a “fact or circumstance serving as ground or motive for action; intellectual power, thinking faculty”. Reason in the first sense is gründe; in the second sense raison (Leibniz wrote in French). The generative process of being and the dynamic movement from being to thinking is a serial repetition. Might we talk of this process under a new word (and yet another philosophical language): psyche (psūkhé)? The original meaning of breath, the breath that animates life, has a dipolar character something like a systole and diastole or a contraction and expansion. The contraction of being in actuality is then a formative ground for expansion into reason and contraction to new grounds.
I think it’s time to stop now since, first, I have collapsed the externality which described the dynamic panpsychism argued for, and second, I’m writing bad poetry and quoting from a dictionary. I still have these questions then: what power is reason and where’s the psyche?
On an Artificial Earth
Posted by | Chris | 15.7.10 | 1 Comment
Trying to think through Iain’s paper on panpsychism I thought I’d re-read the Notre Dame review of ‘On an Artificial Earth’. ‘All Things Think’ is a brilliant piece, suggestive of a great many possibilities, but I feel like it’s only a beginning with a great many things left unsaid.
It’s clearly no substitute for actually reading the book, but the review is illuminating of a number of points:
Schelling unveiled in nature a material vitalism that rescues matter from the category of the inert and mechanical to which Kant and Fichte had relegated it. In this way, he understood nature as always more subject than object, the ground and condition of human subjectivity rather than simply the object of human reflection.
Clearly, a vital materialism is something that we’re all interested in, but what really struck me is “nature as subject”. Precisely this point was suggested recently here on the blog in the context of panpsychism and nature as the producer of human subjectivity.
What Grant adds to the general vision of physical dynamism is the thesis (and, yes, this too is very much in Schelling) that nature itself is therefore history.
I want to expand more on this at another time but the history of nature is something that I think is really important. Today I mentioned to Alex the idea of nature’s generativity as based on chance; like the flip of a coin. But as I walked home I thought that this cannot do justice to the repetition of pattern and form which characterises all we see in nature. That nature re-uses, in different places and times, forms that exceed their particular instantiation is I would argue an important point for a realist metaphysics.
Political Science
Posted by | Chris | 14.7.10 | 3 Comments
Panpsychism and Emergence
Posted by | Anonymous | 2.7.10 | 1 Comment
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