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Harman, Graham. "Realism with a Straight Face: A Response to Leonard Lawlor." New Realism and Contemporary Philosophy. Ed. Gregor Kroupa and Jure Simoniti. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 99–112. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350101791.ch-006>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 09:05 UTC. Copyright © Gregor Kroupa and Jure Simoniti 2020. You may share this work for non- commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 6 Realism with a Straight Face: A Response to Leonard Lawlor G r a h a m H a r m a n In the closing weeks of 2017, my Argentine friend Laureano Ral ó n conducted an interview of Leonard Lawlor that I read with great interest.1 Lawlor is currently Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University, and has long been one of the most infl uential members of his generation in the American continental philosophy establishment. He has distinguished himself as a scholar of established classics in philosophy, but also as someone unusually alert to such relatively recent trends as the philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. In short, he has always been near the cutting edge of wherever American continental philosophy happens to be. For this reason, his views on some of the latest developments in continentally inspired philosophy need to be taken seriously. Nonetheless—as will be seen in what follows—I think he gets these developments largely wrong. I hope that Lawlor will take these pages in the spirit of friendly disagreement in which they are intended, though inevitably there will be some friction when two views of the future of continental philosophy as diff erent as ours confront each other. We begin with the third-to-last question of the interview, in which Ral ó n asks Lawlor about “the new realism of the 2000s.” More specifi cally, Ral ó n wants to know if “Deleuze is more of a realist than, say, Heidegger, Foucault, or Derrida.”2 Th is seems like a reasonable question, given the broad spectrum of views on this topic: ranging from Manuel DeLanda’s provocative claim that Deleuze simply is a realist to Ray Brassier’s rather vitriolic account of Deleuze as one of the great anti -realists of recent philosophy. 3 Rather than answering directly, Lawlor challenges the question itself: When I hear the word “realism” today, I’m really not sure what it means. If realism means that we seek the ontological conditions of consciousness, of the subject, then of course Heidegger is a realist. But if realism means that reality exists in itself, separate from experience, then I think this is a return to the “old metaphysics.” . I guess if the debate now is between realism and transcendentalism, then I am a transcendentalist. Simply, I do not see how one can return back beyond Kant’s Copernican Revolution. As Kant showed, if there is a reality beyond the forms in which things are given to us, the noumenal, then we can say nothing about it. And to say anything about reality in itself amounts to falling prey to an illusion. 4 99 100 New Realism and Contemporary Philosophy Here we lodge a fi rst point of disagreement with Lawlor. For object-oriented ontology (OOO, pronounced “Triple O”) just as for DeLanda himself, realism defi nitely does not just mean that “we seek the ontological conditions of consciousness, of the subject,” which is the defl ationary sense of realism that Lawlor off ers. 5 Although I do read Heidegger as a realist, this involves a much more stringently classical defi nition of the term. 6 Th at defi nition—also used by DeLanda when he calls Deleuze a realist—happens to be the very one rejected by Lawlor as a form of the “old metaphysics,” which he rejects in favor of “transcendentalism.” Hence, in the fi rst part of this article, I will defend realism against transcendentalism. But it will be necessary to do a bit more than that: for unlike DeLanda, I regard the notion that “reality exists in itself, separate from experience” to be a necessary condition for realism, but not a suffi cient one. Th e reason for this is that reality exists not just “separate from experience,” but separate from any relation at all , including the sort that is so ontologically primitive that we might hesitate even to call it experience. Finally, I will challenge Lawlor’s rather mainstream assumption that “if there is a reality beyond the forms in which things are given to us, the noumenal, then we can say nothing about it.” For there is actually quite a bit that can be said about the noumenal, paradoxical though it may sound. Th e second interesting passage from Lawlor’s interview, and thus the topic of the second section below, concerns OOO’s connection with the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux. Th e link is not at all how Lawlor portrays it; nor does he get Meillassoux quite right. I speak of the following passage: While I fi nd Meillassoux’s Aft er Finitude to be an interesting work, the argument he makes for ancestral time is very weak. How could we speak about anything that is prior to givenness, when what we are speaking about must have been given to us somehow? If it was not given somehow, we would know nothing about it. Th erefore, it seems to me that Meillassoux and his followers—object-oriented ontologists— are dogmatists. What must be explored fi rst of all, as Husserl showed, are the modes of givenness.7 Several problems arise in this passage even before we reach the key point of philosophical interest. First, though I am happy to hear that Lawlor fi nds Meillassoux’s Aft er Finitude 8 to be an interesting book, he seems to get the basic argument of that book wrong. Lawlor claims that Meillassoux makes a “very weak” argument for ancestral time, and that the French philosopher thereby mistakenly assumes we can speak about something beyond its givenness. Yet, this is not actually what Meillassoux does. His entire book is based on the assumption that both the claim of science to speak of a world independent of givenness and the correlationist claim that there is no way to speak of anything prior to givenness are persuasive. 9 He does not simply belittle correlationism at the expense of scientifi c realism, but employs considerable fi nesse in trying to fi nd a novel solution that incorporates the insights of both. Th ough I happen to think his solution fails, it is not the simplistic “na ï ve realist” solution that Lawlor seems to imagine, but something far more intricate.10 Furthermore, in no sense are object-oriented ontologists “followers” of Meillassoux, as even a cursory reading of my criticisms of Meillassoux’s position would show. And fi nally, it is hard to see how Realism with a Straight Face: A Response to Leonard Lawlor 101 Lawlor can call object-oriented philosophers “dogmatists” when the entire OOO position is based on the acceptance and amplifi cation of Kant’s notion of the thing-in- itself: the very kryptonite of all dogmatism. In the second section of this article, then, I will show how Lawlor misreads: (a) Meillassoux’s approach to realism, (b) Meillassoux’s relation to OOO, and (c) OOO’s position with respect to dogmatism. Th e third and fi nal passage from Lawlor’s interview that I wish to consider is the following, which concerns the status of the human being in recent continental philosophy: Here too, one more comment: as far as I can tell, the object-oriented ontologists do not really understand what the transcendental is, especially as this idea develops in 20th century phenomenology. Th e transcendental and even the transcendental subject are not human. Th e whole 20th century discourse of anti-humanism develops from the recognition that Dasein in Being and Time is not human, not human existence or human reality. Fundamental ontology and transcendental phenomenology are not forms of anthropology. While not equating the two, Dasein in Heidegger and transcendental subjectivity in Husserl refer, respectively, to the conditions for human existence and the conditions for human subjectivity— but these two kinds of conditions are not identical with human existence and human subjectivity. If they were, they would engage in the kind of circular reasoning we discussed earlier. Already in transcendental phenomenology, humans are “actants,” as I think some of the object-oriented ontologists say, along with objects. 11 Having already declared himself on the side of transcendental philosophy, Lawlor preemptively critiques OOO for misunderstanding what that position entails. Specifi cally, Lawlor holds that OOO is wrong to fi nd transcendental philosophy guilty of a human-centered standpoint. He does get one thing right: OOO does, in fact, claim that transcendental philosophy is anthropocentric. Making unexpected use of the terminology of Bruno Latour (who still seems little known among American continental philosophers) Lawlor claims that Heidegger’s Dasein is already an “actant,” thereby implying that OOO is reinventing the wheel when it tries to outfl ank Heidegger on the side of anti-anthropocentrism. 12 Th e third section of this chapter, then, will address Lawlor’s view that Heidegger is already as “anti-humanist” as one can possibly be. I Realism and the “old metaphysics” We have seen that Lawlor expresses some perplexity about the meaning of the word “realism” in its contemporary usage.