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Object-Oriented Philosophy as Ponzi Scheme: On Financial and Metaphysical Bubbles
I was inspired by Kvond’s excellent post at his blog Frames /sing—please do read it—responding to my informal comments over at this Perverse Egalitarianism thread, where I wrote a brief critique of the work of Graham Harman and the object-oriented philosophy (henceforth, OOP) movement that has recently coalesced around him, to formalize them a little bit into a post here at the Howler.
On the topic of Steven Shaviro and Graham Harman’s recent conversation/debate about object-oriented aesthetics, Mikhail Emelianov over at Perverse Egalitarianism perspicaciously notes:
If I understand Shaviro’s point about OOP being an essentially aesthetic position (and Harman himself, I think, said that much), then it doesn’t seem as though anyone is really pretending to sell anything to anyone. I think there’s a certain amount of realpolitik going on here, especially in terms of Harman’s advices on how to become a successful philosopher – all those things are true, it’s just that they are usually discussed behind-the-scenes and not on blogs. Maybe he is doing us all a service with his advice columns? I mean his real advice columns, not that stuff when under the mask of giving advice he simply describes his own way of doing things (like the disappointing “Composition of Philosophy” series that I followed for a bit until I realized I’m reading Harman’s writing diary and don’t see how it would apply to me at all).
My real point is simple – I do sometimes react in a way that shows
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Realism and Correlationism: Truth
I haven’t had a chance to read Quentin Meillassoux’s much-discussed After Finitude yet, but this post over at Grundlegung, which, among other things, defends the complexity of the Kantian “thing in itself” against speculative realist reduction, is a pretty marvelous read. It’s also probably one of the few, if only, somewhat inspiring posts I’ve read throughout the rather asinine Realism Wars™. The real bite of the post comes here:
Even with these revisions in place, it seems to me that Meillassoux mischaracterises the thrust of the Kantian strategy. Kant is not trying to redefine truth or objectivity in intersubjective terms, under the pressure of epistemological constraints introduced by transcendental idealism. Instead, he attempts to vindicate certain a priori concepts — such as the categories of the understanding — as being objectively valid. For example, these concepts include like causality, as a necessary connection between two events. These concepts figure in Kant’s attempt to provide a reformed and legitimate metaphysics, able to justify the concepts to which it appeals. In contrast with empirical concepts, such as bear or atom, we supposedly cannot give a full defence of them by simply looking to the world and seeing whether there is anything which corresponds to them (recall Hume’s scepticism about justifying causality). For Kant, these concepts have a special status: “since they speak of objects through predicates not of intuition and sensibility but of pure a priori thought, they relate to objects universally, that is, apart from all conditions of sensibility.” (B120) Not being based upon experience, they “arouse suspicion.”
If Kant had argued that truth is reducible to universalizable intersubjectivity, then the first Critique would’ve been far less devastating for both traditional metaphysics, as well as skepticism. What Kant is really after with his transcendental philosophy is a critique of introspection by way of introspection.