My oh my there are some dirty words: linear, naive, folk. And here's a super dirty one: metaphysics.
See Derrida (or at least a form of deconstruction) did a number on ever using it again without embarrassment.
This provides cover for a certain form of scientism that also eschews metaphysics, but for another reason. It's interested in beating up on “folk” philosophy, that is, philosophy that doesn't kowtow to scientism.
Heaven forbid we ever get caught being metaphysical. Dawkins, or Derrida, would be very upset with us. Yet science rests on all kinds of metaphysical assumptions. For instance, some scientists think that physical laws are immutable. That's a belief at this point. Others are eliminationists. That's also a belief.
These are the only two reasons I can think that Hägglund insists that he isn't advocating “neo-realism” or a kind of “ontology.” And for sure they are reasons why an advocate of Hägglund might enjoy him: he's making a rigorous case for a belief that is sanctioned by scientism, namely a certain form of atheism, which he now bankrolls with a certain form of reductionism.
Why use Darwin, then, as one's example of the trace structure? A Shakespeare play would do. Or an Austen novel. Why Darwin, unless perchance there is a metaphysics in there?
Of course there's a metaphysics in there. For a kickoff, there's the strongly metaphysical statement that matter subtends life. It implies an ontological view, reductionism. It rules out other forms of view, such as vitalism.
This move is either incoherent or disingenuous. To use Darwin and not a “scholastic” or whomever is to prefer Darwin. Either you're saying you aren't being metaphysical, while being patently metaphysical, or you're performing some kind of knowing exclusion of the “wrong” sort of metaphysics.
I know. I used Darwin and sent him on a blind date with Dawkins and Levinas in The Ecological Thought. It was all I could do to keep from buying the neo-Darwinist attitude (“Everything you say is nonsense until you agree with me”). I'm sure I bought into it in places.
The dice are loaded towards certain kinds of science. Time as a succession of moments (past, present, future) just is a fundamental feature of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century science. This conveniently means that you can be as metaphysical as you like when it comes to policing the “wrong sort” of view, without having to be explicit.
To say you're only logically grounding good arguments, not doing metaphysics, is to beg the question: you are bankrolling these not those arguments. You are advocating an ontology.
To use logic is to move preformed pieces around, into their proper places (pace Derrida on the proper). Thus there are already pieces, a certain game, a certain space of play, certain rules—a certain ontology. If you really are just being logical, then you're using someone's preformed conceptual pieces. (I'm a Hegelian on this score.)
What are those pieces? Why, pieces of reductionist materialism, long refuted by twentieth-century physics itself.
What got me from deconstruction to OOO was a decision to be explicit about ontology, not implicit. It's just disingenuous to hide behind the coattails of the other and say you're not doing metaphysics.
12 comments:
I understand you've been reading Bakunin lately. Gotta say, writing at the moment he was, he also thought 'metaphysics' was a dirty word:
"One must, for instance, be at bottom either a fool or a theologician or at least a metaphysician, jurist or bourgeois economist to rebel against the law by which twice two make four."
-What is authority?
From what I can tell science is really about a methodology, which is why so many different ontological and metaphysical positions have fit under the umbrella of the sciences. What pragmatic difference does holding to this or that metaphysical position/attitude make in what scientists (not science) are doing when they make experiments, control for errors and describe results (among still other things).
"You must never read or like anything that remotely differs from your view. Purism above all. Cynicism above that."
sounds like Epistemology to me
Haha! You need a book of jokes, something like those Head First Java Books with cartoons, a Head First for OOO with you, Harman, Bogost, and Levi humorously opining on the wonders of objects :)
"'You must never read or like anything that remotely differs from your view. Purism above all. Cynicism above that.'"
So, the scientific practice (coming up with hypotheses, constructing the means for testing them, actually deploying the experimental apparatus, actually coming up with findings/measurements, actually recording/reporting them, actually going back and applying those to whatever hypotheses and the theories that subtend them) isn't different, but that attitude one takes toward what is worthwhile or relevant? That makes the issue seem to be that these scientists who doggedly hold to their disavowed metaphysical assumptions are simply not being wholesome (samma) scientists. Do disavowed metaphysical assumptions give rise to partial/spurious science and if so, then what is partial/spurious about the scientific practice that is not simply the scientists unwillingness to let go of said assumptions? Or is it that doing wholesome science is testing things the partial scientists are unwilling to, in which case nothing is really different about the practice, just the extent of its application.
Remember Joe, I'm not talking about science. Many of my nearest and dearest are scientists. I'm talking about scientism. I'm talking about Harris beating up Chopra on TV for quoting (accurately) particle physicists. Because he is a reductionist mechanist. Because he has a metaphysics. But he says he doesn't. He's a neuroscientist. But he's also scientistic.
I get you, Tim. I guess I'm just trying to figure out whether scientism as an ideology has a material support in the way science is done outside of how things get funded, what lines of research get pursued and what gets said in public. If not, then are we just dealing with a kind of false-consciousness? I ask because of my background with Zizek, but to be honest I think that half of what he calls cynical reasoning sounds like malarkey.
Could you give me a reference where Derrida/deconstruction "did a number on ever using metaphysics again without embarrassment", please?
Please, could you give me a reference where Derrida "did a number on ever using" metaphysics again "without embarrassment"?
Many thanks
Hi wake65, pretty much everywhere, but "Violence and Metaphysics" is a pretty easy one to start, in Writing and Difference. Then I'd do "Plato's Pharmacy" in Dissemination followed by the long piece on Rousseau in Of Grammatology. But the shortest one is the essay "Différance."
Trust can only be created but never destroyed. Lets wait and see what happens next?
Post a Comment