My Question for Graham Harman regarding Scientific Materialism

Graham Harman spoke at DePaul today on “A New Look at Identity and Sufficient Reason" to a packed room.  His paper was a relatively straightforward account of some differences between his Object-Oriented philosophy and the work of Quentin Meillassoux.  These differences are, I expect, well known to those who are following the speculative realist literature so I am not interested in recounting them here.  Harman’s paper was structured so that he could provide a succinct and readily accessible account of his own thoughts on object-oriented ontology (OOO).  It was very helpful to novices such as I am.

The questions that followed were probing, querulous to some extent, but the exchange was good humored and Graham gave a stout defense in respond to any objections that were raised.  The only question that seemed to give him real pause, or so it seemed to me, was one from Will McNeill (who chaired Harman’s dissertation committee back in the day), who suggested (if I am getting this right) that Heidegger had abandoned his phenomenological approach of the 1920s and by the mid-thirties in, for example, The Origin of the Work of Art had been doing a type of philosophy that began with the object.  That is, McNeill was ratifying a certain distinction between early and later Heidegger that Harman is not prepared to concede.  Harman has called Heidegger “a rather monotonous philosopher”.  The exchange was fueled by a high-octane level Heidegger-speak that is above my pay-grade, so to speak, but if I followed the thrust of it, it hinged on the question of whether Heidegger himself took the object-oriented turn, thus blunting some of the claims that OOO is more out of the mainstream of continental philosophy than it might seem.  I did appreciate Harman’s taking this on board and he seemed to indicate that he’d give it some more thought. 

My main purpose in this short post is the restate a question that I asked and would like to hear more on at some point.  The question is a simple one, and may have been so simply stated that the question was not especially clear.  In the circumstances I cannot be dissatisfied with Harman’s response.  Noting that I am a scientist by training (an ecologist) I suggested that natural scientists were already, in some respects, naïve realists.  And if that is the case I asked what OOO does for or to science.  I had in mind here a couple of things.  Firstly, scientists generally would have little objection to the notion that inanimate objects should be given the same priority in our thinking about the world as the human-object relationship. They act, that is, as if they are outside a correlationist circle, mainly because most of us have never considered that we are in one in the first place!  Natural science doesn't have an ontology at all in the (trivial) sense that scientists typically proceed without systematically inspecting their ontological commitments!  Secondly, I also had in mind Harman acknowledgment that OOO seems to have something in common with scientific materialism (which is, of course, not the same thing as doing science).  In The Quadruple Object he finds a number of problems with scientific materialism.  One of these is that the object-object relationship in scientific materialism is “insufficiently realistic” because it “does not raise the genuine philosophical problem of how two entities can relate…”  This seems right to me, but I am interested then in how OOO might do a better job in relation to science than materialist accounts do.

In Graham’s response he correctly pointed out that philosophy should not be in the business of being a handmaiden to the sciences (fair enough!).  Scientists will have to see for themselves how their practice might respond to emerging developments in ontology.  However, it seems unlikely that they will as most will remain happily unaware that they either are or are not on shaky ground as the philosophical landscape swirls and changes around them.  There are costs to this cavalierness - something I'll write about later.

Graham did make some potentially helpful comments about OOO and one branch of the natural sciences in particular – ecology.  Noting that Tim Morton (one of the OOO band) is doing interesting work in this area -- I am very enthusiastic about Tim's work, by the way -- , Harman indicated that with Morton’s notions of the mesh, strange strangers etc. that ecology would have to revisit its notion that "everything is connected."  This is interesting to me since as an ecologist I can assure us all that ecology as a scientific discipline is as much concerned with the limits of connection as it is with connections per se.  If everything was indeed connected this world would fall apart like a game of jenga!  I am not quibbling with Harman here, I just want to note that there is some potentially exciting work to be done in introducing object-oriented philosophers to natural scientists and vice versa.  This is not work that many philosophers or scientists have an appetite for, and most need not respond to the call, but for those that do, the results of the dialogue will be interesting.

It was a very stimulating afternoon and I thank Graham for it.

No Jordan and Morton Discussion Tomorrow

Because of some logistical snafus (Heneghan’s) we will not meet tomorrow nor for a few weeks.  

Here’s the plan: We are reading The Sunflower Forest http://www.amazon.com/The-Sunflower-Forest-Ecological-Restoration/dp/0520272706/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334175269&sr=1-3 And

The Ecological Thought http://www.amazon.com/The-Ecological-Thought-Timothy-Morton/dp/0674064224/ref=tmm_pap_title_0 side by side…back to front etc.  

Rather that read small sections at a time I am urging us all the read both thoroughly in April and then we can convene every Thursday morning 11:30 am in McGowan S rm 204 in May.  I shall send us out a reading schedule soon.

Both books are now available in paperback...let Liam know if you care to join us when we reconvene in May. Price of admission is having read the books!

Tim Morton’s Marinade: An Interdisciplinary Recipe for The Ecological Thought

 “Quantity humiliates.⁶⁸”p40 

"68. TI, 137, 274" p 143"

From Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought.
(TI, Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority)

In the introductory sequence to each episode of Clever Apes, a science segment on WBEZ, a Chicago-based NPR affiliate, a small explosion sounds its bang and a kid goes “Whoa!”  That’s the sound of science. 

But it may be more than that.  The frisson of a fantastic bang can reverberate as the disciplines collide and that sound alone might be reason enough, says Tim Morton author of The Ecological Thought, to tempt us to indulge in an interdisciplinarity exchange.  “The ecological thought”, Morton writes, “is intrinsically queer.  (Joining ecological thinking with thinking on gender and sexuality would make a fantastic bang, and this is reason alone to try it.)”

The ecological thought is that everything is connected, the living, the dead and the never-alive. Intertwined in this mesh are strange strangers, entities with whom (with which?) we are connected and yet cannot predict.  The more we learn about our mesh-mates the more crepuscular they seem.  There is more to say on this, in fact there will quite literally always more to say about this because there is no bottom to get to – it is a mesh.  I am re-reading The Ecological Thought with colleagues at DePaul’s University’s Institute for Nature and Culture and will write more specifically about the book in the coming weeks. 

For now, I want to comment on Tim’s work as an interdisciplinary model. Not to promote it as the model, but rather to ask what sort of interdisciplinarity it might represent, and moreover to show what this particular species of interdisciplinarity looks like.  I want to quantify it. 

Now, if there ever was a thought that’s going to transcend a discipline it will be the ecological thought, since the ecological thought contains the disciplines that might try to grapple with it.  In her taxonomy of interdisciplinarity (ID) Julie Thomson Klein reported that the defining characteristic of transciplinarity TD (let’s assume here that TD is a variant form of ID) is that it is transcending, transgressing, and transforming. [1] That the topic of Tim’s book is transcending cannot be in much doubt for the reason stated above.  As we are pushed to the brink in thinking the ecological thought we are “goad[ed]..to greater levels of consciousness, which means more stress, more disappointment, less gratification(though perhaps more satisfaction), and more bewilderment.”  (ET, 135.)  The ecological thought transgresses in that we can’t be the same having really thought it.  If Tim is correct we can’t be the same because the thought nags us with the realization that we were never what we thought we were.  We are part of a mesh.  We have transgressed (Latin, transgredī, to step across, OED) – we have leapt out of our own skin, which never was much of a boundary anyway.  The ecological thought will transform us – it already has.

Deep, Dark and Shameful: Morton and Jordan and Our Ecological Futures

Over the coming weeks I will be re-reading books by two authors who have been important to me in recent years: William Jordan III's The Sunflower Forest: Ecological Restoration and the NewCommunion with Nature and his new Making Nature Whole: A History of Ecological Restoration, as well as Tim Morton's Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics and The Ecological Thought.

In particular I am interested in the relationship between two terms in these books: "shame" in Bill Jordan's work and "dark" in Tim Morton's work.  

Briefly, Bill regards the jettisoning of shame in contemporary culture (or the desire to avoid shame) as being problematic since it is through our grappling with shame that, arguably, we get to transcendent values such as beauty, meaning and community (in this he is drawing upon the work of critic Fred Turner).  Shame is differentiated in this account from guilt in as much as the former is not necessarily associated with wrongdoing.  Rather, shame is the painful awareness of limitation or shortcoming - existential shame as Bill qualifies it.  For instance, I personally feel the hot sting of shame twice each week in my French translation class, not because I have naughtily neglected my homework (when I do, I may feel guilty) but because my woeful facility with this language becomes publicly apparent.  Especially significant for Bill is that ecological restoration, unlike many other forms of ecological activity (or inactivity - i.e. environmental asceticism: see here or a shorter version here) provides an encounter with shame, or to put it as Bill does, it "implicates the restorationist in the universal scandal of creation [and] provides a context for achieving communion with creation."  To deal with shame then is to willfully tussle with the less seemly aspects of existence, rather than to ascetically disengage from the world with all it problematic aspects.

Robinson Jeffers' Inhumanism: The Ecological Thought or The Misanthropic Rebuke?

I have been rereading poems by Pittsburgh born Robinson Jeffers (1887 – 1962) with my seminar class recently.  Jeffers has had a perennial appeal for environmentally-inclined readers, with his wilderness inflected meditations on his adopted home on the California coast.  The poems that I know (I am a Jeffers amateur) are sturdy rather than pretty, and charged with solid thought rather than airy abstractions.  Though there has been some discussion among the critics about his influences (was Schopenhauer as important to him as Nietzsche?) what strikes me are the thematic resonances with on the one hand American environmental writers both before and after him and, on the other, with themes from the Upanishads (which I am reading with another class).

The influence of the Upanishads, philosophical texts in the Hindu tradition, on Emerson and Thoreau is pretty well known.  The Upanishads were also famously a source for Schopenhauer (and Schopenhauer, of course, exerted a substantial influence on Nietzsche). Finally, these texts also influenced W B Yeats, whom Jeffers admired (see this post).  The Upanishads rest at the intersection therefore of many of Jeffers’ more important inspirations.  From this influence Jeffers can create striking things.  In The Answer (1935), for example, he writes:

“A severed hand/ is an ugly thing, and a man dissevered from the earth and the stars and his history…for contemplation or in fact… /Often appears atrociously ugly.  Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is/ Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.