Category Archives: Inscribed Electrons

“Institutional levels” are not necessarily indicative of significance at the level of ideas and discursive production.

Monod’s “Chance and Necessity” was a bestseller, and its themes would have certainly been in the air after he won the Nobel prize in 1965.  

Perhaps Derrida’s: “The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end.” alludes to it? Who knows?

If you consider Bachelard et al. marginal now, this only refers to the fact that their works are ignored by present trends of Anglophone appropriation. They do not fit into the particular schematism of contrived contentions demanded by an Anglophone readership eager to comfort itself through replays of the historical victories enabled by empirical method, a method that has merely arranged the ‘world’ in its own image, commandeering it through an emphasis on military technique, generating only the global scenario of a rudderless ‘modernity’ drifting in the the infinite seas of ‘alienation’, ‘freedom’ and ‘possibility’. Post-Modernity brought in a fresh consideration of these issues, applying eminently modernist formalisms, reflexively, to the processes of modernity itself. This has obviously proved too much for those who merely chant ‘progress’ as a mantra, believing in the argot of ‘modernity’, even as it displaced the autonomies of everything contrary to its projects, to the extension of its ‘networks’, and supplied them with the booty, the sp(oil)s?, of this regimentation. But this ‘supply’ has been getting a little uncertain, recently. Time to boost the old ‘self-esteem’, the flagging spirits, let’s run the good ol’ narratives of ‘can-do’, no-nonsense reductionism again, the ones that gave us what we have, the simple ones that we can understand, the ones with heroes like Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud.        

You cite Husserl’s epoche, Heidegger’s questioning of technology, the ‘linguistic turn’, and social constructivism, as if they are wayward aberrations from the orthodoxy of ‘naturalism’. You then magnanimously state that you are not suggesting the rejection of phenomenology. You call for a ‘naturalistic’ revision of these errant discourses. You don’t seem to be thinking too clearly, or at least deeply enough, in offering these claims. To be fair, the initial post was a manifesto of intent, and your response is carried by the momentum of its zeal. You also qualify this:

“The truth of the matter, however– and I won’t even bother to make arguments here –is that naturalism and materialism are the only credible philosophical positions today.”

And, of course, your qualification is couched in an unequivocal declaration of your ‘orientation’. lol

1) The outlook of naturalisms (there isn’t just one) are very adequately represented: the sensus communis is replete with their  presuppositions. ‘Scientific naturalisms’ are informed by a general ‘common sense’, and this forms a large measure of their persuasive appeal. But it’s often a simplistic appeal, and we live in a complex world: the inveterate reduction of these complexities to populist criteria is not always a good thing.

2) If I have a problem with my tap (US: faucet), it makes sense to call a plumber and listen to his advice. If I want to learn about the composition of a globular cluster, I should ask an astrophysicist. If I wish to ascertain the modalities of ‘mental process’, it would help to have the input of a phenomenologist, a neurophysicist, a psychologist, a philosopher, a yogi: which one, would depend on the specific goal or purpose guiding the inquiry. Definitely, all of them would have something interesting and unique to offer, to ignore any of them would be an impoverishment.

 3) If someone wants to engage in naturalistic revision of fields that are allegedly non-naturalistic, go ahead, interesting things can result from that. But don’t try to suppress a ‘natural’ tendency for people to think otherwise. They might come up with something of interest, too.

4) Regarding the epoche (Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonian scepticism, Husserl), in Husserl’s case his explicit method was to suspend the natural attitude, in order to see what would result from what he felt would be an unprejudiced focus on ‘actual phenomenal experience’. For you to suggest a ‘naturalistic’ revision of this is revealing.

  i) It is simply contradictory. It’s like telling a vegetarian restaurant that, yes, they can be vegetarian, but they must revise their menu to include meat dishes.

 ii) The fact that you indulge in such contradiction indicates a lack of awareness, as well as your stated unwillingness to acknowledge, that ‘naturalism’ is a position, if it is conceptually articulated. Your assumption of ‘naturalism’s’ exclusive credibility leads you to position yourself in Husserl’s workshop, with its sign on the door saying ‘No Natural Attitude Beyond This Point’, with a sandwich board on your shoulders that declares: “Naturalism is nigh!” lol

There are multiple ways to question Husserl’s project, do you feel you’ve chosen the most effective one? There is a point where such assumption amounts to ev(angel)istic (demon)stration, rather than reasoned consideration.

5) ‘Naturalism’ could be said to be a kind of ‘sedimented pragmatism’, the historical accumulation of coping strategies that have worked, to one degree or another. That’s important, but it isn’t a justification for closing off or limiting other considerations, even seemingly opposing ones. There’s always more routes to follow.

“The central failure of Continental philosophy has been the rejection of naturalism.”

Is this really an accurate characterisation of Continental philosophy?

Aside from ignoring notable instances such as Gaston Bachelard, Rene Thom, Jacques Monod, perhaps even Michel Serres, all of whom have been hugely influential in ‘Continental philosophy’, it is insensitive to philosophy’s obligation to consider all claims, all positions, all traditions, and not to presuppose the privilege of any one of them, just because of a measure of any popular success.

Have not conceptions of Nature varied through the ages?

This variation indexes contingency in what counts as scientific knowledge, at any particular time, sometimes in a quite profound way.

In any statistical distribution, any calculation of an ‘average’ serves commonality and not the ‘outlier’. ‘Nature’ is the residual conceptualisation that emerges from such a sifting of ‘experiences’, the filtering for ‘consistency’: sometimes, the ‘outlier’ phenomenon is host to scientific possibilities radically different to what the ‘received consensus’ claims. And, perhaps, it is this that is of most interest. The insight that jumps to a new understanding, instead of mere combinatorics.

“If you find yourself explaining being in terms of the signifier, text, rhetoric, culture, power, history, or lived experience, then your thought deserves to be committed to flame.”

This is disturbing, it is redolent of other book burning practioners rather than David Hume. Hume’s scepticism emerged out of a genuine philosophic path, rather than the unthinking ‘cult-speaks’ that characterise the epoch of an exploitative ‘modernity’, of which ‘speculative realism’ seems to be the most recent, sub-cultural ‘gang’ argot. A collation of anachronies and out-of-context citations, ‘speculative realism’ attempts to contrive imaginary philosophical contentions by replaying ‘positions’ noone has seriously held for centuries.

I remember telling a physics and philosophy student about a joke I’d written, involving an army of Hume clones rushing around and burning books. He laughed a little too much. It wasn’t really that funny.

“The point is not that these other orientations have failed to make contributions to our understanding of the natural world, but that they have mistakenly treated these things as grounds of the natural world, rather than the reverse.”

If the ‘naturalist’ believes all those ‘orientations’ are rooted in the ‘natural’: if the ‘natural’ is a self-enclosed system of mutual ‘self-referentialitease’: who is to say what is a ‘ground’ or not? What confers the attribute of ‘ground-ness’?

“Your thought is a reaction formation to the narcissistic wound of the fact that your existence is contingent and that you are only the third of the three great apes.”

“great apes”? – “‘You are reckless in your modesty!'” (Sheckley:1966) lol

A thought is a thought, wherever it seems to be hosted, its spatiotemporal qualities (‘materiality’, etc.,) are features to be taken into consideration, not excuses to limit the scope of that thought only according to a particular ‘lowest common denominator’ understanding.

“There’s even a bit of truth in Christ, Paul, and Buddha.”

Can you speak so assuredly on concepts of truth that you are able to dispense portions of it to those traditions which played a large part in their very formation?

“All you need to do is abandon the notion that humans aren’t an animal, that somehow being is dependent on humans and culture, and that somehow we have ends like knowledge and transcendence. All you have to do is re-interpret the entirety of your claims about lived experience, the signifier, culture, power, etc., in naturalistic terms.”

anima, animation? soul?

knowledge, transcendence

These are all open concepts, perspectives whose resolutions according to this or that logic, whether ‘scientific’ or otherwise, are themselves contingent and arbitrary.

‘Naturalistic reinterpretations’ are the easiest thing in the world, all it means is that one reinterprets according to the vocabulary of relatively uncontentious ‘physical presences’: the systems where they seem to have most theoretical consistency, and the ‘lowest common denominator’. The problem is that there is always more than one way to do this, and that everything one rejects as extraneous comes rushing back at ‘deeper levels’ of investigation.

Any search for the ‘ground’ of the manifest, always leads to a non-manifest principle, a theory, a novel principle of form, a substantial configuration derived from the very manifestations it is supposed to account for. So it is a self-referring system. But it is never fully closed. As Derrida says: “Meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless.” This applies to everything, not just ‘language’. Would not Godel have said something similar?

If the Occidental tradition can come up with no more than the disingenuously regurgitated contentions of ‘Speculative Realism’, then it hasn’t moved beyond Derrida and the 60’s. And ‘speculative realism’ is merely a reactionary nostalgia for the comforting ‘finitudes’ of ‘anthropic’ forms of ‘presence’ (‘self’, ‘world’, ‘substantia’, etc.,) in a ‘universe’ that always exceeds the limited comprehension of an exploitative mentality.