“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.
I think that Levi Bryant is indulging in word magic, or is being dramatically misled by words (his title “Fighting Words” then takes on a more comic, though also more appropriate meaning, like fighting windmills. My thesis for a while now has been that OOO is concept-blind and in place of concepts and arguments fetishises words and ritual phrases). Just because it’s called bracketing the “natural” attitude does not mean it is anti-naturalist, au contraire! However it does mean that we are not naive objectivists and want to subject the environing mixture of common-sensism and scientism to critical scrutiny.
One can ask whether Husserl was an ‘idealist’ or ‘realist’, or whatever, but it helps maybe to be sympathetic to what his project actually was trying to achieve. My impression now, correct me if i’m wrong, is that he was trying to achieve a kind of neutral, ground-zero, untainted by any sort of metaphysics at all, introducing only that which was revealed by phenomenological method. So the importation of any presupposition not necessitated by the method would be seen as a vitiation by Husserl. If eidetic structures of ‘ontological regions’ emerged that were homologous to the logical structures of a metaphysics of ‘Nature’ that would be a scientific confirmation of the metaphysics, in Husserl’s view. Husserl was all about scientific method, as applied to ‘phenomena’. It’s about the ‘logical investigation’ of ‘appearances’, ‘phenomena’, ‘things themselves’ and the (eidetic?) structures that can be discerned in and from them.
As already stated, the project can be questioned, his method can be questioned, but it would help to take him seriously, and not just import one’s own presuppositions, without good reason, into the heart of what Husserl was doing.
Any ‘materialist’ who proposes a ‘naturalisation’ of phenomenology is putting ‘the cart before the horse’, so to speak. Because Husserl’s phenomenology is supposed to pre-empt the biases producing conventional metaphysical distinctions. It’s an attempt to delineate ‘constitutions’, but in a broader way than more specific, or fragmented, ‘utility’-based inquiries.
This is why Husserl felt it could be a good candidate to unify the other sciences: like them, it is engaged in perpetual investigation, unlike them, it is engaged in theoretical questioning of foundations and contexts.
To suppress this questioning is to produce a darker version of phenomenology: the mere administration of a predetermined and colonised being.
Once again we have a furtive shifting between an extended concept of naturalism as the suspending of transcendence: naturalism as immanence (the thesis that “there is nothing outside the world”), and a more restricted notion of naturalism as the extrapolated unifying framework of the sciences. On the extended sense of naturalism, nothing can be ruled out a priori except transcendence and transcendent causation. In this sense a naturalist could accept teleological causes, that would be a matter of research. Husserl is a philosopher of immanence and the bracketing of the natural attitude brackets out concepts and assumptions that are transcendent to this field.
So I think Bryant falls foul of the Laruellian critique that he posits naturalism twice: the extended but weak sense of immanence and then some hoddgepodge that he can never decide on containing whatever specific hypothese he needs at the moment of proclamation to specify his naturalism. The strong, but always changinng and ever oscillating between mechanism, materialism and physicalism, is somehow meant to be reinforced by the weaker more philosophical naturalism, which is itself reinforced by the “scientific” content. Having two forms of immanence he can exclude a maximum of potential rivals. With weak philosophical immanence he thinks he can exclude teleology in the sciences (but he can’t!) and with strong scientific immanence he thinks he can exclude Husserl and Foucault and whoever. But research (and here I include both philosophy and science) is not so much about demarcation and exclusion as critical investigation and experimentation.
This comment is answered here: The Final Refractions of Common Sense (sensus communis), the Clarifications of Commerce