Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon

Sunday

Separating the Inseparable

For the Sake of the Objects Themselves

The bête noire of the recently emergent philosophical school of speculative realism (which also goes by other names, but I will make it easy on myself and employ only this formulation, whatever its inadequacies) is correlationism. What are the speculative realists rejecting? What is correlationism? Quentin Meillassoux, in his After Finitude, offers an explicit characterization:

“…the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant seems to be that of correlation. By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.”

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, p. 5

While Meillassoux specifically cites Kant, one feels that it is rather the Cartesian tradition that is the real target. Meillassoux is a Frenchman, and the Cartesian tradition remains institutionalized in France in a way not unlike the way in which Kantianism is institutionalized in the Germanophone world. After all, Descartes initiated philosophical modernism by asserting cogito ergo sum, which connects thinking and being in a particularly intimate and essential way.

In the twentieth century the Cartesian tradition was primarily represented by Husserl’s phenomenology, and it is impossible to read Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism without supposing that he is calling out Husserl. Husserl didn’t call his phenomenology correlationism, but rather formulated his position in terms of intentionality, but it amounts to much the same thing.

Here’s what Husserl has to say about intentionality in his classic and very condensed book (that begins by invoking Descartes in the first section of the work) Cartesian Meditations, eponymously named for Descartes himself:

“Inquiry into consciousness concerns two sides (for the present we are leaving out of consideration the question of the identical Ego); they can be characterized descriptively as belonging together inseparably. The sort of combination uniting consciousness with consciousness can be characterized as synthesis, a mode of combination exclusively peculiar to consciousness.”

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, section 17, p. 39

Later, in section 20 of the same work, Husserl elaborates:

“Intentional analysis is guided by the fundamental cognition that, as a consciousness, every cogito is indeed (in the broadest sense) a meaning of its meant [Meinung seines Gemeinten], but that, at any moment, this something meant [dieses Vermeinte] is more something meant with something more than what is meant at that moment “explicitly”.

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, section 20, p. 46

Throughout the Cartesian Meditations Husserl uses “correlate,” “correlates,” “correlative,” and “correlatively” quite freely to express aspects of intentionality, and there is no question that Husserl is the source of the “co-givenness, of the co-relation, of the co-originary, of co-presence, etc.” (p. 5) to which Meillassoux refers.

The explicit rejection of correlationism, then, among the speculative realists, is an explicit rejection of Husserl and the phenomenological tradition. This is interesting for us in several ways, but what I will point out at present is that it points to the continued vitality of the phenomenological tradition that it should still inspire such explicit renunciation.

I must point out here that much post-war continental philosophy — indeed, the greater part of what we now think of as “continental” philosophy — is an unambiguous rejection of Husserl and phenomenology, and these are rejections that go in different directions. Foucault was clearly reacting against phenomenology, as was Derrida, who was a very careful reader of Husserl, and very careful in his renunciation of phonocentrism (or phonologism, call it what you will, as this is also a movement that goes by many names) that he found in Husserl. But Foucault and Derrida cannot even themselves be assimilated to or reduced to a single “continental” tradition, since they went in different directions and criticized each other quite unambiguously.

The point over which Foucault and Derrida most clearly and explicitly differed is itself interesting in the present context, because it was the Cartesian cogito that was their point of difference (or, if you prefer, différance). In Foucault’s seminal work on madness he gives a brief exposition of the Cartesian conception of madness (and how it crucially differs from dreams and mere error) at the beginning of the second chapter. Derrida tore this passage from its context as exemplary, and devoted an essay to it, “Cogito and the History of Madness” (published in Writing and Difference). Foucault responded in turn with his “Reply to Derrida” (this has been published in the newly translated History of Madness). This is an oddly stilted and, in a sense, Freudian dialogue, because each speaks of Husserl by carefully avoiding him. Husserl has become the stern father, in whose absence his children have become unruly, prodigal, and profligate. And they know it. It would make an interesting project to re-formulate their dialogue in explicitly phenomenological terms.

As I see it, the speculative realists stand a little closer to Foucault (despite the Heideggerian influence that is present in common in both Derrida and speculative realism), since the anti-humanistic human science toward which Foucault was striving is also, in a sense, the object oriented ontology toward which speculative realism is working. But, as I said, while speculative realism and earlier forms of continental philosophy have in common their rejection of phenomenological intentionality, they are different reactions.

Earlier continental philosophy had as its twin fascinations Freud and Marx, and these do not play anything like the same role in speculative realism. The structuralist rejection of phenomenological subject-centered philosophy was, like positivism in the Anglo-American tradition, explicitly anti-metaphysical and scientistic. Speculative realism seems to take the scientism in a new direction, although without abandoning it, and is in no sense anti-metaphysical. Indeed, I have previously written of some speculative realists that their work constitutes an Apotheosis of Metaphysics, and their appropriation of contemporary science seems to point toward a metaphysical science, the inversion of Husserl’s aim of a scientific metaphysics (i.e., philosophy as rigorous science).

There is a sense in which it is a noble philosophical ambition to sunder thinking and being, so that each might take up the separate and equal station to which nature entitles them. Yet much of this effort seems to focus on freeing up objects to participate in an object oriented ontology, as though the Husserlian call to philosophical arms — to the things themselves! (Zu den sachen selbst!) — becomes something like, to the objects themselves! (Zu der Gegenstandes selbst!), with objects now explicitly understood as separate from thought in a way strangely parallel to the explanations that always had to be added to Husserl, such that by “things” he meant our experience of things.

Of course, the legitimacy of beings without thinking implies the equal legitimacy of thinking without being, unless one takes an explicit position of rejecting thought in itself, and indeed among the alternative formulations of speculative realism we have speculative materialism, which is how I think Meillassoux identifies his position (though I may be wrong about this; I’m not sure).

Taking objects on their own account and dispensing with thinking, as though it had no role to play in the world, is the traditional position of scientific realism. Are we to identify speculative realism with Anglo-American scientific realism? Certainly not simpliciter. But how exactly the two differ and what exactly the two have in common is an investigation that I will leave for another time.

While I certainly would not want to privilege any being or form of being on the basis of its relationship to thinking, I would equally eschew the valuation of thought based on a privileged relationship to being. If we bring thought and being together in an intentional relationship, we avoid this problem, as we avoid all the Humean problems that have bedeviled Anglo-American philosophy since Hume pointed out the difficulty of identifying any identity for the self that was not identical with some perception — that is to say, some object in the Husserlian sense. But when thought and being are sundered it is more difficult to say how this difficulty will be met.

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Footnote: In regard to what I wrote above on, “The structuralist rejection of phenomenological subject-centered philosophy,” cf. my post By indirections our directions find…

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Thursday

Dore's illustration of the Fall of Satan.

Aiax. Will you subscribe his thought, and say he is?

Ag. No, Noble Aiax, you are as strong, as valiant, as
wise, no lesse noble, much more gentle, and altogether more tractable.

Aiax. Why should a man be proud? How doth pride
grow? I know not what it is.

Aga. Your minde is the cleerer Aiax, and your vertues
the fairer; he that is proud, eates vp himselfe; Pride is his owne Glasse, his owne trumpet, his owne Chronicle, and what euer praises it selfe but in the deede, deuoures the deede in the praise.

[Enter Vlysses.]

Aiax. I do hate a proud man, as I hate the ingendring
of Toades.

Nest. Yet he loues himselfe: is’t not strange?

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act. II, scene iii (First Folio Edition)

Holding pride of place among the Seven Deadly Sins, pride has a bad reputation, and it was pride of course that was the occasion of Satan’s fall. Even outside a strictly theological context, we have the above-quoted passage from Shakespeare on pride, in which The Bard artfully, true to holding up a mirror to nature, shows the divided human attitude to pride: pride is hated, and yet even those who publicly condemn pride seem to love themselves. No doubt Satan, too, condemned pride before being cast out of Heaven.

Aristotle's “Great Souled Man” puts pride in a very different context than that which we have inherited from the Christian Middle Ages, when the narrative of pride was that of the sin that resulted in Satan's expulsion from Heaven.

In antiquity, pride had a better reputation. In my recent discussion of Aristotle’s Great Souled Man, as he appears in Book IV, Chapter 3, of the Nichomachean Ethics, I noted that this particular virtue (μεγαλοψυχία — megalopsuchos or megalopsychia or megalopsukhia, depending upon your transliteration of the Greek) in Aristotle is at times translated as pride, though at other times it is rendered magnanimity, and still other times as great souled. In Aristotelian fashion, it represents the mean between the extremes vanity and pettiness.

A few days ago I was reading Sartre’s War Diaries and came upon another interesting treatment of pride, what Sartre called metaphysical pride, and the passage was striking because it almost seemed as though it was conceived in parallel with what I wrote about metaphysical responsibility and metaphysical modesty as exemplifications of an object oriented axiology (i.e., an axiology consistent with the metaphysical values implicit in an object oriented ontology).

However, Sartre’s exposition of metaphysical pride has a particular purpose in his diary, as it occurs in the course of a long entry (most of Sartre’s entries are long; the bulk of his writing is at times stunning) of 24 February 1940 in which he describes in detail his almost complete lack of interest in owning anything. He discusses his childhood during which, “money used to drop from the sky like ripe fruit” (p. 249), while his later years are contrasted to his friend’s various attitudes to personal property. Indeed, this entry in Sartre’s war journal could well be called Pride and Property.

In any case, this is what Sartre wrote:

“The first reason I don’t want to own anything is metaphysical pride. I’m sufficient unto myself, in the nihilating solitude of the for-itself. I should find no comforts in the substantial substitutes for myself. I’m not at ease except in freedom, escaping objects, escaping myself; I’m not at east except in nothingness — I’m a true nothingness, drunk with pride and translucid. Yet that doesn’t resolve the metaphysical question, since, proud or not, since I’m a lack and precisely lack the world. So it’s the world I want to possess. But with no symbolic substitute. That, likewise, is a matter of pride.”

Jean-Paul Sartre, The War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War, November 1939-March 1940, Pantheon Books, New York, 1984, p. 251

Sartre goes on in a similar vein for some time, eventually revealing that he wants to the possess the world as knowledge. (This is the philosophical quest, is it not?) Elsewhere in his war journal, Sartre also invokes “metaphysical dignity” (p. 82), “metaphysical inhumanity” (p. 300), and even “metaphysical optimism.” Though many people familiar with existentialism might hesitate to associate it with optimism, anyone who knows Sartre’s writings knows that he asserted that it was not the pessimism of existentialism that offended others, but its fundamental optimism. I agree with this.

From reading Sartre’s war journal it seems clear to me that the circumstances of the war caused him to think with great concentration and intensity upon the concrete situations of individuals, bringing his metaphysical sophistication and subtlety to bear upon the actual problems that actual people experienced in the ordinary business of life. Existentialism is the true pragmatism. Indeed, the war was not yet over when Sartre published his great metaphysical treatise, Being and Nothingness. I think much of its content can be obliquely ascribed to the war, and even to Sartre’s experiences as a soldier.

Apart from the particular circumstances of Sartre’s life that inspired the reflection, what exactly is metaphysical pride? Unlike metaphysical responsibility and metaphysical modesty, metaphysical pride can be understood as a metaphysical vice or a metaphysical virtue. While from the perspective of contemporary thought this makes pride ambiguous, pride does not necessarily retain this ambiguity in all contexts. It has often been observed that the Machiavellian sense of Virtù, sometimes mistakenly conflated with virtue, represents a condition of vigorous self-assertion that might be good or evil by turns, and it would not be too far off the mark to say that a metaphysical Virtù is nearly equivalent to metaphysical pride.

Sartre's war journal is quite remarkable, and it is a great loss that much of it is missing. Sartre liked his formulation “being-for-war” so much that he used it several times, but his exposition of this idea was in the first notebook, which was lost soon after being written. It would be a worthwhile exercise to compare Sartre's journal from the Second World War side-by-side with Wittgenstein's journal from the First World War.

There is also a close relationship — though not an identity — between pride and Aristotelian excellence, i.e., Aretē (ἀρετή in the original Greek, and sometimes translated as “virtue,” just like Machiavelli’s Virtù). Throughout Aristotle’s ethics there is a clear implication that human beings take pleasure in achieving excellence, and in so doing experience a proper sense of pride. Thus a metaphysical excellence would be the proper occasion of metaphysical pride, an in so far as “the Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them” (Rackham translation of I.7.1098a), then metaphysical good is the active exercise of the Being of beings in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several ontological excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them. In short, metaphysical excellence is ontological bella figura.

Any agent in the world that can attain to metaphysical excellence, and can bask in the immediacy of the metaphysical enjoyment of an achieved perfection, will experience metaphysical pride, and rightly so. Metaphysical pride is predicated upon metaphysical excellence. I think Aristotle would have recognized this as readily as Sartre, though I don’t think Aristotle would have used this language, and I don’t think Sartre would have invoked the Aristotelian anticipation of his position.

What about the dangerous and destructive aspects of pride, presumably raised to a higher order of magnitude (or, at least, a higher level of generality) in metaphysical pride? But little imagination is necessary to conceive of the potential disasters of metaphysical pride, and perhaps it would not be out of place to observe that metaphysical pride goeth before metaphysical destruction.

There are few greater affronts to the world than a virtue that has been twisted beyond recognition into a vice. We find this, unfortunately, quite often in relation to honor. Honor is the source of much that is valuable in the world, but when it is distorted by the baser impulses of human nature, and insult is added to injury when agents are so self-deluded that these baser impulses are interpreted as virtues, “honor” so distorted becomes worse than if the idea had not existed at all, because its degradation is used as a pretext for inflicting harm and suffering with a clear conscience. So it is with so-called “honor killings.”

From the example of how something as dignified as honor can go wrong, it is easy to imagine how pride can also go wrong. Of course, the Occidental tradition has been deeply sensitive to the follies of pride; perhaps this is an instinctive correction to Occidental individualism, which, if exposed to the idea of pride without a cautionary narrative, might well be more harmful than if the very idea of pride had never been conceived. Metaphysical pride gone wrong, twisted and distorted by the baser impulses of human nature, would be (and has been) a metaphysical affront to the world.

Confined within a bourgeois discussion of property ownership — which, paradoxically, is what Sartre does — metaphysical pride scarcely attains to the level of a virtue or a vice simpliciter, and certainly not to the level of metaphysical virtue or metaphysical vice.

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