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I’ve lately been trying to start understanding Speculative Realism, a contemporary movement within “continental” philosophy. Speculative Realism is of particular interest to me because, it seems, it is one of the first philosophical movements whose social network is focused on the Web. (One of its leading thinkers, Graham Harman, has his own regularly updated blog.) This is not yet the future I’ve been starting to imagine where the Web replaces universities and book publishing as philosophy’s institutional locus, since most if not all Speculative Realists are academics. Still, it’s an interesting first step.
Now what about the content of Speculative Realism, the ideas? It’s a difficult school of thought and I’ve only scratched the surface, by scanning of some of the websites. I am certainly not in a place to evaluate this emerging tradition’s arguments, not yet at least. But to help myself and others think through what Speculative Realism might mean, I’d like to try some preliminary comparison – what Charles Tilly would call “individualizing” comparison, the attempt to understand one phenomenon by drawing connections to others.
As I understand it so far, the most central idea in Speculative Realism is a critique of what the French Speculative Realist Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism.” I pinch Meillassoux’s definition of “correlationism” from Skholiast’s blog: correlationism is “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.” Correlationism is an idea associated above all with Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, according to which our knowledge is limited to categories of human thought; it is thereby anthropocentric, focusing epistemology and metaphysics too much on the human subject and not enough on objects in the world. (Thus Speculative Realists like Harman often refer to their thought as “object-oriented philosophy,” a philosophy focused on the objects of knowledge, as opposed, presumably, to the “subject-oriented philosophy” of Kant.)
The first comparison that came to my mind when I read about this was one that I doubt Speculative Realists would find flattering: Ayn Rand. Rand blames Kant for most of the perceived evils of contemporary society, including even its supposed irrationalism, going so far as to call the austere Prussian “the first hippie in history.” Why? Because, in a word, of Kant’s correlationism! What most irritated Rand about Kant was the turn toward the subjective, away from the objective facts of the world; from here, she thought, it was a short slide into Communism, sacrificing human beings’ rational faculties. The merits of Rand’s interpretation of Kant and of post-Kantian intellectual history are dubious; nevertheless it intrigues me that in some respect she has found an unlikely bedfellow in the Speculative Realists.
The second comparison is a bit more far-reaching, and I think more intriguing. The more I read about Speculative Realism, the more this thought came to me: the basic goal of Speculative Realism is to make Western thought less Indian and more Chinese.
A while ago I noted that South Asian and East Asian thought are in many respects further from each other than they are from the West, and I’d like to expand on the point in the context of Speculative Realism. A central concern, possibly the central concern, of Indian (or more generally South Asian) thought has been the psychology of the human subject. One begins with the suffering subject, already conceived in some sense as separate from the world, and then that subject tries to detach even further from the world. The Yoga Sūtras and the Jainism of the Tattvārtha Sūtra take us even further than Descartes: we are trying to become pure subjectivity. Even Pali Buddhism, focused on the subject’s unreality, nevertheless focuses its attention on the inner subjective world. Reality in the Pali suttas is composed of five “aggregates”; only one of these (r?pa, matter or form) is physical, while the other four are all primarily within the mind. I’m not sure that this all is correlationist per se, but it is anthropocentric and privileges the subject in ways the Speculative Realists seem to oppose.
Turn to China, on the other hand, and one finds a philosophy concerned above all with the outer world, one that often speaks of the exterior world in interior terms. The closest word classical Chinese has for “emotion” is qing, which has more of a sense of “disposition”: one’s emotions are imagined in an almost behaviourist way, based on the way that they predispose one to react in the outer world. I say “almost” behaviourist because there’s some dispute about how much interiority one finds in the work of thinkers like Confucius: Ted Slingerland has argued there is a little, while Herbert Fingarette has argued there is none at all. (On Fingarette’s account Confucius begins to seem an eliminative materialist like Paul and Patricia Churchland; and at least according to the “Pathfinder” list of links I found above, the Speculative Realists are quite sympathetic to eliminative materialism and its attack on subjectivity.)
Either way, though, the lack of attention to the subjective world in classical Confucianism is striking. Aaron Stalnaker’s comparison of Augustine and Xunzi is instructive here. Both Augustine and Xunzi are deeply concerned with the bad tendencies in human nature; but for Xunzi this remains almost entirely at the level of behaviour. Not for him Augustine’s pained reflections on memory, worrying that he still enjoys the memory of past sins even after he’s stopped sinning; nor Augustine’s worries that he still sins in his dreams. The problem for Xunzi isn’t with what we think and feel; it’s only with what we do. On a first glance at Speculative Realism, this Confucian world seems a lot like the intellectual world they’d like to create. Nor is the nonsubjective world of Chinese philosophy limited to Confucianism; Ch’an Buddhism itself attempts to decentre the subject in favour of the natural world (rather than the mental aggregates of Indian Buddhism).
I recall Harman once saying something on his blog to the effect that you could tell the essentials of any philosopher’s thought from that philosopher’s aesthetics; and the point seems very much validated by classical Indian and Chinese aesthetics. Anne Monius once pointed out to me that classical Indian aesthetics are extraordinarily anthropocentric. Until the medieval Indian Muslims, and perhaps even after that, one does not find any paintings or statues depicting the natural world by itself, or even at the centre of a picture. The centre of every art object is a human or humanlike being. The closest one gets to a painting of a nonhuman is anthropomorphic animal deities like the monkey god Hanumān. It is the human(oid) subject that matters. The most characteristically Chinese style of painting, by contrast, is the landscape, in which human beings’ presence is tiny. This is object-oriented art.
I don’t know nearly enough about Speculative Realism to say anything about whether they’re right. My sympathies usually lie with Indian over Chinese philosophy, and strongly against eliminative materialism; so I view this new tradition’s ideas with considerable caution. But I’m not trying here to engage with them constructively yet – just to see if I can get a first grasp of what they’re up to. And it does seem like the idea, put crudely, is to make us less Indian and more Chinese.
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himanshu damle said:
excellent comparison. i had never thought of Chinese philosophy coming close to SR. I myself have had issues with coming to terms with Harman’s notion of OOO and the dismissing of anthropocentrism and many Indian thinkers i have had the chance to discuss the nullifying of human-centeredness have directed me close to Buddhist thought, wherein at one level, the being and what is being thought become one. I also found some interesting linkages between SR and Aurobindo’s thought. But the real problem lies in ‘correlationism’ and is it ever possible to exorcise the ghost of it. One thing is for sure that Indian thought is getting more and more human-centric and there I think your analogy of moving away from Indian Philosophy and ever closer to Chinese philosophy as what the SR is doing sounds interesting. though, i must admit, Chinese philosophy is hopelessly unexplored by me and this post would get me to look into it. thanks for it. another point is, can everything be treated as objects as in Harman’s OOO. As in one of his criticisms, it is said, that Harman’s (Kvond’s blog, I guess) attempt to decenter and remove the human from the privileged point of access for any ‘first philosophy’, naturalizes the human by smuggling it through the backdoor: he takes Husserl’s transcendental starting point of the Cartesian withdrawal-into-self through universal doubt and then extends it to the propositions that “all objects withdraw into themselves” is apt. isn’t it?
Amod Lele said:
Thanks for an intriguing post, Himanshu, and welcome to the blog! Can you say a bit more about the last point? I’m not sure how the “withdrawal” language is working, or what Harman does to take individual objects as foundations comparable to the Cartesian self.
Also, where do you see links between SR and Aurobindo? Is this something you’ve written about on your blog?
himanshu damle said:
Thanks. the link between SR and Aurobindo is what I am deliberating on with a colleague of mine from the ashram. It is said by Aurobindo that even an inanimate object has consciousness that could act morphogenetically to evolve. This consciousness is innate/inherent and is particulate in nature: a kind of separated one at that from the cosmic consciousness. this could be looked upon as a play, albeit never a revision to determine if the particulate consciousness on its own could evolve to realize the divine plan. as of now, in the writings, man is invested with the exponential acceleration of realizing the plan, or even if he fails in his endeavour, the superman concept of Aurobindo would achieve it. Although this is to a large extent human-centric, what really interested me and is still is baffling me is the contingency invested in the inanimate object with its particulate consciousness to achieve it as well. This is where i see the link between SR and Aurobindo and Meillassoux’s reaction to post-Kantian ‘correlationism’. This might not have been articulated all that well, but i have just laid hands on my copy of letters on yoga by Aurobindo and this purports to strike some revelations. Well, this would mark the start for me to post on my blog and with further clearing, I would surely try and unearth the possibilities of the link. But, I somewhere see radicality in Aurobindo’s thought.
As for Harman’s OOO, please see (links):
http://kvond.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/harmans-speculative-bubble-the-runaway-capitalism-of-oop/
This is wrought with some revealing insights.
himanshu
Amod Lele said:
Hmm – the Kvond post you mention doesn’t seem to engage with the content of Harman’s philosophy or its relation with Husserl. Rather it’s a marxisant critique of the processes and social networks through which SR happens. Were you meaning to link to a different post?
The Aurobindo point is intriguing. I’m wondering about the extent to which SR tends to panpsychism. Levi’s response to me seemed to suggest that SR was specifically about deemphasizing subjectivity, as opposed to deemphasizing the human. But to speak of consciousness in nonliving objects seems to put more of an emphasis back on subjectivity and consciousness, just pulling humans further out of the picture. It’s obvious I’m barely scratching the surface of this stuff here…
himanshu damle said:
Hi Amod,
I am terribly sorry for the goof up in directing you to the wrong post. I am reading a lot of posts in a lot of windows these days to cover up the backlog!!! The real one is:
http://velvethowler.com/2009/11/13/speculative-realism-as-ponzi-scheme/
The point of SR leading to panpsychism is apparently meant here, but then in a way, if I could be allowed to flirt a bit with SR, then it could indeed be meaning that. I am sure, there is no such connectivity though and the only link I had in mind with Aurobindo’s thought was to reach out to a parity between subject and object by invoking a particulate consciousness in objects as with consciousness with the animate beings. As Levi’s post makes it very clear that SR does not per se make a vociferous claim to deemphasize humans, the real question I am baffled with the above idea is consciousness in objects as WHOSE SUBJECTIVITY? Aurobindo, I guess (I am yet to encounter this in my reading of his, which is progressing) does not emphasize on subjectivity of objects possessing consciousness. Then what really is it? Pure auto-kinesis, may be. If you are scratching the surface of the stuff here, maybe, I am doing violence to SR (read OOO as the best faction according to Levi). What do you think….
Amod Lele said:
Not sure what to make of all this yet, since again I’m new to SR. I don’t really see a panpsychism in Aurobindo; I’ve read him as more of a spiritualized Hegelian, where there’s a single spirit developing in the whole world, but that spirit is focused on the consciousness of human beings or at least living beings. I’m not entirely sure whether that counts as “correlationism.”
Stephen C. Walker said:
Of course, how could I not chime in this time?
Speaking just for pre-Han thought, I think there may be some diversity in the degree to which individual writers develop and work with concepts of psychological interiority. Pre-Han writers do indeed speak of states and processes internal to the body, internal even to the heart (organ of cognition, emotion, and volition), including (in one instance) a heart within the heart. The best-known texts seem interested mainly in using internal resources to interact with the world outside the agent’s skin, and naive realism about the physical world prevails almost unquestioned. (This does not rule out magico-religious happenings within that physical world.) There appears to be very little interest in exploring an interior mental space, though the interior of the body is of interest for medical reasons. The early visionary and meditative literature (abundant in texts like Zhuangzi) is very hard to interpret, and has not motivated much philosophical reading so far – there’s certainly interior space of some kind going on there, at least sometimes, but I don’t know how mentalistically we should conceive that interior.
Core texts’ pronounced disinterest in what I’m calling an interior mental space has proven highly attractive and stimulating to philosophical readers of this literature in the past 40 years. Behaviorism, if rarely in rigorous form, has indeed been a keynote of the discussion – like pragmatism. There is continuing enthusiasm about investigating a philosophical tradition that developed technical epistemological and psychological concepts and debates while relying on very unique assumptions about how cognition and action work–assumptions that contrast most starkly, perhaps, with those of the 17th and 18th centuries in European thought. In my opinion scholars are still working out the basics of these assumptions. I’m persuaded by Chris Fraser’s recent work indicating that pre-Han thinkers considered error to consist in (accurate) knowledge of some inadequate part of an overall situation – not in “losing touch” with reality. Such an epistemology makes no use of possible disconnect between subject and object – the subject is always faithfully in touch with some real portion of his environment, and the only question is whether that portion is sufficient given specified goals. “Subjectivity” begins to seem a less relevant concept than “agency”, since in pre-Han philosophy a person is paradigmatically engaged in constant activity, and probably being evaluated in his interactions with his environment.
Amod Lele said:
Thanks, Stephen. This does a lot to confirm my sense that I’m on the right track in drawing parallels between the SR worldview and at least pre-Han Confucian thought. (See my comment to Levi Bryant’s critique of this post: neither SR nor classical Confucian thought are about an absence of subjectivity, but rather a decentring of subjectivity, in favour of an ontology that takes relations among objects as central.)
Zhuangzi seems like a very interesting case when we talk about interiority among Chinese thinkers. He does strike me as the classical Chinese thinker who’s most concerned with interiority. His best-known idea – well, all right, the one that I know best – is the butterfly dream. And it seems to me that dreams are paradigmatic examples of interiority, indeed (as I argued a while ago) a key example of why a purely objectivist (reductive or eliminative materialist) approach doesn’t make sense. But I suspect Zhuangzi’s point in thinking of the dream is quite different.
skholiast said:
Excellent post. I tried to formulate some thoughts here:
http://speculumcriticum.blogspot.com/2010/02/object-oriented-orientalism.html
Stephen C. Walker said:
One problem that pre-Han text advocates face, when they want to read them philosophically, is that the texts seem simply unconcerned with – not to say unaware of – most of the issues that have made “philosophy” a distinctive discipline. Especially in recent times and in the Anglophone world, philosophy is something that is not theology, not science, not literature, and certainly not something with activist political ambitions. Fuzzy edges and counterexamples must be taken seriously, but I think it is not problematic to say that the “contemplative” element of philosophy is just missing in early Confucian texts. If a given concept or debate or wondering doesn’t translate in some fairly straightforward way into action or patterns of activity that they consider desirable, they cut it off from their concern – sometimes aggressively, as in Xunzi. I might like to call Confucians “impatient” philosophers, who want to see ethical goods issuing immediately and obviously from intellectual activity. Their ethical goods of choice are notably political and activistic, and from the beginning Confucian discourse developed strategies to keep people focused on those goals and not to be distracted by irrelevancies. This may make early Confucianism a poor match for philosophers interested in finding philosophers’ problems in early China. I would certainly welcome a little less philosophical publishing on the Analects, for instance, and a little more on texts that spend time taking seriously questions of moral justification, knowledge, cognition, etc. This is not to say I dislike the Analects or think it isn’t important – I just don’t think that its authors cared about many things that philosophers characteristically care about in our culture. There is a difference between the use that a modern reader makes of an ancient text, and the uses to which any of its ancient authors and custodians could imagine it put. I think that one kind of distinctively philosophical oversight is to look for ways that a text like the Analects might be relevant to us, to the exclusion of looking for ways that we might be relevant to the Analects. Early Confucians’ inattention to normative disagreement, and their systematic avoidance of social situations in which critical pressure might be put on their system, I think deserve greater acknowledgment.
That was a bit of an excursus. (!) In any case, we might look for ontologies and subjectivity-relevant beliefs in early Confucian literature, but I think the most direct and accurate statement remains “they didn’t care”. So Confucian texts invite readers to inhabit a world where aesthetic, interpersonal, and political matters loom large enough that some core philosophical problems simply do not arise, even remotely or implicitly. This might be interesting for philosophers who are already inclined away from those core problems (like Fingarette, founder of contemporary philosophical enthusiasm for the Analects), but I think it also forces us to consider factors of genre that render those texts something other than philosophical – or many other things besides philosophical.
Now for Zhuangzi. First, I use “Zhuangzi” to mean the text of that title, as well as the character Zhuang Zhou who appears in various literary contexts. I regard the Zhuangzi as a text riven, maybe to its very foundation, by diversity of viewpoint. Multiple authorship is already widely recognized for the text, but my instinct is to push that thesis further – the text may contain dozens of traceable positions, not a handful. I am very suspicious of assumptions that the Inner Chapters are either philosophically coherent or authorially foundational – there’s a bit of a movement afoot these days against those assumptions. I think that scholarly privileging of the Inner Chapters has led readers to ignore the variety and difficulty of claims the text advances in areas like metaethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Disciplinary divisions have led scholars to focus on either threads that are more amenable to philosophy, threads that are more amenable to religion, or unifying perspectives that render the whole project both philosophical and religious. I think the Zhuangzi talks about a mad variety of things, and that persuasive arguments for reducing that variety to a handful of consistent perspectives have not yet been advanced. It seems beyond contest to me that some contributors to the text were interested in psychophysical practices that involved some kind of interior cultivation and promised contact with supreme, cosmic entities. (I will not say contact with any kind of “reality”, since reality versus appearance is not what is at issue.) I do not know how much the interior cultivation passages have to do with the famous stretches of skeptical and relativistic reasoning that also appear in the anthology.
About the butterfly dream – chapter 2 of Zhuangzi, in which this passage appears, is notable for developing skeptical and relativist themes without presupposing a reality-appearance divide, and without supposing that subjects can “lose contact” with real objects. The chief theme of that chapter is limited perspective, which fits well with the idea that error is about partial awareness of a real environment. Also interesting is the focus not on the nature and dispositions of physical objects but on the applicability of norms – the chapter explores ways we might be able to act in light of a proper understanding of our limited perspective, without transcending our basic limitedness (which is impossible). The butterfly dream involves a sudden shift in perspective, which leads its protagonist to wonder about the trans-contextual viability of his judgments. At point a, he judges himself to be a butterfly, and at point b, he judges himself not to be. How is he to proceed in light of this? For this passage, dreaming presents an example both dramatic and quotidian of epistemically troubling shifts, and shifting from one condition to another is extensively probed in the rest of the chapter. “Illusion” and its attendant concepts like representation do not appear.
Amod Lele said:
Thanks, Stephen. Honestly, the assumptions of contemporary philosophers sometimes drive me crazy. I stubbornly insist on a view of philosophy as love of wisdom, which the Confucians are happy to provide, more than many Indian philosophers even – it is often difficult to see the ethical or even soteriological relevance of the Ny?ya and Vai?e?ika schools or of Buddhists like Di?n?ga, and some have tried to claim there isn’t any. The ironic thing to me is that although Indian philosophy engages much more directly with the so-called core concerns of contemporary philosophy, the study of Chinese philosophy has found more of a home in philosophy departments, whereas Indian philosophy is still mostly examined in religion departments. Whatever – I try to avoid starting my examination of contemporary philosophy with philosophy programs or departments. I try to start them with concerns from my own life and the views I have encountered, and progress to bigger and bigger questions, exploring more and more thinkers who can address them. I’ve learned from both analytic and “continental” philosophers and will continue to do so, but I don’t put their concerns front and centre.
The Zhuangzi discussion is interesting. If “illusion” does not appear, what replaces it? Suppose the writer actually was Zhuangzi and only dreamed he was a butterfly; what then is the status of the dream, if not illusion? Is the question simply not asked?
Stephen C. Walker said:
I definitely feel your first paragraph. As I said once before, I’m attracted to certain texts (or the visions they participate in) and to critical rationality, in such a way that I end up talking mostly to philosophers, and respect and enjoy philosophical discourse. But that is certainly different from taking the priorities of the contemporary academic philosophical scene as my own priorities. As for the relative home Chinese philosophy has found in philosophy departments, and Indian philosophy in religion departments, I’ve given that a little thought in the past. Chinese philosophy has been making…I won’t say inroads, but definite advances, in the professional landscape, judging by such things as number of panels at APA meetings, and the kinds of people who participate in them. It seems that almost all of the “mainstream” philosophers who have begun taking an interest in Chinese thought are ethicists, particularly those interested in virtue ethics. The virtue ethics interpretive movement in Chinese philosophy, particularly focused on early Confucianism, has done great service in “consciousness raising”. I’m less familiar with the struggles and advances that Indian philosophy scholars have been dealing with, but it seems to me that questioning the status of Buddhist and Hindu traditions as “religion” is almost unthinkable in the current academic landscape. Hence religion departments will always have a demand for specialists in those Indic traditions; there is no comparable demand (in philosophy or religion) for people who do Chinese thought, since if anything the “great tradition” of Chinese classics is perceived as even less relevant to religion than it is to philosophy.
It’s been a while since I’ve looked seriously at Zhuangzi 2, so I’ll let your question about illusion stand as an “interesting question” I should keep in mind when I revisit it. The Mohists and Xunzi directly address perceptual illusions and, in general, confused perception (brought about by psychological disturbance, etc.). So it is certainly not accurate to claim that misleading perceptions are not recognized as a problem. What is notable about solutions to this problem is that the Mohists and Xunzi think errant perception can be corrected for with relative ease. Certain psychological states can be identified as disturbed (dreaming, alcohol intoxication, conceptual “intoxication”) and their perceptions correspondingly ignored or placed in proper context. In other words, examples of illusion or distorted perception that crucially motivate other philosophers toward skepticism about the “external world” do not have that effect in the Warring States. One possibility is that the writers were too committed to their pragmatic priorities to linger much over skepticism – Xunzi’s response to skeptical arguments may be unsatisfying from a strictly philosophical perspective, but we (that includes me) need to be on the lookout against the contemplative bias of much Western and Indic thought. If disinterest in the possibility of subject-object severance be counted a philosophical sin, we might be able to argue “on behalf of” the Warring States thinkers that their psychological and epistemic theories militated against the plausibility of such severance. I’ve already used expressions like “internal mental space” and “representation” of things that I think early Chinese philosophers did not use in their theories. I admit that unless alternatives were present and argued in that intellectual environment, this realism must be naive, in the crucial sense that it never had to be defended, regardless of how competent the thinkers might have been to defend it had the need arisen.
michael reidy said:
Amod:
I’ve been having a look at OOO and my difficulty with it is that it proceeds by negative definition. It’s not x, y or z as though you got directions from someone who said – you know the fire-station – well don’t take that road and if you find yourself with a multi-story car park on your left you took the wrong turn. Go back and take the other turn.
Now you’re there. But where’s there. There’s such a thing as knowing too much, as though each new student had to replicate the history of the founder’s path. That Wittgenstein didn’t know philosophy in a conventional sense meant that to express what he wanted to say he had to develop a deictic mode.
What I would like to know is the key event, the protophaenomenon as Coleridge called it, “the one fact that is worth a thousand”. What world does it make? Where’s the poetry?
But it’s not Chinese poetry definitely.
Amod Lele said:
Hi Michael – interesting thoughts, and ones I’m not the best equipped to answer. From what I’ve read so far – and I could be totally talking out of my butt here – I have gotten a vague sense that the point is a strongly increased environmental consciousness, a greater harmony with nature. Like the Engaged Buddhists who talk about “interdependence.” I think I get this sense mostly from the critique of “anthropocentrism” – they want a world where humans are not raised above other species and given dominion over the earth. Levi Bryant’s response to me about Ayn Rand strongly suggests this point to me as well.
skholiast said:
Amod,
I meant to respond to yr comment over at Speculum Criticum sooner. Your remarks on Rand, both there & in both your comments to Levi, are quite helpful in spelling out why you made that comparison (a comparison, by the way which I initially kicked myself for not seeing on my own).
I think that, in my caveats about over-generalizing and orientalism, I may have distracted a bit from the substantive points you made in your post. I quite agree that blogging can be a more relaxed and free-form style of philosophizing– the only kind I care to participate in, really– and I issued my warnings mainly to myself.
Glad to see the conversation continuing over here. I agree that there is an anti-anthropocentric vibe to SR and OOO, but I think it may just dovetail nicely with environmental/green concerns– I am not sure it is motivated by them. You mention Levi’s response to you re. Rand giving you this sense as well, but my impression is that this was more reaction at being potentially targeted by “the disapprobation generally directed at Rand’s despicable philosophy,” than any strong [eco-]political stance motivating OOO.
If anything, I think Harman’s opposition to special metaphysical treatment for humans is a case of parsimony. I believe he genuinely thinks it’s just simpler to “democratize” objecthood and to have the noumena/phenomena distinction apply across the board. Note too that neither Harman nor Bryant speak of humans being raised above other species. It’s other objects that are their concern.
The other thing that bears mentioning is that the eliminativism you note as a theme in some SR work is more characteristic of Brassier than Harman; the latter has gone on record several times critiquing eliminativism (search his blog for some likely suspect, e.g. “Churchland,” for examples).
However, having said this, I still think you are right that OO-thinking resembles Chinese thought in a general way, and the analogy between the evolution of Buddhism as it moved north from India and that of post-Kantian thinking from the Romantics through phenomenology to SR and OOP is a very interesting one. I realize you didn’t zoom in on Buddhism per se, but this is the case I find most striking, despite my great interest in Confucius (mainly sparked by Fingarette); in Buddhism you have, ostensibly, a single tradition, but in these very different contexts they veer, as you note, in rather opposite directions. I believe Roberto Calasso, among others, says that the Buddha’s teaching is more or less the inversion of the Vedanta (I’m citing from memory, don’t quote me); then, when the dharma goes north, it’s as if (you suggest) it inverts yet again, but not back into the atman-laden philosophy against which the Buddha reacted (although “reacted” is probably not the right word for how the Buddha taught!).
Amod Lele said:
You may well be right, skholiast. Again, the eco motivation is just a guess – it strikes me as the kind of motivation that people who advocate this sort of worldview often have. But not exclusively. Roger Ames at Hawai’i is well known for the kind of interpretation of Confucianism that I’m taking here, one that’s about avoiding dualisms and especially the dualism of subject and object. And I think that for him too, eco-concern is only one of the motivating factors.
I generally agree with your point about Indian v. Chinese Buddhism; I said a bit about the idea here and might follow up on the point a bit further next week.
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