Comments on “Mind” by John Searle

In a wonderfully written book, “Mind” (2004 — see my Amazon review here) John Searle introduces us to issues in the philosophy of mind and promotes his own version of a theory of mind. While carefully rejecting present views of dualism (substance and property versions), and a larger set of variations grounded in materialism. He proposes his own view grounded, in the end, in materialism, but claims to avoid all the problems with other versions. What makes his version materialistic is that he assumes both the necessity and sufficiency of brains to be causally responsible for consciousness, that is agent subjectivity and intentionality. In large part, it is because of the causal relationship that presentation to consciousness via sensory experience, and causal action by an agent who can “make things happen” that the “interaction problem” (the “mind-body problem”) largely disappears in Searle’s philosophy of mind.

But it never completely disappears. Searle runs into problems with free will and personal identity that the theory fails to accommodate. Free will does fit into his view of mind as it relates both to the individual and the collective. It has “conditions of satisfaction” that can be easily specified in Searle’s terms. Personal identity is far more problematic. I discuss both below.

While the necessity of brains to consciousness is these days not controversial, Searle’s assumption of their sufficiency begs the question in the debate between dualists (particularly substance dualists) and materialists, including Searle. It is precisely the point of the debate here that no one has established sufficiency of brains to minds, and it turns out the whole debate turns on what evidence there might be that brains are insufficient. It turns out the evidence, not proof, comes from physics itself; the causal closure principle!

Searle implicitly recognizes this “begging of the question”. At the end of chapter 4, having said that he belives his arguments fully refute the various materialist variations he explores, he says this about dualism.

“Notice that these arguments still leave dualism as a logical possibility, though I think extremely unlikely, that when our bodies are destroyed, our souls will go marching on. I have not tried to show that this is an impossibility (indeed I wish it were true), but rather that it is inconsistent with just about everything else we know about how the universe works and therefore it is irrational to believe in it.”

I do not believe he really “wishes it were true”. If he did, he might have found a more sophisticated version of the argument (see also “From What Comes Mind?”). He also says, in the same conclusion to chapter 4 that as goes the two ontological realms (the mental and the physical), “No one has ever succeeded in giving an intelligible account of the relationships between these two realms”. Part of the purpose of this essay is to give such an account consistent with his structural analysis of mind. In the end, the precise mechanism of the connection remains a mystery, but in my view, it is no longer a connection between realms. One problem is that by “how the universe works” Searle is speaking of the discoveries of science, starting with physics. In physics, there simply is no evidence of any positive reality added from elsewhere (besides brains) that could constitute consciousness some separate thing added to physics. Physics finds no other realm and that is certainly true! There is no other realm that physics can possibly detect. But for physics to declare, blithely, that “nothing other than physics exists” obviously begs the question, something even physicists (those not pushing some vested interest) admit. This blatant assumption impacts both substance and property dualism.

Property dualism is a materialism where brains are necessary and sufficient causally, but what they cause comes, inexplicably, to take on a being of its own. Property dualism says that a new ontological realm emerges from physics, and once emerged has independent properties that are ontologically objective and yet remain interactive with physics. Property dualism springs from materialism and either proposes a new, fundamentally different ontology springing (who knows how) from the material, or it falls into epiphenomenalism. The core of this view falls into the same trap as many nondualistic (materialist) explanations, the naked assumption that “nothing but physics” is manifesting any such ontologically novel realm.

As for substance dualism, Searle refers explicitly to a strictly Cartesian version. In this variation, God in some direct way imposes mind on bodies. Brains are not even directly involved, although even Descartes recognized that some connection must exist between them. This view leads to all sorts of distractions (souls, disembodied minds) that are not, in fact, entailed even by a “mind realm”. Searle believes the whole idea of an ontologically objective “mental realm” (substance or property) is the root of dualist problems and he is right, but for some of the wrong reasons. His reasons stem, mostly, from belief expressions that come down to us through the history of religious institutions. These beliefs are vague and confused and may not properly distinguish between mind, soul, person, or spirit. All this vagueness was present in Descartes, and everyone (dualist or anti-dualist) since Descartes has simply imported it into their idea of what dualism must entail. Property dualism of course looses the disembodied soul notion but still comes out to an ontologically objective “realm” that brains produce. I agree with Searle, this is the wrong way to look at it.

There are more sophisticated versions of a proper substance dualism argument, but it remains the case that some of what is substantial about substance dualism has to come from something that is itself nonmaterial. This typically ends in God because that is what humans have thought must ground anything nonphysical. Once you have God, the physical too becomes grounded, and the fact of interaction between whatever it is that constitutes the mental and the physical is no longer a surprise. Nevertheless, the mystery of the interaction mechanism remains. But we need not go as far as God to paint a more sophisticated substance dualism; we can start with physics. The principle of causal closure stated briefly is that physics comes from and produces only physics. Subjective experience, being in its essential nature nonphysical, cannot emerge from physics, at least not physics alone!.

Consider a radio, powered up, properly functioning, playing some music. The music issues from the proper functioning of the radio in a way analogous to subjective mind’s issuing from our brains. Clearly the music (technically pressure waves of a certain type) is not the radio itself. But there is no music realm, only music which stops (or becomes distorted) the moment the radio stops functioning properly. Note now the properly functioning circuitry of the radio is 99% responsible for the music, but not 100%. There is something else, in this case a physical electromagnetic wave, that carries information to which the circuitry of the radio is (through a complex convolution of electron perturbation) sensitive. The important point here is the music is not merely added to the radio the way Descartes added mind to body. That is why, in the case of the music, there is no realm. The radio is responsible, the cause, of the music, and brains are similarly the cause of consciousness.

Consciousness is not added to brains, but stems from them. However, the radio while necessary is not sufficient to produce any music at all without the information bearing (and electron perturbing) radio wave to which its functioning circuits are sensitive. The music (strictly speaking the configured pressure wave) is the expression of that sensitivity transformed through the radio’s circuitry. Something to which the brain is sensitive results in a metaphorical interpretation we experience literally as experience. There is no realm because mind as such is not added from the outside to brains. Mind, subjectivity, springs from brains in response to or as a result of (transformed by brain circuitry) sensitivity to something nonphysical that must, nevertheless, exist inside the physical universe.

We must posit something, we need not go all the way to God, existing inside (is a part of) the physical universe that has three qualities. 1) It cannot itself be physical. 2) it must be able to affect brains, or put another way, brains must be sensitive to or detect this something. 3) it must be everywhere in the physical universe such that where ever the right circuitry comes to be in the universe, a subjective experience, attached to that circuitry, appears in or rather as some subject. This “hybrid-substance dualism” says this: Consciousness emerges from brains. Consciousness is not added to brains from the outside but emerges in functioning brains themselves in conjunction with or as a result of (causal) interaction with some entity that is not itself material.

Why not material? Because the material alone, the brains, cannot invoke the nonmaterial which is the essential characteristic of a subjective awareness! This is my core assumption, and I justify it not by religion but physics! No physics has demonstrated the emergence of a nonphysical phenomenon from nothing but physical forerunners (causes). It is also a fact that the only seemingly nonphysical phenomenon we know is consciousness, subjectivity, itself. Given what it is physics is competent to explore, the physical, and that we have a manifestly nonphysical subjective experience that is clearly reliant on brains, the only legitimate assertion physics can make about mind is that we cannot possibly know if physics is sufficient to produce it. This does not prove “physics doesn’t produce it”, but it also gives us no justification to say that it does.

In both of my books and a few essays here on the blog I call this entity “Cosmic Mind”, but that has the unfortunate connotation that it is itself a thinking entity or that it amounts to panpsychism. Neither is the case. Perhaps a better name might be “Cosmic Mind Field” (CMF). Existing in time and pervading all space. It is nevertheless not a panpsychism because it evokes consciousness only in brains, not rocks, individual living cells, or thermostats. But it must function as a field (albeit not electromagnetic) because it performs where ever functioning brains are present and evokes a continuum of consciousness from brains of varying levels of complexity.

Perhaps there is “something it is like to be a fish or a lizard, but we have good reason to believe that whatever that is, the consciousness of lions, apes, and parrots is richer, and that of humans richer still. Like two radios of different quality, the more primitive brains invoke a more primitive and limited consciousness in the same way the lower quality radio reproduces less of the information present in the electromagnetic wave.

This picture allows Searle’s view of consciousness to go through. Brains being causal entities evoke consciousness. There is no mystery of “causal mind” because brains do all the causing. Searle’s analysis of “aspectual intentionality”, qualia (aspectual perception), belief, desire, the subconscious, and so on all can go through as he supposes they do. My proposal avoids the Cartesian “realm business”. Mind is not some realm imposed on bodies, but stems from them. At the same time it resolves the causal closure dilemma. Mind is nonphysical because its invocation from brains isn’t entirely physical but depends on the brain’s sensitivity to the CMF.

But what is that exactly? It is precisely because the only handle we have on objective (mind-independent) ontology is perceptual and therefore physical that we cannot say. We cannot detect the CMF with physical instruments, nor conceive of any experiment that would isolate it from other phenomena because we can only so isolate physical phenomena! CMF sensitivity is common to all consciousness. There is nothing that we have from within consciousness that isolates the effect of the CMF because consciousness is that effect. But human consciousness at least effects a partial escape from this. I will come to that a bit below.

The Free Will Problem

In Mind Searle runs into two problems he cannot fit into his analysis, free will and personal identity. As concerns free will Searle admits he cannot reconcile even a causally efficacious consciousness with free will on the brain side. On the psychological side, from within subjectivity, he cannot shake the conviction that free will must somehow be genuine. We presuppose it in everything we do and every utterance we make. Does my model help us here? I could always say that free will is just a power (more in man than in fish) that consciousness has. Searle would rightly object that this doesn’t explain anything new. It doesn’t explain the ontological ground of the freedom. How in a universe of random (quantum) and deterministic phenomena does anything (even the nonmaterial) become free in the volitional sense?

This is both a physical and a metaphysical problem. It’s hard enough to accept that physics alone is sufficient to cause consciousness. Now it also happens that this consciousness is volitional, its choices neither determined nor random (both purposeless) but now directed and purposeful? The CMF is becoming extraordinary indeed.

The metaphysical issue is not merely the possibility of volition in the universe, though that is one issue. Like consciousness, free will must be possible as its exercise supports our entire intentional state. As with consciousness, free will’s possibility is something physical law makes room for. What physical law demands is that physical causal chains have some physical starting point. Physics allows its macro-deterministic behavior to arise from randomness, the quantum vacuum. If physicists were being honest, they could not rule out that something else, something not visible to scientific method, can also start causal chains.

Volitionally initiated causal chains, the causal part, all begin with some macro-physical starting point; for example the motion of a hand or a speech act. They are not causal chains until that point. But physics cannot preclude that, perhaps simultaneous with neural activity, a volitional act neither determined nor random, initiates that chain. It is, in other words, logically possible that physics alone is not enough to explain the appearance of a third source of causal chains; volition. Not only is this logically possible, physics itself recommends the conclusion. In centuries of sophisticated experiments and observation physics has found only determinism and randomness. Why should physicists concede the possibility of a type of cause they cannot, even in principle, detect? Because unlike other hypothetical entities (ghosts) and powers (remote viewing), free will is presupposed in virtually every decision we make as human beings. Volitional capacity is the closest thing to “obvious in our experience” besides experience itself. Not only must we presuppose it, our entire culture, language, art, institutions, cleverly designed experiments, and engineering feats, all imply free will.

In “Making the Social World” (2011) Searle devotes a chapter to language and the commonalities and differences between pre-linguistic and linguistic mind. He lists five possible types of “linguistic utterances”: Assertives, Directives, Commissives (e.g. promises), Expressives (e.g. apologies), and Declarations (e.g. “I pronounce you husband and wife”). The first four of these all have pre-linguistic forms (beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions respectively) but Searle says that Declarations, making something real (e.g. a married couple) merely by declaring it, has only a linguistic form. Searle does not recognize that free exercise of will is precisely a pre-linguistic declarative. It “makes something real” by willing it, and has the same “two directions of fit with the world” as declarations.

One freely chooses (Searle’s “prior intention”, “will-to-world fit”, “world-to-will” cause) and then freely acts (“intention-in-action”, “world-to-will fit”, “will-to-world” cause). The “conditions of satisfaction” for free will are the same, indeed a combination of, those of perception and action, homologous to linguistic declarations. If I think I am free, that belief can only be true if I really am free. If I act freely and introduce into the world a new [physical] causal chain that action is satisfied only by a genuinely new causal chain initiated by a free choice. If this analysis is correct, then free will is a property of consciousness in the same sense as intentionality and the CMF must, in some sense be its metaphysical ground.

The Identity Problem

Searle demurs on free will’s “ontologically objective” reality, but he cannot bring himself to do the same for agent-identity. To be conscious, to have purposes, to choose, are, in human experience, the consciousness, intentionality, and volitional elections of an agent. All of our experience presupposes agency, some singular identity that recognizes the change all around it by reference to its constitutive changelessness. Searle doesn’t use the word ‘changeless’, but his examples are telling.

He shows that memories do not explain the phenomenon. There is an image in my mind from when I was two. I believe it is real because my parents explained to me once what it was when I was a little older. But then there is a gap and the next memories (few) I have are of events taking place when I was four. Gradually, the gaps become smaller and the number of memories grows, but gaps persist here and there even to recent times. And yet, I have the unshakable conviction, as much as the conviction that a persistent “I”, the same person, have existed since that earliest memory.

I had that memory and I have all the other memories, the same I despite gaps in the memory record spanning years! What about the future? I can plan for a future, say going to graduate and postgraduate school to become a philosopher. I can act today so eight or ten years from now I, the same I who today applies to graduate schools, becomes a philosopher. Looking backwards from that time, I will be the same person who filled out those first applications. I will recognize this. If my brain has functioned normally throughout that time, its truth (reality-representation) is immediately apparent. The “conditions of satisfaction” for changelessness are met.

Searle believes it necessary to posit some functional entity that stands for this “I”. He does not hesitate to declare that it cannot be a substance, but something must stand antecedent, logically anterior, to consciousness itself. As we experience it, agency is inseparable from our (that is human-subjective) exercise of will. Both the freedom and the will in “free will” seem, in our phenomenal arena, to come from, to be the will of, my agent-self, my “I”.

Is Searle’s “functional entity” helpful here? What does it mean for a functional entity to be changeless? How does this property emerge in a universe where everything else from physics to thought is constantly in flux? How does a functional entity dependent in some necessary sense on both a changeable brain and changeable consciousness gain this quality? Searle’s suggestion is merely a stand-in, but the qualities it must have suggest more.

Functions are processes. A changeless process is logically impossible. The agent can only be a substance whose persistence, at least, is logically possible. If that is the case agency cannot take origin in mind. The always-changing cannot produce changeless substance any more than physics alone can produce nonmaterial mind. Agency is always experienced and expressed in mind, but its metaphysical source must be external to it.

It is this substantial agency that makes possible the capacity to partially escape otherwise transparent subjectivity, something it appears only humans can do. By this I refer to our capacity to analyse mind itself. Lions have some sense of individuation from the world, but do not exhibit any ability to think about their consciousness as such. Only humans do this, and while language seems to be necessary in the exercise of this capacity it isn’t sufficient for its appearance. Even though what we experience of our own identity is experienced only in and through mind, only the existence of something in someway distinct from mind can provide a sort of “binocular perspective” that enables us to say something about mind itself, to describe our subjectivity (to ourselves or others) as if, as it were, from a third person perspective. I have much more to say about this in my essay “Why Personality”.

Putting it All Together

Both free will and identity raise extraordinary ontological issues. For mind, it seems an extraordinary coincidence that this CMF happened to be around to evoke consciousness from a certain organization of matter, especially as both the consciousness and the life on which it rests were contingent. Not only is the CMF implicated in consciousness (which at least we can suppose is generated by brains as music is generated by the radio), but also volition, something for which physics and philosophy cannot even account for logically let alone physically!

Identity is even more remarkable. It is one thing to suppose that some nonmaterial reality can arise out of the purely physical. It is even more of a stretch to demand that an entity that never changes in time arises in a time-drenched universe in which everything else changes! The absurdity of these impossibilities ends in two extreme positions, denial that nonmaterial phenomena exist, including consciousness, or that its existence must be purposeful. This is to say the antecedent presence of the CMF, is not an accident, but produced for the purpose of causing consciousness with free will when the right material organization comes along. Of course this has further teleological implications.

Searle insists that all explanations find their ground in physics, material reality, but he is left with three problems resulting from this demand; the mind-body problem, free will, and timeless agency. Starting with consciousness as such we have Searle’s assertion that it is just “what brains do” but he knows his explanation does not cross the gap. Dual-aspect (Russellian) monisms (Davidson, Nagel) or panpsychism (Chalmers, Goff) also fail to bridge the gap. If, as these philosophers insist, mind is nothing more than an expression of undiscovered physics then we should find evidence in physics for the emergence of something (besides mind which begs the question) even minimally nonphysical.

My own solution, the CMF, doesn’t get to the details either, but it explains why what we seek is not found in physics. It isn’t there. If the CMF and brains interact (which they seem obviously to do) then either we are back to impossible physics, or there is a third entity responsible for both. When we discover interaction between two otherwise discontinuous phenomena in the physical world we take this discovery to be evidence of some third phenomenon that mediates the interaction. In proposing such an entity, a common source of physics and mind, we are doing nothing new philosophically speaking.

The CMF makes consciousness possible, evoking subjectivity from brains, but by itself doesn’t give us free will. If free will, obviously exercised in and by mind, has a ground it must come also from our third entity. That entity must itself be willful, purposeful. It is reasonable to locate free will in mind, a power of consciousness, because its operation fits perfectly into Searle’s structural analysis of intentionality in language and both exhibit constraint by time. We choose only in the present and both the choices made and the conscious arena in which they take place are constantly changing.

But the same cannot be said of human subjective agency. This also exists in time and expresses in mind; I am here in the universe after all. But unlike everything else agency does not change. Our consciousness is always changing and our will (free or not) can act only in the present, but all this change takes place within a phenomenology of changeless self. This is such an extreme problem for Searle that he proposes a functional entity in some sense independent of both mind and physics. But just as we never see physics resulting in the nonphysical, it cannot yield up a changeless entity antecedent even to mind. Moreover, it is this agency that enables us to reflexively examine mind itself, something it could not do if it was not in ontologically distinct from mind.

Function resting on a constantly changing consciousness cannot be changeless. Unlike volition, changeless agency cannot be a product of the time-constrained CMF. Our antecedent and ontologically objective source must also be a timeless agency, able to add this agency to time-constrained mind. With this step we are all the way to a personal God outside time.

Granted this is a truncated argument. Searle is honest enough to admit that substance dualism remains logically possible but rejects it on the grounds that it adds nothing useful to the philosophy of mind. But Searle does not get any closer to the secret of subjectivity emerging out of physics alone other than to insist that it does. The dualism I propose takes nothing away from his analysis of the structure of consciousness as we experience it. My analysis of free will (above) shows that Searle’s basic insights about mind remain sound. Free will fits into his ideas about the relation of mind to language, better in fact than in his own analysis!

While not popular with physicists or philosophers, God, like dualism, always remains logically possible. Moreover, while theism does not explain the details, it does account for free willed nonmaterial agency outside physics. It tells us why physics cannot find these in physics itself but yet experiences (presumably in the minds of physicists and philosophers) them in a physical universe otherwise governed by deterministic process resting on the randomness of quantum mechanics.

That we have agency and do exercise free will is so obvious to me that I will make the extraordinary claim that what motivates most free will and agent denial is not physics as such which says only “physics cannot account for it”, but precisely that accepting the ontological objectivity of free will agency too easily opens the door to theism. Of course physicists and philosophers will greet this claim with derision but the fact remains that, in the end, only God can provide the ontological ground for both free will and agency.

Searle’s Quantum Mistake

In a chapter on free will (of the libertarian sort) Searle runs into something of a wall. He concedes that psychological freedom must be real, but he cannot reconcile this with what is ultimately physical biology (brains) both necessary and sufficient to produce consciousness, the arena in which psychological free will operates. He speculates on a popular suggestion, that quantum behavior, some quantum randomness essential to the brain’s function, is in some part responsible for a genuine (ontologically objective) volitional will. Searle knows that randomness is not volitional freedom, but he says that it is possible that something about the brain transforms the randomness into volitional freedom in agent consciousness.

But he doesn’t like this solution because it makes the brain different from all other organs in that only the brain requires quantum processes in its role. I believe he is mistaken here. There is good reason to suppose that life itself rests to some degree on quantum phenomena. Every bacterium, amoeba, or living cell in an organ of the body lives because quantum phenomena are an intimate part of the mechanics of living processes. The brain then would be no different from any other life in this respect though it may (I suspect does) further constrain (in Terrence Deacon’s sense, see “Incomplete Nature”) the quantum processes necessary for life. That is the brain utilizes quantum processes in some quantitatively or qualitatively “enhanced way” as compared to life in general, but it is no longer unique in its dependency on quantum process generally.

Suppose I am right here. Does it help us answer the free will question as concerns biology? No. There always remains the gap between physics and the subjective experience. How do “enhanced quantum constraints” become volitional, or for that matter subjective? The interaction problem always remains. But my suggestion does clear one of Searle’s objections to the involvement of quantum phenomena with the phenomenal experience of consciousness and free will; quantum processes are essential to life generally.

Two More by Zizek

Here are reviews of two books by Slavoj Zizek. “Refugees” (2016) is much more social commentary than philosophy concerning as it does a more specific “current event”, the matter of Middle Eastern and North African refugees in Europe. Beginning in earnest a few years ago now, the issue has passed from most American headlines. But this social phenomenon remains pressing for all the peoples involved and may grow again to numbers well beyond the capacity of European (not to mention American) governments to process and absorb. Written only a year earlier, “Trouble in Paradise” (2015), is commentary on a wider (but still present) phenomenon, global capitalism (mostly since the collapse of the Soviet Union), and what hope there is that something better can be brought to political and economic fruition before ecological catastrophe kills us all. Hint: I do not hold out much hope and I do not believe Zizek does either.

Zizek analyzes both the “human condition” and the inconsistencies inherent in global capitalism. He says in effect “something must change or we are headed for disaster”, but I get the sense that he knows full well that disaster will be the outcome no matter what happens in the near to medium term. In the first review below I take note of Zizek’s reliance (over much I think) on abstract cultural artifacts, namely fiction represented in contemporary literature and film. I only want to note here that this is not a problem only here in this book, but I suppose in Zizek’s style, for I remember it from his earlier “Living in End Times” reveiwed here.

Zizek’s atheism also gets in his way alas. It is one thing to critique the “institutional church” in social, political, and economic dimensions. But throwing the baby (God) out with the bath water (institutional religion) cannot help but further distort his picture of history as a whole. Since the literature he chooses as foundation for examining the human condition as such is also either atheist or non-committal on the subject, the distortion (if there happens to be a God) is self-reinforcing. But it is also the case that this literature reflects the real culture of the present day in which most people are functional atheists. People, the majority of people on Earth, claim to believe in God, but the God they believe in is often limited, fickle, inconsistent, and intolerant, sometimes even justifying horrific evil. Zizek’s analysis of religion is mostly wrong, but by analyzing this mistaken notion of God he does achieve genuine insight into the nature of real people and history because that is the God in which they believe. Alas for both him and us, those insights do not give us a lot of confidence that things will ever get better any time soon.

Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

I still enjoy reading Zizek, but I find so many problematic issues in his views. His style and sense of (sometimes twisted) humor are on full display in this, something of a reprise of his “Living in End Times”, but much less heavy on the triumverate of Hegel, Lacan, and Badiou. All three appear of course along with many others, philosophers, novelists, film makers, and so on. His hammer falls squarely on Capitalism generally, and global Capitalism in particular. The book’s over-arching subject is the socio-political-economic situation of our present world. Zizek’s scholarship is as broad here as always.

It isn’t possible to say “there is no truth” in Zizek’s analysis. Published in 2015 he makes a statement that proves to be a prescient prophecy in his own terms: “…if moderate liberal forces continue to ignore the radical Left, they will generate an insurmountable fundamentalist wave”. Isn’t this exactly what happened in the 2016 presidential elections in the U.S? Once she gained her party’s nomination, Hillary Clinton more or less ignored her primary opponent’s positions along with his substantial base who, while not radical, were to the political left of her. Sanders’ supporters are here exactly in the position of the “ignored left” of which Zizek speaks. As a result, a large cohort of Bernie’s supporters in critical states simply did not vote and effectively cost Clinton the election.

Having established that Capitalism is a part of the problem Zizek calls for something else, but what? He would like, I think, to see a more egalitarian world, something of a more level playing field economically at least, but in the first half of his book he recognizes that the inclusive forces that initiate a true “emancipatory movement” (Zizek is careful to distinguish these from purposeless violence, though they can and perhaps must [Zizek’s opinion] have a violence of their own) are never the forces that ultimately take power if the movement succeeds in its initial aim; ridding themselves of an unjust regime in the aegis of some particular master.

If nothing else history teaches us that some less inclusive (often out-rightly intolerant) agency, whether of the left or right, has always got the edge in the in-between time, when the government has collapsed but nothing yet has crystallized in its place. Zizek cites numerous examples of this process. Zizek well knows that today, with more than seven billion people on Earth, any transition, even leading to a better outcome eventually (something highly unlikely in itself), would if globalized, precipitate the death of billions! He also knows that this fate likely awaits us anyway as ecological catastrophe catches up with us eventually. Perhaps that is the ultimate fountain of Zizek’s inclination to an “any movement having some genuine aim is better than nothing” position.

But while there is truth in Zizek’s analysis, it is distorted, in my opinion, by his reliance on art, particularly literature and film (along with a few jokes) to support his over all view of human nature. Fiction is wonderful for highlighting particular characteristics of the human condition, for contrasting them to a real environment that otherwise might swamp them out. But their very value in this regard is also a liability because they accomplish their mission precisely by distorting reality.

I think it is unfortunate also that Zizek uses the word ‘violence’ as ambiguously as he does. In an appendix, among many other things, he mentions this and addresses one of his critics. I would take a different tack. Earlier in the book he uses the Christian notion of ‘agape’ as an example of violence because it aims at precipitating the destruction of the existing (speaking of Biblical times) order. An atheist by reputation and declaration, Zizek cannot but have a distorted view of theology. A true “emancipative act” need not be violent in the normal sense of that term. Christian emancipation in the proper sense has nothing to do with the politico-economic order as such (be it Biblical Rome or modern global Capitalism). In the Christian sense, agape is “beyond the law” (among the senses of violence he seems to mean) because it goes farther than the law being more just, more fair; an act that would be approved by the law.

Zizek is surely right that anything that is aimed at the politico-economic order, if successful, will surely precipitate violence of the literal kind as it collapses, but that is a distinction, the violence (or lack of violence) of the act versus the violence it precipitates elsewhere, he seems not to recognize. Was the violence of the Jacobins who commandeered the French Revolution greater than the violence the European system visited on countless peasants for hundreds of years? Perhaps not, but the same cannot be automatically said today of violence perpetrated by left or right in relation to the overall impact of global Capitalism. For one thing, in the 18th century there were fewer people in all of Europe than live today in any one of its countries.

In this book, Zizek has a decision to make. Global Capitalism is a fact and seven-and-a-half billion people on Earth is also a fact. Zizek insists that no amount of “adjustments to the present system” can over-come its inherent contradictions. True as this is, he surely sees that such adjustments can extend the life of the inconsistent system precisely by, perhaps periodically, ameliorating excessively wide discrepancies. He describes such adjustments. If he understood the distorting nature of his reliance on fiction to provide his archetypes, he might realize that “adjustment” constitutes a more ethical course under the circumstances than even a successful emancipatory event. In the end the most pressing issue is the future ecological catastrophe. While Capitalism is certainly a contributor, there doesn’t seem to be any likely outcome of an “emancipatory event” that would halt the slide to that disaster anyway. Perhaps I am even more of a pessimist than Zizek?

Refugees, Terror and Other Trouble with the Neighbors: Against the Double Blackmail

Think of this little book as “applied Zizek”. It isn’t philosophy, it is social commentary and Zizek is one of today’s premier social commentators. Having written this book, Zizek has been accused by the left of being a fascist ideologue, and by the right of being an old-style communist ideologue. I have never taken him to be either and I read his little book to see for myself.

Zizek is here a “discerner of nuance” of every sort: sociopolitical, geopolitical, historical, environmental, economic, psychological, ethical ideological, and so on. His subject is the European refugee crisis spawned by ongoing wars in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, though he brings to the subject plenty of historical material demonstrating exactly the sort behavior (good and bad, even outrightly evil) seen in all parties to the present matter. This includes the refugees themselves, but also the governments and peoples of nations who are parties in the conflicts, and of course the corrosive effects of the present economic order. No one calls a spade a spade like Zizek, and it seems precisely his point in this book to note that there are spades everywhere, on every side, in the present context and none of them is without precedent in the history of the last few centuries. He draws his examples from every peoples on every continent, and this is how he opens himself to be a target of every side.

So what is to be done now, and in particular by Europe? Here Zizek seems to despair of an answer. Perhaps anything (to the right? To the left?) is better than nothing, anything that advances some vision. But he is well aware that no vision will actually come out as intended, and he spends time examining what must be done as concerns so much of the violent behavior of refugees that has no vision but the destruction of their own present environment. He concedes that much of what is being done (police raids, information gathering, and such) must to some extent be done, but he tries to discern the productive from the counter productive. His most concrete recommendation is to militarize, literally give to the army, the job of gathering refugees in temporary camps near to their points of origin, seeing to their registration, and then to safe passage into Europe. The military is expert at large scale organization, this a logical suggestion, but then what?

Ironically, as this was published in 2016, Zizek seems to assume that the nations of the European Union will each take their share of refugees! This is not taking place now in 2017 and the reasons it is not are all fully anticipated in Zizek’s analysis from politics, economics, racism, and the mindless violence of SOME individuals! Zizek sees both the rationale behind the backlash, and feels the ethical weight (on Europe) of at least some measure of responsibility. Is that not the attitude Christians are supposed to take? Can ethics and political will ever be genuinely reconciled; especially “on the ground”?

Even this is not the end of the matter, as bad as the situation can yet become as goes Europe (and by extension the United States) with refugees fleeing wars in which all these parties (including other Arab powers who take no refugees) have a part, reasonable projections for the future of our globe portend an even greater world-wide refugee crisis in the offing spawned by environmental disaster, political fragmentation, anti-globalism, and the inevitable economic dislocations that will follow from these. Is capitalism and globalism (including the colonialism of the last few centuries) largely to blame for all this? You bet! But Zizek also knows that it is too late simply to abandon their present manifestations wholesale! It is in calling attention to all this nuance that he makes himself a target for everyone. And the book can also be read as a kind of plea. Zizek fully admits that he does not know of a “solution” that is politically acceptable, economically feasible, and ethically justifiable all at the same time. But he pleads of those who have the power to do this to prepare some plan for that inevitable future.

If you aren’t afraid of seeing all the spades called out, including perhaps one or two that you might presently hold, and if you can stomach the answer that there may not be a realistic answer, a future in which millions don’t die, this will be a good book for you.

Aganorsa Leaf TABSA review

There isn’t a lot of detail to be found on the tobaccos in this cigar. A Nicaraguan puro, this one I am reviewing is the “Bodhi” at 5.25″ x 50 a classic robusto. There are three other sizes, but overall this is the smallest of them. The “Dharam” is 6 x 50, the “Sunyata” is 6 x 60 (sheesh) and the Aficion is 6.5 x 48 which might be interesting.

TABSA stands for the Tabacos Valle de Jalapa S.A. factory in Estelí sold under the Casa Fernandez brand. There is also a “Connecticut” version that sports an Ecuadorian Connecticut wrapper over Nicaraguan binder and fillers.

Having gone through most of a box of these now here is my review.

Unlit aroma: light mix of grass, hay, manure, barnyard

Cold draw: slightly salty, grass.

Construction: A+. Wrapper a light brown, mostly smooth, tiny veins. Great draw, smoke output, burn line. Not a densly packed cigar but even. Well made!
I should note I count a good smoke output highly as also a nice medium draw that does not vary (usually to “tighten up”) through the cigar. This stick comes through on both counts.

Flavors: light leather, barnyard, vegetal, and a little roasted nut and sweet wood. No transition, a bit more sweetness comes up from time to time. One dimensional, but what is there is sweet and almost complex except that all of the notes are very light. Sweetness fades a bit in the second half leaving more vegetal grassy, and some cedar flavors. Taste disappears entirely in the last inch. The cigar starts out light, but by the end has reached a medium strength.

If this was a $4 cigar I would say it was great! At least the equal of the new HOYO la Amistad, even a little bit sweeter. Alas it came to me for $6.40 and while the cigar’s construction merits that price, the flavors, in my opinion, do not. The cigar is not bad by any means, but there isn’t enough there for me at that price.

I tried this cigar with various rums, but they all tend to overwhelm the stick. It does pair very well with coffee however. So a good morning cigar complimented by its light-to-medium transition.

There are those in the cigar universe who want to try every Aganorsa leaf cigar that comes along. If you are one of those, put yourself down for a 5 pack or two, you will like it.

Hamilton Pot Still Gold

Another rum from the collection of Ed Hamilton. This one different in that there is no explicit “declaration of honesty” (added sugar?) and looking this up on the Ministry of Rum website doesn’t add much. Here is what it says:

Black rum distilled from fermented molasses. Aged up to five years.

A blend of light, very light and heavy pot still rums from the Worthy Park Estate where rum has been made since 1670. Colored with gold-tint sugar-based caramel, this pot still rum embodies the heavy aroma and flavor of Jamaican rum. Over-ripe bananas dominate the aroma and yield to spice, sugar cane and ripe fruit in the body. The finish is reminiscent of the aroma with ripe bananas and vegetal notes.

I cannot fathom what is “black” about this. As you can see from the photos, it is the palest rum I’ve ever had. Any paler and it would be perfectly clear.

Bottled at 46.5% ABV. There is no age statement on the bottle.

Glass: Thin fast legs at first followed by a thicker, slower wave. Never quite seen anything like this. There are distinctly two different legs. Perhaps the difference between the light and heavy rums in the blend?

Aroma: Nose of alcohol, bright pineapple, ripe banana, and light caramel. Some dark fruit aromas (prune/raisn?) too belying the rum’s color. If you have too many straight hits it starts to take on a varnish quality. Making me dizzy.

Flavor: Bright pineapple and citrus, a little bit of raw sugar and I get a distinct note of mint and anise! the rum has a hint of Schnapps in it! I can taste youth in the rum but depth at the same time. It is much smoother than I would expect with a “young rum” with something like a minty black cherry cough drop on a surprisingly long aftertaste.

I’m trusting that the Hamilton name means there is no added sugar in here. the label says nothing about it. The bottle has no “batch number” on it either. Obviously a blend and surprisingly (or at least seemingly) the components are distinctly sensible.

This is a little like Smith & Cross (you can also taste two rums there) but smoother, much less “in your face”, and with a mint/anise twist. A good substitute in the rotation. the Smith & Cross was getting a bit overpowering. For $24 Hamilton’s “Jamaica Pot Still Gold” an outstanding find for those times when I feel like a change from dark rums.

John Searle: Seeing Things as they Are

I gave this book 5 stars in my review and possibly I should have left it at 4. Not only is Searle a bit over confident about consciousness in general (this is not the book’s focus but he does review his position because most perception happens in consciousness), and the validity of his somewhat circular argument for the nature of perception. However for other reasons (I am after all a realist philosopher) I do believe that his description of what it is that perception delivers to mind is correct, and he very effectively compares and contrasts that description to most of the other dominant philosophical threads on the subject. Thus even if his own view is not so perfectly supported, his demolition of competing views is effective.

Searle’s work dovetails with that of Maruzio Ferraris just about perfectly. I mention this in the review, but I want to say something more about the connection here. Both philosophers might be called “common sense realists” despite their emerging from radically different backgrounds; Searle from Anglo-analytic realism, and Ferraris from Continental anti-realism. For Ferraris, the evidence that our senses present (Searle’s term) already structured mind-independent reality is its unamendability. In terms of “objective ontology” a tree cannot be wished or for that matter simply pushed out of your path. In relation to subjective ontology (what vision presents to mind) you cannot simply “see it” ten feet to the left. By contrast, if you close your eyes and merely imagine the tree, you can, in your imagination, move it anywhere you wish. Reality (Ferraris again) also provides affordances. With the proper tools, you can cut the tree down and make a shelter from it. In Searle’s terms, mind-independent reality responds to (fits) our acts upon it.

I have two more books from Searle to read, the subject being social reality. I expect to find more parallels with Ferraris. For Ferraris, the ontologically objective basis of social reality is located in documents, from constitutions and laws to parking tickets and restaurant menus. One of the first things Searle mentions among constructed social phenomena is money, one of Ferraris’ recorded documents whether represented in bills, coins, or bits in computer memory. I expect to find these parallels because both Ferraris and Searle are genuine realists as compared to “speculative realists” like Harman and Meillassoux. For genuine realists the bottom line, the philosophical starting or ending (depending on which way you look at it) has to be, well, logically prior and already structured mind-independent “objective reality”. If realism is true, then all realists have to agree on (start or end with) the same mind-independent reality. This is clearly not the case with the “speculative realists” (see my “Problems with Object Oriented Ontology” and its links). Harman and Meillassoux come to different and mutually exclusive conclusions about what constitutes the mind-independent world because they are not fundamentally realists at all.

Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (Kindle Edition 2015)

A very good book. Searle’s focus is on perception, particularly vision, but he brings the other senses in as well. He begins by reviewing what he calls the “bad argument” which he claims has misled philosophy for the past few hundred years. His review of the “bad argument” is straight forward but its badness springs directly from its opposition to his own view which he calls “direct realism”, a term he prefers to “naive realism” which nevertheless also fits his position. Searle’s view is like a glass of cool water on a hot day. I would call it “common sense realism”, but M. Ferraris has already adopted that phrase for his “new realism”. The two views have much in common, but Ferraris’ focus is not perception as such. I have reviewed a few of Ferraris’ books elsewhere on Amazon.

In an early chapter on consciousness in general Searle burnishes his materialist credentials by declaring (at least as concerns life on Earth) that consciousness is necessarily associated with brains (which is uncontroversial), but he also declares that brains alone are sufficient to produce consciousness, something that no one (on Earth) knows for sure. This precisely why there is a “hard problem of consciousness”. He repeats this claim a few times but his theory of perception does not hang on it. Another quibble is that he is a little sloppy as concerns statements of cosmological fact. In one of his examples he says “I look at the star and know it ceased to exist millions of years ago”. He could only mean “I look at the stellar explosion” (a nova or supernova) and know it ceased to exist millions of years ago.” If he “sees the star” then the light of its demise has not reached us yet and he could not know that it has already ceased to exist.

Searle begins by recognizing that when we experience something visually, what we have is a “subjective ontology”, a phenomenal experience that philosophers for centuries have called a “sense datum”. The “bad argument” comes down to the belief that this sense datum is really all we KNOW and that for all we know there is nothing about “objective ontology”, the structure of the mind-independent world, to which we have access unless the sense datum represents the objective to the subjective. What has confused philosophy for centuries is the matter of how (or if) this representation actually works. Searle’s argument here is very simple. Our senses, particularly vision and touch, do not merely represent the world, but PRESENT it, presentation being a special case of representation. What constitutes presentation specifically is that there are “conditions of satisfaction” for the presentation. If I see a tree, the sense datum is satisfied (and so presented and not merely represented) by there being an actual tree where I see it. This accounts for hallucinations. If the identical sense datum is hallucinated then the satisfaction criteria are not met, no tree is present where I appear to see it.

Presentation is causal with the direction of cause going from world to mind, objective to subjective. Response (what Searle calls “direction of fit”), on the other hand goes from mind to world. Searle also gets a bit into “action” because it happens that its connection between mind and world is the inverse of perception. Cause goes from mind to world and the “direction of fit” from world to mind. This ties in beautifully with Ferraris’ concepts “unamendability” (perception) and affordance (action). Searle recognizes the matter of will, free will, comes up here but he demurs. I would like to see him talk about it somewhere.

Searle goes on to flesh out perception with a distinction between basic presentational properties like shape, color, motion, and so on, and those properties that require background knowledge on the part of the receiver. Perception is hierarchical. This accounts for the distinction between seeing a shape and color (basic perception) and seeing “an automobile”, and further up the hierarchy (additional background), recognizing “my car”. Importantly, “conditions of satisfaction” lie all the way up the hierarchy and they really apply TO THE OBJECT. The base phenomenology is not only a black object of such and such a size, but a car, and furthermore, it really is my car! All of this makes perfect sense to me, but then I am also a realist. It is hard to imagine not living one’s life in a realist mental environment. If you are about to step off a curb into a lane of traffic but have a visual experience of a black object about the size of a car hurtling down the same lane towards you, you likely ASSUME that the object IS a car and that it makes sense not to step into the lane. You take for granted that the object is being presented and not merely represented to you.

Philosophically though, Searle’s perception requires two assumptions. First that your brain and sensory system are operating within normal parameters, and second that the mind-independent world is genuinely structured AS PRESENTED. It is this mind-independent structure (including I believe its causal relations) that constitutes the “conditions of satisfaction” of the presentation which rests also on the causal relations between perception and the perceived object! For Searle to get his theory of perception out, he has to presuppose that the world is real and already structured having causal properties. The apropos structure must be present to be presented. This is the very assumption that anti-realists want desperately to avoid and it makes Searle’s argument circular. Because of the causal properties, the demand that we live AS IF the world is presented breaks the tie in favor of Searle’s position (and against anti-realism), but I do not recall him acknowledging this circularity..

Apart from this omission, the book is a very refreshing departure from all the anti-realism I’ve been reading lately. It is not a long or very technical read. I highly recommend it.

3 Good Inexpensive Cigars

I’ve reviewed families of rums in the past, but this is my first multiple cigar review. The cigars here aren’t a family and don’t much resemble one another in any respect other than their price. They all cost about $4/stick (box price) and they are all pretty good if not “great” cigars. The reviews will be short, just the basics. These are good cigars for their price, but they’re not going to compare to more expensive Padron, My Father, Drew Estate, and many others that are two or more times their price. All of these sticks are pretty one dimensional. There isn’t much point in describing their flavors inch by inch, but they do all have decent flavors, and all of them good budget smokes.

Sancho Panza long corona from Honduras.

5.75″ x 46 box press
Wrapper: Oscuro
Binder/Filler: Honduran, Nicaraguan, and Dominical Piloto.

Of the three sticks reviewed, this is the sweetest. Wrapper is smooth medium brown in color. Cold smell is barnyard and sweet wood. The cold draw is salty and sweet at the same time. I’ve smoked a half a box of these and encountered no construction issues. Draw is firm but not fighting you and stays that way throughout. Lots of smoke all the way along, burn line is good. Burn time is about an hour and fifteen minutes. I am very impressed with these.

Flavors are sweet wood, nut, and leather. There is little pepper, sometimes some floral notes and an occasional hint of vanilla. Paired with a dark sweet rum the cigar comes up with a very sweet wintergreen note in response. Even on the retrohale there is little pepper here but the leather and sweet wood smoke notes stand out. Strength is a solid medium. All in all this is the smoothest as well as the sweetest of the three cigars. For about $4.25 this is a very good smoke I can take all the way down to less than an inch.

HOYO La Amistad robusto from AJ Fernandez, Nicaragua

5″ x 54
Wrapper: Ecuadorian Habano
Binder: Nicaragua
Filler: Nicaragua (Esteli, Ometepe, Condega, Jalapa)

This is a pretty elaborate blend for a $4 cigar. Anything AJF does is worth trying. Most turn out pretty good, and for the price I’m not going to complain if it doesn’t taste like a Padron or OpusX.

Cold smell is light barnyard, fresh hay, grass. Cold draw doesn’t present much but a little hay and saltiness. The cigar seems well made. Wrapper is light brown in color and looks nice, clean cap. Draw is light on these, maybe too light even for me. Pack is nice and even though. In a whole box I’ve had no construction issues. Burn line is clean with a few minor corrections now and then. Smoke output is excellent all the way through the stick. Burn time about an hour.

Reading reviews of this you would think it cost $12. Yes there is flavor, a little hint of floral sweetness, earth, cedar, and barnyard. But flavors aren’t very strong. Mostly you get a nice thick smoke carrying minimal, but otherwise nice flavors. Some pepper presents itself all the way along, especially on the retrohale where the flavors come forward a bit also. Other reviewers have talked about a lot of pepper, but I just don’t get that myself. Really you only get anything substantial from this cigar on the retrohale. Nothing in the flavor profile is outstanding, but there are no sour or off putting notes either. The cigar is pleasant. Many of you have tried AJ’s “Puro Authentico”. This cigar has the same sort of manly earthiness to it, but the flavors are less full bodied and the flavors mostly disappear by the last inch. Light to medium in strength, of the three cigars reviewed here, this one is the lightest in strength and flavor, but I recommend it as a good change away from sweet.

Illusione Rothchilds Short Robusto.

4.75″ x 50
Wrapper: Mexican San Andres
Binder/Filler: Nicaraguan

Commonly to be found at $3.65 or so (box of 50) this is the strongest and also the least expensive of the sticks reviewed here. Illusione blends are almost always good but tend to be in the $8 – $12 range. This low-ball offering is superb at the price.

Cold smell is mostly manure and floral. Taste is a little salty and dry chocolate. Like the others reviewed the construction of this cigar is excellent. Nice dark brown wrapper, slightly bent cap, a good hefty stick for its size. Of the three cigars this is the most densely packed and very evenly. Draw is medium. Sometimes needs a little burn correction but mostly it’s fine and produces great smoke. Strength is medium to full, burn time about an hour or a little more.

Flavor here is earthy, barnyard, dry chocolate, with a little pepper throughout. Stronger flavor than the HOYO and not as sweet as the Sancho Panza. The retrohale is particularly earthy and full of burning wood with more pepper. Flavors stay with the stick down to less than an inch. Of the three sticks I like these the best. Flavors are similar in strength to the Sancho Panza but more earthy, a cigar man’s cigar.

————————

All three of these sticks are worth their price and make a good rotation for one another. In connection with this price point I should mention a fourth stick reviewed elsewhere on the blog, the Drew Estate Papas Fritas. At about $4.35 only a few cents higher than the Sancho Panza, it is by far the most flavorful cigar of the group but it is also smaller than the others. All to be enjoyed though. See what you think. I know that many of my readers have a larger discretionary budget than I do. I once did myself, but no longer. Discovering so many good cigars in the under $5 range has been a delight.

Problems with Object Oriented Ontology

Graham Harman is a popular guy in philosophy circles these days. Sometimes associated with Maruzio Ferraris, Manuel DeLanda, and Quentin Meillassoux as one of the “New Realists”, he is also, with DeLanda and Meillassoux, known as a “speculative realist”. Although this essay is mostly about Harman (I have written about Meillassoux and Ferraris elsewhere on the blog) I first try to provide some perspective on them as a group.

All four emerged (in their fundamental epistemology and ontology) from late 19th and early 20th century continental anti-realism with its own roots going back to Kant. All four accept that from our inescapable subjective viewpoint we cannot in the end simply assume that, as concerns the appearance of an external world, what we see is what we get, a view called “naive realism”. Even non-continental realist schools recognize this in theory. Some analytic realists agree there is a “representation problem” but discount that it blocks-out as much of the mind-independent world as anti-realists claim. This partly explains their drift in a scientistic direction. John Searle (“Seeing Things As They Are” 2015) by contrast defends naive realism (he calls it “direct realism”) by distinguishing between presentation (what the senses, especially vision and touch, deliver) and representation. Among other things presentations cannot be manipulated at will (connecting up with Ferraris’ concept of “unamendability”) while representations can be manipulated. I will have a review of Searle’s book soon, but for now back to the continentals.

Of the four philosophers named above, only Ferraris has shaken fully loose of the anti-realist cloud (see my article on anti-realism). Ferraris takes a position that what you see is close to what you get. The mind independent world is self-structured (stars, galaxies, primitive life) is all real and already jointed long before mind comes along to recognize and react to the joints. That mind does recognize and react to the joints is a phenomenon fully within the process of world-self-structuring. Mind is a means (not necessarily the only means) of mediating between sensory input (evolved) and behavioral response which partly directs the future of that organism and its community. Ferraris does not think that fish-mind, lion-mind, bird-mind, and human-mind, all mediate the joints in the same way. But the structure of all these forms of consciousness do reflect mind-independent joints, those the animal’s survival depends upon. The evidence for this is the way those world-structures push back at us as well as the manipulative potentials their regularity affords to mind. Ferraris’ ontology is fully real then.

Epistemologically speaking, mind is not merely guessing at what might be “out there”, but knows it at a graining suitable to its daily navigation about the world. Human mind knows the natural world from a far more sophisticated viewpoint yet remains analogous to the viewpoints of higher animals. But humans are in addition able to frame their own abstractions, additional joints, on top of the natural world making recursive use of the affordances (Ferraris’ term) given to us by the regularity of the resistance (we cannot change the past, running into a wall hurts, we cannot fly merely by wishing it), of the world. For Ferraris both the resistance and affordance are epistemological evidence that ontology is “more or less” what epistemology represents.

Meillassoux and Harman are different. I think DeLanda belongs in this group but I have read but little of DeLanda and must limit myself to points he makes in his jointly authored book (“The Rise of Realism” 2017) with Harman. Harman and Meillassoux have not shaken themselves free of the anti-realist fog. In the end, neither can accept that what seems real and jointed about the mind-independent world to consciousness very much likely is real and that the independent joints are close to where we perceive them to be! This is the reason this group are “speculative”, a fitting moniker. If we do not have a good reason to believe the mind-independent world approximates what it appears to be, then in the end the best that can be done by ontology is to speculate about it and hope the speculation serves to enhance insights in some other arena of philosophy or science.

Of the two Meillassoux (from his major work “After Finitude” [2010]) is the more careful analyst. He begins in essence with a traditional anti-realist assumption; the Principle of Sufficient Reason is not necessarily true of the mind-independent world. He concedes that it appears to hold and that it must indeed hold for long periods (essentially an anthropic argument) but in the end he concludes that it need not necessarily hold out beyond what we can perceive in space or in time. That’s fair enough. He starts with an assumption and traces it to a logical conclusion. I think he is wrong because his fundamental assumption is wrong (I’m a realist theologian after all) but I do not fault the quality and professionalism of his reasoning from assumption to conclusion. He reminds me, in style not content, of some modern analytic philosophers like Lowe (recently deceased), Chalmers, Searle, and Deacon among many others.

Harman does not seem (anywhere that I can find) to build his ontology he rather asks us to accept a purely speculative proposal in the hope that it will be useful. Like Ferraris, Harman believes the mind-independent world is already structured as concerns particulars, that is there are particulars along with various relations between them. But Harman asks us to accept for the sake of argument) that “the real” is made up of nothing but individual objects. Further, ‘object’ includes everything from atoms to asteroids, stars, events of all kinds, and thoughts. The last includes both subjective relations (that tree over there as I experience it) and fantasies (the pink elephant I see floating in front of me).

Objects must exist before they can have properties through which they have relations with other objects. Thus Harman introduces an essence or haecceity but it seems to do nothing except stand in for “that which has properties” and grounds its causal potential. The object’s properties, even the complete history and future of its properties (and relations into which they enter) down to the finest detail, does not exhaust the being of the object. This is one place where DeLanda diverges, but for Harman, something is deeper than the object’s complete history and it comes down to the object’s being or essence. Being in his context seems to be a placeholder for “that which must exist but cannot be known”!

From the moment an object exists it has properties that enter relations with other objects through their properties. These relations too are objects as real as their relata, and further, the properties are also objects with their own haecceity, further properties, and so relations. If this looks like the beginning of an infinite regress it is and Harman has no real answer for it. What he offers is the observation that objects do not persist indefinitely. Objects and relations can come and go, sometimes transform into new objects or cause there to become objects that until that time did not exist. But none of this avoids the regress problem. Even considered syncronically (at a point in time), every property and relation in the universe is itself an object related to every other relation and object in multiple ways. This is already a well-neigh infinite number of objects. Physicists estimate there are 10^80 protons in the universe. That makes the number of relations (all objects) between protons alone 10^80^80! But nowhere (in the four books I’ve read) does Harman make a case for the object-hood of properties. The sun is hot and my hallucinated elephant is pink, but hotness and pinkness are not objects in any normal uses of that word. Anything that can be bounded, anything whose joints can be delineated, is an object. But while my pink elephant can be bounded, its pinkness cannot in any way that Harman makes comprehensible. Harman has a problem with universals.

Harman sets this problem aside and moves on however. While all of these objects are equally real (ontology) they are not all “equally important”. Harman knows that importance can be importance to human mind or animal mind but he also suggests a possible mind-independent measure of importance in the form of a “symbiotic object”. Objects of all kinds come and go. Some never persist long enough to express causal relations but most have at least some small effect on their environment. The encounters between properties in their multiple relations, have causal implications for Harman that he calls a species of non-theistic “occasional cause”.

Some few of these object-relations have widespread and long-perduring outcomes. For example (mine, not Harman’s) the iron asteroid that struck Earth 5 billion years ago forming Earth’s core, producing a magnetic field, fueling future tectonic processes, and perhaps even creating our moon with all of its knock-on (hence symbiotic) effects, would be an “important object” that uncontroversially predates mind (on Earth at least). But where to place symbiosis? Start with the asteroid, but then it also has to be the asteroid-Earth-relation, the event (another object) of the impact, and so on. One symbiotic object produces many following object-event-relations. Does the symbiosis apply to all of them? I don’t think Harman would have a problem spreading out the symbiotic credit as it were, but the flatness of his ontology prevents him from drawing any hard lines. Any event, no matter how trivial (like the gravity of any mass) must have some effect on the world-line of any larger event with which it has now, or had in the past a relation. Harman is explicit about all of these objects (not only records in the present) being equally real even if only at some past time.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Even that subset of events with enough world-line effect merely to be recorded such that they appear as present records (physical evidence of their reality, not only formal documents) of past events may or may not be symbiotic in Harman’s view. Surely some recorded events (and by extension their records) were, and perhaps continue to be, more significant than others. There is a continuum of importance. Further, the effect of an event, any event, on a larger world-line spreads out towards the future resulting in an infinitely fine continuum of importance. Ontologically then there is nothing to divide the important from the unimportant (a classic sorites problem). The only relations in which mind-independent objects exhibit a property of importance are mind-dependent objects (see ‘sensual-objects’ below). I do not see how Harman can defend a line between unimportant and important without eventual reference to mind? The asteroid impact predated mind, but its importance stems from its causal impact on the evolution of mind, and in particular human mind, becoming aware of it.

Harman also introduces us to “dormant objects” which are more problematic than symbiotic objects. A “dormant object” emerges from its constituent relations but does not participate in any relations of which it is a constituent. A dormant object “has no effects”. Is such a thing even possible? An object must exist to have properties, but once it exists it immediately has properties and these enter into relations. There are no objects (mental or otherwise as we shall see) that do not immediately have properties and just as immediately (or at least at the speed of light) enter into relations. Perhaps such relations are trivial (analogous to the gravity of a proton) by our lights but they cannot be nonexistent.

In the end there is a top-of-the-chain relation between every particular and every other particular in the universe. This is not an “all is one” view like that of Heidegger or Whitehead because the relation of everything to everything else is no more or less real than the relation between any two atoms or thoughts anywhere in the universe. It is possible, given all the spatially or temporally extended relations, even the most trivial of events will turn out to be symbiotic when viewed over wide enough scales. Again Harman has no way to draw a line other than by “significance to mind”.

Harman also distinguishes between “real objects” and “sensual objects” where ‘real’ here means “mind independent”. The pink elephant floating in front of me is a sensual object as is the relation (resulting in a cognitive acquisition) between my mind and a mind independent tree. Both of these objects are (or might be) causally efficacious; having an influence on a subsequent world-line. If I see the pink elephant while driving I might swerve and cause an accident. If I am driving down a dirt road and see a tree in the middle of it I had better swerve to avoid an accident. I have no problem with this distinction, but it risks un-flattening Harman’s ontology. It at least takes a small step towards an ontological dualism (mind vs everything else) he wants very much to avoid. The move adds epistemology to ontology. The “objects of our minds” are like any other object except that they are ours, belong to an individual subjectivity, while all the other objects are not ours, not a property of a subjectivity! If this is, for Harman, an epistemological distinction without ontological weight, then we cannot possibly know, but only claim by speculative fiat, that all objects, sensual or otherwise, are “equally real”. I do not see how he can have it both ways.

Also problematic is Harman’s claim that “matter doesn’t exist”. I cannot find a way to make sense of this claim in the context of his “Object Oriented Ontology” (OOO). At first I thought perhaps he was suggesting the quantum wave function is the “real real” (some physicists believe this) and matter is merely a second-order by-product. But he doesn’t much talk about the wave function and he cites an example of two tectonic plates opposing each other “rock to rock” which seems material enough to me.

Another possibility is that Harman makes no room for universals. Red doesn’t exist only individual red objects. ‘Animals’ are not an object, only particular animals. But Harman considers sets to be good sensual objects and “classes” or “kinds” are merely another way to refer to sets. Red perhaps doesn’t work here because it is purely sensual, but ‘animals’ does. ‘Animals’ is a concept and so a sensual object. But it is not like the pink elephant because there are mind-independent individual animals tieing the sensual object to the mind-independent realm. Why can’t matter be a property common to some non-sensual objects?

Maybe this claim is about relations? Being (objects existing) entails relation and perhaps in the end relations (mental or entirely mind-independent) are the only objects we can talk about. But that wouldn’t imply that matter didn’t exist only that it might not exist. Relations are not made of matter but some of their relata might be. If existence is logically prior to properties and relations but we cannot grasp all of that in which this existence consists, who is to say that matter is not a part of the essense of some objects? From inside the phenomenal, direct access only to sensual objects, nothing entails or even implies that some non-sensual objects are not matter. OOO must remain ambivilant about this and this is not the end of the problem. Relata, for example non-sensual rocks, are also relations (between atoms) and they in turn are relations (between particles) and so on (infinitely alas) and so in the end there are no relata only relations and Harman is, in effect, defining matter away.

Haecceity seems to be something of a substitute for matter at least as concerns traditionally material objects. OOO here comes down to “there is a mind independent real but in the end we can never experience or embrace the core of it only its effects; manifestations in properties and relations.” But even granting this, the immateriality of properties and relations then cannot stand as evidence for or against the ontological genuineness of matter! If we cannot know “the core of being” then we cannot know that some of it is or is not matter.

I return to the question of what Harman gets out of this? The point of ontology is to be useful at least to other philosophical arenas (epistemology, ethics, aesthetics) and perhaps human endeavor in general whether in the hard or soft sciences, arts, politics, and so on. One thing he might get is univocality of cause. Harman says that cause is fundamentally “agent cause” because an object’s causal potential is some part of its withdrawn essence. But an object’s causal potential expresses through its properties and their relations with other objects. The agent (essence) is the secret of an object’s causality, but what objects manifest to one another are their properties and what mind recognizes of cause is revealed in object-relations.

Physical cause and mental cause are both “occasional” outcomes of relations derived ultimately from properties manifest by being. If this is so then “causal agency” is, ontologically speaking, an assertion of faith, a speculation. All that we know of cause is more suitably described in event or process terms. The ontological (object) status of events or discrete process has no epistemological bearing. Proposing a universal causal manifestation in relations (however grounded in a haecceity we cannot know) tells us nothing new. If everything is a relation, how could cause not express itself in or thru relation? Individual essences, events, and relations are all objects of equal ontological status. Cause therefore belongs to everything equally.

Like the continental tradition generally, Harman takes an interest in the social sciences. In “Immaterialism” (2016) he offers us an example of applied OOO in the form of a corporate history. A corporation is, after all, an object like everything else. It has a historical duration. It has relations to people, events, recordings (documents), and such; the stuff of its daily doings (all objects). Corporations also have relations to later historical events (more objects). The corporation he chooses is the Dutch East India Trading Company, known in Harman’s book by its Dutch initials VOC.

The VOC is an interesting choice because it has a clearly bounded history (1605 to 1795). It illustrates an object’s coming into existence and going from it. At the same time, undergoing many transformations and a participant (not to mention instigator) in many historical events, it shows the ability of objects to transform without thereby ceasing to exist and become new objects at every turn. He also explains here symbiotic objects and dormant objects using the same object, a document (policy statement) introduced by the corporation’s most notorious Governor-General in 1619.

What makes this document symbiotic? It had a far reaching effect on the actions (decisions taken by directors, employees, and so on) of the VOC for the next hundred years as compared (I suppose) to most of the thousands of other documents (minutes of board meetings, policy statements, and so forth) generated during that time; a clear “disproportionate effect”. How then could it also be dormant, an object with “no upward relation”? Harman tries to throw a little too much in here I think. The document was first dormant because it had no particular effect on the actions of the corporation until a few years after its introduction.

But how could Harman possibly know this? He does not know of any immediate effects precipitated by that document, but he cannot claim that there weren’t any. Sitting in the room, when the document was introduced were a pair of investors. One ran home immediately to his wife and said: “The governor general is a monster. We must sell everything we have and divest ourselves of VOC stock now!” The other investor likeways ran home to his wife and said: “that man is brilliant. We must divest of everything elsewhere and double down on VOC!” Now Harman might reply that yes after all there is no absolute but only relative dormancy. That my example is hypothetical and does not come down to us in the historical record (another object) is evidence that relations can be more or less fecund. But such a reply makes importance “importance to human mind”. Only humans care about documents or for that matter “the historical record”. What makes this document important is that it had disproportionate effect, over time, on the decisions of human beings and those, in turn, effected the lives of other humans. Our judgments of relative importance or unimportance are always judgments (themselves always sensual objects) with respect to their effects, ultimately, on other humans.

Immaterialism is given over to much detail on the doings of the VOC and in particular its doings after the introduction of that document. I can only imagine the idea is to show how relations can play themselves out. But in giving us this admittedly interesting history and connecting it up to a particular document Harman does no more than give us a description of decisions (on the part of people) and events (naval battles, enslavement, genocide) that read like a history told by any other historian. Harman neatly divides up traditional objects (cannon, ships, documents), people (decision makers and their decisions), and events (naval battles, invasions) that stand out primarily because they have come down to us in the historical record. Of course Harman ignores many records so he can thread these particulars together in a cohesive story and not write a thousand page book. The problematic part is that in describing all of this, Harman uses the conventional language of objects, relations, and events. Whether all of these are ontologically objects, makes not the slightest difference to the story. Whether or not a particular naval battle or act of genocide had a withdrawn essence that we cannot know simply has no bearing. “Everything is an object and all objects are equally real” doesn’t add anything to our grasp of this history.

Like Meillassoux, Harman is stuck behind the anti-realist wall. There is no hole in the wall for Meillassoux. His conclusions are purely inferences based on an epistemological assumption (the Principle of Sufficient Reason is true only for epistemology and not for ontology) about ontology. This restricts him to a very limited and tentative set of speculative conclusions about the nature of the mind-independent world. Mind independent contingency (for example) entails time and space apart from our mental categories. Beyond this, he cannot say anything about the structure of the extra-mental other than that it appears stable (for now) and is of necessity entirely contingent.

Harman also is not able to say very much about what is mind independent beyond that it is real and divided up into objects having infinite relations. Of course he can distinguish between rocks, rock concerts, and pink elephants because their properties vary, but these distinctions, these joints, are picked out by mind. Harman insists that they are real independent of mind, but his ontology supports this assertion only because every possible object-relation is real. Harman can go a bit further than Meillassoux because, while the mental arena cannot contact the core of any object, it does contact relations, and we are able to explain much using a language of relations as Harman does with the VOC. There is, in effect, a hole in Harman’s wall that lets [some] relations through to mind. The external relation between the tree and me invokes a sensual-object, my perception of the tree, in my mind. This is what allows Harman to say anything at all about the mind-independent world.

Harman’s mind-independent world is therefore a little richer than Meillassoux’s but on the other hand Meillassoux reasons himself to what he concludes about the world from a few assumptions. Harman simply intuits a solution and hopes that other work (like history, political science, art) will demonstrate its usefulness. Only Ferraris manages to get past the wall altogether by connecting up unamendability (a fixed past and the constraints of natural law) and affordance (opportunities, realizable potentials) the world presents to us and so realizes that there is no wall, only a screen, and the screen lets much through to mind which evolved in response to its transparency.

Hamilton 86 Guyana Rum

Another from Ed Hamilton creator of the Ministry of Rum. A Guyana Demerara River rum I expect this to be both sweet and smooth. I was not disappointed. The bottle says 43% ABV product of Guyana distilled and aged on the banks of the Demerara river. Who doesn’t like Demerara rums? On the back label: “A blend of rums aged up to five years in Guyana and then bottled in the U.S. without adding any sugar or other sweetener.

Color: Dark mahogany red, rich looking.

Legs: A few fast thin legs descend from a swirl, but many little beads also form and slowly coalesce.

Aroma: Heady molasses, coffee, chocolate, burnt caramel (treacle), prune, strike you along with just a little alcohol. The nose is fantastically rich. There are no “young rum” acetone notes, only delicious darkness. This smells very sweet. No ester funk in the aroma at all.

Flavor: Smooth, dark fruit, less sweet than it smells. Very creamy blended flavors favoring prune, tobacco, and coffee but subtle. No one flavor leaps out and there is something a little different from every swallow. No funk! Warm but not at all hot or sharp. Smooth, smooth, smooth. Medley of aromas disappears in the flavor to a subtle dark fruit sweetness, creamy throughout. Long finish warm creamy rich with just a touch of bitterness at the very end. It reminds me of the Foursquare Port Cask or maybe a richer version of English Harbour.

This is my second “Hamilton Rum”, the first being a very high ester (funky) St. Lucian 2006. Also rich, but very funky. This one is very different. Ed has a good nose for good rum of all kinds. This bottle cost me $42 (the St. Lucian was $60 something)! Fantastic deal for such a well crafted rum! Highly recommended.

Review: Harman and DeLanda

Two more books, one (2002) by Graham Harman is I think an early statement of his full system. There are things missing here (dormant and symbiotic objects for example) but the core of it, that Heiddeger’s tool/broken-tool distinction is a foundation for a full fledged ontology, and that what is both real and mind-independent has, nevertheless, a being or essence (haeccity is an old word for it from the scholars of the middle ages, but it fits) that is both ontologically real and unreachable (withdrawing) from any relation. The second review is of a recent collaboration between Harman and Manuel DeLanda. I have not read DeLanda otherwise. His thoughts about ontology are not systematically clear for me. Harman’s would not be either if I had only this book to go by. Instead what we get is terminological refinements of one another’s thoughts (each compared to the other) in five broad ontological subjects.

It seems to me that as concerns the most ontologically fundamental nature of being Harman and Delanda have a very fundamental disagreement. The haeccity that withdraws from us (Harman) is summed up (for DeLanda) in the object’s world-line, the exact details of its entire history. I get the impression that DeLanda is saying that if we had immediate experiential knowledge of every detail at all levels of graining expressed in all (even possible) linguistic systems, we would know that object. He concedes that such knowledge is in principle impossible and so what constitutes being cannot ever be fully touch it. Harman agrees that the world-line is real (an object), but insists that even the entirety of its history does not exhaust it. The two positions come out, in the end, to the same thing as concerns our experience of what is real. We cannot ever reach the core of things. In this sense, Harman is a little more realist in the sense that he adds a little more to what is mind-independent, but his addition seems arbitrary, utterly speculative. He never quite explains what difference it makes. DeLanda also doesn’t know for sure if being is encompassed by a world-line, but he argues that it goes at least that far, something on which both authors agree.

Both of these authors, along with Meillassoux are called “speculative realists”. The moniker is well deserved. Coming from a continental anti-realist position both remain trapped behind the anti-realist boundary between thought and mind-independent reality. But even anti-realists (apart from pure idealists who became extinct over a century ago) believe that there is a mind-independent world though nothing can be known for certain about it. In becoming “realists” all three are attempting to formulate a view of what can be said about that world, but they still accept that what might be said cannot be known with certainty. Thus it is they are *speculating!*

Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Kindle Edition 2002)

I suspect Tool-Being was Harman’s first attempt to reveal his developed ontology to the world. The book, written in 2002, is now a bit dated as Harman has updated his ontology with a few modifications (additions and subtractions) in later books, but those are still only adjustments around the edges. The basic ideas are all still here. What I do not see, again, is any development of his conclusions from first principles, but his ontology does not simply spring fully formed into his head. Rather than first principles it appears to have been a patchwork of inspiration taken from the ideas of Heidegger, Whitehead, Latour, and others. If anything Tool-Being provides us with this historical foundation of Harman’s thought.

So what we get here in this book is first a review of Heidegger’s theory of tools and broken tools which forms the fundamental insight that Harman extends to everything, not just tools, in the universe. Next he looks into various interpretations of Heidegger and shows how they can be extended to be about more, and different, than Heidegger himself had in mind. Lastly, we have the explication of his own insights derived from the foregoing. All of this until the last 7 or 8 pages of the book is illustrated by reference to other philosophers, in the last chapter mostly Levinas and Zubri. Finally, at the end Harman states his conclusions and several problems (paradoxes and regresses) stemming from them. He recognizes that these issues must be worked through (presumably by him and others) to fully flesh out the ontology, but he declines to do this here claiming for this book only a pointer to the way forward.

There is a good reason why Harman is grouped with a few others among the new generation of “speculative realists”. Given their continental anti-realist roots (Meillassoux being the only other of this group I’ve reviewed) they accept that perception alone (naive realism) doesn’t give us reality, and that, in the end, we can’t do philosophy (or anything else) from outside the mind. What they have in common is the conviction that from within mind, we can say something reasonable about the layout of a reality that includes both mind and something outside it. But they also know that what might well be reasonable and even useful for other areas of philosophy and the human-sciences cannot be known to be true. At best, as concerns ontology, these ideas of Harman (and Meillassoux and others) are speculations. They are not inductive conclusions based on evidence, but speculative possibilities. Harman is at least aware that the summing up of his particular speculations, up through the development of his thought to this point, leaves many questions to be resolved. He finishes convinced that, as a beginning, the fleshed out [future] system will be useful to someone. I have to wonder if he doesn’t come across a bit too convinced given the historical foundations of his ideas, but he does make a good effort in the last pages to explain his views particularly as they contrast with those of Heidegger and Whitehead.

I gave the book 4 stars because even if one is not a fan of Harman, the book is a superb explication of Heidegger and others as concerns possible implications of their metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology to the nature of the mind independent world.

The Rise of Realism (Kindle Edition 2017)

This little book consists of a dialog between Manuel DeLanda and Graham Harman, two of a small suite of continental philosophers who today are trying to reclaim realism from the self-referential swamp of anti-realism having its beginnings in Kant. The book is divided into five broad subjects (chapters): Realism and Materialism; Realism and Anti-Realism; Realist Ontology; Cognition and Experience; Time, Space, and Science. In each chapter DeLanda and Harman conduct a conversation covering various sub-topics within the overall category.

One gets the impression of a couple of philosophy graduate students chatting over beers in a local pub. Of course Harman and DeLanda are a bit more disciplined than graduate students, but not by a lot. The conversation tends to drift from sub-topic to sub-topic. As each side of the conversation approaches more technical or nuanced issues over which they might disagree more than being a “matter of terminology”, each changes the subject so as to move on. Nothing is explored in any depth. In part this is understandable. I suppose neither wanted to write a thousand page book. But neither party actually explains the derivation of their particular “system of thought”, merely stating it as it relates to whatever particular subject is at hand. Harman mildly contradicts himself here and there as one broad subject (chapter) moves on to the next, and overall DeLanda’s position seems to me to be the more common-sensical but both have their problems.

Meanwhile, the two rarely disagree and when they approach disagreement they tend to change the subject. Only in the last chapter is there any substantive disagreement discussed. Overall if you are looking for some overview of both philosopher’s thoughts on these broad issues this book is a good summary. As a means of using one another’s thought to adjust their own positions it falls flat. Neither author’s position changes in the slightest except where they can agree that their positions on some particular sub-issue can be brought closer together by terminological adjustments. Not a bad book and a good review of each author’s already mature thought. But it isn’t great either. Nothing new is accomplished. For $18 (Kindle edition) this book is probably more expensive than it should be.

Review: Hicks, Postmodernism

Not a long or profound review here but I put it up because the topic has come up a lot lately on various philosophy forums. One can trace the development of postmodernism all the way from the Greeks, but in our era, it all begins with Kant and the question of “what we can know?”. It is an epistemological position, about truth and what we can know of it. There are both Anglo-analytic and continental expressions of it, but the dominant thread runs through continental antirealist philosophy. As the history of Western philosophy progressed the notion of what we could know, how we could recognize truth became narrower and narrower. Eventually someone thought: “well if there is nothing we can know for sure, no truth that we can be absolutely sure of, perhaps there isn’t any such thing as truth that can be known at all”. From there it was but a small step for the next philosopher to add: “It doesn’t matter that we try to approach truth. Since we cannot know what it is, or even in what direction it lies, we can call anything we want ‘truth'” and with this, postmodernism was born. If you don’t like postmodernism (I don’t). If you think it leads down a dangerous path; “getting what you want matters, truth does not, any lie is justified and the ends always justify the means” (I do), then this is a book for you. Hicks skewers postmodernism with both humor and philosophical rigor.

Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Kindle Edition 2010) by Stephen Hicks

Not often I get to say of a non-fiction book that I didn’t want to put it down and was sad when I reached the end. Except for a sense of the movement’s nihilism, I didn’t know much about Postmodernism, but Dr. Hicks has covered the ground. He begins with a broad brush of what postmodernism stands for metaphysically (anti-realism), epistemologically (skepticism), ethically (collectivism in the social, educational and political sphere) and aesthetically (the meaninglessness of art and criticism). One gets the impression that he knows the subject well. His attention to detail is that of the scholar and even the true believer, but he hints slyly at the movement’s absurdity even here. From his review he goes backwards and traces the roots of the movement beginning with Kant’s response to the Enlightenment in an attempt to shore up the authority of the Church, and up through Rousseau, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Fichte, Nietzsche, Marx, and then Heidegger to the later 20th century with Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty. There are many other voices mentioned along the way (Kierkegaard plays a role as does Freud). Besides philosophers he traces political movements of the left and the right in opposition to the Enlightenment’s development of capitalism resting on individualism.

In the last chapter HIcks returns to Postmodernism proper and its absurdity from the metaphysical and epistemological to the political and aesthetic. In 200 hundred years every political and social consequence of anti-Enlightenment philosophy, every prediction and political hope has singularly failed. Postmodernism is the response to this failure by philosophers who come to the conclusion that if the foundation and development of the anti-Enlightenment movement over 200 years is rotten the only thing left to do, besides admit that you are wrong, is attack and destroy what the Enlightenment produced. Even Nietzsche (who Hicks returns to illustratively at the end) presciently suggests that one can take anti-realism and nihilism too far leaving the postmodernists to “quote Nietzsche less and Rousseau more”. Not only is Postmodernism nihilistic, it is destructively so, the bitter fruits of jealousy over the failure of collectivist anti-realism and seeming political, economic, and social success of Enlightenment realism, rationalism, and individualism.

An excellent review, thorough, scholarly, and easy to read. I find Hick’s style both serious and humorous at the same time. Superb!

Ruminations

"And a woman is only a woman but a good cigar is a smoke" Kipling. "The Betrothed"