The correct order is: nature, politics, ontology

I.T. has been ranting about nature and ontology, both of which are close enough to my heart to drag me out of my ‘don’t bother posting about philosophy’ torpor, to the extent that I have been forced to get out of bed  to comment upon her post. This is excellent:

But it occurs to me that there has indeed been a kind of naive and perhaps unnoticed return to Engels in certain corners of contemporary continental philosophy: tracing politics from the laws of nature, we end up fusing concerns about the environment (apocalypticism, teleology) with desperation about the state of the world as it is (political struggle, a supposed all-pervasive feeling of despair). Everything is presumed, perversely following Heidegger though couched in a resolutely anti-phenomenological rhetoric, to take place on the level of ontology: a strike is as meaningful (or meaningless) as a leaf falling onto the pavement.

Absolutely nothing to disagree with there. I find the claim made in some quarters that it is somehow possible to evacuate politics from any area of philosophy a deeply troubling one. Likewise, the related claim that certain areas of philosophy can take place prior to politics.

She goes on to coin a marvelous slogan:

Ontology is play-science for philosophers;

Which I partially agree with, but then backs it up with this:

I’m pretty much convinced when Badiou argues that mathematics has better ways of conceiving it than philosophy does and that, besides, ontology is not the point.

The problem with this claim is that is completely in thrall to the sort of Heideggerian account of ontology which she name-checks in the previous quote.  Inasmuch as Heidegger boils down ontology to the Question [sic] of the being of being and plays it out via a purported ontic/ontological distinction, she might have a point (although I’m not at all convinced that Badiou’s mathematical ontology is any more satisfactory). But does ontology have to be played out in terms of the Heideggerian grand narrative or variations thereof which have haunted philosophy ever since? Additionally, I.T’s crack about play-science is presumably an allusion to the equally dubious idea (not hers, I hasten to add) that if anything is ever going to get a handle on the ultimate ‘reality’ of being it must be ’scientific’ in some sense (hence ‘tracing politics from the laws of nature’) but not actually in the sense of what scientists themselves get up to (although it might very well piggy-back on such practices, e.g. by allusions to quantum mechanics). This is the part that I have some sympathy with, but it still leaves other ontological questions untouched. Here are two:

1. What is the relationship between universals and particulars? In what way can universals be said to ‘exist’ at all?
2. What is the ontological status of art? If a particular painting can be said to ‘exist’ as an artwork? How can a piece of music be said to exist as an artwork in the same way? Is the artwork (all or any of) the score, performance, or recording? Is each recording (for example) one artwork? If not, why not as that seems to be what is going on with the painting?

There are others. These just happen to be my favourites.

The point is, that I cannot even conceive how scientific practice would go about setting up hypotheses and experiments in order to approach such questions, although I can see how philosophy might usefully rationally speculate upon them. As for mathematics; is it possible that it could address question 1? Some might think so.  It certainly couldn’t address question 2 outside the realm of applied maths, which means we’re back to scientific practice again. Furthermore, inasmuch as these are interesting questions which have political implications, ontology is the point and I.T. is simply making a reverse move to that of the people she criticizes: They evacuate politics from their ontology; she evacuates ontology from her politics.

However, if you can do it with ontology, why not go the whole hog and evacuate philosophy altogether? It doesn’t have to be done all at once but can be carried out piecemeal over time. Lets start with metaphysics as play-science:

Metaphysical questions are best recharacterized as those questions where scientific and experimental progress is not yet sufficient to found a flourishing explanatory paradigm. This implies that “metaphysical” is a label we apply to a stage – an immature stage, in fact – in a theory’s scientific development, rather than a distinct subject matter with distinct methods (Patricia Churchland, Brain-Wise, pp. 39-40).

The problem here (if you think it is a problem) is that it operates on a strongly teleological assumption of scientific progress which claims that science will eventually be able to reconfigure all these questions in ways that make them amenable to answers that metaphysics could never provide (personally, I think that it smacks of the same logic as Hick’s eschatological verificationism, but that’s by the by). This is perfectly consistent with Churchland’s eliminative materialist position with regard to folk psychology, which is currently popular (although not always well understood) in some parts at present. It should be noted that corollary to this definition of metaphysics and the elimination of folk psychology is the (not particularly smooth) reduction of epistemology to neuroscience. So that gets rid of another branch of philosophy.

“But we’re talking about politics!” I hear you cry. Well, if you can reduce ontology to mathematics and epistemology to neuroscience, why not reduce politics to evolutionism and socio-biology? You can’t. Here, I.T. is absolutely spot-on:

Confronting ‘what is’ has to mean accepting a certain break between the natural and the artificial, even if this break is itself artificial.

Politics, in the broadest possible sense, is this break. It is via our practices  and thought as social beings that we situate ourselves with regard to everything else. This is why Deleuze and Guattari say that ‘politics precedes being’. Inasmuch as we think and do things, we are unavoidably political. This is not some sort of claim that politics constitutes the real; rather that our access to the real is mediated via politics. If this makes me an idealist in some quarters, then I don’t really care because the term is currently being used with such careless abandon that it has lost all traction philosophically.

What follows from this is that metaphysics and epistemology can no more be given up to science than ontology can (nor can the latter be handed over to mathematics). If all these disciplines are somehow constituted politically (and this goes for maths and science themselves as well) then it is incumbent upon us to investigate the political implications of them and this is one of the things that philosophy is good at. This is not to make the anthropocentric claim that we cannot think things apart from the human, but even when we do this it is a political decision and should be regarded in such a light.

In conclusion, I couldn’t disagree more with Nick’s riposte to I.T. over at Speculative Heresy:

The positive political outcome of speculative realism, then, is to refuse the move of deriving politics from philosophy – and to restore politics to its own relative autonomy.

It is impossible to refuse such a move because philosophy is founded upon the break between the natural and artificial which is politics. The one presupposes the other