I thought I would shift this discussion here, Temp, and hope you and others notice it. My response, such as it is, to this at the bottom.

Caro wrote:

Have to admire your persistence, Temperence. I am going to ignore OOOs and ANTs. Seems to be knowledge I can do without. Can there be objects without humancentric input really? Do animals think in terms of objects? Apart from natural things, objects are nearly all man-made anyway. I daresay I have this all wrong.

I think I have it all wrong too, Caro.

"Champagne corks, sailors' hats, Antwerp beer bottles, fish boxes, oranges, lemons, onions, banana stems, waterworn timber and the most exquisite flat and round pebbles, black, dove grey, veined wheat coloured."

"I come home daily with pockets full of smooth pebbles, often pearshaped (flattish), rosy of primrose coloured and transparent nearly...& in the fresh moistness wonderfully beautiful: others white and round or oval: some split & and with grain like chestnuts: not one but makes me think or rather draws out a part of me beyond my thinking."

That's Thomas writing to Gordon Bottomly, and it's that last bit that's got me pondering - how things draw out things from *us* beyond our thought. Is this OOO all about what existence really means? What is reality? What actually "exists"? Does something only exist because we "think" it - do we conjure up our reality, so to speak? I think the OOO-ers maintain that objects do exist independent of our thought... Oh Lord, I don't know. But the ecotheorists are big into OOO, and I suppose all the "Nature" poets are now being interpreted with OOO in mind. I was actually more comfortable with the other lecture - "Time and the Poetry of Edward Thomas" - Prof. Patrick McGuinness who compared Thomas with Proust. Oh good, I thought, this makes more sense - a blackbird, willow-herb, a hissing train, a bare platform, a man, a moment in time (12.45 pm on June 24, 1914) - all come together, and together will forever be/mean Adlestrop, a railway station in England, which will forever mean... a memory becomes an epiphany, or something like that. But that's OOO too, I suppose.

I wish I understood more. This OOO business is probably a lesson in humility. I'll ask the next 18 year old I meet if they have heard of Ian Bogost. I bet they will have. He's a philosopher, but his day job is designing computer games. Some young person will explain it all to me.


From Caro: I thought there had always been discussion about whether objects exist outside of people's experience or not. [Does a tree falling in a forest happen if no one sees it? - isn't that the classic question?] I don't quite see on the surface (and I am, as usual, only looking on the surface, not even having opened up your links) what is new and newly important about all this. There must be something I am not getting.

Hi Caro,

Thanks for moving my post here - I'm off out now, but I do hope people respond. I'm so confused by all this - wonder if there are (younger?) folk out there who could help?

PS I've edited my post slightly over on the Shakespeare Challenge - there should be a capital "G" on McGuinness, and I've put the exact date and time for the Adlestrop moment - slightly altered the sentence too. Any chance you could edit it here for me? (This is me going OTT with my OCD!)

Good Lord, on BBC Breakfast they're talking about a new opera all about *Swindon*. Whatever next?

Edward's comments on stones immediately reminded me of this

http://home.zcu.cz/~dsosna/SASCI-papers/Ingold%202007-materiality.pdf

I can't find an open access copy of the responses to Ingold and his reply but if you've got a login for Cambridge journals you can find the whole discussion here, I think you'd enjoy it Temp.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?iid=987116

It's fascinating stuff even if I find I almost always agree with whatever I'm reading at the time, if it's well written, and Ingold writes well, as does Chris Tilley, with a real talent for finding and expressing beauty.

And to think, when I started this archaeology lark, I thought I'd be spending my time digging up and examining bits of pot, not wandering the tangled and overgrown pathways of philosophy, hoping desperately to get to a clearing where I might see beyond the nearest bramble bush and away to the hills.

Many thanks for the link, ferval; I'm sure I shall enjoy the Ingold article. Got through a bit already actually, and I must say I immediately warmed to your man when I read: "For the most part, I have to confess, I could make neither head nor tail of what they were talking about."

ferval wrote:

And to think, when I started this archaeology lark, I thought I'd be spending my time digging up and examining bits of pot, not wandering the tangled and overgrown pathways of philosophy, hoping desperately to get to a clearing where I might see beyond the nearest bramble bush and away to the hills.

And to think, when I started this poetry lark all those years ago, I thought it would be all about assonance and alliteration and knowing your dactylic dimeters from your anapaestic tetrameters. And if you could spell onomatopoeia - well, you were home and dry. How times change. It all started going downhill for me around 1989ish when people started muttering darkly about "Theory". Not easy. But one tries to keep up...

I enjoyed listening to Dr Macfarlane and Professor McGuinness last week, but if I'm honest their kind of glittering, icy intelligence applied to the poetry of Edward Thomas didn't really work for me. The performance of a young PhD student from the University of Exeter, however, had me almost in tears. Philip Lancaster, a remarkable young musician and a specialist in early 20th century British music and poetry, gave a recital of Thomas's work set to the music of Ivor Gurney. He was accompanied by Dr Helen Jones, a young Cambridge historian and pianist. They were superb, and I was able afterwards to question Philip about Gurney's manic depression (poor man ended up in an asylum) and Thomas's own crippling depression. A definite link between the two men, I think, and the combination of Gurney's music and Thomas's words delivered a powerful double punch. Emotional stuff, I know, but listening to the Lancaster recital somehow meant more to me than trying to follow the rather cold and clinical OOO and ANT stuff. To be honest, I think I'm just getting old. But I wonder too, like Caro above - is the OOO approach to life actually that new - or is it just newly fashionable?

I suppose OOO is anti-Kantian (???), but I'm not sure: my understanding of Kant is sadly limited. In fact, if I am honest, it goes little beyond "Immanuel Kant was a real pissant/Who was very rarely stable..."

PS I love that photo of the Japanese ladder. I wish Norman was around, because I think that is art!

There's a point where analysis stops being illuminating and slithers into the kind of obsessive dissection which destroys the subject of that study: the operation was a success but the patient died.

Of course I'm entirely delighted that I haven't spent all my time pouring over pot sherds, that way lies madness, and been forced to grapple with all this theory malarkey. I just wish I'd tackled it all a long time ago when I could remember the next day that which I thought I understood the night before.

Here's a basic guide to OOO for anyone interested. Lord knows what the "advanced" guide would be like!

http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.co.uk/p/ooo-for-beginners.html

I like the quotation Timothy Morton uses at the beginning of his book The Ecological Thought: "Infinity overflows the thought that thinks it." That surely is what Edward Thomas was getting at with his "draws out a part of me beyond my thinking." Makes me think of William Blake too. I've just started Morton's book and I'm also pondering what Caro said above. Morton argues that all forms of "life" are connected, even the uglier, more synthetic ones. That's made me think of the plastic bag scene in "American Beauty". I'm going to look for a YouTube link in a minute.

This is hard, but makes a change from the Tudors and Richard III.

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGWU4QhJ4L8&feature=related

Edit: The Ian Bogost short video "Seeing Things" is superb - Gary Winogrand was doing with his camera what Thomas was doing with his pen.


PS Is this all pretentious crap? I always start thinking such thoughts when I'm struggling with things beyond me. That Graham Harman chap kept mentioning Gilles Deleuze, someone I'd never heard of, so I looked him up on Wiki and discovered that Deleuze was yet another philosopher who just couldn't cope. I was distressed to learn that this Frenchman committed suicide by defenestration. (He was, to be fair, a very sick man, describing himself as being "chained like a dog" to an oxygen machine.) Has any philosopher actually had a happy life? Do all their deep thoughts and musings actually make them any better than the rest of us at dealing with life's terrible vicissitudes? The French and the Germans seem to have been the most neurotic/depressed.

My head hurts now. The video is good although every time I hear or read 'the thing itself' I wonder if the world really would have been very much worse if Heidegger have never been born.
I know someone who has just got their doctorate with a thesis on Deluze and mesolithic flint knapping. When he spoke about it, I couldn't understand any of it and I've resisted the urge to follow it up.

You ask if this is all just pretentious crap: I don't know but I also wonder if it's us, those of us who sit there, a cold towel wrapped round our heads and making little bemused noises, trying to puzzle it out that are the pretentious ones. Am I deluding myself that I ever will really 'get it' and that it's an ego trip to bolster some kind of sad self esteem by being able to say things like "Of course, I've read Husserl and I find his view of phenomenology inadequate"? Then making my excuses and leaving promptly if asked to expand.

I know that if I weren't depressed and neurotic at the start, I soon would be if I had to contemplate these questions all the time. It's a bit like cosmology: when ever I hear someone talking about heat death, the universe dark and empty, I have the greatest difficulty in not bursting into tears.

The bar now I think, the nonsense I babble seems to make more sense after a few wines.

ferval wrote:

My head hurts now.

My brain has been hurting for some time now.

ferval wrote:

You ask if this is all just pretentious crap: I don't know but I also wonder if it's us, those of us who sit there, a cold towel wrapped round our heads and making little bemused noises, trying to puzzle it out that are the pretentious ones. Am I deluding myself that I ever will really 'get it' and that it's an ego trip to bolster some kind of sad self esteem by being able to say things like "Of course, I've read Husserl and I find his view of phenomenology inadequate"? Then making my excuses and leaving promptly if asked to expand.

Well, I don't know about you, ferval, but that's certainly true of me. I don't understand all this philosophy stuff and I never have done - ever since my father hit me round the head with a copy of Plato when I was seventeen and told me I had a second-rate mind. The mystery is why I still keep trying, even though there is no need. What on earth am I trying to prove? Why do I still struggle to "keep up"? Keep up with what? With whom? Pathetic perhaps, rather than pretentious.

I've been thinking about this a lot since I got back from Oxford. What should have been an enjoyable trip learning about the poetry of Edward Thomas has actually left me - if I'm honest - pretty depressed. (Although the nightmare on the M4 contributed - I was so glad to get back to Devon and our green lanes, even though they are all awash with muddy water.) I don't think actually I'm trying to "prove" anything anymore - I really do simply want to grasp what these clever young men and their OOOs and ANTS are trying to teach us about the world. But the sad truth is I can't grasp it. I haven't got the intelligence, and I haven't got the right sort of incisive, logical, analytical mind. I just like reading poems, stories and plays - and thinking about people and how we all try to cope with the utterly absurd situation - life - we find ourselves in.

But I get so frustrated and resentful at times. I know these brilliant young thinkers like Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Timothy Morton (and Dr. Macfarlane, who spoke to us) are genuine - enthusiastic and full of the love of learning and utterly passionate about their discipline (or disciplines in the case of Morton - he's actually a professor of English, damn him) - but I wish that their philosophising was not being forced on the rest of us. That's a terrible thing to say, I know, and sounds so stupid - of course philosophy and literature are inextricably linked, but philosophy - especially all the recent continental stuff - now seems to be taking over. It's become a monster devouring everything (history too?). Are we losing something in the translation?

I blame Terry Eagleton (Morton was taught by Eagleton at Oxford). He started all this with his bloody Marxian interpretation of everything from Beowulf to T.S. Eliot. God knows I've lived and struggled through it all during the past 40 years: academic feminism, Marxism, Lacanianism , Foucaultianism , Derrideanism and so on, but I wonder how much all this has actually contributed to our real understanding of the great writers. I remember reading somewhere that John Bayley, Iris Murdoch's husband (he was Warton Professor of English at Oxford from 1974 to 1992 when Eagleton, who loathed him, took over), said he believed that no one wanted him - and his style of teaching English - at Oxford anymore. Sad - he was a great man.

But it was ever thus. The young men - and women - have their way to make and their OOO and ANT is the new big thing. It - and they - will have their day. Meanwhile it's 8.00am and the sun has actually come out. And we still get great BBC productions like "The Hollow Crown" to lift our spirits and give us hope.

I suppose I'd better get dressed and then struggle on with young Timothy.

Interesting stuff, Temp. I couldn't pronounce some of the jargon above - as for ever trying to spell it , well - and as to meaning, I seem to have got by without knowing none of it.

A few years back a young scholar at Oxford from hereabouts, brilliant by all accounts in Literature was offered all manner of lures and positions to get him to stay on to shine his light even further. I was a tad dismayed to hear that he had declined all. Instead, he went to London, reapplied his ample ability and is now one of those bankers who made a great pile. Mmm. I'd be surprised if he even read a book now from what I hear of him. Not sure if this is a good thing or not, all in all.

Priscilla wrote:

Interesting stuff, Temp. I couldn't pronounce some of the jargon above - as for ever trying to spell it , well - and as to meaning, I seem to have got by without knowing none of it... Mmm. I'd be surprised if he even read a book now from what I hear of him. Not sure if this is a good thing or not, all in all.

Do you remember I mentioned on another thread the Oracle lady in the Matrix? She had the "Know Thyself" proverb on her kitchen wall, but it was in Latin, not Greek, and I wondered why. Apparently (so Wiki informs me), Thomas Hobbes used the Latin version "Nosce te ipsum" or "Nosce teipsum" in his Leviathan - he translated it as "Read thyself"; in other words you learn more from studying people than you do from trying to learn from books. But perhaps both are useful.

Coleridge wrote a poem which ended up with "Ignore thyself..." which is also interesting advice.

I still want to know more - and at my advanced age I am at last facing up to the embarrassing fact that I really haven't got a clue about much of this at all - especially the confusing terms that are used in philosophy. I've always been too ashamed (and too dishonest?) to admit that - but why should there be shame? What ordinary person really does understand the jargon - and why should the academics make muddy mysteries of such things for us all? It *frightens* people, and that kind of intellectual bullying has always *infuriated* me. Good teachers seek to clarify, not terrify.

I'd like an Ordinary Idiot's Guide to Philosophy - I'm serious - clear, easy (if such a thing is possible) and *reliable* (not like Wiki) explanations of the following:

idealism

subjective idealism

objective idealism

phenomenology

realism

subjective realism

objective realism

speculative realism

correlationism

materialism (not Madonna)

a posteriori knowledge

a priori knowledge

contingent

I am dizzy just typing it all out.

Maybe bog standard philosophy should be taught in our bog standard comprehensive schools. Such an idea would no doubt be laughed at, but why the hell should it be? Why should the rich kids get all the good ideas?

8.40am and I'm already ranting.

I've given up with Timmy Morton for the time being - got a new book about Henry VIII ("Our Man in Rome" - everso good).

Forgot:

empiricism

logical empiricism

posiitivism

logical positivism

Is there an illogical negativism? I bet there is. No wonder they all go mad and jump out of windows.

I'm going to Morrison's now. My supplies of "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" are running low.

I'm rooting for illogical positivism. My life is based upon this - that it 'will be all right on the night.' And it usually is because I assume it will be; my husband roots for logical negatism - or would more so if I would listen so he gives up and reads the Telegraph instead. I am told mine is female thinking; of course it is. I really have no time to fit in other ism's and have no wish to know what they are since my son in law's brother who did maths and Phil masters showed me his notes where the whole lot was expressed in forumlae. He eventually left the course because his tutor and he fell out over a definition. He stayed sane, went out and got a life caring for the homeless instead. he seems happy .. his small son was on TV at Glastonbury playing a guitar in the mud.

I also believe in 'It's not Butter.' Delphi also goes for 'Nothing in Excess.' I had fun with one in my Delphi trilogy.

You missed:

structuralism

post structuralism

hemeneutics

ideational realism

and on and on.........

ideational realism - is that when someone says 'I think you brought dog poo in on your shoes?

Priscilla wrote:

ideational realism - is that when someone says 'I think you brought dog poo in on your shoes?

As the actress said to the Bishop.

PS Please forgive the smileys, Priscilla, but I am smiling.

PPS Trying "Utterly Butterly" today for a change.













That's odd. I tried to post a picture of Utterly Butterly, but George Berkeley's come up instead. Oh well. I hope that's not a copyright picture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5fGSBsfq8&feature=related

*Was* Socrates offside?

I certainly hope that Socrates - the only one I know - of was off side. What would be the point of taking the hemlock penalty, otherwise?

Anyway, he copped out with that "Me? I onl' 'no dat I 'no nuffink - Guv. 'onest."

I've found something that has cheered me up.

It's a comment from Ray Brassier, an influential young philosopher, author of "Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction", and translator of Quentin Meillassoux's "After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency", works which have contributed so much to our understanding* of speculative realism (OOO and ANT are part of that movement). Brassier rather crossly said this recently:

"The 'speculative realist movement' exists only in the imagination of a group of bloggers promoting an agenda for which I have no sympathy whatsoever: actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy. I don't believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiam of impressionable graduate students. I agree with Deleuze's remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity, so I see little philosophical merit in a "movement" whose most signal achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity."

These rather brutal comments have upset many, and a lot of clever young men are now having a great time arguing away angrily about it all in utterly baffling language.

Seems best to leave them to get on with it and to stop fretting. As both Caro and Priscilla have wisely pointed out, we have all lived thus far without OOO or ANT to guide us.

And perhaps "Adlestrop" was simply a poem about a moment in time when a blackbird was singing its heart out.

*

Seems odd that an influential philosopher starts a sentence with ... " I do not believe...' albeit about using blogs. It sounds a bit prosaic and no better than 'I believe.....'

I really ought stay out of this sort of wrangle though I did wonder why it cheered you, Temp? Me. I'll stick with the blackbird theory. The perceived beauty of that is mystery enough.

Temperance wrote:

Brassier rather crossly said this recently:

"The 'speculative realist movement' exists only in the imagination of a group of bloggers promoting an agenda for which I have no sympathy whatsoever: actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy. I don't believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiam of impressionable graduate students. I agree with Deleuze's remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity, so I see little philosophical merit in a "movement" whose most signal achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity."

It seems that Ray Brassier was echoing the grumble which was heard from some in the UK during the Second World War regarding US servicemen being 'overpaid, oversexed and over here' (OOO). Only in this case it is the speculative realists who are seemingly 'overpsyched, overspiced and over net'.

I wrote:

Many thanks for the link, ferval; I'm sure I shall enjoy the Ingold article. Got through a bit already actually, and I must say I immediately warmed to your man when I read: "For the most part, I have to confess, I could make neither head nor tail of what they were talking about."

Lord, what was all this stuff about? Three years ago now, and I am still none the wiser about OOO and ANT. To be honest, I can't even remember what the letters stand for.

I really did just like reading Edward Thomas's poetry...

I have just looked up "Speculative Realism" on Wiki.    

Did I really spend three or four days (back in 2012) trying to understand this?  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_realism

Object-oriented philosophy

The central tenet of object-oriented ontology (OOO) is that objects have been given short shrift for too long in philosophy in favour of more "radical approaches". Graham Harman has classified these forms of "radical philosophy" as those that either try to "undermine" objects by saying that objects are simply superficial crusts to a deeper underlying reality, either in the form of monism or a perpetual flux, or those that try to "overmine" objects by saying that the idea of a whole object is a form of folk ontology, that there is no underlying "object" beneath either the qualities (e.g. there is no "apple", only "red", "hard", etc.) or the relations (as in both Latour and Whitehead, the former claiming that an object is only what it "modifies, transforms, perturbs, or creates"[10]). OOP is notable for not only its critique of forms of anti-realism, but other forms of realism as well. Harman has even claimed that the term "realism" will soon no longer be a relevant distinction within philosophy as the factions within Speculative Realism grow in number. As such, he has already written pieces differentiating his own OOP from other forms of realism which he claims are not realist enough as they reject objects as "useless fictions".

According to Harman, everything is an object, whether it be a mailbox, electromagnetic radiation, curved spacetime, the Commonwealth of Nations, or a propositional attitude; all things, whether physical or fictional, are equally objects. Expressing strong sympathy for panpsychism, Harman proposes a new philosophical discipline called "speculative psychology" dedicated to investigating the "cosmic layers of psyche" and "ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust, armies, chalk, and stone".[11]

Harman defends a version of the Aristotelian notion of substance. Unlike Leibniz, for whom there were both substances and aggregates, Harman maintains that when objects combine, they create new objects. In this way, he defends an a priori metaphysics that claims that reality is made up only of objects and that there is no "bottom" to the series of objects. In contrast to many other versions of substance, Harman also maintains that it need not be considered eternal, but as Aristotle maintained, substances can both come to be and pass away. For Harman, an object is in itself an infinite recess, unknowable and inaccessible by any other thing. This leads to his account of what he terms "vicarious causality". Inspired by the occasionalists of Medieval Islamic Philosophy, Harman maintains that no two objects can ever interact save through the mediation of a "sensual vicar".[12] There are two types of objects, then, for Harman: real objects and the sensual objects that allow for interaction. The former are the things of everyday life, while the latter are the caricatures that mediate interaction. For example, when fire burns cotton, Harman argues that the fire does not touch the essence of that cotton which is inexhaustible by any relation, but that the interaction is mediated by a caricature of the cotton which causes it to burn.






PS The list of publications at the end of the Wiki page is interesting. It includes the following:

Grant, Iain Hamilton. 2008. "Being and Slime: The Mathematics of Protoplasm in Lorenz Oken's 'Physio-Philosophy'" in Collapse IV: Concept-Horror. London: Urbanomic

Brassier, Ray. 2001. "Behold the Non-Rabbit: Kant, Quine, Laruelle" in Pli 12: Materialism.


What on earth is a "Non-Rabbit"?

Somewhere in this man's world, there are non rabbits;



Thick as a Brick is the fifth studio album by Jethro Tull. Released in 1972, the album includes only one song: the 44-minute-long title track
The original LP cover was designed as a spoof of a 12-by-16 inch multiple-paged village newspaper called The St. Cleve Chronicle and Linwell Advertiser, with articles, competitions, adverts, and so on, lampooning the parochial and amateurish local journalism that still exists in many places today, as well as certain classical album covers
Jethro Tull’s official website states about the mock-newspaper: “There are a lot of inside puns, cleverly hidden continuing jokes (such as the experimental non-rabbit), a surprisingly frank review of the album itself (written by Anderson under a pseudonym), references to penguins, stuffed or other, and a non-rabbit occur often, and the crossword puzzle is wonderful.