Abstract
Some contemporary philosophers have called for a “new realism” in philosophical ontology. Hartmann’s works provide some of the richest resources upon which recent realists might draw for both inspiration and argument. In this brief exploration I touch on some key concepts and arguments from a few of the players in this “ontological turn,” including Meillassoux, Brassier, and Ferraris, and show how many of them were already clearly articulated in Hartmann’s works. I’ll also describe and comment on Hartmann’s arguments concerning the “thing in itself,” which he considers a key “critical” concept of his new ontology. His treatment of this issue demonstrates the sophistication—and, perhaps, superiority—of Hartmann’s approach.
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Notes
With the exception of this passage (co-translated with Frederic Tremblay), all translations of Hartmann throughout the essay are my own.
It was followed by a second workshop in Bristol in 2009. 2007 participants included Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux, and Ray Brassier, all of whom had recently published original works. These were Harman (2005), Grant (2006), Brassier (2007), and Meillassoux (2006). The record of the first workshop, including presentations and subsequent discussion, is published by these authors in the journal Collapse (Collapse 2007). Recently, Brassier has denied that there is such a movement, and Harman has argued that there certainly is. For discussion of this recent dispute, and an interesting comparison of “new” and “speculative” realisms, see De Sanctis and Santarcangelo (2015).
The point is clarified with reference to Berkeley: “[T]o take one of Berkeley’s own favoured examples, the fact that I cannot think of an uninhabited landscape without thinking of it does not mean that this landscape becomes inhabited merely by virtue of my thinking about it. It is certainly true that I cannot think about the Empty Quarter without thinking about it; but it does not follow from this that the Empty Quarter is populated by my thinking about it. To insist that it does would be like claiming that it is impossible to paint an uninhabited landscape because the act of painting it renders it inhabited. But this would be to confuse the act of painting with what is painted, or the act of thinking with what is thought. [The argument] rests on precisely this equivocation between the necessary or formal conditions for the being of the act and the real conditions for the being of its correlate” (Brassier 2011, 63).
He also calls it the “transcendental fallacy.” According to him, “the vast majority of philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” took this path (Ferraris 2014, 30).
Again: “Now, one of the characteristics of experience is the fact that in many cases the surprise is there and cannot be corrected, there is nothing we can do, it is there and does not pass nor change. This characteristic is precisely unamendability, and it presents itself as a fundamental trait—as a persistent and nontransient character—of reality” (Ferraris 2014, 36). “[U]namendability, in fact, reveals how perceptive experience possesses an admirable stability and refractoriness compared to conceptual action and suggests that this stability should be ascribed more deeply (since, as in the slipper experiment, there is an interaction between beings with very different perceptual apparatuses) to the stability of the encountered world, prior to the action of our perceptual apparatuses and conceptual schemes” (Ferraris 2014, 37).
Like Ferraris, Hartmann also distinguishes between taking the senses as epistemological tools and as ontological witnesses. “It is a mistake to allow the senses to serve only for the givenness of the reality of things. In the experience of resistance a basis in the experienced always already exists that is also incorporated into the perceived. Perception builds on the prepared ground of a more primitive, but stronger experience of reality. It is not as if every perception of things has to be preceded by running into those same things; the naively experienced resistance is generalized without further ado” (Hartmann 1965, 169).
This does not mean that conceptual schemes are not employed in it—it just means they do not constitute the experience. In his ontological taxonomy he distinguishes between natural objects, ideal objects, and social objects, and it is only with social objects that conceptual schemes prove to be constitutive. His taxonomy and social ontology are fully developed in Ferraris (2013).
“[T]he decisive argument for realism is not theoretical but moral, because it is not possible to imagine moral behavior in a world without facts and without objects” (Ferraris 2014, 47).
Whether phenomenon or thing in itself, thought is directed at something that exists independently of the cognition. “[W]ithout the ‘in-itself character’ (Ansich-Charakter) of the object there is no knowledge at all” (Ibid., 141). The analysis of gnoseological being-in-itself reveals that it has the same “scope” as the ontological, and that “ontological being-in-itself is behind it from the very beginning, and it only requires dialectical unfolding in order to be grasped in all its clarity” (Hartmann 1965, 143–144).
This phenomenon of natural realism is the starting point for the new ontology. “[N]atural realism is not a theory, doctrine, or thesis, but a foundation upon which all human consciousness of the world is found to be built” (Hartmann 1965, 150). Already in 1921, he explained that “Ontology takes a middle way between [natural realism and idealism]. Its thesis is this: there is a real existent outside of consciousness, outside the logical sphere and the limits of ratio; cognition of objects has a relation to this existent and reproduces a portion of it, no matter how inconceivable the possibility of this reproduction seems; but the cognitive image is not congruent with the existent, it is neither complete (adequate) nor similar to the existent. Natural realism is justified in its bare thesis of reality, since the real lies in the object-oriented direction of natural cognition; but it is unjustified in its thesis of [the immediate] adequacy [of this knowledge]. The speculative standpoints are justified in their rejection of the latter, but unjustified in their extrusion of the real from the object-orientation. Ontology combines the justified aspects of both. It preserves the reality-thesis of the natural world image, but cancels the thesis of adequacy” (Hartmann 1949, 188).
“Everything existing stands in permanent interdependencies. The whole concept of the ‘independent’ is only a limiting case” (Hartmann 1965, 141).
The complete passage runs: “’Being-in-itself’ as an epistemological concept is only a crutch for our reflection, used in contrast to being-for-me and mere objectified being. […] The concept 1) fends off a sort of relativity which (in intentio recta) no longer really matters ontologically, and 2) it still expresses negative relativity to a subject (its independence from it), which—in contrast to the relations at play in the subject—runs counter to the fundamental indifference of ‘being qua being’” (Hartmann 1965, 142).
Ferraris’s notion of “unamendability” and the “ab-solute” in Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism can be seen as “negative” in this sense. (Ferraris freely admits this, and also has arguments for “positive” realism).
He defines it this way: “[W]e always mean by the phrase ‘transcendent act’ an act that does not play out solely in consciousness—such as thinking, representing, or imagining—but steps outside the limits of consciousness, reaches out beyond it and connects it with that which exists independently of it. It does so irrespective of whether the independent thing is material, mental, or spiritual. Transcendent acts are those which establish a relation between a subject and an entity that itself does not first arise through that act; or, they are acts that make something transobjective into an object” (Hartmann 1965, 146). Thus “cognition, understood as an act (for it is not ‘only’ an act), is not reducible to an act of consciousness; it is a transcendent act” (Ibid., 147).
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Peterson, K.R., Peterson, K. Nicolai Hartmann and Recent Realisms. Axiomathes 27, 161–174 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-016-9313-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-016-9313-3