There
is nothing “outside” the natural order. In this sense, I am
opposed to the transcendentalist’s move to remove Reason or the
reflective understanding from physical reality. There is indeed a
supernaturalist residue in much transcendental and phenomenological
philosophy. This is why my project has always been to theorize “the
natural order” as itself always already creative, aesthetic,
interpretational, experiential (mine is a naturalized transcendental
(Schelling’s “Nature is a priori”)). There is no “other”
world from which the causal efficacy of our world derives. With our
universe, the cause is internal to the effect, which is another way
of saying our universe is primarily organic (with mechanism
as a secondary appearance). This is why I follow Whitehead in
the endeavor to construct an ontology of organism, wherein: 1)
Physics is the study of the evolutionary development of particles,
stars, galaxies, and other micro- and macro- organisms-in-ecologies;
2) Biology is the study of the evolutionary development of single
cells, plants, and animals in their meso-cosmic ecologies; 3)
Philosophy, anthropology, and theology are different aspects of
the study of the evolutionary development of languages, myths, and
ideas in their noetic ecologies. The organism-environment
field becomes the metaphysical metaphor guiding
our theorizing, rather than the machine.
Now,
when I say “my project has always been to theorize…”, I should
qualify that “theory” in the context of an open-ended, evolving
cosmos such as ours can never pretend to certainty or finality.
Theory is not the construction of a disinterested, reflective ego (at
least, no valuable theory is). Theory always remains dependent on the
speculative leap of some metaphor or another. Theory is imaginative
construction requiring equal doses of aesthetic taste and logical
clarity. Our theories are always as much science fiction as
they are science fact.
I
agree with Bakker than cognition of
the real just isn’t possible. But we must distinguish between
cognition on the one hand, and sensation, feeling, and intuition on
the other. If an intuition of
the real is our goal, using the reflective instrument is like shining
a flashlight in search of darkness. Reflective cognition is like King
Midas, turning everything it touches into noetic gold. It transforms
everything not-I into food for itself, digesting the world and
defecating whatever it can’t assimilate as waste. It
does’t seem to me much of a stretch to say that modernity’s
exclusive reliance on reflective cognition is one of the main factors
leading to the ecological crisis.
Let
me be clear that, while I defend transcendental phenomenology from
Bakker’s eliminativist meta-critique, my own philosophical home
base is process-relational
ontology. I
have major issues with transcendental phenomenology as a
philosophical resting place. It
remains too anthropocentric, too concerned with issues of human
access and not attentive enough to solar nucleosynthesis, cellular
mitosis, and atmospheric levels of CH4. But still, I just don’t
understand how, having grasped the power of transcendental
critique–as critique–one
could fail to see eliminativist arguments like BBT as anything
but dogmatic materialism (materialism has today become the new School
Philosophy, though it pretends to be the ultimate critic of all
metaphysics). Where I leave transcendentalism behind is in my pursuit
of a constructive,
cosmologically-rooted philosophy, something the phenomenological
approach just cannot provide.
It
is clear Bakker has done his philosophical homework. I don’t think
it is fair of him to lump everyone into the same transcendentalist
clown car, though. Phenomenology was born out of the intense debates
between Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all of whom accused Kant of not
having cleared his vision of dogmatist residues. They all recognized
the possibility and the fact of neglect, and even of the neglect of
neglect. But for these post-Kantians (with the possible exception of
Hegel), the transcendental project was an infinite one
by definition, meaning there would never be a point when the a priori
structures were finally reached and could be clearly and distinctly
spelled out once and for all. Fichte grounded the transcendental
historically in the ethical development of humankind, describing
philosophy as an attempt to asymptotically approach absolute
metacognition as an ideal while never in fact being able to reach it.
Schelling went further and grounded the transcendental in the
creative developmental arc of the cosmos itself. For Schelling (and
here he converges with Whitehead), not even God knows the a
priori conditions
of experiential reality: the divine is just as caught in the chaotic
turmoil of historical becoming as any creature is. None of these
thinkers, with the possible exception of Fichte when he is sloppy,
thought that impersonal natural systems could be cognized in terms of
their own 1st person experience.
Here
is Schelling mulling over this exact problem, for ex.:
“I
could conceive of that being perhaps as something that, initially
blind, struggles through every level of becoming toward
consciousness, and humanity would then arise precisely at that
moment, at that point in which the previously blind nature would
reach self-consciousness. But this cannot be, since our
self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of that nature
that permeates everything: it is just *our* consciousness and hardly
encompasses within itself a science of becoming applicable to all
things. This universal becoming remains just as foreign and opaque to
us as if it had never had a bearing on us at all. Therefore, if this
becoming has achieved any kind of purpose it is achieved only through
humanity, but not for humanity; for the consciousness of humanity
does not = equal the consciousness of nature” (The
Grounding of Positive Philosophy,
1841).
In
other words, 1st person reflective ego consciousness is largely a
sham. It can tell us little if anything about the unconscious natural
ground from which it emerges. Of course, Schelling (like
Whitehead) argued that the field of experience extends
beyond mere 1st person ego consciousness. My argument with
Bakker has always been: why reduce the experiential field that is
open to us to 1st person ego consciousness? Most of
our daily and nightly experience is not egoic! Most of the time we
are flowing through other experiential states more akin to animals,
plants, and even minerals. So in a sense mine is also a post-human
manifesto. We have never been human, if you want.
Text
by Matthew David Segall
