Quote of the Week – “Wilderness Thinking”
by Adam Robbert
A part of Michael’s excellent response in his recent post:
The sort of ‘wilderness thinking’ I support is not simply based on metaphors but evokes and enacts the literal and empirical sense of the term. Our planet is a vast ecological niche with wild (untamable) processes and entities. And as we emerge from this generative matrix of material-energetic (ecological) potencies we find ourselves thrown into a dark and tangled reality. This sometime obscure, sometimes illuminated field of possibilities (forces and affordances) is literally a wilderness full of objects, flows, agencies, complexes and differential powers. And we are literally animals coping and adapting to these ‘forces’ through whatever means available. We are, as it were, necessary explorers in the wilderness of being. That is to say, being as such – as the totality of distributed beings and the possibility spaces between them – is fundamentally ecological.
Every now and again someone captures a point of view that is so close to one’s own that it makes you want to celebrate.
Adam, I think in many ways our individual perspectives couldn’t be closer. It’s good to find kindreds. Cheers.
With all this talk of things being fundamentally ecological, I wonder why OOO doesn’t plump for a “fundamental ecology” to replace Heidegger’s old “fundamental ontology.”
That would also actually be a good riff on the classic Odum ecology textbook Fundamentals of Ecology. I guess your sarcasm pays off here and there.
Ross, I don’t think the two can easily be teased apart. A ‘fundamental ecology’ would be an ontology. All perspectives have an ontology that sustains them, or allows them to make positive claims about the world, whether they are acknowledged explicitly or assumed implicitly. Going after a ‘fundamental ontology’ is taking up the challenge of making your metaphysical assumptions explicit and checking your ontology against the available experiential data.
Heidegger’s venture in B&T begin (and ends, in my opinion) with Dasein. Dasein is that being which allows Being to be disclosed. Heidegger then goes on to make all sorts of ontological claims on the basis of analyzing Dasein, some of which are important, but not all of which I agree with or follow. But, for me, the most significant aspect of Heidegger’s project is that it provides impetus for what Merleau-Ponty later called ‘radical reflection’. Such a phenomenological investigation of human experience in situ has consequences for thinking not only Dasein, or the human-being, but also becoming intimated with how Dasein fits into-the-world. That is, taking a radically open phenomenological approach – what I call ontography – generates empirical questions about human existence but also, and perhaps only, as it relations to the structure and efficacy of the Real world.
Ontography, then, is the necessary starting point for a reflexive reevaluation of Real which attempts to preempt our ideological commitments and cultural-logical certainties. What wilderness thinking represents for me is a post-ontographic interpretation of our ‘fundamental ecology’.
My only response to this is that ontology is too rigid and static a system within which to make stable claims about objects. Any particular state of being that prevails at a given moment is only a snapshot, a freeze-frame, of the ongoing flux of history. History itself is a complex of forces and polarities which propels itself through a series of transformations by constantly annihilating and sublating the existing state of affairs and subsequently reconfiguring it. Different states of being can be relatively continuous with one another, but transformative events and revolutionary upheaval allow for radical discontinuity as well.
This is why for me the only adequate “position” is that of dialectical “opposition,” a critical mode of engaging with the exigencies of world history. This is Adorno’s reason for rejecting ontology. Or as he puts it in his Negative Dialectics, with specific reference to Heidegger:
Criticism, thoroughgoing negativity, transcends both the immediate datum of experience and the ontological givenness of Being by maneuvering immanently within these structures and imagining their determinate negation. It extracts the category of concrete possibility from the domain of the real, and thereby derives the program for an emancipatory politics. This is the foundation of dialectics, in both its Hegelian idealist and Marxist materialist forms. It reenacts the logic of history by observing all things as in a perpetual state of transition.
This is my chief objection to the ontologization of the world, or the hypostatization of any ecological set of relations between humanity, nature, culture, the world, etc. Ontologies are nearly always methodologically synchronic, even if they try to assimilate history to the structure of being by positing a present “historicity.” This results in the reification of whatever objects and relations that presently obtain as some permanent state of existence. It denies the possibility that nature as we know it, that humanity as we know it, can be radically transformed. This is why deep ecological demand for respect for things in the world as possessing value-in-themselves is false, because we are the Mind of nature, and the alienation between man and nature can only be overcome through the humanization or socialization of nature, such that it becomes merely an extension of society’s will.
Ross, ontology is simply an abstracted map, or model of the actual ontic territory, whereas ontography is the transdisciplinary, multi-methodological investigation of the territory, or wilderness of being. Thus, in my opinion, the ontological can only be inferred or deduced from the ontic.
Obviously I mutate the notion of ontology a bit here to fit my own theoretical orientation, but what is important for me is process and practice of investigating reality (ontography) not the derivative theories (ontologies) we might settle on. As Jane Bennett suggests, ontologies can be understood as “onto-stories” – necessary fictions of the realist persuasion. And certain onto-stories are useful if they afford us a fresh view of things or help us create ruptures in dominating systems, or assist with the generation of new practices and lines of thought.
But there is nothing necessarily synchronic about map-making in this regard. Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, DeLanda, Connolly, etc., have all contructed diachronistic ontologies.
And it seems to me entirely sensible to attempt to cultivate a radically reflexive and pre-ideological understanding of being and beings, lest we unwittingly take up an already implicit metaphysically laden schema, such as “empiricism” or “rationalism”, or “dialectial materialism” to make sense of the world. ALL belief systems function based on an implicit ontology with guiding metaphysical assumptions. So why wouldn’t you want to be more reflexive and attempt to make your ontology explicit instead of letting yourself be content to prioritize your thoughts with an implicit metaphysical posture?
If we can make our always-present ontologies more explicit then we can work with them to identify pernicious biases and begin to orient ourselves to certain pre-conceptual actually existing conditionalities. Ontography is about reflexively investigating the nature of experience and the world, and making our metaphysics (ontologies) explicit enough to overcome.
I agree with you that anything approaching an “ontology” underlying or disclosing things (i.e., in Heidegger’s sense) can only be inferred from the ontic, which is more empirically available. This is why ontology is anti-empirical, because it seeks to ground the possibility of the empirical in the structures or modes of Being. The Marxist approach to analyzing the real world is similarly anti-empirical: it considers the most immediate form of experiencing the world as false, fetishized, and disguising the true reality behind the accumulation of commodity-forms that everywhere surround us. But its methodology, counter to virtually every ontology I’ve encountered, is dialectical and critical, rather than hermeneutic and phenomenological.
I’ve read quite a bit of Bergson, and while I can appreciate him as a philosopher of the modern, reflecting (along with Proust) an aspect of the time-consciousness of modernity, I agree with Adorno’s assessment that his emphasis on the perpetual, irrational flux of intuition, ends up absolutizing itself:
I’m not as familiar with Whitehead’s cosmology, though I have read some of his writings on process and reality. The sense I got from it, though, was that he was certainly not attempting to execute an ontology in the Heideggerian sense of the term. If anything, Whitehead’s was a more dynamic approach to the old sense of ontology handed down from Aristotle than Heidegger’s ever was.
With regard to the ontic-ontological split, I also agree with Adorno that the passage from the ontical to the ontological is a fundamentally idealist maneuver on Heidegger’s part, and all those who have followed in his tradition. Adorno calls this “the ontologization of the ontical.” He starts with ontic objects like tools or signs, and proceeds from there to try and interpret the being of Dasein. His idea of historicity likewise takes an immediate ontical datum of what the past looks like from the vantage of being-towards-death and thus performs an Husserlian eidetic reduction of history to an aspect of Being. And all of Heidegger’s successors who adopt his existentiale of “historicity” or “historicality” fall prey to exactly the sort of unhistorical thinking I accused them of. “[T]he ontologization of history permits one without a glance to attribute the power of Being to historical powers, and thus to justify submission to historical situations as though it were commanded by Being itself.”
I can’t claim to have read enough Deleuze to really get a sense of whether his methodology is diachronic or not. Certainly Derrida and Ricoeur, two of the other French thinkers most polluted by Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, adopted the neutered and undialectical version of history offered by his account of “historicity.” The only ontology I can accept is one that is dialectical, and constantly annihilating itself from instant to instant, only recognizable from the relative continuities and discontinuities this engenders. This is the only responsible interpretation of the being of the world so long as it is mired in contradiction, the state of unfreedom. Or, to once again quote Adorno: “Regarding the concrete utopian possibility, dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it: neither a system nor a contradiction.”
[...] on its relation to Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” (see the comments on THIS post). Since I am not a Heidegger scholar, nor very familiar with his work, I will not weigh in on [...]