Dennis Hollingsworth

Una Cadena (sobre poder)

A chain, una cadena.

(I was bearing in mind the thought that contemporary philosophy has civilization stuck in a cul de sac of power. When Truth is gone, power is all that remains.)

Why We're POST-FACT by Peter Pomerantsev

This equaling out of truth and falsehood is both informed by and takes advantage of an all-permeating late post-modernism and relativism, which has trickled down over the past thirty years from academia to the media and then everywhere else. This school of thought has taken Nietzsche's maxim, there are no facts, only interpretations, to mean that every version of events is just another narrative, where lies can be excused as 'an alternative point of view' or 'an opinion', because 'it's all relative' and 'everyone has their own truth' (and on the internet they really do).

Maurizio Ferraris, one of the founders of the New Realism movement and one of postmodernism's most persuasive critics, argues that we are seeing the culmination of over two centuries of thinking. The Enlightenment's original motive was to make analysis of the world possible by tearing the right to define reality away from divine authority to individual reason. Descartes' 'I think therefore I am' moved the seat of knowledge into the human mind. But if the only thing you can know is your mind, then, as Schopenhauer put it, 'the world is my representation'. In the late twentieth century postmodernists went further, claiming that there is 'nothing outside the text', and that all our ideas about the world are inferred from the power models enforced upon us. This has led to a syllogism which Ferraris sums up as: 'all reality is constructed by knowledge, knowledge is constructed by power, and ergo all reality is constructed by power. Thus . . . reality turns out to be a construction of power, which makes it both detestable (if by "power" we mean the Power that dominates us) and malleable (if by "power" we mean "in our power").'

Post-modernism first positioned itself as emancipatory, a way to free people from the oppressive narratives they had been subjected to. But, as Ferraris points out, 'the advent of media populism provided the example of a farewell to reality that was not at all emancipatory'. If reality is endlessly malleable, then ...

I then searched for Ferraris...

The turning point via Wikipedia:

At the end of the eighties, Ferraris developed an articulated critique of Heidegger and Gadamer's tradition (see, in particular, Cronistoria di una svolta, the 1990 afterword to Heidegger's conference "The Turn"), which makes use of post-structuralism to challenge the romantic and idealistic legacy affecting such tradition. The conclusion of this critical path led the philosopher to the reconsideration of the relationship between the spirit and the letter as well as to a reversal of their traditional opposition. Oftentimes, both philosophers and ordinary people despise the letter (the rules and constraints instituted through documents and inscriptions of various kinds) and set the spirit (i.e. thought and will) above it, recognizing the creative freedom of the latter as opposed to the former. For Ferraris, it is the letter that precedes and founds the spirit. Thus occurred the transition to the second phase of the thought of the Italian philosopher.

Ferraris abandoned hermeneutic relativism and Derridean deconstruction to embrace a form of realistic objectivism according to which "objectivity and reality, considered by radical hermeneutics as principles of violence and abuse, are in fact - and precisely because of the contraposition between spirit and letter mentioned above - the only protection against arbitrariness". This principle, which applies to morals, is based on the acknowledgement of a sphere of reality that is independent of interpretations (see, in particular, L'ermeneutica, 1998). The external world, recognized as unamendable, and the relationship between conceptual schemes and sensory experience (aesthetics, restored to its etymological meaning of "science of sensory perception", acquires a primary significance - see, in particular, Analogon rationis (1994 ), Estetica (1996, with other authors), L'immaginazione (1996), Experimentelle Ästhetik (2001) and Estetica razionale (1997)) are the dominant themes of the second phase of Ferraris' thought, which involves a re-reading of Kant through the naive physics of the perceptologist Paolo Bozzi (see Il mondo esterno (2001) and Goodbye Kant!(2004, forthcoming for SUNY Press)). Ferraris' "critical ontology" recognizes the world of everyday life as largely impenetrable compared to conceptual schemes....

...New Realism presents itself primarily as a negative realism: the resistance that the outside world opposes to our conceptual schemes should not be seen as a failure, but as a resource - New Realism presents itself primarily as a negative realism: the resistance that the outside world opposes to our conceptual schemes should not be seen as a failure, but as a resource - a proof of the existence of an independent world. If this is the case, however, this negative realism turns into a positive realism: in resisting us reality does not merely set a limit we cannot trespass, but it also offers opportunities and resources. This explains how, in the natural world, different life-forms can interact in the same environment without sharing any conceptual scheme and how, in the social world, human intentions and behaviors are made possible by a reality that is first given, and that only at a later time may be interpreted and, if necessary, transformed. New Realism presents itself primarily as a negative realism: the resistance that the outside world opposes to our conceptual schemes should not be seen as a failure, but as a resource - a proof of the existence of an independent world. If this is the case, however, this negative realism turns into a positive realism: in resisting us reality does not merely set a limit we cannot trespass, but it also offers opportunities and resources. This explains how, in the natural world, different life-forms can interact in the same environment without sharing any conceptual scheme and how, in the social world, human intentions and behaviors are made possible by a reality that is first given, and that only at a later time may be interpreted and, if necessary, transformed. Now that the season of postmodernism has died out, New Realism expresses the widespread need for renewal in extra-disciplinary areas such as architecture, literature, pedagogy and medicine.

(And what about art? Unless it is assumed to be encompassed by architecture, which is an idea natural to architects.)

Link follows link, a chain. Una cadena.

An Introduction to Introduction to New Realism:

Fintan Neylan explains the realism Maurizio Ferraris introduces in his Introduction.

Negativity

Ferraris first sets out a number of elements of New Realism, all of which are inspired by the fact that it is a "critique of constructivism" (p.10). Constructivism denies the reality of anything independent of the human mind or culture, because it holds that all knowledge ultimately has a subjective or intersubjective origin. Ferraris sees constructivism as the result of the modern period's uncertainty concerning the world perceived through the senses, so that it sees its task as being to "re-found, through construction, a world that no longer has stability" (p.26). In contrast, New Realism aims to be a "return to perception" (p.8) and engages in a "relaunch of ontology as the science of being and of the multiplicity of objects" (pp.8-9). (Ontology is the study of the types of things that exist.) These elements are framed against what Ferraris sees as the prevailing tendencies in contemporary thought, which he explores in the first section of the book, 'Negativity'.

At the centre of 'Negativity' are two philosophical figures, Foukant and Deskant. These are not historical philosophers, but rather amalgamations of viewpoints which cluster around Descartes, Kant, and Foucault (or, more precisely, the reception of their ideas). In essence, both Foukant and Deskant serve as Ferraris's intellectual foils.

Foukant is a postmodernist, and is the outcome of fusing the subject, or the representing 'I' (via Kant), with an ontology based on power relations (via Foucault). Foukant's position proceeds from this syllogism: "Reality is constructed by knowledge, knowledge is constructed by power, and ergo reality is constructed by power" (p.24). The problem with this is that Foukant thereby locks himself out of being able to discuss a mind-independent reality, in part because he believes knowledge of reality is a social construction. In itself, this would be an unremarkable form of idealism, but it does not stop there. Not only is all knowledge socially constructed, but, in this position, knowledge is always compromised politically, for "behind any form of knowledge there hides a power" (p.25). So on Foukant's account, when we happen upon knowledge which claims to refer to a mind-independent reality, what is really going on is only an exertion of power by reigning forces.

This suspicion of knowledge is not limited to postmodernity; indeed, it goes back centuries. Ferraris claims it has its origins in a much older set of philosophical tendencies, which he collects under the figure of Deskant (ie Descartes + Kant). Deskant's thinking combines the Cartesian subject, who is isolated from the physical world, with the Kantian subject, who frames the world but is not a part of it. Deskant's belief is that "our conceptual schemes and perceptual apparatuses play a role in the constitution of reality" (p.26). This is in response to the uncertainty of the world opened up by early modern scepticism, which generated the idea that the structure of the world people see only comes through the subject: that it is what we ourselves have put into the world via our conceptual apparati, and so not present in reality itself. For this reason, the emergence of Deskant marks the point where conceptual knowledge trumps knowledge through the senses. There is a trade-off here: to elevate conceptuality, as Kant does with his 'pure concepts of the understanding', shields one against uncertainty, but at the price of there being "no longer any difference between the fact that there is an object X and the fact that we know the object X" (p.27). The trouble with Deskant and Foukant is that, in this absconding from dealing with reality in itself, they cannot but conflate of the knowledge of an entity with the entity itself. Thus we enter an age where it is asked "not how things are in themselves, but how they should be made in order to be known by us" (p.26). Ferraris calls this collapse of ontology into epistemology the "fallacy of being-knowledge" (p.24).

Positivity

Having charted the various vestiges of 'Negativity', in the next section, 'Positivity', Ferraris turns to his own position:

"if the realist is the one who claims that there are parts of the world that are not dependent on the subjects, the new realist asserts something more challenging. Not only are there large parts of the world independent of the cogito [the thinking subject], but those parts are inherently structured, and thus orientate the behaviour and thought of humans as well as animals" (p.37).

Ferraris's move here is twofold. He first agrees with Foukant and Deskant that knowledge is a human construction, but rejects their identification of knowledge of the world with the world itself. He claims knowledge may still point to an independent reality which is inherently structured. There is not only the structure of the knowledge we have of the world (i.e. the conceptual schemes we have developed, which he calls "epistemological reality") but also the actual structures of the world, whether perceived or not ("ontological reality") (p.41). Thus his account presents the reader with two strands of reality, or, as he puts it "two layers of reality that fade into each other"

(Emphasis Mine.)