Realism Means Formalism: Latour, Bryant, and the Critique of Materialism

1 Case Against Materialism

The first thing that comes to mind when the word “materialism” is mentioned is probably a vision of hard material particles streaking through a void. This vision is not broadened by much if it is expanded to include fields, which are physical without being intuitively material in the same sense as particles. Quite often this model of reality is either reductive or outright eliminative in character: for many materialists, after all, the main point of the doctrine is that it can be used to debunk the purportedly naïve beliefs held by others. In the first place, the materialist usually wants to unmask the Church as a mere temple of follies: a daring and risky endeavor in early modernity, but no longer especially bold in the present day. Next come political and even sexual liberation, for the libertine is an exemplary product of materialism, perhaps even more so than the freethinker or revolutionary (although Maurizio Ferraris has noted that revolutions of desire tend to be politically conservative, as in the case of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les liaisons dangereuses and Richard Wagner’s Art and Revolution, and one could easily add the Marquis de Sade to this list).^[8] When armed with materialism we can quickly get rid of many other superstitions as well, with ghosts, witches, evil eyes, thirteenth floors, and black cats thrown quickly into the historical waste bin. In the end, the materialist can rest easy in the view that physics alone provides us with the ultimate truth of reality. A certain degree of scorn is invoked not only against the priest and the rhetorician, but also against the sociologist, the literary critic, and perhaps even the chemist, since the latter fails to join the physicist in dealing with the bottommost layer of the cosmos.

In continental philosophy and related humanistic disciplines, however, “materialism” has recently taken on an unusual opposite meaning that seems difficult to explain. Consider the following remark by the influential Slavoj Žižek: “The true formula of materialism is not that there is some noumenal reality beyond our distorting perception of it. The only consistent position is that the world does not exist.”^[9] A Žižekian might quibble over this passage by claiming it is less extreme than it sounds. Does not the pejorative use of the word “noumenal” here mean that Žižek is simply making a Hegelian case against Kant? And does not “the world does not exist” imply nothing more than Žižek’s well-known defense of the incompleteness of reality, rather than an outright denial that matter exists outside the mind? Yet these sorts of damage control efforts are wrong not to take Žižek at his word. After all, there is hardly anything unusual about Žižek – a devotee of both Jacques Lacan and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory – taking a distance from philosophical realism. In any case, this oddly idealist twist on materialism goes well beyond Žižek himself, and has infected large portions of recent continental philosophy. Levi R. Bryant, who admires Žižek’s books as much as I do, laments as follows: “The term materialism became so empty that Žižek could write, ‘[m]aterialism means that the reality I see is never ‘whole’ – not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it.’”^[10] Bryant rightly wonders what the purported blind spot of the subject’s inclusion in reality has to do with materialism. After surveying the broader field of continental “new materialisms,” and with Žižek’s remarks clearly on his mind, Bryant concludes sharply: “materialism has become a terme d’art, which has little to do with anything material. Materialism has come to mean simply that something is historical, socially constructed, involves cultural practices, and is contingent … We wonder where the materialism in materialism is.”^[11]

If we recall the classic materialism of billiard balls smacking together in empty space, this new materialism of social construction, cultural practices, and contingency sounds puzzling if not outright misleading. Nonetheless, there is a good reason why materialism took on this unexpected second meaning. Nicholas of Cusa’s notion of the “coincidence of opposites” is widely known to contemporary philosophers: for instance, if the radius of a circle is increased to infinity, the circle will become increasingly indistinguishable from a straight line.^[12] We are dealing with a version of the same coincidence here. Whether we speak of materialism in the traditional sense of a rock-bottom physical layer on which everything else is built, or of the new and more puzzling variety of “cultural materialism” in which human practices are the underpinning (or rather, “overpinning”) for everything that exists, both kinds of materialism are foundationalist theories that reduce everything to a single privileged layer from which everything else arises. Stated differently, the two forms of materialism simply express the two forms of knowledge that exist. When someone asks us what something is, there are only two basic options in response: we can either (1) tell them what it is made of, or (2) tell them what it does. These two correspond perfectly to the two kinds of materialism just described. Let us discuss each of them in order, under the dull but clear names “Knowledge 1” and “Knowledge 2.”

First, note that traditional materialism is not the only kind of Knowledge 1. When explaining what something is made of, we need not answer in terms of rock-bottom physical underpinnings. That is to say, “what something is made of” could refer to the historical background of a thing just as easily as to its foundational particles. One could also say, as many philosophers have done across the ages, that there are no individual particles anyway, but only a sort of shapeless lump from which all specific things emerge: this is the strategy of theorists of the apeiron and its variants, including Anaximander, Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Anaxagoras. Along with these pre-Socratic philosophers, the twentieth-century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argued that the world itself is merely a shapeless il y a (“there is”) before the human mind carves it up into pieces.^[13] Nonetheless, it is safe to say that traditional materialism or physicalism remains the most prestigious form of Knowledge 1 in our time, no doubt because it is the one most consistent with the standard intellectual hero of the modern period: the exact physical sciences.

Knowledge 2 is found more often in the humanities and social sciences. Why turn to the existence of hypothetical ultimate particles – its partisans ask – when we only know them indirectly, through fallible experiments and frequently changing theories? Did René Descartes not prove that we ought to begin with the immediate givenness of thought as the only thing that cannot be doubted?^[14] Did phenomenology not renew this insight and develop it with even greater precision?^[15] A case can certainly be made that what is immediately given to thought is a more stable foundation for knowledge than any supposed microphysical ultimates. But there is an additional factor that links Descartes and Husserl: both are vehement rationalists, confident in their ability to discover the foundations of knowledge once and for all. While this is true of some Knowledge 2 advocates, it is certainly not true of them all. One recently popular variant argues that although we indeed must start from what is given rather than from mere hypotheses about the external world, Descartes and Husserl fail to realize that they are looking with the eyes of white European males gazing outward from a position of tacit colonial and patriarchal dominance, so that their own way of obtaining Knowledge 2 is historically tainted. Here we have one prominent form of the sort of upside-down materialism already identified by Bryant: “Materialism has come to mean simply that something is historical, socially constructed, involves cultural practices, and is contingent.”^[16] Another such form, one that at least has the merit of breaking with anthropocentric politics, holds that entities are characterized not primarily by how they appear to human minds of any sort, but by their interactions with each other. The great master of this form of Knowledge 2 is Alfred North Whitehead, whose insights are picked up and developed by Latour.^[17]

The reader may recall Arthur Eddington’s famous parable of the two tables in his Gifford Lectures, entitled The Nature of the Physical Universe: “I have settled down to the task of writing these lectures and have drawn up my chairs to my two tables. Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object about me – two tables, two chairs, two pens.”^[18] The first table is the familiar one of everyday life, while the second is the table composed of tiny whirling particles as described by physics. Eddington continues:

I need not tell you that modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there – wherever “there” may be. On the other hand I need not tell you that modern physics will never succeed in exorcising that first table – strange compound of external nature, mental imagery and inherited prejudice – which lies visible to my eyes and tangible to my grasp.^[19]

Hence, objects in the everyday sense cannot be eliminated and should therefore be tolerated, though we must also recognize that the table of science has the upper hand thanks to its “delicate test and remorseless logic.” This twofold theory survives today in many places, including Wilfrid Sellars’s influential distinction between the “manifest” and “scientific” images of the world, as if two kinds of images were enough to exhaust reality as a whole: a metaphysics of images as vehement as that of Henri Bergson, who is generally no hero of Sellarsian rationalists.^[20] But Eddington’s apparently thorough survey of the “two tables” misses the table itself, which elsewhere I have called “the third table.”^[21] For in the first place, what is wrong with the scientific table? By treating the table as nothing more than the ultimate pieces of which it is made, Eddington discounts the phenomenon of emergence, which ensures that the table – or H₂O, or anything else – has properties that belong to it alone, though not to its constituents taken one by one.^[22] And what is wrong with the “manifest” table? Essentially, this table exists only in relation to me, or – at best – in relation to other entities besides humans, as in the admittedly intriguing relationist efforts of Whitehead and Latour.

The problem here is that when we define a thing solely in terms of its relations, we are adopting a hardcore actualist position, one which maintains that a thing is only whatever it happens to be doing right now. Not only is this the very position of the Megarians (“no one is a house builder unless they are building a house at this moment”) refuted by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, it also leaves no mechanism for anything in the world to change.^[23] For if nothing is different from its current actions, there is no reason why it would not persist in being exactly what it is right now. In short, the first kind of materialism “undermines” the table, while the second kind “overmines” it. Taken jointly, the two forms of materialism – the scientific and the cultural as described by Eddington – “duomine” the table.^[24] They deflect the reality of the table onto something other than itself, whether this be its own internal components or its outer effects on its environment. Whichever it may be, the table itself is lost.

But what is this table itself? It cannot be “material” in either of the two senses described, since these very two materialisms have already failed to do the table justice. Instead, what makes this table the very table that it is is its form: not in the sense of a visible outward look, but that of an inner structure of the table. This is not unlike what the medievals used to call “substantial forms,” before Descartes proposed that physics can dispense with these so as to focus on tangible or measurable properties of things. There is no denying that this has had beneficial results for physics, but philosophy does not always profit from the same kinds of simplifications that benefit other fields. For this reason, I propose formalism as an alternative to materialism. Although formalism often refers to an epistemological flattening of things into scientific or practical formulae, or even into austere mathemes or theories of signs, I mean it instead in the sense of a philosophy devoted to accounting for the real structure of things. A table is neither its pieces nor its effects, but is that which emerges above the pieces and submerges beneath the effects. It is a table that is not of knowledge, and therefore not a literal table that can be paraphrased in clear propositions that refer to its components, its actions, or to both of these combined.

Here it should be recalled that this is precisely the meaning of the Greek word philosophia: which is not sophia but only the love of it, meaning that we can never attain sophia in the form of literal propositional knowledge. Instead, philosophy is a search for the forms of things, and this requires an awareness that literal language simply can never do the job quite right. This entails further that philosophy cannot concern itself solely with the content of statements. For one thing, any particular literal statement is a violent abstraction from everything else it implies, as suggested by Heidegger’s notion of the withdrawal of the ontological behind the ontic, and in media theory by Marshall McLuhan’s thesis that the background features of any medium of communication are the deep condition of its superficial literal content.^[25] Furthermore, the same literal content can occur in numerous different ways: the phrase “Jesus is my Lord and Savior” might function at various times as a neutral declaration about reality, a performative statement in which a religious conversion is made, or even as a sample of cutting irony from a non-believer.^[26] For similar reasons, Alain Badiou supplements philosophy with what he calls “anti-philosophy,” in which the latter sort of activity is composed of charismatic figures who treat philosophy primarily as an “act” rather than a doctrine expressed in prose.^[27] He cites such cases as Heraclitus, St. Paul, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Lacan.

As mentioned, Latour is another philosopher often wrongly assigned to the “materialist” camp, although few contemporary authors have been as openly critical of materialism as he. In a still widely neglected 2007 article on the topic, Latour adds a key point to the anti-materialist case through his demonstration that materialism is a form not of realism, but of idealism.^[28] As he puts it in his opening paragraph: “For a short while, materialism seemed to be a foolproof appeal to a type of agency and a set of entities and forces that allowed analysts to explain, dismiss, or see through other types of entities.” He continues: “Typically, for instance, it was possible to explain conceptual superstructures by means of material infrastructures. Thus an appeal to a sound, table-thumping materialism seemed an ideal way to shatter the pretensions of those who tried to hide their brutal interests behind notions like morality, culture, religion, politics, or art.” This line of criticism peaks later in the same paragraph: “Materialism, in the short period in which it could be used as a discussion-closing trope, implied what now appears in retrospect as a rather idealist definition of matter and its various agencies.”^[29] For if we abstract from entities everything other than spatial extension and its derivative properties, and then “[gawk] at the miracle” of how well this procedure succeeds in understanding nature, then we have simply baked materialist results into our initial assumptions. For it should hardly be surprising that a theory of entities as reduced to spatio-temporal physical properties matches up well with experiments designed to measure those very same properties. With the turn to materialism, things are converted solely and simply into what can be known about them.

2 Bryant’s Attempt at a Materialist OOO

It is one thing to disagree with materialists when I also reject their views on nearly everything else, but quite another to reject materialism when found in the writings of someone whose ideas I often accept with enthusiasm. I speak of Levi Bryant, who is not just a fellow practitioner of Object-Oriented Ontology, but the person who coined that term in the first place. Already I have quoted his observation that the new materialisms in Continental theory do not seem very materialistic at all. But despite having made this criticism, Bryant still basically considers himself to be a materialist. For as he tells us quite openly: “This book attempts a defense and renewal of materialism.”^[30] Obviously, what Bryant wishes to defend and renew is not the kind of materialism he criticizes on the second page of his book. For as he reports with dismay, “history became a history of discourses, how we talk about the world, the norms and laws by which societies are organized, and practices came to signify the discursive practices – through the agency of the signifier, performance, narrative, and ideology – that form subjectivities.”^[31]

Bryant suggests two causal factors in the rise of this ultra-discursive trend in the humanities, which he admits to having formerly admired. One is the innate professional narcissism that leads anyone to see the world in terms of their chosen vocation: in this case, scholars who spend their lives analyzing statements and books began to treat reality itself as if it were a series of statements and books. Another factor stems from a strange misreading of Karl Marx’s critique of “commodity fetishism” early in his major work Capital.^[32] Bryant gives a nice summary of Marx’s analysis,

which showed [that] how we relate to things under capitalism is, in reality, a relation between people or [society]. Marx was right. When a person buys a shirt, they are not merely buying a thing, but are rather participating in an entire network of social relations involving production, distribution, and consumption. However, somehow – contrary to Marx’s own views – this thesis became the claim that things aren’t real, or that they are merely crystallizations of the social and the cultural … Everything became an alienated mirror of humans and the task became demonstrating that what we found in things was something that we put there.^[33]

Bryant’s materialism, then, is not of the “overmining” or cultural sort. As he tells us in a disarmingly vulnerable moment, it was his 2006 encounter with the computer game Sim City 4 that awoke him from his discursivist slumber. If players of Sim City do not build their roads and electrical grids the right way, then economic growth stagnates, traffic becomes congested, and the populace votes the player out of office. One must also respond to natural disasters, which are the very opposite of linguistically constructed realities. The events that occur in a city are not “the result of a signifier, a text, a belief, or narrative alone [but]… the result of the real properties of roads, power lines, pollution, and so on.”^[34]

Well, then, does Bryant want to return us to an “undermining” classical materialism in which scientific discussion of matter counts as the ultimate discourse on reality? There is one passage in his introduction that seems to suggest so: “The materialism that I defend in the pages that follow is unabashedly naïve. I do not seek to determine what matter-in-itself might be … This is a question best left to physics and chemistry […].”^[35] But the inclusion of chemistry on the same footing as physics should be enough to show that Bryant’s program is far from an ultra-reductionist one, since chemistry makes no claim to deal with physical ultimates.^[36] In fact, Bryant sends the interested reader to his previous book The Democracy of Objects for a defense of the view that any coherent ontology must recognize emergence.^[37] Beyond this, he accurately reports that he has a remarkably pluralist conception of “matter”:

[E]verything seems to point to the conclusion that there are many different types of matter … [B]y “matter,” all I mean is “stuff” and “things.” The world, I contend, is composed entirely of “stuff” and “stuff” comes in a variety of different forms. Even ideas and concepts have their materiality … [W]hat follows begins with the premise that worlds are composed of units or individual entities existing at a variety of different levels of scale, and that are themselves composed of other entities.^[38]

Here there is nothing resembling classical undermining materialism. Bryant is simply telling us that the world is made of entities at many different scales, and that these entities in turn compose others, some of which are ideas and concepts. The only place where he seems to flirt with outright physicalism is as follows: “the world is composed of physical things such as trees, rocks, planets, stars, wombats, and automobiles … thought and concepts only exist in brains, on paper, and in computer data banks, and that ideas can only be transmitted through physical media such as fiber optic cables, smoke signals, oxygen-rich atmospheres, and so on.”^[39] I have italicized the two uses of the word “physical” in order to emphasize how little they commit Bryant to anything like classical materialism. For his references to the “physical” tend to be negative in character, and generally emphasize the following points: (1) the physical is not the discursive, and (2) the physical should be left to physics and chemistry because philosophers always get it wrong. I conclude that Bryant is not really a materialist in either the undermining or overmining sense. Instead, he is a pluralistic thinker of objects at many different scales. But if I can turn Bryant’s critique of Žižek back against Bryant himself, I wonder where the materialism in such materialism is.

3 Conclusion

The argument so far has run as follows. There are two kinds of materialism, which are closely related despite initially looking like polar opposites: (1) the classical materialism of tiny physical ultimates, and (2) the cultural materialism that calls anything “materialist” as long as it is “historical, socially constructed, involves cultural practices, and is contingent.”^[40] Although the first view is widely linked with ruthless scientistic thinkers who play hardball with gullible spiritualists, and the second with fuzzy relativists who reduce science to a cultural phenomenon no different in kind from a poem, the two kinds of materialism share a number of important features in common:

1. Both take the material to be the knowable. This is what Latour saw when making his argument that materialists are actually idealists.

2. Strictly speaking, neither form of materialism can explain how anything new could ever happen. For the classical underminer, it hardly counts that empires rise and fall, new babies are born, and breakthrough discoveries are made, since these occurrences are mere epiphenomena: the same physical ultimates exist that have always existed. Conversely, although contemporary overmining materialism always claims to champion dynamic flux over fossilized stasis, its denial that anything exists other than the manifest current configuration of the world leaves it with no mechanism for explaining change.

3. Both are suspicious of claims that any surplus exists over and above (or under and beneath) what they take to be material. Classical undermining materialists detest those supposed obscurantists who think we need anything more than matter, while overmining cultural materialists are equally suspicious of other supposed obscurantists who believe in “deep essences” hiding behind the public manifestations of things as they are here and now.

4. Both forms are better characterized by what they oppose than by what they promote. For it is strangely unclear what the underminer means by “physical,” although it is vividly clear that they oppose gods, angels, ghosts, and spiritual energies. And it is often just as unclear what the overminer means by “cultural,” but not hard to see that they oppose essences, hierarchies, and fixed identities (except in the case of oppressed or marginalized human groups, which are encouraged to affirm their identities).

5. In the end, both kinds of materialism define what they respectively take to be “material” in relational rather than intrinsic terms. For the classical underminer, physical matter means that which resists our efforts (this is its relation to us), or that which fills up a specific co-ordinate of space-time (this is its relation to the spatio-temporal continuum). For the contemporary overminer, the material results from a holistic cultural structure that shapes everything that exists in the region it governs. Neither group can tell us what the “material” is in its own right, since relationality is built into its definition from the start.

The position defended in this article becomes evident simply by reversing all of the features of materialism just listed:

1. The real is not the knowable, and cannot be adequately undermined or overmined.

2. Novelty can be explained by multiple entities combining to form something that did not previously exist (emergence), and by the fact that everything is more than its current effects on the mind or on the world as a whole (submergence).

3. “Obscurantism” works as a pejorative term only if we assume that luminous clarity is always the proper goal. If there are cases in which allusion or innuendo are the best that can be done, then obscurantism becomes a term of honor, and in that case The Obscurantist might even be the title of a journal containing excellent works of philosophy. By analogy, consider how ridiculous it would be to reject the chiaroscuro of Italian painters by demanding that every subject be depicted in bright direct sunlight, since the oscuro (the dark) is not a mere negative, but produces significant painterly effects. Nor should we assume that what goes for the arts never goes for the sciences.

4. Whereas materialism is largely negative in both of its forms, formalism is positive. The only negative aspect of the formalism proposed here is its suspicion of any commitment to equations or propositional prose as the primary means of communication about reality. But indirect, metaphorical, or analogical language is not primarily negative. When pseudo-Dionysius clarifies the Trinity by saying that “in a house the light from all [three] lamps is completely interpenetrating, yet each is clearly distinct,” the fact that this does not convince most readers does not reduce it to sub-cognitive rubbish.^[41] After all, the image does succeed in suggesting how the Trinity might be more than mere numerical contradiction, quite aside from whether we are personally converted by it. Nor is Socrates merely speaking negatively when he tears down one definition after another without providing a successful positive definition of his own.

5. Whereas both kinds of materialism define the material in purely relational terms, the formalist aims to study what is intrinsic. Although it is always helpful to define the symptoms by which we recognize a hidden reality – as when Heidegger describes equipment by the way it surprises us through breaking – formalism recognizes that a thing is not reducible to its symptoms.^[42]

We might now ask again about Bryant: is he really a materialist? We have seen that his materialism is largely negative, referring primarily to the fact that language is not enough to account for the material infrastructures unveiled by Sim City. But we have seen that materialism generally follows the via negativa in spite of itself, so this alone cannot determine Bryant’s materialist credentials. Moreover, he also defers to science in the way that classical materialists generally love to do. But in the end, Bryant is a strong advocate of emergence and a “multiple scales” model of reality, and neither of these points is compatible with strict versions of either the undermining or overmining materialisms.

Here it is also worth noting that theories of emergence often suffer from various problems, some of them better known than others. One of the best-known problems is that early theories of emergence tended to conflate the emergent with the inexplicable, so that any purportedly emergent reality would lose this status as soon as someone was able to explain it. DeLanda covers the history of early emergentism before giving a clear explanation of why something can be perfectly explicable (a question of epistemology) while still being emergent (a question of ontology).^[43] A second problem is that emergence usually refers to emergent properties, although the primary referent of emergence should be entities. For with H₂O, what emerges in the strict sense is water, and what are usually called the emergent properties of water (the ability to extinguish fire and quench animal thirst) are merely symptoms of this entity, being too relational in character to be intrinsic properties of water. One way of grasping the important difference between emergent entities and their emergent properties is to note that emergent entities have more novel features than just their emergent properties. As DeLanda shows, emergent entities can also have retroactive effects on their own parts (laws passed by the European Union must be adopted by its member states), generate new parts (the EU admits the formerly Soviet Baltic states), and also remain the same even when their parts change (the EU might not change very much with the loss of the United Kingdom or even the later addition of an independent Catalonia or Scotland).^[44]

But there is another, perhaps more significant problem with many theories of emergence: namely, their excessive focus on the emergence of the mental. Stoljar writes as follows: “Physicalism is intended as a very general claim about the nature of the world, but by far the most discussion of physicalism in the literature has been in the philosophy of mind. The reason for this is that it is in philosophy of mind that we find the most plausible and compelling arguments that physicalism is false.”^[45] Indeed, the only kind of emergence that is usually taken to be a “hard problem,” in David Chalmers’s phrase, is the emergence of the mental from the physical.^[46] Elsewhere I have argued against this assumption, since if we cannot explain the emergent reality of a hammer by describing its pieces or its atoms, we also cannot explain this reality functionally through all the things it does and can do.^[47] The hammer has an intrinsic reality that is – in principle, if not in fact – just as difficult to understand as the intrinsic reality of the mental. And quite aside from that, the usual way of framing the debate in philosophy of mind as an opposition between first-person “feels” and third-person external “descriptions” fails to recognize that first-person experience is not intrinsic anyway, since it is merely a way of relating to the reality of the mind. Reality is not exhausted by one’s direct experience of it, since otherwise my mind would be equivalent to my experience of it, and we would be stuck with all the flaws of the overmining position. Among other things, psychoanalysis would no longer be possible, since nothing like an unconscious could possibly exist.

Jaegwon Kim is certainly right that a commitment to emergence entails a commitment to supervenience.^[48] After all, the emergentist does not mean to claim that emergence happens suddenly in utterly contingent fashion, with no grounding in what was there previously. This is why I would argue that Quentin Meillassoux, who holds that the laws of nature can change at any moment for no reason at all, cannot really be considered a strong advocate of emergence even though he requires the successive advents of matter, life, thought, and justice to build on each other successively.^[49] The emergentist is committed to novelty, not to novelty ex nihilo. Moreover, although Meillassoux and others tend to think of causation as something that happens over the course of time, the notion of supervenience helps clarify that the more primary sense of causation is that of part/whole relations in the synchronic sense. When we consider the emergence of water from hydrogen and oxygen, we are not normally concerned with the creation of water at some temporal moment, but with how this water differs from its components here and now. But while commitment to supervenience implies a commitment to mereological determinism (since the same components should yield the same compound entity every time, ceteris paribus), it does not imply a commitment to physicalism. For here we are driven back against the same problem as before: we have no idea what “physical” means other than through its relational and basically negative qualities, such as the fact that it occupies some point in space-time, or that it resists my efforts or any collective effort to reduce it to a product of human discourse. Materialism is effectively a political doctrine, as when Ray Brassier insists that everyone obey the “cognitive authority of the natural sciences,” before adding negatively that without the granting of such authority, “you reduce scientific authority to a discourse like any other discourse… and you basically turn into Richard Rorty.”^[50] Amusing though this remark may be, I submit that the wish to be other than Rorty is not sufficient grounds for physicalism.

But quite aside from the aspiration to be something other than Rorty, or other than theists and pre-Enlightenment yokels wielding their pitchforks with ignorance, or other than those who refuse to grant “cognitive authority” to natural science, there is another philosophical intuition that helps explain much of the attraction to materialism or physicalism: namely, the intuition that our knowledge of things somehow relates to things without being identical to them. We have a certain amount of knowledge, say, about pigs, without this knowledge consisting of actual pigs; we are perfectly aware that the pig is one thing and our knowledge of it another. Therefore, any theory of knowledge needs to explain not only the link between knowledge of the thing and the actual thing, but the non-identity of the two. Historically, it was the concept of matter that played this role, through the doctrine – whether explicitly held or tacitly adopted – that the difference between our knowledge and its object is that the latter inheres in something called “dead matter.” Matter becomes a substratum whose primary function is to serve as a vague placeholder for our awareness that knowledge of things and the things themselves are not the same. As a corollary, it is assumed that the form of the thing is what moves from the thing into our minds without alteration, even when it is conceded that we can never get the form into our minds in any entirely adequate version.

But there is an alternative to this theory, one that does not require us to adopt the largely mythical notion of a formless “matter” from which forms are then extracted by the mind. This alternative is to adopt the theory that the pig and my knowledge of the pig are altogether different forms. This is easier to accept if we think of forms as emergent from their component entities, and acknowledge that a real pig has entirely different components than does our knowledge of pigs. Kant famously argued that “a hundred actual thalers do not contain the least [bit] more than a hundred possible thalers,” for “if the object contained more than the concept, then my concept would not express the entire object and thus would also not be the concept commensurate with this object.”^[51] Left unstated is that Kant also believes in the converse principle: that a hundred possible thalers do not contain the least bit less than a hundred actual thalers. For if it did, then any concept of a pig would not truly be referring to a pig.

Committed as he is to the idea that there is “nothing more” in the object than in the concept, Kant is led to his prominent thesis that there is only a difference in “position” between the possible thalers and the actual ones. For materialists, matter serves the same function as position does for Kant. Namely, it is a means of sidestepping the genuine difference in form between knowledge and its object, out of fear that this would leave us stranded with an inadequate sort of knowledge, one that is incommensurate with that to which it refers. But against Kant’s claim, I would say there is a very big difference between 100 possible and 100 actual Thalers, and it is one that has nothing to do with the purely relational concept of position. Only when we consider Thalers in terms of their externally visible qualities – in a sort of Turing Test for coins – is there any resemblance at all between the possible Thalers and the real ones. To see the difference between them requires that we consider the difference in their composition. It has not escaped my notice that this offers a different path from Kant’s own for criticizing Anselm’s ontological argument.^[52]