Mormonism, Externalism and OOO

Posted on February 23, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Peirce, Religion | 3 Comments

I’d brought up at LDS-Herm my recent comments on Heidegger, Peirce and externalism. While this is one of those topics where there appears no over LDS connection I did find it interesting that this discussion was so close to topics I’ve been studying off and on for many years. In fact this blog got started way back on a similar topic. I collected a few of the posts into a rough quasi-theological outline of a topic on agency. I’d hoped to pull this together into a more robust form and make it a SMPT paper. However small kids and starting a new business sort of put an end to that idea – at least for a few years. (Although I am planning to be at the SMPT Conference on March 25 at UVU here in Orem)

I’d posted a few comments tying the above very rough thoughts to the recent controversy raging at many OOO and Heideggerian blogs. As I see it once you make the move to externalism then the issue of being manifesting through strife takes center stage. This is obvious in Heidegger with his notion of polemos. I think it pretty obvious with Peirce where Secondness (or the encounter with the Other) involves the Other battering down our ideas with the Real. (See my post from last week) Now the issue of violence will always be pertinent here precisely because of this sort of relation, as will the issue of justice and Ethics (in the Levinasian sense).

The basic thesis of that early post is that there’s a similar pattern of strife found in LDS scripture and ontology from the basic ontological in D&C 93 up through the pattern of creation in 2 Ne 2 and even the pattern of living in the Book of Mormon. That is the problem of realism from within externalism is a basic fundamental rhetorical (at minimum) pattern in Mormonism.

Now Levi (over at Larval Subjects) has written on related topics I think over the months. (He’s not Mormon so far as I know – but his posts often lead to various discussions at the LDS-Herm mailing list) Adam Miller sums this up in the following:

The OOO claim about realism is not that humans have some kind of direct access to the way things really are in themselves (it is not this kind of “realism”). But, rather, the OOO claim (at least on Levi’s take) is that the necessity of “translation” involved in a human experience of the world is ubiquitous and “is true of any relation between two or more objects regardless of whether humans are involved.”

Here, rather than getting humans and objects all on the same ontological plane by saying that humans have the same kind of direct relations to one another that non-human objects do, Levi claims that human and objects are all on the same ontological plane because all non-human objects enter into real relations with one another only in the same that human beings do: by way of negotiation, translation, modification, etc.

Now this does relate to a constant albeit typically minority view within Mormon theology which sees all existants in just this way. Orson Pratt is the obvious initial example but he’s been quite influential. Most of these positions end up verging into a kind of panpsychic view of the universe. (Not quite Stoic, for various reasons, but there are similarities)

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t really LDS theology proper. But it is a way many LDS theologians have thought about the issue of existence and especially divine influence. That’s because if all existence works by negotiation and translation (effectively the issue of strife and Ethics) then this explains a lot about how LDS view God. Certainly we reject the creation ex nihilo view that characterizes most of the rest of Christianity.

I bring all this up as a round about way of raising the following issue:

Is it fair for me to see the OOO critique of Heidegger as trying to reintroduce a bigger ontological – epistemological divide given that OOO sees itself as focusing in on Kant through an ontological critique? (Recall that the neoKantians tended to neglect ontology in preference to epistemology) All of this can be seen in Levi’s recent discussions of Hegel and realism.

I just don’t know enough about OOO to even want to begin to criticize that movement. I’ve been thinking all this more in terms of Heidegger. But let me answer the epistemology/ontology issue in a subsequent post.

Related posts:

  1. Anselm’s Ontological Argument and the Problem of Evil
  2. Heidegger and Science
  3. Ontological Argument
  4. Epistemological and Ontological Realism
  5. Objects as a Point of View
  6. McDermott Responds to Critics

Comments

3 Responses to “Mormonism, Externalism and OOO”

Clark,

Excellent post. I’m struggling with the same concepts right now, particularly as I’m taking my first course on Heidegger (we’re studying Being and Time) while being introduced to OOO at the same time. Lots of questions, lots of confusion. This recent post from Levi seems to sum up OOO pretty well, and engages Heideggerian thought:

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/02/23/we-dont-act-alone/

On a more personal level, I find some interesting resonances between OOO and Joseph Smith’s Welding Theology that I’ve been roughly propounding in various places.

I take it “OOO” is “Object Oriented Ontology”.

Yup – I have to confess I don’t know nearly as much about it as I should. So that’s why I’m avoiding making any criticisms of the movement itself. I’m more just dealing with how they are reading Heidegger.

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