Adrian Johnston is interviewed by Graham Harman about his new book out in May 2014, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers.
Here are some important excerpts
Graham – Your title contains the phrase “transcendental materialism.” There is a tension between these two words that in some sense drives all of your intellectual work. “Transcendental” generally refers to a sort of philosophy, like Kant’s, that asks about our conditions of knowing the world rather than about the world itself. Meanwhile, “materialism” has always been a philosophy that turns in the most hardnosed fashion towards the world itself, viewing humans as a material thing just like everything else. Stated briefly, how does one reconcile the transcendental and materialist standpoints?
Adrian – The tension between the two terms “transcendental” and “materialism” indeed lies at the heart of my work overall. To begin answering your question with some very broad brushstrokes, I am committed to two foundational claims as motivating philosophical intuitions.
First, everything that truly exists is or arises from (and, in all instances, remains situated fully within) nature qua ensembles of material beings and happenings as themselves, at least in principle, accessible to being handled by the natural sciences.
Second, subjectivity as conceived of within Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism (as per Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel) is a real feature of being too, with this subject amounting to a set of non-epiphenomenal structures and dynamics immanent yet irreducible to material substances (and, as such transcendences-in-immanence, human subjects are, in important respects, not “just like everything else” material).
Obviously, the first claim is materialist and the second transcendentalist.
Transcendental materialism preliminarily could be characterized as a single theoretical framework or system based on a synthesis of these apparently incompatible commitments.
The interval between transcendentalism and materialism understandably looks to be an insurmountable gaping chasm (and, hence, the label “transcendental materialism” an oxymoronic absurdity) if one assumes that the transcendental is the exclusive purview of transcendental idealism à la Kant and his various progeny.
Then, of course, it seems to be the case that any and every philosophy self-identifying as transcendentalist would have to limit itself to putting forward some permutation of a subjectivist epistemology, namely, a theory of knowledge and its conditions of possibility anchored exclusively in human mindedness, devoid of firm ontological investments, and opposed to robust realisms and materialisms.
But, for reasons both historical and philosophical, I deny that Kantian (or, for that matter, Fichtean) transcendental idealism possesses a copyrighted monopoly on the transcendental.
I read Schelling’s and Hegel’s developments of objective and absolute idealisms, themselves generated out of immanent critiques of Kantian and Fichtean transcendental idealisms, as demonstrating, among many other things, that a rigorous, consequent, and thorough transcendentalism cannot remain within the confines of anti-realist, anti-materialist subjectivism.
Arguably, both Schelling and Hegel retain key aspects of transcendental subjectivity à la Kant and Fichte while, nonetheless, showing why and how this subject, as a set of possibility conditions for knowledge, must itself be accounted for and grounded in a theory of being(s) furnishing the possibility conditions for this very subject and its knowledge as real/true (what one might identify as a meta-transcendental ontology necessarily accompanying a transcendental epistemology).
For Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel (as well as such contemporaries as Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel), one of the most profoundly dissatisfying features of Kant’s and Fichte’s idealisms is that the transcendental subject appears to be left frictionlessly spinning in a deontologized void (to paraphrase John McDowell), mysteriously floating in an unexplained vacuum.
In particular, the philosophies of nature elaborated by Schelling and Hegel already point towards a type of anti-reductive (quasi-)naturalism, one including the idea of more-than-material/natural subjects, essential to both dialectical and transcendental materialisms from Marx and Engels through Žižek and myself.
Relatedly, I view the “hardnosed” varieties of materialism you have in mind here (such as mechanistic, reductive, or eliminative materialisms, themselves akin to McDowell’s “bald naturalism”) as “contemplative” in the sense incisively criticized in the first of Marx’s eleven “Theses on Feuerbach”; of course, in 1845, Marx has in view both the hybrid Newtonian-Spinozan Weltanschaaung of the eighteenth-century French materialists as well as the philosophical anthropology of Feuerbach.
In line with the speculative dialectics of a post-contemplative materialist standpoint, I consider exclusions of an account of subjective spontaneity (even if such spontaneity is taken to be somehow illusory) at the levels of epistemology and/or ontology to be indefensible for any and every materialist, even the most hardnosed.
The entire first part of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism (i.e., Chapters One through Four) explains and defends this line of thought.
Philosophically, if transcendental arguments involve reverse-engineering out of a given phenomenon its necessary conditions, then I see no reasons why only subjective idealists fixated on epistemology, and not also realists and materialists concerned with ontology, can help themselves to such arguments.
I start from the two intuitions lying at the base of transcendental materialism I mentioned at the outset of my answer to this question. The transcendental argumentative strategy specific to my research program is to extrapolate out of the experience of subjectivity as both theoretically and practically spontaneous (with, in the background, a construal of this spontaneity as the ultimate concern of both theoretical as well as practical philosophy in Kantian and post-Kantian German idealism) the conditions of possibility within material being itself for such subjectivity emerging out of this being qua lone monistic expanse.
Worded differently, some guiding questions of transcendental materialism are:
1. What makes possible the surfacing of the transcendental subject (as “second nature”) out of meta-transcendental substance (as “first nature”)?
2. How must the material and the natural be (re)conceptualized if they indeed generate out of themselves more-than-material, denaturalized agents and actors?
3. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for these generative occurrences?
4. How must we think of the universe so that it is not incomprehensible and ridiculous to affirm that it produced us in all our human peculiarity and strangeness, we who gaze back on it while remaining ensconced within it as a precious few of its myriad parts?
I am a transcendental materialist insofar as I seek to delineate, via transcendental arguments as defined above, the necessary (and, I would add, also sufficient) conditions within the physical being(s) of nature for the immanent genesis of autonomous, self-determining subjectivity (itself consisting of sets of reflective, reflexive, and recursive structures and dynamics).