Adrian Johnston is interviewed by Graham Harman about his new book out in May 2014, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers.
Having said all of the above, I nonetheless deliberately preserve and play upon certain senses of the (apparent) tension between the terms “transcendental” and “materialism.”
As the preceding already reveals, transcendental materialism fundamentally is preoccupied with two of the biggest of big issues in the history of philosophy, ones closely interrelated: the freedom-determinism dispute and the mind-body problem.
One of my main preoccupations is with developing integrated phylogenetic and ontogenetic accounts of the conditions of possibility for the bottom-up emergences of autonomous, more-than-material mindedness and like-mindedness out of nothing more than heteronomous matter (with the latter as understood within the frame of the naturalist materialism of the empirical, experimental sciences of nature).
However, my temporally elongated genetic transcendentalism along these lines also maintains that these emergences are “strong” in the sense of eventuating in spontaneous subjects that enjoy irreducible, ineliminable independence from natural causal determinants while, at the same time, still dwelling entirely within the realms of the physical, the chemical, and the organic.
The ultimate tension operative here is that between the natural and the denaturalized, with the former being self-sundering through internally producing the latter out of itself.
The transcendental materialist ontological vision here is that of an auto-disruptive, self-denaturalizing nature that drives itself beyond itself, namely, a nature whose effects, at least in the forms of human Geist both subjective and objective, come vastly to exceed the naturalness of their causes.
That is to say, the material and the natural (as meta-transcendental substances) give rise out of themselves to frictions between them and the more-than-material/denaturalized (as transcendental subjects).
Finally, in addition to Adventures in Transcendental Materialism, I also can recommend to readers a manifesto-like essay of mine providing a succinct overview of the core tenets of transcendental materialism. It is a piece entitled “Points of Forced Freedom: Eleven (More) Theses on Materialism” that was published last year (2013) on-line in Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism.
I also discussed both transcendental materialism and the Prolegomena trilogy in an on-line interview with Peter Gratton available through Society and Space.
Graham – You first became well known as probably the most systematic interpreter of Slavoj Žižek. But in this book more than ever, we see differences between you and Žižek, particularly as concerns your approach to the sciences. Tell us a bit about these differences, and why you prefer to emphasize the brain sciences rather than quantum physics.
Adrian – To employ a Žižekian turn of phrase, I would characterize the disagreements between Žižek and me as “inner party disputes.” That is to say, I perceive the two of us as continuing to be in fundamental solidarity apropos the most important philosophical points of overlapping concern; we still sit together on the same theoretical Politburo.
Moreover, in his recent magnum opus, 2012’s Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Žižek adopts the label “transcendental materialism” in the context of critically engaging with Quentin Meillassoux in particular. I wholeheartedly agree with Žižek’s characterizations of it therein.
The critiques of Žižek in Adventures in Transcendental Materialism are immanent rather than external ones (as is entirely appropriate between Hegelians).
Put differently, my objections to, for example, his renditions of naturalism and appropriations of quantum physics ultimately amount to indictments of him for failing to stay true in these cases to his own best insights and arguments elsewhere.
In yet other words, I offer Žižekian critiques of Žižek himself, contending that he violates the parameters of his own philosophical system in those instances for which I (sympathetically) take him to task (and, yes, I believe there is such a thing as a consistent Žižekian system, the very thing for which I initially coined the phrase “transcendental materialism”).
Of course, your question here reflects the fact that Žižek’s uses (and, arguably, abuses) of quantum physics are a central topic of critical discussion in Part Two of Adventures in Transcendental Materialism (specifically, Chapter Seven therein: “Spirit Is a Quark: Quantum Physics with Žižek”).
My immanent critique of this Žižek pushes off from our shared commitment to a specific interpretation of Lacan’s dictum “the big Other does not exist” (il n’y a pas de grand Autre) as itself an Ur-thesis for a transcendental materialist ontology.
One of the implications of this Lacanian ontological stance, an implication Žižek and I each have been developing in our own ways, is that Nature qua All/Whole (whether imagined as Spinoza’s substance, Laplace’s demon, Darwinian evolution as the “great chain of being,” the harmonious ecosystems of Gaia, or whatever else along these pseudo-secular, God-like lines) is a non-existent big Other, namely, the fantasy of the seamless totality of a tightly-woven tapestry of entities and events all governed and supported by this One.
When Žižek declares that “Nature does not exist” or I speak of “weak nature,” what we both have in mind is the disunity of nature as per, in more Lacanese, the “barring” of the material/natural Real following from the principle of the non-existence of big Others (as regards this trajectory of thought, I recently have been drawing on the invaluable work of some of the main representatives of the Stanford School of the philosophy of science).
By flirting with, if not outright embracing, short circuits between, on the one hand, the microcosms of quantum objects and processes and, on the other hand, the (relative) macrocosms of the configurations and operations of subjects, Žižek is in danger of reinforcing a reductivist program of someone like Roger Penrose to subsume human mindedness under the explanatory jurisdiction of the physics of the extremely small.
In fact, Žižek’s own dialectical/transcendental materialism entails a strong emergentism in which non-epiphenomenal level distinctions between a multiplicity of natural tiers and strata forbids simply identifying or collapsing levels such as those of the sub-atomic and the organic (and this apart from the external criticisms one could voice apropos the philosophical as well as scientific problems with speculating about correlations and/or causations holding between the domains of the quantum and the mental).