OOO Answers

8/13/2019 OOO Answers

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The rest of the biological world is exceptionally violent - what makes humans unique is our

ability to engineer peace.

Goodall & Wrangham 13 - *has directed the scientific study of chimpanzee behavior at

Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania since 1960, **Professor of Biological Anthropology

at Harvard University (Jane, Richard, January 4th, 2013, We, Too, Are Violent Animals

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323874204578220002834225378.html)Where does human savagery come from? The animal behaviorist Marc Bekoff, writing in Psychology Today after last month's awfulevents in Newtown, Conn., echoed a common view: It can't possibly come from nature or evolution. Harsh aggression, he wrote, is "extremely

rare" in nonhuman animals, while violence is merely an odd feature of our own species, produced by a few wicked people. If only we could

"rewild our hearts," he concluded, we might harness our "inborn goodness and optimism" and thereby return to our "nice, kind,

compassionate, empathic" original selves. If only if it were that simple. Calm and cooperative behavior indeed

predominates in most species, but the idea that human aggression is qualitatively different from that of

every other species is wrong. The latest report from the research site that one of us (Jane Goodall) directs in Tanzania gives a

quick sense of what a scientist who studies chimpanzees actually sees: "Ferdinand [the alpha male] is rather a brutal ruler ,

in that he tends to use his teeth rather a lot…a number of the males now have scars on their backs from being nicked or

gashed by his canines …The politics in Mitumba *a second chimpanzee community+ have also been bad. If we recall that: they all

killed alpha-male Vincent when he reappeared injured; then Rudi as his successor probably killed up-and-coming youngEbony to stop him helping his older brother Edgar in challenging him…but to no avail, as Edgar eventually toppled him anyway." A 2006

paper reviewed evidence from five separate chimpanzee populations in Africa, groups that have all been

scientifically monitored for many years. The average "conservatively estimated risk of violent death"

was 271 per 100,000 individuals per year. If that seems like a low rate, consider that a chimpanzee's social circle is limited

to about 50 friends and close acquaintances. This means that chimpanzees can expect a member of their circle to be

murdered once every seven years . Such a rate of violence would be intolerable in human society. The

violence among chimpanzees is impressively humanlike in several ways. Consider primitive human warfare, which has been well documented

around the world. Groups of hunter-gatherers who come into contact with militarily superior groups of farmers rapidly abandon war, but

where power is more equal, the hostility between societies that speak different languages is almost endless. Under those conditions, hunter-

gatherers are remarkably similar to chimpanzees: Killings are mostly carried out by males, the killers tend to act in small gangs

attacking vulnerable individuals, and every adult male in the society readily participates. Moreover, with hunter-gatherers as withchimpanzees, the ordinary response to encountering strangers who are vulnerable is to attack them. Most animals do not exhibit this striking

constellation of behaviors, but chimpanzees and humans are not the only species that form coalitions for killing. Other animals that use

this strategy to kill their own species include group-living carnivores such as lions, spotted hyenas and

wolves. The resulting mortality rate can be high: Among wolves, up to 40% of adults die from attacks by other

packs . Killing among these carnivores shows that ape-sized brains and grasping hands do not account for this unusual violent behavior. Two

other features appear to be critical: variable group size and group-held territory. Variable group size means that lone individuals sometimes

encounter small, vulnerable parties of neighbors. Having group territory means that by killing neighbors, the group can expand its territory to

find extra resources that promote better breeding. In these circumstances, killing makes evolutionary sense—in humans as in chimpanzees and

some carnivores. What makes humans special is not our occasional propensity to kill strangers when we think we

can do so safely. Our unique capacity is our skill at engineering peace . Within societies of hunter-gatherers (though only

rarely between them), neighboring groups use peacemaking ceremonies to ensure that most of their

interactions are friendly. In state-level societies, the state works to maintain a monopoly on violence. Thougheasily misused in the service of those who govern, the effect is benign when used to quell violence among the governed. Under everyday

conditions, humans are a delightfully peaceful and friendly species. But when tensions mount between groups of

ordinary people or in the mind of an unstable individual, emotion can lead to deadly events. There but for the grace of fortune, circumstance

and effective social institutions go you and I. Instead of constructing a feel-good fantasy about the innate goodness of most people and all

animals, we should strive to better understand ourselves, the good parts along with the bad.


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we can have politics, but only after ontology. At this point, we are hardly political at all - it

eliminates the possibility for an event.

Galloway 12 - Phd in Literature, Associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and

Communication at New York University (Alexander, http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/a-response-to-graham-harmans-marginalia-on-radical-thinking/, A response to Graham Harman’s “Marginalia on

Radical Thinking”, June 3rd 2012) I cite this as a textbook example of the liberal bourgeois position that people from the likes of Zizek to

Carl Schmitt have called “depoliticization and neutralization.” It shows Harman’s anti-political position

quite clearly. Today we might even call this an anti-badiousian position (although Harman of course has

no interest in being badiousian in the first place!). The reason is because he has no opposition to the

state of the situation. By his own admission, he only expresses revulsion *after* the confrontation with

the state has taken place, after he witnesses the excesses to which the state will go to hold on to power.

That’s a classic case of liberal neutralization (“don’t rock the boat,” “we just need to go along to get

along,” “this is the best of all possible worlds,” “ontology shouldn’t be political,” etc.). This is thus not a

political desire of any kind, merely an affective emotional response at the sight of blood. But such

palpitations of the “sensitive” bourgeois heart, no matter how reformed, do not a politics make. By

contrast, Badiou’s position is so useful today because he says that it’s all about the first antagonism,

not the last. To be political means that you have to *start* from the position of incompatibility with the

state. In other words the political is always asymmetrical to the state of the situation. The political is

always “trenchant” in this sense, always a “cutting” or polarization. Hence the appeal of Badiou’s

“theory of points” which forces all of the equal-footed-objects in OOO into a trenchant decision of the

two: yes or no, stop or go, fight or retreat. Hardt and Negri say something similar when they show how

“resistance is primary vis-a-vis power.” For his part Harman essentially argues the reverse in this

interview: ontology is primary (OOO “is not the handmaid of anything else”), power is secondary

(Mubarak), resistance is a tertiary afterthought (the Arab Spring). Yes we should applaud the Spring

when it arrives, Harman admits, but it’s still just an afterthought that arrived from who knows where. If

you’re still skeptical just use the old categorial imperative: if everyone in Cairo were clones of Harman,

the revolution would never have happened. That’s political neutralization in a nutshell . In other

words there is no event for Harman . And here I agree with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem’s recent

characterization of Tristan Garcia’s ontology, modeled closely after Harman’s, as essentially a treatise on

“Being Without Event.”

Separating ontology from politics causes pure passivity.

Galloway 13 - Phd in Literature, Associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and

Communication at New York University (Alexander, Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter2013), pp. 347-366, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668529, The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-

Fordism)In order to address these important questions I will expand the field of view and make some observations about philosophical realism.9 In

this context, realism means quite simply that an external world exists independent of ourselves and our languages, thoughts, and beliefs—

although it is often also taken to entail the less simple epistemological thesis that we have direct and verifiable access to knowledge aboutthat external world. In the wake of Kantianism and subsequent to phenomenology and structuralism, realism had essentially gone extinct in

the continental tradition, despite having healthy offshoots in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of science. But

things began to change around 2002. In that year Manual De Landa published a book on Gilles Deleuze, Intensive Science and Virtual

Philosophy, stating in no uncertain terms “I am a realist”; in the same year Harman published his first book, which proposed a

realism around a so-called object-oriented philosophy Perhaps the most influential of the recent realist texts has beenMeillassoux’s book After Finitude, which advocates that one move beyond what Meillassoux calls correlationism and reconcile thought withthe absolute. For Meillassoux correlationism means that knowledge of the world is always the result of a correlation between subject and

object. “By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and

never to either term considered apart from the other,” Meillassoux writes.11 Under the system of correlationism,


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subjectivity and objectivity are forever bound together. Thus, one might naturally put figures like Immanuel Kant in thiscamp with his highly mediated model of subject and object. Phenomenology is also a key entry in the history of correlationism, as well as

much of the French philosophical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, obsessed as they were with the inability for man to move beyond the

prison house of language. Postmodernism is considered to be a high water mark for correlationism, particularly the notion, often attributed

rightly or wrongly to postmodern thinkers, that the subject is ultimately at the mercy of ideology and spectacle, behind which there exists

no absolute truth or reality. For correlationism human subjectivity always has a crucial role to play; the real

world doesn’t exist, or if it does we cannot have direct access to it. Meillassoux pits himself firmly against the longtradition of correlationism in continental philosophy. For Meillassoux the real world exists, and it can be known. He endorses a so-

called Copernican revolution wherein the anthropocentrism of correlationism is displaced in favor of a

system in which reality is at the center, and the human is but one element in the network of the real.

Levi Bryant and others have called this a flat ontology comprising a single plane, the real, within which exists

human In the opening chapter of After Finitude, titled “Ancestrality,” Meillassoux lays out the basic stakes of what a noncorrelationistposition might look like by making reference to the Kantian trap that has gripped Western philosophy for some time: “Thought cannot getoutside itself in order to compare the world as it is ‘in itself’ to the world as it is ‘for us’. . . . We cannot represent the ‘in itself’ without itbecoming ‘for us’, or as Hegel amusingly put it, we cannot ‘creep up on’ the object ‘from behind’ so as to find out what it is in itself” (AF, pp.3 –4). Meillassoux does not so much creep up on the object but posit a historical time scale outside the cognition of the human, a historicaltime prior to humanity altogether. Thus he speaks of the “ancestral realm” and the “arche-fossil”: “ancestral” claims are claims about thingsbefore the existence of man and therefore prior to what the phenomenologists call the “givenness” of human experience; the “arche-fossil”is the trace that allows someone to make ancestral claims. For example, radiological decay is an “arche-fossil” that allows a scientist to dateprehistoric fossils. Meillassoux culminates these provocations by asking what if anything correlationism can say about such “ancestral”

claims; the facts in question technically would fall prior to the subjectobject relation as such and hence prior to the model proposed bycorrelationism. If human thought had a beginning, what to think of history prior to human thought? Science emerges as something of a

trump card, as Meillassoux poses the following question to his correlationist opponents: “how are we to conceive of the empirical sciences’capacity to yield knowledge of the ancestral realm?” (AF, p. 26; emphasis removed). The opening section of the book also stresses theimportance of mathematics. He describes an enigma in which mathematics is granted the ability to speak about the historical past in which

humanity was absent: “how is mathematical discourse able to describe a world where humanity is absent. . . . This is the enigma which wemust confront: mathematics’ ability to discourse about the great outdoors; to discourse about a past where both humanity and life areabsent” (AF, p. 26); but also earlier Meillassoux brings in mathematics during his discussion of primary qualities: “all those aspects of theobject that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningf ully conceived as properties of the object in itself” (AF, p. 3; emphasisremoved). (I will return to the question of mathematics in a moment, but it is worth identifying it explicitly here.) Meillassoux’s use of the“ancestral realm” thus allows him to open up a space for a purely real world, a world that has never had a human eye gaze upon it or a

human mind think about it. “To think ancestrality is to think a world without thought,” he writes, “a world without thegivenness of the world” (AF, p. 28). The phrase “givenness of the world” is a reference to how phenomenology talks about presence. It refersto the way in which the world is given into perception by a thinking being. “Our task, by way of contrast,” writes Meillassoux, “consists intrying to understand how thought is able to access the uncorrelated, which is to say, a world capable of subsisting without being given.” Theholy grail for Meillassoux is therefore existence without givenness. He understands the absolute as something “capable of existing whetherwe exist or not” (AF, p. 28). How should we evaluate Meillassoux and his intervention into contemporary philosophy?13Afew issues springto mind, all concerning Meillassoux’s relationship to politics and history. I will address two criticisms first in relatively vague terms, thenmove to a third, more pointed critique. First is the question of metaphysical necessity itself, be it in the form of essentialism, the absolute, a

natural reality, or universal truths. All of these things were at some time or another the antagonist of what one calls

critical theory in the broadest sense, that is to say the practice of sociocultural critique invented by Karl Marx in the middle ofthe nineteenth century and practiced in various ways by the Frankfurt school, structuralism and poststructuralism, semiotics, cultural

studies, and certain kinds of queer theory, feminism, and critical race theory up through the end of the twentieth century. In much of this

work, essence and truth themselves are the antagonists, to be replaced by constructed identities and contingent worlds. (Recall how Marx

and Friedrich Engels, in part two of the Communist Manifesto, promised to do away with truth!) With the new speculative

realism, and perhaps also in a different way with Harman’s object-oriented philosophy, one risks switching from a

system of subjective essentialism (patriarchy, logocentrism, ideological apparatuses) to a system of “objective”

essentialism (an unmediated real, infinity, being as mathematics, the absolute, the bubbling of chaos). Is it time to trot out the

old antiessentialist arguments from our Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial forebears? Isn’t Meillassoux’smetaphysical essentialism—his support of the universality of contingency (which in its impotent universality becomes meaningless), his

pursuit of the absolute, his endorsement of a pure real— just as repugnant as other brands of metaphysical

essentialism ? Thus we must confront directly the fundamental provocation of the new philosophical realism. For, contra the tradition

of materialist critical theory since Marx, much of today’s realism claims that ontologies should not be political; itclaims that ontological speculations must be separated from political ones. Such choruses are being heard moreand more frequently today. I have no doubt that many of the figures associated with today’s philosophical realism would view themselves

as politicized souls of some caliber. And the argument is often heard that the uncoupling of the ontological from


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the political is a neutral act in and of itself and in so doing casts no aspersion as such on the political

project. One simply can do metaphysics over here, while doing politics over there. Furthermore, promulgators of such arguments oftenlaud the uncoupling as a feature of realism, not a liability, because it allows the political to persist inside its own autonomous sphere,

unsullied by the nitty-gritty questions of Being and appearing. Yet the uncoupling of the ontological realm from the

political realm is not entirely neutral, for it arrives less as an innocuous attempt to tidy up the

cluttered landscape of philosophical discourse ( so that one’s talk of Being will not be tainted by one’s

talk of politics ) than as an ideological strategy bent unwittingly or not on the elimination of competing discourses. Recall what must be

discarded when overturning correlationism. One must discard phenomenology certainly, but one must also throw out social

constructivism and the various fields that rely on a socialconstructivist methodology including much of

second- and third-wave feminism, certain kinds of critical race theory, the project of identity politics in

general, theories of postmodernity, and much of cultural studies. Phenomenology has a politics, to be sure: beyond

the ravages of modern life, the return to a more poetic state of being guided by care and solicitude. Social constructivism has one too: throw

out the violence of patriarchy, logocentrism, and all the rest. Have no illusions, this is what is at stake with the recent return to the absolute

evident in theoretical discourse from Meillassoux to Badiou, and even evident in other authors such as Žižek and Susan Buck-Morss.14 To besure, certain of these theorists understand the stakes and therefore scaffold their newfound universalism with a robust and often militant

political theory—Badiou and Žižek, one shall re- member, are in no uncertain terms advocating communism, and Buck- Morss herself has a

robust political consciousness. Fading violets they are not. The question becomes more pressing however when aphilosopher uncouples Being from politics in order to withdraw from the project of political critique

altogether.

Anthropocentrism is inevitable; history proves

Sowers--02

[George F. Sowers Jr., Lockheed Martin Astronautics, The Transhumanist Case for Space, pgs. 6-7, April 2002]

Man is a prodigious consumer of resources. From energy to minerals, from food to living space, the

great bounty of our home planet is being depleted at ever increasing rates. Yet, this trend represents

more than mere wastefulness. The history of humanity is one of ever increasing physical power. Thatwe seek ever increasing power is one of the fundamental features of our species, and one of the keys

to our success. Unfortunately, increasing power as it is utilized, generally leads to increasing demands

for resources. After all, in a Newtonian sense, power is simply the rate of energy expenditure. The trends

toward ever increasing resource utilization are easy to recognize, especially in the modern world

where such statistics are actually recorded. For example, per capita energy consumption in America has

increased many-fold in the last 100 years even though enhancements in energy efficiency have slowed that

increase in over the last 20 years or so. The standard of living enjoyed by a country can generally be related to per

capita energy consumption and by this measure America has the highest standard of living in the world. Now I take

it as given that higher standards of living are more desirable, and indeed, higher standards of living are consistent

with transhumanist objectives. As I have argued above, we desire not just longer life, but better life.

Donahue--10[Thomas J. Donahue, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute for Philosophical Research, “Anthropocentrism

and the Argument from Gaia Theory,” Ethics and the Environment vol. 15 number 3, pgs. 59-61, Fall 2010]

If anthropocentrism did imply the Dominion Thesis, that would, in my opinion, decisively refute the

doctrine. But the implication does not hold good (even though a good many anthropocentrists have

embraced the Thesis). The trouble with the Routleys’ argument is the middle premise, according to which

humans are, on anthropocentric principles, entitled to treat as they wish anything which must serve


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human interests. Let us call this the Entitlement View. This view is false. The anthropocentrist need

not hold that humans are so entitled. The reasons are as follows. Recall the claim made by

anthropocentrism—that the only things valuable in themselves are human beings; their desires,needs, and purposes; and the satisfaction of those. The Entitlement View does not follow from this

claim. For suppose I accept anthropocentrism. I still run into the problem that any plausible

anthropocentric morality will forbid me from treating things in such a way that they needlessly harm

other human beings. For example, suppose we concede that a mountain must serve human interests.

Still, on any plausible anthropocentric morality, I may not strip mine the mountain such that the

resulting sludge contaminates a nearby town’s water supply. The same would hold true even if(implausibly) all humanity agreed to use a certain thing in a way that needlessly harmed some human beings. But

then it follows that on any plausible anthropocentric morality, it is false that humans are entitled to treat as they

wish anything which must serve human interests. So the Entitlement View is false. Defenders of the Dominion

implication might reply that a weaker version of the Entitlement View still holds good: namely, that on

anthropocentrist principles, humans are entitled to treat as they wish anything which must serve human interests,

so long as they do not violate any of the tenets of any plausible anthropocentric morality. But once this concession

is made, the route to the Dominion Thesis seems to be blocked. For it is hard to see how one could reach the

thesis that “man is entitled to manipulate the earth and all its non -human contents as he wants” bycombining anthropocentrism with this weakened Entitlement View. So it seems that anthropocentrism

does not imply the Dominion Thesis. Another ugly consequence attributed to anthropocentrism is the

view that human beings cannot have general obligations not to harm plants, non-human animals, or

ecosystems. The idea here is that, on anthropocentric principles, one cannot have obligations not to harm such

beings unless incurs the obligations by promises, contracts, or the fact that the beings are someone else’s

property. Let us call this “the No-obligation Thesis.” This Thesis fails, because it does not take into account

all the ways that we can incur obligations. If, by harming an ecosystem, I would be needlessly harming

other human beings, then clearly on anthropocentric principles I have an obligation not to harm the

ecosystem. More interestingly, even if in harming the ecosystem I would not be harming other human

beings, I might still have an anthropocentric obligation not to harm the ecosystem. For suppose that a

great number of people strongly desire that the ecosystem not be harmed, and have connected some

of their hopes and plans with its not being harmed (Yellowstone National Park might be such an

ecosystem). On anthropocentric principles, it is quite possible that I would then have an obligation notto harm that ecosystem, even if the harm I might do would not (seriously) harm or endanger any

human beings. And since promises, contracts, and property do not figure here, it seems that the No-obligation

Thesis is also false.

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