Graham Harman observes that Latour is called an idealist by materialists, a materialist by idealists, and is, in fact, neither.

I was going to say that this is correct: Latour is, in fact, a solipsist. But actually his thinking is deeply confused and I’m sure he has a range of mutually contradictory beliefs..

It’s clear that reductionism isn’t Latour’s target when you actually read what Latour has written (and even if it were his target, it’s a bad one to choose). He has said that Ramesses II couldn’t have died of tuberculosis because the bacillus hadn’t been identified in his time; he actually died from what was locally believed to have killed him, which cannot possibly have been tuberculosis. He has said that whatever you believe to be true is true, and that we need to ‘take seriously’ the idea of total ontological relativism, with the implication that if I believe that p and you believe that ¬p, then we’re both right and they’re both true statements. And if two contradictory things are both ‘true’, then there can be no real world and no truth.

I’m sure he claims to be a materialist, and I suppose he sees no contradiction between this and his view that there is no real world and no truth. It’s easy to hold a range of contradictory higher-order beliefs if you don’t believe in a real world.

“There persists, however, throughout the whole period the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ’scientific materialism.’ Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived. It is not wrong, if properly construed. If we confine ourselves to certain types of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which they occur, the materialistic assumption expresses these facts to perfection. But when we pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks down at once. The narrow efficiency of the scheme was the very cause of its supreme methodological success. For it directed attention to just those groups of facts which, in the state of knowledge then existing, required investigation.”

Note that “It is not wrong, if properly construed.” While the physics of light and the neurophysiology of sight can both be shown to have definite relations to the colors of the sunset described by a poet, they aren’t what the poet is talking about. We do not understand the poetry by talking about the physics—and, of course, the reverse is true.

(3) it limits our anthropological bad-assery, which should just claim “everyday philosophy” as our own.

It’s not about tribes. Or, it shouldn’t be. It should be about being right about things, not about who is right about things.

I find some of your (ahem — Anon’s) objections to this ontology thing a bit strange. There are better reasons for being suspicious of it, chief among them being that it is based on a bizarre and unsupportable anti-realism that has somehow passed muster among anthropologists. Whether it leads to Ivory Towerism or not, it is philosophically unsophisticated and bizarre, and Anon is right to raise Johnson’s objection.

You know, most philosophy departments in the world – and literally all of the good ones – are dominated by analytic philosophers who have nothing to do with this continental stuff and who avoid impenetrability and obscurity like the plague. Might be a good idea to check out, say, Dan Dennett – not his atheist writings, but his stuff on human thought and action (e.g., The Intentional Stance) – or Donald Davidson.

We’re material beings, we’re agents, the world is a material place, other people think differently than we do…

As Anon points out, this is obvious and should serve as the basis for literally any realistic approach to human culture and society. The world is material, human reason and action is material, and humans can have wildly different beliefs and, therefore, reasons. This should be obvious and not a source of any contention whatsoever.

Oh, I get it intellectually, this struggle to understand how we can understand the other yet also incorporate that into our philosophy, and to open up our thinking beyond just a mentalese version of culture (rules, symbols, etc.).

Which would be fine, except that a) culture and society are mental things, and they have their material existence in human brains, and b) there’s really no reason to adopt the ideas of other societies into our views of the world, especially if they can’t be independently supported. There’s no point in taking demons as real just because some communities believe in demons. Some beliefs are just beliefs, no matter how fervently they’re believed. Unfortunately for Latour’s view, and other’s, believing something to be true doesn’t make it true.

Those sorts of pragmatic questions could be of more use in anthropology. So could an empirical philosophy that, even as it insists on materiality and trying to dissolve the nature/culture division, treats both of those as more than ideas, as more than Western traditions hampering our present understanding.

I wonder if by ‘materiality’ Anon means Daniel Miller style materiality? The ontologists have nothing on the materiality crew as far as high-intellectual agendas go!