On Idealism vs. Anti-Realism

Graham writes,

As a general rule, people who claim that the realism/idealism dispute is a false dispute invariably come down on the side of idealism, they simply don’t want to admit it. Where in Zizek, Badiou, Lacan, or even Johnston, does one find a treatment of relations between two non-human entities without humans on the scene speaking about or observing it? I see no room in any of these authors for such a thing.

I think Graham is asking the right question. I wonder, though, if the word “idealism” is useful here, at least rhetorically. For example, looking at Heidegger, as we’re doing in the course, I have much in mind Harman’s own readings (but not as to make this a Harman course—one deserved, but that will have to be later—I’ve tried to limit readings of his work to two works later in the semester), and I also have in mind Anglo American responses to Heidegger on this question. And idealism is not a word that fits, though it’s true that for Heidegger one can’t talk about things opening onto each other in a way that the world is an open for that being that asks after its own existence. Things as things, for Heidegger, have to be lit up by the torch that is Dasein. In a sense this makes him less an idealist than anti-realist about objects and entities outside the worlds worlding for us. And Husserlians can claim that they are not idealists—so too with Johnston, and so on. I guess for them it’s bad to be idealist. Fine. But what’s more crucial is what they’re denying reality to. In other words, in looking at Husserlian lifeworlds, no doubt there is very much reality to the world as he describes it, but beyond the possibility of being a correlate of intentionality, an object is not real. Thus Husserlians are anti-realists about the type of stuff that interests Graham, just as eliminativists are anti-realists about consciousness and the like, but are in turn realists about brain matter. Thus, all of them can spend a lot of time on their materialisms, etc, and deny being idealists, but the point that remains stubbornly for Harman is that they are anti-realists precisely about what occurs outside of human language, conceptual schemes, etc. That’s the key point missed when people respond to Graham: it’s not simplistic reading. I don’t think it’s a simplistic reading of Marx to say that he’s anti-realist about animal or non-human labor. But he is. Is it helpful then to talk about him being an Idealist? That might miss the point, because he’s certainly realist about the dialectical process that is imbedded in nature and culture, and for which all of our philosophical notions are epiphenomenal. Thus, in turn, I don’t see how one can read Zizek’s reinscription of the Lacanian Real as anything but an anti-realism with regard to a Harmanian-type discourse. They think Graham is ultimately exporting onto natural entities human conceptual schemes and notions of relations. In other words, he can talk about Reality, but not the Real in Lacanian parlance, and its the former, not the latter, that Zizekians would point to in saying that they are not idealists, which would miss the point.

All of that was to say that I guess a quicker diagnostic is to think less about what a given discourse takes to be real than what its takes to be unreal or causally linked to a more fundamental set of terms (the unconsciousness linked to brain matter; ideology linked to superstructures, etc.). And it’s there, not by discussing idealism but “anti-realism,” that one cuts to the immodesty of some types of these claims (and thus frustration realists often evince), since you are turning to another with the look of one who thinks a friend guides their life by astrology or unicorns or other unreal entities.