A Serious Man: On Bruno Latour
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> in his own words, religion was not to do with “belief.” God was not an entity you believed in: God did not exist outside of the practices—what Bruno called “the processions and rituals” that make Him present. That is, God is made manifest in an actor-network of religiosity.
The other interesting things you learn here is that Latour was from the famous Latour wine family, he was a youngest son so his family kind of expected him to enter the church, and they were apparently unimpressed and uninterested in his academic career.
Sums it up pretty nicely. I have no clue what "undeformed travel" means, which is a nice reference to how his writing resists analysis. His writing does seem to encourage repetition in a lot of people who are not into logic or proper reasoning.
If you say a lot, keep things extremely vague, and change definitions as you go, you attract a lot of people who think, "Hey, this is exactly what I was pondering about," but you also oppose those who think, "Hey, you are not making any sense." I tried to find a middle ground because the subject matter Latour talked about seems very important to our society, but until now, I have consistently failed to like his way of philosophizing.
(He was famous for Lab Life, of course, but he did the exact same sort of detailed anthropological-philosophical analysis of French courts too.)
There's this idea in popular culture that he only wrote incomprehensible nonsense, which is just not true, and he's become a punching bag for some people who cannot handle the (somewhat made-up) "continental v. analytic" divide.
I say this as someone who loves both Gadamer and Quine, not an erstwhile philosophical culture warrior.
Concerning Heidegger I stand in the opposite corner of the room: I liked his later writings more and despite having read him profusely, I'm not able to articulate his thoughts like you did by contrasting present-at-hand with ready-at-hand which however pinpoints very well the divide between analytical and continental thought.
You're right to say that he "collapses into a kind of solipsistic logorrhea", and it is pertinent to what we are discussing since in heideggerian terms this should be expressed as "language bringing language to language through language".
An example: the linguistic proximity between explicate vs implicate that is another instance of the ready-to-hand vs present-at-hand dichotomy.
I was just wondering if you had found it to be tough sledding, if you had read it.
I say this as someone who used to be partial toward postmodernist texts, and defended them using arguments similar to yours (they should be understood in this other way!), but I eventually, finally moved on, and I (in my opinion) deem them to be at their worst harmful to critical thinking.
Regarding Latour specifically there is hate-paper on his work, a professor published a paper describing exactly why Latour is problematic bullshit.
>He protested that religion really has “nothing to do with belief” but “everything to do with Words—the Logos or Spirit that transform the life of those you address.”
This feeling may be aggravated by the use of phrases such as "network of agents" which lie somewhere between scientific jargon and poetical language. Since the whole sentence seem to touch about this aspect I'm going to quote it:
>The wine of Burgundy was a network of agents, only conventionally sorted into the human-artificial and the non-human natural, but so too was the landscape of Burgundy, and so too was any countryside
Maybe I could recommend you to read Heidegger's commentaries of Hölderlin's hymns ? This is a beautiful text that reaches a zone in language that had never been attained before. It starts with a discussion of what poetry is (neither its form or content) and slowly morphs Hölderlin "terminology" into philosophical discourse. Unique.
Some quotes from the book [1]:
>[...] how it is that this poetic, religious people [the Athenians] should also be a philosophical people, this I cannot see. Without poetry, I said, they would never even have been a philosophical people! [...]Poetry, I said, sure of my subject matter, is the beginning and end of such knowledge. Like Minerva from Jupiter’s head, it springs from the poetry of an infinite, divine way of beyng. And thus what is irreconcilable in the enigmatic source of poetry in the end comes together in it once again. [...] From mere intellect no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than just the limited cognition of what is present before us. From mere reason no philosophy can arise, for philosophy is more than the blind challenge of a never-ending progression in unifying and differentiating a possible subject matter.
Hölderlin, as quoted by Heidegger.
>Yet the only way in which we can attain the space of the poetry beyond the poem that lies present before us is the way in which the poet himself becomes master and servant of the poetry, namely, through a struggle. The struggle for the poetry in the poem is the struggle with ourselves, [...]. The struggle with ourselves, however, in no way means inspecting ourselves and dissecting our soul through some form of curiosity; nor does it mean some sort of remorseful ‘moral’ rebuke; this struggle with ourselves, rather, is a working our way through the poem. For the poem, after all, is not meant to disappear in the sense that we would think up a so-called spiritual content and meaning for the poem, bring it together into some ‘abstract’ truth, and in so doing cast aside the overarching resonance that oscillates in the word. To the contrary: The more powerfully the poetry comes to power, the more the telling of the word prevails in pressing upon us and tearing us away. And when it does so, the poem is no longer a thing lying present before us that can be read and listened to, as it appears initially whenever we regard language as a means of expression and reaching agreement—something that we have, as it were, in the same way that an automobile has its horn. It is not we who have language; rather, language has us, in a certain way.
Heidegger
[1]https://www.amazon.com/H%C3%B6lderlins-Germania-Studies-Cont...
Still, I remember proposing something more artistic for the exhibition, and he countered by saying that it would make things less clear, harder to understand. He was genuinely looking for ways to express ideas in ways that would make them easier to grasp. It's just that, for some things, the more direct way towards understanding might actually be the winded, poetic way.
> Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature's representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled. (Science in Action)
Bruno Latour was among the selected few that were criticized in Sokal and Bricmont's "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science".
For what it’s worth, I trained in theoretical physics and also read a fair bit of Latour later on. I don’t really like his work all that much, and wish he would be clearer sometimes, but the guy wasn’t an idiot, at least start from there.
In philosophy the usual advice when approaching someone’s work for the first time is to suspend critique on the first reading and just try and take them seriously and understand what they were doing on their own terms. Then you can go back and apply the critical razor later. It’s a useful tool to apply to other areas of life too.
As the parent mentions, engaging with primary sources from a different historical or cultural context with some patience and forbearance is particularly important for understanding philosophical works, but it’s not that different for say mathematics or physics. Notation and terminology changes. With your attitude you’d probably assume archimedes, newton and Fibonacci were all stupid.
The point is only that it’s easy to dismiss most philosophy because it’s easy to take a common reading, interpret words in ways the author may not have intended, and make them into a contradiction or other ridiculousness—but in contrast it’s hard to do the work to understand the context in which the author is writing, what the author is responding to, and what the author actually is trying to say through those words.
It’s fine to take the easy road here, it’s just not going to teach you anything most of the time—and nor is it going to convince those who’ve done the hard part of anything.
Unfortunately this argument is not correct. Many, many, people have read Latour, and he has influenced a lot of thought. Ignoring Latour would imply that you'd have to ignore quite a few other people as well, and that is near impossible.
Ironically, it is Latour who writes about the connectedness of things in his "actor-network theory".
Even more ironically, Latour tried to improve mutual understanding in his "Inquiry Into Modes of Existence" project, but apparently it is not that easy.
It might be interesting to hear out the criticisms against Latour's way of reasoning, instead of dismissing it.
I’m not sure you read my post, it sounds like you just assumed its contents, which was not in fact about being free to ignore Latour, but about being free to critique him with or without an understanding of what he’s trying to say.
If you read it you’d know that of course I’d be happy to hear out the criticisms against Latour’s reasoning, but they’ll be much more powerful if they come with an understanding of what he’s trying to say in the first place.
Bad philosophy begets bad critical thinking skills, which then reproduces itself in readers who keep making bad arguments. So then it spreads and you get people who are well-read yet lack basic critical thinking ability, and even worse they cannot detect their own mistakes anymore. That's the reason why bad philosophy is especially harmful, because it works on a meta-level. Studying philosophy is not just a thought exercise rabbit hole, some literature (Latour) is actually just bad, and other philosophers have argued this!
Latour may well be bad, but an argument saying so that just attacks a straw man of his work is unlikely to be very compelling.
Yes, that was my point?
Make no mistake, “intellectual garbage” does exist. I’m not saying everything is equally valid. Furthermore, life is short and you don’t have to engage deeply with everything if it’s not your cup of tea. But if you do want to engage in a debate about a major thinker with long career and a serious body of work (which by the way is not comparable to engaging with a random short HN post), then people are more likely to listen to you if you make an effort to understand them.
Like great, you are scientific realist, we get it. Congratulations. That's all it needs to be.
I just don't know how you can even live a peaceful life just getting angry that there is "bad" philosophy out there. Who cares? The line between "good" philosophy and "bad" is fraught and has been talked about since there's been philosophy (in the West). Hence the figure of the sophist for Plato being absolutely essential.
Imagine Socrates with no Thrasymachus. Nietzsche without Hegel. Wittgenstein without Russell. "Bad" philosophy is always only a future gift to a good one. We should be giddy in our tear downs of other thinkers, not angry and bitter.
It just really doesn't make any sense to be like this!
One thing I notice about philosophy, especially the continental kind, is that it often seems to consist entirely of listing the names of philosophers rather than answering questions.
Although continental philosophy also likes writing the question 50 different ways instead of attempting to answer it; the usual claim is that this is because they're asking questions whose answers can't be expressed in language or something like that.
Well, for instance in some circles quoting Latour and showing that you are fully in agreement with his work is a way to really improve your chances to get cold, hard grant money. I know a lot of students who are forced to read Latour through their class and have to take it pretty much as gospel, in Concordia University in Montreal.
"The basic trouble with much of Latour’s writings—as with those of some other sociologists and philosophers of a “social constructivist” bent—is that these texts are often ambiguous and can be read in at least two distinct ways: a “moderate” reading, which leads to claims that are either worth discussing or else true but trivial; and a “radical” reading, which leads to claims that are surprising but false. Unfortunately, the radical interpretation is often taken not only as the “correct” interpretation of the original text but also as a well-established fact"
From https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/comment_on_NYT_latour....
I don't understand why you find this so objectionable.
If I grasp Latour's point, the settlement of a controversy fixes an understanding of nature at a particular point (the causal effect). It seems sensible then to forbid that understanding of nature to be used as an explanation for why the controversy was settled. Doing that would affix an absoluteness to the understanding that's unjustified, given the empirical approach. At some point in the future some new anomaly in the understanding (Nature) will be discovered, leading to a controversy, empirical science will resolve it, and a new understanding will be synthesized; handing us a representation. It's probably better than the earlier representation, but it's still not all of Nature.
I think Latour's view is a humble view.
It was apparently his first time in this school, and he was not prepared for the controversy that happened due to his (controversial) stance on the scientific method. He ended up calling us names, and privileged kids (that part was 97% true, but not entirely true...).
It's only after his death that many articles praising him appeared. I guess people capitalize on its notoriety rather than on whatever bullshit he wrote...
That stance is well-covered here.[1]
Some of the problems in science come from experiments too close to the noise threshold. This is most of social science and psychology. The hard-line position is Rutherford's "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." Related to this is Hoyle's "Science is prediction, not explanation." For phenomena that led to useful engineering, repeatability and predictability are very good. Otherwise the products won't work.
People tend to forget this, because controversial research topics are often close to the noise threshold. It something turns out to be real, and you can get it to happen further from the threshold, it becomes routine engineering. It's then no longer controversial. Your result gets a few lines in the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. This sort of science makes the world go.
Philip K. Dick's “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” remains useful.
Taking this hard-line position is useful, because humans are evolved and wired to see patterns near the noise threshold. This is a useful survival strategy for detecting predators in the brush, even with a high false-alarm rate. Once past survival level, it's less useful.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-pos...
I like to think we humans are also part of nature, therefore our work, and our creations, cannot be so clearly separated from nature. In the same manner, the work of bees and ants can also be called artificial, in the sense that they practice a craft and manipulate the natural world around them. For me it's all on the same spectrum.
Now, who does that make you think of?
"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep", as some mustachioed German once properly described.
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-I...
(You can tell he's a continental philosopher because this is five times as long as it should be due to every sentence being filled with synonyms.)
Of course, he also once said that Ramses II couldn't have died of tuberculosis because science hadn't invented the concept of "dying of tuberculosis" yet.