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2015.10.02
New realism is one of the very few philosophical movements of which one may
indicate the exact date and place of birth: it was 23 June 2011 at 13.30 at the
restaurant "Al Vinacciolo" in Via Gennaro Serra 29, Naples. I can be so
accurate because I was there, with Markus Gabriel and his Italian collaborator
Simone Maestrone, after a seminar at the Italian Institute for Philosophy
Studies. Markus was in the process of founding an international centre of
philosophy in Bonn and wanted to inaugurate it with a big conference. I told
him the right title would be "New Realism." I thought that name captured
what in my opinion was the fundamental character of contemporary
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philosophy: that is, a certain weariness of postmodernism and the belief that
everything is constructed by language, conceptual schemes and the media.
Well, it is not like that . . . (Kindle edition, Loc 261)
The "new realism" in Gabriel's subtitle is not necessarily identical to the new realism
championed by Ferraris -- the manner of argumentation, strategy, tone, and
interlocutors differ -- but it shares the same spirit and offers a vibrant, invigorating
tonic to those still hungover from the dominant trends in twentieth-century
philosophy. Not unlike the texts of his occasional collaborator, Slavoj Žižek, Gabriel's
book is not only intellectually rigorous, it is peppered with Žižek-style pop culture
references and humor. It is genuinely entertaining at points, a fact that simply
complements the provocation of its arguments. Which is not to say that Gabriel does
not exhibit his own distinct style, which avoids many of the excesses familiar to
readers of the Slovenian and exhibits a facility for presenting difficult ideas as if they
were less than difficult. While this aids in consumption of the text, one must be on
guard against mistaking what is complex for what is simple and must occasionally
ask if Gabriel has not made the weaker argument appear stronger. Readers
interested in both analytic and continental metaphysics, as well as German idealism,
will find a lot to digest, and they should have a pleasant time reading what is to my
mind a quite readable book that defines its terms and pithily characterizes the
problems, positions, and debates it engages for those unfamiliar with them.
Unlike Mythology, Madness, and Laughter, the book he coauthored with Žižek
(2009), and Transcendental Ontology (2013), Fields of Sense is less a book on
German idealism that happens to include a number of original insights and much
more an original ontological treatise. Furthermore, it is an expanded, more wide-
ranging iteration of the issues and arguments that Gabriel introduced in his
bestselling Why the World Does Not Exist, originally published in German in 2013
and delivered as a TEDx talk that same year. The newest book is divided into two
halves, the first a "negative ontology" and the second a "positive ontology."
Although, this is a bit misleading as there are a handful of affirmations and theses
advanced in the first half and plenty of critical chiseling done in the second. The
negative first half, which consists of seven chapters, identifies a number of enemies,
including naturalism, materialism, physicalism, the mathematization of ontology
(Badiou et al.), contemporary nihilism, and the correspondence theory of truth. The
last of these chapters, the most constructive and pivotal, summarizes and sketches
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the "no-world-view" that gets fleshed out in the book's second half. Given that
Gabriel is defending a version of realism, his no-world-view is not, of course, a
rejection of the reality of the external world in the name of idealism, antirealism, or
constructivism. It is the view that there is no entity or compilation of entities that
answers to the label "the world." What exists, properly speaking, are objects and
fields of sense, neither of which garner their existence from participation in the
world. I will return to this theme after outlining the book's first half.
Chapter 1, "Zoontology," lays out the terms of ontology by rejecting zoontology as the
ground of ontology (39). At first glance zoontology looks like nothing more than
anthropomorphic naturalism, which would reduce the domain of what is to the
domain of whatever can be known by humans given their specific, biologically-
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appearing within a given field (65). The sense of existence, ontology itself, is never
about independent individuals or "empty" fields: fields and objects exist
codependently, and neither is more real than the other. This is not to say that every
individual and every field exists together, at the same time and in the same way, just
that there is no a priori way of determining what exists as an "actual individual" as
opposed to a "mere mereological sum" (52).
Even though Gabriel is clearly already building his own no-world-view, Chapter 3
continues the negative ontological work by criticizing Kant's and Frege's views on
existence, while Chapter 4 launches an offensive against the set-theoretical ontology
of Badiou and its complicity with contemporary nihilism. Kant's rejection of
existence as a real, as opposed to logical, predicate rests on a conception of the world
as a totality, a unified spatiotemporal "field of possible experience" that recognizes
as actual only those individuals that are themselves (possibly) spatiotemporal (53).
Since no such field exists, this cannot adequately account for the meaning of
existence (73). Frege, on the other hand, is shown to present an excessively formal
and mathematized account of existence that does not get at the objective, language-
user-independent sense of existence required for a realist ontology. Gabriel helpfully
summarizes, in chart form, what is fascinatingly wrong (and right) about Kant and
Frege on existence (101-102). For his part, Badiou, following Cantor, is found guilty
of peddling an inadequate mathematical formalism in the same vein as Frege.
Gabriel classifies this as obvious ontotheology (130) and takes it to task for
masquerading as a genuine ontology of the real rather than the inadequate
formalism that it is. As Gabriel says,
This attack applies as much to Badiou as it does to Frege, Kant, and Quine.
Gabriel fills out his understanding of the term "field" in Chapter 6. There he tells us
that the term is a synonym for "domain" and one that he has chosen in order to
differentiate his position from both traditional domain ontology and set-theoretical
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ontology. The problem with traditional domain ontology is that "it is premised on
transcendental asymmetry," which entails the idealist principle that thought itself
determines the truth conditions of thought but not the conditions of truth itself (148,
157). "The essence of transcendental asymmetry," writes Gabriel, "is a very general
form of internalism according to which domains of objects (logical horizons) are
constructed, whereas the objects appearing within the domains usually are
encountered" (148-149). As a realist, Gabriel must reject this premise of traditional
domain ontology. He replaces it with a position -- devoid of the metaphysical
assumptions of domain and set-theoretical ontology -- which asserts the
unconstructed nature of domains, now called fields:
Fields are generally unconstructed, and their force is felt by the objects
entering them. . . . The field provides objective structures and interacts with
the objects appearing within it. It is already there, and objects can pass
through it and change its properties. Fields are not horizons or perspectives;
they are not epistemological entities or objects introduced to explain how we
can know how things are (157-158).
Anything that exists appears in a field. For this to happen, a field must exist. But this
implies that the field itself appears within a field, "and so on infinitely" (159). There
are, then, a plurality of fields. If there were only one field, it would be universal and
everything would appear within it. It would be the world, which does not and cannot
exist (159). What exists is what appears in a field, which means that what exists are
relations between objects (real or fictional) and fields.
This emphasis on relations, rather than objects, places a certain distance between
the new realist ontology of Gabriel and the object-oriented ontology of Graham
Harman. Gabriel likewise distances himself from the "modes of existence" ontology
of Bruno Latour, Harman's occasional ally. Fiction and reality, for example, are not
two modes of existence, as if the fictional and the real stand for two separate
domains of existence. They are, on the contrary, two fields of sense. Their difference
is a functional one, not modal; the same goes for the distinction between appearance
and reality. Which is not to say that all things appear in the same way; objects
appear in different forms (171-172). But all of these forms are forms of appearance,
of what it means to exist. This is why it is not inaccurate to classify Gabriel as a "flat"
ontologist, although not without some qualification, which the author himself
provides.
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By the time readers get to the positive ontology (Chapters 8-13), they already have a
good idea of where Gabriel stands and how he came to stand there. The second part
of the book is, perhaps, more constructive than the first insofar as its dialectical
presentation unpacks more of Gabriel's own theses. There are two chapters on
modality (Chapters 10 and 11) and two on epistemology, wherein Gabriel defends a
version of epistemological pluralism (Chapters 12 and 13), none of which will I
discuss in detail.
Chapter 8 cashes out the idea that there are indefinitely many fields of sense. Gabriel
has also asserted (see above) that there are infinitely many fields of sense, so there is
some nonfatal ambiguity in his position. Nevertheless, this chapter not only makes
the case for the plurality of fields of sense and the case that we can know of this
plurality a priori, it also argues that the world is the only thing that necessarily does
not exist (214 ff.). We get a more precise account of the meaning of "sense," initially
introduced as the rules for individuating a domain (139), as well as a case for the
priority of sense over concept; "object" and "individual" are likewise fleshed out. One
of the book's chief virtues is Gabriel's consideration of the readers. He never
assumes too much of them, which means that his presentation rarely, if ever,
exploits their ignorance of the matter at hand. The chapter also stages substantial
engagements with Kripke and Hegel.
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Readers of Harman, Manuel DeLanda, Jane Bennett, and Levi Bryant will be
interested in Chapter 9, where Gabriel asks "How Flat Can Ontology Be?" and
answers that it cannot be as flat as some might think. There are at least as many
versions of flat ontology as there are proper names in the opening sentence of this
paragraph. All of them challenge the kind of hierarchized ontology typical of
ontotheology, however. Gabriel's ontology claims that "all fields of sense are equal
insofar as they are fields of sense" (252). This is a clear rejoinder to Harman's
version of flat ontology, for which all objects are equal insofar as they are objects.
This is not equivalent to the claim that all objects exist equally, no matter what their
scale or what domain they belong to, factual or fantastic. Gabriel also presents an
alternative to DeLanda's flat ontology, which Gabriel quite succinctly sets aside by
noting that it is a flat metaphysics, not a flat ontology (252). One may wish to
quibble with him here, perhaps about the definition of metaphysics. Now, while
Gabriel wants to oppose hierarchical ontology, his view compels him to resist a
completely flat ontology precisely because, as he says, "it is impossible for there to
only be a unified level (a plane of immanence, as it were, to misuse Deleuze's
metaphor) of equal objects that happen to differ from each other in one way or other
(most likely by their properties)" (255). The so-called "curving" of flat ontology is
necessitated, he maintains, by the functional difference between fields of sense and
objects alluded to earlier: some things are objects within a field and simultaneously a
field in which objects appear, and there is a sense in which fields take priority over
objects even though both are necessary for something to appear, to exist. In short,
"What serves as a field of sense and what serves as an object is not fixed by any
transcendental standards, but negotiated on a case by case basis" (258).
At times, when I was in the thick of Gabriel's book, I found myself wishing I was
instead tasked with reviewing the briefer Why the World Does Not Exist or, in
especially weak moments, his TEDx talk. Some of the tangents and ancillary
discussions veer into terrain that others more steeped in analytic metaphysics
debates will find more compelling than I do. Occasionally it seemed like the
substance of the no-world-view had already been established, and yet the book
continued on to discuss matters that seemed of only secondary interest. I wanted to
repose in satisfaction, having gleaned the big picture and navigated through a
number of rewarding, yet taxing, passages. Several skirmishes remained to be
decided, however. But I suspect that many reviewers experience such desires and
feelings while working their way through a tightly argued and incisive ontological
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