Interview with Graham Harman

Today Graham has agreed to answer a number of questions relating to his eventful career. Without further ado!

1. You've stated before that you have read the entire Heidegger Gesamtausgabe and yet you managed to write a book, Heidegger Explained, which is less than 200 pages. Do you think there is a tendency among academic philosophers to mystify Heidegger (to the overall detriment of his reputation)?

There is certainly a tendency to make him too complicated. Great philosophers of the Heideggerian sort, as a group, are not primarily motivated to catalogue all the fascinating concrete details in the world. That impulse can be found in zoology, botany, linguistics, anthropology, and other such fields. By contrast, philosophers tend to be great systematizers, which means great simplifiers as well. In my view, to understand a philosophy means to understand a handful of basic intuitions from which the entire philosophy unfolds. Of course, the true smplicity of a philosophy can take years of hard work to discover, but it remains the goal of interpretation nonetheless. Heidegger suggests this method himself with his famous maxim : “every great thinker has one great thought.” I think that’s a slight exaggeration; it’s more like two or three great thoughts. But the basic point is correct.

Since Heidegger was such a prolific writer (though not a prolific publisher of what he wrote), there is plenty of lush jungle for Heidegger specialists to study. But it’s all fairly repetitive jungle. There’s no shame in that— that’s what first philosophers do, as opposed to zoologists, botanists, linguists, and anthropologists. We are specialists in the simplicity of things. But things aren’t altogether simple, and that’s why philosophers are not masters of all the other disciplines.

One of the benefits of having read the entire Gesamtausgabe, and indeed one of my motives for having done so, is that now I cannot be bluffed with obscure references by other Heidegger specialists who might wring their hands over how complicated he is, and how many years of labor it takes even to understand Being and Time. I’ve already put in those years of labor, and have fully earned the right to say that Heidegger is actually pretty simple.

2. Can you tell us a little about your reasons for writing your dissertation on Heidegger and how you came to place the tool-analysis at the heart of his thinking?

The story began some years before the dissertation itself. Many high school students in Iowa earn money in the summer by detasseling corn. This involves walking down several miles’ worth of rows, pulling the fuzzy tassels out of the plants to prevent unwanted cross-pollination. It’s horrible work in muddy, hot, mosquito-infested fields. Despite the heat you have to wear long sleeves or else your arms get covered with pesticide and a rash breaks out. But it’s good summer money by the standards of high school students.

The relevance of this is that I bought my first copy of Being and Time with a big corn detasseling paycheck, between my junior and senior years of high school. I had become interested in philosophy early in junior year. At that point I hadn’t read much more than the usual Nietzsche that so many people start with, but nine months into my philosophy career I had learned who most of the big names were, and Heidegger was one of those names. But I struggled with Being and Time, and quickly ended my first three attempts to read it. I couldn’t really get a foothold in what the question of the meaning of being was about.

Later, something happened in the second semester of my sophomore year in college. I was at St. John’s in Annapolis, which has as classical a curriculum as you can get. We had a class one day about medieval logic, and for various reasons I found the discussion frustrating, and felt more confused than ever about the topic. After that class I went straight to the college bookstore and bought Heidegger’s Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, hoping that it would help. It was one of those life-changing books. It didn’t teach me much about logic, but did open my way into Heidegger’s thinking for the first time. Immediately thereafter I returned to Being and Time, and this time finished the whole book in a month or less, and this time thought that I understood it. Over the course of the next half-year I read everything the college library had by Heidegger in English, which was about 11 books.

The library also had everything in German too. But I’d been a bit lazy during my 4 years of high school German, and had a tough time with Heidegger’s language at that point. I remember thinking "I’ll never be able to do this."

What made me really serious about reading the German volumes was the publication in 1989 of Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie, which everyone was immediately celebrating as his second magnum opus. I now view that claim as wildly exaggerated, but that was the word at the time. I didn’t want to be deprived of the supposed second major work, but it was obviously going to take years to translate the Beiträge into English. So eventually I bought a copy of the German, and forced myself to read it and to look up every single word I didn’t know. This took a very long time, more than a year in fact. But it turned out to be an excellent starting point... Learning Heidegger’s German from the Beiträge is like exercising with ankle weights: it’s making things tougher than they really are, and that makes you stronger. None of the other volumes are as hard to read as that one, especially since like all authors Heidegger uses a fairly limited range of vocabulary that is easily mastered with practice. The second volume I read in German was the famous 1929/30 course on boredom and animal life (the English was not yet available then). I took it to a café, unhappy that I had no dictionary with me, but before I knew it I had blazed through 75 pages without a dictionary in just a few hours, and that was when I realized it would be pretty easy to start reading a whole bunch of the volumes. A close friend then asked why I simply didn’t read them all, and inspired by that question, I embarked on the great “Manhattan Project” of my 20’s, finishing the entire set shortly after my 30th birthday. It’s one of those things I’ve never regretted doing, because I’m still convinced there was no greater philosopher in the twentieth century than Heidegger, and no better way to orient your own thinking than with a thorough top-to-bottom survey of his thought. From the ages of 19 to 29, I was convinced that he was right about all philosophical issues other than the obvious political ones, so any criticisms I make are not those of an outsider whose whole purpose is to criticize.

That’s a long prologue to get to the question about my dissertation. But perhaps now you’ll see that by dissertation stage, the choice of Heidegger as a topic was inevitable. I did toy with a few alternatives, but it was just that: toying. But it had to be Heidegger. He was my point of entry into serious philosophy.

You also ask how I came to place the tool-analysis at the center of my reading. That stems from 1991 and 1992, my first two years of graduate school. I’d always liked the tool-analysis, as everyone does, but it gradually occurred to me that there wasn’t really anything else going on in Heidegger than this interplay of shadow and light or veiled and unveiled, which takes on far more concrete form in the tool-analysis than anywhere else in his writing. I thought I had found Heidegger’s “one great thought” at last, and still think that’s the case.

Incidentally, I was not yet a “realist” at that stage. I was still the usual sort of agnostic about the outer world that most people from a phenomenological background tend to be. Only in 1997 (entertainingly enough, it happened on Christmas morning) did I extend the tool-analysis to cover inanimate interactions as well. That was mostly under Whitehead’s influence. I didn’t read a word of Latour until a couple of months after that.

3. There has been talk that you are about to make a break with Heidegger. Would it be fair to suggest that, other than the tool-analysis, you made that break quite some time ago? In other words to what extent have you already rejected aspects of Heidegger's thinking such as authenticity and other well-known aspects of his philosophy?

Nothing dramatic is on the verge of happening in my relationship to Heidegger. As you say, whatever break there is happened more than a decade ago.

1997 was an interesting year for me. I had moved back to the Chicago area after a year in Iowa City. That was the heart of my sportswriting career, which kept my brain lively. But I wasn’t writing much on my dissertation yet, even though I had defended the proposal two years earlier, already a bit later than it should have been. So, from the outside I might have looked like a perpetual ABD. My advisor may even have thought so, though he never said so.

But that’s not really what was going on. I was reading Heidegger like a fiend, as always. More importantly, that summer I was reading both Whitehead and Zubiri. And those two thinkers happen to address two areas where Heidegger needs to be supplemented from the outside.

Whitehead explodes the atmospheric Kantian bias still at work in Heidegger, which places the human-world relation on a pedestal above all other relations in the cosmos. The Sein/Dasein correlate strangles Heideggerians intellectually, to such an extent that they don’t even see it as problematic. But they are hardly alone in this predicament. Look at someone as brilliant as Zizek, so energetic and original, yet so strangely convinced (through his admiration for German Idealism) that the subject is a unique point of rupture with the rest of reality, a special flaw in the cosmic diamond. Heideggerians may use different metaphors, but essentially they say the same thing. But with Whitehead, who is truly a great philosopher and rarely read in continental circles, some of the great lost elements of pre-Kantian philosophy return to the fore.

The problem is that Whitehead (like Latour) relationizes everything. He hates traditional substance so badly that he wants to interpret entities solely as clusters of relations. Zubiri is the perfect antidote for that disease, because Zubiri’s On Essence is about how realities have essences in their own right, not insofar as they affect other things or insofar as they are known. The essence of a thing cannot be “respective” to some other thing. In that respect, Zubiri is the anti-Whitehead. But put the two of them together, and what you get is a world in which all animate and inanimate relations are on the same plane, but in which those things also have an autonomous reality that partly withdraws from that contact.

And that’s pretty much the nucleus of my own philosophical position. Starting from late 1997 I was essentially the same person readers know today. These tendencies were only solidified when I started reading Latour a couple of months later— the right influence at the right time. Where Heidegger’s tone is unbearably solemn, Latour’s is inventive and witty; where Heidegger pours contempt on most individual entities, Latour places trains, apricots, and Adidas shoes on the same level of being as Greek temples, peasant handiwork, and human Dasein.

If anything, I’m starting to appreciate Heidegger even more with age. For instance, with my focus on inanimate entities I’d always been inclined to downplay Heidegger’s analyses of human moods and everydayness. But the last time I read Being and Time (while teaching it in Amsterdam) I was actually quite impressed with his sensitive touch in describing human affairs. In fact, I now wish he had done more of the same.

4. Judging from your blog it is clear that you have an eye for (philosophically) neglected thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard or Bruno Latour. Can you tell us which thinkers have had the strongest impact on your thinking and why? Further by rediscovering neglected thinkers such as Xavier Zubiri do you think that object-orientated philosophy is reviving a forgotten tradition that we managed to lose sight of? If not can you tell us about any isolated predecessors with whom you feel an affinity?

The obvious thinkers who have had a great impact on me are Heidegger, Husserl, Whitehead, and Zubiri. But let me name a few others, in chronological order.

First, José Ortega y Gasset. I was reading Ortega before I was reading Heidegger. He writes brilliantly (he nearly won the Nobel Prize for Literature), and is one of the two major influences on my writing style. I’ve tried to emulate his clarity as well as the light touch with which he includes erudition in his works. I also love Ortega’s commitment to writing newspaper articles and other non-standard genres of philosophy rather than dull, plodding treatises. I’ve also heard him called “the intelligible Heidegger,” so in some ways he may have paved the way for my acceptance of Heidegger a bit later. Finally, if there is one essay by anyone that prefigures all of my philosophical ideas, it is Ortega’s “Essay In Esthetics By Way of a Preface,” found in English in Phenomenology and Art. I discuss that essay in detail in Guerrilla Metaphysics. It’s a masterpiece, though Ortega himself went no further along that trail.

Second, I should mention my old mentor Alphonso Lingis, the most dazzling prose stylist and most interesting human character I’ve ever known. He’s one of the few people who took phenomenology in any sort of realist direction. In American continental philosophy he is left somewhat at the fringes... Sort of an amusing character people tell nice jokes and stories about, and respected to some extent, but nowhere near the center of philosophical debate. And I consider this to be something of an indictment of the scene in America, because when all is said and done, Lingis was one of the few original thinkers to be found in American continental philosophy in the 1970-2000 period. A lot of important translation and commentary was done during that period, but few people were in the same league as Lingis in terms of original ideas, and of course no one remotely equaled him as a writer. If Ortega’s clarity and liveliness was the first thing I tried to emulate as a writer, Lingis’ exoticism and spookiness was the second.

Third, Emmanuel Levinas. The fact that Lingis had translated so much Levinas made me wonder what the appeal was. And Existence and Existents had a major impact on me. No one –I repeat, no one—is a better reader of Heidegger than Levinas. He takes Heidegger so seriously, but without ever lapsing into a pious attitude toward him. It was Levinas who first showed me how to be a Heideggerian and an innovator at the same time, though I think Levinas takes the wrong fork in the road.

5. I've often felt that object-orientated philosophy and speculative realism are missing a trick when they overlook the 'pre-transcendental idealism phenomenology' of Edmund Husserl. Would it be possible to read your breakthrough from Heidegger as a return to the earliest phenomenological analysis of Husserl (but with an eye for the contemporary world)?

Yes! Husserl is badly out of fashion these days, and it often feels that I’m fighting a losing battle in my circles of friends when insisting on his importance. Last summer (2008) I went back and reread the whole of the Logical Investigations, and it was a pleasure, despite the work’s obvious difficulty.

The empiricist doctrine that things of the senses are nothing but bundles of qualities enjoys widespread acceptance even among those who otherwise denounce empiricism. The real greatness of Husserl is to have challenged, and in my view destroyed, the notion of a bundle of qualities.

Everyone wants to dump on Husserl for being an idealist, but many of these same people rush to embrace Badiou, who is no less an idealist than Husserl! While I obviously dislike Husserl’s idealism, he is the first object-oriented idealist, followed in this respect by Merleau-Ponty and very few others. Even if we are trapped in a phenomenal realm, this realm displays a mighty duel between various trees or houses on one side and the wildly shifting profiles or adumbrations through which we grasp them on the other.

In my philosophy, this tension between intentional objects and their qualities is one of four great tensions that make up the fabric of the cosmos, all of them involving the tension between an object-pole and a quality-pole. In my recent writings this has become a new fourfold of time, space, essence, and eidos. Without Husserl, despite his idealism, object-oriented philosophy could not exist.

6. It might be nothing more than my tendency to seek out predecessors, but I find that speculative realism, and especially object-orientated philosophy, contains something of the scholastic atmosphere (specially ontologists such as Franciso Suárez). Is this a fair reading?

Most likely I’m the only one of the speculative realists who has any relation with Scholasticism, and even in my case the relations are indirect: by way of Leibniz and Zubiri.

What are the Scholastic-sounding elements in my thinking? Perhaps there are two obvious ones. The first is their realism. And the second is their focus on individual substances, which not all realists observe. The ultimate forefather of object-oriented philosophy is Aristotle, since he was the first to make individual substances the primary topic of philosophy. But of course I reject the notion that substance must be natural or simple: “objects” for me refers to armies and cartoon characters no less than horses or neutrons. I also regret Leibniz’s doctrine, an unfortunate backslide from Aristotle, that substances must be indestructible. No, many or even all objects may be perishable, as Aristotle’s theory allows for the first time in ancient Greece.

7. Have you had any more thoughts on the metaphysics video game? If so can you tell us more about it?

It’s an idea that Ian Bogost and I were kicking around during our early e-mails, which I think date to September 2006. Ian is an actual game designer no less than an academic. He is also highly literate in philosophy, as his books indicate.

What had me thinking about this idea is a simple fact. Whereas it is hard work to concentrate on difficult philosophy books, videogames can be absorbing for many hours at a time. A Heideggerian would take this as proof of their superficiality, but that’s not necessarily the case. A brilliant piece of architecture is also absorbing. I remember walking through and around the Taj Mahal as if in a dream, for many hours. And in fact I thought at the time: why is philosophy not usually as hypnotic as the Taj Mahal or a good piece of music? It should be.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when Bogost asked aloud why philosophers don’t try to create objects other than books. It’s a great question. Visual artists are well beyond the idea of creating only marble statues or paint on canvas. So why do philosophers not try to create videogames or other objects we haven’t thought of yet?

But I haven’t gotten serious about such a game yet. I’m currently thinking about a more immediate non-standard object I will be creating: the book Circus Philosophicus. The description of the book says: “Platonic myth meets American noir in this haunting series of philosophical images, from gigantic ferris wheels to offshore drilling rigs.” I plan to do more things of this kind in the coming years, and a metaphysics video game will, I hope, be on the list.

8. You give some excellent advice about composition over at your blog, and it has proved to be quite popular among struggling graduate students. Why do you think graduate students have such a hard time submitting their dissertations? Do you have any advice about publishing journal articles?

On the dissertation question, I think most destruction is self-destruction. The two main causes of self-destruction by graduate students are (1) perfectionism and (2) paranoia.

Let’s start with perfectionism. It’s often nothing more than a fear of being judged. This is an understandable fear, especially in the young who still have no track record of successes and are so in need of positive feedback from their elders. As long as you are still working to perfect a piece of writing, you have a built-in shield against any criticism of it. It’s not done yet! I also think there’s an ingrained tendency among intelligent humans to defer and delay everything out of fear of success no less than fear of failure. Isn’t it a frightening prospect that you might actually get the things you want? So, quite often we do a lot of work to make them seem inaccessible and far off in the distance. Many of the great moments in life, the moments where we get something really incredible that e wanted for so long, are psychologically destabilizing moments, and part of us wants to avoid those rewards for various reasons. These are the tendencies you have to fight if you want to finish your dissertation. I can assure you that life looks a lot better after you finish.

As for the “paranoia” part, in some ways it is pretty horrible to be a graduate student. There can be problems with one’s professors and with one’s fellow students. At that stage you feel too dependent on the favor of your professors. But don’t feel that way, because they’re always partly wrong about you. They have only the most superficial impressions of you. As a professor I constantly misjudge my students and which of them are the most serious students, because I simply don’t know them as well as their peers do. So try not to worry too much about what anyone says about your work at that stage. And don’t worry if other students seem to be having more success than you are. Often enough, the teacher’s pets and superachievers of their 20’s burn out, while the ones who are struggling to articulate their ideas are the ones with the really good ideas. Personally, I give everyone a free pass until some time in their 30’s, because before that there’s a sense in which we are merely seeing rehearsals of what a person might someday be.

On the subject of professors... There tend to be a couple of mean, nasty professors in any Department. But it is rarely a secret who they are. Graduate students gossip like crazy about their professors, and the older ones can tell you on day one who the rotten ones are who will ruin your morale and maybe your life. So, just listen to those older students. If a professor has done terrible things to other students over the course of many years, what makes you think your case will be any different? Simply avoid the harmful people on your faculty and spend time with the good ones. Who was it who wrote that we all basically know which people and situations to avoid, but “an imprudent curiosity” leads us to seek them out anyway? Don’t have imprudent curiosity. It’s simple. Don’t choose an advisor because you think they’re going to help you on the job market. I wouldn’t even choose one based entirely on dissertation topic. Choose a person you like and respect as a human character—one who is psychologically clean and won’t mess with your mind. And if you do have problems with your advisor, just change advisors! These things happen, and your Department will want you to finish. Don’t wallow in whatever problems you might be having with faculty members. This becomes an alibi not to get work done.

As far as articles, I have no advice to give. I’m in the strange position of having published two books before I published even one article! And many of the articles I’ve published since have been solicited by those who like my books. Only once in awhile do I send an unsolicited article for blind review at a journal, so I am no special expert at how to do that.

As far as book proposals, I do have one piece of advice. We’re taught to be modest when writing cover letters for job applications, because no one wants to hire an arrogant colleague. But it’s somewhat the opposite with book proposals. There, it’s best to err a little on the side of cockiness. Publishers aren’t worried about hiring an arrogant colleague, because they’re not hiring you as a colleague. They’re thinking of investing a lot of money in editing, printing, and distributing something you wrote. Why should they do that if you don’t seem like a fervent believer in your own ideas ?

Also, do not target specific publishers for your book based on some idea of what your career should look like. Or at least I don’t respect that strategy very much. Especially on your first book, most of the responses will be instant form rejection letters. Send the initial proposal to 10 or 12 publishers, not just one, because it can take ages to receive responses. Don’t double-submit manuscripts, which isn’t fair to the publisher, but at the initial inquiry stage you can contact as many as you want.

However, today’s graduate students are going to be facing a radically different publishing environment from the one I faced at my debut a decade ago, so some of my advice will prove to be dated. No one really knows what academic publishing will look like ten years from now, but much will have changed. I suspect that it will become much easier to publish books, even without academic credentials already in hand.

9. You have chosen to published with two non-mainstream publishing houses. Can you explain your reasons for doing so?

re.press offered to publish Prince of Networks 20 months faster than the more mainstream publisher that wanted the book. 20 months is a long time! And they kept their promise, with an unavoidable delay of just one month. As for zerO Books, they approached me. And besides, I don’t know if any other publisher would have taken a gamble on a project as outlandish as Circus Philosophicus. But I think they made the right decision— I think it will be a hit. You’ve never seen anything like it.

10. Finally as somebody who has been through it all before what advice do you have for somebody just starting off with Heidegger? (recommended reading, german advice etc.)

History of the Concept of Time (not to be confused with the very brief The Concept of Time) is a good first thing to read. It contains most of the best content of Being and Time, along with that brilliant 100-page opening about Husserl and his greatest contributions to philosophy. It’s also much better written than Being and Time, since it was a lecture course for undergraduates.

Advice on how to learn German? Other than just plugging away seriously for ten years and looking up words that I didn’t know, I benefited greatly from a couple of summer language courses in Germany, one in Bremen and the other in Leipzig. There are all kinds of summer courses available, and grants can often be had to attend them.

For American students of continental philosophy in particular, it’s also important not to get too sucked into Europhilia. The world is a lot bigger than France and Germany, rich though their intellectual traditions obviously are. It’s a good idea to put one foot in any non-Western tradition, just to make your world larger. And even more simply than this, I would encourage American students to discover the American intellectual tradition as well, which is something we tend not to do. In philosophy there’s William James, who may not be of the magnitude of Heidegger, but can still teach you a lot about how to think and write. In literature and history there are all kinds of good people; Poe happens to be my favorite, just as he was the favorite of the French. In political philosophy, the USA has a treasure trove of figures. If you’re Canadian, don’t you realize how important McLuhan really is? He’s big, big, big. People have no idea how big he is. We’ve only barely begun to appreciate McLuhan.

My point is, young North Americans (especially in the USA) working in continental philosophy have a tendency to feel very insecure in relation to Europe, the motherland of most of what we read in our discipline. It is vital to overcome this insecurity if you ever want to do more than write book reports about famous Europeans. Becoming familiar with the best homegrown intellectual work is one excellent way to do that. Whenever I enter a bookstore in the States, my first trip is to the Library of America rack. Don’t be like T.S. Eliot and think that we’re from a half-savage country with nothing to contribute in intellectual matters. That’s not how they think in analytic philosophy or the hard sciences, let alone on Wall Street.

Interview with Lee Braver

Our first interview is with Lee Braver, author of 'A Thing of this World' and Heidegger's Later Writings (which I thoroughly recommend). Braver's A Thing of this World is currently the subject of an online reading group over at Perverse Egalitarianism. OK enough from me...over to the questions:

AHB: You’ve been involved in an online reading group for your new book ‘A Thing of This World’. Can you tell us whether you consider the exercise a success and do you think such reading groups have anything to tell us about the emerging blog culture associated with many contemporary philosophical movements?

LB: I think it's a success in raising the book’s profile and getting feedback from readers. Keep in mind that several hundred thousand books in English are published each year, so bringing titles to the attention of those who may be interested in them presents a real problem. Our training in graduate school, by its very nature, gives a highly distorted picture of the profession: we study with prominent scholars, who get invited to speak all over the world and whose writings are avidly discussed and reviewed. By default, this moulds our impression of the profession, but they represent a highly atypical, tiny minority of professors. The vast majority, if they get jobs at all, work at teaching schools and, if they publish, their publications sink beneath the surface with barely a ripple. This has been perhaps my greatest surprise in publishing, how little attention one’s work gets, largely because my expectations were, naturally, formed by the important works, the ones that everyone reads and discusses and writes about. So, getting my book onto people’s radar and seeing people engage with it has been very gratifying and I feel very fortunate for the opportunity. Let me add a word of advice: if you read something that impresses or intrigues you, drop the author a line. Generally, they are very friendly, even grateful to know that someone’s reading their work and, from a self-interested point of view, these contacts can be surprisingly valuable for one’s career.

AHB: You’ve written an excellent reader’s guide to Heidegger’s Later Writings. Why do you think the later Heidegger has proved so popular with critical theorists today and do you think there is still room for the existential analytic?

LB: Existentialism had many beneficial effects on continental philosophy, but it also suffered from a number of flaws. It was pinned to a historical situation (the end of WWII) with particular stubbornness, making it simultaneously extremely popular at that time and primed for quick obsolescence. Many people have a reflex suspicion of philosophy that achieves mass popularity, assuming that it can only achieve such wide appeal by spreading itself thin. Sartre was an unfortunate representative; I find that where he alters Heidegger’s ideas, it’s almost always for the worse and more superficial. I’ve always had high regard for Kierkegaard, and both Nietzsche and early Heidegger have successfully escaped getting pigeon-holed as existentialists. While both have some overlap with the movement, neither can be reduced to it.

Personally, I’m surprised that later Heidegger isn’t more influential. The narrative I trace in A Thing of This World shows why he deserves such a high place in the pantheon by exploring his innovations with precision. Being and Time is unquestionably a masterpiece, but a flawed one. I find the later works more important and innovative. I suspect that part of the reason for its comparative popularity is that Being and Time is more accessible, especially given the number of figures one can use to triangulate it (Kant, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Dilthey), and it plays the role of the magnum opus. Right from the outset, grasping the later work is harder because it lacks a single work that can give one the gist of it. That’s why I used Krell’s Basic Writings as the subject of my guide. It does a very good job of picking representative essays from across his career, and it serves quite well in lieu of a single book. Since it’s the book actually used in many courses, I thought an essay-by-essay guide would be the most useful approach.

AHB: As a scholar well versed in the later Heidegger what do you think he would have made of the technological beast that is the internet?

LB: Bert Dreyfus has written a book on the internet which I haven’t read, but which would I’m sure be illuminating on the topic. The internet does in many ways fit the culmination of technology in “cybernetics” (BW 434): it forms an enormous, frictionless, almost instantaneous circulation of knowledge, putting tremendous amounts of information at our fingertips. This makes us take a great deal for granted, perhaps the most pernicious feature of technology. On the other hand, he was a great letter-writer and we’re living through a tremendous rebirth of correspondence due to the internet.

AHB: Your latest book deals with both continental and analytic philosophy. Do you think the ‘divide’ is somewhat artificial? What do you think Heideggerians could learn from analytic thinkers and vice versa?

LB: There is a way in which the divide is artificial, and a way it is not. I think there are substantive differences in the way continental and analytic thinkers approach issues, in general (of course, there are plenty of exceptions), some of which I try to trace in my book. It is the lack of communication that I find both artificial and unfortunate. It’s a meaningful distinction, but an artificial division. What we’re supposed to be doing is arguing with each other, and the wall of silence is both unnecessary and harmful. We have a lot to learn from each other—especially since we employ different approaches—although I don’t think one can just list particular ideas that one branch should adopt from the other. It’s more a matter of Gadamer’s notion that we only see our own taken-for-granted prejudices upon encountering those who don’t share them. This kind of dialogue does require a considerable amount of ground-laying, some of which I do in the book (e.g., giving a Heideggerian response to Davidson’s denial of conceptual schemes, a Derridean deconstruction of Frege, etc.), the lack of which I suspect to be the primary reason so little interaction takes place. My book tries to prepare the ground by constructing a common vocabulary and demonstrating the existence of common topics.
AHB:
There has been a lot of discussion about the speculative realist movement on this blog and many others that are not firmly rooted within that movement. Since your latest book attempts to show how the two big traditions of analytic and continental philosophy are more or less concerned with the problems of realism/anti-realism, albeit from their respective trenches, what do you make of speculative realism?

LB: I’m just starting to get a sense of this movement; I want to undertake a more serious study of it once I’m done with my present project. When I first encountered it—in Graham Harman’s work on Heidegger—I didn’t know what to make of it. I was firmly entrenched in anti-realism and couldn’t conceive of a sophisticated realism; it seemed to me that any realism would have to ignore all the ideas generated in Kant’s wake. So much realism amounts to Johnsonian rock-kicking, or ad hominem attacks on the intelligence of anyone who doesn’t subscribe to a sufficiently robust realism. I’m finding the movement very intriguing. The first part of Meillassoux’s After Finitude loosened my unquestioning allegiance, though it didn’t quite convince me to jump ship.

AHB: Now that you’ve tackled a whole range of thinkers, and even attempted to straddle the divide between the two traditions what are you planning to take on next?

LB: Surprisingly, I’ve stuck to the plan announced in A Thing of This World. I’m almost finished with a thorough comparison of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, tentatively titled Standing on Groundless Grounds. I’m still carrying on the project of dialogue across the divide but, instead of the breadth of A Thing, I’m now focusing on a deeper and more focused analysis. It’s simply astonishing how much agreement there is between the two greatest philosophers of the century who happen to work in different traditions.