A Post-Metaphysical Morton?

Something occurred to me today about Tim Morton’s project that triggered a cascade of thoughts about the difference between ontography and ontology. In a post calling attention to the availability of Steven Shaviro’s Whitehead conference paper, Morton remarks, “reports of the death of metaphysics have been greatly exaggerated”.

Now I’ve never been shy about my opinion that much of what counts as metaphysics is the “learned poetics of an elite educated class”. And one of the reasons I think this way directly flows from my belief that phenomenology (broadly speaking and in an unconventional sense) is the starting point of any serious philosophical endeavor. This is to say, ‘knowledge’ of the world outside our skin encapsulated egos begins with experience. Everything we know, or have come to know, is based on our embodied encounters with reality.

Of course, humans have the added endowment of symbolic thought and semantic reasoning, which does indeed influence our every experience, but humans are capable of reflexive awareness, and as such can train ourselves to “bracket out” much of our pre-methodological semantic baggage in order to take up a radically empiricist (although not necessarily in the Jamesian sense) position within the world.

My point is, based upon my investigations into the nature of reality, I have come to privilege embodied inquiry while subordinating (as opposed to denying) ideation in the quest for understanding. And this is precisely why I argue that “ontology” (as the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such) actually derives from “ontography”, and is thus secondary to the more primal methodological imperatives flowing from embodied empirical encounters. That is to say, Ontography as embodied inquiry precedes Ontology as speculative ideation.

So what about Tim Morton? In response to Tim’s claim that metaphysics is alive and well (and perhaps sporting a slick new SR fedora), I responded by writing that even though metaphysics might still be discussed, taught and bandied about - thereby remaining technically “alive” - its credibility as a stand-alone thought procedure has been and will remain utterly destroyed.

I can summarize my reasons for why I think metaphysics is an obsolete project with three relatively straightforward assertions: i) experience, as discussed above, is primary/primal, ii) speculation, ideation and logic are derivative from our embodied experiential encounters, and iii) reality exceeds all languaging (cf. post-formalism). [And I won’t rehearse the various arguments against metaphysics arising from within the academy (mostly because I’m not of the academy) but instead briefly mention James’s pragmatism, Wittgenstein’s language-use critiques, Rorty’s combination of both those fellas, and Derrida’s deconstruction as a few bodies or work that have also claimed metaphysics as a dead end.]

The knowledge of the primacy of experience (what I call our 'primal methodology') can also generate an awareness of the limits of speculation (symbolic reasoning) - or what some have called “Post-metaphysical thinking”. Someone who thinks post-metaphysically is someone who allows their ‘realism’ to remain ‘speculative’, but also refuses to extend their speculations beyond the accumulated data of embodied and extended human experience. [‘Extended experience’ here referring to how our inherent sensual apparatus has come to be extended viz. the use of a variety of supplementary methodologies, instruments and technology.]

But again, what of Tim Morton? Well, in a nutshell, I argue that Tim Morton, despite his valorization of metaphysics, is in fact a post-metaphysical thinker. I haven’t said a lot about Tim’s work to date because I have yet to read The Ecological Thought (although it sits about 5 feet away from me as I type this), but I have watched all of his youtube videos and listened to most of the talks posted on his weblog, and quite enjoy his strain of thinking overall (especially the pre-OOO stuff). What struck me today, however, was how one of Morton’s key motifs demonstrates, to me at least, his post-metaphysical leanings: that is, the notion of “ecology without nature”.

I don’t have space to review what Morton means when he suggests that authentic ecological thinking privileges ecology (as praxis and method) over our conceptions of ‘Nature’, but I argue that by parsing out the distinction between those two notions he also points out the distinction between ontography (as praxis and multi-methodology) and ontology. And further, Morton’s prioritizing ecological-thinking over nature-thinking is identical to my claim that ‘ontography precedes ontology’. In fact, I would crudely represent the equivalences this way:

ecology = ontographic methodology (praxis)
nature = ontologic speculation (abstraction)

I may be bastardizing Tim's thoughts a little here, but I think the point needs to be made that our engagements within the world are more important, and more significant, than our talking about them. Am I wrong here? What do you think?