Good point. Maybe categorizing the bulk of white collar work as "petite bourgeoisie" is incorrect. The working class makes a wage but not returns on investment, true. I guess the point is that are all these things a fatal blow to his ideas? Whether wage workers are not getting enough investments or not, if there is not enough agitation for the working class to feel exploited, then Marx was essentially wrong. What do people care if capital is owned by individuals or by the state if they have their basics met? The Democrats would say that with a tweaking of healthcare, and some other social programs, some of those basic needs can be expanded, but that's about as much sympathy as you're going to get in the American system. That doesn't change things structurally. — schopenhauer1

Marx's mature work (i.e. the Contribution, the Grundrisse, and Capital) gives us a different picture of what the "pauperization" of the proletariat will consist in. It's true that hard industry moved eastward, but that's not the only reason why there is now less industrial labor in the west. The major contributing factor -- and Marx saw this -- is the ever-increasing automation of industry, which allows the capitalist to extract ever larger sums of surplus value from every hour of labor.

One effect of this process is that, given the growth-structure of capitalism, it becomes impossible for capitalists to employ non-machine-mediated labor power save at exceedingly low wages (if, that is, they want to stay afloat). This is why we see the bulk of the ugly industrial work move over to the cheapest labor markets. (It should be noted, too, that Marx did predict the globalist stage in the development of capitalism; he just understood it strictly in terms of the need for new markets).

Another effect is that, as less and less of the labor process involves human beings at all, the worker is slowly pushed out of the equation altogether -- a trend which evidences itself in the slow expansion of what Marx calls the "industrial reserve army" (i.e. those members of the working class who are either unemployed or underemployed to the point that they cannot meet their basic needs). We've seen the growth of this group temporarily interrupted by the need for bureaucratic labor, but as automation spreads into this field, we'll see the soft labor jobs start to dissolve as well.

In his later work, at least, Marx's substantive prediction was not that the working class will become so irritated by distribution-side inequality that they'll revolt and install a worker's state. Rather, it was that technological development, on a long enough timeline, will progress to the point that less and less human labor is required in the process, and yet our ability to consume the goods produced thereby will still depend (because of the structure of the economy) on our ability to sell our labor power for wages -- a constraint on consumption which was once necessary to facilitate production, but will be, at that time, no longer so. The transition to a mode of production not organized around the exploitation of human labor will then follow as a matter of course. It will be obvious to the industrial reserve army what must be done (i.e. it will not take any political cajoling by mustache men with nationalist credos).

By the way, Marx did forecast that the average person would come in time to expect ("need") more and more from life (e.g. WiFi and smartphones, rather than bread and water), and saw this as a good thing. He also predicted the democratization of scientific knowledge. Here's a nice passage from the Grundrisse where he sums up some of these points. (Note that "the development of the productive powers of labor" refers here to the intensification of labor through the use of machines. This relates to the category of "relative surplus value" in Capital):

What appears as surplus value on capital's side appears identically on the worker's side as surplus labour in excess of his requirements as worker, hence in excess of his immediate requirements for keeping himself alive. The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labor from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves -- and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations, has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species -- and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased

-Marx, Grundrisse, 324-25.

So ... a few things.

1. Marx distinguishes his method from Hegel's in many ways. He is clear, for instance, that for him the method of scientific discovery (i.e. the method by which we come to knowledge) is to be distinguished quite sharply from the method of presentation (i.e. the method by which we present that knowledge to others). This is a variation on the Aristotelian and Thomist idea that what is first in the order of being is not what is first in the order of knowing. Marx acknowledges that his method of presentation derives from that of Hegel, and he gives due credit to the accomplishments of the Hegelian system, granting its many shortcomings. But his method of discovery differs significantly from that of Hegel. Marx is a naturalist. His claims are not "dogmatic" or "rationalist." Every empirical claim in Capital (i.e. all those made after the initial excursus, at the start of Vol. 1, on the logic of the commodity form, which establishes the basic conceptual framework employed in what follows) is supported by appeal to evidence. No one, having read and understood Capital--having worked through the chapters of detailed attention to English state-administered labor surveys, for instance--will claim that its method is dogmatic. This is a claim made only by people who have not read the book. The notion that the dialectic form plays a constructive role is an artifact of Engels's sometimes clumsy appropriation of Marx's thinking, of the former's own forays into nature-philosophy (as in his Dialectics of Nature), and of the Bolshevik vulgarization of Marx's work.

2. The thesis-antithesis-synthesis model, which is a vulgarization of Fichtean and Hegelian ideas, does not figure in Kant's thinking. I gather you are confusing two Kantian ideas. In the Antinomy of Pure Reason section of the First Critique, Kant treats a series of pairs of contrasting metaphysical conclusions, decision between which cannot be made by reason alone because each follows validly from true premises. His proposed resolution, however, is not to synthesize the opposed theses, but to dissolve the tension between them through the postulation of regulative ideals. Separately, in the transcendental deduction of the pure categories of the understanding (especially in the A-deduction), Kant treats of various syntheses which are involved in the logical movement from the pure, non-cognitive manifold of sensation to the conceptually thick perceptual datum we encounter in ordinary experience. Such talk also arises earlier, already in the Transcendental Aesthetic. These two notions, however,--antinomy and synthesis--are not related in the way you suppose them to be.

3. Fichte employs something like this model, but not in the rigid way you suppose. Hegel did not use the phraseology, and it aptly captures only the first few steps of his Science of Logic. Marx's few remarks on the topic of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model are critical, as for instance in his early book on Proudhon's vulgarization of Hegel, where he mocks Proudhon's employment of the model. It is unclear whether Marx himself believed at the time that Hegel employed the model. But it is very clear that by the time he revisited Hegel's Science of Logic while he wrote the Grundrisse--well before completing the first published edition of Vol. 1 of Capital--he had adopted a more sophisticated understanding of Hegel's method as involving a movement from abstract or one-sided conceptualization to concrete or all-sided conceptualization. This movement can be compared to the movement from a simple physical theory of (say) the behavior of gasses, which treats only of their behavior under idealized conditions, employing a multitude of ceteris paribus clauses, to a more all-encompassing theory, integrated with other physical theories, able not only to predict the behavior of gasses, but also to explain (in more fundamental terms) why gasses behave as they do. It is this method that Marx inherits from Hegel.

4. Marx's positive program was not concerned with "the denial of property as a right." Nor was it concerned with rights at all. Marx's principal contribution was a critique of political economy, bringing out the many odd suppositions of the classical Smithian and Ricardian tradition, and identifying a number of key structural contradictions within the capitalist mode of production. He identifies some key tensions in some of the central elements of the capitalist economic formation--in particular the category of relative surplus value, which concerns the intensification of surplus production through machine-assisted labor--which went unnoticed by previous economists. Marx identifies talk of rights, like talk of law, the good, and other ideological notions, as byproducts of underlying economic relations. And he believes that economic transformation--even of the revolutionary kind--owes its possibility and its appearance in history to economic prefiguration. Thus, though his legacy was co-opted by the authoritarian populist managerial socialism of the Bolsheviks, and from there exported to much of the Eastern world, Marx was of a thoroughly anti-populist and (basically) anti-socialist spirit. His advocacy for centralizing programs in the First International days was even then motivated by concern for economic progress, etc. This line in Marx extended, at its extreme, to support for liberal free trade and explicit opposition to socialist efforts. This because he believed that the development, within capitalism, of basic structural and class-centric antagonisms through increasing automation (as well as the intensification of labor time and ever-increasing production-side inequality between working and ruling classes) was the only way forward to a world in which large portions of the human population are not forced into harmful and alienating labor. He tended to dismiss both social democratic solutions to distribution-side inequality and utopian socialist proposals for immediate revolution as hapless instruments of the existing order, obstructing progress toward the next. For an example of explicit endorsement of free trade, see his public address to the Democratic Association of Brussels in 1848: http://marx.eserver.org/1848-free.trade/ftrade.speech.txt

Yeah, there are many reasons not to take Davidson's line on this point. For fun:

On the one hand, we might follow philosophers like Haim Gaifman and Xinli Wang by pointing out that the notion whose coherence Davidson attacks is not a generic conception of conceptual scheme, but rather the particular conception of conceptual scheme developed by Quine (as recognized by the latter in his "On the Very Idea of a Third Dogma," where he traces his own concept of conceptual scheme to Lawrence Henderson's 1935 monograph Pareto's General Sociology).

Alternatives have been developed by Gaifman and Wang, but also (and especially) by Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars's alternative is notable for allowing comparison between frameworks while still avoiding one of the main targets of Davidson's critique (which critique was inspired by Davidson's reading of Sellars): the crude reductionist conception of an uninterpreted element common between frameworks.

On the other hand, we might argue that, much like Quine's attack (in terms of the analytic/synthetic distinction), Davidson's attack on the possibility of a coherent notion of frameworkhood (in terms of the impossibility of establishing untranslateability) supposes that frameworks must be individuated formally, in terms of internal semantic or syntactic criteria, rather than (say) externally, in terms of differing systems of (non-linguistic) practical norms or uniformities of behavior, through which conformity with particular frameworks (or conceptual schemes) is realized.

That is, we may recognize, following Quine and Davidson, that framework-internal, formal criteria of framework-individuation are not forthcoming, while still distinguishing between frameworks in terms of their conditions of realization in the world. To block the latter move, Davidson would have to persuade us that his radical interpretation account of belief-ascription precludes my recognizing any behavior as conforming to a rule which I do not myself follow -- and to do so would be to render his own account even less adequate to explaining language-acquisition.

There are definitely interesting things to be said about the relationship between the metaphysical subject/object distinction and the grammatical subject/predicate distinction -- not least that the copula 'is', which links subject to predicate, has often been understood to have a special bearing on the metaphysical notion of being.

Speaking very roughly, Aristotle held that the ultimate metaphysical objects are those which are never found in the predicate position of any true judgment (e.g. "the statue is the clay"); they are only ever the subjects of judgment (e.g. "God is all things").

Kant, likewise, held that because every judgment is issued by a thinker, the true grammatical subject of every judgment (e.g. "the table is brown") just is the metaphysical subject, or self (e.g. "I think the table is brown"). Philosophers have had a lot to say about these ideas.

The problem I see here is that terms such as "cognition" and "conation" and the like are as much folk psychological notions (despite being more 'technical sounding' and not as apparently explanatorily efficacious) as "belief, "desire" and "impression", and I cannot see how the former could be any more "amenable to law-like generalization" than the latter. — John

This seems right to me. I should have been more cautious with my language! Speaking of "alternative theories of cognition," etc is not the right way to couch this issue.

What I should have said is this: though our folk psychological vocabulary has a great deal of explanatory efficacy in a number of domains, it is not of much use in answering questions like "How does the physical environment condition the structure of language?" My proposal is that we identify counterpart concepts in the physical vocabulary, which do allow for answers to these kinds of questions, allowing for the following concessions:

1. Our ability to recognize a particular concept as a counterpart to our folk psychological notions of cognition or conation quite obviously presupposes the resources of our folk psychological vocabulary. The latter is epistemically primary with respect to the physicalist counterpart vocabulary.

2. The counterpart concept of (say) cognition will not capture the essentially first-personal aspects of the concept as it figures in ordinary discourse, just as counterpart talk of norms as descriptive regularities loses the essentially first-personal rulishness of them.

It can be readily admitted that such counterpart concepts do not capture the depth of their folk psychological models, but also maintained that the counterpart concepts better afford answers to questions about (for instance) the material conditioning of the structure of language.

To begin, one of the most fundamental question that has bothered me since I can remember is: why is the world the way it is? — darthbarracuda

I wouldn't be surprised if the answers you're getting here are dissatisfying to you. Here's the closest we'll get to a direct answer to the question. There's a distinction to be drawn between explanatory and justificatory questions.

Paradigmatic explanatory questions include (1) "Why does the sky (under standard conditions) appear blue to human eyes?" and (2) "Why does steel (under standard conditions) have a melting temperature 250°F lower than that of iron?" and (3) "Why is mental functioning interrupted by injury to the brain?." Answers to these questions might take the form of (1) empirical generalization; (2) theoretical postulation (i.e. the introduction of new, unobservable entities like atoms or quarks into our ontology); or (3) metaphysical assertions (i.e. claims to the effect that mental properties supervene on or are grounded in the physical properties of the brain and nervous system).

Paradigmatic justificatory questions include (1) "Why would you ever do something like that?" and (2) "Why is that one can't maintain both that-p and that-not-p?" and (3) "Why does this one count as a diamond while that one does not?." Answers to these questions might take the form of (1) reports of beliefs and desires, or rules for correct action; (2) appeals to principles of logic or reasoning; or (3) commentaries on the way that language is used.

As you present the issue, it doesn't sound like your question is an explanatory question. You're not looking for empirical generalizations from available evidence: this misses the point of the question. Neither are you looking for a new class of theoretical postulates that will explain the available evidence: this simply adds more to the class of facts specifying how the world is. And neither are you looking to carve out the metaphysical relationships that ground one class of facts or properties in any other: again, those relationships themselves would just be more to explain. Theological answers to your question seem to make the mistake of confusing it for an explanatory question, and in so doing propose original causes as unexplained explainers. As should be no surprise to anyone, this still leaves us wondering how it could be that there should be such a thing as an unexplained explainer--a wonder which eventually finds shape in yet another explanatory question.

But the question doesn't work as a justificatory question either. Like the explanatory question why steel melts at lower temperatures than iron, the question why things are as they are cannot be answered by appeal to beliefs and desires or rules for correct action or principles of logic or conventions of language. It's simply not that kind of question either. It's neither kind of question. And some philosophers, particularly early analytic philosophers much concerned with clarity in language, might conclude from this that it's not a question at all--but rather a pseudo-question disguised as a question.

However, there clearly is something to the question. What's important to keep in mind is that questions are artifacts of our very specific human linguistic faculty, and the appropriateness of a particular answer to a particular question turns not only on facts about the extra-linguistic world, but also on the structure of language itself. My suspicion is that the uncertainty that motivates this question (and neighboring questions, such as "Why is there something rather than nothing?") simply cannot be articulated as a question, for the reason that it does not admit (even in principle) of any answer. It obviously still indexes a very real and very important uncertainty that we all can be made to feel. It seems clear, however, that we're simply not able to think about the issue with any real clarity--or, at least, without mistaking it for either an explanatory or a justificatory question. It's simply never entirely clear what's being talked about.

I bring this up because in a roundabout way, this problem of psychology's impotency to be used as "real" evidence will be hard for any realist account of concepts or meaning. A very fanciful and elaborate construct of how meaning is imputed through physical forces can be explained, but never verified via science due to there being no fitting psychological experiment that would definitely be agreed upon as truth to that elaborate theory. — schopenhauer1

Thanks for tagging me!

There are a number of interrelated issues here. I think the problem you indicate is real, but that it doesn't really turn on the reliability of psychological research. The trouble is, rather, that psychological research (for lack of any better alternative, after internal problems rendered the behaviorist program untenable) more often than not relies on an unreduced commonsense mentalistic vocabulary ("belief," "impulse," "appraisal," "attitude," etc) that doesn't admit of the kind of law-like generalizations we seek in the physical sciences. As Davidson and many others have argued, we simply use our psychological vocabulary in a very different way than we use our physical vocabulary.

However, if we take Sellars seriously on this front, we should understand even the fundamental psychological notions ("belief," "desire," "impression," etc) as having an essentially explanatory significance: we can conceive of them as theoretical postulates--unobservables--which serve to explain observable human behavior. In acquiring the psychological vocabulary, we learn to apply bits of it not only to explain the behavior of others, but also to recognize certain of our own experiences as instantiating those bits (e.g. recognize an experience as instantiating the desire to sit down). Understood in this sense, our psychological vocabulary does very good explanatory work.

That said, what is most explanitorily powerful in our practical lives (folk psychology), may not be what is most explanitorily powerful in giving a comprehensive picture of how the world hangs together metaphysically. It's perfectly plausible that we will continue to employ folk psychological notions in our practical lives, and even depend on them to make sense of our scientific ambitions, while simultaneously offering alternative theories of cognition, conation, etc, which are more amenable to law-like generalization. There is good reason to believe that such explanatory frameworks would have little role to play in our day to day lives, but they would certainly allow for more effective explanations of (for instance) the material conditioning of language. In fact, this is precisely the alternative approach to the issue we see on evidence in neuoroscientific approaches to ostensibly psychological questions, and precisely the application to semantic concerns we see in the field of neurolinguistics.

I got bogged down before in trying to understand 'objects' because of this problem: that Sellars-Brassier assume that the core basis of language is a kind of fact-finding, truth-seeking mission. That gives a certain shape to one's very notions of 'concept', 'language' and 'object' that I - coming from a lifetime of arts and communication - don't automatically share. I think of language as communication, story-weaving at its core. I realise that that way postmodernism (and possibly madness) lies, but I'm looking for the analytic route all the same :) I tend to think of this quasi-logical account of language as a subset of language as a whole, as one language-game among many, whereas they are treating the language of science as the exemplary basis of language, but making it look as if they're addressing language as a whole by using very simple examples about red and rot. — mcdoodle

Sellars, at least, was much influenced by the later Wittgenstein, so he's pretty sensitive to the multifariousness of language. A distinction that might be helpful is the one he draws between language as thought and language as communication. Though children acquire language through communication, what they acquire is a system of representation that constitutes the very activity of thought. This is not to say that thoughts themselves are linguistic episodes, but that the structure of thought is derived from and governed by the structure of language. Though there is a sense in which, for each speaker, language as communication is temporally and epistemically prior to language as thought, there is also a sense in which communication is only possible once we have already acquired the ability to think. One consequence of this is that expression-meaning at the level of thought is ontologically prior to expression-meaning at the level of communication: in order for communicated language to be meaningful, thoughts themselves must have meaning.

Thus when Sellars offers his functional role semantics, he is giving an explanation of how expressions come to be meaningful within thought (i.e. through their role in inference). Sellars, of course, takes empirical representational language (e.g. "the table is red") as exemplary of language as thought, because one of the main things we get up to as thinking beings is representing the world. This, of course, is an idea from Kant: the same concept RED that appears in the spoken judgment "the table is red" plays a role in our first-personal experience of the table as red. It is one of Sellars' main purposes in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" and elsewhere to show that there is no coherent sense in which we can be said to experience the table as red, save through representing it (in language as thought) using the concept RED. Now, the kind of language you're after--of the story-telling variety--certainly presupposes our ability to experience things as red, and therefore presupposes that we already have in place a full-blooded system of language as thought for representing the world as it is.

The sense in which this language is scientific by its own lights is meager. However, another aim of Sellars', throughout his career, was to show that the concepts we employ in representing the world in thought are themselves influenced by our theoretical commitments. The commonsense way of approaching the world is, on his picture, already the byproduct of a great deal of theorizing. He shows this through his famous fictional account of the genius Jones, who postulates theoretical entities called "thoughts" and "impressions" to explain certain kinds of otherwise mysterious overt human behavior. The idea is that, in incorporating these theoretical notions into our representational system, employing them not only in thought but also in story-telling, etc, we get a better grip on how the world actually is. And this is the principle purpose of the physical sciences, as the natural outgrowth of our fundamental curiosity about the world. Scientific language just is a mature realization of this curiosity, and it consists in representations of how things are, just as thought (understood as the medium of perceptual experience) traffics in judgments of how things are. The succession of microphysical theories we see coming out of physics are just more and more sophisticated descriptions (or recipes for descriptions) of how things are.

I feel like Thomas Nagel said something along these lines..but that could be a false connection. Is it bad that most evolutionary biologists and others (including my self to an extent) already thought along these lines way before Brassier said it with more words and more references to French philosophers? — schopenhauer1

I'm not surprised to hear that Nagel holds some commitments along these lines, but the interesting source is Sellars. Though not widely known outside of academic circles, Sellars was one of the most important American philosophers of the 20th century, and was extremely influential in bringing analytic philosophy to the forefront of American intellectual consciousness, while simultaneously pushing past some of its early missteps (e.g. naive empiricism). Though it can be traced in fragmentary ways back to Aristotle, the notion of conceptual representation we find in Brassier was first worked out in Sellars' work on semantics. Sellars himself found some of the central ideas in Carnap's Logical Syntax of Language.

The concern with originality is a bit misplaced here. Brassier is an eclectic philosopher, meaning that his principal virtues are erudition and the ability to synthesize disparate ideas and traditions. He *seems* original to people who mainly read contemporary continental philosophy because they're used to interacting with a very narrow constellation of (anti-naturalist) ideas. Brassier is right about a lot of things because Sellars is right about a lot of things, but he does the extra service of relating ideas from Sellars to work in other traditions, and thereby increasing the number of human beings in the world who have encountered Sellars' philosophy.

Can you give an example of how we can make sense of these notions in more fundamental metaphysical terms (e.g. in materialist terms)? — schopenhauer1

Brassier does not discuss the details of such an account in "Concept and Object." He does, however, in some of his work on Sellars -- particularly in "Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism," which StreetlightX referenced earlier, and in the recorded talk "How to Train an Animal That Makes Inferences." Sellars' own account, in which Brassier has shown a great deal of interest, is very complex. I'd be happy to discuss it in depth, but I don't think this is the place. For the time being, a quick summation:

Sellars first gives a functional role semantics on which the meaning of an expression in natural language is its role in inference (governed by logical and lexical rules of inference); he then gives a theory of rule-governed behavior as supervening on (purely naturalistic) pattern-conforming behavior (such as develops through evolutionary change); he then gives an extremely robust defense of an explanation-first model of scientific inquiry on which the very structure of scientific theory-succession enjoins the logical possibility of a single, convergent explanatory theory (i.e. the unity of science), which account depends on a mind-bogglingly original treatment of the structure of inductive and abductive inference in terms of complex deductive argument schemas; he then gives a sophisticated ontology drawing on Wittgenstein's picture theory of representation in which predicates are reducible to structural descriptions of names, and names picture objects; he then gives very persuasive arguments to the effect that thoughts and other mental events are best understood as behavior-explaining theoretical postulates modeled after the characteristics of overt linguistic utterances; he then shows how, on a final ontology of the final explanatory theory, names in our ontology, understood as physical inscriptions or utterances, will (by logical necessity) stand in one-to-one *physical* isomorphy relations to the physical constituents of the universe; he then shows how the rules, thoughts, and events of inference which make up our folk psychology, if they are actual, can be modeled in precisely this sense, and conceived of as subject to physical laws. This presentation is spread out over a hundred or so papers, as well as a number of lecture series published as books. It's fascinating stuff.

In an entirely literal sense, Brassier's argument is, from the advocate of the transcendental's point of view, suggesting we enrich the here and now. He is denying the absence of meaning in the world. Things are by themselves, not as the result of some transcendental force. If we start thinking in terms of Brassier's philosophy, we start taking part in an idea that the world is not nothing, is not "meaningless" itself. In our understanding, we leave behind the meaningless world of the transcendental position, where things only matter because of some other reason (i.e. the "Why" ), and take-up (from the point of view of advocates of the transcendental) a stance of an "enriched world," in which things exist on their own terms. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Even in "an entirely literal sense," this seems wrongheaded to me. It's true that Brassier now recognizes the reality of meaning, but this is meaning as representational content. Think of the first level of meaning in Gilbert Harman's "Three Levels of Meaning" (not to be confused with that blustery charlatan Graham Harman). And Brassier is clear both in "Concepts and Objects" and elsewhere that the world itself does not possess meaning in this (or any other sense). To suggest that it does is to commit the Parmenidean error of identifying thinking and being, which he is very fond of criticizing.

The sense in which it might be said that Brassier is concerned with the here and now is this: in his political work, he endorses "Prometheanism," which is a form of ultramodernist Marxism intent that preservation of existing conditions of life has no weight in the making of large-scale political decisions. Political thinkers concerned with the "here and now" tend to be liberals and utilitarians worried to keep everyone happy under existing conditions of life. As in the Piercean philosophy of science he borrows from Sellars, in political contexts Brassier seems more interested in progress toward an end. In the theoretical case, the end is the stopping point of inquiry as representation of the real; and in the political case, the end is the stopping point of collective rationality as generic communism. These ends themselves have an immanent transcendence (the noumenon as the immanent transcendence of the object over itself, etc). It is the ends toward which we are oriented that concerns Brassier. He's interested to make clear that those ends are already present within our horizon of action, but it's not the flimsy, existential here and now of the secular liberal that concerns him.

'm not sure about this - if anything, Brassier's ultimate charge in "L and the Reality of Abstraction" is that Laruelle basically loses his nerve at the last minute, rather than follow the consequences of his affirmation of the autonomy of the Real all the way to the end. This is why, among other reasons, C&O is so concerned about epistemology. Although his explicit targets are Latour and to a lesser extent Deleuze, in the background is also the Laruelleian gnosis which basically skimps out on furnishing the justificatory grounds of it's own position. Brassier's disillusionment with Laurelle is more or less that Laruelle doesn't follow through on his own insights - insights which Brassier holds to be singularly valuable. The whole post-NU 'turn' towards truth, negativity and representation is in some sense a way to remedy this lacuna and forge a Laruelleian inflected philosophy that throws out the bathwater without the baby of Laruelleian thought. — StreetlightX

I worry this is a merely verbal dispute, but: the Laruellean idea to which Brassier is still committed is the autonomy of the real? I'd count it more likely Brassier found this idea in Kant, as did both Laruelle and Sellars. It's also present in Plato, to whom Brassier has turned with some enthusiasm in recent work. Laruelle's way of trying to flesh the idea out is precisely through the vision-in-one as radical immanence/gnosis, which is what Brassier rejects in him -- and all of which is flatly incoherent. It's not that Laruelle didn't go far enough, it's that his method didn't match his motivations. Brassier retains the motivations, which were what drove him to Laruelle, but it was those same motivations that drove him away. Sellars also shared the motivations, and developed a much more sophisticated, fully worked out, actually coherent account long before Laruelle started holding court (like so many small-time demigogs before him) among discontented ENS dropouts. So yes, Brassier had the good sense to throw out the Laruellean bathwater, but it was a Kantian baby that he retained.

Mm, I quoted Bryant because he gives a nice reader's digest version of NU to the uninitiated. Brassier's take on his own work is in fact more interesting, but without the relevant background - one I suspect Schopenhauer does not share - it can be hard to parse. — StreetlightX

Agreed. Sorry about the tone, there. Just meant to communicate to others that Bryant's rather milquetoast remarks weren't representative.

Your summary account seems on point, and I certainly agree that there's a solid through-line of philosophical motivation between the earlier and more recent stuff. I still think there's a pretty huge discrepancy between Nihil Unbound and what we're seeing now, though, mainly owing to Brassier's rejection of nearly all of the commitments he took back then from Laruelle. (Note to those unfamiliar with Brassier's work: ignore what follows.)

Still, at the conclusion of NU, he claimed that

Decontraction [i.e. the anterior posterior dimension of extinction] is not a negentropic starting point to which one could return, or an entropic terminus towards which one could hasten. Its reality is that of the 'being-nothing' [i.e. the Laruellean One read through Badiou's subtractive ontology] whose anterior posteriority expresses the identity of entropic indifference and negentropic difference, an identity which is given to thought as the objective reality that already determines it (Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 238).

Thus Laruelle's notion of radical immanence is the index of the "collapse of time" concomitant to the reality of extinction. This is really the same kind of thing he was saying when he was running around with the Laruelleans. See, for example, this passage from the Grelet volume:

Against Reason, Sense, and Life, against the glorification of the human which underlies them, hyperspeculation must mobilise the non-individual, the impersonal, the void, the multiple, the insignificant, the real-nothing. It is a matter of opposing the impersonal to life and asserting liberatory destruction over blissful creation; affirming the non-being of the One and the insignificance of multiple-being while refusing any recourse to an evental supplement; claiming that annihilation according to the transcendental identity of the void has nothing to do with Dasein, consciousness, or man (Brassier, "Liquider l’homme une fois pour toutes").

But then, well after the move to Sellars, we see in his most recent paper on Laruelle:

[Laruelle] successfully conceptualizes the separation of the in-itself, but misidentifies it as an experience, refusing to recognise that no residue of experience can withstand determination by mediation. The rejoinder that the One is 'abstract without abstraction' begs the question, for it simply radicalises abstraction in an attempt to neutralise ('unilateralise') the dialectic of mediation and abstraction (Brassier, "Laruelle and the Reality of Abstraction," 118),

Admittedly, in NU, Brassier already hinted at the rejection of Laruelle that would come to fruition here, but he was still leaning heavily on the Laruellean notion of radical immanence, which I take to be totally incompatible with his current Sellarsian naturalistic conception of rationality. That said, there are a few elliptical remarks in "That Which is Not" which may indicate that you have a better nose for these things than I do:

The transcendental difference between appearance and reality indexes a form of negativity that is at once the condition of objective truth in discourse, but also that which cannot be objectified without undermining the possibility of such truth. This negativity does not index a difference between recognizable 'things' or entities but a unilateral distinction between the structure of objectifying discourse and its unobjectifiable motor: the non-being of the real as 'irreducible remainder' implicated in the originary dehiscence between appearance and reality (Brassier, "That Which is Not," 186).

We'll have to see once he finishes the new book.

Brassier is decidedly not a purveyor of mainstream secularism. To this end, StreetlightX, I think you're off the mark reading Brassier's extinction stuff as suggesting that we focus on enriching the here and now. That would be a pretty mainstream secular idea. The whole Nihil Unbound period in Brassier's career was an outgrowth of his dissertation work. At that time he was mainly concerned to criticize ideas prominent in mainstream French philosophy, which was at the time (and to some extent still is) dominated by theologically motivated phenomenology. He did make some initial gestures toward his current project back then, but he's distanced himself from the book since it was published -- so it's really not all that relevant to the "Concepts and Objects" paper.

This having been said, to those concerned about how mainstream, Schopenhaurean, or scientistic Brassier is: it might serve you well to worry a bit more about whether he's right.

Here's a brief summary of the some of the early sections, filling in the gaps a bit:

1-5. To understand what is real, we also have to understand our own method of representing the world. The only way to get at what is real is through representation in thought. However, in granting this fact, we can't forget that objects (what is represented) are distinct from the concepts through which we know them (representation). Reality is not already carved up into concept-sized bits for us: we do not get the concept DOG, for instance, by encountering dogs and abstracting the concept therefrom. Thus our cognitive activity shapes how things present to us. Nevertheless, reality itself is not of our making, and the concepts we employ in representing the world are not chosen freely. We ourselves are physical beings, shaped by the material world, and our mode of representing the world is part of what is shaped. So even though the meaning of the concept DOG is not inherited from a concept-world relationship between DOG and dogs out in the world, the fact that we have the concept DOG is a product of our being shaped by the world in which we live.

6-10. Heidegger understood that to access reality, we needed to understand our method of accessing it. However, he gave too much credence to commonsense ways of representing the world, confused representations with the real objects represented thereby, and never moved past explicating the structure of thought to explaining why it has that structure. The endgame of human inquiry is to understand how things are -- full stop -- not just how they are for humans. But even when we understand this, we will understand it through representation in thought. These are not incompatible claims. It is precisely by coming to understand our own cognitive machinery, and how it interacts with the world, that we attain such access to how things are in themselves. Some continental philosophers think we can just skip worrying about how we know what's real by identifying the "real" with what appears to us in immanent experience. This misses the point, and cheapens the notion of reality that we're after. We should neither assume that our concepts were given to us by the world to match the objects contained in it, nor that our concepts are an unchanging feature of us as human beings in our relationship to the world. Rather, we should see concepts as part of us, as material beings, shaped both by history and by natural history. We should adopt a "methodological naturalism," which allows us to make use of concepts like "concept," "reason," etc, so long as we can make sense of those notions in more fundamental metaphysical terms (e.g. in materialist terms).

11-15. Kant understood the importance of concepts in our representation of the world. But those who followed him overemphasized the role of concepts, and in the process lost track of the distinction between thought and reality. Kant also understood the difference between knowledge and sensation. Sensation is our material connection to the world. Knowledge, by contrast, is conceptual, and is governed by the norm of truth, which is independent of any particular subject. Knowledge is related to sensation in complex ways, but is not reducible to it. Wilfrid Sellars is important to this project. Like Kant, he synthesizes important lessons from empiricism and rationalism, while avoiding the skepticism of the former and the dogmatism of the latter. But he also synthesizes the important lessons from post-Kantian idealism and post-Darwinian naturalism, while avoiding the naive idealism of the former and the naive materialism of the latter. Sellars' work gives us tools to make sense of why the commonsense picture of reality celebrated by most continental philosophers has to be eliminated, and why the scientific worldview (consisting of theoretical postulates) is essential to making sense of ourselves as thinking beings. In giving up the commonsense worldview, we cannot give up the very concept of "concept" or of "thought" or "reason," as to do so is obviously self-defeating. Rather, we must employ rational tools to demystify rationality, explaining it in naturalistic terms as something not at all different from other natural processes. By allowing reason to retain an air of mysticism (a la Hegel), we leave it open to straw-man critiques from postmodernism and other forms of irrationalism.

16-24. Critique of Latour. Skipping this part. This is Brassier getting a jab in at Graham Harman. Harman is an acolyte of Latour's, and edited the volume in which this paper appears. Brassier doesn't like Harman. Anyway, Latour is not a very good philosopher, and the critique makes sense, but it's not all that interesting.

I'll pick this up again later.