Didn't José Ortega y Gasset develop these ideas in the early 20th century? "I am I and my circumstance"?

In general, I don’t like how the article portrayed Latour’s ideas as entirely original and new. Yes, he absolutely made his own unique framework and also directly placed these ideas in dialogue with modern philosophy, which is valuable, but similar thoughts on the equal footing of thoughts and all other phenomena have been part of Buddhism in one form or another for over a thousand years. As you point out, these ideas have even already been part of Western philosophical thought

Wouldn’t this go all the way back to henology and Plotinus?

I was going to ask, isn’t this already the perspective of eastern philosophies?

Ah, these are good points. And in any case I'm happy to have a new philosopher to dive into. Cheers for the reply!

I guess a better formulation would be that he developed a substantial sociological theory that has gained a lot of traction based on this assumption

Advaita Vedanta, even.

And taoism and Buddhism

Bingo.

The whole field of phenomenology seems to be about investigating the connection between these supposedly separate domains. Husserl was on this stuff in 1929 and like others have mentioned, a lot of eastern religions are entirely based on this idea

Reading "...Latour was a peg who never quite fit the most prestigious holes." and seeing he ended up at lessor institutions. Thought at first he was regulated to the School of Mime!

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Not sure this is specific to Latour. He certainly had his own way of looking at the issue through ANT. He was buddy buddy with a lot of Frankfurt School guys, and reconciling the general and the particular, form and content, individual and society, has been around since Hegel (Philosophy of Right) and definitely had a prominent part in 20th century Marxism. Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example.

Definitely eager to learn more about his approach.

Zen Buddhism enters the chat

Many people have done this, Lucretius, Marx, deleuze, Virginia woolf, etc.

there is nothing new or useful in latour's work

Phenomenology. Husserl.

Exactly. This is hardly a “new” idea in philosophy, especially if one knows anything about eastern traditions or h*ll philosophy before the 19th century

graham harman is so annoying and I can’t pinpoint why

In the field of sociology, his ideas where original and new. While almost all great sociological theorists thought of the physical/material world as an environment that coexists with the social world of humans or as background noise with negligible influence, Latour came up with a theoretical framework that allowes us to incorporate the physical world, flora and fauna into the social construction of reality.

Edit: To make it a little bit clearer. Latour thought of all kind of things, like stones, keys, bacteria, doors and so on, as social actors that had to be taken into the equation. For him, they where as important as humans when it came to action and the questions why we act and why we act in a certain way.

Unfortunately I think we have yet to understand the importance of philosophy in our society Ada whole

Stoicism was already there as well as its ontology only includes one thing - the universe.

I love how /r/philosophy is just filled with posts like this where some guy you’ve never heard of is “challenging” something, or proposes some idea that’s been discussed ad nauseum for literally thousands of years. This is why I stopped at my masters after deep dives into ethics and phenomenology—philosophy is amazing, but it is no longer a productive field of study, despite the delusions of academics that it is.

I think the misunderstanding that many people have is that Latour wasn't interested in "reconciling" anything. He argued instead that, most of the time, these supposedly massive distinctions between such domains don't actually exist - or that they don't matter, which, in Latour's heavily pragmatist-influenced philosophy, amounts to exactly the same thing.

It reminds of this detail from a Neal Stephenson book I read called Anathem (the book is... fine). Ignoring the merits of the book as a whole, there is one funny detail that I think would be useful. In this world, there is an ancient order of logicians and mathematicians, each members of various sects with various roles to play in the continuity of society. The task of one of the sects was to analyze all new works and point out where the author thought they had an original idea only to be shown that it had been written about thousands of years prior. Does seem to be where we find ourselves often these days.

I see a lot of disagreements with this single quote from the entire article that hasn't quite grasped where Latour was coming from. Latour was aware of, and dismissive of, existing philosophical attempts to bridge the gap between subject and object because he denied there was any special need to bridge it in the first place. He further argued that modern attempts to solve this "problem" still kept the divide implicitly present.

Phenomenology? Solves the "problem" by reducing all experienced reality to the subjective pole and rejecting any independently objective reality. Scientific realism takes the opposite, equally problematic approach of reducing all experienced reality to the objective pole only. Hegel and Marx's dialectical solution posits a mediating process between subject and object but still treats them as ontologically distinct domains. I can't speak to non-modern philosophies like Buddhism.

Latour's solution? Simply, that there was no real need for a solution, because the question was not worth asking in the first place. Gaps between actors are innumerable, moreover, and positing this one alleged gap between subject and object as the most important one vastly overinflated its importance in contrast to all the other gaps between actors that might exist. The later, much less well-understood work of Latour - the "modes of existence" work mentioned in Harman's article - is an attempt to identify and explain the nature of some of these additional gaps and how actors overcome them.

EDIT TO ADD perhaps this quote from A.N: Whitehead, a huge influence on Latour, might help clarify where he coming from a bit better. This is taken from The Concept of Nature (1927, p. 30):

> What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream.

Exactly. Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, etc we’re all challenging the subject-object split and refuting through phenomenological exploration in several realms. Perhaps, Latour posed a new variation of this historical theme? Otherwise, it feels inaccurate.

I use phenomenology as the core of my therapeutic practice. I get to study Heidegger with a group of therapists who present cases using Heideggarian (existential/phenomenology) and psychoanalytic relational models.

This shit becomes alive when using it in practice and watching clients use key themes to integrate and move towards health. It’s pretty damn cool.

Dude, that is extremely my shit. I just got a bachelor's in psychology and philosophy and have been debating where exactly I want to go from here. I'm leaning towards therapy but I don't really love a lot of the more modern cbt-esque forms of it. My favorite class throughout college was without a doubt phenomenology, I feel like I've really integrated that perspective into my own thinking.

I'd love to hear whatever you have to say about your work; how you got into it, how you're applying the view in your cases, any advice you'd have for someone moving into their masters. I've debated trying to get into a program for Jungian/Depth psychology but the work you're doing sounds exciting.

There’s a massive difference between ‘having the idea’ and elaborating that idea into a complex and rational theoretical apparatus and situating it within a philosophical problematic. Often we don’t even realise that initial idea was ‘good’ until someone does the actual philosophical work. As pascal pointed out, Augustine had something like the idea cogito, but it was Descartes who was able to use that idea to completely revolutionise philosophy and how we think about the subject.

Not Zen specifically tbh.

As far as I know this is the first article I’ve read by him, but he strikes me as one of those cheerleaders who give obscurantist philosophers all their heft by proclaiming them to be geniuses without ever really elucidating their (ineffable) philosophies. I feel like I learned nothing significant about the actual meaning of Latour’s work from this article, except that maybe he’s another of those continental philosophers who I’m definitely serious you guys has for real this time finally blown the lid off what’s wrong with all previous philosophy.

Buddhist philosophy should really be required material for philosophy students. This would never have been an assumption.

Letting /r/philosophy and in particular Graham Harman stand in for the field is egregiously unwise

You got into a masters and never heard of Latour?

For the last two years of my study I was reading primarily Heidegger, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and before that I was into social and political ethics. So no, I’ve never heard of him.

I’m not letting /r/philosophy stand in for the field…more like letting it reinforce beliefs that I already held due to other reasons.

That’s incredible, any resources that you know of that discuss the topic?

Still, if you haven't passively heard of Latour by the time you got to your masters and then is prepared to say that he is a nobody which should not contend with what has already been discussed a thousand years ago, I feel that you don't really have the credentials to claim whether or not he is a serious contender, or what it is that has already been discussed in philsophy for a thousands years. Latour is very much a part of an important discussion in philosophy. Just look at his contributions to the philosophy of science for one.

I would simply not let anything Graham Harman says reinforce any beliefs you have about the wider field

These ideas have been already been (more or less) systematized by western thinkers like Heidegger, Lacan, and Deleuze. Subjectivity is pushed to the margins.

I would disagree that phenomenology is pure subjectivism. At least I would argue, the phenomenology of Heidegger in particular is not subjectivistic at all. Entities are real beings for Heidegger, and his entire approach is consequently empirical in nature. There is likewise, no problem of the external world for him, because in each case Dasein is already being-in-the-world and cannot be otherwise. In Being and Time, he describes the phenomenological approach as 'To the things themselves' rather than accepting Kant's contention that we cannot know any thing-in-itself

There is no subject-object distinction to be made in his approach, because there is no such thing as a pure subject or a pure object. Things always appear to someone and disappear for someone. To talk of an object as independent from an object of thought is impossible. Yet being that this someone is in every case Dasein, and is therefore caring being-in-the-world, they are never a pure subject, but rather are engaged in the various activities of life of which 'pure contemplation' is only one among many (for Dasein is a caring being, one who cares about being, i.e is mortal, is anxious, and wants to live in the world.) A person necessarily presupposes the existence of a real world, and exists in that world, prior to any philosophical investigation. That world is ready-to-hand and not present-at-hand, i.e, the world is a place of activity and not a big list of things which exist independent of our cares or involvements. So Dasein cannot be a pure subject, because a pure subject without any cares is the only kind which pure contemplation would be possible for. Tranquil contemplation is the mood which is most peculiarly appealing to philosophers and scientists for grounding their ontologies within, but it is only one mood out of many which humans find themselves in. Yet to believe that pure contemplation is the best way of formulating an ontology is in Heideggers view, a mere prejudice of philosophers, and one which precludes them from uncovering certain truths about being which are impossible to acquire within this mood and must be found through other moods. Heidegger famously analyses the case of anxiety (being afraid of nothing in particular) in order to contrast being and nothingness and thereby explain human mortality and finally connect being and time.

To see phenomenology as mere idealism would therefore be an error. Nor is phenomenology solipsism. What the phenomenology of Heidegger appears to me to aim at is the rational analysis of experience and an investigation of existence. "What is being?" is famously the question Heidegger in particular has concerned himself with, and his method of examining human being (being-there) in order to get to being, necessitates an understanding of the existence of others. Being-with, or being with others, is treated in several sections of Being and Time

Nor does Heidegger adopt a position which does not allow for the positing of truths. Truth for Heidegger, is the proper way of pointing out or uncovering beings or being as they are. Entities cannot be true or false, only propositions (or other ways of pointing at them) can be true or false. It is possible to misrepresent things, but things cannot in themselves be a misrepresentation. Beings simply just are what they are. Even the entity which an erroneous proposition is, is itself not true or false but rather the connection it makes is true or false. That I have uttered a falsehood cannot be determined until one examines the thing itself. In the meantime it is simply a proposition, neither true or false.

All this being said, I fail to see how Latour's actor-network theory is at the outset incompatible with the phenomenological approach. Though I have not read Latour, I would tentatively argue that many of his sensibilities seem compatible with Heidegger's. For instance, their shared opposition to Bergson, opposition to metaphysical explanations of reality which act as though there is force in itself, or thought in itself, etc. Likewise, their shared concern with 'delusions' of modernity and technology, their orientation towards explaining entities in terms of the totality of their activities (the world for Heidegger is the totality of involvements of ready-to-hand equipment and Dasein) rather than falling back on essentialism, the empirical approach as opposed to a deductive or rationalist approach, etc.

I have not read much of Heidegger, and I did get the impression that Latour was over-simplifying things in his criticisms of other approaches. I've seen Graham Harman (author of the original post, and a philosopher who has spent considerable time arguing that Latour fully deserves the title of "philosopher") claim elsewhere that he found Latour and Heidegger surprisingly compatible, but I have not had time to pursue the details of such a claim.

As near as I can tell, Latour is highly suspicious of the privileging of "Dasein" in Heidegger's work. I'm not sure how strongly related this is to his criticism of the subject/object distinction. It is related to another aspect of Latour's work, which is that no single actor is inherently privileged in any way at the outset (some actors become privileged in some situations, but this is always an outcome of an earlier act, not something that inheres in any "reality-in-itself"). More broadly, Latour strongly insists he is not "anti-modern", which is true insofar as he does not reject the usefulness of science or technology - he simply views dominant accounts of how they work as very problematic. I have read Heidegger's famous "Question of Technology" essay, and I find it very hard to reconcile with Latour's much more pragmatic and anti-essentialist approach.

I am not an expert on Heidegger, just reading through Being and Time atm (I have studied philosophy for seven years, sometimes in school sometimes on my own. My main focus is on Nietzsche, but I go to school in English, and nobody teaches 'Continental' stuff here) Some of it makes sense to me, other bits do not. Heidegger's style is obscure and often obtuse, and unreasonably so in my opinion. It is probably cleverer (though not necessarily much less obscure) in German from what I have seen from footnotes, etc. in my translation, but my German is not at all good enough to appreciate it. There is nevertheless, some method to it, even if it means we have to read his works with a solid dictionary in hand which explains the etymological connections which are not readily apparent in a more surface level reading. It is a difficulty I am familiar with however, due to my study of Nietzsche, who knew multiple ancient languages inside and out, and who likewise had a similar understanding of his own German.

I figured Latour would probably object to the centrality of human being in Heidegger, regardless of any subject-object framing of the problem. That makes sense from my 15 min reading of Latour's wiki page. Moreover it is a generally fair objection, even if I would personally disagree with it. It seems to me presuming to approach anything philosophical from the standpoint of an outsider such as a dog or a cat is simply dubious at best, and so we must start from an analysis of human being if we are to get at being in any sense. Certainly it is probable that animals share much in common with humans in their being in the world, but we are far less certain of all the details. Humanity is obscure enough as it is. It would also be fair to level this charge against Heidegger because he seems to presume a commonality between all humans which may at times be in error. Heidegger offers no proofs as to a great number of the insights he offers in Being and Time, instead relying on self examination and analysis and simply hoping that the reader will agree with him. It would also be fair to object to this. Yet deducing things we cannot know from what we do know does seem to me an error in methodology, and Heidegger's creative approaches to circumventing artificial barriers to our knowledge is perhaps the most interesting thing about his thinking.

Heidegger's later work is suspect to me for obvious reasons, and it's been a while since I have examined it, having first encountered his 'Question of Technology' in my second year of university. The last time I have read it was probably six years ago. I remember being impressed by his profound understanding of Aristotle and his grandiloquent doomsaying (we are after all, in grave danger due to technology,) but I am uncertain whether I would agree with the way he thinks about technology today. It probably did not help that the main objection to Heidegger's prophecisations against technology which we studied in that class was Emannuel Levinas' 'Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us,' whose religious framing of the problem and whose emphasis on the human utility of technology as overagainst any environmental concerns, struck me as chauvanistic and vulgar at the time and further galvanised me in favour of Heidegger's approach. I have not read that in years either, however. Today I am also more pragmatic, it is not a god which will save us from nuclear war or climate change or anything else technological, but rather humans, and possibly technology itself, if such saving is possible at all. From what I have seen of the literature most Heidegger scholars seem to argue that he himself is not a Luddite, though he is suspicious of technology. Again however, that was years ago for an undergrad paper. I were to be superstitious I would guess that Heidegger's sentiments against technology are more deeply ingrained in his own personal, romantic view of agrarian living, which beneath all his poetic posturing and profundity is really grounded on the bases of little more than his own parochial nostalgia for the old-fashioned rural communities he grew up in, which may and probably does even boarder on the fascistic.

In vastly different ways though.