Fourth Person Singular

Levi is trolling ‘correlationists’ again with this post.

His logic is that the correlationist perspective inevitably leads to racism:

“why did Eurasia manage to conquer the Americas, the Australian continent, and Africa and not the reverse?” This is such a great question because it backs the anthropocentric humanist into a corner.
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In short, if one adopts the correlationist hypothesis they are inevitably led to racism when answering these questions (shades of Heidegger’s sendings of Being and the primacy of the Greco-German culture here).

I’ve replied to his post on his site, but I am reproducing it below:

Or you can point out that this exercise it flawed from the beginning by your working assumption that ‘to conquer’ is somehow a better event than, for example, ‘to sustain’ (for example, evidenced by 40,000 years of civilisation on the Australian land mass prior to European intervention)? Or that there is assumed to be no process of ‘becoming-together’ of cultural transformations of an essentialised ‘Eurasia’ as it came into contact with other civilisational assemblages?

Human history has not even begun to be written yet. Why assume that essentialised Eurasian ideals that valorise the composition of the world in this tiny instant in geological time (a couple of centuries) are ideals that are even worth using as an analytical tool?

Rather than being backed into the corner, the correlationist wonders at such uncritical assumptions, particularly when you are attempting to give voice to ‘things’. Surely any perspective from a ‘non-identity’ has to pass through a cosmological perspective (fourth person singular) first? Then there is an ethical decision to be made about which events are worthy of implicating oneself in (‘to conquer’ versus ‘to sustain’, for example).

Levi, you teach students and engage with them. How many of them have the skills to engage with what you teach? ‘Engagement’ is a core problem for this generation of youth: investment in technologies of convenience are not making an aggregate of the population stupid, they are simply redirecting their intelligence away from worthy tasks. The neutered capacity of youth does not indicate a decline of intelligence, only that the apparatuses of capture deployed under the monumental shadow of capital have become more efficient. The mistake of neo-Kantians was to believe that pointing out the limits of rationality would be enough for self-critique, when it is merely another opportunity to reaffirm investment in faith and stupidity.