Rahul Samaranayake has had me on his podcast a few times over the years, including an especially generative conversation with Peter Rollins last year. This time he invited me and Graham Harman into dialogue. Below is the transcript.
RAHUL
It’s funny. I was reading some of your articles, Graham. You mention Whitehead quite a lot. So obviously my head went to Matt. So I just Googled “Footnotes2Plato, Graham Harman,” and I came across these blog posts from like 15 years ago. I was like, oh, so they have been writing to each other. I thought this would be a really cool conversation to put together. So yeah. Thanks, both of you, for doing this.
GRAHAM
Matt and I met accidentally in a coffee shop in Claremont, CA back then.
MATT
I remember that well. I was there with my friends Adam and Jamie. We were graduate students. That was the December 2010 Metaphysics and Things conference, I think. The Whitehead Research Project hosted it.
GRAHAM
Yeah, that’s right.
RAHUL
Graham, you’ve said in many places that for you Whitehead really is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century.
GRAHAM
Oh, yes.
RAHUL
And of course, it’s no secret that Matt has thoughts on Whitehead. And are you in California, Graham?
GRAHAM
I am. Los Angeles, in Long Beach.
RAHUL
Okay. And you’re in the Bay Area, Matt?
MATT
I have been for many years. I’m up in Humboldt County for now.
GRAHAM
Way up north.
MATT
Yep. I’m embarking on a more nomadic lifestyle as of the last couple of months.
RAHUL
A true philosopher.
MATT
A theoretician in the old sense. For the ancient Greeks, a theoros was one who traveled from city to city. I’m trying to bring that back.
RAHUL
You truly embody that ethos. So the blog post correspondences that I came across were 15 years ago, so to say a lot has happened since then is an understatement, although in the world of philosophy, that’s nothing. So it’s almost like we’re going to resume from 15 years ago.
So, Graham, in this really good essay of yours that I read a while back, I think it was called “The Only Exit from Modern Philosophy,” you sing a lot of praise for Whitehead. And you criticize Kantian philosophy for cutting up the world, as if there’s human stuff and there’s everything else. And you say that both analytic and continental philosophers have kind of fallen victim to this mindset.
And you say, “It is for this reason that a taste for Whitehead is usually a good sign that one also has a taste for escaping the straitjacket of modern philosophy.”
So could you talk a bit about Whitehead’s influence on your thinking, and perhaps even on OOO [Object-Oriented Ontology], and then we can go on from there.
GRAHAM
Sure. I actually was in my freshman year of college, first semester, in a reading group on Process and Reality. And frankly, it was a bit over my head at 18. So I stayed with the group for a couple of months, and I didn’t realize I was going to go in the direction of becoming a kind of speculative philosopher.
Then one of my fellow graduate students reminded me about Process and Reality. So I returned to it and I said, oh yes. I was working on Heidegger then, and Heidegger is very much trapped within the Kantian schema of a transcendental standpoint: that you first have to talk about the thought-world relation before you talk about anything else. And Whitehead does a nice job of just saying no, that presentational immediacy is simply one form of prehension.
And I think this is one reason why he’s never been taken seriously enough by analytics or continentals. Analytics like his work on Principia Mathematica. Continentals who are into Deleuze—Deleuze praises Whitehead, and so they go along with it. So we’re getting a lot of Deleuzian-influenced interpretations of Whitehead that I don’t think really work.
I don’t think Deleuze and Whitehead have as much in common as people like Isabelle Stengers or Steven Shaviro think. I have a lot of respect for these people, I just disagree with the way they’re Deleuzianizing Whitehead.
That’s one thing I really like about Whitehead: his escape of both the analytic and continental paradigms.
The other thing I really like about him is I think he’s probably the best meta-philosopher we have, the best philosopher talking about what philosophy should be doing. It’s very powerful, for instance, early in Process and Reality, when he says that this idea we have in modern philosophy, that you’re supposed to start with some unshakable axiom and then deduce from that, like with Descartes, with Kant, that’s not really how philosophy works.
That’s maybe how geometry works in most cases. But philosophy has to be judged by its results, not because it has some unshakable starting point. So this is another thing I appreciate about him.
MATT
Yeah, I mean, the metaphilosophy that Whitehead lays out in that first chapter of Process and Reality is just brilliant. I know a lot of colleagues of mine who love Whitehead’s metaphilosophy but do not like his metaphysics for various reasons.
But yeah, that line where Whitehead says “philosophy is not deduction, philosophy is the search for premises,” I think very helpfully avoids falling into that trap which someone as brilliant as, say, Spinoza can fall into, where the mathematical or geometrical method becomes borrowed and brought into philosophy. Whitehead was quite a mathematician himself, knew its limits, and so I think he was inoculated, against that temptation.
We could ask, though, whether some of the positions Whitehead ends up with regarding the primordial nature of God, or eternal objects and so on, whether he’s not listening to his own metaphilosophy, or straying a bit from it. I mean, this is a criticism I’ve heard from some interlocutors of mine. I don’t know that it’s true, but I think if we forget that Whitehead intended his system to be open-ended, and really he doesn’t even call it a system, he calls it a “scheme,” and I think that was a deliberate choice…
Even halfway through Process and Reality he’s abolishing one of his categories because he’s found it redundant. I think there he’s exemplifying the openness of his scheme.
But it’s hard to read the first part, where he lays out the categorical scheme, which is unbelievably abstract and difficult, and not think he’s trying to do systematic philosophy and that he’s got a more or less closed system.
He was writing in 1928–29, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems were a few years later, but he was already well aware from his work with Russell and the Principia that there were paradoxes that hadn’t been formalized yet.
But I think Whitehead was well aware of the danger of trying to close one’s system. There’s much to learn from his metaphilosophy even if we disagree with the scheme, which I know you do in parts, right, Graham?
GRAHAM
Okay. Right.
The fact that he isn’t a foundational figure in both the analytic and continental traditions speaks in his favor and is a red flag for both of those traditions. There are a lot of calls now for bridging the analytic-continental divide. That’s kind of a universal sentiment now. I disagree with that. I think we should push beyond both of those traditions. I think they have the same flaw at bottom.
Also, I think bridging the divide would be a lot more to the benefit of analytic philosophy because it’s the dominant partner in the struggle. So what it really means is that analytic philosophers don’t want continental philosophers claiming they’re some separate thing. They want to dominate the whole spectrum.
But they both miss the things that Whitehead has told us, and a lot of that has to do with Whitehead’s rejection of Kant. He’s not naive about Kant, but he calls for reviving some of the pre-Kantian tendencies. So for instance, Locke. If you’re someone who doesn’t know why you should take Locke seriously, read Whitehead, he’ll explain why Locke is really a major figure in philosophy.
And also, Whitehead is just a good person. I know that sounds kind of naive to say, but it’s nice to have a good person after you’ve been working on Heidegger for a long time as a 20th century figure. And it’s not just the Nazism, it’s all the anecdotes about how he treated his students and so forth.
Whitehead seems like a good man, and there’s something refreshing about that. And of course Gertrude Stein once said, “I’ve only met three geniuses, Picasso, Whitehead, and myself.” It’s a funny line, and Whitehead deserves to be on that list.
RAHUL
I think it’s worth, especially for those of us who aren’t Whitehead experts here, just to touch on Whitehead’s critique of Kantian philosophy, or the Kantian way of thinking. Especially because I think, in different areas, you both have approached this notion that Kant did this cutting up of the world, so to speak: that we left discussions about the so-called natural world, or the non-human world, to the natural sciences.
And I think you both have pointed out in your work that when thinkers, or even scientists, try to do a “scientific metaphysics,” they go awry, or terribly wrong. They make a lot of leaps and a lot of mistakes.
So yeah, either one of you, talk about what was Whitehead’s criticism of Kantian philosophy, and then what he proposes as an alternative.
GRAHAM
Do you want to take this, Matt?
MATT
Sure. I’ll offer some thoughts, and I’m curious to hear how you would approach it.
When Whitehead was at Cambridge as a student, he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles. He wasn’t a philosophy major, he was studying mathematics, but he mentions that they read the Critique of Pure Reason very closely. He appreciated Kant very much.
He’ll praise Kant later for being, among the German thinkers of that time, more up to speed with natural science. I think he exaggerates a little bit. Schelling was quite up to speed with the natural science of his day, and even Hegel was. But nonetheless, Whitehead has a lot of praise for Kant.
However, the major criticism is that Kant makes all relations relative to human cognition. Whereas Whitehead wants to generalize the ways in which we’re related to the world, and not just how we as humans are related to the world, but relation as such beyond the cognitive relation.
He comes up with the term “prehension.” And so that move to break free of this subjective anthropocentric orientation, this “we can only know the world in terms of how the human mind accesses the world,” and instead recognize that the human subject is one example of a much broader experiential process that constitutes relations among any entities in the world. The cognitive relation becomes a special case of a more generic type of relation. And that move is brilliant.
In a way it’s a generalization of Kant beyond just human cognition, but it’s also… I don’t know how closely Whitehead read the third critique, the Critique of Judgment, but that’s when Kant is at his most romantic and begins to undermine the strictures of the critical system he created in the first two critiques.
Kant starts to explore self-organization in the living world, and aesthetics, and how our perception of beauty and our attempts to understand it… the understanding can’t quite grasp what’s going on with organisms, nor what’s going on with beauty. There’s a different kind of causality at work.
I think what Whitehead does, and here he’s following someone like Schelling also, is that through that third critique and Kant’s very creative ideas about both beauty and organism, Whitehead is able to ontologize what, for Kant, remained merely a matter of our reflective judgment on organisms and on beauty.
Whitehead pushes further into what I would call an aesthetic ontology, and what he himself calls “organic realism.” There’s no evidence I’ve read—maybe you know, Graham?—that Whitehead read the third critique. He never mentions it as far as I know. But I think there’s a way you can see him pushing Kant further than Kant was willing to go in that third critique.
GRAHAM
You know, Kant obviously, I love the third critique also, I teach bits of it every year, but Kant is not someone to be trifled with. I’d probably put him number three in the history of Western philosophy after Plato and Aristotle, or Aristotle and Plato. He’s a transformational figure.
That doesn’t mean we have to accept his starting point, or all aspects of it. I of course have retained his thing-in-itself in a modified form. But for Kant, the thing-in-itself is this unique problem for human thought because we’re starting with human thought.
He thinks we have immediate access to human thoughts. You can’t talk about what happens when fire burns cotton, you can only talk about how fire burning cotton appears to human thought. And I think that’s based on the false idea that we have immediate access to human thoughts in a way that we don’t to anything else.
And we actually don’t, because psychoanalysis is one example of why. If we had immediate introspective access to ourselves, why would the human psyche be so complicated and hard to untangle that psychoanalysis or psychotherapy are needed?
Obviously, to some extent I know myself better than you two know me, because I spend a lot more time in my own head. But a lot of times we gain better insight about ourselves from other people than we do from any amount of introspection. Our self-understanding is mediated by society, by others. We don’t have any direct access to it.
So I don’t have a problem with doing what Whitehead did and saying we can talk about any relation on the same footing as the thought-world relation. And that’s what people won’t accept about him.
That’s why he’s sometimes considered dogmatic in the Kantian sense by opponents. People are really stuck on transcendental arguments: you have to first talk about how humans encounter the world before you talk about anything in the world. Which I think is false.
MATT
Can I ask you about that, Graham?
GRAHAM
Yeah, of course.
RAHUL
We’re getting to the interesting bits now.
MATT
I wonder if you… when I understand how Kant differs from Descartes, Kant denied intellectual intuition of the self. For Descartes, we do have immediate access to our own thoughts, to our own identity as a thinking substance. But for Kant it seems to me the thing-in-itself isn’t only what’s beyond our sensory experience, it’s what’s, as St. Augustine would say, so intimate to ourselves that we can’t even notice it.
And so I don’t think Kant would say we can experience the transcendental ego with any immediacy. We experience the empirical ego. We experience thoughts, but not the thinker directly.
GRAHAM
That’s true. And that’s why free will isn’t directly perceptible either, same reason. So that’s true. It’s just that the effect in his philosophy is as if he did think we had direct access, because he does think we can start with the thought-world interaction.
And any discussion of other object-object interactions… well, he does two things with it. One is: it’s a thing-in-itself that we can’t talk about directly. On the other hand, he also lets the sciences do whatever they want with it, which is characteristic of the double bind contemporary philosophy is in.
On the one hand, all we can know about is the thought-world relation, supposedly. And yet on the other hand, even though we supposedly can’t know directly about object-object relations, we let the natural sciences have a monopoly over that.
That’s why you’re not going to hear too many philosophers say anything about object-object interactions, because that sounds like German Naturphilosophie, like Schelling, where you’re coming up with weird speculative thoughts about chemicals and electricity and magnetism.
But actually, the natural sciences, as great as they are, as Russell noted, they “relationize” things. They give us spatiotemporal mathematical expressions of what things do, in terms of relational properties. So they don’t really get us the things-in-themselves either.
So there is room for a metaphysics of nature of the kind Whitehead offers.
And by the way, Bruno Latour is someone who got me even more interested in Whitehead than I was, because Whitehead had a huge impact on him.
I think the big difference between Whitehead and Latour is that you can call Latour a philosopher of science. You could never really call him a philosopher of nature. Latour doesn’t really venture statements about the way reality is in itself the way Whitehead tries to do. For Latour there’s usually a human scientist in the picture somewhere who’s organizing the situation.
So in a way Latour is more of a Kantian than Whitehead, even though he’s basically on the same escape path that Whitehead was.
MATT
Well, let me just say, when I was a grad student, I read Guerrilla Metaphysics, and I was like… I had not been that excited about a book since I was a 17-year-old reading Nietzsche (despite barely understanding a word). I think I understood more of your book than I did as a teenager reading Nietzsche, but it just lit my hair on fire. It was such an exciting time back then when the blogosphere was exploding in response to speculative realism.
And this idea of objects withdrawing and having this inaccessible essence to them was compelling to me, but I never felt it was all that different from Whitehead’s view. It’s easy to say Whitehead is a relationalist, and I know you’ve written about Latour as a relationalist, but it seems to me that in Whitehead’s account of concrescence there is this moment of privacy, so every actual entity has a privacy. It has at least a moment of its process of concrescence where it’s withdrawing from all relations to achieve its own unique purpose, perspective, and satisfaction.
And then it perishes and does become public and accessible, but not as it was in its formal existence. Its objective existence becomes accessible to others, but formally it’s private, it’s withdrawn. Do you have a different reading of that, or…?
GRAHAM
Whiteheadians often throw this at me. Steven Shaviro was the first to do so. We probably have to get in the weeds on a passage-by-passage reading to see whether it’s enough privacy for my standards.
But here’s a thing that can’t be denied: you talk about it perishing, and of course they’re also called actual occasions. He borrows from the occasionalist tradition in that sense, whereas Triple O actually has more of an Aristotelian-Bergsonian theory of time. Things do endure. They aren’t perishing every instant.
I have the greatest interest in the occasionalist tradition, starting in the Islamic version of it, with al-Ash‘ari, because at least the occasionalists make a problem out of this: how something can endure, how something can link with something else. That’s one of the things that interests me most about Whitehead.
There are two sides to occasionalism. One is the problem it raises about object-object interactions by routing them through God. You could say Whitehead does this with the eternal objects. The other aspect, that not all occasionalists accept, is the idea of discontinuous instants and continuous creation, which you find in the Islamic version, but also in Malebranche and some of the Europeans.
Whitehead is not so much continuous creation, but certainly a continuous rebirth, moment to moment. That’s something Triple O doesn’t have.
I’ll leave open the question about privacy. That would be worth an extensive technical debate.
MATT
Sure. Maybe better done in writing.
RAHUL
Yeah. I just want to say, I think this was 2011. Matt, you said that object-oriented ontology hit you as more of an intellectual shock that you’re not entirely sure you’ve recovered from yet. So I’m not sure if you’re still recovering, but that was the impact the work had on you.
MATT
Well, let me speak to that for a second. Part of it was because, as an undergraduate, I had been exposed… I was in a cognitive science program at the University of Central Florida studying with Shaun Gallagher, who had studied with Francisco Varela. Most cog-sci students don’t get much phenomenology. You just go straight into computer science or something. So I was lucky to have that exposure.
And I loved it. It felt like this counter-discourse to a dominant mechanizing mode of academic and scientific thought about consciousness and human beings. And in my late teens and early twenties, the idea that something might be fundamentally wrong with phenomenology, or that it had this deep limitation, just hadn’t crossed my mind. I was so into it.
And then I read your work for the first time and I was like, oh. Oh no. Okay. It’s a philosophy of human access. And all of a sudden what seemed so liberating to me… and I have deep respect for the phenomenological tradition and continue to read it and gain much from it… but reading your work pointed out a blind spot that I never would have seen.
So I’m glad that 15 years ago my immediate reaction got recorded, because whatever critiques I made of phenomenology came from a place of love. Phenomenology was a real passion for me, and it still is.
GRAHAM
And there’s a lot on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Lingis in Guerrilla Metaphysics. It’s interesting to hear you were studying with Gallagher. Gallagher has been one of the most productive people in American continental philosophy precisely by stepping outside of it with one foot and getting into the cognitive science stuff. He’s incredibly influential compared to the more powerful people at SPEP. The celebrities within that circle don’t have nearly as much discipline-wide relevance as someone like Gallagher, or Evan Thompson, who have really made a mark, and helped mainstream Merleau-Ponty in analytic philosophy even, I would say.
RAHUL
You were sort of joking about this in one of your lectures, that this split between continental and analytic philosophy, that you should double down on this and make it deeper, in one of your talks at the European Graduate School. But I actually don’t think that is happening now, especially because if you’re bringing thinkers like Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger into the cognitive sciences and more analytic-driven ways of thinking… there are a lot of exceptions, for sure.
GRAHAM
Some of it’s a generational shift. These younger kids you find in analytic graduate programs now, some of them are extremely open-minded and ecumenical.
I had this guy, Robinson Erhardt, who has a nice podcast, and he’s a PhD student at Stanford on philosophy of mathematics, and he wanted me to come on and talk about Triple O aesthetics. We had a great conversation. That’s probably not going to happen with an analytic philosopher my own age or older. So, generational difference.
RAHUL
Yeah. But also, I spoke to the logician Graham Priest recently, and he made an interesting comment. He said he has great admiration for people like Quine and some of these big figures in analytic philosophy, but he doesn’t believe people will be reading Quine in 200 years. However, he wouldn’t say the same for Heidegger, who he thinks will be read for the next few centuries.
So sometimes it seems like it’s also about the style of doing philosophy, or even the rhetoric. That being said, you’ve mentioned that rhetoric itself has value. It’s not just used in a vulgar way; rhetoric has value in itself. It’s an art form, coming from the ancient Greeks.
GRAHAM
One of the downsides of analytic philosophy’s way of doing philosophy is: it’s got some of the smartest people in the world, so I don’t want to shortchange them. But they conceive of philosophy as a kind of science that progresses incrementally and needs to be very, very clear, and needs to say in literal form everything they believe, and not say anything shadowy. They take pride in that.
But I think what it means is that they don’t really prioritize writing classics in a way that the continental tradition more often does. Of course, most people don’t and can’t write classics, so it leads to insecurity. It leads to a situation on the continental side where people are following masters in an insecure sort of way, and that’s not a great thing.
But analytic philosophers are going to hate this: what definite classics are there in analytic philosophy so far? I like reading Kripke’s Naming and Necessity over and over, but it deals with one particular problem.
Wittgenstein is often mentioned as someone who could be read in 200 years, but they’re so focused on solving contemporary frontline research problems, they actually think they can solve them like scientific problems. It’s harder to see that they’re building stuff that will last beyond our current historical constellation of problems. That’s the reason I prefer the continental tradition for all its weaknesses. There’s more of a sense of how to do that.
MATT
I’m not an editor, nor do I have a publishing house to grant you a contract, but a possible book title for you, Graham, is In Defense of Vagueness. For Whitehead, vagueness is a very important philosophical concept.
You mentioned presentational immediacy earlier, and how these philosophies of human access think that’s our only mode of relation to the non-human world. Whitehead talks about causal efficacy, or instead of sense perception, bodily reception, where we’re vaguely inheriting these energetic processes, or prehending the environment around us, and that vagueness is the very basis of experience.
If we can’t thematize it, and we can’t talk directly in a precise way about it, we still have to acknowledge it. Otherwise we’re deceiving ourselves with the clarity and distinctness of presentational immediacy and leaving out the massive basis of our existential experience.
So if analytic philosophy is not even recognizing one of the fundamental background realities of conscious thought, to have left out… I don’t want to put a percentage on it, but let’s say it’s 90% of our experience, that’s a major problem.
I have a lot of respect for analytic philosophers, and I’m often intimidated arguing with them because they’re very sharp. But at the same time, if philosophy is captured by that method, I would prefer we call it something else. Let’s call it logical analysis. Philosophy isn’t just logical analysis.
Whitehead says deduction is an important tool, and he was quite skilled at logical analysis. Even Russell would say, when they worked on the Principia, that he was relying on Whitehead to tell him what to do next, and then he’d go and do the calculations, and then, “Okay, now what do I do, Alfie?” But Whitehead could see beyond that. He’s unique as a figure who can speak across or beyond that divide.
He has a funny line in a letter later in his life, when he was already at Harvard, I believe. He refers to Russell, who was still a friend of his, and Wittgenstein too, who he says was “insufferable” (Whitehead’s words) to be around. He calls Russell and Wittgenstein and the other analytic philosophers “bright boys,” right? But they don’t have a deep penetrating insight into the nature of existence, human or otherwise.
GRAHAM
I’m a hardliner when it comes to the etymological meaning of “philosophia.” It’s not wisdom. It’s not knowledge. It’s love of wisdom.
Yes, there are dialogues where it seems like Plato is offering knowledge as the alternative to doxa, but that’s not really what happens in the dialogues. Socrates never comes up with a successful definition of anything.
So when people complain about negative theology and so forth, I’m left cold, because you learn a lot from negative theology. Pseudo-Dionysius has this wonderful passage on the Trinity, whether you believe in the Trinity or not, where he compares it to a house where you go in and there are three lamps, but there’s only one light, and you can’t tell which part of the light is from which lamp. Beautiful metaphor. It offers something of cognitive value.
The idea that everything’s either knowledge or it’s worthless is wrong. Human cognition leaves out, Matt estimated 90%, and I think that’s probably true. We downplay aesthetic appreciation, we downplay rhetorical ability, we downplay intuition, what’s now called emotional intelligence. This kind of knowing your way around things is actually a bigger part of our cognitive ecologies than explicit knowledge.
As I’ve argued in a couple of publications, or more than a couple, there are only two kinds of knowledge, really. You can reduce a thing downward or reduce it upward. If someone asks what water is, you can either say it’s H2O, or you can say water quenches thirst and allows plants to grow. Both are good answers. They increase human knowledge. But they’re far from exhausting what water is. Water is more than its parts, and it’s less than its current effects, or maybe more than its current effects, however you want to say it.
So I think Whitehead is a wise person, as wise as a philosopher can be. He’s a philosopher, not a sophist, but he has a broader sense of what philosophy is supposed to do. You can see this in his historical insights.
I love that part in the Lucien Price dialogues. There are so many nuggets of wisdom in there. Lucien Price asks, “Do you see any hope for humanity?” And he says, “Only the appearance of a half dozen or so,” he says “great men,” which is no longer politically correct, so let’s say great humans. Lucien Price asks, “Do you see six of these people on the horizon?” And he says, “They don’t appear on the horizon. They appear in our midst and are not at once recognized.”
That shows an insight into human affairs that you don’t always hear from these bright boys.
A bright boy is often someone very good at calculating quickly. But there’s a reason philosophers tend to be old people. There are only a few exceptions in history, Schelling, Duns Scotus, Hume. Heidegger once said Pascal was a great mathematician at 20. But you philosophize with your whole being, not just your intellect. That’s why life experience and wisdom are usually an important part of it.
Whitehead did his best work in his 60s, that’s why, I think.
RAHUL
Yeah, no doubt.
I want to get into this big debate you both probably would have between objects and relations, which is certainly where the biggest divergences are. But before that, the book that really influenced me was the short one, An Introduction to Object-Oriented Ontology, from 2018. A part I really enjoyed was this notion of a “flat ontology.” I don’t know if you’ve read that book, Matt, or if you’re familiar with that notion, but perhaps we could spend some time discussing it.
I’m sure you’re repeating yourself here, Graham, but what is flat ontology?
GRAHAM
The sense in which I use the term is the sense in which Manuel DeLanda uses the term to talk about Deleuze and Guattari.
There’s an earlier use I know of from Roy Bhaskar, the critical realist philosopher of science. He uses it pejoratively. He treats empiricism as a flat ontology because it puts everything on the same flat level of accessibility to the senses, when Bhaskar is a realist, so he thinks there’s another layer of reality hiding beneath the empirical layer. So for him flat ontology is the bad guy.
DeLanda introduces it in a positive sense to mean, basically, that human thought isn’t anything ontologically special. We care about humans because we’re humans, and humans can do things that most other entities can’t. We can plan ahead, we can dream, all those things.
So flat ontology for me is a starting point, not an ending point. Sometimes people say Triple O can’t make distinctions between different kinds of objects because it’s a flat ontology. No. For me it’s just a starting point: you can’t start by assuming there are two kinds of things in the universe, A, human thought, and B, everything else, which is what people assume in contemporary philosophy, analytic or continental.
So we start by saying you can’t make any prior decisions about that. You have to look at each entity in its own right. That’s what flat ontology means for us.
And I would consider Whitehead largely a flat ontologist in that sense. I guess God has a different status, even though God also prehends things. God is also the location of the eternal objects, and so that makes God different from everything else for Whitehead.
But you certainly wouldn’t say human thought has a special status compared to animal thoughts, or compared to inanimate interactions for Whitehead. That’s my favorite aspect of him.
MATT
Flat ontology for me is… I didn’t know about Bhaskar’s use of it as a critique of empiricism, flattening everything into sense perception. But I’ve always understood it more in the sense that Whitehead meant it.
He says God is supposed to be the chief exemplification of this account of the concrescence of an actual entity, and yet there are certain special differences between God’s concrescence and all other concrescences. They occur in reverse order, where God’s conceptual prehension of eternal objects precedes God’s physical prehension of the world’s response to that conceptual prehension.
Although there are points in Process and Reality where he says you could also understand a finite actual occasion as beginning with its own conceptual prehensions, because it’s inheriting God’s conceptual apprehension in its physical pole. Things get twisted when you get into the weeds.
But it seems to me Whitehead’s aim was to have a flat ontology. His aim was to describe one type of entity that would include human beings and bumblebees and H2O molecules and God and everything else in between. Whether or not he succeeds, for reasons we’ve both mentioned already, is another question, but he’s certainly attempting that.
People might misread “flat ontology” ethically or morally or aesthetically, as if it means you can’t have any scale of beauty or value. I don’t think it means that. In Whitehead there are various intensities of experience, and he doesn’t think conscious experience is present in every actual occasion. It takes a certain context for consciousness to be realized in an actual entity. Those entities that are conscious are achieving a certain intensity of value (that nonetheless depends on the whole rest of the universe).
So I wouldn’t want flat ontology to be misunderstood as flattening all the differences we might want to mark between different types of entities. But in general, as a metaphysical account of what there is, a flat ontologist would say human thought is on par with any other type of relation. We need to understand human thought and human sensation in the same way we understand any other relation, at least at the level of the metaphysics, in terms of general categories.
RAHUL
All right, so now it’s a good place to get into this paper where you, Graham, flesh out your critique of Whitehead. My understanding is, as an object-oriented ontologist, you see a place for self-contained substances. And your reading of Whitehead would be that he’s a relational reductionist, in the sense that there’s nothing more to an object other than its relations.
But I don’t want to put words in your mouth. If you could outline your critique of Whitehead, that’d be great.
GRAHAM
Yeah. Matt already stated what Whiteheadians usually say in response, that in concrescence there’s an element of privacy. That’s more of a can of worms.
The main mission of that article was to show that what Whitehead is doing on one side and what Bergson and Deleuze are doing on the other side is not the same project. I was motivated to do that because of the Deleuzians’ efforts to take Whitehead as one of them. And I said, if you look at the philosophy of time, that’s not the case at all.
In Whitehead, you can speak of individual occasions, individual moments. Whereas in the Bergsonian tradition, you can’t speak that way. There are no cinematic frames of time. Time is a continuum. It’s not made of occasions. The same is true of Aristotle, though Aristotle and Bergson aren’t usually seen as allies.
That’s how Aristotle treats time in the Physics. It’s continuous. There’s no definite number of instants of time in any stretch of time. You can keep cutting it up infinitely. That would not be the case for Whitehead, or any of the occasionalists. Time will be made of instants.
That’s why I have “school X” and “school Y” in that paper. Those are arbitrary names I gave to groups. Both emphasize change. Aristotle emphasizes change too. You could read Aristotle’s entire philosophy as a way of doing justice to motion by contrast with Plato.
Triple O is also a philosophy of change. We just don’t think change comes for free. Change involves work, and it doesn’t always happen. So time itself can be purely superficial from the standpoint of Triple O. Time can be the realm of shifting accidents that don’t change anything underneath.
That’s one place where I feel like I have something in common with Badiou. I don’t agree with him on a lot, but he talks about how most of what we go through are mediocre situations where nothing’s really happening. Once in a while there’s an event that really changes something.
I think the disagreement there is that for Badiou an event happens when you make direct contact with the truth. Triple O doesn’t allow direct contact with the truth. We allow direct contact with a reality, and a reality can always be interpreted in multiple ways.
In Badiou’s case, the only political events are ones that express the communist invariance. He’s free to be a communist, but it makes your interpretation of history predictable. It means communism will never be surprised, it will only be surprised by the excellent events of which it alone is capable.
Whereas there could be political events on the center or the right that teach us something about politics that aren’t the kinds of things a Marxist would approve of. I could come up with examples. The American Revolution probably had some, even if they weren’t ones the left would celebrate.
So for me direct contact with a truth is not something that happens. There’s always ambiguity connected with truth. But I agree with him that things happen when you punch holes in mediocre everyday situations and make contact with something different.
MATT
Yeah. I’ll circle back to the philosophy of history and the event and how that might relate to Whitehead’s philosophy of history.
But on the relational reductionism thing, and the issue of time, and how Bergson and Deleuze are different from Whitehead, I think you’re right. But I wonder if it’s fair, because it almost sounds like you’re saying, well… a Bergsonian would say Whitehead has fallen prey to the cinematographic fallacy that Bergson articulates in Creative Evolution, where time is reduced to a series of snapshots.
But I think Whitehead makes a distinction in Process and Reality between the genetic process, or the becoming of an actual occasion, which he says is not in physical time and it’s not an instant. Rather, space and time, the metrical understanding of space and time, are excreted by the relations among actual occasions. Spacetime is a secondary emergent phenomenon.
And what’s going on internal to an actual occasion can’t be thought of as the same kind of time physicists measure with clocks.
Whitehead borrows a lot from Bergson. They had deep mutual respect. Whitehead has a sense of continuity as something that has to be constructed. There’s a “becoming of continuity,” not “a continuity of becoming.”
But he does affirm what Bergson calls duration as something different from clock time: but Whitehead locates duration internal to concrescence. I’ve seen comparisons where Bergson’s understanding of becoming as duration, as a qualitative multiplicity, is not that distinct from what Whitehead is trying to do with actual occasions that inherit from one another to give rise to measurable time.
So do you think Whitehead is falling prey to the cinematographic fallacy, or is he doing something else with concrescence?
GRAHAM
I wouldn’t call it a fallacy. People always call positions they disagree with fallacies. In metaphysics you have to make decisions sometimes, and you pay a price no matter what your decision is.
Try to imagine Bergson using the term “actual occasion.” It wouldn’t work, because for him the continuity of time and becoming is a primitive. It’s something he takes as underlying everything else, whereas I wouldn’t say that’s the case for Whitehead.
Part of why this comes up is Isabelle Stengers’s book on Whitehead. It’s had a lot of impact. It’s heavily Deleuzian, and I think she’s had a lot of influence here. Latour sometimes even saw himself as allied to Deleuze in a way I don’t think he was.
Latour was very influenced by Stengers in his self-conception. It’s funny: he got first place in the agrégation in philosophy in France in the early 70s, but then his career took that turn toward anthropology. He stopped reading history of philosophy very much, and anytime he was unsure about something, he relied heavily on Stengers as his walking encyclopedia. She’s a scientist, but she also knows the history of philosophy quite well.
A lot of what I wrote was aimed at her interpretation, which I think is wrong, as good as her book is on Whitehead. Bergson and Deleuze are on a different wavelength from Whitehead, and actually from Latour. I appreciate the attempt to read continuity inside concrescence, but for me Bergson and Deleuze treat becoming as primitive in a way it’s not for Whitehead. And as you said, there’s a becoming of continuity, not a continuity of becoming.
So there is more of a cinematographic model in Whitehead, though I wouldn’t call it a fallacy. I think it’s every bit as right as Bergson’s.
You can also read about how Russell began to hate Bergson more and more, and he embraced the cinematographic view. He says a man is not the same man from one instant to the next, even if the police swear to his identity.
There’s a great book on the Bergson-Einstein debate by Jimena Canales called The Physicist and the Philosopher that I strongly recommend. She dug into the historical archives on that debate. Anyway, I got off into the forest somewhere. I can’t remember your original question.
RAHUL
There are a few questions coming up, but if I could backtrack for those of us who aren’t experts: could you briefly outline what you see as the difference between Bergson and Deleuze, how they make becoming primitive, and then what you think Whitehead’s position is?
GRAHAM
Well, if you go back to Aristotle’s Physics… I should say I recently published a new book called Waves and Stones. The whole book is about the opposition of discreteness and continuity. I began the book with Aristotle, even though he bores a lot of people. He shouldn’t.
It occurred to me while researching that Aristotle’s philosophy, in a way, is based on the opposition between the continuous and the discrete. Most contemporary philosophers seem to require that one of those be real and the other be derivative. These days it’s usually that becoming is real and discreteness is derivative.
If you treat Physics and Metaphysics as Aristotle’s two central books, Physics is all about the continuous and the Metaphysics is all about the discrete. The Metaphysics is about individual substances, which are discrete from each other, and the Physics is about the continuum.
Aristotle defines the continuum as something that has no definite number of parts. You can cut it up however you want. How many numbers between 0 and 100? No definite number. Just cut it up however you want.
Aristotle thought this about time and space. Time and space are continuous. You can cut them up into as many as you want. Motion too. That’s how he tries to refute Zeno: there’s no definite number of halfway points between you and the door, or between Achilles and the tortoise.
There are two exceptions for Aristotle. One is individual substances. The more surprising one is qualitative becoming, because he says that doesn’t happen continuously. A river can wear away a stone for a long time and nothing happens, and suddenly a chunk breaks off the stone. That he thinks is discontinuous.
Then you get other philosophers who treat one side as fundamental. In Islamic occasionalism, discreteness is all there is. I wouldn’t say Whitehead goes that far. In European occasionalism too, discrete moments aren’t connected; individual things aren’t connected; they’re connected through God.
Bergson comes back in the late 19th century and says time is basically a continuum. He makes allowance for the discrete through the idea that our practical activity has to cut up the world into individual units, but he thinks that’s human-produced. I’m aware of the paradox, I just don’t like his solution, because he makes the human mind the source of the cutting into discrete units.
Deleuze is on Bergson’s page there. Becoming is a key term in Deleuze; discreteness is not. Philosophers claim to account for both sides, otherwise they wouldn’t sleep at night thinking they’ve solved everything, but that doesn’t mean they do.
I say this about Heidegger, for instance, that he thinks he has a philosophy of time. He actually doesn’t. One of my more controversial claims. What he means by time is not what time really means.
What he means by time is that there’s a threefold structure even of an instant. Even if there’s a frozen moment, you can analyze it in terms of thrownness and projection—past, present, future. His analysis still works for a frozen instant. Bergson would be aghast. Bergson would say you can’t break time into an individual instant. Heidegger never says that.
Heideggerians assume his threefold temporality is the ground for clock time, therefore it is time. No, he never does that work. So Heidegger is not a philosopher of time. He’s closer to the occasionalists, I’d say.
It’s Bergson and Deleuze in the 20th century who are the real philosophers of time, and also Levinas, because Levinas borrows from Bergson. Levinas criticizes Heidegger’s time as frozen in the present, which I think is right. For Levinas the Other is futuricity, the surprise we get.
I’m talking too much. Matt’s so polite he’s never going to interrupt me. So I’ll stop.
MATT
No, your treatment of Aristotle is very interesting, and I look forward to reading Waves and Stones. I have a colleague named Jack Bagby whose dissertation was on Aristotle, and he’s also a Bergsonian, and his reading dissolves all my cheap shots at Aristotle as just a substance thinker.
It’s also about the Greek language. Ancient Greek is much more dynamic than the English translations, which are often tortured with these hyphenates, like reading Heidegger in English.
But in any event, I think one issue with Whitehead versus Bergson and Deleuze, the French processualists, is that Whitehead says at the beginning of Process and Reality that he’s trying to save Bergson, William James, and John Dewey from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which has rightly or wrongly been applied to their thought.
Whitehead elsewhere says he disagrees with Bergson’s idea that the intellect inevitably falsely spatializes time. Whitehead thinks the intellect can be reformed. We can come up with different categories so as to allow us to think becoming faithfully, in a way that wouldn’t falsely spatialize it, or reduce it to signs, or to a practical tool for intervening and controlling the world, in the way Bergson thinks the intellect inevitably does.
So it’s ultimately whether you think the intellect can be reformed. Whitehead thinks so. He wants an understanding of individuals, because the intellect seems to need entities to think clearly about anything. He wants to arrive at an analysis of entities that are also occasions, without dismissing creative advance as the most accurate general statement about reality, that it is creativity.
But he also wants to justify how scientific knowledge is possible. How is accurate measurement possible? There’s a whole part of Process and Reality where he’s trying to show how his scheme still allows physicists to mathematize nature.
He out-contextualizes whatever knowledge physics gains by—to put it in Whitehead’s terms—saying the physical pole analyzed by physicists gets swallowed up within the mental pole, the full concrescence, which exceeds whatever physics comes up with when it tries to map everything into spacetime. There’s much more than spacetime to reality for him.
So for me that’s the difference: can the intellect be reformed? Whitehead thinks so.
RAHUL
That’s a good point.
Can I ask, just to be really precise? In a simple way, my understanding of Triple O is that it’s an Aristotelian way of looking at reality, saying there are self-contained substances that we need to give ontological respect, independent of their relations and whatnot.
So from a Whiteheadian perspective, can we allow self-contained substances?
MATT
Yeah. I mean, when I was a graduate student, the very word “substance” made my skin crawl. I think because I was just so on team process. But instead of having allergic reactions to words, it’s important to think.
Whitehead has an account of substance. The actual entity is his version of substance. It’s different, of course, from how Graham understands substance. But he hasn’t done away with substances. He’s known as a process philosopher and he emphasizes creative becoming, but in a letter, I forget where, he says the first title he had for Process and Reality was Extension and Reality. He wasn’t necessarily thinking of himself as the “process guy.”
There’s a way of understanding this phase in concrescence where the subject-superject undergoing concrescence achieves a novel perspective on the past universe that’s unique, never occurred before like that. That private moment of self-enjoyment is, to my mind, an attempted translation of what Graham means by withdrawal. As with any translation, something is lost.
But I think there is a way, as a Whiteheadian, to account for what you’re doing in Triple O, because it’s important to maintain some kind of privacy. It might not be adequate to the emphasis you want to place on substance and individuality, but it’s there. Whitehead has various ways of making that distinction.
But I’m curious to hear your response. I know you’ve heard these rebuttals from Whiteheadians for decades now.
GRAHAM
I’d say the biggest difference is that Whitehead was deeply influenced by British empiricism. It’s one of the pre-Kantian strands he wants to bring back into philosophical dialogue.
You could try to make the argument that actual entities are his version of substance, but what disappears compared to Aristotle is the substance-accident distinction, just like it disappears in Hume. Because there you can’t really distinguish those. The thing is equal to all its properties, all its prehensions at any given moment.
For me, no. A thing has a certain endurance. It doesn’t have to endure long, but you can have a core that supports accidental properties or relations that don’t really matter to the thing.
There’s a sense in which if I were speaking to you from my native Iowa rather than Long Beach, I’d still be the same person. That’s arguable, because Egypt changed me, but I wouldn’t say it changes me into a totally different thing.
MATT
That substance-accident distinction not being possible in Whitehead has me really thinking. I appreciate that. I have to go back to the drawing board now.
RAHUL
Sorry, what is the substance-accident distinction? I’m sure some of us don’t know either.
GRAHAM
Sure. Aristotle would tell us that Socrates-happy and Socrates-sad are still both Socrates. So in a sense his happiness or sadness aren’t part of his essence. He can be happy one day and sad the next and he’s still Socrates.
Then there are philosophies, and I take Whitehead to be one of them, where you can’t really make that distinction. It’s not really the same actual entity, except maybe derivatively. You can say there are certain features you can extract from happy Socrates and sad Socrates that resemble each other.
That’s a typical move of British empiricism. British empiricism is skeptical of the idea that a thing can be separate from its public qualities. Hume talks about an object as a bundle of qualities, and the self as a bundle of perceptions. There’s nothing deeper than the qualities, or deeper than the perceptions, that endures. That’s Whitehead’s debt to British empiricism.
RAHUL
Yeah, that makes sense. What you’re saying is, for Hume, an apple… there really isn’t an apple, it’s just whatever the shape is, all of these properties we give it, and the impressions we have from it.
A final question: I don’t know where you are at with panpsychism, Matt. I don’t even know if you’ve begun to identify as a panpsychist. But perhaps you could briefly share your view on panpsychism, and then Graham could respond.
MATT
Okay, as a schematic way of starting: I’ve suggested there might be four main ontological positions on the table right now: physicalism, dualism, panpsychism, and idealism. If those are the four choices, and maybe there are others, but if those are the four, I’m a panpsychist.
But within panpsychism there are analytic philosophers like Philip Goff and Galen Strawson who articulate it in a way I find problematic.
Whitehead never uses the term panpsychism. He doesn’t use panexperientialism either, which David Ray Griffin coined to distinguish the process approach. Because for Whitehead, experience is a technical term. It’s not the same as what we mean by psyche, soul, or consciousness. For Whitehead, the vast majority of experience in the universe is not conscious and is nothing like sense perception.
Well, it’s something like sense perception, but not in the way Hume would think of sense perception, more like Locke would think of it (because he sometimes speaks as if we perceive ideas in the world).
But of the options on the table, if those are the four, panpsychism seems to be… and this is almost a branding exercise, which is embarrassing to admit, but the history of ideas requires it… if you want your ideas to be heard and taken seriously, you need a compelling way to communicate them.
So I’ve tended to be on team panpsychism, but I’m also a close ally of the idealists.
And just to go back for a second to the personal identity and individuality issue: I’ve studied the German idealists closely, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the romantics. It’s hard for me to give up the sense of the I, or this self-consciousness. I’m not a philosopher of human access, but I still think there’s something to account for there that Whitehead doesn’t do a very good job accounting for. He has an account of consciousness, but there’s something I need the German idealists to help me think that Whitehead doesn’t really help me think.
So I’m with the idealists on some questions, but I more or less fall on the panpsychist side because I’m worried about the human access issues we’ve been talking about.
From my point of view, most idealists end up… even if they reference a mind-at-large, they still keep the human special. The human mind has some unique place in the universe. There’s something interesting about human minds, but in metaphysics I want to generalize beyond that specialness.
But I could rule out dualism and physicalism. So, hopefully that helps situate it.
I remember the first time I heard of Bernardo Kastrup. He had written an article years ago called “The Threat of Panpsychism,” and that got my attention. I responded, and the difference I articulated there was basically the monism-pluralism distinction.
Panpsychism, while there can be reference to a world-soul, is a pluralistic approach, whereas idealism tends to be monistic.
RAHUL
Yeah, that’s fair.
GRAHAM
My position is pretty close to that. You could probably call me a panexperientialist. I’m glad panpsychism is catching on, because it’s better than the other positions. It’s stirring things up.
It’s remarkable to see it catching on in analytic philosophy, which is the last place you’d expect it, with Goff, Strawson, and David Chalmers even before that.
My only objection is that it maintains dualism’s position of thinking consciousness is so important that either we hoard it for this special entity called humans, or we put it everywhere. What if it’s interesting, but it’s just not that important cosmically?
It’s something that can be built, like an airplane can be built. Since we are conscious, we’re especially interested in it. But we don’t know it’s the most interesting thing in the universe. Why should it be half of ontology? That’s a symptom of modern philosophy: human thought on one side, everything else on the other.
One symptom is how horrible modern philosophy has been on animals. There aren’t many good theories. And this goes before modernity. Aristotle has the commonsensical distinction between plants, animals, and humans. Aquinas complicates it by splitting animals into those that can move and those that can’t, like shellfish.
Then you’ve got Heidegger in the 1929–30 course: worldless, world-poor, world-forming. I think it’s disappointing. He doesn’t clarify those, and he doesn’t distinguish animals and plants.
We’ll know we’ve moved beyond modern philosophy when we get a really good philosophy of animals. My favorite so far, still not adequate, is Plessner. He says plant, animal, human might not be the big jumps. The big jumps might be from single cell to multi-celled, and from non-central nervous system to central nervous system. Jellyfish to octopus is a huge jump because of that.
So I’m looking for alternative approaches from the ground up. Philosophy repeats commonsensical distinctions too often. It uses terms like instinct, nobody really knows what that means. And the animals-humans distinction lumps so many different animals together. Are you going to treat a dolphin the same as a bacterium? That’s impossible.
There have to be big jumps before humans. Yes, we do things animals can’t, but there have to be some big jumps before that. Panpsychism makes it too easy for itself by saying it’s just a slight difference of degree all the way up, because it’s not always a difference of degree. There are jumps that are bigger than others.
RAHUL
Wonderful.
Also, I think this is your criticism of the Ljubljana school, where the subject is this ontological catastrophe, and you say it’s not this massive negativity. That was interesting. I didn’t think you would sing praise to panpsychism. I thought you’d be opposed to it, given your view, but that’s an interesting way to put it.
This has been really fun. Thank you both. I’ve got one little thing, not really a question, more like asking for a teaser into Waves and Stones. If you, Graham, want to stay you can, but unless there’s anything else, I think this is a nice place to conclude. It’s got this great subtitle, “On the Ultimate Nature of Reality.”
GRAHAM
Well, that came from the marketing department, or my editor at Penguin. The original subtitle was “On the Continuous and the Discrete in Reality.”
MATT
That’s not going to sell as many copies.
GRAHAM
No, it’s not going to sell. This works better. They said, “Make it ballsier.” That was a direct quote.
RAHUL
Nice. So generally, what are you exploring in that book? I’ve already pre-ordered it. I think it’s going to be in February for the Australian region.
GRAHAM
This is one of those books I wrote because I wanted to read it, and I found out there was no such book. I wanted to read a book on the history of the continuous-discrete problem, because it goes all the way back to Aristotle at the latest. History of mathematics discovered the continuum early, and Zeno’s paradoxes depend on the opposition.
Then I realized it’s in a lot of places. It’s in the fight between Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins about evolutionary theory: punctuated equilibrium or gradual Darwinian change. It’s in the dispute between relativity and quantum theory: quantum theory is discrete jumps, relativity is curvature of spacetime.
It’s also in Thomas Kuhn’s theory of science as discontinuous paradigm shifts.
Then I got into Ibn Khaldun’s theory of history. He’s talking about generational decline, where each generation is a little more corrupt than the preceding one, and dynasties collapse. And he talks about the difference between the steppe and the city: the barbarian steppe versus walled cities.
Cities corrupt barbarians by making them crave luxuries. Eventually you get Kublai Khan, barbarian blood but a huge fan of Chinese civilization, basically became Chinese, became the emperor of China. Then you’ve got the opposite, Tamerlane, who was essentially the civilian turned barbarian. Leader of Samarkand, but decided to turn the rest of the cities into continuous steppe by destroying them repeatedly. I compare Kublai Khan and Tamerlane in that chapter.
There are other chapters too, other theories in relation to the continuous and the discrete. I think it’s a book that needed to be written. I couldn’t find one that crossed multiple disciplines like this, so I made myself write it. That’s the origin story.
RAHUL
Can’t wait to read that.
It looks really interesting. In the blurb you say this paradox is fundamental to reality itself. Looking forward to reading it, and maybe I’ll organize another podcast to discuss it. It has a chapter on Aristotle and a chapter on Bergson, so some of what we’ve talked about today comes up.
And I do want to ask: how in the hell do you write so much? Any writing tips for those of us trying to even get a blog post out?
GRAHAM
To simplify: I was a terrible procrastinator in graduate school. Then I got to Egypt, and it’s very sunny. It improves your mood.
I was in a situation facing a two-year contract, maybe renewed once, and I wasn’t going to go beyond that because we had a tenure quota per department and we were already over quota in philosophy due to a past controversy. Then the provost introduced something called floating tenure, available regardless of department, but you had to blow the doors down with quantity.
So I decided I’m going to do that. And I should say I was hired to do sports writing in graduate school. That was my first experience of having to write very fast on deadline, in an interesting way, to keep the job. I started applying those techniques to philosophy writing.
And I do my best thinking when I’m writing. If I want to think, I need to write. That’s why I write. I want to think.
RAHUL
Wonderful. And you write the books you want to read. OK, I’ll let you both go.
GRAHAM
That was great.
MATT
Yeah, this was fun.
GRAHAM
If you’re ever in LA, do drop me a line.
MATT
I will.
GRAHAM
To continue the conversation.
MATT
Absolutely.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?