On Speaking Matter, Boundary, and Place

Abstract

Philosophy must learn to hear the speaking of matter.-John McCumber, On Philosophy, 229IJohn McCumber's On Philosophy: Notes from Crisis opens with tracing the multiple crises from which philosophy suffers today back to the problem- atic presumption that certain human beings are unable to attain rational enlightenment because they lack the natural endowment to do so. The belief is these humans lack the capacity to accomplish effective self-legislation in keeping with the norms of pure reason, especially those formulated by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. McCumber points out that this belief in effect excludes sizeable segment of the human species, notably women and those considered savages by Kant, from membership in the Kingdom of Ends. Yet in the last half-century these same human beings have been clamoring from the four quarters of the earth to be heard: they have raised their voices, they have found their voices, where before under various colonialist regimes these voices were stifled and muted. This clamor has been multivocal. In addition to racial groups of every description, the chorus includes women from around the word-women who seek not only a different but an effective say in determining their own destinies.To this muilti-voiced body (in Fred Evans' phrase) McCumber brings new perspective. Arguing on the basis of certain understanding of how adequate bases of justification are to be found for scientific findings-an understanding emerging from the work of Thomas Kuhn and Arthur Fine-he proposes that in successful scientific experiment matter is allowed to speak: it forward with its own voice, to McCumber spots convergence between the way that matter is allowed to in science and how women's and subalterns' voices have begun to be heard in the contemporary world. In both cases, what was formerly considered mere brutematter, something debased and without intelligence, calls for an audience. In each instance, we have to do with the speaking of matter.A third circumstance of comparable dynamics is furnished by AA meetings, such as that described in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, where situation of brutal honesty encourages the intense articulation of the experience of hitting Bottom and of having no choice but that between life and death. In all three instances, an initial circumstance of lacking apposite concepts (and the words to signify them) leads to search for adequate expression in concepts (principles, universals, laws) that will illuminate situations otherwise characterized by confusion, loss, suffering, and disorientation. McCumber sees the process of seeking conceptually clarified insight as parallel to, indeed as actually involving, the employment of reflective judgment in Kant's sense of the term.A moment ago I said that in McCumber's view matter comes forward with its own voice, to speak. This so to speak is at the heart of the issue: in what sense of matter can speaking happen? Is it literally matter that speaks, as Mc- Cumber sometimes implies provocatively?1 Or is the speaking metaphoric only, borrowing from matter certain force and density that is transferred to human speaking in its thrust and moment? In that case, what is from sheer matter would also be its weight, its being located below us (on the earth, in our bodies) such that we must out and up from it. I suspect that the distinction between literal and metaphoric that I have just invoked in order to construe Mc- Cumber's very strong claims reduces and simplifies the situation unduly, sorting things out too neatly for what McCumber really wants to say.What he wants to say is something more forceful and more alarming philo- sophically. If matter speaks, it speaks not with sense of voice but with its own kind of voice. For borrowed (or transferred) in this context entails be- ing modeled on the human voice taken as the only voice that counts as voice, as authentic, full-throated voice. …