Speculative Realism and the Chemical Object

A few weeks ago I became interested in the subject of speculative realism and what the speculative realists might have to contribute to the philosophy of chemistry. At first sight, it seems not too much: speculative realists take the latest French philosophical fashions as their model, and some of the self-important pompous braying-ass ness that are all too often found in French philosophical thought seem to be much in evidence here (the writing style is dominated by superlatives, but I think I can make up my own mind here).

Then on second thought, speculative realism seems involved in travelling from the work of Latour more or less back to earth. If one's starting point is intertwined with the world-weary

'turns' of Bruno Latour, I somehow think it will take a while before one lands back on earth, but it's a journey well worth following, if even from a distance.

Philosophy of chemistry tends to sit more in the analytic tradition, but it has a couple of problems inside this analytic tradition where some thoughts from speculative realism might just help.

For instance, philosophy of chemistry has a large ontological problem, which has been keeping me busy for a few years now. I think I'm close to a solution, and no, it's not a solution that even remotely resembles speculative realism (it has more to do with the notion of encapsulation of properties inside an iterated Kantian object, but maybe more about that in a later post). But there is something intuitively attractive for a philosopher of chemistry about a philosophical position that has the following to say about reality, for instance by Graham Harman in The Speculative Turn [1]:

Radical philosophy is never weird enough, never sufficiently attentive to the basic ambiguity built into substance from Aristotle onward. Radical philosophies are all reductionist in character. Whether they reduce upward to human access or downward to more fundamental layers, all say that a full half of reality is nothing more than an illusion generated by the other half. Objects by contrast are the site of polarization, ambiguity, or weirdness. (p.24)

There is a strange connection here with what I've always found attractive in chemistry over physics: the green lab coats that some people in our lab had, coloured with self-made pigments of course, the dabbling with stuff like thermite in front of a classroom full of astounded kids, the strong coffee, the home brew and distillation (the latter not strictly speaking legal), the fact that, as my own university told me on their careers day, with a chemistry degree one could do everything: they had a graduate who'd started a bicycle repair shop, one that started a mini brewery, and oh, some went into research. All were life-long learners. If speculative realism is somewhere capable of capturing that, there is a lot of French philosophy I'd be prepared to put up with.

[1] Graham Harman, On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy, in Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism re.Press, Melbourne, 2011)