CONTEMPORARY PLURALISM 1) DREYFUS AND KELLY'S ALL THINGS SHINING ALL THINGS SHINING is an ambitious book, it aims at helping

us to find meaning in our lives by way of a philosophically informed reading of some of the great classics of the Western Canon. It seeks to address a popular audience rather than a professional one: it has its roots in Heideggerian philosophy but the style is not that of academic prose and it uses examples taken from news items, the practice of sport, and readily available literary classics such as THE ODYSSEY, THE DIVINE COMEDY, and MOBY-DICK. It can be read without any major difficulty and with a great deal of pleasure, but it has the ambition of addressing the grand question of the search for meaning and for a life worth living in our contemporary world. This is a world that the authors, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, describe as "postmodern", "technological", and "nihlist": a world where the "shining things" have been lost, where we are subject to a crushing burden of choice without the guidance of an unquestioned framework of meaning, such as served as a foundation for life and its meaning in previous epochs. According to these authors the world was formerly a world full of intensity and meaning, "a world of sacred, shining things" (cf. the preamble ), which elicited moods of wonder and reverence and gratitude and openness. This is the explanation of the book's title. However the shining things are now long gone, and life has become permeated with moods of sadness and lostness, a purely personal affair to be managed by the plans and choices of the closed-off "autonomous" ego. The solution proposed is a reappropriation of Homer's polytheism, now understood to be a polytheism of moods, such as we can see the outlines of in MOBY DICK. An important part of this response is the necessity to cultivate a specific skill that can help us discern when we can or should let ourself be taken up in the moods we encounter (example: a nonviolent freedom march) and when we should resist and walk away (example: a Nazi rally): this skill they call "meta-poiesis". There is something very attractive about the ideas in this book: the pluralism of understandings of being, the polytheism of moods , meta-poiesis, a subjectivity of openness to the world and wonder at its shining things. But there are ambiguities that make one wonder (in the other sense of wonder) whether the book avoids the trap of romantic nostalgia. Its vocabulary is often nostalgic: "lure back" the gods, "uncover" the wonder, "reveal" the world. Also there is the danger of proposing merely a new postmodern theology, however philosophically distilled and sublimated. Here we can cite the suggestive slippage from "the shining things", index of a world charged with intensity and meaning, to the more theological sounding "sacred things", as if that were the same thing. But surely a life based on intensities, on moods and on meaning without any reference to the sacred is worth living. A last worry is that with their constant evocation of moods that attune a subject and reveal a world the authors seem to be stuck in what Quentin Meillassoux calls the "correlationist circle", unable to talk about the world outside its correlation with subjectivity and with a particular understanding of the world. It seems that Dreyfus and Kelly are aware of this problem and try to undercut their grand narrative of a succession of incommensurable understandings of being with a different model based on Heidegger's notion of a thing thinging. One example that Dreyfus gives in his lectures is that of the feast in the film BABETTE'S FEAST, a focal event that assembles or gathers together elements in a way that makes them shine, that brings them out at their best. The polytheism of moods would then be reinforced by a pluralism of things thinging, but this is left undeveloped in the book. Another trace of this attempt to maintain the grand narrative and to make room for other ways is the concept of marginal practices and the things that embody them. One dominant understanding of being is only a hegemonic rather than a totalitarian paradigm, and each epoch contains many other things, events, practices as marginal phenomena. This model has the further advantage of making change

conceivable. The other concept that merits developing is the notion of meta-poiesis which allows us to navigate between different moods and different understandings, tracing out our own individual path. As such, it would seem to be the pluralist virtue par excellence. Once again I would put this notion of metapoiesis in relation with the ability to engage in marginal practices and assemblings, being able to take things out of their stereotyped uses and set them thinging, thus producing change, and allowing communication between incommensurable understandings. Dreyfus and Kelly seem to have realised that they were in danger of expounding an epochal solipsism, and gave indications for a way of communicating across the barrier of incommensurability. Once again we see, as both Deleuze and Feyerabend have emphasised, that openness must precede (logically) closedness or we will never be able to get outside our framework. Finally, for a book whose message is pluralist its bibliography is surprisingly monist. There is no mention of such pluralist philosophers as Paul Feyerabend, Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, William Connolly, or Alain Badiou. 2) RORTY'S POLYTHEISM Rorty shares with Dreyfus and Kelly (in ALL THINGS SHINING) the notion of a secularized polytheism that rejects all attempts to commensurate the incommensurable as hegemonic power tactics. The desire to reinforce this polytheistic attitude by supplying it with an ontological basis such as panpsychism, or even Harmans polypsychism, seems both unnecessary and a mistake. As Guattari said before Being is politics. Rorty seems more thoroughgoing in his polytheism here: Once you become polytheistic, you will turn away not only from priests but from such priestsubstitutes as metaphysicians and physicistsfrom anyone who purports to tell you how things really are (http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/dickstein-pragmatism.html). We have seen in our analysis of Graham Harmans THE THIRD TABLE that he makes a great fuss of avoiding the dogmatic trap of giving physicists or humanists the status of priest-substitute, but that he himself does not refrain from telling us how things really are. Harmans OOO is metaphysical in this sense and the OOOxian is the new priest-substitute for a generation that has forgotten, or never knew, the struggles to liberate us from such an ontotheological metaphysical stance. The problem is not so much should one be metaphysical or not? but more one of pluralism, multiplicity, polytheism, becoming, anarchy as incorporated in our modes of acting, perceiving, feeling and thinking. Its a question of typology rather than content, of what Deleuze calls the Image of thought. So Deleuze can say unashamedly that he is a pure metaphysician (AV: Are you a nonmetaphysical philosopher? GD: No, I feel I am a pure metaphysician) because he is concerned with a meta-competence of navigating between the unities and multiplicities of our world. The question is, as Andrew Pickering explains, one of a different type of ontology than the ontotheological one, up to and including its object-oriented avatars. Dreyfus with his insistence that Heidegger is a realist with respect to modern physics seems to be an incomplete polytheist as he does not wish to extend his pluralism to physics, preferring a strange mix of Kuhn (incommensurability) and Kripke (rigid designator as recommensuration). He is however an advocate of incommensurability and paradigm-change both within the sciences, and between the scientific understanding as a whole and other types of understanding (Homeric, tragic, theological). With Harman, all this is forgotten (there is no such thing as a horizon, TOOLBEING, p155). Having thus radically de-worlded everything, Harman only has to wrestle with the problem of making sure that Kripkes rigid designation concerns the withdrawn real objects of his transcendental metaphysical realm. 3) DELEUZE AND POLYTHEISM In ALL THINGS SHINING, Kelly and Dreyfus, following Heidegger, talk about gathering to describe the coming together of practices in configurations of ways of being in the world: The practices have gathered throughout the history of the West to reveal these manifold ways the world

is (ATS, 223). This is not necessarily a monistic metaphysical term to describe a monolithic allencompassing structure that would correspond to a particular historical epoch. Dreyfus and Kelly in fact argue that there are always other practices on the margins, and that these marginal practices can sometimes come together, gather, in a new understanding of being that reveals a new way the world is. It is only a small leap to recognize that not only marginal practices, but full-blown alternative gatherings or traditions exist in every epoch this is the leap that they make whenever they espouse Heideggers thing-paradigm over and above his History of Being paradigm. The problem with ALL THINGS SHINING is that it is a good step in the direction of pluralism but it is not pluralist enough and that this is perhaps due to its heideggerian foundations. In comparing Heidegger to Whitehead, Steven Shaviro (in WITHOUT CRITERIA) condemns what he sees as Heideggers concern with retrieving the past where Whitehead is more concerned with the New. Heidegger begins with the endeavour to raise anew the question of the meaning of Being , Whitehead is not concerned with beginnings and origins but with the production of novelty. Dreyfus and Kelly repeat this nostalgic orientation towards the past in their slogan luring back the gods. The luring back is a monist gesture strangely inconsistent with the pluralist gesture of opening out to gods. It is monist because it violates the notion of incommensurability that they so timidly construct to describe the radical difference between understandings of being and then undo by postulating a continuity within the background assured by the presence of marginal practices that correspond to other understandings of being. Deleuze and Guattaris pluralist notion of agencements, usually translated as assemblages, could just as well be translated as "gatherings". Further, they often invoke minor practices that exist alongside the majority mode of organising practices and that operate outside its hegemony. Pickering too talks in terms of assemblages, and explicitly invokes a counter-hegemonic gestalt switch which would empower the marginal practices embodying a more open, non-dualist, ontology of becoming. Deleuze is firmly on the side of Whitehead in the production vs retrieval contrast: the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness). (DIALOGUES II p.vi). Deleuzes affinity with polytheism can be seen in his repeated references to the non-personal powers that traverse us. Deleuzes pluralism can be seen as a form of polytheism. As Tim Clark remarks, Deleuzes ontology is a distinctly postmodern avatar of polytheism: a vision of multiple little divinities effecting random syntheses of differential elements within an immanent space of possibilities. However Deleuze prefers to speak of demons rather than gods, as gods are too often used in a way that is too codified and too territorialised: Demons are different from gods, because gods have fixed attributes, properties and functions, territories and codesWhat demons do is jump across intervals, and from one interval to another. (DIALOGUES II p.30). 4) LISTS VERSUS ENCOUNTERS Pluralism as a philosophy suggests new ways of of thought and of practice putting more emphasis on diversity and exchange, on interaction and transversality, than is customary for our dominant modes, which remain disappointingly monist. The aim is to favorise freer and more creative approaches by liberating us from relations of domination and authority. However, paradoxically enough, our contemporary pluralists seem to produce convergent or complementary analyses, but in practice remain quite solitary and compartmentalised. The question that we can ask is how to pass from a thought of plurality to a pluralist practice? how can we pluralise the pluralists? In a thoughtful article, entitled How can we speak about contemporary philosophers, that the French philosopher Jean-Clet Martin published on his blog Strass de la Philosophie he meditates on the lack of properly philosophical, and not just journalistic, lists of contemporary philosophers. He sees in this state of affairs not simply the external sign of the fact that a philosopher busy creating

his work has little time to or interest in reading his contemporaries but also and more essentially a sign of the untimeliness of philosophical work, whose inspirations are constituted of singular encounters that are refractory to the aim of objectivity and of generality inherent in the notion of such a list. For Martin this lack in a philosopher of a conceptual cartography including other contemporary philosophers as positive factors, and thus the absence of any real discussion and exchange, is not just a contingent matter, but is somehow a necessary condition of the act of intellectual creation One reason that I find this observation, which I take to be globally true, so disappointing is that it seems to be the case even for pluralist thinkers, who seem for the most part to ignore each other. As I have recounted elsewhere on this blog, I became a pluralist in 1972 when I read the first version of Paul Feyerabends AGAINST METHOD, which was initially published as an essay, and was expanded into a book several years later. As my philosophy department (at Sydney University) was dominated by Althusserians and Lacanians my years of study and teaching as a pluralist philosopher were quite lonely. When I discovered some translations of Deleuze, Lyotard, and Serres, I taught myself French to read their books, and later, in 1980,I came to France to attend the seminars of these three thinkers. The richness and the la beauty of their thought dazzled and inspired me, and I have never regretted my choice to take on French nationality and to establish my life here. However, I was disappointed to see that there was a gap between a rhetoric valorising multiplicity, transversality, going beyond binary oppositions and summary demarcations on the one hand, and on the other the persistence of practices of submission and of exclusion, of schools of thought and of consensual coteries. One had to be a Derridean or a Foucauldian or a Deleuzian etc, in the practice of that very exclusive disjonction that had been refuted by the theory. I was astonished to see, not as in Australia the pure and simple rejection of pluralism, but the practive of what I have called a monist pluralism, of which today Alain Badiou is a brilliant example. What was described and prescribed in theory was far from being applied in practice. Deleuze seems to constitute a partial exception to this rule. He regularly cited Michel Serres in his courses, and he consecrated two years of his seminar and a book to the work of Michel Foucault, who he mentioned in many of his other courses and books. He cited very favorably Lyotards DISCOURS, FIGURE, but to my knowledge made no allusion to his subsequent texts. He also cited Franois Chtelet and devoted a little book to him. Thus, Deleuze was able to make coincide locally the practice of lists and an openness to singular encounters. An amusing anecdote illustrating the lack of communication between philosophers comes to mind, dating from the period when I attended Deleuzes seminar on the cinema on Tuesdays and on Saturdays Serres class on multiplicities (which gave rise to the books ROME and GENSE). On Saturday I would hear an interpretation of the dispute between Bergson and Einstein favorable to Einsteins position from the point of view of a theory of time (this in Serres class on multiplicities), on Tuesday I would hear a discordant interpretation justifying Bergsons position (in Deleuzes class on time and cinema) in the name of the theory ofmultiplicities. This difference of interpretation and of evaluation was already amply treated in the previous published work of the two philosophers, without any explicit attempt by one to respond to the arguments of the other. A second anecdote, less amusing for me at the time: I was discussing the relation between spiritual practices and traditions and contemporary pluralist philosophy with Lyotard. I spoke of the relation between Buddhism and the Homeric cosmology described by Feyerabend (which he found to have important features in common with Ernst Machs general methodology). Lyotard found the comparison valid and interesting from the point of view of the relativisation of the unitary ego and of the dissolution of the foundations of knowledge and legitimation that we were going through both in philosophy and in society as a whole. Lyotard declared Jadore Feyerabend, and he added that in fact everything that he was saying at that time about the Hassidim (for example in JUST GAMING) went in the same direction, and that the Hassidim are perhaps the Buddhists of the Occident. Unfortunately I then tried to make a parallel with Deleuzes notion of the body

without organs and Lyotard totally rejected the concept, declaring that it was metaphysical, and that Deleuze gave too much importance to the signified. Lyotards pluralistic openness did not extend to Deleuzes pluralism. Nonetheless, it is Lyotard who a couple of years later, in a text published in TOMBEAU DE LINTELLECTUEL, gave a very admiring list grouping together Deleuze, Foucault, Levinas, Derrida, Serres and himself as thinkers of incommensurability and thus of pluralism. This was to combat the primacy given to consensus in the communicational philosophy influenced by Habermas. This pressure towards consensus, and so towards monism, as norm of thought continues today. In France I find that there are thinkers who permit us to struggle against this monist pressure: Franois Laruelle, Bernard Stiegler, and Bruno Latour. This is my short list, to which I would add Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kellys ALL THINGS SHINING and William Connollys work on pluralism (especially A WORLD OF BECOMING) and I would like to get these pluralists to take note of and to interact with each other. No doubt the thinkers on this list belong to my own personal intellectual cartography of singular encounters, but I think that they have a more general scope and potential impact. 5) CLOSED STRUCTURES OR OPEN MULTIPLICITIES I think that pluralism becomes interesting when it is not just an acknowledgement of a plurality of totalities but when it sees each totality as open and porous, and constituted as well of open and porous subpluralities. One of the consequences of this way of thinking is that totalities are not consituted by one sole synthesis, but by several different and conflicting operations of synthesis that may draw the boundaries in different ways. Another is that the subpluralities are in interaction inside a totality and between totalities. So I would distinguish a structuralist pluralism emphasising macroscopic wholes and closure, and a poststructuralist pluralism that completes this picture with a swarm of underlying interferences and interactions and hybridisations. This means that pluralists in this sense are ready to analyse innovations in terms of metaphor, transfer, translation, transport, transversality, etc and to break down all identities into multiplicitous components. My problem is that they only rarely incorporate these insights into their style of work. Deleuze and Guattari, with their idea of the rhizome and with their slogan pluralism is not just something you talk about its something you do (my words), made important gestures in this direction. But I think that more can and should be done. So I think that when these pluralists explain that closed totalities are hallucinatory or fantasmatic pseudo-entities (ie the opposite of what Levi Bryant tries to tout with his indebtedness to Luhmann and his notion of operational closure, which I am calling here structuralist pluralism)) with quantum tunnels and relativistic wormholes underlying and undermining their macro-structure, then they should not act like they were the only pluralists in the world. No Latours system is not born from some philosophical tabula rasa and he is wrong not to engage with past and present pluralists, and when he talks about Souriau and modes of existence he is doing misdirection in my eyes. Dreyfus and Kelly are wrong to talk about pluralism without discussing people like Deleuze and Feyerabend and Badiou who sometimes confirm sometimes contradict their analyses, and sometimes just plain go further along that path than they do. etc etc. 6) LARUELLE: NON-PHILOSPHY vs NON-STANDARD PHILOSOPHY I am ambivalent about non-philosophy and I find that it is only beginning to get interesting now that it has become non-standard philosophy. Even here sometimes I wonder What! all this conceptual creation and analysis to get to the idea that we are Future Christs who can use philosophy as materials without believing in its structural founding principle? I already knew that with Feyerabend and Deleuze and Jung over 30 years ago. Wittgenstein encouraged his disciples to quit philosophy and to take up some practically useful profession. Those who stayed behind got bogged down in exegesis and in linguistic analysis. Will non-philosophy win out over non-standard

philosophy and create a new scholasticism based on a performative contradiction? Will we see the rise of a lobby of "Laruelle scholars" who remain behind in the academic-bunker while talking about the Great Outdoors. In Laruelles own terms, we must not read him as yet another academic philosopher, but suspend his philosophical sufficiency and treat him as material for our own nonstandard philosophical activity. In his defence I would quote Lyotard from the end of LIBIDINAL ECONOMY where he makes this same objection to himself of an intellectual who teaches from inside the academy on the limits of the academy. Lyotard refuses the dualism and the implied notion that there is some good place to be, superior to all the compromised intensities. There is no right place to be, there is only being open to the intensities that we encounter in us and around us, and refining ourselves to become ever better as conductors of intensities (and I would add to become ever more open to free exchange of intensities). This would correspond to non-standard philosophy winning out over non-philosophy. This is one way of stating my own aim in these discussions of pluralist philosophers . One can only hope that this is the case for Laruelle and that with his turn to non-standard philosophy and with his increasing emphasis on the immanental that he is moving closer to the thoughts that I have defended under the name ofdiachronic ontologies, claiming that they are processual, pluralist, and immanental. Yet I am also sensitive that such an immanent thought must produce a leap inside ourselves (the multiple is not just something to describe, you must do it). So without judging on the empirical question of persons, I think it is useful to examine the questions: (1) when an academic philosopher thinks he is making the leap into immanence(remembering Deleuzes expression of making the movement or staying in reflection) is he deluding himself or is this, as both Deleuze and Guattari suggest, a real possibility. Is being critical and temporalising and democratic enough to make the leap? (2) when a non-academic thinker thinks he has made the leap, is he being over-confident in his intensities, or is he expressing and incarnating an important part of the immanental process? Anthony Paul Smith in a lecture on Laruelles Ethical Theory confirms the analysis of Laruelle as a pluralist: I wouldnt say that Laruelle is a relativist in some kind of recognisable Anglophone sensehes really a pluralist, though. Its an attempt to try to create a pluralising effect in thought, while still having this commonality that connects those pluralising things. (1.00.56-1.01.14). Smith gives another interesting talk on Laruelle and the Speculative Turn here. He makes much use of Louis Morelles paper on Speculative Realism. For some reason he keeps talking about chairs, but to align his talk with the example used in Harmans THE THIRD TABLE I will couch my summary in terms of tables. Smith gives the by now standard, but apparently still necessary, explanation of the non- in nonphilosophy as not so much an operator of negation as of relativisation and pluralisation. He cites the pluralism of mathematics (around 26minutes in) as a model of what non-philosophy is trying to do and talks about the pluralist claim of non-philosophy (27mins45s): Given an object more than one form of knowing is able to know it as such its a pluralist notion. This shatters philosophys monist Ur-doxa, negates its authoritarianism, and liberates lived experience. The aim is to free the actualised immanent identity from its transcendental conception (32mins). Actuals are projected by philosophy and circumscribed in closed concepts within a transcendence. Laruelle resolves the correlationist dilemma by seeing subject and object as projections of a third thing (37mins) the thing as it is radically immanent not to a concept or an idea but to itself as it is lived without life. For the example of the table (37mins50) you cant just say that it has no relation to subjectivity there is still some human element to the actuality of the table, there is still some mathematical actuality to what the table is (Note: in the original APS talks of the chair, I have substituted table). The identity of the table as radically immanent is what he is concerned with. Smith comes out with what he calls a non-philosophical thesis: There is no fundamental

ontological difference in the relations between subject and object, but there is an identity of each of these objects that is prior to ontology and significant, what Laruelle calls in-One (41mins15). NP and OOO agree that philosophy itself has no privilege, it is just one object amongst others. For Laruelle, ontology is flattened and non-hierarchical objects are real in the last instance ie in Harmans terms have an identity that is withdrawn. For Harman the table is withdrawn from human determination, for Laruelle the table is real in the last instance. It has an identity that is the chairs itself. To illustrate the difference between Non-Philosophy and OOO Smith talks about how OOOs use of Latour litanies does not get beyond the mere observation or affirmation of existence of various objects and so remains within the natural attitude. While we are given a litany, we are rarely given an analysis beyond that litany (46mins30). In non-philosophy there has been an intense analysis of particular objects, more abstract ones like thought, philosophy, science, and religion and also more corporeal ones photos and colours. So NP tries to bring out the identities of different objects in a way that OOO does not. Smith then goes on to talk about Ray Brassiers scientistic version of SR, and then considers the example of the greenness of grass, which as a secondary effect is an illusion for Brassier, but for Laruelle, despite being secondary, is relatively autonomous as rooted in its own radical immanence. It is real because it is actual in the moment of its perception by an observer, it has some real effect. This can be shown ecologically affirms Smith rather cryptically (52mins30). Conclusion: the actuality of the table is caught up in the human in a way such that it is not determined by the human and that it is not totally withdrawn and unknowable or incomprehensible either, but this imbrication with the human bears on its identity in the last instance. I find this talk on Laruelle and the Speculative Turn very interesting, but also very puzzling, especially if one compares the position attributed to Laruelle with Graham Harmans position in THE THIRD TABLE. Harmans position is one of a surface pluralism (there are multiple rgimes of knowing for an object such as a table) overcoded by a deep monism and demarcationism (the humanist, the scientific, and the everyday tables are utter shams, only the withdrawn table is real) embedded in a synchronic ontological frame (time is not an ontologically pertinent feature of real objects). The superiority of Laruelle over Harman is is that his pluralism is non-demarcationist: given an object, more than one form of knowing is able to know it as such declares Anthony Paul Smith. But he contrasts this with Harmans view by asserting there is still some human element to the actuality of the table, there is still some mathematical actuality to what the table is (Recall that where APS talks of the chair, I have substituted table to bring out the contrast with Harman). So where Harman demotes both the mathematical and the sensual table to the status of utter shams, Laruelle, on this account affirms the reality (or actuality) of the third table (note: Smith speaks of the real table as a third thing) in its imbrication with the human and with the mathematical. So, opposed to Harmans demarcation we have Laruelles imbrication. Thus the table has its own identity but it is an identity-in-the-last-instance, as opposed to a withdrawn identity. It is an abundant identity including its imbrications, rather than an impoverished identity abstracted from those imbrications. This is surely an improvement over Harmans version of OOO. But what is missing for me is the sense of diachrony. Perhaps the notion of imbrication, which is pluralist in the sense that the imbrications are multiple, is meant to convey the diachronic dimension as well, in the sense that our perceptions and our scientific theories evolve over time, and that so does the object? One could of course give a philosophical reading of Laruelle's views on objects. One could maintain that the object is only determined as such inside a particular philosophy (or what amounts to the same thing for the principle of sufficient philosophy, inside a particular world). This is a very tempting path to take but it would amount to repeating OOOs de-realising gesture for ordinary objects. The table would only be specified as such in a given philosophy-world, and the object itself

would be some identity, withdrawn from all humanly knowable and sensible attributes. I think Anthony Paul Smiths idea that the table is imbricated with human subjectivity and practices without being totally determined by them is a more promising line of thought. This imbrication of the human with the table is both itself real and a part of the identity of the table. This is important if we want to avoid the notion that the table is pure illusion, utter sham. For me Harmans idea, in THE THIRD TABLE, that the table we know is an illusion expresses a confusion. There are no tables in Physics. There are tables in ordinary life, what Harman mistakenly calls the "humanist" table. The Eddington paradox of the two tables is to show up the contrasr and the incommensurability between these two images (the scientific and the everyday). OOO in Harmans version declares that both are false, are utter shams (THE THIRD TABLE, p6). For Laruelle, according to Anthony, the table has an Identity, so the appellation table is not an arbitrary human adjunct to a mathematically describable physical reality, there is a third thing there that we can legitimately call a table. So the ordinary table outside philosophical specifications is real and it is Harmans withdrawn unknowable imperceptible table that is an utter sham, a philosophical hallucination. Ultimately there are two prongs: as philosophers caught up in the principle of sufficient philosophy we need non-philosophy as part of our anamnesis of the Real and of philosophys conditions and conditionings, dissipating its illusions and hallucinations. As ordinary-humans-in-immanence nonstandard philosophy allows us to pursue our noetic pluralism, exploring different ways of knowing object. This includes knowing philosophy, which as Anthony Paul Smith affirms, is itself an object. These two prongs are twin vectors of our process of individuation as it proceeds through philosophy in behalf of radical immanence. 7) CONCLUSION The desire to escape from enslavement to traditional transcendental schemas of conceptuality, to be free from the domination of transcendence and of onto-theology, to make the leap into pure immanence, explains why some of us were initially attracted by the pretentions of OOO to embody a non-traditional or non-standard philosophy, and why we were fairly rapidly disappointed. There is in OOO the promise of such a leap out of the old transcendental structures and into immanence, out of the mind and its stratified concepts into the plurality and the flux of immanence. Feyerabend already went much further than OOO in getting us to regard any clear and definite arrangement with suspicion (letter-preface to AGAINST METHOD). This suspicion is like the non- of nonphilosophy, it does not negate the clear and definite structures and schemas, nor does it become the basis of a new negative philosophy: It is very important not to let this suspicion deteriorate into a truth, or a theory, for example into a theory with the principle: things are never what they seem to be. Reality, or Being, or God, or whatever it is that sustains us cannot be captured that easily. My critique of OOO is not so much that it is negative theology, but that it is bad negative theology, a new impoverishment and imprisonment, and wont admit it. It is also bad realism and bad pluralism. Feyerabend admits to his theological inspiration in his notion of the Real. He says explicitly I myself have started from what Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita said about the names of God (CONQUEST OF ABUNDANCE, 195). He also calls his point of view a form of mysticism with arguments (a mysticism that uses examples, arguments, tightly reasoned passages of text, scientific theories and experiments to raise itself into consciousness). So for me a liberation from the conceptual schemas of philosophy is possible if, as Paul Feyerabend invites us, we think and act outside stable frameworks (There are many ways and we are using them all the time though often believing that they are part of a stable framework which encompasses everything) and fixed paths (Is argument without a purpose? No, it is not; it accompanies us on our journey without tying it to a fixed road). This is what I have been calling diachronic ontology. It is the exact opposite of the path that OOO has chosen, where we find a synchronic ontology incapable of dealing with time and change and a monism of transcendent "withdrawn entities". No realism and no pluralism.