My oh my there are some dirty words: linear, naive, folk. And here's a super dirty one: metaphysics.
See Derrida (or at least a form of deconstruction) did a number on ever using it again without embarrassment.
This provides cover for a certain form of scientism that also eschews metaphysics, but for another reason. It's interested in beating up on “folk” philosophy, that is, philosophy that doesn't kowtow to scientism.
Heaven forbid we ever get caught being metaphysical. Dawkins, or Derrida, would be very upset with us. Yet science rests on all kinds of metaphysical assumptions. For instance, some scientists think that physical laws are immutable. That's a belief at this point. Others are eliminationists. That's also a belief.
These are the only two reasons I can think that Hägglund insists that he isn't advocating “neo-realism” or a kind of “ontology.” And for sure they are reasons why an advocate of Hägglund might enjoy him: he's making a rigorous case for a belief that is sanctioned by scientism, namely a certain form of atheism, which he now bankrolls with a certain form of reductionism.
Why use Darwin, then, as one's example of the trace structure? A Shakespeare play would do. Or an Austen novel. Why Darwin, unless perchance there is a metaphysics in there?
Of course there's a metaphysics in there. For a kickoff, there's the strongly metaphysical statement that matter subtends life. It implies an ontological view, reductionism. It rules out other forms of view, such as vitalism.
This move is either incoherent or disingenuous. To use Darwin and not a “scholastic” or whomever is to prefer Darwin. Either you're saying you aren't being metaphysical, while being patently metaphysical, or you're performing some kind of knowing exclusion of the “wrong” sort of metaphysics.
I know. I used Darwin and sent him on a blind date with Dawkins and Levinas in The Ecological Thought. It was all I could do to keep from buying the neo-Darwinist attitude (“Everything you say is nonsense until you agree with me”). I'm sure I bought into it in places.
The dice are loaded towards certain kinds of science. Time as a succession of moments (past, present, future) just is a fundamental feature of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century science. This conveniently means that you can be as metaphysical as you like when it comes to policing the “wrong sort” of view, without having to be explicit.
To say you're only logically grounding good arguments, not doing metaphysics, is to beg the question: you are bankrolling these not those arguments. You are advocating an ontology.
To use logic is to move preformed pieces around, into their proper places (pace Derrida on the proper). Thus there are already pieces, a certain game, a certain space of play, certain rules—a certain ontology. If you really are just being logical, then you're using someone's preformed conceptual pieces. (I'm a Hegelian on this score.)
What are those pieces? Why, pieces of reductionist materialism, long refuted by twentieth-century physics itself.
What got me from deconstruction to OOO was a decision to be explicit about ontology, not implicit. It's just disingenuous to hide behind the coattails of the other and say you're not doing metaphysics.