Object-Oriented Ontology, Graham Harman

Introduction

• ‘philosophy has great cognitive value even though it is not a form of knowledge. And in a time like ours that quickly invokes knowledge as the cure to every ailment, this makes philosophy a potentially disruptive force, with a vastly different agenda for human advancement than the sciences’ (7)
• ‘Some of the basic principle principles of OOO, to be visited in detail in the coming chapters, are as follows: (1) All objects must be given equal attention, whether they be human, non-human, natural, cultural, real or fictional. (2) Objects are not identical with their properties, but have a tense relationship with those properties, and this very tension is responsible for all of the change that occurs in the world. (3) Objects come in just two kinds: real objects exist whether or not they currently affect anything else, while sensual objects exist only in relation to some real object. (4) Real objects cannot relate to one another directly, but only indirectly, by means of a sensual object. (5) The properties of objects also come in just two kinds: again, real and sensual. (6) These two kinds of objects and two kinds of qualities lead to four basic permutations, which OOO treats as the root of space and time, as well as two closely related known as essence and eidos. (7) Finally, OOO holds that philosophy generally has a closer root with aesthetics than with mathematics or natural science.’ (9)
• ‘Over the centuries, a number of thinkers have suggested that the reality of things is ultimately unknowable to us: Immanuel Kant’s ‘things in themselves’, Heidegger’s ‘being’, and Lcan’s ‘Real’ are just three examples of this tendency in intellectual history. What makes OOO different from these currents of thought – but similar to object-oriented programming – is the idea that objects never make full contact with each other any more than they do with the human mind.’ (11-12)
• ‘commitment to the mutual darkness of objects’ (12)

Chapter 1

• Finding a ‘theory of everything’
• For physicists:
  •  everything that exists must be physical (no room for anything religious/spiritual and also does not take into account how one ‘object’ is not always simply a discrete collection of parts – example of Dutch East India Company and also the Ship of Theseus paradox)
  • Everything that exists must be basic and simple (this does not count for the phenomenon of ‘emergence’ – ‘in which new properties appear when smaller objects are joined together into a new one’. )
  • Everything that exists must be real which does not account for fiction – this has no physical matter and thus could not be explained by a physical ‘theory of everything’ – ‘all of the objects we experience are merely fictions: simplified models of the far more complex objects that continue to exist when I turn my head away from them, not to mention when I sleep or die’ (34)
  • Everything that exists must be able to be stated accurately in literal propositional language (ie be able to be written in a clear way in prose) – ‘objects are never just bundles of literal properties’ (37) – ‘the reality of things is always withdrawn or veiled rather than directly accessible, and therefore any attempt to grasp that reality by direct and literal language will inevitably misfire’ (38)
• OOO is therefore a theory of everything that is against ‘physicalism, smallism, anti-fictionalism and literalism’ (38)
• Difference between ‘object’ and ‘thing’ – for someone such as Heidegger the object is our perception of something vs the thing being the object in actuality, its true self (42) – Harman disagrees and uses object just as widely
• In OOO ‘an object is anything that cannot be entirely reduced either to the components of which it is made or to the effects that it has on other things’ (43)
• There are two ways of saying what a thing is: what it is made of and what it does – two kinds of knowledge – ‘The problem is that we humans convince ourselves that knowledge is the only kind of cognitive activity worth pursuing, and thus we place a high value on knowledge and practical know-how, while ignoring cognitive activities that do not translate as easily into literal prose terms.’ (43/44) – e.g. art and philosophy
• Thales of Miletus – ‘water is the first principle of everything’ (45)
• Anaximander: apeiron as the name of a base substance from which everything comes from (45)
• ^this is ‘undermining’ – objects not having the same ‘degree of reality’ as their true foundations – a very pre-socratic (and scientific) way of thinking that doesn’t account for emergence
• The opposite to this is ‘overmining’ which ‘reduce things to their impact on us or on each other, denying them any excess or surplus beyond such impact’ (49) – doesn’t account for things’ ability to change
• Duomining is where both of these are carried out e.g. ‘the natural sciences duomine by speaking of nature simultaneously as made of tiny ultimate constituents (undermining) and as knowable through mathematics (overmining)’ (50)
• ‘In OOO […] ‘object’ simply means anything that cannot be reduced either downward or upward, which means that has a surplus beyond its constituent pieces and beneath its sum total of effects on the world.’
• ‘the only necessary criterion for an object in OOO is that it be irreducible in both directions: an object is more than its pieces and less than its effects’ (53)
• Flat ontology – a term from DeLanda referring to an ontology that ‘initially treats all objects in the same way’ (54) – similar to Bennett although Harman does go on to emphasise that this is only initial – ‘we expect a philosophy to tell us about the features that belong to everything, but we also want philosophy to tell us about the differences between various kinds of things’ (55) – flat ontology encourages a rigorous examination of the first half of this but then does still have on to the second half
• What was once a dualism between Creator and Created is now just between human and nonhuman (whole page 56 says this point pretty well)
• Latour: defines modernism as the view of ‘nature’ and culture’ that are as separate as possible – Latour has developed a counter-model called ANT (actor-network theory) which outlines that ‘all human and non-human actors try to form links with other actors in order to become stronger or more persuasive’
• Poems, jokes, threats and metaphors are all given as examples of non-literal forms of cognition – times where indirect communication is more powerful/effective that direct prose
• (complete side note but the phrase ‘philosophically tender age of thirty-one’ caught my attention – interesting idea that in philosophy the older you are the more in your prime you become (especially interesting through a feminist lens as philosophy has historically been a male-dominated field) and it being obvious how true this is, in doing so shaking up how arbitrary and ridiculous the idea of (particularly females) peaking in their 20s is)
• Kant’s phenomena = ‘everything that humans are able to encounter, perceive, use or think about’
• Kant also theorised ‘noumena’ = ‘things-in-themselves that we never experience directly, since we remain trapped in the conditions of human experience’ (68) – ‘We do not have direct access to plastic-bags-in-themselves any more than we do to human-beings-in-themselves; in both cases we only encounter these things phenomenally, not noumenally.’ (69)
• We can only ever encounter objects from the outside – ‘there is nothing we can make an object of cognition, nothing that can exist for us unless it becomes an image, a concept, an idea’ (69 end)
• We also might think that we can cognitively access ourselves at least, but ‘there is no access to the noumenal self any more than to a noumenal house, dog or horse’ (70)
• ‘each of us is an ‘I’ not because we each have a special zoological apparatus called ‘consciousness’, but because each of us is something, and that something can never be exhausted by conscious introspection any more than by outward description. It follows that every non-human object can also be called an ‘I’ in the sense of having a definite inwardness that can never be fully grasped.’ (70)
• Ortega: ‘There is the same difference between a pain that someone tells me about and a pain that I feel as there is between the red that I see and the being red of tis red leather box. Being red is for it what hurting is for me. Just as there is an I-John Doe, there is also an I-red, an I-water, and an I-star. Everything, from a point of view within itself, is an I.’ (71)
• Ortega then claims that art gives us access to this noumenal realm^ through aesthetics: ‘I am not saying that a work of art reveals the secret of life and being to us; what I do say is that a work of art affords the peculiar pleasure we call esthetic by making it seem that the inwardness of things, their executant reality, is opened to us’ (71) **maybe read Ortega essay?
• ‘metaphor satisfies us preceisely because in it we find a coincidence between two things that is more profound and decisive than any mere resemblance’ – ‘The two objects initially repel each other. As a result, we have the annihilation of what [cypress and flame] are as practical images. When they collide with one another their hard carapaces crack and the internal matter, in a molten state, acquires the soften of plasm, ready to receive a new form and structure.’ (72) STUNNING and also very much like the critical essay – use this somehow in diss?

(TBC)