Adventures in Metaphysics 1: Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology

1) Can objects be understood without reference to human subjectivity?

2) Is it even wise to try to overlook the human aspect to all knowledge?

Is this not only a fool's errand but somehow anti-human or is this just trying to take out a pernicious anthropomorphism that might lead to a more open field of exploration?

Hart, Mining Conditions, a response to Harman, pg 48:Clearly, then, the problem stems from the mutual abstraction of becoming and
thing, a problem whose solution Plato already foreshadowed in coining the principle of immanence in the form of ‘the becoming of being [genesis eis ousian]’ (Philebus 26d8): it cannot be other-than-being that becomes, or becoming would not be at all. In the present context, this means: ‘the mark of all being is power’. Powers are inseparable from their products; if no products, then there were no powers, but not the reverse. It is neither the case that things ground powers, nor the converse; rather, powers unground the ultimacy attributed to substantial being and necessitate, therefore, rather than eliminate, the becomings of objects. Powers accordingly are natural history, in the precise sense that powers are not simply formally or logically inseparable from what they do, but are what they do, and compose being in its becoming. The thoroughgoing contingency of natural production undermines, I would claim, any account of permanently actual substantial forms precisely because such contingents entail the actuality not simply of abstractly separable forms, but of the powers that sculpt them. This is where
Harman’s retooling of vicarious causation will become the focus for discussion, but which must take place elsewhere.

Harman’s difference from Whitehead,
and his creative contribution to Speculative Philosophy, consists in the ‘translation’ of
the deep problems of essence and change from one realm (that of relations) to another
(that of substances). These two realms, oddly enough, seem to be reversible into one
another—at least in an overall anti-correlationist framework. Given that ‘there is no
such thing as transport without transformation’, the only remaining question is what
sort of difference Harman’s transformation of ontology makes. I would suggest that the
contrast between Harman and Whitehead is basically a difference of style, or of aesthetics.
This means that my enjoyment of one of these thinkers’ approaches over the
other is finally a matter of taste, and is not subject to conceptual adjudication. And this
is appropriate, given that both thinkers privilege aesthetics over both ethics and epistemology.
Whitehead notoriously argues that ‘Beauty is a wider, and more fundamental,
notion than Truth’, and even that ‘the teleology of the Universe is directed to the
production of Beauty’.76 Harman, for his part, enigmatically suggests that, in a world of
substances withdrawn from all relations, ‘aesthetics becomes first philosophy’.77

1) Can objects be understood without reference to human subjectivity?

2) Is it even wise to try to overlook the human aspect to all knowledge? Is this not only a fool's errand but somehow anti-human or is this just trying to take out a pernicious anthropomorphism that might lead to a more open field of exploration?

Why the fear of "anthropomorphism"?

Badiou: I have difficulty in understanding Laruelle [laughs] especially regarding the question of the Real. The strength of philosophy is its decisions in regards to the Real. In a sense Laruelle is too much like Heidegger, in critiquing a kind great forgetting, of what is lost in the grasp of decision, what Heidegger called thinking. Beyond this, and not to judge a thinker only by his earliest work, his most recent work has a religious dimension. When you say something is purely in the historical existence of philosophy
the proposition is a failure. It becomes religious. There is a logical constraint when you say we most go beyond philosophy. This is why, in the end, Heidegger said only a god can save us. Ultimately, I do not see an opposition between being qua being (as multiplicity) and the Real, not at all. The Real can be decided except for the event which is always in relation to a particular world.

Clarify what you mean by "understood".

Speculative Realists seem to be attempting a more complete and consistent application of the Mediocrity Principle (i.e. anthropo-decentricity) – neither a 'view from here' nor a 'view from nowhere', but a view from everywhere – in ontology.

How would a view from everywhere look different from either in your understanding?

Whether human or non-human, all objects should be given equal attention;
Objects are not identical to their properties;
There are two aspects to any object the ‘real object’ (RO) and the ‘sensory object’ (SO);
Real objects can only relate to one another via their sensory object;
The properties of objects are also divided into real and sensual;
The real object and the sensory object with their distinct properties or qualities (RQ and SQ) create four basis permutations: time, space (the two Kantian constructs), essence and eidos;
Philosophy has a closer relationship with aesthetics than mathematics or sciences.

"From either" what?

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once.

Shaviro 281:Harman gives Whitehead an important place in the genealogy of speculative realist thought. For Whitehead is one of the few twentieth-century thinkers who dares
‘to venture beyond the human sphere’,13 and to place all entities upon the same footing. Whitehead rejects ‘the [Kantian] notion that the gap between human and world
is more philosophically important than the gaps between any other sorts of entities’. Or, to restate this in Whitehead’s own terms, Western philosophy since Descartes gives
far too large a place to ‘presentational immediacy’, or the clear and distinct representation of sensations in the mind of a conscious, perceiving subject.15 In fact, such perception is far less common, and far less important, than what Whitehead calls ‘perception
in the mode of causal efficacy’, or the ‘vague’ (nonrepresentational) way that entities
affect and are affected by one another through a process of vector transmission.16 Presentational immediacy does not merit the transcendental or constitutive role that Kant
attributes to it. For this mode of perception is confined to ‘high-grade organisms’ that
are ‘relatively few’ in the universe as a whole. On the other hand, causal efficacy is universal; it plays a larger role in our own experience than we tend to realize, and it can
be attributed ‘even to organisms of the lowest grade’.17

Shaviro 281:From the viewpoint of causal efficacy, all actual entities in the universe stand on
the same ontological footing. No special ontological privileges can distinguish God
from ‘the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space’: in spite of all ‘gradations
of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level’.18 And what holds for God, holds all the more for human subjectivity. Whitehead refuses to privilege human access, and instead is willing
to envision, as Harman puts it, ‘a world in which the things really do perceive each
other’.19 Causal and perceptual interactions are no longer held hostage to human-centric categories. For Whitehead and Harman alike, there is therefore no hierarchy of
being. No particular entity—not even the human subject—can claim metaphysical
preeminence, or serve as a favoured mediator. All entities, of all sizes and scales, have
the same degree of reality. They all interact with each other in the same ways, and they
all exhibit the same sorts of properties. This is a crucial aspect of Whitehead’s metaphysics, and it is one that Harman has allowed us to see more clearly than ever before.

Shaviro 282:It is in the context of this shared project that I want to discuss the crucial differences between Whitehead and Harman. Although both thinkers reject correlationism,
they do so on entirely separate—and indeed incompatible—grounds. For Whitehead, human perception and cognition have no special or privileged status, because they
simply take their place among the myriad ways in which all actual entities prehend
other entities. Prehension includes both causal relations and perceptual ones—and
makes no fundamental distinction between them. Ontological equality comes from
contact and mutual implication. All actual entities are ontologically equal, because
they all enter into the same sorts of relations. They all become what they are by prehending other entities. Whitehead’s key term prehension can be defined as any process—causal, perceptual, or of another nature entirely—in which an entity grasps, registers the presence of, responds to, or is affected by, another entity. All actual entities
constitute themselves by integrating multiple prehensions; they are all ‘drops of experience, complex and interdependent’.20 All sorts of entities, from God to the ‘most trivial
puff of existence’, figure equally among the ‘‘really real’ things whose interconnections
and individual characters constitute the universe’.21 When relations extend everywhere, so that ‘there is no possibility of a detached, self-contained local existence’, and ‘the environment enters into the nature of each thing’,22 then no single being—not the human
subject, and not even God—can claim priority over any other.

How would a view from everywhere look different from either in your understanding?

You're arguing from an empiricist viewpoint - that we learn the concept of roundness from the exposure to many instances of it.

have their own form of interaction that manifests roundness

Badiou:This is why, in the end, Heidegger said only a god can save us.

Can objects be understood without reference to human subjectivity?

Moliere, I like your ideas, but you jumped ahead a bit. I want to read this page by page to get all the analysis from it.

Prehension is used here. However, it seems to be an overmined term.

It can refer to "registers the presence of, responds to, affected by, another entity". He then adds in "drops of experience". Is this not conflating a certain type of phenomena (experience) with a more general idea of interactions in general? How are these two tied?

Of which you have a concept, hence the designation 'roundness' that goes with it.

I agree that there are objects that are approximately round in the world, but my assumption is that no exactly round object has ever existed or will ever exist in the world, if exactly one means within the Planck length, being 10?35m
10
?
35
?


If no round object has ever existed or will ever exist, then any talk about round objects cannot be about Real Objects RO but must be about Sensory Objects SO.

How so? By overmining I understand there to be no objects. But prehension just puts objects on the same ontological level as humans by smushing perception and effect together. So it seems to recognize the reality of objects, though they are all interconnected -- which I think might speak against your thought here:

If objects are all connected, and perception, response, affect, and register are the relations between entities, then a drop of experience would just be another entity. It's the kind of entity we are -- and I am a little suspicious in general of reifications of experience so I don't think I'd put it like this, but that doesn't seem to be a conflation as much as a different way of looking.

Not sure what to make of this. What do you mean "reifications of experience"?

Hypostatization is pretty much what I have in mind. If experience be material, as a materialist must accept if they are not eliminative, it's still not a thing. Experience is of things, and reification is when you treat what is conceptual or experiential as if it were the same as the things it's about.

I guess I meant, "overused".. used to refer to too many vaguely related but not quite necessarily related things.

Sure, but the controversial element is whether "roundness" is a thing outside that concept.

1) Can objects be understood without reference to human subjectivity?

2) Is it even wise to try to overlook the human aspect to all knowledge? Is this not only a fool's errand but somehow anti-human or is this just trying to take out a pernicious anthropomorphism that might lead to a more open field of exploration?

Shaviro 282:For Harman, in contrast, all objects are ontologically equal, because they are all
equally withdrawn from one another. Harman posits a strange world of autonomous,
subterranean objects, ‘receding from all relations, always having an existence that perception or sheer causation can never adequately measure … a universe packed full of
elusive substances stuffed into mutually exclusive vacuums’.23 For Harman, there is a
fundamental gap between objects as they exist in and for themselves, and the external
relations into which these objects enter. ‘The basic dualism in the world lies not between spirit and nature, or phenomenon and noumenon, but between things in their
intimate reality and things as confronted by other things’.24 Every object retains a hidden reserve of being, one that is never exhausted by, and never fully expressed in, its
contacts with other objects. These objects can rightly be called substances, because
‘none of them can be identified with any (or even all) of their relations with other entities’. So defined, ‘substances are everywhere’.25 And in their deepest essence, substances are ‘withdrawn absolutely from all relation’.26

The contrast between these positions should be clear. Whitehead opposes correlationism by proposing a much broader—indeed universally promiscuous—sense of relations among entities. But Harman opposes correlationism by deprivileging relations
in general. Instead, Harman remarkably revives the old and seemingly discredited
metaphysical doctrine of substances: a doctrine that Whitehead, for his part, unequivocally rejects. Where Whitehead denounces ‘the notion of vacuous actuality, which
haunts realistic philosophy’,27 Harman cheerfully embraces ‘the vacuous actuality of
things’.28 Whitehead refuses any philosophy in which ‘the universe is shivered into a
multitude of disconnected substantial things’, so that ‘each substantial thing is … conceived as complete it itself, without any reference to any other substantial thing’. Such
an approach, Whitehead says, ‘leaves out of account the interconnections of things’,
and thereby ‘renders an interconnected world of real individuals unintelligible’. The
bottom line for Whitehead is that ‘substantial thing cannot call unto substantial thing’.
There is no way to bridge the ontological void separating independent substances from
one another. An undetectable, unreachable inner essence might just as well not exist at
all: ‘a substantial thing can acquire a quality, a credit—but real landed estate, never’.29
The universe would be entirely sterile and static, and nothing would be able to affect
anything else, if entities were to be reduced to a ‘vacuous material existence with passive endurance, with primary individual attributes, and with accidental adventures’.30

Shaviro 282-283:Harman, for his part, makes just the opposite criticism. He explicitly disputes the
idea, championed by Whitehead (among so many others), that ‘everything is related to
everything else’. In the first place, Harman says, Whitehead’s ‘relational theory is too reminiscent of a house of mirrors’. When things are understood just in terms of their
relations, an entity is ‘nothing more than its perception of other entities. These entities, in turn, are made up of still other perceptions. [b]The hot potato is passed on down
the line, and we never reach any reality that would be able to anchor the various perceptions of it’[/b]. This infinite regress, Harman says, voids real things of their actuality. In
the second place, Harman argues that [b]‘no relational theory such as Whitehead’s is able
to give a sufficient explanation of change’[/b], because if a given entity ‘[b]holds nothing in
reserve beyond its current relations to all entities in the universe, if it has no currently
unexpressed properties, there is no reason to see how anything new can ever emerge’[/b].31
[b]Harman thus turns Whitehead’s central value of novelty against him, claiming that
Whitehead cannot really account for it. If ‘every actual entity is what it is, and is with
its definite status in the universe, determined by its internal relations to other actual
entities’,32 then we will be eternally stuck with nothing more than what we have already[/b].

Whereas modern philosophy has tended to 'flatten' ontology such that anything that exists, exists in the same way. This is why there are disputes over platonic realism in philosophy of maths. Numbers, and so on, don't exist in the same way as objects. So the tendency is to declare that they don't exist at all, save as mental constructs; things either exist, or they don't, in other words, existence is univocal, has only one meaning.

Employing the subject/object dichotomy as a linguistic framework to take account of ourselves and 'the world' results in rendering stuff as one or the other. Not all things are one or the other. To quite the contrary, some things consist of both. Hence, I find that it is an inherently inadequate framework to begin with, ontological or otherwise.

Those are the ones current convention and everyday people has/have trouble with. The result of the former is denial of language less thought. The result of the latter is often anthropomorphism.

Can you explain that more about why it cannot be the Real Object?

Shaviro 282:For Harman, there is a
fundamental gap between objects as they exist in and for themselves, and the external
relations into which these objects enter.

This seems pretty similar to Aristotle's substance, except that Aristotle didn't have an idea of a "hiddenness". He seemed pretty concerned with their "essence" which is something that I believe can be known, and thus not hidden. But if anyone else has ideas of how this ties to Aristotle, let me know.

Aristotle. Metaphysics, 1038b15, translated by CDC Reeve:But perhaps the universal, while it cannot be substance in the way in which the essence is, can yet be present in it—for example, as the animal is present in the human and the horse. Well then, clearly there is some account of it. And it makes no difference even if it is not the account of everything in the substance. For this [universal] will not be any the less the substance of something, as the human is of the human in whom it is present. And so the same result will again follow, since it (for example, the animal) will be the substance of that in which it is present as something special to it. Further, it is both impossible and absurd for the this (that is, the substance)—if it is composed of something—not to be composed of substances or of the this something but of a quality. For then non-substance (that is, the quality) will be prior to substance (that is, to the this). Which is just what is impossible. For neither in account nor in time nor in knowledge can the attributes be prior to the substance. For then they will also be separable.

From this perspective, the 'essence' is hiding in plain sight.

If I talk about a round object, for my talk to make logical and coherent sense, I must be talking about something that exists. As the concept of a round object certainly exists in the mind, but a round object is highly unlikely to exist in the real world, I must be referring to the concept in my mind, not an impossible object in the real world.

If the equal things are different from Equality and yet can bring Equality into our minds, they must somehow remind us of the Form of Equality. We are aware that the sticks or stones fall short of being perfectly equal, but to be aware that they fall short, we must already have an idea of what it means to be perfectly equal; that is, we must already know the Form of Equality.

Whether a person chooses one or the other, as the basis of one's ontology, depends on whether the person is looking outward (Kant's external intuition), or looking inward (Kant's internal intuition). So Harman, as you describe, looking outward, apprehends external, spatial relations, and Whitehead looking inward, apprehends internal, temporal relations.

Shaviro 283-285:In this standoff between Whitehead and Harman, or between the idea of relations
and the idea of substances, we would seem to have arrived at a basic antinomy of object-oriented thought. Whitehead and Harman, in their opposing ways, both speak to
our basic intuitions about the world. Harman addresses our sense of the thingness of
things: their solidity, their uniqueness, and their thereness. He insists, rightly, that every object is something, in and of itself; and therefore that an object is not reducible to
its parts, or to its relations with other things, or to the sum of the ways in which other entities apprehend it. But Whitehead addresses an equally valid intuition: our sense
that we are not alone in the world, that things matter to us and to one another, that
life is filled with encounters and adventures. There’s a deep sense in which I remain
the same person, no matter what happens to me. But there’s an equally deep sense in
which I am changed irrevocably by my experiences, by ‘the historic route of living occasions’33 through which I pass. And this double intuition goes for all the entities in the
universe: it applies to ‘shale or cantaloupe’34 and to ‘rocks and milkweed’35, as much as
it does to sentient human subjects. Where does this leave us? As Whitehead suggests,
we should always reflect that a metaphysical doctrine, even one that we reject, ‘would
never have held the belief of great men, unless it expressed some fundamental aspect of
our experience’.36 I would like to see this double intuition, therefore, as a ‘contrast’ that
can be organized into a pattern, rather than as an irreducible ‘incompatibility’.37 Whitehead insists that the highest task of philosophy is to resolve antinomies non-reductively,
by operating ‘a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast’.38

Harman himself opens the way, in part, for such a shift of meaning, insofar as he
focuses on the atomistic, or discrete, side of Whitehead’s ontology. Whitehead always
insists that ‘the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism. The creatures are atomic’.39
And Harman takes the atomicity of Whitehead’s entities as a guarantee of their concrete actuality: ‘Consider the case of ten thousand different entities, each with a different perspective on the same volcano. Whitehead is not one of those arch-nominalists
who assert that there is no underlying volcano but only external family resemblances
among the ten thousand different perceptions. [b]No, for Whitehead there is definitely an
actual entity ‘volcano’, a real force to be reckoned with and not just a number of similar sensations linked by an arbitrary name[/b]’.40[b]For Harman, this is what sets Whitehead
apart from the post-Kantian correlationists for whom we cannot speak of the actuality
of the volcano itself, but only of the problem of access to the volcano, or of the way in
which it is ‘constructed’ by and through our apprehension and identification of it.[/b] But
at the same time, Harman also sets Whitehead’s atomism against the way in which, for
the speculative realist philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant, objects as such do not really
exist, but only ‘emerge as ‘retardations’ of a more primally unified force’.41 For Grant,
as presumably for Schelling, Deleuze, and Simondon before him, there would be no
actual volcano, but only its violent, upsurging action, or its ‘force to be reckoned with’.

The point is that, even as Whitehead’s actualism links him to Harman, so his insistence on process and becoming—which is to say, on relations—links him to Deleuze
and to Grant. Whitehead refers to the ‘“really real” things’ that ‘constitute the universe’
both as ‘actual entities’ and as ‘actual occasions’. They are alternatively things or happenings. These two modes of being are different, and yet they can be identified with
one another, in much the same way that ‘matter has been identified with energy’ in
modern physics.42 (I am tempted to add a reference to the way that the quantum constituents of the universe behave alternatively as particles and as waves; but it is unclear
to me how familiar Whitehead was with developments in quantum mechanics in the
1920s and 1930s).[b]When Harman rejects Whitehead’s claims about relations, he is not
being sufficiently attentive to the dual-aspect nature of Whitehead’s ontology[/b].

This can also be expressed in another way. Harman skips over the dimension of
privacy in Whitehead’s account of objects. For Whitehead, ‘in the analysis of actuality
the antithesis between publicity and privacy obtrudes itself at every stage. There are
elements only to be understood by reference to what is beyond the fact in question;
and there are elements expressive of the immediate, private, personal, individuality of
the fact in question. The former elements express the publicity of the world; the latter
elements express the privacy of the individual’.43 Most importantly, Whitehead defines
concrescence, or the culminating ‘satisfaction’ of every actual entity, precisely as ‘a unity of aesthetic appreciation’ that is ‘immediately felt as private’.44 In this way, Whitehead is indeed sensitive to the hidden inner life of things that so preoccupies Harman.
Privacy can never be abolished; the singularity of aesthetic self-enjoyment can never
be dragged out, into the light.

But privacy is only one half of the story. The volcano has hidden depths, but it also
explodes. It enters into the glare of publicity as it spends itself. Whitehead recognizes
that, in the privacy of their self-enjoyment, ‘actual entities … do not change. They are
what they are’.45 But he also has a sense of the cosmic irony of transition and transience;
and this is something that I do not find in Harman. Whitehead insists that every entity must perish—and thereby give way to something new. Throughout Process and Reality, Whitehead keeps on reminding us that ‘time is a “perpetual perishing”’. For ‘objectification involves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full
immediacy’.46 In this way, Whitehead entirely agrees with Harman that no entity can
prehend another entity in its fullness. There is always something that doesn’t get carried
over, something that doesn’t get translated or expressed. But the reason for this is not
that the other entity somehow subsists, beyond relation, locked into its vacuum bubble.
Rather, no entity can be recalled to full presence because, by the very fact of its ‘publicity’ or ‘objectification’, it does not subsist at all; indeed, it is already dead. The volcano explodes; and other entities are left to pick up the pieces. This reduction to the status of a
mere ‘datum’ is what Whitehead calls, with his peculiar humour, ‘objective immortality’.

Aristotle's essences would be ones where we could determine by human standards of induction the essential form of a substance that determines what that substance is. He does not seem to hold the notion that there are some attributes which are hidden or withdrawn as far as I've seen.

Is internal intuition a false category when applied to objects that aren't animals?

Accidents are obviously the source of actual outcomes, but we do not have a science for it.

Are you saying that happenings are not beings, and science only treats of beings?