Amazon Book Description
- What is reality, really?
- Are humans more special or important than the non-human objects we perceive?
- How does this change the way we understand the world?
- We humans tend to believe that things are only real in as much as we perceive them, an idea reinforced by modern philosophy, which privileges us as special, radically different in kind from all other objects. But as Graham Harman, one of the theory's leading exponents, shows, Object-Oriented Ontology rejects the idea of human specialness: the world, he states, is clearly not the world as manifest to humans. At the heart of this philosophy is the idea that objects - whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human or non-human - are mutually autonomous. In this brilliant new introduction, Graham Harman lays out the history, ideas and impact of Object-Oriented Ontology, taking in everything from art and literature, politics and natural science along the way.
- Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles. A key figure in the contemporary speculative realism movement in philosophy and for his development of the field of object-oriented ontology, he was named by Art Review magazine as one of the 100 most influential figures in international art.
Book Comment
"Mulhall (Stephen), LRB - How complex is a lemon?"
Source: London Review of Books, Vol. 40 No. 18; 27 September 2018
Notes
- I suppose I ought to read the book this paper reviews - ie. "Harman (Graham) - Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything" - but I doubt I'll ever have time and even if I did, Mulhall's review suggests that it wouldn't be worth the bother.
- It strikes me that Harman’s thesis is rather similar to Immanuel Kant's distinction between Noumena and Phenomena, but Mulhall - while he mentions Kant once - makes no mention of this distinction between things in themselves and things as perceived, which is at least part of what Harman is on about.
- The excerpt below isn't the best. There's a useful defence of moderate common-sense realism in the centre of the review.
- I can't remember how this paper got on to my reading-list for Ontology1.
Author’s Introduction
- Early on in his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein imagines an interlocutor who claims that every word in language signifies something - where ‘signifies’ means something like ‘names an object’. Wittgenstein gives an indirect assessment of that claim by discussing a second, analogous one. He imagines someone saying: ‘All tools modify something.’ Sounds plausible: a hammer patently modifies the position of a nail, and a saw the shape of a board. But what is modified by a glue pot or a ruler? Well, with a bit of imagination and a lot of intellectual charity, we could find something they might be said to modify - the temperature of the glue perhaps, or our knowledge of a thing’s length? But, Wittgenstein asks, what would be gained by this assimilation of expressions?
- The problem is that each step we take in extending the reach of ‘modification’ to accommodate apparently resistant cases forces us to attenuate the meaning it has when we apply it specifically to hammers and saws. If temperature and a mental state are to qualify as possible objects of modification just as easily as the position of a nail or the shape of a board, our definition of what counts as an act of modification will become increasingly loose and baggy, and so calling something a ‘modifier’ will tell us less and less about how it actually works. At the limit, we may be able to accommodate every imaginable kind of tool within our ‘modification’ theory, but only at the price of evacuating the theory of any content. Rather than revealing that the underlying essence of tools is that they modify something, we have simply recast ‘modifier’ as a notational equivalent for ‘tool’. As Wittgenstein puts it, we have said nothing whatever.
- This is the trouble with philosophical theories of everything, whether it’s everything in a given domain (tools, say, or language), or absolutely everything. It isn’t so much that their generality increases the risk of incorporating erroneous claims; it’s that they risk failing to make a claim at all. This isn’t necessarily a problem for scientific theories of everything: they have a specific purpose - to unify gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and the weak nuclear forces - that concerns differences within the domain of material reality. As Graham Harman rightly points out, this kind of endeavour is problematic only when its proponents present it as a genuinely universal theory of absolutely everything, for this amounts to presenting a project in physics as if it were ipso facto an exercise in metaphysics - an account of the structure of reality as such (not just physical reality). Unfortunately, Harman also thinks that philosophy can provide what physics cannot. His object-oriented ontology (OOO) is explicitly presented as an original and compelling metaphysical theory of everything, which can serve as one central contribution to a broader but loosely-woven movement sometimes (though controversially) called ‘speculative realism’, to which the writings of Ray Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux, Levi Bryant and Timothy Morton also belong. Since speculative realism is one of a number of philosophical projects competing to occupy the dominant position in contemporary European thought vacated by the death of Derrida, and has acquired some influence in cognate areas of culture such as art and architecture, it’s worth asking whether Harman’s theory of everything avoids the familiar problems encountered by its predecessors.
Paper Comment
Review of "Harman (Graham) - Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything".
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- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)