Graham Harman spoke at DePaul today on “A New Look at
Identity and Sufficient Reason" to a packed room. His paper was a relatively straightforward
account of some differences between his Object-Oriented philosophy and the work of Quentin
Meillassoux. These differences are, I
expect, well known to those who are following the speculative realist
literature so I am not interested in recounting them here. Harman’s paper was structured so that he
could provide a succinct and readily accessible account of his own thoughts on
object-oriented ontology (OOO). It was very helpful to novices such as I am.
The questions that followed were probing, querulous to some
extent, but the exchange was good humored and Graham gave a stout defense in
respond to any objections that were raised.
The only question that seemed to give him real pause, or so it seemed to
me, was one from Will McNeill (who chaired Harman’s dissertation committee back
in the day), who suggested (if I am getting this right) that Heidegger had
abandoned his phenomenological approach of the 1920s and by the mid-thirties in,
for example, The Origin of the Work of
Art had been doing a type of philosophy that began with the object. That is, McNeill was ratifying a certain
distinction between early and later Heidegger that Harman is not prepared to
concede. Harman has called Heidegger “a
rather monotonous philosopher”. The exchange
was fueled by a high-octane level Heidegger-speak that is above my pay-grade,
so to speak, but if I followed the thrust of it, it hinged on the question of
whether Heidegger himself took the object-oriented turn, thus blunting some of the
claims that OOO is more out of the mainstream of continental philosophy than it
might seem. I did appreciate Harman’s
taking this on board and he seemed to indicate that he’d give it some more
thought.
My main purpose in this short post is the restate a question
that I asked and would like to hear more on at some point. The question is a simple one, and may have
been so simply stated that the question was not especially clear. In the circumstances I cannot be dissatisfied
with Harman’s response. Noting that I am
a scientist by training (an ecologist) I suggested that natural scientists were
already, in some respects, naïve realists. And if that is
the case I asked what OOO does for or to science. I had in mind here a couple of things. Firstly, scientists generally would have little
objection to the notion that inanimate objects should be given the same priority
in our thinking about the world as the human-object relationship. They act, that is, as if they are outside a correlationist
circle, mainly because most of us have never considered that we are in
one in the first place! Natural science doesn't have an
ontology at all in the (trivial) sense that scientists typically proceed without
systematically inspecting their ontological commitments! Secondly, I also had in mind Harman acknowledgment
that OOO seems to have something in common with scientific materialism (which is, of course, not the same thing as doing science). In The
Quadruple Object he finds a number of problems with scientific materialism. One of these is that the object-object
relationship in scientific materialism is “insufficiently realistic” because it
“does not raise the genuine philosophical problem of how two entities can relate…”
This seems right to me, but I am
interested then in how OOO might do a better job in relation to science than
materialist accounts do.
In Graham’s response he correctly pointed out that philosophy
should not be in the business of being a handmaiden to the sciences (fair
enough!). Scientists will have to see
for themselves how their practice might respond to emerging developments in
ontology. However, it seems unlikely
that they will as most will remain happily unaware that they either are or
are not on shaky ground as the philosophical landscape swirls and changes
around them. There are costs to this cavalierness - something I'll write about later.
Graham did make some potentially helpful comments about OOO
and one branch of the natural sciences in particular – ecology. Noting that Tim Morton (one of the OOO band) is
doing interesting work in this area -- I am very enthusiastic about Tim's work, by the way -- , Harman indicated that with Morton’s notions of the mesh, strange strangers etc. that ecology would have to revisit its
notion that "everything is connected."
This is interesting to me since as an ecologist I can assure us all that
ecology as a scientific discipline is as much concerned with the limits of
connection as it is with connections per se.
If everything was indeed connected this world would fall apart like a
game of jenga! I am not quibbling with
Harman here, I just want to note that there is some potentially exciting work
to be done in introducing object-oriented philosophers to natural scientists
and vice versa. This is not work that
many philosophers or scientists have an appetite for, and most need not respond
to the call, but for those that do, the results of the dialogue will be
interesting.
It was a very stimulating afternoon and I thank Graham for it.
