Friday, January 11, 2013

My Question for Graham Harman regarding Scientific Materialism


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.

7 comments:

  1. Liam, I agree that Graham's presentation was provocative and stimulating in a number of ways, and your question about OOO's value for science was appropriate. Perhaps OOO will generate inquiry that doesn't look much like either philosophy or science. Just as ecology developed analytical frameworks that biology couldn't provide, in an attempt to answer new questions, OOO is beginning to devise frameworks to address phenomena that we're having trouble understanding via established disciplinary outlooks and practices. Following Graham, the question of "change" is both as old as philosophy but as timely as ever - I'm thinking of climate change here. OOO would bring together all the objects implicated in this ongoing event, something we aren't doing so much at present with the climate scientists over there and the politicians over here and the philosophers largely absent.

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    1. Thanks Randall. The question of change is a significant one in The Quadruple Object and Graham said interesting things about it in his lecture -- especially the sorts of eruptive changes that characterize different moments in the history of the universe, including that of the "ontological catastrophe"(I hope by the way that we get this essay in published form before too long). And of course ecology, especially through resilience thinking/critical transitions is attempting to get beyond the linear models of change inherited from some other sciences. So there is a point of connection here. But of course the discussion of change that is relevant to philosophy is a "metaphysical" one whereas in ecology it is an empirical one - though to be honest it seems like they are not so very far apart. There's a lot more to be said here, and trying to articulate it will be profitable.

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  2. Good post, Liam. I think OOO inquiry is going to look odd to any established disciplinarian. Following Graham's attempts to understand change of any sort, maybe understanding something like climate change would entail accounting for all the objects - at all scales - entailed in the problem. Experiments with familiar forms but quite different content?

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    1. Encountering, describing, and predicting at all scales is what climatologists and ecologists think they are doing wrt to climate change, of course. But, at the moment it seems to me that we can both proceed with science as we have been doing (recognizing at the same time that its record of producing and solving problems is confusing) while at the same time imagining what a new set of practices might look like if scientists were prepared to be more open to changes in the ontological assumptions. It's hard for me at the moment to know precisely what that would look like....but we should open that conversation up.

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  3. I’ve been working through and blogging about object-oriented ontology for the last year and a half or so and have been particularly interested in the relationship between philosophy and other more specialized disciplines. I think it’s a tricky one.

    Harman is certainly correct in believing that philosophy isn’t and shouldn’t be a handmaiden to science. But it’s difficult for me to see how a philosopher can get a feel for the problems and concepts of a discipline without substantial immersion in the phenomena of that discipline.

    I’ve seen this maxim of “everything is related to everything else” argued out in a couple philosophy blogs and, as an abstract argument, it’s just words. And I don’t find the words terribly convincing one way or the other. At this level of abstraction I can’t see such a maxim as anything more than a crude rule of thumb. To argue it as though it embodied some deep principle that applies across the board to everything seems to me beside the point.

    The matter only becomes interesting when you consider a specific example in some detail. Once you’ve got an example domain and a case or three from that domain, however, you’re moving from philosophy and into some other discipline. I’m interested in language and cognition. The “everything is related” assertion takes a certain form, for example, in the linguistic system that Sydney Lamb argues out in Pathways of the Brain. There’s no reason to think that that reasoning would be relevant to life-forms in an island ecosystem. It may, it may not. But the specific details matter and they’re quite different in the two cases.

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  4. Bill, thanks. I agree that very substantial engagement is needed in order for sciences and philosophy to do interesting things with one another (which is partly why I am doing graduate work in philosophy). As I say, I don't think realistically this will be on the agendas of many people. But their are exceptions. I like the work of both Anthony Paul Smith and Tim Morton who both take ecology very seriously - though they are coming to it from very different philosophical perspectives.

    I am frankly fed up with "everything connected" being used to characterize ecology. Except in the most trivial possible way it means little in the discipline (it may be more helpful in providing an encouraging and terrifying maxim for sustainability). I write a little more about it here: http://10thingswrongwithenvironmentalthought.blogspot.com/2011/10/everything-connected.html

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  5. I found my way to object-oriented ontology through some blog posts by Tim Morton. Though it seemed strange--despite my undergraduate background in both Continental and Anglo-American philosophy--I got the sense of something interesting going on. So I started reading around and two ideas resonated with conclusions I'd already reached through rather different intellectual means: 1) the irreducibility of objects, and 2) the inexhaustibility of objects (that is, Harman's notion of withdrawal). But I've never really seen correlationism as an issue. To use a phrase of Wittgenstein's, it seems to me that fly left the bottle some time ago. It may be an issue within Continental philosophy, but otherwise it seems to me a non-issue.

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