Ep. 384: Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (Part One)

0:08 Mark: To the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 384 is what is there? And we read the introduction plus chapters 1, 2 and 4 of Graham Harman's 2018 book, Object Oriented Ontology, A New Theory of Everything. More information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, Ontographically self presenting in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:36 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, mediated locally in Austin, Texas.

0:40 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, a mid to large sized object who is not reducible to his parts or his whereabouts in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:49 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, pentamining in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:54 Mark: Pentamining. Is this a.

0:56 Wes: Wait, there's duo mining, undermining, overmining, and penta mining.

1:00 Dylan: I said penta mining.

1:01 Mark: Oh, okay, okay. I bullshitted as well. There's no ontographic chart. There's no ontographic self presentation. That is pure nonsense. There's some interesting terminology in here. This. This man who went to St. John's right?

1:16 Wes: Yeah, he was a senior when I was a freshman.

1:19 Mark: Yes. He's. What we could have been doing. Did you get some kind of. When somebody, you know, that we went to grad school with or something like. Yeah, I could have been.

1:30 Wes: What do you mean?

1:31 Mark: In that direction. He'd been much recommended to us.

1:34 Wes: No, I'm pretty happy where I am. But I did notice reading his. I forgot he went to St. John's and I think I told you guys, I just saw all the typical St. John's tropes and references. I'm like, okay, this guy goes to St. John's looked at his Wikipedia pages. I went to St. John's yeah.

1:50 Mark: And we are scheduled to actually speak to him next episode about his newest book. But we wanted first to cover his more famous book, which, you know, is quite recent. It's one of the most recent books that we've done. It's. But he's been thinking about this. I think this really goes all the way back to his first book, 2002's tool being Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. So that should tell a little bit about where he's coming from. But I thought just with his presentation, at least he. Given that he's going to be writing some pretty bizarre stuff, it's admirably clear.

This is, you know, so this is his umpteenth presentation of this topic and he really tries to make it accessible to new philosophy readers and even Though there's lots of sort of little secondary literature on Bruno Latour and Jose Ortega y Gasset and several other people. It's usually presented in a way that you don't have to know anything about them. It was only when he got to. I don't know, I dispute some of his readings, let's put it that way, when he's talking about Husserl and Heidegger. Yeah. Any initial reactions, summaries?

2:54 Wes: I think he would say he's a continental philosopher. Right. Or maybe he wouldn't classify himself.

2:58 Dylan: Either way, he says as much later at the end, part of what we read.

3:02 Wes: Yeah. So at the very least, he's coming out of the continental tradition. But the way it reads. Right. It doesn't have the same kinds of flourishes or maybe obscurity as some continental readings might, which I'm not. For better and for worse. Right. So.

3:22 Mark: But it.

3:23 Wes: And likewise. So in a way, it makes some grand claims. It's a theory. And it reminds me of a. More like the theorizing of early modern philosophy or the German idealists and that there are some big ideas in here. But when those, you know, even the early moderns and the. The idealists, when they wrote. Right. You sort of got a sense of the kind of grandeur of what they were doing. But here there's a kind of plainness and modesty, even though some of the ideas are quite speculative.

3:55 Dylan: I enjoyed, in part because he followed through, or is following through, facing a question or problem that had sort of one of the reasons why I started doing, or where I was sitting, doing physics and doing political philosophy back when I was an undergrad. So when I was. As an undergrad, I was reading a lot of postmodernism and Foucault and pragmatism and Nietzsche.

4:24 Wes: I'm just imagining the paroxysms of rage some of that must have caused.

4:30 Dylan: Well, so I wrote a lot of that, and then I was also doing a lot of physics, especially for my last three years. And in my fifth year, I was doing a Hegel seminar in a graduate quantum mechanics. So I had this kind of bifurcation that was going on. And what I found was that the postmodernists had something right about the fact, you know, that there's something incomplete or overstated about the claims of science, you know, even from a. You know, and then you could see this even when you were doing science, that, you know, there's this kind of revisions going on and stuff like that.

There's something to the notion that there is Both a, a narrative that's involved and even the account of how a scientist does science isn't scientific. Like the judgments that a scientist uses to decide whether or not a theory is really is good or not, or what kinds of objects there are in the world. That's not scientific. Strictly speaking, you don't have a law for what the objects are in the world. You know, you don't have a law that gets you electrons. It's. It's a different kind of judgment involved. So there's something right about that.

On the other hand, they just completely didn't engage with taking seriously both the claims and the practical success of accounting for reality in some way. So you have these like extraordinary flourishes. This would get to what Wes is saying about. What might make me really irritated is that postmodernists would say something like, well, it's all just a text as a Derrida thing. And I met Rorty, who was in this weird position of being a pragmatist and a postmodernist, but not exactly. And he would say things like that. And I asked him personally, do you really think that all of science is just more literature?

And he just said yes. It didn't engage the question with me at all. And so I found myself in this position where I didn't. There's something to the notion of recognition of metaphor and aesthetics and the fungibility of ideas in science, but there's also this in philosophy, especially in the postmodernist stuff that I was reading, just frankly just didn't even take seriously, engage seriously with the notion that you have a world in front of you that you actually interact with in ways that are much more palpable and quantitative and real than they were engaging in.

And I felt like in reading this that like, that's right where he is, he's right in the middle of that question.

7:08 Mark: I mean, Rorty's an interesting comparison just because he was familiar with the Continentals, but he still writes in a clear nice way. In some way. I was comparing this to the John Searle book that we read, sort of a counter to that. So John Searle in the, when we spoke to him was saying that, you know, all of so called modern philosophy and thinking, all we have in contact with is our own ideas, representations of things, and we never actually come in contact with things. That's all just ridiculous. I want to be more commonsensical than that.

And this is also an attempt to be more commonsensical in a certain way. More true to like, of course There are objective objects in the world that have nothing, that are mind independent. That would be there whether any humans were living on Earth or not, of course. But denying that central Searlean claim that we have actual contact with him. So he wants to actually bite the bullet and take a Kantian position explicitly that what we experience are a world of phenomena. Sensory objects, he calls them, which. But when we're actually talking about.

I guess this is a point of ambiguity. We're getting into it when we're talking about a physical object in the world. Right. This is something that's going to be in his ontology. So he's arguing in favor of common sense against somebody that says, well, no, they're really only molecules and, or atoms. And the, the macro objects are just. Can be reduced.

8:31 Wes: Mark Strings.

8:32 Mark: Yes, they could be reduced to strings or, oh, you know, that table is just a social construct. We should just treat it as a functional object. We should only think of something as the sum of its relations to everything else in the universe. He's going to say both those things are crazy. I just want to actually talk about objects. But that introduces, as with Kant, a skepticism that objects are objectively there in the world. Well, what is it? You know, we have illusions, we have. We only perceive sides of objects, we only perceive parts of objects.

And so he wants to create this, this slice that a lot of continental philosophers, every single one after Kant, starting with Hegel, seemed. He's reading Heidegger as a return to Kant on this. They really wanted to get rid of this idea that we have no contact with the actual world that we talk about. When I'm talking about the table, I'm talking about the real physical object that would be there whether any humans. Well, obviously we built the table, but so a rock, whatever, you know, that it's entirely independent of people.

9:36 Seth: So I agree somewhat with a little bit of what everything's been said. There's a kind of audacity to the approach and the claim. There's a clarity to the way it's written. There's an openness to referencing all different sorts of figures. But there's also a little bit of. It feels a little dilettante at times, kind of bouncing around from thing to thing. So, you know, it started off. And when you hear object oriented ontology, at least I have a particular thing that is brought to mind. I think of Whitehead. I think of the idea of somebody trying to provide an alternative to traditional Aristotelian substances and the idea of trying to solve or address the concerns about the thing in itself, something like that.

And it's a very compelling opening where he draws the analogy between the theory of everything, a theory of everything that is apparently being searched for in physics, and then a theory of everything philosophically. So something that would explain materialist and non materialist things and not simply either dismiss the 1 or declare that they're 2, completely opposed and never to be conjoined things. So I appreciated that and was, you know, excited of course, by the references to the phenomenologists and also excited when he sort of in chapter two, brought up this notion of aesthetics and the idea that there's alternative approaches, conceptual approaches to the world that will.

So somehow, at least in what we've read so far, it hasn't quite come together for me yet. So I kind of like it, but I also feel like I'm sort of wandering around. Yeah, it's like, okay, now let's talk about MENO for five pages.

11:37 Dylan: Yeah,

11:40 Wes: it's a presentation for laypeople. Right. So for people who are not professional philosophers. And so there's a lot of gaps and I don't know, you know, if you look at professional articles, if some of those are filled in. So for instance, on the idea of the aesthetic is acts as giving us some access to indirect access to reality or that we can't get descriptively. Well, that's a very old idea that also comes out of Kant and comes out of Kant's third Critique and is elaborated by the Romantics and even makes its way into German idealism a bit. So it.

There's no discussion of that. And there's also no discussion in his discussion of metaphor on like the vast philosophical literature on metaphor and how that might line up with what he wants to say about metaphor. He's not going to defend the idea that we don't have access to things in themselves. And as Mark mentioned immediately after Kant, I don't know if Reinhold was the first person letters on the Kantian philosophy, but immediately people were objecting to the idea of the thing in the thing in itself. And Hegel, right. That's one of the big attempts to solve that problem.

So there's not going to be any discussion of that or any sorts of justifications, any delving into academic literature. There's just a very straightforward presentation that's largely devoid of getting into the academic weeds. And you know, at certain points you get. He wants to delve into Plato's MENO a bit, which does seem a little bit forced maybe for the work. It's Supposed to do with justified true belief and the concept of knowledge. So I get what you're saying about all that stuff. Yeah, I had the same sort of impression.

13:18 Mark: I mean, the juxtapositions are kind of surprising sometimes. And in a way, that was fun. Like, it wasn't till. So just to give us the structure, this book has seven chapters, the last of which is just a summary that Wes read and said we didn't have to read because it just really didn't add anything. And so the chapter one introduces it. And I could just call it Against Scientism. It's called A New Theory of Everything. But it's really, you know, why his idea of an ontology as opposed to a reductionist ontology of some sort. So it's a very promiscuous ontology that what we're going to count as real objects in the world could be just momentary confluences of things. And Seth, you mentioned Whitehead.

13:59 Seth: Right.

14:00 Mark: I thought that object oriented ontology was supposed to be opposed to a process ontology on top. But he explicitly says, like, no, I consider events to be objects. So I have such a wide ontology that just about anything fits into it. Then chapter two was this thing on aesthetics, so we can talk about that. And then chapter three was on society and politics, which I did end up skimming. You read it, Wes. Right. Which I thought was pretty skippable. But then chapter four was the real meat, and it kind of enraged me. And I kind of want to talk because that's where he gets into Husserl and Heidegger and Kant on the thing in itself and just this epistemic idea. I want to hold off my rage about that, to actually present it in something like the order that he presents it so we can talk about overmining and undermining and duo mining and stuff in the CH in chapter one first.

14:53 Wes: Yeah, we could try and get through chapter one at a pretty brisk pace if you want. And then maybe do chapter four before chapter two.

15:00 Mark: Yeah.

15:01 Wes: Since that's what you.

15:01 Dylan: Yeah, I would do that.

15:03 Mark: Right. Just as you referred to Wes. It's chapter two, chapter four is there are things in themselves, all the objects we talk about, in fact, tables and chairs. It's not just like whatever it is, an unknown X that lurks behind what we call tables and chairs. No, there's an actual real table, real chairs that are in the world that we will never have direct access to and so can actually have no knowledge of. So he has to tell us in chapter four, what is knowledge? Then if it's not that chapter two is, though. Oh, we. We can, as you refer to Wes, have some sort of indirect access to the objects, the things in themselves, through art, through metaphor. And we've talked about Schopenhauer and other folks that thought things like that. But it is a little bit of a tangent.

15:49 Dylan: The reason that he has the aesthetics chapter and two there is to prepare you for what he means by indirect access. So he wants to lean on metaphor and aesthetics as the mode of indirect access that gives us knowledge. So he wants to give you enough of that in order to have some kind of clarity about what he's going to mean in the end when he talks about indirect access in chapter four.

16:14 Wes: Yeah, and I forgot to mention, besides the German Romantics, there's Schopenhauer, I guess, overlaps a bit with that. So. Right. Schopenhauer's conception of the thing in itself is as will. And so we do have access to things in themselves, says Schopenhauer, because we are willing creatures, and in a way we can grasp the thing in itselfiness of everything out there in terms of its manifestation of will, which turns out they're barnacles on the great big God, Will in the same way. Right. That Spinozan individuals are barnacles on God, properties of God, but with this added dimension of will.

So it sounds very similar in some ways, this idea that we place our. Put ourselves in as it'll turn out, and we'll explain this more later, but put ourselves in the place of the object that is being elaborated using a metaphor, but to which we gain access only in a sense, by putting ourselves in its place. And yet he doesn't really mention Schopenhauer, and I don't know if that's just for simplicity of presentation, and it comes up in other of his writings, but it's just the sort of thing that anyone who's read a bunch of philosophy is likely to take note of.

But, yeah, but Dylan. Yeah, the point is to talk about how we might get indirect access or some sort of access to things in themselves. There's an old tradition, there's a long tradition of people making these similar sorts

17:41 Dylan: of claims in this way. The audacity is he's trying to solve a very old problem about how do we know things in the world and the variety of solutions that you have to solving that problem, and the way in which our access to the world is mediated by our minds and our senses, but it also has this part of it that is sort of manifestly there Just all the problems that you have with just the way in which we interact with the world and the world interacts with us. And he comes down that of being on the one hand, Kantian in some important ways. But he wants to wrest back realism from it.

From Kant. That's one way I think I would put it. And he glancingly points to the aesthetic work that Kant did and talks about his ethics a bit as part of framing it. And one way I might have put it is he is trying to go further of applying Kant's ethics and just going further than that to an ontology about the world that's based upon aesthetic judgments. In the end, he has this whole section where he's explicitly trying to also not rely on the third step, basically the God step. Whatever version of God it is, he wants to make it all effectively secular.

It's us in some kind of contact, but not direct contact with the world. So the world is real, we have contact with it. We. But not direct contact with it. And that account in is formulated in object oriented ontology is an attempt to account for all of our interactions with things.

19:31 Wes: But we as things in themselves, as we are also things in themselves and we are ourselves. So we have a special kind of access there. But we stand in, in a sense.

19:42 Dylan: Yep.

19:43 Wes: For the. We substitute ourselves in for the object out there to which we can't have direct access. So we. And that, you know, it does sound a little bit like. Right. So we do that instead of making this appeal to God, we make the appeal to the self. Right. But that's just one of the metaphysical objects. You know, you're just shifting the burden from one metaphysical object to another. And so I'm not sure it's all that different than God. Right. And God and the consciousness come together in the German idealists. So I think Mark is worried that we're getting a little bit too fuzzy and vague here.

20:17 Mark: I mean, this is really mysterious when he brings it up in chapter and says, look, I'll explain in chapter four. So we're just following him and throwing these things more or less out there.

20:27 Dylan: Right.

20:28 Mark: We had this idea that we discussed in our Malebranche episode. And then actually you could see like, okay, maybe this is even a Descartes of occasionalism. So that's what. What Dylan was referring to is that you would think that if you want to really have an objective account of the world, you know, you're an Ayn Randian objectivist, then you don't say causality is in our head. You say causality is really in the world, just like objects are really in the world, you know, a part of what anybody might think of them. They have causal relations. But that's not just as there's this rift between us and the objects in the world.

Well, of course, that's basically a causal relation. Right. The object in the world is supposed to cause something in our senses which gives us some kind of idea. So if he's going to say causality is. Doesn't make any sense between us and the world, he's actually going to say exactly the same thing happens between, you know, billiard ball one, that is going to hit billiard ball two. Those actually, those are both things in themselves and they cannot come in contact. So there is no causality.

21:33 Dylan: Yeah. So when we get into four, there are. I have a whole bunch of questions about what he means by direct contact and not having direct contact and stuff like that. Welcome into that.

21:44 Seth: So let's rewind it just a little bit back here to one and try to use some of the language that he's using so that we can at least set the stage, because there are. He's tackling the big stuff. There's nothing small about this enterprise. Right. So part of what he's talking about is that we figured out over the last 400 years or so that our epistemological relationship to the world is one of knowledge, and that knowledge is of qualities or attributes we experience and we come to get knowledge of objects in the world through their attributes or qualities.

Right. And he says this presents us with the problem that we can't seem to access the quote unquote, objects which actually possess these qualities. This is. There's a gap and this causes consternation. And there have been a bunch of different ways that philosophers have tried to resolve this dilemma. And he says, I'm going to, you know, essentially I'm going to take on that same problem. I'm just going to come up with a different approach which isn't idealism. In other words, it doesn't appeal to something above and outside that over determines the object and guarantees our epistemological place in the world.

And not going to appeal to materialism, which appeals to something that's under, determines or undermines. I don't remember the language exactly, but says, oh well, it's all just atoms. And that explains it. That's the real thing is the atoms, or the real thing is the form or the idea or God's secure attachment to it or whatever it happens to be. And he says, I'm going to give you an account that explains how we know attributes. We have regular old knowledge like we know we. But I'm also going to give you an account that explains how we have access.

He doesn't want to use the term knowledge, but access to those things that we think are somehow behind those attributes. So he introduces this nomenclature of real and sensible. So there's a real object and a sensory object, and then there's. We'll leave this on the table for now. Real qualities, but there's also sensible qualities. And then he starts speaking in that language about how traditional knowledge works and perception and so forth versus what he's trying to get at. So I just want to introduce that because I think we should start using that language as we kind of get into his argument.

24:15 Wes: Do you want to start with chapter one and give why science can't provide a theory of everything and his arguments against the four assumptions there. Physicalism, smallism, anti fictionalism and literalism.

24:26 Dylan: Yes.

24:27 Wes: So, yeah. So I mean, he begins by reminding us of string theory as an attempt to give a theory of everything and a kind of theory that will unite, I guess, different trends in physics. And apparently physics can ultimately explain everything because everything is ultimately made of matter. And then he's going to move on to objections to the idea that science can explain everyone. And the first objection, he's going to say there are four false assumptions. And the first one is physicalism, which is the idea that everything is reducible to physical material components.

And his primary example there is the Dutch East India Company, which he's going to say is real but not material. And we're all very familiar with that kind of move in philosophy. We can't say exactly where it is. It was spread out over various locations. It lasted for 200 years. All of its material elements change the people involved change the boats and various other things. So it was a form, really, and with shifting material components. So the Dutch East India Company is not reducible to its material components. It's an example of an object, what he would call an object that is not material and it has a history.

25:38 Mark: So it's not even like the ship of Theseus that he brings up. Well, that's a form. It's the same ship. If you were on the ship once and then you went later, you might have a new paint job. But it would look, the structure is the same, the bow is in the same place, whereas East India training like, well, it got bigger, it got smaller, it got, you know, it can go through lots of important Changes, but still remain the same thing.

26:01 Seth: This would be true for any association or group like we've been talking about for the last few weeks.

26:06 Dylan: Yeah. He could have picked a country, he could have picked a city, he could have picked a family. He could have picked all kinds of things that are combinations of physical objects. He could have picked the weather, pretty

26:17 Seth: much anything you could name.

26:18 Dylan: Yeah, but it's a good example in that we would very naturally call it a thing. In fact, we treat something like the East India Company as an entity in a very natural way.

26:31 Wes: Ultimately, we do need criteria for entities. And he doesn't say a lot about this, but he gestures at that. Right. He says his ontology is flat to begin with. So we're kind of promiscuous and inclusive and maybe even in the beginning we do the thing that Aristotle's unwilling to do, which is to say it's not just Socrates who's a substance, an entity, a unity. Right. All those things go together. But Socrates on the chair we might want to call an object too. We might want to take an odd hat combination like that and call it an object. Now, I think ultimately, probably for him, that would fall out as we got into our ontology. We would end up agreeing that Socrates on the chair is not. It might be a certain kind of object for certain kind of purposes, but would it be a thing in itself? Would it be a unity in itself? I think we would ultimately have to reject that, but it's a bit unclear.

27:14 Dylan: It's similar to the question, well, a difference between a thing and a heap. So a heap as an entity.

27:19 Mark: But this is really going to get into our Ellis episode came to mind where he was not promiscuous about what counts as a real entity, as in something that actually has an essence. Right. That he was working on the sophistication picture, that there's a definable essence. This is what science is trying to get at. You know, Harman says, you know, a lot of his reasons for insisting that things themselves are, you know, that is, which is what science wants. Well, sorry, I'm already getting ahead of myself. Yeah, just go on.

27:48 Dylan: Yeah, I think Wes is right. I think maybe it'll be interesting to ask him this. Whether Socrates in a chair is a thing or not. My guess is that it is. I don't see why it. That it's completely depends on the context in which you were considering it.

28:04 Wes: Yeah, it's a. It's a bit unclear to me because he does say that we would. It's hard to tell what are. What's ad hoc in our, you know, what's a heap and what's a unity? And so we are somewhat agnostic about that in the beginning, but that's. Yeah, I don't think there's a lot of clarity on that in this text.

28:20 Dylan: Yeah. Importantly, he doesn't show any concern about essences.

28:25 Wes: Well, eventually he does talk about essences in chapter four, but this is what

28:29 Mark: stopped me in my going through this is because I thought maybe for something to be a real entity, it has to have an inner nature that could be explored or you could ask questions about. And he does say, you know, that one of his. The ways that he is, you know, he points a lot to Latour and how Latour allowed for lots of more kinds of entities, including hybrid entities, so that you wouldn't think. So maybe Socrates on a chair, Socrates using the technology. Maybe that ends up being a hybrid

29:00 Dylan: smoking a cigarette on the corner.

29:02 Mark: Yes, something like that.

29:03 Dylan: But.

29:04 Mark: But thinks that actually Latour is not promiscuous enough that he should have allowed these momentary, really events. So Socrates in the act of right now sitting on the chair, maybe that is actually something that we could. Oh, we could analyze that. We could make a metaphor about it. We could. We could talk about. And importantly, like the collision, like he actually uses this example, the collision between two airplanes in the air. So, you know, the collision between Socrates butt in the chair, that could create a temporary entity. Right. The collision which then goes away. Right. The entity only lasts for a second, but it then has grave effects on the component parts.

29:44 Wes: Yeah, Pretty grave if you're in the plains. Less grave for Socrates, ass in the chair.

29:50 Dylan: But this is one of the questions I think we're going to end up gnawing on a lot is he clearly wants events to be objects. And it feels like there's a distinction that I would want to make between objects and events. And it might be just that I don't have a promiscuous enough idea about what objects are. I think that's part of his answer, but I guess I want to understand better what problem he's solving by insisting that that's the case.

30:20 Wes: Yeah, see, I'm not ultimately very happy with this use of the word object. I don't know what it adds to promiscuously use the word object in this way. You can see him. I think the best case for it is in a way made in chapter two, where he gives an analysis of the Civil War, Chapter three. Yeah. And there seems to be a certain methodology that comes out of this that might have application to the social sciences. Now, I don't really think you need object oriented ontology to do history, for instance, but he gives a nice cogent analysis of the Civil War and applies object oriented ontology's methodology. So I think readers could look at that and think, okay, is this. If they want to know whether it's useful, That's a really good case example to me.

31:04 Dylan: He's trying to get rid of the problem between being and becoming by having events be things. So it allows for the full dynamicness. And so Aristotle had. Did it in a different way. Right. He has things have their own nature and part of their nature is becoming the thing that they are.

31:27 Wes: Yeah. There is no entity without dynamism for Aristotle.

31:31 Dylan: That's right.

31:31 Wes: What we see is static and what seems to be at rest, the substance, the entity, is driven by some underlying dynamic thing. It's driven by circular motion, essentially because just. Just as an atom. Right. The thing that keeps the atom being the atom is even though it's all motion is that there's a circle in a sense, it may not really look like a solar system, but, you know, something like that.

31:54 Dylan: Yeah. So that's what. I was constantly reminded of Aristotle when I was reading what he's doing for this reason.

32:00 Seth: Yeah. Well, so this is why I thought of Whitehead. Right. So if you're saying, how do we explain the eternal, persistent, unchanging object, or how do we explain change in that eternal, persistent. You can say, oh, well, there aren't things that are only events. Everything is becoming. That's one way to do it. There's nothing eternal. And the other way is to say, oh, well, becoming is part of the thing. It's not our conception of the thing. So you can change how you think about objects, or you can say, well, we don't have objects, we only have something else, like what we call events. But I remember about 20 minutes ago, when we kicked off on this, somebody said we should talk about those four things that he says, he's.

32:41 Dylan: So we have the second one now.

32:42 Wes: Yeah. So I think, yeah. With this remaining 20 minutes, there's a possibility we'll get to these three other things. And then we could explain overmining and undermining. And I think that would be the essence, if there are essences of the.

32:54 Mark: The essence of the chapter.

32:56 Wes: So smallism, Right. Is this prejudice that everything that exists must be basic and simple and that you kind of drill down to get that. Right. You decompose things, you do mereology. And decompose things into their parts. And ultimately you may get atoms or strings or whatever. But all the, the idea is that all the properties of mid and large size and objects, you know, that the macro level that we experience in our daily life are reducible to this other realm of tiny, simpler things. And he's going to want to make the claim again. You know, something we've seen many times on this show, that actually these emergent properties that appear when smaller objects are joined together, it's perhaps the case that you could predict them from the, you know, what's going on at the micro level, but they have unique properties of their own.

And that, in other words, the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

33:52 Dylan: Exactly.

33:53 Mark: And an interesting point I'm trying to find exactly where it is that he adds to this is it doesn't even matter. Like people often make. The point about emergence is could you predict what the whole is going to do based on the parts?

34:06 Dylan: It's on page 31.

34:07 Mark: Yes. Okay. And he says, even if you could predict what this, you know, oh, if we get these four people together in a group, we. And with these technologies and these structure, then this is what it's going to come out. Even if we could do that. Exactly. He says, yes. Predictability is not even the point, since even if we could predict the features of all larger entities from their ultimate physical constituents, the ability to predict would not change the fact that the larger entity actually possesses emergent qualities not found in its components. So there you go.

34:34 Wes: Right? So we can do this with carbon and organic compounds. Right. We can often predict macro properties from features of carbon and the way it's combined with other elements, although I do have a quibble with them on that, but I'm not going to go there. But it doesn't change the fact that.

34:49 Dylan: Right.

34:49 Wes: Whether or not we can predict doesn't change the fact that there are such emergent properties. And it's right. Emergence, the joint, the kind of properties that occur of the compound are not themselves found in the components. So each layer, right, there's a sense in which it's not entirely reducible to the other layer. So if we want to talk about biology and evolution, for instance, we couldn't just translate that all into talk about atoms. There's something that would be lost if we just did that translation. If we tried to translate everything into atom talk or string talk.

35:25 Mark: And even you've given the example before from Lucretius, atoms aren't colored, right? Color is an emergent property. When you Get a bunch of atoms together. Now I'm bringing in an observer there. Right. So this is. This raises an issue of is there any sort of primary secondary quality distinction? Right. Primary qualities, space are supposed to be more central ontologically than secondary qualities. It seems like he has to say that green is a real. It's still a property, but it is a real thing. It is an entity because, you know, the same green.

If I have a green bag, you might see it differently in different lighting conditions. You know, if you squint your eye, if you have. Are colorblind, whatever. So there actually is a real color that this thing has. He's not going to be able to rule that out just based on. Well, you don't have colors till you have, you know, light plus an observer plus. Like, it's still. It's okay. It can be a hybrid like that.

36:23 Wes: Yeah. The distinction here is between epistemological and ontological emergence, which he doesn't bring up. Right. Ontological emergence would be, oh, there are colors that are emergent upon the properties of light and things like that. And it's not just a matter of our eyes, the way things affect our eyes. And then epistemological emergence is primary secondary quality theory. And in Lucretius, it's probably ontological emergence. But it's a little bit unclear in Lucretius. But yeah, it seems here that Harman is probably leaning on ontological emergence.

But it's a bit of a problem. Right, Because Kant is all about epistemological emergence. There's unknowable things in themselves. And then everything that we think is a property of something is just a result of our. The interactions of our minds and their categories and spatiotemporal tendencies to construct everything, you know, what we're interacting with in a certain way. But again, not something that's here in detail. Do we want to do the third one, Anti fictionalism?

37:21 Mark: I mean, we can mention it. Right? Sherlock Holmes. That is a character that we talk about, the possible worlds guy. There's one. We had one of the analytic guys,

37:29 Wes: Davidson or not David. Was it Davidson?

37:32 Mark: I don't know. We talked about Sherlock Holmes in particular quite a bit on one of these.

37:36 Wes: We did things.

37:36 Mark: Maybe this was on the Possible world's guy, David Lewis, I think that might be.

37:41 Wes: Yes, that's what it was. Yeah.

37:42 Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you want to allow fictional entities to be objects in your ontology. What did you guys think about that as well?

37:50 Dylan: Yeah. The way he says it is, everything that exists must be real. That's A false assumption. So Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes is a thing and it exists, but it's not real.

38:02 Wes: Yeah, Sherlock Holmes isn't made of strings. He's made of fictional strings. No, he's not even made of fictional strings. He's not real characters. But, yeah, he's.

38:13 Dylan: This, to me, is fine. It just raises the question about. Now you have to make the distinction between real things and not real things.

38:21 Mark: Yeah. So he brings up these literary characters as a way of saying what I think we saw in Quine. He doesn't mention Quine, but I remember Quine specifically saying, macro, physical objects are theoretical constructs. Right. We have all these different views of different sides of it, and they stick together. And so we just call it this table. Whereas, you know, I think you compare to, like, the Olympians or something like that. And so Harman says on page 34, any real orange or lemon, as I perceive it, is a vast oversimplification of the real citrus objects in the world that are submitted to rough translation by the human senses and human brain.

The real orange or lemon is no more accessible to my human perception than it is to a mosquito or dog whose organs translate the fruits differently into their own types of experience. In this respect, all 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.

39:14 Dylan: Okay, so this part annoys me a lot. This is where, to me, he's doing something that's very common in postmodernism is all the objects we experience are merely fictions. In this respect, they're all merely fictions. When you say it that way, to me, it means that they have no bearing on reality. And I don't think that's what he means. I think he's trying. Or maybe it is what he means. But what the hell does something like that mean? All these objects are merely fictions. What it reads is, it's just when someone says that, it just means it's just horseshit. That's what that means.

39:53 Wes: No, I think so. The Kantian interpretation, which I'm sympathetic to, is a possibility, although I happen to like Aristotle and Hegel as well. I don't know how to decide. There's just so many choices. But the Kantian possibility that I am sympathetic to is that it's all just secondary qualities that we have access to. Right. And so we may be in the Matrix, and at bottom, the lemons might just be code. Let's just say that and. Okay, that's fine. That's fine. Maybe everything that we have access to, the color of the lemon and the taste and all that is just a.

That's mind, object interaction. And they're not. They don't. Those properties don't belong to lemons in themselves. And neither they do spatial properties. What would write what the early moderns thought of as what the in itself, for the early moderns is everything of spatial, temporal. That's their scientific view of the world. And Kant says, no, that's all secondary qualities as well. All right, that is fine. I think that's a sustainable point of view. But that doesn't change the fact that if the cat is on the mat, the cat is on the mat. If the cat is code and the mat is code at bottom, okay, fine.

But contingent truth, which, by the way, Kant does a very bad job. Kant doesn't really address this problem of contingent truths like the cat is on the mat. As we go forward in this book, we do know that that's true. That's not inaccessible to us. Like if the cat is on the mat, the cat really is on the mat. If John is in the living room near me, and I'm not deceived about that, then John really is in the living room. Now, John may look like something else in himself, and so might the living room, but it doesn't change those contingent truths.

41:25 Mark: So I think.

41:25 Wes: I don't know if I'm getting at your intuition here, Dylan, about what's so objectionable about this, but that that's what I would say about it.

41:33 Seth: So I don't know if his use of the term fictions is an unfortunate choice or if it's deliberately provocative. But I don't think it's doing what you guys think it's doing. You know, what he's trying to say is you have a bias that tells you that your ability to perceive something in the immediate present that's right in front of you is giving you some kind of privileged access to that thing and that you have some kind of experience or knowledge of it that is several degrees removed from something like a fictional character. Or if that's too objectionable, how about a real character that lived in the past, like Abraham Lincoln, right, or Alexander the Great that's existed and was real and is no longer real.

Right? Maybe that makes it more complicated. But what he's just trying to say is whatever that representation you have of that thing is just a representation. I think that's all he's saying. He's not saying that it's fictional.

42:33 Wes: That's the Kantian position. All we have are the appearances. All we have are secondary qualities. That's he's telling us over and over again he's a Kantian. In fiction is this way of saying appearance.

42:45 Seth: Then Dylan is concerned with something else.

42:48 Dylan: Here's my objection. It's in the second part of his sentence. All the objects we experience are merely fictions, colon, simplified objects of a far more complex object that continue to exist when I turn my head away from them. Simplified models are not fictions. They might be partial information, but they're not fictions. In that if I am making a model that is not a fiction, I am describing something maybe partially, but that about which I can make decisions about the world, about things that will actually affect me. I might have a simplified model about how gravity works, but I'm going to use that to keep me from jumping out a fucking window.

43:30 Wes: That's the dramatic version of my cat is on the mat example.

43:32 Mark: Well, and he ends up agreeing, right? He says this very provocative thing at the very beginning, page six. No one is actually in possession of knowledge or truth. And so strictly speaking, that's going to be the case. But we have a lot to go on. We have expert, we have contact with reality, is what he's going to say. So we've opened the Pandora's box. Let's start our part 2. Engaging directly what he has to say about these things in themselves, which is what we've just opened with this last quote. But I think we should shut down and give ourselves a few minutes to recover.

44:04 Wes: We don't want to do literalism before we get off here.

44:06 Dylan: Just do the fourth assumption really quick

44:08 Wes: five minutes and then I think we will have to start part two. I don't think much is going to make sense if we don't do undermining and overmining first. But anyway, literalism, right? He wants to object to the idea, to the assumption that everything that exists must be able to be stated in literal propositional language. So the thing that he brings up is Dennett's form of literalism where there is no qualia. So wine, right? The taste of wine can be adequately expressed by chemical assay, like the. Our subjective sense of what the wine tastes like doesn't actually add anything that's some kind of delusion or illusion.

And he wants to say that even the chemical assay doesn't do justice to the chemical physical structure of wine. There's a. Something in reality is always withdrawn or veiled rather than directly accessible. So any attempt to grasp that reality by direct and literal language will inevitably fail. And this, I think, again, is just. It just kind of builds on the Kantianism. And we can, in the case of science. Right. A scientist might provisionally say the same thing. What we're saying about water at the macro level fails to capture what's going on with the H2O molecule, the deeper reality.

But Kantianism just kind of expands on that sort of idea and radicalizes it.

45:25 Dylan: Yeah, you stopped your quote right at the end on page 38 of that section where he summarizes, in a sense, this point by Heidegger, which he was referring to, about things not being directly accessible, merely developed Aristotle's ancient claim in his metaphysics that individual things cannot be defined, since things are always concrete, while definitions are made of universals. That, I think is a really great point. Point, right. That an account in science, for instance, it's intrinsically expected to be universal. And so in this way, the world, the things are concrete and the world is always bigger than the account that you're going to make of it, of the definition you're going to make of it. That's something that he's going to hold precious. The world is basically bigger and more interesting and more voluptuous than any of our accounts of it are.

46:17 Mark: All right, so we'll see how that very reasonable statement matches up with the claim that there must be contact with things in themselves and stuff in part two. Come back next week or become a Partially Examined Life supporter through our website or Patreon. Learn about those options. Partially examinedlife.com support. Thanks.

46:36 Wes: Thank you.