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

0:07 Mark: Hey. This is the Partially Examined Life Episode 384, Part 2. Discussing Graham Harman's 2018 book, Object Oriented Ontology. We had given a sprawling overview of the parts that we read and discussed most of chapter one. We didn't really explain those key terms that he introduces about really it's about reductionism. So we've had a lot of reductionism in our podcast coverage over the years. I was looking back at Carnap, for instance, Wittgenstein. The idea that in an ontology, there's some things that are not real, maybe psychological states, maybe mental states.

We need to somehow reduce them. So, like, reduce the mental to the physical Carnap. And Wittgenstein in his Tractatus, wanted to reduce philosophical project as reducing the inchoate massive creation, including the tables and chairs and things that we, the macroscopic objects, reduce them to something more basic, whether it be atoms or strings or molecules. So instead of just calling that all reduction he wants to call it, well, it's undermining if it's moving you toward a smaller thing, but it could also be a more basic internal thing. But he also then introduces this term over mining, where when you're reducing it to something phenomenal or something merely social, or something merely functional, and you're saying, oh, what is this chair?

A chair is just something that we as pragmatists, we carve out of the mass, the blooming, buzzing confusion, and we just make it an object because it's useful for us. But really all the chair is, is the function. It doesn't really matter what it's made of, it is just, you know, what it is to us.

1:49 Wes: Yeah, I think the difference, right. Undermining is a reduction to something that's not readily apparent to us, and overmining is a reduction to what is readily apparent to what's epistemologically more basic. So undermining goes to what's ontologically more basic but not necessarily accessible to us directly. Overmining goes towards what's epistemologically more basic and more directly accessible. So in the case of undermining, which we're familiar with, and we've already talked about this in this episode, in association with smallism, right.

Mid sized objects are. He says they're too shallow to be real. That's the way he puts it. What there really are are atoms, for instance, and these things are reducible to their component parts. In over mining, he gives, I think this is a little bit more of a difficult idea, but he gives the example of Descartes reducing everything to res extensa. That's what Descartes thinks of as matter, but it's really more like just geometrical extension. And that might be seem like an odd contrast because Descartes in a way is a materialist himself, scientifically, even though he's ultimately a dualist.

Descartes overminds, according to Harman, in two ways. One is to matter as res extensa, and one is into consciousness as something that we have incorrigible direct access to. Right. I think, therefore I am. In the case of res extensa. I think the idea is that geometry wears its essence on its sleeve, right? So if we're dealing with the surface properties of the triangle, we are dealing with the essence of the triangle. If we are reducing things to mathematics, as we might do in science, we gain this immediate access to the structure of the world.

And so in some ways it ironically has something in common with idealism, where Idealism tries to reduce matter to something that's directly accessible to us.

3:44 Dylan: Yeah. And in fact, he refers to the idealist after the section on Descartes, he brings up Berkeley and then he pivots over to Whitehead, Latour and pragmatists and Husserl, Derrida. He summarizes them all as saying that they have in common that all over mining theories that reduce things to their impact on us or on each other, denying them any excess or surplus beyond such impact. Then he says that the problem is that none of them are able to account for change, which I'm not sure about that part, but.

4:21 Wes: And I think, you know, he's right to associate idealism with post structuralism. I just think of post structuralism as the modern fancy version of idealism. Right. So post structuralism, I'm including Latour and Foucault and Derrida and all in that category. Post structuralism being associated with postmodernism. And the idea, the way Harman sums it up, is that they try to reduce everything to their relations or to their effects. So for pragmatists, it's difference. You know, what practical difference does it make? For Foucault, it's about power.

For Derrida it's a text. For Latour, it has to do something with social construction and social relations as well. So these are in a way akin to idealism, because we to say what a thing is, right, Even if it seems deflationary to say, well, there aren't really tables, it's all just socially constructed. Well, the social construction is in a way, something that's transparent to us, unlike atoms. So we gain a kind of idealistic direct access to the thing once we turn it into a social construct.

5:22 Mark: Well, and he explains, Dylan, you mentioned his point about change. So if you define something just in terms of its relation to other things, then, well, what happened when those relations change? So the fact that we engage in counterfactuals. If you say Homer is. This actually might be a purely functional description, because we don't know if Homer was a real person, but Homer is whoever it was that wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. But if there was an actual person, then there's way more to him than you could ask. Well, what if Homer didn't write the Iliad and the Odyssey?

What if Homer wrote other things instead? What if Homer became a carpenter and didn't do that? Like in ordinary talking about people, we of course think that they are actually objects and they could have been in other situations. It's a reaction to this extreme reduction of things to their relationship. I guess this is in Latour, you know, this is not a normal. This is a very weird view. So it's sort of easy for him. It's shooting fish in a barrel for him to defend himself against that. But I think the idea of Homer. Right. Maybe Homer really is exhausted by this description like that.

We don't actually know if it was a real person. Maybe a different person wrote the two. Maybe the Odyssey was written by several people over time. So in a way that Homer is actually an exception to this, that he is not necessarily. Harman says, like, we can't really know for sure whether any object we pick out is a real object or is some kind of illusion just based on what we're being exposed to. Right. This is part of what is going to be results from our actual divorce from objects. Another example he gives is a disease that he's arguing against some other thinker who said, there's no such thing as a disease.

There's just. It's. The medical establishment interprets all these various phenomena and they stuff it under one thing. And you could definitely see this in like, mental illnesses. Like, is schizophrenia. Is that actually one thing or is it many different things?

7:16 Wes: Yeah, but this author was trying to say atherosclerosis is.

7:20 Dylan: Yes.

7:21 Wes: So, yeah, diseases are socially constructed and they're products of practice in a certain sort of way. Which is right on board with Latour. He's not overstating this, by the way. People should go back and listen to our Saussure episode where there's an attempt to reduce. Well, maybe not in Saussure himself, but in people who follow him. Reduce meaning to make it not depend on reference. It's reducible to syntax. It's reducible to all the relations that one signifier has with all the other signifiers in the system. And then that gets applied by the post structuralist to reality.

Everything is the text. Everything just is its relations to everything else. So they pull in, I think, a little bit of what they think is a Hegelianism as well into that. But in any case, that's the idea. And he wants to say, by contrast, that there's something. A surplus. Right. We can't just reduce their things to their relations or to their impact on us. There's always some surplus beyond that which he identifies with the thing in itself. He says, page 50. There must be some surplus in things that is both deeper than its effects and shallower than its constituent pieces.

So that's a way of objecting to both overmining and undermining at the same time. The undermined thing is not the thing in itself, and neither is the overmined thing, nor is the thing both what it is made of and what it does in combination. A common strategy that I have called dual mining.

8:40 Dylan: I just want to register a quibble that I don't think that he's right about pragmatism in general falling in the same thing. In fact, I think a lot of the things that he's saying are problems in undermining, overmining. They're actually addressed directly in pragmatism by utility. Now, you may object to it for other reasons, but it's not the same kind of idealist problem.

9:08 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I tend to see pragmatism as a form of idealism, actually, but we've had that argument before. But yeah, no, your point, your objection is well taken. But I think in the end we could end with, I think, talking about the section with this idea that there's an upshot for here, for what he means by an object. Because objects don't just end up being what's, you know, the components, right, that we've undermined to or overmined to. They are just whatever is more than their pieces and less than their effects. So the other way he puts it early on in the chapter is that objects are anything that cannot be entirely reduced, either the components of which they are made.

I'm paraphrasing here. Or to their effects on other things. So that, you know, even though his. He admits that he's going to be using object in this very wide sense, that kind of reins it in a little bit. It's whatever corresponds to the surplus. So it's not reducible.

10:06 Dylan: Can we just take a couple of examples that he's used and just make sure you understand it. Like, I get that the east, that the Dutch India Company is more than the individual parts, okay, the ships and the people and stuff like that, but what does it mean to say that it is smaller than the sum total of effects on the world beneath its sum total?

10:31 Wes: He says less than its effects is the word he uses.

10:34 Dylan: I'm just reading page 51.

10:36 Wes: Yeah, he says this in different places. What I was referring to was 53 and 51. 53. He uses this phrase less than the effects. I thought it was very pithy, but yeah, 51 is a clear statement of this.

10:47 Dylan: Okay, less than its effects beneath its sum total of effects in the world, whichever way you want to say it. What does it mean that The Dutch East India Company. How do I say that that is true about it as an object?

11:00 Mark: Didn't we specifically deal with this in Aquinas, talking about what constitutes an action? Like, if you want to say, well, it has to include something about the circumstances. But it's still, we're judging the action, we're not judging the totality of the univers. Everything is connected to everything else. I think that is the extreme view that if you want to say the universe is a system, and if you want to define what a specific thing in the system is, you really have to say how it points to everything else. And so that's the way that it is totally inexhaustible.

And even though most of his emphasis here is that we don't want our theories to exhaust. We don't want our theories. We don't want to confuse the map with the territory. We want to say that any object is more than a description that we will give of it. But in this one place, he's saying that a certain theory which would not promise to say, you know, obviously you can't spell out, right, this is not the literalism objection. You can't spell out all the relations that an object has to everything. But if you say that the properties of an object include all of its.

What we would call extrinsic connections with other things, then you've just lost the object.

12:09 Dylan: Especially if you. If you say it's all of them, right? So you know that it's an object less than all of the effects that it has. Got it?

12:19 Seth: Yeah. Well, if you got it, then there's no further need. But I think there's some other ways to think about that too.

12:25 Wes: Well, he strongly associates this with social construction as well, right? This idea of everything being reducible to their relations or to. And the relations is a kind of ambiguous term, right? Because relation can mean its effect on my consciousness. It's sort of a secondary property type of idea or relations can mean actual relationships between objects in the world or relationships between signifiers. This is his way of capturing over mining, which he strongly associates with social construction. And so the claim here is that the Dutch East India Company is not a social construct, it's a social phenomenon.

And this is a thing I think people. And I think he's right. This is something people often confuse. It's a social object, but that doesn't mean it's a social construct. It's not just made up like we don't make it up ourselves. It really is there. And it involves all these different formal social relationships and activities that really are out there in the world.

13:16 Dylan: Got it. So do we just move up to chapter three or four?

13:20 Mark: Four, yes. Right. We can bring in the stuff about metaphor or whatever, as is required when we really get into his final. His diagram of how we talk about things in themselves. But. Right. We've already thrown out this idea that there is a wedge, there's an unbridgeable chasm between us and the things that we know. So how he wants to put this is that there is a phenomenal object that we construct. But that's right, that's our sort of image of the object. And that's what we use for general purposes and in fact what science is concerned with, because we want to know things for pragmatic reasons.

So we actually, you know, functionalism is okay to use in certain circumstances for when we were concerned with the functions of something. So if I want to build a bridge, I don't necessarily need to know about the, the inner nature of the stone. I just need to know if the stone is going to work in the configuration that I put it in to hold up the bridge. But so I'm in working with those things, I'm dealing with the phenomenal object stone. Right. Just in terms of objects not getting to properties yet. This is only the least weird point

14:32 Wes: you're leading in here to chapter four.

14:33 Mark: Yes.

14:35 Dylan: Okay. Yeah. So for me, the thing that he says in the very first paragraph, especially the second half of it, while I kept reading and I found it interesting, I was very confused. And maybe this goes to the fact that he never really addresses this question. He never clarifies to me what it means to not have direct contact. What does that mean? But he just restates it again that in the context of causality, I wonder how it's possible for an entity to influence another in any way. Obviously, I do not question the existence of such influence, but only wonder about the mechanism behind it.

Given that real objects are by definition incapable of touching each other, we need a way in which they touch without touching, through some sort of indirect contact. This concept is known in object oriented ontology as vicarious causation. Okay, so he's saying that the big problem I have here is that there is causation. How things are caused by how one thing causes another. And I know that things don't actually touch one another, but they have some kind of causation. Do you guys understand what he means? What? This question of direct contact or incapable of touching each other.

What does it mean?

15:53 Wes: So in 150. So he starts out by reminding us there's a rift between.

15:57 Mark: Yeah, Dylan had jumped to an issue like near the end of the chat, which is one of the most interesting issues.

16:02 Wes: No, it's actually there.

16:03 Mark: Oh, it is, right? Oh, it is mentioned. Okay.

16:05 Wes: I think he teases it and then he doesn't get into his occasionalism until fully so later. But he reminds us in the beginning there's a rift between the real object and the sensual qualities, which is just Kantianism. Right. The thing isn't really red, it appears red to us. That's the appearance. The real object is something else. At one point we thought, well, the real thing is all the. Is the spatiotemporal stuff, the scientific model. And then Kant wants to radicalize and say that, no, that might as well be a secondary quality as well. And whatever's underneath it, we don't really know, we don't have contact with that.

And then he wants to say, likewise, there's a rift between the sensual object and the real qualities. In fact, there's four rifts total. I think that there's a rift between real objects themselves. And he'll say, since real objects exceed the grasp not only of all human theory, perception and practical action, but of every sort of direct relation, then I wonder how it is possible for one entity to influence another in any way. So in other words, what's real about an object, any sort of thing in its in-itselfness that it has, is non relational.

Its independence is completely. It's as an entity. To the extent that it's an entity, it is so non relationally.

17:21 Mark: Yeah. So why is it, why is this not bonkers? Let's. Right, I think we've made the less controversial point that something transcends our. Our perception of it. There's always going to be more qualities. So whenever I come in contact with a thing, I'm coming in contact with a part of it. And I like the interpretation of that, says I'm really interacting with the thing, but. But only with part of it. It's an aspect of the thing. He does not like that. That's the Hegelian answer. That's the Humean answer. He says, no, no, we are coming with a representation of the thing.

We are imposing something. So we are never coming in contact with a thing at all. But then what's weird about that is that we think the reason that Kant would say, or that, you know, any epistemologist would say that we is because, like, well, we have these special senses that's the way we take things in. But he wants to say, like even two rocks approaching each other, their interaction is through an aspect. It's not through the. The internal, unknowable, infinite part of the rocks. It is merely through a surface level thing. So it's as if the one rock is perceiving the other.

And it's not a matter of consciousness, just that this is actually what sort of causality amounts to. Interaction amounts to is only interacting with a very surface level. That is, he doesn't want to say is part of thing is divorced from the essence of the thing, the inner nature of the thing.

18:46 Wes: Yeah, I don't think he really spells this out until 161. Right. You're giving us a kind of summary here.

18:53 Mark: I'm just trying to make it not sound completely. Because still is. Right. He teases this and it sounds bonkers.

18:59 Wes: Well, it's teased. And then there's a bunch of stuff leading up to it which we could go through and try and build up the theory, but.

19:05 Dylan: Yeah, but direct touching means the directness would always be between the thing and itself. So when he says real objects are by definition incapable of touching each other, what that is saying in a very compact form is that the thing in itself of A and the thing in itself of B are incapable of touching each other, which I still don't understand really, but let's just say. Is that what that means?

19:32 Wes: Can I just say one thing about. Like, it's not new historically, right. This is what Leibniz thought about monads. They're windowless. This isn't a way. What Hume is suggesting and what Kant picks up on the things in themselves. Causality is purely a matter of, you know, something supplied by the mind, constructed by the mind. So whatever things are, them in themselves are not even part of the causal realm. Causality is what's added to them.

19:58 Dylan: Well, so I get the reference to Leibniz, who to me, you have your monads that they are the things and all of their interactions are governed by God and that they don't have any interactive properties themselves and that he solves motion that way. I don't get Hume, which to me Hume was making causality. We don't actually know what's going on and that we don't have access. Maybe, maybe that's where it comes in. We don't have access to what the actual causes are. But he's not denying that things actually affect one another.

20:37 Wes: Yeah, people go back to our Malebranche episode.

20:40 Mark: Right.

20:40 Wes: There's A classic statement of occasionalism. And part of the motivation there is that what's really doing the work of our laws of nature and those belong at the level of God. Everything right Res extensa builds off. Descartes is not something with occult properties. They thought they were objecting. They're kind of fishy academic theories about an Aristotelian theories about things having these innate forces in them and they want to get rid. That's almost like mysticism to them. They just want to say, look, matter is res extensa. It doesn't have any thing else but what's mathematical in it.

And if there's something doing any pushing and pulling that comes from this law like activity, which is what God does. So God is the mediating feature in any causal interaction. What it appears like causality is really you have God as mediator and then God gets replaced by the mind in Kant. So like space and time from Malebranche are just in God. And then Kant comes along. Oh no, actually they're in the mind. God and mind can do all the same work. Mental structure. What's unique here with Harman is he wants to say, well yeah, it's not God doing the mediating, it's something else doing the mediating, which turns out to be a little bit opaque.

What that is secular occasionalism.

22:02 Seth: So I think you're making this hopelessly, philosophically complicated when I think he's doing a great job of being hopelessly complicated on his own. So this is why I used the term earlier. I said let's talk about sensible objects, sensible qualities, real objects, real qualities. What he's basically saying is everything is sensible. That's all we've got is all we can interact with is the sensible qualities of an object. And by extension, objects can only interact in the sensible realm. So they can only interact through their sensible and what was.

And he's like, this is just a consequence of the way we've defined and talk about object oriented ontology with this to this real versus sensible distinction. So then he says, oh, but that makes it seem like causality, which should belong to the real object, is somehow stuck in the sensible. And he's basically having to explain or address the Humean criticism all over again when he's put himself there by his own definition, why is there any reason to think that the sensible realm is not the physical realm? Because it is, right? He's saying, oh no.

But for causality to be really real, we've got to somehow connect it to the real objects that we struggle to get access to and not just in the sensible realm. I just feel like this is a very confused. Maybe I'm the one who's confused. No, no, it's clear.

23:32 Wes: Let's. Let's look at what he says on page 163. You know, I'm not particularly sympathetic either, but I'm not sure I. Also not sure I fully understand it. But on 163 he wants to talk about. Right, so real object. Real object interaction.

23:46 Seth: Ro.

23:47 Wes: Ro on ro crime. So they meet in a sense, but via the sensual object as the mediators. As in this case, the two real objects only meet through a sensual one. Although this entails a rather bizarre sounding theory of causation, it is the one to which object oriented ontology enthusiastically adheres. For according to this theory, two real objects in the world make contacts not through direct impact, but only by way of the fictional images they present to each other. One real rock strikes the sensual version of another in such a way that there are retroactive effects on the real.

This is what object oriented ontology calls vicarious causation. But it is not as strange as it sounds, since more than a millennium's worth of the history of philosophy has already been weeding in this direction. And then he gives an account of classic occasionalism in which God must be the mediator. Things like Malebranche. And then he says contemporary philosophy accepts the mind as the locus of causation, which we just got into with Hume and Kant Latour. Causality must be mediated socially. And he says the variant, what object oriented ontology is doing, and this is on page 166, is basically replacing God or these other possibility, possible mediators, God or mind or something else, with the mediation of the sensual object.

Real objects interact through the mediation of the sensual object. And that's the part, I think, like you guys, I don't still don't fully understand.

25:26 Mark: Yeah, because it seems like a sensual object has to be attached to a human mind. Right? That's the whole point. They're the ones we know. But we're saying, even when we're talking about, you know, the first two instances, the Big Bang, and then whatever came after that. So the Big Bang caused whatever the state of the universe was after that. Those were still. Those events did not interact with each other. They revealed themselves to each other through their sensual aspects, even though there were no people with senses.

25:53 Dylan: Can we just do something really, really simple? Can one of you explain this to me about just two billiard balls running into each other? I'm Going to have one billiard ball sitting still on the table and another billiard balls rolling at it and they collide and they both go off in two directions. I can calculate that all day long. I can tell you exactly where they're going to roll all that stuff. How would I say that interaction, that causal interaction in this language?

26:28 Wes: Yeah. I don't know. How is it we know what Malebranche would say, right. Or Hume or Kant. It's just for them it's in your head and for Malebranche it's in. It's just what God is doing. Right. God is playing a film strip for us and he's making sure everything lines up correctly. So the laws of nature, the billiard balls will behave according to the laws of nature. Not because there's any occult properties in them. Not because they're forcing each other to do something. God is writing the whole narrative of this and he's doing it consistently and in a law like way. So yeah. How does his. With you, Dylan, how does the mediation of the sensual object do the work that God is doing in Malebranche or mind is doing in Kant? Unless it's just the same thing as Kant, is it? We're supplying causality through as a mental construct. It seems like he doesn't want to say that.

27:19 Dylan: The part that I'm trying to get is the real. Like I want to have the analysis of that interaction between the real and the sensual and the object and the qualities. I mean, in the case of Malebranche or someone like that is, I would say, okay, I have this law. I'll just pick one. The law of the conservation of momentum. And those collisions adhere to the law of conservation momentum. And that's this higher level law. That's a way of talking about how God is interacting in the world to render the motion of these consistent. And that's my way of talking about it. And that isn't causal in any way. It's just a description about the way in which things work.

28:00 Wes: Or God is doing all the causing

28:02 Dylan: and God where God is doing all the causing. In fact, God has created the conditions or this law such that the universe behaves this way. But I wouldn't say that the law of the conservation momentum causes this interaction. And I wouldn't say that anything other than that those balls adhere to the law of conservation of momentum. As a descriptive term.

28:26 Mark: Yeah. So I want to bring in Ellis here again because one of the things Ellis hated, he said, no, things have their own natures. They cause each other. They have their own dispositions. You don't want to refer to God's laws or some sort of external laws of nature making things happen. That's not how it works. It's the things that do. And I think Harman shares that. But looking back at here. So we've been talking about two real objects interacting with each other. That's page 163, page 162. Part of what happens, as we've said, when two real objects interact with each other is they do through.

Through a sensible object. So that's the ro to. So the real object to the sensible object, sensual objects. The real object that I myself am is directly confronted by sensual objects looking straight through the qualities by which they are announced so as to encounter various macro objects. Various. He lists a bunch. So that's what's is. You have to imagine that you are the billiard ball and you're seeing the other billiard ball come at you. And even though the billiard ball is not conscious, that's fine, it doesn't have. But to react to something is to in a sense be aware of it.

It's not through knowledge, it's not through something like human consciousness. But there is a positionality, you know, such that there's a point of view that the receiving billiard ball has such. The other one comes at it and it receives the image of it basically, and the image smacks into it and is doing the work.

29:55 Wes: Yeah, this is a great mark. You're putting it very well. I don't know that listeners are going to understand, but this is a great explanation. Yeah, I think you're completely right. Yeah. So we have to imagine almost like one of the billiard balls is a subject. That's how the sensual object, in a way is the mediator. It's as if one billiard ball is a conscious being and the other one is its sensuous object, that it's perceiving something like that.

30:20 Seth: So don't answer this immediately, but take this question seriously. What problem is he posing that that's supposed to solve? Because he's making it out like I better explain causality, like he's created a problem and I don't understand what his problem is.

30:36 Wes: You don't think causality is a problem? Isn't there like a 300 page Stanford Encyclopedia article on it? Is it not a problem?

30:44 Seth: No, what I'm saying is he doesn't come out and say again, he's using these different terms, real, sensible, quality, object. And he says everything interacts at the sensible level. There's this weird vicarious interaction between real objects through their sensible qualities that we love to talk about in Object Oriented. And in fact, the whole history of philosophy has been leading to the notion of vicarious is causation, right? But he didn't explain to me why causality isn't sufficiently explained, so to speak, at the sensible level. Like, how is the fact that we have real objects complicate the matter any more?

So in a way that needs to be explained. But before you answer, I don't know that I agree with Mark's analysis that it's like we have to imagine that one of the objects is sentient, right? Because we know objects of any sort can interact sensibly. And there's early on in the book, he talks about kind of everything having a kind of subjectivity in a weird way. And so he also talks about. There's a very curious little passage, it's almost like a throwaway, when he's saying we know an object through its sensible qualities. And he talks about the Lockean or the Scottish Enlightenment process.

You take away property X, property Y, and what's left at the end, right? And he says the thing, the object, even if it's not the same color or even if it's not, this is the same object. Until you take away something that's kind of essential to it. There is a way that you can deconstruct, change, or take properties, take qualities away, sensible qualities away from a real object, and it ceases to be that object. And he just throws that out, right? And then we talk about emergence. So what I thought he was working towards and what I thought this vicarious causality is, and what I thought sensibility is, you know, what Dylan is talking about at some point, and he likes emergence.

A real object is something that has a set of emergent properties that we experience as sensible and that kind of. In a reverse way, right? Or in a negative definition way, kind of define what that real object is. And when that real object is no longer the grounds for these emergent properties and activities and motivations and whatever else, then it's no longer that object. And so my read on this causality discussion is that causality between objects is not object to object, like you said, but it's more like emergent characteristic sensible quality with sensible quality.

But of course, right? Sensible qualities, emergent properties can in turn have a retroactive effect on the real object. I think, yes.

33:37 Wes: I think he's not saying that causality is so s o interaction. That would be Kantian. But this is why I think Mark is right, although I think it helps. Right, the second chapter on aesthetics would help in this regard because this is where we get the idea that the in itselfness of things, in a way we can only understand it as kind of corresponding to a kind of subjectivity. Even though we know things aren't conscious, we know they're not subjects. But let me just. Here's him quoting Ortega on page 71. There is the same difference between a pain that someone tells me about and a pain that I feel as there is between the red that I see and the being red of this leather box.

Being red is for it what hurting is for me. Just as there is an I, John Doe, there is also an I red, an I water, and an I star. Everything from a point of view within itself is an I. So this idea of something being its own and in itself, right, the concept of I, I think, kind of helps us with that. And that's why Mark, I think, was rightly getting at this idea that the real object, we have to understand that on analogy to a subject. And so that causation between two objects is. He wants to think of it on analogy to a subject, object relation. I really do think Mark is actually right about that.

35:02 Seth: Now, Wes, you say analogy, but are you using metaphor?

35:08 Mark: Just all philosophy? In a way, he's defending those continental philosophers talking in a very complicated, strange, offhand way, because even trying to express the truth about the philosophy is not something that we can say literally. So there's inevitably going to be. He's doing the best he can to be clear. So go ahead, Dylan.

35:30 Dylan: So I don't know if I'm just being naive and trying to understand this, but it seems that I ought to be able to take the account of causation and the account of what things are in the world and talk about what I would consider a very, very rudimentary, straightforward, in many ways well understood case of causation, which is one thing running into the other. And I'll even simplify it down. Super, super, super, super, super, super, super simple to billiard balls, one running into the other. Now, the idea that I need to analyze that and understand it really not from a kind of third person point of view as two billiard balls that have these individual properties and they run into each other.

That I really can only understand it as is imagining being one of the balls and having another ball run into me and what's going to happen to me and what's going to happen to the other ball. That's Fine. Is that the way I analyze it? Is that the way I understand? I'm just trying to understand what's.

36:39 Wes: Yeah. Real objects can't touch each other, right. So one real object interacts with the sensual object. That's in a way on top of the other real object.

36:48 Mark: Dylan, you sounded right there as if. Remember, you know, when we discuss Aristotelian teleology, that it's as if the rock wants to go down. Well, in the same way, it's as if the. The Billy roll sees the other one, you know, senses the other one.

37:02 Wes: Yeah, because then it runs, Seth. It's scared. Runs away.

37:07 Dylan: Maybe I'm just being dense. I'm not sure. But in that example, what is the real object and what is the sensual object?

37:15 Wes: They're both. Both. You got a crisscross between each's realness and sensualness. Yeah, yeah.

37:22 Mark: They coincide. Maybe film we can find the ideal quote about this of what he says.

37:26 Dylan: I understand. I remember him say things like this, having them coincide with each other. Right. But then I don't understand what is the distinction being made When I have my diagram and I have these. All these tensions, real qualities and two real qualities and sensual object to sensual object. And I just want to know, like, what can I hold on to at all? That tells me, okay, yes, they're both. Both. But what am I talking about when I talk about the real object and what am I talking about when I talk about the sensual object? Is that a stupid question?

38:00 Seth: No, I don't think it's stupid. But let me ask you a question. You and I. I'm going to use this very specific. Right now, the four of us are talking on zoom. You're big in the picture for me. There's four little guys at the top, one of which is you. One is me, one's Mark and Wes. Right. You are interacting with me through sound and your eyes, right? You're seeing an image of me. You're hearing my voice. I see him in an image of you. I hear your voice. Right. Now, the way I would describe that using his language is I am interacting at a. There's two sensible, sensibly.

Body Dylan and body Seth with voice and sight are interacting through a sensible realm. But in my head, there's a me that's trying to grasp what you're saying, that's trying to pay attention, argue, get my voice in. Maybe that's the real me and there's a real you and you. But the real us's aren't talking. The sensible uses are Talking.

39:04 Mark: Well, I really like that analogy, but just the last thing, I like to

39:08 Seth: think of it as a metaphor.

39:09 Mark: Right. And the very first time he brings up this distinction, I think, between the real self and the apparent, the sensory self is in talking about Kant's idea of free will. Right. I see that I'm a person with a cultural background and you could sort of predict what my beliefs would be. But I also feel inside that I could choose whatever I want to say. I could choose whatever beliefs I want to have, that I have this freedom. And so that's. For Kant, that is the phenomenal self, which is part of the causal order and the noumenal self, which is, has freedom.

And that's how he, you know, his, his compatibilism works. And so I think that is. Right. Yes, exactly. So you, you, your real self is interacting through these medium with the rest of us. And when I refer to you, I'm actually referring to your real self. I'm not referring to the image I have of you. Even though I, I think he brings up Kripke somewhere. Maybe this is in a lecture, I saw him. But right. When Kripke says we refer to water, we don't know what it is until we've done the science. Whenever we refer to anything, we're referring to something I know not quite what.

So that's the same thing. You are actually talking to me. But maybe I'm just an AI construct and there actually is no mark and there never has been a mark. Let's see if you've only seen me over zoom. So the thing that you thought it was, the whole, whole thing is a mirage. So, and you're just interacting with the sensory image. But normally you assume, and you refer to in your language the real person, the real objects.

40:42 Seth: But I don't know that that helps. With the billiard ball example, I mean,

40:45 Mark: so that one billiard ball is really causing the other one. So it's a real. Is that wrong?

40:52 Seth: No, I mean, the question is again, there's some problematic in his mind about situating causality in this sensible, you know, as an interaction between, at the sensible level that somehow cheats real objects.

41:07 Wes: Well, real objects can't touch each other, so we would have to understand what motivates that.

41:12 Dylan: Yeah, yeah. And this whole section is all about interactions. But the tensions. Maybe I'm misunderstanding then. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. You know, in a section on causation, it. To me, these are all about tensions, the conjunction. I don't even know anymore.

41:28 Mark: I thought that was a Word that he used, it is confusing. Right.

41:31 Wes: And we get. Right, so the different tensions, right? We get ROSQ for space, SOSQ for time, S O, R, Q for eidos, RORQ for essence.

41:42 Seth: That's not going to help us.

41:43 Wes: And then we get into, unfortunately, we're out of time sets, so I'm going to have to keep using these abbreviations. And then we get into RO interaction. So that causation is R ro, ro.

41:55 Seth: We should, we.

41:55 Mark: Yeah, we should throw in at least what he says about qualities because it's really important in terms of how knowledge works, how metaphors works, that in addition to we're having a real trouble with the real object versus the sensible object. And he has this. He says this is Heidegger's view, that it was there in Kant and that he mentions Husserl. But we, you know, at least can back it up to Hegel and people before, hey, you know, Fichte, probably even that the thing in itself is the real object and there's a constructed thing that we identify via its properties.

So this is the important thing. And as somebody. Somebody's mentioned Hume's bundle theory of properties, and this is actually the. The everyday way. So when I deal with an apple, I'm not thinking about the inner nature of the apple, you know, what its chemical compounds are or what anything like that, what soul might be. I'm thinking of it being functional. It's delicious, it is nutritious, it is red, it is round. You know, so the things that I can actually interact with, and those are sensory. But he wants to still distinguish between, and I made this distinction before, the sensory properties from the real properties that it has.

So it's the fact that, like, is this apple really red? It depends what light I hold it in, but those are the sensory properties. And there is some real property that I could actually, you know, red is not the most interesting one, but the chemical composition, the acidity, these are all real properties that we could be wrong about. And that, you know, depending on how is it tastes sweet to me. Well, did I just eat some ice cream? Did I just brush my teeth? You know, it's going to taste differently. So those are all sensory properties where we're trying to get the real properties.

So in science, what we're doing is trying to get at the real properties of a sensible object. Right. He specifically says science doesn't care about real objects. It doesn't care about things that forever slip from human grasp. It only cares about this construction that we have made for Social purposes or whatever, of. Okay, let's call this individual thing an apple. And let's say all the things we want to say about it. We don't want to be wrong. We don't want to give, you know, just the bullshitty how it seem. How does the apple seem to me? No, we want to see how the actual apple actually is.

So that is very strange result of this is that science doesn't deal with real objects, it only deals with sensible objects. And so that's. It's fine, right, if causality is between sensible objects. This is a question.

44:21 Seth: That's exactly my fucking point is that the entirety of materialism takes place in the sensible realm.

44:28 Mark: Right. So is it the same as Kant, though?

44:30 Seth: Everything's. Yeah, we're all aimed at the real, but science doesn't get at it any more than we do.

44:35 Wes: But I don't. Mark, are you backtracking now on your brilliant elucidation of this? He doesn't want to be the same as Kant and causation, right? He doesn't.

44:44 Seth: Yeah.

44:44 Mark: No, but the rest of it, if you want to say science is only investigating the surface level, this is what is aggravated. Right. What was aggravating about Kant when we did in the first place is because it seems like if something has depth to it, if there's something that science is going to look into, then you're not just dealing with a purely phenomenal realm realm, you're dealing with something that is real. But he wants to say we group these Harman following. I think trying to follow Kant is saying we. We group these things together and create phenomenal objects which are our only access to the real objects. It's just the difference between him and Kant is I think for Kant, Harman wants to say there is a phenomenal apple and there's a real apple.

45:27 Wes: Whereas for Kant, we have access to it.

45:29 Mark: Well, we have access to phenomenal apple and somehow this coincides with the real apple. And that's the thing we actually want to know about. It's just that we can't. So we strictly speaking can't have knowledge at all. Right, because we have no direct access.

45:45 Dylan: Yeah, we can't strictly speaking, but we can, we can vicariously. This is what he's trying to.

45:50 Mark: Right, so no direct knowledge.

45:52 Dylan: Yes, we can get indirect knowledge and that indirect knowledge is real knowledge about the real thing.

45:57 Wes: Justified false belief. Yes, we can have justified false belief. That's his version of knowledge.

46:04 Seth: Yeah, I mean, the problem here is using the word knowledge, we can't have knowledge of it. Because again, knowledge is already defined as a conceptual relationship to the world that takes place through sensibility.

46:16 Mark: Blah, blah, blah.

46:18 Seth: We want something, we crave nonsensical knowledge, we crave access to the thing, but we try to get to it through knowledge or reason or whatever. And that's not the right thing. What we can is we can get close, we can get adjacent to the thing. We can get a glimpse out of the side of our eye, right, of the real thing through this concept of essentially it's substitution, and it's substitution through metaphor, analogy, whatever. But that's an action that we have to take subjectively. We essentially get close to a thing by finding a way to put ourselves in its place or to put ourselves in a relationship to it.

That's not literal, that's not sensible, right? And that gives us insight. It gives us access to something which is part of the real and not part of the sensible. But of course, it's not the complete real object. This is the solution. He's. I'm kind of giving up on causality at this point because I don't want to talk about it anymore. But the point is, that's not really knowledge, at least not in the way that we conceive of it. He keeps using the term because he's stuck in that paradigm. But what he's describing is something else.

47:35 Wes: It sounds like in the beginning, right, that we can't have knowledge. But he kind of resurrects a different kind of knowledge. But he does use that term. So on 181onwards, right? So we get the idea that there's a kind of knowledge which is justified, untrue belief. And then he has a whole section called Knowledge without Truth. So he says knowledge can be rehabilitated as, quote, superior expertise that can be found to a greater degree in some human masters, places or historical periods than others. And he has the whole thing about the hospital and all that. So, yeah, we do get some sort of resurrected concept of knowledge that isn't quite what we wanted it to be.

48:12 Dylan: Well, in particular, he divorces knowledge and truth. So knowledge isn't related to truth. He restricts knowledge to what a thing is made of and what a thing does. That's what knowledge is about.

48:29 Wes: Yeah, overmining or undermining. That's where we get. Try to get knowledge.

48:33 Dylan: No, that's the definition. That is the definition of knowledge for him, what a thing is made of and what a thing does. And he separates cognition from knowledge. That philosophy and aesthetics are cognition. They are thinking about Things, but they are not knowledge.

48:54 Wes: Well, he does. You know, again at the end of chapter four, he does rehabilitate knowledge without truth. He wants to rehabilitate. So he does use the word knowledge for his new form. But yes, it's not that form of knowledge that involved overmining or undermining mastery.

49:10 Mark: He wants to say that he's not a relativist. He wants to say that, for instance, a doctor. Right. You just referred to this, has been training a long time and has knowledge of how to treat these ailments. But it's different than saying that the doctor knows the inner depths of something. So we recognize this from Plato, is that you could have techne. You know, you're a good doctor, you've got techne about being a doctor, but you don't actually understand the fundamental nature of anything that you're dealing with the

49:43 Seth: people's soul because you're a slave.

49:45 Wes: Yeah. So this is why he brings up the meno. We don't actually have knowledge of virtue and that's why it can't be taught. We might have true opinion about it, but really ultimately it's about habituation and it's about tacit, what we would call procedural knowledge, tacit knowledge. And that's. He uses that word at the end of this. So in a way, what we do know is we know it at this tacit level. It's not this explicit theoretical knowledge.

50:11 Dylan: On page 187 he says undermining and overmining, which I just would say knowledge are both ways of replacing a real object with sensual building blocks, whether it be the components of which it is built or the effects it has on other things. What it is made of and what does it do. In both cases, the miner claims to have adequate direct access to these replacements and thus makes a claim to possess the truth.

50:40 Mark: So we're pretty much out of time here. Luckily we're going to talk to Harman so we can. Even though we're ostensibly talking, I have a feeling you took a peek at this new book, Right? What is it called?

50:50 Seth: Yeah, my last book was wrong. Here's my new theory.

50:52 Dylan: No, it's called Waves and Stones. So I did take a look at the, the beginning and I think he does something that is very sensible. He frames it in the problem and the old question of the discrete versus the continuous. And this gets to like, what is a thing and how is it different than other things? And I think it's a great way to frame this problem. But he's looking through the Table of contents. He's covering a lot of this similar ground and expanding on it.

51:27 Wes: So is this for a general audience or for philosophers?

51:31 Dylan: I just read through the bull we'll have to see.

51:34 Wes: I think it would probably be helpful if it's more technical.

51:37 Seth: Once you go pop, you never go back.

51:39 Mark: I'm anticipating that the new book will read like more chapters of this and so that it will not be off topic at all for us to re engage with him on some of these fundamental things and have him explain to us firsthand. I know we have not gotten into the details of a lot of his formulations here, so, you know, perhaps we can have a part three discussion, some of us if we want, but maybe we just go and we talk to the man himself. And then afterwards, whether it's through a nightcap or through an aesthetic specific episode about the Ortega y Gasset essay that he talks about for whatever, then we could bring him.

Anyway, there's various strategies. We could have to pick up some of these loose threads. But let's wind down for now. This certainly got us. Got us going. So yeah, it is a recommend for me. If you are interested in cool ideas in philosophy delivered in a way that you can take. Is that. Should we make that the. The subtitle of our show?

52:43 Wes: You should talk to his advertising department.

52:45 Dylan: Yeah, that's your blurb. Cool ideas of philosophies delivered in a way you could take.

52:50 Wes: Delivered in a way that you can take.

52:54 Mark: It goes down smooth. Hey, well, until it reaches a certain part. Until you choke on a few sentences as it gets there. Anyway, thanks for listening everybody. You can reach out to us through the contact form@PartiallyExaminedLife.com I hope everybody's doing great.