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

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode 384, part three. We're continuing on Graham Harman's book Object Oriented Ontology, A New Theory of Everything. Turning now to chapter two, which we said a little bit about in the previous parts. Aesthetics is the Root of All Philosophy is the title of it. So it comes off of the end of chapter one where he was criticizing literalism. And so here we're going to see why the artwork is something that we can. Knowledge is not the right word because it's a type of cognition that is not in involve knowledge, but as a way that we can actually get at what Harman considers to be the real. In an indirect way.

0:48 Wes: Yeah. He starts off by talking about this Theory of Everything that we seek and saying it should account for non physical entities just as much as physical. And then he gets into, you know, why? Literalism might be the sticking point for many readers who will not like the idea of unverifiable mystical claims. It kind of compares it to negative theology where we can't say what God is directly, we can only say what he's not. Harman claims that mysticism, in a way is more comparable to rationalism because both are supposed to have complete access to reality.

But there's a possibility that's indirect. And he. He says, in a way this is more powerful. He compares it to lingerie, right, or love notes that aren't too explicit, or threats that are better left vague, like I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse. Or likewise, humor is ruined by literalization. So that gets us into a non literal cognition of things. Indirect access to reality as involving metaphor, which seems to be at the heart of an aesthetic relation to reality.

1:52 Mark: So a lot of this he attributes really the inspiration to his entire system to this early José Ortega y Gasset essay, an Essay in Aesthetics, by way of a preface, which I did look at. But Ortega, as he's referred to in this book, he disdains actually doing metaphysics here. So he's really talking about the phenomenology of art. When we, for instance, have a metaphor, or really any other aesthetic experience, we are creating a new object. The objects that we normally perceive, we are destroying them in a certain way temporarily through our interpretation.

And so if I see something as, you know, a statue, I could just see it as a lump of marble. But if I take it aesthetically, then it's like I'm pulling off the aesthetic. I'm making the lump of marble into the beautiful lump of marble. And so I'm doing that. I'm creating a new thing. You know, it's easiest to see in the case that we get given in quite length by Harman in the idea of a metaphor. So if you have two things that you're comparing, then it's like you take the original meanings of those two things and you pull them apart. You don't care about those two things.

So the wine, dark sea. We're not talking about the sea anymore. We're not even talking about the wine, dark color. We're creating this new entity that exists only so far, you know, in our imagination here.

3:14 Wes: Can we back up just a little bit?

3:15 Mark: Yeah, for sure.

3:16 Wes: Yeah. I think we should probably go step by step with this because it's A bit complicated, but at first he talks about Kant, right. We can't access to the things in the themselves. And Ortega seems to have a similar position. We encounter objects as only shadows or outlines of themselves. And the same goes for our inner life just as much for objects of, you know, sensuous objects, objects of our senses. There's no direct access to our noumenal selves.

3:42 Dylan: I just wanted to point out that I think you were Referring to page 62 when you were talking about the mysticism piece. He's also saying that there's a priority of indirect access that's provided by metaphor and aesthetics that gives indirect access to reality. And its goal is solving the problem that mysticism and rationality, both of them have. He'll lump them together as they fail this claim. They both claim to have direct connection some way to reality. And so there's a implicit but fairly strong criticism of the fail of rationality is the same fail as mysticism.

That the thing that rationality was claiming to solve, which was to be non mystical. That's not true. And that's because it's just substituting a new mechanism for a better mechanism for direct connection to reality. And he's saying, look, it fails in that respect. So the only way we have is indirect connection. And that's where aesthetics and metaphor are going to come to save us. As long as we can articulate what indirect access means. Because indirect access is going to have to have content to it, otherwise it's just garbage. Right, so that's what he's going to have to present.

5:03 Wes: Yeah, and I was, you know, I'm trying to see if we can just work up to that bit by bit. We don't have to linger over all this. But I was on page 70 where I just think the Right. So Kant objects to this whole idea of a rationalist intuition of things in themselves as well. And Harman calls us a zero person aspect of things. Right. We can't get through it through the first person, we can't get through to the third person. There's a reality apart from our observation and introspection. I'm quoting him there.

5:31 Mark: A view from nowhere.

5:33 Wes: Each of us is an I, because. And here's a. Here's a quote from page 70. Each of us is something. And that something can never be exhausted by conscious introspection any more than by outward description. It follows that every non human object can also be called an I in the sense of having a definite inwardness that can never fully be grasped. And then he's going to give us a. Or take a quote that I read in our first recording. You know, being red is for a red object, what hurting is for me. I think this is really important. And this is kind of what Mark was getting at in his explanation of causality, this weird form of occasionalism, which is that the thing in itselfiness of the object, we have to think on almost on analogy to whatever this thing that's almost like being an I, being a self, being a subject, even though he's not claiming it's.

It's conscious. And that'll play a pivotal role in how we elaborate this conception of metaphor, because, as Mark said, the I, me as observer or audience for the metaphor, I'm going to actually have to play a role and stand in for the. What you would call the tenor of the metaphor or the subject of the metaphor. I'm going to stand in for the thing that's supposed to be described by the metaphor, because that thing is ultimately inaccessible. And the metaphor itself is not going to do it justice unless I do that role. But that's a little bit later.

I think we still have a little bit more set up to here. We start to get. We get the move into the metaphor. And the example of the cypress is like the ghost of a dead flame. So maybe that's the place to go here in 72.

7:01 Dylan: Yeah. So we should talk about this as an example for how it works. I mean, to me, one of the things that you're going to have to solve is that you have cognition. You're thinking about something that in the end has content. It's indirect content. It is content. It's content about the world. So it's a kind of murky place that he's. That, to me, what we have to solve is what kind of content, what kind of decisions are we making on the basis of that. One of the ways he does this is he explains just the way in which that metaphor works with the cypress tree and the flame. And that, for instance, one way is that you can't invert it. That's one of the ways in which you see that content is. You have content in there.

7:41 Wes: One of the points he's going to make is that we are. We're going to. It'll seem like Ortega says, it will seem like metaphor is going to open up the executant reality of things, the, you know, sort of thing in itselfiness of things in the sense of their I ness. And so then the question is how. How that is done. And he gives us this example of the cypress. The cypress is like the ghost of a dead flame. And he points out that there's something deeper about this than mere resemblance, right? The metaphor isn't, you know, the cypress is like a juniper or something like that.

The metaphor must be doing some deeper sort of work. And I think, as people often point out, philosophers and literary theorists who study metaphor, metaphors are often. They take two dissimilar, quite dissimilar objects. And often, technically, it's really a statement of identity or predication. It's not like a simile with a like. Because the simile sort of takes down the power. So, for instance, Juliet is the sun is the sort of paradigmatic metaphor. Romeo says, juliet is the sun. Of course, she's not the sun. Why is she the sun? The reader is, or listener is left to figure that out to some extent.

And that's one of the delights of metaphor. It's almost like a scientific model. And the reason why I'm bringing this up because I think Harman's theory of metaphor is going to form quite a contrast to this model theory of metaphor, which is quite standard. So the Juliet is the sun. There's a model there. There's all these important isomorphisms between Juliet and the sun. She provides nourishment, in some sense, to Romeo. She's warm, she's this, she's that. The metaphor is. Can be extended in this satisfying way to create all these structural isomorphisms between the two things being compared.

That extension will fail at a certain point, but the extension suggests that there's some kind of, again, isomorphism with a deeper reality. And in Harman's case, that's not the kind of theory that we get. It's almost like the right. It'll turn out that the cypress tree. There's too much dissimilarity between that and the dead flame or between the sea and its wine dark qualities. Right? The sea isn't really wine dark, and the cypress really isn't a dead flame. So Harman is going to look. Look for. Somewhere else for how it is that the metaphor works.

10:04 Mark: So what would be satisfying according to the. The other theory that you're referring to is that it packs so much information in one phrase that it's the multivalence, you know, a double entendre, a triple entendre, that it's saying all these things, but Harman is saying, that's not enough. That would be boring. If you're merely saying, I don't even know why the cypress is supposed to look like a Dead flame. I can't even. I don't know the context of this, but you can imagine a tree that's kind of tilted to the side and the way that it is growing, that sort of looks like a little like a flame, but not one that is straight up. That is. You know, this. The best I can come up with is why you would even use this.

10:44 Wes: This speaks to something that Harman is leaving out of his account. Because it's not that just there's just some passing, accidental connection between a cypress and a flame. Right. It's a growing thing, it's a unity, but it's very ragged around the edges. And that's the kind of the weird nature of biology. And it almost looks accidental because it's growing towards light or it's doing this or doing that. And yet it's still a unity. It's still an organic whole. And if we were to speed up using time lapse photography, the growth of a cypress, it might look like it's flickering a little bit.

It might look a little bit like a flame. And that dynamic between becoming and being, I think is an essential part not just of that metaphor, but metaphors in general. So it's almost like in the tree, life has been frozen in time. Life, which. Which fire is a much more dynamic representation of. You know, it's a very interesting metaphor, but you really have to delve into it, into the content, to get at what's going on. And that's the thing that Harman is actually going to avoid. He doesn't get into this. The kinds of explanations that I just got into there, that Mark started, you

11:49 Dylan: don't think that he. He implies that very content, that one ought to get into that one, even though he's not getting into it. And this is to describe the example, doesn't it have to be that that's where the. That richness comes from, that you get content that you'd actually think about. You'd have cognition about the world as a result of it, and you would in fact come to conclusions. And it would lead to. Potentially lead to actions as a result of that. I mean, if it doesn't, then. Then it seems to me that it's empty.

12:21 Wes: Well, I'll read you in a second after Seth talks what. What Harman says about this on 73. But yeah, go ahead.

12:27 Seth: Before we get too deep into how metaphors may or may not work, or are there theories of metaphor, we should try to clarify a little bit for Harman what they're significantly different from. Like, why is he even Bringing this up. Right? So. So we know. We've talked about. He's talked about literality, and we've talked about. And he talks about mysticism. But if we go back to chapter one, talking about sensible qualities or sensible properties of objects, and he mentions the approach. We've talked about definite descriptions on this podcast before, this idea that somehow a literal and exhaustive description of a thing would somehow exhaust the thing.

And he's like, nope, even if you could do that, which you can't. Right. The thing is always. He uses the Heideggerian language, right. That it's always receding. The real object always recedes from you because you can't. There's always something you can't capture, you can't describe. And that's the kind of thing that gets captured in propositional, discursive language. And the type of thing that we do when we use our understanding and we describe the world or make propositions about the world. Mysticism and literalism supposed to be providing direct access.

He says the problem is it's like we're searching for direct access to this receding object that we can't grasp, and we keep trying to find new methodologies, new strategies, new cognitions to get there, and we can't. We'll never grasp the thing. So, you know, when he brings up metaphor, what he's trying to say is we should give up the enterprise of trying to grasp the real object at all directly and instead recognize that we do have the ability, and I'm hesitating to even use the word learn or know or something about the real object through this poetic, you know, metaphorical type practice.

So, yes, the question is, how would that actually work? And the reason I bring this up is I don't think, Dylan, that he would want to say that the metaphor is a form of cognition. The use of metaphor is a form of cognition or provides a form of knowledge.

14:42 Wes: Well, he does call it a form of cognition.

14:44 Dylan: He does, explicitly. He's explicit about that aesthetics and philosophy provide cognition, and that's not knowledge, but it's cognition. Yeah, it's cognition about the world. That's I'm confident about.

14:56 Seth: Okay, so maybe not cognition. Maybe. Maybe knowledge is. What I'm trying to say is that we. What we're doing, metaphor does not provide knowledge the way that we think it provides knowledge. He has the description that Ortega Gasset gives, which is that metaphor presents things to us in their act of executing themselves. And then he also uses a spatial metaphor where he talks about it, almost like puts us Close to or puts us in the neighborhood of the thing in a weird way.

15:28 Mark: So can I relate. I actually read the original just in the two hours before we had this discussion. I read the original Ortega article, which is freely available online. I think it does not actually. Even though it has the stuff, like everything has its own I Ness. I mean, he's. It really comes down to this. The same thing that we've seen in Heidegger. Chibi no harmonies Loves Heidegger. Objection to how science and literalism and rationalism does damage to things by just stripping off an aspect of them. That when I think I know the thing, I'm really just.

I've. I've reduced it to some sort of model. And we don't want to confuse the model with the real thing. But I don't think that, according to my reading of this, that Ortega thinks that somehow art lets us peek behind, in fact, so he says, anytime I perceive something, I turn away from the real thing. I make it into an activity of my eye, right? I make it my representation. So that's. It's just inevitable. Something that was not that. Harman did not quote an image as an event. For my eye gives me a feeling. So it's not just, you know, some description, but there's some feeling that goes along with it.

In metaphor, the cypress feeling and the flame feeling become identical. It's like we're taking Sue. Two subjective things which, you know, he says are in a way a violation of the real object. They are not the real object. And we're make. We're jamming them together and making them have the same feeling. I feel the same. So I'm no longer talking. Talking about the real cypress. I'm talking about the beautified cypress, right? The cypress taken aesthetically. So we are living executently in this being. The combination cypress flame is what he says.

So nothing about that says to me I'm learning something real about the underlying character of the cypress.

17:24 Dylan: No, I'm Harman saying that we're learning about the thing in itself.

17:28 Wes: I don't.

17:28 Dylan: I don't think he is.

17:29 Mark: We're not getting knowledge about the thing in itself. But if we even want to say we're having some cognition, some indirect access to the thing, what the hell else could we be talking about?

17:38 Wes: I think these are good questions. I just. Let's just look quickly because he does make this pivot, right? He's not following Gasset or Ortega down his particular line of thought. He's going to deviate with this concept of theatricality. Yeah. So he quotes Ortega on 73 as saying, the similarity of linear outline in cypress and flame is so extrinsic, so insignificant with respect to each component, that we do not hesitate to call it a pretext. Once this is done, on the basis of their inessential identity, we assert an absolute identity. Yet this is absurd, impossible.

The two objects repel one another. As a result, we have the annihilation of what cypress and flame are as practical images. When they collide with one one another, their hard carapaces crack, and the internal matter in a molten state acquires the softness of a plasm ready to receive a new form and structure, which is beautiful. Just. I just had to read that he's going to get into what Ortega's essay teaches us, and that the first is that Ortega is bringing noumena back. That's the first point. The second is that we have access to them in a manner which is not merely facile or negative, like in Negative theology.

And he's going to say he objects to Ortega in the sense that metaphor is asymmetrical in a way that Ortega, whereas Ortega, suggests it's symmetrical. And then the second part is the theatricality. I don't think the asymmetricality is that important for us to talk about. If we go to theatricality on page 82, then we get a real sense of what. How Harman is modifying this point of view. So, as he says, no number of metaphors could exhaustively allude to the cypress in its inwardness. Flame qualities somehow become fused with an object, not just as an inscrutable void where the cypress used to be.

Thus, and I'll just read this quote that goes into 83. Nonetheless, one real object that is never absent from our experience of art, namely, we ourselves. Yes, it is we ourselves who stand in for the absence of cypress and support its freshly anointed flame. Qualities which. Mark? Yeah, Just from hearing your quotations, it's hard for me to say how much of that Ortega is suggesting and how much of that is just Harmon's own thing.

19:53 Dylan: I agree that's hard to tell. But if you continue on from that place, he continues in genuine aesthetic experience, which simply means the kind that does not bore us. We are not just observers, but place our chips on the casino table, or rather, we place ourselves on that table. So, Mark, I think you're the one who brought it up, the notion that the way this ontology is working, we are acting as the interpreter for one of the components of the inner. Of the.

20:24 Wes: Of an interaction well, we stand in for it, right? We are the object. We are the real object, the noumena. As crazy as it is that. Well, it's not actually that crazy. It's just as crazy as any philosophy that we do. It's all crazy.

20:36 Mark: One more thing from Ortega, just to show how different he is from this conclusion, Ortega is arguing with a guy that I feel like has been mentioned in something else we read named Lipps. The description that a contemporary esthetician gives of the very peculiar form of cognition, of knowing an object that art affords is both trivial and erroneous. According to Lipps, I inject my eye into the piece of polished marble so that the inwardness of this statue is my own in a disguised form. This is certainly false. I'm perfectly aware that the statue is one thing and I am another, and that it is its eye and not mine.

Lipps's error derives from the subjectivist longing, as if my eye could ever aspire to the quite literally incomprehensible trans transparency of an aesthetic object in anywhere but art. Neither in introspection nor in self observation do I find that inwardness of thinking that I find in this piece of marble. There's no more erroneous view of art than that which sees it as an underground chamber of our inner life, a means of communicating to others what flows in our spiritual depths. I think that means that we do not stand in for the object, according to Ortega, that.

21:48 Wes: Let's contrast that with what Harman says on 85. Even though every image we encounter gives us just an outline or shadow of the inwardness of the thing itself, I myself am fully invested in all these experiences and inwardly invested, rather than as just a shadow or outline of myself, I myself am the sole real object in all experience, encountering any number of sensual things. Let me say that again. I myself am the sole real object in all experience, encountering any number of sensual things. Though the tension between these real and sensual poles becomes explicit only in art and a limited number of other cases.

Ortega continues the theme a bit later, saying that in art we find the subordination of the part of the image which looks towards the object to that part which is subjective, felt or part of an eye. It would be more accurate, however, to say that in art the part of the image which looks towards the object is subordinated to our efforts as basically thespian beings to become the new object generated by the metaphor. Now, I don't know if that makes Harman more like Lipps. I'd have to study that passage that Mark read But, yeah, maybe he's closer to Lipps than to Ortega.

22:56 Mark: Even just reading it this way, it's hard to see. Harman says it would be more accurate that in art, the part of the image which looks toward the object is subordinated to our efforts to become the new. So it subordinates, coordinated. Right. He says it drops out. So how are we getting. I don't want to say indirect knowledge, but we're having cognition, a vague sense at the periphery, indirect access to this thing in itself, when it explicitly drops out, it is not actually present in the cognition, is it? Just because, well, it was sort of there in the first place. And the I part, our interpretation of it is at least an interpretation of that thing. Right. That there is a cypress. That is the original thing that is being, obviously, is. There's no real cypress. This is just a line in a poem.

23:43 Wes: Well, no, well, that's a whole other layer. Yeah.

23:49 Dylan: I mean, the only way that indirect access is going to work is in the metaphor, is that there is something like the flame that the flame and the cypress are like. And that enables you to think about the flame and think about the cypress and think about the cypress and think about the flame. Now, there's this asymmetricality and stuff like that to it, but that's what the metaphor is going to allow you to do. Metaphor is going to allow you to connect two things together and think about one with the other.

24:18 Wes: So just to contrast this again to the model theory of metaphor, which I happen to like, metaphors are more like scientific models, like Bohr's model of the atom. And so there are phenomena like Juliet and the sun or the cypress tree and the flame. And they're via a comparison, you kind of point down to that deeper model, that deeper structural isomorphism. Now, whether or not you want to call the sun the model in this, in the Juliet example or something else, there's still an element of the literal there. We're still saying there's these important qualities that Juliet has that are sum unlike that make that ascription legitimate.

But he avoids all that in this case. He avoids justifying, okay, yes, the shape of the flame and the tree. Okay, but then he says, that's the phenomenal level. He gets very content about it. But the thing in itself, underneath the cypress, is nothing like the cypress. So the scientific model at issue, the deep structural isomorphisms don't matter because that thing looks nothing like the cypress that's being described. So the only way to save the metaphor is to say, well, I'm A thing in itself. I am the real object here. And I can, as a thespian, as an actor, go ahead and stand in for the cypress tree.

Now, that sounds to me quite a bit like Schopenhauer saying, I'm a willing being and everything is will, and will is the thing in itself. And so I have access to things that in themselves by putting myself, my will in the place of the willing thing that I'm encountering is very Schopenhauer. And I'm very surprised he didn't mention that here. But that's the best I. I can do to make sense of this. But it, to me, it leaves out the thing that's most interesting about metaphor.

26:01 Dylan: The thing that he also. That I also was wishing he was engaging with is Maxwell. James Clerk Maxwell's thinking about the Are there real analogies in nature? He invented electromagnetism, you know, unified electricity and magnetism, mathematically. And he did that work through three papers in the mid-1800s. In one of his papers, the second one, he does the entire thinking of that work through an analogy explicitly with fluids. So thinking through how real fluids like water flowing around works and analyzing electricity in that analogy and explicitly using that analogy to do scientific work.

Now, ultimately, he ends up dispensing with the fluid analogy because it ends up being that the field has other properties to it. But he actually writes a paper about are there real analogies in nature and how far can I go? And what are the limits to thinking through one thing in nature in analogy with another thing in nature? That seems to me like a very powerful example about the kind of thing that we ought to be talking about here.

27:20 Wes: Well, you're reminding me that Shakespeare does this all the time, except he wants to compare the natural world to the social world. So when Portia in Merchant of Venice says to Shylock, the quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is. Twice blesseth him that gives and him that takes. She uses nature to try to represent the fact that if you give something, that doesn't mean you lose something necessarily because it's freedom. It's a form of power. And at a deeper level in nature, right.

Loss is also gain. Something like the conservation of energy. I won't go deeper into that just for the sake of time. But what I want to say is, for Shakespeare, it's not an accident that our social world mirrors the natural world in various ways. And when he points, when he uses a natural metaphor to say the social World works like this too. He's not just saying, oh, what a coincidence. He's saying, wow, there's some kind of deeper, interesting reality here that informs both. But for Harman, that's not what's at stake because it's always I who am the deeper.

The deeper reality is a noumena that we can't know. So it's always I who come in to save the day.

28:27 Seth: So if Shakespeare, instead of having written it is the east and Juliet is the sun, had written, oh, Juliet has an effect on me, that's very similar to the effect the sun has on the Right.

28:42 Wes: That was in the first draft, actually.

28:44 Seth: Yeah. If he tried to literally describe. There's a couple things that wouldn't happen. One is we wouldn't get the kind of emotional response that we get. And the second is we probably. I don't know if this is true or not, but I feel like what Harman's saying is that there's a sense in which the metaphor invites our subjectivity into a relationship with the real object. So, no, we don't get direct access because we're not objectifying it. But metaphor allows us to relate to the real object and not through its qualities, not through properties, and only in the sense that we can't say of a metaphor or simile that it's true.

You know, that you would say, like, it's true that the sea is wine dark, or it's true that Juliet is the sun, it's obviously false. So at least what I got out of this chapter was him saying, I'm going to rescue noumena from this failure of direct access through this notion of indirect access, which is really just a relationship. And the first thing I thought was. Of when I read this chapter was Levinas. What we read on Levinas, the idea that there is an ethical relational relationship that precedes ontology in a weird way, or at least precedes metaphysics, maybe is a more accurate way of saying it.

He mentions, as you said, Wes, he talks about, we put our own subjectivity in the place of the thing, but really it's not that we do that so much as we are called upon to create an interpretation or create some kind of, and it's probably emotionally driven picture, if you will, of this. This thing that's not necessarily descriptive of it, but somehow gives us access to it in a way that we have some kind of experience of it that's not an experience of knowledge. And, you know, the paradigmatic case of this, which I think he gets to by the End of the chapter is Dasein to human subjectivities.

I mean, you know, if you have a relationship, if you have a beloved, right? We've talked about this a thousand times on this podcast. Your relationship to your beloved or your relationship to your family or your mom or your dad or siblings or children or whatever can't be captured in literal language. If somebody asks you to describe your relationship with your kids or whatever, the best way that you could do it would be to draw an analogy or tell a story. Story, right. That creates a picture. So really, you know, it's a weird thing that there is no real object in the sense that it stands alone.

It's our relationship to the real object. So the real object can't stand alone without our relationship to it. And so he's basically saying the only way we can get access to things that's not literal is by entering into a non literal relationship with it. And of course it. It will always recede. We're not actually getting any sense of what it is in its real self or any of its properties, but it creates a relationship that's meaningful in some way. That doesn't seem terribly outrageous to me.

31:47 Wes: I don't think I agree, though. First of all, I think he thinks objects do stand on their own. That's one of his main points in objecting to people who want to treat objects as products of relations. There's an inwardness that does stand on its own. And also with regard to metaphor, I don't think he. The description you gave, where we. It's. That's the model theory of metaphor where we discover important symmetries between the two things based on the assertion of the metaphor. But that's not what we're doing when we stand in theatrically for the real object. I don't think. I think he is getting away from that entirely. It's not about appreciating similarities between the cypress and the flame anymore. It's just about the sense that I somehow access indirectly the thing in itselfiness of the cypress via my own thing in itselfiness.

32:39 Mark: We just back off and consider just this relation that we supposedly have to things in itself. Right? The way that Ortega starts this, which I think Harman follows, is my own experience of myself, right? If I stop and I try to introspect, then I've made myself an object and I'm only capturing some little bit of it. So.

32:58 Wes: Well, also the phenomenal, the phenomenal self. We're not capturing a noumena by introspection.

33:04 Mark: Well, this is what I'm trying to figure out is where. Obviously, Harman is looking to Kant for this idea of the noumenal self. And he uses that example in our chapter here of ethically. I sort of have this feeling that I'm free, that I'm noumenally free. But the way that this immediate inspiration for everything, having an eye or take it here, is just saying I'm going around doing my life and there's some sort of. Sort of background, just the experience of being me. And so Harman would have to say, I am in that sense, not introspecting, I'm just being me.

Then I am in touch with the thing in itself that is me. Right. You just read that quote, Wes. The only thing in experience that is a thing in itself that is involved is me. So it's. Whenever I stop and I try to. So I could just be in pain. But as soon as I think I'm in pain, that thought is not a painful thought. It's a. It's an observation of myself. And when I say the words I am in pain, I'm actually reporting on that thought. I'm not even reporting on the pain anymore. The pain itself is inexpressible. So is there any way that we could relate in any way to other things?

If other things have an inwardness like. Like this. Right. Schopenhauer says we can relate to them because we're all underlyingly the same one will. And that is not what Harman thinks. He thinks that everything has its own inwardness that is just pulled away from me forever now. I mean, I guess I. I gotta just see this as like Bergson, that, you know, what Ortega is describing is Bergson's. Right. And remember Bergson's. So, you know, sort of pre. Phenomenology. Pre. His early. And phenomenology he referred to as metaphysics. So that the ongoing seamless wall of experience that is the primary thing and that we objectify things, we falsify them in a way.

When we pick things out and we say this is an object, we're never talking about the fundamental part of experience. But I just. I don't. Right. I see. Bergson is closer to. It's a phenomenalist view. It's saying the field of experience is this unbroken, blooming, buzzing confusion is how William James calls it. There's no thing in itself involved here at all. So this is. I think where Harman is going wrong is he thinks that we should think that there are things in themselves within everything else, because everything has an inwardness that is comparable to my own.

Inwardness, when in fact my own inwardness. Unless you're a Christian, you think that there's some deep sea soul or something like that. Or of course there's the being that is my body, brain, combination. You know, there's always something about any physical object or mental object that. Well, I don't know about mental objects, but that transcends any particular description of it. That's no problem. But there's nothing in that that says there has to be something that is fundamentally sundered from the act of cognition. So I think Harmon's wrong.

35:58 Wes: Well, as you know, I do think that there has to be something fundamentally sundered from the act of cognition, but I think it has to be formal, it has to be something like an Aristotelian explanation. So yeah, Mark, you're bringing up, well, what are the criteria for being a being, for being a unity? Why is it that I am a thing in itself? Harman already gave us this idea of a promiscuous conception of the object, right. So we could almost say anything is an object. Does any object have a thing in itself standing behind it? I don't think so. There's.

Right. For Aristotle, the rabbit is a thing in itself because there's an underlying dynamic, repetitive system, non static, a kind of form of becoming that it has an emergent property of being that somehow produces unity and stasis. And at the level of form, being at work, being itself. So that's a very good example of a criterion. Right. We do need criteria for what's going to be of, you know, a real object. And then something that's just ad hoc.

36:57 Dylan: That end of it is that long list of all the characteristics are why you would say the rabbit is real. And that would be your test. Right. All those things that you said is an example of a test. Is it real or not? Right. And so when somebody says, you know, does the rabbit exist or does it not? Well, you would ask yourself all those kinds of questions, right? And what's the difference between. With. With the rabbit and the dragon? There would be all kinds of realish things about the dragon, but it would fail in a number of them. But do you say, well, it's not

37:28 Wes: real or the, you know, the rabbit on the chair. Right. They're not one being. It's not. That's not a real object in our ontology. And why not? Well, well, maybe it would be if somehow the chair had this vascular system that had joined the rabbit system, like something out of science fiction. And the chair. Chair were alive and they were somehow feeding each other. So then they become one dynamic system somehow. And then you might say, okay, maybe that is an object.

37:52 Dylan: Well, so. So a good example of that would be us and all the bacteria in our gut or a lamprey that lives on the surface of a shark. And we actually have. In those cases, we would recognize this as being a complicated unity. Right. That we, you know, we would recognize the shark and the lamprey as distinct unities. And they say, but we have a. But they have form a new unit. We call it symbiotic. They're symbiotic with one another. And we mean something different about that than the individual unities that they are because we would recognize, oh, the shark and the lamprey are actually separate entities.

38:28 Wes: You're pointing us to the gray areas, which is our downfall. Yeah. How do we account for these gray areas?

38:35 Dylan: But that is the answer about the rabbit being in the yard and why I say, you know, the rabbit in the yard is not an individual entity until I start talking about an ecosystem.

38:46 Wes: Yeah. So we might agree with Harman that that that type of thing, like an ecosystem is an object because it meets certain criteria. I mean, Harman did give us criteria, by the way, just to remind ourselves. He said, it's anything that can't be broken down. It's not simply the sum of its parts or of its larger relations. It has its own inwardness. But that's. I think what we're getting at here is that's a rather mysterious kind of definition of an object. It's just, oh, it has an inwardness. And I do. And what does, what doesn't, you know,

39:17 Mark: there are sensory objects and there are real objects for him. So the sensory objects too, I guess, have an inwardness. Right. Where the science is explicitly concerned with sensory objects. So the lamprey and the shark are both things that as a whole, it transcends any particular or even as many observations as you were going to make of them. So in that sense, they are sundered from any person's individual cognition. There might be things about them that we simply could never know because you'd have to be so small or so big or, you know, some in a different dimension.

You would have to be. So there's all that's fine. But we perceive them correctly as holes and we can talk about this object that they create, the shark, lamprey, suckathon, where, where they're somehow a combination entity. But there's nothing fundamentally mysterious. We don't need things in themselves to do any of that. So it's just the fact that something has an inner nature. If you want to say its inner nature is its essence, that sounds like something. Oh, science then characterizes the essence. Once we know that water is H2O, again, not that we've exhausted every possible observation you could make of the water, but you know, its inner essence.

It was sundered from that immediate I'm splashing around in the water kind of cognition, but it's not sundered from all cognition. It's not sundered from scientific, theoretical cognition.

40:42 Dylan: So I think that Harman wants to say that saying that the water is essentially H2O is wrong, that that's part of it, but that does not capture the full essence. It doesn't tell you why water is wet and any number of other things. This is the space where the recognition of the indirect access to the world in objects that's achieved through aesthetics and metaphor. That's the work that he is trying to do, is trying to solve that problem. I'm still left with a little bit of trying to understand what kind of access is indirect access and what is it enabling us to do. Because to me, in the end, if we can't do anything with it, if we're not making any decisions or conclusions with it, then it's not doing anything.

41:29 Wes: A good example of indirect access to science. Right. Scientific models it is.

41:33 Seth: I agree. And it seems like he sort of goes through chapter two, and then he just immediately takes a left turn and we're into something else in chapter three. He doesn't. Maybe it does more work later in the book.

41:42 Dylan: Well, we haven't read the whole book, so I mean.

41:45 Seth: Right, that's what I'm saying. Maybe it does a lot more heavy lifting later on.

41:49 Wes: Well, really just in four, which we

41:51 Seth: did read, but I'm trying to be charitable here in the way that I'm interpreting it, because I think there's a way, just in the same way that he's talking about a broad and promiscuous sense of objectivity, I can easily see how we could say, well, metaphor creates an object that includes us and the real object. It's not a relationship, like with objectivity or knowledge or whatever or literality, but it's something else. And then he could work with that concept in his ontology about talking about objectivity. Like, if we join another real object, if two real objects somehow join together into another object, do they get some kind of privileged access to each other? Other? That's not sensible. That gives them some sense of what they are? I don't know, but that's kind of where I thought it was headed.

42:42 Mark: All right, well, we'll revisit this objects coming into contact with each other when we actually talk to Graham in our next episode. So come back for that. Thanks, everybody. Good night.

42:52 Wes: Good night.

42:53 Seth: Good night. Good night.