Ep. 385: Guest Graham Harman on Object vs. Continuum (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partial Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better it. For episode 385, we're following up on our last discussion on Graham Harman's Object Oriented Ontology, a New Theory of Everything. So now talk to him directly about the issues we had with him in that, as well as getting to his new book, Waves and Stones. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linson Meyer with continuous and discreet touching willy nilly. In Madison, Wisconsin.

This is Seth Paskin winging it, touching nothing, discreet or no other discrete object.

0:46 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan existing in my own right in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:52 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey reflecting on wholes and parts, the discrete and the continuous, in the wake of my half hog broke class in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:00 Mark: Graham, welcome.

1:00 Graham: Thanks very much. Fresh out of bed in Long Beach, California.

1:04 Mark: Ah, yes, thanks for getting up a little early for us to do this. We were very excited by your previous book and I feel like your new book, maybe you moderated some positions or at least just explained them in, in a way that was less objectionable to me, such that some of the rage that I was feeling about the insistence on Kant's thing in itself, for instance, has faded. So yeah, I guess let's go around the horn, say what we want to get out of this. I for sure wanted to. Instead of. We often kind of start at the beginning of the book and go through.

And instead of doing that with waves and stones, I think we should just raise the issues as they come up. But I'm certainly interested in the overall issue of ontology, what counts as an object. I'm interested in the extension of that. Do we need this distinction between real objects and sensory objects? Right. Kantian things in themselves? Or is Husserl or somebody like that right? When they say, you know, of course we don't contact the entirety of an object, but we contact part of it, so it's an aspect. So we I am really contacting the real thing.

It's just not every property of the thing is relevant to my contact. Of course not. And then as a third thing, causality, obviously coming out of that. Seth, do you want to. Do you have anything to add before we get into the discussion proper and let Graham.

Yeah, I have lots to add. So first, Graham, you know you have the write off audience if somebody is enraged by your insistence on.

2:28 Wes: He was excited and then it turned into rage yes.

2:32 Mark: So I love the audacity of the thesis. Meaning I think you're not taking on a small project here. When you say a theory of everything, you're really trying to explain everything. I love the insistence that materialism is not what it purports to be or the way it's taken in society and sort of anti scientism. I love that part of the project. I love the insistence that knowledge is not the only way that cognition can function as an interaction between subjectivities or objects and so forth. I'm the romantic of the group, by the way. So that's the connecting to the infinite and the continuum via the discrete is something I'm very sympathetic to.

I just. I'm not all the way with you on the conclusion because I don't understand kind of the resolution that you're proposing 100%. And you're a wonderful writer, so it was a very enjoyable read as well. So I'm excited to kind of hear more directly from you about this idea that objects come together in a continuum and continuums come together in an object and what that relationship might look like.

Should we let Graham have a first pass at that before we add more to the pile, or do you want to say something initial, Dylan, before we get into it, or Wesley?

3:48 Wes: Yeah, I think Graham should speak.

3:50 Dylan: Yeah. Welcome to the podcast.

3:52 Graham: Thanks very much.

3:52 Dylan: I think it'd be also good for our listeners for you to say a few words about your background and stuff like that, where you're from.

3:59 Graham: Sure. First, let me ask Mark, you said my previous book. Are you referring to my previous book with Pelican, or are you referring to

4:07 Mark: some other book, Object Oriented Ontology, A New Theory of Everything. Yes, as the Pelican book.

4:12 Graham: Right, okay, sure. So as Dylan asked, I'll just say I come originally from Iowa, a little place called Mount Vernon. Went on to do graduate study in various places. Ended up with my first job at the American University in Cairo, the job I absolutely wanted because I had never been to the Middle east. That point. It was a life changing. Sixteen years there and for the past 10 years, well, I like to tell people I went all the way to Egypt for my first job and all the way to architecture for my second. I'm at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, Very famous among architects, not so well known among the general public.

I think it's not a coincidence that I had to go all the way to Egypt for my first job and all the way to architecture for my second, because philosophy is still polarized between the analytic and continental wings. And though my background is in the continental, I don't really fit there either. So I kept falling through every possible crack and had to create my own movement or subspecies of philosophy. But to turn back, to pivot back towards the first two sets of questions. My acceptance of Kant's thing in itself, which I have some differences from Kant on this, of course, is grounded in a pretty simple consideration, which is that perfect knowledge of anything, hypothetically that you might have is not itself the thing.

And so then we have to ask ourselves, what is the difference between those two? And the traditional answer in philosophy has always been, if you have perfect knowledge of a dog, the difference between that and a real dog is that the real dog inheres in matter. If you scratch the surface of people's views, that's really what they believe. But there isn't really any evidence of any such thing as matter. In fact, I think matter was invented as a kind of. Simply to explain this gap between the knowledge of the thing and the thing itself. I think what happens is the form gets translated, the form gets distorted when you change the form of a dog or anything else into some other medium such as knowledge.

And this is why the thing in itself is inevitable. It doesn't mean some spooky thing inhabiting a different dimension. The things in themselves are right here around us. We simply only have a translated access to them. And yes, Husserl does deny that. Husserl says the thing in itself is an absurd notion. But that's a lot of table pounding on Husserl's part. As much as I respect and admire his work, he simply. He has a mathematical background and he loves this idea that you can have direct access to reality as it is. For instance, in one of his famous early works of the 1890s, he says, the Berlin in my mind can't be different from the real Berlin, because then there will be a problem of how those two make contact.

And you could never really know Berlin. To which I say precisely, Knowledge of the real Berlin is problematic. It's always going to be indirect, vicarious, as I sometimes call it. And so I think it's Husserl's own problem that he is over committed to this idea that we can have direct access to a foundational sort of knowledge in phenomenology. And yes, he also has this other aspect of his theory, partial knowledge, access to the adumbrations of things, Abscheltungen. But that is only something that comes to the senses. For Husserl, if you want the real knowledge of things, it's through the intellect.

And so Husserl believes in intellectual intuition that the senses can never get direct access to things, but the intellect can. And this is what the point of the phenomenological reduction is. So I'll stop there with Mark's question. Seth doesn't understand the conclusion of waves and stones. And I get it. It was a little speculative. But I'm trying there to extend what I see as the major current in modern German philosophy, which is a new focus on the interior of objects that we don't really get in Aristotle's tradition. At first, Aristotle's talking about substances.

He's not going inside of substances, whereas Leibniz is. Right, Leibniz is talking about all the perceptions put there by God inside the monad. And then this extends into Kant, although Kant unfortunately limits it to the interior of human experience. And then you've got Slaughterdyke with his more recent theory of spheres. The world is consisting of spheres. And so in a way, I'm simply extending that current and saying that objects meet inside of a larger object and that perceptions occur on the interior of objects. And, of course, there was limited space there to go into detail with that theory.

I just wanted to give readers a taste of that. And there's nothing wrong with romanticism, by the way. It's got a bad name these days, but It's.

8:13 Mark: I agree 100%.

8:15 Wes: I mean, Seth, do you want to say more about what you didn't understand?

8:18 Mark: No, no. I think actually Graham just kind of blew my mind a little bit there with that. So the way I was reading it, I was thinking. In fact, I have in my notes, I'm like, okay, if knowledge. Let's just say knowledge doesn't get you to the real thing. And then he says, also the contact fix. This doesn't get you there either. In other words, causality. Materialism isn't going to get you there either. I was thinking of object encountering object in the continuum as being more like relationship. So I was almost going back to Kierkegaard or further back, where the answer is going to lie in the idea that object and object in relationship to each other create some new thing.

And it sounds like. But I wasn't thinking of it as a container, as a sphere in which they're inhabiting the interiority of it. I was just thinking about a more traditional relationship model. And so I guess I could just reconceive the idea that the encounter they have is the encounter almost as part of the continuum brings Two objects together into a third object in which the original two objects are parts or interior. And that in some way enables those two real objects to have some kind of real interaction with each other, so to speak. I don't want to get into the real and sensory thing, but I think I kind of was going there and maybe in my mind, but I just hadn't gotten there yet.

So the way you articulated it really helps me.

9:40 Graham: Maybe I should explain thexis for the listeners who may not have read the book yet. Thexis is one of the several ancient Greek words for touch. And obviously I'm not the first person who has been interested in touch and philosophy recently in the continental tradition. Jacques Derrida and Jean Lee have talked about this extensively. I don't come from that wing of continental philosophy, but it goes really the problem of touch, there's a little bit of that in Aristotle, because Aristotle talks about different degrees of contact. Contact is the word he uses.

But the problem of touch really becomes interesting with occasionalism, which some philosophy students know about from 17th century Europe, where the occasionalists were the followers of Descartes who talked about how mind body interaction was possible, it was only possible through God. But it's actually an Islamic innovation going back to the school of Al Ashari in Basra, Iraq, in deep into medieval times, where their reading of a particular passage in the Quran was that not only is does God intervene divinely in cases of miracles, but that everything that happens is a case of divine intervention.

So that if two things smack into each other, it's actually God that makes that possible. And in fact for them also two consecutive moments of time do not even make contact. The universe is disappearing and being recreated in every instance. And that he's the first I know of in the history of philosophy to come up with these ideas. Then this sounds a lot like Leibniz of course too, right? There's no direct contact between things, monads have no windows. And so God essentially programs all the interactions between things from the dawn of time. But this actually begins with a theological problem in Islam that the Asharites were trying to solve in a very radical way.

And I think they had a point. I don't have God coming in to solve everything because that to me that would just push the problem onto gods. If nothing else can touch anything else, then how can God do it? So then piety becomes the only reason for solving the problem so easily. And so for me, even if God is doing it, there's still a problem of how does God make contact with all those things, if nothing else, can do it. So thixis is the technical term I introduced in the book waves and stones to try to highlight what the different possible kinds of contact are.

Do like things, touch like things, or do unlike things, touch unlike things. I opt for the latter. So that's just a quick description of thexis for those of you readers who haven't read the book.

11:53 Dylan: So this question of touching and the relationship between the continuous and the discrete I thought was very evocative and it made me think a lot about. So I'm a particle physicist by training and it made me think a lot about quantum field theory and the way in which this, you know, this question of interactions happens and what it means for physicists when they talk about the, you know, there are lots of kind of oversimplifications that evoke this problem. When you say, well, an atom is mostly space or, you know, when you touch a table, it's really not your hand touching the table, but the electric fields between the table and your hand.

So this notion of it's very evocative. I think when I read the book, and especially going into waves and stones after the object oriented ontology, it brought together a lot of pieces to me. I thought it was a very, very apt place to go think about the discrete and the continuous. And I found myself wanting to frame the problem as you inevitably have a hole that is some kind of something like the universe. So there's this way in which someone like the holist folks, there's something right about there's some whole thing, and then if you go down there, you have the problem.

Well, but there are also parts, right? And so if you have parts in the whole and you can cut continuous things into parts, you end up having to account for what the relationship is between those parts and those wholes. And I guess if I threw out a question or the conundrum is that you spend some time, especially in the Aristotle section, where effectively what makes a discrete thing a discrete thing, rather than just another piece of the continuum, has to do with whatever causation it is that causes it to be a whole, a whole as distinct from the continuum.

And that's the question that I think I found myself reflecting on in where that boundary is, but the boundaries between discrete things such that you have them be discrete entities, that this is not part of it and this is part of it. And the touching I think gets to it. Like, you know, there's a point, you know, the discrete things are joined up with a continuous, they Touch things in the continuum because that's where they have access to it. But this is where I felt like this was the box of the sort of landscape of thinking that you were in. And where I'm wondering is what the relationship of objects about what makes them wholes as distinct from just parts of the continuum.

And that seems to be like the heart of the matter.

14:34 Mark: Things instead of heaps.

14:35 Dylan: Yeah. So the way you talk about. I think you do a nice formulation of the continuum in following Aristotle that you can just cut a continuum up, you keep cutting it up in any arbitrary way. And you have this distinction between carving and cutting. So carving is along the joints. This is why I was thinking about my whole hog butchery class, half hog butchery class. And I think that's a super interesting thing. So there's a naturalness in the carving. It falls along the joints. That naturalness is referring to what makes those parts parts. And I think you point to that being.

Cause there's causes that make the part the part and it makes it different from the other thing. And to try to wrap up my sort of pseudo commented question is I was trying to figure out how this falls in the objects between the real and the sensual objects and where we're. Because in the end I'm going to be carving up and I'm going to have sensual experience, I'm going to have the real object. Just how that plays out.

15:39 Mark: Let me just stack on that before you answer it, which is yes, What I really liked about the new account, this whole. Oh, well, you know, I understand. Causality is so mysterious anyway.

15:49 Graham: Right.

15:49 Mark: We don't understand how, you know, we see two things next to each other, as Hume says, but we don't actually see the cause. Well, you could say, well, one has a power, it has a potential. What does that mean? How does that. So adding anything to that. I'm very open to it. Even if it's. I don't know if the idea of God coming in of the occasionalism. You know, we've read Malebranche, we know what occasionalism is. I don't know if that. That might be more of a distraction than. But I really like the idea of the let's. We need the continuous to bridge two things. Something like that.

16:18 Graham: Funny you mentioned Hume because Hume is also a descendant of the occasionalist tradition in his own way. And there in Madison you've got Professor Stephen Nadler at the University of Wisconsin has written extensively about this, that the occasionalist roots of Hume, because causality is a problem for Hume Just as it is for the occasionalist. He's not a religious person like they are, but it's just. The problem's the same. But anyway, in terms of Dylan's question, maybe one way to do this is to start at the bottom of the universe rather than the top.

And let's say someone claimed that the universe is really just a bunch of independent pixels of ma matter or something, and that we can really explain everything in terms of looking at those tiniest units like the pixels. Why do I not accept that? The reason I don't accept that is because of emergence, which I accept, which is that not any two things that interact create something larger that's only a small subset of interactions. And then you end up having realities at all different scales. And not everything automatically interacts with everything else.

We have lots of things that sit side by side and don't interact in the least, even though they are in close physical proximity. And incidentally, I think one of the innovations of my position is that I reinterpret all causation in terms of composition. I don't know if that's been done before. So in other words, when you have two things interacting, what's really happening is that they are becoming, however briefly, a new third object. And that new object is having retroactive effects on its pieces. This is what I wrote a whole essay once about.

The rather grim example of two airplanes crashing and two small airplanes crashing into each other. And then what happens is they actually become a single entity. The crash object. It then has retroactive effects that damage both parts. And then they re emerge from that single entity as separate again, but in damaged form. And this is why the crash occurs. But anyway, that might take us too far afield.

17:56 Dylan: Well, just, just, I'll just make a comment. There is. I'll just start. That's exactly how a physicist would think about two objects crashing, right? Is you would immediately make them into a hole, right? And that you would do conservation of energy and all that jazz on it. And so you separate out whatever that entity is that's interacting from the rest of the universe and consider that as a whole in order to. You know, if I'm really sort of pragmatic from a physicist perspective, I make it a whole so that I can rationalize it so that I could talk about the parts and talk about their relationships with one another. Because if I have the whole universe as the thing that it's in relationship to, I can't. I don't have a denominator, right? And so I make it into a whole and talk about the parts. And talk about the parts, how that whole then becomes multiple parts.

18:41 Graham: Right. Okay. So much the better. And then I would say that there are only these local holes. I don't accept the notion of a whole. We can say universe. But that for me would be just a central object. It would be a concept. In order for the universe to be an object, everything would have to causally unite, which I don't see as being the case because objects are very much immune to many of the causes around them. So Bruno Latour has this funny example that a man pounds his fist on the table and it does nothing to the copy of Aristotle's Metaphysics on his shelf.

Not everything is connected. And we're in an era in, at least in continental philosophy, where holism has a lot of cachet, where process has more cachet than objects, and even where human experience is still more important than the world outside of human experience. So these, all these things make Object Oriented Ontology a bit of an oddity and at odds with the fashions today. These are some of the problems people have with the reception of it.

19:34 Mark: So I noticed so far you very seldom brought up properties. And this is, I think, something at the near the end of your chapter 4 in object oriented Ontology, a new theory of everything that we did not really do justice to in our presentation. We sort of ran out of time. But that you have the real object, the sensory object, the real properties and the sensory properties. And instead of talking about continuums meeting whole things, you talked about two real objects can only interact with each other through sensory properties. And so we were interpreting that as well.

Each object. So we were talking about the one billiard ball is about to hit another one. And my description of it was very anthropomorphic in a way that I think in the new book you've headed off this, that there has to be some sort of way in which the receiving billiard ball is aware, not of the full billiard ball that's coming at it, but just of the properties of its hardness, of its speed, something like that. And I understand that only the hardness and speed are relevant for their interaction. But why we have to talk about those as sensory properties when clearly billiard balls don't have senses.

The way that you explain it is that when two things interact, and it could be lice, it could be inanimate objects, they're necessarily not getting the whole story about the other. They're only reacting to certain. So you could say that the billiard ball who's about to receive the impact has a certain image in that it is going to be affected by something about the other billiard ball, but certainly not the billiard ball itself, certainly not the real billiard ball. So you could metaphorically say its sensation of the billiard ball are these properties.

But is that correct? I mean, why do we want to say that those properties are the sensory properties when there's no humans involved?

21:24 Graham: First, I should say it's actually sensual, and a lot of people read it as sensory, and it's think of sensual more in the sense of sensual contact. You can think of it in the erotic sense, if you please. And the reason that's an important difference is, as you say, if I say sensory, then it sounds like I'm saying billiard balls have minds and sense organs. And panpsychism is becoming more popular. But I'm not in that camp. Just a brief parenthesis here. The reason I'm not in that camp is I think panpsychism makes the same mistake as the view it opposes, which is that it's making human thought too important in the structure of the cosmos.

I see human thought as a very interesting but ontologically derivative phenomenon. It's not part of the very fabric of the universe. I don't think you have to retroactively project anything like human thoughts, even in primitive form, back on the inanimate world. But I do think the inanimate world does encounter what I call the sensual realm, because nothing interacts with anything directly. What you're encountering are the sensual profiles of things, as with Husserl's Afshatoman, Husserl's adumbrations, where you're only getting profiles of things.

So it's kind of like a form of Cubism, right? In Picasso's paintings, you're never getting the thing itself. You're just getting all the different faces it can possibly show put onto the same plane or many of the possible faces it can show.

22:37 Dylan: Well, so, Graham, you've teed up a question that I wrote on the margins several times is when you're using this phrase, nothing interacts directly. Is there a distinction between nothing interacts directly and the question of completeness that, like I, in any kind of interaction there is simply not a complete rendering of? It's always partial. Is there a distinction between those two things?

23:02 Graham: Yes and no. My usual objection to that way of putting it is that people sometimes tell me causation isn't indirect. It's direct but partial. But as I see it, that just pushes the Problem back a step further because let's say you shake hands with somebody and you can say, oh, Well, I touched 8% of them directly. Okay. But then the question is, how does that surface of the hand that you touch during the handshake relate to the whole of the person? And we make that problem too easy for us because for us, physically, intuitively, you can see that the hand is part of the body.

And so if you touch the hand, you're touching part of their body. But then you still have to ask yourself, how is it that the surface of the hand that you touch makes contact with the whole? So now you've got a problem with what's the relation between the hand and the whole person. And so I think there is only indirect action because you're never going to touch the body. You're never even going to touch the whole of the hand or even of the surface of the hands. Right. Because there's always going to be only a partial version of that. And so at some point you're going to have to stop passing the buck and you're going to have to talk about how the part interacts with the whole, if that makes sense.

24:04 Dylan: So my version of it as direct means complete and indirect means incomplete. Doesn't quite get to what you're pointing about, in part because it's a whole part question. So direct has to do with the wholeness of something. And so if you be. So if I say that a hand or a person or pick your whole, I'll never have direct access to that whole. I'll only have indirect access to a part of that whole.

24:35 Graham: Right? That's correct. And so there's going to be a lot of part whole questions that arise. It's not easily dismissed in the way people try to.

24:42 Mark: Sorry, did you mean, Dylan, direct access to a part of the whole or why is it indirect access to the part as opposed to indirect access through the whole through direct access to the part?

Yeah, this came up, Grant, when we were talking about. Ooo, just to use the abbreviation.

Yes. When we're talking about the old book, we're just going to say, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh for now.

Well, that particular problem and that particular example, it's easy if you go down that. It's easy to lay the path to thinking about what's happening as we're talking by analogy, we're saying everything is a kind of form of subjectivity or a form of consciousness, every individual object. Because we were talking about. Well, when you shake hands with somebody. Yes. There's the physical contact of the hand, but it is a gesture. And of course, the real me is not touching the real you. But when I, even when I speak, like right now, what's happening between us is I'm making sounds, and somehow those sounds are traveling over the airwaves and coming into your ears and your brain is doing something with them.

And in a way, we're forming a connection between the real me and the real you in a kind of impartial, indirect way. But the real me is engaged in the activity, so to speak. At least that's the way we were. That's kind of how we were. And so if you take that by analogy, you know, then that's where we were talking about billiard balls. It's easy to think like, okay, well, what Graham's trying to go for here is a form of the idea that the real object is always engaged in the sensory interactions in this kind of indirect way, that consciousness is always a part, or self consciousness, probably better, more accurate, is always a way that we as human beings interact with the world.

But I think now, hearing you talk and understanding the problematic, that's not a direction we want to go because self consciousness, as you said, is a very small part of things and introduces its own problems through cognition in the form of knowledge. So we don't want to use that as an analogy, but that's kind of where I think some of this came from.

Okay, can I just throw some grammar in here? So sure. Just to get at that, you're a representationalist we interviewed, I see, 10 years ago, John Searle, his new book at the time, Seeing things as they Are, that he was anti representationalist, said that crazily. Modern philosophers still carry over this problem that was introduced by Locke, by folks like that, that we never actually perceive objects, we only perceive are representations of them. But clearly I don't perceive something in my mind. That's an abusive grammar we want to say. So for you, if I'm seeing an apple, if I'm touching an apple, if I'm talking about an apple, I'm thinking about.

Because you even include cognizing as part of what gets merely essential and not a real, you know, anything that's knowledge is only getting at all of science is only concerned with the sensual aspect. So it seems like I can never actually say anything. If I say that apple is red, that apple is round. I'm always talking about merely the sensory apple, not the real apple. Is that correct?

27:50 Graham: You may be talking about the real apple. I'm just saying you don't have direct access to it and that whatever propositions you come up with about the real are essential. And I try to talk about, you know, you mentioned that I talk about many different forms of cognition and we haven't mentioned yet that aesthetics is more important for me than it is for most philosophers. And that's because I define the obsession with knowledge as what I call literalism. Literalism is the idea that you can dissolve a thing into all the properties that it actually has, or maybe all the true statements that can be made about it.

Whereas for me, there's always a loose relation between things and their properties. And so aesthetics for me in the broadest sense, which doesn't just include art, is about driving a wedge between the objects and their qualities. And this is why I spend a lot of time talking about metaphor. Metaphor is a very simple, elementary form of aesthetics. It's not the physicality of aesthetics. But I talk a lot about Homer's metaphor. The Wine Dark sea. And there's an Odyssey movie coming out soon, so that's topical.

28:46 Mark: We'll get to see at last what color the wine dark sea is in the movie, right?

28:50 Graham: Filmmaker has to make a choice. Yeah, Wine dark sea is not telling you that. Hey, have you ever noticed the Mediterranean is pretty much the same color as wine? Because that's probably false. And even if it's true, it will be trivial. What it's really doing, that metaphor is it's using that bare literal similarity between the wine and the sea to insinuate a bunch of other similarities that literal language doesn't usually, such as the depth, the danger, the mystery of the wine and the sea, that kind of thing. And so for me, the wedge between objects and their qualities gets us closer to the real than the assumption that we simply need to come up with all the true properties of things.

And in the case of Searle, I simply disagree with him. He thinks that it's Locke's fault that we ended up in this. Well, again, as I mentioned earlier, knowledge of a dog is not the same thing as the dog, right? And yes, we are aiming our knowledge of the dog at the real dog, but there's never going to be a complete overlap between it. And it's not just that it's partial, it's that there's no conceivable way to convert the dog into statements about the dog or dog properties, just as there's no way to change the globe into a two dimensional map without distorting the size or shape of the land.

Masses. This is something school children know. And there's no way that you can make PI expressible as a number with decimal points that ends, or e or many other mathematical numbers, any irrational number. So incommensurability is something that mathematics and the sciences know about. And I'm just saying it's also there in philosophy. It's there between knowledge and what knowledge is about. So I would just disagree with Searle about that.

30:22 Mark: So this is the emphasis on metaphor in the chapter on aesthetics is, of course, what got me excited as a romantic as I am.

Did you cut straight to the absolute this morning, Seth, or unmediated?

You know, I'm always encountering discrete, finite objects in my sphere here as levers that launch me into the infinite or put me into a relationship with. With God. Yeah, that's kind of how I experience the world. But I really do like that idea. And I wasn't sure, Graham, if you were saying, hey, literally, we should all do aesthetics and metaphors the way that we're going to get what we want. Or if you were saying, let me talk about metaphor and aesthetic appreciation or aesthetic experience, and that. That's a good analogy. Or that kind of points towards the type of experience that I'm talking about, but it still is.

You said it in the first book this way. You talked about it as us as the subjects putting ourselves in the position of the object. So there is this sense of a kind of dislocation through a relationship, and also kind of a substitution, if you will. And here in the second book, you're saying, well, we're in a relationship with the object, but it's inside of this bigger, not aesthetic experience or aesthetic process, but really aesthetic object. When I am in relation with this work of art or when I'm truly contemplating or experiencing this metaphor, not sure what the right verb there is, then I am part of.

I've created this third thing, and I'm inside of it. And that gives me access in a very meaningful way to the object. And I agree with that, and I also like the sentiment. But I also was going to ask you just if it's. I don't know if this is interesting or not, but I am curious. There's aesthetic experience and aesthetic appreciation and metaphor. The reading and the contemplation, or the use of metaphor is one thing. Then there's the creative act, like when the poet writes those words versus us reading those words. And is the same type of activity happening?

And is our poets, our artists, our creative types, somehow already aware of, in a Kind of weird way. This is the very romantic question, right? Do creative people and is the act of creativity give you access to this privileged form of connection or not to real objects that we forget those of us who don't create, and they're here stuck in our intentional, knowledge driven minds.

Literal minds.

32:55 Graham: Literal minds, yes. There must be a sense in which those who create the artworks have a heightened aesthetic capacity, otherwise they wouldn't be devoting their lives, sometimes incurring much material suffering by generating these works. However, that's Heidegger and Nietzsche talk about how aesthetics should focus on the experience of the creator rather than the passive recipient. But I disagree with this. I think ultimately the creator is simply a special case of the consumer. I shouldn't use the word consumer because everyone's down on capitalism now.

But I'll sit the recipient or the spectator, the beholder and in fact a different issue. This is why I am not as bothered by artificial intelligence as many intellectuals are. I think ultimately the human vocation is not creation, but connoisseurship and curatorship. Because I think ultimately we're all spectators and we have to create the works now because there's been no machine that can do it for us. But ultimately, if all the actual writing was being done by artificial intelligence and humans were simply sorting and sifting and choosing the best, I wouldn't see that as anything more than a cutting to the chase of what the human mission always was.

But that's maybe a bigger topic for another time. Also, I should point out that aesthetics isn't the only thing for me that expands the map of cognition beyond knowledge. We've been in a 400 year period where the hard sciences have essentially replaced theology as the source of ultimate knowledge, ultimate insight for educated people. And in many ways, the hard sciences have deserved that. They've had a wonderful run. They've improved human longevity. They've caused some problems along the way too. But you can't really condemn what natural science has done in the last four centuries.

It's really taken the whole species a leap forward. That said, the wish to turn everything into a similar discipline, to say we got to take a scientific approach to this or that isn't always the right way to do it. Is it bigger? Do we need to take a scientific approach to literary criticism? I doubt that's going to work. There's also humor, for example. Humor is a huge part of human cognition. We choose our friends, we choose the things we use our entertainment based on the sense of humor exhibited by different humans. We bond with People of the sense of humor.

You're not going to find a whole large percentage of philosophy devoted to humor. There's a few works devoted to that. George Santayana said back in the 1890s that beauty is a very small part of philosophy, but it's a huge part of everyday life. We're all constantly making a aesthetic decisions from haircuts to what we put on in the morning, to which way we walk to work. Rhetoric is another one. Rhetoric in the last few hundred years has turned into mere rhetoric. It's turned into this devious way of manipulating people. It's viewed as sophistry.

Actually, rhetoric is extremely important. It does you no good to have a truth that you present poorly. And Aristotle talks about what rhetoric is, among others in the ancient world. And rhetoric, for Aristotle, is about entimemes. It's about saying things without saying them, which is an extremely important part of any communication that cuts against the grain of literalism. Literalism is about being very clear about everything you say, putting everything in lucid propositions or just clear propositions. But actually, rhetoric is an extremely powerful element of human communication.

And people always say, well, Plato didn't like it, okay, But Aristotle spent half the day teaching his students rhetoric. So you can't leave Aristotle out of it. When Aristotle gives the example of this man has been three times crowned with laurel. The ancient Greeks didn't need to be told because he has won the Olympic Games three times. We need to be told that because we're not familiar with the idiom. But you insult people when you spell things out too much. You need to find just the right level of implicit and explicit in your giving a speech.

And so rhetoric is something that needs to come back. One of my criticisms of analytic philosophy is that it has many very clear writers, but few really brilliant lucid writers, you know. So people will praise Quine as a stylist in analytic philosophy circles. Well, Quine is very clear, but I wouldn't call him a great writer. Some people are fond of Wittgenstein as a stylist. I may be a little less so. I kind of like Kripke as a writer, but more because of his sense of humor. So there's. The art of writing, finally, is not really valued in analytic philosophy because it's seen more as a distraction.

It's a kind of philosophers are supposed to be like scientists and simply make their point and get out. But I don't think that's really the key to the art of writing. You have to seduce your reader, weave a Spell.

37:02 Mark: Yeah. We should force analytic writers then to put abstracts at the beginning. They should all have to write abstracts at the beginning of all their papers and state their process and the hypothesis and the way in which they've got around to what they were saying.

37:16 Graham: Well, one thing you can use ChatGPT for that's a lot of fun is you can pick some random analytic philosophy article and ask ChatGPT to rewrite it in the style of Bergson or Nietzsche to add some style to it. It's pretty funny. I use ChatGPT in all kinds of ways. The people are just too negative about it. There are many interesting things you can do with it already, let alone 10 years from now. So we don't like it now because students are all cheating with it. Essentially. Paper writing is over pedagogically for now until we figure out eventually we're all going to be writing in human computer teams.

It's just we're in that in between zone where no one wants to do it because it seems like cheating, but no one has figured out the way you can do it without cheating. How can you use it productively? And honestly, what sorts of expectations do we have for better writing from human computer teams? I think clinging too much to the idea of I, human, must sit here and struggle sentence by sentence to generate each sentence by myself, which is what we think of as essential to the act of writing right now. It's maybe not the best use of our time. If I could have a computer, if I could say, hey, write 100 drafts.

I want to write a book about climate change. Write 100 drafts of that book in the style of my previous books, and then I could kind of skim those books, figure out which one was closest to what I was trying to do, and then edit it intensively. That would be considered abject plagiarism right now. But I think at some point we're going to see that. It's not. At some point we're going to see that there is added human value in an exercise like that that might lead to better books. I don't want to be an early adopter of that because whoever does it first is going to be crucified by the profession.

And I'm not interested in fighting those kinds of battles, but eventually someone's going to do that.

38:49 Mark: So I think you've given us a really good picture in the last stretch of what you said of this movement that we see in your books from topic to topic to topic, that I think Seth started, you know, talking about. You know, we introduced aesthetics to talk about what? Is it adding to knowledge? Or is it giving us a substitute for knowledge, is giving us some deeper inner truth or something? And the Wine Dark Sea example, was it right? We grappled with that ourselves. If we say, well, the sea itself, the real sea, we can never have any knowledge about.

We go in, we take samples of it, we do lab tests on it. Well, we're just learning about the sensual sea. We're learning about some properties, some sensual properties of the sea. But the real sea is always going to be transcendent. It is going to be beyond. And you want to insist that we're not learning about parts of the sea. We're learning about something that is ontologically fundamentally different than the real sea. The real sea is something that recedes. So, well, if we can't get through knowledge, through any sort of investigation at this real thing that recedes, maybe we can get it through it some other way.

Maybe we can get it through artistic contemplation. But when, as you say, when Homer describes the wine dark sea, he's not actually talking about the real sea. He is creating a new object that smashes together the properties of wine and the properties of sea and asking you, hey, don't even worry about the real sea. The real sea is now receded. We're contemplating this new thing that I've created. And so, I mean, that's wonderful. You've created a new thing that has something to do with your sensory properties of the sea. But we're not getting any indirect access, any deeper understanding.

I don't think of the real sea, or am I wrong about that?

40:30 Graham: I think aesthetically you're getting more of an attachment to the real sea. And first of all, I don't want to look like I'm downgrading science in the book, because I'm not. I'm an absolute fan of the history of science and the ongoing achievements of science. I'm just tired of the idea that it is the ultimate court of authority on all issues and that it exhausts the picture of what adequate human knowledge, human cognition looks like. But, okay, the Case of the Wine Dark Sea. I often am drawn back to Slavoj Iek's very funny remarks early in his book the Parallax View, where he talks about the Shakespeare Made Easy series, where what they do is, on the left side they have Shakespeare's actual text, and on the right he's translated into plain American English.

So to be or not to be, that is, the question becomes my Problem now is knowing if I should kill myself. And I think we all recognize that something is lost, even if that is the literal meaning of Hamlet's line. And then I want to do it for another funny phrase, you know, Heidegger. Heideggerians are slavish admirers of the poetry of Holderlin, and they love quoting this phrase. But where the danger is, there too lies the saving power. And Zizek translates that into, if you're ever in trouble, don't panic too quickly. The solution might be just around the corner.

There's something comical about that. You're turning these into platitudes. There's something, obviously that's a good literal translation of what Holderman means, but you're destroying it. And you can always make something look ridiculous by literalizing it. Right. I Talked in my H.P. lovecraft book about eminent American literary critic literalizing Lovecraft stories in this way, right. That he would say things like, basically, Lovecraft stories are all about a prehistoric race of peoples who play tricks with space and time, usually somewhere in Massachusetts.

Okay, that's a nice, funny polemical description of Lovecraft stories. But I can still read Lovecraft and still enjoy the stories. Or he refers to Lovecraft's monster Cthulhu as an invisible whistling octopus, which is funny, but that doesn't quite exhaust the heart of the matter with Lovecraft's fiction, which is that Lovecraft really does make it seem like you're inhabiting this world of invisible monsters that are playing tricks with space and time. So I think you are gaining a lot aesthetically. Anytime you can aesthetically improve something, you're gaining from it.

Just think of architecture. You could have kind of bare functionalist modern architecture that gets the job done, but people aren't really happy living in those environments. People need some aesthetic complexity and even some mystery. And I know mystery has had a bad name for the last few hundred years. It's been seen as obscurantism. But we like a little bit of perplexity in our day to day lives. And that has to do with our aesthetic sensibilities. I think not everything, when stated literally becomes better.

42:59 Dylan: What you're talking about, Graham, is to me, and this goes back to the holes and parts and the emergence question is the way in which when you grab a hold of something for actual objects, they're bigger than the account that you have of them, they're bigger than that particular experience. And so one of the powers of when you start emphasizing the aesthetic experience with respect to them, which I want to make Much bigger than just say your artistic experience or beauty or something is you open up the ability to get more towards the source of it.

So this is one of the distinctions I think, that you've been emphasizing in the distinction between the real and the sensual is that there's a way that you're trying to preserve the sourceness of the real object and not have it be limited in the way in which those accounts that say, well, we have direct access. Because it's really responding to the question that when I start trying to say, well, I have direct access to X, Y or Z, I end up having limited in ways that I would just say are wrong. I have more access to it. There's more to it than that.

So the wine Dark sea is an example. Or if I talk about water and I say it's H2O, well, there's a whole bunch of other things that I want to say are true about water as water as the real water. And I'm not going to get to it with just that.

44:30 Graham: Not get to it with what? Just the aesthetic.

44:32 Dylan: Just saying, for instance, that it's H2.

44:34 Mark: Oh, right, right.

44:35 Graham: Yeah.

44:36 Mark: Can't believe I'm blanking on the terms already.

Undermining. Overmining. Undermining.

Yes, undermining. So Mark, where do you want to go? Do you want to put a wrap this up or.

Yeah, let's stop part one here and Graham will be back for part two. Folks can if you're supporting us through the site partsexamine life.com support then one of your feeds should have part two in it very shortly, if not already. Otherwise we'll see you next week. Thanks.

45:00 Dylan: Thanks.

45:01 Mark: Thank you.