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

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life. This is episode 385, part two, discussing Graham Harman's Waves and Stones with Graham himself, as well as whatever was issues were hanging on us from the object oriented ontology, a new theory of everything that we discussed in our last episode. Wes, you wanted to start us off with some talk about the thing in itself.

0:27 Wes: Sure. I did used to get a lot of flack for being a Kantian on this podcast. Now I have to say I'm more sympathetic to the idea that we have direct access to reality, or at least to the reality that matters. In part because of Hegel, in part because of Aristotle. And really I don't know that I ever considered myself a Kantian. I just thought he was an important point of departure for understanding everything that came after. In fact, in a way, I think the central preoccupation of epistemology since Kant, on both the analytic and the continental side of things is whether we can make sense of things in themselves, and if so, how.

The criticisms of that idea started immediately with people like Jacobi and Schulze. And one of the important criticisms was that, well, the whole model of the thing in itself assumes a kind of causal interaction between the thing in itself and the mind. And causality is one of the things that was supposed to be reduced to the level of a phenomenon, supposed to become something else. Another thing that was like a secondary quality along with space and time and all the other categories. And that I think that kind of critique can be expanded in a way I thought it was in Hegel.

And I think it also has a legacy in say, Wittgenstein's On Certainty and then Moore's Moorean propositions. And the idea is that there's something importantly self limiting about skepticism. And if we don't like that word, we could just say about any theory that suggests that we have mediated access to reality. And that's because our intuitions about skepticism are predicated about observations, about phenomena, about things that are supposed to be mediated. So for instance, it's there in ancient skepticism, but it really takes off in early modern philosophy where you get scientific models of the interaction of the eye and the world and primary qualities.

With Galileo and Locke, light reflects off objects and goes into the eye and the colors aren't real, the spatiotemporal primary qualities are real. But all of those types of observations assume that we have some sort of important access to reality through the phenomena. Because if we didn't, then we'd have no reason to believe our access to reality were mediated. We'd have no reason to be skeptics. I think this is why Hegel suggests that we doubt the doubt. The skepticism is self limiting. It can't be motivated without assuming at least some sort of access to reality, because we need that kind of access to frame our skeptical ideas and to motivate those ideas.

So yeah, I think in a way this may not be really within the scope of your project because you're taking out things in themselves as in a way, as a point of departure. And that debate, it's a bigger debate in a way that precedes it. But I'm wondering what you think about all that.

3:03 Graham: Yeah, you're right. I've never liked the word skepticism because I don't believe we can have no knowledge at all about the world. But one problem these so called anti skeptics have is why is Knowledge not yet complete. Why do theories change over time? That is much better explained by the idea that we have a. No direct access to reality, that it's indirect.

3:26 Wes: Yeah, but I would say indirect in the. In the scientific sense of. Indirect. Indirect in the sense that we need more undermining someone sympathetic to that mindset. But let's say, you know, for Hegel, Hegel might say, well, why not say that we actually do have direct access to categorical aspects of reality. So for instance, if I see a cat on a mat and I understand that the cat is a unity, it is a being, as opposed to the cat on the mat, where the cat on the mat, as Aristotle would say, is sort of an ad hoc, ad hoc type of object. It's not a real unity because there's not an underlying dynamic system sewing those two things together and doing, you know, putting them at work, being them, being itself. Why not say when I see the unity of the cat, that it is a unity, I have unmediated access to that categorical aspect of the cat, that it is a unity.

4:20 Graham: Possibly, but I don't think you have unmediated access to the cats.

4:24 Wes: Right. One thing Kant doesn't count very well for is contingency. Maybe space and time are in the mind and things look very different if we could have a view from nowhere. But the fact that the cat is on the mat or not on the mat, that can be a matter merely of mental structure that's being supplied. Maybe underneath it it's code. And we've translated some sort of very, very abstract code like thing into the appearance of the cat being on the mat. But that doesn't change the truth of that proposition, doesn't change the fact that it's knowledge. It doesn't make us doubt that the cat is on the mat. It may look different, but the contingent fact remains the same.

5:02 Mark: Let me just add to that.

Just.

Yeah, I was wondering throughout how the ontology of facts fits into all this that you talk a lot about. We can't know the whole object, but can I not know the fact the cat is on the mat? Or when I know that fact, do the components have to be on your round sensory. So I know that the sensory cat has the sensory property of being on the mat or is related to the sensory mat, but I don't know anything about the real cat or the real mat. And that's. But knowledge, you know, this is all science does. You know, science wants to know if the cat's actually on the mat or. And what you know If I drop it on the mat, how fast will it fall? And all these things about the interaction between objects and science can know those, because it's only talking about sensory things, never about the real things.

5:44 Graham: Sensual, I would say. Not sensory. Sorry.

5:47 Mark: Yes.

5:48 Graham: Well, again, I would just go back to the point I made first, which is that there's always going to be some sort of gap between the real and whatever knowledge we have of the real or whatever kind of contact we have with the real. Not necessarily just knowledge, it could be just physical contact. There's always going to be that gap. And how do you account for that gap? Traditionally, again, the idea was that your mind extracted a form from the matter and left the matter behind, but you brought the form unchanged into your mind. That seems impossible because I don't think there is such a thing as this matter, which is a neutral receptacle for forms that move unchanged. The form, when it moves from one place to another, is going to have to undergo some sort of change. And I don't think that's skepticism.

6:29 Wes: What about the form of unity, though?

6:31 Graham: The form of unity, I don't know. I'd have to think that one through.

6:34 Wes: This is a major category for Aristotle and for Kant. And you can say, well, unity is supplied by the mind.

6:41 Graham: I don't think unity is supplied by the mind, though. I think unity exists in objects.

6:45 Wes: So my claim would be that's a formal aspect of objects to which we have direct access. It wouldn't make sense to say we have indirect access, access to the unity of the object.

6:54 Graham: Why not? Because I can't be absolutely sure that I'm right. Somebody could come back with a knockout argument in the future for why there isn't really such a thing as unity. And so you have to leave that open. It's just that I have no reason for.

7:04 Wes: Because I can be sure that an individual substance, like a cat, actually is a unity. That's something that science is not actually going to undermine in the future. It's a starting point for investigation.

7:15 Graham: But a philosopher could undermine it. I don't think there is such a thing as a unshakable foundation in philosophy. I think that's a Cartesian error, this idea that we got to start with something that's unshakable, then build from there step by step, as if it were a geometrical proof. I think everything's up for grabs.

7:30 Wes: The other aspect of this, and I think we did. Ellis is his name, right? Mark, on essentialism. Yeah, we might, at the phenomenal level, get these fuzzy unities for which we can't give necessary and sufficient qualities. And we might not be able to say a cat is a natural kind, although it comes very close. And it comes very close because it is related in an undermining sense to component natural kinds, which ultimately have to be, you know, something like what science ultimately supplies with subatomic particles and things like that. At some level, we do have to get to natural kind Legos in order to understand the unities that we experience in the phenomena.

And we can't explain those unities, otherwise we need undermining of some sort to explain those unities. That would be an idea that I'm sympathetic to, and to simply posit them as unities that are whose for whom the grounds of the unity is inaccessible. That's what I'm not sure I fully understand.

8:24 Graham: Okay, maybe I should say briefly what undermining is about. For readers who don't have a background in object oriented ontology. I've made the case in a number of publications that there are really only two kinds of knowledge. One of them is you can say what something's made of, and the other is you can say what it does. So if someone asks you what Gatorade is, I've got a bottle of Gatorade here to hydrate. I can describe the chemical composition of Gatorade that will be undermining, as I call it. You're going down from the Gatorade to explain the more fundamental pieces of which it's built.

Or you can overmine it, a term I coined myself. You can go upward and talk about what Gatorade does, that it provides electrolytes and hydration and maybe too much sugar, and that's fine. Without knowledge, humans would go extinct. You need to be able to explain things in terms of other things. But you're losing something about what the Gatorade is. Why? Because the chemicals miss the emergent properties of the Gatorade. It's going to have things about it that aren't explained by the smallest pieces and over mining fails because it has all kinds of other possible uses.

Maybe, maybe it could be used as a rocket fuel and for some future rocket. Who knows? You're never going to know all the possible uses of Gatorade. So the object itself inhabits a mezzanine level between the two kinds of knowledge about it. And this is an a priori proof that knowledge never exhausts its objects.

9:40 Wes: One thing I would say about the Gatorade is we know the emergent properties of the Gatorade are Causally linked to its component. Right, Its parts. We can't say why. You know, there's a mystery around qualitatively. Well, why would it have these, you know, why would we get red out of this wavelength? There's mystery in those types of questions. But that the unity and the other aspects of macro level phenomena, those are related to, to smaller unities, I think is very important, even if we can't explain some of the qualitative results.

10:11 Graham: I should add that early on in the history of the concept of emergence, it was linked closely with mystery that, oh, no one can explain why hydrogen and oxygen suddenly are able to put out fire rather than fuel it when they are brought together. But that's not the sense of emergence that I am interested in. You can totally explain a lot of things using quantum chemistry. It may have seemed like mysteries before, but it's not a question of inexplicability. It's a question of the whole being something more than its parts ontologically having the properties, even if you can explain perfectly well why that happens.

So I'm not committed to any mystery in emergence. Now also then there's dual mining, the third term, which is the notion that usually undermining and over mining are instinctively aware of their own weaknesses and they travel as a pair for safety. So you have, for example, in many forms of scientific materialism, you have the undermining part, which is that there's some ultimate layer of particles that explains everything. But then you can know them mathematically, which is a form of over mining. You can know them exhaustively through mathematical means.

And so you're claiming to exhaust the object, but you're actually not. And this is why one of the reasons aesthetics plays a strong role for me is because it's trying to hint at that middle level between the two forms of literal explanation.

11:22 Mark: Can I throw in Kripke? I was trying to think of him in terms of. Because you use him as an example in Triple O, where I was very sympathetic against Kripke to the idea that. So that the argument is, I run across this stuff, you know, it flows in the rivers and streams. And now we're on another world. And here's other stuff that flows in the rivers and streams. We find out that in our world that's H2O. On the other world it's D2O. It's something else. So the question is, are those both water? No, we were always referring, even though we didn't know before we did the science, that it was H2O.

We were always referring linguistically to that underlying unknown thing. So that's a way of saying, like as you were saying, that I'm picking out the object as a whole. I'm trying to refer to the real object, even though I only have a handle on the sensual aspects of it. But it's okay, the object can, can transcend the particular reference to it. The question then, then was a pragmatist would say if you can't tell the difference between these things, that they really are the same thing. So you could say, well, there's a. A sense in which the two substances are both water in that they serve the same functionality, purpose.

So they're both functional water, but chemically they're different. So, you know, they're different chemical proper. Still, between these, you would think that once I know both what the chemical property is and I know the functional thing, I know everything there is to know about it. And that would be an example of duo mining. Right. Of course, you don't know everything there is to know about it just with those two things. Right.

12:45 Graham: And of course, Kripke also gives the example that finding a unicorn skeleton buried wouldn't prove that it was a unicorn.

Right.

Because that wouldn't prove that we were referring to the same thing with unicorns that this skeleton was of.

12:57 Wes: I think with the Kripke, the part that I'm sympathetic to is that what we know when we have water or we see a dog, we know that there is a real unity and it's explained by some underlying dynamic system. And this is where I think kind of Aristotle meets modern science. Becoming, in a way, has to explain being. Becoming has to explain stasis, motion. And when it's circular and in some sense repetitive can be put into the service of stasis and being and real unities. So we refer, you know, what I would say is that there's some sense in which the beingness of water, of the real unity of water shines through.

And that unity, there is nothing more to know about it. So that is some, in a way, an unmediated form of access to unity, even though the phenomenal unity may be very different. Right. What's going on with H2O? The dynamic system, in a way looks very different than the phenomena, but what shines through is the unity. So that's a very speculative way of putting it. So when I refer to the water in a way, I am referring to what, to the referent, you know, H2O, the essence that kind of shines through. And I do have a Different thing on another planet.

14:07 Graham: But I don't think the unity of the underlying thing directly shines through. There are all kinds of cases where we think we're dealing with one thing thing, and it turns out there are multiple things going on there.

14:16 Wes: Right. Are we going to discover that water is not a unity?

14:20 Graham: Well, I might think there's a thing called witch and the unity of which is shining through. And then it turns out that's a completely fabricated concept and we've been unjustly accusing widows.

14:30 Wes: Right. And I would say it wasn't shining through, it was a delusion. It was in your head. It was more like a dream.

14:35 Graham: So now I want to talk about that last word that you use for the. For the first time at the very end of your book, connoisseurship and being a connoisseur, which made me think of something very related to what we're talking about now, which is judgment and how. And when you invoke aesthetics, to me, you're invoking judgment. You're invoking this notion of what makes one thing one and make it one thing and not two things, or if it's one thing, has a unity to it. So H2O. Water is a unity. Does it have parts that are also their own unities? Yes. An electron is its own unity.

And. And you have this emergent property of H2O that has its own unity to itself that is distinct from the unity of the proton and the electron. And when we have other things, to me, it becomes down to, well, where do I start making my distinction between carving and cutting? And if I'm going to say carving is I'm breaking up holes, I'm breaking up the continuum along the joints.

15:38 Mark: Well, it's not a continuum along the joints.

Right.

It would have to be an object along the joints, according to Grams.

15:43 Graham: Well, I think you can reject the idea that there is a whole that's a universe, right? Because it's just a concept, it's not a thing. That's fine. But you're going to be breaking up. Let me take my. Have a hog example. When you go to. Go to butcher a hog, the way you start is you have this slaughtered hog and what they do is they present you with a hog that was band saw down from nose to tail. And I would say that what you've done is you've cut through the continuum of the hog, okay? The hog is a unity and you cut it. You didn't cut it along the joints, you cut through its continuum and then you start having the parts you start cutting along the joints, you know, you cut off, you know, this muscle and that muscle, and now you start having parts that.

And then when I cut through, say, the loin, I'm cutting through something that is a continuum. There are, you know, they are as many different pieces of the loin as I can cut into pieces of loin. I'm not carving anymore. I'm cutting. And I think that this distinction is at the heart of saying something is a whole or something is a part, something is a one, and something is not. And so it's absolutely critical that we are able to talk about what is a one thing. And that's what I think Wes is pointing to, is that when we have a one and unity, an entity, what are we talking about?

And what I took you talking about, Graham, is that it's. We have a real thing that has its own. You seem to, you know, it's reflective of the thing in itself. In the Aristotelian terms, it has a cause that makes it a one thing holds the parts together. And those things have, you know, Wes was pointing to the fact that in having motion, those parts have causes that. That keep them together as a whole. That's persistent over time.

17:26 Wes: It has to involve work and persist over time.

17:28 Graham: Means persistent in motion between the relations of the parts.

17:32 Wes: Yeah. Something is working to keep the unity alive, to replicate it over time.

17:37 Graham: And that alive would apply directly, of course, to organisms, but it'd be the same kind. It's the same exact thing going on with other kinds of unities that aren't like H2O is a unity because it has a active mechanism, active causality that is generating that unity, the thing. That is what I mean when I talk about it being a one thing. And I think if I pick a lot of your other examples, like World War I, I would end up going down the same exact discussion about what are the things that make it a one as opposed to a many in a heap, even though it has parts.

18:15 Mark: Graham, do you want to weigh in on how does what Dylan's saying match up with your conception?

18:20 Graham: Well, let me first ask the question about one of the more grisly examples. When you say they bandsaw the hog in half from head to tail. Okay, why are they doing that? What's the benefit for the butcher of doing that?

I think it just has to do with the way in which the symmetry of animals. It just. You end up having your slices of meat. It's just a convenient way to ship hogs around. They do the Same thing with. At least with the torsos of cattle too.

Right. But you wouldn't saw through it at an arbitrary angle. They're deliberately doing that to cut it right down the middle.

Yes, there's a symmetry. So if you want to say that there's a symmetry in the hog from tip to tail, that is as a natural parting of it, I suppose you could do that.

19:00 Mark: So something has parts in that it has. It is physical matter and you can cut it up, but it's not parts in terms of the parts that were functionally responsible for the organism being able to do what it does.

19:11 Graham: That's normally how I would think of carving. But you could also consider this a form of carving in the sense that you're choosing it deliberately for a certain reason.

You're carving it based upon the symmetry involved.

Sure, yes, that's right. It's just we don't. Normally the symmetry isn't what we think of when we think of the body of the hog.

But yeah, yeah, you could do that.

19:27 Mark: So am I right to say that Dylan is wrong in saying that any of this was a continuum? That it's still all just a substance, even if you're cutting it in a way that is not along the joints? Well, it's. You're cutting it for a reason. You're not just pounding it to bits or something. Right. That you're always going to be carving when you're dealing with a physical hog or is. Yes. We need to get into the continuum versus discrete thing here.

19:51 Graham: That's right. Dylan has been trying to argue that an object is a continuum. And I, I toy with that idea a bit. There are some similarities in terms of the unity.

19:58 Mark: Right.

19:58 Graham: An object is one, a continuum is one. But not always. There's this because all objects are made of parts. In my system, it's always a matter of carving, not of cutting.

But all pieces aren't parts. The way I take you to be speaking is that. And that. That's why I give the example of the hog in the way I did is that I can have lots and lots of pieces. Less grizzly example would be just like a sheet of paper, you know, as a number line or a piece of string. Right. Or I can have lots and lots of pieces. And this is how I understood your explanation of continuum is continuum. I can have. Is I can have an infinite number of pieces. But those aren't all parts in the way in which you carve things. And there I'm saying a part is its own unity.

Well, I say a Continuum has no pieces or parts until you create them.

So then the example with the hog slicing that into two. So I guess you would say that that's why it's not a continuum.

Right? Exactly right.

20:53 Mark: So an abstract number line is a continuum, a number line drawn in pencil on a piece of paper. Insofar as we're actually talking about this physical representation and not what it represents. The ideal Platonic number line, yes, you could cut that piece of paper, but there's going to be a limit because just the practicality of the cutting. So saying, well, theoretically, I could cut the piece of paper infinitely. No, you actually can't. It's going to hit some sort of minimum.

21:20 Graham: But are we saying. I did not understand the continuum as being merely a concept?

21:26 Mark: Is that what follows? Graham? I mean, that's.

21:28 Graham: Well, no, there are real continua, but in the sense that mathematical objects can be taken to be real. Right. I would consider them to be.

21:35 Mark: So space and time.

21:36 Graham: Right. Space and time are real. So it doesn't overlap completely with the distinction between conceptual and real. Because there are mathematical objects that have. That you have to carve. Right. See if I can think of a good example.

Mathematical objects that have what you have to carve.

21:50 Mark: I mean, a triangle, it has three sides. Those. That's how you would carve them.

21:54 Wes: Right?

21:55 Graham: Right, that's right.

21:56 Mark: Or between, conceptually. Between the sides and the angles. But I did want to ask you, because you talk in triple O about fictional objects being still objects, but you just gave the example of witches. Definitely not being a real object. But if witch becomes a meme, those whom we prosecute. So this. Clearly there is a functional definition of witches, those that were found by the tribunal to be witches. And that's all it means. Right. So how is that terribly different than Sherlock Holmes as a fictional creation like you've actually created? Through this horrible practice of accusing innocent women of things, you've created a category of witches.

And we can talk about that as an object, but does it have. Certainly, we don't want. Is it. Does it have parts? It has. Does it have a causal connection with. I mean, it was an idea we thought of, it was then used. You are a witch. So it has, in, you know, Latour's sort of expanded sense, lots of causal connections with lots of things. But, yeah. Can you talk more about ideal objects like that?

22:58 Graham: There's always a point when a sensual object can turn into a real one. It's just a question of what properties it has. So you can say Sherlock Holmes is now A real object, in a sense. And what I mean by that is you can watch the latest Sherlock Holmes movie and say, that wasn't Sherlock Holmes. That character was not Sherlock Holmes. Right. The actor's interpretation of Sherlock Holmes was so off that it wasn't really Sherlock Holmes. I heard somebody say that once about Danny DeVito's portrayal of the Penguin in one of those Batman movies. My friend told me, interesting character, but it wasn't the Penguin. So what that means is this character has failed to match the objective guidelines of what the Penguin is as a character.

23:37 Mark: Are they objective guidelines or is it just his opinion? And clearly the opinion like this. So if you want to say it's a real object, but different people have different opinions about where its boundaries are, that it just makes it problematic for me that it's a real object.

23:51 Graham: Yes, but not all opinions are equal. Right. Not even the majority of opinions is necessarily valid. So you could have a case where 80% of viewers on Rotten Tomatoes like Danny DeVito as the Penguin, but Batman connoisseurs. We could argue about what that means. Say, no, no. That was a betrayal of the essence of the Penguin as a villain. It misses the essential features of the Penguin. It's the same with Sherlock Holmes. There was one of Sherlock Holmes adaptation. This was pre Benedict Cumberbatch. I don't remember what movie this was where it was just Sherlock and Watson were very violent. Do you remember this one? They were getting in fistfights all the time.

24:25 Mark: Robert Downey Jr. And Jude Law.

24:27 Graham: That's what a lot of critics were saying. It wasn't Sherlock Holmes. Right. It's too different in spirit from Conan Doyle's character. But we don't have to get into that. I think it goes beyond opinion. Right. And this is where you're never going to have access to the direct truth of any of this stuff. But a good critic can say, no, that was a bad Hamlet. Right. That really missed something.

24:47 Mark: So if an object is created. Right. I'm just going to posit. Hey, a square. I'm just imagining a square and it has 3 inches on each side, then that square is a real object. We can talk about it, but it doesn't have any inner properties. It does not transcend. Because I just. It's not. It's a truly nominal object. Right. Is it not that we can exhaustively know everything there is about it? Even though it's an object, it does not have an inside in the way that a natural object in the world does? Do you admit that much?

25:17 Wes: Yeah.

25:18 Graham: At this Point, we're probably not going to learn much about a 3 by 3 square. But unexpected things can pop up even in the mathematical domain. Even though you think in principle you should be able to exhaust a mathematical object, new things do pop up. I used to be one of those who took mathematical truths to be completely different in kind from scientific truths. But then I encountered Lakatos's Proofs and Refutations, which ends up making mathematical proofs look a bit more like scientific theory change. And so I'm a little more reluctant now to separate mathematical truth in that way and say that it can be exhausted in a way that physical truth cannot.

To me, the generation of the calculus, the generation of new numbers in order to account for continuity, that's all the same kind of thing that's happening in scientific paradigm shifts.

Yeah, we haven't talked much about scientific paradigm shifts yet, and there's a whole chapter in the book about that. So did anyone have any thoughts on that chapter?

26:13 Mark: Well, we didn't formally read that chapter, but we have done Kuhn and Lakatos and other things, so I think we, you could probably catch us up pretty quickly.

26:22 Graham: Okay. I was just more throwing it out there in case any of you found part of that chapter unconvincing or anything.

26:27 Mark: Yeah, I guess it's not a question of convincing or unconvincing. It's like, okay, well what's the problem? Right? Every time we do that, we're doing this now for 17 years or something like that, plus all the graduate school and undergraduate. So I find myself like, okay, let's get back. What is the problem we are actually trying to solve here? What is the thing you're actually trying to accomplish? Right. And what's at stake? What's really at stake? Why should we care about this particular problem and the question about how science moves forward in the building of knowledge?

That's an interesting question in itself from an epistemic perspective. It's also if you're a romantic philosopher instead of a scientist or a sympathetic philosopher of science. Right. It's nice to put the lie to the idea that we're on this inevitable march towards completion and totality of knowledge and truth and so forth. But if I could just kind of come back a little bit to your project without. And if you want to just throw away my comment and move on to science and scientific revolution, go ahead. But when it comes down to it, you stated it pretty clearly, right?

These guys are asking you and they're hitting you up. Okay, well, how do we know that's an object and not a heap, and what is the defining characteristic of an object? And all this. But the problem is persistence versus change, part versus whole. These are the fundamental structural questions that you're trying to get at with this theory is addressing these big ticket items. And I really like the idea. And by the way, so do all my lay friends. I don't have any philosophers in my immediate vicinity. So when I try to explain to my wife and my friends what we're doing our podcasts on, and I was trying to walk them through the problematic that you put forth, right, they get it.

They understand that this is something fundamental. So I think that ultimately the question is, have you moved this discussion along? Have you provided a perspective on these very, very important and critical philosophical questions and a path forward to thinking about them in a different way or potentially resolving some of the antinomies that we might have been experiencing? And I think in a lot of ways the answer is yes. But a lot of it too, of course hinges on those crucial things like what is an object and how do we make that distinction, or can we answer that we don't have to know how to make that distinction, and so on and so forth.

28:45 Graham: I will address that. But the reason I brought up the chapter on Kuhn in my book is that to those who would call me a skeptic, I would say no, I'm just a fallibilist, right? And if even something is revered in our time, as the natural sciences can be seen not to gradually approach the truth, that's something very important. So whatever Hegel has to say about having some kind of direct intuition of the unity of things, that's in many ways opposed to the spirit of the sciences, where at least if you follow the models of philosophy of science, that's Popper, where you have these radical theory changes happening intermittently.

29:21 Wes: But to say, even to say we have an imperfect grasp of reality, we have to make an enormous number of assumptions. And in those assumptions we assume that we do have a good grasp. So one of those assumptions is about there being subjects and objects, for instance, interacting in certain ways and producing the possibility of mediation and error and all that stuff. And those subtypes of assumptions are not as trivial as we might think, which I think is the point G.E. moore and Wittgenstein and On Certainty were trying to make. The assumptions are actually much more numerous than we think are much more important. So bodies exist, for instance, and there's such things as eyes taking in light and all that stuff.

29:59 Graham: I don't think there's ever going to be a theory without assumptions. I don't think that means the same thing as saying that the truth of those assumptions shines at us directly from somewhere.

30:08 Wes: Well, we would have no reason to believe that there's anything mediated about our access to reality without those assumptions.

30:14 Graham: Okay, so it's possible that we have direct access to reality. I guess the only assumption I'm making is, is that if you want to call it an assumption, is that there's a difference between a thing and any possible knowledge we have of that thing. Because the knowledge you have of the thing does not do what the thing does.

30:32 Wes: Saying we'd be something like naive realists. It's not that we wouldn't admit the possibility of an error. It's just we wouldn't explain it in terms of these more advanced concepts of representations and appearances versus the thing in itself and making all those distinctions. Those are rather advanced distinctions that require a theoretical apparatus that. So if we became skeptical enough, we'd no longer have any motivation. But if, for instance, if there are only ideas, if there's no objects in the world, then there are no human bodies interacting with objects and there's none of the phenomena which motivated the idea of a mediated reality in the first place.

So we would, as Hegel has, has to say, doubt the doubt. And I'm not saying that there's complete unmediated re access to reality, but I think, you know, I don't have a firm position on any of this, but I'm sympathetic. I find intriguing this idea that maybe to certain categorical aspects of reality there is something unmediated about it in the sense that there wouldn't be anything more to say about the unity of the cat. If that's something that shows itself. It's not like I'm going to see more of, you know, I'm going to see more or less unity if I had access to the thing in itself.

It may not even make sense to say I could have. Right. Talk about access to a thing in itself. Except to say, as Hegel does, that there's a sense in which when we know our minds, if we do have incorrigible access to the structure of our minds, our own minds, which is something that Kant seems to. To think to say that there's a category of unity, then that's when we know reality best. At that moment where we say there's a category of the understanding that has to do with the unity of things, that we should go, oh, that's not just in the Mind, that is reality.

And they join. They join right there because we are also beings. And Schopenhauer would give a very. And I thought of. I was surprised you didn't bring Schopenhauer up because it kind of fits into your talk of metaphor and the idea that we might understand things on themselves as an analogy to subjects. Right. For Schopenhauer, we know things in themselves because we are things in themselves, and in particular, the willing beings. And to the extent that things are beings, that we can call them unities and beings, they are also at least metaphorically willing beings.

So we understand things in themselves as wills. But anyway, right.

32:42 Graham: Going back to Kant for a second, I think one of his mistakes is thinking we have immediate access to our own minds, and you don't even need psychoanalysis for that. But psychoanalysis helps demonstrate that.

32:52 Wes: I think I am actually psychoanalyst, believe it or not.

32:56 Graham: Oh, yeah, wonderful, wonderful.

32:57 Mark: You said something in an early chapter of Triple O as maybe you were just kicking off the idea that things have insides that we don't have access to, but that I don't have access to your mind, but yet I have access to my own mind. But you immediately say, look, introspection is not getting me. Like, if, what am I actually? Am I a soul? Clearly, I as a being am transcendent of any particular view that I have of my being, just as the apple as an object is transcendent of any particular view I have it.

33:27 Graham: Yeah. A good part of our self, knowledge is mediated, whether through other people or through something else. So I think the idea that we have direct access to anything in introspection is not tenable. Obviously, I know myself better than I know you, probably. But that's not always the case on individual issues. Often we get very important feedback from others, things about ourselves that we had completely missed. So that's the problem. One of the problems in Kant is this idea that we somehow have direct access to the categories of understanding in a way that we don't to things of the outside world.

33:59 Mark: I want to throw in a question that I really have throughout the. You talk about philosophy as not being a science, as being more like art in that. And you give the example of, isn't it strange that in the Socratic dialogues ask for, you know, we want some literal knowledge about what justice is, and he never comes up with anything that satisfies him. So this should say, sort of as Wittgenstein says at the end of the Tractatus, that what I've been doing this whole time, you can't actually do. I'm going to pull the ladder up after me and I'm going to say that even when.

So when we're speaking about continua and individual things and we're talking about causality, we are always doing something that is not literal. And this often becomes an excuse for continental philosophers to talk very obscurely, Right? Oh, I'm being poetic. I'm just giving a metaphorical picture of how the universe is set up. But it seems like you do not resort to that. You try as, as far as you can, in keeping with analytic philosophy, to actually say, outline your view. But on the other hand, the way that you were moving from topic to topic to topic, I don't know if you're just, I hesitate to use this word, doing the weave, such that I'm going to give you some.

I'm going to eventually get back to. You'll see that all my digressions were just filling out this fundamental theory, as opposed to trying to be like you described, the analytic philosopher. You know, I'm just going to, in as concise a manner as possible, come up what is an object for my ontology? And yeah. So how much does this idea that philosophy is an art rather than a science contribute to your style and what you think you're doing when you give a philosophic theory?

35:36 Graham: Well, I do try to be clear, but clarity isn't enough. You need to be interesting. For one thing, a lot of analytic philosophy just isn't that interesting unless you're interested in the topic enhanced and you're really concentrating part. And the digressions, as you call them, often are things that I think the reader will find interesting ways of developing a problem. And so no, I don't. I'm not especially interested in desert landscapes, to use Quine's phrase. It's like being an architect and trying to create a building that would be interesting to walk around in. So I wouldn't call it the weave. I would call it a way of creating an architectural space that's fun to explore and to inhabit for the reader. And most people have not found my books hard to follow.

36:15 Mark: I would say not hard to follow in a sentence to sentence, but I think maybe I shared Seth's initial thing that, okay, we've gone through all these things and I kind of see why you're bringing this up, but it's maybe at least not the most succinct way of putting together these various ideas. So we all read chapter two on Aristotle, but it seems like only a few couple things came out of that. Right. The difference between you and Aristotle on what counts as a substance, that for Aristotle it was these organic things that have parts that work together.

So like a system, a mechanism, like only those count as substances, whereas plenty of things you would count as substances, including the composite two planes that are smashing to each other. That becomes a substance or at least an object. I don't know if you always use terms interchangeable for you, a substance and object fairly interchangeable.

37:03 Graham: Substance has a historical sense, but.

37:05 Mark: Yeah, so. But Aristotle is not going to call that it's just not stable enough to be a substance.

37:10 Wes: Then the Socrates chair dyad is a substance. This is Aristotle's example. Socrates versus Socrates on a chair. So is the Socrates for him, the classic idea is that Socrates chair dyad is Socrates on a chair is not a substance. But Socrates is a substance.

37:26 Graham: Right, Exactly. Leibniz is even more explicit about that. Substance versus aggregate. No, I think the main thing that came out of my Aristotle chapter is that the physics is about the continuous and the metaphysics is about the discrete. I've not heard any Aristotle commentators say that before. And that puts the continuous discrete opposition at the heart of Aristotle's philosophy, which I think was an important step forward in understanding Aristotle. So that's what I was most proud of with that chapter.

37:50 Wes: Yeah, that was really helpful and fascinating.

37:53 Mark: And did he have an idea? You know, in all his four types of causation didn't seem like there was a problem between a material thing causing a material thing, even though. But so, yeah, I don't know that we've really focused on this yet. That when one billiard ball hits into the other, those are both discrete things. They can only do. So according to your, you know, we talked about. Well, they're really. It's only the edges of them. It's only a property that's coming in. But you're claiming in waves and stones that it is the continuum that is space and perhaps also the continuum that is time that enable the causality to work.

That the. The real billiard ball as substance and the other real billiard ball as substance cannot contact. They touch only through the medium of space. So that is a way of saying that two discrete objects need a continuum that in order for there to be a causal loop, which I've left out there. The whole idea of them being inside a system, a bigger object, that is the two billiard balls in space. Yeah. So where am I going wrong here?

38:53 Graham: I don't think you're going wrong. I think that was a Pretty good count.

38:56 Mark: Oh, okay.

38:57 Graham: So the challenge that I see, and this is one of the way. One of the reasons why someone, you know, any number of people, Whitehead or even Leibniz, would start talking about wholes and flux and stuff like that, is it's impossible to talk about the two billiard balls interacting without, of course, talking about them both and their motions, because their resulting motion is dependent upon each of them. So if you have something like something that ends up being a principle governing the way we understand these things is conservation of energy or conservation of momentum.

That's a characteristic of the system as a whole, where you have these two distinct entities, so you have a whole part relationship already in that interaction. And it's going down that road that's going to take people to saying, well, everything is connected to one another. And I think you're right, Graham, that when you overemphasize that, one of the ways in which you're, I guess, at the beginning of your book and at the end of your book are basically saying, look, all the people who say everything's one thing, just all flux, they're going too far.

And the people who are saying everything is completely independent, they're going too far. That there is a meeting of the discrete and the continuous even within themselves. So that seems right. And you can't talk about that collision without talking about their environment in their context. It's not possible to talk about the resulting motion without talking about some kind of whole that you're doing it with respect to. But that doesn't mean it's the whole of the universe. It doesn't mean you have to talk about the entire universe to do that.

40:39 Mark: I think that Heraclitus. Everything is flux for Heraclitus, but it's held in tension. So there's apparent stability because there are these tensions that are holding against each other. That's a great idea of philosophy as poetry, which I think you're right, Graham. And Aristotle points this stuff out too, that if everything were just a morass, how would we explain how individual objects even come to perception, let alone to metaphysical permanence or something like that? So that there are trouble. Even though you describe it as a sort of a sexier view, a counter view to.

I'm going to go against common sense that, you know, tables and chairs and all the solidity or atoms being. I'm going to say it's somehow all. So maybe it's just all super string. It's all just a field and the way that the strings vibrate. Okay, now It's a top quark and now it's a. A left muon. Whatever the things are that you find that baffling in some way.

Right.

41:33 Graham: And especially in the continental philosophy side that's so on vogue right now, the idea that everything's motion, that everything is flux and process. And I tried to give a number of reasons why I don't think that works. Aristotle already said so. You can't just say everything is change. He thinks that's closer to the truth than saying nothing has changed because he is a philosopher of motion, after all. But, yeah, I think you have to account for both.

Well, and I think you do a really nice job in your Aristotle chapter of, for me, clarifying exactly why is that the thing that you underlined that for Aristotle, time is importantly, is not the primary thing, motion is that time is the counting of motion. Well, but motion is the activity of the parts of unities. And so you can't even talk about the motion of something without talking about things. Right. And so, you know, the notion that everything is in flux is in a deep way, just nonsensical unless you also include with it there are things that are unities, that are actual, genuine unities, even if they're changing, because that persistence has to be there in order for you to have change at all.

42:47 Mark: Yeah, I'm kind of winding towards my more sympathetic ally conclusion here. So again, I'm going to go back to what I said in the last episode, which is. Or maybe I said it in this one and I can't remember, but this is nothing short of how is change possible? Being and becoming part and whole, discrete and continuous. That's a big, big philosophical problem. And there are ways to cash out things like what is consciousness and knowledge and all that in terms of these types of questions. So cheers to Graham for taking on the big stuff and not arguing over propositions.

So I think I would be promiscuous in my interpretation of what an object was. So when we read Ooo, the first thing, when you started off, I immediately thought of Whitehead, but I didn't think of Whitehead in terms of, oh, it's a counterexample. I just thought, oh, this is you using the term object to describe events in some sense. And that felt very natural to me. And we could talk about since everything hangs, since what we're trying to do is answer, what is the discrete part of the discrete and continuum here? And we're using the term object.

So Graham, I think, is right in saying you can't undermine it or Overmine it if what you're trying to do is get at the thing itself, but you can use those as a kind of definition of object. So what is an object? An object is something that can be undermined and can be overmined without being consumed or turned into a hole or whatever. And you use the example. There's a part where I think we can have arguments about whether Socrates. For me, Socrates seated is an object.

44:30 Wes: Really disappointed in you, sir.

44:32 Mark: Hey,

44:35 Wes: the whole section on the law of non contradiction, he. I thought he gave a very convincing refutation of that, but go ahead.

44:42 Mark: Well, no, no, listen, this is why I'm going to use two examples and I'm going to bring it back to Graham's own words. I hope so. The first is, can I paint a picture of Socrates seated?

44:52 Graham: But the picture of Socrates seated is an object.

44:55 Mark: Correct, but the picture of Socrates seated is also an over determination of Socrates seated. And if what we've said is that an object is something that can be over determined and underdetermined without capturing its full essence.

Overmining.

Yeah, sorry, overmined. Yes, overmined or undermined. So if something can become an object of, in this case, an aesthetic, a representation, doesn't that make it a good candidate for objecthood? And then, Graham, you have another example, I think, in this latest book where you say something like France, a piece of string and like a Maserati, you put them together, they're not really an object. Right. But I could say Francis is sleek, or the French culture is as sleek and smooth as a Maserati. Blah da blah. I could use a metaphor to bring those things into relationship to each other and in essence, make an object out of them. They don't hang together, but by use of metaphor, I could conceivably bring them together.

45:57 Graham: Yeah, but notice how much work it takes. You have to do some real labor for that. Just as I can make a machine out of just about any random collection of pieces I find on the streets. And yeah, I can make a real object out of that, but it takes some labor.

46:09 Mark: So what those kinds of artists.

46:11 Graham: Yeah, well, it takes labor. And that labor is the unity of that thing.

That's right. So the point is, anything can be an object. That doesn't mean everything is an object.

46:21 Mark: I agree with that. But what I'm just trying to say I agree, I agree. We're not disagreeing about that. So I just think, is there a way, though, that you. Does it say like it's not an object until we make it an object through that transformation It's a potential object.

46:36 Graham: There are lots.

46:37 Mark: Anything is potentially an object with anything else or whatever.

46:40 Graham: Some are very hard to make that happen. But, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of potential out there. But the fact that anything can be made an object doesn't mean everything is an object.

46:46 Wes: I mean, I would say, and I think Aristotle would say that it's an object to the extent that it can be seen as the product of a dynamic system where there's unity in the dynamism. So even a stone that's been polished by the elements. Right. By the weather. The weather is a dynamic system. So it wouldn't be wrong for a psychotic person to. I mean, it would be wrong for a psychotic person to look at a heap of stones and see a God. But we can understand the error to some extent. But the thing that Aristotle says about Socrates in the law of non contradiction part, it's Socrates, man and white man are the examples.

And he's specifically responding to opponents who might want to say, well, we can carve up the world in different ways. And he supposes, okay, well, suppose there are two different unities, man and white man, and each is an entity, each is a being. So in that sense, there are no essential qualities. Everything is an accidental property. But if everything is an accidental property, Aristotle says, and there's nothing for those properties to be of. There is no unity, there is no particular. So I think that's an, you know, that's. That's an important idea.

47:53 Mark: Yeah. Let me add to. So I had brought up the three by three square that I've just invented in my mind. If we learn later that Greta Garbo used to think of exactly that kind of square every time she was about to act. Have we learned anything about the square? Have we learned, oh, I didn't realize the square had uncounted depths. No, it's. The nature of the square is only in its intrinsic properties. There have to be some relational properties that are simply not relevant to defining it. Or is that not okay?

48:19 Graham: I would say that's fair. It gets harder if Bernhard Riemann thought about that square every time he woke up in the morning. Maybe it's a little different, but I agree, there are lots of extrinsic properties.

48:29 Mark: Yeah, I continue to not see what the problem is, but you guys are like, oh, well, not all properties are, you know, not all relational properties are relevant.

Let me throw out a sort of my closing thought. So Carnap. We've done. We did his social construction of the world, a very undermining or maybe overmining, because he's trying to reduce the whole world to appearances. Anyways, he's trying to build the world. And we talked with David Chalmers. He was doing a very Carnap influence project. But then we read Carnap later saying, look, the ontology, ontology is not even a philosophical issue because it's whatever endeavor you are engaged in. You ask what objects are required to describe that endeavor.

If I'm playing chess, then we know what the moves are. If I'm, you know, so it's sort of become. And so there's no real question, is this an object in itself? It's just a matter of, is this an object that you need to talk about for the thing that you're doing right now? Then. Then it is. I mean, is that just another case of overmining or. Yeah, just reducing things to their potential uses in language games that you're not fond of, Graham, because you. You want to say, no, no, there actually are some things that are real objects and some things, like the mirage, like the witches, that are simply not real objects, like various heaps, you know, that nobody has gone through the poetic effort of putting together that there is, as inviting as you are to all sorts of objects, like, it is very important to rule out most things are not objects.

That's maybe the wrong way to put it.

49:58 Graham: Things, most things are not real objects. And also the other thing I should add is that all sensual objects for me, are not real objects. I think a lot of times people think that what I'm trying to do is look at all the sensual objects and classify them into real and unreal, but that's not really it, because none of the sensual objects are real. Even a sensual object that corresponds to something real in some meaningful way is a different object from the real object underneath. So I'm pretty sure my wife exists, but I wouldn't say that the wife, when I leave this room, is a real object.

I would say maybe the perceptionists I have of her correspond to something in the real world. So it's not meant to be a sorting exercise of going through all the perceptions and saying, this one's real, this one's not real. Most of our perceptions do have some relation to something that's real, right? Hallucinations are fairly rare. So it's more about creating a rift between two different kinds of objects than it is about judging all the things in the sensual realm and trying to decide which ones are real. So I just mentioned that because a lot of people misunderstand that about object oriented ontology, even contamination I've worked with closely, the French philosopher still misinterprets my philosophy that way.

But I'm trying to say that some objects that we see are real and some aren't. No, all the objects we see are unreal. I want to add one other name into the mix here. I don't know if you guys are familiar with Donald Hoffman, a psychologist at UC Irvine. I've spoken with him once before and we have a lot in common. He looks at the world as an interface and that the world we inhabit is largely hallucinatory. And to some extent I go along with a lot of what he says. But the difference is he thinks that's the result of natural selection. Right? An increasingly common idea that evolution did not train us to know the world, evolution trained us to survive.

And so therefore there are lots of convenient fictions that we have evolved to

51:49 Wes: believe in natural selection inside the matrix or outside the matrix.

51:53 Graham: Yeah, exactly right. Whereas I would say it's not a matter of natural selection. Even if creationism were true, even if God had created us in Eden, we would still have that problem because we are not the same as the objects we intuit. So I don't think natural selection is really relevant to this particular issue. It might accentuate the fact that, that there are certain shortcuts and fictions that, you know, we are not evolved to live in a universe where this or that we are evolved to live in a universe of macro sized objects to be hunted or whatever. That may increase the amount of simulation in which we are living.

52:30 Wes: This is a really good illustration of my point. Because if we're in a simulation because of, you know, to some degree because of natural selection, well, we can't be fully simulating natural selection, otherwise it wouldn't play that causal role in the story anymore. The doubt is self mediating. And the idea of a mediated access to reality, I think presupposes, it seems, direct access to certain categorical realities. So I do think access to reality is mediated. But I don't think it makes sense to say that causality is only in the mind and it's something, it's mediated access to something out there that isn't causality. The whole idea of mediated access to reality, it's motivation that the way we theorize it presupposes unmediated access to causality. Even if we are often wrong about causes.

53:18 Graham: I would say instead that it simply presupposes that we have to assume something, right? We don't have any direct access to causality. Causality may not exist. Right. We have to be open to that. I just have no reason to doubt that exists.

53:29 Wes: Yeah, I just don't. I can't make sense of that myself. I don't think we can theorize immediate. That mediated access without causality. You know, this is just a variation on those early objections, like Jacobi to come.

53:40 Graham: It just sounds to me like you're thinking that we must have direct knowledge of something and I don't see that.

53:46 Wes: Well, how does mediation make sense without causality? The whole idea of mediation is a causal notion.

53:52 Graham: Oh, then you're just saying that if I assume mediation that I have to assume causality before that. I agree with that. I'm just saying. I'm just saying that doesn't prove that causality or mediation actually exists. I'm a radical fallibilist. Right. I can't.

54:04 Wes: So the whole motivation for mediation may be an illusion.

54:09 Graham: It's possible, yeah.

54:11 Wes: So then there's no reason that's. Then let's just cut to the chase and say there is no mediation. We come back full circle.

54:16 Graham: No, no, I don't why that I believe there are reasons to believe in mediation. You're saying that in order to say that I have to believe I have unmediated access to the reality of causation. I don't. Right. I have no way of knowing that I have access to that gem of a truth that will never be shaken by anything that happens in the future. That's just where I stop. Right. It's something that I don't doubt. I don't have any reason to doubt. But that doesn't mean I have direct access to reality.

54:41 Mark: Right?

54:42 Wes: Yeah. All right.

54:43 Mark: We don't want to open up another

54:44 Wes: can of worms, but yeah, this is the closing. I think Mark's about to wrap it up here.

54:47 Graham: Okay.

54:48 Mark: I was just going to say Graham has made a suggestive comment though, that I want everybody to take is how an object oriented ontologist would handle Valentine's Day, having mentioned his wife and her reality or unreality as he moves about the room around her.

Essential objects are perfectly fine to deal with. And you can do science. You can live your life assuming that your wife is real and such things like that.

Dear beloved, even though I do not have unmediated access to you. Okay, Mark, sorry.

Thank you so much, Graham. Obviously we could do this for another two hours, but I'm sure we're going to carry some of these questions into our future debates and look back to parts of the books that we did not read for this. So you've really added something for our ongoing journey here, and we appreciate it.

55:37 Graham: All right, so it's challenging. It's not often that podcasts turn into such granular discussions of metaphysics, so I was a bit surprised by that, hopefully

55:45 Wes: pleasantly or not too unpleasantly. Well, thank you.

55:50 Mark: After the nice, easy reading of Graham Harman for two sessions, we're going back to Hegel's Phenomenology. We're going to actually read at least the beginning of the section on spirit that is past the parts that we've dealt with before on this podcast and past what I've ever read. So we'll see if we can make any sense of that. Folks should reach out to us. Pe partiallyexaminedlife.com if you have a URL you want to promote, I mean, they can just Google you, but blog.

56:16 Graham: I'm shut out of my blog and my Facebook account now because of an Internet reset in the building. Building Object Oriented Philosophy is the name of the blog. If you Google that, you'll find my past posts. I may never make another one if I continue to be shut out of it.

56:28 Mark: All right, well, good luck with that. Thanks, everybody. Good night.

56:31 Wes: Thank you. Good night.

56:31 Mark: Good night.

56:32 Graham: All right, take care.