What Are Objects ? Harman's Heidegger

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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I don’t always agree with him, but I love Graham Harman for his daring and style. While I’m open to following tangents where they lead, I suggest starting with Harman’s Heidegger.

Tool-Being, which you can look at here, is a great source to have on hand.

What’s it all about ?

The key to my argument lies in a fresh reading of the famed tool-analysis of Being and Time. Although hundreds of scholars have already commented on this masterful analysis, I am not aware of any who have drawn sufficiently radical conclusions from it. Of the few interpreters who have been willing to give center stage to the drama of tool-being, all have followed Heidegger too closely in regarding human Dasein as the biggest star in the theater. The tool-analysis is read as the triumph either of practical activity over theoretical abstraction, or of the network of linguistic signs over the ever unpopular “things in themselves.” Such readings of Heidegger prevail among both analytic and continental philosophers. Against these standard readings, I claim that the tool-analysis is neither a theory of language and human praxis, nor a phenomenology of a small number of useful devices called "tools. " Instead, Heidegger’s account of equipment gives birth to an ontology of objects themselves.
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Contrary to the usual view, tool-being does not describe objects insofar as they are handy implements employed for human purposes. Quite the contrary: readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) refers to objects insofar as they withdraw from human view into a dark subterranean reality that never becomes present to practical action any more than it does to theoretical awareness.

I connect this to Plato’s “ideas” and Kant’s “things-in-themselves.” The “identity” of the object is a grip on something that mostly lives in the darkness.

Harman goes further than I’m willing to follow him personally, but here’s where he goes:

But my argument goes another step further. When the things withdraw from presence into their dark subterranean reality, they distance themselves not only from human beings, but from each other as well. If the human perception of a house or tree is forever haunted by some hidden surplus in the things that never becomes present, the same is true of the sheer causal interaction between rocks or raindrops. Even inanimate things only unlock each other’s realities to a minimal extent, reducing one another to caricatures. It will be shown that, even if rocks are not sentient creatures, they never encounter one another in their deepest being, but only as present-at-hand; it is only Heidegger’s confusion of two distinct senses of the as-structure that prevents this strange result from being accepted.
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But this means that, contrary to the dominant assumption of philosophy since Kant, the true chasm in ontology lies not between humans and the world, but between objects and relations. Moreover, this duality holds equally true for all entities in the cosmos, whether natural, artificial, organic, or fully human. If we read Heidegger’s tool-analysis in the right way, the lingering priority of Dasein in his philosophy is vaporized, and we encounter a strange new world filled with shocking possibilities for twenty-first-century philosophy. Certainly, Heidegger deals yet another mortal wound to metaphysics of the old -fashioned kind, the kind that is slapped and pummeled still further by Derrida, Wittgenstein, and others. But by the same stroke, he unknowingly suggests a possible campaign of guerilla metaphysics.
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Tool-beings turn out to be a strange variant of traditional substances, though they are as irreducible to physical particles as they are to the traces they leave in human perception. They are substances that exceed every relation into which they might enter, without being ultimate pieces of tiny matter. But this leaves only one possibility: for the first time in a long while, Heidegger pushes philosophy to the point where it has no choice but to offer a renewed theory of substantial forms.

The real meaning of “fundamental ontology” is not that Heidegger privileged human Dasein at some provisional early stage of his career before later repenting his error. What this term really means is that all concreteness collapses for Heidegger into a single obsessive fundament, a black hole of ontology whose gravity is so powerful that no recognizable entities ever escape it. As long as we take his numerous specific topics at face value, we will not grasp the utter philosophic desolation wrought by his assault on the “ontic” realm.

What sense do you make of this ? We might also discuss this gesture, not so uncommon, of twisting a famous philosopher into new shapes.

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As a rule, the more efficiently the tool performs its function, the more it tends to recede from view: "The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were , withdraw [zuruckziehen] in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. " But this familiar point is rarely grasped in a sufficiently rigorous way. It is not just that equipment is generally invisible as long as it is working properly. Such a notion can never surpass the level of empirical anecdote, and only invites free-wheeling attempts at contradiction (“but then we noticed that it worked a lot better if you stared right at the damn thing”). The truth is far more radical than this. In the first instance, there is an eternal chasm between equipment and its tool-being. The wrench as reality and the visible or tactile wrench are incommensurable kingdoms, solitary planes without hope of intersection. The function or action of the tool, its toolbeing, is absolutely invisible-even if the hammer never leaves my sight. Neither gazing at an object nor theorizing about it is enough to lure its being from concealment. Someone might object that the tool is always invisible “only in a certain respect” rather than absolutely. And sure enough, a table obviously does not vanish into the ether once it begins to function as a support for plates or apples. But this complaint once again presupposes the idea of the table as a natural object, portions of its reality momentarily visible and others unseen. On the contrary, it is not the chance fluctuations of human attention that determine whether the ready-to-hand is invisible or not. To say that the tool is unseen “for the most part” is ultimately superfluous, even incorrect. Whatever is visible of the table in any given instant can never be its tool-being, never its readiness-to-hand.

For Harman, all manifestation of the object is not its dark tool-being. We might call this “the darkness under objects.”

He’d probably call me a correlationist, because I identity being and consciousness, while emphasizing that I’m not talking about a stuff in either case.

What I’d readily grant Harman is that the “idea” or the “identity” of the object is fundamentally ajar. So the darkness under objects is for me the darkness of their unwritten future. The object never quite arrives. We expect to come to know things about the object that we will project backwards on the past of the object.

A tool exists in the manner of enacting itself; only derivatively can it be discussed or otherwise mulled over. Try as hard as we might to capture the hidden execution of equipment, we will always lag behind. There is no gaze capable of seizing it, despite Heidegger’s claims to the contrary.8 Insofar as any aspect of the table is represented to us, it is already presentat-hand, loitering in the very dimension of surface-apparitions that the analysis of tools was born to undermine . Thus, we find that there are two separate facets to equipment: (1) its irreducibly veiled activity, and (2) its sensible and explorable profile. In more familiar Heideggerian terms, there is the tool viewed “ontologically” and the same tool viewed "ontically. " For the moment, we have no way of bringing these worlds into communion, other than to say that one is primary and the other not primary.
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The totality of equipment means that each tool occupies a thoroughly specific position in the system of forces that makes up the world. Or to be more precise, the totality of equipment is the world; not as a sum of ontic gears and levers, nor as an empty horizon in which tool-pieces are situated, but as that unitary execution in which the entire ontic realm is already dissolved. The action of individual tools has already receded from view, as it exerts its force against all other equipment, even if only by remaining at a safe enough distance so as not to impede or damage it. We cannot presuppose the notion of the tool as an impenetrable, self-sufficient unity that shifts between contexts, for this is already to view it from the standpoint that Heidegger has worked to discredit. This would be to offer an implicit theory of substance existing independently from the relations in which it is involved. Nothing could be more foreign to Heidegger’s philosophy, or indeed to any of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century, who as a rule earned their living with a thoroughly relational theory of reality.

This suggests a “black holism.”

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Harman certainly twists Heidegger into a pretzel of his own making. But what kind of pretzel? What I’ve gathered thus far from my reading of Harman is that although his aim is to overcome anthropocentrism and put forward a new realism, he allows thought only for humans and ends up treating this thought as immaterial, making his approach a kind of rational subjectivism.

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Interesting. My object to his theory is that the “dark and hidden” relationships between objects only make sense to me at all via human concepts.

I feel that he wants to get beyond anthropocentrism, but for me all he achieves is an admirable emphasis of the transcendence of objects.

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When you mentioned correlationism, I was reminded of the paper “Concepts and Objects” by Ray Brassier that was the topic for a reading group on the older TPF in 2015, and that I had been unconvinced by and had extensively critiqued from a Wigginsian sortalist perspective.

I was thereafter surprised when googling “Ray Brassier” together with “Graham Harman” to see that Graham is indeed mentioned in the Speculative Realism Wikipedia page as having been one of the participants (alongside Brassier) at the second conference on the topic at UWE Bristol.

This led me to ponder how much kinship there may be between Brassier and Harman’s speculative realism and to what extent both my response to Brassier and your current attitude towards Harman may betray our shared “correlationist” proclivities.

One immediate reaction I had to your suggestion that “So the darkness under objects is for me the darkness of their unwritten future” is that this matches my appeal to Aristotle’s epieikeia when a general rule is shown not to fit a new unanticipated case. The ineliminable “darkness under objects” is like the ineliminable “epieikeia” (as enabled under, for instance, the discretionary power of jury nullification, as I had argued in the other thread) when the normatively governed conceptual/normative “net” that is meant to capture the constitutive relations between phenomena (or the internal order of a Heideggerian totality of equipment, or the ethical/legal norms of a practical form of life) happens upon a recalcitrant phenomenon (by the lights of our epieikeia, or practical deliberation).

Regarding the retreat of the tool, say the hammer that drops out from consciousness when it performs its duty smoothly, I interpret this as simply a moment of salience where the focus is the nail being driven into the plank. Since hammers exist as instruments for driving nails, hammers and nails (and wooden planks, etc.) are constituted by “lateral” (in-order-to) relations between items belonging to totalities of equipment. But totalities of equipment hang together in for-the-sake-of-which (Worumwillen) relations to Dasein, or “transversal” relations, in Bitbol’s sense, to our practical form of life, or Umwelt.

I had always (maybe naïvely) interpreted Heidegger’s intimations regarding Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit as the denial that the former can be reduced to the latter, or that the latter could be ontologically prior in the sense that, say, a hammer could be conceived as existing (as such) independently of the way it fits within a practical form of life (and hence of its specific placement in a totality of equipment). I don’t, though, view this claim as necessitating that a non-rational form of life has ontological primacy over a rational one, since I view the latter to be a modification of, rather than an accretion over, the former. I therefore resist the opposite claim that a pre-rational or a-rational Zuhandenheit is a foundation for Vorhandenheit. I rather view the latter as a different moment rather than a different stage in the constitution of objects as what it is that they are (not in-themselves but for us, for purposes either of practical engagement or of theoretical inquiry.) There remains the uncontroversial fact that, qua animals, we are able to make use of objects without the need to thematize them, through skillful coping. This shows that thematization (the Brandomian moment of making things explicit in thought or in discourse) is optional in practice, but not that it is constitutionally optional, as it were.

I think my main residual difference with you is that you view revision of belief always to constitute a disclosure (and/or creation) of a new aspect or face of an object, or of the world, whereas I am making a distinction between mundane revisions (e.g. I wrongly thought that there was milk in the fridge but, as I may discover through looking, there isn’t any remaining) and conceptual revisions (e.g. We were seeing something as such or such object, but in the particular case our conceptual net isn’t apt as to capture the phenomenon (or lead the practical judgement) in the way that it should.

Coming back to the charge of correlationism, that may be a bullet that you and I ought to be happy to bite. The only reason why, it seems to me, Graham, Brassier and Meillassoux might find correlationism objectionable is because they seemingly think that it doesn’t accommodate the sort of scientific ontology that their speculative realism and/or object-oriented ontology demand but we seemingly both are happy to relinquish those in favor of “parochial”, “pragmatist” and/or “anthropocentric” (and non-fundationalist) conceptions of all empirical and practical domains.

In the earlier TPF thread on Brassier, the problem of ancestrality (i.e. the alleged mind-independence of Meillassoux’s arche-fossil) came up, and it was briefly revisited in the pragmatism thread. There are two ways to construe mind-independence that John Haugeland distinguished in his paper Truth and Rule-Following. There is, we might say, to put it crudely, causal independence, and conceptual independence. We do grasp that there were stars, planets, electrons, etc., and the Earth once was a barren rock. Earth did not depend on us (and our rational form of life) existing (i.e. our actually having evolved) for it existing as (or simply being) a planet, orbiting the Sun, having such and such an atmosphere, etc. But the question of anything counting as a planet or as an electron is conceptually dependent on our present scientific practices. In fact, the very fact that the ancestral lifeless period was past at all (and not just earlier than us along in the smooth undifferentiated order of the physicist’s B Series) and hence also that its physical albeit lifeless determinations are causally independent of our present intellectual and practical activities, both conceptually depend on the categories of substance, temporality and causality that normatively structure our rational lives. And I’ve always been with you in insisting that our rational lives encompass both our minds and our world(s) as conceptually and ontologically, dependent (in Haugeland’s non-causal sense) on one another.

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This seems reasonable to me. Heidegger weirdly and brilliantly coldly theorizes on the pre-theoretical. Is the pre-theoretical still so “innocent” after we thematize it ? Phenomenology comes after the naive theoretical move, as a third wave, dependent on the first two. The first wave is strangely dependent on the second, not chronologically but for contrast.

“The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Blake’s illustration for Job. They hang up their instruments and gather around the book. Then disasters.

I’m curious if you’ve looked at Braver’s similar “transgressive realism.”

I’m glad that you posted in this new context, because it’s illuminating for the other thread.

You touch on something that I really didn’t address, but I actually agree with you. My larger commitment is to consciousness as the presence of a “face” of the world. On this “face”, “a freckle can become an eyebrow.” Maybe I answer the phone and think I’m talking to Jane, but eventually I figure out it’s Cindy. That’s a big leap. I have to reorganize the past, “synthesizing with Cindy” what I “wrongly” ( in terms of my adjusted vision of the world ) understood as moments of Jane.

Or radium creates energy out of thin air.

I lean toward saying that the ambiguity and terror in a face of the world is “real.” The sensory-affective-conceptual “whole” just “is what it is.” So, from my POV, I have only Heidegger’s branded “formal indications.” I dig for words that I hope can point. At the “proximity” of reality, including the proximity of absence. The object as transcendent conceals the darkness of its future.

Yes. I agree. The forum itself has the darkness of its future. Let Voltaire’s Sirians arrive. Perhaps synthetic beings whom we will treat and recognize as “conscious.” I’m don’t yet tend to think of machines as conscious, but I don’t see why it’s not possible.

(I will respond to the rest separately.)

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I’m glad you shared this with me. And we basically agree on this. I enjoy the influences you bring to the table. I haven’t read Haugeland. I read more continental stuff, but that includes the Vienna Circle. Brandom grabbed me though right when I was first really thinking about mind and matter seriously. I was obnoxiously disdain of this beautiful issue in my early pragmatist days. In retrospect, my gripe with OLP and pragmatism and certain evasive/soporific tinctures is that they are equivalent to rationalizations of incuriosity, or of complacency with respect to a unharmonized explication of the world. But finally it’s just a pleasure to wrestle with these intricate issues. And I recognize the finesse that you approach these issues with. So I’m glad to trade these signs with you.

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Wait a minute, I have read some Haugeland. Because Heidegger. He generalizes Dasein in an exciting way. My excuse for fuzziness is that forum life is a late late night thing for me.

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I understand the distinction between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit to be that the latter is, as you say, derivative of or a modification of the former. But what is key here is that it is a concealing or privative sort of modification. That is to say, when we encounter a thing as present to hand, we are always implicitly understanding it in terms of the richer hermeneutic structure of a totality of relevance to which it belongs.

But we are explicitly aware of it only as this present at hand object. As to the question of whether or not the ready to hand is pre or a-rational, I am inclined to compare it to Wittgenstein’s forms of life. A form of life is not itself a rational structure, but it is the system of intelligibility within which rational relations make sense. I don’t see this as compatible with Brandom nor the other Pittsburgh school Hegelians, who need to assume that rationality applies all the way down.

I would thus make a distinction between Heideggerian thematization and theorization. The pre-theoretical is not a question of ‘innocence’ with respect to reason-giving, but of production as opposed to explanation.

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A form of life can be seen as rational in a generalized sense. A logocentric emphasis on assertion is just a small piece of this, which I’d criticize for missing how visceral the forum is. Before rationality is made explicit, I might simply not follow “Joe,” without having words for what it not “imposing” (persuasive, compelling) in attempts to lead me in this or that practical activity. Deeper than mirroring, there is a “pushing toward” doing this or that. Not “reality is X” but “we do stone move this way.” Or maybe “Joe” ignores disregards “Bill” as if enacting a judgment for everyone. The “simple” mind lacks self-conscious, takes a perspective on the world as the world itself, has to learn later of “differing beliefs” and “failures to mirror.”

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Some tension on page 142.

For Heidegger it is quite otherwise . He reads hammer-being not as a representation waiting to happen, but as a real being that supports or hinders both our own labors and the deeds of other objects. No mere horizonal fringe of Dasein’s awareness, equipment is an autonomous province that could hardly care less about Dasein. Until this is realized, Heidegger’s thought will continue to be interpreted as a philosophy about people, whether they be called subject, Dasein, or any other new alias that might emerge. Heidegger will be read simply as a hypercontextualized phenomenologist who still views rocks as dead matter, thereby ceding most of the pre-Socratic landscape to the heirs of Democritus.

For many, disenchantment is precisely the projection of Nature as radically apathetic or trans-moral. Harman himself seems invested in a matter that is dead in this sense. But Harman’s “dead stone” conceals secrets. The dead-stone-for-us, already dead, is merely surface. Yet Harman pushes this crucial apathy into the darkness of the object, which questionably illuminates it. He echoes “the real is that which resists.”

He might be understood to dodge the paradoxical idealism that posits the human-created scientific image as substrate. He isn’t naive enough to enjoy this scientific image as plausibly trans-human. So he takes one of the great critics of this naivety and reads him as a fascinating “hyper-realist.” Does Harman think that claims about objects in their darkness and depth can be true ? Whatever we say about “things in themselves” is useful gossip about their surface.

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Here are a couple of passages that speak to me.

It is not the hammer that is insufficiently fundamental, but our ontic view of the hammer as a present -at-hand conglomerate of physical parts. There is no temporality outside of the relation between specific beings and their being; indeed, outside of this relation there is nothing at all. It is the Alpha and Omega of philosophy

When I stroll across a bridge, care is already there, time is already there, being is already there, and Ereignis is already there . I will never be able to approach these terms by abstracting from the bridge and my act of strolling. Each of these structures exists only in concrete form.

I suggest that we understand “concrete” in terms of the “full sensory-affective situation.”

As usual when it comes to Rorty, the great value of this essay stems from its author’s willingness to make bald-faced and daring assertions in clear English at precisely those points where others tend to hedge their bets behind tortured professional jargon.

This is game recognizing game. Harman proudly shares this approach with Rorty, and I value it in both of them.

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I’ve been looking through Harman’s book, and it’s pretty wild.

Every entity that we can access in any way, even as ready-to-hand entities, is mere surface. If O is the entity, then every manifestation of the entity is f(O). In their depths, all entities work together as the dark active being of the world. The bridge that I walk on is only an avatar of the “true bridge,” which somehow collaborates in the dark with all the other “true” objects to enact the dark substrate of the world. Note that the scientific image is still lit up and therefore a mere facade or avatar. Being is a black whole.

So what we really have is the dark X. Now Harman wants to maintain the identity of various entities even in the darkness, while also insisting on their collaboration, but I can’t make sense of this.

This X is like Kant’s “thing-in-itself” as a single thing, a single postulated dark operation of the world, from which bubbles or aspects emerge as the things we know in every possible way we can know them. Time is the play of the presence and absence of things, with absence as their more genuine being. This is not temporary absence from consciousness but absolute transcendence.
To me the more coherent reading is that the X shows itself only through fugitive eruptions that aren’t even aspects. They aren’t like petals that add up to a flower.

It’s something like a radicalization of Kant that can take for a granted a richer understanding of the lifeworld. The style is very different from CPR, and that’s part of the effect. Harman is a poet. The most not-Kantian part is the objects operating on one another through aspects in the darkness. It’s not consciousness-centered, and yet it’s hard to make sense of the darkness metaphor without leaning on what does and does not appear for a subject.

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Being is also a black box, which has a lot to reveal from interiority about the exteriority. Like the black box out of the downed plane, Being can reveal a lot more about the exteriority from its interiority after the Being has deceased.

I am still unsure if thing-in-itself is to reveal anything about the world, or thing-in-itself.

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Can you say more about this ?

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By rational I mean subject to verification or invalidation. A point of contention within a language game can be submitted to tribunal. Is it correct or incorrect. Is it the case or not? But a form of life is a way of seeing things, a pattern of relations which makes a family of language games intelligible. From the vantage of a different form of life, the first form of life will simply be invisible, incoherent, unintelligible rather than incorrect.

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I read Harman’s ‘Tool Being’ Heidegger book and his Meilassoux book around the same time as I read After Finitude. The basic problem I had with his thought, as I interpreted it, was that he banished objects to a darkness that seemed to be alien to their nature as objects. I couldn’t come at the idea of an indeterminate object. For me the “surface” (perceptible) aspects of objects are the whole story about them as objects.

Beyond that they cease to be objects at all, and we , in my opinion, are better served by reaching for a more coherent and less human-centred understanding of them in terms which can bear some indeterminacy―as events, processes or fields. I have long liked Whitehead’s process metaphysics (for the most part) as it avoids this “bifurcation of nature” into the human and the non-human.

The problem of the “Arche-Fossil” is a real problem for any correlationism that thinks of human perception as primary. In my view it is only in the context of perception that we may rightly think in terms of objects―but I don’t see as following from that the idea that the cosmos of things is dependent on human perception and consciousness. I like Rovelli on this―his ‘relational realism’ understands any interactions between “systems” as an “observation” thus eschewing the anthropocentrism that seems to bedevil much of postmodernist thought and the thought of the “spiritual” readers of the purported implications of QM.

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Yes indeed. That’s just it. The object doesn’t make sense at all except through these aspects.

Same here. A non-bifurcated OOP looks like a good approach to me. In some sense we as subjects are glued together by shared objects. My “consciousness” is just the being of these (aspects of) objects. Including, crucially, signs.

In an important sense, I agree. First, we need not obsess over a particular species. We can consider other animals and creatures from other worlds. Second, we need not reify consciousness.

On the other hand, the arche fossil is hard to understand except as the “empty mysterious” X, unless we project its current aspects back on a past that it supposed to be “beyond” all such aspects.

The speculative realist wants to project back only the primary/mathematical properties, and yet also insist that it’s not the math itself but what the math “points at” somehow.

It’s a rich issue. I like to play the correlationist side because it’s fun and because of my resistance to the bifurcation of the world. But After Finitude is a great little book.

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Yes, I agree with you.

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It was just a metaphorical inference. :slight_smile:
If you would allow augment, so it goes.

Being carries the unmanifested private history like all the airplanes carry the black box in the cockpits, when being is in the world as Dasein.

When the being is no longer in the world having departed and became non-being, the private history gets revealed by other beings reading the departed being’s past works often repeatedly attempting to manifest the past history of the being, or regenerate new meanings from the history.

The history of the departed being is in the form of writings or ideas in the writings.

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