Very poetically expressed, and I agree.
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What does Harman get right, in terms of tone and emphasis, even if I can’t follow him very far ?
We sometimes notice that we have been dependent all along on a vast network of things that until then we just took completely for granted. So Harman nails the issue of deeply subliminal equipment. The hammer that I “don’t notice” in my hammering hand is a very light version of this. For that hammer is circumspectively there. But the magma beneath the earth’s crust that is part of what allows me to hammer is something I almost never think of. I also don’t worry, usually, about the fusion in the sun that makes all life on earth possible. To remember this dependence is uncanny. It’s a bit like God speaking from the whirlwind.
Imagine that an unintelligent but exceedingly tranquil person is chained to a pillar somewhere on the earth, motionless. Placed before him is an immense but well-camouflaged machine, a device that controls all aspects of his environment-the unchanging temperature and scent of the air, the uniform amount of light that shines on him from a fixed angle, the constant sonorous drone that he hears, the steady infusions of intravenous liquid that provide his nourishment. Furthermore, we can assume that a second blend of chemicals introduced into his veins keeps his moods at an optimum level of stability. Imagine that it goes on in this way for years, until suddenly, the machine enters an era of gradual decay. Each day, two or three of its thousands of functions cease to operate , leading to various failures in its workings.
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Only now will the drugged man begin to notice the “temporal” structure of the machine and of his world. That is to say, only through this passive observation of the suddenly collapsing terrain does he perhaps become aware of an inherent reversal of execution into tangible landscape, an Umschlag that had already characterized the stable machine-world from the outset. Put more simply, only now does the ever-present phenomenon of equipment and its breakdown come to light.
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My question about this scenario is as follows: would it ever occur to such a person to consider himself as the source of the ecstatic-temporal nature of this environment? Not at all. By hypothesis, his vantage point has never shifted in the least, and his mood has remained entirely unaltered. Obviously, faced with the sudden decay of his environment, he would have to regard the machine’s own degradation as the source of all temporal ecstasis.
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Imagine further that the machine finally breaks down to such an extent that the prisoner becomes wracked by inner turmoil . Now undergoing violent mood-swings, he breaks loose from his chains and stands on his own feet. Locating the machine itself after a brief search, he deliberately begins to dismantle its gears one by one, ruining its various functions as he goes.
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Only at this point in the story would the prisoner be tempted to regard himself as the key to all ecstasis, only after realizing that his willpower and manual activities and even his own crazed, turbulent moods can lead to changes in the total environmental effect of the machine. The point of citing these images is to suggest that only common-sense prejudice leads us to regard Dasein, rather than the things themselves, as the site of temporal ecstasy.
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In everyday life, we tend to conceive of the world as a relatively stable landscape that we ourselves can personally reorganize as thinking, acting, transcending animals. This encourages the faulty ontological inference that the world’s ecstatic structure results from a sort of human mental-physical kinesis, a subjective Bewegtheit that resolutely goes to work in a theater made up of bland solid blocks. But although the ecstatic environment is indeed conditioned by our own projections, it is still the ecstasis of the things: it is still the machine itself that either functions quietly or falls into ruin.
Here’s a quite different piece of daring, whether or not you agree.
As of this writing (January 2001), the Klostermann Gesamtausgabe runs to 18 ,649 published pages. Of these pages, the vast majority prove utterly predictable to anyone familiar with five or six key Heideggerian texts. Indeed, one searches the recent history of philosophy in vain for a more single-minded, repetitive thinker; if Heidegger had lived in a more taciturn age, it is easy to imagine his life’s work confined to a single papyrus manuscript.
A critic might say that Harman radicalized “tool” versus “broken tool,” completely transforming it, and then projected it back on all of Heidegger.
I don’t want to sound rude, but to me this hardly looks like philosophy at all. It feels closer to something like Lovecraftian fiction or gothic doom-poetry.
For example, I may disagree with Derrida’s reading of Heidegger, but I can still recognize its intellectual subtlety and philosophical force. With Harman, however, I do not really see the philosophical thought itself. I do not see a system, nor a real argument. It feels more like a certain vision of the world being projected onto Heidegger.
In principle, Harman could have chosen some other text just as well in order to express this vision. Heidegger seems less like the necessary source of the argument here and more like a literary or atmospheric medium through which Harman stages his own metaphysical mood.
I am not convinced by Harman ( or by speculative realism in general), so for me it’s the strange audacity and tone of the text that makes it worth looking at. He forcefully misreads Heidegger to have had one insight, but I think we agree that this insight ( thesis ) is Harman’s ontology rather than Heidegger’s.
Heidegger is a correlationist.