Structation

Thought I'd start posting YouTube videos here so I don't have to write out all my thoughts.  Here I address a conflict between process philosophy and object-oriented ontology, and my attempted synthesis between the two camps.




For those who want a visual representation of what I'm talking about:

The One and the Many

There is an increasing tendency among philosophers and other intellectuals to insist that everything is interconnected.  So consistently will they harp on the sickness and wrongheadedness of the tendency to divide the world up into discrete, autonomous entities, that one wonders who exactly they're arguing with.  The Cartesian worldview is dead, and Aristotelianism doesn't get much praise either.  So who is contesting this interconnectedness that all these intellectuals insist upon?

One person challenging this view is Graham Harman.  In his object-oriented approach, he critiques both the undermining of objects in which they are reduced to their component parts as well as the overmining of objects in which they are reduced to their relations.  He suggests instead that objects recede from their relations -- that they are always more than any of their properties or relations, and have hidden capacities to relate in other ways than they currently do.  In this sense, no object ever encounters another directly.  They only encounter a caricature of the other objects, experiencing only a small portion of the objects properties that are relevant to it within their particular relation.  Objects do not relate to each other directly, but only vicariously through a third object which constitutes the relation between them.  Thus, according to Harman, nothing is directly connected, and the connections that do exist have to be made by the objects, and are not all simply pre-existing.  He describes a reality that is "clunky" and not a smooth continuum like that described by someone like Alfred North Whitehead or David Bohm.

Object-Oriented Ontology

I find the most interesting philosophers are ones that make me rethink my previous ideas while still not quite sitting well enough with me to fully sign on to their philosophy, thus forcing me to develop my own ideas in response.  Such is the case with Graham Harman and his object-oriented ontology.

I've long been fascinated by Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy(a fascination that runs in the family).  Actually, it would better be described as "process-relational philosophy," as Whitehead, like Wittgenstein and a few other philosophers of his day, took relations as the fundamental building blocks of reality.  Reality, for him, is constructed of single "actual occasions" which are relational in nature, and which form complex occasions called "societies" or "actual entities."  Some of these actual entities form what are called "enduring objects," which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.  But the enduring objects have to recreate themselves at every moment to maintain their identity.  Thus, instead of a continuity of becoming, what you have is a becoming of continuity.  I won't yet go into the role that God plays in Whitehead's system, because that's not really important for the point at hand.  The point is that in his system, objects are defined by their relations, and maintain their identity through a process of inheritance from the past.

Harman, starting from a Heideggerian perspective comes to a very different view.  Heidegger famously spoke about the use of a hammer.  While you're using a hammer, its status as an object is invisible to you.  It exists purely as a tool that is "ready-to-hand."  We can use it with theorizing about it.  Only when it breaks does it become "present-at-hand" -- that is to say, present as a real object.  But whereas this analysis has traditionally been interpreted from a phenomenological angle, in terms of what tools are "for us," Harman offers the more radical suggestion that whether he knew it or not, Heidegger is actually giving us an ontology of objects.  Using the example of a hammer is a bit deceiving, since hammers have to be wielded by the person using them.  But the ready-to-hand can be found all around us at any moment.  As I speak, there are wood beams holding up the roof over my head, which in turn are held together by nails.  Solar radiation is penetrating the Earth's atmosphere and warming up the planet to a temperature at which I am able to survive.  Plants are producing oxygen I require to breathe.  Electricity is being supplied to my house, thus allowing me to type this sentence on the keyboard and have it show up on the internet.  Objects all around me are exerting a real force upon the world to form a background of order that is invisible because it functions so perfectly.  Only when these things break down do they become present to me.  These objects don't exist the way they do for me.  They exist in their own right, and they exert a real force upon the world because of some inner quality that gives them the capacity to relate to other objects.