Moving on to the second aspect of Harman’s system, the fourfold obviously emerges from the combination of the real/sensual distinction provided by the arguments for withdrawal with the object/quality distinction. There are a number of different ways in which Harman introduces the latter distinction and thereby facilitates this emergence. However, the fourfold lacks any obvious counterpart to withdrawal’s tool-analysis: there is no single argument which stands out above all others. Rather, there is a mix of the three forms of exposition, which, although it can be broken down into two core arguments—the argument from eidos (taken from Husserl) and the argument from essence (taken from Leibniz, Zubiri, and Kripke)—is principally organised by Harman’s interpretation of Heidegger’s famous fourfold (das Geviert) of earth (Erde), sky (Himmel), gods (Göttlichen) and mortals (Sterblingen). As such, we must once more preface our examination of Harman’s own arguments with a brief analysis of his reading of Heidegger.
Harman’s reading of the fourfold is to be praised for refusing either to sideline it as an unimportant feature of Heidegger’s work, or to deny the numerical specificity of the categories constituting it. Moreover, it is to be commended for interpreting these categories as the result of the intersection of two distinctions that it basically gets right: cleared/concealed, and multiple/unitary. It is in the interpretation of these distinctions that everything goes wrong. The most serious problem is that Harman conflates the more well-known fourfold discussed above with another fourfold schema found earlier in Heidegger’s works—namely, in his lecture course during the Freiburg Emergency War Semester of 1919. This is the intersection of a distinction between the pre-theoretical (vortheoretische) and the theoretical (theoretische) and a distinction between the generic and the specific, producing these four categories: the preworldly something (vorweltliche Etwas), the world-laden something (welthaftes Etwas), the formal-logical objective something (formallogisches gegenständliches Etwas), and the object-type something (objektartiges Etwas).1 This is complicated by the fact that Harman also misreads the 1919 schema, reading its concern with the ‘something’ as a matter of singularity as opposed to universality, of beings as opposed to Being.
It is understandable that Harman takes the pre-theoretical/theoretical distinction to correspond to his own real/sensual distinction, but, as we have already seen, this is a misreading of Heidegger’s concern with the difference between the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand. The latter is not a distinction between that which is understood (the sensual) and that which exceeds understanding (the real), but a distinction between theoretical (apophantic) and pre-theoretical (hermeneutic) modes of understanding. The more serious error is that he confuses the distinction between beings considered generically (beings qua beings) and beings considered specifically (e.g., this pen, that piece of paper, etc.) with the distinction between the unitary bearer of qualities (e.g., this pen, qua this) and the multiplicity of its qualities (e.g., this pen qua pen, qua plastic, qua blue, etc.). Although in considering something as a generic something we are indeed abstracting away from its specific determinations, we are not thereby moving from multiplicity to unity: the object-type something is already unitary; it is simply a unit of a specific type (e.g., a pen) with many other specific features (e.g., it is made of plastic, it is blue, etc.). The point is not to investigate the singularity of each being as distinct from the plurality of its qualities, but to investigate the universality of its Being as distinct from the particularity of its type and its other features. In essence, the 1919 schema is an early articulation of the connection between projective understanding and the question of Being: it circumscribes the relationship between the general structure of our theoretical understanding of beings (formal-logical objective something) and the primordial source of our understanding (pre-worldly something). This is just what Heidegger will later characterise as the relationship between Being and time.2
The later fourfold most famously appears in an essay entitled ‘The Thing’ (1950), in Heidegger’s analysis of the conditions under which a humble jug appears to us. But hints of the themes that compose it appear at least as early as his masterful ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935) and run rampant across the jumble of musings that compose Contributions to Philosophy (1936–8). Harman overlooks these for the most part, in favour of his attempt to read a continuity with the 1919 schema. It is ironic, then, that his interpretation of the twin distinctions that constitute the fourfold gains more traction upon these works. This is because what they present is essentially a modification and extension of the account of the strife between earth and world briefly discussed earlier. The important differences are that: (a) world qua projected space of possibility is renamed sky; (b) Dasein’s role in the projection of this space is made explicit in the form of mortals; and (c) the enigmatic gods are added as a counterpart to mortals. This leaves us with a split between a unitary horizon of appearance (sky), multiple agents who clear this horizon (mortals), a unitary locus of resistance to this clearing (earth), and multiple foci where this resistance is hinted at within the horizon itself (gods). The mirror play between these four is then nothing but an extended account of strife: the process through which we attempt to negotiate a coherent and comprehensive grasp of reality by wrestling with that reality itself.
Harman underplays Heidegger’s version of the cleared/concealed and multiple/unitary axes in order to draw a continuity with his own fourfold.3 The crucial difference between them is that Heidegger interprets the multiple/unitary axis as a distinction between beings as such (the plurality of beings) and beings as a whole (the totality of beings), whereas Harman interprets it as the distinction between the multiplicity of a being’s qualities and its singularity as bearer of these qualities. This reflects their differing interpretation of the other axis, insofar as the later Heidegger understands concealing principally in terms of the whole (earth), of which particular concealings (gods) are derivative, whereas Harman takes particular concealings to be, not only the primary, but the only real form of concealing (withdrawal). Harman does not so much think that the whole conceals itself, as that it doesn’t exist. It is nothing but the mutual withdrawal of every being from every other.4 This raises the issue of the relation between the multiple/unitary distinction and the part/whole distinction. Harman’s rejection of the whole turns on interpreting it not merely as the totality of beings, but as a single being composed out of all other beings. As we have seen, this is precisely how he interprets Heidegger’s account of totality. This makes Heidegger’s position into a variant of what he would call onto-theology, insofar as it comprehends Being in terms of a single privileged being. This misinterpretation reveals a deeper issue though, insofar as Harman seems to blend these two distinctions in explaining his own schema. Specifically, the multiplicity of a thing’s real qualities and its unity as bearer of these qualities is often exchanged for the distinction between the thing’s real parts and its unity as the whole these parts compose.5 This conflation sometimes comes out into the open, only to disappear once more.6 We must be careful not to let it pass without notice.
It is clear that any argument Harman presents for his fourfold schema and the categorical structures he derives from it will inevitably depend upon the arguments for withdrawal we have already presented. Beyond this, Harman does not really need to argue for the distinction between objects and qualities, at least insofar as it is a correlate of the intuitive distinction between subjects and predicates. Rather, what must be argued for is his interpretation of the way this distinction intersects with the distinction between the real and the sensual, to create a divide between two kinds of quality. The first such argument we will consider, from The Quadruple Object, attempts to reverse-engineer this distinction by independently deriving one of the categories that emerges out of it. It aims to demonstrate the divide between kinds of quality from within experience itself by appropriating Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of eidos. Harman is fond of remarking that despite the avowedly idealist character of Husserlian phenomenology, it nevertheless has a distinctly realist flavour.7 He finds this flavour concentrated in the analysis of eidos, where he attempts to separate it out from the bitter overtones of Husserl’s idealism.
Harman begins by introducing Husserl’s theory of adumbration (Abschattung).8 The basic idea underlying this phenomenological concept is that in ordinary perception we encounter things from different perspectives, and that the way the thing is presented may vary between them, highlighting some features and concealing others, despite the object remaining the same. We can stand outside a house and view it from various angles, and even walk within it, touching its walls and smelling its scents, but we are always encountering the same house, even if the encounters themselves are distinct. From this, Harman draws the phenomenological insight that the object is distinct from the qualities that it presents in these adumbrations, not because it is more than them, but because there is some sense in which it is less than them. This is because it is possible to subtract them from the object without its ceasing to be the same object. However, there is a limit upon subtraction, because if we could subtract all of a sensual object’s qualities there would be nothing to distinguish it from other such objects.9 There are some essential features without which the sensual object cannot be what it is, and it is possible to compare different adumbrations of the same object and strip away the inessential features they present, in order to leave these behind. Husserl calls this process eidetic variation, and its result, eidos.
Harman then claims that, according to Husserl, eidetic qualities are never revealed in perceptual adumbrations in the way that accidental ones are, but only through the process of eidetic variation, or the categorial intuition that arises from it. Harman then criticises Husserl, and amends his account in the following way:
Husserl is wrong to distinguish between the sensual and the intellectual here; both sensual and categorial intuition are forms of intuition, and to intuit something is not the same as to be it. Hence the eidetic features of any object can never be made present even through the intellect, but can only be approached indirectly by way of allusion, whether in the arts or in the sciences.10
The argument from identity thus makes a reappearance here to invoke the split between the real and the sensual. But what is more important is the way this is configured in relation to the analysis of eidetic variation. Harman draws a distinction between sensual and intellectual modes of engagement with a thing’s eidetic features, only to collapse it by insisting that these features must lie beyond both. He thus converts the distinction between accidental and eidetic features into his distinction between sensual and real qualities: ‘For the qualities of its eidos are also withdrawn from all access, and “real” is the only possible name for such a feature.’11 Here we once again encounter the strange interface between metaphysics and phenomenology in Harman’s work. Just what is eidetic variation if the features it was supposed to reveal can never actually be revealed?
The truth of the matter is that Harman had parted ways with Husserl long before this move was made. Husserl’s concept of eidos is an account of general essence, as opposed to the account of individual essence that Harman is attempting to develop. Husserl principally talks about eidetic hierarchies of genus and species (e.g., the eidetic features of trees as opposed to those of elms) which eidetic variation and its corresponding modes of intuition allow us to traverse on the basis of our intuitions of individuals.12 He insists that all eidetic features ‘belonging to the essence of the individuum another individuum can have too’,13 in contrast to the idea that eidos could be unique to a given sensual object. However, this claim is not just in conflict with Harman’s take on essence, but also with his take on the qualities that compose it: ‘qualities as described in this book are always individualised by the object to which they belong.’14 Harman not only thinks that the process of eidetic variation aims at what makes a sensual object the unique individual that it is; he thinks that it does so by considering qualities that are unique to it qua individual. This dearth of generality means that there is no basis for the process of comparison, insofar as there are no qualities that could possibly be shared.15 This makes the basis of the process of subtraction entirely mysterious, as there are no criteria for sorting accidents from eidos.16
In essence, what Harman does here is capitalise upon this mystery, in a manner similar to that we have seen in the arguments from execution and excess. He converts the absence of criteria for differentiating between essential and inessential qualities in any given case into an absolute difference between essential and inessential qualities in all cases. That there are no conceivable features that could be the end point of the process of determining eidos so described is used as a reason to treat eidetic features as inconceivable. Ultimately, the paucity of Harman’s account of eidetic variation is actually best indicated by the way he appeals to allusion to fill it in. Not only does this bear no resemblance to the Husserlian phenomenological method on which the argument is supposedly founded, but it raises difficult questions about the categorical schema derived from the fourfold, insofar as it seemingly conflates allure (space-fusion) with theory (time-fission).
The second argument for the distinction between sensual qualities and real qualities is less localised. It must be reconstructed out of two components that are liberally spread throughout Harman’s work, one associated with Kripke’s work on rigid designators,17 and one associated with Leibniz and Zubiri’s work on individuation and essence.18 When taken together, these components allow for a reverse-engineering of the distinction similar to that of the argument from eidos, by deriving the corresponding category of essence. Also like the argument from eidos, it depends upon the distinction between sensual and real established by the arguments for withdrawal. This is because it needs to conceive the relation between the sensual object and the real object in terms of reference. This does not mean that it must be described in terms of Heideggerian functional relations between things and things (Verweis), but rather that it must be described in terms amenable to the debates regarding how words relate to things inaugurated by Frege’s theory of sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung). This is facilitated by the fact that the Husserlian terms in which Harman couches his theory of sensual objects were developed in dialogue with Frege. It is this concern with the intentional basis of reference that connects his work with the issues that Kripke raises for the theory of names.19
Harman draws on Husserl’s concept of nominal acts to explain the relationship between the sensual object and its real counterpart.20 He interprets Husserl’s claim that all other intentional acts are founded upon nominal acts as saying that in any intentional relation we are acquainted with an immediate ‘this’ (sensual object) that in turn refers to a shadowy ‘this’ (real object). Names are attached to the former as if they are the senses that determine their references. This means that distinct sensual objects can refer to the same real object insofar as one thing can have many names. The crucial point is that, although Harman thinks that we can become acquainted with a sensual object by means of a description of the object that would draw our attention to it, and thus that we can learn how to use names through using descriptions (e.g., ‘“Pete” refers to the person who wrote the book you are currently reading’), he does not think that this is necessary for acquaintance. As he explains in his reading of Ortega y Gasset, our acquaintance with the sensual object is a sort of feeling, and the object a sort of feeling-thing, which any particular description can never completely capture.21
However, this inability of descriptions to capture the feel of sensual objects is not yet the inability to capture the meaning of names that Kripke reveals. Harman takes the latter inability to consist in the relation between the name and its reference rather than the name and its sense: ‘For Kripke, names are “rigid designators” that point to (or stipulate) realities beyond all possible descriptions of them.’22 Whereas the immediate ‘this’ is something more than the particular descriptions that give us purchase upon it, the shadowy ‘this’ is something other than every possible description. It’s helpful to quote Harman at some length on this point:
Kripke’s ‘rigid designator’ is meant to serve as a proper name pointing to something that remains identical even when all known features of the thing are altered, so that the moon remains the moon even if we turn out at some future point to have been catastrophically wrong about all its properties […] However, the question for us is whether the inviolate ‘this’ beneath all apparent properties is something lying within perception, or is instead a real object lying somewhere beneath it.23
Obviously, Harman answers this question in the affirmative; but it is important to see that he does so for epistemological reasons. He thinks that because we can use names to talk about the same thing regardless of any possible disagreements about how we should describe it, every name must therefore refer to a mysterious ‘inaccessible “X” lying behind any descriptions that might be given of it’.24 What this means is that, because Kripke shows that the reference of names is somehow independent of our beliefs about their qualities, the individuation of the objects they refer to cannot have anything to do with these beliefs. This is the first component of the argument.
The second component is much simpler. It amounts to a rather straightforward claim about the nature of individuation, which enables us to draw consequences regarding how the individuation of real objects does work from the above claim about how it doesn’t. Harman discusses this in relation to Zubiri’s work, but his simplest statements of it are invariably his remarks on Leibniz:
[Leibniz] observes that even though each monad must be one monad, each also needs a multitude of qualities to be what it is, to differ from other monads rather than being interchangeable with them.25
For real objects to be distinct from one another, they must possess some qualities that distinguish them. There can be no individuation without qualities. This claim interacts with the Kripkean component in the following way:
The basic point is that we can no longer simply distinguish between a sensual world of properties and a deeper hidden core of the essential ‘this.’ […] The ‘this’ may be separable from all sorts of specific and falsifiable features, but it is never separable from a specific essence, and is therefore no ‘bare particular.’ 26
Real objects must have individual essences that distinguish them from all other things, even if these cannot be adequately described in terms of any sensual qualities whatsoever. Therefore, if sensual qualities are unable to compose these essences, there must be an entirely distinct type of quality capable of doing so. The need for essence thus demonstrates the need for a distinction between real qualities and sensual qualities.
The issue with this argument is that, much as we saw with Husserl in the argument from eidos, Harman’s attempt to integrate Kripke’s insights into his metaphysical framework ends up seriously warping them. We could focus on the fact that Kripke would not endorse the account of indirect reference that Harman’s division between sensual and real objects implies, but this is a tortuous point, given the intricacies of neo-Fregean attempts to account for names as rigid designators.27 A more salient point is that although Kripke also develops a conception of individual essence out of his account of rigid designation, it is remarkably different from Harman’s. Kripke does not take his account of rigid designation to imply that the essential properties of things must be of a completely different kind to their inessential ones.28 For him, it is entirely possible for one thing to possess a property essentially (e.g., a living cell’s salinity, which must remain within a narrow range in order for it to function) and for another to possess the same property accidentally (e.g., a cooked piece of pasta’s salinity, which can vary well outside of this range without dissolution). Of course, he might simply have failed to recognise the implications of his own theory, but it should give us pause for thought. As such, we should take a look at his argument against descriptivism.
Kripke claims that the meaning of a name such as ‘Aristotle’ cannot be composed out of descriptions such as ‘the most famous student of Plato’, ‘the tutor of Alexander the great’, or ‘a Greek philosopher with an impressive beard’, even if these descriptions uniquely pick out the relevant object, either individually or in conjunction. Put in its simplest form, the argument for this claim is that we would otherwise be unable to make sense of statements such as ‘Aristotle might not have been the greatest student of Plato’, ‘Aristotle could have died before Alexander was born’, or ‘It was possible for Aristotle to shave off his beard and abandon philosophy’. For any descriptive feature that is supposed to belong to the meaning of a name, we can construct a seemingly reasonable counterfactual statement involving that name in which the object lacks it, thereby producing a contradiction. The important contrast to draw with Harman’s presentation of the argument is that this is straightforwardly modal rather than epistemic: it involves differences between the way the world actually is and ways it could have been, rather than differences between the way the world really is and ways we take it to be. What Kripke means when he says that names are rigid designators is simply that they pick out the same thing in all counterfactual scenarios. Moreover, he does not think that the name successfully refers to an object in every proposed scenario. He holds that some counterfactual statements (e.g., ‘Aristotle could have been a pig’) are false precisely because there are some essential features (e.g., humanity) that could not be absent from a scenario without the object being absent. He thus does not think that grasping the essence of a thing is impossible, but simply that it is distinct from grasping the meaning of a name that refers to it. There may be independent reasons not to endorse Kripke’s essentialism, but they are not necessarily reasons to endorse Harman’s alternative.
Harman’s account of rigid designation has thus mutated into stubborn designation, insofar as names not only refer to the same thing throughout counterfactual variations, but across all possible appearances. For Kripke and those who attempt to incorporate his insights, there is still at least some role for descriptions of the features and history of the objects our names refer to, in determining whether two different names refer to the same thing: There can be entirely separate causal histories (or anaphoric chains) determining the reference of different names (e.g., ‘morning star’ and ‘evening star’) and yet facts about these can help determine whether they have been referring to the same thing all along (e.g., ‘the morning star is the evening star’, since both are names for Venus). For Harman, we can at best use descriptions to determine whether the sensual objects our names are attached to are the same, but never whether distinct sensual objects might refer to the same real object. This makes the boundaries between real objects as mysterious as their qualities.29 The sensual chair I am sitting on and the sensual tree I am staring at are sensually distinct, but they might not be really distinct. The sun, the sea, and the strudel I had for breakfast may really have been the same thing all along. The messy business of working out just what it is we’re talking about can only be given over to allure in the same fashion that the theorisation of eidos seems to have been. It therefore seems as if the whole issue of reference from which the argument began has gone out of the window.
Even more worryingly perhaps, we are left wondering why we must affirm the reality of discreteness at all, rather than some singular Apeiron underlying a plurality of discrete appearances. Harman’s own analysis of appearance cannot but dissolve the ‘glaringly obvious fact’ of discreteness that he himself held up against Heidegger’s purported holism. His radical dissociation of the individuation of sensual objects from the individuation of real objects precludes any appeal to apparent discreteness in order to prove real discreteness, and thereby undermines his seemingly radical individualism. If we cannot know anything about the criteria of individuation of real objects, then we are left with the real possibility that there might only be one.
1. T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 21–5.
2. Of course, Heidegger never provided a complete account of his analysis of Being in terms of time. The third division of part one of Being and Time which was supposed to contain this analysis was never published, although we have fragments of the ideas that would have made it up in the form of Basic Problems of Phenomenology, which provides the most extensive version of the analysis, along with the best account the projection of Being upon the primordial source of temporal understanding (Temporalität).
3. I say ‘underplays’ here because there are points at which he seems to recognise that Heidegger’s later schema simply does not fit his own. This is somewhat implicit in Tool-Being (266), but it is explicit by the time of The Quadruple Object (87–8).
4. Tool-Being, 294–6.
5. This is most explicit in the section of Tool-Being where he explains the distinction between real objects and real qualities by way of Zubiri’s account of essence: ‘The object lives with a dual tension in its breast. On the one hand it fluctuates between the vacuum of its tool-being and the power of its impact on neighbouring beings. On the other hand it is itself a systematic empire swarming with interior parts’. (266, my emphasis).
6. The sheer extent of this is dramatised across Guerrilla Metaphysics, in which the distinction between parts and qualities finally becomes evident, as if suddenly discovered, only to metamorphose through a number of different forms (cf. §7B, §10, §11) before finally settling upon a rejection of the plurality of qualities in favour of the plurality of parts (228–9). A detailed commentary upon these convoluted transitions is beyond the scope of this book (although see chapter 3.2, subsection II); but the need for one is ameliorated by the subsequent fading of this bold position in the formulation of the object/quality distinction presented in The Quadruple Object (cf. 88).
7. E.g. The Quadruple Object, 20.
8. Ibid., §1B.
9. Ibid., §1C.
10. Ibid., 28, my emphasis.
11. Ibid.
12. E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, I, tr. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1982), 8–15.
13. Ibid., 8.
14. The Quadruple Object, 30.
15. We have already seen this dearth of generality in Harman’s interpretation of Heidegger’s phenomenology (cf. Tool-Being, 84–5), but it is equally present in his reading of Husserl’s. For instance, the example of the phenomenological reduction he presents in Guerrilla Metaphysics (§10B) never moves beyond the level of the individual, but simply decomposes sensual wholes into sensual parts and explores the relations between them. We will discuss this further in chapter 3.2, subsection II.
16. Going further than this, in ‘On Vicarious Causation’ (in R. Mackay [ed.], Collapse vol. 2 [Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007], 171–205), Harman claims that Husserl’s method is superficial, because it cannot analyse eidetic qualities without turning them into ‘something like accidents’ (214). He even goes so far as to claim that, not only are qualities individualised, but there is really only one quality—the singular eidos. He thus sees eidetic variation as a sort of frantic scrabbling to unwrap a present in which we never reach the gift itself, only ever more layers of wrapping paper.
17. Cf. Tool-Being, 124, 213–15; Guerrilla Metaphysics, 28–9, 108–10, 197–8; Prince of Networks, 175; The Quadruple Object, 67.
18. Cf. Tool-Being, §§23–24; Guerrilla Metaphysics, 82–3, 147, 162, 192; The Quadruple Object, 48–9.
19. S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).
20. Guerrilla Metaphysics, 28–9.
21. Guerrilla Metaphysics, 108–10.
22. The Quadruple Object, 67.
23. Guerrilla Metaphysics, 197–8.
24. Tool-Being, 213.
25. The Quadruple Object, 49.
26. Guerrilla Metaphysics, 197–8.
27. I have in mind the work of Gareth Evans, John McDowell and Robert Brandom. I personally endorse Brandom’s own anaphoric approach to integrating the Fregean sense/reference distinction and rigid designation, which he calls ‘tactile Fregeanism’ (R. Brandom, Making It Explicit [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994], chapters 7–8).
28. Cf. Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 39–53, 110–15.
29. I owe this point to Daniel Sacilotto.