Having extensively mapped the failure of Harman’s metaphysics to provide a coherent explanatory programme, demonstrating both its impotence and regressiveness, and its proximity to the dogmatic correlationism it purportedly opposes, we are now in a position to see the true significance of these failures. This requires examining one last extended quote from Harman’s work, which I think most explicitly articulates the essence of his thinking, and thereby distills the fundamental error upon which it is based. The following passage provides a condensed version of the chapter titled ‘The Inherent Stupidity of All Content’ from Weird Realism, which elaborates and generalises Žižek’s thoughts on ‘the inherent stupidity of all proverbs’.1 Žižek’s original point is that proverbs can be reversed into their opposites (e.g., ‘seize the day!’ and ‘consider eternity!’) without losing their seeming profundity. This mutates into something much more virulent in Harman’s hands:
While the annoying reversibility of proverbs provides a convenient target for his comical analysis, the problem is not limited to proverbs, but extends across the entire field of literal statement. Indeed, we might speak of the inherent stupidity of all content, a more threatening result than the limited assault on proverbial wisdom […].
Now, it might be assumed that we can settle the issue in each case by giving “reasons” for why one proverb is more accurate than its opposite. Unfortunately, all reasons are doomed to the same fate as the initial proverbs themselves […]. The point is that no literal unpacking of their claims can ever settle the argument, since each remains an arbitrary Master for as long as he attempts to call upon literal, explicit evidence. There may be an underlying true answer to the question, assuming that the dispute is properly formulated, but it can never become directly present in the form of explicit content that is inherently correct in the same way that a lightning flash is inherently bright [...].
There is no reason to think that any philosophical statement has an inherently closer relationship with reality than its opposite, since reality is not made of statements. Just as Aristotle defined substance as that which can support opposite qualities at different times, there is a sense in which reality can support different truths at different times. That is to say, an absolutism of reality may be coupled with a relativism of truth [...]. [All] content is inherently stupid because reality is not a content.
There are two strands of ‘argument’ in this passage. The first has only been partly quoted, as it consists in an attempt to show that one cannot use reasoning to decide between any two conflicting propositions by narrativising a hypothetical debate regarding two conflicting proverbs (‘a penny saved is a penny earned’ and ‘penny wise, pound poor’). The fact that Harman holds to the example of conflicting proverbs while implying that it can be usefully extended to all cases of rational conflict (e.g., conflicting theories of quantum gravity) is indicative of both the poverty of his theoretical resources for dealing with these cases and his willingness to substitute rhetoric in their place. There is nothing further to be said about it. The second is the argument that epistemic relativism follows from the fact that ‘reality is not a content.’ This is nothing but a bare assertion of the argument from identity—an argument that I have already spent more time unpacking and analysing than Harman has expounding in all of his works.2 It should be clear that neither of these arguments is remotely plausible; but they are not what is interesting about the passage. What is interesting is that it reveals that the true essence of Harman’s scepticism is semantic.
It is important to understand that Harman has not developed an analysis of the nature of semantic content in order to justify the core correlationist conceit that knowledge is irredeemably contaminated by its semantic conditions (e.g., forms of sensibility, language games, cultural practices, etc.), but has instead rejected the very possibility of semantic analysis at all. The background for this move is that the unprecedented progress made in semantics in the twentieth century (following the logical revolution of Frege, Russell, Tarski and Gentzen) has slowly chipped away at the bond between meaning and the experience of meaning, to the point at which radical semantic holism (as found in the otherwise diverse works of Hegel, Saussure, Quine, Derrida, and Brandom) threatens to completely dissociate semantic content from either external (representational) or internal (phenomenal) correlates. Harman’s radical haecceitism is a reactionary response to this trend, which, in the name of defending our authority over what we mean, retreats to primitive conceptions of external (reference) and internal (quality) correlation, in which what we mean becomes a pure thisness to which no one else has any access. This is precisely the sort of haecceitism (‘Sense-Certainty’) that Hegel strips to its bare essence and systematically undermines at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit.3
In essence, Harman presents us with a semantic parallel of Descartes’s defence of our epistemic access to our own representational states. Such semantic cartesianism comes at the price of the possibility of knowledge, or a complete and irremediable disjunction between what these states represent and their phenomenal manifestation (or the external world and the internal world). We are once more monarchs of our own mental domains, not in the sense that we have privileged access to ourselves qua real objects, but in the sense that nothing is hidden in our sensual contact with anything qua sensual object but the truth. Returning to Hegel’s dialectical dramatisation of this problematic, in unfolding the implicit contradictions present within Sense-Certainty, he confronts anyone who wishes to occupy this position with a choice: either move beyond it (into ‘Perception’) and start doing genuine semantic analysis of the relations between concepts,4 or abandon the search for truth. Those who stay within Sense-Certainty are thus naïve sceptics who are unable to see anything but the nothingness of the self-undermining of their own position, entirely missing the determinacy of its negation and the way this motivates the continued pursuit of certainty.
Harman has openly embraced this epistemic void. He has not motivated the core epistemological idea that he shares with correlationism, so much as accepted it as the price of his phenomenal kingdom. Far from being the metaphysical messiah, destined to liberate philosophers from the horrors of correlationism, Harman is the Fisher King of its sceptical community. He has been nominated to the post not by the multitude of oppressed realists seeking wise philosophical rule after the dark days of correlationism, but by the legions of oppressive sceptics seeking a new justification for their prejudices after sacrificing the previous occupant (as they are wont to do with surprising regularity).
This rejection of semantic analysis goes hand in hand with Harman’s wilful disregard of philosophical logic. There is a reason why the various advances in semantics throughout the history of philosophy have accompanied the development of new logical tools (e.g., Aristotle’s term logic (and the Port-Royale revisions of it), Kant’s propositional logic (and Hegel’s extension of it), Frege’s functional logic (and Russell, Tarski, and Gentzen’s advances upon it), Kripke’s modal logic (and its deployment by Lewis, Montague, Creswell, etc.), and the ongoing substructural revolution...).5 This is because, as Brandom says: ‘logic is the linguistic organ of semantic self-consciousness’.6 To put it another way: logic is what lets us move from meaning what we say (sincerity), to saying what we mean (explicitness). The various forms of logical vocabulary that we have naturally evolved (e.g., ‘if... then...’, ‘Some, but not all...’, ‘It could be that...’, etc.) and the various formalisations and extensions of these that we have subsequently developed (e.g., differentiated conditionals, iterated quantifiers, nested modal operators, etc.) provide us with the expressive resources needed to make explicit what we mean. The precision that this vocabulary makes possible when used correctly is useful in all forms of rational enquiry.7 The acquisition of these resources is thus a hard-won communicative victory (or series of victories in the long war on semantic false-consciousness), which has come at the cost of a great deal of difficult work and experimental fumbling by our philosophical forebears, and thus should not be cast aside lightly.8
The upshot of this is that Harman subordinates the expressive virtues associated with the logical regimentation of communication (e.g., clarity, precision, etc.) to the expressive virtues associated with its aesthetic dimension (e.g., style, vividness, etc.). This is because the only linguistic resources that let us move beyond simply pointing at the various sensual haecceities presented to us are the resources of literature, poetry, and aesthetic discourse. His semantic cartesianism thus gives way to a semantic romanticism. It is for this reason that metaphor enjoys such a privileged place in both Harman’s philosophical system and in the writings that present it. It is the expressive exemplar of his semantic picture: an expressive form whose content cannot become explicit without ceasing to be what it is. One cannot explicate a metaphor without transforming it into a simile, or worse, a full-blown analogy. It seemingly allows one to mean what one says without saying what one means, or to be sincere without being explicit.9 However, this picture simply misunderstands the expressive role of metaphor. It refuses to let metaphors grow, mature, and ultimately die, preferring to keep them in a perpetual expressive adolescence. To become similes, analogies, and ultimately even concepts in their own right (e.g., the classic dead metaphors: the river’s mouth, the bottleneck of the system, falling in love, etc.) is their expressive lifecycle. Metaphors are a part of a larger expressive ecosystem, and their role is to be consumed by roaming explanatory predators seeking new conceptual forms. If they are precluded from partaking in this cycle, then they play no genuinely expressive role at all.10
In the end, it is no coincidence that Harman’s scepticism in the epistemological domain is accompanied by romanticism in the semantic domain. It all amounts to an attempt to protect sincerity from anything that might challenge it, or to insist that we mean what we say regardless of any attempts on behalf of others to say what we mean, and thereby show us that we cannot both understand and endorse it. Once the possibility that anything we mean might actually be true is thrown out of the window, the relationship between understanding and endorsement gets defenestrated along with it. If we know that nothing we mean will ever be true, then the revelation that what we happen to mean is internally inconsistent can have nothing but an ironic hold upon us.11 We are thus free to mean what we like. It is then but a small step to the idea that the only access to the real is provided by the most free form of expression. We liberate ourselves from the myriad constraints placed upon us by our language (and our culture, biology, etc.), by playing with the limits of expression (or living, life, etc.). It is only by liberating ourselves thus that we can commune with the real directly, without being mediated by these constraints. In essence, the idea that no form of discourse which aims to speak the truth about the real can achieve this truth (scepticism) is converted into the idea that the only form of discourse that can actually grasp the real is that which abandons any claim to truth (romanticism).
This is OOO’s inverted world: what it takes for freedom is in truth mere caprice, what it takes for self-consciousness is in truth pervasive self-deception, and, most importantly, what it takes for sincerity is in truth nothing but a sense of entitlement to mean whatever one wants. By contrast, I maintain that if something cannot (at least in principle) be made explicit, then there is nothing implicit in the first place. There is no content without expression. One can sincerely mean what one says if one is unable to explicitly say what one means, but not if one is merely unwilling to do so. On this basis, the refusal of the myriad expressive resources that philosophers and logicians have carefully cultivated over the past two and a half millennia in favour of purposely stunted metaphors can only be called insincere.12 The philosophical virtues of sincerity and explicitness have thereby been traded for the sophistic vices of insincerity and implicitness.13
1. S. Žižek and F. W. J. Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/The Ages of the World (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press, 1997).
2. Chapter 2.1, subsection III.
3. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. Harman shrugs off this critique of immediacy without much further analysis in Guerrilla Metaphysics (147–8). See chapter 3.2, subsubsection III for our earlier discussion of the implications of Hegel’s ideas for the theory of qualities.
4. See Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead, chapter 7.
5. See G. Restall, An Introduction to Substructural Logics (London: Routledge, 2000).
6. R. Brandom, Articulating Reasons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 149 (emphasis added). This is what Brandom refers to as his logical expressivism.
7. It is all too possible to have too much of a good thing here, and to move from confusion to precision and back again by means of obfuscatory formalism. This is a serious problem in certain circles.
8. Harman is far from unique here. There is a widespread tendency to reject the logical tools that have been made available to us (at great cost) as somehow shackling the ways we may express ourselves, as if they are the components of some great logical gulag designed to imprison and ultimately extinguish all expressive creativity. This is total nonsense. It may be that certain stylistic norms that encourage the excessive use of logical formalism are currently in vogue in some areas, and that these do cause expressive maladies, but this hardly warrants the widespread equivocation of logical form with literary style that has accompanied much orthodox correlationism. In fact, it warrants precisely the opposite approach: the rigorous analysis of style as something distinct from semantic content and its logical expression. See chapter 4.1.
9. This is the view that Harman defends against both Davidson and Derrida in Guerrilla Metaphysics (121–4).
10. It is important to point out that there is more to the use of metaphor than its expressive role. If nothing else, metaphor plays an important aesthetic role in the production of literary and poetic affects, which although it may overlap with its expressive role is not to be assimilated to it. Just how the expressive and aesthetic dimensions of metaphor are to be understood, both independently and in relation, is a topic worthy of another book entirely.
11. Recall Bogost’s ironic appropriation of contradiction in his formulation of the liberal demand: ‘everything exists, even the things that don’t’ (Alien Phenomenology, 11).
12. This is to deny Harman’s own opposition between sincerity and critique (Tool-Being, 226). To refuse the critical injunction to make our meanings explicit, and thereby ensure that they are consistent, is to refuse to be sincere. This is also to deny Harman’s own metaphysics of sincerity: ‘Everyday life is laced with sincerity through and through, in the sense that I really am doing right now whatever it is I am doing—delivered over to that activity rather than to any of the possible others that might be imagined.’ (Guerrilla Metaphysics, 135) To say that the chair I am currently sitting on is ‘sincere’ in supporting me is to devalue the term to the point at which it completely ceases to name a virtue in accordance with which we could live (or fail to).
Sincerity is never simply a matter of being oneself. Anyone, and indeed, anything does this by default. Sincerity is a matter of owning one’s commitments and engaging in the process through which these commitments are tried, tested, corrected, and possibly abandoned. If these commitments are part of who one is, then sincerity involves a willingness to become other than one is, to be pushed outside one’s comfort zone in the name of truth. Putting this point another way: pace Harman, sincerity is not naiveté.
13. Harman’s relationship to the historical sophists is an interesting one, insofar as he champions much of Latour’s work (cf. Prince of Networks, 85–95), which explicitly attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of sophism against the attacks upon it by Socrates and his followers (Pandora’s Hope, chapters 7–8). However, he thinks that Latour is too harsh on Socrates, and that the latter’s skill as an ironist, along with his professed ignorance, make him a superior philosophical role model. Harman interprets Socrates’s famous dialectical practice as a matter of performatively demonstrating that definitions are always inadequate, and thus championing his own idea that things withdraw from our knowledge of them (Guerrilla Metaphysics, 152).
This is a parody of Socrates as bad as Aristophanes’s infamous The Clouds. It champions Socrates only by transforming him into an exemplar of sophism. This is because it transforms Socrates’s dialectical practice into nothing but an ironic gesture. The demand for definition becomes completely insincere, insofar as it is no longer one part of an expressive dialectical process (the practice of explicitness and consistency) aimed at truth, but a rhetorical trick employed to undermine every sincere attempt to achieve it. We may remember Socrates mainly for his refutations of other thinkers, but he equally had positions (and definitions) of his own, even beyond those that Plato puts into his mouth (cf. Xenophon, The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates [New York: Kaplan, 2009]). Harman’s Socrates is not a master dialectician, but a mere rhetorician; not the archetypal philosopher, but the sophist par excellence. This is perhaps worse than his reading of Heidegger, insofar as it does not merely radically misread Socrates, but transforms him into his antithesis.