Having looked into the ‘what’ of OOP, it is time to concern ourselves with the ‘why’. This means locating the various arguments that Harman presents for each of the different aspects of his metaphysical system distinguished above. As I hinted in the introduction, this is by no means an easy task. Although Harman’s work is peppered with phrases such as ‘I will show…’, ‘I have already argued…’, or ‘As argued repeatedly…’, these often do not refer to specific arguments so much as to the overarching dramatisation of a given idea that takes place throughout the work.1 There are a few notable exceptions to this, as we shall see, but what arguments there are in Harman’s work tend to be blended together in ways that make them hard to tease apart—a task which is vital if they are to be properly assessed. To draw on Harman’s own preferred metaphors once more, the arguments often seem to withdraw into themselves, leaving textual vicars that tantalise one’s cognitive faculties by alluding to their real logical depths. Our current task is thus to draw them out of hiding and expose them to the light of reason.2
Of course, Harman also has his own (fairly derogatory) opinions about the role of reason and argument within philosophy, as a part of his wider concern with the importance of philosophical ‘style’, a concern that must be taken into account.3 We shall address these later on (chapter 4.2). For now, our aim is to delineate and perhaps even repair as much as is feasible of the justificatory tissue holding together the skeletal structure of Harman’s corpus that was revealed in chapter 1. This is a delicate operation that requires exegetical care, logical skill, and no small amount of discursive charity. We are about to move from exploratory to reconstructive surgery. In order to facilitate this, I shall highlight three different ways in which Harman frames his ideas with an eye to their justification: historical narrative, phenomenological description, and metaphysical argument.
Historical narratives introduce an idea by reconstructing its genesis within a particular historical dialectic, usually constituted by a series of different thinkers each of whom makes some important contribution to the problematic in which the idea gestates, only to emerge fully formed in Harman’s own work. These rational reconstructions are an important philosophical tool deployed by many of the great figures in the history of philosophy.4 The philosophies of Hegel, Heidegger, and Deleuze would not be as compelling or even as accessible without the thematic vectors they trace through their forebears in the direction of their own work. Harman is thus to be commended for wielding this method of exposition with some skill. However, the danger associated with this method is that it can easily slip from licit exposition to illicit justification in the form of arguments from authority. Such arguments can be useful as shorthand forms of justification (equivalent to saying ‘you need to go read Aristotle/Hegel/Heidegger/etc. before we can talk seriously about this’); but they wither under more sustained forms of philosophical scrutiny. The issue is exacerbated where the readings of the figures in question are particularly controversial, as is Harman’s reading of Heidegger, which forms a crucial part of his own object-oriented history.5 As such, in separating out these narratives from the other forms of exposition and argument in Harman’s work, my primary goal will be to ensure that they play no such illicit justificatory role.
Phenomenological descriptions play an important part in Harman’s work, insofar as his metaphysics is thoroughly influenced by an appropriation of the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger. His is a metaphysics of intentional relation, and his account of intentionality is fundamentally culled from the phenomenological tradition and its methodology of immanent description. However, the methodological questions regarding the nature and status of phenomenological description that were of such concern to Husserl and Heidegger receive little attention in Harman’s work. He is often all too eager to delve directly into phenomenological analysis without clarifying precisely what it means to do so. Whereas Husserl devotes a enormous amount of time and effort to elaborating the various aspects of the phenomenological reduction, and Heidegger devotes a serious (if not necessarily comparable) effort to modifying this within his own existential-hermeneutic framework, Harman gives us little in the way of phenomenological methodology. This not only makes the precise content of many of his phenomenological claims unclear, but more worryingly brings into question the metaphysical conclusions that are leveraged on the basis of these claims. It is thus of the utmost importance to identify precisely which of Harman’s claims are motivated by phenomenological analysis, and how they are deployed in the attempt to justify his more contentious metaphysical claims.
This brings us to the third form of exposition: metaphysical argument itself. Specifically, it raises the question of what qualifies either a philosophical claim or its justification as ‘metaphysical’. In other words: Just what is metaphysics anyway? (chapter 3.5 will address this explicitly.) This question should weigh heavily on the shoulders of anyone intending to engage in renewed metaphysical speculation regardless of their preferred method, but this weight becomes particularly acute when one intends to derive metaphysical conclusions from phenomenological premises. Although it is possible to find his account wanting, it could hardly be said that Heidegger merely identifies phenomenology and ontology without addressing and attempting to justify this quite radical divergence from the metaphysical tradition.6 Heidegger’s detailed historical and methodological work on the problem of metaphysics and the question of Being garners almost no attention in Harman’s work, nor is it supplemented by any detailed alternative schema. Indeed, the most sustained engagement with the question I have been able to locate dismisses the possibility of even addressing the methodological task of clarifying the question of Being prior to answering it: ‘the question of [B]eing cannot be elucidated until the meaning of [B]eing itself has already somehow been clarified, prior to any special description of Dasein.’7 This sidelining of methodological issues is rather worrying given Harman’s unapologetic calls to return to the problems of precritical metaphysics.8
All of this indicates just how important it is to separate out the roles these different forms of exposition play in the more or less explicit arguments within Harman’s work, and the way overlaps between them further complicate many of the implicit assumptions undergirding the latter. However, the critical purchase upon Harman’s work this would provide requires an exhaustive approach that presents its own particular problems. Firstly, the ideal of exhaustiveness places exegetical demands upon a commentator (and critic) that are often unrealistic, and this can easily lead to accusations of impropriety. I have gone out of my way to read as much of Harman’s extant work as I can, in order to forestall such accusations, but I expect them nonetheless.9 Secondly, it places hermeneutic demands on those who would read (and perhaps respond to) the commentary—demands that are substantial if not unreasonable. Not only must readers be willing to cover the same exegetical ground as the commentator; they must also keep track of multiple different arguments and their intersections. I have endeavoured to organise this book in as accessible a manner as possible, but this can only ameliorate these problems rather than obviate them entirely. Thirdly, the exhaustive approach often has profoundly counterproductive psychological effects. It is an unfortunate fact that it is often easier to convince someone of the falsity of a theory or the wrongness of a policy by focusing upon a single objection to it, rather than aiming to present several, equally serious objections. We all have a finite amount of attention, and thus a limited ability to cope with barrages of arguments; and these unavoidable limitations can often lead to our dismissing arguments that overload our attentional capacities. This phenomenon is a serious problem in many mainstream political debates, where certain multifariously flawed ideas often survive precisely because no unitary line of attack upon them is obvious. I enjoin the reader to recognise this phenomenon, and not to take the lack of a singular knockdown criticism as a point in favour of the position criticised.
This brings me to the last substantive point in this prolegomena, which regards the nature of philosophical disagreement and its presentation. In previous, more informal debates, Harman has complained that I fail to follow the proper procedure for engaging with a discursive opponent: firstly outlining the areas in which one agrees with one’s interlocutor, and then proceeding to outline the relevant disagreements.10 My response is that, sometimes, there simply are not enough points of agreement to make this anything more than an empty gesture. My own commitments, which I have endeavoured to keep out of this book wherever possible,11 are quite radically different from Harman’s, and this leaves little ground for praise on my part. Nevertheless, I will mention six areas in which there is something resembling agreement between us: (i) we both think that correlationism is problematic; (ii) we both hold that individuality is an important metaphysical topic; (iii) we agree that there is more to panpsychism than is often thought; (iv) we each take it that aesthetics is an important philosophical field with wider ramifications than commonly accepted; (v) we are jointly committed to both the possibility and necessity of metaphysics in some form; and (vi) we strongly agree that realism is essential if this metaphysics is to be pursued properly.
The problem is that, once we begin to define what is meant by the core terms in each case (correlationism, individuality, panpsychism, aesthetics, metaphysics, and realism), the agreements turn out to have been fairly superficial: (i) I agree with Quentin Meillassoux12 that the essence of correlationism is epistemological rather than metaphysical, and that it must be challenged on this terrain rather than dismissed as ontologically arrogant; (ii) I think that there can be no study of the metaphysics of individuality that does not begin with its logic (e.g., identification, quantification, existential commitment, etc.) rather than leaping headlong into intuitive speculation; (iii) the history of panpsychism I am concerned with (e.g., Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, Whitehead, and Deleuze) is characterised by its generalisation of non-intentional features of thought (i.e., conation and sensation); (iv) I am convinced that aesthetics, as the study of a certain kind of value, has less to do with the sensations and feelings that signal its presence than with the actions this demands of us; (v) I predict that a return to metaphysical speculation without the methodological awareness accompanying an answer to the question ‘What is metaphysics?’ is doomed to failure; and (vi) I think that there can be no viable ‘realism’ without a definition of ‘real’ more subtle than ‘that which is always other than our knowledge of it’.
This is all I shall say about these disagreements for now. The criticisms upon which they turn will be revealed as we look at Harman’s arguments themselves. I shall group these arguments on the basis of the aspect of his system that they underpin (withdrawal, the fourfold, and vicarious causation, respectively), so that the order of the following subsections corresponds directly to the order of those in the previous section. Each section will deal with a number of different arguments of varying strength and complexity, with varying degrees of reconstruction on my part. Each is shorter than the last, as the relevant arguments build upon one another. I will do my best to indicate exegetical concerns surrounding my reconstructions, but my aim is to present the strongest possible forms of each argument, so as to make the corresponding criticisms as strong as possible.
1. These examples are all taken from Tool-Being (19, 61, and 70), but one can find many similar phrases in all his works. It is very rare to find such a phrase that is tied in any way to a specific chain of inferences (for instance by referencing the pages upon which the supposed argument takes place).
2. Harman himself looks down on this sort of critical engagement with the arguments underlying a philosophical position for various reasons (cf. Guerrilla Metaphysics, §12A), some of which are curiously intertwined with elements of his own position. Instead of systematically critiquing a position on the basis of flaws in its argumentation, he would rather that we strove to present counternarratives that construct suggestive alternatives to it. Even while Harman admits that ‘such debunking may be necessary work at times’, he nevertheless maintains that ‘we should not forget that it is mainly the work of dogs (cynics, to say it in Greek)’ (ibid.). Even if we grant this, it cannot get in the way of the work that respect demands. Mere preference cannot dictate when the dogs should be released. Woof.
3. Cf. Prince of Networks, 169–75.
4. For an account of the logic of this process of reconstruction, see Robert Brandom’s work on the historical dimension of rationality in the introduction to Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) and his own reconstruction of Hegel in Reason in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), chapter 3.
5. This is an area in which I can speak with at least enough authority to be taken seriously, given the fact that my PhD thesis (The Question of Being: Heidegger and Beyond, Warwick University 2012, <http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/thesis/>) presents a synoptic reading of Heidegger’s work which, while diverging from both the standard analytic and Continental readings, much as Harman’s does, comes to conclusions radically different (and, I would argue, far more nuanced) than Harman’s.
6. For details, consult my The Question of Being.
7. Tool-Being, 40.
8. It is also helpful to note that despite using the term ‘being’ quite extensively throughout Tool-Being, Harman never provides any generic definition or analysis of the term that goes beyond his own metaphysical account of it. If pushed to provide a quick analysis of his usage of the term, I would say that he uses it in one of two senses: (a) in the particular sense to refer to the being of a given object (cf. Tool-Being 85), or (b) in the singular sense to refer to the totality of objects (cf. Ibid., 294). This almost entirely elides the general sense referring to the Being of objects as such with which Heidegger himself is principally concerned (as the subject of the question of Being). In addition, in accordance with his own metaphysical proclivities, the senses in which Harman does use the term are almost universally deployed in opposition to seeming (cf. 26), which is only one of the major oppositions that Heidegger outlines (and indeed, questions) in the course of his career (cf. Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. G. Fried and R. Polt [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000], 103–22).
9. The footnotes throughout this book will reveal the full extent of this reading. I have consulted all published books and essay collections, but I have not read all of Harman’s published papers, nor any unpublished material that may be circulating. I have also followed the writings on his blog (<http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com>) rather extensively, though I have refrained from referencing them in justifying any of the substantial points in this paper, for obvious reasons. I consider this to be an eminently reasonable level of work to justify the present book, even if I cannot completely rule out the possibility that I have missed something crucial in the writings I have not read.
10. Private correspondence.
11. For an unpolished overview of my own position, I recommend reading the available draft of my Essay on Transcendental Realism (<http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2010/05/essay-on-transcendental-realism.pdf>). This is a rough draft that has yet to be revised and expanded for publication, but it does a reasonable job of outlining the central themes of my work.
12. ‘Speculative Realism’, in Collapse vol. 3, 445–6, in conversation with Peter Hallward.