Harman has several arguments for his account of withdrawal. By far the most famous is the reading of Heidegger’s tool-analysis presented in his first book, Tool-Being. However, despite the fact that the tool-analysis is referred to and summarised to different degrees throughout Harman’s work, it remains fairly opaque in its logical structure.1 This is principally because, although it is referred to as if it were a single argument, Harman’s version is really a blend of a number of distinct arguments, mixing all three forms of exposition discussed above: historical, phenomenological, and metaphysical. Disentangling these expository and justificatory strands is difficult enough when focusing on one text, but its manifold presentation confronts us with some serious choices about how to proceed. I have decided to focus upon two presentations of the analysis: the original and most detailed presentation of it in Tool-Being, and a more recent and concise presentation of it in Harman’s book on Meillassoux, Philosophy in the Making.2 I highly recommend reading the relevant sections of these texts alongside my reconstruction of the tool-analysis, so as to confirm the fidelity of my reconstruction. These preliminaries aside, I shall break down the tool-analysis into two separate parts. I call these the argument from execution and the argument from excess. This will be followed by an examination of an additional argument that often accompanies them, and which I call the argument from identity.
Before delving into the details of the tool-analysis, we must address the exegetical elephant in the room. I have already announced my disagreement with Harman’s reading of Heidegger. Harman is very clear that his version of the tool-analysis is not one that Heidegger would himself endorse, and that as such it must be assessed on its own merits. This is precisely what I intend to do. However, in line with my earlier remarks about the role of historical narrative, it will be helpful to present the crucial errors of Harman’s reading of Heidegger as I see them. On the one hand, this inoculates against any illicit slip from exposition to justification, and, on the other, it helps to situate within their correct historical context many of the issues Harman is dealing with.
There are five principal aspects of Harman’s reading with which I disagree: (i) he reads Heidegger’s critique of presence as championing a complementary notion of execution; (ii) he takes the distinction between the ontological and the ontic to be equivalent to the distinction between the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand; (iii) he claims that the ‘world’ should not be understood as a phenomenological horizon; (iv) he holds that Dasein is not central to Heidegger’s ontology; and (v) he identifies the encounter with the broken tool with the as-structure. I shall tackle these disagreements by addressing several characteristic criticisms that Harman deploys liberally against other interpreters of Heidegger. (If understanding these exegetical points is of little interest to you, you may wish to skip the rest of this subsection, though I do not recommend it.)
To begin with, Harman repeatedly criticises other interpreters for mistaking the significance of the distinction between readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) for a distinction between types of entity. He zealously reminds his readers that ready-to-hand entities are not those specific things that happen to be used as tools by humans, but rather that any extant entity may be taken as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand.3 This point is certainly misunderstood by a number of interpreters. However, even combined with his reading of Heidegger’s use of the word ‘mere’ (Bloß) to denigrate the status of presence (Anweisenheit),4 this does not show that Heidegger is championing a complementary notion of execution (Vollzug) as the real meaning of ‘Being’ that the metaphysical tradition overlooked. On the contrary, it is possible to view this as a distinction between different modes of Being (Seinsarten/Seinsweisen) without reducing it to a distinction between mutually exclusive types of beings. This is precisely how Heidegger describes the distinction.5 Moreover, the fact that Harman will develop this notion of execution into a new conception of substance (ousia), bemoaning the inability of Heidegger commentators to see the connection between Zuhandenheit and ousia,6 indicates that he has diverged from Heidegger somewhere upstream of this point.7
Secondly, Harman claims that Heidegger’s insights cannot be truly ontological ones if they are understood in terms of the intelligibility of entities to Dasein. The argument for this essentially boils down to the idea that intelligibility to Dasein is seeming for Dasein, and Harman defines ‘Being’ in opposition to seeming.8 For Harman, ontology is the study of beings as they are in themselves, as distinct from their appearances. This is almost the opposite move made by most orthodox Heidegger scholars, who define ‘Being’ as the intelligibility of beings as distinct from any ‘metaphysical’ conception of the underlying grounds of this intelligibility. For them, ontology is the study of appearances freed from the mistaken metaphysical search for the substantial basis of these appearances. In fact, both of these readings are seriously misguided, since Heidegger does not define ‘Being’ in either of these ways. However, each has an element of truth to it. In line with the orthodox interpretation, Heidegger does indeed try to argue, against the metaphysical tradition, that Being is to be understood in terms of intelligibility (unconcealing). And in line with Harman’s interpretation, he also thinks that something must be said about that which resists or escapes intelligibility (concealing). His later work in particular attempts to show that the revelation of each entity to our understanding is tempered by its being situated within a broader field of meaning (world) which is always in tension with reality in itself (earth). Every entity thus appears as a local modification of this global struggle (strife/truth).
Thirdly, this brings us to Harman’s criticism that, in interpreting Heidegger’s use of ‘world’ as a phenomenological horizon within which entities appear to each given Dasein, Heidegger scholars have stumbled into a disastrous regress towards ever deeper unitary grounds (e.g., Zeitlichkeit, Temporalität, Ereignis, etc.).9 Again, as much as this is a legitimate lampooning of the stylistic and exegetical excesses of much Heidegger scholarship, it does not amount to a proof that there is no well-defined regress of unitary grounds in Heidegger. Even if there is a certain overworn argumentative trope in Heidegger, this does not excuse us from examining the specificities of its instances. It is thus entirely possible (and desirable) to determine that there are only a specific number of steps in Heidegger’s analyses, and that they actually have an end point in some more or less well-delimited unitary structure (e.g., Temporalität in the early work, or Ereignis in the later work). Harman’s alternative is to read ‘world’ as a complete totality of entities rather than a phenomenological horizon within which entities appear. This is a disastrous misreading, one that is explicitly counselled against by Heidegger.10
Fourthly, this sets the stage for Harman’s attack on anthropocentric readings of Heidegger. Although Harman recognises that Heidegger himself grants Dasein ontological privilege, he takes this to be entirely unnecessary, insofar as every entity can be interpreted as a for-the-sake-of-which engaging with other things in terms of projective understanding.11 Harman explicitly claims that although Heidegger uses the term ‘understanding’ (Verstand) here, this can be interpreted non-anthropocentrically as covering all interactions between things. This is indicative of a really pernicious misunderstanding of Heidegger’s project that underlies the other points addressed so far.
Let us briefly summarise Heidegger’s account of understanding: he thinks that Dasein relates to the things it encounters in terms of the possibilities for action that they provide it, and that what characterises Dasein qua Dasein (Existenz) is that set of conditions (Existentiale) without which Dasein could not count as freely choosing, and thus acting in any real sense. Harman is fond of ridiculing Heidegger’s analysis of the mode of Being of animality as distinct from Dasein’s mode of existence, precisely because he fails to see that Heidegger is describing entities which have similar behavioural capacities to Dasein (drives) but which nevertheless lack the specific conditions of organisation that enable choice (as opposed to mere disinhibition).12
This brings us back to our preceding point: Harman cannot see what it would be to be world-poor precisely insofar as he does not see what it means for something to have a ‘world’ in Heidegger’s sense: an internally articulated space of possible action (i.e., the projection of what is possible), involving a grasp of both generality and particularity (e.g., the possibilities of pens as such vs. the possibilities of this particular pen), in isolation and situation (e.g., the possibilities of this pen in relation to paper as such vs. the possibilities of this pen in relation to that piece of paper), organised in terms of a hierarchy of ends (e.g., the end of writing a letter, itself a means to maintaining a friendship, itself a means to… etc.) united by the fundamental goal of becoming oneself (i.e., Dasein as its own for-the-sake-of-which). Entities appear in the world for Heidegger insofar as they modify this space of possibility: their actuality consists in the way they open up certain specific possibilities for action while closing down others. This explains an even earlier criticism: Harman cannot see that differences in modes of Being (e.g., Zuhandenheit, Vorhandenheit, Existenz, etc.) are not simple differences between types of beings, because he does not see the different ways they are supposed to be individuated as actualities within the world qua space of possibility. So, it is true that all spatio-temporally located particulars are both ready-to-hand and present-at-hand in some sense (even if the space and time in question are not straightforwardly identical); but this is a matter of the difference between our grasp of possibilities as tied to the everyday forms of activity we inherit from the culture we are thrown into (e.g., pens qua writing implements), and our grasp of possibilities as abstracted from these activities (e.g., pens qua ink-filled molded plastic).
Finally, this brings us to Harman’s persistent criticisms of pragmatist readings of Heidegger in general, and of the tool-analysis more specifically. These are inextricably bound up with the other criticisms already presented, but there is an important additional dimension here: Harman’s claim that Heidegger’s concern with the use of equipment has nothing to do with use as we normally understand it, but should be understood as a matter of reliance upon equipment.13 It is the fact that reliance is an essentially causal notion that underpins Harman’s claim that all interactions between entities can be described as entities ‘understanding’ one another ‘as’ something, and the development of this into the further claim that all such interactions are analogous to the encounter with the broken tool. We shall return to the independent methodological problems with this claim, but for now it suffices to point out the sheer extent to which it misunderstands Heidegger’s account of the as-structure and its relation to the broken tool encounter. The crucial point is that Heidegger distinguishes between the hermeneutic ‘as’ and the apophantic ‘as’, and associates these with the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand, respectively. The relationship between the former circumscribes the relationship between the latter: this is essentially a matter of the relation between the implicit and the explicit.
It is important to understand that the ‘as’ is indicative of generality. We grasp something ‘as’ something insofar as we grasp a particular as an instance of a general type. The idea behind the split in the as-structure is that our understanding of this generality can be articulated in two distinct ways, even if these forms of articulation are fundamentally inseparable and always combined to different degrees. We grasp the entities around us principally through the hermeneutic ‘as’ insofar as the specific possibilities we are immediately presented with by them (e.g., writing a letter) are articulated by an implicit grasp of the general types of equipment they instantiate (e.g., pens and paper qua equipment for writing). This implicit grasp is the condition of interpretation, which is the process through which we reconsider these immediate possibilities, taking them apart and bringing forth the generalities that articulate them. However, this process of interpretation is not yet linguistic: it is the move to making assertions about entities that transforms the hermeneutic ‘as’ into the apophantic ‘as’. The latter involves the use of special linguistic equipment to isolate and then rearticulate the general possibilities that constitute these types, thus enabling a process of progressive abstraction which extricates the causal capacities of entities from the normative functions through which our everyday understanding grasps them. The present-at-hand is nothing but the correlate of the limit-case of this process of abstraction. It is not constituted by pure presence, or actuality devoid of possibility, but rather by pure capacity, or possibility devoid of function. The exemplars of the present-at-hand are those entities posited by science independently of any role they could have in everyday practices (e.g., electrons, black holes, mitochondria, etc.). Science is thus hardly the domain of pure presence in this vacuous sense, but rather the forefront of our attempt to work out what is really possible, over and above the expectations implicit in our parochial forms of life.
The encounter with the broken tool must be understood in terms of this complex interplay between causal capacity and normative function. The important thing to realise is that the tool cannot break unless it behaves in a way it is not supposed to: there is no malfunction without proper function. It is the fact that we grasp equipment (e.g., pen and paper) in terms of a set of normatively articulated everyday activities (e.g., letter writing, drawing, doodling, etc.) that enables it to surprise us by failing to behave as it should in the context of those activities (e.g., the pen leaking ink all over the paper). This means that we must already encounter the equipment as equipment: without a prior hermeneutic ‘as’, nothing can break. This prior ‘as’ forms the basis of the response to the encounter, insofar as the surprise malfunction incites us to reinterpret our grasp of the tool’s possibilities. This interpretation can then either stay at the hermeneutic level, or be developed apophantically by using assertions to draw out the causal capacities the tool possesses independently of its functional role; or rather, independently of its status as a tool. It is in this sense that the encounter with the broken tool amounts to a transition between the tool as ready-to-hand and the tool as present-at-hand: it is an invitation to a different form of understanding.
What all of this reveals is that Harman’s reading cannot be an interpretation of the substance of Heidegger’s ideas—even one that Heidegger himself would disagree with. It is possible to read thinkers against themselves, but this requires that there is some essential element present in their work that the work itself fails to live up to.14 But the element that Harman tries to unearth in Heidegger’s tool-analysis is not even there.15 The only reason he can propose to extend the intentional relation between Dasein and its tools to cover all interactions between entities is that he has stripped this relation of everything that makes it recognisably Heideggerian. He has excised the structure of projective understanding wholesale, and thereby completely abandoned the semantic and epistemological framework within which the encounter with the tool is described. This becomes clear once we ask a question such as: Just what would it be for a screen door to encounter a knife as a knife?16 Harman has an answer—that it would consist in the door’s being affected by the knife in a way that is common to all knives—yet this does not warrant his using the word ‘encounter’ in an intentional sense. The screen door has nothing that could qualify it as having anything like an awareness of generality. There is no hermeneutic ‘as’ circumscribing its engagements with things. This leaves us saying that what it is for a screen door to interact with a knife qua knife is for it to be affected in the way that knives affect screen doors—an empty tautology unworthy of metaphysical scrutiny.17
The principal argument derived from the tool-analysis in Tool-Being is what I have called the argument from execution. This argument aims to establish that the reality of entities consists in their execution (or tool-being), and on this basis to demonstrate that they withdraw from all epistemic and causal contact. Insofar as it is supposed to reconstruct Heidegger’s own phenomenological analysis, the argument is presented as a phenomenological description.18 Its aim is to reveal the absolute invisibility of objects qua execution, by presenting three interrelated characterisations of execution: as causal capacity (or ‘effect’), as pure action (or ‘impact’), and as functional role (or ‘reference’). However, as already noted, Harman provides no clarification regarding the nature of his phenomenological method, nor how it might be expected to yield metaphysical results. This is complicated by the fact that many of Harman’s claims are patently more metaphysical than phenomenological. This raises the possibility that in some cases he has simply imported metaphysical assumptions instead of collecting phenomenological evidence. We will thus have to be very careful to keep all the elements of his analyses separate in reconstructing their logical form.
Harman’s take on Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis opens by specifying its object: our ubiquitous encounters with the entities that we ‘use’ in the course of living. His break with Heidegger’s analysis occurs already in this first paragraph:
Heidegger demonstrates that our primary interaction with beings comes through ‘using’ them, through simply counting on them in an unthematic way. For the most part, objects are implements taken for granted, a vast environmental backdrop supporting the thin and volatile layer of our explicit activities. All human action finds itself lodged amidst countless items of supporting equipment: the most nuanced debates in a laboratory stand at the mercy of a silent bedrock of floorboards, bolts, ventilators, gravity, and atmospheric oxygen.19
This break is subtle, and does not become completely apparent until a few pages later, when Harman explicitly substitutes the word ‘rely’ for ‘use’.20 The examples that Harman focuses on are indicative of this shift. Gone is the emphasis upon equipment actively deployed toward a goal (e.g., hammers, cars, signals, etc.), to be replaced with a focus upon ‘equipment’ necessary to passively sustain a given state (e.g., ventilators, gravity, oxygen, etc.). It is not that Heidegger is not concerned with some examples of this kind—sustaining a state is as eligible a goal as achieving one—but rather that Harman narrows the scope of the analysis by collapsing active use into passive reliance, while simultaneously expanding its scope to include cases of dependence that lack anything that could be construed as awareness of the thing depended upon. This move enables execution to take on the role of persistence we saw earlier, and at the same time facilitates the universalisation of intentionality to encompass all objects, not to mention the flaying of Heidegger’s account of intentionality that accompanies it.
We can already see the pretense of phenomenology slipping here. Harman has subtly shifted the focus of his analysis from our practical comportment toward things to our causal dependence upon them. We are invited to conclude that phenomenological description is as apt to describe my relation to my internal organs, the geological strata that I stand upon, or the delicate balance of environmental factors necessary for life on earth as it is to describe my relation to the various socially delineated props I passively engage in carrying out everyday tasks. This shift hinges upon a delicate ambiguity with regard to the sense in which encounters with things can be ‘unconscious’ or ‘unthematic’.21 It consists in misunderstanding what Heidegger calls circumspection (Umsicht). Heidegger’s intention in introducing this sort of ‘unthematic’ understanding was to provide a phenomenological analysis of comportments that lacked a specific kind of awareness, rather than lacking awareness as such. He would not consider my relation to my internal organs to be an intentional relation unless it consisted in some implicit grasp of general ways in which they are involved in carrying out practical activities, either as obstacles (e.g. an awareness of my fickle digestive system) or resources (e.g., the metabolic control achieved by certain yogic masters), or some explicit grasp of their general modal features (e.g., the theoretical understanding of a biologist or surgeon). For Heidegger’s concern with the ‘unconscious’ encounter as awareness without attention, Harman substitutes a concern with it as dependence without awareness.
Bearing all of this in mind, we can turn to the first step in Harman’s analysis. This is his claim that what we encounter in relying upon equipment is its causal capacity to produce the specific effect that we rely upon. This is his first characterisation of the execution that constitutes the reality of the tool, and he vehemently opposes it to the idea that the tool consists in the ways humans expect to use it:
Equipment is not effective ‘because people use it’; on the contrary, it can only be used because it is capable of an effect, of inflicting some kind of blow on reality. In short, the tool isn’t ‘used’—it is.22
On the face of it, this is a perfectly good inference—successful reliance upon a thing demands that it possess the causal capacity to produce the effect relied upon—but the way in which it is introduced and used by Harman is questionable precisely insofar as it is metaphysical rather than phenomenological. Harman is already straying into metaphysics in describing the thing as consisting in this capacity, rather than simply possessing it, and he will stray further when he fleshes out his characterisation of this capacity qua execution. He does not linger in this register though. He rapidly returns to phenomenology when he insists upon the invisibility of this capacity.23 But invisibility is apparent only when we focus upon precisely those un-Heideggerian cases that Harman has smuggled in (e.g., the invisibility of my organs). This paradoxical revelation of invisibility essentially consists in our discovery that we really have no awareness of those things upon which we depend without being aware of it—at least, that is, until we turn our phenomenological gaze upon them. This has no force whatsoever, because there is no correlation between dependence and awareness either way. Prima facie, it is entirely possible for me to be aware or not aware of the things I depend on, to varying degrees.24 Becoming aware of the myriad environmental factors that make our lives possible does not in and of itself alter our dependence upon them.
Let us move deeper into the nature of execution and its purported invisibility, then. The second characterisation of execution is its status as pure action, and this has two aspects: Firstly, the equipment is never what it is simply because it is capable of an effect, but must also enact this effect at every moment: ‘Equipment is forever in action, constructing each moment the sustaining habitat where our explicit awareness is on the move.’25 Secondly, this perpetual action is unitary: its effect cannot be broken down into subsidiary actions that might be held in reserve. It must be ‘an agent thoroughly deployed in reality, as an impact irreducible to any list of properties that might be tabulated by an observer’.26 There are at least two distinct tensions inherent in this characterisation: a modal tension between possibility and actuality, and a temporal tension between dynamism and stasis. The former comes from the contrast between this and the first characterisation of execution in terms of capacity, insofar as it flattens whatever possible effects a thing might have into its current actual effects. The latter comes from the characterisation of the thing as always already in action, an act whose occurrence is such that we only encounter it in a state of silent repose, or diachronic transition so pure it is the very essence of synchronic persistence. These tensions are seemingly constitutive for the invisibility of equipment. Try as we might to understand any specific capacity, we never reach the unitary effect that silently whirs behind it:
Whatever is visible of the table in any given instant can never be its tool-being, never its readiness-to-hand. However deeply we meditate on the table’s act of supporting solid weights, however tenaciously we monitor its presence, any insight that is yielded will always be something quite distinct from this act itself.27
Try as we might to understand the way an occurrence unfolds, the things it involves are events already past yet ongoing:
A tool exists in the manner of enacting itself; only derivatively can it be discussed or otherwise mulled over. Try as hard as we might to capture the hidden execution of equipment, we will always lag behind.28
Harman provokes us like a zen master wielding a koan: a pure act rests behind all superficial acts, a pure actuality grounds all potential actualities. One hand claps slowly.29
It now seems we may have gone too deep after all. What should we make of these tensions within the account of execution from the perspective of the split between phenomenology and metaphysics? At best, they constitute a brute phenomenological description of dubious plausibility. Despite the general paradox of the accessibility of inaccessibility, and the more specific paradoxes of modality and temporality it poses, we might simply have to throw up our arms and admit: ‘Well, things do seem this way, just like he says!’ Even so, we should have to be receptive to any analysis that could dissolve these seeming paradoxes, as opposed to using them for effect. At worst, they constitute a series of strange and strained metaphysical assumptions extending the reification of capacity carried out by the first characterisation, assumptions we are given anything but good reason to endorse. Just what is really going on here?
Harman seems to have transposed the phenomenological analysis of tools as deployed in actions—which he otherwise ignored in favour of passive dependence—into a metaphysics of tools as actions. This has a peculiar effect that can best be described as ‘performative phenomenology’. The revelation of invisibility is merely an artefact of the way in which execution is introduced. The general paradox is underwritten by the specific ones. We encounter the invisibility of equipment as an ineffability engendered by the impossible tensions contained in the ways in which it is described. The supposed demonstration of epistemic inaccessibility is actually an elaborate numbing of our epistemic faculties, performed by multiplying the incompatible aspects of the mysterious withdrawn tool. Single hands don’t clap after all.30
We now turn to the third and final characterisation of execution: as functional role. This builds upon the previous two characterisations by articulating the effect which the capacity produces in its pure action as a means to an end of some sort. This is how Harman cashes out Heidegger’s account of reference (Verweis): he takes every entity to refer to those things whose persistence depends upon its own. The reference of a thing’s execution is another thing whose execution it sustains. Reference and dependence are thus unified into a single relation of functional dependence. This is responsible for Harman’s machinic descriptions of entities, insofar as it underwrites his discussion of dependence relations in mereological terms, not merely as between part and whole, but as between component and system. What happens here is that the causal capacities actualised in composition are transformed into normative functions through being normatively underwritten by the whole they actually compose. The various girders, nuts, and bolts that compose a bridge are simultaneously depended upon by the bridge and captured in executing their functional role in sustaining the bridge as a systematic effect upon which further things depend.31 It is this interpretation of reference relations that collapses Heidegger’s account of world into a simple totality, insofar as it takes them to hold exclusively between individuals, understood in terms of their actual states, rather than (as Heidegger intends) within a complex horizon that involves relations between both types and instances, understood in terms of their possible states.
According to Harman, this characterisation implies the second fundamental aspect of Heidegger’s tool-analysis: what he calls the tool’s totality as opposed to its invisibility. To understand this, it is important to see that Harman takes functional dependence to extend beyond intuitive forms of mereological dependence (e.g., my dependence upon my internal organs), to include things like environmental dependence (e.g., my dependence upon external factors such as gravity and oxygen), and even goes so far as to incorporate negative dependence relations (e.g., my dependence upon a meteorite not falling from space into me). Moreover, although both dependence and reference are asymmetric relations, they go in opposite directions: if x depends on y then y refers to x, and each relation is transitive, meaning that if x depends on y and y depends on z, then x depends on z, and therefore z also refers to x. The world becomes a network of functional dependence relations in which each specific entity is individuated through its location relative to everything else. The bridge is what it is in virtue of depending upon precisely what it actually depends upon, and supporting precisely what it actually supports; and the same is true for every nut, bolt, girder, and environmental condition upon which it depends, not to mention everything upon which they depend, ad infinitum; the same is true also for every passing traveller, supply chain, or local business the bridge exists in aid of, and everything they in turn support, ad infinitum. This converts the world from a simple totality of disparate individuals into a unified individual in its own right: the plurality of local systems of execution becomes an integrated network of components in a single global system or ‘world-machine’.32 The numerous ends at which execution aims are subsumed within a single system of ends, the ultimate purpose of which can only be to sustain the system itself.
This produces a relational tension alongside the modal and temporal tensions we have already uncovered. This one is more complicated since it arises from a conflict between the relational holism Harman attributes to Heidegger and the radical individualism that he aims to derive from the principles upon which it is founded. The tension consists in Harman’s attempt to convert holism into individualism by transforming execution from something individuated through the functional dependence relations it is bound up in, to something prior to these relations which makes them possible. This makes the bridge’s execution a condition of its relations to the economy of actions it supports, rather than something that consists in those relations. The tension becomes manifest in the way Harman connects totality and invisibility through the characterisation of execution as functional role. His attempt to derive invisibility from functionality is far more reminiscent of Heidegger than the other arguments for invisibility we have discussed: ‘The function or reference of the tool is effective not as an explicit sign or symbol, but as something that vanishes into the work to which it is assigned.’33 For Heidegger, our attention is inevitably drawn towards the immediate ends of our activity, rather than the various subordinate tasks and the means they involve. We focus upon what we are doing with the hammer—putting up shelves—rather than the mechanics of the hammer and our use of it. Nevertheless, this phenomenological insight is not meant to preclude the possibility of our turning our attention to any of these easily overlooked details. Our awareness of the task as an articulated whole enables us to shift our attention back to any aspect of it. We shift focus to our grip upon the hammer, thereby adjusting it to optimise the force we can achieve at the odd angle the space allows us. Harman’s reading warps this insight: the activity becomes the thing, and the focus of our attention upon the end of the activity becomes the vanishing of our awareness of the thing into whatever it sustains. This mutates further when exposed to Harman’s totalising logic of reference: all awareness vanishes into the world-machine, as the unitary activity within which everything plays its sustaining role.34
So far, then, Harman appears to have derived the invisibility of everything except the world as a whole from his functional account of individuation. But perhaps the strangest move is yet to come, because he converts this claim about invisibility back into a claim about individuation:
Every being is entirely absorbed into this world-system, assigned to further possibilities in such a way that there could never be any singular end-point within the contexture of reference. In the strict sense, the world has no parts.35
It is not merely the visibility of the parts but their distinctness that collapses into the whole—vanishing becomes absorption. This is highly problematic, because it uses an account of the articulation of systems into distinct components to deny that there is any such articulation at all. It presupposes the fact that there are distinct entities with differentiated capacities that can be combined and configured in a variety of ways, only to interpret this combination and configuration in such a way as to deny the distinctness that it is predicated upon.
We would be forgiven for insisting upon a reductio ad absurdum of some, if not most, of Harman’s premises at this point. He does indeed intend to perform a reductio of sorts, but it is not the one we might expect—and indeed, should insist upon.36 He ignores the inconsistency at the heart of his account of functionality and instead focuses upon the fact that his account of invisibility contradicts the ‘existence of [distinct] objects as a glaring experiential fact’.37 He combines this with a further contradiction he takes to be implied by the account: ‘If [this] were the case, physical causation could never occur, since there would be no individual objects, but only a single system, with no explanations for why this system should ever alter’.38 Harman treats the apparent existence of diachronic causal interaction (as opposed to synchronic causal dependence) and a multiplicity of distinct objects (as opposed to a singular world-machine) as two sides of the same problem.
What is Harman’s reductio then? What is it that converts Heidegger’s purported holism into the radical individualism of OOP? It is the introduction of the break between the real and the sensual—which is to say, the core of the account of withdrawal. This emerges in Harman’s interpretation of the as-structure and the way he identifies it with the broken-tool encounter.39 The principal motivation for this theoretical supplement is its ability to diffuse the live contradictions hovering in the background. However, it will only be warranted if it can integrate the three facets of the account of execution into the individualist account of substance, at least in outline, and thereby dissolve the relational tension between this account and its functional foundations. How this is supposed to work, and whether it can also dissolve the accompanying modal and temporal tensions, is now our principal concern. We shall tackle it one contradiction at a time.
On the one hand, Harman aims to resolve the contradiction between functional totality and apparent individuality by reconceiving the very notion of appearance itself. Harman’s concern with invisibility up until this point has turned upon an implicit conception of awareness, which, as we have seen, has not yet been made explicit through the provision of a phenomenological methodology. Nevertheless, the invisibility of things has been ‘shown’ through purportedly phenomenological analyses of the scope of this awareness. What now changes is that the phenomenal aspect of this implicit conception is explicitly severed from the epistemic aspect: awareness is split in two, so that multiple individuals may phenomenally appear, even while the singular whole from which they appear epistemically withdraws. We can see the hammer, but we can never know the intricate system that harbours its hidden essence. This rift constitutes the difference between the hammer as presence and the hammer as execution, the hammer as hammer and the hammer in itself, and the malfunctioning hammer and the functioning hammer, respectively. It permits the conversion from invisible to visible in the encounter with the broken tool precisely because the underlying execution of the tool is not really made visible. The malfunction throws off an epistemically irrelevant husk that can at best hint at the silent reality of proper functioning.
On the other hand, Harman aims to resolve the contradiction between functional fixity and apparent change by uniting the question of causal interaction and the question of phenomenal presence. Although this is often hinted at, it only becomes completely explicit towards the end of Tool-Being itself:
[T]he time has come to admit to the reader that I have been guilty of a deliberate over-simplification […] In fact, it is impermissible to replace the tool/broken tool distinction with the difference between causality and visibility. For it turns out that even brute causation already belongs to the realm of presence-at-hand.40
If we accept Harman’s identification of presence with malfunction, then the above makes a certain amount of sense: If the world is taken to have a fixed order because it is constituted by a network of functional dependence relations, then any change to this order must amount to a break with these relations, and thus to a malfunction of some sort. This would make the question of interaction/presence a matter of explaining how components rebel against the systems in which they are seemingly subsumed, so as to generate the abundance of individuality in our phenomenal experience. This is not a question Harman takes the tool-analysis to answer. He simply takes it to have posed the problem in the correct terms. Nevertheless, he insists that the analysis implies that any solution must move beyond the appearance of individuality to the reality of individuality, because entities can break with the functional order in which they are enmeshed only if they hold something in reserve that is not determined by this order.41 This is where the relational tension becomes most acute: Just how is the account of execution that implies holism to be modified so as to permit the individualism it seemingly demands?
The tension is more serious than might initially be apparent. This is because Harman extends the identification of presence with causality beyond diachronic interaction to include the cases of synchronic dependence upon which his initial characterisations of execution were built. This can be seen in his example of a bulky metal appliance sitting upon a frozen lake: ‘When the lake supports the appliance, this act of supporting unfolds entirely within the as-structure, not within the kingdom of tool-being.’42 It is this move that enables Harman to convert the distinction between execution and presence into the distinction between substance and relation, insofar as it enables him to treat all causal relations in the same way. Whatever is held in reserve in order to change the relations of functional (and thus causal) dependence that entities are bound up in, withdraws from all current relations, as the substance that underlies them. However, as Harman continues: ‘This raises the following question: If the fact that the frozen lake supports an object is not its tool-being, then what is?’43 As he puts it slightly earlier:
In short, tool-being is not at all what we have thought it was up till now. It must lie at a still deeper level than that of force or relation. It is no longer an effect as opposed to an appearance, but rather an executant being that is neither of these.44
We are once more told what execution is not, but we are still none the wiser about just what it is.
Here is where we stand then: The relational tension consists in the fact that Harman’s individualist conception of execution as substance is incompatible with the holistic conception of execution as functional role from which it is derived; but he does not make clear which aspects of the latter conception are abandoned, and thus precisely how the former differs from it, apart from its purported individualism. He does not stop characterising execution in terms of function.45 He continues to think of objects in terms of systematic unity.46 When he needs to talk about the substantial reserve that necessitates individuality, he simply turns to his earlier characterisations of execution: it stands independent of all relations as an actuality ‘richer than all possibility’47 and prior to all effects as a ‘real execution, silently resting in its vacuum-sealed actuality’.48 Far from dissolving the modal and temporal tensions discussed above, he intensifies them, and he nowhere provides an account of how the functional character of execution is to be curtailed, let alone how it is to be integrated with its status as capacity and act. When they are acknowledged, the three tensions we have located (modal, temporal, and relational) are presented as paradoxical intuitions that open up room for further metaphysical speculation, but, at best, they are an argument left hanging.49 Harman has not yet succeeded in discharging the contradictions that arise from his assumptions. He has failed to provide us with a good reason to adopt his partial reconstruction of what he takes to be Heidegger’s inconsistent system, rather than simply rejecting its core presuppositions.
How does this reflect upon the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics? Let’s take one last look. I think the core methodological issues emerge from the attempt to provide an account of modality. Here it is useful to contrast Harman’s approach with the brief summary of Heidegger we provided earlier. Heidegger provides us with an intricate modal epistemology. He builds a phenomenological framework within which he analyses both our understanding of the entities we encounter in terms of the normative features they acquire through the practices we are socialised into, the unthematic understanding of the causal features of these entities that is implicit in this, and the various levels of thematic understanding that can be developed out of it. His analysis of the encounter with the broken tool is a subtle demonstration of the interface between these levels of modal understanding.
By contrast, Harman’s approach can only be described as modal mysterianism. It begins with phenomenological descriptions of our experience of things, from which it derives a pseudo-Heideggerian functional vocabulary, but almost immediately converts this into a metaphysical inquiry into our causal relations with things, in the process hypostatizing this functional vocabulary into a metaphysical teleology. It is important to emphasise how contentious this move is. There are deep and divisive arguments about the reality of functions running from Plato and Aristotle, through Leibniz and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, all the way to contemporary debates regarding the correct interpretation of Darwin. Harman makes this move not by providing a compelling reason for it, but by simply ignoring an important methodological distinction. As we have seen, the other claims he makes about the metaphysical basis of causal capacities are equally methodologically suspect. Where Heidegger does his best to delineate the modal relations between normative functions and causal capacities, showing both how they differ and how they are related, Harman systematically conflates them under the single heading of execution, which he then fails to sufficiently integrate. Thus his purported justification for epistemic inaccessibility on the basis of these modal features (excess) is stuck halfway between a questionable attempt to phenomenologically delimit phenomenal access (the revelation of invisibility), and a dubious metaphysical reinterpretation of phenomenal access itself that simultaneously undercuts his phenomenological pretensions (the split in awareness) and fails to provide a coherent account of the inaccessible (the unresolved tensions). The philosophical framework he builds in Tool-Being leaves us with no grasp of what tool-being is—and simply to decree that ‘that’s the point!’ is to lapse into mysterianism.
The other argument that Harman associates with the tool-analysis, which I have called the argument from excess, can be found intermingled with elements of the argument from execution at several points in Tool-Being and elsewhere,50 but it becomes the dominant strain of argument by the time of his presentation of the tool-analysis in Philosophy in the Making.51 It is fairly brief, and its conclusion is more often simply asserted than properly derived from its premises, but it is possible to reconstruct a reasonably concise version of it on the basis of these examples. I will first quote the relevant sections from the Meillassoux book, to provide a basis for reconstruction:
In Heideggerian terms it is true that phenomena in consciousness fail to do justice to the full depths of things, to their inscrutable being withdrawn from all presence. Yet it is also the case that the practical handling of entities fails to do them justice as well […] [H]uman theory and human praxis are both translations or distortions of the subterranean reality of [tool-being], which is no more exhausted by sentient action than by sentient thought.52
Here Harman opens with an outright assertion of the thesis of withdrawal, but he frames it in two important ways. He articulates it as a matter of the inexhaustibility of tool-being, and he identifies theoretical understanding and practical use in terms of their inability to exhaust it. The framing of withdrawal in terms of inexhaustibility will form the centrepiece of the argument, whereas the identification of theory and praxis paves the way for the more controversial identification of knowledge and causation. This is followed by a sort of retroactive argument for withdrawal that works from within this frame:
All of these activities could possibly be linked under the term ‘intentionality’, but whereas the intentionality of Brentano and Husserl is a matter of immanent objectivity, we are now concerned with a transcendent kind of object. It is true that the hammer takes on a specific configuration both for the construction worker and for the scientific specialist on hammers (assuming the latter person exists). But what is most relevant here is the transcendent hammer that startles us with surprises, shattering in our hands or rotting and rusting more quickly than expected. The present-at-hand hammer cannot explain these sudden surprises, and hence by subtraction we arrive at the notion of a withdrawn, subterranean tool that enters into relation with me and other animate and inanimate entities as well.53
What we have here is an argument that aims to proceed from the obvious fact that the causal capacities of an object can exceed our understanding of them (and thereby ‘surprise’ us) to the contentious claim that we cannot encounter the real objects in which this excess consists, but only the distinct sensual objects that they withdraw behind.
What follows is my best attempt to reconstruct the transition between the two. I shall begin by splitting the obvious fact into two fairly uncontentious claims:
(i) Our knowledge of things does not exhaust all of their features. There is more to them than we actually know.
(ii) Our causal interactions with things do not exhaust all their capacities. There is more to them than we actualise.
Harman obviously adopts the example of the hammer’s causal capacities exceeding our grasp from the analysis of the broken tool; but its real import comes from the manner in which it straddles the divide between (i) and (ii). Although his various presentations will emphasise one or the other, the justification of the thesis of withdrawal depends upon equivocating between these two claims in some fashion, be it by leaning upon aspects of the argument from execution (e.g., interpreting praxis as reliance) or by simply treating the identity of intentional and causal relations as a given. This equivocation exemplifies the collapse of phenomenology and metaphysics into one another discussed earlier. What is important is that the combination of (i) and (ii) gets interpreted in a somewhat more contentious way than either of them:
(iii) Our knowledge/interactions can never exhaust all the features/capacities of things. There is more to them than we could possibly encounter.
This move converts a factual excess of features/capacities into an essential excess. The move is strictly illicit, but, although it leads to a stronger claim than either (i) or (ii), it is still not all that contentious. There are many who would agree with (iii) for independent reasons, or simply because it is reasonably intuitive. The really contentious claims are those that are subsequently inferred from (iii):
(iv) Our knowledge/interactions can never exhaust all the features of a thing, because there is some feature of every thing qua thing that we can never encounter.
This move aims to explain the necessity of excess by locating it in a feature common to all things, as opposed to something which varies from thing to thing. It holds that excess is essential because there is an essential feature of entities that is excessive. This makes sense if one demands an intrinsic explanation of excess which locates the reason for the excess in the encountered object, as opposed to an extrinsic one which locates it in the encountering object. When the latter is understood as a knowing subject, the extrinsic explanation of excess has traditionally taken the name of finitude. This posits an internal limit upon the cognitive abilities of the subject that precludes it from knowing objects in full. This limit need not be interpreted in terms of some common qualitative excess, but could be seen as a disparate quantitative excess. It could simply be the case that the subject can only grasp a finite number of the infinity of features belonging to each thing, but that there is no particular feature that is in principle ungraspable.
Harman insists upon an intrinsic explanation, as can be seen in the above quote, but it is important to recognise that this is underwritten by the equivocation between knowledge and causation: ‘I am convinced that objects far exceed their interactions with other objects, and the question is both what this excess is, and where it is.’54 In other words, he takes the issue of essential excess to be equivalent to the issue of substantial reserve discussed in the argument from execution.55 The localisation of epistemic excess is thus predicated upon the localisation of causal excess. This sets the stage for the final (and most contentious) inference:
(v) Our knowledge/interactions can never exhaust a thing, because we can never encounter the essence of the thing. We only encounter the (sensual) appearance of the thing, never its (real) being.
This move converts the essential excess into an excessive essence. Harman takes the common essential feature of all things that cannot be encountered to be what things are in themselves, or essence as such. This is supposed to warrant the absolute distinction between the real and the sensual, insofar as it implies that whatever epistemic/causal contact there is with a thing must be contact with something other than what it really is. It thereby moves from localisation to isolation. However, this exploits the same equivocation as (iv), albeit in reverse, insofar as it makes sense of causal isolation in terms of epistemic isolation. While it is easy to understand withdrawal as the impossibility of direct epistemic access, it is much less clear how we are to understand independence as the impossibility of direct causal contact. There is a clear quantitative line from some access to no access, because we can intuitively grasp what it would be to completely fail to know anything about a thing despite seeming to; but there is no such clear line from some contact to no contact, because we cannot intuitively grasp what it would be to completely fail to activate any of a thing’s capacities, despite seeming to.
Of course, this is not how Harman conceives of independence. He bypasses the quantitative considerations involved in (i) to (iv) by treating that which underlies causal interaction as a unitary execution as opposed to a multiplicity of distinct capacities. The actualisation of capacities through causal contact is then treated as something qualitatively distinct from the independent substance which underlies them, much as the appearance of features through phenomenal access is treated as qualitatively distinct from the withdrawn essence which underlies them. This qualitative break is what divides execution and causation into distinct forms of actuality (modal tension) and activity (temporal tension). The equivocation between knowledge and causation thus disguises an illicit leap from quantitative to qualitative excess, along with the mysterian tensions it invokes.
The overall shape of this argument is thus another reductio ad absurdum of sorts. It begins by assuming that there is partial contact between objects, only to try to demonstrate that its essentially partial character implies the impossibility of any contact at all. It slides easily from quantity to quality on the back of Harman’s characteristic universalisation of intentional relation, but as with the argument from execution, this conceals problems that warrant rejecting the terms in which it is framed. However, there is a further aspect of the move from quantity to quality worth considering:
But the following objection to this theory often arises: why exaggerate and say that things cannot touch at all? Does it not seem instead that things partly make contact with each other? […] The problem is that objects cannot be touched ‘in part,’ because there is a sense in which objects have no parts.56
Harman is very insistent that withdrawal is complete. Our knowledge of things is not merely limited, but entirely inadequate. Objects are foreclosed to us. But here he presents the mereological missing link in his reasoning from quantitative excess to qualitative excess. It seems that he takes the idea that a whole is more than its parts to imply that the whole is entirely distinct from its parts, such that to know the parts is not to know the whole—not even partially, as it were. This is somewhat questionable, but it is not the whole story, since it only works if we treat the features and/or capacities of objects as if they are parts. This provides a path between (iv) and (v), but it is a highly dubious one.
The final argument, which I call the argument from identity, will require even more reconstruction than the argument from excess. This is because, although it is frequently invoked, it is usually presented without a detailed analysis of how it is supposed to work. Though it does appear in the context of the tool-analysis,57 usually in conjunction with some form of the argument from excess, it also appears independently,58 as the snappiest and most condensed statement of the case for withdrawal. The most explicit presentation it has so far received is in Harman’s criticism of James Ladyman and Don Ross’s Every Thing Must Go, which I will quote at length:
Let’s imagine that we were able to gain exhaustive knowledge of all properties of a tree (which I hold to be impossible, but never mind that for the moment). It should go without saying that even such knowledge would not itself be a tree. Our knowledge would not grow roots or bear fruit or shed leaves, at least not in a literal sense. Even in the case of God, the exhaustive knowledge of a tree and creation of a tree would have to be two separate acts. Now, it has sometimes been objected to this point that it is a straw man. After all, who confuses knowledge of a tree with an actual tree? The answer, of course, is that no one does, since no one could openly identify a thing with knowledge of it and still keep a straight face. Yet the point is not that people defend this view openly, which they do not. Rather, the point is that many people uphold a model of the real that entails that knowledge of a tree and a real tree would be one and the same, and hence their views are refuted by reductio ad absurdum. Namely, if someone holds that there is an isomorphic relationship between knowledge and reality, such that reality can be fully mathematized, then it also follows that a perfect mathematical model of a thing should be able to step into the world and do the labor of that thing. But this is absurd.59
The essence of this argument is the attempt to derive the impossibility of complete knowledge of a thing from the ontological distinction between a thing and our knowledge of it. Although it sometimes appears that this invocation of non-identity is an argument for withdrawal proper, it is really an argument for the epistemic component of premise (iii) of the argument from excess. The rejection of complete knowledge must then be leveraged into a rejection of partial knowledge, as is clear from the article just quoted, in which the above section finishes with a short appeal to the mereological component of the argument from excess discussed above.60
The inference from ontological distinction to the impossibility of complete knowledge once more takes the form of a reductio ad absurdum. The principle that underlies it is the claim that complete knowledge of a thing would somehow have to be identical to the thing, thereby contradicting ontological distinction. It is this principle which is nowhere given a detailed analysis, and which therefore we must reconstruct. The major problem we face here is that Harman’s use of the term ‘knowledge’ is never really backed up by an epistemology that could answer questions about the distinction between completeness and incompleteness, how this relates to the distinction between correctness and incorrectness, and whether knowledge of an object is composed of distinct representations. I have thus endeavoured to reconstruct the argument on the basis of reasonable assumptions about what Harman means by knowledge, the most important of which is that although Harman tends to simply talk about knowledge of an object as a unitary phenomenon (e.g., knowing a tree), the notion of completeness/incompleteness implies that this must be composed out of correct representations of distinct features of the object (e.g., its species, size, shape, colouration, location, etc.). I shall thus begin with some premises that codify this implicit epistemology:
(i) For any representation of an object to be correct, the object must in some sense be the same as it is represented as being: I know the tree is an elm only if I represent it as being an elm and the tree is actually an elm, or if the tree-for-me and the tree-in-itself are the same in the relevant respect.
(ii) For a composite representation of an object to be correct, every distinct piece of it must be correct: my representation of the tree will not amount to knowing the tree if I misrepresent its structure, despite correctly representing its species, or if there is a difference between the tree-for-me and the tree-in-itself.
(iii) For a composite representation of an object to be complete, it must be both correct and exhaustive: I know the tree completely only if there is no feature of the tree that is not accurately represented by some component of my representation of it as a whole.
From these premises it is then possible to infer the following claim:
(iv) For any knowledge of an object to be complete, the object-for-us and the object-in-itself must be the same in every respect.
We now only require Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles to reach the principle from which our contradiction is derived:
(v) For any knowledge of an object to be complete, the object-for-us and the object-in-itself must be identical.
This means that, as long as we have good reason to think that the object-for-us and the object-in-itself must be ontologically distinct, the reductio will work. Harman’s argument depends upon the self-evidence of this fact.
However, if we dig into this self-evidence, we will find that all is not as straightforward as it might initially seem. I take the intuitive basis for ontological distinction to be the conjunction of two ideas: what I’ll call the possibility of error and the necessity of identity. The former is the idea that for any representation to be a representation there must be a possibility of its being incorrect, because correctness makes no sense without the possibility of incorrectness. The latter is the generally accepted principle that if two things are identical it is not possible that they could have been distinct. If we add these to (v), we can derive ontological distinction by reductio ad absurdum. This is because, if the object-for-us and the object-in-itself were identical, then our knowledge of the object would be necessarily complete, and therefore its component representations would have to be infallible, thereby violating the possibility of error. However, the fact that this demonstration includes (v) should give us pause for thought. It indicates that there is something fishy about the connection between (v) and ontological distinction, something that should be pursued further. What it indicates is that (v) already has some ontological content. Some potentially questionable metaphysical assumptions have been snuck in via the back door.61
There is an illicit assumption concealed in (i) that only becomes explicit with the invocation of the identity of indiscernibles in inferring (v) from (iv). It all comes down to how the notion of sameness is interpreted. In order for the inference from (iv) to (v) to work—that is, in order for us to conclude that the object-for-us and the object-in-itself are identical from the fact that they must be the same in every respect—the uncontroversial idea that a correct representation must somehow represent the object as being the same as it actually is, must be converted into the much more controversial idea that a correct representation must somehow be the same as the object is. This means that correctly representing some feature of an object is interpreted as standing in some relation to another object that also possesses that feature. Knowing that the tree-in-itself is an elm involves standing in some curious relation to a tree-for-me that is an elm in precisely the same sense as the tree-in-itself. For the principle of the identity of indiscernibles to work, the object-for-us and the object-in-itself must not only be able to have the same features, they must also possess these features in the same sense. What this shows is that the argument from identity can contribute to the proof of withdrawal only if Harman is allowed to base his epistemology upon a metaphysical distinction (object-for-us/object-in-itself) closely resembling the distinction between the sensual object and the real object it is intended to demonstrate. The fact of a distinction between types of object is already given, even if its character is not.62 To call this epistemology idiosyncratic would be an understatement.
1. To give a representative example, in the collection Towards Speculative Realism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), 8 out of 11 essays contain truncated summaries of the tool-analysis.
2. Philosophy in the Making, 135–6.
3. Cf. Tool-Being, 38.
4. Ibid., 48–9.
5. Cf. Basic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 305; Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, tr. M. Heim (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 151–2.
6. Tool-Being, 270.
7. Heidegger’s criticism of presence is inexorably tied up with his critique of substance, at least in his most systematic presentations of it (cf. Introduction to Metaphysics).
8. See Section 2.2 n.5, above.
9. He even parodies this regress by way of a children’s sleepover game (Tool-Being, 27).
10. Cf. Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, §67.
11. Tool-Being, 41–2.
12. Cf. Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, part 2, chapters 3–6.
13. Tool-Being, 18–21.
14. This is a hermeneutic strategy that Brandom calls de re interpretation, as opposed to de dicto interpretation: the attempt to be faithful to the subject matter, rather than the words used to express it (Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead, chapter 1).
15. Another point to make here about Harman’s reading qua reading is that even if there were some evidence that Heidegger did see the tool-analysis in something resembling this way, then it would still be far-fetched, given the extent of the other aspects of Heidegger’s work it invalidates: theory, mood, space, time, etc. (cf. Tool-Being, §§4–7). Harman gives us a long list of features of his thought about which Heidegger can say nothing specific, despite his sincere and extensive attempts to do so. The sheer amount of Heidegger’s work that Harman’s reading disqualifies thus constitutes a pretty good reductio ad absurdum of it as a reading of Heidegger, even if we ignore the misunderstandings just discussed.
16. This is Harman’s own example (Tool-Being, 30–32).
17. For a further example of Harman’s attempt to universalise the as-structure in this way, see his discussion of tectonic plates towards the end of Tool-Being (221–2).
18. Tool-Being, 18.
19. Ibid., 18.
20. Ibid., 20.
21. It is also helped by an ambiguity in the sense of ‘reliance’, which can be read either as an intentional relation involving an expectation regarding whatever is relied upon, or as a matter of brute causal dependence.
22. Tool-Being, 20.
23. Ibid., 21.
24. No doubt some will claim that although there may indeed be degrees of awareness, this never amounts to complete awareness, and that this is sufficient to underwrite the putatively ‘absolute’ character of invisibility. This is a entirely separate argument, which I will deal with in the next subsection as the argument from excess.
25. Tool-Being, 18.
26. Ibid., 21.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 22.
29. Before withdrawing into itself, and disappearing in a puff of metaphysics.
30. It turns out to have been a puff of logic.
31. Tool-Being, 22–25.
32. Tool-Being, 33.
33. Ibid., 25, my emphasis.
34. Tool-Being, 32–3.
35. Ibid., 43.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 34.
39. Ibid., §4.
40. Tool-Being, 221.
41. Ibid., 229–30.
42. Ibid., 223.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 222.
45. Cf. Ibid., 285.
46. Cf. Ibid., 288.
47. Ibid., 229.
48. Ibid., 283.
49. Harman explicitly presents two unresolved paradoxes at the end of Tool-Being (287–8), but they are not the tensions I have outlined here, which emerge more sporadically throughout the work.
50. Cf. Tool-Being, 96, 98, 223; ‘A Fresh Look at Zuhandenheit’, in Towards Speculative Realism, 54–5; ‘The Revival of Metaphysics in Continental Philosophy’, in Towards Speculative Realism, 116–17.
51. Philosophy in the Making, 135–6.
52. Ibid., 135.
53. Ibid., 136.
54. ‘The Revival of Metaphysics in Continental Philosophy’, in Towards Speculative Realism, 117.
55. This is precisely how the arguments intertwine in Tool-Being (223).
56. The Quadruple Object (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), 73.
57. Cf. Tool-Being, 224; Philosophy in the Making, 136.
58. Cf. Guerrilla Metaphysics, 83, 103; Prince of Networks, 132; The Quadruple Object, 28, 73.
59. ‘I am also of the opinion that materialism must be destroyed’, in Society and Space, vol. 28 (2010), 788–9.
60. Ibid., 789.
61. It should be noted that to reject these questionable assumptions and the hasty proof of ontological distinction given above is not necessarily to reject the brute fact of ontological distinction. Another way of looking at the issue is to say that our knowledge (or its representational content) and its object are distinct by default, insofar as, pace Harman, the question of their identity simply cannot arise. To give a parallel example, Julius Caesar is distinct from the number 9 because, although we have procedures for determining whether numbers are identical, and whether people are identical, we have no procedures that cross the number/person divide. Similarly, we have ways of determining whether representational contents are identical (e.g., whether you and I are saying the same thing in speaking the same sentence), and these are not necessarily compatible with our procedures for identifying the objects they represent.
62. This is an interesting contrast to the way the distinction between types of object emerges in Tool-Being, which sees it as a consequence of his reconstruction of the tool-analysis, rather than something already implicit in the analysis (258–9). However, the argument of this particular section is suspect (essence must itself have essence, ad infinitum) and does not seem to be repeated in any of the subsequent work. We will discuss this further in chapter 3.4, subsection V.