Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything

Pelican Books #18

by Graham Harman

We humans tend to believe that things are only real in as much as we perceive them, an idea reinforced by modern philosophy, which privileges us as special, radically different in kind from all other objects. But as Graham Harman, one of the theory's leading exponents, shows, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) rejects the idea of human the world, he states, is clearly not the world as manifest to humans. "To think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but obligatory." At OOO's heart is the idea that objects—whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human, or non-human—are mutually autonomous. This core idea has significance for nearly every field of inquiry which is concerned in some way with the systematic interaction of objects, and the degree to which individual objects resist full participation in such systems. In this brilliant new introduction, Graham Harman lays out OOO's history, ideas, and impact, taking in art and literature, politics and natural science along the way. From Sherlock Holmes, unicorns, and videogames to Dadaism, Voltaire, and string theory, this book will change the way you understand everything.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Design, Art, Architecture, Metaphysics

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Graham Harman (born May 9, 1968) is a professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He is a contemporary philosopher of metaphysics, who attempts to reverse the linguistic turn of Western philosophy. He terms his ideas object-oriented ontology. A larger grouping of philosophers, Speculative Realism, includes Harman and the philosophers Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 1 out of 5]

Scamming the Scammers

I have a negative bias about the subject of this book. It takes its name from a computer programming technique (object-oriented programming, OOP) that was the Next Big Thing in the late 1980’s. At that time I was around many people who praised it and promoted it. But I could never get either a clear explanation from these folk about what OOP was or why it was superior to so-called procedural programming. It remains, for me, even today the densest form of nerd-talk abounding with neologisms that make Heidegger’s philosophy look like merely conversational chit-chat. So, that a group of philosophers would choose such a designation as Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) for their work is surprising and somewhat off-putting.

After reading this book, I have as much a grasp of OOO as I had of OOP. So I must start my comments with the author’s intention rather than anything more substantive in order to focus my remarks. What is the philosophical or practical issue that the book is meant to address? The philosophical issue he wants to address is epistemological: what counts as authentic knowledge? Practically, Harmon thinks that it will help us deal with the apparently growing problem of untruthfulness in democratic politics as demonstrated by the persistent popularity of Donald Trump and his cohorts. Specifically he wants to advise us all ”How we go about detecting the gap between knowledge and reality is one of the main concerns of this book.” I am mystified by this. His claim is obviously bombastic and certainly not something he has justified in the remainder of the book.

Like many other thinkers who are concerned with the enormity of today’s political mendacity, Harman does not want to compare what people say to the truth, which is an evidential state dependent upon facts which are in turn tendentiously selected in politics (or for that matter in any argument). That is, facts have to be weighed against one another; and their is no rational method for assigning weights. Instead, he wants to test political (and other) statements against what he calls reality. “Reality is the rock against which our various ships always founder, and as such it must be acknowledged and revered, however elusive it may be,” he says. His philosophical target is not relativism but idealism, by which I take him to mean the tendency to treat language as if it were things that are not-language. Harmon doesn’t trust language. Neither do I

I can understand Harman’s desire to escape from the pitfalls, flaws and scandals of language, to reach some external point from which to measure the authenticity and accuracy of what is said and written. Wouldn’t we all? But the inherent problem of course is obvious: it’s not possible to escape from language by using more language. Any attempt to do so simply digs the epistemological hole one starts in even deeper. Language is invincible. Even recognising that there is something called reality which is not-language demands to be expressed in words. Therefore the appeal to reality rather than truth as the test-bed for claims, statements, propositions, and promises is entirely vacuous as so many others have found before.

Harman nonetheless wants us to accept that OOO, in its rather monumental linguistic complexity, really does have a handle on this reality business. But he has a bizarre way of trying to convince us. For Harmon, reality is composed of a sort of bricolage of philosophical conceptions. Bits and pieces of thought, that is to say, language, taken from philosophers from Socrates to Heidegger and beyond. From this melange, he formulates what he thinks is the fundamental building block of the cosmos - not atoms, or quarks, or fields of various orientations, and certainly not strings, but rather The Object, which is immaterial, of no determinate size/function/quality, and essentially isolated from other objects in the manner of a Leibnizian Monad, a Platonic Form or a Peircean System. More analytically: “[A]n object is anything that cannot be entirely reduced either to the components of which it is made or to the effects that it has on other things.” Or, in short form, “an object is more than its pieces and less than its effects.” If that sounds vague, Harmon wants it that way because language can’t do it justice.

I admit that I don’t understand what Harmon’s ‘object’ is. This is disappointing and no doubt reflects an intellectual deficiency on my part. But my deficiency isn’t serious enough to prevent me noticing something crucial about Harman’s definition. It contains lots of words. It is therefore true (although not all that comprehensible) because it has been specified by these other words in a grammatically correct sentence. This thing he calls an object is, therefore, about as far removed from reality as any other philosophical conception. It is a definition which Harmon then imposes on the cosmos (including the hapless reader) and which he then claims as his standard of reality. Under all the hand-waving and bogus referencing of history, biology, economics, and any other intellectual fragments he can muster, he ends up with this? A reality constructed from immaterial Lego blocks by a closet arch-idealist who cuts off the branch of language he sits on and then acts like it’s still there?

Harmon seems to have lots of academic chips on his shoulder. The catalogue of things he finds objectionable in most sciences as well as in philosophy is long and varied. Their are few thinkers who escape his critical eye. He does remind me of the very passionate young nerds who were pushing Object-Oriented Programming back in the day - everyone else was wrong, the world was not as we thought, all existing ideas were passé. But at least they had something to sell - computer code doesn’t write itself. I can’t imagine who is in the market for what Harmon is trying to sell. Perhaps it’s the conspiracy theorists from QAnon and the Republican Party. Can you just see a television reporter challenging some Trump surrogate about stolen election claims on the basis that they don’t conform to a set of abstract philosophical objects with ghostly (sic) qualities? I think the gap between knowledge and reality has opened to the size of the Grand Canyon. Trump should love it just for its supply of alternative facts.

Postscript: I hesitated to include Harman’s ultimate conclusion in my remarks because I found it so intellectually embarrassing for the man. But on second thought, it really needs to be publicised lest my bias is thought the source of those remarks. This is his solution to the Trump problem:

“From a OOO perspective, there is no truth: not because nothing is real, but because reality is so real that any attempt to translate it into literal terms is doomed to failure. We can invoke knowledge against Trump’s deceptions and evasions, but only insofar as we adopt a new definition of knowledge that incorporates elusive real qualities rather than directly masterable sensual ones. None of us can point to an instrument that clearly displays global warming or the world refugee crisis on a luminous screen, as patent truths that compel specific strategies for dealing with these issues. What we can do, however, is hold the Trumps of the world accountable for taking no account of reality, by which I mean the genuine disturbances in our world that indicate that climate and refugee problems must somehow be incorporated into the body politic.”

That should stop Trump in his tracks alright. Redefine knowledge. Go beyond the palpable and measurable. Get those elusive qualities, those immaterialities, squarely on the table. What a contribution to philosophical and political thought! Quackery.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

After commenting in my last review that I like personal recommendations as the basis for reading classic fiction, here is an example of the opposite behaviour. I saw 'Object-Oriented Ontology' while browsing in the library and didn’t know what the title meant, but it was a cute little Pelican edition and I fancied a bit of philosophy, so I borrowed it. As it turns out, I’m not as wholly unfamiliar with the concept of object-oriented ontology as I thought, as I’ve come across Timothy Morton in this interview and The Ecological Thought. His work is contextualised by the new philosophical theory of object-oriented ontology in this succinct, lucid, and thought-provoking book.

OOO, as it abbreviates itself, is supposedly pronounced as ‘triple O’, however I continually read it as a ghostly ‘oooooooo’. The tone of the book is somewhat argumentative without being aggressive, in fact defensive might be a better term. The author is very conscious of OOO running counter to dominant currents in academic and popular philosophy, and as a consequence a fair chunk of the book details what it isn’t, rather than what it is. If, like me, you are fairly unfamiliar with current academic debates in the discipline of philosophy, this is actually quite helpful. Creating a straw woman to explain what constitutes a ‘theory of everything’ worked less well for me. Apart from anything else, why should a single theory explain everything? That seems like an unnecessarily difficult task to set yourself. On the other hand, I appreciated the references to current politics (Trump, inevitably) and repeated complaints about Slavoj Žižek. Harman is an infinitely clearer writer, I must say. While I found something invigorating in the sheer difficulty of reading Žižek, there wasn’t a lot of substance beneath the relentless verbiage. While that may be a failure of comprehension on my part, I can say with confidence that he was just talking garbage with the Trump is a liberal stuff.

In any event, Harman may not have instantly converted me into an OOO evangelist but he taught me a new and very interesting way of thinking about ontology. This is impressive in part because I’ve always had great difficulty recalling what ontology means; it’s one of those words that always came unmoored in the dictionary of my memory. Now it seems to have stuck, which is great, and I have some grasp on what realist philosophy and flat ontology are. The writing is reassuringly sensible and intentionally non-academic, clearly written for as wide an audience as possible. As a result, I found some very perceptive insights that transcend the topic of OOO and invite wider consideration. A couple of examples follow.

More generally, conservatives and progressives tend to debate too much whether human nature is fixed or malleable, as if human nature were the primary factor in politics.

That is such a good point! OOO’s emphasis on non-human objects having equal importance to humans is a helpful counterpoint to the endless debates on how humans are. Apart from anything else, I don’t think human nature can be reduced to one or several simple maxims, and for another humans exist among objects, many of which we created ourselves. Considering how these objects shape behaviour at the individual and collective levels has a lot more relevance to the problems of today than debating whether we are inherently selfish. Another nuanced point:

By contrast, OOO is inclined to think that every reality supports multiple types of knowledge, but not an infinite number. More concretely, there may be five or six ways to different interpret a medical condition, and a similar half-dozen ways to approach a political dilemma, interpret Hamlet, or follow Emmanuel Kant with a new philosophy of one’s own. The customary postmodernist jump from one truth to infinite truths misses the more interesting option of a finite plurality of them.

The implications of this are then taken further when Timothy Morton’s specific work is under discussion in a subsequent chapter:

This leads Morton to a fine insight about how very large finite amounts of anything are somehow more threatening than supposed infinite amounts of the same thing. For these ‘gigantic timescales [of hyperobjects] are truly humiliating in the sense that they force us to realise how close to Earth we are. Infinity is far easier to cope with. Infinity brings to mind our cognitive powers…’ And later on the same page: ‘There is a real sense in which it is far easier to conceive of “forever” than a very large finitude. Forever makes you feel important. One hundred thousand years makes you wonder whether you can imagine one hundred thousand anything.’

A dichotomy of single/infinite is not often questioned, so I found this a powerful point. Morton’s concept of hyperobjects is especially relevant in ecological contexts, unsurprisingly given his focus on them. To me, infinity implies beyond meaningful human influence, which in an environmental context encourages fatalism. A very large, very complicated, but finite problem is more alarming because it poses a challenge that may or may not be possible to deal with. Infinity can only be shrugged at; vastness requires sustained attention and effort.

I also found new insight into semiotics via Harman’s critique of Derrida:

OOO’s account of the metaphorical and the literal is completely different from Derrida’s. Though we agree with him that there is no literal access to the thing-in-itself, we do not agree that this is because no thing-in-itself exists. For us, the difference between the metaphorical and the literal has to do with whether the bond between the object and its qualities is successfully severed (metaphorical) or whether the object is loosely or explicitly identified with those qualities (literal).
[…]
The situation as Derrida sees it is that everything that exists refers immediately to something else that exists: ‘from the moment there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.’ Here he is too quick to equate ‘we only think in signs’ with ‘there are nothing but signs’, as if the realm of being were one and same as the realm of thinking. […] The argument, in short, is that we never reach some final thing that shines in ‘luminous presence’, therefore everything must be a sign. What Derrida never considers is the OOO option: that signs do have an ultimate signified whose nature is precisely not to become present.

This implies that belief in the thing-in-itself is a matter of faith. In an OOO world, it is by definition forever beyond direct human perception. This plethora of references to the thing-in-itself also reminded me of the philosophical sci-fi thriller The Thing Itself, a unique and very entertaining riff on Kant (surely an unusual combination of words to find in a sentence).

‘Object-Oriented Ontology’ is definitely worth picking up if you spot it on the library shelves, as it provides a refreshing insight into current philosophical debates. It has undoubtedly encouraged me to seek out more of Timothy Morton’s work.

[Campbell Rider]

homie should focus more on getting some knobject-oriented gobtology imo

[Zoonanism · Rating 2 out of 5]

A sad effort to concoct something novel. Graham Harman writes clearly and this allows one to see the absolute pointlessness of OOO. We can follow his recommendation and consider an object 'everything which cannot be reduced to its parts and which is less than it's effects' and that consideration will leave everything as it was. It is a harmless effort and the chapter on aesthetics has a clever meditation on the asymmetry of metaphors. A better title for this cutely designed pelican paperback can be: a non-theory of nothing in particular.

[path · Rating 3 out of 5]

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is a theory of reality that, after a Kantian fashion, thinks of reality as being inaccessible to us (258). It’s not just the things-in-themselves or the noumenal objects that Kant envisioned but all objects (69). Not just the noumenal concept of Eyeglasses, but the very pair of eyeglasses next to me on the table. “There is no direct knowledge of anything” (52). This is not to say, however, that our lives and actions are not grounded in reality, just that reality is unavailable to us for direct acquisition of truth. When we try, we err by either reducing objects to what they are composed of (i.e., “undermining” [41]) or treating objects as the sum of their effects (i.e., “overmining” [47]). Or we do both. Using literal language to describe an object, a hallmark of analytic philosophical work is entirely misguided (37). At best, we can only understand reality “indirectly” (7), through aesthetic means, metaphors most notably (66), which have their own syntax (86-89).

Readers of Bruno Latour will recognize a form of this thinking in his work on Actor-Network Theory (ANT). This is because, like OOO, ANT is based on a flat ontology in which humans and non-humans are ontological equivalents. Neither is more object-like than the other. Both are equally capable of combining with other objects into new, emergent objects. The main difference between OOO and ANT is that where ANT sees things in the world as actions (i.e., networks of [re]enacted relations) OOO sees them only as objects. So, where ANT might see a family as a network of continually re-enacted relationships (i.e., as an ongoing action) OOO would see that depictions the object as a form of “overmining” or reducing the object to the sum of its relations. (Note: to “undermine” goes in the opposite direction: a family is comprised of these constituent parts …). To the object-oriented ontologist, a family may be a collection of “real objects” (i.e., the individuals) with “real qualities” that we relate to each other via a “sensual object” (i.e., the family) with its own “sensual qualities.” Real objects and qualities are those experienced in space. Sensual object and qualities are those experienced in time (81). Time and space are also Kant’s two essential media of experience through which we can have phenomenal experience that is conceptually relatable to the noumena. In OOO, however, even the objects around us retreat from knowability because, as Harman invokes from Heidegger — (human) being is in time.

Sensual objects are just as consequential as real object but they are more ontologically complicated. Take the example of a family and imagine a photo of five people against a blank background. The photo might depict a family but “family” is not a quality observable in the photo. We might see a similar of facial features but not “family” per se. And yet, “family” is a real, felt thing.

I can’t say that I really get the importance of seeing things as objects instead of actions except that Harman believes the former doesn’t reduce objects to their relations to other objects. Harman draws his example from Latour’s Pasteurization of France to ask what would become of the germ theory of disease if Pasteur was removed from the network. As an object, Pasteur is both more and less than his role in the network. Latour gets around this problem by noting that with enough actors already aligned in a network, removing one piece may not disrupt the whole. Instead new pathways form to survive the trial of strength. After a certain arrangement of data from battlefield surgeons, observations of livestock, and reports of post-surgical care, enough of the right actors would be in place for the germ theory that some actor would have served the role of Pasteur even if it wasn’t Pasteur. I sense that Harman doesn’t find this argument satisfying (144), but it seems equally plausible as the explanation coming out of OOO.

Neither to I really get the importance of perceiving the combination of objects as a new, merged object instead of perceiving it in terms of how the objects relate to one another (e.g., A is related to B is related to C = a family). I suppose that the latter feels more like a natural fit to common language and the rules of ordinary syntax, which is why he calls the merged object “family” as a sensual object with its own emergent qualities (134) that are not accounted for in the parts or in their relationships to each other (31). That’s probably it, but this gets to my main complaint about the book, which is that there is too little argumentation in this book about OOO theory, its premises and its perspectives, and there is a whole lot of “this is what OOO isn’t” (150-193) and “we’re not associated with these scholars” (197-217) and “people who say this just don’t get it.” That’s all fine, but I need to know what is being defended before I can even appreciate differentiating it from what it isn’t. That seems like a big let down, especially if this book is attempting to be for a general reading audience.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harman has done alot for speculative realism, and his writing is clear and accessible for philosophy. In putting his thought together, however, I begin to see how much I personally diverge from the Object Oriented Ontology side and reconfirm myself firmly on the more materialist wing of speculative realism. This was probably not the intention of the author.

I greatly enjoyed reading this book and am appreciative of all the author has done, but I cannot help but feel that an inability to escape from Heidegger means having to wrestle with his lingering anthropocentrism even in this explicitly anti-anthropocentric work. I feel that western philosophy needs to decouple itself from only looking at other western philosophies when tackling these issues and that an attempt to find a philosophical theory of everything can smack of monotheism-something that we should reject.

Meillassoux's idea that the laws of the universe can change with time matches nearly perfectly with physicist Lee Smolin's contrarian take on the universe and his push for natural philosophy to come back to science, but it also seems that many in the speculative turn have yet to make this connection (from what I have read myself so far)

All that aside, I still heavily recommend this book as a necessary and interesting text to anyone following these trends in contemporary philosophy.

[Kenny · Rating 1 out of 5]

If I could give this book 0 stars I would do so unhesitatingly. Harman fails to exhibit even the barest iotas of philosophical rigour or charity. His readings of other philosophers, where they (and this is indeed a rarity) display even a pitiable modicum of accuracy fail without exception in their targeted criticisms. Most upsetting of all is that in the midst of his misreadings and poorly posed criticisms, Harman and his cabal can simply retreat behind these farcical notions of 'hyperbolic reading' and 'rhetorical philosophy' to justify their lack of intellectual honesty.
Most often, when one ought to avoid a philosophy book it is simply because one can gain nothing from reading it. On this occasion one runs the risk of actually having lost something by the time they finish the book.

[Jere · Rating 1 out of 5]

Harman is a distressingly popular self-obsessed charlatan

ross wolfe gets it: https://thecharnelhouse.org/2011/05/2...

[Tvrtko Balić · Rating 2 out of 5]

Graham is a smart guy and this isn't terrible, but I also certainly wouldn't say it was good either. It starts off very ambitiously, even the title seems so over the top, "A New Theory of Everything", but the author is completely serious. At the beginning of the book he describes the quest of physicists to find a theory of everything only to dismiss it because it says nothing about fictional characters. There's a bit more to it than that, but Graham gives the most basic criticism of materialism and acts like he has shaken the very core of modern science and can offer an answer for life, the universe and everything. That is not a good start and it doesn't get any better. He dismisses various theories way too easily. I find myself enjoying his descriptions of other thinkers he throws in here and there, but he often just accepts it that certain notions are absurd and moves on. And what he proposes in the end I don't see as particularly revolutionary. He did not come up with a theory of everything, he just came up with a way of describing relations between objects. He criticizes analytic philosophers, but doesn't go far enough to realize he is stuck in the same language games and in the end I don't see why his system couldn't just be a modification of some other ontology, Leibniz is the one that came to mind most often. There's something worth exploring in this book, but it's not a theory of everything and treating it like it is ruins it. In the end I can't tell if Harman is smart and he decided that a boring book on ontology wouldn't sell so he decided to spice it up or if he is really narcissistic.

[Michael Sussman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was eagerly anticipating this book, but ultimately found it disappointing. I feel that Harman took a defensive approach, spending far too much of the text fending off attacks and differentiating OOO from other philosophical approaches, rather than clearly laying out the tenets and implications of this interesting approach to understanding the world.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are at least two ways of approaching a book like this - as a 'good faith' work offering a popular version of academic philosophy (in this case Object-Oriented Philosophy or OOO) and as a 'phenomenon'. The first can be critiqued by other reviewers better than I.

To treat the book seriously as philosophy requires a depth of engagement and usage of time that, frankly, the book does not inspire me to undertake. Its analysis (and its tangential obscurities) may require to be challenged but can only be challenged 'professionally' in the form they are presented.

It is the 'phenomenon' that I want to deal with. Why, at this point in history, was a major publisher willing to invest in this particular book and what may it say about the situation we are in. Philosophy is a fashion product like many others and this one clearly has a 'market'.

It reads as if it is seeking such a market. Initially it is clear and even persuasive. It then goes into analytical philosophical mode that requires serious effort (to the point that most otherwise well educated people are going to be embarrassed by their inability to 'get it').

From there, it closes with what amounts to a sales pitch for a school of philosophy in which the author has clearly invested himself heavily over a long period of time, a pitch clearly directed at a particular class of person - the modern urbanised Western liberal intellectual.

In the interstices of this project lies a politics, sometimes made quite explicit but mostly implicit or even just hinted at, one closely associated with that same target market, a loose non-analytical implication of beliefs centred on a shared aestheticisation of shared liberal (US sense) norms.

All philosophies may be useful steps to a perhaps unattainable 'truth' but they are also perspectives embedded in the psychologies not only of their proponents but of their class and 'civilisation'. OOO simply seems more obviously so than many which is why I think we should be wary of it.

We should not, of course, be over-wary. There is a sincere 'good faith' alternative ontological perspective here that requires taking seriously even when, especially when, one is not persuaded that its 'newness' is a guarantor of its meaningfulness.

The politics is more 'occult'. It is only occasionally explicit in the book but it is there. We need to tease out OOO's potential implications for our society if it ever got a real hold (although I suspect it is too abstruse for that in its pure form). Those implications might be worrying to some.

On the other hand, simply reconstructing our perspective on reality to suit the interests of a battered Western educated liberal class may help reinforce the walls of its fortresses but it does nothing to change the fact of the hordes outside and the collapse of morale within.

OOO in this book seems to manage (in accordance with one interpretation of its meaning) to hover uneasily between academic philosophy and something close to a proto-ideology. Its critique of existing ideology seems to be a clearing of space for a new ideology.

In all such cases, we have to ask what gap does it fill and what is it trying to sweep away. Harmon is good on that. But we also have to ask whether the gap is a gap in thought or ideology and what social forces require that gap to be filled and why.

OOO strikes me as very much a 'fashion product', a creature of its time, attempting to meet the needs of part of an educated class out of its depth and looking for an intellectual saviour. The tone is of a 'sales pitch' in the eternal academic game of philosophical one-upmanship.

The rare but important references to Trump and climate change (in the UK, it would be Brexit) merely hint at its potential ideological use-value but those references may help us to see why the philosophy has shot out of the Academy to get a major publisher interested in it.

It is striking that Harman gives up the ghost on any attempt to try to counter new populist trends in politics through traditional Enlightenment-derived critiques. He knows that battle is lost and, instead, tries to forge new weapons by marrying analytical and continental philosophy.

Sometimes he is highly persuasive. There are flaws in Western philosophical thought that OOO exposes and his objections to the easy acceptance of dubious assumptions are well within the task of the professional philosopher. It is what he puts in its place that can seem equally dubious.

Cynically one might say that the liberal mind has looked at the divisions in its own ranks and demanded discipline, a partial return to Plato and Aristotle (via Heidegger's critique and clearly owing a great deal to Latour), in order to restore order. Harman certainly offers discipline.

Harmon seems to want to appropriate the whole Western philosophical tradition in order to subvert it from within. To dismiss the 'modern' in good part in order to reconstruct a radical philosophical perspective from the ground up. There is nothing wrong with that. It is creative.

He uses analytical methods in the context of continental philosophical questions to get his cake and to eat it - to have the weight of traditional authority in place for a subversive vision of being detached from Man the observing and conscious animal.

OOO is thus on a potential roll as a tool or weapon - a potential intellectual equivalent to Russia's hypersonics - in the age-old struggle between 'civilisation' and 'barbarism'. Its potentially de-humanising equivalence of all possible objects (things) in the world clears the decks for battle.

One senses a conservative pessimism lurking in minor key being transformed into justification for liberal action. It is not blatant but Harman clearly admires Latour's turn towards (liberal) moralism on a bedrock of an understanding of what Harman calls Power Politics.

Latour seems to abandon the idea of there being political knowledge with great ease and moves to a position of issues and coalitions that is precisely identical to the practical politics of the Western liberal-left. It is a politics that had become hegemonic before the crisis of 2016.

The OOO political philosophy (which seems more detached from the actual ontology than Harman allows us to see) strikes me as an intensification of liberal-left tactics and ideology despite these having failed to deliver anything of true substance except more jobs for the educated classes.

The point is to ensure that this culture of the Western intelligensia remains hegemonic against the threats from populism and what is defined as foreign authoritarianism ... by, if necessary, embracing a justification by hook or by crook of a new liberal authoritarianism based on 'issues'.

Climate Change, Trump, Remain, Diversity, Nato and so forth ... these are all 'issues' that unite around a political and intellectual class shoring up walls to keep out the savages despite those walls crumbling from ineptitude and past neglect. Perhaps OOO is to come to the rescue!

Perhaps the jump from a human-centred ideology to an ideology of all objects in the world being equal is a useful way to dish both communitarian nationalists (unless they are Ukrainian, of course) and working class Leftists.

For, after all, the main aim of politics, surely, is to ensure that the vast over-supply of graduates in the market and the huge educational apparats all have jobs and incomes higher than the uneducated and that the values that bind them as a class remain hegemonic for ever.

Yet, although pre-dating speculative realism and its tendency towards nihilism, OOO seems haunted by despair even if its response is to adopt an existentialist front in order to redirect humanity (meaning the educated liberal intelligensia) to their own salvation.

It certainly helps to clarify a confusion in politics - the Left as we have always understood it is almost dead in the West with half its clothing stolen by authoritarian rivals to liberal democracy and the other half crushed under the weight of progressivism and liberalism.

Yet conservatives persist in confusing the terms liberal and Left. OOO simply disposes of the Left as it has traditionally been understood as a way of seeing derived from the Scientific Enlightenment and replaces it with an implicit 'occult' justification for liberal authoritarianism.

If aesthetics (art), nature (the planet) and ideas in themselves are of equal ontological status to persons, then, of course, some persons (those the real Left were interested in) can be told that their economic demands are secondary to 'values' and 'the planet', problems defined by the hegemons.

It is no accident that its heroes are poets, architects and artists, that its stance is fundamentally 'aesthetic' and that it makes a nod indirectly to Plato and his 'guardians'. These are the sub-Randian creatures who believe that their creativity is truth and truth is to impressed on others.

The abandonment of a perfectly justifiable anthropocentrism by our apex predator species is an act of despair, of course, but it becomes necessary for a significant minority of anthropoi to present the totality of existence as prior in order to ensure their priestly functions and access to resources.

I suppose I too can be creative in marrying the analyses of Nietzsche in the 'Genealogy of Morals' with the insights of Marx and Engels and so create a counter-ideology to that of twenty-first century late liberal capitalist 'bourgois pessimism'.

If it is only a short jump from philosophy to ideology, it is a similar short jump from ideology to religion. The battered graduate classes who expect to rule by divine right are badly in need of something like a faith - pessimism about existence and ritual action to placate (whatever).

OOO does not go so far and I have spun off in a direction that the contents of the book do not justify as a criticism of it and yet ... and yet, one can see the seeds in OOO of a desperate need to make sense of a world in chaos more than a need to understand the world as it actually is.

Architects and artists today, in particular, live in a half world between left-liberal values and the struggle for survival in a liberal-capitalist economy. They are obligated to innovate but most innovate along lines that appeal to the 'market'. OOO may help fill their needs as a new Idea.

OOO's commitment to giving aesthetics primacy over everything, including ethics, has not been seen since the fascists drew that lesson inappropriately out of Nietzsche. Aesthetics is neat because while ethics soon finds itself bogged down in futility, aesthetics can disregard all crimes.

The aestheticisation of ontology and its broad spread and faux-equality under OOO manages to remove responsibility from individual human relations and towards 'issues' and abstractions now privileged as 'things in themselves'.

The mechanics of politics is simply the holding of office in order to do aesthetic big things and create coalitions of issues managed (or manipulated) through like-minded media. It ceases to be what is most fruitful, the struggle of individuals, interests, classes and even nations.

Dropping the anthropocentric principle in ontology may have some considerable abstract meaning but applying that abstraction to 'really existing humans' and we start to go down a dark road where Ideas, Causes, Issues and Coalitions dictate terms to populations who, of course, turn to 'populism'.

This is not to say that there is not merit in Harmon's perspective. At times he is persuasive. But the game here may not be 'truth' (that slippery term) but sufficient truth to buttress a pessimistic, unstable and insecure Western culture with the tools for its own fight-back against populist reality.

I was struck (in the discussion of politics) with the barely concealed frustration at the liberal intelligentsia losing too many battles (the book was published in 2018) and looking for a harder-edged Straussian/Schmittian solution to its problems while rejecting their particular formulations.

The result is an endorsement of the issues-based and coalitional politics implied by Latour and of the methods of the liberal activist class (and its artists) in trying to exert hegemony over populations. OOO is an after the fact philosophical justification of a new form of Power Politics.

This Power Politics is actually a class politics, not of the middle class as such but of a sort of lumpen-bourgeoisie based in the universities, media, influencer networks in both private and public sector, foundations and so forth. It is like the Buddhist priestly class in ancient Japan.

Its purpose is to promote not the Idea (as in Idealism) but a network of ideas that become an ideology of social hegemony centred on this class's need to maintain and increase public spending on 'culture' and increase its presence in the private sector. Values maintenance is survival.

It becomes a 'mass', centred on the cities and so capable of more effective organisation than rural or small town areas, but it lacks a cohesive philosophy since Marxism and the Enlightenment are tainted and 'post-modernism' is too fragmented and can incline, in fact, to futile action.

Perhaps OOO wants to fill that gap. It is undoubtedly cohesive. It may be pessimistic at core but it is activist. It is inclusive (a vital requirement for coalitional politics). It implies the superiority of its own kind of thinker over all others.

There is a rather odd long section on the American Civil War where Harman, undoubtedly a very good philosopher within the Western academic tradition, suddenly fancies himself as an historian and attempts to shoehorn past reality into his theory.

Any decently trained historian would demur. His account of the American Civil War proves to be suggestive and interesting but far too neat, falling into that classic fallacy of thinking that we can tell the truth of the past as simply our retrospective analysis.

But it is the sociology of OOO that fascinates - a philosophical movement that is attractive to poets and artists is a philosophy attractive to people who have lost the ability to contest populist claims and promote their own. They desperately need a theory that enables them to make a stand.

OOO perhaps now 'thinks' it provides that theory, re-positioned as philosophy and on the very edge of ideology. It may prove so to those it is intended to serve - a beleagured 'guardian class' besieged in its intellectual fortresses by existentialist cynicism. That does not make it true, merely useful.

This is not to say the book is not worth reading. Far from it. There is merit in Harman's perspective. There are some good ideas. Some of those other OOO-related philosophers that he discusses at end of the book look even more interesting and worth studying.

If you can get past the now-necessary eco-guff (in some cases) Bogost, Bryant, Morton, Bennett and Garcia may each have something significant to offer in shifting our perspective on 'reality' even if the general movement seems to be towards a pessimistic anti-humanism.

But the denial of the anthropocentric is not merely wrong-headed but sinister. It is one thing to say that sustainability is rational to protect our species (which is almost certainly true) but it is another to consider all non-human objects of equal status to the observing human consciousness.

It is almost as if our culture had been infiltrated by acolytes of the Elder Gods, diminishing us in favour of a vast universe of equal things. It feeds the depressive nature of the activist who acts only to avoid thinking about the futility or irrationality of his action but it is also dangerously religious.

After all, the priestly castes of the past, whose thought was based on self-negation and some future state whether of heaven or nirvana, are a variant of our species that never dies off. OOO threatens to provide a similar philosophy of simultaneous negation and ritual group action in the world.

For those of us who are actually more grounded in 'sufficient reality' - real time human consciousnesses inventing and manipulating what is to hand - the idea that OOO might give a stronger intellectual base to young activists detached from that reality should fill us with gloom.

The book certainly may bear a second reading to master the analytical thinking Harman offers although one should be instinctively suspicious of anything that frames reality in analytical terms and then seems to deny the primacy of the human observer as analytical definer of that 'reality'.

In short, Harman over-sells his offer as a theory of everything while being another useful addition to the questioning of reality. The new perspectives are intriguing but they are still only ways of seeing. 'Reality' continues to elude us. OOO is an answer but not the answer.

The impossible question is generally answered not by philosophy but by ideology because, ultimately, 'reality' is just a word and an experience and the word is just a tool or a weapon in the hands of those engaged in existential struggles for power.

[Emiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harman weet op heldere wijze het gedachtegoed van OOO uiteen te zetten en te positioneren binnen een bredere context van verschillende ontologische stromingen. Hoewel ik na het lezen achter blijf met vragen en mij überhaupt afvraag in hoeverre ik het met Harman eens ben, vond ik het boek erg prikkelend.

(eigenlijk 3,5 ster, maar ik rond naar boven af omdat ik oneens ben met veel van de negatieve reviews :) )

[Morgan Blackledge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) challenges the anthropocentric focus of traditional philosophy.

In other words.

OOO decenters HUMAN experience.

FLAT ONTOLOGY

OOO assumes that all objects, whether living or non-living, exist on the same ontological level.

OOO rejects the hierarchical distinctions between objects, promoting the idea that all objects have equal ontological status.

OOO extends the concept of agency to all objects, suggesting that everything from rocks to rivers possesses a form of agency that deserves philosophical/ethical consideration.

QUADRUPLE OBJECTS

OOO introduces the idea of the quadruple object, which includes four aspects:

1. real objects
2. sensual objects
3. real qualities
4. sensual qualities.

OOO uses the quadruple object to articulate the complexity of objects and their relationships.

Example: A Tree

Tree as Real Object:
The tree itself, with its unique essence and existence, independent of any observer.

Tree as Sensual Object:
The tree as it is seen and experienced by an observer, including its shape, color, and texture.

The Trees Real Qualities:
The intrinsic properties of the tree, such as its biological structure, genetic makeup, and other qualities that define its essence but are not fully accessible through perception.

The Trees Sensual Qualities:
The observable characteristics, such as the greenness of its leaves, the roughness of its bark, and the sound of its rustling leaves, as experienced by someone sitting under it.

OOO emphasizes that the real object and its real qualities are only indirectly accessible, or completely inaccessible via direct experience.

We can’t directly experience the trees DNA.

We can only know about it via abstraction.

We can only directly experience and interact with the sensual object and its sensual qualities.

OOO makes this distinction to highlight the depth and complexity of the objects existence independent and beyond human perception.

METAPHOR

Metaphor takes on a unique role in OOO.

Harmon argues that metaphor is not just a linguistic device, but rather a philosophical process that reveals the hidden realities.

OOO views metaphors as a way to gain access to the real qualities of real objects. OOO posits that metaphors bridge the gap between our perception (sensual qualities) and the object’s deeper reality (real qualities).

OOO assumes that metaphors are not just about finding similarities but also about creating new ways of understanding. They are acts of ontological creativity that generate new meanings and connections. This creative process is crucial in OOO, as it underscores the dynamic and relational nature of objects.

Example: “Time is a River”

This metaphor doesn’t directly describe time but provides a creative way to understand its real qualities of relentless flow and continuity.

Importantly: metaphors are not bidirectional.

You can’t play them in reverse.

Example: “A River is Time”.

It just doesn’t make metaphorical sense.

POLITICS

OOO rejects the conventional LFET/RIGHT political binary. OOO adds TRUTH/POWER.

TRUTH POLITICS are primarily concerned with the TRUTH (as in real objects/qualities).

POWER POLITICS are primarily concerned with obtaining and maintaining POWER regardless of the TRUTH. As such POWER POLITICS tends to value the SENSUAL (objects/qualities).

RIGHT WING TRUTH POLITICS might include Dick Cheney’s approach to “strategic resource management”. It assumes a pragmatic stance and disregards the optics. Duty calls. Dirty jobs.

LEFT WING TRUTH POLITICS might include Barak Obama’s bank bailouts. It’s was a REAL BAD LOOK. But the consequences were worse.

RIGHT WING POWER POLITICS might include Newt Gingrich’s assertion that he would go with public sentiments over the truth. Not to mention Trump and Kellyanne Conway’s alternative facts.

LEFT WING POWER POLITICS might include the CLINTONS (if you can include them as left wing).

POST-HUMANISM

OOO is one of many variations on philosophical post-humanism (PPH).

PPH is a vast topic.

But generally speaking.

Some (not all) PPH rejects anthropomorphism.

Much of PPH decenters Human existence.

PPH deconstructs the very notion of humanity.

PPH attempts to reboot ethics to include nonhuman life.

And even no living things.

OOO/PPH has implications for various fields, including art, literature, and architecture.

And REALLY big implications for ecology.

Graham Harman's OOO offers a radical shift in philosophical thinking, advocating for the importance of objects and their inherent properties. By placing objects at the center of ontology and recognizing their independence from human perception, OOO levels the human headed hierarchy and provides a framework for understanding the complexity and diversity of the a POST ANTHROPOCENTRIC world.

[Rosewater Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Труд совершенно случайно был выхвачен из Сети, но при предшествующем намерении «почитать что-то приближенное к настоящему дню» - ни об авторе, ни об онтологии такого сорта слышать конкретных вещей не приходилось. Как оказалось, в коллекции таки имеется его работа по Хайдеггеру (доселе не изученная), но только после прочтения данной книги у Хармана появилась собственная папка с пометкой «(1968-)».
Теперь к содержанию.
Автор говорит об «обычности» выступления знания наравне с истиной. Но обычность равноценна «временной приемлемости» в контексте непрерывного развития науки (или лучше - безграничного развёртывания постижения). То есть если знание выступает на определённом этапе, вне зависимости от того, сколь продолжительным с точки зрения всей предшествующей истории он является – нельзя считать неоспоримым утверждение, что так пребудет вовеки. В конце концов, «много раз повторённая ложь становится правдой» - крайне актуальная на сегодняшний день поговорка. А истина в большинстве традиций понимается в качестве противоположения лжи или лучше - того, что предвещает и предвосхищает следующее за ней по пятам заблуждение (если только не считать заблуждение - противоположением лжи).
В этом русле можно рассудить опасность идеализма в сравнении с релятивизмом: если взять первое как проявление истины, второе - как симптом знания.
Таким образом, ООО-реальность может истолковываться как «лекарство и от знания и от истины» - но не прекращение исследования. Реальность представляется исследованием:
а) того, что не является реальностью;
б) того, что принадлежит реальности;
в) того, что не может или может стать частью реальности;
г) того, что находится в становлении реальностью;
в этом отношении само становление принадлежит ли реальности? Или же становление, разумно предположить, сохраняет свою природу объекта в границах ООО?
Но эти самые «границы», следовательно, выступают отдельным объектом: а в данном случае речь о нескольких границах – отделяющих ООО от прочих теорий, оставляющих возможность одностороннего воздействия, размывающихся, когда это необходимо сторонникам либо оппонентам ООО, онтологических, самоповторяющихся (а именно – границах, находящихся в том же становлении, «научных», обречённых на непрерывное доказательство собственной функциональности в качестве объекта-границы); число границ в этом смысле будто предопределено к постоянному увеличению.
Далее, Харман в введении называет досократиков научными предшественниками философического Сократа. Но за счёт чего Сократ приобретает право зваться «первым философом»?
А дело в том, что сам термин «философия», как известно, переводится «любовью к мудрости»; то есть, по мнению автора, мудрость рождается из любви к ней, а философия - из недостижимости любви к мудрости (по причине ли природной глупости философа?). Если человек отказывается от поиска начала начал (по мнению Хармана & imho) внимание обращается на окружающие его объекты, постепенно приобретающие опору в сознании, самостоятельность, исключаемую из свойств объектов предшествующими этапами сознавания. Конечно, надо уточнить, что самостоятельность не является свойством, если придерживаться суждений ООО.
Но что если непросвещённый читатель слегка развернёт вопрос и задаст его таким образом: нуждается ли любовь к мудрости в термине, определение которому даётся и поныне? Если нет философии, то нет и философа, но означает ли это конец мышления, спекуляции, метафоры, в конце концов, метафизики? Необходимо ли мыслителю проговаривать свою любовь к отвлечённой сущности (с помощью отождествления своих умозаключений и исторической\категорической верстки) или достаточно испытать её «взаимность», как это, безусловно, удалось Фалесу, Гераклиту, Анаксимандру, Демокриту?
Однако «не все отношения и связи предполагают взаимность» - и спор с этим, по моему мнению тоже, будет доказательством дурного вкуса.
Как и синонимичность онтологии с метафизикой, философия и мудрость соотносятся именно так, дабы избежать возможных посяганий на самостоятельность одной из представляющихся Харману хрупкими сфер.
Наблюдение о поспешном различении, присущем «новой философии» верно лишь отчасти, imho - фоном тотальному разнообразию служит желание контроля на гуманистических/демократических/анархистских началах. Та же многовариантность (а не просто вариативность) раскрываемых естественными и социальными науками свойств остаётся в границах доминирования предшествующего и в развитии\определении объекта.
Во II главе Харман говорит о том, что «искусство разрешает либо запрещает» тем или иным собственным элементам принимать участие в современной ей социо-политической картине. Но в чём состоит запрет или разрешение, например, упоминаемой позже «Герники»? Запрет ли аналогии либо повторения? Не находятся ли запрет и разрешение в прямой зависимости от тех обстоятельствах, в контексте коих они приобретают вес? Не означает ли последнее, что искусство попросту разрешает собственным элементам быть его частью? Или же части «нотариально заверяют» существование целого? Таким образом, если воздержаться от спешного уличения в наделении индивидуальностью коллективного объекта, нельзя всё же возразить ничего весомого против того, чтобы искусство имело выбор из себя (своевольный), независимый от целей автора.
И именно отсутствие возражения заставляет насторожиться.
Если в случае с «дурновкусием» возражение находит себя исполняющей определённые социальные функции, уже несколько десятков-сотен лет как предназначенные к выполнению механическому, то в случае «неоспоримости» возражающий испытывает на себя откровенно принижающее давление как на механизм, чья многофункциональность оказалась несравнимой с человеческой «иррациональностью».
Идеалистически звучит утверждение, что «внутренняя жизнь как она есть» является эстетическим объектом. Галерейный идеализм sort of. Внутренняя жизнь, безусловно, объектна и объективна, но то и другое не реализуются за счёт эстетизации (если только не считать эстетикой всякую реализацию, формулировку, воплощение; к тому же, адекватно ли отождествление воплощения и осуществления, или же я вновь начинаю блуждать в рамках наивной семиотики?).
«Внутренняя жизнь как её нет» - утверждение равноценное. Как минимум, говоря это, я ничего не утверждаю о присутствии и потенциале «внешней жизни»
Относительно «Корабля Тесея» можно предположить, что другой объект не будет идентифицирован при замене каждой его части на новую. Однако из старых частей можно собрать только другой объект, назвав который «Кораблём Тесея», строители создадут альтернативу объекту в истории и массовом сознании. И какой из кораблей ближе к оригиналу, пересобранный или обновлённый?
Альтернатива позволяет двум кораблям быть спущенными на воду для прославления одного имени, парадокс требовал бы признания невозможности дублирования Тесея, чего вовсе не касались условия задачи.
Это же касается расставшейся пары любовников. Они включают в себя такие объекты: пары, любви, пары как двойки, мужчины, женщины, численности, мужчины и женщины как пары (и гомосексуальных отношений), расставания, сексуальности, следствий расставания, самодостаточности в паре, до и после, времени, схождения, возможности воссоединения, обстоятельств, если брать прозаический минимум; благодаря чему можно предположить, что пара, расстающаяся в разных обстоятельствах образует всякий раз новый объект «пары, расставшейся при обстоятельствах».
Однако, во-первых, обстоятельства оказывали неопределённое воздействие до и после их актуализации – расставание может не быть связано с их влиянием, но иметь влияние на продолжительность этих обстоятельств; во-вторых, определённый объект непременно доминирует при оценке расставания и предполагаемое воссоединение не несёт в себе message о восстановлении той же пары. По причине простой физиологической невозможности обновления (и создания первоначального «единства» из перечня старых фотографий, например), пара всякий раз либо дублирует то, что является ожиданиями от воссоединения, либо образует совершенно новый, исключительный объект, предвосхищающий ожидания, касаемо воссоединений будущего.
Складывается тривиальная картина, подтверждающая тезис Хармана об объекте – «больше частей, меньше следствий».
В то же время слегка искажённая формулировка позволяет истолковать объект с точки зрения критики релятивизма и сепарации. Чем массивней государственный аппарат, тем меньшее влияние отдельные его части способны оказать на исторически сложившийся жизненный строй. Объект («государства») становится больше собственных следствий, если он перестаёт предполагать развитие собственных частей, в свою очередь, по причинам приобретения исключительно материальной устойчивости, обращающихся в нечто, превосходящее избранный режим («демократии»). Так «либеральность» обладает преимуществом перед равенством возможностей. А равенство, при иных обстоятельствах, обрекается на законодательную ограниченность.
Далее, с тем, что переоценка событий и недооценка объектов приводит к фатализму – сложно не согласиться (хотя допустимо).
Однако к чему приводит нас переоценка объектов? Не к объявлению ли Зеноновой стрелы событием, которому только предстоит случиться? Фатализму в отношения будущего, объекта преклонения людей столь же мнительных, как классические консерваторы.
Рождение метафоры через сугубо едва заметное сходство аксиоматично (в продуктивном осмыслении). Однако трудности с идентификацией этого сходства – это проблема не столько таланта либо проницательности, сколько индивидуальной оценки того, что может быть понято под сходством и подобием. Можно ли что-либо сказать метафорически о самой метафоре?
К примеру, «гнездовий плач утешится в норе» - чему предшествует «у лошади родился боров». Что играет роль в появлении такой цепи: преднамеренный символизм, иносказательная сатира либо безумствующая прямолинейность? Помещать ли лошадь в гнездо и предполагать ли её способность к полёту? И что общего между лошадью и боровом, позволившего первой произвести на свет второго (через непорочное зачатие)?
Парадигма, в свою очередь, отрицает театральность восприятия, поскольку не нуждается во внимании формулирующего в области её влияния (или тезисоносца). Однако отрицание не гарантирует отсутствия – если поклонник отрицает качество нового продукта режиссёрского труда, не приходит на премьеру, не смотря на личную просьбу и взятые обязательства – кассовые сборы могут быть достаточно высокими, а влияние достаточно долгоиграющим, чтобы можно было наречь в 2-3 заслуживающих особого уважения рецензиях картину «культовой» (независимо от того, адекватен ли в принципе культ – для примера можно взять «Обед нагишом» Кроненберга или «Джанки» Известно-Чьего).
Поклонник, так или иначе, обречён засвидетельствовать успех и материальные выгоды своего кумира, не взирая на то, что он будто не вложил никаких ресурсов. Внимание включено, по умолчанию, и «внепарадигматическое» мышление может считаться аналогией метафоризации, поскольку и метафора благонадёжней всего, если за ней остаётся преимущество неполного понимания: беря те же «пламя» и «кипарис» - даже при условии «полного погружения» реципиента остаются, помимо объектов, недостижимых никоим образом, ещё и параллельно прочитанные «пламени» и «кипарисы» и асинхронные «полные погружения», зависящие как от исторического числа и качеств объектов, оказавших влияние на обыкновенный акт чтения (на голодный желудок либо переев), так и от числа, качеств объектов в каждом моменте, сопутствующем знаку, символу и интерпретации.
Проще говоря, ни лирика, ни парадигма, с этим Харман согласится, не могут быть буквальными интенционально; даже если последняя использует буквальные формулировки – необходима «учёная лиричность» для совершения «прыжка веры» неофита.
Остаётся вопросом, почему автор вводит «приверженность», тем сближая ООО и труды Арендт? Ведь довольно однозначно заявляется то, что «политическое знание невозможно», или я что-то проморгал? Приверженность в науке делает из последней сорт партийности, что при подразумевающимся отсутствии знания оборачивается очередным утопическим проектом европеизированного конфуцианства.
Делая пару «лилипутов» назад по содержанию, откровенно тешишься делением информации\данных на «обоснованное неистинное мнение», именующиеся обыкновенно «знанием», и «необоснованное истинное мнение», имеющее в виду эстетическое суждение.
At the same time, картины реальности (КР) двух эстетических суждений (если предполагать их ограниченное количество, а не бесконечное множество), по аналогии с лекарствами – не будут соответствовать ни КР этики, ни КР технологий, ни КР войны, ни КР СМИ, ни КР йогов, собирающихся по вечерам на городском стадионе, ни КР завершающего свою карьеру вратаря, ожидающего пробития 11-метрового, ни КР девицы, промахивающейся ракеткой по мячу и пропускающей опрятного жёлтенького шалунишку между чистенькими коленками. В этом контексте представляется «неловкой уловкой» попытка изобразить эстетику в качестве поставщика реальных объектов (РО). Как минимум, РО эстетики должен был быть поставлен, и задолго до Аристотеля!
Наконец, во второй половине книги прямо называется «центральное притязание ООО» - «отношения между объектами даже того, когда на сцене вообще нет людей».
..и даже не знаю, начинать с «однако\но» и сразу браться за «во-первых»?
«Сцена без людей» - легко формируемый объект. Претензия философии ООО на объяснение «сцены без людей», вместо того, чтобы «оставлять вычисление результатов этих отношений обычным наукам», всего лишь поддерживает существование «сцены без» как объекта – возможно, гипер-разновидности, но всё же находящего ориентиры для самоидентификации в другом, себе-не-подобном, объекте «сцены с людьми».
И что такое «без людей», если даже сама философия является одним сплошным, неопровержимым и непрерывно опровергаемым «с людьми»?
Остаётся надеяться, что речь не зайдёт, при ознакомлении с большим числом новых ООО-трудов, о всевозможных гуманизмах, эстетически усовершенствованных до транс-, пост- и мета-версий. Опасения в данном контексте могут внушать, например, такие слова как «в свете нашего экологического кризиса существует ощущение, что любой объект является гиперобъектом».
К тому же, если под «неодушевлённостью» понимать ту же архитектуру, можно ли говорить о том, что экологическая катастрофа, учитывая неограниченный объём жизни, ею затрагиваемой, является «неодушевлённым объектом», влияние которого растёт? Не стоило бы ли в этом контексте называть «неодушевлёнными» политические решения, принимаемые в условиях угрозы экологической катастрофы, которые, очевидно, последнюю игнорируют? И к чему мы приходим в этом случае? Изучению отношений между катастрофой и преступлением в её тени, что может в итоге послужить даже оправданием и нуждаться в снисходительности будущих поколений? А если за снисходительностью следует (допустим, при отсутствии чувства меры) повторение, то сколько же катастроф ещё необходимо перенести человечеству, дабы анатомические ассоциация крови и финансов потеряли свою ценность?
Очень может быть, что эта рецензия уже чересчур разрослась, чтобы сохранить ещё остатки осмысленной критики, однако, один из последних моментов, касающихся напрямую «плоской онтологии»: с чего последователи ООО берут, что уничтожение вертикали одновременно с тем обесценивает иерархию?
Или – неужели одного только ХХ века недостаточно, чтобы усвоить, что власть необязательно распространяется сверху вниз, et vice versa?
Власть можно использовать в качестве синонима пропаганды, хотя не всякая власть в последней нуждается. Следуя же ООО, пропаганда образует объект, наделённый свойственной ей одной властью, о реалистичности чего можно судить, смотря на замкнутые информационные общества – всё те же КНДР и РФ (или, с другой стороны, повседневную Швейцарию, Португалию, Турцию); сталкиваясь с объектом «открытого общества (с ограниченной ответственностью)», пропаганда не трансформируется, но пересматривает данные 4О таким образом, что объект последнего может выступать элементом первого (действительность дополняет пропаганду, по причине своей открытости, позволяя пропаганде дополнять себя).
Те, кто обладает неисчислимым богатством – необязательно тлетворствуют (и необязательно исключительно тлетворствуют!) на самых верхних этажах, откуда имеют возможность обозревать свои «владения». Те, кто наделён неограниченной властью – не спешат возводить вокруг своих усадеб многометровые, многоуровневые преграды. Непосредственно управляющие глобальными и локальными процессами персоналии, если всё же настаивать на том, что они способны на что-то, кроме как приписывать себе провидческие способности и гуманистические инициативы, не стремятся занимать правительственные, административные, покровительствующие должности. Самое банальное доказательство – литература. Только попытайтесь подсчитать, какое влияние оказали Кафка, Достоевский, Мисима да и Лавкрафт на современное истолкование отношений или (деконструированной, детерриторизованной) структуры того, что всё ещё продолжает называться Действительностью, Реальностью.
А причина? Не более чем повседневный опыт: вовремя закипевшая вода, тщательно отмытая сковородка, паук, отправляющиеся в свободное парение с балкона, куда он явился без приглашения, комок пыли, который ты забываешь выбросить в помойное ведро из-за того, что самое время садиться за продолжение никому особо не интересной рецензии – и в итоге комок этот становится полноценным объектом, едва ли включаемым тобой сознательно в ООО комнаты, в которой ты прожил более 30 с лишним лет.
Пыль, лежащая под моими ногами, арахисовая шелуха, подсолнуховые семечки, карандашная стружка, пепел ароматических палочек, кошачья и собачья шерсть, фрагменты эпидермиса всех, кто когда-либо оказывался в этих четырёх стенах с одной дверью и одним окном, капли чая, пота, слюны и прочих человеческих и неоромантических выделений – всё это иерархически превосходит меня, с бездарно маскируемым самомнением возвышающегося, сидя на превосходящем чресла мои возрастом стуле, с клавиатурой на коленях, шрифт на которой становится практически неразличим – во особенности белый, латиница.
Первая буква кириллических алфавитов, приравненная в латинице к f, имеющая совершенный аналог, выполняющий те же функции в латинских алфавитах, на клавиатуре вступающий в непозволительную близость с кириллической «ф» - это объекты, как и смешавшаяся с выше перечисленным богатством краска, облупившаяся с клавиш. Почему именно «а» и следующие за ней ближайшими «с, м, и, т»?
Плоская онтология – это власть языка, проецируемая на клавиатуру.

[Avşar · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a true believer in the interconnectedness of everything, this book is (has become) as the ground beneath my feet. It is a more constructed and refined version of Harman's ideas in The Quadruple Object, putting not the human being but the object -which is everything existing including human beings- in the middle of the ontology and entangling their complex qualities and interrelations.
It is sad to see that his theory is almost completely misunderstood through a literalist narrowmindedness, especially in architecture -like the ones of Deleuze, Harman complains in OOO-.
My only objection is to the first chapter where he utilizes an imaginary female -Brianna Browne, but why female?- scientist and her flawed imaginary theory of everything to construct and develop his theory of OOO. While Browne's theory vehemently clashes with the ones of various disciplines such as physics, economy and psychoanalysis, there emerges OOO, brand-new, shiny and scratchless.

[Ireneo Funyes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Normalde non-fiction kitapları yıldızlamıyorum ama Graham Harman özel bir muameleyi hak ediyor. Hayatımda okuduğum açık ara en net yazılmış, anlatmak istediğini birebir anlatan, hatta biraz romantik bir iddiada bulunayım, en güzel felsefe kitabı. The Quadruple Object de aşağı kalmıyor, yalnızca bu kitap ortalama okura hitap etmek üzere yazıldığı için daha bir ilgi çekici. Amerikan İç Savaşı'nı case study olarak kullandığı bölüm hariç en ufak bir kusuru yok kitabın (o da benim ABD'nin o tarihlerine en ufak bir ilgi duymamamdan kaynaklanıyor sanırım).

[Hrafnkell Úlfur · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Hlutir eru meira en efniviður sinn, en minni en áhrifin sín"- Graham Harman.

Hið fullkomna inngangs/yfirlits rit fyrir alla þá sem vilja kynna sér hlutlæga verufræði. Harman tekst að útskýra grunnhugmyndir hlutlægrar verufræði á afar skýran máta og nær virkilega vel að setja hana í samhengi hugmyndasögu heimspekinnar með því að vísa í aðra hugsuði til samanburðar. Einnig tekst honum afar vel að benda manni í margar mögulegar áttir ef maður vildi kynna sér aðra hugsuði sem að eru að pæla í svipuðum hugmyndum eins og Timothy Morton sem leggur áherslu á umhverfismál og djúp-umhverfishyggju eða Levi R. Bryant sem að fer með þetta í mun Deleuze-ískari átt, eða eins og Harman kallar það: vélarmiðaða verufræði.
Hvað varðar kenninguna sjálfa er hún einnig áhugaverð, þetta er einsskonar blanda á frumspeki Heideggers og hugmyndum Latours um leikara tengslanet, en það nær þó ekki alveg utan um hana. Einnig er gagnrýni hennar á aðrar frumspekikenningar fyrir að vera of mannmiðaðar og ekki flatar alveg góðar og gildar. Hlutlæga verufræði vill í stað þess sjá alla hluti sem jafna, og eitthvað sem að við erum í raun blind til að sjá og ofan á það að allir hlutir eru blindir og sjá í raun ekki hvorn annan. Meira var það ekki.

[Mehtap exotiquetv · Rating 2 out of 5]

"What is reality, really?
Are humans more special or important than the non-human objects we perceive?
How does this change the way we understand the world?"

Das war die Erwartungshaltung und der Inhalt war alles andere als das. Mir war auch nicht vorher bewusst, dass ich mir wieder ein sehr philosophisches Buch geschnappt habe.
Mir hat es gar nicht gefallen, es war sehr abstrakt und zum Teil auch komisch.

[Myat Thura Aung · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since Kant, things-in-themselves have haunted us that we can never grasp things as they really are. OOO contends that there is nothing special about it since objects withhold themselves not just from human access, but from each other as well. The interaction between two objects is always mediated and hence there is never a direct access. The withdrawal of objects from us is merely a corollary of this axiom.

But what is an object ? An object is to be understood whatever that cannot be reduced to the constituents nor to the sum-total of its properties. In other words, an object is more than what it is made of but less than what it does. Human subjects can also be counted as objects in this sense.

With humans on one side and the world on the other, we have taken 50% of philosophy so far. OOO contends that it's overdue that we give more consideration to the objects and that philosophy hitherto has been largely anthropocentric.

This is quite an accessible introduction, aimed at the general audience and written by no other than the leading philosopher of this school of thought. Professing to be a new theory of everything, it briefly touches on aesthetics, science, sociology, politics (inhuman politics with the consideration that most political actors are, in fact, inanimate objects) and outlines its nascent influences in the field of architecture.

[William Yonts · Rating 2 out of 5]

So I am very much a nondualist and am very sympathetic to any philosophy that purports to develop nondualistic thought. I've recently been interested in D.W. Winnicott, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Bruno Latour for this reason. Now I've heard a lot of things about this whole object-oriented ontology thing, a lot of polarized opinions. Having read "We Have Never Been Modern" and being a fan of rhizomes and so on and so on, I decided to actually read Graham Harman and take up my own position, see where I stand with his stuff. I won't lie, my attention started waning very early on in my read, but I have nonetheless reached a position on OOO:

Graham Harman is a very excited little boy. He wants to show off his awesome new "theory" to you, show you how awesome it is, and how nothing else is quite as awesome. I harbor no strong contempt for him, nor do I love him very much at all. I see his whole project as an innocent but ultimately pointless thought experiment. I mean, sure, it is successfully a "theory" of everything, the "quadruple object" model can in fact be grafted onto whatever you want. But if this is what a "theory" of everything is, then I guess we don't really need "theories" of everything. Like, I've only read the one Latour book, so I don't want to say that I've reached a definitive position on actor-network "theory," but I like the network as a model for thinking because it emphasizes DOING, what things (or "actants," tee hee!) are DOING to each other, what effects things have beyond the pure domains of human and non-human, which, as a broad approach, I think is valuable. I fail to see what's valuable in thinking of everything as a static object. I say to myself, ok, let me use the object, to which Harman would say, "Aha! But the object is still itself! No more, no less!" ...Ok?

[Jason Borga · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lets begin by stating that I am quite sympathetic to many of the impulses behind Harman’s philosophical program. The general move away from anthropocentrism in the arts and sciences is important, and while it certainly doesn’t originate in Object Oriented Ontology (or OOO, as Harman likes to style it), it is to Harman’s credit that an aversion to human exceptionalism is built into the theory. Likewise, we are in agreement that science cannot be held as the ultimate arbiter of what constitutes a valid philosophical claim. Unfortunately, Harman is largely unconcerned with delivering actual arguments for his theory, and spends most of the book either delivering bold unsupported claims, or attempting to establish OOO’s validity via association with other thinkers, in particular the very trendy Bruno Latour. A great deal of time is spent arguing that Latour’s views are essentially compatible with OOO, regardless of what they might actually say in their details. Sadly however, Latour is not the only ‘celebrity’ whose support Harman seeks to enlist via proximity; we are given the important information early on that “the actor Benedict Cumberbatch… listened attentively to one of my lectures at a private residence in London in 2014”. This sort of extraneous information is a general tendency throughout the book, which often wastes time on trivial information at the expense of serious argument (another egregious example is found in the 20 PAGES spent unpacking the history of the American Civil War in order to illustrate what is essentially a mere difference in terminology between OOO and Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory). To end on a positive note, Harman’s clear and lucid (if occasionally digressive) writing makes it easy to assess just how hollow OOO truly is, at least as presented here.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Anyone who can so quickly dismiss philosophy without care for the sake of an uninitiated audience can be dismissed through the same methods. There's a reason artists and not trained philosophers are sticking around. That said, Harman is compelling in his writing style. This book was at least very consumable and readable. Unfortunately, for him, his clarity comes at the cost of being able to quickly see he's mistaken about a great deal in his interpretations of previous philosophy.

Another annoyance with this book is that it's clear that Harman, outside of flippantly dismissing philosophies that at first blush disagree with him, regularly misleadingly interprets his speculative realist peers to situate himself and OOO as being front and center. This is clearly not the case for anyone who has read alternative speculative approaches. Harman has been a great facilitator for the philosophical discourse of the speculative. However, Ray Brassier is right: Harman is trying to build a brand more than develop a coherent view "of everything."

[Luna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably one of my fav reads for this year. The writing is both simple and well-read, which differs from many philosophical books. Harman succeeds in balancing between complex theories and clear rendering of their meanings for the aim of introducing a "new theory of everything". His defense of OOO is interesting, and it offers prospects of investigation that are definitely worth pursuing.

[DRugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-written review of a flat ontology, which puts people, places, and things on the same plane of importance. I especially like the idea of having to deal with the finite as opposed to the infinite. The difference being, the finite is oriented toward the aesthetic, and the infinite is oriented toward the cognitive.

[Joel Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

// ok intro — but I found myself wanting to read the books discussed in this book than the thing itself

[Alex Dincovici · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most thought provocative books read in a while. And its implications range well beyond philosophy alone.

[Tom Pepper · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written and useful book. For those of us who’ve been hearing about OOO for a few years now, and couldn’t quite get what it was all about, this book should clear things up.
On the positive side, it is great to see that there is some movement attempting to resume metaphysics, and get out of the dismal swamp of reductivism and extreme relativism. When we forget that “objects” really do have essences and structures that are more than just their enabling conditions, we forfeit any real hope of agency.
However, I’m not convinced at all that OOO is really going to overcome the reductivist-relativist problem.
For one thing, it is quite clearly just another form of Romanticism, recycling the same approach with new terminology and pretending to ground-breaking novelty. I mean, it’s not just the laments about the barren meaninglessness of reductive science, and not just the idea that all knowledge of reality is ultimately sublime aesthetics. Although this is enough to see this is nothing new, right? Of course, Harman seems blissfully unaware of the history of aesthetics, and so believes that his idea that the aesthetic experience of the unpresentability of the thing-in-itself is a radically new idea. It’s just the Romantic sublime. And we’ve known for decades (centuries?) that such aesthetic experiences are really just the mistaking of culturally-produced meanings for the object’s own deep essence. Such “sublime” effects are the misrecognition of ideology for deep ontology…and sure, they give us a “thrill” and all, but they don’t help us out of the trap of empiricism.
What’s even more strikingly Romantic is the section on “Society and Politics,” which is mostly made up of a discussion of the American Civil War. The war is discussed as an “object,” in the OOO sense. But what we can talk about, in OOO, is generals and battles and the importance of the Emancipations Proclamation. What is ruled out is discussion of the effects of economic practices or of the struggles and practices of masses of oppressed people. I can see, I suppose, why OOO might function as a useful heuristic, calling attention to feature of a thing we might otherwise miss. But it also seems designed to discourage attention to things Harman would rather not think about—like oppression, poverty, human struggles, and most of all capitalism.
The one thing that gets him irate is the suggestion that we humans might be able to work to make the world a better place. As he says in a YouTube video made just when he was finishing this book, he has no patience for “whining about capitalism”; after all, it is, he says, the same old complaint for hundreds of years now—with no imagination at all. Hmm, why would this be?
He does rely on some clever sophistry…in fact, relies on it a bit too much. As when he says that any suggestion that human thought is a different kind of thing than a non-human object is tantamount to dividing ontology in half, and insisting that human thought makes up half of all existing reality. Well, no, it isn’t. One thing can be different from all others without therefore counting as half of all things.
And many of his claims are just assertions of the form “OOO says that,” with no real convincing argument why we should believe what this personified entity tells us. Not all claims are mere assertions—he makes arguments for some of them. But why, for example, should we accept that an “object” can have only five or six “symbiotic” objects that constitute it? How do they arrive at that number? And why should we believe that humans can have no effect on politics, only objects like catastrophes or technology can (he insists on this, but doesn’t make a case for it).
The goal seems to be to insist, like Romanticism (see, for instance, Schopenhauer) that we shouldn’t bother to act in the world, and all we can do is have profound sublime aesthetic experiences. Haven’t we heard the call to aestheticize politics enough in the last two centuries?
I would suppose that any thinking person reading this book will be spared the time trying to engage with other OOO texts. So as an introduction, it seems to me exemplary.

[David Steele · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm part of the "wider general readership" that Harman was referring to in this book. I've got an interest in science because I once watched Cosmos, a basic understanding of biology because I've seen every episode of Greys Anatomy and I know a bit about philosophy because I've read Calvin and Hobbes.
I really had to work at this to keep up, and nearly gave it up half way through. I'm now glad I stuck with it because, now that I've got to the end, I found it both insightful and relevant (It did help to have access to Youtube so that I could watch some videos that helped me to understand the basics). I can understand why many of the people who've reviewed this book with pre-existing attachments to either Analytic or Continental trains of thought would find much to argue against, but Harman makes these points in the text. From my complete layman's point of view, it feels a little as if the author has offered me a very brief peek inside a box full of shiny things, and it's encouraged me to start building a little box of my own.
I've approached this from a popular neuroscience point of view. I'm very interested in concepts of how our brains hallucinate the world around us, from a cognitive point of view, as set our in layman works such as Being You: A New Science of Consciousness and How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. from my understanding of these themes it's becoming increasingly apparent to me that we need to be able to define / understand the difference between what an object is and the subjective way that we pretend we "know" about (or experience) that object.
Four rather than five stars because, for a book aimed at the beginner, Harman makes too many assumptions of knowledge. I appreciate it's not his job to do our learning for us, but some discrete footnotes would have been handy.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly accessible and largely compelling, OOO presents a significant new perspective in philosophy and I'm interested to see its application across other disciplines, particularly politics.

[Sarah Chekfa · Rating 3 out of 5]

i would have preferred less talk about the civil war and more talk about the sunset