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Circus Philosophicus
Platonic myth meets American noir in this haunting series of philosophical images from gigantic ferris wheels to offshore drilling rigs.
92 pages, Paperback
First published November 16, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 4, 2011
A mediocre but mildly entertaining book of myths designed to illuminate some questions of metaphysics. The myths themselves are not very imaginative or interesting, and they don't really do the job of shining light on any serious philosophical questions. On the occasions that the author presents his views on some issue, this view seems inevitably naïve and vague to the point of being completely void of meaning. It's hard to see to whom it is addressed. The reader unfamiliar with philosophical questions will not get the references to different systems of philosophy and will likely not get much out of the "discussion". On the other hand, any one with even a cursory knowledge with philosophy will find nothing new and much of the simplistic and boring. The very idea of returning to using myths (a practice more common in philosophy in the ancient world, see Plato) may be interesting, and I certainly don't object to using thought experiments to illustrate a point (mere terminological analysis can be a bit opaque and unpedagogical), any such experiment needs to be accompanied with some rigor and analysis to make the conclusions drawn from it worth anything. Of course, one could argue that this is not intended as a serious philosophical treatise but in that case, the simplistic conclusions should have been left out entirely. In any case, the myths are neither interesting nor well told enough to give the book any value in that regard either. Seeing then, how it has neither philosophical nor literary value, one can only see it as a mildly entertaining brief read for anyone who has already picked it up in a bookstore or library (it's short enough to warrant a reading), but anyone not already curious about it need not bother.
February 19, 2013
In six chapters (plus a brief conclusion),Graham Harman sketches out six scenarios/objects/things that address various parts of his take on object oriented ontology. Chapter one considers a Ferris Wheel of objects, to defend thinking about objects from trends favoring events and relations. In Chapter two, Harman reconceptualizes an ex-girlfriend's concept of a local bridge by projecting it into hell and throwing the old classicists off it, in order to demonstrate how things should be thought of in terms of individualities, rather than absolute essences. Chapter Three is about Harman coming into horrifying contact with a calliope while considering how to frame Leibnez' monads in the context of Heidegger and the fourfold structure of things. Chapter Three has Harman on a deserted oil rig with China Mieville, testing their memories of the American gothic and building from the rig a theory of causation, naming it and all things polytheistic (one among many), asymmetrical (acting not itself, nor in equal measure to what it acts on), and buffered, that things do not engage directly with other things. Chapter Five ponders a haunted Japanese boat and a potential childhood deception to discuss the quadruple object, and chapter six uses a hailstorm at Bruno Latour's house and a zebra flag to discuss the dormant object. In other words, even for a philosophy book, even for Harman, the man who did a close reading of 100 Lovecraft essays, it's pretty weird. As a blend of fiction and philosophy, a series of surreal thought experiments, I appreciate that the book is trying something different. But I couldn't help but wonder if it was something necessary. Most of the philosophy I recognized from other books and writings of Harman; it's pretty much the same as he wrote it elsewhere, only elsewhere, he generally said it more lucidly, because he wasn't writing in this narrative mode. It's not really a book for newcomers either; the theory isn't described in enough detail for that. So the question is what value is added by writing in this mode. Arguably, while some of his ideas are presented more clearly elsewhere, you could say that here they are presented in their element, as ideas that strange and wonderful and sometimes scary. And there'd be some truth to that, enough to justify the book, if it needed that. On the other hand, the fictional or descriptive elements beyond the theory just lead to questions: why the surrealist, monk, and telepath at the book's end? Why use Meiville and an oil rig if they never really met there? What significance does the varied locations of the book--Paris, Japan, the middle of the ocean, India, Annapolis--have? Were they really places Harman was at, or are they metaphors for something else? The book isn't telling, and it's hard to determine what's meant for contemplation and what's an elaborate in-joke. Again,I appreciate the attempt, but it just doesn't work for me. ...Then again, it's only 80 pages. So even if you don't like it, at least it's over quick.
December 22, 2010
Disclaimer: I am not really invested in the debates surrounding "object oriented ontology" (that is, whether it's anything more novel than a certain reading of Whitehead combined with some post-phenomenology, a philosophical fad, or some combination of both). But the title of this book attracted me, enjoying both circuses and philosophy.
Harman poses each chapter as a thought experiment of sorts, each inspired by a specific object or scene (a miles-long ferris wheel, a bridge, a calliope, an offshore oil rig, a haunted boat, a sleeping animal), setting up what he terms illustrative "myths." The settings and descriptions and narratives are perhaps more interesting than the conclusions reached -- the conclusion always being that objects are *not* simply constituted by their relations alone, or by their perception, but rather that it makes sense to think that something (not necessarily material or physical) inheres in objects themselves which exceeds their relationality, alongside but not reducible to their relationality.
One might ask: that's all well & good, but is that really such a novel idea? Or *that* different from what Whitehead had been trying to get at since the 1920s? (Harman briefly addresses this on p. 72, and in relation to panpsychism generally on pp. 70-75.) The "myths" Harman poses are amusing and enjoyable, but also convoluted and specified to the point that one can't imagine them being of any broader expository value (in terms of any hopes of amounting to any coherent, illustrative metaphysics on any cosmic, or even just unified, scale; apart from, perhaps, a version of the "it's turtles all the way down"* theory?). But it's expecting too much from a short book like this to resolve all that (although his speculations on sleep at the very end start to come close); one would need to turn to Harman's longer, "serious" books to sort it all out. If you've been looking to read some colorful imaginings on the pros and cons of the metaphysical primacy of objects vs. relations, though, then this is surely the book for you (!).
*http://books.google.com/books?id=SDR9...
Harman poses each chapter as a thought experiment of sorts, each inspired by a specific object or scene (a miles-long ferris wheel, a bridge, a calliope, an offshore oil rig, a haunted boat, a sleeping animal), setting up what he terms illustrative "myths." The settings and descriptions and narratives are perhaps more interesting than the conclusions reached -- the conclusion always being that objects are *not* simply constituted by their relations alone, or by their perception, but rather that it makes sense to think that something (not necessarily material or physical) inheres in objects themselves which exceeds their relationality, alongside but not reducible to their relationality.
One might ask: that's all well & good, but is that really such a novel idea? Or *that* different from what Whitehead had been trying to get at since the 1920s? (Harman briefly addresses this on p. 72, and in relation to panpsychism generally on pp. 70-75.) The "myths" Harman poses are amusing and enjoyable, but also convoluted and specified to the point that one can't imagine them being of any broader expository value (in terms of any hopes of amounting to any coherent, illustrative metaphysics on any cosmic, or even just unified, scale; apart from, perhaps, a version of the "it's turtles all the way down"* theory?). But it's expecting too much from a short book like this to resolve all that (although his speculations on sleep at the very end start to come close); one would need to turn to Harman's longer, "serious" books to sort it all out. If you've been looking to read some colorful imaginings on the pros and cons of the metaphysical primacy of objects vs. relations, though, then this is surely the book for you (!).
*http://books.google.com/books?id=SDR9...
February 3, 2011
The human Graham Harman travels the surface of the earth, inspired by encounters with other cosmopolitan intellectuals to create parables to retell and occasionally incrementally develop the insights of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. The conceit of cosmopolitan humans talking to other cosmopolitan humans--particularly the embarrassing conversation with the justly named love-object, Olympia (meant to be an automaton?)--fails the weirdness of speculative realism, while doing nothing to numb my sense of the political and ethical vacuity of at least Harman's branch of OOO. For starters, look at this: "I made the quarter-hour walk to Marina Beach, briefly saddened by memories of those who had perished there in the great tsunami." Oh. Boo. Hoo. Perished, thinks the briefly saddened liberal flâneur. Perished.
If I want to read about fabulous people having fabulous times, I'll stick to in-flight magazines.
If I want references to "purely Asian phenomen[a]"...well, I can't see myself wanting this. I'll just pass.
If I want to read humanist philosophy, I'll seek it out. I don't want to see my OOO gummed up with anything like this: "And given longstanding tradition that ghosts are generated by sudden or violent deaths, no one could doubt that Hiroshima might be enveloped in a haze of phantoms, however happy the city may be today." I have a friend who believes in ghosts, but only, for some reason, human ghosts. Whatever this person's faith, this prejudice is humanism. If we have ghosts, actual ghosts, why shouldn't the ghosts be the ghosts of chickens, trilobites, ferns, viruses, dust? Why should a human catastrophe be extended a superstition (or a hope of persistence) and not anything else? Why doesn't Harman allow himself to go further?
Remember too that Plato at least had the good sense to give his victories to Socrates. No matter who he talks to, no matter what he looks at, Mary Sue Harman always comes out on top.
Instead of sticking to humans thinking about objects, instead of sticking to the surface of the earth, Harman might have taken a page from Calvino or perhaps from some of the weirder medieval texts. He might have turned his attention to his own body (and mind).
As compared to other Harman I've read, Circus Philosophicus: inefficient and not useless. He continues his assault on humanist epistemological loneliness, preserves real objects from relations, finds sentience in every relation, argues that causation is always direct, and further describes his version of the 'fourfold' character of objects. Very good. If this were all CP had, I'd be fine with it; but if this were all it had, CP wouldn't have needed to exist, because all of this is elsewhere in Harman's ouevre.
Highlights:
"We cannot use physical duration as a standard of what is real and what is accidental."
AGAINST 'POTENTIAL'
"twentieth-century theories invoke potentiality in order to shut substance out of relations, since if the hammer is defined by its totality of relations, to speak of its unactualized future states as “potentials” frees us from having to determine where these potentials are located, thereby denying any actuality outside of explicit current relations."
"To define a thing as potential is to view it solely from the outside, in terms of the effects it might one day have on other things, and this avoids the question under dispute."
"Whatever Leibniz’s reputation for personal cheerfulness, his vision of trillions of entities cut off one from one another, each lodged in a private vacuum accessible only to God, could inspire nothing but horror."
"The Empiricists were misled to hold that we encounter individual qualities and then link them together through the gullible myth of an underlying thing. Instead, Husserl and his heirs were more on the mark in saying that we first confront the calliope as a whole, so that the eerie underlying style of the object imbues all of the isolated songs and notes that emanate from it."
"Just as the calliope was independent of the specific notes it played at each moment, and separate as well from its shifting effects on me and the sixty or seventy other listeners on the beach, so too it achieved an autonomous life over and above its component pieces."
"The calliope was no less unified than the simplest hydrogen atom, yet this fact did not entail an absence of tinier components."
"“We have seen that causation is vicarious. Like oil rigs reducing all other entities to fuel, each object reduces every other to a hazy caricature of its deeper plenitude. But now I want to show why causation must also be asymmetrical."
"Real objects, no less than sensual ones, are torn between their unified reality and their plurality of specific traits. They are not empty poles of unity, but have distinct qualities without being mere bundles. And thus we have the fourth tension in things."
TIME AND SPACE
"This tension in which a unified thing of the senses emits a sandstorm of shifting facades is what we mean by time. The time we experience involves precisely this landscape of constantly swirling accidents atop some minimally enduring core: the sensual objects."
"space is the name for the fact that things fail to be in direct contact without being outside all contact entirely."
ON INTERNET TROLLS
"My thesis was that the troll is the new successor to past figures of anti-philosophy: the sophist, the pedant, and the Inquisitor, among others. I argued that the troll is the degenerate form of the critic, untethered from any commitment of his own, and unleashed on the world to doubt and critique whatever one might doubt and critique rather than what truly deserves refutation."
"panpsychism holds that everything perceives as soon as it exists. I counter that everything perceives only insofar as it relates."
"The encounter between zebra and fire is not just two things, but also one: the experience as a whole. And when something is one, it instantly acquires the status of 'object.'"
"While the fashionable doctrine today is that things are real only by virtue of having effects, in fact the reverse is true: they can have effects only because they are real."
"free will does not exist for objects, but only for pieces of those objects."
"by being withdrawn from the world as sleeping objects, we are unfree rather than free; being just what we are, we are incapable of anything else. Yet in a sense we are always inside the world through the fact that we are made of pieces— and only //therefore //are we free, with our components doing the work of liberty on our behalf. For there is an excess in our pieces beyond what is needed to create us, and this excess allows new and unexpected things to happen."
If I want to read about fabulous people having fabulous times, I'll stick to in-flight magazines.
If I want references to "purely Asian phenomen[a]"...well, I can't see myself wanting this. I'll just pass.
If I want to read humanist philosophy, I'll seek it out. I don't want to see my OOO gummed up with anything like this: "And given longstanding tradition that ghosts are generated by sudden or violent deaths, no one could doubt that Hiroshima might be enveloped in a haze of phantoms, however happy the city may be today." I have a friend who believes in ghosts, but only, for some reason, human ghosts. Whatever this person's faith, this prejudice is humanism. If we have ghosts, actual ghosts, why shouldn't the ghosts be the ghosts of chickens, trilobites, ferns, viruses, dust? Why should a human catastrophe be extended a superstition (or a hope of persistence) and not anything else? Why doesn't Harman allow himself to go further?
Remember too that Plato at least had the good sense to give his victories to Socrates. No matter who he talks to, no matter what he looks at, Mary Sue Harman always comes out on top.
Instead of sticking to humans thinking about objects, instead of sticking to the surface of the earth, Harman might have taken a page from Calvino or perhaps from some of the weirder medieval texts. He might have turned his attention to his own body (and mind).
As compared to other Harman I've read, Circus Philosophicus: inefficient and not useless. He continues his assault on humanist epistemological loneliness, preserves real objects from relations, finds sentience in every relation, argues that causation is always direct, and further describes his version of the 'fourfold' character of objects. Very good. If this were all CP had, I'd be fine with it; but if this were all it had, CP wouldn't have needed to exist, because all of this is elsewhere in Harman's ouevre.
Highlights:
"We cannot use physical duration as a standard of what is real and what is accidental."
AGAINST 'POTENTIAL'
"twentieth-century theories invoke potentiality in order to shut substance out of relations, since if the hammer is defined by its totality of relations, to speak of its unactualized future states as “potentials” frees us from having to determine where these potentials are located, thereby denying any actuality outside of explicit current relations."
"To define a thing as potential is to view it solely from the outside, in terms of the effects it might one day have on other things, and this avoids the question under dispute."
"Whatever Leibniz’s reputation for personal cheerfulness, his vision of trillions of entities cut off one from one another, each lodged in a private vacuum accessible only to God, could inspire nothing but horror."
"The Empiricists were misled to hold that we encounter individual qualities and then link them together through the gullible myth of an underlying thing. Instead, Husserl and his heirs were more on the mark in saying that we first confront the calliope as a whole, so that the eerie underlying style of the object imbues all of the isolated songs and notes that emanate from it."
"Just as the calliope was independent of the specific notes it played at each moment, and separate as well from its shifting effects on me and the sixty or seventy other listeners on the beach, so too it achieved an autonomous life over and above its component pieces."
"The calliope was no less unified than the simplest hydrogen atom, yet this fact did not entail an absence of tinier components."
"“We have seen that causation is vicarious. Like oil rigs reducing all other entities to fuel, each object reduces every other to a hazy caricature of its deeper plenitude. But now I want to show why causation must also be asymmetrical."
"Real objects, no less than sensual ones, are torn between their unified reality and their plurality of specific traits. They are not empty poles of unity, but have distinct qualities without being mere bundles. And thus we have the fourth tension in things."
TIME AND SPACE
"This tension in which a unified thing of the senses emits a sandstorm of shifting facades is what we mean by time. The time we experience involves precisely this landscape of constantly swirling accidents atop some minimally enduring core: the sensual objects."
"space is the name for the fact that things fail to be in direct contact without being outside all contact entirely."
ON INTERNET TROLLS
"My thesis was that the troll is the new successor to past figures of anti-philosophy: the sophist, the pedant, and the Inquisitor, among others. I argued that the troll is the degenerate form of the critic, untethered from any commitment of his own, and unleashed on the world to doubt and critique whatever one might doubt and critique rather than what truly deserves refutation."
"panpsychism holds that everything perceives as soon as it exists. I counter that everything perceives only insofar as it relates."
"The encounter between zebra and fire is not just two things, but also one: the experience as a whole. And when something is one, it instantly acquires the status of 'object.'"
"While the fashionable doctrine today is that things are real only by virtue of having effects, in fact the reverse is true: they can have effects only because they are real."
"free will does not exist for objects, but only for pieces of those objects."
"by being withdrawn from the world as sleeping objects, we are unfree rather than free; being just what we are, we are incapable of anything else. Yet in a sense we are always inside the world through the fact that we are made of pieces— and only //therefore //are we free, with our components doing the work of liberty on our behalf. For there is an excess in our pieces beyond what is needed to create us, and this excess allows new and unexpected things to happen."
May 26, 2022
I'm rating this book somewhat poorly for a simple reason: almost all of the content within related to Harman's object-oriented philosophy is more clearly and thoroughly explained in his subsequent book, The Quadruple Object. Read that instead of this if you have any interest at all in Harman's ontological system. Circus Philosophicus introduces watered-down versions of the same concepts as The Quadruple Object but through autofictive narratives which are not nearly compelling enough to carry the difference.
July 26, 2020
excellent series of myths introducing Harman’s object-oriented ontology; read like a lemony snicket book (which is my thing) and instilled in me hope that you can still have fun while writing philosophy
November 4, 2021
At least what I got out of it was that there’s always going to be an unrelatable part of one’s own experience of self.
July 28, 2011
Slim but challenging. I'm relatively new to Harman, but quite enjoyed his approach in this book, using myth and story to introduce elements of his philosophy. I'm not sure I"m ready to devote my life to Object-Oriented Ontology just yet, but this was a nice way to have pieces of it explained.
I suppose I was also drawn to it by his smooth, flowing writing style. He reminds me a bit of Sebald at times, which can be a very good thing.
Worth a look.
I suppose I was also drawn to it by his smooth, flowing writing style. He reminds me a bit of Sebald at times, which can be a very good thing.
Worth a look.
May 13, 2012
Written in the style of Platonic myth, Circus Philosophicus is a fascinating and very readable introduction to Harman's Object Oriented Philosophy. He sets out bold claims and then uses the backdrop of his own travel diaries to create supporting myths. While I was not swayed by many of his arguments, I did enjoy the style of the book and the many ways in which it made me think.
July 15, 2012
A philosophical reflexion on an object oriented ontology in the form of amusing and colorful allegories. A strange, captivating book for philosophers and amateurs alike.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews