Graham Harman - Art and Objects

13 13. David E. Wellbery, “Schiller, Schopenhauer, Fried,” p. 84.

14 14. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy.

15 15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

16 16. The classic example is Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy.

17 17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

18 18. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment.

19 19. Virgil, Aeneid.

20 20. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. There is another interpretation of modernity – or at least of its degenerate forms – that reads it in the opposite way as an improper commingling of thought with world. This can be found in the valuable polemic against “correlationism” by Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude, which nonetheless resembles Latour’s position in agreeing that thought and world count for the moderns as the two basic ingredients of reality. In this book I will focus on Latour’s “purity” interpretation or modernity rather than Meillassoux’s “impurity” version, since the Latourian stance is the one more relevant to Kant’s aesthetics and formalism in the arts.

21 21. Dante, The Divine Comedy, La Vita Nuova.

22 22. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values.

23 23. Max Scheler, “Ordo Amoris.”

24 24. Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art, Vols. I and II; Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio.

25 25. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, Manet’s Modernism.

26 26. Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics; Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood.

27 27. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter. I had the opportunity to raise this issue with Fried in person on February 10, 2018 during his visit to Los Angeles, and he was helpfully direct in his response.

28 28. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 60.

29 29. Alain Badiou, Being and Event; Meillassoux, After Finitude.

Let’s begin with an overview of the basic principles of OOO, since it cannot be assumed that all readers of this book are familiar with these matters. Object-oriented philosophy hinges on two major axes of division, one of which is usually ignored by our critics and sometimes even our supporters. The first and best-known axis concerns the difference between what OOO refers to as the withdrawal or withholding of objects. A hammer or candle is present to us, and yet they are also more than what is present to us. Though it may seem that this simply repeats the unpopular Kantian rift between noumena and phenomena, or the thing-in-itself and appearance, OOO adds the crucial twist that the thing-in-itself does not just haunt human awareness of the world, but is found even in the causal relations of non-human things with each other. While it is true that numerous thinkers since Kant have made room for an excess, surplus, or otherness of the world beyond our perception or theorization of it – Heidegger in particular – none to my knowledge have seen that such unformatted residue also exists in relations that do not involve human beings. The second and often forgotten axis concerns the connection between objects and their qualities, which OOO treats as being unusually loose. This counteracts the widespread empiricist tendency to treat objects as nothing over and above the bundles of their qualities, as if “apple” were merely a joint nickname for a set of tangible features bound together by habit, as in the philosophy of David Hume. 1Joined together, these two axes yield a fourfold structure that OOO employs as a framework for illuminating everything that happens in the cosmos, whether in art or elsewhere. The best way to clarify these points is to begin with two of the most recent great European philosophers: the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and his deviant heir Heidegger.

Kant launched a philosophical revolution with a trio of great works published in less than a decade: Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment (1790). The subject matter of these books can be summarized respectively as metaphysics, ethics, and art, though the third work also treats of themes in biology. For the moment, let’s focus on the Critique of Pure Reason . Kant’s central idea is his distinction between phenomena and noumena , also known as appearances and the thing-in-itself, though some scholars draw subtle distinctions between these pairs of terms. Kant sees his predecessors as having been devoted to “dogmatic” philosophy, which means the attempt to provide definitive answers about how reality is by means of rational argument. For example, this might involve attempts to prove that human freedom either exists or does not exist, that physical matter either is or is not made of indivisible particles, that time and space either have or do not have a beginning and an end, or that God must exist or need not exist. Kant covers these four themes under the heading of “antinomies,” and concludes that it is pointless to attempt philosophical proofs for any of them, since their solution one way or the other lies beyond the limits of direct human awareness.

Kant’s case against dogmatism hinges on his claim that human cognition is finite . All human access to the world seems to occur in three dimensions of space and one of irreversible time, and in a framework of twelve basic “categories” that define our human experience of reality: cause and effect rather than random events, the distinction between one and many, and other such rudimentary features of the world as we know it. But given that we are humans, and that we therefore encounter the world in a specific human manner, we have no way of knowing whether the conditions of our experience apply to the world as it is apart from our access to it. Perhaps God and angels experience a world without time and space or devoid of causal relations. Going beyond Kant’s own remarks, maybe the same holds for hyper-intelligent alien beings or even for various animal species. Our imprisonment in human finitude means that we must limit the claims of reason; philosophy can no longer be about reality apart from us, or the “transcendent.” Instead, philosophy must restrict itself to determining the basic conditions that hold for all human access to the world. Somewhat confusingly, Kant calls these conditions “transcendental,” a word so unfortunately close to “transcendent,” which we have seen means something entirely different. Whereas dogmatic philosophers claimed to address transcendent reality directly, Kant insists that we have access to the transcendental alone.

It is ironic that, although the career of virtually all major Western philosophers since the 1780s has been determined by their assimilation of Kant, his central idea of the thing-in-itself has been almost universally rejected. The unknowable noumenon has often been scorned as a residual form of Platonism or Christianity that slanders the world of bodies, pleasures, and life-affirming forces that we ought to celebrate instead, as in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Yet Kant’s more direct heirs, the so-called German Idealists running from J.G. Fichte through G.W.F. Hegel, make an important objection from within Kant’s own framework. Namely, if we claim to think a thing-in-itself outside thought, this is itself a thought; seen from this standpoint, Kant seems to commit what would later be called a “performative contradiction.” 2Since thinking a thing outside thought is itself a thought, the distinction between appearance and the thing-in-itself itself turns out to be contained wholly within the sphere of thought. This line of argument is what allows Hegel to claim a new sort of “infinity” for his philosophy, replacing Kantian finitude with an ultimate reconciliation between subject and object through a dialectical movement of positing and negation. German Idealism has influenced many contemporary philosophers, and is most visible today in continental thought in the line passing through Slavoj Žižek and Badiou up through the latter’s important disciple Meillassoux. None of these authors has any sympathy for the Kantian thing-in-itself: all of them claim, each in a different way, that the human subject is able to gain access to the absolute. We should note that OOO actively opposes this trend – which it designates as “neo-Modernism” or “epistemism” – and holds that reaffirmation of the thing-in-itself is the key to future progress in philosophy, though rather differently from how Kant imagined. Importantly for the present book, OOO also holds that the elimination of the thing-in-itself forecloses any effort to clarify the nature of artworks, since it robs us of the ability to disarm literalism.