Debating metaphysics may be a waste of time —of which I gladly partake sometimes. If metaphysics had a church, I’d post Bas van Fraasen’s empirical manifesto on its door:
1. No form of inquiry into the nature of the world should be immune to the possibility of error or failure.
2. Correct logical or grammatical form should not be considered sufficient to render claims about the world substantive.
3. The epistemic status of one’s criteria for theory choice should be linked to the epistemic status of one’s theories.
This is not to imply that the enterprise is without merit. Metaphysics can be entertaining, even productive. As we shall see, metaphysics doesn’t have to be entirely disconnected from the world.
While looking at a Heidegger compilation for my class, I bumped into Graham Harman’s Heidegger Explained, which I found to be a terrific introduction. This book led me to Harman’s first book, Tool-Being. I was immediately attracted to Harman’s flair for rhetoric and his clear and combative prose. It’s through Harman that I learned about the Speculative Realism movement. Yet, the more I read Harman, the more I disagreed with his views.
Harman is not doing thing/metaphysics as much as Dasein/metaphysics —an ongoing drama as Dasein wrestles for power.
Harman’s tool-being
What is human life when seen from the vast expanse of future eons?
Enough time, enough weight on top, and we’re all squeezed into crude oil. 2
The thing was here before us and will be here after we disappear.
It was right after the Bang that,
… the fluid Mass, but downward purg’d
The black tartareous cold Infernal dregs
Adverse to life: then founded, then conglob’d
Like things to like, the rest to several place
Disparted, and between spun out the Air,
And Earth self ballanc’d on her Center hung.— Milton’s Paradise Lost (7, 240).
Tool-being metaphysics may deserve a place in philosophy, but let’s not forget that Dasein’s imperialism is not far from the apprehensions of tool-being’s fetishism.
Even more dangerous, what if the thing becomes —thanks to the metaphysician’s legerdemain— Dasein-in-drags?
Let’s introduce the characters of this metaphysical performance:
a) Heidegger, b) Harman, c) Dasein & tool-being and the resulting doubles, i.e., d) Harman-as-Heidegger, e) Harman-as-tool-being & f) Harman-as-Harman.
What’s tool-being? It boils down to daseining the universe sans Dasein.
Harman takes the qualities traditionally reserved for humans — as he puts it— down!
The human can no longer be viewed as a “creature of distance” (…) Dasein’s movement occurs in the opposite direction. Dasein moves down into the bowels of the earth.
Consciousness is not an epiphenomenon but an intra-phenomenon. (TB, 226)
Here’s a five-point list of this hotch-potch:
1. Implode Zuhandenheit & Vorhandenheit 1
Two irreducible faces of the same entity (TB, 31).
Why? For Heidegger, Dasein and being (Sein) make up a hermeneutical whole. We cannot understand one without the other —as Heidegger argues in sections 2 and 4 of B&T.
By taking Dasein’s involvement out of the picture, things can resurface.
Power to beings! 2
What pre-existing theories can one possibly entertain that are seemingly akin to this realm?
Vitalism? Too bio-oriented for Harman.3
Hylozoism? Judging by this: “I am not claiming that material objects have souls; I simply lack the general term other than ‘encounter’ that would be painfully sterile,” it remains a possibility. (TB, 30).
Get things to think!
2. Destroy Dasein’s empire over things means degrading its moods
Harman presents Heidegger as having been ready for a great discovery he missed:
It is clear that the liberating power of Heidegger’s theory of equipment lies in its subversion of the traditional dominance of Vorhandenheit. The problem is in the additional assumption, often encouraged by Heidegger, that human existence is the hero that frees entities from the present-at-hand real. (TB, 19).
This is what Harman does with Heidegger’s equipment in Section 3:
Heidegger’s tool analysis yields fundamental insights that they cannot be confined to officially sanctioned tool items (…) In brief, Heidegger has told us about beings in general, but nothing at all about tools in particular (…) For if the structure of tool-being can be found in any entity whatsoever, animals and human beings must have the mode of being equipment.
Thus:
…here as before, there is a tendency to take two modes of being that can be found everywhere at all times, and to try to segregate them from one another in two distinct types of being.
However, this is precisely Heidegger’s enterprise, and the two modes offer a fundamental insight into Dasein’s analysis. Harman is right that everything hinges on this distinction. In other words, freeing things from the tyranny of Dasein takes dismantling its proprietorship over theory. What’s left? Harman doesn’t care (& why should he?)4
Dasein’s “Space” is dispatched in a summary fashion:
It’s useless to object that ontological place is spatial insofar as it makes up the ground of ontic space. As we have seen, the ontological place is the ground of everything.
Yes and no. This misrepresents Heidegger’s idea of spatiality, which gradually develops from his Being and Time days to 1935’s The Origin of the Work of Art to The Thing (delivered in 1950) to Building Dwelling and Thinking (1951). Discounting this development is to throw away 30 years of conceptual growth of oppositional threads. What started with “space” ends with the idea of “locality,” which concerns the thing!
Edward S. Casey points out in The Fate of Place that the spatiality of “The Origin of the Work of Art” is no longer that of Dasein’s being there. The work of art is not comprehensible either in craft or ready-to-hand alone. This self-sufficient presence that Heidegger belabors as “The Open” will be transformed later in his “Conversation on a Country Path” (1944). Here, Gegend (“region”) becomes a dyad: Gegen (“regioning”) and Gegent (“that which regions”). To be in a region includes “things and thoughts.” Casey tracks the term “nearness” to Heidegger’s 1950 lecture “The Thing,” where “nearing” has very little to do with equipment —as Harman pretends— and more with the thing itself. “In the default of nearness, the thing remains annihilated,” Casey points out, “nearing is the thinging of things.”
Casey’s analysis takes us into a built-constructed thing, the “bridge” that Harman is so fond of in Tool-Being.
This remarkable passage reinscribes in terms now familiar to us —most notably, Stätte, Platz, but this is done in a way that constitutes a new composition, indeed a new vision, of place. For “place” is nothing “preexisting” —as “positions” are in world space— but arises with the bridge regarded as a thing. This first operation transforms what would otherwise be a mere spot or position, a “simple location,” into a full-fledged location. On the far side space, on the near side localities.5
Why does Harman dismiss this development? He forgets that we may take needless detours only to cross paths. If tool-being analysis supposedly considers the thing itself, one wonders how much of what’s left out could be incorporated into the thing.
It is as if the selection process reflects more Dasein (the metaphysician’s interest) than the thing itself. One wonders if what’s demoted, as Dasein-like, could not, in principle, become tool-being material.
Is this an error in interpretation?
Why can the thing not be ahead of itself, anticipating its annihilation? Why can thrownness not be a form of external causality? Could Angst be reformulated as a form of thing-possibility?
Why is tool-being not free? Harman’s entity-ruled authoritarian paradise is legislated by Dasein ventriloquizing the thing as Ereignischaraktere 6
Van Gogh, Shoes, 1886
There are moments when Harman is betrayed by his shadow:
I do not make the claim in the name of a relativism that would liquidate all existing distinctions between being, so that all interpretations of any entity become “equally true” (TB, 97).
This brings us to the art of ventriloquy. Doesn’t talking about things requires us to get below them and appropriate their voice?
English and German Romantics did it successfully. Heidegger has great moments in The Origin of the Work of Art and The Thing.
This only makes it harder for Harman, who is wearing so many different hats that, at times, he forgets which is which. One jumps from Harman to Harman-as-Heidegger, to Harman-as-thing, and vice versa, to Harman ventriloquizing himself!
3. Hide the thing. Make it withdraw!
Heidegger’s fixation with withdrawing harks back to Avicenna’s idea of wajib al-wujud bi-dhatihi, “that which is self-withdrawing.” Why is this important?
Withdrawing assures Harman (as it did with Heidegger before) a lettre de course into deeper regions of Being and/or tool-being. In essence, Being’s oblivion, since this means the Being’s withdrawal, remains essential to Being.
This is Being’s Kapital! No wonder Heidegger’s Being played hide-and-seek all along. Who needs epistemology when you have hermeneutics?
The motto goes: If you see it, you don’t; if you don’t, you see it.
Suppose the being of the hammer withdraws from all of its relations. In that case, it is equally valid that the hammer-being is not a present-at-hand atom descended from the skies to breathe life into mere derivative relations.
Instead, tool-being is a form, a kind of formal cause that acts as a substance concerning its surroundings. But it is born only as a relational composite of its internal elements. On the other hand, the hammer is a vast surplus beyond human praxis, no less than beyond human theory. (TB, 171)
Harman’s withdrawal is different than Heidegger’s, not anymore, a strategy of Being playing a Wessen/Unwessen game with princess Aletheia. Harman’s withdrawing becomes tool-being’s sole behavior! Isn’t that moody enough?
The exact status of this system remains, and must remain, inaccessible. Otherwise, it would revert to the conditions of presence-at-hand (…), where the tool is what withdraws from any particular expression of perception, including linguistic ones. (168)
Here is Harman-as-thing (or is it the other way around?)
Quite apart from the bridge as something perceived, there is the subterranean tool-being. The bridge is set loose on the earth as a distinct and independent power, giving birth to a universe in which canyon-effect and river-effect are more or less neutralized, partially surpassed in their former roles as obstacles. (TB, 220)
All right, but words, not things, are doing the job of presenting. Things are not talking; Harman is!
Harman’s book could be entitled Who is Talking? Above, we have the voice of tool-being. For example, “loose on the earth,” which is meant as thing-talk, cannot be imagined without a bridge-and-the-earth relation, which is prohibited to tool-being.
Can tool-being break free from the metaphysician’s straitjacket?
Imagine the following conversation between the relational side and the tool-being side of the same entity:
Relational side: Hey, I just underwent a radioactive decay!
Tool-Being side: Good God, I felt nothing.
R‑side: What do you mean? It felt like a f*** explosion!
TB-side: That’s between you and the outside. Our sides are compartmentalized. You are sensuous; I’m subterranean.
R‑side: How does “subterranean” feel?
TB-side: Er, subterranean-like.
R‑side: C’mon, meine Freund. Can you do better than that?
TB-side: It feels, er, in vacuo. I can’t even tell anymore. To say it, I must use sensuous words referring the phenomenal realm.
R‑side: Are you a noumenal freak?
TB-side: I think I am.…
R‑side: What?
TB-side: (imperceptible echo) … withdrawing.
We must not forget that a powerful rhetoric of opposites is going on here. The more the tool-being withdraws, the more important its revelation becomes. For whom? Dasein, who else!
4. Theorize without theory. Harman moves swiftly. The order is to subvert
Even though theory cannot free us entirely from the unthematic contexture, depth will always remain in the entity that eludes any theoretical view. (TB, 59)
I am bewildered by how one can write the sentence above and go on theorizing. Let’s see: It’s trivial that theories always leave aspects to be further adjusted, tweaked, or reinterpreted. The reason is that theories are not a priori mandates but built—or splintered—from previous ideas.
In that trivial sense, Heidegger is right that theory interprets things in a way that abstracts them from the global context of significance. Ideally, the new theory will be tested for adequacy, i.e., simplicity, consistency, and fruitfulness, which amounts to explanatory power (or justification, depending on your take). Besides, a theory is true (or valid) until proven false (or invalid), meaning that a theory is not necessarily true (or valid) forever. Unless there is a non-trivial conclusion that there is a structural impossibility of theoretical prehension, which is what Harman means. Part of the world is forced to withdraw from our view.
I agree with Pierre Keller’s comparison between Husserl & Heidegger’s theorizing styles. According to Heller, for Husserl one cannot develop general claims about human existence, whether “existentials or conditions of the possibility of any human existence except by considering the idea of what it is o exist as a human being in a context-independent manner.” 7 Same with Harman: One cannot legislate the essence of the universe ventriloquizing Dasein’s angst-driven transcendence from a rocking chair.
Our awareness does not penetrate back behind objects into the systems of tools but lingers in the sensuous zone of raindrops and handshakes, and bright colors. In each instant, we contend with a set of irreducible elements or stock characters, with objects populating the earth.” (TB, 47)
Am I alone in hearing noumenal overtones in the paragraph above? This is not something Harman wants us to notice (though Dasein creeps through the back door to reclaim its place).
In the end, as much as he fights for the thing, Harman forgets that Dasein is also a thing (not only that things are Dasein, which is his claim).
5. Another victim of Harman’s steamrolling over Dasein? The “As-structure”
Harman dispatches it readily:
Theory cannot be distinguished from other experience by appealing to the as-structure, since the “as” can never bring us the least bit closer to the things themselves than we already were.
There is a brief toying with Heidegger’s idea of metaontology only to prepare for the revelation in Section 9. 8 Up to this moment, Harman proceeds quickly by leveling and demolishing distinctions.
As we know, the only thing left is ready-to-hand and presence-to-hand as two sides of the same coin. But he cannot keep deferring an explanation he owes from the start: Where is the beef?
Get ready for Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Ground.”
Dig this Harman-as-Heidegger nugget:
… the presence of an object to thought is only possible on the basis of a prior state of transcendence.
What follows deserves attention:
Heidegger says what we would expect him to say: that the beings that emerge in our transcendence are born from the robust power of a hidden depth unearthed from the dark empire of a prior execution. Transcendence is a “not” that surpasses the anonymous real of tool-being: “That which is surpassed is precisely only beings in themselves, i.e., every being that can be unconcealed and become unconcealed to Dasein, and thus even and precisely that being as which ‘it itself’ exists.”
For Harman-as-Heidegger, theoretical statements interpret things in a way that abstracts from the global context of significance in terms of which we orient ourselves in the world. That doesn’t mean that theoretical propositions interpret the world in terms of objects that have no essential connection to each other.
Harman accepts Heidegger’s insight that because there is no meaningful way of articulating what the object is independent of one’s understanding of the world, the relation between statements or beliefs and objects is really an imperialistic way of construing what is.
Yet, what Harman-as-Heidegger is doing is theorizing as not theorizing. The safe-conduct is transcendence:
… phenomena are partly liberated from their occluded action into some sort of tangible form.
6. Finally Harman reveals the arcanum
Now you see it:
Überschwung! the “freeing of entities into the clearing where they are encountered. (TB, 91)
Now you don’t:
But predictably enough, Heidegger also tells us that beings are never completely transcended, as if they were somehow able to become transparent at a glance.” (TB, 91)
Let’s follow now Harman-as-Heidegger’s tautological platitude:
Thus, whatever contours of objects may be illuminated through Dasein’s transcendence, other possibilities remain withdrawn. The objectification of things never offers full monetary equivalent of their dark and silent labor, since no such objectifying can exhaust their reality. “Following both ways of grounding, transcendence outstrips and withdraws at the same time.”
Aber natürlich!
Harman understands he’s on shaky ground:
It should be reemphasized that Heidegger is in no position to identify Dasein as the source of transcendence.
For being so non-atomic, tool-being reminds one of Schrödinger’s cat paradox: Accept that the cat is both dead and alive. 9
As he doubts Dasein’s transcendence, Harman inadvertently produces this false dilemma:
This does not prove that only humans transcend, as if objects surrounding us were only dreary present-at-hand lumps that needed human touch to come to life.
For tool-being sans Dasein, click here (skip to 1:07). The only problem with Harman’s mind experiment is that the toys are not alone. Pixar’s non-toy camera is filming them!
Here is Harman-as-Harman on behalf of the thing, now appealing to pity:
Perhaps entities are rendered bland or unidimensional only through their contact with humans. Maybe instead of liberating objects into a clearing, Dasein is guilty of chloroforming the things, of pinning them down like the exterminated moths that bulk up an amateur’s private collection. (My italics).
One can tell Harman is not too comfortable with Heidegger’s Angst. Why? One can connect the dots of Angst to epiphany: Angst leads to fruition in resolution, which opens up a field for the authentic exercise of freedom. Now, Dasein becomes free from the tyranny of the meaningless domination of the anonymous “they.”
How will Harman connect Angst to tool-being? By displaying nothingness as nothingness?
Vielleicht.
Ray Brassier, another speculative realist and a Harman ally, has a similar point to make about Harman’s metaphysics:
It is not enough to evoke a metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality in the manner, for example, of object-oriented philosophies since the absence of any reliable cognitive criteria by which to measure and specify the precise extent of the gap between seeming and being or discriminate between the extrinsic and intrinsic properties or objects licenses entirely arbitrary claims about the in-itself. For an example of object-oriented philosophies, see Graham Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. 10
After all is done, one is left with two options: Reject Einstein’s separability (locality) or reject objective reality.
Most physicists take a mechanistic explanation of Bell’s theorem, which results in some violation of locality. The detailed explanation of how one can assume that the observer may affect the things observed in quantum mechanics is rather complicated. A summarized explanation of Bell’s theorem is needed, which cannot be explored here. Yet, the result I want to draw is similar to Pascual Jordan, one of the significant early contributors to quantum theory:
Observations not only disturb what has to be measured, they produce it.… We compel [the electron] to assume a definite position.… We produce the results of measurement.11
More than any other mode of measured observation, Quantum Mechanics opens the possibility that consciousness is just a euphemism for a participatory constituent of physical reality. Harman ignores this vital vector in his tool-being analysis. Dasein brings a different angle to this discussion as part of the totality of things.
When Von Neumann traces the act of observation back to the very edge of our mind, he’s doing an intra phenomenal Husserlian reduction. Is that undoing Harman’s tool-being and taking us back to point one? Not necessarily. This is more like a Hegelian Aufhebung.
Then Harman’s motto: consciousness is an intra phenomenon, makes sense but now from the opposite (and forgotten) axis of Dasein’s thinking.
Consciousness can be approached as a complex & organized form of tool-being, which of course has nothing to do with eliminative and other reductive materialisms. I advance that this is the best way to solve the riddle of correlationism that Harman et al. diligently pursue.
___________
All my notes are taken from Graham Harman’s Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court, 2002).
1 See Anjan Chakravartty’s Metaphysics for Scientific Realism (Cambridge University Press, 2009) p. 23. 2 Gene Ray’s “Note to On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.” Catalog for an exhibit Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture, December 1992. 3 “A substance is not one kind of entity amongst others, but a way of being belonging to all entities, even those which seem at first to be mere composites.” Or, “… since every relation can also be regarded as an entity, the world is jampacked with entities: there is no room for nothing in ontology. (TB, 11). So, Don Quixote = Cervantes = Pierre Menard = Jorge Luis Borges. I’m sure Don Quixote (a stubborn Spaniard of the old school) would protest this leveling. Flooring his world of adventures, imploding the imaginary with the non-imaginary? That’s his business, not ours! Does it matter that Quixote is not Cervantes’ author but Pierre Menard? What if Cervantes was “really” a Spanish cross-dresser named Dulcinea? 4 Dasein is always in a state of mind or mood that discloses how it is and how it encounters something that matters. This is fundamental to Heidegger’s project. For example, spatiality emerges from Dasein’s equipmentality because these ready-to-hand entities have a place, even if they change from moment to moment. 5 Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (University of California Press, 1998) p. 269–280. 6 See Vincent Vycinas Earth and Gods: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (Martinus Nijhoff, 1961). p. 40. Just as all meaning contexts point toward Dasein, the spatiality of the implements is based on the caretaking (the to-be-in) of Dasein. “Encountering the handy things in the space of their surroundings is only possible because the Dasein itself, in respect to its to-be-in-the-world, is ‘spatial.’ ” 7 Event character. Never mind that to properly understand an event character, one needs to bootstrap it with Heidegger’s temporality, which Harman disqualifies: “You can say what you like, but Heidegger has no theory of time.” (Harman’s italics, TB, 65). 8 Peter Keller, Husserl and Heidegger on Human Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1999). p. 143, 145. 9 In a lecture in 1928, Heidegger promised meta ontology as the ontology for which fundamental ontology merely paves the way, taking up the question of the status of entities insofar as they are independent of human existence. Gerry Stahl puts it clearly in his Marx and Heidegger: Even in Being and Time, there is a tendency, developed in Heidegger’s later writings, to talk of man as “being there” in a “clearing of Being.” This circumstance is before the hermeneutic “as” and can perhaps be construed as follows: Beings are present to people and, as present, are given specific meanings. While these meanings are to be attributed to the subject manifold of signification, the presence of the beings is independent of this subjective hermeneutic sieve before it. “Being” applies to this latter level as the determination of the character of the presence of beings as given beings in general, not as the determination of the meaning of individual beings or even of the system of their possible meanings. The question is not whether Heidegger achieved that idea but whether it is achievable, i.e., to presuppose that one can conceptualize being independent of one’s conceptualizing. 10 “To withdraw from the context of the world is not to become an atom” (TB, 170). 11 The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek & Graham Harman Ed. (re.press, 2011) p. 51. 12 Evan Harris Walker, The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Minds and the Meaning of Life (Perseus Books, 2000). p. 136. Though I disagree with other conclusions of Professor Walker, I agree with this one: “(…) The way out of our difficulty, the path we must take now, is to try to understand what was previously rejected. We must recognize that objective reality is a flawed concept, that state vector collapse arises from some interaction with the observer, and that consciousness is a negotiable instrument of reality. Our entire conception of reality must now be rethought. We stand at the threshold of a revolution in thinking that transcends anything that has happened in a thousand years. Now the observer, consciousness, something self-like or mind-like, becomes a provable part of a richer reality than physics or any science has ever dared to envision.”
Leave a Reply