Ep. 384: Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology (Part One)

What It Covers

The Partially Examined Life examines Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology, exploring his argument that real objects exist independently but remain inaccessible to direct knowledge. The discussion covers Harman's rejection of reductionism, his Kantian framework distinguishing real versus sensory objects, and his claim that metaphor and aesthetics provide indirect access to things-in-themselves.

Key Questions Answered

• •Promiscuous Ontology: Harman argues for a flat ontology where entities include not just physical objects but also organizations like the Dutch East India Company, fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes, and momentary events like airplane collisions. This challenges physicalism by demonstrating that real objects need not be material, spatial, or permanent to qualify as genuine entities in the world.
• •Four False Assumptions: Harman identifies physicalism (everything is material), smallism (only basic particles are real), antifictionalism (only real things exist), and literalism (everything can be stated propositionally) as flawed assumptions in scientific reductionism. He contends that emergent properties at macro levels possess unique characteristics irreducible to their components, even when those properties are predictable from micro-level analysis.
• •Kantian Withdrawal: Objects-in-themselves remain permanently inaccessible to direct perception or knowledge, creating what Harman calls withdrawal. Humans only access sensory objects, simplified representations that function like fictions compared to the complex real objects. This applies equally to all interactions, including between non-human objects like billiard balls, eliminating traditional causality and requiring occasionalism where objects never truly touch.
• •Aesthetic Access: Harman proposes metaphor and aesthetic experience provide indirect access to real objects that literal propositional language cannot capture. This approach draws on Kant's third critique and romantic philosophy, suggesting humans substitute themselves as things-in-themselves to gain oblique knowledge of other withdrawn objects. Scientific definitions using universals inherently fail to capture concrete individual things.
• •Undermining and Overmining: Harman rejects both undermining (reducing objects to smaller components like atoms) and overmining (reducing objects to their relations or effects). He positions his theory against both materialist reductionism and idealist approaches, maintaining that mid-sized objects like tables possess genuine reality irreducible to either their constituent parts or their functional relationships with other entities.