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

Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life episode 384 part three. We're continuing on Gran Harmon's book, Object Oriented Ontology, A New Theory of Everything. Turning now to chapter two, which we said a little bit about in the previous parts. Aesthetics is the Root of All Philosophy is the title of it. So it comes off of the end of chapter one where he was criticizing literalism. And so here we're gonna see why the artwork is something that we can knowledge is not the right word because it's a type of cognition that does not involve knowledge, but is a way that we can actually get at what Harman considers to be the real in an indirect way. Yeah. He starts off by talking about this theory of everything that we seek and saying it should account for non physical entities just as much as physical. And then he gets into, you know, why literalism might be the sticking point for many readers who will not like the idea of unverifiable mystical claims, a kind of in comparison to negative theology where we can't say what God is directly, we can only say what he is not. Harman claims that mysticism in a way is more comparable to rationalism because both are supposed to have complete access to reality, but there's a possibility that's indirect. And he says, In a way, this is more powerful. He compares it to lingerie, right, or love notes that aren't too explicit or threats that are better left vague like, I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse. Likewise, humor is ruined by literalization. So, that gets us into a non literal cognition of things, indirect access to reality as involving metaphor, which seems to be at the heart of an aesthetic relation to reality. So a lot of this, he attributes the the really, the inspiration to his entire system to this early Juan Ortega y Gasset essay, an essay in aesthetics by way of a preface, which I did look at, but Ortega, as, he's referred to in this book, he disdains do actually doing metaphysics here. So he's really talking about the phenomenology of art, how when we, for instance, have a metaphor or really any other aesthetic experience, we are creating a new object. The objects that we normally perceive, we are destroying them in a certain way temporarily through our interpretations. And we're so if I see something as, you know, a statue, I could just see it as a a lump of marble. But if I take it aesthetically, then it's like I'm pulling off the aesthetic. Yeah. I'm making the lump of marble into the beautiful lump of marble. And so I'm doing I'm creating a new thing. You know, it's easiest to see in, the case that that we get given in quite length by Harmon in the idea of a metaphor. So if you have two things that you're comparing, then …