Ep. 385: Guest Graham Harman on Object vs. Continuum (Part One)

What It Covers

Philosopher Graham Harman discusses his object-oriented ontology with The Partially Examined Life hosts, defending his position that objects never directly contact each other and explaining how real objects interact only through sensual properties. The conversation explores the distinction between real and sensual objects, the role of aesthetics versus knowledge, and how causation works as composition.

Key Questions Answered

• •Indirect Contact Theory: All interactions between objects are necessarily indirect and translated, not merely partial. When two objects interact, neither accesses the other's full reality but only sensual profiles. This applies equally to billiard balls colliding and humans shaking hands—the surface contact still requires explaining how that surface relates to the whole object, creating an infinite regress problem.
• •Causation as Composition: Harman reinterprets all causal interactions as compositional events where two interacting objects temporarily become a third, larger object. When two airplanes crash, they form a single crash-object that has retroactive effects on its component parts before they re-emerge as separate damaged entities. This framework eliminates the need for mysterious causal powers or occasionalist divine intervention.
• •Aesthetics Over Literalism: Metaphor and aesthetic experience provide better access to real objects than literal scientific description because they preserve the gap between objects and their properties. Homer's wine-dark sea does not literally describe ocean color but uses bare similarity to insinuate depth, danger, and mystery—qualities that literal translation into plain language destroys, reducing rich meaning to platitudes.
• •Emergence Creates Scale Hierarchy: Not all interacting things create larger wholes—only specific interactions produce emergent objects at different scales. This means the universe cannot be reduced to fundamental particles, nor does a unified cosmic whole exist, since many proximate objects never causally interact. Local wholes emerge where genuine causal unification occurs, creating ontological reality at multiple irreducible levels.
• •Knowledge Limitations: Perfect knowledge of a dog remains fundamentally different from the actual dog, not because matter separates them but because translating form into any medium—including knowledge—necessarily distorts it. This parallels how globes cannot become flat maps without distortion, or how pi cannot be expressed as terminating decimals. Incommensurability exists between knowledge and its objects, making Kant's thing-in-itself inevitable.