Читать книгу Art and Objects - Graham Harman - Страница 11

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.”² Since 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.

A different way of rejecting the thing-in-itself and claiming direct access to the absolute is found in the phenomenology of Husserl. Born in Moravia in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Husserl’s turn from mathematics to philosophy occurred in Vienna under the tutelage of the charismatic ex-priest Franz Brentano, who was also the teacher of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Brentano’s most famous contribution to philosophy was to revive the medieval concept of intentionality, which does not refer to the “intent” of a human action, as the term often falsely suggests to beginners. Instead, Brentano’s concern was to ask how psychology differs from other sciences.³ What is most characteristic of the mental realm, he claimed, is that every mental act is directed at an object. If we perceive, judge, or love and hate, then we perceive something, judge something, love or hate something. Now, it will immediately be remarked that we sometimes perceive things that are not really there: we hallucinate, make confused misjudgments, or go ethically astray by loving and hating imaginary things. What, then, is the relation between the objects of my mental acts and any “real” objects that might exist beyond them? Brentano gives insufficient guidance on this question. Intentionality, he says, is aimed at immanent objects, meaning objects directly present to the mind, and not – as frequent misreadings hold – at objects that may lie beyond it. Despite Brentano’s Aristotelian heritage through his Catholic background, and his temperamental dislike for German Idealism, his philosophy shows a lingering idealist or at least agnostic attitude toward the outside world.

The numerous talented students of Brentano worked to clarify this cloudy point in his teaching.⁴ One of the finest efforts in this direction was made by his brilliant Polish disciple Kazimierz Twardowski, in a provocative 1894 thesis entitled On the Content and Object of Presentations.⁵ The most important claim of this work is that intentional acts are double, aimed both at an object outside the mind and a specific content inside the mind. Though Twardowski was seven years younger than Husserl, he was initially far more advanced than the latter, who had shifted from mathematics to philosophy relatively late in his student career. Indeed, much of Husserl’s early work can be read as a protracted struggle with Twardowski’s doubling of object and content. What worried Husserl is that under this model, there was no way to reconcile the two realms in such a way as to make actual knowledge possible: a variant of the issue that bothered the German Idealists when reading Kant. As Husserl put it at the time, how can there be two Berlins, one of them a content inside the mind and the other an object outside it? In that case, there would be no way for the two Berlins ever to come into contact, and knowledge of Berlin would not be possible.⁶

This question led Husserl to his philosophical breakthrough, which amounts to a radical idealism despite repeated denials by his followers even today. His solution, namely, was that Berlin itself is purely immanent: not because it exists merely in the mind, but because there is no important difference between what is in the mind and what is in reality. The thing-in-itself outside thought is for Husserl an absurd notion; there is no object that could not be, at least in principle, the object of an intentional act by some mind. To speak of Berlin is to speak of Berlin itself, not just of a mental Berlin inside my mind. To be the real Berlin is not to be a Berlin-in-itself beyond access for all thought, and to be the Berlin-for-consciousness is not to be a mere mental figment with no objective correlate. Instead, the real Berlin and the Berlin in my mind are one and the same, both occupying the same ontological space. In short, Husserl rejects Kant’s division between noumenal and phenomenal worlds. The major difference between Husserl and Hegel (another famous critic of the thing-in-itself) is that Husserl is far more interested in objects, which – despite being immanent in rational thought – nonetheless have shadowy contours and elusive profiles that must be carefully analyzed. This is why Husserl often feels like a realist adrift in a world of independent objects in a way that is never true of Hegel, even though Husserl rejects the noumena just as decisively as Hegel himself. Philosophy for Husserl must be phenomenology: not – as for Hegel – because we need to describe the various stages through which the thinking subject passes in becoming aware of the world more concretely, but because the phenomenal realm is filled with translucent objects that can only be illuminated through painstaking description. The world is already there before us for rational consideration, with no “absurd” noumenon lying beyond all possible mental access. Like Hegel, Husserl is an idealist and a rationalist; unlike Hegel, he is fascinated by all sorts of specific entities – mailboxes, blackbirds, imaginary battles of centaurs – that can be understood only when their concrete sensual profiles are analyzed and their essential properties sifted from their inessential ones. We will soon see that there is more to Husserl than this. But first, we should speak of his student Heidegger’s effort to challenge and radicalize his phenomenology.

The young Heidegger felt called to philosophy after reading Brentano’s early thesis on the different meanings of “being” in Aristotle.⁷ He soon learned that Husserl was considered one of Brentano’s leading disciples, and by sheer luck Husserl was called to a professorship at the University of Freiburg in Germany, where Heidegger was already enrolled. A close partnership formed between the two, despite their thirty-year age difference, and Husserl came to regard Heidegger as his intellectual heir. But Husserl’s expectations would be disappointed, since it was not long before Heidegger put an independent spin on phenomenology. We have seen that the phenomenological method involves describing things as they appear to us, carefully sifting the wheat from the chaff so as to discover by intellectual means the essential features of every object in the world, as opposed to their transient silhouettes as perceived by the senses. But in Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture course Towards the Definition of Philosophy, held when he was aged twenty-nine, his decisive break with Husserl is already visible.⁸ Our primary way of dealing with the world, Heidegger tells his students, is not through direct consciousness of it as phenomenology holds. For the most part, we deal with things as equipment, meaning that we take them for granted unconsciously rather than encountering them sensually or intellectually. For example, the podium in the lecture hall is something the professor normally does not think about explicitly. We could make the same point about the oxygen in the room or the bodily organs of the professor and students, all of them normally invisible unless some environmental or health disaster leads us to notice them. In short, the phenomenal world that is primary for Husserl first arises for Heidegger from an invisible system of background entities. In most cases these are not directly observed by the mind, but are pre-theoretically relied upon or used. Our life-world is filled with equipment, all of it tacitly understood as useful for further human purposes. With this step, the basic assumption of phenomenology is rejected: it is simply not the case, Heidegger contends, that appearance in our mind is the primary way we encounter the world.

Over the next decade he continued to develop this model, culminating in his 1927 masterpiece Being and Time, regarded by many – myself included – as the most important philosophical work of the twentieth century.⁹ Here, Heidegger gives an even more detailed version of his tool-analysis. A hammer is usually not noticed, but silently relied upon as it works to help us achieve some more conscious ulterior purpose. It helps us to build a house, and the house in turn assists our aspiration to remain dry and warm, which in turn provides support for more intricate family life and personal health. All the items of equipment in our environment are locked together in a holistic system, so that in a sense there are no individual pieces of equipment at all. This situation of unconscious holism can be disrupted in a number of ways, with the most famous such case occurring when equipment breaks or fails. If the hammer shatters into pieces, is too heavy, or is otherwise ineffective, our attention is suddenly seized by this individual utensil. Only at this late and derivative stage does the hammer finally become an individual phenomenon viewed directly by the mind in Husserl’s sense.

Over the ensuing decades Heidegger has gained wide influence, and is now taken seriously even in analytic philosophy circles that tend to be allergic to philosophers from the heavily Franco-German continental tradition. Unfortunately, the mainstream interpretation of Heidegger limits his importance by reducing his insight to a trivial form of pragmatism. Heidegger’s chief lesson is widely said to be as follows: prior to any theoretical or perceptual access to things, we deal with them through a set of unconscious background practices, one that is holistically determined by our total social-environmental context.¹⁰ But there is a serious problem with this interpretation, and OOO first arose in the 1990s in direct opposition to it. For one thing, it should be clear that our practical contact with things is no more exhaustive than our theoretical or perceptual awareness of them. Heidegger is certainly right that our scientific objectification of a fish or flower fails to exhaust the full depths of these things. Perceiving something directly with the mind does not mean capturing the whole of its reality: no sum total of views of a mountain, for instance, can ever replace the existence of that mountain, any more than the set of all organic chemicals exhausts the existence of their key ingredient, carbon. Even if God could see all sides of a mountain simultaneously from every possible vantage point, this would not be enough: for the mountain is simply not a sum of views, as claimed tacitly by the idealist philosopher George Berkeley and explicitly by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.¹¹ Quite the contrary: the mountain is the reality that makes all the views possible in the first place. In Heideggerese, we could say that the being of the chemical or mountain are not commensurate with any knowledge or perception of them; the mountain is always a surplus unmastered by all our efforts to grasp its properties. And yet, is the same not true of our practical dealings with an object? When we use a chemical in preparing a medicine or poison, or when we climb a mountain in a spirit of adventure, in these cases too we abstract certain features from these objects, which exist in their full and unexhausted plenitude quite apart from all our theoretical, perceptual, or practical encounters with them.

Another, harsher way of putting it is that the widely celebrated difference between the conscious theory or perception of a thing and the unconscious use of it is too superficial to count as a genuine philosophical insight. Far more important is the unbridgeable gap between the being of an entity and any human dealings with it at all, whether they be theoretical or practical. Another way of looking at it is that Heidegger, unlike Husserl, unwittingly revives a sense of the Kantian thing-in-itself. While it is true that Heidegger does not usually put it this way, there is a frequently overlooked passage where he directly invites this interpretation. In his important book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, published shortly after Being and Time, he writes as follows: “What is the significance of the struggle initiated in German Idealism against the ‘thing-in-itself’ except a growing forgetfulness of what Kant had won, namely … the original development and searching study of the problem of human finitude?”¹²

But ultimately, it is not Heidegger’s own statements that authorize us to interpret his tool-analysis as leading back toward the Kantian noumenon. Thought experiments are often better understood by later figures than their original authors, as is clear from the history of science: Einstein’s ingenious reinterpretation of the Michelson/Morley experiment on aether drag comes immediately to mind. As soon as we realize that unconscious practices fail to grasp the reality of things just as much as theory and perception do, we come to see that Heidegger’s tool-analysis is not just a new theory of practical reason, but the demonstration of a noumenal surplus beyond all praxis no less than all theory. Furthermore, we must reject Heidegger’s claim that the system of tools is holistic, with all tools linking together in a totality that is determined by the purposes of some human being. For we must never forget that one of the chief features of tools for Heidegger is that they can break, and that nothing would break if it were seamlessly assigned to other tools in its environment. A hammer can break only because it has more features – such as feebleness or fragility – than the current practical system takes into account. While Kant seemed to place the noumena in another world far from human everyday life, Heidegger shows that the thing-in-itself enters and disrupts all thought and action in this world. We are always merely caressing the surface of things, only half-aware that they are more than our theory or praxis takes them to be at any moment. To summarize, what Heidegger bequeaths to philosophy is a model of individual beings impenetrable to the human senses and intellect, but equally opaque to everyday human use. Though he was too focused on the internal drama of human being ever to read his own tool-analysis in quite this way, I believe it would be possible to convince him of this interpretation if he were still alive.

This was the original motivating insight of OOO, dating to the early 1990s. The next one, coming a half-decade later, concerns a point on which there would be no hope at all of convincing Heidegger.¹³ For if it is true that no human theoretical, perceptual, or practical encounter with objects can ever exhaust the surplus reality of things, the same is true even of non-human objects in their relations with each other. Ultimately, the rift between things and our encounter with them is not the contingent product of a human, alien, or animal “mind,” but occurs automatically in any relation at all. When a stone strikes the surface of a pond, the stone is real, and so too is the pond. Through their interaction, they have either one-way or two-way effects on each other. But clearly the stone does not exhaust the reality of the pond, and neither does the pond encounter the full reality of the stone. In other words, it is not just humans that are finite, but objects more generally. The stone encounters the pond in a “stony” way even if it has no trace of anything like consciousness, and likewise, the pond encounters the stone in a “pondy” way. The same is true of any relation. Critics of OOO are often bothered by this point in particular, because this is where we break with the Kantian framework of modern philosophy, and also where our critics – wrongly – think that we stray into a form of disreputable panpsychism. For on this level we are speaking merely of the finitude of all relations, not claiming that this requires anything worthy of being called mental life.

Nonetheless, OOO does have a certain moral authority stemming from a largely forgotten aspect of the post-Kantian landscape. German Idealism continues to receive lavish praise for demolishing the thing-in-itself, yet it is rarely noted that the noumenon is not Kant’s only major principle, and hence not the only one that might have been reversed. The other, more claustrophobic element of Kant’s thought is the assumption that the only relations we can talk about must involve a human being. That is to say, for Kant as for his successors there is no way to speak of the relation between fire and cotton, but only of the human cognition of both as the first burns the second. This is the Kantian prejudice that German Idealism unknowingly preserves, despite its self-congratulatory murder of the noumenon. OOO holds, by contrast, that the German Idealist radicalization of Kant was not just contingent, but wrong. What should have happened instead, from the 1790s onward, is that Kant’s notions of finitude and the thing-in-itself should have been retained, while simply removing their restriction to cases involving human beings. For in fact, the entire cosmos is a dramatic strife between objects and their relations. The first principle of OOO is now on the table, the only one that most critics bother to take into account: the withdrawal of real objects from all relation. To discover the second, we must leave Heidegger and return to Husserl, doing more justice this time to his misunderstood legacy.