Читать книгу Art and Objects - Graham Harman - Страница 12

When we last encountered Husserl, his emphasis on the direct mental awareness of objects had just been overthrown by Heidegger’s appeal to our mostly tacit dealings with entities in the world (which OOO then developed into a theory of objects withdrawn from their relations with humans or anything else). Most arguments over the difference between Husserl and Heidegger remain stalled on this single point, with one side triumphally affirming Heidegger’s maneuver and the other claiming that Husserl already knew about the hidden being of things. The latter camp is simply wrong, since Husserl is perfectly clear in his rejection of any thing-in-itself beyond direct access by the mind, though this is precisely what Heidegger champions if we read him properly. Nonetheless, there is an important side to Husserl that Heidegger seems to grasp only hazily: not the rift between accessible beings and their hidden being, but a different one between beings themselves and their own shifting qualities.

Empiricist philosophers, who urge us to restrict our attention to what we experience directly, have generally been skeptical of any notion of “objects” as something beyond their palpable qualities. For example, Kant’s admired predecessor Hume famously treats objects as just bundles of qualities: there is no proof of any “horse” over and above its countless visual appearances, the sounds it makes, and the various ways it can be ridden, tamed, or fed.¹⁴ Husserl’s greatest contribution to philosophy, despite his idealism, was to show how much tension is already underway within the phenomenal realm between an object and its qualities.¹⁵ Let’s stay with the example of a horse: we never see it in exactly the same way for more than a passing, flickering instant. We see the horse now from the left side, now from behind, now from an oblique angle, and at other times even from above. It is always at a specific distance from us when standing, walking, or running, and is always found to be peaceful, agitated, or in some other mood. If we take the empiricist view, then it is never strictly the “same” horse in each of these instances. There is merely a sort of family resemblance between the horse at each specific moment: after all, the empiricist holds that we only encounter a set of qualities at every moment, never an enduring unit called “horse” over and above such qualities. Husserl’s view, like that of the entire phenomenological tradition after him, is the exact opposite. Whatever the horse is doing from one moment to the next, however close or far away it is and however subtly different its colors become as the sun sinks toward the horizon, what I encounter is always the horse. All its shifting qualities are inessential, and merely pass from one moment to the next in a kaleidoscopic manner. For empiricism, the qualities are all-important and there is no enduring horse-unit apart from them; for phenomenology, there is only the horse-unit, and all its shifting qualities (which Husserl calls “adumbrations,” Abschattungen) are merely passing decorations atop its surface. To summarize, Husserl gives us a new rift – barely present in Heidegger, outside a few important early traces – between the intentional object and its shifting, accidental qualities.

But there is even more going on than this, because Husserl actually discovered that the intentional object has two kinds of qualities. Along with those that pass quickly from one moment to the next, there are also the essential qualities that the horse needs in order for us to keep considering it this horse, rather than deciding it is really something else. In fact, this is the major task of phenomenology according to Husserl: by varying our thoughts and perceptions, we should ultimately come to realize which of the horse’s features are essential rather than accidental. Unfortunately, he also holds that the intellect grasps the essential qualities of an object while the senses grasp the accidental ones: though Heidegger later shows that the difference between the intellect and the senses is simply not that important, given that both reduce entities to presence before the mind. Yet we should not understate the complexity of what Husserl discovers. Although we must reject Husserl’s limitation of objects to the sphere of consciousness as being too idealist to account for the thing-in-itself, there is more going on here than mere idealism. What arises in Husserl is a double tension in which the intentional object – such as the horse I perceive in the meadow – has accidental qualities, despite being different from them, and also has essential qualities despite being different from them, given that an object is a unit over and above its essential features no less than above its accidental ones.

The time has come to restate everything in the standard OOO terminology that will occasionally be used in this book. For objects and qualities, we use the simple abbreviations O and Q. For Heidegger’s realm of real objects, withdrawn from all relation and descended ultimately from Kant’s noumena, we use R. For Husserl’s realm of appearances, which do not withdraw but are always directly present, we do not use the ugly and ambiguous term “intentional,” but call it “sensual” instead, abbreviated as S – even though it includes cases of access to things via the intellect rather than the senses. Just as genetics analyzes DNA in terms of the chemical abbreviations G, C, A, and T, OOO has a basic alphabet of O, Q, R, and S, with two types of objects (R and S) and two of qualities (again R and S), with the difference that we allow both R and S to pair with either O or Q, giving us double the number of possibilities found in genetics. Objects can be either present (SO, from Husserl) or irredeemably absent (RO, from Heidegger, with the proviso that objects hide from each other no less than from us). The same holds for the qualities of objects, which can either be present to the senses (SQ, Husserl’s “adumbrations”) or forever withdrawn from direct access (RQ, like Husserl’s “essential qualities,” with the proviso that Husserl is wrong to think the intellect can grasp them directly).

Furthermore, since there are no bare objects without qualities or free-floating qualities without objects, none of these four abbreviations can exist in isolation, but must be paired with one of the opposite type. This yields four possible pairings in all. Let’s consider Husserl once more. Though we reject his notion that the real qualities of things can be known by the intellect, we agree with him that real qualities exist: his analysis is perfectly convincing when he shows that any sensual object (such as a horse) has essential qualities no less than inessential ones. In OOO terminology, Husserl shows that when dealing with sensual objects we have both SO-SQ (inessential qualities) and SO-RQ (essential ones). Turning to Heidegger’s case, in which the broken tool announces its qualities while remaining forever withdrawn, we have the interesting hybrid form RO-SQ, which proves to be the most important of the four tensions for art. I say four rather than three because we must also speak of the RO-RQ tension, one that is admittedly hard to talk about, since both of its terms are withdrawn from direct consideration. But without RO-RQ, withdrawn objects would all be the same: interchangeable substrata that would differ only insofar as each displayed different sensual qualities at different times to some observer. Since this would preclude any inherent difference between a hammer-in-itself, a horse-in-itself, and a planet-in-itself, there would be no way to account for the special character of each withdrawn object. Thus, the existence of an RO-RQ tension must also be affirmed. Leibniz already saw this in Monadology §8, where he insists that his monads are each one, but that each must also have a plurality of traits.¹⁶