A Four-Fold Encounter?

Graham Harman has a great post up over at his blog Object-Oriented Philosophy that includes some meaty comments regarding what he is calling “the quadruple object”. It is a great post for me to learn more about how he ‘structures’ his arguments. Here is the meat:

As for the fourfold structure, a few quick points…

1. Heidegger is far from the first person to use one. The history of philosophy is saturated with them, from Empedocles onward.

2. All of the even remotely rigorous ones don’t reach the number four through empirical observation. Instead, they result from the intersection of two dualisms, some of them better than others.

3. If you don’t like my version of the fourfold structure, then you have to say which of the two axes you reject:

*Do you reject the Heideggerian distinction between concealment and unconcealment? If so, then I’m afraid you’re simply another underminder or overminer of objects. In the former case you’re trying to reduce or eliminate the phenomenal level, and I have found all such efforts feeble. In the latter case you’re celebrating appearance and making a cliché attack on deep and hidden realities, in a form that is already a couple of centuries old. So, I think rejecting the distinction between withdrawn objects and their sensual translations is a big mistake.

*Do you reject the distinction between objects and their qualities? If so, then you’re simply following the well-established empiricist tradition, slavishly followed even by most anti-empiricists, which holds that an object is a bundle of qualities, nothing. But then there are all sorts of problems explaining how the bundling occurs. Either it’s through some bland and unconvincing material substrate, or (more frequently) people are allowed to decide what belongs together as one object. Or at most, objects are defined functionally in terms of the effects they have on other things. But in my opinion, you don’t have to read too much of Husserl’s Logical Investigations to be convinced of the ramshackle character of the “bundle of qualities” approach to objects.

And if you reject neither of these distinctions, like me, then you have the very fourfold structure I describe. There are then a ton of difficulties in trying to account for everything that happens within it, but that is no proof against the necessity of the structure itself.

Harman’s four-fold explication of how ‘objects’ exist, become encountered and known is certainly interesting, but, I believe, not entirely convincing. For me, I think there are a variety of ways we can conceive entities outside the simplistic object v. qualities binary. If we take seriously human embodiment we find that we do in fact encounter things ‘directly’ through the physical interaction between our constituent properties (flesh, etc) and the constituent properties of other objects - but never in their entirety. Encounters between things are direct but partial – according the onto-specificity (uniqueness) of any particular ‘object’ as a coalesced and organized assemblage (and their affective and receptive properties). And it is the interactive matrix of the processual linkages and maintenance relations of things in situ that determine what effects and affects are generated.

I won’t go much more into details at this time because I’m still hoping to get some more definitive posts up about this summer about how we can align object-centered philosophies with relational ontologies. The way forward, I believe, is to let go of some very confused understandings of what human ‘knowing’ entails through an acceptance of the primal activities of perception and by paying closer attention to actual encounters in the world.

*UPDATE: About 10 minutes after I posted this I read a recent blog entry by Gary William's on Heidegger and 'truth' which resonates nicely with what I think is wrong with metaphysical notions of perception and appeals to 'withdrawn' realities in general. Although Gary's post was not directed at Harman's ontology specifically, I think it goes a long way to helping Heidegger-influenced philosophies become even more realistic. From Minds and Brains:

Structural coupling occurs whenever there is a history of recurrent interaction between two systems. More specifically, in virtue of its autopoietic (i.e. self-organizing) unity, an organism is structurally coupled with the environment insofar as it maintains its unity it respect to the environment. Accordingly, cognition can be defined as “A history of structural coupling that brings forth a world.” This definition of cognition is in stark contrast to the traditional conception of cognition as the manipulation of explicit symbol tokens by a central processing unit.

What does this have to do with Heidegger’s notion of truth? I propose that for Heidegger, Dasein is “in the truth” insofar as it is structurally coupled to a real environment. Dasein isn’t coupled to itself, nor its ideas, representations, or thoughts; it is coupled to the Umwelt, which is composed of real entities that have a structural determination independent of whether we are there to disclose it. Indeed, look at this passage:

Because the kind of being that is essential to truth is of the character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Dasein’s being. Does this relatively signify that all truth is ‘subjective’? If one interprets ‘subjective’ as ‘left to the subject’s discretion’, then it certainly does not. For uncovering, in the sense which is most its own, takes asserting out of the province of the ‘subjective discretion, and brings the uncovering Dasein face to face with the entities themselves. (SZ 227)

I have elaborated on this notion of encountering before (more recently here). Basically, the idea is that our cognition is directed towards the things themselves rather than any putative re-presentation of the things inside a mental theater. As I put it earlier,

perception is a matter of encountering or attending to what is already presenting itself to us. As long as we are alive, we have no choice but to encounter the Earth. Understood this way, sensations are irrelevant for the achievement of perception. All that matters for the act of perception is the performance of the act. And it is only dogmatism which supposes that the act of perception involves re-presenting the phenomena in terms of sense-data. For this, there is no need. We only need to respond or react to that which is there in such a way as to maintain the unity of our bodily singularity.

This direct response to what is “really there” in the environment grounds Heidegger’s notion of truth. This notion is taken from his definition of phenomena as that the totality of what shows itself. I contend that this notion of showing and encountering can be explained in terms of J.J. Gibson’s theory of direct realism.

As for Graham’s ontology specifically, I must admit I have only read Guerrilla Metaphysics and his essay on “vicarious causation” (along with numerous posts on his blog) but I continually get the sense that Graham is unnecessarily boxing himself into some very problematic positions (most of which have already been outlined by Steven Shapiro here) if only because he is still operating within the traditional boundaries of philosophical discourse (metaphysics per se). Of course, it makes sense professionally seeing as he is an academic philosopher, but now that he is becoming somewhat more established I think there could be room for Graham to stretch beyond certain established ‘logical necessities’ to think objects in new ways (cf. the distinctions he makes above re: concealment and unconcealment, qualities, and bundle theories). A mind as obviously powerful as Harman’s should be unleashed without recourse to established conceptual modes.