Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything by Graham Harman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Scamming the Scammers

I have a negative bias about the subject of this book. It takes its name from a computer programming technique (object-oriented programming, OOP) that was the Next Big Thing in the late 1980’s. At that time I was around many people who praised it and promoted it. But I could never get either a clear explanation from these folk about what OOP was or why it was superior to so-called procedural programming. It remains, for me, even today the densest form of nerd-talk abounding with neologisms that make Heidegger’s philosophy look like merely conversational chit-chat. So, that a group of philosophers would choose such a designation as Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) for their work is surprising and somewhat off-putting.

After reading this book, I have as much a grasp of OOO as I had of OOP. So I must start my comments with the author’s intention rather than anything more substantive in order to focus my remarks. What is the philosophical or practical issue that the book is meant to address? The philosophical issue he wants to address is epistemological: what counts as authentic knowledge? Practically, Harmon thinks that it will help us deal with the apparently growing problem of untruthfulness in democratic politics as demonstrated by the persistent popularity of Donald Trump and his cohorts. Specifically he wants to advise us all ”How we go about detecting the gap between knowledge and reality is one of the main concerns of this book.” I am mystified by this. His claim is obviously bombastic and certainly not something he has justified in the remainder of the book.

Like many other thinkers who are concerned with the enormity of today’s political mendacity, Harman does not want to compare what people say to the truth, which is an evidential state dependent upon facts which are in turn tendentiously selected in politics (or for that matter in any argument). That is, facts have to be weighed against one another; and their is no rational method for assigning weights. Instead, he wants to test political (and other) statements against what he calls reality. “Reality is the rock against which our various ships always founder, and as such it must be acknowledged and revered, however elusive it may be,” he says. His philosophical target is not relativism but idealism, by which I take him to mean the tendency to treat language as if it were things that are not-language. Harmon doesn’t trust language. Neither do I

I can understand Harman’s desire to escape from the pitfalls, flaws and scandals of language, to reach some external point from which to measure the authenticity and accuracy of what is said and written. Wouldn’t we all? But the inherent problem of course is obvious: it’s not possible to escape from language by using more language. Any attempt to do so simply digs the epistemological hole one starts in even deeper. Language is invincible. Even recognising that there is something called reality which is not-language demands to be expressed in words. Therefore the appeal to reality rather than truth as the test-bed for claims, statements, propositions, and promises is entirely vacuous as so many others have found before.

Harman nonetheless wants us to accept that OOO, in its rather monumental linguistic complexity, really does have a handle on this reality business. But he has a bizarre way of trying to convince us. For Harmon, reality is composed of a sort of bricolage of philosophical conceptions. Bits and pieces of thought, that is to say, language, taken from philosophers from Socrates to Heidegger and beyond. From this melange, he formulates what he thinks is the fundamental building block of the cosmos - not atoms, or quarks, or fields of various orientations, and certainly not strings, but rather The Object, which is immaterial, of no determinate size/function/quality, and essentially isolated from other objects in the manner of a Leibnizian Monad, a Platonic Form or a Peircean System. More analytically: “[A]n object is anything that cannot be entirely reduced either to the components of which it is made or to the effects that it has on other things.” Or, in short form, “an object is more than its pieces and less than its effects.” If that sounds vague, Harmon wants it that way because language can’t do it justice.

I admit that I don’t understand what Harmon’s ‘object’ is. This is disappointing and no doubt reflects an intellectual deficiency on my part. But my deficiency isn’t serious enough to prevent me noticing something crucial about Harman’s definition. It contains lots of words. It is therefore true (although not all that comprehensible) because it has been specified by these other words in a grammatically correct sentence. This thing he calls an object is, therefore, about as far removed from reality as any other philosophical conception. It is a definition which Harmon then imposes on the cosmos (including the hapless reader) and which he then claims as his standard of reality. Under all the hand-waving and bogus referencing of history, biology, economics, and any other intellectual fragments he can muster, he ends up with this? A reality constructed from immaterial Lego blocks by a closet arch-idealist who cuts off the branch of language he sits on and then acts like it’s still there?

Harmon seems to have lots of academic chips on his shoulder. The catalogue of things he finds objectionable in most sciences as well as in philosophy is long and varied. Their are few thinkers who escape his critical eye. He does remind me of the very passionate young nerds who were pushing Object-Oriented Programming back in the day - everyone else was wrong, the world was not as we thought, all existing ideas were passé. But at least they had something to sell - computer code doesn’t write itself. I can’t imagine who is in the market for what Harmon is trying to sell. Perhaps it’s the conspiracy theorists from QAnon and the Republican Party. Can you just see a television reporter challenging some Trump surrogate about stolen election claims on the basis that they don’t conform to a set of abstract philosophical objects with ghostly (sic) qualities? I think the gap between knowledge and reality has opened to the size of the Grand Canyon. Trump should love it just for its supply of alternative facts.

Postscript: I hesitated to include Harman’s ultimate conclusion in my remarks because I found it so intellectually embarrassing for the man. But on second thought, it really needs to be publicised lest my bias is thought the source of those remarks. This is his solution to the Trump problem:

“From a OOO perspective, there is no truth: not because nothing is real, but because reality is so real that any attempt to translate it into literal terms is doomed to failure. We can invoke knowledge against Trump’s deceptions and evasions, but only insofar as we adopt a new definition of knowledge that incorporates elusive real qualities rather than directly masterable sensual ones. None of us can point to an instrument that clearly displays global warming or the world refugee crisis on a luminous screen, as patent truths that compel specific strategies for dealing with these issues. What we can do, however, is hold the Trumps of the world accountable for taking no account of reality, by which I mean the genuine disturbances in our world that indicate that climate and refugee problems must somehow be incorporated into the body politic.”

That should stop Trump in his tracks alright. Redefine knowledge. Go beyond the palpable and measurable. Get those elusive qualities, those immaterialities, squarely on the table. What a contribution to philosophical and political thought! Quackery.

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