8 responses to “Graham Harman’s Method of Ruination”

1. Direct but partial revisited?

   “Harman has a really interesting epistemic* perspective. He agrees with Berkeley and Kant that a certain kind of knowledge prized by a certain kind of philosopher is radically limited. Our ability to straightforwardly describe the world in literal terms is so constrained by our own finitude that the metaphor of us being in some sense cut off from the great outdoors is a fruitful one.”

   It is not so “fruitful” when such onto-stories exasperate our sense of alienation and separation from natural processes, and often serve as justification for all manners of narcissistic and abusive actions and mentalities towards non-humanity. Understanding epistemic “withdrawal” as neuro-semantic extrapolation and information capture can help clarify how embodied conception works, how biases structurally occur, and what we might do in our relations to mitigate and mediate, but that’s only part of the story. There are a lot of non-linguistic activities, forces, flows, etc. going on in any situation as well that are variously determining and intensively consequential. Until those “cutting” realities are registered and regarded in our philosophical fantasies we will indeed remain with Kant and Berkeley – which is cognitively dead and centuries behind empirical researchers.

   “our only access to the world as it is in itself is via literal language and the representational conceptual resources that go along with that language.” (Cogburn)

   WHAT? Language is not our “only access to the world”. Aren’t we past this by now? Aren’t we open to another way of understanding of what bodies can do and are subjected to, and capable of sensing (Merleau-Ponty, Lingis, Sparrow) and encountering. Such an arrogant, misguided and ‘academic’ conclusion that supposes all things actual and registering come via conception and language. Epi-cycles of idealism abound. Yawn.

   Maybe we would do well to go back to Aristotle and start again, and again, until we start living out of our heads and in the world with-in which we always already are?

   • Michael,

     I find what you write interesting and actually agree with it. If you read the whole post to which DMF linked you’ll see that I also talked about Heideggerian practical comportment as well as Harman’s third stance. Harman nor I think that language is the only access to the world. We both agree with Heidegger that our linguistic/conceptual/discursive cognition is *not* the primary means by which we connect with the world and that it is bootstrapped out of a prior practical comportment where our behavior manifests sensitivity to the modal and valuative reality of the world.

     But this creates a problem first because philosophy on the face of it consists in discursive moves and second because Berkeley type arguments apply to Heideggerian practical comportment as well. How then does philosophy get out of the epistemic trap? Harman’s view is that we must take philosophy to be closer to art than science and understand how art gives us a distinctive mode of access not covered by Heideggerian readiness to hand nor by discursive representational thought. My post was a very brief precis of how this goes for Harman.

     Again, I think you read the stuff I was setting up for a reductio as Harman’s considered view. But it’s absolutely not. Harman, me, and you from what I can tell all take Kant and Berkeley to be inadevertant reductios of the claim that linguistic, discursive thought is primordial. As an epistemologist (and he is primarily a metaphysician) Harman thinks Heidegger doesn’t go far enough though.

     • hey JC thanks for stopping in and filling in the context, for me Rorty’s strong misreading of Heidegger (and Nietzsche & Freud) via Davidson (and in some sense Kuhn) on living and dead metaphors is a more fruitful approach when married to enactivist phenomenology and folks like John Shotter: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jds/TA-HS.htm

   • I guess it depends on how one takes these things/folks for me reading Harman is like reading Lovecraft, what is else is one to do with say how he tries to make mysterious the limits of our grasps by invoking “withdrawal”, as if instead of us just being relatively simple/blinkered critters in a world of blooming buzzing confusions there is some-thing(s) playing coy with us (reminds me of a hindu priest who explained to me that existence is just Vishnu playing hide and seek with himself)? Have you had a chance to flesh out yer own thesis some since your Archive days?

     • I also love Rorty on these things and think read enactivism as going far toward establishing a Heideggerian approach to mind and language.

       However, I don’t think that enactivism solves the big P philosophical problems. Nor do I think Heidegger successfully dissolved the problem of the external world as he apparently thought he had in Being and Time.

       One of Harman’s principle claim is that many (not all) of the philosophical problems that beset representationalism crop up again for whatever one takes to be more originary than representation. So anti-representational theories do yield better philosophies of mind and language, but still don’t solve the epistemic and metaphysical problems such as the nature of normativity, alethic modality, and the external world. I think to some extent Rorty agrees with this negative assessment which is why he counsels changing the subject.

       As far as my own theses, I remain stubbornly a meta-metaphysician. I hope some day to rectify that. I’ve just finished a draft of a book on Tristan Garcia (tying him to Graham Priest, Paul Livingston, Harman, Badiou, Putnam and a lot of analytic metaphysics). I think it’s pretty good, but of course I would.

     • looking forward to seeing where it all takes you, after working with Rorty (couldn’t interest him in the enactivist/phenomenology/ANT aspects) I generally follow Paul Rabinow’s work (1st with Bert Dreyfus and than without) after Foucault into anthropologies of the contemporary and leave all the waxing meta to those who are troubled by such, seems like a theo-logical hangover (I’m a big fan of Jack Caputo’s demythologized Heidegger) to me but I know that still speaks to most.

     • Have you followed Caputo’s recent stuff in radical theology? Maybe he’s trading a demythologized Heidegger for a mythologized (negative theology, in particular) Derrida.

     • I have thanks, for me he was at his best in his more rad.herme book when he also was working after Foucault on a hermeneutics of not-knowing and I could even follow his more phenomenological/anthropological uses of Derrida and our faith-commitments (religious or otherwise) but when he takes the quasi-transcendental leap into using Derrida to say things like events/phenomena (like Gifts or Hospitality) are truly themselves when they are im-possible I can’t see how one could know/test/support such a thing.