Object-Oriented Ontology 7. Morton 1.

 Ecology without Nature. 2007. Timothy Morton. Harvard University Press.

• I am trying to show the substance of a coat, I tear it apart, then I explain each set of its threads, then I explain the nature of the texture, then I explain the mechanism of its sewing, and then I find that the more I try to capture the substance of this coat, the more I jump to other things, and the substance becomes more obscured. If I analyze the coat, I find myself enforced to explain millions of things, and I do not get to the coat's substance, and if I keep the coat on the table, just looking at it,  the substance also is still obscured, mysterious, and hidden. 
• I am writing now and trying to explain to the reader the real "I" of me. As much as I try to discover and unveil this "I," the more I must link other "Is," other issues, other things to it, the more the substance of this "I," I sought to reach, escapes and eludes. 
• When you contact a person, think of this contact, try to arrest the real contact. You will find that contact is always in the past (p.76). When you contact, you never have it or inhabit it as it is happening; you always reflect on it only when it has gone. Hence, we always cannot fully or essentially or substantially contact! 
• I listen to music. Sounds and silences are woven together. When I try to really capture the essence or substance of this music, I find myself either capturing the moment of a sound or the moment of a silence. I know that I cannot fully capture the Music as it is. I have to kill half of it to be able to perceive it; either its silence or its sounds. 
• I see a wolf, roaming near a stream. Blood is marking its teeth, and its fur is glistering under the sun. The wolf I see is only the foreground of the entity wolf. I know that the wolf to appear as such, there must be a background of and for it: caves, sheep, bones broken in its mouth, a herd, nice dark in which it can sleep and hide, and so on. The wolf I see is only the tip of this huge or deep background. When I try to discover, unveil, reveal this background, it becomes a foreground, and I lose it again. Each foreground alludes to a background infinitely. This there above is a sign of this background, which is never captured; it is there and never can be here; it is there as much as there is mysterious, far, absent, and as much as it gives breath to the here. I know that here will never be here if there is no there. I know that I am not me if there is no others who are not me. However, these others are not substantially captured and fixed; such that, I cannot stop and point to selves, saying that "Look! they are my others." The others are there, in the background of me, and I can never fix them. Otherness should always be intrinsic to the Self, Morton asserts. 

Ecology without Nature aspires to inform us that Nature is not fixed in front of our eyes or brains, and nothing at all is fixed in front of our eyes and brains. What we think is fixed is no more nor less than the foreground of the ecology. It is only the world, the ecology, or the ambience what exists. Not me nor you, not the nature nor trees. Only ambience. Ambience is not fixed, is not captured, so it is painful. Ambience appears to us with one status: I know that music is both silence and sound, but at any moment I can only capture one, not both; "I" is not separate from others, but I can capture only one at a moment; I contact you, but I know that I either contact you and lose the substance of this contacting (as I only can understand that contact when it ends) or I do not contact you. For some reason,  appearance allows only for one thing, status, probability to occur: I flip a coin in the air, but only one side appears (when it falls down); however, we know that this side is not the whole real coin, we need to see the other side to "capture" the coin, but we cannot. This "fact" glues us to death. We cannot know fully, we cannot be a well-delineated object (or subject) separate from others: We are always invaded by the ambience, and this invasion does not appear to us fully. That is, only ambience exists, and reveals its heads (tips) while hiding its huge bodies in the background. 

Below, you can see how ambience can be studied.

Object-Oriented Ontology 6. Bogost 1.

 Alien Phenomenology, or What It Is Like to Be a Thing. Ian Bogost. 2012. University of Minnesota Press.

Similarly to any text in Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), this book argues that a car, a human, a tree, an idea in my mind, my computer screen have the same degree, the same reality, the same strength of their being. My being, my existence is neither more nor less than the existence of the idea suddenly emerging in my mind that "aliens may exist." However, and apparently, me as a human, my computer screen, and that idea are not equal in how they exercise their existence or their being. I am not identical, nor equal, to an idea roaming in my mind. Hence, things equally exist but not exist equally. 

This basic argument of OOO leads to a striking conclusion: humans are not the center of the world, and more precisely, the classical division of subject-object is refuted. If you espouse the OOO, you should stop thinking of yourself and the world around you and of other objects you meet every day as two separate realms. It is not the rational subject vis-a-vis the Object. Everything that exists is equal in its being; thus, "we" are all objects.  That what distinguishes me as a human from other objects is not essential nor more sublime than what distinguishes a car from a turtle.

What indeed makes Bogost's argument distinct from other OOO's scholars is how he understands a thing. For him, we should not talk about things or objects but about UNITs. The words object and thing are misleading. Everything is in fact a unit.  My fountain pen is a unit, my city is a unit, a cell is a unit. Now, a unit is not an atom, is never an essence that is solid, homogenous, and one. A unit is a set. Any thing then is a set. For example, a car is set = {wires, tires, metal}; {mobility, fuel, gaz}; {engine, fire, shape} . . . and we can disclose this set (car) infinitely.  The unit car is not reducible to any particular set of its manifestation (or disclosure) and it is never the sum of them. 

So, a unit always expands, explodes, infinitely, on the one hand, as it meshes other units' sets (a car manifests or explodes as a set {fule, fire, etc.} when it meshes another set of another unit {energy, etc.}); and it shrinks into an infinite density as it "goes back" to its inside (the non-explosion side, the "non-meshing others" side, the non-manifestation side), on the other hand. Bogost sees a unit as a black hole: It is infinitely dense and it is infinitely explosive. Hence, for Bogost, there is no flat ontology, our existence is not a flat on which things hinge, but it is dotted. The existence is made of points, each point is a thing (unit), each unit is a black hole. 

Finally, to see how a unit manifest, Bogost understands things' manifestation as a fractal's expansion: 

This video shows how a thing, when "repeated," expands in a very complex manner. Similarly, a unit is a set that is internally dense, but it can expand in a fractal manner by meshing other things according to its own (inner logic). That means a car cannot mesh the thing-idea of "a bird is extinct," simply because this idea does not resonate with the logic of the unit car, so it cannot mesh it. But, a car can mesh very loosely the thing or the set Mars because it - in some degree of its manifestation - resonates with gravity, which is a set (or a manifestation of a set/unit) that is closer to the logic of the set car. In other words, units can link and meet each other even though loosely as metaphors. Hence, even the unit of "a bird is extinct" can meet very loosely the unit car eventually, but this linkage will be so weak, so unnecessary to both of these two units, the car and the "a bird is extinct."

 

Object-Oriented Ontology 5. LR Bryant 1.

 The Democracy of Objects- LR Bryant. 2011. Open Humanities Press.

Click on the Figure

Mosquito and me, a car and the carton imagined cat (Tom), Marxism as an ideology and God equally exist. They share one thing equally, existence. God does not exist more truly than me, a book on my table is not less real than a mosquito flying around a lamp, and a mere idea or an image in my mind is not less real than the moon. All objects exist on the same ontological footing. However, that does not mean they have equal "power." I, a human object, can easily get rid of a mosquito, whereas - with the advanced medicine - it cannot do the same for me. If you believe in that, then you espouse the philosophy of flat ontology.  

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is to a wide extent flat ontology. 

Flat ontology implies that there is no entity that is more real than others; hence, there is no God, there is no entity that transcends the other entities/objects (otherwise, this entity will be more real than the rest). Moreover, there is no world.  If there is a world, then this world would be the condition for other objects to exist; in this case, the world would be the most real ever. Since objects exist at the same level of the being, then they are similar at the essence; i.e., there is no object that is essentially different from others: the division of subject-object is rejected in OOO. Human beings are not subjects, which are distinct from all other objects by their self-awareness, by epistemology. No. Humans and cars are both objects, and the difference between them is the difference between two objects: A car relates itself to other objects by its qualities (move, transport, burn fuel, etc.), and humans relate themselves to other objects by their own qualities (knowledge). Knowledge and burning fuel are two ways for objects to meet other objects. I know you, I know the sky, I know how to walk; a car moves, a car burns fuels, etc. These actions are the same in terms of their existence. Only objects are what exists; no subjects. 

No Transcending Entity; No World; No Subject-Object Division 

Only Objects Exist

Pendulum

To explain Bryant's theory, I will explain an example given by him: Pendulum. The pendulum is a symbol of Object, any object. This Pendulum-object is always split: On the one hand, the Pendulum is a thing-in-itself, a real thing that does not need to appear, does not need to swing, does not need to be known, and does not need to be related to any other objects to exist. It exists by and for itself even without the need to manifest in the world. Indeed, this Pendulum is always withdrawing from the world, from itself as a manifestation, to be very much itself, to be unseen, to be un-manifestable. The Pendulum as an object-in-itself, as a real object, is a small ball and a string. These ball and string are its endo-relations; they are its system. The Pendulum is a system of a deep structure, of endo-relations: ball and string. The ball can fall down and the string can be cut. This does not matter, the Pendulum will continue to be the Pendulum as long as another ball can be linked to its string or a new string can be fixed to its ball. For a system, the endo-relations are what matters not the parts. The parts are substitutable. The endo-relations are not. Your body always loses and earns new cells, but it continues to be your body. The US can have some citizens plotting against it, but it is still the US of these citizens even when many of them die, others are born, and many abandon their American nationality. A ball can betray the Pendulum; nevertheless, it continues to be the Pendulum since the relation between the ball and the string is maintained. The object as the real object, the Pendulum-in-itself, is what is called substance. The substance cannot contact with other real objects or objects-in-themselves. The Pendulum cannot meet, interact with other objects such as a table. Why? Because the Pendulum-in-itself is always withdrawing to the endo-relations where no other object can enter. 

On the second hand, the Pendulum swings, its ball occupies many positions, it interacts with the air, it meets the gravity, and it can be hit by a human hand and stops: The Pandelium manifests, or it acts in its local manifestation. The Pendulum can appear, act itself, act its substance through its exo-relations (relations with other objects, such as gravity). It translates its substance into qualities: Each possible position of its all is a symbol of a possible or potential quality that the Pendulum can do, can act, can manifest as it responds to other objects (through its exo-relations). When qualities are produced by the Pendulum, then it transforms from being only real (a thing-in-itself) to be real and actual. 

Thus,

Any object is a split-object: 

1. real object, a system of endo-relations, a real object that withdraws from the world and from itself, a substance.
2. actual object, a local manifestation, a potential action that it produces in and according to its exo-relations with other objects. 

Needless to say, an object can be real without being actual. That is why Bryant accepts the idea of potentiality. I will explain more his theory by using another example from his book: Mug.
 

I have a mug on my table. The mug is an object. It is a split-object. On the one hand, it is the mug-in-itself, the substance mug that no other object can enter into its endo-relations. The mug appears, acts, manifests on my table by releasing a few of its qualities: it blues (more precisely than saying it is blue, we need to say it blues or it is bluing) when it enters an exo-relation with the sunlight. Its endo-relations allow it to respond to the sunlight, so it blues (is bluing), and it allows it or it endows it with the potentiality of redding (coloring itself with red) when it enters another exo-relation with red light. There are unlimited potentialities that the mug can do, can actualize according to its exo-relations. However, it cannot actualize all of these potential manifestations (or qualities) at once. It cannot blue and red and black at the same time. The Pendulum cannot put its ball in the whole potential points that it can occupy at once. This is impossible. Hence, the endo-relations of a substance allude to more power than the manifestation of that substance because the endo-relations are multiple; the object as real, in-itself, is multiple, not simple. That is why it can manifest in infinite ways. In addition to that, the mug cannot enter an exo-relation with a mosquito; a mosquito flying above it does not help the mug to show any potentiality of its qualities. 

Thus,

An object is an engine of difference (because as it acts in its local manifestation, it generates differences with other objects in their manifestation), and an object is a generative mechanism and is power. It manifests, it acts. It withdraws and it differentiates itself from others. 

The Whole-Parts Problem

Are the ball and the string parts of the whole Pendulum? No. According to the OOO, the ball and the string are objects and they exist independently from the Pendulum. Is not the ball able to betray the string and run away? It is an object. 

The ball, the string, the Pendulum do not exist in the world; they exist in each other. They produce what we see as the world, which is nothing by their actual or local manifestations. The ball manifests in the Pendulum and the Pendulum manifests in an environment that it creates (ability to swing) and in exo-relations with other produced environments, such as the gravity that is a manifestation of the Eath-object. 

The World does not exist; it is nothing more than the manifestation and exo-relations of objects. 

 

Object-Oriented Ontology 4. Graham Harman 4.

 Graham Harman. Towards Speculative Realism. 2010. 

Click on the Figure for a better view

Object-Oriented Ontology or Speculative Realism differs from other philosophies or, more precisely, metaphysics by asserting that an object (e.g., oak) cannot be either a substance or relational; an oak cannot be either a substance of the abstract oak or the relational object appearing as an oak as it appears through the interactions with water, soil, human beings, wood, etc. Any object is a force playing between essence (the essence of an oak, but not an eternal essence) and relations with other objects. 

To summarize this book, I will ask one question (which is asked in the book) and comment on it. 

Is an acorn potentially an oak? 

From the speculative realist perspective, no. An acorn is not potentially an oak. Because if we say that an acorn is potentially an oak, then we reduce either the oak-object to its "essence" which is allegedly the acorn, or, vice versa, we do not admit the acorn to be an object by its own by reducing it to its duty, its function as a producer of oak-object. In both cases we kill these two objects, the acorn and the oak. Speculative Realism admits both the oak and the acorn as two objects, fully two objects, independent from each other. An acorn can produce an oak when it is thrown into soil, with good water, in good weather; it can also be food for humans or animals; and it can also stay as an acorn for thousands of years if it meets suitable conditions. Hence, the acorn-object is an object without the need to function as a potential carrier of the oak-object (because it does not need to be an oak tree to be an acorn; it can be food, for example).

Rule 1: An object, either an acorn or a hammer, is not used for some purposes to exist; it is not used for doing something, but only it is. 

An acorn is formed by other objects, atoms, cellulose, etc. An acorn also forms an oak tree. Oaks can form other objects, forests. This binary is what confuses us:

Rule 2: Any object is at the same time formed by other objects and forms others. 

When the acorn-object comes across other objects, water and soil, it has to meet them, to relate itself to them. But water, soil, and acorn are three real objects that stand side-by-side, so they cannot meet by themselves. They need a mediator to do so. Speculative Realism suggests that the acorn can relate to them only by imagining their intentional qualities. Water has an image, an intentional quality that the acorn can imagine: wet, delicious, absorbable, etc. Soil also has imagined, intentional qualities that the acorn will receive and react accordingly: warm, embracing, etc. The same thing is to be said about how water and soil meet the acorn. Hence, the real objects (water, soil, and acorn) meet with each other only through imagined or intentional objects (the image of water as the acorn pictures it, the image of the acorn as soil thinks of it and its properties, etc.). In response to these imagined qualities of the objects, the real object, the acorn, shows some of its properties: It sends roots in the soil, it opens, a small oak tree emerges. If the acorn met a hearth, not water and soil, then it will imagine the intentional qualities of fire, and it will relate to the fire showing other properties: being food. Based on that, an acorn cannot be an elephant because we do not know so far any objects that an acorn can imagine and interact with to, finally, shape an elephant. However, that might happen in the future. We cannot be certain. 

Rule 3: The binary of intentional and real objects is what forms the world, enabling objects to meet each other and to breathe into each other. 

After the acorn became an oak, it exists no more because it lost its essential qualities. This, however, does not mean that the acorn became an oak; it means the meetings between that acorn and many other objects formed the object of that oak tree, and the oak tree is not reducible to the dead, perished acorn. 

Rule 4: Objects die, they grow, and are born first of all.

This rule explains to us why Speculative Realism rejects the idea of substance. However, as we said before, an object has essential qualities, and we cannot grasp them all. We cannot understand fully an object. Any other object cannot fully relate to an acorn fully, exhausting the whole qualities it has (that is why we cannot know whether in the future an acorn can form an elephant). We say a real object withdraws to itself away from others. On the contrary, intentional objects go forwards to meet other objects. 

Rule 3`: Objects play between two inseparable forces: relating to other objects (each intentional object - an image of a real object - tends to meet and fuse itself into another real object) and withdrawing from other objects (each real object withdraws with its non-exhaustible qualities from other objects). 

Object-Oriented Ontology 3. Graham Harman. 3

 Graham Harman. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Open Court. 2011

In my summary of this book, you can find the basics of Object-Oriented Philosophy or Ontology (OOO); so, this summary serves as an introduction to OOO. 

Click on the Figure for a better view

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is a beautiful and nice philosophical tool to understand the being, the things, and the world. The figure above summarizes the elements, the "OOO pieces" by which you can analyze a thing or things. To make the idea of OOO and its usage understandable, I will apply the OOO pieces (in the figure above) to an example taken from the book. 

Wreck in the Sea of Ice, by CD Friedrich, 1798

In the Wreck in the Sea of Ice painting we see three objects, mainly, sea, a ship, and a boat with people. Each one of these things is discernable; it has its own boundaries, it is durable over time, it can interact with other objects, and it also consists of "smaller" objects that are - eventually - form it. Let us analyze the sea and the ship according to the OOO. 

The sea is there, we can see it; we, humans, perceive a sea. It is not, at any rate, melted with the ship or with the people we see in the painitng. We can see that the ship was sailing in this sea, and we can see also a boat carrying a few people, and we can perceive that ice has been formed from the sea, on its surface, so the ship got stuck. We assume, although we do not directly see, that marine animals exist under the surface. We know also that the main component of the sea is water. All of these types of knowledge allude to our interactions as humans with the sea; the sea is a unitary object. All types of interactions between other objects and the sea, such as the ship wrecked in it, a boat floating on it, animals living in it, also allude to the fact that this sea is a unitary object interacting with other objects (humans and non-humans equally). 

The relations the sea has with other objects are critical to us, the humans, to understand the sea; they are critical to the sea itself to make itself manifest in the world, showing its features or properties.  If this sea does not interact with the ship (say by wrecking it) and with the boat (say by allowing it to float) and with humans (say by permitting traveling for us), the sea will not be known, not only for the humans but also for the other objects. The sea appears, acts, as a specific object (i.e., as a sea not as a river, for example) because it manifests through relations in this world with other objects. The sea acts through relations with other objects as a specific object. 

The sea, finally, is composed of other objects: water, animals, salts, air, rocks, etc. Without these objects, the sea is a sea no more. However, the sea is not reducible to any of these components. If the whole animals are dead inside this sea, it continues to be the sea; if no salt has been in it, it continues to be the sea. In other words, the sea as a unitary object can endorse its unitary even when some of its components evaporate (apparently, not the water). The sea is made of components, but it is more than its components.  

A thing, the sea in this example, (1) is a unitary object/thing; (2) is composed of other objects but it is more than them; and (3) it is related to other objects but is not contingent on them as well. 

Bearing that in mind, the sea as an object has its own being, its own "essence," it is a thing-in-itself. A thing-in-itself refers to a thing that exists away from any other relations, including our understanding of it as humans. It exists there as it is, and it does not need to be related to other things. The sea is the sea (and is not the thing in which a ship is wrecked). Using Heidegger's term (but from the OOO's perspective), the sea as any other object (humans or non-humans) is a Dasein. Dasein means "to be its there" (p.45, emphasis in origin): The sea is in its being as a sea. Hence, we cannot understand the sea fully as a Dasein; we cannot interact with the sea using the whole properties it has; and no other object (ship, boat, etc.) can ever interact with the sea-Dasein exhausting its whole features. In other words, no relations can exhaust their relata. This is exactly why each object is a Dasein, a thing-in-itself. Needless to say that an object interacts with, relates to, other objects through its properties. That is how the sea is able to wreck a ship. The ship interacts with the sea in multiple ways: it sails, it is wrecked. But both of these two relations do not exhaust the whole properties of the sea as a Dasein. The sea is also a place for animals, a huge lump of water that balances the climate, etc. The relation between the sea and the ship does not show us the salty feature of the sea, for example. 

We need to understand the tension between an object as a dasein, thing-in-itself, and its relations with other objects. 

Finally, 

water is H2O, two elements, each one of them is an object in-itself; water is also an object in-itself, and water + salt + rocks+ animals + huge hole in the earth is a sea, which is in turn a thing-in-itself. We see that these objects can be melted together; hence, they can lose their boundaries. This is true. We need also to pay attention to the tension between  (1) an object manifesting in the world as a system of relations between many objects bringing them together, where at the end every thing, every object, will be related or even melted with other objects, and (2) that object keeping its own specific entity, appearance, action, as a specific object that is different from others. It seems that the world does not accept many objects and tends to devour them all in one world, one being, or one object. 

In sum, 

• Obejct as a thing-in-itself is called, in Heidegger's terms, ready-to-hand. It is unknown to any other object, it is concealed. 
• Object as manifesting, interacting with other object is called present-at-hand. 
• However, when an object is present-at-hand, it appears as-object; i.e., a hammer appears as a hammer, a sea appears as a sea not the sea itself, not the hammer itself. 
• Finally,  the world tends to devour the whole objects, melting them together in one object which is the world itself; that is, because of the ability of interactions between objects.