andrewfm replied to your quote: Perhaps instead of rising beyond good and evil,…
But what does this mean
Okay stay with me here – I might not have this perfect.
Essentially it’s Harman’s pithy quote (of which he has many) on the work that Object Oriented Ontology is particularly concerned with as a project – the de-centering of human consciousness as the arbiter of ontological meaning in the universe. What’s amazing about Tool Being is that it’s a Heideggerian approach to philosophy that makes a pretty radical claim to other Heideggarians: Heidegger’s only (ONLY) important discovery was tool-being, but he completely failed to push it to its logical conclusion.
According to Heidegger, Daesin is what brings the world of objects to meaning, without it it all is part of “world” or “universe”, a totalitarian glob of matter. It’s the classic “if a tree falls in a forest” question. Harman, however, uses the example of the stove on an icy lake. Heidegger argues that stove falling through the ice is without being until Daesin shows up and imbues the fall with contemplation (theory). This contemplation is all that matters, that only humans can ever truly know the stove and the lake. Heidegger argues that through this theory humanity can come to truly know objects and touch their very essence, their very being.
Harman thinks it is absolute folly for humanity to ever hope to truly know the inner being of objects – that objects’ tool being is something we can never touch, that there are innumerable possibilities for different encounters of stove and lake, infinite levels of being through thoughts, networks of relations and the core properties of the objects themselves. He suggests that tool being always goes deeper. There is the tool being of the stove as object, but also the tool being of the heating element, and a tool being of the door, and a tool being of the screw, and deeper to atoms (and maybe the tool being of electrons, and whatever makes up those…). It goes in the opposite direction too. There is the tool being of the ecosystem, the nation state that the lake resides in, the world and the solar system, up and up.
Instead we must be humble and except that, ontologically speaking, we are on the same plane as the stove, that the stove will never truly touch our being, even as we burn ourselves with it while cooking, and vice versa. Instead of hoping to ever to rise above the stove and know it, we can go below it and tease out some of its secrets. Harman says this better than me:
Instead of creating an open space in which entities come to light, we actually burrow beneath them, toward the tool-beings that remain untouched by any relationality whatsoever. To become aware of these tool-beings is not to rise above them, but to make oneself ever more vulnerable to them, increasing the surface area of our being that can come into contact with them. In this way, consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, but an inJraphenomenon. Theory has little in common with a forest clearing, but resembles an ever-extending network of subway or freight tunnels. I cite this image only to suggest an alternative possibility. But one further conclusion is immediately suggested by all of this. The model of knowledge as transcendence is a model of irony and critique . By rising above the things, it seems that we no longer take them for granted, and that in this way we have unmasked their pretensions. To this day, intellectuals remain in heated competition to see who can debunk the pretensions of the others the most thoroughly, thereby attaining an even more neutral , “cleared” standpoint. An analogous attitude can be found in the ethical realm, in which “transgression” takes the place of critique for those who believe they have risen beyond all the nullities by which uncritical minds are duped ( for example, religion, virtue, mainstream sexual mores) . But maybe this critical stock character, who has dominated intellectual life in the West for several centuries, begins to look less prestigious as soon as the model of knowledge-as-distance falls apart. If acquiring knowledge of things means to enter into even closer contact with the things rather than to stand beyond them, then maybe critique reverses into sincerity-and maybe Deleuze is right that transgression gives way to treason (at least the traitor seeks new citizenship somewhere) , and irony to humor ( at least the comic implicates himself in his buffoonery) Perhaps instead of rising beyond good and evil, the more radical step is to move beneath them.
What’s interesting about OOO and speculative realism, at least to me, is that it appears to give us an ontological method that is actually really simple. Look at objects (ideologies, bridges, ecosystems) and then look at it. It might confront other objects. It might not. In the process it gets us away from the human at the centre, while letting us talk about humans and their place and role in objects of all sorts. But maybe humans aren’t there at all! That’s okay.
I like that the world is still a mystery, and knowledge is about sincere engagement with that mystery, leaving it wondrous, rather than some glob of ecosystems, bureaucrats and fossil fuels to dominate.