Graham Harman

Martin Heidegger is famous for his early analysis of tools, and equally famous for his later reflections on technology. This might suggest an easy literal reading of these themes in his work along the following lines: ‘Heidegger began his career fascinated by low-tech hardware such as hammers and drills, but later took an interest in advanced devices such as hydroelectric dams’. But such a literal interpretation would miss the point, since neither Heidegger's tool analysis nor his views on technology are limited to a narrow range of specific kinds of entities. When he speaks of ‘tools’, his analysis holds for trees and monkeys no less than for hammers; when he speaks of ‘technology’, he has little to tell...

This dissertation aims to develop Martin Heidegger's famous analysis of equipment into an ontology of objects. Although numerous commentators have discussed the role of the tool in Heidegger's work, all have interpreted it too narrowly as a question of human practical activity, in connection with a limited range of familiar utensils such as chisels, jackhammers, and saws. Chapter One argues that Heidegger's analysis actually holds good of all possible entities, whether they be "useful" or not. The term 'tool-being' holds good for grains of sand as much as saws, for angels as much as windmills. In truth, all entities are caught up in Heidegger's famous reversal between readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand, a crippling global dualism from which nothing in the cosmos is immune. My related claim is that all of Heidegger's various attempts to discuss any sort of concrete subject matter quickly implode into a sheer repetition of the duel between tool and broken tool. His supposed discussions of "space," "truth," and "time" are nothing more than distracting code words for a repetitive duality that Heidegger tries to escape by means of his abortive project for a 'metontology.' His monotonous appeal to the drama of tool and broken tool is complicated by only one further dualism, one found in his work as early as the 1919 Freiburg course Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. The interplay of these two principles is what leads Heidegger to his infamous notion of the fourfold , a concept too hastily ridiculed even by many of his admirers. Chapter Two offers a critical engagement with the secondary literature, focusing in particular on the concepts of Dasein, being, time, truth, Ereignis, language, and technology. Chapter Three attempts to develop the implications of this reading of Heidegger for a theory of the structure of objects in general. I argue in conclusion that Heidegger's holistic theory of the world, expressed in even clearer form in the works of Whitehead, leads to just as many perplexities as the substance-based theories of Aristotle and Leibniz. The concept of 'tool-being' requires some sort of compromise position between context and substance

The context for these interviews was a seminar [Peter Gratton] conducted on speculative realism in the Spring 2010. There has been great interest in speculative realism and one reason Gratton surmise[s] is not just the arguments offered, though [Gratton doesn't] want to take away from them; each of these scholars are vivid writers and great pedagogues, many of whom are in constant contact with their readers via their weblogs. Thus these interviews provided an opportunity to forward student questions about their respective works. Though each were conducted on different occasions, the interviews stand as a collected work, tying together the most classical questions about “realism” to ancillary movements about the non-human in politics, ecology, aesthetics, and video gaming—all to point to future movements in this philosophical area.

This paper criticizes two forms of philosophical materialism that adopt opposite strategies but end up in the same place. Both hold that individual entities must be banished from philosophy. The first kind is ground floor materialism, which attempts to dissolve all objects into some deeper underlying basis; here, objects are seen as too shallow to be the truth. The second kind is first floor materialism, which treats objects as naive fictions gullibly posited behind the direct accessibility of appearances or relations; here, objects are portrayed as too deep to be the truth. One major thesis of this paper is that these two forms of materialism are parasitical on one another and need each other's resources to make sense of the world. The second major thesis is that both forms of materialism thereby stand condemned, and that philosophy must be rebuilt from the individual objects that the two forms of materialism disdain. These points are made through a detailed consid- eration of the book Every Thing Must Go by the analytic structural realists James Ladyman and Don Ross, which has gained a surprising following among some speculative realists in continental philosophy. Ladyman and Ross claim to preserve objects by treating them as ``real patterns'', but they do so at the price of destroying their autonomous reality. Furthermore, they are unable to tell us whether the mathematical structures they see as the basis of human knowledge are also the basis of reality itself. In short, their ontology is scientism for scientism's sake (or `Bunsen burner realism') and must be eliminated in favor of a genuine realist metaphysics of objects.

This chapter follows the fortunes of one specific object that is both widely prized and universally known: gold. It examines the long history of gold from cosmic eons predating humans and considers various structural features of gold that arise from its chemical properties without being reducible to them. After considering examples of the effect of gold on humans, who are dazzled by its splendor, corrupted by its value, and made cruel through their ravenous hunt for the metal, the chapter observes gold in its interactions with bacteria, governments, collapsing stars, geothermal currents, and mountain streams. Since the great value of gold entails that it is rarely discarded, the total human storehouse of gold continues to expand while losing very little, making gold the great unifier of all the generations in human history. But while gold represents a vast sum of “congealed human labor,” it also has countless properties that humans had no role in producing, but which force human labor into definite channels. For this reason, today’s Hegelian Marxists miss the point whenever they claim that object-oriented philosophy is a form of “commodity fetishism.”