I got the LRB (27/9/18) at the kiosk Sunday. Stephen Mulhall reviews Graham Harman's
Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything.
Harman actually regards Heidegger as
his primary 'Continental' authority for both
the four-fold ontology of the object and the
inaccessibility of the real. Heidegger's later
work certainly offers a ready (if deeply obscure) source for the figure of the four-fold;
and he always emphasised that something
about the real Being of things necessarily
withdraws from us. However, Harman tries
to derive this latter insight solely from
Heidegger's early ontology of tools, and in
particular from his valid but modest point
that tools function smoothly as such primarily by virtue of sinking into the background when they are employed, thereby
allowing the end-product or goal of the relevant activity to occupy the foreground.
But this self-concealing tendency does
not on the face of it lead Heidegger to
think that he is constitutionally debarred
from giving a detailed analysis of the ontology of equipment, or of the non-objectual
meaning-informed environment within
which alone (he claims) tools can exist.
And nothing in that analysis entails that
genuine knowledge of the hammer, regarded as a material object as opposed to a
tool, is impossible. On the contrary, that's
the kind of knowledge of it that we naturally seek when, for example, a hammer is
damaged, and so can no longer function
smoothly as a hammer until it is repaired.
What Heidegger is trying to show is that the
environmental conditions which make it
possible for us to grasp a hammer either as
a tool or as a material object cannot them-
selves be analysed in the terms appropriate
to such encounters. At this deeper onto-
logical level we do indeed find an enigmatic dialectic between disclosure and withdrawal. But that dialectic is what makes it
possible for us to encounter objects as they
are (or to fail to); it does not demonstrate
that we can never do so.
These are deeply contested issues, of
course. But Heidegger is at least not as
straightforwardly vulnerable as Harman is
to the following objection. If real objects
and their properties are essentially inaccessible to us, how could we grasp — let alone
articulate — an object-oriented ontology
that not only posits their existence but delineates their turbulent four-fold nature?
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