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Sep 16, 2022

"Graham Harman’s Architecture and Objects could very well be a new philosophical blueprint for how to build our emerging twenty-first-century world. By reconsidering the relationship between humanity, reality, and the built environment, he shows us, like a UV light at a crime scene, ways of understanding architecture that we’d never even considered but that are now, all of a sudden, glowing with brilliant potential." —Mark Foster Gage, Yale University and principal of Mark Foster Gage Architects

Full details.

Object-oriented ontology has become increasingly popular among architectural theorists and practitioners in recent years. Architecture and Objects, the first book on architecture by the founder of object-oriented ontology (OOO), deepens the exchange between architecture and philosophy, providing a new roadmap to OOO’s influence on the language and practice of contemporary architecture and offering new conceptions of the relationship between form and function.

Graham Harman opens with a critique of Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze, the three philosophers whose ideas have left the deepest imprint on the field, highlighting the limits of their thinking for architecture. Instead, Harman contends, architecture can employ OOO to reconsider traditional notions of form and function that emphasize their relational characteristics—form with a building’s visual style, function with its stated purpose—and constrain architecture’s possibilities through literalism. Harman challenges these understandings by proposing de-relationalized versions of both (zero-form and zero-function) that together provide a convincing rejoinder to Immanuel Kant’s dismissal of architecture as “impure.”

Through critical engagement with the writings of Peter Eisenman and fresh assessments of buildings by Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Zaha Hadid, Architecture and Objects forwards a bold vision of architecture. Overcoming the difficult task of “zeroing” function, Harman concludes, would place architecture at the forefront of a necessary revitalization of exhausted aesthetic paradigms.

About the author.

Graham Harman is distinguished professor of philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles, and author of many books, including Speculative Realism: An Introduction and Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything.

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/architecture-and-objects

August:
Welcome to Philosophy podcast, where we interview leading philosophers about their recent work. Today we're talking about the book Architecture and Objects: Art After Nature by Graham Harmon. The description is "Object-oriented ontology has become increasingly popular among architectural theorists and practitioners in recent years. Architecture and Objects," this book, "the first book on architecture by the founder of OOO, Object-Oriented Ontology, deepens the exchange between architecture and philosophy, providing a new roadmap to OOO's influence on the language and practice of contemporary architecture, and offering new conceptions of the relationship between form and function. Engaging with Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, writings of Peter Eisenman, and buildings by Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Zaha Hadid, Graham Harmon forwards a bold vision of architecture, one that places architecture at the forefront of a necessary revitalization of exhausted aesthetic paradigms."

August:
A couple of the recommendations.

August:
Mark Foster Gage, Yale University. "Graham Harmon's Architecture and Objects could very well be a new philosophical blueprint for how to build our emerging 21st-century world. By reconsidering the relationship between humanity, reality, and built environment, he shows us, like a UV light at a crime scene, ways of understanding architecture that we'd never even considered, but that are now all of a sudden glowing with brilliant potential."

August:
Aron Vinegar of the University of Oslo. "Graham Harmon's willingness, indeed his pleasure, to immerse himself in the complexity of architectural history, theory, practice, and criticism, results in a book that not only subtly translates between architecture and philosophy, but more provocatively argues for architecture's centrality in rethinking Kantian aesthetic formalism. He offers us a compelling account of architecture as a drama of rifts and splits in the zeroing of form, function, and time."

August:
Graham Harmon is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. His books include Art and Objects, and Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Welcome, Professor Harmon.

Graham Harmon:
Thank you very much, August. It's a pleasure to be here.

August:
You start off your book by saying "why a book on architecture, other than that I have recently been appointed to a architecture school." I think that's your opening joke. How do you answer that?

Graham Harmon:
I answer that by saying that this book is a continuation of my book Art and Objects from two years earlier, in which I was trying to express support for what's called Kantian formalism in the arts. The idea that an artwork is cut off from other things, and needs to be interpreted in its own rights, not in terms of its conceptual meaning, not in terms of its socio-historical surroundings, not in terms of how it personally makes us feel. I want to basically express support for that while also pointing to the limitations of Kantian formalism, which I did in that book, by pointing out that Kant and some of his modern heirs in art criticism such as Michael Fried, someone I admire very much, are two quick to dissociate the artwork from the human beholder. I argued in that book there's no way to do that, because artwork has to be seen as a composite or hybrid made of the physical work and the person who encounters it.

Graham Harmon:
Now, in Architecture and Objects I wanted to take up the fact that Kant is quite down on architecture, ranks it very low in the arts. The reason being that it's useful. If an artwork is useful, that's just as bad as an ethical act being useful. Because, of course, in Kant's ethics, ethical acts have to be performed for their own sake not because they lead to any good results, or lead to a better reputation for the person for being ethical, or lead to the person going to heaven instead of hell.

Graham Harmon:
All of those things ruin the purity of an ethical act for Kant, and likewise, for an artwork to be useful ruins the purity of the beauty. I realized that the conclusion I reached in Art and Objects allows us to rethink Kant's idea of architecture. Namely, since the entanglement of the human and the artwork is no longer a problem in my interpretation of visual art, that means that architecture is no longer suspect. Because that entanglement already occurs at the level of visual art, let alone at the level of architecture. It was a chance to rethink architecture in a post-Kantian way that nonetheless respects what Kant was seeing.

August:
Okay. I guess you clearly haven't gone through the other fields that have both art and practical application, fashion design to interior design to just being a hairdresser. I understand you make an argument about the difference between architecture and art, and you talk about the centrality of architecture. But it'll be another project to think about how those other fields might rank.

Graham Harmon:
Yes. I mean, I could write a book about anything if I put myself to it. Architecture just seemed more pressing both because Kant has bad things to say about it, and also because I am working in architecture school. I've been pressuring myself to learn a lot about architecture over the past 10 years, but especially the last 7 that I've been teaching at an architecture school.

August:
I see. One of your statements in the book is that when an architect makes a building, it's a tacit statement about the nature of reality, and that provides a overlap with philosophy. That's not clear to me why that would be true. Why, when an architect is building a building, it is a statement or it is an attempt to capture a deeper reality.

Graham Harmon:
My friend and colleague David Rue, I was undergraduate with him and now on his colleague at SCI-Arc, made a very interesting statement about 10 years ago in one of his articles, where he said that architecture gives us our first sense of reality. It's quite rare that any human is in the middle of raw nature. Even if you're in a national park, you're in an organized space, at least the entrance into the park has been arranged by civil engineers and landscape designers. All the moreso if you're in a city, you're in a town. Right now you're in a house, I'm in an apartment building. We are not in direct confrontation with nature. We are inhabiting a human-designed medium. Just as many animals primarily inhabit media that they create themselves, whether it's beehives or beaver dams.

Graham Harmon:
What this means is that our sense of reality is actually decided by the architect. The architect can decide whether we're in a soothing space or an ominous space, can decide whether we are in a space that allows in lots of sunlight or not much sunlight. In more recent architecture, the architecture can decide that the world is basically homogeneous and smooth and curves gently from one thing and another, or that there are abrupt cutoff points and different fashions have held sway at different times.

Graham Harmon:
This is the sense in which architecture makes a tacit statement about the nature of reality. On this basis, architects have picked up different philosophers at different times, especially in the last 60 years, to help guide their thinking. That itself is controversial in the architectural world now. There are some architects who think there's been too much philosophy and they want to get back to disciplinary craft.

Graham Harmon:
In my book, I make the case that, look, architecture is already involving all kinds of other disciplines. Why should you simply decide to exclude philosophy? Architects are some of the most omnivorous intellects I've encountered. They have to know about everything. They have to learn about whatever it is that their project is dedicated to. We'll always be a natural dialogue partner for architects.

August:
I would assume there's a lot of variety across architects, so that some architects would look for inspiration in philosophy and others wouldn't. They might find it somewhere else, or they're feel the muse is speaking through them. Is that true? A wide variety?

Graham Harmon:
Yes it is, and if you just look at recent architects, Peter Eisenman is as much a theorist as he is an architect. He drew first on Noam Chomsky, later on Derrida, later on Deleuze. He's picked up all kinds of things that are interesting to him he writes theoretical texts that I find interesting as a philosopher. I've debated with some of them in my book. Then you've got Zaha Hadid, the late lamented Zaha Hadid, who unfortunately died six years ago, too young, who was one of the preeminent architects of recent decades, but doesn't show much evidence of having been interested in theory on the philosophy [inaudible 00:09:35]. And yet, she fits very well within the Deleuzian current of architecture, even if I don't know how much Deleuze she read, if any. But the kind of design she does as a natural partner for Deleuze's philosophy. She was called the Queen of the Curve. Everything is continuous. They are very beautiful forms that she creates. They are also a statement about the nature of reality, even if she wouldn't have framed them that way.

August:
One of your concerns is clearly to, it seems that people have started using your theory, or the theory that's associated with you. Do you call it OOO?

Graham Harmon:
I pronounce it Triple O usually, but-

August:
Triple O? Okay. People have started to use that. You've seen it being referred to in texts about architecture or in discussions. It seems that one of your points was, "Okay, how do you do this in a way that is not too superficial, not too literal?"

Graham Harmon:
I think literalism is itself a philosophical problem. One of the themes of my book. Literalism you can define is the idea that a thing is nothing more than all of the qualities that it possesses. Philosophically, I guess the godfather of this idea is David Hume, who says "there are no objects, there are just bundles of qualities." There's not really any such thing as an apple. There's just red, round, juicy, hard, cold, sweet. All of these things go together so frequently that we form the habit of thinking of them as one thing we call it an apple. But apple itself is really nothing more for Hume and his followers than all of those things put together. Whereas phenomenology in the 20th century, with Husserl and beyond, Merleau-Ponty and others, says the opposite. That an object is always more than its qualities, because it vary, see different qualities of the thing at different times. Yet you never stop thinking of it as one and the same thing.

Graham Harmon:
So, the path to literalism, first of all, is seeing that the object is something distinct from its qualities, can change qualities and still be the same thing. It can be split from its qualities and still be the same thing. What interests me about aesthetics, which is usually considered a minor side annex to philosophy. While the big shots do metaphysics and epistemology and political theory. Aesthetics, for me, is not just about art that cultured humans find enjoyable. It's about a split between the object and its qualities. Which I think is the fundamental philosophical problem, because you can never pin down a thing in terms of definite qualities. Aesthetics helps remind us of this. Aesthetic language play a much larger role in Triple O than they do for other philosophies. Because I don't think literalism works. I don't think you can get the literal truth about the cosmos. Philosophy is not a knowledge.

Graham Harmon:
I think even science, in a sense, is not a knowledge. Science is, in large part, a knowledge. But we find in moments of what Kuhn called paradigm shifts, science comes into crisis, that we're not really sure anymore what the fundamental nature of reality is. Not just Kuhn. I would make the same statement about Popper and falsification, that science is, in many ways, a negative procedure rather than a positive one. Knowledge, in a way, is what deep thought opposes. Knowledge is a pragmatically useful thing. I wouldn't want to live in the world without knowledge. We rely on medical knowledge, we rely on engineering knowledge and so forth. But the frontiers of thought are always somewhere other than knowledge. They're at the place where we don't know something yet.

August:
I think one of the things you're doing is saying, "Let's not downplay something like metaphor." It's very insightful, actually. I don't know. You talk about non-rationalism. I think of it as a romantic current. Do you think of it that way?

Graham Harmon:
It could be. One difference from romanticism, which I admire a lot about romanticism, is this notion of the sublime, and Triple O's opposition to the sublime. Kant defines the sublime. He's talking about things like standing and looking out at the stormy sea, or looking up at the sky at night, maybe looking at these new photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, that, I agree, with those profound emotions unlocked by those moments. But Kant defines the sublime as the absolutely large or the absolutely powerful. I'm questioning the absolute part of it. Another Triple O theorist, Timothy Morton, wrote on his book Hyperobjects, that in a way, infinity is easily masterable. When you think about infinity, you think, "Wow, I can think the infinite." You feel proud of yourself. But Tim Morton says, "Try counting up to a hundred thousand." That's a finite number, but in some ways that's a more realistic threat than, say, infinity.

Graham Harmon:
And he primarily applied this to climate change, that it's somehow less threatening to say infinity than to say that the half-life of this material is 70,000 years or something. Because nobody in 70,000 years who's left, if anyone is left, I'm not going to have any meaningful connection with any of those people. It will be a totally different world. That's an idea I drew from Morton, to critique the sublime, that things can seem infinite, but they're actually all infinite in different ways and in different amounts. That would be the difference from romanticism, the idea that each, also the fact that in some ways romanticism fetishizes nature. Triple O does not want to do [inaudible 00:15:04]. For Triple O, technological objects are just as interesting as pine forests. That's another departure from romanticism.

August:
I understand. That's a good point. I notice you go through the book and you talk about how architects have used other philosophers and it's Heidegger, Derrida, DeLeuze. It strikes the reader that these are so-called continental philosophers. Even when you describe how architects might want to look at/to philosophers for maybe a new way of seeing things, that seems like more of a role for a continental philosopher, to inspire provoke, rather than the, as I understand the more analytic, let's be very clear and careful just inscribing things, not trying to provoke or astonish. Would you agree with that?

Graham Harmon:
I would, and this doesn't reflect even a value judgment on my part. It's just the description of what architects are doing. Architects are not really reading analytic philosophers. I'm not even sure what analytic philosopher they might read to inspire new architecture. Obviously Wittgenstein is of interest to everybody on some level, and was also a fine architect himself. I had the chance to tour his-

August:
I didn't know that.

Graham Harmon:
... house behind in Vienna. Which it's not generally accessible to the public. It's the Bulgarian cultural attache's office or something now in Vienna. But we had an architectural contact who enabled us to make a tour of that house. I was with an architect friend who said he thinks AR V Stein could have been one of the great architects [inaudible 00:16:42] decided to be. It's a remarkable piece of work. You'd think that Wittgenstein might appear more in architectural discourse, but that hasn't really happened the way it has in the visual arts with people like Kossoth, who was very influenced by Wittgenstein. Stanley Cavel is another person who writes well on the creation and has obviously had some influence on arts and our criticism through his friend, Michael fried. But I don't hear, Cavel mentioned by architects. I hear the big continental names. Heidegger, [inaudible 00:17:10] Deleuze, to a lesser extent Latour, Peter Sloterdijk has some growing interest, though he hasn't really spawned a school yet.

Graham Harmon:
We could ask why that is. I think part of this analytic philosophy made a decision early on. It is what it is. It made a decision to constitute itself as a science. It emulates specialized scientific disciplines. They take pride in this, in having very precise terminology, in referring mostly to recent work by other analytic philosophers, in dominating the departments of philosophy in the Anglo-American world. At least the prestigious ones. If you want to do continental philosophy like me, you end up going to small Catholic universities or maybe a few state schools such as Penn State or Memphis, Stony Brook, that do that kind of thing. But it's largely a Catholic-

August:
Interesting.

Graham Harmon:
Because continental philosophy fits well, I think, with the Catholic church's admirable support of the history of philosophy. Even though most of the graduate students at these places are not themselves Catholics. The Catholic universities support this very nicely.

Graham Harmon:
The problem that analytic philosophy has created for itself, there's two sides to every coin, is that it's not as accessible to the general public. Indeed, I think it takes pride in that, that we are a scientific discourse and just like the average person can't read quantum theory articles in a journal, the average person shouldn't expect to read analytic philosophy journals with ease.

Graham Harmon:
All right, but there's a sense in which philosophy also needs to be readable by the average intelligent person. This is something continental philosophy, in principle, does better. In practice, a lot of the professors in continental philosophy become just as narrow in their writing, and also tend to be more commentary-oriented sometimes. Rather than putting forth theories of their own, they tend to comment on Heidegger or Kant [inaudible 00:18:55] their own theories. But people like Zizek are always going to be more easily readable and perhaps more interesting for the general public than, say, Timothy Williamson at Oxford, who's one of the leading philosophers at Oxford, analytic philosophers, or David Lewis. The deceased David Lewis, one of their great meta-physicians. These are always going to be hard for the average person to read. I think that's the issue with architecture.

August:
Some would say, well, I guess there's the famous Nusbaum article on Butler where she says that some in the continental tradition cultivate a mystique around being obscure. Do you see any merit in that also? In some of the writing is very obscure.

Graham Harmon:
Sometimes. For example, I'm not an admirer of Derrida's style at all. I find it to be a headache to read Derrida most of the time. He gets into a groove once in a while, where he is got 8 or 10 pages that get right to the point. But that's usually preceded and followed by lots of dancing that I find tedious. Judith Butler is an interesting case. I just have to say this in defense of Butler. I don't like how she writes. She writes very technically. She's not as accessible as she could be. I think no spam made some fair points about that in her article. Then I had the chance to meet Judith Butler. She came over to Cairo, Egypt, as a guest speaker at the university when I was there. She's really disarming. Because, first of all, she's incredibly intelligent. There are certain people you're just in their presence and you have the sense immediately, "This is a very smart person."

Graham Harmon:
Second, she's an incredible listener. She looks you right in the eye and listens to everything you say. It's unnerving in a way. [inaudible 00:20:41] Judith Butler's listening to every word I say. It's rare to meet people like that. I didn't get the sense she's someone who cherishes obscurity as a person. Also, in the talk she gave, which was simply on Palestinian-Israeli politics, she was very clear. She didn't try to dither. She told us exactly what she thought should be done, to this audience. Obviously pro-Palestinian audience primarily in Egypt. I'm not sure why she chooses to write that way. I don't like the excuses that are sometimes made for that. They'll sometimes say, "Well, nobody complains that quantum theory is hard to understand." The difference there, Michelle Serres pointed this out, that in science, technical language is a shortcut. It's a way of saying more using fewer words. Whereas sometimes in the humanities, it's a way of saying less using more words. I think Serres is right about that. This is why I think it's very important to write clearly.

Graham Harmon:
I think one of the things about my generation in continental philosophy is if you look at someone like Meillassoux, he's very clear, very easy to read. I've talked to him about this. He said that that was his explicit goal. He didn't like the way Derridans wrote, he didn't like the way phenomenologists wrote even, and simply wanted to be as clear as possible. I think all of us in speculative realism made an effort to write clearly, to a greater or lesser extent I think this was an excess of the, let's say, post-structuralist generation of continental philosophy.

August:
We imitate our teachers, so something like a style can perpetuate like that.

Graham Harmon:
Yes.

August:
Let's talk about Triple O. All right. This was the first time I saw it. I actually just found your name by looking up leaving philosophers.

Graham Harmon:
All right.

August:
Yeah. Object-Oriented Ontology. I think if someone asked me to explain my understanding of it, in my words, I would say the idea is basically we want to go against what you hear. Currently. You hear this a lot in psychoanalysis, for example, about there is no such thing as a person. There's just a bunch of connections with other people. It's relationships come before the person, and there's a big problem with thinking about a person as a unit that goes through time. Triple O wants to talk about objects. That's the first word. It wants to have a very broad view of objects.

August:
I think it's very much in the line of Socrates in the sense of saying there's a lot that we don't know. It's also in line with Kant saying there is this noumena behind reality that we can't really access. I think it addresses the traditional problem in philosophy, which is this idea that there's what we interact with, then there's what things really are. That all our interactions are mediated. Then there's this question about what is real, what is underlying and real? It seems to me that Triple O addresses that. Then I would say, addresses that basic question, but it doesn't say, "Let's have a divide between consciousness and world, or mind and world." It says, essentially, as I understand it, "we're going to talk about objects, but we're not really going to put a subject in the center. We're going to make the subject another object. We're going to recognize an underlying or a deeper level, which is real and a higher level, which we'll call sensual, which includes much more than just sense perception."

August:
Then I think the other thing that it does is it says we're also going to put some structure on this real realm. Which is to say that there are, in this real realm, both objects and qualities. That would be my take after reading this book, but feel free to tell me I got it totally wrong.

Graham Harmon:
You got it totally right.

August:
Okay. Great.

Graham Harmon:
Nice summary. Very nice summary. Yes. You made a couple of important points there that I need to respond to. First of all, yes, we shouldn't reduce the thing either downward to its pieces or upward to its effects that's a common ... First of all, let me say that's what knowledge is. There are really only two kinds of knowledge that humans can have. If I ask you what something is, you can either tell me what it's made of or tell me what it does. There are subcategories of each of these. You can tell me the history of a thing, you can tell me its physical composition. These are all ways of telling me what it's made of.

Graham Harmon:
Or you can tell me what it does. You can say that oxygen allows living creatures to breathe, it causes fire to combust, things like this. And all forms of knowledge involve explaining a thing in terms of something else. That's fine. We need knowledge to survive as a species.

Graham Harmon:
But knowledge does not exhaust human cognition. There is also a human cognition that does a kind of mute justice, or tries to do a kind of mute justice to things that goes beyond that. It's commonly known, accepted by any philosophers if not all, that a thing is an emergent thing beyond its components. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, and it's great that we've known that since Lavoisier' chemistry in the late 1700s. But obviously oxygen has properties not found in either hydrogen or oxygen. It puts out fire, whereas both hydrogen and oxygen combust fire, and so on. You need hydrogen and oxygen to make fire, and you can even predict the properties of water using quantum chemistry once you know what hydrogen and oxygen are. But it's not a question of predictability. It's a question of the thing, having an independent reality.

Graham Harmon:
The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team is something over and above each of the individual members, right? It has obviously not had the same members for the whole 60 years. Players keep leaving, new players come in, so the Dodgers are something over and above their pieces. They're also something, I would say, under and beneath their relations. Because new teams have been added to the league since the Los Angeles Dodgers franchise relocated from Brooklyn to Los Angele.s they have to play now the Colorado Rockies and the Marlins who did not exist when the Dodgers first existed. The Dodgers, they play in different stadiums than they used to. New stadiums are being opened. So, the Dodgers, and obviously the American society around the Dodgers and Los Angeles, these are all changing. And yet the Dodgers, in some sense, remain the Dodgers. You can't reduce them upward. Some kernel remains always there, though never perfectly expressed in any given Dodgers game or any given season.

Graham Harmon:
Those are what I call critiques of undermining and overmining. You can undermine a thing by going downward, overmine it by going upward, then those combine in what I call dual mining. Normal scientific materialism, for example, is a dual mining gesture. Because on the one hand, it says things are reducible to their tiniest particles or the fields, whatever the smallest stuff is. But then it also wants to say, "Yes, but this is all mathematizable," which we can know. Therefore reducing it upward to its knowledge. We're not taking account of any residue in the things that's non-mathematizable, ever since Galileo and Descartes.

Graham Harmon:
Object is something in between those two extremes, and you can't know it by definition because any knowledge involves an undermining or an overmining. So how do we get at it? Well, aesthetics is the obvious answer, because when you're experiencing an artwork, you're not telling the beholders what it's made of. I mean, you might as some kind of dadaist gesture, but we're not primarily interested in what an artwork is made of the way we are interested in what a rock is made of in science. You're also not interested only in how this artwork makes me feel, or how this artwork comments on contemporary politics, because those things all change, and an artwork is supposed to challenge me to perceive it differently. The better it is, the more I'm going to have to go back to it and find things in it that I didn't find first.

Graham Harmon:
An artwork's an obvious example, but then there's also philosophy, which I think is closer to the arts than the sciences. Something analytic philosophy would never like. Because philosophy is, of course, philosophia. Possibly from Pythagoras onwards. Philosophia means the love of wisdom, not wisdom. Philosophy is not a knowledge. You get some analytic philosophers referring to what they do as scientific philosophy or exact philosophy. I see those as a contradiction in terms. That's like saying exact art, what would exact art be? It misses the point.

Graham Harmon:
Socrates asks a lot about the definitions of things, but he never gets any definitions. Every dialogue ends in further perplexity. He always says, or at least a few times says, "The only thing I know is I know nothing. I've never been anyone's teacher." So we shouldn't see Socrates as a wise man or as a scientist. He's not. He's a philosopher, and philosophy is something a little closer to the arts than to science. I'll give one quote supporting this that's often overlooked. Last great philosopher before the analytic continental split was Franz Brentano, the teacher of Husserl. He gave a very interesting lecture about philosophy in the 1890s in Vienna. He made this point that's not been commented on often, where he said, "In some senses, philosophy is like science. It makes progress. Every generation should see things in philosophy that the previous generation didn't. But in another sense, it's like the fine arts. It has periods of ripeness and periods of decline."

Graham Harmon:
You wouldn't necessarily say, even in analytic philosophy, that analytic philosophy knows more in 2022 than it knew in the time of Russell and Wittgenstein. In some sense, yes, because we have critiques to Russell and Wittgenstein now. But in some sense, that was a riper era. That was a more celebrated era of analytic philosophy than 2022, I would say .just like you have in the arts. 2022 art is not necessarily better than high cubism, which was considered a great period in modern art.

Graham Harmon:
Now, the question is how you reconcile those two. In many ways, this was also the question that guided Thomas Kuhn in discussing the history of science, the difference between normal science and revolutionary science. What is the relation between those two? Because normal science is cumulative. Then from time to time, it's completely disrupted by paradigm shifts. This hasn't been applied to philosophy enough, this idea that there are paradigm-shifting periods in philosophy. German idealism remains one of the most revered periods in the history of philosophy by scholars [inaudible 00:31:41] between Kant and Hegel that seems to embody philosophy to an eminent degree. Lots of stuff was happening every year. That isn't happening right now, as far as the public eye can see. Right?

August:
Right.

Graham Harmon:
This seems like a fairly normal period in philosophy by comparison.

August:
Well, take Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. There's three, they were [inaudible 00:32:02] teachers.

Graham Harmon:
In Western philosophy this happens a lot. You also had Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. In the UK you had Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and you had Husserl, Heidegger, and-

August:
Brentano. Yeah. Okay.

Graham Harmon:
Yeah. I would add Brentano. I might add Scheler. You could [inaudible 00:32:20] decrease the groups of. Oh, even in the Medieval time you had Aquinas, Scotus, Occam. This seems to be a common phenomenon in Western philosophy. I should say European philosophy. If you go to Islamic philosophy, what jumps out at you is that their lifetimes don't overlap. If you look at Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Averroes, I don't think any of their lifetimes overlap. There's small gaps between each of them.

August:
Interesting.

Graham Harmon:
I'm not sure what that means. I've been puzzling [inaudible 00:32:49] that for years, that they were spread out in time. I think that gives a different topology to Islamic philosophy. Whereas, yeah, in the European tradition, it's always bang, bang, bang. Three or four people in a row. Often they knew each other personally, at least some of them.

August:
And sometimes they were the student of the professor

Graham Harmon:
Quite often. That's right. Or at least met each other. Leibniz went and met Spinoza for example.

August:
Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, clearly.

Graham Harmon:
Exactly. Exactly. That's an interesting phenomenon. You see that in the history of art as well, that the artists are grouped together usually, in great periods, as though one unlocks the possibilities of the next.

Graham Harmon:
Another interesting thing about those clusters, is that the first person in the cluster always starts older, or almost always starts older. It's as though it's harder for someone like Kant to dream up the new principles of a new way of looking at philosophy. But then once someone's put it out there, younger people can take it and improve it or revolutionize it in some way. Hegel started much younger than Kant. The Phenomenology of Spirit, he was in his, I think, mid-thirties. [inaudible 00:34:00] wrote that. Whereas Kant was in his late 50s, publishing the First Critique. Same with Husserl and Heidegger.

August:
That's right. I imagine that, and you talk about this and I can tell that you have gotten, this must be a common response to the object-oriented ontology. It sounds like you're going to miss change over time. You're going to miss flows. It sounds like it's going to be static.

Graham Harmon:
That's been the most common criticism ever since my doctoral dissertation from some committee members. Here's what I would say. Constant change, in a way, ends up not giving you much of an explanation of change.

August:
Sure. That's a good point.

Graham Harmon:
Yeah. Because if everything's changing all the time, why should you then be interested in revolutions or periods where science changes? Because a hair falling from my head is also radical change according to this.

August:
Right. In fact, you could take, say, the economy and say if the inflation rate is the constant through time, prizes are increasing all the time, but there's no change really. The [inaudible 00:35:08] would say there's no change there because it's continuous. Yeah.

Graham Harmon:
Right. Is economics your-

August:
It was, yeah. Yeah.

Graham Harmon:
All right. Great. Yeah. Yes, and you also have, in paleontology, which is called punctuated equilibrium of Gould and Eldredge, opposed to Darwinian gradualism. but it turns out in their eyes to be a better explanation of evolution that it happens quickly followed by long periods of stability. That's more my own view as well. That if you're saying everything's changing all the time, you miss the punctuated aspect of history, that not equally interesting things are happening at every moment in time.

Graham Harmon:
For example, right now, if I were going into the sciences, I were a young person, I think I would choose astronomy. Physics, maybe not. Even though you think of physics as fundamental. That's what you want to go into. But Lee Smolin lamented in one of his books that he's part of the first generation of physicists in 500 years that hasn't made fundamental forward progress. He was quite depressed about it. Since the standard model in the early '70s, okay. We've discovered the Higgs-Boson, but that's just fulfilling a prediction of the standard model. There hasn't really been a huge breakthrough since then. But if you look at astronomy, well, first of all, astronomy discovered dark matter and dark energy, so that's coming from outside physics.

Graham Harmon:
There's also major discoveries happening in astronomy literally every day. Just open any news website you're probably going to find an astronomical discovery even before the Webb telescope, which is just accelerating it. Astronomy is really in a revolutionary phase, just like physics was in the early 20th century where Rutherford said, "We live in the heroic age of physics," and he was right. New discoveries all the time. At any given moment, there are certain fields where that's happening and others that are a little more devoted to consolidating what's already known, or to polishing our understanding. There's different rhythms in different fields, the different [inaudible 00:36:57].

August:
So the point would be that these points of disruption are become objects themselves, or that the objects change from one to another?

Graham Harmon:
I think points of disruption, such as Kuhn's paradigm shifts or Alain Badiou's events, are points when we no longer can think of a thing in terms of its qualities. Because the qualities are no longer internally consistent, they no longer make sense, so we have to theorize what's deeper than these qualities? That's the object. What is it that's lying behind this? We're redefining the object. Einstein essentially redefined what space and time are in his [inaudible 00:37:37] and general theories of relativity. Some people try to make the case that, "Oh, Newton's theory is still true as a special case of Einstein's." I don't think that's right. I think that Newton's theory is refuted. I agree with Kuhn on this. Because says that, "Look at something like mass." Both Newton and Einstein use the concept of mass, but you can't say they're the same concept. Because in Newton, mass is conserved. In Einstein, mass is convertible with energy. So they're not really the same thing, sense. Einstein redefined an object. It might have the same name, mass, that Newton's hard physical stuff did, but it's not the same thing. You're redefining the referent of the term.

Graham Harmon:
I'm more on the side that these moments of crisis can lead to actual different conceptions of the world in terms of the objects that populate them.

August:
I understand. And the other idea, I think where there's some tension or I'm not clear how it's handled, is in relationships between real objects, or in relationships. Because it seems so, Winnicott said, "There's no such a thing as a baby. There's a nursing couple before there's a baby." The idea is there's a relationship that's a real thing in between two objects. My understanding would be that relationship becomes an object. Or I'm not sure about that.

Graham Harmon:
Yes. Any real relation will become a new object. The reason for that is, what defines an object for Triple O is that it has a reality deeper than our understanding of it, that no understanding can exhaust. There are certain objects that are false objects. I can name six random things and say that they comprise an object, but that object probably doesn't exist outside my thinking of it.

August:
[inaudible 00:39:31] once you name it does.

Graham Harmon:
It becomes a sensual object at least, then the question [inaudible 00:39:35].

August:
I understand. Yeah.

Graham Harmon:
The question is, at what point does a sensual object become a real one? Because-

August:
I gotcha.

Graham Harmon:
Sherlock Holmes began as a sensual object in the mind of Arthur Conan Doyle. But now, in a sense, Sherlock Holmes is a real object. Because if somebody did a Sherlock Holmes movie where the Holmes character was not at all convincing, we would say that wasn't really Sherlock Holmes.

August:
Yeah. That's really good point.

Graham Harmon:
Which some people said about Danny DeVito's Penguin in one of those Batman movies. It was an interesting character, but it wasn't the Penguin. [inaudible 00:40:02] critics say that. How can you say it wasn't the Penguin when the Penguin doesn't exist? Well, because the [inaudible 00:40:06] does exist in a sense.

August:
Yeah. Right.

Graham Harmon:
You brought up the relation between real objects, and that brings us back to the second point I forgot to answer about your excellent summary of Triple O. Which is you talk about the Kantian noumena, which are things humans can think about but never directly contact. There is a lot of that in Triple O, and also Heidegger's withdrawn reality, withdrawn being, that can never be known directly. Some people accuse Triple O of just rehashing that. But there's a huge difference, which is that objects are impenetrable to each other. Also for Triple O. The usual tendency is to say, "Oh, we poor humans can't reach the in itself. It's our special burden." No. For Triple O, any relation has that aspect. So, in physical causation, is not a direct impact. It's an indirect impact. This brings us into contact with the occasionalist tradition in philosophy, the idea that nothing can affect anything else directly.

Graham Harmon:
Traditionally, it was thought that God has to bring those things together, which is not part of the Triple O theory. Because, for Triple O, no privileged object can be the locus of relation between all other objects, whether it's God or the human mind. Kant and Hume simply secularize their occasionalism by saying, "Ah, it's not God. It's the human mind. All causation's really happening in the human mind." Either through habit for Hume, or through a category of the mind for Kant. Whereas, for Triple O, no. It has to be local in each case. The way we handle that is with the difference between real and sensual objects. That two real objects can only be mediated by a sensual object. Because things only encounter the images of each other.

August:
I see.

Graham Harmon:
[inaudible 00:41:41] itself. Then two sensual objects are only mediated by a real object. Because on my table now there's my sensual scotch tape and my sensual book on the Huns. But they're both connected only through my mind. That's how we get around it.

August:
We're running out of time. But I thought that was very interesting. Yeah. You talked about the hard problem, mental life and consciousness, and you said that's a problem more broadly. Consciousness in the world, that's a much more broadly than that. Just to give the listeners a sense of the work that one does, there's this diagram with the real object and the real qualities, the sensual object and the sensual qualities. It wouldn't make sense to try to do this in a podcast. But basically you can look at the tensions between these and try to capture them through art or architecture or metaphor. Then there's another concept of a cell, which is, I understand it would be to take three of these and think of it as a milieu, or no?

Graham Harmon:
Well, you take two, which combine to a third. Yes. There are three in that sense. The idea there is that an architectural cell requires that we not see the human beholder and the artwork as two separate things. Kant [inaudible 00:43:09] wanted to purify the two of each other. For Kant, art is really about our minds. But then Kant's followers in the 20th century, implicit followers like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, did it the other way. For them, it was the artwork that was important, not the human beholder. This is why they hated all the post-1960s stuff like performance art and conceptual art. They thought it was humanizing the artwork too much. Fried would call it "being too theatrical about the artwork". Whereas, I would say that art is inherently theatrical. It requires a beholder. If all humans are extinct, we don't have any art. We just have a bunch of pieces of canvas hanging in derelict museums.

Graham Harmon:
Because in order to have art, you need to create that rift between the object and its qualities, which you don't have, unless there's some creature capable of apprehending it. I mean, obviously some animals have aesthetic experience. I don't think there's any evidence of animals appreciating our artworks are artworks yet. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe certain primates understand that paintings are paintings and can appreciate them on some level. I don't know with dolphins. I'd be happy to hear that, but I don't personally know any evidence of that. Certain artworks are made for the human scale and are not intelligible to non-humans, let's say. Maybe all artworks. Maybe most. I don't know the exact percentage.

August:
I sense that another aspect of this theory is that it's not so human-centric.

Graham Harmon:
Yes.

August:
Which is certainly annoying when you look at other theories, and the human capacity is so much different than anyone else's, than any other creature's.

Graham Harmon:
Right.

August:
Well, Graham. Professor. It's been great talking to you. I could talk to you for a few hours. What a large amount of work to do to grasp architecture. I realize you've been teaching it and that's helped you say it out loud and get it. But that was quite an adventure to learn all this stuff, I would think

Graham Harmon:
It is. I would like to always encourage people to realize they can, if not master a field, they can get up to speed in a few years.

August:
That's what I was really thinking about when I read this. I was like, "I would never think about taking this on because how many library floors are devoted to architecture? And how can one come in, having a PhD in philosophy, and then come in and do that?" Yeah, no. You have a sort of optimism about that, which then becomes real.

Graham Harmon:
Way to stay young is keep learning new things. Whether it's new languages, or new fields. Keeps your brain active, keeps giving you resistance. And yes, there are endless floors of architecture books I haven't read them all and neither have the professionals in the field. But there are certain key joints in the history of any [inaudible 00:45:53] and you go right for those. Then that creates a space in which you can learn more details all the time, so I'm still checking out. I wrote a book on architecture, yes. But I'm still checking out new architecture books every week from our library trying to learn them.

August:
Yeah. I thought that your discussion of that show. I guess it was partly Phillip Johnson and someone else who put together that-

Graham Harmon:
Mark McGee.

August:
Right. That was, yeah. You could tell that was a real key point, and it really did open everything up. Okay. Great. Well, it's a great book. Congratulations on it. Architecture and Objects: Art After Nature. 2022, I think.

Graham Harmon:
Yeah. Just published in July.

August:
Great. Well, it was great talking to you. Appreciate your time very much.

Graham Harmon:
Thanks, August. I see you have a lot of interesting podcasts on your site.

August:
I hope so.

Graham Harmon:
Look forward to catching up on those.

August:
Okay. Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Graham Harmon:
Sure.

August:
I'll talk to you later. Bye.