Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins and weaves new patterns: a blend of memories, experiences, spontaneous ideas, absurdities, and improvisations.
August Strindberg, Dream play, Ending of Fanny and Alexander
In this article I will try to give an account for Object Oriented Onthology. My thoughts are based on two books :
1. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything
2. Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality
In the past, I wrote about ‘metaphors in the root of consciousness‘ trying to formulate an up-to-date concept of consciousness. Timothy Morton in his book RM:OOC writes about something in the same spirit.
What is Object Oriented Philosophy ?
Object-Oriented Philosophy (OOP), often associated with Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), is a philosophical movement that emerged in the early 21st century. It challenges many traditional philosophical views by arguing that objects, whether animate or inanimate, have their own reality and agency that is independent of human perception or interaction. Here are some key points and concepts related to OOP:
- Objects at the Center: OOP places objects at the center of philosophical inquiry. It argues that objects exist independently of human perception and have their own reality.
- Against Anthropocentrism: Traditional philosophy often places human experience and perception at the center of understanding reality. OOP challenges this anthropocentric view by arguing that objects have their own existence and agency, irrespective of whether humans perceive or interact with them.
- Flat Ontology: One of the key ideas in OOP is the concept of “flat ontology.” This means that all objects, whether they are humans, animals, rocks, or even fictional entities, have the same level of ontological status. No object is inherently more real or significant than another.
- Withdrawal: Objects, according to OOP, always “withdraw” from complete access or understanding. This means that no matter how much we know or perceive about an object, there’s always an aspect of it that remains inaccessible to us.
- Inter-object Relations: While objects withdraw from complete understanding, they also relate to and interact with other objects. These interactions are central to understanding the nature of reality in OOP.
- Challenging Reductionism: OOP opposes reductionist views that try to explain objects solely in terms of their parts or their relations to human beings. For OOP, objects have their own essence that can’t be fully reduced to their components or human perceptions.
- Influence on Other Fields: While OOP is a philosophical movement, its ideas have influenced other fields, including art, literature, and even some areas of science and technology.
Interpretation
OOO borrows a lot of ideas from Plato, Kant and Heidegger. Timothy Morton’s books RM:OOC is especially interesting for me to think about OOO’s insights in regard to modern philosophy, science and culture.
The main driving force for me about OOO is about its anti-materialism and anti-reductionism. OOO is not in accord with any view that sees or assumes reality’s basic blocks are Lego pieces made up of the smallest (/sub/atomic) particles we can ‘observe’.
For OOO space/time is not a container where objects exist. Space/time is actually a product of every object. In the beginning of philosophical thought, Parmenides and Heraclitus drew different pictures of the universe, a static one and a dynamic one, respectfully. OOO thinks about objects as such, which, like quantum particles, does not comply with the law of non-contradiction. That means that objects are inherited with contradictions and Dialetheism. Morton sees objects as ever-changing while staying the same entities. While sounding like nonsense in the beginning, in the spirit of deconstruction, this approach has the potential to change how we talk about things and objects ontological, to be able to create a new sense of things, to climb the ladder and throw it away once we crossed over, to shift a paradigm.
When using language on a cosmological level, we make generalizations and describe a universe without any detail. On a quantum level, even space and time are non-descriptive, when we cannot make any generalizations, objects becomes paradoxes (LNC). Odin gave an eye for the gift of knowledge. The nature of knowledge is dialetheistical, knowing is ignoring, turning a blind eye, making generalizations. This is what Morton suggests in RM:OOC.
We should ask ourselves why did we assume that reality should fit EXACTLY lingual description ? It might be the illusion caused by the allure of science and or own safety, which is fading away recently due to current events. We use math and language to describe, to predict the future (Causality model) and to communicate. We experience reality as a dynamic flow, therefore talking about frozen images of reality, for example in physics, can help us approximate reality, but it can never be fully accurate. The paradoxes of movement are moved once one understand there is no such as thing as a freestanding object in time and space. There might be objects which exist only in relation to each other – a common new approach in physics as well – which gives a non-static (non-mechanical and non-Cartesian) description of reality. Objects contain one another : A sand which has a footprint of a dinosaur is a ‘dinosaured’ sand, sound waves from a violin contains the footprint (timbre) of the violin, the musician’s body language, interpretation, the shape of the room it was played in – in short, it is time to stop thinking only about sand, a room, a violin, without thinking about other objects.
Objects for OOO could be Anything that has a discrete, unified presence is considered an object. This can include animals, people, events, concepts, and even fictional entities. The scope is vast, encompassing everything from atoms to galaxies, from melodies to emotions.
In a Heideggerian way, objects always “withdraw” (“Entzug”, conceal) from other objects, including humans trying to perceive or understand them. This means that an object’s essence is never fully accessible or exhaustible. No matter how much we study or engage with an object, there’s always more to it than what is presented or available to us. While relations between objects are important, OOO emphasizes that objects are not merely the sum of their relations with other objects. An object has its own essence and reality that exists independently of its relations.
OOO opposes the reduction of objects solely to their components or their effects on human beings. For instance, while a scientific analysis might break down a tree into its cellular structure, chemical compounds, or its role in the ecosystem, OOO would argue that the tree, as an object, has its own reality that isn’t fully captured by these analyses. While some philosophical traditions prioritize phenomena (things as they appear to us) over noumena (things as they are in themselves), OOO argues that objects have their own reality regardless of how, or even if, they appear to other entities. OOO allows for the idea that objects can contain other objects. For instance, a human body can be seen as an object that contains other objects like organs, cells, and molecules. Each of these objects, while part of a larger object, has its own reality and agency.
So, when we humans encounter objects, we encounter only a fraction of their ‘essence’ due to the rift between their ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’. Try not to think about essence and appearance, the way other philosophies think about them.
Aesthetics as Causality
In traditional views, causality is often seen in terms of direct, mechanical interactions between objects. One thing physically affects another in a linear chain of cause and effect. In Object-Oriented Ontology, objects are seen as fundamentally withdrawn from one another. This means that objects never fully interact in a direct, straightforward manner because there’s always an aspect of an object that remains inaccessible to other objects.
Given this view of objects as withdrawn, Morton proposes that causality isn’t about direct mechanical interactions but is instead aesthetic in nature. When objects “interact,” they don’t touch in a direct, physical sense but rather “sense” or “perceive” one another in a way that’s more akin to how we experience art or music. This aesthetic encounter is how objects influence one another.
Causality as aesthetics is a radical reimagining of how objects relate and influence one another. It moves away from a purely mechanical understanding of the world and towards one that recognizes the importance of experience, meaning, and narrative in how things unfold. This perspective is especially relevant in the context of ecological thought, where the challenges of the Anthropocene demand new ways of understanding and relating to the world around us.
The subject is time is explored through OOO. We know Einsteinian time works as relativity – that means at least two objects are relating to each other, without an absolute framework of time. Time was always -the- relation between two objects, change itself, we Cartesian-ly think – change in location over the course of ‘time’ and the boundary of the speed of light. There is also psychological time, temporality as Bergson put it, duration/durée. There is also periodicity. Periodicity would refer to an object which has a constant of repetition. When we want to measure absolute time (which parameter is communication) we relate to the Periodicity of the Earth, the Sun and Quartz or lasers in certain watches, which nevertheless gives us a huge amount of control and synchronicity as humans.
Talking about time, we should consider there is as well an end to events and objects even before they get to other events or objects, meaning it is not like the whole universe is entangled. There is a dark side, lack of interaction, between certain events and objects. The tipping point is called the sorites paradox (1+n) or the paradox of the heap, If you have a heap of sand, and you remove one grain, you still have a heap. If you continue to remove grains one by one, at what point does it cease to be a heap? It might be impossible to establish a clear Cartesian border between objects and events.
Our classical notion of continuous time might break down at extremely small scales. OOO goes well with the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, where quantities are defined in relation to other quantities. For instance, in some interpretations of quantum gravity, the idea is that spacetime is not a fixed backdrop but emerges from relationships between quantum systems. In this view, without relationships or interactions, the classical notion of time (and space) might not be meaningful.
What is OOO offering ?
OOO is offering an Expansive view of objects, emphasizing their autonomy, depth, and irreducibility. Objects, according to OOO, are central to understanding the nature of reality, and they exist with their own essence, independent of human perception or their relations to other objects.
OOO tries not only to align with the scientific findings, but also offer a new look towards ontology. Objects have way more to offer, not only from the dimension of time, or what we call future, but also from a greater, what we call (the yet-) unknown.
Time is not a series of now-points “in which” objects exist, but instead time flows out of objects in two different ways. The unknown, unknowable essence of the thing is the future; how something appears is the past. This is in accord with physics, since the speed of light guarantees that any sensual impression of a thing is an impression of its past. What I am arguing here is that there is an ontological reason for this, namely that time pours out of objects. The fixity of things, their history, definition and so on, is the past. The openness of things is the future. The present is an “objective” fiction of something immediately “present at hand” (Heidegger, vorhanden). Presence is difference-from-itself, the thing hollowed out from the inside by past and future.
Timothy Morton, Realist Magic
Some more interesting points to think about :
- OOO’s ecological thought is about objects that they interact with each other without putting humans as central. We, as humans, can only tune to certain aspects of these interactions (unconcealment) and can be aware of the background – thinking ecological. Consciousness is a realm of both light and dark yielding its flickering contents into clarity or concealing them in shadow.
- Time as a relational property of every object. Appearance is always past, we only see objects in the state they are no longer in (speed of light, the stars, everything…). Future is the essence or potential of objects, the pure possibility of objects. Time is not this linear flow where objects ‘are’. Past : Memory, Future : projection / imagination – The past is evident, a footprint in the sand, the future is possible within relations and in a way always present.
“Measurement gives meaning to the unspeakable secretiveness of things by setting up relationships with the isotopes of those things. The meaning of a thing, then, is caught in its relations, that is, they are past. We just can’t know what an object is until we’ve handled it, tasted it, shot it around a particle accelerator, written a poem about it.”
A poem is always a message from the future. Interpretation is part of how humans are a part of their own evolution, or rather I will say ‘can be’.
Time is tied with meaning. It is like a musical piece. It has a structure which relates to our memory, being and imagination(retention, attention, protention). For a being it happens all together, concatenation, gather-togetherness, which is very different from time as mechanical causality.
- The Heideggerian lesson that being-in (Dasein) distort the Cartesian conceptualization of the world. A place is not just coordinates, a person is not just a body. Technology and tools bend those notions – talking ‘close’ to a person over the computer, although they are far away. But it is much more than that, distance becomes de-geometricized. This is from the point of view of our concern and understanding. Cartesian notions are taken to be negatively associated with the enlightenment period in how men relates to their world, putting too much emphasis on the importance of the ego and consciousness.
- According to OOO, object are ‘withdrawn’. For us, there is a nonphysical dimension (a real one) which links objects to each other. According to OOO, Truth does not comply with the law of non contradiction (LNC) and respectfully truth can be ‘unconcealed’, ‘undisclosed’. That follows the Greek ‘Aletheia’. There is no easy way to explain this since we clogged by our language, processes and definition of truth. Truth can be material and immaterial at the same time. We have to encounter objects in order to find out what they are. “Neither can a photon know what an object is until it’s adjusted it in some sense. Yet even then, we do not have the object: we have our knowledge of its feel, its voltage, its flavor. Relations are what establish the significance of an object, and these relations are irreducibly the past.” It seems like our current concept(s) of time sometimes lacks some aspects of our experiences and the things that do not appear to us or ‘dead’ – the unimaginable absences.
- Ecological thinking takes into account that -I am ‘not myself’ for the most part in every day, because ‘we are’ mostly for others, also ooo objects. Meaning we are involved, even Inextricable, with our environment ‘with-them’. ‘Mass culture’ side by side with ‘coexistence’, Modernism as the end of ‘individualism’.
- Death can be considered the totality of things, where an object is merged or transformed to another. Death is the totality of being, of all options, and while not being dead, an object, a being, is just withdrawn, partial of its totality. Morton draws a parallel between beauty and death, since experiencing beauty can be considered the experience of the things beyond appearances, which in its totality, if ‘realized’ result in destruction.
OOO in the context of language, knowledge and processes
Morton looks beyond a philosophy rooted in processes. Indeed, the mechanical and/or atomistic view of the world seems increasingly limited in our current era. However, we mustn’t overlook the lessons from the 20th century, often dubbed the “century of language”: Language is not transparent; it never offers a direct representation of the world. Thus, encountering its limitations should hardly come as a surprise.
We are confined to speaking in generalizations and tautologies. We can discuss what we perceive or feel, but we can never articulate the true essence of things, independent of our own perspective. This realization places us in a distinct position within the world.
Language, text, mathematical descriptions, are ways of generalizing. There is no reason for thinking reality should fit the logic of language. We use language as a way of communication, and mostly to provide ourselves with certainties about an uncertain world.
On the less reductionist side, words like feminism, ecology, unconscious, network or philosophy establish beings and objects and is able to keep them. Think about it, although OOO is not human centered, it might be, at this point, that we could only keep co-existing with the help of something which is essentially human – a developed language, as a container of ideas, actions, awareness and care.
Verhältnis – our ability of holding together, is something that can be lost as well. The OOO of Morton, as well as Heidegger’s philosophy, saw poetry and the use of language (such as metaphors) as extremely important. It is a strange idea, but it becomes less and less strange the more I think about it.
OOO seeks to carve out a middle path, offering an alternative that, while not entirely groundbreaking, bridges the gap between reductionist philosophies, such as Cartesian dualism, and nihilistic approaches exemplified by first-generation deconstructionists.
In a film called Fanny and Alexander, we are told something similar to what OOO is telling us : Art and aesthetics, powered by imagination, makes the most dominant and real ontology of the human mentality.