OOO, dating to the early 1990s. The next one, coming a half-decade later, concerns a point on which there would be no hope at all of convincing Heidegger.13 For if it is true that no human theoretical, perceptual, or practical encounter with objects can ever exhaust the surplus reality of things, the same is true even of non-human objects in their relations with each other. Ultimately, the rift between things and our encounter with them is not the contingent product of a human, alien, or animal “mind,” but occurs automatically in any relation at all. When a stone strikes the surface of a pond, the stone is real, and so too is the pond. Through their interaction, they have either one-way or two-way effects on each other. But clearly the stone does not exhaust the reality of the pond, and neither does the pond encounter the full reality of the stone. In other words, it is not just humans that are finite, but objects more generally. The stone encounters the pond in a “stony” way even if it has no trace of anything like consciousness, and likewise, the pond encounters the stone in a “pondy” way. The same is true of any relation. Critics of OOO are often bothered by this point in particular, because this is where we break with the Kantian framework of modern philosophy, and also where our critics – wrongly – think that we stray into a form of disreputable panpsychism. For on this level we are speaking merely of the finitude of all relations, not claiming that this requires anything worthy of being called mental life.
Nonetheless, OOO does have a certain moral authority stemming from a largely forgotten aspect of the post-Kantian landscape. German Idealism continues to receive lavish praise for demolishing the thing-in-itself, yet it is rarely noted that the noumenon is not Kant’s only major principle, and hence not the only one that might have been reversed. The other, more claustrophobic element of Kant’s thought is the assumption that the only relations we can talk about must involve a human being. That is to say, for Kant as for his successors there is no way to speak of the relation between fire and cotton, but only of the human cognition of both as the first burns the second. This is the Kantian prejudice that German Idealism unknowingly preserves, despite its self-congratulatory murder of the noumenon. OOO holds, by contrast, that the German Idealist radicalization of Kant was not just contingent, but wrong. What should have happened instead, from the 1790s onward, is that Kant’s notions of finitude and the thing-in-itself should have been retained, while simply removing their restriction to cases involving human beings. For in fact, the entire cosmos is a dramatic strife between objects and their relations. The first principle of OOO is now on the table, the only one that most critics bother to take into account: the withdrawal of real objects from all relation. To discover the second, we must leave Heidegger and return to Husserl, doing more justice this time to his misunderstood legacy.
Husserl’s Insight: Objects and Qualities
When we last encountered Husserl, his emphasis on the direct mental awareness of objects had just been overthrown by Heidegger’s appeal to our mostly tacit dealings with entities in the world (which OOO then developed into a theory of objects withdrawn from their relations with humans or anything else). Most arguments over the difference between Husserl and Heidegger remain stalled on this single point, with one side triumphally affirming Heidegger’s maneuver and the other claiming that Husserl already knew about the hidden being of things. The latter camp is simply wrong, since Husserl is perfectly clear in his rejection of any thing-in-itself beyond direct access by the mind, though this is precisely what Heidegger champions if we read him properly. Nonetheless, there is an important side to Husserl that Heidegger seems to grasp only hazily: not the rift between accessible beings and their hidden being, but a different one between beings themselves and their own shifting qualities.
Empiricist philosophers, who urge us to restrict our attention to what we experience directly, have generally been skeptical of any notion of “objects” as something beyond their palpable qualities. For example, Kant’s admired predecessor Hume famously treats objects as just bundles of qualities: there is no proof of any “horse” over and above its countless visual appearances, the sounds it makes, and the various ways it can be ridden, tamed, or fed.14 Husserl’s greatest contribution to philosophy, despite his idealism, was to show how much tension is already underway within the phenomenal realm between an object and its qualities.15 Let’s stay with the example of a horse: we never see it in exactly the same way for more than a passing, flickering instant. We see the horse now from the left side, now from behind, now from an oblique angle, and at other times even from above. It is always at a specific distance from us when standing, walking, or running, and is always found to be peaceful, agitated, or in some other mood. If we take the empiricist view, then it is never strictly the “same” horse in each of these instances. There is merely a sort of family resemblance between the horse at each specific moment: after all, the empiricist holds that we only encounter a set of qualities at every moment, never an enduring unit called “horse” over and above such qualities. Husserl’s view, like that of the entire phenomenological tradition after him, is the exact opposite. Whatever the horse is doing from one moment to the next, however close or far away it is and however subtly different its colors become as the sun sinks toward the horizon, what I encounter is always the horse. All its shifting qualities are inessential, and merely pass from one moment to the next in a kaleidoscopic manner. For empiricism, the qualities are all-important and there is no enduring horse-unit apart from them; for phenomenology, there is only the horse-unit, and all its shifting qualities (which Husserl calls “adumbrations,” Abschattungen) are merely passing decorations atop its surface. To summarize, Husserl gives us a new rift – barely present in Heidegger, outside a few important early traces – between the intentional object and its shifting, accidental qualities.
But there is even more going on than this, because Husserl actually discovered that the intentional object has two kinds of qualities. Along with those that pass quickly from one moment to the next, there are also the essential qualities that the horse needs in order for us to keep considering it this horse, rather than deciding it is really something else. In fact, this is the major task of phenomenology according to Husserl: by varying our thoughts and perceptions, we should ultimately come to realize which of the horse’s features are essential rather than accidental. Unfortunately, he also holds that the intellect grasps the essential qualities of an object while the senses grasp the accidental ones: though Heidegger later shows that the difference between the intellect and the senses is simply not that important, given that both reduce entities to presence before the mind. Yet we should not understate the complexity of what Husserl discovers. Although we must reject Husserl’s limitation of objects to the sphere of consciousness as being too idealist to account for the thing-in-itself, there is more going on here than mere idealism. What arises in Husserl is a double tension in which the intentional object – such as the horse I perceive in the meadow – has accidental qualities, despite being different from them, and also has essential qualities despite being different from them, given that an object is a unit over and above its essential features no less than above its accidental ones.
The time has come to restate everything in the standard OOO terminology that will occasionally be used in this book. For objects and qualities, we use the simple abbreviations O and Q. For Heidegger’s realm of real objects, withdrawn from all relation and descended ultimately from Kant’s noumena, we use R. For Husserl’s realm of appearances, which do not withdraw but are always directly present, we do not use the ugly and ambiguous term “intentional,” but call it “sensual” instead, abbreviated as S – even though it includes cases of access to things via the intellect rather than the senses. Just as genetics analyzes DNA in terms of the chemical abbreviations G, C, A, and T, OOO has a basic alphabet of O, Q, R, and S, with two types of objects (R and S) and two of qualities (again R and S), with the difference that we allow both R and S to pair with either O or Q, giving us double the number of possibilities found in genetics. Objects can be either present (SO, from Husserl) or irredeemably absent (RO, from Heidegger, with the proviso that objects hide from each other no less than from us). The same holds for the qualities of objects, which can either be present to the senses (SQ, Husserl’s “adumbrations”) or forever withdrawn from direct access (RQ, like Husserl’s “essential qualities,” with the proviso that Husserl is wrong to think the
