Howdyshell, Stanford, Ma 2018 Philosophy on Essences

HOWDYSHELL, STANFORD, M.A. 2018 PHILOSOPHY

ON ESSENCES: PHENOMENOLOGICAL INSIGHTS INTO OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGY

Thesis Advisor: Gina Zavota

Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), as developed by Graham Harman, draws on many of the insights developed in the research programs of phenomenology, systems theory, active network theory, and

Deleuzian ontology. From the phenomenological tradition, Husserl's theory of intentional objects and

Heidegger's tool analysis have been central to the development of OOO. Discussion on essences has been, for the most part, neglected by the philosophers of OOO. While maintaining that OOO is a metaphysical system which includes essences, they have been content to either leave the question of essence to the phenomenologists or to neglect them altogether. This is a problem because OOO allows for objects to change while retaining their identity, but lacks a firm theory of identity conditions. In this thesis I will investigate this shortcoming of OOO and apply the positive insights from Edmund Husserl’s and Martin Heidegger’s philosophies of essence to OOO. This investigation will result in a theory of essence that integrates the phenomenologist’s philosophies of essence into OOO. ON ESSENCES: PHENOMENOLOGICAL INSIGHTS INTO OBJECT ORIENTED ONTOLOGY

A thesis submitted

To Kent State University in partial

Fulfilment of the requirements for the

Degree of Master of Arts

Stanford Howdyshell

May, 2018

 Copyright

Except for previously published materials

Thesis Written By

Stanford Howdyshell

B.S., the University of Akron, 2016

M.A., Kent State University, 2018

Approved by

Gina Zavota______, Advisor

Deborah Barnbaum______, Chair, Department of Philosophy

James L. Blank______, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

Table of Contents Table of Contents ...... iv Acknowledgements ...... vi Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 1: Object Oriented Ontology ...... 5 What is an Object? ...... 5 Causation ...... 9 The Structure of Objects ...... 14 An Object’s Environment and World ...... 18 Role of the Environment ...... 20 The Epistemic/Ontological Division ...... 21 Identity and Change: A Question of Essences ...... 24 Graham Harman’s Account of Essence ...... 25 Chapter 2: Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology ...... 31 Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology ...... 31 A Science of Essence ...... 37 The Essence of an Object ...... 44 Insights from Husserl ...... 45 Compatibility Problems for Husserl and OOO ...... 47 Chapter 3: Martin Heidegger and the Essence of Being ...... 50 Why are there Beings instead of Nothing? ...... 50 The Essence of Being ...... 53 Phusis ...... 56 Alētheia ...... 60 Violence ...... 62 Compatibility Problems for Heidegger and OOO ...... 63 Insights from Heidegger ...... 64 Chapter 4: A New Theory of Essence ...... 66 No Ontological Priority ...... 66

The Essences of Objects ...... 69 Discerning Essences ...... 77 Conclusion ...... 85 References ...... 88

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank Dr. Gina Zavota of the Philosophy Department at Kent State University.

Her comments on the content of this thesis and her advice on the process of writing it were invaluable.

She regularly made time to meet with me, which not only improved my writing and philosophical understanding, but also helped me work through my own ideas and provided a structure to the project, which was indispensable.

I would also like to thank my thesis committee: Dr. Michael Byron and Dr. Andreea Smaranda

Aldea of the Philosophy Department at Kent State University and Dr. Kevin Floyd of the Department of

English at Kent State University for their comments and advice.

Introduction

Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), which has been developed primarily by Graham Harman and

Levi Bryant, is a flat ontology, meaning that all objects have the same ontological status. No one object or type of objects serves as a ground for the other objects or as a fundamental level of being from which all other objects are derived. Objects also exist over time, maintaining their identity through shifting causal relationships with other objects and while undergoing changes themselves. The combination of the flat ontology and the continuing identities of objects implies essences that are both internal and particular to individual objects. Outside of acknowledging the necessity of essences to OOO, little has been said on the subject. Graham Harman addresses them briefly, but fails to provide a concrete account of essences.

The failure to account for a theory of essences within Object Oriented Ontology leaves a recurring theme within the ontology unexplored. OOO assumes and often relies on an object maintaining its identity as an object through time and while undergoing change, but without a robust theory of essences, it is not able to account for the nature of this identity. Accounting for essences provides an explanation for the continual existence of objects and the terms of their coming into existence and ceasing to exist, as well as providing further insight into the structures of objects and how they exist in and interact with other objects.

Some philosophers of OOO, such as Graham Harman (2005, p. 253-256) and Ian Bogost (2012, p.

30), express the desire to move beyond abstract theory and begin to use OOO to investigate objects themselves. They wish to apply their ontology in order to have a better understanding of objects in the

1 world and of how the objects interact with one another. The scope of the exploration of objects is limited without a theory of essences. Without a theory of essences, a philosopher would not be able to distinguish which aspects of the object are fundamental to its being and which are accidental, would have trouble distinguishing the point at which the object comes to be or ceases to exist, and would have trouble figuring out what changes an object could or could not endure. The development of a theory of essences within OOO thus would allow for more successful and more in depth investigations into the nature of objects.

In developing OOO, Graham Harman drew on the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin

Heidegger extensively. OOO, in many ways, resembles Heidegger’s ontology, particularly in regards to the presentation and withdraw of beings. It has also been influenced by Husserl’s understanding of intentional objects, and Harman has modified and adjusted the concept to extend beyond objects of consciousness to objects in general. In this thesis I will seek to develop an account of essences drawing on these two philosophers, using Husserl’s and Heidegger’s philosophies to further shape and develop

OOO. Due to the similarities in their ontologies, I will use Heidegger’s philosophy to provide an ontological framework for essences. I will then use Husserl’s philosophy to develop a way for people, or other objects with consciousness, to make inferences about the particular essences of objects.

While influenced by the phenomenological tradition, Object Oriented Ontology is a radical departure from that tradition. Though OOO is distinct from, and often times hostile to, phenomenology, there are still some strong resemblances, which allows for OOO to incorporate phenomenological insights. Apart from the previously mentioned influences of Heidegger’s sense of presentation and withdraw, Heidegger’s ontology and OOO share a commitment to the universality of Being. Heidegger explores this universality through his conceptions of phusis and alētheia, which can serve to shed light on OOO due to the similar commitments of Heidegger and OOO.

Husserl’s phenomenology works with the structure of consciousness and studies the experiences of consciousness. Within the framework of OOO, consciousness would be an object, and more importantly, the type of object that is engaging in philosophy. Husserl’s phenomenology can be incorporated into OOO as the study of the conscious object, which can then serve as a starting point for the investigation of other objects. Since interactions between objects are limited by their structures, the structure of consciousness dictates how a conscious object interacts with other objects and how the conscious object can come to know about other objects. Thus the phenomenology of Husserl can provide a starting point for an investigation into the essences of objects.

The first chapter will be an explication of OOO. It will explain the basic concepts of the ontology, including the structures of objects, causation, and the relationship between an object and its environment. This will lead to a discussion of essences, which must be internal to the object and which determine the life of the object, when the object comes into being and ceases to be, as well as how the object interacts with other objects. The chapter will end with an investigation of Graham Harman’s account of essences and its shortcomings in giving a robust theory of essences.

In chapter two I will discuss Husserl’s phenomenology. Drawing from Ideas I, I will explicate the basic structure of consciousness for Husserl, the role essences play in his philosophy, and how Husserl uses the eidetic reduction to gain access to the essences of objects. I will then discuss the ways that

Husserl’s phenomenology can help shape a theory of essences in OOO as well as possible problems that could arise from integrating phenomenology into a theory of essences for OOO.

In chapter three, I will look at how Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics can help shape OOO and contribute to a theory of essences. I will lay an initial groundwork with a discussion of the meaning of “being” in Heidegger’s thought, before moving on to a discussion of the essence of Being, which will then lead to a discussion of phusis and alētheia.

Phusis and alētheia will be central to the development of essences in OOO. In chapter four, I will show how an object’s essence is determined by the internal relations that shape how the object presents itself to and affects other objects and how other objects are able to reveal themselves to and affect it (what Heidegger would call its particular form of phusis and alētheia). Then, returning to

Husserl, I will reformulate the eidetic reduction as a way to gain insight into which internal relations are essential to the objects. This will be the final component of a theory of essences that are internal to objects and particular to each individual object, and will also provide OOO with a method for determining the essences of objects.

Chapter 1: Object Oriented Ontology

In order to develop a theory of essences within Object Oriented Ontology, I will begin with an explication of OOO, as proposed by Graham Harman and Levi Bryant. This will start with a basic explication of the theory, followed by a more in depth look into causation and the structures of object. I will also discuss the role played by an object’s environment before posing the problem of identity that a theory of essences should help to resolve. The chapter will end with a discussion of the theory of essences put forward by Graham Harman, and examine some of its shortcomings.

What is an Object?

Within Object Oriented Ontology, the fundamental level of being is the object, where “an object or substance is a real thing considered apart from any of its relations with other such things” (Harman,

2005, p. 19), or, in other words, objects are things that exist with their own reality apart from their environment and, due to their independent existence, do not need to have their being grounded in some outside force or actor. This creates a flat ontology, where, according to Harman, rather than looking for a foundational level of reality, be it subatomic particles or an idealist form of discourse, being is found in “anything that has a unified reality that is autonomous from its wider context and also from its own pieces” (Harman, 2011, p. 116), be it an electron whose existence and affects are not dependent on any of the surrounding neutrons and protons but affects those surrounding particles in ways that a random set of quarks would not, the carbon atom it is within, which is capable of relations beyond that of any random conjunction of its six protons, electrons, and neutrons, the plastic pen on my desk, made up of countless carbon chains, but interacts with a world of furniture, paper, and humans, or the

5 conglomeration of humans, buildings, computers, books, papers, and classes that make up Kent State

University.

While objects exist on their own, independent of relations with others, they still relate to other objects. The electron is attracted to protons and repels other electrons, my pen lies on my desk, exerting a downward force and having a normal force exerted upon it, Kent State enrolls students and competes in the NCAA and with the surrounding universities in the recruitment of local students. These relations, though, are incomplete. Due to their autonomy, or their existence and affectations beyond their external relations, objects can’t be exhausted in their relations. While some of the qualities of the object are used in the interaction, part of the object is withdrawn, or unavailable to the relation. When I look at my coffee mug, I enter into a relationship with it. Within my visual perception, I see the white hieroglyphs and lettering on top of the black ceramic, I see the rounding of the front side flowing to the unseen back, and I see the steam rising from liquid within. In this perception, the reality of the coffee mug is not exhausted; I cannot see the back side of the mug, perceive the solidity of the ceramic, or feel the heat radiating through the mug from the coffee it holds. The weight of the mug is beyond the relation. I can pick up the mug, changing the relation, feeling the heat, weight, and solidity, but some of the object is still beyond me. As Alphonso Lingis noted,

the real thing is not the sum of all that [I] have [perceived] of it; it closes in upon itself, remains

exterior, always beyond all that [my] perceptual samplings have turned up of it, not a given but

an external ordinance. (1998, p. 63)

The rift is between the aspects of the object that enters into relations with other objects, called the sensual pole, and the withdrawn part of the object, or the real pole, is the first rift or tension within an object. The real pole of the object is never available to other objects, it is always withdrawn, always

“beyond any kind of access, any kind of perception or map or plot or test or extrapolation” (Morton,

2013, p. 54). This pole consists of the internal structures that make up the object and qualities that exist independently of any perception of experience made by an outside object. The real mug is independent of and withdrawn from not only myself, but the coffee inside of it, the desk it rests on, the air surrounding it, the workspace it helps make up, and the room it is within.

The sensual side of the rift is how the object is presented to other objects and exists only in the interaction between two objects. When two objects interact, the real objects cannot touch, for they are withdrawn, but they interact through the presentation of the sensual to one another. Thus the sensual objects only exist within the interactions between objects (Harman, 2011, p. 49). For example, I do not experience the real coffee mug, or the coffee mug’s internal structures and qualities, but the sensual mug. The mug I perceive and experience is mediated by my own structures and qualities, which dictate my observations and experiences. I perceive it as smooth, but the smoothness is not the smoothness of the mug, but of the mug as experienced by me. Were my hands more susceptible to variations in surface roughness, the mug may not appear smooth. The blackness of my mug is not intrinsic to the mug, nor due exclusively to its internal structure, but with how the structure interacts with the light that strikes it and is absorbed or reflected before my eyes. When I see the green of a leaf and a colorblind friend sees it as grey, the real leaf is the same, but the sensual presentation is different to each of us.

Thus, according to Harman, “objects come in only two kinds: the real object that withdraws from all experience, and the sensual object that exists only in experience” (2011, p. 49). Experience here, rather than being a psychic phenomenon, is used simply to denote an interaction or relationship between objects. Thus when I set my mug down on my desk, the desk experiences the coffee mug, though the psychic or mental phenomenon usually associated with the term is absent. Within this ontology, then, an experience can be said to be an event in which a sensual object or quality is present.

It should be noted that while the real pole of the object is withdrawn from its relations and the sensual pole is presented, the withdrawn and presented aspects need not be consistent between

7 relations The sensual pole is not uniform. The heat of my mug is withdrawn from me when I look at it while the black color is apparent, but if the relation were one of tactile contact rather than sight, the blackness of the mug would be withdrawn and the heat would be part of the sensual pole of the object.

When I leave a jelly stain on my countertop, the qualities that are open to me, the sensual aspect, and the qualities that are hidden, the real pole, for me are different than those for the ant that is drawn to it.

While different qualities, affects, and relations are available or hidden depending on what objects are interacting with one another, and an aspect of an object may be withdrawn or available depending on the nature of the relation, no two objects can relate in such a way that they are not withdrawn from each other.

The second rift within OOO is between objects and their qualities. The qualities are the individual aspects of the object, where the object, when opposed to the qualities, is often called the substance. Some qualities of my mug are the color, the smoothness of the ceramic, and the roundness of the rim. The object is the coffee mug. It may seem that the object is merely the summation of its qualities, but this has the relation in reverse, for rather than experiencing a conglomeration of isolated qualities, we experience the unified whole of the object and then the qualities are derived from the unified object (Harman, 2011, p. 11). Thus, according to Levi Bryant, the qualities reside in and are predicated in their objects (2011, p. 73). Additionally, “qualities can change, and yet substances persist”

(Bryant, 2011, p. 30). After years of use, the color fades from my mug, yet the mug persists. Qualities, then, are particular manifestations of the structure of the objects from which they come. The smoothness of my mug is a manifestation of the ceramic material from which the cup is shaped.

The two rifts of real/sensual and substance1/quality create the four poles of the object. These poles are the real substance, the sensual substance, the real qualities, and the sensual qualities

1 While Harman usually uses the term ‘object’ in this distinction, the term ‘substance’ is commonly used in the literature as well. For the sake of clarity, when denoting one of the poles of an object I will use the term

(Harman, 2011, p. 97). The real substance is thus the withdrawn structure of the object, or what

Harman calls the “subterranean reality” (2002. P. 79) from which the sensual substance is mediated.

The real qualities are the manifestations or accidents of the real substance from which the sensual qualities are mediated. These real qualities “belong to the objects themselves rather than to our consciousness of them” (Harman, 2005, p. 47) and exist as side effects or accidents resulting from the structure of the real substance. The sensual counterpart to the real substance is the sensual substance.

This is the totality of the object that appears to the outside objects which interact with the object in question. It is the presented totality and the sensual substance only exists for the objects to which they are presented (Harman, 2011, p. 74). Finally, the sensual qualities are the qualities that are presented to the outside object, radiating out from the sensual substance. To once again use my coffee mug as an example, the mug itself is the object, a structure and totality with its own reality completely withdrawn from the surrounding world. The mug that I see is the sensual substance, the presented totality meditated by my own capacity to experience. The blackness of the mug is a sensual quality, and the underlying side effect of the structure of the real mug which leads it to be mediated as black is a real quality of the mug.

Causation

The nature of objects, of their presence and withdrawal from one another, implies that no two real objects ever meet. Indeed, “there is always just one real object involved in any interaction”

(Harman, 2011, p. 75) and that real object is thus interacting with the sensual face of the second object.

At the same time, the roles may be reversed, and the real second object may be interacting with the sensual object of the first. Of course, not all relationships are reciprocal, when I look at my coffee mug, I

‘substance’ and reserve the use of the term ‘object’ for when I am referring to the totality of both substance and quality.

9 experience the sensual object of the mug, but it seems unlikely that the coffee mug is a flip side to my perception.

This leads to a problem. If objects are always withdrawn from each other, if no two real objects can interact, how can change occur? How can one object affect another? How can causation occur within OOO? As Timothy Morton notes, since real objects are completely withdrawn from each other

“causality must reside somewhere within the realm of relations between objects” (2013, p. 30), but, according to Harman, this realm of relation cannot be completely divorced from the real objects themselves, for if causation were explained simply in terms of relations and effects without the objects, then change within said objects could not happen (Harman, 2016, p. 28).

The answer to these questions lies in the relationship between real substances and the sensual qualities of the objects that they are interacting with, which in turn is derived from the real substance itself. Thus, the sensual substance acts as a buffer between the two real substances. The real substances don’t interact, but are mediated by the sensual. Due to there being a sensual buffer between the interacting objects, and that the real objects are being mediated by sensual objects in causal relations, the effects of one object on another is referred to as vicarious causation.

This will require a more in depth investigation into the real and sensual qualities of an object and the relationship between the two. From there, the relationship between the sensual qualities of the object and the real qualities of the foreign object it is affecting can be explained. In these investigations

I will start with the sensual qualities of an object and work backwards to the real qualities, then, once this relationship is established, I will turn to the effects of these qualities on the real qualities of the outside object that has entered into the causal relationship.

As I mentioned in the previous section, the sensual qualities are the qualities of an object as they are presented and in relation with other objects. The sensual exists for and because of the other.

Of course, they are not arbitrary properties that blink into existence with the relation, but exist more as a translation from the real qualities of the object at hand to the object that has entered into a relation with it. Thus, the sensual qualities are dictated by both the object they present and the object they are presented to.

The sensual quality is first dictated by the real qualities of the object. As mentioned earlier, these qualities are the side effects of the substance or structure of the object. The internal structure, or the relations between the components of the object, is such that certain factors of the object frame how it is exerted upon the world. When I perceive my coffee mug as solid, it is because of the structure of the composing parts of the mug. The real quality that I cannot experience shapes and limits the sensual object I experience, as I can only experience my mug as solid, when I grab the mug it will not be soft or deform like a liquid, or when I set it down on my desk the mug will not sink into it or dissolve upon its surface. What is perceived or experienced as solidity is dictated by the underlying real quality of the mug.

Another way of putting this is that substances “manifest themselves through their qualities”

(Bryant, 2011, p. 30), where the terms or possibilities of the manifestation are set by the real qualities, or how the object is in itself, and where the manifestation then comes to fruition in the sensual quality, where it affects and interacts with the world. The real quality, though, cannot be reduced to a function of environment and sensual qualities (Bryant, 2011, p. 70), but is completely withdrawn from the environments or other objects. My mug appears black to me, but were I not here to look at my mug, the sensual blackness would not exist. The mug would still be such that it absorbs and reflects light waves such that if I were there to observe, it would still be black (Harman, 2012, p. 2). The structure or makeup of the object is such that some wavelengths are reflected and others absorbed regardless of observation, and regardless of the sensual objects that mediate those observations.

The sensual quality is also constrained by the real qualities of the object that it is interacting with. As noted earlier, the sensual dimension only exist when two real objects interact with one another, and as a mediation between the two real objects. This mediation is dependent on both of the real objects it is mediating between. The blackness of my mug depends both on the surface structure of the mug, which determines the wavelengths absorbed and reflected by the mug, and my eye’s ability to perceive the color black. The solidity of my mug on the desk depends both on the structure of the mug and the solidity of the desk. A beta particle, for example, would not experience the mug as solid and would pass right through. Therefore, the real qualities of the first object in an interaction define what is being presented as the sensual quality, and the real qualities of the second object define how those presentations are received. My mug presents itself (based on its structure) in such a way that I experience it as solid, but the beta particle experiences it as empty space, or that I perceive it as hard, but a diamond tipped razor would experience as soft. In a similar way, snow presents itself to me as cold and wet, while its crystalline structure is withdrawn, a corporation presents products and stock values, employees and factories, while the relations of engineers, salespeople, production workers, raw materials, board meetings, CAD files, market research, QA samples, and so on are withdrawn from the public eye. The corporation manifests itself differently to different objects as well, to a competing company through competitive costs and market share, to a consumer through price and quality, to governmental agencies through regulation, to a bank through loans and capital, and so on.

The interaction of two real objects mediated by the sensual dimension can also be said to be a translation from the terms or constraints of the first object to the terms and constraints of the second object. As Bryant says, when two objects interact, they are “translating what they receive and thereby producing something new as a result” (2011, p. 179). When I see my mug as black, I am translating the interplay of light on the surface of the mug into the experience of blackness, when my mug sits on my desk, it is translating the structure of the desk into that of a solid surface it can rest upon. As seen in the

12 last example, translations between the real and the sensual need not include a conscious or even perceiving subject, just two objects which withdraw in part and present in part in relations with other objects. A tree photosynthesizing sunlight, a magnet moving an iron nail, a family moving into a new house, a raindrop dissolving into an ocean, and fire burning cotton all consist of the interplay between the real and the sensual, the withdrawn and the presented that makes up this translation of terms and constraints.

Causation, then, occurs in the interplay of real qualities mediated by sensual qualities, or as this translation. Causation can then be said to be two objects experiencing one another in such a way that there is a “production of one event by another event” (DeLanda, 2002, p. viii), or that the experience changes the totality of the objects experiences. In other words, a causal experience would be one in which one object’s experience of another causes either a change in its structure or a change in the web of relations that it is currently enmeshed. In my mugs experience of my desk, the two objects exert their solidity upon each other, and the mug translates the desk’s solidity into a normal force against gravity. This interaction naturally leads to its own continuation, as the mug will rest upon the desk until an outside force comes to change the relation it holds with the desk, such as if I picked it up. The mug’s experience of the desk also serves to prevent other relations from taking place. The mug’s interaction with the desk is preventing the mug from falling to the ground and translating the real qualities of the ground into its own terms. If the mug were to fall to the ground and break, the translation of the solidity of the ground would translate into the disintegration of many of the internal relations that structure the mug, leading to the mug breaking.

In summation, causation within OOO is when the real qualities of one object translate the real qualities of a second object into sensual qualities, and that the translation leads to a change in the either the internal structure of the first object or to a change in the relations that the object is maintaining with other objects.

The Structure of Objects

Much has been attributed to the structure of objects and the effects of such structures; in this section I will explain the nature and importance of the structure of objects. To begin the discussion we must note that all objects are composed of smaller objects. While this leads to an infinite regress of smaller and smaller objects, Harman and the other object oriented philosophers find an infinite regress preferable to the alternatives of a finite regress or no regress at all (Harman, 2011, p. 113). The first of these alternatives would lead to a fundamental level that grounds all others and make it so that the ontology is no longer flat but derived up from this fundamental level, while the second would mean that there “is no depth behind what appears to the human mind” (Harman, 2011, p. 113), which would then ground being in the human mind.

The component objects form the object in question through their relations or interactions with each other. Additionally, there is no bar or barrier to entry for relations to create an object, for imposing such a barrier would be to add criteria to being that is centered in the experience of a single object (humans), and thus “any relation immediately generates a new object” (Harman, 2011, p. 117).

These relations must be genuine relations, though, in that they must “give rise to a thing that exceeds them” (Harman, 2011, p. 117). An example of a relation bringing an object into existence would be the head of a hammer being joined with the handle. The newly created relation between head and handle would bring a new object, the hammer, into existence. On the other hand, a combination of a random pair of objects, such as my coffee mug and Alpha Centauri, despite being asserted together, would not be a new object because there is no genuine relation between them beyond my own assertion. They do not affect each other and there is no emergent object coming out of them. Emergent properties, which, while controversial, are generally accepted within Object Oriented Ontology, and is defined as “a property of a whole that is produced by ongoing interaction between its parts” (DeLanda, Harman,

2017, p. 11).

In other words, emergent properties are part of how an object interacts with its world, and this interaction is beyond that of a mere sum of its parts, and often radically different from that of the parts.

For example, oxygen is a necessary component to combustion and hydrogen is highly flammable, but water is not. If a room were filled with hydrogen and oxygen at a two to one ratio and a match were lit, there would be a dramatic fire, but if the same hydrogen and oxygen atoms were in the room, but bonded as water, there would not be. This shows that the object of the water molecule isn’t merely a summation of its three component parts, because in one instance the summation burns and in the other it does not. It is not merely the summation, but the arrangement of the three atoms that changes the properties. In other words, the emergent properties are due to the structure of the object rather than simply the objects components. These properties can be explained, in theory at least, as the sum and arrangement of their parts. As previously mentioned, while controversial in a wider philosophical context, it is a central concept in Object Oriented Ontology, and over the course of this thesis I will grant it as part of OOO. Further discussion into the relations an object can enter into will be discussed in the next section.

There is a tension between new relations creating new objects and the fact objects do have duration, or that the relations and subcomponent members of an object do in fact change throughout the course of an objects existence. Once an object comes into existence, once a relation establishes it, some relations become more important than others, for “if all relations were equally significant, then every entity would become a new thing in every trivial instant of its existence” (Harman, 2016, p. 44).

This means that while every new relation creates a new object, an object can gain new relations while maintaining its integrity as an object. This can be explained in what happens when an object comes into being, in that an existent object has a retroactive or downward effect on its parts, has emergent properties, or a reality beyond its parts that it can exert on the world, and from these two properties it is able to create or enter into relation with new parts (Harman, 2016, p. 41-42). So, while the new relation

15 may create an object, the new relation itself isn’t what makes the object an object, but merely initiates the existence of the object, which is existent independent of external relations and consists of the three aforementioned features.

The first feature of an object’s internal relation is that the object has a causal effect on its component parts. In other words, the object doesn’t exhaust the relations of interior objects or use them in their totality, but only makes use of certain aspects of them, in order to serve its own arrangement. The relation of the components to the object is such that the object “needs these smaller parts in order to exist, it never fully deploys these objects in their total reality, but makes use of them only by reducing them to useful caricatures” (Harman, 2005, p. 94). The object of me-looking-at-my- mug only makes use of a caricature of me, mainly my ability to see, and a caricature of the mug, is visual presentation, while neglecting my other abilities to affect the world and the mug’s other qualities, such as its hardness or solidity. The mug itself caricatures the ceramic that makes it up, neglecting the conducting properties that fuel cells would make use of while neglecting the solidity. In using the sensual presentation of the subcomponents, the object engages in vicarious causation with its component parts, or is putting a “constraint on the behavior of the component parts” (Protevi, 2009, as cited in Bryant, 2011, p. 286). This comes in the form of changing either (or both) the internal or external relations of the component parts. The object of me-looking-at-my-mug causes the psychic event in me, a forest ecosystem exerts downward what a squirrel eats and what traits are genetically favorable to survival, the atom constrains the location and bonding options of its electrons, and the set of internal relations that is my car determines positions of the pistons within the engine are at any given moment.

The object that is exerting this downward causation is, of course, made up of a set of relations of the component objects that the downward causation is being exerted upon. In other words, the object is made up of a set of relations that, according to Bryant, serve as a “constraint on permissible

16 relations between elements” (2011, p. 234). An object, then, could be defined as a set of component objects whose relations are such that the totality of said relations causes the change in the internal or external relations of said component objects. Thus, the object of me-looking-at-my-mug is the set of relations that lead to and necessitate the psychic event of my visual perception of my mug, the forest ecosystem is the set of relations of animals, plants, soil, and so forth that, among countless other things, create the squirrel’s diet and the traits best fit for the squirrel’s survival, the arrangement of protons, neutrons, and electrons exerts itself onto an electron’s position and bonding abilities, and my car is a particular set of relationships between metal, polymer, fabric, and others that forces the piston to be in a certain place and position at any given time.

The force or change that the object exerts on its constitutive parts, and also on other, external objects, is different than the force that would be exerted if the components were not arranged together or if they were arranged differently. In other words, the qualities of the object are not merely a summation of the qualities of the components, but are unique features of the object which come from the particular arrangement of the components. The qualities of the object, the constraints that it places on its components, and the affects it has on its environment are the emergent qualities of the object.

This reinforces the fact that objects are “irreducible to smaller scale entities” (Bryant, 2011, p. 285), for in reducing the object, in simplifying it to its components, the emergent properties would be lost.

The third main aspect of the internal structure of an object is its ability to create or incorporate new component parts, as well as its ability to lose some of its components while maintaining its integrity as an object. An object can obviously lose some of its relations while maintaining its being. For example, if the lip of my mug chips or if the handle breaks off, it is still my mug, or if an atom loses an electron it is still the same atom. Additionally, that atom would remain the same atom if it gained an electron or if one of its electrons was replaced by a different electron. I can replace my car’s radiator

17 without destroying the object and then creating a new object. I could also turbocharge my car with it still being the same object.

The continuity of the object, despite changes in its parts, can be explained by the fact that the defining feature of the object is the structure of the relations rather than the actual parts. The set of relations that creates the downward causation on its parts and the emergent effects on the environment is what makes the object, and if that overall structure is maintained, the pieces can come and go, so the atom can swap out electrons, my car can be repaired, and the ship of Theseus sails on.

Additionally, the components do not need to be superficially alike to be replaced within an object, so long as they are caricatured by the object in the same way. Harman uses an example of a windmill with a wooden ladder, which “caricatures the ladder…ignoring [its] full reality by harnessing [it] to a specific formal task” (2005, p. 94), where the important part of the windmill-ladder relation is how the windmill is caricaturing the ladder. Any change to the ladder that does not affect the relation or the caricature of the ladder to the windmill doesn’t matter much to the object as a whole. Thus, I could replace the wooden ladder with a stainless steel one, or a ladder made of polymer composites, without changing the structure of relations of the object, or in other words, without changing the object.

An Object’s Environment and World

Objects tend to exist in causal relations with other objects. At no point in my mug’s existence has it existed in a vacuum apart from causal relations with other objects. An object, then, exists among other objects that are in genuine relation with it, with those relations being mediated by a subset of the qualities of each object. This is an object’s environment. The object’s environment and world play a role in its birth and death, as well as serving to shape and change the object over the course of its life.

The objects that make up the environment will be responsible for causing inessential changes in the object, as well as ultimately severing the essential relations that make up the object. The discussion of

Heidegger in chapter three and further discussion of essences in chapter four will show an objects relation to its environment is central to any discussion of essences.

In describing object’s interactions with their environments, Levi Bryant draws on Niklas

Luhmann’s treatment of social systems as real entities, which are, in Bryant’s terminology, objects

(2011, p. 137). One insight from Luhmann is that the environment for the object cannot be arbitrary

(1995, p. 13), but is defined by the specific external relations of the object, which in turn are defined by the specific interacting qualities of the object and the environment. An object, of course, “cannot rely on point-for-point correspondences with the environment” (Luhmann, 1995, p. 43), but rather specific caricatures that are particular to that object. Thus two objects that are in genuine relation with the same set of outside objects would not have the same environment, because they would be experiencing different faces of those objects, they would be caricaturing them differently, or the relations would be mediated through a different set of sensual objects.

While defined by the relations that the object enters into, an object’s environment also acts to restrict which relations an object enters into. My desk’s presence in the environment of my mug is preventing the mug from entering into a relation with the floor beneath the desk.

Object’s interactions with their environment are also asymmetrical. The Earth’s gravitational pull on my mug is extremely influential in its environment, and defines the nature of most of the mug’s external relations, while the mug’s gravitational pull on the Earth is inconsequential to the point of the non-existence of the relation.

An object is also capable of entering into relations with objects that it is not currently in relation with, or in other words, an object is capable of entering into relations with objects that are not currently part of its environment. Therefore, an object’s environment can change. These objects that can be related, but have yet to, and may never, enter into relations with the object still have the overlapping

19 real qualities required for the production of a sensual quality and then vicarious causation. The set of objects with this overlap of qualities is the object in question’s world. While my mug is not currently in relation with the floor, the floor possesses the qualities that would allow it, if circumstances or the mug’s environment changed, to become part of the mug’s environment, and thus it is part of the world of the mug. On the other hand, my mug and a beta particle do not share qualities that would allow them to interact, and thus, the beta particle is not part of the mug’s world.

Role of the Environment

Objects exist amongst other objects, and in causal relationships with them. These relationships determine the particular way in which objects exist and interact. My coffee mug’s position relative to me is partially determined by the causal relationship with the desk, which is holding it several feet off the ground, fairly level with where I am sitting, which in turn is due in part to my own causal relationship with my chair. As noted earlier in this chapter, the set of external causal relationships an object is in is its environment, and since every causal relationship results in a new object, and complex sets of relationships also result in singular objects, an object’s environment is an object. The environment- object, then, is the object that completely subsumes the object in question. In other words, the object is completely contained within its environment-object.

The environment determines what entities are capable of entering into relationship with the object and serves to limit the types of causal relationships that the object can enter into. Not all objects are capable of existing within the same sets of relations, even if they would normally be able to enter into causal relationship with one another. My coffee mug, in the environment of my desk and myself within my house, is not able to enter into a causal relationship with a raindrop, not because the two don’t possess the necessary overlapping qualities to enter into a causal relationship, but because the raindrop couldn’t make it to the mug in order to have a causal relationship with it, my houses roof is

20 preventing it. On the other hand, if I had left my mug outside on my front stoop, then the raindrops could strike it in that environment, and would be entering into the coffee mug’s environment. This also means that when two objects interact they are entering into and becoming part of each other’s environments. When I add coffee to the mug, the coffee enters into a causal, external relationship with the mug, but also becomes one of the member objects of the coffee mug’s environment-object, and the coffee-mug relation becomes an internal relationship within the coffee mugs environment. It goes on to restrict the relationships that the coffee mug is able to enter into, for example, since the mug is full, it cannot constrain any other fluids while in its relationship with the coffee.

The Epistemic/Ontological Division

Another key aspect of Object Oriented Ontology is that, as a realist ontology, OOO maintains that objects exist as objects regardless of their relationship to other objects, and particularly to human objects. In other words “Ontological realism…is not a thesis about our knowledge of objects, but about the being of objects themselves, whether or not we exist to represent them” (Bryant, 2011, p. 19). The existence of my coffee cup is not dependent on my having seen it or knowing anything about it, and the coffee cup’s relation of resting on my desk is likewise not dependent on my knowledge of the relation.

The fact that an object’s existence is not contingent on one’s knowledge of the object means

“ontological questions should be kept separate from epistemological ones” (DeLanda, Harman, 2017, p.

91), or that questions of what objects exist and how they exist should not be conflated with what knowledge of objects is possible and how that knowledge is obtained.

There can be some ambiguity between the two sets of questions though. The ambiguity lies in the fact that the withdrawn substance and qualities of an object is part of a “subterranean realm which we can glimpse only at second hand” (Harman, 2002, p. 5), through the experience of the presented, sensual object. Furthermore, the withdrawn object cannot itself be experienced beneath its sensual

21 manifestations that are experienced by other objects, and “the gap between the two dimensions remains absolute”(Harman, 2002, p. 160). Therefore, any claim about the internal structure of an object is based not off of experience of the structure itself, but on its sensual presentation.

The distance of the object’s withdraw as experiential, meaning that no matter how much of the object I experienced, how many viewpoints I observed it from, or how many different senses I used in the experience, I would never come any closer to experiencing the real, subterranean object. My only experience would be of the sensual object. For example, to try to fully experience my coffee mug I could look at it from all sides, in different lightings, and from different distances, feel its smoothness and weight and observe how it interacts with my desk or the coffee I pour into it. Doing all of this, experiencing the coffee mug in many different ways, would never take me beyond the sensual profile of the mug, and never let me penetrate to the substance beneath.

Due to the nature of interactions between objects, and how they are always mediated through sensual objects and qualities, all experience of an object is sensual experience and further experience will not move one beyond the sensual object to the real object. However, while further experience can’t lead one to experience the withdrawn substance it would allow for better inferences about the withdrawn structure. In order to come to knowledge about objects, Levi Bryant states that “we must vary the environments of objects or their exo-relations” (2011, p. 170), where exo-relations are simply

Bryant’s term for external relations between objects and other objects external to them. In other words, one must observe how objects manifest themselves to a great variety of other objects. The weaker application would allow for further and further experience of an object leading to better inferences being possible, but maintain that the structure itself would never be experienced by me, or any other object, and the gap between sensual and real would remain.

In other words, while further experience of the object may not let one experience the substance rather than the sensual object, they allow for inferences about the structure. Seeing the color of the mug allows me to infer about its surface roughness through how it reflects light, holding the cup allows me to infer about the interior relations due to its shape, hardness, and smoothness. In other words the sensual qualities allow me make inferences about the underlying real qualities and the underlying structures. Thus, it is possible that further experience can allow us to make better inferences about the underlying structure, but the structure will never be experienced, and therefore experiencing an object further will not bring the experiencer any closer to experiencing the object’s substance. Since “the being of objects is an issue distinct from the question of our knowledge of objects” (Bryant, 2011, p. 18), the ontological relations of objects, or the experiences of objects, and discussion about the structure of those objects are separable issues. While the issues of experience and related, the inferences are based off of the experience of sensual manifestations of an object’s internal structure, not the experience of the internal structure itself.

In other words, while we may come no closer to experiencing the withdrawn, internal structure of an object, we can come to make meaningful and increasingly accurate theories and inferences about the internal structure. In other words, the claim that objects exist independent of one another and of those who speculate about them “does not commit one to claim that it is conceptually inaccessible”

(Brassier, 2011, p. 58). These theories and inferences will never show with absolute certainty the exact structure of the object or every facet of its existence with certainty due to their inferential and speculative nature, they can, nevertheless, reveal more and more about the withdrawn object, and if complete knowledge is impossible, the development of knowledge is at least asymptotic.

Being able to make inferences about the substance of the object then allows us to make statements about the essences of objects. Essences, being internal to the withdrawn object, cannot be experienced by an outside object, but like the substance, can be inferred from sensual manifestations.

In other words, understanding the essence of an object is not dependent upon experiencing the object’s essence or any of its internal structure. Also, like inferences on the withdrawn substance and qualities, inference into essence will be incomplete, discussion of essences is without the possibility of direct knowledge (DeLanda, Harman, 2017, p. 55), but asymptotically based on further and further experience with the sensual manifestations of the object and observations of the external relations that the object enters into.

Identity and Change: A Question of Essences

There is a fundamental tension for objects within Object Oriented Ontology. On one hand, objects exist and have duration, or exist in time for a time. They can come into being and later they can cease to be. Objects can also change while remaining themselves. In other words, objects can manifest themselves in different ways and enter into a variety different causal relations, while maintaining their identity over time (Bryant, 2011, p. 166). The fact that objects can change, and yet remain themselves, and that objects can also change and cease to exist, means that some qualities can be removed, changed, or added to an object without fundamentally changing the object, while removing or changing some other qualities would cause the end of the object. These are, respectively, accidental and essential qualities.

On the other hand, OOO is a flat ontology, which means being is a binary which all objects have or do not have, rather than objects being grounded in a fundamental level or in the human mind, experience, or discourse. Therefore, the essence of an object cannot be grounded in or derived from some fundamental level. One implication of this is that human use, experience, or discourse cannot prescribe an object’s essence. Additionally, with each object having its own reality, their existence cannot be iterations or instances of a natural kind or form, for if they were, their existence would be derivative of the kind or form. Instead, an “essence is always individual” (Harman, 2002, p. 247).

Finally, objects exist beyond their relations, and therefore, their essence must be their own, rather than derived from an external relation. This means that one must look to internal relations, which, according to Bryant “are those relations that constitute the internal being of an object, its internal structure, and therefore the essence of the object” (2011, p. 215).

This leads to objects having essences, but with the essences being internal to the object rather than in its relations or grounded in some other thing. This question has been briefly engaged, but in insufficient depth. As seen in the previous quote from Levi Bryant, the essence seems to be derived from the internal structure, but specification beyond the internality of the essence is lacking. Timothy

Morton, similarly, contrasts the external appearance of an object with its internal essence, saying that

“there is a profound rift between essence and appearance” (2013, p. 76), but once again fails to explicate the difference between the essential and accidental within an object. I will end this chapter with a discussion of Graham Harman’s formulation of essence, analyze its shortcomings and also some of its key insights into the nature of essences within Object Oriented Ontology. In chapter two, I will look at Edmund Husserl’s conception of essences and briefly discuss how his conception can relate to

OOO. Then, in chapter three I will similarly discuss Martin Heidegger’s formulation of essence. I will then seek to integrate the insights from these chapters into OOO in chapter four.

Graham Harman’s Account of Essence

Harman notes that an object’s essence must be internal to the object, withdrawn rather than presented to other objects. This means that it is part of the real rather than sensual sphere of the object’s four poles. Since objects can change while maintaining their identity, and these changes are changes in the object itself, not merely in its sensual profile, then the change must be in the real qualities while the real substance itself remains. This means that “these [real] qualities are not the same as the real [substance] itself, and hence it lives in a kind of permanent strife with them, which is

25 precisely what we mean by essence” (Harman, 2010, p. 15). This strife is then the difference between the internal structure of the object and the qualities that are a result of this structure, or the difference between the internal structure and how that structure is able to exert itself upon its world. The object’s world, then, plays a central role in bringing about the essence, for “a real object is real and has a definite character, but its essence is first produced from the outside through causal interactions” (Harman, 2011, p. 107). In other words, the essence is brought about through causal relations with other objects.

Essence being produced through causal, external relations leads to some problems though.

First, if objects exist independently of other objects and their relations with other objects, then it seems to follow that the essence of the object, or what makes the object itself, should also exist independently of other objects, and must exist prior to external, causal relations.

The second problem with this formulation of essence is that both real qualities that occur out of essential internal relations and real qualities that come from inessential internal relations are both real qualities. Therefore, both the essential and inessential real qualities are part of the objects causal profile, or are, at least theoretically, able to exert themselves on other objects. So while the tension between the real object and the real quality’s causal interactions may come about in the relations with other objects, this fact doesn’t reveal much about which structural relations are essential to the identity and continuity of the object and which are accidental, for “each real object must have a multitude of real traits” (Harman, 2011, p. 195) but not every one of those traits could be central to the objects being, for if it were the object could not survive change. Even with these shortcomings, Harman’s explanation helps to reveal that the essence isn’t in any of the traits, or in a combination of traits, but

“rather than an essential list of properties…the executancy of a thing is a dark and stormy essence that exceeds any such list of properties” (2005, p. 104). In looking for an essence, then, one must look at the underlying structure of the object and its relationship with the real qualities.

The essence can then be found, at least in part, in an investigation into the life of objects, into their birth, the changes they undergo while they exist, and their death or cessation of being. As previously noted, an object comes into being, or is born, when a new relation is formed. Thus, a new relation becomes the internal relation that makes up the structure of the object. The creation of a complex object is inexact, with each new relation creating a new, more complex object, but eventually the additional of new relations stabilizes with enough durability to bring about or take on new relations without fundamentally altering itself and becoming an altogether new object. Once the object exists with stability, it can take on new relations, and some of these relations will be more important to the object than the others, for, according to Harman, “if all relations were equally significant, then every entity would become a new thing in every trivial instant of its existence, since our relations with objects are ever on the move” (2016, p. 44), or since objects internal and external relations are capable of shifting. Therefore, objects have both essential and inessential internal relations, or the structure of the object has both essential and inessential components.

Little is said about differentiating between essential internal relations and inessential internal relations. Some ideas have been put forward that may provide insight into the difference between the two though. One is that of symbiotic relations. These are new relations that “mark discrete phases in the life of one and the same object” (Harman, 2016, p. 50), such as when an animal is reintroduced into an environment from a rehabilitation program, the animal remains the same, but its system of relations and environment are radically altered, as well as the causes it exerts upon the world. It should then be noted, first, that these relations can be either internal relations or external relations, such as a company replacing its CEO or a carbon atom bonding into a hydrocarbon chain, thus binding its electrons in covalent bonds and limiting further bonding by the carbon atom. Secondly, symbiotic relations are not necessarily reciprocal relations (Harman, 2016, p. 46), or in other words a symbiotic relation is only necessarily symbiotic for one of the objects in the relation, so that the relation only marks a significant

27 change in the life of one of the objects, while being trivial for the other. As seen in the aforementioned example of an animal being released back into an ecosystem, it has entered into a distinct phase of its life, but the addition of a single rehabilitated animal only effects the ecosystem as a whole on a trivial level.

On first glance, symbiotic relations look like appealing candidates for the formulation of the essence of objects. An object’s essence could possibly be a set of formative or symbiotic relations that make it what it is. Unfortunately, symbiotic relations cannot be essential relations. Firstly, this is because symbiotic relations “must be distinguished from the birth and death of the object” (Harman,

2016, p. 50) and thus are not necessarily part of the set of internal relations that make an object itself from its origin and are not necessarily among the relations whose breaking results in the cessation of the objects existence. Secondly, symbiotic relations can, and often do, involve external relations, while objects are defined by their internal structure and relations, and exist “prior to their [external] relations or effects”(Harman, 2016, p. 42-43). This implies that the internal relations of the object that are essential to its being must also exist prior to any external relations the object forms or effects the object has on its world. Therefore, a kind of relation that includes external relations cannot make up the objects essence. Finally, an object can theoretically come into being, exist for a time, and then cease to be without entering into any new discrete phases in its existence. This object would still have an essence, even though it would have no symbiotic relations, and thus the essence cannot be reliant or relative to symbiosis.

This leads to the death of an object. As an entity independent of external entities, an object’s end must come from a breakdown of its internal relations, and not just any of its internal relations, but its strongest or most central ones. For example, if I were to drop my mug and it were to shatter, my mug would cease to be the same object because the set of relations that held it in the shape that it was and allowed it to interact with its world as it did, has been broken. If I were to chip my mug the object

28 would carry on, because while the structure of relations of the mug changed, it was a non-essential set of relations that ceased to be rather than an essential set. Similarly, a carbon atom gains and loses electrons with some degree of regularity, not merely swapping out one electron for another, but existing for a time as a positively or negatively charged ion, therefore these are non-essential relations whose severance doesn’t cause the object’s death. On the other hand, if a carbon atom were to lose a proton the cessation of the relation would be much more dramatic and it would be reasonable to say that the carbon atom ceased to be.

It may seem that if the death of an object results from the breaking of an essential relation, then an object’s essence can be found out merely by performing a post mortem on the object after it dies.

The problem is that, firstly, it either requires the object to have already ceased to be, and thus cannot provide useful insight unless the object has died, or is merely speculation about what would need to happen in order for the object to cease to be. Secondly, when an object dies, oftentimes more than one relation is broken, so further investigation would need to be done to see which relations are essential.

Finally, the death of an object doesn’t require all of the essential relations to break, but just one of them, because if the object could survive the loss of the relation, it wouldn’t be an essential relation, and it is plausible that objects would have more than one essential relation.

While Graham Harman doesn’t explicate a satisfactory theory of essences, an analysis of the life cycle of objects in his philosophy provides some insights into the question. The first is that the essential internal relations of the object will be present in the object at its birth, will lend the object the stability to exist and that the breaking of an essential internal relation will result in the death of the object.

Through the life of the object and symbiosis, it was seen that the relations are “deliberately strong, meant to generate stability rather than motion” (Harman, 2016, p. 121), or rather that the central relations are those that allow the object to remain as it is rather than force it to change. Essences should be stable relations that promote stability. Symbiotic relations, while not essential, may lead to

29 further insights about the essential. Since symbiotic relations mark off distinct phases and periods in the life of the object, and do so through changing the object or the relations the object is in, some insight into an object’s essence may be gleaned through what of the original object survives the transitions from one distinct phase of the objects life to another, or what is essentially present both before and after the symbiotic relationships. In order to develop a more rigorous theory of essences, I will now turn to insights from Edmund Husserl and then to Martine Heidegger to provide insights into essences from the tradition OOO came out of.

Chapter 2: Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology

One of the intellectual predecessors to Graham Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology is the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In particular, the phenomenological objects of consciousness have contributed to and influenced OOO. This chapter will begin with a basic overview of Husserl’s phenomenology, then move to Husserl’s formulation of the eidetic science. Using the tools and definitions of the eidetic science I will then analyze how it applies to objects. I will finish this chapter with a discussion of objections to Husserl’s formulation of essence from an OOO standpoint, possible defenses of Husserl’s view, and some insights his position can provide into the formulation of essences in OOO.

Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenology

Phenomenology begins with the bracketing of the natural attitude, where the natural attitude is not only the everyday way of experiencing the world, but also the scientific approach to the world. In this attitude “corporeal things in some sort of spatial distribution are simply there for me; in the literal or figurative sense of the word they are ‘on hand’” (Husserl, 2014, p. 48), meaning that when I experience something, it is something in the external world that I experience. I am then able to make statements about the world of my experience that may or may not ‘map’ onto the external world correctly. When I look at my coffee mug in the natural attitude I maintain that I am looking at a thing among many things external to myself and in the world, and if I were to say that “my coffee mug is on the desk,” the statement would be vindicated by the state of affairs external to myself and in the world.

Additionally, the sciences subscribe to this attitude. When a physicist makes a statement like “protons

are made up of quarks,” she maintains that there are protons and quarks in the world, external to herself; that the statement would be vindicated by the fact that protons are made of quarks; and that it could be verified by scientific practice.

Making statements about the world can then lead to questions about how exactly those statements interact with the world, how well they map onto the world, whether they even map onto the world, and how would I know whether or not they map onto the world. A further question that most of the prior ones lead to is how the person making the statements, or more specifically, the particular consciousness responsible for those statements, interacts with the world. Trying to answer these questions has been one of the central themes of modern philosophy, but work on the problem has met with limited success.

Rather than trying to find a way of correlating thoughts with the external world, Husserl focuses on consciousness itself. He focuses on experience itself, rather than on the outside world, because “we have experience, in the originary sense, of ourselves and the states of our consciousness” (Husserl,

2014, 9). In other words, the fact that an experience is going on in my own consciousness is beyond question, though whether or not that experience corresponds with something that is happening in “the world” can be doubted.

This is in contrast to Descartes’ method of doubt, where in order “to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences” (1998, p. 59) he needed to get rid of all his false opinions, and in order to do this he needed to “raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations” (Descartes,

1998, p. 59). He did this through systematically doubting his beliefs, positing that what he originally thought to be true was, in fact, not the case. He started with sense perceptions (Descartes, 1998, p. 60), then moved to his experience of the external world, noting that he couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t mad or dreaming (Descartes, 1998, p. 60). He then he moved on to the possibility that he had been deceived

32 into believing logical and mathematical truths, but that they may not, in fact, be true (Descartes, 1998, p. 61); and then he concluded by doubting the veracity of his experience of his body (Descartes, 1998, p.

62). In the end, the only thing Descartes believed he could be certain of was his own existence as a thinking thing, which led him to state that he “is nothing but a thinking thing” (Descartes, 1998, p. 65).

Husserl, contra Descartes, maintained that it wasn’t the thinking thing that could not be doubted, but the experiencing consciousness, and the actual experiences of consciousness. For example, when I experience seeing my coffee mug, it cannot be doubted that I am having the experience of “seeing my coffee mug,” but I could doubt the veracity of the experience within “the world”. The coffee mug may not be my coffee mug but a similar looking coffee mug or a façade of a coffee mug. I could be hallucinating the visual profile of my coffee mug and thus there would be no actual coffee mug to see. I could be dreaming, in which case not only would the coffee mug be illusory, but so would my own presumed physical situation within the world. From my own point of view, there is no real way to rule out these counterexamples satisfactorily and to confirm the naïve realist view that since I see my coffee mug on the desk, my coffee mug is on the desk. In each of these situations, however, within my consciousness, the experience of “seeing my mug” would have occurred, and while in the natural attitude it may not have turned out to be an experience that reflects the states of affairs of a world external to consciousness, it nevertheless would have been given to my consciousness as the experience “seeing my mug.”

This means that the study of phenomena must be internal to consciousness and cannot be about the relation of an experience in consciousness to the outside world but “experience of the external world,” where “the world” is the world external to consciousness and the world of scientific inquiry. In phenomenology, what is being studied is strictly structure of the consciousness. The experience of “seeing the coffee mug” is being studied rather than the interaction between consciousness and the world that might yield the sight of the coffee mug or the illusion of the sight of

33 the coffee mug. Therefore, this study is radically different than anything that can be done in the natural attitude; it cannot be done in the natural attitude because the natural attitude assumes the external world to be integrally correlated with experience in consciousness. Therefore, “instead of remaining in

[the natural] attitude, we want to alter it radically” (Husserl, 2014, p. 52).

This alteration comes in the form of the suspension of judgment about the world external to consciousness. Within the natural attitude every experience or act of consciousness is assumed to have

“the character of ‘being there,’ ‘on hand’” (Husserl, 2014, p. 53); or when I see my coffee mug in the natural attitude the experience comes with the assumption that my coffee mug is, in actuality, there. In departing the natural attitude, I perform what Husserl calls the phenomenological epochē, where, although an assumption about a state of affairs or a statement about the world “continues to remain in itself what it is, we place it as it were ‘out of action,’ we ‘suspend it,’ we ‘bracket it’” (Husserl, 2014, p.54). In this bracketing I simply don’t make statements about what is external to experience. It is important to note that, unlike Descartes’ method of doubt, “the epochē consists in an act of suspension rather [than] negation, conjecture, calculation, or doubt” (Ricœur, 1996, p. 89). In the phenomenological epochē, I suspend judgment, so in suspending judgment about the statement “it is the case that the mug is on the desk,” I would not instead assert “it is not the case that the mug is on the desk,” or “it is a hallucination of the mug on the desk,” or “it is possible that I am dreaming of the mug on the desk,” or so on; the reduction simply results in not making a judgment, and from there not relying on the judgment of “it is the case that the mug Is on the desk.” In this, “the thesis is ‘put out of action,’” (Husserl, 2014, p. 55) or put aside in order for an investigation of consciousness to occur.

In its bracketing of the natural attitude, the epochē allows for the formulation of a new domain of scientific study (Husserl, 2014, p. 55), an area of study that Husserl believed had not yet been investigated in a rigorous, systematic way. The suspension of the judgment that takes place in the natural attitude is quite comprehensive, where “we put in brackets anything and everything that it

34 encompasses in an ontic respect” (Husserl, 2014, p. 55), or everything “out there” external to consciousness itself. This doesn’t just involve physical things, such as trees and coffee mugs, but also the empirical sciences “regardless of how firm a standing they have” (Husserl, 2014, p. 56), or regardless of how well verified, how commonly accepted, or how accurate their conclusions seem. This bracketing also “utterly closes off for me every judgment about spatiotemporal existence” (Husserl, 2014, p. 56).

This bracketing, again, isn’t a negation of the world external to consciousness (Husserl, 2014, p. 55), but merely withholding judgment about it and not making use of it to make further judgments. In this epochē, then, the judgments and findings found in the natural attitude; the explanations in terms of external, physical things; and the findings of the empirical sciences cannot be factored into phenomenological explanation, because to use them would be to leave the phenomenological epochē and reenter the natural attitude.

Once the world external to consciousness has been bracketed, Husserl’s phenomenology studies strictly what is internal to conscious experience. In order to discuss the essences of the objects of consciousness, some understanding of the structure of experience or of an act of consciousness is necessary. The following discussion will outline the structure of an act of consciousness as explicated in

Ideas I.

The first component of an act of consciousness is the inherent noetic aspect, or the noesis

(Husserl, 2014, p. 167). This is the act of directing one’s focus, or the actual act of experiencing something, such as perceiving, remembering, imagining, and so on. The noetic aspect is an act of the ego, or of mental focus (Husserl, 2014, p. 182), of fastening of attention which “is an inherent aspect of experience” (Husserl, 2014, p. 183). In the fastening of attention, sense is bestowed on the object as the sensuous data of an experience is coalesced and synthesized into the objects of the experience. For example, when I look at my coffee mug, I direct my focus on it, rather than relegating it to a background of my experience. I am fastening my attention to it and bringing it to the front and center of my

35 perception, thus in focusing on the mug, “the pertinent phenomena stood out in a uniform, perfectly clear and distinct way” (Husserl, 2014, p. 182). The fastening of attention is essential to the experience because without it the mug would not become the object of the act of consciousness and thus remain an unfocused blur in the background of my consciousness, rather than a focused object. In bringing my coffee mug into focus, all the various sensuous data is brought together into a singular object.

Husserl calls the sense data that is constrained and focused in noesis hyletic data or sensory materials (Husserl, 2014, p. 167). The hyletic data in the noetic component “afford themselves as material for intentional forming or affordances of sense on various levels” (Husserl, 2014, p. 166); in other words, there is a constant stream of material data within consciousness, which intentional acts of consciousness shapes and constrains the objects of consciousness. This means that “the phenomenological stream of being has a material layer and a noetic layer” (Husserl, 2014, p. 168), or a layer of constant data input underlying a shaping layer of intentional action. For example, as I survey the office, I receive a constant stream of sensuous information (hyletic data), and then, as I focus on various areas or objects in the office the data is constrained and formed into what I perceive as a desk, a computer, or a chair.

The second component of an act of consciousness is the noema, which is the content of the act.

The noema correlates with the noetic component, for “there is no inherent noetic aspect without an inherent noematic aspect specifically pertaining to it” (Husserl, 2014, p. 185). An act of consciousness is an intentional experience, or an experience of a particular object, which is called the intentional object.

This is the object that comes to the center of one’s attention, while everything else fades into the background. For Husserl, “every intentional experience has its ‘intentional object”(Husserl, 2014, p.

177); in other words, there aren’t any intentional experiences that don’t have a focus.

The object of focus consists of “essentially diverse layers that group around a central ‘core’”

(Husserl, 2014, p. 181), or in other words, there is the object itself, the various predicates connected to the object, and surrounding it within the act of consciousness, a diverse set of additional sensations. For example, when I perceive my mug, the predicates or descriptions that are part of it include the color, the shape, the texture and so on. There is also how the mug is made available to consciousness; in this example, it is the mug-as-perceived, but it could also be imagined, or remembered. Within different types of acts of consciousness, the object remains. The object of my memory of the mug is the mug itself, not some separate faux-mug of my memory. In other words “what is identical in them that is at one time perceived, another time directly envisaged, a third time pictorially portrayed in a painting, and the like—alludes to only one central concept” (Husserl, 2014, p. 181). Further information is present in the noema as well, such as the modality, or the way in which the experience occurs, the clarity of the act of perception, and so forth.

A Science of Essence

In Ideas I, Husserl set out to establish transcendental phenomenology as a science of essences

(2014, p. 5), or an eidetic science (2014, p. 7), or in other words to set essences as the region of study for phenomenology and to formulate the tools and method to study them with. This came with the goal of providing “knowledge of the essence of the real, and…knowledge of the essence of the irreal”

(Husserl, 2014, p. 6), or insight into the essence of both what is physically existent and can be studied by the sciences and what is intuited in experience but cannot be reduced to an empirical science such as an aesthetic experience, feelings of significance around a place or event, or a given culture’s zeitgeist.

In his eidetic science, the essences Husserl is investigating were “initially designated what is to be found in the being that is proper to an individual itself as its what” (2014, p. 11); in other words, they were historically thought of as what makes a being itself and not some other being. In performing the

37 phenomenological epochē, I leave the natural attitude. Without the metaphysical commitments of the natural attitude, the object of study becomes the experience of the being, which can be converted from a thing into an idea, where “experiential or individual intuition can be transformed into an instance of seeing the essence” (Husserl, 2014, p. 11). The essences are then found in consciousness, not in an outside object and, therefore, phenomenological investigations can be carried out to discern them.

This means that intuition and experience are the starting point for an investigation into essences. When I look at my coffee mug, I experience it as mug-as-perceived and with that I carry a set of intuitions about the coffee mug. These intuitions can consist of simple things such as how much the mug can hold, what the rear of the mug will look like, the texture of the mug, and so on. Within these intuitions is “the possibility of turning the perspective on a fact into an essence” (Ricœur, 1996, p. 67), where facts are the state of affairs of the object of consciousness. This means that essences, through intuitions, can be derived from, the state of affairs of the object as it is given in consciousness.

As objects are given to consciousness, their essences can be discovered with varying degrees of certainty. Essences can be discerned in an adequate manner, where the nature of the object of consciousness and the way that it is given to consciousness is such that discernment of the essence occurs in an originary way, or in a fashion that is given immediately in experience rather than through some derivative process. The essence of a color or a tone (Husserl, 2014, p. 12) can be given in an adequate, originary manner. These essences are given in a “perfectly clear apprehension” (Husserl,

2014, p. 124) when they are seen or heard or otherwise given to consciousness in an unambiguous and complete manner; and a perfectly clear apprehension “allows absolutely indubitable identification and differentiation, explication, relation, and so forth” (Husserl, 2014, p. 124). There is no ambiguity in relation to the essence in these instances. For example, when a tone is heard there is no ambiguity as to its nature, and if it is varied or changed at all it clearly ceases to be the same tone.

On the other hand, inadequate discernment is also a possibility. This occurs when the correlative empirical intuitions are incomplete. My mug is an example of this. I can receive a perspective of it from the front or the back or the top or the bottom, or perhaps a combination of two of these (front-top, back-bottom, etc.) but never the whole mug, never front and back. This is the sense in which “essences can inherently be given only ‘one-sidedly’; they can be given in succession in a ‘many- sided way’ but never ‘from all sides’” (Husserl, 2014, p. 12). This means that if the experiential or empirical intuitions are perspectival and incomplete, the essential intuitions will also be perspectival and incomplete. Even still, “it would, indeed, be too much to say that all evidence for apprehension of essences demands full clarity of the underlying individual instances in their concreteness” (Husserl,

2014, p. 125); essences can still be apprehended even if not with complete clarity.

Free phantasy is Husserl’s method to help determine the essence of an object of consciousness when it isn’t apprehended with perfect clarity. This is because “it is inherent in the universal essence of the immediately intuitive apprehension of essences that it can be carried out…on the basis of merely envisaging exemplary instances” (Husserl, 2014, p. 125), thus there is no inherent superiority to perception over phantasy. They are both ways for the object to be present to consciousness: object-as- perceived and object-as-imagined. The superiority of one over the other depends on the particular situation and particular object of consciousness, and “envisaging (for example, phantasy) can be so perfectly clear…that it enables us to apprehend and discern essences perfectly” (Husserl, 2014, p. 125).

For essences not given in a perfectly clear apprehension to be discerned with any sense of clarity, phantasy must be employed. In this sense, “free phantasies acquire a certain prerogative opposite perception” (Husserl, 2014, p. 126), in that while perception is based off of material data coming from the object of consciousness in a way that the perceiver cannot control, to discover the essence I must use phantasy to modify, adjust, or vary configurations of the object of consciousness to intuit the ‘what’ of the object. In varying the object-as-imagined I “must take great pains to intuit clearly” (Husserl, 2014,

39 p.126) the object of consciousness. For example, in intuiting the essence of my mug, I can imagine that the lettering blurs together, the coloration changes, or that it becomes a little wider or taller, but if I were to imagine it growing wings and flying, that would be beyond the realm of a clearly intuited phantasy. There are constraints in how an object can be varied in phantasy, yet within these constraints of intuition I have “incomparable freedom in reshaping the fictitious figures at whim, in running through continuously modified possible configurations, thus in producing an unlimited number of new forms”

(Husserl, 2014, p. 126).

Free phantasy is often performed on objects of consciousness that were originally given as perceived. After the original perception, though, perception plays only a small role in the use of free phantasy and the discerning of essences. This is partially because in the discerning of essences, in viewing the object and contemplating it, more than mere perception is occurring. The contemplation of an object is based not only perception, but also in phantasy (Husserl, 2014, p. 126). When I look at and contemplate my mug, I am not only perceiving the mug but also thinking about it and performing variations on it within my mind. In discerning its essence I move past merely seeing it and begin to contemplate it further, and that contemplation involves the use of phantasy. Then, if the mug were removed from my sight, I would still be able to perform the same variations. Whether or not the object is present in perception, in discerning essences “the phenomenologist can only make limited use of an originary givenness as a means of assistance” (Husserl, 2014, p. 127) and must rely much more heavily on the envisaging of exemplary instances and variations of the object within imagination. Simply perceiving my coffee mug will give limited insight into the essence of the mug because it is fundamentally static within my perception, while determining essences requires envisaged variations on the mug measured against clear intuitions about the mug. Therefore, in determining essences, “’fiction’ makes up a vital element of phenomenology” (Husserl, 2014, p. 127).

Using the process of free variation in phantasy, I can then perform the eidetic reduction. Where the phenomenological reduction is performed to bracket and suspend judgment about the external world of science, the eidetic reduction is performed to bracket the contingent or accidental qualities of the object of consciousness and leave the essential qualities. In performing the eidetic reduction, I vary the qualities of the object of consciousness until I come upon a quality that cannot be varied without losing the original object. Take my coffee mug as an example. In performing the eidetic reduction the object of consciousness is no longer the mug-as-perceived, but the rather mug-as-imagined. In intuiting the essence I start with an image in phantasy replicating the mug-as-perceived and begin varying the image, intuiting whether an essential relation is broken by the variation. I imagine it as the same mug, but without writing on it, and intuit that it is still the mug. Thus I learn that the writing on the mug is not an essential quality, and I bracket the writing during the further investigations into the essence of the mug. I then move on to the next quality, for example the color. I imagine that instead of black, the mug is red, then brown, then yellow. The object of my consciousness is still a mug, so I bracket color. I move on to another quality, shape. Instead of hollow inside, I imagine it as a solid block of ceramic. It is clearly intuited to no longer be a mug, so I have discovered that being hollow is an essential quality of the mug. I continue varying the shape finding examples where the shape is unimportant, such as whether the bottom is concave or flat; I bracket those and find further qualities that cannot be changed, such as having an open top. Upon further variation more unessential qualities can be bracketed and a more complete picture of the mug’s essence can be found.

Intuition, as we have seen, plays a central role in the discernment of essences. This is because, for Husserl, intuition is a genuine source of knowledge, as he explicates in the principle of all principles, saying

each intuition affording [something] in an originary way is a legitimate source of knowledge,

that whatever presents itself to us in “intuition” in an originary way (so to speak, in its actuality

in person) is to be taken simply as what it affords itself as, but only within the limitations in

which it affords itself there (2014, p. 43).

In other words, an intuition is present in an experience in a way that is analogous to the way that sense perception is present in experience (Husserl, 2014, p. 43). When observing my mug-as-perceived, the visual perception of the mug is given in an originary way in my consciousness, and when discerning the color or shape of the mug, it acts as the source of knowledge about those discernments. Similarly, intuitions are given in experience and in discerning essences they act in the same manner, as the legitimate source of knowledge into the property being investigated.

The process of free variation in phantasy results in phenomenology being a descriptive science rather than a deductive one, meaning that rather than following a set of propositions to a conclusion like a logician or mathematician, the phenomenologist relies on originary experience and variations performed on the originary experience in phantasy to describe the essential ‘what’ of the object of consciousness. In other words, because it is based off of originary experiences that are “concrete and non-abstract” (Ricœur, 1996, p. 121), the abstracted parts of phenomenology—the envisaging and variations in phantasy--“do not lend themselves to deductive constructions because [phenomenology’s] essences are inexact” (Ricœur, 1996, p. 121). In other words, the process of focusing on an intentional object, having originary intuitions about it, and then envisaging exemplary instances of it and performing variations on the object within the constrains and limits of the originary intuitions of the object involves steps that may lack clarity. The original experience of the object may be blurred, the orignary intuitions may be off or neglected in some way during the variation and envisaging, the phantasy may be imprecise, and so forth such that the intuiting of the object’s essence can become unclear, and unclear or inexact steps will leave a deductive conclusion contestable.

This inexactness doesn’t pose the same problem for descriptive sciences, however. While more precision and clarity is preferred over less, in phenomenology “if what counts is bringing to adequate conceptual expression the intuitive sorts of givenness of a thing in their intuitively given essential characters, then it calls precisely for taking them as they afford themselves” (Husserl, 2014, p. 133). This means that given the goal of phenomenology as an eidetic science, namely discerning the essences of a given object of consciousness, I must accept a potential lack of clarity in the originary experience and reduction, and refine them. Thus “the very process of focusing on an idea, as a process that yields ideal essences as ideal ‘limits,’ is in principle not to be found in any sensory intuition” (Husserl, 2014, p. 133); in other words, an essence based off of sensory intuitions is going to be implicitly limited and unclear, and using a process that involves them cannot yield a perfect or exact essence. In some cases, though, eidetic essences can “’approximate’ those ideal limits more or less, without ever attaining them”

(Husserl, 2014, p. 133). For example, the ideal essence of a square is derived from its geometrical properties through a deductive process. If I observe a very precisely drawn picture of a square I can, using the phenomenological, descriptive process, intuit and discern the essence of the square with enough clarity that it is incredibly similar to the ideal essence, but it will not be identical to it. I may be able to eidetically discern that the square has four interior right angles and four sides of equal length, but I may not arrive at the fact that the distance of an interior diagonal line between corners is the square root of twice the length of a side. Thus, in some cases, usually when a geometric shape is observed, I can “characterize exact essences as ideal limits to inexact essences” (Ricœur, 1996, p. 121), or as the complete, clear essence that could be the highest level of clarity that could possibly be reached when the eidetic reduction is done under ideal circumstances.

In summation, the discernment of essences in Husserl’s phenomenology is a descriptive project rather than a deductive one, meaning that discovering the essence of a thing is based off of that thing being experienced and then the essence being intuited from there through the eidetic reduction. This is

43 done through the process of free phantasy, where ideals of the object are envisaged and an infinite amount of variations on the object can be phantasized and imagined. Through comparison of these variations and ideal envisaging I can arrive at “an unfolding of abstract features shared by appropriate sets of fictitious and real-life examples” (Beyer, 2016), or through the analysis of the objects in free phantasy and variation I can intuit the essential qualities and features that make the object of consciousness what it is. There is a fundamental indeterminacy in the process due to its being a descriptive science, and the determined essences will always be inexact, but under the right circumstances the ideal, exact essence can be approached.

The Essence of an Object

With the eidetic reduction, we can now investigate more closely the essences of intentional objects. The noematic core is given to consciousness as the intentional X of the act of consciousness to which predicates are attached. For example, when I look at my mug, it is the intentional X, or the object at the center of my attention, and predicates are attached to it; my mug is black, my mug is round, my mug is smooth, etc. The object, while remaining in consciousness, can present itself differently (Husserl,

2015, p. 259) depending on the manner of its presence in consciousness, such that “it is ‘the same,’ only it is given in different predicates, with a different determination of its content” (Husserl, 2014, p. 259); in other words, even as the predicates of the object of consciousness change, the core of the object remains the same. This can be seen in the simple case of reaching out and grabbing my mug, then looking away. I no longer experience “my mug is black,” (that predicate is removed), but I begin to experience “my mug is smooth,” and “my mug is light” and so on. It can also be shown in cases of free variation, such as if I hold the mug-as-imagined in my consciousness, but vary its colors in free phantasy such that the predicate “is black” is replaced by “is yellow” or “is green.” In both of these examples, the noematic object, where the intentional X is my mug, remains the same while its predicates vary. Since the predicates can be varied while the object remains, the intentional object “distinguishes itself as a

44 central, inherent noematic aspect” (Husserl, 2014, p. 260) or as “the pure X in abstraction from all predicates” (Husserl, 2014, p. 260). This X is “an essence that is indifferent to such modifications”

(Husserl, 2014, p. 258); in other words, it persists despite the variation and changes of the attached predicates.

Predicates can be added to the intentional X at the core of the object through the use of different perceptions or different acts of consciousness. For example the “is smooth” and “is hard” predicates are added through a tactile perception, while “is black” is perceived through a visual perception. These diverse sensations “merge into the unity of an identity, a unity in which one is conscious of ‘something,’ something determinable that lies in every core, as identical” (Husserl, 2014, p.

260). Thus at the core of the mug-as-felt, the mug-as-seen, the mug-as-remembered, the mug-as- imagined, etc. is the same noematic, intentional X, or the same noema. Therefore, “each noema contains such a pure something-qua-object as a point of unity” (Husserl, 2014, p. 260) or a central component that all of its predicates converge on.

Insights from Husserl

Husserl’s phenomenology provides a starting point for the discernments of essences in an

Object Oriented Ontology in two separate ways. The first is that phenomenology provides an analysis of how sensual objects are presented to a human consciousness. In other words, phenomenology can provide an analysis of how a conscious object interacts with the sensual objects and sensual qualities of the other objects that it comes into contact with. It provides an analysis of my consciousness’s interaction with my sensual coffee mug. Within the metaphysical framework of OOO, the phenomenological study of consciousness can be formulated as the interaction between an object with consciousness and the sensual realm presented to it. Thus, in OOO, the phenomenon of the coffee mug is the sensual object being experienced by myself, and the coffee mug itself is the withdrawn object.

While the coffee mug, and other objects presented to consciousness, are experienced as sensual objects, they can provide insights into the withdrawn objects themselves and into how real and sensual objects interact with one another.

This is important because, for OOO, human experience isn’t ontologically distinct from other interactions between objects, since consciousness isn’t of a different ontological kind than the other objects in the universe. Since “the human-world relation has no privilege at all” (Harman, 2011, p. 119), then an analysis of consciousness’s interaction with other objects can provide insights into how objects in general interact with one another. In other words, since sensual interactions are “not a special feature of human intellect or animal sentience, but a basic feature of relationality in general” (Harman,

2011, p. 121), investigation of a consciousness’s relations can be used to gain insights about relationality in general. For example, my phenomenological experience of my coffee mug’s solidity and of my desk’s solidity can help me to make inferences about how the substance of the desk will interact with the sensual coffee mug. In a more abstract sense, the phenomenological study of intentional objects was used by Harman in the development of Object Oriented Ontology2, starting with the experiences of things “already molded into distinct objects” (Harman, 2005, p. 28), before broadening the discussion to the all interactions between objects. Husserl’s phenomenology is thus a resource already drawn upon in

OOO and can continue to provide insights into the nature of objects.

It is worth noting that the relationships formed by conscious objects and those formed by other objects are ontologically the same type of relation, however, the way these relations are manifested is different, due to the different qualities of the objects in question and the different worlds which are available to them. My desk can’t imagine free variation or perform the eidetic reduction on my mug, doesn’t associate memories with it, and doesn’t see its lettering. This is because the qualities of objects

2 See: The Quadruple Object p. 20-30, and Guerilla Metaphysics p. 21-32 for examples of the use of the phenomenological study of intentional objects in the development of OOO.

46 allow them to interact with different objects differently. Still, both the desk-mug relation and the relation between the mug and myself would consist of the substance of the mug withdrawing and the mediation of the interaction by the sensual mug. The ontological equivalence between these two relations will be discussed further in chapter four.

The second way Husserl’s phenomenology can be used as a starting point in the discernment of essences is that, in the eidetic reduction it provides a method for determining essences. While this method is limited by the compatibility issues between phenomenological study and Object Oriented

Ontology, the use of free variation and the bracketing of non-essential qualities can provide the foundation for further investigation into the essences of objects.

In his formulation of phenomenology as a descriptive science of essences, Husserl also provided an insight into the fact that the discernment of the essence of an object of consciousness is an inexact and indeterminate process. This complements the nature of the withdraw of an object within Object

Oriented Ontology, where only the sensual object is given and observations into the withdrawn substance must be inferred with less clarity. These inferences lack certainty and precision and are always incomplete. Husserl acknowledges this in his theory and accounts for it, and similarly, any theory of essences in Object Oriented Ontology will need to account for it.

Compatibility Problems for Husserl and OOO

Husserl formulated a rigorous method for determining the essences of objects of consciousness, and the method can be used to provide insights into the role and determination of essences within

Object Oriented Ontology. However, some compatibility issues that arise when it comes to the use of

Husserl’s phenomenological and eidetic reductions to determine an objects essence, which serve to prevent me from simply applying Husserl’s phenomenology directly to Harman’s Object Oriented

Philosophy.

The first issue that comes up is the nature of objects within the two philosophies. In Husserl’s phenomenology, the object being investigated is an object of consciousness, rather than the external object itself. The object of study is within consciousness, where “the expression ‘consciousness’…covers all experience” (Husserl, 2014, p. 57); it is the experienced object, not the object of the natural attitude.

It follows from this that in Husserl’s phenomenology, essences are “the what” of the experience of the object, and essences are located within consciousness. This stands in stark contrast with Graham

Harman’s realism, where the object of study is a real object that is not only “out there” but is in part withdrawn from anyone who perceives it. Phenomenology, then, is too egocentric to be easily fitted into Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology. By locating essences in the conscious experience of objects rather than in the objects themselves, Husserl is grounding essences in human consciousness rather than in the actual objects, and thus transforming any potentially flat ontology into one that is based completely around objects with consciousness. By contrast, for Object Oriented Ontology to remain a flat ontology, Harman needs to keep the “what” of the object located within the object itself. For

Harman, the essence is “the tension between a real object and its real qualities” (2011, p. 101) or between the withdrawn structure and the withdrawn accidents of the structure.

Along a similar but distinct line of reasoning, one could object that Husserl’s phenomenology is anthropocentric. This means that it is centered on human beings at the ontological expense of other beings. Anthropocentrism alludes to how the world is structured around humans. Since essences are found in objects of consciousness through the use of intuitions, and intuitions are informed by experience, and humans have a limited (human centered) ability to experience sensual profiles, and can only experience the sensual qualities that align with their own qualities or abilities to perceive, then the only essences that can be intuited are the ones that have both the right type and the right scales of sensual profile. For example, while I could use the eidetic reduction to discern the essence of my coffee mug or the color green, I could not use it to determine the essence of an insect’s pheromones, which my

48 own senses cannot pick up and thus would not be given to me in a phenomenological reduction. To take another example, after I perform the phenomenological epochē, electrons are no longer available to me to perform variations upon, because electrons themselves are not a part of my world; they are far too small for me to experience as electrons. While there are some limitations to the insights provided by Husserl’s phenomenology, it still serves to inform a theory of essence within OOO, as will be seen in more detail in chapter four. I will now turn to Martin Heidegger for further explications of essences within the phenomenological tradition.

Chapter 3: Martin Heidegger and the Essence of Being

In his lecture Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger discusses the essence of Being, or what essential traits are shared by all beings. In the investigation into these traits I will be able to find a set of conditions that separate a being from not-Being and set out how that being exists in its world. These essential traits for Being will then be applied to Object Oriented Ontology as the starting point in developing a set of boundary conditions for the existence of objects.

This chapter will begin with an explanation of Heidegger’s fundamental question of metaphysics and how this leads to the discussion of Being in contrast to not-Being. This will lead to a discussion on the universal nature of Being and its effects on the discernment of the essence of Being and the essences of beings. I will conclude by discussing some fundamental qualities of Being, which are shared by all beings, and how some of these key features of Being relate to beings.

Why are there Beings instead of Nothing?

For Heidegger, the fundamental question of metaphysics is “why are there beings at all instead of nothing” (2000, p. 1)? In asking this question, he makes the point that “every being counts as much as any other. Some elephant in some jungle in India is in being just as much as some chemical oxidation process on the planet Mars, and whatever else you please” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 4) in other words, no entity or type of entity has priority over any other when it comes to inclusion as a being. Being extends not just to entities or things in the everyday sense, but also to processes and relationships between entities. For Heidegger, Being is incredibly inclusive and stands in contrast to Nothing, and because it is contrasted with Nothing, being can no longer be presupposed. When beings were contrasted with other

beings, rather than with Nothing, Being was assumed, and the distinctions between beings and why one there was one being instead of another were the focus of philosophical inquiry. On the other hand, when beings are contrasted with Nothing, “beings are held out in a questioning manner into the possibility of not-Being” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 30). This means that no particular being is necessary and neither is being as a whole, for if being were necessary then beings would not stand in contrast with

Nothing, but simply with other beings. In other words, if being was necessary, then the question of metaphysics would become “why are there these beings instead of other beings?” and any investigation into being itself would become lost in the discussion of the existence of one individual being contrasted with another.

Nothing brings in the possibility of not-Being, where not-Being is the negation of Being, as opposed to Nothing, which is the absence of Being from which Being must arise. The contrast between

Being and not-Being brings forward a different set of questions, such as “Why are beings torn from the possibility of not-Being?” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 30) and “why do they not fall back into it constantly with no further ado” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 30)? In other words, the questions of “why do beings come into existence?” and “why do they remain in existence?” become salient issues. According to Charles Scott, these new questions are supported by

our experiences of despair, joy, and boredom [which] suggest that things might be supported

finally by nothing at all, nothing so negatively empowered in our circumferences of life that

things can cease forever or arise as though originated again in a moment of repetition (2001, p.

18).

In other words, not-Being is present in human experience, and these experiences of not-Being cannot be accounted for in traditional metaphysics, where the possibility of not-Being is neglected.

This requires a move away from traditional metaphysics, where beings are considered as present at hand, or as things that exist in the world alongside other things as entities to be theorized about and conceptualized, but not as experienced things or as things that are used and interacted with.

With this move away from traditional metaphysics, “beings are now no longer just what happens to be present at hand, they begin to waver, whether we know beings with all certainty, regardless of whether we grasp them in their full scope or not” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 30). Beings can no longer be accepted as merely present-at-hand because considering Being and beings as present at hand already presupposes their being and closes off the possibility of their not-Being. By presupposing beings, further inquiry into the nature of their being cannot be carried out; in addition, the presupposition contradicts experience, because, according to Richard Polt, “our very ability to deal with beings implies an exposure to Nothing”

(2001, 79). This exposure to nothing cannot be accounted for in present-at-hand metaphysics, and therefore a new, more fundamental investigation into being must be carried out.

Since metaphysics based in the present-at-hand, or the metaphysics of presence, began in the

Western tradition with ancient Greek philosophers, Heidegger turns to them in order to determine the conditions for the beginning of the metaphysics of presence and then to overturn the metaphysical tradition and begin an analysis of Being. He does this through a linguistic analysis of Being and the terms and phrases that are related to Being. The linguistic analysis is important because, for Heidegger,

“the fate of language is grounded in the particular relation of a people to Being” (2000, p. 54) and thus

“the question of Being will be most intimately intertwined with the question about language”

(Heidegger, 2000, p. 54). In other words, even though “language in general is used up and abused”

(Heidegger, 2000, p. 54) and is “an indispensable but masterless, arbitrarily applicable means of communication” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 53), it also serves to show how a group of people relate to each other, their world, and Being in general. Thus, in analyzing language, one can discover how the language users related to and thought of Being. Or, in the words of Gregory Fried, “language is not a being at all,

52 but, like Being itself, it is what gives us access to all beings in the first place” (2001, p. 127); in other words, since people relate to being through language, analysis of language can lead to insight about beings and Being. Thus, in analyzing the German language about Being, Heidegger can investigate how people in the modern world view Being, and in analyzing the Greek language about Being, he can investigate the conception and relation to Being that preceded the turn toward a metaphysics of presence.

The Essence of Being

Inquiry into the essence of Being and of beings must begin with the previously discussed distinction between Being and not-Being. In other words, beings could have been otherwise, or could have not been, which calls the being into doubt, and “in order for such a thing to come into doubt in the first place, we must presume a definite distinction between Being and not-Being” (Heidegger, 2000, p.

82). The fact that the distinction between Being and not-Being is binary, that there are no other options for a being other than to Be or to not-Be, is one of the defining characteristics of Being that set it apart from mere beings, for “everything else besides Being, each and every being, even if it is unique, can still be compared with another being…But Being, in contrast, can be compared to nothing else. Its only other is Nothing” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 83).

The contrast between the multiplicity of beings and the binary of Being and not-Being can shed further light on the nature of Being. Heidegger uses the example of “the universal representation of

‘tree’” (2000, p. 84) to show this. In order to find the essence of the universal representation of “tree”,

“we turn away from the universal representation, to various species of trees and individual examples of these species” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 84). In other words, in order to determine the essence of a tree, one must look at different individual trees representing a variety of species of trees in order to understand which features or qualities they all share and which features vary within the universal representation of

53 tree. These shared qualities can then be built up into the essence of the universal representation of tree.

While this approach is in some ways valid, it can be circular. In order to exclusively use instantiations of the universal representation of tree, or different types and example of trees rather than things that are not trees, one must already have access to the universal representation of tree. In other words “if the self-developing knowledge of the tree as such does not light our way in advance in this enterprise, and does not clearly determine itself and its essential ground, then all this will remain an idle enterprise” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 84). Thus one must use instantiations of trees in order to find the essence of the universal representation of tree, but that essence must be available in order to sort through possible instantiations to determine if they qualify as trees and thus should be used to determine the essence of the universal representation of tree. In other words, “though it may be correct that in order to determine more precisely the essential multiplicity of the essence “tree” we must go through the particular” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 84), or that we determine the essence through looking at examples of trees, “it remains at least equally correct that the illumination of the essential multiplicity and of the essences takes hold and progresses only when we conceive and know more originally the universal essence ‘tree’” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 84). In other words, one determines which beings count as trees through original knowledge of the essence of the universal representation of

“tree”.

This problem of genus, species, and particular can then be traced beyond the universal representation of ‘tree’. In the same way the problem is posed for trees, it can be posed for the essence of ‘plant’, where trees are just one species that needs to be accounted for in the determination of the essence, likewise, the essence of ‘plant’ is subsumed in the universal essence of ‘living thing’ (Heidegger,

2000, p. 84). For every step up to a more general level, there will remain other beings that do not fit into the universal representation, which will allow for distinctions to be made and the essence of the

54 universal representation to be distinguished from the backdrop of the multiplicity of things that fall outside of it. For example, the distinction between instantiations of living things (a tree, a bush, a squirrel, a single celled organism, etc.) and non-living things (my coffee mug, a house, a book, a car, etc.) helps define what the essence of ‘living thing’.

The problem with finding the universal essence of Being arises when all possible distinctions converge into Being, leaving it as the universal that encapsulates the entirety of the multiplicity of beings. This means that instantiations can’t be used to make distinctions between Being and not-Being, because for the instantiation to be available to make distinctions, it must be within Being, and therefore there are no particular instances of not-Being that can be investigated and distinguished from particular instances of Being. Thus, due to its being universal, meaning that every being is encapsulated in Being, one cannot discern the essence of Being through particular instances of being. Rather, one must discuss the universal representation of Being in order to define its essence. Or, as Heidegger notes

Earlier we stressed that we must already know in advance what “tree” means in order to be able

to seek and find what is particular, the species of trees and individuals as such. This is all the

more decisively true of Being (2000, p. 85).

As the universal, “Being is not a being, nor any ingredient of beings that is itself in being”

(Heidegger, 2000, p. 92); in other words, in addition to not being a thing, it is not a component of any of the beings that are instantiations of it. For example, a tree that exists as a being participates in Being completely; it is not a sum of some tree-component of its being and some Being component of its being.

This means that discerning the essence of Being cannot be discerned by finding some component part shared by all beings, but rather by looking at beings in their entireties and how they participate in Being as whole beings. In other words, the essence of Being cannot be found by looking for a shared element

55 that in part constitutes all beings, such as saying “all beings have atoms, therefore atoms are an essential element of Being”, but must be considered as a whole that is distinct from not-Being.

I will not turn to what Heidegger considers to be some of the key aspects of all beings, which make them distinct from non-Being. These features will then factor into the discernment of the essences of beings within Object Oriented Ontology.

Phusis

The first essential quality of Being that is shared by all beings’ and marks the beings distinction from not-Being is what Heidegger calls phusis3. This concept describes the fact that beings put themselves forward as present in their world (Heidegger, 2000, p. 64) and that presence isn’t grounded or dependent on other beings. In other words “phusis means the emergent self-upraising, the self- unfolding that abides in itself” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 64), or an “emerging sway” (Heidegger, 2000, p.

173). Phusis is emergent because it comes from the being itself, rather than from a fundamental ground or from forces outside of the being. The individuality of beings is reinforced in the fact that they are self-upraising, or that they exist as independent entities beyond their surroundings or environments, and that independence is contained within them rather than being defined by their environment or a grounding force. The emergent sway of phusis “suggests the movement of surging force that relentlessly unfolds in the form of beings of distinctive sorts” (Guignon, 2001, 38). The sway of Being is the way that beings exert themselves upon their worlds as separate, individual beings distinct from one another. The sway of Being is the constant coming to presence of beings; by contrast, the sway of beings is their own constant coming to presence in their worlds. For example, as a tree emerges into

Being, its roots will displace soil and absorb nutrients from the soil; its trunk and leaves will block and

3 Heidegger appropriated the term phusis from Greek philosophy, where it is commonly taken to mean ‘nature’, and is often opposed to the productions of people. See Introduction to Metaphysics p. 14-18.

56 absorb sunlight, converting it into nutrients and casting shadows; it will provide some animals, birds and squirrels and insects, with a place to live and forage for food, and so on. The particular way in which the tree is affecting the world around it is the sway of the tree, of the particular being. The tree has an effect on the world in which it is growing due to its coming into being and the particular form in which it is coming-to-be. The sway of the particular being is also an instantiation of the sway of Being. The phusis of the tree is a manifestation of the phusis of Being.

Phusis as self-upraising, whether described as self-unfolding, as a continual coming to presence, or as an emerging sway, is a dynamic activity of beings exerting themselves upon their environments.

Thus, according to Susan Schoenbohm, “phusis may be thought of as a process, but not as a process among others” (2001, p. 146). In other words, it is a process in that it is the way beings interact with other beings in their environment and reveal themselves to other beings in their environment, but it isn’t merely another process for doing that. It doesn’t stand among the other processes of nature such as rusting, heating, or flowing towards equilibrium. These processes are what are taken to be nature, which is fundamentally manifested as “the motions of material things” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 16). For

Heidegger, though, phusis is not the same as nature, but “is standing forth, arising from the concealed and thus enabling the concealed to take its stand for the first time” (2000, p. 16). This means that phusis is the process of coming to presence that allows the other processes or activities of things to take place.

In other words, phusis is the “’process’ in an originary sense of that eventfulness that enables or allows the processes of things to come into appearance, to take a stand ‘for the first time’” (Schoenbohm,

2001, p. 146). So, much like Being isn’t merely the total collection of beings, phusis is not merely “a collection of processes that physical beings exhibit” (Schoenbohm, 2001, p. 146) but is the central process that allows those other properties to exist. Furthermore, its relation with physical processes is similar to the relation between Being and beings; all the processes of nature—all the instances of beings standing forth or exerting their emergent sway—are species within or instantiations of phusis, but the

57 sum of these instantiations cannot encapsulate phusis. In other words, the processes of beings, the species and instantiations of phusis, are derivative from phusis rather than the component parts of phusis; they come from phusis, rather than making up phusis.

Since it is an originary, active process, then, according to Schoenbohm, “we can see the word phusis points not to beings—or even to the being of beings as beings—but to that originary event of the very emerging, for the first time, of some determination” (2001, p. 148) or to the emergence of a particular being. Rather than showing how some being exists in its world, or how existing beings participate in Being, phusis shows the originary act of standing forth and emerging from not-Being.

Phusis, then, is an “emerging, abiding sway [which] includes both ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’ in the narrower sense of fixed continuity” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 16); it is the process of a being becoming itself rather than remaining nothing or emerging as something else, as a different being. It thus involves being in the sense that it brings about beings as continuously existing entities and brings about distinctions between beings as they hold sway over their surroundings in different ways. In other words, phusis is

“the process of something’s coming-to-be-something from nothing” (Schoenbohm, 2001, p. 149) and through its coming to be something, phusis makes it a determinate being distinct from other beings and from not-Being. Phusis, therefore, is the originary process in which a being emerges from not-Being and the process in which the particular form or way that it participates in Being is determined.

While originary, it is also a continual process. Since beings continue to exist in their world as determinate entities, they continue to hold sway over it, remaining in Being and having effects on other beings, and they continue to unfold within it. They continually come-to-be; coming into being is not a onetime event. In other words, rather than coming-to-be and then existing statically, or coming-to-be and then immediately falling back into not-Being, beings are in a continual process of emergence from not-Being. In coming-to-be from not-Being and remaining a being instead of falling back into not-Being,

“a being essentially unfolds, it holds sway” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 196), and since beings are essentially

58 unfolding, and holding sway, where “this sway is the overwhelming coming-to-presence…within which that which comes to presence essentially unfolds as being” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 64), if a being no longer held sway or ceased to be unfolding, it would no longer be a being. Thus, beings must continuously be in a state of unfolding, or of holding sway; they must continuously be in a state of emergence in the world from not-Being, or continuously be in a state of phusis. Therefore, the continual process of phusis not only brings beings into being but also maintains beings in the same originary sense, as beings continue to be held in and to come-to-presence in their determinate form.

The determinate form of the being that is unfolding is also central to phusis, because when a being comes to hold sway over its world, and the other beings in its world, it is doing so in a particular way that is unique to that being. By having a determinant form, the being isn’t an amorphous part of universal Being, but a particular instantiation of a particular species of being that then participates in the universal. In other words, “a being essentially unfolds as this or that; it has this what-determination”

(Heidegger, 2000, p. 196). Therefore, phusis stands as a universal, originary process of unfolding, holding sway, and coming-to-be in which all beings participate, but the nature of this participation is particular to each being, leading to the determinate form that each being takes.

The unfolding of beings and physical sway of phusis brings beings into being and maintains them as beings, and thus

this physical sway can subsequently be thought in relation to the beings that come to be in and

from it and yet can also be thought to ‘have’ or ‘be’ that sway which holds sway in and through,

over and beyond beings (Schoenbohm, 2001, p. 150).

In other words, when a being emerges from not-Being it exerts itself on other beings, or holds sway over them in some way, while at the same time the other beings also have emerged from not-Being and hold sway over their own set of beings with which they enter into some form of relationship. Additionally,

59 two beings can be thought of as mutually holding sway over each other. In its continual emergence in

Being, coffee heats my mug and exerts pressure on its sides, while the mug contains and shapes the volume of the coffee. Phusis can then be conceptualized as this mutual abiding sway among beings, which they exert on each other in their continual emergence from not-Being. However, it also exceeds the totality of these relationships as that which not only holds beings in sway over each other but also continually holds them in a state of coming-to-be out of not-Being, or in a state of emerging as something rather than as nothing.

Thus phusis contains, but cannot be reduced to “(a) the articulation of itself, (b) the beings that emerge ‘from’ it , (c) the event of emerging, (d) what, subsequent to the emerging of something, comes to be called nothing” (Schoenbohm, 2001, p. 149) and stands above and in excess to “the entire constellation of these” (Schoenbhom, 2001, p. 149) factors. This excess, or the way in which phusis stands beyond its various determinations is also central to the conception of phusis. This is the case because, in order for there to be future possibilities beyond what has already taken determinate form as some being, and in order for a being’s not-Being to be possible, there must have been and continue to be the possibility both that some other determinate form could have taken place or will take place, and that the being could have not come out of not-being and may once again fall into not-Being. If phusis were exhausted, or if it did not exceed articulations and emergences, then other possibilities would not be available and beings would be reduced from a constant state of emergence and holding sway to a static condition of static, unchanging presence.

Alētheia

Beings present themselves to other beings, and this presentation is fundamental to the Being of beings. Therefore, “Being means appearing. Appearing does not mean something derivative, which from time to time meets up with Being. Being essentially unfolds as appearing” (Heidegger, 2000, p.

107). This unfolding then takes the form of phusis (Heidegger, 2000, p. 107) and results in the being manifesting itself to, or no longer being concealed from other beings. In other words, “insofar as a being as such is, it places itself into and stands in unconcealment” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 107), and this unconcealment is what Heidegger calls alētheia, referring to the Greek conception of truth4. For example, as a tree emerges into Being from not-Being, it reveals itself to the soil as its roots push the soil aside and absorb nutrients from it. The tree shows itself to the grass and the passerby through the shade that it casts as its coming to presence alters the world that the grass inhabits. Squirrels and birds can experience the tree as a place to live and forage for food, and so forth.

Since truth is understood as unconcealment, or appearance, which is fundamental to Being,

“truth belongs to the essence of Being. To be a being—this implies to be made manifest, to step forth in appearing, to set itself forth, to pro-duce something” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 107-108). Thus, all beings appear, or show themselves to their environments. Beings are not merely apparent in their environments, but they are productive in those environments. In other words, the being appears to other beings, and those beings are affected by that appearance, it is present to its environment, and its environment changes due to its presence.

The presence and appearance of a being stands in contrast to not-Being, which is a “step away from appearance, from presence” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 108). In other words, not-Being is when presence is completely withdrawn and there is no appearance or unfolding of the being. Appearance, then, as an essential aspect of Being consists of a continual act of beings presenting themselves to other beings, but not all beings are continuously apparent to one another, and when they are apparent to one another the appearance isn’t complete. For example, as I look at my coffee mug, I see the front and top of it, its shape and size, a glimpse of the inside and the level of coffee within it. I see its dark color and

4 Alētheia, in Greek philosophy, meant unforgetting, which Heidegger then took to be unconcealment.

61 the white writing on its front. These appear to me, or are present for me, whereas the back and bottom are not present for me. As I rotate and lift the mug, not only do I now see the bottom and rear of the mug, but its weight and texture become apparent. In doing this, the top and front of the mug are withdrawn from my presence and concealed. Therefore, “the essence of appearance involves this stepping-forth and stepping-away, this hither and hence in the genuinely demonstrative, indicative sense” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 108). In other words, the unconcealment of alētheia that is essential to

Being is a continual process of the appearance of beings to other beings. The availability to be experienced is not simply a continual coming-to-presence or showing of oneself, but a continual process of revealing and concealing where a being shows one or another aspect of itself while withdrawing another from the presence of its perceiver. Thus, the unfolding of alētheia is never a complete unconcealment, but a continual act of partially appearing.

Thus, there is phusis, which is a being’s exertion on its environment, and alētheia, as a being’s availability to its environment and other beings. Phusis and alētheia share an essential relationship. As phusis occurs, as the being unfolds and makes itself manifest, an availability for other beings to manifest themselves onto the first being also unfolds as the unconcealment of the first being to the other beings, or as alētheia. As the being holds sway over other beings as phusis, the other beings holds sway over it as alētheia. In other words, as a being holds sway over other beings, it also reveals itself to those other beings.

Violence

While in many ways reducible to phusis and alētheia, or the interplay of holding sway and coming-to-presence, another essential feature of beings that will be important in determining the essences of objects within Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology is that beings do violence to the other beings in their environment. In coming into being, in becoming present to other beings, a being changes

62 the other beings around it. This violence comes from the sway that beings hold over one another, for

“the violent, the overwhelming is the essential character of the sway itself” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 159).

The violence, implicit in the act and process of phusis, is thus essential to the essence of Being, and therefore present in all beings.

Heidegger breaks violence into two categories; the first is the violence of nature, which he calls dikē, and the second the violence that humans do to nature, technē (Dahlstrom, 2001, p. 92). The violence of nature is the sway that being that are not Dasein hold over each other and over Dasein, such as water rusting iron, tree roots breaking apart rocks, my coffee mug holding coffee and preventing it from running out and forming a puddle on my desk, and a raindrop falling and getting someone’s hair wet. Technē, on the other hand, is the how people change and hold sway over other beings, such as cutting down trees, building things, and creating a new environment.

Being, then, is fundamentally violent, and all violence is carried out within Being. Just as phusis is a continual process of coming-to-be and holding sway and alētheia is a continuous act of appearing, doing violence is the constant state of beings. In Being, or in standing in contrast to not-Being, beings are continually changing their environments and being changed by others as they themselves are held in the sway of other beings. Thus, “doing violence must shatter against the excessive violence of Being, as long as Being holds sway in its essence, as phusis, as emerging sway” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 173). In other words, the violence done by any one being is merely one of the countless instantiation of the violence done within the universal violence in the essence of Being.

Compatibility Problems for Heidegger and OOO

Heidegger offers an in depth explanation of the concept of Being and how different beings participate within it. Essential to participation within Being is that beings reveal themselves to other beings, or alētheia, and that beings hold sway over one another, or phusis. The particular nature of the

63 unconcealment of beings and of the sway that beings hold over one another is due to each being having its own determinate form.

While, for Heidegger, the form of the being determines how it interacts with other beings and how it holds sway and unveils itself, he does not address the determination of the determinate form of the being in detail. In other words, he addresses how beings participate in Being and how they exist rather than not existing, but not how a being comes to exist and continues to exist as itself in particular.

He doesn’t explain how a being is a coffee mug rather than a desk, ant, building, or ecosystem. While allowing for particular determinate forms of beings, Heidegger’s focus is on the essential qualities shared by all things that participate in Being, and therefore an account of the essential differences between different beings is not part of his project.

This distinction between beings is important in developing a theory of the essences of individual beings beyond the universal essence of Being. Determining what makes one being separate from another, while both participate in Being, and how they come to be, exist, and cease to be—or their birth life and death—requires further analysis. Beyond how they participate in Being, we must investigate how they uniquely participate in Being in a way that is not universal to all Beings.

Insights from Heidegger

In the preceding analysis of Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, we have mostly focused on his concepts of phusis and alētheia as, respectively, the sway beings hold over other beings and how beings reveal themselves to other beings. These are essential to Being, and all beings that participate in

Being participate in phusis and alētheia. Thus, if a being ceases to participate in phusis or alētheia, it has ceased to participate in Being, and has ceased to be.

This means that the sway that a being holds over others and how a being is unveiled can then be used as a sort of boundary condition in determining a being’s participation in Being. In other words, an

64 object’s ability to enter into causal relationships and present sensual qualities to other objects as well as interact with the sensual qualities of other objects can be set as the determining conditions for the object’s being an object, such that if those conditions were never met the object would not exist, and if the conditions cease to be met the object will cease to exist. Due to the individuality of objects in

Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology, then, each object’s ability to interact with other objects is particular to itself, and thus each participates in Being in its own particular form. From there, an individual object may be able to be determined as itself by investigating its particular way of participating in Being, or through its particular forms of phusis and alētheia. These particular forms could thus be used as the boundary conditions to its existence as a particular object and then be used to determine the essential qualities and relations of the object. This will be further discussed in the next chapter.

Chapter 4: A New Theory of Essence

While objects have essences in Object Oriented Ontology, as seen in chapter one, theories of essence have not been developed. The philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger offer some resources for providing a robust theory of essences for Object Oriented Ontology. In this chapter I will begin with a discussion of consciousness’s place within OOO. I will then discuss how Heidegger’s concepts of phusis and alētheia can provide a general theory of essences and then show how a form of

Husserl’s eidetic reduction can be integrated into OOO to make inferences about the essences of particular objects.

No Ontological Priority

As we have seen, Object Oriented Ontology gives no ontological priority to conscious objects, such as humans. This applies both to their reality—human persons are not more real than other objects and do not define the reality of other objects—and to how they relate to other objects. In other words, a consciousness interacting with an inanimate object is not ontologically different than two inanimate objects interacting with one another. The relationship between the real and sensual objects is the same for my drinking from my coffee mug and for my coffee mug resting on my desk; when watching a match burn a cotton ball, “there is, in fact, cotton-in-itself that withdraws from fire no less than from human awareness” (Harman, 2011, p. 137). Human interaction is just one of the countless relationships of withdraw and presentation that objects are within and doesn’t have special access to the withdrawn object. In other words, “humans occupy no privileged place within being and…between the human/object relation and any other object/object relation there is only a difference in degree, not

66 kind” (Bryant, 2011, p. 32). While causal relations involving humans or conscious objects may be different, these differences are variations within the type ‘object/object relations’, rather than a separate ontological class of relations.

Conscious objects also exist within higher order objects as constitutive parts. These higher order objects withdraw from human consciousness just as they withdraw from the other objects with which they interact. In other words,

human consciousness does not transcend the cosmos and observe it from a neutral scientific

void, but forever burrows through an intermediate layer of reality, no more aware of the larger

objects to which it belongs than the tool-beings that withdraw from it (Harman, 2011, p. 113).

When a conscious object is part of a higher order object, such as a university, corporation, nation, economic system, or neighborhood, the intricacies of the internal relations are withdrawn from it and the emergent properties that the object displays are not completely known to the consciousness; thus, the emergent object is partially withdrawn. These objects cannot be reduced down to conscious objects, because conscious objects don’t exhaust the component objects that form them. A neighborhood consists of houses and a university has buildings, greenspace, computers and so on beyond human members; humans are not more constitutive of these higher order objects than the other constituent objects. A neighborhood may not be able to exist without people, but it also couldn’t exist without homes. Even if a social object were to exist with only conscious objects as its constitutive objects, no deconstruction of the social object could arrive at merely a set of conscious objects, because the object exists beyond its components, through their causal relationships with one another and their interplay of presentation and withdrawal. The shape of all these causal relationships creates an emergent entity which is irreducible to any of the members or relations.

In this way, too, human consciousness is no different than any other object. They all become constitutive parts of higher order objects, which exist as sensual objects to them and to which they present their own sensual qualities. This, of course, isn’t to say that humans or other objects with consciousness experience the world in the same way as non-conscious objects, but that the difference isn’t ontologically significant. The difference is in the sensual qualities that are available to the conscious object and how the object exerts its own qualities on the world, but these differences are merely about how objects interact with each other; the distinction is not a fundamental ontological rift.

In other words “the difference between people and minerals is vast indeed, but so is that between stars and black holes, or hunter-gatherers and string theorists” (Harman, 2011, p. 119), where different objects, both conscious and non-conscious, experience their respective worlds drastically differently, while still being ontologically equal.

Thus, in Object Oriented Ontology, ontological divides shouldn’t be between different kinds of entities, between the conscious and non-conscious, or between more or less complex entities, but between objects and relations, or between the real and the sensual (Harman, 2011, p. 119). All objects thus have an equal claim to being and are of the same kind—emergent structures of relations between constitutive objects—and all relations are of the same kind: one object presenting its causal profile to another, or a sensual object interacting with a real object.

The fact that consciousness has no ontological priority in OOO means the essence of an object cannot be dictated by consciousness and is not dependent on an object’s relation with consciousness.

In other words, defining and discerning essences in OOO must give equal weight to all relations the object is in rather than giving priority to the consciousness-object relation.

The Essences of Objects

Heidegger presented beings as holding sway, or phusis, over other beings as one of the essential characteristics of Being, as something that in some form or another, all beings participate in; all beings have “fundamental experience of being as phusis” (Heidegger, 2000, p. 194). His concept of phusis can provide the groundwork for a robust theory of essence in OOO, which is currently lacking. In this section

I will apply phusis, and to a lesser extent, alethia, to Object Oriented Ontology to develop a theory of essences, and in the next section I will use Husserl’s eidetic reduction to develop a way of discerning the essences of particular objects.

For Harman, like Heidegger (2000, p. 4), all objects are beings, from atoms to pencils, people, universities, ecosystems, countries, and planets, and therefore all objects would participate in Being.

Thus, in applying the essence of Being from Heidegger’s ontology to OOO, objects, since they participate in Being, hold sway or participate in phusis, and if they ceased to hold sway, they would cease to be participating in Being, and would no longer be beings. They would then cease to be objects. Therefore the sway that the object holds over other objects in its environment is essential to its being an object.

My mug is sitting on my desk in front of a couple of pens and next to my computer. As it sits on my desk, it presents the sensual profile of its base to the desk, exerting pressure on the desk, and likewise, the desk exerts a force back onto it, presenting its own sensual profile and exerting a normal force and pressure back on it, effectively holding the mug up. If the desk were not present, the mug would fall to (or be placed on) the floor; in other words, the desk is preventing the relation between the floor and the desk. When I look at the mug, the sensual object is the visible object for me, and I see it.

As I see it, it also sits in front of my pens, and prevents me from seeing them. Thus, the particular set of relations of the mug’s position and the position of the pens on the desk prevent the Stan-sees-pen relation from coming to be. Additionally, the mug holds coffee, and the coffee, as a liquid, conforms to

69 the shape of the mug. If the mug weren’t there, the coffee would be in a puddle on my desk. The mug is then preventing the coffee-desk relation. The ceramic of the mug is also a decent insulator, and thus slows down the dissipation of heat from the coffee into the air and changes how the air and the coffee relate. The coffee mug is thus determining the relations that the coffee can take, as well as the relations that I have with the pens and the desk beneath it that it obscures. In this way, the coffee mug is holding sway over its environment. At the same time, the environment is holding sway over the coffee mug, holding it in its position in space, heating the mug, and so on, as well as preventing the coffee mug from entering into a causal relationship with the floor.

The sway of an object on its environment and the environment on the object take the form of both the causal relationships that the object is in with its environment, and the causal relations that the object is preventing from occurring. The desk is holding up the mug and preventing the mug from entering into a causal relation with the floor; the mug is holding in the coffee and making the coffee conform to its shape, while also preventing the coffee from resting on the desk.

The sway of the object on its environment is thus comprised of the causal relationships that the object has with the other objects in its environment and the causal relationships within the environment that the object prevents from occurring. Additionally, since all relations form new objects, the object and the surrounding objects with which it is in causal relationships together constitute another higher level object. Causation then occurs as internal relations within the more complex, higher level objects.

In other words “All objects relate on the inside of another object” (Harman, 2005, 0. 189), and the set of the external causal relations that the object is in that contain it and within which it relates to other objects is what Bryant calls its environment (2011, p. 146). Thus my mug, my pens, my computer, and myself can make up the object that is my workspace. This object has emergent properties that are beyond those of any of the individual objects and that constrain the individual objects, but that come from the individual objects acting in conjunction. Where the coffee mug rests on top of the desk is

70 determined by whichever arrangement of objects is most conducive to writing on the computer. While it is placed where it is by my hand, this placement is also determined in part by where my computer is, where the edge of the desk is, and so forth, such that its position is different than where it would be had the other members of the environment not been in the relationship as well. Thus the downward causation of the totality of the environment exerting itself on the mug is an instance of the environment, as a whole rather than in parts, holding sway over the mug.

Objects are determinate beings, or instantiations of being in the world, and therefore they take a determinate, particular form. The objects, then, not only hold sway over their environments, but they hold a particular sway over their worlds, or over the set of possible objects with which they can enter into causal relations. In other words, their being isn’t merely in the fact that they have relations with other objects and prevent other relationships between objects from happening, but in the particular type of relations that they hold and prevent. The object in part determines what objects are formed out of it and around it. The opacity of my mug prevents some of my visual relationships, such as the relationship of seeing the pens and seeing the spot of the desk where the mug sits. Its solidity and weight is exerted as pressure on the desk and its shape and solidity contain the coffee within it. These particular instances of sway exert the existence of the coffee mug on its surroundings, and in such a way that if it didn’t obscure the desk beneath it, rest on the desk, and contain the coffee, it would not be the coffee mug. Thus, objects do not participate in Being through merely holding sway over their environments, but in holding sway in a particular fashion. An object holds sway in a way that is unique and particularly to it.

On the other hand, objects exist beyond their relations, and could theoretically exist without being in a relation with any external objects, or in Harman’s words “an object is real when it forms an autonomous unit able to withstand certain changes in its pieces. This does not require additional relations with other entities” (2011, p. 123). Therefore their being cannot be reliant on actual

71 occurrences of phusis over their environments and objects in their environments. Even still, these objects are holding sway over their internal objects. The objects that make up the internal relations of the higher order object are still being constrained, still in a certain set of relationships because of the higher order object and still prevented from entering into relationships because of the higher order object that they are within. If my coffee mug were somehow completely isolated from all external objects, it still would be made out of its constituent silicate molecules that are held together in a particular shape, and those atoms are constrained and prevented from moving about and forming different relationships with each other.

The internal relations of the constituent objects also define the external relations that the object forms. Back on my desk, the weight, opacity, and solidity of my mug, through which the external relations take their forms, are the result of the relationships between the silicate molecules that the mug is made out of. In other words, the internal sway that the object holds over the objects internal to it sets the conditions for the external sway that the object holds over external objects, its environment, and the higher order objects that it is a constituent object of.

This shows a suite of reciprocal relationships that the object is in. At the same time that the object holds sway over its internal objects, those objects hold sway over it. At the same time that the object holds sway over a higher order object, the higher order object is constraining it and holding sway over it. At the same time that the object is holding sway over another object, that object is holding sway over it. The mug holds its silicate molecules in their positions and internal relations as the molecules and their relationships dictate the properties and shapes of the mug, the mug exerts downward force on the table as the table exerts a normal force up at the mug, and the mug was placed on the desk as part of the workspace while other objects in the workspace are placed around it.

On the other hand, an object holds sway over other objects through its causal relationships, while they hold sway over it in the inverse causal relationships. Phusis is an essential quality of beings, and thus is essential to all objects. On the other hand, objects exist independently of external objects, and therefore are not dependent on any individual external, causal relationship. Thus, holding sway is necessary for the object to be existent, but no individual or particular case of holding sway is essential to the object. Additionally, as we saw in the first chapter, an object’s constituent objects can change if the structure remains, and therefore the internal sway of the object can change from internal object to internal object, and the existence of the object is beyond any particular instance of phusis internal to the object. Finally, not all objects need to be a constituent object of higher order objects (Harman, 2011, p.

113), so that while objects can hold sway over higher order objects, holding sway over higher order objects isn’t essential to the being of the object. Thus, the sway that the object holds over its environment is essential to it, but no particular instance of the object holding sway is essential. The way in which my mug exerts itself on my desk and the coffee is essential to my mug, but breaking these relations, moving the mug from the desk or drinking all the coffee doesn’t destroy the mug or break any essential relations. In other words, the essence is within the set of internal relations that make up the mug, rather than the external relations that they manifest in. The essence is the internal relations of the mug that dictate the sway that it holds over its world.

I will call the set of essential, internal relations that dictate how it affects the world are the object’s determinate form. These essential relationships create a distinct and determinate causal profile in the object. The causal profile is then present to other objects as the sensual object, which will then exert itself upon the other objects, hold sway over them, and enter into causal relationship with them.

The other side of how an object presents itself to other objects is how other objects reveal themselves to it. In Heidegger’s philosophy, this was a continual act of unconcealment, or alētheia.

While phusis was the sway that a being held over other beings, alētheia was how a being came to be

73 present to other beings and available for them to exert their own sway. In OOO, an object holds sway through its sensual presentations to other objects, much like phusis. Other objects show themselves as sensual objects with sensual qualities, which interact with the real original object and its real qualities.

In this, the object is presented to others in causal relations, in a fashion comparable to alētheia. These other objects are revealed to, or become unconcealed through the medium of the sensual object. This sensual object is determined by the real qualities of both involved objects. The real qualities of the primary object determine the ways it will be able to interact with the other object, or how the two withdrawn substances will interact, and these qualities are in turn determined by the internal structure of the object, or the relationships between the constituent objects of the object. For example, the desk’s sensual profile at the bottom of my coffee mug is that of a solid, even surface exerting a normal force on the bottom of the mug. The sensual profile exists as it is because the mug has the right real qualities—solidity and the like—that the internal relations of the desk can be mediated as solid and even, whereas a wave of light wouldn’t experience the desk as even and an alpha particle wouldn’t register it as solid. The substance and the real qualities of the mug determined how the desk’s substance and qualities were presented to it.

The nature of the internal relationships determines the sensual object that is put forth and which exerts itself over other objects and holds sway over them, and it also determines how other objects are able to be revealed to the object. They determine both how the object unveils itself to others and how other objects can unveil themselves to it.

As mentioned in chapter one, both essential and inessential qualities, as side effects of both essential and inessential internal relations, determine how an object is presented to other objects and what sensual objects and qualities mediate the relations between objects. The determinate form of the object as the particular object that exerts itself upon its world, though, would seem to be formed by the essential internal relationships, because the loss of an inessential relationship would leave the object in

74 its determinate form behind, even though the relationship was broken. Therefore the determinate form of the object is constituted by the essential internal relationships of the object.

Beyond merely constraining the external relationships an object can enter into, foreign objects, the object’s environment, and the higher order objects that the object helps to constitute can also change the internal relations that make up the object. These are causal external relations that change the object, or cases where the sensual object presented to the original object alters the set of internal relations that make up the original object’s substance. Continual use can rub off the writing on the mug or the condensation from it can wear away some of the finish on the desk, such that the formerly internal relations of the writing on the mug and the finish on the desk were removed from the object by an external object. External relationships can also break apart the essential relations of an object. For example, if I dropped my mug and it shattered, the external relationship between my mug and the floor would break apart the mug and the essential relations that constitute it.

The essential relationships then determine the causal profile of the object and how it is able to exert itself and change the world around it. The breaking of an inessential relationship will not have a strong effect on how the object can exert itself over other objects. For example, a chip on the rim of my coffee mug is the fracturing of some of the internal relationships that had formerly made up the mug, but even without those relations it still exerts itself on the world in the same fashion. The sensual objects that it experiences are the same and it still holds the same sway over its environment. It still rests on the desk and exerts a downward pressure, it still constrains the coffee within it, and it still stands opaque and blocks my vision of the desk beneath it and the pens behind it. On the other hand, if the mug were to shatter, it would not be able to holds a similar sway over its world: it wouldn’t exert the same downward pressure profile on the desk, it couldn’t constrain the coffee and the coffee wouldn’t adjust to the mug’s shape, and the pieces would be obscuring the visibility of a radically different profile of the desk.

Thus, the essential relationships that make up an object are those that determine its causal profile, which sensual qualities are presented to it and what type of sensual qualities it presents to other objects. When an internal relationship is broken but the object still exerts a causal profile that is largely the same, and the sensual qualities available to the object are largely the same, then it seems that the broken relationship was inessential. The chip on my mug didn’t change the fashion in which the mug experienced the world, and the nature of the causal relationships it was in with other objects didn’t change, thus the chipping of the mug broke only inessential relationships.

If an object is still capable of holding its particular, determinate sway over its environment after a relationship is broken, then it remains the same object, and thus its essential relationships were preserved despite the change. If the object no longer holds sway in the same manner, then an essential relationship was broken and the object no longer remains. Similarly, if a relationship breaks but other objects still reveal themselves to the first in the same manner, then the original object remains, but if the unconcealing is fundamentally different, then the object has fallen out of being and a different object stands in its place.

Finally, the causal profile of the object prevents relationships from happening around it. The mug prevents me from seeing the desk underneath it and the coffee from pooling onto the desk. If an essential relationship is broken, it will no longer prevent the same set of relations from occurring, and if the set of relationships that it is able to prevent remains the same, then the object’s essential relationships were preserved and only inessential ones were destroyed. When my mug is chipped, it is still opaque and maintains roughly the same profile for obscuring my vision, and the mug is still solid and shaped such that it constrains the coffee from pouring out on the table. If the mug were shattered, though, then while remaining opaque the profile of prevented visual relationships would be radically altered, and it would no longer hold the coffee away from the desk.

In integrating insights from Heidegger’s ontology, a new theory of essences can be added to

Object Oriented Ontology. The essence of the object is the set of relations within the internal structure of the object that determine the sway that the object holds, or can hold, over other objects and its environment. The sway of the object is particular to the object, and is the fashion in which the object can influence or change other objects and its environment, through the causal relationships it can enter into and prevent.

Discerning Essences

In this section, I will build on Husserl’s eidetic variation in order to develop a method for determining the essence of an object in OOO. As seen in chapter two, in performing the eidetic reduction in Husserl’s phenomenology, I imagine variations of the object of consciousness and tests those variations against my intuitions about the object in order to draw conclusions about the essence of the object. In a similar fashion, I can intuit the essence of an object within OOO based off of the object’s sensual presentations. In the reduction, I bracket imagined changes that don’t result in the intuition that the object of consciousness is no longer the same object; because the object survives the change, the qualities are inessential. On the other hand, if the change results in the object ceasing to be itself, then the quality whose change resulted in the end of the object is an essential quality. Through iterations of this process, I can find the essence of an object of consciousness. Within Object Oriented

Ontology, I can weigh various presentations of sensual qualities against my intuitions of the object to make inferences about the essences of objects.

As seen in chapter two, one of the main problems in integrating Object Oriented Ontology and

Husserl’s phenomenology is that the reduction is carried out by conscious objects for conscious objects.

When the eidetic reduction is carried out to find the essence of my mug, phenomenologically, the object of the reduction is the mug-for-me; the relationship through which the coffee mug is being analyzed is

77 my relationship with the coffee mug. Thus, in OOO terms, in carrying out an eidetic reduction, the object being analyzed is the sensual object which exists exclusively for the particular, analyzing conscious object. This is an appropriate scope for the phenomenological project, as phenomenology studies the structures of consciousness and experiences of conscious objects. While the phenomenological method could perhaps be used to determine the essence of the sensual object for consciousness, a direct use of the phenomenological method wouldn’t expose the withdrawn substance of an object or the essential relationships that form it.

Since Object Oriented Ontology is a realist ontology, in which objects and their relations exist independently of any external object, one should be able to make judgements about the substance of an object, which cannot be experienced, based off of the experienced sensual object. The real, withdrawn relations and properties are manifested through the sensuous object, which is how the real properties of the object in question are mediated to the object interacting with it. When a sensual object is presented to a conscious object with sufficient knowledge of its own perceptual properties and how they relate to external objects, the conscious object could make justifiable judgments about the real qualities of the object and the substance of the object based off of the sensual object presented to it. For example, the shininess of the sensual mug can lead to a set of beliefs about the surface roughness of the mug, presupposing the perceiver has the requisite knowledge of the processes of perception and interaction of light with surfaces.

If one can move beyond the sensual object and its qualities to making reasoned judgments about an object’s real qualities and substance, and if one can make judgments about the essential qualities of a sensual object, then one should be able to make inferences about the withdrawn essence of the object. A form of free variation could be used to determine the possible variations of an object’s causal profile in which it would hold the same, or a similar enough, determinate sway over the perceiving conscious object. One could imagine changes in the sensual object that would cause the

78 perceiving object to judge that it held the same determinate sway over him and others that caused it to hold a sway that was distinct from the original object’s sway. After a variation that is similar to the phenomenological process, one could then, in a similar fashion to making inferences about the real qualities and substances, make inferences about the changes in internal relations that would bring about the variations performed in the first stage. If the variations performed didn’t change the determinate form in which the object held sway over the conscious object perceiving it, then the internal relations that would have to be changed would not be essential relations, and any qualities lost would not be essential qualities. If the variation is such that the sway the object holds over the observer has fundamentally changed, then the relations that would have to change within the sensual object as the variation changed it would be essential internal relations, because their alteration would result in the object no longer being itself.

For example, in order to intuit the essence of my coffee mug, I could perform free variation upon it. I can first imagine that it had a wider diameter. With this variation, the mug would appear a little larger, feel a little heavier, hold more coffee, and so on, but it would still strike me as being the same mug. Thus, an increase in the diameter of the sensual mug would not be an essential change, and

I can infer that the withdrawn, internal relations that lead to the mug’s diameter to be inessential relations. I can also imagine the mug as green or blue instead of black. The sensual object would, once again, remain the same to me, though with the quality of greenness or blueness. Once again, I can infer that the internal relations that define the sensual manifestation of color to be inessential relations. On the other hand, I can imagine that the mug is fractured, or broken into a couple of pieces. It would no longer hold liquids, and while having the same set of components, would no longer be the same shape.

It would appear to no longer hold sway over me in the same way, and would thus no longer be my mug.

I can then infer that the internal relations that hold the mug together in a solid, singular form to be essential relations. I can also imagine the mug to be porous, such that it would no longer contain liquids

79 and determine that, once again, the object’s sensual manifestation would no longer be presented to me as a coffee mug. Thus I can conclude that an essential aspect of the mug-for-me is that it be able to contain fluids, and the internal relations that cause the mug to be able to contain fluids are essential relations.

Much like in the eidetic reduction, intuitions play a central role in this process, and these intuitions are based on the person’s experience and familiarity with the object in question. Additionally, the essential relations make up the withdrawn substance of the object, which is unavailable to the observer. Thus, if an essential relation of my mug is broken, the mug no longer holds its particular sway over me as the mug and, as a result, I no longer experience the sensual object as the mug. Since the object which formerly was experienced as a mug no longer is experienced as a mug, the change in internal relations which brought about the change in the sensual object can be reasoned to be an essential relationship.

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, conscious objects do not receive any ontological priority within OOO. This means that any determination of an object’s essence based on how a person interacts with the object, or based on the sensual object that it presents to the conscious object, will be incomplete. The sway that the object holds over non-conscious objects in its environment is just as important to its being as the sway it holds over conscious objects. Therefore inferences into the essences of objects based solely on the sensual object presented to conscious objects will be insufficient in determining the essence of an object.

Essential relations are internal to the object; they are part of the withdrawn substance which is then manifested in the sensual presentation of the object. Thus, just as the internal structure of an object can be inferred from the sensual profile of the object, the essence can be investigated through the analysis of the particular causal profile that the object exerts over its environment and the world

80 that the object is open to. Using a form of variation, one can check which of the object’s relations are essential to the object holding its particular sway over other objects and thus make up the essential structure of the object. In discerning the essence of the mug, one would analyze the determinate form that all its causal relationships take and find the acceptable and unacceptable variations of these relations.

While an observer cannot experience anything beyond the sensual object presented to her, in observing the object she can see how it interacts with other objects. She cannot see the vicarious causation that occurs between them, but she does interact with the sensual presentation of the composite object brought into existence by the two objects’ relation. For example, I can only experience my mug through the sensual object that is presented to me, and when my mug interacts with my desk, I cannot see or experience the sensual object that the desk is presenting to the mug or that the mug is presenting to the desk. Since the mug resting on the desk is a legitimate causal relationship, the two objects form a composite object, the mug-desk object. I can interact with the mug-desk object and make inferences into the structure of that object in the same fashion that I was able to make inferences about the mug itself. In other words, the causal relationship between the mug and the desk is an essential, internal relationship within the mug-desk object. I can then analyze this relationship in the same way that I could analyze the internal relations of the mug and thus analyze the sensual presentations between two objects external to myself.

Thus, one could use an analysis which is analogous to eidetic phenomenology to determine the essential characteristics of relations between objects. It is worth noting that the phenomenological reductions being performed are being done by conscious objects to intuit the essences of real, external objects. The essences found through this process are present in the object regardless of the presence of a conscious object and regardless of the investigations of the conscious object.

The mug’s being is such that it holds sway over the desk in a particular, determinate form. This sway is the way that the mug constrains the desk and the desk constrains the mug within the composite mug-desk. The effect that the coffee mug has on the desk is the downward force of its weight, the profile of the area of the bottom of the mug, the prevented relationships with the liquid in the mug and the light that would otherwise strike where the mug was sitting and so forth. If the mug had a wider radius, and thus weighed a little more and covered a wider area on the desk, the same properties—such as the hardness and weight of the mug—would be interacting. Thus, the determinate sway of the mug over the desk would appear to remain intact with this variation.

On the other hand, if the mug were porous and the coffee were able to seep through it, then the mug would not be preventing the relationships whose absence seem to be central to how the mug interacts with the desk. In other words, the set of qualities that are exerted on the desk would be different and the set of qualities that would otherwise prevent the coffee from flowing onto the desk would have been replaced. From there, I can infer that the internal relations that make the mug solid as opposed to porous are essential to the mug. In a similar way, if the mug were broken into several pieces, it wouldn’t be preventing the coffee-desk relationship, and it also wouldn’t be asserting a similar pressure profile on the desk, so the relations that keep the mug together are essential for the mug’s sway over the desk.

The mug is in more relationships than just those with myself and the desk; it is also in causal relationships with the coffee, the air in the room, the light coming from my lamp, and so on. The mug’s essence is determined in these relationships as well. Therefore it is impossible to determine the essence of an object through examining only a few relationships. In other words, the essential internal relations of an object determine how it affects the object’s entire environment and the world that the internal relations of the object open the object up to. The particular sway of the mug that is determined by its essential internal relations determines how it interacts with the coffee, the air, the room it’s sitting in,

82 the tourism industry5, and so forth. It also includes the relations that it is capable of entering into, though it may not currently be in them, such as how the mug would interact with my chair, water or tea, packaging material, a different room or home, and so forth.

In more theoretical terms, one needs to analyze the sensual objects that the object presents to other objects through an analysis of the causal relationships that the objects form, and then perform free variations around those causal relationships. This will determine which relations are necessary to the determinate form that the object exerts on its environment. The internal relations that can change without changing the way in which the object can interact with its world are thus inessential to it, because they are not necessary to the sway in which the object comes to be.

The process of variation may result in each sensual profile of the object presenting a different set of essential and inessential relationships. The essence manifested in my mug’s sensual presentation to my desk may be different from the essential relationships made present in its relationship with myself, such as the degree to which it can conduct and withstand heat. Since no object has ontological priority over any other, no single object should receive priority in determining which qualities and internal relations are essential or inessential. Thus, if a quality is essential to any external relation, with any other object, it should be considered essential to the object. By studying more external relationships, one can find more essential relations and develop a more comprehensive list of essential qualities.

Due to the withdrawal of an object’s substance and the inaccessibility of the essential relationships, knowledge of an object’s essence can never be complete, much as the eidetic reduction for Husserl cannot result in complete knowledge of essences. In addition to this, the object has many relations with the non-conscious objects in its environment and is available to a world of non-conscious

5 The mug was purchased in a museum gift shop.

83 objects. The determination of the internal relations essential to the object’s particular causal profile to other objects is then inherently limited by the withdrawal of both objects in the relevant interaction.

The shortcoming is epistemic, not ontological. The essential relations of an object exist within it regardless of an observer’s ability to recognize them. Furthermore, as a person develops more familiarity with the objects she can make more accurate judgments about the causal profile of the object and how it interacts with other objects. Knowledge of an object’s essence is asymptotic. While complete knowledge of an object’s essence is not possible, research and experience with the object can result in ever greater knowledge of it and its essential structure.

Conclusion

In Object Oriented Ontology, individual objects are made up of essential and inessential relations between component objects. Little has been said about essences, though. The philosophies of Edmund

Husserl and Martin Heidegger had a great influence on the philosophers who developed OOO, and thus I have developed a theory of the essences of objects was developed through an investigation of these two philosopher’s theories.

Heidegger’s conceptions of phusis and alētheia being essential to the Being of beings shed light on conceptions of essence without relying on some form of an external ground. Each object is a particular object, rather than an instantiation of a form or kind, and has its own, unique sensual profile that it exerts on other objects and upon its environment. Each object is also available to its environment in its own particular way, being able to enter into a set of relationships with sensual objects based off of its own withdrawn structure. Some changes to the structure of an object will alter the way in which an object can interact with its environment in a fundamental way. When this happens, an essential relation is lost or changed. When a change doesn’t alter the world of objects which the object is open to, then the essential relations remain intact and the object remains essentially the same.

An object’s essence is internal to the object. The essence is part of the object’s structure which is withdrawn from the experience of other objects. Therefore, the essence cannot be directly experienced by other objects, particularly by people or other conscious objects, who are trying to discern them. Since OOO is a realist ontology, and the withdrawn structures exist regardless of how they are experienced, and those structures dictate how the object is presented, one should be able to

85 make inferences about the withdrawn nature of the object based on the sensual object mediating them.

Using a form of Husserl’s eidetic reduction, one can intuit variations in the sensual presentation that would either fundamentally change the experience of the object or leave the object essentially the same and then infer essential and inessential relations from the variation.

One cannot take only the human-object relation into account but must also consider the various object-object relations that the object is in or could be in. Since a new object is formed when two objects enter into a causal relationship with one another, the human observer can perform a variation on the composite object and make inferences about the internal relations within the causal object. In doing so, the observer makes inferences about the essential relations of the component object. These inferences are imperfect and bound to change with further analysis and experience. The discernment of essences is an ongoing process, which, while never fully revealing the essence of the object, continuously draws closer to it with further investigation.

The integration of Heidegger’s concept of essence thus provides a robust theory of essences in

OOO, and the integration of Husserl’s eidetic reduction can make it possible to make inferences about the essences of objects. Together, these two additions provide a theory of essences for OOO and a method for theorizing about the particular essences of objects.

One area where further research is necessary, but which is beyond the scope of this project is the further integration of phenomenological study into OOO. Since an object’s structure helps to determine the sensual presentations that the object experiences, understanding the structure of the object can lead to further understanding of the sensual presentations it experiences. Inferences can then be made about the structure of the objects it experiences. Since consciousness is an object in

OOO, an understanding of the structure of consciousness could provide insights into the sensual objects presented to consciousness and the withdrawn structures of those objects. Thus, a phenomenological

86 study of consciousness could provide further insights into the nature of objects. Furthermore, intuitions play an integral role in my account of essences, and a more thorough investigation into the development of intuitions in a conscious object’s experience could provide further insights into the process of discerning the essences of objects.

Knowledge of how objects relate to one another is vital in the discerning of essences, and the sciences can be a useful tool in discovering and explaining these relations. At the same time, scientific studies and communities are themselves objects, and understanding their structures would lead to insights about the objects of their studies, and on how they shed light on inferences about the essential, internal structures of other objects. Thus, work in developing an object oriented philosophy of science would contribute to the understanding the essences of objects.

The theoretical framework of essences provided in this thesis will allow philosophers of objects to analyze existing objects, or to apply the ontological framework of OOO to the objects that they wish to study. They can now analyze the objects such as coffee mugs, desks, homes, companies, cultures, universities, nations, ecosystems, scientific communities, books, and solar systems, through their essential internal structure and effects on their environments, leading to more in depth, though never complete, knowledge of the objects of study.

References

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