Michael Polanyi and Object-Oriented Ontology: In Response to Turkis

Graham Harman

§1. Introduction

Martin Turkis’s outstanding book, The Metaphysics of Michael Polanyi, is easy to summarize. After beginning with a helpful biography of Polanyi, he notes that the philosopher’s metaphysics is less fully developed than his epistemology, which famously emphasizes the role of tacit knowledge and personal commitment.¹ Turkis then goes on to show that a developed Polanyian metaphysics would probably lead him toward a Platonic theory of forms. Along the way, he considers the similarities and differences between three differing forms of contemporary realism: the Ontic Structural Realism of James Ladyman in Bristol, my own Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), and various forms of neo-Aristotelianism.² I would love to engage at length with Turkis’s campaign for Plato, especially given my own usual preference for Aristotle. But given that he treats OOO at some length in two different sections of his book (77-93, 146-151), my most useful role in the present symposium will be to focus my remarks on these pages in particular.

First, a brief word about my relation to Polanyi’s work is in order. My initial interest in a “post-critical” philosophy was spurred by long association with the late French philosopher Bruno Latour (1947-2022), who is mentioned only a few times in Turkis’s book.³ In his widely read We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Latour critiques modernity as an artificial attempt to split reality into two separate types of things: (a) nature, which is said to behave with clockwork mechanical necessity, and (b) culture, which is said to consist solely in the arbitrary projection of human values onto a cold, grey universe. In Politics of Nature (1999), Latour undertakes an assault on the fact/value distinction that Polanyi would surely have enjoyed, had he only lived to read it. Finally, at my own instigation, Latour explicitly took on the critical tradition of thought in his 2003 Stanford University Presidential Lecture, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” At one point (I believe in 1999), I asked Latour in an email to what extent Polanyi had inspired some of his ideas, but he did not address that issue in his response, and I forgot to raise it again. In any case, I agree with Turkis’s points about potential areas of overlap between Polanyi and OOO, and can even think of a few others not mentioned in his book. But it was only recently that Polanyi earned a large share of my reading time; readers of my future work will find him mentioned far more often than has been the case so far. In this respect, the chance to review Turkis’s book could not have come at a better time.

One obvious area of (at least partial) overlap between Polanyi and OOO is the idea of a “flat ontology.” In Turkis’s own words from the conclusion, “Polanyian ontology is flat, not hierarchical, since all existents are joint meanings comprised of the integration of their subsidiary particulars[…]” (248) In his 1975 A Realist Theory of Science, Roy Bhaskar used “flat ontology” in a sense almost diametrically opposed to its current one. For Bhaskar it was a pejorative term aimed at empiricism, which flattens all reality onto the layer of its accessibility to humans, thereby ignoring the “intransitive” depth of things that forms the backbone of Bhaskar’s realism. As far as I know, the first author to use “flat ontology” in its new sense, which is also realist but non-hierarchical, was the Mexican American philosopher Manuel DeLanda.⁴ Since then the term has been used widely by me and others in debate. It also plays a key role for the French philosopher Tristan Garcia in the opening pages of his under-read classic Form and Object (2011).⁵ For OOO purposes, the chief virtue of flat ontologies is to oppose the modern dogma that human thought is something utterly different in kind from inanimate entities. Yet OOO also pulls back from flat ontology when it offers a fourfold theory of the relation between objects and qualities, as manifest at both the real and sensual levels. Here OOO leans in the direction of Aristotle’s principle that “being is said in many ways,” as opposed to the (flat) theory of the univocity of being, traceable to Duns Scotus and popular today among followers of Gilles Deleuze.⁶

In any case, Turkis’s generous (and accurate) reading of OOO is quick to emphasize obvious points of similarity with Polanyi. For instance, “There are a number of uncontroversial points of agreement between Harman’s OOO and Polanyi himself along with the dominant interpretations thereof” (79). All of the instances listed by Turkis seem on target, and as far as I am concerned, the reader can take his word for it as to these similarities. Yet it may be more interesting here to focus on points of friction. OOO is perhaps most famous for its flat ontological starting point and its subsequent critique of modern philosophy’s excessive focus on the critical human subject; here the connection with Polanyi is clear. But what is truly central to OOO is its double-axis picture of reality, from which the rest of this philosophy follows: (1) The first axis is the distinction between real and sensual, which does have much in common with Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal pair and Heidegger’s Zuhandenheit/Vorhandenheit distinction; as Turkis notes, it was the Heideggerian difference that inspired OOO from the time of my first book, Tool-Being (2002).⁷ (2) The second axis is the Husserlian distinction between intentional objects and their adumbrations or, more generally, the difference between objects and qualities. This in turn can be traced back to the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident, with the difference that Aristotle was talking about real substances, while Husserl is concerned with an analogous distinction in the phenomenal sphere (since he recognizes no other, regarding the thing-in-itself as an “absurd” notion). I interpret this as a radical critique on Husserl’s part of British Empiricism’s “bundle” theory of objects.⁸ To what extent does Polanyi also recognize these two axes of OOO?

§2. Object-Oriented Ontology and Kant

We begin with the thing-in-itself. Turkis is quick to note that OOO’s real object is not quite the same as Kant’s Ding an sich (81), though he does not give the most direct explanation as to why. The major difference is as follows. For Kant, the thing-in-itself is a tragic residue of human finitude alone. Since human thought is transcendentally structured according to the pure intuitions of space and time and the twelve categories of the understanding, finitude results from the fact that we are perceivers and thinkers: namely the fact that we have minds. OOO’s most controversial step is to say that finitude is characteristic of any relation at all, including those between inanimate entities. Our predecessor here is Alfred North Whitehead, whose primary challenge to Kant consists likewise in his assertion that Kant focuses too much on the “presentational immediacy” of human consciousness and has nothing to say about the more rudimentary “experience” of less-than-human entities.⁹ Although OOO avoids the term “experience” as being too redolent of panpsychism (which need not be true for OOO’s ontology to hold), we see Whitehead’s boldness on this point as striking a decisive blow against post-Kantian orthodoxy. In the wake of Kant, there has been a dispiriting division of labor in which philosophy limits itself to meditations on the relation between thought and world, while science is considered the sole legitimate authority on questions of inanimate interaction. No less a figure than Bertrand Russell has noted the problem here: science can give us nothing more than the relational rather than the intrinsic properties of things.¹⁰ The irony, of course, is that Whitehead’s metaphysics is also thoroughly relational (just as Russell says of science), which limits his ability to assimilate the key non-relational aspect of Kant: the in-itself, rejected by Whitehead as a “vacuous actuality” in the same manner as Aristotelian substance.

It is worth asking why the injection of finitude into inanimate relations is so controversial among readers of OOO. The obvious objection to the OOO strategy is that we are humans, not inanimate entities, hence we encounter our own finitude directly, whereas to speculate on the finitude of inanimate things means to engage in illegitimate, “dogmatic” theorization about inanimate things-in-themselves. My answer comes in two steps: (1) First, for Kant the way to get rid of dogmatism is to introduce the thing-in-itself as that which cannot be adequately grasped by a finite being. The way to get rid of dogmatism is not to shift from talking about things to talking about human thought: this is merely a byproduct of the ban on knowing the an sich directly. But if we ascribe the in-itself to inanimate interactions, thereby making it impossible for their causal relations to exhaust either term, then we are effectively already beyond dogmatism. (2) Admittedly, it is a truism that we are human and thus have some idea of what it is like to be human but very little idea of what it is like to be a grasshopper or a hailstone. But this does not mean that we experience human finitude directly—quite the contrary. Daily experience seems perfectly full and interesting, and it takes a rather acrobatic effort of thought, of the order of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Heidegger’s tool-analysis, to grasp that such experience is finite. In short, although I am human I must deduce my finitude, and I can deduce the finitude of other humans, animals, plants, and inanimate beings in exactly the same way. Indeed, Kant might conceivably have done this in his own work, beginning with a description of the rudimentary experience of protozoans or worms to show their finitude, before turning and arguing that even humans have an impoverished sense of the thing-in-itself.

The reason Kant never did so is because of the modern assumption, beginning with René Descartes, that we have some sort of direct awareness of our own thought in a way that we do not of God or extended substances, which come second and third in his proof, respectively.¹¹ Yet it should be clear that we have no such direct Cartesian awareness of our own thoughts. We misinterpret ourselves just as easily as we misread a text or a famous experiment. When we turn to look at ourselves reflexively, the consciousness that does so is not the same thing as the consciousness at which it looks. Consciousness A is engaged in suffering from a headache, and Consciousness B is engaged in observing the suffering of Consciousness A. Hence there is no self-transparency or self-equation but a difficult bridge to be built between two different moments of consciousness. And just as Consciousness B concludes that Consciousness A is finite, it can also conclude that chimpanzees, amoebas, and raindrops are finite as well. Hence, Kant’s initial meditation on finitude is not merely “epistemological” but applies to all possible beings other than God (and I would even reject his theology of a self-transparent God). This conclusion is prefigured by at least two earlier authors. The first is José Ortega y Gasset in “Preface for Germans,” his critique of Husserl’s theory of self-consciousness. The second is the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in his notion of the “split subject”: namely, he claims that in Descartes’s famous principle “I think, therefore I am,” the I that thinks is not the same as the I that “am.”¹² Lacan even pushes this to the point of denying that the Cretan liar’s “I am lying” and even Russell’s Paradox in set theory are genuine paradoxes. But to examine this further claim here would take us too far afield.

To return to the main point, to what extent does Polanyi agree with OOO on the inaccessibility of the real? In one sense, Polanyi is deeply aware of everything that can go wrong in scientific work. When it comes to personal knowledge as personal commitment, he conveys the tragic sense that most commitments fail. In passing, this awareness accounts for the superiority of Polanyi’s “fiduciary” view of truth to the otherwise similar notion of truth as “fidelity” found in the writings of Alain Badiou today.¹³ For Badiou, a truth-event in history is not a real event except in the retroactive fidelity of those who live in accordance with it. This certainly sounds Polanyian enough. Yet Badiou has the unfortunate tendency to behave as if fidelity cannot go wrong; there is little if any account in his work of misfired fidelity devoted to an error. In particular, this makes his Maoist politics intellectually suspect, since he simply assumes that political truths can take the sole form of “the communist invariant.” Hence there is political truth neither in the American Constitution with its boring details about the selection of judges nor in General de Gaulle’s resistance to Nazi occupation on behalf of “une certaine idée de la France.”

To that extent, Polanyi’s fallibilism implies the concession that the ultimate truth of things is unknowable. Yet this fallibilism does not go nearly as far as OOO’s. Consider Nicholas Rescher’s discussion of three possible views of the position of human knowledge. First he considers scepticism, defined as the view that “all claims to theoretical scientific knowledge are inappropriate.”¹⁴ This is not Rescher’s view and certainly not Polanyi’s, since the latter spent his entire philosophical career in opposition to the method of critical doubt. The second position listed by Rescher is “approximationism,” defined as the view that “what we claim as scientific knowledge is always inaccurate and approximate.”¹⁵ The leading mascot for this position is surely Heidegger, with his notion of truth as a gradual unveiling that never fully uncovers its object, even if some beliefs can safely be regarded as closer to the truth than others.¹⁶ On the analytic side of the fence, traces of this view can be found in Alvin Plantinga, among others.¹⁷ The third and final view surveyed by Rescher is fallibilism proper, which he describes as follows: “our theoretical scientific knowledge claims are always vulnerable: they must always be staked tentatively because the prospect that further inquiry and discovery will lead to their modification and replacement can never be eliminated; the things we take ourselves to know [may] in the end have to be abandoned.”¹⁸ At any moment we might be right, but we might also be wrong, and therefore we need to be careful about assuming that any scientific knowledge is final.

Rescher chooses the third option, fallibilism. But what about Polanyi? Polanyi’s sense of the immeasurable depths of reality leads me to classify him under the second option, “approximationism.” There are three different places in Personal Knowledge where Polanyi speaks of one’s “growing proximity” to a scientific solution or hidden truth.¹⁹

Yet despite OOO’s Heideggerian roots, it rejects approximationism in favor of another view, one that is often confused with outright scepticism. Namely, for OOO there is always an unbridgeable gap between a statement (scientific or otherwise) and what it discusses: the very gap between real and sensual. One impetus for this view was the revolution brought about in the philosophy of science by Karl Popper, for whom knowledge loses the Vienna Circle sense of “verified” and takes on a new sense as “not yet falsified.”²⁰ But this can be pushed even further if we follow the interpretation of Popper by his onetime student Imre Lakatos. Noting that even Newton’s highly successful theory of gravity faced roughly two hundred anomalies even during its heyday, Lakatos concludes that “[a]ll theories are born refuted and die refuted.”²¹ And unlike Polanyi’s focus on our growing proximity to truth, Lakatos concludes that science is less a movement toward truth than a movement away from earlier theories. As he puts it, “the most rigorous observance of Popperian method may lead us away from truth, accepting false and refuting true laws.”²² Ultimately, this is because science is driven more by justification than by truth. And in Polanyian terms, we can read justifying evidence as a sort of alibi for spurring specific personal commitments.

But the main reason OOO rejects approximationism is as follows. We all agree, no doubt, that there is a difference between any given thing and some hypothetical perfect knowledge of that thing. If we imagine a completed final biology, for instance, one that understood everything that could possibly be known about living creatures, this knowledge would still not itself be a living creature. It would not eat, respirate, reproduce, or hide from predators, even though those who created this perfect biology would themselves be living beings. In what does the difference consist between biological creatures and perfect knowledge of them? It is rare to hear anyone address this question. But if you would force someone to answer (if not “at gunpoint,” then through more peaceful means), they would likely say that biological creatures are material or inhere in matter, whereas perfect knowledge of them is not material. I leave aside the obvious objection that no one has any evidence that formless matter even exists; it really might be “forms all the way down.” The key question, though, is why they would lay such stress on matter as the true site of biological creatures. The answer, of course, is that hypothetical perfect knowledge would admit of no difference in form between creatures and perfect knowledge of them, since otherwise this knowledge would not be perfect. In short, the very assumption that perfect knowledge might be possible requires the hypothesis of matter as that which distinguishes between knowledge and its object.

The same mistake is made by Kant in his famous refutation of the ontological proof for the existence of God, in which he assumes that we can adequately know the qualities of God (greatness, omniscience, and so forth). After all, if we did not have these qualities right, we would not be speaking of God at all; our concept would not be the concept of God.²³ Thus, despite the deep sense of mystery in which Kant ostensibly leaves the thing-in-itself, he seems to think we are perfectly equipped with concepts of these things that can only be thought, not known. A better approach is to say that the forms found in any concept are translations of the forms in the things, and like all translations they entail creative adjustments. Just as we would never say that a given French translation of Shakespeare’s work is closer to the original than another, we should not say this about scientific results. Nearness and fairness are not the right metaphors here, just as Lakatos’s commentary on Popper suggests.

Before concluding these remarks on the varying ways that Polanyi and OOO conceive of truth, I should say something about Turkis’s discussion of Polanyi’s notion of “indefinite future manifestations” (IFMs) as a crucial characteristic of the real. As Turkis puts it, “Polanyi’s definition of the real [is…] that which has the power to continually surprise us through its indefinite future manifestations” (37). Turkis identifies this with “the requirement that an entity be causally potent in order to have its ontological status recognized […]” (37). Here I would say that OOO also takes it to be very good evidence of a thing’s reality if it continues to generate surprises. To this extent we are aligned with Polanyi, who takes care to emphasize how the discoverers of a scientific principle hit on something real without imagining all its future implications: Kepler as the unsuspecting forerunner of Newton is one such example discussed by Polanyi.²⁴ Given Turkis’s extensive commitment to final causes in the latter part of his book, he seems to hold that the real almost automatically pushes toward its future manifestations. But OOO also considers a case it calls “dormant objects”: real entities that are not now causally active and may not even be active in the future if the proper circumstances fail to arise.²⁵ In other words, OOO sees indefinite future manifestations more as an excellent way of detecting real objects than of characterizing their reality. My conclusion, then, is that Polanyi does allow for something like OOO’s distinction between the real and the sensual, but that he divides them in a less absolute way than does OOO. Turkis seems to acknowledge this when he speaks of “a de-emphasis in Polanyi’s work on what lies on the other, darker side of the moon” (148) where he sees OOO as being at its best.

§3. Turkis on Polanyi and Object-Oriented Ontology

We turn now to the second question: does Polanyi recognize anything similar to OOO’s sharp distinction between objects and qualities? As a reminder, this principle was drawn from consideration of Husserl’s theory of how an intentional object can remain identical despite the numerous adumbrations it exhibits at any given moment: the blackbird flying in the garden constantly changes the angle of its wings and its position in space, yet we continue to recognize it as one and the same blackbird, barring recognition of some major mistake on our part.²⁶ I take this to be Husserl’s primary achievement and also view it as a devastating attack on the Humean bundle-theory of objects. Now, I am also largely persuaded by Turkis’s remark that “Polanyi is not a bundle theorist” (127). He offers good textual support for this in a passage from The Study of Man: “dismemberment of a comprehensive entity produces incomprehension of it and in this sense the entity is logically unspecifiable in terms of its particulars.”²⁷ This certainly proves that Polanyi’s theory of part/whole relationships does not treat larger entities as simple mereological sums of tinier elements. That point is presumably uncontroversial. But what about more immediate cases, such as the simple perception of an object? Would Polanyi side here with Husserl and draw a sharp distinction between the object of perception and the qualities through which it is manifest? Here I will defer to Polanyi scholars, but some of Turkis’s remarks about OOO suggest an important difference on this point.

The key passage comes when Turkis expresses some doubts about OOO’s use of the term “aesthetics” (88-90). In a first step, he worries that this term carries subjectivist or anti-realist connotations. In a second, he casts doubt as to whether there is really a sharp distinction between the literal and the metaphorical or whether this amounts to “substitut[ing] a binary in place of a more complicated continuum” (89). The first point is easier to answer. Although the term “aesthetics” is obviously borrowed from the domain of the arts, OOO uses it synecdochally for a much wider range of happenings. Namely, the object-oriented theory of aesthetics is concerned with all instances in which objects and qualities come into tension rather than appearing in the form of a bundle. As Turkis nicely summarizes in his book (83-85), this takes the form of four possible tensions: SO-SQ, SO-RQ, RO-RQ, and RO-SQ, where R stands for real, S for sensual, O for object, and Q for qualities. This entails that even inanimate causation can be treated aesthetically in OOO’s sense, something done most explicitly in Timothy Morton’s 2013 book Realist Magic.²⁸

The second point is more substantive: does OOO not draw too sharp a distinction between the literal and the metaphorical? To some extent, any confusion here is my own fault. Here is Turkis again: “Thus Polanyians will generally insist on the centrality of the aesthetic dimension for all noetic pursuits, including those, such as science, that fall on the ‘knowledge’ side of the OOO binary” (89). In other words, Eros for Polanyi is ubiquitous, not confined to the arts. This is the point where I must own up to a fault in exposition. What Turkis has in mind is the fact that whenever I speak of the difference between the aesthetic and the literal, I often treat it as a kind of professional taxonomy in which artists use the aesthetic while scientists only make use of the literal.²⁹ But I do not really think this. Among other things, I want to be able to affirm Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between revolutionary science and puzzle-solving normal science.³⁰ I interpret the difference between them in the following OOO “aesthetic” terms: whereas paradigm shifts concern the existence of a new object, normal science is occupied with a more accurate determination of the bundled properties of an object. In short, normal science works in Humean fashion and revolutionary science in the more OOO sense of a sharp split between objects and their qualities.

This also sheds light on why Kuhn finds it difficult to know exactly when a scientific discovery takes place. As he sees it, there is one moment at which we are sure “that” something new exists and another moment in which we determine “what” exactly it is. These two moments can also occur in reverse order. In other words, Kuhn like Husserl is fully aware of the object/quality tension, and it alone explains the “grey zones” (lasting months, years, or several decades) in which a revolution may have happened without fully happening. This is especially clear in Kuhn’s book on Max Planck and black-body radiation, where he argues that although the quantum revolution seems to have happened in 1900-1901, it did not really happen until 1909.³¹ For that was when Planck finally came to the (fiduciary) view that quanta actually exist as tiniest units of nature, not just as a mathematical artifice. Thus, only from the standpoint of 1909 can we say that the quantum breakthrough happened in 1900-1901. It is impossible to make sense of this story unless we are philosophically committed to the importance of the object/quality split.

As concerns Turkis’s second point, the implication that OOO should replace its sharp literal/metaphorical split with a more complex continuum, I must stand firm. The distinction is not only absolute but required by the basic principles of OOO. There can be no question that much or most experience is literal in the sense that we treat objects de facto as bundles of qualities. It is one thing to say that Eros is everywhere but quite another to find anything erotic in a literal statement such as “a pen is like a pencil.” Here we merely perform a linguistic version of “normal science.” That is to say, we consider the various qualities of pens and pencils, weigh their relative importance, and decide whether the similarities are enough to justify the comparison. Metaphor is an entirely different case, and Turkis summarizes the OOO theory of it quite well (85-86). As he notes, in metaphor there is first a split between an object and its qualities, and the qualities of another object are transferred to it. Those qualities are perfectly tangible to us, but the object that bears them is no longer so. In Homer’s “wine-dark sea,” countless vague wine-qualities are transferred to the sea. And while these qualities are easy enough to list, however vaguely and incompletely, the sea that would be wine-like is completely unknown to us and hence withdraws into darkness. As a result, the mind of the poem’s reader must perform that absent sea like a method actor, unifying the wine-qualities in their own mind. It is only here, I think, that we can speak of anything like Eros, which cannot be present in the mere comparison of the qualities borne by two objects. Eros emerges only with the exit from bundle theory, since only then do we have a distant object of desire. Not every moment of life involves genuine striving. But I was simply wrong in those passages where I implied that such striving happens only in the arts. Among other examples, it also occurs in philosophia, where “love is wisdom” is obviously more than literal knowledge. As seen from the discussion of metaphor, Eros entails “participatory realism,” a term I love that Turkis borrows from Phil Mullins.³² In any case, Polanyi’s sense of a continuum between literal and metaphorical means that he is not nearly as strict on the object/qualities distinction as OOO.

In the closing pages of his book, Turkis assesses that “Harman’s approach does not adequately explain the relationship of the sensual to the real” and adds that “further treatment of the integration of parts within ‘machines’ could benefit from engagement with Polanyi’s theories” (247). First, I should say that while Turkis borrows the term “machine” from my own writings, it is developed in greater detail by Levi R. Bryant in his book Onto-Cartography, which even contains “machines” in its subtitle. Although I no longer use this term often, it is a perfectly good one and forms an obvious link with Polanyi’s conception of comprehensive entities. All that aside, I certainly agree that OOO can (and will) benefit from closer engagement with Polanyi’s theories.

Turkis’s more important charge is the inadequate explanation by OOO of the relation between the real and the sensual. Indeed, this is the animating duality of all object-oriented thought and is always its central concern. But while many unexplained problems remain, the road so far has not been without progress. Earlier in his book, Turkis seems well aware of this (see 84-85). In particular, there are two object-quality tensions in which the real and the sensual co-exist. The first and best known of these is the aesthetic tension discussed in my treatment of metaphor (RO-SQ), identified with space, in which a mysterious real object somehow gathers the qualities of another thing. Since the real object is necessarily absent, I myself am the only real object left to do the gathering, and in this way the reader of a metaphor becomes the performative or “participatory” real being: it is a matter of vocation, to use Polanyian terminology.

The second example is the discussion of theory (SO-RQ), identified as eidos. This emerges from the strange dual status of qualities in Husserl’s phenomenology. On the one hand, qualities are mere adumbrations that disappear in a flash without affecting the underlying identity of their object. But on the other, Husserl is aware that some qualities belong necessarily to an object, since otherwise we might stop thinking of it as an apple and start thinking of it as a pear. Unfortunately, Husserl takes the easy way out and asserts that while the merely adumbrative qualities of an object are given to us by the senses, its deeper real qualities are reached by the intellect. This all-too-traditional rationalism prevents Husserl from reaching Heidegger’s insight that any qualities known by the mind can be no better than present-at-hand. The real qualities of things are vague and unknowable, yet tacitly present in all experience. Perhaps this is the right Polanyian note on which to end.

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Endnotes

Tradition & Discovery: The Polanyi Society Journal 51

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