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Graham Harman, "Waves and Stones: The Continuous and the Discontinuous in Human Thought" (Allen Lane, 2025)
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- [00:01]
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Professor Graham Harman
The New Books Network.
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Adam Bobeck, Host
Hi, welcome back to the New Books Network. My name is Adam Bobeck and I'm your host for this episode. I am very excited to welcome Professor Graham Harmon back to the program. Professor Harman is Distinguished professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, or Sci arc. He is also the leading philosopher behind Object Oriented Ontology and has written many, many books, such as the Quadruple Object Art and Objects and Object Oriented A New Theory of Everything. Today we are discussing his latest book, Waves and Stones on the Ultimate Nature of Reality, published with Alan Lane, which is an imprint of Penguin in 2025. Professor Harmon, welcome back to the show for what I believe is the sixth time that many.
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Professor Graham Harman
Wow.
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Adam Bobeck, Host
I think so.
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Professor Graham Harman
They've been so enjoyable it feels like one or two.
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Adam Bobeck, Host
And I'm very excited to talk about this book because you've been teasing Waves and Stones for a few years already.
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Professor Graham Harman
Yes, I've been working on it. It's the longest it's ever taken me to finish a book. It took four years. Usually I like to write them relatively quickly, but there was Covid and some other issues here that Delayed this, including the difficulty of the material itself, the amount of material in different fields I had to. To read to write this book. So maybe we could start off with.
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Adam Bobeck, Host
Kind of a general question. What inspired this book?
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Professor Graham Harman
Like several other of my books, this is a book that I wanted to read, but it turned out that it didn't exist, so I had to write it myself. There have been a few like that. In this case, I thought that there has to be a general book out there on the conflict between the continuous and the discrete because it's such a basic intellectual issue. But I couldn't find such a book, if one exists. I didn't find it. So I had to write this myself.
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Adam Bobeck, Host
And one thing you. I love when you do this with your books, you have these enormous subtitles like A New Theory of Everything and on the Ultimate Nature of Reality. Can you maybe give us a taste of how you perceive the ultimate nature of reality here?
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Professor Graham Harman
Sure. I should first say that the subtitle on the Ultimate Nature of Reality, this one was suggested by the publishers who like to sell books even more than I like dramatic titles. I think the original title was something like on the Continuous and the Discrete, Inhuman Knowledge, or something like that. Then they suggested, no, how about on the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Swing for the Fences. And I didn't mind because there is something about the continuous and the discrete that speaks to the ultimate nature of reality. And I don't know where you'd like me to start with this, but perhaps I can talk. Begin by talking about how this is a topic, like all philosophical topics, that's present in pretty much every field you look to. Certain problems are obviously discipline specific, such as the humans first come to North America over the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. There's several fields impacted by that, but it's not global in scope. Certain other cases are very much issues that are present literally every field, and this is one of them. In every field, we ask ourselves, was there just a gradual change here? Was there a sudden leap at some point? And I could start with a couple that people might be familiar with already. But one of those, of course, is evolutionary biology, where orthodox Darwinian Darwinianism sees evolution is happening gradually over the course of millions, billions of years, as big fish have bigger baby fish that eat the smaller fish, and so gradually fish are becoming bigger over time, as Niles Aldridge and Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in their pathbreaking article on punctuated equilibrium in the early 1970s. The fossil record does not support this. And of course the creationists are able to score heavily on this. The fact that the fossil record does not show a gradual change in size. In fact, there's a remarkable stability in species once they appear. Sharks have been around, for example, in the same form for, what is it, 250 million years, more or less. And so they've reached an optimum form that doesn't need gradual evolutionary change. You may see oscillation in mean values where a period of less food means sharks are smaller for a while, and then they get bigger for a while when food supply returns. But you're not seeing a movement in one direction usually. And so Eldridge and Gould borrowed from Ernst Meyer's theory of speciation, which was the idea that a species is formed when part of a population of a species becomes geographically isolated. So let's say a land animal gets cut off on a piece of land that becomes an island, and they can no longer swim across and mate with the others. Well, the island may have new selection pressures that the isolated part of the species has to adapt quickly to maybe less food supply. And so we get these tiny foxes here on the Channel Islands in California. I don't know how they got there, but once they're there, there's not as much food. It's a small island. They're like dwarf foxes. And we. We have them on a number of islands that might be an example. And maybe eventually the lands reattach. And so maybe the dwarf foxes come back into mainland California. Maybe they're eaten right away. Maybe they for some reason dominate the larger foxes, or maybe they exist side by side. So they used Ernst Meyer's theory. And you can also look at a case like the extinction of the dinosaurs, where the sudden destruction of dinosaurs open this huge window for mammals and birds to come in and evolve into the many forms we have today, including humans. There's also one pretty well documented case of snapping shrimp study by Nancy Knowlton and her colleagues. If you think about north and South America being united at the isthmus of Panama, this is only 2 or 3 million years old. The continents were separate. They were not connected until 2 or 3 million years ago. And of course, this cut off the sea life on the two sides. And so you had, for instance, shrimp that still look fairly much alike, One on the Gulf of Mexico side of Panama, the other on the Pacific Ocean side. If you bring these shrimp together, you don't find the expected courtship rituals between the male and female shrimp. Instead you find them snapping violently at each other. And they are now classified as different species, Even though They still look kind of the same, and ancestrally, they're the same. We seem to be seeing here the process of an emergence of a new species through geographical isolation. So this is what Eldredge and Gould oppose, the Darwinian gradualism. They think there are certain events that geographically isolate certain creatures that allow for speciation. Then you've got Lynn Margulis, one of my favorite authors, who has an even more radical suggestion. Her idea, of course, was serial endosymbiosis. And so the reason evolution is not gradual from Argulus is that, for instance, a virus can invade a cell. The virus might change some of the capacities of the cell, and then the virus reproduces along with the cell. And so it actually becomes part of a new species that has the virus as opposed to the one that didn't. And there could be differences. So Margulis is a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the late 60s, made a radical proposal that this is where she thought eukaryotic cells come from. Eukaryotic cells being the kind that they're not amoeba like, but instead they have a nucleus and they have organelles and perform various functions. And her prediction back in the 60s, which was ridiculed then, but is now textbook biology, is that if we can ever analyze the DNA of a cell nucleus, we're going to find that that DNA does not code for some of the organelles, because some of the organelles came from elsewhere. They're aliens. Well, in the 80s, that became possible for the first time, and they verified what she had said, that this is what many of the organelles came from outside. They're alien invaders of human cells or other animal cells. So these are possible alternatives to Darwinian gradualism. Phyletic gradualism is what Eldridge and Gould call it. So that's one area where the debate persists because obviously people like Richard Dawkins are still taking a hard Darwinian line. They're not impressed by Gould and these others who try to alter our picture of evolution. But then we also need to talk about cutting edge physics. And there are a couple of things that are going on here in advanced physics. One of them, of course, is the wave particle duality of light that I talk about in the book. Where, yes, in one sense light behaves like discrete particles or photons. In another sense it behaves like waves. And it has both of those aspects. You can't really reduce one to the other, despite attempts to have done so. But more broadly, physics has been facing a brewing crisis because for over a Hundred years. Now, contemporary physics, which is an intellectual masterpiece of many, many geniuses leading us to this point, is based on two pillars, and those pillars are quantum theory and general relativity. Einstein's general relativity explains gravity. Quantum theory explains the other three forces of nature, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Now the problem is they're incompatible. And this incompatibility is sometimes expressed even by important physicists as saying, quantum theory is really good with the very small and general relativity is good with a very large. It's not a bad rule of thumb, but it's not actually correct. And physicists will admit this. I've had physicists admit this to me when I pinned them down on it. Because what the discrepancy is really about is that quantum theory deals with nature as made of tiny chunks or things happening in jumps, whereas general relativity, Einstein's theory is about the gradual curvature of space time by mass. And the two become incompatible. For instance, because quantum theory tells us we can't ever know the exact location of a particle. We only know with a certain probability where a particle is. And yet wherever the particle is, it's bending space and time there. But Einstein can't allow that only to be probabilistic. Because Einstein's theory is a classical theory, it doesn't allow for quantum effects. Likewise, quantum theory assumes that space and time are neutral containers that aren't affected by what's in them, which is what Newton thought. Whereas Einstein, like Leibniz, German philosopher, thought that space and time are very much affected by the relation actually generated by the relations between the. The things that are in them. And so the incompatibility becomes glaring at certain points. And in cases like black holes, there are real problems of calculation that result from this. So this is a problem very much at the heart of contemporary physics. And I'll stop there in case you want to ask a follow up or shall I Keep going, keep going, keep going. All right. Well, one of it's. It happens in other fields too that we'll talk about this discrepancy, this conflict. One usual mechanism that happens in people's minds is as soon as they've seen a conflict like this, they try to create a unified theory by reducing one of the opposites to the other. So people will want to reduce all of the continuous to the discrete or vice versa. And the central thesis of my book is that this is not possible, even though I do object oriented ontology, which is a philosophy of discrete objects, people assume that means I don't think Continuity is real. That's not true. I haven't emphasized it as much, but I need continuity in my theory too. But let's start with people who try to reduce everything to the discrete because there are fewer of them. One instance is the effort to find a quantum theory of gravity. So some, some, let's say most scientists today think that the solution to the conflict between quantum theory and Einstein's general relativity is to give a quantum explanation of gravity. In other words, gravity is made of chunks of gravity as distinct jumps rather than a gradual curvature of space time. And string theory is one candidate to do this. But string theory has notable problems and some people are souring on it. There's what's called loop quantum gravity. But then there's also Jonathan Oppenheim, now in London, whose work started becoming prominent as I was writing this book. Oppenheim is at ucl and his view, still a minority view, is that the discrepancy will remain because gravity must remain a classical theory, not quantized. And quantum theory will continue to handle the other three forces of nature. And so instead of trying to reduce one to the other, we need to find some sort of interface between the two that explains how the things that happen in one framework are translated into the terms of the other. And I've got a lot about interface in this book so that I don't know whether Oppenheim is right or not. I'm not going to pin my philosophy book on whether or not Oppenheim turns out to be accepted by physicists. But it's an interesting parallel. And I'm going to meet him actually in a couple of weeks in London through a Penguin hosted dinner. So curious to hear more about his theory then. That's one example, the more classical example. And you know, because we have a shared interest in Islamic philosophy that the so called Asharites in southern Iraq, Basra Al Ashari, one of the great thinkers of the fairly conservative strain of Sunni Islam, develop what's called occasionalism. The idea that first of all, not only is God the only creator, as all monotheists believe, but God is also the only causal agent. And so that if fire burns cotton, actually God is burning cotton. Fire and the cotton might seem to be in proximity, but they have no causal power. God alone has that power. So it's a very hardcore way of reading one particular passage in the Quran that is not the mainstream way, but it was very influential. And not only do they think that God is needed as a causal mediator for every relation, but also every instant of time Time vanishes and then God needs to recreate the universe in every instance. And so the instance of time are not even connected other than by God. So this is about as discreet a theory as you can get. And again, they have to save it in the end by bringing in God. And interestingly, this did not catch on in medieval Europe. It caught on in early modern Europe for a different reason. When you had Descartes and Malebranche, French thinkers who believed that there are two finite substances, thought and extension, or mind and body. These two substances being so different in kind, how can they possibly affect each other? Well, you need the infinite substance, God to come in and, and do that. And some of these European occasionalists also agreed with the point about time disappearing and being recreated in every instant. I would say this is the biggest influence of Islamic philosophy on European philosophy, the occasionalist strand, which. So why do I say that? Because you might think these 17th century Europeans are out of fashion now. Nobody believes them, literally. All right, but human Kant, in a sense, are also occasionalists. Instead of saying that God is the causal link between everything, they say the human mind is the causal link between everything. So they simply turn it into the human mind replaces God in human Kant's philosophy as the source, the one location where all causation is known to occur. So that's one possible way of discretizing everything in the universe. Along with the quantum theory of gravity, more common today, especially in continental philosophy, is the idea that everything's connected, everything's in flux, everything is one, and we only believe there are individual things because the human mind is arbitrarily cutting things into parts for its practical purposes. Nice theory, but the problem there is that if the human mind is distinct enough from the rest of reality to be able to cut it into pieces, that means you already have more than one. You already have at least two things, the mind and the world, and probably multiple minds. Unless you're going to claim that we're all part of one giant mind and are arbitrarily cut from that. So that's the more common position these days, that everything is continuous and the discrete is an illusion in some sense. Well, rather early on I realized that I don't believe that. I believe that both of them are irreducible aspects of reality. They cannot be reduced to each other. And this is my, hence my interest in Oppenheim's physics, whether it pans out or not. Then I, then I realized that Aristotle was more aware of this than anybody. And I don't think it's Ever been noticed that his books, the Physics and the Metaphysics, two of his greats, obviously the physics talks about nature. The metaphysics has been interpreted to mean what's beyond nature, even though it originally just meant what's after the physics. It came to mean beyond nature. Metaphysics, the deeper things that are beyond the physical universe. Really, what the physics and the metaphysics are about for Aristotle are the continuous and the discrete. And so let's define continuum. Continuum can be defined as anything that's an undivided whole in which you can create as many internal pieces of that whole as you want. It is arbitrary. Classic example would be the number line. How many numbers between 0 and 100, or even 0 and 10, or 0 and 1? As many as you want. There's no definite. You don't have to stick to integers. You can count by halves, you can count by tenths, by millionths. There is no limit to the number of numbers you can find between 0 and 100. And that is why it's called a continuum. And arithmetic deals with continuum. I talk about Dedekind in the book, Richard Dedekind, who defined it for the first time, the continuum in mathematical terms. All right. For Aristotle, time and space are also continuum in the sense of how many units of time are. In this conversation we're having, Aristotle thinks there's no definite number of units of time. Time is not made of frames or instants. It's simply an undivided whole that we divide up with our mind for the purposes of analysis. There's not a definite number of instants. Space, the same thing. How many pieces of space are in this guest bedroom that I'm speaking in, in our apartment? No definite number. I can carve it up. Sorry, cut it up arbitrarily however I want. And motion is the last one that Aristotle treats that way. Now, motion is an important example because Aristotle was faced with. With the reality of Zeno's paradoxes, these ancient riddles which were designed to show that motion does not occur and individual objects do not exist. So to give one of his famous examples, if I'm trying to get from here to the door of the room, well, first I have to go to the halfway point to get all the way, of course. So let's call that point A. I have to go to point A. Okay, now I'm at point A. But now in order to get from point A to the door, I have to reach the halfway point of that distance. So let's say point B. So now I'm at point B. From point B to the door, I also have to go halfway before I go all the way. So now I'm at point C. The point being, you're going to get closer and closer and closer to the door, but you're never going to regions. That's one of the examples. One of the paradoxes, another famous one, Achilles and the turtle. If you imagined the fleet footed Greek mythical heroic warrior Achilles running against the turtle, one of the slowest land animals, if the turtle has a head start, the turtle will always win, according to Zeno, because let's say achilles is exactly 10 times faster than the turtle. Okay, so first the first Achilles has to run to where the turtle started. And in that period of time, the turtle will have gone 10% of that distance forward. Okay, so now Achilles still has to catch up with where the turtle has gone, and in that period, the turtle will have gone 10% of that distance. So again, just as with the door, Achilles gets closer and closer to the turtle, but never passes him. Now, we all know that people can pass each other on the sidewalk and in races, and we know that people can walk to the door easily. So what's the point of the paradoxes? Well, Zeno, like his teacher Parmenides, would say, you're trusting your senses. Why are you trusting your senses? The senses are nothing but delusional. Trust your reasoning mind. Our senses tell us the sun is this big, but actually we learn using reason that the sun is very large but very far away. That's why it looks this big. Well, Aristotle can't let things stand there, because Aristotle is nothing if not a theorist of motion, because he's a physicist and a biologist as well as a philosopher. And motion for Aristotle, doesn't just mean physical movement as it does in the modern period. It means any kind of change. And so for him, change involves movement along a continuum. Now there's motion, I'm sorry, involves movement along a continuum. There's going to be an exception here in a second for qualitative change. But Aristotle in the physics treats time, space, number and motion as all being cases of continua that can be cut however we please. But there's no definite number of components in them. Becomes very different in the metaphysics, because in the metaphysics he's talking about discrete substances. So if I were to ask how many people are here in this conversation room, the answer is exactly two. You can't say there's one arbitrary lump of humanity here, and we are arbitrarily cutting us up into 2 instead of into 7. People or 100. There are philosophers who make that case. But it's very hard to make that case. And Aristotle would not. He said, there's just definitely two people here, here. So there's always a definite number of substances in every instance, as long as we agree on the definition of what's a substance. The other thing is qualitative change. And he gives the example of a stone in a river that's being worn away by erosion. He says the stone does not lose an equal number of particles in every instant. Instead, for large periods of time, nothing happens. And then suddenly a chunk of stone breaks off and it's a different shaped stone. So those are the two cases he gives of the discrete. And so really the idea that the two are irreducible to each other. I think Aristotle was the first to theorize that. And he doesn't do the greatest job of talking about how those two communicate. I try to make a small contribution to that in my book. But he at least points to the problem that you have the discrete and you have the continuous. And as I have argued, discrete things can only interact in smooth continua, like time and space. And continua only can meet in a single entity, a discrete entity. And so this is where the term heterothyxis comes from. In the book, I introduced the term fixis as one of the many Greek words for touch. And it refers to the contact between surfaces. And so for me, thixis is a problem, because discrete objects, how do they touch? When fire burns cotton, fire is not interacting with all aspects of the cotton. It's interacting with a small sample of the qualities of the cotton. Because fire doesn't interact with color or smell, as far as we know, or price of the cotton, it interacts with the flammability of the cotton. So contact is a problem in my philosophy and always has been. And so fixis is a problem for me, and I call it heterothyxis. To emphasize, I review several different types of fixes in intellectual history late in the book to show that only things of opposite kind can touch each other. And the analogy would be a magnet, right? When you want to make magnets touch, you better match the North Pole with the South Pole. If you've ever played with magnets, you'll know how it repels. If you try to touch north to north. In biology, you need opposite sexes for fertility unless you engage in very complicated scientific manipulations. So there are cases like this. Heterothixis means that a real object can only touch a sensual object or that a continuum can only touch a discrete object and vice versa. So maybe I'll pause for breath there and listen to your thoughts. That was a long speech I just gave. I'm sorry, got very excited.
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Adam Bobeck, Host
You did something very interesting with the book, with the structure of the book, which, I mean you've already touched on. It goes in every direction because the distinction between the continuous and the discrete touches everything. Right. Could you talk about how you fell on this structure for the book?
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Professor Graham Harman
Yes, there is a history behind that. Obviously I wanted to cover as many different fields as I could and so obviously biology was going to be in there. Physics, Aristotle, the architecture chapter. There's the chapter on Thomas Kuhn and scientific revolutions. And there was quite a bit of debate going back and forth between me and my editor about what order the chapters should go in. We finally agreed on a chronological order. She wasn't so keen on having Aristotle at the beginning, but over time she changed her mind. And there is a risk in putting Aristotle first, which is that some people consider Aristotle to be sort of a stuffy middle aged boar, whereas I consider him to be a real comedian who has a bizarre sense of humor. And I tried to bring that out a bit in my chapter. But in any case. So all the chapters two through eight are chronologically ordered now. And then they asked me to put a triple O chapter at the beginning just so the readers know where I'm coming from. And then of course, the final chapter is where I try to propose some tentative solutions to some of these problems. So that's, that's where the, where that story comes from. And then a few things were added as I went along. I did. I wasn't actually wasn't expecting to have a chapter on Kuhn when I began, but a year or so into it I realized there really has to be a chapter on Kuhn Kuhn. For those who aren't familiar, he wrote his famous books the Structure of Scientific Revolutions back in the 1960s, often refuted, but still with us because its picture of the history of science is so compelling. Kuhn, who started training as a physicist, switched to history of science, realized fairly early on that he did not like what was then the contemporary picture of science as being a slow cumulative advanced the solving of problems. Instead, Kuhn looked at the history of science and saw certain revolutionary periods that were where a new science emerged that was incommensurable with its forerunner. So for instance, Einstein's theory of gravity replaced Newton's. I think 1919 is when it was experimentally verified by the eclipses measured by Eddington. And a couple of differences. One of them is for Newton. And Newton didn't really believe this, but it was part of his theory that gravity happens at infinite speed. And Newton realized that was spooky action at a distance. But that was the cleanest way to develop his theory. Whereas of course, for Einstein, the speed of light is the maximum possible speed for anything. So gravity happens at the speed of light, not any faster. So if the sun disappeared, it would be some minutes before its gravitational pull on the Earth would cease, just as the sunlight itself would be there for some minutes after the sun burned out. Another difference is that for, for Einstein, mass bends time and space, and there's no such conception in Newton. And then finally in a related part of the physics, the difference between them, for Newton, mass is conserved, meaning there's always the same amount of mass. Whereas for Einstein, you can convert mass into energy. And this is how we have atomic power, atomic bombs, something that Newton never could have dreamed of. So that's a rather sudden change. And you do hear sometimes this are people who say, well, Newton's theory is. Newton's physics are still correct within certain limits. And Einstein simply expands the range of cases. Okay, Kuhn thinks that's nonsense. Kuhn thinks there's a radical jump precisely because terms like mass don't even mean the same thing in Newton's theory and in Einstein's. And this leads Kuhn to the relatively radical conclusion that it's not just that Newton and Einstein are speaking about nature differently, they actually inhabit a different nature because the scientist is a part of nature. They're co creating it precisely by theorizing it. And that's a separate controversial issue. But it's a nice consequence of Kuhn's way of looking at science as being made more of radical changes. It's true that more than 90% of science is still what he calls normal science, meaning the average physicist isn't planning to challenge Einstein's theory of gravity. They're simply solving puzzles and anomalies that have arisen within that framework. Imre Lakatosh, the Hungarian philosopher of science, once claimed, and I'm assuming he's right, that Newton's theory of Gravity always had 200 and some anomalies that it couldn't explain. But people accepted it anyway because it was so powerful at predicting so many things. At first he couldn't even explain the attraction of three bodies. We got the three body problem that it took mathematicians some decades to solve. Newton couldn't explain the Motion of the moon. In the end, Newton couldn't explain why the perihelion of Mercury, Mercury's closest approach to the sun, was behaving so strangely. It was only Einstein's theory that could prove that. And that's one of the reasons people thought that Einstein was right, that he solved a problem he wasn't even trying to solve. So it's not like he was cherry picking data. He simply gave a theory, and that theory gave the correct answer to this anomaly that Einstein, I don't even think knew about necessarily at the time of his theory. So Kuhn is very much a believer in science as a matter of sudden, incommensurable jumps between one reality and another. And this is how he got himself into trouble, by comparing scientific revolutions to religious conversions. Because of course, scientists want to think that what they're doing is utterly different from religious conversions. As a rule, religious conversions are arbitrary and personal and false for the hardcore scientist, whereas a scientific revolution is based on hard data. But there is a certain leap of faith because different people adopt a new science at different times. Not everyone signed up with Einstein's theory of gravity right away. There may come a certain point when the majority do. But there's a certain element of, of choice in investing yourself in a new theory of science, just as there is in a new religion. What makes you decide that one religion is the true one, even though you're never going to have exhaustive evidence for that. You have a finite lifespan. Kierkegaard writes about this. Why do Kierkegaard said, you're never going to have a long enough life to know if Hegel's system is right. You have to decide whether to be a Christian or not. And Kierkegaard embraced Christianity. So there's that side of truth. Philosophers often speak of knowledge as justified true belief. And one of my contributions in the last 10 years or so has been to say the justification of belief are opposites. Justification, sorry, justification and truth are opposites. Yeah, it's how I, it's how I put it. And here's the reason, here's the reason for that. Scientists cannot tell you everything they really think. They cannot tell you their hunches. Or they might, they might say, this is my hunch. But a scientist is only going to speak in public or write in public about findings for which there is evidence. And this is justification. So that's one side, the all justification side. Even though scientists know that science changes often in radical ways, and whatever we think about physics now is almost surely wrong in Some fundamental sense. And the discrepancy between quantum theory and general relativity is just one piece of evidence of that. We have no idea what the physics of 200 years will look like. It's going to probably be very different from now, and so all of today's physicists are going to look pretty primitive in retrospect 200 years from now.
- [30:11]
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Professor Graham Harman
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- [31:11]
Professor Graham Harman
So justification simply means what the current evidence allows us to say with some confidence. And we, we feel compelled by that. On the opposite side, the truth side, you have someone like Kierkegaard who, who says you're never going to have enough evidence. There has to be a leap of faith at some point. But one interesting contemporary philosopher is Alain Badiou in France who talks about these two sides in a sense. And he also talks about what he calls anti philosophy, which is this shadow of philosophy. And he seems to conceive of philosophers as making arguments and thereby using justifications. But then you have this distinguished list of anti philosophers who are all very hard on academic philosophy and who are all more interested in making very basic life decisions. So Kierkegaard is one of those, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, he mentions lacan, the psychoanalyst. St. Paul is a great example from religion that the advent of Christ changes everything and you simply have to get on board with that. Pascal. These are all very great figures who are neighbors of philosophy. You call some of them philosophers, you might call Nietzsche and Wittgenstein philosophers. But there's something different about them in that they don't always proceed by argument and justification. There's a lot of rhetoric, very powerful rhetoric often. And what I think Bob, you is getting at there is the idea that justification is never the whole story. There's going to be a certain gap between the amount of evidence and the conclusions we draw from it or what we are able to say about it. And that gap, I think, is irreducible in human reality. There is another philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi, who writes wonderfully about how you can't have methods of radical doubts the way Descartes wants, because you might claim that you're radically doubting everything, but you're not, right? And this has a lot to do with our history. So, as an American, for instance, you too, we just kind of take it for granted, without often questioning it, that majority rules is a valid principle in political gatherings. You're not going to get that from an average Chinese person or even an average Russian person, right? Because that's. That's not exactly how their societies work. And you need to be thrown into a situation where you're challenged and you're like, oh, actually, the majority really sucks sometimes. We shouldn't always be following them. And our Constitution recognizes there are limits to what the majority can do, right? There are certain protections for minorities. The majority can't simply vote to confiscate all of Elon Musk's wealth, for instance, we can vote to tax him. But there are limits to what the majority can do. And the majority does very dumb things sometimes, and we don't have to look too far, for example. So anyway, Cardinal Newman, the great Catholic author in the uk, wrote a whole book called why Is the Title Escaping Me? But it's about. It's about. I'm going to look it up here because I don't want to forget the title here. I learned about this book from Polanyi. It's called the Grammar of It's Something Essay towards the Grammar of a Sense. The idea being that there are many, many reasons that we give our assent to certain propositions, and they don't all follow the scientific method, nor could they. If you're trying to decide whether or not you trust somebody to babysit your daughter, you're not going to use the scientific method. You're not going to run tests and have degrees of statistical significance. You're going to use a lot of gut feeling. You're going to be talking to other people who know this person, who have used them as a babysitter. And ultimately you have to decide, do I trust this person alone with my daughter for three hours? The scientific method would not be either helpful or appropriate in that case. And you might make a mistake. You might actually choose the wrong person, you might marry the wrong person. There's lots of things that can go wrong in human life, but there are lots of different ways that we make decision. And Newman being a great leader in the Catholic Church, obviously is concerned to defend some of those ways that the natural sciences usually want to debunk as sloppy or fideistic or whatever, whatever terms they would use. So I don't remember how we got onto belief. Oh, it's about Kuhn, probably, and about the fact that religious conversion. There's something like religious conversion in any scientific change. Well, I feel. Now there's a couple other chapters I want to talk about. Or would you rather ask some follow up questions first?
- [35:16]
Adam Bobeck, Host
Yeah, you want to talk about the architecture chapter.
- [35:19]
Professor Graham Harman
I knew nothing about architecture until around 2011, 2012, when architects first started consulting me and asking me what I thought about architecture. The answer was I didn't know. And now since 2016, I've been employed at a very avant garde architecture school, CyArk in Los Angeles, and may well retire there at this point. I think what happened is that modern architecture underwent a crisis starting in the 1960s, when this idea of simply using rational, logical plans to design buildings or cities reached a kind of natural limit and history started reasserting itself. So you had things like Penn Street Station being torn down in New York and replaced by a very ugly successor. But then you had in the UK a number of poets protesting to keep St. Pancras Station open and succeeding, so that was preserved. And so a kind of, kind of preservationist impulse sprang up, which was part of a general increase in respect for history. History not as just a series of contingent accidents, but history is a part of who we are. And as part of a way of navigating this landscape of so called postmodern architecture, Architects turn like never before to philosophers. And they were into a philosopher for roughly a generation at a time. So you had a Heidegger face with Merleau Ponty mixed in. You had a Derrida phase that culminated in 1988 with the deconstructivism show at the MOMA in New York, where deconstructivist architecture with cracks down the middle of buildings, or windows that weren't vertical but strangely angled, or Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, where there's strange turns in the halls. This was the thing for a while. And then starting in the early 90s, actually a few years before philosophy, Deleuze replaced Derrida as the standard avant garde continental figure. And I noticed this in philosophy for the first time around 94, 95, apparently in architecture, it was a couple of years earlier, you had a guy named Greg Lynn who still teaches at ucla. He's not that much older than I AM you have Sanford Quinter, who's a kind of Deleuzean, author, architecture expert, who defended the Deleuzian cause. And there are others. And then you have great architects like Zaha Hadid, who wasn't only a Deleuzean, but she does a wonderful job putting curves on her buildings and having no right angles. So this idea that architecture should not be discontinuous like the deconstructivist thought, but a continuous gentle gradation between parts of the building, but also between the building and the environments. And my generation of architects suddenly became worried about that because they said now architecture is nothing more than a branch of ecology. It's turning into a carbon footprint analysis and everything's blending together with everything else and the building is no longer something with a unique, identical self, identical character. And so of course, triple O is right there as a philosophical counterexample. They picked it up. I'm never sure exactly how much influence I'm having. One thing about architecture is that like philosophy, it's a profession dominated by middle aged and elderly people, unlike mathematics or chess or sports, where the young people dominate. And we can argue about why that similarity. But Frank Gehry now is in his 90s and silver very much in his prime as an architect. Oscar and Eemay are built till over 100. It takes a long time to build up credentials as an architect and to be trusted with huge budgets and building a corporate headquarters or something. And then in philosophy, I think it's just a matter of picking up enough wisdom and not just being able to calculate things with lightning speed, but learning how to balance various factors and various considerations. This is why I certainly don't think as quickly as I used to. My memory is not as good as it used to be, but I've read a lot more now than I ever had in the past. And I also am better at making trade offs of which which element of my philosophy is worth keeping and what sacrifices does that entail as opposed to some other choice? So I think they are wisdom fields. Architecture is a wisdom field in a way, like philosophy is. So in that chapter about architecture, which I call Fractures and Folds, I'm talking about the difference between deconstructivist architecture, which tries to create breaks in things, and Deleuzian architecture, for lack of a better term, which folds. Why does it fold? Because if you take like one piece of paper and do it in the origami way, you could make a unicorn out of 270 different folds and yet it's still the same piece of paper. So someone like Deleuze can say, see, everything's really one. It's just that the paper is folded. And that's another school of architecture. And I kind of came along as a rejoinder to the Deleuzians. The Deleuzians are a generation above me. They're not all happy about my arrival in architecture. And I'm not going to claim I have the same impact in architecture as Heidegger, Derridar, Deleuze. I think maybe premature to say that, but that was at least the efforts of the people who started bringing my work into architecture is a counterweight to the Deleuzian era, which had gone a full generation. So we'll see. We'll see if something comes in to challenge Triple O.
- [40:11]
Adam Bobeck, Host
So one of the chapters I did want to talk about, because I thought it'd be worth jumping into just because it's so different from the other chapters, is the Pope and the Horsemen.
- [40:22]
Professor Graham Harman
Yes.
- [40:22]
Adam Bobeck, Host
Which a lot of people, as you mentioned, have told you that they love. So can we talk about the Pope and the Horsemen or your question as the subtitle to the chapter, How Many Magisteria?
- [40:35]
Professor Graham Harman
Yeah. My editor, Ananda Pelleran, the one who went over the manuscript many, many times of me, was the first one to say this chapter is going to be a classic. And I found that early readers. Here's the book. It isn't published yet. It's not published till next Thursday. But obviously as part of the publication process, a number of people have seen PDFs, including you. And a lot of the people who are reading the PDFs are gravitating towards Chapter 8, the Pope and the Horseman, what that chapter is about. It starts anyway by talking about the so called Four Horsemen of New Atheism. And for people who don't know them, this is Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, two of them now deceased. Dawkins and Harris are still alive. And these are people very much working in the Enlightenment tradition. After September 11, they were appalled by Islam and the ruins of the World Trade center and wanted to claim that religion is a danger to the very values of liberal civilization. And ironically, in this proclamation, they were opposed by none other than Stephen Jay Gould, who describes himself accurately as a Jewish agnostic, who nonetheless was defending the rights of religion to make claims about the fate of the human soul in the afterlife, because science can't really tell us anything about that. And that led him to coin the acronym NOMA for Non Overlapping Magisterium. Magisterium in the singular refers to the Catholic Church's term for its own teaching authority. There's one magisterium, the Catholic Church has the right to decide on most matters. And famously there was a condemnation. Was it 1277 or 1288? I'm forgetting now it's 1277. Thank you. Condemnation of 1277. Bishop Stephen Tempier Etienne Tampier in Paris condemned a number of theses that were ultimately owing to Islamic influence for the most part, because you had in, in Andalusia, what is now southern Spain, you had Averroes or Ibn Rushd, the great Islamic philosopher, jurist and commentator on Aristotle, who said some things that did not really fit with Catholic orthodoxy. They don't necessarily fit with Islamic orthodoxy either. But that's another question. One of the things Ibn Rosh said in attempting to mediate between monotheism and Aristotle, in other words, Aristotle thinks the universe was always here. Monotheism says it was created out of nothing. Ibn Rushd ends up with the compromise position that matter was always here and God gave it form at a certain time. Not good enough for Bishop Tampier who condemned this, the so called Latin of Eroists, people like Seger of Brabant and Boethius Odacia, who were very much influenced by this Islamic current. And of course Aristotle himself came through Islamic channels. Aristotle, despite being an ancient Greek philosopher, was too worldly in a sense for early medieval Christianity to adopt, whereas Islamic philosophy tended to see less of a difference between Plato and Aristotle and tended to accept them both. And we know about the superiority of Islamic science during the Middle Ages, partly as a result of Aristotle's influence, I would say. And then because of Ibn Rushd in Spain, you had, and interestingly, Ibn Rushed, like St. Thomas Aquinas, could never read Aristotle in the original Greek, right? Ibn Rushed was reading him in Arabic and Thomas Aquinas in Latin. Well, it was only because of Ibn Rushd that a number of primarily Jewish Arabic speaking translators in Spain and southern France by then, southern France, translating Aristotle into Latin so that he was readable by people like Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas. And this is what started the Aristotle fashion in Paris, which was so fateful for the Western world, for our later scientific revolution, and of course for medieval philosophy. And for a brief period of say, 11 years after St. Thomas Aquinas death, he could not be read. He was considered part of this dangerous trend of renegade Paris Christian intellectuals reading Islamic influenced material. And then of course, lo and behold, St. Thomas Aquinas is now the pillar of the Catholic Church. He's the leading philosopher of the Church. And so how things change. Anyway, that was one example of the Catholic Church asserting a single magisterium, its own teaching authority. Today there's been a role reversal, and it's now secular natural science that adopts that papal rule and says we can't have any religion mixed in because that's superstitious nonsense. We need enlightenment. Now, to be fair to that side, Dawkins does score some points on this, because Dawkins points out that you can't just say that science and religion have their own spheres of authority and they don't overlap, because even Gould admits they overlap. Dawkins gives a nice example. Imagine that somebody found some DNA evidence in a cave in the Middle east that proved that Jesus had no earthly father, so it proved the Immaculate Conception. Do you think the Pope would say, oh, I can't say anything about that because that's scientific and science is a different domain? No, of course the Pope would be excited and say, hey, see, see, Catholic dogma is true. Jesus had no earthly father, Immaculate Conception. Dawkins is probably right about that. So that the Church is not going to let science have its own way in cases that help the Church's case. Okay, but they don't necessarily need to be totally distinct from each other to be somewhat distinct. And I was close to the late philosopher Bruno Latour in France who died three years ago. And Latour wrote a major work relatively late in his career called An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. And the point of that book, Latour was always a heavy critic of modernity. He defined modernity as the impossible attempt to separate nature from culture cleanly without realizing that they're completely interwoven. And in this book in particular, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, or modes, as I can Call it for short, Latour is complaining that in the modern period, our period, still, science and economics have a kind of monopoly on truth when it comes to nature, science, when it comes to the human sciences. Economics is considered the queen of the social sciences, and its practitioners sometimes behave like arrogant know it alls as a result. Right? They're the human science par excellence now. So Latour does some interesting things in that book. He tries to show that neither science nor economics can be the sole authority. Perhaps his most convincing example is law. He talks about the fact that, okay, we in a sense, in modern Western secular society, the hard sciences have replaced religion as the ultimate standard of truth for many people. However, we all recognize that that Isn't the case in the legal system. Science does not have absolute rights in the legal system. The judge can always throw out pieces of scientific evidence or allow scientists to be cross examined to see if they messed up the experiments or to see if corrupt police deliberately placed OJ Simpson's bloody glove at the house of person he murdered. Or you could have a totally legitimate DNA test but they forgot to share it with the defense attorney and so the judge excludes it from the trial. And so science never has the absolute authority in legal cases. Okay, that's one very good example. The law has its own mode of existence that has its own procedures and some of them are purely technical. If something is not placed in a folder on time, tough luck. No matter how ironclad it is, you can't use it. Alec Baldwin got off on his manslaughter trial in New Mexico largely because the prosecutors were withholding evidence, according to the judge. And Alec Baldwin may very well be guilty of manslaughter in terms of the facts we'll never know because the trial wasn't held. But you can't have prosecutorial misconduct like that. Another example Latour gives is politics. And some people do think politics should be scientific and that political conflict is petty and people are being irrational and this is why political conflict happens. Neil Degrasse Tyson, the new host of Cosmos, even had a tweet on Twitter, I refuse to call it X on Twitter some years ago where he said the world needs a new country called Rationalia that has a one line constitution. All conflicts, all disputes shall be settled by evidence. And I think that's simply the wrong way to look at politics. And Latour would agree, because politics is often the sphere where what's rational and not rational is what is sorted out. It can't appeal often to a external criterion of rationality. And there are plenty of cases of this. Who invented flights? Every American will tell you it's the Wright brothers, but in Brazil it's someone else. And there's going to be near unanimity in those countries. And I guess you could subject this to some research, but there might be a gray area. The example I like talking about since I lived in Egypt for so long is the conflict between Egypt and its southern neighbors about Nile water rights. Many older listeners grew up in a world where Egypt and Israel were constantly in conflicts in the future and they haven't been in conflict now for 46 years, at least not directly. This kind of a cold conflict between Egypt and Israel, but they cooperate on a lot of stuff. In the future, it's almost surely going to be Egypt and its African neighbors, not Egypt and Israel. For reasons of water, Egypt's a mostly desert country. The Nile gives a lot of water, but maybe not quite as much as Egypt wants. And that's the main source other than a couple of oases. Well, the brief history here is that my point's going to be that you can't rationally decide with ironclad logic which of these countries is right. There is a treaty that gives Egypt a certain fairly high percentage of the Nile water, Ethiopia a certain percentage, Sudan a certain percentage. And then when South Sudan was formed as a country, whenever that was, 20 or so years ago, Egypt was actually lobbying against the recognition of South Sudan as a sovereign state because they didn't want another country to have to argue with about water. Well, they lost that battle. So now they have at least three neighbors. I don't know how much Uganda's involved, but Egypt's policy for many years was if Ethiopia builds a dam, we're going to bomb it because that's going to restrict the water flow into Egypt. And at a certain point, right around the time I moved to Egypt in 2000, these Sub Saharan African countries started pushing back and saying, stop threatening us, stop treating us like children. We will negotiate a share of the water rights. And Egypt said, yeah, but you already signed a treaty. And those countries said, yeah, but that was under British imperialism. You can't expect us to abide by that. And then Egypt says, yeah, but we're a desert. It never rains here. You guys have rain. But then the other countries say, yeah, but you're wasting all your water because of poor irrigation techniques. So it goes back and forth and back and forth. Now, you could submit this to a binding international court. This has happened there. For example, there is Taba, Egypt, on the Red Sea, which was disputed between Israel and Egypt for many years. And Egypt and Israel agreed to put that in the binding arbitration in international court. Egypt was awarded the city. I've been to the hotel, the Taba Hilton, which was later blown up after I was there by a terrorist rebuilt. It's a weird place because it's technically in Egypt, but all the signs are in Hebrew and almost all of the guests were Israeli because it had traditionally been ranked as one of the nicest hotels in Israel, but it actually switched to the Egyptian site because of this binding arbitration. So countries can agree to do that in some cases and they can't abide by it. But the ruler of a country ultimately has to look out for the welfare of their country. And international law is nice. But if you think that international law is just about set to really screw your country and put it in an impossible position, you as the president of the country would be doing your country a real disservice to abide by whatever an international court decides. And this, of course, is one of the insights of the right wing political philosopher Carl Schmitt in Germany, a Nazi who defines the sovereign as the one who can decide the state of exception. And so if an international court were going to decide something that you thought was very grave for your country and its future prospects, you're probably not going to abide by it. And the last thing I want to get into is Israel, Palestine. But I need to provide a good example here, and it's very easy to do a Schmidian reading of what Israel is up to. Any, any reasonable body of international law would probably tell Israel that your retaliation at this point is excessive. You're killing women and children. All the Hamas leaders have been killed. Isn't that enough? You're not letting humanitarian aid in, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I happen to agree. But let's say you were trying to make the best case you could for Netanyahu's position, and I'm not saying you should, but the best case you could make is Israel's a small country. It's very survival is at stake. Our neighbors don't want us to exist, and therefore we need to send Hamas the message that you will pay a horrible price if you ever do anything like October 7th again. So it's an extralegal statement, it's a political statement in the purest form. It's outside the bounds of law and probably of morality. And yet you can imagine a case, even if you don't like that particular case, even if you are utterly opposed to what Netanyahu is doing, you can probably imagine a case for your own country or your own cause where you would support something similar pushing back against the international legal framework. So aside from that particular case, you can imagine cases where we've just got to do this. It's make or break for our society, and it's the President's job to save our society. There's an existential threat being posed here, and so we're going to do it. Bruno Latour himself made the case that we all face an existential threat from climate change skeptics, and so that it's time to pull a Schmittian move and stop debating with These people stop arguing with these people and simply start taking forceful action in favor of climate change. Very interesting moment in the tour's career because, yes, you can. You can keep saying there's not unanimity. Yes, because you can find 3% of climate scientists who don't think it's happening. The mainstream all think it's happening. And so law comes in conflict with politics, which comes in conflict with science, with law, with religion, is another for the tour. Of course, Latour, unlike many practice philosophers, was a practicing Catholic and attended mass regularly. His religious views are a little unusual at times. I'm not sure they're entirely orthodox, but he's not here to defend himself, so. But the point being is he thinks religion has something to teach us as well, that religion involves processions and ceremonies that bring certain elusive religious objects into a kind of presence for us. And so Latour thought it was foolish to subject the truths of religion to scientific scrutiny, because it's not really about trying to establish whether a neutron exists independently, outside the mind. This is not what religion is about for him. And then he's got another mode of existence called fictionality and technology. And then he decomposes science into two modes, and he decomposes economics into three. So Latour is really trying to remap our sense of what the valid authorities are for knowledge and claiming that there are different authorities that are valid in different cases. So, anyway, that's a long detour away from the NOMA chapter, but in a way, not so much, because in a way, Latour is making an expanded version of Gould's case. Instead of just science and religion, it's 15, or actually 14 different modes. And Latour invites us to invent others if we want, because he doesn't think these are ontological. He thinks they're historical and contingent and develop in different cultures. All right. So also in that NOMA chapter, though, I talk a lot about Daniel Dennett and Qualia, because ultimately, believing there is only one magisterium is an argument for the total continuity of cognitive life, that there is one authority, science. And science gets to judge about everything, or in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church gets to decide about everything. Well, you can also have a richer cognitive ecosystem like the one that Gould embraces, with science and religion having separate complementary roles, or the Torah with 14 or 15. And so the second model points to a kind of discontinuity in mental life that there are. We have to jump around between different standards of reference. Well, Daniel Dennett tries another way of having a soul Magisterium natural science. And one of the ways he does that is by trying to eliminate what he calls qualia. And qualia simply means the subjective experience of a certain quality in the mind, like blue or sweet or salty. The way Dennett tries to get rid of this is by reducing it in two separate directions. You know, in my earlier philosophy I call, and still now I call this duo mining. What I say is that there are two and only two kinds of knowledge. If someone asks you what something is, there are only two kinds of answers you can give. You can tell them what it's made of, or you can tell them what it does. You can reduce a thing downward, water is H2O, or you can reduce a thing upward, water quenches animal thirst and puts out fires. And every kind of knowledge, I have argued, fits into one of those two baskets. And I have argued that those two together, which I call dual mining instead of undermining or overmining, does never exhaust its topic. Any form of knowledge is always going to come up short of its topic. Well, Dennett completely disagrees. Dennett doesn't think there's anything mysterious. Not even in the elusive sanctum of the human mind. And in his book Consciousness Explained, for example, from around 1990 or maybe a couple years before that, some people joke it should be called Consciousness Explained Away. Because in that book then it says, here's how you explain consciousness. You look at the neurological physical patterns and you look at the outward behavior of the person who has those patterns. Those two factors together explain everything about consciousness. There's not some inner experience that is cut off from the physical underpinnings or the behavioral overpinnings. And this is why Dennett was opposed by someone like David Chalmers, a younger philosopher of mine from Australia, who says we have to address the hard problem. The hard problem, namely, is the difference between the physical world and the mental world. I've actually argued that Chalmers doesn't go far enough. I don't think mind is the only hard problem. I think any object as emergent beyond its pieces is the hard problem. But that's a separate issue. I'm certainly on Chalmers side against Dennett. Dennett thinks that there's no. There's no way to separate Qualia from their physical underpinnings or their behavioral manifestations. And Dennett was a sharp guy, apparently, was good to have a conversation with, even if you disagreed with him. He gives wonderful examples and thought experiments. He gives one in his. One of his essays about coffee tasters. He invents these two Fictional coffee tasters Chase and Sanborn, who work for the Maxwell House Company, and one of them says, you know, maxwell House coffee has tasted the same the whole time I've been here, but I don't like it anymore. And the other guy says, actually, I disagree. I think the flavor has changed, and that's why I don't like it anymore. And the point being, you can go from one extreme to the other. You're trying to figure out which is right. But for Dennett, the ultimate authority is a scientific test. But ultimately, what you do is you test the chemistry of the beans, and that decides whether the flavor has tasted or not. All right.
- [58:59]
Adam Bobeck, Host
A flamboyant and velvety Pineau, but lacking in stamina.
- [59:03]
Professor Graham Harman
I'm glad you bring up wine tasting, because that's another of his examples. The wine taster says, and flamboyance and velvety Pinot, but lacking in stamina. And I think, oh, that sounds like good wine tasting. Whereas then it says, oh, that's pretentious, poetic crap. Real wine tasting is pouring a wine in a machine and getting a chemical formula. And this other stuff's just poetry. Well, as you know, I also don't think poetic language can be reduced to literal language. So he's lost me from the start. Dennett and I disagree on almost everything. He died last year, unfortunately. Also, if I can say something that sounds a little harsh, I don't think Dennett was an especially original philosopher. I think of Dennett more as an office, like Pontifex Maximus, that Dennett is gone. But someone else will have to fill that role of saying science is right about everything, because that's a natural niche in the intellectual ecosystem. It's somewhat. Someone's going to fill.
- [59:51]
Adam Bobeck, Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [59:52]
Professor Graham Harman
With. With something like his level of talents.
- [59:54]
Adam Bobeck, Host
Yeah.
- [59:55]
Professor Graham Harman
So I. I don't actually. I think he was very clear. I don't. I just don't think he was a very original thinker. I'm sorry he's gone. Rest his soul. But he wouldn't want me to say that. But he's an atheist. But I will miss Daniel Dennett because he wrote very clear books and he was always very precise about what he wanted to say about things. Yeah. That wine tasting is another example. He thinks wine should be reduced to a combination of the chemical structure behind the flavor and the way the wine makes us feel. There's nothing in between that's called the real flavor of the wine. Because for Dennett, there's this total continuity between the layers of reality. They're not Cut off from each other. All right, well I don't agree with that. I think that layers of reality are somewhat self contained. They influence each other. But for instance, a thing is partially independent from its history. It's helpful to know the history of a thing. But once a thing is created, it's created and it doesn't entirely matter which path it took to being created. It may preserve some of its history. Right. We can all think of examples where an object has certain weird features for historical reasons that don't make logical sense, but it doesn't retain all of its historical features. That's a very selective process. So I think Dennett is wrong to challenge Palia that way. That we need to leave some room for independent layers of reality that are not explicable by scientific means. And closely related to this is Frank Jackson's myth of Mary. And for those who don't know it, it's another great thought experiment. Mary is an imagined neuroscientist who is the most brilliant neuroscientist ever. She understands everything about the human brain 100% with this strange stipulation that she has been raised in an underground room where everything is black and white. She's never seen a color in her life and yet she understands the human brain so well that she fully understands color vision and why it happens. Now the thought experiment is they decide to take poor Mary out of this underground chamber and they take her up above ground and she sees red things for the first time. The question is, has Mary learned anything from seeing the red things? And you or I, and probably most people would say of course. But these hardcore scientific thinkers would say no, she hasn't learned a thing because there's nothing new about the quality red that's distinct from the knowledge that was used to explain it. And to me that's a kind of reductio absurdum. I don't see how you can defend the scientistic position on this.
- [62:14]
Adam Bobeck, Host
So as you know, we have a tradition on the New Books Network. I ask you every time. The final question what are you working on now?
- [62:21]
Professor Graham Harman
Interesting. What I'm working on now is a number of articles I promised to write. I have a hard time saying no to articles because usually there's some general topic that's provided and I always feel like if I say no to this I'm going to miss a chance to push my thoughts on this particular topic and who knows if the chance will rise again. And so I'm writing a lot of these articles and it's, it's taking up most of my semester. And so I've realized I need a change. There are enough requests now that I need to start saying no to most of these inquiries. And I need to work on the things that I think are most important to where I am intellectually. And that's hard because I don't like saying no to people when they're interested enough in my work to ask me to do things. I'm probably pulling out a series editor, also of book and journal series that I edit because I just don't have enough time. And you start getting a little older, you feel your energy levels decreasing a little. I still have a high level of energy, but not the manic levels of energy I had in past decades. And so I just need to be more selective about what I'm working on and not working on. So I'll have to be able to press the reset button probably after Christmas. And I want to get back to finish the book I had been planning to write for years on Latour's philosophy of modes that we talked about. I think I signed the contract for that back in 2013 or so. And Repress has been patiently waiting for me ever since. So there was that. There's my quote unquote big book that I've been working on and scrapped four or five times, which is called Infrastructure, A big system of philosophy that that's another reason I need to start saying no to things, so that I'm working every day on infrastructure, which I don't currently do. So that's the not so short answer to your question maybe is that I'm currently doing things that maybe aren't quite so central to my larger project, but that I agreed to do. So I'll do them.
- [64:04]
Adam Bobeck, Host
You also have a basketball book.
- [64:06]
Professor Graham Harman
Yes, that's on the burner too. I'm a huge basketball fan. I'm still a half season ticket holder for the LA Clippers. So basketball is a big part of my life. Yes. And I want to write a book about that.
- [64:16]
Adam Bobeck, Host
And you also have an architecture book, if I recall correctly.
- [64:20]
Professor Graham Harman
You're right. I want to write a whole book on Rem Koolhaas. And I chose Rem simply because he's probably the consensus most important architect alive right now. And that doesn't necessarily mean he's always my favorite, but he's an important one. And people say a lot of things about Rem Koolhaas that are contradictory. This is the Dutch architect famous for the Seattle Public Library and the TV tower in Beijing that people have compared to a pair of trousers and so forth. One of the things people say about REM Koolhaas. Rem often explains his projects in programmatic terms. For instance, the TV tower in Beijing is supposed to mean that each stage of the TV production process, it's going up one leg of the pants and then across the waist and then down the other leg of the pants. But then other people point out that you could do that on a horizontal building. Right? You don't need that to look like a pair of pants. And so certainly at Sci Arc, the standard discourse about REM is that he's really a formalist. He's really interested in making cool shapes. And this programmatic discourse is simply rhetoric that he uses to try to get people to choose him for the projects. I'm not entirely sure that that's true. I think there's something to that. But I want to explore that question in a little more detail. There's a lot of writing about REM Koolhouse out there that I still have to digest. But I wanted to do a case study of one architect in particular. He also comes up at the end of my Architecture and Objects is a kind of loose end. And so one of my architectural readers in particular was. Or two in particular were pushing me to develop the thoughts on RIM a little more. Thanks for reminding me of that book. I haven't thought about it in a few weeks.
- [65:50]
Adam Bobeck, Host
That's what I'm here for.
- [65:51]
Professor Graham Harman
All right.
- [65:53]
Adam Bobeck, Host
The book is Waves and Stones, published by Alan Lane, which is an imprint of Penguin in 2025. Professor Harman. It's coming out on Thursday, right?
- [66:03]
Professor Graham Harman
It's coming out on Thursday. And there are two other points I forgot to make about the book. One of them is that it's. This is the first time in my career that it hasn't been paperback right away. It's going to be hardcover only for the first year. It's also the first time I was asked to do an audiobook. And so I spent three, four days in a recording studio in August here in Los Angeles. And that was an amazing experience. The amount of respect I gained for voice actors and audiobook readers. It's very hard to read for even a page and a half without mispronouncing something or your voice catching in the wrong place and having to redo a. Sometimes I realized I didn't know how to pronounce a name that I thought I knew how to pronounce. And so we'd have to look it up and we'd have to sometimes consult five or six different people to see what the consensus is for how to pronounce a certain surname. And it was just wonderful to discover this subculture of recording studios in Los Angeles that I had known nothing about before. And so the audiobook should be available maybe not the same day as the hardcover, but shortly thereafter.
- [66:58]
Adam Bobeck, Host
One thing I love is the way Germans pronounce your name, which is always Graham. They always get that H in there.
- [67:05]
Professor Graham Harman
And really, that's right. Whereas in some languages it's totally silent. French and Spanish don't like saying the H's. Yeah, Graham. And I don't mind how people pronounce my name. I give a lot of leeway to native speakers of any language because I butcher a lot of names, I'm sure, in those languages.
- [67:24]
Adam Bobeck, Host
Anyway, once again, the book is Waves and Stones, published by Alan Lane. Professor Harman, thank you so much for joining me today.
- [67:32]
Professor Graham Harman
Thanks, Adam. It's always a pleasure.
- [67:46]
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