Ep. 384: Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology (Part Three)

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

Mark Linsenmayer

Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2026

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We consider chapter 2, "Aesthetics Is the Root of All Philosophy," where Harman describes how art can help us see behind the veil to things-in-themselves. Art is "theatrical" in that it's really the spectator who is standing in like an actor for the object encountered in art.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is the partially examined life episode 384 part three.
0:12.8	We're continuing on Grand Harmon's book, Object-oriented Ontology, a new theory of everything.
0:18.6	Turning now to chapter two, which we said a little bit about in the previous
0:23.7	parts, aesthetics is the root of all philosophy, is the title of it. So it comes off of the end of
0:29.6	chapter 1, where he was criticizing literalism. And so here we're going to see why the artwork
0:35.9	is something that we can, knowledge is not the right word because it's a type of cognition that is not involved knowledge, but is a way that we can actually get at what Harmon considers to be the real in an indirect way.
0:48.4	Yeah, he starts off by talking about this theory of everything that we seek and saying it should account for non-physical
0:57.0	entities just as much as physical. And then he gets into, you know, why literalism might be the
1:02.4	sticking point for many readers who will not like the idea of unverifiable mystical claims.
1:09.6	It kind of compares it to negative theology where we can't say what God is directly.
1:13.8	We can only say what he is not.
1:15.9	Harmon claims that mysticism in a way is more comparable to rationalism because both are
1:20.6	supposed to have complete access to reality, but there's a possibility that's indirect.
1:25.6	And he says in a way, this is more powerful.
1:27.8	He compares it to lingerie, right? Or love notes that aren't too explicit. Or threats that are
1:32.2	better left vague, like, I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse. Likewise, humor is
1:37.2	ruined by literalization. So that gets us into a non-literal cognition of things, indirect access to reality as involving metaphor, which seems to be at the heart of an aesthetic relation to reality.
1:51.9	So a lot of this, he attributes really the inspiration to his entire system to this early Juan Ortega-I-Gassette essay, an essay in aesthetics by way of a preface,
2:03.6	which I did look at, but Ortega, as he's referred to in this book,
2:08.2	he disdains actually doing metaphysics here.
2:11.1	So he's really talking about the phenomenology of art,
2:14.2	how when we, for instance, have a metaphor or really any other aesthetic experience,
	...

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