Recently I have found myself wondering if object-oriented ontology does not require something like the destruction of the history of ontology called for by Heidegger in §6 of Being and Time. In the case of Heidegger, the necessity of this destruction arises from the fact that
[i]n its factical Being, any Dasein is as it already was, and it is ‘what’ it already was. It is its past, whether explicitly or not. And this is so not only in that its past is, as it were, pushing itself along ‘behind’ it, and that Dasein possesses what is past as a property which is still present-at-hand and which sometimes has after-effects upon it: Dasein ‘is’ its past in the way of its own Being, which, to put it roughly,’historizes’ out of its future on each occasion. (41)
For Heidegger, the aim of this destruction of the history of ontology is to make the fundamental structures of this tradition explicit. If there is a problem in them remaining implicit, then this is because “[w]hen tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it ‘transmits’ is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn (43)”.
For Heidegger, the destruction of this history of ontology does not consist in the abandonment of the philosophical tradition, nor is it a negative project, but rather this destruction is a positive project that seeks to free up possibilities for philosophy by undermining the self-evidence of that tradition but also by disclosing the primordial sources upon which it is based in an “implicit” way. In Heidegger’s thought, the question of being is to be taken as the clue for the investigation of this tradition. As Heidegger puts it,
In thus demonstrating the origin of our basic ontological concepts by an investigation in which their ‘birth certificate’ is displayed, we have nothing to do with a vicious relativizing of ontological standpoints. But this destruction is just as far from having the negative sense of shaking off the ontological tradition. We must, on the contrary, stake out the positive possibilities of that tradition, and this always means keeping it within its limits; these in turn are given factically in the way the question [of being] is formulated at the time, and in the way the possible field for investigation is thus bounded off. On its negative side, this destruction does not relate itself towards the past; its criticism is aimed at ‘today’ and at the prevelent way of treating the history of ontology, whether it is headed towards doxographhy, towards intellectual history, or towards a history of problems. But to bury the past in nullity is not the purpose of this destruction; its aim is positive; its negative function remains unexpressed and indirect. (44)
Clearly the aims and method of object-oriented ontology’s destruction of the history of philosophy will differ from those outlined by Heidegger, yet nonetheless there will be certain similarities. First, like Heidegger’s destruction of the history of philosophy, one of the aims will be to overcome the self-evidence through which which the question of being is formulated today. In particular, the target here will be the subject-object division of being into two incommensurable houses or ontological domains perpetually at war with one another, such that one is offered the stark alternative of either choosing the correlationist route of mind and reducing the object to a carrier of culture, mental categories, language, and so on; or choosing the side of world or object as in the case of materialism and reducing all human actors to effects of matter. The work of Latour already outlines what an alternative to the modernist project might look like in his careful dismantling of the two-world ontology of nature versus culture.
Second, like Heidegger’s destruction, such a project would seek to liberate or render available positive realist possibilities from out of the tradition. Instances of this way of approaching the history of philosophy can be found in both Whitehead and Graham Harman’s work. Readers of Process and Reality will be familiar with the manner in which he approaches the work of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant. For Whitehead it is never a question of dismissing these thinkers, but of reading their epistemological investigations that revolve primarily around questions of representation and the nature of mind with “realism as a guiding clue”. Thus, for example, Hume’s “impressions” become, for Whitehead, “prehensions”, but prehensions refer not to representations or sensations in the mind, but rather to the manner in which one object grasps another object in the constitutions of its own being. Mind becomes a particular case of a generalized process characteristic of all beings. By treating realist ontology as his guiding clue, Whitehead is able to liberate all sorts of possibilities from the history of philosophy while also escaping the endless epistemological deadlock first inaugurated with Plato’s allegory of the cave and its two-world ontology consisting of the rabble of the slaves and the Truth of the philosopher. Similarly in the case of Harman. When one reads Tool-Being or Guerilla Metaphysics, he very quickly discovers that Harman does not simply dismiss the tradition of correlationism, but that he engages with a series of correlationist philosophers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Husserl, and so on, treating realism as the guiding clue of his investigations and liberating, as a result of this guiding clue, all sorts of insights into the nature of objects that can be found embedded in these texts but covered over by the self-evidence of a philosophical tradition that pitches the question of being in terms of a divided house between the distinct ontological realms of the subject and the object. By reading, to use Zizek’s term, the tradition awry through the lens of realism as the guiding clue, a rich resource of realist insight is made available for thought.
Larval Subjects . 
August 12, 2009 at 4:45 pm
It may seem rather trite coming from a Heideggerian but I cannot help but think of ‘Heidegger’ as the elephant in the speculative realist room. Try reading Heidegger’s three prejudices anew with speculative eyes and I see no reason why couldn’t lift them wholesale into a basic introduction to speculative realism.
Where does the split occur? Somewhere in the quest for worldhood. Heidegger has eyes only for the existential analytic so tools are nothing more than a warning sign: do NOT treat Da-Sein as a tool (later do NOT treat Artworks as tools comes closer to onticology).
What Graham Harmen seems to do is lay down anchor in the tool-analysis asking why not stop here? Let Heidegger drift onward and upwards into the history of being. There are enough questions about tools (or objects or tools as Heidegger interchanges them) to keep us going for a while.
My only worry about pursuing the Abbau is that it is precisely the destruction which resulted in the transcendental solipsism of Derrida. It becomes a game of limits and the entire reading of metaphysics in Heidegger (it becomes an overcoming all metaphysics and not just a destruction of ontology). Are we willing to dive back into that paticular swamp?
Consider that the least interesting parts of Heidegger deal with the overcoming. In fact next to nobody enjoys the division two of Being and Time even though that is supposed to be the meat. Students, for instance, almost always remember the hammers i.e. the objects. Teachers almost always begin with the workshop. W
August 12, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Accidently submitted too early there. Must be all the excitement. My final point is that the workshop, complete with named objects is a pretty big step for philosophy. Consider how empty philosophy seems before Heidegger (excluding Husserl for the moment as a sadly neglected thinker in this regard).
My own attempts at an attempt phenomenology are a bit boring in this regard. I simply want to step boldly into the workshop and pretend Heidegger had never got caught up in the naturalism V historicism V neo Kantian debates of his day. In this regard Graham does us a pretty damn service in liberating Heidegger from ‘Heideggerians’.
I would also add that even the most hardcore Heideggerians I meet at conferences are open to ‘onticology’ in principle.
This is not to reduce the work by all the other SR down to Heidegger. We need to fill the gaps with Latour and DeLanda and whoever else we might find. Let many flowers bloom as they say.
[I should note that this is precisely the angle I am currently pursuing in my next article. I think there is also scope for a collection on ‘Heidegger & Speculative Realism’ but there seems to be no end into potential avenues].
August 12, 2009 at 4:53 pm
That is my own attempts at an ‘ontic’ phenomenology.
August 12, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Paul,
I agree about the problematic nature of resurrected the old concept of “Abbau”. What needs to be avoided is a mode of investigation that knows what it’s going to find in advance and that leads us back into the textual rut of endlessly deconstructing the ontology of presence (even if, in one very real sense, OOO is a post-ontotheological metaphysics no longer based on presence). I am not quite sure, however, what other term should be used for this sort of retrieval of unexplored possibilities in the philosophical tradition.
August 12, 2009 at 6:53 pm
That may be a warning. I’ve not seen you struggle to name things before. You seem to have a talent for it. I would add that whatever the project is named it ought to be an ‘explosive’ name. Why? Otherwise it risks becoming another jaded catch-phrase or cliche (a new semiotic toy).
The other, cheeky I admit, possibility is that we are the true re-constructors who are beyond the deconstruction. Sure Derrida was neccessary, but now its time for the real work. In this sense we would be engaged in a Re-Struction of the History of Ontology. Instead of sneaking up on texts in order to discover presence we sneak up on texts and try to find when they came closest to onticology (or when they gave objects a fair shake of the stick).
August 12, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Is it really fair to Heidegger to say that he followed the “philosophical tradition that pitches the question of being in terms of a divided house between the distinct ontological realms of the subject and the object.”?
Heidegger was pretty critical of such a model namely because when left in such a formula, both “subject” and “object” are incredibly vague and don’t capture the nuances of phenomenological experience.
August 12, 2009 at 10:34 pm
Gary,
I did not suggest that Heidegger’s thought is organized in terms of the relation between subject and the object, and explicitly said that the contrary is the case in Heidegger’s thought. With that said, however, I do believe that Heidegger belongs to the tradition of correlationism that arose out of modernity. Historically modern thought has divided the world into two entirely distinct ontological realms: nature and the human. From this you get a variety of approaches to this divide. On the materialist side you get those who side entirely with nature and strive to ground all that is human in the material. On the idealist side you get those that side with the human sphere and make nature an effect of various human activities. Heidegger falls into this latter camp. If you can find a moment away from Heidegger, you should take a look at Latour’s discussion of this in We Have Never Been Modern and The Politics of Nature to get a better sense of these issues and how OOO is attempting to think a third possibility that falls into neither of these strategies. They both have the virtue of being rather short books and charmingly written.
August 12, 2009 at 11:12 pm
“On the idealist side you get those that side with the human sphere and make nature an effect of various human activities. Heidegger falls into this latter camp.”
How would you reconcile this claim about Heidegger with all the numerous passages which claim that the ontology of the natural, extant world is independent of human disclosure? Heidegger says explicitly in numerous places that humans “comport toward the extant” but not that humans “make” nature an effect of human disclosure. For Heidegger, we perceive nature but don’t create it. This is “presence” pure and simple.
August 12, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Gary,
With the exception of Berkeley, this is what all idealists claim. No idealist makes the claim that humans somehow “make” nature. What they do claim is that the idea of a world independent of humans is strictly speaking meaningless because we can only speak of the world in terms of how it is disclosed to us in terms of our aims, purposes, categories, intentions, language, etc. In Heidegger this role is played by Dasein. In Kant it is played by mind and categories. In Derrida it is played by language. In Merleau-Ponty it is the body. Structurally, however, it is always the same basic move, claiming that the thought of a world independent of some human phenomena is meaningless or incoherent. When an idealist makes the claim that the whole problem of representation is meaningless, what they’re really claiming is that they’ve chosen one half of the modernist divide. At any rate, it would be kind if you could put to rest the idea that realists are making the claim that idealists believe we create nature. Anyone who has even the most rudimentary philosophical background is aware that this claim is not being made. That is not the issue. The issue is that in some way or other the idealist always has to include the human. If you prefer, it could be said that the object-oriented ontologist takes the central phenomenological imperative more seriously than does your average phenomenologist. Husserl declared “to the things themselves!” The problem is that he never gets to the things themselves. He instead gives us the things for cogito. Similarly, Heidegger never gets at the things themselves, but rather remains at the things for Dasein.
August 13, 2009 at 1:53 am
[…] Comment Responding to my perplexity as to just what to call OOO’s engagement with the history of philosophy with realism as its guiding clue, Paul Ennis proposes the term “re-construction”: That […]
August 13, 2009 at 9:36 am
I’d just add that Harman has an excellent argument for Heidegger as an OOO in ‘The Prince of Networks’ (the second less Latour section).
I suppose what this requires is a certain deflation of Heidegger’s own concerns. If we are not out to endlessly trace being, catch a glimpse of Seyn, and ponder of the fact ‘that things are’ then we are free to mull over the implications of Heidegger’s phenomenal investigations.
In other words to read Heidegger as an OOO you basically follow him a step or two behind as he opens up a background…a ‘more than’ the correlation that he hints at in the tool-analysis and all over the later writings. You have to go into a Seinsfrage detox.
August 26, 2009 at 8:51 am
[…] Kant (I imagine Iain Grant is a touchstone here). What is more, Levi argues (as he has on his blog here, and here), for what he calls a re-construction of the history of philosophy, in which […]