Nameless horror

(More on object-oriented ontology and Wittgenstein. The post's title refers to HP Lovecraft, who was fond of the phrase. A search for "nameless horror" in these collected stories gets five hits.)

Brian Kim Stefans writes:

The one principle that is inarguably shared by these philosophers [i.e. "speculative realists"] is quite simple: they wish to retrieve philosophy from a tendency initiated, or at least made unavoidable, by the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that the subject (meaning a human being) can [n]ever know anything about the external world due to the very fact of subjectivity.

Surely many philosophers, including Wittgenstein, reject this skepticism. But there is more to speculative realism than this:

Harman’s philosophy displaces the mind→object relationship with that of object→object, the “mind” being just one object among many.     

Compare Chon Tejedor on the early Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein suggests that, given the fundamental contingency of facts, it is a source of profound wonder that any possible state should obtain as a fact. This sense of wonder arises in connection to all facts: physical facts (involving the rocks, plants, animals and human physical bodies we describe in language and think about) but also mental facts (i.e. our thoughts, desires, beliefs, emotions and, more broadly, our minds and empirical selves). Being clear in one's grasp of certain formal concepts involves being disposed to use signs in particular ways so as to reflect the fundamental contingency of facts. But this involves treating ourselves (i.e. human beings) as facts on a par, with respect to their contingency, with all other facts in the world.

Now back to Harman:

An idiosyncratic feature of Harman’s philosophy is that “objects” for him are not just things, and certainly not just natural things, but also concepts, imagined entities, and nearly any entity that can have some effect on reality for however long or short a time, on however large or small a scale, and at whatever level of availability to human perception or “science.” 

This is not a radically new idea. Compare Russell’s notion of a term in The Principles of Mathematics: 

Whatever may be an object of thought, or may occur in any true or false proposition, or can be counted as one, I call a term. This, then, is the widest word in the philosophical vocabulary. I shall use as synonymous with it the words unit, individual, and entity. … A man, a moment, a number, a class, a relation, a chimaera, or anything else that can be mentioned, is sure to be a term; and to deny that such and such a thing is a term must always be false. (p. 43) 

See also Frege: “Places, instants, stretches of time, logically considered, are objects,” p. 42— “On Sinn und Bedeutung” in The Frege Reader.  I speculate more about what the early Wittgenstein might have meant by 'objects' and, especially, 'things' here. 

So speculative realism does not sound all that incompatible with Wittgenstein's philosophy, except for its metaphysical ambitions. How does Lovecraft fit in? 

In Lovecraft’s version of reality, laws seem to function in ways that make our foundational certainties — Euclidean geometry, the private experience of dreams, the inviolable divisions between human, animal, plant, and the nonliving, etc. — merely contingent: just the way things appear to us, rather than absolute necessities.

This makes Lovecraft sound not so much anti-Kantian as a product of the post-Kantian world. Apparently what makes Lovecraft so great is that he takes the world to be weird, and he is not a linguistic idealist (nor someone who focuses on language rather than the world). Sounds like Musil. Or Wittgenstein (see the emphasis on contingency in the Tejedor quote above). (Or Kafka, for that matter. And many other people.) Wittgenstein certainly pays attention to language, but not because he's a linguistic idealist, and not because he isn't interested in life or the world.

Lovecraft seems Schopenhauerian, given his Kantian emphasis on the unknown but with a horrible, pessimistic twist. (He's also Shakespearean, or Macduffian, given this from Macbeth:

O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart

Cannot conceive nor name thee!

To use Harman's words, I would say that here "language is overloaded by a gluttonous excess" of negatives and iterations of 'horror.' But I digress.)

And Wittgenstein's ethics, or religious attitude, if you prefer, is rather Schopenhauerian too, though in a different way. Schopenhauer links art and genius with a kind of knowing that is independent of the principle of sufficient reason. There is little room for the principle of sufficient reason in Wittgenstein's philosophy, at least in the early Wittgenstein. The only necessity is logical necessity, so there is no reason sufficient to explain why things have to be as they are. Compare also the later Wittgenstein on the two identical-seeming seeds that produce different plants. Wittgenstein challenges the assumption that there must be some undetected difference in the seeds.

In short I quite like the sound of speculative realism, but mostly because it reminds me of Wittgenstein. I wonder whether the two could be brought fruitfully together. Perhaps I should investigate further.

Impossible colors

Via Neatorama I find that Wikipedia has an article on impossible colors. I wonder what Wittgenstein would make of this:

In 1983, Hewitt D. Crane and Thomas P. Piantanida carried out tests using a device that had a field of a vertical red stripe adjacent to a vertical green stripe (or in some cases, yellow–blue). In contrast to apparatus used in simpler tests, the device had the ability to track involuntary eye movement and to adjust mirrors so that the image would appear to be completely stable. The boundary of the red–green stripes was stabilised on the retina of one eye while the other eye was patched and the field outside the stripes was blanked with occluders. This allowed for a mixing of the two colors in the brain, producing neither green for a yellow–blue test, nor brown for a red green test, but new colors entirely. Some of the volunteers for the experiment even reported that afterwards, they could still imagine the new colors for a period of time.

My hunch is that this is one of those reason/cause cases, so that it's possible to tell a story about what might cause our inability to see, say, reddish-green, but that this would pass by the incomprehensibility (grammatical non-existence) of 'reddish-green'. It's also worth noting that the evidence from this experiment is disputed.

My favorite part is this:

In 1927, American horror fiction author H. P. Lovecraft wrote a short story called "The Colour Out of Space" in which a meteorite crashed into a family farm in rural New England. The meteorite contained a mysterious globule of a color that was "almost impossible to describe," with a note that it was "only by analogy" that professors studying the globule called it a color at all.

Incidentally, in the book 90 Minutes in Heaven, which claims to describe what it's like to be dead and then come back to life, the whole heaven part is said to be true only by analogy. There is neither time nor space, we are told, and then follows a lot of stuff about old friends and relatives happily running to greet the dead person, and so on. Curious.

Both cases (Lovecraft's color and a timeless moment that is like a 90 minute meeting with various people) push (or perhaps simply violate) the boundaries of what we (or I) can comprehend. It's probably good to experience a bit of such uncanniness every now and then, but bad to take too much refuge from canny reality in it.

The possibility of an island

Kelly Jolley reminds us of Kant's island of truth in an ocean of illusion:

We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place.  This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits.  It is the land of truth–enchanting name!–surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion. (Critique of Pure Reason, A235/B294)

Similar images occur elsewhere. Nietzsche, as j. reminds us, uses related language:

…Indeed, at hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead’, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation – finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea’ (The Gay Science §343, ed. Williams).

Then there is Wittgenstein on Heidegger:

Anyone who speaks of the opposition of being and the nothing, and of the nothing as something primary in contrast to negation, has in mind, I think, a picture of an island of being which is being washed by an infinite ocean of the nothing.  Whatever we throw into this ocean will be dissolved in its water and annihilated.  But the ocean itself is endlessly restless like the waves on the sea.  It exists, it is, and we say: ‘it noths.’  (The Voices of Wittgenstein, pp. 69-71)

And H. P. Lovecraft:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

I'm not sure that the Wittgenstein passage belongs here, but it's hard to think that it wasn't somewhat influenced by Kant's image, however indirectly or unimportantly. That is, I'm not claiming that he is referring to Kant here. Mostly I just want to bring these passages together, but I intend to return to some of their themes in a future post.