Bells and Whistles by Harman Graham

Author:Harman, Graham [Harman, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78279-037-2
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2013-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

Let’s briefly discuss what Garcia means by this, before ending with some more general reflections on his philosophical position. The first impulse of thought, Garcia says, should be to seek the weakest constraint on what counts as a thing. Philosophy should be able to include everything, no matter what it is. But there cannot be no constraint at all. After all, philosophy cannot treat “no-matter-what” as itself a thing, since every individual thing is determined in some way, and is never a no-matter-what. In this connection Garcia often uses the unfamiliar term “tinology,” which is derived from the Greek word ti (or “what”) and was coined, as far as I can tell, by Pierre Aubenque. It is important for Garcia to insist against the Russell/Quine axis that contradictions do have some minimal determination. In a fascinating analysis, Garcia explains the difference between various contradictions along the following lines. A non-human human has the possibility of being a circle, but not the possibility of being human or the possibility of being non-human, since it is constrained by definition to be both of these. But for a non-circle circle, the situation would be the reverse. The non-circle circle would have the possibility of being human (since it is indeterminate with respect to humanity) but is constrained to be a circle and also constrained to be a non-circle. Thus, the non-human human and the non-circle circle are two different things, not one. To eliminate all constraints and allow for something to be purely indeterminate would be to compact the no-matter-what. We will say more about the compact shortly.

Having any determination at all is all it takes to count as a thing. Any further determinations than this will be shared by some things and not others. And this, says Garcia, is what explains the fact that his book has two parts. The first part, entitled “Formally,” concerns only things qua things, things as having any determination at all rather than specific ones. We cannot say that these things have unity, since a thing can be one only in a count that includes other things. Instead, the things are marked by solitude; they are alone in their solitude. In Garcia’s strangely beautiful words: “My hand is only something when it is the sole thing, when it is alone in the world. Where my hand is something, nothing else is something: all that which is not my hand is undifferentiated, whether it be my finger, the blue of the sky or the word ‘hand.’ And where my finger is something, my hand is not.”

But insofar as things are not alone in their solitude, they either contain or are contained by other things. We have now left the field of things, defined by the first half of the book, and entered that of objects (the second half of Garcia’s book is entitled “Objectively”) which are always greater or lesser, asymmetrical in their relations with one another. Atoms are contained in the coffee mug but the reverse obviously does not hold: the coffee mug is not contained by atoms.

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