Graham Harman on Lovecraft

[gveranon]

Very good interview. Reading Harman is always stimulating and thought-provoking for me. There is much that is quoteworthy, but I especially liked these two passages:


"Remember that in 'The Call of Cthulhu,' a sailor was swallowed up by an angle of masonry 'which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse.' Whatever that means. This is not something to which advanced mathematicians are any closer than are you or I. This is why I am unsympathetic to scientistic interpretations of Lovecraft, and am not completely sympathetic to the 'materialist' interpretation of Lovecraft found in Houellebecq, much though I love his book in other respects. Lovecraft may be a materialist in the negative sense that he doesn't believe in souls, ghosts, or other spiritualist leftovers. But this hardly makes him someone whose world is expressible even in higher scientific and mathematical languages, even if he sometimes gestures in this direction. Cthulhu is metaphysically different from our encounter with him, not just beyond our limited sense-organs and cognitive categories."

------------------

"... My view is that the arts in general are the future dialogue partner of philosophers, after four centuries of slavish admiration of the hard sciences and the deductive procedures of geometry. The key point for me is that the 'philosophical' aspects of film should not be too literal. If a filmmaker has a conscious philosophical doctrine in mind and puts that in the film, the result will inevitably be banal. Imagine a hypothetical Heideggerian film called 'Throwness.' It would probably just be a predictable story about how the lead character is absorbed in the idle chatter of the public until one day he has a liberating experience of anxiety, and so forth. That's not the kind of relation that film (or any art) should have to philosophy, dramatizing on screen the explicit things that have already been put into books.

"Philosophy's task is conceptual innovation, an avoidance of the trench warfare that leads us to choose one concept simply because it opposes another that we happen not to like. What philosophy does, or does at its finest moments, is carve new paths that resemble no currently available alternatives. This makes philosophy a Protean discipline that cannot afford to rest in one place -- though ironically, it is also slower in speed than the other disciplines, which face pressures from reality to innovate more quickly. Philosophy moves more slowly, but moves at a level that others take for granted, along paths that lead into all other disciplines without dominating them.

"... The reason [for a philosopher] to stay in close contact with other disciplines is to share in the pressures they are facing from reality: the need to respond to new technologies and social forms. But since philosophy can only be love of wisdom rather than wisdom itself (cf. Socrates), it has a certain ingrained negative element in which the other disciplines cannot afford to indulge. Other disciplines must always take a stand in real time, and that's why all disciplines are more political than philosophy."