Weird Realism

Lovecraft and Philosophy, Graham Harman

Jan 25th, 2013 | By Zero Books Editor | Category: Book News

A Writer of Gaps and Horror
One of the most important decisions made by philosophers concerns the production
or destruction of gaps in the cosmos. That is to kantsay, the philosopher can e
ither declare that what appears to be one is actually two, or that what seems to
be two is actually one. Some examples will help make the theme more vivid. In o
pposition to common sense, which sees nothing around us but a world of normal ev
eryday entities, Plato created a gap between the intelligible forms of the perfe
ct world and the confusing shadows of opinion. The occasionalists of the medieva
l Arab world and seventeenth century Europe produced a gap between any two entit
ies by denying that they exert direct influence on one another, so that God beca
me the only causal agent in the universe. The philosophy of Kant proposes a gap
between appearances and things-in-themselves, with no chance of a symmetry betwe
en the two; the things-in-themselves can be thought but never known.
But there are abundant examples of the opposite decision as well. We might think
that horses are one thing and atoms are another, but hardcore materialists insi
st that a horse is completely reducible to physical atoms and is nothing over an
d above them. In this way the supposed gap between horses and atoms is destroyed
, since on this view there is no such thing as a horse at all, just atoms arranged
in a certain pattern. Instead of atoms, we might also claim that the whole worl
d is made of water, air, fire, or a gigantic and indeterminate lump. In ancient
Greece these were the various tendencies of the pre-Socratic philosophers. Alter
natively, we might hold that there are individual objects on one side and the va
rious qualities of those objects on the other. David Hume denounced this gap, re
ducing supposed unified objects to nothing more than bundles of qualities. There
is no such thing as an apple, just many different qualities that occur together
so regularly that through force of habit we begin to call them an apple. And as f
or Kant s gap between appearances and things-in-themselves, the German Idealists t
ried to destroy this gap by calling it incoherent: to think of things-in-themsel
ves outside thought is meaningless, for given that we do think of them, they are
obviously an element of thought. The destruction and production of gaps can eas
ily coexist in the same philosopher, just as black and white co-exist in the sam
e painting. For example, if Hume is a destroyer of gaps by holding that objects
are nothing more than bundles of qualities, he is also aproducer of gaps through
his denial that we can prove causal relationships between objects (this latter
point is an inheritance from the occasionalists he so admired). Nonetheless, the
re is generally a dominant tone in every philosopher favoring one technique or t
he other. Since those who destroy gaps by imploding them into a single principle
are generally called reductionists, let s coin the wordproductionists to describe
philosophers who find new gaps in the world where there were formerly none.
lovecraftIf we apply this distinction to imaginative writers, then H.P. Lovecraf
t is clearly a productionist author. No other writer is so perplexed by the gap
between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects a
nd the qualities they possess. Despite his apparently limited interest in philos
ophy, Lovecraft as a tacit philosopher is violently anti-idealist and anti-Humea
n. Indeed, there are times when Lovecraft echoes cubist painting in a manner amo
unting almost to a parody of Hume. While Hume thinks that objects are a simple a
massing of familiar qualities, Lovecraft resembles Braque, Picasso, and the phil
osopher Edmund Husserl by slicing an object into vast cross-sections of qualitie
s, planes, or adumbrations, which even when added up do not exhaust the reality
of the object they compose. For Lovecraft, the cubists, and Husserl, objects are
anything butbundles of qualities. In parallel with this tendency, Lovecraft is
anti-idealist whenever he laments the inability of mere language to depict the d
eep horrors his narrators confront, to the point that he is often reduced to hin

ts and allusions at the terrors inhabiting his stories. The present book will co
nsider numerous examples of both sorts of gaps in Lovecraft s writings. But while
Lovecraft is a writer of gaps, he is also a writer of horror, and the two should
not be conflated. One could imagine a very different writer who used Lovecraft s
staple techniques for other purposes perhaps a sensual fantasist who would place u
s in a world of strange and indescribable pleasures, in which candles, cloves, a
nd coconut milk were of such unearthly perfection that language would declare it
self nearly powerless to describe them. A literary weird porn might be conceivable
, in which the naked bodies of the characters would display bizarre anomalies su
bverting all human descriptive capacity, but without being so strange that the e
rotic dimension would collapse into a grotesque sort of eros-killing horror. We
will see that while the stylistic production of gaps augments Lovecraft s power to
depict monstrous horrors, the horrors themselves must occur on the level of lit
eral content, not of literary allusion. Lovecraft as an author of horror writes
about horrific content (monstrous creatures more powerful than humans and with n
o regard for our welfare), while Lovecraft the author of gaps is one who could h
ave flourished in many other genres featuring many different sorts of content.
It should be obvious to readers of my previous books why Lovecraft, when viewed
as a writer of gaps between objects and their heideggerqualities, is of great re
levance for my model of object-oriented ontology (OOO). The major topic of objec
t-oriented philosophy is the dual polarization that occurs in the world: one bet
ween the real and the sensual, and the other between objects and their qualities
. The two will be described in greater detail below. One involves a vertical gap,
as found in Heidegger, for whom real objects forever withdraw behind their acces
sible, sensual presence to us. The other is a subtler horizontal gap, as found in
Husserl, whose denial of a real world beyond all consciousness still leaves room
for a powerful tension between the relatively durable objects of our perception
and their swirling kaleidoscope of shifting properties. Once we note that the w
orld contains both withdrawn real objects with both real and sensual qualities a
nd fully accessible sensual objects that are also linked with both real and sens
ual qualities, we find ourselves with four basic tensions or gaps in the world.
These gaps are the major subject matter of object-oriented philosophy, and Lovec
raft s constant exploitation of these very gaps automatically makes him as great a
hero to object-oriented thought as Hlderlin was to Heidegger.
In 2008 I published a widely read article on Lovecraft and Husserl. Having recen
tly reread this article, I find that I am mostly happy with the ideas it develop
s. Nonetheless, it also makes two proposals that I now see as unfortunately onesided. First, the article holds husserlthat there is no Kantian or noumenal aspect
of Lovecraft, and asserts that Lovecraft should be paired solely with Husserl a
s an author confined to the phenomenal plane even if he produces strange new gap
s within that plane. Second, it strongly downplays the importance of the fact th
at Lovecraft is a writer of horror and Husserl (though more weird than most people
realize) is not a philosopher of horror. My fresh reservations about these two
points are in many ways the engine of the present book. First, Lovecraft must be
read not as a Husserlian author, but as jointly Husserlian-Kantian (or better:
Husserlian-Heideggerian). This places him closer to my own position than either
Husserl or Heidegger taken singly. And second, horror as the specific content of
Lovecraft s stories must be accounted for, despite the fact that he is also an au
thor of gapsthat might be stylistically incarnated in numerous different genres
other than horror. In short, the tension between style and content now becomes v
ery important. In our efforts to fight the overly literal reading of Lovecraft a
s just a portrayer of scary monsters, we must also acknowledge that those monste
rs are his almost exclusive subject matter in a way that is true neither of Huss
erl nor of the vast majority of fiction writers. In this first part of the book
I will show why this presents a problem; in the concluding third part, I will tr
y to provide a partial solution, one that goes hand in hand with the fact that L
ovecraft works along two separate axes of gaps, not just one. In the longer seco
nd part I will examine numerous passages of Lovecraft in detail, thereby setting

the stage for the concluding argument.

**********************************************************
weirdrealismWeird Realism - Lovecraft and Philosophy
ISBN: 978-1-78099-252-5, $24.95 / 14.99, paperback, 277pp
EISBN: 978-1-78099-907-4, $9.99 / 6.99, eBook
As Hlderlin was to Martin Heidegger and Mallarm to Jacques Derrida, so is H.P. Lov
ecraft to the Speculative Realist philosophers. Lovecraft was one of the brighte
st stars of the horror and science fiction magazines, but died in poverty and re
lative obscurity in the 1930s. In 2005 he was finally elevated from pulp status
to the classical literary canon with the release of a Library of America volume
dedicated to his work. The impact of Lovecraft on philosophy has been building f
or more than a decade. Initially championed by shadowy guru Nick Land at Warwick
during the 1990s, he was later discovered to be an object of private fascinatio
n for all four original members of the twenty-first century Speculative Realist
movement.
In this book, Graham Harman extracts the basic philosophical concepts underlying
Lovecrafts work, yielding a "weird realism" capable of freeing continental phil
osophy from its current soul-crushing impasse. Abandoning Heideggers pious refer
ences to Hlderlin and the Greeks, Harman develops a new philosophical mythology c
entered in such Lovecraftian figures as Cthulhu, Wilbur Whately, and the rat-lik
e monstrosity Brown Jenkin. The Miskatonic River replaces the Rhine and the Iste
r, while Hlderlin Caucasus gives way to Lovecrafts Antarctic mountains of madness
.
gharman
Graham Harman is Associate Provost for Research Administration and Professor of
Philosophy at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He was born in Iowa in 19
68. He received his undergraduate degree from the classical liberal arts program
at St. John's College, Annapolis (1990). His Master's Degree was done at Penn S
tate (1991) under the renowned philosopher Alphonso Lingis, and focused on Levin
as. He completed his Ph.D. at DePaul University in Chicago (1999), with a disser
tation that became his first book. While finishing his doctoral studies, he work
ed as a Chicago sportswriter from 1996-98. In September 2000 he began work in th
e Department of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo. Egypt has become
his base for travel to more than 60 countries and the composition of ten books
in less than a decade. He is a vegetarian for ethical reasons.
**********************************************************
Also of interest:
What is Speculative Realism

Quadruple Object

Tags: Graham Harman, HP Lovecraft, philosophy, Weird Realism

3 Comments to Weird Realism Lovecraft and Philosophy, Graham Harman
James Anderson says:
February 1, 2013 at 5:42 am

This is a very interesting approach to Lovecraft. I appreciate how the author pr

oves that Lovecraft is a superior artist by using specific quotes from each of t
he texts and showing how they work the create a new form of cosmic horror. I wis
h I d had this book back when I was doing my Ph.D. dissertation on Lovecraft.
James Arthur Anderson
Author of Out of the Shadows (a rewrite of my dissertation published by Wildside P
ress.
Reply
Gilbert Austin says:
June 23, 2013 at 12:12 pm
Fascinating, but the space between HPL and Husserl has been investigated (and in
evitably, mostly ignored) over four decades ago. The British phenomenologist Col
in Wilson wrote The Mind Parasites for Derleth s Arkham House imprint in 1967. The
novel s premise is extrapolated from an insight in Wilson s textbook on the phenome
nology of Husserl (The New Existentialsm, 1966) and although it s tone is parodic
Wilson suggests he was making use of Brecht s A-Effekt as he was writing it
there
is a serious philosophical point on the prejudices of consciousness in it s narrat
ive.. Wilson continued with the Cthulhu phenomenonology with The Philosopher s Sto
ne and The Return of the Lloiger. Also worth reading viz HPL is his The Strength
to Dream from 1962 which compares the recluse of Providence with the Vampire of
Dusseldorf , Peter Kurten (!) Like PKD, Wilson was doing phenomenology within pulp
covers, and he deserves paricular credence for his linking of HPL and Husserl s
o long ago. A Wilson fancy, the Crowleyesque occultist Kenneth Grant, also wrote
extraordinary stuff on Lovecraft which is relevant to Mr Harman s argument here.
Reply
Sandy Robertson says:
June 29, 2013 at 10:28 am
This relation between Lovecraft and the likes of Husserl was hardly an innovatio
n by Mr Land in the 90s! Colin Wilson was writing on HPL and phenomenology in Th
e Strength To Dream in 1962, and used the ideas in his noel The Mind Parasites i
n 1967! Credit where credit s due, please!!!!!!!!!
Reply
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