Ambient Temporalities: Rethinking Object-Oriented Time through Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger

1 Introduction

Plato defines temporality during the Timaeus as “a moving image of eternity,” persisting in relation to the eternal nature of the Forms; time is an absolute receptacle enclosing all existence, subsisting independently of whatever is posited inside it.^[1] In opposition to this, Aristotelian time advocates the temporal not as an autonomous totality populated by entities and occurrences, but as the heterogeneous play of relations between substances.^[2] Aristotle’s departure is to extract “time” from “change,” such that the former becomes a means of measuring the latter. Thus, “time” becomes heterogeneous, a plurality of changes, rather than Plato’s temporal homogeneity. Traditional readings of Kant position him as a Platonic temporal absolutist.^[3] These interpretations are based mainly on Kant’s thesis, in the First Antinomy from the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), that “[t]he world has a beginning in time,” and the same volume’s “Refutation of Idealism,” which doubts the facticity of space and time’s objective existence.^[4] Kant questions the validity of these dichotomous postulates that neither an a priori nor a posteriori method of inquiry can adequately accommodate the existence of mind-independent space and time. The awareness of being is thus considered an impossibility, without also accepting the equivalent reality of something existing outside of that awareness, against which it can be distinguished. Granted, all rational beings are capable of thinking the world, but without a concomitant instinctive understanding of time and space, such entities are incapable of knowing the world, a subtle but important distinction. Thus, an epistemological hierarchy emerges, between the “higher” knowing beings and those capable of “mere” thinking. Indeed, Kant argues that rational beings (to wit: humans) must define the world within uniform temporal and spatial structures, because time and space are the very conduits through which noumena are experienced as phenomena. Phrased differently, it is via sense impressions, such as concurrence or seriality, that the quiddity of objects is parsed temporally. Given this, the representation of things in time becomes inseparable from time itself. Time and space are therefore required as predetermined factors of reality, wherever phenomenal consciousness is considered. For this reason, neither temporality nor spatiality can be perceived directly. Nor can ideas of time or space be posited experientially, without always already being presuppositional, thus axiomatic. It is in this sense that Kant can be construed as a totalist thinker of the temporal; time as a container, one indivisible from consciousness: an absolute repository in which all objects take place. I suggest calling this temporal model sublime time. What might one say are the conditions of possibility which lead Kant, and to a lesser extent, his subsequent interlocutors, to this temporal sublime?

2 Kant and Sublime Time

A long duration is sublime.

Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1764^[5]

In some sense, Kant is a historian of his modern philosophical forebears: an arbiter of the rationalists (René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz) and the empiricists (John Locke, David Hume). He writes in a way that aspires to integrate metaphysics and the burgeoning science of the era – e.g., the innovations of Galilean telescopy or Newtonian physics – to seek a grounding for scientific presuppositions concerning cause and effect. Kant believes that the repercussions of, say, Humean scepticism, are hazardous for human subjectivity, that a lack of concreteness or fixity (for either the experienced object, or the experiencing subject) may result in a devolution into something akin to George Berkeley’s sacred immateriality. As a remedy, Kant concretises a division between thought and world, formalising the sovereignty of human thought against the shortcomings he ascribes to Hume’s “single existence.”^[6] The Critique of Pure Reason formulates twelve a priori categories that inform knowledge as a means of discovering what fundamentally governs human understanding, thereby facilitating all basic cognition.^[7] In justifying the categories, Kant restricts them to mere phenomena, curbing Hume’s metaphysical attacks on necessary laws. Kant postulates that, while reality persists, it does so in a manner that is beyond the access of human knowledge. Following this reduction of reality to the binary of phenomenal and noumenal (effectively human and nonhuman), one does not have to push much further to reach a consonant notion of noumenal or “sublime” time.

Contra absolutist readings, considering Kant’s temporality through an object-oriented lens allows for a somewhat different interpretation of Kantian time. Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) advocates a radicalised version of Aristotelian substance as the fundament of reality, with a dual heritage in Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl. Heidegger’s distinction, in Being and Time (1927), between 1) practical aspects of being accessible to mind and 2) being’s withdrawn theoretical excess, provides a catalyst. This relational system connects the tool (specifically, a hammer) to two levels of being: its existence as presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) and its reality as readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). The former pertains to the hammer’s being “as” something specific, while the latter refers to its general being “as” something at all (what Heidegger calls the “as-structure [die Als-Struktur]” of being).^[8] In Harman, Vorhandenheit becomes the experientially manifest “sensual object,” while Zuhandenheit becomes the permanently withdrawn surplus being of “real objects.” OOO retains a similar dyad from Husserl, but in a qualitative register. Real qualities present themselves to the intellect, while sensual qualities present themselves to the senses. The Heideggerian realm withdraws, the Husserlian adheres. The former bequeaths absence, the latter presence. In returning to substance, Harman’s innovation can be considered more broadly as a move away from Kantian themes of the subject as the nexus of philosophical engagement with the world, and towards a general finitude separating all objects.

The consolidation of the sensual from Husserl’s intentional dualism and the real from Heidegger’s ontic dualism leads Harman to theorise that the “primary dualism in the world is not between matter and mind, but between objects and relations.”^[9] Proceeding from this double dualism, OOO combines the real and sensual dyads to formulate a notion of the quadruple object.^[10] Heidegger’s real objects and real qualities intersect with Husserl’s sensual objects and sensual qualities to comprise the four basic poles of which all entities are composed. In addition to the intersection of dual real and sensual opposites, there is also a tension between each pole, which Harman differentiates as time, space, eidos, and essence.^[11] Time is the tension between sensual objects and their sensual qualities, space is the tension between real objects and sensual objects, eidos is the tension between sensual objects and their real qualities, and essence is the tension between a real thing and its real qualities.

Temporal monist renderings of Kant suggest a continuation of Platonic absolute time. Whereas Plato’s time is a divine construct, Kantian temporality is instead secular: a mind-dependent construct with which the human frames reality. Perhaps counterintuitively, however, Kant already operates as a discontinuous thinker, by Harman’s reckoning, rather than the absolutist of lore, on account of the German thinker’s notion of finitude. For OOO, the placing of a gap between humans and the rest of existence – between noumenal reality and its phenomenal reception – is perhaps Kant’s key insight for Harman, and one worth retaining. Despite this, Kant’s greatest innovation risks tipping over into being its greatest failing, whereby finitude remains inherently anthropocentric. Harman’s intervention is to hypostatise this gap for all of reality. Where two real objects – regardless of animacy – encounter one another there is a gap to be traversed. Yet, what seems to be a very Harmanian reading of Kant is actually already extant within the source, specifically in the latter’s aesthetic writings.

3 From the Temporal Sublime to Object-Oriented Time

Historically, how humans know the world has favoured Platonic epistemology, the seeking out of truth internally, understanding reality through thinking about it. Against this emphasis on inherent thought and rationality, Kant marks a concerted effort to counter post-Cartesian philosophy’s elevation of cognition and diminution of feeling and affect, by accounting for the senses in human processes of understanding the world. This Aristotelian manoeuvre, although still subjective and human-centred, at least acknowledges the role played by sensation and sensory experience, that the conditions for knowledge come from the world. One of Kant’s aesthetic innovations is to recognise and foreground the benefit of spending time with an artwork, its capacity to induce thought. Using the reflective process as an opportunity to contemplate, pushes art into a mode of knowledge creation for Kant; what, in the Critique of Judgement (1790), he refers to as a “feeling of freedom in the play of our cognitive powers.”^[12] Thus, out of Kant’s aesthetic writing in general, and the sublime-beautiful binary in particular, emerges an aspect of his work which is perhaps most underplayed: the opening up of a space for multiple ontological modes to exist.

Consider the start of the First Section of 1764’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, which offers a means of reorienting Kant away from his orthodox absolutist renderings, and towards a conceptual register that anticipates OOO:

The different sentiments of gratification or vexation rest not so much on the constitution of the external things that arouse them as on the feeling, intrinsic to every person, of being touched by them with pleasure or displeasure.^[13]

Kant’s emphasis on the benefits of spending time in reflective judgement with a work of art – what he calls “purposeless purposiveness” – amplifies the ontological potency of a sense of not-knowing-ness.^[14] Art deals with the not-yet-known, with the thought that is not necessarily right or wrong, but merely “is.” Writing in a manner which surreptitiously stresses the facility of “every person” to reflect on lived experience, Kant suggests that the sublime and the beautiful not only hold shifting significances according to the purview of each observer, but that these multiple dimensions of affect and meaning increase exponentially with the uniqueness of every experience. From here, the pluralising of each heterogeneous aesthetic “feeling, intrinsic to every person,” it is possible to posit multiple modes of being. Further, through bypassing the anthropocentric register of Kant’s original context – i.e., aesthetic contemplation – and applying the universality of existence to his ideas of temporality, one might speculate on their being multiple experiences of time. Further still, and following Harman, rather than sublime time, there exist innumerable times, for all things, not merely humans, unique to all entities as their ontological modes of being.^[15]

Harmanian time is consonant with Aristotle, supporting an account of differential and plural times. The discontinuous and granular nature of objectal time prescribes a disjunctive and episodic theory of cause. Enduring real and sensual objects are static while their real and sensual qualities are in flux. The tension between sensual objects (stasis) and sensual qualities (flux) equates to the passing of time. Given the radical withdrawal of the essential being of real objects, Harman seems to advocate a timeless present beneath the shifting appearance of things, whose transitory accidents are ephemeral when compared with the infinite substantial object subtending them. OOO’s universe of discrete objects echoes the modal realism of David Lewis. In On the Plurality of Worlds (1986), Lewis classifies two opposing accounts of identity through time: perdurance and endurance.^[16] Something perdures if its persistence is due to it having distinct temporal parts – or phases – at different times, though no one particular temporal section is entirely present at more than one moment. Something endures if its persistence is determined by it being wholly present at more than one time. Relatedly, in Truth and Ontology (2007), Trenton Merricks describes a temporal dualism, similar to that found in Lewis, between the traditionally opposed concepts of eternalism and presentism.^[17] An eternalist account of time prescribes that every temporal instance is equally real. Things that exist in the past and things existing in the future share the same ontological status – i.e., they are just as real – as things that exist in the present, and so, as such, there is no metaphysical disparity between past, present, or future. In opposition to this, the presentist account of time asserts that it is only ever the present that is real. All entities that persist do so in the present, entities that persist only at other times do not exist. Subsequently – in the presentist equation – the discordance between past, present, and future temporalities is metaphysical, rather than the perspectival difference inherent to eternalism.

Of these four metaphysical temporal modes, endurantism and presentism most potently encapsulate Harmanian time. Somewhat contradictorily, Harman would seem to be a real presentist and a sensual perdurantist. Presentist realism holds that the real object-real qualities axis of the quadruple object is paradoxically: 1) always wholly the present – in terms of temporality, 2) never wholly present – in terms of presence, but 3) always persistent – in terms of existence. Perdurantism of the sensual, meanwhile, holds that while the sensual object-sensual qualities axis is never wholly the present – sequential time is sensual, thus unreal – it is always wholly present during any given instant of its presence, yet its being does not persist perpetually. With regard to presentism, despite the “present” being the only extant time, this does not translate into a being whose presence is fully present. Regarding perdurantism, temporality is transient, presence is mere illusion, and persistence is discontinuous. In sum, for Harman, an individual being is wholly present temporally (in sense) but only partially present manifestly (in reality).

To better understand an object-oriented exposition of time, it will be advantageous to engage with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger as thinkers crucial enough to Harman to warrant exploring how each philosophises time and its causal agency. My motives for examining how Husserl and Heidegger incorporate time are twofold. I hope to 1) establish the temporal ambiguities of aesthetic causation in object theory and 2) amplify the prominence of relations in OOO. What, then, does OOO derive from Husserlian and Heideggerian temporality (and their responses to Kantian time) for its own temporal account?

4 OOO and the “Essential Flux” of Husserlian Temporality

Beginning with Husserl – for whom time is constituted subjectively by the transcendental ego – the absolute external temporality of Plato becomes internalised. The transcendental ego – or pure consciousness – is foundational for Husserlian phenomenology, representing a totality that is both the ground of meaning and the constitution of being. Thematised thus, everything in existence capitulates to pure consciousness as an object. The world subsists in relation to the transcendental ego. Accordingly, to speak of time is to posit temporality as internal to thought for Husserl, as immanent within consciousness.^[18] In the sense that the transcendental ego is constitutive of time, it therefore stands outside temporality, positioning Husserlian time as a correlate and continuation of Platonic readings of Kant. This emphasises the mind-dependent temporality of a subject observing an object, rather than the mind-independent temporality of an object in-itself. To wit: what I above called “sublime” time (but might also be described in Kantian terms as “noumenal” time), acquiesces to “phenomenal” time in Husserl.

Although both Husserl and Harman associate time with the sensual realm, their dissonances stem from the former’s phenomenological grounding. Harman accepts that “[w]e do not encounter a static frame of reality,” but only in so much as access to the enduring real object is unobtainable.^[19] Rather, afloat in the tensile “ether” between sensual objects and their sensual qualities, humans “feel a passage of time.”^[20] Harman attempts to resolve this paradox by utilising a dual conceptualisation of temporality: what might be referred to as “lived” time and “real” time. Lived time is experiential or affectual, pertaining to the tension between enduring sensual objects and their shifting sensual qualities in the quadruple object model, while real-time belongs to space, the realm of strife between real objects and their sensual qualities. Regardless of the apparent spatial quality of real-time, though, it should not be confused with the Cartesian postulate of extension (res extensa). Space is not an extended container of being, for Harman, but an intrinsic property of objects. If there is only ever “now,” if movement is illusory or accidental, and if space is an emergent attribute of substance, how exactly does change occur in the Harmanian universe?^[21]

Change seems to happen at the sensual level for OOO, in the peripheral external realm between individual and deeply withdrawn real objects. This interstitial sensual dimension, of shifting and transitory accidents, is where vicarious causation occurs.^[22] The sensual realm is the relational betweenness which aids the definition of each object as Other. That this environment is one of mutability and flux would suggest that it is also a temporal dimension. “OOO defines time as something belonging to the uttermost surface of reality,” writes Harman, “being is the non-relational, and presence is the relational,” such that “OOO generalizes the relational character of presence to cover the interaction between any two things at all, even inanimate ones.”^[23] In other words, contra a Platonic absolute or Kantian sublime model of time which encompasses all existence, reality is actually a myriad of entity-specific time-space systems for OOO. The multitudinous interaction among these variegated and self-contained organisations facilitates a panoply of times and spaces. One problematic consequence of Harman’s temporality being purely sensual is that – as the tension between sensual objects and sensual qualities – it is not real. Because of this, despite some consonance in their shared attributing of temporality to sensuality or phenomenality, for Husserl, sensual time – as lived experience – is very much real. For phenomenology, there is only the phenomenal realm: as the immanent objects of an intentional act, phenomena are the base component of reality. Stated differently, it is impossible – as Husserl writes, in a salient passage from Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis (1920/21) – to:

[…] conceive of a consciousness that would not go beyond the strict present in its essential flux from presence to new presences; consciousness is inconceivable without retentional and protentional horizons, without a co-consciousness (although a necessarily non-intuitive one) of the past of consciousness and an anticipation of an approaching consciousness (no matter how indeterminate it may be). Thus if something “arises out of something” at all in the stream of consciousness, then apperceptions necessarily arise from apperceptions.^[24]

This brief but complex extract is worth further unpacking – if only sparingly – as it contains some notable themes which run counter to Harman’s objective reading of Husserl. The excerpt hinges on the notion of “horizons,” thus providing an appropriate expositional starting point. “Horizon” intimates a structural element to intentionality, which is equated with the anticipatory nature of experience – “protention” in Husserl’s terminology – and the associated expectancy of possibility. In tandem with the protentional horizon is the “retentional” horizon; the term “retention” alluding not to memory, but, rather, the demonstration of a present extended in time, beyond the instantaneous and transitory moments of sense perception. This is why retention is discussed in conjunction with protention – the prospect of the next occurrence of an extended present – as dual horizons contained within, but also constitutional of, each “present.” The momentary nature of perception exemplified by the horizon structure is consonant with Husserl’s conceptualisation of perception’s tripartite temporality, which can be summarised thus: retention (past), immediate present, and protention (future). This triptych of temporal elements implies a sequential flow to perception: a dynamic process of movement through which each instance of protention becomes the retention of the next in a linear continuum. Thus, for Husserl, time is an intrinsic feature of experience.

Hypothesising that general experience is divisible into specific perceptual episodes – e.g., that a temporal moment is conceivable, in much the same way that the Kantian thing-in-itself can be thought without ever being explicitly known – the phenomenal constituent of an exact instantiation of perception is a particular profile of adumbrations. In other words, a moment of perception – an instance of being – equates to a composition of manifest aspects. The exact profile of an object that is in a sensual exhibition at a given temporal interval is “given” in such a manner that announces a potential in excess of itself: an “excess” that is the protention towards future episodes of experience. This phenomenological emphasis on the temporal nature of consciousness, and the durational aspect of enduring identity through time, is concomitant with Husserl’s onus on an object’s ipseity as a series of horizonal profiles, rather than an underlying autonomous object. Immanent within the horizon-structure of a moment of experience is the protention of subsequent profiles. In this manner, the horizon structure of being is constitutive of the content of experience via the qualia of granular hyletic datum. One might argue that this “granular” aspect of datum is itself an atomistic, thus object-oriented, exposition of being. But, as I will argue below, to taxonomically separate out the constituent elements of being into “objects” and “relations” is not only dubious, but also erroneous. Any particular profile is indexical of some later ensuing profile – the next in the sequence of experiential moments – a portent of the transformation of protention into retention. More fundamentally, concerning the indivisibility of Husserlian time, the difference between an intentional object and its adumbrations is – at least at a temporal level – an issue of duration. The durational registers of intentional objects, even when measured against the drastic instabilities of change at the level of adumbrations, are still, to a degree, essentially just longer periods of non-change (a la Kantian sublime time), in Being’s greater matrices of flux.

The reader may discern a developing tone of ambiguity concerning just how cogent and sustainable an object-oriented interpretation of Husserl can be. Indeed, does the horizon structure of pure consciousness’s temporality – as the decisive arbiter of reality – really lend itself to being discerned as discrete, thus objectal? Or do all horizons merge and permeate one another? To this end, it is difficult to uphold a robust substance-based account of phenomenal episodes. These fundamental ambivalences weaken the plausibility of any ontological model that favours either objects or relations. Rather than erroneously parsing the fundamental nature of reality into either substance or relations, my theory of “ambience” (which is discussed in greater detail in Section 6) is an attempt to synthesise and amplify themes of the “inbetween,” which have permeated metaphysical discourse ever since the Ancient Greek distinction concerning Parmenidean presence and Heraclitean absence. Attempts at identifying the individuated present in Husserl offer further problems as, indeed, does the very act of individuation. This is to say, there is no time for Husserl in which presence is not present. The presences of the past and the future are immanent within that of the present, intimating another temporal monism, in the Kantian mode. Ergo, presence is absolute for Husserl, such that there is no absence. Similarly, Harmanian time conflates the present with presence; both are yoked together as a temporal simultaneity in which each new instance of presence subsists latently within the last. To clarify: while conceding that Harman does not explicitly defend a position of time as made of instants, or as a continuous creation, this opinion is at least hinted at in his thought implicitly. To wit: objects “create” time as an emergent property (see Section 6). This equates to multiple times; thus, I argue, a suggestion that time is composed of (imbricated) moments: a sporadic “local,” or “situated” (read: objectal), version of creation – i.e., pockets of disparate, yet accruing, change, rather than “constant.” Granting this, one might then counter-argue that this is in itself a type of “constant creation.” It is paradoxically fluctual and discrete, returning the quandary back to my theory of ontological “ambience.”

The subsistence of the world occurs intramentally, at least as determined by Husserl. In other words, the ontogenesis of being – the arising of something out of something as a general law of origin – necessarily occurs inside thought, in “the stream of consciousness,” wherein “apperceptions necessarily arise from apperceptions.” Because of this, consciousness itself – as the Husserlian domain of being – is inconceivable without the temporalising horizon-structure of retention and protention. As a result of time’s indivisibility, and the difficulty in reducing temporality to a chain of discrete occasions, sustaining a rigidly object-oriented account of Husserlian time becomes increasingly problematic.

5 From Zeitlichkeit to Temporalität: OOO and Heidegger’s Temporal Shift

Across the vast arc of Martin Heidegger’s corpus, the articulation of time is typically – if somewhat reductively – divided into two contrasting periods by scholars: Zeitlichkeit, the time of Dasein (human being), and Temporalität, the time of Sein (Being).^[25] The former pertains to his early elucidation of time, circa Being and Time, the latter to his subsequent expressions of temporality following “the turn” (die Kehre) of the 1930s.^[26] I uphold that transmissions continually traverse the interpretive nexus of the 1930s, reverberating back and forth between the incipient and mature eras of his writing, sounding out new possibilities in either direction. For the purpose of this essay, I will employ the more orthodox reading of Heideggerian time.

Contra Husserl’s temporal conceptualisations, Heidegger asserts that time cannot be reduced to experience as a mere by-product of phenomenal consciousness. Temporality (Zeitlichkeit) is, rather, the tripartite union of what he terms ecstases (Ekstasen) – a technical turn of phrase introduced in Being and Time, to describe the past (“towards”), present (“to”), and future (“alongside”).^[27] The conjunction of the ecstases aids the constitution of Dasein, via a kind of recursive temporal loop (∞): the future (the “towards-oneself”) and the past (the “back-to”) are perpetually received by the present as a “letting-oneself-be-encountered-by.”^[28] This theorisation of time offers a way of circumventing the traditional Aristotelian exposition of past, present, and future as an infinite series of chronologically sequential discrete moments. Moreover, Heidegger expresses temporality (Zeitlichkeit) not in dimensional terms of spatiality, but as an orientation towards a horizon of time, as in the Husserlian sense mentioned above. Along these lines, Zeitlichkeit – which is finite – exists in relation to the three ecstases. Zeitlichkeit’s quality of being “finite,” e.g., its finitude (Endlichkeit), is invariably a temporal boundary – at least as expressed throughout the pages of Being and Time – one that finds its termination in death. Heidegger locates another articulation of being in Kant, however: one related to the limitations of thought, whereby divine intuition is juxtaposed with the finite knowledge of humans.^[29] This opposition derives from godly thought being constitutive of objects, while humans merely receive intuition from objects. It is in this sense, writes Heidegger, that Dasein exists “in the midst of the essent [ein Seiendes: being] which already is and to which our Dasein is abandoned.”^[30] By emphasising this abandonment – this giving over of aseity to a more communal and interconnected mode of Being – Heidegger coordinates human finitude with the nature of its reception; that is, sensation. Human consciousness compensates for its finitude through its receipt of objective intuitions via its sense organs. In short: Dasein is “finite” in the sense that it requires something else – e.g., a divine entity, phenomenal objects, a community – by which it contrasts and defines itself.

In his articulation of time and being, Heidegger attempts to evade established connotations associated with the Aristotelian lexicon, doing so via an ever more elaborate series of expressive metaphors. His recourse to aesthetic terminology – itself a precursor to Harman’s use of such allegory – can be understood in part as a mode of prose inherited from German Romanticist philosopher and poet, Friedrich Hölderlin.^[31] From Hölderlin, Heidegger distils a means of poeticising the essence of being, of aestheticising existence. He forges this new vocabulary to evade the limits set by standard language in general, and the linguistic poverty of modern metaphysics in particular. In some sense, the impression of his later, less conventional, more gnomic pronouncements, suggests a double movement. First, a shift towards a more adequate means of expressing the wholly indeterminate nature of Being. Second, to mitigate against anterior restrictive anthropological articulations of reality’s fundamental un-representability. Heidegger acknowledges that language is itself an enframing (Gestell), an aperture through which to know the world, at once a support and also a limit, a bounding. As such, then, the German thinker’s more poetic ontological taxonomy – e.g., alḗtheia (“unconcealment”), Ereignis (“event,” “enowning”) – is a lexis used for its agency in conveying an experimental mode of meaning. It is in this lyrical sense that Heidegger does not merely employ “past” and “future” as quotidian descriptors for time, but, rather, formulates the terms “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) and “projection” (Entwurf), respectively, as descriptive alternatives. Both are interchangeable terms that his early work employs to describe the existentially unique ontological structure of Dasein. Thrownness and projection are the awareness that humans have owing to always finding themselves somewhere; an acknowledgment and understanding of one’s own being-in-the-world. As such, Dasein is a thrown projection. Zeitlichkeit is the enablement of opportunity for individuated human existence as a form of “being thrown” (Geworfen) into the world, specifically towards the future. The past – as thrownness – is the total givenness that Dasein is thrown into at any moment. Correspondingly, the future – as projection – is the aggregation of all anterior moments of thrownness combined with each successive totality of givenness. This series of tensions is always already at play within the present such that its presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) nature is derived from the readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) of the past and the future.

Two basic types of temporal existence are identified in Being and Time under the rubric of Zeitlichkeit: inauthentic and authentic.^[32] Inauthentic time is the passive temporality of everyday life, the durational matrices that constitute the temporal milieu of existence. It is an undifferentiated ground of time. Authentic time, meanwhile, refers to the active time of individual life, the discrete instants of specific and distinct temporalities. As a dynamic temporality, authentic time undergoes the process of its own inception: the ontogenesis of an existence out of inauthentic time. Differentiated units of time emerge out of chronological generality as a plurality of subjective temporalities. In this context, Dasein is “temporally particular [jeweiliges]” when juxtaposed against the undifferentiated, temporally general, in a way that is suggestive of the affiliation elsewhere in Heidegger of content (beings) and background (Being).^[33] Authentic time, then, is essentially the product of individuation. As if to corroborate this, in The Essence of Human Freedom (1930), time is designated with “individualizing the human being to himself” such that “in the essence of time itself there lies individualization.”^[34] The temporal constitutes individualisation in this fashion, such that the ontogenesis of being “resid[es] in time itself.”^[35]

Following Heidegger’s reorientation of the relationship between Dasein and Sein in the 1930s, the subjective Zeitlichkeit gradually acquiesces to the objective Temporalität: the time of Being. Given the anthropological connotations associated with thrownness and projection – that sapience seems to be preconditional – this gradual shift chimes with Heidegger’s striving towards a nonsubjective mode of ontological expression, anticipating Harman’s own desire for a democratic metaphysics. By the late period essay, “Time and Being” (1969), Temporalität has come to subtend his entire metaphysical schema, such that every being has its own time.^[36] This latter text attempts to think Being and time in a manner such that neither is a “thing,” as such, because, traditionally (e.g., Platonically), to be an actual thing is to exist in time. What Heidegger is working towards with the notion of Temporalität is an overturning of orthodox philosophical positions, whose discourses conflate presence with the present. In Occidental philosophy, Being has been customarily determined by time as presence, and time determined by Being as the present. Consider the statements: “Being is,” or “time is”; both propose the beingness of each as a “thing” that is present, and thus has presence. Heidegger breaks with this Western metaphysical conceit by contending that, as such, Being is not a thing, because it is not “in” time. Phrased differently, to be a thing is to be present, to have presence. Correspondingly, to be a thing is also to remain, to endure. Thus, stated explicitly: to be a thing is to be temporal. Yet, for the later Heidegger, Being and time are neither temporal nor things. “Existence” is expressed in German as “it gives” (es gibt), rather than “there is,” such that it is apposite to state that “there is Being,” or “there is time.” With this semantic transition comes an associated shift in expression: from it is, to it gives. Heidegger formulates this as “It gives Being” and “It gives time.”^[37] To this end, a thing has the character of an event, an act of giving: each being engages in a performance, whereby the performativity of an entity entails its own truth. “Temporality temporalizes,” states Being and Time, “and indeed it temporalizes possible ways of itself.”^[38] Here, the idea of temporalising (zeitigen) suggests an act of extemporisation – to compose, to improvise – that is, to create one’s own time.^[39] Another way of conveying this is to say that temporality is self-perpetuating, or, that the aseity of time – its self-derivation – produces modes of itself. This is why the temporality of Being is not itself in time. There is no “within-time-ness” (Innerzeitigkeit) to Being as there is with Dasein or any other entity.^[40] In producing its own temporality, Heidegger contends, Being is time.

The unity of past (no-longer-now), present (now), and future (not-yet-now) is what constitutes time as giving for Heidegger. This future → present → past momentum suggests an approaching (a coming toward) but also a reaching out. In its movement towards, the approaching not-yet-present (future), gives and brings about, that which is no longer present (past). Ergo, presence and absence are both co-located in time. That which is no longer present – i.e., what has been – presences immediately in its absence, such that presencing is extended from the past. In this contradictory fashion, absence also becomes a mode of presencing. Future, past, and present – each a mode of giving – offer themselves to one another. The presencing given in each equates to an opening up which Heidegger designates “the time-space of the clearing [Zeit als der Zeit-Raum des Lichtung].”^[41] The hyphenated “Zeit-Raum” is specified when inferring time-space, as opposed to the more common “Zeitraum,” which connotes a period or span of time. Zeit-Raum is deemed to be prespatial in such a way that the incipient opening of future, past, and present – and their reciprocity – facilitates the provision of time-space. This original giving holds the three ecstases together, while also maintaining their separation in a “‘nearing nearness’” or “‘nearhood’ [Nahheit].”^[42] Time is responsible for “giving space [Raum-geben]” or “making room [Einriiumen]”; the space that is given – that which is made room for – Heidegger names clearing (Lichtung).^[43] This space is also temporal in nature, as much an interval or hiatus in time, as it is an extended spatial “there.” In this context, the temporal and the spatial are not, at their root, fundamentally different. Both are founded in time-space. As the unitary origin of these two subsequently divergent terms, Zeit-Raum is the ground of space and time. Allied with this, Being facilitates beings in its sending of presence, and its extending and opening out of time-space. This gift of presence equates to the propagating of existents via the particularisation of a universal.

Despite this democratising of time beyond the sovereignty of Dasein to the times of things, however, the late Heidegger remains problematically anthropocentric, in the context of Harman’s push for an egalitarian ontology. Even in the winter of Heidegger’s thought, the human is still positioned as arbiter of Being, albeit surreptitiously, as that which determines time. The paradoxical absence-presence of Zeit-Raum approaches (moves toward) Dasein only, who receives the gift of presencing as provided by the “It gives.” This receipt of the gift of presence – the unconcealing of Being – from the “‘It gives presence’” is, he writes, “that which distinguishes man as man.”^[44] The presence of the Being of all beings is constituted by human beings in their receipt of it: presence extends and reaches towards Dasein such that “[t]here is no time without man.”^[45]

Given the paradigmatic discord just articulated, what does Harman retain from Husserl and Heidegger for his object-oriented temporal schema of real and sensual time? In the case of Husserl, the internalisation of time as a mental phenomenon is reversed, countering the subject-centric nature of inner-time consciousness, by making temporality both objective and mind-independent. Phenomenology’s intimation of consciousness as a precondition of ontogenesis – that is, that cognisance becomes a principal factor for existence – is incongruent with the Harmanian ontological system. By inverting the central tenets of Husserl’s concept of time, object theory pluralises Husserlian temporality, such that time becomes an emergent property of everything that exists (see Section 6). From Heidegger, Harman first recoups the triptych of temporalities – past, present, and future – and folds them into a singular present. The three ecstases of Being and Time are interpolated so that only the present remains ontologically consequential. Second, OOO communises time’s finitude, expanding it beyond Dasein to become the disjunctive and finite time for all objects. In this respect, he follows Heidegger’s own shift from the earlier Zeitlichkeit (the temporality of Dasein) to the later Temporalität (the time of Being).

The following passage from The Essence of Human Freedom succinctly presages Harman’s radical expansion of Heidegger’s notion of self-temporalising, into a democratisation of aseity for each and every thing:

Time is always in each case my time, my and your and our time, not in the external sense of private bourgeois existence, but from the ground of the essence of existence, which is in each case individualized to itself. This individualization is the condition of the possibility for the division in the distinction between person and community.^[46]

Harman extends the themes of Temporalität beyond Heidegger – who stops short of making temporalisation a quality immanent within all beings – so that each real object is self-temporalising, independent of Dasein’s arbitration. By ordaining that being is a feature of all reality, and through emphasising the heterogeneous times of all things, regardless of animacy, OOO pledges its allegiance to Heideggerian authentic time. Indeed, there can be no inauthentic time for Harman as this would equate to the monism to which he is so opposed. There is only authentic time: a temporal pluralism.

Having now worked through Husserl and Heidegger’s lasting contributions to object-oriented thematisations of time and aesthetic cause, while also critiquing Harman’s substantialist reading of their onto-temporal theories, this essay’s closing sections turn some of the paradoxes and ambiguities of OOO (and its readings of the two earlier thinkers) onto Harman’s own ontological schema, as a means of providing 1) a critique of object-time and 2) an introduction to my concept of ambient temporalities.

6 Object-Oriented Temporality’s Latent Relationality: Towards Ambient Temporalities

There is, over the course of this essay, a growing sense in which the relational and the evental in the ontologies of Husserl and Heidegger are detrimentally suppressed by Harman, to the extent that the object-oriented direction in which he pushes their thinking sounds ever more untenable. As supporting evidence, consider momentarily Timothy Morton’s take on object-oriented temporospatiality in his 2011 essay, “Objects as Temporary Autonomous Zones.”^[47] Although an OOO-adjacent theorist, Morton’s exegesis is actually deceptively relational in quality. He expands on Harman’s Latourian intuition that “time” is an emergent property of objects. Instead of a noumenal process, causality is a phenomenal occurrence that “floats ontologically ‘in front of’ objects, as zones,” where a zone is “an autonomous level of intensity,” which times and spaces.^[48] Morton articulates time and space in a non-objective fashion, emphasising their meaning as intransitive verbs rather than in their transitive incarnation. Instead of referring to an object that is affected by the action of the verb – as transitive – both terms become the action itself, so that the expression of a performable activity is now inhered within the verb – as intransitive. In this way, time and space take on productive characteristics, “as in the manner of dance or revolt.”^[49] Hence, a zone is not so much “in” time as much as it times.

Sympathetic to Morton’s more relation-friendly incarnation of OOO, my idea of “ontological ambience” is an attempt to integrate the variances of relata and relatum. It is inspired, in part, by Harman’s minor motif of “ambient objects” from Guerrilla Metaphysics (2005). Mentioned only in passing – across a handful of pages – “ambient objects” are those entities extraneous to the central object of any intentional act. Such objects operate contiguously – at the peripheries of intentionality – yet retain some minor influence of change, however benign, over the intended object. They are the “excess sensual radiation” of objects, constitutive of intraobjective space.^[50] This phenomenal tension between objects and their qualities is an Husserlian trope, but with Aristotelian provenance. An object displays qualities which change, but this mutability does not mean the object becomes a different thing. On the contrary, the object remains constant regardless of the shifting adumbrations it exhibits. The intentional object beneath is not reliant on these inessential qualities (or, ambient objects) to retain its ipseity, to continue to be the object that it is.

I propose ontological ambience as the contiguous overlap at the peripheral interstices between what I have elsewhere called “becoming objects.”^[51] “Ambience” (borrowed from the French noun ambiance, meaning “surroundings”) allows for a broader aestheticisation of being than does the subject-object binary.^[52] Briefly, my conceptualisation of a metaphysics of ambience accentuates an equalisation of agency between human and nonhuman, substance and relation, thought and affect, subject and object. Ambient metaphysics is primarily concerned with the liminal and interstitial peripheries of such oppositions, implying a balancing out of philosophy’s aesthetic vocabulary: an equilibrium between poetic and affectual allegories. Ambience is composed of, enjoined by, and through, the plurality of all the affective auras of all becoming-objects. It is a quasi-monist confluence constituted by the inessential attributes orbiting all entities, postulated by Harman as the immaterial “glue of the world,” which permeates all being and holds reality together. Ambience negates the vacuum between things, avowed by Harmanian substantialism. This quasi-void is populated by the ambient objects that surround each becoming-object. This reading of OOO operates a more process-relational version of Harman, one that helps facilitate a stabilising of the ontological parity between objects and flux. In temporal terms, ambience can be understood as a realm of forces, composed from the accretion of all evental time-spaces.

Harman’s critique of relational theories of reality is based in part on what he considers to be their insufficient account of any enduring identity. Nothing persists long enough in the continuist ontologies of, say, Henri Bergson, or Gilles Deleuze, for it to perish. He discredits the generalised a priori becoming inherent to such systems, instead equating being to disconnection, which precedes any sort of becoming. All “becomings” – viz. relations – pertain to connection, and so are secondary to inert and enduring objects. OOO’s real objects rely on nothing but themselves for their own reality, requiring no contact or connection with other things. While real objects always retain some sort of surplus being (in excess of any relation they may enter into), events are determined by their surroundings, thus exhausted by their environment. This means that beyond an entity’s relations, any semblance of identity is surrendered to infinite flux. How, then, does Harman’s metaphysics objectively account for the ontological limitations he perceives in relational philosophies? Any object, considered temporally, necessarily becomes one of many self-contained time-systems. Ergo, the notion of duration or succession – identity through time – becomes a mereological issue of temporal parts and wholes. It is not necessary for the past to be retained for Harman because an object has a substantial character. To this end, the past is whatever is retained on the inside of an object – not causally effective in any way, other than such that there is still a trace of its prior reality in its being. Recall my earlier suggestion above, regarding Harman being a real presentist and a sensual perdurantist. Construed thus, Harmanian objects – both real and sensual – become conglomerates of discontinuous moments or instances. Each temporal unit contributes to the greater ontological whole, and is posited as a new or sub-object, such that duration is measured in objective terms. At any moment a thing is the dimensional and contiguous segments of its complete temporal subsistence. One might argue that the instantial, thus relational, arrangement of any object-system is circumscribed by the stipulation that “[s]ubstances are filled with relations; relations become substances.”^[53] If one is to concur with this substantial assessment of reality, Harman’s mereology amply subverts relations, such that temporal identity becomes a problem of objects once more. Yet, regardless of this apparent objectal remedy to the mereological quandary, his conceptualisations of time and space remain contradictory. The weight of authority concerning Harman’s insistence that relations are just another taxonomic category of object diminishes when particular – more subtly processual – lines from his writing are amplified. Consider the claim, from Guerrilla Metaphysics, that “every object can also be considered as a set of relations between its parts or qualities.”^[54] The main point here seems to be that objects are relations and relations are objects, such that both terms become transposable. In this respect, Harman adheres to the Aristotelian conceit that ascribing change to the sensual level of an object’s accidents – those transitory aspects that obfuscate one substance’s enduring being from that of another – negates any processual activity at the more fundamental level of real objects. However, rather than incontrovertibly affirming objects as the basic components of reality, such prose is resounding evidence of Harman’s equivocality, and the cardinal ambiguities at the heart of his thinking. The ambivalent nature of these core claims suggests that there is a more profound problem in his substance-based approach. These ontological discrepancies concern the presumption that object-oriented re-readings of prior thinkers are somehow impermeable to any other interpretations. Harman’s exposition of Husserl provides a case in point.

Recall, briefly, the excerpt from Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis above, only now with its relational content increased. Its accent on “essential flux” amplifies – albeit surreptitiously – an immanent potentiality in the horizon-structure of experience. Consequently, a process-relational element (anathema to OOO) can begin to be discerned, operating latently within phenomenology. The tone of the Husserl citation would suggest that the German thinker’s conceptualisation of temporality – as it is conveyed through the horizon-structure of retention and protention – can only be indivisible. Any attempt to excerpt discrete parameters of time, or “nows,” from its “essential flux” are not possible in ontological isolation from their prior or ensuing adjacencies. To this end, a permeation exists between these serial “nows” – each an instantiation of being – a kind of temporal infusion amid protention and retention, that is constitutive of the flowing current of experience, and the elemental movement of being. A means of reconciling Harman’s objective interpretation of Husserlian realism, with flux becomes increasingly discernible when one considers the latent process at play throughout Husserl’s thought. Countering the Harmanian realm of sensual objects, it is equally plausible to reorient Husserl in a more relational trajectory. If the topography of the Husserlian phenomenal world is considered transitorily, reality begins to sound more and more processual, rather than looking objectal, to the extent that “all of nature, with space, time, causality, etc., is completely dissolved into a web of immanent motivations.”^[55] This “web of immanent motivations” suggests that the complete experiential content of an intentional act radiates out from some central phenomenal nexus within any horizonal environment.

Harman’s explication of Heidegger offers further evidence of a rich and varied lexicon having been compressed by the restrictive demands of an object-oriented agenda. Contemplate the following excerpt from Heidegger’s History of the Concept of Time (1925):

We place ourselves in principle outside of this experiential and interrogative horizon outlined by the definition of the most customary name for this entity, man […] What is to be determined is not an outward appearance of this entity but from the outset and throughout solely its way to be, not the what of that of which it is composed but the how of its being and the characters of this how.^[56]

Here, rather than the philosopher of quanta cultivated by OOO, Heidegger instead seems to advocate an emphasis on the modality of Dasein’s Being: how it is, as opposed to what it is. Although still contextually restricted to an anthropological register (Dasein), this prescriptive amplifying of “the how of its being” over “the what … of which it is composed” at least indexes a movement away from substance towards an evental and relational – thus less subjective – way of being, and of thinking being. In the later Heidegger’s ontological conceptuality, each being is a constitution of two modes of existence: a union of Being and essence. With this move, Heidegger breaks from Aristotle’s matter-form distinction by differentiating instead between the quiddity (whatness) of a thing and its haecceity (thisness). In other words, the disparity between the explicit existence of a particular being, and the general Being in which all beings partake, becomes the central ontological concern. He pushes this further by stating that Being itself is not an entity but is more appositely expressed as a property that structures all things, out of which each entity is constituted. In this vogue, it is the transition between the Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit zonalities of Being – the ambience between substance (‘what’) and relational (‘how’) – that is of utmost ontological importance for Heidegger, rather than Harman’s favouring of quantised zuhanden beings, or a valorising of relations. OOO’s ensuing dilution of Heidegger’s complex prose diminishes much of what Harman terms antithetical, e.g., relations, interstices. Rather than maintaining a schema which sustains the commensurate ontological status of all existents, OOO collapses relations into relata, such that the former becomes another thingly subset within his objective system. This act of firewalling is undertaken in order to silence, or at least subdue, the non-objectal elements of Heidegger’s thinking. Harman’s elliptical interpretation of Heidegger’s thought forecloses the fecundity of other more unconventional readings. Harmanian OOO turns around an intersection of the empirical and the rational. In its schema, the sensual realm pertains to the first, while the real relates to the second. The rational/real is ontologically prior to the empirical/sensual. Rephrased in a Husserlian tone: Harman opts, if only implicitly, to retain the theme of the transcendental ego for his realm of real objects.^[57] Husserl’s emphasis on the transcendental ego grounds what is otherwise a heavily processual schema. Because the transcendental ego is “outside” or “beyond” time, it subtends the flow of consciousness and is constitutive of time. It is the wellspring of Husserl’s idealism which – as an anchoring principle of Object-Oriented Ontology – predisposes Harman to the mental, the human, and the phenomenological.

7 Conclusion

Following this essay’s opening speculations on Kant as a discontinuous, objectal thinker of time, and my subsequent critical analysis of Harman’s metaphysics of objects, its readings of Husserl and Heidegger, and its ideas of time, one may question what there is left of his theory that I take to be redeemable. What is worthy of retention in OOO, to prevent him from collapsing into something of a straw-man figure? What are its progressive, productive contributions? In opposition to collapsing relations into objects, I propose that an approach to Harman’s realism which incorporates relationality and continua, as equally as it does objects, is more harmonious with the multi-directionality of the real. By questioning the metaphysical consequences and opportunities offered by reconsidering his quadruple cosmology as a network – a matrix of relations which render becoming-objects possible – what would Object-Oriented Ontology sound like with different types of entities? As I have thus far evidenced, there are things missing in Harman’s system of thought, quite seriously lacking, in all sorts of problematic ways, but these absences do not devalue the quality of his thought, nor indeed his argument. He performs something of an ontological equalisation, beyond that of its disequilibrium in early- to mid-twentieth-century continental thought. Destressing the accent on the epistemic, while amplifying the significance of the aesthetic, Harman expands realism’s primary mode of inquiry into a question of experience and affect, of causal interaction between all entities.

The sovereignty of Harman’s radical substance theory becomes increasingly tenuous under such intense inquisition. The ways in which beings are time in Heidegger silently undergird some of Harman. This again suggests the grounding of his thinking, if only partially, in an ontology that he would presumably reject: one premised on process-relational causation. To wit: Harman’s objects actually rely upon – and are ontologically preceded by – forces (relations), suggesting that these forces are not objects, and, most importantly, neither are objects, at least not entirely. To this extent, without meaning to, Harman has a relational ontology subtending what he wants to say. Moreover, this would seem to oppose the conscious intentions of his metaphysical system, both implicitly and explicitly, therefore clarifying that his rhetoric mutes this. This outcome – that his purportedly objectal ontology is also relational all the way down – is actually the only logical conclusion for Harman. With this in mind, what happens if the processes involved in an object “timing” and “spacing” are expressed via a vocabulary of ambience? While objects are not limited to orthodox associations with stasis, fixity, manifestation, and presence, this set of semantic connotations is certainly heavily implied by OOO – often inextricably so – to the extent that it is ontologically restrictive. Ambience’s aesthetic lexicon offers means of expression less limiting than the qualitative terminology of an object-oriented paradigm. By not binding temporalities to the ascendent tropes of objects, and operating more in conjunction with a metonymic articulation, an ambient realism remains perpetually unbound and dynamic.