Differences are starting to emerge in our group reading of Integral Ecology, with Tim Morton taking a grumpy stance from the back of the car while others are measured but generally more positive in their assessments. Tim’s main criticism seems to be the Object-Oriented Ontological one that E/Z’s categories “map perfectly onto normal everyday human prejudices,” and specifically prejudices against non-sentient beings. Tim writes:
I must protest as an object-oriented ontologist. Nothing about what a sponge or even a pencil does differs very much, at an ontological level, from what a human does when she cognizes.
And further:
the difference between my use of interobjectivity and E/Z’s use of the term is that for them, “object” just means “something that isn’t social, human, sentient or noetic” or something like that. Whereas for me, “object” can mean the Pope, wallabies, the Oort Cloud and flapjacks.
This difference is worth expanding on. Integral Theorists are quite insistent on the point that all entities — all holons, in their terms — include some kind of interiority (which ranges from simple prehension and irritability to consciousness and beyond) and are characterized by some kind of sociality. Their use of the term “interobjectivity” refers to the relations between things in their objective, that is externally observable, dimension. So this doesn’t refer to objects per se, but to a particular perspective on things.
IT here is consistent with a Whiteheadian usage, where objectivity is something that arises relationally (co-arising alongside subjectivity); it is not something that is simply given. This makes both of these perspectives different from that of OOO, which uses the term “object” to refer to all real and perceived entities.
But back to Tim’s flapjacks. Since I’m not sure if he means a British flapjack (a syrupy granola-ish oat bar) or an American one (a pancake), I’ll substitute it with the better known American example of a Hostess Twinkie. Is a Twinkie really ontologically no different, or little different, from Tim Morton?
If your ontology says “yes, they are no (or little) different,” then this may just make you an Object-Oriented Ontologist. (There’s something to be said about minimalism, philosophical or otherwise.) If, on the other hand, you have some way of accounting for significant differences between Tim and the Twinkie — Integral Theory’s is to speak of level/depth of interiority (among other things), but one could also speak of internal and/or relational complexity, capacity, virtuality, structure, and so on — then you probably aren’t.
But then maybe I’m just all wrong about OOO yet again 😉
Adrian,
As usual, I’m not taking the work on its own terms but trying to translate according to my own particular needs. As such, I saw the idea of the holon as similar to a boundary object, a boundary object being an object that is commonly agreed to have certain properties, but it is also plastic according to context. So an iPhone can be used for making calls or triggering car bombs. But in either case we agree it is a phone. Yet if all holons have an interiorarity (I missed this detail), then what about a boundary object? Can a media text be a holon? If so, what would its interior be? A boundary object may not have a perspective, but it is a node of a system of relations that does have perspective/s. I’m just thinking out loud here.
Antonio – Good question. I suspect that E/Z (and Wilber) would say that a ‘boundary object’ would be a holon if it fit the criteria (the ’20 (or so) tenets’) of holons. So if an iPhone is an emergent, adaptive (etc) entity that is part of a larger emergent, adaptive (etc) entity and that is made up of emergent, adaptive (etc) entities, then it would be a holon. Failing that, it could be part of a larger holon (e.g. a human society that communicates using iPhones and other such things) and be made up of holons (e.g. atoms) but not be holonic itself. In that case, it – and probably most artificial human-made objects – would just be ‘heaps.’
But that’s just a guess… I find it useful to distinguish between living things (which are holons) and non-living things (which aren’t), but I also recognize the reasons to be wary of such a blanket distinction based on something as flimsily-defined as ‘life.’ In this context, the cartoon Michael posted here is brilliant.