新美学·每日翻译 | 面向对象的本体论 ｜序言

Introduction | Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything | Graham Harman

序言 | 面向对象的本体论：新万物理论 | 格雷厄姆·哈曼

翻译者：Lu Fengfeng

On 8 November 2016, as the writing of this book neared com- pletion, the voters of the United States elected the scandal- ridden businessman and reality television star Donald J. Trump as their next President. This astonishing result came despite hundreds of controversial statements by Trump during the election campaign, including multiple inci- dents in which he flatly denied having made various claims despite public video evidence to the contrary. Indeed, the election’s aftermath brought about such widespread shock that it led to an unusually large number of reflections by public intellectuals. As usual, one of the most contrarian pos- itions was taken by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who persisted in his pre-election claim that a Clinton victory would simply lead to more neoliberal mediocrity, while a win for the aspiring strongman Trump would at least serve to galvanize new and surprising political coalitions.1 A more common reaction, however, was to condemn Trump’s victory as the sign of a world that no longer has any respect for truth. Subtly leading the charge was no less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary, which enshrined ‘post-truth’ as its 2016 word of the year, defining the term as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.2 No one could miss the implied refer- ence to a specific, newly minted American politician.

2016年11月8日，随着本书的写作接近尾声，美国选民选出了丑闻缠身的商人、真人秀明星唐纳德·J·特朗普作为他们的下一任总统。这一令人诧异的结果是在特朗普竞选期间作出的数百项富有争议的声明中出现的，在多个场合特朗普断然否认其曾作出多变的声明——尽管公开的视频证据与此相反。实际上，选举的余波带来了如此广泛的冲击，以至于公共知识分子进行了不同寻常的大量反思。像往常一样，某一最逆向思维者的位置由斯洛文尼亚哲学家斯拉沃热·齐泽克 （Slavo Žižek）占据，他坚持他在大选前的声明：一个克林顿的胜利只会导致更多新自由主义的平庸，而一个有抱负的铁腕人物特朗普的胜利至少会激发新的、令人惊讶的政治联盟。[1]然而，更常见的反应是谴责特朗普的胜利，称其标志着一个不再对真相保有尊重的世界。巧妙地领导这项指控的权威不亚于《牛津英语词典》将“后真相”奉为其2016年度核心词汇，它将这一术语定义为“关联或指示着环境，在其中客观事实在塑造公众舆论中的影响力比诉诸情感和个人信仰更不重要”。[2]没有人会不理解这一对一位特别的、新上任的美国政治家的暗示。

If we believe the OED’s definition, the best remedy for our supposedly post-truth condition would be ‘objective facts’. The state of grasping objective facts is often called knowledge, and knowledge is taken to mean the human rec- ognition of a truth, so that knowledge and truth generally come as a pair. In our time, the findings of science are usually recognized as the gold standard for knowledge and truth: a role once filled by the teachings of the Church, and in the future perhaps by other institutions as yet unknown. To say that we now live in a society dominated by the production of knowledge means that the success of the natural sciences and their technical application is the ultimate benchmark for what counts as truth, and hence is the possible key to oppos- ing Donald Trump’s ‘appeals to emotion and personal belief ’. On this view, a demagogue can only be silenced by know- ledge, as in the old Leftist adage of ‘speaking the truth to power’. A similar outlook was aired a few months before the election by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who made the following controversial remark on Twitter: ‘Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evi- dence.’3 In other words, if only we could apply the scientific method to politics then we would finally be rid of irrational human conflict, and could perhaps make as much progress in politics as we have in our understanding of physical nature during the four centuries since the Scientific Revolution.

如果我们相信《牛津英语词典》的定义，那么我们所谓的后真相状态的最佳补救方法就是“客观事实”。掌握客观事实的状态通常被称为知识，而知识被理解为人类对真理的认识，因此知识和真理通常成对出现。在我们这个时代，科学的发现通常被认为是知识和真理的黄金标准:这一角色曾经由教会的教导所填补，将来可能由其他未知的机构所填补。我们现在生活在一个以知识生产为主导的社会中，这意味着自然科学及其技术应用的成功是衡量真理的最终基准，因此可能是反对唐纳德·特朗普的“诉诸情感和个人信仰”的关键。在这种观点下，煽动者只能被知识所压制，就像左派的一句古老格言“对权力说真话”。在大选前几个月，天体物理学家尼尔·德格拉斯·泰森(Neil deGrasse Tyson)也发表了类似的观点，他在推特上发表了以下有争议的言论: “地球需要一个虚拟的国家家: #Rationalia，只有一个条款的宪法:所有政策都应以证据的份量为依据。”[3]换句话说，如果我们能把科学的方法应用到政治中，那么我们就能最终摆脱非理性的人类冲突，并且可能在政治上取得与我们在科学革命以来的四个世纪中对物理本质的理解一样大的进步。

In this way, truth and knowledge are proposed as the antidote to a relativism (formerly ascribed to the Left, but now fully at home on the Right) that invents whatever ‘alter- native facts’ it pleases, to use the already infamous phrase of Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway. Yet somehow it is not always clear where we are supposed to find the truth and knowledge that are recommended as our miracle cure. This is especially evident in fields such as the arts and architec- ture, which are governed by shifting currents of taste rather than by calculative formulae: a difference that has mostly served to devalue these fields in the public eye in comparison with those that seem to produce actual knowledge, such as science, engineering or medicine. It is also unclear who pos- sesses political knowledge, despite Tyson’s call for a polity based on rational evidence. It is hard to believe, for instance, that the procedures of unusually effective politicians such as Abraham Lincoln or Mustafa Kemal Atatürk could be boiled down to a list of formulaic tips easily replicated by their suc- cessors. Nor is it always clear even where scientific know- ledge can be found. Scientific theories are regularly overthrown and replaced during periods of intellectual upheaval, and the efforts by self-described ‘structural real- ists’ to claim that a permanent mathematical core endures in science despite all these revolutions have not been entirely convincing.4 The unshakeable truths of one school of histor- ians are dismissed as bourgeois pieties by another. Reputable engineering firms make errors of calculation that plunge hundreds of victims to death in the sea. Adherents of differ- ent religions slaughter millions of each other’s followers across the centuries, and we should not forget that they are fully matched in brutality by Stalin, Pol Pot and other atheists. It would be easier to counter emotion and belief with truth and knowledge if we knew where to obtain the latter. And though the West is justly proud of its scientific tradition stretching back to ancient Greece, perhaps the greatest intellectual hero of that early period was Socrates (469–399 BCE), who claimed no knowledge whatsoever. Indeed, in Plato’s dialogues we often find Socrates candidly asserting that he has never been anyone’s teacher, and that the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing. Even Socrates’ famous name for his profession, philosophia, means the love of wisdom rather than the possession of it. This atti- tude differs at its root from mathematics and the sciences, which aspire to obtain knowledge rather than merely to love it, though this difference is ignored by the many – from within the discipline and without – who urge philosophy to follow the sure path of a science.

这样，真理和知识就被作为相对主义(以前归属于左派，但现在完全属于右派)的解药提出了，相对主义发明了它所喜欢的任何“另类事实”，用特朗普的发言人凯莉安·康韦（Kellyanne Conway）已经臭名昭著的措辞来说。然而，不知何故，我们并不总是清楚我们应该在哪里找到这些被推荐为我们的灵丹妙药的真理和知识。这一点在艺术和建筑等领域尤其明显，这些领域受不断变化的品味潮流而不是计算公式的支配: 与那些似乎能产生实际知识(如科学、工程或医学)的领域相比，这种差异在很大程度上降低了这些领域在公众眼中的价值。尽管泰森（Tyson）呼吁建立一个基于理性证据的政治体制，但目前还不清楚谁拥有政治知识。例如，我们很难相信，像亚伯拉罕•林肯(Abraham Lincoln)或穆斯塔法•凯末尔•阿塔图尔克(Mustafa Kemal Ataturk) 这样效率极高的政治家的程序可以归结为一串容易被他们的继任者复制的公式化建议。甚至在哪里可以找到科学知识也不总是很清楚。科学理论经常在学术动荡时期被推翻和取代，而自我建构的“结构现实主义者”的努力——他们声称：尽管发生了所有这些革命，一个永久的数学核心仍然存在于科学中——并没有完全令人信服。[4]一个学派的历史学家的不可动摇的真理被另一个学派当作资产阶级的虔诚而不屑一顾。信誉良好的工程公司在计算上犯了错误，导致数百名受害者坠海身亡。几个世纪以来，不同宗教的信徒相互残杀其它教派数以百万计的追随者，并且我们不应忘记，他们的残暴程度与斯大林（Stalin）、波尔布特（Pol Pot）以及其他无神论者不相上下. 如果我们知道从哪里获得真理和知识，就更容易用真理和知识来对抗情感和信仰。尽管西方有理由为其可以追溯到古希腊的科学传统感到自豪，但或许那个早期最伟大的知识英雄是那个宣称自己一无所知的苏格拉底(Socrates)(公元前469-399年)。事实上，在柏拉图（Plato）的对话录中，我们经常发现苏格拉底坦率地宣称，他从未做过任何人的老师，他所知道的唯一一件事就是他一无所知。甚至苏格拉底以他的专业而闻名，哲学家（philosophia），意味着对智慧的热爱，而不是对智慧的占有。这种态度从根本上不同于数学和科学，数学和科学渴望获得知识，而不仅仅是热爱知识，尽管这种差异被许多人忽视了——来自学科内外——敦促哲学走科学的正确道路。

The subject of the book now before you is Object- Oriented Ontology(abbreviated OOO, and pronounced ‘Triple O’), a relatively new school of philosophy that takes Socrates at his word. No one is actually in possession of knowledge or truth, which therefore cannot be our protec- tion against the degeneration of politics or of anything else. As OOO sees it, the true danger to thought is not relativism but idealism, and hence the best remedy for what ails us is not the truth/ knowledge pair (which we will consider in greater detail in Chapter 4), but reality. Reality is the rock against which our various ships always founder, and as such it must be acknowledged and revered, however elusive it may be. Just as military commanders say that no battle plan sur- vives the first contact with the enemy, philosophers ought not to legislate foolproof procedures for surmounting emo- tion and belief, but should recall instead that no theory sur- vives its first contact with reality. Furthermore, since reality is always radically different from our formulation of it, and is never something we encounter directly in the flesh, we must approach it indirectly. This withdrawal or withholding of things from direct access is the central principle of OOO. The usual objection to this principle is the complaint that it leaves us with nothing but useless negative statements about an unknowable reality. Yet this objection assumes that there are only two alternatives: clear prose statements of truth on one side and vague poetic gesticulations on the other. I will argue instead that most cognition takes neither of these two forms, as is clear from such domains as aesthetics, metaphor, design, the widely-condemned discipline of rhetoric, and philosophy itself. Like all of the disciplines in this list, phil- osophy has great cognitive value even though it is not a form of knowledge. And in a time like ours that quickly invokes knowledge as the cure to every ailment, this makes philoso- phy a potentially disruptive force, with a vastly different agenda for human advancement than the sciences. In the meantime, charlatans in politics and elsewhere are best countered not with claims to a truth that no one actually has, but with an unceasing demand that they face up to reality. How we go about detecting the gap between knowledge and reality is one of the main concerns of this book.

你面前这本书的主题是面向对象的本体论（Object-Oriented Ontology，缩写为OOO，发音为‘Triple O’)，这是一个获得苏格拉底承诺的相对较新的哲学流派。没有人真正拥有知识或真理，因此，知识或真理不能成为我们防止政治或其他任何东西堕落的保障。在面向对象的本体论看来，思想的真正危险不是相对主义，而是理想主义，因此治疗我们痛苦的最好方法不是真理/知识(我们将在第4章更详细地考虑这一点)，而是现实。现实是我们各种各样的船只永远触及的岩石，因此，无论它多么难以捉摸，我们都必须承认和尊重它。正如军事指挥官们所说，没有任何作战计划能在与敌人的第一次接触中幸存下来，哲学家不应该为超越情感和信仰制定万无一失的程序，而是要记住，没有任何理论能够在与现实的第一次接触中存活下来。此外，由于现实总是与我们对它的表述截然不同，而且我们从来没有直接接触过现实，因此我们必须间接地接近它。这种事物从直接访问中的回撤（withdrawal）或阻抑（withholding）是面向对象的本体论的核心原则。通常反对这一原则的理由是，它只会让我们对一个未知的现实做出无用的负面陈述。然而，这种反对意见认为，只有两种选择:一边是清晰的事实陈述，另一边是模糊的诗性手势。相反，我认为大多数认知并不采用这两种形式，这一点从美学、隐喻、设计、广受谴责的修辞学和哲学本身等领域就可以清楚地看出。就像这个列表中的所有学科一样，哲学虽然不是知识的一种形式，但它具有巨大的认知价值。在一个像我们这样的时代，知识可以迅速治愈每一种疾病，这使得哲学成为一种潜在的颠覆性力量，它对人类进步的议程与科学有着巨大的差异。与此同时，对政治和其他领域的骗子，最好的反击不是宣称一个没有人真正拥有的真理，而是不断要求他们面对现实。我们如何去发现知识和现实之间的差距是这本书的主要关注点之一。

Barely known to the public a decade ago, Object-Oriented Ontology has emerged in recent years as one of the most provocative philosophical theories influencing the arts and humanities. Žižek has attacked the school for allowing no place in its model for the human subject, and his devotees have mostly united in rejection of OOO.5 The French phil- osopher Bruno Latour has borrowed from the movement more keenly, employing the phrase ‘object-oriented politics’ in his recent major book on the modes of existence.6 OOO has even been ranked by ArtReview among the 100 most influential forces in the international art world.7 But perhaps its greatest impact so far has been in architecture, a discip- line that is a famous early adopter of new philosophical trends. At least two organizers of major architectural confer- ences have stated in public that OOO is eclipsing the previ- ous influence in architecture of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.8 In the meantime Mark Foster Gage, Assistant Dean of Architecture at Yale University, has written that ‘the reason OOO is being explored by . . . architects is that it functions as an antidote not only to the Deleuzian emphasis on becoming over being, but, by extension, to architecture being justified not by its own qualities, but by its relations – its process, its internal complexity, its contextual relations . . .’9 The charisma of this school has even captured the notice of celebrities in other fields, with the popular musician Björk having engaged in correspondence with OOO author Timothy Morton, and the actor Benedict Cumberbatch having listened attentively to one of my lectures at a private residence in London in 2014.10

尽管十年前几乎不为公众所知，面向对象的本体论是近年来出现的影响艺术和人文的最具争议性的哲学理论之一。齐泽克（Žižek）攻击这个学派在其模型中没有为人类主体留下位置，他的信徒们大都联合起来反对面向对象的本体论。[5]法国哲学家布鲁诺·拉图尔（Bruno Latour）在他最近出版的关于生存方式的著作中，更敏锐地借鉴了这一运动，使用了“对象导向的政治”一词。[6]对象导向理论甚至被ArtReview评为国际艺术界最具影响力的100种势力之一。[7]但它迄今为止最大的影响或许是建筑，这是一门著名的较早采纳新哲学趋势的学科。至少有两家大型建筑会议的组织者在公开场合表示，面向对象的本体论正在超越法国著名后现代主义思想家雅克·德里达(Jacques Derrida)和吉尔·德勒兹(Gilles Deleuze)之前在建筑领域的影响力。[8]同时，马克·福斯特·盖奇（Mark Foster Gage），耶鲁大学(Yale University)的建筑学院实物副院长指出面向对象的本体论被建筑师日益探索的原因是，它不仅是德勒兹强调的成为超越存在的解毒剂，从广义上说还是建筑物的解毒剂，其合理性不在于其性质，而在于它的关系-它的过程，它的内在复杂性，它的上下文关系……[9]这个学派的魅力甚至吸引了其他领域的名人的注意，受欢迎的音乐家比约克与物导向本体论作家蒂莫西·莫顿进行了通信，2014年10月，演员本尼迪克特·康伯巴奇(Benedict Cumberbatch)在伦敦的一处私人住宅里认真听了我的演讲。[10]

Object-Oriented Ontology (also known as ‘Object- Oriented Philosophy’) dates to the late 1990s, though its extensive influence began roughly with the first conference on the topic, held at Georgia Tech in Atlanta in April 2010.11 Along with my own books, the most prominent works in a OOO vein have been written by Ian Bogost (Unit Operations, Alien Phenomenology), Timothy Morton (Realist Magic, Hyperobjects) and Levi R. Bryant (The Democracy of Objects) before his thinking took a different direction. As is always the case in an ancient discipline like philosophy, not all of the ideas of OOO are new, though they are deployed in new com- binations and applied to subjects philosophers have often neglected. Some of the basic principles of OOO, to be visited in detail in the coming chapters, are as follows: (1) All objects must be given equal attention, whether they be human, non- human, natural, cultural, real or fictional. (2) Objects are not identical with their properties, but have a tense relationship with those properties, and this very tension is responsible for all of the change that occurs in the world. (3) Objects come in just two kinds: real objects exist whether or not they cur- rently affect anything else, while sensual objects exist only in relation to some real object. (4) Real objects cannot relate to one another directly, but only indirectly, by means of a sens- ual object. (5) The properties of objects also come in just two kinds: again, real and sensual. (6) These two kinds of objects and two kinds of qualities lead to four basic permutations, which OOO treats as the root of time and space, as well as two closely related terms known as essence and eidos.(7)Finally, OOO holds that philosophy generally has a closer relationship with aesthetics than with mathematics or nat- ural science. While some of the ideas just listed may sound challenging or even implausible, I will make every effort to explain them as lucidly as possible. My hope is that those who read this book to the end will find that a remarkable new intellectual landscape has come into view.

面向对象的本体论(也称面向对象的哲学)可以追溯到20世纪90年代末，尽管它的广泛影响大致始于2010年4月在亚特兰大举行的第一次有关这一主题的会议。[11]除了我自己的书，面向对象的本体论中最突出的著作脉络是伊安·博格斯特（Ian Bogost）(《单元作业，另类现象学》)，蒂莫西·莫顿(《现实主义魔法》)以及列维·R·布莱恩特(Levi R. Bryant)思想转向之前的（《对象的民主》)。正如哲学等古老学科的一贯情况一样，面向对象的本体论的所有思想并非都是新的，尽管它们以新的组合形式被部署，并应用于哲学家经常忽略的主题。物导向本体论的一些基本原则，将在接下来的章节中详细介绍如下:（1）所有的对象，无论是人、非人、自然的、文化的、真实的还是虚构的，都必须给予同等的重视。(2)对象与其属性并不相同，而是与这些属性之间存在着紧张的关系，而正是这种紧张关系导致了世界上发生的所有变化。(3)对象只有两种:真实的对象存在，不管它们目前是否影响其他任何东西;感性的对象存在，只与某些真实的对象相关联而存在。(4)真实的对象之间不能直接联系，而只能通过感性的对象间接地联系。（5）对象的属性也只有两种:真实的和感性的。（6）这两种对象和两种品质导致了四种基本的排列，物导向本体论将其视为时间和空间的根，以及两个密切相关的术语，称为本质（essence）和现象（eidos）。(7)最后，面向对象的本体论认为哲学与美学的关系一般比与数学或自然科学的关系更密切。虽然上面列出的一些想法听起来很有挑战性，甚至是不可信的，但我将尽一切努力尽可能清晰地解释它们。我希望那些把这本书读到最后的人会发现，一个崭新的知识世界已经出现在眼前。

OOO has provoked strong reactions – both positive and negative – in such fields as African-American studies, archae- ology, architecture, choreography, design, ecology, education, feminism, history, literary theory, media studies, music, pol- itical theory, psychoanalysis, social theory, theology, video- game theory and the visual arts, not to mention philosophy itself. Now, this breadth of influence might sound like a familiar song, since numerous philosophical methods deriv- ing from the continental (mainly French–German) tradition of philosophy have already swept through the Anglophone world in the past fifty years. These trends have often been lumped together, somewhat inaccurately, under the general name of ‘postmodernism’ or simply ‘theory’, and in some quarters have been denounced as nothing but glittery frauds. Some of the first names that come to mind in this connection are Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, Martin Heidegger and Bruno Latour – the latter two being my per- sonal favourites in the group. But whereas many of these cur- rents have asserted that reality is something ‘constructed’ by language, power or human cultural practices, OOO is a bluntly realist philosophy. This means among other things that OOO holds that the external world exists independently of human awareness. However bland and commonsensical this point may sound, it cuts against the grain of the past century of continental philosophy, and leads in directions surprisingly alien to common sense.

面向对象的本体论引发了强烈的反应——同时有积极的和消极的——美国非裔研究，考古学，建筑学，编舞学，设计，生态学，教育学，女权主义，历史，文学理论，媒体研究，音乐，政治理论，精神分析，社会理论，神学，电玩理论和视觉艺术，更不用说哲学本身了。现在，这种广泛的影响可能听起来像一首熟悉的歌，因为许多哲学方法起源于欧洲大陆(主要是法语-德语)。在过去的五十年里，哲学传统已经席卷了以英语为母语的世界。这些趋势常常以“后现代主义”或简单的“理论”的名义，有些不准确地混为一谈，在某些方面，它们被指责为不过是闪闪发光的骗子。在这方面首先进入我脑海的名字是雅克·拉康，罗兰·巴特，米歇尔·福柯，雅克·德里达、卢斯·伊利格瑞（Luce Irigaray），斯拉沃热·齐泽克（Slavoj Žižek）,朱迪·巴特勒,马丁·海德格尔和布鲁诺·拉图尔——后两人是我个人在小组中最喜欢的。然而，与这些潮流中有许多都主张现实是由语言、权力或人类文化实践“构建”的某种东西不同，面向对象的本体论是一种直率的现实主义哲学。这意味着除了别的以外，面向对象的本体论认为外部世界独立于人类意识而存在。无论这一点听起来多么平淡无奇和常识性，它都与上个世纪的欧洲大陆哲学背道而驰，并将人们引向与常识惊人地陌生的方向。

Even readers new to OOO may be familiar with the notion of object-oriented computer languages, such as C++ or Java. To avoid confusion, I should state at the outset that there is no essential link between the two: OOO merely bor- rowed the phrase ‘object-oriented’ from computer science, and was not directly motivated by developments in that field. Perhaps an expert in computing could carry out a more detailed comparison between object-oriented programming and OOO; so far this has not proven necessary, since OOO only borrows the phrase ‘object-oriented’ from the world of computers, rather than taking inspiration from the details of that world. Nonetheless, there are some important features common to the meaning of ‘object-oriented’ in both comput- ers and philosophy. Whereas programs written in older com- puter languages were systematic and holistic entities, with all of their parts integrated into a unified whole, object-oriented programs make use of independent programming ‘objects’ that interact with other objects while the internal informa- tion of each remains hidden (or ‘encapsulated’) from the others. Given the independence of their parts, computer pro- grams no longer need to be written each time from scratch, since one can make use of programming objects already writ- ten elsewhere for different purposes, bringing them into a new context without needing to change their internal struc- ture; in other words, rather than having to create a whole new program each time, one can bring together individual programming objects to create new sets for new purposes – repurposing them in various combinations to create new uses. I want to stress the fact that these objects are opaque to each other and not just to the user, for the important reason that this idea is foreign to the history of Western phil- osophy. Over the centuries, a number of thinkers have sug- gested that the reality of things is ultimately unknowable to us: Immanuel Kant’s ‘things in themselves’, Heidegger’s ‘being’, and Lacan’s ‘Real’ are just three examples of this ten- dency in intellectual history. What makes OOO different from these currents of thought – but similar to object-oriented programming – is the idea that objects never make full contact with each other any more than they do with the human mind. This is the key point missed by most of the charges that OOO is unoriginal. OOO’s commitment to the mutual darkness of objects is what enables it to resist some of the fashionable hol- istic philosophies of our time, which hold that everything is defined purely by its relations and that the world is nothing but the total system of these relations. Against such theories, OOO defends the idea that objects – whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human or non-human – are mutually autono- mous and enter into relation only in special cases that need to be explained rather than assumed. The technical way of making this point is to say that all objects are mutually ‘with- drawn’, a term taken from Heidegger (1889–1976).12 Against the assumptions of common sense, objects cannot make direct contact with each other, but require a third term or mediator for such contact to occur.

即使是面向对象的本体论的新读者也可能熟悉面向对象的计算机语言的概念，比如c++或Java。为了避免混淆，我应该在一开始就说明两者之间没有本质的联系:只是借用了计算机科学中的“面向对象”一词，并没有直接受到该领域发展的推动。也许计算机专家可以对面向对象编程和面向对象的本体论进行更详细的比较;到目前为止，这还没有被证明是必要的，因为面向对象的本体论只是从计算机世界借用了“面向对象”这个短语，而不是从这个世界的细节中获得灵感。尽管如此，在计算机和哲学中，“面向对象”的含义有一些重要的共同特征。虽然用旧计算机语言编写的程序是系统的、全盘的实体，所有的部分都整合成一个统一的整体，面向对象的程序设计则利用独立编程的“对象”与其他对象交互，而每个对象的内部信息对其他对象保持隐藏(或“封装”)。由于各个部分的独立性，计算机程序不再需要每次都从头开始编写，因为人们可以利用已经为不在其他地方为不同目的而编写的编程对象，将它们带到一个新的上下文中，而不需要更改它们的内部结构；换句话说，不必每次都创建一个全新的程序，您可以将各个编程对象组合在一起，为新的目的创建新的集合-以不同组合重新使用，创造新用途。我想强调的事实是，这些对象彼此之间是不透明的，而不仅仅是对用户是不透明的，重要的原因是，这个概念在西方哲学史上是陌生的。几个世纪以来，许多思想家都认为，事物的现实对我们最终是不可知的：康德的“物自体（things in themselves）”，海德格尔的“存在（being）”和拉康的“真实（Real）”只是思想史上这一趋势的三个例子。使得物导向本体论不同于这些思想——但类似于面向对象编程的——是这样的观念：物体之间的接触永远不会比它们与人类大脑的接触更多。这是大多数对物导向本体论非原创的指控所忽略的关键点。面向对象的本体论对物的相互隐藏的承诺使它能够抵制我们这个时代流行的一些整体哲学，这些哲学认为一切都纯粹由其关系来定义，而世界只不过是这些关系的整个系统。与些理论相反,面向对象的本体论为这样的观点辩护：对象——无论是真实的、虚构的、自然的、人造的、人类的还是非人类的——相互独立，只有在需要解释而不是假设的特殊情况下才会建立关系。提出这一点的技术方法是说所有的对象都是相互“回撤（withdrawn）”的，这一术语取自海德格尔(1889 - 1976)。[12]根据常识的假设，对象之间不能直接接触，而是需要第三个术语或中介才能发生这种接触。

Having discussed the ‘object-oriented’ part of OOO, we now turn to the third O in its name, which stands for ontol- ogy. Here the previous borrowing relationship is reversed: for while philosophy borrowed the phrase ‘object-oriented’ from computer science, computer science borrowed the term ‘ontology’ from philosophy. In philosophy the terms ‘ontology’ and ‘metaphysics’ are so similar that some (includ- ing the author of this book) prefer to use them as syno- nyms. Both refer to the part of philosophy concerned with the structure of reality as such, rather than with the more specific areas covered by ethics, political philosophy or the philosophy of art. The widely accepted history of the word ‘metaphysics’ tells us that it was coined by the ancient edi- tors of the works of Aristotle (384–322 BCE). Aristotle was one of the founding giants of natural science no less than of philosophy, and his Physics gives us a detailed account of the workings of nature. Along with the Physics, Aristotle wrote another work about philosophical issues lying outside or beyond those of nature: such as how individual things (or ‘substances’) act as a support for their changing qualities (or ‘accidents’), as well as the role of God in the structure of the cosmos. It is said that Aristotle’s editors, unsure of what to call these difficult writings, simply placed them after the Physics in the collected edition, and thus they became known as the Metaphysics, or the writings ‘after the Physics’. But in Ancient Greek the prefix ‘meta-’ can also mean ‘beyond’, and thus metaphysics was widely understood as the discipline that goes ‘beyond’ the physical world. In the continental tradition since Heidegger and Derrida (1930–2004), ‘meta- physics’ is used as a highly negative term to accuse one’s opponents of pursuing philosophy in what these continental thinkers regard as a naive fashion typical of Western philoso- phy since Plato. As for ontology, though some philosophers invest a great deal of energy in subtly interpreting the mean- ing of the Greek words ontos and logos, it is sufficient for our purposes to say that ontology means something like ‘the study of being’. On this basis we could say that ontology appeared rather early in Greek philosophy, and even earlier in India. Nonetheless, the word ‘ontology’ itself was apparently not coined until the year 1613, which is practically yesterday in a slow-moving field like philosophy. By contrast with ‘metaphysics’, ‘ontology’ tends to be treated as a broadly respectable term, more rigorous and less laden with histor- ical or mystical baggage. But in the present book as in my other writings, I will not follow this pejorative use of the term ‘metaphysics’, since I see no good reason to ruin a valu- able term from classical philosophy. So in fact, I will use metaphysics and ontology as synonyms to allow us to avoid repetition, thereby obtaining an important stylistic resource for not dulling the reader’s ears too quickly.

在讨论了面向对象的本体论的“面向对象”部分之后，我们现在转向其名称中的第三个“O”，它代表本体。在这里，先前的借用关系被颠倒过来了:哲学借用了计算机科学中的“面向对象”一词，而计算机科学借用了哲学中的“本体论”一词。在哲学中“本体论”和“形而上学”如此相似，以至于有些人(包括本书的作者)更愿意将它们用作同义词。两者都涉及到哲学关注现实的结构本身的部分，而不是用伦理学、政治哲学或艺术哲学所涵盖的更具体的领域。“形而上学”这个词被广泛接受的历史告诉我们，它是由亚里士多德(公元前384 - 322)著作的古代编辑创造的。亚里士多德是自然科学和哲学的奠基人之一，他的物理学为我们提供了自然运行的详细描述。除了物理学，亚里士多德还写了另一部关于哲学问题的著作，这些问题都在自然之外: 比如个人的事情(或“substances”)作为它们不断变化的品质（或“accidents”）的支撑以及上帝在宇宙结构中的角色。据说，亚里士多德的编辑们，不确定如何称呼这些困难的著作，只是把它们放在《物理学》之后收录在这一版本中，因此它们被称为形而上学，或“物理学之后”的著作。但在在古希腊，前缀“meta-”也可以表示“超越”，因此形而上学被广泛理解为一门学科，它超越了物质世界。自海德格尔和德里达(1930 - 2004)以来，“形而上学”是一个高度消极的术语，用来指责反对者追求哲学，这些欧洲大陆的思想家认为这是自柏拉图以来西方哲学的一种典型的幼稚时尚。关于本体论，虽然一些哲学家花费了大量的精力对希腊文ontos和logos的含义进行了微妙的解读，但我们认为本体论的意思类似于“对存在的研究”，这就足够了。在此基础上，我们可以说本体论在希腊哲学中出现得相当早，在印度甚至更早。尽管如此，“ontology”这个词显然直到1613年才被创造出来, 这实际上是一个过去缓慢变动的领域，就像哲学一样。与“形而上学”相比，“本体论”往往被视为一个广受尊重的术语，更为严谨，较少背负历史或神秘的包袱。但在本书中，就像在我的其他著作中一样，我不会遵循“形而上学”一词的这种贬义用法，因为我看不出有什么好的理由毁掉一个古典哲学中的有价值的术语。所以实际上，我将形而上学和本体论作为同义词，以避免重复，从而获得一个重要的文体资源，不让读者的耳朵过于迟钝。

By the time you have finished this book, I hope to have explained the basic concepts of OOO as clearly as possible, and to have conveyed my reasons for excitement about this style of philosophy. The model I have kept in mind while writing is Sigmund Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psycho- Analysis, delivered by Freud to a general audience in Vienna during the First World War. Whatever one thinks of Freud’s psychological theories, he is an undisputed master of the lit- erary presentation of difficult theories, and is well worth emulating in at least that respect. In his well-polished intro- ductory book, Freud begins by explaining slips of the tongue, moves on to the interpretation of dreams, and then proceeds to his theory of neuroses. My method here will be similar, beginning with the simplest aspects of OOO before moving on to its more intricate details.

在您读完这本书的时候，我希望能够尽可能清晰地解释面向对象的本体论的基本概念，并传达出我对这种哲学风格感到兴奋的原因。我在写作时一直牢记的模型是西格蒙德·弗洛伊德在第一次世界大战期间，于维也纳向大众发表的《关于心理的介绍性演讲》。无论人们如何看待弗洛伊德的心理学理论，他都是对晦涩理论进行文学呈现的无可争议的大师，至少在这方面值得效仿。在他那本精雕细琢的介绍性著作中，弗洛伊德从解释口误开始，接着转向梦的解析，然后继续他的神经官能症理论。我这里的方法与此类似，从面向对象的本体论最简单的方面开始，然后再讨论它更复杂的细节。

Chapter 1 (‘A New Theory of Everything’) introduces the notion of objects, which for OOO come in two and only two types: real and sensual. I will also discuss what OOO thinks is wrong with modern philosophy since René Descartes(1596–1650) and especially Kant (1724–1804), though in one respect Kant is an important ancestor of OOO.

第一章(“万物的新理论”)介绍了对象的概念，对于面向对象的本体论来说，对象只有两种类型:真实的和感性的。我还将讨论，物导向本体论认为从笛卡尔开始的现代哲学有什么问题(1596 - 1650)，尤其是康德(1724 - 1804)，尽管在某一方面康德是物导向本体论的重要渊源。

Chapter 2 (‘Aesthetics Is the Root of All Philosophy’) explains why philosophy has less in common with science than is usually believed, and more in common with the arts. Here we touch on the key cognitive role of metaphor, which I claim is more important for philosophy than discursive propositional statements such as ‘the cat is on the mat’, ‘gold is a yellow metal’, or ‘water boils at 100 degrees Celsius’, which philoso- phers so often take as the model for their theories.

第二章(“美学是一切哲学的根源”)解释了为什么哲学与科学的共同点比人们通常认为的要少，而与艺术的共同点则更多。这里我们触及到隐喻（metaphor）关键的认知作用, 我认为其比散漫的哲学命题的语句如“猫在垫子上”,“黄金是黄金”或“水的沸点是100摄氏度”更加重要，而这些语句常常被哲学家作为他们的理论模型。

Chapter 3 (‘Society and Politics’) discusses some of the implications for OOO in these fields. Some explanation is given of Latour’s actor-network theory, since OOO differs greatly from this influential school in matters of social theory while tending to agree with many of its findings concerning politics.13 In social theory OOO is more interested in the inner nature of things than in their actions, and contends that only a half-dozen or so important events befall an object before it reaches maturity, ripens, declines, and dies. In pol- itics, OOO avoids the left/right polarization of political dis- course since the French Revolution, focusing instead on the difference between truth politics and power politics, both of them in need of replacement. It also adheres to the discovery of actor-network theory that non-human entities play a cru- cial role in stabilizing the human polis.

第三章(“社会与政治”)讨论了物导向本体论在这些领域的一些含义。对拉图尔的行动者网络理论作了一些解释，因为物导向本体论在社会理论的问题上与这个有影响力的学派有很大的不同，同时倾向于赞同它在政治方面的许多发现。[13]在社会理论中，物导向本体论更感兴趣的是事物的内在本质，而不是它们的行为。它认为，在一个对象达到成熟、成熟、衰退和死亡之前，只有五六件左右的重要事件降临到它身上。在政治方面,物导向本体论避免了法国大革命以来政治话语的左右两极化，而是注重真理政治与权力政治的区别，两者都需要被替代。它还坚持了行动者网络理论的发现，即非人类实体在稳定人类城邦方面发挥着至关重要的作用。

In Chapter 4 (‘Indirect Relations’) I show why the interac- tion between objects, which seems like the most obvious everyday thing in the world, is more paradoxical than it sounds. There is already a long but partially obscured trad- ition of taking this problem seriously: first among the Arab and European Occasionalists of medieval and early modern times, and later with Kant and the important Scottish phil- osopher David Hume (1711–76). I will suggest that all of these celebrated figures adopt the same incorrect assumptions about the workings of causality. This will lead us to a broader discussion of the fourfold structure of objects, which serves as one of the methodological pillars of OOO. I will also ask what is left of knowledge in the wake of OOO’s rejection of literalism and direct access to reality. Since Chapter 2 has already claimed that philosophy has more in common with the arts than the sciences, some might complain (and have already complained) that OOO ‘aestheticizes’ philosophy while leaving us sceptical as to the possibility of any actual knowledge. Yet we will see that OOO merely rejects the idea of knowledge as a direct presence of reality itself, and does not scorn knowledge per se.

在第4章(“间接关系”)，我展示了为什么物体之间的相互作用，似乎是世界上最明显的日常事物，比它听起来更矛盾。对待这个问题的严肃态度已经有了一个悠久但部分不为人知的传统: 首先是阿拉伯人和欧洲中世纪和近代早期的偶然性，以及的康德和重要的苏格兰哲学家大卫·休谟(1711 - 76)。我将表明所有这些著名的人物对因果关系的运作都采用了同样的错误假设。这将引导我们更广泛地讨论对象的四重结构，它是物导向本体论的方法论支柱之一。我也将追问在物导向本体论拒绝写实主义和直接接近现实之后，知识还剩下什么。由于第二章已经宣称哲学与艺术的共同点多于科学，一些人可能会抱怨(而且已经抱怨)面向对象的本体论“美学化”了哲学，同时让我们对任何实际知识的可能性产生怀疑。然而，我们将看到物导向本体论仅仅拒绝将知识作为现实本身的直接存在的观点，而不轻视知识本身。

In Chapter 5 (‘Object-Oriented Ontology and its Rivals’) I try to clarify the nature of OOO further by distinguishing its treatment of objects from the views of perhaps the two most dominant French thinkers of the past half-century: Derrida and Foucault, neither of them doing the degree of justice to objects that OOO itself demands.

在第5章(“面向对象的本体论及其竞争对手)我试图进一步阐明物导向本体论的本质，方法是将物导向本体论对对象的处理与过去半个世纪法国两位最具影响力的思想家的观点区分开来：德里达和福柯，他们都没有对物导向本体论本身要求的对象做出公正的评价。

Chapter 6 (‘Varying Approaches to Object-Oriented Ontology) discusses the key authors who have worked or still work in a OOO idiom: Ian Bogost, Levi R. Bryant, and Timothy Morton. It also discusses two of the fellow travel- lers who have worked in proximity to OOO without accept- ing the exact presuppositions or methods of this school: Jane Bennett and Tristan Garcia.14 Finally, I will briefly consider the work of several young architects and architectural theorists who have written persuasively about the role of OOO in their discipline: Mark Foster Gage, Erik Ghenoiu, David Ruy, and Tom Wiscombe.15

第6章(面向对象的本体论的不同方法)讨论已经或仍然使用物导向本体论习惯用语的主要作者：伊安·博格斯特（Ian Bogost）, 列维·R·布莱恩特(Levi R. Bryant)和蒂莫西·莫顿（Timothy Morton）。它还讨论了两位在物导向本体论附近工作的追随者，她们没有接受这个学派的确切假设或方法:简·班尼特（Jane Bennett）和特里斯坦·加西亚（TristanGarcia）。[14]最后，我将简要考虑几位年轻建筑师和建筑理论家的作品，他们令人信服地书写了的面向对象的本体论在他们学科中的角色:马克·佛斯特·盖兹（Mark Foster Gage）, 伊瑞克（Erik Ghenoiu），大卫·鲁伊（David Ruy）和汤姆（Tom Wiscombe）。[15]

Chapter 7 (‘Object-Oriented Ontology in Overview’) con- cludes with a summary of some of the most important guid- ing maxims of the movement.

第七章(面向对象的本体论概述)总结了该运动一些最重要的指导原则。

In writing this book I have had two primary goals in mind. The first is that any reader who continues to the end should understand OOO as well as anyone other than a few sea- soned veterans. The second is that reading this book should be as pleasant an experience as possible. It has long been my view that since there are so many books one can read, and so many things that one can do besides read books, the burden is always on the author to make the topic at hand more inter- esting than all of these other options. I would be mortified to bore my guests at a house party, and even more so to bore thousands of readers after they have made a good-faith investment of time and money to read this book.

写这本书的时候，我心里有两个主要的目标。首先，任何读者，只要坚持到最后，都应该理解面向对象的本体论，就像除了一些经验丰富的老手之外的任何人一样。第二，读这本书应该是一种尽可能愉快的经历。长期以来，我的观点是，既然有那么多的书可以读，那么除了读书，还有那么多的事情可以做，作者的责任是总该让手头的话题比所有这些选择更加有趣。在一次家庭聚会上，如果让我的客人感到无聊，我会感到羞愧;而如果让成千上万的读者感到无聊，那就更甚了，因为他们已经真诚地投入了时间和金钱来阅读这本书。

In closing, I would like to thank Ananda Pellerin and Thomas Penn of Penguin, who jointly persuaded me to write this book. Jane Birdsell, also of Penguin, caught dozens of errors that I was astonished to find still lurking in my manu- script, and added a number of stylistic improvements. In decid- ing how to structure my chapters, I have benefitted greatly from some of the volumes already published in this series of Pelican Introductions, including but not limited to Robin Dunbar’s Human Evolution and Ha-Joon Chang’s Economics: The User’s Guide. The helpful diagrams were designed by Professor Emeritus Michael Flower of Portland State University, who has assisted me in similar fashion in the past.

最后，我要感谢阿南达·佩尔兰（Ananda Pellerin）和企鹅出版社的托马斯·潘（Thomas Penn），是他们共同说服我写这本书的。同样来自企鹅出版社(Penguin)的简•伯德塞尔(Jane Birdsell)发现我的手稿中有几十处错误，令我惊讶的是，这些错误仍然潜伏在我的手稿中，并且增加了一些格式上的改进。在决定如何组织我的章节时，我从本系列已经出版的一些书籍中受益匪浅，包括但不限于罗宾·邓巴（Robin Dunbar）的《人类进化》和张夏准（Ha‑Joon Chang）的《经济学:用户指南》。一些有用的图表是由波特兰州立大学名誉教授迈克尔·弗劳尔（Michael Flower）设计的，他过去也曾以类似的方式帮助过我。

注释：

[1] 斯拉沃热·齐泽克 （Slavo Žižek）,《希拉里•克林顿的共识对民主是有害的》。

[2] “后真相”词条，https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/post-truth 。

[3] http://www.attn.com/stories/9613/neil-degrasse-tysons-latest-political-tweet-backfires。

[4] 詹姆斯·雷德曼（James Ladyman）和唐·罗斯（Don Ross），《一切都必须结束》。

[5] 斯拉沃热·齐泽克（Slavoj Žižek）,《后记:对象,对象无处不在》。

[6] 布鲁诺·拉图尔（Bruno Latour），《生存方式研究》，第327、337页。

[7] https://artreview.com/power_100/graham_harman/。

[8] 我听迈克尔院长说过锡拉丘兹大学2014年，德克萨斯大学的迈克尔·贝尼迪克特(Michael Benedikt)于2016年发表了这篇文章。

[9] 马克·福斯特·盖奇（Mark Foster Gage），《对位:护理临终关怀》。

[10] 蒂莫西·莫顿和比约克Guðmundsottir,《这个巨大的阳光照射的深渊未来就在你身边》。

[11] 严格地说，我从1997年开始在自己的作品中使用了“面向对象的哲学”这个术语，并于1999年在一次 名为“面向对象的哲学”的讲座中首次将其公开介绍，后来发表在我的《走向投机的现实主义》一书中。2009年，Bryant创造了“面向对象的本体论”这个术语，作为一个能够包含我自己的方法之外的面向对象方法的总括术语。值得注意的是，到那时，哲学家Aden Evens(2006)已经将“面向对象的本体论”作为文章标题。但埃文斯的术语关注的是计算机编程对哲学的含义，而不是面向对象的本体论运动所设想的那种宽泛的哲学本体。

[12] 马丁·海德格尔《存在与时间》。

[13] 格雷厄姆·哈曼：《唯物论:客体与社会理论》，布鲁诺·拉图尔：《重组政治》。

[14] 简·贝内特，《活力物质》;特里斯坦·加西亚，《形式与客体》。

[15] 马克·福斯特·盖奇，《对位:护理临终关怀》;埃里克，《世界是不够的》；大卫·雷，《回到(陌生)对象》;汤姆·威斯科姆的《离散性，或朝向扁平本体论架构》。

原书链接：https://b-ok.cc/book/3504604/b582a8