On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl

Abstract

Philosophy has never been particularly far from fiction; it has always involved elements of storytelling, fantasy and even horror. By exploring several passages from horror fiction authors, Graham Harman proposes a new path for philosophy guided by the concept of the weird, or the “weirding of philosophy.” The concept of weirdness is somewhat akin to the Freudian Unheimliche or uncanny, but it emphasizes the gap between the sensual surface of the object and the continual elusiveness of its profound “objectness”. Speech about such objects is possible only through metaphor, ellipsis, circumlocution, “productive parody” or literary devices. The forerunners of this new mode of philosophical writing are Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl along with Edgar Allan Poe and Howard Lovecraft; and the Owl of Minerva on its coat of arms is replaced by the Great Cthulhu. Lovecraft’s descriptions of objects are intentionally vague and often refer to dimensions inaccessible to the limited range of human perception. His monsters are more than just mysterious - they are often literally invisible; they surpass our spectrum of emotional reactions and zoological classifications. But this invisibility, Harman argues, should not be understood in Kantian terms. Lovecraftian horror is not a noumenal horror, it is phenomenological horror: a realization that something immensely more powerful than we are and quite material may intrude upon our world of well-ordered categories and utterly disrupt it at any moment. Contrary to the prevailing tendency to reduce objects to a mere fantasy that human beings construct out of the surface contents of experience, Harman claims that reality is object-oriented: it consists of weird substances irreducible to either properties or effects.