We all see the world around us differently. Some people believe in gradual political progress; others push for radical revolution. Some of us see our lives as a long process of growth and change, and others as a series of landmark events.
In Waves and Stones, philosopher Graham Harman gives a name to this age-old divide, and lays out a new, unified theory for understanding it. 'Waves' look at the world through continuities, from phenomena as diverse as the incremental baby steps of childhood to the slow creep of fascism. The 'stone' perspective, by contrast, favours jarring discontinuity: the first day at secondary school, or the dropping of the atom bomb. This dualism is one of the most fundamental paradoxes in human thought.
With dazzling insight, Harman shows how the continuous vs discrete divide can be found wherever we turn, at the heart of every intellectual discipline from mathematics to politics and embedded in the fabric of our daily lives. Tracing its roots from Aristotle to Bergson, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.
A new exploration of our conception of reality, by one of the world's most influential philosophers
How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?
In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction - the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world - permeates every area of human life. What's more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter.
To explore the relationship between the continuous and the discrete, Harman shows, is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world in which we live.
