Not all that long ago, but not just last year, Graham Harman posted a brief tutorial on the history and relations among the thinkers and concepts of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. In that tutorial he asserted that his own philosophy follows from these two propositions:
1. Individual entities of various different scales (not just tiny quarks and electrons) are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos.2. These entities are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by their sum of all possible relations. Objects withdraw from relation.
Elegant, no?
That objects withdraw from relations is, it seems, almost an anthropomorphic principle, all too well confirmed subjectively. Elegant, yes, and dismaying as well.
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