Object-oriented ontology
The term "object-oriented philosophy" was coined by Graham Harman, the movement's founder, in his 1999 doctoral dissertation "Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects".
[9] For Harman, Heideggerian Zuhandenheit, or readiness-to-hand, refers to the withdrawal of objects from human perception into a reality that cannot be manifested by practical or theoretical action.
"[12] While object-oriented philosophers reach different conclusions, they share common precepts, including a critique of anthropocentrism and correlationism, preservation of finitude, "withdrawal", and rejection of philosophies that undermine or "overmine" objects.
Philosophical anthropocentrism tends to limit certain attributes (e.g., mind, autonomy, moral agency, reason) to humans, while contrasting all other beings as variations of "object" (that is, things that obey deterministic laws, impulses, stimuli, instincts, and so on).
Beginning with Kant's epistemology, modern philosophers began articulating a transcendental anthropocentrism, whereby the Kantian argument that objects are unknowable outside of the imposed, categories of the human mind, in turn, shores up discourses wherein objects frequently become effectively reduced to mere products of human cognition.
[5] Related to 'anthropocentrism', object-oriented thinkers reject speculative idealist correlationism, which the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux defines as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other".
[19] Second, one can "overmine" objects by either an idealism which holds that there is nothing beneath what appears in the mind or, as in social constructionism, by positing no independent reality outside of language, discourse or power.
[23] Borrowing the word from computing science, Harman uses "duomining" to refer to philosophical or ontological approaches that both undermine and overmine objects at the same time.
Harman asserts that Quentin Meillassoux's ontology is based on "a classic duomining position", since "he holds that the primary qualities of things are those which can be mathematized and denies that he is a Pythagorean, insisting that numbers do not exhaust the world but simply point to sort of "dead matter" whose exact metaphysical status is never clarified".
He maintains: If the human perception of a house or a tree is forever haunted by some hidden surplus in the things that never become present, the same is true of the sheer causal interaction between rocks or raindrops.
[1] From this, Harman concludes that the primary site of ontological investigation is objects and relations, instead of the post-Kantian emphasis on the human-world correlate.
Moreover, this holds true for all entities, be they human, nonhuman, natural, or artificial, leading to the downplaying of Dasein as an ontological priority.
In its place, Harman proposes a concept of objects that are irreducible to both material particles and human perception, and "exceed every relation into which they might enter".
[39] Harman compares this idea to the classical notion of formal causation, in which forms do not directly touch, but influence one another in a common space "from which all are partly absent".
Causation, says Harman, is always vicarious, asymmetrical, and buffered: 'Vicarious' means that objects confront one another only by proxy, through sensual profiles found only on the interior of some other entity.
He states: For, in effect, the Copernican Revolution will reduce philosophical investigation to the interrogation of a single relation: the human-world gap.
[3]To counter the form of post-Kantian epistemology, Bryant articulates an object-oriented philosophy called onticology, grounded in three principles.
In The Ecological Thought (2010), Morton introduced the concept of hyperobjects to describe objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatio-temporal specificities, such as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium.
[58] Additionally, the existential capacity of hyperobjects to outlast a turn toward less materialistic cultural values, coupled with the threat many such objects pose toward organic matter, gives them a potential spiritual quality, in which their treatment by future societies may become indistinguishable from reverential care.
Matthew David Segall has argued that object-oriented philosophers should explore the theological and anthropological implications of their ideas in order to avoid "slipping into the nihilism of some speculative realists, where human values are a fluke in an uncaring and fundamentally entropic universe".
[74] Philosopher Peter Wolfendale has a book-length criticism of object-oriented ontology, arguing it is unable to deliver on its promise of non-correlationist philosophy.
It seems that OOO could offer a more affection-based approach towards arts: one that, in principle, would not need to possess artistic objects, but could reflect on the way they affect us.
