Friday, November 30, 2012

Friday Quotations: Object Oriented Ontology in a Nutshell, which is also a type of Object

"We cannot support formalism, which holds that the specific content of any experience is relatively unimportant.  But neither can we support materialism, which grants privilege to the original soil from which anything grows, and thereby denies the autonomy or relative independence of that reality itself.  Instead, we can only support objects.  The reason objects are not formalizable is because they cannot be reduced to their conditions of unknowability, whether mathematical or otherwise.  But objects are also not 'materializable,' because the neighborhood conditions of their genesis are relevant only within strict limits.  Nor are objects a hylemorphic combination of both forma and matter, since objects are precisely what lies between those two extremes, engaging with them only occasionally and indirectly.  Instead, objects are what the classical tradition called substantial forms, inhabiting a mezzanine level of the cosmos, and can be paraphrased neither as a meaning for some observer nor as the dangling product of some genetic-environmental backstory."--Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy.

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