the chair ... qua chair, is not real, because "chair" is not a character which belongs to it "of itself"
This is from Of Essence, which arrived a few weeks ago. Graham Harman talks about this in Tool-Being, page 248.
Buddhists are likewise not nominalists: a chariot isn't a chariot because you call it one. Furthermore--there it is!
Thus OOO comes closest to profound theories of emptiness. The superficial understanding is that "form is emptiness"--modernity, from capitalism to scientism to process philosophy, kind of has that bit down.
What OOO grasps better than anything I've yet seen, the next proposition, which nicely reverses the polarities, like Graham's reading of Levinas and Zubiri:
Emptiness also is form
This is the future folks!
2 comments:
Among the several services OOP has rendered philosophy, not the least is renewing interest in Zubiri. Of course, people will want to read him for more reasons than just to see how he informs the OO project; but almost no one I knew of was reading him until Harman cited him. The only exceptions were Mario Bunge, who dismissed him as obscurantist, and Ignacio Ellacuria, whose work -- mostly theology -- is (like Zubiri's) almost all still only in Spanish (I know only of secondary works in English). But doubtless there are others -- maybe I should just get out more.
Thank you. It really is wonderful to read Zubiri.
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