“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Sunday, July 17, 2011

Object Harmartia

The inner fragility of an object allows it to be destroyed by another object. This hamartia (Greek, "wound") constitutes the object as such in its determinacy.

Impermanence is an intrinsic feature of why an object is an object. It's a mistake on this view to see either

(1) Objects as solid lumps in stream of time that gradually wears them down.

(2) Objects as reifications of a temporal flux, overmined by that flux.

(3) Objects as decomposable into parts (undermining).

(4) Fragility/death as an occurrence that "happens to" an object from without.

Fragility is an ontological condition of objects. It doesn't depend on non-objects.

By contrast, (1) through (4) explain fragility by adding to or subtracting from the object.



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