I'm giving this four stars only because the poor construction of the e-book. Footnotes need to link to notes to be useful.

A record of a developing mind, clearly written, with several clear articulations of both object-oriented ontology and the stakes of the philosophy, allowing us to track Harman's differences from and various debts to Heidegger, Whitehead, Husserl, Latour, and DeLanda.

My only serious qualifications in my high recommendation concern Harman's unengagement with physics, given his interest in space and time, and his many photonic and chthonic metaphors. To speak of darkness and depths is to speak in metaphors laden with notions of secret truths, mysterious rituals, rats in the walls (Lovecraft), and the like. If the real object always withdraws, if it is always unavailable, excessive, then we can get no closer to it as such. To call its withdrawal a 'lurking deep in inner darkness' suggests a knowledge of where the real object is...which runs counter to the purpose of OOO.

Florilegium

"If any philosophy does not allow two non-human objects to affect each other even when humans are not looking, there is no honest way to avoid calling that philosophy idealist"

"Like any other object, oxygen has properties that the human body is completely unequipped to utilize; to breathe is to reduce oxygen to a caricature" "Even fire oversimplifies oxygen while consuming it. This has nothing to do with a possible panpsychism of fire-souls and oxygen-spirits. it merely comes from the realization that human consciousness is not a unique instrument of distortion. In fact, any relation between two objects will be unable to avoid caricature"

"objects are not exhausted by their relations to other objects"

Rules about objects

"1. Relative size does not matter: an atom is no more an object than skyscraper.

2. Simplicity does not matter: an electron is no more an object than a piano.

3. Durability does not matter: a soul is no more an object than cotton candy.

4. Naturalness does not matter: helium is no more an object than plutonium.

5. Reality does not matter: mountains are no more objects than hallucinated mountains."

"To treat an object primarily as part of a network is to assume it can be reduced to that set of qualities and relations that it manifests in this particular network. But I have already argued that any object far exceeds the interactions it has with other things in any given moment."

"If an object is always a vast surplus beyond its relations of the moment, it has to be asked how those as-yet unexpressed qualities are stored up for the future. There are numerous controversies that might arise here, but I will confine myself to a negative remark: the concept of “potential” should be avoided wherever possible."

"no substance ever comes in contact with another at all."

"Presence means relationality, nothing more. To consider an object in its being means to consider it in its withdrawal from all forms of presence, whether as something seen, used, or just spatially present among other entities. All objects withdraw from each other, not just from humans."

"If we call the real object withdrawn, so that too little of its being is present, we might call the intentional object encrusted, in the sense that too much of its being is present. For the intentional object is always covered with inessential surface effects that must be scraped away through eidetic variation, so as to move closer toward the more austere essence lying beneath."

"whereas real objects trap us in an occasionalist deadlock in their cryptic mutual withdrawal, intentional objects already bleed and breathe, one phasing into another without difficulty."

" the intentional object is an object for the same reason as any other object: namely, it is a reality whose full depths can never be exhaustively probed."

"the asymmetry in question is not that of “lucid conscious agent versus stupid block of inanimate matter.“ Instead, the asymmetry is simply that in this case I am the one doing the intending, and the object may not be encountering me at all: not out of inanimate stupidity, but simply because I may have no effect on it."

"Kant's unfortunate solution was to adopt an agnostic attitude toward the nature of things-in-themselves: the rough equivalent of escaping trench warfare by wearing earplugs"

"Why do we always speak only of space and time as a pair, with no third or fourth term ever added? Is 'space and time' an adequate topic, or should we replace it with 'space, time, and X' or 'space, time, X, and Y'?

"The complaints may not sound very original, since thousands of authors not only bemoan a false subject/object divide, but even claim to have overcome it. With hands placed on hearts, they solemnly swear that we cannot have humans without world or world without humans, but only a primordial interdependence of the two. In this way they imagine that they have put an end to the central mistake of modern philosophy. Yet all these thousands of saviors miss the point completely. For even while claiming to surpass the gap between humans and world, they leave this same pair intact at the center of philosophy, even if now as a unified pair. The real problem with subject and object is not the //gap //between them; gaps are bridged easily enough with steal, wood, or humble Elmer's glue. Instead, the real problem is that human and world are taken as the two fundamental ingredients that must be found in any situation. As a result, the relation between humans and apples is assumed to be philosophically more significant that the relations between apples and trees, apples and sunlight, or apples and wind"

"We do not experience red, shiny, cold, slippery, and sweet, then arbitrarily fuse such genuine qualities into fictitious union, as Hume believes. Rather, we experience the qualities as if they emanated from an underlying object. For Merleau-Ponty, the red of an apple and the red of blood are not the same color even if their wavelengths or reflected light are found to be absolutely identical"

SPACE AND TIME
"We now come to the central claim of this article: the emanation of accidents from an intentional object //is time//, and the emanation of intentional objects from real ones //is space//....Any attempt to describe space adequately must concede that space involves the relation of objects that do not //entirely //relate. In other words, the simultaneous withdrawal of real objects from one another and their partial contact through simulacra is space itself....space itself //is //the mutual exteriority of objects, and their partial contact with one another, however this might occur. Then space is not relations, but the //tension //between objects and their relations"
"Space is the mutual externality of partially linked objects, while time is the interior of objects themselves. Time is the emanation of accidents from intentional objects, while space is the emanation of images from real ones....Since we have said that two objects can relate only on the interior of a third, it follows that there are infinitely many times, each unfolding on the interior of some vacuum-like space."
"Time has been described as the tension between an intentional object and its accidents, while space has been defined as the tension between real objects and the distorted way in which they manifest in some other object that encounters them....Each object creates its own internal space, and //ipso facto// its own interior time, laced with duels between images and their accidents." "Space itself quantitized, since it is nothing but the relational/nonrelational system of objects, partly linked even as they withdraw into intimate vacuums. And time itself is a continuum, since any time will be filled with enduring pillars (the intentional objects) encrusted with countless permutations of accidents modified within limits to any possible degree of intensity, without change to the images they adorn" ( )