Abstract
AbstractThis article poses a question for Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) in general and Harman’s position in particular. It is Heidegger’s question: “How do matters stand with nothingness?” First, I present the basic outline of Harman’s OOO which is presented as a theory of everything. In order to pin down the question of nothing, I begin by asking about “something”: what is an object? And what does it mean that objects exist? Then I pursue by identifying two notions of nothing in OOO: the withdrawal of objects and the in-between of two objects. The first, I call infrastructural nothing. The second, I call interrelational nothing. The latter is derived from the former. I argue that OOO is very close to Kierkegaard’s account of nothing as the space of possibility of possibilities, since an object is defined as its own interior space which must hold something in reserve in order to allow for change and emergence. Nothing is not merely nothing but something – a bounded openness.
Highlights
Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is a theory – a new theory – of everything
I argue that OOO is very close to Kierkegaard’s account of nothing as the space of possibility of possibilities, since an object is defined as its own interior space which must hold something in reserve in order to allow for change and emergence
If OOO is a theory of everything, what about nothing(ness), ? How do matters stand with nothingness? We might approach this question in different ways
Summary
Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is a theory – a new theory – of everything. What about nothing ? This is my question for OOO in general and for Harman in particular. I begin with a brief introduction of the key elements in Harman’s OOO. I discuss the notion of objects and what count as objects in order to present the peculiar case of nothing in relation to everything. I argue that nothing is not merely nothing but something, or to use Morton’s distinction borrowed from Tillich – a meontic nothing (relational) rather than oukontic nothing (absolute).[1] There are at least two notions of nothing in OOO: the withdrawal of objects and the in-between of two objects. 243 between two objects is an object in its own right and it withdraws.[2] In order to qualify this nothing as withdrawal or withholding, I draw on the background on which OOO is developed, i.e., the phenomenological and existential tradition. While Harman explicitly expands the Kantian limit of the thing-in-itself to count for relations between two objects whatsoever (global finitude) and the human–world co-relation (in-itself vs for-itself), he implicitly expands the Kierkegaardian nothing (the possibility of possibility) in terms of the withdrawal or withholding of objects
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