“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


Tuesday, January 26, 2016

OOO and Nihilism: Nihilism Upgraded

From my essay for Tom Bristow:

Let us now consider object-oriented ontology (OOO), the philosophical view to which I subscribe.What object-oriented ontology does is to multiply the cracks in the real everywhere.There are as many cracks in the real as there are things. Because reality just is things, and things just are riven from the inside between what they are and how they appear, even to themselves. There is a human–world gap. There is a toaster–world gap.There is a crack between octopuses and toasters.There is a crack between octopuses and octopuses: octopus thing and octopus phenomena are fissured from within.There is a crack between this octopus and this coral reef; a crack between this coral reef itself and this coral reef itself. Like some astonishingly beautiful piece of Japanese raku, reality is just riddled with trillions of cracks. OOO is thus the first western view to embrace the nothingness with no hesitation whatsoever.And thus OOO performs the task of overcoming nihilism—which as Nietzsche and Heidegger argued cannot be overcome by pushing or resisting but by going in and transforming from underneath.