There is an increasing tendency among philosophers and other intellectuals to insist that everything is interconnected. So consistently will they harp on the sickness and wrongheadedness of the tendency to divide the world up into discrete, autonomous entities, that one wonders who exactly they're arguing with. The Cartesian worldview is dead, and Aristotelianism doesn't get much praise either. So who is contesting this interconnectedness that all these intellectuals insist upon?
One person challenging this view is Graham Harman. In his object-oriented approach, he critiques both the undermining of objects in which they are reduced to their component parts as well as the overmining of objects in which they are reduced to their relations. He suggests instead that objects recede from their relations -- that they are always more than any of their properties or relations, and have hidden capacities to relate in other ways than they currently do. In this sense, no object ever encounters another directly. They only encounter a caricature of the other objects, experiencing only a small portion of the objects properties that are relevant to it within their particular relation. Objects do not relate to each other directly, but only vicariously through a third object which constitutes the relation between them. Thus, according to Harman, nothing is directly connected, and the connections that do exist have to be made by the objects, and are not all simply pre-existing. He describes a reality that is "clunky" and not a smooth continuum like that described by someone like Alfred North Whitehead or David Bohm.
One person challenging this view is Graham Harman. In his object-oriented approach, he critiques both the undermining of objects in which they are reduced to their component parts as well as the overmining of objects in which they are reduced to their relations. He suggests instead that objects recede from their relations -- that they are always more than any of their properties or relations, and have hidden capacities to relate in other ways than they currently do. In this sense, no object ever encounters another directly. They only encounter a caricature of the other objects, experiencing only a small portion of the objects properties that are relevant to it within their particular relation. Objects do not relate to each other directly, but only vicariously through a third object which constitutes the relation between them. Thus, according to Harman, nothing is directly connected, and the connections that do exist have to be made by the objects, and are not all simply pre-existing. He describes a reality that is "clunky" and not a smooth continuum like that described by someone like Alfred North Whitehead or David Bohm.
