“Nature likes to hide” – Heraclitus

“As an object-oriented ontologist I hold that all entities (including “myself ”) are shy, retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadows…” – Morton

“Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — this is a recluse’s verdict: ‘There is something arbitrary in the fact that he came to a stand here, took a retrospect, and looked around; that he here laid his spade aside and did not dig any deeper — there is also something suspicious in it.’ Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a lurking-place, every word is also a mask.” – Nietzsche

“The second way in which Harman attacked the problem was by a thorough reading of the startling tool-analysis in the opening sections of Heidegger’s Being and Time. This reading demonstrates that nothing in the ‘later’ Heidegger, its plangency notwithstanding, topples the tool-analysis from the apex of Heidegger’s thinking. Heidegger, in other words, was not quite conscious of the astonishing implications of the discovery he made in the tool-analysis: that when equipment—which for all intents and purposes could be anything at all—is functioning, or ‘executing’ (Vollzug), it withdraws from access (Entzug); that it is only when a tool is broken that it seems to become present-at-hand (vorhanden). This can only mean, argues Harman, that there is a vast plenum of unique entities, one of whose essential properties is withdrawal—no other entity can fully account for them. These entities must exist in a relatively flat ontology in which there is hardly any diference between a person and a pincushion. And relationships between them, including causal ones, must be vicarious and hence aesthetic in nature.” – Morton