Wow, I’m two pages into Graham Harman’s Tool-Being, and I’m already exasperated with its uselessness. What could drive a person to embrace a philosophy whose focus is on precisely what is least relevant to human life? Yeah, yeah — the apeiron is radically mysterious — but wow, guys, what is fascinating and consequential about the hiddenness of material reality is how entities constantly emerge from it, seemingly ex nihilo, and form relationships with us, not the simple, blunt fact that infinitely more remains submerged in nothingness.
Like with the Mandelbrot Set, it’s’s the edge region that is most interesting. But OOO guys are interested only in the points in the M-Set that escape to infinity, because no matter high the values go, they can go even higher. “Dude, that’s a really big number. Pass me the bong.”
Object-oriented ontology should be called crypotonomenology. Where phenomenology brackets what is ultimately beyond our experience, in order to make clear sense of what is within our experience, OOO brackets everything within experience in order to savor how impossible it is to make sense of what is beyond our experience.