1) Can objects be understood without reference to human subjectivity? — schopenhauer1

2) Is it even wise to try to overlook the human aspect to all knowledge?

Is this not only a fool's errand but somehow anti-human or is this just trying to take out a pernicious anthropomorphism that might lead to a more open field of exploration?

Like correlationism, object-oriented philosophy begins with an affirmation of the epistemological limit: we can never know the reality of the objects we encounter. Like speculative materialism, object-oriented philosophy then radicalises the correlationist position, but where speculative materialism pushes finitude into a positive epistemological premise, object-oriented philosophy simply extends finitude beyond the bounds of the human to bestow it democratically upon everything. — Ontology for Ontology’s Sake

Clearly, then, the problem stems from the mutual abstraction of becoming and
thing, a problem whose solution Plato already foreshadowed in coining the principle of immanence in the form of ‘the becoming of being [genesis eis ousian]’ (Philebus 26d8): it cannot be other-than-being that becomes, or becoming would not be at all. In the present context, this means: ‘the mark of all being is power’. Powers are inseparable from their products; if no products, then there were no powers, but not the reverse. It is neither the case that things ground powers, nor the converse; rather, powers unground the ultimacy attributed to substantial being and necessitate, therefore, rather than eliminate, the becomings of objects. Powers accordingly are natural history, in the precise sense that powers are not simply formally or logically inseparable from what they do, but are what they do, and compose being in its becoming. The thoroughgoing contingency of natural production undermines, I would claim, any account of permanently actual substantial forms precisely because such contingents entail the actuality not simply of abstractly separable forms, but of the powers that sculpt them. This is where
Harman’s retooling of vicarious causation will become the focus for discussion, but which must take place elsewhere. — Hart, Mining Conditions, a response to Harman, pg 48

Harman’s difference from Whitehead,
and his creative contribution to Speculative Philosophy, consists in the ‘translation’ of
the deep problems of essence and change from one realm (that of relations) to another
(that of substances). These two realms, oddly enough, seem to be reversible into one
another—at least in an overall anti-correlationist framework. Given that ‘there is no
such thing as transport without transformation’, the only remaining question is what
sort of difference Harman’s transformation of ontology makes. I would suggest that the
contrast between Harman and Whitehead is basically a difference of style, or of aesthetics.
This means that my enjoyment of one of these thinkers’ approaches over the
other is finally a matter of taste, and is not subject to conceptual adjudication. And this
is appropriate, given that both thinkers privilege aesthetics over both ethics and epistemology.
Whitehead notoriously argues that ‘Beauty is a wider, and more fundamental,
notion than Truth’, and even that ‘the teleology of the Universe is directed to the
production of Beauty’.76 Harman, for his part, enigmatically suggests that, in a world of
substances withdrawn from all relations, ‘aesthetics becomes first philosophy’.77

1) Can objects be understood without reference to human subjectivity? — schopenhauer1

2) Is it even wise to try to overlook the human aspect to all knowledge? Is this not only a fool's errand but somehow anti-human or is this just trying to take out a pernicious anthropomorphism that might lead to a more open field of exploration?

Why the fear of "anthropomorphism"? — Moliere

I have difficulty in understanding Laruelle [laughs] especially regarding the question of the Real. The strength of philosophy is its decisions in regards to the Real. In a sense Laruelle is too much like Heidegger, in critiquing a kind great forgetting, of what is lost in the grasp of decision, what Heidegger called thinking. Beyond this, and not to judge a thinker only by his earliest work, his most recent work has a religious dimension. When you say something is purely in the historical existence of philosophy
the proposition is a failure. It becomes religious. There is a logical constraint when you say we most go beyond philosophy. This is why, in the end, Heidegger said only a god can save us. Ultimately, I do not see an opposition between being qua being (as multiplicity) and the Real, not at all. The Real can be decided except for the event which is always in relation to a particular world. — Badiou

Clarify what you mean by "understood". — 180 Proof

Speculative Realists seem to be attempting a more complete and consistent application of the Mediocrity Principle (i.e. anthropo-decentricity) – neither a 'view from here' nor a 'view from nowhere', but a view from everywhere – in ontology. — 180 Proof

How would a view from everywhere look different from either in your understanding? — schopenhauer1

Whether human or non-human, all objects should be given equal attention;
Objects are not identical to their properties;
There are two aspects to any object the ‘real object’ (RO) and the ‘sensory object’ (SO);
Real objects can only relate to one another via their sensory object;
The properties of objects are also divided into real and sensual;
The real object and the sensory object with their distinct properties or qualities (RQ and SQ) create four basis permutations: time, space (the two Kantian constructs), essence and eidos;
Philosophy has a closer relationship with aesthetics than mathematics or sciences. — Blog on OOO

"From either" what? — 180 Proof

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once. — Edward Feser

Harman gives Whitehead an important place in the genealogy of speculative realist thought. For Whitehead is one of the few twentieth-century thinkers who dares
‘to venture beyond the human sphere’,13 and to place all entities upon the same footing. Whitehead rejects ‘the [Kantian] notion that the gap between human and world
is more philosophically important than the gaps between any other sorts of entities’. Or, to restate this in Whitehead’s own terms, Western philosophy since Descartes gives
far too large a place to ‘presentational immediacy’, or the clear and distinct representation of sensations in the mind of a conscious, perceiving subject.15 In fact, such perception is far less common, and far less important, than what Whitehead calls ‘perception
in the mode of causal efficacy’, or the ‘vague’ (nonrepresentational) way that entities
affect and are affected by one another through a process of vector transmission.16 Presentational immediacy does not merit the transcendental or constitutive role that Kant
attributes to it. For this mode of perception is confined to ‘high-grade organisms’ that
are ‘relatively few’ in the universe as a whole. On the other hand, causal efficacy is universal; it plays a larger role in our own experience than we tend to realize, and it can
be attributed ‘even to organisms of the lowest grade’.17 — Shaviro 281

From the viewpoint of causal efficacy, all actual entities in the universe stand on
the same ontological footing. No special ontological privileges can distinguish God
from ‘the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space’: in spite of all ‘gradations
of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level’.18 And what holds for God, holds all the more for human subjectivity. Whitehead refuses to privilege human access, and instead is willing
to envision, as Harman puts it, ‘a world in which the things really do perceive each
other’.19 Causal and perceptual interactions are no longer held hostage to human-centric categories. For Whitehead and Harman alike, there is therefore no hierarchy of
being. No particular entity—not even the human subject—can claim metaphysical
preeminence, or serve as a favoured mediator. All entities, of all sizes and scales, have
the same degree of reality. They all interact with each other in the same ways, and they
all exhibit the same sorts of properties. This is a crucial aspect of Whitehead’s metaphysics, and it is one that Harman has allowed us to see more clearly than ever before. — Shaviro 281

It is in the context of this shared project that I want to discuss the crucial differences between Whitehead and Harman. Although both thinkers reject correlationism,
they do so on entirely separate—and indeed incompatible—grounds. For Whitehead, human perception and cognition have no special or privileged status, because they
simply take their place among the myriad ways in which all actual entities prehend
other entities. Prehension includes both causal relations and perceptual ones—and
makes no fundamental distinction between them. Ontological equality comes from
contact and mutual implication. All actual entities are ontologically equal, because
they all enter into the same sorts of relations. They all become what they are by prehending other entities. Whitehead’s key term prehension can be defined as any process—causal, perceptual, or of another nature entirely—in which an entity grasps, registers the presence of, responds to, or is affected by, another entity. All actual entities
constitute themselves by integrating multiple prehensions; they are all ‘drops of experience, complex and interdependent’.20 All sorts of entities, from God to the ‘most trivial
puff of existence’, figure equally among the ‘‘really real’ things whose interconnections
and individual characters constitute the universe’.21 When relations extend everywhere, so that ‘there is no possibility of a detached, self-contained local existence’, and ‘the environment enters into the nature of each thing’,22 then no single being—not the human
subject, and not even God—can claim priority over any other. — Shaviro 282

How would a view from everywhere look different from either in your understanding? — schopenhauer1

You're arguing from an empiricist viewpoint - that we learn the concept of roundness from the exposure to many instances of it. — Wayfarer

have their own form of interaction that manifests roundness — schopenhauer1

This is why, in the end, Heidegger said only a god can save us. — Badiou

Can objects be understood without reference to human subjectivity? — schopenhauer1

Moliere, I like your ideas, but you jumped ahead a bit. I want to read this page by page to get all the analysis from it. — schopenhauer1

Prehension is used here. However, it seems to be an overmined term. — schopenhauer1

It can refer to "registers the presence of, responds to, affected by, another entity". He then adds in "drops of experience". Is this not conflating a certain type of phenomena (experience) with a more general idea of interactions in general? How are these two tied?

Of which you have a concept, hence the designation 'roundness' that goes with it. — Wayfarer

I agree that there are objects that are approximately round in the world, but my assumption is that no exactly round object has ever existed or will ever exist in the world, if exactly one means within the Planck length, being 10−35m
10
−
35
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If no round object has ever existed or will ever exist, then any talk about round objects cannot be about Real Objects RO but must be about Sensory Objects SO. — RussellA

How so? By overmining I understand there to be no objects. But prehension just puts objects on the same ontological level as humans by smushing perception and effect together. So it seems to recognize the reality of objects, though they are all interconnected -- which I think might speak against your thought here: — Moliere

If objects are all connected, and perception, response, affect, and register are the relations between entities, then a drop of experience would just be another entity. It's the kind of entity we are -- and I am a little suspicious in general of reifications of experience so I don't think I'd put it like this, but that doesn't seem to be a conflation as much as a different way of looking. — Moliere

Not sure what to make of this. What do you mean "reifications of experience"? — schopenhauer1

Hypostatization is pretty much what I have in mind. If experience be material, as a materialist must accept if they are not eliminative, it's still not a thing. Experience is of things, and reification is when you treat what is conceptual or experiential as if it were the same as the things it's about. — Moliere

I guess I meant, "overused".. used to refer to too many vaguely related but not quite necessarily related things. — schopenhauer1

Sure, but the controversial element is whether "roundness" is a thing outside that concept. — schopenhauer1

1) Can objects be understood without reference to human subjectivity? — schopenhauer1

2) Is it even wise to try to overlook the human aspect to all knowledge? Is this not only a fool's errand but somehow anti-human or is this just trying to take out a pernicious anthropomorphism that might lead to a more open field of exploration? — schopenhauer1

For Harman, in contrast, all objects are ontologically equal, because they are all
equally withdrawn from one another. Harman posits a strange world of autonomous,
subterranean objects, ‘receding from all relations, always having an existence that perception or sheer causation can never adequately measure … a universe packed full of
elusive substances stuffed into mutually exclusive vacuums’.23 For Harman, there is a
fundamental gap between objects as they exist in and for themselves, and the external
relations into which these objects enter. ‘The basic dualism in the world lies not between spirit and nature, or phenomenon and noumenon, but between things in their
intimate reality and things as confronted by other things’.24 Every object retains a hidden reserve of being, one that is never exhausted by, and never fully expressed in, its
contacts with other objects. These objects can rightly be called substances, because
‘none of them can be identified with any (or even all) of their relations with other entities’. So defined, ‘substances are everywhere’.25 And in their deepest essence, substances are ‘withdrawn absolutely from all relation’.26 — Shaviro 282

The contrast between these positions should be clear. Whitehead opposes correlationism by proposing a much broader—indeed universally promiscuous—sense of relations among entities. But Harman opposes correlationism by deprivileging relations
in general. Instead, Harman remarkably revives the old and seemingly discredited
metaphysical doctrine of substances: a doctrine that Whitehead, for his part, unequivocally rejects. Where Whitehead denounces ‘the notion of vacuous actuality, which
haunts realistic philosophy’,27 Harman cheerfully embraces ‘the vacuous actuality of
things’.28 Whitehead refuses any philosophy in which ‘the universe is shivered into a
multitude of disconnected substantial things’, so that ‘each substantial thing is … conceived as complete it itself, without any reference to any other substantial thing’. Such
an approach, Whitehead says, ‘leaves out of account the interconnections of things’,
and thereby ‘renders an interconnected world of real individuals unintelligible’. The
bottom line for Whitehead is that ‘substantial thing cannot call unto substantial thing’.
There is no way to bridge the ontological void separating independent substances from
one another. An undetectable, unreachable inner essence might just as well not exist at
all: ‘a substantial thing can acquire a quality, a credit—but real landed estate, never’.29
The universe would be entirely sterile and static, and nothing would be able to affect
anything else, if entities were to be reduced to a ‘vacuous material existence with passive endurance, with primary individual attributes, and with accidental adventures’.30

Harman, for his part, makes just the opposite criticism. He explicitly disputes the
idea, championed by Whitehead (among so many others), that ‘everything is related to
everything else’. In the first place, Harman says, Whitehead’s ‘relational theory is too reminiscent of a house of mirrors’. When things are understood just in terms of their
relations, an entity is ‘nothing more than its perception of other entities. These entities, in turn, are made up of still other perceptions. The hot potato is passed on down
the line, and we never reach any reality that would be able to anchor the various perceptions of it’. This infinite regress, Harman says, voids real things of their actuality. In
the second place, Harman argues that ‘no relational theory such as Whitehead’s is able
to give a sufficient explanation of change’, because if a given entity ‘holds nothing in
reserve beyond its current relations to all entities in the universe, if it has no currently
unexpressed properties, there is no reason to see how anything new can ever emerge’.31
Harman thus turns Whitehead’s central value of novelty against him, claiming that
Whitehead cannot really account for it. If ‘every actual entity is what it is, and is with
its definite status in the universe, determined by its internal relations to other actual
entities’,32 then we will be eternally stuck with nothing more than what we have already. — Shaviro 282-283

Whereas modern philosophy has tended to 'flatten' ontology such that anything that exists, exists in the same way. This is why there are disputes over platonic realism in philosophy of maths. Numbers, and so on, don't exist in the same way as objects. So the tendency is to declare that they don't exist at all, save as mental constructs; things either exist, or they don't, in other words, existence is univocal, has only one meaning. — Wayfarer

Employing the subject/object dichotomy as a linguistic framework to take account of ourselves and 'the world' results in rendering stuff as one or the other. Not all things are one or the other. To quite the contrary, some things consist of both. Hence, I find that it is an inherently inadequate framework to begin with, ontological or otherwise. — creativesoul

Those are the ones current convention and everyday people has/have trouble with. The result of the former is denial of language less thought. The result of the latter is often anthropomorphism. — creativesoul