Afraid I won't be of much help.

Can you explain that more about why it cannot be the Real Object? — schopenhauer1

A round object is circular, where the boundary of a circle is the same distance from a centre. For a round object, the distance of the boundary from the centre is the same, not similar, otherwise an ellipse, or a square, or a triangle would be a circle.

Plenty of shapes have been observed in the real world that are approximately round, where the distance of the boundary from the centre is similar, but "similar" does not mean "same". 10 metres is not the same as 1 metre, 1 metre is not the same as 1mm, 1mm is not the same as 1 micron and 1 micron is not the same as the planck length.

A round object can exist as a concept in the mind, but no one has observed a shape in the real world where the distance of the boundary from the centre is the same, meaning known to be the same down to the planck length.

There is a clear distinction between round as a concept in the mind and round as existing in the real world.

If I talk about a round object, for my talk to make logical and coherent sense, I must be talking about something that exists. As the concept of a round object certainly exists in the mind, but a round object is highly unlikely to exist in the real world, I must be referring to the concept in my mind, not an impossible object in the real world.

In Phaedo 72b-e, Socrates has Simmias agree that there is such a thing as Equality itself--something that is independent of any particular case of equality such as sticks or stones of equal length or size. We know this Form of Equality, because it comes into our minds every time we see instances of equal objects. However, Socrates points out, equal stones or equal sticks may look equal from one point of view and unequal from another. Nonetheless, we would never be tempted to suggest that Equality itself is unequal. Therefore, the sticks or stones that are equal cannot be the same thing as Equality, since they can sometimes be unequal, and Equality itself never can be. If the equal things are different from Equality and yet can bring Equality into our minds, they must somehow remind us of the Form of Equality. We are aware that the sticks or stones fall short of being perfectly equal, but to be aware that they fall short, we must already have an idea of what it means to be perfectly equal; that is, we must already know the Form of Equality.

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. — Shaviro 282

The important concept here, which is often overlooked, is the "gap". In order to understand objects as individuals, or to understand activities which involve relations, there is a need to assume a gap of separation, and this might be a boundary, or void space, or some such thing. You can refer to Kant's description of pure intuitions here, as the basis for this understanding. Notice that a distinction can be made between the pure intuition of the external (space for Kant), and the pure intuition of the internal (time for Kant).

If the gap is assumed to be spatial, we have external objects to work with, but if the gap is assumed to be temporal, we have internal conceptions, changing relations and associations, interactions and causation to deal with. Whether a person chooses one or the other, as the basis of one's ontology, depends on whether the person is looking outward (Kant's external intuition), or looking inward (Kant's internal intuition). So Harman, as you describe, looking outward, apprehends external, spatial relations, and Whitehead looking inward, apprehends internal, temporal relations.

There is a way to reconcile these two perspectives, and that is to see the person, the individual self, as the gap, or boundary which separates the internal from the external. In a way it is simplistic, as it plunges you back toward the basic Platonic dualism of the internal mind and the external body. But under the modern day terms provided by Kant, the separation, or gap, may be understood as a separation between space and time, where space is external and time is internal, and the gap (being the self) separates these two.

This seems pretty similar to Aristotle's substance, except that Aristotle didn't have an idea of a "hiddenness". He seemed pretty concerned with their "essence" which is something that I believe can be known, and thus not hidden. But if anyone else has ideas of how this ties to Aristotle, let me know. — schopenhauer1

We encounter the 'essences' each time we come upon a particular being. But there is a tension between this condition and the 'universals' needed to inquire into causes:

But perhaps the universal, while it cannot be substance in the way in which the essence is, can yet be present in it—for example, as the animal is present in the human and the horse. Well then, clearly there is some account of it. And it makes no difference even if it is not the account of everything in the substance. For this [universal] will not be any the less the substance of something, as the human is of the human in whom it is present. And so the same result will again follow, since it (for example, the animal) will be the substance of that in which it is present as something special to it. Further, it is both impossible and absurd for the this (that is, the substance)—if it is composed of something—not to be composed of substances or of the this something but of a quality. For then non-substance (that is, the quality) will be prior to substance (that is, to the this). Which is just what is impossible. For neither in account nor in time nor in knowledge can the attributes be prior to the substance. For then they will also be separable. — Aristotle. Metaphysics, 1038b15, translated by CDC Reeve

From this perspective, the 'essence' is hiding in plain sight.

From this perspective, the 'essence' is hiding in plain sight. — Paine

Well, it looks like Aristotle is railing against his mentor Plato here when he says that non-substance (qualities/attributes) can't be prior to its substance (the instance of the thing). He seems to be describing Plato's ideas that Forms are first and instances come from them. He's also just saying that the universal is contained in similarities of the same substances found in each instantiation. This is his main difference with Plato's notion of universals as some sort of esoteric Form (template) outside the substances themselves.

I don't see anything either way here. Aristotle's essences would be ones where we could determine by human standards of induction the essential form of a substance that determines what that substance is. He does not seem to hold the notion that there are some attributes which are hidden or withdrawn as far as I've seen. It's more of a corollary to Aristotle, not really fixing anything.

If I talk about a round object, for my talk to make logical and coherent sense, I must be talking about something that exists. As the concept of a round object certainly exists in the mind, but a round object is highly unlikely to exist in the real world, I must be referring to the concept in my mind, not an impossible object in the real world. — RussellA

Oh gotcha gotcha. Yeah that's fine and all, but is this contra Harman here? In other words, I can take this to mean that you think there is a Platonic element of perfect Forms, or in Kantian speak, "A priori Synthetic truths" missing from all of this metaphysically? If no human mind existed. If no animal mind existed, could objects have localized "vicarious" interactions that do not need a cognitive stage?

If the equal things are different from Equality and yet can bring Equality into our minds, they must somehow remind us of the Form of Equality. We are aware that the sticks or stones fall short of being perfectly equal, but to be aware that they fall short, we must already have an idea of what it means to be perfectly equal; that is, we must already know the Form of Equality. — Wayfarer

Do Forms (in the Platonic sense) matter for objects to relate to each other? Certainly, I can see it in the Aristotlian sense. Attributes that can be shared between substances can be known by them.

I just realized that attributes may be equivalent to Harman's "vicarious causation". The attributes of the substance is hidden except for the ones that interact with other substances. So for Harman attributes can never fully exhaust the fully essential characteristics of a substance (or object).

Whether a person chooses one or the other, as the basis of one's ontology, depends on whether the person is looking outward (Kant's external intuition), or looking inward (Kant's internal intuition). So Harman, as you describe, looking outward, apprehends external, spatial relations, and Whitehead looking inward, apprehends internal, temporal relations. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is internal intuition a false category when applied to objects that aren't animals?

In this standoff between Whitehead and Harman, or between the idea of relations
and the idea of substances, we would seem to have arrived at a basic antinomy of object-oriented thought. Whitehead and Harman, in their opposing ways, both speak to
our basic intuitions about the world. Harman addresses our sense of the thingness of
things: their solidity, their uniqueness, and their thereness. He insists, rightly, that every object is something, in and of itself; and therefore that an object is not reducible to
its parts, or to its relations with other things, or to the sum of the ways in which other entities apprehend it. But Whitehead addresses an equally valid intuition: our sense
that we are not alone in the world, that things matter to us and to one another, that
life is filled with encounters and adventures. There’s a deep sense in which I remain
the same person, no matter what happens to me. But there’s an equally deep sense in
which I am changed irrevocably by my experiences, by ‘the historic route of living occasions’33 through which I pass. And this double intuition goes for all the entities in the
universe: it applies to ‘shale or cantaloupe’34 and to ‘rocks and milkweed’35, as much as
it does to sentient human subjects. Where does this leave us? As Whitehead suggests,
we should always reflect that a metaphysical doctrine, even one that we reject, ‘would
never have held the belief of great men, unless it expressed some fundamental aspect of
our experience’.36 I would like to see this double intuition, therefore, as a ‘contrast’ that
can be organized into a pattern, rather than as an irreducible ‘incompatibility’.37 Whitehead insists that the highest task of philosophy is to resolve antinomies non-reductively,
by operating ‘a shift of meaning which converts the opposition into a contrast’.38

Harman himself opens the way, in part, for such a shift of meaning, insofar as he
focuses on the atomistic, or discrete, side of Whitehead’s ontology. Whitehead always
insists that ‘the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism. The creatures are atomic’.39
And Harman takes the atomicity of Whitehead’s entities as a guarantee of their concrete actuality: ‘Consider the case of ten thousand different entities, each with a different perspective on the same volcano. Whitehead is not one of those arch-nominalists
who assert that there is no underlying volcano but only external family resemblances
among the ten thousand different perceptions. No, for Whitehead there is definitely an
actual entity ‘volcano’, a real force to be reckoned with and not just a number of similar sensations linked by an arbitrary name’.40For Harman, this is what sets Whitehead
apart from the post-Kantian correlationists for whom we cannot speak of the actuality
of the volcano itself, but only of the problem of access to the volcano, or of the way in
which it is ‘constructed’ by and through our apprehension and identification of it. But
at the same time, Harman also sets Whitehead’s atomism against the way in which, for
the speculative realist philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant, objects as such do not really
exist, but only ‘emerge as ‘retardations’ of a more primally unified force’.41 For Grant,
as presumably for Schelling, Deleuze, and Simondon before him, there would be no
actual volcano, but only its violent, upsurging action, or its ‘force to be reckoned with’.

The point is that, even as Whitehead’s actualism links him to Harman, so his insistence on process and becoming—which is to say, on relations—links him to Deleuze
and to Grant. Whitehead refers to the ‘“really real” things’ that ‘constitute the universe’
both as ‘actual entities’ and as ‘actual occasions’. They are alternatively things or happenings. These two modes of being are different, and yet they can be identified with
one another, in much the same way that ‘matter has been identified with energy’ in
modern physics.42 (I am tempted to add a reference to the way that the quantum constituents of the universe behave alternatively as particles and as waves; but it is unclear
to me how familiar Whitehead was with developments in quantum mechanics in the
1920s and 1930s).When Harman rejects Whitehead’s claims about relations, he is not
being sufficiently attentive to the dual-aspect nature of Whitehead’s ontology.

This can also be expressed in another way. Harman skips over the dimension of
privacy in Whitehead’s account of objects. For Whitehead, ‘in the analysis of actuality
the antithesis between publicity and privacy obtrudes itself at every stage. There are
elements only to be understood by reference to what is beyond the fact in question;
and there are elements expressive of the immediate, private, personal, individuality of
the fact in question. The former elements express the publicity of the world; the latter
elements express the privacy of the individual’.43 Most importantly, Whitehead defines
concrescence, or the culminating ‘satisfaction’ of every actual entity, precisely as ‘a unity of aesthetic appreciation’ that is ‘immediately felt as private’.44 In this way, Whitehead is indeed sensitive to the hidden inner life of things that so preoccupies Harman.
Privacy can never be abolished; the singularity of aesthetic self-enjoyment can never
be dragged out, into the light.

But privacy is only one half of the story. The volcano has hidden depths, but it also
explodes. It enters into the glare of publicity as it spends itself. Whitehead recognizes
that, in the privacy of their self-enjoyment, ‘actual entities … do not change. They are
what they are’.45 But he also has a sense of the cosmic irony of transition and transience;
and this is something that I do not find in Harman. Whitehead insists that every entity must perish—and thereby give way to something new. Throughout Process and Reality, Whitehead keeps on reminding us that ‘time is a “perpetual perishing”’. For ‘objectification involves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full
immediacy’.46 In this way, Whitehead entirely agrees with Harman that no entity can
prehend another entity in its fullness. There is always something that doesn’t get carried
over, something that doesn’t get translated or expressed. But the reason for this is not
that the other entity somehow subsists, beyond relation, locked into its vacuum bubble.
Rather, no entity can be recalled to full presence because, by the very fact of its ‘publicity’ or ‘objectification’, it does not subsist at all; indeed, it is already dead. The volcano explodes; and other entities are left to pick up the pieces. This reduction to the status of a
mere ‘datum’ is what Whitehead calls, with his peculiar humour, ‘objective immortality’. — Shaviro 283-285

This is where it really goes deep. If anyone wants to add their interpretation of what is going on here between the dichotomy of Harman and Whitehead, please be my guest!

My interpretation is that Shaviro is saying that Harman's criticism of Whitehead is overlooking aspects of Whitehead that actually make it similar. Whitehead believed in this oddly phrased, "a unity of aesthetic appreciation" that can be immediately felt as private. This confuses me, but I get a sense it is some sort of experience of the object experiencing as an actuality in time? And this accounts for some sort of actuality that is in the equation that Harman is missing. It is not all novelty and change, but occasions of apprehension as well. Is there anything else people find interesting here? There's a lot to unpack it looks like.

Another thing I found interesting was that it says that Whitehead wasn't a complete nominalist. And it wasn't a problem of access for Whitehead. He thought there were actual entities that comprised the volcano, from various thousands of actual occasions. I'm guessing the process of "concrescence" in Whitehead is what makes it a volcano versus just atoms (or individual occasions) doing stuff.

@Metaphysician Undercover @Wayfarer

Aristotle's essences would be ones where we could determine by human standards of induction the essential form of a substance that determines what that substance is. He does not seem to hold the notion that there are some attributes which are hidden or withdrawn as far as I've seen. — schopenhauer1

Yes, the passage is an objection to Plato's version of Forms. I read it also to say there is a great distance between our grouping by kinds and whatever activity is producing these different beings.

My approval of Grant given earlier in the thread is that he puts the Aristotelian argument that there can be no science of accidents in a particular light. Accidents are obviously the source of actual outcomes, but we do not have a science for it. Is that a problem of overwhelming complexity or the order of the universe coming to some kind of limit?

I am not sure how this lines up with the argument between Harmon and Whitehead but is my attempt to answer what seemed closest to your request for an analogue in the text of Aristotle.

Is internal intuition a false category when applied to objects that aren't animals? — schopenhauer1

Intuition is a feature of the subject, and I think it is the basis for one's ontology.

Accidents are obviously the source of actual outcomes, but we do not have a science for it. — Paine

Isn't statistics and probability the science of accidents? Or would you say that this does not qualify as "science"?

Those techniques may speak to the Aristotelian register of 'things happening for the most part' but does not treat them as a particular being which is treated as primary to all other qualifications.

Are you saying that happenings are not beings, and science only treats of beings?

Are you saying that happenings are not beings, and science only treats of beings? — Metaphysician Undercover

That quote ironically is mimicking the very dichotomy that Shaviro lays out between Harman and Whitehead :grin:.

I was trying to say how I thought Aristotle framed the questions. i don't want to hijack the thread to address your more general question on that basis. I will ponder how to address it in the context of the OP.

So what is Whitehead's "a unity of aesthetic appreciation" that can be immediately felt as private"?