Reflection: What Reality Is Made Of

Prompts to consider

• Harman argues that every object has a real depth that exceeds any description of it. Pick an ordinary object near you right now, a coffee mug, a chair, a houseplant. Try genuinely attending to it as something that exceeds your usual functional relationship to it. What aspects of it do you normally filter out entirely? Does the attempt to take its 'object-hood' seriously change anything about your experience of it, or does it feel forced and pointless? What does your answer reveal about your implicit metaphysics?
• Flat ontology says there is no ontological hierarchy in which humans are uniquely important and everything else is backdrop. Try taking this seriously, not as an ethical claim but as an attitudinal experiment: for a moment, consider that the building you are in, the street outside, the ecosystem under the pavement, and the weather system above are all equally real objects with their own being, not important because of what they do for you but because of what they are. What is it like to try to hold that orientation? Is it possible, or does human-centered perspective reassert itself immediately?
• The speculative realists argue that philosophy's retreat from big metaphysical questions, what is reality made of? what kinds of things really exist?, was a mistake. Do you agree? Is there something valuable in the post-Kantian humility that says we cannot know the world as it is in itself, only as it appears to us? Or does this humility tip into a kind of intellectual cowardice that abandons the questions that originally made philosophy matter? What do you think the right relationship between philosophical ambition and philosophical humility looks like?