What if everything around you has a secret life you’ll never access?
Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology makes a radical claim: objects aren’t just props in the human drama. The hammer in your toolbox, the coffee cup on your desk, the chair holding your weight. They all have withdrawn realities that remain forever hidden from you. They exist in depths you can’t penetrate, no matter how hard you grip them or how much you think you understand them.
This episode explores Harman’s philosophy of withdrawal, where every object, human and nonhuman, hides its true nature in an inaccessible core. We examine how this changes everything: causation, relationships, art, and what it means to live in a world populated by billions of entities that are fundamentally unknowable.
You’ve never actually met anyone. Not really. You’ve only encountered sensual versions, translated surfaces, proxies that stand in for the real person who stays withdrawn in depths even they can’t access. Every conversation is between ambassadors of hidden kingdoms. Every touch is between surfaces while the real entities watch from somewhere you’ll never see.
But maybe that’s not loneliness. Maybe that’s reality. Maybe the unbridgeable gap between objects is what makes relation possible at all. We explore Harman’s democracy of objects, where dust mites and black holes and human consciousness all have equal ontological status. Where nothing is special and everything matters in its own withdrawn way.
This is a philosophy that makes the familiar strange and forces you to see the world differently. From vicarious causation to aesthetic encounters, from the terror of withdrawal to the relief of accepting you’ll never fully know anything, this episode takes Harman’s ideas and makes them visceral, urgent, personally devastating.
The hammer dreams of nails. You dream of being understood. And somehow, in all that mutual withdrawal, reality keeps happening anyway.
Welcome to the secret lives of objects. Welcome to a universe where you’re not special. You’re just here, withdrawn and strange, forever beyond anyone’s grasp. Even your own.
Much love, David x
