The Ontic Principle

outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology

Abstract

There can be no doubt that the work of theory and philosophy requires all sorts of simplifications, reductions, and processes of abstraction so that problems and questions might be properly posed. This is a work of translation that cannot be dispensed with. However, insoluble problems begin to emerge wherever we forget that these reductions and simplifications are selections, are the work of reduction, treating the real itself as being composed of simply these differences and no others. Such a forgetting or putting into abyss of the excess of objects that perpetually withdraw from their relations leads us to ask the wrong sorts of questions or to fall into fruitless lines of inquiry that emerge as a result of forgetting the role played by other differences. Throughout the foregoing I have attempted to form an ontology that does justice to the plural swarm of differences and their interactions, avoiding this sort of hegemony of a pet difference that we isolate for the sake of directed inquiry, yet forgetting the other differences.