The World is Enough: On Overmining and Undermining

It seems to me that one of the greatest ethical challenges for thought is to encounter the world as being enough. While ontology ought not be evaluated on ethical grounds (i.e., we shouldn’t let a set of ethical and political commitments determine what is or isn’t ontologically true), it is nonetheless the case that how we think about the world has practical consequences for how we relate to the things of the world. And like James Bond, one of the repeated trends throughout the history of philosophy is to treat it as if it were not enough.

This treatment of the world as not being enough can be situated in terms of Graham Harman’s concepts of undermining and overmining. As Harman writes,

1. Undermining. You can say that objects are a shallow fiction of common sense, and that the real action happens at a deeper level: whether it be…