stated differently

Stated differently, you can’t say: “I’m not an idealist. I believe the human subject is a passive recipient of the world, not its constitutor,” or “Human and world are co-produced,” or “world produces the human.”

Why does the human need to be involved all of these cases?

Even worse is when the game is played of replacing the human with falsely neutral-sounding terms such as “subject”, “thought”, “Ereignis,” or any equivalent thereof.

If people always have to be involved in any situation being discussed in your philosophy, then you’re an idealist. The problem is that it’s become such a reflexive assumption that the human must be one ingredient in any situation under discussion that people immediately scream “positivism!” as soon as you start talking about inanimate relations. So much contemporary continental philosophy has been built as nothing but a firewall against the natural sciences, and unfortunately Husserl (a truly great philosopher) is one of the worst violators on this front.

It does not follow that philosophy as we know it should be dumped in the garbage gan and replaced by scientific naturalism. Whitehead and OOO show why, in different but related ways. Scientific naturalism is the folk ontology of our time. If you don’t like my saying it, listen to Badiou say something similar at the beginning of Logics of Worlds, when he talks about how “bodies and languages” is the default philosophy of our time. There I have to agree with him. Scientific naturalism (“bodies!”) is as anti-philosophical gesture as social constructionism (“languages!”), and for the same reason. But Latour shows it more effectively than Badiou, in my view.

Nonetheless, naturalism can be highly useful in short-circuiting the correlational circle of human and world. Philosophy today is either naturalism, or intimidated by naturalism to the point that it needs a special human citadel immune from the blows of the natural world. But the point is to occupy neither of these jaded niches.