Levi on the ethical implications of overmining and undermining

HERE, an interesting post.

Incidentally, I should also add that I don’t think undermining and overmining are always impossible.

There are plenty of cases that call for undermining. For example: “The morning star and the evening are actually both Venus, not two separate entities.” I would call that a case of justified overmining.

As for overmining, how about this: “In many times and places, people have believed in witchcraft. However, there is no hidden real thing called a ‘witch,’ there are just certain effects that have been wrongly ascribed to nonexistent witch-entities, with dire consequences for those accused.” This seems to me like a case of justified overmining.

My critique of undermining and overmining is aimed at philosophies (and I’m afraid this includes most philosophies) which hold that mid-level autonomous entities must always be either undermined or overmined, due to their view that there can be no such things as objects at any but the lowest level of the cosmos (undermining) or at the highest level whether of human consciousness or of immanent relational interactions among all human and inhuman entities (overmining).

Objects make up the vast mezzanine level of the cosmos, rising above their components while also sinking beneath their appearances and their effects. That’s what makes them so difficult to deal with, but also what makes them the only way to avoid taking the easy way out, through some grand downward or upward reductionist strategy.