the misconception by which I am most frequently haunted

Every author probably has one misconception that they can’t shake, no matter what they do.

For me, it’s always some variant of this: “Harman thinks that all objects are equally real.”

No, I don’t. That’s true of the early Latour, it’s true to some extent of Levi Bryant, and turns out to be very much true of Tristan Garcia.

But it’s not true of me at all. The whole point is that my ontology is not perfectly flat. I have real objects (inherited from Heidegger’s tool-beings) and sensual objects (inherited from Husserl’s intentional objects).

These are two different things. The tree as I experience it is not “just as real” as the tree that exists autonomously in reality whether anyone looks at it or not. I simply hold that the tree of experience (the “sensual” tree) must be accounted for by ontology as a genuine fact. It can’t be “eliminated.” That doesn’t mean that it’s “equally real” in comparison with autonomous entities that exist in their own right rather than merely as the correlate of some other entity’s experience.

The reason that all actors are equally real for the early Latour is that anything that has an effect is real, and obviously even the wildest hallucinations have some effect on the person who hallucinates. For me, however, just having an effect is not enough to make something a real object. A real object is precisely that which does not have an effect– or at least not a direct effect.

Anyway, it is simply not true that I believe that all objects are equally real, even though Wikipedia said so for many months before it was finally changed.