Brassier is strongly critical of much of contemporary philosophy for what he regards as its attempt “to stave off the ‘threat’ of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning \u2014 characterized as the defining feature of human existence \u2014 from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment”. According to Brassier, this tendency is exemplified above all by philosophers strongly influenced by Heidegger<\/span> and Wittgenstein<\/span>. Unlike more mainstream philosophers such as John McDowell, who would press philosophy into service in an attempt to bring about a “re-enchantment of the world”, Brassier’s work aims to “push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion”.<\/p>\n

According to Brassier, “the disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the ‘great chain of being’ and defaced the ‘book of the world’ is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment”. “Philosophy”, exhorts Brassier, “would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.”<\/p>\n

Harman<\/h4>\n

Harman, through an interpretation of the tool-analysis of Heidegger’s Being and Time<\/em>, Harman sets out to develop what he calls an object-oriented philosophy<\/em>. Taking the tool-analysis as the defining moment in twentieth-century continental philosophy, Harman finds in Heidegger<\/span> the roots of a metaphysics of things which does justice to the things themselves. Although working from within it, he finds the broad history of phenomenology to be deficient<\/strong> in that it constantly subordinates the independent life of objects to our (human) access to them. Against the Kantian tradition, his object-oriented approach considers the neglected real life of objects to be fertile ground for a resurgent metaphysics. Emphasizing the notions of substance and occasional cause (see occasionalism), he affirms the autonomy of objects while aiming to reveal their shadowy underground life and covert interactions. Cutting across the phenomenological tradition, and especially its linguistic turn, Harman deploys a brand of metaphysical realism<\/strong> that attempts to extricate objects from their human captivity and uncover a strange new subterranean network of object relations.<\/p>\n