One of Graham Harman’s major contributions to the field of philosophy has been to reconsider Heidegger’s description of the object. Harman arrives at what he calls the “four-fold object” which is a schematic of real and sensual aspects of the object. He offers this as a grounding form claims that the object withdraws from the perception of the subject. He is less interested in flattening all ontology, and instead suggests that the tradition of western philosophy has either undermined or overmined (his term) object. Atomism is a mode of undermining objects because it says that objects are made up of smaller bits, denying their thing-power; metaphysics is a form of overmining objects because they are reduced to less significant objects than they are. He is interested in describing objects as objects, remaining on their own level.

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