The global ecological crisis of the Anthropocene announces the end of modern humanism, which made the human the measure of all things. As a philosophical response, flat ontology has emerged as an umbrella term encompassing various forms of anti-anthropocentric thought, including new materialism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), speculative realism, actor-network theory (ANT), and critical posthumanism. Of course, these diverse philosophical currents cannot be simply reduced to a single label, since they pursue distinct questions and methodologies and cannot be collapsed into one unified system. Nevertheless, these approaches share a widespread suspicion toward the concept of consciousness, recognizing that “consciousness” has lost credibility in the history of philosophy due to accumulated errors and distortions. Major theorists associated with this paradigm include Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, and Rosi Braidotti.

The flat-ontological paradigm typically dismantles the vertical hierarchy presupposed by traditional ontology—namely, the “subject (human)–object (nature)” structure—and affirms an egalitarian field in which all entities possess reality and meaning on the same ontological level. Levi Bryant offers a succinct formulation in The Democracy of Objects, reducing flat ontology to four theses: the rejection of (1) transcendent substances, (2) “super-objects” (totality, the One), (3) hierarchical relations, and (4) ontological inequality. In short, flat ontology locates all beings within a single plane of an ontogenetic field.1

Yet an overly celebratory embrace of flat ontology should be resisted, since the paradigm may be little more than a symptom of a contemporary blind alley within continental philosophy. The reasons are as follows.

First, flat ontology generates a profound epistemological difficulty by insisting that things are absolutely independent of thought while neglecting how such independence can be conceptualized. For example, Graham Harman argues that every object has two dimensions: the real object and the sensual object.2 Extending Husserl’s concept of intentionality, he claims that not only humans but all objects “intend” other objects. Yet Harman refuses epistemic mediations such as consciousness or a transcendental ego that would connect sensation and object. As a result, intentionality becomes a set of sensual qualities that can disclose only the sensual object, while the real object always withdraws behind the sensual.3 This generates a contradiction: if what we can experience are only phenomenal differences—sensual qualities that distinguish appearances—how can we be confident that there exists a single, identical real object behind them? On Harman’s terms, access is restricted to phenomenal differentiation, and predication about a single object becomes impossible. As Brassier argues, such a position fails to secure individuation and identity and collapses the possibility of knowledge into an extreme incapacity.

Harman recognizes this tension and shifts the withdrawn object from the domain of epistemological proof to that of speculative ontology.4 His position amounts to a declaration that independent reality exists even if it cannot be known. In this respect, his speculative ontology does not surpass Kant’s transcendental philosophy, which maintains that the categories synthesize appearances into objects while setting the thing-in-itself as the limit of cognition.

Second, flat ontology’s denial of access to real objects produces similar contradictions even when framed as a rejection of representation. Manuel DeLanda, for instance, develops Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory to interpret reality as the conjunction of multilayered, historically specific processes.5 He understands things not as representations of substances but as actualizations of virtual forces (intensities) and tendencies. Representation, he argues, can only produce conceptual judgments about already individuated entities and cannot explain the emergence of pre-individuated virtual forces; thus, it reduces becoming to fixed concepts. DeLanda therefore turns to scientific and mathematical “models” to explain emergence as a non-representational, generative process.

Yet Raymond Brassier identifies here the problem of selection: when one chooses a model in order to reject representation, one cannot explain why that model is appropriate for capturing pre-individuated virtual forces and tendencies. The moment one attempts to justify the selection, one reintroduces precisely the representational problem one sought to escape. If one cannot justify the choice, one risks reverting to idealism or dogmatism. Thus, flat ontology becomes internally unstable.6

Third, flat ontology’s refusal of consciousness and representation expresses a broader distrust toward universal truth or grand narratives. In rejecting grand narratives, flat ontology tends to produce an expansion of texts devoted to fabulation and speculation about “possible worlds.” While this emphasis on possibility creates a vacancy of infinite potentiality, it lacks normativity— the question of what ought to be done. This absence is problematic because addressing the suffering produced by socio-technical systems and assigning responsibility requires the loss of neither the structures of transcendental consciousness, nor mind, nor spirituality. By rejecting transcendental consciousness, flat ontology may slide into a reduction of the world to purely materialistic, mechanistic processes.

Arran Gare argues that the resurgence and refinement of mechanistic, materialist reductionism regarding human mind and consciousness in the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries must be understood through simultaneous shifts in philosophical and scientific paradigms.7 Scientifically, after Darwinian evolution became paradigmatic, human selfcentrality was gradually eroded, undermining the remaining bastions of anthropocentrism and humanism—for example, by attributing advanced cognitive and social capacities to animals or relativizing human privilege through theories of autopoiesis. Philosophically, since the Enlightenment, the critique of traditions that defined being through oppositional categories— reason/action, mind/body, form/matter, nature/culture, human/machine or animal—has become increasingly radicalized across generations. In particular, post-structuralism and Marxist critical theory, rooted in Nietzschean critiques of metaphysics, exposed the immanent relation between the structures of reason and the dominant discourses of modernity (capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism). Supported by scientistic and positivist achievements grounded in materialist perspectives, philosophy opened new possibilities for thinking matter itself— nonhuman agency independent of the human subject. At minimum, humans came to be regarded not as privileged subjects of thought but as one agent among others; at maximum, the very validity of the category “human” was dismantled across biological and social dimensions.

Gare traces this mechanistic reductionism back to Hobbes. In Against Posthumanism: Posthumanism as the World Vision of House-Slaves, Gare argues that posthumanism is not new, but rather a revival of Hobbes’s mechanistic reductionism repainted in contemporary vocabulary (information science, cybernetics, etc.).8 Gare even calls Hobbes effectively the “first humanist”: Hobbes defined humans as machines driven by appetites and aversions and nature as meaningless matter in motion. Gare stresses Hobbes’s definition of reasoning as mere “addition and subtraction,” i.e., calculation. Contemporary posthumanists, he argues, inherit this and treat mind as a machine, reducing consciousness to a secondary “side show.” Gare further claims that Hobbes aimed to make autonomy and freedom impossible so that people would conform to the edicts of a tyrannical sovereign, and he extends this analysis to contemporary posthumanism: by erasing the boundary between human and machine and denying human distinctiveness and responsible subjectivity, citizens become more likely to acquiesce to global corporate domination and neoliberal regimes of management. In this view, posthumanism is a speculative repackaging of a longstanding mechanistic tradition that reduces humans to controllable components.

If one were to say that the “newness” offered by flat ontology is merely a deception born of an impasse in contemporary continental philosophy, would that be too harsh? At the very least, it is clear that by denying human subjectivity through the flattened relation between humans and nonhumans, flat ontology risks eliminating the very ethical subject capable of responding to the global ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene. This is flat ontology’s most painful point.

To fill the void of ethical responsibility left by flat ontology, a new form of subjectivity is needed—one that embraces the non-hierarchical relationality between humans and nonhumans while affirming the human as an ethically responsible agent. The following section examines how such a subject form can be generated from Minjung theology’s concept of han.