Why Metaphysics Matters - The Problem Situation

A lively discussion about why metaphysics matters in our current Metamodern era

The Problem Situation

Between two poles the mind has made a swing:

Thereon hang all beings and all worlds, and that swing never ceases its sway.

Millions of beings are there: the sun and the moon in their courses are there:

Millions of ages pass, and the swing goes on.

                                                                                    ~ Kabir (adapted by author)

Dogen, the 13^th century Japanese philosopher-poet, founder of the Soto school of Zen, was known for his preoccupation with the swinging nature of thought. His primary focus was on the metaphysics of oneness and sameness. Dogen’s insight was that the endless swinging of thought was a source of deep suffering. Paraphrasing his illogics (koans) we could say:

If you make the difference, you suffer the sameness.
If you make the sameness, you suffer the difference.

He was telling us that when the mind categorizes, it cuts out parts of reality in abstracting out what is different. And this causes suffering because it distorts the real unity of being. But if we homogenize all beings into the category “oneness,” this also causes suffering, because it negates the infinite display of the myriad beings.[1] We see the consequences playing out in our postmodern society today. We see categories pushed onto people, creating a partial “sameness” while simultaneously difference from the other is exaggerated. We have repeated this cycle over and over again for decades, and as a result, the categories have become narrower and narrower. They are, in process metaphysics terms, a-terms for which no r-term actually exists. White, cis male, western, heterosexual, middle age, upper class is categorically not the same as white, cis male, western, heterosexual, middle age, lower class. And we already know the conclusions we are supposed to draw as they are already predicated (pre-dictated) by the categories.  Consider how the categories “democrat” and “republican” have not only split apart, but have become ridged and so narrow that no one real individual actually fits them anymore. When I was a youth, the categories “girl” and “boy” were very broad, and could fit a wide diversity of behaviors, styles, and bodies. As these behaviors, styles and bodies changed as we grew up, the categories were expected to accommodate them. Today it’s the other way around – our behaviors, styles and bodies are expected to accommodate the categories! Which means we are habitually and exponentially privileging the object (a-term, abstraction, category) over the actual, living, being-in-becoming person (the r-term). This is something a metaphysical inquiry can help us with. If we refer to the figures in the beginning of this paper, we can see that this postmodern dis-ease is a result of being locked into the right hand quadrants where ideas and imagination create a mutually-reinforcing and reifying feedback loop without checking these against perceptual clarity and adequate participation in the real. Which, in this case, means actually getting to know the person you are speaking with, instead of categorizing people you are thinking about. We no longer pursue questions around what is actually happening in real life situations, in order to have deep, personal and intimate conversations at the intersection of two living beings. Rather, our discourse parasitizes real-life stories to create larger, politically-charged narratives that are distortions of reality that get amplified and played out on a stage of abstractions, poisoned by a partial metaphysics--- like players in Beckett’s theatre of the absurd, waiting for the arrival of the abstracted.[2] We can never find what we have already abstracted out of existence, parsing living form into thoughts in our heads which, in the final analysis, will always come up empty.

Furthermore, we are beginning to see that western science cannot address some of the most pressing challenges of our times. We can’t seem to solve the problems that matter most to us—some of which pose existential risks. Gebser proposed that each structure of consciousness represents an epoch which begins with a latent phase, followed by an efficient stage, and then enters a deficient stage. We are seeing clear evidence that the Mental structure of consciousness, whose efficient stage is represented by modern science and democracy, is now entering a deficient period reflected in the breakdown of science and politics as meaning-making endeavors. Even with the rise of global wealth, health, education and technology, the rates of benefit to risk are rapidly declining There are two key factors here: 1) The synthetic-dialectical mind now escalates complexity faster than it solves problems; and 2) The metaphysics of causality is breaking down to the point where if-then propositions are no longer helpful. This means we are creating a “run-away-epistemology” and so, it is not surprising that we are abdicating our agency to machines whose AI is better designed to race along with it. Let’s consider these two in more detail:

1)     The synthetic-dialectical mind now escalates complexity faster than it solves problems

In his book Hyperobjects Tim Morton (2013) writes “going meta has been the intellectual gesture par excellence for two centuries. He asserts it is this attitude, that is directly responsible for our ecological emergency

This attitude is directly responsible for the ecological emergency, not the corporation or the individual per se, but the attitude that inheres both in the corporation and in the individual, and in the critique of the corporation and of the individual.

Graham Harman (2011) uses the term “overmining” in a similar vein. According to Harman, “overmining” occurs when one “reduces a thing upwards,” which is to echo Plotinus’ “up-ward path” and the synthetic-dialectic mind we, along with Gebser, have targeted as the sine qua non  of modernity (in its efficient stage) and post-modernity (in its deficient stage). Overmining has given us great systems views of the universe, while distancing us from the local and the real. Overmining has led to breakthroughs in science and technology, while exacerbating the problem space into inaccessibly large domains. Overminging has created gigantic objects called “hyperobjects” to wrestle with, objects which today supervene on human agency the way it has, for millennia, supervened on the agency of animals and ecosystems. Three millennia of privileging the abstraction, the a-term the “object” over the relative, subjective agent, has brought us to the state where, locked inside an impossibly complex discourse, we can no longer act. Ordinary, inconspicuous acts, like calling the earth “Gaia” is an overmining of our planetary reality, for “Gaia” is a concept, albeit one that was created out of concern for the living earth, but in generating the concept, it lets us off of the hook. Like the retreating God, “Gaia” is elsewhere, impossible to find in my own ordinary acts of choosing what I eat, what I buy, how I treat the land. It was nice to think that “Gaia” prevailed over all we do, balancing things out for us, the way foxes balance the rabbits (and vice-versa). But now, now that the hyperobject “Gaia” has reared her head and become the existential risk “Global Warming” we immediately see the equivalence. We are in a state of subordination to our own thought systems. The same is true for the other hyperobject that represents a real existential risk: Capitalism, and at the end of the day, all three may be equivalent.[3] In the last analysis, a hyperobject is a hyper-system that supervenes on the agent who is trying to cognize it. Every way our reasoning turns, is already curved inwards, back into the logics of the system, in the same way that everything we do to try to alleviate global warming, turns back on itself through the logics of capitalism, into more global warming. Of course, our impulse will be, once again, to “go-meta” on the hyperobjects themselves. But, as we have noted, there are different ways to go meta[4], and hyperobjects are derived from hyper-systemic modes of reasoning, based on the metaphysics of the synthetic-dialectical mind. Is it possible, then, to disentangle hyperobjects, to break them apart into manageable pieces upon which we can reassert our choice and agency, through a new kind of mind? Yes it is possible. But first, I will discuss the second of the key factors that generate our current crisis:

2)     The metaphysics of causality is breaking down to the point where if-then propositions are no longer helpful.

Above a certain level of complexity, if-then propositions are not rich enough to resolve problems or cultivate preferred futures. Without if-then propositions, there can be no hypotheses, without hypotheses, no experimentally validating set-up, and hence, no science as modernity has understood it. Today we are witnessing the emergence of a radically new science, called complexity science. Many people are talking about it, but most people actually construe complexity science as a kind of penultimate level at the top of the meta-tier of systems thinking.

One thing the reader should know for sure, however, is that, as Cognitive Edge’s co-founder Dave Snowden quips “Complexity science is a different from systems thinking as quantum physics is from Newtonian physics.” With complexity science, the ordinary laws of causality, upon which Newtonian physics is based, break down. We enter into domains which are more akin to quantum mechanics where uncertainty prevails. We are used to thinking of quantum domains as incredibly small scales, but incredibly complex systems behave more like quantum systems than as systems at ordinary scales. In these systems, measurement is unreliable, the future is radically unpredictable, and causation is hyper-local—everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Complex systems are unknowable by definition, and therefore cannot be made into an “object.” Attempts to do so create our so-called hyperobjects. The key characteristics of complex systems are novelty and emergence. We participate with-in complex domains as agents gathering local information. This requires us to act, and in so doing, we perturb the micro-states of the system. This is a continuous feedback loop happening from myriad agents at multi-dimensional temporal and spatial scales. Complex processes generate stable and unstable, predictably unpredictable patterns that are part of the information feedback loop. We act freely, to amplify some of the incoming (returning) signals, and to dampen others. In real life, the signals are too subtle to know cognitively. Just like we can never know how it is we learn to speak, nevertheless, we learn. The same is true with other complex domains. We can never know, but we can learn. In this case, we must learn (again) to learn intuitively.  In other words,  – we must become an instrument of perception.

Now we can circle back to the process models of metaphysics (figures, 2 and 3). Local action is participation (LL) but we cannot know by deciding, so we have to choose imaginatively (LR)—together this advances the moment across the next duration of perception and memory (UL, UR). Here perception is pattern recognition, and memory is the infolding of the microstate as the embodied agent.[5] Human agency is reclaimed, because it is responding to perception and memory, through participation and imagination. Hence, at each step there is creative advance. This is the same reality that Stuart Kaufmann (2016) hopes to reclaim, to show us the “emergent magic” that will re-enchant us.

We so wrongly think we know our worlds. We so wrongly believe that we can pose and answer our questions, when we often cannot even post them adequately. (p.1)

Referring to the process model of process metaphysics (figure 3) I noted that “the Upper quadrants represent the antecedents or “priors” of experience, those concrete occasions that constitute the “past” actuals; while the lower quadrants would represent the carrying-forward into the near adjacent moment of the possibly real.” Here is Kaufmann’s version of the same:

We will find a new patter of explanation for the living world: ever-new Actuals do not cause, but enable ever-new, often nonstatable, adjacent possible opportunities (p.4)

These examples show how true complexity thinking, exists the causal structure of the Mental structure of consciousness. In the words of Stuart Kaufmann, it shows us that “the becoming of the biosphere is beyond law,” that “reductive materialism as a whole must fail [however hyperbolic its explanations become]” and that “the biosphere [is lawless and] is part of the universe [that] cannot be governed by a final theory. Solidly unified final theories are what the synthetic-dialiectic mind has yearned for, ever since, with its inception, it tore reality into pieces.[6] Hence for 3000 years, humans in the east and west have tried to close the gap they themselves keep making, through a metaphysics of separation, and as a result have given us extraordinary “things” – densely interwoven entanglements of ideas, perception, memory and participation-- that seem to satisfy, but in the end lead to unsurmountable complexities, or untenable emptiness(es).[7]

            A new process metaphysics could change all that and generate a new enchantment with the world. Absenting separation, it would no longer hunger for synthesis or unity. A profound faith in our conjoined nexi of histories, would replace our proclivity to mend the gap, as it were. Our lust for metaphysical unification has become an existential fetish—at once the thing we most desperately desire, and the thing that is most utterly unattainable. Everywhere we look there is a lot going on! To turn it all off, we have to force ourselves to stop looking, which means to cut off perception and participation. Isn’t this just what we are succeeding in doing, with our obsession with screens and preoccupation with the voices in our own heads? Coming from the bad faith of separation we are overwhelmed with being—everywhere to look, there is a lot going on!  It is, in the words of Satre “de trop.” We try to look away, to assuage the onslaught of eternal becoming through the refuge of eternally unchanging things, for today it is the a-terms that pacify us. A new metaphysics could change all that, help us turn toward what is most alive, and hence, always coming and going, alive in its passing and advancing. We would learn to cultivate a new compass—one that steers up toward a thriving future emerging from the pure potentials of a flourishing new world.

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[1] Of course, process metaphysics readily solves this koan. The myriad beings are r-terms, their one-ness an a-term. Dogen famously said “To study the self is to lose the self,” and here by “self” he means the mind that reifies itself as an eternal (a-term). “To lose the self,” Dogen goes on, “is to be actualized by the myriad things.” This phrase “to be actualized by the myriad things” is identical to Whitehead’s notion of each entity becoming actual through the prehension of all entities.

[2] God/Godot

[3] Stuart Kaufman notes how economies are extensions of human ecology and evolve through the same principles as the biotic.

[4] See appendix for a full list of meta-moves. Can you add more?

[5] In process philosophy terms, “agent” is the nexus at the intersection of this process.

[6] About “laws” Finkelstein (2003) writes
              Some great scientists like Laplace and Einstein have believed in the existence of an absolute law and taken it as the supreme goal of physics. But many Western scientists and philosophers, including Newton, Mach and Whitehead, like many Buddhist and Hindu philosophers, explicitly propose that there is no fixed absolute law of nature, and that it makes sense to speak of a varying law. Bohm’s (1965) expression of this philosophy especially influenced me. He views a scientific theory as a specialized extension of normal human discourse. A theory is something that we tell one another. A final all-inclusive theory is as likely as a final all-inclusive remark.

[7] “Things” such as in the western science: ether, space-time continuum, dark matter, dark energy, quantum observation; and in the east: Brahmin, storehouse consciousness, Indra’s web, karmic law; and in religion/ quasi-spirituality everywhere: God, gods, goddesses, Ashkasic field and the like.