Hegemony of The Medium?

Here some thoughts in the umbra of the disintegrating post-WWII political world order.

Hegemony usually applies to the "leadership, predominance, preponderance" of a state, "esp. the leadership or predominant authority of one state of a confederacy or union over the others" (OED), hence a political concept. In the twentieth century, we read, quoted in the OED, "the hegemon of the western hemisphere is the United States." (Forum Jan.­Mar. 1904 347 Cent. Dict. Suppl.) A political entity is composed of people, the polis being originally a togetherness of people under some kind of constitution that regulates how they live together and how the power of some over others is exercised according to law.

It seems to be a misuse of the word 'hegemony' to apply it to things or an idea. Freedom, for instance, is an idea, or even ideal, that a people can aspire to, and democracy as a form of government is regarded today as realizing an ideal of freedom in a state, but we don't say that the idea of democracy is hegemonic. Nevertheless it certainly predominates today in the West as an idea aligned with freedom or even as the idea of political freedom. Other ideas, such as justice or human rights, may predominate as guiding ideals in the modern world, but we don't say they are hegemonic.

Things themselves are not regarded as free, but may be used by us humans as means to realize our freedoms in living our lives. Life itself is a kind of movement as an exercise of our freedoms of movement. Freedom itself can only be grasped as a kind or kinds of movement. Our use of things from spear-heads through to super-computers running A.I. algorithms is understood as our human deployment of technology for our own ends and, as such, technology, it is said, cannot exercise any hegemony over us. It is our servant, invented by human ingenuity. Nevertheless, with the emergence of the cyberworld, digital algorithms automate control over movements of all kinds, including our own lives. The proponents of the ever-encroaching cyberworld proclaim that algorithmic control is all for the good, our own good, especially our convenience; all that is needed are some ethical guard-rails.

What is the case, however, when an idea becomes a thing, i.e. thingified, and hence moves in the world as thing, even with its own law of movement? This seems at first sight to be an idle, whimsical idea. After all, ideas are at home in the realm of ideas, but things are material, situated on the other side of the divide. How we humans value everything around us, including each other, is indeed ubiquitous. We cannot help but evaluate, estimate and thus appreciate or depreciate, like or dislike, desire or shun, enjoy or reject everything we encounter in the world. Our very social togetherness is borne by a constant mutual estimation of who each of us is, a kind of sociative movement I call interplay. Hence valuation, evaluation, estimation is practised in everyday life which can be conceived as guided by an ensemble of cultural values. In the modern age, at least in the West, the values of human rights have come to the fore as ideals to be lived up to and practised in any polity. Most states pay lip service, at least, to human rights as proclaimed in the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. 

There is also a value that has been realized globally in an especially thingy way. The paradigm for this value-thing is money, which serves to sociate people economically through what has come to be called the cash nexus. But what is money? What is its essence, its specific whatness? At first, one could say, that money is the thingly embodiment of exchange-value and as such serves to mediate market exchange. The forms of appearance or 'faces' or 'looks' of this exchange-value are money and goods of all kinds, including services. But not all thingified value is exchange-value; it has further forms of appearance, starting with capital and wages, and proceeding to profit, interest and ground-rent, each of these being the income-forms of thingified value.

Capital itself is thingified value circling through its own peculiar movement via a series of quasi-Protean transformations of form that aims to generate more thingified value in the form of revenue than was first advanced in the form of money-capital invested in wage-earning employees and means of production. The principle or law governing this movement of capital is that The Medium of thingified value itself must be augmented, i.e. must accumulate or valorize. The residue remaining from the realized revenue after deducting all the costs of the production and circulation processes, comprising those for means of production/circulation, wages/salaries, interest and ground-rent must be positive, i.e. profitable. Otherwise the movement has failed and the continued existence of the functioning, entrepreneurial capital in question becomes doubtful.

The law (or principle) of valorizing thingified value is able to assert itself today globally without humans knowing anything about The Medium of thingified value. That is the beauty of this law of movement. It is a law of movement sui generis that no physical science can ever 'discover'. Why not? Because thingified value itself is nothing physical, but rather a thingified idea of estimation and evaluation realized behind the backs of the players practically sociating in economic life in a so-called 'free market economy'. Thinking from within the ontological difference is required to see it, but currently positivist thinking, that has closed off the ontological difference, has the upper hand. This closure of the mind ensures so far that The Medium remains inconceivable, i.e. without a concept. Liberal political thinking is thus unable to understand its own essential shortcoming, for it remains on the surface, pleading and striving futilely for the fairness of interplay among free individuals. The Medium circulating, valorizing below remains out of sight, beyond the mind's grasp.

Today we are witnessing how the United States, as the state most unequivocally dedicated to capitalism, and therefore tacitly to the law of movement of the valorizing Medium, is unknowingly, but for that all the more ruthlessly and effectively, asserting this law worldwide. The hegemony of The Medium is being exercised via a surrogate, camouflaged under the political slogan of America First, and no one is the wiser, not even right-wing Republican politicians nor oppositional left-wing activists. Instead of seeing The Medium for what it is, the capitalist economy is proclaimed to be the realm of individual freedom in which the players are free to play the rough, competitive gainful game, with its several winners and many losers. Tough luck, buddy, if you're a loser. The so-called Free World is founded on an equivocal idea of freedom that it strives to uphold, come what may. Hence the vilification and repression in the U.S. from the right of anyone calling attention to the ravages of capitalism. Conservatives in other countries follow suit.

The political hegemony of the United States, largely exercised through the U.S. dollar, is seen by many, since it is highly visible, but the weird thingy hegemony of The Medium remains invisible, beyond comprehension. The West's political hegemon is unknowingly itself subjugated to the hegemony of the latter's movements, rendering the 'Free World' a meticulously manicured ideology.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.  

Laws of movement & Energy.

An Invisible Global Social Value TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement. 

Seminal: Critique of Competitive Freedom and the Bourgeois-Democratic State: Outline of a Form-Analytic Extension of Marx's Uncompleted System Kurasje, Copenhagen 1984, reprinted 2015.

Philorock song Do the Da Capo

Another philorock song:

Do the Da Capo

Featuring Willy P. and Pleon Exia.

Why AI isn't intelligent

It's already become accepted hype to speak of AI getting more and more 'intelligent', with ever-increasing computing power and sophisticated 'deep-learning' algorithms, to one day, inevitably, achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). This is a spurious, tendentious claim otherwise known more impolitely as bullshit. Nevertheless it's taken the whole world in, and it is exquisitely monetizable.

It's easy to see why AI isn't intelligent once you have a firm grasp of the distinction between the phenomena three-dimensional time and one-dimensional time. But who today has such a firm grasp? And modern science will fight tooth and nail, with all sorts of self-serving, dogmatic assertions. to make sure that nobody ever understands the distinction.

Here is an analogy that some may find useful: Consider the proof of a theorem in mathematics. The proof can be written out employing the axioms and rules of inference for the specific mathematical entity concerned, be it the natural numbers, real numbers, a group, manifold, topology, or what have you. Anyone (human) reading the proof can go through it step by step to check if the proof holds water. That's fairly easy. 

The proof proceeds sequentially along a line of logical causality driven (from the temporal rear) by the applicable rules of inference. Logical causality is akin to the physical causality evoked by physics and the other modern sciences to explain causally (rather than understand) certain kinds of physical movement, be they physical, chemical, biological, psychological, etc. 

A mathematical proof is cut and dried, and can be checked with relative ease, perhaps even by an algorithm written to perform such a task. But who came up with the more or less ingenious proof in the first place? A mathematician! He or she was hit by a flash of insight that gave inspiration for the proof that could then be written down. The mathematician had the idea (εἶδος) in mind of finding a proof, and her/his power of imagination, looking into the temporal dimension of the future, spontaneously imagined the inferential path to such an envisaged goal, or end (τέλος). By contrast, rules of inference only work from what is already there, i.e. from the steps of the proof already made, with no inspiration, no spontaneous creativity involved.

Today we are expected to swallow that AI, by permutating what is already there (the data, the 'given'), according to rules of inference of a more or less clever algorithm, will eventually attain the intelligence of a mind (i.e. our shared psychic-temporal mind) that is genuinely exposed to the openness of three-dimensional time.

Further reading: 'Algorithmic Control of Movement in Time: Abolishing even our selves ourselves'.

'Turing's cyberworld of timelessly copulating bit-strings'.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter 2024.

Back to first principles

Way back in the 1960s when I was in high school we had different levels at which you could learn maths. There was 2S for second level Short, 2F for second level Full and 1st level, on which you went right back to first principles for grounding the foundations upon which the rest of the maths on top rested. In a way you could say that those studying the 2nd level courses were being short-changed in favour of learning by rote methods for solving mathematical problems that worked, without really knowing why.

Much later I learned that going back to first principles was something practised already by Aristotle, one of the West's deepest thinkers, whose concepts, despite vehement denial by  modern science, maintain their hold on our mind to the present day. Thinking deeply amounts to going backwards, not forwards. Thinking forwards amounts to continuing along the tracks laid down by ancient foundations that today are hardly visible any more.

At university I did a year of physics, continuing on from the 1st level physics I did at high school. I was not satisfied with the way physicists played fast and loose with the maths they needed to present their theories. All they needed was maths that worked for the theoretical explanations of the physical phenomena in question. The equations they came up with only had to be experimentally tested to 'prove', in terms of scientific method, that they were correct and hence true, that is. unless some other physical phenomena were discovered generating empirical data that did not verify the predictions generated by the theoretical model. This was called falsification. If enough instances of falsification were found, or maybe just one black swan, the physical model was in trouble and physicists proposed new models with modified equations. The empiricist scientific methodology was never put into question, and isn't even today. Especially in physics, whether it be quantum theory or cosmology or what have you, scientists demand that theoretical models be conjectured that can be tested empirically by generating predictions. Extremely elaborate and expensive apparatuses may be necessary to generate the data necessary for the empirical testing. Like most modern scientists today, physicists, too, have to compete for funding. Think of what it costs to detect a gravitational wave, as predicted from the theoretical model for the phenomenon of gravitation!

Being dissatisfied with physicists' treatment of maths in their mathematical models, and motivated by the urge to get to the bottom of things, I concentrated my university studies on the three types of maths offered at the time: applied maths, mathematical statistics and pure maths, the last of which seemed to me most promising in my quest for going back to first principles. Unsurprisingly in retrospect, I ended up being deeply attracted by a still fresh branch of mathematics at the time, category theory, in which I earned a Master's degree. Mathematical category theory seeks higher levels of abstraction on which it can investigate in one fell swoop several kinds of mathematical entities sharing the same structure. It thus strives for a kind of universal knowledge of mathematical entities.

After finishing my mathematical studies,  I returned to philosophy, having felt the need for more existential grit in my thinking. This landed me very quickly in German philosophy, for the analytic philosophy taught at Sydney University at the time (and even today) was, to put it succinctly, too dry. In retrospect I would also say that today's hegemonic Anglophone philosophy not only does not go back to first principles, but positively represses any attempt to do so. It has adapted very well to a positivist world in which facts are supposed to be the final arbiter of truth.

The category theory I studied in the final years of my pure maths bears the distinctive name, 'categories', redolent of Aristotle's foundational thinking on categories. Back in the 1970s I had no notion what category theory had to do with Aristotelean categories. Today I do. It is not merely fortuitous that I was immediately attracted in 1976 to a reading of Marx's Critique of Political Economy critically grounded in Hegel's dialectical conceptual system. Hegel's insistence upon systematically developing concepts to grasp the phenomena in question, and that in a proper order, also goes back to Aristotle. A concept can never stand alone, but only has sense and standing through its dialectical interconnections with other concepts that are either systematically prior or posterior. As far as I can make out, conceptual thinking is hardly taught today in universities.

Aristotelean categories are the most primitive, elementary concepts that come first of all. To grasp what a category is, your thinking first has to pass through the ontological difference encapsulated in the Aristotelean formula "the being qua being" (τὸ ὂν ᾖ ὄν). This famous formula is incomprehensible today, since the ontological difference has been forcibly closed down by the rise of positivist thinking, in tandem with the march of triumph of the 'hard' mathematized sciences. led by physics, in the mid 19th century. The second "being" in the Aristotelean formula is best interpreted as the present continuous participle of the Greek verb εἶναι, 'to be'. This allows us to hear it as a movement (of presencing for the mind: cf. my On Human Temporality), rather than as something 'standing', 'static', whereas "the being" in the first half of the formula says something that has come to a stand and is therefore static.

The first of the famous Aristotelean categories are 'what', 'how', 'how much' and 'in relation to'. Asking the question what something is (τί ἐστιν;) leads to the investigation of its whatness, its essence or quiddity. A something (τόδε τι, Etwas) has its whatness (οὐσία) in which it stands as a 'sight' (εἶδος) of what it is. These sights are seen and understood by the mind.

There is a simple phenomenological seeing exercise for learning to see the category of 'something'. Think of a potato with your mind's understanding. You will presumably agree that you see the potato as (or qua) 'something'. Now think of a chair. You will presumably also agree that you see the chair, too, as (or qua) 'something', albeit as a different something. The category of 'something' is available to our mind, through which we can understand anything at all as something. It is given to understanding prior to our seeing anything at all, no matter whether it be through sense perception or through our imagining mind. 

I say 'our' mind because we share this category that enables us to understand anything as something. 'Something' is a universal category available to our understanding prior to anything given by empirical experience. We understand a potato, a chair, etc. as something, and this 'as' is the mind's interpretation of it. Hence it is called the hermeneutic As. Anything we experience ontically, i.e. simply as being, whether it be through sense perception or mental imagination. is always already interpreted by the primitive category of 'something', which is different from anything in particular. This difference is called the ontological difference that is held open by the hermeneutic As that interprets the ontically given 'fact' ontologically, i.e. in its mode of being (understood as a continuing present participle indicating the movement of mental presencing).

The categories laid out by Aristotle address the things (πράγματα) encountered in the everyday world, thus constituting a kind of ontological scaffolding for understanding, in the first place, the world of physical, extended things (called Vorhandenes by Heidegger). One can say that the categories are examples of what is uncovered by going back to first principles (πρῶται ἀρχαί), at least with respect to physical things. In their primitive simplicity, they cannot be taken back (or re-duced, 'led back') any further. As simply discovered for the mind, they are true (ἀληθές). They are deployed by Aristotle in his Physics, which is an ontology of physical things that can be moved (κινούμενα), hence an ontology of physical movement.

By contrast, modern physics is a science (ἐπιστήμη) of the movement of physical entities based on an epistemology of empirically verifiable or falsifiable hypothetical models into which ontic facts, or data, are fed. It skips over the ontological preconceptions tacitly already assumed (and thus 'baked in'), prior to constructing or modifying any theoretical model. In this sense, it does not go back to first principles, and cannot do so since the ontological difference has been closed off to modern science, which pretends that it has rid itself of 'metaphysics'. It does not know that it is caught in the Aristotelean ontology of just one kind of movement: efficient productive movement.

Going back to first principles differs from the Da Capo I propose. The latter entails not just going back to first, elementary, primitive principles, but re-examining, revising and recasting them. Although it can be said that the Aristotelean categories retain their truth in hermeneutic phenomenology with regard to the ontological interpretation of physical things, Aristotle's ontology of movement is restricted to the efficient-causal movement of physical things, as if that were the only kind of movement we encounter through our openness to the world. Aristotle at least allowed phenomena that were fortuitous (τύχῃ) and accidental (κατὰ συμβεβηκός), but placed them beyond the grasp of science. This has led historically to a narrowing of the view of phenomena of movement in the bloody-minded attempt to force all kinds of movement into the corset of efficient-causal movement. 

The conception of efficient causality goes hand in hand with the concept of one-dimensional, linear time developed by Aristotle, no matter whether it be a straight, circular, elliptical or curved line. Straight here refers to Newtonian inertial movement; circular and elliptical to movement of the celestial bodies; curved to cosmological movement in general-relativistic space-time. Wherever efficient causality or a weaker modification thereof (e.g. probabilistic) is taken as axiomatic, the absolute will to power over all kinds of movement is the secret driving force. The tyranny of this absolute will to power must lead, and has led, to the denial of free movement that can be seen most blatantly in neuroscience, in which there is an intense focus on trying to 'causally explain' the generation of consciousness by movements in the material brain. The onslaught on human freedom by neuroscience is complemented by the progressive algorithmization of movement that goes so far as to interpret even human intelligence itself as algorithmic. As a mathematician, I have, of course, published on the cyberworld and its digital ontological cast.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

The stone is in the psyche

In his De Anima Aristotle writes the famous sentence οὐ γὰρ ὁ λίθος ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ, άλλὰ τὸ εἶδος ("The stone, namely, is not in the psyche, but the sight;"·  III viii 432a1). It seems obvious that the stone is not in the psyche, doesn't it? But look closer. The conventional translation of εἶδος (_eidos_) is 'form', rather than 'sight'. 'Sight' or 'look' is preferred here because εἶδος means literally 'that which is seen', from ἰδεῖν, 'to see'. The kind of seeing here is psychic-mental seeing. Is there any other kind of seeing for us humans who, for Aristotle, are cast as a kind of animal (ζῷον)? For Aristotle, the psyche (soul or anima) has two kinds of openness for the world: sense perception (αἴσθησις) and mental understanding (νόησις). Sense perception for Aristotle is of five kinds and requires five different kinds of sense organs in the body, or soma (σῶμα), which can only perceive in the present, when the thing (or person) perceived physically affects the somatic sense organs. (Throughout De Anima Aristotle focuses on extended, physical things or persons qua extended, physical somatic things.) Things perceived by the senses are therefore outside the soma, not inside it. An inside/outside distinction applicable to extended, physical things, each of which occupies a place (τόπος), is valid here.

But the psyche's faculty of sense perception is not exhausted by the somatic sense organs receiving sense data from outside in the present, since sense perception is always already combined with the mental faculty of understanding what is perceived. The psyche's faculty of mental understanding (νοῦς), employing the power of imagination (φαντασία), allows the psyche to perceive the physical thing presenting itself sensuously also categorially, at the very least as something, the most elementary category, but also qualitatively and quantitatively, e.g a big, red ball qualitatively and quantitatively as something. Otherwise the psyche would not understand what it is seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting or feeling. If, with your sense of touch, you feel something, you at least feel it as, or qua, something, even if you cannot identify it further, say, as a ball. Everything imaginable is interpreted from the ground up as such-and-such. The 'as' here is the hermeneutic as. The ontological category of 'something' is always already understood pre-ontologically and employed ubiquitously by the psyche's mental faculty.

The something seen — say, a chair seen by the sense of sight — is also seen in full (in the mind's φαντάσμα of it) as the extended material, physical thing it is, and not minus its matter. Looking at the chair, you perceive it in full as a physical, extended, material thing and understand it as a chair, i.e. something that is good for sitting down upon. Insofar, your understanding of the chair qua chair is the same (αὐτο) as the thing itself. This observation, however, contradicts Aristotle when he claims that the mental faculty, or mind, only understands what it understands ἄνευ ὕλης ("without matter" III vi 430b33). He splits the thing perceived or understood into its sight (εἶδος) and its matter (ὕλη), not taking into account i) that sense perception and mental understanding work in tandem and ii) that mental understanding (the νόησις of νοῦς) is not tied to being presented sensuously with something in the present. The mind, too, sees through its imaginations (φαντάσματα) and it is able to wander and hop through all three temporal dimensions, calling or allowing all that is to presence in its imaginative mental focus and be understood as such-and-such. Note that an imagination here does not imply a mere image or unreal copy of the thing imagined, but a "mental concept of what is not [necessarily ME] actually present to the senses" (OED). The alleged lesser ontological status of an imagination is a consequence of the mistaken dichotomy between the so-called 'real' outside and the 'imaginary' inside, at the same time attributing a superior ontological status to that which is sensuously present (apparently outside) over what the mind thinks (apparently inside).

Aristotle's assertion that "the stone is not in the psyche" results from confusing the psyche with the soma. The stone is obviously not in the soma, for both are physical, extended, material things to which an inside/outside dichotomy pertains, and each is somewhere in its place. By contrast, the psyche is not a thing, not a being (τὸ ὄν) at all, but the name i) for our openness to the world through sense perception and mental understanding and ii) for our power of self-movement as living beings. This openness is three-dimensionally temporal, to which the psyche essentially belongs. Its extent is therefore as extensive as the three-dimensional temporal openness itself, and hence all-encompassing: we humans cannot experience or understand anything at all which does not presence within three-dimensional time in our mental focus. The material stone presences either sensuously or unsensuously in our mental focus and is understood in full as such, i.e. as a stone with its material. 

The psyche has no outside, and therefore also no inside. The confusion arises when the physical-material of the soma is conflated with the sensual perception/mental understanding of the psyche. Then e.g. we seem to have thoughts in our head or our brain, etc., and something called consciousness is said to be inside, even located somewhere within the somatic brain, and we humans are driven to try to make something resembling so-called conscious cognition that is today called Artificial Intelligence. 

There is no external connection between the soma and the psyche as two different things; rather, the soma is encompassed by and presences in the three-dimensional temporal psyche insofar as we experience it at all. And the stone is in the psyche.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Jungian synchronicity vs. causality

C.G. Jung's Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge (Synchronicity as a Principle of Acausal Connections) was published in 1952 together with a monograph by the quantum physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, Der Einfluß archetypischer Vorstellungen auf die Bildung naturwissenschaftlicher Theorien bei Kepler (The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Formation of Kepler's Natural-Scientific Theories). Jung's study is borne by the contrast, or even opposition, between the connection of cause and effect between physical events that forms the basis for natural science, on the one hand, and "sinngemäße[n] Koinzidenzen" (meaningful coincidences; 846), on the other. These latter "synchronistische Ereignisse", Jung says, "beruhen auf der Gleichzeitigkeit zweier verschiedener psychischer Zustände. [...] Ein unerwarteter Inhalt, der sich unmittelbar oder mittelbar auf ein objektives äußeres Ereignis bezieht, koinzidiert mit dem gewöhnlichen psychischen Zustand." (Synchronistic events are based on the simultaneity of two different psychic states. [...] An unexpected content, related immediately or mediately to an objective external event, coincides with the usual psychic state. 855 emphasis in original). He notes in his examples that the present psychic state corresponding to the objective external event may refer presciently to the future. Hence, in this case, a future event presences in the mind's present focus, no matter whether this amounts to prescience or not, as synchronicity would seem to imply and demand.

Subjective psyche inside, objective physical world outside?

The above quotation already makes it clear that Jung proceeds unquestioningly from the supposed axiom of the 'obvious' split between an external, objective, physical world and an inner, subjective psyche. Because of this postulated split between the physical and the psychic, Jung is motivated to posit an "archetypische[r] Grundlage" (archetypal foundation; 846) upon which to glue a meaningful connection between two causally unrelated events. The archetypes postulated to exist in what Jung calls the "collective unconscious" provide a constructed bridge of meaning for the coincidence, being energized affectively by the "Instinkten, deren formaler Aspekt eben der Archetypus ist" (instincts, whose formal aspect is precisely the archetype; 846). "Die Archetypen sind formale Faktoren, welche unbewußte seelische Vorgänge anordnen: sie sind 'patterns of behaviour'." (The archetypes are formal factors that arrange unconscious psychic processes: they are 'patterns of behaviour'. 841)

Jung's "psychoid", which he expressly employs only adjectivally, is coined first of all in another, 1946 study to come to terms with "das eigentliche Wesen des Archetypus" (the proper essence of the archetype ) which "bewußtseinsunfähig, das heißt transzendent ist, weshalb ich es als psychoid bezeichne" (is incapable of consciousness, i.e. transcendent, wherefore I designate it as psychoid; Theoretische Überlegungen zum Wesen des Psychischen para. 417). "[U]nanschaufliche[r] psychoide[r] Faktoren" (Psychoid factors) are therefore "unanschaulich" (ibid.), i.e. literally 'cannot be simply looked at', hence'unclear', 'abstract'.  The "psychoid nature" of the "archetype beyond the psychic sphere," is said by Jung, "to form the bridge to matter" (Damit wäre die Stellung des Archetypus jenseits der psychischen Sphäre bestimmt, [...] und mit seiner psychoiden Natur die Brücke zum Stoff überhaupt; para. 420). Hence "psychoid" is a hybrid, matter-psyche concept. But 'matter' itself is a concept of the mind, and hence itself psychic. Hence the old, untenable postulation by Kant of the "an sich" beyond the phenomenal realm returns to haunt us.

I call the asserted split between the inner psyche and external physical (achieved, incidentally, by a tacit, phenomenologically insensitive spatialization of the phenomenon of time) the Cartesian Cage in which all modern thinking since Descartes is held captive. Jung is no exception. It is telling, however, that he is nevertheless compelled to formulate synchronicity as a "Gleichzeitigkeit zweier verschiedener psychischer Zustände" (simultaneity of two different psychic states; 855 emphasis in original), i.e. the ostensibly 'external' physical event first has to be transformed into an 'inner' psychic image that only then relates meaningfully to another psychic image.

Jung's conceptions of space and time are also conventional, as if there were only one kind of time, namely, linear time, along which physical connections of cause and effect between events can be laid. His conception of synchronicity is therefore also tied to the conception of linear time. 

All-encompassing three-dimensional time of the psyche

Here is where the controversial encounter with my On Human Temporality begins. The book's path of thinking opens with a phenomenology of time that shows itself (i.e. is not merely postulated) to be the all-encompassing, three-dimensional temporal openness within which all that 'is' presences in and absences from the mental focus, being understood hermeneutically, i.e. interpreted, as such-and-such by the mind. The psyche belongs intimately to this three-dimensional temporality because its openness to the world is nothing other than its temporal openness. This has the implication that all that is physical, too, can only presence for the mind in the psyche, i.e. the physical and the psychic are not separated at all, but rather, the physical is encompassed by the temporal psyche. Since the openness that is three-dimensional time is all-encompassing, there is no inside, and also no outside.

Events of all kinds, including physical ones, can only presence and have any connection with each other (for us mortals) within the temporal psyche. In particular, the conception of cause and effect which Jung accepts as the axiomatic basis for all natural science is itself psychic and the psyche's mental faculty that conceives causality as such. This continues to hold true, even when strict causal determinism in physics concedes quantum indeterminacy. 

Different kinds of movement, different ontologies

Efficient causality itself is an ontological conception conceived in order to come to terms with, and thus master (e.g. predict), one kind of movement, namely, physical movement. It has its own specific, historical origins with Aristotle, who presents (cf. e.g. Met. Book Theta) an elaborated ontology of physical movement, with its well-known triad of concepts, based on the paradigm of efficient-productive movement, i.e. τὲχνη ποιητική. This ontology of a single kind of movement has encroached upon and subsumed other kinds of movement, each of which calls rather for its own, explicitly worked-out ontology. By denying this call, all modern science is the profiteer of this usurpation that vainly tries to subjugate other kinds of movement to the rule of linear causality. It is driven by the absolute will to power over all kinds of movement.

Jung does not realize that, as a consequence of taking efficient causality as somehow 'objectively true', hence independent of the subject, thus overlooking its hermeneutic historicity, he is neglecting the task of an ontology of mental movement within the three-dimensional temporality of the all-encompassing psyche.

The free, temporally three-dimensional movement of the mind in shifting its focus on all that presences for and absences from the mind is, of course, not linearly causal, but rather a hip-hopping movement among the three temporal dimensions that has its own sense and meaning for the mind; it is not merely haphazard, meaningless, contingent. What Jung calls "sinngemäße[n] Koinzidenzen" (meaningful coincidences 846) between psychic events, including physopsychic events, may not require archetypal glue from a postulated collective unconscious to make sense of them. 

Furthermore, the causal connection between physical events presencing in the psyche can be conceived as 'meaningful' without requiring the postulation of archetypes. The meaning is provided hermeneutically, phenomenologically by the Aristotelean ontology of efficient-productive movement, not by any archetype. This observation tones down the contrast between scientific causality and Jung's postulated synchronicity.

Jung also overlooks another important kind of movement, the one through which human beings sociate with one another: mutually estimative interplay. This latter requires its own conceptual phenomenology to accomplish an ontology of social movement in which contingency is very much at play (cf. my Social Ontology of Whoness for more detail). Contingency does rob mutually estimative interplay of meaning and sense, but, on the contrary, is a constitutive feature of it per se; it does not have to be suppressed as a phenomenon to attain a sort of effective law of movement. Moreover, no synchronicity based on archetypes is required to make sense of sociating interplay, which is essentially playful, and hence contingent. The Western mind has been implicitly fixated for too long on the ontology of just one kind of movement, viz. physical movement, and therefore expects that other kinds of essentially different movement will also bend to the Western mind's will to power.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Social Ontology of Whoness De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.

C.G. Jung Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge published as one part of Naturerklärung und Psyche, a study from the C.G. Jung-Institut IV 1952, reprinted in C.G. Jung Die Dynamik des Unbewußten Vol. 8 Gesammelte Werke. Cited according to the paragraph numbering in GW Vol. 8.

Wolfgang Pauli Der Einfluß archetypischer Vorstellungen auf die Bildung naturwissenschaftlicher Theorien bei Kepler published as one part of Naturerklärung und Psyche, a study from the C.G. Jung-Institut IV 1952.

C.G. Jung Theoretische Überlegungen zum Wesen des Psychischen (first published in Eranos-Jahrbuch XIV 1946 under the title Der Geist der Psychologie) in Vol. 8 Gesammelte Werke. Cited according to the paragraph numbering in GW Vol. 8.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement

Historical Materialist positivism

Historical Materialists have proposed the term 'capitalocene' as an alternative to the much-disputed 'anthropocene' as the title for a period in the Earth's history. Instead of humans, capital comes to the fore as the main actor in this history. Capital, in turn, has been subjected most intensely to investigation by Karl Marx. Das Kapital and associated writings remains a ground-breaking, momentous work.

The Historical Materialist interpretation of Marx's thinking has the upper hand vis-à-vis an interpretation that roots Marx's Critique of Political Economy — especially its analysis of the value-form — in his philosophical thinking that is indebted especially to Hegel and Aristotle. The Historical Materialist interpretation, by contrast, skips uncomprehendingly and occasionally with a quick genuflection, over the value-form. It has its roots in centuries-old British empiricism that was only reinforced and consolidated by the rise of positivism in the mid-nineteenth century. The birth of sociology with Comte sounded the death knell of philosophy. Since then it seems that only positive facts count. Academics committed to Historical Materialist are almost exclusively sociologists who may also claim to be philosophers. Although talk of ontology and social ontology has emerged in the last couple of decades as en vogue, no socio-ontological interpretation of Marx's Critique of Political Economy has gained any standing among Marx-influenced social scientists. They have to make do anyway with the impoverished conception of ontology and social ontology propagated by today's mainstream philosophy that likewise suffers under the closure of the ontological difference accomplished by empiricist sociology. 

All the more reason to do a 'da capo' and go back to the hour of birth of philosophy when fateful, fundamental concepts were cast in the astoundingly deep and fiery crucible of Greek thinking. They achieved their consummate articulation in Aristotle's thinking. It is these fundamental concepts that call for revision and recasting, e.g. the conception of the human being as a species of animal. It remains untouched in the debates over anthropocene, capitalocene, etc. that are generally couched in terms of 'survival of the human species'. No one interrogates who we are historically as humans; the question concerning whoness, an eminently philosophical, socio-ontological question, is never posed. Perhaps, as a first step, we should start to think of ourselves as mortals. Mortality is a determination of human being explored especially in Greek tragedy, and has an essential connection with temporality. 

The interpretation of the human as a species of animal dovetails superficially with the much later, mid-19th-century casting of the human in Darwin's theory of evolution, in which the human animal is interpreted as having evolved from 'lower' species, and most recently from the primates. Evolution theory itself is a positivist, story-telling science based on positive facts established by dating (in linear, chronological time) fossils found in the geological record, on archaeological excavations and on interpretive attempts to reconstruct how these earlier kinds of near-human animals lived. There is no attempt to interrogate more deeply the being of human being itself, as Greek philosophy did, even within its casting of the human as a kind of animal. Instead, one concentrates on brain size and shared gene pools.

The Historical Materialist notion of the capitalocene is one of many positions in the ongoing debate over what to do about climate change, etc. in order to save the human species and many other species besides. Unfortunately, the entire discussion of the capitalocene, degrowth. sustainable development (goals), environmental destruction, etc. (cf. the Wikipedia articles on Capitalocene and  Degrowth) is undertaken in the mould of empiricist-historical thinking, including its empirically based, hopefully predictive models, as if the concept of capital itself, toward which Marx directed his sharp mind, could be taken as read, as given, and one could speak unproblematically of capitalism (about which everyone 'knows') and argue merely over the historical periodization of capitalist development with a view to pin-pointing, for instance, when the capitalocene began and what historical events in particular (e.g. invention of the steam engine) were responsible for kicking it off, i.e. there is a controversy over causal explanation.

The neglect of a philosophical interpretation of Marx's critique (which is also a phenomenological critique of an historical cast of mind — our own modern mind), and the inherent inability of sociology to think socio-ontologically in a genuine fashion, are major impediments in the debate over degrowth to overcome the worst of capitalism. It is beset by an uncanny, complacent cluelessness about who we are and about the ontologies of fundamentally different kinds of movement that is covered up by voluminous empirical, historical studies serving as substitute.

 The law of global movement

The law of global movement, i.e. the principle of endless accumulation of thingified value, is abstract, but it is no more abstract than the three simple laws of motion postulated by Newton in the seventeenth century. Since then, Newton's mathematized laws of motion have been applied in a bewildering number of areas to precalculate and control all sorts of physical motion. No one complains about the abstractness of Newton's laws. Nor does everyone have to be familiar with them, or even know about them, for them to unfold their far-reaching ramifications in the world. In tandem with the likewise simple and elegant mathematical Maxwellian laws of electromagnetism (an extension of Newton's laws to the motion of electrons), they have turned out to be immensely useful across the entire spectrum of exercising power over physical movement. 

Unlike Newton's powerful laws of physical motion, the principle of endless accumulation (or valorization) of thingified value cannot be employed to precalculate and steer the valorization of thingified value. For it only states the principle that the advance of money-capital and its multiple transformations of value-form through its circular movement must obey if the circuit is to be successful, i.e. generate a residual surplus called net profit. Net profit remains for the capitalist enterprise or enterprises after all the costs incurred (basically wages & salaries, means of production including raw materials, interest, ground-rent) have been deducted. Thingified value itself is nothing physical, thus remaining invisible to all the physical sciences and even the social sciences, including sociology and economics. On the one hand it is astonishing that the social science of economics is lacking its foundational concept. On the other it is not astonishing at all, given the hegemony of empiricism and the positivist closure of the ontological difference. Only the various forms, or 'looks', of thingified value are visible on the surface of society, but not as such. It is the task of ontological thinking to bring these forms of appearance to light as forms of appearance of thingified value. Otherwise, value-forms such as commodity (goods & services), money, money-capital, wages, factories, blocks of land, interest, enterprises, joint-stock companies, etc. are just conceived as different things (factors of production), unimmersed in any sociating medium.

The principle of valorization plays out on the surface of society in the market-mediated competition among the many capitals and their competition with the suppliers of labour power, means of production, loan capital (finance capital) and land on many different markets. Only in this more or less bruising and brutal competition does it turn out whether an individual capital, a given capitalist industry, a national capitalist economy or even the global capitalist economy has been successful in a given circuit at actually valorizing thingified value. For individual income-earning players or certain segments of such players in a given industry or region of the Earth, the gainful game can be rotten and ruinous, with rigged rules of play. I call thingified value the Medium through which the multiple transformations of value-forms must proceed. The Medium sociates (via the surface form of contract between private property owners) all the players in the competition striving to earn their various respective sorts of characteristic income in what I call the gainful game. 'Thingified value' is my preferred translation of Marx's concept of 'verdinglichter Wert' that is usually rendered as 'reified value'. In Marxist discourse, reification has come to have a rather nebulous and equivocal meaning that I prefer to avoid. 'Valorization' names the generation of a net surplus of thingified value in the value-form called net profit (of enterprise) at the conclusion of a circuit of capital; it may be regarded as synonymous with 'accumulation'.

All of us have to earn a living one way or another, which boils down to earning income in one form or another through market competition, which in turn entails immersion in the Medium which, as such, remains invisible. All of us are therefore players in the competitive gainful game, not simply 'people' or 'subjects' who underlie the gainful game and could in some way (collectively, say, through democratic institutions) control it for our own collective ends. The converse role of earners of income is that of spenders of income, which makes consumers of all the players. The consumer is one of the essential roles, or character masks, in the gainful game required for circuits of capital to valorize; produced goods and services must be sold on (local or global) markets for capitals to realize the revenues (the 'top line') that decide whether the advanced capital has actually valorized with a positive surplus, the net profit (the 'bottom line'). The more money-capital thrown into circuits of valorization, the more is produced and the more the consumers must consume to realize revenue.

The global law of endless valorization of thingified value is an abstract, indifferent one that, in itself, pits mortals against each other in endless competition and conflict, and implements the rapacious exploitation and destruction of the Earth. The principle is also prone to calamitous crisis, when dislocations in the global circulation process occur, misjudgements are made by the investing capitalists, excessive bets are placed by greedy speculators on a 'good thing', market conditions change unexpectedly or countless other quirks and irregularities in the circular valorizing movement crop up. As a formal principle, it devours mercilessly and indifferently the material it requires: labour power (employees of all kinds) and natural resources. The mortal material of exploitation, at least, is able to offer resistance against the pressure of valorization exercised via the capitalist class, although today the Earth, too, is displaying its finite limits to endless exploitation, especially in the generation of the physical energy required to materially support the formal movement. 

The subterranean principle, however, has a shiny, appealing façade called individual freedom that most find irresistible, especially when their lives are materially comfortable and they have sufficient income to support a satisfying level of consumption. This deceptive appeal is exploited to the hilt by all those (unknowingly) upholding the principle of valorization, i.e. by those who knowingly support the so-called 'free' market economy of capitalism. They will literally stop at nothing to maintain the status quo. It seems to be a universal law for conservative political parties to tout deceptive slogans in which they proclaim their solemn commitment to 'freedom'. In view of the hidden rule of the valorization principle, freedom amounts first of all to the freedom of movement of thingified value seeking augmentation.

Stepping away from the gainful game?

How could we individualized mortals ever escape the pull of the law of endless valorization that entices with the promises of individualized freedoms? For, an essential feature of the Medium is that it dissociates, or sets free, mortals into competitive individuals, whilst associating them again only via the Medium. We are confronted with the questions i) whether we could ever, or ever want to, strip off our character-mask roles as players in the gainful game and ii) whether there could be, or already is, an alternative medium of sociation. 

Re i): This would involve becoming aware of our roles as income-earners and consumers in the gainful game. Through such reflection it is also possible to gain a distance from the gainful game rather than identifying with it unquestioningly. Is a lifetime playing the gainful game existentially fulfilling?

Re ii): The question concerning an alternative medium of sociation is related in essence to whether there could be, or already is, an alternative kind of sociating movement of our lives. Under the rule of the law of valorization, our lives are constrained to move in ways compatible, subterraneanly, with the never-ending circulation of globally valorizing thingified value. For millions of people, especially those earning a livelihood in so-called 'developing countries', this constraint means nothing other than having to live in abject poverty. Even millions earning a comfortable income through employment are not blind to an existential barrenness of the gainful game. We mortals sociate with each other, i.e. we live together sharing a world, in a kind of movement sui generis I call interplay whose countless variations in modes of play offer an existential richness not available in the gainful game. It is incalculable. So long as the law of valorization holds sway, this sociating interplay is constrained to play out in the Medium with its circular movement of endless accumulation of thingified value. In itself, however, sociating interplay is essentially a movement of mutual estimation between and among the players. 

The interplay is at core one of mutual estimation of each other's powers and abilities. This interplay can be fair or ugly depending upon appreciative or depreciative mutual estimation of who each of us is. As such, it is a power play among whos, benign or malign. Freed from the Medium, this mutually estimative interplay is not sullied from the start by meaner aspirations for gaining one of the many forms of thingified value. Unsullied interplay is often mutually beneficial and can even be mutually caring, a for-each-other rather than an against-each-other, as it mostly is in the competitive gainful game that is prone to descending into cut-throat ruthlessness. The interplay can also be bewilderingly complex and unpredictable, but this is no impediment as long as there is no need to master it from above, nor even measure it. In any case, this kind of sociating movement defies precalculation, defies the will to power over it. The prime concern has to be whether the sociating interplay is fair or ugly, and this becomes the domain of justice: to adjudicate and enforce the free and fair interplay among those living together is a given civil society.

The question then becomes whether it is at all possible and feasible for us to leave, or at least gain a distance from, the gainful game. This includes inventing and cultivating ways of making a livelihood together whilst avoiding immersion in the Medium as far as possible. We have to start with ourselves, asking who we are and as who we could cast ourselves, apart from merely filling character mask roles in the gainful game. The all-pervasive blindness vis-á-vis the invisible Medium of thingified sociation needs to be overcome. Otherwise the wood cannot be seen for the confusing multiplicity of empiricist-scientific trees. In view of ignorance of the global law of movement, there is no guide to see what is needed to weaken its ruinous grip on us. Instead we are misguided by those whose job it is to know better into ways of thinking and practices that do not even tendentially challenge the Medium's inexorable growth.

Further reading: An Invisible Global Social Value TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.

Laws of movement & Energy

Sustainability? Of what?

Social Ontology of Whoness De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Critique of Competitive Freedom and the Bourgeois-Democratic State: Outline of a Form-Analytic Extension of Marx's Uncompleted System Kurasje, Copenhagen 1984, reprinted 2015.