Together with its staunch, subservient ally, analytic philosophy, the modern sciences, both natural and social, have grown and flourished as noxious weeds that spread into every crevice, covering and swallowing the ontological difference that has been the distinctive hallmark of all genuine philosophy since its Greek beginnings: the difference between beings and their mode of being.
The steady, centuries-long degeneration of mind has already led to today's situation, in which even philosophers — not to mention natural and social scientists of all stripes as well as artists — no longer have a clue what the ontological difference means. In this sense of oblivion to the OD, philosophy, too, has also long since degenerated into positivism. Hence, for instance, the never-ending dance in analytic philosophy between so-called realism and idealism, the hermeneutic AS remaining all the while invisible to analytic consciousness.
The historical dementia of the mens — the unminding of the mind, Geist, νοῦς — started already with its degeneration into consciousness, i.e. the co-knowing of itself of the self-certain ego, on which all knowledge was to be unshakably based. This Cartesian hermeneutic casting opened the modern age.
The ontological difference is the crucible whence not just the whatness of whats, but the whoness of whos is cast, and thus how a world shapes up and presents itself to the mind in open historical time.
Instead of hermeneutically recasting, demented modern consciousness is rushing headlong into outsourcing itself to algorithms in which it is becoming inexorably ever more inextricably — but altogether willingly — entangled.
And the worst of it is that 'we' are painlessly blind to what is happening, and therefore defenceless.
Further reading: The Digital Cast of Being. Digital Whoness, Social Ontology.
