Why I am not an atheist

Why I am not an atheist. And also: Why I am not a believer.

An atheist does not believe in the existence of God; s/he denies His existence.

A believer believes in the existence of God; it is a matter of faith.

Both beliefs (or convictions) presuppose somehow the meaning of existence itself. 'To exist' is synonymous with 'to be', but what does 'being' itself mean? Does 'being' have several or even many meanings? And if God were to be, which mode of being would pertain to His being? For a believer or a non-believer, such questions have no weight for pondering because it is only a matter of believing or negating a certain belief.

What modern science ascertains as true, in the sense of its hypothetical models being verified as correct, so far, by empirical scientific methodology, is contraposed to belief in God. For modern science there is no convincing empirical evidence for God's existence, and it also claims to have better, scientifically tested explanations for how the world came about (it seems always to be a question of origins in linear time). This amounts to a tacit assertion that the mode of being with which the modern sciences, starting with physics, deal is the one pertinent also to the question whether God exists. But the modern sciences apply, either directly or indirectly, only to physical kinds of movement of physical, material beings. They are unaware of the ontology of productive-efficient movement on which they are implicitly founded.

In eschewing the philosophical psychology of an Aristotle in his De Anima, even the psyche of modern psychology has had to be broken down to consciousness, and this consciousness somehow, without further investigation as to what it is (its essence), reduced (literally: led back) to a material base for it to be taken seriously from a modern scientific viewpoint. In this way, since it lacks 'material substance' in itself, the reduced psyche's movements becomes materially manipulable, which is what all modern science is about, culminating in psycho-pharmaceutics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Something called the 'psyche' or 'soul' in the traditional sense is useless for scientific purposes; its study an unprofitable line of research amounting, seemingly, to mere speculation. It is tacitly (or not so tacitly) assumed that the human psyche is an epiphenomenon of some kind of physical — say, neuronal-cerebral — movement, as we read in the OED on one of the significations of 'epiphenomenon': "Applied to consciousness regarded as a by-product of the material activities of the brain and nerve-system."

This way of thinking, however, skips over and suppresses the question concerning what the psyche is as a phenomenon in its own right, i.e. without material reduction to the status of an epiphenomenon. How is the human psyche itself to be conceived, not as a kind of being, but as a mode of being? And if it turns out, employing phenomenological methodology (cf. On Human Temporality), that the meaning of being itself is temporal and, in turn, time itself a three-dimensionally temporal openness, then the question concerning the mode of being of any entity at all becomes one concerning its mode of presencing and absencing in three-dimensional time, to which the psyche belongs. The psyche's openness to the world is precisely its 3D-temporality (and not solely its temporally one-dimensional sense-perception, as it has been traditionally). Both three-dimensional time and the psyche are pre-spatial and pre-material, and as such not amenable to treatment by modern science with its narrow-minded, empiricist methodology. For us mortal humans, who are the ones prone to asking whether God exists, and prior to any debates between modern science and religious belief, the question becomes one concerning a mode of 3D-temporal essencing. 

The more fundamental, encompassing and liberating question, however, is that concerning three-dimensional time itself and how this temporal openness is passed through a fourth dimension to reach the human psyche. We belong to time.

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

Aristotle's purely energetic god of the fair.

Newton mathematizes Aristotelean ontology

A widespread attitude and prejudice in modern philosophy of science is to dismiss Aristotle's scientific writings as empirically incorrect and therefore superseded by modern science, starting with physics. Due to its mathematical nature, modern physics is able to employ quantitative data to confirm or falsify its hypothetical models. Such confirmation or falsification relates to the predictions of movement generated by the models. Empiricist scientific methodology reigns supreme, with no alternative in sight, thanks in no small measure to the British empiricist way of thinking initiated by Bacon. 'Aristotle is old hat —  forget 'im', is the message, 'He merely speculates'. He retains interest only from the perspective of the history of ideas, a relatively quaint pastime for genteel scholars.

What then, if it turned out that the father of modern mathematized physics, Newton, could not have conceived and written his Principia Mathematica without having appropriated key concepts from Aristotle's ontology of productive movement, whilst simultaneously dropping their ontological import? There is no ontology of movement in today's physics, nor in any other modern science. Empiricist, 'evidence-based', scientific methodology employing theoretical models has obliterated any trace of ontological thinking in today's mind. The question concerning "the being as being", τὸ ὂν ᾖ ὄν  (_to on haei on_), where the second "being" is understood participially, i.e. as a partaking of being, is dead. To say nothing of the deeper and more radical question as to the meaning of being itself.

Is this simultaneous adoption and ditching of Aristotle's ontology of productive movement by Newtonian mechanics for the sake of calculative power over physical motion to be regarded as an advance and a boon for humankind, or rather as the opposite?

In contrast to modern physics, Aristotle's Physics investigates the participation in being of physical beings conceived as κινούμενα (_kinoumena_), i.e. material beings that can be moved. Hence there is a focus, in particular, on the questions: What is physical movement?, What is time? and How do physical movement and time relate to each other? The distinction between physical beings that can be moved (passively) and beings that can (actively) move themselves, i.e. living beings, is in the background. What life itself is as a mode of being in its own right is investigated in Aristotle's De Anima, Western thinking's philosophical psychology amounting to an ontology of life. The distinction between living beings that are 'in the psyche', i.e. (ἔμψυχον _empsychon_), and non-living beings that are 'without the psyche', i.e. (ἄψυχον _apsychon_) runs throughout ancient Greek thinking. The distinction falls by the wayside in modern scientific thinking that no longer knows about the ontological difference between a being and its mode of being. Modern science is even hell-bent on trying to make life from non-living matter, to hell with investigating the ontology of life as a mode of being.

Let us take a closer look at Newton's laws, first enunciated in 1687, by first citing Wikipedia: 

"Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that describe the relationship between the motion of an object and the forces acting on it. These laws, which provide the basis for Newtonian mechanics, can be paraphrased as follows:

1. A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless it is acted upon by a force.
2. At any instant of time, the net force on a body is equal to the body's acceleration  multiplied by its mass or, equivalently, the rate at which the body's momentum is changing with time.
3. If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions."
   

The first law, properly attributable to Galileo, is the law of inertia for physical bodies in loco-motion, i.e. change of position, in an homogeneous, three-dimensional Euclidian space arithmetized by real Cartesian co-ordinates. The law says that a net force acting on a physical body is required to change its speed and/or direction, a change in speed and/or direction being called acceleration. Acceleration by a net resultant force breaks the physical body's inertia.

The second law in effect states the negation of the first, specifying it further, as given by the famous simple formula f=m.a. Equivalently, the law says that the net force is equal to the rate of change of momentum, given by the formula for momentum, p=mv, with its rate of change in linear time given by the the differential equation, f=dp/dt=d(mv)/dt=m.(dv/dt), since the mass m is assumed to be constant. To be able to even write this equation, it must be assumed that time t itself is composed of instants mathematizable by a real, continuous, single linear variable that, in turn, allows instantaneous speed of a physical body to appear as a sensible notion enabling mathematical manipulation by employing the infinitesimal calculus. It never occurs to a modern physicist to question whether the notions of instantaneous speed and time composed of consecutive instants are at all phenomenologically tenable. In practice they prove themselves useful and effective, and are therefore left unquestioned.

The third Newtonian law simply states that for any force acting on a physical body there must be an equal and opposite resistant force emanating from the body passively being acted upon. Mathematically speaking, this is expressed as: every active force vector f is resisted by a negative vector -f.

One might now ask what this has to do with Aristotle's ontology of productive physical movement, most thoroughly investigated in Book Theta of his Metaphysics. At first sight there seems to be scant resemblance, but it will come to light when discussing the second law. 

The first Newtonian law postulates that the natural motion of a physical body is straight ahead along a line at uniform speed. In Aristotlelean physics, by contrast, the natural motion of a physical body is not through space, but from place to place, hence loco-motion (κίνησις κατὰ τοπόν _kinaesis kata topon_). There is no homogeneous space in Aristotle's physics. For celestial bodies the natural motion is circular, around the Earth, through the æther. For sub-lunar bodies, the natural motion is down or up, toward the centre of the Earth or away from it. Of the four elements, water and earth naturally move downward, whereas fire and air naturally move upward. There is no gravitational force, but only different kinds of natural motion. An external force or 'violence' (βία, _bia_) is required to shift a physical body from its natural motion. There is no effort made to calculate motions and speeds.

This differentiation of natural motions into celestial and sub-lunar is an impediment to mathematization. Hence an homogeneous, three-dimensional space of positions is adopted from Euclidean geometry and arithmetized with Cartesian co-ordinates. Places become positions in a mathematical space. In this space there remains only one kind of natural motion: along a straight line with uniform speed unless a net force, including a gravitational one, is applied. This has the advantage that linear mathematics is elegant and simple, enabling calculations of motions, albeit not without employing the infinitesimal calculus.

The second Newtonian law is where the Aristotelean ontology of productive movement comes in. This ontology proceeds from a phenomenological conception of δύναμις (_dynamis_) as the (ἀρχή μεταβολῆς ἐν ἄλλῳ ἢ ἐν ταυτῷ ᾖ ἄλλο _archae metabolaes en alloi ae en tautoi haei allo_), i.e. as the "starting-point governing a change in another or in itself insofar it is another". (Note that 'self' and 'other' are elementary ontological categories.) When this forceful starting-point is put to work, this is literally the 'at-work-ness' or ἐνέργεια (_energeia_) of the δύναμις on a physical body effecting a movement or change toward an end or τέλος (_telos_) which, in turn, is the product to be made that was initially envisaged in the εἶδος (_eidos_).

The paradigm for this ontology is τέχνη ποιητική (_technae poiaetikae_), the art of making, e.g. a carpenter making a table. The carpenter embodies the know-how for how to make a table, who envisages in advance the table to be made in an εἶδος or 'idea' of the table. The carpenter can only see the εἶδος in the mind (νοῦς,  _nous_) because s/he can see into the open temporal dimension of the future. The embodied know-how is the force that sets the movement of making going by putting the know-how to work in the at-work-ness of the know-how. The productive movement is guided by the envisaged εἶδος of the table, with the carpenter's 'logical' know-how selecting at each step what is to be done, including selecting which tool to use and correcting any mistakes in the productive movement. This continual selection of actions is done by the carpenter's λόγος (_logos_), where λόγος is here to be understood from its associated verb λέγειν (_legein_), one of whose deeper meanings, beyond 'to say', is 'to select', a pre-linguistic meaning. The skilful carpenter is the efficient force working on the material timber or ὕλη (_hulae_) who first has to select the appropriate timber, along with the appropriate tools. Working with the carpentry tools requires continual, selective corrections of the productive movement in order that the εἶδος is finally realized in the τέλος, or finished product, when the productive movement comes to an end in its ἐντελέχεια (_entelecheia_, or literally, its 'in-end-having-ness'). εἶδος and τέλος are both elementary categories conceptualizing how beings show themselves simply as beings for the mind.

There are therefore four essential elements to this ontology of productive movement:
i) the embodied know-how as the mover (efficient cause)
ii) the appropriate material on which the know-how is put to work (material cause)
iii) the εἶδος of the envisaged table to be produced (formal cause) and
iv) the τέλος as the end-product of the productive movement (final cause)

The third Newtonian law is simply an adaptation of the Aristotelean distinction between active and passive forces that is adopted and mathematized. This distinction is apparent already in the selection of the material to be worked upon by the know-how. The material has to have the passive force to resist the active force of the maker. It is no use trying to make a table out of water or rotten wood, for example. The passive force of the timber has to suffer its being shaped by the carpenter's active force into the various parts of a table and its being assembled into the final product as table. 

In the Newtonian adaptation of this Aristotelean ontology of productive movement there is a marked reduction. First of all, there is no mention of elementary categories; they are taken for granted and disappear into mathematical entities. The efficient force at work on a material physical body no longer has as an envisaged εἶδος and therefore also no τέλος, thus rendering it blind, with no insight into the temporal dimension of the future. With the elimination of both εἶδος and τέλος, there remains only the blind, efficient force, or δύναμις, working on a material body, or kind of ὕλη, temporally from 'behind', from 'earlier'. Both are mathematized as quantitative mathematical entities, to wit, a directed force as a spatial vector f in an homogeneous, three-dimensional, mathematical space, and matter reduced to a quantity of mass m, which is merely a real scalar in the vector space. The carpenter's know-how is reduced to a blind physical force satisfying the equation f=m.a, or, in words, force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration in real, continuous, linear time. Linear time is assumed and required because the physical motion itself is governed simply by cause preceding an effect. The force's effect can be calculated along such linear time employing the mathematical operations of differentiation and integration in the infinitesimal calculus that was developed by Newton, and in parallel by Leibniz, precisely for this purpose.

Far from representing an advance over Aristotle's ontology of productive movement, Newton's mathematical mechanics could be regarded as an impoverishment that blinds the mind. The apparent advantage of being able to mathematically precalculate the motion of physical bodies is gained at the cost of losing sight of the phenomena of movement themselves. It can no longer be seen that the Aristotelean ontology of productive movement is applicable to only one kind of movement. This suppression of the phenomena has led to the attempt in subsequent centuries since Newton to extend the reach of mathematized power over movement to kinds of movement that are not amenable to such treatment: the movement of the mind, the movement of interplay in society, the movement of the economy, each of these kinds of movement requiring its own, specific ontology. Hence modern sciences such as psychology, sociology and economics are lacking their ontologically grounded foundational concepts. This amounts to a blindsiding of the Western mind for the sake of the absolute will to power over all kinds of movement. This will to power, however, is delusory, hubristic and therefore, despite its hyperbolical promises of progress in the well-being of humankind, ultimately highly destructive, especially once paired with the valorization movement of The Medium spoken of in numerous other artefactphil posts (e.g. Laws of movement & Energy, Hegemony of The Medium?).

Further reading: Aristotle Metaphysics Book Theta. 

Isaac Newton Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica 1687.

Martin Heidegger Aristoteles, Metaphysik Θ 1-3 Summer Semester 1931, Heinrich Hüni (ed.) Gesamtausgabe Bd. 33 Klostermann, Frankfurt/M. 1981. 

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

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

Psychology without psyche without time

The modern science of psychology is lacking its foundational concept — that of the psyche itself. Not to worry. In the Modern Age it has been replaced by consciousness and subsequently consciousness has been reduced hypothetically to something generated causally by the neurological activity of the material brain, for that is something modern science can get a grip on. Today's neuroscience has set out on the futile quest to 'prove' empirically that this is so, without ever being able to say what consciousness itself (a mere 'quale' or 'quality' of matter?) is, not to mention, what the venerable psyche is. The modern, scientific mind imagines the psyche as something fuzzily spiritual, soulful, and rejects it out of hand.

The experimentally discovered neuroplasticity of the brain is said to offer therapeutic opportunities for 'rewiring' it, thus helping those with a psychological malady. Manipulation of a part of the soma is supposed to improve performance of the psyche-cum-consciousness. In this kind of research, tinkering with animals' brains is assumed to help in attempts to 'rewire' those of that other kind of animal assumed to be we humans. This kind of brain mechanics is what has become of psycho-somatic therapy, with the material soma trumping the immaterial psyche, whose very existence is put into doubt. The barbarism of this kind of thinking (scientific, evidence-based) goes unnoticed.

For ancient Greek thinking, the psyche (ψυχή) was the principle of life, signifying the self-movement of living beings and their sensuous openness to the world. Such self-movement is fourfold: change of where (loco-motion), of how much (quantity: growth, decay), of how (quality: maturing, aging) and of what (propagation, self-replication). Aristotle's De Anima is Western thinking's foundational book investigating the psyche, whose deep insights into what life is have been rendered superficial today. Hence there is no serious critical engagement with the question: What is life? It is answered with a short definition, such as self-replication (e.g. of DNA). 

Whether Aristotle's investigation of life as a mode of being has to be rethought and revamped is not on the agenda. His thinking has been written off as superseded by modern science because it allegedly does not account for the empirical data. Life itself is taken for granted as an empirically established fact, and science concentrates on finding the molecular building blocks of life and figuring out how their combination somehow springs to life, perhaps as a single-cell yeast in a lab somewhere. Astrophysics goes in search of moons or exoplanets on which such building blocks can be detected — on the hunch that living organisms will eventually be discovered there with help from the appropriate technological apparatuses.

The failure to re-engage with Aristotle's thinking on the psyche and human being itself has many consequences, starting with postulating without further interrogation that the human is a kind of animal. This latter is an axiom for all modern science, for it enables the will to power to get a material grip on the movement of human lives. Perhaps the psyche itself as a mode of being has to be completely rethought and deepened in connection with interrogating the Aristotelean hermeneutic casting of time as linear, and more specifically, as derived from counting it off physical movement that, in turn, is supposed to be governed by effective causality.

Human psychology is practised as kinds of therapy for psychic conditions and as techniques for manipulating human behaviour. The latter prove themselves to be extremely useful in marketing goods and services to the consumer, whose essential function is to realize sales revenues for capitalist enterprises. As a linch-pin in the gainful game, consumers are supposed to find happiness in consumption, and modern science has apparently even discovered happiness hormones, whose exudations under the application of appropriate advertising techniques can be measured. Much research goes into such manipulative techniques for the sake of (unknowingly) enhancing valorization of The Medium*. Market research itself is an established, well-paid part of the advertising industry that is crucial for turning over advanced capital, preferably as quickly as possible.

Psychological illnesses themselves have everything to do with the way of life in an historical kind of society whose movement is dictated by a principle of movement antithetical to the movement of human life. The hectic pace of living induces stress, anxiety and depression in many leading their lives under such conditions of accelerating turnover-time of globally valorizing capital. 

Insight is entirely lacking into the essential connection and grating contradiction between the human psyche's belonging to the three-dimensional openness of time (that is at the core of human freedom of movement) and the straight-jacket of the circular movement of ever-valorizing thingified value along sequential, linear time. The elementary question concerning the nature of time itself is not on the agenda.

* The Medium of thingified value itself remains invisible, entirely unknown to the social science of economics, as well as to any other modern science.

Further reading: CO2 and The Medium.

Laws of movement & Energy.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

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. 

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

Ideologically brainwashed suckers

Today we hear allegations from politicians leading the ostensibly Free World that the public is being brainwashed by "radical Left ideology" (MTG).

But what about the indoctrination of the population from birth through the media, starting with television, into the ideology of ruthless, dog-eat-dog capitalism under the guise of individualist freedom? Such indoctrination amounts to inculcating, hammering in with the heel of a boot, a set of ideas that explains the world more or less crudely and deceptively. Under this ideology, each individual has the opportunity to compete to earn income, to acquire property and, sweetest of all, the freedom to enjoy spending it on consumer goods and services. This consumption, in turn, realizes sales revenues for the capital advanced, from which profit is derived as a residue, once all costs have been deducted.

The ugly blemish in this ideology is that the more or less fair, more or less bruising, more or less violent competition for income produces both winners and losers, and that, via the (at least nominally democratic) political struggle over state power, the winners are able to rig the rules of play in the gainful game to ensure that they come out on top and hang on to their advantages, privileges, etc. And what are the rules of play? First and foremost, that the rights of private property be protected. How are these rights of dissociated private property exercised? For one, to enjoy the personal consumption afforded by spending income. For another, to deploy acquired private property to generate more income, untrammelled by the resistance of trade unions and environmental regulations, which drags down profits from their potential maximum.

And private property itself? It is the deceptive camouflage for the endlessly valorizing Medium of thingified value that is covered up precisely by the ideology of individualist freedom. Anyone daring to unmask this ruthless ideology for what it is, of course, is branded a "Left wing lunatic". But even those advocating a softening of the ruthless rules of play of the gainful game, say, by protecting workers' rights to organize in trade unions or by mitigating environmental destruction in social-democratic style are labelled "Left wing lunatics". And millions of indoctrinated voters, who have fallen for the ideology of unfettered individualist freedom and all it stands for, go along with this, even if they are losers in the gainful game. Demanding merely crumbs from the table, consisting of affordable groceries and cheap gasoline, they are what you call suckers, about whom W.C. Fields said: "Never give a sucker an even break." (1941) To be sure, never has the deep truth of this cynical saying, with some thought, been more disgustingly visible than today. It's a pity, only, that no one is looking deeper, including even those who are purportedly "rethinking capitalism"*).

*) Annual theme for 2025 at The New Institute in Hamburg (accessed 27 March 2025).

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

Capitalocene & The global law of movement. 

Laws of movement & Energy. 

Tale of the Qua: A Philosophical Comedy.

Adorno's maxim "kein richtiges Leben im falschen"

"Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen." from his Minima Moralia is known as Adorno's most famous maxim: "There is no correct living in false [living]." The sentence is elliptical, the last in the 18th mini-essay 'Asyl für Obdachlose' (Asylum for Homeless [People]) of Part 1 of the book. One interpretation of the maxim is that it concerns how "private life" (Privatleben) in a "social order" (Gesellschaftsordnung) mediated by "private property" (Privateigentum) is forced to be led 'falsely'.

But the situation is more dire: es gibt kein wahres Leben im verstellten — there is no true living in an untrue world in which the phenomena are fundamentally distorted or hidden altogether. The ambiguity of the phenomena allows the mind, i.e. our historically shared mind, to be caught in a thoroughly topsy-turvy world. The inversion and the resulting blindness are painless, the delusion near-perfect. 

Freedom is fused and confused with subjugation. A veneer of freedom covers up a relentless global law of movement in a medium that remains, even today, invisible (thus 'untrue') for the mind. It is insufficient to speak merely of private property and the freedom individuals enjoy exercising their private property rights, and then point out the many kinds of exploitation that private property ownership enables. One has to ask what the essence of private property is.

There is a fundamental difference between the correctness of facts and the truth of  phenomena. Understood philosophically, Adorno's maxim can be paired with another one reminiscent of Hegel: "Das Ganze ist das Unwahre." ("The whole is the untrue." Part 1, 29 last sentence) The essence, itself remaining hidden, shows itself on the surface of the whole in correct facts that cover up its truth. One indication of this inversion is Adorno's famous term "Verblendungszusammenhang", in which 'Verblendung' means 'blindness' or 'delusion'. The definition of this term given in Duden reads: 

"der Zusammenhang zwischen gesellschaftlichem Sein u. daraus sich bildenden falschen Vorstellungen vom Wesen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft"

"the connection between social being and false ideas about the essence of bourgeois society arising therefrom"

This provokes the question: What is the truth of our social being in today's society? Or: what is the truth of our mode of sociation in this historical form of society that goes under various names, including modern industrial society, liberal democracy or bourgeois-capitalist society?

And the "false ideas"? Above all, that in our painless blindness we con ourselves that we're free in (what remains of) the so-called Free World. Free, above all, as individual players to engage in the competitive gainful game — either as winners or as losers, blind to the law of movement of the global Medium and its sweet poison seeping into every last existential cranny.

It's not just that we are desubjectified as mere cogs in the 'capitalist machine' and could one day overcome our 'objectification' to become the collective subject in charge of social material production and reproduction. It's that we have to question and recast who we are from the ground up, eschewing worn-out, pat, traditional answers. No freedom without truth, which has to be wrested from distortions through to utter hiddenness.

Further reading: Theodor W. Adorno Minima Moralia Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 1951/1980.

Arguing positions — or interpreting phenomena?.

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

Laws of movement & Energy.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

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

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.