22 August 2025
21 August 2025
Devastation of the Earth
The horrendous consequences of global climate change — along with other calamities such as plastics pollution, not to mention the crap floating around in our minds — are becoming more apparent every day. Its deniers remain stalwart in their (self-interested) denial. Huge efforts to make a transition to so-called sustainability make headway and also suffer setbacks from fierce resistance. Powerful, effective opposition is led by profit-seeking corporations and national states with their 'developed economies'.
Well-meaning, concerned scientists work hard to present the undeniable facts of climate change. They gather the empirical evidence, interpreting it through well-established laws of physics to enlighten both politics and the general public. The opponents do their best to present 'alternative facts' that downplay the threats of climate change or deny it altogether. They are the stooges of another, unspoken, non-physical global law of movement. Only the profit-making interests of certain big players in the gainful game are visible. If only their interests could be contained and curtailed by appropriate political action on all levels from the local to the global! That would be democracy in action, progressives say.
This amounts to whistling in the wind so long as the underlying, hidden global law of movement in its own Medium remains unknown. Due to profound ignorance of the law of movement of the global economy, the facts on the surface, although modelled correctly, misinterpret events in their truth and therefore propose illusory or makeshift remedies. We continue to live and act blithely in the untruth. The empirical-positivist thinking of modern science is unable to even diagnose our dilemma, to reveal its truth. It is entirely oblivious and essentially blind to our toxication and intoxication by the Medium that enslaves us as free players. Spellbound by the illusion that we humans are free individual subjects acting collectively through 'our' democratic institutions, it is already captured by the status quo and obliged to dismiss any thinking that delves deeper than the facts on the surface as ideological.
The tatters of philosophy remaining after the onslaught of empiricist positivism are engaged in a scholarly game of tiddlywinks among positions concerned inter alia with ethics, normativity, history of philosophy, defence of 'our' democratic values, including fair play. The core value of liberalism, viz. fairness, is rendered hollow by the Medium, since, despite the best efforts to devise norms and laws to implement and ensure fair play, it is thoroughly undermined, subverted and trumped by the Medium. The Medium dictates its terms and conditions (e.g. ruthless exploitation of mineral resources, containing (wage-)inflation) for its continued successful valorization, upon which all seems to depend (e.g. to 'create' jobs). The capitalist agents of the Medium's valorization, aligned as they are with 'conservative' politics, are always at an advantage, since they stand for 'growth' and promise prosperity.
Who or what is the culprit responsible for the ongoing devastation of the Earth? 'We' humans in the so-called 'anthropocene'? Due to our 'technological progress', as proffered by so-called 'philosophers of technology'? Are these interpretations of our dilemma seen through as woefully inadequate? The question, who we are as humans, demands that the question of whoness be insistently posed. Today's degenerate philosophy is unable to even understand the question, having long since given up even on the question of whatness. How, in view of the ubiquity of the Medium as universal medium of sociation (Vergesellschaftungsmedium), have we been cast as humans in the present historical era? As merely more or less free, as more or less unfairly treated players in the global gainful game? Is that what the so-called Free World amounts to? While the Earth descends ever deeper into utter degradation?
Further reading: Three laws of movement (again).
Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.
Thingified value begets individualized freedom.
16 August 2025
Life, death, degeneration (temporalogically)
What is life?, a question related to the question: What is the psyche? Aristotle answers the former question by answering the latter. For him, the psyche is the eidetic 'look' or εἶδος of a physical body capable of living, its very essence or whatness, which he expresses in the formula that a living physical body has its starting-point for movement and stasis within itself. This having of such a starting-point is its entelechie (ἐντελέχεια) or perfected presence as a living physical body. Aristotle's gaze is thus directed toward such physical bodies that can move themselves, animate, empsyched things (ἔμψυχα) in distinction from physical bodies that are not so endowed, i.e. inanimate ἄψυχα.
Only physical kinds of movement are therefore pertinent, which for Aristotle comprise four kinds or ἔιδη: change (μεταβολή) of i) what, ii) how, iii) how much and iv) where, i.e. i) progeneration, ii) quality (sense perception e.g. hearing-not hearing; sleeping and waking, activity and inactivity), iii) quantity (growth and decay), and iv) locomotion/mobility. For Aristotle, only physical bodies capable of such self-movement can partake of life.
Restricting consideration now (temporalogically) to human living, what about other kinds of self-movement, i.e. those of the non-physical variety? In the preceding post I have already spoken of the movement of the mind as the psyche's capacity to move freely throughout three-dimensional time, a degree of freedom that material, extended, physical things do not enjoy, since the mind is thoroughly pre-physical, unencumbered by matter.
Or, to take another kind of movement: what about the movement of interplay between and among mortal humans when they sociate with each other, mutually estimating who each other is? Is that not their social living? Interplay is a kind of movement that eludes efficient-causal explanation within the bounds of a tacit ontology of productive movement. This, of course, does not prevent sociology and social psychology from fabricating countless explanatory models based on endless empirical research to account quasi-causally for social behaviour.
There is yet another kind of self-movement to consider, since the self-movement of life is only the converse and complement of the self-movement toward death. What does mortality mean for us humans? Do we die only when, through decay, the physical body loses its self-movement? Which kinds of self-movement? The loss of mobility, for example, does not equate with death, nor even the loss of sense perception. How about loss of movement of the cardio-respiratory organs? If machines can maintain the functioning of the cardio-respiratory organs artificially, does this still count as living? After all, it is doubtful whether lungs and heart that cannot move themselves, and are thus no long empsyched, are still living.
Does death coincide with the loss of movement of the brain, i.e. the organ employed by the mind for mental movement? It is at least plausible that the mind loses its freedom of self-movement in three-dimensional time when its physical organ is defunct. Furthermore: is there the possibility of mental life after the physical body dies, i.e. is no longer capable of self-movement? Such a possibility seems to lie beyond the realm of human experience. Whose mental life could it be after death? Conversely, is there the possibility of mental death (e.g. coma), while the physical body lives on? Can mental movement, i.e. thinking, degenerate qualitatively, without impairment of brain function, e.g. through exposure to mass media and the cyberworld?
Mental movement through three-dimensional time, i.e. imagining, would seem to be the freest of all human self-movements and probably also the most potentially deleterious. Why? Because imaginings can become untethered from any phenomenal touchstone. Opinion, belief, conviction rely upon an imagination that is more or less careless, fanciful, undisciplined in interpreting what comes to mind. Does the freedom of the mind degenerate into arbitrariness, caprice, prejudice and dogma when thinking does not bother to carefully interpret the phenomena, to at least establish the correct facts as best we can? (Even though the truth of the phenomena thereby remain concealed.)
Presumably it was the freedom of movement of the imagination that occasioned Kant to subject it strictly to the rules of understanding when revising the first, A edition of the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781 to produce the second, B edition of 1787. In this way, the superiority of the logical mind was reasserted and upheld. Kant's logical rules of understanding, however, are fashioned after the Newtonian laws of movement of physical objects, and these are laws of continuous movement in one-dimensional, linear time conceived as a succession (Nacheinander) of now-instants. The so-called superiority of human rationality is thus maintained at the cost of a massive petitio principii, or begging of the question, since the power of imagination (Einbildungskraft) is the prototype of three-dimensional time as inadvertently conceived by Kant within the strictures of his subjectivist metaphysics. Kant's subsequent suppression of the imagination's role amounts to a suppression of the truth of the phenomenon of three-dimensional time.
A similar petitio principii is performed when it is conceived that the mind moves, or at least rationally moves, according to syllogistic rules of logical inference. This dogma opens the way to conceiving mental movement as constrained by a series of if-then rules, i.e. as a kind of computation, that then can be adequately imitated by a Universal Turing Machine. Since any computer whatsoever, including those running A.I. algorithms, can be conceived, in principle, as a concatenation of Turing machines, nothing then prevents our believing that the algorithmically steered cyberworld, although patently artificial, nevertheless faithfully models our human mind so that, conversely, we (mis)conceive our mind itself as some organic, 'wet' kind of computer (to wit, the brain), thereby suitably degrading our self-conception.
If free mental movement is at the core of our mortal animation, and if this mental movement is (mis)conceived (hermeneutically) as computation that can be replicated by A.I. algorithms running on ever more powerful, energy-hungry, inanimate computers, have we thereby already cast ourselves as the living dead? What's the remedy? Think again! From scratch.
Further reading: The human psyche (temporalogically) (previous post).
Aristotle De Anima (On the Soul).
Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018, Chapter 5 'Ontology of Exchange'.
On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.
Immanuel Kant Kritik der reinen Vernunft 1781/1787.
'Turing's cyberworld of timelessly copulating bit-strings' 2012.
'Turing's Cyberworld' in Information Cultures in the Digital Age: A Festschrift in Honour of Rafael Capurro Matthew Kelly & Jared Bielby (eds.) Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2016 pp. 65-81.
'Algorithmic Control of Movement in Time: Abolishing even our selves ourselves' in Kinder und Jugendliche in der Krise: Gegenwärtige Herausforderungen und neue Perspektiven Rainer J. Kaus, Hartmut Günther (eds.), transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2025 pp. 219-233.
Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.
09 August 2025
The human psyche (temporalogically)
300th post
Psyche according to Aristotle
What is the human psyche? The modern empirical science of psychology does not confront itself with this question, but contents itself with a quick definition such as consciousness or cognition and, more recently, with the dogma that these latter are somehow generated by material, neurological brain processes.
For deeper questioning of the human psyche, we have to return to Aristotle's De Anima (On the Soul), if only because his investigation laid the groundwork, i.e. the foundational concepts and way of thinking, that has governed Western (and today global) thinking on the psyche, even, unknowingly, on modern psychology.
After reviewing and criticizing the thinking of his predecessors in Book I, Aristotle starts anew to pursue the question, "what the psyche is" (τί ἐστιν ψυχὴ 412a3), a question that cannot be answered without understanding fundamental concepts from Aristotle's Metaphysics. Here I will have to assume a knowledge of these concepts. His investigation proceeds in a number of steps to find the psyche of "physical bodies" (σώματα...φυσικά 412a12f) that "have life" (ἔχει ζωήν 412a13), and is thus wider than the question concerning the specifically human psyche with which I am concerned here. Living bodies for Aristotle comprise plants, animals and humans as a special kind of animal.
The first answer deems the psyche "to be an essence as the 'look' of a physical body having the potential/ability to live" (οὐδίαν εἶναι ὡς εἶδος σώματος φυσικοῦ δυνάμει ζωήν ἔχοντος 412a20f), whereby this eidetic 'look' is the body's "having its end" (ἐντελέχεια 412a10) or "perfected presence" as living. (A non-living thing such as an axe, for example, has the eidetic look and perfected presence of something that is good for chopping.) This perfected presence of the psyche accounts for a living physical body's both "sleeping and waking" (ὔπνος καὶ ἐγρήγορσις 412a25). The "ability to live" is further specified as having organs (ὄργανα 412b1) which is exemplified by a plant (a living physical body) having roots in analogy to the stomach (412b4) that enables nutrition.
The general definition of the psyche is then given as the "essence/whatness of such a body" (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι τῷ τοιῳδὶ σώματι 412b11) with organs, which amounts to "having the starting-point/principle of movement and stasis within itself" (ἔχοντος ἀρχὴν κινήσεως καὶ στάσεως ἐν ἑαθτῷ 412b17). Note that the psyche for Aristotle is an eidetic 'look' or 'idea' formulating the principle of self-movement of living bodies, and not a material cause (αἴτιος). The emphasis is on understanding what life is, rather than trying to causally explain it — especially not from material causes.
This concept of psyche applies to the living physical body as a whole and also to its parts. Aristotle provides the example of the eye as a bodily organ, whose essential whatness as organ of a living body is its "eyesight" (ὄψις 412b19), i.e. its ability to perceive visually. The eye is endowed with such psyche even when it is closed and cannot see, just as a living body is still alive even when asleep, i.e. 'dead to the world'. The organ of sight in this case is an organ of sense perception (αἴσθησις) that enables an openness to and receptiveness for everything presently visible in the world. Such sense perception is necessary for a living physical body in order for it to orient itself and move itself in its environs, and the bodily organ of the eye enables such self-movement characterizing for Aristotle what life itself is, and the role of the psyche as the essence or whatness that enables life, in this case, the sense perception necessary for life.
Temporalogical conception of the human psyche
What does this entail for the attempt to conceive specifically the human psyche starting from the elementary concept of three-dimensional time? The conception of life in this case is restricted to that of human life. The psyche is conceived first of all as belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time composed of its three characteristic dimensions of past, present and future familiar to us humans, but also mostly taken for granted and overlooked because, as such, these temporal dimensions are empty. We humans are instead focused on what comes from each these dimensions: from the past, from the present and from the future, and not on the empty, unmoving dimensions themselves that hide themselves in their inconspicuousness.
What moves or stands still in coming from any of the three temporal dimensions is received by the human psyche which has this temporal receptiveness by virtue of belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time which thus provides the initial conception of the human psyche itself. Openness to the environs through sense perception is at the basis of the traditional conception of life in general*, and human life in particular, entails that this openness is restricted to what sense perception can perceive in the present. By contrast, a temporalogical account of the human psyche, and thus of human life itself, starts with its openness to all three temporal dimensions and what comes from each of these dimensions into the psyche's focus in order to be understood. This implies that the human psyche has a faculty of understanding that interprets what comes into focus in one way or another. It is thus hermeneutic through and through. This psychic faculty of interpretive understanding may be called the mind which is able to roam throughout three-dimensional time.
Hence e.g., to expect the visit of a friend from the temporal dimension of the future, is already to understand, to interpret the friend as a living human, which in turn implies already an implicit understanding both of what life is and of what, or who, a human essentially is, i.e. of a human's whatness or whoness. For Aristotle and Plato and the entire Western tradition, the human is a kind of animal, a legacy by which today's thinking remains bound, or rather, in which it remains incarcerated for the sake of preventing any deeper questioning and recasting. Even though the metaphysical, ontological interpretation of human being has receded into oblivion since the rise of empiricist positivism in the mid-19th century, and today's hegemonic understanding of the human as an evolutionarily evolved animal with an exceptionally large and complicated brain holds sway, there is still the need to pose the question of who the human is, thus revising this traditional understanding that has become thoughtless dogma. This requires 'doing a da capo' and starting again from an alternative beginning that may be called temporalogical, rather than ontological.
The phenomenon of human life itself, interpreted temporalogically, starts from the psyche's belonging to three-dimensional time. The self-movement of human life is then initially conceived, i.e. interpreted hermeneutically, as the ability of the psyche's understanding to roam, perhaps apparently haphazardly, throughout the openness of three-dimensional time by virtue of the psyche's power of imagination, focusing on this or that which comes to mind from any of the three temporal dimensions. This kind of self-movement of human life may be appropriately called the life of the mind. Mental movement thus gains precedence over physical movement upon which Western thinking remains fixated to the present day.
A friend's coming to visit is then tacitly 'always already' (a priori) interpreted eidetically** as a human endowed with a psychic openness to three-dimensional time and a mind able to roam freely through this temporal openness. This has consequences for how an encounter between friends is to be understood, namely, as an interplay between two humans, each of whom is endowed with an understanding mind endowed with free, temporally three-dimensional movement. To unfold further the phenomenon of interplay neglected by traditional thinking, however, cannot be undertaken in this brief post, whose aim has been to merely indicate how Aristotle's metaphysical-ontological conception of life can be recast temporalogically from an alternative starting-point. I have attempted this recasting, at least in outline, in On Human Temporality.
* Cf. "..the living being characterized first of all by sense perception", ...τὸ δὲ ζῷον διὰ τὴν αἴσθησιν πρώτος 413b3, the first sense treated being that of touch (ἁφή 413b5).
** εἶδος (_eidos_) reinterpreted temporalogically is the hermeneutic 'look' an essent offers of itself when presencing and absencing for the mind from three-dimensional time.
Further reading: Aristotle De Anima (On the Soul) esp. Book II Chap. i 412a1-413a10.
On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.