Metaphysics

Discussion

Metaphysics is necessary because we are in a time between worlds

Zachary Stein:

"Metaphysics is a difficult word to define outside its simple origin as the title marking the volume that followed the Physics in Aristotle’s canon (in Greek, meta = after / beyond). In the West, metaphysics has been a distinct branch of academic philosophy ever since Aristotle’s works were translated by the Church. Ontology is a related word (based on the Greek, ontos = being), which I use to refer to the practice of working out the details within a larger metaphysical system. Medieval monastics would conceive some of the most complex and ornate metaphysical systems in history, justifying all kinds of miracles and biblical paradoxes through metaphysical theorizing and ontological speculations – and they would buttress it all with a theory of Intuition. Premodern metaphysics is often what people think of when they think of metaphysics pejoratively as a kind of magical thinking (e.g., “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”). Premodern metaphysics also gets a bad reputation from having been used to justify the Inquisition, religious wars, and all manner of theocratic insanity. This is all true, but I am not out to beat the dead horse of premodern metaphysics, which both scientistic New Atheists and postmodern progressives continue to enjoy doing. Instead I am going to argue that contemporary cultural trends signal a “return” to metaphysics. I argue that the modern and postmodern absence of metaphysics causes its own problems, like those now encountered by the modern capitalist world-system as it reaches its terminal limits to growth. Part of responding to our global crises requires finding a way to live again within a metaphysics that puts the human being in context. The phrase “metaphysics after Kant” is used to talk about the difficulty that professional philosophers have in practicing metaphysics during our current epoch of cultural evolution. Metaphysics was taken away from the religious authorities by Immanuel Kant during the Enlightenment. At the time, Kant was considered by some to be the most dangerous and revolutionary man on the European continent – more dangerous even than Napoleon. This idea was comical to others because Kant lived on a meager salary in the same small attic most of his adult life. He never traveled, supposedly never lost his virginity, supposedly never raised his voice in anger, and every day he took a walk at exactly the same time with such regularity that his neighbors set their watches by it (Cassirer, 1981). However, the quip about Kant being dangerous is funny because it is true. Kant’s project was radical (and more dangerous than violent uprisings) to the foundations of religious authority, and in turn to political authority. Kant had thought out a way to overthrow the ancien régime of Leibnizian “metaphysics as apologetics,” and in so doing to make separate places for science and faith under one system. Along with other thinkers of his time, Kant would literally destroy the way a whole culture justified its most important beliefs and values. After Kant, metaphysics was done in a different way. Reality – the thing-in-itself – was put out of reach, which meant that theologians could no longer claim to have intuitions into divine ideas but also that science could claim only to “understand” and never to have the total truth. Science and theological metaphysics were put in their respective places by Kant’s “Copernican Turn” away from the objects of science and theology and towards the knowing subject. His so-called “transcendental subject” was what he thought philosophers should be researching instead of metaphysics, as it is prior to metaphysics. The categories of the subject that structure perception were more important for Kant than the “object” they perceived; he theorized that consciousness constructed the object and the whole of nature, including time and causality. Nature as it really is cannot be known. We can only know nature as it appears to us through the structures of our consciousness. Premodern metaphysics was over, and Kant had ushered in a new era in philosophy during which it would support the activities of the physical sciences while also being freed from the reigns of the church. As modernity progressed metaphysics would be denied and avoided, eventually withering away into the bare bones “flatland” universe implied by the physical sciences (see Bhaskar, 1986). The practice of metaphysics was in disarray 78 years after Kant, when Darwin brought about the most massive changes to our understanding of the physical universe since Newton. Evolutionary theory would change what it meant to practice philosophy, and philosophers would slowly begin their journey “back” to metaphysics. Peirce was one of the first to follow the implications of evolutionary theory up into the aperspectival complexity on the other side of modernity (what we call postmodernism) and then beyond that into a new metaphysics of humanity and the universe (Brent, 1998). I have documented elsewhere Peirce’s work as a proto-Integral metatheorist (Stein, 2015). Here I trace the development of his thought again (but from a different angle) in order to frame a discussion of what it means to do metaphysics after Kant and Darwin. I then follow a line through Peirce’s semiotics and objective idealism to current trends in metamodern metaphysics, including speculative realism. Granted, there are other ways to frame a discussion of post-metaphysical philosophy besides my story about Peirce. For example, there is a line that runs from Kant through Heidegger to Badiou, and another from Hegel through Marx to Bhaskar (as it is, I arrive at Bhaskar via another route). I frame my account using Peirce because at the core of Peirce’s scientific, post-Kantain metaphysics was the idea of evolutionary love, which is an important forerunner to the conception of Eros that is at the core of cosmo-erotic humanism."

(http://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)

Towards a Post-Metaphysical Orientation ?

Bonnita Roy:

"The goal of a metaphysics, contemporarily, is to sew together what Kant’s metaphysics tore apart: the domains of epistemology and ontology. Here I use the simple working definitions that “Epistemology concerns itself with how we know about reality,” and “Ontology concerns itself with reality.” Kant pointed to the limitations of the human mind, language, thought and existential conditions as barriers to knowing the world as it really is. He highlighted certain rules of logic, science and judgment that could serve as accurate correspondences to what is real. Ontology was thereafter whisked away from the discourses of theology and theosophy and made subservient to the rules and methodologies of scientific reasoning.

Once the post-modern mind began to “see” that the scientific enterprise itself could also be contextualized by deconstructive critique, the very idea of an ontologically real truth was abandoned. The philosopher Roy Bhaskar created an entire new philosophy called Critical Realism to redress the postmodern overcorrection. With the word “critical” Bhaskar preserved the deconstructive act of metaphysical examination. With the word “realism” Bhaskar restored the belief in levels of reality that exist independent of human reasoning, positing that there is an ontologically real domain of existence that is not dependent upon epistemological claims. Bhaskar emphasized that this ontologically independent domain is available to examination through methods of reasoning and knowing that generate epistemologically valid truths. Yet, even the epistemologically untapped domain of the real, persistently calls us, to listen at levels deeper than the reasoning mind.

This untapped domain, calls to us with what Bhaskar called the alethic truth. The alethic truth is not an epistemologically known or empirically verifiable truth. Rather it discloses itself through our own existential condition, which is an impulse to greater degrees of freedom. This impulse realizes greater freedoms by throwing off the shackles of slavery and bondage, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by acts of pure creation, by presencing what is absent, as, for example, in Charles Eisenstein’s words, “creating the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.” [1]

Critical Realism plays an important role in healing the rift between epistemology and ontology. But what of metaphysics? When Bhaskar says that philosophy should “under-labor” for science, he comes close to describing a new metaphysical orientation. Under-laboring means revealing the boundary conditions in which certain scientific truths are (and are not) true. If we do a simple empirical test, let’s say, by dropping a feather and a stone from a tower at precisely the same time, our naïve results might suggest that the “falling force” pulls at selective speeds, depending on the substance.

We might conclude that the “falling force” has greater affection for rocks over feathers; or we might conclude that the speed of gravity depends upon the mass of the object. To think of gravity, as Einstein did, as accelerating inertial frames, is an act of pure metaphysical innovation. As such, Einstein argued, the feather and the stone fall at the same velocity and reach the ground at the same time. The difference we see in our experiments are due to the different effects of air resistance. Einstein’s new metaphysics, had such explanatory power, that science switched to his position. Only recently were we able to actually observe a feather and a stone falling (to the earth) at the same velocity and reaching ground at precisely the same time.[2]

Sir Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion constitute a set of metaphysical assumptions that prove to be helpful. Still, they lock us into a certain frame of reference that limits what can be known about the world. Newton’s metaphysics claims that “an object in motion will stay in motion unless an external force is applied to it.” In Newton’s metaphysics, there is no place for self-animated objects. We are comfortable, then, with not including living beings like ourselves. But what of electrons moving in a copper wire wrapped around a magnet? Here we don’t need a third term that identifies the external force. The objects themselves are participating in this dance of movement. We can choose to separate the objects and the “forces” that move them, in much the way that Georg Ohm’s equations do to describe laws of electricity. Ohm conceived of electricity as “currents” just like currents in a stream. This is an act of metaphorical imagination, which releases the complexity of the equations he needed to describe certain fixed relationships between voltage (intensity) and resistance. What if, instead of creating a third term like “current” Ohm thought of the action of electrons as population dynamics of self-organizing systems? There would be no need for a third term. What he viewed as “currents” would become, instead, the “emergent patterns” of complex self-organizing dynamics. What I want to point out here is that good metaphysics creates greater clarity by improving the precision of the description of phenomena. Mathematics is a language of great descriptive precision. This is the reason why Charles Hartshorne (1983) considered mathematics as the purest form of metaphysics.

Another alternative would be to switch to a metaphysics of self-animated form? Einstein moved in this direction when he reimagined gravity not as an external force “pulling” on objects (mass) but rather, as something that mass (objects) does. Two objects dance around each other, and self-organize a familiar pattern we call “acceleration due to the force of gravity.” Yet, with a metaphysics of self-animation, we have no need for the third term “force of gravity.” I first discovered this query in high school when we learned about electricity. Wrap a copper wire around a magnet, and voila! you get electric current. In the laboratory I would shake my head and ask “But where does the electricity come from?” This persistent need for a third term is a necessary consequence of a Newtonian metaphysics of inanimate objects. It’s the metaphysics that cries out for a third term. You can experience this yourself by watching this video of the world’s simplest electric train. In similar fashion, the term “ether” was posited as a substance that propagated the light wave, in the same way that sound is the propagation of air waves. Hence, there is no sound in the vacuum of space. We now think of light as a wave form unto itself, capable of propagating through space without a theory of an ether. In the procession of metaphysical vies, third terms like “ether” “gravity” and “electric current”, are both presented and absented at different times. [3]

This one metaphysical revision alone would have enormous impact for the reality we come to believe in. It would be a re-enchanted reality, where every object, at every scale, was participating with every other object, at all different scales. It would align itself with what Graham Harvey (2014) calls Neo-animism. Suddenly everything would be living and experiencing! There is actually a term for this approach – pan-experientialism. It is a term used to describe the reality that was derived by Alfred North Whitehead’s (1979) process metaphysics. Whitehead, however, was no fool. He understood that he was making things up, creating entirely new ways of thinking and entertaining a really big thought experiment about “reality.” This uniquely philosophical practice is called speculative ontology, and Whitehead was careful in his admonitions to those who might swallow the hook of reification while nibbling on the bait of imaginative reasoning. Right up front in his introduction to his magnus opus, Process and Reality, he cautions us.

Whitehead took great pains to outline a practical methodology for speculative ontology. For him, speculative ontology means to form a theory of reality, with a freely acting, imaginative mind. Taking speculative ontology as a serious philosophical pursuit means the possibility of disclosing worlds that could be possible, which otherwise do not seem possible, given the set of constraints on the metaphysics of ontology conventional to one’s domain, culture and/or milieu.

Whitehead believed that speculative philosophy could be productive of important, undiscovered knowledge if one “endeavor[ed] to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience [could] be interpreted” (p.5). He thought that speculative philosophy, if done right, could be a work-around in lieu of the logical positivists’ efforts to found a metaphysics of reason based on strict categories of logic and mathematics. Instead, Whitehead emphasized imagination, intuition, experience and essence. “Here is what we have in our intuition and experience,” he might have spoken in a casual conversation. “How can we use our imagination to derive a theory of essence that accounts for them?” He could have said, without any special inflection, “Suppose we assume we know nothing about reality. Yet here it is, this existence. It holds together. There must be some essential necessities. And here it is, this inquiring mind, these feelings of curiosity and intimacy. They must be adequate and applicable to them.” Writing alongside the great logical positivists, Whitehead was adamant that useful metaphysical principles were not to be captured by logical reasoning, but rather, through flashes of insight that propagated through “the play of free imagination, controlled by the requirements of coherence and logic” . This, “true method of discovery” he likened to the flight of an airplane:

It starts from the ground of particular observations; it makes a flight into thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

Whitehead contended that the reason why this method of “imaginative rationalization” works, where other methods fail, is due to the fact that influences (what he called factors) that are present yet not presently observed, emerge through the free play of imagination. Here he was anticipating Bhaskar’s notion of how absence presences itself through the alethic truth. What was imaginative rationalization for Whitehead, Bhaskar called “retroduction,” echoing Charles Sander’s Peirce’s notion of abduction.[1] Whitehead writes of the power of imagination to “supply what the differences which the direct observation lacks.” And yet while Bhaskar appeals to a subtle reductionism in his notions of the real, Whitehead remains firmly de-ontological, by staying within the practical “adequacies” of the human imagination and its participation in everyday ordinary experience.

The power of Whitehead, over Peirce and Bhaskar, is that he makes his imagination transparent to his philosophical enterprise. By contrast, Peirce ­was reluctant to “pierce through” his metaphysical veil and realize that he was examining the features of his own mind. There is a great quote from the movie series “True Detective” that illustrates to me what being around Pierce must have been like. The detective Rustin Cohle, (played by Matthew McConaughey), has episodes of “otherworldly” perception and intuition. In one scene, Cohle says that during these episodes of deep intuitive listening, there were “times when I thought I was main-lining the secret truth of the universe."[2] This is the overall impression that Pierce can leave us with. Similarly, reading Bhaskar, especially when he is writing about meta-Reality, the astute reader (the reader wearing their metaphysical decoding ring) can discern a subtle residue of the realist’s ontological reductionism to his otherwise imaginative and creative foray into speculative philosophy. The point I want to emphasize here, is the truth about all metaphysical truths: at the end of the day, what metaphysics describes is the architecture of the most fundamental interface where mind and raw reality participate—the finely grained texture of our imagination and participation.

To live in a post-metaphysical world, does not mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

A post-metaphysical orientation asserts that there is always

1) either an implicit or explicit ontology operating in any truth claim and

2) either a transparent or hidden metaphysical framework that is foundational to that ontology.

Metaphysics is like mining — the deeper you dig, the more gold you’re likely to find. For the metaphysician “gold digging” is all about looking for what is implicitly functioning but not yet explicitly known, and the ambitious gold digger wants also to reveal the hidden metaphysical framework deep at the core of any ontology. Whitehead’s speculative philosophy, his process ontology of reality, proved to be a gold mine for a radical new metaphysical excavation. By situating his ontological musings in a process metaphysics of becoming, Whitehead’s process ontology became the bedrock for a radically new kind of process metaphysics. But before we go further, we need to take a look at the relationship between metaphysics and existence."

(https://bonnittaroy.substack.com/p/why-metaphysics-matters-pt-1?)

The impact of digital networks

Zachary Stein:

"Metaphysics has become an even more complex practice today following the explosion of unprecedented interconnectivities between people based on new communication technologies. The historical co-emergence of popular (pop-)postmodernism and computer technologies is not a coincidence; modernity’s tendencies towards subjectivity and abstraction were sent into overdrive by the proliferation of communication technologies, something I explore in detail later in this paper. It is as if the problems posed by Kant’s transcendental subject were deepened to the point of being entirely transformed. Kant’s point that consciousness creates reality has been driven home by a new fragmentation of subjectivities in which individuals became increasingly engrossed in their own private virtual worlds, seemingly out of touch with each other’s realities. More importantly, computers also have made it impossible to deny that consciousness itself is created through the conditions of material reality. Silicon is now part of the evolution of consciousness. Our minds and the categories in terms of which we understand the world are now being extended by computing power. The near exponential growth of computer technologies has made all too apparent the materiality that is a condition for the possibility of the evolution of consciousness. It is important to understand that today our minds depend upon matter in new and unprecedented ways. Our thoughts and memories are now enmeshed in complex configurations of silicon and other materials that are beyond the limits of our nervous system and skin, at least for now.

I am extending here the idea of the extended mind, which emerged in cognitive science and philosophy around the turn of century (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). Computer technologies made clear a basic truth: the human mind has always been extended out into the environment. From cave paintings to calendars made of stone, we build scaffolds around the self that become part of our cognitive being. Interestingly, timekeeping in particular requires externalizing subjective time into objective time through the utilization of complex material objects that encode time. We use matter to make the reality of the passage of time available to cognition, action, and self-understating. At first this was done through the observation of the stars and then through the construction of complex architectural arrangements built to track them. Sundials and water clocks predate ancient history. Clocks as we know them are a relatively recent invention; a watch that anyone can wear is even more novel and recent.

It is worth thinking about this example because time keeping is something unique that sets humans apart in the animal kingdom. While animals are clearly aware of time, they do not, for example, know how old they are. Animals know something like “spring is coming” (absent of propositionally differentiated speech, of course), but animals know nothing like, “this is my 38th spring.” The animal’s mind is also extended into its environment, but not reflectively or technologically. I am not trying to draw a stark line between humans and animals (because there isn’t one), but I am suggesting that the human mind has evolved in part through its ability to use the world and its material affordances to aid human understanding itself. The minds of all animals are extended into their environments in many ways, a point made by the Santiago School of Cognition’s enactive paradigm. But only the human mind reflects upon its own extensions into the world, which allows us to use the environment for cognitive purposes. Our mind’s abilities are not only a matter of what is contained within our skin, which is an important insight to remember when we begin to discuss the metaphysics of Eros entailed by cosmo-erotic humanism. For example, the smartphone enables a new form of subjectivity (for better and for worse), and new conditions for the evolution of love and relationship are now available. Specifically, smartphones change our experience of the reality of time, space, and identity, which is to say they have metaphysical implications."

(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)

Discussion 2: Perspectives

Charles Sanders Peirce: Metaphysics after Darwin

Zachary Stein:

"Peirce memorized large sections of The Critique of Pure Reason when he was thirteen years old and then began his career as a scientist, a nominalist, and a materialist opposed to metaphysics. He would end his career as a polymath, a realist, an objective idealist, and deeply engaged in a new form of philosophy that he called “scientific metaphysics.” Peirce’s early work was focused on the scientific method and especially on producing a convincing theory of inquiry that took evolution into account (Peirce, 1867). This work has been well summarized by Elizabeth Cook (2006), among others (Apel, 1995). At issue was the status of the human brain and perceptual system, which could no longer be reasonably conceived as structured by God-given categories of experience, nor equipped with “divine intuition.” Peirce argued that humans could never truly know the world once and for all, we could only endlessly learn about it by finding new ways to test our ideas through discourse and experimentation. He rejected the very idea of the abstract knowing subject of modern epistemology and replaced it with ideas about the construction of scientific knowledge by groups of people. Peirce was one of the first theorists of science to use the phrase “community of inquiry” and to engage in philosophy about the practice of science. In his pathbreaking explorations of the implications of modern science and evolutionary theory in particular, Peirce would come to see that the knowing subject is within the world, not outside the world looking in like Kant’s “transcendental subject.” Scientists are imbedded in the world as animals that evolved within the nature, and must arrange and interact with nature in specific ways in order to learn. Learning requires not perception and reflection but action and construction. Kant’s transcendental subject was brought down to Earth and into process, social life, and organic form. By thus detranscendentalizing the subject, Peirce would take the first steps “back” to metaphysics (Habermas, 1992).

The idea of detranscendentalizing the subject is important but can be misunderstood. Peirce not only put the abstract Kantian subject into social and linguistic context (Hegel had already done that), he also put the subject into an evolved organism that itself was a potential focus of scientific inquiry. The knower (the one who knows, i.e., the subject) is a contingent part of nature and thus also open to scientific research and eventual disenchantment. Kant limited scientific knowledge about the nature of humans themselves to an afterthought in his Anthropology; his knowledge was not as advanced as the scientific psychology that Peirce was practicing in the 1870s. Many scholars forget that Peirce was arguably the first experimental psychologist on the North American continent (Brent, 1998). More than anyone up to that point in history, Peirce was directly fixing his scientific gaze upon the scientists themselves, studying various aspects of scientific judgment. What he discovered began to undercut his beliefs in both materialism and nominalism. Peirce would begin to do metaphysics again, in a new way.

In the 1890s, Peirce began a series of metaphysical investigations that ended up having a major impact on the future of philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead would later take directly from Peirce’s metaphysics in laying the groundwork for his Process and Reality. Whitehead’s process philosophy is another major metaphysical system that emerged after Kant and Darwin, which also places love near the ontological center of the evolving cosmos. Karl Popper (1966) would credit Peirce with ushering in a new era of thinking about complexity, chaos, and process – all facets of metamodern metaphysics (as detailed above from Freinacht, 2017 pp. 361-366). Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel would see in Peirce the possibility of a post-metaphysical philosophy, including a form of evolutionary realism that allowed for a speculative scientific metaphysics of evolution (Apel, 1994; 1995). Ken Wilber saw in Peirce a theory of cosmic habits and pansemiosis, while Gafni and Stein found his notion of evolutionary love prophetic (Gafni, 2012a; Stein, 2015).

It is worth mentioning that by this point in his life Peirce was exiled from the academy; this in part explains his continued obscurity. Peirce was subject to an organized smear campaign involving the core of American academia, which was at the time a small and insular place awash in contradictory Victorian-era ethics (see Brent, 1998). Peirce’s divorce and remarriage were all that competing mathematicians and philosophers needed to reframe some of Peirce’s personality traits as deeply unethical character flaws. Before long he could not find a job and was stuck writing definitions for James Mark Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. Baldwin had also been kicked out of American academia due to a politized smear campaign (I discuss Baldwin further in Stein, 2015). Were it not for the generosity of his dear friend William James, Peirce would never have completed any of his metaphysical work during this time. The mischaracterizations of Peirce that began in the 1880s have been repeated up to this day, as can be seen in the popular book The Metaphysical Club (Menand, 2001), that presents an intellectual history of the American Pragmatists that downplays Peirce’s catalytic role in the movement (while also defaming his character). Peirce’s treatment makes some sense in the context of understanding the “the murder of Eros,” discussed at some length below.

Living in poverty and obscurity in 1903, Peirce defined metaphysics as a branch of phenomenology (or what he called phaneroscopy: “the study of common experience”). This practice was wedded to the special sciences (i.e., physics, biology, psychology, etc.) and was a condition for the possibility of their success. “Its [metaphysics] business is to study the most general features of reality and real objects” (Peirce, 1934 p. 5). He maintained that the immature state of metaphysics was hindering the sciences and aimed explicitly to do his metaphysics in the service of future science. Peirce (1934) argued that metaphysics was too often dismissed due to the belief that it is unscientific because it deals with things that cannot been seen or tested.

Yet this is not true:

- The things that any science discovers are beyond the reach of direct observation. We cannot see energy, nor the attraction of gravitation, nor the flying molecules of gases, nor the luminiferous ether [ZS: this ether was a postulated medium for the propagation of light in the nineteenth century], nor the forests of the carbonaceous era, nor the explosions in nerve cells. It is only the premises [sic] of science, not its conclusions, which are directly observed. But metaphysics, even bad metaphysics, really rests on observations, whether consciously or not; and the only reason that this is not universally recognized is that it rests upon kinds of phenomena with which every man’s experience is so saturated that he usually pays no particular attention to them. The data of metaphysics are not less open to observation, but immeasurably more so, than the data, say, of the very highly developed science of astronomy, [where] to make any important addition... [costs] many tens of thousands of dollars [ZS: tens of thousands of dollars in 1890; today it’s tens of billions of dollars]. (p. 2)

The fact that the Peirce quote above contains an outdated scientific concept is exactly the point. Scientific practices precede and outlive scientific concepts. The truths of science are not as readily available as some would think (they also tend to come and go) and they are not more readily available than the truths of metaphysics. The difference between metaphysics and science is not about what you can see and what you cannot see; it is about what you are paying attention to when you are seeing. Humans are seeing reality all the time, they just have to recognize it and figure out how to learn from what is real.

What Peirce (1933; 1934) called phaneroscopy would today be viewed as a form of scientific phenomenology (note that both words are from the same Greek root phainómenon, meaning roughly: “thing appearing to view”). The closet contemporary approach to Peirce’s version of phenomenology would be the enactive paradigm of Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson (1991), who meld Buddhist meditation with cognitive science to yield a new way of thinking about organisms as knowers. This so-called “Santiago School of Cognition” since has already been identified by William Irwin Thompson as containing the seeds of a new metaphysical characterization of the human (Thompson, 1998). But Varela, Rosch, and the Thompsons take things in a different direction than Peirce, who considered phaneroscopy the most foundational branch of philosophy, essential for doing science, but not itself a science (strictly speaking).

Peirce (1934) understood that you cannot use science alone to investigate and justify science. Instead you need to do metaphysics (i.e., you need to investigate the very possibility of truth), and the data for this is to be found in the common experience of the human organism. Peirce was investigating common experience, but not in the sense of experiences that are frequently had by large numbers of people. Rather the experience is “common” because it is universally available as an aspect of being human. One could argue that Buddhist meditators are investigating common experience in this way. Experienced meditators become aware of things that most people are not aware of, which are nevertheless there all of the time. Peirce was seeking to investigate questions such as: What are the most general features that the universe must have for my experience to exist? And by implication, what must the relationship between the world and mind be like for scientific practices to work? The most basic practice of metaphysics begins with the most basic elements of human experience itself. Peirce would engage in these kinds of investigations in the midst of doing science across nearly a dozen fields. He would also investigate the common experience found in the practices of mathematics and logic and explore the metaphysical implications entailed by the success of mathematics as a human practice (i.e., why is it that our mathematical constructs relate to the world with a great deal of consistency?).

Using this method, Peirce (1933; 1934) was able to discover and justify his system of metaphysical categories, which he called “Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness.” Peirce’s early articulations of these categories would inspire Habermas and Wilber to map their own systems of categories in terms of the basic parts of speech found in all languages – I, We, and It – thus marking out three “worlds.” Peircean categories are different from Kantian categories because they are not only properties of the subject; Peircean categories transcend and include both subject and object, co-arising as basic properties of all reality. Peirce placed the Kantian subject firmly in the Darwinian universe and thus did not see consciousness as separate from nature. Kant declared to have found in consciousness a “world constituting power,” declaring that consciousness constructs nature and is thus not a part of nature (and so followed much of modern thought). Peirce said that such a view is only one third of the story. Yes, consciousness constructs nature, yet nature has constructed consciousness over the course of evolutionary timescales that would make Kant dizzy. Moreover, Peirce believed that once consciousness has emerged from nature, it then acts back upon nature and itself to initiate an auto-evolutionary process that unfolds evolutionary love at higher and higher levels of complexity. The dialectic between subject and object is an erotic merger that yields emergence, novelty, and meaning. But this is getting ahead of the story. The point here is that Peirce’s categories are post-Kantian and clear the way for doing metaphysics again."

(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)

Speculative Realism: Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and the CCRU

Zachary Stein:

"Plant is a catalyst for cyberfeminist writings and was the alleged co-writer of a pseudonymous collection of “theory-fiction” fragments attributed to the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (2017). These texts were part of the birth of speculative realism. Nick Land (2011) was also a midwife to speculative realism as well as an alleged co-creator of the Ccru (sic). For the Ccru, taking the impact of computers on consciousness as seriously as possible means returning to metaphysics – returning to a form of metaphysical realism specifically. Remember that Kant was an idealist – he believed that the mind creates reality. For idealists (and most nominalists), matter is less primordial than the mind’s categories. Realists, on the other hand, maintain that that a structured reality exists beyond the human mind and that material reality includes emergent structures and processes that transcend and include the human mind. The human mind can therefore know reality (to some extent) through participation in it and as it.

Realism is entailed by computational extensions of human consciousness because ultimately code itself becomes identified as undeniably real, structured, and outside the mind. Just as Darwin forced Peirce to put the transcendental subject into a nervous system and into the natural history of an evolving planet, so computers forced a further pulling of the mind “down” into matter. In philosophy this marked a deepening of the “return to the object” (i.e., a return to considering the world beyond the mind as knowable, structured, and real). These trends “after Kant” put humans back in their place, not as a floating transcendental subject, but as embodied (and encoded) in space and time. Nick Land speculates (along with others) that time itself is best explained in terms of a metaphysics that posits each person’s total immersion in a computerized world-simulation (like in the movie The Matrix). With these speculations Land is seeking a transcendence of modern and postmodern forms of human subjectivity and is willing to take on a complex transpersonal metaphysics to do so. While I think his speculations are deeply confused, I also think they are a sign that basic metaphysical issues are once again being forced onto the table, even if it is just in the movies.

The Ccru uses science fiction as an entryway into metamodern metaphysics, finding a new location for the creation of speculative ontologies extrapolating from scientific advance. The Ccru is practicing a kind of “guerrilla ontology” by using the text itself as a means to alter consciousness and awareness in the moment for the reader. Guerilla ontology is a term used by the early metamodernist Robert Anton Wilson to describe his own work (Wilson, 1977/2016). The term suggests that the practice of metaphysics today can involve stepping outside of the centralized command and control structure of academic philosophy and engaging in all kinds of covert tactics, including theory fiction, anonymity, and revelations of the truths found in first-person experience. The guerilla ontologist forces readers to confront new realities in their own first-person experience by inviting (or jarring) them into uncanny phenomenological experiences. This is a common tactic among metamodern metaphysicians who are seeking to alter the consciousness of their readers in real time as part of justifying ontological arguments.

Following postmodernism’s critiques of abstract theorizing, it makes sense that metaphysics has taken a “participatory turn” (Ferrer & Sherman, 2009). Practicing metaphysics now demands more than reading and writing theory in the traditional academic sense. Doing metaphysics means engaging in behaviors traditionally understood as “rituals,” as well as in specific practices that allow individuals to see their own experiences objectively. Below I explore how Gafni and Kincaid practice guerrilla ontology in their explorations of human sexuality and love, revealing uncanny mystical experiences in the songs and films of popular culture. As we are exposed to different and larger realities already within our own experience, we are also invited to change our life and the world. The implication of all forms of participatory metaphysics are ultimately political. It makes sense then that Nick Land’s writings on politics have gained as much attention as his metaphysical speculations. Land has been promoting a certain kind of Accelerationism that seeks the political means to hasten the coming of the techno-capitalist singularity, and thus to catapult Earth into a transhuman future. Land is driven to these extremes by his ontological considerations about the new realities of planetary-scale computation. The phrase “planetary-scale computation” has been made popular by Benjamin H. Bratton (2015), who has theorized about our historical moment as involving the creation of an Earth-sized computer, which he calls “The Stack.” The basic question is: At what point does this planetary computational stack replace reality? At what point in history does code itself become more real and world-creating than even the human subjectivity that writes it? Land’s techno-Logos-mysticism presents a world in which humans are not in control of their future because laws of computation and “machinic desire” have already transcend but included them (Land, 2011 p. 319); we are being swept along by these laws into realms of human obsolescence that are politically unprecedented. Land’s speculative realism eventually turns towards forms of political thought that have long been discredited by modernity and postmodernity. Neoreactionary forms of fascism have been inspired by Land’s work because of his unabashed embrace of realities that contextualize human subjectivity and desire in broader geo-historical and ontological dynamics. The metamodern return to metaphysics also marks a return to metaphysically inspired political ideologies as well as their accompanying emotion and violence. The vacuum created by the modern and postmodern absence of metaphysics is now being filled, for better or worse. Land’s work is one attempt to fill this void of meaning – it signals the dark possibilities entailed by the metamodern return to metaphysics."

(https://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)