Владислав Педдер – Processual Pessimism. On the Nature of Cosmic Suffering and Human Nothingness (страница 4)

Part I. Ontological Foundations

Flat Ontology of Process

Traditional European thought, from Christian anthropology to phenomenology, insisted on the special status of the human being, deriving it from the act of self-consciousness: “I think, therefore I exist.” This position not only consolidated anthropocentrism, but also made the subject into an ontological foundation, a point of reference for the world. However, if we look closely at how the very sense of “I” arises, it becomes clear that it is not a source but a result of information processing – a temporary and fragile product of differentiation, integration of information, metabolic and neural processes that unfold without any “observer.”

What is called consciousness is only a process, stable only so long as it is supported by flows of energy, information, and interactions. Thinking, accordingly, is a processual activity. As soon as these flows change, consciousness collapses – not because an “I” disappears, but because it never existed as a substance in the first place. Instead, there is only a non-subjective dynamics, a process that I will describe further.

Such an approach makes it possible to step beyond not only anthropocentrism, but also the very opposition of “subject – object.” The point is not to “return the human being to nature,” but to see that nature never knew the human as a separate category. Living nature is not the center of the Cosmos, but one among many temporary forms of organization of process, as vulnerable and transient as any other. Culture, ethics, creativity – none of this is abolished, but it is deprived of its transcendent status. They turn out not to be manifestations of “spirit,” but complex, historically conditioned modes of stabilizing experience, which themselves obey the laws of thermodynamics, information, and decay.

The contemporary rejection of biocentrism represents a consistent philosophical movement, beginning with the deconstruction of anthropocentrism and reaching its radical phase in the overcoming of naturocentrism as a whole. This evolution is vividly expressed in the work of Jean-Marie Schaeffer, who enacts his rejection of anthropocentrism through a critique of the “Thesis of Human Exceptionalism.” Schaeffer identifies the structures of anthropocentrism by analyzing the Cartesian cogito, demonstrating that the claim to the uniqueness of human consciousness is untenable. However, while Schaeffer stops at the boundary of the biological, disputing human exceptionality without questioning the distinctiveness of the living, other philosophers have gone considerably further. Thinkers such as Manuel DeLanda, Graham Harman, and Levi Bryant initiated a broader perspective, first rejecting consciousness as a philosophically privileged phenomenon, and then discarding the very vertical ontology that structures hierarchies among nature, life, and objects. Their aim became the development of a flat ontology, in which humans, artifacts, natural phenomena, and technological objects coexist on a single ontological plane without any center or primacy. Thus, the final point of this trajectory is a complete departure not only from anthropocentrism and biocentrism, but also from any naturocentrism that dissolves heterogeneous entities into a single whole.

But let us not get ahead of ourselves. In his book, Jean-Marie Schaeffer conducts a meticulous deconstruction of the complex of assumptions we have come to designate as the “Thesis of Human Exceptionalism,” and in this deconstruction, the center of gravity invariably falls on the problem of the “I” and on the legacy of Cartesianism. For Schaeffer, the Cartesian cogito is not merely a historical argument; it functions as a methodological device through which an entire system of epistemological and ontological privileges is defended: the self-referentiality6 of the statement “I think” is attributed immunity against doubt, and on this basis an extended conclusion about the nature of the human as a thinking substance is constructed. Schaeffer clearly demonstrates both the power of this device and its limits: self-referentiality indeed grants the cogito a special performative force, but this force is not equivalent to a proof of the essential nature of the “I.” Descartes sought to derive from the immediate intuition of existence not only the fact of the speaker’s being, but also a characterization of the nature in which this being is realized; Schaeffer emphasizes that such a transition from fact to essence is unjustified when taking into account modern knowledge of biology, neuroscience, and the social nature of human life.

Schaeffer’s key idea is to show that the Cartesian defense of the “I” operates as a strategy of immunization: it delineates the boundaries of what is considered admissible in human knowledge and refuses to accept “externalist”7 evidence originating “from the third person.” Due to this strategy, any external knowledge about the human being can easily be declared irrelevant to understanding their true nature, because the true nature is supposedly revealed only in the act of self-consciousness. Schaeffer terms this segregationism8: the Cartesian defense renders philosophy and the humanities partially insulated from naturalistic explanations, and this, in his view, is precisely what makes the Thesis of Human Exceptionalism resilient, regardless of empirical advances in biology.

Through an analysis of phenomena that disrupt the authentication of mental activity – auditory hallucinations, delusions of “inserted thoughts,” and similar disorders – he demonstrates that the very fact of “I think” can be experienced as non-self; the sense of authorship of thoughts and the sense of agency are separable and susceptible to failure. These clinical cases show that the immunity of the cogito does not guarantee that we are dealing with a monolithic, inflexible center of consciousness; in practice, the act of “I” is vulnerable to distribution, fragmentation, and erroneous attribution. Consequently, even where the performative force of the cogito remains undeniable, its conclusions regarding the nature of the “I” lose their persuasive power.

The development of these ideas can be traced in the works of the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett. Contemporary debates on the “hard problem of consciousness” are gaining momentum today. I have already discussed David Chalmers in the previous book, but I do not share his position on consciousness, although, as you will see in the second part of this book, I acknowledge his arguments regarding cognitive functions. The hard problem of consciousness is resolved if consciousness as a phenomenon does not exist; in this sense, I am an eliminative materialist. Dennett rejects Chalmers’ panpsychism; he is a physicalist, and his approach to consciousness can be called illusionism, which is much closer to eliminativism, but it does not eliminate the phenomenon of “consciousness” – rather, it provides a new explanation, stripped of any magical properties. From his book From Bacteria to Bach and Back, it becomes clear that his critique of the Cartesian subject is even more radical than Schaeffer’s. Whereas Schaeffer analyzes the cogito as an erroneous transition from the fact of thinking to a substantial “I,” Dennett goes further – he questions the very existence of that central subject which Cartesian tradition so vigorously defends. For Dennett, the “I” is a late product of evolution, a kind of “narrative center” arising from the intertwining of multiple cognitive processes. He compares the self to a theoretical construct in physics – a convenient reference point lacking any substantiality.

In the context of Schaeffer’s critique of segregationism, Dennett’s position appears as a logical completion: if Schaeffer shows that the Cartesian “I” cannot serve as a foundation for human exceptionalism, Dennett demonstrates that this “I” simply does not exist as a unified, coherent entity. His famous metaphor of the “heterophenomenon”9 describes consciousness as the result of distributed neural networks. Interestingly, unlike radical eliminativists, Dennett preserves the self as a useful illusion – similar to how the center of mass remains a useful abstraction in physics, even though it does not exist as a discrete entity in reality.

Dennett provides a powerful conceptual apparatus for demystifying the subject, but his caution regarding elimination leaves room for more decisive conclusions. His analysis shows that the Cartesian “I” is not merely erroneous – it is the result of a kind of simplification (the word “illusion” is poorly suited here, because if it were an illusion, there would have to be a reality beyond it, which does not exist at all), created by evolution to simplify complex cognitive processes.

But if the “I” is a process, not a substance, then its ontological status must not only be downgraded but reinterpreted as a temporary pattern within the flow of mental events. Dennett stops halfway, preserving a functional role for the self; I, however, insist that disintegration is not a side effect but a fundamental property of any formation. And this brings us to the discussion of flat ontology. To describe it, we turn to Ray Brassier’s article Deleveling: Against “Flat Ontologies”, where he elaborates the essence of flat ontology in detail.: