Владислав Педдер – Processual Pessimism. On the Nature of Cosmic Suffering and Human Nothingness (страница 5)

“[…] The expression “flat ontology’ has a complicated genealogy. It was originally coined as a pejorative term for empiricist philosophies of science by Roy Bhaskar in his 1975 book, A Realist Theory of Science. By the late 1990s, it had begun to acquire a positive sense in discussions of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. But it only achieved widespread currency in the wake of Manual De Landa’s 2002 book about Deleuze, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. More recently, it has been championed by proponents of “object-oriented ontology’ and “new materialism’. It is its use by these theorists that I will be discussing today. I will begin by explaining the “four theses’ of flat ontology, as formulated by Levi Bryant. Bryant is a proponent of “object-oriented ontology’, a school of thought founded by Graham Harman. In his 2010 work The Democracy of Objects, Bryant encapsulates flat ontology in the following four theses:

Thesis 1: “First, due to the split characteristic of all objects, flat ontology rejects any ontology of transcendence or presence that privileges one sort of entity as the origin of all others and as fully present to itself.”

Thesis 2: “Second, […] the world or the universe does not exist. […] [T] here is no super-object that gathers all other objects together in a single, harmonious unity.”

Thesis 3: “Third, following Harman, flat ontology refuses to privilege the subject-object, human-world relation as a) a form of metaphysical relation different in kind from other relations between objects, and that b) refuses to treat the subject-object relation as implicitly included in every form of object-object relation.” The basic idea is that, unlike Descartes, Kant and other philosophers who put epistemology before ontology, flat ontology does not begin by negotiating conditions of cognitive access to the world. It begins by treating the human-world relation, i.e. our relation of cognitive access to things, as simply another thing in the world, which is to say, an inter-object relation. It refuses the claim that this epistemic or cognitive relation is inscribed in all objectifications, so that anything we say or do with objects reflects or encodes some kind of conceptual or practical transaction.

Thesis 4:”[F] ourth, flat ontology argues that all entities are on equal ontological footing and that no entity, whether artificial or natural, symbolic or physical, possesses greater ontological dignity than other objects. While indeed some objects might influence the collectives to which they belong to a greater extent than others, it doesn’t follow from this that these objects are more real than others. Existence, or being, is a binary such that something either is or is not.” These four theses taken together are supposed to entail something that has been called “antropodecentrism’. Bryant explains this in the following way: In this connection, flat ontology makes two key claims. First, humans are not at the center of being, but are among beings. Second, objects are not a pole opposing a subject, but exist in their own right, regardless of whether any other object or human relates to them. Humans, far from constituting a category called “subject” that is opposed to “object”, are themselves one type of object among many. What is significant are the denials that accompany the four theses of flat ontology. According to the first thesis, there is no transcendence: forms, species, kinds, archetypes, propositions, laws, and other abstract entities are disallowed. The flatness affirmed by flat ontology is the flatness of a more or less differentiated but nevertheless level ontological playing field. According to the second thesis, there is no world: no totality, universe, One-All, etc. This claim is not peculiar to flat ontologists; other contemporary philosophers, including Markus Gabriel and Alain Badiou, defend some version of it. According to the third thesis, there is no constituting subjectivity: no pure Apperception, Geist, consciousness, Dasein, etc. Flat ontologists do not begin by identifying subjective conditions of epistemic access to reality.

According to the fourth thesis, there is no appearance/ reality duality: what is, is, what is not, is not. Here we have an interesting reassertion of the Parmenidean thesis discussed in Plato’s Sophist. For Plato, philosophy or dialectics is predicated on the subversion of this Parmenidean interdiction on asserting the being of non-being or non-being of being: dialectics affirms the mixture of being and non-being. Flat ontology, in contrast, treats being as univocal: things can only be said to be in a single sense. But the claim about putting entities “on an equal ontological footing” implies that there are no degrees of being, just as there is no distinction between being and non-being, or between reality and appearance. Of course, this means that flat ontologists deny Plato’s claim that it is necessary to think the interpenetration of being and nonbeing, which is the task of dialectics.”

The critique offered by Brassier exposes the vulnerable points of flat ontology, but it does not invalidate its philosophical productivity. I accept its rejection of privileged entities, while also acknowledging the necessity of distinguishing between epistemological and ontological levels – a distinction that will become clearer in the subsequent analysis of process and experience. Flat ontology attempts to realize a thoroughgoing anthropo- and bio-decentrism. It moves far beyond the critique of human exceptionalism, subjecting to radical doubt the very idea of the privileged status of life as such. Life is no longer the center of the cosmos, but merely one among many temporary and co-equal modes of material organization, alongside other formations. This is the final point of the trajectory that begins with the critique of the Cartesian “I”: a world without a subject, without a biological center, without any hierarchy between the organic and the inorganic. Yes, it has its shortcomings; however, the essential contribution of flat ontology lies in compelling us to think beyond not only anthropocentrism, but any hierarchy grounded in the supposed “specialness” of life, mind, or metaphysical force. It is simply a necessary step.

Fractal Nature of Determinism

In the previous work I argued that human behaviour and consciousness are not the result of free choice but the lawful consequence of neurobiological, genetic, hormonal, and environmental factors. The work of Robert Sapolsky has shown that free will is an adaptive illusion necessary for social functioning yet incompatible with a scientific understanding of causation. The brain produces a sense of control, while at a deeper level all our decisions are determined by a chain of events beginning long before the moment of conscious choice.

However, the conclusion of the first part left open the fundamental question of determinism beyond human life and behaviour. For the Cosmos, classical linear Laplacean determinism10, now appears untenable in light of contemporary science. Quantum mechanics introduces fundamental indeterminacy at the microscopic level. Chaos theory demonstrates exponential sensitivity to initial conditions, rendering long-term prediction impossible. Self-organization and the emergence of novel forms in nature and society seem incompatible with rigid predestination. How then can determinism be preserved without collapsing into indeterminism or mysticism?

The answer requires a radical reconception of the concept of determinism itself. The linear model of causality, where one cause sequentially produces an effect, must be replaced with a fractal model in which causality is distributed, recursive, and self-similar at all scales. Fractal determinism does not deny quantum randomness, chaotic unpredictability, or spontaneous self-organization. On the contrary, it integrates them into a deeper notion of necessity in which randomness appears as a mode of manifestation of lawful structure, and novelty is a lawful consequence of complex interactions among many causal lines.

If linear determinism assumed that the future is implicitly encoded in initial conditions as an explicit plan, fractal determinism asserts that the future is not pre-scripted but inevitably arises from the system’s self-organization. If classical determinism sought a prime cause and a final goal, fractal determinism describes being as a self-generating process without an external source or teleological direction. If the traditional approach set necessity and chance in opposition, the new perspective treats them as complementary aspects of a single process.

This model finds expression in a number of fundamental mechanisms described within fractal geometry and the theory of complex systems. The observation of self-similarity – that form repeats across scales – emerged from practical problems of measurement. Lewis Richardson’s famous coastline paradox showed that the more finely one measures an indented line, the longer it becomes. This observation received mathematical formulation in the work of Benoit Mandelbrot, who laid the foundations of fractal geometry. Mandelbrot introduced the concept of fractal dimension, which permits the description of irregular, self-similar forms widespread in nature: coastlines, river networks, the vascular system of the lungs, and the distribution of neural activity in the brain.