Interior Dialogue

The branch of philosophy known as ontology is the fundamental, defining delusion of western civilization. In this sense Parmenides may be said to be the founding father of western civilization.

An ontology may be defined as a state of mind whereby one is in denial of time, or change. Parmenides is famous for having argued that time is an illusion. The remarkable longevity and power of this untenable and almost childish notion can be ascribed to the very strong appeal it has to any thinker who seeks to have an impact on the external world (i.e. the world outside his thoughts).

Any thinker considering the possibility of translating his ideas into action will find that ontology is uniquely suited to his purposes. Ontology opens the door to a correspondence theory of truth, allowing him to claim that his views “are true”, that they reflect the fundamental “reality”, rendering his chosen course of action not only desirable but inevitable. Any other course of action would be inconsistent with “reality”. When words such as “right”, “just”, “fair”, “moral”, “true”, “progress”, “evil”, “God’s will”, are used to justify an action, it is an instance of ontology being put to work.

Thus ontology is the perfect, fundamental feature of a culture that makes history. It has been used by men and women of action around the world to create turbulence in the otherwise laminar flow of time. As a consequence it has led to both great acts of creation and of destruction. The stereotypical example is the meteoric trajectory of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The main drawback of ontological thinking is that, while making history, it inevitably uses human beings as laboratory mice in the great social, political, military, economic or other experiments conducted by powerful people of action. Of course, this has been until now unavoidable, due to our very limited understanding of the dynamics of complex systems such as the human body, the human mind, and the biosphere in general, which includes human society, economy, politics, and science. The only alternative to action was paralysis, leading to destruction and death at the hands of other people of action. Refraining from action would only lead, ineluctably, to becoming a mouse in someone else’s experiment.

Strictly speaking, this approach is no different from how the animal world functions: humans, while partially protected from the caprices of the environment by their mastery of technology, have remained subject to the arbitrary yet self-inflicted caprices of their own views and ideas, which have often proven to be at least as unpredictable and destructive as the environment had been centuries previously. Among the most recent, widely known, and also I believe, last representatives of this ontology-centered paradigm are the neo-conservative followers of Leo Strauss.

The first serious challenge to ontology was brought by Charles Darwin. However this has not been recognized for what it was due to the fact that it was concerned with the natural world, rather than with the world of ideas.

The second, more direct attack was undertaken by Karl Popper. He was the first to adopt a non-ontologic view of truth, but rather an evolutionary view. By its explicit recognition of the role of time and change, his work can truly be seen as a turning point in the evolution of Western civilization. The great cycle which started with Parmenides is finally closing. Time is slowly coming back into its rights.

But the work of Popper was only the beginning. Most of his notions are still beholden to the old ontological conceptions of truth and reality. The next step was a reformulation of logic to remove “truth” and replace it with “belief”, which has been achieved with the theory of probability as logic, espoused most notably by Edwin T. Jaynes.

The groundwork has now been laid for a true paradigm shift in modern science and philosophy. The new paradigm will be associated with words such as “complex”, “relational”, “information”, “evolution”, “emergence”, “open”. The catalysts of the next phase of this shift will undoubtedly be, in science, the failure of the LHC to find the Higgs boson, and in politics the end of a -polar world (uni, bi…) leading to an “à la carte” age of world politics.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Alexandru Ioan Căbuz 2008.