Liquid trees

It is hardly contentious that all modern science is materialist, including even psychology, that seems compelled to prove its scientific credentials by referring and reducing to neuronal processes. The social sciences, too, investigate the positive 'reality' of materially anchored, social practices and structures. But what is matter? Is it what can be perceived by the bodily senses and measured by various techniques and apparatuses to provide data for analysis? Is it what extended, physical beings are made of?

Already with the ancient Greeks, science (ἐπιστήμη _epistaemae_) focused on physical beings with size (μέγεθος _megethos_), extension (ἔκτασις _ektasis_)  and mass (ὄνκος _onkos_). Their word for matter is ὕλη (_hulae_), which in its everyday usage covers all sorts of wood: a forest of trees, timber for building, firewood fuel. For the Greeks, the paradigmatic kind of matter is tree, from which the philosophical concept of matter is abstracted, or 'pulled off'.

Modern physics and chemistry would seem to have come a long way from this primitive Greek conception of matter, but is this truly the case? Modern physics has broken down matter into sub-atomic entities including protons, neutrons, electrons, and even stranger entities such as quarks and gluons holding them together like glue, and light itself, composed of streams of massless quantum entities called photons (from Greek φῶς, _phos_ for 'light'). Light is the purest form of energy, consisting of massless photons travelling at maximum physical speed c, the speed of light, thus representing the purest form of transformation of matter into movement, as expressed in Einstein's famous equation E=m.c^2.

In the present globalized world, energy is of vital importance not just physically by powering the movement of all sorts of technological things in production processes, but prior to that, and even more so, in powering such technological things for the sake of keeping valorization of the Medium going, i.e. the endless circular movement of thingified value going through its various value-form transformations to generate surplus-value. The hidden global imperative is that thingified value endlessly augment.

Although the valorization movement of thingified value is purely formal and infinite, it also requires the physical movements of production and circulation, including the activity of human labour, for its endless augmentation. Only by virtue of valorization of the Medium being endless does it have also an endless need for physical energy to drive all the necessary physical movements, enhanced by various technologies for the sake of cost-cutting productivity increases that, in turn, enhance the generation of surplus value.

These technologies have long since liberated themselves from a reliance on matter in the Greek sense, i.e. on wood. Technological devices and buildings are no longer made merely of wood, and energy is no longer provided by burning firewood. We moderns flatter ourselves that we have long since surpassed what a Greek carpenter can do with timber or a Greek blacksmith can achieve with a hammer, anvil and a charcoal fire. We have moved on to more sophisticated fuels as energy sources such as coal, oil and natural gas. All these so-called fossil fuels, however, derive from decomposed trees extracted from the Earth's crust. Trees decompose over geological æons into solid coal, liquid oil and gaseous natural gas, and all three fossil fuels can be burnt to generate electric current that is today the preferred power source for any physical movement, especially as required by valorization of the Medium.

It is even the case that liquid trees, i.e. mineral oil, is the material employed to make myriad kinds of plastics that are ubiquitous in today's world. Without the discovery of polymers, many modern technologies would be impossible, and our lives as players in the gainful game would not be so convenient, environmental pollution by plastics be damned.

The depletion of the Earth's huge deposits of fossil fuels by digging them up or otherwise extracting them, then burning them, has led inevitably, over frighteningly few centuries, to devastation of the Earth for the sake of endless valorization. Climate change, with devastating ramifications, including geopolitically, is upon us. Political efforts are being undertaken to accomplish the momentous shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources for the sake of sustainability. But who is seriously asking: sustainability of what?

Further reading: Laws of movement & Energy.

'An Invisible Global Social Value' TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

Sustainability? Of what?.

Three laws of movement (again).

Three laws of movement (again)

Let us take another look at three laws of movement already addressed in other posts (see links below):

i) the second Newtonian law of physical motion 

f = m.a (or force is equal to mass times acceleration),

ii) Einstein's astounding law of mass-energy equivalence 

E = m.c^2
(energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared), 

and

iii) Marx's basic formula for the valorization of thingified value as capital 

M -> C -> M+ΔM
(value-form transformation of advanced money-capital into commodities required for a production process and the further value-transformation of the product via the circulation process into money-capital returned with a surplus value).

Re i): Newton's classical second law of motion is a most elegant example of how the physical motion of a physical body, regarded as a point mass, can be encapsulated in a surprisingly simple mathematical equation. The scope of its application seemed for centuries to be unlimited, albeit that its first realm of application, in the 17th century, was that of planetary motion, which was at the focus of attention for great names such as Kepler, Galileo and Newton. Along with the law of inertia and of equal and opposite reaction between interacting physical bodies, the law was cast as applying throughout the universe in an homogeneous mathematized (real vector) space ticking uniformly with an absolute, continuous, real time variable t.

Galileo's famous dictum of 1623 in his Il Saggiatore — that the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics — nevertheless turns the truth upside down. Rather, it is the absolute will to power over all kinds of movement that dictates, in particular, that the physical (loco)motion of (celestial) bodies be made precalculable through an appropriate kind of mathematics, namely, the infiinitesimal calculus. Mathematical precalculable predictability of movement satisfies the will to power over movement by reducing physical motion to solvable equations. 

Already a century earlier, in 1543, with his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, Copernicus had ostensibly empirically proved that the Sun does not revolve around the Earth, but conversely the Earth around the Sun. This is nonsense, of course, because motion is relative and reciprocal: if, from A's standpoint, B revolves around it, then conversely, from B's standpoint, A revolves around B. The point of Copernicus' discovery is that the motion of the planets becomes mathematically more elegantly describable from the perspective of the Sun's reference frame as revolutions around the Sun. The complications of Ptolemaic epicycles of planets revolving around the Earth are done away with, paving the way for a more uniform, elegant Newtonian theory of gravitational motion in an homogeneous space.

Re ii): Einstein's mind-boggling equation E = m.c^2 pronounces the equivalence of mass and energy as a postulate of special relativity theory. It was derived not by considering the equivalent of Newton's second law, but by considering and postulating the equivalent of the classical principle of conservation of momentum. Whereas in Newtonian mechanics, a) (counted clock-) time is taken to be uniform throughout the universe and b) the mass of a physical body is taken to be a non-transformable constant in physical interactions, in Einsteinian special relativity, a) (counted clock-) time is relative to the observer's inertial frame of reference and b) mass depends on the body's speed in a given reference frame. The momentum of a physical particle no longer depends solely on its velocity, but also upon its relativistically variable mass. This circumstance links mass with physical movement and thus with kinetic energy. Time itself becomes the one-dimensional path of light, that is linked to the three spatial dimensions via the Lorentz transformation. Henceforth, physical events are conceived as happening in the universe at space-time co-ordinates (x,y,z.ct) in an observer's frame of reference. (The observer here may be simply an apparatus set up somewhere to gather physical data.)

As a body (particle) approaches the speed of light in a given inertial reference frame, its mass tends toward infinity, at least according to the equation expressing the relativistic mass in terms of a particle's rest mass. In other words, the greater the momentum and kinetic energy of a particle, the greater its mass and, in the limit, the threatened, physically impossible infinitude of mass is averted by the conversion of all the mass into the motion of pure light composed of a stream of massless, quantized photons. Matter dissolves into (divine?) light. Einstein's equation expresses nothing other than this possibility of the transformation of matter into pure, energetic movement (including the thermal energy of atoms and molecules in motion) — the physical law for developing nuclear energy and atomic bombs. Anything physical moving at the speed of light cannot have any mass, which is the case for electromagnetic radiation. Note that, whereas the absolute speed limit for anything physical is equal to c, this speed limit does not apply to the movement of the mind, which is non-spatial and hence both nowhere and everywhere.

Note also that, whereas Newtonian gravitational force only acts upon physical bodies with mass, in general relativity theory massless light is subject to gravitational force by dint of its being equivalent to the curvature of space-time itself. The straight path of light in special relativity becomes its curved path in general relativity.

Re iii): Marx's formula for the valorization movement of (the Medium of) thingified value has hitherto not been called a law of movement. Unlike Newton's and Einstein's laws, it is non-predicative but instead enunciates an inexorable principle that the transformational circuiting of advanced capital through its value-forms must fulfil if the circuit is to be sustainable. If a circuit of valorization does not generate a surplus, but instead a loss diminishing the originally advanced money-capital, this endangers the movement altogether, because eventually the capital will consume itself and end up as nothing. 

The law of movement usually associated with Marx's Das Kapital read in the orthodox way is the so-called labour theory of value that Marx adopted in a modified form from Adam Smith. But this 'law of labour-value' is untenable; equal amounts of embodied "socially necessary labour-time" do not change hands in the exchange of commodity goods and services (nor even a regulated modification of such labour-time quantities as investigated in the so-called 'transformation problem'). Rather, quite the opposite: it is the exchange itself in the Medium of thingified value that determines the magnitude of a commodity's value. The commodity's embodied labour is thus evaluated on the market itself.

The deeper insight offered by Marx's main work is that a capitalist economy, and especially a global capitalist economy, must satisfy the principle of valorization if it is to remain viable. This is the law that rules the global economy. Hence economic growth must be unlimited, the finiteness of the Earth and all that lives on it be damned. This law of movement remains invisible and unknown to the modern science of economics because this social science is lacking its foundational concepts. They can only be uncovered by thinking socio-ontologically. The Medium of thingified value, namely, is an ontological form (εἶδος or 'look') of sociated labour that remains invisible to empiricist thinking.

The valorization of thingified value is plainly not a physical movement as such, but a principle governing the sociation in a capitalist economy. It does require, however, also kinds of physical movement associated with the production and circulation processes. Commodity goods and services have to be produced by many different kinds of labour employing many different kinds of physical means of production. Similarly, such produced commodity goods and services have to be actually sold to realize sales revenues for the capitalist enterprise, and this requires labour, including that of transportation and marketing, again employing the appropriate physical means. This entails in particular that the productivity of a production process can be measured via appropriate physical quantities such as hourly physical output which, in turn, can be converted into a measure of labour productivity if wage-costs are known. Each unit output then costs x cents in labour costs, but what the product can be sold for on the market is a brute fact that may have little connection with the labour costs.

As I said, the movement of valorization cannot be seen as such without the appropriate socio-ontological concepts. What capitalism is essentially, i.e. its ontological whatness, remains today an unposed and unanswered question. The social science of economics therefore cannot come to grips with the truth of this kind of sociating movement and instead fudges the questions, engaging wilfully in obfuscation. In remaining blind to the truth, economic movements are then (merely) explained by empirically based theoretical models. Economists look at empirical regularities and patterns from the past and try to extrapolate them more or less successfully. They tend to use sentences starting with 'History tells us that ...'. There is no unified economic theory at all, but only various bits and pieces of theoretical explanation for various scenarios based on unending empirical research. Empiricist modern social science does not even notice the deficit.

Further reading: Newton mathematizes Aristotelean ontology.

Laws of movement & Energy.

'An Invisible Global Social Value' TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

Sustainability? Of what?. 

Appendix: 'A demathematizing phenomenological interpretation of quantum-mechanical indeterminacy' in Movement and Time in the Cyberworld De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Why I am not an atheist

Why I am not an atheist. And also: Why I am not a believer.

An atheist does not believe in the existence of God; s/he denies His existence.

A believer believes in the existence of God; it is a matter of faith.

Both beliefs (or convictions) presuppose somehow the meaning of existence itself. 'To exist' is synonymous with 'to be', but what does 'being' itself mean? Does 'being' have several or even many meanings? And if God were to be, which mode of being would pertain to His being? For a believer or a non-believer, such questions have no weight for pondering because it is only a matter of believing or negating a certain belief. For a philosopher, the search and struggle for the truth of the phenomena themselves trump any concern with belief.

What modern science ascertains as true, in the sense of its hypothetical models being verified as correct, so far, by empirical scientific methodology, is contraposed to belief in God. For modern science there is no convincing empirical evidence for God's existence, and it also claims to have better, scientifically tested explanations for how the world came about (it seems always to be a question of origins in linear time). This amounts to a tacit assertion that the mode of being with which the modern sciences, starting with physics, deal is the one pertinent also to the question whether God exists. But the modern sciences apply, either directly or indirectly, only to physical kinds of movement of physical, material beings. They are unaware of the ontology of productive-efficient movement on which they are implicitly founded.

In eschewing the philosophical psychology of an Aristotle in his De Anima, even the psyche of modern psychology has had to be broken down to consciousness, and this consciousness somehow, without further investigation as to what it is (its essence), reduced (literally: led back) to a material base for it to be taken seriously from a modern scientific viewpoint. In this way, since it lacks 'material substance' in itself, the reduced psyche's movements becomes materially manipulable, which is what all modern science is about, culminating in psycho-pharmaceutics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Something called the 'psyche' or 'soul' in the traditional sense is useless for scientific purposes; its study an unprofitable line of research amounting, seemingly, to mere speculation. It is tacitly (or not so tacitly) assumed that the human psyche is an epiphenomenon of some kind of physical — say, neuronal-cerebral — movement, as we read in the OED on one of the significations of 'epiphenomenon': "Applied to consciousness regarded as a by-product of the material activities of the brain and nerve-system."

This way of thinking, however, skips over and suppresses the question concerning what the psyche is as a phenomenon in its own right, i.e. without material reduction to the status of an epiphenomenon. How is the human psyche itself to be conceived, not as a kind of being, but as a mode of being? And if it turns out, employing phenomenological methodology (cf. On Human Temporality), that the meaning of being itself is temporal and, in turn, time itself a three-dimensionally temporal openness, then the question concerning the mode of being of any entity at all becomes one concerning its mode of presencing and absencing in three-dimensional time, to which the psyche belongs. The psyche's openness to the world is precisely its 3D-temporality (and not solely its temporally one-dimensional sense-perception, as it has been traditionally). Both three-dimensional time and the psyche are pre-spatial and pre-material, and as such not amenable to treatment by modern science with its narrow-minded, empiricist methodology. For us mortal humans, who are the ones prone to asking whether God exists, and prior to any debates between modern science and religious belief, the question becomes one concerning a mode of 3D-temporal essencing. As what/who does God essence in the three-dimensional temporal psyche?

The more fundamental, encompassing and liberating question, however, is that concerning three-dimensional time itself and how this temporal openness is passed through a fourth dimension to reach the human psyche. We belong to time. From this alternative starting-point, further crucial phenomena such as human freedom can be rethought.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Aristotle's purely energetic god of the fair.

Newton mathematizes Aristotelean ontology

A widespread attitude and prejudice in modern philosophy of science is to dismiss Aristotle's scientific writings as empirically incorrect and therefore superseded by modern science, starting with physics. Due to its mathematical nature, modern physics is able to employ quantitative data to confirm or falsify its hypothetical models. Such confirmation or falsification relates to the predictions of movement generated by the models. Empiricist scientific methodology reigns supreme, with no alternative in sight, thanks in no small measure to the British empiricist way of thinking initiated by Bacon. 'Aristotle is old hat —  forget 'im', is the message, 'He merely speculates'. He retains interest only from the perspective of the history of ideas, a relatively quaint pastime for genteel scholars.

What then, if it turned out that the father of modern mathematized physics, Newton, could not have conceived and written his Principia Mathematica without having appropriated key concepts from Aristotle's ontology of productive movement, whilst simultaneously dropping their ontological import? There is no ontology of movement in today's physics, nor in any other modern science. Empiricist, 'evidence-based', scientific methodology employing theoretical models has obliterated any trace of ontological thinking in today's mind. The question concerning "the being as being", τὸ ὂν ᾖ ὄν  (_to on haei on_), where the second "being" is understood participially, i.e. as a partaking of being, is dead. To say nothing of the deeper and more radical question as to the meaning of being itself.

Is this simultaneous adoption and ditching of Aristotle's ontology of productive movement by Newtonian mechanics for the sake of calculative power over physical motion to be regarded as an advance and a boon for humankind, or rather as the opposite?

In contrast to modern physics, Aristotle's Physics investigates the participation in being of physical beings conceived as κινούμενα (_kinoumena_), i.e. material beings that can be moved. Hence there is a focus, in particular, on the questions: What is physical movement?, What is time? and How do physical movement and time relate to each other? The distinction between physical beings that can be moved (passively) and beings that can (actively) move themselves, i.e. living beings, is in the background. What life itself is as a mode of being in its own right is investigated in Aristotle's De Anima, Western thinking's philosophical psychology amounting to an ontology of life. The distinction between living beings that are 'in the psyche', i.e. (ἔμψυχον _empsychon_), and non-living beings that are 'without the psyche', i.e. (ἄψυχον _apsychon_) runs throughout ancient Greek thinking. The distinction falls by the wayside in modern scientific thinking that no longer knows about the ontological difference between a being and its mode of being. Modern science is even hell-bent on trying to make life from non-living matter, to hell with investigating the ontology of life as a mode of being.

Let us take a closer look at Newton's laws, first enunciated in 1687, by first citing Wikipedia: 

"Newton's laws of motion are three physical laws that describe the relationship between the motion of an object and the forces acting on it. These laws, which provide the basis for Newtonian mechanics, can be paraphrased as follows:

1. A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless it is acted upon by a force.
2. At any instant of time, the net force on a body is equal to the body's acceleration  multiplied by its mass or, equivalently, the rate at which the body's momentum is changing with time.
3. If two bodies exert forces on each other, these forces have the same magnitude but opposite directions."
   

The first law, properly attributable to Galileo, is the law of inertia for physical bodies in loco-motion, i.e. change of position, in an homogeneous, three-dimensional Euclidian space arithmetized by real Cartesian co-ordinates. The law says that a net force acting on a physical body is required to change its speed and/or direction, a change in speed and/or direction being called acceleration. Acceleration by a net resultant force breaks the physical body's inertia.

The second law in effect states the negation of the first, specifying it further, as given by the famous simple formula f=m.a. Equivalently, the law says that the net force is equal to the rate of change of momentum, given by the formula for momentum, p=mv, with its rate of change in linear time given by the the differential equation, f=dp/dt=d(mv)/dt=m.(dv/dt), since the mass m is assumed to be constant. To be able to even write this equation, it must be assumed that time t itself is composed of instants mathematizable by a real, continuous, single linear variable that, in turn, allows instantaneous speed of a physical body to appear as a sensible notion enabling mathematical manipulation by employing the infinitesimal calculus. It never occurs to a modern physicist to question whether the notions of instantaneous speed and time composed of consecutive instants are at all phenomenologically tenable. In practice they prove themselves useful and effective, and are therefore left unquestioned.

The third Newtonian law simply states that for any force acting on a physical body there must be an equal and opposite resistant force emanating from the body passively being acted upon. Mathematically speaking, this is expressed as: every active force vector f is resisted by a negative vector -f.

One might now ask what this has to do with Aristotle's ontology of productive physical movement, most thoroughly investigated in Book Theta of his Metaphysics. At first sight there seems to be scant resemblance, but it will come to light when discussing the second law. 

The first Newtonian law postulates that the natural motion of a physical body is straight ahead along a line at uniform speed. In Aristotlelean physics, by contrast, the natural motion of a physical body is not through space, but from place to place, hence loco-motion (κίνησις κατὰ τοπόν _kinaesis kata topon_). There is no homogeneous space in Aristotle's physics. For celestial bodies the natural motion is circular, around the Earth, through the æther. For sub-lunar bodies, the natural motion is down or up, toward the centre of the Earth or away from it. Of the four elements, water and earth naturally move downward, whereas fire and air naturally move upward. There is no gravitational force, but only different kinds of natural motion. An external force or 'violence' (βία, _bia_) is required to shift a physical body from its natural motion. There is no effort made to calculate motions and speeds.

This differentiation of natural motions into celestial and sub-lunar is an impediment to mathematization. Hence an homogeneous, three-dimensional space of positions is adopted from Euclidean geometry and arithmetized with Cartesian co-ordinates. Places become positions in a mathematical space. In this space there remains only one kind of natural motion: along a straight line with uniform speed unless a net force, including a gravitational one, is applied. This has the advantage that linear mathematics is elegant and simple, enabling calculations of motions, albeit not without employing the infinitesimal calculus.

The second Newtonian law is where the Aristotelean ontology of productive movement comes in. This ontology proceeds from a phenomenological conception of δύναμις (_dynamis_) as the (ἀρχή μεταβολῆς ἐν ἄλλῳ ἢ ἐν ταυτῷ ᾖ ἄλλο _archae metabolaes en alloi ae en tautoi haei allo_), i.e. as the "starting-point governing a change in another or in itself insofar it is another". (Note that 'self' and 'other' are elementary ontological categories.) When this forceful starting-point is put to work, this is literally the 'at-work-ness' or ἐνέργεια (_energeia_) of the δύναμις on a physical body effecting a movement or change toward an end or τέλος (_telos_) which, in turn, is the product to be made that was initially envisaged in the εἶδος (_eidos_).

The paradigm for this ontology is τέχνη ποιητική (_technae poiaetikae_), the art of making, e.g. a carpenter making a table. The carpenter embodies the know-how for how to make a table, who envisages in advance the table to be made in an εἶδος or 'idea' of the table. The carpenter can only see the εἶδος in the mind (νοῦς,  _nous_) because s/he can see into the open temporal dimension of the future. The embodied know-how is the force that sets the movement of making going by putting the know-how to work in the at-work-ness of the know-how. The productive movement is guided by the envisaged εἶδος of the table, with the carpenter's 'logical' know-how selecting at each step what is to be done, including selecting which tool to use and correcting any mistakes in the productive movement. This continual selection of actions is done by the carpenter's λόγος (_logos_), where λόγος is here to be understood from its associated verb λέγειν (_legein_), one of whose deeper meanings, beyond 'to say', is 'to select', a pre-linguistic meaning. The skilful carpenter is the efficient force working on the material timber or ὕλη (_hulae_) who first has to select the appropriate timber, along with the appropriate tools. Working with the carpentry tools requires continual, selective corrections of the productive movement in order that the εἶδος is finally realized in the τέλος, or finished product, when the productive movement comes to an end in its ἐντελέχεια (_entelecheia_, or literally, its 'in-end-having-ness'). εἶδος and τέλος are both elementary categories conceptualizing how beings show themselves simply as beings for the mind.

There are therefore four essential elements to this ontology of productive movement:
i) the embodied know-how as the mover (efficient cause)
ii) the appropriate material on which the know-how is put to work (material cause)
iii) the εἶδος of the envisaged table to be produced (formal cause) and
iv) the τέλος as the end-product of the productive movement (final cause)

The third Newtonian law is simply an adaptation of the Aristotelean distinction between active and passive forces that is adopted and mathematized. This distinction is apparent already in the selection of the material to be worked upon by the know-how. The material has to have the passive force to resist the active force of the maker. It is no use trying to make a table out of water or rotten wood, for example. The passive force of the timber has to suffer its being shaped by the carpenter's active force into the various parts of a table and its being assembled into the final product as table. 

In the Newtonian adaptation of this Aristotelean ontology of productive movement there is a marked reduction. First of all, there is no mention of elementary categories; they are taken for granted and disappear into mathematical entities. The efficient force at work on a material physical body no longer has as an envisaged εἶδος and therefore also no τέλος, thus rendering it blind, with no insight into the temporal dimension of the future. With the elimination of both εἶδος and τέλος, there remains only the blind, efficient force, or δύναμις, working on a material body, or kind of ὕλη, temporally from 'behind', from 'earlier'. Both are mathematized as quantitative mathematical entities, to wit, a directed force as a spatial vector f in an homogeneous, three-dimensional, mathematical space, and matter reduced to a quantity of mass m, which is merely a real scalar in the vector space. The carpenter's know-how is reduced to a blind physical force satisfying the equation f=m.a, or, in words, force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration in real, continuous, linear time. Linear time is assumed and required because the physical motion itself is governed simply by cause preceding an effect. The force's effect can be calculated along such linear time employing the mathematical operations of differentiation and integration in the infinitesimal calculus that was developed by Newton, and in parallel by Leibniz, precisely for this purpose.

Far from representing an advance over Aristotle's ontology of productive movement, Newton's mathematical mechanics could be regarded as an impoverishment that blinds the mind. The apparent advantage of being able to mathematically precalculate the motion of physical bodies is gained at the cost of losing sight of the phenomena of movement themselves. It can no longer be seen that the Aristotelean ontology of productive movement is applicable to only one kind of movement. This suppression of the phenomena has led to the attempt in subsequent centuries since Newton to extend the reach of mathematized power over movement to kinds of movement that are not amenable to such treatment: the movement of the mind, the movement of interplay in society, the movement of the economy, each of these kinds of movement requiring its own, specific ontology. Hence modern sciences such as psychology, sociology and economics are lacking their ontologically grounded foundational concepts. This amounts to a blindsiding of the Western mind for the sake of the absolute will to power over all kinds of movement. This will to power, however, is delusory, hubristic and therefore, despite its hyperbolical promises of progress in the well-being of humankind, ultimately highly destructive, especially once paired with the valorization movement of The Medium spoken of in numerous other artefactphil posts (e.g. Laws of movement & Energy, Hegemony of The Medium?).

Further reading: Aristotle Metaphysics Book Theta. 

Isaac Newton Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica 1687.

Martin Heidegger Aristoteles, Metaphysik Θ 1-3 Summer Semester 1931, Heinrich Hüni (ed.) Gesamtausgabe Bd. 33 Klostermann, Frankfurt/M. 1981. 

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Psychology without psyche without time

The modern science of psychology is lacking its foundational concept — that of the psyche itself. Not to worry. In the Modern Age it has been replaced by consciousness and subsequently consciousness has been reduced hypothetically to something generated causally by the neurological activity of the material brain, for that is something modern science can get a grip on. Today's neuroscience has set out on the futile quest to 'prove' empirically that this is so, without ever being able to say what consciousness itself (a mere 'quale' or 'quality' of matter?) is, not to mention, what the venerable psyche is. The modern, scientific mind imagines the psyche as something fuzzily spiritual, soulful, and rejects it out of hand.

The experimentally discovered neuroplasticity of the brain is said to offer therapeutic opportunities for 'rewiring' it, thus helping those with a psychological malady. Manipulation of a part of the soma is supposed to improve performance of the psyche-cum-consciousness. In this kind of research, tinkering with animals' brains is assumed to help in attempts to 'rewire' those of that other kind of animal assumed to be we humans. This kind of brain mechanics is what has become of psycho-somatic therapy, with the material soma trumping the immaterial psyche, whose very existence is put into doubt. The barbarism of this kind of thinking (scientific, evidence-based) goes unnoticed.

For ancient Greek thinking, the psyche (ψυχή) was the principle of life, signifying the self-movement of living beings and their sensuous openness to the world. Such self-movement is fourfold: change of where (loco-motion), of how much (quantity: growth, decay), of how (quality: maturing, aging) and of what (propagation, self-replication). Aristotle's De Anima is Western thinking's foundational book investigating the psyche, whose deep insights into what life is have been rendered superficial today. Hence there is no serious critical engagement with the question: What is life? It is answered with a short definition, such as self-replication (e.g. of DNA). 

Whether Aristotle's investigation of life as a mode of being has to be rethought and revamped is not on the agenda. His thinking has been written off as superseded by modern science because it allegedly does not account for the empirical data. Life itself is taken for granted as an empirically established fact, and science concentrates on finding the molecular building blocks of life and figuring out how their combination somehow springs to life, perhaps as a single-cell yeast in a lab somewhere. Astrophysics goes in search of moons or exoplanets on which such building blocks can be detected — on the hunch that living organisms will eventually be discovered there with help from the appropriate technological apparatuses.

The failure to re-engage with Aristotle's thinking on the psyche and human being itself has many consequences, starting with postulating without further interrogation that the human is a kind of animal. This latter is an axiom for all modern science, for it enables the will to power to get a material grip on the movement of human lives. Perhaps the psyche itself as a mode of being has to be completely rethought and deepened in connection with interrogating the Aristotelean hermeneutic casting of time as linear, and more specifically, as derived from counting it off physical movement that, in turn, is supposed to be governed by effective causality.

Human psychology is practised as kinds of therapy for psychic conditions and as techniques for manipulating human behaviour. The latter prove themselves to be extremely useful in marketing goods and services to the consumer, whose essential function is to realize sales revenues for capitalist enterprises. As a linch-pin in the gainful game, consumers are supposed to find happiness in consumption, and modern science has apparently even discovered happiness hormones, whose exudations under the application of appropriate advertising techniques can be measured. Much research goes into such manipulative techniques for the sake of (unknowingly) enhancing valorization of The Medium*. Market research itself is an established, well-paid part of the advertising industry that is crucial for turning over advanced capital, preferably as quickly as possible.

Psychological illnesses themselves have everything to do with the way of life in an historical kind of society whose movement is dictated by a principle of movement antithetical to the movement of human life. The hectic pace of living induces stress, anxiety and depression in many leading their lives under such conditions of accelerating turnover-time of globally valorizing capital. 

Insight is entirely lacking into the essential connection and grating contradiction between the human psyche's belonging to the three-dimensional openness of time (that is at the core of human freedom of movement) and the straight-jacket of the circular movement of ever-valorizing thingified value along sequential, linear time. The elementary question concerning the nature of time itself is not on the agenda.

* The Medium of thingified value itself remains invisible, entirely unknown to the social science of economics, as well as to any other modern science.

Further reading: CO2 and The Medium.

Laws of movement & Energy.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024. 

Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking Core Phenomena of Political Philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2018. 

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld: Questioning the Digital Cast of Being De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

Ideologically brainwashed suckers

Today we hear allegations from politicians leading the ostensibly Free World that the public is being brainwashed by "radical Left ideology" (MTG).

But what about the indoctrination of the population from birth through the media, starting with television, into the ideology of ruthless, dog-eat-dog capitalism under the guise of individualist freedom? Such indoctrination amounts to inculcating, hammering in with the heel of a boot, a set of ideas that explains the world more or less crudely and deceptively. Under this ideology, each individual has the opportunity to compete to earn income, to acquire property and, sweetest of all, the freedom to enjoy spending it on consumer goods and services. This consumption, in turn, realizes sales revenues for the capital advanced, from which profit is derived as a residue, once all costs have been deducted.

The ugly blemish in this ideology is that the more or less fair, more or less bruising, more or less violent competition for income produces both winners and losers, and that, via the (at least nominally democratic) political struggle over state power, the winners are able to rig the rules of play in the gainful game to ensure that they come out on top and hang on to their advantages, privileges, etc. And what are the rules of play? First and foremost, that the rights of private property be protected. How are these rights of dissociated private property exercised? For one, to enjoy the personal consumption afforded by spending income. For another, to deploy acquired private property to generate more income, untrammelled by the resistance of trade unions and environmental regulations, which drags down profits from their potential maximum.

And private property itself? It is the deceptive camouflage for the endlessly valorizing Medium of thingified value that is covered up precisely by the ideology of individualist freedom. Anyone daring to unmask this ruthless ideology for what it is, of course, is branded a "Left wing lunatic". But even those advocating a softening of the ruthless rules of play of the gainful game, say, by protecting workers' rights to organize in trade unions or by mitigating environmental destruction in social-democratic style are labelled "Left wing lunatics". And millions of indoctrinated voters, who have fallen for the ideology of unfettered individualist freedom and all it stands for, go along with this, even if they are losers in the gainful game. Demanding merely crumbs from the table, consisting of affordable groceries and cheap gasoline, they are what you call suckers, about whom W.C. Fields said: "Never give a sucker an even break." (1941) To be sure, never has the deep truth of this cynical saying, with some thought, been more disgustingly visible than today. It's a pity, only, that no one is looking deeper, including even those who are purportedly "rethinking capitalism"*).

*) Annual theme for 2025 at The New Institute in Hamburg (accessed 27 March 2025).

Further reading:  'An Invisible Global Social Value' TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement. 

Laws of movement & Energy. 

Tale of the Qua: A Philosophical Comedy.

Adorno's maxim "kein richtiges Leben im falschen"

"Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen." from his Minima Moralia is known as Adorno's most famous maxim: "There is no correct living in false [living]." The sentence is elliptical, the last in the 18th mini-essay 'Asyl für Obdachlose' (Asylum for Homeless [People]) of Part 1 of the book. One interpretation of the maxim is that it concerns how "private life" (Privatleben) in a "social order" (Gesellschaftsordnung) mediated by "private property" (Privateigentum) is forced to be led 'falsely'.

But the situation is more dire: es gibt kein wahres Leben im verstellten — there is no true living in an untrue world in which the phenomena are fundamentally distorted or hidden altogether. The ambiguity of the phenomena allows the mind, i.e. our historically shared mind, to be caught in a thoroughly topsy-turvy world. The inversion and the resulting blindness are painless, the delusion near-perfect. 

Freedom is fused and confused with subjugation. A veneer of freedom covers up a relentless global law of movement in a medium that remains, even today, invisible (thus 'untrue') for the mind. It is insufficient to speak merely of private property and the freedom individuals enjoy exercising their private property rights, and then point out the many kinds of exploitation that private property ownership enables. One has to ask what the essence of private property is.

There is a fundamental difference between the correctness of facts and the truth of  phenomena. Understood philosophically, Adorno's maxim can be paired with another one reminiscent of Hegel: "Das Ganze ist das Unwahre." ("The whole is the untrue." Part 1, 29 last sentence) The essence, itself remaining hidden, shows itself on the surface of the whole in correct facts that cover up its truth. One indication of this inversion is Adorno's famous term "Verblendungszusammenhang", in which 'Verblendung' means 'blindness' or 'delusion'. The definition of this term given in Duden reads: 

"der Zusammenhang zwischen gesellschaftlichem Sein u. daraus sich bildenden falschen Vorstellungen vom Wesen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft"

"the connection between social being and false ideas about the essence of bourgeois society arising therefrom"

This provokes the question: What is the truth of our social being in today's society? Or: what is the truth of our mode of sociation in this historical form of society that goes under various names, including modern industrial society, liberal democracy or bourgeois-capitalist society?

And the "false ideas"? Above all, that in our painless blindness we con ourselves that we're free in (what remains of) the so-called Free World. Free, above all, as individual players to engage in the competitive gainful game — either as winners or as losers, blind to the law of movement of the global Medium and its sweet poison seeping into every last existential cranny.

It's not just that we are desubjectified as mere cogs in the 'capitalist machine' and could one day overcome our 'objectification' to become the collective subject in charge of social material production and reproduction. It's that we have to question and recast who we are from the ground up, eschewing worn-out, pat, traditional answers. No freedom without truth, which has to be wrested from distortions through to utter hiddenness.

Further reading: Theodor W. Adorno Minima Moralia Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 1951/1980.

Arguing positions — or interpreting phenomena?.

An Invisible Global Social Value TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.

Laws of movement & Energy.

Capitalocene & The global law of movement.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.