


































This radical finitude includes a strange irreducible openness.

Views: 20749

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Here's a snip of Bryant's 4/26/12 post called "What is a world?":

"Tim seems to conceive world as a container that entities are in. For me, by contrast, the world is anything but a container. Ultimately there are no containers, there are just relations between entities. And as a consequence, in the framework of my ontology, a world is nothing but a network of relations between structurally coupled entities. These relations take work to be maintained (they always threaten to fall apart; and this can be a good thing) and they take time to happen and be forged. They aren’t given. For this reason, worlds can both grow through new entities coming to be related and worlds can decay and disappear as a result of relations and interactions breaking down, entities disappearing and so on. Worlds are ecologies, with the caveat that ecologies are not containers but rather entities or units interacting with one another.

"The universe (and already we’re speaking poorly with the definite article) is a pluriverse.... There isn’t one spatio-temporal matrix in which all entities co-exist,* but rather a plurality of cartographies."

* This one is especially interesting for all you bohrgs.


Count me in for this view. I wonder, though, what sort of manifest (and unmanifest) field is it that Bryant conceives of as being all of reality. If there is not an empty container that precedes the creation of ever more objects what is the overall form of all that is? 

I would lean towards a spectrum of manifest/unmanifest from the ever more subtle at one end to the ever more 'gross' at the other. This spectrum consisting of waves of ever thickening manifestations circling out from and back into subtle emanations in the expansion/contraction of life/death. Most subtle of all, the still point of the causal at one end, while at the other/leading edge of being..? 

What is the relationship of what is to the lack of that 'what is' before it came into existence? I can only imagine it as a thickening of what is, an ongoing enriching of already existing energetic forms. A constant blooming, contracting and expanding as death and life, yet all the while growing in density, complexity and fullness. 

Does the structuring up of reality as conceived of by Levi Bryant have a vanishing point out of which all emerges? And if not, how does it all work? Where does it all come from this flat ontology of what is?

Just musing..


I suggest asking him in that blog post. He accepts comments and generally answers them. If you do and he responds, please let us know.

Bryant's post today on a materialist oriented ontology (MOO) finds kinship with Bennett's and Bogost's MOO, and further differentiates with Harman. He also calls it body oriented ontology (BOO), which sounds a lot like holon oriented (HOO). For example, "Bogost’s claim that all units are simultaneously units and systems," akin to how we've defined holons. Another interesting neologism he coins is objectiles. We also see the difference between immutable present awareness with his withdrawn virtual, as the latter is not only not present (actual) but also not immutable. And immanent, not transcendent. Transcendentally immanent, as we saw above, but there is no inclusion of the transcendent so defined as immutable (aka onto-theological).

Also, regarding his types of objects (dark, dim, bright, vogue), "these determinations are not features of objects but of the degree of relatedness enjoyed by a thing." Interesting.

And his emphasis on objects is to counter the anthropomophic epistemic fallacy we've discussed previously (as well as the metaphysics of presence above).

"My reason for beginning with things is two-fold:  First, I believe now, more than ever, we need to attend to the role that nonhuman things play in assemblages, the gravity they enact, and how they organize relations within assemblages.... Second, I begin with objects because I think that if we begin with the thesis that 'things are related,' we won’t attend to what things are related in these assemblages because we’ll already have assumed that the relations are there.  We won’t do what Michael and I have  called 'cartography.'"

Continuing the last post Bryant, contra Bennett, refutes holism, which implies "that everything is related to everything else." We saw this with Klein in this post (Batchelor thread) when she said "all things that are immutably related to it," meaning both reality and the awareness that apprehends it. He again goes into a constant theme about the political implications of such holism, and that we've also discussed ad nauseum, e.g. with inclusivism as but one example.

He also calls it body oriented ontology (BOO)...

I don't think Bryant would be reading little ol' folks like us and lifting ideas, but with his use of this term, and with his recent more direct equation of (autopoietic) operational closure with his "withdrawn" (which is exactly what I'd argued before), does make me wonder....

Oh, FYI, also, in a more recent draft of my paper (the one Wilber read), I included a quote by Bryant on the epistemic fallacy and argued that, while Wilber's statement that "everything, before it is anything else, is a perspective," could indeed be taken as an example of the epistemic fallacy, the fallacy could be avoided by simultaneously taking the metaphysical step of transcendentally deducing a holon-oriented ontology.  Wilber stopped at this section and told me he agreed with this.


I understand (and definitely appreciate) the inclusivism-suspicious critique of holism, and so I do not mean to firmly or completely resist Bryant's thoughts in this area -- I respect both his interest in relations and his care not to have everything subsumed in or under some kind of hegemonic super-object (or assholon) -- but I wonder how this idea squares with current understandings in physics, i.e. that every particle in the universe is non-locally entangled to some degree; or that the energy-value of every particle in the universe must be slightly different from all others, so when any particle changes its energy value, all other particles simultaneously must shift theirs.  To the extent that I understand this notion, there is a kind of all-relatedness involved in this, but it is an all-relation in/through all-difference.

I don't think Bryant would be reading little ol' folks like us.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. Michael of Archive Fire blog occasionally reads my blog, and he is in dialogue with Bryant. So you never know.

In a more recent draft of my paper (the one Wilber read)...

So is it approved for publication and if so, when? Will you provide us a copy to read?

But I wonder how this idea squares with current understandings in physics, i.e. that every particle in the universe is non-locally entangled to some degree...

Bryant doesn't buy this, and I'm guessing that view, though quite popular and possibly predominant, is not the only or final, absolute view. Morrison noted before that the predominant quantum view has yet to catch up with the predominant complexity view. And the latter has yet to catch up with the likes of Prigogine's complexity of dynamic systems, much akin to Bryant's notions, and he too refutes the likes of simultaneity and superliminal speed. QM might get there, some day, when it goes post-Bohr, who himself formulated his theories long before the insights of de/re pomo.


I think it is mostly approved (Wilber congratulated me on it and appeared to give a thumbs up), but I still have to put in final corrections and submit it for one more review.  I can share a copy with anyone who asks for it but can't post it online for public access (at least for now).


True, Morrison does critique Bohr and dominant quantum theoretical forumlations, but he does accept non-locality.  Non-local entanglement or 'immediate correlation' of particles is a well-demonstrated empirical finding, so this is something that can't simply be rejected on philosophical grounds alone.  Rather, I think it is necessary to come up with workable interpretations.  Even non-locality which is understood without appeals to superluminality challenges the Newtonian atomistic view that objects only interact (or can relate) locally, i.e. billiard-ball or monad bumping into contiguous billiard ball or monad.  (And there is also the other current notion about the relation-via-difference of particle energy values that I mentioned above).  Can Bryant's model explain either?

Recall the complexity and pomo thread, where DeLanda, among others, investigates the science of dynamic systems. I'll be more specific when I refresh my memory.* In general, Bryant discussed hyperobjects, which are non-local. And how local manifestations are in fact caught up in the effects of say the hyperobject of global warming. An extreme example being if the atmosphere heats too much we all die. I think he did a good job of accounting for it in the referenced post. So it's no so much the empirical finding of nonlocality but the ontotheological overlay that comes with it, up to an including a universe that has the same interrelated matrix for all.

* Now I'm recalling something DeLanda said about objects having their own temporal-spatial matrix that is not directly related to objects of different sizes, up to what Bryant would call a hyperobject. Recall the latter's statement upstream: "There isn’t one spatio-temporal matrix in which all entities co-exist."

Yes, of course, the notion that not all objects exist in one spatio-temporal matrix is exactly Einstein's thesis.  But it seems non-locality can violate, in some sense, temporal boundedness.

Reply to Discussion




Notice to Visitors


© 2020   Created by Balder.   Powered by

Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service