Ray Brassier delimits four aspects of what can be called “flat ontologies:”
1. No entity is prior or posterior to others. There is no ontology of transcendence.
2. The world or universe does not exist since no object encapsulates the rest.
3. This reality of objects exists independently of a subject. Therefore, there is no subordination of objects to subjects.
4. All objects are ontologically identical.
These postulates support a “de-anthropocentrism” in which humans are considered objects. Let’s explore the issue further:
In their current conception, flat ontologies constitute the conceptual warp of certain “New Realism” positions. Philosophers like Graham Harman and Manuel de Landa strongly support the movement, advocating for a de-anthropocentric philosophy while exploring objects’ hidden lives. This exploration is often overshadowed by the relentless persistence of subjects attempting to seize the epistemic throne of the universe
However, if we grant Meillassoux that such an intention entails a “Ptolemaic counter-revolution”—that is, revolving the universal (the world) around the particular (Man)—flat ontologies reveal a monochromatic framework that fails to account for central notions, such as the problem of freedom. Let us see why.
Let us distinguish three types of interactions: first, a subject-object relation with Kantian roots, centered on predication (S is P); second, a subject-subject relation of Fichtean origin, grounded in Kantian objectivity and ultimately leading to intersubjectivity; and finally, an object-object relation rooted in Schelling, which implies a wild, sense-devouring nature that exists independently of—if not superior to—the epistemic hubris of subjects.
Let us agree that the first two types of interactions largely depend on language and logic. Indeed, overcoming solipsism requires the existence of a symbolic sphere that enables translation between subjects or between a subject and its object. In this light, it becomes evident that logic says very little about the world itself; instead, it reflects the neurolinguistic configuration through which the subject understands it. This is precisely why neither language nor logic creates the world—they cannot escape the intersubjective framework of meaning. They do, I concede, create an intersubjective world; they are world-objects, but not the real world. Ultimately, the real world remains a mystery.
Thus, the epistemic fog surrounding the object-object relation becomes clear. Harman proposes that we recognize a hidden life of the Michigan fungi, that objects continuously and unknowingly interact with one another.
“…the theater of the world is being traversed from end to end by various objects unleashing their forces, often in total solitude. The red billiard ball hits the green billiard ball. Snowflakes dance under the light that mercilessly annihilates them. A broken submarine wallows on the ocean floor. While a mill spits flour, an earthquake compresses a buried block of limestone, and a family of giant mushrooms appears overnight in the Michigan forest.”
On the other hand, we recognize that the edifice of correlation—the idea that we understand only what becomes an object, what is illuminated by the grace of thought—stands as the central pillar of contemporary philosophy. There is no greater paradox than attempting to think the unthinkable. To imagine, for instance, the sporal and orgiastic ecstasy of nocturnal mushrooms is meaningless if no subject is there to comprehend it. Thus, we construct the edifice of philosophical thought: we accumulate books for students to devour at university fairs, even as we admonish science for asserting the existence of a world independent of the subject.
However, I see from my window a calm volcano, and I wonder if one day it will erupt for us, for itself, or “in itself.” I envision the learned philosophers stacking their vast mountains of books like trenches against the lava, and I imagine how the melting stone, an inexorable phantom of subjective error, devours the texts and their creators because, in the end, the universe does not care about human beings, and thought holds no power over reality.
Is the man in a position to prove this thesis? Evidently not, for it is impossible to think of a world without thought. Those corners of darkness and cosmic silence, unpolluted and condemned never to be bathed by light, can only be intuited. The world exists; it surrounds us daily, but it is philosophically unreachable. It would be understandable if a grasp of such cosmic darkness existed in the mind. And if we consider that our body, our flesh, the perishable seat of consciousness, shares its atomic structure with these dark confines, we can begin to find a solution to the problem.
Paul Klee, a German painter, gives us a diagram that explains the question:
As stated, subject and object generate a relation. But fundamentally, how does one move from the object to its representation and vice versa? This relation does not emerge from the ether; rather, it entails both a material and an ideal pathway of information exchange. First and foremost, it requires a material reality—a physical and chemical foundation that guarantees interaction: land, soil, and a material base. Yet, although both subject and object arise from the earth, they cannot be reduced to it, for the world is a continuum where neither individuals nor freedom exists.
Consider Spinoza’s God and Leibniz’s world. Suppose we inhabit the best of all possible worlds—this would imply that divinity possesses exhaustive knowledge of this world, including a record of every possible cause and effect, constituting a Leibnizian pre-established harmony. At the same time, in Spinoza’s framework, everything that exists is merely a mode of God’s expression. Combining both views, it becomes evident that, in such a world, the only true freedom belongs to God; consequently, every individual action is predetermined.
There is no hope of redemption or transcendence for the individual, nor is there evil, for, technically, there is no error. However, contrary to these exponents of rationalism, while subjects require a land—a material foundation—for interaction, this remains a necessary but insufficient condition. In the relationship between thought and the world, we witness the dawn of the world of Spirit: individuals constrained by materiality yet in profound rebellion against their bodies. The world of freedom has been born.
A flat ontology is a sad and gray world for precisely this reason: it lacks differentiation. For new things to emerge—especially the furtive flower of thought—differences that make a difference are essential
Paradoxically, individual freedom does not emerge from nothing. For individual differences to exist freely, the world—bound by necessity—must be populated by potential differences. Indeed, emergence depends on the fact that while some systems develop new, inexplicable properties, others do not. Nature itself is Schellingian freedom in potency.
A flat ontology is a sad and gray world for precisely this reason: it lacks differentiation. For new things to emerge—especially the furtive flower of thought—differences that make a difference are essential. The universe must contain numerous pools, each brimming with amino acid broths fluttering in molecular ecstasy. Yet, as far as we know, life emerged in only one—and with it, though.
Evidently, some primordial broths possess greater ontological dignity than others, for the tendency toward systemic complexity—an indomitable Freudian Eros—is both an observable fact and an enduring mystery. The fundamental question remains: why does emergence occur in some systems but not in others? This question cannot be answered without at least intuitively conceding that there exists a potency of difference in the land of Paul Klee—one that flat ontologies crafted by free individuals fail to explain.
The ontology of emergence proposed here does not critique flat ontologies merely for their inability to explain why new beings arise but rather for failing to account for the emergence of new individuals—bellicose individualities in rebellion, resisting absorption into a flat, freedomless world.
With individuals, a new layer of existence is born. Subjects emerge as both included in the world and constitutive of it. Here, man (the effect) coexists with the cause (the world) without this implying that he configures the world, as in phenomenology, nor that he possesses the same ontological dignity as the world, as flat ontologies suggest.
Let us see how a free individual can exist in the Spinozist substance.
The subject must have access to the real world—at least enough to intuit that something lies beyond the reach of their knowledge. Thus, a somatic turn in philosophy is necessary. The path cannot be a blind plunge into the darkness of the world of objects whose knowledge is without guidance, like a sea without a lighthouse or handhold, rendering the world a chaotic mystery. Instead, the way forward is introspection: only through subjectivity can we uncover the royal road to non-subjectivity.
In this pursuit, we realize that the world resides in the other, for an individual exists only in relation to other individuals and things that, paradoxically, also seek its annihilation. The individual—the thinking miracle of the cosmos—is discovered through introspection. But this introspection is no mystical act of meditation; rather, it is the rigorous study of the connections between body and thought and their correlation with another body and another thought—even if this understanding leads us to conceive of the world itself as a great subject striving for comprehension and redemption.
How, then, do we find a world without a world—a reality beyond intersubjectivity? The answer lies precisely in the very foundation of an ontology of emergence: the capacity of certain systems of similar complexity to arise while others do not. There must exist in the cosmos a hidden force—one that cannot be reduced to the simplistic notion of chaos. There must be, in the universe, a certain intentionality, if you will—one that drives objects to interact, to possess a secret life beyond the reach of the subject.
Yet, this force cannot be reduced to a theological explanation, for such a move would resolve one mystery by dismissing another—subsuming individual freedom into a predetermined harmony. Herein lies the central paradox of knowledge: we intuit the world’s existence, yet we cannot prove it. The only possible resolution may lie in the exhaustive analysis of that miraculous instant when a dimension that did not exist before comes into being: thought. Perhaps, of all emergences, it is the only one that is truly real.
References
Brassier, Ray. «Desnivelación: contra las “ontologías planas”». Reflexiones Marginales, n.o 44 (2018).
Harman, Graham. Hacia el realismo especulativo. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2015.
Meillassoux, Quentin. Después de la finitud: Ensayo sobre la necesidad de la contingencia. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2015.
Notes
[i] Ray Brassier, «Desnivelación: contra las “ontologías planas”», Reflexiones Marginales, n.o 44 (2018).
[ii] Quentin Meillassoux, Después de la finitud: Ensayo sobre la necesidad de la contingencia (Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2015), 188.
[iii] Meillassoux, 44.
[iv] Meillassoux, 11.
[v] Graham Harman, Hacia el realismo especulativo (Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, 2015), 73.
