Abstract
This chapter has two main complementary goals. First, it analyzes the main ontological ideas of Gustavo Bueno’s discontinuous materialism in contrast with other philosophical systems. Second, it explores some of the main ontological questions and issues still open in this system of thought, while advancing some possible paths of resolution. In order to do this, I follow a double general definition of philosophical materialism. Positively, materialism, in general, names the branch of philosophical worldviews that identify being (i.e. the “ὅντος” of ontology) with matter, understood in its broadest sense as changeability and plurality (partes extra partes). Negatively, materialism denies the existence of disembodied living beings and hypostatized ideas. Within this general framework, I then locate the specific ontological characteristic of discontinuous materialism in the rejection of any attempt to hypostatize any element, property, state or relation of reality. Like the Medusa’s gaze, hypostasizing metaphysics turns parts of the complex interplay of continuities and discontinuities that constitutes reality into stone. I then conduct a comparison between discontinuous materialism and other philosophies, in particular Mario Bunge’s systemic materialism, physicalism, ontotheology, and speculative realism(s). This approach aims at opening new avenues for philosophical research for both metaphysics in general and materialist philosophy in particular.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
From this point of view, one key criterion to measure the quality of a philosophical system is its capacity to incorporate well established scientific theories and discoveries. Nevertheless, although necessary, the necessity of being scientifically up-to-date is not enough to develop good philosophical theories. The best proof of this are all the good scientists that have bad or poor philosophies. The idea of philosophy of a second degree discipline mainly supported on scientific concepts and theories, can be coordinated with Mario Bunge’s and Gustavo E. Romero’s view of “scientific philosophy”, i.e. a philosophy properly informed by updated scientific theories and practices (Bunge 1977, 2003; Romero 2018).
- 3.
In El papel de la Filosofía en el Conjunto del Saber Bueno identifies rigorous and systematic philosophy with “academic philosophy”, in contrast with “mundane philosophy”. It is important to note, though, that for Bueno academic philosophy is not necessarily done at universities. Some of modernity’s most important philosophers were not even university professors (Bueno 1970).
- 4.
Bueno (1993), pp. xii, xiii.
- 5.
As a non-continuist materialism, Bunge’s philosophy also approaches the principle of symploké in formulations such as “every one of [the world’s] component things interacts with some other things” (Bunge 2006: 21). For a more detailed analysis of Bunge’s powerful critiques of metaphysical continuism, see my discussion with Íñigo Ongay in this volume.
- 6.
Specifically with the publication of the seminal Ensayos Materialistas (1972), where Bueno summarized the main ideas of his ontology.
- 7.
A couple of brief examples will shed some light on this conceptual labyrinth: Hobbes’ and D’Holbach’s corporeal materialism were unaware of electromagnetic waves or nuclear forces, which were considered material later. Their idea of matter, like the more advanced idea of matter in nineteenth century physicalist materialism, is outdated today. Today we no longer identify matter with mass, impenetrability or energy. This means that if the idea of matter is not univocal, there are many materialist ontologies, depending on the idea of matter they rest on.
- 8.
Bunge (2009), p. 18; 2010, p. xi.
- 9.
When possible, I will put forward examples about how other philosophical theses of this philosophy rest on ontological considerations.
- 10.
Bueno (1972), p. 48.
- 11.
Although I will focus later on some specific problems of discontinuous materialism’s ontology, it is important to start noting that the terms “general ontology” and “special ontology” themselves are not problem-free. We have seen that, although this terminological division comes from Wolff, it actually has little to do with his metaphysics, in which the idea of Being behaves like the idea of fruit in relation to oranges, apples and grapes. In Wolff’s system, special ontology studies the World, Man and God, whereas in Bueno’s materialism, special ontology studies the three genera of materiality that compose the World. Although Bueno (1972) put forward some partial analogies between ontotheology’s three main ideas and the three genera of materiality, the issue here seems clear: is it the best terminological decision to use “special ontology” to talk about the contents of the World? After all, the distinction between special and general applied to the universe is instantly linked to Einstein’s theory of relativity. In it, general relativity studies the universe, whereas special relativity studies limited or partial sectors of it. In order to avoid the more than probable confusions linked to Wolff’s and Einstein’s use of “general” and “special” in their theories, new terminological possibilities could be explored.
- 12.
Even if some philosophies do not recognize it, as it is the case of Malebranche’s ontologism.
- 13.
Bueno used the term “ontotheology” in Heidegger’s and not in Kant’s sense (for whom “ontotheology” was linked to “cosmotheology”). Basically, for Heidegger ontotheology is the worldview according to which “being” is reified into a Supreme Being that has created and controls the rest of beings. In Scholastic terms: for ontotheology, Being, as Ipssum Esse, is both the metaphysical God of natural theology and the mythopoetic God of “Revelation”. Although Heidegger opposed his thinking on being to ontotheology, Bueno thought that the idea of “being” was too loaded with ontotheological meanings. It seems quite reasonable to suppose that behind this view was Bueno’s education in a Catholic Spain where the vast majority of university professors were ontotheologians.
- 14.
Bueno (2016b), p. 2.
- 15.
The use of “anthropic” here is not related to the so-called “strong anthropic principle” in cosmology which, due to its metaphysical teleologism, is incompatible with a materialist philosophy. On the contrary, it is a materialist reconstruction of Protagoras’ principle whereby “man is the measure of all things” (Bueno 1993, 2016).
- 16.
Nevertheless, in this chapter I will sometimes use “worlds” between quotation marks as a synonym of human/animals’ scales. The quotation marks are placed against any attempt to hypostatize any of these scales. Spiders’ “world”, such as cats’ “world” or the Ancient Sumerians’ “world”, belong to a common World or universe.
- 17.
From my point of view, the main philosophical problem that arises here is this: due to the ontological discontinuities between biological matter, chemical matter and physical matter (all of them belonging to M1), shouldn’t Bueno’s decision of calling spatio-temporal matter (M1) “physical matter” be considered misleading? Although Bueno himself (1997) emphasized the discontinuities between organic and inorganic matter, the early decision to call M1 “physical matter” remained until the end of Bueno’s intellectual career (2016). Bueno’s terminology to refer to M1 implies a reductionism incompatible with his own philosophy.
- 18.
An important issue here is related to the universe’s ontological unity. For modern astrophysics, the universe’s unity, as a result of a mega-physical aggregate of cosmic materialities, has objective properties (such as a specific topology, average temperature and density, age, and so on). But by identifying the animal and human World with the universe, Bueno held that, without corporeal subjects, we have no criterion whatsoever to talk about the existence and unity of the universe. Nevertheless, the fact that the universe’s contents are given/translated/selected/filtered/adjusted at our finite and imperfect human scale should not necessary imply that these contents do not form a structural unity independent from the epistemological and operational frameworks of humans. Why should we accept Bueno’s claim that the anthropic scale has the monopoly on the universe’s unity? Are not ontological unities independent from subjects’ operations possible?
- 19.
Bueno (2016), p. 29. The idea of stroma implies, among other things, that cosmic materialities have an “obverse and reverse”, which Bueno translated to a dimension filtered to our human scale, and an absolute dimension (the “reverse”) that is not exhausted on our scale.
- 20.
Nevertheless, I also think that discontinuous materialism’s ontological actualism arises key philosophical problems related to the ontology of spacetime. According to current physics, there is not universal simultaneity, meaning that what is an actual moment in one part of the universe has already occurred in another. Up to what point, then, does the rejection of the idea of absolute simultaneity affect ontological actualism? And how can we take ontological possibility and contingency into account from radical actualism?
- 21.
Bueno (1972), pp. 291–325; (1993), pp. 1420–1427; (2016), p. 196.
- 22.
Without denying the pedagogical importance of this criterion of demarcation, it also opens up its own knot of problems. For instance: where does space and time’s ontological privilege come from? Up to what point is it ontologically consistent with modern physics “to break” the structural unity of spacetime claiming that psychological activities, although temporal, are not spatial, or that time emerges from animal interactions in space (Bueno 2013a)? On the other hand, if every content we find in the World either belongs to M1, M2 or M3 (or results from the combination of realities belonging to different genera, such as animals) to which genera or specific combination of genera does space-time belong?
- 23.
Bueno (1972), p. 65.
- 24.
Which Bueno expressed as follows: E ⊂ Mi.
- 25.
Bueno (1972), p. 51.
- 26.
The problem opened by this use of Kantian terminology is obvious: in Kant’s philosophy, the Transcendental Consciousness, in a similar way as Descartes’ ego cogito, is an aprioristic disembodied activity or entity. As such, it is not compatible with a materialist ontology: Kant’s aprioristic metaphysical Ego is the condition of possibility of the world of matter, from the laws of physics to the brain’s activity. For a materialist ontology, on the other hand, there is no possible ego without very complex physical, neurobiological and sociocultural material processes.
- 27.
Bueno (1972), p. 65.
- 28.
Bueno again links this to Kant’s philosophy, here to the idea of “transcendental apperception”, which is also behind the “partial identification” between the World and the Transcendental Ego (1972: 67). In Kant’s philosophical system, this apperception is what makes experience possible at all. Without it, the perceptual data would not be combined or held together in a structured unity. Therefore, it would be an absolute chaos, and knowledge would be impossible. As such, Kant’s transcendental apperception is where the ego and the World come together. By this confusing assimilation, Bueno tried to argue that he was not introducing any radical new ideas in philosophy: he was just further deepening age-old philosophical theories. Bueno’s Transcendental Ego, as a materialist activity, operates through diverse categories: grammatical, legal, psychological, ethnological, ethological, neurobiological. Overflowing each one of these categories and, at the limit, all of them, this activity is considered “transcendental” by Bueno in a Scholastic sense, rather than in a Kantian/aprioristic one (2009, 2016).
- 29.
Bueno was always reluctant to use the idea of Being because this idea, he claimed, was too linked to monist continuism, from Parmenides’ metaphysics to millennia of ontotheological thought (Bueno 2016a).
- 30.
Bueno (1972), pp. 50, 52, 60, 72, 283, 288.
- 31.
For Bueno, these general properties are not the product of imagination, but of apagogic thinking: since M refers to everything that exists or can exist, it cannot be “finite” by definition; since our World is seen as an episode of M, and the World’s discontinuities and changeability are structural, we have no reasons whatsoever to hold that M is an absolute immutable continuous unity; since the idea of absolute auto-determination leads to the idea of causa sui, which is contradictory, we should hold that the components of every material multiplicity co-determine each other.
- 32.
- 33.
Bueno (1972), p. 60.
- 34.
Bueno also noted that the determination of the properties of M is richer than the medieval via remotionis, which, if taken seriously, should lead to a total negation of the World, and therefore to absolute nothingness: see Bueno (1972), p. 60. According to Bueno, the “autocontextual analysis” of the World leads to the conclusion that it does not exhaust reality in general. (“Autocontextual” here means “without epistemologically seeking to leave the World”). In Bueno’s logical terminology, since the World (Mi) is a contingent and finite reality, and absolute nothingness (as Parmenides already knew) is impossible, the World structurally needs a complementary set: M/absolute reality. Bueno put forward this thesis as follows: (Mi ⊂ M) & (M \(\nsubseteq \) Mi).
- 35.
This primitive form of physicalism, nevertheless, poses specific difficulties to the Greek atomists, since for them the void is as real and necessary to explain the world as physical atoms.
- 36.
- 37.
Bunge (2006), p. 14; (2010), pp. 65, 103.
- 38.
Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is inconsistent as a result of this (Pérez-Jara 2011).
- 39.
Bunge (2010), p. 178.
- 40.
Naturally, for both discontinuous and systemic materialism, to explore the possibility of material realities that are “prior” to space-time would lead us to the ontological problem of conceptualizing changeable but not temporal materialities. In this, spatio-temporal events should be considered as a specific type of unknown changeable events. But here, of course, we are in the constant danger of getting lost in the dark jungle of non-empirical speculations.
- 41.
This theory of the ontological schemes of intersection is a good example of a virtuous circle between sciences and philosophy; methodologically, it prevents the reductionisms of many scientists who start out with a wrong ontology. An example of this are the neurobiologists who seek to explain the generation of the “ego” by neurobiological activity alone (Damasio 2005), without accounting for the complex sociocultural networks of interactions. Ontologically, it prevents (or at least puts in their place) the idle talk of science-ignorant “philosophers” about culture or consciousness as hypostatizable realities.
- 42.
In Bueno’s formal terminology, this idea is expressed as follows: M3 \(\nsubseteq \) M2. The non-arbitrary nature of many realities of M3 is one of the main arguments that discontinuous materialism has against Hume’s and Stuart Mill’s “psychologism”.
- 43.
Bueno (1972): 77, 354.
- 44.
Bunge (2006), pp. 205–209.
- 45.
Bueno stressed that neither mathematics nor logic would exist without typographic symbols (which belong to M1). Nevertheless, the ontological difficulties lay in explaining the relationships between such physical symbols and the eidetic relations and entities with which the mathematician and logicians also work, specifically in the “most abstract” parts of mathematics (in contrast, for instance, with Greek arithmetic and geometry). For more on this issue, see the discussion in this book between Carlos Madrid Casado and Gustavo E. Romero.
- 46.
Bunge (2006): 27.
- 47.
Bueno (1972), p. 366.
- 48.
Hume’s radical skepticism and Leibniz’s pre-established harmony, for instance, lead to important contradictions (Pérez-Jara 2014).
- 49.
Hegel (2010[1813–1832]), p. 322.
- 50.
Schopenhauer (2001[1847]): 29.
- 51.
Meillassoux (2008), p. 5.
- 52.
Ennis (2011), p. 38.
- 53.
- 54.
Harman (2009), p. 122.
- 55.
Brassier (2007), pp. 408–438; Harman (2010). Let’s compare this claim with Heidegger’s late philosophy, according to which we need Ereignis to explain Ereignis itself; as the last presupposition of knowledge, we cannot go further than it (Sheehan 2014). But unlike speculative realists, Heidegger never tried to achieve knowledge of absolute reality beyond the general idea that entities are independent from Dasein.
- 56.
Meillassoux (2009), p. 10.
- 57.
As every complex ontological term, correlationism is a non-univocal ideal; there are different kinds of correlationisms, and each is so to different degrees. Bryant (2014) recognizes this as follows: “Correlationism presumably comes in a variety of different forms, and is therefore not restricted to theories focused on the relation between mind and being. Thus the relation between transcendental ego or lived body and the world in phenomenology would be one variant of correlationism, while the relation between language and being in Wittgenstein, Derrida and Lacan, or between power and knowledge in Foucault, would be other variants. In each case we encounter the claim that being cannot be thought apart from a subject, language or power.”
- 58.
From this point of view, knowledge can be replaced by phenomenological openness, and we would be in the same problem: Heidegger privileges the Dasein over the rest of entities, because thanks to it the rest of entities can show, in changing contexts, their “being”.
- 59.
Of course, this importance is linked to the planet Earth; to determine, in Max Scheler’s words, “the Human Place in the Cosmos” (Scheler 2008[1928]) we have to consider exobiology’s hypothesis and future findings.
- 60.
The concept of Yūgen has the virtue of not dragging unwanted meanings from other possible Western concepts, worn out by millennia of ontotheological thinking. In particular, my use of this concept stresses that animal “worlds” are finite and transient episodes of a mysterious absolute and impersonal reality. From this point of view, both otherworldly metaphysics and immanentist metaphysics are equally blind.
- 61.
That is, negative, stressing differences between the absolute and the worldly.
- 62.
That is, positive, emphasizing similarities.
- 63.
Some theologians, accepting the non-existence of the idea of God, defend the existence of God nonetheless. Elsewhere I have called this position “the taboo of the idea of God” or the “iconoclasm applied to the idea of God” (Pérez-Jara 2014). These positions are plays of words, for there are very good philosophical reasons to hold that ontological possibility is a prerequisite of existence. Heraclitus and Nicholas of Cusa recognized, in their own way, that the contradictory character of God is an essential part of His mysterious nature. But this view only makes sense if “contradictory” is replaced by “paradoxical”, since finding literal contradictions in the notion of something, including the idea of God, is the best way of determining its ontological impossibility (Ongay 2020; Pérez-Jara 2004, 2005, 2014).
- 64.
From the family sphere (God as Father), the political sphere (God as King of the Universe and Lord of the Armies), the juridical sphere (God as Judge), the medical sphere (God as Savior), livestock-raising sphere (God as Shepherd) and the artistic or technological sphere (God as Supreme Architect). In fewer occasions, the metaphors that are taken literally come from the animal spheres. Examples of this are represented by God as an unknown creature that terrorizes us, as happens in some mystical experiences (Bueno 1996).
- 65.
Bueno brilliantly argued that anthropomorphic metacosmic foundations are, in truth, an imaginary and distorted duplication of real contents of our World (Bueno 1972, 1997). Therefore, the Ens extramundanus, along with His transcendental realm, are not really transcendental. Furthermore, when spiritualist worldviews try to explain the origin of life and humankind through living anthropomorphic entities (such as the supreme deities of Antiquity) they merely fall into a vicious circle. Only the ideas of Deus Absconditus or Agnostos Theos, when they are really stripped down from any literal anthropomorphic or zoomorphic imaginary, can be associated to a real transcendence relative to the animal and human World, and therefore to a criticism of the anthropomorphic foundations of the universe.
- 66.
Naturally, this position does not imply the so-called logical fallacy of the middle ground; I am not talking about an “arithmetical middle”. The scientific evidence is that the psyche generated by certain living beings, despite its undeniable ontological reality, only constitutes a tiny part of reality.
- 67.
The concept of “primordial facticity” has been previously employed by the phenomenological tradition. My use here, though, goes beyond correlationism and therefore acquires new meanings. It is important to make clear that the concept of primordial facticity has to be interpreted metaphorically. Indeed, facticity comes from the Latin factum, which is the neuter perfect passive participle of facio and the neuter perfect active participle of fieri. But reality’s primordial facticity is not something that has been “done” by something or someone. Rather, it is the condition of possibility of every possible doing.
- 68.
With his usual unnecessary obscure prose, Heidegger declared: “Why then the ’why’? Why and to what extent the mere necessity of the horizon of such a questioning, even if we entirely disregard whether this question refers to beings or not? (…) Inquiringly thinking ahead, we do not reach further than Seyn because Seyn—more originarily than Hegel thought—’is’ nothingness. The consequence is that [we must] unmask that ’why-question’ which lies in the foreground as a superficial question.” Heidegger (2006[1938/1939]), p. 237.
- 69.
Furthermore, there is not a dichotomy between being and nothingness, because absolute privative nothingness is a contradictory idea, and relative nothingness belongs to the realm of being in general. As Plato. (1993) made clear in the Sophist, every rational discourse implies relative non-being. Further considerations are required to take into account the concept(s) of nothingness or emptiness as understood by some Asian philosophies, from Neo-Taoism and traditional Japanese Buddhism to the Kyoto School of Philosophy.
- 70.
The concept of reality’s primordial facticity is even further from the (on the other hand very interesting) concept of “contextual” brute facts held by Anscombe (1981).
- 71.
If we hold (as I do) that change is an essential characteristic of reality, we could argue, for instance, that absolute immutability is an imaginary and impossible product of hypostatizing the concept of “now”. But this is not a true explanation of the necessity of change, for it is already supported on the factual structure of reality, which implies mutability and therefore human temporality.
- 72.
Gabriel (2015), pp. 232, 133.
- 73.
Gabriel (2015), p. 232.
- 74.
Chorismos: rift or gap.
- 75.
And we do not yet know whether future developments in AI will be able to generate psychic contents from artificial biosystems.
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Pérez-Jara, J. (2022). Discontinuous Materialism. In: Romero, G.E., Pérez-Jara, J., Camprubí, L. (eds) Contemporary Materialism: Its Ontology and Epistemology. Synthese Library, vol 447. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89488-7_3
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