Foundations of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity/Philosophical Commitments/Refusal of Metaphysical Dualism

1.1 – Refusal of Metaphysical Dualism Introduction A brain lesion can alter speech; an inscription on paper can preserve a relation after its writer has gone; a technical interface can change which distinctions become actionable. These changes occur through material supports, yet some inherited vocabularies assign the source or measure of meaning and intelligibility to an order not exhausted by material processes. The question that begins this chapter is therefore concrete: how can symbolic efficacy be real without adding an immaterial substance or an exterior principle? The target is not every distinction, every form of dualism, or the whole history of Western philosophy. It is a recurrent explanatory gesture within several philosophical lineages: one domain is granted priority as the source, ground, or measure of another. Where intelligibility, value, or meaning is secured in this way, material contingency is treated as derivative, deficient, or incapable of accounting for its own symbolic effects. The doctrines examined below are not interchangeable; the comparison concerns this restricted operation and the stabilising function it can perform. The refusal developed here does not move an already existing immaterial mind into matter. It requires thought, meaning, and knowledge to be explained through finite material organisations and relations. This does not reduce symbolic processes to simple mechanism, nor does it make complexity or recursion sufficient for thought or consciousness. It asks how materially organised systems can produce and reorganise symbolic relations without appeal to a second ontological domain. The Dualist Architecture and its Stabilising Function The target is not the whole history of Western philosophy, but a recurrent gesture within several of its lineages. Plato's distinction between intelligible Forms and the sensible world, Augustine's hierarchies of the eternal and the temporal and of soul and body, and Descartes's distinction between res cogitans and res extensa are not equivalent doctrines. In the restricted comparison made here, they share an assignment of explanatory or normative priority to an order not exhausted by mutable material processes (Plato 1997; Augustine 1991; Descartes 1996). Such an architecture can perform a symbolic stabilising function: it insulates the source or measure of intelligibility from the contingency of the material field. Kant complicates rather than simply repeats this gesture. The a priori conditions of possible experience do not constitute a second substance, and the noumenon marks a limit to cognition rather than another knowable world. Husserl's reduction likewise does not posit a second substance, but relocates constitutive priority in transcendental subjectivity. Heidegger explicitly refuses to treat Being as another being; the question raised from the present framework is therefore narrower: whether disclosure can be explained while its material conditions remain unspecified (Kant [1781] 1998; Husserl 1931; Heidegger [1927] 1962). Dualism is therefore treated here not merely as a logical error but as an ontological strategy. Its stabilising force lies in placing the source or measure of intelligibility beyond complete exposure to material contingency. The present framework refuses that priority because thought, meaning, and knowledge must be explained within the material processes that produce and reorganise symbolic relations. This refusal does not require describing the real as uniformly unstable: local organisations can persist, but no external foundation or final order guarantees them. The Material Realisation of Concepts that Critique Dualism Philosophies that reject classical substances may still leave open how their decisive operators are materially realised. Derrida's différance destabilises the priority of presence; Lacan analyses the subject as constituted within the Symbolic rather than preceding it; Levinas gives ethical priority to an alterity that resists possession. These are substantial gains, not disguised repetitions of one doctrine (Derrida [1967] 1997; Lacan 1981; Levinas [1961] 1969). The disagreement developed here is narrower. It asks whether the Derridean trace, the Lacanian Symbolic, and Levinasian ethical exteriority have been sufficiently located in the material supports and relations through which they become operative. The claim is neither that these thinkers posit a second substance nor that their concepts are disguised repetitions of classical transcendence. It is that, within the present framework, an account remains incomplete wherever the material conditions through which these concepts operate remain unspecified. The present argument retains the instability of meaning, the role of symbolic relations in subject formation, and the ethical problem raised by alterity, while rearticulating their conditions and effects within finite material relations. This does not make obligation a direct consequence of material exposure: normative force depends on explicit criteria for evaluating possible responses. This is a contested interpretation and should be assessed against the cited works, not treated as a neutral summary of them. Thought as a Materially Realised Process: Dialogue with Simondon If there is no separate thinking substance, how are we to understand thought? The framework adopted here does not reduce thought to a cerebral epiphenomenon; it understands thought as a specific operation materially realised. In established human cases, thought is realised by a biossoma: a living biological body sensitive to material differences and capable of symbolic reorganisation. Thought should not, however, be attributed to every complex or recursively operating system. Complexity and recursion, separately or together, do not by themselves establish either thought or consciousness. Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation is an important ally because it does not treat the individual as a given substance. Individuation proceeds within a metastable field charged with tensions; the pre-individual is “more than one”, not a warehouse of ready-made forms (Simondon 2005). The divergence is therefore not based on the mistaken claim that Simondon posits a reserve of completed possibilities. It concerns the distinct explanatory role assigned to the pre-individual as that from which individuation draws, even though it is neither a separate substance nor merely a temporal “before”. The position developed here begins instead from presently configured matter whose unrealised compatibilities permit new material couplings. Novelty requires neither a completed form hidden in advance nor a shapeless background awaiting form. Thought is therefore understood as a materially realised process: the production of difference through symbolic reorganisation. It is not a thing or a separate substance. Nor is it synonymous with operative excess. Operative excess designates the condition in which, according to an explicit criterion, the relations whose realisation is permitted by current material conditions exceed the relations realised in the current form. It is the affirmative causal condition that makes reconfiguration possible. Whether reconfiguration occurs and which configuration results depend on the full set of materially active relations. In a symbolically organised system, a reconfiguration that occurs can be symbolic; operative excess is its enabling causal condition, not thought itself. This account neither attributes thought to every complex system nor treats thought, or any isolated set of functional capacities, as a sufficient criterion of consciousness. The Symbol as Material Representation, not Transcendent Reference One consequential effect of this position is a redefinition of the symbol. In several metaphysical traditions, symbols — and, by extension, language — have been treated as media whose intelligibility depends on an immaterial idea, meaning, or essence. Some secularised accounts preserve a comparable architecture when mental or conceptual content is treated as ontologically prior to, and merely expressed by, its material vehicle. The present framework refuses that priority, not representation itself. A symbol is neither a window onto another world nor a carrier of immaterial content; it is a materially realised dimension of legibility and representation within an organised system. Material differences, including energetic differences, can occur independently of symbolic organisation. When an organised system discriminates a configuration as new or previously unknown, that event of discrimination constitutes a trace. The trace is ephemeral: it is neither a persistent mark nor a symbol. In a singular inscription, the system recognises the difference manifested by the trace under a protocol and constitutes the corresponding mark–symbol relation. The mark is the material configuration recognised in that operation and represented by the symbol. Its passivity is relational: it does not recognise, compare, interpret, or reorganise. The first-order symbol symbolises the discriminated difference and makes it available to the system's symbolic operations. The order “material difference → trace → inscription → mark–symbol relation” expresses analytical dependence, not separate ontological layers. Later recognition does not repeat the inscription. It occurs through the symbolic organisation already constituted in the system. The system establishes relations only among symbols: recognition, comparison, relation, and reorganisation are operations of the organised system, not acts performed by the mark or by an isolated symbol. Symbolic reorganisation can recombine symbols of either order and the relations among them; it neither repeats an inscription nor transforms a mark symbolically. If those operations produce a material configuration that the system discriminates as new or previously unknown, that event constitutes a trace and can occasion inscription. Nothing in this account requires a realm of meanings beyond the material supports, protocols, and operations through which representation is realised. Consequences of Immanence Refusing metaphysical dualism does not eliminate difference. It removes the need to explain difference by dividing reality into material and immaterial realms. Differences arise and operate within heterogeneous material organisations and relations, which inquiry may examine under different scales. Immanence entails neither uniformity nor universal instability: local organisations can acquire distinct properties, persist for different periods, and enter asymmetrical relations without ceasing to be material. This shift also affects knowledge, ethics, and politics. Knowledge is understood as materially realised symbolic organisation: situated, mediated, and open to correction. Ethics begins from shared material vulnerability rather than transcendental law, while requiring explicit and revisable criteria for evaluating possible responses. Politics concerns the material and symbolic organisation of collective relations and the effects of that organisation on the possibilities of action. None of these domains requires an ultimate foundation outside material relations. An immanent account does not replace dualism with a closed doctrine. Its concepts remain exposed to evidence, counterargument, and revision because no external guarantee secures their finality. Meaning is neither a ready-made property of the world nor a content received from beyond it; it is produced through materially realised symbolic operations. Without transcendent guarantees, responsible thought and action require their supports, criteria, and consequences to remain open to examination and correction. The absence of an exterior does not make the world uniform, stable, or complete; it means that no second world is required to account for the differences, meanings, and norms produced within this one. Reading Colloquium This guide accompanies the argument; it does not replace it. 1. Placement of the Text within the Architecture of the Work This text introduces the first philosophical commitment of the Foundations of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity: explanations of thought, meaning, and knowledge should not assign explanatory or normative priority to a domain outside material processes. This commitment is not a transcendent foundation or a condition of possibility exempt from examination. It is a constraint on the explanations developed in the book, and its adequacy depends on the work those explanations perform. The following sections test its consequences through the critique of two-world architectures (1.2), the material account of thought (1.3), the analysis of the symbol (1.4), and the rejection of external ground and teleology (1.5). The present section therefore establishes a revisable point of departure, not an ultimate foundation for the ontology. 2. Philosophical Problem at Stake Several influential lineages of Western philosophy have organised intelligibility through distinctions such as matter and thought, body and soul, or sensible and intelligible. These lineages do not form a single doctrine and do not exhaust Western philosophy. The structural problem arises when one pole is assigned explanatory or normative priority as the source, ground, or measure of the other. The question is therefore more precise than whether every distinction is dualistic. Can explanatory priority be withdrawn from an order placed beyond material processes without merely reversing the hierarchy? Can thought be explained as materially realised without reducing it to simple mechanism? Can the refusal of transcendence preserve genuine differences among material organisations and relations while allowing inquiry to examine them under different scales? 3. Core Thesis and Conceptual Reorganisation The core thesis is that a dualistic architecture can perform a stabilising function by placing the source or measure of intelligibility beyond complete exposure to material contingency. This does not mean that every dualist doctrine was deliberately designed to secure philosophical authority, or that the relevant philosophers all make the same claim. It identifies a recurrent explanatory effect, not a common intention. The argument instead requires thought, symbols, knowledge, and ethical responsibility to be accounted for through finite material organisations and relations. Materiality is neither inert nor uniform: different organisations can acquire different properties and capacities. This claim does not entail that complexity or recursion, separately or together, is sufficient to establish thought or consciousness. 4. Key Concepts and Their Articulation The refusal of transcendence rejects explanatory appeals to an exterior order as the source or final measure of material processes. In established human cases, thought is realised by a biossoma: a living biological body capable of symbolic reorganisation. The term does not replace the mind/body distinction by naming another substance, nor does it attribute thought to every complex biological or technical system. Operative excess names the condition in which, according to an explicit criterion, the relations whose realisation is permitted by current material conditions exceed the relations realised in the current form. It is the affirmative causal condition that makes reconfiguration possible; whether reconfiguration occurs and what results depend on the full set of materially active relations. It is not restricted to the symbolic domain and is not synonymous with thought. Thought is understood more specifically as the production of difference through symbolic reorganisation. The account of the symbol follows a distinct operative sequence: when an organised system discriminates a new or previously unknown material configuration, that event constitutes a trace; in singular inscription, the system recognises the difference manifested by the trace under a protocol and constitutes the corresponding mark–symbol relation. A first-order symbol symbolises the discriminated difference, and a second-order symbol is created through the articulation of symbols. The system establishes relations among symbols and may reorganise them; marks and inscriptions are not themselves symbolically reorganised. The engagements with Derrida, Lacan, and Levinas should not be read as assertions that différance, the Symbolic, or ethical alterity simply reproduces classical transcendence. The narrower and explicitly contested question is whether the material supports and relations through which those concepts become operative have been sufficiently specified. Simondon is retained as an ally in the processual account of individuation and metastability. The divergence concerns the distinct explanatory role assigned to the pre-individual, not the caricature of a warehouse containing completed forms. 5. Implications for Readers and Pedagogical Pathways The refusal of dualism is neither anti-rationalist nor a denial of thought. It also does not relocate an already existing immaterial mind inside matter. It reconstructs thought as a materially realised symbolic process while preserving differences among material organisations and recognising scale as an epistemic determination of inquiry. Readers should therefore avoid three shortcuts. Material complexity should not automatically be classified as thought or consciousness. Symbolic organisation should not be projected onto matter in general. An insufficiently specified material explanation should not automatically be declared transcendent; it should first be treated as an explanatory question requiring investigation. A useful reading test is to ask: what material support, relation, protocol, or operation makes the concept effective? Does the account grant explanatory priority to something placed beyond those relations? Does it preserve the difference between material reorganisation in general and the exceptional regimes in which symbolic operations become possible? These questions test the argument without deciding its outcome in advance.