Foundations of the Ontology of Emerging Complexity/Order as Local Effect/VII - Ontological and Ethical Consequences/Reading Colloquium

3.3.7 – Ontological and Ethical Consequences

Reading Colloquium – Pedagogical Framework

(For students and readers in training. This section does not replace the text—it accompanies it.)

Placement of the text within the work's architecture

This text extends the refusal of dualism expounded in the previous text but shifts the focus: it moves from the critique of conceptual separation to the analysis of the historical gesture that instituted the fiction of "two worlds". It shows that the ideal/sensible split does not describe the real; it founds a symbolic authority that expelled instability and hierarchised meaning. Within the adopted framework, this expulsion is not an episodic error: it is an ontopolitical operation that configured the criteria of the intelligible. The materialist-emergent perspective refuses this foundational operation and re-establishes the self-sufficiency of the real in transformation, without appeal to a transcendental "exterior".

Philosophical problem at stake

What symbolic and political function does the division between an ideal plane and a sensible plane serve? The text argues that we are not faced with a discovery, but with a normative invention: a fiction that regulates what counts as intelligible by excluding time, bodies, error, and transformation. The split is, therefore, a device of symbolic stabilisation: it converts matter into copy, noise, or fall, reserving for the ideal instance the guardianship of truth and meaning (Plato; Kant 1781/1998; Hegel 1807/1977). The consequence is twofold: epistemological (knowledge is abstracted from material operation) and ethical (the vulnerability of the biosoma is subordinated to values extracted from an extramundane "height").

Central thesis and conceptual reorganisation

The Ontology of Emerging Complexity refuses the architecture of two worlds and does not replace it with a rival hierarchy: it refuses the very gesture that instituted the asymmetry. Emergence designates threshold operations of material reorganisation under operative excess, not the ascent of a "superior" from an "inferior". This results in the reconfiguration of classical terms: origin ceases to be an archetypal point and becomes a function of couplings that create conditions; truth ceases to mirror essences and becomes a value of operative inscription; meaning does not come from an "outside", it is composed locally; relation does not link prior substances, it creates entities by linking. Thought does not ascend—it modulates; difference does not come from outside—it irrupts internally; the real does not need another plane to justify itself—it is self-sufficient in its variation. Even critiques of phenomenological or post-structuralist matrix, such as in Heidegger (1927), Levinas (1961), and Derrida (1967), sometimes preserve a transcendent remainder (Being that exceeds beings; alterity that precedes relation; trace that escapes presence). Against this remainder, radical immanence is affirmed: all efficacy is material and every symbol is a material structure that represents relations between material structures and operates upon marks.

Key concepts and articulation (in dialogue with the operative lexicon)

• Invention of two worlds: metaphysical operation that divides being into ideal and material, instituting a symbolic hierarchy that debases the sensible to copy/noise (Plato; Kant 1781/1998; Hegel 1807/1977).
• Ontological fiction: construction that regulates thinking by excluding the unstable; it does not describe, it norms.
• Emergence: threshold operation in matter; effect of operative excess that forces compatible reorganisations, not manifestation of a "superior" level.
• Rejection of transcendence: refusal of any plane of being exterior/prior to the real in variation; the real is self-sufficient.
• Articulation with the lexicon: trace (ephemeral material difference) becomes a mark through inscription (technical gesture); symbol operates upon marks and other symbols to reorganise. The fiction of two worlds saturated the symbol with transcendence; here, the symbol remains strictly material-operative.
• Critique of transcendent remnants: in Heidegger (1927), a "Being" that surpasses the entity; in Levinas (1961), an alterity that precedes and normativises relation; in Derrida (1967), a trace whose flight from presence can be reappropriated as a new exterior. The adopted framework conserves the best of these critical gestures (anti-essentialism, de-centring, primacy of difference) but deactivates the appeal to any non-material "outside".

Implications for reading and pedagogical paths

This text exposes a recurring blind spot: the supposition that meaning requires an "elsewhere". By demonstrating that this demand for exteriority is a historical and normative construction, it invites us to think the real as self-sufficient and to reconduct truth and meaning to situated operative inscriptions.

Proposals for classroom work/study:

• Historical cartography: map the "two worlds" line from Plato to Kant (1781/1998) and Hegel (1807/1977), highlighting the regulatory function of the hierarchy.
• Persistent hierarchies: analyse how remnants of transcendence subsist in philosophies of difference or alterity (Heidegger 1927; Levinas 1961; Derrida 1967), indicating the precise point where the "remainder" emerges.
• Diagnosis of the present: identify the "two worlds" operation in contemporary discourses (diffuse spiritualisms, techno-gnosis, idealised aesthetics) and explicate their normative effects.
• Exercise in radical immanence: outline what it implies to think without an outside: declare conditions of validity, losses, and costs of each inscription; test how functional couplings generate consistencies without resorting to transcendent foundations.
• Techno-epistemic case study: compare practices of measurement/inscription (in light of Hacking 1983; Barad 2007) to show how meaning is produced in operation, and not by reference to an ideal plane.