by Happy Cracker

Ontology is the study of being, and the reason why such a simple concept is gifted such lofty Greek-derived nomenclature is to underscore the need for sufficient circumspection in this endeavor.

We are just now recovering from a period where a flowering of scientific methodology, and the resulting accumulation of knowledge, have lead to a breakdown in our ontological models of the world. The adoption, implementation and breakdown of ontological models due to accumulation of contradictory scientific knowledge, can be visualized as a series of parabolic figures on a coordinate plane. The x-axis represents historical time and the y-axis represents certainty of ontological knowledge. The parabola thus represents the adoption, implementation and breakdown of the ontological model - consistent with a rise, peak and fall in the certainty or belief in this knowledge. Some parabolas are in series, such as Rousseau’s “Natural Man” and Robespierre’s terror-as-virtue Republicanism:

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Decades later, the nature of man had changed; Robespierre needed to use the state to enforce terror in order to create a virtuous order:

“We wish that order of things where all the low and cruel passions are enchained, all the beneficent and generous passions awakened by the laws; where ambition subsists in a desire to deserve glory and serve the country: where distinctions grow out of the system of equality, where the citizen submits to the authority of the magistrate, the magistrate obeys that of the people, and the people are governed by a love of justice.”

Arrest of Robespierre on 19 March 1794. He went to the guillotine five days later.

Other parabolas are in parallel - separated by distance in the z plane, that is to say, geographically. For example, Russian communism and American Civil Rights inspired by the Frankfurt School. Some parabolas are nested within one another like Russian nesting dolls, and perhaps all of these broken ontological attempts are nested within the one great parabola which overshadows our entire millenium: Christianity. We are still on the long descending arc of this last one.

This has been the history of the last 500 years: a wealth of personal accounts of various mountain-climbers, who upon reaching the top of some peak, claimed to have attained an all-encompassing view of the terrain: they were only too happy to draw for us a map.

Few restricted themselves to the scientific method or practiced modesty: for many men the temptation to be The First Man To Understand Mankind proved so strong, that they had to imply universal import and consistency to their understandings. It seems that Understanding in white societies is like Bling in black societies: if you got it, flaunt it. Nothing better than letting another erudite white know that your Understanding trumps his in terms of consistency, parsimoniousness and universal import. Its like when one black has a shinier chain than another black: it portrays an existential diss.

And everywhere, everywhere, we are surrounded with shambolic understandings of the nature of man. The most recent is the multicultural/multiracial lie - readers of this website know it and it’s proponents only too well. Economics is likewise suffering from the overstatement of past zealots: google ‘Debunking Economics’ for a discussion of how much confidence in economic theory is actually justified.

Attempts at understanding the nature of man are especially important given that Christianity is no longer the basis of society, as it was in medieval Europe. The attempt to understand things gains urgency and force as we get farther away from the theological understanding of human life, because it is increasingly understood that human beings have to accept some kind of common hypothesis to form the basis of a social life.

Anti-rationalist or romanticist thinkers such as Nietzsche and Dostoevsky can be seen as repudiating the attempts at conclusive delineations of human nature by referring to pathological tendencies and the abnormal, and giving these a positive valuation as a source of information and experience. In a sense, they were resisting the encroachment of limiting ontologies of human nature which were gaining acceptance in their epoch.

Dostoevsky, founder of existentialism

Nietzsche accomplished this by famously viewing contemporary affairs through a classical lens, as well as emphasizing both the elevated idiosyncratic modes of thought (presumably) unknown to most people and the aspects of tragedy, alienation, loneliness and misanthropy encountered by the far right end of the bell curve as a result of their inability to relate to the vast majority of other people.

Dostoevsky fought for dimensions of life wider than ‘bourgeois comfort and sophistication’ by consistently choosing to deal with themes relating to poverty, sickness, loss, mental illness, ferocious eccentricity, and fundamental character flaws which he did not condemn.