artefactphil

Plato’s highest idea is that of the Good, one could say, a positive value. The Idea of the Good has had its long, historical career, especially via the Neoplatonism that was absorbed and adapted by Christianity.

The highest idea in our present age of nihilism is that of thingified value, an ambiguous value which as yet remains unknown, obfuscated.

The god of this age is Pleon Exia.

Pleon Exia is slyer and more seductive than Mephisto, and more ruthless. His Medium, thingified value, is destined to grow endlessly by circuiting through its set of intermeshing ‘looks’ or forms of thingified value. Its principle of movement — valorization — is exploitative of human labour power and destructive of the Earth. It stands for inexorable devastation and exhaustion of the Earth that has been reduced in today’s mind to mere necessary, exploitable, income-generating factor of production (with or without so-called environmental guard-rails). The principle is senseless, leading to nothing other than more senseless destruction, more senseless consumption, more senseless, unending, bitter competition.

And yet Pleon is supremely seductive, since he promises reward to the players in the Gainful Game. He urges continual enhancement of productivity for the sake of valorization which, as such, remains under wraps. Instead, the dictates of endless ‘economic growth’ fallaciously promise ‘continually improving standards of living’. The successful players see no reason to question, let alone curtail, Pleon’s gainful game; some — inevitably — even eye the prospects of roping the Moon and Mars into his game.

The unsuccessful players fall for the empty promise of reward through the pursuit of happiness. They have fallen for the ideology of individual freedom as booby-prize for losers who, in turn, take their resentment out on those fellow humans deemed to be inferior and a threat.

Seems we are all suckers for Pleon’s siren calls, flying blind through the night of nihilism, since we haven’t fathomed and prodded the underbelly of the individualized freedom enabled by his Medium.

Further reading: Tale of the Qua: A Philosophical Comedy arte-fact.org, Cologne 2024, an Aristophanic replay of On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Social Ontology of Whoness: Rethinking core phenomena of political philosophy De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

Pleon Exia Philorock song featuring Jeff Todd on saxophone.

Uncovering the unbridled will to valorization, once it is seen explicitly as such and the blindness alleviated through long philosophical controversy and struggle, enables the sociating power interplay among the players to be seen for the first time, in another light, for what it is, thus exposing the lie of liberal ideology. The immense dilemma confronting today’s globalized humankind becomes visible; the deceptive ideology of individual freedom played out in ideally fair, competitive interplay under the rule of law is unmasked as illusory.

By deciphering the inherent one-dimensional bias toward limitless accumulation hidden beneath the bland, indistinctive rubric of ‘economic growth’, the mutually estimative power interplays can be seen to be played out — properly speaking — in existential, three-dimensional time with its three degrees of freedom of movement.

In this sense, with deconcealing insight enabling a step back, the sociating power interplays at least essence more clearly. Without the imposition and encumbrance of thingified value’s temporally one-dimensional valorization movement that systematically undermines any possibility of genuine fairness in sociating power interplays, the mutual estimation performed in sociating interplay can be seen — in thoughtful imagination — to be one of mutually estimating what we as players can do for each other. This beneficent for-each-otherness may be regarded as a synonym in the economic realm for what has traditionally been called ἀγάπη, i.e. love of one’s fellow.

The deconcealment of thingified value as endlessly accumulating medium of sociation — the ugly truth of capitalism — provides at least a diagnosis of one the impediments to such loving interplay, but certainly not a political panacea, if only because politics always remain on the surface, without interrogating deeply enough who we are. Its coming to light through our learning to see — the core mission of philosophy — the very idea of thingified value and its pernicious principle of movement amounts to a change of mind in the Platonic sense of a περιαγωγὴ ὅλης τῆς ψυχῆς, i.e. a “turning around of the entire soul” (cf. Politeia 518d/e, 521c).

It requires courage.

Excerpt from 9.3 Fairness as criterion of justice (revised) of my On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Why we’re in this pickle (inter alia):

On the Nature of Time According to Modern Physics - Jim Al-Khalili. A lecture presented to Gresham College on 23 June 2026.

Master obscurantist heaped over and over with honours, out to bamboozle us. In truth, modern physics hit a dead end over a century ago, but (or rather: because?) physicists long ago lost all understanding of genuine philosophical thinking. They became model-builders. The mathematization of physics has made blind idiots of us all, but especially of the physicists themselves.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

Folly of endless empiricism.

Movement and Time in the Cyberworld Appendix: ‘A demathematizing phenomenological interpretation of quantum-mechanical indeterminacy’ De Gruyter, Berlin 2019.

Quantum indeterminacy and the will to precalculate motion.

Time and space seem to go together like horse and carriage, or love and marriage, or even more so. Why are they treated so self-evidently as on a par with each other? Or are they on a par — in the Western mind? Doesn’t space have precedence over time? Why do English speakers today say things like, “In a time where…”. Why don’t we blink an eyelid at the concept of relativistic space-time in which time is incorporated into space? It is conceptually easier to spatialize time than it is to temporalize space. Has the latter even ever been attempted in Western thinking?

Here is another conundrum: ever since Euclid, three spatial dimensions of physical things have been taken to be self-evident and accordingly geometrized in Euclidean geometry: length, height and depth. Physical things can take their places higgledy-piggledy, anywhere in three-dimensional space. Physical things can line up, or be lined up, spatially in a line next to each other, but they do not have to be so ordered.

The same does not apply for events in time, including especially physical events; they are supposed to line up along a time-line in succession. The three temporal dimensions of past, present and future are self-evidently taken to be aligned, resulting in a one-dimensional, linear time-line (which may be either straight or circular or even curved). Why is this so self-evident that even great Western minds don’t baulk at it? Why can’t events eventuating temporally be strewn higgledy-piggledy throughout a genuinely three-dimensional time? Do not physical events have to take place at some where in the openness of time? Why does the idea of three-dimensional time seem so strange, peculiar and non-intuitive? Is it merely a matter of traditional, inherited, ingrained habits of thought that resist any effort of the mind to revise them?

The puzzle is easily solved: physical events may happen anywhere in three-dimensional space, but they are (tendentiously) supposed to be interconnected through cause and effect, with the cause preceding the effect on the one-dimensional time-line. Hence past, present and future have to be brought into alignment for the sake of causally explaining (especially physical) events in terms of each other, thus exercising (predictive) power over physical movement. This has been the program of Western science, starting with physics, ever since the inauguration of ancient Greek philosophical thinking that culminated in Aristotle’s philosophy.

The unbridled will to power over all kinds of movement is alive and well today. It finds its leverage especially in manipulating matter, to which the schema of cause and effect is applied. To this end, even the mind itself must be conceived (in neuroscience) as reducible to the material brain, so that thoughts line up syllogistically along a one-dimensional time-line of logical inference. This conception of thinking as a kind of syllogistic computation can then be mimicked by a Turing machine and subsequently by artificial neurons that are at the heart of Artificial Intelligence. A.I. is currently invading our human world by setting up an artificial, material, energy-hungry, algorithmically driven, parallel cyberworld alongside an apparently increasingly obsolete world of flesh, blood and mind.

Since the philosophical endeavour to disclose the truth of the phenomena has been superseded by the striving to construct models generating correct empirical predictions, a break-out from the straight-jacket of one-dimensional time seems less likely than ever. But appearances can be deceptive.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.

‘Turing’s Cyberworld’ in Information Cultures in the Digital Age: A Festschrift in Honour of Rafael Capurro Matthew Kelly & Jared Bielby (eds.) Springer VS, Wiesbaden pp. 65-81, 2016, modified from my earlier paper, ‘Turing’s cyberworld of timelessly copulating bit-strings’ 2012.

In my recent interchange per video with Dean Rickles (Exploring Three-Dimensional Time with Michael Eldred, recorded on 07 May 2026), I neglected to mention several salient points of my temporalogical thinking. Here I have the opportunity to remedy at least a couple of these desiderata.

Dean and I touched upon and even delved into crucial aspects of my thinking through our back-and-forth. I notice that there is a constant danger and even inevitability of relapsing by spatially reducing the phenomenon of time, say, by thinking of the openness of three-dimensional time as a kind of quasi-space, implicitly confusing ‘when’ with a non-temporal ‘where’. That’s no wonder, considering the millennia-long tradition of Western metaphysics and our resultant ingrained habits of thinking.

Three-dimensional time is nowhere at all. It is ‘pre-where’, prior to any whereness. (It is also pre-physical and thus pre-material.) A possible event/occurrence presencing from the future in the mind, for example, but still absent as a present event, and perhaps never presencing in the mind as coming from the present, has its futural ‘when’ and may still present itself ‘whence’ as present for the mind. In general, events eventuate temporally from one or other of the three possible whens when presencing in the mind.

In the case of genuinely creative eventuations from the future, these happen spontaneously ‘out of nothing’, futurally from their own characteristic ‘when’. They cannot be reduced to some kind of more or less complicated permutation of what has already come to presence for the shared mind in the present. The futural dimension of imagination is the genuinely creative source that may combine with and build upon what is already there and presences in the mind, thus rendering inventiveness of any kind temporally hybrid. (The futural nature of any kind of genuine creativity or inventiveness allows us to see the fundamentally delusive nature of any kind of Artificial Intelligence, no matter how sophisticated, since A.I. can only generate algorithmically from what is already there, viz. from the given data.)

I could have made the temporal meaning of being itself clearer by speaking of presencing, absencing and essencing for the understanding mind, and pointing out that all three can be seen as temporalizing (re)interpretations of Greek οὐσία (_ousia_). Οὐσία is the principal concept of Aristotle’s ontology that continues its career throughout Western thinking under its mistranslation and misinterpretation as ’substance’. Properly speaking, οὐσία has to be interpreted in its intimate temporal proximity to παρουσία (_parousia_, presence) and ἀπουσία (_apousia_, absence), all formed from the feminine present participle οὖσα (_ousa_, being) of the verb εἶναι (_einai_, to be). Thus, reinterpreted temporalogically, ‘beings’ become ‘essents’ essencing ‘participatively’ in the temporally three-dimensional psyche by presencing in and absencing from the mind.

Furthermore, when Dean and I discussed historical hermeneutic casts of mind, I could have done better by outlining the hermeneutic cast of our present age as the cast of interior subjective consciousness vis-à-vis an external objective world. In our age it is almost impossible for us to think in any way other than in terms of subject, object, consciousness. It seems self-evident, with its distinction between inside and outside, and the concomitant, apparently independent objectivity of the external world. Without this hermeneutic cast, we would not be plagued today by A.I.

Temporalogical thinking allows our mind to break out of this corset, first by recasting consciousness hermeneutically as the psyche belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time and then by realizing that the so-called objective world of material, physical objects is itself encompassed by this temporal psyche (it can essence ‘no-where’ — or rather, ‘no-how’ — else than temporally).

At the other end of the spectrum to temporalogical insight lies an apparently ‘external objective world’, misconceived as somehow ‘internalized in our heads’. Defusing this fateful misconception is just one of the daunting historical tasks and challenges facing the alternative temporalogical way of thinking da capo.

Further reading: On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.