This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm, Spotify, and other platforms
Hail and welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible, a podcast about philosophy and religion. Many of my recent episodes have been focused on explicating my central philosophical doctrine, ecumenical phenomenology, a transcendental and phenomenological idealist ontology of abstract reality. This episode continues that series, but I have at this point a complex net of ideas spread over several episodes and so I think it would be worth, as my patrons have suggested, laying it all out in one place as simply and briefly as I can.
So here’s the whole thing, as best and as tersely as I can explain it, without any of the background that supports why I think that this is true. I’ve got that covered elsewhere. Most of the basic elements of this theory come from a long list of other thinkers; as I’ve said before, ecumenical phenomenology barely even qualifies as an original idea; rather, I’m just the one who noticed how these different ideas connect. I’m not going to be citing those thinkers directly because I’m going for a clear and straightforward presentation without any unnecessary details, but just to give credit where credit is due, I’ll list what I hope are at least most of them here: Plato, David Hume, Kant, Hegel, Leibniz, Alexius Meinong, William James, Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, Thomas Luckmann, Martin Heidegger, Kurt Gödel, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jürgen Habermas, Edward Zalta, Reza Negarestani, Slavoj Žižek, and Peter Sloterdijk. Most of what I’m about to present was not derived from the work of these thinkers but found to relate to or mirror their findings after the fact, and I’ve often adopted their language where I’ve found that it expresses the concepts better. In some cases, I’ve kept my own terminology because of its relationship to the broader context of my theory. I also owe a huge debt to my friend Damon, who has pointed me to numerous resources and with whom I have had many conversations that have helped enormously in my putting all this together.
Getting into it: What we call “reality” is an essentially mental substance. Your experience of the world and of yourself and your own thoughts… all of that is activity in your brain. It seems to us, in our day to day experience, that we exist in a kind of spatiotemporal bubble, that there’s a world out there, outside of us, and that we’re inside this world and seeing out into it, we ourselves a kind of bubble in which our own thoughts are contained. But this is an illusion and a fundamental error about the nature of reality. All of these things are of mental substance. Everything you’ve ever thought, felt, believed, known, sensed, or experienced in any way are patterns of the neural activity of a brain.
Perhaps you protest, saying, “Be that as it may, there’s still a real world outside of ourselves that we’re experiencing, and that’s reality, not whatever’s in our heads but what’s out there.” The error here is entirely understandable. A certain feature of the mental substance of reality strongly reinforces that illusion, and I’ll get back to that in a second. Whether or not it’s the case that there’s something out there that we’re experiencing representationally, what we mean by reality is most often not whatever is beyond our experience but what is within our experience. Think about what is real to you right now, in this moment: the environment you’re in, the sound of my voice or my words on a screen, the people and things around you, various things that you’re sensing or feeling, and your thoughts as well are part of your reality. And these various things that you point to as being immediately real are within your mental experience. You’re not reaching for whatever non-experiential thing lies beyond those experiences. If you you pick up a book, it’s your experience of its weight and its color and its size and shape that make it real for you, not the intricacies of its atomic structure or whatever else about the book lies outside your experience. And all of that experience is mental.
Suppose we were walking together along a path as I explained this to you. You, by way of refutation, perhaps having once heard a story that went somewhat along these lines, kick a rock several times. It’s an effective counterpoint: the world seems quite physically real, and in fact there are certain points of consistency between the experiences of our two minds. We both see the rock. We both see and hear you kicking it. And if I were to kick it I would feel the same hardness you felt and you would hear me kicking it. This doesn’t seem to accord with reality as mental substance. After all, I can imagine myself kicking a rock and it won’t cause you to hear it or see it or even think it.
I refer to this plane of consistency as the liminal surface of the ontic void. Let’s try to put aside for the moment the notion of the liminal surface as “reality.” That’s what we normally call it, but I’m trying to circumvent our normal patterns of thought in order to expose certain errors and illusions. The liminal surface is simply those features of mental substance which are consistent across minds. The rock you kicked is part of the liminal surface and the sound of you kicking it is a kind of inscription that you made on that surface, something that emerges into my own consciousness, something shared, to which we can both refer. But it remains that the rock, as we understand it, as we point to it, speak about it, see it, hear it being kicked, is, for both of us, purely mental.
Let’s return to that term, the liminal surface of the ontic void. “Ontic” is a word meaning “real,” and I’m using it here in the sense of referring to not what we actually mean when we talk about reality in an everyday way but what we think we mean: the world out there, beyond us, represented to us by our conscious experience but not itself our conscious experience. The liminal surface is the form of appearance of the ontic—it is how reality appears to us—and we vest in it our entire world of meaning and values. I’m writing this on Christmas day, 2022, and surrounding me is an entire universe of meaning and values. My partner, our roommate, our cat, the movie The Exorcist playing (as is Christmas tradition in my household), gifts of unusual foods, my laptop and the document I’m writing, the cold and snow covered world outside the window, and hundreds of other things large and small, but my understanding of all of these things, individually and collectively, is not part of their essential ontic substance but of the symbolic world in which human experience exists. And when I try to get beyond that world of experience to see what’s really there, I am confronted with… nothing. I can’t get beyond my own experience to encounter whatever non-experiential world exists behind it, so when I reach for the real, the ontic, I encounter only void. What we think we’re talking about when we talk about reality is, in actual reality, not even an empty space.
Considering now the nature of the mental substance of our reality, we can say that a mind functions as a network of elemental conceptual units. A word or object appearing in your reality will conjure up various associations which, together, constitute its meaning for you. These associations include behaviors that you may undertake in response to this appearance. Beyond this, we understand how various occurences predict or relate to other occurrences, and this too is meaning, in the sense of saying “the sunset means the onset of night.” Thus, meaning is the activity of reality.
Suppose that you and I continue our walk and come upon a bramble from which a single rose is growing. Upon seeing it, you will think certain things, feel certain things, behave in certain ways. Perhaps you think of the line from Romeo and Juliet, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Perhaps you quote that line out loud. You might stop to admire the rose, or bend over to inhale its scent. Those things in turn conjure further thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and in fact thoughts and feelings are themselves kinds of behavior. If you stop and bend over to smell the rose, I wouldn’t be at all surprised; I would probably think to do the same myself. Not just the appearance of the rose within the liminal surface but also a deeper and richer world of meaning is shared between us. Not entirely; I likely have memories of roses which you do not share, but there’s a great deal of overlap, enough that we could have a detailed conversation on the subject of the rose and of roses in general, about their biology, their cultivation, their symbolism, their appearance in Elizabethan dramaturgy…
We make this fundamental error that we are in the world, that the world is something outside of us, but in fact the entire world, both the liminal surface and the human world of symbols and meaning, is contained within each of us. This begins to paint a bleak, solipsistic picture of our reality, each of us alone in a private universe which we are unable to transcend. As we continue our walk, you and I, my entire experience of you is contained within my own mind, and your entire experience of me within yours. The Break between our minds is spanned by the liminal surface of the ontic void. We inscribe upon it and thereby bridge our private worlds, every communication like a message in a bottle which crosses an infinite void to reach other minds.
Imagine a mind as being a web of connections, trillions of connections between billions of neurons. These connections encode our knowledge, our beliefs, our personalities, our memories, everything that makes us who we are as individuals. These neural connections form and strengthen in response to neural activity. When you see a rose and recall the Shakespeare quote, the neural connections involved are strengthened. This means that the dynamic structure of our minds responds to the liminal surface and to inscriptions upon it; in other words, our minds change in response to communication. Now imagine the billions of minds of the entire human species, including all of those who have come before us, interacting in this way, creating a distributed dynamical system which is enormously complex but also self-similar, like a fractal. This is the ecumenicon: the distributed connectionist network of mind. The idea of a rose and everything associated with that idea is a recurring pattern across individual minds, developed and reinforced through communication between minds and interaction with the liminal surface. The similarities and differences between these patterns from mind to mind encode our social circles, societies, cultures, and civilizations.
Some interesting revelations arise from ecumenical phenomenology. For example, the world is alive. It’s as alive as you are. It is your life, in fact; everything that you call the world is something of you. We give life to the world, every inanimate thing animate in our living experience. Admittedly, this is something of an abuse of language: we mean “living” or “alive” in a certain way and typically don’t intend for it to refer to a kettle or a chair, but this leads us to the erroneous conclusion that the world is a dead thing in which we live rather than to the correct conclusion that the world is the living reality of ourselves.
Another corollary is that abstract objects exist. Things like the idea of a rose, the concept of justice, the number three, the fictional character Frodo Baggins, the laws of physics, the government of Sweden… some of these abstract objects, like the idea of a rock, reflect features of the liminal surface in a rather direct way; others, like Frodo Baggins, relate more indirectly: the Lord of the Rings books—the actual paper books and digital versions as well—are a feature of the liminal surface, but that’s just ink on paper or pixels on screen. Frodo Baggins is a feature of the Lord of the Rings books as they exist abstractly and conceptually. Other abstract objects are more difficult to tie to specific features of the liminal surface. The concept of justice relates to certain behaviors, most often human behaviors, but applies to them in an astoundingly complex way. Indeed, abstract objects are structures of incredible complexity and differentiation. They are highly dynamic, sometimes stable, sometimes changing like the weather. And while there are differences between different classes of abstract objects and different relationships between those objects and the liminal surface, both abstract and concrete objects are made of the same mental substance and are thus equally real.
Yet another corollary is that the world is intrinsically meaningful. Again, meaning is the activity of reality. Everything signifies. I think when we look for causes of things—of events, of behaviors, of results—what we find instead is meaning. The thrown ball means the broken window, the clouds mean the rainfall. We ask whether abstract objects can be causes the way that concrete objects—features of the liminal surface—can be causes, but we haven’t really figured out concrete causation to begin with. But both concrete and abstract objects signify, and the meaning thus signified includes behaviors. Suppose you witness something injust and protest against it. The meaning of injustice is your protesting.
I’ll wrap it up here. Again, the background and support for all of this is contained in past episodes—“Introduction to the Phenomenology of Abstract Reality,” “Heidegger’s Question of Technology and the Disenchantment of the World”, “Hypoptosis and the Phenomenology of Grief,” and “Connectionism: The Foundation of the Ecumenicon”—as well as in what will be at least three coming episodes, one focusing on a specific application of ecumenical phenomenology called the cartel model, one focusing on how the theory answers specific philosophical questions, and one focusing on how the theory can be applied to religion, theology, and Satanism.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.