Matter and Idea II

In relation to the semantic operator matter/idea, my concern is with the old ontological assumptions that are inherited and assumed unnoticed in its use, its implicit reifications. Physics does not speak anymore about matter. Fermions, the particles which are thought to be matter-like (in opposition to the force carrier bosons) make only sense within the whole system, which implies that matter is not material in the traditional sense, but some sort of symbolic construction that we use to understand an apeironic experience. For instance the Weyl-fermions are massless, which means a massless matter, if such an expression has any meaning at all. In this sense is very different to old Greco-Roman atomic constructions. And things do not get any better if we try to switch the matter representation for the concept of energy. According to Maxwell’s definition: energy is the capacity of a system to perform mechanical work (1891), but in order for the definition to have any meaning we already have to know the concepts of system and mechanical work (and its associated intuitions), we need a Lebenswelt praxis to construct upon.

Psychology, on the other hand is showing that ideas are not independent of the vital process (unless we assume them a priori to be so), and that even perception is conditioned by emotional valuations, id est, the relation object/subject is more complex than it was thought to be, I would say mimetic. The reference for matter and idea is mind, but mind is not an exomorphic representation, for we can think it in terms of life processes, and for those processes we can take as an anthropological departing point the system of mythical interpretation with its economical and primitive determinations (as I have explained these concepts in Mythopoetics). In this sense ideas are determined not only by Lebenswelt butalso by what we could call Unterlebenswelt, valuations on a physiological levelprior to the symbolizations of human language. My opinion is that we need some sort of metaphilosophical system to encompass such a wide and complex scope of conceptualizations that independent sciences cannot think. It does not have to be reductionistic, neither depart from a unique ontoepistemology but simply define a basic framework for the treatment of the emergence of all these new complex relations, in myths harmonized with our ways of life.

It is not so much that matter has become more ideal and ideas more material, as a question of the obsolescence of the old semantic dual operator.