A History of Liberal Ontologizing As Kyriarchist Genring

From proto-Classical metaphysics through Enlightenment Rationalism and into the contemporary post-structuralist theories, the Western concept of being has moved through a teleological narrative arc that determines its own history as progressive and positive.

This narrative arc, I believe, is not incidental, but reflective of the mechanisms by which the Western ontology unfolds. That is, it is a part of the genring by which Western ontogenics manifests.

Genring, as a concept, has developed from a literary mechanism to an epistemic mechanism for conceptual analysis, as the sociocultural effects of literature and literary cognition were studied further. It is a minimal extension of the concept to view it as a mechanism of worlding. That is, genring can be described as a collection of world-making heuristic processes: whether it is directed at an individual text or one's own existence is irrelevant, if not opaque, to the processes.

Kyriarchist genring, then, is genring which dominates reality with the claims determined through its genring processes: a doctrinial embedding of existence into a regime of linear intelligibility. The unknown is not encountered on its own terms, but prejudged as variation within a closed semantic horizon, allowing any unknown to by known, as an unknown, and thus part of an arc of knowing.

There is anticipation in this logic, and this anticipatory structure, where every anomaly becomes known and every rupture resolved, induces an anticipation that ontologizing will come to have a knowledge of all things, leaving space for attachment to that future-possession.

In the lineage of liberal ontology, to know is to determine its form. The language we use to describe this act has changed, and will continue to change, but the general cadence may be described as, things are known by determining how they are similar to, and different from, other things. But to determine whether some thing is like another thing, the other thing must be determined. This determination is derived from a priori claims of relationality between the other thing and some thing, leading to a causal sequence that the other thing both validates and is validated by some thing.

That is, an apple is known as a fruit because fruit is inclusive of apples, and fruit is known as inclusive of applies because apples are a fruit. Modern theorists have unpacked this logic significantly, describing complex interlocking systems of categorization and sequencing.

With apples and other things tied to physical referrants, the consequences of such tautological descriptions are minimal. When dealing with abstractions like the climate or evil, the recursive reinforcement of form can lead to significant errors.

Notably, these mechanisms of determination are indistinguishable, except in content, from what Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza termed kyriarchy. In the concept of hierarchy, entangled categories of hierarchy (i.e. patriarchy, colonialism, ableism) do not only provide structuration to material relations, but format the conditions through which material relations exist.

Liberal ontological projects, such as Platonic forms, Linnaean taxonomies, Cartesian dualism, have developed a metaphysical grammar by which this kyriarchism seems like physical truth, and thus believers in these ontologies a priori believe in kyriarchism.

The grammar of being that liberal ontologizing developed did not emerge from nothing. Centuries before the formalization of metaphysics, social stratification and ecological abstraction was occurring in the city-states of the Mediterranean basin.

The ontological systems developed by proto-Classical Greek thinkers were responses to, and instruments of, a rapidly changing material world. Agriculture and trade were intensifying, monetary systems were developing, labor was specializing, and the polis emerged, all inducing different, complex, and related abstractions. These conditions induced a new incoherence, which necessitated stabilization.

Under these pressures, being was (re)defined.¹ What something was became something that must be apprehended, measured, and ordered. An individual's crop was generalized to "grain," for example.

The early metaphysical move, to locate reality in arche (a primal element), may have been the ontological correlate of surplus management: a response to the desire to find what underlies variation so the surface can be controlled. [This is a leap, logically, from the previous paragraph.]

Thales of Miletus is often attributed with inaugurating Western philosophy by proposing that all things derive from water. Often presented in contemporary text as naive materialism, it is nonetheless the origin of Western metaphysics, serving as a conjecture that has oriented all future ontologizing, and to my purpose, what matters is not the content of the claim, but its form: that complexity can be reduced by removing difference until the innate similarity is revealed. This is the first act of kyriarchist genring: rendering the world as a coherent and knowable deviation from a thing.

Anaximander extended this idea by positing the apeiron (boundless or indefinite) as the source of all things. By introducing the idea of cosmic justice, where things necessarily emerge from and return to the apeiron, he tied ontological form with temporal sequence: beings are not known only by their deviation from form, but by their position within this arc of deviation-and-resolution.

The unknown thus becomes narrativized as an anticipated possession, and the remains as an unknown is the position of the original unknown along its arc of cosmic justice, establishing a simple mode of knowing-by-genring: knowing, by understanding how a thing relates to the genre of its own being. Critically, this is not understanding a thing through its position within an arc of cosmic justice, but by understanding a thing through it having a position within an arc of cosmic justice.

Heraclitus and Parmenides, though opposite in claim (All is Changing or All is One), share a belief in a universal substrate that is beyond their perceptions. While Heraclitus located coherence within logos, a principled, ordered, operationality that governed all change, Parmenides claimed change was an illusion of perception caused by our own position within our arc of cosmic justice. But both lines of thought were derived from Thales' original claim that the world we experience is a coherent and knowable deviation from a thing. Unknowability, irresolvabilty, mystery, became further integrated into an increasingly-formal logic of legibility and intelligibility, developing the mechanisms of ontological genring further.

Pythagoras codified these ideas into mathematics, a form of legibility that is radically abstracted from the material world, its context, or its relations. Harmonic ideal was not seen as a dynamic balance of things within their cosmic relations, but their alignment with an abstract and immediate order. [This needs more meat]

Plato synthesized the strands of thought that came before him. For him, the world we could perceive was a shadow of forms: ideal, eternal structures of which all worldly things are deviant copies. [Explain how forms were derived]

Plato's Form of the Good served as a genre of genres: the ultimate form toward which all things strive, the genre to which all things adhere. This was the first full, albeit minimal, expression of kyriarchist genring: philosophizing whose metaphysics determine the real through its relationship to its own metaphysics, not the real's relationship to the real.

Aristotle developed these ideas. Where Plato posited transcendence, Aristotle posited immanence: every being has an essence (telos)…

• categories, taxonomies, logics
• aristotle's ontology == political
  • human = rational
  • male = normative
  • slave = subordinate
• thus, aristotle = moved kyriarchist genring from metaphysical to naturalized/social
• sum:
  • classical period established western ontology as a project of stabilizing-by-formalizing
  • six generations constructed narrative infrastructure by which western thought would come to know itself
  • don't just precede other ontological regimes: establish the genre of ontology
    • that genre is recursive:
      • to be is to be knowable
      • to be knowable is to conform to form
      • to conform to form is to be
    • ur-arc of kyriarchist genring/liberal ontologizing:
      • formating of existence into storylines that naturalize domination as intelligibility
• proto-imperial kyriarchist genring
  • intro
    • stoicism
    • epicureanism
    • skepticism
    • divergent conclusions, similar operations: preserving and adapting the belief that truth is stable, difference resolvable, and beings have form
  • stoicism
    • zeno of citium
      • chrysippus, seneca, epictetus, marcus aurelius
    • universal logos
      • rational, divine order immanent in all things
    • good life = align yourself with this order through rational self-disciple, emotional regulation, and virtuous social conduct
    • kyriarchist genring: binds moral coherene to cosmic legibility
      • suffering isn't injustice but misunderstanding or misaction
      • logos = imperial genre: all that is is good and necessary, if it's aligned
      • difference, deviation = internal failure, not structural condition
    • ontological legibility = moral good
      • can't live according to nature?
        • child
        • criminal
        • feminine
  • epicureanism
    • no divine teleology, no cosmic justice
    • atomistic universe
      • random chance
      • natural law
    • ataraxia (pleasure/tranquility) is the highest good
      • reached with mdoeration, friendship, apolitical living
    • often framed as radical against stoicism
      • operates as parallel genring:
        • reality might not have divine intentionality, but it is still rationally comphrensible: self-consistent and calculable
      • ataraxia = measure of distance from indeterminacy??
    • stoicism = align with empire, epicureanism = opt out
      • both require empire for orientation
  • skepticism
    • pyrrhonian/academic
      • suspend judgement (epoche), avoid dogma, get ataraxia
      • often framed as interrupting metaphysical certainty
      • not interrupts, AFFIRMS:
        • skeptical self is assumed coherent and stable
          • derived from prior genring logic
  • hellenistic kyriachist genring:
    • ontological adaptation to imperialism
      • stoicism: internalized hierarchy
      • epicureanism: fake agency
      • stoicism: fake individualism
• early imperial kyriarchist genring
• Roman emprie
  • grammar of governance
  • Greeks: "what is it to be?"
    • to have form
  • Neoplatonists: "What is it to be good?"
    • To align to form
  • Romans: "What is it to belong?"
    • To know/project form??
  • shift from pure sesnece to place, duty, recognition-within-the-order
  • philosophy becomes infrastructure
    • law codes
    • citizenship
    • imperial cult
    • Roman subject as genre
    • Rome = Divine
      • world stratified by proximity to rome, not divinity
      • Pax Romana²
      • All Roads Lead to Rome
  • Roman Stoics
    • Cicero (1st century BCE)
      • converts stoic natural law to civic ideal
        • good citizen = one who conforms to universal reason, by fulfilling their role in the Repubic [Aside: Cicero and Confucius both describe an ideal citizen defined by civic duty, but the metaphysical and moral background is different. There may be grounds for a historical analysis of modern synthetics derived from the superficial similarities, and an analysis of which elements of the respective foundations are maintained in those synthetics.]
    • Seneca
      • internalization of genre
        • imperial political chaos -> retreat to self
          • solve instability of social systems through coherence of individual systems through coherence with transcendent 'truth'
      • Marcus Aurelius Meditations
        • legibility as virtue
        • ideal self = transparent, self-regulating, internally coherent
        • contradiction = vice
        • emotion = disturbance
        • difference, internal or external, is to be resolved through alignment into form
    • Roman stoics didn't question the moral legitimacy of empire, so rather than ontologize its legitimacy, ontologize how to reproduce (endure) it
    • being = not just belonging to an order, but actively enacting it inward, through one's relation to self and duty.
    • Roman juridicial metaphysics
      • Roman law = form as force
        • closed grammar of being:
          • persons (citizen, slave, freedman)
          • acts (licit, illicit)
          • obligations (public, private)
        • the real is mapped, measured, and enforced through law
      • thus roman ontologizing = metaphysical narrative arc = judicial arc = civilizing/civilization
  • Neoplatonism
    • founded by Plotinus (3rd Century CE)
      • developed by Porphyryr, Iamblichus, and Proclus
    • developed Platonic thought into cosmic architecture
      • synthesized hellenistic ontological schools into a unified schema:
        • all real comes from one single perfect source (One/God)
          • The One is beyond being, beyond intelligibilty, beyond division.
        • from the One radiates Nous (divine intellect), and then Soul, and then the material world.
          • each level is more multiple, more unstable, and more distant from truth
          • this structure preserves platos' two-worlds metaphysics
            • but as sequenced, graded, hierarchy
              • distance from source = measure (of value, intelligibility, legitimacy)
      • Plotinus, in Enneads, presents cosmology of emanation, not creation:
        • One does not choose to create, it overflows, and this overflowing is structured as the necessary logic of gradation.
          • Difference is not rupture but diminishment
          • FUrther from One = less real
          • Evil = privation of form; excess distance from the One
      • This inscribes value into proximity and genre into metaphysical radiance.
        • formats a mode of relation to existence:
          • not engagement with Real, but return to One, via erasure of difference
            • world is a veil to be overcome, not a field ot be related with
      • Thus the only proper relation to the world is spiritual withdrawal into higher forms.
      • neoplatonnism trascendentalizes Plato: instead of abstract Forms, a cosmic chain of being.
      • doesn't suppress difference or alteratiy, but grades it
      • future: christians say God is the source of being, sin as ontological deviation, and salvation as restoration of form. Neoplatonism bridges Classical philosophy and Scholastics
• Early Christian ontologizing
  • synthesized neoplatonic belief, stoic praxis, and hellenistic morals
  • soteriological grammar:
    • existence is a story authored by God, and every being's value is determined by its fitness to that genre
  • Origen of Alexandria (185-254ce) offers an early christian ontology
    • theorized all souls were created near to God (and thus equal), but fell/descended/corrupted/sinned/became evil through misuse of their free will, thus coming into being in various material forms. Thus the material world is a map of ontological deviation from God, and its purpose is to facilitate re-alignment with God.
    • Kyriarchist genring as metaphysical perfectionism: soul is being-in-genre: has an origin/genesis, a narrative arc, and an end. Its legitimacy (value) is measured by its distance from God, which is manifest and thus measurable by material, cognitive, and emotional realities.
    • Origen's cosmos = structured by graded coherence
  • AUgustine of Hippo (354-430ce), Confessions and The City of God:
    • reconfigures Platonic and Roman frameworks to produce a linear cosmology:
      • Creation -> Fall -> Redemption -> Judgement
      • history is not cyclical or emanative, it is narrative, and salvation is the end of the narrative.
      • Augustine shifts location of divine legibility to interior, not civic, self: God, not Empire, reads the heart and soul, not the behaviors and words.
      • Self = being-of-genring, through confession, discipline, and grace.
    • Recursive systemm of subjectiviation:
      • subject must be legible to God
      • legibility requires adherence to narrative
      • thus the subject must adhere to a narrative which precedes and exceeds itself.
    • Boethius (480-524ce), living through the collapse of the western Roman Empire, synthesizes Aristotelian logic and Neoplatonic metaphyiscs in Consolation of Philosophy
    • affirms:
      • graded cosmos
      • immanating from God
      • God is outside being and time
        • views all existence as a single eternal moment
      • all the real is hierarchally ordered, narratively resolved, and ontologically coherent by divine induction. anything unknowable or unpredictable is falsehood or evil.
  • early christian ontologizing intensifies kyriarchist genring:
    • legibility as salvation
    • form as legibility
    • unlike earlier systems which allowed for natural mystery or ambiguity, the Christian cosmos rendered difference as failure and unknowability as sin.
      • This reinforced the development of kyriarchist genring:
        • claims the genre of being derives from the condition of divine authorship
        • thus, the self and the systems it is in are genres of the divine narrative
    • the result: a world-picture in which all deviation is already known, already judged, and already folded into a larger narrative of coherence ("God has a plan")
      • substrate of medieval scholasticism
• Enlightenment:
  • commonly viewed as rupture:
    • break from dogma
    • turn from theology to reason
    • birth of freedom
  • viewed as ilneage of kyriarchist genring?
    • metaphysics as method
    • doctrine as data
    • God as reason
    • structures of legitimizing/knowing don't change, just the idioms/signs used to discuss it:
      • form remains sovereign
        • being is a genre
      • unknown is impossible
      • reason = genre of reality
      • truth = capacity to engenre
      • KEY enlightenment transformation: development of systems of rationalization of hierarchy and kyriarchism.