{"id":13454,"date":"2024-02-09T15:58:57","date_gmt":"2024-02-09T20:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=13454"},"modified":"2024-02-09T16:02:19","modified_gmt":"2024-02-09T21:02:19","slug":"ontology-101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2024\/02\/09\/ontology-101\/","title":{"rendered":"Ontology 101"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The word <\/em>ontology comes up a lot in the fields I work in (loosely speaking, the environmental humanities and social sciences), especially among scholars grappling with cultural differences and “decolonial” thinking. Here’s a crack at a 5-minute introduction to it for newbies.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ontology is commonly defined as something like “the philosophical study of being<\/em>” or “of the nature of being,” or the study of “what is <\/em>and of how<\/em> it is.” I prefer to call it “the study and understanding of reality<\/em> in its differing contours, dimensions, and modes.” So what does that mean?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s take a random list of items: the Brooklyn Bridge, the rain falling outside my window as I write, the number six, a copy of The Book of Mormon <\/em>found in a drawer in room 613 of the New York Downtown Marriott, gravity, Jesus’s resurrection on the third day, Spiderman, an earworm of Pere Ubu’s “Chinese Radiation,” and the Red King. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of these is real<\/em> in some sense or other: for instance, as a tangible object, as a concept (a type or category, a theory, et al.), as an event that either occurred or was imagined to occur, as a possibility, etc. Some of their realities may overlap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

But distinguishing between their different “realities” is not always obvious, and is likely to diverge based on perceivers’ cultural assumptions and other factors. There may be a real<\/em> reality — something singular, fundamental, and irreproachable — beyond<\/em> the perceptions, agreements, and disagreements we humans might have about them, and we may or may not be able to “access” that real<\/em> reality. But that — the idea that there exists a “deeper” reality to which we do or do not have “access” — is itself an ontological claim. One could claim instead that that there are multiple realities and we only have access to one or a limited number of them, never to all of them; or that real <\/em>reality is some sort of spacetime manifold we finite cogs-in-its-wheels couldn’t possibly experience or understand; or that “reality” itself is an incoherent concept, so nothing we say about it could possibly be coherent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And since we have no clear and obvious basis on which to completely reject any of these claims, we can either (a) discuss, consider, dispute, and work through these possibilities and their implications, (b) continue with our lives in the trial-and-error ways that got us where we are, or (c) give up. Most philosophers choose a mix of (a) and (b). Most non-philosophers prefer (b), until they get to the point where it’s obviously not working well for them. Then they might fork over to (a) or to (c). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why might it not work for them? And why is any of this important, anyway? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because a lot of the things that are<\/em> important to many people in the world — things like the climate crisis, grotesque social injustices, the existence of evil in our midst, the Rapture, the possibility of liberation from suffering, or the need to respect the authority of the King, the Law, Tradition, or Science — are the kinds of things whose ontological status people disagree about. So if you want to get anything done<\/em> about them — like solving the climate crisis, getting people to stop sinning, or overthrowing the capitalist system — you need to deal with ontological difference (or what in another context has been called iconoclash<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Back to that list, then. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parsing through it can be easy or difficult. A “common-sensical” consensus might hold, for instance, that some of those things are “real” (say, the Brooklyn Bridge, the rain, gravity, the number six) and some are “fictional” (Superman, the Red King). Others — like Jesus’s resurrection on the third day — are contested precisely because some put them in the first category and some in the second. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that kind of differentiation doesn’t get us very far, especially when the things we argue about fall into that third category. (Did Jesus resurrect on the third day? What does that even mean? And what do we know about him, beyond the stories people have told for a long time, like a game of telephone with unreliable scribes?) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more important point is that each <\/em>of the things on that list is more than simply either real<\/em> or fictional<\/em>, let alone true<\/em> or false<\/em>. The Brooklyn Bridge is an actual bridge, designed, built, and maintained by a certain set of urban authorities, but it is also an image, a concept, a point on maps, a discourse (or metaphor), a site or node within larger relational networks (the idea of Brooklyn, mental images of New York City, online image databases, and so on). The bridge itself is something experienced physically by those crossing it, swimming under it, or flying over it. It’s also something that has enabled a certain spread of roads and traffic, construction and commerce, connectedness and differentiation (are you from Brooklyn or from Manhattan? why is it more expensive to live on one side than the other?). The bridge is deeply woven into the social and environmental history of one of the most densely populated urban centers on the planet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The number six, on the other hand, is everywhere and nowhere. It is in Alpha Centauri and it is in your head. Anyone or anything that counts might be able to conceive it, in some sense, but if we were asked to locate it, we would have to point to things (six steps, six fingers) or draw a sign that someone unfamiliar with Indo-Arabic numerals would fail to connect to the concept we’re referring to. Six, in other words, has a conceptual or theoretical existence. It is the kind of thing A. N. Whitehead called an “eternal object,” which is always there in potential, but nowhere in actuality until it has “ingressed” into a real situation. Math is all about the reality of potentials. Abstractions are, in this sense, as real as anything, and realer than many things, but they cannot be grasped except through representation, figuration, and thought. Sixness is a concept, not an object. Yet in its consistency — for instance, in the fact that four plus two always equals six — it has a coherence that may elude that of any physical object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Superman, on the third hand, is “less real” (on our real-vs.-fictional spectrum, which we’ve already rejected) than the number six, but “more real” than that earworm of Pere Ubu’s song “Chinese Radiation.” Superman is an idea embodied in comic books, movies, Hallowe’en costumes, and children’s imagination (a lot of children, a lot of imagination(s)… which raises the question: what is<\/em> imagination? — sshh, that’s what my next book is about). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our imaginary dualist may wish to assign Superman to the “unreal” side of the ledger, but to the extent that the idea and image of Superman have informed people’s behavior — not just their reading and movie viewing, and the wallets of the producers of those movies, but also their action in situations that call for heroic acts — Superman has changed the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same is obviously true for Jesus, whose resurrection on the third day (whether it literally happened or not) has inspired civilizations, wars, revolutionary movements, mountains of architecture, and countless acts of kindness, generosity, judgment, ridicule, violence, and other things. If there is a religion called Christianity but not (yet?) a religion of Supermanity, that’s only because the ontological value we ascribe to “religion” requires a certain level of adult commitment to organized action on behalf of<\/em> the thing that is its object. Superman hasn’t attained that level. Jesus has, as has the Buddha, L. Ron Hubbard (for a much smaller set of people), and other real or perceived supermen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By contrast to both Jesus and Superman, that earworm of a song by Pere Ubu is a relatively rare occurrence, intermittent when it does appear, and fairly inconsequential. But the song exists — it can be streamed, hummed (with some effort), grooved to (though not exactly danced to), and played (differently). Every time you or I hear it in our mind’s ear, it will be a different variation on the mix of rhythms, sounds, hedging, warbly lyrical inflections, and words that were recorded in a Cleveland studio on a day in 1977 after a certain number of rehearsals, jam sessions, and “aha” moments, and then spliced together with a live recording to create the version that appears on The Modern Dance<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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He’ll be the red guard
She’ll be the new world
He’ll wear his grey cap
And she’ll wave her red book<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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