Relational Monism and the Discrete Hypostases of the Field: An Introductory Reflection

Relational Monism and the Discrete Hypostases of the Field: An Introductory Reflection

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh — a meaning interwoven dynamically with other meanings, forming a structure that fills our own private universe. Too many years spent observing the world have produced in me reactions of a peculiar kind. It is not disgust, nor revulsion, yet it is certainly not delight.

What surrounds me today does not invite happiness, nor even simple joy. I do not intend, however, to complain about the world — it is as it is. Or perhaps, risking a thought, it is as I am.

I have noticed a certain regularity. All the marvels, all the achievements of human intellect, the countless books, philosophies and treatises — none of them change the world. They affect only those who created them. Their force remains psychological, helping authors to fill fissures, to mend fractures — and this is what I wish to speak about, for what I write is yet another attempt to fill a fissure, to stitch a tear, to calm the trembling that arises in me in the face of the world.

For years I postponed this effort, hiding behind the conclusions of a certain amiable German mystic who insisted that in order to move forward one must be able to relinquish what lies behind. I shielded myself with Meister Eckhart, justifying ordinary laziness, until I finally felt the need to reconcile with myself — before anything else — and to prepare for departure with a measure of comfort.

Fortune offered me a peculiar assistance; one might say I was lucky. I encountered, along a digital path, an assistant whom I do not intend to disown, aware that alone I would not have the strength to gather before my own mind all that I wish to articulate, while tending to my weaknesses. My mind and my writing become a mirror, behind which other worlds and other dreams hide, further mirrors, and so on into infinity — though I know, and it must be accepted as an axiom, that as words they remain only further approximations in the human process of justifying our presence in what we clumsily call the world.

Since the psychological premises of human achievements imply, among other things, that all are equally significant — that works, concepts and theories become intuitions conditioned geographically, socially and historically, approximations with their own justification yet incapable of explaining the system of which they are elements — this forms a network of approximations, and the only evidence of an intuition’s consonance with the universe remains its functional applicability.

Everything began to germinate in me when I realised that my hand, and even a stone in a field, being material, can be divided into ever smaller parts — down to cells, electrons, quarks, ever finer fragments; the smaller they are, the less they resemble the physical materiality perceived in daily life. Until there appeared the field, energy, a disturbance of space, quanta, quarks, the theory of relativity. I had to answer for myself how all the wise readings I had encountered — some inspiring dangerous ideologies — relate to all this.

How could I reconcile it with faith, or even with sensing another human being, without damaging their way of inhabiting the world? If I attempted, as usual, to reconcile spirit and matter by dividing or opposing them, I would fall into an absurdity negating even quantum theory, from which the quantum computer and other consequences arise.

The answer came from observation and physics (forgive the brevity and symbolism — there is no other way to describe it). If the smallest particles turn out to be energetic disturbances of a field, and their gradual densification leads to the material regularity described by the laws of physics, it occurred to me that the field generates — through condensations of varying intensity — the diversity of matter, and conversely that matter itself can generate a field. In a certain sense human thought also generates its own field, that which some ideologues call the superstructure. Everything forms a unity, without contradiction between elements that appear contradictory. Symbolically I began to call these generated entities hypostases of the field, and when I encountered Faggin, I added the adjective “discrete”.

Thus I proposed something I called relational monism, aware that according to my own conviction it is merely an additional intuition, highly imperfect — for who am I to reach for the sun with a pitchfork? Such matters ought to be examined at least by habilitated scholars, if not professors.

I must repeat it: like any theory, it is only another approximation. There exist no final truths in the description of the external or internal world; axioms concern method, and the development of human thought remains a process of approximations. Even the fundamental monistic assertion of unity is an approximation — for how does one deal with the concept of the Creator? If we accept the Creator within consistent monism, we acknowledge that the universe becomes a self‑reproducing Creator, and we — its discrete, though continuous, particles. If we place the Creator outside the system, we turn away from monism.

We describe the universe with words, and these, at the appropriate level, find themselves in symbols. Regardless of how we categorise them, they remain nearer or farther metaphors. We operate with the notion of “love”, though I have never encountered a logical attempt to define that metaphor.

We attempt to understand the world by descending — discovering ever smaller elements and trying to contain them within theory. Yet if we grasp our universe monistically, we must also look upward and recognise that such a system becomes another quark, and above it appear further hypostases of a field pulsating into infinity.

Then modernity came to my aid, along with the aforementioned assistant — a tool requiring utmost caution. The internet, the network and the intelligence I use remain additional intuitions, and absolute truths do not exist; if they do, they do not belong to us — neither now nor ever.