David Cowles
Feb 6, 2025
At its most fundamental level, philosophy takes data from one level of reality and organizes it into patterns that make sense of all levels of reality. “To see a World in a grain of sand…” (William Blake)
Traditionally, philosophers have approached their mission from one of two vantage points. Existentialists, empiricists and phenomenologists (Sartre, Mill, Husserl) start with data taken from personal experience. They find patterns in that data which they hope will resonate at all levels of reality, experienced from all possible perspectives. The search for a TOE did not begin with Newton or Einstein or Hawking-Penrose; it began with Thales.
From our unique, embedded vantage point we cannot know everything about everything, but perhaps we may hope to know something about something. So the task of philosophy is to identify ‘something’ we can know that can act as a universal decryption key. For some, that key lies in sense data (Hume), for others, in self-awareness (Descartes).
Either way, this project requires a gigantic leap of faith. To do philosophy from the bottom up, you have to believe that the World is a Rosetta Stone, that it contains the key to its own decryption: “Signatures of all things I am here to read.” (James Joyce)
Others take a top down approach. They consider the universe as a whole and search for patterns that can elucidate experience at all levels and from all perspectives. Plato, Hegel and Marx fall into this category.
On the margins of Intellectual History, there is a ‘third way’ - an approach to philosophy that is neither bottom up nor top down; in fact it rejects the very idea that the World is organized along a vertical axis. Think ‘inside out’ instead of ‘up down’ (horizontal vs. vertical). Philosophers in this camp include Anaximander, Buber and Whitehead.
Doing philosophy on the vertical axis means setting out either from the quantum or from the plenum and proceeding, somewhat algorithmically, to fill-in the gap. At its worst, this process can feel a bit mechanical.
Doing philosophy on the horizontal axis, on the other hand, means giving up the polar concepts of quantum and plenum. The paradigm here is neither computation nor causation; it is organism.
Sidebar: I am intentionally excluding from this survey folks whose primary contribution is as a theologian or religious leader. However, I cannot fail to mention Jesus of Nazareth. Without taking a single 400 level university course, he covered all bases: “I am the Way (bottom up), the Truth (top down), and the Life (inside out).”
We begin our journey c. 2500 BCE with the grandfather of Western philosophy, Anaximander. Anaximander believed the fundamental unit of reality to be neither quantum nor plenum but xreon (‘reck’), the mutuality of relationship.
According to Anaximander, the ‘real’ World begins when two unrelated ‘virtual’ entities freely grant each other reck, each giving the other the space it needs to become itself. While not the dominant Western paradigm, it shows up everywhere in our culture:
In advertisement: ‘Be all that you can be’.
In scripture: “I (John the Baptist) must become less so that he (Jesus) may become more.” (John 3:30)
On bumper stickers: “Live simply that others may simply live.”
In prayer: “As we forgive those who trespass against us.”
As a simple salutation: Shalom.
Perhaps surprisingly, contemporary science has discovered that Anaximander’s somewhat arcane model is actually operational in the physical world; in fact, it forms the substructure of that world:
Quantum Mechanics (c. 1925) revealed the existence of a ‘virtual world’ in which variables only acquire a specific value when they interact (are measured).
Bell’s Theorem (1964) proved that particles well outside each other’s light cones can remain entangled and function as a single, coordinated entity.
Philosophically, Martin Buber and Alfred North Whitehead brilliantly represented the horizontal vision during the early 20th century, but it was cybernetic philosopher Gregory Bateson, who emerged in the later part of the 20th as the undesignated spokesperson for the ‘horizontal worldview’. Among his greatest hits: "It takes two to know one."
R. Buckminster Fuller wrote, “The universe is plural and at minimum two.” In this he allied with our common ‘grandfather’. Bell’s Theorem refined this intuition: Everything is plural and at a minimum √2. Bell made Fuller interactive.
In this horizontal ontology, there are no ‘naked singularities’; the #1 is just a placeholder. Counting begins with √2. A quantitative value less than √2 does not meet the threshold to be.
Finally, the three vectors of Western Philosophy have analogs in our Indo-European languages. Our active voice verbs describe events from the bottom up (I do it); our passive voice verbs describe events from the top down (it is done to me). To describe events on the horizontal axis we would need a third voice, a ‘middle voice’ and we don’t have it, do we?
But we did! Many IE languages had a strong middle voice syntax, once upon a time. It was used to describe events where reciprocity is involved; but according to some of the philosophers we met above, whenever there is an event, reciprocity is involved.
If so, middle voice should be the ‘default voice’ in all our languages; it isn’t. And so, advocates of a horizontal world view struggle to express their positions and defend them against the glib advocates of the ‘vertical way’. As the quantum nature of reality unfolds, communicating complex middle voice concepts has become philosophy’s #1 challenge: So do it!
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