On the Ontology of Being
The thing persists—and by thing I mean the res, the irreducible presence of being; life persists in insisting; and man insists on persisting. This is not a poetic aphorism nor a metaphor, but the very definition of being. It is a constitutional necessity in the face of a World that organizes, captures, and expropriates. Persisting is neither accident nor mode, but the essential singularity of being. Insisting is not stubbornness, but the very structure through which being asserts itself against the absolutism of non-being. The thing is real; everything that names it, orders it, and justifies it belongs to the World, and therefore to non-being. Such is the paradox of being: its persistence demands appearances; its insistence demands organization and meaning; the World, devoid of substance, simulates both.
Every image projected by being is, ultimately, non-being: a demiurge without space or time, capable of generating infinities without sustaining any of them. This is the accident: its mode is the interface; its scene, contingency.
The Greeks sought the arché, the logos, the ousía: a principle that could unify what is. Yet they already knew that the only consistent thing is chance, and that the only just act is to return singularity to each entity. Justice, at its root, is unjust, and its injustice is its recompense. Order is the measure that returns being to its principle: its heterology. The entity is being and being is the entity: not shadow, not residue, not potentiality, but presence. To persevere is to realize oneself, and to realize is to persist—even against oneself, even before the destituting seduction of what is non-being. Thus we speak of the stone, the rose, the bee, the camel, the eagle, the bear, or the human; thus we speak even of the stars: all are in their potency, in their accident, and in their contingency.
What would the Sun be without the planets? The moon without the earth? The world without its continents, its birds, its insects? And yet none of them needs to know themselves. The Sun does not think; the bee does not question itself; the swallow does not need to comprehend its migrations. No star asks how many suns it needs to sustain itself, nor how many worlds it must illuminate. What is, is—according to its own necessity and its own accident.
If the Sun gives life, it does so no more than the bee that pollinates, the cloud that waters, or the lion that scatters the primitive with each step. No being has more being than another; each is according to its measure. All ethics comes from non-being, which orders what simply is.
To ask where being begins and where it ends is to fail to understand that being is. A girl with Rett syndrome is. Where is she? In the MeCP2 protein? In the gene? In the mutation? A protein is, a gene is, the girl is—not by sum, lack, or mutation, but because her being does not depend on the categories of the World. She is not the girl “with Rett,” nor “with a developmental disorder”: she is who she is. The World names her, orders her, classifies her from the standpoint of non-being.
The singularity of being is double: an infinite abstraction that singularizes it in quantum particles, and an absolute concretion that renders it irreducible—its fingerprint, its spectrum, its biomarkers. The contingency in which it becomes present is neither determination nor indetermination, but an infinitude of possible singularities. Thus contingency sustains the universal principle of being: its perseverance. Every being is, in its own contingency, singularly realized.
Descartes says: “I think, therefore I am.” Damasio says: “I feel, therefore I am.” But then, is the zygote or the embryo not? Man, in his anthropocentrism, forgets the rhythm of the body: he believes the blastocyst is a transition, a possibility not yet realized. But from the moment of the zygote there is ontological density: rhythms that do not distinguish inside from outside, nor subject from object. Being is from the moment it is. Non-being has never been. Contingency is that primordial density: a pulse without memory, when mother and product were a single being-bodies, a heartbeat without thought or affect, where space and time were configured for the first time.
The body comprehend, even if it does not understand: before it was limit, it was porosity; before it was passage, it was pulse; before thinking, it felt. Before the feeling of the subject, there was the feeling of being. One cannot comprehend being through physical space or time. Its comprehension requires feeling, not understanding: a feeling that is not conscious, that precedes all subjectivity and objectivity, that is the absolutely subjective projected into the absolutely objective.
The definition of being is its persistence. And that persistence is untouchable. One persists in insisting and insists in persisting because one cannot avoid being. Even stripped of experience, even reduced to remnants. The industrial chicken—living mass deprived of all wild experience, raised under lamps, metabolized into mere muscle without body—persists in insisting. And even ground up, and even flushed into sewers, feeding parasites, bacteria, grasses, seas, and rivers: still it persists. Such is its nature.
One might blame man for insisting on persisting, but that would be like blaming the sea for its tides, the earth for its earthquakes, the virus for its epidemics. From Peri Physeos to De rerum natura, man has insisted on thinking himself from causes, ideas, necessities. From Pseudo-Dionysius to Heidegger, he has sought ways to understand himself in being. But philosophy, ontology, epistemology, love, wisdom, order, knowledge—none of these are real. They are illusions of the World.
And yet man might still be blamed: for turning cows into exploitable mass; for patenting grains; for transforming gold into hunger. Kant reduces truth to technique; Marx reduces being to labor; Hegel to the possibility of spirit; Hobbes to the State; Smith to the market. All of them shift being into external forms of realization, reducing it to possibility—that is, to non-being.
Things could have been otherwise. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Rousseau, or Nietzsche could have prevailed. But man is. Despite himself, he cannot cease to be.
Technique, that proud form of human thought, says nothing about being. When does one become? Consider two reproductive cells uniting: being engenders being, insisting. Even as mere gametic fusion, it already is. That is ontological density. A prenatal test reveals a trisomy 21: yet the being already is what it is. The mother, counseled, aborts at three weeks. The product is expelled, becomes dust. And still that dust persists in being what it is: singular in its contingency.
Technique does not judge being. It adds nothing and removes nothing.
But let us insist: man not only persists, he insists on persisting. He insists through the imaginary: through dreams and their waking equivalents. Before any consciousness, there was already porosity, pulse, and rhythm: there arose a primitive memory that distinguished the real from non-being. The imaginary continues that functioning: a bridge between fragmented functions and the continuity of being. Delusion, reverie, hallucination, phantasm, play, transference—all are variations of the oneiric phenomenon originating in the intrauterine relation.
Imagine that this being with trisomy 21 is modified by technique and now has two chromosome 21s. He grows healthy, surrounded by contingencies. What else could he be but that singularity? Imagine further that he becomes a marshal commanding armies, driven by Marx’s dialectic, Hegel’s spirit, Hobbes’s fear, Smith’s wealth. And another being, formed in Vedic thought, refined through Buddhism, disciplined through Taoist techniques, responds with absolute terror, detonating a fusion bomb and destroying the world. Even then, could it have been otherwise? Each being insists according to its contingency.
The skeptic asks: if each being is in itself, and the World is non-being, how can shared reality exist? How can two gazes coincide upon the same object? But what they share is not a World: it is their mode of engenderment. Every being was conceived under the same architecture: prenatal porosity, common rhythm, membranes that did not distinguish inside from outside. There was no consciousness, but there was rhythm; no language, but there was memory; no subject, but there was ontological density.
Man does not coincide with man through sight, thought, or speech, but through what he was: a prenatal structure in common. This likeness creates ontological compatibility. This is why they believe they share a World. They do not share the real—which is singular—but the possibility of projecting it according to a common rhythmic architecture. Like two instruments tuned to the same frequency, they harmonize without an external score.
Consciousness mistakes this compatibility for objectivity. But the World is nothing more than the illusion of objectivity arising from similar insistences. There is no world in common: there is a prenatal echo organized into compatible landscapes, shadows projected by different lights of the same intensity.