Ideality

Possibly perching on the precipice of potential, potentially perceiving a panoramic possibility, particularly of totality, perchance.

Never have I been mystified or enamored by the honey trap of a phrase, “quantum”. It certainly has a unique allure to it. “Quantum” physics, “quantum” mechanics, “quantum” computing, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately, for many who have caught wind of this, it seems to hold a position within their cosmology which was once held in high esteem by another sovereign: ideality. Quantum has become a catch-all term for wonders that materialism exiles, while also being built upon materialism, which is a foundation which lacks integrity. In reality, all quantum means is the general sense of quantity, with an implied scale of “small”. Physicists might be ready to jump the gun and vindicate the term, but real physicists will concede that there isn’t even a unified theory of “quantum mechanics” (read: the mechanics of small things, such that classical mechanics does not apply to them) to defend. Likewise, it is in the best interest of science educators to clean up this train-wreck of a phrase. Unfortunately, most are interested in the institutional credits and clout gained from “insider” knowledge (which is ironically freely available online), instead opting to make fun of those that aren’t “in the know”, all while themselves being mediocre of intellect! Therefore, I will take it upon myself to write this article.

Materialist scientism created a vacuum by dismissing “ideality”, which is the realm of non-material, structuring principles. Modern day institutional bias will hold this as unscientific ghost-talk. However, there are a series of problems which “ideality” solves, that modern cosmologies can’t, placing them prior to the 18th century, which have at least confronted and, in some cases, overcome such questions. Ideality is not a given thing in the world, it is the necessary logical and ontological precondition for there being a world of intelligible things in the first place. It is the “domain” of form, determinacy, relation, meaning, possibility, and all things which make raw existence into a coherent reality. It is the why behind all the hows. More developed spiritual frameworks call this moment of ideality “spiritual”. Physics can tell you how a thing moves, but it cannot tell you why there is such a thing as motion, or why there is an entity which moves, or causality, let alone if these things are even justified to begin with! These are ideal structures which make any description possible. Ideality is the “one” behind the many, the “actuality” of potentiality, and so many more things. Ideality promises and delivers. It helps us answer questions which haunt the mind of modern materialists and physicalists alike. For example, it helps us bridge the noumenal-phenomenal distinction (or for you Christians out there, the Essence-Energies distinction). The phenomenal world is mere appearance, structured by our minds. The noumenal “thing in itself” is inaccessible. We are trapped in subjective experience! Except, we are not. The phenomenal is the noumenal, as sublated. The true essence (Wesen) of a thing isn’t hidden behind its appearances, it manifests itself through them. Likewise, God’s essence, for the Christian, is shown through his energies. Kant assumes a rigid dualism. But the logic of Essentiality shows this is an unstable, immediate opposition. Ideality operates as follows: a pure, unrelated essence is an empty abstraction. It has no content. To be anything determinate, anything at all, it must manifest. Appearance likewise is not a distortion of essence, it is a function of essence as its own necessary self-externalization. The phenomenon is the shining-forth of the essence. Therefore, the noumenal is not a separate thing behind the curtain. It is the process of appearing. The truth is the relation between essence and appearance. The essence is essentially appearing. Ideality is this very relation. How about another example?

Is this “tree-ness” a universal, or just a name we give to similar things that we call trees? We see countless particular trees. What grounds our knowledge that they are all “trees”? Nominalism, that only names exist, but not true universals, is hollow. It makes science a game of arbitrary grouping, mere taxonomy (this is meant with derogatory emphasis. We do not like taxonomy here, we aspire to grasp the generative principle of things). The good news is that ideality bails us out. The abstract universal tree is empty. The bare particular oak is blind. The truth is the universal as it particularizes itself according to its own inner necessity. The ideal “tree” is the active self-differentiating principle that generates and organizes the particulars, while remaining itself throughout its manifestations. Ideality is this active, self-particularizing (or self-participating) logical form. Ideality helps us understand that the law is the genuine infinite that lives within and through the finite. Not convinced? Alright, how about one more example: consciousness. The “hard” problem of consciousness assumes consciousness and matter are two distinct substances, then asks how one produces the other. Ideality solves this problem by rejecting this premise as fundamentally mistaken. Consciousness is not a product of matter, matter is Ideality as it is manifesting itself externally in the world! Consciousness is ideality returning to itself from inside to outside and back. Matter and consciousness are two moments of the same process. The “ideal” is the logical and teleological priority of this self-knowing activity. Your subjective experiences are not and can not be an anomaly. They are the finite point where the universe’s ideal structure becomes self-aware.

In Being-for-self enters the category of Ideality. Being-there-and-then, as in the first instance apprehended in its being or affirmation, has reality (§ 91); and thus even finitude in the first instance is in the category of reality. But the truth of the finite is rather its ideality. Similarly, the infinite of understanding, which is coordinated with the finite, is itself only one of two finites, no whole truth, but a non-substantial element. This ideality of the finite is the chief maxim of philosophy; and for that reason every genuine philosophy is idealism. But everything depends upon not taking for the infinite what, in the very terms of its characterisation, is at the same time made a particular and finite. For this, reason we have bestowed a greater amount of attention on this distinction. The fundamental notion of philosophy, the genuine infinite, depends upon it.
—Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic

This also bears good news for you Christians. It implies the redemption of the world in addition to man.

Re-branding Ideality

Now that we have such a principle, that the truth of all finite things is ideality, we can address modern intellectual malaise. What we find is an abandonment of this rigorous notion of ideality, but we are still effected by the voids it once filled. The contemporary mind has split into two equally misguided camps, both committing the same error, albeit in mirror-image ways, both converging on the same solution of rebranding the highest reality as found in “quantum”.

Materialism commits a sleight of hand, where the commitment to a closed physical universal forces a series of intellectual retreats. Everything must be explained away, everything mystical, that is. And so we have found that the miraculous and the meaningful have been transformed into coincidence as a result of being exorcized by probability. Probability is the tool of the materialist to explain away higher purpose, organization, and structure. Yes, the awe of existence becomes a statistical fluke. Everything that has ever happened to you? Coincidence. Had you done a single thing different one day, which would have resulted in your death? Lucky coincidence. Consciousness is an “emergent” illusion (emergent is another buzzword for the materialist, which points out a Point A and Point B and says point B emerges essentially by magic, avoiding the work of justifying the necessary connection between A and B). A loved one who was fond of butterflies has passed away and after their death, you reach out to them, only to be met with a vision of butterflies migrating? What a synchronicity! What we have before us is a philosophically bankrupt stance whose proponents perform a bait-and-switch. While publicly decrying metaphysics, they smuggle in unexampled idealist assumptions through the back door of “quantum physics” and probability. When pressed on why the laws of physics are intelligible, or what even constitutes an observation, they implicitly appeal to a metaphysical framework their own materialism denies. Physics becomes a metaphysics by necessity, while this finite system parades itself as being a complete world-picture.

On the other hand, we have Spiritualism’s intellectual vacuum. Recoiling from the landscape of materialism, or more specifically, from this age’s mode of consciousness, but also lacking the discipline found in philosophy and pure abstract thought, the seeker goes looking for wonder in the wrong place. They latch onto the weirdness and mystery of quantum physics as a scientific validator, or authority, for pre-existing intuitions of total connection and ideality. Quantum is, for this person, a re-brand. A kind of magical incantation which is a hollow shell, albeit sounding science-adjacent, into which any vague spirituality can be poured. It is ideality for the uninformed and impatient, offering the thrill of the infinite without the hard work of either logic or discipline.

From two opposing directions, both the rigid materialist, or physicalist, and the spiritualist arrive at the same destination. Both take the particular finite theory of quantum mechanics (at best, they just take the name) and inflate it into an “infinite”, using it to answer questions it was never designed to address. One uses it to preserve materialist dogma, the other to justify a spiritual yearning. Both evade metaphysics and ideality. The other side of this approach has an “equal and opposite reaction” (if we are to co-opt physics for philosophy). While both reach the summit in inverted ways, both perspectives also corrupt physics and spirituality at their root.

For thousands of years, the profound questions or problems of being, consciousness, and the world were met with disciplined, centuries-deep work. The intentional practices of spirituality, and the rigorous methodology of philosophy/metaphysics. This was the task of confronting reality in its full depth, which produced frameworks of holding the meaning all people seek to partake in. The “quantum” mambo jumbo offer a cheap counterfeit as a substitution. Why grapple with philosophical problems, or work to become a master of poetry and conveying truths, when you can just invoke “quantum entanglement”? Why sit and think through the metaphysics of good and evil, or elaborate on angelology and demonology, when you can just appeal to “quantum fields” of energy? On one level, everything is vibration and interconnectivity, but this means entirely different things for someone who has engaged with the rigorous conception of audiation as a universal phenomenon, or someone who has worked out the relationship between God’s essence and energies, than it is for someone who has not done the work to be able to explain what is meant. The “quantum” rebrand actively displaces and discredits the work of metaphysics and theology, while creating a culture that uses buzzwords as a crutch for a shared intuition.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Metaphysics

Cease the apology. Be cringe and use the words which really draw ire from the mainstream. Use metaphysics, ideality, spirit, and truth. Assert that things are sacred. Stigma is just another word for intellectual capitulation, a PTSD by a militant materialism which doesn’t even know what it itself is claiming. Why grant veto on the deeper questions and realities of being to a mode of thought which can’t even formulate, let alone answer them, and as a result refuses to acknowledge they exist? Worrying about such stigma is the very mechanism that enables use of this “quantum term in the first place. Internally, there is a looming cloud of physics called philosophy, and it’s not going away by being ignored. Physics is a successful enterprise for modeling quantitative behavior in the natural world (after all, it was initially called “natural philosophy). But it is ontologically mute and thus requires a supplement of philosophy which, in reality, is what physics itself is a supplement to. Physics operates within a meta-physical framework that it did not create and cannot justify. Assumptions about causality, uniformity, the intelligibility of mathematics, etc., all of these are not found within physics. Even now, so-called prominent figures in the field of physics are re-claiming the domain of ideality internally, since this is logically where an exploration of physics and engineering leads you (albeit in a form which is institutionally acceptable).

We must go even further and recognize that what is clumsily, superstitiously, inadequately, and disrespectfully gestured at with the “quantum realm” is, in all coherent traditional systems, recognized with the depth and accuracy it deserves as the world of ideality, or the world of spirit. This is not metaphorical. The determining principles of reality are conceptual, sure, they are formal, and in a sense conscious. The world of spirit is a manifestation of Logos (Logos here being the objective, living formative intelligence of the cosmos, not a metaphor and not merely reason). This spiritual world is the legitimate and essential domain of inquiry, more fundamental than the physical. Physics does not explore it, it in actuality conforms to it. The laws physics discovers are finite, partial reflections of this ideal (and living) order. The fatalistic modern error is to take this reflection for the source. Beyond the mathematical description, or representation, is the determination it is downstream from. What physics records, spirit has already decided.

Your journey through the quantum realm ends here.