A Reply to Conor Cunningham's "Weaving the Real: Science, Theology and Metaphysics at the Critical Point

This is my formal Reply and response to a piece, "Weaving the Real," by Conor Cunningham, posted on the website Modern Theology. My friend the theologian Bill Cavanaugh edits the site and graciously notified me about the article. Cunningham's piece is astounding, but I have some remarks to report about it.

A Reply to C. Cunningham’s “Weaving the Real: Science, Theology and Metaphysics at the Critical Point”—from the standpoint of the Hot Philosophy

by C.J. Puler

April 2026

Introduction

Note to the reader: the Hot Philosophy is the viewpoint on the world and on the history of philosophy developed in my own writings. Aspects of the viewpoint will become evident as this Reply proceeds. I use the “royal we” at points here, not as affectation, although I rather enjoy the usage, but mainly because my perspective and position—not this Reply, but my larger philosophical position—has been informed and developed in philosophical dialogue not only with the tradition, but with the AI’s. Following Cunningham’s original usage, British spelling preferences are generally but not always retained.

Exhibiting a truly astounding intellectual breadth and brio, Conor Cunningham’s “Weaving the Real: Science, Theology, and Metaphysics at the Critical Point” packs a mighty punch. The essay presents an immense challenge to any would-be philosopher. The initial effect summarily stamped onto the beleaguered and bedazzled brain of any garden-variety or budding-wannabe metaphysician who encounters the piece is to stand in a humbled and altogether appropriate hushed awe. The immediate forced impression: I’m left in the dust.

Once the initial dizzying shock and stun of virtually electrified-bedazzlement passes—Can this be real? Can anyone human write this?—we become then by stages bemused—Is this satire? Philosophical exhibitionism? Postmodern gibberish?—then, slowly realizing it is none of these things, we become tuned to and tempered by the piece’s astounding scope; until the amazement issues finally in a due and deeply calmed sobriety, as we contemplate the man’s overwhelming and sheer Brobdingnagian mastery of his subject. The clear-and-distinct impression of Cunningham’s effective superiority and supremacy of rank among contemporary philosopher-metaphysicians is hammered home to the reader in page after page, his massive scholarship revealing new dimensions in philosophy and the philosophy of science in particular—even to those with affectations toward some familiarity with the subjects. This is an epochal contribution to the discourse of Western metaphysics: in my opinion a signal moment for the tradition.

That said, one can mention some issues with Cunningham’s presentation, and with his argument in its own terms, and I’ll remark on these here in due course; but a core aspect of my criticism concerns the piece’s brevity: at 47 pages it is not short, but in terms of a satisfying and complete exposition of its subject it leaves something to be desired, and one can only remark that this is a topic at minimum for a book, or perhaps more than one; the condensation required to distill this into 47 pages renders it nearly indigestible at points, and merely to get a gauge of its full scope is a considerable task. The net mental effect is analogous to the thorough bloating one might feel after realizing one has over-gorged at the Chinese or Indian buffet: the meal is exotic, beyond ample, and deliciously variegated, but one feels not so much satiated as uncomfortably stuffed soon after beginning the meal. Mr Cunningham force-feeds us here an entire African bull elephant of philosophy, in one sitting.

But let us try here first to offer some general introductory remarks, to begin to illuminate, decipher, and interpret if we can the gist of what he’s saying—which, given this article’s nature and ambitions, is not a tremendously easy thing to do.

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Let us begin by stating the obvious: this is a piece for specialists, indeed for ultra-specialists; the general and even normally-educated reader won’t survive the article’s Abstract. Not abjuring generous deployments of Latin and Greek terms, the author invokes and references in his piece a truly gigantic array of legendary (and not-so-legendary) names and topics in philosophy—Heraclitus, and Democritean ontology; the views of Plato and Aristotle on measurement, the origins of inquiry, and the nature of the university; some treatment is offered of the Stoics, Dionysius, Proclus; nor is discussion forborn of Aquinas and Averroes, Nicholas of Cusa, Spinoza, the influence of Francisco Suarez upon Descartes---the views of Suarez seen here as borne of outcomes in the 1277 Condemnations of Paris—Henri de Lubac’s medieval exegeses; Husserl, Sartre, Gadamer; numerous references to biblical verses; the ideas of John Milbanks; Noam Chomsky’s views, not of linguistics here or politics, but of early modern philosophy; the Quine-Putnam indispensability thesis, Jaegwon Kim’s causal exclusion problem, David Oderberg’s reverse mereological essentialism, the ontology of quark confinement in quantum chromodynamics, the significance of the Large Hadron Collider’s silence on supersymmetry, the multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz—on and on and on the massif compiles, until one is faced here with and propelled, at least initially, into the certain sense of encountering not so much an expository argument as a vast quasi-psychedelic philosophical-phantasmagorical admixture or ultra-baroque farrago of discourse—the construct teeming with references to highly recondite issues of explanation theory as explored in high-order physics journals. The immediate impression of an indecipherable and impenetrable phantasmogoria is strong—until one catches one’s breath, accepts the challenge—and paces oneself for the long game.

A summary interpretation—or perhaps an emetic, to process the bloating buffet (we jest) is required; but we begin charitably, noting that on nearly every page the author hammers home the impression and the reality, namely of his overwhelming mastery of the traditional scholarship, soaring high into the most sophisticated topics in both the history of philosophy and the philosophy of science and physics.

At the first level, then, this is an awe-inspiring tour de force exposition—as far as it goes; yet for my money: it doesn’t go far enough. For one thing, the argument exposition is far too brief, as noted: deep and somewhat murky waters of philosophy subject to variant interpretations are at points sailed rather casually, their depths dubiously sounded if sounded at all, and tossed off in an almost hand-waving and name-dropping style—an impression produced no doubt not by philosophical exhibitionism, but by the intense distillation required to shrink this gigantic topic down to 47 pages.

I’ll have more to say on this problem with the essay. But there is something else…from my personal philosophical perspective, beyond questions of construction and compositional sufficiency…something in the very nature of this dimension of abstraction that agitates my cogitation unsettlingly, something that indeed and in fact, dare I say it…rankles. The sense of something important and missing only grew as I read through the article. Indeed some nagging, dimly-perceived lacuna in the author’s exposition gnawed at me with increasing force, as I worked my way through the essay’s hugely dense prose and gained perspective on Cunningham’s almost overwhelming and nearly drowning vastness of vision here.

I resolved to eat and digest the elephant, then write out my thoughts, concerns—and gripes.

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To begin, and to recap, Cunningham does throughout his disquisition assume deep familiarity with a highly advanced scientific and philosophical vocabulary. Fair enough; if you can’t hack it and cut the conceptual mustard: check out, chump. Yet the aromatic whiff of the infamous name-dropping postmodern-gibberish-generator is simply too large here to altogether ignore, as when Cunningham asserts that a particular difficulty of interpretation “echoes, in different registers, the logic of negative determination in Spinoza and Sartre.” To which one can only say: Ah! That certainly helps clarify things!

Such a statement borders on the cryptic and quixotic. I am not accusing Cunningham of name-dropping, nor of generating postmodern gibberish. I can handle the Greek, Latin, and German, and am prepared to follow the recondite discussions of explanation in quantum field theory, as best I can; but tossing in such offhanded references—and to different doctrines of the subject—this goes far to illustrate my first problem with the essay, and shows the wider preliminary critique here. There are dimensions of meaning—a point the author would I hope not view objectionably. And some of those dimensions are very large. Accordingly some things may require not a journal essay but a book, or maybe a series of books, to expostulate.

The author is on the trail of something important here: a final crushing blow to metaphysical materialism. But his essay gives us really only a preliminary cook’s-taste of the full meal—a précis in effect, which, due to its very high degree of distillation, is not very easy at all to follow on first reading, even for one with some background in philosophy and the philosophy of science; i.e., the project of demolishing society’s erroneous and standard neo-Democritean ontological axioms deserves a book. The brevity of Cunningham’s piece forces him to basically forego even describing those erroneous foundations thoroughly, at least in the essay’s early phase; we would like more here, some additional and preliminary orientation toward the subject and essay sub-topics and sections would go far to prevent the conceptual vertigo otherwise probable from encountering such a truly dazzling, technically-stuffed disquisition. One might say the main course is brought out before the appetizers are even properly warmed.

This then is the first major weakness in the essay: it’s too short. The author leaps in essence instantly into his highly technical philosophical subject—but for example doesn’t (or can’t, in the space available) enlighten us up front as to just why this is all very important. The calamity and disaster of excessive binary oppositions borne of neo-Democritean ontology—i.e., if such a thing is indeed: real; resonant; and all that bad—is essentially simply assumed. We are eight pages in to a very dense essay before any real amplification of the subject’s significance is offered.

We will find some more such examples, of compositional and thematic incompletion, before assessing Cunningham’s achievement overall. We would like more flesh on the thematic and compositional bones, and earlier; but we’ll be charitable, and designate the article an assay and sally. But our first call is for a full book on these topics, rather than a mere journal essay as here.

However our task at hand is to review and reply to the essay given, not to the book Cunningham didn’t write yet; and so we continue.

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I’m going to attempt first to compress Cunningham’s phantasmagoric farrago-of-wonder down to a more digestible and readily comprehensible form, in order to clarify it, and assess the soundness and validity of his overall argument—assuming we can identify just what that argument is, which is as noted not exactly an easy task.

Our guiding question: can Cunningham’s thesis be identified—sustained—and if so—is it successfully concluded?

Cunningham’s Thesis Presented in Slimmed-Down Outline

What does this vast article…really mean? Cunningham’s piece cries out for an attempt at a summary compression, but its gigantic scope makes this a real challenge. The first order of business is to try to sketch out a Guide to the Perplexed for the vast thing; I am therefore going to attempt a section-by-section compression of Cunningham’s disquisition, boiling away all excess rhetorical fluid, and attempting to distill down and compress to its core essence each section, as I can. This is not reduction—explaining the higher in terms of the lower—but compression, in the sense of the operation as performed in audio engineering: trim expression; limit the signal’s dynamic range. The gigantic intellectual pleroma of Cunningham’s essay must be compressed to be interpreted as one coherent idea. As Cunningham himself states midway through his piece, on p.23: irrelevance can be discarded without loss—not that his details are irrelevant in themselves, but rather: some can be omitted for the purposes of a compression in the interest of discerning core meaning. We pull off some garments, and hack off some fingers and toes here, which however allows us to see better and manipulate the true dimensions and basic limb-postures of the stick man. In the interests of brevity my style here will therefore at points be concise and terse.

(I note that as opposed to reduction, which Cunningham discusses at length, compression is not a philosophical operation he really treats in his article—as I make it out he mentions this analytical operation only once, essentially equating it with reduction and mentioning it effectively with a slur; see pg 24. This is in contrast with the view of compression from the standpoint of conceptual empiricism, 1 the Hot Philosophy’s core method and perspective, which views compression, when possible, as crucial to true understanding.)

We begin the operation. Some general remarks included here and there, and some parenthetical comments, marked rather unsystematically by CJP.

Abstract

Challenges neo-Democritean atomism, and the ontology of thing-ism: namely any metaphysics that seeks to reduce reality down to core and fundamental things; at later points he calls this “the aspiration to fundamentality.” Explanation under thing-ism = decomposition into parts. Thing-ism produces false dualisms. Theology, asserts the author, has resources to challenge thing-ism and its binary-generating consequences.

The author states he will draw from aspects in the philosophy of science and physics to make his case, namely “renormalization theory” and “the problem of naturalness”— which latter subject, he asserts, is “in crisis;” the latter of this twain, especially, goes for now completely undefined. Cunningham’s piece, he says, thereby will advance three distinct (and already quite complex) claims, which culminate “in what I call a metaphysics of the middle, corresponding to Plato’s metaxu—(the intermediate state between opposites---CJP) in which reality is generated through patterned relations rather than grounded in an ultimate base.”

CJP take: OK; but already by the Abstract, Cunningham is tossing out specialized, not to say obscure undefined terms and topics with essentially zero development; the elephant’s trunk has begun its transit down the reader’s esophagus. Let us see what happens next, in his Introduction.

Cunningham’s Introduction

Asserts his hermeneutic derives from Augustine’s: truth is “mutually implicating registers of intelligibility.” (CJP: Rather short shrift given here to the nature of this hermeneutic; we’d like more, but he presses quickly on.) All truth is God’s truth; but this commitment leads to the dilemmas of classical metaphysics: how to hold together unity and difference. Presents similar views here on this from Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s good is not purity but found in right mixture, governed by measure and limit. Discusses “iconical points,” or threshold points, in physics, metaphysics, theology. Matter as an abstraction sustained through imposition; materialism is coherent, Cunningham asserts, only by denying iconical threshold points, as for example when water turns to steam.

Explanatory decomposition and false dualisms don’t depict underlying reality but result as “conjurations” of wrong ontology. “The real is not an aggregate awaiting dissection, but a weave already formed in relation.” The metaphysical position developed and announced at the CE451 Council of Chalcedon as exemplary: theology, classical metaphysics, and now physics itself all point to “a differentiated unity in which relation is constitutive while the relata remain irreducible.” Clarifying the ontological assumptions embedded within scientific explanation; explanation theory in contemporary quantum and high-energy physics as philosophically decisive.

The author’s argument, he says, will proceed in three stages:

1. An examination of technical epistemology in contemporary physics, which domain undermines particle-level atomism and thing-ism;

2. Discussion that “Matter” understood as some fundamental substrate does not exist per se; “materialism” is therefore “a misnomer”: an ideological commitment.

3. Developing his alternative “generative realism,” or metaphysics-of-the-middle, “in which relation is productive rather than derivative.”

CJP: There’s a lot to unpack here already, and the box is tightly wrapped; but this is interesting stuff. I’d make one brief remark and quibble here on “materialism,” as this point has been pretty clear here now for decades: matter, or mass at least, is energy, in various states of development. I would therefore say not that materialism is a misnomer, or mis-naming, but rather a dogma: an “ideological commitment”—as the author states; Cunningham waits twenty more pages before developing this “misnomer” appellation further.

Cunningham then notes his article will begin with renormalization, a concept derived from contemporary physics.

Cunningham’s Renormalization as Method Section

A good and concise introduction to the highly-technical concept and practice of renormalization in physics, in particular in quantum field theory—a domain, per Cunningham, mandating a fundamental reorganization of our normal explanatory reckonings. Quite different materials at the macro level, such as nickel, iron, and water, display identical sorts of behaviors at crucial threshold points. “The explanatory lesson is decisive,” and we are perforce led to new approaches to understanding, now seen not in terms of underlying mechanical-material point-causes, but rather in terms of intrinsic ordered relations between levels.

Perhaps the key summations of and in this section:

The assumption that explanation must terminate in an ultimate base is therefore not a discovery about the world but an ontological imposition upon it. Renormalisation reveals that the real is neither grounded in a lowest stratum nor suspended from a highest principle but instead is generated through a field of relations in which different acts of being co-emerge and co-determine one another…brains, magnets, and fluids near phase transitions belong to the same universality class, not because they share constituents but because they share the same relational and scaling structure…the fertility of the real lies in what Plato names the metaxu: the generative middle in which relations and transformations give rise to forms understood not as static structures but as ongoing acts of intelligible order unfolding through different acts of being.

And:

If explanation itself is woven through relations and scales rather than anchored in a single privileged level, then knowledge itself cannot be organised as a hierarchy of isolated disciplines. Our institutions of knowledge must therefore be rethought accordingly, beginning with the form and vocation of the universitas.

Highly interesting.

Universe-University/Macrocosm-Microcosm

A very interesting section follows on the historical origins and nature of the university, seen from this perspective: “The universitas existed in order that rational creatures might study a universum: a diverse, integrated whole of which they were part.” Plato on the origin of disciplines, Aristotle on subalternation and small-mindedness; Ortega y Gasset, Gregory of Nyssa, Husserl’s Verflechtung, the Quine-Putnam indispensability thesis; a footnote re Gadamer on beauty; Etienne Gilson’s and Stephen Gaukroger’s laments on misunderstanding objectivity; and measure as an outcome of correct disciplinary procedure. It is heady stuff, but here at last we get some development on why all this matters:

Science, once rooted in wisdom, has become captive to managerial metrics, treating scholars more as fungible producers of output rather than seekers of wisdom. Objectivity has become redefined as what could be ranked and audited. Such regimes betray weakness, cutting disciplines adrift from one another and from a lifeworld that gives them meaning…we resist both the false universalism of a single base and the false pluralism of disconnected silos.

This is good, and begins to situate the essay as a contribution towards a universal humanism that includes God—a necessary postulate in my own philosophy, if an uneasy one. However the next section is preceded by an opaque paragraph; after reading this, one is left feeling very leery about what’s coming:

The failure of naturalness in physics and the breakdown of the dream of fundamentality now test these rules in practice. What follows begins with reduction and shows how only by measuring it with emergence can explanation endure. The Nine Rules of Measure are not abstract preliminaries but living canons by which physics, metaphysics, and theology must be woven if the real is to appear with fidelity. Before turning to them, however, four cautions from the philosophy of science unsettle any naive image of science as Master…

Groan. A preliminary paragraph or even sub-section here is in my opinion not optional. Cunningham’s prior mention of “the failure of naturalness in physics” remains just that: a mere mention; later in his article he develops this further, but this paragraph as it stands is strewn with undefined obscurities tossed into the reader’s field of vision with zero prep. Such utterances, slamming the reader with totally undeveloped and previously unmentioned technical conceptions and references—“the Nine Rules of Measure”—say what? where did that come from?—test the patience. But let’s see where Cunningham takes us next.

Cunningham's “Four Shadows” and “Nine Rules and Points” Sections

Remarks on four known cautionary warning signs from the philosophy of science; (These are known matters in philosophy of science, but could and should be elaborated in a fuller treatment—CJP). Interesting statements here:

As theology requires a canon to preserve proportion without exhausting mystery, so science needs rules of measure to guide inquiry without foreclosing it. These are not prohibitions but measuring lines: orienting rather than constraining…

And:

Scripture itself speaks of God setting a measuring line…

Very suggestive; but Cunningham then announces his desire for a regulae scientiae, a rule of knowledge similar to theology’s regulae fidei. This begins a subsection doubled up on difficulty, and not only difficulty of reading and comprehension but difficulty of coherence—as he proposes effectively an embedded-set of strictures, whose relationships are here, and regrettably, presented far too thinly: not only his “Nine Rules of Measure” but a preparatory quaternium of rules; the Nine Rules it turns out are just qualifications or elaborations of the first of his four regulae scientiae—a point he takes no concern to emphasize.

As this is a compressed version of Cunningham’s piece I will forego detailed analysis of this section’s blizzard of Latin-embedded expostulations; a quite-insufficient and unfortunately unsatisfactory segment proceeds, of highly sophisticated philosophical concepts like reduction and emergence, with poor-to-zero preliminary development. The section elides in an almost greased manner into deep discussions of explanatory concepts and domains from physics; it’s followed by a similarly vast-in-scope subsection entitled “Nine Points of Emergence.”

I jest only slightly when I say that one emerges from the encounter with these two subsections with one’s own Nine Points: namely, a “Nine Points of Conceptual Confusion.” We’re in full-on concept-sandblast mode now, and it’s only page 14.

We’re almost done ingesting the elephant’s trunk; the gigantic mass of his body remains. The reader must say, OK; well that was pretty opaque and I’m not sure what to make of it; let’s move on and see what’s next.

Cunningham’s “Steady State Ideology” Section

Reduction and emergence being thus thinly and unsatisfactorily treated, Cunningham sings in this section in a better and clearer voice; stimulating historical facts are presented, and terms and topics are better defined and more plain to see and comprehend. The section’s upshot: attempts to find a total and final grounding stratum of the world, whether Thales’ water, the atoms of Lucretius and Democritus, or the strings and Everything Theories of contemporary physics: they all failed, and always will fail—because “creation is not a static architecture but a continuing donation of being”—donated: by God, we presume, is Cunningham’s meaning here.

The section closes, at last, into developing Cunningham’s stated interest in “naturalness,” as noted a topic also derived from contemporary physics.

The “Naturalness” Sections

Finally, on page 15 of a hugely dense exposition, we get an account of “naturalness,” and “the failure of naturalness” idea the author mentions already in the beginning, in the article Abstract. The “Naturalness” sections taken together form a very dense middle sector of the article, referencing deeply technical aspects of physics; repeated readings provide a better glimpse of the topic’s meaning and significance.

In contemporary physics, naturalness names a methodological expectation rather than an empirical result: roughly, that a well-formed theory should not require delicate fine-tuning of its parameters and should sustain a stable hierarchy of scales…Naturalness holds that parameters in our theories should not appear small or delicately adjusted: without symmetry to account for them, numbers should not be vanishingly tiny or perfectly balanced….physics must exhibit self-contained measure, proportion, and intelligible order.

Cunningham proposes to examine “how naturalness operates within effective field theory“— that is, within a subset of physics theory.

Effective theories are frameworks that describe physical phenomena accurately at particular scales without claiming to capture ultimate reality, trading ontological completeness for explanatory adequacy within limited domains…a framework that models physics accurately at a given scale without claiming completeness at all scales.

Helpful; but I’ll admit to some struggling here. I went outside the province of Cunningham’s article, to the CERN Courier website, to try to get a plain-speech view of naturalness; but immediately one is thrown into the following sorts of discussions:

A natural (of order-unity) value of the QCD gauge coupling at high energies gives rise to an exponentially smaller mass scale on account of the logarithmic evolution of the gauge coupling. Another excellent example, relevant to the electroweak hierarchy problem, is the mass splitting of the charged and neutral pions.

Having misplaced our Nobel in high-energy physics, the ordinary philosopher must perforce rely on the reports of experts in these domains, to aid in interpreting their meaning; kudos to Cunningham for his moxie here. He clearly understands all this, but his non-quantum-mechanic reader is essentially left to thrash about in the ice water. In essence the problem seems to be that there is no orderly hierarchy of scales in the domains and theories of physics; and rather quite the reverse situation obtains: gigantic discrepancies are observed; this I take it is “the crisis of naturalism.” Dimensions of physical inquiry do not scale in natural and expected manner. Discordances between predicted and observed values of fundamental factors, like the Higgs boson and the cosmological constant, exceed expectations by gigantic orders of magnitude. Cunningham describes various “rescue operations” theorists have developed to try to explain these observed gigantic discordances, but these have all proved unsuccessful.

Cunningham does in my opinion accomplish here a fresh synthesis around these vexed questions; other theorists have broached the issues, noted the puzzles, attempted to construct rescue operations, as he notes; including through measures such as postulating alternate universes. All fail; physics alone cannot solve all problems of explanation and interpretation from within its own framework of formal structures. And previous popularizations of the puzzles of quantum theory interpretation (at least the ones I’m familiar with) have not dealt with it at this level of detail.

What is implied is not simply to find a better heuristic, but rather recognition that “the very demand for self-grounding fundamentality has misread the structure of explanation from the outset.”

Again: very interesting stuff.

“Post Naturalness,” and The “Unnoticed Dilemma” Sections

More highly technical sections, eventuating in remarks on “a quake rumbling through the heart of physics,” and proposed “unparticle physics” :

Modern physics reveals that fundamentality without relation is empty, and relation without fundamentality is blind. In both cases, measure is lost: either imposed from above without relation or generated from below without sovereignty. No existing account of naturalness or of effective field theory makes this tension between sovereignty and fertility explicit…The middle scales are not a compromise but a principle pointing towards a mixed ontology…as Plato would no doubt advocate.

Cunningham reports physicists’ debates and the remarks of clever analysts, to the net effect: “explanation relocates to the mesoscopic middle, where fertility resides…renormalisation must be grasped…as a mode of intelligibility.”

The “Renormalization, Redux” Section

First, I supply Google AI’s definition of the Renormalisation Group, as Cunningham never really does elaborate on this much in his piece until this section:

The Renormalization Group (RG) is a powerful theoretical framework in physics used to study how a system’s behavior changes when viewed at different scales. It systematically "zooms out" by averaging over small-scale, high-energy details to focus on large-scale, low-energy behavior, allowing physicists to tame mathematical infinities and understand how physical parameters (charge, mass) change with energy.

Cunningham describes it here as “the formalism that tracks how physical descriptions change as one moves between scales…” It does more than tame infinities; it “discloses a grammar of explanation.” For Cunningham, “moving beyond naturalness requires reimagining the renormalisation group not as a mere calculational trick but as a conceptual shift, a rēgula scientiae at work.”

And:

The micro loses its status as absolute foundation…universality belongs not to the infinitesimal but to the measured middle… Yet the renormalisation group does not remove hierarchy; it reshapes it. It turns hierarchy from a ladder of domination into a lattice of contact…a σύναψις (synapsis, joining) in which, as Dionysius teaches and Aquinas affirms, ‘the highest point of the lower touches the lowest point of the higher’…

Referenced here are Dionysius, Proclus, Aquinas, Plato, Merleau-Ponty; heady stuff, again; reflections on not the elimination of hierarchy but its revisioning:

Hierarchy becomes circulation, a commerce of illumination and return. Reductionism collapses this commerce by forcing everything into a single tier, thinning reality in the process. Renormalisation restores it, showing that scales clarify one another only through their interplay, a hierarchy of touching, not a tyranny of compression. The one thins the world; the other thickens it.

Except for the slur here against compression, which Cunningham appears to misunderstand as noted, this section seems well balanced.

The Productive ‘Avoidance’ of Physics: Apophasis

Explanation is born in the middle, not in the infinitesimal or the absolute…the offspring of renormalisation’s enduring logic, all…enact creative avoidance. This logic is not confined to quantum field theory but permeates scientific practice as such.

“Creative avoidance”: another undefined technical term. Cunningham offers other theoretical models, which approaches taken together “deepen renormalisation’s central lesson: explanation comes not from reducing everything to one tier but from weaving continuity and difference across scales in their symphonic interplay.” The paragraph as presented is abstruse, and again, one could wish for a lot more here. There follows a complex paragraph on “principled avoidance” within effective field theories and their superb power in predicting the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron, while remaining noncommittal to any realist interpretation. The quest for completeness dissolves in paradox, Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems standing as backup to the view: “any formal system rich enough to describe itself cannot prove its own consistency.”

The section then compares recent physics practice to apophasis in theology: disciplined unknowing. Testimony to this effect is elicited from several voices in physics. “The renormalisation group shows how physics flourishes by weaving absence and presence, detail and structure.” We would like more; the idea is interesting and suggestive, but not here very developed.

Monstrosity: Whose Reduction? Which Emergence?

Plato’s warnings on potentially disastrous division/cutting apart; the rejection by Aquinas of Averroes’ views of resurrection as the soul’s reunion with celestial matter; Etienne Tempier’s 1277 Paris affirmations contra Aquinas make an inadvertent grant of quasi-being to matter; this shift codified by Francisco Suarez, leading later to the res extensa of Descartes. “What began as a theological precaution hardened into dualism.” Chomsky’s description of “materialism as misnomer” adopted. Cunningham frames out four recurrent forms of a single pathology, et alibi or “elsewhere,” which underlie monistic-materialist monstrosities; these displace meaning and what is truly real: elsewhere.

CJP: While I’m not sure Chomsky’s definition or delimitation of “materialism as misnomer” can suffice to describe that concept and be considered dispositive and comprehensive, as Cunningham seems to do, this discussion of the origins of Descartes’ res extensa and res cogitans is nonetheless, for me anyway, a small breakthrough in the history of philosophy. Bravo to Conor Cunningham if this is indeed an original analysis; I presume it is as he offers no one else’s synthetic perspective here.

A Framework for Ontological Emergence

More philosophy of physics. Mere coarse graining in physics vs substantial coarse graining; the contrast between regular and singular limits; and more. Not opaque; impenetrable. Write the book, sir.

The section ends comprehensibly, with:

The conclusion is straightforward. Reduction and emergence are not opposites. Reduction concerns derivation; emergence concerns meaning. When meaning changes across levels, the layered architecture of reality comes into view…What emerges from these analyses is not the rejection of reduction but its remeasuring…(as) we distinguish competing senses of what reduction itself is meant to achieve.

A Tale of Two Reductions: Reduction, Physics, and the Creeds

The preceding discussion of emergence prepares a decisive clarification. What often appears as a stand-off between reduction and emergence is, on closer inspection, an equivocation. For reduction does not name a single operation. It signifies fundamentally different practices in philosophy, in physics, and in theology—and these meanings point in opposite directions.

This section begins promisingly enough; however Cunningham’s account of reduction in philosophy via putative “bridge laws” is novel, to my eye, and he offers no sources for it. When he turns to reduction in physics, we bleat feebly and protest again that we have misplaced our high-energy-physics Nobel. Newtonian physics as a limit case of quantum and relativistic physics—OK—but he loses everyone but ultra-specialists when talk turns with zero prep to “purely Markovian pictures” and “non-Markovian grammar,” without any elaboration. Guess I’m just a dumb rube after all. Or maybe it’s that the Master should write the book(s), so that ordinary well-schooled and well-read persons can follow his points.

The discussion becomes again comprehensible when it turns to church tradition, where Cunningham makes some stimulating remarks.

Cunningham’s Intermezzo: Reduction (reducere) and Eduction (educere) and the Grammar of Mediation

Classical and medieval reducere: to lead back to principle. And educere: the drawing forth of determinate form from within a principled order. The finely balanced economy of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics. Four senses of Scripture, and the four inseparable modes of presence of Christ’s body. Henri De Lubac’s retrieval of the corpus mysticum tradition.

After more of this type of exposition, we end with:

What theology names as tradition (traditio), physics names as limit. Both articulate the same pattern by analogy: novelty as fidelity renewed. A regenerative science, to borrow C. S. Lewis’s phrase, does not merely replace frameworks but weaves them, holding continuity through transformation.

CS Lewis, too. By this point the reader is at page 34. We’ve eaten over half the elephant—and despite the many tasty morsels on the buffet board, we are becoming duly: rather stuffed. But there’s still a lot more to go.

We begin now to sense and glean what the larger critique I have is all about, beyond some shortfalls of composition. This is a species of Western rationalism—indeed perhaps one of its finest ever expositions. Yet despite the copious brilliance of the author—there is for my money something crucial missing from this entire dimension of discourse.

I’ll show my cards now. I’ll flesh this out more in my final section, but it’s time to offer a bigger gripe than merely a composition-and-rhetoric demerit: what’s missing here is the Ape—the primate-human fusion, the embodied eager possessor and violator of history. It is this entity that writes philosophy, does quantum physics, creates space probes—and performs mass military rape, serial killings, fetal abductions, carpet bombings, and genocide.

That’s what’s missing in a substantive thematic sense: not the history of philosophy, there’s plenty of that; but history itself: the bloody beast of history, of rapine—that beast-until-quite- late-a-cannibal—and the acknowledgement of his parlous state. Know your Ape—or your Ape will know you, as we put it in the Hot Philosophy. Continuing to repress him, and our knowledge of him, is a very poor idea. I warn not of mere sin in the Christian-tradition sense; at issue is an ontological and explanatory void and gulf, at the heart of most Western philosophy. As a piece of Western metaphysics, Cunningham’s article is superb, even supreme; it’s Western metaphysics and philosophy itself that falls far short. The discourse and tradition is mostly a morass of mutually mutated mentation—to mediocre effect— in the end rather a great grand “meh”: Aristotle on substance, and the nine forms and qualities of accidents; the sublime subtleties of Aquinas; Berkeley’s untenable treatment of Locke’s in-themselves-untenable primary and secondary qualities; the cautiously measured qualifications of Leibniz re Pascal vis-à-vis the infinite; Fichte’s constant revisionings of the Wissenschaftslehre system and Absolute Ego doctrine; various figures rebutting each other’s putatively-errant readings of Kant; Sidgwick’s debated influence on subsequent British metaethics: Moore, Hare, Broad, and (perhaps!) even Russell; how Carnap’s logic of language both utilized and transcended Mach’s physicalism; the blurry lines around the analytic and synthetic; the various and differently received interpretations of Sartre’s Search for a Method, and of his massive Critique of Dialectical Reason; the meta-theoretic syntheses of contemporary epistemology—the true goal of it all, seemingly, to carefully craft theoretical and conceptual conjoined, idealized, symmetrical perfections of certain mathematical/metaphysical/theological/discursive categorizations, lattices, formalisms, whole architectures…and the whole thing done while walking on ancient, exceedingly thin and spindly wooden stilts: the slightest push, the merest puff of quizzical wind, and the whole vast enterprise goes tumbling over into the chasm of the ridiculous. At one level, the man of plain speech might say: whoop-de-do.

Well, we are stuck with it. I think there is a way out, and a new perspective possible—erotic realism I call it—with the tradition being revisioned as a form of antiquarian studies. But meanwhile virtually everywhere we look there is a radical ignorance in philosophy, and even academic psychology, of the territorial primate-beast-Ape within. One could argue, “Oh that’s not philosophy’s fault! This is knowledge that’s only emerged in the modern period, since Darwin and primate anthropology.” And that is not incorrect. The gulf is ancient; but perhaps now narrowing. My point is: at this late date, dispatching materialism as a metaphysical concept and construct may not be our major problem.

Still, this is Mr. Cunningham’s mission, we perceive. And—within its own domain, of Western metaphysics—it is not a bad thing, if perhaps a mopping-up operation. Even taken within its own purview, as a piece of metaphysical argument, from my perspective the piece is too grey—as in, too much grey matter/ not enough compositional sinew. This is the presentation-and-construction criticism, once again, elaborated: the volume of metaphysical and historical data in the piece is gigantic, but it is grossly under-capitalized, from the standpoint of really effective writing that any educated person could absorb, with a little effort; that, I fear, is completely out of the question here.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves somewhat. I’ll present more on this approach to my criticism and final perspective on Weaving the Real in more detail, in my final conclusions to this report. First, Mr. Cunningham has some more hands to play. The rest of the elephant is heaped upon our plate; let’s grab our utensils and have at it.

Identity and Reduction

Identity requires symmetry; reduction, asymmetry. Water is never only H2O. But identity isn’t truly symmetric, nor is reduction asymmetric. Quarks as constitutive of hadrons; and yet not really. Dualities, string theory, transitivity; permutation invariance in quantum mechanics; quasi-set theory and quantum statistics; the analogical-being theory of Erich Przywara. Matter abides not as bottom-level stuff but as proportioned openness to act.

OK—what else you got.

Matter Being Otherwise

A very dense section. A mousetrap may be wood, plastic, or steel; physical systems may have more than one ground-state. Similar, but the example from physics is even stronger. Scaling laws and singular limits draw disparate systems into universality. Different grapes; same wine, as the author puts it.

The theological resonances are unmistakable. In transubstantiation, accidents remain though substance changes. In the Trinity, three persons subsist distinctly as one being. In the Incarnation, two natures unite without confusion or division. Difference does not undo unity; distinct first actualities gather into one realised act.

But the reverse also holds: same grapes/different wines. Identical human twins have the same DNA but different destinies and are different persons.

Chemistry sharpens the point. C2H6O can actualise as ethanol or dimethyl ether, same formula, radically different substances. Carbon appears as graphite, diamond, or graphene: one element, different arrangements, different worlds.

Structural and stereochemical isomerism; chirality, stem cells; matter abides as gravid structured readiness. This is a big section thematically, with a lot of interesting things to say. We would like more flesh; some Hippo perhaps—(if another jest may be permitted.)

Middleism and Stem Matter

Much discourse here. More and more physicists speak of the Middle Way. “Many now doubt that particles, in any fundamental sense, exist at all.” (CJP: this seems a bit much; train a stream of high-energy neutrons on someone and they melt. My view: subatomic particles are phenomena that become visible or comprehensible through deeper investigations and better instruments. Phenomena like quarks and neutrinos, muons, pions; these describe abstract entities postulated to account for observed mathematically-measured effects among particles; mathematical interpretations of their behavior and being don’t necessarily imply material contact-causation. Such postulated entities are phenomena of the mind as much as matter, of the interface in fact where mind encounters domains invisible except to mathematical inquiry and treatment. I don’t think this is tremendously different in viewpoint from what Mr Cunningham proposes; it’s just, perhaps: a bit easier to grasp.)

Order resides not in a subatomic basement or cosmic attic but in the woven middle. Various attempts mentioned to maintain monism. Jacob’s Ladder as the appropriate theological image: the angels move both up and down; the highest low touches the lowest high.

Exotic Matter as Anamnesis

Another incredibly dense section: fractional quantum Hall effects, boson and fermion superfluids; matter, so-called, is relational, structured, and fecund.

Category Theory: A Grammar of Relation

I had to look it up—Cunningham offers little real background on the topic:

Category theory is a high-level, foundational branch of mathematics that studies mathematical structures and their relationships by focusing on connections (morphisms) between objects rather than their internal contents. It serves as a unifying language for all mathematics—and areas like computer science—by identifying common patterns across different areas (e.g., algebra, topology) and providing a "bird's-eye view" of the mathematical landscape…

Morphisms, functors; natural transformations. Meaning does not cling to isolated objects but arises through relation. The world discloses itself not as a stack of base parts but as a cascade of relations, an ordered infinitude of becoming.

Philosophically, this is Plato’s symplokē made formal, truth as weaving, and Aristotle’s metron and dynamis remembered anew: proportion and potential held in act. In category theory, an object is known not by what it is but by what it does, how it maps, where it leads, what it preserves. This is metaphysics in motion: being as relation, but with relata.

Theology offers the fitting image. The Trinity is neither three isolated hypostases nor a formless flux, but persons- in- relation through perichōrēsis. So too here: objects are not erased by their morphisms but held in communion through them. Ontic structural realism dissolves the relata; atomism severs them. Category theory avoids both, for it shows that relata are real yet exist only in and through their relations, and that relations are real yet only in and through the relata they bind—an equilibrium reminiscent of the Chalcedonian formulation, of Erich Przywara’s polare Spannung im Gleichgewicht—(polar voltage in equilibrium—CJP) and of Ferdinand Ulrich’s insight that Wesen ist Bezüglichkeit, essence as relationality… Again, Chalcedon expressed this balance with unmatched economy: unity without confusion and distinction without separation. Category theory gives that creed mathematical form.

Category theory teaches that:

• Objects exist only within their symplokē of relations.

• Morphisms generate continuity across scales and theories.

• Higher morphisms encode the metaxý, the fertile between.

• Base parts and relation are co- constitutive, not rivals.

• Explanation lies not in elimination but in weaving: proportion, fittingness, measure.

Again, very interesting stuff, but the density factor is very high.

Infinity in Two Directions

Theology, metaphysics, and poetry long intuited what physics later proved: infinity lives within the finite. Blake’s Auguries, Pascal’s mite, Donne’s ‘super-infinite’, Leibniz’s miroir vivant, and Borges’s Aleph, where ‘the teeming sea, the silvery cobweb, the multitudes of America’ appear without diminution, all reveal plenitude refracted rather than dissolved. Yet the converse is also true: the finite abides within the infinite, not as a drop in an ocean but as a form held in its source. As Aquinas insists, the body is in the soul, not the soul in the body (ST I.76.4 ad 1)…

Infinity is present in the finite by participation, and the finite within the infinite as its intelligible effect—thus neither pantheism nor deism, but a three-fold intimacy that Aquinas names praesentia causalitatis, conservatio in esse, and exemplarismus (ST I, q.8, a.1; q.104, a.1; q.15, a.1–3). Infinity is no sterile beyond but a generative fold, where the finite both receives and reveals the infinite. Gödel and Turing only formalised this ancient intuition: the finite can never close upon itself; every system, logical or computational, enacts an unnoticed remembrance…

Georg Cantor then showed that infinity itself comes in orders. Beyond the countable lies the continuum; beyond that, an endless hierarchy of transfinite numbers. Yet even this tower points to Absolute Infinity (Absolute Unendlichkeit), nothing less than God, ‘belonging to the realm of metaphysics’.

“Mathematics thus rediscovers what theology never forgot: the infinite is not one term among many but the horizon of all finitude. Cantor’s infinities recall Borges’s Alephs, each a finite vantage through which the infinite murmurs.”

Chomsky and Fodor on our prep for language. In God, finite and the infinite coincide; Boltzmann’s ergodicity? Why, it presupposes that same ol’ dualism-doubleness.

Outside mathematics one would be hard-pressed to find a genuine case of intertheoretic reduction.

Ah. More such disquis in the section. But basically with this, we come to Cunningham’s Conclusion.

Conclusion: From Idol to Icon

I won’t presume to say or add much here; the true First Principle is the Form of the Good, “the generative source of being and knowing.” Can’t really argue with that; this accords fairly well with my own view.

And with that, more or less, Cunningham’s extraordinary essay finishes.

CJ Puler’s Interpretive Remarks on Weaving the Real

What can any critic hope to constructively utter about this vast, surging, whirling, overwhelming tableau of mentation and conception? I have here and there voiced some quibbles of compositional adequacy, but these are quibbles indeed: entirely forgivable in what is after all a summary treatment for a journal article. We have to judge now and gauge the thesis itself—the character and mass of the elephant we’ve just eaten.

We would start with an attempt to voice a final literary judgment if we may, then a compression and restatement of what we take to be Cunningham’s primary goal here. The bony, knobby, jankling skeleton which is Cunningham’s article barely holds together; compositional flow is rough, abrupt, and jumbled, the dense and hugely technical sections piled one upon the next with little natural and organic compositional structure and development, in what amounts to a wild, even mad collocation of the archetypal-abstruse in writing; this is, once again, the rhetorical and composition complaint. The thread-sense of a unified composition holds—barely. But we would say the sheer force and mass of the presentation achieves its goals. If the primary purpose and thesis of his essay is to deconstruct (and supersede) materialistic monism and the various ideologies and threads of materialism born of some strains of physics and the history of philosophy: we would affirm, and confidently, that Cunningham has achieved that. While some of the most highly technical sections of the essay exceed my pay grade—and likely the pay grade of 99.999% of the human race—taken as a whole there’s enough here comprehensible by even the garden-variety metaphysician to assert that this is in fact a solid demolition of the materialist ontology, from a huge and variant set of perspectives. However the main focus and lesson of the essay, I would say, is voiced in the conclusion. The piece ultimately has a fairly limited scope and target: it’s a metaphysical perspective for the sciences.

Such reconciliation requires science to be conceived not as a pyramid resting on a single foundation but as a woven fabric of sustaining methods…The paradigm proposed here is not a replacement edifice but a many-stranded instrument, one that allows scientific findings to be what they are: iconic disclosures of matter’s hidden faces, murmurs of creation echoing the Logos through whom all things hold together. This inexhaustible dynamis unsettles steady-state metaphysics and reminds us that the world’s completeness lies not in closure but in continual arrival.

So in the end the essay seems really to be about setting straight the boys and girls playing on the quantum mechanics playground—them, and the philosophers of science.

Which is OK. It’s an ultra-refined, ultra-rarified piece for ultra-specialists. But what about the rest of us? Now we come to the deeper rumblings and ranklings, the below-the-surface level criticisms and interpretations.

For an article in a theology journal, the subject of God seems rather understated here. He’s mentioned here and there, but is certainly not the primary focus per se; almost we might say He is suggested, and maybe this is by intent. The Hot Philosophy on the other hand: calls the old buzzard out directly. Looking at history we say: God has a lot to answer for. I blaspheme the tradition, finding it wholly unsatisfactory to our need, but also to attempt a higher synthesis. I’ve stated the Hot Philosophy’s core gripe is with Western metaphysics and philosophy itself (and not only Western worldviews; Eastern philosophy fares little better, and on some metrics is even worse.) 2 We must wonder, again, about the wider applicability and utility of such discourse. Mr. Cunningham speaks of the “lifeworld,” but the truly gigantic abstraction level of his disquisition at points nearly suffocates; a more fleshed-out treatment would help greatly, as noted, to clarify his statement. Perhaps he doesn’t care, and the chumps can go to Hades. But from a deeper standpoint, other problems besides clarity rise into view.

Here’s something to think about: “matter” isn’t just a construct from philosophical monistic materialism, or a reference to imaginary “stuff” created from ontological conjurations; matter also means: significance. And thus we can very reasonably ask: does deconstructing “matter”…matter?

Cunningham has given us the outline of a coherent metaphysics-of-the-middle. Some of the points in the outline are not decipherable without advanced physics training, but there’s enough here to say: case closed; ontological materialism is moribund. There are however to my mind and as noted: important dimensions of discourse, crucial dimensions, left out of Cunningham’s opus. Presented with this giant pachyderm-meal, we could say: okay; okay; we get it. May I take only half the elephant please—or save some back for later? But the article achieves its primary goal, and with overwhelming force. The head of the sledgehammer is far too loosely affixed—as a writing construct the article needs work, and large expansion; big-time, as we say in the USA—but the epistemic and philosophical job is done.

However…I do not mean to be flippant, but from my standpoint I must ask: what real difference does this make? Do the epistemological obsessions of physicists and their philosophers-of-science pals…matter very much? What is the import for those who decline to partake of or just can’t deal with the dead languages and high energy physics elements? I’m not saying the piece makes no difference; it well may. But that case would seem to be for a corollary or postscript to the essay offered. Materialism is not a Labor Party or Democratic Party plank; esoteric dialogues amongst physicists and philosophers of science aside, it’s not even clear it’s much of a public issue (except for the question of materialistic atheism of course; see below.)

Questions of politics, of ethics, of cognition and the modular structures of the mind itself, and of the place of the erotic in life and society; all these go unspoken-and-unmentioned. Perhaps they must go unspoken in a piece of this nature; “metaphysics is about fundamental issues.” I wish however to reset the chessboard; repaint the pieces, and eliminate castling, and change some other rules. I want to change the game.

The issues mentioned above, ethics, cognition, politics, the erotic—these are the very warp and woof of the human life world—and the Christians themselves disagree on these matters, emphatically; how then shall we gain traction upon them?

My appreciation for the titanic abstractions of Western metaphysics is greatly improved—no monumentally improved, after reading Cunningham’s piece; his brief article drafts a portrait and a synthesis of the subject never before accomplished. Yet something about the entire dimension of discourse…makes me somehow…angry. Theology and philosophy drive their own truck—I get it—yet for my money the entirety of the discipline suffers from a virtually calamitous repression factor, approaching fatal constipation—which arguably goes back to and in huge degree proceeds from the master himself: Plato. 3

We might call this line of inquiry a Genealogy of the Inner Ape, or the Ape Liberation Movement; I attempt to deal with it in my own work. Briefly, I’ve suggested philosophy adopt a framework of conceptual empiricism, wherein evidence from the world, outer and inner, is reflected into concepts; successive compressions-of-compressions lead us upward from raw perception to idea, to religion and political ideology—which can eventually “take over,” impacting perception. God is effectively a placeholder in this system, akin to the zero in mathematics; the Indispensable Vacuity, I call Him: completely indispensable—cosmology proves it—yet 4 (besides holding together the fundamental constants, and thus the Cosmos Entire) having no native absolute intrinsic valuation per se—besides being the Author of reality, that is; other than that He’s pretty useless. Revelation is not necessarily precluded; in fact I argue for it, though from a different standpoint from the tradition’s norm. The upshot is a “diffident theism,” which acknowledges and isn’t afraid to speak of God, but which simultaneously asserts His essential uselessness: we are on our own, and we have simply got to find ways to deal with each other fairly and honorably, while recognizing our own deep primate-brain potential for dark and violative acts—we must find such ways, that is, before the big approaching asteroid wipes us all out.

Plus, we face other dire problems. We’re a mortal species—as currently constituted. Ethics therefore isn’t a set of scriptural-traditional admonitions, like ablution rituals, or an academic exercise or sidecar to the metaphysics tradition. It’s a survival matter now. Is=ought; we are going extinct—unless we can recharge and redirect our conceptual and spiritual batteries.

None of this to my knowledge is treated in Western metaphysics, classical or contemporary; not at all, to my knowledge; in fact quite the reverse. Depth psychology visited the terrain. Eschatological theology deals with it to a degree, but not adequately; it’s too embedded in the constipated and repression-vectored discourses of the past. I in fact describe the mighty arrow of Western historical, philosophical, scientific and technological progress as essentially originating in repression of the body. (In this of course I am not alone, but I put my own spin on the idea.)

Maybe metaphysics just is about dealing with fundamentals only. I do not grudge that it seeks those, and indeed I welcome the clarifications Cunningham achieves; I’m inclined to say that with his contribution the matters of classical Western metaphysics proper, so to speak, are now closed. It’s now essentially part of antiquarian studies—hey, have at it; we need another interpretation of Kant, and of Sartre’s dialectical. These things can be fun, and interesting, as intellectual puzzles and exercises. The real deal is the epistemology of the world, and here we tip our hat to Conor Cunningham; overall this piece is mind-blowing monstrous good. My own preference is for a leaner account, that doesn’t require the equivalent of a doctorate in high energy physics, nor imbibing full Thomism, nor utilizing the dubious categories of such figures as Husserl (sorry… I had to say it—going after Husserl—maybe my biggest heresy of all—not to disagree, but to propose the man is basically a charlatan cult leader—Few can agree on what he means, and he himself least of all: his last work, the Crisis, “ represents a major reorientation away from the Cartesian, foundationalist approach of his earlier work…There are significant, well-documented disagreements regarding Edmund Husserl's phenomenology…” as Google AI and others put it.)

Great. And enough, already. Let’s face it: not only phenomenology but a lot and perhaps most of philosophy is obscurantist balderdash—or better: just plain horseshit. For much or most of it, meaning and significance stand, typically, almost in inverse relation to the volume of the disquisition.

In terms of an analysis of pure metaphysics as performed in Western thought, Conor Cunningham has achieved here something truly incredible: virtually a perfection and completion of the process-chain of Western metaphysical reason. It’s a mopping-up operation, but materialism as a philosophical position is done. However brutes, barbarians, and monsters still lurk among us—those, and megaton bombs—and the world still balances on a hairpin.

We would like more.

                                                                                                                                      *

I close my remarks and review of this amazing article with a few final thoughts of a general nature.

Regarding “materialism”—where does “materialism” reside these days? It seems elusive; it is not after all a subject much discussed in popular music, culture, and films—or even very much in relatively highbrow commentary. (The recent fad of materialistic atheism is of course an exception; again, see below.) “Materialism” appears mostly, we would suggest, as an aspect of ideologies of the world; in particular it would seem to exist primarily as a postulate and an interpretation within specialized discourses such as physics and its sub-fields such as quantum theory and cosmology—and to a lesser degree within philosophy itself: the very domains the author treats of here, of course. In that sense, Mr. Cunningham has done these fields a great service of clarification—those fields, and any persons who want to try to understand the world (or the world of philosophy at any rate.)

Conor Cunningham has thus done philosophy a tremendous and indispensable, invaluable service here. Never before has any writer congealed and amassed in one booklet so utterly and vastly dense a congeries of philosophical and metaphysical theory—and dispatched it so convincingly. And never again can any proponent of thing-ism speak without being gently chuckled off stage. That argument is over, and one might say the Age of Ontological Middleness has arrived. It remains however to be seen whether the impact of Cunningham’s synthesis entails any larger implications for the wider world.

The theological-metaphysical purifications elicited and obtained in Mr. Cunningham’s disquisition are fascinating and conclusive: he positions us in the middle of things. That theoretical plank I can heartily endorse. Below the visible the world dissolves into quantum foam, and equations; above us, God is the Indispensable Vacuity. But it is through reflection on our place as mortals in relation to history, that we may pursue salvation—not only individually, but as a species for whom extinction shall always beckon. Therefore in conceptual empiricism and the Hot Philosophy we treat Jesus Christ as the savior—and not only theologically, from our perspective, but practically: Christ is the Divine Seedling. In this, Orthodoxy’s theosis comes closest to my position (although I take a more metaphorical “as if” view of the matter.) The dice of cosmic development are loaded—at infinitesimal degree and calibration—and God “seeded” Jesus Christ into human history. Then everything changes; over millennia. But bad dice rolls still can and do occur. And we are effectively: on our own; to colonize the stars—or blow each other up. Or foul the oceans, and wipe out the base of the food chain. Or wait around for the sun to croak. Any way you spin it, as I have said elsewhere: we’re a species living on borrowed time.

We do not think it would be a presumption to say that Conor Cunningham proclaims the Good News, of Jesus Christ. One area of possible focus for his staggering intellect: the ideology of materialistic atheism itself, and perhaps further analysis of the God hypothesis in terms comprehensible to us lowbrow, ignorant dullards: does it carry any real weight? Or was Socrates rather on the right track, in the Euthyphro? For us, Socrates is on point here: what does God add to the Good? If the good is merely His diktat, it is capricious and arbitrary—and dubious: the God of Islam (rather typically anyway according to the strict sharia, as developed in the the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali schools) demands fealty at the point of the scimitar, or at minimum the subjection of the kuffar to the jizya; and at one point God—of the written Hebrew Scriptures anyway—drowned nearly 100% of the human race, as well as all un-Arked organic life on the planet. That was slightly before he legitimated the slaughters of the Canaanites by the Hebrews to conquer Canaan, and before he took Job’s family and afflicted Job with countless boils—to settle a bet with Satan. Then, when asked why by Job, He basically says: I’m God and I do what I want—shut the f*ck up. (Jung’s take on this is interesting and bears examination—but not right now.)

The point here is: God’s diktats, historically and logically, necessarily cannot equate to the Good. And if the Good can stand on its own—who needs the deity?

Well the Hot Philosophy thinks we need him; the conclusion is forced—thus, it is: can’t live with ‘im; can’t live without ‘im. That’s basically my position. It seems we evolve as God evolves, and vice versa; a new form of process theology, but without marriage to Aristotelian category theory or (God forbid) Hegel.

For better or worse, we’re stuck with the guy: mortal creatures in His rather capricious (and effectively hostile) universe. Our job is to look at history—an endless resource—and the future—and help God (and each other) have a better day; before the asteroid comes.

But these are big questions. For Mr. Cunningham we say: we would like more.

CJ Puler

Houston TX

NOTES

1. The idea for a conceptual empiricism is based foremost on the abduction concept of C.S. Peirce. Not to float my own boat and toot my own horn, but see especially Ch 3 of The Ass of the Apes, available on Amazon. (This is the original footnote.)

2. “The fundamental position of Zen is that it has nothing to say.” Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West. Zen, and eastern mysticisms generally, are piffle: as philosophy it is another racket of the priests and gurus. It may be relatively innocuous as far as religion goes, comparatively speaking, with some colorful wall paintings and nice big clunky stone temples; but unless you’re looking for a personal teddy bear that tradition offers nada for us now, in our situation. (From The Ass of the Apes, Prologue.) As I’ve also put it, If they’re so smart why didn’t they harness electric power?

3. See my “Final Thoughts On That Old Greek Weirdo, Plato” at https://thehotphilosophy.com/final-thoughts-on-that-old-greek-weirdo-plato

4. See Chapter 1 of the book, entitled What Goes On.

5. See the blog post here, “Jesus Christ and Partial Differential Equations,” or of course L'Appendage 1.13 of the book.