First, have a listen to Timothy Jackson’s recent Lepht Hand podcast about the ontogenetic stance:
Then have a read of his essay on Darwin, Simondon, and Battaile and the importance of a “variation first” approach that replaces classical effective theory ontology with an account of ontogenesis. One consequence of such an approach is that we can only ever talk about ontologies. As a process-relational ontological pluralist myself, there is so much here that excites me: “Excess and Ontogenesis” By Timothy Jackson
We must resist the temptation of rationalism to close the world by prematurely bounding the real. Tim’s critique of “effective theorization” (the way a pre-defined phase/state space quietly smuggles ontotheological necessity into supposedly secular models) is both philosophically incisive and ethically important. The mechanization of nature is not just an epistemic move in theoretical space but a world-making (and/or -destroying) bid for control, mastery, and immunization against whatever still exceeds the grid.
I appreciate Tim’s caution that we move carefully and deliberately between the prosaic, inquired, and speculative registers (ie, everyday interpersonal life, hypothetico-empirical research, and imaginative generalization) without letting any one of them tyrannize the others. Where I suspect we may differ is not in the need for this threefold distinction, but in how we braid it into an integral cosmology.
His “variation first” postulate is a powerful wake up call for the old metaphysical and modern scientific habit of treating invariant identity as primary and differentiation as derivative. But the rub is that even to say “variation first” is already to treat variation as invariant, as a principle that must hold, everywhere, in order to do the philosophical work you want it to do. There’s no escape from the variation-invariance polarity. We can try to enthrone difference and demote identity, but we end up reinstalling identity just by virtue of insisting difference has priority.
I don’t accept Kant’s rationalist sublation of empiricism. But he named and responded with epochal genius to the unbearable existential wound of modernity severing thought from sense, concept from percept, head from heart. His account of the “epigenesis of reason” borrows a biological theory of development to construct a novel meta-epistemic method wherein the activity of reason is analogized to a developing organism, spontaneously unfolding from mutually sensitive inner formative principles, rather than having form imposed from outside. Knowing is not a passive recording of ready-made facts but an active systematizing, a purposive synthesis of a manifold. And yet, famously, Kant calls off his analogy at the critical moment, affirming reason’s transcendental autonomy while treating the idea of organismic purposiveness to which it was analogized as a mere heuristic, not an ontological disclosure. Self-organization, he cautioned, is projected by mind rather than genuinely expressed in nature.
The process-relational approach (and perhaps also the ontogenetic stance) begins by stepping through the door Kant opened but refused to enter by ontologizing what he kept as mere metaphor. If reason is ontogenetic, why assume nature itself as a whole and in its parts is not also a formative process? Not a finished Gestalt but an active Bildung, not only material but mental all the way into the depths? In this chiaroscuric light, the evolutionary process is less a blind nature’s death machine for sifting happy accidents and more an artistic nature’s play of creative metamorphosis, as choric as it is noetic.
This helps us reframe classical autopoietic theory, which both Tim and I have found reason to (appreciatively!) critique. Organisms are materially and semiotically promiscuous beings and cannot be adequately understood as “operationally closed” unities. They live at odds with themselves. The oddity is that autopoiesis is always also sympoiesis. Structural coupling to an environment is not an incidental property of life; it is essential. A living system cannot be abstracted from the multi-level coupled dynamics that include its milieu.
Once you notice that the coupling is where all the action of life is, the “environment” becomes not just an inert container or a dead constraint. Life is an organism-environment flow; and while it may appear that the house (oikos/environment) always wins (because no organism is immortal), in ontogenetic ontologies, the environment is understood to be composed entirely of other organisms. Life is always passing on into other life.
“The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
—Walt Whitman
Tim’s account of why metaphysicalizing as a theoretical practice of minimalist generalization is necessary, lest we become tacitly trapped in an un- or under-theorized scientistic effective theory, is exactly right. Whitehead has been attractive for my thinking on these issues because he allows us to distinguish (1) the misplaced abstractness of physicalism’s eternalist conception of law—its habit of treating equations or particles/fields as ahistorical ultimates—from (2) the more generic metaphysical category of invariance. On a process view, what persists in nature are not eternal laws but evolved, enduring patterns or what he calls “societies”: temporary, contingent achievements of meso-cosmic stability amidst a world-process that otherwise micro-cosmically oscillates between arising and perishing “and never really is” (Plato).
Whitehead (like Plato) still treats invariance as real, but (unlike Plato) not as sovereign. His “eternal objects” (pure potentials) are not a fixed state space waiting to be traversed by actual occasions. This is why he distinguishes so carefully between enduring objects adventuring in space-time and eternal objects “beyond” it (though we ought not imagine “another world” or some kind of Platonic heaven: the “beyondness” of eternal objects just signals their non-locality: that they are in relative potentiaeverywhere). They do not constitute a fixed or pre-given state space. On the contrary, the eternal objects are precisely what is NOT given, NOT yet actualized anywhere in metrical space-time, nor fully given as space-time geometry itself (since many such geometries remain possible). Eternal objects function in their absence as potential data for actualization, only constraining what happens next because of how each newly arising present must at least partially conform to prior historical ingressions. “Partially” because the ontogenetic polar complement of invariance—variation—assures that no two occasions are ever the same. Conformal inheritance meets and mingles with creative invention.
I part company with any picture of evolution as primordially rooted in arbitrary motion, as if the universe only accidentally stumbles forward, checked by the death penalty of passive selection, into endless forms most beautiful. I would instead affirm that evolutionary ontogenesis is driven from the beginning by aims as well as by accidents, by eros and by error, by lures and lacks, by improvisatory decisions as much as chance denials. Selection is not and has never been just blind. Selection (even as Darwin was imagining it, influenced by his close study of William Paley’s logic of intelligent design*) is not just “natural” but also “divine,” or if you prefer a less loaded term, “artistic.” In nature’s beauty, as Kant came so close to affirming, there is disclosed something like Leibniz’s “striving possibles” or Whitehead’s “initial aim.” Unlike the Paley paradigm’s emphasis on imposed design, this line of thinking affirms a radically different model of divine creativity: expressivist rather than externalist. The order and intelligibility expressed by the world is not the result of some logical necessity or divine fiat but a function, rather, of divine feeling, of each worldly creature’s relation to a “fellow sufferer” reminding it of All that remains possible even when most everything seems lost. We inhabit a cosmos and not chaos because the world is at least in kindling pockets swayed by “God’s love” (or by the love of beauty and harmony, if you prefer), inclined to feel divinely and not blindly. At least so far.
So yes: ontogenesis as first philosophy. May a thousand ontologies bloom. Yes: metaphysics is the open-ended practice of minimalist generalization, “open” lest we become prisoners of unacknowledged effective theories. And yes: I affirm Tim’s critique of “apotropeic eliminativism”: the fearful turn away from what hurts, what confuses, what exceeds… The lure of the beautiful (“the teleology of the universe,” according to Whitehead) can feel like the siren call of the sublime to the still wounded Kantian in us. It draws us near, warms and enlightens us, only to destroy us. It is pointless to turn away from suffering and tragedy, for if nothing else we can be certain that the dream of youth wears out and death will come knocking for us all. But I at least feel just as assuredly that it is the excessiveness of life that meets us on the other side of death’s door.
“Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Translated by Robert Bly)
* Darwin, at least when the Romantic spark of his youth still smoldered, was not insensitive to the evolutionary potency of beauty.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?