Naturally - Occurring ontologies

Naturally - Occurring ontologies * by J.K. FEIBLEMAN

This paper is the result of a suggestion that I extract from my Ontology a typical theme which could be developed as an independent argument and yet remain representative of the main position of that book. The theme to be extracted is that while ontology as such continues to be a speculative field, some ontologies have an empirical reference. The first contention need hardly be emphasized in such a meeting as this; the second, however, can use all the support that can be found for it. I should add parenthetically that I might have used the term ‘meta- physics’ instead of ‘ontology’ were it not for two old associations. ‘Met- aphysics’ is ordinarily regarded as a synonym for theology or idealism, and I wanted a fresh start.

Perhaps it would be best to begin by pointing to a confusion in the use of the term, empirical, as traditionally employed. Both philosophers and physical scientists have found the term useful, but they have not meant the same thing by it. The philosophers have meant something like the effect of sense experience on the subject. The physical scientists have used it to refer to the investigations of the material object follow- ing suggestions arising from the disclosures of sense experience. This divergence in meaning has led to widely separated investigations. I t has led the philosophers to dwell on the structure of human experience, after the manner of Immanuel KANT, for instance; and it has led the scientists to collect the evidence of uniformities in the nature of the material world. The philosophers have been more concerned with the empirical method of inquiry and the scientists with the empirical con- lent. When I use the term, empirioal, here it will refer to an inquiry in philosophy which resembles that of the scientists. For I hold that there are in the material world naturally-occurring ontologies, just as there

* Invited Address before the Metaphysical Society of America, Loa Angeles,

Vol. 23, No 2 (1969)

March 16, 1968.

Dialectica

136 J. K. Feibleman

are naturally-occurring metal's: the gold which i,s found on or near the earth's surface, for instance.

On my hypothesis nothing exists without an ontological implication. So long as there is a rock, then it can be asserted as a truth that part of the real earth is material. The higher one goes in the integrative levels of the empirical fields, the more is implied ontologically. What, then, is the empirical field of reference which I am claiming for some ontologies? Let me say at once and without more reservations that it is the corresponding human cultures, the whole of them. My justification for making such a claim will fall into three parts.

I will argue that (I) if anyth'ing has being then it has an ontology; (11) cultures have being; therefore (111) cultures have ontologies.

I

In order to understand the conception advanced here, it will be necessary to give up thinking of being as meaning only human being, as with HEIDEGGER, and return to something similar to the Greek view affect or to be affected. The approach chosen here in a way supple- of being as waht-there-is, or to PLATO for whom it was the power to ments that of HEIDEGGER. He called attention to the fact that the subjective perspective has its own kind of ontological status. For he is very much concerned with the being of the fact that man is thrown into the world; but he does noit care to understand the world into which man is thrown. Worst of all, he does not care about the being of the world, yet world being encompasses human being. To say that man was "thrown into the world" suggeslts that he had been somewhere else. But where eEse and under what conditions?

The alienation of man from the world, about which the existentialists from KIERKEGAARD on have been so worried, involves the ontological recognition, long overdue, of a feeling of dread or anxiety which occurs chiefly as part of the pathology of individuals in a fractured society, a feeling on which unfortunately the existentialists base the subjectivisty of all truth. And they are right that it is subjective for individuals in a state of anguish-indeed it is for all illness-but I would say subjectiive merety and therefore false: not false as a feeling of course, for I recognize that there are no false feelings, but false in what the feeling is taken to represent. There is no material alienation.

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Man has material being as well as psychological awareness; and if he lives in terms of the difference between himself and the other, it is because he is taking with ontological seriousness a separation which does not exist in faot. If man does feel alienated, it is because of his refusal to recognize tha the distinction, so popular with German philosophers, between man and the world, is not viable, since man is the name for a part of the world. He need nolt suffer from the feeling which follows from a false ,distinction, and bestowing this understanding upon him may help in getting rid of it. Thus in order to understand human being it would first be necessary to understand the being of the world, which is to say, “being” in the widest sense.

With this understanding, we are in a position to proceed to take the next step in the argument. To exist-in PLATO’S definition to affect or to be affected or in my defi’nition more specifically to interact materially in space and time-means to posit assumptions which are no less authentic for being inadvertent. The ontological assumptions of a non-human material thing, a stone, say, or a planet, begin with its existence as a material thing, an existence which means that it occupies a particular space, endures for a particular time, and moves into and out of contact with other material things; it affects them and it is affected by them.

But that is not all. For it is involved as well with the laws which exist one type above it.

A stone behaves ,like stones; so that to know the behavior of stones is to be able to predict the behavior of a stone. The laws describing the behavior of stones themselves belong to a class of similar laws, and so on. But it will always be the case that most stones are not present, only one is or some; and so it is fortunate that we can turn this situation round and say that to know the behavior of a stone which is present is to be able correctly to predict the behavior of all those absent objects which are similar and so belong to the same class. W e know about absent stones from present ones, but generality refers chiefly to absents objects because there are always so overwhelmingly many more. So then the behavior of a stone is a set of-call them what you will: regularities, generalities, abstractions, laws, universals.

If now we see that we have posited the existence of a world of material things and another world of logical classes which are themselves the members of classes, and further that the classes of material things belong to the two worlds in virtue of the regularities in their behavior and in this way conned those worlds, then we can see that we

138 J. K. Feibleman

have posited one type of ontology. No doubt other types are possible from a different approach.

Thus it should be possible, given the existence of anything, to speculate about its ontological assumptions. I am aware that in making this statement I am committed to meta-assumptions and I may add that I don’t care; for I have already provided for them in defining ontology as such, in the full force of the generality that ontologies too must be there to be represented.

Let us see now where this excursus has left us. W e have material things with their native ontological assumptions, and we have oato- logics which are wider in scope than such things, ontological systems which pretend to be common to all such assumptions and to be independent both of the material things and their assumptions, on the ground that being ‘common to all such assumptions’, is not necessarily a relation of dependence. But in any case I can think of no way to avoid the conclusion that what we are dealing with at this point is two distinct domains: one of matter, containing particulars, and another of logic, containing universals. This conclusion will call for a little more filling in of details before we leave it to talk about culture. Then we will be in a position to bring the two conceptions together and expatiate in terms of the ontology of culture.

To say that something exists, then, is to say that it lies in the domain of matter and is active in space and time, and it is also to say that it has implications in the domain of logic consisting of universals, that is to say, in the domain of being without existence. Existence is a kind of being, but being is not a kind of existence. An ontology is a theory of being. Perhaps the terms, ‘being’ and ‘existence’ will come clearer if I say that in my ontology I define ‘reality’ as equality of being, and so dispense with that term since there are then no distinctions with respect to it.

Existence is the substantial lower story of a two-story world, which after the manner of PLATO, has a superstantial upper story consisting of abstract entities. The difference is that for PLATO the second story may be independent of the first and floats so to speak in its own am- bience. For me the second story is an abstract one governed by logic, and is supported by the first story which is a concrete one of matter. The being of the second story is no different qua being from that of the first, since its elements are capable of affecting those of the first when called out in some way to do so. W e learn about the elements of the second story from a study of them in the first story. There are

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reasons to suppose that the two stories differ with respect to their stay- ing powers. The world of matter is also one of transient things. Nothing formed of material is permanent though matter itself may be. The world of logic is a persistent world, since if anything has being in the world of logic it may always recur in the world of existence even though there are times when it does not exist.

In the conception of an ontology of the two-story world, I have sought to discover something of the truth about being while avoiding the Platonic and Aristotelian excesses: The Platonic unwillingness to admit that our knowledge of the Ildeas derived from the sensible world, and the Aristotelian unwillingness to admit that the Forms are independent of substance. Instead, there is posited for the world of logic a persistent recurrence of abstract relations safe from all impact, and for the world of matter transient occurrence of semi-stable objects such as plants, animals and planets.

Later we shall see that we need to discuss the relations between the two stories of the two-story world in greater detail, in terms of the effects of activity. A subordinate but perhaps exceedingly significant conection between the two stories is to be found in what I have named destiny: the evidence of direction that can be detected in the world of matter, such evidence as that of entropy; of evolution, which runs counter to it; and even of the direction of human cultures, which does also.

WITTGENSTEIN in the Tractatus has shown us very well how our knowledge of the second story, which is one of abstract entities governed by logic, can be put together fram a study of the representations of fact in language. In his account there are two steps: in the first step the abstractions are made in order to get them off the ground, and in the second they are combined. The combinations can then be repeated so that there are combinations of the combinations. If both of these steps are repeated sufficiently, the result is a mesh of abstractions of so tight a character that it can be counted on faithfully to reflect the ground floor. When we move among the neatly-fitted abstractions we are so to speak inside a great mirror.

But this is an affair of' knowledge and not of being. So far as being is concerned, it does seem l o be the case that elements of both kinds, the facts of the material story and the logic-guided linguistic constructions which represent the elements of the abstract story, have had and continue to have their being independently of our knowledge of them, and this does seem to be the case for many reasons, chiefly those taken

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from evidence in the present that they were in existence well before the evolution of the human species. They would exist whether they were know or not, though in the latter case admittedly we would not know even this.

Truths of logic and truths of fact (a la LEIBNIZ) may both be discovered, and when we make such discoveries we are inadvertently committed to believing in their having existed before the discovery; and this holds as true for the square root of minus one as it does for petroleum under the surface of the earth. Whitehead’s warning comes to mind in this connection. ‘Abstraction’ for him did not refer to the making of abstractions by human individuals, and so he invented the term, “extensive abstraction”, which means, among other things, that the movement of the abstraction is primarily from the world of matter to the world of logic and only secondarily to ithe subject of knowledge.

Those who are doing me the honor of listening may be objecting at this point that I have been arguing nothing, merely developing the outlines of a system of ontology. They are quite right in this; my only defenses are therefold: that the coherent nature of the ontology is in some sense an argument for it, if consistency on a large scale means anything; secondly, that I must have tools if I am to do the work: and. finally, that a satisfactory explanation carries a sufficient degree of conviction with it to support the claim that sometimes at least it can convey the force of an argument. So if you will bear with me a little longer, I may hope to convince you of at least the respectabilisty of my position.

Having set forth at least one ontology that might be implied by anything possessed of being, it will next be necessary to show that cultures have being and .the sort of being they have. Our first task in this direction is to address ourselves to the question of what culture is in the sense to be employed here. Since cultures exist they can be described materially and also each must have an ontology. But to say that a number of different cultures exist is to say also that they have equality of being. I mention this by way of introducing the special sort of meaning I attach ontologically to the term, culture.


I define culture as the use of artifacts. This includes of course their invention by men working together in a society. Let me hasten to explain. The difference between the humanoid types of pre-history and the recognizable members of the human species was effected by the introduction of artifacts. Artifacts are materials whic have been altered through human agency to help in reducing human needs. They are of two kinds: tools and signs. Tools are (materials designed to make it possible to move other materials, and signs are materials designed to refer to other materials.

No one seems inclined to take issue with ,the material nature of signs, but many differ rather sharply with the idea of the material reference of signs. Elsewhere I have contended that signs have one of three anid only three kinds of direct or indirect references: material things, parts of material things (such as qualities and relations), and classes of material things (and of course classes of classes).' In so far as a sign refers to a class, it may be said to refer to a non-material thing directly but it is still referring to a material thing indirectly. H. LEVY in his Universe of Science pointed out that even so recondite a mathematical notation as 1/-1 means "turn the turned picture".* Since abstractions may be abstracted froan abstractions indefinitely, it may be a long way down to the ground, but this is no evidence against the material nature of 'the ultimate reference.

What is true of signs is true also of languages, for languages, I need hardly add, are combinations of signs. Languages introduce an additional set of material references to those possessed by signs stand- ing by themselves. All language is referential ; emotive language, for instance, refers to the feelings of the human organism, and perform- ative language to behavioral intentions on the part of that organism, both material. The argument for the material nature of language is long and involved, but i t can be summarized, Languages exist in order to convey meanings, and this is done by means of modulations of sound waves or by on marks flat surfaces. The meanings, like the more primi- hive signs, involve references to other materials.

What man has made out of his immediate environment by using the tools and languages he has invented (and often by using them together) is a world which has been adapted to his need-reductions. I take it that man in (this way surrounded himself with an artificial or, what is the same thing, artifactual, world by interacting with his immediate environment in a construotive manner. He has made things that serve his turn out of what he has found around him, and this is no

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less true of the discovery of the properties of uranium 235 than it was of the man who cast the first stone. Civilization is externalization. The advancement of culture is clearly in the direction of learning to do outside the body what formerly had been done only inside. Cooking is a kind of pre-digesting, and operating a computer a certain kind of thinking.

I shall need at this point to enter a disclaimer concerning the distinction between the artificial and the natural which has plagued understanding for so long. What we have been meaning by nature is that part of nature which has gone undisturbed by man. And what we have been meaning by artificial is those constructions made by man which, like man himself, form no part of nature. Although we have not always indicated these meanings, we have only too often assumed them by using the terms in this way. But such usage relies upon a conception which will have to be discontinued here if my expo- sition is to proceed, for it goes against the facts as we have been learning them for the last century.

According to the best scientific information, man is a high organization of matter, he emerged from the background of the material world and he has survived by adapting to it. In these senses he belongs to it. Organic evolution has furnished the evidence for the first part of this assertion, and the material theory of culture the second. On these assumptions, man and his works are parts of nature, the artificial being understood in the sense of artful-something made out of something else. If we look at the earth, as if it were from a long distance off-a perspective to which evidently we are going to have to became more and more accustomed-we can note that man has made inroads into his immediate environment, which does not seem the same where he has been busy as where he has not existed.

And then if we return with the speed of a satellite to a position close enough to observe man himself, we shall further note that the artifacts he has constructed have had a feedback effect on him. He is not the same as he was before they existed. Man is not the only animal capable of constructing artifacts, but he is the only one which has made artifacts out of almost everything in his immediate environment, including the ground on which he walks and the air that he breathes, and, more importantly, he is the only one which has proved so adaptable that he can change himself in order to conform to the demands of his own constructions. This development has been brought to the point where it is fair to say that the musician (in so far as he is a musician)


is a function of the piano, and the pilot a function of the airplane, and not the converse. Thanks to such artifacts he has reached out to a wider range of values and so made considerable advances in his own sensitive responses, clearly a great gain rather than a loss.

The conclusion from our examination of the nature of artifacts is that there is a continuous spectrum from the natural to its extension into the artificial, and that therefore ontologically the distinction between the natural and the artificial will not bear scrutiny. Man is a part of nature and SO are his works. Together with them he contributes to a complex which can best be described as material culture.

I have tried to show something of what culture is from the perspective afforded by its development. Now we shall have to try a less functional and more structural approach and show on another spectrum its relations to the natural world. This will lead us logically and inevitably to the topic of our paper and the existence of naturally-occurring ontologies.

For some time interest in the relations between the areas investigated by the experimental sciences has grown, and it properly belongs in the philosophy of science because scientists are not concerned with such relations but are notoriously preoccupied with a single science. Nature is evidently all of a piece but it fractures in predictable stria- tions, like geological ‘fault lines’ which open up when pressure is applied. This produces levels having qualibies and relations. W e shall be concerned briefly enough with the relations of tall and the qualities of one. The generally accepted name for this set of relations is the integrative levels. It is necessary to distinguish at this point, however, between the integrative levels and the sciences which investigate them, for they bear the same name. “Physics” for example is the name of a science, and a science strictly speaking is a group of trained professionals together with their tools. These consist in a body of existing information, such as in this case physical laws and data, and investigative instru- ments: laboratories, cyclotrons, and so on. The physical world investigated by the physicists is the world of matter in motion in space and time.

The names of the integrative levels are familiar. Beginning with the lowest level, they are: the physical, the chemical, the biological, the psychological and the anthropological. At each of these levels there are structures and emergent qualities, as for example, at the physical level atoms and the three kinds of energy: gravitational, electrodynamic and nuclear; at the chemical, molecules and valence; at the biological,

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organisms and life; at the psychological, minds and awareness; and at the anthropological, societies (or human cultures) and the ethos. If molecules are composed of the organizations of many atoms, cells composed of the organization of many molecules, organisms of many cells and !societies of many organisms, then human cultures would be the most complex organizations known; and this will be even more evident if we add in the construction of artifacts which are germane to the anthropological level, material culture.

Each of the integrative levels from the lowest to the highest has its own autonomy, and so there are many functions which hold between any two of these levels, such as the fallowing: each level above the lowest consists in an organization of many elements of the lowest plus one emergent quality; each level depends upon the level below for its umechanismn and upon the level above for its “purpose”. The population of elements, by definition, then, declines in proportion to the height of the level. In this way #atoms, molecules, cells, orgmisms and societies are constructed. A molecule contains many atoms, a cell many molecules, an organism miany cells, and a society many organisms.

Our interest is of counse in the highest of the integrative levels. Now we can see how the anthropological level rides dependently above the others. No human individuals, then n o material culture. Organi- zations at the anthropological level of material culture would not be possible except pyramided above vast accumulations of atoms, molecules, cells and organisms, non-human as well as human. It is the organization of these disparate elements, including of course men in societies acting as agents, that constitutes material cultures.

But there is more than one curious feature to this structure. For at each integrative level, in addition to the emergent quality which I have already mentioned, there are other organizational properties. Cultures, as we have noted in another connection, do not consist merely in human individuals, for even thsough they be the necessary cause of culture they are not the sufficient cause. Artifacts have to be included, and still another element thus far not introduced into the analysis: institutions. Individuals and artifacts do not occur together in cultures helter skelter but organized into well-recognized units called institutions. These contain as necessary ingredients other elements which we now have to inspect.

Every culture contains as its first level of analysis a hierarchy of institutions established on the basis of a set of values determined for it by the highest institution. And an institution is an interest-group


together with its artifacts established by a charter 'and organized around a certain aim. MURDOCK and other sociologists have shown that every culture has the same set of institutions even though not the same hierarchy of institutions, and even has the same set of culture traits; I seem to remember that he counted seventy-three.3 The odd thing is that in many ways an institution has more in common with the corresponding institution in other cultures than it has with the other institutions in the same culture. A marriage nite in Belgium has more in common with a marriage rite in New Guinea than it has wi'th a method of transportation in Belgium.

W e can now bring together the various strands of the development on which we have been engaged, in order to show what sort of being cultures have. If we unite the functional and structural aspects of ma- terilal culture (including both artifaots and their alterations of the men who made them) then we have a graphic illustration of the construc- tivism of WITTGENSTEIN, discussed eanlier. The selection of elements and the way in which they are fitted together determines the ontology. Empiricism guides the former and logic the labter. The more complex a material thing, &e more specialized its ontologiaal assumptions. Dif- ferent cultures, then, must have different ontologies, and the ontologies they have are as naturally-occurring as the cultures themselves; for the cultures grew out of the worked-over makerials found in nature and the ontologies grew out of the cultures.

I11

W e shall have to account for the fact, then, that there are as many different ontologies as there are diverse cultures. It will be best to begin by noting the similarities among diverse institutions in the SQme culture. And we shall have to get even more basic than that: we shall have to account for the pound common to diverse culture traits. And where is this to be found? It is (the core of my contention that here we have located the empirical basis for ontology.

My hypothesis is that ontologies make up the ground for the consistency-rules between divergent sets of empirical data. What very different institutions in the same culture have in common is an identical set of ontological assumptions. That is why I have thought it appropriate to borrow a term from chemilstry and call them naturally-occurring

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ontologies. Nature is capable of supporting as many concrete ontologies as there are material cultures. By abstracting these we arrive at the ontologies of cultures.

Cultures arise because men build what they can with the materials at hand, and this is just as true of temples and factories as i t is of customs and traditions, as true of ships and sealing-wax as of languages and capital cities. Men come to a new land equipped with inherited customs and traditions, but these are quickly modified by means of the interactions which take place between the men and their artifacts.

The deliberate work of philosophers emerges as a recognition of what is already taken for granted in the culture. Piart at least of the wisdom of the discoveries of the great thinkers is their recognition of common assumptions, and involves a process of making explicit what was already implicit. The particul’ar version of phenomenology which we think of as typical of the Indian outlook did not produce that outlook but instead was produced by it. Those who wrote the Vedas were only setting down what everyone around them had already come to believe. In this sense an especially astute and comprehensive worker in the field of the philosophy of history is a reporter of cultures, a journalist who tries to get at the heart of what is already held within the culture to be true.

The concrete ontology of a culture is held in a number of ways. We can catch it most readily in the places where it rises to the surface.

I think first, of course, of the fundamental beliefs which the individuals in a culture unconsciously hold in common, their social beliefs. The fundamental beliefs from which men do things “instinctively” are unconsciously held and rarely rise to the surface as such. They reveal themselves in critical actions when individuals are forced to do something without having had time to reflect. In other words, the actions are the consequences of beliefs which are held so deeply that the individual holding them is unaware of their existence. Yet then remain the postulates from which deduotions are carried out in practice in sudden and decisive behavior. Such beliefs are common to all the individuals of a given culture and were laid down inadvertently and covertly when the culture itself was formed. Since the beliefs at this level are crucial, I have chosen to give them a collective name and to call them the unconscious crucial commitment.

One distinguishing feature of the unconscious crucial commitment is that it usually takes the society, in iits aim at least, outside the culture in efforts to penetrate beyond itself and well into the depths of the


environment. The conquest of other cultures by societies predominantly military, and the sacrifice of society to the religious benefibs of another world, belong together in this respect; for both are forms of self-sacrifice intended to gain an ultimate aggrandizement.

The unconscious crucial commitment is psychological. But because the smallest human isolate is a culture and not an individual, I am thinking chiefly of its objective counterpant in and between social institutions which may be called the implicit dominant ontology: it lies covertly below the surface and operates effeotively while remaining unknown, it is dominant because it takes precedence over all thoughts, feelings and actions, and in many oases dictates what they shall be, and it is ontological because it defines the limits of consistency and purports to offer solutions to ultimate problems of being. Socially it consists in the common use and application of complex objective ideas by the members of social groups working with tools, folkways and institutions.

Every social institution has its own implicit dominant ontology, but what I am more anxious to show is that the organization of social institutions in a culture sets the philosophy of <the culture, and it does so because the various institutions constitute themselves a hierarchy. The institutions within a culture are arranged in some order of impor- tance, and this arrangement differs from culture to culture. Thus the order is revealing. The culture is dominated by the instikution it places at the top of the hierarchy. I t is the leading institution wbth its charter, its myth and its style, which provides the implicit dominant ontology for the whole culture. I should add that a ‘myth’ in the present usage is a theory of reality which the individuals who have grown to maturity in a given culture regard as the absolute truth of fact.

That the leading institution determines the direction of a society is not difficult to show. The material cultures in which we all live can be turned round speculatively for purpolses of analysis. And then we find that their status is that of concrete exemplificationts of ontologies. I shall try to give a few examples from both contemporary and his- torical cultures.

No one would dispute the contention that the CHURCH was the leading institution of the Middle Ages in Europe or that business was the leading institution in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The implicit dominant ontologies are clear in both instances: the objective idealism of medieval Christilanity and the nominalistic materialism of Ithe United States.

There was a kind of conditional immortal materialism inherent in

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the ancient Egyptian cult of the dead. The assumption that life con- tinued on in the grave so long as the body was preserved intact had tremendous consequences in the culture, and as a matter of fact gave rise to some of the largest structures ever ereoted: The Pyramids.

The consideration of contemporary Russian philosophy is reserved to those with party sympathies, which is unfortunate, for there are many cultural lessons to be learned. That economics, politics and the philosophy of dialectical materialism are the obsessive concerns of most literate citizens of the Soviet Union is a direct result of the earlier explicit adoption of an ontology as hencefolith implicit and effective at all levels. This may be the only instance of its kind in history, where an explicit ontology dominates by functioning in the same way as the usual implicit dominant ontology.

In other cultures other philosophies are to be found. The metaphysical realism of ancient Athens was decided for her by the equal observance of (two religions: the chthonian deities of the mystery religions, such as the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries, which had been lett by an earlier peoples, and the Olympic gods they brought to Greece with them. For the Athenians to have sky gods and earth gods meant that they were constrained to the belief in two separate ontological levels: a level of perfeGt abstractions and a level $of irrational concre- tions, more or less as PLATO, for instance, expressed them.

There are six places where charaoteristically the naturally-occurring ontologies rise to the (surface of the cultures and make themselves evident. W e have noted three of (these already: the unconscious beliefs of the individual, the hierarchy of institutions, and the myth, style and charter of the leading institution. There remains fashions in the fine arts, sets of preferred artifacts, and the quality of customs.

Fashions in the fine arts indicate shifts in the implicit dominant ontology. Consider for instance the ontological bearings of surrealism and of abstract expressionism in painting. Surrealism, occurring after world war I, expressed the deliberatdy disturbing unconscious belief that nothing rational matters and that the only real is the impure irrational. Abstract expressionism, aster world war 11, indicated a belief that reality is abstraot and atomic, in (the sense that the can be found by breaking up the concrete world into its constituent parts, a sort of reconstitution of the ontology of Democritus.

Sets of preferred artifacts are also indicators of implicit ontologies. Currently in the United States it is every individual's ambition, ful- filled if he can afford it, to be surrounded and assisted by dozens of


little motors. They run hiis car windows, shave him, shine his shoes, carve his meat, stir hi's pudding, and perform many other chores. There is joy in this sort of miniaturized automation which makes of every man a king. Reality in this framework is a kind of self-powered cause- and-effect.

The qualities of customs are difficult to describe because any qualities are. The heavy reliance on trivial ritual in nineteenth century England, when customs were assumed to have been fixed forever because social institutions were, makes an interesting contrmt with the casual nature of the corresponding customs in twentieth century United States. Both have produced atmospheres in which the individual lives and by which he i8s influenced wicth respect to hits most fundamental beliefs. Style and taste are the qualitative expressions of values which had been chosen at deeper levels.

IV

It is time now to bring our themes together and to endeavor to draw some conclusions from them. There are such things as naturally- occurring ontologies, and they are to be found by analyzing human cultures. Ontology, then, is an enterprise which, although governed by logic, has nevertheless an empirical field. One interest of speculative philosophers lies in exploring the possibilities of ontologies. Those who found cultures, though they bear the names of other pursuits, are applied ontologists, in much the same way that there are applied mathematicians.

The fact that an inquiry can be pursued in isolation does not mean that its results may not prove useful in practice. The greatest appli- cations to practice often come from the highest abstractions. This is as true of ontologies as it is of quantum mechanics. Men did not anti- cipate the social consequences of nuclear energy, and they did not foresee the social consequences of dialectical materialism any better. Yet both enterprises have transformed the world in which we live. There is nothing more powerful than the ideas which lie at the sources of cultures and determine the directions they will take. It may be that professionally we have just begun to get hold of the fact that such ideas can be discovered, discussed and controlled.

There are so many components to a material culture that in the

150 J. K. Feibleman

end it goes its own way, influenced perhaps by the goals we set for it but not altogether determined by them. Material cultures are the frozen solutions to ontological problems. Speculative philosophy, then, is a liberating force; it frees us from the fixed abstractions under which we had been living without knowing that we were doing so, and calls into question the answers we had innocently accepted to those ultimate questions which have no final answers.

It is possible to see in the direction a culture does take something of the pure theory of ontology which I have been advocating from the outset. The direction of human culture, like that of organic evolution, is from the simpler to the more complex. The most complex of organic species is also the most numerous in membership. Human cdture is like evolution also in its ordinal effecbs. Each empirical level perhaps has its own principle of order. Entropy is physioal, evolution biological and culture anthropological. T o say that in the end the most prevalent will prevail is hardly more than a brief tautology. And so it may be a case not only of what persicsts the longest but of what can make the highest water-mark of being. In connecting the world of matter with the world of logic by endeavoring in the former to reach the lakter, the question is already answered; and, I contend, that answer is ontological.

REFERENCES

1 "A Material Theory of Reference", in Ttltnne Studies in Philosophy, VoI. XVI

2 H. LEVY, The Universe of Science (New York 1933, Century), p. 99.

"The Common Denominator of Cultures" by George Peter MLJRDOCK, in Ralph Linton (ed.), The Science of Man in the World Crisis (New York 1947. Columbia University Press), pp. 123-142.

(1967), p. 58.

James K. Feibleman Tulane University New Orleans, La. 70118

Dialectica Vol. 23, No 2 (19G9)

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Naturally - Occurring ontologies