How to Build a Meta-Ontology
A practical method for structuring/building your approach to philosophy
This Wednesday February 26th
Crooijmans of will be leading the second Slovenian School Reading Group focused on “The Metaphysics of the Voice” at 7pm CET. You can access the Slovenian School Reading Group by becoming a member of The Portal, or you can access it by becoming a paid subscriber to Crooijmans’s Patreon or Substack. All information can be found here: Slovenian School Reading Group.The following article is inspired by a clip shared by
from a conversation he hosted last year. You can find the clip below, and the full conversation at the end of this article:In a paper I published in my doctoral thesis Global Brain Singularity titled “A Reflective Note for Dialectical Thinkers”,1 I outline a “foundational meta-ontology” for both the way I am thinking in philosophy, but also for how one can construct their own, as I think it is a helpful tool for cultivating your own philosophical cognition.
First, what I call a “meta-ontology” involves building a philosophical lineage of thought which reflects the four different major historical epochs of philosophy. I consider these four different historical epochs to include:
Ancient philosophy
Modern philosophy
Post-modern philosophy
Trans-modern philosophy2
The goal of constructing a meta-ontology involves thinking and building in terms of philosophers who signify a certain correlation with a different historical epoch of being. In my own thought, I tend towards the following structure:
Plato (Ancient philosophy)
Hegel (Modern philosophy)
Lacan (Post-modern philosophy)
Žižek (Trans-modern philosophy)
For me this is both an exercise and a tool in building one’s philosophical thought. In other words, one does not need to identify with the four thinkers that I am mentioning above, but rather you can use this structure to develop your own meta-ontology. The only principle would be: cultivating your own understanding of philosophy through the structure of these different epochs, i.e. the ancient philosopher that you can build with into the modern world; the modern philosopher you can build with into the post-modern world; the post-modern philosopher you can build with into the trans-modern world, and the trans-modern philosopher you can build with in the context of currently unfolding events. This in the end presents one with a type of “fractal of historical thought”.
In my own meta-ontology, I see an on-going conversation between these four thinkers — Plato, Hegel, Lacan, and Žižek — that is fundamentally connected, retroactively. Of course, Plato did not engage with Hegel, Lacan, and Žižek, but Hegel is fundamentally engaging with Plato, and Lacan is fundamentally engaging with Hegel (and Plato), and Žižek is fundamentally engaging with Lacan (and Hegel and Plato). And so when thought all-together, there is a conversation that is being developed historically, and this conversation itself makes each of these thinkers more robust, retroactively. Also note here that, while Plato and Hegel are often perceived to be the foundation of philosophy, a thinker like Lacan is often perceived as an anti-philosopher (perhaps appropriate for his position in “post-modern philosophy”), and Žižek, our contemporary, is often perceived to be an outsider in relation to more classical or academically trained philosophers (perhaps appropriate for his positioning of “trans-modern philosophy”).
Let us consider for a moment how this meta-ontology can make one’s engagement with each of these thinkers more robust. Consider that Plato on his own, thought in isolation from modern, post-modern and trans-modern thought, I would claim, is not capable of standing on his own in thinking our time. In fact, one of the big mistakes I see in growing philosophers today, is thinking that Plato can stand on his own as our contemporary. An example I use in the clip referenced above, is derived from my own partners’ reading of Plato. Last summer, my partner started reading Plato for the first time, and I think she perceptively and spontaneously started disagreeing with a lot of what Plato thinks, claiming that he is too much trapped in a masculine philosophical fantasy. Now while I agree to a degree with her, i.e. Plato is trapped in a masculine philosophical fantasy, what is interesting is that when you are thinking with Plato in the above referenced meta-ontology, what you find is that her criticism of Plato can be framed in a new, even a vitalising, perspective in regards to Plato. For example, when you read how Lacan is working with Plato, he is analysing Plato as an unconscious philosophical fantasy. For example, reflect the following statement from Lacan where he uses Plato to think the “Position of the Unconscious”:3
“My seminar [on the unconscious] was not “where it speaks”, as people happened to say jokingly. It brought forth the place from which it could speak, opening more than one ear to hear things that would have been passed over indifferently since they would not have been recognised. One of my auditors put this naively, announcing the marvellous fact that, that very evening, or perhaps just the day before, he had come across in a session with a patient that I had said in my seminar — verbatim.
The place in question is the entrance to the cave, towards the exit of which Plato guides us, while one imagines seeing the psychoanalyst entering there. But things are not that easy, as it is an entrance one can only reach just as it closes (the place will never be popular with tourists), and the only way for it to open up a bit is by calling from the inside.”
In this context, we receive a new dimension to Plato, previously unthought internal to philosophy, and in many ways allow us to “think with Plato anew” (in this context, with psychoanalysis). Lacan is claiming that, while Plato as ancient philosophy invites us to “leave the cave” (“towards the exit of which Plato guides us”), the very historical position and function of the psychoanalyst, is to occupy the “entrance” (“one imagines seeing the psychoanalyst entering there”).
Similar interesting discoveries can be made if you pay close attention to the way Hegel or Žižek works with Plato. Consider the following reflection from Hegel on the introduction of his logic:4
“Logic has nothing to do with a thought about something which stands outside by itself as the base of thought; nor does it have to do with forms meant to provide mere markings of the truth; rather, the necessary forms of thinking, and its specific determinations, are the content and the ultimate truth itself.
To get at least some inkling of this, one must put aside the notion that truth must be something tangible. Such tangibility, for example, is carried over even into the ideas of Plato which are in God’s thought, as if they were, so to speak, things that exist but in another world or region, and a world of actuality were to be found outside them which has a substantiality distinct from those ideas and is real only because of this distinctness. The Platonic idea is nothing else than the universal, or, more precisely, it is the concept of the subject matter; it is only in the concept that something has actuality, and to the extent that it is different from its concept, it ceases to be actual and is a nullity; the side of tangibility and of sensuous self-externality belongs to this null side.”
In this context, we also receive a new dimension of Plato, one disconnected from a logic of ideas/forms in another world separated from our world (dualistic concept of “God”), and now see this form of universality as the opposite of what it is often presupposed to be: sensuous self-externality which comes to null, and which requires mediation via particularity towards singularity. In other words, we see the way in which Plato becomes historicised through Hegel.
I should add that this can work both ways, meaning that not only can one “re-think Plato” in light of “Hegel, Lacan and Žižek”, one can also engage in a potentially even more difficult project, and try to think about how “Plato, Hegel, and Lacan” would engage Žižek (for example). Žižek’s own methodology involves this forward reading of (for example, Plato to Lacan), but also the reverse (for example, Lacan to Plato). Consider the way he introduces the method of the Slovenian School in Less Than Nothing:5
“Over the last decade, the theoretical work of the Party Troika to which I belong (along with Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupančič) had the axis of Hegel-Lacan as its "undeconstructible" point of reference: whatever we were doing, the underlying axiom was that reading Hegel through Lacan (and vice versa) was our unsurpassable horizon.”
The retroactive reading is intrinsically a more speculative and daring aspect of this work, but it is one that I think could prove very useful. Here is Zizek’s perspective on the consequences of it for Hegel and Lacan specifically:6
My wager was (and is) that, through their interaction (reading Hegel through Lacan and vice versa), psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectics mutually redeem themselves, shedding their accustomed skin and emerging in a new unexpected shape.
Furthermore, Žižek’s own emphasis on the retroactive method is one that I think he pioneers, not only in regards to Hegel-Lacan, but mostly in the way he attempts to think how Hegel would think Marx (a tremendously important effort for today):7
“Perhaps the most productive way to deal with an “official” history of philosophy is to consider how a philosopher who was “overcome” by his successor (according to this “official” line) reacted (or would have reacted) to his successor. How would Plato react to Aristotle, or Wagner to Nietzsche, or Husserl to Heidegger, or Hegel to Marx?”
He continues:8
“I […] have […] proposed a demonstration of why one should speak of Marx’s idealist reversal of Hegel.”
Now that I have outlined the logic of the meta-ontology, let me also justify my personal reasons for working with the aforementioned thinkers.
First: Plato. Plato is the foundation for what becomes Western philosophy and (arguably) religion as well. In this context, we have to respect the concrete results of Plato’s philosophy, in terms of what was practically being built in the Greek world and what has become the Western world. Plato has had an outsized impact on both mathematics, geometry, and logical thinking, but also sexuality, love, and social life. There is a remarkable breadth and depth to Plato’s thinking that seems to cover everything from mathematics to sexuality and all that lies in-between.
This presents us with an interesting intersection with Hegel, because Hegel, from my perspective, is able to historicise Plato. When we think about Plato, we usually think about the eternal ideas or forms, and the main criticism of Platonist thinking, is that you can get caught in eternal ideas/forms, and basically enter into a process of disembodiment. This gets potentially rectified with Hegel because we do not just end up in an “embodied relativity”, but have to think the “eternal idea” as a “historical process”. Hegel is thinking the intersection between eternity and history, which is a powerful philosophical explosion that occurs, and goes on to influence a lot of what we call modern philosophy, including Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and others. In mentioning these thinkers in particular, I am not saying these thinkers agree with Hegel, but rather have become profoundly influenced by Hegel, even as they differentiate from Hegel.
Next, with Lacan, we get the “psychoanalysis of philosophy”. In many narratives of philosophy we can leave with the idea that philosophy begins and ends with German Idealism (Kant to Hegel; or Kant to the tension of Schelling/Hegel). But with Lacan, we get a type of resurrection of the philosophical project in a weird way, because we are entering into the idea that the unconscious is itself intelligent, that the unconscious “thinks and speaks”. This presents us with an important contrast with philosophy as a tradition focused on the importance or even centrality of “self-consciousness”. Consider the aforementioned example I gave of my partner reading Plato and claiming he is living in a masculine philosophical fantasy unable to help us with contemporary political problems. Well this idea itself becomes interesting when you think about Lacan as suggesting that the unconscious (as fantasmatic wish-fulfilment) is at work at the ground of philosophy itself.
Lacan makes similar moves throughout his career, for example with Descartes. When we typically think about Descartes we think about the “dualist” who originates a “rational materialism”, but Lacan always notes how, at the foundation of Descartes own thinking, we see an “explosion of madness”, where he doubts everything on the suspicion that God is deceptive. In this context, we have to consider the way in which rational materialism itself is grounded by its own unconscious madness and insanity, which is perhaps why Lacan can make claims about the psychotic character of the subject of science.
Now in concluding the way I construct my own meta-ontology, with Žižek, I want to emphasise how important it is to construct this meta-ontology with a living philosopher in mind. In other words, it might be a mistake to only engage with dead philosophers. The reason why it is important to be in contact with a living philosopher is because philosophy is like eternity refreshing itself in every historical generation. In other words, every historical generation has to refresh its idea of the absolute. For me, in this context, Žižek’s philosophy spoke to me in a deep way, both his performativity (as a kind of constructive subversion of the neoliberal academic system) and also the way he engaged history.
I see Žižek as introducing us to the historical era after the end of the Cold War (1989/1991). The Cold War ends and we no longer find our world historical situation in a battle of capitalism vs. communism, but rather in a universal capitalism. The common idea during this period is that we have transcended world historical conflict, the battle between capitalism and communism is over, and now we can just work towards an affluent rational, liberal, secular world society. But Žižek is saying, no, ideology is now more pervasive than ever, and functions unconsciously, to bring in the Lacanian dimension, and that we enjoy our ideology. In other words, while people are usually critical of ideology, seeing it as something to be deconstructed, Žižek is saying, even the deconstructionists love their ideology, and do not want to let that go, becoming more ideological than ever.
Moreover, Žižek has always engaged world historical crisis, and has thought with world historical crisis. For example, when 9/11 occurred, he wrote a book about it;9 when the 2008 financial crisis occurred, he wrote a book about it;10 when the coronavirus occurred, he wrote a few books about it.11 So when world historical crisis breaks, that is the time for philosophy to get its hands dirty so to speak. That is an important dimension that typical academic philosophy takes a distance from, as if we are just in the idea reflecting on Plato’s dialogues, as opposed to thinking about coronavirus, or 2008 financial crisis, or 9/11 and so forth.
In short, Žižek teaches us that we need to think these world historical crises, and that this is the role of philosophy because these crises are precisely what cannot be predicted to anticipated by science. No one knew coronavirus or 9/11 was going to happen, they disturbed and disoriented our world society.
What’s next? And will our philosophical cognition be prepared to think it?
If you are looking to not only learn philosophy, but to become a part of a philosophical community learning to struggle with contemporary issues, consider becoming a member of The Portal. The Portal is a live event space that meets every week, hosting thinkers and practitioners focused around new topics every month. In the next two months we will be hosting events focused on Culture and Religion from a Christian perspective. The first half of this month will involve deconstructionologist
, and evolutionary theorist , as well as active practitioners of Peter Rollins’ pyrotheology, Rob Zahn and Kevin Crouse. Members also get access to our reading groups and year long seminars. This year we are working on a Slovenian School Reading Group led by Crooijmans, currently focused on Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More, and we are also working on a Deleuze and Analysis year-long seminar led by Prof. . All information about these events and opportunities can be found here: The Portal.For more, see: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon (link).
Or, see my entire conversation with Artem Zen, here:
Last, C. 2020. A Reflective Note for Dialectical Thinkers. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 257-292.
While it is currently fashionable to suggest we are either in or entering something like a “meta-modern” era, in my doctoral thesis I consistently use the term “trans-modern” as denoting our era as pointing towards the transcendence of modernity. I do not think this is in many ways incapability with signifies like “meta-modern” or “hyper-modern”, but I take “trans-modern” to be signifying our era as pointing towards something radically other (post-human, trans-human realities). In contrast, meta-modern seems to signify the dialectical oscillation of “modern and post-modern”.
Lacan, J. 2005. Position of the Unconscious. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 710-1.
Hegel, G.W.F. 2010. Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press. p. 29-30.
Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 18.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 137.
Ibid.
Žižek, S. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Verso.
Žižek, S. 2009. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Verso.
Žižek, S. 2020. Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World. Polity.; Žižek, S. 2021. Pandemic! 2: Chronicles of a Lost Time. Polity.