Metanoia & Sympoiesis

re-imagining politics in the relational frame

Aleksandr Glukhov. Purgatorium. The central part of the triptych. 2017. Canvas, acrylic. 30X30 - Creative Commons

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Metanoia is a term with roots in ancient Greek that refers to a transformative change in one's way of thinking, feeling, or experiencing life. It signifies a profound shift in perspective or a fundamental change in one's mind, often associated with a change in behavior or beliefs. It's like a moment of realization or epiphany that leads to a complete change in one's outlook, habits, or understanding of the world. In essence, it's a transformative journey that involves a deep and often spiritual or psychological change within an individual.

Sympoiesis is a term coined by the scholar Donna Haraway, often used in ecological and philosophical contexts. It describes the collective and interconnected making or creating together of complex systems, where multiple entities come together to form emergent wholes.

Unlike the concept of autopoiesis, which refers to self-making or self-production within a system, sympoiesis emphasizes the interdependence and co-creation among different entities or agents. It highlights how various elements, organisms, or components collaborate and interact to generate new and evolving systems rather than functioning in isolation.

This emerging series of articles will explore these two terms in relation to political theory and practice.

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When, last month, Resilience published Richard Heinberg’s article, Can we save the world without free will?, I read it. I always read Resilience articles by Heinberg, who has been an important influence on my thinking for many years. And, anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about agency lately — and “free will” is a conceptual cousin of agency. But both topics are vastly more complex (and complicated) than I had fully appreciated at the time of my reading of this article. To get anywhere with the discussion of these terms, one has first to choose a somewhat formal definition for the terms, and there is no singular formal definition for them among philosophers. Rather, there is a history of using these terms to mean very different things — or things different enough to make a real difference when discussing these topics.

One almost has to be a specialist in the field — this particular inquiry — to really understand what agency or free will would even mean! And I don’t imagine I’ll ever engage these topics in that sort of depth, as what I’m really most interested in, to the horror of some of my readers (or former readers, who are bored with any talk of politics) … is politics. Specifically, I’m interested in what sorts of political philosophy, theory and praxes are most aptly suited to relational, process-relational and / or relationalist ontology.

…free will has traditionally been conceived of as a kind of power to control one’s choices and actions. When an agent exercises free will over her choices and actions, her choices and actions are up to her. But up to her in what sense? As should be clear from our historical survey, two common (and compatible) answers are: up to her in the sense that she is able to choose otherwise, or at minimum that she is able not to choose or act as she does, and up to her in the sense that she is the source of her action.

— from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/#NatuFreeWill

Some philosophers have basically defined “free will” as a capacity not to have one’s actions determined by “external” factors or predestined by fate. In this condition one’s actions are said to be “autonomous” in a very particular way — a way which requires one to be causally and relationally isolated, fully independent of ostensibly external others, be they other people or anything else ostensibly external to the person. This also seems to me to be the common sense notion of “free will” among those who are not deeply schooled in the philosophical complexities, its history and shapes.

All of the conditions of my life have led me to adopt a relational ontology.¹ And so this sense of ‘self’ and human agency, as a discrete, isolated entity is plainly nonsense to me. That is, I cannot make sense this way, since my sense of How The World Is (and how people are) is rooted into a basically a process-relational ontology (by which I’m not necessarily identifying as a Whiteheadian).

Relational ontologies refer to a particular understanding of ontology which gives primacy to the relations between entities as a constitutive element of their existence. Put another way, entities are what they are because of their relations with other entities. Unlike substantive ontologies which give primacy to the independent, preexisting ontological status of an entity, relational ontologies challenge claims to essence and substance emphasizing interdependence, fluidity, and emergence in the context of an ever-changing relational world. — Relational Ontologies, Spyros Spyrou

The version of relational ontology which feels like home to me, makes the most sense to me — which accords with how the world is in my experience — is one which takes it that all things/entities exist in relation to all other things/entities. None are excluded from this “relational field”. All beings are relational beings from top to bottom. So the notion of an isolated (“interior”) self, which is purely “interior” just makes no sense to me whatsoever. But in no way does this relational ontology imply that we can’t have agency, or even autonomy. It simply implies that any kind of agency or autonomy which we can express or enact has got to happen within the “relational field”.²

Many of the concepts analysed by philosophers have their origin in ordinary—or at least extra-philosophical—language. Perception, knowledge, causation, and mind would be examples of this. But the concept of substance is essentially a philosophical term of art. Its uses in ordinary language tend to derive, often in a rather distorted way, from the philosophical senses. (Such expressions as ‘a person of substance’ or ‘a substantial reason’ would be cases of this. ‘Illegal substances’ is nearer to one of the philosophical uses, but not the main one.) There is an ordinary concept in play when philosophers discuss ‘substance’, and this, as we shall see, is the concept of object, or thing when this is contrasted with properties or events. But such ‘individual substances’ are never termed ‘substances’ outside philosophy.

— Substance, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

In the relational ontology to which I subscribe, everyone and everything which influences my choices, actions, perceptions, etc., is simply part of who and what I am³— and is thus not in the least external to me in any absolute sort of way. I have clouds in my blood, rainfall in my lungs, friends in my heart, and cultural history in my mind. I’m a relational being from top to bottom and cannot be isolated from what folks call “the environment,” be it social, ecological, historical or atmospheric. It’s not that I don’t exist, or that our unique individuality doesn’t exist. Rather, I’m saying here that how we exist is … in relation, and never in full (or even really approximate) isolation. We’re relational creatures, through-and-through. Each of us carries many inside of us, and our insides surround us, well beyond our skins.

Can I then make decisions of my own, act on my own, choose, etc.? Well, of course I can! Being influenced by others is what we and I do. It’s what and who we are. It’s our nature. I choose many of my influences, but not all of them. Nor would it be possible for me to choose all of them, because the relational field is such that I simply cannot make it all conscious — available to my conscious mind. To choose, I must be aware that I have a choice to make — but all of my choices, without exception — have causal influences. And so it is with you, as I see it.

We (most folks now reading this) were raised up within a culture in which individual minds are regarded as separate, isolated, independent. But I do not believe this accurately describes the nature of mind—, or psyche, or soul…. Everything is woven into the fabric of a process-relational field, and nothing exists independently.

This fact (for me it is a fact) implies another kind of politics (theory, philosophy, praxis) than the one which has shaped our present political reality. And that’s the topic of the present series of articles. Ahead, I shall explain my title, and how these terms fit into what I’m up to here, today. But this is enough for now. See you next time.

1. Curiously, I don’t recall ever having a metanoia experience of any singular kind which shifted me from “object ontology” to relational ontology. There have been many epiphanies along the way, but I suspect I always had the incipient form of relational ontology as my most basic sensibility from very early childhood. So the epiphanies were confirmatory of what I had always, in some sense, understood to be the case.

2. In the present context, the term "relational field" refers to the complex interplay of relationships, interactions, and dynamics among individuals (persons) and other entities within a particular context or environment. It's a concept often used in psychology, sociology, and related fields to describe the interconnectedness and mutual influence between people within a group, family, organization, or any social setting. But the same phrase can refer to the relations of organisms and “environmental features” of ecosystems, or components of any complex system, including human social systems.

3. … but “what I am” in a decidedly non-solipsistic sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism If a leaf on a tree claims an identity with the tree, that leaf is, of course, correct! Same with a wave on the ocean or a mushroom within a mycelium (mycelial) network. I am Gaia. And I am the cosmos. And so are you!