The problem faced today epistemologically can broadly be described as one of synthesis. By this I mean the fact that the acquisition of knowledge has branched off not just along dual lines of Natural and Human Sciences, but that within these two branches exist a multitude of not just disciplines but methodologies in acquiring knowledge, as well as conceptual frameworks through which problems are looked at within those disciplines. However the problem remains that there exists an underlying unity between all of these domains of knowledge, the psychological and the economic, the social and the natural, the particular and the universal. This unity is present for the objects which the various sciences study do not present themselves in the abstract forms in which they are conceptually framed, but apprehended immediately in a rich local context. This existing tension, between ways of apprehending the world and the world as is, has given rise to various problems, particularly in our ability to explain far reaching consequences of actions in the present. I propose in this essay that the structural subcategorization of knowledge and its specialized ways of seeing lie at the root cause of this, and this cannot be resolved by a simple ‘additive’ solution or ‘synthesis’ of contradicting elements.

The dominant epistemological assumption underlying our systems of knowledge is atomism. The simple assumption underlying much of our understanding of the world is that systems are passive recipients of causally active dynamic components within them. Atomism has not been without its successes. Rather, its prevailing popularity is built on its tremendous success with regards to explaining processes within specific contexts. Science can explain in intricate detail ways in which events in the world around us unfold. The sciences, particularly the natural sciences offer us a vast body of knowledge which has been built upon atomism, and this body of knowledge is particularly excellent at calculation. This quantitative grasp of the world has allowed us to locally manipulate our environments, for our understanding of objects within local contexts is extremely advanced. Atomism breaks up entities into divisible and discrete quantities, allowing us to better appreciate particular nuances of an object’s nature, particularly its inherent properties, but says very little about its dynamic nature beyond a given local context. This means that our understanding of the second and third order effects of our activities in local contexts and how they permeate beyond the local context is extremely poor, for our understanding of objects are nevertheless simplified to cases which can be generalised. To be sure, there exists vast literature on the specialised behavior of many objects but an understanding of their behavior as apprehended, in the context in which they are found, is not the emphasis placed today by modern science. This means that models necessitate increasing degrees of complexity to apprehend larger and larger problems. The second issue this faces is that it recognises only one or a limited number of dimensions of the object's interactions (with one or many objects, but confined to a specific dimension, say the physical, chemical) with its system at a time, and presupposes that the object itself is not the recipient of not just the creative activity of other objects within the system but the system itself. Atomistic science assumes an unchanging system which provides the backdrop for the play of life to unfold. The issue with this approach is that in reality the system can be observed as changing with its entities, the world is always evolving with us, not as separate from us or as completely under us. The stage evolves with its actors.

Why then, has the epistemological tendency of modernity been towards atomism? We find our answer in Descartes, Kant, and the view they offered us of objects in the world. We inherit our central epistemological anxiety from Descartes, namely doubt. Descartes doubted the appearance of all around him until it led him to conclude the ultimacy of thought, for it was thought alone that with certainty could be tied to him as its originator. Thought became the verifier of Self, and thus began the identification of self with thought and the Cartesian tradition. For Descartes there exist two poles of experience, the mental and the physical, and these were made of different substances. Thus all physical apprehensions must be ‘cognized’ by the mind, for it is only in this process of transformation from fact or observation to representation that the mind is able to comprehend reality. This paved the way for Kant to then define objects in the physical world conforming to the forms imposed upon them by our mind. Kant further underlays the assumptions of modern epistemology’s unchanging systems, for substance in Kant is what grounds all change. Changes in form are necessarily transient, and grounded by an unchanging substance. Therefore science embarked on its journey to discover substance, to discover the essence of the objects in the world around us. For very long science was successful with this method of abstract consideration of the objects in the world around us. It gave science not only a deep understanding of the object’s ‘inherent’ properties or characteristics, but in turn allowed us great power to manipulate objects, particularly in physical, chemical, and biological domains, leading to progress by leaps and bounds in technology in this fields, for technology is the practical application of our understanding. In the human sciences equally the understanding of the human as social, psychological, economic, political, and historical subject has allowed for great manipulation of human behavior, particularly in the form of social technology. Therefore, our ability to manipulate matter and mind in controlled environments has proved excellent.

An unchanging substance however implies a static system. But the world is not a controlled environment, actions in a local context can have broader implications. Kant’s substance therefore contradicts our observation of the world around us, for the systems in which we exist are far from static, but ever evolving. Here let us consider an alternative statement of the world. Our world consists of entities within them. These entities do not simply exist within themselves, but interact with each other and shape each other. Entities themselves are constituted of mutually constituted actual entities linked through a nexus of prehensive relations, where each actual entity ‘prehends’ the existence of the other, thus constituting its own nature. A plant for instance is constituted of various moments such as ‘leaf moment 1’ or ‘stem moment 1’. Entities in the world then can be said to exist within a nexus, they cannot be thought of as solely constituting themselves for they are always already present within a given context. The current success of today’s epistemological regime has been based precisely in its ability to abstract, to apprehend certain aspects of entities through particular conceptual frameworks to broaden their understanding of the particular aspects of an entity. This has surely led to vast leaps in our understanding of entities themselves, in so far as we gain an understanding of how to manipulate them. But the nature of entities cannot be restricted to a simplified understanding of its particular characteristics. There is more to be understood about the entity when understood with reference to the various processes it undertakes, the various other entities with which it comes into contact to, which it shapes and which shapes it. Thus the atomised view of the world, while greatly enhancing our understanding of particulars, rarely amplifies our understanding of the universal, for the current emphasis of knowledge has been in achieving generality.

Generality here is contrasted to universality. Generality can be thought of as the external factors common to particulars, it exists as a transcendent category. Universals on the other hand permeate particulars, particulars are various instantiations of the universal, manifest in a multitude of forms. The universal therefore is an immanent and transcendent category, immanent in the particulars through which it is actualised, and transcendent conceptually, as that which exists beyond the particular. The apprehension of the universal cannot be acquired through the general, for the universal cannot be synthesised or composite of variously additive parts. The universal may only be understood through its various particulars, through the observations of its manifold variations in the entities present in the world around us. This further implies that the universal cannot be comprehended by a singular mind, for there exist variations of entities we are yet to anticipate. This is due to the fact that not only does the singular subject condition the universal within their local context, but so do other subjects within their local contexts. This results in a change to the universal that cannot be ascribed to any one of its parts, and concurrently the parts that shape this universal have been shaped by it themselves. Therefore the two are fundamentally relational, they exist in relation to. To consider their abstract nature, even if possible, would result in a rather partial understanding. The proposition in this essay is simple, that if your model makes incorrect predictions it seeks a different way of seeing, not fine tuning of the model.

This entails flipping the process of knowledge acquisition on its head, namely in inverting a process which is dominated by, and hinged upon abstraction, and instead prioritising observation and taking appearance seriously. This necessarily entails love for the world around us, for we are no longer concerned with the entities as objects themselves and their nature, but how they reveal themselves to us. This does not mean we are to discard the entirety of our previously acquired knowledge, for this would merely repeat the error of the enlightenment in casting aside appearance, but merely to acknowledge the limitations of the approach at hand. The current scientific impulse of knowing things in abstraction, ‘things as themselves’ is derived from Descartes’ doubt about the certainty of the existence of the self. ` For Descartes refused to take appearance seriously, doubting instead the origin of his existence and thusly identifying himself totally with the mental pole of his existence, therefore assuming that constituted his whole or ‘true’ being. For in Descartes’ dualism there is no way of unifying the two poles of experience, and his loyalty to the subject-predicate logic of the world leads to his relegation of the physical world below that of the mental world. It was thus concluded that the ‘true’ essence of entities in the world was to be understood through the apprehension of their essence in their most abstract form, but this defies common experience. For being is always being in the world, entities are never present in the world absent relations to other entities.

The answer to understanding the nature of these variously interconnected entities is to ground them not in substance but in process. For if reality is understood as the progressive unfolding of process, then the emphasis is not the entities themselves but the relations between them and the entities constituting them, shifting the emphasis to process. Emphasising the relations between various objects as opposed to the objects themselves and their consequent relations to their environment constitutes a paradigmatic shift. It involves taking the presentation of the seriously, its form, its relations, and its environment. It also considers the nature of global actions affecting local contexts, emphasising an understanding of the whole as a series of intricately interconnected parts as opposed to a unidirectional local understanding of cause and effect. Understanding the unfolding of the world around us as process also allows us to interact with and participate within that process better, to integrate ourselves harmonically with the environment we are in. Of course, the implication of integration implies a degree of separation, and this integration may only truly be achieved when there is the simple realisation that there was never any separation, that the category was imposed mentally. But still, why does synthesis fail?

The precise problem with synthesis is not in its ability to acknowledge division, but in its implicit insistence that the whole is composite of parts by virtue of simple addition. There is no qualitative difference between a whole and its parts, merely a quantitative one. The problem thus faced is that while we may understand entities in the world as simple parts of a whole, or even as complex parts interacting with parts of a simple whole, we are unable to predict the behavior of these entities as we apprehend them, in the world. It is therefore a logical contradiction to consider anything in its ‘total abstraction’, for nothing in the world is apprehended in its completely abstract form. In effect, the abstracted views of forms of entities we possess today lend us useful knowledge, but limited knowledge. The reason for this is that every entity is not static but dynamic, it is always coming into being through its interaction with other entities and its various parts. The sciences successfully integrate this to the extent of understanding entities within specific contexts of their existence, but fail to achieve a unity in this diversity of understanding. A simple synthesis too, fails on this count, for the entity is not apprehending these different influences on its being successively or additively, but at once. The synthesis of information as an additive process never occurs in an entity (living or non-living) for information or data in the world is apprehended immediately and in a unified manner. Division happens always after cognition, after the moment apprehended in its unity has passed, allowing us to form divisible representations.

It is therefore prudent, if one seeks to understand the whole or the universal, not to proceed additively but to look for common strands that exist without separation, or, relation in process. The problem however with apprehending the universal is that we are restricted to a finite set of experiences. This is to say, the ‘window’ through which we apprehend the world around us is necessarily a window. It gets processed through our conscious and unconscious predispositions and our attention to certain facts brings out their nature in a way unique to our subjective dispositions. This is the additional layer of complexity associated with understanding reality as a process or flux, for the observer and the observed are forever commingled, acting upon one another. Thus it becomes essential to ‘clean’ the window through which we observe, to observe without judgement or orientation towards outcome, but merely curiosity to observe the process of unfolding. The second requisite within such a system of knowledge is a high degree of collaboration. Dialogue forms an essential component of not just verification of the universal being experienced, as seen in the parallel desire for replicability in order to produce generalisability, but to broaden one’s own understanding of the universal. For not only is our perspective limited, but the universal is shaped by each entity’s interaction with it, as each entity is by the universe. It is for this reason that strict logic internally consistent with any discipline in the human sciences particularly fails to produce any degree of long term predictive success, for while the subject arises from a set of determined conditions, the subject’s interaction with those conditions remains indeterminate.

The apprehension of the universal implies the necessity for dialogue and love, for it is only with love that curiosity and wonder are born. Through love is born a recognition of compatibility within the various parts, that all exist within a relative harmonic whole, not of synthesis, which is a cold calculus performed in the mind. It is an understanding that division is present only in perception and in abstraction, not in apprehension. The coming revolution for the sciences natural and human is not a technological or methodological one, but a simple one in taking appearance seriously, to once again touch what originates thought, the ground of our being. To ask why without curiosity or wonder but solely skepticism has been modernity’s greatest sin. Perhaps the way forward is in allowing the world to unfold in front of us as we observe it in awe.