Note. This is a machine-assisted translation of a Chinese original. Where wording matters, please consult the Chinese original.
Modern philosophy: struggling within the gravitational field of reification
Prelude
The previous essays analysed monotheism and Platonic representation. Together, the two form the default substrate of Western thought: there is an ultimate "One"; it is what is most real; it is the final goal of cognition.
Once this substrate is in place, the philosophers who follow — however clever or original — are only making adjustments on top of it. They are like a person standing in a fixed gravitational field: they can jump, run, perform all manner of acts, but every step is pulled by gravity in the same direction.
Modern philosophy — from Descartes to Kant — is, in essence, struggling within Plato's gravitational field. Each thinker's struggle is more powerful than the last, but no one frees himself entirely from gravity.
To see this process clearly is not to mock them with "they didn't make it." It is to see clearly: just how deep the gravitational field of reification really is.
1. Descartes: looking for zero on the sixth floor
Descartes faced a problem his predecessors had not.
After the Reformation, the Church's authority as a cognitive baseline was broken. Luther said "scripture alone" — but each person read the scriptures differently. Catholicism said "the Church alone" — but corruption and schism made that claim a joke. The sceptics (Montaigne, Charron) crouched at the side: "Look, even you can't make sense of yourselves; you may as well admit that we know nothing."
Within Plato's gravitational field — under the assumption that "there must be a certain starting point" — the situation Descartes faced was a cognitive crisis.
His solution was to clear the field with a single operation: universal doubt.
The senses can deceive me. Reason can err. Even "I am sitting by the fire" might be a dream. Even "2 + 2 = 4" might be a demon's trick. So believe nothing. Doubt everything that can be doubted.
Then, in the rubble of doubt, he found one stone he could not move: I cannot doubt that "I am doubting."
"I think, therefore I am" — not an inference, but a having-to-be-so.
Descartes took this "I think" as the "zero" he had been searching for — that absolutely certain starting point that needs no further premise. From "I think," he could derive "I exist," "God exists," "the material world exists."
On the generative chain, what was Descartes doing?
He felt the old attractor (Church doctrine) had become unstable and could no longer serve as a cognitive baseline. He needed a new attractor. But he did not walk upstream all the way to 0 (maximum indeterminacy) — he walked midstream, into the cognitive layer, and took the certainty of "I think," a cognitive operation, as the starting point of the entire chain.
This strategy has two consequences.
The first is that it works. Taking the certainty of a cognitive operation as a foundation is indeed firmer than taking the authority of doctrine — because "I think" is your own operation, requiring no external mediation. In this sense Descartes was right: he had found firmer ground than the Church.
The second is what it does not solve. "I think" is itself a generated thing — it is a product of the loops of the cognitive system. Did you not "think" as a small child? When you sleep and are not "thinking," do you cease to exist?
The deeper problem is this: the certainty of "I think" comes from the closed loop of the cognitive system — it confirms its own operation in its own operation. This is not contact with an independent reality but the self-touching of a cognitive loop. Descartes thought he had grasped bedrock, but in fact he had grasped the plumbing inside the house.
Yet his goal was achieved: scepticism's attack was held off for a time, and reason was given a new place to stand.
2. Spinoza: the most extreme compression
Spinoza was more thorough than Descartes.
Descartes said there are two substances — thinking (res cogitans) and extension (res extensa). Spinoza said this simply will not do. If there are two substances, can they interact? If they can, they are not truly independent. If they cannot, how does thought know extension? Pushing the argument all the way through, there is only one substance — he called it "God or Nature" (Deus sive Natura).
In cognitive economy, this is the most extreme compression scheme in the history of thought: not "all things converge into one," but "all things just are two manifestations of the One." Thought and extension are not two things — they are the same thing known in two ways. You see your body walking — that is a mode of the attribute of extension. You feel yourself thinking — that is a mode of the attribute of thought. Two modes, one substance.
Plato said "true reality is over there." Spinoza said here is over there.
This idea is philosophically extraordinarily deep, and cognitively extraordinarily close to the starting point of generative ontology. Spinoza's substance has no external division — it contains everything within itself. This resembles 0 (maximum indeterminacy): both are wholes not delimited by any external condition.
But here lies a crucial half-step difference.
The 0 of generative ontology has no determinate commitments. It does not assert that substance exists — it says: indeterminacy precedes all structure, including the very assertion that "there is a substance."
Spinoza's substance is a determinate "One." Its infinity is stipulated — "God has infinitely many attributes." Its necessity is argued — "God cannot not exist." Its structure is derived — "all things act according to the necessity of God."
He took the endpoint as the starting point — but not in Plato's sense of "Forms in the heavens." In a deeper sense: the whole of being itself. Spinoza's substance is what the chain looks like when one looks back from its end — the multitude of phenomena, all one process. But he froze that into a substance.
"Under the aspect of eternity" (sub specie aeternitatis) — this is Spinoza's central method. From the standpoint of substance, watch the unfolding of all modes. All individuals are merely temporary modes of substance — all things flow, only God endures.
This standpoint comes very close to the generative-ontological "seeing that all structure is generated" — but at the last step, Spinoza is not dissolving reification; he is using one maximal reification to contain everything. He is not lowering precision-weighting — he is concentrating all precision-weighting onto a single thing.
That is why he is called "the God-intoxicated man." His God is not a personal deity — he does not need to be; everything is in God, and the love of God is the ultimate cognitive satisfaction. This is not the monotheist's "obey God"; this is the philosopher's "become God."
Spinoza is closer to the chain's endpoint than any monotheist — but he still did not take the last step: to give up the fixity of "there is a substance."
3. Hume: the most radical de-reification
Spinoza took compression to its extreme. The next entrant did not come to compress further — he came to decompress.
Hume did the most radical thing in the history of Western philosophy. He did not construct a new system. He picked up the knife of empiricism and stabbed, one by one, the attractors that had been reified.
Is causation a substance? No. What you see is one ball striking another, and then the other ball moves. What you see is only "succession" — not "necessity." You bind the succession together because you are used to it — not because you have seen causation. Causation is habit, not substance.
Is the self a substance? No. When you introspect, what you grasp are particular sensations — heat, cold, pain, joy, anger. There is never an "I" that appears in introspection. The self is "a bundle of perceptions," not a substance.
Is reason a substance? No. "Reason is the slave of the passions" — reason supplies means to the passions, but the ends are never set by reason. You think you are reasoning; in fact you are serving emotions you never chose.
And God? In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume runs every argument for the existence of God through the wringer. The argument from design? The world has a designer? Then who designed the designer? If evil has not been eliminated, the designer is either not omnipotent or not all-good. The argument falls apart.
Hume offered no replacement system. He said the belief that "the sun will rise tomorrow" is not proven by reason — it is sustained by habit. That is enough. You don't need ultimate certainty in order to live. You only need habit.
In the generative framework, what was Hume doing?
He was systematically lowering the precision-weighting on every attractor. Causation is not a substance. The self is not a substance. Reason is not a substance. As for God — let it go.
But his operation has a limitation: he only lowers, he does not construct. He does not give a positive narrative — "if these things are not substances, what are they?" His answer is: "I don't know, but at least I know what they are not."
This limitation is fatal. If you only destroy attractors and offer no new framework of understanding, people will only see you as a sceptic. And the sceptic can never win the next round — because the next person says, "you have only said the old is wrong, but you still need something to live by. At least the old supplied a structure. What is yours?"
Hume did not answer this question. So someone, after him, was bound to come and answer it.
That person was Kant.
4. Kant: the most powerful struggle
After reading Hume, Kant said his famous line: Hume had roused him from his "dogmatic slumber."
What was this "slumber"? It was the assumption — descended from Plato, reinforced by monotheism, inherited by Descartes and Spinoza alike — that the structure of cognition comes from a reality outside cognition. Plato said it comes from Forms in the heavens. Descartes said it comes from "clear and distinct perceptions" placed by God in "I think." Spinoza said the order of thought and the order of extension are two parallel manifestations of the same substance.
They all assumed: the order of cognition imitates the order of reality.
Hume punctured this assumption. The relation between experience and reality is not imitation — it is habit. Causation is not given by reality — it is something we add to experience. The self is not given by reality — it is the customary association of a bundle of perceptions.
Kant saw both Hume's insight and Hume's limitation. If cognition is merely habitual association of successions, what about Newtonian mechanics? Physical laws confirmed thousands of times are not merely "habit," surely?
Kant's answer is the most magnificent operation in the whole of Western philosophy — the Copernican revolution.
Not "cognition conforms to objects" — but, "objects must conform to our way of cognising."
In the language of generative ontology, Kant's positive contribution is this: he recognised that the cognitive system generates the structure of experience, and not merely receives the content of experience.
Space and time are not objective containers external to cognition — they are the a priori forms of sensibility. Your cognitive system must place every experience within space and time in order to organise it — not because the world itself has space and time, but because without spatio-temporal scaffolding you cannot process the input.
Causation, substance, unity — these are not given by experience. They are the tools you use to organise experience. Without causation, signals have no structure. Without substance, change has no bearer. Without unity, multimodal information cannot be put together.
Kant called these "the a priori categories of the understanding."
On the chain, Kant moved Plato's inverted arrow most of the way back.
Plato: Forms → experience. Cognition passively receives Forms and projects them onto experience.
Kant: cognitive structure → experience. Cognition actively organises experience using categories.
The distance of this "moving back" is enormous — Forms are no longer in the heavens but within cognition. But here Kant stopped.
5. Kant's halt: the a priori categories become the new unaskable
Kant says the categories are a priori, necessary, invariant.
Why exactly twelve? No more, no less? Why those four groupings — quantity, quality, relation, modality? Why must causation be a necessary connection rather than a probabilistic one? Kant borrowed his table from the logic and physics of his day — and then declared them a priori.
This is where he stopped.
In the generative framework: the categories are not a priori fixed structures — they are attractors self-reinforced by the cognitive system within experience. Causation is not built into the cognitive hardware — it is the most stable predictive pattern that emerges from a great mass of experience. A child does not first possess the category of causation and then come to understand the world — rather, in repeated experiences of "push → motion," the attractor of causation gradually stabilises.
The categories are not the starting point. The categories are the product of a cognitive system that has run through enough experience.
But Kant placed them at the starting point. He says: any possible experience must presuppose these categories. Without categories, no experience. Therefore the categories are the "a priori conditions" of experience.
The argument is correct within its own framework — but its premise is that the cognitive system already has these categories before it generates experience. What if the categories are themselves self-reinforced? What if a cognitive system can, without a complete category of causation, first have a fuzzy pattern-recognition of "repeated successions," and then, in enough patterns, exhibit an increasingly stable causal attractor?
Then the categories are not a priori — they are developmental. Not fixed but plastic. Not universal — they form different stable configurations in different experiential environments.
Kant took the cognitive system's currently most stable attractor configuration and treated it as the system's eternal structure. This is a freezing of one temporal cross-section — the same operation as Plato's freezing of the highest attractor into "the sky of the Forms," only at a different layer.
A deeper step: Kant says the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) is unknowable — we can know phenomena, but never things as they are in themselves. This is his concession to Hume: since the structure of cognition is added by cognition, we can never reach what is outside cognition.
But generative ontology does not need the concept of "thing-in-itself."
You do not need to assume "there is an independent object that has nothing to do with cognition." You only need to say: the cognitive system is generating its world. Mountains and rivers, grass and trees, causation and ethics — all are worlds generated by cognition. There is no "truer" world hiding behind the phenomenal one. The phenomenon is the world. The thing-in-itself is a residual image — a leftover concept from the unexamined assumption that "there must be something outside cognition."
But this is asking too much. Kant is already the figure in the entire history of Western philosophy who walked furthest back along the chain — from Plato's "Forms in the heavens" all the way back to "Forms in cognition."
He simply did not walk all the way back.
6. The way out: walking all the way back
What does walking all the way back mean?
Descartes walked back to "I think," but he did not ask how "I think" itself is generated. Spinoza walked back to "one substance," but he did not let the "One" continue to thaw into indeterminacy. Hume deconstructed causation, the self, and God, but did not give a positive replacement narrative. Kant walked back to "cognitive structure," but froze that structure into a priori categories.
To walk all the way back is to walk back to 0 — maximum indeterminacy.
Once you walk back to 0, you find: the categories are not a priori but generated. Causation is not necessary but most stable. The self is not a substance but an attractor. God is not the starting point but the endpoint — the reification of the deepest attractor.
Once you walk back to 0, you no longer have to ask "where does cognition get these categories" — because they were always something the cognitive system itself ran out of indeterminate experience.
Once you walk back to 0, the thing-in-itself disappears automatically — because no one any longer presupposes that "behind phenomena there must be an independent object."
Walking back to 0 is not giving up knowledge. It is giving up an unnecessary assumption: that cognition must have a fixed foundation.
Cognition does not need a foundation. It can stand on its own process of generation. On the sea of indeterminacy — not anchoring, but sailing.
Closing
From Descartes to Kant, a group of the cleverest people walked upstream against Plato's gravitational field with all their strength.
Descartes walked to the cognitive layer, taking "I think" as bedrock. But he did not know that "I think" is itself generated. Spinoza walked to one substance — his "One" came closer to 0 than anyone else's. But he froze the "One" into a substance, not letting it thaw further. Hume walked the most radical road — using empiricism to dissolve causation, the self, and God. But he gave no replacement. Kant moved Plato's inverted arrow most of the way back: Form is not objective; it is added by cognition. But he froze cognitive structure into the a priori — not seeing that this structure is itself a product of self-reinforcement.
Each of them pushed Plato's endpoint back. But none of them pushed it back to 0.
And the one who set out from 0 — the one who, from the beginning, placed the starting point at maximum indeterminacy — is absent from the history of Western philosophy.
In the East, that person came two thousand years before Kant.
His name was Laozi.
This is the sixteenth essay in the Tianwen series. The complete series is at prajna.club/generative-ontology/essays.