How to Read the Ontohistorical Sequence

This table is not intended as a conventional chronology in which one historical period simply replaces another. It is a compressed map of several processes that unfold at different rates, overlap for long periods, and accumulate across approximately six thousand years of Civilization. The three central columns—Physical Reality, Psyche, and Thought—represent the three principal targets of Relational Being Reduction (RBR). They should therefore be read both downward, to follow the historical development of each form of reduction, and across, to see how changes occurring at the same time interact with one another.

The table begins around 4000 BCE with the stage of Civilization—the third stage of our species’ existence—because this marks the emergence of the social conditions in which RBR becomes systematic and cumulative. This does not mean that every form of separation begins suddenly in 4000 BCE. As the table indicates, some disconnection from nature and animal being precedes Civilization. Nor does it mean that Civilization appears fully formed at a single historical moment. The date identifies the beginning of a long ontohistorical process whose effects become progressively more extensive.

The first distinction necessary for reading the table is between Direct Materialistic Reduction (DMR) and Symbolically Mediated Reduction (SMR). DMR acts directly upon bodies, land, animals, communities, and the material conditions of existence through such processes as violence, enclosure, monumentality, and mass labor. SMR works differently. Symbols, representations, abstractions, language, religious formations, categories, and eventually increasingly elaborate systems of thought mediate people's relationship with reality. Neither process simply replaces the other. DMR continues throughout Civilization, while SMR becomes progressively more important and powerful.

The Physical Reality column traces the changing human relationship with the tangible world. Early Civilization transforms physical reality directly through DMR. Land is enclosed and reorganized; bodies are subjected to organized labor and violence; settlements and monumental structures transform lived environments. At the same time, SMR progressively places symbolic and abstract constructions between human beings and directly experienced reality. By approximately 3800 BCE, according to the sequence represented here, ideas and essences acquire increasing importance. Physical reality does not disappear, of course. Rather, it becomes progressively less tangible as the primary basis through which reality is experienced and understood.

This development helps explain the importance of transcendence. Reality increasingly comes to be understood through something presumed to exist beyond, above, behind, or more essentially than the immediately experienced material world. Transcendence is therefore not merely a religious belief within NT. It represents an important form of SMR through which the tangible world can become subordinate to an invisible or abstract one. Fuller definitions of DMR, SMR, transcendence, Physical Reality, and RBR can be found on the Naturalistic Theory: Core Concepts and Processes page.

The Psyche column follows a different but related trajectory. NT uses psyche to mean much more than conscious thought. The integrated human psyche includes the body, instincts, emotions, intuitions, unconscious processes, conscious thought, and our animal being. Civilization does not create these dimensions; it progressively alters their relationship to one another.

The early reduction of the psyche occurs through increasing separation—from nature, from animal being, between human beings, and eventually within the person. The table therefore should not be read as claiming that the psyche suddenly becomes divided at one particular date. It depicts a long historical narrowing.

Three especially important transitional formations appear in this column. The Hebrew Purity Regime develops distinctions of purity and impurity, covenant and exclusion, and contributes to the formation of what NT calls the proto-self. Pauline interiorization moves crucial elements of conflict inward: flesh and spirit, sin and salvation, the old and new person increasingly become struggles occurring within the human being. The Augustinian theological self further stabilizes this divided interior condition. Civilization had already fragmented the psyche; Augustine gives that fragmentation an extraordinarily durable theological form.

These three developments are important because they help explain the later emergence of the Protestant Individual (PI). The PI does not suddenly appear with Luther as an entirely new human type. It is the historical outcome of a much longer process of psychic reduction and interiorization. By around 1500, the individual increasingly becomes conceived and experienced as a bounded, inward, consciously thinking self. The successive phases shown below it indicate the continued development of that individual within modernity rather than six entirely different kinds of individual.

The Thought column follows yet another trajectory. NT distinguishes the reduction of the psyche from the reduction and structuring of thought itself. Once conscious thought has acquired an increasingly privileged position within the reduced psyche, the question becomes: what structures the thought that remains?

This is where Thought Regimes (TRs) become crucial.

A TR does more than tell people what they should think. It helps condition what is actually available to think, believe, and even experience within a particular Sociocultural System. TRs arise through the interaction of SMR, the Mass Mind effect, institutional structures, inherited concepts, and the values implicit in a particular SCS. Because people participate in creating the social world that subsequently acts back upon them, a Thought Regime does not require a group consciously designing it from above.

The First Thought Regime, beginning around 2350 BCE, is comparatively simple. The political and theological worlds become joined through gods and imperium. Authority can now be represented symbolically as extending beyond the immediately visible human beings exercising power. This is one reason the First TR belongs in the Thought column rather than being treated merely as the history of religion.

The entries at 800 BCE, 550 BCE, 100 CE, and 400 CE show that the development of thought is not a simple march toward greater control. The Iliad and Odyssey, Hebrew thought, Paul, Augustine, Greek philosophy, and other formations also contribute to what NT calls naturalistic oppositional thought: attempts from within Civilization to confront suffering, injustice, mortality, domination, meaning, and the human condition. Civilization produces structures of reduction, but human beings continually think against those structures as well.

The three transitional TRs—the Hebrew Purity Regime, Pauline formation, and Augustinian formation—are especially important because their effects occur simultaneously in the Thought and Psyche columns. They do not merely introduce new doctrines. Through what NT calls Negative Ontological Transfer, structures initially directed toward an external object or opposition can be transferred into the organization of human being itself. The history of thought consequently becomes part of the history of the psyche.

Around 1500, these accumulated developments enter a qualitatively different stage: the Modern Thought Regime, the most recent and fifth TR. The table divides this regime into six cumulative phases:

1. Division of Unities (DoU) separates previously integrated domains and makes them increasingly available for independent conceptual treatment.
2. Instrumental Rationality (IR) increasingly organizes thought around means, calculation, utility, and control.
3. Scientization and Mathematization (S/M) intensify the authority of measurement and quantitative representation.
4. Formalization (F) increasingly translates phenomena into standardized systems, categories, procedures, and formal representations.
5. Computationalization (C) makes these formalized representations increasingly susceptible to machine processing.
6. Algorithmization (A) allows computational systems not merely to process representations but increasingly to organize, select, rank, predict, and shape the world people encounter.

The phases are cumulative. The appearance of Instrumental Rationality does not end Division of Unities; mathematization does not eliminate instrumental reason; computation does not eliminate formalization. Earlier processes remain active inside later ones. The sequence therefore describes an accumulating architecture of reduction, not six self-contained historical periods.

This is also why the three columns must ultimately be read together.

Physical Reality becomes progressively mediated and abstracted. The once-integrated psyche becomes progressively narrowed toward the consciously thinking individual. Thought itself becomes increasingly divided, rationalized, quantified, formalized, computationalized, and algorithmized.

The sequence can therefore be compressed as:

Reality → essence

Psyche → conscious mind

Thought → binary code

These are not literal claims that reality becomes nothing but essence, that the psyche literally ceases to contain anything except conscious thought, or that all human thought becomes computer code. They identify the direction of reduction traced by NT.

The final row, 2008–present: Necrology, should consequently not be read as simply another historical phase following Algorithmization. Necrology is the accumulated condition produced by the preceding reductions.

By this point, DMR has acquired enormous technological power over bodies, ecosystems, species, land, and material resources, while SMR has acquired unprecedented power to mediate experience, relationships, meaning, identity, knowledge, and thought itself. The reduced individual increasingly encounters a world already selected, categorized, quantified, represented, and algorithmically organized for them.

Necrology therefore brings the three histories represented by the table together. The reduction of Physical Reality, the reduction of the Psyche, and the reduction and structuring of Thought are no longer readily separable processes. They reinforce one another.

The table is consequently best understood not as a timeline of ideas but as an ontohistorical map of changing human being within Civilization. Its subject is what happens when direct material reduction and increasingly powerful symbolic mediation operate cumulatively upon our relationship with physical reality, upon the structure of the psyche, and finally upon thought itself.

The table necessarily compresses arguments that require much fuller treatment. Definitions of its principal concepts are provided in the Naturalistic Theory: Core Concepts and Processes tab. The ontohistorical arguments underlying the sequence—including the emergence of the First Thought Regime, the transitional TRs, the Protestant Individual, the Modern Thought Regime, and Necrology—are developed in considerably greater detail in the accompanying essays.