Naturalistic Theory: An Ontohistorical Excursus

Naturalistic Theory (NT) begins with a historical question that the familiar divisions of scholarly work make difficult to answer: how did human beings come to inhabit a world so different from the one in which our species developed for most of its existence? The question concerns neither a lost paradise nor a single departure from an original human nature. It asks how successive transformations in material life, social organization, symbolic meaning, and psychic experience altered the conditions under which human beings exist. NT names the cumulative and mutually reinforcing processes through which Civilization has suppressed and reduced Relational Being (RB). Its object is therefore historical change in being, rather than a history of ideas detached from the lives in which ideas acquire their force.

The term naturalistic has a specific, deliberately counterintuitive meaning here. It does not identify the theory with naturalism as a philosophical doctrine or suggest that Civilization's destructive processes are simply nature at work. Nature can destroy and regenerate. The processes NT calls naturalistic arise within Civilization and increasingly damage the conditions for ecological renewal and integrated human life. The term directs attention to the historical production of destruction that can perpetuate itself, often through practices that appear ordinary, beneficial, or unavoidable to those participating in them. NT is the theoretical foundation of the Relational Being Project (RBP), whose practical concern is to understand these processes and help create the conditions in which RB can again flourish.

The object of inquiry

RB refers to a way of being in which a distinct human person exists through living relationships with oneself, other people, other living beings, places, the physical world, and the cosmos. These relationships extend through time as well as space. RB does not dissolve individuality into an undifferentiated whole. It locates distinct persons within the relations through which their lives become possible and meaningful. Nor is RB an appeal to a supernatural state. It names an embodied and worldly mode of existence involving the entire psyche: bodily, animal, instinctive, emotional, intuitive, unconscious, and conscious capacities functioning together rather than being arranged in a hierarchy with conscious thought at its summit.

The historical claim is that human beings are capable of such integration and that the predominance of Civilization has progressively narrowed its range. The claim does not require every society to have been identical, free of conflict, or perfectly integrated. It calls for inquiry into the long history of human capacities and the specific changes that have reduced their exercise. It also requires distinguishing a person from the historically produced form of personhood that later becomes dominant. A distinct human being is not necessarily the bounded, substantially self-contained individual imagined by much of modern thought.

NT's Ontohistorical Method (OHM) studies changes in being through changes in the conditions of life. It asks what arrangements made particular experiences, relationships, forms of authority, and conceptions of self possible, and what other possibilities those arrangements foreclosed. Historical investigation and ontological inquiry thus inform one another. An account of a wall, a city, a household, a law, or a machine is incomplete if it records only its construction and use. One must also ask how recurrent encounters with it changed the ways people inhabited their bodies, understood others, and experienced their world. Conversely, a philosophical account of the self is incomplete if it treats the self's apparent structure as timeless while leaving its historical production unexplained.

This method is necessarily synthetic. Economics, political history, archaeology, anthropology, psychology, religious history, and the history of philosophy each illuminate part of the problem. None, taken as an autonomous field, can establish how the material, institutional, symbolic, and psychic dimensions acted upon one another. NT calls the human-mediated totality in which they interact the sociocultural sphere (SCS). Its institutions, languages, customs, technologies, economic practices, political arrangements, stories, theories, and systems of value predate any one person and are continually reproduced and modified by people. The relationship is recursive: human beings make a world that acts back upon their capacities to perceive, interpret, and act.

The Mass Mind names one aspect of this recursion under Civilization. Ideas, desires, anxieties, habits, and judgments circulate between persons, groups, and the wider SCS, acquire social and institutional durability, and return to shape individual psyches. It is neither an external agent nor a claim that everyone thinks alike. It is a way to investigate how historically produced assumptions become an unremarked background of life and how people can collectively sustain conditions that diminish their own possibilities.

A long history of reduction

NT places Civilization within a much longer history of Homo sapiens. Its stage theory distinguishes early hunter-gatherers, the emergence of the capacities associated with behavioral modernity, and a long period of behaviorally modern hunter-gatherer life before the transition toward Civilization. In the Ancient Near East, changes in settlement, cultivation, accumulation, hierarchy, and population concentration unfolded across millennia rather than in a single agricultural event. NT locates the onset of Civilization as a distinctive stage around the fourth millennium BCE, while treating both this chronology and the proposed psychic consequences as matters for continuing historical examination.

The point of this periodization is analytical. Agriculture alone cannot explain the transformation of human being; neither can the first large settlement or the invention of writing. NT asks when changing arrangements began to produce sustained and mutually reinforcing reductions of RB. Reduction is a careful term. Relationships, embodied capacities, and collective practices do not simply vanish. They can be fragmented, subordinated, redirected toward hierarchical institutions, or made dependent upon categories that diminish the wider field from which they arose. Reduction may coexist with genuine gains in security, coordination, knowledge, and material provision. Those gains can help explain the endurance of the very arrangements that reduce other capacities.

The earliest predominant form is Direct Materialistic Reduction (DMR). The transformation first reaches human beings through altered material conditions: enclosure, urban density, the proximity of strangers, concentrated resources, stratified space, restricted access, organized violence, and the embodied experience of hierarchy. A person does not need an elaborate doctrine of social superiority to experience the distance between those permitted to occupy an elevated place and those required to stand below. The arrangement is encountered through movement, vision, labor, fear, and bodily position. Repetition can give such encounters durability within the psyche.

Yet the material and the symbolic cannot be isolated. A constructed height can become an image of elevated status; control of space can become legitimate authority; a ruler's physical position can acquire meanings that travel far beyond the original encounter. This is a transition in predominance, rather than the replacement of one process by another. Symbolically Mediated Reduction (SMR) increasingly works through meanings, categories, myths, laws, values, and explanations that organize experience across distances and generations. Material arrangements continue to support them, while established symbolic meanings alter the experience of material arrangements in return. DMR and SMR identify two interacting routes by which RB can be reduced.

SMR has two especially consequential products in NT: transcendence and Thought Regimes. Transcendence denotes the movement by which value, authority, or reality is abstracted from embodied relationships and elevated above the world from which it arose. Its theological forms have been historically powerful, but NT also investigates secular forms. Reason, the nation, the autonomous individual, progress, the market, data, or computation can acquire authority over the lived relationships and material conditions that produced these abstractions. The question is not whether an abstraction is useful. It is what happens when an abstraction becomes privileged over the reality it was devised to describe.

A Thought Regime (TR) is a historically specific organization of the possibilities of thought and experience within Civilization. It cannot be reduced to censorship, propaganda, or an elite's deliberate plan. Its first operation is to condition what is readily available to think, believe, articulate, and sometimes experience at all. A structure of domination can persist for centuries before the conceptual means to identify it become widely accessible. Patriarchy illustrates the problem: the historical existence of patriarchal arrangements and the public availability of patriarchy as a critical category are profoundly different things. A TR helps explain why a pervasive arrangement can appear natural even to those living within its constraints.

NT proposes a First Thought Regime associated with the emergence of empire and increasingly powerful theological and political forms in the Ancient Near East. It then examines transitional TRs through which distinctions of purity, sin, and human deficiency became increasingly internal to the experience of self. The mechanism NT calls Negative Ontological Transfer identifies the attribution to human being of negative qualities first organized in relation to a divine or transcendent order. The theory traces distinct transformations in Hebrew, Pauline, and Augustinian settings rather than treating them as one continuous, unchanging doctrine. Its argument concerns the historical remaking of the psyche through institutions and lived distinctions as well as texts. Specific lines of influence, dates, and degrees of continuity require evidence in each case; a suggestive sequence alone cannot establish causation.

The modern transformation

The Modern Thought Regime (MTR) marks a further development. Earlier TRs conditioned the range of available thought and experience. The MTR increasingly reorganizes the forms through which people think. NT understands its phases as overlapping and cumulative: Division of Unities; Instrumental Rationality; Scientization & Mathematization; Formalization; Computationalization; and Algorithmization. They are analytical distinctions, not a claim that one era ends neatly when another begins. A system capable of algorithmically sorting people still depends on earlier divisions, industrial infrastructures, standardized categories, and formal rules.

The early modern transformation is inseparable from the formation of the Protestant Individual (PI). NT uses this term for a historically particular form of personhood, not for distinct human persons as such and not for all Protestants. In the PI, conscience, belief, responsibility, choice, and personal salvation increasingly become centered on a bounded self. The Pauline and Augustinian remaking of interior life forms part of this inheritance. Protestant developments intensify it; philosophy, property relations, state formation, capitalism, and later secular institutions carry and alter it. The PI can experience real forms of freedom and initiative while the boundaries of that self become a means of separation from other persons, the living world, and aspects of its own psyche. Its freedom and enclosure develop together.

Division of Unities names the progressive separation of what had been experienced and understood in more integrated ways: subject and object, mind and body, humanity and nature, religious and secular, individual and collective. This was never merely a philosophical exercise. Imperial expansion, changing labor relations, theological conflict, and new forms of authority provided conditions in which such divisions became socially effective. Philosophers articulated and altered a world already in transformation. Their work matters because conceptual distinctions can return to institutions, sciences, and ordinary practices with renewed power.

Instrumental Rationality and Scientization & Mathematization intensified the treatment of time, work, bodies, resources, and social life through productivity, standardization, measurement, and organized procedure. Formalization translated increasing portions of thought into explicit rules, models, & symbolic structures. Computationalization made many such structures executable by machines. Algorithmization extends this sequence into systems that select, rank, predict, and shape the encounters through which people come to know their world. At each point, gains in coordination and capability accompany the question NT presses: which dimensions of reality must be excluded or transformed so that they can be represented and processed in these ways?

This is not a claim that conscious thought, mathematics, science, or computation are inherently destructive. NT's concern is the historical elevation of one capacity and its representations over the integrated psyche and the relational world. The distinction matters because a useful representation can become a governing substitute for what it represents. The narrowing is especially difficult to perceive when the resulting systems also deliver convenience, knowledge, and protection. The MTR can thereby draw people into reproducing its assumptions without requiring their explicit assent to a comprehensive doctrine.

The present Necrological Era names the convergence of ecological devastation, global extraction, deprivation, and increasingly extensive reductions of cultural, communal, and psychic life. In NT, necrology concerns more than literal death. It concerns arrangements that determine what may live, flourish, retain meaning, or disappear. Neoliberal forms of valuation intersect with computational and algorithmic power, while material extraction connects the lives of affluent populations to the exhaustion of distant lands and peoples. The contemporary condition is not exhausted by digital technology: it is an interaction of political economy, imperial histories, ecological transformation, the SCS, and the accumulated phases of the MTR.

What the theory asks us to test

NT is ambitious because its explanatory object crosses conventional boundaries. Ambition, however, cannot substitute for discrimination among claims. Its historical proposals must be assessed against material records, textual evidence, alternative chronologies, and the diversity of societies often grouped under a single period label. Its account of psychic integration calls for careful distinctions between an interpretive reconstruction, observations about living persons, and claims that could be investigated empirically. Its mechanism of reduction must show how specific arrangements alter experience, rather than infer an inner transformation solely from the existence of an institution or an artifact.

These demands are productive. The theory can be examined at several scales. One can ask whether a particular spatial arrangement organized bodily experiences of hierarchy; whether an account of purity changed practices of self-scrutiny; whether an apparently secular concept carried forward a prior structure of transcendence; or how computational categories return to reshape the people classified through them. At a larger scale, one can compare historical sequences and ask whether the proposed cumulative movement from material enclosure toward increasingly powerful symbolic and technical mediation explains phenomena that separate disciplinary accounts leave disconnected. Counterexamples and uneven developments matter, because the theory describes historical tendencies rather than a uniform experience shared by every person in every society.

The Ontohistorical Map provides the fuller sequence of these transformations and the relationships among NT's principal processes. The accompanying Explanation of Terms tab defines the specialized vocabulary and offers a route into the map's details. Neither is needed to grasp the central proposition of this excursus: historical arrangements do more than distribute resources, power, and ideas. They help form the capacities through which human beings encounter themselves and their world. NT proposes that Civilization has repeatedly reorganized those capacities in ways that diminish RB, even as it generates real powers and benefits. Its purpose is to make that long reduction intelligible enough to be contested—and to open inquiry into how the RB capacities that persist within us might again become the basis of life.