This is a three-part series from philosopher Dionysis Christias, distilling his recent book Towards a Hyperstitional Process Nominalism: Outline of a Fractured Immanent Ontology (2025). He advances a conception of ‘fractured immanence’ in which mind and nature are not ontologically distinct regions of being (they are both ways of being processes) yet diverge in the order of understanding, a tension enabling their ongoing self-correcting interplay as concepts without presupposing transcendence or complete mutual transparency. Drawing on Deleuze, Sellars and Peirce, the book replaces substance metaphysics with an anti-representational, univocal process ontology which throws light on core problems in contemporary analytic metaphysics of powers and emergence. Normativity is embedded in this naturalistic process framework by being understood as an emergent intensive regime whose function is hyperstitional: it stabilizes and projects ideal possible worlds expressed by unactualized universals, and performatively makes them actual over time by collectively treating them as real. [Part 1 Here], [Part 2 Here].
6. Fractured Freedom and Emancipatory Universals
How is freedom to be construed in a fractured immanent world? It will be argued that freedom is itself expressed in a fractured form: 1.) as normative freedom, i.e. freedom as self-determination (with Kant, Sellars and Brandom being their main representatives) and 2.) as non-normative freedom, i.e. as an increase of the power to act, as opposed to the ‘power to dominate’ (the main representatives here being Spinoza and Deleuze). Normative freedom and non-normative freedom are intimately related in that the former is epistemically and practically necessary for achieving the latter, while the latter is the ultimate raison d’ȇtre of the former, in the sense that the very motivational power for pursuing individual and collective autonomy essentially depends on the non-normative kinds of freedom it elicits.
Let us first delve into the nature of normative freedom. An essential insight of Kant and German Idealism, rejuvenated by Sellars, McDowell and Brandom in 20th century analytic philosophy, is that freedom, despite appearances to the contrary, demands the presence or imposition of certain kinds of (rational) constraints between agents for it to be so much as possible. According to this conception, freedom’s enabling constraints are constraints by norms as opposed to causal constraints (which can be external or internal – bodily, psychological ones). To be free is to believe, think and act on the basis of reasons that can potentially overtake our desires, dispositions, drives and impulses, and are independent of the causal force of tradition, authority or coercion. Thus, the difference between being free or unfree becomes itself a social-normative difference rather than an outright ontological one. We treat someone or something as free insofar as we consider its behavior subject to the norms inherent in the social practices conformity to which is the criterion of membership in our community.
By contrast, insofar as we cope with someone or something in terms of the causes which objectively constrain it, we treat him as an object, and thus as unfree (Sellars 1963, 39-40, Brandom 1979, 192-193). Importantly, normative constraints on our desires and impulses imposed by reciprocally recognized normative attitudes (holding and treating oneself and others as capable of undertaking commitments about one’s beliefs, thought and actions, and thus as willing to risk or sacrifice one’s other desires), diminish our negative freedom (e.g., the free expression of whatever desire or impulse happen to be more intense at a time), while at the same time and by the same token making possible novel forms of positive freedom, namely, freedom to do something we could not do before or could not even conceive as something that we could intend to do.
Consider, for example, the fact that as a result of normative linguistic constraints, namely our collective commitment to bind ourselves to rules for the correct use of language, it becomes possible for us to create novel conceptual contents (meanings), purposes, interests and even novel needs. Indeed, our very existence as persons, capable of undertaking and attributing commitments and entitlements, authority and responsibility for our beliefs, thoughts and actions, over and above our behavioral habits, desires and impulses, and the causal force of tradition and societal conventions, is itself a case of a novel form of positive freedom made possible by mutually recognitive attitudes of constraint over the intensity, direction and flow of our multifarious short-term impulses, inclinations and desires.
Absent such collective commitment to rules that function as standards or relevance and correctness of language use, our negative freedom could be said to typically ‘increase’ only at the expense of demolishing the network of social institutions that make meaning, personhood, social cooperation, social institutions and reasoned discourse possible. Consider for example how many individual and collective purposes, interests, needs, in short, novel forms of expression and freedom presuppose the existence of linguistic practices, and the existence of social institutions such as money, education, democracy or law (which are themselves built on the foundation of linguistic practices).
Of course, all this is compatible with the view that normative constraints that make possible novel forms of positive freedom also make possible many novel forms of oppression, repression and alienation (masterfully analyzed by Deleuze, Foucault, Adorno and others) that would not otherwise exist as such and that are detrimental both to our normative and our non-normative freedom. Indeed, it might be pointed out that normative constraints diminish important dimensions of our non-normative freedom systematically and not accidentally, due to the fact that they are essentially ‘identitarian’ or homogenizing, sacrificing the unique, non-repeatable dimension of particulars for the sake of the general, repeatable characteristics of the universal to which they can be subsumed. Does this not severely impoverish our experience and creativity, thereby diminishing essential aspects of our non-normative freedom? (Deleuze 1968, Adorno 1969).
Let us now take a brief look at non-normative freedom. As was mentioned earlier, normative freedom is incomplete unless it is supplemented with a corresponding non-normative, naturalistic account, in which it can be understood in terms of increase or decrease of our non-conceptually characterized affective powers, and more specifically, as an increase in what Spinoza calls ‘joyful passions’ and a decrease in our ‘sad passions’ (Spinoza 2018). This is a conception of freedom as an occurrently existing power, that materially underpins normative freedom conceived as a social status. Freedom in this sense does not operate on the basis of the imposition of normative constraints of any sort (commitments, entitlements, authority, responsibility) in our behavioral patterns – though, of course, the imposition of these normative constraints through our normative attitudes necessarily effects changes in our power to affect and to be affected at the non-normative level.
Importantly, the concept of domination at work here must not be equated with the concept of control or mastery over things or humans, but rather with the severing of their potentialities of action and capacities to affect and be affected. In other words, domination is not the exercise of power as such, but the exercise of power in ways that diminish the powers of others to act, affect, and be affected. Conversely, certain forms of discipline, guidance, and mastery are emancipatory precisely because they augment these capacities. For example, while the process of learning all sorts of skills, from speaking a language to playing tennis or mastering various crafts or arts arguably ‘coerces’ the free expression of desires and impulses, it does not thereby sever our overall capacity to act.
Our conception of normative and of non-normative freedom as distinguishable yet inseparable and complementary dimensions of freedom points towards an essentially immanent yet fractured conception of freedom. The power of normative freedom to ‘intervene’ and alter the order, sequence and qualitative character of sensory-affective patterns in the flow of the non-normative level does not derive from special emergent causal powers of normative freedom but by its being a subtractive manner of appearance of a self-fracturing of the non-normative affective level itself through processes of productive and subtractive imagination (see figure 1). Thus, from our point of view, the level of normative freedom, just as the level of normativity tout court, does have world-making powers, yet not because it is a transcendent emergent level over and above the non-normative and non-conceptually articulated level of affective processual individuals, but by being an immanently emerging manner of appearance of the self-fracturing of the latter.
Another important aspect of our view of freedom is its essential connection with universals. Thus, a peculiarity of the (process) nominalistic metaphysical view developed here is that it is a non-traditional form of nominalism since it has an essential place for universals. If universals do not stand for static metaphysical essences but are critical self-correcting semantic-epistemic tools of our descriptive and explanatory practices, then they are perfectly compatible with nominalism. Under this light, far from denoting abstract metaphysical essences of interest only to philosophers who think they can escape the material world of genesis and corruption, universals are construed as semantic-epistemic tools that perform an immanent critique of the current epistemic-ethical status quo, thereby initiating a dialectic of freedom that makes possible the transformation of this world, of our material conditions of existence, so that we be able to exercise our sensory, conative and intellectual powers in an ever-expanded, unhinged manner.
How do universals function in such a manner?
To see this, we must first note that universals have a surplus normative content, specifying how things ought to be for the content of the universal to be fulfilled. This surplus content is not exhausted by the way in which the concept exemplifying the universal in question is actually used to describe concrete particulars in the context of our everyday practices. As we shall see, this surplus normative content of universals is a projection of emancipatory ideals expressing historically evolving expectations regarding our collective epistemic and general welfare. This surplus content functions normatively as a tool of immanent critique, roughly, in the following manner:
First, by expressing and sustaining an open-ended, schematic, and functional characterization of the concept-universal, it enables successive transformations in the determinate content of its sense. Thus, the meaning of ‘personhood’ may come to include higher animals or intelligent extraterrestrials, just as the meaning of ‘mass’ changed with the transition from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics. Such transformations occur when the concept-universal fails to satisfy the explanatory aspirations internal to the practice of which it is a part.[3] This failure, however, is itself registered as such only because these explanatory aspirations are already implicitly operative in the actual use of the universal in ongoing practice. In this way the very adequacy of a concept-universal in fulfilling the ideals inherent in its normative way of being is challenged from within its own practice of use. This is precisely a process of immanent critique of the existing semantic and epistemic status quo.[4]
Second, this schematic ought-content enables the formulation of orienting narratives with which to navigate the future in our attempt to progressively determinate it in actual evolving practice (Srnicek & Williams 2015, 75). When this orienting function is combined with the self-correcting function of universals discussed above, this surplus ought-dimension of universals both gives direction to inquiry and progressively generates criteria to adjudicate which determinate applications of universals are adequate and which are not. Crucially, these criteria possess no antecedently fixed content. What remains fixed and irreducible to its determinate actualizations is the schematic and functional character of the universal itself, not any supposedly invariable schematic or functional content. Thus, the determinate specification of the ought-content of universals may well change in response to transformations in the determinate specification of their is – dimension, that is, their descriptive and explanatory content. Moreover, the surplus ought-dimension of universals, far from being a fixed regulative ideal or an external normative constraint, is essentially a historically evolving source of orientation whose determinate content co-evolves with the descriptive and explanatory practices through which a form of life progressively comes to understand itself and its world.
Third, since the critical, regulative and orienting function of universals is essentially a normative function, and since the way of being of the normative is hyperstitional (section 5), the same goes for the above functions of universals: they are essentially hyperstitional. These functions are self-posited as expressions of something that does not yet exist that aims to transform itself into a truth by performative means. By exhibiting this hyperstitional structure and by piggy-backing on the schematic, homogenizing, and functional dimensions of universals (which are themselves hyperstitionally sustained), the surplus content of universals can catalyze dispersed affective states into novel we-attitudes that consolidate, expand, and eventually scale up into a historical force for change. In this way, universals acquire a world-making power with significant emancipatory potential, measured by the extent to which they increase our individual and collective autonomy and power to act.
How exactly does this critical function of universals reveal its emancipatory and subversive character? It does so when particular contents that were ignored as irrelevant or excluded from the range of application of a universal are shown to be essential ‘determinate fillers’ of its schematic surplus content, and thus essential part of the universal’s unconditional demands.
Consider, for instance, the concept of universal human rights. Certain determinate versions of this concept-universal can be criticized as inadequate (that is, as failing properly to embody its more schematic and ideal content) because they unjustifiably exclude particular persons and communities, such as women, Black people, homosexuals, or immigrants, from its scope. These individuals are recognized as persons only in a deficient sense: they bear responsibilities without corresponding authority and duties without corresponding rights. Such asymmetric recognition reproduces fundamentally unequal recognitive relations and reveals a deep tension within the actual use of our concept-universal of personhood (Brandom 2019).
In cases such as these, the determinate universal ‘person’ appears to exclude particular individuals and classes of individuals not for principled reasons but because of non-rational causes, such as biologically and historically entrenched asymmetries of power, superiority biases, fear, or anxiety in the face of the other, or because of instrumentally rational strategies serving non-rational ends, such as the preservation of privileged social positions. The process through which a universal such as human rights is challenged for unjustifiably excluding individuals and communities is doubly transformative. On the one hand, the excluded particulars who contest their exclusion and demand inclusion within the universal are themselves hyperstitionally transformed into exemplary embodiments of that very universal, thereby altering its determinate content and orientation.
On the other hand, the previously established universal is revealed to be merely a parochial particular (for example, the figure of the Western, white, heterosexual male masquerading as humanity as such). Thus, by claiming to embody the universal ‘humanity’ more adequately than its established representatives, formerly excluded particulars (‘woman’, ‘Black’, ‘homosexual’, ‘immigrant’) become, through the socio-political movements they engender, vehicles for the critique and transformation of existing determinate versions of that universal. The supposedly universal conception of humanity is thereby exposed as a contingent particular, lacking unconditional validity (Srnicek & Williams 2015, 77-78; Jonsson 2010). This is a paradigmatic instance of immanent critique: a process that creatively extends the determinate sense of a universal precisely in order to remain faithful to it and to the unconditional demands implicit within it.[5]
This model is not limited to ethico-political universals but also finds application to natural-kind universals. For example, observable phenomena that were previously excluded from the natural-kind universal ‘water’ (e.g., its phase-transitions into ice or gas) and are now explained on the basis of the behavior of chemical processes, subsequently became exemplary representatives of the universal ‘water’, while its former defining observable properties (based on its liquid form) are now seen as surface manifestations of water in relation to the senses and the particular historical context and knowledge of particular human communities. Or, to take another example, consider the case of psychological phenomena (anxiety states, phobias, obsessions) and the defense mechanisms that explain them (repression, rationalization, sublimation, projection, introjection) that were excluded from the universal ‘autonomous subject’.
In all these cases, the critique of existing versions of universals and their exposure as parochial particulars is conducted from a standpoint that aspires to be faithful to the universal in question. In this respect, it is completely opposed to the post-modern anti-universalist attitude which sees the above critique of universals as entailing their elimination in favor of a series of diverse, incommensurable particulars (individuals, identities, communities etc.). This view thereby has interesting consequences regarding our contemporary ethico-political situation: The critical function of universals consists in highlighting the particular, the divergent, what is excluded from the dominant universalist discourse (women, immigrants, ethnic minorities, the precariat) as a focal point for hyperstitionally constructing new ‘hegemonic signifiers’ that claim to be more faithful representatives of the unconditional demands and ideal dimension of the universal in question (e.g., human rights, human dignity, human freedom).
If successful, the argument of this section shows how a process nominalism in ontology is not only consistent but complementary with an uncompromising universalism in semantic, epistemic and ethico-political contexts, provided that this universalism is construed as resolutely non-representational, critical and hyperstitional in nature.
The Politics of Fractured Immanence: Democratic Prometheanism
What are the political consequences of the above fractured immanent account of freedom? What political outlook emerges from the need to reconcile the tensions between the normative and non-normative dimensions of freedom? It will be suggested that the most promising view in this regard is democratic prometheanism.
To see this, we must first note that normative and non-normative freedom present us with two equally fundamental yet not mutually entailing or complementary regulative ideals. The regulative ideal at the heart of our conception of normative freedom is expressed by the ‘universalist’ impulse for collective (semantic, epistemic, moral) self-mastery while the regulative ideal of our non-normative conception of freedom is expressed by the ‘particularist’ impulse for unhinged monadic material empowerment (think of Spinoza’s Conatus).
The difficulty in reconciling these regulative ideals can be immediately grasped if we realize that the impulse for collective self-mastery is a way of fostering our collective welfare by being oriented towards normatively equalizing or ‘commensurating’ the different monadic worldly perspectives of human beings by the construction of a universalizable shared semantic, epistemic and moral space representing a common world, while the impulse for monadic material empowerment is directed towards the empowerment of the non-equalizable, incommensurable and non-universalizable dimension of us as monadic perspectives.[6] Thus, the (non-egalitarian, non-universalizable) impulse for monadic empowerment and the (egalitarian, universalizable) impulse for collective self-mastery pull us in two significantly different directions and it is not easy to see how we can make them hang together.
Another way to view the potential tension between the impulse for collective self-mastery and the impulse for the empowerment of monadic perspectives is as a tension between a collective and normatively constrained and a monadic and normatively unconstrained vision of ‘promethean freedom’[7]. The optimal resolution of this tension requires institutional arrangements in which the realization of promethean freedom becomes inseparable from the flourishing and empowerment of a community characterized by forms of cooperative (non-means-ends) rationality and relations of reciprocal recognition between monadic perspectives. And this, transposed to the political realm, implies that the impulse for promethean freedom should be put under democratic control and channeled through social institutions and avenues that foster transparency, accountability and criticism and are sensitive to the emergence and reproduction of systematically unequal distribution of individual, social and political power.
Of course, there is no guarantee that promethean freedom as a de facto reality (i.e. not constrained by theoretical and practical reason) will jointly empower individuals irrespectively of their privileges and their place in the network of societal power relations. The only certainty that the transformation of nature, individuals and society effected by disenchanting reason in its continuing effort to increase promethean freedom is such that the stakes of preserving and reproducing asymmetric relations of recognition between persons will incrementally increase.
Indeed, we can see even from our own 21st-century viewpoint that e.g., increasing techno-scientific literacy, sophistication and knowledge sharing (‘digital commons’) would make the minimization of domination and the achieving of symmetric recognition a live option for everyone, while at the same time making it possible for those in positions of power (corporations, governments) to align humanity to their interests directly at the bio-psychical level (e.g., by valuing and reinforcing profit-related abilities, feelings, thoughts and behaviors) (Zuboff 2019). In such circumstances, the demand for equality in opportunities to possess socially significant goods would cease to function as a merely abstract regulative principle and would be motivationally salient and concrete for (almost) everyone. This utopian impulse for equal access to promethean freedom would also lose its ideal status as a mere abstract regulative principle of political organization and would be concretely expressed as a motivationally salient existential commitment necessary for the very survival and minimal well-being of the community of persons.
Let me now disentangle democratic prometheanism and promethean freedom from what I consider to be the most implausible features of the classical prometheanist view both theoretically and practically.
First, I take the promethean quest for liberating ourselves from broadly causal (evolutionary, historical, psychological, socially induced) constraints to be meaningful only in the context of our structural finitude, namely the ‘transcendental’ fact that perceiving, thinking and acting depend for their very existence as structural features of personhood on the existence of a world that is partly out of our control and in which the success of our projects cannot be guaranteed (Hägglund 2020).
Second, promethean freedom is misunderstood if it is conceived in abstraction from our social institutions, their normative constraints, and their heteronomous dimension. All these are enabling constraints on our freedom and not (only) disabling ones.
Third, and more importantly, as an ideal of practical reason, promethean freedom can only thrive in a democratically organized community of persons, where democracy is also conceived as an enabling constraint: By being based on wide networks of checks and balances and self-correcting mechanisms it functions as a filtering mechanism for selecting increasingly workable policies that foster the common good and individual autonomy while at the same time openly embracing antagonisms, conflicts and different viewpoints on what this common good is or what our ‘real needs’ really are, thus rejecting any privileged access (Givenness) with respect to their objective content. Thus, our view here might be described as a self-constrained and self-correcting prometheanism.
Fourth, in my view, promethean freedom, and its core ideals of liberation from causal constraints that hinder the free expression of our sensory and intellectual capacities and of collective mastery over the world and ourselves as a necessary condition for achieving this liberation, must be understood as a form of dependence. More specifically, promethean freedom, and the liberation through mastery over nature and ourselves that goes along with it, must be understood in terms of controlled interdependence.[9] This is related to the fact that our promethean need to be free from any kind of causal constraint that hinders our ability to think and act is itself materially conditioned for its existence and efficaciousness on the establishment, maintenance and reproduction of dynamic allostatic relations between our bodies and our social and natural environment.
Democratic prometheanism also differs from the left accelerationist strand of prometheanism based on reason’s ability to techno-scientifically reshape the world and ourselves in accord with rational ethico-political ideals (Srnicek & Williams 2015), as well as from Land’s right accelerationist view (2011, 2022) that opts for the liberation of ‘machinic’ desiring production from its representational confinement in human-all-too-human values and its subjugation to the ends of reason. Although my point of departure is, like Land’s, a Deleuzian one (reason is not imprinted in the fabric of reality), my overall view, by asserting reason’s hyperstitional power to reshape the world and ourselves to their mutual benefit (where reason is construed as a non-representational world-making power) is closer to left accelerationism and rejects Land’s collapse of normativity and reason to means-ends reasoning, optimization and selection. On the other hand, democratic prometheanism differs somewhat from left accelerationism in its construal of reason as fractured desire, its emphasis on structural finitude as an enabling constraint of prometheanist reason, its explicit metaphysical grounding on a resolutely process metaphysics with broader ecological implications, and its emphasis on democratic values as means for internally connecting and coordinating epistemic and social transformation.
Another distinctive trait of our democratic prometheanist view is that it is internally linked with the theme of hyperstition, hyperstitional normativity, and, indeed, to (the totally un-Landian concept of) hyperstitional reason (section 5). One concrete case that shows how hyperstitional norms might work in the field of politics in the context of democratic prometheanism would be participatory technology governance experiments, such as citizens’ assemblies on artificial intelligence regulation (Talpin 2012, McKinney 2024). These initiatives bring together diverse actors (citizens, technologists, ethicists, policymakers) to collectively articulate normative frameworks for emerging technologies. What makes them hyperstitional is their performative temporality: they prefigure the democratic futures they seek to bring about (e.g., a future where technological development is governed democratically, inclusively, and reflexively) by enacting them in the present. In this way, the process feeds back into itself by reshaping the political field in which it operates.
Finally, democratic prometheanism’s collective response to present political and ecosystemic challenges (dramatic increase of income inequalities, climate change, immigration, Al challenges to individuals, work, geopolitical balance) is based on an attitude of joyful responsibility: Our collective response to these existential challenges must not be based on fear, since fear, being a particularly intense sad passion, is often epistemically and politically paralyzing and is fundamentally a reactionary force which merely attempts to preserve what can be salvaged from our culturally inherited epistemic and moral understanding instead of creating novel ways of understanding ourselves and the world in the face of new existential predicaments. It might be objected that the fear of death and the impulse for self-preservation, far from being conservative or reactionary attitudes, are actually beneficial for rethinking and reinvigorating enlightenment, humanism and universal rights for the 21st century, since they arguably inform the so-called ‘ethics of vulnerability’ which emphasizes our shared fragility and our ethical ties to all sentient beings (Jonas 1984, Pelluchon 2021).
But aren’t we faced here with a fundamental tension between the prometheanist aspirations of scaled-up technologies (including bureaucracy, government, capital platforms, supply chains) and the democratic control that is supposed to be exerted on them? For it seems that prometheanist projects sooner or later will have to implement closed technologies that are opaque to democratic understanding and control. Indeed, many technologies now central to planetary life, such as foundation-model AI, climate engineering infrastructures, algorithmic capital platforms and global supply chains, are not only opaque but must be opaque to function at all.
They involve technical specialization, global coupling, non-linear risk propagation, and operational invariants that resist direct democratic control. What sense can be made of a democratization of the promethean impulse in this context? I think that the key for a proper response to this legitimate worry is to see that the democratic form appropriate to our technological circumstances cannot be one of direct openness or participation to their constructive principles but must be one of stratified openness: a multi-level architecture in which closed and opaque operations remain embedded within open, polycentric, adversarial, and reversible meta-control systems.
In conclusion, from this democratic prometheanist point of view (contra Castoriadis 1975), it is not enough for a social imaginary that seeks to replace the neoliberal-capitalist imaginary merely to denounce the latter’s obsession with unlimited growth and domination over nature and others. It must also appropriate science and technology and democratically repurpose them toward the development of material powers capable of collectively controlling this very domination and unleashing the productive (sensory, affective and intellectual) powers that foster collective flourishing. Accordingly, this new democratic prometheanist social imaginary does not aim at mastery as such, but at mastering (controlling and repurposing) the dominating and coercive powers that produce an increasingly uninhabitable environment and obstruct collective liberation[12] (Brassier 2020). And it must do so by productively combining its acute awareness of the fact that there are no metaphysical guarantees of success, no invariantly meaningful ends or eternal values, with an attitude of joyfully affirming and harnessing the transformative power of hyperstitional reason ‘here and now’, thus viewing the world and ourselves at once as something to be affirmed and as something to be overcome.
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NOTES
- One way of cashing out this idea of normative freedom (and normativity as such) as an expression of a subtractive self-fracturing of the sentient non-normative affective level of somatic forces-impulses, can be found in Adorno when he argues that conceptual rationality is itself a product of a change of orientation effected within non-conceptual ‘mimetic’ consciousness (Horkheimer & Adorno 2002). To this end he introduces the concept of ‘mimetic rationality’ which expresses a change of orientation of our mimetic abilities initially geared toward an ‘organic adaptation to otherness’ (a direct immersion to the environment), into sublimated distanced forms of ‘mimicking the invariant’ for purposes of self-preservation (conceptual thinking based on substitution and on invariant features of worldly processes).
- Sellars (1973) shows how successor concepts (e.g., of Einsteinian mass) in science can be generically similar though specifically different from their predecessors (Newtonian mass), due to the intra-theoretical functional role similarity between the two concepts, a similarity which is itself justified by their being involved in relevantly similar explanatory tasks in the context of the scientific practice of physics (O’Shea 2007, 159-160).
- For a comprehensive account of immanent critique see Jaeggi 2018.
- There are several historical examples of hyperstitionally functioning universals: The 18th and 19th century abolition of slavery, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the women’s voting rights campaigns can be all understood as hyperstitional projection of universal norms that did not describe reality but gradually made themselves real by reshaping law, culture, and economic practice, purging them of their parochial and unjustifiably exclusive elements.
- Monadic perspectives do not amount to fully formed individual selves (standing over against society and a common objective external world), although, obviously, they are intimately related to them. The formation of individual selves presupposes the existence of a conceptual space in which common semantic, epistemic, and moral norms are already operative.
- Promethean freedom expresses our impulse to overcome any causal constraint that stands in the way of our collective self-mastery or individual empowerment.
- Ironically, perhaps this intensification of the existential risks involved might be the most effective way for us to see through the invisible cage of ideology, to face the truth of our individual and social existence, and to take sides in this existential struggle for survival and well-being.
- This understanding of promethean freedom in terms of controlled interdependence distances my view, even from prometheanist accounts that are otherwise closely related to it such as those of Brassier (2014) and Negarestani (2018).
- See e.g., Yang & Bachmann (2025) who discuss the case in which the assembly’s outputs are coproduced by citizens and algorithms in an iterative, adaptive process. This recursive structure allows the assembly to bootstrap its own legitimacy: by showing realtime responsiveness to participants’ inputs, it models the kind of dynamic, participatory governance it advocates, which in turn strengthens public and institutional acceptance.
- This also explains why the invocation of ‘practical wisdom’ in our effort to rationally decide how we must act in the face of novel challenges posed by techno-scientific revolutions or how exactly we must ‘draw the limits’ in applying the latter are ultimately uninformative: Because techno-scientific developments, by instituting novel ways of intelligibility, thereby also change what counts as ‘practical wisdom’.
- Of course, in this context ‘mastery of mastery’ does not mean freezing techno-scientific evolution into pre-given ends. Neither does it entail omniscient prediction or closure of future contingencies (Roden 2025). Rather, it seeks to expand our collective capacities by instituting feedback-rich forms of governance for managing our interdependence with techno-scientific systems. Recall here that from our point of view collective self-mastery is itself a hyperstitional projection, which does not require exhaustive foresight.