Auditioning Ontology: Towards an Ambient Metaphysics

This thesis asserts that a dual ontological fallacy lies at the heart of Western metaphysical realism. First, since the Presocratics, being has been parsed, erroneously, into either substance or process. Second, this false opposition is symptomatic of a grammar of visualism that has increasingly permeated post-Kantian philosophical discourse, in relation both to substance and process. By collapsing the hylomorphic into the scopic, this dominant schema (which I call 'scopo-hylomorphia') posits consciousness, the ocular, and the symbiosis of the two, as prerequisite factors in the arbitration of being. My thesis proposes that any firm distinction between substance and process is untenable; by contrast, I argue that being is neither solely one nor the other but is located in the ambience between both. In pursuing a metaphysics of ambience, I examine the potential consequences of ‘auditioning’ ontology—of amplifying sonority as a means of conveying the nature of reality. In restoring and adapting a pre-Kantian openness to onto-aesthetic expression, I investigate the implications for contemporary metaphysics of articulating being through the aesthetic tropes of sonority. By putting orthodox ontological thought to such atypical use, I explore the possibilities of subverting its more standard (that is, anthropocentric and ocularcentric) employment in philosophy, thus evidencing the value of ‘auditioning’ as an agent of methodological reorientation.

I employ a close reading of the quasi-adversarial relationship between Graham Harman and Jean-Luc Nancy—paragons of substance metaphysics and process-relational metaphysics, respectively—in order to rethink those ontologies which reductively oppose relations and relata. In particular, I challenge the presumed enmity between substantial and relational thought by exploiting Harman’s and Nancy’s paradoxical co-alliance with Martin Heidegger. By making explicit the sonority implicit in Harman, Nancy, and Heidegger, while also accentuating their shared resonances, my thesis advances the possibility of an aestheticisation of being through sound. In so doing, I suggest new and productive ways for realism to apprehend the nature of reality, beyond its current normative (and ethically unsound) anthropo-, ocular-, and subject-centrisms.