Abstract: This article outlines a framework for a systematic quantum philosophy. It addresses the
metaphysical deficit of the Copenhagen interpretation, which has long risked collapsing into instrumentalism due to
a lack of robust ontological grounding. Critiquing both naïve realist interpretations and neo-Kantian
transcendental models, the author proposes a retrieval of Aristotelian hylomorphism mediated by pneuma as an
active, subtle, and formative substance. Tracing the historical decline of this pneumatic vehicle through
Scholastic immaterialism, nominalism, and subjectivism, the article shows how quantum physics retroactively
supports an ontology of immanent transcendence. Within this framework, quantum measurement is conceptualized as a
bidirectional, participatory-incarnational event: a transition from objective potentiality to classical
actualization. Ultimately, this quantum philosophy provides a coherent metaphysical foundation for quantum
phenomena, framing cosmic history as a progressive process of physical incarnation.
Keywords: quantum philosophy, Bohr, Heisenberg, Aristotle, Plato, Maximus Confessor, Pseudo-Dionysius, Bacon,
von Hartmann, Platonic form, pneumatic hylomorphism, logoi, nominalism.
Introduction
What kind of being does quantum reality have? Quantum physics is a formalism of extraordinary predictive power that
resists any classical ontological description. Superposition, complementarity, contextuality, and non-locality are
difficult to reconcile with post-Cartesian philosophical thought. Because quantum entities lack determinate
properties prior to measurement, exhibit interference and entanglement, and evade spatiotemporal localization, they
cannot be treated as classical objects. Yet they are not mere fictions either: the formalism constrains nature to
twelve-decimal-place accuracy and predicts genuinely novel phenomena. Quantum objects (electrons, for example) are
not “real” in any naïve sense; their objectivity is constituted rather than simply discovered. We
render them intelligible by casting quantum phenomena into classical terms: giving the electron “spin
up” or “spin down,” or assigning quarks the colours red, green, and blue. But electrons do not
literally spin, and quark charges are not literally coloured. Still, none of this implies that science fails to
describe a mind-independent reality.
Bohr’s Copenhagen model still stands, yet it has long frustrated philosophers and physicists because it lacks
a clear metaphysical grounding. This brings it perilously close to instrumentalism: the view that scientific
theories function as tools for predicting and organizing experience rather than literal descriptions of underlying
reality. Bohr treated quantum concepts, such as the wave function, as mere formalisms rather than as real entities.
Yet he still regarded the “quantum object” itself as an independent reality. He maintained a
fundamentally realist outlook and never embraced instrumentalism (Favrholdt, 1994, p. 86). However, although
Bohr was not an anti-realist, he was strongly anti-ontological (MacKinnon, 1994, p. 290). This stance was in
keeping with the Enlightenment ideal, which assumed that reason could proceed from a presuppositionless standpoint
to grasp truth neutrally. Yet Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that this ideal is itself a
prejudice, or pre-judgment (Vorurteil), and a particularly dangerous one, because it conceals its own
conditioned character. We never approach understanding from a position of absolute detachment; rather, our
pre-judgments are not obstacles to understanding but its very enabling conditions, without which nothing could show
up as meaningful (Gadamer, 2013, ch. 4).
The consequence for metaphysics is that all thought, including ostensibly anti-metaphysical thought, operates
within an inherited ontological framework sedimented into language, tradition, and pre-reflective
fore-understanding. Applied to the quantum realm, this hermeneutical reality demonstrates that a purely
“neutral” or non-ontological physics is an illusion. Because the mathematical formalism of quantum
mechanics does not interpret itself, any attempt to speak of what the equations mean must import conceptual
frameworks. Providing quantum physics with an explicit philosophical ontology is therefore not an optional luxury,
but a methodological necessity, ensuring that the metaphysical concepts we inevitably use are critically examined
rather than unconsciously assumed.
There are many competing views about the metaphysical nature of quantum reality. Neo-Kantian approaches treat it as
an impenetrable noumenon, whereas the dominant realist position regards the quantum field as ontologically
fundamental. Others take the wave function itself to be real, and a minority among them hold that wave-function
collapse is a genuine physical process. This article proposes a new perspective on quantum reality, inspired by the
Aristotelian notion of pneuma (πνευμα; breath, wind, spirit) as a subtle
formative substance that permeates the material world, though applied here only to the quantum domain. It is
entirely consonant with the Copenhagen model and far less antiquated than one might assume.
The many unsuccessful interpretations
Realist interpretations of quantum physics, especially those that treat the wave function as an ontologically real
entity, have met with substantial criticism. They turn mathematical structures into supposed features of reality,
mistaking a predictive formalism for a literal description of the world. Such interpretations generate ontologies
that are unobservable, inhabit spaces unlike physical space (for example, a high-dimensional configuration space),
rely on ad hoc collapse mechanisms, and expand the metaphysical framework far beyond necessity. They often resolve
one difficulty only to introduce several new ones. If something is genuinely real, why is it accessible only
through indirect inference? Many critics regard this as a metaphysical overreach rooted in classical habits of
thought. The same charge can be levelled against Everett’s many-worlds interpretation as well as Bohmian
mechanics, which posits an ontologically real pilot wave guiding the particles (Goldstein, 2025).
In his cosmic delayed-choice thought experiment, John Wheeler (1998) illustrates a profound quantum paradox by
imagining a single photon emitted by a distant quasar billions of years ago, split into two paths by the
gravitational lensing of an intervening galaxy before converging on Earth. By choosing whether to use a telescope
to detect which single path the photon took (revealing particle behaviour) or to allow the paths to interfere
(revealing wave behaviour), an observer on Earth seemingly dictates the photon’s history. This setup creates
the appearance of retrocausality, suggesting that a present-day choice reaches back billions of years to determine
whether the photon travelled along one path or both. Wheeler himself resolved this by arguing that no elementary
phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is observed and registered: the past acquires definite form only through
present acts of measurement (Wheeler, 1998, pp. 337ff).
The delayed-choice experiment can, however, be employed to make a stronger and more precise philosophical point. It
is not a demonstration of retrocausal time travel, but rather a compelling illustration that our classical concepts
of wave and particle are fundamentally inadequate categories for describing quantum reality. Rather than claiming
that a present-day choice changes the past, we need only recognize that the photon’s past flight never
consisted of waves or particles to begin with. The photon travelled as an irreducibly quantum entity, one that
cannot be coherently described in classical terms prior to measurement. The act of measurement merely determines
which of its mutually exclusive classical aspects becomes actualized in the present.
Bohr captured the descriptive dimension of this problem in his doctrine of complementarity: wave and particle are
not competing descriptions of a single underlying entity, but rather mutually exclusive modes of appearance that
manifest under mutually exclusive experimental conditions. Heisenberg pressed further into the ontological question
by attributing the status of potentia to the quantum state itself (Jaeger, 2017). This Aristotelian term
denotes the mode of being of something that is real but not yet actual, representing a genuine potentiality that
awaits the act of measurement to actualize one of its possible manifestations. Only when detected in a cloud
chamber, for instance, does the cosmic particle “incarnate” in classical reality. On this reading, the
apparent paradox dissolves entirely: there is nothing retrocausal about the situation, because there was never a
determinate classical past to be altered in the first place.
Neo-Kantianism
There are, however, respectable interpretations within the neo-Kantian tradition, the most intellectually
disciplined being Hernán Pringe’s transcendental interpretation of quantum objectivity (Pringe, 2007).
While retaining the classical Kantian categories without modification, Pringe introduces a regulative level on
which the quantum concept is exhibited in intuition only symbolically, mediated through complementary classical
images. Such a Neo-Kantian approach finds strong justification because quantum physics yields no direct knowledge
of the quantum-object-in-itself, restricting our understanding to conceptual constructions formulated in classical
terms. Nonetheless, many physicists find this restriction difficult to accept, demonstrating a persistent
inclination toward realist interpretations.
To recapitulate, Immanuel Kant’s transcendental categories organize not raw stimuli but our experience
of the phenomenal world. They constitute the phenomenal world according to the concepts of the understanding, so
that the world becomes intelligible to us. They are, as Kant says, conditions for the possibility of
experience, giving rise to a world of objects, causality, substance, and quantity. The noumenal, by
contrast, remains the reality as it is in itself, forever inaccessible to our cognition.
But quantum mechanics turns out to violate Kant’s own transcendental arguments, which were tailored to
Newtonian mechanics and Euclidean geometry. Yet on Pringe’s reading, the Copenhagen emphasis on classical
description supplemented by complementary symbolism is not a departure from Kant but an unexpected vindication of
the full architecture of the critical philosophy, including the often-neglected Critique of Judgment. Pringe
draws on the third Critique to argue that reflecting judgment can produce a legitimate form of scientific
objectivity even where determining judgment fails, yielding an objectivity that is regulative, symbolic, and
intersubjective. He concludes:
The quantum postulate is thus not only compatible with Kant’s theory of knowledge, but it has its own place in the system of our cognitive capacities as a principle of the reflecting power of judgment. As soon as the reflecting power of judgment assumes the quantum postulate for its own sake, it becomes the quantum power of judgment. (p. 150)
Unlike other neo-Kantian formulations, this theory does not dispense with the quantum object, even though
quantum objects are not themselves objects of possible experience. The quantum object has objective validity
without objective reality, and this is precisely the status of a transcendental ground. So when the
Copenhagen interpretation demands that “new concepts be applied to the experimental situation,” Pringe
reads this not as the emergence of new a priori determinations but as the operation of the reflecting power of
judgment, which gives the quantum postulate to itself as a maxim (pp. 162–64). The reflecting power of judgment never determines nature; it only prescribes
a principle to itself for reflecting on nature. Quantum objects are thus regulatively real but not
constitutively real: they are necessary intersubjective regulative representations, neither optional
fictions nor mirrors of noumena. Predictive completeness and constitutive knowledge are not the same thing, and
Pringe’s framework drives a wedge between them precisely where the wedge is needed to maintain Kantian
orthodoxy. The view avoids the unmotivated proliferation of new categories that more aggressive transcendental
readings require, and it accommodates the strange fact that quantum theory is mathematically complete while
remaining ontologically ungraspable.
The difficulty with this reading is that it makes quantum formalism suspiciously successful for something that
operates only at the regulative level. Regulative principles, in Kant’s use, do not make precise quantitative
predictions about specific experimental outcomes. Quantum formalism does precisely this. It predicts experimental
outcomes with extraordinary precision; it reveals novel phenomena that were not anticipated when the formalism was
developed (antimatter, Lamb shift, neutrino oscillations, Bell inequality violations) and it constrains future
experimental results in ways that go far beyond the systematizing function a regulative employment is supposed to
perform. A framework that does so much work, constraining reality so tightly and anticipating phenomena so
precisely, is not merely organizing our concepts. It is tracking something. The question is what.
Quantum formalism does not merely systematize known phenomena; it predicts radically novel phenomena, sometimes
decades before they are observed, and it does so on the basis of formal manipulations whose physical interpretation
is not given in advance. This is not the behaviour of a regulative device. It is the behaviour of a theory that has
locked onto something real. Pringe’s regulative quantum object appears to be doing work that looks
suspiciously like what a transcendent ground (an invisible reality “out there”) would do. What is it
about the empirical world that makes the regulative employment necessary in the first place? Quantum mechanics
seems to show the world as already structured in ways that constrain cognition, rather than as raw matter awaiting
subjective form. The mathematical structures of quantum theory (Hilbert spaces, symmetry groups, probability
amplitudes) look uncannily like discovered features of a pre-existing intelligible order rather than like
impositions of subjective form.
A purely regulative employment cannot constrain reality, but can only organize our representations of reality; if
quantum formalism constrains reality, then it is in contact with reality, and the question of what it is in contact
with reopens the noumenal question that Pringe’s framework is designed to suppress. The predictive success of
quantum formalism would be miraculous if the formalism were merely regulative, suggesting that we should commit to
the formalism’s tracking some real structure, whether phenomenal, noumenal, or otherwise. This makes Pringe’s
instrumentalist-leaning theory difficult to sustain in light of the empirical success of quantum physics. Even
though science cannot explain what a quantum object is in metaphysical terms and can offer only classical images
and mathematical descriptions, it is nevertheless the most successful of the sciences. Everything indicates that
our experiences depend on objective phenomena “out there,” precisely the phenomena described by quantum
physics, rather than on any transcendental categories or regulative representations, suggesting that the worldview
of Plato and Aristotle is ultimately closer to the truth.
Pneuma
Kant’s term ‘transcendental’ names the a priori conditions on the side of cognition that make
experience possible, a methodological category about subjects. The term ‘transcendence,’ in the older
metaphysical sense, names a real ontological status: an indiscernible mode of being that exceeds classical
determination. The two terms are not synonymous; they belong to different philosophical registers. Without
reactivating the older sense of transcendence as an ontological category, the conceptual vocabulary for what
quantum mechanics has discovered is unavailable.
For Plato, the forms are separate, transcendent (not transcendental), and participated in externally by
material instances. For Aristotle, forms are conjoined with substance, immanent in the things they inform, not
located in a separate realm. The Aristotelian form has a distinctive mode of being: it is locatable with the
substance yet not a spatially extended object. It is the substance’s principle of being, present throughout
it as its formal cause (Robinson, 2024). Crucially, form in the Aristotelian sense is not an abstract structure or
a mere organizational pattern. Rather, it is an active, immanent principle: a substance’s characteristic
qualities, tendencies, and activities are not features added to a neutral substrate but are the form itself
expressing itself materially. Under this view, the substance is identical with its essential activity and with what
the pre-modern tradition called its insentient will, which is to say its inherent directedness, responsiveness, and
being-at-work. Because these aspects are conjoined rather than separable, they constitute a single, undivided
reality. This is the very metaphysical structure that modern philosophy lost when it reduced form to a passive
abstraction or to a subjective mental category.
On Abraham P. Bos’s reading, the Aristotelian pneuma is not just biological but cosmological and
theological; it is how the logos is transmitted and sustained by a source that is itself transcendent to the
material composite (Bos, 2018). The pneuma thus functions as a mediating substance that is simultaneously
formal and dynamic. This reading transforms Aristotelian pneuma from a biological curiosity into a
metaphysical category for the immanent presence of transcendent rational organization. The divine element,
pneuma, is the instrument functioning as bearer of the divinely emanating power that brings about order and
structure in the sublunary sphere (Bos, 2018, p. 3). Form cannot act directly on ordinary matter without an
appropriate medium. In both living and non-living matter, pneuma is the vehicle of form as logos, and
as such is goal-oriented. It imparts this goal-orientedness to everything with which it is mixed (pp. 138–39). However, Aristotle also says that nature not only uses pneuma as an
instrument, but also as “matter” (p. 194). Pneuma maintains an invisible presence
throughout the sublunary sphere and is also present within earth itself (pp. 144, 149). This does not signify
the presence of the divine essence, but merely reflects the active, formative power of the transcendent God
(p. 102).
Aristotelian form can thus be interpreted as pneumatic form, a subtle formative presence analogous to an
invisible medium that permeates the material world. This principle may well be applied to quantum reality, but it
cannot be taken as the formative principle at a macroscopic scale. According to the modern scientific view, form is
not a static mould but a stable, dynamic state. Matter is not wholly inert; when energized, it exhibits an inherent
tendency to organize itself. The self-organization of matter is the process by which order arises spontaneously
without any blueprint or creator directing it. Matter simply follows basic local physical laws (attraction,
repulsion, diffusion) that naturally propagate outward to generate complex global patterns, such as the symmetry of
a snowflake or the spiral of a whirlpool. By contrast, biological form is active and self-generating, guided by
genetic memory and evolutionary history to adaptively shape and preserve itself across generations, with natural
selection retaining those forms that prove functionally viable.
We may therefore conclude that Aristotelian pneumatic form provides a compelling metaphysical foundation for the
Copenhagen model, much like the historical role of Platonic forms in grounding theology. Under this pneumatic
interpretation, the hylomorphic components of matter and form within the quantum object are understood as distinct
yet inseparable principles. While matter serves as the principle of pure quantum potentiality, form acts as the
actualizing force of classical manifestation, with both principles held in a state of dynamic, reciprocal tension.
This integration is mediated by pneuma, which serves as the active, underlying substance that allows these
distinct principles to cohere as a single, unified quantum reality.
Logoi
Aristotelian, Stoic, biblical, and patristic traditions are independently grappling with the same difficulty: how
does transcendent rational organization become immanently operative in material things? The pneuma, the
logoi spermatikoi, the ruach, and the rationes seminales are different answers to the same
question, arising from partially overlapping but distinct intellectual contexts.
The Stoics understood the logoi spermatikoi as pneumatic in character. For the Stoics, the divine
logos pervading the cosmos is itself a pneuma, the finest and most tensional grade of fire-breath.
The seminal reasons are that logos differentiated into particular organizing principles, each one a seed of
rational form embedded in matter (Sedley, 1998). The Stoic pneuma is admittedly materialist in a way
Aristotle’s is not, but structurally the match is close: in both cases a pneumatic principle carries the
rational form of a natural thing and is itself derived from or continuous with a cosmic divine rationality.
Augustine reframes the concept within a theology of creation: the rationes seminales are the dormant causal
powers deposited by God in matter at the moment of creation, awaiting actualization by appropriate conditions
(Boersma, 2020). This is precisely a case of transcendent rational organization embedded in matter as a kind of
latent form, the divine intellect’s plan for creation stored not as an explicit structure but as a
germinative potential. Augustine does not use pneuma language explicitly for these principles. However, if
one reads the rationes seminales pneumatically, as the operative presence of the divine logos in
matter before its temporal unfolding, the conceptual resonance is genuine. The pneumatic vehicle is implicit rather
than named, but the function is analogous: a formative rational principle descending from divine intellect and
lodged in the natural order as an organizing seed.
For Pseudo-Dionysius, the logoi (λογοι), frequently translated as
‘divine laws,’ ‘preordinations,’ ‘designs,’ or ‘divine wills,’
constitute the divine predeterminations (proorismoi) and exemplars (paradeigmata) through which God
eternally projects, creates, and sustains the cosmos. The crucial formulation is that the logoi are many in
their processions towards creation but one in God; they are not abstractions or mere formal patterns but genuine
divine processions, active, operative, and really communicated to created things (Togni, 2023). Within this
framework, the transcendence of the quantum object relative to classical matter mirrors, within the immanent order,
the transcendence of the logos relative to the created thing that embodies it. The pneumatic vehicle is
precisely what allows the procession to become immanently operative rather than remaining an external paradigm, a
mechanism that Maximus Confessor makes fully explicit. While Pseudo-Dionysius establishes the logoi as
divine paradigmatic causes, Maximus takes the decisive further step of showing how they are genuinely present
within natural things: for Maximus, each created thing has its logos pre-existing in the divine Logos,
functioning not merely as an external model but as an interior dynamic principle of the thing’s being,
motion, and eschatological orientation (Wood, 2017).
Maximus is in this respect more Aristotelian in sensibility, treating the logos as an immanent dynamic
principle rather than a blueprint contemplated from outside, so that their source remains transcendent even as
their mode is constitutive from within. In Maximus all particular logoi are held together and unified in the
divine Logos, the second person of the Trinity. The pneumatic resonance is strong in several respects. The
logoi are genuinely mediatory: they are not simply formal structures but participatory relations binding
each creature to its transcendent ground. Maximus’s logoi have a dynamic, eschatological character:
they are not just the principle of what a thing is but of what it is becoming, which aligns well with pneuma
as a life-generating, not merely form-preserving, power.
However, the Scholastic substantial form (forma substantialis), especially in its Thomistic articulation,
represents a genuine rupture rather than a straightforward continuity. It is the principle of act that makes a
composite substance what it is, but it is explicitly immaterial, received into prime matter as pure act of form
with no pneumatic vehicle. Thomas carefully excludes any suggestion that the form itself possesses a quasi-material
carrier or mediating substance. As Pasnau observes:
Given the tight connection that Aquinas describes between form and matter, it is hard to characterize his theory of souls in general as dualistic. To be sure, in some sense, material substances are a composite of substantial form and prime matter (with accidents on the outside, so to speak, unified only accidentally with the substance). Still, Aquinas takes pains to stress that it is the substance as a whole that properly exists. And he definitely does not think that material substances are a composite of form and body, since the material substance is the body. His unitarian framework deliberately makes it incoherent to speak of the body of a living thing (or of any substance) as something distinct from that substance. (Pasnau, 2024)
In this sense, Scholastic substantial forms may represent precisely the dematerialization or de-pneumatization
of what Bos argues was originally a pneumatically mediated structure in Aristotle. The logos of a thing, for
Thomas, participates in the divine intellect through exemplar causality, not through any descending pneumatic
medium. The Scholastics preserved the formal-causal structure of Aristotle’s account while effectively
excising the pneumatic dimension that, on Bos’s reading, was doing the real cosmological and theological
work.
Nominalism
When form lost its pneumatic vehicle, it became impossible to maintain that forms or universals have any genuine
presence in the world. The consequences for medieval thought were immediate and dramatic, finding their most
decisive expression in the rise of nominalism. According to the late medieval nominalists (Ockham, Buridan, Biel,
and others) things are simply individuals, and all general concepts are nothing more than mental labels applied to
groups of similar individuals, with no real counterpart in the world (Cowling, 2025). Even today, outside the
specialist debates of academic metaphysics, asserting that universals possess an intelligible reality of their own
is widely regarded as a mark of metaphysical excess.
Nominalist epistemology defends a direct realist empiricism, according to which human beings perceive objects
through intuitive cognition (cognitio intuitiva), without the assistance of any innate ideas. Intuitive
cognition grasps the existing individual directly and immediately, impressing the unity of the object upon the mind
as a brute causal given — a unity that is simply assumed rather than explained. A second,
subsequent act of cognition, abstractive cognition (cognitio abstractiva), then groups similar individuals
under general concepts, assigning a common name to them. The intellect’s role is therefore entirely
posterior: it organizes the impression, sharpens its content, and applies a label. Nothing constitutive is required
of it, because the intelligibility of the object is treated as already fully present in the thing itself, delivered
to the mind ready-made. What goes unasked, and unanswered, is what actually grounds that unity in the object in the
first place.
Thus, the object is presented to the mind as an essentially complete and predetermined entity. Its unity and
character are given as brute facts about an individual, which the mind receives without contributing any
constitutive element of its own. The cognitive work of the mind is subsequent and primarily linguistic, consisting
in the post hoc formation of general concepts that group similar individuals under common mental terms.
Intelligibility, such as it is, belongs entirely to the surface of the object, which the mind merely registers.
Nominalism did not so much solve the problem of intelligibility as displace it upward into the divine will,
positioning God as an invisible logos-provider who underwrites the intelligibility of creation without
appearing within the philosophical account of perception itself. Because God directly and reliably creates each
individual, intuitive cognition is able to track this creation with equal fidelity. The object is a unified
individual simply because God constitutes it as such.
The pneumatic medium is precisely what nominalism renders superfluous and consequently eliminates by Ockham’s
razor. Without a transcendent logos to mediate, the pneumatic vehicle has no explanatory function to
perform. The logos cannot be carried into the entity by a non-classical interior medium, because there is no
logos to carry. Under this view, the thing simply is what it is, which is to say a brute individual. Without
the pneumatic account, the organizing principle has nowhere to reside except in the material composite taken as a
whole. The unity of the thing thus becomes an irreducible given, which is not explained by the immanent presence of
a transcendent formal principle but is simply asserted as a fact about the individual object. Stripped of both its
transcendent source and its pneumatic vehicle, the logos contracts into the external surface of the thing
itself, becoming nothing more than the object’s observable configuration and behavioural dispositions.
Arbogast Schmitt (2012) traces the detrimental consequences of abandoning Platonic and Aristotelian epistemology in
favour of an epistemologically naïve nominalism, a move that resulted in what he calls a metaphysical overload of
the individual object. In his words: “The conviction of the theoreticians of late medieval Nominalism that
each individual object is itself an instance of its concept, and that means of precisely one concept, is a source
of much epistemological confusion even to this day” (p. 50). It resulted in a naïve copy-realism
grounded in the belief that one can begin with individual objects and simply derive one’s concepts
“from experience.” (For this reason, many researchers outside the hard sciences have piled up data in
the expectation that a theory would somehow grow out of it.) Every individual object must now present itself as a
complete, “well-determined” instance of its concept, containing everything that belongs to that concept
and disclosing this full conceptual identity in a single, immediate act of intuition. In this way nominalism turns
the individual into an instance of itself — an embodiment of absolute rationality, and even the
direct and immediate embodiment of God. Not humanity but the individual human embodies what is really
a man. If the individual is constantly assured that he already possesses a unique and ineffable individuality, he
not only dissolves into this supposed uniqueness but also loses any opportunity, and any motivation, to develop a
genuine individuality by cultivating his own faculties (p. 499). As Schmitt writes:
He therefore thinks historically and not metaphysically; he is himself the final instance that decides what is true or false, good or bad. In doing so, he constitutes himself as a subject and an individual. He is determined through himself rather than through some external thing; he does not let himself be led by allegedly universal binding norms, but follows his own conscience instead. (p. 521)
Modernity promised liberation through the sovereign individual; it delivered instead a subject cut loose from
form, truth, and its own cultural history — free only to drift.
Subjectivism
If the logos is not in the thing as a transcendent immanent principle, or if it does not participate in its
Platonic Idea, its unity and intelligibility must be constituted somewhere else. The natural candidate is the
perceiving and knowing subject. This migration happens gradually across the late medieval and early modern periods.
In John Locke, the primary qualities of matter are real but the secondary qualities (colour, warmth, texture
as experienced) are contributions of the perceiving mind (Uzgalis, 2024). The object as a unified, intelligible
whole begins to be partly a product of consciousness rather than wholly a structure discovered in the thing. In
David Hume, this reductive process reaches its logical conclusion, wherein substance itself, understood as the
underlying ontological substratum that holds an object’s properties together, cannot be found in experience
and is therefore dismissed as a fiction of the imagination. There is no immanent logos within the thing.
Instead, the object is reduced to a mere bundle of discrete impressions, which the mind habitually associates and
subsequently mistakes for an objective, unified entity (Robinson, 2024).
The Kantian synthesis represents the culmination of this trajectory. For Kant, the unity of the object, namely its
status as a coherent and law-governed entity rather than mere sensory chaos, is constituted by the transcendental
unity of apperception and the a priori categories of the understanding. The categories of substance, causality, and
their counterparts are not discovered within things; instead, they function as the very conditions under which a
mind like ours can experience unified objects at all. The logos, which in the Aristotelian-pneumatic
framework descended from the divine intellect through a pneumatic medium into the natural thing (rendering it
genuinely accessible to intellectual perception), has now been fully relocated into the knowing subject. The
rational organization of nature is therefore something the mind brings to experience, rather than something it
finds there.
The consequence of this trajectory is impoverishment. The realism of the Aristotelian-pneumatic account gives way
to a constructivism in which rational organization is something the knowing subject imposes. The natural thing
loses its genuine interior depth, as it is no longer a participant in transcendent rational order. Subjectively,
knowledge is no longer a real contact between intellect and the logos: the mind encounters only what it has
itself partly constituted. What this trajectory demonstrates is that naïve realism and idealist constructivism do
not constitute genuine opposites, but are rather two distinct phases in the collapse of a single metaphysical
premise. Both positions arise directly from the exclusion of the pneumatic logos from the natural thing.
Without an immanent formal principle to ground the entity, the cognitive relation is reduced to an unsustainable
choice: either the mind passively receives a unity for which it cannot account (naïve realism), or the mind
actively projects a unity that has no objective reality (idealism). The Aristotelian-pneumatic account remains the
only framework in which neither of these unsatisfying conclusions is required. It alone maintains that the
intelligibility of the thing is genuinely there to be known, existing as a real presence in the object through its
pneumatic ground, as a real communication to the intellect through formal participation, and as a reality
transcendent to both in its ultimate source in the divine logos.
It must also be emphasized that macroscopic properties of the object, such as colour, derive ultimately from
quantum reality. This is precisely the philosophical context in which the quantum object becomes so significant, as
it restores what the nominalist trajectory eliminated: a real, non-classical organizing principle that is genuinely
interior to the natural thing, irreducible to its classical material configuration, and entirely independent of the
perceiving subject. It is not the knowing subject that constitutes the quantum object; rather, the quantum object
exists in its own right prior to and independently of measurement, even though its classical properties only become
determinate through physical interaction. This corresponds exactly to the structure required by the pneumatic
account, which posits a logos-bearing reality that is immanent in the thing, transcendent to its classical
surface, and free from the projections of consciousness. The nominalist displacement of the logos onto the
observable surface of matter, and ultimately into consciousness, is retroactively challenged by the quantum
evidence that there is indeed something genuinely non-classical operating inside natural things.
Locke’s epistemology achieved its greatest success not in academic philosophy, but in the wider culture. This
empiricist picture of the mind as a receiver of experience, forming ideas out of sensory data, became the very
self-understanding of modernity. Even those who have never read the Essay Concerning Human Understanding
habitually think in Lockean terms. The interesting complication is that educated people in the post-Kantian world
often maintain a latent Kantianism alongside their operative Lockeanism, remaining entirely unaware of the tension.
When pressed philosophically, they will admit that perception involves interpretation, that observation is
theory-laden, and that the mind is not a passive mirror. Most individuals simply toggle between these two positions
depending on the context, without noticing the inconsistency. By contrast, almost no one in the modern landscape
holds anything resembling the Aristotelian-pneumatic view. This older perspective maintains that the object has a
genuine interior formal depth that is really there to be known, that perception is a formal participation rather
than a causal impression, and that the intelligibility of nature is not the mind’s projection but its
discovery. That position feels strange and counterintuitive precisely because the nominalist flattening of the
object into its classical surface has been so thoroughly successful: this surface is all most people are now
capable of imagining.
The Immaterial Atom
Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg argues that whatever the final interpretation of modern physics turns out to be, it will stand
“nearer to the philosophical concepts… in the Timaeus of Plato than to those of the ancient
materialists” (Heisenberg, 1962, p. 27). He stresses that this is not a dismissal of nineteenth-century
materialism, which incorporated scientific advances unknown to antiquity; still, “the elementary particles of
present-day physics are related rather more closely to the Platonic bodies than to the atoms of Democritus”
(ibid.). Because these particles are defined by mathematical symmetries, they are neither eternal nor strictly
real, but rather representations of underlying mathematical structures. For contemporary physics, “in the
beginning” is not matter but form, mathematical symmetry (which is ultimately an intellectual content).
Hence, Heisenberg invokes Goethe’s Faust to declare that “in the beginning was the word” (the
logos), concluding that the task of atomic physics is to clarify this logos in the fundamental
structure of matter (ibid.).
Heisenberg was deeply fascinated by Plato’s concept that the smallest constituents of matter are not material
entities, but mathematical symmetries, namely the “triangles” of the Timaeus. He returns to this
theme consistently throughout his philosophical and popular writings. Far from existing as abstract, transcendent
concepts in a heavenly realm, the triangles of the Timaeus are immanent geometric structures. They actively
bound and organize the Receptacle (Hypodoché or Chora), which serves as the formless, passive, and
eternal spatial medium in which all physical things emerge, transform, and decay (Roux, 2013). (In this manner,
Plato had already brought the Forms down from the heavens and integrated them directly into the fabric of physical
matter, effectively preparing the way for Aristotle’s formalization of hylomorphism.) Plato famously
describes the Receptacle as the ‘mother’ or ‘wet-nurse’ of becoming, depicting it as
perpetually shaken and in constant motion. Because it is entirely devoid of any qualities of its own, it acts like
a blank canvas or a lump of characterless wax, receiving the mathematical and geometric impressions of the
transcendent Forms to produce the physical universe. While Plato’s Receptacle is most often interpreted as
empty space, the argument of this article suggests that it is better understood as the pneumatic medium.
The emergence of quark theory in 1964 vindicated Heisenberg’s intuition. The parallel between Platonic
triangles and quarks is not merely a loose poetic metaphor, but a structurally precise analogy. All everyday matter
is composed of protons and neutrons, which constitute the atomic nucleus. These nucleons are made up of three
quarks in two different configurations. Because they are bound in groups of three, the fundamental building blocks
of stable matter exhibit a triadic structure, held together by the strong nuclear force (Griffiths, 2004,
ch. 1.8). Analogously, Plato theorized that two types of right-angled triangles serve as the fundamental
building blocks of all physical matter.
Bacon
Although the scientific worldview of Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) depends on alchemical and
mythological concepts, it bears a striking affinity to a pneumatic quantum framework. Bacon postulates two types of
matter, tangible and pneumatic, treating the latter as a vitalist, active, and animating principle that performs
essential metaphysical and physical work. Characterized as warm, highly mobile, and self-determining, this
pneumatic matter serves as the source of all change, transformation, and activity in the universe. While the
celestial ether and the stars are composed of free spirits, Bacon’s framework conversely defines attached
spirits as tiny, highly active pneumatic particles trapped within the pores of tangible, solid bodies. This
structural division corresponds directly to their vital status, where the former constitutes a living spirit
(spiritus vitalis) and the latter is a dead spirit (spiritus mortualis) enclosed in tangible matter
(Jalobeanu, 2025).
With respect to forms, Bacon is an ontological realist who maintains that they are entities existing in nature, and
that a form is objectively identical to the properties it causes. For Bacon, these forms are constant, eternal,
universal, and infallible. His ontology permits no real separation between form and matter, meaning there is no
actual division among matter, motion, and the form of properties. They constitute a single, undivided reality that
scientific inquiry differentiates conceptually only to better comprehend and act upon nature; to this end, Bacon
asserts that forms are in truth the laws of pure acts (actus purus). These laws are identical to the simple
natures of bodies, such as heat, whiteness, or hardness, representing what is fundamentally real at the corpuscular
level and existing in relation to the universe entirely independent of human perception (Manzo, 2026,
p. 196).
Von Hartmann
In his Philosophy of the Unconscious, Eduard von Hartmann (1842 – 1906)
attempted to integrate physical, biological, psychological, and religious phenomena under a single metaphysical
principle. Although this represents an overreach in its original formulation, his conception of physical atoms
aligns with the traditional doctrine of the logoi. While a direct vindication would be too strong a claim,
von Hartmann’s core framework exhibits a striking heuristic parallel with quantum mechanics (a
scientific development unavailable to von Hartmann in his own time). Postulating a cosmic and metaphysical
Unconscious akin to Schopenhauer’s unconscious Will, von Hartmann writes:
The manifestations of the atomic forces are thus individual acts of will, whose content consists in the unconscious representation of what is to be performed. Thus matter is in fact resolved into Will and Idea. Herewith is the radical distinction between spirit and matter abolished; their difference consists only in higher or lower forms of manifestation of the same essence, the eternally Unconscious, but their identity is perceived in this, that the Unconscious manifests itself equally in mind and matter as the intuitively-logical Ideal, and dynamically realises the conceived ideal anticipation of the actual. The identity of mind and matter herewith ceases to be an uncomprehended and unproved postulate, or a product of mystical conception, by being elevated to scientific cognition, and that, too, not by killing the spirit, but by vivifying matter. (1950, p. 180)
Von Hartmann contends that atomic forces are not blind mechanical impulses, but individual acts of Will
whose content is the unconscious representation of the task to be performed. Under this view, matter is resolved
into Will and Idea; that is, into directed activity and the intelligible content of that activity. Rather than
abolishing the spirit-matter distinction by reducing spirit to matter, as materialism does, von Hartmann
recognizes both as manifestations of a single Unconscious, which expresses itself as an intuitive-logical Idea and
dynamically realizes this Idea in the physical world. This formulation is highly reminiscent of
Maximus Confessor’s conception of the logoi as both paradigmatic causes and acts of divine will
(Tollefsen, 2012, pp. 114–15). Indeed, Tollefsen highlights this conceptual
development in Maximian cosmology, noting that the “improvement, as compared with Plotinus, consists in the
introduction and application of divine paradigms as logoi or acts of will that set the limits for the
essential capacity or potentiality of created being” (p. 115).
In contrast to Schopenhauer’s conception of a blind, directionless striving, von Hartmann explicitly
recognizes that the Will possesses content, operating as an intelligently directed activity. For von Hartmann,
the Unconscious is inherently logical, ideational, and representational within its own pre-conscious modality.
Applying this metaphysical framework to quantum reality is less a matter of poetic license than of genuine
conceptual alignment. Indeed, the quantum object exhibits the precise characteristics that von Hartmann
attributes to the Unconscious, namely directedness, ideational content, rule-governed realization, a lack of
consciousness, and an activity that logically precedes the emergence of localized, thing-like being. The electron
is not blind; it is lawfully responsive, “knowing what to do” in the specific sense that its
unconscious Will is imbued with the structural content of quantum dynamical laws.
Von Hartmann concludes that physical force, characterized by a striving or an endeavour to produce a change
(such as the attraction or repulsion of another atom), is fundamentally identical to Will. Just as the human will
constitutes a striving to realize a specific state, so the atomic force operates as an unconscious volition
striving to realize a spatial change. Consequently, the manifestations of atomic forces are, in reality, individual
acts of the Unconscious Will. The Will provides the dynamic power of the atom’s existence, while the Idea
provides the specific mathematical and logical laws that govern how that atom interacts with others. Because atoms
are essentially acts of Will informed by an Idea, they are fundamentally immaterial. Von Hartmann further
asserts that the atomic will is entirely non-spatial, meaning that space and spatial relations do not serve as
containers for the Will, but are instead generated by its activity (von Hartmann, 1950, pp. 181–82). The “seat” of an atom is thus reduced to an ideal mathematical
point where its forces converge. Rather than viewing individual atomic wills as separate, independent substances,
von Hartmann conceptualizes them as phenomenal manifestations, or “functions,” of a single,
unified cosmic entity (the “All-One” or the “Unconscious”). Free from both self-awareness
and the constraints of indecisiveness, this Unconscious is nevertheless characterized by supreme intelligence and
absolute purposiveness.
Although von Hartmann’s theory belongs to the logoi tradition, the pneumatic medium is
conspicuous by its absence. In classical and late antique physics, immaterial principles or divine logoi
require a subtle, highly mobile, and semi-material medium to bridge the ontological gulf between the purely
intelligible and the tangible. This pneumatic vehicle is exemplified by the Stoic pneuma or the Neoplatonic
ochēma, serving as the vital intermediary between body and soul. Historically, this pneumatic medium
served as a crucial middle realm that prevented the collapse of the cosmos into either a stark Cartesian dualism or
an undifferentiated monism. It allowed for a graduated scale of being, within which the spiritual could gradually
condense into the physical. Without this pneumatic buffer, von Hartmann’s metaphysics is highly
polarized: on one side is the purely immaterial Unconscious (Will and Idea), and on the other is the phenomenal
illusion of classical surface matter.
Because von Hartmann rejects Christian creation ex nihilo and the distinct, sustained reality of created
substances, his logoi (the Ideas) and his Will have no vessel or medium in which to dwell. They do not
inform a created nature; rather, they constitute the sole reality, leaving the physical world as a ghost-like
manifestation of a single, un-incarnated Unconscious. There is no intermediate, active, vitalist medium to explain
how the immaterial Will transitions into physical force. This transition is simply absorbed by the omnipotent,
immediate action of the Unconscious, leaving the actual mechanics of physical causality mysteriously ungrounded.
Consequently, the dynamic interaction of logical atoms collapses into a series of unmediated, magical
actions-at-a-distance, where immaterial wills affect one another without any ontological tissue to connect them,
and the theory degenerates into a form of radical monistic idealism. This metaphysical vulnerability might have
been avoided had von Hartmann followed Bacon’s example by retaining a pneumatic principle.
Measurement as incarnation
After nearly a century, physicists still argue about whether the wave function is a real physical thing or just a
calculational tool, what actually happens during measurement, and whether there is a deeper reality underlying the
probabilistic descriptions. The measurement problem remains unresolved, and the nature of quantum reality is still
philosophically contested. Complementary properties like position and momentum don’t simultaneously exist in
definite form. Quantum reality does seem to actively defeat the very conceptual moves we make toward it. There is
no hidden layer of determinacy waiting to be uncovered. Niels Bohr himself concluded that classical concepts
simply cannot apply to quantum reality without contradiction.
A pneumatic interpretation of the quantum measurement problem justifies employing the concept of incarnation as
more than a metaphor, denoting a structurally precise ontological event. What the quantum formalism describes is
not a “thing” but a space of possibility constrained by probability amplitudes. When a detection event
occurs, such as a track in a cloud chamber or a click in a detector, something determinate precipitates out of the
indeterminate, representing not a transition from one region of reality to another, but a transition in the mode of
being: from the possible to the actual, from the indefinite to the definite, and from the unsayable to the sayable.
Because this transition has the formal structure of incarnation in the theological sense, signifying the
becoming-concrete of what was previously virtual or latent rather than creation out of nothing, this philosophical
move entails accepting a transcendent dimension within immanent reality. Under this framework, the world consists
not merely of matter, but also of pneuma, the subtle medium through which intelligible form, the
logos, is present and active in the world. It is pneuma that allows form to be genuinely in things
rather than merely in thought, and that allows the mind to receive form from things rather than merely constructing
it from sensory data. Pneuma serves as the vehicle that bridges the intelligible and the material, giving
universals a real presence in the world and grounding the mind’s ability to read that world truly.
This starting assumption is not itself a scientific finding. It’s a philosophical presupposition: one that
rejects the prior commitment to ontological closure, the very boundary that resists change. Instead, by postulating
a transcendent ground of reality, the sealed box is breached, and something outside the purely physical system can
be responsible for actualizing one definite outcome from among the quantum possibilities. The “problem”
then dissolves, not by being solved mechanistically, but by being reframed within a larger ontological picture.
Insisting on a purely immanent, closed physical reality is not a neutral position; it is itself a very strong
metaphysical claim: that there is nothing beyond the physical. That claim cannot be established scientifically,
considering that science by its method only ever examines the physical. So the playing field between transcendent
and purely immanent ontologies is more level than physics culture typically acknowledges. The mystical traditions
would say that demanding total immanent closure is precisely the category error, since reality by its nature has a
depth that exceeds any closed formal system. Interestingly, this theological insight closely mirrors what Gödel
demonstrated regarding mathematical logic itself.
Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon in which two or more particles become interconnected such that the
physical state of one instantly dictates the state of the other, regardless of distance. This suggests a non-local
unity underlying apparent separateness. On Bohr’s account, an entangled system must be considered an
undivided whole (Murdoch, 1987, p. 194). Yet, the theory can only express this wholeness as correlations
between measurement outcomes, never as an ontological account of what that underlying unity is or means. It points
towards wholeness without being able to inhabit it. Rather than searching for a more fundamental theory, this
problem is resolved by adopting a pneumatic framework: the phenomenon is a pneumatic wholeness. Prior to
measurement, a quantum object is constituted by an Aristotelian immanent form, whereby its laws are identical to
its essence and present within it as its very mode of being. Upon measurement, it incarnates into the classical
world, temporarily assuming a thing-like state in one of its complementary modes. The double-slit experiment forces
electrons or photons into an encounter with classical reality, leaving them no choice but to conform and display
classical behaviour as wave and particle. While classical laws, such as friction, do not exist in quantum reality,
they are nonetheless emergent from it, a transition illustrated by the single-slit experiment, which (contrary to
common assumption) also produces an interference pattern, although less pronounced. This pattern is generated by
what may be understood as a form of ontological friction within the slit, where the physical boundaries of the
classical world resist and constrain the pneumatic reality, forcing it to conform to a wavelike pattern.
The quantum dynamical laws are not laws governing things, but rather the ideational content of un-incarnated
quantum reality itself. They possess an entirely different status: they do not apply to electrons; they are what
electrons are. This is why the Schrödinger equation feels so fundamentally different from Newton’s second
law. While Newton’s law applies to an external object (a mass), the Schrödinger equation does not apply to a
pre-existing “thing”; instead, it describes the evolution of a state that constitutes its own reality.
While the quantum object is inherently self-determining, behaving much like an autonomous software program,
classical objects are entirely devoid of this intrinsic autonomy. The latter are governed by external,
“Platonic” laws, whereas the quantum object is identical to its laws, which may thus be characterized
as “Aristotelian.” The classical world represents the realm of incarnated quantum reality, and the laws
of that realm, understood as the Platonic laws of nature, apply exclusively to incarnated being. They do not apply
to the un-incarnated quantum reality from which this being arose, except weakly in the case of gravity. Measurement
is not a passive registration of a pre-existing fact but an active imposition of the Platonic mode onto an entity
that, prior to measurement, was not in that mode. The measurement apparatus, being itself a classical thing fully
governed by Platonic laws, demands of the quantum object that it answer the question being put to it in classical
terms: a definite position, a definite spin, or a definite outcome. The quantum object, which in its un-incarnated
mode does not have these definite properties, is forced by the measurement situation to incarnate partially, taking
on enough thingly being to register as a determinate outcome in the classical apparatus. The classical world is
contagious; to touch it is to be at least partially and momentarily classicalized.
A complete account of this classicalization must also address within-kind indeterminacy, given that the distinction
between a spin-up and a spin-down electron is itself probabilistically determined. If the electron-kind as a single
ontological reality (the pneumatic Electron-wholeness) individuates into specific electrons at measurement, then
this within-kind indeterminacy serves as the mechanism through which the wholeness distributes itself into
particular actualizations.
This framework calls for a conception of transcendence as “non-contrastive transcendence” (Tanner,
1988, ch. 2), rejecting the picture of a shared ontological space divided by a boundary, which is the very
framework Tanner identifies as deeply problematic. Nor does this model refer to a form of ontological alterity, as
though the transcendent were simply a being of a different kind; the transcendent is not “outside” the
immanent in the way that one region lies outside another. Rather, it is the source from which the immanent receives
all its being, activity, and reality, and is therefore more intimately present to the immanent than the immanent is
to itself. This intimacy is so radical that it transcends even the distinction between transcendence and immanence,
which is precisely why the seemingly oxymoronic phrase “immanent transcendence” is, on reflection, the
correct designation. Quantum reality is in this sense radically transcendent: not sequestered on the far side of a
boundary from the classical world, but present to it as its hidden source and ground. Yet precisely because it is
transcendent, the only way it can become accessible to us is by incarnating itself and revealing itself through
forms familiar to our experience, a dynamic that directly mirrors how theology understands incarnation and divine
revelation, wherein the radically transcendent does not become less transcendent by making itself known, but rather
discloses itself through what is immanent without being reducible to it.
Immanent transcendence
Only the classical, macroscopic properties of matter are incarnate in the Platonic sense; the quantum constituents
remain, in the strict sense, transcendent. Aristotelian hylomorphism, properly understood with its robust
ontological commitment to form as pneumatically active logos rather than as modern abstraction, provides the
conceptual framework for making sense of quantum ontology as immanent transcendence. The quantum entity is immanent
in classical matter, not transcendent to it. It is not a separate realm in which classical matter participates; it
is present in classical matter as its quantum constituent. Yet it is transcendent with respect to classical law, in
that it is not subject to the laws that govern classical matter. It is immanently transcendent, present in matter
as its quantum principle while not being reducible to classical properties. This is precisely the ontological
structure of Aristotelian form: immanent in the substance rather than inhabiting a separate realm, yet irreducible
to its material properties. It is present in the substance as its formal principle (not as a property of a
different ontological standing, but as a vertical dimension of the same being) and remains irreducible to its
horizontal, material properties. The form is immanently transcendent with respect to matter: immanent because it is
in the substance, and transcendent because it is not reducible to matter. This parallel is striking because it
suggests that quantum reality, properly understood, is not a novel feature of the cosmos requiring a new
metaphysics, but rather the rediscovery, in the language of physics, of what Aristotle was already articulating in
the language of metaphysics. The quantum substrate of matter is what Aristotle called form, the immanent
transcendent principle of material being, whereas the classical properties of matter are what emerge at the level
of macroscopic determination, corresponding to what Aristotle called the accidents, the determinate characteristics
of the substance.
The difficulty modern readers have with Aristotelian form is not born of arbitrary prejudice, but rather stems from
Aristotle’s own choice of examples. While he speaks of the form of the horse or the form of the table,
prompting the modern reader to rightly balk, treating “horseness” as a real ontological principle
immanent in particular horses seems like a category mistake, a confusion of the biological with the metaphysical,
or a hypostatization of what is actually just a classificatory convenience. Modern biology, with its evolutionary
and genetic account of species, leaves no explanatory work for the form of a horse to perform, rendering the
concept an idle abstraction. This is why post-Cartesian philosophy generally relegated Aristotelian form to the
history of ideas, given that the forms of medium-sized macroscopic objects are adequately handled by physical,
chemical, and biological descriptions, with their apparent unity resolvable into the arrangement and behaviour of
their parts. Adding form as an immanent ontological principle to these macroscopic entities ultimately seems to
explain what was already explained. Yet this verdict, however reasonable when applied to horses and tables, was
overextended. While modern philosophy concluded that Aristotle’s specific examples were mistaken, it went
further, asserting that the category of immanent ontological form was entirely empty and that nothing in reality
possesses the structure Aristotle attributed to substances. Here, however, the verdict was premature, because
quantum entities do possess precisely this structure. A proton is not a classical object with determinate
coordinates and properties that might be exhaustively described in material terms. While it is not reducible to
classical properties, it is nonetheless a real principle, locatable to matter: an immanently transcendent entity in
the precise Aristotelian sense, whose mode of being requires the very category modern philosophy discarded.
The irony is that Aristotle selected the wrong examples. While horses do not require hylomorphism, protons do. The
metaphysics he developed for the macroscopic world turns out to fit the microphysical world whose existence he
could not have known; consequently, the modern dismissal of his framework, though warranted in the cases he
considered, has left contemporary thought without the conceptual resources to describe what physics has actually
discovered. The primary obstacle is that modern philosophy has obscured this Aristotelian understanding. From its
early modern origins through the analytic tradition, modern thought has generally conceptualized form as a mere
abstraction: a mental construct derived from the comparison of particulars, representing a logical or linguistic
category rather than an active ontological principle. Consequently, the form of “horseness” is treated
merely as a conceptual generalization that the mind abstracts from its experience of individual horses, rather than
as a real, organizing principle immanent in the entities themselves. This modern understanding renders Aristotelian
hylomorphism incomprehensible. If forms are merely abstractions, they cannot be conjoined with substance in any
real sense; they reside only in the mind, not in the substances themselves. Under this view, the substance is
simply the material particular, and the form is merely our cognitive representation of it. This nominalist or
conceptualist interpretation of Aristotle has dominated much of the modern reception of his metaphysics.
However, this modern understanding of form as abstraction is inadequate to the ontological reality that Aristotle
sought to articulate, and it is equally inadequate to the ontological reality that quantum physics is now
revealing. To understand Aristotle properly, and to make sense of quantum reality, we must move beyond this
limitation, requiring a pre-modern or trans-modern understanding of form as a real ontological principle rather
than a mere abstraction. This shift in perspective directly challenges mainstream resistance to treating quantum
objects as immaterial, a resistance that is largely a holdover from the assumption that physics is about matter and
its motions. If physics at its foundations describes non-material realities whose incarnation produces matter, then
this classical framing inverts the true order of explanation. Matter is thus revealed as a derivative phenomenon, a
mere mode of presentation of something more fundamental; indeed, this fundamental level is far closer to what the
tradition called spirit, or what has been termed subtle or pneumatic matter, than to what
modernity called matter.
Participation
Quantum reality, as unveiled by modern physics, constitutes a form of transcendence that offers an unexpected
parallel to the theological claim that the divine exceeds all ordinary categories of being. To the question of how
the immaterial realm might interact with the material, theology responds with the concepts of revelation,
incarnation, and participation, which are three terms describing different aspects of the same transcendent
relation. While these concepts govern the theological understanding of the immaterial-material interface, the
quantum realm interacts with the classical realm in a strikingly analogous manner: the quantum object, unknowable
in itself, reveals itself experimentally under one of its complementary aspects, allowing the human mind to
interpret and clothe the phenomenon in classical terms.
In traditional theology and philosophy, participation (methexis, koinonia) dictated that creatures
share in the divine forms analogically. While this traditional participation describes a metaphysical sharing, it
closely corresponds to the way a quantum physicist structures an experiment, allowing a quantum object to incarnate
through the application of classical forms to empirical data. This conceptual framework originates with Plato, who
sought to understand how particulars acquire their form. He conceived that form is already present within the mind
of the observer, which explains why it can be recognized in the external world. This recognition is achieved
through anamnesis (the recollection of the forms perceived by the soul in a prenatal state, as described in
the Meno, 80e–86c). This is not as naïve as it sounds. On a literal reading,
the concept remains mysterious because the relation of participation is left unexplained; indeed, this is famously
the central problem of the Parmenides, where Plato himself raises and fails to resolve the question of how
particulars and forms are related. On an evolutionary-incarnational reading, however, the structure becomes
intelligible. The form is present in the particular because the particular actually possesses the structural
feature in question, as the pneumatic presence of the logoi. The form is present in the soul because the
soul’s apparatus was shaped to recognize that structural feature through a history of encountering its
instances. Recognition is thus the meeting of two incarnate forms: the quantum form as present in the external
particular, and the form as sedimented in the recognizing organism. There is a recognition because they are, in a
deep sense, the same form expressed in different media.
Human beings are endowed with quantum receptors in the form of our eyes; indeed, the human eye is capable of
detecting a single photon (Tinsley, 2016). Evolution has applied the principle of participation, clothing this
quantum phenomenon in colours such as red, green, yellow, and blue. While modern physics speaks of photonic
frequency corresponding to these colours, this is merely a different form of participation in the transcendent
object. It holds no priority over the lived experience of colour. Both descriptions are equally truthful, and one
could even argue that the immediate experience of colour is the more fundamental truth. Today physicists can
recognize many more quantum phenomena, such as quantum entanglement, superposition, electron up-spin and down-spin,
because they have formed concepts of them. In fact, in an evolutionary-incarnational framework, the form of the
electron’s spin is sedimented into the very geometry of our biomolecules. The homochirality of life is
the physical medium through which the organism “coincides” with the quantum reality of electron spin
(Vardi, 2023). The organism did not need to develop a conscious brain to “think” about spin; instead,
it allowed spin to shape its very physical structure, achieving a perfect, silent recognition. However, an organism
under different evolutionary pressures could have developed “spin-receptors.” Such an organism might
perceive a beam of spin-polarized light or a spin-polarized current not merely as intensity, but as a distinct
sensory quality, a “spin colour” entirely foreign to human experience. One could therefore say that the
physicist’s participatory work of clothing a transcendent reality is a way of radically accelerating
evolution.
Just as we possess photoreceptors that translate a quantum phenomenon into the conscious experience of
“red” or “blue,” we can intellectually conceive that same phenomenon in mathematical and
experimental terms as different wavelengths of light. This leads to the common mistake of regarding light as
consisting of objective waves of varying frequencies which the visual system then converts into colours. In
reality, the eyes do not detect frequency; instead, they register energy through the sophisticated
biochemical process of retinal phototransduction (Mannu, 2014). But “energy” is not a physical object
that one can hold or isolate; rather, it is a conceptual, relational, and ultimately transcendental quantity,
representing a measure of the capacity to do work or effect change. This realization strongly vindicates the
pneumatic hypothesis, mapping perfectly onto a dual-aspect model of participation. While the physicist
intellectually translates this energetic, transcendent reality into the language of frequency, the living
organism, through the slow, creative work of evolution, has already clothed that very same reality as
colour. Both are legitimate, participatory modes of revealing the underlying, ungraspable unity of the
cosmos.
In the pneumatic framework, the active, vitalist, and animating principle of nature (pneuma) is not a
passive bystander to a mechanical world. It adds a strict boundary condition to our existence: we cannot
participate in the transcendent except through a specific medium of participation. We are restricted to the
somatic, evolutionary participation of colour, or the intellectual, noetic participation of frequency. Any attempt
to find a “third way” or to see the “objective wave” directly is an ontological
impossibility. Colour is the physical, incarnate clothing of the pneumatic encounter. Through millions of years of
evolutionary sedimenting, the organism has developed a sensory apparatus that translates the raw, ungraspable
reality of quantum energy into the immediate, qualitative reality of “red” or “blue.” This
is evolutionary pneumatic participation: a deep, somatic, and vitalist “coinciding” with the energetic
environment. Conversely, “frequency” or “wavelength” is an intellectual abstraction, a
mathematical formulation of the intellect (nous) used to map, measure, and predict the behaviour of the
electromagnetic field. Through the act of measurement, the physicist clothes the transcendent reality of energy in
the formal language of mathematics, wave mechanics, and numbers. This is noetic participation: the mind grasping
the formal, structural laws (the logoi) of creation. While this highly refined, conceptual clothing allows
us to manipulate and understand the universe at a distance, recognizing that “energy” itself is a
transcendental concept softens the rigid boundary between the physical and the metaphysical.
This structural relation possesses a kind of objectivity that Platonism was tracking; blue is not arbitrary, nor is
it merely a label we attach to wavelengths. Rather, the blue of the sky is the way a certain real feature of the
world appears to organisms whose perceptual apparatus has been shaped by encounters with that feature over deep
time. When we see blue, we are recognizing something real, a recognition that is anamnesis in a sense: the
activation of a sedimented familiarity that the lineage has built up through long association. While the form of
blueness is incarnate in the world and incarnate in the organism as a perceptual apparatus, it is present in
experience as the meeting of these two incarnations. The form is real precisely because it is the structural
pattern connecting the world’s way of being to the organism’s way of perceiving, which are themselves
bound by a shared evolutionary history. Viewed through this lens, the mutual entanglement of organism and
environment reveals a deeper metaphysical commitment: this framework depends upon non-contrastive transcendence, or
what may be termed a radical immanent alterity. The participatory structure presupposes a non-contrastive relation
between the participant and the participated, because a contrastive separation would render such mutual,
evolutionary participation impossible. While this metaphysical predicament is precisely what Plato struggled to
resolve, a participatory ontology provides the very key to its resolution, harmonizing the structural realities of
both nature and intellect.
Bidirectional incarnation-participation
Indeed, participation is necessary for the manifestation of a world, without which the pneumatic quantum domain
would remain invisible. For Plato, the forms become incarnate in the material world through participation. This is
not merely a logical relation between universals and particulars; it is the metaphysical event of the intelligible
giving itself to the sensible, which is, structurally, what incarnation names. Participation and incarnation
represent the two faces of a single metaphysical event: the ontic self-giving of the transcendent. While
participation foregrounds the receiving, incarnation foregrounds the giving, rendering neither intelligible without
the other. Participation, in its classical formulation, names the relation from below: how the many particulars
stand to the one form, how the finite stands to the infinite, and how the creature stands to the creator. The
grammar is ascending, or at least receptive, in that the lower receives its being, its intelligibility, and its
reality from the higher by virtue of having a share in it. The particular horse is a horse by participating in the
form of horse; the just act is just by participating in Justice; the creature is by participating in Being.
The verb is metechein, meaning to have a share in or to partake. The direction of analysis is from the
participant up towards that which is participated.
Incarnation, by contrast, names the same relation from above: how the higher gives itself into the lower, how the
Form takes on flesh, and how the infinite consents to be finite without ceasing to be infinite. The grammar is
descending, or rather kenotic, whereby the higher empties itself into the lower without abandoning its
height. The verb is sarkousthai, to take flesh, or in the Pauline register, kenoun, to empty. The
direction of analysis is from that which gives down towards the receiving particular. Participation is
bidirectional in that the form is present in the particular without being exhausted by it, just as the soul is
present to the form without being identical to it. The outline of this case is straightforward. A measurement
event, on any non-trivial interpretation of quantum mechanics, is not a passive registration of a pre-existing
fact. Rather, it is the meeting of two contributions: the quantum reality, which exceeds classical description and
cannot be assigned definite classical properties prior to the encounter, and the experimental context, which is
itself classical, conceptual, and irreducibly tied to the choices and categories of the experimenter. The outcome
that emerges, such as this electron at this position or this photon with this
polarization, belongs to neither contribution alone. It is what occurs when the transcendent and the conceptual
meet, and this meeting is constitutive rather than merely disclosive. Bohr recognized this with extraordinary
clarity, even if his vocabulary was constrained by the philosophical resources available to him in the 1920s and
1930s. For Bohr, the phenomenon is the entire transaction: an indivisible whole comprising quantum reality, the
measurement apparatus, and the conceptual frame within which that apparatus is intelligible. This transaction
cannot be decomposed into a contribution from the object alone and that of the subject alone; the very
decomposition that classical physics took for granted is precisely what quantum mechanics has shown to be
unavailable (Murdoch, 1987, ch. 5.4).
The bidirectional structure is central to the pneumatic quantum model. Quantum reality gives itself, descends, and
incarnates, taking classical form within the measurement context. Conversely, the scientist’s concept
participates, ascends, and receives, having a share in this giving. The outcome is the event in which giving and
receiving coincide; it is real, determinate, and revelatory without being the totality of what the quantum is.
Neither pure descent nor pure ascent could account for the phenomenon. A pure descent-theology of measurement would
assert that the quantum simply causes the classical outcome, leaving the experimenter to contribute nothing but a
passive registration. This is roughly what realist construals attempt, and they fail because they cannot account
for the ineliminable role of the measurement context as a whole. Conversely, a pure ascent-theology of measurement
would assert that the experimenter constructs the outcome out of their own categories, leaving the quantum to
contribute nothing but bare, unstructured material. This is roughly what radical constructivist construals attempt,
and they fail because they cannot account for the discipline of nature — specifically, the fact
that experiments yield specific results that constrain rather than merely receive our concepts.
The phenomenon is bidirectional, both contributions are real, and the outcome is the meeting itself. This is why
the so-called interpretive disputes in quantum mechanics have been so intractable for so long. Each major
interpretation tends to be a one-sided absolutization of a single moment within this bidirectional structure. The
pure realist interpretations, such as hidden variables or certain readings of Everett, try to recover a fully
descending account in which there exists, somewhere, a complete classical fact of the matter independent of
measurement. Conversely, the pure instrumentalist or strongly observer-dependent interpretations try to recover a
fully ascending account in which the quantum state is merely a bookkeeping device for the experimenter’s
information. Neither side can quite allow the structure to be what it actually is, which is to say a bidirectional,
participatory-incarnational meeting of a transcendent reality with a concept, because neither side possesses the
philosophical vocabulary to describe such a structure. The vocabulary that does exist for it is theological, and
that theological vocabulary has been off-limits to physics since the seventeenth century. Consequently, physicists
have attempted to describe a participatory-incarnational event in the only language available to them, which is the
language of classical realism or its operationalist negation. These descriptions keep failing because the event is
not a classical event.
It is important to emphasize that, within this framework, consciousness is not the origin of form. Consider first
what actually occurs in quantum physics. The physicist does not invent the classical concepts of position,
momentum, and energy from nothing. These concepts were not dreamed up in a vacuum and then imposed on a passive
world. Rather, they emerged over centuries of embodied interaction with a world that resisted arbitrary
description. The concept of position is not a free creation of the mind; instead, it is the crystallization of an
entire history of bodily experience in which the world disclosed itself as spatially structured. Similarly, the
concept of momentum emerged from the experience of things in motion, of forces encountered, and of resistance met.
These forms carry within them the sedimented history of the world’s own self-disclosure through human
engagement with it. To say that consciousness is their origin is therefore misleading if it suggests that
consciousness produced them unilaterally. They arose between consciousness and the world, in the space of
interaction. They are forms of encounter, not forms of invention.
If the classical forms were purely mental products, understood as arbitrary conceptual schemes projected onto
formless stuff, then consciousness would be world-creating in a strong and troubling sense, and the entire
construction would collapse into idealism. But this is precisely what the pneumatic framework denies. The potential
is not formless, nor is it chaotic. Rather, it possesses its own structure, which determines which forms can be
successfully applied. The potential constrains the form as surely as the form determines the potential. Neither
side is sovereign, and co-determination means exactly this. Human consciousness is world-co-creating as one of the
two poles of the constitutive process. The world that appears is neither a discovery of what was already there, as
realism asserts, nor an invention imposed by the mind, as idealism claims. It is a co-constitution in which neither
pole can claim priority. The deepest implication, perhaps, is that the world we inhabit phenomenally is neither a
veil over reality nor a construction imposed on a mute given. Rather, it is the real face that reality has assumed
through its long encounter with the creatures who now perceive it. The blue sky is not a subjective imposition;
instead, it is the way the transcendent object of sunlight scattered through the atmosphere has learned to appear,
mediated by creatures whom that very light shaped to be capable of receiving such appearances.
By way of clarification, to say that theology and the grammar of quantum measurement share a bidirectional
structure does not mean treating physics as confirming theology, or theology as anticipating physics. Rather, we
can recognize this structural unity without dissolving their differences, honouring the convergence without forcing
their respective contents to agree.
The (not so) unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
Mathematical knowledge possesses the peculiar phenomenology that Plato first observed and which has perplexed
philosophers ever since. When we grasp a mathematical truth, this apprehension has the character of recognition
rather than empirical discovery; we see that it must be so, and this seeing carries a necessity that empirical
knowledge lacks. Plato took this as evidence that mathematical objects belong to a separate realm to which the soul
has direct access. The naturalist tradition has struggled to explain this phenomenology without invoking such a
realm, and its dominant strategies, namely formalism, logicism, and fictionalism, all leave residual puzzles
regarding why mathematical reasoning is so remarkably effective at describing the physical world. The
evolutionary-incarnational reading offers a different account: mathematical structures are recognizable because
they constitute the deepest patterns of the world, shaping our cognitive apparatus pervasively through their
presence in every encounter our lineage has ever had with reality. Numerical and geometrical regularities are not
features of one particular type of object; rather, they are features of being an object, of being multiple, of
occupying space, and of standing in relation. These features are so universal that any cognitive apparatus shaped
by interacting with the world would inevitably be structured by them. The necessity we feel in mathematical
recognition is the necessity of structures so deeply sedimented in our cognitive architecture that we cannot
conceive of experience otherwise. They represent anamnesis in its purest form, as they are the most ancient and
universal of the bodily memories our lineage carries.
Whatever their status as separate substances, the forms are real as patterns within the structure of the world.
Cognition is genuinely adequate to them, but this adequacy is the historical product of an evolutionary encounter
rather than a prenatal vision. Consequently, while the a priori remains genuinely transcendental for the individual
experiencer, it is actually the sedimented record of a posteriori encounters at the level of the lineage. The
entire structure thus exhibits the incarnational shape of a transcendent and immanent meeting in flesh, which
itself becomes the very bearer of their encounter. Seen in this light, the “unreasonable effectiveness of
mathematics” is not as mysterious as it is often assumed to be. If we were to investigate the mathematical
properties of a machine, such as a mechanical clock, we would not be surprised to find that the dimensions of the
cogwheels are proportional to the movement of the hands on the dial. Mathematics demonstrates that such machines
possess an underlying logical order, without which they could not function. In a similar manner, the material world
operates according to a coherent logical structure, which is the very condition of our existence.
Incarnation at a cosmic scale
As previously argued, the measurement apparatus, functioning as a classical entity, demands that the quantum object
respond in classical terms, such as a precise position or spin. The quantum object, which in its un-incarnated mode
lacks these definite properties, is compelled by the act of measurement to adopt sufficient thingly being to
register in the apparatus. Ultimately, to touch the classical world is to be momentarily classicalized. While this
bidirectional structure in quantum mechanics is clearly evident within the measurement event, this localized
phenomenon does not necessarily generalize to a metaphysics of all reality. To say that the quantum object
incarnates classically when measured is not yet to claim that all reality is participatory-incarnational in its
fundamental structure. In fact, material reality functions as a continuous measurement structure, as the quantum
object inevitably interacts with its surrounding environment. Through this contact, quantum decoherence occurs.
This is the process by which a quantum system loses its quantum properties, such as existing in multiple states at
once, and begins to behave like a classical, everyday object (Bacciagaluppi, 2025). When particles in the
environment collide with the quantum system, they scatter its delicate quantum information. This interaction
effectively “measures” the system, destroying its state of superposition and forcing it to settle into
a single, definite classical reality.
If the fundamental level of reality is incarnational in its measurement structure, and classical reality is
constituted through measurement-like events, then this participatory structure is not a mere peculiarity of
laboratory physics. Rather, it is the ongoing event by which classical reality is sustained. Every classical fact,
on this reading, is the residue of a incarnational event in which the quantum gave itself into a specific context.
The cosmos is not a collection of classical facts that quantum mechanics happens to describe in a peculiar way;
instead, it is a continuous participatory event whose classical face is its incarnate aspect. Many physicists
working on decoherence are now saying something very similar, though in purely scientific terms. Additionally,
alternative theories propose that the gravitational field of a massive object, or even the background fluctuations
of spacetime itself, continuously “measures” quantum states, thereby inducing gravitational decoherence
(Anastopoulos, 2022). This mechanism explains why classicality remains so robust at the macroscopic level. If
macroscopic objects are inherently classical, they will never spontaneously enter a state of superposition,
regardless of how thoroughly we shield them from external interference. Such a result is precisely what we would
expect if the agent of classicality is universal and unshieldable, which is the defining characteristic of
gravity.
While standard cosmological models must appeal to a brute initial condition to explain the low entropy of the early
universe (Dowden, 2026), the pneumatic model explains this low-entropy state as an ontological necessity. In its
un-incarnated state, the early universe was a single, transcendent quantum object not yet partitioned into a
multiplicity of classical things, which implies that cosmic evolution is the progressive fragmentation of this
primordial unity through ongoing incarnation. Lacking both internal differentiation and thingly multiplicity, an
un-incarnated reality offers no distinct elements to be permuted or redistributed, a condition that restricts the
system to a single, unique configuration and thus precludes the possibility of a high-entropy state. Given that
entropy measures the distinguishability among individuated physical states, a reality that has not yet partitioned
into distinct entities possesses only a single, undivided state. The low entropy of the early universe is therefore
not a mystery requiring a specialized boundary condition, but is instead the logical consequence of a cosmos that
has not yet undergone the process of incarnation.
This perspective invites further speculation. While the arrow of time has long resisted physical explanation due to
the time-symmetry of fundamental physical laws, the present framework offers an alternative solution by aligning
temporal direction with the progressive process of incarnation. Here, the direction of time is identified with the
direction of incarnation, proceeding from an un-incarnated quantum origin to an increasingly Platonized classical
present characterized by determinate forms. The arrow of time represents the direction of this partitioning because
the cosmic process of incarnation is fundamentally irreversible, given that a physical system, once classicalized,
cannot return to a state of undivided, un-incarnated potential. This systemic irreversibility of incarnation
ultimately provides the metaphysical ground for the irreversibility of physical time itself. Incarnation requires
time because it constitutes a transition from one mode of being to another. Time and incarnation are therefore
co-original; neither can occur in the absence of the other, and time is the dimension along which incarnation
proceeds. This relationship implies that time is asymmetric even at the fundamental level, since incarnation itself
is asymmetric and lacks any inverse operation. Time’s arrow is simply the metaphysical asymmetry of
incarnation. The apparent time-symmetry of fundamental dynamical laws is a feature of the un-incarnated mode only,
wherein time exists merely as an external, metrical parameter. In this state, the Schrödinger equation remains
time-reversible because un-incarnated reality possesses no internal directionality. Once incarnation begins,
however, irreversibility necessarily appears, because the process of incarnation is itself the source of cosmic
directionality.
While the theory of cosmic “heat death” predicts a final state consisting solely of radiation (Drake,
2026), this outcome suggests that the universe may ultimately re-enter a pneumatic state of exactly zero entropy.
Under this view, the cosmos transitions from an initial state of zero entropy, through a phase of ever-increasing
cosmic entropy, and finally back to zero entropy. This return occurs because an expanded universe populated
exclusively by massless radiation loses all scale and physical boundaries, thereby erasing the very distinctions
required to define a high-entropy configuration. By eliminating all thingly multiplicity, the cosmos returns to an
undivided, un-incarnated unity that possesses only a single, unique state. This cyclical thermodynamic trajectory
raises the fundamental question of what such a return signifies.
While these proposals are admittedly speculative, they are entirely consonant with the broader framework of the
pneumatic theory, finding a natural physical analogue in the quantum-to-classical transition. Rather than serving
as an external addition, the physics of decoherence and the metaphysics of pneumatic incarnation mutually clarify
one another, suggesting that the emergence of classical “thinghood” is the physical manifestation of an
underlying metaphysical process. This metaphysical process stands in sharp contrast to the standard cosmological
picture, which attributes no agency to the cosmos and regards cosmic evolution simply as an unfolding sequence of
events. The framework proposed here offers a coherent account of the orientation of cosmic evolution, granting the
process a clear metaphysical character. Here, the universe is actively incarnating itself, driving the progressive
transition of an un-incarnated quantum substrate into a fully realized, thingly existence. Ultimately, the rise of
physical complexity marks the successive stages of this cosmic incarnation.
Conclusion
Ancient and medieval traditions possessed a remarkably stable intuition that the structures we encounter in nature
are not brute givens, but rather the expressions of formative principles. The mode of being of these principles is
neither material in the modern reductive sense nor mental in the modern subjective sense; rather, it is the very
source of the distinction between the material and the mental as it appears within experience. The
“spirits” of things, in this classical sense, represent what things are before they are interpreted by
any particular cognitive apparatus, and they render any such interpretation possible precisely because they are
what give themselves to be read. The traditional concept that encompasses precisely these features is
spirit. This refers not to spirit in the modern, diluted sense of mere subjective inwardness, nor to spirit
in the dualistic sense of a substance opposed to matter, but to its older, richer sense of a formative principle:
that which imparts form, possesses form to give, and expresses itself in incarnation according to its own nature.
The classical tradition designated these principles as species in the original Latin sense, or as
eide or logoi in the Greek tradition, representing the formative principles that enable things to be
what they are and to appear as they appear.
Plato and Aristotle are indeed close to the truth, and the precise manner in which their positions are justified
can now be rigorously articulated. What is absent in Plato is a principle of activity inherent to the forms
themselves, specifically when applied to sensible qualities (understood as quantum phenomena) rather than to
macroscopic objects such as tables. The pneumatic framework provides this very resolution by showing that the forms
are always already immanent in matter as the formative tendencies of material things to be what they are, and
always already present in cognition as the sedimented record of a lineage’s historical encounters with these
tendencies. This is likely to provoke resistance in modern readers, deriving from a historical narrowing of the
conceptual imagination. Although physicists recognize that quantum particles are “self-willed,” the
modern scientific worldview still treats matter as inert and form as either subjectively imposed or epiphenomenally
emergent. This conceptual landscape is the result of a deliberate metaphysical decision made in the early modern
period: the decision to bracket formal and final causation in favour of efficient and material causation alone, and
to treat the resulting picture as ontologically complete.
Although this decision proved methodologically fruitful for specific modes of inquiry, it was never empirically
vindicated, and the costs of treating it as ontologically complete have now become glaringly evident. Indeed, this
framework can account neither for consciousness and the cognitive adequacy of perception, nor for the fit between
mathematics and the world, the felt character of phenomenal qualities, and the recognitional structure of
cognition. Each of these explanatory failures points to the same underlying inadequacy: the elimination of formal
causation has left us without the conceptual resources to articulate what actually occurs when mind and world meet.
Reintroducing the formative principle, whether designated as spirit, form, logos,
eidos, or formative tendency, is essential to restoring these resources without sacrificing the
genuine insights of post-Kantian philosophy and evolutionary biology. This is not a return to pre-modern
metaphysics, but rather a passage through modernity to a position on its far side. While pre-modern traditions
possessed the concept of the formative principle, they lacked a clear understanding of the bidirectional structure
of cognition, the historicity of the cognitive apparatus, and the strict transcendental conditions of experience.
Modernity gained these critical insights, yet lost the formative principle in the process.
The blue of the sky is the incarnation of a real formative principle, met through a perceptual apparatus that is
itself the historical product of a long-standing encounter with that very principle. This colour is recognized in
experience as the body remembers what the lineage learned, standing in relation to a tiered order of formative
principles that includes, above the lower spirits of material things, the conscious and wilful spirits whose nature
it is to know their own forming. While Plato and the medievals glimpsed this reality, we are now in a position to
see it with a clarity they could not possess, precisely because we have passed through the critique that taught us
the bidirectional structure of any apprehension and the historicity of any perceiver.
© Mats Winther, 2026.
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