Welt und Zeit—The Fragmentation of Ontology, 20:21—21. Februar 2025

In the unfolding of world and time, understood here in the broadest sense as both a continuation of what has been laid down before and as a new philosophical investigation into the essence of Being, we confront the horizon of ontology in its most expansive form. The present text seeks to disclose the subtle yet pervasive structures that underwrite our understanding of the real, while reckoning with the political and social tumult of our contemporary world. At the heart of this philosophical undertaking is the very notion of ontology itself—a notion so often relegated to the domain of abstract philosophy but which, upon careful reflection, reveals itself as the bedrock of all our endeavors, from the mathematician’s formulations of the infinite to the politician’s quest for power, from the psychoanalyst’s excavation of the unconscious to the historian’s interpretation of revolutions. This project, by its nature, seeks to traverse the boundaries traditionally imposed between theory and praxis, culminating in a meditation on what it means to exist, to act, and to endure across the manifold dimensions of time and space.

Ontology, taken as the study or discourse on Being, is never merely an abstract treatise suspended in a world of pure ideas; it is in constant negotiation with the political and historical conditions of its articulation. The early moments of the twenty-first century—amid global unrest, economic crises, rapid technological innovation, shifting power blocs, environmental catastrophes, and the ongoing redefinitions of democracy—remind us that the question of Being is not an idle speculation but the main concern of life.

In the same way that Freud located the genesis of psychic conflicts in the hidden layers of the unconscious, so too can we locate the genesis of ontological inquiry in the hidden presuppositions that underlie our most fundamental beliefs about the world. The psychoanalytic lens teaches us that illusions and repressions are not anomalies to be dismissed but structural elements that shape our experience, reminding us that the exchange of consciousness and the unconscious always informs the relation between individual subjects and the societies in which they function. In a world where the boundaries between public and private, personal and political, are increasingly porous, Freud’s insights illuminate the manner in which ontological positions are themselves always laced with desire, fear, and yearning. The tension between what is recognized and what remains unacknowledged in the depths of collective and individual psyches mirrors the tension in ontology between the explicit articulation of Being and the unspoken assumptions that sustain it.

Freud’s psychoanalytic revelations meet Hegel’s dialectical vision when we observe how the political realm itself is shaped by contradictions that demand resolution. Hegel’s dialectic, as a metaphysical project, insists on the conglomerate of thesis and antithesis that yiels a contradictory synthesis that both sublates and transcends the prior determinations.

Despite the historical distance from Hegel’s own era, we can see the legacy of this movement today whenever conflicts on the global stage crystallize into new orders and institutions that, in turn, harbor the seeds of their own eventual contradiction. The spiral of history, as Hegel might envision it, is not simply an external phenomenon but is rooted in the ontological structure of reality itself: Being is never still, never reducible to a static concept, but unfolds historically in relation to human consciousness and social conditions. This is evident in the shifting alliances, trade agreements, and cultural dialogues that are forged in response to crises such as war, pandemics, or the climate emergency, each step revealing the contingency yet necessity of progression toward some new form of collective identity. From this vantage, ontology cannot be severed from politics, because the dialectical nature of Being unfolds within and through political relations, institutions, and policies. The upheavals we witness are not random disruptions of an otherwise placid reality; rather, they are expressions of an ontological dynamic that compels Being to manifest itself in ever-new determinations.

In the wake of these dialectical transformations, Heidegger’s emphasis on Dasein as the question of Being provides another crucial perspective. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology in Being and Time sought to uncover the primordial structures through which human beings relate to Being, time, and the world. Reimagining this project, we realize that the relationship between the individual existence and the totality of the world’s unfolding is not accidental but constitutive.

The meaning of Being emerges only through the temporal structures of our existence, where past, present, and future coalesce in the act of understanding, projection, and engagement. Ontology, therefore, becomes a question of how we are in the world as beings shaped by time, tradition, and possibility. In our current political context, where issues of identity, borders, and belonging are increasingly charged, Heidegger’s insight into the facticity of our thrownness in the world resonates powerfully. We do not choose the epoch, the crises, or the heritage into which we are born, yet we are called upon to take responsibility for how these conditions shape our being-in-the-world. The ongoing debates over immigration, global governance, and the lingering shadows of colonialism remind us that the structure of Dasein is complexly interconnected with collective histories, collective guilt, and collective hope. We stand not as isolated individuals but as participants in a shared destiny, each decision or action a node in the web of Being that echoes across our social and ecological spheres.

Yet it is precisely here that the question of ontology as ontology comes to the fore. If ontology signifies the study of Being, then the real core of that definition lies in recognizing that Being is not an inert substrate but an unfolding process shaped by, yet exceeding, the totality of our conceptual frameworks. In other words, ontology must be understood not only as an abstract classification of entities—stones, trees, humans, institutions, and so forth—but as the disclosure of the very horizon within which such entities come to appear as intelligible or unintelligible, significant or insignificant.

And herein lies the link to political reality: the horizon of the political, within which states vie for supremacy, communities articulate their identities, and laws are established or broken, is always undergirded by an ontological dimension that remains obscure. At times, we glimpse it in moments of crisis or in the radical transformations that follow revolutions. In those interstitial phases, the presumably solid ground of our shared reality trembles, revealing that the structures we took for granted were always contingent. It is then that we perceive that ontology is not a static set of categories but the matrix of possibility that shapes our collective existence.

To illustrate the interchange of these dimensions, one might introduce a small grain of mathematics, even within the vast philosophical enterprise. Mathematical structures, in their pure form, appear to stand as examples of an ideal ontology, one seemingly detached from politics and history. Yet if we consider, for instance, the concept of infinity in set theory, we see that even this notion, refined by Cantor and others, relies on an initial understanding of what it means for something to be. Infinity, as a meta-concept, challenges the boundaries of finite comprehension and gestures toward that which exceeds determinate being. This mirrors, at a structural level, the tension within ontology itself: Being is that which enables all entities to manifest, but it perpetually surpasses any finite conceptual enclosure.

Similarly, the debates about whether there can be multiple infinities, or the tension between potential infinity and actual infinity, reflect fundamental questions about the nature of reality, difference, and the limits of conceptualization. These mathematical examples, though seemingly removed from everyday political concerns, force us to see the deeper point that any discourse about what exists (and how) leads us back to the question of how we constitute the horizon of Being in the first place. And so, even the mathematician’s speculation on transfinite numbers is not wholly divorced from the statesman’s speculation on the global order: each, in its own domain, grapples with the question of limits, the possibility of the new, and the nature of structural necessity.

If we go back to the political sphere, we see how the illusions, desires, and intersubjective games that Freud analyzed are, at bottom, part of an ontological drama in which entire populations express the drive for recognition, security, and meaning. Political leaders tap into these drives, forging ideologies that promise to reconcile deep-seated anxieties with visions of a triumphant future. The moral panics, scapegoating, and collective fervors that we observe are not random but symptomatic of the concealed aspects of subjectivity and the pressure of the overt demands of social existence.

In times of upheaval—such as the widespread discontent with global inequality, the backlash against perceived elitism, or the anger fueling populist movements—the question of Being (and belonging, existence) surfaces in the public sphere. People seek a grounding, a stable ontological reference point that can anchor their sense of self and community amidst dizzying change. This search often manifests in the reassertion of traditional identities, but it may also open pathways to more radical reconfigurations of social, economic, and political structures. In either case, the notion of Being, implicitly invoked, becomes the silent partner to these collective struggles.

Such reflections exemplify the indispensability of Hegel’s dialectic for interpreting the political present. History, as the labor of Spirit, is neither an accidental sequence of events nor a linear progression but a self-unfolding process that forces contradictions to transform into yet more problems at a higher level. If we follow this line of thought, every political impasse, every cultural antagonism, every intensification of power structures and every eruption of counter-movements signal deeper ontological schisms, played out over the stages of collective and individual consciousness.

The illusions of progress or the illusions of an imminent catastrophe both risk missing the nuance that Being’s historical manifestation always includes a forward-thrusting negativity. That negativity is the engine that propels us beyond the present limitations, even if the path forward is often fraught with regressions and unexpected diversions. Thus, Hegel teaches us that no political reality is final and no ontological category is absolute. What stands today as an apparently insurmountable contradiction may become the seed of tomorrow’s ascension towards a new problem or yet a new synthesis. By recognizing this dialectical motion, we gain an ontological perspective that prevents despair in the face of conflict and opens the way to transformative action.

Meanwhile, Heidegger’s reflections provide an equally necessary caveat: we must not mistake the dialectical process itself as a final explanation. Beyond the conceptual elaboration of contradiction and resolution lies the lived immediacy of Dasein, whose essence is temporal and contextual. Our struggle with the question of Being is also our struggle with mortality, with the uncanny sense of being thrown into a world we did not choose, with an awareness of finitude that no historical or political narrative can ultimately assuage.

Whether we look at the global stage, where rising geopolitical tensions threaten the stability of entire regions, or at the individual sphere, where existential anxiety gnaws at the self, we see that the question of what it means to be is simultaneously a question about how to embrace the presence of time as it carries us inevitably towards the future and ultimately to our own end. The quest to articulate an ontological definition of ontology, then, can never be divorced from this existential dimension: Being is what enables beings to appear at all, but it is also defined by the irreducible experience of being a particular existence in time.

To define ontology as ontology thus means to recognize its double status as both theoretical discourse and existential unveiling. It is a definition that places the question of Being at the core, not as a single proposition but as an ongoing inquiry into the nature and possibility of existence. In political terms, this translates into a recognition that every constitution, every law, every social movement is an embodiment of certain ontological commitments, even if they remain implicit. To speak about democracy, for instance, is to speak about an ontology of equality and freedom, about a vision of the human being as inherently dignified and capable of self-governance. To speak about authoritarianism, conversely, is to speak about an ontology of hierarchy and subjugation, where power is concentrated and the individual is subordinated. Each political form carries within it a tacit understanding of what truly “is” in the social realm. Whether we adopt the perspective of Freud, who would analyze the libidinal energies binding masses together around authoritarian figures, or that of Hegel, who might read the same phenomenon as part of a dialectical progression, or that of Heidegger, who would ask how the phenomenon discloses a particular mode of Dasein, we remain within the ambit of ontological reflection onto itself, clarifying what it means for humans to exist and how that existence is shaped by collective structures.

At this juncture, there is a clear impetus to explore how past conceptual shifts—from a static understanding of reality to a more dynamic framework, from an unexamined view of consciousness to an awareness of underlying depths, and from seemingly stable global orders to transformative upheavals—can open new avenues for reflection. This perspective highlights the need to consider the question of Being in all its political, psychoanalytic, dialectical, and existential facets. The idea of “Welt und Zeit,” understood as the interplay of an all-encompassing world and the temporal flow of existence, illustrates a fundamental paradox in ontology: it remains both universal and particular, constant yet elusive, shaping collective realities while simultaneously transcending the confines of any single historical or conceptual framework.

We find ourselves in an era in which technology accelerates changes in communication, labor, and socialization at an unprecedented pace, rendering the structures of global politics precarious and fluid. In some sense, technology opens new pathways of Being by reshaping the very fabric of social interactions, collapsing geographical distances while forging new divides. Identity politics, border conflicts, ecological crises, and economic stratifications now occur on a stage that is increasingly global, and yet the dissonance between cultural particularities has never been more salient. In these circumstances, the ontological question resurfaces with renewed urgency: what is the fundamental condition that allows these disruptions, transformations, and emergent orders to manifest? How do we as human beings, defined by Freud’s analysis of consciousness and unconscious drives, by Hegel’s dialectic of Spirit, and by Heidegger’s temporality of Dasein, locate ourselves in a reality that seems to exceed all previously known limits?

The answer, or rather the continued quest for an answer, lies in the realization that ontology is not a purely theoretical venture but an ever-renewed unveiling of Being’s dynamic presence. We come to see that ontology, in (re-)defining itself, must be ever vigilant to the shifting currents of politics, to the revelations of psychoanalysis, to the logic of dialectical reason, and to the existential demands of finite human life. Ontology is thus the fundamental questioning of what is, into how things come to be, and of why we find ourselves in a perpetual state of openness to new meanings. This inquiry leads us into the political realm, because the articulation of new meanings—new conceptions of freedom, new visions of social justice, new expressions of collective identity—is always already a negotiation with power and authority. It also leads us into the psychoanalytic realm, because no grand political narrative can be divorced from the hidden impulses, traumas, and desires that shape both leaders and followers. And it leads us, ineluctably, into the existential realm, because it is the individual human being, in all her thrownness, who ultimately shoulders the burden of history and feels the weight of time.

In drawing together these threads, one sees that the ontological definition of ontology is itself an endeavor that crosses multiple frontiers—intellectual, social, and affective. Its definition can never be final because the object of its study, Being, is inexhaustible and historically manifest. What we can affirm, however, is that in ontology, we find the principle that unites the dimension of thought with the dimension of action, the sphere of the unconscious with the structures of rationality, the heritage of philosophical tradition with the ongoing transformations of the modern world. If In the Wake of Thought beckoned us to consider the effects of previous conceptual legacies, then World & Time (Welt und Zeit) calls us to inhabit the question of Being with a renewed sense of urgency, guided by the political imperatives of our day and the existential imperative of our finite mortality. Each political debate, each psychoanalytic insight, each dialectical movement, each technological innovation urges us to confront the fact that ontology remains the primal horizon upon which our shared reality unfolds.

Thus, the very notion of ontology—the discourse on Being—must be recognized as a living, breathing questioning rather than a static system of classification. In the thick fog of political upheavals, we see how precariously our social constructs hang in the balance, reminding us that ontology is inextricably linked to what is at stake in the real world.

Freud’s vision of the unconscious invites us to examine the motives and libidinal energies driving political movements; Hegel’s dialectic compels us to discern the logical and historical necessity behind these movements; Heidegger’s existential ontology underscores that we ourselves, each individual Dasein, must face our ownmost possibility and own our collective heritage. In that sense, the pursuit of an ontological definition of ontology becomes an existential, political, and philosophical task of self-understanding. It is a stance that says: to define Being is not merely to speak about the universal structures of reality but to acknowledge the way in which we, in our finite temporality, perpetually re-enact and redefine those structures. Through the lens of mathematics, we sense that even the infinite can be approached in myriad ways, and each approach reveals a foundational stance about what it means for something—be it a set, a number, or an entire cosmos—to exist.

Ontology defines itself by illuminating the preconditions of definition itself. It tells us that every articulation, every classification, every theorem, every political constitution, is only possible because Being grants the space in which entities may appear and discourse may unfold.

At the same time, it reminds us that Being is not exhausted by any single articulation. History, psychoanalysis, and the existential dimension come together to ensure that no final closure is possible. We move from Hegel’s dialectic to the complexities of contemporary global politics, from Freud’s theory of repression to the mass mobilizations of collective identities, from Heidegger’s meditations on time to the real experience of climate crises and global migrations. Through it all, the ontological question remains a constant undertone, vibrating beneath every ephemeral political debate and every ephemeral theoretical fad, calling us back to the core enigma of existence. To write in the continuation of In the Wake of Thought is therefore to respond to this call—to merge together the strands of our historical moment, our philosophic heritage, and our personal encounter with Being, and to present them as a variety of notions that reveal the complexities and profundities of the ontological dimension.

One might say that ontology, as the unrelenting inquiry into the nature of what is, (into what women are, as Freud might hint) is both the oldest question in philosophy and as the most urgent contemporary task. We define ontology by enacting it, by living through its demands to ask how it is that anything at all—political structures, unconscious drives, mathematical infinities, historical dialectics—comes forth into presence.

And yet, that living enactment cannot be divorced from the world’s current tribulations, from the crises that expose the fragility of our established orders, from the time that flows irreversibly through each of our individual lives and through collective history. This, then, becomes the world and time as we form the crucible in which Being appears, and it is our task, as philosophers, citizens, and human beings, to meet that appearance with lucidity.

By exposing the ontological foundations of our political discourses, psychoanalytic investigations, dialectical movements, and existential experiences, we fulfill the project of defining ontology as ontology: the perpetual unveiling of that which is most fundamental, most elusive, and yet most real—the question of Being itself.

One now rises to the fore with the unrelenting question: fragmentation. It is as though the structures we once considered immovable—political alliances, economic certainties, cultural identities, even the boundaries between the natural and the artificial—have begun to crack under the pressure of relentless change, revealing previously hidden fault lines.

The figures who once strode across the political stage, conjuring illusions of solidity, now preside over a scene in which unities shatter one by one, leaving only shards of belief and belonging in their place. Their charismatic calls to greatness splinter into echoing soliloquies of discontent, while followers, once solidly anchored, disperse under the weight of disappointment. Even our conceptions of reason itself, buttressed by mathematics and the promises of technological leaps, fracture into innumerable questions about what remains truly human when the frontier of intelligence blurs into computational systems.

Such fragmentation has taken on a distinctly global resonance. The conflicts that erupt across borders, the armies amassing at contested frontiers, and the ensuing humanitarian crises testify to a moral and existential fracturing of international order. We watch institutions that once promised cohesion strain at the seams, as old alliances are tested by new ambitions and resentments.

Diplomacies once forged in the name of unity teeter under relentless assault, battered by forces that revel in disorder and strategic realignments. The swirl of contradictory ideologies—conservative versus progressive, nationalist versus transnational—no longer yields coherent debate but a cacophony of irreconcilable voices. Hegel’s dialectic, once the master of history’s forward momentum, appears caught in endless negation, with no unity in sight. The event that might combine these contradictions hovers beyond the horizon, while each new rupture reveals the staggering fragility of our shared convictions.

Meanwhile, the technological frontier, once heralded as the path to universal advancement, forces us through even more fragmentation. Grandiose proclamations of interplanetary civilization and the harnessing of infinite data mask the deeper tremors: jobs lost to automation, ethical dilemmas unresolved, and economic disparities that widen in lockstep with innovation.

As advanced learning systems produce reams of content at a velocity the human mind can scarcely follow, our sense of what constitutes genuine thought dissolves in an ocean of generated images, texts, and voices. The boundaries that demarcate human agency—once anchored in language, creativity, and reason—fray, replaced by an uneasy collaboration with or submission to the inexorable logic of code. No longer can we confidently assert that we control our tools; rather, those tools threaten to define and reshape the realm in which we live, leaving us to question if our cherished illusions of mastery were always precarious fantasies. Heidegger’s warning about technology as a mode of revealing resonates with a violent twist in this moment of fragmentation: the world is disclosed not as a realm of open possibility but as a crumbling stage upon which we search for meaning while the very essence of Being slips away.

Nor does psychoanalysis remain unscathed. Freud, who taught us to probe beneath the veneer of civility to the seething layers of repressed desires and anxieties, is now a distant observer of a world in which the barriers between inner and outer life have disintegrated.

The raw impulses of the psyche erupt into the public sphere, fueled by instantaneous communication and the dissolution of social taboos. The mass mind, once disciplined by shared norms, fragments along lines of personal grievance, identity politics, and conspiratorial worldviews, manifesting a primal scene of hostility and longing. Transference, once the hidden engine of private therapy sessions, transforms into a collective mania, as political figures exploit base impulses to maintain fractious yet fervent support. In an age of near-constant spectacle, the illusions that once discreetly fueled authority now stand exposed in their full nakedness, and that exposure, rather than prompting healing, provokes further disintegration. The psychoanalytic insight into the unconscious thereby becomes a key to decode the agonizing shattering of once-coherent frameworks of meaning.

Mathematics, too, finds itself captured in this narrative of dissolution. What was once the epitome of conceptual unity—the language of pure reason—manifests now in computational feats that fragment knowledge into data points and pattern extractions. The very notion of infinity, so elegantly explored by set theory, is paradoxically harnessed to fuel the exponential consumption of resources and information, pushing the planet to ecological brinksmanship. The tranquil beauty of mathematical structures stands at odds with the reckless leveraging of those structures to capitalize on market shifts, surveil populations, or wage algorithmic warfare. One is reminded of Hegel’s admonition that pure abstraction, disconnected from the concrete unfolding of Spirit, can become a cold engine of estrangement. And so, even the domain of the infinite splinters under pragmatic exploitation, leaving the mathematician’s dream of transcendent order tarnished by the realities of geopolitical tension and economic inequality.

Against this panorama of crumbling certainties, the notion of Being that we have seek to illuminate seems threatened by an ever-encroaching dissolution. We witness how the integrative force that once bound communities, nations, and indeed individual selves begins to fray, undone by the relentless churn of historical upheaval.

And yet, from Heidegger’s vantage, the fracturing of the world might itself serve as a more primordial disclosure: if Being is that which can never be fully grasped or enclosed by a single interpretation, then fragmentation could signal a radical unveiling, a moment in which the illusions of stability are shattered so that a more authentic question of existence may arise. But the violence of such a moment—the suffering it inflicts on actual lives caught in political or military conflict, the psychic toll it exacts on those whose identities crumble—cannot be romanticized. The dissolution is real, wounding, and marked by the pain of disorientation. We do not know if redemption lies ahead, for the present swirl of catastrophe offers no easy promise.

Still, if we follow the teachings of Freud, Hegel, and Heidegger, we come to see that no dissolution is absolute; it may, in time, herald the gathering of new possibilities. The psychic fragmentation that convulses the collective might spur an eventual reckoning, wherein illusions are not merely replaced by further illusions but are truly confronted and understood.

The dialectical fractures that tear political structures asunder may lay bare contradictions that cannot be ignored, forcing a reckoning that leads to unforeseen paradigms of cooperation or governance. The technological fragmentation, while eroding older notions of human agency, might inspire a deeper reflection on what it means to be creative, ethical, or finite in an age that tempts us with the fantasy of limitless, algorithmic perfection. And so, the very dynamic of fragmentation, for all its ferocity, might become the impetus for a deeper, more authentic encounter with the question of Being that animates our inquiry.

Whether such an encounter can redeem the present moment remains unknowable. The risk persists that the rupture will intensify, that illusions will persist, that the world’s fragmentation will yield not to a higher unity but to a deeper abyss. We stand at the threshold, witnessing the dissolution of once-taken-for-granted certainties, torn between the hope for transformation and the dread of permanent fracture.

In acknowledging this fragmentation as real and potentially catastrophic, we nonetheless heed the call of ontology to see in every crisis a revelation of concealed structures. If this has led us here, then perhaps its central lesson is that the unmaking of our world—its splintering into innumerable shards—can only be faced by engaging the ontological question ever more resolutely.

That question, the question of Being, is the one thread that persists, even in dissolution, reminding us that to exist is to remain open to the ceaseless exchange of creation, destruction, and renewal. And in that openness—in the shattered landscape of our so-called certainties—we might yet discover an unforeseen pathway through dissolution, toward whatever new horizon beckons from beyond the fragments now strewn around us.

Simon Gros

Welt und Zeit—The Fragmentation of Ontology, 20:21—21. Februar 2025

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Welt und Zeit—The Fragmentation of Ontology, 20:21—21. Februar 2025

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