Welt und Zeit—Emerging Fields, 12:03—1. March 2025

Just as knowledge advances by questioning its own presuppositions, so too do emerging fields of study arise when reality presents phenomena that confound established categories. These nascent disciplines – often interdisciplinary and liminal in nature – reflect a transformation in the ontological landscape of the present age. They beckon philosophy to interrogate not only their content but their very coming-into-being: What does it mean for a field of knowledge to emerge? How do these fields alter our understanding of what is (ontology) and how we come to know it (epistemology)?

The present chapter goes into the ontological character of emerging fields in contemporary thought, focusing on two salient examples. The first is the rise of Happiness Studies in the last two decades – a concerted academic turn toward the systematic understanding of human happiness. The second is the pressing debate over whether violence in the virtual realm can bleed into reality – a discourse sharpened by recent observations of extreme online violence potentially giving rise to real-world acts of brutality. In examining these cases, we engage implicitly with a legacy of philosophical reflections on violence and ideology, allowing insights from earlier thinkers to infuse our analysis without overt citation. The goal is a seamless ontological discourse that navigates the threshold between the virtual and the real, between the emerging and the established, and situates current events within the broader dialectic of thought and lived experience.

The emergence of a new field of study is never a trivial event. It signifies a shift in the horizon of intelligibility – a broadening of what society and scholarship deem worthy of systematic attention. In classical terms, one might say that where once a certain domain of human experience existed only in potentia, it has now become actual as an object of knowledge. This transition from potentiality to actuality marks an ontological shift: a new region of “being” is delineated on the map of human understanding. Such shifts do not occur in isolation; they are conditioned by historical and social transformations. As the world changes, so too do the questions we pose. Each emerging field carries with it the imprint of its time, reflecting urgent needs or aspirations that earlier paradigms left unmet. At the same time, to formally recognize a subject as a field is to bestow upon it a certain legitimacy and reality. The field is institutionalized through journals, courses of study, research programs – in effect, it gains ontology in the social world. Thus, emerging fields stand at the intersection of thought and being: they arise from new ways of thinking about the world, and in turn they reshape the very reality they study by carving out novel ontological domains.

Consider the field of Happiness Studies, which has burgeoned over the past two decades. Not long ago, “happiness” was largely confined to the qualitative realms of philosophy, art, or at best, a minor topic in psychology. It was a concept more at home in Aristotelian ethics or utilitarian moral calculus than in laboratories and statistical surveys. Today, however, happiness has been drawn into the light of rigorous inquiry. Psychologists measure subjective well-being with elaborate surveys and neurological correlates; economists incorporate happiness indices into evaluations of prosperity; sociologists examine the social conditions of life satisfaction; even policy-makers speak of gross national happiness alongside gross domestic product. In short, what was once a nebulous private feeling has become an object of knowledge – something that can be studied, quantified, increased or diminished by identifiable factors. This encapsulates a key epistemological development: the subjective is rendered (partly) objective, the ineffable translated into data. Underlying this development is an ontological assertion that happiness, ephemeral as it may seem, is real enough to be the subject of science. One might say that happiness has been ontologically elevated from mere inner experience to a measurable component of the world.

Such an emergence did not occur ex nihilo. The rise of Happiness Studies corresponds to a broad cultural moment – a response to perceived crises and gaps in our understanding of progress. In the late twentieth century, it became evident that increases in material wealth and technological advancement did not straightforwardly translate into increased well-being. A paradox emerged: societies growing richer were not necessarily growing happier. This realization, coupled with the growth of positive psychology in the early 2000s, challenged the prevailing notion that objective conditions (income, health, security) alone suffice to describe human flourishing. The burgeoning field was thus driven by a dissatisfaction with purely economistic or clinical portraits of human life. It asked: what if the essence of human flourishing cannot be reduced to material terms? In pursuing this question, Happiness Studies positions itself in a lineage of philosophical inquiry tracing back to antiquity, yet it does so with modern tools. It straddles a line between normative and empirical: it not only seeks to understand what happiness is and how it arises, but implicitly grapples with how life ought to be organized to foster it.

Ontologically, the inclusion of happiness as a focus of scientific study expands our conception of what counts as real in human sciences. Traditionally, states like happiness might have been regarded as secondary qualities – real only inasmuch as individuals felt them, but not the stuff of objective analysis. The new field contests that relegation. Happiness is treated as having a quasi-objective existence: an individual’s self-reported happiness is taken to correspond to something happening in the brain, in social interaction, perhaps even in one’s existential orientation to life. By quantifying happiness and mapping its determinants, researchers ascribe a kind of being to it, as if happiness were a field that manifests patterns, causes, and effects discernible through study. This move raises deep philosophical questions. Can something so subjective be effectively captured in the net of scientific objectivity without losing its essence? Do the numbers on a survey or neurotransmitter levels truly grasp what happiness is, or do they merely capture its shadow? Here we encounter a classic epistemological problem: the attempt to know and objectify a phenomenon may alter how we conceive its ontology. As happiness becomes an academic subject, it risks being reified – treated as a “thing” that one can have a quantity of, rather than a holistic quality of life. The benefit is that we glean practical insights (for instance, about the impact of social relationships or income on well-being), but the cost might be a technocratic simplification of what it means to be happy.

Crucially, the emergence of Happiness Studies also has an ideological dimension that must be navigated carefully. Whenever a field gains prominence, it can be harnessed to certain agendas. The scientific study of happiness can empower policies that genuinely improve lives – for example, by highlighting the importance of mental health or work-life balance. Yet, one cannot ignore that a preoccupation with measuring happiness might serve to placate deeper discontents. There is an implicit narrative that if only we tweak life circumstances correctly – adjust the economy, tailor our personal habits – universal contentment is achievable. Such a narrative can slide into a gentle form of ideological control: an exhortation for individuals to self-optimize and remain positive, even in societal conditions that might warrant discontent or revolt. In a subtle way, this reflects how an emerging field can become entwined with the ontology of the social order. Happiness, in being elevated to a key metric, becomes almost a mandate – a target state that society expects of its members. The unhappiness of the individual is in danger of being pathologized as a failure to follow the prescriptions that the new “science of happiness” provides. Thus, behind the laudable aim of increasing well-being lurks the specter of a normative coercion: a society that demands happiness may overlook injustices that breed unhappiness in the first place. The field then sits at a crossroads of liberation and ideology – it can enlighten us about human well-being, but it can also become an instrument to ignore or gloss over structural causes of suffering by focusing on individual psychological adjustments.

If Happiness Studies exemplifies an emerging field oriented around a positive condition of human life, our second case pivots to a far darker phenomenon: the nexus of virtual and real violence. In recent years, a troubling discourse has gained urgency, driven by instances in which extreme online violence appears to be linked to real-world acts of brutality. We are confronted with accounts of individuals – often young and without prior history of violence – who immerse themselves in the most horrific corners of the internet, consuming images and videos of torture, mutilation, and death, and who then commit murder or other violent acts in reality. Such cases have led experts to argue that there is an emerging type of perpetrator, one who goes, as it were, from “zero to one hundred” in a short span. The hypothesis is that the virtual exposure serves as a catalyst or training ground for actual violence, effectively eroding the psychological barriers that would normally restrain an individual from inflicting extreme harm. Scholars and criminal justice specialists are now grappling with how to identify and understand this phenomenon. In effect, a new subfield is materializing at the intersection of criminology, psychology, and media studies – one that seeks to map the pathways by which virtual violence transubstantiates into physical violence.

The debate surrounding online violence and its real-life consequences is, at its core, an ontological debate about the status of virtual experiences. Can an action or experience in the virtual realm (watching a video, participating in a simulated scenario, engaging in violent role-play online) possess a reality potent enough to transform an individual’s being and likely behavior? On one side of the debate, the argument is affirmative: the virtual is not a neutral void; it has a reality of its own that seeps into the psyche and can fundamentally alter one’s disposition. In this view, violent online content is not “just images” or “just play” – it is an encounter with violence in a way that can desensitize empathy, normalize brutality, or even arouse a dormant capacity for aggression. Repeated exposure to virtual violence might then be seen as a kind of training in cruelty, breaking down the distinction between seeing and doing. The threshold between the virtual and real is thus perilously thin; the screen becomes a permeable membrane through which destructive impulses pass.

On the other side of the debate, skeptics caution that we must not conflate correlation with causation. They point out that many individuals consume violent media or online content without ever committing real violence. According to this perspective, to assume a pipeline from virtual violence to actual violence is to entertain a simplistic causality, perhaps driven by fear of new media. These critics urge an epistemological humility: our understanding of how virtual content impacts behavior is still developing, and hasty conclusions might lead to moral panic or overreach. Indeed, calls for a new approach to identify would-be offenders based on their online activity raise ethical questions reminiscent of science fiction.

There looms the specter of a preemptive justice system acting on “virtual” evidence of a crime not yet committed. If authorities were to surveil or intervene against individuals solely for their virtual inclinations, we would step into treacherous ontological territory: treating thoughts or virtual actions as equivalent to real ones. The law traditionally confines itself to acts and intentions in the tangible world; expanding it into the virtual realm would mean reconceptualizing what we count as violence or threat. In fact, society is already grappling with this dilemma, as it invokes counter-terrorism strategies to identify potential perpetrators who have no prior offenses except a trail of digital extremity. Such moves implicitly echo earlier philosophical quandaries about the legitimacy of using violence (or coercive force) to preempt violence – raising anew the question of how far a legal order can go in policing the border between thought and action.

To navigate this complex terrain, one must recognize that the digital age has indeed altered the phenomenology of violence. The experience of violence is no longer limited to direct physical encounter or traditional media; it is ambient in the online world, where images and narratives of conflict, cruelty, and suffering circulate with unprecedented intensity. Contemporary political events bear this out in dramatic fashion. A war unfolding in one part of the world is live-streamed and mediatized globally, so that distant audiences are virtually transported into the warzone, witnessing devastation in real time. Acts of terror or atrocity are recorded and disseminated expressly to blur the line between the event and its spectators, to recruit and radicalize. Meanwhile, in the sphere of politics, rhetorical violence online – hate speech, incitement, the glorification of brutality in extremist corners of social media – can spill outward, manifesting as street violence or shaping the actions of lone actors who have been incubated in virtual echo chambers. The virtual phenomena manifest in reality with alarming directness: what begins as a digital murmur can become a roar in the real world. For instance, one can point to episodes where online conspiracy theories or extremist ideologies, propagated in virtual communities, culminated in very concrete acts of violence and upheaval in society. These occurrences press upon us the realization that the virtual is enmeshed with the real in a feedback loop; the two cannot be cleanly separated in ontological terms. The “virtual world” is not a detached realm of fantasies without consequence – it is part of the fabric of actual social being.

Philosophically, this recognition compels us to revisit the concept of violence itself. Violence is traditionally understood as a forceful breach of the integrity of some being – a body, a community, an order. But if images and words can precede and precipitate such breaches, they too partake of violence in a mediated form. There is a chain that links a seemingly innocuous virtual action (like clicking a video) to an outcome in blood. To comprehend this chain, one must consider both the subjective dimension of violence and what might be called the systemic or symbolic dimension. The subjective dimension is the direct, visible act of violence by an identifiable agent – the murder, the physical harm. The systemic or symbolic dimension refers to the invisible background, the field of discourse and power in which violence is seeded. An emerging field studying online violence must therefore grapple with more than just the psychology of a lone killer; it must analyze the entire ecosystem of digital content, cultural norms, and perhaps the quiet violence of ideology that saturates our environment. This includes the way society might tacitly accept daily virtual brutality as normal entertainment, or how economic and political structures allow such content to thrive. In this sense, the extreme case of a “0 to 100” killer might be less a bizarre anomaly than a symptom, illuminating by contrast the latent violence that pervades everyday life virtually. The horror such a killer unleashes is an eruption of what had been accumulating in the shadows of virtual experience.

Merging insights from past thinkers into this discussion, one detects echoes of an ontology of violence that predates the digital era yet finds new applications here. For example, it has been suggested that violence can be either instrumental, serving some law or order, or it can be a pure eruption that founds a new order or shatters the existing one. In the case of emerging forms of violence, we might ask: is the violence stemming from virtual inspiration purely destructive, or does it serve some unarticulated end? Perhaps these acts force society to reckon with the inadequacy of current preventative paradigms (much as earlier outbreaks of violence forced reforms in law and policing). There is also the consideration of systemic violence – the subtle, often invisible violence inherent in the status quo – versus the subjective violence that shocks us in events. An emerging field that focuses on online violence must not lose sight of this distinction: if we obsess only over the spectacular crimes of individuals, we may neglect the underlying culture of violence and alienation that nurtured them. In this sense, the scholarly inquiry into virtual-to-real violence must remain cognizant of ideology: how narratives about violence are framed, what is deemed a cause or merely a coincidence, and who benefits from those interpretations.

Bringing the two cases – happiness and virtual violence – into a common view, one discerns a pivotal theme: the liminality between the virtual and the real and how crossing that threshold transforms both individual lives and intellectual landscapes. Happiness, as a field of study, represents the crossing of an interior, virtual ideal (the ideal of a good life, the imagined state of contentment) into concrete research and policy – the virtual notion of the “good” becomes a factor in worldly decision-making. Violence in the digital age represents the crossing of virtual content (images, simulations, online interactions) into tangible action and suffering – what was thought to be contained in the play of shadows on a screen steps into daylight. In both, there is a movement from latency to manifestation. The emerging fields concerned with each are attempts to understand that movement. They ask: how does something latent become actual? How does a mere idea, or an experience in the mind, attain the weight of reality? These are fundamentally ontological questions, reminiscent of age-old inquiries into how form relates to matter, or how potentiality realizes itself.

Yet unlike the abstract treatments of those classical questions, here we face them in highly concrete and pressing forms. The potential for happiness or unhappiness in a populace becomes an object of measurement and intervention, highlighting how deeply our intangible inner states matter for the health of society. The potential for violence incubating in a virtual space becomes a matter of public safety and ethical urgency, forcing us to enlarge our conception of where dangers to the social fabric come from. In grappling with these, contemporary thought edges into new territory. It must, for instance, develop an epistemology that can handle phenomena that are diffuse, interdisciplinary, and morally charged. Emerging fields often lack the neat boundaries and clear methodologies of established disciplines. They are defined by open questions rather than settled answers. This is what makes them intellectually exciting and challenging: they demand integration of perspectives and a tolerance for ambiguity. The philosopher stepping into these debates must be willing to operate at the crossroads of empirical data and conceptual analysis, of moral concern and ontological exploration.

It is also notable that both happiness research and virtual violence research have direct implications for how we live and organize society – they are not remote theoretical pursuits. They feed back into our lived experience. Governments, corporations, and communities pay attention to findings about happiness; those findings might influence workplace policies, urban design, education, healthcare priorities. Similarly, the understanding of online radicalization and violence influences legislation on internet regulation, shapes law enforcement training, and even guides how platforms moderate content. In this way, emerging fields are participatory in constructing the reality they examine. They do not merely observe from a distance; they are entwined with praxis, shaping interventions and norms. The ontology of an emerging field thus includes a reflexive component: the field’s existence and findings become part of the world, altering the very phenomena under study. Consider that as we become more aware of the determinants of happiness, individuals and institutions might alter behavior to optimize happiness, thereby changing the distribution of happiness itself in the world. Or as awareness rises about the dangers of extreme online content, societies might impose new limits or develop counter-narratives, thus changing the landscape of the virtual violence itself. The field then must evolve again, in a dialectic between understanding and reality.

Stepping back, we may see a larger picture of why such fields emerge in our time. The early twenty-first century is characterized by unprecedented interconnectedness and reflexivity. We have the tools to scrutinize ourselves at the collective level – to gather massive data about subjective states, and to monitor the flows of information and influence that permeate our lives. With such tools comes a new self-consciousness of society. It is as if humanity has turned its analytical gaze upon dimensions of life once left to personal reflection or unexamined habit. The question of happiness, once the province of philosophers or spiritual leaders, is now tackled by statisticians and neuroscientists. The spread of hatred or compassion, once limited by physical proximity, now occurs in global virtual networks, prompting urgent inquiry by anyone concerned with the future of social order. Our era’s transformations – the digital revolution, the crisis of meaning in a consumerist culture, the geopolitical turbulences playing out on social media stages – provide the fertile ground from which these fields spring. They are, in a sense, the spirit of the age coming into explicit consciousness. The world and time (Welt und Zeit) we inhabit call forth these inquiries as necessary responses to its challenges.

The ontological nature of emerging fields lies in their role as mediators between what is nascent in reality and the knowledge that can apprehend it. They arise when the extant matrix of knowledge encounters phenomena it cannot fully account for – whether the quiet crisis of meaning behind the pursuit of happiness or the novel forms of violence spawned in virtual domains. These fields carve out new ontologies: they stipulate that things like “happiness” or “online violence” are not only real, but of foundational importance, deserving sustained thought. And as they do so, they transform our epistemological frameworks, compelling new methods and interdisciplinary syntheses. In their dense academic pursuit, they remain philosophical at heart, continually probing that liminal space where concept meets experience. The inquiry into emerging fields is thus itself an emerging field of philosophical reflection – one that must remain ever attentive to both the seen and the unseen, the actual and the virtual, the promise of new knowledge and the cautionary wisdom of critical insight. Through such inquiry, we navigate the evolving contours of world and time, seeking orientation amid the transformations of contemporary thought and lived experience.

Simon Gros

Welt und Zeit—Emerging Fields, 12:03—1. March 2025

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Welt und Zeit—Emerging Fields, 12:03—1. March 2025

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