Ethical and Epistemic Criteria Page

Ethical and Epistemic Criteria of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity

The Ontology of Emergent Complexity rejects philosophical traditions that seek validity in the absolute, in transcendence, or in the norm. Both in the realm of knowledge and in the realm of action, the criteria of legitimacy are neither inherited nor deduced: they are inscribed as operative effects, produced within the unstable matter that symbolically reorganizes itself.

I. Epistemic Criteria

The epistemology of the current is based neither on representation nor on revelation. There is no exterior “real” to be described, nor a “truth” to be attained. Thought is a symbolic functional gesture, and its criteria are internal to the field in which it operates. Knowledge is valuable not because it reflects, but because it transforms coherently.

1. Operative Coherence

A concept is valid if it produces consequent symbolic reorganization. Thought must prove capable of creating new conditions of intelligibility and operation, even if partial and unstable.

Coherence here is not formal logic: it is functional consistency within a living symbolic field.

2. Power of Symbolic Reorganization

Validity emerges from the capacity of a concept or philosophical gesture to reconfigure the field in which it operates. To think is to redistribute the forms of the possible — it is not to repeat what is already known with new language.

Theory is valuable not for being true, but for being effective as a symbolic reorganization of the real.

3. Rigorous Rational Justification

Every philosophical gesture requires a clear argumentative inscription. Internal coherence, the articulation of operations, and symbolic chaining are minimum conditions of validity.

It is not enough to intuit or proclaim: it is necessary to show how the concept operates, where it acts, and what it transforms.

II. Ethical Criteria

The ethics of the current does not derive from universal norms or transcendent moral categories. It is the symbolic inscription of the relationship with the other as a material and vulnerable presence. Ethics emerges from the encounter, not from the rule.

1. Ethics as a Response to the Finitude of the Other

The other is neither an abstract principle nor a legal subject: it is the interruption that reorganizes my symbolic field. Ethics is not an obligation: it is an effect of the inscription of shared vulnerability.

2. Rejection of Normative Morality

There is no set of universal duties applicable to all bodies and contexts. The ethical imperative is not universalization, but concrete attention to what reconfigures the common.

Morality is code; ethics is gesture. The current chooses the gesture.

3. Listening as Ethical Exposure

To listen is more than to welcome: it is to allow something to disorganize and reinscribe us. Listening here is not tolerance — it is the symbolic risk of being reorganized by what arrives.

Ethical listening is exposure to the other as limit and possibility, without the need for empathy or identification.

Conclusion

In the Ontology of Emergent Complexity, thinking and acting do not require foundations, nor exterior norms. Both are organized around immanent, material, and operative criteria, which demand:

• symbolic consistency,
• effective reorganization of the possible,
• ethical attention to the transformation that traverses us.

Epistemology and ethics are not distinct branches: they are different effects of the same symbolic reorganization of matter.