Enlarge your mesoscopy : a philosophical reflection on the human scale and projectual ontologies

Abstract

Several modern and post-modern philosophical efforts directed towards understanding human ontologies recognize the limit of their inquiry in the ‘human scale’. In other words, philosophers concerned with ontological interrogatives often consider their questions to be inescapably determined by our possibilities to perceive and classify our environment as human beings. Maurizio Ferraris, for example, deemed ontology to be primarily concerned with the perceptibility and invariance of common things that human beings can encounter, interact with, and understand via their proximal experience of the world. More specifically, Ferraris identified in mesoscopy (the middle scale, the spatio-temporal scale of phenomena that human beings can natively perceive and understand) the fundamental context of any human ontologies.

The concept of mesoscopy that was just outlined relies on an essentialist understanding of the human being, a perspective that Ferraris shares, at different levels and among others, with Martin Heidegger. From their perspective, our possibilities to perceive the world, manipulate it, and think about it (our ‘scale’) depends on characteristics of the human being that are, in essence, universal. In line with this belief, philosophers embracing an essentialist perspective would claim that the technologies that are constitutive to human existence (in everyday life as well as in scientific research or space exploration) do not effectively broaden the reach of human ontologies, but rather distance mankind from their native and genuine relationship with reality.

In this essay, I argue that ontologies that do not accompany mankind and its socio-cultural practices in its historical process of change and self-discovery cannot be expected to provide reliable foundations for our progressively more technically-mediated social practices. Consequently, the discipline of ontology can only be expected to be relevant and useful in our progressively more technologically-involved society if reframed in ways that can accompany socio-cultural practices in their historical process of change, and that can assist mankind in its projectual pursuit for meaning, balance, and self-discovery. In the attempt to overcome an essentialist understanding of ontology, and supported by insights coming from the philosophy of technology, this essay proposes to reframe the discipline of ontology as an historical and projectual branch of philosophy.