The following text is not meant to be read dogmatically, but as part of a process of thought. Feel free to engage with it, comment, specify, explore, criticise. Think with me.

 

One of the possible short definitions of dialectics, etymology-based, is: to think through.

This sort of process should not imply necessarily a dualism of the positive and the negative.

If one thinks through the Creal, through the invisible multiplicities that are the subtle stuff in which we are immersed, we are not only getting through the negative, but through all sorts of crealia, most of them probably indefinable in human language, because human language cannot express A and non-A at the same time. Crealectics does not objectify the negative nor the positive. At the level of crealia, nothing is positive or negative per se, not even only posinegative or negapositive, but infinitely charged in ways we cannot clearly imagine or formulate, although we can feel it confusedly.

I proposed to call crealia (rather than realia) the multiple points of contact between the Creal and the Real. The Real is made of objective realities, bodies, consciousness, objects, institutions. The Creal would then be the pre-objective and pre-conscious reality. Perhaps a proper definition of the Creal should include the Real. Perhaps we should posit that the Creal is the Real + the flowing immanent subtle potentialities that are not actualised yet, a.k.a. crealia.

To this we should probably add the desired idea of One, or unity.

Why do we need to presuppose a Creal? One way of answering is to speak of desire. We have in us humans not only the capacity to desire such and such thing but also the capacity to desire in general a reality that would satisfy our deepest aspirations. Perhaps we also possess the capacity to feel a desire without object at all, a pure desire which is not a desire of anything in particular. Whitehead speaks of appetition, a term he takes from Leiniz and the Monadology. He also speaks of unrest, a term he attributes to Samuel Alexander: “Every ultimate actuality embodies in its own essence what Alexander terms ‘a principle of unrest’, namely its becoming.”

Becoming as pure desire.

But if this is a desire without object, should we still call it desire? Desire seems to presuppose a lack, the idea that something is not fulfilled. I have hypothesised that the fundamental lack at the core of the Creal, is the lack of one. This would be a logical consequence of the idea of pure multiplicity. I often write that the cosmos is a love story between the Creal and the One, a story that is dynamic because the Creal and the One are two sides of the same coin: they touch each other yet they constantly miss each other. This point needs to be specified. But let’s postulate for the moment that the universal principle of unrest is the lack of one. Everything desires to be one yet fails to ever be absolutely one because everything desires to be multiple at the same time. Hence the process. In other words, desire goes in opposite directions, not just two directions, since the multiple is multidirectional. Crealectics supports at this point the idea that our fundamental desire is a desire of unity and multiplicity, therefore it is a tourbillon, aspiring to all directions and to unity at the same time or alternatively.

This does not appear to be a binary or trinary process involving the positive, the negative, and the synthesis.

To feel the potentialities of life as pure potentialities might be called a desire without object or a desire with an infinite number of objects. Which means that these crealia are good, because we can only desire what is good. It does not means that the object of desire is good in itself, it becomes good intentionally, by being qualified by desire. We have a “conceptual prehension”, to use a Whiteheadian term, of possibilities that are perceived as good, but not yet as possibilities of this or that.

Perhaps this is what a crealia is, a pure vibrating string, torn between the multiple and the one. In such case, all crealia would be infinitesimal zones of energy capable of playing a role in the actualisation of the Real and the virtualisation of the Creal.

In other words crealia would be like pluripotent spiritual cells.

I would not call them monads, like Leibniz, because I don’t think crealia “have no-windows”. Crealia have an infinite number of windows.

Crealectics names the actual method of description of the unfolding of the Creal because the Creal is the source, but also because dialectics seems too simple, binary or trinary. Obviously, this is reminiscent of Deleuze’s critique of Hegel, which I propose we now read closely.

Hegel is believed to have said just before he died that no one had understood him properly. Perhaps Hegel himself was a crealectician? This means we also need to read Hegel more closely. The fruits of these tasks will be the topic of future posts.