Around 2001 I expressed my desire for a book that would be called, in French, Système du Vécu, a System of the Lived Experience. I believe I have the same desire today, expressed under another label: a theory of crealectics. But whose lived experience are we talking about? Mine? If it is a theory, it should refer to any lived experience, human, animal, any living being to a certain degree. There is here the assumption that all living beings share the same fundamental way of being or becoming, although with variations in a continuum.

We are talking about an embodied theory, one that is experiential and not only intellectual or abstract. If a theory of crealectics is possible, everything that I do, or think, may be part of the same narrative, the same symbolic network. All events can be explained and interrelated under the same worldview. But there is also the possibility that theories are metamorphic, therefore ultimately inconsistent, or consistently indeterminate.

I coined the concept of crealectics, as I have written elsewhere, as a combination of Creal and (dia)lectics. Creal is the name I gave a long time ago in the French novel Paridaiza (to be published in English translation in October 2020) to the feeling and conviction that there is one cosmological ground to everything there is, a creative given or flux, a divine immanent stream of infinite possibility or plenitude, of which we are, more or less actively, co-agents. The ultimate Real, I wrote, is a Creal, a generous and loving – sometimes apparently destructive – possibilisation furnace, a continuous creation of multiplicities, potentialities and actualities. Alfred North Whitehead called it “Creativity”, and Bergson “creative evolution”. A theory of everything should be possible if we accept that the core of the universe is the fact that potentially everything is possible, although not everything gets actualised in the same world. Leibniz would say: everything is possible but not everything is compossible.

Hegelian or Marxian dialectics is, in simplified terms, the idea that reality unfolds historically via a process of contradiction and agonism of opposites which generate new temporary conciliations. Crealectics is meta-dialectical because the ground of apparently contrarian forces at play in lived experience is not necessarily dual, binary, made of couples of opposites, but multiple, chaotic, made of multidirectional conjunctions that are only contradictory for a surface perspective. Moreover, I wrote in Being & Neonness that the hypothesis of the absolute Creal presupposes the hypothesis of the idea of absolute One; unity is the implied horizon of the infinitely diverse, and vice versa. This is logical, ontological and cosmological, since these three aspects, to be truthful, must be one in crealectics or any monist view of the world for that matter.

I also wrote that the universe is a love story between Creal and One, Multiplicity and Unity, in a hyper-dialectical dance. The dynamics and tensions between multiplicity and Unity are enough to create worlds, orders, evolution, matter, mind. This is probably what a theory of crealectics should explain more clearly. I am also aware that Plotinus among other Greek Platonists might have had similar views. Merleau-Ponty suggested en passant, in his unfinished last book, the necessity of a “hyper-dialectics”.