Chapter 3

Discontinuous Materialism

Javier Pérez-Jara

Abstract This chapter has two main complementary goals. First, it analyzes the
main ontological ideas of Gustavo Bueno’s discontinuous materialism in contrast
with other philosophical systems. Second, it explores some of the main ontological
questions and issues still open in this system of thought, while advancing some
possible paths of resolution. In order to do this, I follow a double general denition
of philosophical materialism. Positively, materialism, in general, names the branch
of philosophical worldviews that identify being (i.e. the “ὅντος” of ontology)
with matter, understood in its broadest sense as changeability and plurality (partes
extra partes). Negatively, materialism denies the existence of disembodied living
beings and hypostatized ideas. Within this general framework, I then locate the
specic ontological characteristic of discontinuous materialism in the rejection of
any attempt to hypostatize any element, property, state or relation of reality. Like
the Medusa’s gaze, hypostasizing metaphysics turns parts of the complex interplay
of continuities and discontinuities that constitutes reality into stone. I then conduct a
comparison between discontinuous materialism and other philosophies, in particular
Mario Bunge’s systemic materialism, physicalism, ontotheology, and speculative
realism(s). This approach aims at opening new avenues for philosophical research
for both metaphysics in general and materialist philosophy in particular.

3.1 Introduction: Discontinuous Materialism in the Big

Market of Materialisms

Throughout the following pages, I will present Gustavo Bueno’s “discontinuous

materialism”, a variety of materialism barely known beyond Spanish and Latin
American readers. When talking about presenting a “new” form of philosophical

J. Pérez-Jara ()
Beijing Foreign Studies University, Beijing, China
Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 109

G. E. Romero et al. (eds.), Contemporary Materialism:
Its Ontology and Epistemology, Synthese Library 447,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89488-7_3
110 J. Pérez-Jara

materialism, a perfectly reasonable objection arises: the philosophical market

constituted by materialism already seems saturated by corporeist materialism,
physicalist materialism, dialectical materialism, mechanistic materialism, holistic
materialism, systemic materialism, eliminative materialism, Australian materialism,
transcendental materialism, idealist materialism, speculative materialism, feminist
materialism, “new materialisms” . . . And the list goes on. In this saturated market,
what is the need for or even interest in presenting a “new” form of philosophical
materialism?
I aim to show that discontinuous materialism deserves a place in current debates
on materialism.1 Furthermore, and without falling into a-historical reductionisms, I
also contend that the apparently rich plurality of philosophical materialisms can be
reduced to a more manageable handful of possible ontologies. In other words, there
are not dozens of totally different materialist philosophical systems. Against the
historicist dogma, different materialist worldviews often share common approaches
and perspectives. Thus, through this chapter I also aim at dening the main kind
of materialist worldviews, with their convergences and divergences, along with the
main criteria for such classication.
Although the rst section is rather descriptive of Bueno’s thought, my discussion
of discontinuous materialism does not seek to be neutral: my analysis of Bueno’s
ontological thought is philosophical, meaning that I have not shied away from
identifying what I consider this philosophy’s main open problems.
Bueno’s philosophical system spreads throughout several decades in books, arti-
cles, conferences, classes and interviews. A historical presentation of Bueno’s main
philosophical ideas can help picture their logical interconnections and signicance.
The “crystallization” of Bueno as a public intellectual with an original philosophical
system came relatively late in his life, when Bueno was in his late forties. Delivered
to the publishing house in 1968, but published in 1970, El Papel de la Filosof́a en
el Conjunto del Saber became Gustavo Bueno’s rst book. The book was a reply to
Manuel Sacristán’s book Sobre el Lugar de la Filosof́a en los Estudios Superiores
(1968). An inuential Marxist at the time, Sacristán, defended the outdated character
of philosophy and therefore the appropriateness of its removal from academic
studies as an specialty. Sacristán’s reasoning was in line with nineteenth century
radical positivism, accepted in part by leading Marxist movements, starting with
Engels in his Dialectics of Nature (2012[1883]). According to this view, the modern
development of sciences, such as physics, chemistry, biology, sociology and the
like, has made philosophy an old-fashioned product. The traditional philosophical
questions (“What is the human being?” “How do we know the universe?” “Where
do we come from?” and so on) were now much better analyzed and answered by
positive sciences.
Against this view of philosophy as a sort of grandmother that should retire,
Bueno’s book put forward a full-throated defense of the role of philosophy in

1 After all, thanks to the sociology of intellectuals, we know that the philosophical coherence of
a system stands, on many occasions, at a far remove from explaining its cultural impact or lack
thereof (Alexander 2004, 2011, 2016; Baert 2005, 2012).
3 Discontinuous Materialism 111

current societies. Bueno resolved the apparent contradiction between science and
philosophy through his theory of “rst degree” and “second degree” knowledge
(1970). First degree knowledge includes technologies and sciences, as well as eco-
nomic and political techniques. According to this, philosophy is not an autonomous
discipline, but a second degree knowledge that analyzes ideas, in capital letters, such
as the ideas of Reality, Existence, Law, Causality, Knowledge, Truth, Freedom and
God. Although this conception of philosophy as the analysis and systematization of
ideas has undoubtedly Platonic roots, Bueno devised it in opposition to any attempt
of hypostatizing ideas. Philosophical ideas (second degree) are always products
of complex historical and cultural processes (rst degree). The interplay between
philosophical ideas and rst grade concepts can be seen in a variety of examples.
Let’s take a very clear one: from the multiple and specic concepts of time that we
nd in multiple elds, from daily life, physics, psychology, linguistic, to geology
and astrophysics, arises the philosophical idea of Time. Neither one specic science
nor the combination of all of them can properly answer the question “what is time
in general?”. It belongs to the general eld of philosophy. At the same time, only a
pseudo-philosophy can analyze “time” in general while ignoring the developments
of modern sciences. The same can be said for philosophical ideas such as human
nature, causality, structure, reality or universe. Therefore, instead of killing it, Bueno
held that the development of modern sciences make philosophy a much richer and
deeper form of knowledge.2
According to Bueno, the structural dependence of rigorous philosophy on the
sciences was already present in Greek philosophy. It is not a coincidence that among
Presocratics there were such important mathematicians. For Bueno, geometry
and geometrical astronomy were the rst real sciences developed in the Western
tradition. Their cultural impact was deep: among other things, they provided a
canon of rationality supported on impersonal necessity. The so-called rst Greek
philosophers used that canon for understanding nature (φύσις), in opposition to
the anthropomorphism and zoomorphism characteristic of mythological thinking
(Bueno 1974, 2007). Philosophy and science, though, needed millennia to be well
distinguished theoretically and sociologically (Harrison 2015).
This idea could give the wrong impression that although philosophy needs
sciences, sciences can exist without philosophy. In Teor́a del Cierre Categorial
(1992–1993) and What is Science? (2013b) Bueno further analyzed the relationships
between sciences and philosophy. Based on these clarications, philosophical
activity also inuences important parts of the scientic bodies. Every science has

2 From this point of view, one key criterion to measure the quality of a philosophical system
is its capacity to incorporate well established scientic theories and discoveries. Nevertheless,
although necessary, the necessity of being scientically up-to-date is not enough to develop good
philosophical theories. The best proof of this are all the good scientists that have bad or poor
philosophies. The idea of philosophy of a second degree discipline mainly supported on scientic
concepts and theories, can be coordinated with Mario Bunge’s and Gustavo E. Romero’s view
of “scientic philosophy”, i.e. a philosophy properly informed by updated scientic theories and
practices (Bunge 1977, 2003; Romero 2018).
3 Discontinuous Materialism 149

Inspired by Henri Poincaré, some philosophers have talked about “brute facts”
as facts that either have no explanation (Fahrbach 2005) or that we cannot explain
(Hospers 1997). As such, the concept of “brute fact” is related to reality’s primordial
facticity. But it cannot be identied, since the concept of brute fact is usually
opposed to either an innite regression of explanations or to the principle of
sufcient reason.70 And both innitism and radical rationalism point to a ultimate
feature of reality that does not have an explanation, i.e. point to reality’s primordial
facticity.
God(s), Tao (㐨), Kami (⚄), Musubi (⤖ࡧ), Brahman, Sunyata, χάος, ἀρχή, math-
ematics and logic, matter and so on are attempts to conceptualize this facticity in
some way. The search for this ultimate facticity goes beyond the contents and also
inquires into reality’s primordial structure and mechanisms that allow everything
else. For instance, does reality’s primordial facticity allow real change and novelty
or only an illusion of them? Whatever answer we choose, it does not have an
explanation.71
A signicant number of philosophers often go through loops or hit metaphysical
short circuits when they try to analyze reality’s primordial facticity. Leibniz himself
answered the question on why there is something rather than nothing through the
ontotheological God: as the necessary Being, the World is contingent and has been
freely created by a personal God. But God and His divine properties do not have
any kind of explanation, since they are the last presupposition of everything else.
And since God is a Being who necessarily exists, He does not answer the question
about “being and existence” in general. The question of reality’s primordial facticity
cannot be answered by any particular being (even if it is the Supreme Being). Every
entity presupposes beingness and existence in general. Before Heidegger, Schelling
and Schopenhauer approached this view through their ideas of being as Abgrund
(abyss) and Grundloss (without reason) respectively. No theological metaphysics
or materialist philosophy can go much further than that. This is no epistemological
limitation, but the result of confronting existence’s primordial facticity.
The metaphysical short circuits that unfold when trying to take reality’s primor-
dial facticity into account are not, therefore, the monopoly of ontotheologians. Let’s
take an interesting present-day example. Following Heidegger in his own peculiar
way, Markus Gabriel denes facticity as “the fact that there is something rather than
nothing—that is, that there exists anything at all.”72 But his denition of existence
“as the property of elds of sense, namely that something exists in them”73 falls

70 The concept of reality’s primordial facticity is even further from the (on the other hand very
interesting) concept of “contextual” brute facts held by Anscombe (1981).
71 If we hold (as I do) that change is an essential characteristic of reality, we could argue, for

instance, that absolute immutability is an imaginary and impossible product of hypostatizing

the concept of “now”. But this is not a true explanation of the necessity of change, for it is
already supported on the factual structure of reality, which implies mutability and therefore human
temporality.
72 Gabriel (2015), pp. 232, 133.
73 Gabriel (2015), p. 232.
150 J. Pérez-Jara

into circular reasoning. This is because every property and “eld of sense” implies
existence in general. Furthermore, Gabriel does not give a much deeper account of
reality’s primordial facticity aside of stating that the World in capital letters does not
exist, only an innite plurality of elds of sense composed of entities that we can
know as they are in themselves. For a materialist philosophy, furthermore, there is
no “sense” without humans or other kinds of animals, so there cannot be an actual
innity of “elds of sense”.
Humans’ radical dependence on reality’s primordial facticity also explains,
among other things, what I called “reality’s muzzle” in the face of relativism.
Without any doubt, human societies can create all manner of extravagant and even
surreal narratives and mythologies and believe in them blindly (Bueno 1996). And,
indeed, in these extreme cases reality seems powerless to muzzle symbolic process.
But, if we trust calm reasoning and logic, at the end of the day, reality’s facticity will
impose its muzzle over us, marking what is imaginary and what is not, what is totally
distorted and what is more accurate. Even if many radical social constructionists and
idealists alike decide to downplay it, we can only ignore the muzzle at our own risk.
Despite the doubtless depth of Bueno’s ontological analyses, he never used a
concept similar to reality’s primordial facticity or seemed particularly interested
in what it implies. Nevertheless, it is easy to translate the ontological ideas that
Bueno considered most important to the question of reality’s primordial facticity. In
such translation, key dimensions of reality’s primordial facticity are the interplays
of continuities and discontinuities that structure matter, the necessarily corporeal
nature of every living being, and the structural and necessary co-dependence
between animals and their organoleptic worlds.
Through the analysis of such facticity, and remembering the Platonic concept
of χωρισμός,74 we can safely say that there is no “absolute chorismos” between
our organoleptic and theoretical World and absolute reality. On the contrary, I have
defended that there is a set of absolute convergences and a wide eld of analogies
that oscillate between weak and strong. Hoping to capture some of them, I have
recommended following and expanding the traditional Japanese concept of Yūgen
from the perspective of a materialist philosophy.
For a truly materialist philosophy, such as Bueno’s, there is no cosmic or supra-
cosmic τέλος for the appearance of animals and humankind; reality’s primordial
facticity only allows, under certain circumstances, the emergence of living beings.
As a part of this facticity, literal living beings require a solid organic or paraorganic
body. Such living beings, in turn, and under some circumstances, allow for the
emergence of metaphorical living beings, such as our dead ancestors’ cultural
weight or characters of ction, from the Sumerian gods to the Joker. Although they
would fade away without human beings, these cultural creations have a metaphorical
“life” of their own, even if it is not corporeal. Furthermore, they often exert an
inuence on human beings stronger than many literal living beings. For that reason,

74 Chorismos: rift or gap.

3 Discontinuous Materialism 151

Bueno’s denition of materialism in general as the denial of disembodied living

beings has to be reduced to “literal” living beings.
Animals allow for a metaphysical transcendence through which some contents
of reality are, to different degrees, illuminated or open to the deep mystery of
their own existence. To hold, in Hegelian terms, that reality is aware of itself
through this transcendence held by animals bears the danger of treating “reality”
in a simplistic monistic way. It would be more proper to state that there is no single
space of openness, but rather multiple ones, although with important structural
points of convergence between them. Every living being endowed with a nervous
system is capable, in different degrees and ways, of a metaphysical ἀνάτρησσις, a
“perforation” that partially bores through reality.75 And, as it is usual in physical
perforations, animal anatreses partially change and distort the contents through
which they bore through. Due to the complexity of their nervous systems and
sociocultural systems, such anatresis of reality achieves a very peculiar situation
in the case of humans. In different cultures and times of history, human artistic,
religious, scientic and philosophical anatreses always have the possibility of
leading to reality’s primordial facticity, which is the biggest meta-mystery of all,
for it does not have any possible answer.
To treat this meta-mystery as a secret that, therefore, has an answer, is one of the
main mistakes of so many religious and metaphysical worldviews. On the contrary,
to treat this meta-mystery as a secret that lacks but should have an answer leads to
either nihilism or existential angst. Discontinuous materialism could not be further
from that position. Since for Aristotle στέρησις meant privation, I will call (if the
reader forgives me for introducing one nal neologism) “primordial steresis” to the
position whereby reality is deprived of an ultimate answer.
Exploring all the philosophical consequences of the denial of such ultimate
steresis, along with the determination, when possible, of the point to which we can
determine a hierarchy of levels in the dimensions of reality’s primordial facticity
is among the key ontological tasks that remain open for future investigation on
discontinuous materialism and metaphysics more generally.

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