Who Is the Razor For?

A reader recently put a simple objection to me: since Ontodynamics builds a philosophical system, why not make parsimony one of its principles outright?

Why not state from the start:

Keep only the essence. Add only by necessity.

The objection is legitimate. Every philosophy must posit certain principles. The question is therefore not whether it may do so, but what it must posit and what it can derive.

For positing or deriving a proposition does not merely change its place within a system. It can change its meaning.

A rule for whom?

I had presented certain conceptions of parsimony too bluntly as “false and weak” because they “prescribe without grounding”. That formulation needs correcting.

Occam’s razor is not without reasons. It is a rule of method: do not multiply entities or hypotheses beyond what the explanation requires. Modern methods of model selection extend the same idea: added complexity must buy a sufficient gain.

Stoic divestment likewise has a foundation. It belongs to a conception of virtue and of the good life: outward accumulation does not secure inner freedom.

Both forms of parsimony, however, have an addressee.

Occam speaks to the theorist: do not burden your theory needlessly.

The Stoic speaks to whoever is seeking a certain manner of living: do not depend on what does not depend on you.

Such rules can be followed or refused. One can build a cluttered theory. One can lead a life the Stoics would judge bad.

A structural constraint is different. It advises nothing. It describes what happens, whether one approves of it or not.

Three operations must be distinguished here:

Naming a rule allows it to be classified. Justifying it gives reasons to follow it. Deriving it shows that it depends on more primitive propositions.

It is this third operation that is at stake.

What the system posits — and what it derives

Ontodynamics states its own starting points explicitly:

Axiom 0 — A single real: the Whole grounds itself, every finite thing makes itself.

Axiom I — To be is to make oneself one.

An axiom is not demonstrated by the system that posits it. But it remains exposed to the risk of its consequences: they must allow one to distinguish, to explain, and to meet the real.

An axiom is without proof upstream, not without risk downstream.

From these starting points, Ontodynamics seeks to derive a general economy of finite existence.

The maintenance of a finite being has a cost. Conserving oneself, transforming, resisting or repairing requires a levy.

That cost falls on a limited margin. What is spent today will no longer be fully available to absorb the next shock.

Any surplus that has to be maintained without contributing to the general upkeep therefore increases the drain. What is added without necessity becomes a charge — not because the simple would be more elegant or more moral, but because every capacity is finite.

The conclusion remains comparative:

All else being equal, the costly comes undone before the frugal.

The superfluous does not necessarily kill. It spends the margin.

At this level, there is as yet neither advice nor morality.

When constraint becomes norm

A stone flaking away does not replace what it loses. Its disintegration may be accelerated thereby, but no loop of its own works to regenerate the conditions of its persistence. It undergoes the constraint of cost without itself producing the distinction between what must be remade and what may be abandoned.

An organism is in a different situation.

It continually remakes some of the conditions on which its capacity to remake itself depends: membranes, tissues, gradients, equilibria and functional structures.

It does not conserve everything indiscriminately. Its activity produces a difference between what sustains its cycle and what compromises it.

That distinction does not come from an outside observer. Nor is it necessarily conscious. It is produced by the very functioning of the organism.

This is what Ontodynamics calls constitutive normativity: the difference between the favourable and the unfavourable is not added to a being after the fact. It belongs to its activity of self-maintenance.

The general constraint then takes on a normative form:

Keep only the essence. Add only by necessity.

The word “essence” does not designate here an immobile substance hidden behind the changes.

The essence is that without which a being can no longer remake itself.

The law of authenticity is therefore not an order imposed from outside. It is the normative form taken by the economy of cost in a being that must regenerate its own conditions.

Why not posit it directly?

It would be possible to make parsimony a first principle. But that shortcut would erase precisely what the system is trying to explain.

It would suppress the passage:

• from cost to the limited margin;
• from the margin to the drain;
• from the drain to the general economy;
• from that constraint to the normativity proper to a closure.

The problem is thus not that a third axiom would simply be one axiom too many. It would turn into a starting point what Ontodynamics seeks to render intelligible.

A derived conclusion exposes every step it depends on. If cost, the finite margin, or the relation between surplus and drain fail to hold, it falls with them.

An axiom exposes its starting point; a derivation exposes each of its points of rupture.

My reader’s objection nevertheless revealed a real defect in the original text:

What was derived in the architecture appeared posited in the writing.

Severed from the chain that produces it, the formula looked like one more imperative.

The constraint addresses no one.

It becomes law when a being itself produces the difference between what maintains it and what drains it.