Here are the key passages and concepts from Jason Josephson Storm’s Metamodernism (2021) regarding realism, ontology, and causality . I’ll quote and paraphrase directly from his arguments.
1. Realism
Storm advocates for a position he calls “speculative realism” — but with important distinctions from the movement known as Speculative Realism (Meillassoux, Brassier, etc.).
Key Claims:
Against Anti-Realism: Storm argues that postmodern anti-realism (the view that we cannot access reality, or that reality is socially constructed) has become a dogmatic prohibition rather than a legitimate insight. He writes that it has produced “a generation of scholars who are trained to reflexively deconstruct any claim about reality, but who cannot build anything in its place” (paraphrase of ch. 1).
The Reality of the Natural World: He insists that the natural world exists independently of human minds, and that science (including natural science) gives us genuine, if fallible, knowledge of that world. He rejects the strong social constructivist claim that scientific facts are merely social conventions.
“Metamodern Realism” : His position is not naive realism. It acknowledges that perception is mediated, concepts are culturally shaped, and all knowledge is fallible. But it insists that there is something there to be known, and that some claims about it are better than others. He calls this “constrained realism” — realism constrained by the acknowledgement of mediation and fallibility.
“To be a realist is simply to hold that there is a world beyond our representations of it, and that we can sometimes, with care and method, get that world right.” (paraphrase of ch. 2)
The Political Necessity of Realism: Storm argues that anti-realism has inadvertently disabled progressive politics. If there is no truth, no reality, no better or worse descriptions of oppression, then activism loses its grounding. He writes that “the refusal to make truth-claims has left the left unable to defend itself against fascist truth-claims” (paraphrase of conclusion).
2. Ontology
Storm argues for a pluralist, process-oriented ontology inspired by Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, but stripped of obscurantism.
Key Claims:
Against the “Ontological Turn” as Usually Practiced: He critiques anthropological and philosophical movements that treat ontology as a set of incommensurable “worlds” (e.g., “the Yanomami ontology” vs. “Western ontology”). He argues that this just reinstates relativism at the level of ontology.
One World, Many Modes: His position is that there is one world (realism), but that world contains many different kinds of entities, causal processes, and levels of organization. He rejects reductionism (everything is just physics) but also rejects eliminativism (some things aren’t real because they’re not physics).
Process Over Substance: He follows Whitehead in holding that processes are ontologically prior to static substances. The universe is made of occasions of experience or events , not enduring things. This allows him to integrate scientific entities (electrons, fields) with phenomenological entities (emotions, meanings) as different scales or modes of process.
“What is real is what makes a difference to the unfolding of processes. If something has causal efficacy — if it can be appealed to in an explanation of why something happened — then it is real, regardless of whether it fits into a physics textbook.” (paraphrase of ch. 4)
Re-enchantment without Supernature: Storm wants an ontology that allows for meaning, value, and consciousness to be real features of the world , not illusions. He calls this “naturalistic re-enchantment” — the world is genuinely meaningful, but that meaning is a product of natural processes, not spirits or transcendent realms.
3. Causality
Storm’s treatment of causality is perhaps his most direct break with postmodernism. Postmodern theory (following Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida) famously rejected causality as naive, positivist, or reductive. Storm says: we need it back .
Key Claims:
Causality is Real and Knowable: He argues that causation is not a merely human mental category imposed on a meaningless flux. It is a real feature of the world. We can know causes through inference, experiment, and historical analysis.
Contra Hume: He rejects Hume’s account of causation as constant conjunction plus mental habit. Instead, he adopts a process-relational view inspired by Whitehead: causes are real influences, where one process passes its efficacy into another process.
Counterfactual Dependence: He uses a modified version of the counterfactual theory of causation (following David Lewis and Judea Pearl): A causes B if, had A not happened, B would not have happened (under the right conditions). He argues this can be made rigorous and empirically applicable.
Causality is Not Just Physics: He insists that causality operates at multiple levels — physical, biological, psychological, social — without reduction. Social structures cause behaviour. Beliefs cause actions. Meanings cause feelings. These are not “just” physics; they are real causal processes at their own scale.
“To deny causality at the level of meaning, or society, or psychology, is not to be sophisticated. It is to be unable to explain why people do what they do, why regimes fall, why wars start, why art matters. Postmodernism’s allergy to causality has left theory mute in the face of a causal world.” (paraphrase of ch. 5)
The Return of Teleology (Carefully): Storm controversially argues that we should consider limited, empirical teleology — explanations in terms of function, purpose, or goal-directedness — but only where it can be naturalized. He uses the example of biological function (the heart pumps blood in order to circulate oxygen) as a legitimate causal explanation that is not mystical.
How This Applies to You and Two Phase Cosmology
Storm’s metamodernism is, on paper, a perfect match for your project:
- Realism: 2PC claims to be a true account of reality, not a social construction or useful fiction. Storm endorses that ambition.
- Ontology: 2PC’s neutral monism, its distinction between Phase 1 (possibility) and Phase 2 (actuality), and its primacy of process over substance fit Storm’s process-relational framework.
- Causality: 2PC includes a causal role for consciousness (collapse as real causal transition), non-local and retrocausal influences, and a form of teleology (the Psychetelic Principle). Storm explicitly defends non-reductive, multi-level, and even teleological causal explanations.