Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi
Philosopher
Matrixiality & complexity overlap in her philosophical commitment.
My research develops a philosophical theory of generative embeddedness at the intersection of matrixial philosophy, philosophical epistemologies of complexity, cybernetics, and process ontology. At its core lies the question of how order and form emerge in intelligent systems—whether living, social, or technical—from relational dynamics with their respective milieus. To this end, I develop a relational ontology of the (meta-)pattern.
Additionally, I seek to expose the metaphysical power attributed to algorithms to apprehend the orders of reality by foregrounding the agency of social and collective intelligence.
Vita
She is a philosopher and university lecturer. From 2000 to 2004, she studied philosophy at the University of Deusto in Bilbao under Andrés Ortiz-Osés, a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer and member of the Eranos Circle, who further developed philosophical hermeneutics into a philosophy of meaning. In 2008, she completed her M.A. thesis, The Mothers in Goethe’s Faust II, under the supervision of the philosopher Eugenio Trías Sagnier. In 2018, she received her Ph.D. from the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG Karlsruhe) with the dissertation A Systematic Introduction to Matrixial Philosophy: Mother – World – Womb. Towards a Multivalent Ontology, supervised by Peter Sloterdijk.
From 2019 to 2022, she held teaching and postdoctoral appointments in Vienna at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and the University of Vienna. In 2023, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), in 2024 a Fellow of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and in 2025 a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Excellence Research Group “Transdisciplinarity and Complexity Research” at Aix-Marseille University. She submitted her habilitation thesis, Entropy and the Threshold of Order: Asymmetry, Irreversibility, and Contingency. An Epistemology of Complexity, to the Institute of Philosophy and Art Studies at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
Her research focuses on theories of operational closure, particularly theories of self-organization and second-order cybernetics; philosophical epistemologies of complexity, with a focus on entropy, irreversibility, asymmetry, contingency, observation, and uncertainty; and matrixial philosophy, with particular emphasis on generative ontologies, process ontologies, the philosophy of endomilieus, and environmental relations.
In her current research project, Generative Pattern Philosophy: Pattern as a Form of Embeddedness, she investigates patterns as generative forms of embeddedness and develops from this a philosophical perspective on complex systems.
Why German?
One wonders why she, who was born into a Basque-speaking environment and later schooled in Spanish, writes in German, especially as she only learnt the language latter a decade ago. According to Heidegger, language is the “house of being”, unless one allows oneself the luxury of being housed inhaving several houses and thus being or becoming mere several times. One has no dominion over a language in view of the power of the language into which one is incorporated. On the other hand, the boundary of the dominant language defines the boundary of the well-protected housewalls pretecting the dwelling. If you one approaches the language from a distance, you one steps beyond the its boundaries of the language in a gesture of thoughtlessness. The writing of a foreign language speaker is dedicated to the world that seems boundless beyond the limits of the dominant language. The scenario of the fallacy of the perfect dictionary (Whitehead) forms the smooth plateau of true philosophizsing. To philosophzise is to move within infinite spacey, to create points of orientation, to form words, to draw lines of flight further out and to enter again and again into the darkness of murky uncertainty. For those who have not mastered the limits of language, the limits of the world are not limited.
Post-Doc
AMIDEX
t -co.re@AMU
“Transdisciplinarity and Complexity Research“
Aix-Marseille University
Aus dem Blog
Complexity research investigates, across disciplinary boundaries, how patterns and structures emerge from a multiplicity of unpredictable elements and from the interactions of heterogeneous components. Nonlinearity, self-organization, and emergence are widely regarded as the defining characteristics of complex systems.
My philosophical–epistemological approach to complexity, however, begins at a more fundamental level: with the metaphysical paradigm shift from static assumptions of being toward process-oriented ontologies. This shift radically calls into question classical notions of stability, predictability, and necessity, and compels a reorganization of scientific and epistemological thought.
This perspective unfolds along three lines of inquiry: first, a history-of-science genealogy of the concept of the complex; second, a discourse-analytical investigation of epistemic shifts shaped by nonlinearity, contingency, and uncertainty; and third, an analysis of the close historical and epistemic–operational relationship between complexity and cybernetics—particularly second-order cybernetics—with regard to theories of complex organization and disorganization.
Sektion
Research Topics
- History of Complexity.
- System Thinking.
- Discourse Analysis of Order/Disorder.
- Contingency of Order.
- Chaosmosis.
- Entropy & neg-entropy.
- Algorithmic Modeling: A Second-Order Epistemology.
Current Project
Cybernetics of Complexity
The concept of the matrix (μήτρα) derives, in terms of its meaning, from the Greek word for mother, womb, and origin. Genealogically, it refers to the maternal as the source and enabling condition of emergence and production.
The matrixial, as a philosophical category, refers to the incomplete set of all types of mothers (genus proximum), understood as Mother-Xₙ, such as mother-animal, mother-human, mother-plant, mother-cell, mother-language, and so forth. The respective specific difference (differentia specifica) lies in the formative instinct, which becomes operative within distinct mother-environments. This environmental difference is determined within the matrixial as an ontological difference.
The matrixial thus designates the embedding relation of every process of individuation, insofar as morphogenesis and ontogenesis must be understood as processes embedded in environmental relations while simultaneously operating inwardly.
From the matrixial, a multi-valued environmental ontology can therefore be derived: there are as many (en-)worlds as there are operative matrices.
Research Topics
- Matrixial Philosophy: Matrixiality as a fundamental philosophical category
- Environmental Ontology Inner Phenomenology: Endo-milieu
- Embedding Relation and Individuation
- Bringing into Light: Bildungstrieb (formative drive)
- Morphogenesis and Ontogenesis
- Generative formative force
- Meta-pattern: “The matrix that embeds” Mother-X Archive: Mother-Plant, Mother-Animal, Mother-Human, Mother-Earth, Mother-Language, Mother-X
- (Allo)Maternal Societies.
Current project
The Form of Emptiness: Jorge Oteiza’s Negative Aesthetics
Matrixiale Philosophie: Mutter- Welt- Gebärmutter. Zu einer dreiwertigen Ontologie
“Entropie und die Schwelle der Ordnung”.
Asymmetrie, Irreversibilität und Kontingenz-
Eine Epistemologie der Komplexität
(Entropy and the Threshold of Order
Asymmetry, Irreversibility, and Contingency — An Epistemology of Complexity)
(submitted)
.
Eine Enführung: Operative Theorien.
(In progress)
