Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi

Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi

Philosopher

Matrixiality & complexity overlap in her philosophical commitment.

Vita

From 2000 to 2004 she studied Philosophy at the University of Deusto in Bilbao with Andrés Ortiz Osés, a student of Hans-Georg Gadamer and a member of the Eranos Circle, who developed the doctrine of hermeneutics into a philosophy of meaning. In 2008 she wrote her Master’s thesis on “The Mothers in Goethe’s Faust II” under the supervision of the philosopher Eugenio Trias Sagnier. In 2018 she completed her doctorate with Peter Sloterdijk on “A systematic introduction to a matrixial philosophy. Mother-World-Womb. Towards a multivalent ontology”. From 2019 to 2021 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in the project “Contemporary Prehistories. The Dissident Goddesses’ Network”. In 2023 she received a Marie Curie Fellowship at FRIAS for the project “An Epistemology of Complexity through a Discourse Analysis of the Concept of Entropy”, which will result in the forthcoming monograph “A Gnoseology of Complexity: Contingency and Asymmetries”. In 2024 she received a fellowship from the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Her work focuses on self-organising processes as theories of operational closure and a philosophy of endomilieus and environmental ties. Complexity and matrixiality intersect in her next writing project “Milieu/Matrix/Pattern: The Embedding Principle of the Hollow Form”.

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.

Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi

Seminar SS 2025
Philosophies of Complexity

Faculty of Philosophy, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg.


Post-Doc
AMIDEX
t -co.re@AMU
“Transdisciplinarity and Complexity Research“

Aix-Marseille University

Aus dem Blog

Complex systems are systems that exhibit a high degree of unpredictable behaviour due to a large number of interactions between different components. Complexity is associated with irreversible processes in which the symmetry of causality – between cause and effect – is broken and there is a high degree of indeterminacy and randomness. Complexity therefore coincides with some of the uncertainty that arises from the limits of our understanding, or with that part of uncertainty that is the essence of richly organised systems and therefore cannot be eliminated. Non-linearity, self-organisation and emergence are common features of complex systems.

I am concerned with a philosophical discourse analysis of the concept of order in complexity, where order is inextricably linked to the randomness that characterises it.

  • Operational Closure (self-organisation)
  • Emergence.
  • Irreversibility.
  • Uncertainty and indeterminacy as epistemological aspects of complex systems.
  • Contingency of order
  • Chaosmosis: instability and chaos as generators of order.
  • Entropy & neg-entropy.
  • Algorithms & complexity.

Matrixiality is concerned with the embedding relations of individuation processes. It refers to the formative force (nisus formativus) of organic, inorganic and technical singularities, which takes place in the embedding in an environment.
The matrixial is a philosophical category for the formative instinct (nisus formativus) as the operative force of this organisation. It describes the incomplete set of all types of mothers (mother-animal, mother-human, mother-cell, mother-language, etc.) whose general characteristic is the formative instinct. However, it distinguishes the environments in which each species lives. Mother-X: the mother-human is a formative force of the human environment or world internally, the mother-animal is one of the animal world, etc.
A multi-valued environmental ontology can be derived from the matrix: there are as many (environmental) worlds as there are operative matrices.

  • Pattern formation as a complex process.
  • Emergence: The formation of orders as negative entropy.
  • Autopoiesis & Matrixiality: The recursiveness of emergence or self-organisation.
  • Generative Gestalt research.
  • Embedding systems.
  • Endomilieu.
  • Pattern/matrix as a marker of an embedding relation.
  • Mother-X phylogenesis: Endorelations between different environments.

Matrixiale Philosophie: Mutter- Welt- Gebärmutter. Zu einer dreiwertigen Ontologie

Eine Gnoseologie der Komplexität: Kontintgenz & Asymmetrie.

Eine Enführung: Operative Theorien.