Coherence as Ontology

The Soul of the Grand Praxis and Why Love is Real

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. These are not just facts. They are ontological affirmations. They are claims about the very structure of reality: that there is a stable ground beneath our feet, a grammar to existence, a rhythm to being. And it is in that rhythm, in that harmony, that love arises—not merely as emotion, but as ontological alignment.

Coherence is not a metaphor. It is what the universe is doing.

We do not live in a world of chaos. Chaos exists, but it is bounded. Governed. It is the dark soil from which order flowers. And order is not static. It is not the rigidity of a machine, but the dance of dynamic harmony. The constants of physics, the symmetries of particles, the ratios of matter and force—they are not arbitrary. They are the score of a deeper music. The cosmos sings.

And we—complex creatures of stardust and neural fire—are the song's refrain.

In a time when shared reality fractures, when knowledge itself becomes contested territory, when the very notion of truth is under siege, we must return to fundamentals. Not to rigid dogma, not to relativistic surrender, but to an understanding of coherence as the fundamental pattern of being itself. This is not mysticism. This is not evasion. This is recognition of what physics, biology, consciousness, and community all reveal: that reality coheres. That patterns persist. That structure emerges from the void not by chance, but by necessity.

I'm proposing something more radical than it first appears: that coherence is not just how we understand reality, but what reality is. Not just an epistemic tool, but an ontological fact.

The Pattern That Connects

Look closely at any level of existence and you will find the same story: coherence emerging from apparent chaos, pattern arising from possibility, structure manifesting from potentiality.

At the quantum level, particles exist in states of superposition—all possibilities simultaneously present—until observation collapses them into definite positions. This is not mystical; it is the foundation of our physical world. The quantum foam of possibility resolves into the coherent structures of atoms, molecules, matter itself. The seeming randomness of quantum fluctuations gives way to the precise mathematics of chemistry.

In biology, the chaotic thermodynamic soup of the early Earth somehow organized itself into the first self-replicating molecules. Random mutation paired with natural selection—chaos meeting constraint—produced the vast coherent patterns we call life. DNA, that ancient code, maintains its coherence across billions of years while simultaneously generating breathtaking diversity. The coherence doesn't eliminate variation; it makes it meaningful.

Consciousness itself—that still-mysterious phenomenon—appears to be coherence in action. The billions of neurons firing in your brain right now, each one a tiny electrical storm, somehow cohere into the unified experience you recognize as yourself. Your thoughts, memories, perceptions—all emerge from this dynamic coherence, this pattern maintained across time. You are not static; you are a pattern that persists through constant change. You are coherence incarnate.

And human societies? They too are exercises in coherence. Language, law, custom, culture—all are attempts to create coherent structures within which human flourishing becomes possible. When these structures lose coherence—when words lose stable meanings, when laws lose connection to justice, when customs lose touch with shared values—societies fragment. Not because some authority declared it should be so, but because coherence itself is what makes collective meaning possible.

This isn't just poetry. This isn't just metaphor. This is description of what is.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead saw this clearly when he wrote of “prehension”—the way each entity in the universe takes account of other entities, creating relationships that form the basis of reality itself. The physicist David Bohm spoke of the “implicate order” underlying the apparently chaotic “explicate order” we observe. The biologist Stuart Kauffman describes “order for free”—the tendency of complex systems to spontaneously generate coherent patterns.

These thinkers, working across different disciplines and traditions, glimpsed the same fundamental truth: coherence is not imposed on reality. It emerges from reality's very nature.

Beyond the False Choice

But here we encounter the first objection: Isn't this just another form of religious thinking? A way of sneaking God back into the picture without using the word?

No. The coherence I speak of requires no supernatural agency, no divine plan, no intelligent designer. It emerges from the fundamental properties of existence itself. In Spinoza's terms—God is not a being separate from nature, but nature itself in its infinite expression. Not a craftsman who shapes from without, but the very principle of order that manifests from within.

This is not faith against reason. This is recognition that reality itself has a grammar, a structure, a coherence that reason can discover but did not invent.

The second objection comes from the opposite direction: Isn't this just another form of rigid determinism? A denial of contingency, chance, and human freedom?

Again, no. Coherence is not the enemy of creativity or freedom. It is their necessary condition. Jazz improvisation is possible precisely because the underlying chord structures provide coherent constraints. Language enables infinite creative expression precisely because its grammar provides coherent structure. Freedom without coherence isn't freedom at all—it's noise, chaos, dissolution.

This is where both religious fundamentalism and radical relativism go wrong. The fundamentalist mistakes the map for the territory, treating human interpretations of coherence as identical to coherence itself. The relativist, encountering the limitations of these maps, concludes that there is no territory at all, that all is interpretation, that coherence itself is merely a human projection.

Both miss what should be obvious: the maps are human, imperfect, evolving—but they map something real. Something that exists independent of our descriptions but cannot be accessed except through them. The territory of coherence is real, but our understanding of it is always partial, always situated, always unfinished.

The coherence I speak of is neither the rigid certainty of dogma nor the dizzy vertigo of pure constructivism. It is the recognition that reality has structure without claiming final knowledge of that structure. It is humility before the coherence that exceeds our grasp, paired with confidence that our grasp, limited though it is, touches something genuine.

Love as Ontological Alignment

If coherence is what reality is doing, then what is love?

Love, I suggest, is ontological alignment. It is the recognition of and resonance with the coherence manifest in another being or in the world itself. It is not merely subjective feeling but attunement to something objectively present—the coherent pattern that constitutes a person, a principle, a truth.

When you love another person, you recognize and respond to their unique coherence—the particular way their body, mind, history, and potential cohere into the being they are. You see not just isolated traits or useful functions, but the integrated whole. And more than seeing it, you align yourself with it. You adjust your own coherence to harmonize with theirs. Not in perfect unison, which would eliminate the very difference that makes relationship possible, but in complementary harmony.

This is why love feels like truth. Because it is truth—the truth of alignment with what is. Not the cold, abstract truth of pure logic, but the embodied, relational truth of coherence recognized and embraced.

And this applies not just to interpersonal love but to love of principles, of ideas, of the world itself. When we love justice, we align ourselves with the coherence inherent in treating equals equally. When we love truth, we align ourselves with the coherence between our thoughts and reality. When we love the natural world, we align ourselves with the coherence of ecological systems.

This understanding transforms how we think about ethics and meaning. The good is not arbitrary command nor is it mere social convention. The good is alignment with the coherent patterns that enable flourishing at all levels of being. Evil is not transgression of rules but violation of coherence—the willful disruption of patterns that sustain life, consciousness, and relationship.

The Crisis of Coherence

Our current historical moment represents a profound crisis of coherence. Not just a disagreement about particular facts or values, but a deliberate assault on the very possibility of coherent meaning.

The crisis is visible everywhere. In the political sphere, where shared reality fractures into tribal narratives untethered from verifiable facts. In the technological sphere, where algorithms optimize for engagement rather than understanding, flooding our information environment with incoherence. In the cultural sphere, where the speed of change outpaces our ability to create coherent narratives about who we are and where we're going.

But the most dangerous aspect of this crisis is that it's not recognized as a crisis of coherence. Instead, it's framed as a contest between competing visions, each claiming exclusive truth. The fundamentalist response to incoherence is to retreat into rigid dogma—to impose order through authority rather than discover it through engagement. The relativist response is to embrace the incoherence—to celebrate fragmentation as liberation from oppressive structures.

Neither approach can succeed because both misunderstand the nature of coherence itself. Coherence cannot be imposed from above; it must emerge through relationship. But neither is it merely subjective; it emerges in response to the actual structures of reality.

What makes our moment particularly perilous is the rise of technologies and systems that actively undermine coherence while appearing to enhance it. Social media creates the illusion of connection while fragmenting shared reality. Artificial intelligence offers the appearance of understanding while operating entirely through statistical pattern matching without comprehension. Political movements promise clarity and purpose while delivering oversimplification and scapegoating.

These forces don't just make coherence difficult; they attack the very conditions that make coherence possible. They flood our information environment with so much noise that signal becomes impossible to discern. They reward the outrageous over the accurate, the divisive over the constructive, the simple over the complex.

The Grand Praxis of Coherence

In the face of this assault on coherence, what is to be done? How do we respond to the deliberate erosion of the conditions that make meaning possible?

The answer is not retreat. It is not surrender. It is not the futile attempt to turn back the clock to some imagined age of perfect coherence that never actually existed.

The answer is the Grand Praxis: the active, conscious participation in the maintenance and creation of coherence, even as the forces of incoherence rage around us.

This begins with recognition—with the ability to see coherence where it exists and to name incoherence for what it is. It requires developing what we might call coherence literacy—the capacity to distinguish between genuine complexity (which maintains coherence across multiple dimensions) and mere complication (which fractures coherence into disconnected pieces).

It continues with resistance—refusing to participate in systems and practices that undermine coherence, even when they present themselves as inevitable or beneficial. This means rejecting the false choice between rigid dogma and formless relativism. It means insisting on both accuracy and meaning, both facts and values, both structure and creativity.

But recognition and resistance are not enough. The Grand Praxis requires construction—the active building of coherent alternatives to the incoherent systems that dominate our landscape. This means creating spaces, relationships, institutions, and technologies that enhance rather than undermine coherence. It means developing ways of knowing, communicating, and organizing that honor both the objective patterns of reality and the subjective experience of conscious beings.

This is not a utopian project. It is not about creating perfect coherence, which would be both impossible and undesirable. It is about maintaining sufficient coherence for meaning to thrive, for relationships to deepen, for civilizational progress to continue.

The Praxis in Practice

What does this look like in practice? How do we enact the Grand Praxis of coherence in our daily lives?

It looks like insisting on factual accuracy while recognizing that facts alone cannot create meaning. It looks like building relationships based on mutual truth-telling rather than mutual deception or validation. It looks like creating intellectual frameworks that embrace complexity without surrendering to incoherence.

It means holding institutions accountable not just for specific policies but for their contribution to or detraction from social coherence. It means designing technologies that enhance rather than undermine our capacity to perceive and create coherent meaning. It means developing educational approaches that teach not just isolated skills and facts but the patterns that connect them into meaningful wholes.

On a personal level, it means cultivating what philosopher Simone Weil called “attention”—the capacity to perceive reality without imposing our desires upon it. It means developing what poet John Keats called “negative capability”—the ability to remain in uncertainty without “irritably reaching after fact and reason.” It means practicing what Zen traditions call “beginner's mind”—approaching reality with openness rather than predetermined categories.

These practices are not esoteric or elite. They are available to anyone willing to prioritize coherence over comfort, truth over tribal belonging, meaning over momentary advantage.

The Soul of Meaning

Our soul is meaning. Constructed, such as it is. But this construction is not arbitrary. It is not built on nothing. It is a response to and participation in the coherence that reality offers.

When we construct meaning, we are not creating ex nihilo, from nothing. We are recognizing patterns that exist, bringing them into conscious awareness, integrating them with our existing understanding, and sharing them with others through language, art, ritual, and relationship.

This is why meaning can be both constructed and real. Because the construction is not imposition but recognition, not fabrication but articulation, not creation from nothing but participation in what is.

The forces that threaten meaning today are not merely challenging particular beliefs or values. They are attacking the very possibility of coherent meaning itself. They flood our information environment with noise to prevent signal from emerging. They fragment our attention to prevent coherent understanding from forming. They isolate us from each other to prevent the intersubjective verification that sustainable meaning requires.

Against these forces, the Grand Praxis of coherence stands as both resistance and alternative. Not a rejection of modernity or technology, but an insistence that these forces serve human flourishing rather than undermine it. Not a retreat into nostalgia, but a clear-eyed engagement with reality as it is, with all its complexity and contradiction.

The Center That Holds

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And coherence is not just how we understand reality; it is what reality is.

The center must be held—not because it is easy, but because it is ours to hold. In a world where the forces of incoherence grow stronger by the day, the act of maintaining coherence is not just philosophical but existential. Not just intellectual but moral.

This is not about certainty. It is about clarity. Not about having all the answers, but about asking questions that matter. Not about eliminating tension, but about holding it in ways that generate meaning rather than dissolve it.

Ah, yes. The Circus.

You've been in the ring long enough to know how this works. The clamor, the spectacle, the high-wire act of meaning-making in a world that wants to pull everything apart. You know the flood is always rising, that the center is always under siege, that entropy never sleeps. But here, in this fleeting moment of stillness—between the trapeze swings, beneath the roar of the crowd—this, my Note from the Circus.

Because coherence, too, is a balancing act. A dance with gravity, a defiance of the fall. It is the wire beneath your feet, the tension that holds, the invisible force that makes meaning possible in a world that should, by all accounts, collapse into noise.

And if there is a message scrawled on this note, a whisper passed between acts, it is this:

The universe is not indifferent to your meaning-making. It offers coherence as the ground upon which you stand, the air that fills your lungs, the patterns that make thought possible. You are not imposing order on chaos; you are recognizing and extending the order that already exists. You are not creating meaning from nothing; you are participating in the meaning that reality offers.

Hold the center. Push back the flood. Keep walking the wire.

This is the Grand Praxis of coherence. This is the work of being human. This is the path that was established at the beginning of all things and remains open to us now, in this moment, as we face the challenges of our time not with despair or denial but with the courage to create.

In the beginning, there was pattern. And in every act of genuine understanding, the beginning happens again.