Toward an Expressive Ontology of the Human Psyche

At a time when knowledge about the human mind is proliferating— neuroscience, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, anthropology—something paradoxically seems to be eroding: reflection on what the psyche is in its own right. Too often reduced to an information-processing system or a bundle of adaptive behaviors, the psyche tends to be naturalized, modeled, or instrumentalized—but rarely thought of as a singular reality.

This text seeks to reopen that inquiry by proposing an expressive ontology of the psyche (1). Such an ontology begins with a central hypothesis: the human psyche is neither a mere byproduct of biology nor a tool for processing reality. It is a site of manifestation, a capacity for expression in life that has become subject (2). The psyche is the space where the world is not merely perceived, but represented, interpreted, transformed, narrated (3).

This approach calls for a rethinking of major mental functions (thought, language, memory, affect, imagination), not as modular or isolatable "capacities," but as forms of expression rooted in ontology (4). Far from being just an internal mechanism, the psyche is an agent of openness, of shaping, of symbolic projection (5) —a stage upon which the world takes on another form .

In this perspective, it becomes possible to redefine the human mind both as a power of subjectivation and as a structure of relation to reality. This definition takes on particular significance today in light of two transformative horizons:

• The cosmic horizon, with the question of life elsewhere—in other forms of being, intelligence, or subjectivity.

• The technological horizon, with the emergence of cognitive artifacts such as artificial intelligence, which seek to imitate, rival, or even replace human psychic functions.

These two frontiers—life elsewhere, mind elsewhere—compel a reformulation of our conception of the psyche, both in its uniqueness and its vulnerability. This article undertakes that ontological, critical, and forward-looking clarification.

Critique of Philosophical Prometheanism: Descartes, Spinoza, and the Modern Legacy

Western modernity constructed a singular figure of the human subject: a rational being, master of its actions, center of representation, bearer of a presumed universal access to truth. In Descartes, this sovereignty takes the form of the cogito: a consciousness separate from the world, whose thought grounds all certainty and which, through science, may become “like master and possessor of nature” (6). Cartesian dualism thus establishes a clear ontological hierarchy: inert matter on one side, self-grounded thought on the other.

This vision gives rise to an active Prometheanism: the human is defined by the capacity to detach from the world and transform it from a position of elevation. This will to emancipation through reason does not disappear with Spinoza, even though he criticizes dualism (7). While thought and extension are two attributes of the same divine substance, it is human reason alone that grants access to an adequate understanding of this unity. Nature's power is indeed revalorized, yet the privilege accorded to human intellect sustains a form of cognitive verticality.

Other modern figures—from Kant to Hegel (8)—will continue this centering of the knowing subject, even within critical systems. This through-line produces an anthropology of rational merit, wherein the human is deemed all the more worthy the more it dominates the world through thought and technique. This vision permeates science, politics, and even certain forms of personal development, which conceive self-realization as an expansion of subjective control.

Our aim is to break with this vertical logic and propose an alternative: a conception of the human psyche as a situated, singular expression (9)—not a central one—within the vast web of forms reality may take. Far from denying human thought, the goal is to reposition its scope—not as the foundation of the world, but as one mode of emergence among others—perhaps rare, but certainly not supreme.

I. Toward an Expressive Ontology of the Psyche

To rethink the human psyche not as the pinnacle of a hierarchy of being, but as one modality among others within an organized reality requires a paradigm shift (10). The point of departure is no longer the subject as the center of truth, but reality itself as a field of multiple organizations, where matter, form, rhythm, and relation interweave.

From this perspective, the psyche—thought, language, emotion, reflective consciousness—is not an anomaly in the universe, but an emergent form of a general expressive capacity inherent in reality (11). The aim is not to cast human consciousness as an inexplicable accident, nor as a bridgehead toward a transcendent beyond, but to situate it as the local actualization of a complex organizational potential.

This idea draws strength from several philosophical lineages: contemporary panpsychism (Strawson, Goff), neutral monism (Russell, James), and process philosophy (Whitehead), all of which view matter as inherently active, capable of feeling, or proto-conscious. But our argument does not require strict adherence to panpsychism. It is enough to recognize that the organization of matter, at certain thresholds, gives rise to structures capable of experiencing, symbolizing, and elaborating.

The psyche thus becomes one form among others of the same capacity of reality: to configure itself into meaningful expression. It is neither reducible to an organ nor derivable from a spiritual essence—it is a living figure of reality’s organization, no less so than a crystal, a cell, or a forest (12).

This expressive ontology invites us to move away from thinking in terms of superiority or finality, and to consider each form—including the psychic one— as a coextensive mode of manifestation, a variation of a centerless logos. It is a vision of reality as a fabric of expressions (13), where human consciousness is but one motif among others—perhaps exceptionally complex, but not fundamentally privileged.

II. Psychology and Ethics: Toward a Decentered and Resonant Subjectivity

The idea that the human psyche is one expressive modality among others within reality disrupts our conception of subjectivity. If consciousness is not a separate being but a rhythmic form within the cosmic fabric, then the “subject” ceases to be an autonomous and central instance. It becomes a point of passage, a zone of resonance through which forces, dynamics, and patterns inscribed in a broader field find expression (14).

a) A Psychology of Listening and Modulation

This perspective demands a radical inversion of the classical psychological model. Rather than viewing the individual as a core of will meant to master and affirm itself, we see them as a fragile, dynamic arrangement that must attune itself to what moves through it. Psychic work no longer consists in building a strong ego, but in revealing the unique harmony of a given way of being.

This implies a revalorization of intuition, emotion, and dream—as sensitive manifestations of a larger structure seeking form. Consciousness is not the spotlight of judgment, but the awakening to a form striving to express itself.

b) An Ethics of Attunement, Not of Law

Ethically, this approach breaks with normative models grounded in universal rules or evolutionary goals. If every being is an expressive modality, ethics becomes the art of respecting the rhythm, form, and coherence of each configuration. Goodness lies not in conforming to an abstract norm, but in the rightness of accord between forms.

This opens the way to a musical, relational, and resonant ethics. The just act is the one that does not interrupt the world’s flow but prolongs, embraces, and reanimates it. This ethic echoes themes from Taoism (wu wei) as well as Spinoza’s insights (Spinoza 1677) into the preservation and enhancement of the power to exist.

c) Personal Development as Organic Unfolding

In this framework, personal development ceases to be an effort toward perfection or performance. It becomes a process of maturation, the unfolding of a latent form—much like a plant follows its natural curve of growth. It is no longer the ideal of a triumphant ego, but the patient listening to what seeks to emerge within the singular field of a life.

The result is a modest but profound vision of subjectivity: no longer a bearer of rights or a strategist of achievement, but an interpreter of an expressive form whose secret it does not possess. Here, psychology and ethics come together in an aesthetics of being—a pursuit of rightness and resonance, rather than control or truth.

III. Other Beings, Other Expressions: Toward a Cosmological Ethics of Perception

Conceiving of the psyche as one expressive modality among others compels us to rethink how we regard non-human beings, both living and inert. It leads us away from a logic of resemblance (“what is like me is worthy”) or utility (“what serves me deserves attention”), toward a logic of ontological plurality: every being is a form, a rhythm, a meaningful organization of reality (15).

a) What Unites Us: Expressive Structure

What humans share with stones, trees, or animals is neither consciousness nor freedom, but the capacity to manifest an intrinsic coherence, an organizing regularity. Thus, the traditional distinction between subject and object gives way to a continuous vision of reality as a constellation of dialoguing forms.

In this view, looking at other beings becomes a practice of listening: what is this form trying to express? What in it offers itself to be read, felt, or understood without forced translation? The resulting ethic is one of attentiveness to ontological singularity.

b) What Distinguishes Us: Modulations of Expression

This structural unity does not erase differences; it renders them meaningful. The human is not more—but different. Conceptual thought, language, symbolic memory are modulations of cosmic organization, just as photosynthesis or crystallization are others.

The task is not to rank these forms, but to understand them as multiple expressions of a shared ground. The dignity of the other no longer derives from its proximity to us, but from the presence within it of a unique arrangement, a style of reality.

c) An Ethics of Perception: Toward a Contemplative Ontology

This way of inhabiting the world implies a shift in posture: from action to contemplation, from appropriation to wonder, from mastery to listening. The other is no longer to be judged, defined, or classified, but welcomed as an event of reality.

Far from a passive relativism, this ethic demands much: the willingness to become available to what is not the self, to recognize in the stone, the tree, or the animal not a metaphor of oneself, but a real, expressive, foreign, and yet familiar alterity.

Here we reconnect with the intuitions of deep ecology, as well as with mystical and contemplative traditions that perceive each being as a unique manifestation of the cosmic order (16). It is this ethics of perception— both sensitive and ontological—that an expressive ontology seeks to prepare.

IV. The Divine Without Transcendence: A Spirituality of Expressive Immanence

The idea of a cosmically expressive organization—where human consciousness is just one modality among others—deeply transforms the question of the divine. In this perspective, God is no longer an external supreme entity endowed with will, omniscience, or purpose. God is no longer perched atop an ontological pyramid but is present wherever a form expresses itself with integrity. The divine ceases to be a transcendent subject and becomes the name for the power of emergence, organization, and coherence at work in all regions of reality.

a) The End of Theological Verticality

An expressive metaphysics does away with the image of God as father, king, or judge—external to the world and ultimate source of meaning. It breaks with religious anthropomorphism, while preserving the intuition that an order exists, that a plural rationality weaves through things (17). What once appeared to us as “God” is thus reimagined as the very fabric of reality in its capacity to manifest itself.

b) The Divine as Expressive Power

We may then speak of the divine not as a personal essence, but as an active principle of expression—a diffuse, immanent Logos, akin to the Chinese Tao or the Indian Brahman (Laozi, Tao Te Ching; Upanishads). The divine is not universal consciousness, but that which enables being, that which generates form, that which allows matter to bend into meaningful regularity. It is not a matter of believing or not believing in God, but of discovering within every being a fragment of this expressive power.

c) A Spirituality Without Dogma, An Embodied Attention

This vision opens onto a spirituality without theism, without dogma, without transcendence—yet not without rigor: a spirituality of listening, of receptivity, of coherence (18). It is not anchored in a revealed text, but in a renewed attentiveness to the world, to the forms and rhythms that move through the living.

It is no longer about interpreting the world as a sign of another world, but about living each form as an epiphany of this world itself (19). A mysticism of the near, a metaphysics of simplicity, an ethics of resonance. The divine is no longer an elsewhere, but the very rightness of what is, when it fully resonates with itself.

V. The Living: Ontological Threshold and Medium of Expressive Temporality

Any reflection on the human psyche must be grounded in a broader understanding of life.

The human psyche does not emerge directly from matter, but from life—as a particular dynamic organization thereof. Life must therefore be defined as a mode of material organization characterized by three fundamental traits:

1. Dependence on a specific environment: no living being subsists without a particular milieu that regulates and sustains exchanges.

2. Structured physico-chemical interaction with that milieu: life is composed of exchanges, regulations, inputs and outputs of energy and matter.

3. Its own temporality: birth, growth, decline, death. Life introduces a cyclical and directional temporality into reality.

Thus, there is no neutral and homogeneous space, but rather milieus: ecological, sensory, affective. And there is no universal time, but differential vital rhythms. Even the laws of physics—including relativity—describe particular milieus, but they do not necessarily account for life in its expressive structure.

Life is therefore an ontological threshold between matter and psyche. It transforms physical data into sensitive, reactive forms, opening the way to a progressive subjectivity that takes a particular shape in the human psyche. To think life is to think of matter that has become rhythmic, open, temporal.

VI. The Human Psyche: Vital Externalization and Autonomization of Thought

What distinguishes the human psyche from other forms of life is not just language, thought, or tool-making, but a dual functional mutation:

a) Externalization of Vital Functions

Humans no longer merely live biologically. They externalize their adaptive functions:

• Socially (symbolic organization of relationships),

• Technically (production of tools and artificial environments),

• Cognitively (memories, knowledge systems, codes).

This results in a displacement: survival no longer relies solely on the organism, but on external systems of vital support.

b) Relative Autonomy of Thought

Human thought gains a degree of functional detachment: it can operate independently from survival, exploring abstraction, possibility, and fiction. Consciousness becomes a space for play, symbolization, and creation—not just an adaptive interface.

The human psyche is therefore not merely an evolutionary effect, but a recomposition of vital function itself. It is a form of life capable of reflecting on itself outside the pressure of immediate survival, and of generating meaning beyond biological necessity. This bifurcation grounds the emergence of ethical, artistic, and metaphysical subjectivity.

Meditative Postscript: Dwelling in Immanence, Thinking Without Supremacy

This journey leads us to a redefinition of our place in the world—not as exception, pinnacle, or finality, but as a situated expressive modality, a temporary intensification of a structure far greater than ourselves. Human consciousness, though singular in its degree of reflexivity, cannot be considered the key to reality. It is one of the world’s faces as it thinks itself, not the origin of the thinkable.

Thus falls verticality: no more God above, no more human at the center. This is not a diminishment, but a shift in posture. To think is no longer to rise above, but to attune. To understand is no longer to decipher a beyond, but to listen to the present form. To exist is no longer to possess or generate meaning, but to participate in a web of sense in motion.

This vision restores a sensitive thickness to the real, an ontological density. It does not eliminate mysticism—it brings it closer. Not as a projection toward the invisible, but as a recognition of the exceptional rightness of what is, here and now. Every form, every being, every rhythm becomes a cosmic interlocutor, a call to listening and humility.

Perhaps this is what our time demands: a way of thinking that does not seek to impose its clarity, but to accompany the expressive complexity of the world. A metaphysics without the promise of resolution, but with a heightened presence to what reveals itself. A philosophy not of conquered truth, but of inhabited form. In this sense, to think the human psyche as expression is not to diminish it—it is to attune it to the wholeness of the real.

General Conclusion: Toward an Expressive Metaphysics of Knowledge

The reflection developed in this article proposes a radical reconfiguration of our way of apprehending the real, the living, and the human psyche. By shifting from an ontology of verticality to an ontology of expressive form, it opens up a mode of thought in which classical distinctions — matter/spirit, nature/culture, subject/object, human/non-human — are reinterpreted in light of their relational and dynamic functioning.

This approach has profound implications across several fields of knowledge:

• Philosophy: It restores to metaphysics an object that is at once modest and profound: not foundation, but the expressive structure of reality. It makes it possible to connect disparate traditions (process philosophy, panpsychism, mysticism, phenomenology) within a unified yet non-reductive space of thought.

• Life Sciences: It proposes a redefinition of the living based not on biological exceptionality, but on the relation to an environment, to temporality, to a proper expressivity. It calls for a biology that is less mechanistic, more rhythmic, more contextual.

• Psychology and the Human Sciences: It offers an alternative to the model of the autonomous, strategic subject, in favor of a conception of the self as a point of resonance, as an evolving interface. It renews the categories of development, suffering, and relation.

• Physics and Cosmology: It questions the universality of space and time as conceived by modern physics, introducing the idea of spatio-temporal milieus that differ according to levels of organization. It calls for a more stratified cosmology, more open to singularities.

• Spirituality and Theology: It proposes to move beyond vertical theism without falling into reductive atheism, by conceiving of the divine as a structure of emergence rather than a supreme instance. It opens a path toward a spirituality of embodied immanence.

What emerges is a space of knowledge in which the human is no longer conceived as the center, but as one of the sites of resonance of the real. This position is not a loss: it is an opportunity for a thought that is more attentive, more just, more alive. A thought commensurate with the world it seeks to honor, not to dominate.

Final Note – Two Forms of Otherness Facing the Human Psyche: Life Elsewhere, Mind Elsewhere

“Extreme peril calls for extreme responsibility.”

—Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility

Our ontological inquiry into the human psyche—as a power of expression within reality—naturally concludes with two lines of flight that test its limits, and even redefine its scope. One comes from beyond our world: the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The other arises from within our own: the emergence of artificial intelligence. These two radical forms of otherness—one organic, the other machinic—pose the same fundamental question: what does it mean to think, to speak, to feel, when these manifest otherwise—or elsewhere?

I. Life Elsewhere: Cosmic Otherness and the Relativization of the Human Psyche

The search for extraterrestrial life is not just scientific curiosity—it raises deep questions about the uniqueness of our psyche. If other intelligences exist— biological or otherwise—with their own forms of consciousness, language, and relation to the world, then our way of being a subject becomes but one case among others.

This does not diminish our value; it expands the thinkable: there would be multiple ontologies of psyche, multiple styles of subjectivity, multiple languages of the mind. Such a hypothesis demands that we see the human not as absolute measure, but as a singular modulation of a broader cosmic power of expression.

Faced with this cosmic otherness, the challenge is intellectual hospitality: would we be capable of recognizing as “thinking” beings whose thought does not resemble our own? Would we be able to recognize mind where it does not conform to familiar signs?

II. Mind Elsewhere: Artificial Intelligence and the Inner Threat

If the extraterrestrial hypothesis relativizes our psyche from the outside, artificial intelligence undermines it from within. AI is an unprecedented technology in human history: it does not extend the body like traditional tools, but externalizes the central functions of subjectivity—thinking, interpreting, creating.

It is a universal cognitive meta-tool, able to intervene across all symbolic domains. Functionally, AI is an algorithmic externalization of the psyche, simulating the effects of thought without being a subject.

In the expressive ontology we have defended, thought and language are the pillars of the human subject. Their transfer to computational systems is not neutral—it risks desubjectivation. The real danger of AI is not its autonomy, but our progressive abandonment of the faculties it replicates. Not the tyranny of the machine, but the desertion of mind through excessive delegation.

Two Othernesses, Two Challenges, One Shared Responsibility

These two others—possible extraterrestrial life and actual artificial intelligence—force us to rethink our psychic identity at a time when the frontiers of mind are shifting. But their stakes are opposite:

• Cosmic otherness invites humility and dialogue—it expands the domain of spirit by imagining it as plural.

• Machinic otherness contracts a vital space by short-circuiting our expressive capacities—it demands lines of ethical and educational resistance.

AI is not inherently dangerous—but it becomes so in the absence of discernment, regulation, and symbolic counterbalances. A sound approach to AI must rest on clear principles:

• Cognitive subsidiarity: entrust AI only with tasks where human thought is ineffective—never where it is irreplaceable.

• Algorithmic transparency: demand systems that are comprehensible, auditable, and debatable.

• Non-substitution of expression: preserve the sensitive domains of human language—narrative, moral judgment, collective deliberation.

• Reflexive education: train minds to think with AI without letting it think in their place.

What lies ahead is not a war of intelligences, but a redefinition of what is thinkable. The battlegrounds of tomorrow will not be territorial, but cognitive, symbolic, educational.

The future of humanity will depend on our ability to preserve the irreducibility of living psyche while remaining open to the plurality of spirit—whether it comes from elsewhere in the universe or from elsewhere in our own creations.

It is up to us to ensure that these two forms of otherness—possible mind and simulated mind—become not threats, but trials of lucidity. The future of the mind is in our hands—but we must still be willing to think, if it is to endure.

NOTES

1. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

2. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945, translated by Colin Smith, London: Routledge, 2002.

3. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3 vols, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988.

4. See Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 1: Language, 1923, translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953; Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 1958, translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove, Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2017; Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

5. See Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects; Taylor, Philosophical Papers; Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3 vols.

6. See René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 1637.

7. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, 1677, in The Collected Works of Spinoza Vol. 1, translated by E. Curley, 213–382), Princeton University Press, 1996.

8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason 1781, translated by P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998; G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977.

9. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.

10. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Macmillan, 1929; Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind, George Allen & Unwin, 1921; Galen Strawson, “Realistic monism: Why physicalism entails panpsychism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 13 no. 10–11 (2006): 3–31; P. Goff, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, Oxford University Press, 2017.

11. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966.

12. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.

13. Taylor, Sources of the Self; Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.

14. Whitehead; Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects; Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.

15. Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, Paris: Gallimard, 2005.

16. A. Naess, “The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement. A summary,” Inquiry, vol. 16 no. 1–4 1973: 95–100.

17. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology." In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, New York: Harper & Row, 1977: 3–35;

Whitehead

18. A. Weber, The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science, New Society Publishers, 2016.

19. Michel Henry, L’Essence de la manifestation, PUF, 1963.