it is this idea of an organism, a totality, which basically crushes its parts into submission, that feeds and drains them into the fluid "whole," this ontology itself is woefully under-analyzed and too easily granted. Aristotle's response is as forceful now as it was to the pre-Sophists: if everything is a reflection, if everything is attributable to everything else, then nothing can ever change. At its root, every philosophy which does not admit of some kind of essential substance, form or unity is ultimately left scratching their head about causality, or dissolving it outright into a Heraclitean plasma. I can hear the rejoinder now: "but we want to think the middle ground between this disastrous, changeless flow and a world of specific, disengaged pieces of concrete that never meet at all." Well, then welcome to object-oriented philosophy, the only game in town at the moment which ventures to think the unified multiplicity that is the thing, or this thing, or any-thing at all. Every object is an ecology, but also an ecology. If a philosophy doesn't have some kind of basic tension analogous to a unified object and its pieces, then how can it really explain change?
I can't say it better than that. The return to pre-Aristotelian scientism (where you make a decision about what constitutes the world—some kind of flux or some kind of apeiron, fire, water etc.) then go from there, can't ever, by definition, account for change. Change is fetishized at the level of appearance—but not explained. The materialist decision inhibits it.
That's a far more rigorous explanation than my previous attempt. I was just reading the Physics and the Metaphysics too. Writing a book will do that—erase your memory... While I read them I was thinking, all you have to to do is substitute names: for Heraclitus use Deleuze or Whitehead, for Barad Anaximander and so on.
That's where scientism gets you: right back where we started in the sixth century BC...
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