Provisional Stabilization in an Erosive Field Toward a Non-Telic Ontology of Constitutive Exchange A Contribution to the Niami Framework of Finite Continuance
Abstract
Morteza Niami
This article develops a single, deceptively compact thesis that runs beneath the whole architecture of the ontology of finite continuity: existence is not a path toward a final essence but a bounded process that must preserve its own capacity for reconfiguration against continuous erosion, such that every being emerges as a provisional stabilization within an erosive field, and constitutive exchange of resources between a system and its environment is what makes that stabilization possible at all. The article situates this thesis against the telic image of being inherited from the Platonic and, in a qualified sense, the Heideggerian tradition, and then tests it against three non-anthropological resources that have shaped its formation without yet being fully integrated into the published architecture of the framework: Gilbert Simondon's theory of individuation and metastability, Ilya Prigogine's thermodynamics of dissipative structures, and the autopoietic theory of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, read alongside Niklas Luhmann's operationally closed social systems. Each resource is shown to share a structural intuition with finite continuance while diverging from it on a specific axis: direction of process (individuation versus resistance), normative valence (physical description versus practical prescription), and openness (operational closure versus constitutive, non-closed exchange). The article then draws out the systematic consequences of this comparison for three components of the wider framework: determination regulation, the automatic/dynamic distinction in mask theory and its recently proposed non-circular, perturbation- based criterion, and the regulative ideal type of the post-monopoly human. The result is not an eclectic synthesis but a sharpened self-positioning: finite continuance is shown to occupy a specific and previously under-articulated location among theories of open, far-from-equilibrium, self-regulating systems, one defined by the normative demand that reconfiguration-capacity be actively protected rather than merely observed as an empirical regularity.