Beyond substance: Egon Bondy’s non-substantial ontology between materialist critique and modern cosmology

Abstract

This paper examines the key features of the non-substantial ontology developed by Egon Bondy (born Zbyněk Fišer) in his seminal works of the 1960s and offers one of the first systematic introductions to Bondy’s ontological thought in English. The study situates his philosophy within the broader context of the Czech Marxist philosophical movement of the period and explains why ontology became a central concern of Czechoslovak Marxist philosophy during the 1960s. It reconstructs Bondy’s systematic critique of substantial ontological models, showing why, in his view, they inevitably lapse into metaphysical dualism, devalue concrete existence, and ultimately foreclose the possibility of freedom and meaningful existence. In opposition both to the tradition of substantial ontology grounded in self-subsistent individuals and to the Heideggerian ontological tradition, Bondy formulates a processual and relational non-substantial ontology in which reality consists exclusively of hierarchically structured sets, “events,” or “single-units,” and in which the primacy of structure and relations is emphasized. This article, however, goes beyond mere exposition of Bondy’s philosophical system and argues that his contra-intuitive theoretical claims retain considerable relevance for contemporary philosophy and related fields. In particular, the second part of the article demonstrates striking parallels between Bondy’s non-substantial model of ontological reality and certain contemporary cosmological theories, especially the cosmological model developed by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok.