primärens

Primärens is a neologism used in some speculative ontologies and science fiction to denote a class of fundamental entities that constitute the ground or basis of a system’s reality. In these frameworks, primärens are posited as the most basic carriers of being and causal power, from which more complex phenomena derive. They are typically conceived as indivisible or irreducible at the level of inquiry that concerns the theory, and they are not readily analyzable into simpler components within the same ontological scheme.

The term is derived from the German word primär meaning primary, with the plural suffix -en, and is used mainly in German-language discussions and in English texts that adopt a similar neologism. Primärens are distinguished from ordinary substances by their foundational status and often by a lack of accessible internal structure as described by the theory. They function as the substrates or grounds for laws, properties, and causal relations that appear at higher levels of description.

In practice, primärens appear in two broad ways: as ontological foundations that ground all other entities and properties, or as hypothetical primitives that instantiate causal powers from which emergent phenomena follow. Critics highlight problems of definitional clarity, testability, and empirical access, arguing that positing primärens risks unfalsifiability unless paired with concrete theoretical predictions. In fiction and worldbuilding, primärens provide a compact way to imagine a reality with a minimal, underlying substrate. See also: fundamental ontology, emergence, substratum.