Non-philosophical Definitions on the Transcendental, Sense (of) Identity, Reflection, Generalization, Solitude, and Lived Experience

Transcendental (Pure Transcendental Identity)

First instance after the Real or the One constitutive of the subject as force (of) thought. It is the clone of the transcendental Unity proper to the philosophical Decision and produced by the vision-in-One on the basis of this symptomatic indication. Transcendental Identity is no longer the transcendental One of philosophy associated with a division; it is an undivided identity which finds nothing in it but its occasion.

• The transcendental obviously has a long philosophical history marked by Aristotle, certain scholastics, Kant (who is nothing but an important turn for it), Husserl, etc, but under these etiquettes, there is the transcendental as invariant of the structure of the philosophical Decision as transcendental Unity, immanent and transcendent to the basic Dyad, consequently divided and claiming to be real, the Real, through its autoposition. In this very general sense, the transcendental is the superior dimension of all philosophy. This is how non-philosophy understands it, as that which forms a circle or doublet with the empirical on the one hand through the a priori, and with the Real on the other hand through autoposition.

In its philosophically overdetermined beginnings, non-philosophy is radically equivalent to the transcendental, and then has understood that its project–which risked passing for a radicalization of Husserl–demanded more than a supplementary overcoming of the transcendental, which is in every way first or commencement in the order of thought: that it demanded order it in the primacy of the Real as though in a cause by immanence, not present and positive but non-sufficient or negative. Non-philosophy thus displaces itself on four and not three orders: the Real or the One (foreclosed to the transcendental), the “empirical” given (or the thought-world), the transcendental (which the Real clones on the basis of the Unity of experience), the a priori (equally cloned but on the basis of the Transcendental which is the organon of philosophy). The transcendental forms the first instance of the force (of) thought. Now it is an individed identity although cloned–thus also “separated”–on the basis of divided transcendental Unity; or given-without-givennes in-the-last-instance on the basis of the givenness of this most cloven philosophical Unity. It is related from the point of view of its genesis and its function not in the a priori but even in the transcendental which serves as occasion for it. Thus non-philosophy effectively separates the amphibologies of the philosophical transcendental (with the empirical and with the Real) and the “subjective” identities which are its symptom, and all this without claiming to dissolve these amphibologies. Such an immediate dissolution of the latter would suppose that the One-in-One, the Real, be identitcal to one of their sides: this unilateral identification without fail leads to a new transcendental philosophy (M. Henry) and again to the disappearance of the Real.

Sense (Sense (of) Identity)

Ensemble of knowledges related to philosophical material insofar as they are manifested by the force (of) thought and as its “correlate.” Non-philosophical sense is always sense (of) identity. The content of this identity of philosophy or its structures is of being foreclosure-in-the-last-instance of the Real. Philosophy takes on a sense of foreclosure and simple occasion: it is its identity as “constituted” by the force (of) thought and the vision-in-One in-the-last-instance.

• Sense is the element of philosophy as transcendence in immanence (Husserl), enveloping every given in a “halo of generality” (Merlau-Ponty). It can be defined as irreducible tension, digression, distance or as ensemble of the way in which the ideal identity of an object is given. Analytically, sense is said of a sign or proposition and is reduced either to another sign which interprets the first (Peirce), or reduced to this proposition itself, i.e. to the ensemble of the rules that govern its usage (Wittgenstein). After having insisted it in the line of phenomenology, Heidegger rejects this concept as relevant or seemingly arising too directly from a certain human performativity, in order to come to Truth as Aletheia.

If philosophical sense and in particular phenomenological sense is of the order of generality, non-philosophical sense is uni-versal in-the-last-instance: it is an identity which is said or is related to the philosophy-objet but which is only related by the uni-versality in-the-last-instance of the vision-in-One. Immediate consequences: 1) The philosophical doublet of sense (a halo–itself “general”–of generality..) is eleminated and the non-autopositional identity (of) sense consists in being the sense (of) identity.

2) Sense is determined in philosophy by referential, situational, actional, interpersonal contexts. It arises now in its essence from the determination-in-the-last-instance alone: it is thus identically theory or explanatory and pragmatic or of the usage of philosophy.

3) It can be said that non-philosophical sense is determined by the structure of the force (of) thought as “subject,”yet that this structure does not form a set of rules but a play of rules itself determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real, which suffices to distinguish non-philosophy from Wittgenstein’s solution.

4) Thus understood, sense is a first term of non-philosophy whose formulation and representation are in turn elaborated by the force (of) thought on the basis of the concepts of sense as simple material, in particular of sense in its various relations to the noema, the signifier, the signified, signification, usage, etc. In other words, the non-philosophical representation of sense can make use of extremely diverse conceptual materials. According to the preceding points, this represention of the “sense” object can do nothing but form a circle with the latter but is determined-in-the-last-instance by the sense of this “sense” object. As for these latter, the “sense” object and its sense–the sense of sense–are identical to the equal diversity of philosophical material.

Solitude (Solitary)

Pure affect without affection of the human in man, of his essence “separated” from radical essence, of his self-identity independent of the World or foreclosed to the thought-world. Solitude is also with Veracity that through which the One-in-One determines (in-the-last-instance) its objects and their non-philosophical descriptions.

• In general, solitude takes on an anthropological value: a means of moral asceticism, instrument of introspection (Montaigne, Rousseau, Amiel, Passoa) for an intimate self-knowledge. It becomes a specifically philosophical problem with the Cartesian position of the Cogito menaced by metaphysical solitude or solipsism. Henceforth, even when Husserl defines a transcendental solitude of the Ego, it is a question of reducing solipsism through intersubjectivity and to show that it is only an appearance or a necessary stage. The philosophers’ fear facing human Solitude is still marked in Heidegger: ennui, anxiety, care, being-towards-death, by elevating Dasein to authenticity, promoting a non-human, if not superhuman solitude, giving it a status of effect or attribute and refusing it that of strictly real and simply human essence.

Solitude can primarily be understood in a simple manner as identity of immanence (to) itself. It then radicalizes in a positive way the idea of a finitude intrinsic to the human in man as being-foreclosed, more precisely of the human-of-the-last-instance in the existing-subject-Stranger. It implies that man never coincides with the World, not even “with” itself in distance–contrary to the thesis of philosophy which thus makes of solitude a naturally unthinkable numerical concept. Prohibiting the autoposition of the Ego and the subject-Stranger which it determines, it definitively signifies that man is deprived of all substance (res) and all ideal essence as mode of such a substance. Solitude is the real nucleus of the Ego, its being-separated-without-separation which “precedes” the existence which is the subject-Stranger and more reasonably the philosophical type of essence. It implies the abandonment of every metaphysical anthropology as well as every humanism. Man, in the duality of the Ego, positively alone by himself, and of the subject turned as Stranger towards the World, is not even a transcendental Robinson, and does not arise from number and quantity from which Solitude precisely protects him.

A more differentiated axiomatic distinguishes between the Ego as Solitary (the One without attribute, even of solitude), and Solitude properly speaking as non-worldly or non-philosophical position of the Solitary as subject-Stranger, in the same way that Given-without-givenness is distinguished from Givenness. Another possible distinction is still that of the Solitary and Solitude now as the effect of unilateralization through which the Solitary (i.e. the vision-in-One) affects every thought. Solitude then receives an ethical type of function parallel to that of Veracity which expresses the unidentity in the non-ethical order through which the Solitary affects its objects and their descriptions. Each time it is a problem of axiomatic usage, of rigorous pragmatics rather than a problem of conceptual systematicity.

Lived Experience (Lived-without-Life)

Every act of thought or experience, of theory or life, insofar as it is related in-the-last-instance to the One as lived (of) lived experience or immanent “in-lived-experience” and insofar as it thus defines the cause of a non-phenomenology.

• Transcendental phenomenology achieves, after Descartes, the telos of “lived experience” (Erlebnis) which traversed certain idealist philosophies of life (Plotinus, Fichte, Hegel). “Lived experience” then designates every intentional act as related to consciousness on its subjective side (hyle and noesis). Lived experience is thus conscious by definition and “ready for perception” *Husserl”; immanent or absolutely and adequately given without attempts, unlike the object; individualized and capable of plurality; finally, pure as transcendental and not psychological. Not even in transcendental phenomenology does it attain the purity of radical immanence or the ultimate and reversible character which is the mark of the Real. It is always slightly of the transcendental order of an object or an attribute which forms a frontier, if not violence, to the (rational) subject. A radicalization of phenomenological lived experience, but which remains at the limits of philosophy, is given by immanent “Life,” auto-generative and auto-affective in the sense of Michel Henry.

Non-philosophy universalizes what philosophy gives it occasion of thinking as “lived experience.” The unilateralizing suspension and unidentification of the transcendence of phenomenological lived experience makes the sense of the latter seem like and existent yet a foreclosure of non-phenomenological or radically immanent experience. This sense is in some way the non-phenomenological noema of the “lived” phenomenological object. Under this form, it can then serve to name, as  first term, the One itself or the Real of-the-last-instance, the “thing” of real lived experience. Released from its autoposition and its perceptibility of consciousness reduced to its identity-in-One, it finally possesses a transcendental purity and a universality which allow it to be said of whichever thought or experience as related to this lived-experience-of-the-last-instance. In effect, always in non-philosophy but here more particularly, we distinguish (lived experience as) Real or One-in-One from the “lived” as original conceptual symbol but having undergone a non-conceptual treatment of first term, a symbol through which the Real forms the object of a position of thought obviously without being posited in its essence itself. The term “lived experience” is thus also a vocable among others without a phenomenological type of privilege and without giving rise to a philosophy of Life. Within the framework of non-phenomenology, it can be “re-work” as “lived-without-life,” a first term which effectively marks its neutralization as philosophical concept.

Generalization (Generalization and Uni-versalization)

Said of the reigning redirection of a structure of philosophical or scientific representation and responsible for adjusting it in-the-last-instance to the immanent Real. Generalization is the fundamental operation of non-philosophical knowledge, that which gives it its explanatory and deconstructive force, but on condition of being ordered in the uni-versality of the vision-in-One.

• Philosophy generalizes: autoposition, autoreflection, and primarily every type of metaphysical abstraction, etc. Logos, Kosmos, and Polis are structural invariants, Greco-occidental foundations which are called earth, horizon…according to the eras. The philosophical work has an essence of reflexively forming a logos of these stabilized invariants: this reflection is either pure logology (Aristotle’s Organon), or cosmic logos, or political logos. Philosophical generalization is an amplification of reflexive interactions, an operation with a traditionally unitary and systematic goal; hence the multiplication of tautological effects and reflexive symmetries. After the intervention of Hume and Kant, critiquing the possibility of metaphysical reflection, two simulacra of generalization are set in place: 1) Hegel has conserved the effect of symmetry (bilaterality). Philosophy is then the extrapolation of topology. The invariant foundations are assimilated by totalizing variation as Concept. Hegel simultaneously idealizes and naturalizes thought by revealing real immanence. 2) In the 20th century, the inverse operation was attempted: interpolate or disintegrate. The Other loses the support of Being and provokes effects of assymetry, differe(a)nce, singularity. These effects after Nietzsche and Husserl are still generated in a foundation of the logos which they affect by unilaterality (the differentialists and M. Henry via a completely differrent mode). In a general way through its metaphysical nucleus, philosophy is generality and totality and its universality is thus divided and does not manage to constitute itself in really universal thought. Despite or because of its claims, philosophy remains a particular thought (for example, “Greek,” to which “Jewish” thought can be opposed.

Non-philosophical generalization stems–this is the meaning of the “non-Euclidean” metaphor–from a non-, an effect of the vision-in-One or the Real. This is not an immediate negation but a unilateralizing of the claims of philosophy over the Real. It does not destroy the reality of philosophical mixtures by dissociating the sides of one another (M. Henry), but conserves this reality as support for sense, the sense (of) identity equivalent to philosophy. The vision-in-One does not deny the World but simply unilateralizes its claims. It gives or clones via its own mode in-the-last-instance on the basis of the experience of the World or philosophy, on the one hand the identities which constitute the subject as force (of) thought, and on the other the correlative identities which are equivalent to these objects, their sense (of) identity such that it is lived by the force (of) thought. But this play of “unilateralization” and “unidentification,” which extracts from philosophy identities-in-the-last-instance, is a radical universalization. More precisely, a uni-versalization: everything (received-)given-in-One is on the mode of the immanent uni-versality of the One or is given-in-the-last-instance, as an identity turned-towards…X (insofar as X exists). We thus oppose to the universality by and in the transcendence of philosophy, always divided into generality and totality, the identity of immanent uni-versality which enables constituting on the basis of philosophy’s terms a transcendental axiomatic of uni-versals first terms in-the-last-instance.

A true generalization accepts losing the always illusory foundations, as well as logological manipulation, on behalf of continual work of redirection. The destabilization of Greco-occidental invariants loses the intuitive references which are found in a thought annexed to space and time. The thought that arises, but only in-the-last-instance, from immanence is atopic. Philosophical reflection with its reflexive, bilateral returns [renvois] then appear as the symptom of a unilateral sending [envoi]. The positive destabilization of thought deploys itself without the flattening philosophical symmetries. We could call, for example, “generalized fractality” the uni-versal alterity (in-One) that affects thought and suspends representational closures. Fractal-real objectivity rectifies and generalizes knowledges by continuously adjusting their closures over the uni-versal Other and its non-representational identity. The universalizing redirection must be distinguished from an artificializing philosophy that naturalizes thought. It is a question of simulating–without returning to a philosophy of simulacra–philosophical statements through non-philosophical means of a generalizing fractality and of producing “statements of synthesis”: irreducible to reflexive syntheses and thus capable of explaining them.

Reflection (Reflection without the One or Non-autoreflexive)

Thought’s status as clone according to the One, determined according to the philosophical schema of specularity and speculation. Another way of understanding the cloning of thought by the vision-in-One on the basis of philosophy.

• To the extent that philosophy, taken in its most invariant and most general structure of dyad and decision, is an operation of division and doubling, it integrates a mirror moment, specular and speculative, which forms the double or image of every term, to the closest different, of another or itself. It thus knows of reflection, but the latter is necessarily in turn divided into two reflections which divide representation, the latter being on the one hand a reflection of the real and on the other a reflection of itself. Reflection is thus divided by the duality of the thing and the representation-as-mirror of the thing; the mirror is then the common and mediating form of the thing and representation, and relates the latter to the form because it also (for example, the ego) participates in both, or is thing and representation. Materialism (with Lenin and the concept of knowledge as “reflection without mirror”) has simplified this problematic and begun to denounce the idealist functioning of the metaphysical doubles of the Real. On the one hand, it autonomizes the process of knowledge which no doubt is refered to the Real or is its “reflection,” but without being it in the sense of an image in the mirror, without knowledge and duplicating such a fantasm, a cloud or a mirage. On the other hand, it affirms the nature relative to the Real of this process of knowledge by narrowly subordinating the latter to the form and by thus preventing every idealism, i.e. the speculative autoposition of knowledge as being the Real istelf. Another critique, that of transcendental idealism against transcendental realism,  denouncing in the latter the presence of a mirror (Fichte and Husserl against Spinoza and Descartes).
• The materialist solution poses the problem of knowledge in a simpler and more exact way than idealism, but without perceiving that the latter defines every philosophy, materialism included, and not simply theories of knowledge (Althusser). This is because it still poses it in the element of transcendence–that of matter or “being” in relation to “knowledge”–whereas it is still obliged to conceive the latter via the model of the reflection of a thing (the objectivity of matter). Such a reflection implies, being given the transcendence of matter, the dissimulated existence of a mirror, like in idealist philosophy, but materialism can only simplify this structure in the sense of the identity or the immanence of the “in-itself” of matter which determines consciousness without being determined in return by it (primacy of materialist theory over the gnoseological thesis). It thus rules the problem by recognizing the existence of reflection but by denying that of the mirror.

Non-philosophy takes its departure in the identity of immanence, unbound from all objectivity or transcendence, from the One-Real rather than that of “matter.” The simplification of the philosophical structure is more radical than it but precisely less resolved. On the one hand, the in-objective immanence of the Real excludes that it can give itself as a thing to a mirror, that it can alienate itself in an image which would be its representation, i.e. its auto-representation. The One is thus not bilaterally reflected, not because it does not “exist,” but because it is itself foreclosed to the possibility of being: if there is a reflection and mirror through the World, this will be a reflection without the positive cooperation of the reflected. Furthermore, transcendence and its modes (indicated and presented in particular by philosophy), if they give themselves to the One, are from the latter’s point of view given and lived in-One. But, from their point of view, that of their relative autonomy, they function as a mirror. They undoubtedly do not dispose of a thing which would be given to be reflected but, unlike the intra-philosophical mirror, they enjoy a relative autonomy and are seen to extract a reflection according to the One which they convey or support: their clone. The One does not reflect itself, does not produce the reflection, is not its own mirror; but there is a mirror that lays claim to the One from its solitary authority. The Real is the necessary and “negative” condition of the reflection or clone, which it extracts in some way. This reflection, which supposes the relative autonomy of transcendence (of “being), is the transcendental, then the a priori as specific orders without their own autonomy, caught between the Real cause of this forced reflection and the World which effectuates it. These orders thus articulate the Given-without givenness and the Given-by-givenness. Together they constitute the transcendental and a priori syntax of the subject or force (of) thought.

Thus transferred onto the terrain of radical immanence which dualyzes it, the specular and speculative structure that obviously has the form of a triad (things to be reflected, mirror, image or reflection) is not dismembered: it always comprises three terms, but otherwise disposed. We could speak, except through anti-metaphysical abstraction, of a reflection without mirror in the sense of an absolute absence of mirrors. But it is transformed in depth by being-separated or foreclosed to the Real–through its immanence–and gives rise to a new syntax which charcterizes it, from the fact itself that the Real is not divided and does not give itself to be reflected or to reflect itself, due to its non-autopositional simplification. The clone is the identity of the speculative structure which is reflection according to the Real. In effect, the speculative structure in and of philosophy is itself divided in each of these three instances along with the conditions of the vision-in-One, without removing the reflection (for the World not for the One), the mirror, and the reflection, by extracting simplicity or identity in some way. These conditions suffice to attach the speculative triad to its own autoreflection and in general to the philosophical circle. It is now formed by three terms which are identites, the first being real identity, never divided (the One); the second, certainly a divided identity but which can no longer spread its division (the World); the third, the transcendental order of the reflection which is reflection according to the Real, but undivided, non-autopositional reflection and never double reflection. These three instance no longer form a system like the philosophical Decision. Admittedly, we shall not say that non-philosophy is “antispeculative”–it is never the negation or reversal of philosophy–but that it is non-speculative, which signifies that it is the identity (of) philosophical speculation and in general the identity (of) philosophy.