Hypothesis (Philosophizing-by-Hypothesis)
“Applied” or variant usage of non-philosophy (proposed by A.F. Schmid) that adds to its axioms a supplementary axiom bearing upon the philosophical Decision: that of the de jure multiplicity of philosophical decisions. This axiom is simultaneously added to those of the vision-in-One and those formalizing the philosophical Decision.
- This problem has no meaning in philosophy and must not be confused with the philosophical problem of the One and the Multiple. At most, a historian-philosopher of philosophy (M. Gueroult) has elaborated a theory of the philosophical decision in a Fichtean spirit under the hypothesis of an empirical or de facto spatio-temporal multiplicity of philosophies.
Sufficiency demands the certitude and absoluteness ending in the principles of philosophy. Non-philosophy can on the contrary support and promote a practice of philosophy–and not a “pure” non-philosophy–by hypothesis rather than speculation, without sufficiency or exhaustiveness. The hypothesis is in every way a fundamental concept of non-philosophy but it is even more so for this “application” to which it gives rise. It allows admitting the coexistence of multiple positions, contrary from the point of view of their sufficiency, yet no longer understanding them as contraries or even as “positions” but as transcendental orders or transcendental Identities. Veritable differences of order are no longer determined by the war of philosophical interests but arise from multiple transcendental identities which are so many hypotheses. The engagements of philosophies, concepts, and names of philosophers are no longer the occasion of a hierarchization, the hypothesis being in-the-last-instance the form of equivalence of engagements. Likewise, we could suppose that the simulation has modified relations between theory and experience in the contemporary sciences, we could suppose that, understood in this sense, the hypothesis will transform the relations in philosophy which rule over the transcendental and the empirical while displacing one of the major problems of philosophical objectivity: the respect of the sciences and facts must accommodate themselves for the philosophers in their personal philosophical histories, that which leads them to perpetuate a vicious dialectic between the model and the elevated, the master and the disciple, against the other supposedly inauthentic positions. “Philosophizing by hypothesis” is a way of giving a meaning to a love-without-master-and-without-disciple in philosophy, and making of the latter a veritable oecumine for the Stranger. Philosophical individuation is then considered “ordinary” and no longer as the effect of a narcissistic difference.
If non-philosophy rigorously takes philosophy as reduced occasion and as “object,” nothing prevents us from supposing that this object possesses the degree and nature of autonomy which accords it this new axiom. In this case, non-philosophy modifies the practice of philosophy itself. It is a postulate there in the sense that no rule can allow us to preview the concrete nature of such effects. It is not simply a question of relating the content of the material to the One according to rules which deliver philosophy from its sufficiency, but of practicing philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, etc. in such a way that they satisfy the requisites of non-philosophy under this axiom. This schematism of non-philosophy in this material contributes to transforming the practice of philosophy in several ways. From the point of view of “pure reason,” philosophy would proceed by hypotheses and first terms, there would be as many philosophies as examples of the mixtures between the empirical and the transcendental. From the aesthetic point of view, every philosophical project would have its own style which could individuate it: this is one of the meanings that could be given to “artificial philosophy.” From the ethical point of view, radical evil, which concerns the World, would be judged as the lure that the distance of philosophy from the Real producing the essence of human solitudes on the basis of radical misfortune. Every concept elaborated by non-philosophy could be reintroduced into its original discourse and enrich it without for all that reproducing a logic of sufficiency. This schematism would be a positive and liberating transformation of the material in itself.
Such a schematism confirms that non-philosophy is in no way the end of philosophy but its salvation in multiple and non-exclusive practices. Philosophy continues as one of the forms of non-philosophy. This axiom in question is thus the condition of the reality of philosophy in non-philosophy. It saves philosophy from the edge of non-philosophy which it softens but without returning to the forms of its most spontaneous sufficiency.
Experimentation
Effectuation of the system of hypotheses of non-philosophy by the object “philosophy” as reduced to the state of occasion (symptomatic indication, nomination, cloning). The experimentation of non-philosophy neither verifies nor falsifies it, but effectuates it as “simple” hypothesis determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real.
- An experimental thought only exists by excess or passages to the limit: Hegel experiments with but idealizes experience according to Kant and extracts a dialectic of the Logos from transcendental appearance. Heidegger, reading Kant, experimented with the ontological status of temporality on the basis of the experience of inner sense. Philosophy, correlating the hypothesis and experimentation in a mixture, renders them convertible at the limit, finally knowing neither the one nor the other or ignoring them in their identity. Despite the epistemological discussions on the necessity or non-necessity and status of experimentation, the sciences offer a more solid conception of experimentation. In effect, after the concept of “crucial experience” (Bacon)–still philosophical–has been relativized, the sciences proceed by permanent experimentation either in a goal of verification or falsification.
While non-philosophy conserves the identity of the hypothesis form and prevents it from philosophically converting with the Real, either by verification (logical empiricism), or by falsification (critical epistemology), or by absolute identification (Hegel, Nietzsche, for example), it conserves the necessity and relative autonomy of experimentation. But it suspends the philosophical sense of these latter: the experience (here philosophy) is necessary but limited to its function of occasion, of material, of symptom, etc. There is no transcendental philosophy outside the field of philosophy as its object, but the transcendental is no longer determined in its essence even by this object (the “occasional” cause).
Experimentation indeed has effects of verification and falsification for non-philosophy, more exactly for its previous hypotheses as investments in another philosophical material. But contrary to what happens with philosophical hypotheses, it does not realize those of non-philosophy but effectuates them in their conditions of existence without alienating them. It respects and thus confirms the status of non-philosophy to be a valid hypothesis because it is determined–and protected–in-the-last-instance by the vision-in-One. When transcendental thought is ordered in the Real, it demands more than ever an experimentation relative to its conditions of existence (against Platonism and its “digression,” Kant), but more than ever resists it and does not progressively fall into it. It affirms the unilateral duality of the transcendental and the empirical, of the force (of) thought and of experimentation, and thus avoids the epistemological (positivist, critical, etc.) and philosophical (realist, idealist, “absolute,” etc.) solutions which are all founded on their de jure convertibility (with a verification, a falsification, a rectification close…, to a “labor” of adequation). By making the experimentation pass from its epistemological status to its “occasional” status, it liberates it from philosophical idealism simultaneously as it liberates the transcendental from the empirico-transcendental circle.
Non-intuitive (non-spatial and non-temporal)
Mode of being of thought produced by the force (of) thought on the basis of materials of scientific and philosophical representations, intuitive or spontaneously spatialized and temporalized; it only renders visible according to the Invisible-of-the-last-instance, thus without leading thought back to its philosophical virtualization and temporalization.
- To grasp the problem of space in the constitution of thought, the philosophical work supposes the interaction, for example, of three spatial structures. The first spatial structuration concerns writing which, according to Plato, represses Speech (myth of Teuth). Classical authors are not disturbed by this problematic of inscription. In the second place, space is partes extra partes, the unlimited milieu (apeiron) or Chaos. Finally, these still spatial determinations virtualize Chaos in a positive Logos. In Plato, these three structurations are intricated and constitute the philosophical Order. In Kant, space, the pure form of intuition, is more particularly related to the Logos of the categories disciplining the rhapsody of the sensible. Husserl is disturbed, on the contrary, by the idealizing function of mathematized space, just like Bergson. The differentialists return to shifting writing, sometimes topology, sometimes difference disseminating space. However, by doing so they duplicate space which simultaneously becomes concept and unlimited milieu. Their radicalization does not escape from the doubling interaction of Chaos and the Logos. The entirety of philosophy, explicitly or not (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger), reinforces the spatial intuitivity of thought through its temporal intuitivity, never completely eradicated despite Heidegger’s efforts, to the extent that philosophy essentially remains a work of the language-world.
Non-philosophy abandons the differe(a)ntialist spirit which does not really escape from the doublet of the empirical and the transcendental or the doublet of space and time. Language takes on a functional and no longer originary role on behalf of the force (of) thought. This order of the functional is structured in-the-last-instance by the vision-in-One which supports the supposedly necessary intuitivity of thought. With the end of the importance attached to its intuitivity (common and/or philosophical or ontological), language is brought to the so-called “non-conceptual” state of “words-without-language.” It no longer serves to name Being and to make its ultimate sense appear (that it be topological or temporal), but it is transformed into the reserve of terms or “first names” which enter into the axioms formed on the objects of non-philosophy. If a residue of sensible and ontological intuitivity accompanies thought and its “words-without-language,” it only serves as some manner of support for the noemata that philosophy extracts from the operations and concepts of philosophy. This residual intuitivity is transcendent and no longer determines the essence of thought as ontology but belongs to the pure transcendental axiomatic which it has become as a trace of its occasional philosophical origin and as a testimony to the relative autonomy of the latter. Non-philosophy is the “choice” of the Real against the philosophical choice of space and time, i.e. finally, of Being. More generally and independently of language, intuition as mode of representation of the object is here dualyzed in: 1) intuition in the philosophical sense, now recognized as auto-intuition and not simply intuition of an object; 2) intuition as starting-from-the-intuited, not as exclusion of every intuition, but as “simple” or “non-self-intuitional” intuition (non-self-positional Distance).
Multiple
Nature of the aprioritic instance, the last in the constitution of the force (of) thought as transcendence or non-autopositional Distance. Exteriority, restored to its identity-of-the-last-instance-in-the-One, is the element of a radical multiple or multiple without multiplicity (without Unity to recover it or “set-theorize” it), multiple which is neither qualitative nor quantitative nor quantitative-qualitative, but purely primary and phenomenal.
- Philosophy knows of purely qualitative concepts (Bergson), or even purely quantitative and numerical (Badiou); explicitly the majority of the time, but implicitly for all the others, the mixed concepts, qualitative and quantitative (Nietzsche, Deleuze: difference of quantity as quality). But the two former conceptions are justifiably not pure despite their claim, since we relate them to the structure of the philosophical Decision which their concept of the Multiple employs. Every philosophical theory of the Multiple or even of the One is structured as a metaphysical mixture of the One and the Multiple. The Multiple is amphibological with the One and, for the same reasons, the dyad One/Multiple, the vertical axis crossing in metaphysics the horizontal axis of Being/Existent.
When the One is itself recognized as “separated,” without any abstraction but axiomatic, from the structure in crossed doublets of metaphysics, as “separated-without-separation,” it is neither qualitative (Plotinus), nor quantitative (Pythagoras), nor qualitative and quantitative (Plato). Everything that sustains its mark as clone is perfectly protected from these adventures. This is the case of the Multiple which appears on the last level of the force (of) thought after the real One and transcendental Identity under the form of a non-autopositional Exteriority, simple and single, not duplicated or folded. The a priori has always contained not an empirical multiple but no longer exactly a “pure” multiple, for it is still conditioned by its relation to experience. The non-philosophical concept of the a priori also shelters the first appearance of a multiple-without-unity, precisely of the identity (of the) Multiple. The identity (of the) Multiple is this concept that enables avoiding the quantitative/qualitative mixtures as the amphibology or convertibility–with a hierarchy and its reversals–of the One and the Multiple. The Multiple is not itself multiple, does not predicate itself of itself. But the fact that there is no multiple of the multiple does not mean that it forms a metaphysical entity: the One determines-in-the-last-instance the Multiple as such or in its identity.
Time-without-Temporality (Radical Past, Transcendental Future, Present-World)
Said of the radical past, self-immanence of time, its identity through and through which does not exist nor has existed, which is but negatively or without being. It determines-in-the-last-instance a transcendental and subjective temporality which it clones from the philosophical mixture of the time and temporality proper to Being or the Other–of the present as time-world. This pure transcendental temporality constitutive of the subject-Stranger is the “mobile” clone of the present-world under the condition of the “immobile” Past: non-Platonism.
- It is useless to systematically categorize the philosophies of time. Their aporias (thinking time or the unstable temporally or not) stem from the unitary opposition between metric, chronological, or ontic time and ontological time (or not: Judaic diachronics). Hence the doublet of a “temporal time” or “(self)-temporalizing,” of a temporalized time and a temporalizing time, which testifies to a failure of the identity (of) time conceived as mixture.
- Temporality is more often an interpretation by philosophy of the scientific theories of time (for example, physico-cosmological time conceived as linearity and irreversibility, cf. the second principle of thermodynamics). Contemporary philosophy wishes to avoid this overly passive course and reattaches temporality to Being or the Other. Already in Kant, time, as a priori form of sensibility, enjoyed a privilege in relation to space, understood in a more orginary way (cf. Heidegger). Heidegger radicalizes exiting the Husserlian circle of objective or metric time by opposing it, in an almost Bergsonian way, to subjective duration: the originary lived time said of intimate consciousness. Husserl, through the opposition he establishes between constituting time and constituted time, reveals the originary autoconstitution of time in its different modalities (retention, protention, presentation, representation). It is through these latter that the autoconstitution of the so-called “immanent” temporality of consciousness effectuates itself. Heidegger displaces this problematic by radicalizing it with the three ekstases of time as Dasein’s modes of temporality. If temporality–as question–exists, it signifies the sense of Being as veiling and unveiling of Dasein’s ek-sistence; but as manifestation of Being in its triple and unique dimension.
Unlike the philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries, of Neitzsche and Heidegger after Hegel, non-philosophy renounces to make of time (of history or even becoming) the essence of the Real, to desubstantialize the latter by the former. These operations are so diverse that they repeat the philosophical gesture of the search for an originary and hierarchizing essence which is the “time of time,” an originary temporality, indeed a transcendental or existential temporalization, etc. Recent philosophical decisions multiply the forms of the doublet of time and temporality, deviating it, bringing time back to the alterity of a diachrony, but still not finding the cause of time, nor the subject (of) temporality, nor the identity of this time-world which is philosophical time, precisely because they temporally transcend towards the essence of time on the basis of the presupposition of the (empirical) time-of-the-World and only posit this essence of time as sufficient or mixed essence. The time-world on the contrary can only be a material or occasion for naming, indicating, and effectuating the vision-in-One (of) time. This time-seen-in-One can only be on its side the radical past of pure immanence and identity, a past which not only has never been present but also will never be in the future (and for the future) as trace, but which will remain immanent past even in the future when it clones from the present of the time-world.
It can also not be a question of understanding time-according-to-the-One via the onto-chronological model of Being or that of its semi-specular image (Judeo-philosophical: the infinite Other whose structure takes on the simply inhibited unitary autoposition: temporality as memory or even diachronic past). It is no longer a question of connecting with a particular scientific theory (Einsteinian space-time, for example). It is instead a question of employing a theory and pragmatics (of) the essence of identically philosophical and scientific time (in the cosmological sense, for example), but as determined in-the-last-instance by the One-past.
Hence the clones or instances, rather than dimensions or ekstases, that form the theory of temporality. We shall remark that it implies new conceptions of the “past,” the “present,” and the “future,” i.e. three symptoms of time-in-One or according-to-the-One.
1) Time as Given or Past-without-temporalization, as seen-in-One or “in-time,” etc.–these first names of time symbolize not a past time but a past which simultaneously possesses a primacy over synchrony and diachrony and determines these transcendent dimensions themselves at least as comprising the object of philosophical interpretations. The radical past is uni-versal immanent time, of which one could say that it is-without-existing or even that it is a non-temporal time. It is less a question of a memory capable of forgetting and anamnesis than of a past which cannot be forgotten and which, precisely for this reason, is foreclosed to memory which itself, in its sufficiency, believes to be able to forget and repeat by anamnesis. This One-time, even effectuated as future, remains in its necessary sterility and in no way participates in the present-world such as non-philosophy conceives it and no longer–this is what distinguishes it from the Levinasian Other, and from the “trace”–of the ontological present or the “Same.”
2) The mixture of time and the World–the sense or identity of this mixture–elevates time to the form of the World under the authority of philosophy: it is the time-world, which is not simply a regional time nor even the time of the world, but the philosophical experience of time insofar as it structures a “world” whose sense is foreclosed in turn to the One-time of the past. In its non-philosophical sense, the “present” is no longer a dimension nor even ekstasis of time, but the entirety of the decisions-of-time already operated or still to come according to the World. It is the time-material, the time-occasion in which non-philosophy extracts its language from time.
3) Finally, from the past-in-One to the Present-world is deployed the instance of the transcendental future or the temporalizing force. The future is the identity cloned or produced on the basis of the time-world as One. The way of the future is to be an effectuation of the uni-versal past under the conditions of the time-world. This effectuation signifies that, by definition and in distinction with the past which does not exist, the future exists in the sense that it is transcendental identity turned towards the present of the time-world. Instead of disposing the three instances in the ekstatic or universal-through-transcendence element which generalizes the so-called linearity of time, non-philosophy produces the experience of a time of exteriority or the stranger, existing-Stranger for the present, addressed to rather than thrown in the time-world. The subject-Stranger with which the transcendental future is confused “aims” at the World in its identity, aims at it in a non-phenomenological or non-intentional sense without fulfillment, simply sufficing for it to aim at it to completely assure its possible relation to it. If the future is subject (of) time or temporalizing force (indicated, named, effectuated on the basis of the present of the time-world), it is turned towards the latter which it transforms or from which it extracts itself through the power of the past. The future is the clone obtained by the radically “immobile” past on the basis of the mobile time of the World. The existing-subject-Stranger liberates time from its Platonic as well as Bergsonian and Heideggerian images. It brings about the manifestation of the phenomenon of time, prohibited from applying the structure of a philosophical Decision to it but instead proceeding to a theory and a pragmatics of philosophical time on the basis of the past as radical immanence (of) time to itself. It is heretical time or the heretical conception of time, without history or becoming.
Noema-Universe
Immanent object of the force (of) thought or the subject-Stranger which univerts towards and through it, relating itself in a non-intentional way as its correlate (its unilate) of sense. The universal noematic form is an identity (in-the-last-instance) of sense. The thought-world is given to the Stranger through the sense of being occasion-in-the-last-instence, i.e. foreclosure of the Real or even Other-than-the-One. A more restrained concept of the noema would designate the occasional sense acquired by the phenomenological noema as correlate of non-autopositional Distance (“equivalent” of intentionality).
- In phenomenology where this notion has found its full usage, the noema is the correlate of the sense of noesis, a sense of the object and constituted by the multiplicity of the modes or ways in which the latter is given. The noema is thus the intentional sense of an object in the World, still not uni-versal sense (by universion) of the World itself or its identity for the subject-Stranger. Like noesis, the noema is constrained in this context to a circularity more or less differing with noesis, a parallelism founded upon an identity or a self-sameness rather than broken by a determination-in-the-last-instance, upon a correlation rather than a “unilation.”
If the subject-Stranger constitutes itself by a play of (philosophical) occasions which are universions (effects of the universality of the One), it thus does not manifest itself without the series of philosophy’s “occasional” interventions being manifested in relation to it. The first reduction, called “real,” of philosophical sufficiency precisely transforms the thought-world into a simple occasion of cloning by the One. The state of “occasional cause” is thus the noematic sense in person which is said of the thought-world. This sense is of being, for philosophy, foreclosed to the One. In other words, the noematic identity (of) philosophy gives it as “Other-than-One,” first appearance of an alterity as object of the Stranger. Finally, the non-philosophical noema contains a variety of determinations corresponding to the principle modes of philosophy’s autopresentation. These determinations are all occasional or determined in-the-last-instance by their first state of occasion. The latter has allowed them to enter into the noematic sphere of non-philosophical sense and of the being of the modes of the Other-than-One. But they all participate in the universal essence of the non-philosophical noema–noema (of the) World and unilate of the Stranger–which we shall call “noema-universe” to distinguish it from the “noema-world” which is that, restrained to intentionality, of phenomenology.
Universal Noesis
Non-real dimension of the subject-Stranger constituted by two functional (transcendental and aprioritic) identities cloned from phenomenology and supposing their universion by the One. Noesis is not, in its essence, of the nature of objectifying or intentional transcendence, but of the uni-versal nature of a being-turned-without-return-towards…(the World) even if its last moment is non-autopositional or non-phenomenological Distance. It could be called determined-in-the-last-instance by the Real in reference to its occasion.
- Husserl has re-introduced the ancient thematic of noesis and noema behind intentionality into modern philosophy. Noesis designates the act of aiming of the intentional object (of the noema), an act susceptible to various qualities. It is a lived experience but a non-hyletic or non-real lived experience which only has sense in its correlation with the noema. It is thus of the general nature of transcendence to which its character of immanence remains subordinate. Hence the typically philosophical, unscientific idea of a correlation, parallelism, or semi-circularity of noesis and noema. It is the fundamental dyad of the phenomenological decision insofar as it is structured like a philosophical Decision.
It is possible to re-employ under another reason–the vision-in-One–the noetico-noematic correlation, after expunging it of every philosophical circularity. Noesis will designate the instances cloned by the Real on the basis of the phenomenological material of the transcendental Ego and intentional noesis. These instances, uni-versal by definition, are consequently determined in-the-last-instance by the One, as if henceforth the intention were no longer mixed or co-exclusive with the “hyle,” but determined unilaterally by the latter (itself uprooted from its state of sensual and thus worldly exteriority). These two functions motivated by the occasion of philosophy, which indicates them in a symptomatic way, are identities and not modes of transcendence: transcendental and aprioritic identities. The latter however for content has a distance or “open” exteriority not self-enclosed in an auto-position, but it is also already oriented by essence and in an immanent way “towards” the World as such in its identity rather than towards an object-pole or a world-pole like that towards which phenomenological intentionality transcends. Universion is obviously that which gives its non-philosophical uni-versality to the force (of) thought, to the subject-Stranger, its power of accessing the thought-world itself. The functional and universal nature attributed to the intentionality of consciousness by Husserl is as radicalized as intentionality is thus originarily oriented towards the World itself in its noematic identity rather than towards the object in a world-horizon, and determined by the last-instance of the One which alone gives it this amplitude of uni-versality. We thus substitute a noesis-universe for the intention-world of phenomenology at the same time as a noema-universe for the noema-world.
Speculative Heresy 