Five More Defs from the Non-Philosophy Dictionary (Including Determination-in-the-last-instance)

Determination-in-the-last-instance (DLI)

Central concept, along with the One-in-One, of non-philosophy that distinguishes it from all philosophies. It is said of the causality proper to the One as such or vision-in-One, of the Real in virtue of its primacy over thought and its object (like Being). This causality exerts itself upon what is given as non(-One) and serves as experience or data for thought-according-to-the-One: philosophy itself as form-experience of the World; and upon the universal noematic structures or theoretical knowledge that is extracted by it from this material. It is therefore also the specific causality of non-philosophy in general. This concept has a Marxist origin and is here extracted from historical Materialism, transferred and radicalized in first Science or according to the One which gives it its radical sense and enables its full employment (it should rigorously be called: givenness-in-the-last-instance).

The DLI only has stifled attempts in philosophy whose most complete concept of causality is the category of reciprocal Determination, decisive for philosophical systems with its immediate modes (reciprocity, convertibility, reversibility, systematicity) and its more remote mediate modes, the four forms of causality distinguished by Aristotle, which themselves instead arise from the causality of Being (efficient, final, formal, material) than from the One. The Real which is not Being thus has its original mode of efficacy, whereas thought-according-to-the-One or non-philosophy distinguishes itself from the DLI of every ontology and simultaneously excludes, at least in its essence, finality, formalism, materialism, and technologism.

The DLI is not simply an immanent causality but radical immanence itself—which distinguishes it from every “Spinozistic” immanence or every immanence derived from Spinozism. Reciprocal determination and the DLI are distinguished in many ways. 1) In the first case, causality is divided between two terms (cause and effect) which belong to a set or an ontological or ontico-ontological couple; in the second case it is attributed to one of these alone: the effect then supposes an objective or passive, merely occasional “receptacle” of this causality. 2) This occasion is already reduced to the moment when it manifests itself, in return deprived of determining or real action. The DLI thus supposes a unilateral, non-reciprocal duality of causes. 3) In the first case, causality goes in two opposed yet circular or infinitely convergent directions (action/reaction; real opposition; dialectical contradiction; differential relations of two terms, etc.); and, in the second case, causality goes in a single direction (from the Real towards the effectivity of the thought-world; from immanence towards transcendence). 4) In the first case, it supposes an alienating continuity and an identification of the cause in a supposedly given other term; in the second, cause is not alienated in its effect but supposes, being nothing but a universal negative condition, a functional transcendental instance which is that through which the Real can be said to act.

Ten Definitions from Laruelle’s Dictionnaire de la Non-Philosophie

Transcendental Axiomatic

The nature and procedure of the formation of the primary terms of non-philosophy, of its non-conceptual symbols, starting from philosophical concepts concerned with philosophical intuitiveness and naïveté.

Axiomatics is initially a scientific object. It is the organization of a theory or a fragment of a theory in order to empty the terms of their empirical or regional contents and to explicitly reveal the logical apparatus which connects them and becomes through this their only contents. There is a philosophical reflection on the axiomatic (Aristotle), but there are few examples of axiomatization in philosophy itself, if not perhaps in Descartes’ Responses, Spinoza’s Ethics and Fichte’s Science of Knowledge. In all these cases it is a matter of an ontological axiomatization, still largely intuitive. In the sciences, more or less complete attempts at axiomatization were made in particular by Hilbert in geometry, by Jean-Louis Destouches in quantum physics—i.e. above all in fields where unexpected innovations (non-Euclidean geometries, Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty’ principle) required theoretical reorganization to legitimate their rigor. The epistemology of Mario Bunge draws conclusions from the postulate that it is in theory possible to axiomatize any scientific discipline. But axiomatization is an effort of reorganization which comes with the aftermath—even after a crisis—in the goal of examining the validity of a theory and the formalization of its relations to other theories which, in any event, has known limits (Godel). It is more a theoretical instrument than a theoretical project of the foundation of science.